by Sebastian Rotella, ProPublica, April 19, 2013

As an eighth-grader in a Cambridge public school, suspected Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was quiet, friendly, spoke good English and seemed at home in his adopted country.

While hundreds of police officers pursued the 19-year-old during a nationally-televised rampage across Boston Friday, a former classmate recounted memories of the refugee who, according to counterterror officials, became a U.S. citizen on an ironic date: Sept. 11, 2012.

The story of the Boston bombers, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his 26-year-old brother, Tamerlan, is still unfolding at high speed. Many aspects of the case, including the brothers' motivations, are not yet clear.

But a portrait began to emerge Friday based on ProPublica interviews with counterterror officials, the public statements of relatives and associates, and reports in the media.

Counterterror officials believe the brothers were Islamic extremists. And the information available so far suggests that they appeared to integrate well into U.S. society, yet slid into a spiral of Islamic radicalization with bloody results. The profile has similarities to the home-grown terrorists behind attacks in Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005, according to counterterror officials.

"He was always a nice kid," said Cam Blauchner, who attended middle school with Dzhokhar, in a telephone interview with ProPublica. "He was shy, but not in a creepy way. He was a sweet guy. We played soccer together. I knew he was from Chechnya, but he never talked about it. He never mentioned his religious affiliation. I didn't know he was Muslim."

At some point, however, Dzhokhar and his brother plunged into a subculture that is grimly familiar to counterterror agencies in Europe and, to a lesser but worrisome extent, the United States, officials said.

There are signs that the brothers showed interest in the conflict in Syria, which has drawn al Qaida fighters and other militants from across the Muslim world and Europe, according to a U.S. counterterror official. Like others interviewed for this story, the official requested anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the ongoing case.

The brothers had viewed videos about the plight of Syrian Muslims, the official said. Syria is the latest hotspot on the world map of jihad. Holy warriors a decade ago were inspired by videos about brutal combat between jihadis and Russian troops in the brothers' family homeland: the predominantly Muslim region of Chechnya, a breeding ground for al Qaida fighters in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

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Once again, Senator Elizabeth Warren asks the most obvious question -- why aren't banks prosecuted? -- only to get the same incredulous responses. What? Prosecute the banks? No way!

Warren took bank regulators to task on Thursday about the fact that British bank HSBC is still doing business in the U.S., with no criminal charges filed against it, despite confessing to what one regulator called "egregious" money laundering violations.

The Justice Department’s record $1.9 billion settlement with HSBC exposed the continuing ability of drug cartels, rogue nations and terrorist financiers to move billions of dollars through the international and U.S. banking systems.

Money laundering was a major focus of U.S. counterterrorism policy after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The Patriot Act of 2002 included provisions that required the Treasury Department to identify banks and individuals suspected of links to terrorism. And the law instructed banks to strictly monitor and report potentially illegal transactions.

"They did it over and over and over again across a period of years. And they were caught doing it, warned not to do it and kept right on doing it, and evidently making profits doing it," Warren said of HSBC. "How many billions of dollars do you have to launder for drug lords and how many economic sanctions do you have to violate before someone will consider shutting down a financial institution like this?"

The regulator she was questioning, David Cohen, the Treasury Department's undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, repeatedly refused to answer the question. Like other regulators at the hearing, he said that his department has no authority to shut down a bank unless the Justice Department convicts the bank of a crime.

Warren said: “If you’re caught with an ounce of cocaine, chances are good you’re going to go to jail. If it happens repeatedly, you may go to jail for the rest of your life. But evidentially, if you laundered nearly a billion dollars for drug cartels and violated our international sanctions, your company pays a fine and you go home and sleep in your own bed at night -- every single individual associated with this. And I just -- I think that’s fundamentally wrong.”

The issue is part of a broader debate over large financial institutions and whether they are too big to be broken up. The Massachusetts senator’s comments come after U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder acknowledged Wednesday that some of the largest banks are too big to prosecute and that prosecution could have a negative impact on the U.S. and global economies.

Speaking before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Holder said he is concerned that the size of some of these institutions “becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy.”

Holder added that “I think that is a function of the fact that some of these institutions have become too large.”

It is far past time for someone to "indicate" to Mr. Holder that he needs to prosecute the criminal banks, or someone will show him to the door.

The Algerian army staged a final assault Saturday, in an effort to end an Islamist militant assault at a gas station plant. A provisional death toll issued by the Interior Ministry on Saturday reported 32 militants and 23 captives had been killed in the three-day hostage crisis at a remote gas field. Over the course of the crisis, upwards of 685 Algerian and 107 foreign workers were freed. President Obama issued a statement Saturday saying he still wants a "fuller understanding" of what happened in the strike, but added that "the blame for this tragedy rests with the terrorists who carried it out."

Via:

The siege at Ain Amenas transfixed the world after radical Islamists linked to al-Qaida stormed the complex, which contained hundreds of plant workers from all over the world, then held them hostage surrounded by the Algerian military and its attack helicopters for four tense days that were punctuated with gun battles and dramatic tales of escape.

Algeria's response to the crisis was typical of its history in confronting terrorists, favoring military action over negotiation, which caused an international outcry from countries worried about their citizens. Algerian military forces twice assaulted the two areas where the hostages were being held with minimal apparent mediation — first on Thursday, then on Saturday.

"To avoid a bloody turn of events in response to the extreme danger of the situation, the army's special forces launched an intervention with efficiency and professionalism to neutralize the terrorist groups that were first trying to flee with the hostages and then blow up the gas facilities," Algeria's Interior Ministry said in a statement about the standoff.

Immediately after the assault, French President Francois Hollande gave his backing to Algeria's tough tactics, saying they were "the most adapted response to the crisis."

"There could be no negotiations" with terrorists, the French media quoted him as saying in the central French city of Tulle.

United States Senator Charles Grassley (R - Iowa) and Bloomberg Contributing Editor Neil Barofsky talk with Bloomberg Law's Lee Pacchia about HSBC's recent settlement with US authorities over claims the bank engaged in money laundering for drug cartels and terrorist organizations. Senator Grassley is the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

In a letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa complained that the Justice Department -- in accepting a $1.92 billion settlement in a money-laundering probe by federal and state authorities in the United States -- had not prosecuted a single HSBC employee, “no executives, no directors, no AML [anti-money laundering] compliance staff members, no one.”

“Even more concerning is the fact that the individuals responsible for these failures are not being held accountable,” he wrote. “By allowing these individuals to walk away without any real punishment, the department is declaring that crime actually does pay. Functionally, HSBC has quite literally purchased a get-out-of-jail-free card for its employees for the price of $1.92 billion dollars.”

Economic Hitmen from Hans Fleischer on Vimeo.

"We can't have Homeland Security until we realize that the whole planet is our homeland." -- John Perkins

HSBC's Money Laundering Lapses, By the Numbers

by Cora Currier ProPublica, July 20, 2012

This week a Senate investigation detailed that HSBC had lax controls against money-laundering and often ignored warnings about clients with ties to drug cartels and terrorists.

The bank is also reportedly nearing a settlement with the Justice Department, which has two criminal investigations into whether HSBC was complicit in money-laundering and tax evasion.The federal regulator that should have been keeping tabs on all this, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, also came under fire for "systemic weaknesses" in its oversight of banks' anti-money laundering procedures.

The report reaches back more than a decade, and in testimony in front of the Senate this week, the bank apologized and vowed it has recently overhauled its anti-money-laundering efforts. The bank's head of compliance stepped down this week. But the Senate report notes that HBSC made similar promises of reform back in 2003 when it was cited by regulators for poor oversight of suspicious transactions. HSBC declined to comment further on the report or on the DOJ's ongoing investigation.

There are lot of blunders and blind spots detailed in the Senate's 335-page takedown. Here's a rundown2014in each instance, we've linked to the relevant page in the report.

17,000: The backlog of unreviewed, potentially suspicious activity alerts at HSBC's U.S. arm as uncovered by government regulators in 2010.

200: Number of compliance staff in bank's U.S. branch between 2006 and 2009, of which a smaller group was charged with making sure the bank was following anti-money-laundering rules. HBUS had millions of accounts, and more than 16,000 employees overall, and according to the report, kept compliance staff small as a cost-cutting measure.Members of the anti-money-laundering group told investigators that understaffing was a key problem.

85: Number of problems with the anti-money-laundering efforts at bank's U.S. arm red-flagged by the OCC between 2005 and 2010. That was a third more than the next-closest major bank.

0: number of enforcement actions the OCC took in that time period.

3: number of years, from 2006 to 2009, for which HSBC's U.S. branch didn't do any money-laundering monitoring for transactions with HSBC banks in other countries.

15 billion: Total value of U.S. dollar bills (as in paper money) the bank accepted as part of bulk-cash transactions from foreign HSBC banks during that period, with no anti money-laundering controls.

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[Note: The report in this video is disturbing, but it seems that ABC News filtered the extremely graphic images.]

United Nations observers reported that a brutal attack in a city near Homs on Friday left 32 children and at least 60 adults dead, with an estimated 300 wounded. Syrian anti-government groups claim that official troops raked the city with mortar shells and then sent thugs and soldiers in. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and his predecessor, Kofi Annan, released a joint statement calling for a ceasefire and criticizing the government for the attack. Bloody images of the young casualties prompted anti-government demonstrations across the country.

Via:

The rebel Free Syrian Army, the loose federation of armed militias across the country, issued a statement saying it was no longer committed to the United Nations truce because the plan was merely buying time for the government to kill civilians and destroy cities and villages.

“We won’t allow truce after truce, which prolongs the crisis for years,” the statement said.

The Syrian government blamed “terrorists,” its catchall phrase for the opposition, for killing the civilians.

Interesting that the mainstream media caught on to that "catchall phrase for the opposition" so quickly, yet...oh, nevermind. *Sigh.*

A breaking news story from Cleveland, Ohio today. Occupy Cleveland's May Day festivities have been cancelled today after an announcement from the FBI that 5 members of Occupy Cleveland had been arrested after an attempt to blow up an area bridge, as well as targets at other locations.

From Cleveland's News channel 5:

The Cleveland office of the FBI announced Tuesday the arrests of five people who allegedly tried to blow up a bridge in northeast Ohio.

The FBI displayed a photo of the Route 82 bridge in Brecksville, just east of Riverview Road and referred to it as the "Brecksville-Northfield High Level Bridge" during a 10 a.m. news conference, and confirmed that was the target. The bridge crosses the Cuyahoga Valley National Park and connects Brecksville to Sagamore Hills.

According to a news release from the US Attorney’s Office, these five were arrested Monday evening and charged with conspiracy and attempted use of explosive material to damage physical property affecting interstate commerce:

- Douglas Wright, 26
- Brandon Baxter, 20
- Anthony Hayne, 35
- Connor Stevens, 20
- Joshua Stafford, 23

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