It‘s 1998. The 6-year-old Syrian Christian draws. Her father wants her to be an artist. There are secret police in her playground.
Sebastian, an idealistic photojournalist just out of university, accompanies a reporter who has gotten an interview with a man hiding in a cave. He takes photos of Osama bin Laden. Sebastian is 21 and wants to change the world. He has some minutes of celebrity through his photos of bin Laden, but he can‘t make a go of serious photojournalism, can‘t sell his pictures.
President Bush‘s attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, has come under fire for politicizing the U.S. Justice Department for his dismissals of eight U.S. attorneys, apparently because they didn‘t target Democrats. But using the Justice Department for political ends isn‘t simply an invention of Gonzales or of the President; it‘s an old Bush family tradition.
In politicizing the Justice Department, Bush takes a page from his father. The George H.W. Bush Justice Department 25 years ago balked at investigating and prosecuting the key players in the scandal of the criminal, terrorist-friendly bank, BCCI, and moved only, and in limited fashion, after New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau forced its hand.
Bush had a strong reason to want Justice to block pursuit of the case: the CIA used BCCI for its black ops, including funneling some of the $2 billion Washington sent to client Osama bin Laden and running money for the illegal Iran-Contra operation.
Now that the U.S. Congress is investigating the truth of President George W. Bush’s statements about the Iraq war, they might look into one of his most startling assertions: that there was a link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.
Critics dismissed that as an invention. They were wrong. There was a link, but not the one Bush was selling. The link between Hussein and Bin Laden was their banker, BCCI. But the link went beyond the dictator and the jihadist — it passed through Saudi Arabia and stretched all the way to George W. Bush and his father.
Los legisladores de Estados Unidos que investigan la veracidad de los argumentos del presidente George W. Bush para invadir Iraq deberÃan analizar una de sus afirmaciones más resonantes: la del vÃnculo entre Saddam Hussein y Osama bin Laden.
Los crÃticos de Bush desacreditaron tal aseveración, a la que calificaron de invención. Estaban equivocados. El vÃnculo existÃa, pero no era el que el presidente le vendió al público.
A detailed analysis of Saddam Hussein‘s secret money-laundering techniques shows here for the first time how he used the same offshore money launderers as Osama bin Laden. That covert money network, based in the tax havens of Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Panama and Nassau, helped bankroll the war machines of both Iraq and al-Qaida.
More than 1,000 pages of confidential corporate, bank and legal documents show how the network functioned. The papers come from court cases filed in several European countries, from corporate records, from investigations by Italian police, from a report of the Kroll international investigative agency, and from private sources. The documents are the basis of further investigations coordinated in Europe by the prosecutor of Milan.
A previously unpublished list reveals that backers of a bank that the U.S. says helped fund al-Qaida include prominent members of the Arab world.
According to an unpublished list obtained by the author, the Al Taqwa bank, part of a network of financial companies named by the Bush administration as a major source and distributor of funds for Osama bin Laden’s terrorist operations, has shareholders that include prominent Arab figures from numerous countries in the Middle East. Among the shareholders are the grand mufti of the United Arab Emirates and prominent families in the UAE and Kuwait. Two sisters of Osama bin Laden are also on the list, undermining the bin Laden family’s claim that it separated itself from his terrorist pursuits after he was expelled from Saudi Arabia in 1994.
How did top executives of Enron do it? How did they cause the world’s biggest bankruptcy while making off with millions of dollars?
They used the same financial tools as Osama bin Laden.
To attack the Osama bin Laden financial network, the Bush administration knew right where to look – in offshore secrecy havens, including the Bahamas, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Dubai and Panama.
How did Enron executives cause the world’s biggest bankruptcy while making off with millions? By using the same secret money system used by terrorists and financial swindlers — an offshore financial system that U.S. officials must rein in.
NEW YORK–How did top executives of Enron do it? How did they cause the world’s biggest bankruptcy while making off with millions of dollars?
They used the same financial tools as Osama bin Laden.
Top executives of Enron caused the world’s biggest bankruptcy while making off with millions of dollars by using the same financial tools as Osama Bin Laden.
The Bush administration knew right where to look when it wanted to shut down Bin Laden’s financial network ” offshore secrecy havens. The system moves money for people with something to hide. Sometimes they are terrorists. Sometimes they are financial swindlers.
U.S. investigators had to use muscle to get the Bin Laden information. When a Bahamas bank refused to open its records, the U.S. had it cut off from the world’s wire transfer systems and the bank changed its mind within hours. Offshore revelations on Enron should make the public and policymakers question the continued existence of the world’s financial services system for criminals.
Global money laundering made easy by loose rules on secret accounts
Terrorists work the levers of global banking laws to move money that finance their efforts from phony banks to real ones, like Britain’s Barclays Bank, which Osama bin Laden allegedly used.
Terrorist networks all over the world depend on the international bank and corporate secrecy system to hide and move their money. This structure is allowed to exist by agreement of the world‘s banks and financial powers. A lot of people make money from it, including the owners and managers of banks that hide customers‘ deposits from tax authorities. But an unintended consequence is that it aids and abets worldwide networks of terrorists.
It is Aug 13 2021. Henry Naylor is a topical comedian looking back at the Taliban departure from Afghanistan a decade before. Naylor was a writer for the British TV satire show “The Spitting Image” and a stand-up comic. He likes satires on war like Mash, Catch 22, Dr. Strangelove. A decade earlier, he had a chance to do a show on BBC comedy radio, and he wanted to talk about the Afghanistan conflict, but the state-funded broadcaster said Afghanistan is not funny. Too many dead bodies. He noticed that journalists talking about Afghanistan were not really there. They gathered on the border. Including a BBC reporter who faked reports. Yes, the BBC was full of fakery. Naylor wanted to expose the media lies. So, flashback.
Brit Henry Naylor‘s play about the moral choices of people trapped in the Middle East horror and the western reporters of it could not be more timely, or more searing. The dialogue is stirring, often tough, and poetic. It is part of a series he has presented at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe the last few years about the human suffering and the ethical challenges posed by the region’s crises.
June 8, 2018 – This article by Michael Sainato in The Observer (London) recites the fake news we are used to: Magnitsky a whistleblowing Russian lawyer jailed after tagging officials for tax-refund fraud. However, there are some new elements in the story, about Renaissance Capital, which we have to assume are skewed by William Browder as he is the fount of all the media’s fake news about the Browder/Magnitsky.
Feb 4, 2016 – Art as politics reaches new intensities in the Whitney Museum‘s disturbing and powerful new exhibit of film maker Laura Poitras‘ selection of videos and documents to define the U.S. government‘s threats to liberty after 9/11. The exhibit opens in New York Feb 5 and continues till May 1, 2016.
If only the radical Islamists were just like the people who run the West, capitalists! If you think that‘s the answer, be careful what you wish for. Ayad Akhtar‘s clever, ironic, compelling play shows what could happen when a Wall Streeter, kidnapped for ransom, persuades his captors that he is more valuable to them by showing how to manipulate the West‘s financial system – especially the stock and currency markets.
It‘s presented off Broadway at the New York Theatre Workshop. One wishes it had a broader reach.
Speech to conference on Taming the Giant Corporation, organized by Ralph Nader and The Center for Study of Responsive Law, Washington DC, June 8, 2007
The tax haven racket is the biggest scam in the world. It‘s run by the international banks with the cooperation of the world‘s financial powers for the benefit of corporations and the mega-rich. This talk is about strategy, but first you have to know the target, and most Americans, including progressive activist Americans, don‘t know what I‘m going to tell you. And that‘s part of the problem.
Between 1996 and 2000, of U.S. and multi-national corporations operating in the United States, with assets of at least $250 million or sales of at least $50 million, nearly two-thirds paid no U.S. income tax. Over 90 percent reported owing taxes of under 5 percent. One year, six in ten paid less than a million.
This is the dirty little secret of globalization: the end of controls on capital flows and the expansion of the tax haven system from 25 years ago to where it has more than doubled to about 70 tax havens.
The system is a major reason for the growing inequality in the U.S. and between the West and the developing worlds.
The system has given the big banks and corporations and the super-rich mountains of hidden cash they use to control our political systems.
As a senator, John Kerry was a tenacious investigator and exposed BCCI, an international criminal bank, and its murderous clients. The experience should serve him well in dealing with the international threats we face today.
Hound-Dogs, March 2004
(Same title but not same article as in Dissent 2003)
This is a story about a massive money-laundering operation run by the world‘s biggest banks. It hides behind the “eyes-glazing over” technicalities of the international financial system. But it could be one of the biggest illicit money-moving operations anyone has ever seen. And it‘s allowed to exist by the financial regulators who answer to Western governments.
In these days of global markets, individuals and companies may be buying stocks, bonds or derivatives from a seller who is Clearstreamhalfway across the world. Clearstream, based in Luxembourg, is one of two international clearinghouses that keep track of the “paperwork” for the transactions.
Paris has always been stimulating to the artistic soul and also a little outrageous. There are two edgy museums with art that pushes the most controversial boundaries – sex and politics. And both also defy the staid notion that museums are only for solemn daylight viewing. They are he Museum of Erotic Art in Montmartre, and the Palais de Tokyo near the Arc de Triomphe.
In November 1932, deputy Fabien Albertin took the floor of the National Assembly in Paris to denounce tax evasion by eminent French personalities-politicians, judges, industrialists, church dignitaries, and directors of newspapers-who were hiding their money in Switzerland.
The minister of finance knows very well that for ten years, the concern of all his predecessors has been to track down this fraud . . . he declared. However, till now, the information one has gotten has been extremely vague. When documents arrive, they are formless notebooks in which holders of accounts are represented only as numbers. Employees of the banks don’t know the names of account holders. These names are known only to the director of the bank, who the clients forbid to correspond with them, so anxious are they to preserve anonymity.
Having a quarter of the world‘s oil reserves may mean never having to say you‘re sorry to Washington. Instead, when Newsweek reported in December that checks from the wife of the Saudi ambassador to the United States had been sent to associates of two of the September 11 hijackers, Saudi and Washington officials revved up their spin machines.
When the reports surfaced, Haifa bint Faisal, wife of Saudi ambassador Bandar bin Sultan, acknowledged that she sent nearly $150,000 to the wife of a Saudi living in San Diego. The recipient, Majeda Ibrahin Dweikat, signed over some of the checks to a friend whose husband, Omar al-Bayoumi (with Dweikat‘s husband), helped hijackers Khalid Almidhar and Nawaf Alhazmi find housing in San Diego, open bank accounts, get Social Security cards, pay expenses and arrange flying lessons in Florida.
MSNBC exclusive: Document shows Tunisian with alleged al-Qaida links gave information to Italians two years ago
A Tunisian-born terrorism suspect placed two weeks ago on Washington‘s list of most-wanted militants confessed two years before to Italian police that he helped run an elaborate arms smuggling ring that aided Islamic militants, but it‘s not clear whether Italian and U.S. officials acted on the information. The case, revealed in a confidential document obtained by MSNBC.com, raises new questions about intelligence gathering in the war on al-Qaida.
An aggressive European investigation of international crime has revealed alleged Russian mafia leaders operating in the United States. The U.S. Justice Department dropped the ball three years ago during the Bank of New York scandal, which now threatens to explode.
NEW YORK–Nearly three years ago, the Justice Department called the Bank of New York (BoNY) money-laundering scandal just a Russian tax-evasion scheme. Now, European investigations show that BoNY was a channel for organized crime. And according to a document obtained by Pacific News Service, some of the alleged Russian mafia leaders have operated freely in the United States.
New York, Aug 6, 2002 — Nearly three years ago, the Justice Department called the Bank of New York (BoNY) money-laundering scandal just a Russian tax-evasion scheme. Now, European investigations show that BoNY was a channel for organized crime. And according to a document obtained by Pacific News Service, some of the alleged Russian mafia leaders have operated freely in the United States.
The widening scandal reveals Washington’s dangerous reluctance to confront international criminal networks.
The world‘s biggest banks and multinational corporations have set up a shadowy system to secretly move trillions of dollars”a system that can be exploited by tax evaders, drug runners and even terrorists.
In the tax haven of Luxembourg, a little-known outfit called Clearstream handles billions of dollars a year in stock and bond transfers for banks, investment companies and multinational corporations. But a former top official of this “clearinghouse” says Clearstream operates a secret bookkeeping system that allows its clients to hide the money that moves through their accounts.
Bush had a strong reason to want Justice to block pursuit of the case: the CIA used BCCI for its black ops, including funneling some of the $2 billion Washington sent to client Osama bin Laden and running money for the illegal Iran-Contra operation.
Critics dismissed that as an invention. They were wrong. There was a link, but not the one Bush was selling. The link between Hussein and Bin Laden was their banker, BCCI. But the link went beyond the dictator and the jihadist — it passed through Saudi Arabia and stretched all the way to George W. Bush and his father.
