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Get big enough - and you don't go to jail....
SwissLeaks - the HSBC money laundering machine
In what has been dubbed the "SwissLeaks" case, serious allegations have been made against the Swiss division of British-based banking giant HSBC. The bank is accused of systematic involvement in tax evasion and money laundering to the tune of more than 100 billion euros. Jan Fritsche discusses how the tax evasion and money laundering practices worked.
Falciani Says He Can Prove HSBC Knew of Tax Abuses
March 2 -- Herve Falciani, who took a trove of data from HSBC Holdings Plc that spawned investigations of extensive tax evasion by the bank’s clients, said he also has proof senior managers knew about the practices. Bloomberg's Francine Lacqua has more on "Countdown."
The federal government was in bed with the sugar industry throughout the late 1960s and early 70s, according to a new study of more than 1,500 pages of correspondence between sugar executives and researchers at the U.S. National Institute of Dental Research (NIDR). These “Sugar Papers” show that all but one member of the government task force on tooth decay also sat on the sugar industry’s expert panel, and that 78 percent of industry recommendations crept into the 1971 National Caries Program.
“These tactics are strikingly similar to what we saw in the tobacco industry in the same era,” says Stanton A. Glantz, an anti-tobacco activist and researcher at UC San Francisco, who coauthored the paper. “Our findings are a wake-up call for government officials…to understand that the sugar industry, like the tobacco industry, seeks to protect profits over public health.”
The sugar industry already knew its product caused tooth decay as of 1950. But instead of tackling the problem head on, industry researchers churned out a flurry of pseudo-scientific recommendations that called for more fluoridated water and better dental fillings””anything but a reduction in sugar intake.
WASHINGTON ”” In the spring of 2010, Afghan officials struck a deal to free an Afghan diplomat held hostage by Al Qaeda. But the price was steep ”” $5 million ”” and senior security officials were scrambling to come up with the money.
They first turned to a secret fund that the Central Intelligence Agency bankrolled with monthly cash deliveries to the presidential palace in Kabul, according to several Afghan officials involved in the episode. The Afghan government, they said, had already squirreled away about $1 million from that fund.
Within weeks, that money and $4 million more provided from other countries was handed over to Al Qaeda, replenishing its coffers after a relentless C.I.A. campaign of drone strikes in Pakistan had decimated the militant network’s upper ranks.
“God blessed us with a good amount of money this month,” Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, the group’s general manager, wrote in a letter to Osama bin Laden in June 2010, noting that the cash would be used for weapons and other operational needs.
Bin Laden urged caution, fearing the Americans knew about the payment and had laced the cash with radiation or poison, or were tracking it. “There is a possibility ”” not a very strong one ”” that the Americans are aware of the money delivery,” he wrote back, “and that they accepted the arrangement of the payment on the basis that the money will be moving under air surveillance.”
The C.I.A.’s contribution to Qaeda’s bottom line, though, was no well-laid trap. It was just another in a long list of examples of how the United States, largely because of poor oversight and loose financial controls, has sometimes inadvertently financed the very militants it is fighting.
While refusing to pay ransoms for Americans kidnapped by Al Qaeda, the Taliban or, more recently, the Islamic State, the United States has spent hundreds of billions of dollars over the last decade at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, some of which has been siphoned off to enemy fighters.
The letters about the 2010 ransom were included in correspondence between Bin Laden and Mr. Rahman that was submitted as evidence by federal prosecutors at the Brooklyn trial of Abid Naseer, a Pakistani Qaeda operative who was convicted this month of supporting terrorism and conspiring to bomb a British shopping center.
ADMINISTRATION DECLASSIFIES TOP-SECRET DOC THAT REVEALS ISRAEL’S NUCLEAR SECRETS
The Pentagon has declassified a document that was once labeled “top-secret,” which goes into sophisticated detail about Israel’s nuclear weapons program. The document was released quietly just prior to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s March 3 speech to a joint session of Congress.
Israel has never officially confirmed or denied the existence of a nuclear weapon’s program within its borders.
The Pentagon declassified sections covering Israel’s nuclear program, but “kept sections on Italy, France, West Germany and other NATO countries classified, with those sections blocked out in the document,” Israel National News reported.
The 386-page top-secret memo, titled, “Critical Technological Assessment in Israel and NATO Nations,” goes into great detail about how Israel turned into a nuclear power in the 1970s and 80s.
“As far as nuclear technology is concerned the Israelis are roughly where the U.S. was in the fission weapon field in about 1955 to 1960,” the report assesses.
The report was written by the Institute for Defense Analysis in 1987, which was federally funded and contracted by the Pentagon.
Israel is “developing the kind of codes which will enable them to make hydrogen bombs. That is, codes which detail fission and fusion processes on a microscopic and macroscopic level,” the report states.
Spookception: US spied on Israel spying on US-Iran nuke talks
Israel spied on the recent US-Iran nuclear talks, alleges America. And the US knows enough about it to say it publicly because the NSA is spying on Israel, along with everyone else.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Israel handed over confidential information from the negotiations to friendly members of the US Congress in a bid to derail any deal.
Israel denies the accusations, which highlight a widening gulf between Binyamin Netanyahu’s hawkish government in Israel and the Obama administration.
The talks began in 2012 as part of an attempt to resolve a decade-old dispute over Iran’s nuclear aspirations. Israel has consistently warned that Iran is developing expertise in nuclear materials primarily to develop a bomb. For a long time the US shared these concerns, which led to the development of the infamous Stuxnet nuke centrifuge buster malware and related programmes around 2010.
The world turns and strategic priorities have moved on. These days Iran is an ally in the fight against Middle Eastern terrorist group the Islamic State so the US wants to talk. Israel, unsurprisingly, wants to snoop on these talks.
The apparent decision by the White House to leak the allegations of Israeli spying comes a week before a deadline to produce a framework agreement from the ongoing negotiations in Switzerland. American diplomats have reportedly been briefed by US counter-intelligence about precautions that they would need to make in order to frustrate Israeli snooping.
Although the US has an intel sharing arrangement with Israel that makes it one of its closest allies outside the Anglophone Five Eyes alliance, the country is also regarded as among the biggest threats outside of Russia, China and France.
The US learned of the Israeli spying operation after it spotted Israeli officials exchanging classified info related to the Iran-US negotiations. Spying is all part of the grand game but what seems to have particularly narked the American is the use of stolen intelligence to brief Congress in a bid to sabotage the ongoing talks.
“It is one thing for the US and Israel to spy on each other. It is another thing for Israel to steal US secrets and play them back to US legislators to undermine US diplomacy,” a senior US official told the WSJ.
Israel denied spying on the nuclear negotiations directly, implying it had obtained a low-down on what was going on during the talks via an unnamed third-party source.
The British Heart Foundation seem to say otherwise:
It would be interesting to see the context for the table i.e. did they mean no causal relationship via risk factor, or no link?
Political Correctness: Another Name for Catholic Values
We have seen how “political correctness” is a set of political policies that are being promoted in Australia, New Zealand, Britain, the United States and Canada. These policies amount to the extermination or “ethnic cleansing” of the mainstream culture of these countries. On this page we will consider who is behind this “ethnic cleansing”. Specifically we will consider the evidence that the Roman Catholic Church is behind “political correctness”.
Part of this evidence involves circumstances that seem to show that the Catholic Church is innocent of promoting “political correctness”. We are not setting out with the goal of discrediting the Catholic Church. We are seeking to expose whoever is behind “political correctness”. If the Catholic Church is not guilty, then that would suit us very well. This is like a murder investigation, and we want to catch the perpetrator, not “frame” some innocent party. We will set out the evidence on this page, and you the reader can decide whether the Catholic Church is guilty.
The following is a list of circumstances that tend to indicate that the Catholic Church is responsible for “political correctness”:
•The Australian Labor Party has always supported “political correctness”, and most of its members are Catholics.
•The Liberal Party and the National Party have only supported “political correctness” since substantial numbers of Catholics have joined them.
•Most of the Australian judges who have supported corrupt decisions such as the Mabo decision, that advance the “politically correct” agenda, are Catholics.
•Politicians who attack conservatives like Pauline Hanson are usually Catholics.
•The people who ran the “politically correct” pressure groups such as women’s liberation, the anti-apartheid movement and gay rights groups in the 1960s and 1970s had invariably been to Catholic schools.
•One in every five Australian school children go to Catholic schools, and it is reasonable to suppose that people who went to Catholic schools would have different opinions to people who went to government schools.
•Most people who went to Catholic schools in recent years support “political correctness”.
•The Catholic Church does not excommunicate or dismiss people who support “political correctness”, even including gay rights activists.
The following is a list of circumstances that tend to indicate that the Catholic Church does not support “political correctness”.
•Pope Francis has said he is against “political correctness”.
•Many Catholics claim to be against “political correctness”, such as the Australian politician Bob Katter, who the media says is “ultra-conservative”.
•Many Catholic countries have had governments which were against “political correctness” and which were supported by the Catholic population, such as the Pinochet government in Chile, and the Franco government in Spain.
The Pope has repeatedly condemned “politically correct” activities such as abortion and homosexuality. Most people assumed that the Pope was genuine and was using his influence to stamp out abortion and homosexuality. They assumed his lack of progress in stamping these out was due to the other influences which are really behind “political correctness”.
The Pope has a tremendous amount of influence in his own right. He controls the Catholic school system in Australia, which one in every five Australian school children attend. He has the power to depose or excommunicate Australian bishops and excommunicate the trustees of Catholic school property. This in turn gives the Pope the power to dismiss any Catholic school teacher who he disapproves of.
With the absolute control of Catholic schools that the Pope possesses, we must assume that most of what happens at Catholic schools in Australia meets with the Pope’s approval. There may be things about Catholic schools that the Pope would not entirely approve of. But these things are so insignificant that the Pope has not seen fit to do anything about them.
Since nothing goes on at Catholic schools without the Pope’s approval, and since the Pope claims to be opposed to homosexuality, we would expect students who have attended Catholic schools to be very much opposed to homosexuality. Other churches which are opposed to homosexuality have no difficulty in instilling their viewpoint in children. Catholic schools have no difficulty in instilling children with a hatred of the English, a hatred of wealthy people and a hatred of racists. Why is it that Catholic schools have an inability to instill a hatred of homosexuals?
Could it be because many of the Catholic clergy are homosexuals, and the Pope doesn’t want Catholic school students to be opposed to homosexuals? We know that many Anglican bishops support homosexuality. They seem to be able to reconcile homosexuality in their minds with Christianity, so why wouldn’t the Pope be able to? The Pope probably thinks homosexuality is only a very minor sin, like saying “Damn”. He probably thinks that it is cruel to persecute homosexuals, as the Nazis did, and so he supports the practice of his predecessors that Catholic schools must teach that homosexuality is all right.
If the Pope thought homosexuality is only a minor sin, then he must have been lying when he said he was against homosexuality. The public find it difficult to believe that such an important person as the Pope would tell a lie. On the other hand we have no difficulty in believing news reports that former American President Bill Clinton has pleaded guilty to essentially lying on oath about Monica Lewinsky, a crime which many Australians saw Clinton commit on television, in return for Clinton being suspended from being able to work as a lawyer.
People assume the Pope would have told people if he was in favour of abortion and homosexuality. But consider the consequences if the Pope did that. These things are regarded as henious crimes in many countries. If the Catholic Church said it was in favour of homosexuality, it would be banned in countries like Indonesia, India and Russia. In countries like Australia and the United States, many people would stop voting for Catholic politicians if they knew the Pope supported abortion and homosexuality. By telling a “white lie” that he is against abortion and homosexuality, the Pope is better able to promote these evils, which he considers to be good.
If the Pope was lying when he said he supported traditional Protestant values, this would explain why the Liberal Party no longer promotes traditional Protestant values. The Liberal Party would be under pressure from Liberal Party politicians who are Catholics and from media magnates who are Catholics. If the Catholic Church supported traditional values, their politicians and media magnates would be pressuring the Liberal Party to hold a referendum to ban homosexuality.
It would not take much pressure on mainstream politicians such as Queensland Premier Campbell Newman to get them to support traditional values. In his youth, Campbell Newman expressed support for policies which Pauline Hanson now promotes, which he described as “Liberal Party core values”. Campbell Newman would like to “do the right thing” and support traditional values, but he is under pressure from Catholic politicians and media magnates. Why else would his party not be promoting traditional values?
Some might say that politicians like Campbell Newman once supported traditional values, but that they have changed their minds because of the attitude of the Protestant churches. This view ignores the traditional Protestant attitude towards priests, that their function is to conduct weddings and funerals, and that they have no business in expressing political views. The attitude of Protestants towards the political views of ministers of religion is the same as their attitude towards the views of their employees. That is, the views of priests are “neither here nor there”, and there is no need to take their views on board.
The thing that led to many mainstream people abandoning traditional values and supporting “political correctness” was not the attitude of mainstream churches but the activities of the “pressure groups”. The “pressure groups” came on the scene in the 1960s and 1970s, like an outbreak of a disease. There were groups like Women’s Liberation, the Anti-Apartheid Movement, and the Anti-War Movement. When these groups came out, they were greeted by the mainstream population with extreme hostility.
These “pressure groups” went about conducting protest marches, and putting a case to the public as to why their views were right. Unfortunately there was no-one around putting the opposing case as to why traditional values are right. The public heard the case of the pressure groups, which seemed to make sense. Since no-one put forward an opposing case, the public assumed that there was no good opposing case. As a result many people took on board the ideas of the “pressure groups”, such as civil liberty and democracy, that no-one had hitherto believed in.
The public would have been much more reluctant to take on board the views of the “pressure groups” if they had known that most of the hippies and activists behind these groups were Catholics. These were people such as Germaine Greer, Jane Fonda, and Timothy Leary. The public was confused, however, because most of these people were atheists, and people made an unwarranted distinction between Catholics and atheists. The public failed to notice that these people had become atheists at Catholic schools, and that the ideas they were promoting were the direct result of what they had been taught at Catholic schools.
In thinking about the people who have been to Catholic schools, it makes sense to lump them all into one group and call them “Catholics”. This is in spite of the fact that many of them are atheists, or go to Protestant churches. The reason we can lump them together is that they all have similar ideas, which they all got from Catholic schools. So in talking about Catholics, we are also talking about atheists who went to Catholic schools, and Anglicans who went to Catholic schools. It is reasonable to call them Catholics, even though some of them are atheists, because their outlook on life was determined by the Catholic Church.
The Anglican Church eventually took on board “politically correct” ideas, but this was because of the activities of the Catholic “pressure groups”. So although the Anglican Church supports “political correctness”, it is not to blame for the spread of “political correctness”. Similarly, the Jewish community predominantly supports “political correctness”, but is so numerically small that it would not be able to spread “political correctness” on its own. The Jewish community only has the influence that it has because of the support of the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church set up the “pressure groups” and got their policies adopted through its control of the Labor Party, so the Catholic Church is solely responsible for the spread of “political correctness”.
If we look at countries like Spain and Chile, we see that the Catholic Church has not always supported “political correctness”. Sometime between the 1930s and the 1960s, there was a change of direction, and the Catholic Church repudiated traditional values. It may be decades before we find out why this happened. But it is not difficult to guess why.
In the 1950s, the world was very different to how it is today, and was in the middle of the “Cold War” between the Americans and the Soviet Union. At the time, it appeared as though the Soviet Union might take over the world. If this had happened, Christianity would have been banned, and it would have been the end of the Catholic Church. As far as the Catholic hierarchy was concerned, the Church’s demise was not an acceptable option.
To get around this dilemma, the Catholic Church went to the Russians and said that the Catholic Church had decided to be on the side of communism, and that they would use their influence in the West to promote nuclear disarmament and other policies that would assist the Soviet Union to take over the world. At the same time, the Catholic Church went to the Americans and said that the Catholic Church had decided to be on the side of capitalism, and would use its influence behind the “Iron Curtain” to promote opposition to communism. So throughout the “Cold War”, the Catholic Church promoted communism in the West and capitalism behind the “Iron Curtain”.
This was the ideal solution to the Catholic Church’s dilemma. Whoever won the “Cold War“, the Catholic Church would be on the winning side. Now the West has won the “Cold War”, but the Catholic Church is still geared up to undermining traditional values in the West. This suits the Catholic Church, because most of the Catholics in the leading Western countries are of Irish origin. By undermining traditional values, Irish Catholics are persecuting the Anglo-Saxon (mainstream) majority in these countries.
The Catholic Church has been going around pointing out how terrible it is for ethnic groups to hate each other. The Catholic Church has said, “Let us put all this hatred behind us, and move forward”. When the Anglo-Saxons have gone along with this, the Catholic Church has said, “Now that we’re all on the same side, what about letting us run the country?” The Anglo-Saxons have responded, “Why not let them run the country, since they are just like us”, and have transferred significant power to the Catholics. The reaction of the Catholics has been, “Now that you’re in our power, we’re going to wipe you out, just like we’ve been wanting to do for hundreds of years!”
In other words, the Catholic Church is saying that it is against ethnic hatred, as a tactic to lull other ethnic groups into a false sense of security so that the Catholics can more easily “ethnically cleanse” them. In reality the Catholic Church is trying to do in the 21st century what it has been trying to do since it broke away from the Orthodox Church 1200 years ago. That is to make the Catholics the only ethnic group on the face of the earth.
The Popes have not done too badly in their bid to take over the world. They have got most of the nations of the world to sign up to “international human rights”, another name for Catholic values. Although countries like Japan and India have signed up to Catholic values, the Catholics have only tried to implement these values in countries like Australia. Ultimately the Catholics will run into the difficulty that 80% of the world’s people are strongly opposed to Catholic values. When they wake up to what is going on, the people of the world will smash the Catholics, just like they smashed the Nazis, and for the same reason.
Heavenly Father, we come before you today to ask Your forgiveness and to seek Your direction and guidance. We know Your Word says, "Woe to those who call evil good,," but that is exactly what we have done. We have lost our spiritual equilibrium and reversed our values.
We confess:
We have ridiculed the absolute truth of Your Word and called it Pluralism.
We have worshipped other gods and called it multiculturalism.
We have endorsed perversion and called it alternative lifestyle.
We have exploited the poor and called it the lottery.
We have rewarded laziness and called it welfare.
We have killed our unborn and called it choice.
We have shot abortionists and called it justifiable.
We have neglected to discipline our children and called it building self-esteem.
We have abused power and called it politics.
We have coveted our neighbor's possessions and called it ambition.
We have polluted the air with profanity and pornography and called it freedom of expression.
We have ridiculed the time-honored values of our forefathers and called it enlightenment.
Search us, Oh God, and know our hearts today; cleanse us from every sin and set us free.
Guide and bless these men and women who have been sent to direct us to the center of your will. I ask it in the Name of Your Son, the living Savior, Jesus Christ.
Amen.
Some of the things that Trump is talking about, has certainly ruffled a few feathers in the establishment.
He could be taken out. Even journalists have * joked * about it...
New York Times Columnist Apologizes for Donald Trump Assassination Joke
Trump wants to;
9/11 re-examined and to release censored documents
Audit of the Federal Reserve
Wants to expose the Clinton's and the Bushes
Trump is an outsider - not part of the establishment and a threat to the ruling elite
When the president leaves for a trip to Saudi Arabia on Tuesday an unresolved issue will go with him: did the Saudis play some role in supporting the hijackers responsible for the attacks on September 11th?
The question is being raised in the wake of a renewed push to declassify 28 pages of a 838-page congressional report on the worst terror attack on American soil.
The so-called "28 pages" are locked away in a secure basement room at the Capitol and although they can be read by members of Congress, the pages remain classified.
The Saudi Arabian government has threatened to sell of hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of American assets should the U.S. Congress pass a bill that could hold the kingdom responsible for any role in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, the New York Times reported on Friday.
The newspaper reported that Saudi foreign minister Adel al-Jubeir told U.S. lawmakers last month that "Saudi Arabia would be forced to sell up to $750 billion in Treasury securities and other assets in the United States before they could be in danger of being frozen by American courts."
The bill, which passed the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier this year, would take away immunity from foreign governments in cases "arising from a terrorist attack that kills an American on American soil."
The New York Times, citing administration officials and congressional aides, said "the Saudi threats have been the subject of intense discussions in recent weeks between lawmakers and officials from the State Department and the Pentagon."
It added that the Obama administration had lobbied Congress to block the passage of the bill.
The State Department said it stood "firmly with the victims of these acts of violence and their loved ones."
"We remain committed to bringing to justice terrorists and those who use terrorism to advance their depraved ideology," said State Department spokesman John Kirby.
In September a U.S. judge dismissed claims against Saudi Arabia by families of victims of the attacks, saying that the kingdom had sovereign immunity from damage claims by the families and from insurers that covered losses suffered by building owners and businesses.
WASHINGTON ”” Saudi Arabia has told the Obama administration and members of Congress that it will sell off hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of American assets held by the kingdom if Congress passes a bill that would allow the Saudi government to be held responsible in American courts for any role in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The Obama administration has lobbied Congress to block the bill’s passage, according to administration officials and congressional aides from both parties, and the Saudi threats have been the subject of intense discussions in recent weeks between lawmakers and officials from the State Department and the Pentagon. The officials have warned senators of diplomatic and economic fallout from the legislation.
Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi foreign minister, delivered the kingdom’s message personally last month during a trip to Washington, telling lawmakers that Saudi Arabia would be forced to sell up to $750 billion in treasury securities and other assets in the United States before they could be in danger of being frozen by American courts.
Several outside economists are skeptical that the Saudis will follow through, saying that such a sell-off would be difficult to execute and would end up crippling the kingdom’s economy. But the threat is another sign of the escalating tensions between Saudi Arabia and the United States.
The administration, which argues that the legislation would put Americans at legal risk overseas, has been lobbying so intently against the bill that some lawmakers and families of Sept. 11 victims are infuriated. In their view, the Obama administration has consistently sided with the kingdom and has thwarted their efforts to learn what they believe to be the truth about the role some Saudi officials played in the terrorist plot.
“It’s stunning to think that our government would back the Saudis over its own citizens,” said Mindy Kleinberg, whose husband died in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 and who is part of a group of victims’ family members pushing for the legislation.
Newly released files may show connections between low-level Saudi officials and a terrorist support network in southern California led to the 9/11 attacks
Investigators for the 9/11 commission would later describe the scene in Saudi Arabia as chilling.
They took seats in front of a former Saudi diplomat who, many on the commission’s staff believed, had been a ringleader of a Saudi government spy network inside the US that gave support to at least two of the 9/11 hijackers in California in the year before the 2001 attacks.
At first, the witness, 32-year-old Fahad al-Thumairy, dressed in traditional white robes and headdress, answered the questions calmly, his hands folded in front of him. But when the interrogation became confrontational, he began to squirm, literally, pushing himself back and forth in the chair, folding and unfolding his arms, as he was pressed about his ties to two Saudi hijackers who had lived in southern California before 9/11.
Even as he continued to deny any link to terrorists, Thumairy became angry and began to sputter when confronted with evidence of his 21 phone calls with another Saudi in the hijackers’ support network – a man Thumairy had once claimed to be a stranger. “It was so clear Thumairy was lying,” a commission staffer said later. “It was also so clear he was dangerous.”
An interrogation report prepared after the questioning of the Saudi diplomat in February 2004 is among the most tantalizing of a sheaf of newly declassified documents from the files of the staff of the 9/11 commission. The files, which were quietly released by the National Archives over the last 18 months and have drawn little public scrutiny until now, offer a detailed chronology of how the commission’s staff investigated allegations of Saudi government involvement in 9/11, including how the panel’s investigators flew to Saudi Arabia to go face-to-face with some of the Saudis believed to have been part of the hijackers’ support network on American soil.
The newly declassified documents may also help resolve the lingering mystery about what is hidden in a long-classified congressional report about ties between Saudi Arabia and the 9/11 attacks.
A former commission staff member said in an interview last week that the material in the newly released files largely duplicates information from “the 28 pages”, as they are commonly known in Washington, and then goes well beyond it.
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