Monday, May 19, 2014

Pot Meets Kettle as US Accuses China of Spying


The farce continues. In a staged media event US Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Department of Justice had indicted five Chinese military officers with stealing data. The dog and pony show – complete with wanted posters – comes as the Obama regime stumbles from one foreign policy debacle to another and that accusing the Chinese of stealing data and spying on US interests is about as hypocritical as it comes in the aftermath of the revelations of former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.  Holder will go down as one of the worst Attorney Generals in US history and already has me longing for the good old days of John Ashcroft and the worst thing about Holder is that he just will not go away. This latest charade continues the pattern over the Obama second term of continuing to agitate for trouble with Russia and China and will not end well if it continues which it will given the thin skin of the narcissist in chief and his attack dog at DOJ.
What is truly stunning with today’s announcement (outside of the obvious hypocrisy) is not only that the Obama regime is given to the fantasy that it can indict foreign citizens but that somehow the Chinese leadership is compelled to turn over the officers for prosecution in what Holder describes as the courtesy of giving them “due process” in the American court system. Chinese President Xi Jinping must be shocked at the audacity of Obama’s minions and perhaps when he is done laughing his ass off he will issue a response. Something very, very strange is going on right now in The Homeland with the near daily carnival of perversion that is the elite political class appearing to be experiencing a collective hallucination of global invincibility.
The US Justice Department indicted five Chinese military officers with stealing data from six US companies and unions on Monday, inaugurating a major escalation of tensions with China over economic spycraft.
Attorney general Eric Holder announced that the US for the first time would seek to bring officials of a foreign government to the US to face charges of infiltrating American computer networks to steal data beneficial to US trade competitors. The Justice Department even went as far as printing “wanted” posters.
The charges come as revelations about the scale of National Security Agency surveillance from whistleblower Edward Snowden indicate that at least some US surveillance carries an economic benefit.
“The range of trade secrets and other sensitive business information stolen in this case is significant and demands an aggressive response,” Holder said on Monday.
While suspicions about government sponsorship of corporate data theft have swirled around China for years, never before has the US formally accused officials from China, or any other government, of involvement.
Not only has attribution of online espionage long vexed investigators, the prospect of diplomatic or economic retaliation has also been an impediment to taking action. The Justice Department national security chief, John Carlin, and colleagues from the Federal Bureau of Investigation credited a years-long effort, and the willingness of companies to admit to a data breach, with “exposing the faces and the names behind the keyboards in Shanghai.”
Accused are Wang Dong, Sun Kailiang, Wen Xinyu, Huang Zhenyu, and Gu Chunhui, whom a federal grand jury in Pennsylvania indicted on 31 counts of espionage. Carlin described the five men as members of a People’s Liberation Army entity known as Unit 61398.
AND
China's foreign ministry called the allegations “extremely ridiculous". Ministry spokesman Qin Gang demanded that the US “immediately rectify its mistake" and repeal the lawsuit, according to a statement on its website.
“This grave violation of the basic norms of international relations has harmed Chinese-US cooperation and mutual trust,” he said, adding that China has already lodged a formal complaint with US authorities.
The Chinese government frequently counters hacking allegations by claiming that the country is a safeguard of internet security and that cyber-attacks are a universal problem. Qin said that China “never engages in the activity of stealing commercial secrets through the internet.” He called the allegations “baseless”.
“For a long time, American authorities have conducted large-scale, organized cyber-theft and cyber-espionage activities against foreign dignitaries, companies and individuals,” he said. “This is already common knowledge.”
Indeed it is common knowledge and I can hardly wait for the other shoe to drop on the release of the big stories from Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Glenn Greenwald and his team - I just wonder if the hysteria of AG Holder may be that he himself is hearing the footsteps of the posse closing in. He has long been a connected dirty bastard and a fixer who according to the last story that Matt Taibbi did at Rolling Stone prior to fleeing that sinking ship specifically mentions one Eric Holder as being involved in some rather unsavory activity during the Clinton administration. I excerpt the following from Taibbi's “The Vampire Squid Strikes Again” about sleazy commodities scams:
The sudden turning on of this huge faucet of free money seems to have been a factor in an ensuing commodities shopping spree undertaken by all three firms. Morgan Stanley, for instance, claimed to have just $2.5 billion in commodity assets in March 2009. By September 2011, those holdings had nearly quadrupled, to $10.3 billion.
Goldman and Chase – along with Glencore and Trafigura, a pair of giant Swiss-based conglomerates that were offshoots of a firm founded by notorious deceased commodities trader and known market manipulator Marc Rich – all made notably coincidental purchases of metals-warehousing companies in 2010.
The presence of these Marc Rich entities is particularly noteworthy. According to famed Forbes reporter Paul Klebnikov, who was assassinated in 2004 after years of reports on Russian corruption, Rich made a fortune in the early Nineties striking crooked deals with the Soviet bosses who controlled the U.S.S.R.'s supplies of raw materials – in particular commodities like zinc and aluminum. These deals helped create a fledgling class of profiteers among the bosses of the crumbling Soviet empire, a class that would go on years later to help push Russia out of its communist past into its kleptocratic present.
"He'd strike a deal with the local party boss, or the director of a state-owned company," Klebnikov said back in 2001. "He'd say, 'OK, you will sell me the [commodity] at five to 10 percent of the world-market price . . . and in return, I will deposit some of the profit I make by reselling it 10 times higher on the world market, and put the kickback in a Swiss bank account.'"
Rich made these reported deals while in exile from the United States, which he fled in 1983 after the U.S. government charged him with tax evasion, wire fraud, racketeering and trading with the enemy after being caught trading with rogue states like Iran, among other things. The state filed enough counts to put him away for life, and he remained a fugitive until January 2001, when a little-known Clinton administration Justice Department official named Eric Holder recommended Rich be pardoned. A report by the House Committee on Government Reform later concluded that Holder had not provided a credible explanation for supporting Rich's pardon and that he must have had "other motivations" that he didn't share with Congress. Among other things, the committee speculated that Holder had designs on the attorney general's office in a potential Al Gore administration.
In any case, in 2010, a decade after the Rich pardon, Holder was attorney general, but under Barack Obama, and two Rich-created firms, along with two banks that have been major donors to the Democratic Party, all made moves to buy up metals warehouses. In near simultaneous fashion, Goldman, Chase, Glencore and Trafigura bought companies that control warehouses all over the world for the LME, or London Metals Exchange. The LME is a privately owned exchange for world metals trading. It's the world's primary hub for determining metals prices and also for trading metals-based futures, options, swaps and other instruments.
That would be the same Marc Rich, the global high-finance swindler who is now deceased and whose wife Denise is Hillary's BFF. When I read the reference to Holder in Taibbi's piece it brought to mind something else that I read about him years back in the book by Al Martin "The Conspirators" that was published in 2002 from which I excerpt the following:
Eric Holder (I have a file on this guy six inches thick) was then the US Attorney for Washington D.C., and he personally presented the case to the grand jury.
An indictment was issued and then put under national security seal. Newcomb was eventually unindicted, forced out and retired.
Holder had previously been an Assistant United States Attorney in Little Rock. He was a very loyal Republican under then U.S. Attorney, now Senator Asa Hutchinson, investigating the links between narcotics trafficking, Mena and the Clinton administration in Arkansas.
Holder then moved up to US Attorney and zealously participated in all manner of Iran-Contra coverup.
And where is he today? Eric Holder is the Senior Assistant Attorney General of the United States.
If you look at his career and the cases he was involved in, Holder is a good example of how a Reagan-Bush coverup specialist became a Clinton coverup specialist.
Holder’s career route (the cases he prosecuted, or unprosecuted as the case may be) figure in subsequent allegations he faced in the 1990s during the Alexander probe of Iran-Contra cover-ups.
It’s a real classic example. It also sets the mold if one ever wanted to do a study on all of the people held over from the Reagan-Bush administration and put into the Clinton Administration. There were over 1,100, as we mentioned before, an unusually high number.
But look at who the people are. Look at the commonality between them.
Over two-thirds of the 1,100 people had been alleged, during a congressional hearing or some lawsuit, to have had involvement in the Iran-Contra coverup, the destruction of documents, or the manipulation of witnesses and so on.
Holder is a real sneaky son of a bitch. Not only is holder a Senior Assistant United States Attorney General, but guess what else he’s in charge of?
Holder is in charge of Iran-Contra whistle blower filings.
It keeps getting curiouser and curiouser as that big ball of red, white and blue twine continues to slowly unwind and if the dirty dealings go as deeply as I believe that they do then perhaps there is a method to the madness in the push for starting a war - any war - to lock down the country once and for all before all of the treasonous and criminal activities have been ongoing for decades are exposed to the light of day. 
 (Image: AP)

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