Category Archives: Security

Energy, History, Security

Epstein’s Counterfeit Austrian Passport

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There is some excellent reporting from the Daily Beast, as they lay out the details of a police search:

…U.S. attorney’s office said that the travel document “contains numerous ingress and egress stamps, including stamps that reflect use of the passport to enter France, Spain, the United Kingdom, and Saudi Arabia in the 1980s.”

The passport—which was Austrian but listed a Saudi Arabia address—was found in a locked safe…

A few notable points here:

  • Locked safe contents
  • False identity
  • France, Spain, UK and Saudi Arabia in 1980s

The locked safe is notable because the false identity passport was very old, yet never had been destroyed. Why keep an old document locked in a safe unless it still serves some purpose? Let’s look at what it may prove for those gaining access.

This triad of European countries with Saudi Arabia immediately should be recognized as an arms trade group.

It was less than a year ago this was discussed in the news:

UK, France and Spain to maintain arms sales to Saudi Arabia

The word “maintain” is a big clue. We are talking here about passport stamps from the 1980s, when those arms sales initiated.

An older news story from the 1990s thus becomes more relevant to perhaps explain why this passport still was locked in a safe.

…Mark Thatcher, 41, helped broker a British arms deal to Saudi Arabia worth a reported $35 billion in the mid-1980s.

According to a long report in the London Sunday Times, middlemen in the arms deal–which involved aircraft, warships and ammunition–received about $360 million for their services.

Both the Sunday Times and the Independent on Sunday said Mark Thatcher earned a $19-million commission for helping secure the deal.

Whenever arms trade, or similar black market dealings, come to light there usually are signs of an effort to make large payments untraceable. The Daily Beast offers exactly these details from the police search.

Also found in the safe was $70,000 in cash and 48 small diamonds that prosecutors contend are often kept on hand by someone who needs to make a quick getaway.

I understand why prosecutors right now are saying diamonds are evidence of quick getaway plans. They have a job to do and they probably are right about flight risk.

Yet quick getaway plans don’t match up with a long-expired counterfeit passport, which is why I am reminded here of a similar story from Frontline in 2002 of arms payable in diamonds…

U.N. arms expert Johan Peleman…got a lucky break. Peleman learned of a cocaine bust in Milan, where Italian police discovered four prostitutes in a hotel room with a Ukrainian businessman named Leonid Minin. The police also discovered more than $35,000 in cash, a half-million dollars in diamonds, and more than 1,500 documents detailing a tangled web of business dealings in oil, diamonds, timber and gun shipments to Africa.

A police search based on drugs and prostitution uncovers cash, diamonds and…arms deals.

What may come to pass is the current investigation into Epstein’s history of sex crimes also may now implicate him in serving Israel funneling European arms to Saudi Arabia during the Reagan Administration.

When Reagan came to power he wanted to undo humanitarian embargo policies that Carter had enacted, avoid Congressional worry about oil embargo/power, and return to the prior era of executive-privilege like Nixon/Kissenger secret arms deals.

The explosive growth of major cash sales of weapons to Third World nations—especially those in the oil-rich, but politically volatile Middle East and Persian Gulf region—stimulated a growing congressional desire to be better informed, and consulted with, on such sales that had serious potential consquences for American national interests.

New Yorker Cartoon, 31 May 1974

More to the point, Nixon had spent the early 1970s secretly building up Iran’s military capabilities and Reagan wanted to spend the mid-1980s using executive power to secretly expand Iraq’s military capabilities in a war with Iran.

Here’s “National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) 99, signed on July 12, 1983″, which clearly explains everything in Reagan’s mind.

1985 seems to be the crucial turning point in strategy, as Reagan normalized relations with Iraq he also backtracked on direct arms sales to the Saudis (claiming personal responsibility while also saying he didn’t know what was going on).

You can see the result of that shift was arms deal numbers jumped for France, UK and Spain:

That’s a graph I made from the SIPRI database of 1980s arms transfers to Saudi Arabia. Who brokered them?

The answer in part might be a guy who founded his own financial firm in 1982. His peculiar Austrian passport with a fake name, a Saudi address and stamps from France, UK and Spain now just needs to be held up to a 1980s calendar of major arms deals:

Maybe the target of this current investigation also will be linked directly with infamously unpopular American-made secretive arms deals to both Iran and Iraq to manipulate and destabilize them (see also: Iran-Contra Scandal of 1986).

The Shadow World and BAE Files have a Compendium at Tufts that summarize the significance of this passport to already documented history:

An investigation by the UK government’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) uncovered ‘commission payments, or bribes, totaling as much as GBP 6 billion paid by BAE Systems to members of the Saudi royal family and others.

[…]

The [1985] Al Yamamah deal resulted from the reluctance of the U.S. Congress in the early 1980s to allow sales of major combat aircraft to Saudi Arabia, fearing they may be used against Israel.

General reporting about the 1980s may call out a “reluctance of the U.S. Congress” to sell arms, and I often see talk about Thatcher’s “intent to create jobs” (lining the pockets of her own son) by selling arms into brutally repressive regimes. Andrew Feinstein even goes so far in his book “The Shadow World” to phrase the deals like this (p91):

Such were the benefits of Al Yamamah to Thatcher fils that some refer to the deal as ‘who’s ya mama’.

I have yet to find anyone discussing however whether Epstein was given an Austrian passport by the US or Israel to broker European arms into Saudi Arabia and thereby fuel Iraq in its war with Iran.

In other words, people talk about Epstein’s strange and shadowy accumulation of wealth in very similar terms to Thatcher, without any of the transparency. Maybe they should look into whether his counterfeit passport was within or near a nexus of arms payments between Reagan, Thatcher, Prince Bandar “Bush” bin Sultan, Saddam Hussein and Shimon Peres.

To help, I’ll give a couple examples of what money laundering and arms trade accountability has looked like for Mark Thatcher.

First, consider his conviction for laundering a diamond mines and oil coup d’etat led by an ex-SAS officer:

…son of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher pleaded guilty Thursday to unwittingly helping bankroll a botched coup plot in oil-rich Equatorial Guinea…[after] he paid $275,000 in two installments last year to charter an Alouette III helicopter to be used in the takeover attempt…

I say laundering because his “unwittingly” helpful role since has been proven to be formally approved as necessary by British Prime Minister Thatcher, his mother.

On his release from prison, [ex-SAS officer] Mann said he could never forgive Sir Mark, who he claimed was a key participant in the military adventure rather than a mere investor, for failing to come to his aid.

And second, given the above secretive laundering role, there’s a direct parallel to Epstein’s track record in “financial services” versus reality:

For years mystery has surrounded the way in which Mark Thatcher suddenly acquired great wealth in the 1980s, when his mother was in office. He repeatedly has refused to answer journalists’ questions about the subject but is reported to have told friends he made his fortune offering “financial services.

[…]

The Sunday Times said Thatcher was one of a group of people who helped broker the deal, and who received among them a $360 million commission from the Saudis. It said his share was $18 million.

[…]

The Sunday Times quoted Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi as saying that Mark Thatcher’s value to the Saudis during the negotiation was that he could go to his mother and get an answer to any question they raised.

That leaves quite a lot for Epstein. Given records saying the Saudis expected sexual favors as part of the bribery system (e.g. the UK inflated cost of its jets 30% before signing the deal), it’s not a stretch to see how human trafficking through private jets and private islands became Epstein’s 1980s self-enrichment plan, thanks to his special passport.

Now we just need the Daily Beast to give us some dates from his passport stamps and the name in the passport to see if the above international history analysis holds any water.

History, Security

Inventor of Cloud Computing Dies Aged 93

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Source: MIT Museum. “Professor Fernando Corbató, c. 1965”
There’s something not quite right about a BBC article about the death of Fernando Corbató.

First, the meat of the story describes sharing models of compute.

Using computers during the 50s was an exercise in frustration because the huge, monolithic machines could only handle one processing job at a time.

In a bid to overcome this limitation, Dr Corbato developed an operating system for computers called the Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS).

Rather than have the machine dedicated to one person, CTSS divided up the processing power of a computer into small slices so it could do little bits of work for lots of people.

Given all that…the BBC decided to run their story with a title of “Computer password inventor dies aged 93”.

Password inventor?

A lot of people think of the late Corbato this way, yet I’m not sure why that’s a good idea to keep saying it. The BBC could do better.

We are in an age where sharing systems are wildly popular and everyone hates passwords. Perhaps people think focusing on the password story will get more clicks? I don’t like how it distracts from the bigger picture.

It’s a bit like calling the guy who invented police (another sharing system) the inventor of the nightstick. Why focus on the latter when the former was their actual intent and more notable contribution? Even if there were other sharing systems around that time, Corbato’s sharing system work was seminal and very influential.

Second, the BBC describes antique compute power as “so fast”.

Even in the 50s and 60s computers were so fast that no user noticed they were only getting a small portion of a machine’s processing power at any one time.

WE have both “an exercise in frustration” because jobs had to be stacked, and yet at the same time “no user noticed they were only getting a small portion”. I find it hard to reconcile how frustration drove a user to solve something that no user noticed. Was it frustrating or was it invisible?

Also the story at this point ignores the development of batch processing in the late 1950s.

Anyway Wired describes the situation entirely differently, suggesting that slow speed actually led to hacking passwords.

In the spring of 1962, Scherr was looking for a way to bump up his usage time on CTSS. He had been allotted four hours per week, but it wasn’t nearly enough time to run the detailed performance simulations he’d designed for the new computer system. So he simply printed out all of the passwords stored on the system.

That makes more sense.

And finally, third, this whole narrative misses the point that Dr Corbato himself describes the use of a secret to gain entry as an obvious solution for shared systems.

He was reluctant to take credit for passwords, which begs the question why people are so intent on sticking it to him, instead of credit for a compute sharing model that can uniquely authenticate people.

I’ve seen some people reference IBM in the 1950s, when really there should be an investigation into Philco, RCA, ERA, NCR, GM NAA, Tymshare, National CSS, Dial Data and Fairchild computers from that time.

Many computer systems under development in the late 1950s were serving the US military. So by way of example, here is a page from a 1956 US Army FM26-5 booklet on the language used to handle access to an “internal” shared resource:

Food, History, Security

Uncle Nearest: The Slave Who Taught Jack Daniel

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A while ago I explained in “Lost History of Knob Creek” how American history of whiskey production is tied to slavery.

In particular, Jack Daniel took his recipe from emancipated slaves even though he used his own name for the brand.

Now the man who taught Jack Daniel, “Nearis” Green, is getting his own brand. Proceeds from the sale of this new whiskey are going to fund college education of the master distiller descendants

See if you can trace how the story originally flowed from being “never a secret” to something they can only “embrace, tentatively” to a “gauzy and unreliable” tale, to an allegation that they hope would “never be definitively proved”…

Daniel, the company now says, didn’t learn distilling from Dan Call, but from a man named Nearis Green — one of Call’s slaves.

This version of the story was never a secret, but it is one that the distillery has only recently begun to embrace, tentatively, in some of its tours, and in a social media and marketing campaign this summer.

[…]

Frontier history is a gauzy and unreliable pursuit, and Nearis Green’s story — built on oral history and the thinnest of archival trails — may never be definitively proved.

Then a successful writer comes onto the scene and quickly realizes there is a market for trust and ethics, scientifically eroding the structural white supremacist deception and lies that intentionally obscure roots of American innovation.

…when she got to Lynchburg, she found no trace of Green. “I went on three tours of the distillery, and nothing, not a mention of him,” she said.

Rather than leave, Ms. Weaver dug in, determined to uncover more about Green and persuade Brown-Forman to follow through on its promise to recognize his role in creating America’s most famous whiskey. She rented a house in downtown Lynchburg, and began contacting Green’s descendants, dozens of whom still live in the area.

Scouring archives in Tennessee, Georgia and Washington, D.C., she created a timeline of Green’s relationship with Daniel, showing how Green had not only taught the whiskey baron how to distill, but had also gone to work for him after the Civil War, becoming what Ms. Weaver believes is the first black master distiller in America. By her count, she has collected 10,000 documents and artifacts related to Daniel and Green, much of which she has agreed to donate to the new National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington.

So much for the thinnest of archival trails. Congratulations to Ms. Weaver and the Green family for restoring and preserving American history.

Jack Daniel has since updated their marketing to point out how kind they think they were being to the black men they erased from history.

Source: Jack Daniel

On his farm, Call had a still and Jack quickly took interest in it. Now this was back in the days prior to the Civil War and Emancipation and the Call still was under the watch and care of an enslaved man named Nathan “Nearest” Green. The Reverend Call and his distiller, Nearest, taught Jack how to make whiskey. Most of that mentoring, however, fell to Nearest who worked side by side with Jack and taught the young distiller what would become his life’s passion.

After the Civil War, Reverend Call’s congregation and wife gave the preacher an ultimatum: walk away from making whiskey or walk away from his work as a minister. Call made the decision to sell his business to Jack. And so Nearest, now a free man, was hired by Jack and became the very first head distiller – or what we’d call a master distiller today – of the Jack Daniel Distillery. While slave labor was a part of life in the South prior to the Civil War’s close, Jack Daniel not only never owned slaves but he worked side-by-side with them as a hired hand to Dan Call. When it came time after the war to establish his own distillery, Jack’s crew were all hired men.

Nearest would work with Jack as his first master distiller until Jack moved his operation to the Cave Spring Hollow sometime after 1881. There, Nearest’s sons George and Eli and his grandsons Ott, Jesse and Charlie continued the Green family tradition, working at Jack’s distillery in the Cave Spring Hollow.

More than 150 years have passed since Nearest and Jack first began making whiskey together, and, to this day, there has always been a member of the Green family working at the Jack Daniel Distillery.

Bottom line here? Why didn’t Call sell the distillery run by Green to… Green?

Nobody had heard of Green because Daniel centered the brand and story around himself despite obviously taking advantage of slaves and freemen alike just because of race.

Statements like “While slave labor was a part of life in the South prior to the Civil War’s close” are bogus. Two important points here:

1) Saying “back in the days prior to the Civil War and Emancipation” does NOT excuse slavery or make it acceptable in any way. The Colony of Georgia had abolished slavery in 1735 and the American revolution was in part fought to expand slavery. Indeed, the colony of Vermont had abolished slavery in 1777. Philadelphia passed a 1780 Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery and George Washington went out of his way to find loopholes just so he could continue slavery. American legends such as President Grant however had no slaves when the Civil War started because he already had ended the practice on his own accord (setting free the only slave he ever had, a man “gifted” to him by his wife’s father). General Burnsides as well had seen his father emancipate their slaves. There are many examples like this and the point is anyone claiming “part of life” phrasing for slavery is engaging in toxic apologist nonsense given America re-established slavery by forcibly making it part of life where it had NOT been. Indeed, Florida under Spanish rule was where slaves in America went to be free of American tyranny… until America invaded Florida to claim the land in order to re-establish slavery.

2) Slavery was all over America because its proponents had been violently forcing it to continue, yet it had been naturally ending in the North anyway for a long time (like the rest of the world). Those viciously attacking anyone who dared speak of freedom and liberty in America, censoring black voices, thus could also be called pro-slavery. Texas seceded from Mexico on a singular (“Lone Star”) agenda to violently expand slavery (white immigrants brought slaves into abolitionist Mexico and then violently seized the land to form a new slavery state). And while there were many brave Americans (e.g. Lovejoy, murdered in 1837 by violent slaveholder mobs) who stood up to such expanding violence, people who fought to free black men from the tyranny of America… Jack Daniel clearly was not one of them. His legacy is censoring black voices, erasing and revising history, to falsely market other ideas as his own. He even went by “Uncle Jack”.

Making whiskey together? Jack was learning, taking from Nearest. Working side-by-side with slaves and taking credit for their work, even after emancipation, is in no way the same as freedom.

While it’s tempting to tell white insecurity mobs today that their bourbon was invented by black Americans, this particular story rings the most hollow. We wouldn’t have to seek an Uncle Nearest story today instead if Jack Daniel had done the right thing.

The Story of Nearest Green from Uncle Nearest Premium Whiskey on Vimeo.

Narrated by Emmy-Award winning actor Jeffrey Wright. This beautifully shot short film tells the extraordinary legacy of the first known African-American master distiller. It’s a story of honor, respect, and an unlikely friendship, that would forever change the whiskey industry. Perhaps the greatest American story you never heard.

The truth has finally found the light, no thanks to Jack Daniel. And while the story may be told that Jack Daniel paid Uncle Nearest well enough to prosper and take care of offspring, note that selling whiskey today to “fund college education of master distiller Nearest’s descendants” exposes the exact opposite.

Does a fund for education sound right, or like a given? Just think of a need for education money in terms of the wealth and fame accumulated by Jack Daniel appropriating so much and returning so little.

Food, Security

Americans Feel Guilty About Eating Pork, Not Beef

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A new study that positioned “animals are friends” to Americans had an interesting outcome. Pork became unpalatable by the subjects, while beef was still seen as edible.

…we show that the negative effect of anthropomorphism on consumers’ attitudes and behavioral intentions toward (pork) meat consumption is mediated by increased feelings of anticipatory guilt (Studies 3a and 3c). Nevertheless, no such effect was found with another kind of meat (beef), which indicates that anthropomorphizing meat animals through the friendship metaphor cannot be successfully applied to all commonly eaten species (Study 3b).

While the researchers claim there is some literature angle that may explain the difference, it reminds me of families I know in rural American communities.

They regularly eat cattle they treat as pets. I’ve never heard of pigs treated as pets that see the same end.