Pentagon declined to investigate hundreds of purchases of child pornography

September 3 2010

By John Cook

A 2006 Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigation into the purchase of child pornography online turned up more than 250 civilian and military employees of the Defense Department — including some with the highest available security clearance — who  used credit cards or PayPal to purchase images of children in sexual situations. But the Pentagon investigated only a handful of the cases, Defense Department records show.

The cases turned up during a 2006 ICE inquiry, called Project Flicker, which targeted overseas processing of child-porn payments. As part of the probe, ICE investigators gained access to the names and credit card information of more than 5,000 Americans who had subscribed to websites offering images of child pornography. Many of those individuals provided military email addresses or physical addresses with Army or fleet ZIP codes when they purchased the subscriptions.

In a related inquiry, the Pentagon’s Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS) cross-checked the ICE list against military databases to come up with a list of Defense employees and contractors who appeared to be guilty of purchasing child  pornography. The names included staffers for the secretary of defense, contractors for the ultra-secretive National Security Agency, and a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. But the DCIS opened investigations into only 20 percent of the individuals identified, and succeeded in prosecuting just a handful.

The Boston Globe first reported the Pentagon’s role in Project Flicker in July, citing DCIS investigative reports (PDF) showing that at least 30 Defense Department employees were investigated.

But new Project Flicker investigative reports obtained by The Upshot through the Freedom of Information Act, which you can read here, show that DCIS investigators identified 264 Defense employees or contractors who had purchased child pornography online. Astonishingly, nine of those had “Top Secret Sensitive Compartmentalized Information” security clearances, meaning they had access to the nation’s most sensitive secrets. All told, 76 of the individuals had Secret or higher clearances. But DCIS investigated only 52 of the suspects, and just 10 were ever charged with viewing or purchasing child pornography. Without greater public disclosure of how these cases wound down, it’s impossible to know how or whether any of the names listed in the Project Flicker papers came in for additional scrutiny. It’s conceivable that some of them were picked up by local law enforcement, but it seems likely that most of the people flagged by the investigation did not have their military careers disrupted in the context of the DCIS inquiry.

Among those charged were Gary Douglass Grant, a captain in the Army Reserves and a judge advocate general, or military prosecutor. After investigators executing a search warrant found child pornography on his computer, he pleaded guilty last year to state charges of possession of obscene matter of a minor in a sexual act in California. Others included contractors for the NSA with Top Secret clearances; one of them — a former contractor — fled the country after being indicted and is believed to be in Libya.

But the vast majority of those investigated, including an active-duty lieutenant colonel in the Army and an official in the office of the secretary of defense, were never charged. On top of that, 212 people on ICE’s list were never investigated at all.

According to the records, DCIS prioritized the investigations by focusing on people who had security clearances — since those who have a taste for child pornography can be vulnerable to blackmail and espionage. The documents show that the probe then concentrated on people who had been previously suspected of or convicted of sex crimes, or had access to children as part of their Defense Department duties. But at least some of the people on the Project Flicker list with security clearances were never pursued and could possibly remain on the job: DCIS only investigated 52 people, and 76 of those on the Project Flicker list had clearances.

A DCIS spokesman didn’t return phone calls. But the agency’s own documents obtained via The Upshot’s FOIA request indicate that the decision to press investigations forward hinged largely on questions of the resources available to the investigators. “Due to DCIS headquarters’ direction and other DCIS investigative priorities, this investigation is cancelled” is a common summation in the files.

A source familiar with the Project Flicker investigations — who requested anonymity because public disclosure could jeopardize this person’s job — confirmed that departmental resources, and priorities, were decisive factors in letting inquiries lapse.

DCIS is primarily tasked with rooting out contractor fraud and investigating security breaches; its 400 staffers were already plenty busy before Project Flicker dropped 264 more names onto their caseloads. And child pornography investigations are difficult to prosecute. Many judges wouldn’t issue search warrants based on years-old evidence saying the targets subscribed to a kiddie porn website once.

“We were stuck in a situation where we had some great information, but didn’t have the resources to run with it,” the source told The Upshot. Many of the investigative reports obtained by The Upshot end with a similar citation of scarce resources:

Of course, other federal agencies, including ICE and the FBI, may have prosecuted some of the Project Flicker names the DCIS ignored. But that’s unlikely, given that some of the DCIS investigations were closed due to lack of cooperation from ICE.

In one case, involving an Army Reserve corporal in the Pittsburgh area, a DCIS agent expressed exasperation after repeatedly trying to get ICE to collaborate with him on the investigation: “Based upon the complete non-responsiveness of ICE … it is recommended that [the] matter be closed.”

As for the 212 Project Flicker names that DCIS didn’t investigate, the source familiar with the investigation said there was no systematic effort to inform their superiors or commanding officers of their suspected purchases of child pornography. Source

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Pilot cleared of 9/11 accusations, gets compensation

April 28 2010

An airline pilot wrongfully imprisoned and accused of training hijackers in the 9/11 terrorist attacks finally won his battle for compensation this week.

Lotfi Raissi, and Algerian-born commercial airline pilot who was trained in the US and living in Britain, was the first person to be arrested after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He was held for five months at the Belmarsh High Security Prison in London, but later released due to lack of evidence. An extradition request by the FBI lead to his re-arrest for four and a half months, still without any formal charges. Meanwhile, the media were naming him as the flight instructor who had trained the 9/11 hijackers.

A district judge residing over the case eventually released Raissi in 2002 on the grounds that “the court has received no evidence at all.” Four years after his unlawful detention, Raissi was still seeking compensation, as the government failed to act. Raissi’s legal team had to threaten the government with contempt proceedings until last week the justice secretary, Jack Straw, finally admitted Raissi was “completely exonerated.” However, according to Raissi’s lawyer, Jules Carey, the decision to compensate Raissi on the grounds of exoneration rather than a serious default means that mistakes made by the CPS and Metropolitan police in the case would not be investigated.

But after “nine years of hell,” he is eligible for up to £2m. “I have suffered such a great injustice, I’m grateful for this verdict. They took almost 10 years of my life and now I’m starting to breathe again,” he said.  Source

Lotfi Raissi case: How false link to al-Qaida kept innocent Algerian in jail

Even the  hijackers on 9/11  could have been anyone. Seems some of the so called hijackers  were actually still alive after 9/11. Seems some of them were fakes as well. Now isn’t that special.  So who created the fake hijackers? So again right from the beginning they were accusing innocent people of crime they didn’t commit. They were all From Arabia as well. Not one of them was from Afghanistan. So those in Afghanistan are suffering because of lies and fabrications. The lies are adding up. The truth is slowly emerging and all the 9/11 truth seekers are finding out what they thought is correct. 9/11 was an inside job.

Lotfi Raissi is innocent, yet another bit if evidence that the official story was bogus.

If the hijackers were faked/falsely accused, then one needs consider much  other information was fabricated, as well as how many others have been falsely accused. Any information derived from torture and they have been tortured is not acceptable, information or confessions..

Did you know that a Full Israeli El Al flight also took off on 9/11 from JFK to Tel Aviv

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Published in: on April 30, 2010 at 8:00 pm  Comments Off on Pilot cleared of 9/11 accusations, gets compensation  
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Dubai police chief to seek Netanyahu arrest

Update March 13 2010

Interpol issued red notices for 16 suspects, bringing the total number in the case to 27. The notices enable arrest warrants to be circulated to other countries to help with arrests and extradition.

Also this is rather interesting.

Israeli named Yuval Tal owns Payoneer—which offers prepaid cards, mostly as a way for employers to compensate foreign workers without checks and wire transfers—had been linked to this year’s cinematically brash Hamas assassination in Dubai.

For the rest Go HERE

Alternative reading of the al-Mabhouh murder

Update March 12 2010

When medical examiners inspected Mabhouh’s corpse, they found an injection mark on his thigh. Toxicology tests showed that he had been dosed with succinylcholine, a paralyzing agent. The cops concluded that after sedating Mabhouh, the killers smothered him with a pillow. But by the time the results had come in, police say the suspects had fled to Switzerland, Germany, Hong Kong–and possibly Iran. For the rest Go HERE

March 2 2010

DUBAI

Dubai’s police chief plans to seek the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the head of Israel’s spy agency over the killing of a Hamas leader in the emirate, Al Jazeera television reported.

Dahi Khalfan Tamim “said he would ask the Dubai prosecutor to issue arrest warrants for … Netanyahu and the head of Mossad,” the television said. It did not give details.

Tamim has said he is “almost certain” Israeli agents were involved in the killing of Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh at a Dubai hotel in January, calling for Mossad’s boss, Meir Dagan, to be arrested if it is proved responsible. Tamim said on Monday Mossad had “insulted” Dubai and Western countries whose fraudulent passports were used by suspects in the assassination.

Dubai has asked the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation to look into prepaid cards issued by the Meta Financial Group’s MetaBank which the suspects used, a United Arab Emirates newspaper said.

Citing an FBI source, The National newspaper said the investigation would look into any Israeli involvement in the killing.

“Thirteen of the 26 suspects used prepaid MasterCards issued by MetaBank, a regional American bank, to purchase plane tickets and book hotel rooms,” the newspaper said, quoting Dubai police.

MetaBank said it followed proper procedures when it issued the cards.

Authorities told the bank that the suspects appeared to have used stolen passports to get employment with U.S. companies, MetaBank said in a statement on Tuesday. The companies paid the employees with prepaid cards issued by MetaBank and other banks.

MetaBank said it had launched its own review of the matter, and had so far found that it followed all bank and regulatory requirements.

The suspects authorities had identified were not on any list that would indicate their identities were fraudulent, it said.

The UAE, a U.S.-allied Arab state that backs the Palestinian drive for an independent state and an end to Israeli occupation, has no diplomatic relations with Israel.

But it has established low-level political and trade links in recent years, with some Israeli officials attending events in the Gulf Arab state. Israeli tennis player Shahar Peer competed in the Dubai Championships last month.

Members of the hit squad used fraudulent passports from Britain, Ireland, Germany, France and Australia. Residents of Israel with the same names as the suspects, holding dual nationalities, have said their identities appear to have been stolen.

The passport abuse has drawn criticism from the European Union, and some of the governments involved have summoned the Israeli ambassadors to their countries to protest.

(Reporting by Tamara Walid and Firouz Sedarat; additional reporting by Dan Wilchins in New York; editing by Andrew Roche)

Source

That is now 28 suspects wanted by Dubai police.

They should be also checking those U.S. companies the frauds/assassins had a job with.

I wonder who owns the places they were employed. Are those places even real or  were they as fake as the passports?

I sure would like to know.

To get a job they would also need a work visa from the US  as well.

A bit more information I came across today March 5 2010

The CIA

Also, why was not a single agent out of the 27 identified to be holders of foreign passports a US passport holder?

Israel has a large number of dual-national Jewish-Americans living in the country, many of whom serve in the Israeli military and various government related jobs. Was this deliberate so as not to draw the wrath of the United States? Or was it simply that this operation was coordinated with the CIA?

The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and numerous foreign press outlets have reported that two men linked to the assassination of al-Mabhouh entered the U.S. on specific dates after the killing. According to the reports, someone using an Irish passport with the name Evan Dennings entered the U.S. on Jan. 21, and someone using a British passport with the name Roy Allan Cannon entered the U.S. on Feb. 14.

A sayan in the US?

According to Dubai’s Chief of Police, the MasterCards used by some of the assassins were branded by US-based Meta Bank, but issued by another small company called Payoneer. The company specializes in prepaid debit cards that can be used as credit card alternatives for online shoppers. Payoneer, which is registered in the US, has most of its employees based in Petah Tikva, Israel and is headed by Yuval Tal, who in a 2006 Fox News interview was identified as a former member of the Israeli Special Forces. Is there a relationship between Mr. Tal and the Mossad?

Many of these questions can be easily answered by the US government, but then again the term sayan has a much broader meaning when it comes to Israel and the United States. Source

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Still no verdict in Dr Aafia Siddiqui trial

February 3 2010

On Tuesday, jurors in New York deliberated for a full day without reaching a verdict in the trial of Pakistani citizen Aafia Siddiqui, who is charged with attempted murder of FBI agents and US military personnel.

The deliberations are scheduled to resume on Wednesday.

Siddiqui is accused of grabbing a US warrant officer’s M-4 rifle in a police station in Ghazni, Afghanistan in July 2008 and firing two shots at FBI agents and military personnel when being interrogated for her alleged possession of documents detailing a ‘terrorist’ plan.

The prosecution says she burst from behind a curtain and attempted the ‘murder’ and was shot in the abdomen.

Last week, Siddiqui said she was concerned about being transferred to a “secret” prison by the US forces and was trying to slip out of the room when she was shot. “I’m telling you what I know. I walked toward the curtain. I was shot and I was shot again. I fainted,” she said.

Siddiqui’s lawyer Linda Moreno said during closing arguments Monday that the “science” supported her testimony that she didn’t touch the weapon or fire it.

“Where are the bullet holes? …Did the Afghanis take the bullet holes? …There is no physical evidence that an M-4 rifle was touched by Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, let alone fired,”The Wall Street Journal quoted Moreno as saying.

Siddiqui vanished in Karachi, Pakistan with her three children on March 30, 2003. The next day it was reported in local newspapers that she had been taken into custody on terrorism charges.

US officials allege that she was seized on July 17, 2008 by Afghan security forces in Ghazni province and claim that documents, including formulas for explosives and chemical weapons, were found in her handbag.

She has been brought to the United States to face charges of attempted murder and assault. Siddiqui faces 20 years in prison on the attempted murder charges and life in prison on the firearms charge.

However, human rights organizations have cast doubt on the accuracy of the US account of the event.

Many political activists believe she was Prisoner 650 of the US detention facility in Bagram, Afghanistan, where they say she was tortured for five years until one day US authorities announced that they had found her in Afghanistan.

Source

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Published in: on February 3, 2010 at 6:10 am  Comments Off on Still no verdict in Dr Aafia Siddiqui trial  
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Spanish lawmaker’s photo used for bin Laden poster

The Spanish state requires an explanation from the United States and the FBI withdraw the picture from their website.

Photos From HERE English Translation

Original Source

The New Bin Laden

AP – This digitally enhanced image taken from the U.S. Department of State’s web site rewardsforjustice.net, …

By HAROLD HECKLE

January 16 2010

MADRID – A Spanish lawmaker was horrified to find out the FBI used his photograph as part of a digitally enhanced image showing what Osama bin Laden might look like today, he said Saturday, calling into question the crime-fighting agency’s credibility in battling terrorism.

Gaspar Llamazares of the United Left party said he would no longer feel safe traveling to the United States after his hair and facial wrinkles were taken from the Internet and appeared on a wanted poster updating the U.S. government’s 1998 photo of the al-Qaida leader.

“I was surprised and angered because it’s the most shameless use of a real person to make up the image of a terrorist,” Llamazares said at a news conference Saturday. “It’s almost like out of a comedy if it didn’t deal with matters as serious as bin Laden and citizens’ security.”

The FBI said in a statement Saturday that it was aware of the similarities between their age-progressed image “and that of an existing photograph of a Spanish public official.”

“The forensic artist was unable to find suitable features among the reference photographs and obtained those features, in part, from a photograph he found on the Internet,” the statement sent to The Associated Press said.

The photo appeared on a U.S. State Department Web site rewardsforjustice.net, where a reward of up to $25 million is offered for bin Laden, wanted in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya. The FBI said the photo of bin Laden will be removed from the Web site.

Llamazares said he planned to ask the U.S. government for an explanation and reserved the right to take legal action.

The State Department told a reporter to call back Tuesday after the U.S. federal Martin Luther King Day holiday on Monday.

Llamazares said he couldn’t believe it when he was first told about the similarity, but he quickly realized the seriousness of the situation.

The 52-year-old politician said he would not feel safe traveling in the U.S. now, because many airports use biometrics technology that compares the physical characteristics of travelers to passport or other photographs.

“I have no similarity, physically or ideologically, to the terrorist bin Laden,” he said.

They do share on characteristic — both are 52.

Jose Morales, spokesman for Llamazares’ party, told the Associated Press that no one in Spain had any idea that important security computer images such as the retouched bin Laden photo were built up from photographs of real people. Llamazares, the former leader of his party, was elected to Spain’s parliament in 2000.

“A technician has cut and paste in Photoshop a photograph he found out there on the Internet, and you don’t have to be in Quantico — the agency’s Virginia training facility — to do that,” Morales told the AP.

Llamazares said it was worrying to see elite security services like the FBI resorting to such sloppy techniques, especially in the light of recent security alerts like the attempted Christmas Day bombing of a Detroit-bound airplane.

“It might provoke mirth, but it demonstrates that what we’re seeing from security services isn’t exactly recommendable,” he said.

Bin Laden is believed to be hiding in the lawless Pakistan frontier bordering Afghanistan. His exact whereabouts have been unknown since late 2001, when he and some bodyguards slipped out of the Tora Bora mountains, evading air strikes, U.S. special forces and Afghan militias.

The U.S. State Department Web site shows the photos and bounty on bin Laden and 41 others wanted for terrorism.

Morales said Llamazares had received calls from Spain’s Prime, Foreign and Interior ministers, all expressing their concern and assuring him the government would ask the U.S. for explanations.

Source

N TV Video

The FBI has published fresh photographs of Osama bin Laden to try to track down the al-Qaida leader.

In a first “aged progressed” mugshot, he is portrayed in western clothes with wavy grey and black hair and a trimmed beard; a second shows the terrorist leader in his traditional outfit, with a white turban and a flowing, but greyer, beard.

Forensic artists used digital enhancement to modify Bin Laden’s features in an attempt to show what he might now look like.

The FBI also published “aged progressed” mug shots of another 17 terrorists wanted by the US, which can be seen on the state department website.

Source

So all 17 are bogus. Nice. Can you figure out which ones are bogus.  Just click on the photo to bring up the entire profile. Then Try  click and save pictures. What do you see?  One of them might be you? I would check if I were you.

Well they weren’t the only ones using images for immoral purposes. As noted in the link below. Shameful in  use of someones photo in both cases.

This never made it to the main stream media she wasn’t important enough and the news agency the photo was found on, never even said a word, like she was not important. Had she been a lawmakers child then I suppose something would have been said. Shameful absolutely shameful.

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Published in: on January 16, 2010 at 9:47 pm  Comments Off on Spanish lawmaker’s photo used for bin Laden poster  
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Nasa scientist accused of trying to sell secrets to Israel’s Mossad intelligence service

Former Nasa scientist accused of trying to sell secrets to Israel’s Mossad intelligence service

By David Usborne,

October 21 2009

A leading American scientist who once had access to top-secret materials related to national defence and atomic research appeared in court yesterday after being charged with attempting to pass classified materials to Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency.

Stewart Nozette, 52, a former Nasa scientist who worked on the Reagan administration’s Star Wars missile shield programme, faces a lengthy criminal complaint. The document details a meticulous sting operation that began when an FBI agent contacted him by telephone early last month posing as a Mossad agent. Dr Nozette and the agent subsequently held two meetings, allegedly striking deals to divulge secrets in exchange for cash.

If convicted on the charges of attempted espionage, he could face a sentence of life in prison.

“I don’t get recruited by Mossad every day,” Dr Nozette allegedly told the FBI agent at their first clandestine meeting in a Washington hotel, unaware that every word of their conversation was being taped. He added, “I knew this day would come.” Asked why he had been so sure of that, he responded, “I just had a feeling.”

The day he didn’t see coming was Monday, when agents put in him handcuffs at the Mayflower Hotel, just steps from the White House, where he had arrived imagining he was about to have another meeting with the men from Mossad. They were in fact the men from the FBI’s counter-espionage unit.

“This case reflects our firm resolve to hold accountable any individual who betrays the public trust by compromising our national security for his or her own personal gain,” Channing Phillips, acting US attorney for the District of Columbia, said after the arrest.

David Kris, US assistant attorney general, said: “The conduct alleged … is serious and should serve as a warning to anyone who would consider compromising our nation’s secrets.”

A graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dr Nozette has had a stellar career. According to a former colleague, the Stanford University aerospace professor Scott Hubbard, he worked on the Reagan administration’s Strategic Defence Initiative, in what Mr Hubbard told the AP news agency “was leading-edge, Department of Defense national security work”. He has also been credited with helping to find water on the moon.

Between 1989 to 2006, he was often afforded security clearances that were as high as “top secret”, according to a statement from the Justice Department. That gave him “frequent access to classified information and documents related to the US national defence”.

In those years he worked variously for the White House’s National Space Council and for research bodies for the Energy and Defence departments. In 2000, he set up his own non-profit company which sometimes advised the US government on developing advanced technologies. From 1998 until last year he received payments as a technical adviser to an aerospace company that was wholly owned by the Israeli government. The complaint does not accuse Israel of any complicity in the case.

The Associated Press reported yesterday that authorities became worried about possible espionage activity by Nozette after an investigation in 2006 that looked at whether he submitted false expenses claims.

Alarm bells were further sounded when he travelled abroad earlier this year, leaving for an unidentified country with two computer memory sticks, and returning without them.

It was on 3 September, the complaint says, that he was first contacted by the FBI agent claiming to be with Mossad. During their first hotel meeting, Dr Nozette allegedly acknowledged that he no longer had direct access to national secrets, but pointed to his head and said “it’s in” there, implying that there was much in his memory he could divulge. That, he allegedly went on, would include information about what the “US has done in space”.

At one point in that meeting, the question of remuneration was raised by Dr Nozette. “Well, I should tell you my first need is that they should figure out how to pay me,” he said, adding: “They don’t expect me to do this for free.” He also asked for an Israeli passport.

The two men agreed on a post-office box in Washington that they would use for further communication. In the following weeks, Dr Nozette allegedly took a total of $11,000 in cash in return for initial fragments of information, including answers to what he thought was a Mossad questionnaire, and an encrypted hard drive.

The complaint said that the FBI had video evidence of Dr Nozette leaving a manila envelope in the post office box.

The materials he passed on before his arrest late on Monday afternoon included information “classified as both ‘top secret’ and ‘secret’ that concerned US satellites, early-warning systems, means of defence or retaliation against large-scale attack, communications intelligence information, and major elements of defence strategy”, the Justice Department said in its statement.

Source

More information on Stewart Nozette

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Published in: on October 21, 2009 at 11:06 am  Comments Off on Nasa scientist accused of trying to sell secrets to Israel’s Mossad intelligence service  
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Who Benefited the most by J.F. Kennedy’s Death?

Surprisingly most people are not aware of the  terrorism Israel has inflicted around the world.

Anything in Brown is a the link to the source of story.

Assassinations, Car bombs,  False flags, using fake or stolen passports, the list is rather long and getting longer. Israel funds Terrorism. There is even a connection to 9/11.

There is a list of  Terrorist Activity, Groups and Crimes  below.


New information is added as I find it.

New information was added February 24, 2010

So we start with Kennedy and who benefited the most from his assassination. Israel was a big winner.

Well I was puttering around today looking for something else and came across this. Considering what I had already read on my Quest this really got me to thinking. Many feel J. F. Kennedy’s death was a tragedy.  Many also do not accept the official, Warren Commission Report,  just like they don’t accept the official 9/11 Commission Report. Both reports leave a lot to be desired. Not all evidence was brought to either report and well if you are so inclined, you would have to read it in it’s entirety to understand.

“Israel need not apologize for the assassination
or destruction of those who seek to destroy it.
The first order of business for any country
is the protection of its people.”
Washington Jewish Week, October 9, 1997

Mossad And The JFK Assassination

In March, 1992, Illinois Representative Paul Findley said in The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, “It is interesting – but not surprising – to note that in all the words written and uttered about the Kennedy assassination, Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad, has never been mentioned.”

Considering that the Mossad is quite possibly the most ruthless and efficient intelligence agency in the world, it is peculiar that they have never been scrutinized in relation to the Kennedy assassination, especially when practically every other entity in the world (short of Elvis impersonators) has been implicated. But that all changed in January, 1994 with the release of Michael Collins Piper’s Final Judgment. In this book, Piper says, “Israel’s Mossad was a primary (and critical) behind the scenes player in the conspiracy that ended the life of JFK. Through its own vast resources and through its international contacts in the intelligence community and in organized crime, Israel had the means, it had the opportunity, and it had the motive to play a major frontline role in the crime of the century – and it did.”

Their motive? Israel’s much touted Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, who ruled that country from its inception in 1948 until he resigned on June 16, 1963, was so enraged at John F. Kennedy for not allowing Israel to become a nuclear power that, Collins asserts, in his final days in office he commanded the Mossad to become involved in a plot to kill America’s president.

Ben-Gurion was so convinced that Israel’s very survival was in dire jeopardy that in one of his final letters to JFK he said, “Mr. President, my people have the right to exist, and this existence is in danger.”

In the days leading up to Ben-Gurion’s resignation from office, he and JFK had been involved in an unpublicized, contentious debate over the possibility of Israel getting nuclear capabilities. Their disagreement eventually escalated into a full-fledged war of words that was virtually ignored in the press. Ethan Bronner wrote about this secret battle between JFK and Ben-Gurion years later in a New York Times article on October 31, 1998, calling it a “fiercely hidden subject.” In fact, the Kennedy/Ben-Gurion conversations are still classified by the United States Government. Maybe this is the case because Ben-Gurion’s rage and frustration became so intense – and his power so great within Israel – that Piper contends it was at the center of the conspiracy to kill John Kennedy. This stance is supported by New York banker Abe Feinberg, who describes the situation as such: “Ben-Gurion could be vicious, and he had such a hatred of the old man [Joe Kennedy, Sr., JFK’s father].” Ben-Gurion despised Joe Kennedy because he felt that not only was he an anti-Semite, but that he had also sided with Hitler during the 1930’s and 40’s. [We will touch upon this aspect of the story in an upcoming article entitled The CIA and Organized Crime: Two Sides of the Same Coin].

Anyway, Ben-Gurion was convinced that Israel needed nuclear weapons to insure its survival, while Kennedy was dead-set against it. This inability to reach an agreement caused obvious problems. One of them revolved around Kennedy’s decision that he would make America his top priority in regard to foreign policy, and not Israel! Kennedy planned to honor the 1950 Tripartite Declaration which said that the United States would retaliate against any nation in the Middle East that attacked any other country. Ben-Gurion, on the other hand, wanted the Kennedy Administration to sell them offensive weapons, particularly Hawk missiles.

The two leaders thus engaged in a brutal letter exchange, but Kennedy wouldn’t budge. Ben-Gurion, obsessed by this issue, slipped into total paranoia, feeling that Kennedy’s obstinance was a blatant threat to the very existence of Israel as a nation. Piper writes, “Ben-Gurion had devoted a lifetime creating a Jewish State and guiding it into the world arena. And, in Ben-Gurion’s eyes, John F. Kennedy was an enemy of the Jewish people and his beloved state of Israel.” He continues, “The ‘nuclear option’ was not only at the very core of Ben-Gurion’s personal world view, but the very foundation of Israel’s national security policy.”

Ben-Gurion was so preoccupied with obtaining nuclear weapons that on June 27, 1963, eleven days after resigning from office, he announced, “I do not know of any other nation whose neighbors declare that they wish to terminate it, and not only declare, but prepare for it by all means available to them. We must have no illusions that what is declared every day in Cairo, Damascus, and Iraq are just words. This is the thought that guides the Arab leaders … I am confident … that science is able to provide us with the weapons that will serve the peace and deter our enemies.”

Avner Cohen, in Israel and the Bomb, published by Columbia University Press, reinforces this sense of urgency by writing, “Imbued with lessons of the Holocaust, Ben-Gurion was consumed by fears of security … Anxiety about the Holocaust reached beyond Ben-Gurion to infuse Israel’s military thinking.” He further adds fuel to this point by pointing out, “Ben-Gurion had no qualms about Israel’s need for weapons of mass destruction,” and “Ben-Gurion’s world view and his decisive governing style shaped his critical role in instigating Israel’s nuclear progress.”

Kennedy, on the other hand, was adamant in his refusal to promote Israel’s ascension to the nuclear stage. Avener Cohen, in Israel and the Bomb, stresses, “No American president was more concerned with the danger of nuclear proliferation than John Fitzgerald Kennedy. He was convinced that the spread of nuclear weapons would make the world more dangerous and undermine U.S. interests.” Cohen continues at the end of this passage, “The only example Kennedy used to make this point was Israel.”

Realizing that Kennedy would not change his mind, Ben-Gurion decided to join forces with Communist China. Both countries were greatly interested in creating nuclear programs, and so began their secret joint dealings. Working in unison through intermediary Shaul Eisenberg, who was a partner of Mossad gun-runner and accountant Tibor Rosenbaum, Israel and China proceeded to develop their own nuclear capabilities without the knowledge of the United States.

If you find this scenario improbable, I strongly urge you to read Gordon Thomas’ excellent book, Seeds of Fire, where he exposes how the Mossad and CSIS (Chinese secret service) have conspired on many occasions to not only steal American military secrets, but to also doctor U.S. intelligence programs such as the Justice Department’s PROMISE software. This instance, I am afraid to say, is but the first where echoes of the JFK assassination can still be felt today reverberating through our post 9-11 world. The danger of Israel developing the Bomb in unison with China became a highly volatile situation, and was closely monitored by the CIA.

Intent on pursuing this path, the Israeli’s constructed a nuclear facility at Dimona. When Kennedy demanded that the U.S. inspect this plant, Ben-Gurion was so incensed that he erected another PHONY facility that held no evidence of nuclear research and development. (Does this scenario sound eerily familiar to the game we’re playing with Saddam Hussein in Iraq right now?) Fully aware of their shenanigans, though, JFK told Charles Bartlett, “The sons of bitches lie to me constantly about their nuclear capability.”

Avner Cohen, in Israel and the Bomb, reiterates this claim by saying that Ben-Gurion had taken the nuclear issue so closely to heart that he, “concluded that he could not tell the truth about Dimona to American leaders, not even in private.”

Dr. Gerald M. Steinberg, political science professor at Bar-Ilan University’s BESA Center for Strategic Studies in Tel Aviv, weighs in by saying, “Between 1961 and 1963, the Kennedy administration placed a great deal of pressure on Ben-Gurion in the effort to pressure for acceptance of international inspection of Dimona and Israeli abdication of their nuclear weapons. This pressure apparently did not alter Israeli policy, but it was a contributing factor to Ben-Gurion’s resignation in 1963.”

To convey how serious this situation had become in modern terms, look at what is happening in Iraq with United Nations security teams inspecting the royal palaces and bunkers for nuclear weapons and materials. This matter is so urgent that our nation is on the verge of war. Forty years earlier, the heat that JFK was placing on Ben-Gurion was equally as strong as what George Bush is laying on Saddam Hussein today.

In Israel and the Bomb, Avner Cohen reinforces this point. “To force Ben-Gurion to accept the conditions, Kennedy exerted the most useful leverage available to an American president in dealing with Israel: a threat that an unsatisfactory solution would jeopardize the U.S. government’s commitment to, and support of, Israel.”

The pressure on Ben-Gurion was so immense that he ended up leaving office. But Kennedy, in true pit-bull style, didn’t let up on Ben-Gurion’s successor, Levi Eshkol, as Avner Cohen reports. “Kennedy told Eshkol that the U.S. commitment and support of Israel ‘could be seriously jeopardized’ if Israel did not let the U.S. obtain ‘reliable information’ about its efforts in the nuclear field. Kennedy’s demands were unprecedented. They amounted, in effect, to an ultimatum.” Cohen concludes this thought by asserting, “Kennedy’s letter precipitated a near-crisis situation in Eshkol’s office.”

In the end, as we’re all aware, Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963; but less known is that China conducted its first nuclear test in October, 1964. What makes this event more profound is Piper’s claim that even though Israel said its first nuclear tests took place in 1979, they actually occurred in October, 1964 along with the Chinese! If this is true, other than August, 1945 when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, October 1964 may possibly be the most dangerous month in 20th century history.

Let’s return, though, to JFK’s assassination and the direct results of it in regard to the Jewish lobby, American foreign policy, and the militarization of Israel. To understand how powerful the Israeli lobby is in this country, venerable Senator J. William Fulbright told CBS Face the Nation on April 15, 1973, “Israel controls the U.S. Senate. The Senate is subservient, much too much; we should be more concerned about U.S. interests rather than doing the bidding of Israel. The great majority of the Senate of the U.S. – somewhere around 80% – is completely in support of Israel; anything Israel wants; Israel gets. This has been demonstrated time and again, and this has made [foreign policy] difficult for our government.”

Do you hear what Senator Fulbright said? This isn’t a crazy conspiracy theorist or a KKK anti-Semite. It’s a much-respected U.S. Senator saying that about 80% of the Senate is in Israel’s hip pocket. Adding clout to this argument is Rep. Paul Findley, who was quoted in The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs in March, 1992, “During John Kennedy’s campaign for the presidency, a group of New York Jews had privately offered to meet his campaign expenses if he would let them set his Middle East policy. He did not agree … As the president, he provided only limited support of Israel.”

To understand how important Kennedy’s decisions were during his short-lived presidency, we need to look at the issue of campaign finance. Considering how influential the Israeli lobby is in the U.S. Senate (hearkening back to the words of Senator Fulbright), they had to have been enraged when President Kennedy genuinely wanted to cut the knees out from under the current campaign finance methods because it made politicians so reliant upon the huge cash inlays of special-interest groups. Regrettably, Kennedy did not have the time to implement this program, and to this day our political system is still monopolized by lobbyists from the very same special-interest groups. One can only imagine what changes would have occurred in regard to our foreign policy had Kennedy eradicated these vipers and blood-suckers from the halls of Congress.

Tragically, Kennedy’s ideas never came to fruition, and his heated battle with Prime Minister Ben-Gurion over whether Israel should be allowed to develop a nuclear program was ultimately lost. The reason why is that Lyndon Baines Johnson, who Kennedy intended to drop from his ticket in 1964 due to his extreme dislike for, had a complete reversal in foreign policy. As you will see, not only did Israel’s nuclear program move ahead unchecked; they also became the primary beneficiary of our foreign aid.

But this absolute turnaround would not have occurred if Kennedy would not have been assassinated. Up until LBJ became president, Kennedy dealt with the Middle East in a way that most benefited the U.S. His primary goal – and one which would most keep the peace – was a balance of power in the Middle East so that each and every nation would be secure. This decision adhered to the Tripartite Declaration which the U.S. signed in 1950. But under the Johnson administration, this fragile balance was overturned, and by 1967 – only four years after Kennedy’s assassination – the U.S. was Israel’s main weapons supplier, and OUR best interests were put well behind those of Israel!

As Michael Collins Piper writes: “The bottom line is this: JFK was adamantly determined to stop Israel from building the nuclear bomb. LBJ simply looked the other way. JFK’s death did indeed prove beneficial to Israel’s nuclear ambitions and the evidence proves it.”

Reuven Pedatzer, in a review of Avner Cohen’s Israel and the Bomb, in the Israeli Newspaper Ha’aretz on February 5, 1999 wrote, “The murder of American president John F. Kennedy brought to an abrupt end the massive pressure being applied by the U.S. administration on the government of Israel to discontinue their nuclear program.” He continues, “Kennedy made it quite clear to the Israeli Prime Minister that he would not under any circumstances agree to Israel becoming a nuclear state.” Pedatzer concludes, “Had Kennedy remained alive, it is doubtful whether Israel would today have a nuclear option,” and that, “Ben-Gurion’s decision to resign in 1963 was taken to a large extent against the background of the tremendous pressure that Kennedy was applying on him concerning the nuclear issue.”

If you’re still not convinced; how about some numbers? In Kennedy’s last fiscal budget year of 1964, Israeli aid was $40 million. In LBJ’s first budget of 1965, it soared to $71 million, and in 1966 more than tripled from two years earlier to $130 million! Plus, during Kennedy’s administration, almost none of our aid to Israel was military in nature. Instead, it was split equally between development loans and food assistance under the PL480 Program. Yet in 1965 under the Johnson administration, 20% of our aid to Israel was for the military, while in 1966, 71% was used for war-related materials.

Continuing in this same vein, in 1963 the Kennedy administration sold 5 Hawk missiles to Israel as part of an air-defense system. In 1965-66, though, LBJ laid 250 tanks on Israel, 48 Skyhawk attack aircrafts, plus guns and artillery which were all offensive in nature. If you ever wondered when the Israeli War Machine was created, this is it! LBJ was its father.

According to Stephen Green in Taking Sides: America’s Secret Relations with a Militant Israel, “The $92 million in military assistance provided in fiscal year 1966 was greater than the total of all official military aid provided to Israel cumulatively in all the years going back to the foundation of that nation in 1948.”

Green continues, “70% of all U.S. official assistance to Israel has been military. America has given Israel over $17 billion in military aid since 1946, virtually all of which – over 99% – has been provided since 1965.”

Can you see what’s happening here? Within two years of JFK’s assassination, Israel went from being a weak, outmatched member of the volatile Middle Eastern community that was not allowed to develop nuclear weapons to one that was well on its way to becoming a undeniable military force on the world stage. John Kennedy adamantly put his foot down and refused to allow Israel to develop a nuclear program, while LBJ bent over backward to facilitate and bolster them. Or, as Seymour Hersh wrote in The Samson Option, “By 1968, the president had no intention of doing anything to stop the Israeli bomb.”

The result of this shift in focus from the Kennedy to Johnson administration is, in my opinion, the PRIMARY reason behind our current troubles in the Middle East which culminated in the 9-11 attacks and our upcoming war with Iraq (and beyond). I have a great deal of confidence in this statement, for as Michael Collins Piper points out, here are the results of John F. Kennedy’s assassination:

1) Our foreign and military aid to Israel increased dramatically once LBJ became president.

2) Rather than trying to maintain a BALANCE in the Middle East, Israel suddenly emerged as the dominant force.

3) Since the LBJ administration, Israel has always had weaponry that was superior to any of its direct neighbors.

4) Due to this undeniable and obvious increase in Israel’s War Machine, a constant struggle has been perpetuated in the Middle East.

5) LBJ also allowed Israel to proceed with its nuclear development, resulting in them becoming the 6th largest nuclear force in the world.

6) Finally, our huge outlays of foreign aid to Israel (approximately $10 billion/year when all is said and done) has created a situation of never-ending attacks and retaliation in the Middle East, plus outright scorn and enmity against the U.S. for playing the role of Israel’s military enabler.
In Israel’s, and especially David Ben-Gurion’s eyes then, what were their alternatives – to remain weakened (or at least balanced) in relation to their neighbors and handcuffed by JFK’s refusal to bow to their will, or KILL the one man standing in their way to becoming dominant in the Middle East, the recipient of huge amounts of military aid, and one of the premier nuclear forces in the world? It’s something to think about. Also, while these thoughts are running through your head, ask yourself this question. If Kennedy, LBJ, and all subsequent administrations would have adhered to the 1950 Tripartite Declaration and did everything in their power to maintain balance in the Middle East instead of pushing Israel to the forefront, would our Towers have been attacked on 9-11, 2001, and would we be on the verge of a possibly catastrophic war today? It’s certainly something to ponder.

Source

Here are a few Examples and there are more this is just the tip of the Iceburg.

How the Mossad Tricked US into Bombing Libya

Operation Trojan was one of the Mossad’s greatest successes. It brought about the air strike on Libya that President Reagan had promised.

On the night of February 17-18, two Israeli missile boats, dropped off Mossad agents and they started transmitting fake transmissions.

By the end of March, the Americans were already intercepting messages broadcast by the Trojan, which was only activated during heavy communication traffic hours. Using the Trojan, the Mossad tried to make it appear that a long series of terrorist orders were being transmitted to various Libyan embassies around the world (or, as they were called by the Libyans, Peoples’ Bureaus). As the Mossad had hoped, the transmissions were deciphered by the Americans and construed as ample proof that the Libyans were active sponsors of terrorism. What’s more, the Americans pointed out, Mossad reports confirmed it.

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On April 14, 1986, one hundred and sixty American aircraft dropped over sixty tons of bombs on Libya.

Related:

Trojan device in Tripoli, Libya

1986: US launches air strikes on Libya

We now know that they would start a war on purpose. They tricked President Reagan.

New Zealand jails Mossad men and breaks ties with Israel

In 2004

New Zealand imposed diplomatic sanctions on Israel today after two suspected Mossad agents were jailed by an Auckland court for illegally trying to obtain a New Zealand passport.

What we now know is they will try to get a passport form another country.

Mossad hardman in first foreign kill

ISRAEL’S foreign intelligence service, Mossad, has carried out what is believed to be its first assassination on foreign soil in more than seven years, signaling a radical shift in operations under the hard line general who runs it.

Meir Dagan, 58, has been determined to breathe new fire into the once formidable organisation since his appointment by Ariel Sharon, the prime minister, five months ago.

Last weekend he claimed his first success: Abu Mohammed al-Masri, head of Al-Qaeda in Lebanon, was killed in a car bomb detonated by Mossad as he arrived at a mosque.

What we now know is they will use a car bomb in another country to kill.

A botched assassination attempt by seven Israeli agents and the rise to power of Khalid Mishal

In March 1997, disappointed over the latest reversals in the peace process in the Middle East, King Hussein of Jordan wrote a letter to Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister of ten months’ standing, that must figure as one of the saddest documents in the history of the Arab–Israeli conflict. Having openly endorsed Netanyahu in the Israeli general election of May 1996 – a disastrous miscalculation – Hussein felt a deep sense of betrayal. Netanyahu had wasted no opportunity in the ensuing months to disparage the peace process begun in Oslo in 1993, and to assert a combative line on new settlements in the Occupied Territories.

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The undisputed leader of Hamas today, barricaded with his family inside a fortified office complex on the outskirts of Damascus, is Khalid Mishal. The racy title of McGeough’s book sums up his central thesis, that Mishal came to power largely as the result of a botched assassination attempt by seven Mossad agents in September 1997.

Eschewing the more familiar air-to-ground missile, car bomb or silent bullet in the night, Israel’s secret service opted for a poison that would supposedly result in death a day or so later, while leaving no clues for the autopsy. Stepping out of his car on the way to the office one morning, Mishal encountered a couple of men posing as tourists. One caught his attention by noisily pulling open a soda can; the other leapt up and squirted a deadly toxin into his ear. At this point, however, Mossad’s plan went awry. A bodyguard chased and caught the two assailants, who were handed over to the police. Mishal himself was taken to hospital in time to halt, and eventually reverse, the usually fatal after-effects. And four Mossad accomplices were run to ground in the local Israeli embassy.


Canadian Passport Abuse

But Canada’s involvement is significant enough to have chilled diplomatic relations between Ottawa and Israel. It resulted in the recall “for consultations” late last week of Canada’s ambassador to Israel, an official signal of displeasure proposed by Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy and sanctioned by Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, both of whom, according to a senior Ottawa adviser, “are mightily pissed off” at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in Jerusalem.

Passports are the reason for Canada’s official ire: the fact that Meshal’s assailants were masquerading as a pair of Canadian tourists. While details remain unclear, it appears that the two men who attacked the Hamas leader had entered Jordan along with three male companions, all of them travelling on tourist visas stamped into forged or doctored Canadian passports. Despite Israeli denials, there is little doubt the five were part of a team sent into Jordan by Israel’s secret services – Mossad in all probability – to assassinate Meshal.

On the face of it, Axworthy seems to have a point. It is, however, a connection that might never have come to light had it not been for the bulldog tenacity of a single individual, Mohammed Abu Seif. He was one of Meshal’s two bodyguards that morning in Amman when the Hamas leader was sprayed with what appears to have been a time-delayed nerve gas, an insidious poison that within 24 hours prompted an acute form of respiratory failure. It could very well have cost Meshal his life.

The following year, 50 blank passports were stolen from the vault of the Canadian Embassy in Vienna. One of those documents, traced by the registration number, turned up a year later in Nicosia, Cyprus. It was left behind by a member of a Mossad team that had detonated explosives under the hotel bed of a sleeping Palestinian guerrilla leader, killing him instantly.

Not least in Israel. The bungled assassination attempt in Jordan is not the first time that Israel’s secret service has been caught manipulating Canadian passports. In 1973, Israeli agents travelling on doctored Canadian passports botched another execution attempt in Lillehammer, Norway. A team from Mossad, the Jewish state’s external security service, killed Ahmed Bouchiki, mistaking the Moroccan-born waiter for the Palestinian who planned the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. One member of that hit squad, arrested by Norwegian police, was found to be using the identity of Canadian Patricia Roxborough, a legal secretary whose passport had been stolen months earlier from the desk of her Montreal office.

In addition to outright theft, Israel’s clandestine services have other means to obtain Canadian documents. It is an open secret that new immigrants to the Jewish state, especially from Canada, are sometimes encouraged to donate passports, both valid and expired, to unidentified bureaucrats in the interests of what is euphemistically known as “the security of the state.”

As for the forgeries, Mossad defector Victor Ostrovsky, in the 1991 book he co-authored with Canadian journalist Claire Hoy, By Way of Deception, described a secret Israeli factory engaged in the manufacture of forged passports, including a batch of more than 1,000 Canadian documents. Israel’s spies might be embarrassed by the revelation.

What we know is that Israel doesn’t keep their word. This is of course nothing new.

We also know that Mossad would use a a deadly toxin to assassinate someone. Their agents even used Canadian forged passports.  So were they going to have Canadians blamed for trying to assassinate Meshal.

To add to this

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu authorized assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh

PM approved Dubai assassination in early January of

February 23 2010

By Yossi Melman, Ofer Aderet, Liel Kyzer, Barak Ravid and Avi Issacharoff

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu authorized in early January the assassination of Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, according to a report published in the Sunday Times. Interpole is looking for 11 suspects. They also used fake passports.

Mossad commits crimes and if they get caught other countries get blamed. Well how many times have they done that one has to wonder?

The Lavon Affair

Israel and Terror in Egypt

The Lavon affair (“Esek Habish” – the shameful affair) was one of the most bizarre chapters in Israeli history.  In 1954, the Israeli secret service set up a spy ring in Egypt, with the purpose of blowing up US and British targets. The operation was code-named “Susanah.” The terrorist hits were to be blamed on the regime of Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser, with the purpose of alienating the US and Britain from Egypt and Nasser and somehow preventing Egyptian nationalization of the Suez canal. The ring was discovered. Strict censorship ensured that that the Israeli public officially knew little or nothing of the affair for many years. Names were not mentioned, the affair was called “Esek Bish” – the affair of shame, and key protagonists were referred to as “X” and “the third man.” Unofficially and through leaks, most people knew at least the outlines of the affair.

A short list of Assassinations

In the deadly shadow war between Arab and Jew in the Middle East, Israel’s secret services have demonstrated a ruthless and inventive mastery of the black arts of kidnap and assassination. Among the many casualties attributed to the long arm of Israeli vengeance:

1979

Ali Hassan Salameh, architect of the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes during the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, is killed on a Beirut street by a remote-controlled car bomb.

1988

Khalil al-Wazir, aka Abu Jihad, the PLO’s second-in-command, is shot to death in his beachfront office in Tunis by a squad of seaborne Israeli commandos.

1989

Sheik Abdel Karim Obeid, spiritual leader of the Iranian-backed Hezbollah, is kidnapped in south Lebanon and transported to an Israeli prison.

1992

Hezbollah guerrilla leader Abbas Musawi is ambushed and killed in Israeli-occupied south Lebanon.

1994

Islamic Jihad activist and journalist Hani Abed dies when his car explodes in the Gaza Strip.

1995

Islamic Jihad leader Fathi al-Shiqaqi dies on a busy street in Sliema, Malta, when he is shot five times in the head by two assailants on a passing motorcycle.

1996

Yahiya Ayyash, known in the Hamas movement as “the engineer” for his skill in bomb-making, is decapitated when 50 g of explosives planted in his cellular telephone detonates as he makes a call.

Israel’s Failed Assassination Attempt On US Ambassador John Gunther Deanís In Lebanon in 1979

Had Mossad, Israel’s secret intelligence organization, succeeded, it would have been the perfect crime – the crime of the century. The plan was breathtaking in concept: to assassinate the American ambassador to Lebanon, in Lebanon, with American weapons, intended for Israeli’s defense only. Everything about it would point to Lebanon as the culprit.

Jewish Terrorists Assassinate U.N. Peacekeeper Count Folke Bernadotte

It was 47 years ago, Sept. 17, 1948, when Jewish terrorists assassinated Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden as he sought to bring peace to the Middle East. His three-car convoy had been stopped at a small improvised roadblock in Jewish-controlled West Jerusalem when two gunmen began shooting out the tires of the cars and a third gunman thrust a Schmeisser automatic pistol through the open back window of Bernadotte’s Chrysler. The 54-year-old diplomat, sitting on the right in the back, was hit by six bullets and died instantly. A French officer sitting next to Bernadotte was killed accidentally.

The we have this.

Assassinations in Gaza and West Bank/ a rather long list

The Zionist Terror Network

Jewish Defense League, Tagar/Betar  are in fact terrorist organizations.

Mossad, is

responsible for setting up Jewish defense groups, called “frames,” or misgerot, all over the world, now including some parts of the United States, where anti-Semitism is regarded as a threat…The main job is to help the leaders of Jewish communities outside Israel plan for their own security. Part of this is done through the hets va-keshet, or “bow and arrow,” Israel’s paramilitary youth brigades.
…Often youths from other countries are brought over [to Israel] to spend the summer learning about security, picking up such skills as completing obstacle courses, pitching tents, and learning how to use a sniper rifle and Uzi assault rifle. Still others learn upgraded security skills, such as how to build a slick, for hiding weapons or documents, when and how to do security checks, as well as fundamentals of investigation and intelligence gathering.

You have your bombings,  you have your arson and the list goes on and on.  They will attack any person or country.

It is a very long list of crimes and terrorist acts they have committed.

They even attack those who question the Holocaust.

As we all well know many of things, we were told were false. Many of the records have been open to examine and as it turns out many of the new findings confirm much of the Official story, are in fact false.

Israel provides weapons for the many “Jewish defense groups,”

Israel encourages their hatred, terrorist activity and violence.

One of the early assassinations was:
When the Zionists Killed Yaakov Yisrael Dehan on July 1, 1924
The young martyr, Dr. Yaakov Yisrael Dehan was murdered on July 1, 1924. He was a man who devoted all his energies and the best years of his life to saving the remnant of loyal Jews, and to promote peace with the veteran Arab residents of the Holy Land. Through his knowledge of politics and diplomacy, Dehan contributed much to crystallizing an independent position for Orthodox Jewry unaffiliated with the Zionist leadership.
At a time when the first followers of the Zionist movement began streaming into the Holy Land in large numbers, defiling the holiness of the land, and by virtue of their idiotic ideas began to work to expel the Arabs who had been living there for centuries in order to establish a Zionist state.

The Zionists first approached the British authorities by pretending to present themselves as the representatives of the Jewish nation, who desired to establish a “national home” without any regard whatsoever of the fact that the vast majority of the Jewish People opposed Zionism in those days. However, through their various contacts, the Zionists managed to bring about the Balfour Declaration (known among our rabbis of the time as the Baal Peor Declaration – a pun referring to the idolatry mentioned in the Bible), based on the “right” of the Jews to establish a state in Palestine, and ultimately the state itself to our great misfortune.
USS Liberty

Israel attacked the USS Liberty using UNMARKED AIRCRAFT. This is the single fact which proves Israel knew exactly who they were attacking. Israel’s story is that they thought USS Liberty was an Egyptian ship and therefore a legitimate target of war. Were that true, there would be no reason to attack a supposedly Egyptian ship with unmarked aircraft. The only possible reason to use unmarked aircraft to attack the ship is that Israel knew it was an American ship and intended to sink it, then to blame the attack on Egypt.

The cover-up of the USS Liberty

Despite the overwhelming evidence that Israel had attacked the ship and killed the American servicemen deliberately, the Johnson administration and Congress covered up the entire incident. Johnson was planning to run for president the following year and needed the support of pro-Israel voters.

We now know they would perpetrate a False Flag.

Would Johnson have covered up who Assassinated J. F. Kennedy just to get into power? Now one has to wonder.

Mossad agent may testify in Lockerbie case
LibyaIsrael, Politics, 8/11/1999

Former Mossad agent Victor Ostroviski has proposed to be a witness in the defense of the two Libyans suspected of being involved in the Lockerbie incident of 1988.

The London based al-Sharq al-Awsat daily quoted Ostroviski as saying that he has evidence which will prove innocent the two Libyans, Abdul Bassit al-Miqrahi and al-Amin Khaleifa Fahima. He indicated a role played by the Israeli foreign intelligence in the explosion, which resulted in killing 270 persons.

The paper added that Ostroviski told the defense lawyer for the two suspects that he maintained firm relations with former colleagues, who told him the secrets of this crisis and leaked information to him that might cause great embarrassment for Israel.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat said that Otroviski, who will give his testimony through a sattelite television channel, asked a British army officer who held a meeting with him just a short time after the Lockerbie incident to contact an officer in the Mossad who had told Ostroviski that the Israeli security system had a hand in the Lockerbie incident.  Source

Bomb in San Lázaro, Mexico

The two arrested Israelis were also found to be carrying Pakistani passports.

There  was uproar in the Chamber of Deputies, provoked by the arrested of two individuals, presumed to be of Israeli origin, who were carrying a high power gun and an attaché case with nine grenades, three magazines with 53 cartridges and C-4 explosives, considered to be highly powerful.

Obviously they were going to blow up something. Maybe make another car bomb of blow up a building. And again the Passports.

Israel Has Long Spied on US, Say Officials

We know they spied on the US.

How Israel Wages War in Plain Sight

From 1981-1985, Israeli agent Jonathan Pollard stole 360 cubic feet of classified U.S. intelligence documents on Soviet arms shipments, Pakistani nuclear weapons, Libyan air defense systems and other data sought by Tel Aviv. With oversight by only a few case officers (katsas), Israeli agents routinely manage sophisticated operations with the help of pre-staged assets and a network of sayanim.

Jonathan Jay Pollard, an intelligence analyst working in the U.S. Naval Investigative Service’s Anti-Terrorist Alert Center, systematically stole highly sensitive security secrets from almost every major intelligence-gathering agency in the United States. Over the course of eighteen months in the mid-1980s, he took and subsequently sold to Israel more than one million pages of classified material, enough to fill a six-by-ten-foot room stacked six feet high. No other spy in the history of the United States has stolen so many secrets, so highly classified, in such a short period of time. Ronald J. Olive, the author of this book, was the assistant special agent in charge of counterintelligence in the Washington office of the Naval Investigative Service who led the whirlwind investigation against Pollard. Olive interrogated Pollard and garnered the confession that led to his arrest in November 1985 and eventual life sentence.

Stewart Nozette, 52, a former Nasa scientist

He worked on the Reagan administration’s Star Wars missile shield programme, faces a lengthy criminal complaint.

A leading American scientist who once had access to top-secret materials related to national defence and atomic research appeared in court yesterday after being charged with attempting to pass classified materials to Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency.

Two Jewish Defense League leaders charged in bomb plot

Federal authorities Wednesday charged two leaders of the Jewish Defense League with conspiring to blow up Arab and Muslim institutions in southern California, including the offices of Arab-American congressman Rep. Darrell Issa.

Irv Rubin and Earl Krugel were taken into federal custody following late Tuesday raids by members of an antiterrorism task force, said Thom Mrozek, a spokesman for U.S. Attorney John S. Gordon.

“When you target innocents based on religious or political affiliation or belief, we consider that terrorist activity,” Gordon said.

We now know that terrorist activities could and have been carried out by some in the Jewish community. There is no difference in this then Mossad has done.

False Flag Attacks in Argentina: 1992 and 1994

Added October 17 2009

Coinciding with Thierry Meyssan’s earlier conclusions and with those of other Argentinian investigators [*], economist and globalization expert Adrian Salbuchi chronicles the events that shook Buenos Aires in 1992 and 1994, contouring their unmistakable false-flag profile and connecting them to a wider pattern of similar “terrorist attacks”.

Since Sept. 11, more than 60 Israelis have been arrested or detained, either under the new patriot anti-terrorism law, or for immigration violations.

A handful of active Israeli military were among those detained, according to investigators, who say some of the detainees also failed polygraph questions when asked about alleged surveillance activities against and in the United States.

There is no indication that the Israelis were involved in the 9/11 attacks, but investigators suspect that they Israelis may have gathered intelligence about the attacks in advance, and not shared it. A highly placed investigator said there are “tie-ins.” But when asked for details, he flatly refused to describe them, saying, “evidence linking these Israelis to 9/11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It’s classified information.”

Prior to Sept. 11, as many as 140 other Israelis had been detained or arrested in a secretive and sprawling investigation into suspected espionage by Israelis in the United States.

So this makes one wonder if they had any connection to 9/11.

Odigo says workers were warned of attack

Odigo, the instant messaging service, says that two of its workers received messages two hours before the Twin Towers attack on September 11 predicting the attack would happen, and the company has been cooperating with Israeli and American law enforcement, including the FBI, in trying to find the original sender of the message predicting the attack.

Micha Macover, CEO of the company, said the two workers received the messages and immediately after the terror attack informed the company’s management, which immediately contacted the Israeli security services, which brought in the FBI.

“I have no idea why the message was sent to these two workers, who don’t know the sender. It may just have been someone who was joking and turned out they accidentally got it right. And I don’t know if our information was useful in any of the arrests the FBI has made,” said Macover. Odigo is a U.S.-based company whose headquarters are in New York, with offices in Herzliya.

As an instant messaging service, Odigo users are not limited to sending messages only to people on their “buddy” list, as is the case with ICQ, the other well-known Israeli instant messaging application.

Odigo usually zealously protects the privacy of its registered users, said Macover, but in this case the company took the initiative to provide the law enforcement services with the originating Internet Presence address of the message, so the FBI could track down the Internet Service Provider, and the actual sender of the original message

“OK so now we just have to wonder”?

Ex-staffer at Dimona nuclear reactor says made to drink uranium

Mordechai Vanunu also reveals secret weapons production.

So we now know they were making WMD.

Perpetrated by Mossad, they are Israels  “Acts of Terrorism” and the following legally applies to them. International Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism

So now that we know all that ,we will go back to 1963. The old saying if we knew then what we know now, things may have been very different. So now who would benefit most from Kennedy’s death.

In the winter of 1963, Lyndon Baines Johnson invited John F. Kennedy to make a tour of Texas. While in Dallas on on 22nd November, Kennedy was assassinated and Johnson was immediately sworn in as president on on Air Force One while he travelled back to Washington.

As noted above

1) Our foreign and military aid to Israel increased dramatically once LBJ became president.

2) Rather than trying to maintain a BALANCE in the Middle East, Israel suddenly emerged as the dominant force.

3) Since the LBJ administration, Israel has always had weaponry that was superior to any of its direct neighbors.

4) Due to this undeniable and obvious increase in Israel’s War Machine, a constant struggle has been perpetuated in the Middle East.

5) LBJ also allowed Israel to proceed with its nuclear development, resulting in them becoming the 6th largest nuclear force in the world.

6) Finally, our huge outlays of foreign aid to Israel (approximately $10 billion/year when all is said and done) has created a situation of never-ending attacks and retaliation in the Middle East, plus outright scorn and enmity against the U.S. for playing the role of Israel’s military enabler.

Attacck of USS Liberty ignored by Johnson

Israel is a happy camper.

Tonkin Gulf Lie Launched Vietnam War

The weapons industry are happy campers.

Amazingly enough he didn’t launch Operation Northwood.  Something Kennedy refused to do.

President John F.Kennedy, The Federal Reserve And Executive Order 11110

On that day President John F. Kennedy signed Executive Order No. 11110 that returned to the U.S. government the power to issue currency, without going through the Federal Reserve. Mr. Kennedy’s order gave the Treasury the power “to issue silver certificates against any silver bullion, silver, or standard silver dollars in the Treasury.” This meant that for every ounce of silver in the U.S. Treasury’s vault, the government could introduce new money into circulation. In all, Kennedy brought nearly $4.3 billion in U.S. notes into circulation. The ramifications of this bill are enormous.

With the stroke of a pen, Mr. Kennedy was on his way to putting the Federal Reserve Bank of New York out of business.

****************

A number of “Kennedy bills” were indeed issued – the author has a five dollar bill in his possession with the heading “United States Note” – but were quickly withdrawn after Kennedy’s death. According to information from the Library of the Comptroller of the Currency, Executive Order 11,110 remains in effect today, although successive administrations beginning with that of President Lyndon Johnson apparently have simply ignored it and instead returned to the practice of paying interest on Federal Reserve notes. Today we continue to use Federal Reserve Notes, and the deficit is at an all-time high.

The Federal Reserve was also given back the powers to make money.

They are happy campers.

So who came out on top? Seems a few did.

Maybe the Warren Commission Report is a farce.

When you looking at a crime one must have a motive.

Maybe Lee Harvey Oswald was right he was just a pasty.

He was murdered by Jacob Rubenstein (Jack Ruby) Jack Ruby shot Oswald in basement carpark of Dallas police dept. On November 24 1963, after Kennedy died November 22 1963.

Why would Ruby kill Oswald? What would his motive be?

Had Oswald made it to court they may have found,  he was not guilty. Dead men don’t talk.

Neither one had anything to gain.

Somehow it all seems rather fishy.

Vanunu’s comments that there are “near-certain indications” that Israel was involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy support the thesis of Michael Collins Piper, presented in his book Final Judgment, that Israeli agents played a key role in the murder.

AFP asked Vanunu to explain his comments about Israeli involvement in the murder of President Kennedy.

“My view is that Kennedy was assassinated because of his strong opposition to [Israeli prime minister] Ben Gurion,” Vanunu said.

At the time, Ben Gurion was working to create a nuclear arsenal for Israel.

The group that was involved with Ben Gurion in developing and protecting Israel’s nuclear arsenal “was behind the assassination of Kennedy,” Vanunu said.

As Piper documents in Final Judgment, Kennedy’s resistance to Israel becoming a nuclear-armed state led to increasing hostility between the two leaders until Ben Gurion resigned in June 1963. Kennedy had realized that the Israelis were producing illegal nuclear weapons from the nuclear reactor given to Israel in 1959 under the “Atoms for Peace” program. Source

Israeli Connections to 9/11

A Jewish Defector Warns America He tell a mighty educational story. Also a couple of articles about the mass killing of 100,000 Jewish children in Israel

Israel and US were behind the Georgian Attacks on South Ossetia and Abkhazia

To Israel Hamas is not al-Qaida

UN nuclear assembly has called for Israel to open its nuclear facilities to UN inspection

Israel declares the shooting of American activist, Tristan Anderson to be an “act of war”

President John F.Kennedy, The Federal Reserve And Executive Order 11110

FEDERAL RESERVE OWNERS AND HISTORY

Has Usama Bin Ladin been dead for seven years – and are the U.S. and Britain covering it up to continue war on terror?

The last time we heard a squeak from him was on June 3 this year.

The world’s most notorious terrorist outsmarted America by releasing a menacing message as Air Force One touched down on Saudi Arabian soil at the start of Barack Obama’s first and much vaunted Middle East tour.

Even before the new President alighted at Riyadh airport to shake hands with Prince Abdullah, Bin Laden’s words were being aired on TV, radio and the internet across every continent.

It was yet another propaganda coup for the 52-year-old Al Qaeda leader. In the audiotape delivered to the Arab news network Al Jazeera, Bin Laden said that America and her Western allies were sowing seeds of hatred in the Muslim world and deserved dire consequences.

Seems Bin Laden pops up when the US needs more support for the war.
Just a propaganda ploy.

MURDER OF U.S. NATIONALS OUTSIDE THE UNITED STATES; CONSPIRACY TO MURDER U.S. NATIONALS OUTSIDE THE UNITED STATES; ATTACK ON A FEDERAL FACILITY RESULTING IN DEATH

Usama Bin Ladin
Usama Bin Ladin
Aliases: Usama Bin Muhammad Bin Ladin, Shaykh Usama Bin Ladin, The Prince, The Emir, Abu Abdallah, Mujahid Shaykh, Hajj, The Director

DESCRIPTION

Date of Birth Used: 1957 Hair: Brown
Place of Birth: Saudi Arabia Eyes: Brown
Height: 6’4″ to 6’6″ Sex: Male
Weight: Approximately 160 pounds Complexion: Olive
Build: Thin Citizenship: Saudi Arabian
Language: Arabic (probably Pashtu)
Scars and Marks: None known
Remarks: Bin Laden is left-handed and walks with a cane.

CAUTION

Usama Bin Laden is wanted in connection with the August 7, 1998, bombings of the United States Embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya. These attacks killed over 200 people. In addition, Bin Laden is a suspect in other terrorist attacks throughout the world.

REWARD

The Rewards For Justice Program, United States Department of State, is offering a reward of up to $25 million for information leading directly to the apprehension or conviction of Usama Bin Laden. An additional $2 million is being offered through a program developed and funded by the Airline Pilots Association and the Air Transport Association.

SHOULD BE CONSIDERED ARMED AND DANGEROUS
From
FBI Most Wanted
The FBI has no evidence to connect him to 9/11.
There are many more professional investigating 9/11 then there were before.
NYCCA is trying to get a new Independent Investigation.
Over 800 First Responders have died.
They were lied to.
They were told the air around the fallen towers was safe to breath, when in fact it was not.  Please help them get their new investigation.
The families of those who died and tose who are ill desrve the truth.
The rest of the world also deserves the truth.
Those who died on 9/11 , their families also deserve the truth.

Fire Fighters For 9/11 Truth

Pilots For 911Truth

Political Leaders for 911 Truth

Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth

Lawyers for 9/11 Truth

Medical Professionals for 9/11 Truth

Religious Leaders for 9/11 Truth

Scholars for 9/11 Truth & Justice

Scientific Panel Investigating Nine-Eleven

Veterans for 9/11 Truth

We want Justice not Lies.

The Olson Calls on 9/11: Three Official Denials- Might we say he lied.

Senior Military, Intelligence, Law Enforcement,
and Government Officials Question
the 9/11 Commission Report

A couple of Quotes

Commander Ted Muga, U.S. Navy (ret)

And also in all four planes, if you remember, none of the planes ever switched on their transponder to the hijack code.  There’s a very, very simple code that you put in if you suspect that your plane is being hijacked.  It takes literally just a split-second for you to put your hand down on the center console and flip it over.  And not one of the four planes ever transponded a hijack code, which is most, most unusual. …

Lt. Col. Karen U. Kwiatkowski, PhD, U.S. Air Force (ret) Eye Witness
I saw nothing of significance at the point of impact – no airplane metal or cargo debris was blowing on the lawn in front of the damaged building as smoke billowed from within the Pentagon. … all of us staring at the Pentagon that morning were indeed looking for such debris, but what we expected to see was not evident.
Commander Ralph Kolstad, U.S. Navy (ret)
At the Pentagon, the pilot of the Boeing 757 did quite a feat of flying.  I have 6,000 hours of flight time in Boeing 757’s and 767’s and could not have flown it the way the flight path was described.

I was also a Navy fighter pilot and Air Combat Instructor, U.S. Navy Fighter Weapons School and have experience flying low altitude, high speed aircraft.  I could not have done what these beginners did.  Something stinks to high heaven!

Where is the damage to the wall of the Pentagon from the wings?  Where are the big pieces that always break away in an accident?  Where is all the luggage?  Where are the miles and miles of wire, cable, and lines that are part and parcel of any large aircraft?  Where are the steel engine parts?  Where is the steel landing gear?  Where is the tail section that would have broken into large pieces?

Most of the stories on the site below are not ones you will hear on the main stream media.
Stories about and by First Responders and there are many.

Be sure to check the comments for more information.

Is Osama bin Laden still alive, Seems the answer is No He died in December of 2001

Published in: on September 12, 2009 at 4:45 am  Comments (3)  
Tags: , , , , ,

Butchers: The hidden truth about Israel’s kidney theft ring

Butchers: The hidden truth about Israel’s kidney theft ring


By Joseph Cannon
Cannonfire via Uruknet
Saturday, Aug 1, 2009

Editor’s Note: This report by Joseph Cannon includes his second follow-up report below. First the Zionists starve the Gazans with their blockade. Then they bomb the defenseless people inside the prison they’ve created for them. Then, with the complicity of the government of Israel, major “respected” U.S. hospitals and corrupt politicians, they sell the organs of some of the remaining Palestinians in their lucrative market in New York. What unconscionable behavior this is. What kind of beast is this. – LMB


38.aptopix_corruption_arrests_nyll109.jpg

July 31, 2009

(Note: This is a major story. Although I’ve done no original “in the field” research, I’ve stitched together published material in a way that reveals the true authorship of this crime. You won’t learn about the complicity of the Israeli government anywhere else.)

Where do the kidneys come from?

I’m talking about the kidneys offered by an “organist” named Izzy Rosenbaum. The FBI scooped him up in a corruption probe that focused on pay-offs to New Jersey pols (nothing surprising about that) and money laundering by prominent rabbis:

The probe also uncovered Levy Izhak Rosenbaum of Brooklyn, who is accused of conspiring to broker the sale of a human kidney for a transplant. According to the complaint, Rosenbaum said he had been brokering sale of kidneys for 10 years.

“His business was to entice vulnerable people to give up a kidney for $10,000 which he would turn around and sell for $160,000,” said Marra.

Marra is a US attorney involved with the case. News accounts like the one quoted above have led the public to believe that the “donors” were both willing and compensated, and that this operation was purely private. But good evidence indicates that the matter is far, far more troubling.

The kidneys were “donated” at gunpoint by unwilling victims.

The Israeli government directed Rosenbaum’s grisly scheme.

Major American hospitals wittingly participated in the plot.

Before we get to that evidence, let us confront two simple questions: Whose kidneys, exactly, were taken? And what kind of doctor would extract a kidney from a healthy patient?

“I am what you call a matchmaker,” the complaint quotes Rosenbaum as telling the undercover agent.

Had the transaction been real, federal authorities said, it would have been the most recent chapter in Rosenbaum’s 10-year career as an illicit middleman. In each case, he would take a blood sample from a prospective recipient and give it to an associate at an insurance company who could analyze it at a lab without arousing suspicion. The sample would then be shipped to Israel, and the necessary people paid off to find a match.

“He prayed on vulnerable people, ” said assistant US district attorney Mark McCarron.

Rosenbaum would then arrange the donor’s flight to New York, including obtaining a visa, authorities said. Once the donor arrived in the US, Rosenbaum would help fabricate a relationship between donor and recipient — a story both would repeat during interviews with medical professionals. The two might pretend to business associates, for instance, or close friends from a religious congregation.

“The hospitals seemed to be in the dark,” McCarron said.

As we shall see, we should take that last statement with a grain of salt roughly the size of Lot’s wife.

A close reading of the actual indictment of Rosenbaum (pdf) is troubling. Rosenbaum spilled his guts (so to speak) to an undercover informant posing as a prospective organ purchaser. During these interviews, an FBI agent posed as the purchaser’s secretary.

Let’s look at some excerpts from the indictment. “UC” refers to the informant, whose real name is Solomon Dwek.

The UC asked defendant ROSENBAUM how defendant ROSENBAUM could obtain a kidney on behalf of UC’s uncle, and defendant ROSENBAUM explained that defendant ROSENBAUM could send a blood sample from the UC’s uncle to Israel to find a matching prospective donor. Defendant ROSENBAUM added that “if you want to arrange it faster, then I, I bring the donor over here… The hospital is the authority who decide it’s a match or not. Not me, not you, not him, not nobody.”

Defendant ROSENBAUM then explained that it would be necessary to fabricate some sort of relationship between the donor and the recipient. Defendant ROSENBAUM stated that “we put together something–-the relationship. The hospital is asking what’s the relationship between” the donor and the recipient. Defendant ROSENBAUM continued, “So we put in a relationship, friends, or neighbor, or business relations, any relation.”

Defendant ROSENBAUM explained that he was not a surgeon and that once he had brought a willing donor to this country, “it’s beyond my control.” He did add that “I take care of [the donor] after, after the surgery also.” When pressed on this last point, defendant ROSENBAUM explained that “I place him somewhere,” to look after the donor. Defendant ROSENBAUM further stated: “You have to babysit him like a baby because he may have a language problem, maybe not.” Defendant ROSENBAUM explained the process of finding a donor in Israel and stated that “[t]here are people over there hurting . . . One of the reasons it’s so expensive is because you have to shmear (meaning pay various individuals for their assistance) all the time.”

11. Defendant ROSENBAUM indicated that among those who would need to be paid were the donor and the doctors in Israel who would examine the donor, and further added that there would be expenses incurred for preparing the Visa work and paying the donor’s expenses while in the United States.

The only evidence that the donor would be willing came from Rosenbaum, who had the following motives for lying:

1. He needed to ease the conscience of the prospective recipient.

2. He needed to justify the large amount of cash involved.

3. He needed to protect the hospitals and doctors involved with his operation. Rosenbaum understood that he was engaged in a risky business, and that even if he got caught, he would still need to provide cover for any hospital or surgeon connected to this wretched business.

Do we have evidence of that the donors were coerced? Yes. In fact, we have the testimony of an “insider” witness:

Nancy Scheper-Hughes of the University of California, Berkeley, was and is very clear as to Rosenbaum’s role in the ring.

“He is the main U.S. broker for an international trafficking network,” she said.

Her sources include a man who started working with Rosenbaum imagining he was helping people in desperate need. The man then began to see the donors, or to be more accurate, sellers, who were flown in from impoverished countries such as Moldova.

“He said it was awful. These people would be brought in and they didn’t even know what they were supposed to be doing and they would want to go home and they would cry,” Scheper-Hughes said.

The man called Rosenbaum “a thug” who would pull out a pistol he was apparently licensed to carry and tell the sellers, “You’re here. A deal is a deal. Now, you’ll give us a kidney or you’ll never go home.’

(Moldava, incidentally, is a small country bordering the Ukraine.)

Scheper-Hughes, who is writing a book on this topic, went to the FBI in 2002. They dismissed her evidence. The State Department issued a 2004 report which labeled organ trafficking an “urban legend.” By contrast, authorities in other countries acted on her leads and made arrests.

Scheper-Hughes had better luck in Brazil and in South Africa, where law enforcement corroborated her findings and acted decisively.

But the ring kept operating elsewhere. Scheper-Hughes visited villages in Moldova where, “20% of the men were siphoned off to be kidney sellers in this same scheme.”

We must now pause to re-think Rosenbaum’s statements to the FBI informant. How could any rational person working for a hospital buy the story that the recipients — American Jews — attended services with Brazilians and Africans?

You can see a lecture by the heroic Nancy Scheper-Hughes here. The video also gives her resume, which is extremely impressive. Her testimony to a House subcommittee is here.

NPR’s Brian Lehrer interviewed Scheper-Hughes yesterday morning. An excerpt:

I had begun to unravel a huge network — a criminal network that really looks like, smells like, kind of a mafia. The head office of the pyramid scheme originated in Israel, with brokers placed in Turkey; in New York City; in Philadelphia; in Durban; in Johannesburg; in Recife, Brazil; Moldova — all over the place. And I used my ethnographic investigative skills to just go country-hopping and try to connect the dots.

Eventually, it brought me to Isaac Rosenbaum being the head broker for Ilan Peri in Israel, who is the don, basically, of the operation, and who is a slippery guy. The Israelis tried to nail him and arrest him. They tried to get him on tax evasion and he escaped to Germany. I think he’s back in Israel.

A cynic might posit that Mr. Peri has what Mossad calls “a horse” pulling for him. (A “horse” is an Israeli slang term for a big shot offering covert aid.) Although he has left a very scant public trail, Mr. Peri and his operation are mentioned in this 2004 story.

This fascinating article from Agence-France Presse offers blockbuster information. A retired Israeli army officer named Geldaya Tauber Gady was arrested in Brazil for his participation in this international organ trafficking ring. (I suspect that the information from Scheper-Hughes — which was taken seriously in Brazil — led to Gady’s arrest.)

He told the court that the Israeli government financed the operation. Not only that:

Gady told the court that an Israeli government official, identified only as Ilan, put him in touch with an intermediary in Brazil…

Gady’s courtroom testimony puts the Rosenbaum case in an entirely new light.

The American media’s coverage has led the public to believe that Rosenbaum’s kidney trafficking was purely a matter of private enrichment. But a former Israeli officer has said under oath that the Israeli government runs this ring, and that the master of the ring — “Ilan” is obviously Ilan Peri — functions as an agent of that government.

(Now I’m wondering: Was the Israeli government involved with the money laundering conducted through New Jersey synagogues?)

Frankly, I suspect that Scheper-Hughes knows all about Gady’s testimony and its implications for the Rosenbaum case. She probably has chosen to keep mum about it in order not to lose credibility with the American media.

The Lehrer interview with Scheper-Hughes goes on to deliver more details about her findings in Moldova. In villages there, many young men reported that they had been told that they expect to find work in other countries (including the United States) as house painters. Once in the new country, they were forced to give up their kidneys.

According to Scheper-Hughes’ informant within Rosenbaum’s organization, confused and disoriented Russians would be flown into New York City by Israeli brokers who forced them at gunpoint to “donate” kidneys.

Scheper-Hughes: They told me the names of the hospitals, and they were our best hospitals!

Brian Lehrer: And did they know, professor, that they were performing kidney surgery on people who were unwilling participants and were being exploited and threatened?

Scheper-Hughes: My sense is, how could some of them not have known? The people that arrived, some of them didn’t speak the same languages, they were poor, they were disoriented…

We have rules. We have transplant coordinating committees. We have ethical guidelines. And you don’t just let people walk in off the streets.

She goes on to name Mount Sinai hospital, against whom she has videotaped evidence. She brought the videotape to the attention of 60 Minutes, which did not broadcast it. Later in the interview, she refers to operations done at Albert Einstein Medical Center. Mount Sinai says that its kidney donors “undergo an extensive evaluation to provide for their safety and well-being.”

Over the years, many have accused Israel of trafficking in the organs of Palestinians. The Palestinians themselves have no doubt that the practice is common.

Unfortunately, many of the websites trumpeting charges of Israeli organ theft often display an undeniable anti-Semitic bent. Some of the allegations I’ve looked into do indeed appear to be spurious. (I would, for example, dismiss any claim that traces back to so notorious a source as La Voz de Atlan.) But before you categorize all such accusations as fantasies, consider: As recently as 2004, the State Department officially denounced as mythical the claim that organ trafficking occurs in the United States. As we now know, that “myth” had a basis in reality.

Knee-jerk accusations of anti-Semitism should not deter us from conducting candid and unbiased research into Israel’s record. I would note that those who discuss organ trafficking in India and China are not accused of racial animosity toward the Indians or the Chinese.

This online book
is written to a high standard and cites responsible sources, including Scheper-Hughes. The endnotes attribute the following story to the respected author David Yallop:

West Bank, 8th of February 1988

Nineteen years old Khader Elias Tarazi, a Christian Palestinian, went shopping for groceries in the Gaza. Upon returning with two bags on his bicycle he crossed a road near a demonstration where stone throwers were fleeing Israeli Army soldiers. The soldiers grabbed Khader and beat his head and body with truncheons. Shopkeepers shouted that Khader wasn’t involved but soldiers broke one of Khader’s arms and a leg. They continued the beating then threw him onto the bonnet of their jeep handcuffing the now unconscious Khader to the front crash bar. They drove off continually braking hard whereupon he sustained further injuries including a broken back, skull injuries and his face kept banging against the bonnet.

The Israeli doctor at the Military Prison in Gaza refused to attend Khader because of his serious injuries and inadequate paperwork. He was taken to Ansar Two prison and thrown into a prisoner tent holding thirty to forty prisoners. The other Palestinian prisoners screamed that he must be taken to hospital and the guards responded by forcing them to strip naked and stand outside in the winter cold. Khader died in the tent and later was taken to Soroka Hospital in Beer Sheva and pronounced dead.

Khader’s mother was outside the prison where Israeli officials denied they had a prisoner by his name inside. Later, they admitted he was inside but said he must have been very sick when he went out shopping because he was now dead.

Israeli officials refused to hand over the body and it was transferred to Abu Kabeer hospital, officially for a post-mortem. Mrs Tarazi told David Yallop that during this time many of his organs were illegally removed from his body.

No inquiry was made into the death and the Tarazi family were told if they continued to ask for an inquiry they would be looking for trouble. Five months later soldiers and secret police visited the Tarazi house at midnight, beat up Khader’s brother and father and threw the former into Ansar Three prison.

Yallop is also the source for the following:

West Bank, 30th of October, 1988

When Roman Catholic Palestinians were leaving mass they were confronted by the Israeli Army and began throwing stones. Nineteen-year old Iyad Bishara Abu Saada was killed by a plastic bullet that cut an abdominal artery. The same grim chase for the body entailed. The mourners eluded the Israelis and Iyad was buried a few hours later. Somewhat predictably the Israelis fired teargas canisters into the family home four days later. Mrs Saada told David Yallop the practice of removing organs was common and named Arab and Israeli hospitals where she said organs were removed. She said doctors, accompanied by soldiers, offered large amounts of money to parents of the killed.

Mary Barrett, identified as a Boston-based photo-journalist (I know nothing else about her) wrote this piece in 1990.

Dr. Abu Ghazalch attributes the widespread anxiety over organ thefts which has gripped Gaza and the West Bank since the intifada began in December of 1987 to several factors. “There are indications that for one reason or another, organs. especially eyes and kidneys, were removed from the bodies during the first year or year and a half’. There were just too many reports by credible people for there to he nothing happening. If someone is shot in the head and comes home in a plastic bag without internal organs, what will people assume’?

The doctor went on to state that there were “fewer incidents which point in that direction” as of 1990. Incidentally, the story mentions Dr. Yehuda Hiss, more recently accused of harvesting organs from fallen Israeli soldiers without permission.

According to a story which was published in Ha’aretz (a source not open to charges of anti-Semitism), Romanian authorities have accused an Israeli adoption agency of being part of a global organ theft conspiracy.

The Romanian Embassy in Israel has asked for, and received from the Labor and Social Affairs Ministry, a list of all children born in Romania who have been brought to Israel for adoption in recent years. The Romanian officials are trying to ascertain if all such children arrived in Israel with all organs in their bodies.

Let’s close with a tale about a willing Palestinian organ donation.

In 2005, in the town of Jenin, the Israeli Defense Forces shot and killed a Palestinian child named Ahmed Khatib. His grieving father allowed the child’s various organs to be used to save the lives of other children, both Jewish and Arab. A generous and humane offer. Nevertheless, the father of a Jewish girl whose life was saved said that he would never allow his daughter to befriend an Arab — for fear of “bad influence.”

(I hope my readers will help draw attention to this story. Normally I do not ask others to link to one of my articles, but in this case I must.)

Uruknet

Link: Cannonfire


Writing this story does not make me feel comfortable. Nevertheless, I must offer a follow-up to my previous post about the FBI’s corruption probe in New Jersey, which netted both corrupt politicians and rabbis who used religious charities as fronts for money laundering.

The most troubling aspect of that story involves the illegal trade in human organs. Using responsible sources, my post demonstrated that this organ ring involved unwilling donors, major hospitals, and the Israeli government itself. Alas, no-one has followed up on the leads I have provided.

The key figure in the probe was an FBI informant named Solomon Dweck, the son of a prominent rabbi in Deal, New Jersey. Charged with trying to pass $50 millionin bad checks (!!!), Dweck cooperated the FBI in order to obtain leniency.

Dweck’s criminality — and the even worse criminality of the figures he helped bring to justice — should not reflect upon the larger Orthodox Jewish community in New Jersey. But the reaction of that community is troubling.

Troubling and, to be frank, disgusting.

The Orthodox news organ VIN had offered an incorrect story, based on Israeli sources, that Rabbi Isaac Dweck had announced in public that he was sitting shiva for his son Solomon. (“Sitting shiva” means treating his son as if he were dead.) The rabbi denounced his son not because of the $50 million bank fraud, but because Solomon had informed on other Jews.

A later, corrected account revealed that the rabbi did not sit shiva. Nevertheless…

Rabbi Dweck delivered a very emotional sermon in which he strongly denounced the phenomenon of a Jew informing on other Jews, said that he is also a victim in this saga together with Klal Yisroel, and asked for prayers from the entire Jewish community for his terrible suffering.

Again: Solomon tried to pass $50 million in bad checks. Yet this rabbi — a religious leader! — offered not a syllable of sorrow about that crime. Instead, he denounced his own son for doing the right thing — helping to bring money launderers and organ thieves to justice.

The responses from VIN readers are even more disturbing:

Whatever the halacha is, what he did is disgraceful.

he should sit shivah

one should sit shiva for such a son; his son deserves death, so its as if he died

why wouldn’t the father sit shivah? don’t his son’s action prompt him to cut off ties with him? would his father ever look at him again?

Trust me rabbi dweck knows how disgracefull it is to go after rabbi kassin and trying to get rabbi d yosef too. Does anyone have a clue to how painfull it is to denounce a son in public?

the fact is, the rabbanim were entrapped by shlomo dwek.

dwek, on the other hand, was in trouble. instead of doing his time like a mentsch for the INSANE acts he is known to have committed (keep in mind 3 years have passed since), as his business partner sat the past 3 years and has recently completed his sentence and began a fresh slate with his family and a new job, NO – mr. dwek instead decided to be a moser – a crime for which the chofetz chaim states there is NO kapara – unlike chillul hashem, for which death atones, a moser will continue to burn even after the fuel in gehenom runs out!

“Moser” means “snitch.” “Kapara” means forgiveness. “Chillul hashem” means any act which profanes God’s name.

Moiser is worse, and especially the way he did it with entrapment and bait. this piece if dirt.

FBI and this lowlife,shame on you.That is the real chillul hashem.If Rosenbaum is such a bad guy,organ seller and all,why do they have zero real cases on him.The FBI has been following him for awhile and all they have is one case where he alledgedly conspired to do the act.

He should sit shiva his son is a moser and lost his cheluk to Olam Haba.

how did the press get pictures of the arrest if the FBI didnt turn it into a media circus/setup

I should quickly point out that some VIN readers reacted much more responsibly, denouncing the corruption at the heart of this scandal. Still, it is troubling to see so many members of this community speak as though Dweck’s true crime was ratting out other Jews.

This denunciation of informants might be understandable if we were dealing with members of the IRA during the days of British rule. Does the Jewish community of New Jersey really feel that the United States government is an alien, occupying force?

The FBI acted well within its mandate. Indeed, the feds deserve to be castigated only for not acting earlier on the leads provided by Nancy Scheper-Hughes, whose investigations into the illegal organ trade have lead to arrests and convictions in other countries.

Why does the spectacle of rabbis arrested on charges of criminal conspiracy evince so few expressions of shock and shame from this community? Why aren’t these people disgusted by Isaac Rosenbaum, who (according to Scheper-Hughes) forced organ donations at gunpoint? Why denounce the moser and not the monsters?

Source

Swedish PM: No apology to Israel in regards to article Swedish newspaper reveals Israeli army murders Palestinians for their organs

U.S. group invests tax-free millions in East Jerusalem land

Gaza cancer patients have only painkillers, due to Israeli Blockade

Swedish newspaper reveals Israeli army murders Palestinians for their organs

Published in: on August 24, 2009 at 1:08 am  Comments Off on Butchers: The hidden truth about Israel’s kidney theft ring  
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FBI diverts anti-terror agents to Bernard Madoff $50 billion swindle

December 22 2008

Brian A Pounds/Connecticut Post

From left; Doug Chavenello, president of Firefighters Union Local 1426, and Bob Smith, secretary, listen to the meeting of the Joint Retirement Board at Independence Hall in Fairfield. The town’s pension fund may have lost over $40 million in a scheme by Wall Street hedge fund manager Bernard Madoff

The FBI has been forced to transfer agents from its counter-terrorism divisions to work on Bernard Madoff’s alleged $50 billion fraud scheme as victims of the biggest scam in the world continue to emerge.

Only ten days after Mr Madoff confessed to his two sons that he had created a giant fraud, the FBI and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Wall Street regulator, have narrowed the focus of their inquiries to ascertain which individuals and funds helped him. They are questioning other employees of Madoff Securities and are also examining the role of feeder funds that provided Mr Madoff with clients and capital.

It is understood that the US authorities believe it would have been impossible for the financier to have sustained a fraud of such magnitude over a number of years without significant assistance.

While the FBI and SEC trawled through documentation seized from three floors of the Manhattan headquarters of Mr Madoff, 70, more individuals and organisations who had fallen prey to the scheme were discovered. Members of the Fifth Avenue Synagogue, on the wealthy Upper East Side of Manhattan, are estimated to have lost about $2 billion (£1.4 billion) between them. Of these Ira Rennert, the chairman of the synagogue board, had about $200 million invested in the fund.

It is believed that J. Ezra Merkin, the president of the synagogue, introduced clients to Mr Madoff and gave him access to prominent Jewish charities and universities. The fund of Mr Merkin, Ascot Partners, had about $1.8 billion invested in the schemes.

At the weekend it emerged that Burt Ross, a former banker at LF Rothschild, and once the mayor of Fort Lee, New Jersey, was another victim. Mr Ross estimated that he had lost about $5 million, the bulk of his personal wealth.

Two classes of victim are emerging in the Madoff scandal: those who had a direct relationship with him and fund of funds investors, where one hedge fund invests in another. The biggest of the latter – so far – appears to be Walter M. Noel, who founded Fairfield Greenwich Group in 1983. Mr Noel marketed his investment services to the upper crust of the financial elite, introducing his international clients to Madoff funds.

Mr Noel ran his business from Connecticut, but about 95 per cent of his business was derived from overseas money. It is estimated that Fairfield Greenwich stands to lose $7.5 billion from the collapse of the Madoff scheme.

At the other end of the spectrum the town pension scheme in Fairfield, Connecticut — apparently unconnected to the fund belonging to Mr Noel – suffered a $45 million loss for its firefighters, police officers and teachers.

American regulators have sought to compile evidence against Mr Madoff, who is now electronically tagged and this weekend was placed on 24-hour curfew in his East 64th Street New York apartment.

The FBI and SEC are under increasing pressure from Washington to explain how they could have allowed a scam of such magnitude to operate and flourish – especially after a preliminary inquiry within the SEC found that it had been tipped off several times in the past decade about Mr Madoff’s schemes.

Harry Markopolos, a derivatives expert who once worked for a rival fund, spent ten years urging the SEC to investigate Mr Madoff. In numerous reports, including a 19-page document written in November 2005 entitled The World’s Largest Hedge Fund is a Fraud, Mr Markopolos picked apart the investment strategy of Mr Madoff.

Some claims by Mr Markopolos were anecdotal – “I have spoken to the heads of various Wall Street equity derivative trading desks and every single one of the senior managers I spoke with told me that Bernie Madoff was a fraud” – but vast chunks of his accusations involve detailed analysis of Mr Madoff’s investment strategy. He questions the way that Mr Madoff charged for commissions and alleges that Mr Madoff used the names of leading investment banks such as UBS and Merrill Lynch to lend credibility to his schemes.

He also claims that the overall investment strategy of Mr Madoff would have been impossible to carry out. Mr Madoff sought to lure investors with the promise of 12 per cent returns by buying blue-chip stocks and insuring against the possibility that their value would fall by selling derivatives – a process known as hedging. Mr Markopolos argues, however, that for Mr Madoff to have fulfilled such a strategy he would have regularly done more business than the entire New York market in those securities.

Barack Obama, the President-elect, has accused US regulators of being “asleep at the switch” after it emerged that Mr Madoff had been questioned by the SEC in 2006 but no fraud had been discovered.

Mr Madoff’s business has now been liquidated. He has been charged on one count of fraud and awaits trial.

THE BIGGEST LOSERS

Fairfield Greenwich Group (investment management firm) $7.5 billion

Tremont Group (hedge fund) $3.3 billion

Banco Santander (Spanish bank) $2.87 billion

Bank Medici (Austrian bank) $2.1 billion

Ascot Partners (hedge fund founded by J. Ezra Merkin) $1.8 billion

Access International Advisors (New York investment advisers) $1.4 billion

Fortis Bank Nederland (Dutch bank) $1.35 billion

Union Bancaire Privée (Swiss bank) $1 billion

HSBC (British bank) $1 billion

RBS (British bank) $599 million

Natixis (French investment bank) $554 million

Carl Shapiro (founder of Kay Windsor) $545 million

BNP Paribas (French bank) $431 million

BBVA (Spanish bank) $369 million

Man Group (British hedge fund) $360 million

Reichmuth & Co (Swiss private bank) $327 million

Nomura (Japanese broker) $304 million

Maxam Capital Management (fund of funds based in Connecticut) $280 million

EIM (European investment firm) $230 million

Aozora Bank (Japanese bank) $137 million

AXA (French insurer) $123 million

Yeshiva University (private, New York) $110 million

UniCredit (Italian bank) $92 million

UBI Banca (Italian bank) $86 million

Swiss Life Holding (Swiss insurer) $78.9 million

Great Eastern Holdings (Singapore insurer) $64 million

Nordea Bank (Swedish bank) $59 million

M&B Capital Advisers (Spanish broker) $52.8 million

Hyposwiss (Swiss private bank) $50 million

Banque Bénédict Hentsch & Cie (Swiss private bank) $48.8 million

Fairfield, Connecticut (town pension fund for firefighters, policemen and teachers) $42 million

Source

Bad for investors, good for lawyers

City regulators probe Madoff’s London firm

Madoff’s UK arm holding £100m assets

Madoff house arrest ordered as European banks reel

Madoff victims threaten legal action

Banks and investment firms blamed for introducing clients to ‘$50bn fraudster’

By Stephen Foley in New York
December 17 2008

The victims of the world’s biggest fraud are raising harsh questions about how Bernard Madoff was able to run his $50bn (£33bn) scam for so long without his staff, the authorities or his trading partners noticing.

A firestorm of legal action is gathering as individuals who lost their life savings and charities threatened to pursue the banks and investment firms that made their ill-fated introduction to Mr Madoff.

“If this were a traditional bank robbery, the eyewitness reports would say Mr Madoff walked out with billions of dollars as someone held the door open for him,” said Jeffrey Zwerling, a lawyer representing some of the victims. “There is just no way that this happens without help of some kind.”

The fall-out from Mr Madoff’s arrest on Thursday is being felt around the world as banks, hedge funds, charitable organisations and thousands of well-to-do individuals tot up their losses. With each passing hour, new victims come to light, often in the tight-knit world of Jewish philanthropy, where Mr Madoff managed cash for numerous charities and for many of their biggest donors.

Christopher Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the US financial regulator, said last night that he was “gravely concerned by the apparent multiple failures over at least a decade” and that he had ordered “full and immediate review of the past allegations regarding Mr Madoff and his firm and the reasons they were not found credible”.

More European finance houses confessed to losses, including Crédit Mutuel, France’s second-largest bank. Regulators in Spain said 224 investment funds in the country had been exposed and faced losses of €107m (£97m). Among the celebrity victims revealed yesterday is Uma Thurman. Her husband, Arpad Busson, had £145m invested with Mr Madoff through his hedge fund. A charity connected to Steven Spielberg, the Hollywood director, was already among the list of victims. UK banks HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland and Santander – owner of Abbey and Alliance & Leicester – have previously admitted exposure of more than $5bn between them.

The breathtaking fraud, committed over many years by one of Wall Street’s best-respected investment managers, was uncovered only when Mr Madoff confessed to his two sons a week ago that he was “finished”. In a criminal lawsuit filed the next day, public claims that Madoff Investment Securities was managing $17bn of client money and had made double-digit returns every year for almost a decade were “all just one big lie”, he had told them.

Mr Madoff was running a giant pyramid scheme, paying out to existing investors with money coming in from new ones. But as the credit crunch began to bite, investment dwindled and there was a surge in requests to cash out. It proved to be his undoing.

Lawyers said the investment managers who recommended that their clients invest with Mr Madoff should have investigated his methods, which he had shrouded in mystery. They pointed to red flags going back as far as 1999, when Harry Markopolos, a securities industry executive, urged the SEC to investigate Madoff Investment Securities. Last year, investigators hired by potential investors urged them not to invest because they were suspicious.

The New York Law School – which fears losing $3m of its endowment fund – launched a lawsuit against one of its financial managers, Ascot Partners, Ascot’s boss, Ezra Merkin, and the auditor, BDO Seidman. The defendants “recklessly or with gross negligence caused and permitted $1.8bn, virtually the entire investment capital of Ascot” to be handed over to Mr Madoff, according to the suit. Separately, Yeshiva University said it was considering its options after it lost about $110m.

Mr Madoff is due in court today for a bail hearing. He was released on a $10bn bond last week but has failed to find the required three co-guarantors. Meanwhile, details are emerging of the two separate sets of books he kept: ones showing the real losses, the other detailing the fictitious trading and profits, which he would mail to investors.

Mr Madoff has told the FBI he acted alone. His sons, Andrew and Mark, work in a different part of the business and the Massachusetts Secretary of State, William Galvin, did not suggest his brother Peter was involved.

The victim: A charity devoted to the poor

As well as the super-rich circling Mr Madoff in his playgrounds of Palm Beach, Florida, and Long Island, New York, there are scores of philanthropic victims of his record-breaking fraud, the JEHT Foundation among them. Since it was formed in 2000, it has given away $62m to fund research, to lobby for progressive reforms, and to prop up projects in some of the most deprived areas of the US. It harnessed the fortune of the late real estate mogul Norman Levy, but the family’s money was invested with Mr Madoff, and is probably now gone.

Source

Bank billions at risk from Wall Street Fraud

UK: Council’s pension fund ‘caught up in Bernard Madoff’s Wall Street fraud’

By Jon Land
December 16 2008

Council's pension fund 'caught up in Wall Street fraud'

Council’s pension fund ‘caught up in Wall Street fraud’

A UK council admitted today that it could lose more than £7 million from its pension fund which has been caught up in the alleged Madoff fraud.

But Hampshire County Council moved to reassure its fund’s 46,000 contributors and 27,000 pensioners that their payouts were not at risk.

It emerged yesterday that alleged victims who sunk cash into veteran Wall Street money manager Bernard Madoff’s investment pool included some of the world’s biggest banking institutions and hedge funds, the super rich and the famous, pensioners and charities.

The 70-year-old Madoff (pictured), well respected in the investment community after serving as chairman of the Nasdaq Stock Market, was arrested on Thursday in what US prosecutors say was a £33 billion scheme to defraud investors.

Hampshire says its losses could reach £7.1 million, 0.3% of its pension fund’s total assets of £2,400 million.

A spokesman said: “Whilst any losses are deeply disappointing, they should be seen in the context of the much larger falls in the overall value of the Fund as a result of the financial crisis from £3,100 million in October 2007 to £2,400 million now, a fall of £700 million (22.5%).”

Council leader Ken Thornber added: “The actual position remains to be seen and Hampshire’s exposure is extremely small relative to other investors.

“Nevertheless the Hampshire Pension Fund is very concerned that a small proportion of its investments may be at risk because of this alleged fraud.”

In addition to Hampshire County Council, the list of major investors who have funds tied up in Wall Street money manager Bernard Madoff’s investment pool includes major banks, charities, and the rich.

Here are some of the people and institutions who say they were caught up in the 50 billion dollar fraud, including the amount of exposure for each investor.

Fairfield Greenwich Group 7,500,000,000 dollars

Grupo Santander SA 3,200,000,000 dollars

HSBC Holdings PLC 1,000,000,000 dollars

Natixis 617,000,000 dollars

Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC 612,000,000 dollars

BNP Paribas 480,000,000 dollars

BBVA 452,000,000 dollars

Man Group PLC 360,000,000 dollars

Reichmuth & Co 332,000,000 dollars

Nomura Holdings 304,000,000 dollars

Unicredit 103,000,000 dollars

Union Bancaire Privee “hundreds of millions of dollars”

Benedict Hentsch & Cie SA 48,300,000 dollars

Fairfield Town Employees Board

and Police and Fire Board (Fairfield, Connecticut) 41,900,000 dollars

Mortimer B. Zuckerman Charitable Remainder Trust 30,000,000 dollars

The Phoenix Holdings 5,000,000 dollars

Harel Insurance Investments & Financial Services 14,300,000 dollars

Societe Generale below 13,700,000 dollars

Credit Agricole below 13,700,000 dollars

Robert I. Lappin Charitable Foundation 8,000,000 dollars

Nordea 6,600,000 dollars

Neue Privat Bank 5,250,000 dollars

Source

Fund manager in scandal once boasted about profits
December 16 2008

In this Thursday, May 13, 1993 file photo, Richard Grasso, president, New York Stock Exchange, left, joined by former Security and Exchange Commission Chairman, David S. Ruder, center, and Bernard Madoff, chairman of Madoff Investment Securities, appear before the House subcommittee on Telecommunications and Finance in Washington. Damage continued to ripple from the massive fraud allegedly engineered by storied Wall Street money manager Bernard Madoff Monday, Dec. 15, 2008, even as investigators worked to unravel the scheme’s working and its reach. (AP Photo)

WASHINGTON

The money manager accused of duping investors in one of Wall Street’s biggest Ponzi schemes once boasted to the Securities and Exchange Commission about how much money he earned and formally advised the U.S. government on ways to protect investors from scam artists.

Now Bernard Madoff stands accused of being one.

The 70-year-old Madoff (MAY-doff), well respected in the investment community after serving as chairman of the Nasdaq Stock Market, was arrested last week in what prosecutors say was a $50 billion scheme to defraud investors, including the world’s big banks, the rich and the famous.

Alleged victims include the family charitable foundation for Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J.; a trust tied to real estate magnate Mortimer Zuckerman; and a charity of movie director Steven Spielberg. The Wall Street Journal reported that the foundation of Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel also took a hit.

As the scale of the alleged scheme was realized, attention turned quickly to Madoff’s connections to Washington regulators responsible for monitoring investment funds like the one Madoff operated. He knew everyone, former SEC chairman Arthur Levitt said in an interview with The Associated Press. Levitt said he did not invest any money with Madoff.

The director for enforcement at the SEC, Linda Thomsen, said the government was working with federal prosecutors and the FBI to understand the case, “to pursue the case we’ve got, to preserve assets to the extent we were able and to bring everyone who was responsible for the conduct at the Madoff firm. It’s justice,” she said Monday.

At one SEC hearing in April 2004 — during the period when Madoff is accused of carrying out his $50 billion fraud — Madoff joked with then-commission chairman William Donaldson about Madoff’s own extraordinary profits and teased that he wasn’t inclined to provide any advice that might help his business rivals.

“Our firm has made a fairly decent living as a fast market competing with a slow market,” Madoff said, “so I’m not sure it’s in our own best interest for everyone to become a fast market.” Commissioners laughed openly as Madoff agreed “to take off our selfish hats here and speak for the public good.”

As a former Nasdaq chairman, Madoff was an expert sought by Washington regulators who asked for advice on any number of regulatory issues over the years. In 2000, Madoff served on the government’s Advisory Committee on Market Information, established to protect investors by ensuring accurate and full public disclosure of information to them.

Financial analysts raised concerns about Madoff’s practices repeatedly over the past decade, including one letter to the SEC as early as 1999 that accused Madoff of running a Ponzi scheme, but the agency did not conduct even a routine examination of the investment business until last week, The Washington Post reported on its Web site Monday night.

Questions have been raised in two earlier cases about the SEC’s handling of investigations involving influential figures on Wall Street or powerful investment firms.

The agency’s inspector general, in a report issued this fall, said there were “serious questions” about the impartiality and fairness of the SEC’s insider-trading investigation in 2004 and 2005 of hedge fund Pequot Capital Management. A former SEC attorney who worked on the probe and was fired by the agency told Congress he was blocked by agency superiors when he tried to question John Mack, now chairman of the Morgan Stanley investment house.

The SEC took no enforcement action in the Pequot case. The hedge fund and Mack have denied any wrongdoing.

In another report, the inspector general, H. David Kotz, determined the head of the SEC’s Miami office failed to properly enforce securities laws in the investigation of now-defunct Bear Stearns’ pricing of complex investments it sold, and found that he shouldn’t have closed the inquiry in the summer of 2007 without enforcement action.

Bear Stearns nearly collapsed into bankruptcy in March and was purchased by rival JPMorgan Chase with a $29 billion federal backstop.

Last month, an administrative law judge at the SEC rejected Kotz’s conclusions and his recommendation for disciplinary action against Thomsen, the agency’s enforcement director, and two other officials in the matters. The judge, Brenda Murray, wasn’t acting in her capacity as an administrative law judge but rather as an SEC official asked by the agency’s executive director to assess the inspector general’s findings.

Source

Well if there is one thing America can do is allow criminals to make a fortune on innocent victims.  Capitalism at it’s finest hour.  I am quite sure however Bernard is not the only one who does this. This is probably and unfortunately the tip of the iceburg.

Hedge Funds are not regulated. But then again many things are not regulated in the US. “Deregulation” the banshee cry of George Bush and Capitalism has hit the fan yet again.

Capitalism, profiteering certainly helps criminals I must say.

All I can say is NEXT!

So who is willing to listen to anything Wall Street says?

Who in essence is that stupid I mean?

They have pretty much messed up the entire planet with their “GOOD” advice and their “I am a  genius attitude”.

America the land of opportunity. Especially if your a thief.

George Bush accuses anyone and everyone of being a criminal.  He should be cleaning up his own back yard, but instead because of his policies, he has created a den of thieves. The saga continues until the “NEXT” catastrophe hits. How can you trust a country that rips off anyone and everyone around the world.

They didn’t even regulate the war coffers. Contractors were stealing hand over fist as well.  Seems the American people and everyone in the rest of the world are continually being ripped off.

Seems that “private sector” has it paws in the pockets of everyone.

The “Den of thieves” is a rather long list and getting longer.

The corruption in America runs deep and has been there for some time. One would need a a few giant roto routers to find it all.

The American government enables the criminals however. They are just a corrupt however. Politicians can be bought and sold.

The slim of Capitalism and Privatization has slithered into every country around the world.

When there is no oversight as to what corporations or businesses do criminals are sure to take advantage of it.

Like  Haliburton, banks, wall street, insurance companies, oil companies etc etc etc .

Corruption in the US is a way of life.

Those who make the laws actually protect those who commit the crimes. They even protect themselves.

Like Bush trying to have himself and his war crimes helpers get off the hook.  That is so special.

The shoes belted at his head certainly is mild in comparison to the numbers of people that Bush and his Cronies  are responsible for murdering in an illegal war.

The theft of Tax dollars by the contractors  and crimes comitted by those hired by the Bush administration,  I guess has been long forgotten.

Corruption is common place  in the US. It would be a simpler task to look at what isn’t Corrupt in the US. It might be a very short list.

It’s just a pity it has slithered into every country around the world.

Bank billions at risk from Wall Street Fraud

Legal Scholars Outraged by Talk of Blanket Pardons

151 Congressmen Profit From War One has to wonder what else they profit from?

Bank billions at risk from Wall Street Fraud

December 15 2008

By Kelly Macnamara

Banks lined up today to reveal billions in potential losses as a result of alleged fraud by Wall Street investment manager Bernard Madoff.

The Royal Bank of Scotland – 58 per cent owned by the taxpayer – said £400 million was at risk in the hedge funds invested with 70-year-old Madoff, who was arrested last week after police said he admitted a £33 billion scheme to defraud investors.

Spanish bank Santander, which owns Abbey and the savings business of Bradford & Bingley, said its potential exposure was more than £2 billion, while HSBC could reportedly lose up to £668 million.

Nicola Horlick, who manages Bramdean Alternatives, which had 9 per cent of its funds invested with Madoff’s scheme, said the case raised serious questions about the regulatory system in the US.

She said it had been given a “clean bill of health” by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

“I think now it is very difficult for people to invest in things that are meant to be regulated in America because they have fallen down on the job,” she told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.

“All through the credit crunch this has been apparent. This is the biggest financial scandal, probably, in the history of the markets.”

She said that, even if Bramdean Alternatives was forced to write off its entire investment in Madoff’s scheme, it would still only be down 4 per cent on the year while the stock market had fallen 35 per cent.

According to court documents, Madoff – a former chairman of New York’s Nasdaq stock exchange – told his employees that his operations were “all just one big lie” and “basically, a giant Ponzi scheme”.

A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment vehicle which pays very high returns to existing investors paid for by money put into the scheme by newcomers.

Madoff’s arrest will raise questions about the effectiveness of regulatory authorities, which failed to notice the scam.

Hedge fund giant Man Group, said: “Based on information available to date, it appears that a systematic and comprehensive fraud may have been committed, evading a range of structural controls.”

The company, which said it had approximately 360 million US dollars (£239 million) of exposure, added that Madoff Securities was registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which monitors investment funds.

Madoff Securities was also a member of five self-regulatory organisations, including US independent securities regulator Finra and the Nasdaq.

The FBI said members of Madoff’s own family turned him in after he confessed his fraud to them.

A criminal complaint filed with a court in Manhattan said he told senior employees of his firm before his arrest that he had blown more than £33 billion with fraudulent financial moves.

The list of victims of the alleged fraud ranges from giant financial institutions to tiny local foundations.

Museums, hospitals, a Jewish youth charity in Boston and pensioners are all thought to be among the alleged victims.

Harvey Pitt, a former chairman of the SEC, said the fact that foundations and charities could lose out is the “real tragedy”.

“There were a lot of very sophisticated people who were duped, and that happens a great deal when you’ve had somebody decide to be unscrupulous,” he said.

Reports from Florida to Minnesota in the US included ordinary investors who gave Madoff their money. Some had been friends with him for decades, others were able to invest because they were a friend of a friend.

They told stories of losing everything from £26,500 to an entire nest egg worth well over £670,000.

Other financial institutions with potential exposure include Nomura, Japan’s largest securities company, which has £204 million invested with Madoff.

Switzerland’s Reichmuth & Co said the private bank had £218 million of exposure. It told investors that they “sincerely regret” being affected.

French bank BNP Paribas estimated its exposure Madoff’s fund could lead to £311 million in losses.

HSBC’s exposure could reach 1 billion US dollars (£668 million), according to the Financial Times.

The banking giant’s exposure is understood to have come from loans it made to clients, who invested around £500 million of their own funds in Madoff’s venture.

Under the typical terms of these deals, it is thought HSBC would be reimbursed before its clients if the US authorities recover any funds.

Madoff is on £6.6 million bail.

The assets of Bernard L Madoff Investment Securities were frozen last Friday in a deal with US government regulators and a receiver was appointed to manage the firm’s financial affairs.

Source

Victims of record $91bn fraud speak out

December15 2008

From a Jewish youth charity in Boston to major banks as far afield as Zurich, the list of investors who say they were duped in one of Wall Street’s biggest Ponzi schemes are streaming forward.

Around the world, investors who sunk cash into veteran Wall Street money manager Bernard Madoff’s investment pool spent the weekend calculating how much exposure they might have. The 70-year-old Madoff, well respected in the investment community after serving as chairman of the Nasdaq Stock Market, was arrested Thursday in what prosecutors say was a $50 billion scheme to defraud investors.

One thing was clear in the fallout from his arrest: The alleged victims span from the super rich, to pensioners and powerful financial institutions, to local charities. Some investors claim they’ve been wiped out, while others are still likely to come forward.

“There were a lot of very sophisticated people who were duped, and that happens a great deal when you’ve had somebody decide to be unscrupulous,” said Harvey Pitt, a former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, a regulator in charge of monitoring investment funds like the one Madoff operated.

“It isn’t just the big investors,” he said. “There’s a lot of charitable and foundation money involved in this, which is the real tragedy.”

Charities across the country are expected to be directly affected by the collapse of Madoff’s investment fund. The assets of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC were frozen Friday in a deal with federal regulators and a receiver was appointed to manage the firm’s financial affairs.

One of the largest financial scams to hit Wall Street has investors wondering if they’ll ever get their money back.

In Boston, the Robert I. Lappin Charitable Foundation, a charity that financed trips for Jewish youth to Israel, said on its website Sunday that the money for its operations was invested with Madoff.

“The money needed to fund the programs of the Lappin Foundation is gone,” it said. “The foundation staff has been terminated today.”

New Jersey Sen. Frank Lautenberg, one of the wealthiest members of the Senate, entrusted his family’s charitable foundation to Madoff. Lautenberg’s attorney, Michael Griffinger, said they weren’t yet sure the extent of the foundation’s losses, but that the bulk of its investments had been handled by Madoff.

Lautenberg’s foundation handed out more than $765,000 to at least 100 recipients in 2006, according to the most recent listing on Guidestar, which tracks charitable organization filings.

The foundation helps support a variety of religious, educational, civic and arts organizations in New Jersey and elsewhere, and its contributions range from a gift of than $300,000 to the United Jewish Communities of MetroWest New Jersey to a $2,000 donation to a children’s program at the Hackensack Medical Center.

Reports from Florida to Minnesota included profiles of ordinary investors who gave Madoff their money. Some had been friends with him for decades, others were able to invest because they were a friend of a friend. They told stories of losing everything from $40,000 to an entire nest egg worth well over $1 million.

They join a list of more powerful investors that have come forward, all worried about the extent of their losses. The roster of names include Philadelphia Eagles owner Norman Braman, New York Mets owner Fred Wilpon and J. Ezra Merkin, the chairman of GMAC Financial Services, among others.

Beyond US hedge funds, more corporate names disclosed exposure to Madoff. Late Sunday, some of Europe’s biggest banks acknowledged they, too, were exposed to Madoff’s investment fund.

Switzerland’s Reichmuth & Co. said the private bank has $327 million at risk. It told investors that they “sincerely regret” being affected.

Other banks such as Spain’s Grupo Santander SA, Europe’s second-largest banking consortium, and France’s BNP Paribas are also left with billions of dollars in exposure, according to media reports. Both banks could not immediately be reached for comment.

Source


Cameron calls for probe into financial crisis

By Daniel Bentley

December 15 2008

Cameron has challenged Gordon Brown to call an immediate general election
David Cameron accused Gordon Brown of a “failure of moral leadership”

David Cameron called today for a thorough investigation into the causes of the financial crisis, insisting that City executives should be prosecuted for any criminal wrongdoing.

Pledging a “day of reckoning” for those behind the turmoil, the Tory leader said rooting out the culprits was essential to restore confidence in the financial services sector.

He also accused Gordon Brown of a “failure of moral leadership” for not urging the authorities to probe scandals in the City.

In a speech at Thomson Reuters in Canary Wharf, home of thousands of City workers, Mr Cameron said the rich and well-connected should not be protected from the law.

While claiming the Government was most to blame for the financial crisis, he said Labour’s “economic policy mistakes” were compounded by “irresponsible” behaviour in the City.

He went on: “Doctors who behave irresponsibly get struck off. Bankers who behave irresponsibly should face professional consequences.

“And, for sure, if anyone is found to have behaved criminally they must be prosecuted.

“Of course, this requires clear evidence of wrongdoing. But that doesn’t mean we should sit on our hands and say it’s all a failure of regulation.”

The Conservative leader said there was evidence of mortgage fraud, “possible” insider trading and other misconduct investigated but not prosecuted by the Financial Services Authority.

“To send out the right message about our country’s values to help stop this crisis from happening again and to help restore the City of London’s reputation I believe it is now vital that investigations are vigorously pursued to their appropriate conclusion,” he went on.

“And the fact that the Prime Minister has not been urging our authorities to pursue financial wrongdoing, like in America, is in my view a failure of moral leadership.”

Mr Cameron said there was a lack of will in Britain to see justice done “at the highest level”, either from the Government or the FSA.

“The FSA and the Serious Fraud Office should be following up every lead, investigating every suspect transaction,” he said.

“And the Government should be urging them on, because we need to make it 100% clear – those who break the law should face prosecution.”

In the US, large financial institutions were being investigated by the FBI and the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Tory leader said.

“We all know there was poor decision-making and some reckless activity in the City of London,” he added.

“But we do not know if there was wrongdoing and the nature of any wrongdoing, because we haven’t examined the issue thoroughly in the way the Americans are doing.”

He called for a bigger levy on the City to pay for the “best possible staff” for the FSA, which in turn had to force firms to hold more capital to offset high risks.

Mr Cameron added that the City would not recover from the financial crisis unless it regained confidence, and that meant holding those responsible to account.

“In the good times, some people working in the financial services industry paid themselves vast financial rewards – salaries and bonuses beyond the comprehension of most of us,” he said.

“Now, when it’s all gone wrong, they have been bailed out by the taxpayer.

“Nurses and cleaners and teachers and many millions of others, working in every part of our economy, they will foot this multibillion-pound bill.

“Well, on behalf of the taxpayer, on behalf of the nurse on £20,000 a year, on behalf of the cleaner on the minimum wage, on behalf of working families worrying this Christmas like never before about what next year will bring, I say it is fair and reasonable that those responsible are held to account for their behaviour and that we show clearly that, in this country, there is not one rule for the rich and a different rule for everybody else.”

He said that more than a million people who work in the financial services industry had had their names blackened by the crisis.

“It’s in their interests too that we make sure we root out any wrongdoing that may have happened, whoever is involved, however high or well-connected they may be,” Mr Cameron added.

Source

An investigation what an after thought.

That would have been my first thought.

The Persecution of Syed Fahad Hashmi

By Stephen Lendman
December 10, 2008

It’s a familiar story. A Muslim American is accused of terrorism for supporting Al Queda and conspiracy to provide support for a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO). The prosecution asks for the maximum sentence. Once again, an innocent man is arrested, charged, indicted and convicted with no substantiating evidence except for what prosecutors say they have. All of it is bogus and much classified and withheld from the defense. Witnesses are enlisted to cooperate and proceedings orchestrated to intimidate juries to convict. Justice again is denied. Those accused bear the mark of cain for being Muslim in America at the wrong time – especially if they’re devout, activist, and for some prominent and engaged in charitable work.

The mainstream portrays Hashmi as a “jihadist” and believer in “radical Islamic ideas” because of his association with the now defunct (since 2004) London-based Al Muhajiroun (The Immigrants) and a related still active New York-based Islamic Thinkers Society.

Its web site describes it as “less than a handful of Muslims….who give public da’wah (inviting others to Islam through words and deeds).” They “command the good, forbid the evil and expose falsehood from every angle. (Their) struggle is always (through) intellectual & political non-violent means.” Their activities play out peacefully on New York streets. In Times Square and Jackson Heights where they give out leaflets and display posters and banners related to spiritual, social, economic, and political issues. It’s their constitutional First Amendment right – our most fundamental one without which all others are at risk.

Compare their ideology to America’s dominant Christian Right:

— militarism; war; and apocalyptic violence;

— an abhorrence of democracy;

— ending constitutional government;

— Christian tyranny based on “free market” fundamentalism;

— racial hatred;

— white Christian supremacy; their divine right to rule;

— a Christian utopia under Christian dogma with no legal or social protections;

— male gender dominance;

— anti-choice;

— anti-gay;

— subservience to the movement’s leadership with no free and independent thought; all non-believers are called heretics;

— mysticism and magic over proved scientific fact; a utopian world of prophets;

— the rejection of secular humanism; reason; ethics, social equity and justice; and a free and open society; and

— a final apocalyptic victory of their ideology over “evil” non-believers.

Syed Fahad Hashmi’s Background

His friends strongly support him and say charges and media accusations against him are false and misleading. They call him humble, devout, attentive to studies, and accommodative to others and their needs – Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

He’s victimized and innocent of all charges but has yet to be tried. Born in Karachi, Pakistan, he became known as Fahad. At age 3, his family emigrated to America and settled in Flushing, New York. He attended public schools and the State University of New York (SUNY), Stony Brook. He then transferred to Brooklyn College and in 2003 earned a BA in political science.

Devout in his faith, he became active in the Muslim community as an advocate for Islamic issues. After college, he enrolled in London Metropolitan University and received a master’s degree in 2006. On June 6, his ordeal began when UK police arrested him at Heathrow airport as he awaited his flight home to Pakistan. Subsequently he was held as a Category A prisoner – defined as those considered highly dangerous to the public and/or national security. He was kept under draconian conditions in Southeast London’s Belmarsh prison where he experienced extreme deprivation as follows:

— solitary confinement for 23 hours a day;

— 24-hour electronic monitoringl

— no access to fresh air; and

— only occasionally given one hour of “recreation” inside a cage.

He was also placed under special administrative measures (the UK version of American-style SAMs) under which:

— he was denied communication with other prisoners, lawyers, family, the media or anyone else outside prison;

— for the most part, given no reading material or any news from outside;

— prevented from regular praying;

— refused medications and medical treatment;

— threatened and abused by guards;

— treated like a menace to society; a wild beast; a pariah for his faith and activism.

He was effectively buried alive in a virtual tomb as a consequence, making him and others like him no match against society’s jihad against Islam.

“United States of America v. Syed Hashmi, a/k/a Fahad”

On May 25, 2007, Fahad was extradited to America on terrorism charges. On May 26, the Department of Justice charged him as follows:

Count One – “Conspiracy to Provide Material Support Or Resources To A Foreign Terrorist Organization;”

Count Two – “Providing and Attempting To Provide Material Support Or Resources To A Foreign Terrorist Organization;”

Count Three – “Conspiracy To Make Or Receive A Contribution Of Funds, Goods, Or Services To, And For The Benefit Of, Al Qaeda;” and

Count Four – “Making Or Receiving A Contribution Of Funds, Goods, Or Services To, And For The Benefit Of, Al Qaeda.”

An accompanying press release read:

“From January 2004 through May 2006, HASHMI, 27, a United States citizen, provided support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization, namely al Qaeda. In connection with these charges, HASHMI assisted al Qaeda by providing military gear to others who then transported the gear to al Qaeda associates in South Waziristan, Pakistan. HASHMI also agreed with others to provide military gear to al Qaeda to be used by al Qaeda to fight against United States forces in Afghanistan….The total maximum sentence for the charges against HASHMI is 50 years imprisonment.”

On May 26, 2007, Fahad was presented in US Magistrate’s Court and on May 30 arraigned before Manhattan US District Court Judge Loretta Preska (appointed by GHW Bush and a close family friend). Supporters offered to put up $500,000 in bail. Fahad’s lawyer presented prosecution witness statements that supported his innocence. Michael Garcia, US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, didn’t refute them, yet claimed “we cannot give him bail because he doesn’t respect American law….he believes Allah’s law is superior.” This said about a non-violent student with no prior arrests or record of wrongdoing.

Fahad was denied bail for his faith and activism, for being a devout Muslim, for believing God’s law is sacrosanct. For feeling and behaving no differently than devout Christians, Jews or members of other faiths. Nonetheless, Judge Preska said she had to take his beliefs into account and deny him bail even though preceding Fahad’s hearing, she agreed to a pre-arranged plea bargain for a convicted drug dealer – because (as she stated) he turned to the Bible during detention and bettered himself.

Fahad is a student, not a terrorist or supporter of violence. All charges against him are bogus. He wasn’t charged with providing money or resources for terrorism or being an Al Queda member. Instead he was targeted for his beliefs and for letting an old acquaintance – Junaid Babar – stay in his London apartment for about two weeks in 2005.

Babar was alleged to have kept some raincoats, ponchos, and waterproof socks in luggage he stored  there. DOJ claimed he gave them to a high-ranking Al Queda member. No evidence connects Fahad in any way if he did. He has no association with individuals or groups engaged in “terrorism.” Nonetheless, he was so charged.

Junaid Babar

As it turned out, he’s a dubious character indeed – a  government cooperator paid to testify against targeted Muslims and nicknamed “Supergrass” by the UK media. He was used in Britain against Omar Khyam and other Muslim men in the so-called Fertilizer Case – the supposed plot to bomb a London nightclub and shopping center with a half-ton of ammonium nitrate. Charges were largely bogus but led to the arrest and conviction of targeted “bombers.” Some, that is, not others let loose throwing into question the validity of any plot at all.

At trial, it was learned that Babar met with FBI agents in 2004 and agreed to be a government cooperator – because in June that year he was indicted and pled guilty to four counts of conspiring to and providing and attempting to provide material support or resources to terrorists. A fifth count as well for providing funds, goods, or services for the benefit of Al Queda. In return for a reduced sentence, he agreed to a plea bargain. It requires him to provide “substantial assistance,” including testifying against other Muslims like Fahad. He’s an innocent man whose only recent association with Babar was the two week period in his apartment during which time nothing nefarious happened or was discussed. Nor is Fahad connected with Babar’s charged offenses.

Fahad’s Confinement and Upcoming Trial

Fahad is incarcerated at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correction Center in solitary confinement in its Special Housing Unit. In October 2007, SAMs were imposed as in Britain to punish and isolate him from family, friends and nearly all human contact. They’re the same draconian conditions he experienced at Belmarsh.

Less than 50 inmates in the Federal Bureau of Prisons population are under these constraints. The practice was established in 1996. They can be imposed for a year, then renewed for additional one-year periods. Before 9/11, 120 days was the maximum.

Visitations were denied him for many months. They’re now severely limited to pre-cleared lawyers and immediate family only for short periods. His reading is also restricted to designated newspaper sections 30 days after publishing. No radio or TV news is permitted or participation in group prayer. Overall he’s subjected to extreme deprivation under outrageous conditions for anyone and outlandish ones for a non-violent innocent man, guilty only of being Muslim at the wrong time in America.

On November 19, Fahad’s attorney, Sean Maher, petitioned Judge Preska to reverse or lessen his harsh conditions. Whatever the ruling, it will test what Harold Reynolds wrote in the October 29 New York Law Journal – whether Barack Obama will bring justice to “thousands of….men and women (like Fahad) cut off from access to their families, tortured, humiliated….and kept off stage to this day by Bush’s resistant administration.”

Fahad’s next court date is on December 17th – at US District Court, 500 Pearl Street, New York. The freefahad.com web site urges supporters for him and his co-defendant, Dr. Aafia Siddiqui (known also as “Prisoner 650” at Afghanistan’s infamous Bagram prison where those held were brutally tortured), to attend and “stand up against oppression.”

Dr. Aafia Siddiqui – “Prisoner 650”

A brief word about Aafia. She’s a highly educated researcher with a doctorate in genetics from MIT. She mysteriously disappeared from Karachi in March 2003 with her three children, after which Pakistani officials denied any knowledge of her whereabouts. It was later learned she was at Bagram under draconian conditions with her children (aged one month to seven years). She’s incarcerated now in New York, but it’s not known if her children are still alive and if so where they’re held.

Human rights organizations, British journalist Yvonne Ridley, and MP Lord Nazir raised questions about her detention, and, according to Nazir “she (was) physically tortured and continuously raped by the officers at the prison” – for over four years. Chalk it up to “Western values” that (in a post-9/11 climate) view Muslims as sub-humans to be subjected to unlimited degradations.

Ridley called Aafia a “grey lady” “because she (was) almost a ghost, a spectre whose cries and screams continue to haunt those who heard her. This would never happen to a Western Woman.” It did to Aafia, and her ordeal continues under US detention.

The Constitutionality of SAMs

On June 24, 1974, the US Supreme Court ruled 5-1-3 in Pell v. Procunier that appellants’ (four prison inmates and three journalists) First Amendment face-to-face interview rights weren’t violated by a California Department of Corrections regulation (415.071) stating: “(p)ress and other media interviews with specific individual inmates will not be permitted.” However, the Court held that inmates have alternative ways of communicating with the media and others on the outside, thus implying that prison authorities may not prohibit them.

On April 29, 1974, the High Court ruled 9-0 in Procunier v. Martinez for appellees (prison inmates). They challenged California Department of Corrections mail censorship regulations and its ban against use of law students and paralegals to conduct attorney-client interviews with inmates. These prohibitions violate First and Fourteenth Amendment rights – the First with regard to free expression and right of prison inmates to communicate with persons outside the penal system. The latter guaranteeing everyone (citizens and non-citizens) due process rights and “equal protection of the laws.”

Sixth Amendment rights are also at issue. They guarantee a speedy trial before an impartial jury in all criminal cases and right as well, not just to counsel but to “effective assistance of counsel.” They also assure the opportunity between defendant and counsel to prepare an adequate defense and have one at trial. Despite ruling against petitioner in Avery v. Alabama (1939), the Supreme Court held that:

“denial of opportunity for appointed counsel to confer, to consult with the accused, and to prepare (a proper) defense could convert the appointment of counsel into a sham, and nothing more than a formal compliance with the Constitution’s requirement that an accused be given the assistance of counsel.”

In Powell v. Alabama (1932), the Supreme Court (for the first time) addressed the “effective assistance of counsel” issue. It ruled that a defendant has the right to “the guiding hand of counsel at every step in the proceedings against him” under the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause. It noted that this right “is not discharged by an assignment (of counsel) at such time or under such circumstances as to preclude the giving of effective aid in the preparation and trial of the case.” It reversed the convictions and sentences of the so-called “Scotsboro Boys,” nine black youths falsely accused of raping two white women.

In two succeeding rulings, the High Court set two “effective assistance” standards. In Strickland v. Washington (1984), it established a dual approach:

— whether or not counsel’s performance was adequate or deficient; and

— if the latter deprived a defendant of a fair trial, including if counsel’s assistance was minimal or if the state interfered with adequate client – attorney preparations.

In United States v. Cronic (1984), the Court further noted that “(t)here are….circumstances….so likely to prejudice the accused that the cost of litigating their effect in a particular case is unjustified.” They include:

— “the complete denial of counsel;”

— where “counsel entirely fails to subject the prosecution’s case to meaningful adversarial testing;”

— “when counsel was either totally absent, or prevented from assisting the accused during a critical state of the proceeding (including proper trial preparation);” and

— “when counsel labors under an actual conflict of interest.”

By severely restricting Fahad’s adequate time to confer with counsel; withholding state evidence to be used against him; its questionable validity as well; and how and from whom it was obtained, prosecutors are in violation of the letter and spirit of the Constitution:

— Fahad’s Fourteenth Amendment due process right as well; and

— assurance he’ll receive judicial fairness in a US federal court. In addition,

— his Eight Amendment protection against cruel and unusual punishment by his isolation;

— his First Amendment free expression rights; and

— his Sixth Amendment ones for a speedy trial with “effective assistance of counsel.”

Upcoming Trial

Trial dates were set and postponed. It’s now scheduled for sometime in spring 2009. Under SAMs, his lawyers can’t discuss his case publicly, including supposed “evidence” they were finally able to see – some, that is, but not all. What’s withheld is still classified and is described by the prosecution as “voluminous.” Most of it is from recorded phone calls, conversations and the like plus testimony from Junaid Babar and other witnesses DOJ intends to call. It’s the usual strategy to intimidate juries to convict and what awaits Fahad at his trial.

In the meantime, he and Aafia are isolated under draconian conditions in a nation priding itself as a model democracy – except for Muslim victims of the “War on Terrorism.” Justice for them assures justice denied.

Source

Last Guantanamo trial of Bush era is delayed

FBI Searches Home of KKK Leader Accused of murder

Court Hearings Held For Accused Accomplices
November 14 2008

BOGALUSA, La.
New Orleans FBI agents searched Friday at the home of a suspected Bogalusa Ku Klux Klan leader accused of killing an Oklahoma woman Cynthia Lynch during an initiation ceremony.

At the same time, the last two suspects accused of trying to cover up the crime had court hearings.

Federal, state and local authorities are leaving no stone unturned, as FBI agents returned to Bogalusa to continue the investigation into alleged KKK activity.

The sun was barely up Friday morning when FBI agents descended on the compound at 1616 Louisiana Ave. in Bogalusa. It’s the home that suspected KKK leader and accused killer Raymond “Chuck” Foster, 44, had rented for the past five years from a Washington Parish Sheriff’s Department lieutenant.

For several hours, investigators did just what the FBI had promised: work closely with local law enforcement to determine if any federal laws have been broken. A number of boxes and envelopes were loaded up, and agents left the house with what appeared to be an oven in the back of a pickup truck.

From there, they sat down with the Bogalusa police chief.”I (haven’t) seen it nor read about any kind of activity that even associates to that particular incident like that happened recently,” said Bogalusa Police Chief Jerry Agnew. “We’re going to team up with the FBI.

Any assistance that we can offer them, we’re going to that. So in the near future, if they need us they will call us.

“Meanwhile, the last two of seven people charged with obstruction of justice for trying to cover up the murder of 43-year-old Cynthia Lynch had hearings Friday morning in the St. Tammany Parish jail.

Shane Foster, 21, and Frank Stafford, 20, are both being held on $500,000 bond. The accused shooter, Raymond Foster, is being held without bond.

Video

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Published in: on November 15, 2008 at 1:18 am  Comments Off on FBI Searches Home of KKK Leader Accused of murder  
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Suspect in Klan killing case has long criminal history

November 13 2008

By DAVID J. MITCHELL AND SANDY DAVIS

BOGALUSA

Details emerged Wednesday about a Bogalusa man arrested on charges he shot and killed a white woman who tried to back out of a Ku Klux Klan initiation in northeastern St. Tammany Parish, authorities said.

The alleged shooter, Raymond “Chuck” Foster, 44, 1616 Louisiana Ave., Bogalusa, has a long criminal history in a variety of jurisdictions, including a manslaughter arrest in Washington Parish that apparently did not lead to a conviction, authorities said.

St. Tammany Parish sheriff’s deputies have said Foster is a high-ranking KKK official who heads a Bogalusa chapter that calls itself the Sons of Dixie or the Dixie Brotherhood.

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch, which tracks hate groups, said Wednesday that Foster’s Klan links date to at least January 2001, and include groups based at one time in Livingston Parish.

Hatewatch, based in Montgomery, Ala., said it is not aware of any group operating under the names Sons of Dixie or the Dixie Brotherhood, but a new Klan group calling itself the Dixie Rangers Knights of the Ku Klux Klan has formed in Walker.

On Wednesday, St. Tammany Parish Coroner Dr. Peter Galvan identified the woman victim of the attack as Cynthia C. Lynch, 43, of Tulsa, Okla, through forensic findings, the help of family members and past medical records.

Lynch was recruited through the Internet for the initiation at a campsite next to the Pearl River Navigation Canal with Foster and seven other KKK members.

Lynch had her head shaved while participants were in Klan robes and held burning torches, St. Tammany Parish sheriff’s deputies said. Deputies recovered the robes and other materials.

Chuck Foster shot her with a .40-caliber handgun during an argument about her leaving, deputies have said.

Chuck Foster; his son, Shane Foster, 20, also of 1616 Louisiana Ave., Bogalusa, and others tried to cover up the shooting, cutting the bullet out of Lynch’s body, burning her personal effects and the campsite and dumping her body in a remote location.

All but Foster are between 20 and 30 years of age, St. Tammany Parish sheriff’s deputies said. Foster has been booked with second-degree murder of Lynch and is being held without bond. The seven others were booked with obstruction of justice, deputies said.

White and black Bogalusa leaders provided differing views Wednesday on how far Bogalusa has gotten past racial tensions from the civil rights era, when the city was an acknowledged Ku Klux Klan hotbed.

Bogalusa Police Department officers and Mayor Mack McGehee said they have not seen evidence of the KKK in the city in years. They said they wanted to see the KKK group allegedly involved exposed for whatever it is and expressed concern about what news reports of the event would do to Bogalusa’s reputation.

“I thought we were way beyond that, and it’s kind of disappointing that you can have somebody right under your nose and not even know it,” said McGehee, 48, who has been mayor 10 years.

FBI Special Agent in Charge David W. Welker said in a statement issued Wednesday that the FBI is working with area law enforcement to investigate the slaying and determine whether any federal violation of law took place.

“The FBI takes all such matters seriously and will aggressively investigate all leads and threats,” Welker said in the statement.

But some black leaders said that while the KKK may not be organized like it once was, racial tensions linked to the KKK still linger in Bogalusa.

“The mentality and that attitude, that Klanish hatred, separatist mentality, it is still here in Bogalusa,” said the Rev. Coleman Moses, pastor of White Hall Missionary Baptist Church in Bogalusa.

Moses said he received warnings in 2006 from a white community leader, whom he would not name, that physical and vandalism threats were made against him and other black ministers involved in supporting then-superintendent of Bogalusa city schools, Jerry Payne, who is black.

Moses said several black church officials and school officials were targeted by vandals and he reported those criminal acts to the police.

One of the officials, Marvin C. Austin, 61, deacon at New Triumph Baptist Church, said a rock was thrown at his window shortly after Moses got word of the threats.

Police Chief Jerry Agnew, who said he has not seen any sign of the KKK in his 13 years as chief, reported Moses’ allegations to the FBI. Moses said he spoke with the FBI but never heard from agents again.

Austin also said Wednesday he recalled seeing fliers in October 2007 announcing a public barbecue on Louisiana Avenue hosted by the Sons of Dixie, at a location on the same street where Chuck Foster resides.

“It was the same group, the Sons of Dixie,” said Austin, who is also president of the Bogalusa Voters League. He did not save a copy of the flier.

Hatewatch identified Foster as the founding Imperial Wizard, or national leader, of the Southern White Knights of the KKK, a Klan faction formed Jan. 1, 2001, in Watson.

The group eventually disbanded in early 2005 after forming four active chapters, including relocating the founding chapter to Denham Springs, Hatewatch said.

But there are also doubts that the KKK is back in Bogalusa at the strength it once had, with some skeptics interviewed Wednesday dubbing the eight involved in the killing of Lynch as KKK “wannabes.”

One leader of a white supremacy group said Wednesday the Ku Klux Klan as it once existed is now defunct.

“There hasn’t been a real Klan for years,” said Richard Barrett, the head of the Nationalist Movement.

“You have people now that buy a T-shirt or a flag over the Internet and then say they’re members of the Ku Klux Klan,” Barrett said. “That’s more of a fashion statement than an organization.”

Barrett, who in January led a white supremacy rally in Jena, said the last time the Ku Klux Klan was a large organization was when Robert Shelton, of Alabama, was the Grand Wizard of the United Klans of America from the 1960s to the early 1990s.

“I knew Robert Shelton. He had a building, a telephone, a desk, a membership list and funds. He had people that worked with him and for him,” Barrett said.

“Now all you have is people here and there who pop up and say, ‘I’m the Klan.’ They try to revive it, but it’s never really been organized since Shelton.”

Lewis Murray, assistant district attorney for the 22nd Judicial District, said a Washington Parish grand jury pretermitted, or let pass without notice, Foster’s manslaughter charge in December 1994. Records do not indicate the charge was ever brought again to the grand jury, Murray said.

He compared a pretermitted charge issued by a grand jury to something like a “hung jury” situation. When a charge is pretermitted, the jury either votes to pretermit or cannot agree whether to charge the defendant.

Anyone with information about the case is asked to call the FBI at (504) 816-3000 or local authorities.

Greg Garland and Bob Anderson contributed to this story

Source


KKK still killing and beating

La. Slaying Recalls History of Racial Turmoil

Police probe Election Night threat to Obama


November 5 2008

While most of Chicago was celebrating Tuesday night, police and Secret Service agents believe one man may have been plotting to harm the man who would become president elect.

“Police and the Secret Service are investigating whether a man arrested this afternoon in Rosemont with an assault rifle intended to harm Barack Obama, several sources have told the Chicago Sun-Times,” the paper reported.

The man was arrested during a routine traffic stop, according to the paper. Police found a laptop computer opened to a page warning of possible riots if Obama won. The man also had a stun gun, ammunition and hand guns, along with the assault rifle, sources told the paper.

“There’s an individual who we have in custody at this time. There’s no charges as of yet,” a police spokesman told the Sun Times. “As part of the investigation, we’ve gotten the assistance of other law enforcement agencies.”

Obama, who Tuesday night became the first African American elected president, has been targeted in a handful of possible assassination plots, including during the Democratic National Convention in Denver this summer.

On Wednesday, Newsweek also reported that Obama’s Secret Service detail became aware of an increase in reports earlier this fall.

“The Obama campaign was provided with reports from the Secret Service showing a sharp and disturbing increase in threats to Obama in September and early October, at the same time that many crowds at Palin rallies became more frenzied,” the magazine reports in a special post-election edition. “Michelle Obama was shaken by the vituperative crowds and the hot rhetoric from the GOP candidates. ‘Why would they try to make people hate us?’ Michelle asked a top campaign aide.”

Source

Hackers and Spending Sprees

Newsweek Exclusive

November 5, 2008

The computer systems of both the Obama and McCain campaigns were victims of a sophisticated cyberattack by an unknown “foreign entity,” prompting a federal investigation, NEWSWEEK reports today.

At the Obama headquarters in midsummer, technology experts detected what they initially thought was a computer virus—a case of “phishing,” a form of hacking often employed to steal passwords or credit-card numbers. But by the next day, both the FBI and the Secret Service came to the campaign with an ominous warning: “You have a problem way bigger than what you understand,” an agent told Obama’s team. “You have been compromised, and a serious amount of files have been loaded off your system.” The following day, Obama campaign chief David Plouffe heard from White House chief of staff Josh Bolten, to the same effect: “You have a real problem … and you have to deal with it.” The Feds told Obama’s aides in late August that the McCain campaign’s computer system had been similarly compromised. A top McCain official confirmed to NEWSWEEK that the campaign’s computer system had been hacked and that the FBI had become involved.

Officials at the FBI and the White House told the Obama campaign that they believed a foreign entity or organization sought to gather information on the evolution of both camps’ policy positions—information that might be useful in negotiations with a future administration. The Feds assured the Obama team that it had not been hacked by its political opponents. (Obama technical experts later speculated that the hackers were Russian or Chinese.) A security firm retained by the Obama campaign took steps to secure its computer system and end the intrusion. White House and FBI officials had no comment earlier this week.

NEWSWEEK has also learned that Palin’s shopping spree at high-end department stores was more extensive than previously reported. While publicly supporting Palin, McCain’s top advisers privately fumed at what they regarded as her outrageous profligacy. One senior aide said that Nicolle Wallace had told Palin to buy three suits for the convention and hire a stylist. But instead, the vice presidential nominee began buying for herself and her family—clothes and accessories from top stores such as Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus. According to two knowledgeable sources, a vast majority of the clothes were bought by a wealthy donor, who was shocked when he got the bill. Palin also used low-level staffers to buy some of the clothes on their credit cards. The McCain campaign found out last week when the aides sought reimbursement. One aide estimated that she spent “tens of thousands” more than the reported $150,000, and that $20,000 to $40,000 went to buy clothes for her husband. Some articles of clothing have apparently been lost. An angry aide characterized the shopping spree as “Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast,” and said the truth will eventually come out when the Republican Party audits its books.

A Palin aide said: “Governor Palin was not directing staffers to put anything on their personal credit cards, and anything that staffers put on their credit cards has been reimbursed, like an expense. Nasty and false accusations following a defeat say more about the person who made them than they do about Governor Palin.”

McCain himself rarely spoke to Palin during the campaign, and aides kept him in the dark about the details of her spending on clothes because they were sure he would be offended. Palin asked to speak along with McCain at his Arizona concession speech Tuesday night, but campaign strategist Steve Schmidt vetoed the request.

The disclosures are among many revealed in “How He Did It, 2008,” the latest installment in NEWSWEEK’s Special Election Project, which was first published in 1984. As in the previous editions, “How He Did It, 2008” is an inside, behind-the-scenes account of the presidential election produced by a special team of reporters working for more than a year on an embargoed basis and detached from the weekly magazine and Newsweek.com. Everything the project team learns is kept confidential until the day after the polls close.

Among the other revelations from the special project:

  • The Obama campaign was provided with reports from the Secret Service showing a sharp and disturbing increase in threats to Obama in September and early October, at the same time that many crowds at Palin rallies became more frenzied. Michelle Obama was shaken by the vituperative crowds and the hot rhetoric from the GOP candidates. “Why would they try to make people hate us?” Michelle asked a top campaign aide.
  • On the Sunday night before the last debate, McCain’s core group of advisers—Steve Schmidt, Rick Davis, adman Fred Davis, strategist Greg Strimple, pollster Bill McInturff and strategy director Sarah Simmons—met to decide whether to tell McCain that the race was effectively over, that he no longer had a chance to win. The consensus in the room was no, not yet, not while he still had “a pulse.”
  • The Obama campaign’s New Media experts created a computer program that would allow a “flusher”—the term for a volunteer who rounds up nonvoters on Election Day—to know exactly who had, and had not, voted in real time. They dubbed it Project Houdini, because of the way names disappear off the list instantly once people are identified as they wait in line at their local polling station.
  • Palin launched her attack on Obama’s association with William Ayers, the former Weather Underground bomber, before the campaign had finalized a plan to raise the issue. McCain’s advisers were working on a strategy that they hoped to unveil the following week, but McCain had not signed off on it, and top adviser Mark Salter was resisting.
  • McCain also was reluctant to use Obama’s incendiary pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, as a campaign issue. The Republican had set firm boundaries: no Jeremiah Wright; no attacking Michelle Obama; no attacking Obama for not serving in the military. McCain balked at an ad using images of children that suggested that Obama might not protect them from terrorism. Schmidt vetoed ads suggesting that Obama was soft on crime (no Willie Hortons). And before word even got to McCain, Schmidt and Salter scuttled a “celebrity” ad of Obama dancing with talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres (the sight of a black man dancing with a lesbian was deemed too provocative).
  • Obama was never inclined to choose Sen. Hillary Clinton as his running mate, not so much because she had been his sometime bitter rival on the campaign trail, but because of her husband. Still, as Hillary’s name came up in veep discussions, and Obama’s advisers gave all the reasons why she should be kept off the ticket, Obama would stop and ask, “Are we sure?” He needed to be convinced one more time that the Clintons would do more harm than good. McCain, on the other hand, was relieved to face Sen. Joe Biden as the veep choice, and not Hillary Clinton, whom the McCain camp had truly feared.
  • McCain was dumbfounded when Congressman John Lewis, a civil-rights hero, issued a press release comparing the GOP nominee with former Alabama governor George Wallace, a segregationist infamous for stirring racial fears. McCain had devoted a chapter to Lewis in one of his books, “Why Courage Matters,” and had so admired Lewis that he had once taken his children to meet him.
  • On the night she officially lost the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton enjoyed a long and friendly phone conversation with McCain. Clinton was actually on better terms with McCain than she was with Obama. Clinton and McCain had downed shots together on Senate junkets; they regarded each other as grizzled veterans of the political wars and shared a certain disdain for Obama as flashy and callow.
  • At the GOP convention in St. Paul, Palin was completely unfazed by the boys’ club fraternity she had just joined. One night, Steve Schmidt and Mark Salter went to her hotel room to brief her. After a minute, Palin sailed into the room wearing nothing but a towel, with another on her wet hair. She told them to chat with her laconic husband, Todd. “I’ll be just a minute,” she said.
  • The debates unnerved both candidates. When he was preparing for them during the Democratic primaries, Obama was recorded saying, “I don’t consider this to be a good format for me, which makes me more cautious. I often find myself trapped by the questions and thinking to myself, ‘You know, this is a stupid question, but let me … answer it.’ So when Brian Williams is asking me about what’s a personal thing that you’ve done [that’s green], and I say, you know, ‘Well, I planted a bunch of trees.’ And he says, ‘I’m talking about personal.’ What I’m thinking in my head is, ‘Well, the truth is, Brian, we can’t solve global warming because I f—ing changed light bulbs in my house. It’s because of something collective’.”

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Published in: on November 6, 2008 at 7:26 am  Comments Off on Police probe Election Night threat to Obama  
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National Century Ex-Chief Poulsen Convicted of Fraud

(Update2)

By Denise Trowbridge and David Voreacos

October 30 2008

Lance Poulsen, former chief executive officer of National Century Financial Enterprises Inc., was convicted of defrauding investors of $2.9 billion before his health-care financing company collapsed in 2002.

A federal jury in Columbus, Ohio, today found Poulsen guilty of fraud, conspiracy and money laundering. Poulsen, 65, cheated investors who bought National Century bonds to back the purchase of unpaid insurance bills from medical providers that needed cash, prosecutors said. The company advanced $2.2 billion to six companies in which Poulsen owned a stake, they said.

After the verdict, Poulsen looked at his wife, Barbara, and said, “I’m so sorry.” Barbara Poulsen, who testified in his defense, began to cry.

National Century’s collapse hastened the bankruptcies of 275 hospitals, clinics and other health-care providers, authorities say. Victims included Pacific Investment Management Co., the world’s largest bond fund. Pimco lost $283 million and Credit Suisse Group AG lost $257 million, prosecutors said.

“This is one of the largest frauds the FBI has ever investigated,” Leo Wise, a Justice Department trial attorney, told jurors yesterday in closing arguments. “Investors were told their money would be used to buy accounts receivable. They got a worthless IOU in many cases from a health-care provider teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.”

Witness Tampering

Poulsen, who founded the Dublin, Ohio-based company, faces from 30 years to life in prison. He already is serving 10 years after his conviction in March for trying to bribe the main witness against him. Prosecutors have now won convictions of six National Century executives at trial, as well as four who pleaded guilty.

Jurors deliberated four hours before convicting Poulsen of all 12 counts, including six of securities fraud, three of money laundering, two of conspiracy, and one of wire fraud. The panel of seven women and five men began hearing the case on Oct. 2.

“We’re obviously extremely disappointed with the verdict,” said Poulsen’s attorney, Peter Anderson. He said Poulsen plans to appeal.

U.S. District Judge Algenon Marbley didn’t set a sentencing date for Poulsen, who has been detained at the Ross County Jail. Another former National Century executive, James Happ, is set for trial for Dec. 1.

Poulsen testified in his own defense at the trial, denying the existence of a fraud and seeking to counter testimony by Sherry Gibson, a former subordinate who he tried to bribe. He also said he relied on legal documents and advisers who led him to believe that the advances and other actions were permitted.

`Nobody’s Fault’

“When something this big goes wrong, it’s kind of everybody’s fault and nobody’s fault,” Poulsen said.

“No one woke up one morning and said, `Let’s torpedo this $3 billion funding company, lose all of this investor money, and ruin these people’s lives,”’ he said. “A lot of little things went wrong. When they all went wrong at one time, it was the perfect storm of the financial world and the company collapsed.”

Gibson was one of four former National Century employees who testified against Poulsen. Gibson, who pleaded guilty to a role in the fraud, testified that Poulsen told her to create phony monthly reports for investors about cash flow and receivables. She also said National Century kept two sets of company books.

FBI Tapes

After Gibson served 30 months in prison, a friend of Poulsen’s approached her about changing her testimony. She went to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and secretly taped the friend. Jurors at this trial heard those tapes, as well as FBI recordings made of Poulsen and the friend.

Prosecutors said Poulsen lied to investors about the quality of accounts receivable that were supposed to secure payments on the bonds that kept the company going.

“They were told there was high-quality collateral, there were monthly investor reports and random audits, and there was over-collateralization to protect investors,” Justice Department attorney Kathleen McGovern told jurors.

Poulsen robbed investors of protections through money advances without receivables backing them and by manipulating reserve accounts, McGovern said in closing arguments. He also didn’t rely on third parties, as he claimed, she said.

“He needed the trustees to move the money at his direction, he needed the rating agencies to give the bonds an AAA rating, he needed the underwriters to market the bonds, and he needed investors to put money into NCFE,” McGovern said. “He lied to all of them to get their OK.”

JPMorgan Chase & Co., the largest U.S. bank by market value, agreed to pay $425 million in 2006 to settle claims by Arizona noteholders. The noteholders said JPMorgan and other banks underwrote or were trustees of the notes used to defraud investors.

The case is U.S. v. Poulsen, 06-129, U.S. District Court, Southern District of Ohio (Columbus).

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