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Newsflash!
Monday, Aug 26, 2013
CIA Helped Saddam Gas Iran in ’88
Files now reveal that U.S. intelligence gave key location data to Iraq during war with Iran
By Natasha Lennard
Saddam Hussein
As Foreign Policy revealed Monday, recently declassified documents show that in 1988, the U.S. gave key intelligence to Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi military, which enabled the gassing with chemical weapons of Iranian troops. The U.S. was reportedly well aware of plans to use the nerve agent.
As our current administration equivocates over military intervention in Syria and aid to Egypt, it’s worth remembering that the U.S. has a long and storied history of shifting strategic alliances in the Middle East, aligning with the vagaries of U.S. politico-economic interests of the time.
Via FP
And now to our regularly scheduled "news" . . . but . . . wait . . . first . . . another
Newsflash!
26 Aug 2013 at 4:33 PM
“Well That’s My Cue To Leave” Says Guy Who Handles “All Litigation And Government Investigations Affecting JP Morgan Around The World” After 957th Probe Into Bank’s Affairs
By Bess Levin
Michael Coyne is gonna take off now.
JP Morgan Chase’s co-head of litigation is leaving the bank as it faces a mounting pile of regulatory headaches, lawsuits and investigations, said people close to the situation.
Michael Coyne, who is responsible for all litigation and government investigations affecting J.P. Morgan around the world, will become general counsel of UnionBanCal Corp., a San Francisco lender with $102.23 billion in assets and 422 branches. J.P. Morgan, the nation’s largest bank, has $2.4 trillion in assets and 5,657 branches.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _An announcement is expected Monday. Mr. Coyne’s departure comes as J.P. Morgan tries to work its way through a litany of legal problems and a heightened period of regulatory scrutiny. The bank disclosed recently that future legal losses could be as much as $6.8 billion above its existing reserves, more than any other U.S. bank.Top Litigator Set to Leave J.P. Morgan [WSJ]
The government may very well decide to go after Chase in what it considers a big way. It may do the same for Bank of America, and then it may keep going on down the line to other banks, until it has collected a billion dollars or so from all the usual suspects, who were virtually all engaged in the same kinds of schemes, gathering and selling to customers radioactive mortgage bonds they knew were likely to explode, or were ridden with fraud and faulty underwriting.
But to me, these investigations will be meaningless unless one of two things happens, once they reach the inevitable stage of concluding painstakingly-crafted settlements with the inevitable teams of high-priced lawyers for the offending firms:
As to point one, here's the thing. If criminal laws were violated, then the government certainly has discretion to exercise mercy and seek non-criminal sanctions against the individuals responsible. But they can really only do that and not be total hypocrites if they also simultaneously implement leniency programs for ordinary street criminals at the same time.
- Someone goes to jail.
- The company is ordered to break itself up into smaller pieces.
Just yesterday, for instance, a federal judge in Mississippi handed down a six-month sentence to a man and ordered him to pay $8,282 in restitution for food stamp fraud - one Stanley Jones apparently lied in an application about whether or not anyone in his household had ever been convicted of a felony drug charge when he applied for food stamps.
Stanley Jones is going to do six months in jail for fraud in a case brought by the same Justice Department now sniffing around Chase and Bank of America. I would be shocked if $8,282 didn't represent the entire amount of value "taken" via Jones's fraud.
I spent a lot of time with people targeted for welfare fraud for my upcoming book, The Divide, and the state never settles for anything less than every last dollar in these cases.
Incidentally, you can find cases like this pretty much every day in every state in the country. Guaranteed, someone somewhere in America right now is drawing jail time for some form of welfare fraud.
Meanwhile, S.E.C. target Fab Tourre - the Goldman exec who joked about selling bad bonds to "widows and orphans" - will not do a day in jail for his part in a fraud that caused two banks in Europe to lose over a billion dollars.
And Fab's restitution will range from $30,000 to $780,000, depending upon how much judge Katherine Forrest decides to ding him for each of his six counts of civil fraud. (It will be very interesting to see where she lands on that decision).
Fab's bank, Goldman, Sachs, has already settled for $550 million for the same case, which is a lot of money, but again less than the total amount of the damage.
And nobody went to jail.
This isn't about throwing bankers in jail for the sake of it. It's about making things fair. If we're going to keep throwing people in jail for food stamp fraud, then bankers who commit systematic securities fraud also have to go to jail.
Either that, or we have to come up with alternative punishments for both types of nonviolent criminal. I'm not opposed to that, either. There are powerful arguments to be made against jail for many nonviolent offenders. The punishments for rich and poor just have to match, that's all.
As to point two - if we're not putting people in jail, we at least have to insist the companies break themselves up - this is in response to the argument made by the likes of Attorney General Eric Holder and former Department of Justice criminal division chief Lanny Breuer last winter after settlements involving HSBC (for money laundering) and UBS (for mass rate-fixing in the LIBOR scandal).
The justification in those cases for deferred and or non-prosecution agreements coupled with huge fines as punishments for sweepingly destructive offenses was that the companies in question were too large and too systemically important to risk indicting criminally.
Well, let's say that's true. It's an argument not completely without merit. Nobody wants to see a repeat of the Arthur Andersen case, when the federal government indicted on a single count, the company went under, and 28,000 jobs were lost.
But if that's true, then the state can't simply accept that reality every time a huge company starts committing serial fraud or theft.
If these companies commit crimes but are too big to prosecute, well, then, in lieu of indictments of the firm, or jail terms for executives, they have to become smaller, so that they can safely be prosecuted the next time. The state has the power to make that happen, but it would be a shock if they ever exercised that power.
That won't happen, however. Almost guaranteed, these investigations will end with huge cash settlements. We'll keep the jails filled with food-stamp thieves, while the bank execs who knowingly hawked doomed mortgage bonds to "widows and orphans" all over the world will almost certainly get off.
At worst, their shareholders will cough up another billion or two in settlement money.
All of this is stuff that has to be kept in mind when news of such investigations leaks. It may sound like tough action. But it could just as easily be more of the same cost-of-doing-business, for-appearances-only non-regulation of the looking-busy genus. Wake me up when someone goes to jail.
Matt Taibbi evinces disbelief.
Along with 200 million others.
Matt Taibbi. (Photo: Current TV)
New Bank Investigations: Real Action, or More of the Same?
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
09 August 2013
lot of interesting things happening on the white-collar enforcement front. Evil hedge fund SAC Capital and its villainous ruler Stevie Cohen were run through the gauntlet, Goldman Sachs patsy Fabulous Fab took a beating in civil court (I love the detail that emerged, that Goldman executives now call him "the poor kid"), and now, apparently, a pair of high-profile investigations have been launched against Bank of America and J.P. Morgan Chase for subprime mortgage fraud.
The latter investigations seem to be designed to answer criticisms that nobody is going after the real doers of evil systemic crimes.
The Chase case apparently involves a criminal investigation, which is indeed interesting. The company admitted as much yesterday, saying federal investigators out West have "preliminarily concluded" that Chase brazenly violated securities laws when it sold subprime mortgage-backed instruments in 2005-2007.
But I'm skeptical it will turn into a real criminal investigation. All of the stories that broke in the last day or two noted the same detail, that Chase has beefed up its estimates for litigation/settlement costs:
As the investigations drag on, the bank is racking up significant legal costs. To help cushion against potentially hefty payouts to the authorities, JPMorgan recorded a $678 million expense for additional litigation reserves in the second quarter, up from $323 million in the same period a year ago, according to the filing on Wednesday.
The bank also estimated it could incur up to $6.8 billion in losses beyond its reserves, nearly $1 billion more than the first quarter of the year.The government may very well decide to go after Chase in what it considers a big way. It may do the same for Bank of America, and then it may keep going on down the line to other banks, until it has collected a billion dollars or so from all the usual suspects, who were virtually all engaged in the same kinds of schemes, gathering and selling to customers radioactive mortgage bonds they knew were likely to explode, or were ridden with fraud and faulty underwriting.
But to me, these investigations will be meaningless unless one of two things happens, once they reach the inevitable stage of concluding painstakingly-crafted settlements with the inevitable teams of high-priced lawyers for the offending firms:
- Someone goes to jail.
- The company is ordered to break itself up into smaller pieces.
As to point one, here's the thing. If criminal laws were violated, then the government certainly has discretion to exercise mercy and seek non-criminal sanctions against the individuals responsible. But they can really only do that and not be total hypocrites if they also simultaneously implement leniency programs for ordinary street criminals at the same time.
Just yesterday, for instance, a federal judge in Mississippi handed down a six-month sentence to a man and ordered him to pay $8,282 in restitution for food stamp fraud - one Stanley Jones apparently lied in an application about whether or not anyone in his household had ever been convicted of a felony drug charge when he applied for food stamps.
Stanley Jones is going to do six months in jail for fraud in a case brought by the same Justice Department now sniffing around Chase and Bank of America. I would be shocked if $8,282 didn't represent the entire amount of value "taken" via Jones's fraud. I spent a lot of time with people targeted for welfare fraud for my upcoming book, The Divide, and the state never settles for anything less than every last dollar in these cases. Incidentally, you can find cases like this pretty much every day in every state in the country. Guaranteed, someone somewhere in America right now is drawing jail time for some form of welfare fraud.
. . . All of this is stuff that has to be kept in mind when news of such investigations leaks. It may sound like tough action. But it could just as easily be more of the same cost-of-doing-business, for-appearances-only non-regulation of the looking-busy genus. Wake me up when someone goes to jail.
Speaking of needing to be awakened when any real news is reported . . .
There's nothing odd about the 9/ll buildings take down at all (even though every day new information arises from the dark side).
Keep telling yourself that.
As the U.S. invades the umpteenth country (opened up to takeover by it).
Don't watch the following video if you value your ignorance (it will set your hair on fire).
"We were told the buildings were going to come down." - Rudy Guiliani (son of jailed mobster and other mobster kinship as well as BCCI/CIA insider ties).
"There were no secondary explosions." - Bernard Kerik - in jail at present for numerous felonies (well-known mobster who was NY Police Commissioner during the 9/11 event, worked previously for the Saudi royal family and Morrison-Knudsen (demolitions company) in Saudi Arabia, personal chauffeur for Guiliani before being appointed to several inside jobs including George W. Bush's nominee to head the brand new U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and in charge of the operation which "found" the intact passport of one of the Saudi "bombers" that proved who the culprits really were).
Why did The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) play dumb about any knowledge relating to the finding of nanothermite in the rubble when its top officials at that time were a materials science engineer, a scientist trained at Los Alamos in nuclear demolition, and a man who published over 10 technical papers on nanothermite?
And how did the people guiding the airplanes know when to turn off the transponders in order to perfectly elude the radar? From the Toronto Hearings (www.torontohearings.org):
And, oh yes - one more tiny detail - how did Building 7, which was not hit by a plane (and was behind Buildings 5 and 6, which didn't collapse) implode? (errr . . . collapse?)
USA USA USA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
So, again . . . it's just money (and power and control)? El Greedo strikes again.
And WTF was the mainstream media reporting on during the following tumultuous national and international events?
USA USA USA???
KuwAm and Stratesec: Directors and Investors That Link 9/11 To A Private Intelligence Network
The Kuwaiti-American Corporation (KuwAm), parent company of World Trade Center (WTC) security company Stratesec, had some interesting links to royalty in both Iran and Kuwait. Some of the company’s directors also had connections to U.S. intelligence agencies and at least one was associated with the CIA-funded terrorist financing network that included BCCI.
Through these links we can see that the origins of the War on Terror are related to the origins of the first Gulf War, and to a private network of covert operatives that stretches back for generations.
After the 1993 bombing, a company called Stratesec was responsible for the overall integration of the new WTC security system. In the few years leading up to 9/11, Stratesec also had contracts to provide security services for United Airlines, which owned two of the planes that were destroyed on 9/11, and Dulles Airport where American Airlines Flight 77 took off.
Stratesec’s board of directors included Marvin Bush, the brother of George W. Bush, and Wirt Dexter Walker III, a distant relative of the Bush brothers.[1] Marvin Bush joined the board of Stratesec after meeting members of the Al Sabah family on a trip to Kuwait with his father in April 1993. During this trip, the Kuwaiti royals displayed enormous gratitude to the elder Bush for having saved their country from Saddam Hussein only two years earlier.
But the Bush-Kuwaiti connection went back much farther, to 1959, when the Kuwaitis helped to fund Bush’s start-up company, Zapata Off-Shore. As a CIA business asset during this time, Bush and his company worked directly with the anti-Castro Cuban groups in Miami before and after the Bay of Pigs invasion.[2]
During the 1993 trip, the royals in the United Arab Emirates showed similar gratitude to the Bush family by putting Marvin on the board at Fresh Del Monte, which was purchased by the UAE-owned company IAT in 1994. The alleged 9/11 hijackers had many connections to the UAE, and much of the funding for the attacks came through that country.
Mish’al Yusuf Saud Al Sabah, the majority owner of KuwAm Corporation, was the company’s chairman since 1982. Just after the Bush family visit in 1993, KuwAm gained a controlling interest in Stratesec.[3]
The other owners of Stratesec were Walker, who along with Al Sabah joined the Stratesec board, and an entity controlled by Walker and Al Sabah, called Special Situation Investment Holdings (SSIH). KuwAm owned several other companies, including Commander Aircraft and Strategic Jet Services , which were controlled under the Oklahoma-based company called Aviation General (AGI).
KuwAm’s aircraft companies had international clientele and Al Sabah was known to personally engage customers who purchased aircraft.[4] In 1996, Al Sabah announced that AGI sold aircraft to the National Civil Aviation Training Organization (NCATO) in Giza, Egypt.
NCATO was in a partnership with Embry-Riddle University where two of the alleged 9/11 hijackers, Saeed Alghamdi and Waleed M. Al Shehri, were said to have gone to flight school.[5]
Ten days after the attacks, Embry-Riddle was relieved to report that Al Shehri had turned up alive.[6] Unfortunately, the many reports that some of the alleged hijackers had turned up alive were never investigated by the FBI or the 9/11 Commission.
Like Stratesec, all three of KuwAm’s aircraft companies went bankrupt within three years after 9/11. The company blamed terrorism and the war in Iraq for a reduced demand for its products.[7] Despite the losses, the Kuwaiti royal family can be said to have benefited from 9/11 due to “The War on Terror” that removed Saddam Hussein from power. Of course, that was the second consecutive US war that Kuwait benefited from, the first being the 1991 Gulf War led by President George H.W. Bush.
The 1991 Gulf War was started on the basis of blatant lies, at least one of which involved a relative of Mish’al Al Sabah. This was a 15-year old girl named Nayirah, who was the daughter of Mish’al’s first cousin, Saud Nasser Al Saud Al Sabah, the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States.[8] The girl lied about having witnessed Iraqi soldiers taking babies out of incubators and leaving them on the “cold floor to die.” It was later learned that her testimony was false and that she had been coached to tell the lies by the public relations firm, Hill & Knowlton.[9]
Needless to say, Mish’al Al Sabah is very well connected to the Kuwaiti royal family and, therefore, to the Kuwaiti government. Other first cousins of Mish’al included Salim Abdal-Aziz Saud Al Sabah, the Governor of Kuwait’s Central Bank, and Sabah Nasir Saud Al Sabah, the Head of the Engineering Department for Military Projects in the Ministry of Defence. Mish’al’s brother Ali married the daughter of Kuwaiti Emir Jabir III.
Wirt D. Walker III, CEO of Stratesec and managing director at KuwAm, was the son of a career U.S. intelligence officer and a former coworker of William Casey, who later became CIA director.
Walker was also a descendant of James Monroe Walker, who ran the businesses of the U.S. deep state organization called Russell & Company.[10] Coincidentally, the brother-in-law of the original Wirt D. Walker, John Wellborn Root, was the long-time employer of Emery Roth, whose company was later the architect of record for both the WTC Towers and Building 7.[11]
Mish’al Al Sabah actually lived with Walker and his family for six months when Al Sabah was only 15 years of age, at the time that George H.W. Bush was CIA director. As a result of their close relationship, Al Sabah brought Walker and KuwAm “many rich, limited partnership investors from Kuwait, Europe and the U.S.”[12] Walker and Al Sabah started KuwAm in 1982, when Al Sabah turned 21 years of age.
Other people who worked for Kuwam included Pamela S. Singleton, who was a KuwAm partner and principal. Singleton was also associated with Winston Partners, another company run by Marvin Bush.
KuwAm board member Robert D. van Roijen was said to be the man responsible for getting Walker involved in the aircraft business. Like Walker, van Roijen was the son of a CIA officer. His father was born a Dutch citizen in England, immigrated to the U.S. in the 1930s and was an intelligence officer in the Army Air Corps before joining the CIA.[13] The senior van Roijen later became the owner of Robert B. Luce, Inc., a Washington-based company that published The New Republic.
Van Roijen’s grandfather was Dutch ambassador to the United States in the 1920s, and his uncle, Jan H. van Roijen, had the very same appointment from 1950 to 1964. During the 1973 Oil Crisis, the Dutch government sent Jan H. van Roijen, who was also a member of the Bilderberg Group, to Saudi Arabia in an unsuccessful attempt to patch things up diplomatically.
Unlike Walker, the younger van Roijen admits that he was an intelligence officer too, with the U.S. Marines from 1961 to 1963. It is interesting to note that the CIA-trained anti-Castro Cubans that Marvin Bush’s father was helping, during this same time, thought that the U.S. Marines would be right behind them as they stormed the shores at the Bay of Pigs.
Van Roijen was also Tricia Nixon’s White House party escort during the time of the Nixon Administration. Van Roijen’s sister was working in the White House communications office, and he used those connections to his advantage as a lobbyist for IBM, obtaining strategic information from government offices such as the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB).[14] At the time, future Carlyle Group CEO Frank Carlucci was Deputy Director of the OMB.
Another interesting connection between KuwAm and the Nixon years was that KuwAm’s offices were in the Watergate Hotel, the same building that was burglarized in the 1972 scandal that led to Nixon’s resignation. In the years leading up to 9/11, both Stratesec and Aviation General convened their annual shareholders’ meetings in KuwAm’s Watergate offices, in Suite 900.[15]
As of 1998, the building was owned by The Blackstone Group and the offices that KuwAm occupied were leased by the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia. The offices just below KuwAm, in Suite 800, were occupied by the Saudi embassy.
Hamzah M. Behbehani was a director and partner at KuwAm from 1995 to 1997, and was named as a principal, along with Walker and Al Sabah, in lawsuits in which KuwAm engaged. BehBehani had come to KuwAm after spending three years with investment companies in London. Prior to that, from 1986 to 1992, Behbehani had worked for the British branch of the Banque Arabe et Internationale d’Investissments (BAII), one of the Arab-Western partnership banks started in the 1970s.
BAII was “heavily involved in the oil trade; it finances oil imports and the export of capital goods and equipment for the refining and petrochemical industries.”[16] But as authors Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin noted, BAII was also intimately associated with the CIA-linked terrorist financing network, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI).
“Run by a board member of BCCI, Yves Lamarche, BAII had played a critical role in some of BCCI’s dubious schemes, lending $50 million to help finance the takeover of First American and also providing funds to allow [Ghaith] Pharaon to buy Independence Bank in Los Angeles.”[17] KuwAm director Behbehani worked for BCCI’s partner BAII from the time Pharaon purchased Independence Bank and throughout the time that the financial crimes, in which these banks engaged, came to a crescendo.
Behbehani left KuwAm to become Senior Vice President at Gulf Investment Corporation (GIC), where he remained until 2004. GIC’s 2002 annual report lists Behbehani as “Head of Marketing.”[18] From 2004 to 2008, Behbehani was Executive Vice President at Kuwait Finance & Investment Company (KFIC).
The relationship between the Kuwaiti firms that Behbehani worked for, the Al Sabah family, and the prime BCCI funding vehicle — the Kuwaiti International Finance Company (KIFCO) — remains to be revealed.
However, the U.S Senate investigation did turn up a clue. The IZ Company for Exchange, indicted by the Senate committee, was run by one Subhash Sgar, who was also a director of the Al-Sabah General Electrical company.
The Senate Committee reported that — “Concerning BCCI’s banking arm in Kuwait, the Kuwait International Finance Company (KIFCO), Price Waterhouse found that placements recorded by BCCI with KIFCO were inconsistent with Kifco’s financial statements regarding the same transactions.
Price Waterhouse noted that the principal mechanism for repaying Kifco’s loans from BCCI was a mysterious Kuwaiti entity called “the IZ company for Exchange,” and that “we now have suspicions as to the propriety of the transactions.”[19]
In June 2000, there was a sell-off of Stratesec stock as the company was reporting several years of steady losses.[20] The investors who owned Stratesec stock at the time formed a most surprising group.
- Barah Salem Al Sabah was a Stratesec shareholder. She was the exiled Kuwaiti royal who had called for the ouster of Saddam, in 1990.[21] Two days after Barah’s plea, on September 11, 1990, President Bush addressed a joint session of Congress and the American people and called for an intervention (and a New World Order).
- Journalist Arnaud de Borchgrave was also an investor in Stratesec. De Borchgrave is currently Editor-at-Large of The Washington Times and United Press International. Stratesec stock was also held by a trust in the name of his wife, Alexandra de Borchgrave, who was the granddaughter of American journalist and financier Henry Villard. Alexandra’s father and grandfather both owned the left-leaning magazine, The Nation.
- Another Kuwaiti family, that of Adel & Anwar Mustafah T. Alghanim, was a large volume stockholder in Stratesec. The family runs Anwar Alghanim Engineering in Kuwait.
- A man named Manuchehr Riah was a Stratesec stockholder. This appears to be the same person as Manouchehr (or Manoutchehr) Riahi, who worked for the Shah of Iran. It was said that Mr. Riahi’s family had “devoted itself to the service of the Persian royal families since the 1500s.” Riahi’s wife was the sister of the woman married to the Shah’s half-brother, Prince Abdul Reza-Pahlavi. In 1955, Riahi worked to land a major oil contract for Iran.
- His partner was Vincent Hillyer, a Californian who married into the royal family. Hillyer’s wife was the Shah’s younger sister, Princess Fatemeh. Together they were trying to woo the Pan American International Oil Company (later AMOCO).[22]
Riahi fled to the United States when the Shah fell from power. Interestingly, a young Iranian businessman named Kamran Hashemi was a director and large volume stockholder at Stratesec.Wirt D. Walker and his wife, Sally White Walker, were the focus of 9/11 insider trading flagged by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Unfortunately, the FBI did not interview either of the Walkers and they were both cleared of any wrongdoing because they were said to have “no ties to terrorism or other negative information.”[23]
- Additional Stratesec stock was held by Harrison Augur, an attorney and financier who was a graduate of Yale (1964) and the law schools of both Columbia and New York University.
In any case, there is solid evidence that KuwAm and, its WTC security company Stratesec, had strong connections to the Kuwaiti royal family, which benefited from 9/11 through the ouster of Saddam Hussein.
The companies were also strongly linked to the Bush family network and to people who came from deep-state U.S. intelligence backgrounds, like Wirt D. Walker and Robert D. van Roijen.
Combined with other information about the directors and shareholders, these facts call out for in-depth investigation into KuwAm and its associates with regard to the events of September 11.
Still confused?
Don't blame me. I just found the article - but it fits in with my philosophy that everything comes out eventually. Everything.
It explains quite a lot, too, about why a real investigation into 9/11 couldn't be allowed, ever.
It also makes you stop and think back about the personal danger inherent in JFK's plan for disbanding the CIA. That was his plan for the days immediately after his Dallas trip. And my guess is that Bush's New World Order is not our New World Order.
Lots more at the link here.
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