The masks we wear: Ernst & Young and global terrorism

…the threats we face are no longer from known enemies, nations that have fleets or missiles or bombers that we can see come to the United States, nations that can be deterred through previous notions such as mutually assured destruction or any other previous defence notions.

(Ari Fleischer former White House Press Secretary for U.S. President George W. Bush as reported on ABC AM Tuesday, 3 December, 2002)

The new terrorists act not only with diabolical precision, but also with camouflage, which makes them very difficult to apprehend using loose-knit actions or conventional means in the area of external or internal security.

(Tobias Debiel “Privatized Violence” and the Terror of September 11: Challenges to Foreign, Security and Development Policy)

The new terrorists or new terrorism that Debiel speaks about in this paper are the type of terrorism that was ushered into being, or at least ushered onto the world stage, by the events of September 11, 2001. The events of 9/11 demonstrated how transnational terrorism and the use of violence to achieve political ends had become de-nationalised, de-territorialised and privatised. Previously confined to specific places or conflicts, terrorism had now become global, with intricate financial and recruitment networks and new choices of weapons and victims.

With the privatisation of terrorism came a blurring, like never before, of the demarcation lines between victim and legitimate target and more significantly between combatant and workmate. This blurring of the traditional lines between combatant and workmate is aptly illustrated by one of the casualties of Sunday’s United States drone missile strike in Somalia. The casualty I’m speaking of is Bilal el-Berjawi whose death was reported by Al-Shabab on 22 January 2012. Bilal el-Berjawi is said to have died when three missiles fired from the unmanned aircraft hit his car on the outskirts of Moghadishu.

The Al-Shabab statement reads in part:

Al-Shabab Al-Mujahideen announces that a British jihad fighter of Lebanese origin has been killed in a drone attack in the capital Moghadishu.

Bilal el-Berjawi was the third Muslim from London to be killed in drone attacks in recent weeks. In November, it was confirmed that Ibrahim Adam, 24, and 38-year-old Mohammed Azmer Khan, both from Ilford, had been killed in a drone attack in the South Waziristan region of Pakistan. Khan’s brother, Abdul Jabbar, was killed in a drone attack in the same region a year before.

Berjawi grew up in west London and is reported to be the second British citizen killed in Somalia in two days. On Friday, an official al-Shabab Twitter feed displayed documents said to belong to Said Abdi Jaras, a Somali government official from London, as proof that he had been killed in battle by al-Shabab. I know that this all becomes very confusing, but the point is simple, in the privatised world of new terrorism who is friend and who is foe; more to the point, how do we determine if someone is who they claim to be?

One of the major weapons in the arsenal of the privatised terrorist is identity, or more precisely identity theft. While there is no evidence that Berjawi was anyone other than he claimed to be, a terrorist with transferable identities has the very “camouflage” necessary to “act with [the] diabolical precision” which so clearly concerns Tobias Debiel.

Obviously the easiest way to assume someone’s identity would be to acquire their curriculum vitae or finance applications. And what better place to acquire someone’s curriculum vitae than from a recruitment consultant, to whom an innocent party had provided the curriculum vitae in good faith. One of the issues that I have raised on Blak and Black over the last year or so is the way Ernst & Young (“EY”) and the ACT Department of Treasury have handled, perhaps mishandled is a better word, sensitive personal information that has come into their possession.

The issue that the former Commissioner was ‘fitted-up’ over was for raising concerns that among other things personal information provided by borrowers from the now defunct ACT Home Loan Portfolio was being misused. In fact the allegation was that identities were being ‘stolen’ to facilitate the laundering of money that was ‘stolen’ from the same portfolio. A separate though related issue that has also been raised on Blak and Black is the manner in which EY provided details of the former Commissioner for ACT Revenue’s EY personnel file to a subordinate without appropriate authorisation; a subordinate who was himself under investigation, for among other things, issues relating to the alleged fraud committed on the ACT Home Loan Portfolio.

The officer from ACT Treasury who received this information from EY has testified that he approached Ms Tanya Taylor of EY Canberra, requesting certain information and received that information without the proper, or indeed any, authorisation. It is my understanding based on conversations I had with Ms Taylor in the past that she recruited and therefore had the curriculum vitae of a large number of senior Commonwealth of Australia Public Servants and senior managers in the private sector. The immediate question that springs to mind is how have EY and Ms Taylor treated this information?

If curriculum vitae information provided by senior public servants to EY and Ms Taylor has been released without authorisation to third parties, what sort of threat does this now pose to Australia’s national security? More importantly, what type of risk assessment has the Australian Federal Police (“AFP”) conducted on the ACT Department of Treasury employee who so easily accessed curriculum vitae information that he was not authorised to request, have or use? Added to these concerns must be the issue of the allegation that a person or persons unknown at EY changed the content of the former Commissioner’s personnel file before releasing it. Again, what are the national security implications here?

If you think that these concerns are without merit, let’s stop and consider for a minute the role of EY in the collapse of The Bank of Credit and Commerce International (“BCCI”). Older readers might recall that BCCI was a major international bank founded in 1972 by Agha Hasan Abedi.

It eventually expanded into 69 countries but lost huge sums of money from its lending operations, foreign currency dealings and deposit accounts.

It also became a bank of choice for money-launderers and terrorists including such luminaries as Saddam Hussein, Manuel Noriega, Hussain Mohammad Ershad and Samuel Doe. Other account holders included the Medellin Cartel (the Colombian drug cartel) and Abu Nidal (founder of the Fatah splinter faction Abu Nidal Organization), the very names that spring to mind when we think about new terrorism.

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency held numerous accounts at BCCI, according to William von Raab, former U.S. Commissioner of Customs. Oliver North also used and held multiple accounts at BCCI. These bank accounts were used for a variety of illegal covert operations, including transfers of money and weapons related to the Iran-Contra scandal, according to Time Magazine. The CIA also worked with BCCI in arming and financing the Afghan mujahideen during the Afghan War against the Soviet Union, using BCCI to launder proceeds from trafficking heroin grown in the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands, boosting the flow of narcotics to European and U.S. markets.

The US intelligence agencies used BCCI to funnel drug money to Afghan Mujahideen in their fight against Soviet invasion and to insurgents such as Nicaraguan Contras.

However legitimate depositors – including many small Asian businesses – lost thousands of pounds when the bank was closed down in 1991 owing US $16bn.

BCCI’s liquidators, Deloitte & Touche, filed a lawsuit against Price Waterhouse and Ernst & Young – the bank’s auditors – which was settled for $175 million in 1998. A further lawsuit against the ruling Sheikh of Abu Dhabi, a major shareholder, was launched in 1999 for approximately $400 million. BCCI creditors also instituted a $1 billion suit against the Bank of England as the relevant regulatory body, whose court papers were used to compile the above summary.

Auditors Ernst & Young were forced to respond to and then to settle a law suit for US $175 million over the way they conducted their audits on a bank exposed as a major conduit for money laundering, not to mention its involvement in the international arms and drugs trade!

In discussing Australia’s leadership in the Solomon Islands intervention, Howard said,

“The Solomons is our patch…. If the Solomons becomes a failed state, it’s a haven potentially for terrorists, drug runners and money launderers… we don’t want that on our door step.”

Instead of looking towards our pacific neighbours, perhaps Australia’s interests would be better served if the Australian Government and the AFP concentrated their resources on looking for “terrorists, drug runners and money launderers” in our own backyard rather than someone else’s.

Finally, while I’m on the issue of new terrorism, multi-national accounting firms, drug runners and money launderers it is worth considering the following:

Why is UBS AG (aka UBS Warburg/UBS Warburg Dillon Read/UBS Paine Webber/UBS Phillips & Drew/UBS GAM Asset Management and thousands of subsidiary companies and Cartel associates) “audited” by Ernst & Young (aka CAP GEMINI Ernst & Young now Capgemini) which is owned by ATAG AG of Switzerland which is owned by Swiss Bank Corporation which is now owned by UBS AG?

Since when is it legal/acceptable that Banks are audited by their own subsidiary companies staffed by their own bank employee lackeys?

Why have the so-called Swiss bank “auditors” failed to uncover the massive theft of savings/pensions/the holocaust billions and the massive proceeds from drugs/arms/crime since the First World War that has enabled the Swiss banks to buy up the world? The fact is that any organization/corporation/authority that is “audited” by Ernst & Young or involved with Capgemini is in fact a UBS vassal/lackey subsidiary.

What a tangled web one racist can weave!