- Governments Admit that Much of Modern History Has Been Manipulated By False Flag Attacks
Presidents, Prime Ministers, Congressmen, Generals, Spooks, Soldiers and Police ADMIT to False Flag Terror
In the following instances, officials in the government which carried out the attack (or seriously proposed an attack) admit to it, either orally, in writing, or through photographs or videos:
(1) As admitted by secret Russian police files that are part of the Hoover Institution’s archives, the Russian Tsar’s secret police set off bombs and killed people in order to blame and arrest labor agitators. And see this.
(2) Japanese troops set off a small explosion on a train track in 1931, and falsely blamed it on China in order to justify an invasion of Manchuria. This is known as the “Mukden Incident” or the “Manchurian Incident”. The Tokyo International Military Tribunal found: “Several of the participators in the plan, including Hashimoto [a high-ranking Japanese army officer], have on various occasions admitted their part in the plot and have stated that the object of the ‘Incident’ was to afford an excuse for the occupation of Manchuria by the Kwantung Army ….” And see this.
(3) A major with the Nazi SS admitted at the Nuremberg trials that – under orders from the chief of the Gestapo – he and some other Nazi operatives faked attacks on their own people and resources which they blamed on the Poles, to justify the invasion of Poland.
(4) Nazi general Franz Halder also testified at the Nuremberg trials that Nazi leader Hermann Goering admitted to setting fire to the German parliament building in 1933, and then falsely blaming the communists for the arson.
(5) Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev admitted in writing that the Soviet Union’s Red Army shelled the Russian village of Mainila in 1939 – while blaming the attack on Finland – as a basis for launching the “Winter War” against Finland. Russian president Boris Yeltsin agreed that Russia had been the aggressor in the Winter War.
(6) The Russian Parliament, current Russian president Putin and former Soviet leader Gorbachev all admit that Soviet leader Joseph Stalin ordered his secret police to execute 22,000 Polish army officers and civilians in 1940, and then falsely blamed it on the Nazis.
(7) The British government admits that – between 1946 and 1948 – it bombed 5 ships carrying Jews attempting to flee the Holocaust to seek safety in Palestine, set up a fake group called “Defenders of Arab Palestine”, and then had the psuedo-group falsely claim responsibility for the bombings (and see this, this and this).
(8) Israel admits that in 1954, an Israeli terrorist cell operating in Egypt planted bombs in several buildings, including U.S. diplomatic facilities, then left behind “evidence” implicating the Arabs as the culprits (one of the bombs detonated prematurely, allowing the Egyptians to identify the bombers, and several of the Israelis later confessed) (and see this and this).
The U.S. Army does not believe this is an isolated incident. For example, the U.S. Army’s School of Advanced Military Studies said of Mossad (Israel’s intelligence service):
“Ruthless and cunning. Has capability to target U.S. forces and make it look like a Palestinian/Arab act.”
(9) The CIA admits that it hired Iranians in the 1950′s to pose as Communists and stage bombings in Iran in order to turn the country against its democratically-elected prime minister.
(10) The Turkish Prime Minister admitted that the Turkish government carried out the 1955 bombing on a Turkish consulate in Greece – also damaging the nearby birthplace of the founder of modern Turkey – and blamed it on Greece, for the purpose of inciting and justifying anti-Greek violence.
(11) The British Prime Minister admitted to his defense secretary that he and American president Dwight Eisenhower approved a plan in 1957 to carry out attacks in Syria and blame it on the Syrian government as a way to effect regime change.
(12) The former Italian Prime Minister, an Italian judge, and the former head of Italian counterintelligence admit that NATO, with the help of the Pentagon and CIA, carried out terror bombings in Italy and other European countries in the 1950s through the 1980s and blamed the communists, in order to rally people’s support for their governments in Europe in their fight against communism.
As one participant in this formerly-secret program stated: “You had to attack civilians, people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security” … so that “a state of emergency could be declared, so people would willingly trade part of their freedom for the security” (and see this) (Italy and other European countries subject to the terror campaign had joined NATO before the bombings occurred). And watch this BBC special. They also allegedly carried out terror attacks in France, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the UK, and other countries.
The CIA also stressed to the head of the Italian program that Italy needed to use the program to control internal uprisings.
False flag attacks carried out pursuant to this program include – by way of example only:
- The murder of the Turkish Prime Minister (1960)
- Bombings in Portugal (1966)
- The Piazza Fontana massacre in Italy (1969)
- Terror attacks in Turkey (1971)
- The Peteano bombing in Italy (1972)
- The Atocha massacre in Madrid, Spain (1977)
- The abduction and murder of the Italian Prime Minister (1978) (and see this)
(13) In 1960, American Senator George Smathers suggested that the U.S. launch “a false attack made on Guantanamo Bay which would give us the excuse of actually fomenting a fight which would then give us the excuse to go in and [overthrow Castro]”.
(14) Official State Department documents show that, in 1961, the head of the Joint Chiefs and other high-level officials discussed blowing up a consulate in the Dominican Republic in order to justify an invasion of that country. The plans were not carried out, but they were all discussed as serious proposals.
(15) As admitted by the U.S. government, recently declassified documents show that in 1962, the American Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off on a plan to blow up AMERICAN airplanes (using an elaborate plan involving the switching of airplanes), and also to commit terrorist acts on American soil, and then to blame it on the Cubans in order to justify an invasion of Cuba. See the following ABC news report; the official documents; and watch this interview with the former Washington Investigative Producer for ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings.
(16) In 1963, the U.S. Department of Defense wrote a paper promoting attacks on nations within the Organization of American States – such as Trinidad-Tobago or Jamaica – and then falsely blaming them on Cuba.
(17) The U.S. Department of Defense also suggested covertly paying a person in the Castro government to attack the United States: “The only area remaining for consideration then would be to bribe one of Castro’s subordinate commanders to initiate an attack on Guantanamo.”
(18) A U.S. Congressional committee admitted that – as part of its “Cointelpro” campaign – the FBI had used many provocateurs in the 1950s through 1970s to carry out violent acts and falsely blame them on political activists.
(19) A top Turkish general admitted that Turkish forces burned down a mosque on Cyprus in the 1970s and blamed it on their enemy. He explained: “In Special War, certain acts of sabotage are staged and blamed on the enemy to increase public resistance. We did this on Cyprus; we even burnt down a mosque.” In response to the surprised correspondent’s incredulous look the general said, “I am giving an example”.
(20) A declassified 1973 CIA document reveals a program to train foreign police and troops on how to make booby traps, pretending that they were training them on how to investigate terrorist acts:
The Agency maintains liaison in varying degrees with foreign police/security organizations through its field stations ….
[CIA provides training sessions as follows:]
a. Providing trainees with basic knowledge in the uses of commercial and military demolitions and incendiaries as they may be applied in terrorism and industrial sabotage operations.
b. Introducing the trainees to commercially available materials and home laboratory techniques, likely to he used in the manufacture of explosives and incendiaries by terrorists or saboteurs.
c. Familiarizing the trainees with the concept of target analysis and operational planning that a saboteur or terrorist must employ.
d. Introducing the trainees to booby trapping devices and techniques giving practical experience with both manufactured and improvised devices through actual fabrication.
***
The program provides the trainees with ample opportunity to develop basic familiarity and use proficiently through handling, preparing and applying the various explosive charges, incendiary agents, terrorist devices and sabotage techniques.
(21) The German government admitted (and see this) that, in 1978, the German secret service detonated a bomb in the outer wall of a prison and planted “escape tools” on a prisoner – a member of the Red Army Faction – which the secret service wished to frame the bombing on.
(22) A Mossad agent admits that, in 1984, Mossad planted a radio transmitter in Gaddaffi’s compound in Tripoli, Libya which broadcast fake terrorist transmissions recorded by Mossad, in order to frame Gaddaffi as a terrorist supporter. Ronald Reagan bombed Libya immediately thereafter.
(23) The South African Truth and Reconciliation Council found that, in 1989, the Civil Cooperation Bureau (a covert branch of the South African Defense Force) approached an explosives expert and asked him “to participate in an operation aimed at discrediting the ANC [the African National Congress] by bombing the police vehicle of the investigating officer into the murder incident”, thus framing the ANC for the bombing.
(24) An Algerian diplomat and several officers in the Algerian army admit that, in the 1990s, the Algerian army frequently massacred Algerian civilians and then blamed Islamic militants for the killings (and see this video; and Agence France-Presse, 9/27/2002, French Court Dismisses Algerian Defamation Suit Against Author).
(25) In 1993, a bomb in Northern Ireland killed 9 civilians. Official documents from the Royal Ulster Constabulary (i.e. the British government) show that the mastermind of the bombing was a British agent, and that the bombing was designed to inflame sectarian tensions. And see this and this.
(26) The United States Army’s 1994 publication Special Forces Foreign Internal Defense Tactics Techniques and Procedures for Special Forces – updated in 2004 – recommends employing terrorists and using false flag operations to destabilize leftist regimes in Latin America. False flag terrorist attacks were carried out in Latin America and other regions as part of the CIA’s “Dirty Wars“. And see this.
(27) Similarly, a CIA “psychological operations” manual prepared by a CIA contractor for the Nicaraguan Contra rebels noted the value of assassinating someone on your own side to create a “martyr” for the cause. The manual was authenticated by the U.S. government. The manual received so much publicity from Associated Press, Washington Post and other news coverage that – during the 1984 presidential debate – President Reagan was confronted with the following question on national television:
At this moment, we are confronted with the extraordinary story of a CIA guerrilla manual for the anti-Sandinista contras whom we are backing, which advocates not only assassinations of Sandinistas but the hiring of criminals to assassinate the guerrillas we are supporting in order to create martyrs.
(28) An Indonesian government fact-finding team investigated violent riots which occurred in 1998, and determined that “elements of the military had been involved in the riots, some of which were deliberately provoked”.
(29) Senior Russian Senior military and intelligence officers admit that the KGB blew up Russian apartment buildings in 1999 and falsely blamed it on Chechens, in order to justify an invasion of Chechnya (and see this report and this discussion).
(30) As reported by the New York Times, BBC and Associated Press, Macedonian officials admit that in 2001, the government murdered 7 innocent immigrants in cold blood and pretended that they were Al Qaeda soldiers attempting to assassinate Macedonian police, in order to join the “war on terror”. luring foreign migrants into the country, executing them in a staged gun battle, and then claiming they were a unit backed by Al Qaeda intent on attacking Western embassies”. Macedonian authorities had lured the immigrants into the country, and then – after killing them – posed the victims with planted evidence – “bags of uniforms and semiautomatic weapons at their side” – to show Western diplomats.
(31) At the July 2001 G8 Summit in Genoa, Italy, black-clad thugs were videotaped getting out of police cars, and were seen by an Italian MP carrying “iron bars inside the police station”. Subsequently, senior police officials in Genoa subsequently admitted that police planted two Molotov cocktails and faked the stabbing of a police officer at the G8 Summit, in order to justify a violent crackdown against protesters.
(32) The U.S. falsely blamed Iraq for playing a role in the 9/11 attacks – as shown by a memo from the defense secretary – as one of the main justifications for launching the Iraq war.
Even after the 9/11 Commission admitted that there was no connection, Dick Cheney said that the evidence is “overwhelming” that al Qaeda had a relationship with Saddam Hussein’s regime, that Cheney “probably” had information unavailable to the Commission, and that the media was not ‘doing their homework’ in reporting such ties. Top U.S. government officials now admit that the Iraq war was really launched for oil … not 9/11 or weapons of mass destruction.
Despite previous “lone wolf” claims, many U.S. government officials now say that 9/11 was state-sponsored terror; but Iraq was not the state which backed the hijackers. (Many U.S. officials have alleged that 9/11 was a false flag operation by rogue elements of the U.S. government; but such a claim is beyond the scope of this discussion. The key point is that the U.S. falsely blamed it on Iraq, when it knew Iraq had nothing to do with it.).
(Additionally, the same judge who has shielded the Saudis for any liability for funding 9/11 has awarded a default judgment against Iran for $10.5 billion for carrying out 9/11 … even though no one seriously believes that Iran had any part in 9/11.)
(33) Although the FBI now admits that the 2001 anthrax attacks were carried out by one or more U.S. government scientists, a senior FBI official says that the FBI was actually told to blame the Anthrax attacks on Al Qaeda by White House officials (remember what the anthrax letters looked like). Government officials also confirm that the white House tried to link the anthrax to Iraq as a justification for regime change in that country. And see this.
(34) According to the Washington Post, Indonesian police admit that the Indonesian military killed American teachers in Papua in 2002 and blamed the murders on a Papuan separatist group in order to get that group listed as a terrorist organization.
(35) The well-respected former Indonesian president also admits that the government probably had a role in the Bali bombings.
(36) Police outside of a 2003 European Union summit in Greece were filmed planting Molotov cocktails on a peaceful protester.
(37) Former Department of Justice lawyer John Yoo suggested in 2005 that the US should go on the offensive against al-Qaeda, having “our intelligence agencies create a false terrorist organization. It could have its own websites, recruitment centers, training camps, and fundraising operations. It could launch fake terrorist operations and claim credit for real terrorist strikes, helping to sow confusion within al-Qaeda’s ranks, causing operatives to doubt others’ identities and to question the validity of communications.”
(38) Similarly, in 2005, Professor John Arquilla of the Naval Postgraduate School – a renowned US defense analyst credited with developing the concept of ‘netwar’ – called for western intelligence services to create new “pseudo gang” terrorist groups, as a way of undermining “real” terror networks. According to Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh, Arquilla’s ‘pseudo-gang’ strategy was, Hersh reported, already being implemented by the Pentagon:
“Under Rumsfeld’s new approach, I was told, US military operatives would be permitted to pose abroad as corrupt foreign businessmen seeking to buy contraband items that could be used in nuclear-weapons systems. In some cases, according to the Pentagon advisers, local citizens could be recruited and asked to join up with guerrillas or terrorists…
The new rules will enable the Special Forces community to set up what it calls ‘action teams’ in the target countries overseas which can be used to find and eliminate terrorist organizations. ‘Do you remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador?’ the former high-level intelligence official asked me, referring to the military-led gangs that committed atrocities in the early nineteen-eighties. ‘We founded them and we financed them,’ he said. ‘The objective now is to recruit locals in any area we want. And we aren’t going to tell Congress about it.’ A former military officer, who has knowledge of the Pentagon’s commando capabilities, said, ‘We’re going to be riding with the bad boys.’”
(39) United Press International reported in June 2005:
U.S. intelligence officers are reporting that some of the insurgents in Iraq are using recent-model Beretta 92 pistols, but the pistols seem to have had their serial numbers erased. The numbers do not appear to have been physically removed; the pistols seem to have come off a production line without any serial numbers. Analysts suggest the lack of serial numbers indicates that the weapons were intended for intelligence operations or terrorist cells with substantial government backing. Analysts speculate that these guns are probably from either Mossad or the CIA. Analysts speculate that agent provocateurs may be using the untraceable weapons even as U.S. authorities use insurgent attacks against civilians as evidence of the illegitimacy of the resistance.
(40) In 2005, British soldiers dressed as Arabs were caught by Iraqi police after a shootout against the police. The soldiers apparently possessed explosives, and were accused of attempting to set off bombs. While none of the soldiers admitted that they were carrying out attacks, British soldiers and a column of British tanks stormed the jail they were held in, broke down a wall of the jail, and busted them out. The extreme measures used to free the soldiers – rather than have them face questions and potentially stand trial – could be considered an admission.
(41) Undercover Israeli soldiers admitted in 2005 to throwing stones at other Israeli soldiers so they could blame it on Palestinians, as an excuse to crack down on peaceful protests by the Palestinians.
(42) Quebec police admitted that, in 2007, thugs carrying rocks to a peaceful protest were actually undercover Quebec police officers (and see this).
(43) A 2008 US Army special operations field manual recommends that the U.S. military use surrogate non-state groups such as “paramilitary forces, individuals, businesses, foreign political organizations, resistant or insurgent organizations, expatriates, transnational terrorism adversaries, disillusioned transnational terrorism members, black marketers, and other social or political ‘undesirables.’” The manual specifically acknowledged that U.S. special operations can involve both counterterrorism and “Terrorism” (as well as “transnational criminal activities, including narco-trafficking, illicit arms-dealing, and illegal financial transactions.”)
(44) The former Italian Prime Minister, President, and head of Secret Services (Francesco Cossiga) advised the 2008 minister in charge of the police, on how to deal with protests from teachers and students:
He should do what I did when I was Minister of the Interior … infiltrate the movement with agents provocateurs inclined to do anything …. And after that, with the strength of the gained population consent, … beat them for blood and beat for blood also those teachers that incite them. Especially the teachers. Not the elderly, of course, but the girl teachers yes.
(45) At the G20 protests in London in 2009, a British member of parliament saw plain clothes police officers attempting to incite the crowd to violence.
(46) Egyptian politicians admitted (and see this) that government employees looted priceless museum artifacts 2011 to try to discredit the protesters.
(47) In 2011, a Colombian colonel admitted that he and his soldiers had lured 57 innocent civilians and killed them – after dressing many of them in uniforms – as part of a scheme to claim that Columbia was eradicating left-wing terrorists. And see this.
(48) Rioters who discredited the peaceful protests against the swearing in of the Mexican president in 2012 admitted that they were paid 300 pesos each to destroy everything in their path. According to Wikipedia, photos also show the vandals waiting in groups behind police lines prior to the violence.
(49) In 2012, NBC News’ chief foreign correspondent, Richard Engel, was kidnapped in Syria. NBC News said that Engel and his reporting team had been abducted by forces affiliated with the Syrian government. He reported that they only escaped when some anti-Syrian government rebels killed some of the pro-government kidnappers.
However, it turns out that they were really kidnapped by U.S. backed rebels fighting the Syrian government … who wore the clothes of, faked the accent of, scrawled the slogans of, and otherwise falsely impersonated the mannerisms of people associated with the Syrian government. In reality, the group that kidnapped Engel and his crew were affiliated with the U.S.-supported Free Syrian Army, and NBC should have known that it was blaming the wrong party. See New York Times and the Nation’s reporting.
(50) A Colombian army colonel has admitted that his unit murdered 57 civilians, then dressed them in uniforms and claimed they were rebels killed in combat.
(51) On November 20, 2014, Mexican agent provocateurs were transported by army vehicles to participate in the 2014 Iguala mass kidnapping protests, as was shown by videos and pictures distributed via social networks.
(52) The highly-respected writer for the Telegraph Ambrose Evans-Pritchard says that the head of Saudi intelligence – Prince Bandar – recently admitted that the Saudi government controls “Chechen” terrorists.
(53) Two members of the Turkish parliament, high-level American sources and others admitted that the Turkish government – a NATO country – carried out the chemical weapons attacks in Syria and falsely blamed them on the Syrian government; and high-ranking Turkish government admitted on tape plans to carry out attacks and blame it on the Syrian government.
(54) The Ukrainian security chief admits that the sniper attacks which started the Ukrainian coup were carried out in order to frame others. Ukrainian officials admit that the Ukrainian snipers fired on both sides, to create maximum chaos.
(55) Burmese government officials admitted that Burma (renamed Myanmar) used false flag attacks against Muslim and Buddhist groups within the country to stir up hatred between the two groups, to prevent democracy from spreading.
(56) Israeli police were again filmed in 2015 dressing up as Arabs and throwing stones, then turning over Palestinian protesters to Israeli soldiers.
(57) Britain’s spy agency has admitted (and see this) that it carries out “digital false flag” attacks on targets, framing people by writing offensive or unlawful material … and blaming it on the target.
(58) U.S. soldiers have admitted that if they kill innocent Iraqis and Afghanis, they then “drop” automatic weapons near their body so they can pretend they were militants
(59) Similarly, police frame innocent people for crimes they didn’t commit. The practice is so well-known that the New York Times noted in 1981:
In police jargon, a throwdown is a weapon planted on a victim.
Newsweek reported in 1999:
Perez, himself a former [Los Angeles Police Department] cop, was caught stealing eight pounds of cocaine from police evidence lockers. After pleading guilty in September, he bargained for a lighter sentence by telling an appalling story of attempted murder and a “throwdown”–police slang for a weapon planted by cops to make a shooting legally justifiable. Perez said he and his partner, Officer Nino Durden, shot an unarmed 18th Street Gang member named Javier Ovando, then planted a semiautomatic rifle on the unconscious suspect and claimed that Ovando had tried to shoot them during a stakeout.
Wikipedia notes:
As part of his plea bargain, Pérez implicated scores of officers from the Rampart Division’s anti-gang unit, describing routinely beating gang members, planting evidence on suspects, falsifying reports and covering up unprovoked shootings.
(As a side note – and while not technically false flag attacks – police have been busted framing innocent people in many other ways, as well.)
(60) A former U.S. intelligence officer recently alleged:
Most terrorists are false flag terrorists or are created by our own security services.
(61) The head and special agent in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles office said that most terror attacks are committed by the CIA and FBI as false flags. Similarly, the director of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan – Lt. General William Odom said:
By any measure the US has long used terrorism. In ‘78-79 the Senate was trying to pass a law against international terrorism – in every version they produced, the lawyers said the US would be in violation.
(audio here).
(62) Leaders throughout history have acknowledged the “benefits” of of false flags to justify their political agenda:
“Terrorism is the best political weapon for nothing drives people harder than a fear of sudden death”.
– Adolph Hitler“Why of course the people don’t want war … But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship … Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”
– Hermann Goering, Nazi leader.“The easiest way to gain control of a population is to carry out acts of terror. [The public] will clamor for such laws if their personal security is threatened”.
– Josef StalinPostscript: Of course, sometimes atrocities or warmongering are falsely blamed on the enemy as a justification for war … when no such event ever occurred. This is sort of like false flag terror … without the terror.
For example:
- The NSA admits that it lied about what really happened in the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964 … manipulating data to make it look like North Vietnamese boats fired on a U.S. ship so as to create a false justification for the Vietnam war
- One of the central lies used to justify the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq after Iraq invaded Kuwait was the false statement by a young Kuwaiti girl that Iraqis murdered Kuwaiti babies in hospitals. Her statement was arranged by a Congressman who knew that she was actually the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the U.S. – who was desperately trying to lobby the U.S. to enter the war – but the Congressman hid that fact from the public and from Congress
- Another central lie used to justify the Gulf War was the statement that a quarter of a million Iraqi troops were massed on the border with Saudi Arabia (see also this article)
- Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind reported that the White House ordered the CIA to forge and backdate a document falsely linking Iraq with Muslim terrorists and 9/11 … and that the CIA complied with those instructions and in fact created the forgery, which was then used to justify war against Iraq. And see this and this
- Time magazine points out that the claim by President Bush that Iraq was attempting to buy “yellow cake” Uranium from Niger:
had been checked out — and debunked — by U.S. intelligence a year before the President repeated it.
- Everyone knew that Iraq didn’t have weapons of mass destruction. More
- The entire torture program was geared towards obtaining false confessions linking Iraq and 9/11
- CIA agents and documents admit that the agency gave Iran plans for building nuclear weapons … so it could frame Iran for trying to build the bomb
- The “humanitarian” wars in Syria, Libya and Yugoslavia were all justified by false reports that the leaders of those countries were committing atrocities against their people. And see this
- Why Did the 9/11 Commission Not "Follow the Money?", by Lars Schall
In the below article, independent investigative journalist Lars Schall explores the time-honored tradition of following the money in an attempt to discover answers to yet unanswered questions regarding the terrorist attacks of 9/11 in New York City. Here is his report below.
Why Did The 9/11 Commission Not “Follow the Money”?Lars Schall has put some material together that brings him to the question why the time-proven approach to “follow the money” was dismissed when it came the funding of the biggest terror attack on US soil.
By Lars Schall
Bill:Howdy! I am an investigative financial journalist from Germany, who’s in the process of finishing a book trilogy on the topic of the so-called “Deep State”. Related to that project, I examined the case of a software program called the Prosecutor’s Management Information System (PROMIS), a database system developed by INSLAW Inc., a U.S. information technology company, which was founded by William A. Hamilton, a former analyst with the National Security Agency (NSA). Indeed, in mid-2012, when he became aware of my research connected to PROMIS, Mr. Hamilton contacted me to ask me for help with investigating some certain aspects of the PROMIS case.’
Here’s a recent confirmation for this fact.
Lars:
I am pleased to confirm that I contacted you for help in investigating aspects of the INSLAW Affair in which the U.S. Department of Justice secretly misappropriated the PROMIS legal case management software from INSLAW, Inc., one of its software vendors, and disseminated stolen copies beyond the U.S. Department of Justice for U.S. and Israeli intelligence database projects, including NSA’s Follow the Money Project for real-time electronic surveillance of wire transfers of money and letters of credit through the banking system; Israel’s sale of a version of PROMIS equipped with a special data retrieval capability to foreign intelligence and law enforcement agencies of both friendly and adversarial governments worldwide to facilitate the theft of their intelligence secrets while producing profits for intelligence insiders; the CIA’s deployment of PROMIS to virtually every component of the U.S intelligence community as ’compatible database software’ for the gathering and dissemination of U.S. intelligence information between and among the entities that ’produce’ the intelligence information and the entities that ’consume’ the intelligence product; the CIA’s deployment of PROMIS to the leading semi-conductor manufacturers in the world so NSA could exercise real-time electronic surveillance of the manufacturing and illicit sale of integrated circuits engineered for advanced defense and military applications; and the sale by a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) proprietary company in Cyprus to the drug interdiction entities of Middle Eastern governments of a back-door version of PROMIS so DEA could augment its own drug trafficking intelligence information with the intelligence information stolen from these Middle Eastern governments.Bill Hamilton
Founder and President INSLAW, Inc.
Washington, D.C.
The Prosecutor’s Management Information System (PROMIS) was originally developed by INSLAW for the US Justice Department. However, according to Guy Lawson’s book entitled Octopus, that sophisticated piece of software “had been so successful that the American intelligence agency apparatus had secretly stolen the software to put it to use covertly. The CIA had reconfigured the code and installed it in 32-bit Digital Equipment Corporation VAX minicomputers. The agency had used front companies to sell the new technology to banks and leading financial institutions like the Federal Reserve. Hidden inside the computer was a ‘trapdoor’ that enabled intelligence agencies to covertly monitor financial transactions digitally for the first time. (…) In Bob Woodward’s book Veil, former CIA director William Casey said the secret money-tracking system had been one of his proudest achievements. (1)
In May 1998, Dr. Norman Bailey published a monograph entitled The Strategic Plan That Won The Cold War, which references the importance of NSA’s Follow the Money Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) mission and also includes a Foreword written by William P. Clark, President Reagan’s National Security Advisor in 1982 and 1983, extolling the role of Reagan’s NSC staff in “bringing about the end of the cold war.” (2) Dr. Bailey also acknowledged several years before on the public record while being interviewed by the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) that NSA undertook its so called Follow the Money Program.
While being interviewed by PBS for a July 12, 1989 television documentary entitled Follow the Money, he stated that the Reagan White House tasked the NSA in 1981 with implanting “powerful computing mechanisms” in three major wire transfer clearinghouses: CHIPS (the Clearing House Interbank Payment System) in New York City, which reportedly records payments and settlements for foreign trade, foreign exchange, and syndicated loans for its 139 member banks in 35 countries; CHAPS in London, which reportedly performs similar functions for Sterling-denominated transactions; and SIC in Basel, Switzerland, which reportedly records the same types of transactions when they involve Swiss Francs. Dr. Bailey described the new NSA SIGINT penetration of the banking sector as giving the United States the capability to follow the money flowing from foreign governments to international terrorists through the international banking system, intercepting the fund transfer messages from one bank to another as they occurred in real time. (3)
When he was interviewed for a July 23, 2008 article by Tim Shorrock in Salon Magazine, Dr. Bailey was quoted as stating that INSLAW’s “PROMIS was the principal software element used by the NSA” for its real-time surveillance of bank transfers. (4)
In a personal message that I received in June 2013, Dr. Bailey told me:
“I was appointed Director of Planning and Evaluation on the staff of the National Security Council at the White House in early 1981, when Ronald Reagan took over the presidency. In that capacity I coordinated national security planning throughout the government and evaluated the results of operations undertaken as a result. One of the projects I personally initiated was the tracing of the funding of activities contrary to the national security interests of the United States back to their sources. This activity was given the nickname ’follow the money’. I worked especially with the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve Board and the National Security Agency in carrying out this project (which is very much ongoing today). During this period I visited the NSA twice, and during my visits was told that the principal software utilized for the purpose of tracing money movements was PROMIS. At that time this meant nothing to me, as I was not a computer specialist, but rather a financial and monetary economist. Only much later did I realize that the NSA must have been given this software by the Department of Justice, which had originally utilized it to track cases. I had little to do with the Justice Department in my position, and even if I had known that such a transaction had taken place I would have found nothing wrong with it in principle, assuming the laws regarding patent protection and payment for patented products had been processed normally. That is absolutely all I know from personal experience: the NSA began to use PROMIS software sometime in 1981.”
As mentioned before, in his book, Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981-1987, Bob Woodward quotes CIA Director William Casey as claiming that one of his proudest achievements as President Reagan’s CIA Director was the “penetration of the international banking system, allowing a steady flow of data from the real, secret set of books kept by many foreign banks …” (5)
Moreover, a June 5, 1986 email message from David Wigg to Colonel Oliver North, originally classified SECRET/CODE WORD but later partially declassified and released in redacted form as a result of the Iran-Contra investigations, discusses a Reagan National Security Council (NSC) staff proposal to expand NSA’s SIGINT penetration of the banking sector to add another approximately 400 major commercial banks. The email message reported on a meeting that same day with the two top officials of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel to obtain a legal opinion, binding on the Executive Branch and authorizing the planned expansion. David Wigg, who had served as CIA Director Casey’s liaison from the CIA to the NSC staff before transferring to the NSC staff, (6) described its objective as helping to “track financial flows through Syria, Libya, Iran, etc. through the 400 or so principal banks that make up the interbank market; to notify and work with European Govs. To fill gaps in our coverage and to cooperate with us in freezing/seizing assets as appropriate (all on a confidential basis).” (7)
The use of NSA’s bank surveillance project in the fight against international terrorism led to the decision by President Ronald Reagan to bomb Libya. That decision was based on precise Follow the Money SIGINT evidence that Libya had financed a terrorist attack in Germany that killed an American soldier. “The highly classified initiative, known as ‘Follow the Money,’ had allowed the Reagan administration to trace the Libyan government’s secret funding of a terrorist group that had bombed a disco in Berlin in 1986, killing an American soldier and wounding two hundred civilians.“ (8)
In the Preface of The 9/11 Commission Report, released in 2004, the 9/11 Commission writes near the very beginning:
“Our aim has not been to assign individual blame. Our aim has been to provide the fullest possible account of the events surrounding 9/11 and to identify lessons learned.“
It looks as if the lesson learned is that you can ignore the funding of a terror attack that kills more than 3.000 people on American soil, while during the presidency of Ronald Reagan the U.S. Government took the funding issue of a terror attack in Berlin extremely serious. Why do I say so? Because in Chapter 5, the 9/11 Commission states with respect to the funding issue of the 9/11 attacks:
“Ultimately the question is of little practical significance.”
However, ask yourself, if you do not really investigate this question, is “the fullest account of the events surrounding 9/11” still possible? Interestingly enough, NSA’s Follow the Money mission exists until today and was expended in recent years. According to the German magazine Der Spiegel in 2013:
“Indeed, secret documents reveal that the main NSA financial database Tracfin, which collects the ’Follow the Money’ surveillance results on bank transfers, credit card transactions and money transfers, already had 180 million datasets by 2011. The corresponding figure in 2008 was merely 20 million. According to these documents, most Tracfin data is stored for five years.” (9)
Furthermore, Der Spiegel reported:
“Classified documents compiled by the US intelligence agency NSA (…) show how comprehensively and effectively the intelligence agency can track global flows of money and store the information in a powerful database developed for this purpose.
’Follow the Money’ is the name of the NSA branch that handles these matters. (…) Financial transfers are the ‘Achilles’ heel’ of terrorists, as NSA analysts note in an internal report. Additional fields of activity for their ’financial intelligence’ include tracking down illegal arms deliveries and keeping tabs on the increasingly lucrative domain of cybercrime. Tracing international flows of money could help reveal political crimes, expose acts of genocide and monitor whether sanctions are being respected. (…) The classified documents show that the intelligence agency has several means of accessing the internal data traffic of the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a cooperative used by more than 8,000 banks worldwide for their international transactions. The NSA specifically targets other institutes on an individual basis. Furthermore, the agency apparently has in-depth knowledge of the internal processes of credit card companies like Visa and MasterCard. (…) The collected information often provides a complete picture of individuals, including their movements, contacts and communication behavior. The success stories mentioned by the intelligence agency include operations that resulted in banks in the Arab world being placed on the US Treasury’s blacklist. (…) [T]he documents reveal the close involvement of the US Treasury in selecting the program’s spying targets. Indeed, according to the documents, there is an exchange of personnel in which NSA analysts are transferred for a number of months to the relevant department in the US Treasury.“ (10)This report by Der Spiegel certainly documents that the NSA and the US Treasury are still interested in the financial activities related to terrorism. This is underlined by the fact that the US Treasury established in 2004 – the same year in which the 9/11 Commission Report was released – a special branch called the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence (TFI), which oversees the Office of Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes (TFFC). Its mission: “to combat terrorist financing domestically and internationally”. (11)
CNN stated in a detailed 2010 report that the US Treasury is:
“…one of the key players in the war on terrorism and smack in the middle of nearly every major international conflict in which the United States is involved. (…) Inside Treasury, the work is done by a low-profile but high-impact unit known as the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. (…) Treasury is the world’s only government finance agency with its own in-house intelligence unit. It has offices as far flung as Riyadh, Islamabad, Kabul and Abu Dhabi. They’re the ones seizing or freezing assets of suspected bad guys — from terrorists to drug runners. They’re a part of the U.S. intelligence apparatus, sharing information with the CIA and the FBI, among others.
‘Treasury is the only finance ministry in the world to have an intel shop that is very much focused on financial intelligence, getting access to information about the networks that support terrorists, weapons proliferation or narcotics traffickers,’ said David Cohen, assistant secretary for terrorist financing. (…) The Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence was put together six years ago following the big federal agency shuffle that created the Department of Homeland Security.
The office has more than 700 attorneys, investigators, analysts and financial experts. And the financial intelligence unit is housed with other Treasury teams, such as the financial crimes unit, that need intel on alleged dirty money transactions. (…) Sometimes the office’s work has drawn controversy. For example, since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Treasury has had access to a database of intra-European financial transactions, despite protests about privacy violations.” (12)Obviously, the U.S. Government disagrees with the 9/11 Commission in a substantial way when it comes to the “practical significance” of this specific issue, i.e. the financing of terrorism. In the 9/11 Commission Report, they tell you not a single thing about the “Follow the Money” program and its capabilities. Moreover, they give you no clue what the U.S. intelligence agencies actually did to track down the financial activities of the alleged 9/11 hijackers and their handlers. And they even made a false statement when they wrote “that the National Money-laundering Strategy Report for 2001 ’didn’t mention terrorist financing in any of its 50 pages’, when in fact that report “mentions it 17 times”. (13)
When you see it through the prism of 9/11, isn’t it justified to ask why the U.S. Government has a “Follow the Money” program at all, if the funding of 9/11 was “of little practical significance”?
Maybe the answer to this question depends on which kind of story the 9/11 Commission had in mind that it wanted to tell the public. An account as the following written by British investigative journalist Nafeez Ahmed is for sure at odds with the “mythical historical narrative” that 9/11 has become. He writes:
“In his book Intelligence Matters (2004), Senator Bob Graham, co-chair of the
Congressional Inquiry into 9/11, discusses the contents of a top secret CIA memo dated 2nd August 2002 about two 9/11 hijackers, Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi. The CIA memo concluded that there is ’incontrovertible evidence that there is support for these terrorists within the Saudi government.’The 28 page section of the Congressional report including discussion of the CIA memo was classified, but some of its contents were leaked, and related issues revealed in press reports. Early in 2000, when Almidhar and Alhazmi arrived at Los Angeles airport, they were picked up by a fellow Saudi, Omar al-Bayoumi, who gave them $1,500 in cash, moved them into his apartment building, and helped them apply for flight school. Al-Bayoumi worked for Dallah Avco, a Saudi-based airline chaired by Prince Bandar’s father, Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz. The firm is a major contractor for the Saudi Ministry of Defense and Aviation.
In the following months, al-Bayoumi and his associates received regular cashier’s cheques of around $2,000 a month, totaling tens of thousands of dollars. These came from Prince Bandar and his wife, Princess Haifa bin Faisal. Both Bandar and his wife claimed the money was donated for charitable purposes (one payment track was made after one of al-Bayoumi’s associates requested assistance from the Saudi embassy for thyroid treatment), and that they had no idea it was being diverted to fund the 9/11 hijackers.
After 9/11, British authorities questioned al-Bayoumi in London about the Saudi money trail to bin Laden’s hijackers. They had discovered secret papers with the private phone numbers of senior Saudi government officials concealed beneath the floorboards of his flat in London. The investigation went nowhere: al-Bayoumi was soon released, and disappeared into Saudi Arabia.” (14)
Fact is, you won’t find this addressed in any way in the final report of the 9/11 Commission. The same is true when it comes to the allegations against a man by the name of Omar Sheikh Saeed. Why should anybody bother about this man?
Well, Nafeez Ahmed writes:
“In his memoirs, In the Line of Fire, Gen. Musharraf revealed that Omar Sheikh Saeed was a MI6 agent who had executed certain missions on behalf of the British intelligence agency, before travelling to Pakistan and Afghanistan where he met Osama bin laden and Mullah Omar. Sheikh Saeed was first recruited by MI6 while at the London School of Economics, recounts Musharraf. The agency persuaded him to join anti-Serb demonstrations during the Bosnia conflict, and later sent him to Kosovo to join the jihad. Musharraf argues that at some point, Saeed likely became ’a rogue or double agent.’
Musharraf’s claims are no doubt self-serving, deflecting from the widely-reported fact that Sheikh Saeed was an ISI asset. But they chime with other facts in the public record. Former US Justice Department prosecutor John Loftus, for instance, who held top secret national security clearances, has confirmed that MI6 was working with leaders of the now banned British group al-Muhajiroun?—?Omar Bakri Mohammed, Abu Hamza and Haroon Rashid Aswat (who would later become bin Laden’s bodyguard)?—?to recruit British Muslims to fight in Kosovo in 1996.
Sheikh Saeed would have been part of that MI6-backed funnel. Others in Musharraf’s government were convinced that Sheikh Saeed was also a CIA asset. In a little-noted article on Saeed’s murky background in March 2002, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reported that: ’There are many in Musharraf’s government who believe that Saeed Sheikh’s power comes not from the ISI, but from his connections with our own CIA.’ Officials believe that ’Saeed Sheikh was bought and paid for.’” (15) At the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Brigadier Ijaz Shah, the former Director-General of Intelligence Bureau of Pakistan, was “the handler for Omar Saeed Sheikh, who was involved in the kidnapping of Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002”, reported Pakistani security specialist Arif Jamal. “Omar Saeed Sheikh surrendered to Brigadier Shah who hid him for several weeks before turning him over to authorities.” (16)As Nafeez Ahmed explains:
“Brig. Shah’s connection to Omar Sheikh Saeed is deeply troubling. Sheikh Saeed was not simply accused of murdering Daniel Pearl?—?he was al-Qaeda’s finance chief during the 9/11 attacks. After 9/11, Indian intelligence officials confirmed that then ISI director Gen. Mahmoud Ahmad had ordered Omar Saeed to wire at least $100,000 to the chief 9/11 hijacker, Mohammed Atta. As I documented in my books The War on Truth (2005) and The War on Freedom (2002), which was among 99 books selected for the 9/11 Commissioners to use as part of their inquiries, multiple US intelligence investigations corroborated the Indian allegations. US authorities had further confirmed that Sheikh Saeed had wired as much as $500,000 if not more to several of the 9/11 hijackers?—?all at the behest of the ISI. Despite this, US authorities took no measures to designate or extradite either Sheikh Saeed or his ISI boss, Mahmoud Ahmad. As former British Cabinet Minister Michael Meacher observed: ‘It is extraordinary that neither Ahmad nor Sheikh have been charged and brought to trial on this count [of financing 9/11]. Why not?’” (17) And John Newman, “a former executive assistant to the director of the NSA who spent 20 years in the US Army Intelligence and Security Command, pointed out that despite Sheikh Saeed’s kidnapping of British citizens and related terror offenses, he faced no indictments from the US or Britain, and was even able to travel back to London in January 2000. He had also kidnapped American citizens, but faced no indictments from the US until after 9/11.
‘Did the United States not indict Saeed Sheikh because he was a British informant? Did the agency [CIA] receive information provided by Saeed Sheikh from British or Pakistani intelligence?’ asked Newman rhetorically at a 2005 Congressional briefing on the findings of the 9/11 Commission Report.‘This would help explain why Saeed Sheikh was not indicted and escaped justice for his crimes and traveled freely around England… If the foregoing analysis has any merit, Western intelligence agencies were receiving reports from a senior al-Qaeda source. Once again, however, al-Qaeda had used Western intelligence to accomplish its own mission. Saeed Sheikh was probably a triple agent.’ Ahmed Omar Sheikh Saeed’s role in the 9/11 attacks on behalf of the head of the ISI, Newman noted, was completely ignored by the 9/11 Commission Report.“ (18)
Another researcher is skeptical when it comes to the allegations that Nafeez Ahmed is talking about. His name: Peter Dale Scott. The former Professor for English at the University of California in Berkeley writes in his book, The Road to 9/11:
“In October 2001, shortly after the catastrophic events of 9/11, U.S. and British newspapers briefly alleged that the paymaster for the 9/11 attacks was a possible agent of the Pakistani intelligence service ISI, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh (or Sheik Syed). There was even a brief period in which it was alleged that the money had been paid at the direction of the then ISI chief, Lieutenant-General Mahmoud Ahmad. (19) The London Guardian reported on October 1, 2001, that ’U.S. investigators believe they have found the ‘smoking gun’ linking Osama bin Laden to the September 11 terrorist attacks. . . . The man at the centre of the financial web is believed to be Sheikh Saeed, also known as Mustafa Mohamed Ahmad, who worked as a financial manager for Bin Laden when the Saudi exile was based in Sudan, and is still a trusted paymaster in Bin Laden’s alQaida organization.’ (20) This story was corroborated by CNN on October 6, citing a ’a senior-level U.S. government source’ who noted that ’Sheik Syed’ had been liberated from an Indian prison as a result of an airplane hijacking in December 1999.
The man liberated in this way was Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, a notorious kidnapper raised in England and widely reported as a probable agent of the ISI. (21) One newspaper, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, suggested he may have been a double agent, recruited inside al Qaeda and the ISI by CIA. (22) Others have since argued that Saeed Sheikh worked for both the United States and Britain, since ’both American and British governments have studiously avoided taking any action against Sheikh despite the fact that he is a known terrorist who has targeted U.S. and UK citizens.’ (23)
Subsequent newspaper stories reported on the undoubted relationship of Saeed Sheikh to the ISI, to FBI claims that he wired $100,000 to 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta’s bank account, (24) to a CNN report that these funds came from Pakistan, (25) and to the uncontested statement that (as later stated in the indictment of the so-called twentieth hijacker Zacarias Moussaoui) ’on September 11, 2001, Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi left the U.A.E. for Pakistan.’ (26)
The most sensational charge, alluded to earlier, came from Indian intelligence sources: that Saeed Sheikh had wired the money to Atta at the direction of Lieutenant-General Mahmoud Ahmad, then director of the ISI.” (27)
“All these important and alarming charges are ignored in the 9/11 Commission Report, in which the Saeed Sheikh born in London is not mentioned. (28) Instead, the report assured its readers in a carefully drafted comment that ’we have seen no evidence that any foreign government—or foreign government official—supplied any funding.’ (29) It was later reported, however, that ’the Pakistan foreign office had paid tens of thousands of dollars to lobbyists in the U.S. to get anti-Pakistan references dropped from the 9/11 inquiry commission report.’ (30) The U.S. government and the mainstream media’s decisions to drop the Saeed Sheikh story in October 2001 were clearly political. On September 20, 2001, President Bush delivered his memorable ultimatum to ’every nation, in every region. . . . Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.’ There was probably no leader for which the choice was more difficult, or the outcome more unpredictable, than General Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan. But on October 7, Musharraf fired his pro-Taliban ISI chief, General Mahmoud Ahmad, along with two other ISI leaders. (31) As the historian John Newman, a former U.S. Army Intelligence analyst, has commented: ’The stakes in Pakistan were very high. As Anthony Zinni explained to CBS on 60 Minutes, ‘Musharaf may be America’s last hope in Pakistan, and if he fails the fundamentalists will get hold of the Islamic bomb.’ Musharaf was also vital to the war effort, and was the key to neutralizing Islamists and rounding up Al Qaeda operatives in Pakistan.’ (32)
A number of books, in reporting the Saeed Sheikh story, have focused on the fact that General Ahmad was in Washington on 9/11, meeting with such senior U.S. officials as CIA director George Tenet. (33) In my opinion the mystery of 9/11 must be unraveled at a deeper level, the ongoing groups inside and outside governments, in both Pakistan and America, which have continued to use groups like al Qaeda and individuals like Ahmad, for their own policy purposes. (…) They [the relationships between these groups] are far too complex to be reduced to two or three individuals. The ongoing collaboration of the ISI and CIA in promoting terrorist violence has created a complex conspiratorial milieu, in which governments now have a huge stake in preventing the emergence of the truth.” (34)
The 9/11 Commission surely would have had the chance to address the issue. But again, it decided the question was “of little practical significance”.
Let me remind you on the idea of “follow the money”. Fred Shapiro, author of the book, The Yale Book of Quotations, wrote in 2011 for example: “The forthcoming Dictionary of Modern Proverbs, to be published by Yale University Press, quotes (…) a 1975 book by Clive Borrell and Brian Cashinella, Crime in Britain Today: ‘Mr. [James] Crane usually offers this piece of sound advice to all new officers joining his fraud department: ‘Always follow the money. Inevitably it will lead to an oak-paneled door and behind it will be Mr. Big.’ It is a tip that has paid off in scores of cases.’” (35)
The alternative catchphrase “Money trail” refers to the same idea of following the movement of money, e.g. from one person to another, from one organization to another, from one bank account to another, in order to find out what is really happening. So, why did the 9/11 Commission deem this tried and tested approach useless? Yours truly leaves the silent answer to the reader’s wisdom.
Best regards,
Lars Schall.
SOURCES:
(1) Guy Lawson: “Octopus – Sam Israel, The Secret Market, and Wall Street’s Wildest Con”, New York, Crown Publishers, 2012, page 144. On the PROMIS saga see also Cherie Seymour: “The Last Circle – Danny Casolaro’s Investigation into The Octopus and the PROMIS Software Scandal”, Walterville, TrineDay, 2011.
(2) See Norman A. Bailey: “The Strategic Plan that Won the Cold War – National Security Decision Directive 75”, published here: http://www.iwp.edu/news_publications/book/the-strategic-plan-thatwon-
the-cold-war
(3) For the transcript of the PBS documentary “Follow the Money” see Lars Schall: “Follow the Money: The NSA’s real-time electronic surveillance of bank transactions”, published at LarsSchall.com on February 2nd, 2014 under: http://www.larsschall.com/2014/02/02/follow-themoney-
the-nsas-real-time-electronic-surveillance-of-bank-transactions/
(4) See Tim Shorrock: “Exposing Bush’s historic abuse of power”, published at Salon on September 23, 2008 under: http://www.salon.com/2008/07/23/new_churchcomm/
(5) Compare Elliot L. Richardson: “INSLAW’s ANALYSIS and REBUTTAL of the BUA REPORT:
Memorandum in Response to the March 1993 Report of Special Counsel Nicholas J. Bua to the Attorney General of the United States Responding to the Allegations of INSLAW, Inc.”, published here: http://textfiles.com/law/rebuttal.txt
(6) David Wigg also earlier worked with William Casey when Casey headed the Export/Import Bank (1974-76).
(7) The National Security Archives at George Washington University published a collection of White House emails that Iran-Contra investigators had recovered from the Reagan National Security Council IBM mainframe computer after the NSC staff had deleted them as the Iran-Contra scandal began to unfold. See here: http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/white_house_email/. The documents
were later also published as a book, see Tom Blanton (ed.):
“White House E-Mail: The Top Secret Computer Messages The Reagan/Bush White House Tried to Destroy”, New Press, New York, 1995. For an online reference to the email message from David Wigg to Oliver North see J. Orlin Grabbe: “Plot to Spy on Banks Outlined in White House Email”, January 2, 1997, published at Mem Research under: https://www.memresearch.org/grabbe/email.htm(8) Guy Lawson: “Octopus”, loc. cit., page 144.
(9) See Laura Poitras, Marcel Rosenbach and Holger Stark: “’Follow the Money’: NSA Monitors Financial World”, published at Spiegel Online on September 16, 2013 under:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/how-the-nsa-spies-on-internati…
(10) Ibid.
(11) Compare “U.S. Treasury Department Announces New Executive Office for Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes”, published at the website of the U.S. Treasury on March 3, 2003 under:
https://www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releases/Pages/js77.aspx
(12) Compare Jennifer Liberto: “Treasury’s quiet war”, published at CNN on February 16, 2010
under: http://money.cnn.com/2010/02/16/news/international/Treasury_intelligence…
(13) Jim Hogue: “Follow the Money? God forbid”, published at Baltimore Chronicle on January 29, 2008 under: http://www.baltimorechronicle.com/2008/012908Hogue.shtml.
Hogue points in this article at “an unusual surge in the currency component of the M1 money supply” in the U.S. in July and August of 2001 that was “never investigated”. Related to this specific case see also Lars Schall:“How does ’dirty money’ become ’clean money’?”, published at
LarsSchall.com on September 27, 2012 under: http://www.larsschall.com/2012/09/27/how-does-dirty-money-become-clean-m…,and Lars Schall: “9/11: Currency joins insider trade claims”, published at Asia Times Online on September 13, 2013 under: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/GECON-01-
130913.html
(14) Nafeez Ahmed: “The bin Laden death mythology”, published at Insurge Intelligence on July 3, 2015 under:
https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/the-bin-laden-death-mythology-9a…
(15) Ibid.
(16) Ibid. Ahmed writes: “Jamal refers to an interview in 2000 with a Pakistani security official, who disclosed Shah’s relationship with Ahmed Omar Sheikh Saeed on condition of anonymity.”
(17) Michael Meacher: “The Pakistan connection”, published at “The Guardian” on July 22, 2004
under: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/jul/22/usa.september11
(18) Nafeez Ahmed: “The bin Laden death mythology”, loc. cit.
The following footnotes from 19 to 33 are taken from Peter Dale Scott: “The Road to 9/11 – Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America”, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2007, pp. 334-335:
(19) Griffin, 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, 104–7; Ahmed, War on Truth, 137–44; and Peter Dale Scott, “The CIA’s Secret Powers: Afghanistan, 9/11, and America’s Most Dangerous Enemy, Critical Asian Studies 35, no. 2 (2003): 233–58.
(20) Julian Borger and John Hooper, “Trail Links Bin Laden Aide to Hijackers,” Guardian, October 1, 2001, http://www.guardian.co.uk/wtccrash/story/0,,561001,00.html.Cf. Griffin, 9/11
Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, 109–10. The investigators were later identified as the FBI (Wall Street Journal, October 10, 2001; CNN, October 28, 2001; and Times [London], November 16, 2001).
(21) For example, Daniel Klaidman, “Federal Grand Jury Set to Indict Sheikh,” Newsweek, March 13, 2002: U.S. officials suspect “that Sheikh has been a ‘protected asset,’ of Pakistan’s shadowy spy service, the Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI.” The story was enhanced by Indian intelligence sources with a more sensational claim: that Saeed Sheikh had wired the money to hijacker Mohamed Atta at the direction of Lieutenant-General Mahmoud Ahmad, the director of the ISI at the time (Wall Street Journal,October 10, 2001). Indian sources later downplayed this anti-Pakistani
allegation by suggesting that the money came instead from a ransom paid to another terrorist, Aftab Ansari in Dubai, when a Kolkata businessman, Partha Roy Burman, was kidnapped in July 2001 (B. Muralidhar Reddy, “Omar Sheikh Arrested, Says Pearl Is Alive,” The Hindu, February 13, 2002).(22) “Did Pearl Die Because Pakistan Deceived CIA?” Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, March 3, 2002,
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/s_20141.html “There are many in Musharraf’s government who believe that Saeed Sheikh’s power comes not from the ISI, but from his connections with our own CIA. The theory is that with such intense pressure to locate bin Laden, Saeed Sheikh was bought and paid for.”
(23) Ahmed, War on Truth, 142; cf. John Newman, “Omissions and Errors in the Commission’s Final Report: Rep. McKinney 9/11 Congressional Briefing,” August 18, 2005,
http://911readingroom.org/bib/whole_document.php?article_id=422; Musharraf, In the Line of Fire,
225: “It is believed in some quarters that while Omar Sheikh was at the LSE [London School of Economics] he was recruited by the British intelligence agency MI6. It is said that MI6 persuaded him to take an active part in demonstrations against Serbian aggression in Bosnia and even sent him to Kosovo to join the jihad. At some point he probably became a rogue or double
agent.”(24) Maria A. Ressa, “India Wants Terror Spotlight on Kashmir,” CNN, October 8, 2001,
http://archives.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/asiapcf/south/10/08/india.ressa/.
(25) “Sources: Suspected Terrorist Leader Was Wired Funds through Pakistan,” CNN, October 1, 2001, http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/10/01/inv.pakistan.funds/: “As much as $100,000 was wired in the past year from Pakistan to Mohamed Atta.” Subsequent developments lent weight to the Pakistani connection, such as the arrest of Atta’s alleged controls, Ramzi Binalshibh and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, in Pakistan.
(26) United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria Division. United States of America v. Zacarias Moussaoui, #108.
(27) “India Helped FBI Trace ISI-Terrorist Links,” Times of India, October 9, 2001; Wall Street Journal, October 10, 2001.
(28) The appendixes note, in a list of names, a “Sheikh Saeed al Masri” as an “Egyptian; head of al Qaeda finance committee.” Instead, following a previous reversal in the U.S. media, the financial role attributed earlier to Sheikh Saeed is now given to “Mustafa al Hawsawi,” the name (or pseudonym) used for the financial transactions (9/11 Commission Report, 436). The only
reference to any Sheikh Saeed in the text says that the Egyptian (or Kenyan) Sheikh Saeed “argued that alQaeda should defer to the Taliban’s wishes” and not attack the United States directly (9/11 Commission Report, 251). The report treats Sheikh Saeed and al-Hawsawi as two people, whereas earlier they had been identified in U.S. media reports as the same person.
(29) 9/11 Commission Report, 172.
(30) “Pakistan Weekly Spills 9/11 Beans,” Telegraph (Calcutta), March 13, 2006,
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1060313/asp/nation/story_5962372.asp. The Telegraph story cited the Friday Times, a Pakistani weekly, which claimed the story was based on “disclosures made by foreign service officials to the Public Accounts Committee at a secret meeting in Islamabad.”
(31) Kamran Khan and Molly Moore, “Leader Purges Top Ranks of Military, Spy Services,” Washington Post, October 8, 2001; Thompson, Terror Timeline, 260–61. It was widely reported that Mahmoud was let go for being too sympathetic to the Taliban (for example, Alan Sipress and Vernon Loeb, “CIA’s Stealth War Centers on Eroding Taliban Loyalty and Aiding Opposition,” Washington
Post, October 10, 2001).(32) Newman, “Omissions and Errors in the Commission’s Final Report.”
(33) For example, Ahmed, War on Truth, 137–46; Griffin, 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, 103–9.
(34) Peter Dale Scott: “The Road to 9/11”, loc. cit., pp. 132-134.
(35) See Fred Shapiro: “Follow the Money”, published at Freakonomics on September 23, 2011
under: http://freakonomics.com/2011/09/23/follow-the-money/
- From Democracy To Pathocracy: The Rise Of The Political Psychopath
Submitted by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
“Politicians are more likely than people in the general population to be sociopaths. I think you would find no expert in the field of sociopathy/psychopathy/antisocial personality disorder who would dispute this… That a small minority of human beings literally have no conscience was and is a bitter pill for our society to swallow — but it does explain a great many things, shamelessly deceitful political behavior being one.”—Dr. Martha Stout, clinical psychologist and former instructor at Harvard Medical School
Twenty years ago, a newspaper headline asked the question: “What’s the difference between a politician and a psychopath?”
The answer, then and now, remains the same: None.
There is no difference between psychopaths and politicians.
Nor is there much of a difference between the havoc wreaked on innocent lives by uncaring, unfeeling, selfish, irresponsible, parasitic criminals and elected officials who lie to their constituents, trade political favors for campaign contributions, turn a blind eye to the wishes of the electorate, cheat taxpayers out of hard-earned dollars, favor the corporate elite, entrench the military industrial complex, and spare little thought for the impact their thoughtless actions and hastily passed legislation might have on defenseless citizens.
Psychopaths and politicians both have a tendency to be selfish, callous, remorseless users of others, irresponsible, pathological liars, glib, con artists, lacking in remorse and shallow.
Charismatic politicians, like criminal psychopaths, exhibit a failure to accept responsibility for their actions, have a high sense of self-worth, are chronically unstable, have socially deviant lifestyle, need constant stimulation, have parasitic lifestyles and possess unrealistic goals.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about Democrats or Republicans.
Political psychopaths are all largely cut from the same pathological cloth, brimming with seemingly easy charm and boasting calculating minds. Such leaders eventually create pathocracies—totalitarian societies bent on power, control, and destruction of both freedom in general and those who exercise their freedoms.
Once psychopaths gain power, the result is usually some form of totalitarian government or a pathocracy. “At that point, the government operates against the interests of its own people except for favoring certain groups,” author James G. Long notes. “We are currently witnessing deliberate polarizations of American citizens, illegal actions, and massive and needless acquisition of debt. This is typical of psychopathic systems, and very similar things happened in the Soviet Union as it overextended and collapsed.”
In other words, electing a psychopath to public office is tantamount to national hara-kiri, the ritualized act of self-annihilation, self-destruction and suicide. It signals the demise of democratic government and lays the groundwork for a totalitarian regime that is legalistic, militaristic, inflexible, intolerant and inhuman.
So why do we keep doing it over and over again?
There’s no shortage of dire warnings about the devastation that could be wrought if any one of the current crop of candidates running for the White House gets elected. Yet where the doomsayers go wrong is by ignoring the damage that has already been inflicted on our nation and its citizens by a psychopathic government.
According to investigative journalist Zack Beauchamp, “In 2012, a group of psychologists evaluated every President from Washington to Bush II using ‘psychopathy trait estimates derived from personality data completed by historical experts on each president.’ They found that presidents tended to have the psychopath’s characteristic fearlessness and low anxiety levels — traits that appear to help Presidents, but also might cause them to make reckless decisions that hurt other people’s lives.”
The willingness to prioritize power above all else, including the welfare of their fellow human beings, ruthlessness, callousness and an utter lack of conscience are among the defining traits of the sociopath.
When our own government no longer sees us as human beings with dignity and worth but as things to be manipulated, maneuvered, mined for data, manhandled by police, conned into believing it has our best interests at heart, mistreated, jailed if we dare step out of line, and then punished unjustly without remorse—all the while refusing to own up to its failings—we are no longer operating under a constitutional republic.
Instead, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, what we are experiencing is a pathocracy: tyranny at the hands of a psychopathic government, which “operates against the interests of its own people except for favoring certain groups.”
Worse, psychopathology is not confined to those in high positions of government. It can spread like a virus among the populace. As an academic study into pathocracy concluded, “[T]yranny does not flourish because perpetuators are helpless and ignorant of their actions. It flourishes because they actively identify with those who promote vicious acts as virtuous.”
People don’t simply line up and salute. It is through one’s own personal identification with a given leader, party or social order that they become agents of good or evil.
Much depends on how leaders “cultivate a sense of identification with their followers,” says Professor Alex Haslam. “I mean one pretty obvious thing is that leaders talk about ‘we’ rather than ‘I,’ and actually what leadership is about is cultivating this sense of shared identity about ‘we-ness’ and then getting people to want to act in terms of that ‘we-ness,’ to promote our collective interests. . . . [We] is the single word that has increased in the inaugural addresses over the last century . . . and the other one is ‘America.’”
The goal of the modern corporate state is obvious: to promote, cultivate, and embed a sense of shared identification among its citizens. To this end, “we the people” have become “we the police state.”
We are fast becoming slaves in thrall to a faceless, nameless, bureaucratic totalitarian government machine that relentlessly erodes our freedoms through countless laws, statutes, and prohibitions.
Any resistance to such regimes depends on the strength of opinions in the minds of those who choose to fight back. What this means is that we the citizenry must be very careful that we are not manipulated into marching in lockstep with an oppressive regime.
Writing for ThinkProgress, Beauchamp suggests that “one of the best cures to bad leaders may very well be political democracy.” He advocates for the media holding politicians accountable for their actions and the actions of their staff. While psychopaths may not care about how their actions harm other people, notes Beauchamp, “they very much do care about being able to hold on to their positions of power. A system that actually holds people accountable to the broader conscience of society may be one of the best ways to keep conscienceless people in check.”
That said, if we allow the ballot box to become our only means of pushing back against the police state, the battle is already lost.
Resistance will require a citizenry willing to be active at the local level.
If you wait to act until the SWAT team is crashing through your door, until your name is placed on a terror watch list, until you are reported for such outlawed activities as collecting rainwater or letting your children play outside unsupervised, then it will be too late.
This much I know: we are not faceless numbers. We are not cogs in the machine. We are not slaves.
We are human beings, and for the moment, we have the opportunity to remain free—that is, if we tirelessly advocate for our rights and resist at every turn attempts by the government to place us in chains.
The Founders understood that our freedoms do not flow from the government. They were not given to us only to be taken away by the will of the State. They are inherently ours. In the same way, the government’s appointed purpose is not to threaten or undermine our freedoms, but to safeguard them.
Until we can get back to this way of thinking, until we can remind our fellow Americans what it really means to be a free American, and until we can learn to stand our ground in the face of threats to those freedoms and encourage our fellow citizens to stop being cogs in the machine, we will continue to be treated like slaves in thrall to a bureaucratic police state run by political psychopaths.
- 8 Things The Chinese Are Scrambling To Buy In America
There has been some confusion in recent months about the unprecedented M&A buying spree unleashed by Chinese investors on international, but mostly U.S. targets, a spree which has already resulted in a record amount of Chinese outbound M&A capital, manifesting in $41 billion in US deals in just the first quarter, already double the full amount for 2015…
… funded by just as ridiculous amounts of debt:
The truth is that there is nothing confusing about this: M&A is merely the last surviving loophole allowing domestic oligarchs to bypass Chinese capital controls and park billions in equity on U.S. and international soil. It also explains the complete lack of price sensitivity when Chinese bidders rush to purchase any desired target as can be seen in the most recent example involving global hotel chain Starwood and its Chinese acquiror, shady insurance company Anbang. The reason is that contrary to conventional M&A where the transaction IRR is determined by the purchase price (the lower the better), for Chinese “bizarro M&A” deals, the more capital that can be invested offshore, the better – it simply means that even more capital will evade the Chinese financial system.
In many ways, Chinese “bidders” are now the full-blown replica of what Japanese buyers were in the 1980s, when at the height of the Japanese stock bubble, every US assets was fair game, including golf courses and, of course, the the Rockefeller Center.
* * *
So what U.S. assets are these rabid Chinese buyers after? Here, courtesy of Bloomberg, is a sample of what Chinese money is buying.
Luxury Hotels
Strategic Hotels & Resorts Inc.’s portfolio includes Four Seasons properties in Austin and Silicon Valley, as well as the Intercontinental Miami and Chicago. China’s Anbang Insurance Group Co. is paying about $6.5 billion to buy the hotel group from Blackstone Group LP—just three months after the New York-based private equity firm acquired it.
More Luxury Hotels
Anbang is also currently the lead bidder for Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc., after twice topping Marriott International Inc.’s bid. Starwood owns real estate valued at about $4 billion, including the St. Regis in New York. Anbang’s latest offer values Starwood at about $14 billion.
Refrigerators, Dishwashers, and Coffee Machines
General Electric Co. agreed to sell its appliances business to China’s Haier Group Co. for $5.4 billion in January—$2 billion more than Electrolux AB had agreed to pay for the business before the deal collapsed amid opposition from the U.S. Justice Department. Haier will need antitrust approval from authorities in the U.S., Mexico, Canada, and Colombia.
Cranes
Zoomlion Heavy Industry Science & Technology Co., a Chinese industrial machinery manufacturer, is pursuing Westport, Conn.-based cranemaker Terex Corp. After Terex agreed to a merger with Finnish competitor Konecranes Oyj, Zoomlion made an unsolicited counter-bid in January; last week it upped the offer to $31 a share.
The Dark Knight’s Hollywood Producer
China’s richest man agreed in January to buy Legendary Entertainment LLC, producer of Godzilla and the Dark Knight trilogy and co-producer of Jurassic World, for as much as $3.5 billion. Wang Jianlin is set to become the first Chinese person to control a Hollywood film company.
Software Distributors
Computer, networking, and software distributor Ingram Micro Inc. was snapped up in February by an arm of China’s HNA Group Co. for an equity value of about $6 billion. Ingram Micro will continue to be run from Irvine, Calif., and will become part of the Chinese conglomerate that acquired airport luggage handler Swissport International AG last year and missed out on London City Airport last month.
A Gay Dating App
Beijing Kunlun Tech Co., an Internet games company that helped introduce Angry Birds to China, bought a majority stake in Grindr, the world’s biggest gay social networking app. Chairman Zhou Yahui’s company offered $93 million in cash for 60 percent of New Grindr LLC and is now scouting for other potential U.S. investments.
A Stock Exchange
The Chicago Stock Exchange said in February that a Chinese investor group, Chongqing Casin Enterprise Group, agreed to acquire it. The 134-year-old bourse handles only about 0.5 percent of U.S. stock trading, but the deal, which needs regulatory approval, would be the first Chinese acquisition of a U.S. exchange.
* * *
And lest there is any confusion that the acquiring companies are nothing but frauds, make that mega frauds, here is an excerpt from the NYT’s profile of China’s Anbang, and its chairman Wu Xiaohui, one of China’s richest men:
He is often compared in the media to Warren E. Buffett. Like the American billionaire, he is leveraging his control of an insurance company to become one of the biggest names in global finance. Like Mr. Buffett, he looks to be acquiring an immense personal fortune. But that is where the comparisons between Wu Xiaohui, the chairman of the Anbang Insurance Group of China, and Mr. Buffett come to a halt.
Mr. Wu has links to some of the most powerful families in China. He married Zhuo Ran, the granddaughter of Deng Xiaoping, China’s former paramount leader in the 1980s and much of the 1990s. That name, uncommon in Chinese, appears in corporate records tied to at least two of the 37 holding companies.
His exact holdings in Anbang are not clear. A close examination of Anbang’s shareholding structure shows that the 37 companies control more than 93 percent of Anbang, while two Chinese state-owned companies own the rest. The 37 shareholders are linked by common phone numbers, email addresses and interlocking ownership, according to company records filed with the Chinese government and available online.
* * *
One Anbang shareholder — a coal mining company in China’s western region of Xinjiang — is owned by another mining company, Zhongya Huajin, that listed a Zhuo Ran as its first legal representative, though that person has since resigned.
Zhongya Huajin shares an official website address with a different Anbang shareholder, a Beijing real estate company. Collectively, those companies own nearly 4.6 billion shares of Anbang, or more than 7 percent. The companies could not be reached for comment, and their common website now contains only links to pornography and gambling services.
Five shareholders list the same legal email address in government filings. Phones at those companies rang unanswered, and a message to that address was not returned.
Calls to Anbang’s listed phone number were not answered. Nobody replied to a list of questions delivered to its Beijing headquarters, with its enormous lobby — the size of several basketball courts — and its large chandelier. An Anbang employee said the company did not answer media questions.
And there you have it: global money laundering at an absolutely epic scale, now masked as Mergers and Acqusitions.
- PBOC Slams Yuan Shorts Again – Strengthens Currency Most Since 2005
It appears the messaging from The People's Bank Of China to The Fed was heard loud and understood. Having exercised its will to weaken the Yuan (implying turmoil is possible), Janet Yellen delivered the dovish goods and so China 'allowed' the Yuan to rally back. In a double-whammy for everyone involved the biggest 3-day strengthening of the Yuan fix since 2005 also pushed Yuan forwards back to their richest relative to spot since Aug 2014 – once again showing their might against the dastardly speculative shorts.
As we warned previously, it appeared a 'message' was being sent to The Fed via Yuan weakness – first ahead of The FOMC meeting and then, as several hawks got vocal, ahead of Janet's speech. Her uber-dovishness was rewarded as China 'allowed' the Yuan to rise and thus the USDollar to weaken…
And since Janet delivered, PBOC has strengthened the Yuan Fix by the most since 2005!!
Crushing shorts as Yuan forwards collapse back to their 'richest' relative to spot since Aug 2014…
And just like Keyser Soze, they were gone. So while the old mantra of "Don't fight The Fed" may apply to some, it most certainly does not apply to The PBOC…
- The More Corrupt The State, The More Numerous The Laws
Submitted by Nick Giambruno via InternationalMan.com,
Today, I’m going to share one of the most important things I’ve learned traveling around the world: There’s a crucial difference between committing a real crime and breaking the law.
I’ve seen it firsthand in the Middle East as well as many other places.
The difference is huge and few people understand it.
While laws vary dramatically across countries, almost every country in the world universally considers real crimes immoral. A real crime involves harm or the threat of harm to person or property. Think murder, theft, or arson.
Virtually every government prohibits real crimes. Most also prohibit a lot of other things…
When someone breaks the law, it’s often not a real crime at all. He may have merely violated a particular government’s law without threatening or harming anyone or anything.
Keep in mind that the idea of a victimless crime is an oxymoron. If there is no victim, there is no real crime.
Insulting the Dear Leader in North Korea, being a woman who’s driving a car in Saudi Arabia, or possessing certain plants in the U.S. government all violate laws. But none of these activities harm or threaten people or property. They’re not real crimes. They simply violate the laws of certain governments.
Of course, I am not suggesting that anyone break the law anywhere, even if it wouldn’t harm people or property. As a practical matter, it’s foolhardy to violate any government’s laws while you’re within its reach. That is, unless you prefer the lifestyle of an outlaw or a martyr.
It would be risky to disparage the Dear Leader while in North Korea, or to possess an unapproved plant in the U.S., and so forth.
Distinguishing between real crimes (i.e., harming or threatening to harm people or property) and breaking the law is critical to your personal freedom. The next step is for you to minimize your exposure to arbitrary, make-believe “crimes” invented by your home government.
You can do this by diversifying internationally. That means moving some of your savings abroad in the form of physical gold to a safe jurisdiction, owning real estate in another country, opening foreign bank/brokerage accounts, and obtaining a second passport, among other things. Taking these steps will significantly dilute the power bureaucrats in your home country have over you.
This is what this publication is all about: maximizing your personal freedom and worldwide financial opportunities.
The more laws, regulations, and edicts your home government subjects you to, the more important it is to diversify internationally.
This problem is particularly obvious in the U.S., where every level of government is continually passing more laws…especially the federal government. There are so many vague, overly broad federal laws criminalizing mundane activities that it’s impossible for anyone to be 100% compliant.
Many people think felonies only consist of major crimes like robbery and murder. But that isn’t true. An ever-expanding mountain of laws and regulations has criminalized even the most mundane activities.
It’s not as hard to commit a felony as you might think. Many victimless “crimes” are felonies.
A study by civil liberty lawyer Harvey Silverglate found that the average American inadvertently commits three felonies a day.
Today, there are thousands of federal crimes, and the number is constantly increasing. It brings to mind the words of the great Roman historian Tacitus: “The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.”
Here’s what Doug Casey says.
Corruption can be defined as the taking of bribes of one type or another by officials in order to allow subjects to avoid taxes or regulations. Political corruption doesn't, therefore, occur in totally free markets simply because there's no taxation or regulation to avoid. Inevitably, and completely predictably, the more taxed and regulated a society is, the more necessarily corrupt it is.
Today in the U.S., the government won’t necessarily go after you if you break a law. After all, most everyone has technically broken some law. Instead, the government decides whom to go after and chooses which laws to enforce. A creative prosecutor can always find some crime to charge you with if he looks hard enough.
This doesn’t sound like the land of freedom and opportunity. It sounds like an out-of-control government.
If you think it’s bad now, just wait until American politicians get even more financially desperate. Like most governments in financial trouble, we think the U.S. will keep choosing the easy option…money printing on a massive scale.
This is a huge threat to your financial security. Politicians are playing with fire and inviting a currency catastrophe. The socio-political consequences are likely to be even more severe than the financial ones.
This is a big reason why we think everyone should own some gold. Gold is the ultimate form of wealth insurance. It has preserved wealth through every kind of crisis imaginable. It will preserve wealth during the next crisis, too.
- Yellen-Driven Short-Squeeze Sends Bonds To Best Quarter In 4 Years
After The Fed jawboned the world into the largest aggregate net short position in Treasuries in Q4 since 2010, its rapid realization that all is not well in the real world – and subsequent talking (and walking) back of rate-hike expectations – has sparked the biggest short-squeeze in 6 years and sent Treasuries up by the most since 2012. With odds collapsing for any more rate-hikes in 2016, as Yellen admits their forecasts are worthless, it seems – just as in 2010 – the bonds shorts have a way to go.
The Fed should “proceed cautiously” in raising interest rates, Yellen said in New York. The chance of a move by the end of 2016 has declined to 64 percent, from 73 percent at the end of last week, futures prices compiled by Bloomberg indicate.
The 10-year note yield slumped eight basis points on Tuesday, the most in seven weeks, and fell two basis points earlier Wednesday. U.S. government securities have returned 3 percent this quarter, based on Bloomberg World Bond Indexes.
Yellen’s speech "was more dovish than I expected,” said Wontark Doh, head of overseas fixed-income investment in Seoul at Samsung Asset Management Co. Ltd., which manages $200 billion. “The upside for Treasury yields is limited."
"Yellen came out as dovish and as forceful as she was" at the Fed meeting in March, when officials kept rates unchanged and scaled back forecasts for how high they’ll rise this year, said Barra Sheridan, a rates trader at Bank of Montreal in London. "I didn’t think April was a live meeting before Yellen spoke yesterday and I definitely don’t now — nor does the market."
All driven by the biggest Treasury short-squeeze in 6 years (which was forced upon investors by The Fed's jawboning)…
And finally, the constant jabber from The Fed demandingthat investors short bonds continues…
Central-bank policies have pushed long-term Treasury yields to “very low” levels, San Francisco Fed Bank President John Williams said in Singapore before Yellen’s appearance. He said the threat of a “pretty big correction” in bonds supports the argument for gradual rate increases.
How's that working out for you? It appears fighting The Fed in bond-land has worked very well recently.
As The Wall Street Journal reports, bond traders are confused and concerned…
“It is confusing because the recipe keeps on changing,” said Anthony Cronin, a Treasury bond trader at Societe Generale. “I think it does create more volatility because there is just so much uncertainty over what is important to the Fed.”
Most concerning to Mr. Cronin was Ms. Yellen discussion of “potential global risks.’”
This uncertainty “can do more harm in itself and become self-fulfilling,’” he said. “Why would a company commit to investing in their business if the Fed Chair is worried about the economy slowing from overseas developments?”
The Fed’s mixed messages rippled through U.S. government bond yields, the dollar and gold over the past week.
…
“I believe that Yellen really believes that the downside risks of tightening too soon far outweigh the risk of waiting and maybe being a little late,” said Tom di Galoma, managing director at Seaport Global Securities LLC. “The Fed is market dependent at this point and not data dependent.”
As we have said for a long time, The Fed is Dow Data-Dependent.
- Presenting, "The Company That Bribed The World"
This won’t exactly come as a surprise: the global oil industry is corrupt.
We are, after all, talking about the most financialized commodity in the history of the world, and up until a few years ago, it was controlled by a cartel comprised entirely of nations run by caricatures and stereotypes that the Western public generally regarded as a kind of necessary evil in a world that revolves around fossil fuels.
More recently, we’ve seen how oil funds terrorism and how crude prices are manipulated by the Gulf monarchies to secure “ancillary diplomatic benefits” in the never-ending quest to perpetuate Sunni hegemony in the Arabian Peninsula.
In short, blood money and oil money are synonymous concepts and at the end of the day, any geopolitical dispute that can’t be explained by sectarianism, tribalism, or some other ancient cultural rift, can very likely be explained by a dispute over energy.
Given the above, we weren’t at all shocked to learn that a heretofore obscue firm based in Monaco has made a killing by perfecting the art of oil market bribery and corruption. But even if the story isn’t surprising, it is nonetheless intriguing and with that in mind we present below excerpts from “The Company The Bribed The World,” a collaborative piece by Huff Post and Fairfax Media.
* * *
From The Huffington Post
A massive leak of confidential documents has for the first time exposed the true extent of corruption within the oil industry, implicating dozens of leading companies, bureaucrats and politicians in a sophisticated global web of bribery and graft.
After a six-month investigation across two continents, Fairfax Media and The Huffington Post can reveal that billions of dollars of government contracts were awarded as the direct result of bribes paid on behalf of firms including British icon Rolls-Royce, US giant Halliburton, Australia’s Leighton Holdings and Korean heavyweights Samsung and Hyundai.
The investigation centres on a Monaco company called Unaoil, run by the jet-setting Ahsani clan. Following a coded ad in a French newspaper, a series of clandestine meetings and midnight phone calls led to our reporters obtaining hundreds of thousands of the Ahsanis’ leaked emails and documents.
The trove reveals how they rub shoulders with royalty, party in style, mock anti-corruption agencies and operate a secret network of fixers and middlemen throughout the world’s oil producing nations.
The leaked files expose as corrupt two Iraqi oil ministers, a fixer linked to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, senior officials from Libya’s Gaddafi regime, Iranian oil figures, powerful officials in the United Arab Emirates and a Kuwaiti operator known as “the big cheese”.
It is the Monaco company that almost perfected the art of corruption.
It is called Unaoil and it is run by members of the Ahsani family – Monaco millionaires who rub shoulders with princes, sheikhs and Europe’s and America’s elite business crowd. At the head are family patriarch Ata Ahsani and his two dashing sons, Cyrus and Saman.
Their charities support the arts and children, and Ahsani family members sit on the boards of NGOs with ex-politicians and billionaires. Ten years ago, a spreadsheet showed they had cash, shares and property worth 190 million euros. They are members of the global elite.
Bankers in New York and London have facilitated Unaoil’s money laundering, while the Ahsanis have built a major property investment business in central London. Since 2007, Unaoil has been certified by anti-corruption agency Trace International. This in itself raises serious questions about the worth of such international accreditation.
But for the western companies confronted with questions under anti foreign bribery laws in their own jurisdictions, Unaoil appears to be a reputable and discrete middle-man, giving listed businesses what is known as “plausible deniability”.
IraqAfter the US led coalition won the second gulf war, it went to guard the oil ministry – leaving the Baghdad museum undefended to be looted of its treasures.But they did not save the oil industry from thieves. The Unaoil files reveal that Western companies, in concert with Iraq’s new elite, themselves began a sustained campaign of looting.
Unaoil paid at least $25 million in bribes via middlemen to secure the support of powerful officials – while complaining internally that they were “assholes, and greedy”.
Between 2004 and 2012, Unaoil corruptly influenced a Who’s Who of the country’s oil industry: the Deputy Prime Minister of Iraq turned education minister Hussain al-Shahristani; Oil Minister Abdul Kareem Luaibi (who was replaced in 2014); the Director General of the South Oil Company, Dhia Jaffar al-Mousawi, who in 2015 became a deputy minister; and top oil official Oday al-Quraishi.
Iran
Everything works and progresses on connections, relations with special talent”. So wrote an Iranian fixer, part of Unaoil’s remarkable network of insiders dedicated to paying and pocketing bribes. After the recent relaxing of United Nations, US and European sanctions, this network has become even more valuable.
In 2006, this Unaoil operative complained in emails that one of the company’s clients, UK firm Weir Pumps (now owned by US firm SPX), owed him hundreds of thousands of dollars which he had promised to use in part to sling to others in Iran.
“[It] is the end of Iranian new year here, expectations high, I am short in cash, and about five million pounds of business with Weir [is] in danger… Because I can not fulfill my obligations to my team of Supporters.”
If the money was not forthcoming, he warned, Weir Pumps risked “melting like a piece of ice, day by day.”
“…over half a million dollars of my consultancy fee… I have already spend it for the promotion of their businesses in Iran.”
A separate set of leaked memos from 2006 said Unaoil would pay “10 k/month” to secure the support of the managing director of a firm chaired by a high ranking Iranian official, part owned by an Iranian government entity and overseen by a board with “political influence.”
Libya
In 2004, when the West began removing sanctions against Libya, and the regime of Colonel Gaddafi started dealing with foreign companies, Unaoil stood ready.
By 2011, its network of corrupt insiders included officials and front men able to influence the dealings of many of Libya’s most important oil and gas agencies.
In late 2008, a Canadian drilling firm, Canuck Completions, told Unaoil it was “curious about … what type of Baksheesh is needed to present to these men in order to get work” in Libya.
Among Unaoil’s corrupt insiders was the powerful Libyan official, Mustafa Zarti, a confidant for the Gaddafi regime. Unaoil’s files describe Zarti as “good friends of President Ghadafi’s [sic] son of Libya and have lot of influence in lobbying the jobs in Libya”. Unaoil agreed to secretly pay Zarti millions of dollars. In return he would use his influence to advantage Unaoil’s clients.
“MZ [Zarti] sits on the board of LFIC [Libyan Foreign Investment Committee] … which controls… Oil fund ($6bn) … He sees his role as us executing and him fixing issues we come across. MZ has agreed to bring all his oil & gas work to us,” a September 2006 Unaoil memo said.
Unaoil’s multinational clients in Libya included Malaysian giant Ranhill, Korean conglomerate ISU and Spanish company Tecnicas Reunidas.
Syria and Yemen
In Syria, Unaoil turned to a middleman close to the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.
In 2008 and 2009, Unaoil promised the man 2.75 million euros who helped its British client Petrofac win contracts from Assad regime petroleum companies. “Strictly confidential” emails from 2008 show this middleman promised to pay others to win these contracts.
But when he was not paid on time, he complained the delays were causing problems with “friends” in Syria.
“It is becoming very unpleasant [sic] for me not delivering as expected,” he wrote to Unaoil in December 2009.
Petrofac is understood to be unaware of Unaoil’s involvement in its Syrian dealings and in response to questions said it “aspires to the highest standards of ethical behaviour”.
In Yemen, Unaoil paid millions to a. Swiss account belonging to fixer and businessman Haitham Alaini, the son of the former Yemeni prime minister. In return, Alaini used his contacts in the Yemen to help Unaoil.
- "It's A Big, Scary World Out There," BofA Warns, And Only Janet Can Save Us
On Tuesday, Janet Yellen delivered what some observers called her finest “performance” since ascending to the monetary throne in February of 2014.
Of course in the post-crisis world, central bankers are only praised when they make dovish pronouncements. Hawks are heretical. To tighten is to sin.
The conundrum for Yellen is that she appears to have been talked into going along with the global easing bias for a few more months at the G20 – data be damned. That is, despite the fact that the US economy is about to hit full employment (and we’ll ignore the fact that the numbers are goalseeked and that the only jobs being created are lowly service sector positions), Yellen has to find an excuse to avoid adopting too steep a “flight path” for rates, lest the dollar should soar causing commodities to plunge anew and triggering massive outflows from EM.
With no way to justify a dovish tilt based on the dual mandate (inflation isn’t exactly where the FOMC would like it to be, but compared to Japan and Europe it looks rather robust), Yellen did the only thing she could this month: she admitted (just as she did in September) that the reaction function now includes international financial markets and, more specifically, China.
That admission was greeted with a high degree of skepticism last autumn, but it would appear that now, having proven that it’s at least possible to hike 25 bps without the entire world coming to an end, the market is more than happy to see the Fed stand pat if it means forestalling global turmoil. As we noted this morning, some Fed officials didn’t get the message and so on Tuesday, Yellen the “mother lion” was forced to “swat her misbehaving cubs back into line” (to quote Bloomberg’s Richard Breslow) with an uber dovish speech at the Economic Club of New York.
The message the vaunted Fed chair sought to drive home was simple: it wouldn’t matter if the unemployment rate dropped to 1% and inflation expectations spiked above the FOMC’s target overnight – it’s simply too dangerous out there for the Fed to lean hawkish. Or, as BofA puts it in a new note: “It’s a big scary world out there.” Excerpts are below.
* * *
From BofA:
It’s a big scary world out there
Fed Chair Janet Yellen, in her speech and subsequent Q&A at the Economic Club of New York, was very clear in conveying her message that the weak global backdrop is preventing the Fed from hiking rates very much. While the Fed’s baseline economic scenario was roughly unchanged between the December and March FOMC meetings – given appropriate monetary policy accommodation – uncertainties are higher due to a weaker path of projected global growth. In other words the reduction in the dot plot to two rate hikes this year at the March meeting, from four hikes in December, is thought appropriate to mitigate the impacts of the weaker global backdrop. That reinforces the impression from the last FOMC meeting that the Fed is willing to risk higher inflation over the longer term in order reduce shorter term uncertainties. Hence the increase in 5-year, 5-year forward inflation expectations and simultaneous decline in equity vol following today’s comments by Chair Yellen (Figure 1).
Why the Fed matters
To illustrate why the Fed’s clear shift to a more dovish stance is so effective in reducing uncertainties in financial markets, consider our recent survey of US credit investors. Arguably at least three – if not all – of the top-4 investor concerns – China, Oil prices, Geopolitical risk and Slow recovery (in that order, Figure 2) – are mitigated to some extent by the more dovish Fed. First of all a more aggressive Fed rate hiking cycle would likely accelerate China’s capital flight which, with an open capital account, leads to the equivalent of monetary policy tightening in China at a time where the weak economy needs the opposite. Furthermore, to stem such capital flight incentivizes the PBOC to pursue more aggressive currency depreciation, which is very deflationary through commodities. Second the stronger dollar associated with a more aggressive Fed puts downward pressure on oil prices – instead the USD weakened 0.8% today. Third to some extent even geopolitical risk is related to lower oil prices. Fourth the stronger dollar and lower oil prices could initially be negative for the US economy through the manufacturing sector – before consumers eventually do react to lower prices at the pump.
- The Reason Why The Young #NeverTrump Protester Was Maced: Punching An Elderly Man In The Face
In this morning’s media frenzy story du jour, a 15-year-old girl, who was protesting at a Trump rally in Wisconsin, ended up being pepper sprayed, or at least that’s how most of the media portrayed the incident. Since we were unsure what had happened, we specifically stated that “who knows what actually happened here and we won’t endeavor to speculate although it does appear that the pepper spraying was in retaliation for an initial provocation by the young girl.”
There was, however, more to the story than headlines such as this one from Time Magazine “15-Year-Old Girl Assaulted at Donald Trump Rally, Police Say” suggest.
As the following Youtube clip from Rebel Pundit reveals, the unnamed female #NeverTrump protester was only maced after she first punched an elderly man in the face: the moment is clearly caught on tape 28 seconds into the following clip.
Andrew Marcus, who works on these video projects with Rebel Pundit, posted this image.
.@NYCitySasha Here’s the elderly man who the 15yr old #NeverTrump fanatic punched in the face UNPROVOKED. pic.twitter.com/epw4pdG4XS
— Andrew Marcus (@ImAndrewMarcus) March 30, 2016
As the LegalInsurrection website notes, “I don’t know the man’s age, but in many states a physical assault on a person over a certain age (usually 60 or 65) get accelerated charging, turning what would be a misdemeanor battery into a felony.”
It adds: “we saw this extensively when Trump’s Chicago rally was shut down after near riots by anti-Trump activists who infiltrated the rally venue. And we saw it yesterday at a Trump rally in Janesville, WI…. It’s the same agenda used against the Tea Party — to portray an overwhelmingly peaceful group of people as violent, and to portray the violent leftist perpetrators as victims.”
And speaking of the Janesville WI, protest, we wonder if the young girl was being compensated (to the tune of $15/hour) by anonymous sources, the same ones who had previously put up the following CraigsList posting seeking to recruit “Paid Protesters at Trump Rally.”
- We're Not Going To Make It… (Without Real Sacrifice)
Submitted by Chris Martenson via PeakProsperity.com,
Right now I'm on a Metro North train heading the NYC. I’ve been invited to sit on an advisory council at the UN on building a sustainable energy future.
I’ll let you know how the meeting goes, after I take a few selfies to immortalize the experience in case I'm not invited back.
Why might I not? Because I can either be a good boy, hold my tongue, and get to serve on more committees (maybe); or I can speak the truth as I see it.
It's not a hard decision: I'll be going with the latter. I really don’t know how to do differently any more; it’s a matter of internal integrity.
Now, I may not understand the ‘truth’ any better than the next person. But I do have access to a lot of data that seems to confirm this one idea: Humanity is not going to painlessly wean itself off of fossil fuels.
Instead, we’ll hit some sort of a wall: be it a food/population crisis, a climate crisis, or a debt/fiscal/economic crisis. Each of those candidates has it roots in our global society's addition to fossil fuels.
No growth in fossil fuels and we get no growth in our debt-based economy. Translation: we’ll have a debt/financial crisis.
No fossil fuels and our entire method of industrial agriculture breaks down. Food crisis anyone?
Now, we won’t suddenly run out of fossil fuels. But we are going to find it increasingly difficult to extract more and more of them. And other limits like oceanic acidification and climate change may force us to move away from fossil fuels for a totally different set of reasons.
No matter the path we take, we need to transition sooner or later. We should know that.
Poor Math
One of the things I did in the book version of The Crash Course was to run the basic numbers to make the case that, unless we immediate decide to pursue the equivalent of a Manhattan Project (times) an Apollo Project (times) some whole number like 10, we're not going to make anything even remotely resembling a seamless transition to alternative energy.
Fortunately, there are now more groups carefully studying the math and making the same case:
Renewable energy demands the undoable
Mar 27, 2016
LONDON, 27 March, 2016 – The world is increasingly investing in renewable energy. Last year, according to UN figures, global investment in solar power, wind turbines and other renewable forms of energy was $266 billion.
But right now, the report says, renewable energy sources deliver just 10.3% of global electrical power. Neither the report’s authors nor anyone else thinks that is enough to slow climate change driven by rising global temperatures as a consequence of greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels.
In the last century, this has already climbed by 1°C. In Paris in December 2015, 195 nations agreed on a global plan to limit global warming to a figure no more than 2°C above the long-term average for most of human history.
This will be difficult, according to Glenn Jones, professor of marine sciences at Texas A&M University in the US.
In 2015, the world installed the equivalent of 13,000 five-megawatt wind turbines. But to contain global warming to a figure less than 2°C nations would have to ramp up renewable investment by 2028 to the annual equivalent of 485,000 such wind turbines.
“That’s a 37-fold increase in the annual installation rate in only 13 years just to achieve the wind power goal,” Professor Jones said.
(Source)
There’s some really important information in this study, not the least of which is the realization that, to achieve just the wind power goal, the world would have to increase its rate of wind tower installation by 3,700% (or 37 fold).
This translates into going from installing 36 towers per day (the current rate) to 1,329 per day. Every day. 365 days a year. For 13 years straight. With no breaks.
But our fossil fuel addiction goes well beyond the desire/need for electricity. Transportation fuels are just as essential to our current human condition.
The article continues:
He and a colleague argue in the journal Energy Policy that during each hour of every day 3.7 million barrels of oil are pumped from wells; 932,000 tons of coal are dug; 395 million cubic metres of natural gas are piped from the ground; and 4.1 million tons of CO2 is released into the atmosphere.
In that same hour, another 9,300 people are added to the global population. By 2100, the world will be home to 11 billion of us.
“It would require rates of change in our energy infrastructure and energy mix that have never happened in world history and that are extremely unlikely to be achieved,” he says.
“So the question becomes, how will they be fed and housed and what will be their energy source? Currently 1.2 billion people in the world do not have access to electricity, and there are plans to try to get them on the grid. The numbers you start dealing with become so large that they are difficult to comprehend,” Professor Jones says.
“To even come close to achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement, 50% of our energy will need to come from renewable sources by 2028, and today it is only 9%, including hydropower. For a world that wants to fight climate change, the numbers just don’t add up to do it.”
3.7 million barrels of oil per hour, along with nearly a million tons of coal and 400 million cubic meters of gas. Every day, for 365 days a year.
The numbers are indeed difficult to comprehend. But they just don’t measure up to our hopes for the future. At the current pace of energy transition, we’re not only going to miss the climate targets we've set, but we’re also going to miss the chance gracefully deal with the continued growth in both our debt pile and population.
This chart explains why. As fast as renewable energy sources have grown, fossil fuels have grown, too. They remain ~80% of the world's total energy consumption:
While people excitedly point out the growth rates in energy renewables, they often fail to note either/both the scale involved and/or the fact that a tiny percentage growth in fossil fuels will utterly dwarf a large percentage gain in renewables.
This is the dynamic that the numbers in the above study are warning us of. Loudly.
It’s nothing personal. It’s just math. But it’s going to get very personal over the next years and decades as the world is finally forced to confront the idiocy of attempting infinite growth on a (quite) finite planet.
And it's for this reason I am going to have a hard time being a good little committee member and sign off on some cheery report suggesting we can achieve a sustainable energy future if we all just try a little harder.
We’re going to need to try harder than any generation has ever had to try on anything, ever in all of history, to remake our energy infrastructure.
Meanwhile…
The Predicament That Stares Us In The Face
These days it’s very hard to scan the headlines without running into seriously troubling ecological data.
The two ocean related articles below recently jumped out at me, both of which are related to the implications of oceanic warming:
Underwater Heat Wave Devastates Great Barrier Reef
Mar 29, 2016
CANBERRA, Australia—An underwater heat wave is devastating huge swaths of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, marine researchers have found.
An aerial survey of the chain of 3,000 coral outcrops—a Unesco world-heritage site and the only living system visible from space—found 95% of its northern area, roughly half the reef’s length, had been hit by a bleaching event that began six months ago. Damage to the southern area is still being assessed.
“This has been the saddest research trip of my life,” said Terry Hughes, a professor at Australia’s James Cook University and expert in coral bleaching. “Almost without exception, every reef we flew across showed consistently high levels of bleaching, from the reef slope right up onto the top of the reef.”
(Source)
This bleaching is caused by the loss of the symbiotic algae upon which coral depends, causing the coral organisms to die from starvation.
Another important bottom-of-the-food-chain organism, phytoplankton, has been disappearing from a variety of ocean basins with the Indian Ocean being one that recently made the news:
OCEAN PASTURES OF INDIAN OCEAN DISAPPEARING RAPIDLY
Feb 2, 2016
Research reveals that phytoplankton stocks in the region fell an alarming 30 percent over just the last 16 years. This most recent tally of the collapse of this vital ocean pasture ecosystem compounds the observed collapse that has been documented since the early 1950’s!
The collapse of ocean pasture ecosystems is taking place in all of the world’s ocean, not just in the Indian Ocean. Indeed many of those ocean basins are in a much worse condition of pasture collapse than the Indian Ocean.
(Source)
As the study itself concluded, the cause was due to hot surface water blocking mixing with the nutrient dense(er) lower waters:
We find that these trends in chlorophyll are driven by enhanced ocean stratification due to rapid warming in the Indian Ocean, which suppresses nutrient mixing from subsurface layers. Future climate projections suggest that the Indian Ocean will continue to warm, driving this productive region into an ecological desert.
(Source)
These are by no means rare exceptions plucked from a sea of otherwise positive news. The world’s ecosystems are having a really rough time absorbing the scope and the pace of changes that humans are creating.
The grief expressed above by the scientists who study these ecosystems tells the tale.
Conclusion
The world is just not yet serious enough about the urgency of transitioning away from fossil fuels. The math says that without a tremendous change in behavior, far greater than anything currently on display, we simply won’t “get there” waiting for market forces to do the job for us.
We’ll have to make and adhere to very different priorities. Such as completely redirecting our entire defense budgets to the process of retooling our entire relationship to energy.
We’ll need our buildings to use less energy. And we’ll need to live closer to where we work and play.
Our food will have to be grown differently. And it will have to travel less far to get to our plate.
Electricity will have to come from sources other than fossil fuels too.
Is it possible to figure this out in time? Well, whether it is or not is sort of beside the point. Because these changes are going to be forced on us anyways if we don't.
So I guess I could be an optimist on the UN panel by telling them that I have 99% confidence that humans will someday be powering 100% of their energy needs from the sun.
I’ll just leave out that what I mean is that, in 100 or 200 years, humans will have painfully reverted back to a 1600’s-style subsistence farming lifestyle.
The point of this article is to refocus our attention on the need for each of us to lead the way, to begin our own individual energy transitions without waiting for some top-down solutions to come forward. The calvary simply isn't going to show up.
In our podcasts with Joel Salatin, Singing Frogs farm and Toby Hemenway, we've been surfacing examples of the ways in which we can begin farming regeneratively and relationally today. You can do this on your own if you garden. Or you can support local farmers/CSAs that will do this for you.
Anybody paying into a pension or trying to manage an endowment that needs to be there in 30 or 40 years (or forever, as is the case for university endowments) needs to understand that projections based on prior rates of economic growth are fantasies, hatched when we had the luxury of pretending there were no energy limits.
The restructuring of our energy economy, if taken under our own terms and on our own timelines, will utterly crush traditional economic growth as we’ve come to know and love it.
If taken under more dire terms, there may not even be a recognizable economy for a very long time.
These are serious matters. They deserve serious consideration and even more serious answers.
Every little step each of us can make, both for its direct impact and for its leadership effects, is actually vitally important.
So one question we might ask ourselves is: How can I use less energy today, enjoy life just as much (if not more), and be part of the solution?
The future is gong to be very different from the past. And the only thing that could come along to ameliorate the situation from an energy-food-survival standpoint would be a brand new source of energy. Something along the lines of workable, scalable fusion or if LENR (Low-Energy Nuclear Reaction) pans out and is quickly adopted.
As long as we are collectively relying on ~80% of our primary energy coming from fossil fuels, we're on the opposite path from creating a world worth inheriting.
And the extent to which we fail to run he numbers and appreciate the scale and the scope and the timing involved, preferring perhaps to content ourselves with just the renewables side of the story, is the extent to which we are failing to appreciate the challenges we face.
So my challenge for myself is to see how much I can further cut back my own energy use — something I've already done in good measure by heating my water using the sun, insulating my home, and having a relatively efficient vehicle. But there’s still a lot more I can do.
How about you?
- Meanwhile In San Francisco – $400/Month To Live In A Box In Someone's Living Room
We’ve spent quite a lot of time documenting the inexorable rise in housing prices across some of the world’s red hot markets.
Take Vancouver, for instance, where according to National Bank, one third of all homes sold in 2015 went to Chinese buyers whose voracious demand has driven prices into the stratosphere in both British Columbia and Ontario. Here’s what $2.5 million will get you in Point Grey:
Or how about London, where things are so out of control that it will cost you £500 to live under someone’s stairs:
Then there’s San Francisco, where the median home price is now well over $1 million. Indeed, as we noted just yesterday, San Francisco home prices rose 10.5% in January and, along with properties in Seattle and Portland, have now surpassed their housing bubble highs:
And when last we checked in on Silicon Valley, a tent in someone’s backyard goes for $46 a night (you get an extension cord, one shower a day, and wi-fi).
But if you aren’t the camping type, there’s another option: you can always build yourself a wooden box and put it in someone’s living room. “The median rent for a one bedroom apartment in San Francisco is a stunning $3,670 a month, and a bedroom in a shared apartment will set you back at least $1,500 for a decent location on the peninsula,” Gizmodo writes, on the way to recounting the story of Peter Berkowitz, a 25-year-old illustrator who devised an innovative way to save on rent in the Bay Area’s lunatic market. Here’s more:
Peter Berkowitz is my new favorite guy. The 25-year-old illustrator recently moved to San Francisco and instead of settling for some landlord’s price-gouging, he found some other cool kids who let him build a box in their living room. Peter’s rent is just $400 a month.
This box-in-the-living room idea, now that’s something I can get behind. You’re lucky to have any space at all to yourself in San Francisco’s housing shortage, but it’s damn near impossible to find such a cozy little sleep pod like this. Peter built the thing with his bare hands for only $1,300 and even included a little window and some fairy lights so that it feels less like coffin and more like a magical escape from the dystopia that is the city by the bay. It’s eight feet by 3.5 feet (a little longer and wider than a coffin). The real perk though is that it’s 4.5 feet tall (much taller than a coffin). And look, there’s a cute little shelf for his MacBook.
One time I lived in a closet in London for £250 a month, roughly the same as what Peter’s paying for his box. I was able to stand up straight in my closet, but I was not able to stretch my arms out in both directions. It was no problem, though, because I was broke as hell and got to use the living room from time-to-time. I even had a girlfriend for a little while.
In all seriousness, it’s absurd that Frisco living has come to this. It’s bad for everyone who’s not some overpaid Facebook employee, and it’s bad for America. The housing crisis also isn’t entirely the tech companies’ fault, although they could be doing a lot more to fix it. Take a hint from Peter. He seems like a real get-up-and-go guy. Well, more like get-up-slightly-hunched-over-and-crawl-out-of-your-box-and-into-a-living-room kind of guy. I like this guy.
It may be cliché, but this is one time where you really can blame China and if Beijing really does intend to liberalize the capital account while simultaneously orchestrating a far deeper devaluation of the RMB, you can bet things are going to get even crazier in the world’s hottest housing markets.
Trade idea: long prefab living room cubicles.
- Brazil Posts Largest Budget Deficit Ever As Rousseff Cries "Coup," Olympic Ad Sales Top $1 Billion
On Tuesday, embattled Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff was dealt a bitter blow when PMDB – the party of VP Michel Temer and House Speaker Eduardo Cunha – officially left the coalition government.
“Dialogue, I regret to say, has been exhausted,” Tourism Minister Henrique Eduardo Alves, a PMDB leader and former speaker of the lower house of Congress, said on Monday as he resigned from Rousseff’s cabinet.
To let the market tell it, a complete political meltdown is great news. As we showed yesterday and as we’ve discussed on a number of occasions this month, the more precarious things get politically in Brazil, the harder the BRL and Brazilian risk assets rally. Why? Because the assumption is that when it comes to the country’s floundering economy, anything is preferable to the current arrangement. With output in free fall, inflation running in the double digits, and unemployment marking an inexorable rise, it’s difficult to imagine how things could possible get any worse.
Indeed, the prospect that Rousseff and Lula will be sent packing has created so much upward pressure on the BRL that the central bank has begun selling reverse swaps to keep a lid on the currency lest its rapid appreciation should end up short circuiting a much needed economic adjustment.
Meanwhile, Brazilian stocks have soared this year amid the turmoil. Of course this state of affairs simply isn’t sustainable. As Craig Botham, an emerging markets economist at Schroder Investment Management put it, “you don’t invest in a place where you don’t know who’s in charge.“
Right. And you also don’t invest in a place where the economic fundamentals get worse by the day.
Just this morning, for instance, we got the latest read on the fiscal deficit and it was, for lack of a better word, a disaster. The budget gap was the largest on record and came in wildly above expectations. Long story short, the primary deficit printed at 2.1% in February, up from 1.75% the previous month. “While revenues are falling sharply due to the economic situation, at a rate of 12 to 13 percent (a year), expenses continue to grow,” Tulio Maciel, head of the central bank’s economic research department told reporters on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, debt-to-GDP continues to rise. Here’s Goldman with the full breakdown of today’s dismal data:
The overall public sector fiscal deficit (primary surplus minus interest payments) remained broadly stable at a very large 10.8% of GDP in February, substantially above the 6.6% deficit recorded a year ago. The 12-month net interest bill dropped to 8.6% of GDP in February compared to 9.1% of GDP in January. The consolidated public sector primary fiscal deficit climbed to 2.1% of GDP from 1.75% of GDP the month before.
Gross general government debt worsened to 67.6% of GDP in February, up from 67.4% of GDP in February and 57.2% of GDP at end-2014.
A deep, permanent, structural fiscal adjustment remains front-and-center on the policy agenda to restore both domestic and external balance. In our assessment, at the end of the fiscal consolidation process Brazil needs to end up with a primary surplus of 3.0% to 3.5% of GDP. This would be the level of primary surplus that would put gross public debt on a clear declining trajectory, something that is required forBrazil to rebuild fiscal buffers and regain room to use fiscal policy counter-cyclically, whenever needed and appropriate.
Ultimately, a weaker BRL and a deep structural fiscal adjustment are key pillars to restore domestic (i.e., lower inflation) and external balance (i.e., to promote and consolidate the adjustment of the current account). However, given the very modest scope and slow pace of fiscal consolidation, and its far-from-ideal quality, the burden of current account adjustment will likely continue to fall disproportionately on monetary policy and the BRL.
Now obviously, there’s a long, long way to go for Brazil to get back to primary surplus at all, let alone push the black ink up to 3% of GDP. The idea that this is going to turn around the second Rousseff leaves the Presidential palace is laughable at best. And speaking of laughable, have a look at this rather amusing bit from Citi:
- Rousseff impeachment won’t sustain Brazil rally
- As the likelihood of President Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment increases “investors will take a step back.
- “It might be the case of buying the rumor and selling the fact.”
In other words: investors might suddenly wake up to the fact that an intractable political crisis is most assuredly not risk positive.
Meanwhile, Rousseff is back on the tape likening the impeachment proceedings to a coup. “Presidents must be chosen in free elections,” she proclaimed on Wednesday. Countdown to impeachment: around 45 days.
Finally, it’s worth noting that according to the latest figures, NBC has sold $1 billion in national ads for the Summer Olympics in Rio. “We’ve surpassed the $1 billion mark four months ahead of (the 2012 Summer Games in) London,” Seth Winter, NBC Sports’ executive vice president of advertising sales, said in a statement.
$1 billion. That’s a lot of refunds, Seth.
- Depressing Survey Results Show How Extremely Stupid America Has Become
Submitted by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,
Ten years ago, a major Hollywood film entitled “Idiocracy” was released, and it was an excellent metaphor for what would happen to America over the course of the next decade. In the movie, an “average American” wakes up 500 years in the future only to discover that he is the most intelligent person by far in the “dumbed down” society that he suddenly finds himself in.
Sadly, I truly believe that if people of average intellect from the 1950s and 1960s were transported to 2016, they would likely be considered mental giants compared to the rest of us. We have a country where criminals are being paid $1000 a month not to shoot people, and the highest paid public employee in more than half the states is a football coach. Hardly anyone takes time to read a book anymore, and yet the average American spends 302 minutes a day watching television. 75 percent of our young adults cannot find Israel on a map of the Middle East, but they sure know how to find smut on the Internet.
What in the world has happened to us? How is it possible that we have become so stupid? According to a brand new report that was recently released, almost 10 percent of our college graduates believe that Judge Judy is on the Supreme Court…
The American Council of Trustees and Alumni publishes occasional reports on what college students know.
Nearly 10 percent of the college graduates surveyed thought Judith Sheindlin, TV’s “Judge Judy,” is a member of the U.S. Supreme Court. Less than 20 percent of the college graduates knew the effect of the Emancipation Proclamation. More than a quarter of the college graduates did not know Franklin D. Roosevelt was president during World War II; one-third did not know he was the president who spearheaded the New Deal.
It can be tempting to laugh at numbers like these until you realize that survey after survey has come up with similar results.
Just consider what Newsweek found a few years ago…
When NEWSWEEK recently asked 1,000 U.S. citizens to take America’s official citizenship test, 29 percent couldn’t name the vice president. Seventy-three percent couldn’t correctly say why we fought the Cold War. Forty-four percent were unable to define the Bill of Rights. And 6 percent couldn’t even circle Independence Day on a calendar.
Even worse were the extremely depressing results of a study conducted a few years ago by Common Core…
*Only 43 percent of all U.S. high school students knew that the Civil War was fought some time between 1850 and 1900.
*More than a quarter of all U.S. high school students thought that Christopher Columbus made his famous voyage across the Atlantic Ocean after the year 1750.
*Approximately a third of all U.S. high school students did not know that the Bill of Rights guarantees freedom of speech and freedom of religion.
*Only 60 percent of all U.S. students knew that World War I was fought some time between 1900 and 1950.
Of course survey results can be skewed, and much hinges on how the questions are asked.
However, even studies that are scientifically conducted confirm how stupid America has become. In fact, a report from the Educational Testing Service found that Americans are falling way behind much of the rest of the industrialized world. The following comes from CBS News…
Americans born after 1980 are lagging their peers in countries ranging from Australia to Estonia, according to a new report from researchers at the Educational Testing Service (ETS). The study looked at scores for literacy and numeracy from a test called the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, which tested the abilities of people in 22 countries.
The results are sobering, with dire implications for America. It hints that students may be falling behind not only in their early educational years but at the college level. Even though more Americans between the ages of 20 to 34 are achieving higher levels of education, they’re still falling behind their cohorts in other countries. In Japan, Finland and the Netherlands, young adults with only a high school degree scored on par with American Millennials holding four-year college degrees, the report said.
Out of 22 countries that were part of the study, the Educational Testing Service found that Americans were dead last in tech proficiency, dead last in numeracy and only two countries performed worse than us when it came to literacy proficiency…
Half of American Millennials score below the minimum standard of literacy proficiency. Only two countries scored worse by that measure: Italy (60 percent) and Spain (59 percent). The results were even worse for numeracy, with almost two-thirds of American Millennials failing to meet the minimum standard for understanding and working with numbers. That placed U.S. Millennials dead last for numeracy among the study’s 22 developed countries.
So why has this happened?
Why have we become such an extremely stupid nation?
Well, at least a portion of the blame must be directed at our system of education. The following is an excerpt from an article written by reporter Mark Morford. In this article, he shared how one of his friends which had served for a very long time as a high school teacher in Oakland, California was considering moving out of the country when he retired due to the relentless “dumb-ification of the American brain”…
It’s gotten so bad that, as my friend nears retirement, he says he is very seriously considering moving out of the country so as to escape what he sees will be the surefire collapse of functioning American society in the next handful of years due to the absolutely irrefutable destruction, the shocking — and nearly hopeless — dumb-ification of the American brain. It is just that bad.
Now, you may think he’s merely a curmudgeon, a tired old teacher who stopped caring long ago. Not true. Teaching is his life. He says he loves his students, loves education and learning and watching young minds awaken. Problem is, he is seeing much less of it.
And of course things don’t get much better when it comes to our college students. In a previous article, I shared some statistics from USA Today about the rapidly declining state of college education in the United States…
-“After two years in college, 45% of students showed no significant gains in learning; after four years, 36% showed little change.”
-“Students also spent 50% less time studying compared with students a few decades ago”
-“35% of students report spending five or fewer hours per week studying alone.”
-“50% said they never took a class in a typical semester where they wrote more than 20 pages”
-“32% never took a course in a typical semester where they read more than 40 pages per week.”
I spent eight years studying at some of the finest public universities in the country, and I can tell you from personal experience that even our most challenging college courses have been pathetically dumbed down.
And at our “less than finest” public universities, the level of education can be something of a bad joke. In another previous article, I shared some examples of actual courses that have been taught at U.S. universities in recent years…
-“What If Harry Potter Is Real?”
-“Lady Gaga and the Sociology of Fame”
Could you imagine getting actual college credit for a course entitled “What If Harry Potter Is Real?”
This is why many of our college graduates can barely put two sentences together. They aren’t being challenged, and the quality of the education most of them are receiving is incredibly poor.
But even though they aren’t being challenged, students are taking longer to get through college than ever. Federal statistics reveal that only 36 percent of all full-time students receive a bachelor’s degree within four years, and only 77 percent of all full-time students have earned a bachelor’s degree by the end of six years.
Of course our system of education is not entirely to blame. The truth is that young Americans spend far more time consuming media than they do hitting the books, and what passes for “entertainment” these days is rapidly turning their brains to mush.
According to a report put out by Nielsen, this is how much time the average American spends consuming media on various devices each day…
Watching live television: 4 hours, 32 minutes
Watching time-shifted television: 30 minutes
Listening to the radio: 2 hours, 44 minutes
Using a smartphone: 1 hour, 33 minutes
Using Internet on a computer: 1 hour, 6 minutes
When you add it all up, the average American spends more than 10 hours a day plugged into some form of media.
And if you allow anyone to pump “programming” into your mind for 10 hours a day, it is going to have a dramatic impact.
In the end, I truly believe that we all greatly underestimate the influence that the mainstream media has on all of us. We willingly plug into “the Matrix” for endless hours, but then somehow we still expect “to think for ourselves”.
There are very few of us that can say that we have not been exposed to thousands upon thousands of hours of conditioning. And all of that garbage can make it very, very difficult to think clearly.
It is not because of a lack of input that we have become so stupid as a society. The big problem is what we are putting into our minds.
If we continue to put garbage in, we are going to continue to get garbage out, and that is the cold, hard reality of the matter.
- European Peripheral Corporate Bond Yields Tumble To Record Lows Ahead Of Draghi's Monetization
On the day Mario Draghi announced that the ECB would launch a historic corporate bond monetization program, the first of its kind, we said that we expect bond yields to tumble imminently as the market frontruns the ECB’s open-market purchases of corporate bonds and soaks up all available supply in the market. Not even we expected what would happen next though.
As the WSJ writes, four years after ECB President Mario Draghi‘s famous “whatever it takes” speech sparked a decline in the cost of servicing sovereign debt in the Eurozone’s shattered periphery, the same is now seems to be happening for corporate bond issuers in those countries.
It references the Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s nonfinancial bond index for the Eurozone periphery which includes countries like Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ireland (which earlier today issued a 100 Year bond courtesy of the very same ECB), and which touched its lowest yield to maturity ever on Tuesday, at 0.76%.
Once again, Draghi has worked his verbal magic unleashing a buying spree before the ECB has bought even one single bond, all because other buyers are now completely price indiscriminate and fully aware they have the ECB’s backstop.
Perhaps the recent record low yields are a warning: the previous record low yield for the index was 0.78%, which was reached just before the so called bund tantrum of Spring 2015, when credit across Europe sold off, and yields jumped.
However, back then, the buying impetus was driven by the ECB’s sovereign QE program when, unlike now, there was no explicit backstop to corporate bond risk. There is now.
The WSJ also points out that yields on other classes of debt have also declined, but not to the levels recorded in the early months of last year.
Financial companies, whose bonds the ECB will not buy, are still a little way from their lows. In March last year, the yield to maturity of the Bank of America Merrill Lynch index for financial companies in the periphery fell to 1.12%, and it’s now at 1.35%.
The index for non-financial companies in the eurozone but outside the periphery also has a higher average yield than it did in April 2015.
This “arbitrage” will be fixed: once ravenous yield chasers run out out of peripheral bonds to buy and the market becomes dangerously illiquid – as we also warned will happen – buying activity will shift to corporate bonds in the core. At that point, once all yields are at record low yields, if not negative, the ECB will proceed to monetize financial bonds as well.
The WSJ’s conclusion:
Since the ECB’s bond buying program is designed to spur lending by reducing the cost to corporations, record low yields are good news: for now, at least.
We disagree: what the chart above shows is yet another asset class that is now completely dislocated from its fundamentals, just like European sovereign bonds, which are trading not on their underlying merit but because the ECB has to buy them. The same is happening in the corporate financial space. And, once the corporate non-financial market ends up broken and there is no more supply, the ECB will be forced to expand its bond buying universe again, launching the monetization of junk bonds, convertibles and ultimately equities.
At that point, no news and no fundamentals news will matter any more, and the only driver of “markets” will be whether the ECB’s credibility is intact, which in turn will make it a political issue as will the “valuation” of the markets.
And then, one day, when for whatever reason the ECB’s mandate to monetize everything is taken away (whether as a result of German revulsion or the political collapse of the Eurozone) prices will once again find their fundamental “fair value.” One thing that is certain: it will be far, far lower than where it is with the explicit backing of central banks to buy anything and everything.
- A Brief Rebuttal To Jim Cramer
In response to what seemed like a rather stunning statement by CNBC entertainer Jim Cramer that "Fed Chief Yellen is speaking for the common person," we thought the following simple chart might provide some useful food for thought when considering everything that escapes his mouth…
So yep – jawbone all you like, but actions speak louder than words and enabling companies to 'live' that should be dead and enabling executives to pump up share prices (via cheap debt-funded buybacks) at the expense of their 'expensive' labor force seems like anything but "speaking for the common person."
Just like Greenspan and Bernanke before her, Janet Yellen has only one mandate – enable the elites to survive (and thrive) no matter what the cost.
- US & China Are Collapsing Into Thucydides Trap
Submitted by Simon Black via SovereignMan blog,
In his History of the Peloponnesian War, ancient Greek historian Thucydides told us the tale of a dominant regional power (Sparta) that felt threatened by the rise of a competing power (Athens).
Sparta felt so threatened, in fact, that all the moves they made to keep the Athenian rise in check eventually escalated the power struggle into an all out war.
Modern political scientists call this the Thucydides Trap.
The idea is that when, out of fear, a dominant power takes certain steps to keep its competitor at bay, these actions ultimately lead to war between the two.
There’s a lot of concern that the US and China will fall into the Thucydides Trap.
This is certainly a valid concern. Both are nuclear superpowers with some of the largest militaries in the world.
But in 2016, modern warfare is not about tanks and aircraft carriers anymore. Modern warfare is insurgent, cyber, and financial.
In fact, if you look at the state of the financial system and the tactical brinksmanship between the US and China, it’s clear that the two are already in a Thucydides Trap.
This power struggle is leading to financial warfare of nuclear proportions; and as with any war, there will be a lot of casualties.
Just over the last several months we’ve seen many exchanges of fire between the two nations.
- The US government claimed legal jurisdiction over the Bank of China, one of the largest banks on the mainland.
- The Chinese launched the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, a supernational bank designed to compete with the Western-dominated IMF.
- The US blacklisted one of China’s largest telecom companies, forbidding any US company from doing business with China’s ZTE.
- China has been rapidly expanding its global payment network, UnionPay to become a direct competitor with Western systems like Maestro, Visa, and Mastercard.
And don’t forget, China could unleash its nuclear option at any time– dumping its vast trillion+ pool of US government debt, which would potentially cause a major crisis for the US dollar.
It’s a bit sad, because almost EVERY action of the US government only escalates the conflict further… and the Chinese eagerly follow suit.
This is how World War III starts. And it will be financial.
Listen in to today’s podcast and learn more about how this conflict will unfold… and how to not to end up as collateral damage.
(click image for link to podcast)
- Noose Tightens On Clinton As Second Federal Judge Grants Discovery In E-Mail Fiasco
There have been some interesting developments in the Hillary Clinton e-mail saga over the past two weeks.
In response to an FOIA request, conservative legal advocacy group Judicial Watch obtained documents which seem to show that Clinton was well aware her BlackBerry wasn’t secure from the very beginning of her tenure as the nation’s top diplomat. Correspondence between Senior Coordinator for Security Infrastructure Donald Reid, long-time Clinton aide Cheryl Mills and the NSA suggests the former First Lady had become “addicted” to her BlackBerry and essentially refused to use the secure desktop computer provided to her by security officials.
(Mills and her boss)
The e-mails published by Judicial Watch show Clinton and Mills went to great lengths to get around the ban on BlackBerry devices in Mahogany Row and the language in the correspondence clearly proves that the Secretary knew conducting State business from her unsecure phone was outside of the guidelines prescribed by the NSA. “These documents show that Hillary Clinton knew her BlackBerry wasn’t secure,” Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton said.
Further, one of the e-mails Mills sent to Clinton regarding the pair’s discussions with the NSA is dated February 13. That’s a problem because it seems to contradict statements Clinton made about when she began using her private e-mail server for work related correspondence.
Although, as we noted on Monday, there’s some ambiguity, there are legitimate questions around why she did not turn over that e-mail and others sent prior to March 18. One explanation seems to be that, again quoting Fitton, “she didn’t want Americans to know about her February 13, 2009, email that shows that she knew her Blackberry and email use was not secure.”
Now, in the latest developments from the never-ending Clinton e-mail saga, a second federal judge will allow Judicial Watch to seek sworn testimony from officials. “U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth entered an order Tuesday agreeing that Judicial Watch can pursue legal discovery — which often includes depositions of relevant individuals — as the group pursues legal claims that State did not respond completely to a FOIA request filed in May 2014 seeking records about talking points then-U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice used for TV appearances discussing the deadly attack on U.S. facilities in Benghazi in September 2012,” Politico writes. “Lamberth is the second federal judge handling a Clinton email-related case to agree to discovery, which is unusual in FOIA litigation.”
As Reuters goes on to note, Judicial Watch has “filed several lawsuits, including one seeking records about the 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.”
“Where there is evidence of government wrong-doing and bad faith, as here, limited discovery is appropriate, even though it is exceedingly rare in FOIA cases,” Lamberth wrote in the order. “The government argues that this does not show a lack of good faith, but that is what remains to be seen, and the factual record must be developed appropriately for the Court to make that determination,” Lamberth wrote.
Although the ruling is, to quote Fitton again, “remarkable,” the “practical impact of could be limited” because, as Politico goes on to point out, U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan – the first judge to give the go ahead for Judicial Watch to seek sworn testimony – has already received a discovery plan and will rule on it by the end of next month. In other words, Lamberth’s ruling is just icing on the proverbial cake.
“Discovery will allow us to get into the shifting explanations,” Fitton says.
Indeed. Or, as we put it on Monday:
“..the story keeps changing, and indeed that’s the whole problem. At this point it’s abundantly clear that Clinton would have been far better off telling the truth from the very beginning and the fact that incremental information continues to surface certainly seems to suggest that the former First Lady fully intends to admit only what someone else – in this case Judicial Watch – can prove.”
Well thanks to judges Sullivan and Lambreth, the group may be able to prove a bit more.
* * *
- ISIS Threat Math 101
Digest powered by RSS Digest
Saving...