Nina Burleigh

The authors also allege that the Sept. 11 attacks were a calculated response to Western pressure on the Taliban to hand over bin Laden and permit the return of the long-exiled Afghan leader, King Shah. They say the terror attacks were aimed at sparking a widespread war in Central Asia and thereby reinforcing the Islamic extremists’ grip on power.

Brisard, a private intelligence analyst who once worked for the French conglomerate Vivendi, compiled a report in 1997 on the financing behind the al-Qaida network. Dasquie is a journalist and editor of Intelligence Online. The authors are negotiating with American publishers now to get the book translated and published in England. They recently discussed their book with Salon.

How did you meet John O’Neill, and how often and where? Did you ever tape your discussions with him?

Brisard: I met him twice. The first time was in Paris in June 2001 and then in July in New York. I met him because I wrote some years ago a report about the bin Laden family and its financial connections with Osama bin Laden. Our meeting was in the process of the French sharing information with the FBI. He wanted to meet me again a month after our first meeting to discuss the points of my report, and so we met at the end of July 2001. I never taped him and that’s why I only quote him directly three or four times. That’s all I have and the rest is paraphrase. The discussion of O’Neill is only 10 pages in the book. It is the first 10 pages of the book. What he said is a synthesis of what we say in the book, and that’s why we decided to put it on the first pages. That is, the role of Saudi Arabia, the role of oil and the way the investigation worked in the United States before Sept. 11.

Did O’Neill indicate that the FBI expected more attacks on the United States?

Brisard: No. Not even implicitly. We didn’t talk about the threat itself. We focused on the sources and roots of the problems and the way to deter further action.

How much did Mr. O’Neill know about al-Qaida that the public didn’t know until after Sept. 11, such as the extent of the training, the network and the hatred?

Brisard: John O’Neill clearly knew extensively about the threat of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida. He told me the FBI had identified for years the financial supports of bin Laden. For instance, in the Yemen investigation [of the terrorist bombing of the USS Cole], he said everything pointed at Osama bin Laden but there was an unwillingness among U.S. diplomats to act and to put any kind of pressure against the governments. His investigation was made difficult because of this unwillingness, and in his mind it was especially because of the economic interests of the United States. I quote him saying that everything about bin Laden and al-Qaida can be explainable through Saudi Arabia. And when I asked why the U.S. was unwilling to go after the states that host bin Laden, he said because of oil.

In what sense was Saudia Arabia supporting bin Laden? He had been exiled.

Brisard: Yes, the official stance is he was banned in 1994 and his assets were frozen. This is the official position of the Saudi government. But we prove in our book that until 1998 he was able to use economic and financial structures in Saudi Arabia. He could have linked working bank accounts in Sudan with companies registered in Saudi. He had various contacts with Saudi officials. And remember, the Saudis were supporting the Taliban regime, which was hosting him. In Saudi Arabia, the left hand ignores the right hand. And the FBI was fully aware of the situation.

Other than the U.S. ambassador in Yemen sending O’Neill home because of his alleged insensitivity to the culture, exactly how did the State Department hinder the FBI investigation?

Brisard: O’Neill said the State Department has had an overwhelming role on these investigations. He was explicitly blocked in Yemen from further investigation. We now know from different files that the FBI was starting investigations on different aspects of Saudi Arabian support [of bin Laden], and those investigations were all stopped, even under Clinton. What John O’Neill said is that for him, there was a clear [conflict] between the FBI’s goal, which was to go fast and to implicate members of the networks and eventually to implicate states that gave them support, and the State Department’s goal, which was to move in a more diplomatic way to negotiate with those states and to some extent accommodate them. And what he said was that the diplomatic way was chosen over the security or law enforcement policy, and of course he was very angry about what happened to him in Yemen.

In your book, you allege that the Bush administration was negotiating with the Taliban last year over a proposed Central Asian oil pipeline through Afghanistan. Which Bush official conducted those talks?

Brisard: [Assistant Secretary of State] Christina Rocca, in August 2001 in Pakistan, explicitly discussed the oil interest, not the pipeline.

Did you ever speak with Rocca?

Dasquie: I tried to, but when you are a foreign journalist you must ask the U.S. embassy in France before an interview. My correspondent in Washington also made requests. Since March or April 2001 we had tracked this story, because just after the United Nations’ decision against the Taliban, it was crazy to see Taliban leaders coming into Washington and having meetings. Christina Rocca arrived at the State Department in June, and we knew her background at the CIA; she had managed all the relations between the agency and Islamic groups in Central Asia. Since around June I have been focused on Rocca. We made requests. The embassy said it was impossible. With no explanation.

Do you allege that she mentioned oil explicitly?

Dasquie: Madeleine Albright was the first to refuse to negotiate with the Taliban in 1997. Before that, from 1994 to ’97, Clinton did negotiate with the Taliban. We describe the meeting of Rocca and some Taliban leaders in Islamabad in August 2001. There are documents to support it. And at the same time in Washington there are lots of meetings of the energy policy task force and lots of oil company representatives around Dick Cheney. The task force’s conclusion is that Central Asia oil is a very important goal. And at the same time people are negotiating with the Taliban for the first time since 1994.

Brisard: We believe that when [Rocca] went to Pakistan in 2001 she was there to speak about oil, and unfortunately the Osama bin Laden case was just a technical part of the negotiations. I’m not sure about the pipeline specifically, but we make it clear she was there to speak about oil. There are witnesses, including the Pakistani foreign minister.

Are you saying that the Central Asian oil and pipelines were not an issue under Clinton, or just more of an issue for the Bush administration? And what are you basing that on?

Brisard: Oil was also an issue for the Clinton administration, but the difference between Clinton and Bush is, under Bush the economic argument became predominant and the U.S. thought they could pursue the Taliban to accept a deal on economics.

Dasquie: The area was of enormous strategic concern to many nations. The U.N. “six plus two” group [made up of the six countries that border Afghanistan, plus the United States and Russia] had tried to persuade the Taliban to take back the Afghan king in exchange for recognition. The biggest mistake of the U.N. and the U.S. was to consider the Taliban as independent and able to negotiate. Nobody saw the reality of the relationship between Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar. So when the U.N.’s six-plus-two group and the U.S. said accept the king and give us Osama, it was incredible; it was like asking them to kill themselves. It was the very wrong way to negotiate. People say the only reason 9-11 happened is that Osama is a bad boy and the Muslims hate the U.S., but that is not enough. It is a pity to see that all our policies are built on that. It is very, very much more complex. They knew that if they did nothing they would lose. Everyone wanted to give power to the former king. When you think you are going to lose, the easy reaction is to be the first to attack. So 9-11 was not just a mad act, it was a political act meant to create a good ground for a big war in all Central Asia. Mullah Omar and bin Laden wanted to rally Muslims in Central Asia. In the last 10 years, the focal point of Islamists has taken off from the Middle East and gone into Central Asia.

The first President Bush has lots of connections with the Saudis and has made visits there as a private businessman with the merchant banking firm the Carlyle Group. Did you find any trace of the Carlyle Group on the financial trail?

Brisard: No. Carlyle has connections to the bin Laden family. Also, [Saudi banker and alleged terrorist financer] Khaleed bin Mahfooz financed the Bush oil companies in Texas in the late ’70s and we discovered that he is also the primary financial support of Osama bin Laden. For years he was the personal banker of King Fahd, but now Mahfooz is under house arrest in Saudi Arabia for allegedly financing terrorist groups. He was arrested in 1999, but he is still a shareholder of the Saudi Bank National Commercial. He had charities around the world and one of them, International Development Foundation in London, has just been banned by the charity commission in London because of our book. We also make lots of connections with BCCI [Bank of Credit and Commerce International, the foreign bank closed 10 years ago after a huge scandal connected it to fraud, secret weapons deals, money laundering and the financing of terrorist groups]. We say the system financing bin Laden was more or less the revival of the BCCI. Even the associates of the BCCI are now involved in those networks. And bin Mahfooz was the operational director of BCCI.

Exactly how have the Saudis promoted Islamic terrorism?

Brisard: It’s a political question for them. They have to support those religious fundamentalists because they are a large part of the regime of the kingdom and they need them to survive politically. Wahhabism, the Saudi form of Islam, is one of the harshest forms, and bin Laden is a product of his country.

Is there anything in the American press about your book you would like to correct?

Brisard: The main error is to say that the U.S. preferred oil to fighting against al-Qaida. That oversimplifies it. And it is also wrong to say John O’Neill told me that George Bush blocked inquiries into al-Qaida because of oil. It was not personally Bush [that O'Neill complained about]; it was a policy of putting diplomacy ahead of law enforcement going back to Clinton.

Why is the book so popular in France?

Brisard: Because there have been a lot of books about Sept. 11 and what happened and bios of bin Laden, but it’s the first time that two investigators put facts on the table, documents, interviews and nothing else. We don’t say it could have been stopped. If any government had known what was going to happen it wouldn’t have happened. But we point out the role of the Western countries that led to Sept.11 — back to 50 years ago, when we agreed to make an alliance with Saudi Arabia, and then by closing our eyes to the support they were giving fundamentalists around the world for the last 20 years.

Bernie is for all intents and purposes OWS’s man in the Senate — whether they want one or not. Not one but two online campaigns have been launched to draft him for a presidential run. His epic eight and a half hour filibuster against President Obama’s extension of the Bush tax cuts last December has been published by Nationbooks under the title “The Speech: A Historic Filibuster on Corporate Greed and the Decline of Our Middle Class. ”

“Enough is enough!” he cried out at one point “How many homes can you own?” (The answer, if you are Oracle co-founder and third richest American Larry Ellison, is close to infinite.)

If there’s anyone in Washington who actually links Occupy Wall Street from Zuccotti Park into the stream of American politics, it is Sanders. In mid-October he tweeted: “People might want to think about going to your local community bank and withdrawing funds from these large institutions. #ows.” It’s an idea Move your Money has been pushing for a while. Now Occupy Wall Street is talking up Nov. 5 as a National Bank Transfer day when people will withdraw funds from the big banks and deposit it in community banks and credit unions.

In an interview with Salon.com last week, Sanders said he didn’t know about the Nov. 5 action when he made his proposal but he says he thinks the idea will catch on.  The single most important thing Americans can do to save the economy, he said,  is break up the biggest banks.

“I think there is a whole lot of anger and mistrust of large financial institutions and Wall Street that caused the terrible, terrible recession. And at the end of the day, after causing millions of Americans to lose their jobs and homes, CEOs are making more than they ever did and on top of that the banks are now charging $5 on debit cards.

“The country’s six largest financial institutions [Bank of America, CitiGroup, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs] now have amassed assets equal to more than 60 percent of our gross domestic product. That is $9 trillion.”

Sanders said that the OWS effect on American politics is providing a vent for previously unfocused anger. “Polls are pretty clear about this. The people of America are concerned not only about the greed and recklessness of Wall Street but also, as the OWS folks have pointed out, about the growing inequality of wealth in America. You’ve got the top 400 Americans owning more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans. Most folks do not think that is right. You are seeing a growing anger and an understanding that the middle class is collapsing, poverty is increasing, and those elected officials willing to speak to those issues are going to touch a nerve.”

Since 2008, Sanders has been focusing on conflicts of interest and the role of the Federal Reserve in aiding and abetting the banks that ran amok.

“The Fed put 16 trillion into the big banks during the financial crisis,” he said. “The Fed during that period lent out $16 trillion to every major financial institution in this country and wealthy individuals and central banks all over the world. We are saying to the Fed, if you can bail out central banks in the Middle East and Africa, you may want to help small businesses in this country so they can expand and create jobs.”

Last week, he released his summary of a GAO report he’d requested on conflicts of interest at the Fed. In ordinary times, such a report would have landed in the heaps of white paper that get bundled and shredded without reporters beyond the most obscure business journals paying any attention at all.

Bloggers jumped on the report, which found numerous problems at the Fed that create “an appearance of a conflict of interest,” including the policy of the Fed to give banking industry members the power to both elect and serve on the Fed, and the fact that 18 current or former Fed members had received emergency loans during the financial crisis.

Among those named in the report are:

• Former chairman of the New York Fed Stephen Friedman, who simultaneously sat on the board of directors at Goldman Sachs and owned stock in Goldman, which was actually prohibited under the Fed’s own rules;
• General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt, who was a Fed board director when  the Fed provided $16 billion in financing to GE;
• Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP MorganChase, who was a sitting Fed board director when the Fed provided his bank with $29 billion in financing to buy Bear Stearns, and also gave the institution an 18-month exemption from risk-based leverage and capital requirements.

“We have to go beyond shining a light,” Sanders said. “We have to say Wall Street caused this recession. We have been trying to come up with a program.”

The concentration of wealth in the top six banks is “a very dangerous situation for this country,” not least because of the way they can buy political power. Sanders says the same banks and their allies spent $5 billion over 10 years in Washington to deregulate Wall Street. That’s a lot of steak and golf.

On Vermont Public TV last week,  Sanders was again talking about the “greed, recklessness and illegal behavior on the part of Wall Street.” He conceded it feels good to have company.  “Yeah I do!” he responded to a question about whether he felt vindicated by the occupation movement.  “It is nice to hear all over this country in hundreds and hundreds of cities people talking about these issues.”

But he said he had no plans to go down to Occupy Wall Street in New York, D.C. or any other city at the moment.

“I’ve been asked. But they are trying not to get involved with elected officials. They want to maintain their grass roots. I think it’s the right thing. And at this point I’m not going down there.”

Haskell, population 2,681, located in cotton and ranch country north of Abilene, is a place where people can spot a fake a mile away. It’s also the place where Anita Thigpen Perry grew up, third of four kids of the town doctor, interested enough in medicine that she went on rounds with him before she was 10. She went on to be voted the 1970 Haskell High Homecoming Queen and though she went away to nursing school, she came back to Haskell right after. It’s the place where Anita and Ricky met and got married in 1982, in the Howards’ barn, just outside of town, after a packed service at the Methodist Church, Anita wearing her mother’s wedding dress from the 1950s.

Haskell is conservative, but in a way Rick Perry is not. Sure, some people there don’t like gay marriage and abortion, and believe evolution is a “theory” that’s “got some holes.” But they are fewer and far less fervent on the subjects than one might think from the way their former inhabitant, the presidential candidate, has presented himself. The tone is different. They are politically polite in the old-fashioned sense of the word, quiet and respectful of each other. Crucially, they recognize that the problems they — and the country — face right now transcend cultural differences, and can’t be solved by the talk and ideas that excite the Tea Party base.

Opposites attract

Haskell people first sent Rick Perry into politics, electing him as a Democrat in 1984 to the state Legislature, while Anita stayed behind and worked as an RN, first in her dad’s clinic, in a house by the 50-bed hospital, and then as head of nurses at the Haskell Hospital itself. 

Neat as a pin, she favored subdued shades of slate blue in clothing and curtains and carpets. She was quiet, organized, not a showoff. She kept such a neat house that the housekeeper she hired to come once a week would walk into the one-story L-shaped brick ranch house on F Street just north of the square and say to herself, “What am I supposed to do?”

Anita didn’t have much taste for politicking. And until recent weeks, when the presidential campaign has trotted her out, first in Florida and more recently in Iowa, Texas political observers joked about how unhappy she looked whenever she appeared at a campaign event with him.

According to a friend, Anita Perry had a “prayerful” change of heart about the presidential race last February, at a point when Rick Perry was actually considering getting out of politics to earn some money. And now, she is the one doing the reading and homework on the race, and urging him to step up his game and do his homework, too, rather than trying to fly by on confidence alone.

Folks in Haskell think that’s just because she’s the reticent ballast to Rick the glad-hander. Opposites attract.

They first met at a piano lesson, when she was 8 and he was 10. They went on a date later, in high school, but didn’t get married until years later, after she went off and got her nursing degree and he had come back from Texas A&M. Before they got married, she was actually dating another guy, who went on to become a dentist. “She was courtin’ two guys at once,” recalled Dr. Wayne Cadenhead, who along with his father, Frank Cadenhead, shared a medical practice with Anita’s dad. “And Ricky just won out, I guess.”

The Methodist Church, where Anita was churched and where they got married, is a big red brick with fancy stained-glass windows from the late 1800s, one of the prettiest buildings in Haskell. The message on the lawn sign for this week is “Treat Everyone the Way You Wish to Be Treated.”

Haskell’s Methodist Church Pastor Dustin Wilhite says his parishioners aren’t unduly concerned about gay marriage, abortion or taxes. “Haskell Methodists, we are probably not as political as churches in bigger cities,” he said, as Sunday worshipers drifted out, shaking his hand and thanking him for his sermon on grace and baptism.

“Those social issues we are more concerned with,” he went on, “are helping the poor and needy and helping those who have nothing have something in these hard financial times, helping them move forward. As far as social issues, poverty is the one issue we are going to be focused on in this church.”

Poverty? That sounds so … ACORN. And yet that’s the main concern in the home church of the Superman-haired Texas conservative who calls Social Security a Ponzi scheme, takes pride in executions and has courted Texan hybrid “Teavangelicals” by officiating at a Houston stadium with so-called Apostolics who believe the government should be theologically based.

While Rick was in the Legislature, Anita Perry held down a job in Haskell. In fact, she was the family breadwinner. When Perry switched parties in 1990, became a Republican and ran for statewide office (after chairing Al Gore’s campaign in Texas in 1988), a lot of people in Haskell were angry for a while, but he beat Democrat Jim Hightower to become the state’s agricultural commissioner. Anita and the kids finally moved to Austin with him, but she kept working. First she was a lobbyist specializing in healthcare, then worked for a political consultant.

She quit that job when Perry was first elected governor in 2001, but two years later she went back to work as a fundraiser for the Texas Association Against Sexual Assault, becoming the first Texas first lady in history to hold a job. Reporters have noted that the contributors to her cause were also big contributors to Perry’s political coffers. Having her on board, she was a rainmaker for donations. According to Austin American Statesman, of 37 donors to TAASA during her tenure as fundraiser, only three didn’t have ties to the governor or state business.

 The Austin women’s community appreciates that sort of fundraising punch and is thrilled to have her around. “We recruited her in 2001,” Sheryl Cates, a lawyer and founder of the National Domestic Violence Hotline, told Salon. “She went to shelters in rural areas. She’s the real deal. She was a catalyst for change.”

It’s highly unusual to find conservative women working in organizations like TAASA, or speaking out on things like domestic violence, because they tend to reject organizations that highlight female victimization, let alone organizations usually staffed by patchouli-scented, Take Back the Night college girls politically to the left of Barack Obama.

Funding her cause

The possibility that Anita Perry might be Rick’s left hand is an accusation she’s taken pains to address, as recently as earlier this summer, at a Hill Country conservative meeting, where she reportedly replied to a question about whether she would be pro-abortion like Laura Bush with: “You don’t have to worry about that with me.”

Yet she has quacked like the duck. In October 2004, she participated in a “Silent Witness” ceremony in which 153 red female statues commemorating the 153 women killed in domestic violence the prior year were displayed in the state Capitol. “Those living with abuse often conceal their pain as well as signs of abuse,” she said then. “That’s why many times it takes someone to see past the layers and excuses: a friend, another family member, a co-worker, a teacher or clergy.”

In 2006, Perry’s opponent in the gubernatorial election charged that he had hurt domestic violence causes by asking for a $2.4 million cut in the state domestic violence prevention programs. A campaign spokesman was quick to ridicule that charge, pointing out that he “goes home every night to a wife … who has made raising awareness and helping women who have been victims of domestic violence one of her causes for her entire life.”

The pillow talk seemed to have an effect. In 2007, Perry signed into law a “pole tax” on “sex oriented businesses” — aka strip joints — that also serve alcohol, with proceeds earmarked toward helping battered and abused women and children. The pole tax, which strip clubs are still fighting against, has raised $85 million, according to the Austin American Statesman, some of which has gone to TAASA.

Angela Hale, a publicist for women’s anti-violence nonprofits in Austin, says Anita Perry’s activities shouldn’t be confused with feminist ideals. “These issues aren’t political in Texas. We have Republican leadership throughout the state, and these issues are taken seriously. It’s about changing lives and helping people. That’s not political.”

Democratic consultant Chris Lippincott used to work at TAASA in a cubicle beside the Texas first lady, where they talked a lot of football. “She’s definitely no Lynn Cheney. She didn’t concern herself with politics. But she’s a boomer, a modern woman, who worked.” Lippincott had been predicting Perry wouldn’t run for office, mainly because he thought Anita would oppose it. She proved him wrong.

In the race for first spouse, Anita Perry joins a crowded and distinguished field including: Dr. Marcus Bachmann, who has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, and who has been married to Michele since 1978; Newt Gingrich’s lovely third wife, the former Calista Bisek, his former aide, born in 1966; Gloria Etchison Cain, who married Herman in 1968, a year after he graduated from Morehouse; Jon Hunstman’s wife, Mary Kay Cooper, who met her husband in high school but didn’t start dating him until they were both working at a pie shop in 1981; and Ron Paul’s wife, Carol Wells, who met Ron when she invited him to her 16th birthday party in 1952 and married him in 1957. Gary Johnson is separated from Denise Johnson, whom he met in college and married in 1977.

Anita, born in 1952, came of age with the Age of Aquarius, a fact commemorated in her senior yearbook, which had a zodiac theme. But that’s as far into Haskell High as the ’60s extended. Girls in her class took home economics, learning how to bathe infants and bake muffins, and were not allowed to wear pants to school.

Haskell’s town doctor, Wayne Cadenhead, graduated with Anita and is carrying on the medical practice started by Anita’s father, Dr. Joe, and his own dad, Dr. Frank Cadenhead. Dr. Wayne, as the nurses call him to differentiate him from Dr. Frank, bears a passing resemblance to Dick Cheney, accentuated by his passion for hunting (dozens of heads of horned beasts and gators he’s killed adorn his living room wall) and his rather extreme political views. His take on Anita is that “she’s a good nurse, I’d let her work on me if I was sick,” and “she’s not uppity” and “she wouldn’t be into it except for Rick.”

Cadenhead — who concedes he “couldn’t survive” as a doctor without Medicare and Medicaid paying at least 60 percent of his patients’ bills — thinks the Anita he knew 20 years ago at the clinic would have been equally happy raising five kids out on a ranch as being married to a governor running for president. “I don’t know what her political ambitions are now,” he said. “But if your husband is in a position to run for president of the United States, you fall in behind him. And if you don’t, you’re not much of a wife. I think she’s going to do what it takes.”

One of Anita Perry’s admirers in Haskell put it this way: “When it’s all about getting elected, you will say and do things. But people here in Haskell keep their politics to themselves. It’s not in your face, we are neighbors and friends. Because of the hyperbole of the last few decades that’s a line we don’t cross together, because we have to work together.”

As Rick Perry starts to flame out, slogging around in the wasteland between rock-ribbed façade and his own moderation involving immigrants and female healthcare, his handlers, striving for authenticity and maybe worried about his numbers with women, are sending out Anita Perry, who’s proving herself more into the game than anyone in Austin predicted. It’s both sad and startling to try to imagine what sort of presidential candidate Rick Perry would have been had Haskell’s sort of conservatism still had a place in the Republican Party, and had the candidate remained as true to his roots as his wife has. 

Schneiderman, like Obama, comes from the low-drama school of political presentation. He doesn’t get red-in-the-face mad. He doesn’t seduce. He’s earnest and self-effacing and pedagogical. But unlike the president, he has a steady refusal to back down and a ready willingness to fight. He is the antihero that boiling mad progressives hope can manacle and perp-walk those responsible for the financial crisis.

Schneiderman may not disappoint. In an interview with Salon in his office, Schneiderman refused to get specific about criminal or civil, jail time or fines. But he made clear that he has committed time and staff to an investigation with goals that go well beyond extracting $20 billion in exchange for release from prosecution, the deal that his fellow state attorneys general have tossed onto the table down in Washington, and which the Obama administration would like to see him sign.

“The people who caused this crash have to be held accountable and I don’t detect any diminution in the desire of the people of New York for that basic kind of justice to be done,” he said. “Part of this [investigation] is to air this out and expose it so we can make sure it never happens again.”

What everyone wants to know, of course, is can he play to win in the contact sport of Wall Street litigation? If, as he says, his time in the New York Assembly taught him that politics was “a contact sport,” it was football. The Wall Street game is more extreme, Thai boxing, maybe. I asked him if he thought he had what it might take — the starch, the fight and the clean trou with which to wade into battle. I asked, or rather told him, his fight was “dangerous.”

“Well, we’ll find out, won’t we?” he shrugged.

As if responding on cue to that taunt, the New York Post reported two days later that one of Schneiderman’s staff attorneys had been moonlighting as a dominatrix for hire under the name Alisha Sparks. In her day job, she had negotiated deals with errant bankers, by night she was allegedly taking money to whip submissive men into states of bliss. Schneiderman promptly put her on unpaid leave on the basis of the charge that she had broken the rule against outside employment. His press secretary assured me that Sparks hadn’t come anywhere near the current ongoing investigation. But financial bloggers immediately smelled a rat and suggested the outing was just the beginning of a coordinated dirty war on Schneiderman’s office as he turns up the heat with bank subpoenas.

“I think the banks are very scared,” said Tom Adams, a former securities insurer who now writes about the banking industry for nakedcapitalist.com. Adams says he believes Schneiderman has no shortage of hurt and angry former Wall Street players willing to talk to him about what went down.

“To impose accountability seems to be an overarching theme for him, by pursuing this in a way the SEC hasn’t,” Adams went on. “A crisis happened and there were people responsible. I think he has fertile territory in MBS [mortgage backed securities] and CDOs [collateralized debt obligations] and if he actually names individuals and gets meaningful time, that would be significant, more than taking away the jets or the Hamptons homes.”

For all his mildness, Schneiderman disdains the current discourse of Washington.

“One of the things that concerns me right now is this effort to rewrite history, to move us away from the fact that it was bad deregulatory moves and greedy, risky conduct that caused this to happen and that it wasn’t the fault of the teachers and cops and firefighters who now seem to be the targets of this effort to cut spending. The markets didn’t crash because we were paying too much to teachers.”

Nice words to hear from someone with subpoena power on Wall Street. But in June, Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller booted Schneiderman off the 50-state AG’s committee that’s been trying to make its own deal with the banks over mortgage servicing. Miller’s spokesman in Des Moines said Schneiderman’s desire to go after the big fish — the investors and banks — would hurt consumers.

“We are trying to focus on homeowners, not investors,” said Geoff Greenwood of the Iowa AG’s office. “We are focused on foreclosure, servicing. We are not trying to address everything under the sun in connection with our financial crisis and we think that by including securitization we are definitely stalling the case, broadening beyond homeowners and potentially pitting homeowners against investors.”

Schneiderman responds that he’d rather not “get into a tit for tat” over what happened with the Iowa AG, but insisted that their tack is too narrow. So, he’s pursuing a New York-based investigation, which may or may not lead to a separate and better deal, leveraged with depositions and subpoenaed documents revealing facts about the mortgage servicing issues that affect consumers, and also the so-called securitization issues — the mortgage-backed securities and CDOs, investor products that actually led to the economic crash still playing out on the shabby streets and foreclosed homes of Main Street America.

“The sense of public confidence has been eroded so badly,” he says. “People still haven’t gotten over the crash and the bailout … and people are not going to be satisfied until they have a sense that those responsible have been held accountable. This was a man-made catastrophe.”

Schneiderman said his office is “digging into” earlier phases of the mortgage-backed securities era. “Origination, the pooling of loans by the banks, the securitization, sale,” he said, and activities after 2004, when the housing bubble started filling with air, and the numbers of mortgages dropped. “That’s when things started to shift and you can see this whole process of — making money of these securitizations was so profitable, that it didn’t stop when it should have stopped.”

Around the same time, he noted, investors began scrutinizing MBS more carefully, and diverting money into the more complex but also troubled collateralized debt obligations. As everyone knows in hindsight, the quality of mortgages deteriorated, the quality of securities deteriorated, and it all collapsed. “We are looking at what caused that to happen and what people were doing and what people knew,” he said.

The same well-heeled Manhattan stream that spawned Spitzer also produced Schneiderman. He’s a privileged, Jewish native of the Upper West Side, where he still dwells. His dad was a lawyer, he attended the city’s elite Trinity prep school and then Harvard Law. Schneiderman’s trajectory into politics was a little less perfectly aimed, or perhaps a little more perfectly progressive. He seems to have collected all the progressive merit badges. Besides a stint helping out his aunt running an abortion clinic in Washington before Roe v. Wade, when he was 17, he spent a college year in China talking with people there about Vietnam, and worked in a jail in the Berkshires, in western Massachusetts, starting up a drug and alcohol program.

He spent 15 years with a corporate firm and occasionally defended bankers and financiers. But he gravitated toward pro bono work, and eventually decided to run for the New York state Senate. There, he managed to so irritate the Republicans in control that they attempted to gerrymander him out of a job by redrawing his West Side district to include all of Hispanic Washington Heights and Inwood, and almost none of white, Jewish, Upper West Side New York. He won anyway and learned some “political Spanish” along the way. “I know how to say the state budget is not balanced in Spanish,” he said.

New York Public Interest Group lawyer Gene Russianoff worked with Schneiderman when the public action group sued the transit authority over a fare hike, on civil rights grounds, and won. “He was like a gift from the gods,” Russianoff said. “Politically savvy, a great lawyer and really good on his feet. He made things happen, but he’s not your table-banging extemporaneous politician. He’s thoughtful.” Russianoff recalled sharing space at a news conference with him when he was a state senator. Schneiderman leaned over and drily advised, “Answer all the questions: The sponsor has not read the bill.”

Schneiderman deflects comparisons with Spitzer, with whom he is friendly. “Look, I did not expect to get engaged in this more national level. The difference is, Eliot brought cases because he had jurisdiction” — cases that no one in the Bush administration Securities and Exchange Commission or Justice Department would have bothered with at the time. “This is a very different time. This is more politically significant than nationally significant. I think the Indian Point case [a groundbreaking action against nuclear power] was a case of national significance.”

Given that he’s now running a case of national political significance, the question is, can he withstand the heat, as Spitzer and, yes, Anthony Weiner — New Yorkers with similar political, if not other, passions — could not?

“I didn’t get involved in public life because I need a job or some lust for power,” he said. “I liked public policy law and I can always go back to that and if I can’t pursue my long-term vision of what I think is right and what I think is the quintessentially American mission of constantly working toward greater equality and greater justice, then I can go do something else! People think everyone in politics is like Bill Clinton, who was 8 and wanted to be president. That’s certainly not my profile.”

In pursuing his own investigation, Schneiderman has irritated the administration and the bankers, but he hasn’t buckled. He says that to believe there is any other possible way to resolve things is misguided.

“Look, this [the AG's deal] is fraying at the edges. I don’t know at what point this thing actually ends.” He admits pressure from the Obama administration to get on board: “There were sort of calls made to friends,” he said without naming names. “But my take is people who are concerned about this, borrowers, unions whose members’ pension funds got some of the bad paper, they are all very supportive.”

Since Schneiderman left Tom Miller’s pack, he has garnered the support of other AGs. Delaware’s Beau Biden (in whose state, like New York, most of the trusts were registered), Massachusetts’ Martha Coakley, Minnesota’s Lisa Swanson and Kentucky’s Jack Conway have indicated they support his tack of investigate first, negotiate later.

“He’s taking on the administration, which wants to put everything behind us without doing any work,” said Tom Adams. “The administration wants to impose best practices going forward and put everything else behind. What do you expect? The Obama chief of staff is from Chase Bank.”

Schneiderman doesn’t share progressive discontent with Obama, though. “I think that he is doing the best he can with a party on the other side that will do things that are really bad for the country just to beat him. We haven’t seen this kind of politics in my lifetime. It’s the kind of thing you expect in less developed countries.”

Despite the fact that the Pope resides among them, Italians are not as Catholic as one might expect. Italy remains, as the journalist Luigi Barzini put it, “gloriously pagan.” In Italy, “Christianity has not deeply disturbed the happy traditions and customs of ancient Greece and Rome” but is a “thin veneer over older customs.”

Pagan pantheism survives in the Italian proliferation of saints. But in Italy, one feminine deity has always been venerated above the rest. Throughout Italy, one confronts images of a beatific young mother holding or nursing a baby, gazing down mysteriously from a roadside edicola — tiny shrine — or from a niche in a church, or from the walls of art museums.

There’s a pagan element in the cult of Mary, the mother of Jesus. The young virgin is worshipped apart from God or Christ. The Mary cult is stronger in Italy than in any other European nation. Italy has the greatest number of Church-validated Marian “apparitions” — sightings of the Virgin — than any other nation throughout recorded Church history.

Italy is home to hundreds of regional Mary cults. The most common name for the local Madonna deities is, simply, Santa Maria delle Grazie — the Mary of thanks, the Mary who dispenses favors. Traditionally, favor seekers approach the icon of Santa Maria delle Grazie on their knees with ex voto objects, small pressed metal or painted tile offerings, usually depicting a body part — a heart, an arm, a pair of eyes — whose recovery will be attributed to the attention of the Madonna delle Grazie.

Favors, though, are not granted for free. Madonnas in the Italian Mary cult are not necessarily altruistic. Like the vengeful goddesses of ancient Rome, the Madonnas are jealous and fickle and demand veneration. “The madonnas and saints worshipped by Italian Catholics are seen to have the power to cure and protect, they are also seen as a source of danger,” wrote a scholar of popular Italian Catholicism, Michael Carroll. “This danger has nothing to do with the punishment of sin, it derives from something much simpler: the saints and madonnas of Italy want to be worshipped, and it is toward this end, and the maintenance of their own cults, that they use their great power.”

The flip side to Italian veneration of the female deity is wariness about her legendary insatiable neediness, the voracious desire and jealousy of females, embodied in the whore, who is also still very much a part of modern Italian culture. All women are assumed to be in possession of bewitching seductive powers, but proper women are assumed to know how to use control and limit those powers.

Modern young women visiting Italy might not recognize those limits, though, because the stripper or girly-showgirl was so mainstreamed in Italy, especially during the years of Silvio Berlusconi’s control of Italian television and politics. The gusher of hard, sex-based commercial marketing, the nearly naked television dancers called veline jiggling on political talk shows, were just the visual element of a political structure that officially degraded women.

Their schizophrenic status had subtle effects on Italian women. The nation had a large and growing class of professional women who were not veline. Female lawyers, police, judges, and forensics experts played key roles in the Amanda Knox trial. While most media focused on the male judge, prosecutor, and lawyers, all of these men had female lieutenants who did most of the heavy lifting in the case. The best lawyer in the case was a woman, Giulia Bongiorno, a powerful Parliamentarian who had, inexplicably, used her wits to help womanizer Berlusconi stay in power.

But Italy was ranked 74th out of 128 nations in the World Economic Forum’s 2010 global index of gender equality, lowest in the EU and behind Ghana and Kazakhstan. For professional women like the lawyers and policewomen involved in the Kercher murder investigation and trial, the years leading up to and during the murder trial were a time of massive disconnection between their apparent and their real status. Italian professional women like Bongiorno and the other female lawyers and police in the Knox case put up with their veline sisters and the national girl-ogling sport, but uneasily. Many were divorced or single. The ancient Madonna/whore split poisoned their private lives, not to mention their attitudes toward other women — including the American college vixen Amanda Knox.

Two popular Madonnas reside in Perugia. One is the Madonna del Verde, a very old fresco from the mysterious round hilltop Tempio Sant’ Angelo, dating to the Dark Ages, whose background color green represented hope. The temple, located at the highest point in Perugia, is locally believed to have originated as a temple to Venus or Vesta. The site was probably also important to the Etruscans, who kept spiritual sanctuaries and tombs on hilltops adjacent to, but separate from, the city centers reserved for the living.

The other Perugia Madonna is the Madonna delle Grazie in the Duomo. Giuliano Mignini, the prosecutor of the Knox trial, kept her image hanging on the wall behind his desk and spoke of how she had helped his uncle escape from certain death at the hands of the Russians in the 1940s. The icon is a larger-than-life, clearly pregnant young woman, painted in 1515 by Giannicola di Paolo, one of Perugia’s Renaissance greats. She wears a brocade blue dress, and her pale eyes are strangely distant and slightly uneven. Perugians hundreds of years ago adorned her image with a real crown. Every day, parishioners can be seen kneeling before her. Over the centuries, they have appeased or thanked her with thousands of ex voto offerings — silver hearts and other body parts tied with small red ribbons — tucked in the glass case behind her.

Both Perugia’s Madonnas have pale, heart-shaped faces, tiny pert noses, light distant eyes, small perfect mouths. Amanda Knox bears an uncanny resemblance to both of them. The hippie soccer player from twenty-first-century Seattle could have been the Renaissance artist’s model.

Nina Burleigh is the author of “Unholy Business: A True Tale of Faith, Greed, and Forgery in the Holy Land,” “A Very Private Woman: The Life and Unsolved Murder of Presidential Mistress Mary Meyer,” and two other books. She has written for the New York Times, the New Yorker and Time, and is a contributing editor at Elle.

Excerpted from “The Fatal Gift of Beauty: The Trials of Amanda Knox. Copyright @ 2011 by Nina Burleigh. Reprinted by permission of Broadway Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. 

In conjunction with the new Web site, Blades co-wrote and released a new book, “The Motherhood Manifesto: What America’s Moms Want and What to Do About It.” The book, with a Rosie the Riveter-style, kerchief-clad woman on the cover elbow-curling an infant, is an even-tempered examination of six problems Blades and her coauthor, environmental policy consultant Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, believe American mothers need to see addressed — whether they’re home or working, Republican or Democrat. Each chapter also includes harrowing anecdotes from stretched and strained working mothers, and sometimes, fathers, struggling to be parents in the United States today.

Blades and Rowe-Finkbeiner intend their book and Web site to be nonpartisan, which explains the underlying restraint with which they deliver their arguments. In the nation of motherhood, they say, there are no red states or blue states, just one big, shared landscape in which mothers want roughly the same things. As laid out in their “manifesto,” those things correspond with the mnemonic acronym “MOTHER”: maternity and paternity leave, open and flexible work, TV we choose and other after-school programs, healthcare for all kids, excellent child care, and realistic and fair wages. To some cynics, “The Motherhood Manifesto” might sound an awful lot like the policies progressives have been fighting for with little or no success for years.

Blades, 50, and Rowe-Finkbeiner, 37, each have two children, and both work from home, Blades from Berkeley, Calif., and Rowe-Finkbeiner from Washington state. Salon spoke to them recently by phone about the pay bias against mothers, why quality television programming is a political issue, and how mothers can swing the next election.

What was the genesis of this project?

Blades: A couple of years ago I wrote a two-page document that I called “The Motherhood Manifesto,” which was very similar to what’s in the book. I shared it with Arianna Huffington and she invited me to talk about it at a gathering of political types she held in her home after the 2004 election. So I did, and a number of powerful people told me they thought it was a great idea. That was the inspiration for doing the book. The issues have been out there, but the general public is not mobilized around them.

“The Motherhood Manifesto” is also the name of a documentary we produced. The women we feature in the book are in the film and we will be previewing it in June at the Take Back America conference. After that, we will do organizing around it. We want to create massive grass-roots support for issues that affect mothers. Once people realize that it’s not just their personal problem but that these are issues we all share, I think there will be a huge opportunity to back good leadership and good policy.

Dedicated people have been out there promoting these very issues in legislatures across the country and in Washington for decades without success. How is your effort different?

Blades: As a founder of MoveOn.org, I have seen the power of grass-roots mobilization. It’s unleashing the so-called wisdom of crowds. Give people a connection and a way to engage and they will, in deep and intelligent ways.

Rowe-Finkbeiner: We are developing a blogging roster on MomsRising.org for people who will be able to come in and talk about what is important to them, whether it’s child care, healthcare or other issues. Also going up is a networking function, an online forum so moms can talk to moms and organizations can talk to organizations about who is doing what where.

We are trying to offer avenues for engagement — everything from reading a story about other mothers’ dilemmas and solutions to calling your legislator. Ultimately we’d love to have a “how to start your own group” piece. Certainly we’ll do house parties around the film. We are also encouraging book groups. There are also talking points if you want to get together as a play group or for afternoon tea. Basically we are saying here are some things to discuss, and some background. It’s community building in person as well as online.

Blades: We are going to learn a lot from our members about what they want to work on. We are going to give them opportunities to engage. And they will give us great ideas. That’s where we will go deeply and explore more. I believe good online work is a two-way dialogue. The Web site went up this week and it is rapidly growing. We have had an amazing response, with close to 40,000 members signing on in five days. We have both a petition and a sign-up. The petition urges policymakers to be more genuinely family-friendly by supporting legislation to close the wage gap between mothers and men. It reads: “It’s time for our leaders to do more than talk about valuing families. Join us as we let American leaders know we support common sense family-friendly policies that protect and invest in mothers, children, and families today.”

Can we realistically hope to mandate things like more maternity/paternity leave and open and flexible work in today’s political and economic climate? Are there any companies that are models for this? You mention Google in the book, but are there others?

Rowe-Finkbeiner: One model is Johnson Moving and Storage in Denver. They have done an amazing job with open and flexible work in a sector not known for flexible work. They are able to attract and retain really high-qualified employees by offering them flexible schedules. JetBlue is another company with flexible options. They make people’s homes satellite offices. All the reservation agents work from home, many part-time. Most of these folks are in Utah and a whole lot of them are moms.

Did you organize the issues in the acronym MOTHER in descending order of priority? Because it seems to me the last two, healthcare and wages, ought to be at the top.

Blades: We recognize that you can’t fix one thing and not have all the others affected. Employers have a problem offering work flexibility because they are trying to minimize the cost of healthcare and don’t want to hire two people to share a job, even though they would probably be more productive. Businesses are performing unnatural acts in order to avoid having high healthcare costs. We choose issues that a vast majority of Americans can recognize. These are needs we all share.

Why did you include “T” for TV? Why is good TV programming important for mothers?

Blades: “T” is for TV and other entertainment, and also for after-school programs. The fact is we’ve got 40,000 kindergartners home alone after school, and many of them are in front of the TV. We’d be in denial if we didn’t recognize that TV is a huge part of how we raise our kids today. We want parents to support very clear ratings systems so that they know what is and is not appropriate for their kids and we want them to support educational programming.

Rowe-Finkbeiner: There are 12 million kids home alone every day after school. The most common time for crime is between 3 and 6 in the afternoon, and for teens to have unprotected sex. They need after-school programs.

You chose “E” for excellent child care. It seems as if child care has been turned into a trench war about morality and gender roles. Often, the discourse moves away from what mothers need to what mothers should be, and I think American mothers internalize that. I lived in France for a few years and found it to be much more genuinely family-friendly, partly because they offer affordable day care on every block and public school starting at age 3. No one questions whether the women putting children in these institutions are bad mothers. They just do it.

Rowe-Finkbeiner: Seventy-two percent of moms are in the workforce. The majority of families need two working parents in order to support their families. Right now all parents have to work an average of 500 more hours a year to keep up with 1979 income levels. To frame this issue as one about whether child care is good or bad for children really misses the point that most mothers need to work.

A lot of people feel it’s their fault if they can’t figure out how to make it work. But there are certain areas that are shared community problems. It’s not just about parents. There really needs to be societal support to help parents care for children.

You chose “R” for realistic and fair wages for women. Let’s talk about the pay bias against mothers. Aren’t there legitimate reasons for it to be there? For instance, don’t mothers — parents, really, but mothers primarily — tend to put their children before their employers? Don’t childless women have more energy to expend on work?

Rowe-Finkbeiner: I will point out that it’s Saturday and all three of us are mothers and we are all working right now. The fact is, mothers do not have lower job commitment. Dr. Shelly Correll, at Cornell, found mothers are 44 percent less likely to be hired than nonmothers given the same résumés and are offered $11,000 less as a starting salary. We don’t talk about how much money we make. We need to in order to unearth this problem.

Blades: The other side of that question is, Shouldn’t your kids be a priority for a man or a woman? And if they are, then you should not be punished for it. A lot of people are surprised by the fact that mothers are discriminated against. Women without children make 90 cents to a man’s $1, so the majority of the gender gap is coming from mothers because 82 percent of all women are mothers. The inequality faced by mothers is pulling down all women.

This brings me to something that has bothered me since I first opened your book. You address this book to mothers. Why is it assumed that fathers can’t do their share? Why is this “The Motherhood Manifesto” and not “The Parents’ Manifesto”? Isn’t that distinction a big part of the problem?

Blades: You will note that “M” is for maternity and paternity leave. Everything in this book is good for parents. But it’s “The Motherhood Manifesto” because it is mothers against whom there is substantial bias in terms of wages. The single parents in this country are predominantly mothers. It’s mothers and their children who are living in poverty. The need for work flexibility will be good for all parents.

Rowe-Finkbeiner: Fathers actually get a wage boost for having children. The traditional feeling is that men are supposed to support their children. Yet women now make up 46 percent of the labor force. We have old standards that haven’t caught up with modern parenthood. Everybody should get a wage boost for having children. They’re expensive.

Blades: Chapter “O,” for open and flexible work, is the longest chapter because that’s where there is the most opportunity for change. Most jobs are modeled after the “ideal worker,” yet most workers don’t fit into that category. The upper echelons of business are primarily male and if women get there they are usually childless. What businesses are doing is selecting by schedule. Is it really true that the smartest people are childless?

How do you plan to translate these ideas into reality, especially when so many family-friendly policies have failed already?

Blades: I think you eventually get to a tipping point. Many people would argue that the number of hours parents have to spend working is hitting a breaking point, and people can’t take it anymore. This book and the online movement we are building are about trying to help that growing recognition take hold. We are telling it through the stories of people we can identify with. When I hear about Selina [a working mother described in the first chapter of the book] having to breast-feed and type at the same type, I think to myself, Something has got to give.

Rowe-Finkbeiner: We need to let business and political and community leaders know they have to support family-friendly politics. If leaders don’t know they have support, it’s harder.

Blades: Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy — they are not getting traction when they try to do these things [increasing healthcare access and mandating fair wages]. It’s like they are whistling in the wind. We need to be there for them. We need to provide them with grass-roots political capital so they know they have millions of citizens behind them ready to work to make sure these policies get enacted.

Do you see mothers as a silent political force?

Rowe-Finkbeiner: Yes. They are increasingly likely to be able to swing elections. Looking at the last two presidential elections, there was a 5 percent shift among married women between Gore and Kerry. That can make or break an election.

Most of the women described in the book are trying to balance child rearing with work. How do you get working and nonworking mothers to see their aims as similar?

Blades: I think when you focus on what’s best for kids you see that your goals are the same.

Rowe-Finkbeiner: MomsRising is not just for working mothers. Certainly issues like access to healthcare, paternity leave and TV programming are relevant to both stay-at-home and working mothers. These issues relate to being a parent in general.

Don’t you think that since you’re affiliated with MoveOn.org, a liberal organization, you will be seen as partisan and have a hard time attracting conservatives to this movement? Especially when you name leaders like Ted Kennedy and Hillary Clinton.

Blades: I think ultimately conservatives are going to hook up with us because it’s the right thing to do. It’s very hard for conservatives to do anything but team playing right now. But good citizens are starting to realize that team playing is not good in terms of getting good policy enacted. It has become very hard for people to behave as conscientious individuals as opposed to part of their team and that’s a loss for everyone.

How do you know this manifesto is what American mothers want, as your subtitle suggests?

Blades: Women’s intuition.

This story has been changed since it was first published.