The media ignored the citizen activists.

In 2005, Patrick Byrne, then CEO of internet retailer Overstock.com (and future reporter for  DeepCapture.com) gave a famous conference call titled “The Miscreants Ball” in which he sought to expose a “network” of miscreant hedge funds. Soon after, Patrick identified SAC Capital as being the central player in that miscreant network.

The media ridiculed Patrick.

In 2007, DeepCapture was founded, and in May 2008, we published “The Story of Deep Capture” to tell the story of how DeepCapture came into being and to expose a pack of prominent journalists who seemed to be doing the bidding for (i.e. they were “captured” by) a “network” of miscreant hedge funds, including SAC Capital.

Since then, DeepCapture has published numerous stories exposing various misdeeds that have been perpetrated by these journalists and hedge funds, including SAC Capital. Some of the journalists ignored us. Some of them ridiculed us. Some of them, such as the eminently corrupt Gary Weiss, ridiculed us and fought us at the same time.

Gandhi said: “First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.

Then the news broke (this week) that SAC founder Steve Cohen has received a subpoena to appear before a grand jury, possibly a prelude to an indictment of Cohen and/or his hedge fund. In addition, the media has reported that SAC Capital is the main target of the largest insider trading investigation in FBI history, and the media has even reported (at long last and accurately) that SAC Capital is part of a larger “network” of financial operators and hedge funds involved in insider trading. So, apparently, we win.

But we have not won.

We will not have won until the day when the media reports that SAC Capital and other hedge funds in its “network” are involved in activities that are more damaging to the markets than mere insider trading. For example, some of the creditors to Lehman Brothers have sued SAC Capital and two other hedge funds for allegedly perpetrating manipulative short selling that triggered the 2008 death spiral in the stock price of Lehman Brothers and the resulting collapse of that bank.

You will recall that the collapse of Lehman Brothers brought the global financial system to the brink of apocalyptic ruin.

It is not clear what the status of that lawsuit is, so we cannot yet say with certainty that SAC Capital was the culprit behind the manipulative short selling that contributed (as even the SEC noted in 2008 “Emergency Order”) to the collapse of Lehman, but there is little doubt that hedge funds in the “network” have schemed to destroy other important companies. Have a read, for example, of the following email.

= = = = =Begin Message= = = = =

Message # : 727

Message Sent: 02/22/2006 08:57:48

From: AHELLER3@bloomberg.net|ANDY HELLER|EXIS CAPITAL MANAGEM

To: JONKALIKOW@bloomberg.net|JONATHAN KALIKOW|STANFIELD CAPITAL

Subject: CNBC – FAIRFAX

Reply:

He did this one time before, and the stock went down 3 on the open, then closed up 1. the way to get this thing down is to get them where they eat, like the credit analysts and holders. we’re taking this baby down for the count. ads and I are going to toronto in 2 weeks for a group lunch. J

= = = = =End Message= = = = =

That email was authored by a top employee of Exis Capital, which is an offshoot of SAC Capital, and as you can see, it concerns a conspiracy to take “this baby down for the count.” The “ads” to attend the “group lunch” was former SAC trader Adam D. Sender, head of Exis. The “baby” to be taken “down for the count” (unsuccessfully, in the end) was Fairfax Financial, a major, publicly listed insurance and financial firm.

The emails were acquired through discovery in Fairfax’s lawsuit against a group of hedge funds, one of which was SAC Capital. Although SAC Capital was ultimately dropped from the lawsuit, SAC’s satellite funds (including Exis and an outfit called Sigma Capital) were not dropped from the suit, which is ongoing. And the discovery from that lawsuit has produced additional evidence of shenanigans at SAC Capital. See, for example, DeepCapture stories “Hedge Funds Reading Tomorrow’s Headlines Today,” and “Hedge Funds Scurry…”

It is important for the media to begin paying attention to SAC Capital’s more egregious behavior because far too many people believe that SAC has done no worse than engage in a bit of insider trading, and a lot of people regard insider trading as nothing worse than “good research.” In addition, failing to tell the full story ensures that history will repeat.

Back in 1991, when Michael Milken was sentenced to prison, the media reported that Milken’s principal crime was insider trading when, in fact, he and others in his “network” had also “busted out” (i.e. looted and destroyed) multiple savings and loan banks, some of them among the most important financial institutions in the nation. Those “bust-outs” contributed to the savings and loan crisis that began in the late 1980s, and which ultimately cost American tax-payers billions of dollars in bailouts—a portent of bigger and better things to come.

For starters, the SEC might want to read our story “Michael Milken and the Story of Dendreon” (or my book, “The Dendreon Effect: How Felons, Con-Men and Wall Street Insiders Manipulate High-Tech Stocks“) because that story (and the book) demonstrate that Milken has not only violated his ban from working as an investment advisor, but has also violated (but, of course, not been charged for) a host of other laws, from insider trading to influence peddling and scheming under the cloak of his cancer “charity” to manipulate the stocks of publicly listed pharmaceutical companies.

More specifically, Milken has used his Prostate Cancer Foundation to “capture” a few of the nation’s most prominent cancer doctors and to promote (with help from the doctors) pharmaceutical companies in which Milken and/or Milken cronies have large investments. Meanwhile, Milken and his associates have schemed to destroy at least one pharmaceutical company (i.e. Dendreon Corp.) that had a promising treatment for prostate cancer (and which was a competitor to companies promoted by Milken’s Prostate Cancer Foundation).

In addition, Milken and his associates have (with the help of those same doctors) “captured” the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) so as to influence FDA decisions about treatments for prostate cancer. This influence peddling, of course, has involved convincing the FDA to endorse treatments that were developed by companies with ties to Milken, and it has involved convincing the captured FDA to delay approval of Dendreon’s promising prostate cancer treatment (one that could have extended the lives of 60,000 men during the three years while Milken’s cronies successfully schemed to keep it from coming to market).

Unfortunately, the (captured) SEC is not (so far as I  know) investigating the more egregious infractions. In addition, Milken has successfully captured most of the major U.S. news organizations, all of which have bought into the party line put forth by Milken’s impressive public relations machine that Milken was one of Wall Street’s all-time greatest “innovators” in the 1980s, when he ostensibly helped build some of America’s most successful companies, but has in more recent years devoted the greater portion of his efforts to “philanthropy.”

Actually, Milken deliberately destroyed far more companies than he built during the 1980s, but it is true that his finance helped grow the media empires of both Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch, and neither of those media empires have ever shown any inclination to expose Milken’s miscreancy. Nor has Fortune Magazine, which was one of the first to report this week that the SEC was investigating Milken, but was quick to remind its readers that Milken was a prominent “philanthropist” who had featured in a Fortune Magazine cover-story (title: “The Man Who Changed Medicine”) that trumpeted Milken’s good-deeds in the field of prostate cancer.

Ack. So it goes…

* * * * * * * * *

Henry Kissinger, who served the Nixon administration as national security advisor and secretary of state, has commented that the 1973 oil embargo was “one of the pivotal events in the history of the [twentieth] century.”

Kissinger did not refer specifically to the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) in that statement, but there is no doubt that one of the most important outcomes of the oil embargo was to fill the coffers of BCCI, making it one of the more powerful financial institutions in the world. There is also no doubt that the idea for the oil embargo was hatched by the ruler of Abu Dhabi (then one of BCCI’s controlling shareholders) in consultation with other BCCI principals, including BCCI founder Agha Hasan Abedi. Also playing a role in implementing the oil embargo was BCCI principal Shiekh Kamal Adham (who served concurrently as chief of Saudi intelligence) and the Saudi royal family, which had involvement with the BCCI enterprise.

Others who helped implement the oil embargo included Sheikh Ahmad Turki Yamani, then the Saudi minister of petroleum; and Sheikh Abdel Hadir Taher, then governor of the Saudi state oil company Petromin, both of whom we met in chapter 2 of this series, wherein it was noted that Sheikh Yamani and Sheikh Taher were among the select few billionaires (another being Shiekh Khalid bin Mahfouz, BCCI’s largest shareholder in the 1980s) whom Osama bin Laden referred to as his “Golden Chain.”

All of those shiekhs also had close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, and the ruler of Abu Dhabi (who masterminded the oil embargo) was one of the leading sponsors of the Muslim Brotherhood. In addition, we know, BCCI had close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, and we might consider the founding of BCCI in 1972 and the enforcement of the oil embargo a year later to have marked the beginning of what Muslim Brotherhood leaders now (see earlier chapters of this series) describe as “The Financial Jihad.”

As noted in an earlier chapter of this series, Muslim Brotherhood leaders say that the manipulation of oil prices are an important component of the “Financial Jihad.”Muslim Brotherhood leader Yussuf al Qardawi, for one, has spoken often of the imperative to deploy  Silah al Naft – i.e. “the weapon of oil” – against the U.S. economy. This was precisely in line with the thinking of Osama bin Laden, who stressed  “the absolute necessity to use the oil weapon.”  And according to a report that was prepared for the Department of Defense, the oil weapon was deployed against the U.S. economy in the years leading up to the great meltdown of 2008.

Indeed, the report for the Defense Department (see chapter 1 of this series) concluded that while a variety of financial weapons have been deployed against the U.S. economy, much of the destruction of 2008 could be attributed to two particularly effective financial weapons: 1) the manipulation of the oil markets that caused oil prices to nearly quadruple in the five years leading to 2008; and 2) the manipulative short selling that was one (though not the only) component of the “bust-outs” (i.e. destruction) of some major financial institutions, including Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and others.

Similarly, the oil embargo of the 1970s quadrupled the price oil, and a few years later, the BCCI enterprise helped “bust out” some of America’s largest savings and loan banks, contributing to the savings an loan crisis that began in the late 1980s, eventually costing U.S. tax-payers billions of dollars (a mighty sum at the time) in bailouts.

* * * * * * * * *

The 1973 oil embargo was an act of economic warfare against the United States, said to be retaliation for America’s support of Israel in the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. Henry Kissinger was no doubt justified in describing this economic warfare as “one of the pivotal events in the history of the [twentieth] century,” but what Kissinger failed to mention was that he and then President Richard Nixon opted to do nothing in response to the economic warfare that was waged against our nation.

This might have been partly because higher oil prices benefited U.S. oil companies and partly because the Gulf states had agreed to use some of the new oil wealth that they were to acquire as a result of the oil embargo to support the U.S. dollar. Nixon would also have been aware that the oil embargo was transforming BCCI into a global powerhouse, and that BCCI and its owners would become important business partners for certain elements of the American establishment, including America’s leading weapons manufacturers, and some of the most powerful people on Wall Street.

In addition, BCCI and/or its partners effectively “captured” Washington. One famous story describes a BCCI partner named Adnan Khashoggi visiting Nixon in the Oval Office, and “accidentally” leaving behind his briefcase, which was found to contain $1 million in cash. The story might be apocryphal, but there is no question that Khashoggi was one of the largest financiers of Nixon’s political war chest. Khashoggi would also later establish himself as one of history’s most destructive financial criminals, but he would remain on close terms with officials in Washington, including multiple U.S. presidents.

Not long after Nixon left power, BCCI employed (as a consultant) a man named Bert Lance, who would soon be appointed director of the office of management and budget in the administration of President Jimmy Carter. Lance brokered BCCI’s secret acquisition of a prominent financial institution called National Georgia Bank, and that acquisition likely had something to do with the fact that National Georgia Bank was the principal financier to Carter’s family peanut business.

After Carter left office, the former president traveled the world with BCCI founder Aga Hasan Abedi. BCCI was also the largest donor to the Carter Presidential Library. The major U.S. news organizations, however, found nothing untoward about this relationship, and after BCCI was revealed to be (in the words of Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau) “the largest banking fraud in world financial history,” the major U.S. news organizations (and some books on the BCCI scandal) suggested that Carter was oblivious to the fact that BCCI was a criminal enterprise. Some reports also maintained the party line that one of BCCI’s missions was to end global poverty, and so it was natural that Carter, who also desired to help the poor, would join forces with BCCI in this philanthropic endeavor.

Anyone who believes this party line is either dangerously innocent, or guilty of the sort of apathy and lack of inquisitiveness that poses a threat to our democracy. It is possible that Carter genuinely believed that BCCI (which had helped kleptocratic government leaders  “bust out” the economies of poverty stricken nations in the non-developing world) was on a “philanthropic” mission to end global poverty, but that is beside the point. Or, rather, it is  precisely the point. Because if you genuinely believe that the perpetrators of the “largest banking fraud in world financial history” are engaged in a philanthropic mission, you are, by definition, so friendly with those perpetrators as to be wholly incapacitated.

This is the essence of what we call “deep capture.”

One of BCCI’s most important business partners in the 1980s was a leading oligarch named Jackson Stephens, who was one of the largest contributors to both the Democratic and Republican parties. Stephens was also one of Bill Clinton’s closest associates, and Stephens would later figure in some of the scandals that plagued the Clinton presidency. One of the more famous Clinton scandals saw a Chinese spy donating large sums to Clinton campaign coffers and stealing U.S. nuclear weapons secrets, all the while working in some capacity for a brokerage called Stephens, Inc., which had been founded by Jackson Stephens, and which, in the 1980s, had maintained a close business relationship with BCCI. Stephens had, in the 1980s, also been among those who brokered BCCI’s “secret” acquisition of a financial institution called First General Bankshares, later renamed First American Bankshares.

First American Bankshares was the most prominent financial institution in Washington, DC, and it counted among its clients a large number of America’s leading politicians. In addition, First American Bankshares had extensive ties to the U.S. national security community, and it was no accident that BCCI principals controlled First American in partnership with a man named Clark Clifford, whom BCCI also appointed to run the day-to-day operations of First American and its affiiliates. Clifford, a former Secretary of Defense, was, at the time, one of the most influential people in Washington, and he was the eminence gris of the Democratic Party.

After BCCI collapsed in 1991, the major U.S. news organizations focused almost exclusively on BCCI’s “secret” acquisition of First American Bankshares as being the most salient feature of the BCCI scandal, though the major U.S. news organizations seemed to find nothing more scandalous about it than the fact that the acquisition was “secret,” and therefore illegal. Many earnest U.S. government investigators (including Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau), meanwhile, had determined that there was nothing particularly “secret” about it. Top officials in Washington were aware that BCCI had acquired First American Bankshares, and it is likely they were also aware (as even the whitewashed Congressional report on the BCCI scandal would suggest) that BCCI principals (including the chief of Saudi intelligence) had acquired First Commerce as a way to peddle influence in Washington.

Meanwhile, of course, the BCCI enterprise was carrying out other missions, one of which was to provide a full package of services to leading jihadi terrorist organizations, another of which was to wage the “Financial Jihad” against the American economy. But, of course, captured regulators  in Washington allowed BCCI and its partners to “bust-out” the American economy, and the major U.S. news organizations published not a word about it.

Noteably, the Congressional report into the BCCI scandal also revealed that a BCCI subsidiary called Capcom Financial (whose principals included Saudi intelligence official Shiekh Kamal Adham) had formed business relationships with leading American telecommunications and media companies, including CNN, likely for the purposes of influencing (through the media organizations) American public opinion. Unsurprisingly, the major U.S. news organizations, including CNN, did not report on this aspect of the BCCI scandal. Nor, for some reason, did the major U.S. news organizations report the Congressional finding that Capcom Financial had meanwhile transacted around $90 billion (an astounding sum in those days) in illegal “wash” trades through the trading desk of Michael Milken, who was then the most prominent and powerful financial operator on Wall Street.

Such “wash trades” are usually accompanied by manipulative short selling, and they do extensive damage to the markets. In addition, “wash” trades are usually a component of larger money laundering schemes (hence the term “wash”), and it should be stressed that nearly every serious investigator of the BCCI scandal (including the Manhattan District Attorney; the director of the Senate committee tasked with investigating BCCI; the director of the House Task Force on Terorrism; and others) has reported that one of BCCI’s principal lines of business was to launder money not for the world’s leading terrorist organizations, but also for leading transnational organized crime syndicates. Some of BCCI’s executives, including  Ziuddin Ali Akbar, who served as BCCI’s treasurer and as director of Capcom Financial, were indicted for laundering money that belonged to Colombian drug cartels.

Aside from Milken, another of BCCI’s most important business partners in the 1980s was Bank of America, which was, in fact, among BCCI’s founding shareholders. According to the party line delivered to the public by the major U.S. news organizations (and by some books on BCCI), Bank of America sold its shares in BCCI in the 1970s because Bank of America had concluded at that early date that BCCI was a criminal enterprise. But this failed to explain why Bank of America did not report the criminality. And more recently, in 2007, Morgenthau (who was still district attorney) concluded that Bank of America had laundered huge sums for drug dealers in Latin America who had ties to Hezbollah and Al Qaeda. Most of the major U.S. news organizations failed to report this news.

Meanwhile, the major U.S. news organizations seemed to believe that people like Jackson Stephens and Michael Milken (i.e. one of history’s most destructive financial criminals) were prominent figures of the American establishment, deserving of our respect and admiration. Thus,we are left to contemplate the state of the republic.

To be continued…

* * * * * * * * * *

In Chapter 2 of this series, we began to discuss an outfit called the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI)  which collapsed in 1991, at which point the Manhattan district attorney called it “the biggest banking fraud in world financial history.”  It will be useful for us to further review the amazing history of BCCI because most of BCCI’s former principals and their former partners in crime remain in business today. Moreover, we will see, they have, along with some new and younger players, built a financial network that presently poses a significant threat to the stability of the global financial system.

Unfortunately, the public knows little about the BCCI scandal other than what was published by the major news organizations during the brief period after the scandal broke in 1991, and according to the major U.S. news organizations, BCCI’s most significant crime was to have secretly acquired  a financial institution called First American Bankshares in contravention of rules prohibiting foreign ownership of American financial institutions. The major U.S. news organizations also reported that a few BCCI executives were indicted for laundering money that belonged to Colombian drug cartels, but the media left the public to believe that this was not evidence of any larger conspiracy on the part of BCCI and its partners (which I will refer to as the “larger BCCI enterprise”).

The major U.S. news organizations did transcribe the Manhattan District Attorney’s statement that BCCI was the “largest banking fraud in world financial history,” but most U.S. media failed to properly quantify the magnitude of the fraud or the damage that had been done to the global financial system. So far as the fraud was concerned, the major U.S. news organizations reported only that BCCI’s executives had failed to properly account for a few billion dollars, while BCCI’s depositors had lost a total of around $20 billion when the bank collapsed.

Not only that, but some reports suggested that unlike other major financial institutions, BCCI had pursued a mission that was largely “philanthropic” in nature. According to this narrative, the founder of BCCI, a Pakistani businessman named Aga Hasan Abedi, ascribed to the same  “mystical” brand of Sufi Islam that was favored by some American hippies, and guided by these “mystical” religious beliefs, Abedi and other BCCI executives set out to eliminate global poverty and contribute to the economic advancement of the world’s disenfranchised nations, though a few billion dollars had apparently vanished into the ether of this ultimately misguided and “mystical” mission.

By contrast, Yossef Bondansky, who served as director of the House Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare during the years 1988-2005, reported (in his 2000 seminal book on Osama bin Laden) that BCCI’s “philanthropic” mission included the following:  “providing ‘special services’ in support of worthy causes—from laundering money for terrorists, Muslim intelligence services, and mujahedeen; to clandestinely funding deals for conventional weapons, weapons of mass destruction…to shipping around and laundering huge sums embezzled by corrupt leaders.” Bodansky continued: “In the process of sponsoring these Islamist ‘causes,’ the BCCI’s management not only did not keep any books…[but also] BCCI had become a hollow entity with a lot of unaccounted for and dirty money moving around the world…”

In fact, the mission was grander than all that, and to understand the larger mission, we must recall that leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood presently speak of a mission called “The Financial Jihad.”  To some extent, the “Financial Jihad” involves Muslim Brotherhood banks providing “special services” to jihadi terrorist organizations, but a report prepared for the Department of Defense (see chapter 1 of this series) suggests (as do other experts) that the “Financial Jihad” has two additional objectives: 1) to build a global financial empire that can serve as an alternative to the prevailing financial order dominated by the West; and 2) to deploy financial weapons of mass destruction to undermine the prevailing financial order dominated by the West.

The financial institution that spearheaded the “Financial Jihad” was BCCI. It was not known as the “Financial Jihad” back then, but there can be no doubt that BCCI’s mission had little to do with a “mystical” mission to eliminate global poverty. It was true that BCCI founder Aga Hassan Abedi ascribed to a “mystical” brand of Sufi Islam, but it was also true (contrary to the media reports that the Muslim Brotherhood was an entirely Sunni outfit) that some key Muslim Brotherhood figures, including several of the people who originally founded the Brotherhood, ascribed to the “mystical” brand of Sufi Islam. Although it is  not known whether Abedi himself was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, he and other BCCI executives had relationships with Muslim Brotherhood leaders, and it is clear that he and the Muslim Brotherhood had a common vision of what they referred to at the time as “Islamic finance.”

BCCI also counted among its founding shareholders and top executives current and former officials of governments that were among the Muslim Brotherhood’s principal state sponsors. One of the largest shareholders of BCCI was the ruler of Abu Dhabi (in the United Arab Emirates), and other key shareholders included the ruling families of Dubai (also in the UAE) and Oman. In addition, the Saudi royal family had close involvement with BCCI, and one of BCCI’s most important shareholders (and a key hands-on executive of the bank) was Shiekh Kamal Adahm, who was chief of the Saudi intelligence service at the time when BCCI was founded in 1972 until he retired from that position in 1977.

When Shiekh Adahm resigned as chief of Saudi intelligence, he was replaced by Prince Turki bin al-Faisal, who was also closely involved with some of BCCI’s important initiatives. Meanwhile, many of BCCI’s top executives were “former” top officials of Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, which itself had extensive ties with the Muslim Brotherhood, while other BCCI executives were among the closest associates (including the son) of Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, who was the leader of Pakistan until his death in 1988. Some accounts of the BCCI enterprise described BCCI as being effectively an arm of both the Saudi intelligence service and the Pakistani intelligence service (with Pakistan’s government being, to some significant extent, a proxy of the Saudis).

All of these governments had been engaged in a program (a program that continues to this day) to grow the Muslim Brotherhood into a powerful and global political movement. An important component of this program was (and is) to help the Muslim Brotherhood build an impressive financial empire, and as of the 1980s, a centerpiece of this financial empire was an outfit called Faisal Islamic Bank, which was one of BCCI’s most important affiliates. BCCI itself might properly be regarded as having been an important component of the Muslim Brotherhood financial empire, and this was especially the case in the 1980s, when a Saudi billionaire named Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz became BCCI’s largest shareholder and an executive director of the bank.

As we know from Chapter 2 of this series, Shiekh Mahfouz had extensive ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, and he was later a key sponsor of the terrorist organization that we now know as “Al Qaeda.” He was, in fact, one of the select few billionaires whom Osama bin Laden referred to as his “Golden Chain.” And, of course, Osama bin Laden was himself a prominent Saudi billionaire, so it should surprise nobody to learn that Osama bin Laden himself was also involved with the BCCI enterprise.

It has been reported that Osama bin Laden was a mere client of BCCI, and perhaps he was nothing more, but it is important to understand that Osama bin Laden was not just the leader of a violent terrorist organization, but also a sophisticated financial operator. In addition,  as Yossef Bondansky (then director of the House Task Force on Terrorism) reported in his 2000 book on Osama bin Laden, soon after BCCI collapsed in 1991, a Muslim Brotherhood leader named Hasan al-Turabi assigned Osama bin Laden to help lead a Muslim Brotherhood initiative to replace the BCCI enterprise with a similar banking network that could serve the jihad. Also involved with this effort was Omar Abdul Rahman, otherwise known as the Blind Shiekh, and he was one of Osama bin Laden’s closest associates.

Presently, the media reports that the Blind Shiekh is a fringe fanatic and terrorist who was jailed for his involvement in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. However, the Blind Shiekh is also a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and he was (prior to his arrest on terrorism charges) an eminently prominent banker who co-founded several major  financial institutions, including an outfit called Faisal Islamic Bank, which (recall) was BCCI’s most important affiliate (delivering much of its depositors’ money to BCCI, with BCCI looting some significant portion of that money).

The Blind Shiekh and Osama bin Laden were not the only terrorists who had involvement with BCCI. Another was Abu Nidal, leader of a terrorist organization called Black September (among other names). Abu Nidal was the most notorious terrorist of his era, and according to numerous reports, including one in Time magazine, Abu Nidal worked for a while out of BCCI offices in London.

Abu Nidal, too, was reportedly a mere client of BCCI, but his terrorist organization was closely intertwined with a transnational organized crime (and terrorism) syndicate operated by a global terrorist and mobster named Monzer al Kassar, and al-Kassar played a role in brokering some of BCCI’s important business ventures. (Aside from being a global terrorist and mafia kingpin, Monzer al Kassar was a prominent businessman and oligarch often referred to as “The Prince of Marabella” because of the lavish parties he held at his mansion in Marabella, Spain).

Rachel Ehrenfeld, now director of the Economic Warfare Institute, has written that the  “religious convictions of the founders of BCCI coincided with those of the Muslim and Arab leaders who sponsored terrorism. It was also the extension of this belief that led [BCCI founder] Agha Hassan Abedi to immerse BCCI in terrorist activities.”  Ehrenfeld continued: “Funding revolutions, terrorism, and other subversive activities is expensive and difficult. An Iranian web of international financial institutions was created, with BCCI as one of the most prominent strands. The bank not only facilitated direct contact between terrorist networks, it also provided cover and deniability for the sponsoring states.”

All true, but more than that, the BCCI enterprise (contrary to the notion that its “mystical” mission was to eliminate global poverty) contributed to the further impoverishment of the world.  Not only did the BCCI enterprise steal billions from its depositors (many of whom were citizens of poverty-stricken nations), but BCCI also helped numerous kleptocratic government leaders “bust out” (i.e. loot and destroy) the economies of destitute nations in Africa and Latin America. In addition, the BCCI enterprise “busted out” a significant chunk of the American economy, which is to say that it achieved one objective of what is now known as the “Financial Jihad.”

However, it should be noted that the BCCI enterprise perpetrated much of its destructive crime in partnership with prominent figures of the American establishment.  And presently, Muslim Brotherhood financial institutions  (many with links to former BCCI principals, or operated by former BCCI principals) count among their important business partners some of Wall Street’s most notable (and notorious) brokerages and investment houses. In other words, Swiss author and political scientist Richard Labeviere (who is one of the world’s more astute observers of the jihad and the Muslim Brotherhood) was correct to report (in 2000) that the jihad and political Islam (led by the Muslim Brotherhood)  “is less likely to produce a ‘clash of civilizations’…than to consolidate mafia channels of organized crime and the far-reaching networks of businesses built under globalized capitalism.”

Another astute (and independent) observer of the jihad is Robert Dreyfuss, who has spent much of his long career in the Middle East, and who has served as national security correspondent for Rolling Stone magazine, which is mostly about hip music bands, but which is, unfortunately for civilization, the only major U.S. media outfit that consistently publishes in-depth stories (see also stories by Matt Taibbi and Greg Palast) that approximate the truth on important subjects such as Wall Street, Washington, the jihad, and other things that make the world the way it is. Dreyfuss, who has studied the Muslim Brotherhood since the 1970s, and is the author of two excellent books (one on Iran, the other on political Islam) has correctly observed that the “real Muslim Brothers are the secretive bankers and financiers…whose genealogy places them in the oligarchical elite…”

Dreyfuss has also reported (correctly) that: “the Muslim Brotherhood is money. Together, the Brotherhood probably controls several tens of billions of dollars in immediately liquid assets, and controls billions more in day-to-day business operations in everything from oil trade and banking to drug-running, illegal arms merchandising, and gold and diamond smuggling. By allying with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Anglo-Americans [i.e. the oligarchical elite of the West] are not merely buying into a terrorist-for-hire racket; they are partners in a powerful and worldwide financial empire that extends from numbered Swiss bank accounts to offshore financial havens….”

Dreyfuss continued: “Need a few hundred million dollars to bail out [a] bank? Try the Muslim Brotherhood. Is a major London conglomerate seeking partners to invest a few billion in an African raw materials extraction venture? Try the Muslim Brotherhood. Does an Anglo-American bloc of banking houses want to start a run on the French franc? Try the Muslim Brotherhood.”

* * * * * * * * *

While the major U.S. news organizations regularly cited $20 billion as being the extent of the BCCI fraud, that figure represented only the sum that BCCI’s depositors lost when BCCI collapsed. By perpetrating a host of other destructive financial crimes (i.e. financial terrorism), BCCI and its partners looted far more—at least two trillion dollars—from the global financial system. Some of this looting was accomplished by a global network of BCCI-affiliated brokerages that specialized in perpetrating so-called “pump and dump” schemes, and we will see in later chapters that  most of those brokerages were not only linked to BCCI, but also operated by prominent financial operators (e.g. a fellow named Thomas Quinn) with ties to La Cosa Nostra and other organized crime syndicates.

See Chapter 1 of this series for a fuller description of “pump and dump” schemes, but the basic idea is that miscreants gain control over the stock of a publicly listed company, and sometimes gain a degree of control of the company itself. The miscreants then “pump” the share price, and as the share price rises in value, the miscreants lure in ordinary investors. Once the share price reaches sufficient heights, the miscreants then “dump” shares into the market, meanwhile bombarding the stock with manipulative short selling that causes the stock to go into a death spiral from which the stock does not recover.

Sometimes the companies targeted in these schemes are fraudulent companies to begin with, at other times the companies are legitimate until such time when the miscreants seize control of the companies and begin manipulating their stock, meanwhile looting their cash. Either way, the end result is aways the same: the companies are “busted out” (i.e. destroyed) and the death spiral caused by the “dump” and the manipulative short selling ensures that the stock price hits zero before ordinary shareholders have the opportunity to exit the stock and recoup some of their losses.

The global network of BCCI-linked brokerages “busted out” mostly small to medium sized companies, but the larger BCCI enterprise used similar methods to “bust out” some important American savings and loan banks. In later chapters of this series, we will see that BCCI also played a key role in the operations of Michael Milken, then the most powerful man on Wall Street. In addition, we will see, BCCI helped Milken and some of his closest associates “bust out” Lincoln Savings and Loan, then one of the most important financial institutions in the nation. Indeed, BCCI and the Milken operation were major contributors to the savings and loan crisis that began in the late 1980s, and which ultimately cost U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars in bailouts—a portent of bigger and better things to come.

In 1993, when a few BCCI principals were brought to trial, the presiding judge correctly noted that the BCCI had singlehandedly “shattered the integrity of the global financial system.” And perhaps it is no coincidence that the Blind Shiekh (co-founder of a key BCCI’s affiliate, Faisal Islamic Bank, which had played an important role in shattering the integrity of the global financial system) not only was linked that same year to the bombing of the World Trade Center (i.e. the first attempt to topple the twin totems of the global financial system), but also subsequently issued one of the most famous of all fatwahs–a fatwah that was cited by Osama bin Laden in his declaration of war against the United States, and a fatwah that is quoted with admiration by Muslim Brotherhood leaders everywhere.

The Blind Shiekh’s fatwah (issued from his jail cell) was the first fatwah (or, at least, the first fatwah issued by a terrorist who was also a prominent banker) to publicly suggest that it would be good idea for his fellow jihadis (and fellow bankers?) to “tear down the edifices of capitalism.” And, to be sure, the Blind Shiekh was no friend of “capitalism” as that noble idea was formerly understood, with free and fair markets unfettered by a ruling oligarchy and governed by a minimal rule of law. To the contrary, the Blind Shiekh was a criminal oligarch.  And though the World Trade Center was no doubt one “edifice of capitalism” that the the Blind Sheikh wished to “tear down,” the Blind Shiekh made it clear in his fatwah that the objective was not merely to destroy a building in the heart of the New York financial district.

The Blind Sheikh stated that there was a larger objective. This is the objective we now know as “The Financial Jihad,” but back then, the Blind Shiekh did not mince his words. He stated it emphatically. He stated it bluntly. He stated it as a formal command:  “Destroy their [our] economies…”

To be continued…

Mark Mitchell is a journalist who spent most of his career working for mainstream media publications before joining DeepCapture.com.

If this essay concerns you, and you wish to help, then:

1) Use the Social Media buttons at the top of the article to help it go viral;

2) Email it to a dozen friends;

3) Go here for additional suggestions: “So You Say You Want a Revolution?“

* * * * * * * * *

Al Qaeda’s supporters are “aware of the cracks in the Western financial system as they are aware of the lines in their own hands.”

– Osama bin Laden, in a 2001 interview with a Pakistani Journalist

* * * * * * * *

In the summer of 2003, customs agents at London’s Heathrow airport inspected the luggage of a man named Abdurrahman Alamoudi and found hidden in a secret compartment of one of his suitcases a total of $350,000 in cash. Mr. Alamoudi failed to adequately explain why he was hauling large stacks of $100 bills in a secret compartment, so there was an investigation. This investigation yielded some interesting facts.

Mr. Alamoudi, a member of a wealthy family in Saudi Arabia, had been a long time resident of the United States, where he was among the most prominent members of the Muslim community. He was also a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, and an outspoken supporter of Hamas and Hezbollah. In addition, he counted among closest friends and business associates people like Sami al Arian, a leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Mousa Abu Marzook, political chief of Hamas.

Some people believe that groups like Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and the Muslim Brotherhood are focused on faraway lands, but all of these groups (we will see) have ties to Al Qaeda, and all of them are united in their hostility to the United States. Moreover, they pay close attention to the U.S. markets – and they see the economy as key to undermining American power.

When the financial crisis hit in 2008, Hamas leaders reacted with glee and issued an official statement proclaiming that the economic cataclysm marked the “End of the American Empire.” Meanwhile, leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood regularly preach the glory of Al Jihad bi-al-Mal, or the “Financial Jihad.”

A report (see Chapter 1) commissioned by the Defense Department’s Irregular Warfare Support Program suggests that the “Financial Jihad” has two key objectives: 1) building a global financial network that can serve as an alternative to the prevailing financial order dominated by the West; 2) perpetrating destructive financial crimes that can be described as “financial terrorism” because the crimes are, to some extent, politically motivated and meant to undermine the global financial system, which is viewed by leaders of the Financial Jihad as being a product of the West.

Muslim Brotherhood leader Hamud bin Uqla al-Shuaibi implied as much when he stated in 2007 that jihadis must resist the West, but do not necessarily need to do so with violence. He suggested that “Financial Jihad” was a viable alternative to violence and was indeed “more important than self sacrificing [in armed battle].” He did not specify what he meant by “Financial Jihad” but he was certainly not talking about giving to charity. Rather, he said, “Money is a weapon of Jihad.”

Similarly, Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader Yussuf al Qardawi has spoken of the need for Muslims to deploy  Silah al Naft – i.e. “the weapon of oil” – against the U.S. economy. This was precisely in line with the thinking of Osama bin Laden, who stressed  “the absolute necessity to use the oil weapon.”

In another typical manifesto, Osama bin Laden and his deputy wrote that “it is very important to concentrate on hitting the U.S. economy through all possible means.” In 2007, bin Laden released a video on which he taunted the U.S. for having too much mortgage debt.

Although Osama bin Laden is dead, his words remain important. Indeed, among jihadis, the words of the fallen “martyr” might have more resonance than ever. And the jihad is bigger than bin Laden. It is a global movement that has clearly articulated its goals, and remains intent upon achieving them.

Al Qaeda and many other outfits have repeated over and over that jihadis should wage economic warfare any way they can. They don’t mean knocking down buildings – they mean wiping out the markets. As Al Qaeda operative Monin Khawaja wrote in 2003, “We have to come up with a way that we can drain their economy of all its resources, cripple their industries, and bankrupt their systems…”

Then there is the Muslim Brotherhood document, which is quoted all too frequently, and often to the wrong purposes. It says that Muslims “must understand that their work in America is a kind of Grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and `sabotaging’ its miserable house by the hands of the believers…”

When I say that the document is quoted to the wrong purposes, I am referring to those who point to it as evidence that radical Islamism is taking over America, which it is not. Certainly, we should not be hysterical about Muslims calling America a “miserable house”, which is an accurate description of our current state of affairs. However, it is possible that jihadis are, in fact, “sabotaging” our miserable house from within.

As early as 2003, the Department of Homeland Security warned that Al Qaeda  was interested in infiltrating American financial institutions, and that Al Qaeda operatives possibly had already obtained jobs at American brokerage houses and banks. Said DHS spokesman David Wray: “There is new intelligence that indicates specific interest [on the part of Al Qaeda] in financial services and indirect indication…that led us to believe that threats could come from within as well as without.”

Osama bin Laden, meanwhile, liked to brag (as he did in the statement with which I opened this chapter) that his supporters understand the weaknesses in the American financial system. In another statement, he was even more explicit, saying not only that his supporters knew how to “exploit” the “cracks inside the Western financial system”, but also that the “faults and weaknesses are like a sliding noose strangling the [American economy].”

Which brings us back to Mr. Alamoudi, the fellow caught with $350,000 stuffed in his suitcase. Mr. Alamoudi was a central figure in what FBI investigators used to call the SAAR Network, or sometimes the Safa Group, a complex web of companies, investment funds, banks and charities alleged to have funded a host of jihadist outfits, including Al Qaeda. Shortly after the 9-11 attacks in 2001, the SAAR Network became the principal target of Operation Green Quest, the U.S. government’s effort to shut down the flow of money to terrorists. (Operation Green Quest led to few indictments and was disbanded in 2003, but its findings remain relevant).

One SAAR Network outfit was called the Ficq Council, where Mr. Alamoudi served as a trustee. The founder of the Ficq Council, Taha Jaber Al-Alwani, was named as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the government’s case against Mr. Alamoudi’s friend, Sami al-Arian, who was himself a central figure in the SAAR Network until he was jailed for his activities as U.S. leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad. (Sami al-Arian was also suspected of providing support to the 9-11 hijackers, but he was never charged for doing so).

The secretary and board director of the Ficq Council was a man named Sheikh Yusuf Talal DeLorenzo, who is another one of Sami al Arian’s close associates. Sheikh DeLorenzo and Mr. Alamoudi (the fellow with the suitcase full of cash), meanwhile, co-founded a SAAR Network outfit called the Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences (GSISS).

Shiekh DeLorenzo himself has not been implicated in the funding of terrorism, and for a time, GSISS had a contract from the U.S. Department of Defense to screen and hire Muslim Army chaplains, some of whom accompanied U.S. troops to Afghanistan. That, however, was before Mr. Alamoudi was caught at Heathrow with $350,000 in cash hidden in a secret compartment of his suitcase. The investigation that ensued revealed that Mr. Alamoudi had received the cash from Libyan dictator Moammar Qaddafi, and that he planned to use it to finance a plot that he had hatched to assassinate then Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. In 2004, the Treasury Department issued a press release stating that Mr. Alamoudi had ties to Al Qaeda and was one of Osama bin Laden’s most important funders.

After it became clear that Mr. Alamoudi (who is now serving a 23-year prison sentence) had ties to Al Qaeda, the U.S. Senate held a hearing to discuss how it came to be that GSISS (the outfit co-founded by Mr. Almoudi and Sheikh DeLorenzo) was hiring chaplains to accompany American troops to Afghanistan. Echoing the words of most everyone else at that hearing, Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona said that it was pretty “remarkable” that  “people who have known connections to terrorism are the only people to approve these chaplains.”

The Defense Department also concluded that it was remarkable, and ultimately concluded that the GSISS had probably been inserting Al Qaeda spies into the U.S. Army. At least one of the chaplains that GSISS hired for the Army was eventually charged and convicted for passing U.S. military secrets to Al Qaeda. Other GSISS clerics were suspected of espionage and merely fired.

Three years later, a lot of people still thought it was “remarkable GSISS (co-founded by Mr. Alamoudi, a key funder of Al Qaeda) had managed to insert spies into the U.S. military. but that didn’t stop GSISS’s other co-founder, Sheikh DeLorenzo (a sophisticated financier) from seeking permission from the Securities and Exchange Commission to set up a trading platform called Al Safi Trust, the ostensible purpose of which was to enable Muslim traders to engage in short selling without violating shariah law.

In 2007, the SEC granted permission, which is pretty “remarkable” because Al Safi Trust creates precisely the sort of “crack” in the financial system that would likely be exploited by people looking to crash the markets.

Traders who engage in legal short selling (as opposed to naked short selling) first borrow stock, then sell it, hoping the price will fall. This is a legitimate practice when it is not meant to intentionally manipulate the markets. The stock that is borrowed and then sold is real stock; it is not phantom stock that artificially increases supply and drives down prices. When Sheikh DeLorenzo set up Al Safi Trust, however, he explained that Muslim traders cannot borrow stock because shariah law prohibits paying interest.

This claim is, to begin with, not entirely true. Shariah law (by a strict reading of the Koran) does not ban interest. It merely warns against “excessive” interest, or usury. Nobody in modern times ever said that Muslims cannot pay interest until the Muslim Brotherhood’s “Financial Jihad” began to take off in the 1970s. This is about politics, not religion. Regardless, the interest problem could have been resolved in any number of ways. For example, Al Safi Trust could have worked out a fee structure whereby the prime broker, rather than the traders themselves, paid the interest on the borrowed stock.

Instead, Al Safi Trust provides an altogether novel service, known as Arboon, the amazing feature of which is that nobody locates or borrows any real stock. The clients of Al Safi Trust can simply sell as much stock as they like even if there is no stock available to sell.

Of course, if there is no stock available, they are not selling actual stock. They are simply hitting the “sell” buttons on their computers, indicating to the markets that stock has been sold, and creating phantom supply that drives down prices. According to Sheikh DeLorenzo, Al Safi Trust’s short sellers enter into an agreement to eventually buy stock so that they can deliver what they have sold.  But an agreement to buy stock  at some indeterminate point in the future is a far cry from having actual stock before selling it.

Presumably, Al Saft Trust’s clients do fulfill their agreements by eventually purchasing stock and delivering it to whomever bought it. But by that time, the phantom stock that was sold would have already done its damage to the markets. With the damage done, Al Safi Trust’s traders can buy shares at lower prices, deliver them, and then unleash another blast of phantom stock, further driving down prices.

In short, Al Safi Trust is nothing more than a cloak for another form of naked short selling, embroidered in Islamic jurisprudence so that regulators will not see through it. Because it is condoned by regulators, there is no evidence that Al Safi Trust itself has broken any laws. However, criminals  (or, for that matter, financial terrorists) looking to inflict damage on the markets now have a service, Al Safi Trust, that would enable them to conduct their mischief without fear that American regulators would pay even the least bit of attention to what they are doing.

I shudder to think who the clients of Al Safi Trust might be, but we should probably consider the possibilities. And towards that end, maybe we should know more about Sheikh DeLorenzo’s background.

* * * * * * * *

Sheikh DeLorenzo was born in Massachusetts as Anthony DeLorenzo, the son of upper-class parents, and the grandson of Italian immigrants from Sicily. At the age of twenty, he dropped out of Cornell University, and converted to Islam. Soon after, he moved to Pakistan, gradually making his way to Karachi, where he spent several years receiving religious training at Jamiah Ulum Islamia, a maddrassah led by scholars who, like the Taliban, subscribe to the strict Deobandi school of Islam.

According to the International Crisis Group, a well-known non-profit organization that studies war zones and political conflict, the Jamiah Islamia maddrassah has “carried the mantle of Jihadi leadership,” since the days of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and now serves as “the fountainhead of Deobandi militancy countrywide.”

The International Crisis Group notes further that the Jamiah Islamia “boasts close ties with the Taliban” and has played a “major role in helping to establish and sustain” Pakistan’s most violent jihadist outfits, including Harkat ul-Mujahideen, Jaish-e-Mohammed, and Sipah-e-Sahaba. All of these groups have close ties to Al Qaeda, and Jaish-e-Mohammed, along with the intimately affiliated Lashkar-e-Tayiba, have become, for all intents and purposes, Al Qaeda subsidiaries.

As evidence of this, investigators note, as just one example, that Omar Sheikh, a leading member of Jaish-e-Mohammed, wired money to Mohammed Atta, the ring-leader of the Al Qaeda hijackers who carried out the 9-11 attacks. Omar Sheikh was also responsible for kidnapping Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was subsequently killed, his head sliced off with an ornate, Yemeni knife and held up to be filmed for a jihadi propaganda video. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the September 11 attacks, has said that he committed the murder himself.

This was a great tragedy because Daniel Pearl was one of the few journalists to understand the threat to the United States is not just Al Qaeda, but a much larger, complex web of interlinking jihadist groups, shady financiers, agents of rogue states, narcotics smugglers, nuclear weapons traffickers, and Mafia kingpins. We’ll dig into that web in future chapters, but I’ll note now that Jaish-e-Mohammed, one of the outfits spawned by Sheikh DeLorenzo’s madrassah, has been implicated in multiple terrorist plots, including one to fire Stinger missiles at passenger planes in New York.

This is not to suggest that Sheikh DeLorenzo himself is a terrorist.  But there is no question that Sheikh DeLorenzo — who is also known as Usama DeLorenzo, and Usama a-Ali, and Usama Ashraf Ali, and other names – is on familiar terms with jihadist groups. Indeed, in the 1980s, Sheikh DeLorenzo worked as a key advisor to Zia ul-Haq, who was then the leader of Pakistan, and Sheikh DeLorenzo’s job was to help implement the Pakistani government’s most pernicious program — the further development of the country’s network of madrassahs in order to strengthen relationships between the government and jihadist paramilitaries, including many that are now plotting the demise of the West.

As part of Shiekh DeLorenzo’s program, many of these jihadist groups became closely intertwined with Pakistan’s spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). It should be said that the madrassah program also received support from the U.S. government, which was then hoping that the jihadist movement would serve as bulwark against the Soviet Union. But nowadays, of course, the jihadist paramilitaries are enemies of the United States, and their entanglements with the ISI cause endless problems for U.S. government officials who rely on Pakistan as an American ally.

The nexus between the ISI, the jihadis, and also key Mafia figures (such as the Indian Mafia kingpin Dawood Ibrahim, who lives under the protection of the ISI and is a key money man for Al Qaeda, according to multiple U.S. government reports) is a genuine threat to global stability, and to the financial system that underlies the American economy. Ibrahim himself is a serious threat. Aside from being involved in multiple violent terrorist attacks, he is reportedly the biggest trader on the Karachi stock exchange. Forbes Magazine ranks Ibrahim as one of the 50 most powerful people in the world.

The extent to which Sheikh DeLorenzo remains part of the Pakistani nexus is unclear, but his experience in Pakistan might be less worrying than his time in America, where he came to be on close terms not only with Sami al-Arian (a leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad) and Mr. Alamoudi (his Al Qaeda-tied partner in  GSISS) but many other important jihadis, most of them key figures in the SAAR Network of alleged terrorist financiers. Indeed, though Shiekh DeLorenzo has never been charged with any crime, he held key positions with multiple SAAR Network organizations, and it should be stressed that all these organizations were operated by the Muslim Brotherhood, and all were said (by U.S. law enforcement agencies) to have ties to terrorist organizations (e.g. Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Al Qaeda, and others) that were spawned by the Brotherhood.

For example, in addition to his high-level positions with the Ficq Council, Sheikh DeLorenzo was a board member at the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), another outfit identified by FBI investigators as being part of the SAAR Network. Other top officials of IIIT have been linked directly to Al Qaeda and provided logistical support to at least two of Al Qaeda’s biggest achievements – the 1998 simultaneous attacks on the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya; and the bombing, in 2000, of the USS Cole, an American destroyer that was parked at the Yemeni port of Aden. One IIIT officer, Tarik Hamdi, hand delivered the satellite phone that Osama bin Laden used to order the assault on the USS Cole. The IIIT was also the largest “donor” to the World and Islam Studies Enterprise, which simply handed the money over to Sami al-Arian’s Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other terrorist groups.

After Sami al Arian’s arrest, the secretary general of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Ramadan Shallah (who was once a professor, along with Sami Al-Arian, at the University of South Florida, and is now based in Syria) identified IIIT as the Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s most important source of funding. In 2000, Youseff Bondansky, then director of the House Task Force on Terrorism, published a book reporting that Shallah and other terrorists had attended meetings with Osama bin Laden to plan a “spectacular” terrorist attack inside in the United States. (Again, Shiekh DeLorenzo himself has not been implicated in terrorism, but his relationships with some terrorists might be pertinent).

Sheikh DeLorenzo was also a top executive (and continues to serve as a consultant for) a large SAAR Network investment fund called the Amana Trust, which is interesting on several levels. For one, the Amana Trust was founded by a Muslim Brotherhood figure named Yaqub Mirza, who was the most important U.S.-based operative in the SAAR Network of terrorist financiers. In 2001, U.S. government agents raided the offices of not just Mr. Mirza, but also at least three other Amana Trust officials because they (and Amana Trust) were suspected of funding terrorism. (Neither Mr. Mirza nor any other Amana Trust officials were ever charged with any crime, and nor were most of the other key figures in the SAAR Network who were targeted by Operation Green Quest investigators).

After raiding Mr. Mirza’s offices, U.S. law enforcement officials said that Mr. Mirza was the incorporator or manager of more than a dozen SAAR Network hedge funds, charities, and financial entities, including Mar-Jac Investments, Mena Investments, Sterling Management Group, and Reston Investments. In addition, Mr. Mirza ran the SAAR Network’s centerpiece, an outfit called the SAAR Foundation, which advertised itself as a charity, but was allegedly an important vehicle for laundering money raised in the United States for jihadist groups. (Again, no convictions were forthcoming, and Mr. Mirza is innocent until proven guilty, but I will report the allegations of government investigators, and let readers make up their own minds).

In 1998, the SAAR Foundation reported that it had an astounding $1.8 billion in annual revenue. After the 9-11 attacks, when the authorities began investigating the foundation for alleged ties to jihadist terrorist groups, the foundation (as first reported by terrorism expert Steve Emerson) issued new books that stated that it had zero income. In other words, $1.8 billion simply vanished, and officials suspected (though never proved) that the money ended up in the hands of terrorist outfits. In another instance, the SAAR Foundation transferred $9 million to an off-shore account held in the name of Humana Charitable Trust, an entity that did not exist.

Mr. Mirza has also been named by FBI investigators and terrorism experts as the principal U.S.-based bagman for Yasin al-Qadi, a Saudi billionaire and Muslim Brotherhood leader who was one of a select number of people labeled (in 2001-2002) by the U.S. government as a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist.” Yasin al Qadi ran an “Al Qaeda front” called the Muwafaw Foundation, which was, according to the U.S. Treasury Department, one of Osama bin Laden’s sources of funding.

However, the U.S. government has refused to hand over evidence to prosecutors and Yasin al Qadi has yet to be convicted of any crime. This has been lamented by some investigators, including former FBI special agent Robert Wright, who insists that Yasin al Qadi was “Al Qaeda’s banker” and that the U.S. government has failed to go after him and others in deference to the government of Saudi Arabia. The U.S. Treasury Department no longer refers to Yasin al Qadi as a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist.” Instead, he and thousands of others are referred to as “Specially Designated Nationals” who are suspected of financing terrorism.

In the late 1990s, Yasin al-Qadi was a major investor, along with a man named Sulaiman al-Ali, in a Chicago company called Global Chemical, which was ostensibly involved in warehousing chemicals for the manufacturing of soap. But when Global Chemical was raided in 1997, government experts said that the chemicals were likely for use in manufacturing explosives or even chemical weapons. (Again, Yasin al Qadi was not charged).

The president of Global Chemical was Mohammed Mabrook, who used the alias Mohamed Elhazeri, and who was, in the 1990s, the director of an outfit called Mercy International. One of Mercy’s board members was Mr. Alamoudi (Sheikh DeLorenzo’s GSISS partner), and Mercy International has been linked to 1) the terrorists who carried out the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa); 2) the masterminds of both the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the September 11 conspiracy; and 3) Osama bin Laden himself.

Meanwhile, Global Chemical co-investor Sulaiman al-Ali incorporated, along with Yasin al-Qadi’s bagman, Mr. Mirza (Sheikh DeLorenzo’s partner in Amana Trust), a company called Sana-Bell Inc. Sana-Bell’s principal purpose, according to government investigators, was to generate and manage money for the U.S. arm of the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO). Mr. Alamoudi was one official of the IIRO in the U.S.

Among the principals of the IIRO’s overseas offices was Mohammed al-Zawahiri, the leader of the military wing of Egyptian Islamic Jihad (which has since merged with al Qaeda). Mr. al-Zawahiri is also the brother of Ayman al-Zawahiri, who was Osama bin Laden’s deputy, and is now the new leader of Al Qaeda. Ayman al-Zawahiri trained jihadi paramilitaries in the Balkans under the auspicies of the IIRO.

Given these connections, it should not be surprising to learn that IIRO  has been identified by authorities as an organization that funds terrorism. The United Nations, at one point, officially declared that the IIRO’s branch offices in the Philippines and Indonesia were Al Qaeda subsidiaries. For a long time, the Philippines office was directed by Mohammad Jamal Khalifa, a high-ranking Al Qaeda figure who was Osama bin Laden’s brother in law.

The IIRO, meanwhile, is a subsidiary of the Muslim World League, which Osama bin Laden identified (in a recorded conversation with Al Qaeda lieutenant Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl) as one of his primary sources of funding. The Muslim World League, which was (according to government investigators) also a big backer of Sami al Arian’s Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hamas and other jihadist outfits, was incorporated in the United States by Yasin al-Qadi’s bagman, Mr. Mirza. (Despite the official accusations, the IIRO and the Muslim World League have not been convicted of any crimes, and remain in operation today).

While Mr. Mirza handled affairs in the U.S., the Muslim World League’s Peshawar office was managed by Wael Jalaidan, one of Al Qaeda’s founding members. The Muslim World League’s vice president in the U.S., Hassan Bahfazallah, was a member, along with Mr. Mirza, of Sana-Bell’s board of directors.

Mr. Bahfazallah, meanwhile, was also the executive director of an outfit in Chicago called Benevolence International, which received considerable support from Yasin al-Qadi. Benevolence’s overseas offices, including its office in Chechnya, were reported by U.S. officials to be “Al Qaeda fronts” directed by top Al Qaeda operatives, and the DOJ accused the Benevolence office in Chicago (including Mr. Bahfazallah) of having contacts with a Chechen organized crime (and terrorism) syndicate that was trying to obtain nuclear bombs for Al Qaeda.

Nuclear bombs are weapons of mass destruction.

Sheikh DeLorenzo’s Al Safi Trust naked short selling platform is a financial weapon of mass destruction.

* * * * * * * * *

I do not know whether Yasin al-Qadi, Mr. Mirza and the other alleged terrorist financiers are clients of Al Safi Trust, but they have been in other lines of business with Sheikh DeLorenzo, and their relationships deserve scrutiny, just as we should scrutinize business relationships between gun dealers and the mentally disturbed. The difference here being that Yasin al Qadi (“Al Qaeda’s banker”) and Mr. Mirza (Yasin al Qadi’s bagman in the United States) are not mentally disturbed. They are sophisticated hedge fund managers with experience in the U.S. market, and they might be of service to the “Financial Jihad.”

Both Shiekh DeLorenzo and Mr. Mirza were also involved with an outfit called Saturna Capital, and tax returns show that Saturna Captital was a funder of the Holy Land Foundation, named by U.S. prosecutors as the principal U.S. front for Hamas. Prosecutors in the Holy Land Foundation trial were the first to unveil the document outlining a “grand jihad in eliminating and destroying Western civilization…”

Sheikh DeLorenzo also helped run (and continues to serve as a consultant to) the Saturna Brokerage, which, like Saturna Capital, was a unit of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), a Saudi funded outfit tied to the Muslim Brotherhood.  Amana Trust also operates under the ISNA umbrella, as does the NAIT investment bank and (see chapter 1 of this series) trader Zuhair Karam’s Bridegview Mosque, whose directors help run the operations of all of these financial entities.(The mosque was also a contributor to the Holy Land Foundation, according to those tax returns).

As of 2010, the president of Saturna Brokerage was Monem Abdul Salam, who was formerly a principal at Dickinson & Co., a brokerage that was a unit of the Stotler Group, which received a pile of subpoenas in 1989 as part of Operation Sour Mash and Operation Hedge Clipper – two famous FBI investigations into financial firms suspected of laundering money for narcotics kingpins and organized crime.

Mr. Salam was not directly implicated in those investigations, but there is no doubt that Dickinson was a dubious brokerage. Several of its leading traders left to found MB Trading, which never bothered to register itself with the authorities until it became the first brokerage ever sanctioned by the U.S. government for catering to a customer in Iran in violation of laws that prohibit doing business with state sponsors of terrorism.

As of 2008, the president of ISNA (the outfit that controls NAIT, Saturna, and Amana Trust) was Muzammil Siddiqi, who also served as president of the Ficq Council, where Sheikh DeLorenzo served as secretary and as a director of the board.  Mr. Siddiqi has since been named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terrorist financing case.

There are many other reasons to be concerned about the brokerages and other financial outfits operating under the ISNA banner, one of which is that ISNA was co-founded by Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Sami al Arian, who (we know) has been accused of (though never charged for) providing support to the 9-11 hijackers, and was (according to court documents) taking directions from agents of the Iranian regime operating out of the UN headquarters in New York. This is one reason why NAIT, the multi-billion dollar investment outfit, was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the government’s case against Sami al-Arian.

ISNA, meanwhile, was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the government’s case against the Holy Land Foundation. According to United Press International, U.S. government investigators also believed that ISNA had transferred money directly to Al Qaeda, but ISNA has not been charged on that account and likely won’t be charged, perhaps in deference to the Saudi government, which is one of ISNA’s big donors and would be embarrassed by any association with Al Qaeda. The best the FBI can do, apparently, is occasionally mention ISNA officials as  “unindicted co-conspirators” in cases related to Al Qaeda.  As one example, former ISNA vice president Siraj Wahhaj was named by the U.S. government as an “unindicted person who may be alleged” to have participated in the 1993 “Day of Terror” plot, hatched by a diverse assortment of jihadis, all with ties to Al Qaeda.

The mastermind of both the “Day of Terror” plot and the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center was a religious scholar and Muslim Brotherhood cleric named Omar Abdel Rahman, otherwise known as the “Blind Sheikh” – and he is one of the most important people in the world because his words, more than those of any other Islamic clerics, have inspired the actions of Al Qaeda and other leaders of the grand jihad. He was, before his arrest, also a sophisticated financial operator, and he had co-founded several major financial institutions. For example, he was a co-founder (with Mr. Alamoudi, Mr. Mirza, Yasin al Qadi, among others) of an outfit in Geneva called Bank al Taqwa, which established the Milan Cultural Center said (in 2001) by the U.S. Treasury Department to have been “Al Qaeda’s main operating base in Europe for the movement of men, weapons, and money around the world.”

The Blind Sheikh was until his imprisonment the leader of Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, an Egyptian terrorist group. It was long assumed that Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya was a fierce rival of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, led by Ayman al-Zawahiri, who merged his outfit with Al Qaeda (and is now leader of Al Qaeda). To be sure, al-Zawahiri and the Blind Sheikh had their differences when it came to tactics and strategy (especially with regard to Egypt), but they were nonetheless united in their hatred for the United States. Meanwhile, many jihadis (including Mr. Alamoudi, who often gave speeches calling for the Blind Shiekh’s release from prison) are united in their admiration for the Blind Sheikh because his PhD. from Egypt’s prestigious Al Azhar University, the fount of Muslim Brotherhood thought, gives his fatwahs legitimacy.

Moreover, his fatwahs are bolder than those of any cleric, and they have a particular ring to them. “Tear the Americans and Jews to pieces!  And kill them wherever you find them. Ambush them. Take them hostage…Kill these infidels! Until they witness your harshness. Fight them, and God will torture them…”

And so on…

In his most famous fatwah, the Blind Sheikh was the first to call for the use of airplanes as weapons. In this same fatwah (issued from his prison cell after the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center) the Blind Sheikh was also the first prominent jihadi to publicly declare that jihadis the world over should  join forces to attack the American economy.

The lengthy fatwah is worth a read, but one line can give you a general idea. The Blind Sheikh began with the usual command to “tear [the Americans and Jews] to pieces”. He then specified how this could be done: “destroy their economies, burn their corporations, destroy their peace, sink their ships, shoot down their planes and kill them on air, sea, and land.”

At the 1998 press conference where Osama bin Laden announced his declaration of war against the United States, the Al Qaeda leader gave the assembled journalists laminated cards printed with a photo of the Blind Sheikh and a few words of his famous fatwah – namely, the words that I quoted above. Meanwhile, many other polished jihadist financiers in the SAAR Network had advocated for the Blind Sheikh’s release from prison.

That was in the 1990s, and nobody paid much attention. Given what we now know, however, maybe the SEC or somebody should pay attention to jihadist financiers who might, indeed, be working to  “destroy [our] economies” and “burn [our] corporations” – not with fire, but with the weapons of high-finance.

Again, this is not to suggest that Shiekh DeLorenzo or others in this story are guilty by virtue of their relationships, some of which are once removed. The point is not that Shiekh DeLorenzo himself is a terrorist. It is that some terrorists would likely be aware of Sheikh DeLorenzo’s phantom stock machine, also known as Al Safi Trust, and all the financial entities under the ISNA umbrella. But to the extent that the SEC does pay attention to ISNA (or to the former ISNA officials who are alleged accomplices or associates of Al Qaeda and the Blind Shiekh), it is only to give the SEC stamp of approval to ISNA’s financial empire.

* * * * * * * *

The leaders of the jihad are often portrayed as primitive bumpkins who live in caves and are armed with nothing more dangerous than a few maniacs willing to blow themselves up. This is to ignore the power of the jihadist ideology, which is articulated with great eloquence by countless people who are eminently learned scholars of both Islam and global politics. It is also to ignore the jihad’s fighting capabilities. The jihadis have done much more than dispatch a few terrorists here and there. They have organized and commanded insurgent armies with thousands of soldiers. And these armies have fought, with considerable success, two all-out wars (Afghanistan and Iraq) against the world’s most powerful military.

Perhaps even more important, the notion that jihadis are backward thinkers right out of the seventh century grossly underestimates the jihad’s sophistication as a modern-day global financial operation. And it is not just sophisticated; it is a massive criminal undertaking that has, according the United Nations, laundered more than $1 trillion through the global banking system in the last five years alone.

As one report prepared for the French Directorate of Military Intelligence explains, “the financial network of [Osama] bin Laden, as well as his network of investments, is similar to the network put in place in the 1980s by BCCI [Bank of Credit and Commerce International] for its fraudulent operations, often with the same people…The dominant trait of bin Laden’s operations is that of a terrorist network backed up by a vast financial structure.” [Italics are mine.]

For those who do not know, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) was a massive and complex financial institution, founded by a Pakistani wheeler-dealer named Agha Hasan Abedi in partnership with Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, then leader of Abu Dhabi. Among the other key figures in BCCI and its satellites were the Gokal family of Pakistan; Kamal Adham, former head of Saudi intelligence; a close-knit network of Saudi billionaires (some later known to be funders of Al Qaeda); and the ruling family of Dubai, which is (like Abu Dhabi) part of the United Arab Emirates.

In 1991, BCCI was forced to close its doors after New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau declared that it was the “largest bank fraud in world financial history.” Eventually, prosecutors demonstrated that it had done illegal business with everyone from La Cosa Nostra and Colombian drug cartels to shady arms dealers, terrorist groups, and foreign intelligence agencies. BCCI, as we will see, was also a player, along with “legitimate” U.S. financiers, in the savings and loan “bust-outs” that wrought havoc on the U.S. economy in the late 1980s. Meanwhile, several of BCCI’s affiliates specialized in manipulating the U.S. markets.

We will discuss BCCI at greater length in later chapters of this series, but for now it is enough to know that it is a tenet off both Salafi Islam (the brand of Islam subscribed to by many of the sheikhs involved with both BCCI and the Muslim Brotherhood) and Shiite Islam (subscribed to by a number of BCCI’s key executives) that Muslims should fight their enemies by “plundering their money.” And regardless of  what the motives of BCCI’s founders were in the past, it is clear that most of them are, to this day, major players in the global financial system. They have more than enough firepower to inflict damage on the U.S. markets. And, as the report for French intelligence noted, “directors and cadres of the bank [BCCI] and its affiliates, arms merchants, oil merchants, Saudi investors” have been among the most important financial supporters of America’s Enemy Number One – Al Qaeda.

By way of introducing just a few former BCCI figures who have supported Al Qaeda, I need to relate a story about Benevolence International, the Al Qaeda front that was accused by the U.S.. government of having contacts with people trying to obtain nuclear weapons for Osama bin Laden.

* * * * * * * *

In 2002, U.S. soldiers stationed in Sarajevo raided the local offices of Benevolence International and found a document that referred to the “Golden Chain” – an elite club of twenty Saudi billionaires whom Osama bin Laden had identified as his most important financiers. These financiers not only delivered large sums of money to the prospective nuclear weapons proliferators at Benevolence International, but can correctly be understood to have been among Al Qaeda’s founding fathers.

Some highly regarded authors, such as Steve Coll, who is otherwise reliable, have suggested that the Golden Chain members funded Al Qaeda only in its early years. This is false. Most of them continued to support Al Qaeda after bin Laden declared war against the United States, and there is evidence that at least one of them was funding Al Qaeda as of this writing in 2013.

Regardless of the degree to which they continue to fund Al Qaeda today, it can be safely assumed that the Golden Chain billionaires remain hostile to the United States. It is possible that, for the time being, they no longer financially support violent terrorism against the United States, but there should be no question that they are entirely supportive of the arguably more important “Financial Jihad” and other components of the non-violent “grand jihad in eliminating and destroying Western civilization…”

The Golden Chain document has, meanwhile, received virtually no attention from the media, perhaps because it would seem a bit “crazy” to suggest that the jihad’s most important operatives are not rag-tag fringe fanatics living in caves, but rather the crème de la crème of Saudi society – the people who control much of the world’s oil wealth, the people who own the most powerful manufacturing conglomerates, and the biggest Saudi banks, and the biggest hedge funds, and the biggest stock brokerages, and the Saudi stock exchange itself.

There is something in the wiring of American brains that makes it impossible for even the smartest people in this nation to accept surprising or unpleasant realities. There are a few exceptions, such as Glenn Simpson, who was once The Wall Street Journal’s finest investigative reporter, and who did write about the Golden Chain. But Simpson has left The Journal, and the newspaper has since failed to investigate Saudi ties to terrorism. In fact, it has failed to investigate much of anything at all.

In any event, there is a vast body of additional evidence that most of the people identified as members of the Golden Chain have actively participated in the movement of radical jihad on multiple fronts. And the Golden Chain document has been confirmed to be authentic by, among others, American intelligence officials, multiple FBI agents, Al Qaeda’s most reliable defector Jamal al-Fadl, and the nation’s most learned terrorism experts, including Steve Emerson of the Investigative Project for Terrorism, which possesses the world’s largest non-governmental database of intelligence on Al Qaeda and other jihadist outfits. (Much of the information in this chapter about the “SAAR Network” can be found in various of Emerson’s excellent books).

So we must know more about Al Qaeda’s Golden Chain. For starters, we must understand that these extremely wealthy financiers are bound together by the sorts of relationships that many Americans do not understand. These are not mere business relationships. They are the bonds of brotherhood and blood. They are the bonds of fervor and ancient grievances. They are, moreover, the bonds between people who are united in their disdain for the prevailing order, and whose financial activities have, in many cases, helped subvert that order.

One billionaire member of the Golden Chain, according to the Benevolence International document, was Sheikh Khalid Bin Mahfouz, who had been among the key shareholders of BCCI, and had paid more than $200 million to settle charges for his role in that massive criminal enterprise. Sheikh Mahfouz, who passed away in 2009, had also founded National Commercial Bank, which is the single largest financial institution in the Middle East.

Some of Sheikh Mahfouz’s companies – such as Al Khaleejia, SEDCO, and the Saudi Sudanese Bank – have done business directly with companies that were founded by Osama bin Laden. And it was Sheikh Mahfouz who originally set up the Muwafaq Foundation, the outfit that was managed by Yasin al-Qadi until the U.S. government declared Muwafaq to be an “Al Qaeda front” and labeled Yasin al-Qadi as a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist.”

While he was alive, Shiekh Mahfouz denied any involvement with Al Qaeda, and filed lawsuits against journalists and researchers (including the prominent Rachel Ehrenfeld, now director of the Economic Warfare Institute, and author of an excellent book, “Funding Evil”) who reported his ties to the Muwafaq Foundation, Benevolence International and other Al Qaeda fronts. After the lawsuits, Sheikh Mahfouz’s name rarely appeared in print.  Meanwhile, some American pundits claimed that Saudi billionaires like Sheikh Mahfouz had donated to Al Qaeda only to avoid being attacked, like frightened shop owners paying protection money to the local Mafia thug. These pundits misunderstand the nature of Saudi society, the two most important features of which are Salafi Islam (one of the foundations of the jihadist ideology) and the inviolability of personal relationships.

Sheikh Mahfouz  not only believed in the grand jihad, but his relationship with the bin Laden family went back decades. Osama bin Laden’s father, Mohammed, and Sheikh Mahfouz were best friends, and it was Sheikh Mahfouz who provided the original finance that allowed Mohammed to build Saudi Arabia’s largest construction company. When Sheikh Mahfouz filed lawsuits against the few journalists who sought to expose his ties to Al Qaeda, the families of the victims of the 9-11 attacks filed lawsuits against Sheikh Mahfouz for providing financial support to the people who killed their loved ones.

And I am thinking I might file a lawsuit against Sheikh Mahfouz’s estate seeking damages for all the stress that I have endured as a result of learning that Sheikh Mahfouz and his friends not only were (and, in most cases, still are) among the world’s destructive financial criminals, but also had billions of dollars, some of which ended up in the hands of people like  Mohamed Loay Bayazeed, who tried, according to the FBI, to “obtain uranium for Osama bin Laden for the purpose of developing a nuclear weapon.”

* * * * * * * *

Another member of the Golden Chain was Sheikh Saleh Abdullah Kamel, owner of Dallah Albaraka, a conglomerate involved in banking, stock trading, construction, and jihadist media. In addition, Sheikh Kamel, who is linked to the Muslim Brotherhood and has financed Sami Al-Arian’s Palestinian Islamic Jihad, owns the powerful Saudi al-Baraka Bank, which, according to U.S. government investigators, provided much of Al Qaeda’s financial infrastructure in Sudan during the 1990s. Shiekh Kamel also gave Hamas, the jihadist outfit that controls the Gaza strip, more than $20 million so that Hamas could open a bank of its own.

The new Hamas financial institution, which is called al-Aqsa Bank, quickly formed a joint venture with Citibank. That joint venture was quite lucrative for Citibank, which may have been willing to turn a blind eye to illicit financial transactions. In 2001, the U.S. Treasury Department advised Citibank that it was operating a joint venture with a bank controlled by Hamas, and the U.S. Treasury Department advised Citibank that it might want to disband this joint venture. Citibank, however, ignored the advice. (Neither Shiekh Kamel nor any other Golden Chain billionaire has been charged with any crime related to the financing of terrorism).

U.S. authorities have taken no substantive action against Sheikh Ibrahim Muhammad Afandi, a Golden Chain billionaire who owns some of Saudi Arabia’s most influential businesses, including the Saudi Industrial Services Company, the Great Saudi Development & Investment Company, and the Arabian Company for Development and Investment Limited. Sheikh Afandi also controls BSA Investments, a big private equity fund active in the U.S.

Then there is Abdel Qader Faqeeh, a member of the Golden Chain club and chairman of major corporations and financial institutions, including Bank Al Jazeera and the Savola Group, which recently merged with Azizia Panda to become Saudi Arabia’s 13^th largest company. A business partner of Sheikh Faqeeh is Golden Chain member Sheikh Saleh al-Din Abdel Jawad, who is the CEO of the blue chip General Machinery Agencies manufacturing company in Jeddah.

Sheikh Faqeeh also had a joint venture business with the above-mentioned Sheikh Mahfouz. Indeed, each Golden Chain member has some sort of business partnership with each of the other Golden Chain members – one reason why I say that these people need to be viewed as not just a club, but as a family. I will not bore the reader with a long recitation of every financial transaction that ties these jihadist financiers together, but I will mention a few, just to erase any question as to whether the relationships exist.

For example, National Commercial Bank, owned until recently by Sheikh Mahfouz, is a partner in a multi-billion dollar investment outfit called the Middle East Capital Group, which is partly controlled by Sheikh Rahman Hassan Sharbatly – who was another member of Golden Chain club. Sheik Sharbatly is also a partner, with Sheikh Faqeeh, in a unit of Sheikh Faqeeh’s Savola Group. In addition, Sheikh Sharbatly is a board member and major shareholder of Beirut Ryad Bank SAL, Egyptian Gulf Bank, and several other major financial institutions.

Meanwhile, Sheik Sharbatly and Sheikh Mahfouz were both board members of the Saudi Arabian Refinery Company, which refines much of the world’s oil supply. This brings to mind the report that I mentioned at the outset of this story – the one commissioned by the U.S. Defense Department’s Irregular Warfare Support Program.  That report speculates that one component of the possible financial attack on the U.S. economy in 2008 might have been the manipulation of oil prices to excruciating highs in the summer of that year.

That seems like a possibility that is worth considering, especially in light of Osama bin Laden’s proclamations about the “absolute necessity of using the oil weapon.” Another reason to ask whether oil prices might have been manipulated is that the membership of the elite Golden Chain club included Sheikh Abdel Hadir Taher and Sheikh Ahmad Turki Yamani – two former Saudi officials who were among the masterminds of the 1973 oil embargo that crippled the U.S. economy–retaliation for America’s support of  Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

Sheikh Taher, in addition to being a Golden Chain member and the former governor of the Saudi state oil company Petromin, has also served as director of Saudi European Bank, a big financial institution that is important to the stability of global economic order.  Al Qaeda Golden Chain member Sheikh Yamani is a former Saudi minister of petroleum. He is also a former director of Saudi Aramco, which is the largest oil company in the world.

In addition, Sheikh Yamani presides over Investcorp, an investment firm that he founded. Actually, it’s not just an investment firm; it’s a market-moving behemoth – one of the largest hedge fund and private equity outfits in the world, with more than $50 billion under management. Investcorp has made a deep imprint in the American markets, and has been involved in everything from short selling to the trading of self-destruct CDOs. As for what sort of short selling Investcorp engages in, we need only know that Ivestcorp is a client of Sheikh DeLorenzo’s Al Safi Trust phantom stock machine.

Investcorp was also a pioneer, and continues to be one of the few major players in the world of so-called PIPEs deals, also known as “death spiral” finance. Investcorp has not been implicated in any crime related to its PIPEs deals, and I am not suggesting that Ivestcorp has done anything technically illegal, but PIPEs deals generally are considered to have been a major scourge on the American markets. PIPEs, or “Private Investments in Public Equity” are simply transactions that see the investors buying stock directly from companies rather than on the open markets. But PIPEs investors often end up destroying the company to which they are supposedly serving as benefactors.

Since PIPEs finance dilutes shareholder value, a company that does a PIPEs deal often sees its stock price decline. When this happens, short sellers (often naked short sellers who are colluding with the outfit that provided the PIPEs finance) attack the company, causing its stock price to drop. The more it drops, the greater the number of shares are owed to the PIPEs financier. The greater number  of shares, the greater that drop; and so on. Hence the term,  “death spiral” finance. Once the stock price of a PIPEs victim is mauled, the finance is cut off, and the company goes bankrupt, delivering big profits to the short sellers (i.e. profits that far exceed the cost of providing the PIPEs finance in the first place).

Again, this is not to suggest that Investcorp has necessarily done anything illegal, and we cannot say with certainty that its PIPEs business follows the same modus operandi of most other PIPEs dealers. But the emergence of the PIPEs industry has, without doubt, been a scourge on the markets. As numerous court cases attest, it has destroyed countless companies and countless jobs. Basically, it is a not-insignificant reason why America’s “miserable house” (as that Muslim Brotherhood document called it) is, in fact — miserable.

* * * * * * * * *

Sheikh Sulaiman Abdul Aziz al-Rajhi is not miserable. He’s the patriarch of the wealthiest family in Saudi Arabia, and thus one of the 100 richest people in the world. He is jolly and well. So, naturally, he was also a member of the Golden Chain, the elite club of Al Qaeda’s 20 most important financiers.

Maybe because the twenty members of the Golden Chain club are the most prominent people in Saudi Arabia, the U.S. government does not label them as financiers of the grand jihad.  It does not take steps to shut down their bank accounts or bar them from trading in the U.S. markets. It does not even dare utter their names, perhaps because to do so would embarrass the Saudi government, which is ostensibly a U.S. ally.

When Congress issued its final report on the Al Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington, it contained 28 pages that reportedly detailed Saudi ties to Al Qaeda. But when the report was released to the public, the 28 pages about the Saudis were censored, so ordinary people could not read them. A full 28 pages – with no words; nothing but big blocks of black ink. Thus, it is left to independent jihad experts to sort out many of the connections. Steve Emerson and his Investigative Project on Terrorism have done especially hard work in this regard. Some former top government officials have said that Emerson is better informed about the jihad than the government itself. But Emerson and other people who have done excellent research are largely ignored by the media, which will not report the facts unless they have been stated explicitly by some official spokesman. And the official spokesmen have nothing bad to say about Saudi billionaires, regardless of whether they fund terrorism.

Indeed, Saudi billionaires with ties to terrorism have deployed their wealth to “capture” some elements of Washington. This ”deep capture” has been the state of affairs since at least the 1980s, when Sheikh Mahfouz (the future founder of what the U.S. Treasury Department called an ”Al Qaeda front”) and other BCCI figures began investing in banks and other companies with prominent figures in both the Democratic and Republican parties. When the BCCI scandal broke, it was widely reported that Shiekh Mahfouz and other Saudis (some, such as Kamal Adham, with links to Saudi intelligence) had invested with prominent figures of the American political establishment in order to gain influence over American government policy. But nothing was done about it, and the influence increased exponentially in the years that followed.

Therefore, it is not an exaggeration to say that some elements of Washington have been “captured” by billionaires who are not only destructive financial criminals, and who are not merely casual financiers of terrorism, but who are also regarded as being among the leaders of “The Financial Jihad” and what that famous Muslim Brotherhood document described as the larger “Grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within…”

At any rate, you won’t read about it in the media, but it is clear that Sheikh al-Rajhi, the wealthiest man in Saudi Arabia (and an honorary member of the American establishment) is an important leader of the grand jihad. Aside from having been an Al Qaeda Golden Chain member, he was the principal force behind the U.S.-based SAAR Network of jihadist entities (many of which were named in that Muslim Brotherhood document as being precisely those entities that were meant to lead the “Grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within…”). In fact, the SAAR Network was named after Sheikh al-Rajhi himself. The initials, S.A.A.R., stand for Sulaiman Abdul Aziz al-Rajhi.

Most of the other Golden Chain members were also involved with the SAAR Network financiers operating in the United States. For example, Shiekh Afandi and Sheikh Kamel were board members of Sana-Bell, the outfit run by “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” Yasin al Qadi’s bagman, Mr. Mirza (who, as I mentioned, was the central U.S.-based figure in the SAAR Network). Also a board member of Sana-Bell, you will recall, was Mr. Bahfzallah, head of Benevolence International, the outfit that was dealing with people who were shopping for nukes.

Yasin al Qadi’s lawyer, Cherif Sedky also worked for Sheikh Mahfouz. And this same lawyer represented Shiekh Rajhi when the FBI began to ask how it came to be that $1.8 billion dollars from the SAAR Foundation disappeared, most likely into the hands of other jihadis.

Given his important role in the jihad, it is fair to assume that Shiekh al-Rajhi harbors some disdain for not just Western civilization, but also the prevailing economic order. At the same time, Sheikh al-Rajhi is one of the most important players in the global financial order, a person who is perfectly capable of transforming or even undermining it. Indeed, it is fair to say that few men have more sway over “the system” than Sheikh Sulaiman Abdul Aziz Rajhi.

Said to be a whiz with numbers, Sheikh Rajhi directs multiple hedge funds that manage many billions of dollars, several stock brokerages, and the massive Al Rajhi Bank, which is the most venerable of the elite financial institutions that control the Stock Exchange of Saudi Arabia, also known as the Tadawul. A 2013 report issued by a U.S. Senate investigative committee revealed that Al Rajhi Bank was still (as of 2013) dealing with Al Qaeda, and that it was laundering Al Qaeda money through HSBC, the prestigious British bank, but, of course, Al Rajhi has been charged with no crime on that account (HSBC paid a relatively small fine for this and other money laundering infractions).

Sheikh Rajhi’s companies have around $100 billion in cash at their disposal. All told, the financial fire power of the Golden Chain exceeds that of most mid-sized nations.

But, rest assured, jihadis are just bumpkins in caves.

* * * * * * * * *

Despite the death of Osama bin Laden, the jihad’s sophisticated financial operation remains entirely in place. Moreover, it is doubtful that the Securities and Exchange Commission is monitoring the activities of the billionaire financial wizards who were members of Al Qaeda’s Golden Chain. Certainly, it has never prevented any member of the Golden Chain from engaging in financial schemes (such as self-destruct CDOs and “death spiral” finance) that have done damage to the U.S. economy.

Indeed, as we know, the SEC has made it easier for these people to legally manipulate the markets by allowing people such as Sheikh DeLorenzo (who, as a prominent member of the SAAR Network, was certainly on good terms with the Golden Chain) to operate trading platforms, such as Al Safi Trust’s naked short selling operation, that damage the U.S. markets. Meanwhile, Wall Street’s largest brokerage and investment houses stumble over themselves to do business with the Golden Chain, and with other financial behemoths that might not be entirely committed to keeping the U.S. economy in good health.

One such behemoth is the financial empire of Dubai’s ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum — or “Sheikh Mo,” as he is affectionately called in the West.  Sheikh Al Maktoum, whose family members were among the controlling shareholders of BCCI’s criminal enterprise, now operates, among other entities, the Dubai International Finance Center, which houses Sheikh DeLorenzo’s Al Safi Trust (set up in partnership with Sheikh Mo) and countless hedge funds, many of them intertwined with Dubai’s sovereign wealth fund.

The Dubai International Finance Center’s stated mission is to advance shariah compliant finance (such “compliance” being defined by the Muslim Brotherhood), and it has at its disposal more than a trillion dollars. Frank Gaffney, former assistant secretary of defense for international security and one of the nation’s leading experts on the Muslim Brotherhood, correctly insists that shariah compliant financial products “threaten what is left of the integrity of our free market system. Worse yet, they – and the theo-political-legal doctrine, Shariah, from which they spring – pose a real threat to our society and form of government.”

On the surface, it seems that there is nothing wrong with people creating shariah compliant financial products, even if they cater to a radical interpretation of Islam. People have a right to be radical and to create radical financial products. Indeed, it took me a long time to believe that shariah finance posed any threat whatsoever. My instinct was to believe that it was merely an effort to cater to people who are devoutly religious, no more dangerous than Halal beefsteak.

However, it is prudent to consider whether there is more than religion behind the astounding growth of shariah compliant finance in recent years. Indeed, we must understand that the new and radical interpretation of shariah “compliance” is overtly anti-American, and has been developed by leaders of the jihad as a means to challenge the U.S. financial order. This was well-documented in a book called “Understanding Sharia Finance”, by Patrick Sookhdeo, then director of the Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity.

Paul Bracken, professor of management and political science at Yale University, notes that shariah compliant finance has become a powerful force and raises “the prospect that Wall Street could be knocked out of action [with] strategic implications for the United States and for the entire global system of finance.”

As for Sheikh Al Maktoum, the eminence grise of shariah “compliant” finance, many in Washington consider him to be an important ally of the United States. But it is also true that Sheikh Al Maktoum considers one of his most important allies to be the regime in Iran, which would like to see the United States obliterated. Meanwhile, Sheikh Al Maktoum and his family have been among the biggest supporters of organizations that are carrying out the “Financial Jihad.”

For example, Sheikh Al Maktoum’s family, along with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Golden Chain Saudis, and some factions of the Saudi government are among the biggest contributors to ISNA, an organization whose depredations I have partially described. A charity founded by Sheikh Al Maktoum also donated $50 million to the Council on American Islamic Relations, an ISNA-tied outfit that grew out of the Islamic Association of Palestine, which was the U.S. propaganda arm of Hamas. Numerous CAIR officials have been alleged to have ties to the jihad, which might explain why CAIR has plotted ways to secure the release from prison of the Blind Sheikh.

In Europe, where Sheikh Al Maktoum is received warmly (the BBC recently called him an “enlightened dictator”), Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader Yousef al-Qaradawi (the cleric who has issued calls for “Financial Jihad”) runs the European Council for Fatwa and Research, which has played a key role in fostering the development of shariah “compliant” finance. That outfit was funded almost entirely by Sheikh Al Maktoum and his family until it was implicated by authorities for having ties to violent jihadists. (Despite their accusations, authorities did not file charges against the organization).

Meanwhile, Dubai, with Sheikh Al Maktoum’s acquiescence, has long served as an important operational hub for some the world’s most notorious organized crime figures, some with direct ties to jihadist groups. For example, Indian mafia kingpin Dawood Ibrahim was, until he moved to Karachi to live under the protection of the Pakistani intelligence service, one of Dubai’s most honored and ostentatious residents, regularly holding lavish parties at his landmark white mansion – parties attended by prominent figures in the world of high finance (some of whom I will introduce in upcoming chapters), and also by members of Dubai’s ruling family.

Mr. Ibrahim had the full protection of Sheikh Al Maktoum until Dubai was pressured by the international community to send him packing. And Mr. Ibrahim was no ordinary mobster. He was, as I mentioned, intimately intertwined with the operations of Al Qaeda and other jihadist groups – the only person in the world to be labeled by the United States government as both a “Global Narcotics Kingpin” and a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist.”

Former ABC News journalist Gretchen Peters, a friend and work colleague of mine when we both lived in Cambodia, has published an excellent book about the nexus between jihadists and the heroin trade. One CIA official whom Peters interviewed for the book noted that  “if you want to know what Osama bin Laden is up to, you have to understand what Dawood Ibrahim is up to.”

Another close friend of Sheikh Al Maktoum was Viktor Bout, a Russian organized crime figure who was, for a long time, flying cargo planes filled with weapons from Dubai to Taliban and Al Qaeda  redoubts in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Viktor Bout, like Dawood Ibrahim, operated with the full support and protection of the Dubai government until Interpol put out an arrest warrant for him. Then he moved to Moscow, where he enjoyed the protection of Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin until he was lured to Thailand and arrested by the FBI.

Viktor Bout was also closely tied to Abu Dhabi’s ruling family, whose leading members (like Dubai’s ruling family) probably first came into contact with the underworld while they were presiding over the criminal operations of BCCI. Some cargo planes that Bout used to smuggle weapons to Afghanistan were registered as belonging to a company called Flying Dolphin, which was owned by Sheikh Mansour Al Nayan, the present ruler of Abu Dhabi.

Then there is the famous story (widely reported by U.S. officials) of why President Bill Clinton failed to kill Osama bin Laden. Soon after Al Qaeda’s 1998 attacks on U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, the CIA located Osama bin Laden and reported that the Emir of Jihad was hosting some of his closest friends at a party in a remote corner of Afghanistan. The Al Qaeda leader and his friends were spending their days hiking in the mountains and hunting with falcons, then retreating to an Al Qaeda training camp to drink tea and (perhaps) talk of subversive notions.

Figuring that there would not be much time before Osama would vanish again, the U.S. military told President Clinton that this was the ideal moment to blow the Al Qaeda leader to smithereens with a precision-guided Hell-Fire cruise missile. The generals were ready to pull the trigger, but Clinton and his cabinet stopped them. They aborted the mission because Osama bin Laden and his friends were having a party.  And these friends were all from Dubai. In fact, they were among the most prominent members of Dubai’s ruling family.

Sheikh Al Maktoum’s family and the leaders of Al Qaeda had finished hunting and were relaxing in the tents that the Dubai royals had brought with them to Afghanistan – house-sized luxury tents equipped with giant electricity generators, and decorated with fine carpets, and fabrics laced in gold. No doubt, Osama bin Laden regaled the Dubai ruling family with stories of his exploits, and the Dubai ruling family members perhaps responded with praise for their host’s victories against the United States.

At any rate, the CIA watched the satellite images. The generals asked Bill Clinton if they should fire the missile. And Bill Clinton said, “No” — because, of course, Dubai’s royals were American allies. As George Tenent, who was then the director of the CIA, later put it, Clinton could not take this rare opportunity to kill Osama bin Laden because the missile strike “might have wiped out half the royal family of the UAE.”

Put differently, one might say that “half the royal family of [our ally] the UAE” was partying with Osama bin Laden.

That’s some ally.

Well, never mind, say America’s elite – if Sheikh Al Maktoum is supporting jihadis, it is only a matter of political expediency. Perhaps. But, in the end, it doesn’t matter whether the politics are expedient or not. What matters is the end result. And it is probably safe to assume that the Dubai royals who went on hunting expeditions in Afghanistan with Osama bin Laden may be (at least to some extent) sympathetic to the jihad. That is, they have, to a degree, been possessed by a subversive notion – that “the system”, as epitomized by the United States, can be undermined.

But the billionaire sheikhs of the Middle East – whether they be members of ruling families, funders of the SAAR Network, or members of Al Qaeda’s Golden Chain – are not the only potential threats to America’s economic well-being. As I mentioned at the outset of this story, the president’s national security staff has suggested that there is “nexus” between jihadist financiers, organized crime, agents of rogue states, and ”legitimate” financial operators in the United States. This “nexus” has contributed to the great meltdown of 2008, and to the instability of the global financial system that continues to this day.

Before we discuss our present predicament, however, we need to understand more about the nexus. And to do that, we must first go back in history. We must, for starters, further examine the BCCI enterprise. We must, in addition, consider what occurred after BCCI collapsed in 1991.

One thing that occurred soon after BCCI collapsed in 1991, of course, was that BCCI was revealed to be the biggest banking fraud in the history of world finance. More important, that same year, 1991, a Muslim Brotherhood leader named Hasan al Turabi (then also a top official in the government of Sudan) founded an outfit called the Islamist International, appointing Osama bin Laden to serve as chairman. The purpose of the Islamist International was to unite the Muslim Brotherhood, affiliated terrorist organizations, and their state sponsors behind a common mission.

That mission was partly articulated in the famous Muslim Brotherhood document (published that same year, 1991) outlining plans to wage a “Grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within…” There were also numerous violent terrorist attacks planned at meetings of the Islamist International. However, Osama bin Laden’s most important mission as chairman of the Islamist International was not to plan acts of violent terrorism. His most important mission–”The Financial Jihad”–was to help lead a Muslim Brotherhood initiative to replace the BCCI enterprise with an enterprise that would be similar in every respect except that it would exceed BCCI in scope and destructive power.

Yossef Bondansky, then director of the House Task Force on Terrorism, reported in his seminal 2000 book on Osama bin Laden: “The collapse of the BCCI and the shock waves that were still reverberating throughout the Muslim world could not have come at a worse time. Turabi had always known the importance of a reliable financial system to support and sustain Islamist activities.”  The Islamist International “urgently needed an expert to salvage whatever was possible and rebuild a global financial system [to replace the BCCI enterprise]. By then Osama bin Laden was the most qualified individual in Khartoum to untangle this financial mess. In late summer 1991, Turabi approached bin Laden and asked for help.”

This, of course, raises some questions.

For example: What, exactly, was BCCI, and why was it so important? What, exactly, did Osama bin Laden do after he was appointed to deal with the collapse of BCCI? Precisely what sort of “global financial system” did Osama bin Laden and his associates build from the remains of BCCI, and what is the status of that global financial system today? The director of the House Task Force on Terrorism noted that this financial network—a global financial empire that was built by Osama bin Laden, among others more important than him—eventually extended all the way from Osama bin Laden’s cave in the Hindu Kush to the caverns of Wall Street, but what else do we know about it? And why has this story never appeared in The Wall Street Journal?

In fact, Osama bin Laden played a role in building what is not only one of the greatest financial empires the world has ever known, but also one of the world’s most destructive transnational organized crime (and terrorism) syndicates, so we really ought to ask: precisely what lines of business (aside from terrorism) did this amazing enterprise pursue? What lines of business is it pursuing today? And is this good news for the American economy?

Those are questions that will be answered in later chapters of his series.

To be continued…Click here to read Chapter 3 of this series

Mark Mitchell is a journalist who spent most of his career working as a correspondent for mainstream media publications before joining DeepCapture.com.

If this essay concerns you, and you wish to help, then:

1) Use the Social Media buttons at the top of the article to help it go viral;

2) Email it to a dozen friends;

3) Go here for additional suggestions: “So You Say You Want a Revolution?“

Then, in August 2008,  the SEC lifted its Emergency Order banning naked short selling of stock in the 19 big financial institutions, and those financial institutions began naked short selling each other again. Their stocks (which had increased in value while the Emergency Order was in place) once again nosedived, and one of them, Lehman Brothers, saw its stock go into a classic death spiral (i.e. a spiral that caused death). Almost immediately after Lehman collapsed, the SEC issued another Emergency Order, this time banning all short selling in financial stocks, and in this new Emergency Order, the SEC stated in plain English that naked short selling can cause stocks to go into death spirals, making it difficult for the targeted companies to raise new capital, and thereby result in bankruptcy. Which, of course, was what had just happened to Lehman, as the SEC knew full well.

Some weeks later, the SEC lifted that Emergency Order and put into effect some new rules governing naked short selling. Ever since, the SEC has maintained that naked short selling rarely occurs, and it certainly has never sanctioned anyone for the naked short selling that (according to the SEC) created an “emergency” in 2008. So once again, the conventional wisdom is that only wild-eyed conspiracy theorists believe that naked short selling occurs, and only UFO abductees with tin foil hats believe that naked short selling occurs in massive volumes, causing damage to the markets.

It has long since been forgotten that CEOs of big banks were, back in 2008, hollering that naked short selling had caused their stock prices to nosedive, and it has long been forgotten that the SEC issued two Emergency Orders in 2008 to save the banks from naked short selling, suggesting in one of those Emergency Orders that naked short selling had contributed to the collapse of Lehman Brothers. And now we know why it has been forgotten. Now we know why the term “naked short selling” has once again been scrubbed entirely from the public discourse in quite Orwellian fashion. It is, of course, because the big banks are still perpetrating (with the full connivance of the SEC, whose data says it isn’t happening) massive volumes of naked short selling. This, anyway, is what we can conclude from a recent FINRA settlement.

FINRA, for those who don’t know, is the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, which sounds like a government regulatory agency, though it is owned and operated by Wall Street, and its activities as a “Regulatory Authority” amount mostly to leveling small fines for massive crimes perpetrated by Wall Street, thereby relieving the SEC of any need to do its job. If  FINRA has issued a “settlement”  letter to a perpetrator, the issue is “settled” so far as the SEC is concerned, and such was the case when FINRA recently issued a “settlement” letter asking the big investment bank UBS to pay a small fine for violating the rules against naked short selling that the SEC isn’t enforcing.

More precisely, FINRA’s recent “settlement” letter (which you can read here) asked UBS to pay a fine for “not admitting or denying” having “entered tens of millions of proprietary and customer short sale orders without having reasonable grounds to believe that the securities could be borrowed and available for delivery.” When a brokerage sells stock short “without having reasonable grounds to believe that the securities could be borrowed for delivery” that means the brokerage has deliberately engaged in naked short selling (i.e. selling phantom stock that increases supply, driving down prices), and in this case it appears that UBS (between the years 2004 and 2010, according to FINRA) transacted naked short selling to the tune of “tens of millions”(emphasis added) of phantom shares in nobody knows how many companies were affected by this massive deluge.

In fact, UBS might have naked shorted far more than tens of millions of shares, though for some mysterious reason, FINRA reports that it doesn’t actually know how many additional shares were naked shorted. In its settlement letter, FINRA simply reported that aside from the “tens of millions” that were naked shorted, UBS “effected an additional significant but unquantifiable number of short sales without valid locates [i.e. naked short sales] during the Relevant Period.” Unquantifiable? As in too big a number for a calculator to handle? Or is it some smaller but still unpalatable number that FINRA’s ”regulators” dare not speak (or regulate)?

In any event, FINRA did report (or, rather, understate) the obvious fact that the “duration, scope and volume of the trading [i.e. a volume of naked short selling that is ‘unquantifiable’ but significantly more than “tens of millions’ of shares naked shorted] created a potential for harm to the integrity to the market.”

In fact, UBS at least “created a potential” to crash the markets by flagrantly violating the SEC’s supposed naked short selling regulations, and FINRA is asking UBS to pay a small fine (without admitting or denying what it did) so that the SEC can take no action whatsoever. Meanwhile, of course, the captured media continues to pretend that naked short selling (i.e. a criminal conspiracy) exists only in the minds of “conspiracy theorists” (i.e. people in our brave new world who are are crazy because they speak the truth).

Things have changed.

Have a listen to a speech recorded in the video below. The speech begins at 2:08, after the intro by the off-kilter guy in a t-shirt (don’t know who he is), and the speech was given at (of all places) the Philadelphia Federal Reserve by (none other than) economist Jeffrey Sachs, named by Time magazine as one of the 100 “Most Influential” people in the world.

Sachs says that Wall Street is full of crooks.

Not just that. Sachs said that, “I meet a lot of these people on Wall Street on a regular basis. I’m going to put it very bluntly. I regard the moral environment as pathological. I’m talking about the human interactions I have. I have not seen anything like this, not felt it so palpably…they have  no responsibility to their clients, they have no responsibility to counterparties in transactions. They are tough, greedy, aggressive, and feel absolutely out of control, in a quite literal sense. And they have gamed the system to a remarkable extent, and they have a docile president, a docile White House, and a docile regulatory system that absolutely can’t find its voice….We have a corrupt politics to the core.”

Or in the DeepCapture vernacular, Washington has been “captured” by financial miscreants.

Sachs also rails against (among others) Goldman Sachs and short seller John Paulson for manufacturing synthetic CDOs (i.e mortgage derivatives deliberately designed by short sellers to self-destruct). Basically, he says what we’ve been saying for years, but what most prominent economic professors dared not say in speeches at the Federal Reserve—not, anyway, until now. And when prominent economists start talking like this (he even criticizes fractional reserve banking) in speeches at the Federal Reserve—well, that’s a revolution in the making. Wait and see.

Click here to listen to the speech.

The CBS crime drama told the tale of insider-trading at a hedge fund called “VAC Capital,” a clear reference to SAC Capital, and just as the real SAC trader Mathew Martoma has been accused of earning for SAC Capital a massive sum ($276 million) from trading on tips about Alzheimer’s drug trials that he received from a University of Michigan professor, so too does the VAC trader turn a massive profit (inflated to $500 million for the purposes of television titillation) from an inside tip. However, readers of DeepCapture might recall that the full (true) story is a lot worse than just that.

In 2009, DeepCapture published a book-length story (“Michael Milken, 60,000 Deaths, and The Story of Dendreon”) demonstrating that Milken had worked with “captured” doctors to derail FDA approval for a promising cancer treatment while promoting less-than promising treatments from which they stood to profit. That story also demonstrated that there was a high probability that a small group of hedge funds, including SAC Capital, had not just traded on inside information about the FDA’s decisions, but had perpetrated manipulative short selling attacks on the stock of the company, Dendreon, that was manufacturing the promising cancer treatment.

I am no TV producer, but it seems to me that Wall Street miscreants trying to destroy companies with promising medical treatments (i.e. killing people, which is exactly what they are doing) is better television than miscreants merely “making a killing” on inside information. Or maybe not. It could be that the old narrative of Gordon Gecko, the greedy but charming rogue scoring the big bucks from his clever reading of inside information, is what people want to see on their TV screens—not the far uglier truth. Even the major U.S. news organizations seem intent upon portraying SAC Capital’s insider traders not as destructive miscreants, but as basically harmless rogues, perhaps even worthy of our respect and admiration.

During the three years while hedge funds were attacking Dendreon’s stock price and Milken was successfully scheming with FDA doctors to derail Dendreon’s cancer treatment (more specifically, a treatment for prostate cancer), more than 60,000 men who would have benefited from that treatment instead died before their time. In fact, Wall Street miscreants nearly destroyed Dendreon, but thanks largely to citizen activists (and not the media) who exposed the corruption that led to the FDA initially denying approval to Dendreon’s cancer treatment, the FDA did (albeit three years too late) finally approve the drug–so maybe it was a Hollywood ending, after all.

Either way, Wall Street miscreants are attacking many other companies with promising medical treatments…and nobody (aside from a few citizen activists) is watching.

Mr. Nazerali obtained this BC Supreme Court Order without any prior notice to DeepCapture which had no idea Mr. Nazerali had even begun to file a lawsuit.  Ignoring DeepCapture’s First Amendment rights, Google, Bing, and GoDaddy simply knuckled under to the foreign court’s ex parte Order and disappeared all trace of DeepCapture. DeepCapture was blacked out. Silenced. So far as we are aware, this was the first time in history that a foreign court succeeded in shutting down an American website or media outlet of any kind.

On December 13, 2011 DeepCapture had its chance to challenge the ex parte injunction and tell a different judge of the Canadian Court its side of the story.  We presented our case through affidavits showing the basis for our reporting. We drew the Court’s attention to the governing Canadian law which places severe restrictions on pre-trial injunctions, limiting them to rare and special circumstances which did not apply to DeepCapture.

After hearing both sides, in a ruling from the bench the same day, the Court denied Mr. Nazerali’s request that the injunction be extended beyond December 13, 2011, expressing concern that the previous judge “did not have before him or was not directed by [Mr. Nazerali’s lawyer] on the ex parte application [on October 19, 2010] to the full body of the case law.”

At that point DeepCapture was free to return to the internet.

However, Mr. Nazerali was not done. He had his lawyer send an e-mail to Rackspace citing the original October 19, 2011 injunction order and asking that Rackspace refuse to host Deep  Capture.  He neglected to tell Rackspace that the British Columbia Court had already refused to extend the injunction and that it had ceased to have any force. And he certainly did not tell Rackspace that the British Columbia Court had criticized Mr. Nazerali’s submissions to the original judge on October  19, 2011.

After that, Mr. Nazerali’s lawyers set his claims down for hearing in the Canadian Court by “summary trial” on affidavits instead of a normal trial with sworn witnesses, including Mr. Nazerali who would have to take the stand and submit to cross-examination by our lawyer.  Before the “summary trial” was to begin, our lawyers applied to the Canadian Court for a ruling that a trial on affidavits would not be a just and fair way of getting at the true facts of the case.

On February 27, 2013, the Court agreed with DeepCapture and cancelled the “summary trial” on affidavits, which means we will have an opportunity to properly defend ourselves by cross-examining Mr. Nazerali and his witnesses in open Court and calling oral testimony from our witnesses in the normal way.  This will permit a full presentation of the facts, and allow the Court to assess Mr. Nazerali’s credibility on the basis of his appearance on a witness stand, instead of paperwork drafting by his lawyer.

The judge, explaining his decision in favour of a normal trial, wrote the following:

[Mr. Nazerali] claims that the natural and ordinary meanings of the statements [published on DeepCapture] are that he has repeatedly engaged in serious criminal behavior, including fraud, drug dealing, and terrorism, as well as disreputable conduct. Included in his pleadings is an allegation that the defendants were motivated by express malice in making the statements.

In addition to responding that the words complained of either did not appear on the website, or were taken out of context and are not capable of being defamatory to the plaintiff, the defendants [DeepCapture] plead justification [truth] for the allegations of dishonesty, by reference to a litany of facts. These relate to Mr. Nazerali’s alleged  involvement in shady financial practices and his association with other individuals who have been found guilty of criminal fraud. There are also defences of fair comment on a matter of public interest [and] responsible journalism, and a constitutional challenge to the combined operation of the Supreme Court Civil Rules with the common law burden of proof of justification being on the defendants”

Turning to the suitability of this case for summary trial, there is no issue that I can dismiss an application to proceed in that manner if the issues are not suitable for determination by summary trial, or it such a trial process will not assist in the efficient resolution of the proceeding.

On the issue of justification, at least so far as the fraudulent and dishonest behaviour that has been pleaded is concerned, it will be necessary to decide whether the justifying facts put forward by the defendants or Mr. Nazerali’s denial of them should be preferred.  Unlike cases in which conflicts in the evidence can be resolved by resorting to objective evidence external to the parties … engaging in that process on the evidence in this case would place a summary trial judge in an impossible position…

As to the defence of responsible journalism, …this case will depend on an assessment of the credibility of the defendants’ claims that Mr. Nazerali was inaccessible for the purposes of gaining his side of the story and that the nature of the confidential information that they relied on made it reasonable not to seek his input.  Again, these are not conclusions that can be arrived at solely from a comparison of affidavit contents.

…I conclude that without live testimony and cross-examination rights, a judge will not be able to find the facts necessary to resolve the factual and legal issues.  Therefore, I allow the defendants’ application and pursuant to Rule 9-7(11)(b) dismiss [Mr. Nazerali’s] application for a summary trial.

…The defendants have had substantial success on these applications so costs will be to them in the cause.

The trial has been scheduled to take place in Vancouver in September, 2014. At trial, we plan to call evidence that we intended not malice in alleging that Mr. Nazerali, although not himself involved in drug dealing or terrorism, has had questionable dealings with shady people.

As the judge mentioned, our defence at trial will include an argument based on the Canadian constitution that Mr. Nazerali should be required to prove that what we wrote about him is false, instead of putting a reverse onus on the defence to prove it was true.  In almost every type of case the plaintiff has the burden of proof and the law of defamation should be no different.  Because this constitutional issue could change the law in Canada, the Attorney General of British Columbia has given notice of his intention to be involved in the trial.

In other words, this is an important case. It also concerns an attempt by one man (Mr. Nazerali) to prevent the public from reading a story that pertains to the economic well-being of all nations. As readers of DeepCapture know, our story explored the way that various elements of transnational organized crime, international terrorist financiers, and foreign intelligence services have entwined, infiltrated the global financial system, and are manipulating and destabilizing it.

That sounds like a lot to swallow until one considers that on July 25, 2011, President Obama signed an Executive Order declaring a national emergency on pretty much precisely those grounds: “I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, find that the activities of significant transnational criminal organizations…have reached such scope and gravity that they threaten the stability of international political and economic systems….I therefore determine that significant transnational criminal organizations constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat…and hereby declare a national emergency to deal with that threat.”

The US National Security Council immediately followed up with this statement:

“Transnational organized crime (TOC) poses a significant and growing threat to national and international security, with dire implications for public safety, public health, democratic institutions, and economic stability across the globe….The apparent growing nexus in some states among TOC [Transnational Organized Crime] groups and elements of government—including intelligence services—and high-level business figures represents a significant threat to economic growth and democratic institutions…”

Though we believe in vigorous and fearless journalism, we are never above taking another look at a story if we are given new information in order to ensure that we are as fair and accurate as possible. Good journalism stirs good debate. At the same time, it is our contention that there is not enough good journalism, and as evidence of this, consider that the mainstream media has, in most cases, failed even to report that the president of the United States has declared a national emergency, much less expose the organizations and activities that have contributed to this state of affairs. Meanwhile, we at DeepCapture intend to continue our investigation, and we will soon begin again to publish stories that demonstrate why we are the red pill.

Patrick M. Byrne speaks at Rutgers University from Overstock.com on Vimeo.

Yet I had never heard Black speak until one night in April, 2009, when he appeared on Bill Moyers. How refreshing it was to see the tabloid analyses be at last replaced with discourse about the system itself (and remember that while the following claims now seem barely controversial, in 2009 most were still heretical):  Banksters. Fraud versus trust. Moral hazard and pathological incentives in the financial system (e.g., lending firms’ Ninja Loans + investment bankers pooling mortgages + captured ratings agencies = toxic waste = systemic risk).  FBI warned on mortgage fraud in 2004, but the Machine failed to react. Bank lobbyists. Glass Steagall. Brooksley Born and Credit Default Swaps. Bailout of the elites. Bank CEOs. Cover-up. Strategy to keep the public from understanding how bad the problem is. Prompt Corrective Action Law: Nationalize zombie banks. WHERE IS OUR PECORA COMMISSION? Scared of insolvent banks being revealed. Mimicking the strategies of Japan’s Lost Decade.  AIG-to-Goldman bailout.  Increasingly horrific give-aways of taxpayer money. Stop hiding the losses.  The current bleak numbers still vastly underestimate the fraud problem.

Black had me at “control fraud.”  I leave it to the community of readers to judge the familiarity of the other claims he made:

Alas, Bethany McLean and I are not so sympatico, and in fact have had a challenging relationship. Her side of the story is told  here:

Is Overstock the new Amazon?

PHANTOM MENACE

DeepCaptures’ side, here:

Bethany McLean: your benefit of the doubt is hereby revoked

Rocker Partners and Bethany McLean: the smarmiest guys in the room

David Einhorn, Cheryl Strauss, and the “Unavailable” Bethany McLean

One interesting aside: in the last year I have had numerous journalists bring up to me Bethany’s emails wherein she schemes with a hedge fund (emails obtained by DeepCapture from a New Jersey courthouse and published in Bethany McLean: your benefit of the doubt is hereby revoked). These journalists have told me that they know about it and see it as a tremendous breach of journalistic ethics. So there it sits, an open secret, although not, apparently, a secret anymore, but just something about which one whispers.  In a similar fashion, Jim Cramer’s video sat on DeepCapture for a couple of years drawing no comment, until Comedy Central confronted Cramer with it.

In any case, this week on CNBC Maria Bartiromo invited William Black and Bethany McLean on as guests to discuss the Justice Department’s decision not to pursue criminal charges against Goldman Sachs for its role in the financial crisis in general, and for selling financial products from whose specific failure Goldman profited. Truly remarkable performances were delivered by all, albeit in different ways.

Black responds to Maria’s opening by stating the obvious: Generating liar loans and packaging them for resale is fraud. There is no evidence that there was a significant federal investigation, or that a grand jury was convened. There is an absence of  accountability.  Goldman has been given a pass by Obama and Bush.

Bethany responds with bromides delivered with a dulcet confidence intended to suggest that she knows what she is talking about. Her analysis: I don’t think anybody is giving  Goldman Sachs a pass to be honest. I think this is a tough case to make. I do think integrity needs to be restored to the financial system, but you don’t do that by bringing a case that shouldn’t be made. Goldman Sachs didn’t make liars’ loans -  they actually among the Wall Street firms were not on the ground making mortgages. So if you can’t bring a case against Countrywide how can you possibly bring a case against Goldman Sachs?  … From an overall perspective Goldman Sachs as a firm lost money in the mortgage business. Awfully tough to bring that case to a jury and win, I think… I’m not giving Goldman a pass or any of Wall Street a pass. I think I’m with Bill on that. But I don’t think this was a criminal case.  I think Goldman’s customers should make the call: Do we want to do business with this firm? …

These vapid apologetics draw Maria Bartiromo’s stammering, nodding approval: As you said earlier, stupidity does not mean criminality.

Bethany: Greed and venality do not make a criminal case.

There are two remarkable items about Bethany’s performance. First, note the air of confidence she exudes when in fact (as will become clear) she has essentially no idea of what she is talking about (hence the expression “a journalistic understanding”). Second, note that Bethany is apparently unaware that the man she is debating on-air, Professor William K. Black, knows a lot about what she is talking about. In fact, he is perhaps the nation’s foremost expert on precisely the issue she and Maria are trying to spin to Goldman’s behalf: the federal prosecution of white collar crime at financial institutions.

Professor Black continues like a gentle professor with two weak students: Critical area here…. First, I’m the type of person that was involved in training the FBI agents, the assistant US attorneys, serving as the expert witness in these successful prosecutions where we had a 90% successful rate. Um, clearly people are not understanding fraud mechanisms. In accounting control fraud, the firm – loses – money. Indeed that is one of the defining elements because the way you maximize it is by making bad loans. And Goldman did make liar’s loans, it did it through subsidiaries, and Goldman purchased loans that it knew to be fraudulent, and it packaged them and sold them as if they were good loans. This belief that this is the first virgin crisis in which fraud was not driving it is amazing. Nobody believes it about the savings and loan debacle. No one believes it about the Enron era fraud. And given what you’ve seen in the last three weeks, how can you believe it out of the current…”

Bethany appears to panic slightly then, unable to respond substantively to a single one of Black’s arguments, simply locks into a repetitive, droning regurgitation of the talking points she just delivered a moment earlier (which amplifies my suspicion that some Goldman PR flack gave them to her to memorize). Behold Bethany McLean’s verbatim analysis of legal culpability in the greatest financial collapse of our lifetime (so far):

Maria, I think there was a hue and a cry and a lot of political pressure to bring charges in this case. And I think that if they could have, they would have. And I don’t think that any of our interests are served… I think it’s just as dangerous to bring a case that shouldn’t be made as to not bring a case that should be made. Neither one helps with the integrity of the financial system. I agree – peoples’ behavior during this crisis was unethical, it was abhorrent, it was every word you can come up with for ‘wrong.’ But if you are going to bring a case against Goldman Sachs you have to bring a case against every single other Wall Street firm as well as every mortgage originator as well as every home owner who lied on his or her mortgage application. You cannot single out one firm and say we are going to charge Goldman and we’re not bringing charges against everybody else. That’s wrong.

Maria Bartiromo: That’s a great point.

William Black (like a professor exasperated with dull students he can no longer humor): No, it’s not a great point. It’s a terrible point. You’ve got to start with somebody. Your first prosecution is always your first prosecution. And you can always say where there’s been an epidemic of fraud…”

Bethany’s nails-on-a-chalkboard apologetics have received a fair bit of shocked attention this week:

Columbia Journalism Review: “Bill Black goes on CNBC and shreds Maria Bartiromo and Bethany McLean on whether Goldman Sachs (and others) could and should have been prosecuted for fraud related to the financial crisis…”

Bill Black vs Goldman Sachs Apologists

WATCH: Bill Black On CNBC Debates Wall Street Fraud-Deniers Maria Bartiromo, Bethany McLean

Bethany McLean Demonstrates her Profound Lack of Understanding of Control Fraud, Gresham’s Dynamics, and Justice: “In this painful CNBC segment, former Goldman Sachs employee Bethany McLean provides a heartfelt apologia for her much-maligned former employer. Bethany says it is time for us all to move on for the good of confidence in the economy…In the process of prostrating herself for GS, she demonstrates her complete lack of understanding of control fraud, Gresham’s Dynamics, and how white collar crime can be pursued.”

I think this interview was unusual in that her panic drew Bethany into baring her biases incautiously (though frankly, the first sentence she uttered the first time she called me in 2004 conveyed to me that she is a shill and a Mean Girl). Asserting without argument that  political pressure supported bringing charges against Goldman, Bethany appears literally incapable of considering the possibility that net political pressure ran in the opposite direction, and that in fact were it not for “political pressure” Goldman Sachs would have been prosecuted years ago.

But personally, I think Bethany is not really incapable of considering such a possibility, and that her adamancy thus has other motive.

Daily headlines disappoint with lack of prosecution, making clear that this will go down as history’s “first virgin financial crisis” (in Professor Black’s phrase) in which fraud played no role.  When you read these headlines, imagine Bethany McLean, or someone very much like her, standing in an oak-paneled room in Washington, DC, droning through the same set of talking points to some senior decision-maker, and that decision-maker slowly getting snowed in under the same dulcet non sequiturs as appear in this remarkable exchange.

Rolling Stone: Accidentally Released – and Incredibly Embarrassing – Documents Show How Goldman et al Engaged in ‘Naked Short Selling’

Bloomberg: Goldman, Merrill E-Mails Show Naked Shorting, Filing Says

Economist: An enlightening mistake

Leading legal blog “Above the Law” described the situation this way: ”It has been quite a while since we have covered a grand mal discovery screw-up here at Above the Law,” and summarized the moment with the accompanying image.

And seminal law journal DeepCapture.com published its May, 2012, analysis entitled “Joe Floren Screws the Pooch“, referencing the Bloomberg, Economist, and Rolling Stone stories cited above.

Since May I have wondered, With the truth emerge at last in publications such as Economist, Bloomberg, and Rolling Stone, surely the Bad Guys must understand they have lost control of the narrative. Surely, I thought, they are working out some new damage control strategy  to deflect or usurp the truth  as it comes out.

And as always, Gary Weiss doesn’t let us down.

This weekend brought forth from Weiss an effort that takes the same facts as the articles cited above, spins them to best advantage for the criminals, and is most remarkable for being an obvious rip-off of Taibbi. That’s right, Barron’s published an essay cribbed from a previously-published essay by a competing magazine’s journalist in a plagiarization so bald it would not pass muster at one of those companies that sells term papers to college undergraduates. Moreover, it presents clear evidence that the Bad Guys realize they have lost control of the narrative, and are searching for ways to restore their control.

Alas, the best weapon they have in their arsenal is…. Gary Weiss?

I encourage readers to compare Taibbi’s article side-by-side with Weiss’ treatment of exactly the same set of documents.

Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone (May 15, 2012):

Accidentally Released – and Incredibly Embarrassing – Documents Show How Goldman et al Engaged in ‘Naked Short Selling’

Gary Weiss, Barron’s (August 4, 2012):

Documents accidentally unsealed from Overstock.com’s failed lawsuit against prime-broker units of Goldman and Merrill Lynch raise questions about short sales.

Matt Taibbi:

 ”The lawsuit between Overstock and the banks concerned a phenomenon called naked short-selling, a kind of high-finance counterfeiting that, especially prior to the introduction of new regulations in 2008, short-sellers could use to artificially depress the value of the stocks they’ve bet against. The subject of naked short-selling is a) highly technical, and b) very controversial on Wall Street, with many pundits in the financial press for years treating the phenomenon as the stuff of myths and conspiracy theories.”

Gary Weiss (two months later):

“Naked short selling has long dwelled in the grassy knoll of the equity markets, denounced by crackpots, devotees of penny stocks, and troubled companies eager to divert attention from their failings. In other words, sightings of it often turn out to be bunk.

“Despite this, a failed naked-shorting lawsuit lodged against all of the major Wall Street prime brokers, including units of Goldman Sachs Group and Merrill Lynch, by Overstock.com, has raised intriguing issues. The case, filed in California Superior Court in San Francisco in 2007, was summarily dismissed in January on a technicality;…”

Matt Taibbi:

“A quick primer on what naked short selling is. First of all, short selling, which is a completely legal and often beneficial activity, is when an investor bets that the value of a stock will decline. You do this by first borrowing and then selling the stock at its current price; then, after the price drops, you go out, buy the same number of shares at the reduced price, and return the shares to your original lender. You then earn a profit on the difference between the original price and the new, lower price.

“What matters here is the technical issue of how you borrow the stock. Typically, if you’re a hedge fund and you want to short a company, you go to some big-shot investment bank like Goldman or Morgan Stanley and place the order. They then go out into the world, find the shares of the stock you want to short, borrow them for you, then physically settle the trade later.”

Gary Weiss (two months later):

“NAKED SHORTING—selling stock that the seller doesn’t have and hasn’t borrowed, in the hope that its price will quickly fall, letting the seller repurchase it at a lower price and then deliver the stock to the buyer—is generally illegal. Usually, sellers must borrow a stock, or at least determine that they can borrow it, before they can sell it short.”

One can go through this new article doing this one-to-one mapping of content and tone from the August piece by Gary Weiss onto Matt Taibbi’s story from May.  It’s all rather creepy, actually.

It is an attempt to re-highjack the narrative. I predict that however this plays out over the next couple of years you will see Weiss tagging along trying to reconstruct the story to the benefit of the criminal element described in DeepCapture. He’s obsessive. It is almost as if his job is to downplay, minimize, and cover-up in vain attempt at damage control.

No, it’s exactly as if his job is to downplay, minimize, and cover-up. We’ll see how vain it is when we see what publications go along for the ride, besides Barron’s.

That, of course, is the most remarkable thing of all: That a publication like Barron’s would publish something by Gary Weiss, given what has long been publicly documented about him. We know, because we documented it. Newcomers to this story might start with the Reader’s Digest version by reading “Gary Weiss: Psychopath and Scaramouch“. For the graduate course on this psychopath, look him up on antisocialmedia.net.

I think, however, that this was a strategic mistake by the Bad Guys, in that it provides the public (and importantly, other journalists!) with a controlled experiment: one set of facts being handled by three real journalists and one hedge fund choagie.

Perhaps decades from now it will be a case study in some school of journalism’s graduate seminar on “Journalism and the Fall of the American Oligarchy, 2008-2014″:

“OK students, the assignment for next week’s class is a paper that examines Goldman’s inadvertent release of those its documents as treated by Bloomberg, Economist, and Rolling Stone, versus how the same event was treated by Gary Weiss, a pseudo-journalist who had already been exposed long before that as a hedge fund shill. For extra credit, describe the significance of its publication in Barron’s: Did Barron’s willingness to publish an obvious rip-off of Matt Taibbi reflect the desperation felt by the Sith to recapture the narrative?”

To which Russell replied, “But what’s the turtle ride on?”

“Another turtle,” replied the audience member.

Insisted Russell, “But what’s that turtle ride on?”

Came the answer, “I’m sorry Professor, but it’s turtles all the way down.”

That story has often come to mind over the last eight years. In the early part of the last decade I had cause to mingle in financial circles, and by 2004 I had smelled skunk regarding a range of Wall Street activities such as are chronicled extensively on DeepCapture. I went with plenty of data, anecdotes, and experts, first to NASD, then to the SEC, then the House, then Senate Banking, and finally to the financial press. All of them reacted with something between indolence and hostility (and thus began seven years of one federal investigation against me after another, just as I had been forewarned). I began to use the expression “Turtles all the way down” to describe the Establishment and its capture by financial interests, and wondered if the turtles would run all the way down, forever, or if we would ever hit something solid.

Today has brought good cheer in the form of an excellent piece by Gretchen Morgenson, “Into the Bailout Buzz Saw“, concerning Bailout, by Neil Barofsky (coming out Tuesday, July 24). Ms. Morgenson, one of several journalists at the New York Times, describes assertions that will not be strange to long-term readers of DeepCapture:

“IT might seem remarkable that there’s more to say about our late Bailout Age. But there is more — a lot more…..

“We tag along with Mr. Barofsky, a former federal prosecutor, as he walks into a political buzz saw as the special inspector general for TARP. Government officials, he says, eagerly served Wall Street interests at the public’s expense, and regulators were captured by the very industry they were supposed to be regulating. He says he was warned about being too aggressive in his work, lest he jeopardize his future career…

“‘The suspicions that the system is rigged in favor of the largest banks and their elites, so they play by their own set of rules to the disfavor of the taxpayers who funded their bailout, are true,’ Mr. Barofsky said in an interview last week. ‘It really happened. These suspicions are valid…’

“THIS was just one of many examples from Mr. Barofsky’s 16-month tenure, during which, he says, Washington abandoned Main Street while rescuing Wall Street. ‘There has to be wide-scale acknowledgment that regulatory capture exists, dominates our system and needs to be eradicated,’ Mr. Barofsky said in the interview. ‘It was my job to bring as much transparency to taxpayers so they knew what was going on. Writing the book, I tried to bring the same level of transparency so people understand how captured their government has become to the financial interests.’”

Oh.

“Really? That’s beautiful. I love it!” He replied with glee.

Joseph E. Floren, Esq., is a lawyer at Morgan Lewis, the white shoe law firm defending Goldman Sachs against Overstock’s prime broker litigation, and tonight I celebrate the mistake Joe Floren made yesterday.  In filing Goldman’s response to Overstock’s motion to vacate the trial court judge’s decision to stay his own decision to unseal various documents related to this litigation (in more straightforward English: the trial court judge decided to unseal some documents while also deciding to delay acting on his decision, but we objected to this delay, and Goldman responded to our objections), Joe Floren screwed the pooch. He filed something containing an attachment he forgot to redact. That attachment is a previous filing of Overstock’s, a filing which contains but a sample of the shenanigans at Goldman and Merrill that has turned up over the course of five years and millions of pages of discovery, but which filing we had redacted when we made it (as good litigants do).

Fortunately for the cause of all that is good and right about America, Joe Floren’s goof came to the attention of a diligent 1st amendment attorney in California named Karl Olson, who represents the Economist, Bloomberg, the New York Times and Wenner Publications (owners of Rolling Stone magazine) in their efforts to obtain the documents.  Karl Olson provided Joe Floren’s sloppy filing to his clients. Tonight these stories appeared:

Rolling Stone: Accidentally Released – and Incredibly Embarrassing – Documents Show How Goldman et al Engaged in ‘Naked Short Selling’ 

 Bloomberg: Goldman, Merrill E-Mails Show Naked Shorting, Filing Says

Economist: An enlightening mistake 

Really, Joe Floren?  That’s beautiful.  I love it.

I could be wrong, but I do not believe anything like this had ever happened before. Never in history had a court outside the United States blacked out (censored) an entire American media website, much less at the behest of one man who did not like what was written in only one of hundreds of articles on many subjects that were  published on that website in the exercise of First Amendment rights.

Fortunately, on December, 13, 2011, the court heard my application opposing a continuation of the injunction and considered my detailed affidavits defending this story. Finding in my favor, and refusing to extend the injunction, the court noted that the October 19 injunction was based on an incorrect legal test for pre-trial injunctions which had been suggested to the judge by lawyers for Mr. Nazerali at the earlier one-sided hearing. 

Applying the correct legal test for injunctions, which my lawyer described in his submissions on December 13, the court ruled that our freedom of speech had to be restored, at least until Mr. Nazerali’s claims were tested at a trial.

Since then, I have taken a few months to investigate further, and we are now publishing an updated version of this book-length story, chapter by chapter.

Even if you had followed DeepCapture prior to the interruption, I encourage you to read this updated version of the story because it goes quite a bit deeper, and contains additional evidence and information that supports my thesis. In addition, I have clarified and refined my argument, because some people had slightly misunderstood it, while others (such as Mr. Nazerali and the former journalist Gary Weiss, who features prominently in this story) had misrepresented what I had written.

* * * * * * * * *

The Miscreants’ Global Bust-Out

Chapter One

Was the United States Attacked by “Financial Terrorists”?

I did not think that Zuhair Karam was violent, but I telephoned him because I thought his biography was interesting. For example, it was interesting that soon after making a home in the United States, Zuhair Karam obtained finance to publish a semi-famous work of jihadist propaganda, and soon thereafter, became a proprietary day trader of equities and derivatives at a small, unregistered brokerage in Chicago.

Many of the other people who operated through this brokerage also had interesting biographies. One of them was a trader who had ties to Russian organized crime, and whose business partner was  killed in a brutal gangland-style murder in New Jersey. Also trading through this little unregistered brokerage in Chicago was an account controlled by the top henchmen of a Russian oligarch and members of an organized crime syndicate that has been accused by U.S. officials of having ties to both Al Qaeda and the Russian government’s intelligence services.

In addition there was (to name just one more) a trader whose family members worked for the Revolutionary Guard in Iran. One of this trader’s close relatives (based outside Iran) had employed an undercover Iranian government agent who was implicated in a terrorist attack and who was caught shipping sophisticated weaponry to Hezbollah, the jihadist outfit that takes its directions from the Iranian regime.

Zuhair’s little brokerage, meanwhile, maintained partnerships with a number of other brokerages, all of which were similarly interesting. Some of these brokerages were operated by people who had previously been principals at brokerages controlled by La Cosa Nostra, Russian organized crime syndicates, and (in most cases) both. Some of these brokerages had important ties to a man who is now (according to credible reports from Moscow) running financial crime operations for the Russian intelligence services.

One of these brokerages was a partnership with a Moscow bank that is (according to U.S. officials) controlled by the Russian intelligence services. Another brokerage in the network had ties to a U.S.-based Iranian government company that was (in 2009) not only investigated for transacting manipulative trading, but also accused by the Department of Justice of conducting espionage against the United States and funding Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

Meanwhile, some owners and/or top employees of brokerages in this network included: a fellow who once worked for a man who commands a private army in Lebanon; another guy who had worked for a trader who orchestrated an ill-fated scheme to topple the government of Afghanistan in league with a heroin-smuggling warlord who worked closely with Iran; and an Iranian trader whose family was, in the 1990s, flying cargo planes filled with gem stones from a remote Illinois runway, in partnership with a money launderer who ran an organization that had hosted the leadership of Hezbollah.

Yet another of the brokerages in the network was connected to a Middle Eastern financial institution that has been accused of funding terrorism, and which financed a bank in Sudan that was founded by Osama bin Laden himself. Meanwhile, not just Zuhair Karam, but a number of traders who either controlled brokerages in this network or traded through the brokerages had business relationships with Islamic organizations that have been listed in a famous Muslim Brotherhood document as being organizations designated to lead a “Grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.”

Perhaps just as important, the clients of these brokerages included some of America’s most notoriously destructive financial operators, many of whom themselves have business relationships with organized crime and, perhaps not coincidentally, also have business relationships with financiers of terrorism.

But what is most noteworthy about these brokerages is that they all cleared their trades through an outfit in Texas that was relatively obscure until late 2007, when it suddenly became (by volume) the largest brokerage on the planet. Moreover, data strongly suggests that most of this new volume was short selling targeting critical American companies, including the the nation’s largest financial institutions.

Indeed, the data suggests that this one previously obscure outfit in Texas (an outfit whose principal clientele was the network of brokerages that I have just briefly described, and which this story will describe in far more detail) transacted more short selling targeting major American financial institutions than the combined short selling (targeting financial institutions) transacted by the broker-dealers of Wall Street titans Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and Merrill Lynch.

Moreover, this barrage of short selling continued and intensified through September, 2008, when the Securities and Exchange Commission was moved to issue an “Emergency Order,” stating that manipulative short selling had likely contributed to the collapse of major financial institutions (e.g. Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers) and was threatening to undermine the stability of the American financial system.

As for Zuhair Karam – well, I didn’t know enough about him, but I knew a little. For example, I knew that he was born in Lebanon, and had recently spent some time overseas, where he came to be attached to an Islamic cleric named Sadathullah Khan, who tells the media that he is “moderate” – a term that, of course, has different connotations depending on your perspective.

Some people say that Sadathullah Khan is an extremist, partly because he has had ties to an outfit called the Supreme Council of Global Jihad, which espouses violence. Sadathullah Khan, meanwhile, has also worked closely on projects (an Islamic media project, for example) with a cleric named Zakir Naik, who has preached that “Every Muslim should be a terrorist.”

When he talks to the Western press, Zakir Naik says he is not fond of Al Qaeda, but in a video made for his followers, he said, “If Osama bin Laden is fighting the enemies of Islam, I am for him…If he is terrorizing America the terrorist, the biggest terrorist, I am with him.” Imam Naik also served as a mentor to Najibullah Zazi, an Al Qaeda operative who was arrested in 2009 shortly before carrying out a plan to plant explosives in the New York City subway system.

Imam Naik was banned from entering the United Kingdom after he was deemed to be immoderate, but the United States still grants him visas (he hasn’t been charged with involvement with any terrorist plot) and perhaps he will one day return to Chicago, where he once gave what he calls “my most famous speech” at a gathering organized by an outfit that has worked closely with the Bridgeview Mosque, a house of worship in Bridgeview, a middle-class neighborhood on Chicago’s south side.

Zuhair Karam, in addition to his work as a financial operator, has been fairly prominent among the small band of jihadis who congregate at the Bridgeview Mosque, where Zuhair’s relative has helped organize the mosque’s fund raising for groups such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

The Bridgeview Mosque, it should be said, serves thousands of ordinary people, most of whom probably harbor no politics other than a desire for peace. Many jihadis, meanwhile, are not themselves violent people, and merely support the political ideology of jihad. But there was a time when the Bridgeview Mosque’s imam regularly gave fiery sermons urging jihadi freedom fighters to take up arms.

The sermons were toned down after the FBI began investigating, but it is assumed by some prominent terrorism experts that the Bridgeview Mosque’s top officials (and Zuhair’s family) are members of the Muslim Brotherhood. One reason to believe this is that the mosque is controlled by the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), which government investigators have identified as being a Muslim Brotherhood front.

The Muslim Brotherhood is a diverse organization, and at least publicly disavows violence. It is probably wise to engage the Brotherhood, rather than vilify and incite it. Nonetheless, it should be understood that the Brotherhood is united in its opposition to the foundational principals of Western civilization and is making efforts to undermine the United States.

It is also true that many Muslim Brotherhood figures in the West (including some officials at ISNA) have been accused of providing material support (including money, personnel, and sometimes weapons) to violent terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda.

The Bridgeview Mosque itself has not been accused of directly supporting Al Qaeda, but there is no question that it has funded other violent jihadist groups. For example, according to the Chicago Tribune and others, the mosque was one of the most important funders of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, an outfit that was spawned by the Muslim Brotherhood and also takes directions from the regime in Iran.

Zuhair Karam and his relatives are close family friends of Sami al-Arian, who was not only a founding director of ISNA, but also a U.S.-based leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, indicted in 2003 for funding terrorist attacks in Palestine. As Rachel Ehrenfeld, now director of the Economic Warfare Institute, first reported, FBI investigators suspected (though never proved) that Sami al-Arian provided support to the Al Qaeda hijackers who carried out the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The Bridgeview Mosque and many traders affiliated with brokerages discussed above were also among the principal supporters of the Holy Land Foundation, which was indicted on charges of financing terrorism in 2007 after prosecutors demonstrated that it was a principal U.S. front for Hamas, another Muslim Brotherhood creation that receives support from Iran. The mosque’s directors, and one of Zuhair’s family members, meanwhile, help administer investment funds worth billions of dollars controlled by the North American Islamic Trust, an investment bank (and a unit of ISNA) that has been tied to the Muslim Brotherhood and was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the government’s case against the Holy Land Foundation.

In addition, some Bridgeview Mosque congregants (a number of them close family friends of Zuhair Karam, and some of them also traders who operated through the same network of brokerages) were involved with a Chicago-based charity called The Benevolence International Foundation, which was actually an Al Qaeda front, founded by Osama bin Laden’s brother-in-law. According to federal prosecutors, Benevolence was “involved in terrorist activities” and had contacts with “persons trying to obtain chemical and nuclear weapons on behalf of Al Qaeda.”

More to the point of this story, Mark Flessner, a former U.S. prosecutor who was at the front lines of the government’s “war on terrorism”, has said that the Bridgeview Mosque was, at least until it came under closer government scrutiny, a “gold mine of information about terrorist finance.”

So, obviously, I wanted to know more about the Bridgeview Mosque, and I wanted to know more about Zuhair’s brokerage and other brokerages in its network. Zuhair, as I mentioned, was far from the only jihadi ideologue attached to these brokerages, though I do not mean to single out jihadis. It was perhaps more important that this network of brokerage had highly significant ties to organized crime syndicates. Some of those syndicates (especially the ones emanating from Russia) had become politicized and were hostile to the United States.

When I called Zuhair for the first time in 2010, our conversation did not go well. Zuhair began by demanding to know how I had come to possess his telephone number. I told him, honestly, that I had found his phone number in the White Pages, but he refused to believe me. When I explained that I had some questions about the little brokerage where he had worked, he insisted that he didn’t know anything about the brokerage, and he said that he did not know anyone else who worked there.

After some additional prodding, Zuhair said, “Look, man, I’m just one of the little guys.” I said, “Yes, I know, but let’s meet anyway, I can tell you more about this investigation.”

Zuhair seemed already to know about some investigation. He said, “Shit, man, I thought this was over.” Which seemed strange to me because the only investigation I knew about was the investigation that I was conducting. But I wanted to be helpful, so I said, “Let’s meet, I can tell you more about it.”

Zuhair paused. He seemed to be figuring it all out. Finally, he said, “You’re not a journalist, that’s for sure, man, tell me who you are…Are you an Arabian?” No, I am not an “Arabian” – that’s what I told Zuhair Karam. I said there’s this investigation, I have information.

I did not have any negative feelings about Zuhair or the Bridgeview Mosque. I told him that I had some sympathy for some of the opinions expressed in the jihadist propaganda that he had produced. (The propaganda was focused on the situation in Palestine).

I had also developed a fascination with Islam, and considered it to be an attractive religion. I told Zuhair this, and I told him I would like to come down to the mosque to meet him. I said I’d also like to meet his father, Haaz Karam, who helped raise money for Islamic Jihad.

Zuhair said, “He’s not my father.” So I said, “Sorry, your relative.” And Zuhair said, “Yeah, so…what is this? Man, the FBI — you say you’re a journalist, why do you know about this investigation? That just isn’t right…the FBI…man, I’m telling you, I’m just one of the little guys…the FBI…the FBI can come, let them come, they know where I live, let them come, let them try – see if I care.”

* * * * * * * *

In his 2010 report to Congress, Admiral Dennis Blair, who was then the U.S. director of national intelligence, outlined one of the biggest threats to America’s economic well-being and national security. He began by noting that transnational organized crime syndicates are closely intertwined with the intelligence services and governments of some countries (such as Russia) that are considered to be adversaries of the United States. He then stated that “the nexus between international criminal organizations and terrorist groups [including, but not limited to Al Qaeda]…presents continuing dangers.”

In the same breath, the national intelligence director warned that transnational organized crime syndicates are “undermining free markets,” and “almost certainly will increase [their] penetration of legitimate financial and commercial markets, threatening U.S. economic interests and raising the risk of significant damage to the global financial system.”

We should understand the implications of what the national intelligence director was saying. He was saying that organized crime syndicates (and, by inference, the jihadist groups and foreign governments that maintain ties to organized crime syndicates) have the capability to disrupt the financial markets and harm the American economy. The only question was: had they already done so?

On August 12, 2011, President Barack Obama answered that question in dramatic fashion. The president reiterated that there was a clear “nexus” between transnational organized crime syndicates, multiple terrorist groups, international drug cartels, and some foreign governments and intelligence services that are hostile to the United States.

The president also reiterated that transnational organized crime syndicates (and, by inference, perhaps others in the “nexus”) had not only “penetrated” the “legitimate” financial industry (i.e. Wall Street), but had already “undermined markets” to such an extent that they now posed an imminent “threat to the stability of the global financial system.”

The president did not just reaffirm this assessment. He declared it to be a “National Emergency.”

The president did not precisely define what he meant by “undermining markets,” but many in the national security community believe that one of the bigger threats “to the stability of the global financial system” is manipulative short selling and what I refer to as the “bust outs” of publicly listed American companies, the wider markets, and the economy itself.

* * * * * * * * *

The term “bust-out” is one that I borrowed from organized crime. In the old days, mobsters would take over, say, the corner bar, load it up with debt, loot the cash, declare bankruptcy, and force the bar out of business. In the modern world of high finance, “bust outs” come in many permutations, but most of them follow the same routine of leverage, loot, and destroy.

Some “bust outs” see traders financing a company (often legitimate companies; in other cases companies that are frauds to begin with) and gaining a degree of control over the company’s stock price. The traders then “pump” the stock for a period of time, but ultimately the company is looted, the stock is “dumped,” and affiliated short sellers attack the company, sending its stock into a death spiral.

In a typical “pump and dump,” the manipulative short selling accompanying the “dump” ensures that the stock hits zero before the company has a chance to raise capital from more legitimate sources, and before shareholders have an opportunity to get out of the stock and cut their losses.

In other cases, individuals or firms will provide a legitimate company with toxic finance (often referred to as “death spiral” finance), which, for reasons explained in this story, immediately causes the company’s stock price to lose value. The financiers and affiliated traders then attack the company with manipulative short selling, sending the stock into a death spiral, and making it impossible for the company to raise new capital from more legitimate sources.

When the company is forced into bankruptcy, the people who provided the finance (often the same people as the short sellers) receive what is left of its assets, and they pocket short selling profits in excess of the cost of the initial toxic finance.

In still other cases, miscreants simply invest in a company’s shares or bonds, and gain a degree of control over the company’s management, either by demanding seats on the board or by exerting influence as major shareholders or creditors. Often the financial operators will then work with corrupt insiders to loot the company or engage in more complex schemes to saddle a company with toxic assets (purchased from the  miscreants themselves or from their associates).

Ultimately, the goal is to loot and weaken the company.

If the company is publicly listed (private companies are also “busted out,” and this final step does not, of course, apply to them), the miscreants or their associates eventually attack the company with manipulative short selling. For complex reasons (to be outlined in this story), owning a company’s bonds (especially convertible bonds, sometimes known as “toxic converts”) makes it easier for the bond owners and their associates to engage in manipulative short selling.

There is also a long history of miscreants not just investing in a company, but taking the company over entirely, and looting its assets. Once sufficiently looted, the company is, as usual, attacked with manipulative short selling. Before the company’s board of directors or regulators have an opportunity to oust the miscreants, the company’s stock goes into a death spiral, making it impossible for the company to raise new capital, and forcing a bankruptcy.

In such cases, the tendency is to say, “Well, it was bad company, so its bankruptcy was inevitable.” But often, the companies are good companies until they are “busted out,” and often even troubled companies would be salvageable if it were not for the rapid death spirals of their stock prices, which do not allow time for restructuring or the ousting of the miscreants who gained control over the company.

There are also plenty of cases in which financial operators do not gain any control over their target company, but merely attack it with a steady barrage of manipulative short selling, meanwhile deploying any number of other tactics (for example, spreading false rumors about the company’s health, and manipulating credit default swap prices, which are an important measures of a company’s well-being) to drive down the company’s stock price.

* * * *  * * * *

Financial operators have, in fact, been “busting out” major American companies since at least the 1980s, when numerous savings and loan banks were “busted out,” fueling what came to be known as the “savings and loan crisis,” which delivered a devastating blow to the financial system. Many of the perpetrators of those “bust-outs” (see, for example, the book “Inside Job,” which is the seminal work on the savings and loan crisis) had ties to organized crime.

Sometimes organized crime syndicates perpetrate “bust outs” for the purposes of laundering money. The dirty cash goes into companies in the form of toxic finance, and comes out clean in the form of short selling profits. In cases where short sales are not “covered” (i.e. in many cases involving manipulative short selling, and in all cases where the target stock hits zero), the short selling profits do not even have to be reported to tax authorities.

Former FBI investigators and experts who study financial crime say that market manipulation and “bust outs” of publicly listed companies is one of the more important money laundering techniques deployed by the world’s leading organized crime syndicates and other miscreants. Indeed, many of history’s biggest “money laundering” scandals were, in fact, market manipulation and “bust out” scandals.

In 1999, for example, a famous scandal saw the Russian government and organized crime syndicates with ties to the Russian intelligence services laundering upwards of $7 billion through the Bank of New York. As later chapters of this story will demonstrate in great detail, this money laundering was (according to a careful reading of indictments, statements of government investigators, and other information) the tail end of a large scale market manipulation (“bust out”) network that destroyed countless U.S. public companies.

Some of the destroyed companies were pure frauds that were “pumped and dumped.” But many of the companies had been going concerns until they were targeted by people who had ties to Russian organized crime, and who gained control over the companies’ stock prices. Once in control, they “pumped” and then “dumped” the stocks while engaging in manipulative short selling that sent the stocks into death spirals.

Today, Russian organized crime continues to “bust out” public companies with a vengeance. While this activity has gone largely unreported by the media, a notable exception is Forbes magazine’s Nathan Vardi, who has written multiple stories (see, for example, his story, “Sewer PIPEs”) that note the extensive involvement of financial operators with ties to Russian organized crime syndicates in one form of “death spiral” finance (so-called “PIPEs”) and the manipulative short selling that usually comes with such finance.

As we will see, there is no question that Russian organized crime syndicates have (as White House national security staffers maintain) ties to the Russian intelligence services. It is, moreover, my contention that when “bust-outs” are perpetrated by organized crime syndicates with ties to the Russian intelligence services, we should consider whether they are motivated, at least to some extent, by politics, and specifically by Russia’s disdain for the United States and the prevailing economic order.

But, of course, Russian organized crime is not the only concern. As we know, the president and his national security staff say that there is a “nexus” between transnational organized crime syndicates (including, but not limited to those emanating from Russia) and other potentially hostile constituencies, including jihadist organizations and foreign governments besides Russia.

Therefore we must ask whether sophisticated financiers with ties to jihadist organizations or hostile foreign governments are among those who have “undermined markets,” thereby inspiring the president to declare a “National Emergency.”

It is not often that a president issues a formal declaration of a “National Emergency,” and it is even less often that a president suggests that he is doing so because transnational organized crime syndicates (and perhaps others in the nexus, including terrorist organizations and hostile foreign governments) have “penetrated” the “legitimate” financial sector (i.e. parts of Wall Street) and are now posing a “threat to the stability of the global financial system.”

One would think that this would be front page news. But, amazingly, the president’s declaration of a “National Emergency” received almost no coverage at all from the major media outlets. One rare exception was the highly respected Economist magazine (based in Britain), which noted the “National Emergency” (and also noted the dearth of U.S. media coverage of the emergency) in a December 2011 article (titled, “Financial Terrorism”) that noted the possibility that the financial system might already have been attacked by hostile entities.

While America’s media and financial regulators seem largely uninterested in this issue, some in the national security community are devoting a lot of attention to it. A 110 page report commissioned by the Department of Defense Irregular Warfare Support Program even goes so far as to state that there is high likelihood that the economic cataclysm of 2008 was significantly worsened by politically motivated “financial terrorists intent on wiping out the American financial system.”

The report (a copy of which can be found at DeepCapture.com) makes reference to the massive volumes of short selling that went through the previously obscure brokerage that I discussed at the outset of this story. While the report for the Department of Defense does not identify the brokerage by name, I will do so in later chapters of this series, and I will also name its client brokerages (i.e. the network that I briefly described above). However, to understand the significance of these brokerages, we must first cover some other ground.

* * * * * * * *

The report for the Department of Defense states with good reason that the weapons most likely to be used by financial terrorists are so-called “naked” short selling and other forms of short-side market manipulation.

Before I continue, let me stress that short selling is a perfectly legitimate practice. It involves traders borrowing shares and then selling them, hoping the price will drop so that they can repurchase the shares at a discount, return them to the lender, and pocket the difference.

In “naked” short sales, however, traders do not borrow or purchase stock before they sell it. They simply sell what they do not have – phantom stock. You probably can  imagine how easy it is for miscreants to suppress the price of a security if they are able to swamp a market with artificial supply.

Of course, by definition, if people are selling a phony supply of a security, then they cannot be delivering what they are selling. Regulators and Wall Street folks call this “failure to deliver.”

There are, in fact, a variety of methods that can be deployed to create “failures to deliver.” There are technical differences among the methods, but all share this one basic idea: generate “failures to deliver” that act as phony supply to drive down a security’s price. Because “naked short selling” is the most famous of these methods, and because the differences among it and the other methods are generally so technical as to interest only experts, I intend to refer to this whole class of methods as “naked short selling”, or even more generally, “market manipulation.”

As the report commissioned by the Defense Department correctly points out, foreign governments, terrorist groups, or organized crime syndicates wishing to manipulate the markets would not have to do the dirty work themselves. They would need only to invest in one among the multitude of American hedge funds  that have ties to organized crime and have demonstrated that they are willing to deploy financial weapons of mass destruction for profit.

Under one scenario described in the Defense Department report, “a terror group could direct investments to a feeder hedge fund. The feeder fund would locate a Cayman Islands based hedge fund on their behalf that was predisposed to sell short financial shares. With sufficient new money, the hedge fund would expand its short selling activity (naked and traditional) and trade through dark pools or with sponsored access. At the same time, the same terror group might invest heavily in [credit default swaps] of the targeted short sales…”

Experts painted similar scenarios in testimony before a September 2010 informal meeting of the House Committee on Homeland Security. These experts were unanimous in their opinion that a hostile foreign entity could crash the U.S. financial markets. And to do so, it would most likely engage in manipulative trading through one of several brokerages that offer platforms – such as dark pools or so-called “sponsored access” – that enable miscreant financial operators to trade in anonymity.

Partly because such trading platforms exist, and for several other reasons (see Patrick Byrne’s DeepCapture story, “A Peace Sign to Wall Street”), SEC data reflects only a fraction of the naked short selling that occurs in the markets. But even the SEC’s partial data show that an average of 2 billion shares “failed to deliver” nearly every day in the months and weeks leading up to the 2008 market meltdown.  Those shares, as I have explained, “failed to deliver” because they were phantom shares – artificial volume that drove down stock prices.

The SEC’s incomplete data also shows that more than 13 million shares of Bear Stearns sold short during the week before that bank’s demise in March 2008 failed to deliver. Soon after Bear Stearns collapsed, the CEOs of Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, and other major financial institutions began complaining to the SEC that naked short sellers had caused the demise of Bear Stearns and were now targeting their own banks.

We need to take seriously the complaints of the Wall Street CEOs because they were intimately familiar with the crime of naked short selling. Many of their own brokerages had engaged in it. When people are raising hell about a crime that has previously lined their pockets, it is reasonable to assume that they know what they are talking about.

Moreover, the Wall Street CEOs continued to demand that the SEC take action against the market manipulators even after their high-paying hedge fund clients (some of whom might themselves have been naked short sellers, others of whom were merely inclined to object to stronger regulation of any sort) asked the CEOs to stop their campaign.

When the CEOs continued to complain about the naked short selling, many of their big hedge fund clients began to pull their business in protest. It goes without saying that Wall Street CEOs do not sacrifice large chunks of their profits to speak out against crimes that do not exist.

On July 15, 2008, the SEC responded to the Wall Street CEOs by issuing an “Emergency Order” that temporarily protected 19 of the nation’s largest financial institutions (the biggest banks plus Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) from naked short selling. The stock prices of these financial institutions immediately soared in value, and it looked like a major crisis had perhaps been averted.

Amazingly, though, the SEC lifted its “Emergency Order” just weeks later, on August 12. The next day, the naked short sellers resumed their attacks. The SEC’s own data (which, again, incompletely reflects the full magnitude of the problem) shows failures to deliver rising steadily from August 12 onwards, and these failures to deliver correspond directly to the downward spiral of stock prices.

According to the SEC’s partial data, Lehman Brothers saw an astounding 30 million of its shares fail to deliver during the week before the bank collapsed on September 15, 2008.

And make no mistake: Lehman might well have survived if it were not for the naked short selling and other attacks (such as the seemingly deliberate insertion of damaging false rumors into the marketplace, and the apparent manipulation of credit default swaps) that hammered its stock price.

Three days after Lehman’s collapse, on September 18, the SEC issued another Emergency Order, this one banning all short selling. In that Emergency Order, the SEC (without mentioning any banks by name) stated clearly that manipulative short selling was contributing to the collapse or near collapse of multiple banks, and thereby threatening to collapse the entire financial system.

In the weeks before Lehman’s collapse, the bank had plenty of liquidity to remain a going concern, and it had deals in the pipeline that would have enabled it to raise capital. But the free fall of Lehman’s stock price and (I will show) other maneuverings by short sellers derailed those deals, and panicked clients pulled their cash. Only then was Lehman forced to declare bankruptcy.

Lehman was not a healthy bank, to be sure. And there is no doubt that it was weakened with help of corrupt insiders who leveraged and looted. But that leverage and looting was only one part of a larger “bust out” that saw miscreants selling to the corrupt insiders toxic assets (which I will describe in a moment), while others attacked the bank with manipulative short selling.

If it were not for that manipulative short selling, the stock would not have gone into a death spiral, and there might have been time to restructure and oust the corrupt insiders. Lehman was a venerable bank that had survived plenty of bouts of ill health and worse economic downturns. But it had never faced an assault on its stock price like the one that it saw in the lead-up to September 18, 2008.

And nearly every other major bank, regardless of its health, faced precisely similar fates during the gory month of September, 2008. All seemed doomed to collapse until the SEC issued its September 18 “Emergency Order” banning all forms of short selling, legal or otherwise.

There was no reason to ban legal short selling (a crackdown on illegal naked shorts would have been enough), but the Emergency Order gave the markets some breathing room while the Treasury Department prepared the massive (and now notorious) bailouts that signified that the government would not allow any more banks to collapse, no matter what sort of attacks might be directed at them.

As the authors of the report for the Defense Department’s irregular warfare unit conclude, there is no question that short-side market manipulators contributed to the collapse or near-collapse of many of America’s largest financial institutions in 2008. The report states further that “the [short selling] attacks on [America’s biggest banks] were so brazen that it is difficult to imagine that they were uncoordinated.”

* * * * * * * * *

It wasn’t just the banks that were attacked. The SEC’s partial data shows that there was also massive naked short selling of exchange traded funds, or ETFs. These are publicly listed funds that are often highly leveraged and typically trade a basket of multiple stocks across a given industry. When market manipulators attack an ETF, they inflict damage on the entire industry that the fund indexes  – and the high leverage magnifies the impact.

Meanwhile, there is strong evidence that the markets for U.S. government debt have also come under attack. The first naked short selling assault on U.S. Treasuries was launched in September 2001, at the time of Al Qaeda’s attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Prior to the 9-11 tragedy, a daily average of $1.5 billion worth of U.S. government bonds failed to deliver. During the week immediately after 9-11, the daily failures to deliver were an astounding average of $1.5 trillion.

This was new and unusual market manipulation on a Herculean scale, but it was even worse during the months leading up to and following the 2008 crisis, when an average of $2.5 trillion worth of U.S. Treasuries failed to deliver every day. The authors of the report for the Defense Department speculate that financial terrorists, having precipitated the financial crisis, might have intended to attack the government bond markets in an attempt to bankrupt the national treasury.

Unfortunately, the government has done little to address the problem. Despite having issued its 2008 “Emergency Order” stating that manipulative short selling had contributed to the demise of major banks and now threatened to collapse the financial system, the SEC has yet to prosecute even one manipulative short seller involved in those attacks. That is, the SEC has yet to prosecute even one of the people who (according to the SEC) nearly obliterated the global financial system in 2008.

Meanwhile, after the president declared a “National Emergency” in 2011, he never said another word about it. The government has yet to prosecute any of the “legitimate” Wall Street outfits that have (according to the president) been “penetrated” by transnational organized crime syndicates. Nor has the government arrested any members of transnational organized crime syndicates that have (according to the president) “undermined markets” to such an extent that they now pose an imminent “threat to the stability of the global financial system.”

* * * * * * * *

The media fails to give sufficient attention to these problems, insisting instead on reinforcing the narrative that the financial crisis was in essence caused by “reckless” lending to home buyers who could not pay back their mortgages. It is correct that the financial crisis of 2008 had its proximate cause in the collapse of the mortgage and property markets a year earlier, but that is only the surface of the story.

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) made clear in its January 2011 report to Congress that the principal cause of the mortgage and property disaster was the freakish collapse in 2007 of the market for collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), which are packages of mortgages that trade like securities.

As the FCIC also made clear, the collapse of the CDO market was by no means inevitable. Nor did it have much to do with “predatory” lending or the quality of most subprime mortgages.  Rather, the problem was that more than half of the CDOs issued in 2006 and 2007 were so-called “synthetic” CDOs, every single one of which was deliberately designed to self-destruct.

That is, just a few firms that specialized in marketing “synthetic” CDOs worked with a select number of bankers and short sellers to hand-pick a relatively small number of mortgages that seemed certain to default. The miscreants then packaged bets against those relatively few toxic mortgages into so many self-destruct CDOs that they came to account for (I must repeat) more than half of the overall market.

It is not quite correct to say that this was phantom supply similar to what is generated by naked short selling. But there is no question that the “synthetic” CDOs created a market that was, alas, “synthetic.” It was a market overwhelmed by a supply of instruments that purported to contain representative samplings of an underlying asset (subprime mortgages) that a reasonable person might expect to have some value, but which actually contained (as only the short sellers knew) assets that were worth zero.

In other words, a small number of miscreants effectively flooded the market with massive volumes of synthetic toxicity.

As these miscreants surely knew, the self-destruct CDOs would, indeed, self-destruct, and thereby wipe out the overall market for CDOs, causing property values to crash. And when that happened, the banks that had leveraged themselves to the hilt to buy CDOs and overvalued property would  be weakened. They would not be so weak that they had to die. But their weakness would create negative sentiment that could be turned into a panic if miscreants were to circulate exaggerated rumors about the banks’ problems and unleash waves of naked short selling that would send stock prices into death spirals.

In short, the report commissioned by the Department of Defense Irregular Warfare unit was correct to note that the financial crisis that nearly destroyed the nation went “far beyond normal expectations…” The authors of this report were also right to note that all of the events that precipitated the financial cataclysm raise “serious questions about whether this was a purposeful attack and if so, by whom, and why?”

By whom? And why?  Over the coming weeks, DeepCapture will be publishing the remaining chapters of this book-length story, which is the product of a years-long investigation into the underworld of market manipulation and the vulnerability of the U.S. economy to malicious attacks. To that first question – by whom? – we do not have all the answers, but we have quite a few. That is, our investigation has led us down many paths, but they all seem to circle back to a distinct network of individuals and financial firms.

This social and business network did not singlehandedly wreck the economy, but we will see that financial operators in this network were responsible for much of the mortgage fraud that occurred in the lead-up to the crisis, while others in the network created (with fraudulent mortgages) most of the self-destruct CDOs that crashed the CDO market in 2007.

People in this network also sold toxic assets to corrupt insiders at the leveraged big banks. These toxic assets included not just CDOs, but also (we will see) a number wildly overvalued properties whose prices were certain to collapse, and all the more so after the CDOs self-destructed. Once poisoned by the toxic assets, the banks were vulnerable to the short selling attacks that came in 2008. And the social and business network described by this story includes many of the world’s most notorious short sellers and market manipulators.

Moreover, this social and business network nicely illustrates the “nexus” described by the president and his national security staff on August 12, 2011, when the president stated that the “legitimate” financial sector (i.e. parts of Wall Street) had been “penetrated” by transnational organized crime syndicates with ties to terrorist organizations and hostile foreign governments. As we know, the president suggested that this “nexus” had “undermined markets” and now posed a “threat to the stability of the global financial system.”

In other words, the social and business network (or “nexus”) described in this story is comprised mostly of “legitimate” American financial operators. However, to the extent they are actually “legitimate” deserves scrutiny given the extent to which they have “undermined markets,” and given that many of them have done business with others in a “nexus” that includes transnational organized crime syndicates, agents of hostile foreign governments, and sophisticated financiers with ties to the global movement of radical jihad.

Before I continue, though, let me define what I mean by “network.” It is not the case that all of the people in this network know each other, and it is certainly not the case that all or any of its constituencies (i.e., terrorist financiers, transnational organized crime syndicates, agents of rogue states, and “legitimate” American financial operators, among others) gathered in some secret meeting hall to hatch one grand conspiracy to wipe out the global financial system. Some of the relationships I will describe in this story are, in fact, once or twice removed.

However, it is the case that a number of “legitimate” firms and individuals in this network have engaged in activities (sometimes in tandem with organized criminals, terrorist financiers, and/or agents of hostile foreign governments) that have done damage to the markets. I also feel that it is fair (indeed a matter of some urgency) to describe the larger “social network” and the relationships between the people who inhabit this network.

Nobody, of course, is guilty by virtue of his relationships alone. That a “legitimate” financial operator (whether he be from the United States, Canada, Saudi Arabia, or wherever) has done business with, say, a Russian organized crime boss or a Saudi billionaire who has funded Al Qaeda, does not mean that the “legitimate” financial operator supports terrorism or would knowingly participate in a politically motivated act of financial terrorism against the United States.

Nonetheless, there is strong reason to believe that the report for the Department of Defense Irregular Warfare Support Program was right: the United States was attacked by financial operators with ties terrorist organizations and rogue states. There is also clear reason to believe that “legitimate” American financial operators and transnational organized crime syndicates have attacked the markets. In addition, there is reason to believe that some relationships between these various constituencies are not altogether irrelevant, and might, indeed, account for the magnitude of the damage done to the financial system.

The evidence is not 100 percent conclusive, but the facts are suggestive. At a minimum, they point to a scenario for how things might have played out in 2008–a scenario that needs to be taken seriously because it does show that the United States is, without doubt, vulnerable to future attack. Indeed, there is every reason to believe that such an attack is inevitable.

When the attack comes, I hope that this story will have provided at least a few good answers to that first question:  ”By whom?”

As to the Defense Department report’s second question – why? – I have no definitive answers. And ultimately, the question might be irrelevant. The damage to the economy is the same whether it has been done in the name of profit or jihad; in the name of terror, geopolitics, another billion bucks, or nothing more than the fun of the game. The financial operators who will be described in this story come in many stripes, but their various activities pose a collective threat to American prosperity and national security.

In Chapter 2, I introduce some information about prominent Saudi billionaires alleged to have financed Al Qaeda, and one fellow who ran an Islamic organization accused of inserting Al Qaeda spies into the U.S. military, and who subsequently set up a financial weapon of mass destruction that has, without doubt, done damage to the American markets.

To be continued…Click here to read Chapter 2 of this series

* * * * * * * **

*Zuhair Karam is an alias.

* * * * * * * *

Mark Mitchell is a journalist who spent most of his career working as a correspondent for mainstream media publications before joining DeepCapture.com.

If this essay concerns you, and you wish to help, then:

1) Use the Social Media buttons at the top of the article to help it go viral;

2) Email it to a dozen friends;

3) Go here for additional suggestions: “So You Say You Want a Revolution?“