JusticeForRaymondMcCord4

















Below receipt dated the 29th of March, 1999
 from the LISWA Alexander Library Western Australia
for the purchase of the books entitled "The Triumph of Truth (Who Is Watching The Watchers?)






     





















Diana - The Secret Years
Prince William about 15 years old

by Simone Simmons with Susan Hill



 Prince Harry about 10 years olf

 
James Hewitt had a long standing and and what in the end became a very public affair with Princess Diana  in the 1980's
It is said by some that Prince Harry is the real son of James Hewitt. Not that this maters much in normal life, as people have affairs all the time in marraiage and Princess Diana had a right to look for love when she quickly found out after marrying Prince Charles that Prince Charles had been having a long standing affair with Camilla Parker Bowles before and after Princess Diana's marriage to Prince Charles...


"....Princess Diana was only as a brood mare who had dutifully safeguarded the future of the Windsor dynasty by producing two sons...."

Diana - The Secret Years

 

by Simone Simmons with Susan Hill

"....I don't think Diana ever quite forgave some of Prince Charle's relations or influentiual friends for suggesting, when Diana and Charles were still together, albiet very unhappily so, that Dianna be consigned to some residential clinic for treament ( Diana mentioned to me that the  Prince Charles and the rest of the Royal Family wanted Diana to go to a 'nut house' but Diana had refused to go, Diana always seemed completely compos mentis to me)...."

 

 

 

The year 1993097 in the life of Diana, Princess of Wales can justly be called her ‘secret years’. This may seem an amazing claim about a woman who appeared to live on the from the front pages of the tabloids, but it is, nevertheless, true. The real life that Diana was leading during those years was known to only her very closest friends –and to one special friend in particular.

 

That friend was Simone Simmons. It was Simone who helped guide Diana through the past-Windsor years that set the Princess on her first faltering steps to freedom, and which resulted in the much more confident woman we saw in 1997. Diana would open her heart to Simone, trusting her with truths that she kept from others..


The Men In Diana's Life

 Diana _ the Secret Years- Chapter Nine


 

For  long time Diana had felt particularly bitter about her husband's mistress of many years, Camilla Parker Bowles, findig it baffling as well as harmful that one woman, especially a Cancerian like herself, could behave so deceitfully towards another. Until as late 1992, eleven years after her marriage, Diana had been forced to meet Mrs Parker Bowles socially, sometimes in public, and to feign a gracious oblivion about the intense love affair between Camilla and the Prince of Wales. Such occasions were indeed ordeals. Diana as almost as angered by the fact that Charles's family knew what was happening and tacitly accepted the state of affairs. They had embraced Diana in the same way, but only as a brood mare who had dutifully safeguarded the future of the Windsor dynasty by producing two sons.

Diana remained inarticulately angered at Charles's in ability to understand her as a woman and respond to her vulnerability. Like many others, I believe that Diana's affair with James Hewitt, which began in the 1980's, was at heart a pathetic and misguided attempt to fight back, and that at any time up to their divorce for greatest wish was for reconciliation with her husband. If Charles had offered her just enough kindness, support and affection, I am convinced that Diana would have been adult enough to tolerate his parallel need for Camilla. Whether Diana would have been underselling herself in such a situation must remain for ever a moot point. What is certain, however, is that Diana felt a growing resentment at Charles's apparent inability to display loyalty towards her in the fact of disparaging comments from family and friends. Moreover, things were made even worse for her, as is clear form her observation that it was not as if her husband was unaware of her misery. Various remarks he made proved that he saw it very clearly, but instead of showing that he was worried about her, he would ask friends to take care of her, proving himself guiltily incapable of acknowledging his wife's pain....



Heart surgeon Hasnat Khan (Mirror Syndication International), who had a affair with princess Diana, but no children...with Princess Diana


Captain James Hewitt of the LIfe Guards


Diana's first (publicly known and undisputed) serious romantic entanglement during her marriage - with Captain James Hewitt of the LIfe Guards- came as a double-whammy. Even as her marriage was collapsing Diania imagined herself to have matured and become more sophisticated. Diana trusted that she could handle such a relationship with poise and competence. Here was a strong man, a soldier, someone Diana trusted to proect her. As a child she had formed a fear of horses after she had broken an arm when a poney threw her. How she had found a man who could finally make her feel safe and confident when riding, bestow upon her one of the skills so prized by the royal familty and which hitherto she lacked -something Diana was sure they saw as failure and as a mark of inadequacy. Furthermore, James Hewitt seemed to show her unconditional love even while her husband, as she was now so miserably certain, preferred the arms and attention of another woman.
James Hewitt was tall, well spoken and handsome in a dull, knitting-pattern sort of way. the light informatlity of their lessons and Diana's small subsequent equestrian achievments did much to bolster a broad shoulder to weep. Diana fell in love with Jame Hewitt for these reasons and. perhaps, for the obvious sexuasl ones as well. The very qualities which attracted Diana to James Hewitt made his subsequent betrayal of Diana all the more incomprehensible. When James Hewitt and Diasna decided to end their love affair - due to the combined presures of increasingly loud wispers about their relationship and the treats to James Hewitt's career and Diana's reputation having become too great - it had been we been with grace, fondness and dignity on both sides. Or so Diana had believed.
Perhaps later it was just too painful for her even to contemplate that idealized sort of man and the comfortable, relaxed country life that he might have provided, and which would have suited Diana rather more than one in which she found herself caged.
 
Diana could only discuss James Hewitt with me in terms of ther disappointment, grief and pain Diana had felt, anguish which I tried to help her to cope with over the next couple of years....
 
 
"....I don't think Diana ever quite forgave some of Prince Charle's relations or influentiual friends for suggesting, when Diana and Charles were still together, albiet very unhappily so, that Dianna be consigned to some residential clinic for treament ( Diana mentioned to me that the  Prince Charles and the rest of the Royal Family wnanted Diana to go to a 'nut house' but Diana had refused to go, Diana always seemed completely compos mentis to me)...."









Justice for Raymond McCord
By Raymond McCord Senior
Murderers, drug dealers, extortionists, knee-cappers bombers: all in the pay of Her Majesty’s Government. Is not ficton, but the truth that was uncovered by the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland, Nuala  O’Loan. Her investigation ‘Operation Ballast’ was the most damning report relating to police cover-ups and collusion with the UVF to come out of her office…

In a television documentary on UTV, Insight, a few years ago, Detective Sergeant Joyhnson Brown (JB), who served for thirty years in the RUC, told reporter Chris Morrow (CM):

JB: It you're asking me are there people who had committed murder but got away with it because they were informants, yes, they did. 
If you're asking me if, on some occassions, the informants went outside those parameters, yes, they did.
CM: Including murder>
JB: Yes. they did, were they protected by the highest authority, Yes, they were. 
Could we have put the majority of them in jail, in 1977, 1998, 1999, Absolutely.
Would lives have been saved time and time again?
Yes, indeed. There appeared to be no will to prosecute certain individuals. 
I couldn't understand it and I spoke of my reservations, but you're a voice in the wildnerness.
 
"......These are the words of a seasoned detective who operated for many years in the RUC's CID murder detectuive squad in North Belfast. This is the same detective who helped to put away Johnny Adair for directing UFF terrorism. The words from that interview which jumped out at me were that certain individuals were being protected by the highest authority and there was no wil to prosecute them, Here we have a police detective sergeant supporting what Irish Labour leader Pat Rabbitte had told Dail. Yet these two men had never met, didn't know each other, came from different countries, backgrounds and political views, but were in absolute agreement with each other. When I watched and listened to Johnson Brown that night on television saying that killers were being protected, I thought that surely someone at the highest level had to be held responsible for letting killers get away with murder....." ....Raymond McCall Senior from his book ... Justice For Raymond...


Justice for Raymond
Raymond McCord Snr, Belfast

Justice for Raymond McCord

By Raymond McCord Senior

Murderers, drug dealers, extortionists, knee-cappers bombers: all in the pay of Her Majesty’s Government. Ot fictoopn, but the truth that was uncovered by the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland, Nuala  O’Loan. Her investigation ‘Operation Ballast’ was the most damning report relating to police cover-ups and collusion with the UVF to come out of her office…




We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them
Albert Einstein
This is the story of Raymond McCord’d ten-year fight to track down his son’s killers and bring them to justice. In the process he proved that the RUC Special Branch were colluding with loyalist paramilitaries in murders and other serious crimes. 
Through a relentless campaign of death threats from the UVF, Raymond Snr’s quest for truth and justice was rewarded in January 2007, when the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland, Nuala O’Loan, published her report into his son’ s murder. Codenamed Operation Ballast, Mrs O’Loan’s inquiry discovered that, at the time of the McCord murder, Mark Haddock was an RUC Special Branch informant who had been paid £80,000 from the public purse. Moreover, she discovered that Haddock had been directly involved in at least ten murders, several attempted murders, drug dealing, extortion and punishment beatings for which he was never brought to book. 


Justice For Raymond
 by Raymond McCord Senior

13 May 2008
On 9 November 1997, the body of 22-year-old former RAF radar operator Raymond McCord was found dumped at Ballyduff quarry, Newtownabbey, just a few miles outside of Belfast. He had been killed with a concrete breeze block. His face had been so badly disfigured from the rain of blows that his coffin had to remain closed during his funeral. The outlawed UVF, the oldest Protestant paramilitary group in Northern Ireland, had killed him on the jailhouse orders of Mark Haddock, the head of a drug-dealing unit in the north Belfast suburb of Mount Vernon. Haddock feared that Raymond McCord Jnr was about to reveal his activities to the leadership of the UVF. The murder sparked an unstinting ten-year campaign by his father Raymond Snr to find his son's murderers and attempt to bring them to justice. Through a relentless campaign of death threats from the UVF, Raymond Snr's quest for truth and justice was rewarded in January 2007, when the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland, Nuala O'Loan, published her report into his son' s murder. Codenamed Operation Ballast, Mrs O'Loan's inquiry discovered that, at the time of the McCord murder, Mark Haddock was an RUC Special Branch informant who had been paid GBP80,000 from the public purse. Moreover, she discovered that Haddock had been directly involved in at least ten murders, several attempted murders, drug dealing, extortion and punishment beatings for which he was never brought to book. This is the story of how one man, Raymond McCord, finally proved that the RUC Special Branch were colluding with loyalist paramilitaries in murders and other serious crimes.

Justice for Raymond
Raymond McCord Snr, Belfast

Mr McCord, your son’s body has been found. ….’ That’s all I remember. I started to shout and scream, but to this day I don’t know what I said. It all happened so suddenly. Then the police were gone. I went into the living room, sat down and cried. I still can’t describe my feelings. I was thinking how could my son Raymond be dead, murdered? When the reality hit home that this was not a sick joke and I wasn’t having a nightmare, I was faced with the hardest thing I had ever done in my life – To tell my wife Vivienne.
The tears just wouldn’t stop and neither would the pain. I truly wished it was me they had killed and not young Raymond. He had his whole life in front of him at 22 years of age. Why not me?
There is no greater pain in the World than losing a son or daughter. It is even worse when they are so cruelly taken away from you, beaten to a pulp, dumped in an isolated place and left to die alone with no one to help them. I have sat many nights on my own thinking of how Raymond must have suffered that night, how he must have cried out in pain as those evil bastards murdered him. The pain I felt when I lost my son is like nothing I had ever experienced before in my life. Losing a close relative is difficult, but when it is your own flesh and blood, a child you helped create and held in your arms in his first few minutes after he was born, it is simply unbearable. I felt so empty inside, almost numb at times. My heart has literally ached from the day the police came to my home and broke the news. I didn’t just lose a son, I lost a very close friend, like the brother I never had.
But I was not going to allow my grief and my pain to deflect me from getting to the bottom of what I can only describe as the vicious and brutal murder of a lovely, kind young man who had his whole life ahead of him. Those who had killed him had made a fatal error of judgement. They thought they were untouchable, out of reach. But their downfall was to murder Raymond McCord Jnr and their crime was about to be exposed for all to see.
I started to dig into the murky world of the UVF looking for clues as to who was actually involved in my son’s murder. I wanted to know why they had killed him. No one in North Belfast was saying very much, but I knew there were people in that community who would talk, some out of spite, others out of fear. Some people were helpful, but others I found out were lying to me. In no time at all different versions of the murder started to emerge, and I knew I had to check out the each and every one to get to the truth.
Murderers, drug dealers, extortionists, knee-cappers, bombers : all in the pay of Her Majesty’s Government. Not fiction, but the truth that was uncovered by the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland, Nuala O’Loan. Her investigation ‘Operation Ballast’ was the most damning report relating to police cover-ups and collusion with the UVF to come out of her office.
It covered at least ten murders, ten attempted murders, punishment shootings, drug dealing, criminal damage, extortion and intimidation, all carried out by a unit of the UVF from Mount Vernon and Newtownabbey. The result was sickening for both the victims and families, because no one was charged with those crimes, thanks to corrupt practices by officers in the Special Branch.
The UVF unit was headed up by Mark Haddock who had been recruited as an informant while in his teens by the Criminal Investigation Department. Eventually the Special Branch took over as his handlers. While working for the Branch he was said to have been involved in at least ten murders and other serious crimes, yet he was paid a minimum of £80,000 by the State even though the Special Branch knew what he was doing. Instead of helping to prevent murders and other terrorist acts, Haddock was personally involved in a number of murders and was the guiding hand for other assassination squads. He had a terrible reputation for violence within his community; nobody in Mount Vernon dared to challenge him. Those who tried were either murdered or severely beaten. Haddock thought no one could stop him.
One man did.
Haddock’s downfall was the murder of Raymond McCord Jnr when I as his father, decided to get to the truth of his murder. What I was to learn about Haddock, about the UVF whose leader was also acting as an informant, and about the Special Branch, was simply unbelievable. Yet it was the truth.
I had made a promise to my son as he lay in the funeral parlour. I reached into the coffin and held his hand. I told him that I would personally hunt down the killers and expose them. It was a promise I would keep.
Read the full harrowing story of a father's fight for justice in 
'Justice For Raymond' by Raymond McCord
Published by Gill Macmillan

Raymond Irvine McCord (born 23 December 1953) is a victims rights campaigner from Northern Ireland. McCord became involved in the issue of victims rights after his son, Raymond McCord, Jr., was killed by the loyalist paramilitary group the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) in 1997 He is an outspoken critic of the UVF. 

Background

McCord, a Protestant, was born in the loyalist York Road area of North Belfast. His family lived at 17 Grove Street until he was aged two when they moved to a new house in the recently built Rathcoole estate in Newtownabbey.[3] As a youth McCord was educated first at Whitehouse Primary School and subsequently at Belfast High School.[4]
During his teenage years he played in a football team Star of the Sea alongside future IRA member and hunger striker Bobby Sands. The team featured both Catholics and Protestants.[5] Although the club was nominally Catholic it was fully mixed and two of McCord's other team mates, Terry Nicholl and Michael Acheson, would both later join the UVF and serve time in prison for offences related to that organisation.[6]
Most of the Protestant players left after the outbreak of the Troubles, although McCord remained and played for the senior side, alongside Marty Quinn.[7] As a 17 year old he had trials with Manchester United, the club he supports, and Blackpool but was not offered terms by either club and did not pursue a career in football.[8]
McCord had worked as a welder at Harland & Wolff and as a bouncer. In 1992 as a result of a dispute with the loyalist paramilitary group the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) he received a vicious beating from six UDA members in Rathcoole. He left Northern Ireland some time after to go to America returning in 1995. Upon his return he attempted to address the intimidation of his wife Vivienne and their three children: Raymond, Gareth and Glenn, by the UDA.[9]According to McCord his two youngest sons, who lived with their mother in Rathfern whilst Raymond jnr lived with him, were frequent victims of gang attacks from local UDA members.[10] McCord's dispute with the UDA was linked to an incident with prominent UDA member John Gregg.[11]

Killing of Raymond McCord Jnr

Raymond McCord Jnr in his RAF uniform
Raymond junior, the oldest of McCord's three sons, was born on 24 November 1974.[12] He joined the Royal Air Force (RAF) in his teens serving as a radar operator. He left the RAF after four years and returned home to Northern Ireland, where he joined the UVF. McCord snr believed this was to offer his family protection from the UDA due to the McCord family's previous trouble with the UDA.[13]
McCord jnr was attached to the Mount Vernon unit of the UVF and was under the command of Mark Haddock. Mostly involved in drug running operations, McCord jnr was caught with a haul of cannabis and arrested. Fearing a rebuke from the UVF Brigade Staff (Belfast leadership) from McCord jnr informing the police and the UVF leadership about Haddock's involvement in the drug trade Haddock allegedly decided to have McCord jnr killed. On 9 November 1997 the latter was believed to have been lured from home and taken to a disused quarry in Ballyduff, Newtownabbey where he was beaten to death with concrete blocks.[14] He was 22 at the time of his death.[15] He was buried in Carnmoney Cemetery in Newtownabbey on 14 November 1997.[16]
McCord snr initially believed his son had been killed by the UDA as part of the established bad blood that the organisation had with his family but later had it confirmed by several sources that the UVF had been behind the killing.[17] The UDA South East Antrim Brigade issued a statement acknowledging the bad blood it had with McCord but denied any involvement in his son's death.[18]

Campaigning

Loyalist poster accusing McCord of being a republican, Shore Road, Belfast, November 2012
Angered by the lack of interest by mainstream Unionism and the police investigation McCord carried out his own investigation. Promising to his family to act within the law he used his contacts with loyalism to uncover that Mark Haddock was a police informer. McCord claims he met with UVF Chief of Staff John "Bunter" Graham and other leading members of the organisation in the Maze prison, where they were waiting to visit an inmate, soon after his son's killing and that they agreed to conduct the internal investigation that uncovered the information about Haddock.[19] However he further claimed that the inquiry did not target Haddock as some of those involved in it were themselves police informers.[20] McCord discovered that Haddock's status as an informer meant he wasn't questioned or linked to the killing of his son. Telling anyone who would listen to his claims McCord make a decisive breakthrough in 2002 when he met Police Ombudsman Nuala O'Loan.[21] O'Loan conducted an investigation and the results were published in 2007.[22] The investigation was named Operation Ballast, and focused on alleged collusion between the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and the UVF. The report stated the police colluded with loyalists in over a dozen murders in North Belfast.[23] O'Loan had established that a leading loyalist who was also a police informer had been involved in the killing and in 2005 it was announced in the Dail by Irish Labour Party leader Pat Rabbitte using parliamentary privilege that the loyalist in question was Mark Haddock.[24]
After being dismayed by the reaction of unionist politicians McCord announced his intention to stand for election in the 2007 Northern Ireland assembly elections in his native North Belfast constituency.[23] McCord stated that he took the decision after Jeffrey Donaldson condemned him in a television interview after the publication of the O'Loan Report, questioning why McCord did not report his son to the police for being a UVF member.[25] McCord's manifesto was co-written by Mark Langhammer, with the two being old friends.[26] He subsequently received 1320 votes (4.4% of the total vote).[27] This was actually McCord's second election as he had also been a candidate in the 2003 election when he captured only 218 votes (0.7%).[27]
In 2008 McCord made history by becoming the first Unionist to address the annual Sinn Fein Ard Fheis. Wearing his father's Orange Order sash at the event he denounced the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) for ignoring evidence of collusion between the security forces and loyalist paramilitaries.[28] Sinn Fein previously in 2007 had organised a trip for McCord to attend the European Parliament in Strasbourg to address a meeting of MEP's regarding the issue of collusion in Northern Ireland.[29] McCord had also met Gerry Adams on the Falls Road around this time.[30]
McCord was again an independent candidate for North Belfast in the 2011 assembly elections. This time he captured a reduced vote total of 1,176 for a 3.5% share.[27] He was also an unsuccessful candidate for Belfast City Council in the concurrent local elections, running in the Court District Electoral Area.[31]

Personal life

McCord was the second child of Hector and Kathleen McCord (née Elliott), his sister Jean being seven years older than him.[1] McCord states that, whilst his father was a member of the Orange Order, the Apprentice Boys of Derry and the Royal Black Institution, he maintained close friendships with his Catholic neighbours in the new Lodge area and, before the advent of the Troubles, regularly drank in the pubs there.[1] Hector McCord died in 1994 aged 70 whilst Kathleen McCord was still alive as of 2008.[32]
McCord met his wife Vivienne, who also lived in Rathcoole, when he was 15.[33] They married in 1973 and set up home in a flat in Rathcoole.[34] The family moved to nearby Rathfern around 1976 and their second son Gareth was born there in 1977.[35] A third son Glenn followed soon afterwards.[36] McCord and his wife split in the 1980s and he returned to live in Rathcoole.[36] He subsequently moved back to York Road.[37]

References

  1. Jump up to: a b c d Raymond McCord, Justice For Raymond, Gill & Macmillan, 2008, p. 1
  2. Jump up ^ "Raymond McCord calls for action over UVF"BBC News
  3. Jump up ^ McCord, Justice for Raymond, pp. 1-2
  4. Jump up ^ McCord, Justice for Raymond, pp. 10-11
  5. Jump up ^ "What happened next after groundbreaking BBC NI documentaries?"BBC News 18 June 2012 Retrieved 12 November 2012
  6. Jump up ^ McCord, Justice for Raymond, p. 29
  7. Jump up ^ McCord, Justice for Raymond, pp. 30-36
  8. Jump up ^ McCord, Justice for Raymond, p. 34
  9. Jump up ^ "McCords UVF killers are unlikely to face justice" Belfast Telegraph 24 February 2012 Retrieved 12 November 2012
  10. Jump up ^ McCord, Justice for Raymond, pp. 55-59
  11. Jump up ^ "McCord loses bid to head up victims' body"Belfast Telegraph 24 April 2007 Retrieved 12 November 2012
  12. Jump up ^ McCord, Justice for Raymond, p. 46
  13. Jump up ^ "Ervine should have been arrested"Newshound
  14. Jump up ^ "NI police collusion 'confirmed'" BBC News 22 January 2007 Retrieved 12 November 2012
  15. Jump up ^ "1997 list of deaths"Conflict Archive on the Internet
  16. Jump up ^ McCord, Justice for Raymond, pp. 63-65
  17. Jump up ^ David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney, Chris Thornton & David McVea, Lost Lives: The Stories of the Men, Women and Children Who Died as a Result of the Northern Ireland Troubles, Mainstream Publishing, 2008, p. 1415
  18. Jump up ^ McCord, Justice for Raymond, pp. 65-66
  19. Jump up ^ McCord, Justice for Raymond, pp. 72-73
  20. Jump up ^ McCord, Justice for Raymond, p. 75
  21. Jump up ^ "A Belfast Father's Vindication" Time 23 January 2007 retrieved 12 November 2012
  22. Jump up ^ Operation Ballast report
  23. Jump up to: a b "McCord to stand in NI election" BBC News 23 January 2007 Retrieved 12 November 2012
  24. Jump up ^ McKittrick et al, Lost Lives, p. 1416
  25. Jump up ^ McCord, Justice for Raymond, p. 194
  26. Jump up ^ McCord, Justice for Raymond, p. 195
  27. Jump up to: a b c "North Belfast election results" Ark Election results
  28. Jump up ^ "Victim's father at SF conference" BBC News 1 March 2008 Retrieved 12 November 2012
  29. Jump up ^ "Sinn Fein MEPs facilitate Raymond McCord in Strasbourg" Sinn Fein April 23, 2007 Retrieved 12 November 2012
  30. Jump up ^ McCord, Justice for Raymond, p. 158
  31. Jump up ^ Court Election Results
  32. Jump up ^ McCord, Justice for Raymond, p. 7
  33. Jump up ^ McCord, Justice for Raymond, p. 13
  34. Jump up ^ McCord, Justice for Raymond, p. 22
  35. Jump up ^ McCord, Justice for Raymond, p. 49
  36. Jump up to: a b McCord, Justice for Raymond, p. 50
  37. Jump up ^ McCord, Justice for Raymond, p. 59

http://www.irishabroad.com/Modules/CMS/Articles/DSSPrintArticle.aspx?ArticleID=3496

Father Continues Fight for Justice

May 23, 2008
By Barry McCaffrey 



HE lives on his own behind bulletproof windows with CCTV cameras watching his home to prevent being killed.

But after 10 years of fighting to expose his son’s killers as Special Branch agents, Raymond McCord insists that his journey for justice is not over.

The story of one man’s campaign to bring his son’s killers to justice has been published in a new book.

Justice for Raymond exposes the extraordinary extent that the RUC Special Branch used to protect Mark Haddock and the Mount Vernon Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) from prosecution despite involvement in more than a dozen murders, including 22-yeard-old Raymond McCord.

But the book goes further, accusing Unionist politicians of deliberately snubbing Raymond McCord pleas for support in bringing his son’s killers to justice. 

“I believe one of the reasons Unionist politicians shunned me was because I wasn’t a member of a paramilitary organization,” he says.

While McCord’s father Hector had been an Ulster Defense Association (UDA) member, he insists that he was never interested in joining any paramilitary grouping and recalls his teenage friendship with hunger striker Bobby Sands.

“From a very young age I had Catholic and Protestant friends, so there was no way I was going to join the paramilitaries, even though that was what was expected of you,” McCord says.

“I respect people having their own political beliefs, but I don’t believe anyone has the right to force their beliefs on you through the barrel of a gun.

“Myself and Bobby Sands grew up on the Rathcoole estate together. We went to discos together and were in the same football team.

“We had a great team spirit, there was no politics or sectarianism. There were guys on the team who went on to join the UVF, UDA and IRA while others like me took nothing to do with anyone.

“But when we were kids we were all mates. The face staring out of Republican murals is not the Sandsy I knew.

Former shipyard worker McCord admits to having been a street fighter throughout his life and to having “stepped outside the law” at times.

“I’ve never claimed to be an angel, but I was no bully either and if someone hurt my family, then I’d hurt them back,” he says. “That’s the way I was brought up and I make no apologies for it.”

McCord’s refusal to bow down led to conflict with both the UDA and UVF. In the 1990s the UDA twice tried to kill him after he beat up the organization’s south east Antrim brigadier.

“I saw John Gregg bullying a guy in a bar so I knocked him out. I hit him so many times I broke both my hands,” recalls McCord.

“He went to the police and had me charged, but when it came to court he refused to give evidence against me.”

Weeks later a UDA gang broke both McCord’s legs.

However, his life changed forever on Sunday, November 10, 1997 when police arrived at his York Street home to break the news that his eldest son had been beaten to death.

“I just broke down and cried when they told me Raymond had been murdered,” McCord says.

“To this day I can’t remember what hymns were played at his funeral because I was just numb.”

In the years that followed the heartbroken father attempted to prove that his son’s killers were being protected by Special Branch.

“No one wanted to know, especially Unionist politicians. I was labeled a crank,” he says. “Protestants didn’t want to believe that collusion took place against Protestants.” 

The campaign to expose his son’s killers led to his family paying a heavy price, with countless deaths threats and attacks on their homes, including his son’s grave being desecrated on three occasions.

However McCord gained an invaluable ally when he approached Police Ombudsman Nuala O’Loan in 2003.

“She was my last chance,” McCord says. “I had nowhere else to go, but Nuala O’Loan believed in me and gradually her office was able to show that I’d been telling the truth all along.

“One of the most satisfying days of my life was being there on January 22, 2007 to witness Nuala O’Loan exposing the fact that Special Branch had allowed Haddock and his gang to commit up to a dozen murders.

“It showed that 10 years of my life hadn’t been wasted, and it showed that police had allowed innocent Catholics and Protestants to be killed in cold blood.”

The 55-year-old says it is ironic that he received more support from Nationalists than politicians from within the Unionist community – including help from the Irish American community.

In 2007 McCord was among a number of families whose loved ones were killed as a result of alleged security force collusion who were invited to the White House.

Among those in the U.S. who supported the Protestant father in his campaign to highlight his son’s murder was Irish National Caucus founder Father Sean McManus and the Ancient Order of Hibernian. 

In January McCord took another unusual step by addressing the Sinn Fein Ard Fheis (convention) in his father’s Orange Order collerette.

“I wore my father’s collerette to show people in the south that not all Protestants and Loyalists were bigots and that there were just as many Republican bigots,” McCord says.

“Just as collusion wasn’t one sided, neither was bigotry.”

Raymond McCord says that one of the proudest moments in his life came while canvassing during last year’s Assembly elections.

“Certain Unionist politicians told me I’d no mandate to speak for anyone, so I decided to stand in the Assembly elections,” he says.

“I got 1,320 votes — that was 1,320 people saying I was right to fight for justice for Raymond.

“I don’t care whether the people who voted for me were Catholic or Protestant. I just want to thank them and to promise them the same thing I promised Raymond when he died.

“I’ll not rest until the men that killed my son are brought to justice.


McCord seeks U.S. justice for son

\
Raymond McCord in New York Photo by: Nuala Purcell








Nuala O'Loan

Baroness O'Loan



Hell’s Cartel: IG Farben and the Making of Hitler's War Machine


Jeffreys’ judgment about the preeminent role of IG Farben is unequivocal. ”Had the IG’s managers found the courage to oppose doing business with the Nazis in the late 1930s, or had they been even marginally less compliant, Hitler would have struggled to get his war machine moving.” Going even further, the author quotes one of the company’s top executives, Georg von Schnitzler, who concluded after the war had ended that the firm gave “‘decisive aid for Hitler’s foreign policy which led to war and the ruination of Germany . . . I must conclude that IG is largely responsible for the policies of Hitler.’”

It is difficult to imagine a more dramatic example than IG Farben of business unmoored from any moral purpose — not just supplying the products that literally fueled the Nazi war machine and sponsoring the gruesome research of Dr. Josef Mengele (the notorious “Angel of Death”), but going so far as to build its own concentration camp for Jewish slave laborers at Auschwitz. [Note: "Auschwitz" connoted a network of more than forty camp facilities, including the Birkenau extermination camp and the IG's installation near the synthetic rubber plant it was building near the Polish border town of Auschwitz.]

In the final pages of Hell’s Cartel, Jeffreys returns to the 1947 IG Farben trial in Nuremberg, detailing the testimony and attitudes of the two dozen defendants, introducing the American lawyers and judges, and relating the court’s verdict on each of the defendants. I won’t summarize here the outcome of the trial. Suffice it to say that the final chapters of this book make the whole story well worth reading.

Diarmuid Jeffreys is a British journalist and television documentary producer. In an earlier book, Aspirin: The Remarkable Story of a Wonder Drug, he researched some of the early history of Bayer and other German pharmaceutical companies that figure in central roles inHell’s Cartel.

http://malwarwickonbooks.com/who-was-really-responsible-for-hitler-and-world-war-ii/

Operation Ballast investigation into collusion
"...I was totally disgusted by what mrs O'Loan had found. it was increditable that a police charged with protecting life was interested in protecting murdering, drug dealing informants..." Raymond McCord Senior


Nuala Patricia O'Loan, Baroness O'Loan, DBE (born 20 December 1951), known between 2007 and 2009 as Dame Nuala O'Loan, is a noted public figure in Northern Ireland. She was the first Police Ombudsman in between 1999 and 2007. In July 2009, it was announced that she was to be appointed to the House of Lords. Consequently, she was raised to the peerage in September 2009. In December 2010, National University of Ireland, Maynooth appointed her as Chairman of its Governing Authority. She is a columnist with The Irish Catholic

O'Loan was born and educated in Hertfordshire, England, one of eight siblings. She studied law at King's College London, graduating in 1973, and became a law lecturer in Northern Ireland. In 1977 she survived an IRA bombing at Ulster Polytechnic,Jordanstown, while pregnant; she lost the baby as a result.

She is married to Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) councillor and former North Antrim MLA, Declan O'Loan; they have five sons. One of her sons, Damian, was badly beaten up in the Oldpark section of North Belfast. The attack, in June 2006, required him to receive hospital treatment. The motive for the attack has not yet been established. She was also a voluntary marriage counsellor, working particularly to prepare young people from different religions who are getting married.

Previous Career

O'Loan is a qualified solicitor and was a law lecturer at the Ulster Polytechnic and University of Ulster from 1974 to 1992. She was then a Senior Lecturer holding the Jean Monnet Chair in European Law at the University of Ulster from 1992 until her appointment as Ombudsman.

She has also been:

  • Chairman of the Northern Ireland Consumer Committee for Electricity
  • A Member of the Police Authority
    • Vice-Chair of the Police Authority's Community Relation Committee;
  • A Member of the Northern Health and Social Services Board
    • Convenor for Complaints for the Northern Health and Social Services Board
  • A Member of the General Consumer Council, and Convenor of the Transport and Energy Group of that Council
  • A Legal expert member of the European Commission's Consumers Consultative Council

A member of the Green Economy Working Group

Chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission's Human Rights Enquiry

For seven years, she was an independent custody visitor ("lay visitor") to policestations, which meant she could speak to people being detained, at any time of the day or night.

O'Loan was appointed by the Government of the United Kingdom to the post of Police Ombudsman designate in 1999. The Ombudsman's Office was created by the Police (Northern Ireland) Act 1998. This reform came into force some two weeks prior to the Belfast Agreement and the office's existence and practice has been the subject of continued controversy since.

Career as Ombudsman

In August 2001, she was tasked with looking into police handling of the Omagh bombing in 1998. This attack killed 29 people (and 2 unborn children). Her report, published in December 2001, found that the Royal Ulster Constabulary had prior knowledge of some form of attack planned for that area and it questioned the leadership of Northern Ireland's then Chief Constable, Sir Ronnie Flanagan.

Responding to the report, Flanagan said he considered the report to represent neither a "fair, thorough or rigorous investigation".[6] He said he was considering legal action on a "personal and organisational basis”. An application for a High Court judicial review of the report was made by the Police Association trade union in 2002 and withdrawn in 2003.

He further added: "I consider it to be a report of an erroneous conclusion reached in advance and then a desperate attempt to find anything that might happen to fit in with that, and a determination to exclude anything which does not fit that erroneous conclusion". Flanagan said that if he believed the allegations in the report had been true "I would not only resign, I would publicly commit suicide.

O'Loan attracted both praise and criticism for her robust activity in investigating alleged abuses by officers in the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI). She has also served as a trusted intermediary in controversial cases involving alleged criminal activity by Irish Republicans. This role came about because many Republicans did not yet recognise the PSNI as a legitimate and unbiased police service, and so refused to co-operate in its investigations. This role has largely disappeared as Sinn Féin have now called upon republicans to assist the PSNI.

A UK House of Commons Committee reported on the Police Ombudsman in 2005 and praised O'Loan, recommending that she be given wider powers. The same committee acknowledged that the Office was not seen as impartial by the PSNI and its officers and urged that these concerns be addressed. In December 2006, an independent survey by the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency found that Protestants and Catholics are equally supportive of the Police Ombudsman. More than four out of five people questioned from both communities also believed that police officers and complainants would be treated fairly. In addition, a survey of police officers investigated by the Police Ombudsman's Office, suggests 85% believe they have been treated fairly by the office.

Controversy

Former Ulster Unionist MP Ken Maginnis said, in relation to her handling of the Omagh Bomb Inquiry, that it was as though she had walked through "police interests and community interests like a suicide bomber”. ormer Secretary of State Peter Mandelson said she has displayed a "certain lack of experience and possibly gullibility" in relation to the same affair.

During the summer of 2006 her youngest son Ciarán, 18, was involved in an altercation with police in his home town. The PSNI announced their intention to caution him, but later reversed the decision without comment.

In October 2006 she was involved in a public row with Ian Paisley Jr. The incident happened in a Belfast coffee shop when Paisley was approached by O'Loan. She voiced her concerns on alleged comments made by Paisley about her children. Her marriage to a nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) councillor has, in the past, caused Paisley to question her ability to remain independent. On her retirement, a farewell party was organised, to which all political parties were invited. However, no representatives from the Ulster Unionist Party, Democratic Unionist Party or Sinn Féinattended.

In August 2008 O'Loan while being interviewed on BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour caused controversy by reportedly claiming that Protestants in Northern Ireland were brought up not to trust Catholics.

Awards

In 2003, the Annual Conference of the National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement (a US organisation) presented O'Loan with an award for her contribution to police accountability.

In 2008 Dame Nuala was made Person of the Year at Ireland's Annual People of the Year Awards.

On 3 July 2008 Dame Nuala was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws (LLD) by the University of Ulster in recognition of her work as Police Ombudsman and for her contribution to the social development of Northern Ireland.

In 2008 Dame Nuala was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Laws by the Higher Education and Technical Awards Council, Ireland

In 2008 Dame Nuala was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Laws by the National University of Ireland, Maynooth

In 2010 Baroness O'Loan was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Laws by Queen's University Belfast

In 2012 Baroness O'Loan was elected a member of the Royal Irish Academy

Operation Ballast investigation into collusion

On 22 January 2007 she published the results[18] of Operation Ballast, an investigation into collusion between the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the Ulster Volunteer Force in relation to the murder of Raymond McCord, Jnr in 1997.

Several crimes committed by informants working for Special Branch were investigated, including the killings of:

  • Raymond McCord, Junior
  • Peter McTasney
  • Sharon McKenna
  • Sean McParland
  • Gary Convie
  • Eamon Fox
  • Gerard Brady
  • John Harbinson

Most of the allegations concern an individual known as "Informant 1" ,[citation needed]who acted as a Special Branch informant.[citation needed]

Damehood

She was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) on 29 December 2007 in the 2008 New Year Honours. She, along with the other recipients of 2008 New Year's Honours, were congratulated by First Minister Ian Paisley.[20]

Appointment to Timor-Leste

On 19 February 2008, O'Loan was appointed by the Irish Government as special envoy in Timor-Leste (East Timor). Foreign Affairs Minister Dermot Ahern announced the appointment of O'Loan during a two-day visit to the country.

Peerage

On 11 September 2009, she was created a life peer as Baroness O'Loan, of Kirkinriola in the County of Antrim, and she was introduced in the House of Lords on 27 October 2009, where she sits on the Crossbenches.

National University of Ireland

In December 2010 it was announced that she was to be immediately appointed to Chairman of the Governing Authority by National University of Ireland, Maynooth.

See also

  • List of Northern Ireland Members of the House of Lords

References

  1. Jump up ^ "Nuala O'Loan appointed to Lords". BBC News. 13 July 2009. Retrieved 15 July 2009. 
  2. Jump up ^ Hattenstone, Simon (2002-03-11). "In the line of fire". The Guardian (London). Retrieved 2006-10-18. 
  3. Jump up ^ The Telegraph article on O'Loan
  4. Jump up ^ "Assault gang 'will not be caught'". BBC News. 2006-08-15. Retrieved 2006-11-07. 
  5. Jump up ^ Independent Custody Visitors website; retrieved January 10, 2008
  6. ^ Jump up to: a b c d "Omagh bomb report 'grossly unfair'" BBC News website, 12 December 2001
  7. Jump up ^ "Omagh legal bid withdrawn". BBC.co.uk (BBC News). 2003-01-23. Retrieved 2008-07-30. 
  8. Jump up ^ BBC report on Sinn Féin/PSNI dynamic
  9. Jump up ^ Equal support for PSNI Ombudsman BBC News website, 1 December 2006

10.  Jump up ^ Tempest, Matthew (2001-12-07). "Reid condemns leaked Omagh report". The Guardian (London). Retrieved 2006-10-23. 

11.  Jump up ^ Sharrock, David (2001-12-15). "Mandelson attacks Omagh report". The Daily Telegraph (London). Retrieved 2006-10-23. 

12.  Jump up ^ "O'Loan's son cautioned for 'torrent of abuse to cops'". The Sunday Life. 2006-08-13. Retrieved 2006-10-23. 

13.  Jump up ^ "Paisley and O'Loan in public row". BBC News. 12 October 2006. Retrieved 2006-11-07. 

14.  Jump up ^ Sunday Life, 4 November 2007

15.  Jump up ^ Controversy over O'Loan comments on BBC Radio4

16.  Jump up ^ Dame Nuala warns of fragile peace University of Ulster News Release 3 July 2008

17.  Jump up ^ RIA chief highlights longer-term goals of education, Joe Humphreys, The Irish Times, 1st June 2013

18.  Jump up ^ Operation Ballast report

19.  Jump up ^ "O'Loan made dame in honours list". BBC News. 2007-12-30. Retrieved 2007-12-30. 

20.  Jump up ^ O'Loan and Lynam receive awards in British honours list Irish Times, 29 December 2007

21.  Jump up ^ "East Timor envoy role for O'Loan". BBC News. 20 February 2008. Retrieved 20 May 2010. 

22.  Jump up ^ House of Lords Minutes of Proceedings of Tuesday 27 October 2009. Retrieved 14 June 2012.

23.  Jump up ^ "O'Loan appointed NUI Maynooth chairman". RTÉ. 15 December 2010.

On 26 June 2007 former RCMP Assistant Commissioner Al Hutchinson succeeded O'Loan as Police Ombudsman on 5 November 2007.


Hell’s Cartel: IG Farben and the Making of Hitler's War Machine

Thursday 6th August 2009
Submitted by David Matthews

http://www.historyextra.com/book-review/hell%E2%80%99s-cartel-ig-farben-and-making-hitlers-war-machine


Author:
 Diarmuid Jefferys
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Reviewed by: Roger Moorhouse
Price (RRP): £8.99 (paperback)

Grim as it is fascinating, Roger Moorhouse recommends this exploration of the business leviathan that supplied Nazi armies across Europe

The story of the IG Farben chemical conglomerate is one with tremendous relevance for the present day.  Formed in 1925, from a merger of a number of familiar firms including Agfa, BASF and Bayer, it was the largest industrial concern in Europe, and soon found itself embroiled in Hitler’s ‘revolution’, emerging as one of the mainstays of the economy of the Third Reich.

The German war effort after 1939 is almost unthinkable without IG Farben. The Wehrmacht’s vehicles rode on its synthetic tyres, were powered by its synthetic fuels and fired shells filled with its explosives. More darkly, IG Farben developed an intimate relationship with the SS; consumed countless slave labourers in its plants; most infamously the Monowitz plant near Auschwitz, and in the process earned itself grim complicity in the Holocaust. Long before the phrase was coined, it was the original military-industrial complex.

Yet, when its 24 senior executives were arraigned for trial at Nuremberg in 1947, on charges of planning aggressive war and crimes against humanity, it seems that the political imperative of rebuilding Germany had replaced that of justice and retribution.  After the standard defence of ignorance or deflecting responsibility, only 13 of the defendants were convicted, and were sentenced to moderate terms of between 18 months and 8 years.  After brief periods of enforced contrition, most of them were then free to continue their lucrative careers as captains of industry.

Diarmuid Jeffreys’s book is a wonderful exploration of this sorry tale of the amorality of rampant capitalism, in the service of a wicked dictatorship. It is engagingly written, with admirable research in evidence, but also a degree of repressed anger.  Jeffreys concludes, for instance, that when IG Farben was finally wound up in 2003, its remaining assets were paid, not to organisations of former forced-labourers, but to the banks.



Hell's Cartel: IG Farben and the Making of Hitler's War Machine Paperback

Zyklon B labels
by Diarmuid Jeffreys

“A damning new history . . .Jeffreys brings a rare combination of forensic acumen and narrative flair.” —Chicago Tribune

At its peak in the 1930s, the German chemical conglomerate IG Farben was one of the most powerful corporations in the world. To this day, companies formerly part of the Farben cartel—the aspirin maker Bayer, the graphics supplier Agfa, the plastics giant BASF—continue to play key roles in the global market. IG Farben itself, however, is remembered mostly for its infamous connections to the Nazi Party and its complicity in the atrocities of the Holocaust. After the war, Farben’s leaders were tried for crimes that included mass murder and exploitation of slave labor.

In Hell’s Cartel, Diarmuid Jeffreys presents the first comprehensive account of IG Farben’s rise and fall, tracing the enterprise from its nineteenth-century origins, when the discovery of synthetic dyes gave rise to a vibrant new industry, through the upheavals of the Great War era, and on to the company’s fateful role in World War II. Named one of the best books of the year by Business Week, Hell’s Cartel sheds new light on the codependence of industry and the Third Reich, and offers a timely warning against the dangerous merger of politics and the pursuit of profit


http://www.shellnews.net/wikipedia/HellsCartelBook.pdf

http://us.macmillan.com/hellscartel/DiarmuidJeffreys

http://www.goodreads.com/work/editions/2564757-hell-s-cartel-ig-farben-and-the-making-of-hitler-s-war-machine

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/hells-cartel-diarmuid-jeffreys/1100650014?ean=9780805091434

http://books.google.ie/books?id=reaULlRvTgwC&pg=PP5&lpg=PP5&dq=Hell%27s+Cartel:+IG+Farben+and+the+Making+of+Hitler%27s+War+Machine+Paperback+by+Diarmuid+Jeffreys&source=

Hell's Cartel: IG Farben and the Making of Hitler's War Machine

 By Diarmuid Jeffreys


http://www.whale.to/b/review4.html

Hitler's Chemists Chased Auschwitz Profits, Financed Mengele 
Review by James Pressley

Aug. 8 (Bloomberg) -- A sweet stench filled the site in occupied Poland where chemical maker I.G. Farbenindustrie AG was building a factory to feed Adolf Hitler's tanks and bombers with synthetic rubber and fuel.

Amid the hammering, barking dogs and screaming kapos, emaciated men unloaded cement bags at a trot, bent under iron girders, and died like animals. All around milled I.G. Farben men -- ``quiet men in impeccable civilian clothes,'' as one survivor recalled, ``picking their way through corpses they did not want to see, measuring timbers with bright yellow folding rules.''

This was Buna-Werke, a.k.a. I.G. Auschwitz, and the cloying smell came from the crematoriums at Birkenau.

Buna-Werke was I.G. Farben's single biggest investment ever, the site where eight years of Nazi collaboration culminated in ``a carefully planned process of extermination through labor,'' as Diarmuid Jeffreys writes in his damning new history, ``Hell's Cartel: I.G. Farben and the Making of Hitler's War Machine.''

Jeffreys is a British journalist and television producer whose previous book, ``Aspirin,'' recounted how German chemical makers pioneered that painkiller. In ``Hell's Cartel,'' he draws on Nuremberg tribunal documents, corporate and state archives, memoirs and his own interviews with survivors to explore the dark side of I.G. Farben, which was once the world's fourth-largest industrial concern.

The leading lights of the German chemical makers that merged into I.G. Farben in 1925 had invented breakthrough drugs, succeeded in mass-producing fertilizer and won Nobel Prizes.

Chemical Weapons

They also had shown a disturbing willingness to put German nationalism -- and profits -- ahead of humanity: Fritz Haber, the scientist renowned for ``fixing'' nitrate, also engineered the first poison-gas attack in World War I.
Jeffreys brings a rare combination of forensic acumen and narrative flair to bear on the material. Tracing the story back to the 19th century, he exposes the historical logic, financial pressures and moral failings that would place sophisticated executives and scientists at the heart of Hitler's strategy of autarky and conquest.

The real madness began in the 1920s, when I.G. Farben gambled its future on breakthrough technology: synthetic gasoline made from coal. The bet was predicated on research that concluded the world was running out of oil.
The first Leuna gasoline went on sale in 1927. Barely three years later, massive oil reserves were discovered in Texas, then more in the Mideast. As the Great Depression drove down demand, Leuna's prospects looked grim.

Secret Luftwaffe

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, a new market emerged: Hermann Goering was building his illegal military air force, and the secret Luftwaffe needed stealth supplies of aviation fuel.

By the end of 1933, the Reich agreed to buy all of the Leuna factory's output that couldn't be sold on the market, Jeffreys says. That same year, I.G. Farben donated more than 4.5 million Reich marks to Nazi Party funds, he says.

The cooperation deepened as I.G. Farben bosses joined the Nazi Party, worked on government commissions, dismissed Jewish workers and executives. How central was the company to Hitler's war? Here's how Jeffreys describes the Luftwaffe's dependence on I.G. Farben products as Germany prepared to invade Poland:

"The Heinkel and Junkers Stuka bombers that would launch attacks on Warsaw, Krakow, Lodz and Lublin were largely made from the I.G.'s light metals. Around 75 percent of their engines were produced from high-grade I.G. nickel, their fuselages from I.G. aluminum, their wings from I.G. magnesium.'
'The company supplied the fuel and oils. More than 90 percent of the phosphorous incendiaries they carried were made from I.G. Farben materials.

Financing Mengele

Later, at Auschwitz, the company financed the diabolical experiments of Josef Mengele and supplied the Zyklon B used in the gas chambers.

After the war, I.G. Farben was broken up and 23 of its executives were tried in Nuremberg. Most resorted to blanket denials of wrongdoing: They acted under orders, didn't dare oppose Hitler, and had no idea prisoners were being murdered.

Though 13 were found guilty of crimes including plunder, slavery and mass murder, the stiffest sentence was eight years in prison. By early 1951, all had been released on good behavior. They returned to boardrooms at German companies including I.G. Farben successors BASF AG, Bayer AG and Hoechst AG.

Some evil in Nazi Germany was born of cowardice, and some sprang from greed and ambition. Jeffreys leaves no doubt about which variety of malevolence motivated I.G. Farben.

"Hell's Cartel'' is from Bloomsbury in the U.K. and from Metropolitan in the U.S. (406 pages, 20 pounds, $32).

(James Pressley writes for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088&sid=a931TWBEmRns&refer=muse 

IG Farben was a German chemical industry conglomerate, notorious for its role in the Holocaust. Its name is taken from Interessen-Gemeinschaft Farbenindustrie AG (Syndicate [literally, "community of interests"] of dye-making corporations). The company was formed in 1925 from a number of major chemical companies that had been working together closely since World War I. During its heyday, IG Farben was the largest chemical company in the world and the fourth largest overall industrial concern, after General Motors, U.S. Steel, and Standard Oil of New Jersey.

Following the Nazi takeover of Germany, IG Farben became involved in numerous war crimes during World War II. Most notoriously, the firm's pro-Nazi leadership openly and knowingly collaborated with the Nazi government to produce the large quantities of Zyklon Bnecessary to gas to death millions of Jews and other "undesirables" at various extermination camps during the Holocaust. The firm ceased operating following the fall of Nazi Germany in 1945, when the company was seized by the Allies; its assets were utterly liquidated in 1952, and many executives were imprisoned (and several executed) at the Nuremberg Trials for their roles in the atrocities.

Engulfed by lawsuits and universal condemnation after the war's end, the company itself no longer exists, as of November 2003. Before the company went defunct it was merely as an asset-less shell with the sole stated goal of continuing to do business so it may pay many millions of marks in reparations to the victims of its many crimes.

Former type Public
Industry Chemicals
Fate Liquidated
Predecessor(s) BASF, Bayer, Hoechst,Agfa, Griesheim-Elektron, Weiler Ter Meer
Successor(s) BASF, Bayer, Hoechst
Founded December 25, 1925
Defunct 1952
Headquarters Frankfurt am Main

Founding members


IG Farben was founded on December 25, 1925, as a merger of the following six companies:

History

Predecessors of IG Farben

At the beginning of the 20th century, the German chemical industry dominated the world market for synthetic dyes. The three major firms BASF, Bayer and Hoechst produced several hundred different dyes, along with the five smaller firms Agfa, Cassella, Chemische Fabrik Kalle, Chemische Fabrik Griesheim-Elektron and Chemische Fabrik vorm. Weiler-ter Meer concentrated on high-quality specialty dyes. In 1913, these eight firms produced almost 90 percent of the world supply of dyestuffs and sold about 80 percent of their production abroad. The three major firms had also integrated upstream into the production of essential raw materials, and they began to expand into other areas of chemistry such as pharmaceuticals, photographic film, agricultural chemicals and electrochemicals. Contrary to other industries, the founders and their families had little influence on the top-level decision-making of the leading German chemical firms, which was in the hands of professional salaried managers. Because of this unique situation, the economic historian Alfred Chandler called the German dye companies "the world's first truly managerial industrial enterprises".

With the world market for synthetic dyes and other chemical products dominated by the German industry, German firms competed vigorously for market shares. Although cartels were attempted, they lasted at most for a few years. Others argued for the formation of a profit pool or Interessen-Gemeinschaft (abbr. IG, lit. Community of interest). In contrast, the chairman of Bayer, Carl Duisberg, argued for a merger. During a trip to the United States in the spring of 1903 he had visited several of the large American trusts such as Standard Oil, U.S. Steel, International Paper and Alcoa. In 1904, after having returned to Germany he proposed a nationwide merger of the producers of dye and pharmaceuticals in a memorandum to Gustav von Brüning, the senior manager at Hoechst. Hoechst and several pharmaceutical firms refused to join. Instead, Hoechst and Cassella made an alliance based on mutual equity stakes in 1904. This prompted Duisberg and Heinrich von Brunck, chairman of BASF, to accelerate their negotiations. In October 1904, an Interessen-Gemeinschaft between Bayer, BASF and Agfa was formed, also known as the Dreibund or little IG. Profits of the three firms were pooled, with BASF and Bayer getting 43 percent and Agfa 14 percent of all profits. The two alliances were loosely connected with each other through an agreement between BASF and Hoechst to jointly exploit the patent on the Heumann-Pfleger indigo synthesis.

Within the Dreibund, Bayer and BASF concentrated on dye, whereas Agfa increasingly concentrated on photographic film. Although there was some cooperation between the technical staff in production and accounting, there was little cooperation between the firms in other areas. Neither were production or distribution facilities consolidated nor did the commercial staff cooperate. In 1908 Hoechst and Cassella acquired 88 percent of the shares of Chemische Fabrik Kalle. As Hoechst, Cassella and Kalle were connected by mutual equity shares and were located close to each other in the Frankfurt area, this allowed them to cooperate more successfully than the Dreibund, although they also did not rationalize or consolidate their production facilities.

Indigo production at BASF in 1890

Foundation of IG Farben

IG Farben was founded on December 25, 1925 as a merger of the following six companies: BASF (27.4 percent of equity capital), Bayer (27.4 percent), Hoechst including Cassella(27.4 percent), Fritz Albert Haas (27.4 percent), Agfa (9.0 percent), Chemische Fabrik Kalle and Chemische Fabrik vorm. (6.0 percent), Weiler Ter Meer (1.9 percent). In 1926, IG Farben had a market capitalization of 1.4 billion Reichsmark and a workforce of 100,000 people, of which 2.6 percent were university educated, 18.2 percent were salaried professionals and 79.2 percent were workers. BASF was the nominal survivor; all shares were exchanged for BASF shares.

Similar mergers took place in other countries. In the United Kingdom Brunner Mond, Nobel Industries, United Alkali Company and British Dyestuffs merged to form Imperial Chemical Industries in September 1926. In France Établissements Poulenc Frères and Société Chimique des Usines du Rhône merged to form Rhône-Poulenc in 1928.

The IG Farben Building, headquarters for the conglomerate in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, was completed in 1931.

In 1938, the company had 218,000 employees.

World War II overview



IG Farben factory in Monowitz (near Auschwitz) 1941
50.036094°N 19.275534°E

During the planning of the occupation of Czechoslovakia and the invasion of Poland, IG Farben cooperated closely with Nazi officials and directed which chemical plants should be secured and delivered to IG Farben.

In 1941, an investigation exposed a "marriage" cartel between John D. Rockefeller's United States-based Standard Oil Co. and I.G. Farben. It also brought new evidence concerning complex price and marketing agreements betweenDuPont, a major investor in and producer of leaded gasoline, United States Industrial Alcohol Company and its subsidiary, Cuba Distilling Co. The investigation was eventually dropped, like dozens of others in many different kinds of industries, due to the need to enlist industry support in the war effort. However, the top directors of many oil companies agreed to resign, and oil industry stocks in molasses companies were sold off as part of a compromise worked out.

IG Farben held the patent for the pesticide Zyklon B[19] (used in Holocaust gas chambers), and owned 42.2 percent (in shares) of Degesch (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung) which manufactured it. IG Farben also had managers in Degesch's Managing Committee. Of the 24 directors of IG Farben indicted in the so-called IG Farben Trial(1947–1948) before a U.S. military tribunal at the subsequent Nuremberg Trials, 13 were sentenced to prison terms between one and eight years. Some of those indicted in the trial were subsequently made leaders of the post-war companies that split off from IG Farben, including those who were sentenced at Nuremberg.

Some of the people who served prison sentences but later became leaders in post war-companies include:

  • Hermann Schmitz, who became a member of the supervisory board for the Deutsche Bank in Berlin and honorary chairman of the supervisory board of Rheinische Stahlwerke AG
  • Georg von Schnitzler, serving as president of the Deutsch-Ibero-Amerikanische Gesellschaft.
  • Fritz ter Meer, becoming chairman of the supervisory board of Bayer AG and a supervisory board member of several firms
  • Otto Ambros, holding seats on supervisory boards Chemie Grünenthal (being active during the Contergan scandal), Feldmühle, and Telefunken, and working as an economic consultant in Mannheim
  • Heinrich Bütefisch, becoming a member of the supervisory boards for Deutsche Gasolin AG, Feldmühle, and Papier- und Zellstoffwerke AG, and consulting with Ruhrchemie AG Oberhausen and subsequently joining its supervisory board.
  • Max Ilgner, becoming the chairman of the executive board of a chemistry firm in Zug
  • Heinrich Oster, becoming a member of the supervisory board of Gelsenberg AG.

Some of the people who were acquitted and later became leaders in post war-companies include:

  • Fritz Gajewski, becoming chairman of the board of Dynamit Nobel.
  • Christian Schneider (chemist), becoming a member of the supervisory boards of Süddeutsche Kalkstickstoff-Werke AG Trostberg and Rheinauer Holzhydrolyse-GmbH, Mannheim.
  • Hans Kühne, taking a position at Bayer Elberfeld.
  • Carl Lautenschläger, becoming a research associate at Bayer Elberfeld.
  • Wilhelm Rudolf Mann, resuming his position as head of pharmaceutical sales at Bayer. He also presided over the GfK, Society for Consumer Research, and the Foreign Trade Committee of the BDI, Federation of German Industry.
  • Carl Wurster, resuming his position of chairman of the managing board, and was the major force behind the reestablishment of BASF. After retiring, he continued to be active as a member and chairman of supervisory boards in companies such as Bosch, Degussa (later being acquired by RAG ), and Allianz.
  • Heinrich Gattineau, becoming a member of the board and supervisory council of WASAG Chemie-AG, and Mitteldeutsche Sprengstoff-Werke GmbH

Facilities during World War II

IG Farben facilities were bombing targets of the Oil Campaign of World War II, and up to 1941, there were 5 Nazi Germany Buna plants that produced Buna N by the Lebedev process.

Dwory
The Buna Chemical Plant at Dwory was under construction by 1943, after a March 2, 1942 contract with "IG Farbenindustrie AG Auschwitz." The Buna Werke plant, which produced synthetic oil and rubber (from coal), was the beginning of SS activity and camps near Auschwitz III-Monowitz during the Holocaust. At its peak in 1944, this factory made use of 83,000 slave laborers. Today, the plant operates as "Dwory S.A." [39]
Frankfurt
In addition to the "cavernous" IG Farben building at Frankfurt, a Hoechst AG chemical factory in Frankfurt was bombed by the RAF on September 26, 1944.
Ludwigshafen and Oppau
The I.G. Farbenindustrie, A. G., Works, Ludwigshafen and Oppau had several chemical plants.
Pölitz, North Germany (today Police, Poland)
In 1937, IG Farben, Rhenania-Ossag, and Deutsch-Amerikanische Petroleum Gesellschaft founded the Hydrierwerke Pölitz AG synthetic fuel plant. By 1943, the plant produced 15% of Nazi Germany's synthetic fuels, 577,000 tons.
Waldenburg
An IG Farben plant was at Waldenburg.

Break-up and liquidation

Due to the severity of the war crimes committed by IG Farben during World War II, the company was considered to be too corrupt to be allowed to continue to exist. The Soviet Union seized most of IG Farben's assets located in the Soviet occupation zone (see Morgenthau Plan), as part of their reparation payments. The Western Allies however, in 1951, split the company up into its original constituent companies. The four largest quickly bought the smaller ones. Today Agfa, BASF, and Bayer remain, Hoechst having in 1999 demerged its industrial chemical operations to Celanese AG and merged its life-sciences businesses with Rhône-Poulenc's to form Aventis.

Part of Hoechst was afterwards Celanese AG, while another part of the company was sold in 1997 to the chemical spin-off of Sandoz, the Muttenz (Switzerland) based Clariant.

IG Farben was officially put into liquidation in 1952, but this did not end the company's legal existence. As of 2012, it still exists as a corporation "in liquidation", meaning that the purpose of the continuing existence of the corporation is to ensure an orderly wind-down of its affairs. Its stock still traded on German markets until the spring of 2012.

In 2001, IG Farben announced it would formally wind up its affairs in 2003. It has been continually criticized over the years for failing to pay any compensation to the former laborers, which was the stated reason for its continued existence after 1952. The company, in turn, blamed ongoing legal disputes with the former captive labourers as being the reason it could not be legally dissolved and the remaining assets distributed as reparations.[43] On November 10, 2003, its liquidators filed for insolvency, but again, this does not affect the existence of the company as a legal entity. While it did not join a national compensation fund set up in 2001 to pay the victims, it contributed 500,000 DM (£160,000 or €255,646) towards a foundation for former captive labourers under the Nazi regime. The remaining property, worth DM 21 million (£6.7 million or €10.7 million), went to a buyer. Each year, the company's annual meeting in Frankfurt was the site of demonstrations by hundreds of protesters.

IG Farben Trial

The United States of America vs. Carl Krauch, et al., also known as the IG Farben Trial, was the sixth of the twelve trials for war crimes the U.S. authorities held in their occupation zone in Germany (Nuremberg) after the end of World War II, against leading industrialists of Nazi Germany for their conduct during the Nazi regime. The defendants in this case had all been directors of IG Farben. Of the 24 defendants arraigned, 13 were found guilty. The indictment was filed on May 3, 1947; the trial lasted from August 27, 1947 until July 30, 1948.

All defendants who were sentenced to prison received early release. Most were quickly restored to their directorships, and some were awarded the Federal Cross of Merit.

Product

Synthetic dyes, Nitrile rubber, Polyurethane, Prontosil, Resochin, Zyklon B, among others. Sarin was discovered at IG Farben.

IG Farben scientists made fundamental contributions to all areas of chemistry. Otto Bayer discovered the polyaddition for the synthesis of polyurethane in 1937. Several IG Farben scientists were awarded a Nobel Prize. Carl Bosch and Friedrich Bergius were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1931 "in recognition of their contributions to the invention and development of chemical high pressure methods". Gerhard Domagk was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1939 "for the discovery of the antibacterial effects of prontosil". Kurt Alder was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (together with Otto Diels) in 1950 "for his [their] discovery and development of the diene synthesis".

IG Farben in fictio

See also

References

  1. ^ Jump up to:a b Tammen 1978, p. 195
  2. Jump up^ Aftalion 1991, p. 104, Chandler 2004, p. 475
  3. Jump up^ Chandler 2004, pp. 474–485
  4. Jump up^ Chandler 2004, p. 479
  5. Jump up^ Beer 1981, pp. 124–125
  6. Jump up^ Duisberg, Carl, Denkschrift über die Vereinigung der deutschen Farbenfabriken (in German) (Abhandlungen, Vorträge und Reden aus den Jahren 1882–1921 ed.), Berlin, pp. 343–369
  7. Jump up^ Beer 1981, pp. 125–134
  8. Jump up^ Tammen 1978, p. 11
  9. ^ Jump up to:a b Chandler 2004, p. 480
  10. Jump up^ Aftalion 1991, pp. 140, 143
  11. Jump up^ Fiedler, Martin (1999), "Die 100 größten Unternehmen in Deutschland - nach der Zahl ihrer Beschäftigten - 1907, 1938, 1973 und 1995", Zeitschrift für Unternehmensgeschichte (in German) (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck) 1: 32–66
  12. Jump up^ Trading With the Enemy (1983), Charles Higham: Delacorte Press, New York NY; Pp. 32 - 62 ISBN 0-440-09064-4
  13. Jump up^ Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler (2000) By Antony C. Sutton]
  14. Jump up^ Facts and Fascism (1943) by George Seldes
  15. Jump up^ The Senate Military Affairs Subcommittee on War Mobilization (Kilgore Committee), headed by Senator Harley M. Kilgore, held several hearings throughout the second half of 1945 that focused on German economic penetration of neutral countries, elimination of German resources for war, German's resources for a third world war, etc. Archives are at NARA's Center for Legislative Archives in the Archives I building. See the National Archives finding aid for Holocaust research.
  16. Jump up^ World Without Cancer: The Story of Vitamin B17 (Laetrile) (1974-1975) by G. Edward Griffen
  17. Jump up^ I.G. Farben (1947) by Richard Sasuly
  18. Jump up^ Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler (2000) By Antony C. Sutton, a book that describes in detail the money trail from its roots to the bank accounts of the Nazi SS.
  19. Jump up^ Česky. "Zyklon B - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia". En.wikipedia.org. Retrieved 2012-02-25.
  20. Jump up^ "Wollheim Memorial". Wollheim-memorial.de. Retrieved 2012-02-25.
  21. Jump up^ "Wollheim Memorial". Wollheim-memorial.de. Retrieved 2012-02-25.
  22. Jump up^ "Wollheim Memorial". Wollheim-memorial.de. Retrieved 2012-02-25.
  23. Jump up^ "Wollheim Memorial". Wollheim-memorial.de. Retrieved 2012-02-25.
  24. Jump up^ "Wollheim Memorial". Wollheim-memorial.de. Retrieved 2012-02-25.
  25. Jump up^ "Wollheim Memorial". Wollheim-memorial.de. Retrieved 2012-02-25.
  26. Jump up^ "Wollheim Memorial". Wollheim-memorial.de. Retrieved 2012-02-25.
  27. Jump up^ "Wollheim Memorial". Wollheim-memorial.de. Retrieved 2012-02-25.
  28. Jump up^ "Wollheim Memorial". Wollheim-memorial.de. Retrieved 2012-02-25.
  1. ^ "Wollheim Memorial". Wollheim-memorial.de. Retrieved 2012-02-25.
  2. Jump up^ "Wollheim Memorial". Wollheim-memorial.de. Retrieved 2012-02-25.
  3. Jump up^ "Wollheim Memorial". Wollheim-memorial.de. Retrieved 2012-02-25.
  4. Jump up^ "Chemical & Engineering News: Latest News-RAG To Take Over Degussa". Pubs.acs.org. Retrieved 2012-02-25.
  5. Jump up^ "Wollheim Memorial". Wollheim-memorial.de. Retrieved 2012-02-25.
  6. Jump up^ "Wollheim Memorial". Wollheim-memorial.de. Retrieved 2012-02-25.
  7. Jump up^ "Summaries: Microfilm 2, U.S. Government Technical Oil Mission" (PDF). pp. 15 pdf pages (last numbered 14). Retrieved 2009-05-21. Table of Contents
  8. Jump up^ HQ. U.S.S.T.A.F. (5 March 1944), "Appendix F", Plan for Completion of Combined Bomber Offensive (Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library: SMITH, WALTER BEDELL: Collection of World War II Documents, 1941-1945; Box No.: 48: HQ, U.S.S.T.A.F), "MOST SECRET … DECLASSIFIED … 4/4/74"
  9. Jump up^ "Ptak Science Books: Abbreviating Auschwitz in a Monstrous Document: the Construction Contract for the Building of Auschwitz III". Longstreet.typepad.com. 2008-09-23. Retrieved 2012-02-25.
  10. Jump up^ IG Farben Trial Documents
  11. Jump up^ "Buna Werke (WWII Nazi Labor Camp) (Now Dwory S.A. Chemical Works) Oświęcim". Wikimapia.org. Retrieved 2012-02-25.
  12. ^ Jump up to:a b (German)Karlsch, Rainer; Stokes, Raymond G (2003), Faktor Öl: die Mineralölwirtschaft in Deutschland 1859-1974, C.H.Beck, pp. 193ff,196, ISBN 3-406-50276-8
  13. Jump up^ "Summaries: Microfilm 2, U.S. Government Technical Oil Mission" (PDF). fischer-tropsch.org. pp. 15 pdf pages. Retrieved 2009-05-21.
  14. Jump up^ Deutsche Welle (German) (2012-11-20). "Norbert Wollheim gegen IG Farben". Retrieved 2013-12-07.
  15. ^ Jump up to:a b IG Farben to be dissolved BBC News Online September 17, 2001. Accessed March 27, 2008.
  16. Jump up^ "I.G.-Farben-Insolvenz: Ehemalige Zwangsarbeiter gehen leer aus - SPIEGEL ONLINE - Nachrichten - Wirtschaft". Spiegel.de. Retrieved 2012-02-25.
  17. Jump up^ Former Zyklon-B maker goes bust BBC News Online November 10, 2003. Accessed March 27, 2008.
  18. Jump up^ Diarmuid Jeffreys, Hell's Cartel: IG Farben and the Making of Hitler's War Machine, Bloomsbury, 2009, pp. 321-341
  19. Jump up^ Nicholson, John W. (2006), The Chemistry of Polymers, London: Royal Society of Chemistry, p. 61, ISBN 0-85404-684-4
  20. Jump up^ The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1931, Nobel Foundation, retrieved 2008-10-27
  21. Jump up^ The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1939, Nobel Foundation, retrieved 2008-10-27
  22. Jump up^ The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1950, Nobel Foundation, retrieved 2008-10-27

Bibliography

  • Aftalion, Fred; Otto Theodor Benfey (1991), A History of the International Chemical Industry, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, ISBN 0-8122-8207-8
  • Beer, John Joseph (1981), The Emergence of the German Dye Industry, Manchester, NH: Ayer Company Publishers, ISBN 0-405-13835-0
  • Borkin, Joseph (1978), The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben, New York, London: The Free Press, division of Macmillan Publishing Co., ISBN 0-02-904630-0
  • Borkin, Joseph (1990), Die unheilige Allianz der IG Farben. Eine Interessengemeinschaft im Dritten Reich (in German), Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, ISBN 3-593-34251-0
  • Chandler, Alfred DuPont (2004), Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-78995-4
  • Dubois, Jr., Josiah E. (1952), The Devil's Chemists, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, ASIN B000ENNDV6
  • Hayes, Peter (1987), Industry and Ideology IG Farben in the Nazi Era, Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-32948-5
  • Jeffreys, Diarmuid (2008), Hell's Cartel-IG Farben and the making of Hitlers War Machine, New York: Metropolitan Books-Henry Holt and Company, ISBN 978-0-8050-9143-4
  • Kreikamp, Hans-Dieter (1977), "Die Entflechtung der I.G. Farbenindustrie A.G. und die Gründung der Nachfolgegesellschaften", Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte (in German) (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag) 25 (2): 220–251, retrieved 2008-10-27
  • Plumpe, Gottfried (1990), Die I.G. Farbenindustrie AG: Wirtschaft, Technik und Politik 1904–1945 (in German) (Schriften zur Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte ed.), Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, ISBN 3-428-06892-0
  • Tammen, Helmuth (1978), Die I.G. Farbenindustrie Aktiengesellschaft (1925-1933): Ein Chemiekonzern in der Weimarer Republik (in German), Berlin: H. Tammen, ISBN 3-88344-001-9

Who was really responsible for Hitler and World War II?

by  • SEPTEMBER 2, 2013


A review of Hell’s Cartel: IG Farben and the Making of Hitler’s War Machine, by Diarmuid Jeffreys

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

In 1965, just twenty years after the collapse of the Nazi regime, I visited Auschwitz. Even though that was nearly half a century ago, my memory of that shattering experience remains vivid: the mountains of human hair, eyeglasses, and gold dental fillings; the photographs of skeletal prisoners staring glassy-eyed from bunk beds crowded together in darkness; the route from the trains to the barracks to the ovens followed by more than one million European Jews from 1941 to 1944.

Those disturbing images kept coming back to me as I made my way through the pages of Hell’s Cartel,Diarmuid Jeffreys’ compelling story of the role of Germany’s largest industrial concern in the rise of the Nazis and the conduct of World War II. Few readers under the age of 60 are familiar with the name IG Farben, but for most of the 1920s and 1930s, the company ranked fourth in the world, just behind General Motors, U. S. Steel, and Standard Oil of New Jersey. However, IG Farben was more than another enormous business — it was, in fact, a cartel, or association of separate huge firms for much of its existence — and, more than any other company, it personified German science and Germany’s rise while it dominated much of the German economy between the two World Wars. (The name IG Farben is an abbreviation for a string of German terms meaning “community of interest of dye-making corporations.”)

Hell’s Cartel opens in Nuremberg in 1947, where 23 of the highest-ranking Nazi political and military leaders of the Third Reich had been tried, and most found guilty, in a lengthy war crimes trial that ended the preceding year. Now, in one of a series of subsequent military tribunals, 24 of the directors of IG Farben were going on trial, too. With the scene set against the devastation of urban Germany, Jeffreys then launches into the history of IG Farben, beginning in the 1880s with the first attempts in Germany to challenge English control of the chemical dye industry; the emergence of several large companies famous in their own right (Bayer, BASF, Hoechst, Agfa) as the German industry overtook its competitors and leapt to the lead in dyestuffs, pharmaceuticals, and chemicals; and the two-decade quest of Carl Duisberg (“the world’s greatest industrialist”) to convince the leaders of competing firms to combine with his own company, Bayer, in an all-German chemical cartel. When Duisberg finally won the day in 1925 and the IG Farben was born, the foundation was laid for one of the darkest chapters in the history of business.

In Jeffreys’ view, the fatal moment came in 1933, shortly after Hitler came to power, when the IG’s chief executive, Carl Bosch, entered into a huge government contract to produce high-octane synthetic fuel for Hermann Goering’s illegal air force. “The agreement Bosch had signed,” Jeffreys writes, “was far more  than the fulfillment of his long-held ambitions [to commercialize synthetic fuel]. It was also a pivotal moment in a sequence of events that would lead inexorably to the blitzkrieg, to Stalingrad, and to the gas chambers of Auschwitz.” Although the IG manufactured thousands of products through its extensive web of companies and subsidiaries — ultimately, throughout the lands Hitler annexed from 1936 to 1943 — its military significance lay chiefly in its production of synthetic fuel, synthetic rubber, and explosives. However, for many observers, the cartel’s most notable product was the Zyklon-B gas used to exterminate millions of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and others judged undesirable and unfit in the deranged mind of Adolf Hitler and those who followed his lead.

Jeffreys’ judgment about the preeminent role of IG Farben is unequivocal. ”Had the IG’s managers found the courage to oppose doing business with the Nazis in the late 1930s, or had they been even marginally less compliant, Hitler would have struggled to get his war machine moving.” Going even further, the author quotes one of the company’s top executives, Georg von Schnitzler, who concluded after the war had ended that the firm gave “‘decisive aid for Hitler’s foreign policy which led to war and the ruination of Germany . . . I must conclude that IG is largely responsible for the policies of Hitler.’”

It is difficult to imagine a more dramatic example than IG Farben of business unmoored from any moral purpose — not just supplying the products that literally fueled the Nazi war machine and sponsoring the gruesome research of Dr. Josef Mengele (the notorious “Angel of Death”), but going so far as to build its own concentration camp for Jewish slave laborers at Auschwitz. [Note: "Auschwitz" connoted a network of more than forty camp facilities, including the Birkenau extermination camp and the IG's installation near the synthetic rubber plant it was building near the Polish border town of Auschwitz.]

In the final pages of Hell’s Cartel, Jeffreys returns to the 1947 IG Farben trial in Nuremberg, detailing the testimony and attitudes of the two dozen defendants, introducing the American lawyers and judges, and relating the court’s verdict on each of the defendants. I won’t summarize here the outcome of the trial. Suffice it to say that the final chapters of this book make the whole story well worth reading.

Diarmuid Jeffreys is a British journalist and television documentary producer. In an earlier book, Aspirin: The Remarkable Story of a Wonder Drug, he researched some of the early history of Bayer and other German pharmaceutical companies that figure in central roles inHell’s Cartel.

http://malwarwickonbooks.com/who-was-really-responsible-for-hitler-and-world-war-ii/


Magazine

IG Farben and Hitler: A Fateful Chemistry



http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2008-08-13/ig-farben-and-hitler-a-fateful-chemistry

How a company whose Nobel-winning scientists discovered vital medicines became a Nazi collaborator

Hell's Cartel:IG Farben and the Makingof Hitler's War MachineBy Diarmuid JeffreysMetropolitan Books; 485 pp; $32

In February 1941, a top manager of German chemical group IG Farben thought he had found the perfect location for a new synthetic-rubber factory. The site was out of range of Allied bombers, easily reached by rail, and had plenty of water and coal. Most important, there was a ready supply of cheap labor. The site was near a town in occupied Poland called Oswiecim, better known to history as Auschwitz.

IG Farben went on to build a plant at Auschwitz so massive that it consumed more electricity per day than Berlin. It was in effect a privately run death camp, where inmate workers' life expectancy was only a few months. That was hardly the only activity that put IG Farben at the center of the Nazi nightmare. An IG Farben subsidiary produced Zyklon B, the pesticide repurposed by the SS for the gas chambers. And the conglomerate was the main supplier of chemical products essential to the Nazi war machine.

Probably never in history has a major corporation been twisted to such evil ends. Yet what is most disturbing is that, for most of its past, the conglomerate and its predecessor companies embodied many of the qualities we admire in business today. Its managers were inventive and diligent, and its scientists discovered vital medicines, with quite a few earning Nobel prizes.

In Hell's Cartel: IG Farben and the Making of Hitler's War Machine, Diarmuid Jeffreys expertly chronicles how this once-proud company descended into the abyss. It's a complex tale spanning a century and featuring a huge cast. Jeffreys, whose previous book, Aspirin: The Remarkable Story of a Wonder Drug, chronicled the history of the painkiller, here does a superb job of managing the material and drawing concise sketches of key figures. At almost 500 pages, this is a brisk read.

IG Farben traced its origins to the efforts of men such as Carl Bosch of BASF Group, who led the effort to mass-produce synthetic ammonia. The work was crucial to solving a worldwide shortage of fertilizer and preventing mass starvation. He and other scientist-managers made Germany the dominant producer of drugs and chemicals in the years before World War I. Bosch was a man of conscience but also deeply patriotic. During World War I he became a national hero after leading a crash effort to develop synthetic nitric acid, essential to producing explosives. Most notoriously, BASF chemist Fritz Haber, who had developed the processes used to make ammonia, came up with the idea of using chlorine gas as a weapon.

That was only the first of the moral compromises that foreshadowed greater horrors. As the war drained manpower from the chemical factories, Bayer (BAY) Chief Executive Friedrich Carl Duisberg lobbied for a novel solution: importing forced labor from occupied Belgium. Germany sent the workers home after vehement international protest, but the precedent was set.

IG Farben came into being in 1925. Bosch convinced Bayer, BASF, Hoechst, and many smaller companies to form a cartel powerful enough to withstand turbulent times. Although Bosch, who became chairman, criticized Adolf Hitler publicly as late as 1939, he was unable or unwilling to prevent more opportunistic members of IG Farben management from joining the Nazi Party, providing financial backing to the regime, and taking an active role in secret war preparations.

IG managers later insisted they knew nothing of Nazi crimes or said they had been coerced. But the Nazi military worked closely with the company: Had IG Farben "been even marginally less compliant, Hitler would have struggled to get his war machine moving," Jeffreys writes. About 35% of a German foot soldier's gear was made of IG Farben materials. Even the keys to Enigma coding machines, the Nazi communications devices famously hacked by the Allies, were made of IG's plastic.

In its final chapters, Hell's Cartel becomes a courtroom drama as Jeffreys chronicles U.S. Army prosecutor Telford Taylor's efforts to convict IG Farben managers of war crimes. Shamefully, right-wing members of the U.S. Congress tried to impede Taylor's work, perhaps attempting to protect constituents in the chemical industry who had cooperated with IG Farben before the war. It's not a pretty history. But it is gripping, full of warnings about the potential of corporations to mutate into criminal enterprises.




 

The book “Justice For Raymond” by Raymond McCord Senior and “the Ballast Report” by Nuala O’Loan (Mrs) , Police Ombudsman For Northern Ireland 

details:

One man’s ten-year fight to track down his son’s killers and bring them to justice.

IN 9th November 1997, the body of 22 year-old former RAF radar operator, Raymond McCord was found dumped at Ballyduff quarry, Newtownabbey, just a few miles outside Belfast. He had been killed with a concrete breeze block. His face had been so badly disfigured form the rain of blows that his coffin had to remain closed during his funeral. The outlawed UVF, the oldest Protestant paramilitary group in Northern Ireland, had killed him on the jailhouse order of mark Haddock, the head of the drug-dealing unit in the north Belfast suburb of Mount Vernon, Haddock heard that Raymond McCord Jnr was about to reveal his activities to the leadership of the UVF.

http://www.policeombudsman.org/publicationsuploads/BALLAST-PUBLIC-STATEMENT-22-01-07-FINAL-VERSION1.pdf

 

 

Statement by The Police Ombudsman of Northern Ireland on her investigation into the circumstances surrounding the Death of Raymond McCord Junior and related matters

 

This Statement is published in accordance with Section 62 of the Police 

(Northern Ireland) Act 1998 and is a report on the Police Ombudsman’s 

investigation into matters surrounding the death of Raymond McCord 

Junior. The report is based on the findings of an extensive investigation 

by the Police Ombudsman, including interviews with former and serving 

police officers and the assessment of intelligence reports and many 

thousands of other documents held within the policing system, only 

some of which will be referred to in this Statement.

 

Nuala O’Loan (Mrs) , Police Ombudsman For Northern Ireland 

 

22nd January 2007

 

CONTENTS 

 

SECTION ONE: A MAJOR INVESTIGATION 

 

 The role of the Office of the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland 

 

Executive Summary 

 

1. Introduction 

2. Human Rights Issues 

3. Initial concerns – Matters brought to the attention of the Secretary of State and the Northern Ireland Office 

4. Matters brought to the attention of the Chief Constable 

5. Matters brought to the attention of the Surveillance Commissioner 

6. The initiation and scope of the investigation 

7. The review of the investigation 

8. Difficulties encountered during the investigation 

 

SECTION FOUR: INTELLIGENCE LINKING INFORMANT 1 AND OTHERS 

TO OTHER CRIMES 

 

23. CID searches blocked by Special Branch, 1997 

24. Planned attack and attack in the Republic of Ireland, 1996 and 1997 

25. Targeting of a Republican, 1994 

26. Arson attack and other crimes, 1997 

27. Drug Dealing in North Belfast and Larne 

28. “Punishment” shootings and attacks 

29. Possession of Information Likely to be of Use to Terrorists 

 

 

SECTION FIVE 

 

30. Financial arrangements and Informant 1 

 

 

SECTION SIX 

 

31. Informant Handling, Supervision and Management 

 

 

SECTION SEVEN 

 

32. Collusion 

 

 

SECTION EIGHT 

 

33. Conclusions 

 34. Recommendations 

 

 

 

APPENDIX A 

 

Changes to PSNI Working Practices Since 2003

 

 

SECTION TWO: THE MURDER OF RAYMOND McCORD JUNIOR. 

 

9. The murder of Raymond McCord Junior and the subsequent investigation by the Police 

 

 

SECTION THREE: INTELLIGENCE LINKING INFORMANT 1 AND OTHERS 

TO MURDER AND ATTEMPTED MURDER 

 

10. The murder of Mr Peter McTasney, 1991 

11. The attempted murders of Intended Victim One, Intended Victim Two, Intended Victim Three and Intended Victim Four, 1989-1991 

12. The attempted murder of Intended Victim Five, 1992 

13. The murder of Ms Sharon McKenna, 1993 

14. The murder of Mr Sean McParland, 1994 

15. The murders of Mr Gary Convie and Mr Eamon Fox, 1994 

16. The murder of Mr Gerald Brady and associated incidents, 1994 

17. The murder of Mr Thomas Sheppard, 1996 

18. The murder of Mr John Harbinson, 1997 

19. The murder of Mr Thomas English, 2000 

20. The attempted murders of Intended Victims Six and Seven, in 1992 and 1997 

21. The attempted murders of Intended Victim Eight 

22. The attempted murder of Intended Victims Nine and Ten

 

SECTION FOUR: INTELLIGENCE LINKING INFORMANT 1 AND OTHERS 

TO OTHER CRIMES 

 

23. CID searches blocked by Special Branch, 1997 

24. Planned attack and attack in the Republic of Ireland, 1996 and 1997 

25. Targeting of a Republican, 1994 

26. Arson attack and other crimes, 1997 

27. Drug Dealing in North Belfast and Larne 

28. “Punishment” shootings and attacks 

29. Possession of Information Likely to be of Use to Terrorists 

 

 

SECTION FIVE 

 

30. Financial arrangements and Informant 1 

 

 

SECTION SIX 

 

31. Informant Handling, Supervision and Management 

 

 

SECTION SEVEN 

 

32. Collusion 

 

 

SECTION EIGHT 

 

33. Conclusions 

 34. Recommendations 

 

 

 

APPENDIX A 

 

Changes to PSNI Working Practices Since 200

 

THE ROLE OF THE OFFICE OF POLICE OMBUDSMAN FOR NORTHERN 

IRELAND. 

 

The Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland is: 

 

• Established by the Police (NI) Act 1998. 

• Accountable to Parliament through the Secretary of State. 

• Constituted and operated independently of the Northern Ireland Policing Board and the Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland. 

• Required to have regard to guidance issued by the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. 

• An executive, non-departmental body financed by Grant in Aid from the Northern Ireland Office. 

 

The Police (NI) Act 1998 directs the Police Ombudsman to; 

 

• Exercise her powers in such a manner and to such an extent as appears to her to best secure: (a) the efficiency, effectiveness and independence of the police complaints system and (b) the confidence of the public and members of the police service in that system. 

• Observe all requirements of confidentiality. 

• Receive complaints and other referred matters and decide how to deal with them. 

• Receive and record policy complaints and refer them to the Chief Constable. 

• Make recommendations to the Director of Public Prosecutions for criminal prosecution. 

• Make recommendations and directions in respect of disciplinary action against police officers. 

• Notify the Secretary of State, the Northern Ireland Policing Board and the Chief Constable of the outcome of certain complaints, referred matters and any investigation which the Police Ombudsman initiates without complaint. 

• Report annually to the Secretary of State. 

 

The Police (NI) Act 2000 directs the Police Ombudsman to: 

 

• Carry out enquiries as directed by the Secretary of State and; 

• Supply statistical information to the Northern Ireland Policing Board. 

 

The Police (NI) Act 2003 directs the Police Ombudsman to:

 

• Investigate a current policy or practice if (a) the practice or policy comes to her attention under the Police (NI) Act 1988 and (b) she has 

reason to believe that it would be in the public interest to investigate it.

 

 

• Investigate a current policy or practice if (a) the practice or policy comes to her attention under the Police (NI) Act 1988 and (b) she has reason to believe that it would be in the public interest to investigate it.

 

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

 

1. In May 2002 Mr Raymond McCord Senior made a complaint to the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland about police conduct in relation to the murder of his son, Mr Raymond McCord Junior. His complaint alleged that police over a number of years, acted in such a way as to protect informants from being fully accountable to the law. 

 

2. Preliminary enquiries following receipt of Mr McCord’s complaint showed that there were sufficient issues of concern to warrant a wide-ranging investigation not only into matters relating to the investigation of Mr McCord’s son’s murder, butalso into the police handling and management of identified informants from the early 1990s onwards.

 

3. In the course of the investigation the Police Ombudsman sought the cooperation of a number of retired RUC/PSNI senior officers. Officers who were being treated as witnesses were asked to provide anexplanation of Special Branch and CID internal practices during this period. Investigators offered to meet retired officers at venues with which they would be comfortable and at times which would suit them.

They were advised of the areas of questioning and provided with significant disclosure of information, at their request. The majority of them failed even to reply. This was despite the fact that witness details would be anonomised in any public statement. Amongst those who refused were two retired Assistant Chief Constable’s, seven Detective Chief Superintendent’s and two Detective Superintendent’s.

 

4. Some retired officers did assist the investigation, and were helpful. Officers varied a great deal in the manner in which they responded to questions. Some, including some retired officers dealt with challenging questions in a professional manner.  

 

5. Others, including some serving officers, gave evasive, contradictory, and on occasion farcical answers to questions. On occasion those answers indicated either a significant failure to understand the law, or contempt for the law. On other occasions the investigation demonstrated conclusively that what an officer had told the Police Ombudsman’s investigators was completely untrue.

 

6. The Police Ombudsman’s initial concerns about PSNI informant management processes caused her to alert the Chief Constable to those concerns in March 2003. She subsequently made him aware on 8 September 2003 of her very detailed concerns about these matters.

She also alerted the Surveillance Commissioner on 15 September 2003. He carried out an inspection of the Special Branch handling of Informant 1. That inspection found serious failings by Special Branch to comply with the requirements of the law in relation to the handling of informants.

 

 

7. The wider investigation was focused on seven main lines of enquiry, which had emerged during preliminary enquiries and in respect of which serious concerns had arisen.

They were, in chronological order of event:

• two attempted murders in 1991.

• the murder of Sharon McKenna on 17 January 1993.

• the attempted bombing of the Sinn Fein office in Monaghan on 3 March 1997.

• the blocking by Special Branch of searches during a pre-planned CID operation in tended to disrupt the activities of the UVF.

• the murder of John Harbinson on 18 May 1997.

• the murder of Raymond McCord Junior on 9 November 1997.  

• Informant 1’s alleged involvement in drug-dealing between 1994 and 2003.

8. Other issues emerged during the course of the investigation and were

considered as part of the investigation.

9. Intelligence reports and other documents within the RUC and the PSNI,

most of which were rated as ‘reliable and probably true’, linked informants, and in particular one man who was a police informant (referred to in this report as Informant

1) to the following ten murders:

• Mr Peter McTasney who died on 24 February 1991;

• Ms Sharon McKenna who died on 17 January 1993;

• Mr Sean McParland who was attacked on 17 February 1994, and died on 25 February 1994;

• Mr Gary Convie who died on 17 May 1994;

• Mr Eamon Fox who died on 17 May 1994, in the same attack as Mr Gary Convie;

• Mr Gerald Brady who died on 17 June 1994;

• Mr Thomas Sheppard who died on 21 March 1996;

• Mr John Harbinson who died on 18 May 1997;

• Mr Raymond McCord Junior who died on 09 November 1997

• Mr Thomas English who died on 31 October 2000.

 

The Police Ombudsman’s investigators also identified less significant

police intelligence implicating Informant 1 in 5 other murders. For someof these murders, ther e is generally only one piece of intelligence,

which police have not rated as reliable. Intelligence was also found linking police informants, and in particular Informant 1, to ten attempt ed murders between 1989 and 2002.   

 

Intelligence was also found which implicated police informants, and in particular, Informant 1, in a significant number of crimes in respect of which no action or insufficient action was taken:

 

Intelligence was also found which implicated police informants, and in

particular, Informant 1, in a significant number of crimes in respect of

which no action or insufficient action was taken:

• Armed robbery;

• Assault and Grievous Bodily Harm;

• Punishment shootings and attacks;

• Possession of munitions;

• Criminal Damage;

• Drug dealing;

• Extortion;

• Hijacking;

• Intimidation;

• Conspiracy to murder

• Threats To Kill

 

 

10. Conclusions of the Police Ombudsman about the allegations made by Mr Raymond McCord about the death of his son.

 

Allegation 1: that a senior UVF figure had ordered the murder of his son, and that this individual was a police informant.

 

Finding: The Police Ombudsman can confirm that a police informant is a suspect in the murder of Mr McCord’s son. She cannot confirm or deny who that individual is.

 

Allegation 2 : that police had failed to carry out a thorough investigation of his son’s murder, and had failed to keep him updated about their investigation.

 

Findings: The Police Ombudsman has identified failures in the investigation of Mr McCord’s son’s murder. These failures may have significantly reduced the possibility of anyone being prosecuted for the murder.

There is some material which indicates some contact between specific police officers and Mr McCord, particularly during the days immediately following the murder. There has been a failure by those supervising the conduct of the police investigation to consider the benefit of identifying at the very least a single point of contact for Mr McCord. Such provision may have allowed the investigation to progress more effectively.

This allegation is therefore substantiated.

 

Allegation 3: that no-one had been arrested or charged with the murder of his son. Mr McCord alleged that this was because the man who ordered the murder was a police informant, and that this individual, and those working for him, had been protected from arrest and prosecution for a number of years.

Findings: A number of people were arrested for Raymond McCord Junior’s murder. No one has been charged with the murder. There is no evidence that anyone has been protected from arrest for the murder of Raymond McCord Junior.

With reference to Mr McCord’s allegation that a police informant had ordered his son’s murder, and that this individual and those working for him had been protected from arrest and prosecution for years the Police Ombudsman conducted an extensive

investigation which is detailed in this Report. It is clear that much intelligence was disregarded by police and that they continued to use Informant 1 despite his criminal record and the extensive intelligence they held in respect of alleged serious

criminality, because he had value to them as an informant. This was wrong.

This allegation is therefore substantiated with the exception, firstly, of that part of it which refers to police failure to arrest anyone for Raymond McCord Junior’s murder, and secondly, of the fact that, whilst the Police Ombudsman can confirm that an

informer is a suspect in the murd er of Mr McCord’s son, she cannot confirm or deny who that individual is.   

 

 

Allegation 4: That unidentified police knew something was going to happen to Raymond McCord Junior, but that they did not warn him or his family about this danger to protect the police informant who was responsible for the murder.

 

Finding: The Police Ombudsman has found no evidence or intelligence to support this allegation. It is not substantiated.

 

11. There are grave concerns about the practices of some police officers.

The activities which were identified included:

•Failure to arrest informants for crimes to which those informants had allegedly confessed, or to treat such persons as suspects for crime;

•The concealment of intelligence indicating that on a number of occasions up to three informants had been involved in a murder and other serious crime;• Arresting informants suspected of murder, then subjecting them to lengthy sham interviews at which they were not challenged about their alleged crime, and releasing them without charge;

• Creating interview notes which were deliberately misleading; failing to record and maintain original interview notes and failing to record notes of meetings with informants;

• Not recording in any investigation papers the fact that an informant was suspected of a crime despite the fact that he had been arrested and interviewed for that crime; 

 

  Not informing the Director of Public Prosecutions that an informant was a suspect in a crime in respect of which an investigation file was submitted to the Director;

• Withholding from police colleagues intelligence, including the names of alleged suspects, which could have been used to prevent or detect crime;

• An instance of blocking searches of a police informant’s home and of other locations including an alleged UVF arms dump;

• Providing at least four misleading and inaccurate documents for possible consideration by the Court in relation to four separate incidents and the cases resulting from them, where those documents had the effect of protecting an informant;

   Finding munitions at an informant’s home and doing nothing about that matter;

• Withholding information about the location to which a group of murder suspects had allegedly fled after a murder;

• Giving instructions to junior officers that records should not be completed, and that there should be no record of the incident concerned;

• Ensuring the absence of any official record linking a UVF informant to possession of explosives which may, and were thought according to a Special Branch officer’s private records, to have been used in a particular crime; 

 

Cancelling the “wanted” status of murder suspects “ because of lack of resources ” and doing nothing further about those suspects;

• Destroying or losing forensic exhibits such as metal bars;

• Continuing to employ as informants people suspected of involvement in the most serious crime, without assessing the attendant risks or their suitability as informants;

• Not adopting or complying with the United Kingdom Home Office Guidelines on matters relating to informant handling, and by not complying with the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act when it came into force in 2000.

 

12. The cumulative effect of these activities, as described by police officers and as demonstrated in documentation recovered, was to protect Informant 1 and other informants from investigation. In the absence of explanation as to why these events occurred, the Police Ombudsman has concluded that this was collusion by certain police officers with identified UVF informants.

 

13. It is accepted by the Police Ombudsman that intelligence, in itself, is

not evidence. However it may be possible to derive investigative opportunities from intelligence. There were mechanisms which were used by other police forces within the United Kingdom to prevent the failings of informant and intelligence handling identified in this Report.

Those mechanisms should have involved clear and effective policies for informant handling, combined with regular training and effective intrusive management. 

 

14. Although such systems were used, to some extent by RUC CID, they were not used by Special Branch. In 1997 the RUC introduced new rules for informant handling

and management. A decision was made by Chief Officers that those rules should not apply to Special Branch.

The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act in 2000 imposed statutory rules about the review, management, assessment and cancellation of informants. The Surveillance Commissioner found, following the referral of the matter by the Police Ombudsman, that those rules had not been complied with in the case of Informant 1, and that there had

been a failure to meet National Minimum Standards and to take into account intelligence about Informant 1’s own criminal conduct.

 

15. In the course of the investigation the Police Ombudsman has estimated that payments of at least £79,840 were made to Informant1.

 

16. The Police Ombudsman has made 20 recommendations and the

PSNI response to these recommendations is included in the Report.

PSNI have accepted all the recommendations made to them.

 

17. Prior to 2003 some RUC/PSNI Special Branch officers facilitated the

situation in which informants were able to continue to engage in paramilitary activity, some of them holding senior positions in the UVF, despite the availability of

extensive information as to their alleged involvement in crime. Those informants must have known that they were not being dealt with for crime. Some RUC/PSNI officers

were complicit in the failure to deal appropriately with Informant 1, and other informants, both by way of criminal investigation and by ceasing to use them as informants.

 

18. Since 2003 the PSNI has made significant changes and introduced new policies and working practices in relation to its strategic management of its new Crime Operations Department, which includes Intelligence Branch (formerly Special Branch) under a single Assistant Chief Constable.

 

19. It is hoped that the further necessary changes, consequential upon this Report will combine with the change already made, to ensure that never again, within the PSNI will there be the circumstances which prevailed for so long in relation to the informant handling and intelligence managements processes which are discussed in this Report.

It is also essential that, in the arrangements for the future strategic management of National Security issues in Northern Ireland, there will be accountability mechanisms which are effective, and which are capable of ensuring that what has happened does not recur.

.

 

SECTION ONE  A MAJOR INVESTIGATION

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Mr McCord’s statement of complaint  alleged that police  over a number of  years, acted in such a way as to protect informants from being fully  accountable to the law. It included the following specific allegations:

• that a senior UVF figure had ordered the murder of his son, and that this individual was a police informer;

• that police had failed to carry out a thorough investigation of his son’s murder, and had failed to keep him updated about their investigation;

•that no-one had been arrested or charged with the  murder of his son. Mr McCord alleged that this was because the man who ordered the murder was a police informant, and that this individual, and those working for him, had been protected from arrest and  prosecution for a number of years;

• that unidentified police knew something was going to happen to Raymond McCord Junior, but that they did not warn him or his family about this danger to protect the police informant who was responsible for the murder.

 

 

1.2  Following initial enquiries of the PSNI in relation to Mr McCord’s  allegations, the Police Ombudsman established that there was intelligence strongly indicating the involvement of informants in several murders and serious crimes. Accordingly the terms of reference of the investigation were widened.

1.3  This report will provide a summary of the investigation which was given the name Operation Ballast. From its outset it has been a criminal enquiry into the actions of police officers. During Operation Ballast investigators have examined a number of incidents in relation to Mr. McCord’s wide-ranging allegation that police shielded an informant and his associates in the UVF, from arrest and prosecution over a number of  years. This Report relates to the period from 1991 –2003.

1.4  Over the years, different official terms have been used to describe individuals who supply information to the police. At various stages they have been described as informants, sources, agents, and, with the introduction of the Regulation of  Investigatory Powers Act, Covert  Human Intelligence Sources, or CHIS.

For ease of reference, this report will generally refer to such people as “informants”.

 

1.5  This report is published by the Police Ombudsman as a report under

Section 62 of the Police (Northern Ireland) Act 1998, as she considers that it is in the public interest so to do, given the gravity of the allegations and of the findings of the investigation.

 

HUMAN RIGHTS ISSUES

2.1 The Police Ombudsman has a statutory duty to investigate allegations of criminality against the police, including allegations such as those made by Mr McCord that the po

lice may have “colluded” with paramilitary informants.

 

2.2 There are significant risks to the lives of people who are publicly revealed to be, or to have been,paramilitary informants. Northern Ireland has a history of the murder

of those who were even suspected of being informants. The most recent murder is thought to be that of a self-confessed informant, who died in 2005.

 

2.3 The Police Ombudsman has a duty to act in compliance with Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights. This article not only confers rights on individuals who may be informants, but also confers obligations on investigators in terms of the nature and scope of the investigation of any matter in which representatives of the State may have colluded with murderers.

 

2.4 This report will refer to relevant police informants only as informants.

No reference will be made to these informants’ real names, their relatives’ names, their police code-names or their police source numbers.

 

2.5 The Police Ombudsman will neither confirm nor deny whether the  informants referred to in this report are the individuals against whom  Mr. McCord has made his allegations. Nor will she confirm or deny whether any individual is, or ever has been, an informant for the police or any part of the security forces.

 

2.6 Over the years, different official terms have been used to describe individuals who supply information to  the police. At various stages they  have been described as informants, sources, agents, and, with the introduction of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, Covert Human Intelligence Sources, or CHIS. For ease of reference, this report will generally refer to such people as “informants”. They will be described as “Informant 1”and other “Informants”.

 

2.7 There remains a risk to police officers who have been involved in the handling and management of terrorist informants. Many of these individuals have now retired, but some are still serving officers. This Report will refer to such officers by

their rank in the relevant period and by letter, e.g. Detective Constable A, B, C etc. in alphabetical order as they occur in this report.

 

2.8 There may also be a risk to other people mentioned in this report and

they will therefore be described using letters: A, B, C et cetera.

 

INITIAL CONCERNS

3.1  Following receipt of Mr McCord’s complaint, preliminary enquiries were undertaken by the Police Ombudsman. These uncovered a large amount of police intelligence, which implicated informants in murder and other serious criminal activity. It uncovered anomalies in relation to a range of Special Branch material relating to informants within the UVF.

3.2 Of particular concern were disturbing irregularities in the police management of the individual who will henceforth be referred to as Informant 1. These irregularities related to the handling, controlling and management of Informant 1, about whom there was considerable intelligence, indicative of linkage with the most serious crime, in the

RUC systems. It is accepted by the Police Ombudsman that intelligence, in itself, is not evidence. However it may be capable of providing evidential opportunities which then require to be explored.

 

 

3.3 When an informant is used by police officers, there is an obligation to assess the informant continually, and also to assess and process any information received. On review of  the RUC material, it was discovered that there was no record of any

individual written assessment of Informant 1 between 1991 and 1999, and no written assessment between 2000 and 2003, which took into account the large amount of

intelligence implicating him in serious criminal activity, including murder.

 

3.4 Preliminary enquiries showed, therefore, that there were sufficient issues of concern to warrant a wide-ranging investigation into the police handling and management of identified informants from the early 1990s onwards. The investigation focused on seven main lines of enquiry.

 

3.5 They were as follows:

• two attempted murders in 1991.

• the murder of Sharon McKenna on 17 January 1993.

• the attempted bombing of the Sinn Fein office in Monaghan on 3 March 1997.

• the Operation Mechanic Searches.

• the murder of John Harbinson on 18 May 1997.

• the murder of Raymond McCord Junior on 9 November 1997.

•Informant 1’s alleged involvement in drug-dealing between 1994 and 2003.

Other issues emerged during the course of the enquiry and are also referred to in this Report.

 

MATTERS BROUGHT TO THE ATTENTION OF THE SECRETARY OF STATE AND THE NORTHERN IRELAND OFFICE

 

3.6 The Police Ombudsman was concerned about the implications, for her other ongoing investigative work, of conducting the investigation into

these matters, because of the anticipated scale of the investigation, and its complex subject matter. She knew that it was inevitable that the McCord investigation would impact adversely on her ability to carry out her other obligations. Accordingly

she explained the seriousness of the allegations to the Secretary of State,

and requested additional funding from the Northern Ireland Office for this enquiry and two other very serious investigations. That request was made on 22 January 2003.

This request for extra funding was not met, although a sum of £250,000 was provided on 27 November 2003 to assist the Police Ombudsman in

these enquiries.

 

3.7 This sum did not meet the anticipated cost of these enquiries. The Police Ombudsman, however, decided it was still her duty to conduct these investigations, al

though it was recognised that it would mean resources would have to be diverted from other investigations. It also meant that this investigation was slower than would have been the case had additional resources been made available. It was not possible to  start the formal stage of the investigation until 2 June 2003.

 

 

MATTERS OF CONCERN BROUGHT TO THE ATTENTION

OF THE CHIEF CONSTABLE OF THE PSNI

 

4.1  The Police Ombudsman rapidly became concerned about informant 

handling processes within the RUC/PSNI, and she decided that it was necessary to alert the Chief Constable to those concerns so that he could take any necessary action to address the emerging problems as rapidly as possible. She therefore communicated her concerns about problems relating to informant handling to the Chief Constable in

meetings on 25 March 2003 and other occasions. The Police Ombudsman’s Executive Director of Investigations then wrote to the Chief Constable on 8 September 2003, alerting him to serious concerns about the PSNI management of informants, and the potential failures in police practice which had already been identified.

 

MATTERS OF CONCERN BROUGHT TO THE ATTENTION

OF THE SURVEILLANCE COMMISSIONER

5.1 The Surveillance Commissioner is required by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act to inspect the level of police compliance with the requirements of the

Act. Preliminary enquiries had indicated to the Police Ombudsman that previous inspections by the Surveillance Commissioner had not identified significant non-compliance by the Police Service of Northern Ireland.

His report of 26 February 2003, whilst identifying some failings stated

“The majority of CHIS are working for Special Branch in the National Security area and are well handled and controlled.”

He also concluded, “Overall there continues to be a high level of compliance with the  legislation and codes of practice.”

 

5.2 Accordingly the Police Ombudsman brought her concerns to the

attention of the Surveillance Commissioner on 15 September 2003. The Surveillance Commissioner conducted a further inspection on 2 and 3 October 2003 and reported on 4 October 2004.

 

5.3 On 6 October 2003 the PSNI set up a Covert Human Intelligence Source Risk Analysis Group to undertake a full and comprehensive risk analysis of all PSNI informants.  

On 23 August 2004 the PSNI wrote to the Police Ombudsman advising her of the progress of the Covert Human Intelligence Source Risk Analysis Group to that date

One of the outcomes was that 24% of informants were cancelled. 12% of all informants were cancelled because they no longer provided useful information and 12% because they were involved in serious crime

 

THE INITIATION AND SCOPE OF THE INVESTIGATION

 

6.1 As a consequence of her emerging findings, the Police Ombudsman decided that there should be an extensive investigation into Mr. McCord’s complaint, and the issues arising from it, and that the terms of reference of the enquiry should be widened to include:

• the collection and analysis of specific informant files and authorities for the deployment of those informants;

• intelligence in respect of named individuals and incidents; and

• enquiries into police actions in respect of the investigation of many identified murders and other serious crimes.

 

6.2 The Police Ombudsman has examined police processes for the handling and management of informants, and intelligence from, and about, informants from within a UVF unit in North Belfast and Newtownabbey, primarily from 1991-2003, although reference is made to matters occurring from 1989. Intelligence indicates that members of this unit were responsible for the murder of Raymond McCord Junior. The Police

Ombudsman has also examined whether the actions of police officers may have prevented these people from being held accountable for any crimes, including the murders of Raymond McCord Junior and other individuals.

6.3 Analysis of information about the informants whose alleged activities emerged during the course of this Report, which focused on the activities of Informant 1, indicated a high level of alleged criminality.

 

 

 

 




Who Runs The World?
Solid Proof That A Core Group Of Wealthy Elitists .....
Is Pulling The Strings



Michael Snyder
Economic Collapse
Jan 30, 2013

Does a shadowy group of obscenely wealthy elitists control the world?  Do men and women with enormous amounts of money really run the world from behind the scenes?  The answer might surprise you.  Most of us tend to think of money as a convenient way to conduct transactions, but the truth is that it also represents power and control.  And today we live in a neo-fuedalist system in which the super rich pull all the strings.  When I am talking about the ultra-wealthy, I am not just talking about people that have a few million dollars.  As you will see later in this article, the ultra-wealthy have enough money sitting in offshore banks to buy all of the goods and services produced in the United States during the course of an entire year and still be able to pay off the entire U.S. national debt.  That is an amount of money so large that it is almost incomprehensible.  Under this ne0-feudalist system, all the rest of us are debt slaves, including our own governments.  Just look around – everyone is drowning in debt, and all of that debt is making the ultra-wealthy even wealthier.  But the ultra-wealthy don’t just sit on all of that wealth.  They use some of it to dominate the affairs of the nations.  The ultra-wealthy own virtually every major bank and every major corporation on the planet.  They use a vast network of secret societies, think tanks and charitable organizations to advance their agendas and to keep their members in line.  They control how we view the world through their ownership of the media and their dominance over our education system.  They fund the campaigns of most of our politicians and they exert a tremendous amount of influence over international organizations such as the United Nations, the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO.  When you step back and take a look at the big picture, there is little doubt about who runs the world.  It is just that most people don’t want to admit the truth.
The ultra-wealthy don’t run down and put their money in the local bank like you and I do.  Instead, they tend to stash their assets in places where they won’t be taxed such as the Cayman Islands.  According to a report that was released last summer, the global elite have up to 32 TRILLION dollars stashed in offshore banks around the globe.
U.S. GDP for 2011 was about 15 trillion dollars, and the U.S. national debt is sitting at about 16 trillion dollars, so you could add them both together and you still wouldn’t hit 32 trillion dollars.
And of course that does not even count the money that is stashed in other locations that the study did not account for, and it does not count all of the wealth that the global elite have in hard assets such as real estate, precious metals, art, yachts, etc.
The global elite have really hoarded an incredible amount of wealth in these troubled times.  The following is from an article on the Huffington Post website
Rich individuals and their families have as much as $32 trillion of hidden financial assets in offshore tax havens, representing up to $280 billion in lost income tax revenues, according to research published on Sunday.
The study estimating the extent of global private financial wealth held in offshore accounts – excluding non-financial assets such as real estate, gold, yachts and racehorses – puts the sum at between $21 and $32 trillion.
The research was carried out for pressure group Tax Justice Network, which campaigns against tax havens, by James Henry, former chief economist at consultants McKinsey & Co.
He used data from the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, United Nations and central banks.
But as I mentioned previously, the global elite just don’t have a lot of money.  They also basically own just about every major bank and every major corporation on the entire planet.
According to an outstanding NewScientist article, a study of more than 40,000 transnational corporations conducted by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich discovered that a very small core group of huge banks and giant predator corporations dominate the entire global economic system…
An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.
The researchers found that this core group consists of just 147 very tightly knit companies…
When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a “super-entity” of 147 even more tightly knit companies – all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity – that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. “In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network,” says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.
The following are the top 25 banks and corporations at the heart of this “super-entity”.  You will recognize many of the names on the list…
1. Barclays plc
2. Capital Group Companies Inc
3. FMR Corporation
4. AXA
5. State Street Corporation
6. JP Morgan Chase & Co
7. Legal & General Group plc
8. Vanguard Group Inc
9. UBS AG
10. Merrill Lynch & Co Inc
11. Wellington Management Co LLP
12. Deutsche Bank AG
13. Franklin Resources Inc
14. Credit Suisse Group
15. Walton Enterprises LLC
16. Bank of New York Mellon Corp
17. Natixis
18. Goldman Sachs Group Inc
19. T Rowe Price Group Inc
20. Legg Mason Inc
21. Morgan Stanley
22. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc
23. Northern Trust Corporation
24. Société Générale
25. Bank of America Corporation
The ultra-wealthy elite often hide behind layers and layers of ownership, but the truth is that thanks to interlocking corporate relationships, the elite basically control almost every Fortune 500 corporation.
The amount of power and control that this gives them is hard to describe.
Unfortunately, this same group of people have been running things for a very long time.  For example, New York City Mayor John F. Hylan said the following during a speech all the way back in 1922
The real menace of our Republic is the invisible government, which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy legs over our cities, states and nation. To depart from mere generalizations, let me say that at the head of this octopus are the Rockefeller-Standard Oil interests and a small group of powerful banking houses generally referred to as the international bankers. The little coterie of powerful international bankers virtually run the United States government for their own selfish purposes.
They practically control both parties, write political platforms, make catspaws of party leaders, use the leading men of private organizations, and resort to every device to place in nomination for high public office only such candidates as will be amenable to the dictates of corrupt big business.
These international bankers and Rockefeller-Standard Oil interests control the majority of the newspapers and magazines in this country. They use the columns of these papers to club into submission or drive out of office public officials who refuse to do the bidding of the powerful corrupt cliques which compose the invisible government. It operates under cover of a self-created screen [and] seizes our executive officers, legislative bodies, schools, courts, newspapers and every agency created for the public protection.
These international bankers created the central banks of the world (including the Federal Reserve), and they use those central banks to get the governments of the world ensnared in endless cycles of debtfrom which there is no escape.  Government debt is a way to “legitimately” take money from all of us, transfer it to the government, and then transfer it into the pockets of the ultra-wealthy.
Today, Barack Obama and almost all members of Congress absolutely refuse to criticize the Fed, but in the past there have been some brave members of Congress that have been willing to take a stand.  For example, the following quote is from a speech that Congressman Louis T. McFadden delivered to the U.S. House of Representatives on June 10, 1932
Mr. Chairman, we have in this country one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever known. I refer to the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Banks. The Federal Reserve Board, a Government board, has cheated the Government of the United States and the people of the United States out of enough money to pay the national debt. The depredations and iniquities of the Federal Reserve Board has cost this country enough money to pay the national debt several times over. This evil institution has impoverished and ruined the people of the United States, has bankrupted itself, and has practically bankrupted our Government. It has done this through the defects of the law under which it operates, through the maladministration of that law by the Federal Reserve Board, and through the corrupt practices of the moneyed vultures who control it.
Sadly, most Americans still believe that the Federal Reserve is a “federal agency”, but that is simply not correct.  The following comes from factcheck.org
The stockholders in the 12 regional Federal Reserve Banks are the privately owned banks that fall under the Federal Reserve System. These include all national banks (chartered by the federal government) and those state-chartered banks that wish to join and meet certain requirements. About 38 percent of the nation’s more than 8,000 banks are members of the system, and thus own the Fed banks.
According to researchers that have looked into the ownership of the big Wall Street banks that dominate the Fed, the same names keep coming up over and over: the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds, the Warburgs, the Lazards, the Schiffs and the royal families of Europe.
But ultra-wealthy international bankers have not just done this kind of thing in the United States.  Their goal was to create a global financial system that they would dominate and control.  Just check out what Georgetown University history professor Carroll Quigley once wrote
[T]he powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations.
Sadly, most Americans have never even heard of the Bank for International Settlements, but it is at the very heart of the global financial system.  The following is from Wikipedia
As an organization of central banks, the BIS seeks to make monetary policy more predictable and transparent among its 58 member central banks. While monetary policy is determined by each sovereign nation, it is subject to central and private banking scrutiny and potentially to speculation that affects foreign exchange rates and especially the fate of export economies. Failures to keep monetary policy in line with reality and make monetary reforms in time, preferably as a simultaneous policy among all 58 member banks and also involving the International Monetary Fund, have historically led to losses in the billions as banks try to maintain a policy using open market methods that have proven to be based on unrealistic assumptions.
The ultra-wealthy have also played a major role in establishing other important international institutions such as the United Nations, the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO.  In fact, the land for the United Nations headquarters in New York City was purchased and donated by John D. Rockefeller.
The international bankers are “internationalists” and they are very proud of that fact.
The elite also dominate the education system in the United States.  Over the years, the Rockefeller Foundation and other elitist organizations have poured massive amounts of money into Ivy League schools.  Today, Ivy League schools are considered to be the standard against which all other colleges and universities in America are measured, and the last four U.S. presidents were educated at Ivy League schools.
The elite also exert a tremendous amount of influence through various secret societies (Skull and Bones, the Freemasons, etc.), through some very powerful think tanks and social clubs (the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group, the Bohemian Grove, Chatham House, etc.), and through a vast network of charities and non-governmental organizations (the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the World Wildlife Fund, etc.).
But for a moment, I want to focus on the power the elite have over the media.  In a previous article, I detailed how just six monolithic corporate giants control most of what we watch, hear and read every single day.  These giant corporations own television networks, cable channels, movie studios, newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, music labels and even many of our favorite websites.
Considering the fact that the average American watches 153 hours of television a month, the influence of these six giant corporations should not be underestimated.  The following are just some of the media companies that these corporate giants own…
Time Warner
Home Box Office (HBO)
Time Inc.
Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.
Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
CW Network (partial ownership)
TMZ
New Line Cinema
Time Warner Cable
Cinemax
Cartoon Network
TBS
TNT
America Online
MapQuest
Moviefone
Castle Rock
Sports Illustrated
Fortune
Marie Claire
People Magazine
Walt Disney
ABC Television Network
Disney Publishing
ESPN Inc.
Disney Channel
SOAPnet
A&E
Lifetime
Buena Vista Home Entertainment
Buena Vista Theatrical Productions
Buena Vista Records
Disney Records
Hollywood Records
Miramax Films
Touchstone Pictures
Walt Disney Pictures
Pixar Animation Studios
Buena Vista Games
Hyperion Books
Viacom
Paramount Pictures
Paramount Home Entertainment
Black Entertainment Television (BET)
Comedy Central
Country Music Television (CMT)
Logo
MTV
MTV Canada
MTV2
Nick Magazine
Nick at Nite
Nick Jr.
Nickelodeon
Noggin
Spike TV
The Movie Channel
TV Land
VH1
News Corporation
Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Fox Television Stations
The New York Post
Fox Searchlight Pictures
Beliefnet
Fox Business Network
Fox Kids Europe
Fox News Channel
Fox Sports Net
Fox Television Network
FX
My Network TV
MySpace
News Limited News
Phoenix InfoNews Channel
Phoenix Movies Channel
Sky PerfecTV
Speed Channel
STAR TV India
STAR TV Taiwan
STAR World
Times Higher Education Supplement Magazine
Times Literary Supplement Magazine
Times of London
20th Century Fox Home Entertainment
20th Century Fox International
20th Century Fox Studios
20th Century Fox Television
BSkyB
DIRECTV
The Wall Street Journal
Fox Broadcasting Company
Fox Interactive Media
FOXTEL
HarperCollins Publishers
The National Geographic Channel
National Rugby League
News Interactive
News Outdoor
Radio Veronica
ReganBooks
Sky Italia
Sky Radio Denmark
Sky Radio Germany
Sky Radio Netherlands
STAR
Zondervan
CBS Corporation
CBS News
CBS Sports
CBS Television Network
CNET
Showtime
TV.com
CBS Radio Inc. (130 stations)
CBS Consumer Products
CBS Outdoor
CW Network (50% ownership)
Infinity Broadcasting
Simon & Schuster (Pocket Books, Scribner)
Westwood One Radio Network
NBC Universal
Bravo
CNBC
NBC News
MSNBC
NBC Sports
NBC Television Network
Oxygen
SciFi Magazine
Syfy (Sci Fi Channel)
Telemundo
USA Network
Weather Channel
Focus Features
NBC Universal Television Distribution
NBC Universal Television Studio
Paxson Communications (partial ownership)
Trio
Universal Parks & Resorts
Universal Pictures
Universal Studio Home Video
And of course the elite own most of our politicians as well.  The following is a quote from journalist Lewis Lapham
“The shaping of the will of Congress and the choosing of the American president has become a privilege reserved to the country’s equestrian classes, a.k.a. the 20% of the population that holds 93% of the wealth, the happy few who run the corporations and the banks, own and operate the news and entertainment media, compose the laws and govern the universities, control the philanthropic foundations, the policy institutes, the casinos, and the sports arenas.”
Have you ever wondered why things never seem to change in Washington D.C. no matter who we vote for?
Well, it is because both parties are owned by the establishment.
It would be nice to think that the American people are in control of who runs things in the U.S., but that is not how it works in the real world.
In the real world, the politician that raises more money wins more than 80 percent of the time in national races.
Our politicians are not stupid – they are going to be very good to the people that can give them the giant piles of money that they need for their campaigns.  And the people that can do that are the ultra-wealthy and the giant corporations that the ultra-wealthy control.
Are you starting to get the picture?
There is a reason why the ultra-wealthy are referred to as “the establishment”.  They have set up a system that greatly benefits them and that allows them to pull the strings.
So who runs the world?
They do.  In fact, they even admit as much.
David Rockefeller wrote the following in his 2003 book entitled “Memoirs”
“For more than a century, ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents such as my encounter with Castro to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure — one world, if you will. If that is the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”
There is so much more that could be said about all of this.  In fact, an entire library of books could be written about the power and the influence of the ultra-wealthy international bankers that run the world.
But hopefully this is enough to at least get some conversations started.
So what do you think about all of this?  Please feel free to post a comment with your thoughts below…
 

This article was posted: Wednesday, January 30, 2013 at 5:41 am



Secret to Prism success: Even bigger data seizure

What makes Prism shine? National Security Agency's megadata collection from Internet pipeline


 
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FILE - In this Jan. 31, 2008, file photo President Bush waves after signing a 15-day extension of the Protect America Act after a speech in Las Vegas. Sternly prodding Congress, Bush told lawmakers they were jeopardizing the nation's safety by failing to lock in the government eavesdropping law. When the Protect America Act made warrantless wiretapping legal, lawyers and executives at major technology companies knew what was about to happen. They didn't know that its passage gave birth to a top-secret NSA program, officially labeled US-98XN. It was known as Prism. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File)" src="http://l1.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/qoiw6NYvNvd.hOcyTj6XDQ--/YXBwaWQ9eW5ld3M7Y2g9MjQ2Mjtjcj0xO2N3PTM2MDA7ZHg9MDtkeT0wO2ZpPXVsY3JvcDtoPTQzMTtxPTg1O3c9NjMw/http://globalfinance.zenfs.com/images/US_AHTTP_AP_HEADLINES_BUSINESS/d2a9eaf40bfdd414340f6a706700bd69_original.jpg" width="630" height="431"
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FILE - In this Jan. 31, 2008, file photo President Bush waves after signing a 15-day extension of the Protect America Act after a speech in Las Vegas. Sternly prodding Congress, Bush told lawmakers they were jeopardizing the nation's safety by failing to lock in the government eavesdropping law. When the Protect America Act made warrantless wiretapping legal, lawyers and executives at major technology companies knew what was about to happen. They didn't know that its passage gave birth to a top-secret NSA program, officially labeled US-98XN. It was known as Prism. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) -- In the months and early years after 9/11, FBI agents began showing up at Microsoft Corp. more frequently than before, armed with court orders demanding information on customers.
Around the world, government spies and eavesdroppers were tracking the email and Internet addresses used by suspected terrorists. Often, those trails led to the world's largest software company and, at the time, largest email provider.
The agents wanted email archives, account information, practically everything, and quickly. Engineers compiled the data, sometimes by hand, and delivered it to the government.
Often there was no easy way to tell if the information belonged to foreigners or Americans. So much data was changing hands that one former Microsoft employee recalls that the engineers were anxious about whether the company should cooperate.
Inside Microsoft, some called it "Hoovering" — not after the vacuum cleaner, but after J. Edgar Hoover, the first FBI director, who gathered dirt on countless Americans.
This frenetic, manual process was the forerunner to Prism, the recently revealed highly classified National Security Agency program that seizes records from Internet companies. As laws changed and technology improved, the government and industry moved toward a streamlined, electronic process, which required less time from the companies and provided the government data in a more standard format.
The revelation of Prism this month by the Washington Post and Guardian newspapers has touched off the latest round in a decade-long debate over what limits to impose on government eavesdropping, which the Obama administration says is essential to keep the nation safe.
But interviews with more than a dozen current and former government and technology officials and outside experts show that, while Prism has attracted the recent attention, the program actually is a relatively small part of a much more expansive and intrusive eavesdropping effort.
Americans who disapprove of the government reading their emails have more to worry about from a different and larger NSA effort that snatches data as it passes through the fiber optic cables that make up the Internet's backbone. That program, which has been known for years, copies Internet traffic as it enters and leaves the United States, then routes it to the NSA for analysis.
Whether by clever choice or coincidence, Prism appears to do what its name suggests. Like a triangular piece of glass, Prism takes large beams of data and helps the government find discrete, manageable strands of information.
The fact that it is productive is not surprising; documents show it is one of the major sources for what ends up in the president's daily briefing. Prism makes sense of the cacophony of the Internet's raw feed. It provides the government with names, addresses, conversation histories and entire archives of email inboxes.
Many of the people interviewed for this report insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss a classified, continuing effort. But those interviews, along with public statements and the few public documents available, show there are two vital components to Prism's success.
The first is how the government works closely with the companies that keep people perpetually connected to each other and the world. That story line has attracted the most attention so far.
The second and far murkier one is how Prism fits into a larger U.S. wiretapping program in place for years.
___
Deep in the oceans, hundreds of cables carry much of the world's phone and Internet traffic. Since at least the early 1970s, the NSA has been tapping foreign cables. It doesn't need permission. That's its job.
But Internet data doesn't care about borders. Send an email from Pakistan to Afghanistan and it might pass through a mail server in the United States, the same computer that handles messages to and from Americans. The NSA is prohibited from spying on Americans or anyone inside the United States. That's the FBI's job and it requires a warrant.
Despite that prohibition, shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, President George W. Bush secretly authorized the NSA to plug into the fiber optic cables that enter and leave the United States, knowing it would give the government unprecedented, warrantless access to Americans' private conversations.
Tapping into those cables allows the NSA access to monitor emails, telephone calls, video chats, websites, bank transactions and more. It takes powerful computers to decrypt, store and analyze all this information, but the information is all there, zipping by at the speed of light.
"You have to assume everything is being collected," said Bruce Schneier, who has been studying and writing about cryptography and computer security for two decades.
The New York Times disclosed the existence of this effort in 2005. In 2006, former AT&T technician Mark Klein revealed that the company had allowed the NSA to install a computer at its San Francisco switching center, a spot where fiber optic cables enter the U.S.
What followed was the most significant debate over domestic surveillance since the 1975 Church Committee, a special Senate committee led by Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, reined in the CIA and FBI for spying on Americans.
Unlike the recent debate over Prism, however, there were no visual aids, no easy-to-follow charts explaining that the government was sweeping up millions of emails and listening to phone calls of people accused of no wrongdoing.
The Bush administration called it the "Terrorist Surveillance Program" and said it was keeping the United States safe.
"This program has produced intelligence for us that has been very valuable in the global war on terror, both in terms of saving lives and breaking up plots directed at the United States," Vice President Dick Cheney said at the time.
The government has said it minimizes all conversations and emails involving Americans. Exactly what that means remains classified. But former U.S. officials familiar with the process say it allows the government to keep the information as long as it is labeled as belonging to an American and stored in a special, restricted part of a computer.
That means Americans' personal emails can live in government computers, but analysts can't access, read or listen to them unless the emails become relevant to a national security investigation.
The government doesn't automatically delete the data, officials said, because an email or phone conversation that seems innocuous today might be significant a year from now.
What's unclear to the public is how long the government keeps the data. That is significant because the U.S. someday will have a new enemy. Two decades from now, the government could have a trove of American emails and phone records it can tap to investigative whatever Congress declares a threat to national security.
The Bush administration shut down its warrantless wiretapping program in 2007 but endorsed a new law, the Protect America Act, which allowed the wiretapping to continue with changes: The NSAgenerally would have to explain its techniques and targets to a secret court in Washington, but individual warrants would not be required.
Congress approved it, with Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., in the midst of a campaign for president, voting against it.
"This administration also puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide," Obama said in a speech two days before that vote. "I will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining our Constitution and our freedom."
___
When the Protect America Act made warrantless wiretapping legal, lawyers and executives at major technology companies knew what was about to happen.
One expert in national security law, who is directly familiar with how Internet companies dealt with the government during that period, recalls conversations in which technology officials worried aloud that the government would trample on Americans' constitutional right against unlawful searches, and that the companies would be called on to help.
The logistics were about to get daunting, too.
For years, the companies had been handling requests from the FBI. Now Congress had given the NSA the authority to take information without warrants. Though the companies didn't know it, the passage of the Protect America Act gave birth to a top-secret NSA program, officially called US-98XN.
It was known as Prism. Though many details are still unknown, it worked like this:
Every year, the attorney general and the director of national intelligence spell out in a classified document how the government plans to gather intelligence on foreigners overseas.
By law, the certification can be broad. The government isn't required to identify specific targets or places.
A federal judge, in a secret order, approves the plan.
With that, the government can issue "directives" to Internet companies to turn over information.
While the court provides the government with broad authority to seize records, the directives themselves typically are specific, said one former associate general counsel at a major Internet company. They identify a specific target or groups of targets. Other company officials recall similar experiences.
All adamantly denied turning over the kind of broad swaths of data that many people believed when the Prism documents were first released.
"We only ever comply with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers," Microsoft said in a statement.
Facebook said it received between 9,000 and 10,000 demands requests for data from all government agencies in the second half of last year. The social media company said fewer than 19,000 users were targeted.
How many of those were related to national security is unclear, and likely classified. The numbers suggest each request typically related to one or two people, not a vast range of users.
Tech company officials were unaware there was a program named Prism. Even former law enforcement and counterterrorism officials who were on the job when the program went live and were aware of its capabilities said this past week that they didn't know what it was called.
What the NSA called Prism, the companies knew as a streamlined system that automated and simplified the "Hoovering" from years earlier, the former assistant general counsel said. The companies, he said, wanted to reduce their workload. The government wanted the data in a structured, consistent format that was easy to search.
Any company in the communications business can expect a visit, said Mike Janke, CEO of Silent Circle, a company that advertises software for secure, encrypted conversations. The government is eager to find easy ways around security.
"They do this every two to three years," said Janke, who said government agents have approached his company but left empty-handed because his computer servers store little information. "They ask for the moon."
That often creates tension between the government and a technology industry with a reputation for having a civil libertarian bent. Companies occasionally argue to limit what the government takes. Yahoo even went to court and lost in a classified ruling in 2008, The New York Times reported Friday.
"The notion that Yahoo gives any federal agency vast or unfettered access to our users' records is categorically false," Ron Bell, the company's general counsel, said recently.
Under Prism, the delivery process varied by company.
Google, for instance, says it makes secure file transfers. Others use contractors or have set up stand-alone systems. Some have set up user interfaces making it easier for the government, according to a security expert familiar with the process.
Every company involved denied the most sensational assertion in the Prism documents: that the NSA pulled data "directly from the servers" of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, AOL and more.
Technology experts and a former government official say that phrasing, taken from a PowerPoint slide describing the program, was likely meant to differentiate Prism's neatly organized, company-provided data from the unstructured information snatched out of the Internet's major pipelines.
In slide made public by the newspapers, NSA analysts were encouraged to use data coming from both Prism and from the fiber-optic cables.
Prism, as its name suggests, helps narrow and focus the stream. If eavesdroppers spot a suspicious email among the torrent of data pouring into the United States, analysts can use information from Internet companies to pinpoint the user.
With Prism, the government gets a user's entire email inbox. Every email, including contacts with American citizens, becomes government property.
Once the NSA has an inbox, it can search its huge archives for information about everyone with whom the target communicated. All those people can be investigated, too.
That's one example of how emails belonging to Americans can become swept up in the hunt.
In that way, Prism helps justify specific, potentially personal searches. But it's the broader operation on the Internet fiber optics cables that actually captures the data, experts agree.
"I'm much more frightened and concerned about real-time monitoring on the Internet backbone," said Wolf Ruzicka, CEO of EastBanc Technologies, a Washington software company. "I cannot think of anything, outside of a face-to-face conversation, that they could not have access to."
One unanswered question, according to a former technology executive at one of the companies involved, is whether the government can use the data from Prism to work backward.
For example, not every company archives instant message conversations, chat room exchanges or videoconferences. But if Prism provided general details, known as metadata, about when a user began chatting, could the government "rewind" its copy of the global Internet stream, find the conversation and replay it in full?
That would take enormous computing, storage and code-breaking power. It's possible the NSA could use supercomputers to decrypt some transmissions, but it's unlikely it would have the ability to do that in volume. In other words, it would help to know what messages to zero in on.
Whether the government has that power and whether it uses Prism this way remains a closely guarded secret.
___
A few months after Obama took office in 2009, the surveillance debate reignited in Congress because the NSA had crossed the line. Eavesdroppers, it turned out, had been using their warrantless wiretap authority to intercept far more emails and phone calls of Americans than they were supposed to.
Obama, no longer opposed to the wiretapping, made unspecified changes to the process. The government said the problems were fixed.
"I came in with a healthy skepticism about these programs," Obama explained recently. "My team evaluated them. We scrubbed them thoroughly. We actually expanded some of the oversight, increased some of the safeguards."
Years after decrying Bush for it, Obama said Americans did have to make tough choices in the name of safety.
"You can't have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience," the president said.
Obama's administration, echoing his predecessor's, credited the surveillance with disrupting several terrorist attacks. Leading figures from the Bush administration who endured criticism during Obama's candidacy have applauded the president for keeping the surveillance intact.
Jason Weinstein, who recently left the Justice Department as head of its cybercrime and intellectual property section, said it's no surprise Obama continued the eavesdropping.
"You can't expect a president to not use a legal tool that Congress has given him to protect the country," he said. "So, Congress has given him the tool. The president's using it. And the courts are saying 'The way you're using it is OK.' That's checks and balances at work."
Schneier, the author and security expert, said it doesn't really matter how Prism works, technically. Just assume the government collects everything, he said.
He said it doesn't matter what the government and the companies say, either. It's spycraft, after all.
"Everyone is playing word games," he said. "No one is telling the truth."
Associated Press writers Eileen Sullivan, Peter Svensonn, Adam Goldman, Michael Liedtke and Monika Mathur contributed to this report.
___
Contact the AP's Washington investigative team at DCinvestigations@ap.org
US whistleblower Edward Snowden 'will fight extradition'
 
Edward Snowden (picture courtesy of the Guardian) says he wants Hong Kong to decide his fate


How surveillance came to light
  1. 5 June: The Guardian reports that the National Security Agency (NSA) is collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon under a top secret court order
  2. 6 June: The Guardian and The Washington Post report that the NSA and the FBI are tapping into US Internet companies to track online communication in a programme known as Prism
  3. 7 June: The Guardian reports President Obama has asked intelligence agencies to draw up a list of potential overseas targets for US cyber-attacks
  4. 7 June: President Obama defends the programmes, saying they are closely overseen by Congress and the courts
  5. 8 June: US director of national intelligence James Clapper calls the leaks "literally gut-wrenching"
  6. 9 June: The Guardian names former CIA technical worker Edward Snowden as the source of the leaks
Related Stories
  1. US spy leaker 'goes to ground'
  2. Tech firms urge security transparency
  3. Profile: Edward Snowden

The ex-CIA employee who leaked secret US surveillance details has vowed in an interview to fight any attempt to extradite him from Hong Kong.
Edward Snowden told the South China Morning Post: "I'm neither traitor nor hero. I'm an American."
It is the first interview he has given since disappearing from his hotel room in Hong Kong on Monday.
His leaks led to revelations that the US is systematically seizing vast amounts of phone and web data.
Mr Snowden left Hawaii for Hong Kong shortly before the highly sensitive leaks surfaced.
Start Quote
I do not currently feel safe due to the pressure the US government is applying to Hong Kong”
Edward Snowden
"I am not here to hide from justice; I am here to reveal criminality," Mr Snowden told the Post, which said the interview was carried out in a secret location in Hong Kong.
"My intention is to ask the courts and people of Hong Kong to decide my fate."
US 'bullying'
The information leaked by Mr Snowden has undoubtedly angered the US government, but so far he has not been charged by the authorities, nor is he the subject of an extradition request.
Hong Kong has an extradition treaty with the US, although analysts say any attempts to bring Mr Snowden to America may take months and could be blocked by Beijing.
The Post quoted Mr Snowden as saying that he had several opportunities to leave Hong Kong, but that he "would rather stay and fight the United States government in the courts, because I have faith in Hong Kong's rule of law."
He also accused Washington of "bullying the Hong Kong government".
"I do not currently feel safe due to the pressure the US government is applying to Hong Kong, but I feel that Hong Kong itself has a strong civil tradition that whistleblowers should not fear," he said.
And when asked whether he had been offered asylum by Russia, he replied: "My only comment is that I am glad there are governments that refuse to be intimidated by great power".
After Mr Snowden's leaks, which led to a series of articles in the Guardian and Washington Post newspapers, US officials confirmed the existence of a secret programme to draw data from the internet, codenamed Prism.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence gave details of the programme last week.
According to the office's statement, Prism is simply an internal computer system, and not a data-mining programme.
But Washington is coming under increasing pressure from many different quarters to end the practice.
The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit on Tuesday, challenging the legality of the programme.
Separately, a coalition of more than 80 rights groups and internet companies have launched a website, StopWatching.Us, which has called on Congress to launch a full investigation.
And the EU's justice commissioner has written to the US attorney general, questioning him about Prism, and saying she was concerned America's efforts "could have grave adverse consequences for the fundamental rights of EU citizens".
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  1. About these results
  1. 10 JUNE 2013, US & CANADA
 
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Rory Cellan-Jones reports on what is known about Prism
It is believed the US is pursuing a criminal investigation, but no extradition request has yet been filed.
The Chinese territory has an extradition treaty with the US, although analysts say any attempts to bring Mr Snowden to America may take months and could be blocked by Beijing.
A petition posted on the White House website calling for Mr Snowden's immediate pardon has gathered more than 30,000 signatures.
However, an opinion poll commissioned by the Washington Post suggests a majority of Americans think government monitoring of phone records is acceptable if the aim is to fight terrorism.
Mr Snowden's revelations have led to allegations that the UK's electronic surveillance agency, GCHQ, used the US system to spy on British citizens.
US spy leaker Edward Snowden leaves Hong Kong hotel

“ ...I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded.....” Edward Snowden
  1. Profile: Edward Snowden
  2. Could Hong Kong shelter Snowden?
  3. Q&A: Prism and privacy

Major US security leaks
  1. Pentagon papers, 1971: Daniel Ellsberg leaks study showing the government had knowledge it was unlikely to win Vietnam war
  2. Watergate, 1972: Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein reveal extent of cover-up over burglary at Democrat National Committee HQ
  3. Iran-Contra affair, 1986: Iranian cleric reveals illegal US arms sales to Iran, the proceeds of which are later used to fund Nicaraguan Contras
  4. Valerie Plame, 2003: Ms Plame is revealed to be an undercover CIA agent, ending her covert career
  5. Abu Ghraib, 2004: Publication of pictures showing abuse of detainees at Iraq prison by US officials turns initial media reports of abuse into full-blown scandal
  6. Bradley Manning, 2010: The soldier downloads thousands of classified documents from military servers and hands them over to Wikileaks
  1. US leaks that shook the world
  2. What can you learn from phone records?
  3. Just how much do the spooks know?

Beijing correspondent Damian Grammaticus says China would not want to deal with any extradition of Snowden to the US
11 June 2013 
An ex-CIA employee who leaked details of US top-secret phone and internet surveillance has disappeared from his hotel in Hong Kong.
World media reaction
  1. The Liberation Daily in China has harsh words for President Obama: "Five years ago, Obama came to power waving an anti-George W Bush banner. Five years later, he is still exactly the same as George W Bush on invasion of privacy issues."
  2. Russia's Izvestiya compares the revelations to a dystopian novel: "The frightening reality of the 21st Century is that the world has become a house with glass walls, notions of 'personal secrets' and 'confidential information' are turning into fiction before our very eyes."
  3. India's Tribune is more forgiving: "The 9/11 terrorist attacks have changed the environment where cyber snooping is now defendable, even acceptable."

Related Stories
  1. Q&A: Prism and privacy
  2. UK: Intelligence agencies within law
  3. How much do the spooks know?
Major US security leaks
  1. Pentagon papers, 1971: Daniel Ellsberg leaks study showing the government had knowledge it was unlikely to win Vietnam war
  2. Watergate, 1972: Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein reveal extent of cover-up over burglary at Democrat National Committee HQ
  3. Iran-Contra affair, 1986: Iranian cleric reveals illegal US arms sales to Iran, the proceeds of which are later used to fund Nicaraguan Contras
  4. Valerie Plame, 2003: Ms Plame is revealed to be an undercover CIA agent, ending her covert career
  5. Abu Ghraib, 2004: Publication of pictures showing abuse of detainees at Iraq prison by US officials turns initial media reports of abuse into full-blown scandal
  6. Bradley Manning, 2010: The soldier downloads thousands of classified documents from military servers and hands them over to Wikileaks
  1. US leaks that shook the world
  2. What can you learn from phone records?
  3. Just how much do the spooks know?

Edward Snowden, 29, checked out from his hotel on Monday and his whereabouts are unknown, but he is believed to be still in Hong Kong.
Earlier, he said he had an "obligation to help free people from oppression".
His leaks led to revelations that the US is systematically seizing vast amounts of phone and web data.
The programme, known as Prism, is run by the US National Security Agency (NSA).
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence gave details of the programme last week after Mr Snowden's leaks led to a series of articles in the Guardian and Washington Post newspapers.
According to the office's statement, Prism is simply an internal computer system, and not a data-mining programme.
However, such data seizures could break the laws of other countries, and could also break US law if they accidentally capture communications of US citizens.
Transatlantic fallout
Hong Kong's broadcaster RTHK said Mr Snowden checked out of the Mira hotel in Kowloon on Monday, and Reuters news agency quoted hotel staff as saying that he had left at noon.
Ewen MacAskill, one of the Guardian journalists who broke the story, told the BBC he believed Mr Snowden was still in Hong Kong.


Rory Cellan-Jones reports on what is known about Prism
It is believed the US is pursuing a criminal investigation, but no extradition request has yet been filed.
The Chinese territory has an extradition treaty with the US, although analysts say any attempts to bring Mr Snowden to America may take months and could be blocked by Beijing.
A petition posted on the White House website calling for Mr Snowden's immediate pardon has gathered more than 30,000 signatures.
However, an opinion poll commissioned by the Washington Post suggests a majority of Americans think government monitoring of phone records is acceptable if the aim is to fight terrorism.
Mr Snowden's revelations have led to allegations that the UK's electronic surveillance agency, GCHQ, used the US system to spy on British citizens.
Foreign Secretary William Hague cancelled a trip to Washington to address the UK parliament on Monday and deny the claims.
The journalists involved in the story were first contacted by Mr Snowden at the start of the year.
Filmmaker Laura Poitras told Salon Magazine how Mr Snowden sent her an email saying: "I want to get your encryption key and let's get on a secure channel.
"I have some information in the intelligence community, and it won't be a waste of your time."
Ms Poitras ultimately filmed the interview with two Guardian reporters.
Mr Snowden told the journalists: "The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting.
"I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things. I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded."
Booz Allen Hamilton confirmed in a statement Mr Snowden had been an employee for less than three months.
"If accurate, this action represents a grave violation of the code of conduct and core values of our firm," the statement said.
The first of the leaks came out on Wednesday night, when the Guardian reported a US secret court had ordered phone company Verizon to hand over to the NSA millions of records on telephone call "metadata".
The metadata include the numbers of both phones on a call, its duration, time, date and location (for mobiles, determined by which mobile signal towers relayed the call or text).
Under the Prism system, officials apply to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court (Fisa) to gain access to communications.
Officials are obliged to show the Fisa court that any "target" is outside of the US, and there is a "foreign intelligence purpose" for the seizure, such as terrorism or nuclear proliferation.
However, details of such targets and subsequent requests made to US technology companies are secret.
On Thursday, the Washington Post and Guardian said the NSA tapped directly into the servers of nine internet firms including Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo to track online communication in a programme known as Prism.
All the internet companies denied giving the US government "direct access" to their servers, and said they had never heard of the Prism programme.
But in separate statements the firms variously said they complied with lawful requests to supply information on an individual basis.
Prism was authorised under changes to US surveillance laws passed under President George W Bush, and renewed last year under Barack Obama.
Mr Obama has defended the surveillance programmes, saying that nobody was listening to calls between American citizens.
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    10 JUNE 2013, US & CANADA
Transatlantic fallout
Hong Kong's broadcaster RTHK said Mr Snowden checked out of the Mira hotel in Kowloon on Monday, and Reuters news agency quoted hotel staff as saying that he had left at noon.
Ewen MacAskill, one of the Guardian journalists who broke the story, told the BBC he believed Mr Snowden was still in Hong Kong.
"If accurate, this action represents a grave violation of the code of conduct and core values of our firm," the statement said.
The first of the leaks came out on Wednesday night, when the Guardian reported a US secret court had ordered phone company Verizon to hand over to the NSA millions of records on telephone call "metadata".
The metadata include the numbers of both phones on a call, its duration, time, date and location (for mobiles, determined by which mobile signal towers relayed the call or text).
Under the Prism system, officials apply to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court (Fisa) to gain access to communications.
Officials are obliged to show the Fisa court that any "target" is outside of the US, and there is a "foreign intelligence purpose" for the seizure, such as terrorism or nuclear proliferation.
However, details of such targets and subsequent requests made to US technology companies are secret.
On Thursday, the Washington Post and Guardian said the NSA tapped directly into the servers of nine internet firms including Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo to track online communication in a programme known as Prism.
All the internet companies denied giving the US government "direct access" to their servers, and said they had never heard of the Prism programme.
But in separate statements the firms variously said they complied with lawful requests to supply information on an individual basis.
Prism was authorised under changes to US surveillance laws passed under President George W Bush, and renewed last year under Barack Obama.
Mr Obama has defended the surveillance programmes, saying that nobody was listening to calls between American citizens.
More on This Story
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    07 JUNE 2013, TECHNOLOGY
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    11 JUNE 2013, US & CANADA
  2. HK 'baffling choice' Watch

    11 JUNE 2013, US & CANADA
  3. Whistleblower: US 'Leviathan' Watch

    10 JUNE 2013, US & CANADA
Cannot play media. You do not have the correct version of the flash player. Download the correct version
Rory Cellan-Jones reports on what is known about Prism
It is believed the US is pursuing a criminal investigation, but no extradition request has yet been filed.
The Chinese territory has an extradition treaty with the US, although analysts say any attempts to bring Mr Snowden to America may take months and could be blocked by Beijing.
A petition posted on the White House website calling for Mr Snowden's immediate pardon has gathered more than 30,000 signatures.
However, an opinion poll commissioned by the Washington Post suggests a majority of Americans think government monitoring of phone records is acceptable if the aim is to fight terrorism.
Mr Snowden's revelations have led to allegations that the UK's electronic surveillance agency, GCHQ, used the US system to spy on British citizens.
Foreign Secretary William Hague cancelled a trip to Washington to address the UK parliament on Monday and deny the claims.
The journalists involved in the story were first contacted by Mr Snowden at the start of the year.
Filmmaker Laura Poitras told Salon Magazine how Mr Snowden sent her an email saying: "I want to get your encryption key and let's get on a secure channel.
"I have some information in the intelligence community, and it won't be a waste of your time."
Ms Poitras ultimately filmed the interview with two Guardian reporters.
Mr Snowden told the journalists: "The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting.
"I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things. I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded."
 
Eric Holder says leak to AP was 'very serious'
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Eric Holder: "It put the American people at risk, and that is not hyperbole"
Related Stories
  1. Q&A: AP phone records seizure
  2. AP condemns US phone records seizure
US Attorney General Eric Holder has said the leak that prompted the seizure of Associated Press (AP) phone records put the US at risk.
The AP has said the justice department secretly seized records of outgoing calls from more than 20 phone lines.
The seizure is believed to be linked to a probe into whether an AP story about a foiled terror plot was based on a leak of classified information.
The news agency called the seizure a "massive and unprecedented intrusion".
On Tuesday, Mr Holder said he had removed himself early on from the investigation that led to the records subpoena out of "an abundance of caution", because he wanted to avoid any conflict of interest.
He said he had been interviewed by the FBI in June 2012 in connection with the investigation into a possible leak of classified information.
'No possible justification'
The phone records were obtained for April and May last year, covering a period when AP published an article about a CIA operation in Yemen disrupting an al-Qaeda plot to blow up a US-bound airplane around the anniversary of the killing of Osama Bin Laden.
Start Quote
It put the American people at risk, and that is not hyperbole”
Eric Holder
US Attorney General
The May 2012 story was potentially embarrassing to the US authorities, coming shortly after they had informed the public there was nothing to suggest any such attack had been planned, say correspondents.
Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, the attorney general said: "I have been a prosecutor since 1976 and I have to say that this is among, if not the most serious, it is within the top two or three most serious leaks that I have ever seen.
"It put the American people at risk, and that is not hyperbole. It put the American people at risk. And trying to determine who was responsible for that I think required very aggressive action."
He told reporters the decision to go ahead with the Associated Press records subpoena was taken under the supervision of Deputy Attorney General James Cole after he removed himself from the inquiry.
The justice department has provided no specific explanation for the scope of the seizure. AP chief executive Gary Pruitt wrote in a letter there could be "no possible justification for such an overbroad collection".
In a response to Mr Pruitt on Tuesday, Deputy Attorney James Cole said such records were only subpoenaed after "all other reasonable investigative steps have been taken".
He said in the AP case this had included "conducting over 550 interviews and reviewing tens of thousands of documents".
Mr Cole said the content of the calls had not been part of the seizure.
Records for the phone lines of five reporters and an editor who were involved in the AP story were among those obtained.
AP said the seizure of records included general switchboard numbers and a fax line at its offices in New York, Hartford, in Connecticut, Washington DC and the US House of Representatives.
The story has prompted fierce criticism from both Republicans and President Barack Obama's Democrats in Washington, raising questions about how the White House is balancing the need for national security with privacy rights.
White House spokesman Jay Carney said earlier on Tuesday that Mr Obama had no knowledge of the justice department's actions on the AP subpoena other than what he had read in press reports.
Mr Carney said: "I can tell you that the president feels strongly that we need... the press to be able to be unfettered in its pursuit of investigative journalism.
"And he is also mindful of the need for secret and classified information to remain secret and classified in order to protect our national security interests."
News organisations are typically notified in advance if the government seeks such information and are given time to negotiate or go to court to block the seizure. The AP says it was first informed of the matter on Friday after the fact.
The Obama administration has aggressively investigated disclosures of classified information to the media, bringing more cases against people suspected of leaking such material than any previous administration, correspondents say.
Mr Holder himself appointed two US attorneys to investigate leaks related to national security, including the Yemen plot and cyberwarfare revelations in June 2012.
Some Republicans criticised the move as not enough, calling for the attorney general to appoint a special prosecutor.
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    14 MAY 2013, US & CANADA

14 May 2013 
Associated Press condemns US telephone record seizure
pastedGraphic_60.pdf
The government would not say why it sought the Associated Press telephone records
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The Associated Press has described the US government's secret seizure of its journalists' telephone records as a "massive and unprecedented intrusion".
Chief executive Gary Pruitt said AP was told on Friday the justice department had gathered records of outgoing calls from more than 20 phone lines.
Mr Pruitt said there could be "no possible justification for such an overbroad collection".
The justice department has provided no explanation for the seizure.
However, officials have previously said the US Attorney's Office in the District of Columbia was conducting a criminal investigation into information contained in an AP story last year.
Published in May 2012, the article was about a CIA operation in Yemen that foiled an al-Qaeda plot to blow up a US-bound airplane.
Confidential sources
The story was embarrassing to the government, coming shortly after it had informed the public that there was nothing to suggest any such attack had been planned, says the BBC's David Willis in Washington.
Start Quote
I am very troubled by these allegations and want to hear the government's explanation”
Senator Patrick Leahy
Judiciary Committee chairman
Records for the phone numbers of five reporters and an editor who were involved in the AP story were among those obtained in April and May 2012.
AP said the seizure of records for general switchboard numbers and a fax line at its offices in New York, Hartford, in Connecticut, Washington DC and the House of Representatives was unusual and largely unprecedented.
"There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of the Associated Press and its reporters," Mr Pruitt wrote in a letter to US Attorney General Eric Holder.
"These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP's newsgathering operations, and disclose information about AP's activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know."
It is not clear if the records seized included incoming calls or the duration of the calls. Nor is it clear whether a judge or grand jury approved the subpoenas.
News organisations are normally notified in advance if the government is seeking such information and are given time to negotiate.
The Obama administration has aggressively investigated disclosures of classified information to the media, bringing more cases against people suspected of leaking such material than any previous administration, our correspondent adds.
'Press intimidation'
Darrell Issa, the Republican chairman of the investigative House of Representatives Oversight and Government Reform Committee, criticised the seizure of records.
"They had an obligation to look for every other way to get it before they intruded on the freedom of the press," he told CNN.
Senator Patrick Leahy, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement emailed to AP: "I am very troubled by these allegations and want to hear the government's explanation."
The American Civil Liberties Union accused the Obama administration of "press intimidation".
In a statement, the US Attorney's Office in the District of Columbia insisted it took seriously its obligations to "follow all applicable laws, federal regulations, and Department of Justice policies".
"Those regulations require us to make every reasonable effort to obtain information through alternative means before even considering a subpoena for the phone records of a member of the media," it said.
"Because we value the freedom of the press, we are always careful and deliberative in seeking to strike the right balance between the public interest in the free flow of information and the public interest in the fair and effective administration of our criminal laws," it added.
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Related Internet links
  1. Associated Press
  2. US Attorney's Office - District of Columbia


US spy chief Clapper defends Prism and phone surveillance

Mr Clapper said there were "numerous inaccuracies" in the report on internet servers being tapped
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US spy chief James Clapper has strongly defended government surveillance programmes after revelations of phone records being collected and internet servers being tapped.
He said disclosure of a secret court document on phone record collection threatened "irreversible harm".
Revelations of an alleged programme to tap into servers of nine internet firms were "reprehensible", he said.
Internet firms deny giving government agents access to their servers.
The director of US national intelligence said he wanted to reassure Americans that the intelligence community was committed to respecting their civil liberties and privacy.
WHAT THE PAPERS SAY
  1. The Washington Post says one of the many things still unclear about the phone surveillance programme is why Americans didn't know about it. In an editorial, the paper says the public needs more explanation to be able to make a reasonable assessment of whether such programmes are worth the security benefits.
  1. The New York Times says President Barack Obama "is proving the truism that the executive branch will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it". The Patriot Act should be sharply curtailed if not repealed, it says.
  1. The Los Angeles Times says this week's disclosures underscore how US intelligence and law enforcement now "secretly glean vast amounts of information from communications technology".
  2. The San Francisco Chronicle says the collection of phone records "conducted with only the barest legal oversight" is "another policy disappointment from a president who came to office promising to ease the worst of the panicky, ill-considered policies launched after the Sept. 11 attacks 13 years ago".
  1. What can you learn from phone records?
  2. US media review: NSA revelations
He issued a strong-worded statement late on Thursday, after the UK's Guardian newspaper said a secret court order had required phone company Verizon to hand over its records to the National Security Agency (NSA) on an "ongoing daily basis".
That report was followed by revelations in both the Washington Post and Guardian that US agencies tapped directly into the servers of nine internet firms to track people in a programme known as Prism.
The reports about Prism will raise fresh questions about how far the US government should encroach on citizens' privacy in the interests of national security.
The NSA confirmed that it had been secretly collecting millions of phone records. But Mr Clapper said the "unauthorized disclosure... threatens potentially long-lasting and irreversible harm to our ability to identify and respond to the many threats facing our nation".
The article omitted "key information" about the use of the records "to prevent terrorist attacks and the numerous safeguards that protect privacy and civil liberties".
He said reports about Prism contained "numerous inaccuracies". While admitting the government collected communications from internet firms, he said the policy only targets "non-US persons".
'Variety of threats'
Prism was reportedly developed in 2007 out of a programme of domestic surveillance without warrants that was set up by President George W Bush after the 9/11 attacks.
Analysis
Technology correspondent
What this highlights is the way we now entrust our data and our privacy almost entirely to American companies, storing it in their "clouds" - vast data centres located in the US.
  1. Read more from Rory
Prism reportedly does not collect user data, but is able to pull out material that matches a set of search terms.
Mr Clapper said the communications-collection programme was "designed to facilitate the acquisition of foreign intelligence information concerning non-US persons located outside the United States".
"It cannot be used to intentionally target any US citizen, any other US person, or anyone located within the United States," he added.
Mr Clapper said the programme, under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, was recently reauthorised by Congress after hearings and debate.
Start Quote
If the government has a broader voluntary national security program to gather customer data we don't participate in it”
Microsoft statement
"Information collected under this program is among the most important and valuable foreign intelligence information we collect, and is used to protect our nation from a wide variety of threats," he added.
But while US citizens were not intended to be the targets of surveillance, the Washington Post says large quantities of content from Americans are nevertheless screened in order to track or learn more about the target.
The data gathered through Prism has grown to become a major contributor to the president's daily briefing and accounts for almost one in seven intelligence reports, it adds.
The Washington Post named the nine companies participating in the programme as Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple.
I may have been wiretapped
In 2006 I was a plaintiff in an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit against the government over a domestic spying programme. Other plaintiffs include the late Christopher Hitchens, and James Bamford, the author of a book, The Shadow Factory, about the NSA.
The lawsuit stated that NSA officials may have eavesdropped on us illegally - and that the warrantless wiretapping programme should come to a halt. In 2007 an appeals court said that we could not prove that our calls had been monitored. As a result it did not have standing. The suit was dismissed.
-Tara McKelvey
  1. Read more
Microsoft said in a statement to the BBC that it only turned over customer data when given a legally binding order, and only complied with orders for specific accounts.
"If the government has a broader voluntary national security program to gather customer data we don't participate in it," Microsoft said.
Meanwhile, Yahoo, Apple and Facebook said they did not give the government direct access to their servers.
In a statement, Google said: "Google does not have a 'back door' for the government to access private user data."
On Wednesday, it emerged that the NSA was collecting the phone records of tens of millions of Americans, after the Guardian published a secret order for the Verizon phone company to hand over its records.
What the NSA found out
  1. The numbers of both people on the phone call
  2. How long the call lasts
  3. The time that the call is placed
A senior congressman, House intelligence committee chairman Mike Rogers, told reporters that collecting Americans' phone records was legal, authorised by Congress and had not been abused by the Obama administration.
He also said it had prevented a "significant" attack on the US "within the past few years", but declined to offer more information.
The order requires Verizon - one of the largest phone companies in the US - to disclose to the NSA the metadata of all calls it processes, both domestic and international, in which at least one party is in the US.
Such metadata includes telephone numbers, calling card numbers, the serial numbers of phones used and the time and duration of calls. It does not include the content of a call or the callers' addresses or financial information.
As surveillance practices come under scrutiny in the US, a new system to monitor phone and internet connections in India is being criticised as "chilling" by New York-based group Human Rights Watch (HRW).
The Central Monitoring System (CMS) enables authorities to follow all online activities, phone calls text messages and social media conversations.
The Indian government said in December 2012 the system would "lawfully intercept internet and telephone services". But HRW says the system by-passes service providers in a country that has no privacy law to protect people from arbitrary intrusions.
In the UK on Wednesday, a committee of MPs criticised a decision to allow Chinese firms such as Huawei to become embedded in British network infrastructure without the knowledge and scrutiny of ministers.
Huawei - which denies close ties with the Chinese state - signed a 2005 telecoms deal with BT to supply equipment for a £10bn major network upgrade.

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Comments

Comment number
615. Corky
7TH JUNE 2013 - 16:17 As an outsider looking in, the USA always promotes itself as a free and righteous country. An ardent counterbalance to the old totalitarian socialist regimes in the Soviet Union.

In reality, the USA appears to be run by a cabal of paranoid, authoritarian tyrants. When these people say it's a free country, they mean some people [them] are "more free" than others.


Comment number
579. Stephen of Woking
7TH JUNE 2013 - 15:37 The state needs the surveillance tools to deal on our behalf with very dangerous people. The people need to remain free from the suffocation of an over-bearing state. Where is the right balance in respect of the Internet? There probability isn't one. So I believe we need to be more interested in defining the checks and balances than precisely what gets monitored.


Comment number
574. Wandalust1956
7TH JUNE 2013 - 15:34 This, is what you get if you demand to know why "our" police/security services "allow" people who may be extermists to go about their business and then attack a man in the street with machetes. Be careful what you wish for....and "mind how you go"...


Comment number
106. Minnie Q Mouse
7TH JUNE 2013 - 10:45 We, the common people, ARE the state, and we must never hand over our rights to all-powerful, all-knowing rulers.
In Soviet Russia, in East Germany, freedom was seriously curtailed in the name of state security.
Of course we fear terrorism, but we have more to fear from power-crazed poiticians. History tells us so.


Comment number
45. Sally says you are free
7TH JUNE 2013 - 9:59 Without a warrant, regardless if you're innocent, we're going to open your personal letters. So much for "The Land of the Free"
What did Washington, Jefferson and Paine fight for?!

"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
~William Pitt, youngest ever British Prime Minister.
Speech in the House of Commons, 1783.

8 May 2012
Al-Qaeda Yemen plane bomb plot foiled by 'insider'
 
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White House counter-terrorism advisor John Brennan refused to reveal how the bomb plot was broken up
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  2. Profile: Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula
  3. Profile: 'Bomb maker' Ibrahim al-Asiri
A plot by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to attack a US-bound plane using an updated "underwear bomb" was foiled by an insider infiltrating a terror cell, US officials say.
The seized device is being examined by the FBI in Quantico, Virginia, while the source is said to have left Yemen.
The White House says the bomb was never an "active threat".
Meanwhile, a senior US congressman has linked the plot to an al-Qaeda leader killed in Yemen on Sunday.
Fahd al-Quso, a senior figure in Yemen-based al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) was killed by a drone strike.
In a separate development on Tuesday a Pentagon spokesman said the US had restarted military training with security forces in Yemen, which had been put on hold because of political unrest.
"We have begun to reintroduce small numbers of trainers into Yemen," Captain John Kirby told reporters, adding that they had been sent for "routine military-to-military co-operation".
Saudi tip
Speaking on Tuesday, White House counter-terrorism chief John Brennan would not be drawn on the nature of the operation to seize the device, instead describing the aim of the FBI investigation into the device.
"Now we're trying to make sure that we take the measures that we need to prevent any other type of IED [improvised explosive device], similarly constructed, from getting through security procedures," Mr Brennan said.
Without giving specifics, the US says multiple overseas intelligence agencies were involved in the operation to seize the device.
'Bomb plot': Unanswered Questions
  1. Unclear who the would-be bomber is or whether he/she is in custody
  2. Country where alleged device was seized as yet unspecified
  3. No information on how the alleged plot was intercepted
  4. Exact composition of alleged device unclear, although said to contain no metal parts and designed to escape detection by magnetometers at airport security
Reports did not detail which foreign agencies the insider was working with.
However, reports have linked the device to a Saudi-born al-Qaeda bomb-maker, Ibrahim al-Asiri, previously named as a key figure in the 2009 underwear bomb plot.
A US intelligence source told CNN the latest plan was thwarted two weeks ago following a tip from Saudi Arabia, heightening suggestions that Saudi intelligence operatives could have been involved.
Senior Yemeni officials say the government in Sanaa has no information on this particular plot, Reuters news agency reported on Tuesday.
As details of the plot emerged in the US, officials said it appeared that AQAP leaders in Yemen had instructed a suicide bomber to board any flight of his choosing to the US with the bomb under his clothes.
However, he had been stopped before reaching an airport.
Reports say no target had been chosen and no plane tickets purchased by the time the alleged plot was foiled.
Christmas Day attack
Speaking late on Monday, Republican Congressman Peter King said late on Monday that the operation was linked to the strike that killed al-Quso.
"I was told by the White House that they are connected, that they are part of the same operation," he said.
 
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The US said the Detroit 2009 attack could have caused major damage
Al-Quso was a leader of AQAP based in Yemen, and the US offered a $5m (£3.1m) reward for information leading to his capture or death.
US officials told ABC News that that al-Quso was planning an attack similar to a failed 2009 attempt to blow up a passenger plane.
The alleged device seized from the Yemen cells shares some features with the bomb sewn into the underwear of would-be suicide bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab during that attempt, officials said.
The Nigerian was arrested when his device failed to explode fully while on a plane bound for Detroit on Christmas Day 2009.
A US intelligence official said the latest device bore the "hallmarks" of the 2009 underwear bomb, which was built by the Saudi militant Ibrahim al-Asiri.
Reports said it was an improved model, with a more effective detonation system; it has no metal parts and probably would not have been detected by most airport security magnetometers.
It is not even clear if it would have been found by the body scanners that have been installed in some US airports after that attempted attack three years ago.
The US Transport Security Administration has sent reminders to some international airports and airlines that liquid explosives or regular explosives could be hidden inside people's bodies, clothes or in printer cartridges, the Associated Press reports.
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  2. Profile: Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula
    11 SEPTEMBER 2012, MIDDLE EAST
  3. Profile: 'Bomb maker' Ibrahim al-Asiri
    09 MAY 2012, MIDDLE EAST
  4. Al-Qaeda leader killed in Yemen
    07 MAY 2012, MIDDLE EAST
  5. Underwear bomber given life term
    16 FEBRUARY 2012, US & CANADA
From other news sites
  1. ITV.com 'Double agent' would-be bomber
  2. Reuters UK Would-be suicide bomber was informant
  3. Deccan Herald Double agent used to foil terror attack: reports
  4. Yahoo! UK and Ireland Would-be suicide bomber was planted,
  5. Zambia Post US 'foils new underwear bomb plot' by al-Qaeda in Yemen 

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    Syrian forces under President Bashar al-Assad have used chemical weapons "on a small scale" against the opposition rebels, the White House says.
  1. US Supreme Court bans DNA patents 
  2. FBI head pledges action over leaks

13 June 2013

US Supreme Court says human DNA cannot be patented
 
Around 40% of the human genome is subject to patents, researchers say
Related Stories
  1. US court hears gene patents case
Human genes may not be patented, but artificially copied DNA can be claimed as intellectual property, the US Supreme Court has ruled unanimously.
The court quashed patents held by a Utah-based firm on two genes linked to breast and ovarian cancer.
The opinion said DNA came from nature and was not eligible for patenting.
The US biotechnology industry had warned any blanket ban on such patents would jeopardise huge investment in gene research and therapies.
"We hold that a naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated," Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in Thursday's opinion.
But his ruling said that synthetic molecules known as complementary DNA can be patented "because it is not naturally occurring".
'Different chemical structure'
Myriad Genetics, the company at the heart of the lawsuit, saw its shares rise after Thursday's compromise decision.



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