HSBC Money-Laundering, Terror Funding Revealed; UBS Shielded by Obama Regime, Corporate Media

WHISTLEBLOWER DISCUSSES BANKS FUNDING TERRORISM, U.S. GOVERNMENT’S ROLE IN ALLOWING DEATHS, INJURIES TO U.S. SOLDIERS, AND COVER-UP

by Sharon Rondeau

(Feb. 9, 2015) — On Friday, WND’s Jerome Corsi reported that Obama’s nominee to replace Attorney General Eric Holder, Loretta Lynch, is involved in a “massive cover-up” concerning London-based banking giant HSBC.

Lynch has served as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York under President Bill Clinton and again under Obama since May 2010.  She is currently undergoing the constitutionally-required “advice and consent” confirmation process in the U.S. Senate.  In its article, The Times incorrectly noted Lynch as “Attorney General” in a caption under her photo and stated her employment as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York in the past tense, although her confirmation process is not complete.

Before Senate hearings could begin, Lynch was required to submit a list of all of her media interviews in a Senate questionnaire.  On January 27, the IBTimes reported that Lynch omitted her interview with CBS News regarding a financial settlement reached with HSBC after the bank acknowledged lax oversight practices.  The money deposited in various HSBC accounts was used to fund illegal activity in Cuba, Iran, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Sudan, North Korea, Burma and Syria.

Various mainstream media outlets have reported on billions of dollars deposited in HSBC accounts around the world which ultimately went to rogue regimes, Mexican drug cartels, or to nations supportive of terrorism as revealed by a report issued by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations following a July 17, 2012 hearing.

The hearing opened with statements from then-Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), who chaired the committee as well as the Senate Armed Services Committee until retiring after the 2014 elections.  The subcommittee’s report can be read here:  PSI REPORT-HSBC CASE HISTORY (9.6)2

On December 11, 2012, CBS reported on HSBC’s admission that it allowed money-laundering to occur in various bank locations by failing to question suspicious transactions.  Included in the video segment of the report, Lynch responded to critics of the U.S. Justice Department’s decision to accept a $1.9 billion settlement from HSBC instead of criminal prosecution that their criticism was “shortsighted.”  Lynch was reportedly “one of the architects” of the settlement.

On July 17, 2012, six HSBC executives testified to the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Intelligence about HSBC’s failure to properly oversee its depositors’ activities.  One of the six, David Begley, announced his resignation at the hearing.  As reported by Bloomberg, the subcommittee’s report stated that “London-based HSBC enabled drug lords to launder money in Mexico, did business with firms linked to terrorism and concealed transactions that bypassed U.S. sanctions against Iran.”

Now-retired Sen. Tom Coburn was quoted as having said that “similar problems exist at other banks.”

Former Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer, who justified the HSBC settlement in several interviews, now works in private practice at Covington & Burling, a Washington, DC-based law firm which has represented large financial institutions including United Bank of Switzerland (UBS).  Holder also worked for Covington & Burling with Breuer in the past.

An article about the HSBC settlement, which was approved by a federal judge after Holder recommended a “deferred prosecution agreement (DPA),” is published on Covington’s website written by three Covington attorneys working in the area of “white collar defense.”  Of the authors, Covington added the following note:

In January 2010, Breuer and Holder testified to a congressional committee about the mortgage crisis which began with the collapse of the housing industry in 2008.  In a January 2012 report, Reuters revealed that as of that time, 22 attorneys who had previously worked for the U.S. Justice Department were employed at Covington, along with 12 former U.S. attorneys.

Breuer is now vice chairman at Covington, where he is said to be “one of the leading trial and white collar defense attorneys in the United States.  He specializes in helping clients navigate financial fraud investigations, anti-corruption matters, money laundering investigations, securities enforcement actions, cybercrime incidents, Congressional investigations, and other criminal and civil matters presenting complex regulatory, political, and public relations risks.”

Breuer and departing Attorney Genera Eric Holder hves been named by 2Lt. Scott Bennett as having direct knowledge that UBS is funding terrorism which is killing America’s men and women in uniform.  “Men have died because of their actions,” Bennett told us in an exclusive interview.

Obama is reportedly not attempting to thwart Iran’s nuclear-weapon ambitions “in exchange for maintaining regional stability in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria.”  Iran is one of four countries designated decades ago as a state sponsor of terrorism, three of which – Cuba, Iran and Sudan – the Obama regime has engaged very recently by announcing a resurrection of diplomatic ties with Cuba; negotiating with Iran and rejecting economy-crippling sanctions to stymie nuclear development; and hosting Sudan’s foreign minister, Ali Ahmed Karti, who perpetrated genocide against the people of Darfur in western Sudan beginning in the 1990s, at the National Prayer Breakfast last week.

The Permanent Subcommittee hearing took place on the same day that Maricopa County, AZ Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his Cold Case Posse lead criminal investigator Mike Zullo declared in a press conference that the image posted on the White House website purported to be Obama’s long-form birth certificate is a “computer-generated forgery” surpassing the standard of probable cause.  The image was apparently posted to quell rising doubts that Obama was eligible for the presidency as a “natural born Citizen” as articulated by business mogul Donald Trump early in 2011.

In January of last year, Reuters noted that despite Lynch’s assurances that HSBC would have to tighten its controls over attempted criminal activity, “U.S. regulators continue to find weaknesses in the way HSBC Holdings tries to prevent money laundering, according to people familiar with the matter, even after the British bank was forced to pay nearly $2 billion in penalties and invested millions in increasing its compliance.”

On Friday, Corsi reported that a whistleblower who had previously been an HSBC vice president told him, “The Obama administration ‘is continuing to cover up its role in the HSBC money laundering scandal.’”

In January 2012, Reuters reported that “Law professors and other federal ethics experts said that federal conflict of interest rules required Holder and Breuer to recuse themselves from any Justice Department decisions relating to law firm clients they personally had done work for.”

In 2013, Sen. Charles Grassley of the Senate Judiciary Committee asked Holder, who was testifying, why “high-profile cases” involving criminal allegations were not prosecuted, to which Holder responded, “…I’m not talking about HSBC here, that would be inappropriate. But I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if we do prosecute — if we do bring a criminal charge — it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy. I think that is a function of the fact that some of these institutions have become too large.”

In a 2013 interview, Breuer defended his record at the DOJ in regard to non-prosecution of large banks as having taken into consideration the long-term economic fallout as “a factor we need to know and understand.”  “…if you look at deferred prosecution agreements and nonprosecution agreements, they are a tool that we use in appropriate cases. And we have to continue to use those,” PBS quoted Breuer as having said.

“Swiss bank accounts and terrorists equal dead soldiers,” Bennett told The Post & Email in an exclusive interview late last month.  Since that time, Bennett has interviewed with Sean Stone, host of BuzzSaw and son of filmmaker Oliver Stone, in his mission to expose the financing which is killing American soldiers with the knowledge and inaction of a majority of Congress and the executive branch of government.

Bennett has explained the connections among whistleblower and former fellow Booz Allen Hamilton employee Edward Snowden, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, himself and others.  Oliver Stone is creating a movie about Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency’s (NSA) spying on American citizens made in June 2013 from a hotel room in Hong Kong to The Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald.

Bennett assumed the role of whistleblower early in 2010 after taking a new position as Terror Finance Analyst with his employer, Booz Allen Hamilton, for whom he had worked since 2008.  Concurrently, he was also serving as an officer in the U.S. Army Reserve.

After discovering irrefutable proof that funding for Islamic terror groups was being supplied through the Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS), Bennett informed both his military and civilian Booz Allen superiors of his newly-acquired knowledge but oddly received no response.

To his complete bewilderment, months later, Bennett was falsely accused, tried in a hasty civilian court, and sentenced to an “enhanced” 30 months in prison on charges of falsifying a military housing form, wearing his uniform without authorization, and impersonating a police officer, all of which he said were complete fabrications.

Bennett was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Florida Sara C. Sweeney as a civilian when he should have been afforded a military trial as a member of the Army Reserves.  The Post & Email has sent a FOIA request to Sweeney’s office for any documents bearing Bennett’s name within a particular time frame.

Following his conviction, Bennett was immediately sent to federal prison in Minersville, PA, where he met another UBS whistleblower, Brad Birkenfeld, who, after testifying in 2007 to the Permanent Subcommittee on Intelligence chaired by Levin, was sentenced to an enhanced punishment of 40 months for allegedly failing to reveal a working relationship with a wealthy California businessman who had had a UBS bank account.

While in the same prison, Birkenfeld and Bennett compared notes and realized that each had discovered information leading to the same conclusion:  that thousands of accounts at UBS were funding terrorist activities where the U.S. military was deployed and suffering casualties.

Six weeks after his release, on September 11, 2012, Birkenfeld was awarded the highest monetary compensation in U.S. history for a whistleblower, $104 million.  He has not since spoken publicly on the UBS matter.

On Sunday, The Post & Email again spoke with Bennett in a face-to-face Skype interview, during which we asked if, given his knowledge of UBS’s funneling of money to Middle Eastern terrorist groups, he suspected a “nexus” between HSBC and UBS.

“Oh, yes,” he responded, referring to a report issued by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Intelligence, which was chaired by Carl Levin until his retirement from Congress following the 2014 elections.  “I’ve chosen to focus more on UBS because that is the one that everyone else is refusing to focus on,” Bennett told us.

Bennett then supplied us with the aforementioned report, which can be read here:

PSI.HSBCreport.071712SenateReport

Bennett continued:

That report precipitated the article in Rolling Stone titled, “Too Big to Jail.”  I was in Pennsylvania at the time the report came out, and I never saw it; I saw only the HSBC article in Rolling Stone.  I immediately wrote to Matt Taibbi, the author, and said, “You have only half the story; it’s all about UBS, and here are all the reports I’ve submitted up the military and congressional chain of command.”

He never responded to me after multiple attempts, and of course, no one in Congress did, either.

I just got wind of the HSBC political report recently and I read through it, and in that entire congressional report on terrorist funding, they don’t mention once Union Bank of Switzerland or Brad Birkenfeld’s revelations, which are the key to connecting the financial donors to Saudi Arabia and the wealthy Muslim states:  Qatar, Kuwait, and others.

On the show I just finished with Barbara Honegger and Susan Lindauer, they both confirmed that is exactly what needs to be released in addition to the 28 pages from 9/11.  They also need to release Brad Birkenfeld’s testimony to Sen. Carl Levin’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, because Birkenfeld’s bank account information on UBS will overlay [Zacharias] Moussoui’s affidavit and database of terrorist financing that he produced for [Osama] bin Laden.

Then the whole world blows up with revelation.

On February 8, PBS reported that “Officials on both sides of the debate acknowledge that protecting the delicate U.S.-Saudi relationship also played a role” in then-President George W. Bush sealing the 28 pages concerning the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States referred to by Bennett.  In October, Moussoui testified in federal court in a civil suit filed by families of survivors against the government of Saudi Arabia that it had funded Al Qaeda in the late 1990s. Moussaoui named Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, a stockholder in Newscorp, parent company of the Fox News Channel, as a funding source of terrorism.

Of the 19 hijackers of four airliners on September 11, 2001, 15 came from Saudi Arabia.

An Associated Press report dated February 4 states that “Lawyers for victims of the Sept. 11 attacks say they have new evidence that agents of Saudi Arabia ‘directly and knowingly’ helped the hijackers, including sworn testimony from the so-called 20th hijacker and from three principals of the U.S. government’s two primary probes of the attacks.”

Last Wednesday, major media reported that Saudi Prince reduced his share in Newscorp from 6.6% to 1%.

In a Fox News report late last week, journalist James Rosen reported that Moussaoui claimed that “Saudi Arabia’s government directly financed the operations of Al Qaeda” and that he had maintained a database of Al Qaeda donors which allegedly includes the new Saudi leader, King Salman.

Former Florida Sen. Bob Graham said that he believes that “the government of Saudi Arabia” bears culpability in the 9-11 attacks, and a Democrat member of the 9-11 Commission, former Sen. Bob Kerrey, said the issue has not been fully “explored.”

The Post & Email asked Bennett if he believes there is a connection between the accusation against bin Talal, Newscorp and UBS, to which he responded:

I’ve learned the hard way that all of these media entities, including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and all of Fox News, do not want anything to do with UBS and UBS bank accounts and terrorist financing.  I wrote to them and sent them all the material, and they didn’t print one word of it.  The Washington Post and NBC came up, interviewed me for two hours, thinking they were going to do a story on something totally different; instead, they got a tidal wave of information they never expected or wanted, and they didn’t print one word about it.  So the corporate media has proven that they are cowardly, stupid or corrupt, because they haven’t touched this.

However, the revelations of the 9-11 missing 28 pages report, combined with these other intelligence sources, will naturally expose not only the terrorist financing component in the Saudi Arabia/Qatari wealthy donor families there, but it will also implicate congressional leaders for covering this up and congressional leaders with UBS accounts and other things.  The whole tidal wave of this is still unfolding, which is very exciting.

Bennett’s communications with NBC News can be read here:  Letters to Isikoff NBC

Bennett noted that nowhere in the Permanent Subcommittee’s report is UBS mentioned as a source of terrorist funding despite its knowledge of it as revealed by whistleblower Brad Birkenfeld in 2007.  Without any knowledge of Birkenfeld’s information at the time, Bennett informed the subcommittee in 2010 of very similar intelligence gleaned through his work at Booz Allen Hamilton and as an Army Reserve officer.  Bennett also produced two reports while incarcerated sent to numerous members of Congress, including Levin, to which he received in response only one form letter from Sen. Rand Paul’s office.

The Post & Email’s most recent interview with Bennett will continue in a subsequent article.