Showing posts with label HSBC. Show all posts
Showing posts with label HSBC. Show all posts

Wednesday, 18 August 2021

Why the West Funds Terrorism


Cynthia Chung is a lecturer, writer and co-founder and editor of the Rising Tide Foundation (Montreal, Canada).

Cynthia Chung

August 15, 202

It is clear that the declared “enemy” in this “War on Terror,” is not what we were led to believe, and increasingly, it is beginning to look like the enemy may in fact be, anyone who resists this global agenda.

“I believe in a cruel God who made me in his image and who in fury I name.”

– Iago, in Verdi’s Opera Othello

On June 22, 2021, Bulgarian journalist Dilyana Gaytandzhieva published an expose titled “US fuels Syrian war with new arms supplies to Al Qaeda terrorists,” showing documents obtained by the US Federal Contracts Registry, revealing that the US Army Contracting Command, ACC Picatinny Arsenal,  has contracted eight American companies to procure Category 1 End User Certificate weapons from 2020-2025.

According to Gaytandzhieva, the Pentagon is buying $2.8 billion worth of weapons for conflict zones around the world. Most of the weapons are destined for Syria. After all, the Idlib Province in Syria (which is presently entirely controlled by Al Qaeda) has been recognised as one of the most strategic locations in the Middle East.

There are even a number of propaganda videos by Hayat Tahrir Al Sham HTS (formerly known as Al Nusra Front, which is Al Qaeda’s branch in Syria), showing them using American TOW anti-tank missiles.

A US-made TOW missile system seized by Syrian troops during their offensive in Urum al-Kubra in the de-escalation zone of Idlib. The province is under the control of the terrorist group HTS. (Telegram)

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Propaganda footage published by Ibba news agency, linked to the terrorist organisation HTS, shows HTS militants being trained to operate American BGM-71 TOW weapon systems, Kornet and Konkurs anti-tank systems in the Syrian province of Idlib (Telegram @new_militarycolumnist)

Abu Mohammad al-Julani is the commander of Hayat Tahrir Al Sham (HTS), the Al Qaeda in Syria, and has been listed under the US State Department as a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist.” And yet there is ample evidence that the US has been arming Al Qaeda in Syria all along.

In addition, there is the strange April 2, 2021, PBS fluff piece on Abu Mohammad al-Julani with a fashion make-over, appearing to prepare the American public for his running for public office. Why would a government-funded American broadcasting company do such a thing?

Above picture: Abu Mohammad al-Julani in natural habitat.

Abu Mohammad al-Julani in PBS habitat.

Eight American companies have been contracted to procure non-US standard weapons from 2020 to 2025 through the US Army Contracting Command (ACC) Picatinny Arsenal. The weapons are not American made and thus cannot be used by American soldiers, however, according to the Pentagon solicitation W15QKN-19-R-0049 “Non-standard Weapons, Parts and Accessories”, the weapons will be used in “theaters of conflict”.

The weapons are described as Category 1 End User Certificate, these are issued by the US to third parties other than governments, which means militia or terrorist groups.

Source: dilyana.bg

According to Gaytandzhieva’s report, the weapon descriptions of these non-US standard weapons indicate that they originate from Bulgaria, Serbia and Romania, (see her report for a detailed run through).

Details on End User Certificates. Source: W15QKN19R0049, US Army Contracting Command (ACC) Picatinny Arsenal

What this means is that Eastern European weapons are going to be flooded into “theaters of conflict” and once released “into the wild” will be very difficult to trace where the source came from, say the United States. Eastern European weapons are analogous to Soviet weapons that are being used by the Syrian army. This will also make it difficult to determine the source in acts of terrorism, since the equipment used by both sides will be virtually indiscernible.

However, as already noted above, for sophisticated equipment such as the American-made TOW anti-tank weapon systems, these are still being supplied by the good ‘ol US of A directly.

Of course, for anyone who has been paying attention to the situation in Syria, this is no surprise.

It should be obvious that the American, European and Turkish arms supplying of Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups is meant as a stubborn continuation of Brzezinski’s Arc of Crisis, which he coined in 1977 as President Carter’s National Security Adviser, and which led to the formation of the Nationalities Working Group (NWG) the following year. The Arc of Crisis concept was and is designed to foment ethnic tensions through encouraging religious fanaticism and terrorism in the Muslim communities of the Middle East which could then offshoot into Central Asia. It was believed that such Islamic fanaticism would direct its wrath against the Soviet Union, sparking Islamic anarchy within the Muslim community of the USSR itself. This was thought to be the “soft underbelly” of the Soviet Union.

However, 54 years later, the west is still in a Cold War with Russia and  terrorist cells have now spread across the Middle East, Asia, Africa and even within western countries who thought perhaps they were too far removed from these “theater of conflicts” to be burnt by the fires they started.

Yet strangely, this rather disastrous foreign policy has not been recognised for the absolute lunacy and general mayhem that it emboldens but rather, the disaster has been used as the very justification for why western countries, who cannot even employ the majority of their populace or offer proper healthcare, needed to enter and spend billions of dollars on the forever “War on Terror,” to which these governments are presently arming the other side to combat!

It is not the Assad government who has proven to be a threat to “western democracy,” but rather it is the very terrorism that the west has created and is backing that has caused the most destruction to western people’s lives at home.

These acts of terrorism are then used to justify why the civil rights of a country’s populace need to be “temporarily” revoked, such as the 20 year old and still going strong Patriot Act, to which we can expect further add-ons in addressing “domestic terrorism.”

It is clear that the declared “enemy” in this “War on Terror,” is not what we were led to believe, and increasingly, it is beginning to look like the enemy may in fact be, anyone who resists this global agenda.

Made in London Mullahs

In a previous paper, I went through the origins of the Muslim Brotherhood as being essentially a British funded and backed creation, which dates back to intellectual founder of the Salafiyya movement, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani back in 1869.

Al-Afghani’s student Muhammad Abduh would receive direct and full support of the representatives of her Majesty’s imperial force and was given positions of high station and influence in British occupied Cairo. Abduh would work closely and openly with Lord Cromer (aka Evelyn Baring), London’s Egyptian proconsul, and scion of the enormously powerful banking clan (Barings Bank) under the city of London, in establishing the base for the Salafiyya movement. (1)

After London defeated ‘Urabi’s revolt against the British consortium in Egypt, which lasted from 1879 to 1882, Baring returned to Egypt in 1883 as a British agent and consul general, and served as the virtual ruler of the country until 1907.

British support continued with Hassan al-Banna (a follower of al-Afghani) who in 1928 officially founded the Muslim Brotherhood which would be linked with the Wahhabism of Saudi Arabia, which also has a history of British funding.

Banna’s Muslim Brotherhood, which was created in Egypt, would receive a grant from England’s Suez Canal Company. (2) It is no coincidence that the Muslim Brotherhood would be run-out of Egypt by President Gamal Abdel Nasser, only after he managed to nationalise the Suez Canal and successfully call an end to Britain’s occupancy of Egypt in 1956.

And thus it was clear that the British military occupancy of the Suez Canal was quite literally being used as a terrorist hub in support of the Muslim Brotherhood, for more on this refer to my paper.

Thanks to the Sykes-Picot affair, British dominance was not only found in Egypt but also, most notably, Saudi Arabia. As a result of the British orchestrated Sykes Picot, Abdul-Aziz ibn Saud, the British India Office favourite, was proclaimed King of Hejaz and Najd in 1926, leading to the founding of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

From the 1920s on, the new Saudi state merged its Wahhabi orthodoxy with the Salafiyya movement, now organized into the Muslim Brotherhood and has taken form as the modern militant Islamic extremism we are supposedly fighting today.

Who Really Runs the Middle East?

Islamic banking [that is the banking system dominated presently by Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States] was born in Egypt and financed by Saudi Arabia and then spread to the far corners of the Muslim world. Eventually the Islamic banking movement became a vehicle not only for exporting political Islam but for sponsoring violence. However, Islamic banking did not get off the ground on its own, as Ibrahim Warde (a renowned scholar of international finance) explains in his book “Islamic Finance in the Global Economy,” Islamic banking:

“…operates more out of London, Geneva, or the Bahamas than it does out of Jeddah, Karachi or Cairo…Ideologically, both liberalism and economic Islam were driven by their common opposition to socialism and economic dirigisme…Even Islamic Republics have on occasion openly embraced neo-liberalism…In Sudan, between 1992 and the end of 1993, Economics Minister Abdul Rahim Hamdi – a disciple of Milton Friedman and incidentally a former Islamic banker in London – did not hesitate to implement the harshest free-market remedies dictated by the International Monetary Fund. He said he was committed to transforming the heretofore statist economy ‘according to free-market rules, because this is how an Islamic economy should function.’  ” [emphasis added]

However, perhaps the best case study to this phenomenon is the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI).

BCCI was an international bank founded in 1972 by Agha Hasan Abedi, a Pakistani financier. The bank was registered in Luxembourg with head offices in Karachi and London. A decade after opening, BCCI had over 400 branches in 78 countries in excess of $20 billion USD, making it the seventh largest private bank in the world.

In the 1980s investigations into BCCI led to the discovery of its involvement in massive money laundering and other financial crimes, and that the BCCI had illegally and secretly gained the control of a major American bank, First American, according to Robert Morgenthau (Manhattan DA) who had been investigating the bank for over two years.

BCCI was also to be found guilty for illegally buying another American bank, the Independence Bank of Los Angeles, using a Saudi businessman Ghaith Paraon as the puppet owner. The American depositors lost most of their money when BCCI was forced to foreclose since it was essentially operating a Ponzi scheme to fund illegal activity of all sorts.

Investigators in the United States and the UK determined that BCCI had been “set up deliberately to avoid centralized regulatory review, and operated extensively in bank secrecy jurisdictions. Its affairs were extraordinarily complex. Its officers were sophisticated international bankers whose apparent objective was to keep their affairs secret, to commit fraud on a massive scale, and to avoid detection.”(3)

This is an incredibly sophisticated operation, and interestingly, uses the very same methods that the City of London has been using for centuries and presently operates to a diabolical perfection today. There is no way that a solo Pakistani financier, even if he was financed by the Sheik of Abu Dhabi, could rise in less than a decade , operating on the turf of ancient banking channels that go back several centuries, to rise to become the seventh largest bank in the netherworld of finance without a little help from the big boys.

Ibrahim Warde writes:

“At the international level, the major Islamic banking groups, rather than trying to establish a global Islamic network that would rival the global banking system, are keen on remaining embedded within that system. Indeed, in its transnational operations, Islamic banking operates more out of London, Geneva or the Bahamas, than it does out of Jeddah, Karachi or Cairo. As for the Islamic Development Bank (IBD), its statutes provide for coordination and collaboration with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other international organizations.” (4) [emphasis added]

On July 29th, 1991, a Manhattan grand jury indicted BCCI on twelve accounts of fraud, money laundering and larceny. Morgenthau has described BCCI as “the largest bank fraud in world financial history.”

So what does this all mean? It means that the so-called terrorists we are supposed to be fighting in this “War on Terror” are essentially working for the orchestrators that justify said narrative.

What it means is that the sin cities steeped in crime, dope, sex-trafficking (including children), arms-trafficking and terrorist groups, are all being funded by the same centralised system of finance, located in the London-Geneva-Bahamas (which is an offshoot of the City of London) triangle.

And it isn’t just Islamic banks that are involved in funding this kind of netherworld activity. It is being done by banks that continue to have an incredibly large role to play in more “respectable” global finance such as HSBC.

Yes, HSBC is still bizarrely considered reputable despite several very embarrassing lost lawsuits, however, the biggest to date occurred in 2012 when allegations were made against HSBC for allowing terrorists to move money around the financial system  and for which it had to pay a record $1.9 billion, with no form of regulated control on the bank afterwards but rather an agreement with the DOJ that the bank itself would install a 5 year independent monitor. (For more on this refer to my paper.)

HSBC managed to avoid being criminally prosecuted, a move that could have stopped the bank from operating in the US.

Lanny Breuer, assistant attorney general at the time, stated:

“HSBC is being held accountable for stunning failures of oversight – and worse…that led the bank to permit narcotics traffickers and others to launder hundreds of millions of dollars through HSBC subsidiaries and to facilitate hundreds of millions more in transactions with sanctioned countries.”

And just as Africa is being looted twice over with capital flight that amounts to 5x their foreign debt, which then returns to City of London offshore nether regions, only to ask for loans to pay off this debt at exorbitant interest rates by the very same grouping who stole the money…So the “privileged” western world is starting to feel a similar brunt.

While western countries are increasingly unable to provide a proper standard of living, with mass unemployment, lack of healthcare, increased crime and suicide rates, and increased overdoses and homelessness, and pretty much everything you would expect to rise during a Dark Age straight out of a Goya painting, these “first-world” governments are applying further austerity measures on the people, even after prolonged lockdowns, while openly pumping billions of dollars into wars that not only fund the destruction of entire nations, but funds the global drug, arms and sex-trafficking trade. All of this dirty money then circles back into the London-Geneva fondi, benefitting a select class that has existed and thrived for centuries on this sort of backdrop.

In this system, you do not own your money and you do not get to decide what your money is used for. Unknowingly, we are all tied to it, we all labour for it, and if so decided for us, we may even die for it.

Iago’s Prophecy

“From the very vileness of a germ or an atom, vile I was born. I am a wretch because I am a man, and I feel within me the primeval slime. Yes! This is my creed! …I think and do by destiny’s decree. I believe the just man to be a mocking actor in face and heart; that all his being is a lie: tear, kiss, glance, sacrifice and honour. And I believe man the sport of evil fate from the germ of the cradle to the worm of the grave. After all this mockery then comes Death. And then? …Death is nothingness…”

–        Iago, in Verdi’s Opera Othello

For those who are not familiar with Shakespeare’s play “The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice.” Iago is a Venetian, and though he most certainly would have called himself a “Christian,” as we see with his above monologue, his interpretation is rather more akin to that of the Devil.

Venice, was the center of world intelligence at the time, and the direct descendant of the Roman Empire. Venice was an enemy of Florence (the birthplace of the Italian Renaissance) and is the reason why Machiavelli wrote ‘The Prince,’ which was meant as a guidebook to the prince of Florence in understanding Venetian techniques so that he could defeat them.

Iago dislikes Othello and wants to remove him from his position as general. Not only this, but he wants to see Othello destroyed. However, in order to destroy Othello, Iago does not use physical force or confront him directly but rather, from the shadows, plays the fears and insecurities of Othello against himself.

Through this strategy, Othello becomes increasingly distrustful of those who he should keep close and is drawn ever closer to his destructor Iago, thinking him his only true confidante. Finally, Othello turns against his beloved wife and trusted friend Cassio and is driven mad by Iago’s relentless poisoned whisperings in his ear. In the end, Othello in a blind fury suffocates his faithful wife Desdemona in their bedroom chamber.

Incredibly controversial at the time of its first performance, it remains so today. What is the lesson we are to take from Shakespeare? Was Shakespeare making the point that Othello simply acted what was in his nature the entire time, as that of a Berber/Arab Muslim man, nothing more than a savage? Was it only a matter of time before Othello would have committed such atrocities against his beloved and his good friend, and that Iago merely inflamed what was already within him?

Othello is a tragedy, because Othello the man did not recognise that he was caught in the middle of someone else’s orchestration.  He allowed himself to be the plaything of another and to execute actions that were not his own conceptualisation. Othello is guilty of his crimes, but it is Iago who is by far the most formidable and terrible monster in the play. It is Iago who manipulates behind the scenes, and it is an Iago that goes undetected and unchecked by most, allowed to continue his atrocities without ever facing any justice until his death, when he will finally be confronted by the eternal.

As Schiller stated in his Ghost Seer about the Venetian technique, one will only be freed by masked tyranny’s terrible grip when one can comprehend what is the nature of true villainy, that is, the orchestrator of evil and not just a mere hand of evil. Only then will such a villain be unmasked to us, otherwise we will forever be pitted against the other, just a plaything for a higher will than our own.

Thus, let us not be fully distracted by the mayhem on center front stage…but rather, let us take a look at who is standing behind that curtain.


River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian   
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Blog!

Saturday, 27 June 2020

Meng, Huawei and Canadian Law: Soap, Rinse and Dry-Laundered

By Harry Glasbeek
Global Research, June 25, 2020


Prologue
One of the graver risks for big-time criminals is that investigators will be able to identify them and their deeds by ‘following the money’. The criminals have to hide the proceeds of their crimes. This is done by depositing their monies into legitimate finance houses and businesses. It often requires some fancy book-keeping tricks and intricate transactions. This is called layering by the afficionados of this dark art. Once it is done, the criminals can draw on the accounts created and mix the ill-gotten gains with legally garnered capital. The term for this is ‘integration’ and it makes the investigators’ tasks much harder. The rotten fruit of crime will have been laundered.,
Extradition
For some time now, Hong Kong has seen massive street protests as many people want more of a say for themselves in governance and less of a say for Beijing. In the midst of the chaos, Hong Kong’s legislators proposed to ink an extradition agreement to which China would be the other signatory.
Extradition treaties are arrangements whereby a nation state agrees to return to its partner-nation to the treaty people alleged to have committed criminal acts against that other nation’s laws. It is meant to prevent alleged criminals from avoiding the consequences for their misconduct by escaping to another jurisdiction. When a request for extradition by a signatory to a treaty is received, a court there is to determine whether the application should succeed. It is not its task to question whether the person actually committed a crime. It merely has to determine whether it is the kind of crime which could lead to prosecution if the conduct had occurred in its jurisdiction. This gives the process its legitimacy because it gives effect to legal values shared by both parties to the extradition treaty. The court considering the request has no interest in whether the conduct actually amounted to a crime, either in the applicant nation or in its own. It assumes the facts as alleged by the applicant nation and then determines whether that conduct would amount to a violation of its own laws if it occurred in its jurisdiction.
It is, then, a judicial exercise which is purely formal. It does not make any findings about the issues between the applicant for extradition and the person resisting extradition.
Although this was the essential nature of the Hong Kong Bill, it met with fierce resistance: huge marches, physical fights in the legislature. The protests added fuel to the already widely burning fires of dissent and the Hong Kong government withdrew the Bill. In addition to the upheaval and violence in the streets, the government was likely somewhat influenced by the great show of support for the anti-Extradition Bill movement in countries such as the UK, the US and Canada. This anti-extradition stance by these nations seemed to sit uneasily alongside the fact that they had signed on to many similar extradition treaties themselves. But, they bought into the argument made by the Hong Kong dissidents. This was that, even though an extradition request made by China would be vetted by Hong Kong courts steeped in the principles and values of English common law, the proposed treaty would allow China to use extradition requests for crass political purposes, to help it chase down political opponents and agitators. It would lead to attacks on precious freedoms. Even though the proposed treaty ‘looked’ much like any other, it was likely to be used for unacceptable purposes. This sort of thing would never occur in the UK the US or Canada because, unlike China, they respected and lived by the Rule of Law.
The Lore and Lure of the Rule of Law
Canada’s legal system presents itself as embodying society’s shared values and norms. They are embodied in principles and the instrumental rules devised to give these fundamental principles life. This presupposes that the basic principles can be found and defined and that the rules will be appropriately fashioned and applied. The conventional view is that the judiciary is an independent institution and can be trusted to go about the finding of principles and the interpretation and application of rules in a non-partisan, in a non-political, manner.
Courts will treat all private individuals, whatever their social or economic circumstances, as legal equals whose disputes must be settled by the application of known, rational criteria. Rationality, of the legal kind, is to replace political and economic power, that is, irrational power.
The courts abide by generalizing principles and specific rules. The rules have to be spelled out clearly; citizens are to know of the existence of those rules; new rules should not apply retroactively. The principles and rules are to be applied even-handedly, regardless of status and class. The access to this justice system should be equally available to one and all. These are some of the ingredients of what is so often termed the Rule of Law. It is an attractive system because it suggests that everyone is subject to the same laws and requirements, that political or economic power is not allowed to deny anyone their entitlements or rights established in law. The UK, US and Canadian view is that it, or any equivalent, regime does not exist in China. But, while the idea of it certainly exists in our rather self-satisfied Anglo-American settings, its implementation may leave something to be desired.
While our courts are punctilious about following the procedural safeguards which make up the Rule of Law, they have an enormous amount of leeway when determining how substantive principles and rules are to be interpreted and applied. They are in a position to launder otherwise politically troubling, anti-liberal, anti-democratic, policies and decisions. What happens is a mixing of the adherence to procedural formalities which abjure bias and prejudice with the manipulation of substantive laws which incorporate bias and prejudice. The integrated outcome is analogous to the consequence of the criminals’ mixing suspect monies with legally acquired assets. It makes it hard to see whether there was a political wrong in the first place. It is a form of laundering, legalized laundering.1
The recent proceedings in Canada dealing with the US demand that the Chief Financial officer of Huawei, Meng Wanzhou, be extradited to the US brings some of this into the open. The Supreme Court of British Columbia ruled that Meng’s argument that there was no legal basis for extradition was rejected. Canada’s talking heads and chattering class sighed with relief. The self-proclaimed liberal Toronto Star’s editors welcomed and characterized the virtue of the decision: “Beijing must understand: out courts don’t serve the government… It’s called ‘rule of law,’ a concept foreign to China’s Communist Party and its mouthpieces.” Apart from their evident cold war genre chauvinism, the editors undoubtedly were glad to have any doubts about the Trudeau government’s and Canada’s allegiance to the Rule of Law stilled.
The recent embarrassment caused by the tawdry behaviour of almost every cog in the ruling class’s legal engine room during the SNC-Lavalin scandal which involved the government forcing its own Minister of Justice to resign because she wanted to act independently and deny a flagrantly wrongdoing corporation any kind of soft landing, now could be pushed aside as an uncharacteristic violation of Canada’s basic principles. To them, the Meng ruling signified that, once again, Canada was entitled to be smug, to assert that it was to be envied because of its stout adherence to an unalloyed good, the Rule of Law.
The Ruling in the Meng Case





It all began with a warrant issued by a New York court for Meng Wanzhou’s arrest in August 2018. She was not there. On December 1, 2018, after an extradition request from the US, Meng was arrested by Canadian authorities when she landed in Vancouver. On 28 January 2019, formal charges were laid by the US Department of Justice, accusing Meng’s employer, Huawei, of misrepresentations about its corporate organization which had enabled it to circumvent laws that imposed economic sanctions on Iran. Huawei was also charged with stealing technology and trade secrets from T-Mobile USA. Meng, the Chief Financial Officer of Huawei, was charged with fraud and conspiracy to commit fraud. Huawei pled not guilty to the charges of violating the Iran sanction provisions in a New York court and not guilty to the stealing charges in a Seattle court. After a number of preliminary legal skirmishes, the extradition hearings against Meng began in 2020. Associate Justice Holmes issued her ruling on 27 May, 2020. Law takes its time.
Meng had told HSBC officials who met with her in the back of a Hong Kong restaurant in 2013 that, despite the allegations in a newspaper article, Huawei had not made improper use of a closely associated firm, named Skycom Tech, to supply US materiel to Iran. The reason she had made this statement to HSBC, it was alleged, was that Huawei used HSBC as a banker when transacting business. If Huawei, as alleged, was implicated in violations of the Iran sanction laws, HSBC might well be held to be complicit in such crimes. The US alleged that Meng’s representations to HSBC constituted fraud under its law.
Meng Wanzhou argued that, for a case of fraud to be made out, in both the US and Canada, it was necessary for the prosecution to prove that the fraud materially contributed to a tangible loss. This could not be made out here. For Meng’s deception of HSBC to cause it a tangible loss in the US, it was necessary for US prosecutors to invoke the impact of another law, the Iranian sanction law. Without it there would not be any harm and, therefore, no fraud in the US. As Canada did not have any such sanction provisions in place, Meng’s deception would not have led to any tangible loss in Canada and there would have been no fraud committed in Canada. This argument that the basic requirement for extradition – mirroring laws – had not been met, was rejected by Associate Chief Justice Holmes.
She deployed standard legal reasoning that is, she looked for previous holdings and used the imprecisions she found in them and in the wording of the legislation she was interpreting. Holmes found that previous decisions had held that, in order to determine whether the conduct in the applicant jurisdiction created an offence, it was necessary to assess the essential nature of that conduct. That meant evaluating the foreign conduct in its context, in its legal environment. Meng argued that looking at the legal environment required taking a foreign law, one distinct from the laws being compared, into account, something which should not be done under the Extradition Law.
The presiding judge responded that only some aspects of the legal environment, constituted by that other law, had to be taken into account, not all of it. It was her job to say which aspects could be so used. Holmes admitted that she was going out on a limb because the distinction between looking at some aspects of a foreign law and taking the actual law into consideration is fraught, both as a matter of logic and of established law. She wrote that “the issue is at what level of abstraction… the essence … of the conduct is to be described… there is little authority or precisely what may be included in ‘imported legal environment’.”
Undeterred by the lack of any known criteria (remember the Rule of Law!), she used what she likely calls her common sense and what Meng’s supporters probably think was her unconscious bias. Associate Justice Holmes decided that, in this case, it was appropriate, when looking for the essential nature of the foreign conduct, to look at the effects of that US law, the Iran sanction law. As its effects made Meng’s deceiving conduct fraudulent in the US, and as deception is the core of fraud in Canada, the essential/contextualized nature of Meng’s conduct satisfied the essence of fraud as defined under Canada’s Criminal Code. Lawyers call this sort of finessing good lawyering; in the wider community it is seen as legal chicanery. Holmes ruled that Canada was free to extradite Meng.
Laundered
All that effort to put Wanzhou Meng’s fraud into legal context and not a scintilla of regard for the political, social and economic context of the case!
Everyone, literally everyone, knew what had led the US to charge Huawei and its CFO. It was to obtain bargaining chips in its fight with China. It was to persuade its citizens that it was right for the government to deny them access to cheaper goods and a better 5G system because China would abuse its growing economic influence and enhance its spying potential. It was to make China more pliable when the US demanded better trade terms and more protection for its intellectual property, etc. There was no attempt to hide any of this.
Did the Canadian government understand this? Of course. Did it feel it had to allow the US to use Canada’s supposedly neutral legal machinery to further its political project? Of course. Could the Canadian government have said “no” and simply turned a blind eye when Wanzhou Meng landed in Vancouver? Of course.
Was Associate Justice Holmes, at the very least, in a position to guess all of this? Of course.
The Supreme Court of British Columbia had the timelines of the saga before it. All the events that led to the fraud charges occurred years before the tug-of-war between the US and China turned into a full blown version of a new cold war. Meng’s alleged misrepresentations to HSBC occurred in August 2013, several months after Reuters had published its report on the links between Huawei and Skycom Tech. that supposedly led to Iran being supplied with US materiel.
It took five years for the US to charge Huawei and Meng. It took five years for its righteous indignation about Huawei’s and Meng’s violations to reach fever pitch. It took five years for the US to decide that a deception of one set of private entrepreneurs by other private entrepreneurs ( a garden variety event in an aggressive competitive milieu), a deception which took place in a far away jurisdiction, presented a danger to the integrity of the US justice system. That integrity had not been seen as severely threatened when the masters of the universe deceived millions of people during the subprime mortgage scandals, at least not sufficiently to charge any of the more senior perpetrators. None of this was of any concern to the Supreme Court of British Columbia. The court was only concerned with the narrowest of decontextualized legal issues before it. Its certainty that its only responsibility was to the Rule of Law signified to it that it should not be troubled by the possibility that it might be used as a pawn, by either the US or the Canadian government or both.
Nor was this lack of concern shaken by President Trump’s highly publicized statement to Reuters (the outfit which had written the report which started the ball rolling), made just after Wanzhou Meng was released on bail. Trump said that he would certainly intervene in her case “if I thought it necessary” to help forge a trade deal with China. Undoubtedly some people (especially lawyers) might think it right and proper for a court to ignore a blatant admission by a craven politician that the supposedly independent system of law of both the US and Canada was being used for partisan political purposes. After all, the statement had been made extrajudicially and had not been put before the court. While the judge might have known about the Trump intervention, much as she knew that the US and China were having a political tug-of-war and that Canada had been drawn into it, the wilful blindness demanded by the Rule of Law demanded that she make no reference to any off this knowledge.
This reasoning makes no sense to anyone not held in rapture by the Rule of Law fantasy. Immediately after Trump made his provocative statement, Trudeau realized that the public might draw the inference that Canada was just bowing to its Big Brother ally and permitting it to abuse the Canadian justice system. It evoked the notion that the US and Canada were just one country with two systems. He was forced to respond.
Trudeau issued the following statement: “Regardless of what goes on in other countries, Canada is and will always remain a country of the rule of law.” The message was clear: we, the elected government and its executive have nothing to do with any of this; we rule an independent country; we have an independent legal system and it makes these kinds of decisions. We respect this and abide by the results. When it comes to the extradition of Meng, we, the politicians, like Pontius Pilate, wash our hands off the whole mess. It has nothing to do with us. It is not a political matter.
This is why the editors of the Toronto Star and all other opinion moulders greeted the ruling in the Meng case with such acclaim. By ignoring all the real facts underlying the dispute, the court had given support to the Canadian government’s pretence that the Meng case had not raised questions about its participation in a complex set of political, economic and ideological controversies. Their role had been laundered. If the outcome suited the US in its struggle with China, this was incidental; Canada’s government had not pushed for such an outcome because it believed in the Rule of Law. These cheerleaders pointed out that, if Canada had interfered with the judiciary’s operations, it would certainly have pushed for a different result.
As it was, the judicial ruling could only strain relations between Canada and China, a most undesirable state of affairs as Canada hoped to have China release two Canadians accused of committing serious offences in China; more Canada had no interest in imperilling important trade relations with China, as the judicial ruling might well do. That is, the result may be a political win for Trump, but a loss for Trudeau, two Canadian citizens and, likely, some farmers and manufacturers if China uses its economic clout to punish Canada.
So viewed, the judicial outcome gives the impression that the government had not played any part in the decision-making. It should, therefore, not be held politically responsible for the consequences. The government had acted righteously, it had been true to the Rule of Law. Its conduct had been sanitized, laundered.
Of course this argument is not as strong if the judicial outcome is not seen as inimical to the government. What did Canada actually want? We can only guess. But it is to be remembered that the government did detain Wanzhou Meng; if it had not done so, the worst that would have happened is that the US might have been annoyed. Assuming, as it makes sense to do, that Canadian officials understood full well what the US was up to, the detention suggests, although it does not prove, that the government was not opposed to the obvious political and economic goals of the US. More strongly, it indicated that it was willing to support those goals. After all, it knew the risks it was taking. The headline in the Ottawa Citizen on 15 December, 2018, read: “Abelev: In the Huawei case, Trump has enlisted in a game Canada can’t win.”
Another glimpse of the Canadian government’s thinking is provided by Prime Minister’s request that John McCallum resign from his post as Ambassador to China after he had made public statements which indicated that he thought the case against Meng was trumped up and, therefore, should lead the government to reject the extradition request. This would help Canada in its negotiations with China which, in apparent retaliation, had jailed two Canadian citizens.
Implicit in McCallum’s intervention was a reference to a legal power that Canada has reserved for itself over extradition processes. The Minister for Justice can, at any moment after a request for extradition is received, abort the process. In Trudeau’s angry reaction to McCallum, he made no reference to this, pretending political interference with the judicial system was to be eschewed.2 While to some people, then, Trudeau’s publicized disapproval of McCallum’s views (and of similar ones by former Prime Minister Jean Chretien a little later), did dovetail with the claim that the government should not take a position on matters to be determined by a judge, it also suggested that the government would not object too much if the ruling went against Meng, regardless of what it might mean for Huawei, Meng and the prisoners. After all, the justification for the hands-off the justice system proffered by Trudeau should not have been given too much credence.
At that time a full-blown scandal was raging over the SNC-Lavalin affair. Trudeau was brazenly trying to get rid of an independent Minister of Justice precisely because she was thwarting his enactment of a law which was to apply retroactively (remember the Rule of Law!) to save a serial wrongdoing corporation. A curious symmetry weirdly surfaces. The Trudeau government was trying to give its rogue actor, SNC-Lavalin, the kind of gentle treatment the US had given HSBC by giving it access to a deferred prosecution agreement of the kind that the US had given that deviant bank.
There were many polluting particles in the ambient air as the Meng case was processed in the supposedly politically unpolluted atmosphere of law. Undoubtedly, Associate Justice Holmes did her best to blow all these toxic particles out of her mind, as all judges claim to do. But this does not mean that they did not influence her mind-set. We will never know. That is how laundering works: if the dirt which soiled the cloth is rinsed out, all that one is left with is clean cloth. Just what the government needed.
Epilogue
The legal processes have not ended. Meng may appeal the ruling on double criminality handed down by the Supreme Court of British Columbia, arguing the Holmes’ reading of how the essential nature of conduct in a foreign state was to be found was erroneous. Her lawyers do have some plausible arguments to proffer on this issue. Before that will take place, a hearing will be held into Meng’s allegation that, when she was detained in Vancouver, prior to being turned over to the RCMP, the border official obtained Meng’s telephone numbers and passwords and then passed these on to the RCMP. She was detained and questioned for three hours before she was told of her arrest. She claims her constitutional rights were violated and that the RCMP and Canada’s Border Services Agency acted, improperly, as US agents.
This is a claim that procedural safeguards essential to the proper operation of the Rule of Law had been breached. If successful it would make the arrest wrongful and mean that the committal process which led to Holmes’ ruling should be voided. The result of the adjudication on this action by Meng can also be the basis for an appeal. If all of it, the denial of proper process and the Supreme Court of British Columbia’s ruling on double criminality, are settled in favour of Canada, the extradition process can continue, although, as seen, the Minister for Justice can always set the whole thing aside.
There are many other hurdles to clear. The Trump Administration may be replaced, the Trudeau government (in a minority position) may fall before all this is over. It is also difficult to know what steps China will take and how this will influence political minds in Washington and Ottawa. These unknowns highlight how artificial it is to pretend that a request for extradition is a legal, non-political, struggle based on rational aseptic criteria.
To underscore this point, note that, on 4 June, 2020, the US State Department issued a threat. It will reassess its sharing of intelligence with Canada (a member of the so-called Five Eye intelligence network) if Canada chooses to let Huawei market its 5G technology in Canada. This makes it clear that the extradition case was never about a fraudulent misrepresentation to a ‘vulnerable’ foreign bank, but about furthering US efforts to ward-off the danger of an economic and political threat posed by China.
Law and its Rule of Law are convenient tools, no more no less. They should not be granted too much respect. Certainly they should not permit our governments to present themselves as unsullied, as if they have come out of the washing machine, smelling fragrantly.
And, oh yes, after its agreement with the US Department of Justice, HSBC had made much of its new approach and had spent money on better systems to inhibit wrongdoing. On 8 April, 2020, it was reported that HSBC had admitted it had engaged in money laundering in Australia. Maybe it does not require Huawei or Meng to engage in fraud to get HSBC to participate in criminality.
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Harry Glasbeek is a Professor Emeritus and Senior Scholar, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University. His latest books are Class Privilege: How law shelters shareholders and coddles capitalism (2017) and the follow-up, Capitalism: a crime story (2018) both published by Between the Lines, Toronto.
Notes
  1. ‘The legalization of politics’ is the name given by Harry Glasbeek and Michael Mandel, “The Legalization of Politics in Advanced Capitalism: The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms” (1984), Socialist Studies, 2:84, and by Michael Mandel, The Charter of Rights and the Legalization of Politics in Canada, rev. ed., Toronto; Thompson Educational, 1994, to a process which removes class and history from political discourse and consciousness.
  2. As well, there is a rarely used law on the books, the Foreign Extra Territorial Measures Act, that the Attorney-General can deploy to repulse measures of a foreign state that are likely to significantly affect Canadian interests. This is the legislation used to allow Canada not to comply with the US sanctions on Cuba. Arguably, but not certainly, it could be used to block the extradition of Meng.
Featured image is from The BulletThe original source of this article is The BulletCopyright © Harry Glasbeek, The Bullet, 2020

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