Something fishy about offshore hacking scandal
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists says they hold leaked secret data on offshore banking customers from 170 countries, “bigger than Wikileaks,” but how they got such information casts a huge shadow on the whole story.
The website of the Washington-based ICIJ refers to Government officials and families in
“Azerbaijan, Russia, Canada, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand,
Mongolia and elsewhere who use covert offshore companies and bank
accounts. Many of the world’s top’s banks – including UBS, Clariden
and Deutsche Bank – have aggressively worked to provide their
customers with secrecy-cloaked companies in…offshore
hideaways.”
And they say they won’t turn over the files to government agencies.
Among the titbits they released so far are items such as “Deutsche
Bank Helped Customers Maintain Hundreds of Offshore Entities” and
“Post-Soviet Billionaires Invade UK ... ” They say dozens of selected journalists have gone
through “millions of leaked records and thousands of names to
produce ICIJ’s investigation into offshore secrecy. A cache of 2.5
million files has cracked open the secrets of more than 120,000
offshore companies and trusts, exposing the hidden dealings of
politicians, con men and the mega-rich the world over. The secret
records obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative
Journalists lay bare the names behind covert companies and private
trusts…” They omit to mention how ICIJ “obtained” such a
cache.
Their selected scandals so far has hit French President Hollande,
Greek billionaires or Russian oligarchs. No scandal has hit the US
White House or Washington in any serious way. ICIJ’s
SüddeutscheZeitung partner writes that they will expose arms
dealers, oligarchs, financial fraudsters and “hundreds of Germans…”
For owning an offshore account?
The ICIJ group claims, “The hoard of documents represents
the biggest stockpile of inside information about the offshore
system ever obtained by a media organization... more than 160 times
larger than the leak of U.S. State Department documents by
Wikileaks in 2010.”
For anyone with knowledge of how tightly controlled mainstream
global media is, the names of the newspapers the ICIJ chose to
analyze the documents include BBC and The Guardian in the U.K., The
Washington Post, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), Le
Monde in France, Süddeutsche Zeitung in Germany, The Washington
Post, among others. UK Prime Minister David Cameron has vowed to
use his leadership of the G8 to help crack down on tax evasion and
money laundering.
Investigating the investigators…
While the mainstream world press is focusing on the leaks, it’s
relevant to ask just who is this ICIJ leaker?
According to their website, the ICIJ was founded in 1997 as a
project of the Center for Public Integrity “to extend the
Center’s style of watchdog journalism.” Among financial donors
to ICIJ are Open Society Foundations, which have been involved in
many countries targeted by the US State Department for regime
change or “color revolutions” including Georgia, Ukraine, Burma
(Myanmar), Libya. The David and Lucile Packard Foundation of
Hewlett Packard founder and former Assistant Defense Secretary
David Packard, among others.
But the more interesting organization is the one which created
ICIJ: the Center for Public Integrity, which shares the same office
floor with ICIJ. Here we find a creation of the most powerful
families of Wall Street and US political establishment. The Center
for Public Integrity was created in 1989 to “enhance
democracy by revealing abuses of power, corruption and betrayal
of trust by powerful public and private institutions, using the
tools of investigative journalism.” Sounds noble
enough.
Notably, however, listed funders in 2012 of the Center include the
Ford Foundation, documented in the Cold War to work intimately with
the CIA; George Soros’ Open Society Foundations; John D. &
Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; billionaire Wall Street banker
Sandy Bernstein’s Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., LLC; GE
Foundation; Rockefeller Brothers Fund and Rockefeller Family
Fund.
Now what do America’s crème de la crème of powerful families and
bankers find so compelling about financing an organization of
journalists who now hold documents allegedly containing material
that could be used to blackmail governments and politicians and
businessmen around the globe? Are their offshore holdings to be
exposed along with those of Russians or French or Germans?
The relevant question is what agency would have the capacity to
hack international computer data banks and secret encrypted banking
offshore records to give to ICIJ?
Control the money, control the World…
The methodology of the ICIJ suggests another agenda at play. A
global witch-hunt against private fortunes—legal or illegal—has
begun. No longer is it a former employee of UBS or another Swiss
bank who steals data files of a few secret German clients to give
German tax authorities as an “act of conscience.” Now all offshore
accounts in the world can presumably be exposed as ICIJ
decides.
James S. Henry, former chief economist at McKinsey & Company,
estimates that wealthy individuals have $21
trillion to $32 trillion in private financial wealth tucked away in
offshore havens.
The question is what agency or agencies of which governments have
the espionage facilities to pull off such a massive global hacking
of all offshore bank accounts?
William A. Hamilton was involved in the Reagan years with a project
that the National Security Agency initiated to interdict the sale
of embargoed technology to the Soviet Union. In a recent exchange
with the author regarding the “source” for the ICIJ files on global
offshore accounts, Hamilton noted, “NSA is one and perhaps the only
obvious candidate.” He added that in the 1980s the NSA “obtained
a copy of [Hamilton’s software] PROMIS from the US Department of
Justice and arranged for copies to be installed on computers in the
banking sector (wire transfer clearing houses…the World Bank…major
commercial and investment banks worldwide) to facilitate NSA's
real-time electronic surveillance.” Clearly in the
intervening three decades the NSA international banking covert
espionage capabilities must have been upgraded.
There is a role for genuine honest investigative journalism, but
the Secrecy for Sale project of the ICIJ smells like a massive US
Government-sponsored blackmail or worse against the rest of the
world’s wealth. As Rockefeller family protégé Henry Kissinger
reportedly said during the 1970’s, “If you control the money, you
control the entire World…”
F. William Engdahl can be reached through his website at
www.williamengdahl.com or at
www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.