HSBC probes 'Saddam connection'

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Nick Goodway, Evening Standard
8 October 2004

LONDON-headquartered banking giant HSBC has launched an investigation into claims by the CIA that its branch in Amman, Jordan, was used by Saddam Hussein as part of the financial network built up by his regime to avoid trade sanctions.

An HSBC spokesman said: 'We had no knowledge of this transaction until the report was published.

'We are confident that we had the best practices in place to ensure that nothing illegal took place. But international finance is highly complex and sometimes things slip through.

'We have set up an immediate investigation into what took place.
More:
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/business/articles/timid83316?source=

[seemslikeadream]

1. “the mobilisation of trillions of dollars”

CIA Accused Of Bank Heist

Shortly before U.S. forces began streaming across the Iraqi border, commencing Persian Gulf War II, the CIA and the Department of Defense, with a little help from Israel and some Europeans, pulled off a massive bank heist in Iraq to the tune of several billion dollars.

By Gordon Thomas

The CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) are accused by International Currency Review, the London-based journal, of mounting a joint ultra-secret operation to electronically remove an estimated $10 billion out of the Iraqi Central Bank hours before the start of Persian Gulf War II. The whereabouts of the money is not known.

“We believe it is in a secret CIA fund which will be used to mount further special services operations, such as tracking down Saddam Hussein,” said the Review’s publisher, Christopher Story.

Story is a former financial advisor to Lady Thatcher when she was Britain’s prime minister. In the past 10 years, he has testified before several congressional committees dealing with financial scandals.

DIA coordinates all intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It is headquartered in the Pentagon.

The report is titled “The Great Robbery of the Central Bank of Iraq.” It has been sent to finance ministers of leading nations, the World Bank, the Bank of England and heads of all other major banks.

The report is bound to cause huge embarrassment to President Bush after he signed an executive order on March 23, ordering a worldwide hunt for the hidden assets of Saddam Hussein and his family.

The Review claims that using skilled hackers recruited by the DIA and key Iraqi bank officials who had been bribed to provide secret access codes to the Central Bank’s accounts for Saddam Hussein and his family, the money was transferred out of the bank in a high-tech operation.
http://www.americanfreepress.net/Bank_Heist.html


Proof of Trillions in Bu$h Family Business With Saddam 1989-1991
author: Gordon Thomas
The Bush family were doing business with Saddam Hussein from 1989 up to months before the outbreak of the first Gulf War.

In a document obtained by the respected London-based International Currency Review, it was claimed that after a year long investigation, it had uncovered evidence “of the mobilisation of trillions of dollars in 1989-91”. The document names a number of banks it alleges were “supervised by the Bush Sr White House” in the transactions


Business links – involving “the mobilisation of trillions of dollars” – by President Bush’s father and his brother Neil, were under investigation by America’s top spy catcher, Paul Redmond, when he resigned.

A well-placed Washington intelligence source said that Redmond quit after a White House meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

They are known as “The Enforcers” – ensuring there is no taint on the reputation of the increasingly embattled President with the failure to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Already, said the Washington source, the two men have ensured Bush distances himself from Tony Blair’s claims that the weapons will be found.

But equally Downing Street will want to stay clear of the allegation that the President’s family were doing business with Saddam from 1989 up to months before the outbreak of the first Gulf War.

In a document obtained by the respected London-based International Currency Review, it was claimed that after a year long investigation, it had uncovered evidence “of the mobilisation of trillions of dollars in 1989-91”.

The document names a number of banks it alleges were “supervised by the Bush Sr White House” in the alleged transactions.

The banks identified in the document include the British Royal Family bankers, Coutts; Morgan Guaranty Trust and Chase Manhattan, New York; Banco Exterior de Espana, Spain; First International Bank of Denver in the United States.

“What will cause astonishment is the provenance of some of these compromising documents. For many months we considered carefully whether they could be forgeries, and whether it could be credible that an intelligence organisation or a private gang of blackmailers and counterfeiters could replicate the precise behaviour of an obsolescent IBM computer to produce output identical to those images shown with this analysis. We checked these possibilities repeatedly with experts and also consulted banking sources to see whether these documents could possibly be fraudulent. The outcome of these investigations was unequivocally that the documentation is genuine.”

http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2003/07/268817.shtml

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2. author Gordon Thomas:

also wrote the definitive book on Robert Maxwell, including his dealings with Poppy:
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/page.cfm?objectid=12419168&method=full&siteid=50143

The more I read about the official cross-over period from the cold war to the supposed end of cold war the more I see how collusion between the security,intelligence and defense agencies and politicians has fostered corruption and ensured that massive cover up campaigns ensured the successful political career of Bush2.

[seemslikeadream]

3. The C.I.A. & The Muslim BrotherhoodHow the CIA set the stage for Sept11

The C.I.A. & The Muslim BrotherhoodHow the CIA set the stage for Sept11

Reverend Franklin Graham, the pugnacious preacher who delivered the prayer at President George W. Bush's 2001 inauguration, might have a bone to pick with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). When Franklin branded Islam "a very evil and wicked religion" after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, he had no idea that American spies were once eager to promote a Muslim leader in the Middle East modeled after his own father, the famous evangelist Billy Graham.

The CIA often works in mysterious ways - and so it was with this little-known cloak-and-dagger caper that set the stage for extensive collaboration between US intelligence and Islamic extremists. The genesis of this ill-starred alliance dates back to Egypt in the mid-1950s, when the CIA made discrete overtures to the Muslim Brotherhood, the influential Sunni fundamentalist movement that fostered Islamic militancy throughout the Middle East. What started as a quiet American flirtation with political Islam became a Cold War love affair on the sly - an affair that would turn out disastrously for the United States. Nearly all of today's radical Islamic groups, including al-Qaeda, trace their lineage to the Brotherhood.

.............

To understand what happened on that fateful day when terrorist strikes leveled the World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon, one must revisit the turbulent changes that took place a half century earlier in the land of the sphinx. After seizing power in a 1952 military coup Egyptian Col. Gamal Abdul Nasser quickly threw prominent Communists in jail. This raised eyebrows among US cloak-and-dagger operatives who were eager to oblige when Nasser requested help in upgrading Egypt's ineffectual secret service. But the US government "found it highly impolitic to help him directly," the late CIA agent Miles Copeland acknowledged in his memoirs, The Game of Nations , so the CIA subcontracted more than a hundred German Third Reich vets, who specialized in Nazi security and interrogation techniques, to do the job.

..............

Copeland was off and running. He visited several Egyptian mosques in search of an Islamic preacher who could sway the Arab masses in a manner most congenial to US interests. Although Copeland never found the CIA's messiah, his furtive machinations were not without impact. While on the prowl for a Muslim Billy Graham, Copeland reached out to leaders of the religious revival movement known as the Ikhwan, or Muslim Brotherhood, which sought to build an Islamic society from the bottom up. The seeds of a clandestine relationship between the CIA and the Ikhwan were planted by Copeland, who surmised that the Muslim Brothers, by virtue of their strong antipathy to Arab nationalism as well as Communism, might be a viable counterweight to Nasser in the years ahead, US intelligence would become a defacto partner of the Brotherhood as it evolved from a mass-based social reform organization into the wellspring of Islamic terrorism.


http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=2268109

CIA & The Muslim Brotherhood How the CIA set the stage for 9/11 Pt.2
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=2272207

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4. More from Bloomberg:

Saddam Hussein Used HSBC in Jordan for Illicit Trade, CIA Says
Oct. 8 (Bloomberg) --

Saddam Hussein transferred money through HSBC Holdings Plc, Europe's largest bank by market value, as part of a financial web his bankers built to skirt sanctions imposed by the United Nations, a CIA report said.

Hussein's Iraqi regime used the Amman, Jordan, branch of HSBC, according to the report by Charles Duelfer, special adviser to the director of Central Intelligence for weapons of mass destruction, who released his 1,300-page assessment Oct. 5. The report doesn't accuse London-based HSBC of any wrongdoing.

When Iraq sold oil, sheep or other goods outside the UN's oil-for-food program, purchasers would often pay cash to the Amman branch of Iraq's state-owned Rafidain Bank, the report said. ``Further cash transfers would then be made to other banks, including the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) in Amman, where Regime money remained,'' the report says.

``That's news to me,'' said David Hodgkinson, chief executive of HSBC Bank Middle East, in a telephone interview from the United Arab Emirates. He said he couldn't comment specifically on the report because he hadn't seen it. ``We've been very, very careful around the world in `know your customer' and reviewing transactions,'' including conforming to sanctions by cutting off Hussein's Iraq, he said.

More:
http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000102&sid=a7hp6eCc3CAI&refer=uk