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Tuesday, May 17, 2011

a million fraud cases a year

The People vs. Goldman Sachs

A Senate committee has laid out the evidence. Now the Justice Department should bring criminal charges


If they do not shut down Goldman Sachs,
 "then Goldman will have achieved a kind of corrupt-enterprise nirvana".





Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein lies before the Senate in April 2010

They weren't murderers or anything; they had merely stolen more money than most people can rationally conceive of, from their own customers, in a few blinks of an eye. But then they went one step further. They came to Washington, took an oath before Congress, and lied about it.

Thanks to an extraordinary investigative effort by a Senate subcommittee that unilaterally decided to take up the burden the criminal justice system has repeatedly refused to shoulder, we now know exactly what Goldman Sachs executives like Lloyd Blankfein and Daniel Sparks lied about. We know exactly how they and other top Goldman executives, including David Viniar and Thomas Montag, defrauded their clients. America has been waiting for a case to bring against Wall Street. Here it is, and the evidence has been gift-wrapped and left at the doorstep of federal prosecutors, evidence that doesn't leave much doubt: Goldman Sachs should stand trial.

The great and powerful Oz of Wall Street was not the only target of Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse, the 650-page report just released by the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Democrat Carl Levin of Michigan, alongside Republican Tom Coburn of Oklahoma. Their unusually scathing bipartisan report also includes case studies of Washington Mutual and Deutsche Bank, providing a panoramic portrait of a bubble era that produced the most destructive crime spree in our history — "a million fraud cases a year" is how one former regulator puts it. But the mountain of evidence collected against Goldman by Levin's small, 15-desk office of investigators — details of gross, baldfaced fraud delivered up in such quantities as to almost serve as a kind of sarcastic challenge to the curiously impassive Justice Department — stands as the most important symbol of Wall Street's aristocratic impunity and prosecutorial immunity produced since the crash of 2008.

To date, there has been only one successful prosecution of a financial big fish from the mortgage bubble, and that was Lee Farkas, a Florida lender who was just convicted on a smorgasbord of fraud charges and now faces life in prison. But Farkas, sadly, is just an exception proving the rule: Like Bernie Madoff, his comically excessive crime spree (which involved such lunacies as kiting checks to his own bank and selling loans that didn't exist) was almost completely unconnected to the systematic corruption that led to the crisis. What's more, many of the earlier criminals in the chain of corruption — from subprime lenders like Countrywide, who herded old ladies and ghetto families into bad loans, to rapacious banks like Washington Mutual, who pawned off fraudulent mortgages on investors — wound up going belly up, sunk by their own greed.

But Goldman, as the Levin report makes clear, remains an ascendant company precisely because it used its canny perception of an upcoming disaster (one which it helped create, incidentally) as an opportunity to enrich itself, not only at the expense of clients but ultimately, through the bailouts and the collateral damage of the wrecked economy, at the expense of society. The bank seemed to count on the unwillingness or inability of federal regulators to stop them — and when called to Washington last year to explain their behavior, Goldman executives brazenly misled Congress, apparently confident that their perjury would carry no serious consequences. Thus, while much of the Levin report describes past history, the Goldman section describes an ongoing?

crime — a powerful, well-connected firm, with the ear of the president and the Treasury, that appears to have conquered the entire regulatory structure and stands now on the precipice of officially getting away with one of the biggest financial crimes in history.


Defenders of Goldman have been quick to insist that while the bank may have had a few ethical slips here and there, its only real offense was being too good at making money. We now know, unequivocally, that this is bullshit. Goldman isn't a pudgy housewife who broke her diet with a few Nilla Wafers between meals — it's an advanced-stage, 1,100-pound medical emergency who hasn't left his apartment in six years, and is found by paramedics buried up to his eyes in cupcake wrappers and pizza boxes. If the evidence in the Levin report is ignored, then Goldman will have achieved a kind of corrupt-enterprise nirvana. Caught, but still free: above the law.

To fully grasp the case against Goldman, one first needs to understand that the financial crime wave described in the Levin report came on the heels of a decades-long lobbying campaign by Goldman and other titans of Wall Street, who pleaded over and over for the right to regulate themselves.

Before that campaign, banks were closely monitored by a host of federal regulators, including the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the FDIC and the Office of Thrift Supervision. These agencies had examiners poring over loans and other transactions, probing for behavior that might put depositors or the system at risk. When the examiners found illegal or suspicious behavior, they built cases and referred them to criminal authorities like the Justice Department.

This system of referrals was the backbone of financial law enforcement through the early Nineties. William Black was senior deputy chief counsel at the Office of Thrift Supervision in 1991 and 1992, the last years of the S&L crisis, a disaster whose pansystemic nature was comparable to the mortgage fiasco, albeit vastly smaller. Black describes the regulatory MO back then. "Every year," he says, "you had thousands of criminal referrals, maybe 500 enforcement actions, 150 civil suits and hundreds of convictions."

But beginning in the mid-Nineties, when former Goldman co-chairman Bob Rubin served as Bill Clinton's senior economic-policy adviser, the government began moving toward a regulatory system that relied almost exclusively on voluntary compliance by the banks. Old-school criminal referrals disappeared down the chute of history along with floppy disks and scripted television entertainment. In 1995, according to an independent study, banking regulators filed 1,837 referrals. During the height of the financial crisis, between 2007 and 2010, they averaged just 72 a year.

But spiking almost all criminal referrals wasn't enough for Wall Street. In 2004, in an extraordinary sequence of regulatory rollbacks that helped pave the way for the financial crisis, the top five investment banks — Goldman, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns — persuaded the government to create a new, voluntary approach to regulation called Consolidated Supervised Entities. CSE was the soft touch to end all soft touches. Here is how the SEC's inspector general described the program's regulatory army: "The Office of CSE Inspections has only two staff in Washington and five staff in the New York regional office."

Among the bankers who helped convince the SEC to go for this ludicrous program was Hank Paulson, Goldman's CEO at the time. And in exchange for "submitting" to this new, voluntary regime of law enforcement, Goldman and other banks won the right to lend in virtually unlimited amounts, regardless of their cash reserves — a move that fueled the catastrophe of 2008, when banks like Bear and Merrill were lending out 35 dollars for every one in their vaults.

Goldman's chief financial officer then and now, a fellow named David Viniar, wrote a letter in February 2004, commending the SEC for its efforts to develop "a regulatory framework that will contribute to the safety and soundness of financial institutions and markets by aligning regulatory capital requirements more closely with well-developed internal risk-management practices." Translation: Thanks for letting us ignore all those pesky regulations while we turn the staid underwriting business into a Charlie Sheen house party.

Goldman and the other banks argued that they didn't need government supervision for a very simple reason: Rooting out corruption and fraud was in their own self-interest. In the event of financial wrongdoing, they insisted, they would do their civic duty and protect the markets. But in late 2006, well before many of the other players on Wall Street realized what was going on, the top dogs at Goldman — including the aforementioned Viniar — started to fear they were sitting on a time bomb of billions in toxic assets. Yet instead of sounding the alarm, the very first thing Goldman did was tell no one. And the second thing it did was figure out a way to make money on the knowledge by screwing its own clients. So not only did Goldman throw a full-blown "bite me" on its own self-righteous horseshit about "internal risk management," it more or less instantly sped way beyond inaction straight into craven manipulation.

"This is the dog that didn't bark," says Eliot Spitzer, who tangled with Goldman during his years as New York's attorney general. "Their whole political argument for a decade was 'Leave us alone, trust us to regulate ourselves.' They not only abdicated that responsibility, they affirmatively traded against the entire market."

By the end of 2006, Goldman was sitting atop a $6 billion bet on American home loans. The bet was a byproduct of Goldman having helped create a new trading index called the ABX, through which it accumulated huge holdings in mortgage-related securities. But in December 2006, a series of top Goldman executives — including Viniar, mortgage chief Daniel Sparks and senior executive Thomas Montag — came to the conclusion that Goldman was overexposed to mortgages and should get out from under its huge bet as quickly as possible. Internal memos indicate that the executives soon became aware of the host of scams that would crater the global economy: home loans awarded with no documentation, loans with little or no equity in them. On December 14th, Viniar met with Sparks and other executives, and stressed the need to get "closer to home" — i.e., to reduce the bank's giant bet on mortgages.

Sparks followed up that meeting with a seven-point memo laying out how to unload the bank's mortgages. Entry No. 2 is particularly noteworthy. "Distribute as much as possible on bonds created from new loan securitizations," Sparks wrote, "and clean previous positions." In other words, the bank needed to find suckers to buy as much of its risky inventory as possible. Goldman was like a car dealership that realized it had a whole lot full of cars with faulty brakes. Instead of announcing a recall, it surged ahead with a two-fold plan to make a fortune: first, by dumping the dangerous products on other people, and second, by taking out life insurance against the fools who bought the deadly cars.

The day he received the Sparks memo, Viniar seconded the plan in a gleeful cheerleading e-mail. "Let's be aggressive distributing things," he wrote, "because there will be very good opportunities as the markets [go] into what is likely to be even greater distress, and we want to be in a position to take advantage of them." Translation: Let's find as many suckers as we can as fast as we can, because we'll only make more money as more and more shit hits the fan.

By February 2007, two months after the Sparks memo, Goldman had gone from betting $6 billion on mortgages to betting $10 billion against them — a shift of $16 billion. Even CEO Lloyd "I'm doing God's work" Blankfein wondered aloud about the bank's progress in "cleaning" its crap. "Could/should we have cleaned up these books before," Blankfein wrote in one e-mail, "and are we doing enough right now to sell off cats and dogs in other books throughout the division?"

How did Goldman sell off its "cats and dogs"? Easy: It assembled new batches of risky mortgage bonds and dumped them on their clients, who took Goldman's word that they were buying a product the bank believed in. The names of the deals Goldman used to "clean" its books — chief among them Hudson and Timberwolf — are now notorious on Wall Street. Each of the deals appears to represent a different and innovative brand of shamelessness and deceit.

In the marketing materials for the Hudson deal, Goldman claimed that its interests were "aligned" with its clients because it bought a tiny, $6 million slice of the riskiest portion of the offering. But what it left out is that it had shorted the entire deal, to the tune of a $2 billion bet against its own clients. The bank, in fact, had specifically designed Hudson to reduce its exposure to the very types of mortgages it was selling — one of its creators, trading chief Michael Swenson, later bragged about the "extraordinary profits" he made shorting the housing market. All told, Goldman dumped $1.2 billion of its own crappy "cats and dogs" into the deal — and then told clients that the assets in Hudson had come not from its own inventory, but had been "sourced from the Street."

Hilariously, when Senate investigators asked Goldman to explain how it could claim it had bought the Hudson assets from "the Street" when in fact it had taken them from its own inventory, the bank's head of CDO trading, David Lehman, claimed it was accurate to say the assets came from "the Street" because Goldman was part of the Street. "They were like, 'We are the Street,'" laughs one investigator.

Hudson lost massive amounts of money almost immediately after the sale was completed. Goldman's biggest client, Morgan Stanley, begged it to liquidate the investment and get out while they could still salvage some value. But Goldman refused, stalling for months as its clients roasted to death in a raging conflagration of losses. At one point, John Pearce, the Morgan Stanley rep dealing with Goldman, lost his temper at the bank's refusal to sell, breaking his phone in frustration. "One day I hope I get the real reason why you are doing this to me," he told a Goldman broker.

Goldman insists it was only required to liquidate the assets "in an orderly fashion." But the bank had an incentive to drag its feet: Goldman's huge bet against the deal meant that the worse Hudson performed, the more money Goldman made. After all, the entire point of the transaction was to screw its own clients so Goldman could "clean its books." The crime was far from victimless: Morgan Stanley alone lost nearly $960 million on the Hudson deal, which admittedly doesn't do much to tug the heartstrings. Except that quickly after Goldman dumped this near-billion-dollar loss on Morgan Stanley, Morgan Stanley turned around and dumped it on taxpayers, who within a year were spending $10 billion bailing out the sucker bank through the TARP program.

It is worth pointing out here that Goldman's behavior in the Hudson scam makes a mockery of standards in the underwriting business. Courts have held that "the relationship between the underwriter and its customer implicitly involves a favorable recommendation of the issued security." The SEC, meanwhile, requires that broker-dealers like Goldman disclose "material adverse facts," which among other things includes "adverse interests." Former prosecutors and regulators I interviewed point to these areas as potential avenues for prosecution; you can judge for yourself if a $2 billion bet against clients qualifies as an "adverse interest" that should have been disclosed.

But these "adverse interests" weren't even the worst part of Hudson. Goldman also used a complex pricing method to turn the deal into an impressive triple screwing. Essentially, Goldman bought some of the mortgage assets in the Hudson deal at a discount, resold them to clients at a higher price and pocketed the difference. This is a little like getting an invoice from an interior decorator who, in addition to his fee for services, charges you $170 a roll for brand-name wallpaper he's actually buying off the back of a truck for $63.

To recap: Goldman, to get $1.2 billion in crap off its books, dumps a huge lot of deadly mortgages on its clients, lies about where that crap came from and claims it believes in the product even as it's betting $2 billion against it. When its victims try to run out of the burning house, Goldman stands in the doorway, blasts them all with gasoline before they can escape, and then has the balls to send a bill overcharging its victims for the pleasure of getting fried.

Timberwolf, the most notorious of Goldman's scams, was another car whose engine exploded right out of the lot. As with Hudson, Goldman clients who bought into the deal had no idea they were being sold the "cats and dogs" that the bank was desperately trying to get off its books. An Australian hedge fund called Basis Capital sank $100 million into the deal on June 18th, 2007, and almost immediately found itself in a full-blown death spiral. "We bought it, and Goldman made their first margin call 16 days later," says Eric Lewis, a lawyer for Basis, explaining how Goldman suddenly required his client to put up cash to cover expected losses. "They said, 'We need $5 million.' We're like, what the fuck, what's going on?" Within a month, Basis lost $37.5 million, and was forced to file for bankruptcy.

In many ways, Timberwolf was a perfect symbol of the insane faith-based mathematics and blackly corrupt marketing that defined the mortgage bubble. The deal was built on a satanic derivative structure called the CDO-squared. A normal CDO is a giant pool of loans that are chopped up and layered into different "tranches": the prime or AAA level, the BBB or "mezzanine" level, and finally the equity or "toxic waste" level. Banks had no trouble finding investors for the AAA pieces, which involve betting on the safest borrowers in the pool. And there were usually investors willing to make higher-odds bets on the crack addicts and no-documentation immigrants at the potentially lucrative bottom of the pool. But the unsexy BBB parts of the pool were hard to sell, and the banks didn't want to be stuck holding all of these risky pieces. So what did they do? They took all the extra unsold pieces, threw them in a big box, and repeated the original "tranching" process all over again. What originally were all BBB pieces were diced up and divided anew — and, presto, you suddenly had new AAA securities and new toxic-waste securities.

A CDO, to begin with, is already a highly dubious tool for magically converting risky subprime mortgages into AAA investments. A CDO-squared doubles down on that lunacy, taking the waste products of the original process and converting them into AAA investments. This is kind of like taking all the kids who were picked last to play volleyball in every gym class of every public school in the state, throwing them in a new gym, and pretending that the first 10 kids picked are varsity-level players. Then you take all the unpicked kids left over from that process, throw them in a gym with similar kids from all 50 states, and call the first 10 kids picked All-Americans.

Those "All-Americans" were the assets in the Timberwolf deal. These were the recycled nightmare dregs of the mortgage craze — to quote Beavis and Butt-Head, "the ass of the ass."

Goldman knew the deal sucked long before it dinged the Aussies in Basis Capital for $100 million. In February 2007, Goldman mortgage chief Daniel Sparks and senior executive Thomas Montag exchanged e-mails about the risk of holding all the crap in the Timberwolf deal.

MONTAG: "CDO-squared — how big and how dangerous?"
SPARKS: "Roughly $2 billion, and they are the deals to worry about."

Goldman executives were so "worried" about holding this stuff, in fact, that they quickly sent directives to all of their salespeople, offering "ginormous" credits to anyone who could manage to find a dupe to take the Timberwolf All-Americans off their hands. On Wall Street, directives issued from above are called "axes," and Goldman's upper management spent a great deal of the spring of 2007 "axing" Timberwolf. In a crucial conference call on May 20th that included Viniar, Sparks oversaw a PowerPoint presentation spelling out, in writing, that Goldman's mortgage desk was "most concerned" about Timberwolf and another CDO-squared deal. In a later e-mail, he offered an even more dire assessment of such deals: "There is real market-meltdown potential."

On May 22nd, two days after the conference call, Goldman sales rep George Maltezos urged the Australians at Basis to hurry up and buy what the bank knew was a deadly investment, suggesting that the "return on invested capital for Basis is over 60 percent." Maltezos was so stoked when he first identified the Aussies as a target in the scam that he subject-lined his e-mail "Utopia."

"I think," Maltezos wrote, "I found white elephant, flying pig and unicorn all at once."

The whole transaction can be summed up by the now-notorious e-mail that Montag wrote to Sparks only four days after they sold $100 million of Timberwolf to Basis. "Boy," Montag wrote, "that timeberwof [sic] was one shitty deal."

Last year, in the one significant regulatory action the government has won against the big banks, the SEC sued Goldman over a scam called Abacus, in which the bank "rented" its name to a billionaire hedge-fund viper to fleece investors out of more than $1 billion. Goldman agreed to pay $550 million to settle the suit, though no criminal charges were brought against the bank or its executives. But in light of the Levin report, that SEC action now looks woefully inadequate. Yes, it was a record fine — but it pales in comparison to the money Goldman has taken from the government since the crash. As Spitzer notes, Goldman's reaction was basically, "OK, we'll pay you $550 million to settle the Abacus case — that's a small price to pay for the $12.9 billion we got for the AIG bailout." Now, adds Spitzer, "everybody can just go home and pretend it was only $12.4 billion — and Goldman can smile all the way to the bank. The question is, now that we've seen this report, there are a bunch of story lines that seem to be at least as egregious as Abacus. Are they going to bring cases?"

Here is where the supporters of Goldman and other big banks will stand up and start wanding the air full of confusing terms like "scienter" and "loss causation" — legalese mumbo jumbo that attempts to convince the ignorantly enraged onlooker that, according to American law, these grotesque tales of grand theft and fraud you've just heard are actually more innocent than you think. Yes, they will say, it may very well be a prosecutable crime for a corner-store Arab to take $2 from a customer selling tap water as Perrier. But that does not mean it's a crime for Goldman Sachs to take $100 million from a foreign hedge fund doing the same thing! No, sir, not at all! Then you'll be told that the Supreme Court has been limiting corporate liability for fraud for decades, that in order to gain a conviction one must prove a conscious intent to deceive, that the 1976 ruling in Ernst and Ernst clearly states....

Leave all that aside for a moment. Though many legal experts agree there is a powerful argument that the Levin report supports a criminal charge of fraud, this stuff can keep the lawyers tied up for years. So let's move on to something much simpler. In the spring of 2010, about a year into his investigation, Sen. Levin hauled all of the principals from these rotten Goldman deals to Washington, made them put their hands on the Bible and take oaths just like normal people, and demanded that they explain themselves. The legal definition of financial fraud may be murky and complex, but everybody knows you can't lie to Congress.

"Article 18 of the United States Code, Section 1001," says Loyola University law professor Michael Kaufman. "There are statutes that prohibit perjury and obstruction of justice, but this is the federal statute that explicitly prohibits lying to Congress."

The law is simple: You're guilty if you "knowingly and willfully" make a "materially false, fictitious or fraudulent statement or representation." The punishment is up to five years in federal prison.

When Roger Clemens went to Washington and denied taking a shot of steroids in his ass, the feds indicted him — relying not on a year's worth of graphically self-incriminating e-mails, but chiefly on the testimony of a single individual who had been given a deal by the government. Yet the Justice Department has shown no such prosecutorial zeal since April 27th of last year, when the Goldman executives who oversaw the Timberwolf, Hudson and Abacus deals arrived on the Hill and one by one — each seemingly wearing the same mask of faint boredom and irritated condescension — sat before Levin's committee and dodged volleys of questions.

Before the hearing, even some of Levin's allies worried privately about his taking on Goldman and other powerful interests. The job, they said, was best left to professional prosecutors, people with experience building cases. "A senator's office is not an enormous repository of expertise," one former regulator told me. But in the case of this particular senator, that concern turned out to be misplaced. A Harvard-educated lawyer, Levin has a long record of using his subcommittee to spend a year or more carefully building cases that lead to criminal prosecutions. His 2003 investigation into abusive tax shelters led to 19 indictments of individuals at KPMG, while a 2006 probe fueled insider-trading charges against the notorious Wyly brothers, a pair of billionaire Texans who manipulated offshore investment trusts. The investigation of Goldman was an attempt to find out what went wrong in the years leading up to the financial crash, and the questioning of the bank's executives was not one of those for-the-cameras-only events where congressmen wing ad-libbed questions in search of sound bites. In the weeks leading up to the hearing, Levin's team carefully rehearsed the moment with committee members. They knew the possible answers that Goldman might give, and they were ready with specific counterquestions. What ensued looked more like a good old-fashioned courtroom grilling than a photo-op for grinning congressmen.

Sparks, who stepped down as Goldman's mortgage chief in 2008, cut a striking figure in his testimony. With his severe crew cut, deep-set eyes and jockish intransigence, he looked like a cross between H.R. Haldeman and John Rocker. He repeatedly dodged questions from Levin about whether or not the bank had a responsibility to tell its clients that it was betting against the same stuff it was selling them. When asked directly if he had that responsibility, Sparks answered, "The clients who did not want to participate in that deal did not." When Levin pressed him again, asking if he had a duty to disclose that Goldman had an "adverse interest" to the deals being sold to clients, Sparks fidgeted and pretended not to comprehend the question. "Mr. Chairman," he said, "I'm just trying to understand."

OK, fine — non-answer answers. "My guess is they were all pretty well coached up," says Kaufman, the law professor. But then Sparks had a revealing exchange with Sen. Jon Tester of Montana. Tester calls the Goldman deals "a wreck waiting to happen," noting that the CDOs "were all downgraded to junk in very short order."

At which point, Sparks replies, "Well, senator, at the time we did those deals, we expected those deals to perform."

Tester then cannily asks if by "perform," Sparks means go to shit — which would have been an honest answer. "Perform in what way?" Tester asks. "Perform to go to junk so that the shorts made out?"

Unable to resist the taunt, Sparks makes a fateful decision to defend his honor. "To not be downgraded to junk in that short a time frame," he says. Then he pauses and decides to dispense with the hedging phrase "in that short a time frame."

"In fact," Sparks says, "to not be downgraded to junk."

So Sparks goes before Congress and, under oath, tells a U.S. senator that at the time he was selling Timberwolf, he expected it to "perform." But an internal document he approved in May 2007 predicted exactly the opposite, warning that Goldman's mortgage desk expected such deals to "underperform." Here are some other terms that Sparks used in e-mails about the subprime market affecting deals like Timberwolf around that same time: "bad and getting worse," "get out of everything," "game over," "bad news everywhere" and "the business is totally dead."

And we indicted Roger Clemens?

Another extraordinary example of Goldman's penchant for truth avoidance came when Joshua Birnbaum, former head of structured-products trading for the bank, gave a deposition to Levin's committee. Asked point-blank if Goldman's huge "short" on mortgages was an intentional bet against the market or simply a "hedge" against potential losses, Birnbaum played dumb. "I do not know whether the shorts were a hedge," he said. But the committee, it turned out, already knew that Birnbaum had written a memo in which he had spelled out the truth: "The shorts were not a hedge." When Birnbaum's lawyers learned that their client's own words had been used against him, they hilariously sent an outraged letter complaining that Birnbaum didn't know the committee had his memo when he decided to dodge the question. They also submitted a "supplemental" answer. Birnbaum now said, "Having reviewed the document the staff did not previously provide me" — his own words! — "I can now recall that ... I believed ... these short positions were not a hedge." (Goldman, for its part, dismisses Birnbaum as a single trader who "neither saw nor knew the firm's overall risk positions.")

When it came time for Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein to testify, the banker hedged and stammered like a brain-addled boxer who couldn't quite follow the questions. When Levin asked how Blankfein felt about the fact that Goldman collected $13 billion from U.S. taxpayers through the AIG bailout, the CEO deflected over and over, insisting that Goldman would somehow have made that money anyway through its private insurance policies on AIG. When Levin pressed Blankfein, pointing out that he hadn't answered the question, Blankfein simply peered at Levin like he didn't understand.

But Blankfein also testified unequivocally to the following:

"Much has been said about the supposedly massive short Goldman Sachs had on the U.S. housing market. The fact is, we were not consistently or significantly net-short the market in residential mortgage-related products in 2007 and 2008. We didn't have a massive short against the housing market, and we certainly did not bet against our clients."

Levin couldn't believe what he was hearing. "Heck, yes, I was offended," he says. "Goldman's CEO claimed the firm 'didn't have a massive short,' when the opposite was true." First of all, in Goldman's own internal memoranda, the bank calls its giant, $13 billion bet against mortgages "the big short." Second, by the time Sparks and Co. were unloading the Timberwolves of the world on their "unicorns" and "flying pigs" in the summer of 2007, Goldman's mortgage department accounted for 54 percent of the bank's risk. That means more than half of all the bank's risk was wrapped up in its bet against the mortgage market — a "massive short" by any definition. Indeed, the bank was betting so much money on mortgages that its executives had become comically blasé about giant swings on a daily basis. When Goldman lost more than $100 million on August 8th, 2007, Montag circulated this e-mail: "So who lost the hundy?"

This month, after releasing his report, Levin sent all of this material to the Justice Department. His conclusion was simple. "In my judgment," he declared, "Goldman clearly misled their clients, and they misled the Congress." Goldman, unsurprisingly, disagreed: "Our testimony was truthful and accurate, and that applies to all of our testimony," said spokesman Michael DuVally. In a statement to Rolling Stone, Goldman insists that its behavior throughout the period covered in the Levin report was consistent with responsible business practice, and that its machinations in the mortgage market were simply an attempt to manage risk.

It wouldn't be hard for federal or state prosecutors to use the Levin report to make a criminal case against Goldman. I ask Eliot Spitzer what he would do if he were still attorney general and he saw the Levin report. "Once the steam stopped coming out of my ears, I'd be dropping so many subpoenas," he says. "And I would parse every potential inconsistency between the testimony they gave to Congress and the facts as we now understand them."

I ask what inconsistencies jump out at him. "They keep claiming they were only marginally short, that it was more just servicing their clients," he says. "But it sure doesn't look like that." He pauses. "They were $13 billion short. That's big — 50 percent of their risk. It was so completely disproportionate."

Lloyd Blankfein went to Washington and testified under oath that Goldman Sachs didn't make a massive short bet and didn't bet against its clients. The Levin report proves that Goldman spent the whole summer of 2007 riding a "big short" and took a multibillion-dollar bet against its clients, a bet that incidentally made them enormous profits. Are we all missing something? Is there some different and higher standard of triple- and quadruple-lying that applies to bank CEOs but not to baseball players?

This issue is bigger than what Goldman executives did or did not say under oath. The Levin report catalogs dozens of instances of business practices that are objectively shocking, no matter how any high-priced lawyer chooses to interpret them: gambling billions on the misfortune of your own clients, gouging customers on prices millions of dollars at a time, keeping customers trapped in bad investments even as they begged the bank to sell, plus myriad deceptions of the "failure to disclose" variety, in which customers were pitched investment deals without ever being told they were designed to help Goldman "clean" its bad inventory. For years, the soundness of America's financial system has been based on the proposition that it's a crime to lie in a prospectus or a sales brochure. But the Levin report reveals a bank gone way beyond such pathetic little boundaries; the collective picture resembles a financial version of The Jungle, a portrait of corporate sociopathy that makes you never want to go near a sausage again.

Upton Sinclair's narrative shocked the nation into a painful realization about the pervasive filth and corruption behind America's veneer of smart, robust efficiency. But Carl Levin's very similar tale probably will not. The fact that this evidence comes from a U.S. senator's office, and not the FBI or the SEC, is itself an element in the worsening tale of lawlessness and despotism that sparked a global economic meltdown. "Why should Carl Levin be the one who needs to do this?" asks Spitzer. "Where's the SEC? Where are any of the regulatory bodies?"

This isn't just a matter of a few seedy guys stealing a few bucks. This is America: Corporate stealing is practically the national pastime, and Goldman Sachs is far from the only company to get away with doing it. But the prominence of this bank and the high-profile nature of its confrontation with a powerful Senate committee makes this a political story as well. If the Justice Department fails to give the American people a chance to judge this case — if Goldman skates without so much as a trial — it will confirm once and for all the embarrassing truth: that the law in America is subjective, and crime is defined not by what you did, but by who you are.



Monday, May 16, 2011

Strauss-Kahn forcibly grabbed the victim's vaginal area

http://assets.nydailynews.com/img/2011/05/17/alg_dominique_strauss_kahn2.jpg

IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn was denied bail on Monday on charges he attempted to rape a hotel maid, a crushing blow for the man until recently considered a front-runner for the French presidency and who oversaw world finance.

Looking tired, with a light stubble and wearing the same clothes as on Sunday, Strauss-Kahn listened as prosecutors told a Manhattan Criminal Court judge they are investigating whether he may have engaged in similar conduct once before.

Strauss-Kahn faces up to 25 years in prison if convicted, and he should be held behind bars because he might flee to France, the prosecutors said.

Defence lawyers failed to get Strauss-Kahn released on $1 million (615,000 pounds) bail. They denied the charges against their client, whose arrest has thrown the IMF into turmoil just as it is trying to help fix the euro zone's deep debt crisis.

"We are obviously disappointed by the court's decision. We will prove...that Mr Strauss-Kahn is innocent of these charges," defence attorney Ben Brafman told reporters.

"His principal intention is to try and clear his name and re-establish his good name."

It was Strauss-Kahn's first appearance in court since he allegedly sexually assaulted a chamber maid who came to clean his room at the Sofitel in Times Square. He was pulled off an Air France jet on Saturday minutes before it left for Paris. The case has altered France's political landscape and left the IMF leadership in turmoil.

The judge set May 20 as the next date for the case.

A defence lawyer said Strauss-Kahn did not flee the hotel and that the person he was having lunch with on Saturday, the day of the incident, will testify on his behalf.

On Sunday the maid, 32, picked Strauss-Kahn from a police lineup that included five other men, a police spokesman said.

Graphic details were described by prosecutors in the courtroom. They alleged Strauss-Kahn shut the door of his hotel room to prevent the maid from leaving.

"He grabbed the victim's chest without consent, attempted to remove her pantyhose, and forcibly grabbed the victim's vaginal area," the prosecutors' office said in a written statement, summarizing the complaint against Strauss-Kahn.

"His penis made contact with the victim's mouth twice through the use of force."

The judge's order that Strauss-Kahn should be kept in custody in New York raises further questions about his future as the globe-trotting managing director of the IMF.

The IMF board was due to meet informally on Monday for an update on its managing director. His second in command, John Lipsky, already has been put in charge in Strauss-Kahn's absence.

The White House said the United States, the single biggest member of the fund, remained confident in the IMF's ability to do its job.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whom Strauss-Kahn had been due to meet on Sunday, said that finding a successor for the Frenchman was "not a question for today," but there were good grounds to have a European candidate ready.

European sources said French Economy Minister Christine Lagarde had been picking up support before the Strauss-Kahn news broke. Former Turkish Economy Minister Kemal Dervis is considered a favourite among the non-European possibilities.

FORENSIC EXAMINATION

The IMF chief underwent a forensic examination by police looking for scratches or evidence of his alleged assault.

Strauss-Kahn led the IMF through the 2007-09 global financial meltdown, pressing for stimulus measures and interest rate cuts to avoid a depression. He has been central in galvanizing Europe to tackle its debt woes.

The IMF said Strauss-Kahn had been in New York on private business during his $3,000-a-night stay at a luxury suite in the New York hotel.

French Socialist party leader Martine Aubry called the pictures of the IMF chief, which dominated news bulletins, "profoundly humiliating" and told reporters: "Fortunately in France we have a law on the presumption of innocence which means that at this stage of proceedings, people cannot be shown like this."

More allegations involving Strauss-Kahn surfaced in Paris, where a lawyer said a woman writer was considering filing a legal complaint against the IMF chief over an alleged sexual incident dating back to 2002.

NAKED CHASE

Police have said the maid had described how the naked IMF chief sprang on her from the bathroom of his hotel suite, chased her down a hall, pulled her into a bedroom and assaulted her.

She told police she broke free but that he dragged her into the bathroom where he forced himself on her again.

Strauss-Kahn's wife, French television personality Anne Sinclair, jumped to her husband's defence, saying she did not believe the accusations "for a single second," and other supporters in France cautioned against a rush to judgement.

Police say Strauss-Kahn left his suite in such a rush that he left his mobile phone behind, but a French tourist who said she saw him check out told France 2 television he had appeared calm and in no hurry.

After he called the hotel from John F. Kennedy airport asking about his phone, police found him in the first-class section of an Air France flight bound for Paris. He was pulled from the flight minutes before takeoff.

Police say the IMF chief does not have diplomatic immunity from the charges.

Defence attorney Brafman is a high-profile criminal lawyer who was part of the team that successfully defended pop singer Michael Jackson against child molestation charges in 2005. Brafman also won an acquittal on weapons and bribery charges against rap mogul Sean "P. Diddy" Combs.

In France, Strauss-Kahn had not yet declared his candidacy but was widely expected to seek the Socialist Party nomination.

Early opinion polls gave him a big lead over conservative incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy, who is likely to seek a second term at the election next April.

France's government as well as Strauss-Kahn's allies and rivals called for caution and respect for the presumption of innocence. But unless the case against him collapses rapidly, it is hard to see how he could enter the Socialist primary, for which the deadline for candidates to declare is July 13.

That leaves former party leader Francois Hollande and 2007 presidential candidate Segolene Royal as the only declared Socialist contenders, but Aubry or former Prime Minister Laurent Fabius might join the race if Strauss-Kahn is out.

French voters are famously tolerant of political leaders' extramarital affairs, but the allegations against Strauss-Kahn are entirely different, and much more serious.

The IMF faces embarrassing questions of its own, because Strauss-Kahn's character had been questioned before. In 2008, he apologized for "an error of judgement after an affair with a female IMF economist who was his subordinate.

The fund's board warned him against improper conduct, but cleared him of harassment and abuse of power and kept him in his job. It will now face new scrutiny over whether that response was too weak, especially as there have been persistent rumours about Strauss-Kahn making sexual advances to women.

The left-leaning French daily Liberation published comments it said he had made at a private lunch with reporters last month in which he said the three most difficult hurdles for his presidential bid would be "money, women and my Jewishness."

(Additional reporting by Michelle Nichols, Lesley Wroughton, Noeleen Walder, Christine Kearney, Andrew Longstreth, Brian Love, Catherine Bremer, John Irish, Gernot Heller, Evren Ballim; Writing by William Schomberg, Peter Millership and Paul Taylor, editing by Stella Dawson and Christopher Wilson)

Dominique Strauss Kahn vs CIA Sarkozy

They want to finish him off in time for the 2012 French presidential election (22 April and 6 May 2012)!!

Background:
http://u2r2h-documents.blogspot.com/2011/05/strauss-kahn-did-not-flee-maid-worked-3.html

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What the third world thinks about sex allegations in New York.

Strauss-Kahn: old sexual assault claim resurfaces

IMF chief allegedly described as 'rutting chimpanzee' by Tristane Banon who claims she had to fight him off in 2002

Anglo-Saxon morals. One inappropriate gesture, one unfortunate comment, and there will be a media hue and cry.

Killing people without trial is ok.


Sarkozi must be laughing all the way to the bank...

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freemason sign

The follwing article is NOT fictional

Operation Sarkozy : how the CIA placed one of its agents at the presidency of the French Republic
by Thierry Meyssan

One should judge Nicolas Sarkozy according to his actions, and not according to his personality. Yet when his doings surprise even his own constituents, it is legitimate to take a detailed look at his biography and question the bonds that brought him to power. Thierry Meyssan has decided to write the truth about the French Republic's president background. All the information included in this article is provable, except for two assertions signalled by the author who alone takes full responsibility.

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War Criminal Bush and Sarkozi

Tired of the overextended presidencies of François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac, the French elected Nicolas Sarkozy counting on his energy to revitalize their country. They were hoping for a break with years of no-change and ideologies of the past. What they got instead was a break with the very principles which founded the French nation, and have been shocked by this "hyper-president", seizing every day a new dossier, attracting towards him the right and the left wing, and tearing apart all points of reference to the point of creating a total confusion.

Like children who have just made a boo-boo, the French are too busy trying to find excuses for themselves to admit the magnitude of the damages and of their naiveté, and they refuse all the more to see who Nicolas Sarkozy really is, that they realize they should have known since a long time who he was.

One must say the man has talents. Like a magician he tricked them. By offering them the spectacle of his private life and posing in People's magazines, he got them to forget his political history.

The aim of this article must be clearly understood. It is not to reproach to M. Sarkozy his family, his friends or his professional ties, but the fact of having hidden those ties from the French who believed, wrongly, they were electing a free man.

To understand how a man whom all agree today to view as an agent of the United States and of Israel was able to become the head of the Gaullist party and the president of the French Republic, we must go back in time, very very far back. We must make a long digression in the course of which we will present the protagonists who are today taking their revenge.

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The family secrets

At the end of Second World War, the United States secret services relied on Italo-US godfather, Lucky Luciano, to control the security of American ports and prepare their disembarking in Sicily. The main contacts of Luciano — held at that time at a New York luxury prison — to the US intelligence services went notably through Frank Wisner, Sr. Later, when the "godfather" was liberated and chose to exile in Italy, they operated through his Corsican "Ambassador", Étienne Léandri.

In 1958, worried about a possible victory of the FLN in Algeria which could open the way to Soviet influence in Northern Africa, the United States decided to provoke a military coup d'Etat in France. The operation was jointly organized by the Cia's Direction of Planning – theoretically lead by Frank Wisner, Sr. – and by NATO. But Wisner had already become senile by that time and it was his successor, Allan Dulles, who supervised the coup. Out of Algeria, French generals organized a Public Salvation Committee which pressured the Parisian civilian authorities to vote full powers to General de Gaulle without having had to use force.

Yet, Charles de Gaulle was not the pawn the Anglo-Saxons had believed they could manipulate. In a first phase, he attempted to deal with the colonial contradiction by granting to the overseas territories a large autonomy within the French Union. But it was already too late to save the French empire; the colonized people didn't believe any longer in the promises of the Metropolitan France and demanded their independence. After victorious but fierce repression against those fighting for independence, de Gaulle decided to face reality, and in a rare show of political wisdom, he granted independence to each colony.

This turn about was perceived by most of those who brought him to power as a betrayal. The CIA and NATO supported then all kinds of plots to eliminate him, among which a missed coup and some 40 attempts to murder him. However, certain of his followers approved of his political evolution. Around Charles Pasqua, they created the SAC (Civic action services), a militia to protect him.

Pasqua was both a Corsican bandit and a former resistant. He married the daughter of a Canadian bootlegger who made fortune during the prohibition and he directed the Ricard company who, after commercialising absinthe, a forbidden alcohol, won respectability by converting to the sales of another alcohol based on liquorice (anisette). The company continued however to serve as a cover for all sorts of traffics connected to the New York Italian American family of the Genovese (and) that of Lucky Luciano. It is therefore not surprising that Pasqua called on Étienne Léandri (Ambassador of Luciano) to recruit the hands that constituted the Gaullist militia. A third man played an important role in the formation of the SAC, the former body guard of de Gaulle, Achille Peretti, also a Corsican.

Thus protected, de Gaulle designs an audacious national independence policy. Even though asserting his belonging to the Atlantic camp, he questions the Anglo-Saxon leadership. He opposes the entry of the United Kingdom into the European common market (1961 and 1967); refuses the deployment of UN helmets into Congo (1961); encourages the Latin American states to become free of US imperialism (speech of Mexico, 1964); kicks NATO out France and withdraws from the Atlantic Alliance's integrated command (1966); he condemns Israeli expansionism during the Six Day war (1967); supports independence of Quebec (Speech of Montreal 1967), etc.

Simultaneously, de Gaulle consolidated the power of France by endowing it with a military industrial-complex including a nuclear deterrent and guarantying its energy provisions. He conveniently distanced the encumbering Corsicans of his entourage by entrusting them with foreign missions. Thus, Étienne Léandri became a leader of the ELF group (today Total), while Charles Pasqua the trusted man of the Francophone heads of State in Africa.

Conscious that he could not defy the Anglo-Saxons on all fronts at the same time, De Gaulle allied himself to the Rothschild family, choosing as Prime Minister, Georges Pompidou, who was the fondé de pouvoir of the bank. The two men constituted an efficient tandem, the political audacity of the first never losing sight of the economic realism of the second.

When De Gaulle resigned in 1969, Georges Pompidou succeeded him briefly at the Presidency before being taken out by a cancer. The historical Gaullists did not admit his leadership, however, and worried about his anglophile proclivities. They howled treason when Pompidou, supported by the General Secretary of the Élysée, Edouard Balladur, had "perfidious Albion" join the European Common Market.

The making of Nicolas Sarkozy

That decorum having been put into place, we can now return to our main character, Nicolas Sarkozy. Born in 1955 he is son to a Hungarian catholic nobleman, Pal Sarkösy of Nagy-Bosca, who sought refuge in France after fleeing the Red Army, and to Andree Mallah, a Jewish commoner from Thessalonica. After having three children (Guillaume, Nicolas and François), the couple divorced. Pal Sarkösy of Nagy-Bocsa remarried with an aristocrat, Christine de Ganay, with whom he had two children (Pierre Olivier and Caroline). Nicolas will not be raised by his own parents alone, but will go back and forth within this recomposed family.

His mother became the secretary of De Gaulle's bodyguard, Achille Peretti. The latter, after founding the SAC, pursued a brilliant political career. He was elected Deputy and Mayor of Neuilly sur Seine, the richest residential suburb of the capital, and later President of the National Assembly.

Unfortunately, in 1972, Achille Peretti comes under grave accusations. In the United States, Time Magazine reveals the existence of a secret criminal organization « the Corsican Union » which controls a large part of the drug trade between Europe and America, the famous « French connection » which Hollywood popularized on the large screen. Based on parliamentary auditions and on his own investigations, Time names the name of a mafia boss, Jean Venturi, arrested a few years earlier in Canada, who is none other than Charles Pasqua's commercial delegate at the liquor society Ricard. The names of several families headed by the "Corsican Union" are cited, among which that of the Peretti. Achille denies, but is forced to renounce to the presidency of the National Assembly, and barely escapes a "suicide"…

In 1977, Pal Sarkösy of Nagy-Bocsa separates from his second wife, Christine de Ganay, who then gets together with the N°2 of the US State Department central administration. She marries him and settles in America with him. The world being very small, as everyone knows, her husband is none other than Frank Wisner, Jr, son of the previous. Junior's responsibilities at the CIA are unknown, but it is clear that he plays an important role. Nicolas, who remains close to his mother in law, his half brother and his half sister, begins to turn towards the United States where he "benefits" from training programs of the State Department.

During that same period, Nicolas Sarkozy adheres to the Gaullist party coming into frequent contact with Charles Pasqua, who was not only a national leader then, but also the head of the party's Haut de Seine department section.

Having finished Law School in 1982 and joined the Barr association, Nicolas Sarkozy married the niece of Achille Peretti. His best man was Charles Pasqua. As a lawyer, Sarkozy defended the interests of his mentors Corsican friends. He bought a property on the Island of Beauty, in Vico, and went as far as envisaging to make his name more "Corsican" by replacing the "y" by an "i": Sarkozi.

The next year, he was elected Mayor of Neuilly sur Seine in replacement of his uncle in law, Achille Peretti, thundered by a heart attack. However, it was not long before Nicolas Sarkozy betrayed his wife, and since 1984, he had a secret liaison with Cecilia, the wife of the most famous entertainer of French television at that time, Jacques Martin, whom he had met while celebrating their marriage, a function he exerted being mayor of Neuilly. That double life lasted five years, before the lovers decided to quit their respective couples in order to build a new home.

In 1992, Nicolas was best man in the marriage of Jacques Chirac's daughter, Claude, with an editorialist of Le Figaro. He couldn't refrain himself from seducing Claude and having a short liaison with her, while officially living with Cecilia. The cuckold husband committed suicide by absorbing drugs. The break was brutal and without pardon between the Chirac's and Nicolas Sarkozy.

In 1993, the left lost the legislative elections. President François Mitterrand refused to resign and entered into cohabitation with a right wing Prime Minister. Jacques Chirac who ambitioned the presidency, and was thinking at that point of constituting, with Edouard Balladur, a couple comparable to that of De Gaulle and Pompidou, refused to be Prime minister and left his post to his "30 year long friend", Edouard Balladur. In spite of his sulphurous past, Charles Pasqua became Interior Minister. While keeping high hand over Moroccan marijuana trade, he took advantage of his situation to legalize his other activities taking control of casinos, gambling and horse races in francophone Africa. He wove ties with Saudi Arabia and Israel and became an officer of honour to the Mossad. Nicolas Sarkozy on his part, became minister of Budget and spokesman for the government.

In Washington, Frank Wisner, Jr. became the successor of Paul Wolfowitz as head of the Political Planning department of the Department of Defense. Nobody noticed at that time the ties to the spokesman of the French government.

It is then that tensions similar to those which rocked the Gaullist party 30 years earlier, broke out between the historical Gaullists and the financial right wing, incarnated by Balladur. The new element was that Charles Pasqua and along with him, the young Nicolas Sarkozy, betray Jacques Chirac in order to join the Rothschild current. Mayhem breaks out. The conflict will reach a climax in 1995 when Edouard Balladur ran for president, against his former friend, Jacques Chirac, and was beaten. Foremost, following instructions from London and Washington, the Balladur government opened negotiations for membership status to the European Union and NATO to States of Central and Eastern Europe who had freed from Soviet control.

Havoc reigns then in the Gaullist party where the friends of yesterday are ready to kill themselves today. To be able to finance his electoral campaign, Edouard Balladur attempts to grab the secret slush fund of the Gaullist party, hidden in the double deckered accounting of the books of the oil group ELF.

The ride through the desert

Through out his first mandate, Jacques Chirac keeps Nicolas Sarkozy at arms distance. The man was discrete during his ride through the desert. Discretely, however, he continued to weave ties to the financial circles.

In 1996, finally succeeding to bring to conclusion an endless divorce procedure, Nicolas Sarkozy marries Cecilia. Two billionaires were their best men, Martin Bouygues and Bernard Arnaud (the richest man of the country).

The final act

Way before the Iraqi crisis, Frank Wisner Jr. and his colleagues at the CIA plan the destruction of the Gaullist current and the coming to power of Nicolas Sarkozy. They move in three phases: first, the elimination of the leadership of the Gaullist party and the take over of the party apparatus, then the elimination of his main right wing rival and the securing the nomination to the presidential election for the Gaullist party; finally, the elimination of any serious challenger on the left to make sure that Nicolas would win the presidential election.

During years, posthumous revelations by a real estate dealer kept the media on their toes. Before dying from a terminal disease, for reasons which remain unknown, he decided to video tape his confessions and for reasons which are even more obscure, the "cassette" landed in the hands of a Socialist party leader, Dominique Strauss Kahn, who addressed it indirectly to the media.

While the confessions of the real estate dealer did not lead to any juridical sanctions, they opened up the Pandora's Box. The main victim of the series of scandals was Prime Minister Alain Juppé. To protect Chirac, he assumed alone all the penal sanctions. The removal of Juppé from the front lodges opened the way for the take by Sarkozy of the leadership of the Gaullist party.

Sarkozy exploited then his position to force Jacques Chirac to take him into the government once again, in spite of their reciprocal hatred. In the end, he became Interior Minister. Mistake ! This post gave him control over the prefects and the internal intelligence apparatus which he used to gain positions of power over the large administrations.

He dealt also with Corsican affairs. Prefect Claude Érignac was murdered. Even though nobody claimed it, the murder was immediately interpreted as a challenge by the independentists to the Republic. Following a long hunt, the police managed to arrest a fleeing suspect, Yvan Colonna, son of a Socialist deputy. Caring little about the presumption of innocence, Nicolas Sarkozy announced the arrest, accusing the suspect of being the assassin. The news is too important, a mere two days away from the referendum the minister has organized in Corsica to modify the status of the island. Be as it may, the electors reject the Sarkozy project, who, according to some, favoured mafia interests. While Yvan Colonna was ultimately declared guilty, he always claimed his innocence and no material proof was ever found against him. Strangely, the man preferred to remain totally silent rather than reveal what he actually knew. We reveal here that prefect Érignac was not directly killed by the nationalists, but by a paid killer, immediately exfiltrated towards Angola where he was hired to the security of the Elf group. The mobile of the crime was precisely connected to the previous functions of Érignac, responsible for the African networks at Pasqua's cooperation ministry. As for Yvan Colonna, he is a personal friend of Nicolas Sarkozy since decades and their children have entertained social relations.

A new scandal broke out then: phoney computer listings were circulating falsely accusing several personalities of hiding bank accounts in Luxembourg, at Clearstream. Among the defamed personalities: Nicolas Sarkozy, who filed a suit insinuating that he suspected his right wing rival to the presidency, Dominique de Villepin, to have organized this machination. Sarkozy didn't hide his intention either to throw him in jail. In reality, the false listings were put in circulation by members of the French American Foundation, of which John Negroponte was the president and Frank Wisner Jr, the administrator. What the judges ignored and which we reveal here is that the listings were fabricated in London by a common office of the CIA and of MI6, Hakluyt and co, of which Frank Wisner is also an administrator.

Villepin denied the accusations, but was indicted, assigned to residence and, de facto, eliminated from political life temporarily. The road is thus free on the right wing for Nicolas Sarkozy. It remained for the opposition candidacies to be neutralized. The membership fees to the Socialist party were reduced to a symbolic level in order to attract new activists. Suddenly, thousands of youth take membership cards. Among them, there were at least 10 000 new members who are in reality militants from the "Lambertist" Trotskyite party, (named after its founder Pierre Lambert). This small extreme left group historically served the CIA against the Stalinist communists during the cold war (it is the equivalent of the Social democrats/USA of Max Schatchman, who trained the US neo-conservatives). It is not the first time the "Lambertists" infiltrate the Socialist party. They introduced there two notorious CIA agents : Lionel Jospin (who became Prime minister) and Jean Christophe Cambadelis, the main advisor to Dominique Strauss Kahn.

Primaries were organized inside the Socialist party to designate its candidate to the presidential election. Two personalities were competing: Laurent Fabius and Ségolène Royal. Only the first was a danger for Sarkozy. Dominique Strauss Kahn came into the race with the mission to eliminate Fabius at the last moment. Something he did with the help of the votes of the infiltrated "lambertists", who voted not for him but for Royal.

The operation is possible because Strauss Kahn is since long on the pay roll of the United States. Frenchmen ignore that he teaches at Stanford, where he was hired by the prévot Dean of the University, Condoleeza Rice. From the beginning of his term, Nicolas Sarkozy and Condoleeza Rice will thank Strauss Kahn by having him elected to the leadership of the International Monetary fund.

First days at the Élysée

The evening of the second round of the presidential election, when polling agencies announced his probable victory, Nicolas Sarkozy gave a short speech to the nation from his general campaign quarters. Then, contrary to all custom, he didn't celebrate with the militants of his party, but went to the Fouquet's. The famous brasserie at the Champs-Élysées, formerly the place of rendez-vous of the "Corsican union" is today the property of Casino magnate, Dominique Desseigne. It was lent to the elected president to receive his friends and main campaign donors. Some hundred guests crowded there, the richest men of France hobnobbing with the casino bosses.

The elected president then offered himself some days of well merited rest. Transported to Malta by a private Falcon 900, he relaxed on the Paloma, a 65 m yacht of his friend Vincent Bollore, a billionaire trained at the Rothschild bank.

Finally, Nicolas Sarkozy was inaugurated president of the French Republic. The first decree he signed was not to enact an amnesty, but to authorize the casinos of his friends Desseigne and Partouche to multiply the money machines.

He composed his working team and his government. Without surprise, one finds there an ominous casino owner (the minister of Youth and Sports) and the lobbyist of the casinos of his friend Desseigne (who became a spokesman of the "Gaullist party".)

Nicolas Sarkozy relies above all on 4 men :

- Claude Guéant, secretary general of the Elysée Palace, the former right hand of Charles Pasqua.
- François Pérol, under-secretary general of the Elysée, an associate manager of the Rothschild bank.
- Jean-David Lévitte, diplomatic advisor. Son of the former director of the Jewish Agency. French ambassador to the UN, he was removed by Chirac who judged him too close to George Bush.
- Alain Bauer, the man of the shadows. His name does not appear in the directories. He is in charge of the secret services. Former Grand Master of the French Great Orient (the most important Masonic organization in France) and former N°2 of the United States National Security Agency in Europe.

Frank Wisner Jr. who in the meantime was named "special envoy" to President Bush for the independence of Kosovo, insisted that Bernard Kouchner be named minister of Foreign affairs with a double mission priority: the independence of Kosovo and the elimination of France's Arab policy.

Kouchner started his career by participating in the creation of a humanitarian NGO. Thanks to financial support from the National Endowment for Democracy, he took part in operations of Zbigniew Brzezinski in Afghanistan against the soviets, along sides with Oussama Ben Laden and the Karzai brothers. One finds him again in the 90's working with Alija Izetbegovic in Bosnia Herzegovina. From 1999 to 2001 he was high representatives of the UN to Kosovo.

Under the rule of the youngest brother of president Hamid Karzaï, Afghanistan became the first world producer of opium poppies transformed in heroin locally and transported by the US Air force to Camp Bondsteed (Kosovo). There, the men of Hacim Thaci take charge of the drug and distribute it mainly in Europe and accessorily in the United States. The benefits are used to finance the illegal operations of the CIA. Karzai and Thaci are longstanding personal friends of Bernard Kouchner who undoubtedly ignores their criminal activities in spite of all the international reports which have been dedicated to them.

To complete his government, Nicolas Sarkozy named Christine Lagarde, minister of the Economy and Finances. All her career was made in the United States where she directed the prestigious law firm Baker and McKenzie. At the Center for international and strategic studies of Dick Cheney, she copresided with Zbigniew Brzezinski a working group which supervised the privatisations in Poland. She organized also an intense lobbying effort for Lockheed Martin against French airplane producer Dassault.

New escapade during the summer. Nicolas, Cecilia, their common mistress and their children went on holidays to the United States at Wolfeboro, not far from the property of President Bush. The bill was paid this time by Robert F. Agostinelli, an Italian-New Yorker investment banker, Zionist and a pure brand of neo-conservative who writes in Commentary, the magazine of the American Jewish Committee.

The success of Nicolas had impact on his half brother, Pierre Olivier. Under the American name of Oliver, he was named by Frank Carlucci (formerly N°2 of the CIA after having been recruited by Frank Wisner, Sr.) Director of the new investment fund of the Carlyle Group (the common investment firm of the Bush family and Ben Laden). Having become the 5th largest business dealer in the world, he handles the main assets of the sovereign funds of Kuwait and Singapore.

The popularity of the President is in a free fall in the polls. One of his communications advisors, Jacques Seguela (also consultant for political communication at the NED where he is in charge of diverse CIA operations in Western Europe and Latin America), proposes to detract the public's attention with new "people stories". The announcement of the divorce with Cecilia was publicised by Libération, the paper of his friend Edouard de Rothschild, to cover up the slogans of demonstrators in a day of general strike. Stronger even, the communications agent organized a meeting between the president and the former top model, Carla Bruni. Some days later, her liaison with the president became official and the media hammering covered up once again political criticism. Some weeks later, the third marriage of Nicolas occurred. This time, he chose as best men Mathilde Agostinelle (the wife of Robert) and Nicolas Bazire, a former cabinet director of Edouard Balladur who became assistant manager at the Rothschilds.

When will the French use their eyes to see what they have to do ?


Plutonium Pakistan NUCLEAR BOMBS (USA cannot invade!)

Nuclear scientist says bomb saved Pakistan

(AFP) – 42 minutes ago

WASHINGTON — The father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb has vigorously
defended the program as sparing his country the fate of Iraq or Libya,
amid signs that Islamabad is ramping up its weapons capacities.

Writing in Newsweek magazine, Abdul Qadeer Khan said that Pakistan's
nuclear weapons had prevented war ....

"Don't overlook the fact that no nuclear-capable country has been
subjected to aggression or occupied, or had its borders redrawn. Had
Iraq and Libya been nuclear powers, they wouldn't have been destroyed
in the way we have seen recently," Khan said.

Many Pakistanis regard Khan as a hero for building the Islamic world's
first nuclear bomb. India and Pakistan carried out nuclear tests in
1998.

He admitted in 2004 that he ran a nuclear black-market selling secrets
to Iran, Libya and North Korea. But Khan later retracted his remarks
and in 2009 was freed from house arrest, although he was asked to keep
a low profile.

While Khan said he was not familiar with the latest developments in
Pakistan's nuclear program, Newsweek published a commercial satellite
image that appeared to show expedited construction at the country's
Khushab nuclear site.

The Institute for Science and International Security, which assessed
the image, said it showed "significant progress" on a fourth reactor.
A frame of a building was now visible, which did not appear in a
picture taken in January.

The Washington-based think-tank said that plutonium from the new
reactors would allow a "dramatic increase" in production, potentially
allowing Pakistan to double its annual production of nuclear weapons.

Saturday, May 14, 2011

AL QUEDA is fictional, because it is a PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE OPERATION

Unlike, say, Hezbollah, I do not believe "Al-Qaeda" to be an actual organization, and I am skeptical of terrorist attacks that take place in countries like Iraq which target civilians specifically and which only seem to benefit the occupier by fomenting sectarian violence and dividing the resistance. I'm not saying there aren't fanatics who commit such atrocities, but I am always skeptical.

I think it more likely that "Al-Qaeda" is a modern variant of the "pseudo-team": individuals who are organized to impersonate enemy forces. Lawrence Kline of the US Army War College discusses the tactic in a paper for the Revolution in Military Affairs. Citing examples from the Huk insurection in the Philippines, the Mau Mau in Kenya, the French in Indochina, and other conflicts, Kline stresses their utility in intelligence gathering.

An even more candid view is offered by a leaked counter-insurgency manual published in 2008. The manual, Foreign Internal Defense Tactics Techniques and Procedures for Special Forces, explains the use of pseudo teams and "doppelganger" operations, whereby individuals posing as insurgents or even specific individuals can be used to tarnish the image of the enemy. Obviously the manual does not explicitly refer to setting off bombs, but there are indeed candid admissions of such. Kermit Roosevelt during Operation Ajax, CIA whistleblower Philip Agee in Uruguay, and many bombings/atrocities under Gladio and Operation Phoenix.

It's not one or the other -- "organic" terrorism or false flag operation. During the Cold War you had leftist radicals carry out terrorist attacks entirely of their own volition; you also had groups like the Baader Meinhoff in Germany that were infiltrated and steered into carrying out terrorist attacks; you had terrorist attacks for which no responsibility was taken (eg in Belgium -- the "Supermarket massacres") designed to create a "strategy of tension", and you had pseudo teams carrying out bombings in the name of the left.

So it's all very complex. In Iraq, there was a period where the Shia and Sunni were uniting to fight the occupation. Then a series of sectarian bombings began. The British SAS were caught in flagrante delicto, while the bombing of the Golden Dome Mosque was almost certainly a false flag operation. Who would call their organization "Al-Qaeda in Iraq" when the term itself was concocted by some guy at the Pentagon?

The various bombings attributed to Al-Qaeda always seem to have some sort of intelligence link, whether MI6, CIA or even FBI. This fact alone is enough to cast suspicion on the entire enterprise.

Anyway, regarding Bin Laden, I agree with you that it is not prudent to simply assume it was a hoax, even with the destruction of evidence, staged photo ops, implausible (and ever changing) accounts, fortuitous timing (election campaign time!) and the highly dubious history of Bin Laden himself. By the same token, I don't think it prudent to simply assume the US government is telling the truth (if they were, the event would be remarkable in more ways than one). I lean towards the view that Bin Laden died many years ago, for reasons I've stated many times, but I have no problem changing my mind in light of new evidence. I did so re the Pentagon, largely due to your own posts.

One of the problems is that when you have a 50 billion dollar a year "black budget" it is not all that difficult to fabricate evidence and pay or coerce people to say one thing or another. It happens all the time in minor legal trials; it must also happen when dealing with events of major geopolitical import. This is the problem -- we end up pouring over minutiae and lose site of the over-arching issues.

In his "comments on the society of the spectacle", Guy Debord wrote:

"At the moment when almost every aspect of international political life and a growing number of those aspects that count in internal politics are conducted and displayed in the style of the secret services, with decoys, disinformation and double explanations (one might conceal another, or may only seem to), the spectacle confines itself to making known a wearisome world of obligatory incomprehensibility, a boring series of lifeless, inconclusive crime novels."

It is perhaps for this reason that we should remind ourselves that Bin Laden could not have organized war games on 911, nor imploded B7. In many ways, Bin Laden himself is just one giant distraction.


Wednesday, May 04, 2011

PHOTOS +++ PHOTOS from compound next morning

http://images.corriereobjects.it/gallery/Esteri/2011/05_Maggio/binladen-festa/osama/img_osama/osama05_672-458_resize.jpg

2 may 2011 5:22 

The official from the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency said up to 12 women and children who survived the US raid on their villa were now in custody.

The child, reported to be 12 years old, "was the one who confirmed to us that Osama was dead and shot and taken away," said the official.

Four bodies were retrieved from the daring covert attack, including one of bin Laden's sons, said the official.

Up to three women and nine children, including the young Yemeni woman who was shot in the leg and a daughter of the Saudi-born mastermind, are in detention, he said.

Intelligence officials said the group were being interrogated.

"There are a lot of questions we want to ask them," another official said.

The Pakistani government said Tuesday that family members of bin Laden were "being looked after" and would be handed over to their countries of origin.


http://images.corriereobjects.it/gallery/Esteri/2011/05_Maggio/binladen-festa/osama/img_osama/osama02_bis_672-458_resize.jpg

photos obtained by Reuters show show three other men lying in pools of blood at bin Laden's compound, allegedly unarmed.

Two men photographed were dressed in traditional Pakistani clothing, while another was in a T-shirt. The photos showed the men with blood streaming from their mouths, noses and ears, Reuters reports.

Their hands and arms were often cropped out of the pictures as they were taken from a close-up distance. No weapons were seen on their bodies, but one of the photos showed what appeared to be a child's plastic green and orange water pistol lying near a man's shoulder.

Osama's daughter watches unarmed father killed

Girl's account differs from US official version

Osama bin Laden's 12-year-old daughter, Safia, has reportedly told Pakistani investigators that her father was captured alive by US special forces before being shot dead in front of his family.

The claims, reported by the al-Arabiya network, contradict early statements from the White House that the al-Qaeda chief was killed trying to resist capture.

But they came as Leon Panetta, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, admitted that the Navy Seals who raided Bin Laden's compound in the town of Abbottabad in the early hours of Monday made no great effort to persuade him to surrender.

"The authority here was to kill Bin Laden," Panetta told PBS television. "Obviously, under the rules of engagement, if he had in fact thrown up his hands, surrendered and didn't appear to be representing any kind of threat, then they were to capture him. But they had full authority to kill him," Panetta said.

Panetta later told NBC television that the opportunity to capture Bin Laden alive "never developed".

There have been conflicting accounts from Washington on the details of the operation, raising suspicions that the Seals had indeed been on a shoot-to-kill mission.

The White House said initially that Bin Laden had used his wife as a human shield and had been armed. But, in fact, a woman killed during the operation was not his wife and the al-Qaeda chief was not carrying a weapon.

Al-Arabiya reported that Safia was one of eight women and children taken from the high-walled compound only a few hundred metres from Pakistan's premier military academy.

It said that Safia and her mother, who is thought to be Bin Laden's fifth wife, had been taken to the garrison town of Rawalpindi for medical treatment and to be debriefed by Pakistani intelligence.

The girl's account differed from the official White House version in other ways.

Safia reportedly told her interrogators her father was shot dead at the start of an operation that took 40 minutes, slightly longer than expected, after one of the Seals' three Black Hawk helicopters crashed to the ground because of a technical fault.

Al-Arabiya reported that Bin Laden was dragged to a helicopter after being shot dead. He was buried at sea a few hours later from a US warship.

Captured with members of the Bin Laden household was a Yemeni woman who Pakistani officials think might have been Bin Laden's personal doctor. The 54-year-old al-Qaeda leader suffered from kidney problems.

A Pakistani official challenged the US account of a gun battle at the compound, telling Al-Arabiya. "Not a single bullet was fired from the compound at the US forces and their choppers," he said.

Security officials said they did not recover any arms and explosives during their search of the compound and the 13-room house on Monday and Tuesday.

"There was no bunker or tunnel inside the house and that's why I don't understand why the world's most wanted man would have decided to live here," a senior official said.

http://images.corriereobjects.it/gallery/Esteri/2011/05_Maggio/binladen-festa/osama/img_osama/osama04_672-458_resize.jpg

strange pulverization of the helicopter .. secret weapons


http://images.corriereobjects.it/gallery/Esteri/2011/05_Maggio/binladen-festa/elicottero/img_elicottero/elicottero01_672-458_resize.jpg


The internet is buzzing with speculation that the aircraft which crashed during SEAL Team Six's deadly raid on Osama bin Laden's compound is a new type of stealth chopper.

US officials said the smooth, silver helicopter was a newer version of the Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk - the helicopter which was shot down during a 1993 raid in Somalia that killed 18 soldiers.

http://pics.livejournal.com/druzifer/pic/005srsed

But military analysts and aviation specialists said the photos showed it had unique features never seen before in public, suggesting it was a secret stealth helicopter.


http://images.corriereobjects.it/gallery/Esteri/2011/05_Maggio/binladen-festa/elicottero/img_elicottero/elicottero02_672-458_resize.jpg


http://images.defensetech.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/silent-hawk.jpg


U.S. military helicopter gunship shot down bin Laden's son.


http://images.defensetech.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/stealthhelo_sm.jpg

chinese description of classified navy helicopter  The Pentagon's biggest fear is that the helicopter pieces will end up in the hands of the China. If that happens they will reverse engineer the pieces and figure out the technology.. The Chinese are great at manufacturing things...

http://images.corriereobjects.it/gallery/Esteri/2011/05_Maggio/binladen-festa/elicottero/img_elicottero/elicottero04_672-458_resize.jpg

Stealth: The strange design of the rotor tail has led many to speculate that U.S. Navy SEALs used a secret stealth helicopter in Sunday's raids- Distinctive features, such as the smooth and angular outer shell, covered rotor blades and pointed rear end have bamboozled aviation experts


http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Fbz14Ye8SDk/Tb6MzFCtCWI/AAAAAAAAHbE/3e7WOohLKZA/s400/bin+laden+dead+2011%252Cbin+laden+dead%252Cbin+laden+killed%252Claden+dead%252Cosama+bin+laden+body%252Cosama+bin+laden+body+found%252Cosama+bin+laden+body%252Cbin+laden+dead+pictures%252Cpictures+osama+bin+laden+dead%252Cbin+laden+dead+picture.jpg

burning wreckage

http://images.corriereobjects.it/gallery/Esteri/2011/05_Maggio/binladen-festa/elicottero/img_elicottero/c_02_672-458_resize.jpg

Aviation Week speculated that the helicopter was a "highly modified version" of the Black Hawk, writing that the chopper's tail "features stealth-configured shapes on the boom and tip fairings, swept stabilisers and a 'dishpan' cover over a non-standard five-or-six-blade tail rotor".

http://cencio4.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/mh-x3.jpg

The blackest of Black Hawks? Bin Laden raid chopper mystery



Photos via Reuters who are confident of the authenticity of the images which they purchased from anonymous Pakistani security official, who started taking them one hour after the raid.

Monday, May 02, 2011

Osama Bin Laden killed in his US protected villa - Fake Body Fake Photo Fake terror


OSAMA BIN LADEN IS DEAD --  LONG LIVE USA DECEPTIONS??

(journalists could ask a million questions... but don't.  Hence the people have to do the HARD THINKING WORK by themselves)

Here are a few thoughts to factor-in.  Take time to read, take time to think. Investigate facts. A week is not too muchwork for such an important subject.


8f) Around 36 "private" videos exist of a plane hitting WTC-2, all of them excluding one anothers genuineness. Here we see frames from Michael Hezarkhani's video.



In Hezarkhani's video we see a hologram-plane disappearing inside the building in the same way that a knife goes through warm butter.

http://www.911conspiracy.tv/images/wtc-gallery/nist1-2d/e-9_still-wpix-tv-nyc-wtc2.jpg

missing wing (incomplete hologram)

People in the USA rejoice in bloodshed, the raging propaganda machine has done the job over 10 years to turn US citizens into little monsters.
Facts are Facts. In the USA, it is against the law, unconstitutional, to kill ANYONE without a fair trial.

IF OBL was indeed killed (A BIG IF)

Osama could never be caught alive (he was died many years ago),
because of what he might say about 9/11  

Right after the the 911 atrocitities in New York, he has already given a
statement that he was NOT INVOLVED: 

September 16, 2001

Bin Laden denied any involvement with the attacks by reading a statement which was broadcast by Qatar's Al Jazeera satellite channel: "I stress that I have not carried out this act, which appears to have been carried out by individuals with their own motivation." This denial was broadcast on U.S. news networks and worldwide

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videos_and_audio_recordings_of_Osama_bin_Laden#September_16.2C_2001

MOST OTHER BIN LADEN TAPES ARE FAKE


image

The photograph of a dead Osama Bin Laden currently being touted on Indian TV news (and elsewhere) is  fake.

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Osama+Bin+Laden+Hideout&aq=0&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=28.334641,86.572266&ie=UTF8&hq=Gammi+Adda+Stop,&hnear=Abbott%C4%81bad,+Abbottabad,+Khyber+Pakhtunkhwa,+Pakistan&ll=34.146383,73.216992&spn=0.000901,0.003664&z=19


Looks like Osama bin Laden's body won't be coming to the US. The terror mastermind was killed and "buried at sea" following a raid by US forces on his Pakistan hideout, an American official has told AP. Authorities decided to handle his body according to Islamic traditions, which call for corpses to be buried within 24 hours. Because it would have been difficult to find a nation willing to accept bin Laden's remains, he has already been dropped into the ocean, according to the source. The official refused to divulge any other details, citing national security concerns.

Osama bin Laden is dead, killed by a U.S. Navy Seal Team Six in Pakistan and, in keeping with Muslim tradition, his remains were buried at sea. No one has stated where bin Laden's body was buried.

http://911review.org/Storage/Http/www.nerdcities.com/guardian/WTC/wtc7-demolition.gif

World Trade Center 7 - was demolished at 5pm on sept 11
with all the records of worldcom and enron inside.

The killing of Osama bin Laden - 2 May 2011

President Barack Obama announced Sunday that US special forces had killed Osama bin Laden, the long-time leader of Al Qaeda, in a raid on a residence in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

Obama issued the statement after 11.30 p.m. Eastern time in the United States, more than an hour after the major media news networks announced that he would be making within minutes a major statement relating to national security.

Obama's statement left critical questions unanswered and raised a host of new ones.

First, Obama stated that "shortly after taking office, I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of our war against Al Qaeda, even as we continued our broader efforts to disrupt, dismantle and defeat his network."

In other words, Obama implied, without offering an explanation, that between 2001 and his inauguration in January 2009, the capture or killing of bin Laden had not been the major priority of the "war on terror."

http://news.sky.com/sky-news/content/StaticFile/jpg/2011/May/Week1/15983694.jpg
burning 4th helicopter?  Pakistani Helicopter shot down?
Second, the location of bin Laden's killing is highly significant. Obama stated that US intelligence "had located bin Laden hiding within a compound deep inside of Pakistan." Obama then identified the location more precisely as Abbottabad. He did not explain that this town is located approximately 40 miles from Rawalpindi, the center of the Pakistani military establishment and only a few miles further from Islamabad, the country's capital. This is the equivalent of a fugitive hiding next to a police station.

Nor did Obama describe the nature of the "compound." But the press is now reporting that the "most wanted man in the world" was living in a comfortable mansion. Moreover, the town of Abbottabad is located on the strategically critical Route N35, the Karakoram highway, which connects Pakistan and China.

In another cryptic remark, Obama said that "our counterterrorism cooperation with Pakistan helped lead us to bin Laden and the compound where he was hiding."

The obvious conclusion to be drawn is that bin Laden -- as many have suspected -- had enjoyed, at least until very recently, high level protection from powerful forces in the Pakistani government, military and intelligence agencies.

Although Obama called on the country to "give thanks to the countless intelligence and counterterrorism professionals who've worked tirelessly to achieve this outcome," the major factor in the killing of bin Laden was, quite clearly, a shift in the position of his long-time protectors in the Pakistani state. For reasons that will eventually emerge, the Pakistani regime decided to toss bin Laden overboard.

The extraordinary facts relating to the whereabouts of bin Laden make a mockery of Obama's claim that the United States "went to war against Al Qaeda to protect our citizens, our friends, and our allies." No, it did not.

While the supposed terrorist mastermind has been protected by the Pakistani state, a critical ally in the "war on terror," the United States has deployed a huge armed force in Afghanistan for the past ten years. This force has been tripled since Obama took office.

Nothing in Obama's remarks suggested in any way that the killing of bin Laden will lead to a significant change in American foreign policy -- let alone an end to the relentless expansion of military interventions.

The three wars in which the United States is currently engaged -- in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya -- have nothing to do with the fight against Al Qaeda and the capture of bin Laden. Both the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, which the United States invaded in 2003, and the regime of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, which is now being bombed by US and NATO forces, opposed Al Qaeda. In Afghanistan, Al Qaeda forces are politically and militarily insignificant.

Both Obama's speech and the press commentary was clearly an attempt to rally public support for wars that have become deeply unpopular. Obama asked Americans to "think back to the sense of unity that prevailed on 9/11. I know that it has, at times, frayed." Media commentators repeatedly expressed the hope that the killing of bin Laden would restore the morale of soldiers fighting in Afghanistan and justify the loss of thousands of lives.

http://media2.newsobserver.com/smedia/2011/05/01/23/Osama_bin_Laden___05.01.11_oFxK3JMO_0001.embedded.prod_affiliate.156.jpg
... Bin Laden was NOT responsible for 9-11 ...

One conclusion can be stated with certainty: the killing of bin Laden will not put an end either to the "war on terror" for which he served as a bogeyman, nor to the imperialist wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, in which American military forces have been deployed to secure strategic positions and oil resources of vital interest to American imperialism.

Patrick Martin and Alex Lantier

- -Text: This is a 1998 photo showing exiled Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden, center, flanked by his aides and armed bodyguards in a meeting at an undisclosed location in Afghanistan, according to the source. In the background is a banner with a verse from the Quran, Islam's holy book. This photo was offered to the Associated Press on Sept. 22, 2001 from a Pakistani photographer who wants to remain anonymous.


http://u2r2h-documents.blogspot.com/2007/10/911-hologram-theory.html
http://u2r2h-documents.blogspot.com/2008/01/luc-courchesne-911-ua-175-hologram.html






The "pod" gets bigger!









The explosion seems stagnant! many frames later:














================


Some Hezarkhani stills extracted from the video!


911 Theodolite Battery Park - third page



THIRD PAGE
Re: Battery Park Michael Hezarkhani CNN video of impact of ghostplane UA175 into south WTC tower of World Trade Center


"WTC vom Battery Park"
http://www.flickr.com/photos/annode/253514158/
Side-on view
http://www.flickr.com/photos/gundust/300179934/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/gundust/300182591/in/set-72157594384254025/
possible of interest
http://www.flickr.com/photos/chascarper/409101655/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/15633834@N00/67205072/

Views from WTC down to Battery Park over top of 19west and WhitehallAnnex
If you can feed this photo into virtual-reality-software,
you can place yourself ON THE VECTOR:
http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=686327933&size=o
NYC - WTC - 2001-08 - Verrazano-Narrows Bridge (115)
http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=67197529&context=photostream&size=o
This photo could also explain the "moving bridge"... What fantastic
optics can make the WTC AND THE BRIDGE that is that far away appear
sort-of equally large? HOMEWORK: take a screenshot and triangulate
from known size of bridge (span-of-elements) and width-of-wtc
the approx distance of the camera = position of wescam helicopter.

http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=776443230&size=o
http://www.flickr.com/photos/15633834@N00/67205072/in/photostream/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/boysy/6950245/ from ellis island

circle line
http://www.flickr.com/photos/redxdress/95995966/
Castle Clinton with Ferry!

Whitehall-Building (with scaffold, unlike Hezarkane video)
Whithall Building with Annex and 19 west street
toward the ferry-boat landing with trees and lamps
Miss Liberty Ferry boat to Ellis Island
BatteryPark Trees 1995 South Street Pier Ellis Island ship-landing

I am exhausted... you can try finding more (put good links into forums or my comments)






Executive Summary:
We are trying to confirm the camera-location of the famous video of the 911-airplane that crashed into the 2nd tower.







GAP vs BOAT LENGTH calculations



We have a close-up of "THE GAP"
http://mikescomputerinfo.com/picstragedy1.htm
http://mikescomputerinfo.com/images/wtcimages/wtc5.jpg
http://mikescomputerinfo.com/images/wtcimages/wtc6.jpg


From the close-up we need to guess the size in feet
of the visual gap between 19west (@facade-front) and wtc2

Lets say 15feet

We substract some OVERLAP in the Hezarkhani Video
Hard to tell, the sharpest image is at the bottom of
http://www.911research.dsl.pipex.com/ggua175/hezarkhani/

Lets say 5 feet. That leaves 10 feet.

Then we have the approximate distances

WTC to ferry 3300 feet
19west to wtc 1900 feet


Now we have a triangle with three known sides,
1900 x 1900 x 10

http://www.1728.com/trig4.htm
- push the Degrees button
- push the 1) 3 Sides button

we get 0.3 degrees (zero point three)

Now we enter this angle for the triangle
boat2wtc -- angle -- boat2wtc

INPUT SIDE a >>>> 3300
INPUT ANGLE C >>>> 0.3
INPUT SIDE b >>>> 3300

we get 17 feet!! That is realistic on a boat.

LETS DO IT MORE PRECISE.

Carmen Taylor Michael Hezarkhani photo footage of WTC impact UA 175 wtc2


The distance measuring tool in Google Maps
measures the width of the "top-box" of 19west as 30 feet

This time I counted the pixel.

21:10

21pixel/30feet = 1.428 pixel per foot (21 divided by 30)
therefore 10 pixel is 14.28 feet

124 pixel/30 feet = 4.133pixel per foot.
therefore 102 pixels is 24.67 feet

So the difference between Michael and Carmen is
24.67 minus 14.28 feet = 10.39 feet

Now the distance from 19West to WTC2
On Google satellite I made a marked on what seemed to
me vertically down to street level,
Estimated where the left corner of the WTC facade
would have been... and I got 1716 feet

The distance from the boat to WTC2 was 3156 feet


The angle turned out to be
0.347 degrees

19 feet !!!!

What did I establish?
That they were on the same boat!


Now the trees

Yey! Carmen took a wide shot WITH TREES
http://mikescomputerinfo.com/images/wtcimages/wtc8.JPG


Where did the Carmen photos come from?



File dates are KEPT INTACT when you download with
wget -N http://blabla.bla/bla.jpg
http://www.google.com/search?q=download+wget.exe

TABBY file dates as on the server
25020 2001-09-11 20:48:33 +0000 mvc-008s.jpg
42536 2001-09-11 20:48:34 +0000 mvc-009s.jpg same
43194 2001-09-11 20:48:34 +0000 mvc-011s.jpg same
36755 2001-09-11 20:48:34 +0000 mvc-012s.jpg same
25939 2001-09-11 20:48:35 +0000 mvc-017s.jpg
19008 2001-09-11 20:48:35 +0000 mvc-018s.jpg
32106 2001-09-11 20:48:35 +0000 mvc-019s.jpg
26481 2001-09-11 20:48:35 +0000 mvc-020s.jpg same
26644 2001-09-11 20:48:36 +0000 mvc-024s.jpg same
44296 2001-09-11 20:48:36 +0000 mvc-026s.jpg same
33913 2001-09-11 20:48:36 +0000 mvc-027s.jpg
71174 2001-09-11 20:48:37 +0000 mvc-029s.jpg same

mikescomputerinfo.com probably edited the pictures.
His files are dated 29jul2002 23:58 GMT on the server,
"same" have identical dates with tabby:
www.mirrors.org/historical/2001-09-11-World-Trade_Center/wtc/tabby/
tabby file-dates as 2001-09-11 20:48:33 GMT = 16:48 NY time

according to http://webpages.acs.ttu.edu/wfryer/911/
he got the photos 11 Sep 2001 16:43:41 -0500 (17:43 NY time -0400)




 Here is a good piece of investigation about the impossibe NOSE OUT -- yes thay forgot to turn off the laser.
Missile SCREEN gas/liquid made it through the tower and then the airplane nose was "projected" on it.

Nose Out - holography projection screen revealed

My buddy, an Air Force vet, woke up his dad to watch Tower 1 smoking. His dad, Wallace, was drafted 4 times in WW2 to continue developing aircraft radar equipment. They watched Detroit Fox channel 2 and saw the "nose out." Wally commented "man, I didn't know the plastic radome was that tough!" His dad, who developed them, said, "me neither!" They picked up immediately on the "nose out."


NEW 14 August 2008! Download high-quality version of September Clues:

http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4358054

http://u2r2h.blogspot.com/2008/08/nose-out.html




NEW 14 August 2008! Download high-quality version of September Clues:
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4358054






I took time to review 911 taboo

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4036784332125730708

at 17 min 20 sec watch the NOSE OUT..

Aluminium aeroplane CAN NOT exit a steel building with the shape of the nose-cone intact.

Watch closely and you can see the VERTICAL SCREEN!
A gas or liquid that is expelled vertically from a missile and is illuminated by a powerful laser (from miles away!), coded with 3-d information.
Result: a life-size, real-time image of a 767 boeing in the sky!


The projection and real-time calculation wasn't perfect. This is obvious when watching the Luc Courchesne video, and the "amputee wings", but hey, it did the job.


The VERTICAL "spray" SHAPE of the "hologram projection screen" is also clearly visible here (5th picture down, "fiery exit").


Many thanks to killtown, genghis, marcus icke, nico and social service. Even though none of you guys are capable to comprehend the simple logic of:

People/cameras saw big jet + No plane debris = hologramme.

Sure, TV-fakery was used, too, but CGI alone is not possible because the perps needed to camouflage the missile and keep up the illusion. They were able to mop up loose ends and keep the media in line with the official version (to this day, amazingly!) but they would not have been able to counter a few movies showing NOTHING )or a missile) impacting the WTC. However they ARE able to confiscate videos "for further study" that show weird things. Not a problem.


NEW 14 August 2008! Download high-quality version of September Clues:
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4358054

http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4358054/September_Clues_(Full_Length_feature_of_9_11_snuff_illusion)

http://www.septclues.com/ (dead now, overloaded)
http://www.thesocialservice.it/
http://www.septclues.com/SEPTEMBER%20CLUES%20COMPLETE%201.avi
14 August 2008 - 470mB download avi

Topic started on 5-2-2008 @ 03:24 PM by u2r2h

I take it you already know that NO 767 jet ever hit the WTC. This is proven by the LIVE TV footage, just listen to Ace Baker or watch September Clues ON THAT POINT. (my blog has the links, see below)

If you believe that a Boeing 767 hit the tower, look again!  (pictures above)


If you still believe hollow aluminium planes butter into buildings THEN DO NOT READ ON.
OK, so you are a noplaner.
Do you really think that the Joint Chiefs of Staff would have authorized the massaker in the USA with the threat that some idiot camera would show an explosion WITHOUT PLANE (or a missile)???
Nah, that's crazy. They could not hope to control all footage.
OK, so NOW YOU BELIEVE IN HOLOGRAMS!!!
it is 100% logical!
Are Holograms possile?
Sure! Someone left us THE PERFECT HINT on Wikipedia!
Please read this again. Someone left us a hint:
There exist also holographic materials which don't need the developing process... (you MUST READ THIS)
LOOK AT THE PICTURE OF A HOLOGRAM:
The "plane" looses wings and is distorted:
Ho--lo--gram
Hey, I don't blame you for your scepticism... it *IS* difficult to swallow. Hey, but that was the idea!!
Please leave comments on my blog!!

Lets ask another one:

1- Do you believe ALL FOOTAGE that shows an airplane hitting tower WAS FAKED??

2- What do you think is the likelihood of uncensored footage to have made it into the public -- given that the second hit was under the eyes of potentially thousands of video-camera owners?

3- Given the likelihood is LOW BUT NOT ZERO, and given you insist that NO 767 hit the tower what do you think the risk was to the perps of the # hitting the fan


You see what I am driving at, huh?

You know what I think. I think it is IMPOSSIBLE that the perps would have risked it.

HENCE... the logical conclusion (people, get this into your heads!) is:

Ho--lo--gram

Why? because THERE WERE films, photos and eyewitnesses and they were NOT ALL FAKED

in fact there were some that were faked by the perps, wanting us to believe there were 767s.

Can you not see that Noplaners are dangerous... they contain the seed for holograms... or to put it as I do:

If you are a noplaners, you MUST be a hologrammer

If you do not agree, come forward, it shall be possible to make you understand.

Here, I quote in full:

Dynamic holography

There exist also holographic materials which don't need the developing process and can record a hologram in a very short time. This allows to use holography to perform some simple operations in an all-optical way. Examples of applications of such real-time holograms include phase-conjugate mirrors ("time-reversal" of light), optical cache memories, image processing (pattern recognition of time-varying images), and optical computing.

The amount of processed information can be very high (terabit/s), since the operation is performed in parallel on a whole image. This compensates the fact that the recording time, which is in the order of a µs, is still very long compared to the processing time of an electronic computer. The optical processing performed by a dynamic hologram is also much less flexible than electronic processing. On one side one has to perform the operation always on the whole image, and on the other side the operation a hologram can perform is basically either a multiplication or a phase conjugation. But remember that in optics, addition and Fourier transform are already easily performed in linear materials, the second simply by a lens. This enables some applications like a device that compares images in an optical way.[7]

The search for novel nonlinear optical materials for dynamic holography is an active area of research. The most common materials are photorefractive crystals, but also in semiconductors or semiconductor heterostructures (such as quantum wells), atomic vapors and gases, plasmas and even liquids it was possible to generate holograms.


So the technology is NOT IMPOSSIBLE. The military value (fool the enemy!) is enourmous. It is a technology MADE FOR UNDERCOVER and PSYOP bloodbaths.
please DEAL WITH IT!! don't let it simmer... cook it up!

Ho--lo--gram are as worthy of investigation as CGI-inserts are!

Why it necessarily was holograms that hit the WTC?


good question and people are figuring it or something like it out...

South Tower Anomalies III - Addressing the Debunkers
www.youtube.com...

pretty good hologram here..
i'm sure governments have better technology
www.youtube.com...


7. WNYW

FOX5 & FOX11 L.A. (KTTV) — Chopper5  YouTube 1, 2, 3, & 4

FOX5 WNYW

FOX11 KTTV Los Angeles airs WNYW

WNYW FOX5 replay

See Chopper 5 page for more, including a slideshow of FOX11 L.A. frame numbered. Or see the best quality rendering available, also in slideshow format, using frames from the Ebbetts mpeg2. Additional downloads: FOX5 .avi - 149MB, and FOX11.mov - 71.3MB, the latter being Eric Salter/Jim Hoffman's best VHS dub.

Kai Simonsen was the camera operator/reporter. Read a short interview/witness account or listen to Jeff Hill's telephone interview.

This is the most contested LIVE airplane video (by no plane theorists). Reasons include:

1. "Fade to black" seems to purposefully hide the "nose-out" of the alleged composite airplane image escaping the layer mask of the WTC South Tower. The absence of static, in addition to the professional opinion of video production expert Steve Wright and the contradictory testimony of Kai Simonsen, all seem to suggest the blackout phenomenon is not signal interruption. Wright asserts the camera's automatic gain control overreacted to the sudden brightness of the explosion. (See his debate with Ace Baker on TV's "Hardfire.") Simonsen has said (in Jeff Hill's phone interview) that the blackout was caused by an untimely equipment change (attaching a 2X lens extender). Was it simply the (well documented) power outage? Or did somebody quickly react to the compositing mistake by pushing a button?
2. "Miracle zoom" ends with the next frame of video introducing the nose of the plane. Coincidence?
3. The FOX5 TV archives do not include this shot, but instead feature a closeup of the North Tower that misses the plane... with the same audio of the original WNYW footage. Additionally, no mainstream 9/11 documentary has included the footage. (That is, excluding a German one.) Broadcast quality footage seems to be unavailable. Of course, the shot is now on the WNYW website.

NIST FOIA files include WNYW_Broadcast\WNYW 1Clip27 (the 9:08 am replay missing part of the approach) and WCBS Dub4 03 (same thing, but without the timer). The WNYW broadcast was replaced between 9:01 and 9:04 with clips from WCBS. Haha. UPDATE: Release 10 has the broadcast starting with the opening frames of the Chopper5 sequence in file WTCI-329-I-#25.wmv at vrt 12:48.