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The essence of (s)elections; if they could change anything, they’d make them illegal …
The world weeps.
And is powerless to stop the madness.
Ever thought you could get your Economics degree just by reading the daily news?
This one will qualify you for your Masters of Finance.
Or it did for those (Goldman Sachs!) who used it to screw up Valeant.
And all the victims who still believed in the stock market.
From today's news:
Wall Street Financial Engineering at Work – How Valeant Got Vaporized
by David Stockman •
If you need evidence that Wall Street is a financial time bomb waiting for ignition look no further than the recent meltdown of Valeant Pharmaceuticals (VRX). In round terms, its market cap of $90 billion on August 5th has suddenly become the embodiment of that proverbial sucking sound to the south, having plunged by nearly two-thirds to only $34 billion by Friday’s close.
(Click on photo to enlarge.)
No, Valeant was not caught selling poison or torturing cats during the last 90 days. What it was doing for the past six years is aggressively pursuing every one of the financial engineering strategies that are worshipped and rewarded in the Wall Street casino.
Indeed, Valeant’s evolution during that period arose straight out of financial engineering central. That is, it was a creature of Goldman Sachs and the various dealers, underwriters, hedge funds and consulting firms which ply the Bubble Finance trade.
At the end of the day, the latter have turned the C-suites of corporate America into gambling dens by attracting, selecting and rewarding company-wrecking speculators and debt-crazed buccaneers to the top corporate jobs.
In this case, the principal agent of destruction was a former M&A -focussed McKinsey & Co consultant, Michael Pearson, who became CEO in 2008.
Pearson had apparently spent a career in the Dennis Kozlowski/Tyco school of corporate strategy. That is, advising clients to buy, not build; to slash staff and R&D spending, not invest; to set ridiculously ambitious bigness goals such as taking this tiny Canadian pharma specialist from its $800 million of sales to a goal of $20 billion practically overnight; to finance this 25X expansion with proceeds from Wall Street underwriters, not internally generated cash. He even replicated the Tyco strategy of moving the corporate HQ to Bermuda to slash its tax rate.
Pearson’s confederate in this scorched earth corporate “roll-up” enterprise was Howard Schiller, a 24-year veteran of Goldman Sachs, who became CFO in 2011, and soon completed the conversion of Valeant into a financial engineering machine.
During their tenure, Pearson and Schiller spent about $40 billion on some 150 acquisitions. At the same time, they militantly eschewed investment in drug research and development in an industry who’s very purpose is the development of new drugs and therapies.
Yet the alternative strategy they peddled to the occupants of the hedge-fund hotel that became increasingly crowded with VRX punters as its shares soared was downright nonsensical and economically vapid. It could only have thrived during the late stages of a Bubble Finance mania.
In essence, Pearson and Schiller claimed that the rest of the industry was infinitely stupid, and that tens of billions of market cap could be created instantly by the simple expedient of buying companies with seasoned drugs and then jacking up prices, often by orders of magnitude.
In fact, Valeant has acquired a reputation for ferocious price increases. In one year alone the company raised the price of 81 per cent of the drugs in its portfolio, by an average of no less than 66 per cent.
The point here is not to echo the Hillary Chorus in favor of government drug price controls. Quite the contrary. Despite a crony capitalist-inspired patent regime and the endless legal obstacles thrown up by the Big Pharma cartel, the drug market is not immune to the laws of economics. Raise the price of drugs radically enough and you will attract competitors into the market with new formulations that circumvent the patent, or generics which will swamp it on expiration.
Nor does that truth completely exempt even small volume or so-called orphan drugs. In those instances, it takes massive price gains to move the aggregate revenue needle. That is, exactly the kind of egregious increases that stir a political firestorm among users and providers and bring the Hillary brigade to the TV cameras.
Accordingly, Martin Shkreli’s 5000% increase of Daraprim went dark even faster than his "Twitter" account.
Stated differently, what seasoned industry executives know that may have escaped the attention of 32-year Wall Street hot shots like Shkreli, or the spreadsheet jockeys who congregate in the hedge fund hotels, is that massive, wanton, overnight price escalation is not a business strategy that builds sustainable value and reinforces brand equity; it’s a scalping tactic that works in the casino, but not the real world.
At the same time, Pearson and Schiller slashed staff chopped down R&D spending to a comically low 3% of sales. That compares to an industry norm of 12% to 18%.
Finally, this Wall Street witches brew was stirred together in pro forma financials that assumed these ;price hikes would be permanent and that these back-of-the-envelope cost savings were immediately realized in full. The resulting profit projections, of course, had virtually nothing to do with the company’s actual results, but they did conform to sell-side hockey sticks like a hand-in-glove.
As the "New York Times" noted in an piece over the weekend:
Looking at Valeant’s real earnings compared with its make-believe ones exposes an enormous gulf. Under generally accepted accounting principles, the company earned $912.2 million in 2014. But Valeant’s preferred calculation showed “cash” earnings of $2.85 billion last year. That gap is far wider than at other pharmaceutical companies presenting adjusted figures.Needless to say, it did not take long to turn Valeant into a veritable debt-mule. Its debt outstanding rose from $400 million in 2009 to $31 billion at present, and that’s the rub.
To wit, Valeant has been a veritable cash-burning machine during its Wall Street driven M&A spree. So it has no possibility of making ends meet under a continuation of the maniacal M&A campaign crafted by Wall Street wise guys.
Indeed, its demise was a near certainty. On the one hand, it was destined to blow-up if it kept “growing” via debt-fueled M&A. Contrariwise, its peak stock market value at 100X GAAP earnings was destined to implode if it stopped doing deals and triggered a mass exodus by the punters who inhabited VRX’s hedge-fund hotel.
It goes without saying, of course, that these Bubble Finance deformations have resulted from the lunatic cheap money and wealth effects levitation policies of the Fed.
Financial repression and QE deeply subsidize corporate borrowing to fund financial engineering deals, thereby reducing the after-tax cost of even sub-investment grade debt to low single-digit levels.
Likewise, ZIRP is the mother’s milk of Wall Street speculation; it enables hedge funds and other fast money traders to build-up positions in rocket ships like Valeant at virtually no cost through the options and dealer financing markets.
Indeed, as VRX’s market cap grew from $14 billion to $90 billion in just 36 months, it generated a daisy chain of rising “collateral” value that enabled leveraged speculators to chase its stock to an ever more absurd height relative to the company’s GAAP financials.
During the 12 months ending in September, for example, VRX generated only $2.54 billion of operating cash flow, but spent $14.3 billion of cash on CapEx, M&A deals and other investments.
Nor was that an aberration. During the 27 quarters since the end of 2008, VRX has generated a mere $7 billionin operating cash flow, but has consumed nearly $26 billion of cash on investments and deals. Stated differently, it was a Wall Street Ponzi pure and simple.
Likewise, during that 27 quarter period, which roughly tracks Pearson’s tenure, the company has posted rapidly rising sales — with the top line growing from $757 million in 2008 to $10 billion in its most recent LTM report.
But it has been an absolutely profitless prosperity not unlike the typical financial engineering driven roll-up. Thus, over this 27-quarter period as a whole, sales totaled just under $30 billion, but its cumulative net income amounted to a miniscule $130 million.
That’s right. Valeant’s market cap soared from $1.2 when Pearson arrived in 2008 to the recent peak of $90 billion — even though the company has generated hardly a dime of profits on Pearson’s watch. It's all been pro forma, ex-items forward-looking Wall Street hockey sticks, and not the least those published by Goldman Sachs.
Yet there is no mystery why these financial engineering scams happen over and again in financial markets which have been corrupted and disabled by the Fed and other central banks.
Namely, because the deal fees from financial engineering are so lucrative and because the checks and balance of a healthy free market in finance — such as short-sellers, heavy hedging expense and the carry cost of debt financed positions –have been destroyed by the central banks.
Thus, a few years ago Valeant’s predecessor company was a backwater player on the Toronto stock exchange, but in the last three years it has become the fifth largest payer of investment banker fees on Wall Street.
Thanks to its rapid acquisition-driven and debt-financed expansion Valeant’s investment banking fees totaled $500 million since 2012. This means that only General Electric Co, Allergan Plc., AT&T Inc. and Dell Inc have paid more, according to data from Freeman and Co, a consulting firm.
Once in a while the wolves suddenly alter their professed preferences for a short period of time …
The Military-Industrial Complex’s Latest Best Friend — Barack Obama
by Contributor •
The Pentagon just won another small skirmish in its long war with Social Security and Medicare. That is the unstated message of the budget deal just announced gleefully by congressional leaders and the President. To understand why, let’s take a quick trip down memory lane.
Last January, President Obama submitted Fiscal Year (FY) 2016 budget to Congress, and he proposed to break the spending limits on both defense and domestic programs. These limits are set by the long-term sequester provisions of the Budget Control Act of 2011 (BCA), which, for better or worse, is the law of the land, and Obama was asking Congress to change the law. Mr. Obama wanted to finance his ramped-up spending proposals by increasing taxes. Of course, he knew that the Republican controlled Congress lusted for defense increases but hated domestic spending, particularly entitlements. Moreover, he knew increasing taxes was like waving the red cape in front of the Republican budget bulls. So, he knew his budget would be dead on arrival. Obama’s budget, nevertheless, had one virtue: it was up front about the intractable nature of the budget problem. In effect, whether deliberately or not, Obama laid a trap that the Republicans merrily walked into during the ensuing spring and summer.
Obama’s gambit set into motion a tortured kabuki dance in the Republican-controlled Congress. The Republicans, as Obama well knew, wanted to keep up the appearances of adhering to the BCA; but at the same time, they wanted desperately to shovel money into the Pentagon’s coffers.
The net result was that Obama’s proposal triggered a series of increasingly irrational Congressional negotiations, bizarre back-room deals and weird budget resolutions. These machinations came to a head with the passage of a National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that proposed to (1) keep the Pentagon’s base budget at the BCA level of about $499 billion, but (2) pack the accounts in the Pentagon’s Overseas Contingencies Operations fund (OCO) with a programs and pork that should have been in its base budget.
The reason for the dodgy OCO ‘slush fund’ rested in the politically irresistible fact that the OCO is a separate war-fighting fund** for the Pentagon that is exempt from the spending limits set by the BCA’s sequester provisions. The net result of the smoke and mirrors by the Budget and Armed Services Committees of Congress was a total defense budget that was almost identical to Obama’s original submission, but one that was not accompanied by his domestic funding increases or his tax increases. And this monstrosity was all wrapped up in a ridiculous pretense of adhering to the BCA limits.
Last week, President Obama seemed to close the trap by vetoing the 2016 NDAA. But this too was smoke and mirrors.
The veto put in motion yet another kabuki dance, this time behind closed doors between the White House and the leaders of Congress. The goal was to reach an overall budget deal that would avoid a government shutdown, which the majority Republicans were terrified of being blamed for on the eve of an election year. At the same time, they wanted to dodge the BCA’s sequester bullet while they shoveled more money into the Pentagon.
That deal has now been joined, and the Republic has been saved, albeit at an unknown price. Nevertheless, some of the sordid details of that price are now beginning to seep through the chinks in the Hall of Mirrors that is Versailles on the Potomac.
According to this report in "Defense News," the elements of the budget deal include:
The deal raises the BCA spending caps (again) by $80 billion over next two years; including $50 billion in FY2016 and $30 billion in FY2017. It also increases the Federal Government’s debt limit. These spending increases would be split equally between defense and domestic programs, and they would be financed by two squirrelly provisions, to wit:
The first financing gimmick cuts back Medicare and Social Security disability benefits. But if past is prologue, the cut to Medicare is likely to be reversed again next year, which is an election year — because everyone in Congress wants the endorsement of the American Medical Association (AMA). The cut to Medicare providers was first made permanent law by the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, and since then Congress has reversed the scheduled provider cut 17 times.
The second financing gimmick is to sell crude oil from the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Ironically, this rather bizarre provision is peculiarly fitting to the culture of Versailles on the Potomac. Few remember that the reserve was justified to the American people in 1975 as an insurance “cushion” to reduce the adverse effects of future rises in oil prices or supply disruptions engineered by OPEC, which is controlled by our supposed “ally” Saudi Arabia.
So why sell the reserve’s oil when prices are near record lows (adjusted for inflation) compared to those of the last fifteen to twenty years, particularly since the Saudis are flooding the market to take out the US frackers? Who benefits is a fascinating question with all sorts of twists and turns and is not yet answered. But it is worth recalling the 1997 Balanced Budget Act had a provision to sell the Naval Petroleum Reserve at Elk Hills (sold in 1998) – at that time, the largest privatization of government assets in history, precisely when oil prices were at their lowest level (adjusted for inflation) since the 1960s. They sold it to Occidental Petroleum which made a killing.
There is one thing the deal makes clear, however. The Pentagon’s share of the spending increases would be $33 billion in FY16, made up of a $25B increase in the Pentagon’s base budget and an $8B increase in the OCO. As for how the Pentagon’s $15 billion increase in FY17 will be allocated, the report in "Defense News" is silent.
So, there is good reason why champagne corks are popping in halls of the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex (MICC) and its lobbying affiliates on K Street. Indeed, to celebrate the triumph, the AF immediately announced it awarded Northrop-Grumman a huge concurrent engineering contract (Milestone B) to design and build the first 21 of 100 new long-range strike bombers, which heretofore had been shrouded in heavy secrecy.
No one knows what this bomber will even look like, let alone what the program will cost, but two years ago, there were reports of a “pre-cost-growth” total program cost estimate (R&D and production) reaching $81 billion. At least one of the MICC’s euphoric wholly-owned subsidiaries in the Fourth Estate has already written that 100 bomber is not enough, given the threats we face and the number of aging bombers that need to be replaced.
This new bomber program is by far the largest weapon acquisition program yet started in the 21st Century. Yet there has been no oversight, except by its advocates in the smoke-filled, super-secret secure compartmented information facilities (SCIFs) spread around Versailles.
Moreover, the bomber’s heavy concurrency means that the production-related money will quickly start flowing to hundreds of congressional districts, well before it is designed. So, before you can say sequester next year, the Bomber, like the troubled F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, will be unstoppable. And, like the F-35, it will acquire a life of its own to live on, no matter how badly it fails to meet its cost goals, its capability specifications, or its production quotas — for the simple but powerful reason that a majority in Congress are being bought off today in a way that will ensure they vote for it tomorrow.
But there is more. The new Bomber is just the beginning of the new defense boom that Mr. Obama and Congress are launching beneath the smoke and mirrors of their budget practices. The Pentagon already has a bow wave of increased spending for new weapons in its R&D pipeline. In that sense, it is no accident that, a year ago, as he was departing the Pentagon, the Pentagon’s ineffectual comptroller Robert Hale characterized the new bomber as the “canary in the coal mine.” He was wringing his hands over the rapidly growing requirements for larger defense budgets in the future — requirements he helped to create. Bow waves are a perennial feature in Pentagon planning. I first heard the term in 1973. The current bow wave, like its predecessors, will lead inexorably to more budget crises and more dodgy budget deals made by the best government money can buy.
So, once again, Mr. Obama had a shot at leading from the moral high ground, and once again, he blew it. He had the Republicans on the ropes, with all their warts on full display, but then he squandered an opportunity to effect even a pretense of challenging a thoroughly corrupt system. Obama’s most recent performance is yet more proof that he is no change agent.
A better characterization would be that he is merely another Manchurian Candidate, whose role is to protect the interests of the factions making up the shadow government that is now running the show — what former congressional staffer Mike Lofgren calls the US Deep State.***
——————
* This essay is the second in a series of occasional essays on the nature of defense spending. The first can be found here.
** The OCO is a George W. Bush gimmick, created in 2001 after 9-11 to capitalize on the national hysteria to pay for the Global War on Terror by taking its costs off the books. All our previous wars — e.g., WWI, WWII, Korea, Viet Nam, Kosovo — were funded out of the “base” defense budget and there was no need set up a special war fighting account.
The Pentagon just won another small skirmish in its long war with Social Security and Medicare.
That is the unstated message of the budget deal just announced gleefully by congressional leaders and the President. To understand why, let’s take a quick trip down memory lane.
Last January, President Obama submitted Fiscal Year (FY) 2016 budget to Congress, and he proposed to break the spending limits on both defense and domestic programs. These limits are set by the long-term sequester provisions of the Budget Control Act of 2011 (BCA), which, for better or worse, is the law of the land, and Obama was asking Congress to change the law.
Mr. Obama wanted to finance his ramped-up spending proposals by increasing taxes. Of course, he knew that the Republican-controlled Congress lusted for defense increases but hated domestic spending, particularly entitlements. Moreover, he knew increasing taxes was like waving the red cape in front of the Republican budget bulls. So, he knew his budget would be dead on arrival. Obama’s budget, nevertheless, had one virtue: it was up front about the intractable nature of the budget problem. In effect, whether deliberately or not, Obama laid a trap that the Republicans merrily walked into during the ensuing spring and summer.
Obama’s gambit set into motion a tortured kabuki dance in the Republican-controlled Congress. The Republicans, as Obama well knew, wanted to keep up the appearances of adhering to the BCA. But at the same time, they wanted desperately to shovel money into the Pentagon’s coffers.
The net result was that Obama’s proposal triggered a series of increasingly irrational Congressional negotiations, bizarre back-room deals and weird budget resolutions. These machinations came to a head with the passage of a National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that proposed to (1) keep the Pentagon’s base budget at the BCA level of about $499 billion, but (2) pack the accounts in the Pentagon’s Overseas Contingencies Operations fund (OCO) with a programs and pork that should have been in its base budget.
The reason for the dodgy OCO ‘slush fund’ rested in the politically irresistible fact that the OCO is a separate war-fighting fund** for the Pentagon that is exempt from the spending limits set by the BCA’s sequester provisions. The net result of the smoke and mirrors by the Budget and Armed Services Committees of Congress was a total defense budget that was almost identical to Obama’s original submission, but one that was not accompanied by his domestic funding increases or his tax increases. And this monstrosity was all wrapped up in a ridiculous pretense of adhering to the BCA limits.
Last week, President Obama seemed to close the trap by vetoing the 2016 NDAA. But this too was smoke and mirrors.
The veto put in motion yet another kabuki dance, this time behind closed doors between the White House and the leaders of Congress. The goal was to reach an overall budget deal that would avoid a government shutdown, which the majority Republicans were terrified of being blamed for on the eve of an election year. At the same time, they wanted to dodge the BCA’s sequester bullet while they shoveled more money into the Pentagon.
That deal has now been joined, and the Republic has been saved, albeit at an unknown price. Nevertheless, some of the sordid details of that price are now beginning to seep through the chinks in the Hall of Mirrors that is Versailles on the Potomac.
According to this report in "Defense News," the elements of the budget deal include:
The deal raises the BCA spending caps (again) by $80 billion over next two years; including $50 billion in FY2016 and $30 billion in FY2017. It also increases the Federal Government’s debt limit. These spending increases would be split equally between defense and domestic programs, and they would be financed by two squirrelly provisions, to wit:
The first financing gimmick cuts back Medicare and Social Security disability benefits. But if past is prologue, the cut to Medicare is likely to be reversed again next year, which is an election year — because everyone in Congress wants the endorsement of the American Medical Association (AMA). The cut to Medicare providers was first made permanent law by the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, and since then Congress has reversed the scheduled provider cut 17 times.
The second financing gimmick is to sell crude oil from the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Ironically, this rather bizarre provision is peculiarly fitting to the culture of Versailles on the Potomac. Few remember that the reserve was justified to the American people in 1975 as an insurance “cushion” to reduce the adverse effects of future rises in oil prices or supply disruptions engineered by OPEC, which is controlled by our supposed “ally” Saudi Arabia. So why sell the reserve’s oil when prices are near record lows (adjusted for inflation) compared to those of the last fifteen to twenty years, particularly since the Saudis are flooding the market to take out the US frackers? Who benefits is a fascinating question with all sorts of twists and turns and is not yet answered. But it is worth recalling the 1997 Balanced Budget Act had a provision to sell the Naval Petroleum Reserve at Elk Hills (sold in 1998) – at that time, the largest privatization of government assets in history, precisely when oil prices were at their lowest level (adjusted for inflation) since the 1960s. They sold it to Occidental Petroleum which made a killing.
There is one thing the deal makes clear, however.The Pentagon’s share of the spending increases would be $33 billion in FY16, made up of a $25B increase in the Pentagon’s base budget and an $8B increase in the OCO. As for how the Pentagon’s $15 billion increase in FY17 will be allocated, the report in "Defense News" is silent.
So, there is good reason why champagne corks are popping in halls of the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex (MICC) and its lobbying affiliates on K Street. Indeed, to celebrate the triumph, the AF immediately announced it awarded Northrop-Grummana huge concurrent engineering contract (Milestone B) to design and build the first 21 of 100 new long range strike bombers, which heretofore had been shrouded in heavy secrecy. No one knows what this bomber will even look like, let alone what the program will cost, but two years ago, there were reports of a “pre-cost-growth” total program cost estimate (R&D and production) reaching $81 billion. At least one of the MICC’s euphoric wholly-owned subsidiaries in the Fourth Estate has already written that 100 bomber is not enough, given the threats we face and the number of aging bombers that need to be replaced.
This new bomber program is by far the largest weapon acquisition program yet started in the 21st Century. Yet there has been no oversight, except by its advocates in the smoke-filled, super-secret secure compartmented information facilities (SCIFs) spread around Versailles. Moreover, the bomber’s heavy concurrency means that the production-related money will quickly start flowing to hundreds of congressional districts, well before it is designed. So, before you can say sequester next year, the Bomber, like the troubled F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, will be unstoppable. And, like the F-35, it will acquire a life of its own to live on, no matter how badly it fails to meet its cost goals, its capability specifications, or its production quotas — for the simple but powerful reason that a majority in Congress are being bought off today in a way that will ensure they vote for it tomorrow.
But there is more. The new Bomber is just the beginning of the new defense boom that Mr. Obama and Congress are launching beneath the smoke and mirrors of their budget practices. The Pentagon already has a bow wave of increased spending for new weapons in its R&D pipeline. In that sense, it is no accident that, a year ago, as he was departing the Pentagon, the Pentagon’s ineffectual comptroller Robert Hale characterized the new bomber as the “canary in the coal mine.” He was wringing his hands over the rapidly growing requirements for larger defense budgets in the future — requirements he helped to create. Bow waves are a perennial feature in Pentagon planning. I first heard the term in 1973. The current bow wave, like its predecessors, will lead inexorably to more budget crises and more dodgy budget deals made by the best government money can buy.
So, once again, Mr. Obama had a shot at leading from the moral high ground, and once again, he blew it. He had the Republicans on the ropes, with all their warts on full display, but then he squandered an opportunity to effect even a pretense of challenging a thoroughly corrupt system. Obama’s most recent performance is yet more proof that he is no change agent. A better characterization would be that he is merely another Manchurian Candidate, whose role is to protect the interests of the factions making up the shadow government that is now running the show — what former congressional staffer Mike Lofgren calls the US Deep State.***
——————
* This essay is the second in a series of occasional essays on the nature of defense spending. The first can be found here.
** The OCO is a George W. Bush gimmick, created in 2001 after 9-11 to capitalize on the national hysteria to pay for the Global War on Terror by taking its costs off the books. All our previous wars — e.g., WWI, WWII, Korea, Viet Nam, Kosovo — were funded out of the “base” defense budget and there was no need set up a special war fighting account.
http://chuckspinney.blogspot.com/2015/10/the-budget-deal-and-canary-in-coal-mine.html
*** Lofgren a former Republican congressional staffer on the House and Senate Budget Committees has written an important new book, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government. It will hit the stands next January.
The USA USA USA audience is such a sad one.
You'd think that after witnessing so many sleight-of-hand tricks almost every day in their political lives, most of them would have caught on by now.
Bernie Sanders has provided some intellectual stimulation for such, but there's only so much one elderly man can do.
Hillary Clinton provides a counter illusion to capture the imagination, but she's been outed so many times that it's only partly interesting now.
And the shadow on the wall?
Constantly moving:
There are some swift boats involved.
Who Was Killed in Abbottabad in May 2011? Osama bin Laden or Someone Else? Pentagon Ordered Purge of Osama “Death Files” from Data Bank
By Prof Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research, October 30, 2015
Global Research 8 July 2013
The decision was justified “to protect the names of the personnel involved in the raid, according to the inspector general’s draft report.”
The personnel involved were members of the Navy SEAL team 6 operative which undertook the bin Laden Abbottabad raids in May 2011.
In a bitter irony, three months after Obama had officially announced that the SEAL 6 unit had killed Obama bin Laden, 22 NAVY Seals belonging to the same unit as the Navy SEALS involved in the Osama Abbotabad operation, died mysteriously in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan:
30 Americans were killed in the crash on August 6, 2011 when insurgents shot down a U.S. military helicopter during fighting in eastern Afghanistan, making it the largest loss of life in a single incident for the U.S. military during the war. …The chronology is important: the Pentagon decided to purge the Osama “death files”, two months after the families of the victims of the helicopter crash went public in May 2013 “with concerns that the Obama administration was at least partially responsible for the deaths of their sons” (Ibid).
US military officials have maintained that none of the individuals involved directly in the Bin Laden mission were killed in the crash. However, sources have claimed that there were at least two SEALs who died on the chopper who had been involved in the Bin Laden raid. (Infowars, July 24, 2013, emphasis added)
Erasing the names of the Navy SEAL Team 6 personnel from the Pentagon “death files”made it impossible to verify whether the Navy SEAL personnel involved in Abbottabad raid were dead or alive.
Michel Chossudovsky, May 24, 2015, reposted October 30, 2015
* * *
A new wave of camouflage is underway at the Pentagon and the CIA. The bin Laden “death files” contained in the Pentagon’s data bank have become the object of controversy.
Navy Vice Admiral William McRaven has been entrusted in removing these secret military files concerning the May 2011 Navy SEAL raid on Osama bin Laden’s alleged hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan from the Pentagon’s data banks.
The files of the bin Laden SEAL operation had to be removed to sustain the Big Lie.
Osama was allegedly killed on the orders of the US government, despite ample evidence that he was already dead at the time of the attack:
… the US government pulled off one of the most audacious stunts of the 21st century, when on May 2nd 2011 they claimed to have killed Osama bin Laden during a Navy SEAL operation in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The contemptuously sloppy story spun by the US government, parroted without question by the controlled corporate media, and obligingly swallowed by a largely gullible Western public, was dubious in the extreme. (Brit Dee, Global Research, May 03, 2012)Who was killed? Was it Osama bin Laden or someone else?
“Rest in Peace”, “‘Truth” will prevail. The files are no longer at the Pentagon, they have been sent to the CIA, in violation of the Freedom of Information Act. The White House tacitly acknowledges that the procedure of moving government records was in violation of federal norms:
A draft report by the Pentagon’s inspector-general briefly described the secret move, which was directed by the top US special operations commander, Admiral William McRaven.The Pentagon spokesperson denied the fact that the removal of these files was to avoid the legal requirements of the Freedom of Information Act.
The transfer did not set off alarms within the Obama administration even though it appears to have sidestepped rules governing federal records and circumvented the Freedom of Information Act.
President Barack Obama has pledged to make his administration the most transparent in US history.
The CIA said the documents were handled in a manner consistent with the fact that the operation was conducted under the CIA’s direction. ("Belfast Telegraph," July 8, 2013)
But secretly moving the records allowed the Pentagon to tell the "Associated Press" that it couldn’t find any documents inside the Defense Department that "AP" had requested more than two years ago, and could represent a new strategy for the U.S. government to shield even its most sensitive activities from public scrutiny. "New York Daily News"According to the official statement, the record transfer from the Pentagon to the CIA has nothing to do with Freedom of Information. Its objective was “to protect the names of the personnel involved in the raid, according to the inspector general’s draft report.”
Protect whom? Several members of the SEAL raid are now dead, allegedly “due to combat and training accidents.” The list of names in the Osama death files is known to US intelligence but not to the broader public, nor to family members:
According to the "New York Times," “79 commandos and a dog” were involved in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden — though other reports peg the number at approximately 24. Since the raid, SEAL Team Six — the team that conducted the Bin Laden raid — has lost several members due to combat and training accidents, though none of them have been confirmed as being specifically part of the Bin Laden raid.The members of SEAL Team Six know the untold truth. And they are forbidden to reveal it.
The largest loss to the team took place in April of 2011 when Taliban fighters shot down a U.S. helicopter and killed 22 members of SEAL Team Six, along with 16 other U.S. troops.
None of those SEALs, however, were reported to have worked on the Bin Laden raid. Separately, the BeforeItsNews piece references Cmdr. Job W. Price, who committed suicide in December of 2012, as being another person connected to the Bin Laden raid who has died. This accusation doesn’t hold up because Price was reportedly part of SEAL Team Four, not Six, and was not part of the Bin Laden raid.
The most recent death tied to SEAL Team Six took place on March 28, when Special Warfare Operator Chief Brett D. Shadle was killed in a parachute training accident when he collided in midair with another SEAL over the Arizona desert. He was later identified as being a part of Team Six, though it’s unclear if he was actually assigned to the Bin Laden mission.
The problem with completely confirming or disproving the accusation that so many SEAL Team Six members have died is that the U.S. military typically does not disclose which units special forces members work on, even after their deaths. In interviews with MSN News, spokespeople at the U.S. Navy, Pentagon and Special Operations Command (SOCOM) each refused to comment on the BeforeItsNews article or the claim that 25 members of the Bin Laden raid team have died. (MSN News, April 9, 2013)
“Many credible commentators, including respected intelligence analysts and heads of state, had claimed years before 2011 that bin Laden was dead.” (Brit Dee, op cit).
In an “authoritative” December 26, 2001, report Fox News acknowledged Osama bin Laden’s “peaceful death” in December 2001:
Usama bin Laden has died a peaceful death due to an untreated lung complication, the "Pakistan Observer" reported, citing a Taliban leader who allegedly attended the funeral of the Al Qaeda leader.“The Coalition troops are engaged in a mad search operation but they would never be able to fulfill their cherished goal of getting Usama alive or dead,” the source saidDid the SEAL team, on orders of the Commander in Chief, kill an innocent person with a view to sustaining the official “Osama death story”.
Bin Laden, according to the source, was suffering from a serious lung complication and succumbed to the disease in mid-December, in the vicinity of the Tora Bora mountains. The source claimed that bin Laden was laid to rest honorably in his last abode and his grave was made as per his Wahabi belief.
About 30 close associates of bin Laden in Al Qaeda, including his most trusted and personal bodyguards, his family members and some “Taliban friends,” attended the funeral rites. A volley of bullets was also fired to pay final tribute to the “great leader.”
The Taliban source who claims to have seen bin Laden’s face before burial said “he looked pale … but calm, relaxed and confident.”
Asked whether bin Laden had any feelings of remorse before death, the source vehemently said “no.” Instead, he said, bin Laden was proud that he succeeded in his mission of igniting awareness amongst Muslims about hegemonistic designs and conspiracies of “pagans” against Islam. Bin Laden, he said, held the view that the sacrifice of a few hundred people in Afghanistan was nothing, as those who laid their lives in creating an atmosphere of resistance will be adequately rewarded by Almighty Allah.
When asked where bin Laden was buried, the source said, “I am sure that like other places in Tora Bora, that particular place too must have vanished.”
Several members of SEAL Team Six which carried out the attack are now dead.
The Osama Legend is now classified, buried in the Osama Death files stored in the archives of the CIA.
Only the CIA knows the names of the surviving members of the SEAL team involved in the May 2011 Osama Abbottabad raid.
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