Just to show, BAE for those that don't know is the leading weapons manufature for the U.K. and "The Queen"...

So U.S. sold weapons to Israel/Iraq while The Qeen sold weapons to the Saudi's, hegamony complete...


http://ayok.wordpress.com/2007/06/25/scandal-of-the-century/

‘Scandal of the Century’

Executive Intelligence Review

by Jeffrey Steinberg

On June 6, the British Broadcasting Corporation aired a sensational story, revealing that the British arms manufacturer BAE Systems, had paid more than $2 billion in bribes to Saudi Arabia’s national security chief and longtime Ambassador in Washington, Prince Bandar bin-Sultan, over a 22 year period. The BBC revelations were further detailed on June 11, in a one-hour Panorama TV documentary, provocatively titled “Princes, Planes and Pay-offs,” which detailed a more than decade-long probe by the Guardian, BBC, and the British Serious Fraud Office (SFO), into the al-Yamamah arms contract, a nearly $80 billion, 22-year long deal between BAE Systems and the Saudi government, in which British-made fighter jets and support services were provided to the Saudi Kingdom, beginning in 1985.

Every British government, from Margaret Thatcher, through John Major, to Tony Blair, has been thoroughly implicated in the BAE-Saudi scandal. In December 2006, Britain’s Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, ordered the SFO probe shut down, declaring that any further investigation would gravely jeopardize British national security. Prime Minister Blair fully backed his Attorney General, and is now scrambling to complete the fourth phase of the al-Yamamah deal before he leaves office next month.

Saudi Arabia’s Prince Bandar and former British PM Thatcher were at the center of creating the BAE arms-for-oil money-laundering scandal.

The furor that followed the Goldsmith announcement triggered a number of international investigations into the BAE Systems scandal, including by the Swiss government and the OECD (Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, the so-called “rich nations” club). More recently, the U.S. Department of Justice has reportedly opened a probe into money laundering and possible violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, on the part of the British and the Saudis. The estimated $2 billion in cumulative payoffs to Prince Bandar, for his role in brokering the al-Yamamah deal, went through the Saudi government accounts at Riggs Bank in Washington, D.C., thus opening the U.S. jurisdiction.

While the various British investigations into the al-Yamamah (Arabic for “the dove”) arms deal did unearth a vast network of front companies, offshore shells, and corrupt politicians, who benefitted richly from the deal, EIR’s own preliminary investigation into the scandal has uncovered a far more significant story, one that will send shock waves through the City of London financial circles, as well as top figures within the British monarchy, who are all implicated in a far bigger scheme that goes to the very heart of the Venetian-modeled Anglo-Dutch Liberal system of global finance, which is now on its last legs.

Al-Yamamah
In 1985, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, in part frightened by the ongoing war between its neighbors Iran and Iraq, which had reached a highly destructive phase known as the “war of the cities,” sought to purchase large numbers of advanced fighter jets to build up their Royal Air Force. Initially, the Saudis sought approval from the Reagan Administration to purchase American-made F-15 fighters. The Saudi F-15 deal required Congressional approval, and the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) waged a massive effort to kill the sale. According to several well-informed Washington sources, Howard Teicher, a senior official on the Reagan National Security Council (director of Near East and South Asia, 1982-1985; senior director, Politico-Military Affairs, 1986-1987), also played a pivotal role in the AIPAC effort, which ultimately succeeded in killing the deal. Teicher, according to the sources, withheld information from Reagan, stalling a Congressional vote until AIPAC had fully mobilized, and then convinced the President to withdraw the request, rather than face an embarrassing defeat in the Congress.

Other sources have offered a slightly different version of the failure of the F-15 deal, claiming that intelligence community estimates, since the mid-1970s, had warned of instability in the Persian Gulf, and that there were, therefore, other reasons to question the advisability of the sales of advanced U.S. military technology to Saudi Arabia, particularly after the Khomeini Revolution in Iran.

Whatever the reason, the F-15 deal failed. The very next day, after the Reagan Administration threw in the towel, Prince Bandar, the Kingdom’s de facto chief diplomat to Britain, the Soviet Union, and China, as well as the U.S.A., flew to London to meet with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. British arms sales did not require parliamentary approval, and the British government, in 1966, had created an agency, the Defence Export Services Organization (DESO), to hawk British arms around the globe. BAE Systems had been created in 1981, when Thatcher privatized the British arms manufacturing industry, which had, only four years earlier, been nationalized under the Labour government. And BAE Systems, the largest arms manufacturer in Europe, dominates the British defense sector.

The Bandar trip to London to confer with Thatcher had been in the works for months. A Ministry of Defence briefing paper, prepared for the Thatcher-Bandar sessions, stated, “Since early 1984, intensive efforts have been made to sell Tornado and Hawk to the Saudis. When, in the Autumn of 1984, they seemed to be leaning towards French Mirage fighters, Mr. Heseltine paid an urgent visit to Saudi Arabia, carrying a letter from the Prime Minister to King Fahd. In December 1984, the Prime Minister started a series of important negotiations by meeting Prince Bandar, the son of Prince Sultan…. The Prime Minister met the King in Riyadh in April this year and in August the King wrote to her stating his decision to buy 48 Tornado IDS and 30 Hawk.”

Thatcher also had every reason to feel confident that Bandar would be the perfect interlocutor between Saudi Arabia and Great Britain in the deal of the century. At age 16, several years after his father, Prince Sultan, had been named Minister of Defense of the Kingdom, the Prince was sent to England to study at the Royal Air Force College Cranwell, the elite officer’s training school for future RAF pilots. At least one senior American intelligence official has reported widespread rumors that Bandar was recruited by MI6, the British Secret Intelligence Service, before he finished his RAF training. Other sources, intimately familiar with the goings-on at BAE Systems, report that the “private” aerospace giant has a sales force made up almost exclusively of “lads” recruited to MI6 before their hires.

Whether or not these reports are accurate, Bandar certainly is a serious Anglophile. The best accounts of his adventures in England appear in the 2006 book, The Prince—The Secret Story of the World’s Most Intriguing Royal (HarperCollins, New York), by William Simpson, a Cranwell classmate, and still-intimate pal of the Prince. Simpson, who wrote the book with the full cooperation of Bandar, recounted his friend’s intimate ties with every occupant of 10 Downing Street.

“In London,” Simpson reported, “Bandar would breeze into Number Ten with uninhibited panache. From Margaret Thatcher to John Major to Tony Blair, Bandar’s access was extraordinary.” By Prince Bandar’s own account to Simpson about al-Yamamah, “When we first made the agreement, we had no contract. It was a handshake between me and Mrs. Thatcher in Ten Downing Street.” It was months before the final details of the al-Yamamah deal were finalized, and the contracts signed. But even before the ink had dried, Britain had provided the initial delivery of Tornado jets—from the inventory of the RAF.

By the time the formal Memorandum of Understanding was signed between the British and Saudi defense ministers on Sept. 25, 1985, the original order had been expanded to 72 Tornado fighter jets and 30 Hawk training aircraft, along with other equipment and services. There have been two subsequent deals, al-Yamamah II and III, and al-Yamamah IV, worth as much as $40 billion in additional arms deliveries, is in the final stages.

Oil-For-Aircraft
The al-Yamamah deal was structured as a barter arrangement. While the Saudis did agree to pay cash for certain services and infrastructure construction under separate sub-contracts—and those cash payments went, in part, to “consulting fees” or bribes, including the $2 billion to Prince Bandar’s accounts at Riggs Bank, and similar reported payments to the Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet and the Dutch Royal Consort, Prince Bernhard—the essential contract involved the Saudi delivery of oil to Britain, in return for the fighter jets.

And here is where the story gets really interesting.

Saudi Arabia agreed to provide Britain with one tanker of oil per day, for the entire life of the al-Yamamah contracts. An oil tanker holds approximately 600,000 barrels of oil. BAE Systems began “official” delivery of the Tornado and Hawk planes to Saudi Arabia in 1989. BAE Systems now has approximately 5,000 employees inside Saudi Arabia, servicing the contract.

Is it possible to place a cash value on the oil deliveries to BAE Systems? According to sources familiar with the inner workings of al-Yamamah, much of the Saudi oil was sold on the international spot market at market value, through British Petroleum and Royal Dutch Shell.

EIR economist John Hoefle has done an in-depth charting of the financial features of the oil transactions, based on BP’s own daily tracking of world oil prices on the open market. Using BP’s average annual cost of a barrel of Saudi crude oil, Hoefle concluded that the total value of the oil sales, based on the value of the dollar at the time of delivery, was $125 billion. In current U.S. dollar terms, that total soars to $160 billion (see accompanying charts).

Based on the best available public records, the total sticker price on the military equipment and services provided by BAE Systems to Saudi Arabia, over the 22-year period to date, was approximately $80 billion. And those figures are inflated by billions of dollars in slush fund payouts. Indeed, the latest limited-damage scandal around al-Yamamah erupted in November 2006, when a Ministry of Defence document leaked out, providing the actual sticker price on the fighter jets. The figure confirmed the long-held suspicion that the prices of the jets had been jacked up by at least 40%.

BAE Systems, a crown jewel in the City of London financial/industrial structure, secured somewhere in the range of $80 billion in net profit from the arrangement—in league with BP and Royal Dutch Shell! Where did that money go, and what kinds of activities were financed with it? The answer to those questions, sources emphasize, holds the key to the power of Anglo-Dutch finance in the world today.

Prince Bandar’s biographer and friend William Simpson certainly provided an insight into the inner workings of the al-Yamamah project: “Although al-Yamamah constitutes a highly unconventional way of doing business, its lucrative spin-offs are the by-product of a wholly political objective: a Saudi political objective and a British political objective. Al-Yamamah is, first and foremost, a political contract. Negotiated at the height of the Cold War, its unique structure has enabled the Saudis to purchase weapons from around the globe to fund the fight against Communism. Al-Yamamah money can be found in the clandestine purchase of Russian ordnance used in the expulsion of Qaddafi’s troops from Chad. It can also be traced to arms bought from Egypt and other countries, and sent to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan fighting the Soviet occupying forces.”

In effect, Prince Bandar’s biographer confirms that al-Yamamah is the biggest pool of clandestine cash in history—protected by Her Majesty’s Official Secrets Act and the even more impenetrable finances of the City of London and the offshore, unregulated financial havens under British dominion.

The Saudi Side of the Street
For its part, the Saudi Royal Family did not exactly get ripped off in the al-Yamamah deal. When the contract was signed in 1985, according to sources familiar with the arrangement, Saudi Arabia got an exemption from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). The barter deal with BAE Systems did not come under their OPEC production quota. In other words, Saudi Arabia got OPEC approval to produce 600,000 barrels a day, above the OPEC ceiling, to make the arms purchases.

According to the Energy Information Administration, a branch of the U.S. Department of Energy, over the life of the al-Yamamah program, the average cost of a Saudi barrel of crude oil, delivered to tankers, was under $5 a barrel. At that price, the annual cost to the Saudis for the 600,000 barrels per day was $1.1 billion. Over the duration of the contract to date, the cost to the Saudis of the daily oil shipments was approximately $24.6 billion. The commercial value, in current dollars, as noted above, was $160 billion.

The Saudis have forged a crucial partnership with the Anglo-Dutch financial oligarchy, headquartered in the City of London, and protected by the British Crown. They have, in league with BAE Systems, Royal Dutch Shell, British Petroleum, and other City giants, established a private, offshore, hidden financial concentration that would have made the British East India Company managers of an earlier heyday of the British Empire, drool with envy.

At this moment, there is no way of calculating how much of that slush fund has been devoted to the clandestine wars and Anglo-American covert operations of the past two decades. Nor is it possible to estimate the multiplier effect of portions of those undisclosed, and unregulated funds having passed through the hedge funds of the Cayman Island, the Isle of Man, Gibraltar, Panama, and Switzerland.
What is clear, is that the BAE Systems scandal goes far beyond the $2 billion that allegedly found its way into the pockets of Prince Bandar. It is a scandal that goes to the heart of the power of Anglo-Dutch finance.

There is much, much more to unearth, now that the door has been slightly opened into what already appears to be the swindle of the century.



http://www.saudiembassy.net/Country/Government/BandarBio.asp

Prince Bandar Biography
 

 His Royal Highness
Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud

His Royal Highness Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz was appointed Secretary-General of the National Security Council by the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah on October 16, 2005.  Prior to his appointment, Prince Bandar served as the Ambassador of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to the United States of America from October 24, 1983 to September 8, 2005.

Prince Bandar was born in Saudi Arabia on March 2, 1949, at Taif, the summer capital of the Kingdom, the son of His Royal Highness Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud, the Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Defense and Aviation, and Inspector-General. He is married to Princess Haifa Bint Faisal. He has four sons and four daughters.

 
...

Prince Bandar graduated from the British Royal Air Force College at Cranwell, England, in 1968 and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Royal Saudi Air Force (RSAF). He received pilot training in the United Kingdom and the United States, and has flown numerous fighter aircraft including the JP 3-4, T-38, T-33, F-5, F-53/55, F-102, and the F-15. During his seventeen-year military career he attained the rank of lieutenant colonel, commanded fighter squadrons at three RSAF bases, and undertook program management responsibilities in the major RSAF modernization project Peace Hawk. In addition, Prince Bandar carried out special assignments in Washington, DC, during the debates between the U.S. administration and the Congress concerning the sale to Saudi Arabia of F-15s in 1978 and of AWACs in 1981. In 1982 he was assigned to Washington, DC, as the Kingdom's defense attaché.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x1529067

Evidence related to the Duke Cunningham-MZM CIA contracting scandal was heard this morning in extraordinary secrecy by a panel of 6th Circuit Court of Appeals Judges in Pasedena. See, http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/state/20070805-9999-1m5secret.html

The extreme secrecy is highly unusual. Veteran lawyers could not remember another time when the appeals court held a completely closed hearing.

The subjects to be discussed are transcripts and documents related to the February guilty plea of Thomas Kontogiannis, a New York developer who admitted to a single count of money laundering in the Cunningham case. Kontogiannis' checkered past includes convictions for bribery and bid-rigging, an estimated $70 million fortune, and a knack for staying out of prison.


The reason this is being kept under wraps that is Greece, like Turkey, has been buying GOP Congressmen and CIA officials . . . with Saudi money, as part of an enormous multinational arms and political influence buying scheme being operated by the Saudi Royal Family in several western countries, particularly focused on the US and UK.

Thomas Kontogiannis' motives in bribing Cunningham has long been obscure. A month ago, it finally came out that Kontogiannis' interest in the matter was arms transfers to his native Greece. According to details that have slowly trickled out of the case, the Saudis are lurking in the background of this, apparently as bankers for the deal.

Mr. Kontogiannis was acting as an agent for the Greek military, which we are now told was seeking backroom business with General Dynamics and other U.S. defense contractors. See, http://news.aol.com/story/_a/disgraced-former-us-rep-duke-cunningham/n20070719164509990014

The lure of Saudi money appears to be key to these bribery and intelligence scandals, which also connects to the Valerie Plame mega-scandal and falsification of Iraq WMD intelligence by San Diego-based defense contractor, MZM.

This is just another side of the same scandal that snared Dennis Hastert, Jerry Lewis, and several dozen other Republican big-wigs and ranking members of various committees, along with the CIA #2, Dusty Foggo. This appears to be part of the American tie-in to the monster scandal in the UK involving BAE, a big British (and US) defense contractor, the Saudi Royal family, and an $80 billion slush fund, Yamamah ("The Dove", rhymes with "Ya mama"), which has been buying western politicians and intelligence services since the mid-1970s.

In 1976, CIA Director George Herbert Walker Bush first entered into an illegal deal with Saudi Intelligence Chief, Prince al-Turki, to continue covert Agency operations banned by Congress in exchange for Saudi money. In 1982, he was picked as Reagan's running mate, and, using Saudi funding, went on run a series of notorious "rogue" intelligence operations out of the Office of the Vice President. See, http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x1281780

The lure of Saudi money appears to be key to these bribery and intelligence scandals, which also connects to the Valerie Plame mega-scandal and falsification of Iraq WMD intelligence by San Diego-based defense contractor, MZM.

This is just another side of the same scandal that snared Dennis Hastert, Jerry Lewis, and several dozen other Republican big-wigs and ranking members of various committees, along with the CIA #2, Dusty Foggo. This appears to be part of the American tie-in to the monster scandal in the UK involving BAE, a big British (and US) defense contractor, the Saudi Royal family, and an $80 billion slush fund, Yamamah ("The Dove", rhymes with "Ya mama"), which has been buying western politicians and intelligence services since the mid-1970s.

In 1976, CIA Director George Herbert Walker Bush first entered into an illegal deal with Saudi Intelligence Chief, Prince al-Turki, to continue covert Agency operations banned by Congress in exchange for Saudi money. In 1982, he was picked as Reagan's running mate, and, using Saudi funding, went on run a series of notorious "rogue" intelligence operations out of the Office of the Vice President.
see: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x1281780


This has been an ongoing conspiracy. Today, it also touches on the scandal surrounding the sudden firing early this year of US Attorney Carol Lam, who was forced out by AG Gonzales just two days after the arrest on February 13 of Dusty Foggo, chief lieutenant to CIA Director Porter Goss. Eight days later, Kontogiannis cut a deal with prosecutors in the Cunningham case, and was offered an unusually light sentence for his role in bribing the Congressman.

TPM Muckraker has been on-top of this story. Consider this Josh Marshall column from last March about Kontogianni and the connections which had then first emerged about MZM owner Mitchell Wade, and his partner, Brent Wilkes, have with corrupt elements of US intelligence and the Saudi Royals

http://beta.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2006_03_05.php


Justin Rood fills in the answer to that last question, here http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/000391.php


Cunningham, Felon Met With Saudi Crown Prince

By Justin Rood - April 17, 2006, 1:06 PM Over the weekend, a new profile by Copley News Service added to our understanding of former GOP Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham's "Co-conspirator #3," the mysterious Thomas Kontogiannis. Today, we can add a bit more. Recall that Kontogiannis bribed Cunningham through purchasing a yacht from the congressman -- and paying several hundred thousand dollars more than it was worth. His finance company also handled some of Cunningham's questionable mortgages. But reporters and investigators have struggled to understand what Kontogiannis was getting from Duke for all the money he spent on the lawmaker. The latest theory seems to be that Duke was introducing him to world leaders. As Copley reports:

Cunningham "introduced him to people. It was like he had a congressman on retainer," added.

The Copley story notes that he twice accompanied Cunningham to the White House, and kept a picture of himself meeting President Bush in his house. Now, TPMmuckraker has learned he apparently met the man who would shortly become king of Saudi Arabia. It's been known that Kontogiannis, a wealthy businessman and two-time felon, in 2004 accompanied Cunningham and a Saudi constituent, San Diego real estate mogul Ziyad Abduljawad, to Saudi Arabia. Rep. Ken Calvert (R-CA) also went. Abduljawad paid for the trip. Until now, we haven't known much about the trip -- who the group met with, why, what they talked about. Cunningham is said to have gone in order to promote U.S.-Saudi ties, or some other such pap. Beyond that, we've had nothing. I called Calvert last week to ask him more about the trip. (He's the only one of the crew who's talking these days: Cunningham's in the pen, Abduljawad declined an interview, Tommy K's lawyer doesn't return calls.) Calvert's memory wasn't perfect, but he had some details to share. The group met with Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah -- then the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, and now its king. Kontogiannis was at the meeting, Calvert recalled, although "he didn't say anything, as I remember," the lawmaker told me. Copley now tells us its sources say Tommy K's purpose "appeared to center on an oil business he owned in Europe." That's not much to go on. The group also met with "ministers of various government institutions within Saudi Arabia," Calvert said. He recalled Kontogiannis being present for "some" of those meetings. As for what was discussed, Calvert recalled only that a number of the ministers pressed Cunningham to help ease post-9/11 restrictions on student visas for Saudis. With Abdullah, Calvert said the discussion was "primarily social," and "trying to build a better relationship with the United States." Now a U.S. citizen, Kontogiannis is worth about $70 million, Copley reporter Joe Cantlupe tells us. He spent over $300,000 on Cunningham. "What Kontogiannis, 59, got from the relationship with Cunningham remains unclear," Cantlupe writes, but notes that the businessman visited the White House twice with the Duke. And now we know they visited the Saudi crown prince together also. Was that it? He bought Cunningham -- a well-positioned but hardly towering member of the U.S. House -- to meet world leaders?


Bottom-line: MZM-Cunningham appears to be part of the American side to the monster scandal involving multi-billion dollar kickbacks from defense contractors to the Saudi Royal family, which has been in turn buying western politicians and intelligence officials for decades.

Over the years, the Yamamah slush fund has bankrolled a series of Saudi black operations from Pakistan's nuclear program, to the BCCI rip-off, to the Iran-Contra operation, to the creation of al-Qaeda and political influence buying in the US and UK by various factions of the Royal family.
Every time the US and Britain puts together an arms deal with the Saudis, and now with third-countries such as Turkey and Greece, the overpricing and kickbacks funds a black program, often inside the US and Britain.


.....

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/state/20070805-9999-1m5secret.html

It is widely believed that Kontogiannis is cooperating with the government and will testify in an upcoming trial of Poway defense contractor Brent Wilkes and John Michael, who is Kontogiannis' nephew and is charged with conspiracy to bribe Cunningham, money laundering, three counts of unlawful monetary transactions and obstruction of justice.

Wilkes is accused of plying Cunningham and CIA official Kyle “Dusty” Foggo with bribes in return for lucrative contracts. Foggo and Wilkes are childhood friends from Chula Vista who were associates of the former Republican congressman.



“It's almost Orwellian double-speak,” said Gregg Leslie, the legal defense director for The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “They say, 'We need secrecy, but the reason we need secrecy is also secret, so we can't tell you.' ”

http://www.wanttoknow.info/911newsarticles

BAE: secret papers reveal threats from Saudi prince
2008-02-15, The Guardian (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/15/bae.armstrade

Saudi Arabia's rulers threatened to make it easier for terrorists to attack London unless corruption investigations into their arms deals were halted, according to court documents revealed yesterday. Previously secret files describe how investigators were told they faced "another 7/7" and the loss of "British lives on British streets" if they pressed on with their inquiries and the Saudis carried out their threat to cut off intelligence. Prince Bandar, the head of the Saudi national security council, and son of the crown prince, was alleged in court to be the man behind the threats to hold back information about suicide bombers and terrorists. He faces accusations that he himself took more than £1bn in secret payments from the arms company BAE. He was accused in yesterday's high court hearings of flying to London in December 2006 and uttering threats which made the prime minister, Tony Blair, force an end to the Serious Fraud Office investigation into bribery allegations involving Bandar and his family. The threats halted the fraud inquiry. Lord Justice Moses, hearing the civil case with Mr Justice Sullivan, said the government appeared to have "rolled over" after the threats. He said one possible view was that it was "just as if a gun had been held to the head" of the government. The SFO investigation began in 2004, when Robert Wardle, its director, studied evidence unearthed by the Guardian. This revealed that massive secret payments were going from BAE to Saudi Arabian princes, to promote arms deals. Yesterday, anti-corruption campaigners began a legal action to overturn the decision to halt the case. They want the original investigation restarted, arguing the government had caved into blackmail.

Note: This report comes very close to confirming the close link between terrorist attacks and high-level policy of certain states. For many revealing clues along these lines from reliable sources, click here.
http://www.wanttoknow.info/terrorismnewsarticles
 

This is an (Them) Illuminati-Anglo-Dutch-American Slush Operation fund. It seems to be used where ever "needed" with the Saudis as key holders. Now that it has been exposed, like BCCI, the money will disappear and then reappear someplace anew with new "key holders"?....

It is interesting how so much of this has been kept out of the press. (cbs nbc abc CNN FOX where were you ?)..
. Abramnoff and all.... So now they "expose Bandar" but he has retired from the front lines..... They make a big deal about recovering a few hundred million, Ha...


http://www.aspendailynews.com/section/home/bandars-aspen-real-e

Bandar's Aspen real estate proceeds frozen by D.C. judge in bribes case
by Brent Gardner-Smith, Aspen Daily News Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 12, 2008


A federal judge has temporarily blocked Prince Bandar from moving money gained from his Aspen real estate sales to Saudi Arabia and other locations outside of the United States.

 U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer issued a temporary restraining order on Feb. 5 in response to a class-action lawsuit claiming that Prince Bandar acquired his Aspen real estate holdings with "illegal bribe payments" from a British defense company,BAE Systems PLC.

Prince Bandar has denied the payments were illegal or were bribes, but instead maintains they were legitimate government funds audited by the Saudi Ministry of Finance. 

The legal team suing Prince Bandar and the officers and directors of BAE filed an "emergency application" for the restraining order because they claimed, despite the slowing Aspen realestate market, that Prince Bandar "has the ability to instantaneously sell the rest of the U.S.-based property interests he holds and transfer the proceeds out of the country."

A hearing to determine whether the order should be extended is scheduled for Thursday at 3 p.m. in Washington, D.C.

 "The $167.4 million in U.S.-based real estate Bandar continues to hold was acquired using the billions of dollars inillegal BAE bribe payments obtained from BAE," the emergency application stated.

The $167.4 million figure presumes Prince Bandar's main Starwood estate is worth $135 million, even though it didn't fetch that price while listed on the market for over a year.

The lawsuit against Bandar claims that BAE leaders knew they were making illegal payments to Prince Bandar as partof an $86 billion arms deal in 1985 that amounted to "intentional, reckless and/or negligent breaches of fiduciary duty," which, the lawsuit alleges, wasted BAE's assets and hurt shareholders.

The lawsuit naming Bandar was filed in U.S.District Court in September on behalf of the city of Harper Woods Employees' Retirement System, which was a BAE shareholder. Harper Woods is a suburb of Detroit, Mich.

The lawsuit was filed against the officers and directors of BAE Systems PLC, Prince Bandar and PNC Financial Group, the successor to Riggs Bank of Washington.

Money spent in Aspen
   

"The illegal bribe/kickback payments were received and spent by Bandar here in the U.S., including over $100million to build one of the largest and most lavish personal residencesin the U.S., located in Aspen, Colorado, and known as 'Hala Ranch,'" charged plaintiffs attorney Roger Adelman of Washington, D.C., in the application for the restraining order.

"While Bandar amassed his palatial Colorado estate, many questioned exactly how Bandar could afford the lavish estate, the 50 full-time workers Bandar employed there, the entourage that accompanied his and his family's increasing visits to Aspen, andthe hundreds of thousands of dollars Bandar was handing out in the Aspen community on an ambassador's salary," the application stated.

But Bandar was always more than an ambassador.

Bandar is the grandson of the founder of Saudi Arabia, King Abdul, also known as Ibn Saud. He is married to the daughter of the late King Faisal. And his father, Prince Sultan, is now next in line to the Saudi throne.

His Royal Highness Prince Bandar bin Sultanbin Abdulaziz served as Saudi ambassador to the U.S. from 1983 to 2005, when he was appointed secretary general of the Saudi National SecurityCouncil.

Prince Bandar bought his main Starwood property in 1989 and the 56,000-square-foot home on the property was finished in 1991.

In 2006, Bandar listed the primary residence for sale for $135 million, but pulled it off the market in November.

A month later, Bandar sold another home in Starwood he had built for one of his daughters for $36.5 million and also sold two other Starwood properties near his main estate for atotal of $49 million.

 "Those sales proceeds have already likely been transferred to Saudi Arabia or other countries outside of this Court's grasp," wrote attorney Adelman in his application for the restraining order.

"In addition to Hala Ranch, Bandar purchased (using bribe payments) and continues to own at least two other private residences in Aspen, 22 units at the Aspen Inn that are used by his staff, and an office suite that houses his Aspen lawyer," the application for the restraining order stated.

The condo units are at the Inn at Aspen at the base of Buttermilk.

Bandar's Aspen attorney, William Jordan III, has a second-floor office on the Cooper Avenue mall.

The restraining order specifically names Jordan and "realtor Josh Saslove" of Aspen-based Joshua and Company, along with Bandar and "his agents, attorneys and others representing him" in its requirement that any money from past or upcoming real estate sales remain in "U.S.-based accounts."

Bandar, Saslove and Jordan could not bereached for comment on Monday. Nor could attorneys for Bandar and the city of Harper Woods pension fund.

Judges and lawyers

Without ruling on the larger merits of the case, Judge Collyer found that the complaint against Bandar "... at a minimum, raises serious questions of law concerning whether Prince Bandar may be required to return the bribe payments and profits on those payments to BAE."

However, the court denied a request for an "immediate accounting of payments BAE made to Prince Bandar, including the present form and location of those funds ... ."

The restraining order doesn't prevent the sale of any of Bandar's real estate, but requires that any resultingmoney not be transferred out of the country.

The suit was filed by attorneys with the San Diego law firm of Coughlin, Stoia, Geller, Rudman and Robbins.

The firm was founded in 2004 by William S.Lerach, a well-known class-action attorney who resigned from Coughlin, Stoia in October shortly before pleading guilty to one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice and make false statements.

He confessed to being part of a scheme while at the law firm of Milberg Weiss to pay clients who filed class-action lawsuits against companies. Lerach, 61, was sentenced Monday by afederal judge in Los Angeles to two years of probation, 1,000 hours of community service and $250,000 in penalties.

Bandar claims innocence
   

Through a London law firm in June, Prince Bandar denied any wrongdoing regarding the BAE payments.

 "The accounts at Riggs Bank were in the nameof the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Defense and Aviation (MODA)," Bandar's statement said. "Any payments into those accounts made by BAE were pursuant to the Al-Yamamah contracts and as such would not in any way have been secret from the parties to those contracts.

"Whilst Prince Bandar was an authorized signatory on the accounts any monies paid out of those accounts were exclusively for purposes approved by MODA," the statement said.

 Also in June, BAE issued a statement saying the payments were proper.

 "The Al-Yamamah program is a government-to-government agreement and all such payments made under those agreements were made with the express approval of both the Saudi and the U.K. governments," the statement said.

Britain's Serious Fraud Office was investigating the Al-Yamamah deal but closed their review in December 2006.

Last month, a British intelligence report disclosed that the investigation into the arms deal was closed because the Saudis might stop sharing valuable information with British officials about terrorism.

In September 2007, the Saudis agreed to buy 72 fighter jets from BAE for almost $9 billion.

The U.S. Department of Justice is now investigating the Al-Yamamah matter and the payments to Prince Bandar.

 Prince Bandar has hired attorney Brad Reynolds of the Washington, D.C., law firm of Howrey LLP to represent him in the city of Harper Woods lawsuit and presumably to help with the Justice Department investigation.

 Reynolds is a former U.S. assistant attorney general with "extensive experience counseling clients on criminal andcivil matters under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice," according to the firm's Web site.

Attorneys for the BAE officers and directors have recently moved for dismissal of the city of Harper Woods lawsuit, saying that the pension fund does not have standing and that decisions made by officers of an English company should be reviewed in Englishcourts.

This shows whoever was in control of that oil  , 600,000 bls per DAY. They would certainly like to have the price of oil go UP.  So a middle east conflict would be helpful.  Since we are doing very loose accounting on this oil, a 10x Billion here or there can't be accounted for.... That's alot of slush money....
Enough to takeover several small countries..like the U.S.

Now we come around to the interconnection of Bush-Bae-Carlyle Group....




http://www.mathaba.net/0_index.shtml?x=557142

2007/07/05

"Our investigation is now bringing to light a nexus of action and an institutional interlock between Riggs Bank, the host of the BAE slush funds; the Bush-family-tied CARLYLE GROUP, which is the U.S.-based corporate partner of BAE; and the Bush networks in government"


(LPAC) - Covert billions that the British poured into American bank accounts of former Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar bin-Sultan, originating with the BAE Systems-Saudi Arabia Al-Yamamah deal went through Washington DC-based Riggs Bank, as recent headline coverage in the British press on the BAE scandal has revealed. Our investigation is now bringing to light a nexus of action and an institutional interlock between Riggs Bank, the host of the BAE slush funds; the Bush-family-tied CARLYLE GROUP, which is the U.S.-based corporate partner of BAE; and the Bush networks in government.

JOHN CARTER BEESE, JR., a veteran of the Bush-connected Baltimore investment bank ALEXANDER BROWN & SONS over most of a 20-year span, was a pivotal figure in the founding of the merger-and-acquisition giant private equity fund, Carlyle Group.

Beese's contacts with the Bush networks go back at least as far as 1980, when he was the financial co-chairman of George Herbert Walker Bush's failed Presidential bid. It was at that time that Beese is said to have met Bush's Texas friend JOE ALBRITTON, just when Allbritton was buying into Riggs Bank. Bush had previously become director of Allbritton's Houston Interstate Bank after leaving his post as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1976. Allbritton would eventually control 41% of Riggs' stock, and Beese would become a Riggs executive in 1998.

Beese, who committed suicide earlier this year, began his career with ALEXANDER BROWN in 1978, directly after graduating from Rollins College in Florida, where he had befriended Dubya's brother Marvin. Beese evidently became the protege of Alexander Brown's chief executive A.B. "BUZZY" KRONGARD, and by 1987, at the age of 30, Beese had become a principal of the Brown firm.

That same year, 1987, Beese became a founding director of the Carlyle Group, along with a small handful of people closely aligned with then-Vice President George H. W. Bush.

Beese was central in arranging the funding for Carlyle, which likely ran through Alexander Brown, and, reportedly, Mellon networks.

After helping to create Carlyle, Beese then shifted into the federal government, taking a George H.W. Bush appointment in 1990 as the director of the Overseas Private Investment Corp. (OPIC), an office which directs government aid to U.S. corporations doing business abroad.

In 1992, Beese became a Commissioner of the Securities and Exchange Commission, where he was "a strong voice for 'market-based solutions' to securities regulatory issues."

In other words, he sought to essentially abolish the organization he was working for. In 1994, with this experience under his belt, Beese went back to Alexander Brown.

In 1998, after having previously carrying out a bond sale for them through Alexander Brown, Beese joined Riggs Bank directly. Beese convinced his old friend Joe Allbritton to set up a $100-million venture capital division called Riggs Capital Partners, which Beese then chaired. While not much is known about this division's activities, this is just after Riggs had absorbed J. Bush & Co., the private banking business of Dubya's uncle (George H.W. Bush's brother) Jonathan Bush. Jonathan Bush had founded his business in 1970, with the explicit intent of "provid[ing] discreet banking services for the Washington D.C. embassies."

Investigators would later report that it was in 1998 that overseers first began to note irregularities in Riggs' activities.

In 2001, Beese became a director of Riggs, with specific responsibility for compliance issues--in other words, keeping the bank clear of regulatory oversight. #
 

→ BAE Fallout: John Bredenkamp Puts His Foot In It
→ The BAE Systems Affair and the Anglo-Dutch Imperial Slime Mold
→ Bill Clinton in Yalta: Share Anti-Missile Technology With Russians That Works
→ LaRouche to Diplomats: The Guns of August or a New Type of FDR-IMF System
→ Official passes give BAE access to the top at the Ministry of Defence
→ Queen's Bankers Intervene to Save BAE
→ British May Have Reason to Worry About U.S. Investigation of BAE
→ Sen. Kerry Demanded DoJ Probe of BAE Bribery Operations on June 21
→ BAE Arms deal saga hurt anti-fraud office
→ BAE Scandal Bursts into U.S. Press as Announcement of DOJ Probe Sends BAE Stock Plummeting
→ LaRouche in Washington Post: History of BAE and 9/11 Legacy
→ LaRouche to Speaker Pelosi: BAE Scandal Demands Cheney's Immediate Impeachment
→ Cheney BAE Scandal Ignored By American Media
→ BAE faces criminal inquiry in US
→ BAE: Indisputably murky
→ BAE accused of secretly paying £1bn to Saudi prince
→ BAE hired actresses for Saudi Prince
→ BAE Systems profits rise, boosted by expanding U.S. operations
→ The parallel universe of BAE: covert, dangerous and beyond the rule of law
→ Tanzania to ask Britain for refund in BAE deal
→ Goldsmith attacked for ending BAE inquiry
→ Britain censured over decision to drop BAE Saudi corruption inquiry
→ BAE bosses named as corruption suspects
→ BAE's secret $12m payout in African deal
→ Arms deal investigators probe BAE payments to South African
→ Blair was urged to plug BAE jet while in the Middle East
→ Ethics are dead. Long live BAE!
→ Dropping Saudi linked to BAE inquiry faces legal challenge
→ BAE Systems secret millions linked to arms broker
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Yes, it is so depressing being a multi-millionaire in Malibu and knowing too many secrets .....  you could just die...  
It is interesting that there is no mention of his involment in the creation of the CARLYLE Group here at all.... Humm...

John Carter Beese Jr. - Suicide - Obituary - Wednesday, April 11, 2007

http://www.thealarmclock.com/mt/archives/2007/04/vc_j_carter_bee.html
VC J. Carter Beese Commits Suicide


J. Carter Beese Jr., venture capitalist and former commissioner of the Securities and Exchange Commission, committed suicide in California on Sunday, according to The Baltimore Sun. Beese, 50, was a partner at Boulder Ventures. He previously was president of Riggs Capital Partners, and was the former vice chairman of the global banking group at Bankers Trust and chairman of Alex. Brown International. At the time of his death, Beese was on the board of China.com among other companies.

http://alt.nntp2http.com/obituaries/2007/05/87bdf515ded0c58d37b45b828eea81d2.html
J. Carter Beese Jr., 50
Originally published April 10, 2007
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/obituaries/bal-md.ob.beese10apr10,0,540597.story?track=rss

J. Carter Beese Jr., a former commissioner of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and former principal of Alex. Brown & Sons, ended his life Sunday at a home in Malibu, Calif. The Owings Mills resident was 50.

Mr. Beese was being treated for depression, family members said.

John Carter Beese Jr. was born and raised in Hackensack, N.J. He was a 1974 graduate of Bergen Catholic High School in Oradell, N.J.

After earning a bachelor's degree in economics and political science from Rollins College in 1978, he began his career at Alex. Brown & Sons. He became an officer in 1984, and was named a partner three years later.

In 1990, Mr. Beese was appointed as a director of the Overseas Private Investment Corp. Two years later, he was nominated by President George H.W. Bush to become one of the five members of the SEC. In his two-year term, he focused on cross-border capital flow, the derivatives market and corporate governance.

He returned to Alex. Brown and was chairman of Alex. Brown International from 1994 to 1997. From 1997 to 1998, he was vice chairman of the global banking group at Bankers Trust.

[ See: ***Derivatives as a method of counterfeiting and destruction of the currency   - Bankers Trust - Deutsche Bank  ]

Mr. Beese had been president of Riggs Capital Partners, a venture fund that was a division of Riggs National Corp. in Washington, from 1998 until 2005.

He had been a venture partner and chairman of the advisory committee of Boulder Ventures Ltd., and had been president of RCP Ventures Management Inc., a venture capital management company that closed last year. He was also a senior adviser to Legacy Partners Group, according to a recent article in Forbes magazine.

Last June, he was appointed an independent director of SafeNet Inc., a Belcamp technology company. He was helping with an internal investigation of SafeNet's stock option awards, which also are under federal investigation. The special board inquiry led to two top executives' ouster.

He had been a member of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee since 2003. He also was a senior adviser to the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, a nonpartisan think tank, and a governor of financial services for the World Economic Forum. He was active in Republican politics, nationally and locally.

"He was an extraordinarily able young man who had a remarkable career in both business and government," said Truman T. Semans, a former Alex. Brown & Sons colleague and longtime friend.

His local club memberships included the Maryland Club, Green Spring Valley Hunt Club, and the Burning Tree Club. He enjoyed traveling, hunting and fishing.

Plans for funeral services at St. Thomas Episcopal Church in Owings Mills, where Mr. Beese was a member, were incomplete yesterday.

Surviving are his wife of 23 years, the former Natalie Wilson; three sons, John Carter Beese III, Wilson S. Beese and Alex N. Beese, all of Owings Mills; a daughter, Courtney L. Beese, also of Owings Mills; his parents, Elizabeth and John Carter Beese Sr. of Towson; and four sisters, Anne Carroll Kypraios of Winter Park, Fla., Mary Elizabeth Beese of Fort Lee, N.J., Anne Marie Kelley of Ringwood, N.J., and Mary Rogers Fischer of Waldwick, N.J.

LaRouche as far as history goes seems to be realistic. Dope Inc. is the bible of the history of Drugs smuggling and money laundering... Just his politics I don't agree with.

Web page explaining Riggs Bank on Ten Dollar Bill:
http://www.rtfa.net/2007/10/04/riggs-bank-ten-dollar-bill

Now an obituary for the great American Bank. It only took a few short years with a Bush at the helm to bring it all down.

Also note: 

1996-7 (Just before Rigg's "buys"  J. Bush; Co . I guess he wasn't on board with the future changes at the bank.


http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_/ai_55807589
Riggs Bank N.A. held dedication ceremonies today for the Paul Cushman III International Financial Center, headquarters for Riggs's international financial services.

The new facility, located at 1528 Connecticut Avenue, N.W., is dedicated to the memory of Riggs's former senior international banking executive who was killed in the plane crash with U.S. Commerce Secretary Ron Brown while on an economic development mission to Bosnia and Croatia in 1996.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZAJAhacLhM
Riggs Bank vault coontained George Washingtons Gold Gavel...

http://www.gwu.edu/~newsctr/pressrelease.cfm?ann_id=23591

GW TO RECEIVE HISTORIC RECORDS FROM PNC-RIGGS BANK ARCHIVES VALUED AT MORE THAN $5 MILLION

PNC Bank Gift Includes Records Documenting Personal Finances of Francis Scott Key, Clara Barton, Daniel Webster, and Susan B. Anthony. Donation Supplements Existing Washington Historical Collection Open to Researchers in GW Special Collections

WASHINGTON--The George Washington University President Stephen Joel Trachtenberg announced today that GW's Gelman Library has been selected by The PNC Financial Services Group, Inc., as the recipient of a unique collection of historical records from the Riggs Bank archives valued at $5.2 million. The collection - which includes ledgers documenting the accounts of U.S. Presidents James K. Polk, Grover Cleveland, John Tyler, William McKinley, and Warren G. Harding, and such notables as Francis Scott Key, Clara Barton, Daniel Webster, and Susan B. Anthony - traces the development of our nation and our nation's capital through the lens of Riggs Bank and its predecessors. The records date from the early 1800s to the 1940s. The donation is the largest single gift ever received by GW's Gelman Library system.

"There are few institutions in this great city that have influenced the development of the District of Columbia as much as Riggs Bank," said GW President Stephen Joel Trachtenberg. "The George Washington University shares this long legacy in, and commitment to, Washington, D.C. This generous gift of the Riggs archives by PNC will ensure that these significant historical records will be well cared for and accessible to future generations."


A great web page with the Riggs History and Timeline. Many Yale / Scoll and Key / Jesuit links
Oh didn't you know the original Riggs was a converted  Catholic

Mr. Riggs, it is stated, was in early life connected with the Protestant
Episcopal church, but his life was closed within the pale of the Catholic
church, to which the members of his family belong. During his final illness
Rev. Father Lynch was in attendance upon him and administered the final
rites of the Catholic church. The funeral will be held under Catholic
auspices.


Interesting FACTS linking Rome and Washington

Charles Pierre L’Enfant - City Planner for Washington D.C. - Roman Catholic

Daniel Carroll - One of three commissioners appointed by President George Washington to survey and acquire land for the new government. The land where the capitol building stands was donated by him. He was the brother of Archbishop John Carrol and was also Roman Catholic.

Charles Carroll - Wealthiest man in the colonies at the beginning of the American Revolution. A signer of the Declaration of Independence and in 1776 was appointed as one of a committee of three, along with Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Chase, to visit Canada to secure their alliance. His cousin Jesuit Father John Carroll, accompanied them. He was educated by Roman Catholic Jesuits.

Robert Brent - The first and appointed mayor of Washington D.C. A nephew of Bishop
John Carroll, and was Roman Catholic.

Constantino Brumidi - Hired painter of occult pictures in the Capitol Dome. He came from Rome where he had gained a reputation for restoring the Vatican frescoes. He was Roman Catholic.

John Carroll - Became a Jesuit Father in 1753. Became the first Bishop of the hierarchy of U.S.A. and first Bishop and Archbishop of Baltimore Maryland. Founder of Jesuit Georgetown College 1789.

Interesting note: In 1669, the surrounding land which is now Washington D.C. belonged to a gentleman named Francis Pope, who called the area “Rome” and its river inlet “Tiber”. He was the sheriff of Charles County Maryland.

Source: "Vatican Design Exposed" page 26
http://www.remnantofgod.org/usa.htm#rcc-wash

Read More information about how Washington DC used to be called Rome, Maryland

http://www.spirituallysmart.com/riggs.html




The center of Georgetown is the busy crossroad of Wisconsin Ave. & M Street, highlighted by the gold dome atop Riggs Bank. Inside the bank's vault is the gold & marble gavel used by George Washington to lay the cornerstone of the U.S. Capitol in 1793.   Short Video


Riggs Bank History(Timeline)

1836 William Wilson Corcoran opens a note brokerage house---an early form of bank.

1837 Businessmen from New York and abroad, including former neighbor Elisha Riggs, shield the Corcoran brokerage house from collapse during the economic panic.

1840 Corcoran and George Washington Riggs, Elisha's son, form Corcoran Riggs, a partnership that offers depository and checking services.

1842 States-rights Democrat John Tyler is the first President of the United States to bank at Corcoran ; Riggs.

1844 The U.S. government selects Corcoran ; Riggs as the sole federal depository in Washington.

1845 Corcoran ; Riggs finances the invention of the telegraph by Samuel Morse. Corcoran ; Riggs purchases the buildings and assets of the Washington branch of the defunct Second Bank of the United States, located across the street from the Treasury.

Corcoran ; Riggs invests heavily in railroads and land, contributing to the nations push westward.

1847 Corcoran ; Riggs lends $16 million to the U.S. government for the Mexican War and subsequently covers the loan by selling bonds to London financial houses. As the first sale of American securities in Europe since 1837, this transaction bolsters the credit of all American bankers.

1850 Senators Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun and Daniel Webster bank at Riggs.

1853 U.S. Army Corps of Engineers opens Corcoran ; Riggs accounts for construction of the Washington Aqueduct and the extension of the Capitol.

1854 Corcoran retires to devote his life to private investments and charitable causes; George Washington Riggs takes over the bank under its new name, Riggs ; Co.


1861 Abraham Lincoln opens an account at Riggs shortly before Civil War hostilities begin, only weeks after Confederate President Jefferson Davis closes his account.


1865 Instead of accepting a charter under the new national bank act, Riggs ; Co. remains a private bank. This decision accounts for the bank's stability in the aftermath of the Civil War.

1868 Upon the request of Secretary of State Seward, Riggs ; Co. supplies $7.2 million in gold bullion to the U.S. government to purchase Alaska from Russia.

1873 Financial panic throws banking houses across the nation into confusion, yet Riggs deposits double within the next three years.

1881 Following the death of George Washington Riggs, Charles Carroll Glover becomes the dominant force in the bank. (Later in 1940, Great Grandson, Charles Carroll Glover III enters Yale and is tapped for Skull and Bones.)
 

1889 Elisha Riggs Donates a Library to Jesuit Georgetown University as a memorial to his father, George Washington riggs.

1896 Riggs ; Co. accepts a national banking charter. The Riggs National Bank elects its first board, sells stock, and shifts its focus from specialized investment services to general banking services for a large clientele. Glover becomes the first president of the bank.

1900 Lawrason Riggs, the last member of the family associated with the bank, retires from the board of directors. With deposits of more than $5 million, Riggs is twice as large as any other bank in the District of Columbia. Riggs issues stock to National City Bank, the largest New York bank, to forge a profitable alliance.

1902 Successful American reports: "The Riggs National Bank is to Washington as the Bank of England is to London."

1904 Headquarters at 1503 Pennsylvania Avenue opens. It features a Ladies' Department designed to meet the special needs of women, including American Red Cross founder Clara Barton and suffragist Susan B. Anthony.

1907 Even though a panic creates severe money shortages, Riggs pays an extra dividend to its shareholders.

1908 Charles Glover presents his plan for economic relief to Congress. This serves as the foundation for a series of financial reforms, including the establishment of the Federal Reserve System in 1913.

1915 Moody's financial monthly reports that Riggs has been for years the favorite bank of army and navy officers, through whose travels its name has been carried to all parts of the world. It has been said that in the Far East the Riggs Bank is the best known American banking institution.

1919 General John J. ("Black Jack") Pershing salutes from horseback during his victory parade. He later joined Riggs' Board of Directors.

1920 Riggs takes advantage of provisions in the Federal Reserve Act that allow national banks to accept savings deposits and establish a trust department.

1921 Former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Milton E. Ailes succeeds Glover.

1922 Following consolidations with two local banks, Riggs opens its first four branches.

1925 After the sudden death of Milton Ailes, Robert V. Fleming becomes Riggs' president at the age of 35.

1928 Riggs merges with Farmers and Mechanics Bank of Georgetown, which a Riggs family member helped found in 1814.

1929 Whereas over-speculation strains the resources of most banks, Riggs does not lose any assets because of bad loans or investments following the Great Crash.

1931 Riggs Bank provides $500,000 in cash to Perpetual Savings and Loan of Washington. Depositors and other banks match this sum to end runs on Perpetual.

1933 Fleming advises Roosevelt regarding the structure of the newly established Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

1935 The American Bankers Association elects Fleming its president.

1939 Total assets are $119 million, compared to $57 million when the Great Depression began. During those years, 40 percent of all U.S. banks failed.

1941 Robert Fleming makes a national broadcast appeal for war bond sales;
by 1945 Riggs will have sold $233 million in war bonds.

1942 The Bureau of Standards stores their most precious items -- standards of length and mass made mostly of platinum --in the vaults at the Chevy Chase Branch on Connecticut Avenue for safety against air raids.

1943 Riggs provides the accounting facilities for the Office of Price Administration, which distributes ration coupons for basic commodities such as sugar, gasoline, meats, and shoes.

1946 Riggs begins to emphasize GI, home, auto and other consumer- oriented loans as the post-World War II boom begins.

1947 Riggs processes a World War II loan repayment of $50 million, the largest check ever drawn on a District bank.

1948 Riggs' general ledger books are done by machine instead of by hand for the first time.

1949 Nationally syndicated newspaper columnist Bob Considine calls Riggs "just about the closest thing we'll ever have to a Bank of the United States."

1950 Riggs' International Division develops a special relationship with the new International Monetary Fund and World Bank; most embassies are now customers.

1951 Korean War commander Matthew B. Ridgway is a Riggs customer, continuing a military tradition which includes William Tecumseh Sherman, Ulysses S. Grant, Douglas MacArthur, Chester Nimitz and Dwight D. Eisenhower.

1958 Riggs now has 13 branches, after recent mergers with Washington Loan and Trust and Lincoln National Bank.

1961 Riggs sponsors its first television program, World Concert Series, broadcast Sundays at 2:00 p.m. Guests include Arthur Rubenstein and Marian Anderson.

1962 Following the Cuban Missile Crisis, Riggs immediately implements a new plan to store bank records "in vault storage space in a mountainous area distant from the City of Washington."

1963 The Fleming era ends the same year that Riggs opens its new corporate headquarters. Lewellyn Jennings, former deputy Comptroller of the Currency, takes over as Chairman of the Board. The computer begins to service customer accounts.

1967 Riggs and Data Computer Center, Inc. (renamed Riggs Computer Services, Inc. in 1970 and absorbed into the bank in 1972) established to provide automated accounting services for business customers. At this time a young named George P. Clancy, Jr. begins as a management trainee and worked his way up to president and chief operating officer. He also attains to a very high position as a Knight of Malta (SMOM) and is named on the board of directors for Jesuit Georgetown's Woodstock Seminary on the Georgetown Campus in 1998.


1969 Riggs opens its first TV Drive-in windows using television cameras, audio systems and pneumatic tubes at its Chevy Chase Branch.

1970 Riggs installs its first computer system that enables staff to view a customer's account on a monitor.

1971 The Advertising Club of Metropolitan Washington awards its top honors to Riggs for its first venture into television advertising---a ten-second ``Bank-by-Mail" commercial.

1972 Riggs' first overseas branch opens in Nassau, Bahamas to serve the Euro-dollar deposit and loan requirements of its customers.

1973 Upon the invitation of the British Embassy, Riggs opens its first facility with a foreign embassy in Washington. Luis F. Corea, Riggs' Senior Vice President in charge of the Foreign Department, receives the National Order of Merit from the French government at its embassy in Washington in recognition of his contributions in banking.


1976 Riggs introduces 24-Hour teller machines at its branches. Customer usage is twice the national average for similar equipment.

1980 Riggs becomes Washington's first and only bank to open a branch in London. Riggs National Corporation is formed as a holding company including all companies sharing the Riggs identity.

Riggs International Banking Corporation (Edge Act Bank) opens in Miami to focus on serving non-U.S. citizens.

1981 Joe L. Allbritton becomes the first active chairman of Riggs National Corporation. He also runs the ABC affiliate in Washington D.C.

1982 When federal deregulation permits bank money market accounts, Riggs gains a greater share than any other District bank, exceeding the $1 billion mark within three years.

1983 ``The most important bank in the most important city in the world" provides the theme as Riggs launches a long-range campaign emphasizing its service capabilities and its commitment to customers.

1984 Riggs purchases the Anglo-Portuguese Bank to form Riggs Bank Europe.

1986 Riggs joins CIRRUS, a nationwide system of 10,000 automatic teller machines, thereby providing customers access to their accounts at more than 12,500 sites. Riggs opens its first branches in the suburbs as The Riggs National Bank of Virginia with the acquisition of Guaranty Bank and Trust.

Riggs dedicates its newly-restored building on 1503 Pennsylvania Avenue to W.W. Corcoran.

1987 Riggs Bank launches private banking to give clients a one-on-one relationship with an experienced financial advisor. Riggs expands into Maryland as the The Riggs National Bank of Maryland with the acquisition of First Fidelity Bank of Rockville.

1988 The U.S. Treasury Department awards Riggs the contract to consolidate
its separate collections systems. CA$HLINK replaced cash payments with electronic transfers and streamlined the government's cash management system, resulting in significant cost savings to the government. At the request of the State Department, Riggs opens a branch at the U.S. embassy in London.

Riggs Investment Management Corporation (RIMCO) is created as a subsidiary of Riggs Bank to manage all the money in the trust department and new clients in the institutional, non-profit and pension markets.

1989 Farmers and Mechanics Branch in Georgetown is restored to its original
neo-classical style, particularly its interior details and gold dome.

1990 Riggs Bank forms the Financial Services Group by merging private banking, RIMCO, and the trust department to enhance customer service. Riggs purchases certain assets and assumes the deposits of the National Bank of Washington.

1993 To date, at least twenty-one First Families have banked at Riggs.

1996 Riggs builds upon its reputation in embassy banking in Washington and extends its banking services to non-U.S. embassies in London for the first time.
Customers can meet nearly all their banking needs, including investment sales,
by simply placing a telephone call with the establishment of RiggsDirect.

While on an economic development mission to Bosnia and Croatia, Paul Cushman III, head of the International Division, dies in a plane crash with U.S. Commerce Secretary Ronald Brown.

1997 Riggs ; Company is formed, bringing together the services of RIMCO and the Riggs Financial Services Group. The subsequent purchase of J. Bush; Co.,
Incorporated as well as alliances with life insurance agents and brokers and Peat Marwick (KPMG) enable Riggs to bring a comprehensive range of financial
services to its clients. Riggs offers a full-range of banking services, including investment sales, on the web.

1998 Riggs Capital Partners is founded to invest in emerging companies, with particular emphasis on the Washington, D.C. area's vibrant technology market.

1999 Riggs Investment Corp., a broker/dealer, is established; its Investment Centers,
located at several branches, provide planning for reduction of taxes, retirement,
college education, and wealth building and preservation. Upon the request of the
State Department, Riggs Europe opens a branch in Berlin, the capital of a reunited Germany.

New eagle trademark is introduced to broaden Riggs' identity as a provider of a full spectrum of financial services.

U.S. Treasury Department selects Riggs Bank to redesign and manage the
CA$HLINK cash management system, the largest deposit and cash reporting system in the world.

Riggs consolidates and relocates all international banking functions to a newly-restored
complex named the Paul Cushman III International Financial Center.

2000 Riggs Investment Banking is launched, offering corporate clients access to a variety of capital markets and financing opportunities. Riggs ; Co. International opened two new offices - one in London and the other in Jersey (Channel Islands)- with a customer-built state-of-the-art information technology platform that provides customers with sophisticated, integrated information on their banking arrangements and investment portfolios.

Tahoe Blue, keep it coming!

Excellent research man!

Rothschild paraphrase "The only 3 currencies in the world are Gold, Oil and Drugs".

Well getting back to BAE and the Yamamah slush fund, there is a great series from the Guardian UK that explains how the funds were laundered.

The BAE Files: A Ten part series
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/bae

Recommend reading all of this but for now let's just look at the mechinism DESO


http://www.guardian.co.uk/baefiles/page/0,,2095840,00.html
BAE's Secret Money Machine

In the 1990s, the temperature started to get uncomfortably hot for Britain's arms salesmen.

For 30 years, Deso [profile] <http://www.guardian.co.uk/baefiles/story/0,,2091293,00.html> had fended off attempts to curb corruption in the arms trade. But now the international climate began to change.

In 1994 the OECD [profile] <http://www.guardian.co.uk/baefiles/story/0,,2091314,00.html> urged member countries to put a stop to overseas bribery.

A binding convention was adopted in 1997. It was signed by Britain and came into force in 1999. Signatories promised to outlaw such corruption.

Inside Whitehall the reaction was as hypocritical as usual.

Many state industries had already been privatised in the Thatcher era, including BAE [BAE's position] <http://www.guardian.co.uk/baefiles/page/0,,2093327,00.html>. So officials no longer needed to employ agents directly.

But the MoD was still lobbying abroad on BAE's [profile] <http://www.guardian.co.uk/baefiles/story/0,,2091253,00.html> behalf and running huge government-to-government contracts, particularly the Saudi al-Yamamah deal [profile] <http://www.guardian.co.uk/baefiles/story/0,,2091241,00.html>.

Instead of fulfilling their international promises, officials merely tried to put more distance between themselves and the companies doing the bribery.

The defence ministry's Cooper directive of 1977 [document] <http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2007/06/01/ch08doc09.pdf> was rewritten in 1994 [document] <http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2007/05/29/ch08doc08.pdf> in more obscure terms. Officials would no longer visibly "authorise" commission payments. Or correspond about them. Instead, they were to merely "consider" and "advise".

BAE, under Dick Evans's [biography] <http://www.guardian.co.uk/baefiles/story/0,,2090606,00.html> chairmanship, moved its whole worldwide system of agent payments to Switzerland.

What it did was not illegal, but the firm constructed what might well be called a global money-laundering machine.

For a supposedly reputable public company, the methods used were surprising.

Britain's Serious Fraud Office later concluded: "The whole system is maintained in such conditions of secrecy that there is a legitimate suspicion concerning the real purpose of the payments."

The system was run from a secure block, Warwick House, at BAE's Farnborough premises. "HQ Marketing Services " was headed by Hugh Dickinson, who was also responsible for company liaison with MI6. His long-serving deputy was Julia Aldridge.

Documents indicate that a board-level committee also met to approve each agency agreement.

BAE set up a front company called Novelmight Ltd. [document] <http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2007/05/29/ch08doc02.pdf> With the help of the Swiss branch of its bankers, Lloyds TSB, the firm discreetly rented a high-security office in Geneva, on the sixth floor of a block at 48 Route des Acacias.

Video surveillance cameras were installed, along with an encrypted fax and phone system. A specialist from the UK was flown out to sweep the vault for bugs. Then, just before Britain signed up to the OECD convention in 1997, the filing cabinets and safes containing the agent details were loaded into a van and driven by trusted staff <http://www.guardian.co.uk/baefiles/story/0,,2095261,00.html> from Farnborough to Geneva.

BAE added a new layer of concealment when the convention came into force in 1999. Novelmight was officially closed down as a UK-registered subsidiary.

But it was secretly re-registered [document] <http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2007/05/29/ch08doc04.pdf> as an offshore entity in the British Virgin Islands, a financial "black hole" in the Caribbean where beneficial ownership can be hidden. Now there was apparently no paperwork at all to link BAE with Novelmight.
The agency agreements were handled by Swiss lawyers Rene Merkt and Cyril Abecassis. The lawyers also set up parallel offshore companies for agents to receive their payments, often into Swiss accounts.

When the agreements were ready to be made or renewed, Dickinson or Aldridge flew to Geneva and unlocked the office at Route des Acacias for the signing.

The contracts were kept in Geneva and could only be inspected there.

The purpose of these tortuous arrangements seems to have been to ensure that nothing questionable involving the hiring of agents took place within UK legal jurisdiction.

But a further secret payment system was also needed for BAE to transfer large sums in cash to those agents.

BAE used offshore front companies once again. In February 1998, "Red Diamond Trading Ltd" was anonymously incorporated in the British Virgin Islands [document] <http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2007/05/29/ch08doc05.pdf>. It was used to channel payments all over the world, via Red Diamond accounts in London, Switzerland and New York.

We have traced secret payments going to agents in South America, Tanzania, Romania, South Africa, Qatar, Chile and the Czech Republic.

Red Diamond was also used to make payments to UK citizens who were working as consultants for BAE. These included David Hart, who advised Thatcher during the miners' strike of the 1980s.

BAE never disclosed the existence of Red Diamond in its published company accounts, and has never explained why it was set up.

A key role in the "laundering" was played by BAE's British bank, Lloyds TSB. [document] <http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2007/05/29/ch08doc06.pdf> Again, what was done was not illegal, although it was surprising.

A system was organised with the online Lloydslink software under which cash from BAE was automatically funnelled through Red Diamond accounts and on to its final destination.

The next year, BAE set up a second front company, purely to handle the Saudi commission payments for al-Yamamah. "Poseidon Trading Investments Ltd" [document] <http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2007/05/29/ch08doc07.pdf> was incorporated in the British Virgin Islands on June 25 1999.

Those close to it say more than £1bn has passed through its accounts to Saudi agents, in transfers made by Lloyds TSB.

A different method was used to disguise corrupt benefits for Saudi officials who went on vacation trips to the US and Europe. This was what became known as BAE's "slush fund".

The head of the Saudi air force, Prince Turki bin Nasser [biography] <http://www.guardian.co.uk/baefiles/story/0,,2095195,00.html>, along with his relatives and hangers-on, were provided with unlimited shopping, plane tickets and free holidays by BAE. They ran up enormous bills, totalling £60m, over the years.

BAE did not pay directly. Instead, the arms firm used two cooperative front companies of travel agents to pick up the bills - Robert Lee International and Travellers World.

Peter Gardiner, Travellers World managing director, has described how deliberately misleading invoices were organised by BAE's executives. They referred merely to "accommodation and support services".

BAE's "money laundries" flourished for a while. In September 2001, however, international terrorists destroyed the twin towers in New York. One of the many reverberations was a US crackdown on terrorist financing.

Under American pressure, the UK was forced to pass anti-laundering measures.

These included a 2002 law that explicitly criminalised overseas bribery and brought corrupt acts abroad under UK jurisdiction.

BAE was now to face a serious new crisis. Confident of its political muscle, the company dealt with it in the end by successfully nobbling the police.

David Leigh and Rob Evans

Yes, what this shows is that there exists massive global (UK-U.S-Dutch-?) slush funds in the 100's of Billions to be used for whatever purpose they see fit. Economic warfare seems the number one use. 
The fact that the official 9/11 investigations have all avoided documenting the Saudi financial involvement is a big red flag. This all shows that it was financially possible for 9/11 to be an inside job.

If you check out the Gaza forum, LaRouche posted an article linking the Saudi's to the rocket attacks on Israel from Lebanon with VERY heavy evidence. Here i'll fetch it and post it here:

http://www.larouchepac.com/news/2009/01/08/anglo-saudi-sponsored-lebanese-countergang-behind-rocket-fir.html

Is Anglo-Saudi Sponsored Lebanese Countergang Behind Rocket Fire Into Israeli?

January 8, 2009 (LPAC)-- The fears that a third force would provoke Israel or give it the pretext to expand the Gaza offensive into a regional war, were made real on January 8, when a number of rockets fired from southern Lebanon hit Israel. The Lebanese Shia group Hizbullah denied any involvement in the attack.

A new Lebanese Shia countergang (openly opposed to Hizbullah) called Arabic Islamic Majlis of Lebanon, declared on Tuesday, January 7, the launching of a militant resistance group. And on January 8, the day of the launching of the rockets against Israel, its leader issued an alert for his troops to get ready to resist an invasion of Lebanon by Israel.

The Saudi-sponsored Lebanese Shia countergang to Hizbullah with offices only in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and London, claimed to have recruited 3000 resistance fighters against Israel.

The group called Arabic Islamic Majlis (with focus on Arabic to distinguish itself as its leader says from the Persian, pro-Iranian Hizbullah) is headed by one Ayatollah Alsayed Alhusseini, and was founded in October 2006 after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in the summer of that year, when Hizbullah clearly defeated the Israeli army.

Alhusseini toured Europe and Britain, according to the group's website, to hold meetings with political personalities in London in February 2008. In a September 15, 2008 report posted on the website of Majlis, Alhusseini is featured in a picture standing in front of a banner stating in Arabic "thank you Saudi Arabia, Kingdom of goodness and humanity." The context of the photo is a letter sent by Alhusseini to Prince Nayef bin Sultan, Interior Minister of Saudi Arabia, for the great support he has given to the charities run by Majlis.

Prince Nayef is a generous donor to Lebanese Sunni groups. He was especially generous after the arrest of Saudi militants who had joined the Salafi group Fatah Al-Islam in fighting against the Lebanese army in the Palestinian refugee camp Nahrel Bared in northern Lebanon in May 2007. Nayef was negotiating the release and transfer of the Saudi terrorist to Saudi Arabia, which he managed successfully.

Al-Husseini is based in Sor and other southern Lebanese towns. A report in the Saudi-financed Al-Arabiya TV states today that Al-Husseinis group is recruiting 3000 resistance fighters, and that Alhusseini said that his group has received 1,500 applications from young people in the Gulf (i.e., Saudi Arabia) to join as fighters in his group. Alhusseini openly accuses Hizbollah's Hassan Nasrallah of being an Iranian agent not a Lebanese patriot.

The bank accounts of Majlis for donations are located at the Lebanese Canadian Bank in Beirut.

Alhusseini is allied with the Duruz sect in Lebanon whose leader, Walid Junbulat, has been calling openly for a U.S. war against Hizbullah, Syria and Iran. Alhusseini visited the religious leaders of Duruz in Al-Irfan Foundation, on January 7, the day he launched his armed resistance against Israel!

In May 16, 2006, Alhusseini sent a letter to the Maryam Rajavi, the leader of British-controlled, US-protected terrorist group Mujahideen-e-Khalg Organisation thanking her for her support in the face of Iranian provocations and harassment against his group in Lebanon. He called her Jihadist sister Maryam Rajavi, president-elect of the (Iranian) republic, who was elected by the Iranian resistance.

A London-based Iranian separatist group, the Arab Ahwazi movement, also propagate the political statements of the Majlis.

There is so much to this and there is no way to do this thread justice...

This thread covers alot of the Bush-Saudi offshore accounts and is well worth reading:
http://72.22.94.80/showthread.php?t=2678

But what now? Lets look at the aftermath of Riggs and who is Riggs replacement as the "Embassy Banking" enterprise in the U.S.? A american bank? NO a BRITISH Bank... HSBC...

Riggs bank execs to receive hefty severance despite laundering probe - The NewStandard

After Riggs, Embassy Accounts Can't Find a Home (washingtonpost.com)

News Release - Wachovia to transfer embassy accounts to HSBC ...

HSBC Expands Embassy Banking Business in Referral Agreement with ...

Competing for the Embassy Banking Business; Out-of-Town Players ...

HSBC to Open D.C. Branch, Pursue Embassy Clients  Article from ...

HSBC Bank USA will open a D.C. branch by the end of November in a bid to replace Riggs Bank as the city's premier diplomatic bank.

Riggs, which decided in April to jettison its more than $1 billion in local embassy accounts, has agreed to refer its embassy clients to HSBC, a sprawling global institution with headquarters in London.

"As Riggs previously disclosed, the company is in the process of winding down its embassy banking business," Riggs spokesman Mark N. Hendrix said. "As a service to our remaining embassy clients, Riggs is working closely with HSBC to ensure a smooth transition."

Riggs decided to shut down its embassy banking business under pressure from federal regulators concerned ...

HSBC's Embassy Banking Gets Bigger - Forbes.com

HSBC board meeting in Bahrain today -- MENAFN - Middle East North ...

SBC Holdings PLC - Board Appointment  Reuters

Vincent Cheng Hoi Chuen (59) has been appointed an executive Director of HSBC
Holdings plc with effect from 1 February 2008.

In January 2008, Mr Cheng was appointed a member of the National Committee of
the 11th Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), and a
senior advisor to the 11th Beijing Municipal Committee of the CPPCC. His
previous government advisory roles have included Member of the Executive Council
(the Hong Kong Government's highest policy-making body) from 1995 to 1997 and a
Hong Kong Affairs Adviser to the People's Republic of China from 1994 to 1997.
He was also a Member of the Legislative Council of the Hong Kong Government from
1991 to 1995.


Mr Cheng, MPhil, BSocSc, joined the HSBC Group in 1978 and was appointed a Group
Managing Director in 2005. He is Chairman of The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking
Corporation Limited, having been appointed a Director in 1995. He is Chairman of
HSBC Bank (China) Company Limited and HSBC Investments (Hong Kong) Limited and a
Director of HSBC Bank Australia Limited.

Chao-Vietnam- HSBC, Standard Chartered Step up Banking In Vietnam

Board of directors - Investor relations - Our company - HSBC Private Bank ...

SBC Holdings PLC (HBC)- Board of Directors - BusinessWeek


Little Bank Makes Bid For Embassies’ Business
Sequoia Competing With Riggs, Bank of America for Diplomats’ Accounts

by Tim Deady

Can a little community bank, with a mere handful of branches and only $243 million in deposits, compete against such behemoths as Bank of America, First Union and Riggs?
Tiny Sequoia National Bank thinks it can and has decided to go head to head with the giants in the limited but prestigious embassy banking market in Washington, D.C.

To Sequoia, it comes down to a question of size, which does matter, said bank President J. Paul McNamara.

"Those banks are very good banks and very good companies, but they’re just too big to give personal service and that’s what the embassy community wants, needs and expects," said McNamara. "I’ve heard from many diplomats who complained that they don’t get personal service that they want from those banks."
The embassy banking business is far from a major source of income for banks with operations in Washington. But there is a prestige factor, plus embassy accounts often lead to overseas business, said banking experts.

McNamara recently hired Walid Maalouf as vice president of private and embassy banking to head the Sequoia effort. Maalouf, a veteran of Washington’s banking industry, said his personal experience illustrates what is wrong with the present competitive environment.


http://web.gc.cuny.edu/eusc/activities/paper/Schwartz04.htm

BANK REGULATIONS AND MONEY LAUNDERING
by
Anna J. Schwartz
National Bureau of Economic Research

            My remarks today will cover three topics. First, I shall review developments in government regulation of financial services institutions in the United States since the 1930s. Until the mid-1980s the main objective of regulation was to insure the safety and soundness of these institutions.

 Second, I shall discuss the key new regulations that impose anti-money laundering obligations on U.S. financial institutions. These obligations have been superimposed on the performance of normal banking activities. Society has determined that national security requires banks to play a part in responding to this need, much as airlines have been given the responsibility to participate in the screening of passengers and their belongings before permitting them to board.  It is useful also to consider the inordinate foreign demand for U.S. banknotes as a source of large cash deposits in U.S. banks that constitute one of the roots of the money laundering problem. In this context I shall refer to the Federal Reserve’s Extended Custodial Inventory Program although it involves only financial institutions that have accepted a contractual agreement to participate in this program, not the entire class of financial service institutions.

Third, I shall describe the dialectical process by which regulated institutions discover loopholes in regulation as originally formulated and regulators’ subsequent amendment of the regulations to close the loopholes. The process then repeats. I shall cite examples of the dialectic based on safety and soundness regulation. Compliance with money laundering regulation has been spotty, but there is no predisposition to change the content of the regulation, so the dialectic is not operative. 

Regulations to Insure Financial Institution Safety and Soundness
            Let me now begin with a brief review of U.S. regulation of financial institutions. The scope of regulation alternated between maximization and minimization. The period of maximization extended from post-1933 to 1970. It was marked by the creation of new institutions like Federal deposit insurance, Federal Home Loan Banks to provide credit to banks servicing home owners. The Bank Holding Company Act and its amendment gave the Federal Reserve supervision of bank holding companies. Demand and time deposit rate regulation was an important component of the general belief structure of the period. It is questionable whether all these regulatory initiatives accomplished their objective.

Minimization of regulation thereafter gradually reversed earlier legislation and programs that were judged to have distorted markets were ended.   Minimization began with removal of rate ceilings on large, negotiable CDs, and proceeded until all deposit interest rate regulations were eliminated. Some changes had mixed effects, such as enactment of the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act which imposed reserve requirements for the first time on non-member banks of the Federal Reserve System. The Garn-St Germain Act made the banking system as a whole more competitive.  Repeal of the New Deal Glass-Steagall Act, however, empowering the financial services industry to engage in securities, real estate, and insurance business, and authorization of  interstate banking and branch banking were unmixed changes freeing markets. In addition, the FDIC Improvement Act changed the way U.S. deposit insurance is administered, requiring early intervention by regulators in the case of banks with below average capital ratios. The change was intended to insulate the taxpayer and insurance funds from undue risk, in response to former forbearance by regulators.

One general observation about bank safety and soundness regulation, whether or not the overall results were favorable, is that regulators did not publicize the name of an individual institution whose performance fell short of regulatory standards. Market participants might have had suspicions about the integrity of the institution in such a case, but its public reputation would not have been at risk. As we shall see when I now turn to the new regulations to which financial institutions have been subject in the past two decades, loss of reputation is at stake if an institution is singled out for violating these legal requirements.

Anti-Money Laundering and Other New Financial Institution Regulations
            It is not only recent legislation that imposes on U.S. financial services institutions the obligation to fulfill the demands of a broad purpose that society values. The U.S. Community Reinvestment Act, for example, is social engineering to assure that banks do not discriminate against residents of low-income districts in allotting mortgage loans. Banks may believe that the Act impugns the impartiality of their judgment of the credit-worthiness of mortgage applicants, but they nevertheless must comply.
            Anti-laundering legislation is of the same genre as the Community Reinvestment Act. It is designed to prevent the movement of illicit cash through U.S. financial institutions. Three laws prescribe their basic anti-money obligations: the Money Laundering Control Act of 1985, the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970, and the USA Patriot Act of 2002, which amended both prior laws.

            The Bank Secrecy Act, as amended, requires the institutions to: (1) establish anti- money laundering programs, an internal audit function, and appoint an employee training officer; (2) verify the identity of persons seeking to open accounts; (3) exercise due diligence when opening and administering accounts for foreign institutions, wealthy foreign individuals including senior foreign political figures. The Treasury Department also is authorized to require institutions and other firms to file reports on large currency transactions.

The Money Laundering Control Act was the first in the world to make money laundering a crime. It prohibits any person from knowingly engaging in a transaction which involves the proceeds of a long list of specified unlawful activity including terrorism, drug trafficking, and fraud. The Patriot Act expanded the list to include foreign crimes involving bribery and misappropriation of funds. It is therefore illegal for a U.S. bank knowingly to accept funds that were the proceeds of foreign corruption.

The Secretary of the Treasury is the primary federal regulator of enforcing anti-money laundering laws, and the Comptroller of the Currency within the Treasury Department is responsible for overseeing banks with a national banking charter.  The agency of the Treasury that has primary responsibility for money laundering is FINCEN, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. In addition, the Financial Action Task Force represents a group of OECD countries that is trying to coordinate efforts to combat money laundering internationally.

Despite the legislation, a prominent Washington, D.C. national bank has recently been found guilty of infringement of statutory and regulatory anti-money laundering requirements, and regulators have been charged with disinclination to compel the bank to correct its deficiencies.

Riggs Bank is a well-known long-standing institution incorporated in Delaware, which operates primarily in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area but also maintains foreign offices in London, Berlin, the Bahamas, the Isle of Jersey, and a subsidiary in Miami. The bank, with over $6 billion in assets as of last year, is the principal operating subsidiary of a holding company, Riggs National Corporation. The bank provides retail, corporate and institutional banking services, and wealth management services to high-income individuals through its domestic and international banking departments. A specialty of Riggs is Embassy banking, administering accounts at more than 95% of foreign missions and embassies located in Washington.

 Riggs has large numbers of foreign clients as well as some from countries with risks of money laundering and foreign corruption. The bank since 1997 has been repeatedly charged with disregard for anti-money laundering requirements and facilitation of suspicious activities, principally on the handling of accounts for Augusto Pinochet, which the bank concealed from the Comptroller of the Currency as well as of turning a blind eye to evidence of foreign corruption for Equatorial Guinea, its officials and family members. The bank’s accounts with Saudi Arabia are still under investigation.

In May 2004 Riggs paid the Office of the Comptroller $25 million to settle allegations that it had failed to report, detect, or even look for clearly suspicious transactions in accounts related to foreign embassies. The Federal Reserve Board at the same time ordered the parent company of the bank to take steps to insure that the bank reports suspicious financial transactions to federal authorities. The Federal Reserve also ordered Riggs to close its Miami subsidiary and to seek Fed approval before it pays any dividends or buys back stock.

With its reputation in tatters, in July Riggs agreed to be bought by Pittsburgh-based PNC Financial Services Group for about $700 million. Thus a historic name will be gone from Washington banking.[1] Riggs still faces serious legal problems as the investigation of its failure to abide by regulators’ strictures continues. This August Riggs placed its chief risk officer on leave.

The regulators themselves, as has been noted, are under a cloud. The examiners from the Office of the Comptroller identified the deficiencies in the Riggs weak anti-laundering program, but were slow to use enforcement tools. More disturbing, the Comptroller’s Examiner-in-Charge at Riggs until he retired in 2002 then joined Riggs staff. The former examiner appeared before his former agency in connection with matters relating to Riggs compliance, and attended meetings with the agency for two years without prior approval of the Comptroller’s ethics office. The Federal Reserve was also charged with being slow and passive in implementing its oversight role.

There is no agreement among various Congressional investigating bodies about how to remedy the problem of regulatory agency failure to provide effective oversight of bank anti-money laundering performance. The investigators concluded that the scandal is not limited to Riggs, that it is not an isolated case, but symptomatic of a pattern of ineffective enforcement by federal regulators.

            There are at least two other banks besides Riggs and UBS that have been in the news recently in connection with money laundering lapses. One is the New York branch of the Dutch banking giant ABN Amro. It is being investigated by regulatory and law enforcement officials for its dealings with foreign financial institutions. FRBNY alleged that the bank was improperly moving funds of questionable origin through the financial system. Dozens of accounts were transferred to ABN Amro in New York from the Bank of New York when it was under investigation in the 1990s.

            ABM Amro in July agreed in a 14-page document to sever relationships with nearly 100 correspondent loosely regulated banks in Eastern Europe, the Mediterranean, and Caribbean because of questions of compliance with money laundering regulations. The Justice Dept. is investigating $885,000 in transfers from Latvia thru ABN Amro in NY that were allegedly part of a fraudulent deal to avoid Russian taxes.  That and similar transactions are part of a broader pattern of fraud, tax and money laundering involving millions of dollars, passed through ABN Amro in NY by banks in Russia and Eastern Europe.
            A provision in the Patriot Act put the legal onus on banks to know the identity of their customers and where their money comes from. In the 1990s Bank of New York moved more than $7 billion from Russia, believed to be proceeds of corruption, tax evasion and organized crime through correspondent accounts with Russian banks. Two Bank of New York executives pleaded guilty to money laundering and haven’t yet been sentenced. The bank wasn’t punished pending full cooperation.

            Correspondent accounts allow foreign banks to conduct dollar-denominated transactions and move funds into the US without setting up a US branch, simply by paying fees to a host bank that has a US banking license. ABN Amro has also cut off its correspondent banks in Cyprus, an offshore banking center that caters to the Russian market. ABN Amro failed to certify that its customers weren’t foreign shell banks, entities that exist primarily on paper for the purpose of moving money secretly. It agreed to enhance its filings of Suspicious Activity Reports on unusual transactions.

            Another institution that regulators have targeted for lack of compliance is Beacon Hill, a small Manhattan firm not licensed by NY State doing suspicious money transmitting business all over the world. JP Morgan Chase opened 40 accounts with Beacon Hill in 1994. Morgan Chase in NY took on Beacon Hill after its London office shut down Beacon Hill in 1994 for suspicious  activities. Between 1997 and 2000 Morgan Chase moved $6.5 billion in wire transfers for Beacon Hill. Its clients included offshore shell corporations and money exchange houses in Brazil,  and Uruguay. Money was linked to the drug trade, some to official corruption and government fraud in Brazil. Beacon Hill also transmitted $32 million to accounts in Pakistan, Lebanon, Jordan, Dubai, Saudi Arabia and other Middle East countries. Investigators have not discovered the real parties behind the transactions because Beacon Hill record-keeping was sloppy.  Its business was run out of a pooled account that served many customers so it was impossible to connect specific deposits to specific transfers out of the account.

            In February Beacon Hill was convicted of operating as a money transmitter without a license. Morgan Chase was not charged with any crime. The NY State Banking Dept and NY Fed were asked in March whether Chase violated “Know your clients rule.” Morgan Chase has since stopped dealing with wholesale money transmitters.

            Another big US financial institution in trouble for failure to prevent suspected money laundering is Citigroup. Japanese regulators in September ordered Citigroup to shut down its four private banks in Japan for other violations as well. The publicity has damaged Citigroup’s reputation probably more than its revenues.

            One of the charges brought against Riggs was that over a two-year period it accepted cash deposits of $1 million or more in bank notes in six separate transactions. It did not treat them as unusual or requiring scrutiny. Cash is a traditional way of hiding the source of income. U.S. banknotes have for many years been a preferred banknote medium for residents of foreign countries the purchasing power of whose domestic currency is unstable and lacks anonymity.  Foreigners have no problem obtaining U.S. banknotes. It is estimated that over $400 billion of $680 billion in circulation is held abroad. Of course, not all suspicious money transactions are conducted with cash. It is easy to transfer funds by wire from even the least advanced countries. Riggs was also charged with failure to conduct routine or special monitoring of frequent and sizeable transfers of funds across international lines.

Providing the banknotes that foreigners demand is a financial benefit for  U.S. taxpayers, so it makes sense for the Federal Reserve to have introduced the Extended Custodial Inventory Program in 1996 primarily to facilitate the distribution abroad of a new design $100 note.  The primary purpose of the program then shifted to enhance the international banknote distribution system, which began to function in January 1998. The program maintains inventory of Federal Reserve notes in strategically located international distribution centers. Currently, a total of eight facilities are operated in five cities by five banks: American Express Bank (London), Bank of America (Hong Kong, Zurich), HSBC (London, Frankfurt, Hong Kong), Royal Bank of Scotland (London), and United Overseas Bank (Singapore). These five cities are now the principal hubs for the distribution of U.S. banknotes. Thirty institutions worldwide participate in wholesale buying and selling the notes that are exported to international markets by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York manages the program, and negotiates an Agreement with each of the five bank operators. The Agreement specifically prohibits operators from engaging in transactions affecting the program inventories with countries subject to sanctions by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Controls. The operators are required to provide the New York Fed with monthly reports of all countries that engaged in U.S. dollar transactions with the operator and the volume of those transactions.

Until late October 2003 one other bank was an operator of the banknote inventory program. The bank was UBS, which operated a site in Zurich  The Federal Reserve Bank of New York terminated its contract with UBS in connection with investigation of the discovery by U.S. armed forces in Baghdad of $650 million of U.S. currency with a New York Fed wrapping. Serial number records identified a sample of the notes as part of twenty-four shipments to several operators including UBS. The other operators provided information concerning the counterparties to whom they sold the banknotes in question. UBS eventually revealed that it had sold the notes to Iran, it claimed, by mistake, and gave a false explanation for its failure to account for the sale in its monthly report to the New York Fed. The Iranian transaction violated the Agreement UBS had signed prohibiting shipment of currency to countries subject to sanctions by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control. UBS was also fined a $100 million civil money penalty for deceptive conduct. Investigation of the trail of the currency to Iraq continues.

The case of UBS differs from that of Riggs. Riggs did not exercise due diligence in performing its anti-money laundering regulatory obligations. UBS violated a commitment it had explicitly agreed to abide by. The test of even well-conceived regulation is whether it works.

The Regulatory Dialectic
             U.S. commercial banks are regulated by many agencies, beginning with obtaining a charter, submitting to periodic examination by its regulatory and deposit insurance supervisor, meeting capital requirements, operating with restrictions on asset holdings, until recently constrained by state branching restrictions. A similar situation applies to other financial institutions, including savings and loan associations, mutual savings banks, and credit unions.

            Financial regulation imposes costs on the regulated, so regulation fosters incentives to avoid them. Regulators in reaction to avoidance behavior by the regulated find ways to tighten the rules they originally imposed. In the following round the regulated again try avoidance, to which the regulators again respond. This is the dialectic of regulation. It applies not only to financial regulation but also to regulation in general. Examples of the dialectic are easily found.

            Sometimes, however, avoidance is not needed. The market may innovate a new financial instrument that serves the purpose of the regulated and clearly improves the general welfare. Regulators in such a case do not respond by attempting to undo the change. An example of such an innovation is the introduction of the eurodollar market, which served the aim of commercial banks to avoid the opportunity cost of reserve requirements on deposits and the costs of deposit rate ceilings.  Eurodollars, U.S. dollars deposited in foreign banks abroad or in foreign branches of U.S. banks, were not subject either to reserve requirements or to former deposit interest rate ceilings, when U.S. banks borrowed these funds from the foreign bank or their own foreign branch. The same was true of commercial paper issued by the parent bank holding company, which was not treated as deposits. These were permanent changes the regulators simply lived with. 

               A good illustration of the dialectic was the effect on savings and loan institutions and mutual savings banks when market interest rates rose above deposit rate ceilings. Depositors withdrew their savings from these institutions, thus limiting their ability to issue residential mortgages. Home ownership, however, was a valued social objective. The Federal Reserve responded by raising the ceiling on time deposits in these institutions by one-quarter of one percent higher than commercial banks could pay and extending the higher time deposit ceiling to formerly unregulated credit unions. In addition, to channel the flow of money from small savers to the preferred institutions, small-denomination Treasury bills were eliminated. As a consequence, low-income households were effectively barred from earning higher market interest rates. Bank holding companies and corporations were encouraged to issue small-denomination debt securities, but these were not a typical investment of such households.   

            The regulators’ strategy to keep low-cost deposits in mortgage-issuing institutions was ultimately foiled by the development of money market mutual funds, which low-income households embraced. The ensuing loss of deposits by the institutions prompted the use of another stopgap measure to help them. They were allowed to issue money market certificates, which paid market interest rates, issued in denominations of $10,000.  Low-income households got no benefit from this change and had no alternative but to keep their savings in the mortgage-issuing institutions. Ultimately, the plugging of loopholes was abandoned by legislation allowing the mortgage-issuing institutions broader scope in lending.

            To sum up: Financial safety and soundness regulation in the U.S. at times has been ill-advised. The regulatory dialectic, however, may serve as a corrective for some misbegotten measures. Even when regulation has been socially beneficial, as in the case of anti-money laundering, some U.S. banks have acted to aid and abet money laundering. The reason is that the international money transmittal business is lucrative. The potential loss of fat fees earned from that business if those banks stopped dealing with wholesale money transmitters whose activities are suspicious accounts for their misbehavior. There is a corresponding indifference on the part of regulators to the urgency of enforcing compliance. This is a matter that requires the attention of top-level authorities in charge of public safety.

REFERENCES

CCH Group. “Senators Criticize Riggs’ Weak anti- money laundering program; Call for Congress to Act.” July 2004 (Catherine Hubbard).

Kane, Edward J, “How Market Forces Influence the Structure of Financial Regulation.” In W. Haraf and R. M. Kushmeider eds. Restructuring Banking and Financial Services in America. Washington, D.C. American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. 1988.

New York Times.  “ABN Amro Raises Guard on Money.” September 30, 2004. (P.W. 1).

OECD Financial Action Task Force. http//www1.oecd.org/fatf/

Pratt’s Letter “Money Laundering Crisis Angers Congress.” July 10, 2004.

Reuters, “Riggs Puts Chief Risk Officer on Leave – SEC Filing.” August 9, 6:36 pm ET 

U.S. Senate. “Testimony of Thomas C. Baxter, Jr. before the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, Oversight of the Extended Custodial Inventory Program.” Federal Reserve Bank of New York. May 20, 2004.

U.S. Senate. Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Committee on Governmental Affairs. “Money Laundering and Foreign Corruption: Enforcement and Effectiveness of the Patriot Act: Case Study Involving Riggs Bank.” Report prepared by the Minority Staff , July 16, 2004.

U.S. Department of the Treasury. “The 2001 National Money Laundering Strategy.” Prepared by the Office of Enforcement, in consultation with the Department of Justice. September 2001.

U.S. Treasury. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.

Wall Street Journal. “Morgan and Beacon Hill.” Editorial, p. A10, August 18, 2004.   

Wall Street Journal.  “Amid Probe, ABN Amro Cuts Off Nearly 100 Banks.”  September 29, 2004. (Glenn R. Simpson).

Wall Street Journal.  “Banks Increase Spending to Fight Money Laundering.”  September 20, 2004.  (Sarah Spikes).

Wall Street Journal.  “Congress Questions Treasury, Fed on Handling of ABN Amro.”  October 1, 2004.  (Glenn Simpson).

Washington Post.  “Fed Order Puts Riggs Under Closer Oversight.” May 17, 2004. P. E01. (Kathleen Day).

Washington Post.  “HSBC to Open D.C. Branch Pursues Embassy Clients.”  October 5, 2004.


 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
[1]    In a bid to replace Riggs Bank as Washington’s premier diplomatic bank, HSBC Bank, a global institution with headquarters in London, will open a D.C. branch in November.  Riggs, which is winding down its $1 billion in embassy banking, has agreed to refer its embassy clients to HSBC.

     Embassies have established accounts with other banks including Citibank, Wachovia, and Bank of America Corp.  A small community bank in Potomac has also won a few small embassy clients.

    HSBC has affiliates in 76 countries, some of which have strict secrecy laws, U.S. authorities believe secrecy laws impede rules designed to prevent international money laundering.  HSBC says it has rigorous controls at its affiliates and will follow regulations closely.


So are we likely to see (or be unable to see) selective enforcement of AML at HSBC? Aren't there a lot fewer players now for Global Money laundering. Are we not seeing a consolidation of the players in this game?

One should not mention PTech without mentioning INSLAW PROMIS ...

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.01/inslaw_pr.html

The INSLAW Octopus

Software piracy, conspiracy, cover-up, stonewalling, covert action: Just another decade at the Department of Justice

By Richard L. Fricker

The House Judiciary Committee lists these crimes as among the possible violations perpetrated by "high-level Justice officials and private individuals":

>> Conspiracy to commit an offense >> Fraud >> Wire fraud >> Obstruction of proceedings before departments, agencies and committees >> Tampering with a witness >> Retaliation against a witness >> Perjury >> Interference with commerce by threats or violence >> Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) violations >> Transportation of stolen goods, securities, moneys >> Receiving stolen goods

...

The Background

Imagine you are in charge of the legal arm of the most powerful government on the face of the globe, but your internal information systems are mired in the archaic technology of the 1960s. There's a Department of Justice database, a CIA database, an Attorney's General database, an IRS database, and so on, but none of them can share information. That makes tracking multiple offenders pretty darn difficult, and building cases against them a long and bureaucratic task.

Along comes a computer program that can integrate all these databases, and it turns out its development was originally funded by the government under a Law Enforcement Assistance Administration grant in the 1970s. That means the software is public domain ... free!
...
But a retired CIA official whose job it was to investigate the Inslaw allegations internally told WIRED that the DOJ gave PROMIS to the CIA. "Well," the retired official told WIRED, "the congressional committees were after us to look into allegations that somehow the agency had been culpable of what would have been, in essence, taking advantage of, like stealing, the technology [PROMIS]. We looked into it and there was enough to it, the agency had been involved."
...
But the CIA was not the only place where illegal versions of PROMIS cropped up. Canadian documents (held by the House Judiciary Committee and obtained by WIRED) place PROMIS in the hands of various Canadian government agencies. These documents include two letters to Inslaw from Canadian agencies requesting detailed user manuals -- even though Inslaw has never sold PROMIS to Canada. Canadian officials now claim the letters were in error.

And, of course, the software was transferred to Rafael Etian's anti- terrorism unit in Israel. The DOJ claims it was the LEAA version, but former Israeli spy Ben Menashe and others claim it was the 32-bit version. According to Ben Menashe, other government departments within Israel also saw PROMIS, and this time the pitchman was Dr. Earl Brian. In a 1991 affidavit related to the bankruptcy proceedings, Ben Menashe claimed: "I attended a meeting at my Department's headquarters in Tel Aviv in 1987 during which Dr. Earl W. Brian of the United States made a presentation intended to facilitate the use of the PROMIS computer software."

Asked why Israeli intelligence would have been so interested in Inslaw and PROMIS, Ben Menashe said, "PROMIS was a very big thing for us guys, a very, very big thing ... it was probably the most important issue of the '80s because it just changed the whole intelligence outlook. The whole form of intelligence collection changed. This whole thing changed it." PROMIS, Ben Menashe said, was perfect for tracking Palestinians and other political dissidents.


Bill Hamilton, Inslaw & PROMIS

http://www.altacocker.com/other_items/promis-2-ptech.htm

PTECH, 9/11, and USA-SAUDI TERROR
PART II
PROMIS Connections to Cheney Control of
9/11 Attacks Confirmed
The FAA & Ptech
Debriefed by Secret Service - looking for a PROMIS
Muslim Brotherhood, Christian Cultists, and Nazis
by

Michael Kane

© Copyright 2005, From The Wilderness Publications, http://www.fromthewilderness.com/. All Rights Reserved. May be reprinted, distributed or posted on an Internet web site for non-profit purposes only.

"I believe that Dick Cheney also had the ability using evolutions of the PROMIS software, to penetrate and override any other radar computer or communications system in the government."

- Mike Ruppert, in "Summation: Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury," from Crossing The Rubicon, p.592

[At the heart of our story is a program (we'll call it Ptech, after the company that produced it) that combines artificial intelligence, datamining, and "interoperability," the capacity for one program to read, operate, and modify the source codes of other programs. The computational power of the Ptech evolution of PROMIS represents a daunting new surveillance-and-intervention capability in the hands of the same elites who planned 9/11, prosecute the subsequent resource wars, and are presiding over what may become a full economic and military disaster for the resource-consuming citizens of America and the world. Since the "War On Terror" and the coming dollar/fossil fuel collapse will necessitate new levels of domestic repression, this is just the capability those elites require. Ptech is the functional equivalent of Total Information Awareness.

The human side of Ptech is where the thievery and murder come in: among the financiers and programmers of Ptech are apparent members of an international network of organized criminals involved in decades of narcotraffic, gunrunning, money laundering, and terrorism. Their personal and professional connections reach up into the highest levels of the American government, and their activities are still underway.

The issue of Saudi complicity in the attacks of 9/11 has played out into two different views. The first is the idea that the Saudis were solely responsible. This has been pumped up by Fox News and largely accepted as gospel in certain parts of the mainstream media. The second view is that the Saudis were set up to take the fall for having pulled off 9/11, covering up U.S. complicity. Neither view is correct, and both depend on a mistaken view of that country as a monolithic, homogeneous actor on the world stage. The opposite is true.

At the top of Arabian society is the giant royal House of Saud, descendants of Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, a charismatic warlord who used religious and marital alliances to consolidate his military conquests and, eventually, found a modern state on the Arabian Peninsula in 1932. Ibn Saud's success was partially dependent on his powerful religious allies, the inheritors of a doctrinaire form of Islam founded by the cleric Mohammed bin Abdul Wahhab (1702 - 1793). That coalition became increasingly unstable with the massive influx of oil wealth that began shortly after the first Arabian discoveries by SoCal (now Chevron) and Texaco, also in the 1930's.

Like virtually all Islamic states, Saudi Arabia has been the target of ongoing efforts by American intelligence aimed at suppressing any stirrings of incipient secular leftism. This is opposed, we believe, to what may be convenient and clandestine support for "al-Qaeda" terrorists (i.e. fundamentalists), acting as US proxies, who might destabilize the kingdom in advance of the US carving off only those regions with oil reserves. Socially polarized oil wealth, the ever-changing Arab-Israeli conflict, and American geopolitical maneuvering configure a daunting matrix of hidden forces that can't be fully understood or managed - not least because the intelligence elements are often double or triple agents with inscrutable loyalties.

The Ptech story is of intense interest for its implications about US government guilt in 9/11. As Ralph Schoenman, Michel Chossudovsky, Paul Thompson and others have argued, "al Qaeda" is not only traceable to CIA activity in Pakistan and Afghanistan during the Soviet period, it is also a current tool of American imperial ambitions. That directly contradicts the official story, in which al Qaeda is the foreign devil incarnate, a militant hate group formed straight from the soil of Saudi ideology - with no economic grievances, no interests in common with anyone in the non-Muslim world, and above all, no connections to the United States through funding, personnel, armaments, drug trafficking, visa assistance, or communications. It certainly is a militant hate group, but the rank and file may be totally unaware of real connections between their own leaders and the people they oppose with their very lives. These disturbing links would be just as agonizing - and just as unthinkable - for American citizens as they would be for a militant Islamist teenager in a ski mask jumping hurdles at some secret training camp.

Beneficiaries of the Ptech-connected MAK charities, the young men in Hezbollah and Hamas are fighting in land disputes, not heady ideological quests. They are also bitter, bereaved, murderous bigots with all the psychic rigidity and hysteria found in fundamentalists from Oklahoma to Hebron to Jeddah. Their hatred of the American national security state is surely absolute, but they are also beneficiaries of the Pentagon's need for an Enemy. That means that they can expect the United States to provide covert help of some kind at crucial points in the game. And the most despicable element in the American side of that process is the Bush-Cheney junta itself, which used its own assets inside the terrorist network associated with Osama bin Laden to murder three thousand civilians in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania as a pretext for unending warfare. This was done for reasons of state. But it was also done for personal gratifications including vast sums of money, permanent blackmail over those involved, and a heroin-like rush of criminally insane individual power. Sophisticated or naïve, cynical or grandiose and idealistic, each person involved betrayed humanity. And the apparatus that permitted this remains in place - as do most of the personnel.

The solution to the Ptech problem is not just to get all that creepy software the hell off the computers. The bigger solution is transparency and disclosure, de-militarization and political internationalism; localization of production and exchange; and a more equitable distribution of resources and opportunity. As Stan Goff has explained in these pages, the word opportunity does not necessarily refer to competition for purchasing power and domination. It means the opportunity to grow Haitian rice in Haiti and sell it in Haiti, without having to contend with the export dumping of American corporate agribusiness. It means the chance to maintain a tribal existence in an Afghanistan that is neither the proving ground for a US-Soviet proxy war nor the playground of American-funded drug lords. And though all ideals are warped by the rigors of practice, this was the point of President Kennedy's de-escalation in Laos, his Alliance for Progress in Latin America, and his refusal to invade Cuba:

What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children--not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women--not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.

Now let's get back to the business of sticking up for people who were murdered on 9/11 and in its aftermath, and to diminishing the present danger. - JAH].

January 27, 2005, PST 0900 (FTW) - Ptech - the software company whose major investors and directors are strongly linked to the Muslim Brotherhood - produced software that derived from PROMIS, had an artificial intelligence core, and was installed on virtually every computer system of the U.S. government and its military agencies on September 11, 2001.

This included the White House, Treasury Department (Secret Service), Air Force, FAA, CIA, FBI, both houses of Congress, Navy, Department of Energy, IRS, Booz Allen Hamilton, IBM, Enron and more.

Whoever plotted 9/11 definitely viewed the FAA as an enemy that morning. Overriding FAA systems would be the most effective way to ensure the attacks were successful. To do this, the FAA needed an evolution of PROMIS software installed on their systems and Ptech was just that; the White House & Secret Service had the same software on their systems - likely a superior modified version capable of "surveillance and intervention" functions.

Ptech is enterprise architecture software, which Indira planned on customizing to use as "risk architecture" software.

Enterprise architecture software is designed with the express purpose of knowing everything that is going on throughout the entirety of the enterprise in real-time. In the case of Ptech software installed on Whitehouse, Secret Service, Air Force and FAA systems, the enterprise included all of the data produced by those agencies in real-time.

Maybe this is why Ari Fleischer stated the Whitehouse didn't view Ptech as a threat; quite to the contrary.1 The Ptech software was a vital asset needed for the White House to execute the 9/11 plot, and may still be in place for possible use against professionals in government and military positions trying to do their jobs in the future.

The FAA & Ptech
In the 9/11 Commission report a "phantom flight 11" was added to the official version of what happened that day. A tape was played at the final commission hearing on June 17, 2004, of a woman from the FAA telling NORAD that flight 11 was still airborne at 9:24 am, long after it had actually struck the WTC. Originally this was reported to be the time when the FAA notified NORAD that flight 77 was off course and headed to the Pentagon.

This information was used by the commission to claim NORAD had never been informed that flight 77 was headed towards Washington D.C., leaving the FAA holding the bag for the penetration of the most heavily guarded airspace in the world. The commission's report states they were "unable to identify the source of this mistaken FAA information."

It has been clearly documented that "false blips," or radar injects, were placed on FAA radar screens on the morning of 9/11 as part of the Air Force war games that morning.2 "Phantom flight 11" fits the description of a "false blip." If it was, in fact, a radar inject, that would explain why the 9/11 commission was unable to locate the source of the "mistaken FAA information." The 9/11 war games are classified and specific information regarding such details is not publicly available. We do know by the time "phantom flight 11" appeared on FAA screens - 9:24 am - the war games had reportedly been called off.3

So what was it doing there?

FTW's position is that "phantom flight 11" was injected onto FAA radar screens by "the maestro"4 using Ptech software to override FAA systems. Let's examine the feasibility of such a scenario.

Ptech had been working on the data blueprint of the FAA's entire network for 2 years prior to 9/11. Their confidential business plan lays out just how much access they had to the FAA's data systems.

Ptech Inc. Confidential Business Plan: Page 37 of 46 11/7/2001

The FAA recognized the need for leveraging its IT investment, with a means of centralizing activities and introducing consistency and compatibility within the operating systems environment. A Ptech consulting team was organized to use activity modeling to identify key functions that could be examined for improvement in network management, network security, configuration management, fault management, performance management, application administration, network accounting management, and user help desk operations.5

What the above tells us is that Ptech had access to the entire informational barn door of the FAA's data systems. In an amazing exchange published in part 1 of this series, FTW editor Jamey Hecht was able to confirm a central thesis of Crossing the Rubicon while interviewing Wall St. Whistleblower Indira Singh. Indira is an IT professional who started First Boston's first Information Technology group in 1975 and had worked on Wall St. until 2002. She's been an IT consultant for Banker's Trust, the U.N., JP Morgan, and American Express. In 1988 she started TibetNet - a derivative of DARPA's Internet, the service you are likely reading this report on at the moment. The exchange was as follows:

Jamey Hecht: You said at the 9/11 Citizens' Commission hearings, you mentioned - its on page 139 of transcript - that Ptech was with Mitre Corporation in the basement of the FAA for 2 years prior to 9/11 and their specific job was to look at interoperability issues the FAA had with NORAD and the Air Force, in case of an emergency.

Indira Singh: Yes, I have a good diagram for that…

Jamey Hecht: And that relationship had been going on mediated by Ptech for 2 years prior to 9/11. You elsewhere say that the Secret Service is among the government entities that had a contract with Ptech. Mike Ruppert's thesis in Crossing the Rubicon, as you know, is that the software that was running information between FAA & NORAD was superseded by a parallel subsuming version of itself that was being run by the Secret Service on state of the art parallel equipment in the PEOC with a nucleus of Secret Service personnel around Cheney.

…In your view, might it have been the case that Cheney was using Ptech to surveil the function of the people who wanted to do their jobs on the day of 9/11 in FAA & NORAD, and then intervene to turn off the legitimate response?

Indira Singh: Is it possible from a software standpoint? Absolutely it's possible. Did he (Cheney) have such a capability? I don't know. But that's the ideal risk scenario - to have an over-arching view of what's going on in data. That's exactly what I wanted for JP Morgan.

You know what's ironic about this; I wanted to take my operational risk blueprint which is for an operational event going wrong and I wanted to make it generic for extreme event risk to surveil across intelligence networks. What you're describing is something that I said, 'boy if we had this in place maybe 9/11 wouldn't have happened.' When I was going down to In-Q-Tel and getting these guys excited about creating an extreme event risk blueprint to do this, I'm thinking of doing exactly what you're saying Cheney might have already had! [emphasis added]

-- end of transcript

Ptech was working with Mitre Corp. in the FAA and, according to Indira, Ptech was the Alpha dog in that relationship. Mitre has provided simulation & testing technologies for the Navy.6 They provide multiple FAA technologies and boast in their annual reports that their two biggest clients are DOD & FAA. Mitre knew the FAA's technological enterprise inside and out, including any simulation-and-testing (war game) technology operated by the FAA.

This was the perfect marriage to ensure that the capacity to covertly intervene in FAA operations on 9/11 existed - in the middle of simulated war games.It is also the perfect marriage to ensure that the command and control of these capabilities was readily available to Dick Cheney via Secret Service Ptech software in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, the bunker to which Cheney was "rushed" by the Secret Service. As already pointed out in part 1 of this series, Ptech does what Total Information Awareness (TIA, the DARPA program to monitor all electronic transactions in real-time) is supposed to do. (There are an undetermined number of other software programs in the hands of an undetermined number of corporations also capable of this. Again, enterprise architecture software is designed with the express purpose of knowing everything that is going on throughout the entirety of the "enterprise" in real-time.

In the case of Ptech software, installed on White House, Secret Service, Air Force and FAA systems (as well as most American military agencies), the enterprise included all of the real-time data of the above mentioned agencies. Indira has confirmed Ptech software could have been set up to allow Dick Cheney to surveil and intervene on FAA radar screens.

As documented by former Bush counter-terrorism advisor Richard Clarke in his book, Against All Enemies, on 9/11 the Secret Service had the capability of seeing FAA radar screens in real time; and as documented by Mike Ruppert in Crossing the Rubicon, Secret Service has the authority to take supreme command over any and all American agencies - including the Air Force.

9/11 is a prime example of what Indira Singh calls "extreme event risk." In the months prior to the attack, she was working on a program capable of providing data in real time to prevent these types of events from happening. She had pitched this very idea just one week before 9/11 at In-Q-Tel Headquarters (CIA) in Virginia, giving a final presentation for an ICH (Interoperability Clearinghouse) project code named "Blue Prophet." Indira explained to CIA why she was supporting ICH in this project.

She told the In-Q-Tel team, "The intelligence and other agencies need this now." One of the men with CIA looked at Indira with what she describes as the "blackest, coldest look anyone has ever given her."

They weren't interested in Blue Prophet's software for interoperability or risk, but rather the data it would produce because the data would point in the right directions. That data was very predictive, producing quality real-time intelligence. This is one week before 9/11. If In-Q-Tel already had this capability, it's no wonder they would be wary of someone like Indira - the woman from New York in Risk Management who resided a few minutes' walk from the Twin Towers.

Debriefed by Secret Service - looking for a PROMIS
It was Indira Singh whose investigative research into Ptech laid the groundwork for this series. One of the first reporters Indira contacted was Joe Bergantino, a 20-year veteran investigative reporter for a CBS affiliate in Boston.

"There are some great people in mainstream media," says Indira, and according to her, Joe is one of them. Joe told her that Ptech's CEO Oussama Ziade had stated, "If it wasn't for that woman in New York, none of this (the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) raid) would be happening". Neither Joe nor Indira liked the way that sounded.

Joe contacted Senator Grassley's office. A Secret Service agent, Charlie Bopp, was reassigned to Grassley's office, and put in charge of the Ptech file. An initial meeting was scheduled with Indira in January 2003.

Indira showed up with what she called, "A major Ground Zero attitude." She was supposed to be on the 106th floor of the WTC on 9/11 but instead responded as a civilian EMT that morning. This was very personal for her. Charlie understood and nevertheless made the arrangements for a debriefing at the Secret Service's National Threat Assessment Center (NTAC) in April 2003.

During the debriefing Indira was asked by a member of the Secret Service, "Is Ptech PROMIS?"

"I already knew what had happened to Danny Casolaro, and they were asking me if I had copies of Ptech," Indira told FTW.

Danny Casolaro was the investigative journalist mysteriously "suicided" in a West Virginia hotel room while investigating the theft of PROMIS software. Casolaro's investigation had uncovered a shadowy network he called "the Octopus" that seemed to have its hands in everything from drug trafficking and money laundering, all the way up to political assassinations and coups d'etat. When Casolaro's body was discovered, his arms were violently slashed and all the documents he traveled with were missing. He had told friends and relatives if anything happened to him they shouldn't believe it was by accident.

Being asked such a loaded question, she responded with her Ground Zero attitude saying:

"You have a copy of the software, why don't you tell me? This is not about the software guys, ok - was it a PROMIS? It was a place you could hide a PROMIS, a place you can drop a PROMIS."

Indira told FTW, "I was going to use Ptech software for risk surveillance at JP Morgan - Duh!"

By the very nature of risk surveillance, it is necessary to use PROMIS progeny based on artificial intelligence to achieve the capabilities we are describing. Charlie Bopp and those present for Indira's debriefing knew this, but they wanted to talk about the software and not the people behind the software. That is extremely significant. In part 1 of this series we've shown how the major people behind Ptech link to the Muslim Brotherhood, elements of the Saudi Royal Family, as well as Dick Cheney and the powerful American 'Christian' cult known as "The Fellowship," or, "The Family."

Indira wanted to name names, but Charlie wouldn't let her. "We can't investigate the people behind Ptech," said Charlie. "Just trust me, let's focus on the software." They gave no reasoning for this, they just said, "we can't."

"Well if you can't talk about the people behind this, it's a waste of time because with software like that you can't find trapdoors now. This is live stuff!" Singh told FTW. "You can't prove an intelligent agent [a small software component that reaches out to claim or insert information from another system - Ed.] went out and sent information somewhere. It's like proving you ate a piece of cake when you were 10 years old, unless you have video of it, it's not going to happen. It's that ephemeral." [emphasis added]

In other words, PROMIS-based activity leaves no footprints.

This means trapdoors are no longer necessary, or at least, no longer detectable. If Indira is correct, there would have been no "fingerprints" left of any kind showing just what Ptech software was used for on 9/11 and who used it.

"These guys debriefing me were from Military Intel, so they were trying to find out what I knew," says Singh. According to her, August of 2002 (the month before the story on Ptech was shut down by the White House, and three months before Ptech was raided) was a significant month. There were supposedly leaks of some kind coming out of the Persian Gulf. She was asked if Ptech software could have been the source of those leaks.

Singh responded, "Well if Military Intel are using Ptech in the Gulf, obviously! YES!"

During one of the initial meetings Indira threw a hat on the table from FDNY Engine 4, Ladder 15 and said, "I want you to put this on your desk, so any time you think of playing some political games you remember there were real people down there."

Indira Singh was done playing games.

Muslim Brotherhood, Christian Cultists, and Nazis
In part 1 of this series we documented the extensive ties from the Muslim Brotherhood running through Ptech. The Brotherhood was founded by Hassan Al-Banna and expanded with the help of Mahmoud Abu Saud of the House of Saud.7

This extensive network runs through various shell organizations and charities with interlocking boards, such as the New Jersey based real estate investment company BMI, CARE International, and the Northern Virginia based SAAR network - named after al Sulaiman Abdul Al-Aziz al-Rajhi, a scion of one of Saudi Arabia's richest families. Heading the SAAR network (renamed Safa) is Yakub Mirza, who also sits on the board of Ptech. It is of interest to note that claims against Al-Rajhi Banking & Investment Corp. for funding and supporting terrorism were recently dismissed by U.S. District Judge Richard Casey.

One of the central funding mechanisms in this nexus is the Al Taqwa Bank of Switzerland - now Nada Management - which the Department of Treasury says funds Al Qaeda.

Hitler supporter Albert Friedrich Armand Huber (aka Ahmed Huber) and Youseff Nada sit on the board of Al Taqwa. Nada reportedly helped the Grand Mufti escape from Nazi Germany when the Third Reich was teetering on the brink of collapse, and Ahmed Huber knew the Grand Mufti quite well; so well in fact, it was the Mufti who convinced Huber to convert to (the Brotherhood's form of) Islam.

Huber has spoken publicly of a "New Right" marriage of Nazi ideology and Islamist fascism. He has both a picture of Adolph Hitler and Osama bin Laden in his Swiss home.

Al Taqwa is a "hawala," a bank conducting transactions leaving no paper trail through a "good faith" global network that transfers funds - no questions asked.8 Bank Al Taqwa is located in the Bahamas; the parent company, Nada Management, is based in Lugarno, Switzerland, and is linked to the Royal Family of Liechtenstein.

Al Taqwa has done business with Asat Trust. The now deceased Prince Emanuel von und zu Liechtenstein became a board member of Asat Trust in May 1970 and stayed until November 1990, when he was replaced by Martin Wachter, the trust's current director.9

Asat Trust is on the American and U.N. terror list. According to the American Jewish Daily Forward, copies of business registration documents on file with authorities in Liechtenstein show that Asat Trust has been intimately involved with the Al Taqwa network during the last 30 years, registering changes in company names, personnel and financial structure.10

Most frightening of all is that this network seems to have links back to the powerful American Christian cult known as "The Fellowship," or "The Family." This organization is tied to American 'Christian' men of high political power including John Ashcroft, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, multiple Congressional members and prominent business leaders. Some "Family" members have stated they would love to have Osama bin Laden as a guest speaker because of the covenant he has with his followers. Doug Coe, the Family's leader who was praised by George H.W. Bush at the 1990 National Prayer Breakfast for his "quiet diplomacy," openly admires Hitler's "covenant."11

Yassin Al Qadi - the Saudi terrorist financier who funded Ptech and BMI - claimed to have met Dick Cheney in Jeddah before he became Vice President and the two "still share cordial relations." When Cheney's office was asked to comment on this, spokeswoman Jennifer Miller Wise stated the Vice President gave her no reason to believe he had met with Al Qadi before he assumed office.12

That is a non-answer; "no reason to believe" he met Al Qadi leaves no reason to believe he didn't. Regardless, there are more transparent connections between elements of Saudi and American elites.

In November of 2001, Halliburton was awarded a $140 million contract to develop an oil field in Saudi Arabia by the kingdom's state-owned petroleum firm, Saudi Aramco, and a Halliburton subsidiary, Kellogg Brown & Root, along with two Japanese firms, hired by the Saudis to build a $40 million ethylene plant.13

Dick Cheney is, of course, the former CEO of Haliburton.

As recently as 1991 ARAMCO had Khalid bin Mahfouz sitting on its Supreme Council or board of directors. Mahfouz, Saudi Arabia's former owner of the nation's largest bank, has been reported in several places to be Osama bin Laden's brother in law. However, he has denied this and brought intense legal pressure to bear demanding retractions of that allegation.14 He also denies any involvement in financing terror organizations.

One journalist who was sued by bin Mahfouz, Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld, is counter suing in New York Federal Court. She is the only one of some 30 authors not to retract claims that Mahfouz has financed Al Qaeda operations as published in her book, Funding Evil: How Terrorism is Financed and How to Stop it.

Khalid bin Mahfouz has major partnership investments with the multi-billion dollar BinLadin Group of companies and is a former director of BCCI, the infamous criminal drug-money laundering bank which performed a number of very useful services for the CIA before its 1991 collapse under criminal investigation by the legal apparatus of multiple countries.15

George Herbert Walker Bush, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney all have extensive ties to the Saudi Royal family and Saudi elites, who in turn have questionable ties to terrorist financiers such as Yassin al-Qadi. It is therefore not unreasonable for Dick Cheney to have met al-Qadi while in Jeddah while CEO of Haliburton.

This is the reality of the world we live in; where a covert international power structure supercedes the interests of nation states, and the misnomer of "national security" is used to keep this network's secrets hidden from the prying eyes of authentic journalists and the public at large.
 
1 On the very day the FBI raids Ptech, Ari Fleischer - president Bush's press secretary - gives Ptech a "clean bill of health" by stating: "The material has been reviewed by the appropriate government agencies, and they have detected absolutely nothing in their reports to the White House that would lead to any concern about any of the products purchased from (Ptech)."
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/12/20021206-4.html.

2 See Crossing the Rubicon, chapters 19 & 20.

3 See footnote #1 from Part 1 of this series.

4 "The Maestro" is the term used by Major Don Arias of NORAD to describe the individual who was in charge of coordinating the 9/11 war games. FTW's research has concluded the 9/11 maestro was either Dick Cheney, or both Cheney and General Ralph "Ed" Eberhart. See Crossing the Rubicon for full documentation.

5 Copy of page 37 of Ptech's Business Plan from 11/17/2001, provided by Indira Singh via email.

6 http://www.stormingmedia.us/07/0720/A072083.html.

7 http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A12823-2004Sep10?language=printer.

8 "A Banking System Built for Terrorism," by Meenakshi Ganguly, Time, 10/05/01: http://www.time.com/time/world/printout/0,8816,178227,00.html.

"Shareholders in the Bank of Terror?" by Lucy Komisar, Salon, 11/09/01
http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/03/15/al_taqwa/print.html.

9 "Terror Fund Trail Leads to Alpine Kingdom," by Marc Perelman, Forward
http://www.forward.com/issues/2003/03.10.17/news4.terror.html.

10 Ibid.

11 Coe listed other men who had changed the world through the strength of the "covenants" they had forged with their "brothers": "Look at Hitler," he said. "Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, Bin Laden." The Family, of course, possessed a weapon those leaders lacked: the "total Jesus" of a brotherhood in Christ.

"In a document entitled "Our Common Agreement as a Core Group," members of the Family are instructed to form a "core group," or a "cell," which is defined as "a publicly invisible but privately identifiable group of companions." A document called "Thoughts on a Core Group" explains that "Communists use cells as their basic structure. The mafia operates like this, and the basic unit of the Marine Corps is the four man squad. Hitler, Lenin, and many others understood the power of a small core of people." From "Jesus Plus Nothing," by Jeffrey Sharlet, Harper's, March 2003 http://www.harpers.org/JesusPlusNothing.html?pg=1.

12 "Software company tries to survive terror investigation," by Justin Pope, Associated Press, 01/03/03
http://www.boston.com/news/daily/03/ptech.htm.

13 "Bush Advisors Cashed in on Saudi Gravy Train," by Jonathan Wells, Jack Meyers and Maggie Mulvihill, Common Dreams, 12/11/01
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines01/1211-05.htm.

14 "COUP D'ETAT," by Michael Ruppert, FTW, 6/8/04 http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/060804_coup_detat.html.

15 Ibid
 

Debriefed by Secret Service - looking for a PROMIS

It was Indira Singh whose investigative research into Ptech laid the groundwork for this series. One of the first reporters Indira contacted was Joe Bergantino, a 20-year veteran investigative reporter for a CBS affiliate in Boston.

"There are some great people in mainstream media," says Indira, and according to her, Joe is one of them. Joe told her that Ptech's CEO Oussama Ziade had stated, "If it wasn't for that woman in New York, none of this (the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) raid) would be happening". Neither Joe nor Indira liked the way that sounded.

Joe contacted Senator Grassley's office. A Secret Service agent, Charlie Bopp, was reassigned to Grassley's office, and put in charge of the Ptech file. An initial meeting was scheduled with Indira in January 2003.

Indira showed up with what she called, "A major Ground Zero attitude." She was supposed to be on the 106th floor of the WTC on 9/11 but instead responded as a civilian EMT that morning. This was very personal for her. Charlie understood and nevertheless made the arrangements for a debriefing at the Secret Service's National Threat Assessment Center (NTAC) in April 2003.

During the debriefing Indira was asked by a member of the Secret Service, "Is Ptech PROMIS?"

"I already knew what had happened to Danny Casolaro, and they were asking me if I had copies of Ptech," Indira told FTW.

Danny Casolaro was the investigative journalist mysteriously "suicided" in a West Virginia hotel room while investigating the theft of PROMIS software. Casolaro's investigation had uncovered a shadowy network he called "the Octopus" that seemed to have its hands in everything from drug trafficking and money laundering, all the way up to political assassinations and coups d'etat. When Casolaro's body was discovered, his arms were violently slashed and all the documents he traveled with were missing. He had told friends and relatives if anything happened to him they shouldn't believe it was by accident.

Being asked such a loaded question, she responded with her Ground Zero attitude saying:

"You have a copy of the software, why don't you tell me? This is not about the software guys, ok - was it a PROMIS? It was a place you could hide a PROMIS, a place you can drop a PROMIS."

Indira told FTW, "I was going to use Ptech software for risk surveillance at JP Morgan - Duh!"

By the very nature of risk surveillance, it is necessary to use PROMIS progeny based on artificial intelligence to achieve the capabilities we are describing. Charlie Bopp and those present for Indira's debriefing knew this, but they wanted to talk about the software and not the people behind the software. That is extremely significant. In part 1 of this series we've shown how the major people behind Ptech link to the Muslim Brotherhood, elements of the Saudi Royal Family, as well as Dick Cheney and the powerful American 'Christian' cult known as "The Fellowship," or, "The Family."

Indira wanted to name names, but Charlie wouldn't let her. "We can't investigate the people behind Ptech," said Charlie. "Just trust me, let's focus on the software." They gave no reasoning for this, they just said, "we can't."

"Well if you can't talk about the people behind this, it's a waste of time because with software like that you can't find trapdoors now. This is live stuff!" Singh told FTW. "You can't prove an intelligent agent [a small software component that reaches out to claim or insert information from another system - Ed.] went out and sent information somewhere. It's like proving you ate a piece of cake when you were 10 years old, unless you have video of it, it's not going to happen. It's that ephemeral." [emphasis added]

In other words, PROMIS-based activity leaves no footprints.

This means trapdoors are no longer necessary, or at least, no longer detectable. If Indira is correct, there would have been no "fingerprints" left of any kind showing just what Ptech software was used for on 9/11 and who used it.

"These guys debriefing me were from Military Intel, so they were trying to find out what I knew," says Singh. According to her, August of 2002 (the month before the story on Ptech was shut down by the White House, and three months before Ptech was raided) was a significant month. There were supposedly leaks of some kind coming out of the Persian Gulf. She was asked if Ptech software could have been the source of those leaks.

Singh responded, "Well if Military Intel are using Ptech in the Gulf, obviously! YES!"

During one of the initial meetings Indira threw a hat on the table from FDNY Engine 4, Ladder 15 and said, "I want you to put this on your desk, so any time you think of playing some political games you remember there were real people down there."

Indira Singh was done playing games.

Muslim Brotherhood, Christian Cultists, and Nazis
In part 1 of this series we documented the extensive ties from the Muslim Brotherhood running through Ptech. The Brotherhood was founded by Hassan Al-Banna and expanded with the help of Mahmoud Abu Saud of the House of Saud.7

This extensive network runs through various shell organizations and charities with interlocking boards, such as the New Jersey based real estate investment company BMI, CARE International, and the Northern Virginia based SAAR network - named after al Sulaiman Abdul Al-Aziz al-Rajhi, a scion of one of Saudi Arabia's richest families. Heading the SAAR network (renamed Safa) is Yakub Mirza, who also sits on the board of Ptech. It is of interest to note that claims against Al-Rajhi Banking & Investment Corp. for funding and supporting terrorism were recently dismissed by U.S. District Judge Richard Casey.

One of the central funding mechanisms in this nexus is the Al Taqwa Bank of Switzerland - now Nada Management - which the Department of Treasury says funds Al Qaeda.

Hitler supporter Albert Friedrich Armand Huber (aka Ahmed Huber) and Youseff Nada sit on the board of Al Taqwa. Nada reportedly helped the Grand Mufti escape from Nazi Germany when the Third Reich was teetering on the brink of collapse, and Ahmed Huber knew the Grand Mufti quite well; so well in fact, it was the Mufti who convinced Huber to convert to (the Brotherhood's form of) Islam.

Huber has spoken publicly of a "New Right" marriage of Nazi ideology and Islamist fascism. He has both a picture of Adolph Hitler and Osama bin Laden in his Swiss home.

Al Taqwa is a "hawala," a bank conducting transactions leaving no paper trail through a "good faith" global network that transfers funds - no questions asked.8 Bank Al Taqwa is located in the Bahamas; the parent company, Nada Management, is based in Lugarno, Switzerland, and is linked to the Royal Family of Liechtenstein.

Al Taqwa has done business with Asat Trust. The now deceased Prince Emanuel von und zu Liechtenstein became a board member of Asat Trust in May 1970 and stayed until November 1990, when he was replaced by Martin Wachter, the trust's current director.9

Asat Trust is on the American and U.N. terror list. According to the American Jewish Daily Forward, copies of business registration documents on file with authorities in Liechtenstein show that Asat Trust has been intimately involved with the Al Taqwa network during the last 30 years, registering changes in company names, personnel and financial structure.10

Most frightening of all is that this network seems to have links back to the powerful American Christian cult known as "The Fellowship," or "The Family." This organization is tied to American 'Christian' men of high political power including John Ashcroft, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, multiple Congressional members and prominent business leaders. Some "Family" members have stated they would love to have Osama bin Laden as a guest speaker because of the covenant he has with his followers. Doug Coe, the Family's leader who was praised by George H.W. Bush at the 1990 National Prayer Breakfast for his "quiet diplomacy," openly admires Hitler's "covenant."11

Yassin Al Qadi - the Saudi terrorist financier who funded Ptech and BMI - claimed to have met Dick Cheney in Jeddah before he became Vice President and the two "still share cordial relations." When Cheney's office was asked to comment on this, spokeswoman Jennifer Miller Wise stated the Vice President gave her no reason to believe he had met with Al Qadi before he assumed office.12

That is a non-answer; "no reason to believe" he met Al Qadi leaves no reason to believe he didn't. Regardless, there are more transparent connections between elements of Saudi and American elites.

In November of 2001, Halliburton was awarded a $140 million contract to develop an oil field in Saudi Arabia by the kingdom's state-owned petroleum firm, Saudi Aramco, and a Halliburton subsidiary, Kellogg Brown & Root, along with two Japanese firms, hired by the Saudis to build a $40 million ethylene plant.13

Dick Cheney is, of course, the former CEO of Haliburton.

As recently as 1991 ARAMCO had Khalid bin Mahfouz sitting on its Supreme Council or board of directors. Mahfouz, Saudi Arabia's former owner of the nation's largest bank, has been reported in several places to be Osama bin Laden's brother in law. However, he has denied this and brought intense legal pressure to bear demanding retractions of that allegation.14 He also denies any involvement in financing terror organizations.

One journalist who was sued by bin Mahfouz, Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld, is counter suing in New York Federal Court. She is the only one of some 30 authors not to retract claims that Mahfouz has financed Al Qaeda operations as published in her book, Funding Evil: How Terrorism is Financed and How to Stop it.

Khalid bin Mahfouz has major partnership investments with the multi-billion dollar BinLadin Group of companies and is a former director of BCCI, the infamous criminal drug-money laundering bank which performed a number of very useful services for the CIA before its 1991 collapse under criminal investigation by the legal apparatus of multiple countries.15

George Herbert Walker Bush, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney all have extensive ties to the Saudi Royal family and Saudi elites, who in turn have questionable ties to terrorist financiers such as Yassin al-Qadi. It is therefore not unreasonable for Dick Cheney to have met al-Qadi while in Jeddah while CEO of Haliburton.

This is the reality of the world we live in; where a covert international power structure supercedes the interests of nation states, and the misnomer of "national security" is used to keep this network's secrets hidden from the prying eyes of authentic journalists and the public at large.
 
1 On the very day the FBI raids Ptech, Ari Fleischer - president Bush's press secretary - gives Ptech a "clean bill of health" by stating: "The material has been reviewed by the appropriate government agencies, and they have detected absolutely nothing in their reports to the White House that would lead to any concern about any of the products purchased from (Ptech)."
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/rele...20021206-4.html.

2 See Crossing the Rubicon, chapters 19 & 20.

3 See footnote #1 from Part 1 of this series.

4 "The Maestro" is the term used by Major Don Arias of NORAD to describe the individual who was in charge of coordinating the 9/11 war games. FTW's research has concluded the 9/11 maestro was either Dick Cheney, or both Cheney and General Ralph "Ed" Eberhart. See Crossing the Rubicon for full documentation.

5 Copy of page 37 of Ptech's Business Plan from 11/17/2001, provided by Indira Singh via email.

6 http://www.stormingmedia.us/07/0720/A072083.html.

7 http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/w...anguage=printer.

8 "A Banking System Built for Terrorism," by Meenakshi Ganguly, Time, 10/05/01: http://www.time.com/time/world/prin...,178227,00.html.

"Shareholders in the Bank of Terror?" by Lucy Komisar, Salon, 11/09/01
http://archive.salon.com/tech/featu...aqwa/print.html.

9 "Terror Fund Trail Leads to Alpine Kingdom," by Marc Perelman, Forward
http://www.forward.com/issues/2003/...ws4.terror.html.

10 Ibid.

11 Coe listed other men who had changed the world through the strength of the "covenants" they had forged with their "brothers": "Look at Hitler," he said. "Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, Bin Laden." The Family, of course, possessed a weapon those leaders lacked: the "total Jesus" of a brotherhood in Christ.

"In a document entitled "Our Common Agreement as a Core Group," members of the Family are instructed to form a "core group," or a "cell," which is defined as "a publicly invisible but privately identifiable group of companions." A document called "Thoughts on a Core Group" explains that "Communists use cells as their basic structure. The mafia operates like this, and the basic unit of the Marine Corps is the four man squad. Hitler, Lenin, and many others understood the power of a small core of people." From "Jesus Plus Nothing," by Jeffrey Sharlet, Harper's, March 2003 http://www.harpers.org/JesusPlusNothing.html?pg=1.

12 "Software company tries to survive terror investigation," by Justin Pope, Associated Press, 01/03/03
http://www.boston.com/news/daily/03/ptech.htm.

13 "Bush Advisors Cashed in on Saudi Gravy Train," by Jonathan Wells, Jack Meyers and Maggie Mulvihill, Common Dreams, 12/11/01
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines01/1211-05.htm.

14 "COUP D'ETAT," by Michael Ruppert, FTW, 6/8/04 http://www.fromthewilderness.com/fr...coup_detat.html.

15 Ibid.

The Safari Club - CIA - Riggs Bank - Promis - E-Systems - Ptech

See: Safari Club

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22Safari+Club%22+cia++Bush+Promis&btnG=Search

Excerpts from:
http://ftrsummary.blogspot.com/2005/08/ftr-522-safari-club.html

the program accesses information from a VERY important new book Prelude to Terror by Joseph J. Trento. In this book, the author sets forth information about the Safari Club, an “outsourced” intelligence network in which the Saudis financed a privatized espionage establishment that dominated American intelligence operations for the better part of a quarter of a century. Utilizing the Saudi GID and the Pakistani ISI as proxy agencies, this network ran the Iran-Contra, Iraqgate and Afghan mujahideen efforts. The most significant outgrowth of this network was the birth of al Qaeda, with all that has resulted from its conception. One of the points that Trento makes is the fact that outsourcing U.S. intelligence operations eliminated the necessary function of counterintelligence—monitoring one’s allies in order to verify their loyalty and competence. The failure to conform to this basic tenet of intelligence has haunted the U.S., and will continue to do so. It is important to note that the elder George Bush and the Reagan administrations were at the core of the Safari Club. The Safari Club was specifically created to circumvent Congressional and even Presidential oversight! Note that Mr. Emory incorrectly cited FTR#367 in his concluding remarks. The broadcast that details the subversion of France in the run-up to World War II is FTR#366. For more about the Fifth Column described here, see—among other programs—FTR#’s 412, 462, 464, 467, 474.

Program Highlights Include: The role of Prince Turki (Osama bin Laden’s case officer) in the Safari Club; the transfer of ultra-secret NSA software to the Saudis through the Safari Club; the capability of this NSA software to compromise the U.S. national security operations and law enforcement; the use of the Safari Club by the Saudis to spy on the United States; warnings by US intelligence analysts that we were backing the wrong Islamic elements in Afghanistan and that they would turn on us after the Soviets were defeated; the overruling of State Department employee Michael Springman when he tried to prevent dangerous Islamists from gaining visas to visit the United States; the Safari Club’s development of the BCCI as a financial base for funding highly illegal covert operations; the use of the Safari Club to develop the Islamic bomb (a subject that is covered at length in FTR#524.)


1. Beginning with a summary introduction of the material in Prelude to Terror (the superb, vitally important book from which the material in this program is excerpted), the program highlights the fundamental theme of the privatization of U.S. intelligence. As discussed throughout the program, the “outsourcing” of much of U.S. intelligence to a Saudi-dominated network called the Safari Club set the stage for the events of 9/11. The Safari Club appears to have been an essential element of the Fifth Column inside the U.S. and its national security establishment. That Fifth Column greatly facilitated the attacks of 9/11. “Prelude to Terror will focus on how the privatization of intelligence metamorphosed from an instrument of limited application in the 1950’s into a broad-based core operating model of significant proportions in the 1970’s and ‘80’s. Simultaneously, a secret alliance was forged with Saudi intelligence. This alliance was orchestrated by CIA covert management, without the knowledge of Congress, and, in some cases, even the president. Ultimately, as these two developments became increasingly intertwined, a dynamic of catastrophic proportions was created, one that left the United States with a severely compromised intelligence apparatus in the Middle East. . . .”
(Prelude to Terror; by Joseph Trento; Copyright 2005 by Joseph J. Trento; Carroll & Graf [HC]; ISBN 0-7867-1464-6; p. xi.)
...

9. As recycled Saudi petro-dollars assumed an increasingly large position within the U.S. economy, the Saudi royal family underwrote U.S. intelligence. The relationship between economic relationships and the configuration of the intelligence community is an important one. Note that one of the principal financial institutions involved in the machinations of the Safari Club is the Riggs Bank. For more about Riggs Bank, use the search function to locate past “For The Record” broadcasts dealing with this subject. President Bush’s uncle Jonathan is a director of the Bank. “Turki’s ‘secret’ was that the Saudi royal family had taken over intelligence financing for the United States. It was during this period that the Saudis opened up a series of covert accounts at Riggs Bank in Washington. Starting in the mid-1970’s, bank investigators say, these accounts show that tens of millions of dollars were being transferred between CIA operational accounts and accounts controlled by Saudi companies and the Saudi embassy itself. Turki worked directly with agency operatives like Sarkis Soghanalian and Ed Wilson, ‘If I needed money for an operation, Prince Turki made it available,’ Wilson said. Clifford’s request for Saudi help came at a very critical time for the royal family. Although the House of Saud had long placated domestic conservative clerics by allowing an education system that targeted the West—especially the United States—as evil, they were still deathly afraid of the establishment of any Muslim fundamentalist regime in the region. Their interests included keeping the shah in charge in Teheran and keeping an eye on an increasingly militant Libya. Although normally Israeli and Saudi interests wee in conflict, in this case they converged. It was in the interest of Albert Hakim, Frank Terpil’s sometime employer, to serve as a bridge between the two.” (Ibid.; pp. 102-103.)


11. Note that among the benefits for Saudi intelligence was a comprehensive knowledge of U.S. intelligence operations. Coupled with the Saudis’ acquisition of sensitive keyword software developed by the NSA, the foundation was laid for a deep penetration of, and subversion of U.S. intelligence by those elements of Saudi intelligence, Pakistani intelligence and the Muslim Brotherhood that were sympathetic to Osama bin Laden. “Adham worked closely with George Bush on the plan to provide covert banking services for CIA operations. Like most things the Saudis do, there were benefits for the royal family. The arrangement would give the Saudis a comprehensive knowledge of U.S. intelligence operations. [Italics are Mr. Emory’s.] In 1976, when the CIA needed an influx of cash for operations, Adham agreed to allow Nugan Hand Bank’s Bernie Houghton to open a branch in Saudi Arabia.” (Idem.)


15. One of the primary vehicles for covert operations in the 1980’s was the BCCI. One cannot separate the milieu of the BCCI and that of 9/11. For more about the BCCI (in particular its relationship to the events of 9/11) use the search function, paying particular attention to FTR#’s 356, 391, 424, 462, 464, 485. Note that the elder George Bush had an account at the bank’s Paris branch. “Adham understood that creating a single worldwide clandestine bank was not enough to assure the kind of resources necessary to stave off the coming Islamic revolutions that threatened Saudi Arabia and the entire region. The Safari Club needed a network of banks to finance its intelligence operations. With the official blessing of George Bush as the head of the CIA, Adham transformed a small Pakistani merchant bank, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), into a worldwide money-laundering machine, buying banks around the world in order to create the biggest clandestine money network in history. Bush had an account with BCCI established at the time he was at the CIA. The account was set up at the Paris branch of the bank. Subsequent senate and other investigations concluded that the CIA, beginning with Bush, had protected the bank while it took part in illicit activities. One source who investigated the bank and provided information about the Bush account in Paris was Jacques Bardu, who, as a French customs official, raided the BCCI Paris branch and discovered the account in Bush’s name.” (Idem.)

25. Consider the grave, devastating implications of what follows. Of what use would the keyword software given to the Saudis have been for those elements of Saudi intelligence hostile to the United States? It does not require a great leap of imagination to see this kind of transaction having set the stage for the stunning role of Ptech in administering America’s air defenses. For more about Ptech and the implications of this firm for the anomalous performance of American air defenses on 9/11, see FTR#’s 462, 464. “ ‘To make matters worse,’ the official continued, ‘the CIA permitted U.S. Customs at Dulles Airport to overlook an illegal export of our most secret eavesdropping software to Saudi Arabia.’ The software, referred to as ‘key word software,’ is a computer code developed for the National Security Agency by a company called E Systems. The software allows key words and phrases to be flagged by computers from targeted voice and other communications in real time. The problem with exporting the software is that any country getting it could use it to target U.S. interests and allies. It could even be used to track what U.S. law enforcement, military, and intelligence agencies were doing. [Italics are Mr. Emory’s. Consider the implications of this for the events in and around 9/11.] Lewis Sams, the man E Systems ordered to deliver the software to the Kingdom, said, ‘I was very nervous when I got to the airport. I knew it was illegal to take it out of the country, but I was given the name of a Customs official at Dulles Airport and told if there were any problems to ask for him. . . . E Systems’ desire to do business with the royal family was why I thought they sent me.’ Sams said that E Systems, which had close ties to the White House, maintained the secret communications gear for Air Force One. As it turned out, E Systems did not get the contract for Saudi Intelligence, but the software was left with GID officials even so, according to Sams.” (Ibid.; p. 340.)

HSBC a Global Riggs Bank...


http://householdwatch.com/wp/2006/03/22/hsbc-money-laundering-may-enable-terrorism

HSBC Money Laundering May Enable Terrorism

In reading this section which originated from HSBC - HSBC Bank USA (”HBUS”) - regarding money laundering and their refusal to provide information, remember that HSBC wants to overturn state and local laws in favor of federal laws.

“Regarding an investigation into certain wire transfers made through Riggs National Bank… HBUS did receive from Riggs a request under section 314(b) of the USA Patriot Act, which authorizes financial institutions in the United States to exchange account information that may be related to money-laundering offenses or terrorist financing. Such information-sharing authority is in stark contrast to federal and state privacy protections provided in the United States that generally prohibit banks from publicly releasing account-level information, except under limited circumstances. Upon receiving the request for Riggs, HBUS confirmed that the account in question had been opened by an HSBC Group affiliate in Luxembourg, and that HBUS had forwarded the funds to a United States correspondent account in the United States for its Luxembourg affiliate. HBUS also informed Riggs, pursuant to the 314(b) request, that HBUS had sent funds for another mentioned company to an HSBC Group affiliate in Cyprus. Like the United States and many other sovereign countries where HSBC Group companies operate, both Luxembourg and Cyprus maintain privacy laws that prohibit the sharing of account information with other companies, even between companies related by ownership. In this case, HSBC affiliates in Luxembourg and Cyprus — and are neither branches nor subsidiaries of a US institution (i.e., they are not branches or subsidiaries of HBUS but share a common, foreign parent), operate under laws which forbid such sharing of customer information. Thus, if those institutions had provided information to HBUS, to any other US bank, or directly to the US Government, they would have been in violation of the laws of Luxembourg and Cyprus respectively and could have been subject to criminal and/or civil sanctions in their host countries. Section 314(b) [of] the USA Patriot Act does not override these local laws applicable to banks operating in Luxembourg and Cyprus.”

As HSBC expands in the United States they claim to be our “local bank” but you can take the Patriot Act and stick it where the sun doesn’t shine. HSBC is investing heavily in the Middle East (including Iraq) and Viet Nam, while at home they disregard the Soldiers and Sailors Act - thus abusing our military. Don’t let this bank fool you! They also do business in sanctioned countries and may not be your friend.

http://www.shariahfinancewatch.org/blog/category/islam/page/89/
Conference To Give Update On Development Of Islamic Finance
By D. Arul Rajoo

13th June 2008

BANGKOK, June 13 (Bernama) — The Second Thailand Islamic Finance Conference, which will be held here on June 26, will give an update on the worldwide development of Islamic finance, including the untapped market in Thailand.

The event offers an opportunity for public sector officials, state enterprise directors, bankers, financiers and private sector business leaders to gain a better understanding of the opportunities offered by Islamic finance, the fastest growing banking and financial sector in the world.

Christopher F. Bruton, Director of Dataconsult Ltd which is organising the event, said Thai Finance Minister, Dr Surapong Suebwonglee, would give a keynote address while other speakers included deputy governor of Bank Negara Malaysia, Datuk Mohammad Razif Abdul Kadir, British Ambassador to Thailand, Quinton Quayle and Kitti Patpong Pibul, chairman of the Islamic Bank of Thailand.

He said the conference was being held with the support from the Thai and Malaysian financial authorities, and with sponsorship from HSBC, Zaid Ibrahim Law Office and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Last year, about 220 participants attended the event.

Bruton said Islamic financing system was gaining worldwide prominent and cited the Arabian Gulf area, the world’s largest source of surplus investment funds which has experienced dramatic development of syariah-compliant financing.

“London, the hub of world financial innovation, now considers Islamic finance as a prime area of concentration. In Malaysia and Indonesia, Islamic finance is a major and fast growing part of the overall banking sector, used by Muslims and non-Muslims alike,” he said.

He said in Thailand, development of Islamic finance was now also gaining serious consideration with support from the Ministry of Finance, the Bank of Thailand and Islamic Bank of Thailand.

“But the development still has a long way to go as necessary tax and regulatory measures to encourage use of Islamic financial instruments are not yet fully implemented while the government has not yet taken full advantage of the massive international sukuk bond market for infrastructure development finance.

“However, interest is fast growing, and there is now a serious desire among bankers, financiers, property developers and infrastructure promoters, to take advantage of the benefits that Islamic finance may offer,” he said.


http://www.bernama.com.my/bernama/v3/news_business.php?id=339179

BTW  look who the current Chairman of BAE Systems is...the former number 2 guy at British Petroleum goes to the number 1 guy at BAE......

On 1st July, 2004 Dick Olver was appointed Chairman of BAE Systems plc and on the same date retired from the Board of BP plc. Prior to leaving BP he was Deputy Group Chief Executive and was appointed to the number two slot on 9th January, 2003. He continued his association with BP as Deputy Chairman of TNK-BP until October, 2006.
http://www.baesystems.com/AboutUs/CompanyStructure/Leadership/DickOlver/index.htm


TahoeBlue has posted allot of interesting info in this thread.

We need to tie up some questions regarding Prince Bandar. What was his relationship with the CIA director George Tenet and the Israeli's and what was he up to around the time of the attacks. Hmmm.

This ties in with:
9/11 Memorandum Commission Select Committees 2004 - Israeli Surveillance

Also note here, that this was a "party" attended by both the Saudi's and the Israelis. There together to get their "roles" and "stories" straight?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=125x237668
Tenet/Bandar meeting on 9/08/01

On Saturday (9/08/01) night, he (Bandar) attended a party hosted by Bruce Riedel, and most of the official Middle East policy community was there, including both the Saudi and Israeli ambassadors, as was CIA director George Tenet. Afterward, Bandar left with Tenet for an all-night schmooze that lasted through breakfast on Sunday morning. According to Reidel, the prince told Tenet that the crisis in U.S.-Saudi relations they had just weathered had been but the tip of an iceberg. The leading lights of the House of Saud had undertaken a sweeping reappraisal of the kingdom's ties to the United States, and the debate had gone on for months. A consensus had emerged in favor of a dramatic change in direction away from reliance on the Americans. In his message, Abdullah had been speaking not just for himself but for the entire family. The good news was that events of the past week had changed all that, and U.S.-Saudi relations were back on track.

From pg. 154 of The King's Messenger by David Ottaway

I wonder what was really discussed between Tenet and Bandar. I would guess the names Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar came up.


Now we have the "legend" history of what Bandar was doing on Sept 11, 2001:

http://www.saudi-us-relations.org/international-relations/prince-bandar.html

Bandar slept late on the morning of September 11th. He was walking across his bedroom when he glanced at one of the ten television screens he kept on and saw fire coming out of one of the World Trade Center towers. "The first thing that came to my mind was that I'm going next week to the U.N. I am going to change my hotel and I am going to go to one of those hotels where you can live on the third or second floor," he recalled. "King Hussein of Jordan, bless his soul, used to tell me, 'Bandar, take my advice. Always stay on the first floor.' I said, 'Why, Majesty?' and he said, 'This fire. Or somebody starts shooting you. You jump out the window you break a leg, but if you are forty feet . . .' " Then he saw the second plane coming. "I had the same feeling I had when Rabin was assassinated," he said. "I almost had a heart attack. And the first thing that came to my mind was 'I hope it's not an Arab, because it would be war.' And I had the same feeling here. 'I hope they are not Arabs.' " When Tenet called the next night to tell him that fifteen of the nineteen hijackers appeared to have been Saudi nationals, Bandar recalled, "I felt the whole world collapse over my shoulders."

As the day wore on, Bandar watched the coverage. At one point, he saw Palestinian youths celebrating in the street. "I thought, My God, the whole impression this nation is going to have of us, the whole world, will be formed in the next two or three days.'' He saw a congressman warning, "We will remember those people."

Two days after the attacks, the President asked Bandar to come to the White House. Bush embraced him and escorted him to the Truman balcony. Bandar had a drink and the two men smoked cigars. Bandar was in a daze, still hoping that the news of Saudi participation would turn out to be a mistake. Al Qaeda operatives, after all, had travelled on false passports in the past, and so far the only identity that appeared certain was that of Mohammed Atta, the ringleader, who was an Egyptian. Until then, Bush had seemed to Bandar to be in his father's shadow; he took more of his personality from his mother-he shot from the hip. But this day there was no bluster. At one point, Bush told Bandar that if any Al Qaeda operatives were captured, "if we can't get them to cooperate, we'll hand them over to you." The clear implication was that the Saudis could do whatever they wanted to elicit information from suspects. A few days later, Bandar helped arrange to get bin Laden family members out of the United States, a move that was made under the supervision of the F.B.I. but caused public consternation.

On September 18th, Condoleezza Rice called Bandar to tell him that the President wanted to see him at the White House. Cheney and Rice were there when Bandar arrived; Bush's two dogs nudged people's legs, and Bush joked that he wanted to see a friendly face before his next meeting with Jacques Chirac, the President of France, who had been critical of him. ("Let him wait," Bush instructed at one point during the two-hour meeting, when an aide announced that Chirac had arrived.) Bandar advised Bush to be careful about his rhetoric; it was fine to put the fear of God in people but not to use words like "crusade," as he had two days earlier. Bush had visited a mosque the day before, taking off his shoes, and Saudi television had broadcast replays of the visit all day long.

On September 21st, Bandar returned to the White House, this time to meet with Bush and the Saudi Foreign Minister, Prince Saud al Faisal. Saud, Princeton-educated and a bit stuffy, pledged Saudi support, but he warned Bush that the fight could take time. In the long term, Bush needed to do something about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "Use this opportunity to do something great," Saud said. As Bandar recalled the conversation, "We said, 'Let's keep our eye on the ball on this, let's not let anybody distract us.' " He added, "It is always dangerous to leave the Middle East to our own, because we can manage to find something wrong that could blow everything up."

The Saudis were worried about terrorist strikes in their own country, but they wanted their American allies to trust them. In one important move, the Saudis began to give the Pakistanis their daily oil allotment-almost two hundred thousand barrels-at no charge, as an incentive to cooperate with the Americans; they have continued to do so. As law-enforcement and intelligence agents travelled between Riyadh and C.I.A. headquarters, in Langley, Virginia, the Saudis let the C.I.A. know about telephone calls that they'd intercepted between key Al Qaeda operatives congratulating each other after September 11th, and about calls from bin Laden family members who had gone into hiding. The help was big and small, in Bandar's view. They passed along another offer of help from Libya's Qaddafi; they helped to trace a pre-9/11 phone conversation, between someone in Afghanistan and someone in Saudi Arabia, that eventually led to the arrest of thirty-five Al Qaeda suspects in Saudi Arabia.

None of this did much to stanch the anti-Saudi feeling in the United States. Commentators and politicians complained about Wahhabism's being taught in Saudi schools. Prince Naif bin Abdul Aziz, the Minister of the Interior, gave an interview in an Arab newspaper in which he blamed the Jews for the terror attacks: "Who benefitted from the events of 9/11? I think they"-the Zionists-"are behind these events." There were press stories that the Saudis were not being helpful enough, in terms of either military support or intelligence sharing. Saudi Arabia is "funding hatred," Senator Joseph Biden, who was then the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said. These attacks put the Saudis and Bandar in an even more delicate position: the ruling Saud family allied itself with Wahhabism's founder more than two centuries ago, and the partnership had been instrumental in keeping the royal family in power; Wahhabism also inspired Saudi support for terror organizations. "We said, 'You preach and I fight,' " Bandar told me last month, and added, "The reality is that we are the only government system where the leadership is more forward-looking than the public, and that is a big problem."

Bandar acknowledged the Saudi hijackers, but he called them loners and misfits. Bush, in a press conference on September 24, 2001, said that the Saudis had "been nothing but cooperative." A couple of months after the terrorist strikes, Tenet privately called Saudi cooperation "fantastic," and Dale Watson, who was then the F.B.I.'s chief of counterterrorism, told me that the Saudis were doing whatever they were asked to do.

Bandar believed that before September 11th Saudi Arabia had been at least as vigilant about Al Qaeda as the United States, and certainly more vigilant than Britain or Germany. I later asked Louis Freeh, the former F.B.I. director, whether Bandar was right in asserting that the Saudis were working hard to pursue bin Laden before September 11th. Freeh, who is now a senior vice-chairman at the credit-card company MBNA, in Delaware, said, "From where I sat and from what I knew . . . Al Qaeda was more a threat to them than to the U.S., particularly prior to East Africa"-the United States Embassy bombings in 1998-"because of bin Laden's earlier activities. His whole focus was on toppling the royal family and getting the U.S. forces out of Saudi Arabia. The notion that the Saudis pulled their punches is not consistent with anything I knew or saw there."
...

----------------------------------



We established that George Tenet had been warned several times as to the terrorist attack threat by the "leaked: information provided by the Israeli's, which establishes and concedes the fact that they were running a massive spy network in the U.S. I always thought that somehow there are ties to the BAE-Bandar-Riggs-Ptech thread and the Israeli spy network. Well here is a link.


The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg offers an interesting excerpt from "A World Of Trouble," a forthcoming book by Patrick Tyler on the White House and the Middle East. In this scene, CIA director George Tenet, drunk on scotch at Saudi Prince Bandar's pool, rants about Bush administration "Jews" who are "setting me up" to take the fall for the false WMD claims.

http://jeffreygoldberg.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/12/george_tenet_drunk_in_bandars.php
George Tenet, Drunk in Bandar's Pool, Screaming about Jews

16 Dec 2008 12:03 pm

I just picked up Patrick Tyler's forthcoming book, A World of Trouble, about America's tortured relations with the Middle East, and the prologue contains this whopper of a scene, one that is  quite devastating, if true: An enraged George Tenet, drunk on scotch, flailing about Prince Bandar's Riyadh pool, screaming about the Bush Administration officials who were just then trying to pin the Iraq WMD fiasco on him: 

   A servant appeared with a bottle. Tenet knocked back some of the scotch. Then some more. They watched with concern. He drained half the bottle in a few minutes.
    "They're setting me up. The bastards are setting me up," Tenet said, but "I am not going to take the hit."

And then this:

"According to one witness, he mocked the neoconservatives in the Bush administration and their alignment with the rlght wing of Israel's political establishment, referring to them with exaxperation as, "the Jews."

Tyler reports in a footnote that, when asked, Tenet initially denied staying at Prince Bandar's palace, then denied that he had said anything in the pool. "He disputed the remarks attributed to him and denied that his memory might have been affected by the amount of alcohol he was reported to have consumed on top of a sleeping pill," Tyler reports.

I'll ask around about this and post any responses I get.   

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/12/17/george-tenet-screamed-abo_n_151690.html
George Tenet Screamed About Jews In Saudi Prince's Pool: Book

The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg offers an interesting excerpt from "A World Of Trouble," a forthcoming book by Patrick Tyler on the White House and the Middle East. In this scene, CIA director George Tenet, drunk on scotch at Saudi Prince Bandar's pool, rants about Bush administration "Jews" who are "setting me up" to take the fall for the false WMD claims:

A servant appeared with a bottle. Tenet knocked back some of the scotch. Then some more. They watched with concern. He drained half the bottle in a few minutes.

"They're setting me up. The bastards are setting me up," Tenet said, but "I am not going to take the hit." ...
"According to one witness, he mocked the neoconservatives in the Bush administration and their alignment with the right wing of Israel's political establishment, referring to them with exasperation as, "the Jews."

Wow those are some good finds!

http://www.na.baesystems.com/releasesDetail.cfm?a=170

BAE Systems North America is a high-technology U.S. company employing more than 25,000 people who live and work in some 30 states, the District of Columbia, and the United Kingdom. The company is dedicated to solving its customers' needs with highly innovative and leading edge solutions across the defense electronics, systems, information technology, and services arenas. 
 
BAE Systems Information & Electronic Warfare Systems employs 5,700 people at 11 major facilities in eight states. The business unit is a major producer of aircraft self-protection systems and tactical surveillance and intelligence systems for all branches of the armed forces. Other major business areas include microwave, mission and space electronics; infrared imaging; and automated mission planning systems. 

http://www.bigsafariassociation.org/
2008 Sponsors:
ATK Integrated Systems , BAE Systems , L-3 Communications Integrated Systems ,Textron Defense Systems ,  Sierra Nevada Corporation , Lockheed Martin , DRS Technologies

http://www.fas.org/irp/program/collect/big_safari.htm

BIG SAFARI is the USAF's program office responsible for for sustainment and modification of specialized special mission aircraft. ...

The Lockheed Martin Skunk Works has been a primary contributor to Big Safari, transforming C-130s into Combat Talon (MC-130E), Compass Call/Rivet Fire (EC-130H), Commando Solo (EC-130E), AC-130H Gunship Special Operations Forces Improvement (SOFI), and Senior Scout. The October 1996 arrival of an EC-130H Compass Call electronic warfare jamming aircraft marked the beginning of a transition of US Air Force's Big Safari class programs, which are managed under specialized procedures, from Lockheed Martin facilities in Ontario, CA, to Palmdale, CA
------
BAE-Israel-Ptech Connection:

http://www.1913intel.com/2007/10/05/what-is-suter/
What is Suter?
Posted by Matt in October 5th, 2007

Israel’s amazing attack in Syria on September 6th left just about everybody scratching their heads. How did they do that? Well, meet “Suter”.

Suter is an airborne network attack system. It hacks into enemy air defense systems so that they can be taken over. Suter includes some powerful sensors for detecting a large assortment of electronic emissions. Computer software can identify the emitters based on a database of known emitters. Based on this information potential entry points into air defense systems can be exploited. Suter can monitor enemy emitters, mislead them or shut them down.

Senior Suter is a Big Safari-managed special access program. Big Safari itself is a shadowy Air Force unit that has developed small numbers of specialized reconnaissance systems, including drones, in what are often classified programs. Big Safari is a specialized process of acquisition and contracting management process that supports 20-24 projects at any one time and includes responsibility for logistics sustainment for over 50 aircraft.

The Suter technology was developed during the last several years by BAE Systems and involves invading enemy communications networks and computer systems, particularly those associated with integrated air defense systems (AW&ST Aug. 16, 2004, p. 24; Nov. 4, 2002, p. 30). Suter 1 allowed U.S. operators to monitor what enemy radars could see. The capability enables U.S. forces to assess the effectiveness of their stealth systems or terrain-masking tactics. Suter 2 permits U.S. operators to take control of enemy networks as system managers and actually manipulate the sensors, steering them away from penetrating U.S. aircraft. Suter 3 was tested last summer to add the ability to invade the links to time-critical targets, such as battlefield ballistic missile launchers or mobile surface-to-air missile launchers. Aircraft involved in the Suter programs include the EC-130 Compass Call, RC-135 Rivet Joint and F-16CJ strike aircraft specialized for suppression of enemy air defenses.