US State Department Unable to Explain Difference Between Panama & Snowden Revelations

Translated by Ollie Richardson for Fort Russ

8th April, 2016

RT

The US State Department has stated that it supported the work of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, who published an archive of Panamanian documents, which contains information from the law firm Mossack Fonseca. The experts' attention was drawn to the fact that previously in such a situation, the State Department took the opposite position: in 2013, the US government called Edward Snowden's revelations a betrayal, and said that the declassification of information is a crime.

The media is wondering why the Panama papers contain so little information about American companies and individuals. Experts believe that the citizens of the US have no need to hide their assets abroad, as they can easily do it at home.

They don't have to go to Panama and other offshore zones. Not only because there are corrupt officials and other criminals to launder money. This can be done in any state of the United States. In 2015, the United States ranked third in the index of financial opacity. Financial analysts say that under current US tax law, companies are not required to disclose information about beneficiaries.

During a regular briefing, State Department spokesperson Mark Toner was asked to clarify Washington's position regarding the Panama documents.

"In fact, you support the publication of these papers, right? In the case of WikiLeaks and the documents of Edward Snowden , the US government publicly stated that it was theft," said Associated Press reporter Matt Lee to the representative of the State Department.

"We already talked about the fact that any profession, including in the legal field, should have a certain degree of privacy. Now I can't say if we would declare the incident a theft," said Toner.

Earlier, in the case of the WikiLeaks revelations, the US government taken a clear position, expressing the declassification of documents as theft. At the time, representative of the US State Department Jen Psaki declared "a patriot would not divulge classified information and endanger people," and Press-Secretary of the US Department of State Philip Crowley called the "declassification of information" a crime.

"Obviously, we are dealing with hypocrisy. On the one hand, American authorities are promoting information disclosure and treat the whistleblowers as witnesses, but if someone exposes their violation, they immediately call that person a traitor. That's the trend," explained former FBI agent Coleen Rowley.

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Panama Papers expose Putin's neighbor's cat!

Where do the cat treats come from? A contraband post office box in the US?

Florian SCHAAR

In Allgemeine Morgenpost Rundschau, April 8, 2016

Satire translated from German by Tom Winter

9000 British companies and 6000 American ones are expected to show up in the Panama Papers. The reader of the reputable Western news magazines might be nervous that something might go wrong in our world. 

But there is an all-clear as the whistleblowers assure us that some of the contents will remain secret, and fortunately, just in time for western ears, there are also, completely sufficient charges against the Russian supervillain Vladimir Putin!

It now turns out that Putin's neighbor's cat had a post office box in the country of birth of John McCain, through which his contraband Wiskas Cat Treats got smuggled past the liberal Western sanctions against Russia. It is impossible that Putin knew nothing about this. 

Finally, there is photographic evidence, with intimate expressions of love, between the errant Ivan and the bewhiskered little beastie. [Photo above]

But that is still far from everything. Because then this evidence would be pretty thin. The investigative journalists of the Suddeutsche Zeitung have found that the cat has more outstanding connections to the Russian despot.

 So this comes from association of a Smolensk potato farmer who supplies a supermarket chain with peeled potatoes, where the brother-in-law of Putin's barber's sister goes shopping. This person in turn, has a daughter whose dog (a male), has often mounted another dog. And the owner of this dog happens to have the initials V. P. - Like Vladimir Putin! And his wife plays the cello! And and also has friends from kindergarten.

Phew. The world is right again!

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Panama? Forget the reporter collective -- Who built the database?

Ronald ZONCA
In Boulevard Voltaire, April 6, 2016

Translated from French by Tom Winter

The case involves a selection of public persons whose social status requires us to look at the causes and the source of the revelations, to say nothing of journalistic ethics.  11.5 million documents, even supposing each is just one page, would stack more than a kilometer high. It is impossible to deal with such a volume with simple humans, even for super journalists. The work had to be done by other people fully equipped.

Faced with such a mass of data, very powerful computers are needed and one asks first, who was able to provide them. For each offshore company name, you must first determine all the actual people. This presupposes a well-populated database and means way beyond the simple request for information from the authorities.

Once spotted, an individual name must be found with whom there were linkages in the past or today. This requires a huge, well fed, and extremely well managed database.

One way to lighten the workload is to reverse the search direction. Rather than starting from an unknown individual involved in the offshore company, and seeing all the relationships he may have or may have had with persons known, one can begin from a selection of famous potentially troublesome people to see if they match up to materials in Panama. In this case, it is a load instruction. 

There are few organizations that can instantly have all the information about privacy extending to any sportive misadventures going back 50 years, or on the details of the family unit. We are descending into the Big Brother realm and, addressing the Panama Papers folder in this way, we can easily guess who was able to provide such work.

The organization that produced the revelations has the capability to feed a database effectively, that is to say by spying and tapping, classifying billions of real-time data, and has powerful tools for extraction. The contenders at this level of expertise are few, especially if one takes into account that no American - or at least no known American - is cited in the dossier. 

The distribution of this colossal work was done by a group of journalists. Maybe so, but it is still rare to find actual philanthropy in organizations funded by patrons such as USAID (United States Agency for International Development) and Open Society. We all know the disinterestedness of such donors to the journalist collective.

Pausing from these investigations these journalists could, for example, reveal 

1. the sponsor of this revelation, 
2. the real reasons why these people are listed, 
3. who performed the correlation, 
4. who built the database, and 
5. how the information got put into it. 

In short, we should stop gazing at the finger while the moon smiles down on our naïveté.


["When the sage points at the moon, the fool looks at the finger" -- Confucius]

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