In the vomit-inducing, hypocrisy stakes of 2011 there has been little to rival the sight of American journalists feeding like starved hyenas off the State Department cables made available by Wikileaks only to retreat to their word processors muttering curses against “that awful man” Julian Assange. This beautifully entertaining takeoff of the MasterCard ad, via Ralph Nader’s 2000 presidential election masterpiece, is dedicated to the Bill Keller’s and John Burns of this world and all those who think and behave like them.
We’re up at Deer Lake for the summer, in the lakeside house we were lucky to get a few years back, on the edge of the Catskills Mountains, about a three hour drive from downtown New York and a welcome escape from the torrid heat of the city at this time of the year.
Deer Lake in the Summer
One of the delights of being here is to savour the wildlife which is still, despite the best efforts of the National Rifle Association, incredibly bountiful. In Europe we never see a deer except in a zoo or grazing in the parkland of some landed gentry’s mansion but up here at the eponymously named Deer Lake you have to be careful when you’re driving in case one jumps out of the forest in front of your car. In Ireland roadkill is a squashed mouse or dog but here it’s likely to be, sadly, an entire deer carcass.
Deer Lake in Winter, seen from the lake
There’s a black bear that lives in the nearby forest and while I’ve never seen it, others have, and we did come across evidence a couple of years back that it wanders near the homes around the lake looking for food. Two years ago, Joan hung some dried corns on the tree outside our front door, an American tradition at Halloween time, and one morning we found they had been ripped down and the bark of the tree was lacerated with the hungry bear’s claw marks.
We discovered later that the tree was diseased and it had to be cut down. In a small hole in the top of the stump a family of chipmunks made their home and every now and then we will open the door to see one perched on the edge. They have this amazing ability to stay completely still for minutes at time, a trick they doubtless developed to fool a potential predator. Until I came here the only chipmunks I had ever seen were in movie cartoons.
As I write this a rabbit is crouched in the middle of the lawn chewing away at daisies or whatever. He or she lives in a bank of bushes at the edge of the property where it meets the lake and I first noticed it one evening three years ago as it stealthily crept out to feed. With the passage of time and the realisation that we mean it no harm, its forays have become longer and bolder.
Birds are everywhere, some of them, like the Baltimore Oriole, simply gorgeous in their bright yellow plumage. Humming birds arrive when the heat rises, Kingfishers in the autumn and always there’s the thump of a woodpecker somewhere, pecking away at a tree to get at the termites eating its innards. The presence of a woodpecker is a sure sign of a tree in trouble. Butterflies in colours I could never have imagined and Dragonflies, so big and of such varied hues that they could have flown right out of Pan’s Labyrinth, glide around the garden and on the edge of the lake.
Yesterday, however, I saw an animal that not only had I never, ever seen before but actually thought was extinct. It flashed across the lawn, a cinnamon-stained streak, taking short rests by each tree as its spied out the terrain in front of it before leaping across the tiny creek at the edge of the garden into the wilderness beyond. It took me a moment or two to realise what it was: a red squirrel.
I had never encountered anything but grey squirrels and the story that I had been told was that they had made their way somehow to Europe from America and made the red squirrel if not extinct then so rare it might as well be. But I could never understand how that had happened; how could one squirrel drive another out of existence?
But once I saw the red squirrel the answer was obvious. The red squirrel was small and lean but nervous and shy; the grey squirrel is much larger and, in my experience, a brazen creature. I could imagine the grey squirrel bullying the red squirrel out of the best feeding and nesting areas, terrifying it and eventually starving it, if not out of existence then into a fearful minority.
That’s what bullies do. We’ve all been bullied at one time or another; it’s a hideous experience and it leaves a hatred that is impossible to quench. But the red squirrel darting across our lawn was evidence that bullies do not always get everything their own way. The red squirrel has survived and the measure of that triumph is the beauty of the creature and an allure that the grey squirrel can never match; after all it is grey.
The Brehon Law Society in New York City has written to the prosecution authorities in Belfast protesting the attempt to subpoena oral history archives and circulated the letter widely to other interested parties – it is well worth a read:
As followers of the saga of the Boston College subpoena will be aware, the text of the demand for access to the oral history archive has been sealed, which means that relevant details – the who is behind this and why they are doing it for instance – have been hidden from the college and therefore the general public. But the secrecy doesn’t end there. In this remarkable piece written by Chris Bray of the History News Network, you can see that the US Department of Justice, which is facilitating the subpoena request on behalf of the British government, is refusing to answer even the most basic questions about the matter, not even which treaty between the US & UK is being used to authorise this request. Why such secrecy? What is going on here?
In recent days some interesting articles about the PSNI’s attempt to violate Boston College’s archive of oral history interviews have appeared and are worth reading. There is this, by Liam Clarke in the Sunday Times; an insightful take by Chris Bray on the History News Network and Anthony McIntyre’s response to Danny Morrison’s rant on his own blog. Enjoy the read. I’m sure there will be more to come. And then there’s this beaut!
New York Congressman Anthony Weiner now admits he lied about sending some semi-revealing photographs of himself to assorted women via Twitter. It was a foolish act but no-one has been harmed, except Weiner himself, his wife and family. He didn’t have sex with any of the women but his political career and ambitions lie in ruins, he has been shamed in public and he may have to quit Congress. His cover-up, if it merits the description, has been awarded the suffix reserved for the most egregious efforts to sweep scandal under the carpet: Weinergate.
Most students of the Iraq war have concluded that US President George W Bush lied about Saddam Hussein and WMD’s, as did British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Iraq was invaded and a lengthy war was fought on the basis of that lie, countless tens of thousands were killed, trillions of dollars wasted and the whole Middle East thrown into chaos and instability. Both men retired as respected statesmen and live in security & comfort. Blair has amassed a fortune and works for one of Wall Street’s largest merchant banks. He and Bush have each written autobiographies that have been widely praised and which earned them a great deal of money. Neither has apologised for anything. No ‘gate’ suffix has been added to their misdeeds.
So, who’s the most offending of this bunch, Weiner or Bush & Blair? And whose misbehavior has been more scrutinized by the American media?
America is a human disaster waiting to happen. Correction, the human disaster has been under way for some time. It just hasn’t made it into the mainstream media.
The evidence is there in the facts and figures, in the measurements of wealth and poverty, in the scale of real joblessness and the misery that accompanies it. And it also evident in the harrowing testimony of those who must deal with distressing consequences for human health, the nurses of America whose job it is to care for the casualties of what is rapidly becoming the greatest economic disaster of our age.
Unemployed get a handout in the 1930's
The calamity that is coming/is already here is the product of two sets of circumstances, each of which would, by themselves, be catastrophic but whose combination is a toxic mix unequalled in nearly a century. One is a growing disparity in the share of national wealth in the United States, now at levels not seen since just before the Great Depression of the 1930’s, and the second is an economic recession whose only remedy, according to the consensus of political and media opinion, lies in policies that can only intensify that inequality. It is as if, knowing that the well is poisoned we return to fill our buckets to overflowing.
Wall Street
Consider this statistic. In 1929, the year of the Wall Street crash which heralded the Great Depression just one per cent of Americans owned 20 per cent of the wealth, that is one in every five dollars was owned by one in a hundred people. Guess what the figure was in 2010? The same one per cent now owns 24 per cent of the economy, that’s nearly a quarter of all wealth in the hands of a tiny fraction of the population.
How has this come about? Most people thought advanced economies like America’s had consigned those levels of income inequality to the dustbin of history and by policies designed to soften poverty – medicare for the elderly, medicaid for the very poor, social security for the elderly and progressive income tax with their equivalents in Europe – sought to make society fairer and the lot of most people more bearable.
That’s true. That all did happen. It came about in America, as it did in Europe, in the post-war years and this golden age, if you want to call it that, lasted until the end of the 1970’s. Social welfare programs and measures to more fairly redistribute wealth were enormously popular with most people but for the wealthy and very wealthy they were a source of resentment, anger and the biting, all-consuming desire to restore the status quo ante.
The election of Ronald Reagan in the US and the parallel election in Britain of Margaret Thatcher signaled that the status quo ante was indeed coming back to town. On the back of slogans like ‘Government is not the solution, it is the problem’, Reagan and Thatcher began clawing back all those gains made by ordinary people and returning the savings to the back pockets of those who claimed it was theirs to begin with.
Ronald Reagan & Margaret Thatcher
Tax changes, privatization, deregulation all served to strengthen the richest sections of society and impoverish most of the rest and those policies have more or less been adopted by governments of whatever ideological hue on either side of the Atlantic, by Republican and Democrat Presidents, by Labour and Conservative prime ministers.
Again the figures tell the story. In 1980, when Reagan and Thatcher came to power, one per cent of Americans owned eight per cent of the wealth. By 1990 they owned 12%, by 2000 it was 16% and it is now 24%. In 1965 the average CEO made twenty four times the wages of his workforce. By 1978 it was thirty-five times; by 1989 it was seventy-one times; by 2000 three hundred times and by 2007 it was three hundred and sixty-four times larger. Inexorably the rich have got richer, the poor poorer.
Now whenever people in America complain about figures like these they are almost sure to be accused of indulging in class warfare, something that is decried as being unAmerican. In fact class warfare is exactly what’s going on. Even Warren Buffet, America’s favorite billionaire, can see that. A few years back he was quoted in a perceptive New York Times piece about tax inequalities that favor the rich: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
It is against this background that the Wall Street-created financial crisis of 2008 happened and the consequent economic recession, now about to go into a double dip. Officially unemployment is above nine per cent and rising but the real jobless figure, which includes those who have lost hope and given up the search for work or part-timers who would like to work full-time but can’t find a job, is nearer to 18 per cent, not far off one in every five people.
The political establishment seems united on one thing. The problem of federal deficits is a more serious and urgent issue. Both major political parties are agreed on that and how to tackle it: government spending must come down. The only thing they differ on is the mix: should it be spending cuts plus tax hikes or just spending cuts. Either way an awful lot of public money is going to be taken out of the economy and the result will be an even more serious and long lasting recession, more poverty and hardship and greater inequality. Where are ye, John Maynard Keynes when we need you?
Back in the 1930’s John Steinbeck’s magnificent novel The Grapes of Wrath captured the misery and waste of the Great Depression. Ask ordinary Americans about today’s economic crisis and they will tell you, it may not be called a Great Depression but it sure as hell feels like one.
There’s no Steinbeck around today to paint the word pictures of this economic calamity in the unique way he could. But there are few people better placed to tell it as it as than America’s nurses.
This week, some eight hundred members of National Nurses United, the union that represents 170,000 of America’s Registered Nurses (RN’s) are this week holding a conference in Washington DC in an effort to highlight the growing health disaster that is overtaking the United States and to put forward a program to redraw national priorities, for jobs at living wages, access to health care, schools, decent housing and an equitable tax system. During the week they will rally outside the White House in the hope that someone, Barack Obama and/or the media, will start to take notice.
The nurses call it a health emergency, the direct consequence of the economic crisis and the worst some of them have seen in careers that have lasted forty years or more.
The health crisis is disarmingly straightforward. Not knowing if you’ll ever work again, worrying about how long the unemployment checks will come in, anxiety about children and families and sheer poverty all cause stress which in turns creates health disorders.
The nurses identify a surge in heart ailments, especially in middle-aged men, hypertension, pancreatitis, colitis, increased obesity caused by poor diets, mental illnesses like anxiety disorders, growing rates of asthma and, in America’s privatized health insurance system, an inability to pay growing premium costs and co-pays (for European readers, a co-pay is like an insurance deductible) as all the consequence of the Wall Street recession. And many of the nurses are sharing the problems they see their patients suffering.
This is what they say:
“Every day patients call me to say that are putting off a procedure, like a colonoscopy, because they cannot afford the co-pay. Employers change the terms of health insurance coverage, raising costs to workers, and many do not know it’s happened until they show up in need of care and are shocked and unable to pay. People are working harder than ever, two or even three jobs to make ends meet. Often it’s tied to a problem in the household or extended family—unemployment or sickness. Men in their 50s, engineers who were laid off and living in my community, have given up looking for work. There is nothing out there.” – NNU Co-president Deborah Burger, RN.
Deborah Burger
“People are going without care at a time when stress-related illnesses are up. Mental illness is enormous and largely untreated. We see extreme angst in children—serious anxiety disorders. They are worried about whether mom and dad have jobs and they hear the talk about losing the house. Patients cannot afford to be out of work, so they are coming to work ill and with symptoms.” – Jean Ross, RN, a NNU co-president.
Jean Ross
“Stress-induced illnesses are growing—gut disorders in people of all ages, even kids. It is all stress from economic circumstances. RNs are scared and nervous. Some are single moms, others have laid off spouses, and their paycheck is critical. Many work an extra shift or two to get by. Many of us have to put off retirement. We are back involved in the lives of our parents because they are aging and vulnerable and do not have the resources to get by.” – NNU Co-president Karen Higgins, RN.
The news that Tyler Hamilton, Lance Armstrong’s former cycling teammate on three of his Tour de France victories has now revealed that he witnessed Armstrong injecting himself with the blood boosting drug EPO – “like we all did, like I did many, many times” – may or may not end with Armstrong facing federal charges that he defrauded the US Postal Service for taking their money while insisting that he was clean of performance enhancing chemicals.
As the NYT’s George Vescey summarised: “According to Hamilton, Armstrong provided illegal drugs to teammates; showed them how to use them; used secret cellphones and code words like Edgar Allan Poe for EPO, the blood-boosting drug; flew Hamilton to Spain for illegal doping; and paid his way out of a positive test.”
Whatever the outcome of the federal probe one thing is for sure, and that is that virtually nobody now believes Armstrong’s claims that he won his record-breaking seven Tour de France crowns fairly and solely by virtue of his own physical abilities. Hamilton’s recent appearance on CBS’ Sixty Minutes follows similar claims from another Armstrong teammate, Floyd Landis who last year admitted to doping while describing Armstrong as the kingpin of doping on the Postal Service team whose management, he added, knew about and encouraged the practice.
Tyler’s claim was made all the more credible by the fact that after the CBS interview he returned his 2004 Olympic gold medal on the grounds that he had cheated to win it. Armstrong, a cancer survivor, has traded on his work for his cancer charity and his claim that he had never ever failed a doping test during his long career. But in the face of evidence that such tests can be and have been faked, and even that Armstrong has covered up, at least once, a failed drug test Hamilton’s interview has created what the New York Times recently called “another huge crack……in Armstrong’s formerly unbreakable facade”.
None of this would have happened but for the great journalism of David Walsh, sports writer for the Sunday Times and a former colleague on the Sunday
David Walsh
Tribune. Back in 2004, Walsh published LA Confidentiel along with French sportswriter Pierre Ballester, an investigation into suspicions that Armstrong’s astonishing cycling feat – coming back from a near fatal cancer to Tour de France glory – could only have been possible with the help of performance boosting drugs.
As American journalists now eagerly follow the path first trodden by Walsh they should remember that when LA Confidentiel first appeared it was either ignored or panned by much of the US media some of whom reacted as though this was the most outrageous and biased slur possible on a national hero and therefore not worthy of a follow-up or serious consideration.
When the book came out America had just invaded Iraq and anti-French sentiment was at a disconcerting height. With great common sense the French had queried the evidence linking Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda and pressed for a diplomatic solution to the WMD issue. In America the reaction was anger, chauvinism and racism: the French were wimps, interested only in making a buck out of Saddam, hadn’t they surrendered to Hitler and wasn’t De Gaulle a pompous pain in the ass? And in Congress the restaurant menus were altered to reflect all this. French Fries became Freedom Fries.
So a book written in French, published in France and co-authored by a French writer which sought to portray Armstrong as a cheat and liar had to be part of ‘Old Europe’s’ payback for the Freedom Fries insults.
It is to David Walsh’s great credit that he persisted in the face of all this. He knew he was right and he followed up LA Confidentiel with From Lance to Landis, written under his sole byline which took the case against Armstrong to the next stage. His perseverance, tenacity and confidence in his sources and the story have paid off. Enjoy the moment, David.
My apologies first of all to all and sundry for my lamentable absence from this blog. First I had horrendous problems with our internet connection and no sooner had they been fixed that I learned that someone in the British security set up had slapped subpoenas on the two participants in the IRA part of the paramilitary oral history archive I had helped to create at Boston College.
Needless to say this latter event has consumed a great deal of my time recently and because of legal constraints I am unable to say all that I would like to say. Suffice it for now to observe that this is yet another example of lazy policemen trying to live off other people’s work. The offence which they are seemingly interested in happened forty years ago and they showed as little interest in the event just after it happened as they did in the intervening years, despite the plethora of evidence and material to follow up that has been available for at least the last decade – and that doesn’t take into account the secret intelligence which was no doubt available on both sides of the Border.
But it is only now, after they learned of the possible existence of ready-made evidence that the police have chosen to move. If I came away with one conviction about the forces of law and order from all my years watching the police at work in Belfast, it was not that they were corrupt or politically biased, although there was never any shortage of evidence for both, it is that policemen are as work-shy and indolent as it possible to be.
In the meantime this recent item on Boston public television is well worth watching. It can be accessed here.
With the White House daily changing key elements of its account of the killing of Osama Bin Laden – he turned out not to be armed, did not use his wife as a shield against Navy Seal bullets and she wasn’t killed (so it was always a shoot-to-kill mission and Osama was not a gutless coward) – it might be prudent to also take the charges of duplicity and double-dealing being leveled at Pakistan with a large spoonful of salt.
(UPDATE: The White House is now saying that there was no firefight in the house where Osama Bin Laden, a son and a courier were shot dead by commandos. The only shots fired at the soldiers came from another courier killed at a guest house elsewhere in the compound. It seems clear that even though the soldiers had only a 60-80% certainty that the Al Qaeda leader was hiding in the complex they were intent on killing everyone they encountered there.)
An old colleague from Northern Ireland, Toby Harnden, who wrote one of the best books yet on the IRA in South Armagh and is now the US editor of The Daily Telegraph, has listed ten questions about the operation in Abbottabad which he thinks throw doubt on the authorized explanation and instead support the theory that Bin Laden was betrayed by someone in his compound. The story put out by Obama’s people, the central feature of which was that months-long tracking of one of his couriers led to the Al Qaeda chief, is designed, Toby suggests, to throw everyone off the scent.
Obama and Osama
I’m not entirely persuaded. For instance he asks why Obama did not just blast the compound with missiles instead of mounting a risky helicopter assault? His answer is that it was done this way so the informer would live to spend the $25 million reward money.
Well, if a source inside the compound was working for the Americans couldn’t they have warned him instead to arrange to be elsewhere at the time the missiles struck? And if missiles were used and the compound obliterated what proof would there be that Bin Laden was dead? It would be like Obama’s birth certificate all over again, but worse. There would be no office in Hawaii that could gallop to the rescue with the requisite long-form proof.
But I have had experience myself of this sort of intelligence trickery and feel that Toby’s questions are therefore worthy of consideration. Over the years I also have learned the wisdom of Izzy Stone’s old dictum: “All governments lie”.
When the Libyan arms ship, the Eksund was captured off the French coast in 1987, stuffed to the gunwales with weapons for the IRA, the British put out the story that the discovery was entirely accidental. The Eksund’s rudder had malfunctioned, we were told, the boat drifted and attracted the suspicious attention of the French customs service which boarded the boat where, lo and behold, they discovered Gaddafi’s arsenal.
The Eksund at dock in France. The ship's captain Adrian Hopkins is pictured, bottom left
In fact we now know that the British had known about the Libyan smuggling operation for some time, tipped off at a senior level within the IRA and had been following the Eksund almost from the moment it left Tripoli harbor. The cover story was concocted – and likely the rudder sabotaged – to protect the British source inside the IRA.
The fact that Osama Bin Laden had been living under the noses of the Pakistani government in a lavishly protected compound within walking distance of the local equivalent of West Point or Sandhurst is being taken as evidence of the Pakistanis’ duplicity, pretending to be America’s ally while subsidizing the Taliban and turning a blind eye to Al Qaeda.
Toby asks this question, which implicitly suggests that the truth is otherwise:
The notion that the Pakistani government, or an important element of it, did not know about the raid strains credulity. Why send in helicopters, across Pakistani airspace and spend 38 minutes on the ground with the very real risk that Pakistani forces might suspect a terrorist attack and come and check it out? A highly possible outcome of such recklessness would be a firefight between SEALs and Pakistani troops or police.
Again there are holes in this hypothesis, two large ones in particular. The Americans could have kept the mission secret from the Pakistanis until the moment the helicopters landed, but once the commandos were in the compound they could have been informed and told to stay away. And since the Americans were in the compound for some forty minutes there was plenty of time to get that message through to the Pakistani authorities and therefore to obviate any risk of an armed clash between them.
CIA chief Leon Panetta
The authorised version of the raid on the other hand, particularly that put about by CIA chief Leon Panetta, paints the Pakistan government as a feeble, untrustworthy but essentially helpless tool of the Americans, unable to prevent the US riding roughshod, John Wayne-style, over local sensitivities as the country’s national sovereignty and pride was sullied by American troops behaving as if they were in North Carolina and not on Pakistani soil.
Coming after Pakistan’s recent failure to bring an alleged CIA agent to justice for killing two of its citizens and the massive civilian death toll wreaked by Obama’s Predator Drones in the country’s border region with Afghanistan – events which have unsurprisingly angered many Pakistanis, especially those of a more fundamentalist Islamic bent – it seems that hiding Pakistan’s alleged co-operation with Washington in the way Toby suggests would actually cause the government much more trouble. Why do that when the effect could be to destabilize a secretly helpful ally?
However, Toby is not the only commentator whose judgement I would respect to suggest that the Pakistanis may indeed have had a hand in Osama’s death. Tariq Ali, whose writings on his native land are always entertaining and informative (his family and social connections with Pakistan’s elite are impressive), had a piece in the London Review of Books earlier this week saying just that.
Tariq Ali
He wrote: “The only interesting question is who betrayed (Osama’s) whereabouts and why. The leak could only have come from the ISI and, if this is the case, which I’m convinced it is, then General Kayani, the military boss of the country, must have green-lighted the decision. What pressure was put on him will come out sooner or later.”
And he goes on to give what to me is the most believable explanation yet why Pakistan would want to shelter Bin Laden and keep his whereabout hidden from the Americans.
The event took me back to a conversation I had a few years ago.
In 2006 on my way back from Lahore I encountered an acquaintance from my youth. Shamefacedly he confessed that he was a senior intelligence officer on his way to a European conference to discuss better ways of combating terrorism. The following conversation…….ensued:
‘Is OBL still alive?’
He didn’t reply.
‘When you don’t reply,’ I said, ‘I’ll assume the answer is yes.’
I repeated the question.
He didn’t reply.
‘Do you know where he is?’
He burst out laughing. ‘I don’t, and even if I did, do you think I’d tell you?’
‘No, but I thought I’d ask anyway. Does anyone else know where he is?’
He shrugged his shoulders.
I insisted: ‘Nothing in our wonderful country is ever a secret. Someone must know.’
‘Three people know. Possibly four. You can guess who they are.’
I could.
‘And Washington?’
‘They don’t want him alive.’
‘And your boys can’t kill him?’
‘Listen friend, why should we kill the goose that lays the golden eggs?’
This makes a lot of sense. The Americans give the Pakistanis $3 billion every year, most of which goes to the military, at least ostensibly. They do that because of the threat posed by the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Kill or hand over Al Qaeda’s leader and the air might well go out of the Taliban’s balloon. If the war in Afghanistan diminishes or ends as a consequence then Pakistan can kiss goodbye to its annual US largesse and to the large slice that is likely creamed off the top. In a country where only a tiny percentage of the population pays income tax and the elite thrives on corruption and graft, giving Bin Laden to the Americans would be irrational.
But who knows whether any of this has any basis? Probably not, but experience has taught me to treat everything that is said or written in the immediate aftermath of events like the operation in Abbottabad with a healthy degree of scepticism. The full or proper truth about such matters always takes time to emerge, not least because there’s always someone whose interests would be threatened otherwise. How long did it take, for instance, for the full story of the IRA’s 1981 hunger strike to emerge and isn’t it striking, now that it has, how different that episode now looks?
At the same time there is something offensive about the superior way so many in the mainstream American media are dumping on the Pakistanis over the Bin Laden hideout, sneering patronizingly on cable TV shows that the authorities were bound to know given that Bin Laden was living in such a heavily guarded compound, so close to Pakistan’s West Point in a town so heavily populated with retired military types.
It is not that the logic is faulty. Those are valid reasons for suspecting that the heads of Pakistani intelligence knew all there was to know about the Bin Laden sanctuary and that he may have been living there under their protection. It’s more the near racist arrogance that is annoying, the assumption that of course such a thing would never happen in America, that a wrong-doer of such notoriety couldn’t possibly hide in plain sight in the US. It’s only in countries like Pakistan that such things happen and we all know why, nudge-nudge, wink-wink.
Except that’s not quite correct, is it? Remember Bernie Madoff, the Wall Street stock broker and hedge fund fraudster who operated a vast Ponzi scheme for the best part of forty years before he was caught. Admittedly he didn’t kill 3,000 people in a couple of hours or persuade his followers to fly planes into skyscrapers as Bin Laden did but he ruined and impoverished thousands of lives in a scam that cost some $50 billion, the most expensive swindle in American financial history.
So many people knew about Madoff’s fraud or strongly suspected it over the years yet nothing happened. Boston-based investor Harry Markopolos, for example, got onto Madoff‘s scam in the late 1990’s when he reverse engineered his financial performance and found such perfection to be an impossibility. He reported Madoff to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which supposedly regulates the financial markets five times between May 2000 and April 2008 but there was no follow up. Not a thing.
Major banks in Wall Street, like JPMorgan Chase strongly suspected something was badly amiss yet sat on their collective hands. “I am not a banker but I know that $100 billion going in and out of a bank account is something that should alert you to something”, Madoff told the Financial Times in a 2011 interview from prison. “JPMorgan got all the financial statements.”
All any potential investor had to do was to compare Madoff’s performance against the markets to see that such staggeringly good results made no sense at
Madoff's performance is in blue, the S&P in red - an impossible perfection (click to enlarge)
all. The major Wall Street investment banks and derivative firms all avoided him like the plague because “they didn’t think his number were for real”. Madoff’s operation stank and the insiders all knew it.
And the reason Madoff survived, right in the heart of Wall Street, surrounded by Wall Street executives? Well basically the same reason, if Tariq Ali is correct, that the Pakistani military establishment covered up for Osama Bin Laden for so long. Too many people were making lots and lots of money out of him. Why kill or blow the whistle on the goose that lays all those beautiful golden eggs?
The Broken Elbow 
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