Swiss Banker, Wikileaks collaborator, convicted

from sify…

Geneva: A former top Swiss private banking executive turned WikiLeaks collaborator was found guilty on Wednesday by a Zurich court of violating bank secrecy, attempted coercion and sending threatening letters.

But Rudolf Elmer, who once worked for Julius Baer Bank, managed to avoid the jail-time prosecutors sought. Instead, he received a fine of some 7,200 Swiss francs ($7,500), suspended for two years. He will also have to pay court fees.

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He was charged with divulging information about Julius Baer customers and the bank, in violation of client privacy and corporate secrecy laws.

Earlier this week Elmer said that in 2005 he was detained by Swiss authorities for 30 days, apparently in connection with his violations of client confidentiality.

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The one-time executive admitted in the Zurich courtroom to having revealed some information, but says he was a whistleblower, aiming to expose wrongdoings by the financial sector regarding tax evasion assistance to wealthy international clients.

Elmer’s lawyers also argued that Switzerland’s strict secrecy laws, which regulate Julius Baer, did not apply in the Cayman Islands, where Elmer was based for eight years.

The Zurich-based wealth management group said that after it sacked the 55-year-old in 2002, Elmer tried to extort money and, when that failed, he made secret bank data public by handing it over to tax authorities.

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The ex-banker tells a similar story, but alleges the firm offered him cash to keep quiet about its business practices.

In court, Elmer denied claims that he sent bomb threats, but admitted to dispatching anonymous threatening letters to bank staff.

At the time he sent the messages, he told the court, he was being followed by detectives hired by Julius Baer, causing intense psychological pressure. His daughter, the former banker related, was afraid to go to kindergarten during that period because of the men who tracked the family’s moves.

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Zurich prosecutors were seeking a smaller fine, but had their eyes set on an eight-month jail term. They told a judge that Elmer was not a true whistleblower, a status that would offer him some protection.

Claiming he was seeking to expose wrongdoings was merely a ‘defence strategy’, Zurich’s prosecutors argued.

Earlier this week, Elmer added to the controversy by giving whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks two disks, which he said contained data on 2,000 clients of several elite Swiss banks.

One report in a Swiss newspaper said the disks has recent data on clients going up to 2009.

It was the second time he has supplied banking information to the website, having first submitted data on Julius Baer in 2008, raising WikiLeaks’ profile internationally after the bank tried to shut down the site.

The trial comes at a critical juncture for the once prized banking secrecy tradition. Banks in countries with confidentiality laws are facing heat, as more foreign governments, including Germany, are agreeing to pay money for stolen disks that contain information on tax-dodging clients.

U.S. military insists that suicides are not its problem

Spike in suicides for Army National Guard, Reserve

By PAULINE JELINEK

from the San Francisco Gate website

Suicides among active duty soldiers dropped slightly in 2010 after five years of record increases, Army leaders said Wednesday.

But there were twice as many self-inflicted deaths last year than the year before among the Army National Guard and Reserve, the nation’s “citizen soldiers.”

The big increase in suicides for members of the Guard and Reserve involved soldiers who were not on active duty at the time.

The number of active duty suicides declined in all services except for the Air Force last year.

“The bottom line is, this is a significant issue,” the Army’s vice chief of staff, Gen. Peter Chiarelli, told reporters at the Pentagon. He said the Army remains committed to improving access to training, health care and other resources.

Chiarelli said the Army must continue to educate soldiers about the overuse and abuse of prescription drugs.

Lt. Gen. Jack Stultz, chief of the Army Reserve, said reservists are spread out geographically, often living in one state and belonging to a unit in another state, and that presents a major challenge.

He said leaders are looking for more ways for commanders to keep in contact with the members of their Reserve units during the bulk of the month, when they are not gathering for their training exercises.

Maj. Gen. Raymond Carpenter, acting director of the Army National Guard, said for his soldiers it is a “young white male problem,” that does not appear to be linked to war deployments or lack of jobs. Instead, he said, about half the cases of Guard soldiers’ suicides involved people who had some type of relationship problem with a spouse or partner.

 

cia-trained terrorist on trial

from al-jazeera…

El Paso, Texas – Margarita Morales Fernandez couldn’t be in court to see the former CIA agent who allegedly killed her father and 72 others aboard a Cuban airplane in one of the world’s worst airline attacks before September 11, 2001.

Fernandez and hundreds other victims are carefully watching the trial of former CIA operative Luis Posada Carriles in US federal court.

His 11 charges include perjury for lying to US immigration officials, but terror-related offences are not on the docket.

“It will be 34 years since the terrorist attack that killed my father, but I remember it like it was yesterday, “Fernandez told Al Jazeera in a phone interview from Havana, Cuba. “I don’t think this trial takes us closer to justice.”

Victims of terrorism

On October 6, 1976 a bomb exploded on Cubana Airlines flight 455, blowing it out of the sky and into the waters off Barbados, killing everyone on board, including Fernandez’s father, the captain of Cuba’s national fencing team.

Posada, 82, a Cuban-born Venezuelan-citizen, was considered the mastermind— a CIA-trained explosives expert who would stop at nothing in his personal vendetta against Cuban president Fidel Castro. Planned in Venezuela, the attack killed mostly Cuban nationals.

“The terrorist activities of Posada Carriles are part of the [current US court] indictment, but they are not what he is being prosecuted for,” said José Pertierra, a Cuban-born Washington lawyer who is representing Venezuela’s interests at the trial. “He is only being prosecuted for lying about them [attacks]… to an immigration judge in a naturalisation hearing.”

Venezuela jailed Posada for the bombing, but the wily operative escaped from prison disguised as a priest and eventually fled to the US, stopping in other Latin American countries along the way where he continued his anti-Castro activities. Venezuela has repeatedly called for his extradition.

“For many years, the truth has been hidden,” Fernandez said. “But I want people to learn that there are a lot of victims of terrorism in Cuba as well as in the US and other countries.”

Fury and personal vendetta

To examine the life of Luis Posada Carriles is to re-live the worst periods of the Cold War – and beyond. Angry about Cuba’s 1959 revolution, he joined CIA Brigade 2506 in February 1961 to invade the island as part of the ill-fated attack known as the Bay of Pigs, declassified documents reveal.

While Posada himself did not fight at the Bay of Pigs, CIA officials thought he was promising and he joined US army in 1963 at their behest, training at Ft. Benning, Georgia. By 1965, he was a paid CIA operative stationed in Miami.

“The CIA taught us everything,” he told The New York Times in 1998. “They taught us explosives, how to kill, bomb trained us in acts of sabotage.”

He stayed with the agency in Miami until 1967, and later became a “paid asset” in Venezuela from 1968 to 1976, according to declassified documents.

CIA- trained and well- connected

After the Cuban attack, and his escape from prison, Posada returned to the CIA’s payroll in the 1980s, supervising arms shipments to the Contras in Nicaragua as part of what became known as the Iran-Contra affair, a murky scandal where the US government funneled money from arms sales to Iran—its official enemy- to right-wing militias in Nicaragua.

His history with the CIA and other clandestine operations means that Posada “has a lot of secrets to tell and friends in high places in Washington,” Pertierra, Venezuela’s lawyer, said in an interview with Al Jazeera outside the court-house.

tunisia lifts bans on political parties, declares amnesty

Tunisia’s transitional cabinet has decided to recognise all banned political parties and agreed on a general amnesty for all political prisoners.

The interim government, appointed earlier this week, held its first session on Thursday amid an outcry over its inclusion of members of the regime of the ousted president.

“The minister of justice presented a bill for a general amnesty, which was adopted by the cabinet, which decided to submit it to parliament,” Ahmed Nejib Chebbi, the development minister, said.

Asked if the government had decided to lift bans on political groups, including the al-Nahda movement, Mohamed Aloulou, the youth minister, said: “We will recognise all the political movements.”

Rachid al-Ghannouchi, the exiled head of al-Nahda, told Al Jazeera earlier this week that he plans to return to Tunisia. However, the prime minister said he would only be able to do so once the amnesty law is passed because he carries a life sentence for plots against the state.

U.S. funds insurgents in afghanistan, and provides helicopters

from project censored…

US security contractors as well as countless other private American corporations cannot provide the safety that they are paid to offer. So US military contractors in Afghanistan pay suspected insurgents to protect the US supply routes they were contracted to protect. A war-torn country such as Afghanistan has plenty of impoverished citizens, and, as a result, it is not hard for private contractors to find individuals willing to take money to protect supply routes.

Thus, an estimated 10 percent of the Pentagon’s logistics contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars are paid to insurgents as the US government funds the very forces American troops are fighting.

It is persistently rumored in Afghanistan that US forces are using their helicopters to ferry Taliban fighters. The rumor is strongly denied by the military. However, the helicopter rumors heard in many areas are feeding mistrust of the forces that are supposed to be bringing order to the country. The international troops deny that they are supporting the insurgents. “This entire business with the helicopters is just a rumor,” said Brigadier General Jüergen Setzer, recently appointed commander for the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in northern Afghanistan. “It has no basis in reality, according to our investigations.” But the persistent rumors that foreign helicopters have been sighted assisting the Taliban in northern Afghanistan were given an unexpected boost in mid-October 2009 by President Karzai, who told the media that his administration was investigating similar reports that “unknown” helicopters were ferrying the insurgents from the Helmand province in the south to the Baghlan, Kunduz, and Samangan provinces in the north.

Aram Roston, “How the US Funds the Taliban,” Nation, November 20, 2009, .

Ahmad Kawoosh, “Is the US Aiding the Taliban?” Taiwan News, October 31, 2009, opinion sec.

Ahmad Kawoosh, “Helicopter Rumor Refuses to Die,” Institute for War and Peace Reporting, November 2, 2009.

Andrew Rice, “Is There Such a Thing as Agro-Imperialism?” New York Times, November 16, 2009.