Tuesday, February 01, 2005

Oh, the places you go (when you follow the money)

Let's pick a story. Say, data recovery from the World Trade Center.

Remember? While the ruins still smoldered, some genuine questions were still being asked by the mainstream media, which were blessedly unaware of how awkward the answers might prove.

For instance, this story, from December 17, 2001:

German computer experts are working round the clock to unlock the truth behind an unexplained surge in financial transactions made just before two hijacked planes crashed into New York's World Trade Center on September 11.

Were criminals responsible for the sharp rise in credit card transactions that moved through some computer systems at the WTC shortly before the planes hit the twin towers?

Or was it coincidence that unusually large sums of money, perhaps more than $100 million, were rushed through the computers as the disaster unfolded?


And this, from CNN, a few days later:

An unexplained surge in transactions was recorded prior to the attacks, leading to speculation that someone might have profited from previous knowledge of the terrorist plot by moving sums of money. But because the facilities of many financial companies processing the transactions were housed in New York's World Trade Center, destroyed in the blasts, it has until now been impossible to verify that suspicion.

That's where Convar Systeme Deutschland GmbH comes in. The company is helping reconstruct data from hard disk drives found in the ruins of the twin towers. While other data-recovery companies are also involved in the effort, the company says it has a special edge: a laser-based scanning technology developed about two years ago.


Peter Henschel, director of Convar, called the extent of the transactions "extraordinarily high."

Further:

"It could turn out that Americans went on an absolute shopping binge on that Tuesday morning. But at this point there are many transactions that cannot be accounted for, " Henschel said.... "Not only the volume but the size of the transactions was far higher than usual for a day like that. There is a suspicion that these were possibly planned to take advantage of the chaos."

Richard Wagner, a data retrieval expert at the company, said illegal transfers of more than $100 million might have been made immediately before and during the disaster.

"There is a suspicion that some people had advance knowledge of the approximate time of the plane crashes in order to move out amounts exceeding $100 million," Wagner said. "They thought that the records of their transactions could not be traced after the main frames were destroyed."


As Convar recovered the data, at a cost of up to $35,000 per hard drive, the information was forwarded to its clients (apparantly telecommunications, accounting, and credit card firms), which in turn passed it on to the FBI.

A Reuters story claims "Convar has recovered information from 32 computers that support assumptions of dirty doomsday dealings." And an article dated May 30, 2002, says Convar "had recoverd the data from 39 computers...and was beginning to work on another 62.... [T[he next time you 'erase' something by clicking delete, it might help to remember Convar: once on view, always on recall."

So, what happened to the WTC data-recovery story, and the "dirty doomsday dealings"?

We need to step back, and ask, what happened to Convar?

In June, 2002, Convar was purchased by security firm Kroll Inc., which employs a number of former FBI and CIA officials, and has a reputation for serving as a cut-out of US Intelligence. It's reportedly known as the "CIA of Wall Street," due to its revolving door of former-and-future spooks, and its role in corporate espionage and the destabilization of foreign governments.

We can learn something about Kroll's reputation from a front-page story of The Washington Post, January 8, 1996:

The French, the CIA, and the Man Who Sued Too Much

William Lee is a 57-year-old Harvard-educated corporate lawyer whose specialty, until recently, was international mergers and acquisitions. But a year ago, the government of France charged that he was a spy for the Central Intelligence Agency, waging a secret war to destabilize French corporate interests in Asia.

...

Some of the French anxiety about Lee stems from what he did next. In mid-1992, he took a part-time position with Kroll Associates, a New York firm that provides investigative services for big companies and employs a number of former CIA and FBI officers.

For French officials, Lee's brief stint with Kroll tagged him as a suspicious person. According to French and U.S. sources, the French equivalent of the FBI, known as the Directorate of Surveillance of the Territory, or DST, suspected that Kroll's Paris operation was a CIA front. They bugged Kroll's Paris offices and harassed some of its clients, according to company executives.

And this story, from October of last year:

Brazil Raids Kroll Offices in SpyProbe

Police raided the Brazilian offices of international security consultant Kroll Inc. and arrested five employees Wednesday in an investigation into allegations of illegal spying by Kroll during the company's probe of a nasty corporate dispute.... Five Brazilians Kroll workers were arrested on conspiracy charges.

...The investigation began in July after Brazil's largest newspaper reported Kroll obtained copies of e-mails written by a top adviser to President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in the course of its investigation for Brasil Telecom Participacoes SA.

Interestingly, in August of 2001, it was then-Managing Director of Kroll, Jerome Hauer, who arranged for former FBI special agent John O'Neill, to be hired as chief of security at the World Trade Center.

Besides being in Kroll's service on September 11, Hauer was also running Rudolph Giuliani's "Office of Emergency Management," and its hardened "command and control" bunker on the 22nd floor of WTC 7. (Perhaps you remember what happened to that.)

I believe too little attention is paid to the role of extra-governmental agencies, both to the 9/11 story and beyond, because it is in their study that Danny Casolaro saw what he came to call the Octopus: the international network of spooks, former spooks, crooks and terrorists, pursuing trans-national criminal interests. To say "it's the CIA" is too simplistic, too black and white for the world of shadows. As Chaim Kupferberg writes:

It is, in fact, security firms like Kroll Associates, Burns Security, Teg, Wackenhut, and their ilk that should garner our interest at least as much as the web of conservative think tanks that have welded in place the parameters of "mainstream" debate - for it is through these very firms that the former stars of law enforcement have gone through the revolving door into the lucrative private sector. It is a world where former military types mix with various operatives of the CIA, FBI, DEA and any number of alphabet soup agencies charged with the security of our nation.

Since acquiring Convar, Kroll itself has been purchased by Marsh & McLennan, a former occupant of Tower One's 95th floor. Last October, Kroll's former President, Michael Cherkasky, was named Marsh's CEO. (Formerly, Cherkasky had "spent 16 years in the criminal justice system, including serving as chief of the Investigations Division for the New York County District Attorney's Office.")

And what an upstanding corporate citizen Marsh turns out to be. Just yesterday, it reached a deal with New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer "that resolves the actions that were commenced against MMC and Marsh Inc. over questionable brokerage compensation and account placement practices":

As a result of this agreement, the company said it would enact reforms to lead the industry in transparency and service to clients and establish an $850 million fund to compensate clients.

Under the terms of the agreement, the company neither admits nor denies the allegations in the complaint filed by the attorney general and the citation issued by the insurance superintendent.

Corporate espionage, US Intelligence, High Crime, Big Money - you can't talk about any of them, without talking about them all. "We are not talking about only governmental levels. And I keep underlining semi-legit organizations and following the money," says Sibel Edmonds.

And what of those "dirty doomsday dealings" on the World Trade Center hard drives? They'll get back to us, I'm sure of it, any day now....

28 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

My pet goat?

3:43 p.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Many different strands coming together, but I think a key link is the big business/organized crime nexus. The US has allied itself with drug-trafficking proxies at least since the Kuomintang, but the "revolving door" process really accelerated after the post-Watergate Church hearings, when the Bushists began to privatize intelligence, security and covert operations to avoid congressional oversight.

Douglas Farah has a recent concrete example of this nexus:

http://www.douglasfarah.com/2005/01/did-viktor-bouts-network-really-stop.html

6:52 p.m.  
Blogger Jeff Wells said...

Thanks for that Farah link; very interesting. And you make an excellent point, about the privatization of Intelligence.

10:19 p.m.  
Blogger spooked said...

Very good point about these extra-governmental agencies. Certainly their existence makes investgating 9/11 all the harder. But while some of these people were probably "in the know" about 9/11, how likely is it that they had anything to do with setting up the hijackers on the planes? These would be just the kind of people to subcontract out some aspect of the attacks, e.g. seeing that security was eased at a crucial spot perhaps, putting remote control hardware on planes. But the basic meat of the attacks-- the hijackers, the wargames and the hijacking drills-- seems like government work to me.

11:00 p.m.  
Blogger Jeff Wells said...

Spooked, I don't think there are more than a handful who had the big picture of 9/11. But they represent a much larger cluster of interests, which profited by it. Interests both in, and out, of government.

12:29 a.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Anonymous One, it's funny how how all that information inside the buildings just vanished after. I almost got my hopes up,but then it just went down the memory hole,where all the good news ends up,Winston. Jeff,what's new with Vreeland,is he still breathing,later.

6:19 a.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The people who ran 9/11 were likely classic "moles"-- government officials acting at the behest of one or more of these outside extra-governmental groups. And unfortunately, this is where everything gets very murky. If these groups were doing 9/11 for some sort of monetary pay-off, where did the pay-off come from? If they weren't doing it for a pay-off, then why were they doing it? The Kroll story is fascinating and intriguing, but does this mean they were in on 9/11, are just helping out with the cover-up, or is the whole thing just guilt by association? And the key question is how on earth can this ever be sorted out?

Spooked

4:27 p.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Michael Cherkasky was president of Kroll? Now, that is interesting. If I remember correctly, Cherkasky was chief investigator under Bob Morgenthau in NY while investigating BCCI, the mother of all money laundering outfits.

Is Cherkasky now covering up dirty secrets possibly found in the recovered hard drives, while in his previous career his job was to uncover crimes?

gandalf

4:49 a.m.  
Blogger Jeff Wells said...

Wow - thanks, gandalf. You sent me to "The Outlaw Bank," and you're right. Cherkasky was Morgenthau's chief of investigations. He only gets one mention. He says when Jack Blum brought the BCCI story to the office, it sounded ridiculous. "This guy was telling us the world was corrupt!" I read elsewhere that prosecutors initially thought the accusations so bizarre, they laughed about it for 10 days.

6:42 a.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

An a tangential note, does any remember reading the official response from the 9/11 Commission regarding the airline stock short-selling. It was so sad. Around the time the 9/11 commission was releasing its report, with all the media hoopla, I remember reading on like page A13 or something in the NY Times one of those one paragraph stories on it. The gist of it was that they found no terrorist connections to the short selling. That was it. Not WHO did the selling, just that the terrorists didn't. If anyone can find an archive of that story that would be great. I've looked and I can't find it, but I definately remember reading it.

12:22 p.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

This is about the 'put' stock sales. Maybe this is close to what you are looking for.

http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/10_09_01_krongard.html FTW, October 9, 2001 - Although uniformly ignored by the mainstream U.S. media, there is abundant and clear evidence that a number of transactions in financial markets indicated specific (criminal) foreknowledge of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

9/11 Film clips. You only thought you saw it that day.
http://www.thewebfairy.com/killtown/wtc7.html
http://www.godlikeproductions.com/bbs/message.php?page=1&topic=3&message=78334&mpage=2&showdate=2/8/05

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Anonymous Anonymous said...

"The land of the free and the home of the brave."
–Francis Scott Key (1779–1843)


"I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won.
There have been tyrants and murders, and for a time they seem invincible.
But in the end they always fall. Think of this. Always."
–Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948)


"Now we understand much more clearly why people from all over the globe want to
come to New York and to America. Why they always have and they always will.
It's called freedom, the equal protection of law, respect for human life and the promise
of opportunity. All the victims of this tragedy were innocent. All of them were heroes."
–Mayor Rudolph Guillani, New York City.


"Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear–not absence of fear."
–Mark Twain (1835–1910)


"This land is your land, this land is my land,
from California, to the New York Island
From the redwood forest, to the gulf stream waters
This land was made for you and me."
–Woody Guthrie (1912–1967)


"There is nothing we cannot live down, rise above, and overcome."
–Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1855–1919)


Photo © 2001 The Record, Begen Co. N.J.
Photo credit Thomas E. Franklin, Staff Photographer


"For God hath not given us the spirit of fear;
but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind."
–Bible, 2 Timothy 1:7


"I love my country, and I take pride in serving her.
But I cannot say that I love her more or as well as Mark Bingham did,
or the other heroes on United Flight 93 who gave their lives to prevent
our enemies from inflicting an ever greater injury on our country."
Senator John McCain, September 22, 2001
Eulogy for Mark Bingham, Flight 93 passenger.


"Okay, there's a group of us and we're going to do something...
If they're going to drive this plane into the ground we've got to do something."
–Thomas Burnett (1963–2001)
Passenger, Flight 93, Sept. 11, 2001


"We've decided, we're going to do it."
–Jeremy Glick (1970–2001)
Passenger, Flight 93, Sept. 11, 2001


"Are you guys ready? Let's roll!"
–Todd Beamer (1917–2001)
Passenger, Flight 93, Sept. 11, 2001


"Imagine there's no country, it isn't hard to do,
nothing to kill or die for, and no religion, too.
Imagine all the people living life in peace."
–John Lennon (1940–1980)


"Never in this world can hatred be stilled by hatred;
it will be stilled only by non-hatred–that is the law Eternal."
–Buddha (568-488 B.C.)



"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living."
–Seneca (c. 4 B.C.–65 A.D.)


"We should always be at war with injustice. Always."
–Maya Angelou (1928–)


"Only the just man enjoys peace of mind."
–Epicurus (371–270 B.C.)


"To correct the evils, great and small, which spring from want of sympathy
and from positive enmity among strangers, as nations and as individuals,
is one of the highest functions of civilization."
–Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)


"Our lives that we trusted and often took for granted have been shaken
but we, Americans, refuse to be shattered. We shall not be moved."
–Oprah Winfrey


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"When written in Chinese, the word crisis is composed of two characters.
One represents danger and the other represents opportunity."
–John F. Kennedy (1917–1963)


"The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting."
–Sun Tzu (c. early 4th Century B.C.)


"If you want to heal, give. When you need comfort and strength,
give to others. By helping other people, you can begin to heal."
–Dr. Phil McGraw


"Until you have become really in actual fact a brother of everyone,
brotherhood will not come to pass. Only by brotherhood will liberty be saved."
–Feodor Dostoevski (1821–1881)


"Life has its ups and downs. When you are down,
the angels are waiting to lift you up."
–Linda Pendleton


"One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."




In Memory
We will always remember those who lost their lives
and those who so gallantly risked their lives to save others.
May peace and healing come to the families and friends of those lost,
and to the many rescue workers and others who were touched by this tragedy.


"The Eagle Cried," a Poem by Ricky Kendall

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