BUSTED - Tsipras' Side By Side With T.Miller & D. Speckhard - What The Greek Media Purposely Ignored
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"Public banks are not here to rescue friends and the former ambassador to the US from politicians who organize meals at Zappeion." It has been a while since we heard SYRIZA leader Alexis Tsipras rant and rave with statements such as the above against figures such as Evangelos Venizelos, (who heard this when he was the Finance Minister under the George Papandreou government in regards to the Proton Bank scandal). At the time, Tsipras pointed to Lavrentis Lavrentiadis (who today is at the Korydallos prison on charges of the creation and management of an organized criminal organization, money-laundering, fraud and embezzlement) as well as to the former Ambassador and Chairman of the bank Daniel Speckhard (yes the same man who was once the US Ambassador to Athens and who sent a multitude of controversial letters to Washington as indicated by various Wikileaks cables).
Apparently, the 38 year old leader of SYRIZA came to the realization after his trip to the US that all of the above scandalous controversy is passe and far too boring. Today Tsipras is too busy with other more serious matters and rather ignores things that deal with corruption, money-laundering and embezzlement. In fact his main focus today is simply to cultivate his international profile!
Don't kid yourselves, this is a tough job!
One of the highlights of Tsipras tour in the US is his visit on January 22 to the famous American-Hellenic Institute. It was an event that journalists strangely avoided and only subtly mentioned.
Now why is that?
The event should not have been of any interest, but oh boy was the press wrong! It was more than interesting since two former (and very controversial) US Ambassadors to Greece were also present, or specifically, Mr. Daniel Speckhard and Mr. Thomas Miller and they even took the time to take their picture taken with Tsipras who was really loving the moment (as seen in the photo).
Who are these two controversial ambassadors, and why all the fuss about the photo?
The best thing to do is to start from the beginning.
On August 3, 2001, Thomas Miller was appointed by former US President George W. Bush to be Ambassador to Greece. He took up the position on October 8, 2001, and held it until he left the post on December 23, 2004. On the other hand, Daniel Speckhard was sworn in as US Ambassador to Greece on November 7, 2007 and arrived in Athens on November 15, 2007, where he served until 2010.
Thomas Miller
Thomas Miller served on the same Board of Directors at Lampsa SA -which owns the Grande Bretagne Hotel in Athens- with none other than Nikos Papandreou, or the brother of the former President of PASOK, George Papandreou. The Lampsa company is owned by the Laskaridis family.
According to Antinews, Niko joined the Board in July 2003 but he suddenly (and mysteriously) decided to quit in October 2009 when his brother George Papandreou came to power.
A little while later Miller left as well but the friendship has always remained. Miller currently serves as Director of the Washington, DC office of Independent Diplomat which is a non-profit organization founded in 2004 by former British diplomat Carne Ross to give advice and assistance in diplomatic strategy and technique to governments and political groups - such as providing 'freelance' diplomats to unrecognized governments (i.e. governments of seceded or proto-states that do not (yet) have international recognition, and usually have little experience in dealing with international bureaucracy). Its projects have included: helping Kosovo achieve recognition as a new state, the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma, etc., and the Turkish occupied section of Northern Cyprus. -
Wikipedia
Over the years, Miller often visited the Balkans, especially Albania and his activities there, according to Parapolitika, are a complete mystery. Nonetheless, rumors claim that he was very interested in the casino industry (something that Mr. Laskaridis is also active in).
According to
kourdistoportocali, Thomas Miller climbed the ladder of success in Washington when his immediate boss, Richard Holbrooke, when, acting as charge d'affaires at the Embassy in Athens (in September 1995 due to the absence of the then Ambassador Thomas Niles), was active in the consultations that led to the signing of the Interim Agreement between Greece and FYROM (13.09.1995).
During the US invasion of Iraq and as ambassador to Athens Miller intervened by asking Greek American community members, to make representations to Athens, to stop the anti-war and anti-Americanism movements (and/or protests). But after the war, and the dismantling of the notorious November 17 terrorist organization -as well as the successful Athens 2004 Olympic Games - he was quoted in interviews as saying that anti-war movements, or protests, were not a manifestation of Antiamericanism.
When Mr. Miller's diplomatic run ended, he undertook projects on behalf of the Turkish occupied area of Cyprus, and was apparently involved in handling the sinful C4i case.
According to reports, when he was US Ambassador to Athens, Mr. Miller -who opened the doors to ministerial offices with ease- promoted American companies such as Lockheed Martin, as well as Motorola (allied friends with Socrates Kokkalis' Intracom company). He also became involved with a security system which was not only costly to the Greek state, but wasn't ever completed nor delivered on time to serve as the center of security for the Athens 2004 Olympic Games. But idiotic Greek tax payers paid for it anyway.
Finally a fresh article from
kourdistoportocali claims that Thomas Miller is also the man who is up to his neck in the wiretapping scandal (against Costas Karamanlis) which cost the life of former Network Planning Manager for Vodafone Costas Tsalikidis.
Who is Tsakalidis? Keep on reading...
"On March 9, Kostas Tsalikidis, was found dead in an apparent suicide. According to several experts questioned by the Greek press, Tsalikidis was a key witness in the investigation of responsibility of the wiretaps. Family and friends believe there are strong indications he was the person who first discovered that highly sophisticated software had been secretly inserted into the Vodafone network. Tsalikidis had been planning for a while to quit his Vodafone job but told his fiancée not long before he died that it had become "a matter of life or death" that he leave, says the family's lawyer, Themis Sofos. There is speculation that either he committed suicide because of his involvement in the tapping of the phones, or he was murdered because he had discovered, or was about to discover, who the perpetrators were. After a four-month investigation of his death, a Supreme Court prosecutor Dimitris Linos said that the death of Tsalikidis was directly linked to the scandal. "If there had not been the phone tapping, there would not have been a suicide," he said."
Reference (Greek Watergate Scandal- US Embassy behind phone-tapping of Karamanlis)
According to
Parapolitika, following his run as Ambassador to Athens, Daniel Speckhard became the non-executive chairman of the Greek Proton Bank - between the period February 1, 2011 until August 19, 2011. He assumed this position at a time when Lavrentis Lavrentiadis was having trouble with his second largest shareholder Mr. Ant. Athanasoglou.
Apart from being a managing partner at WEM Global Investment Inc, Speckhard is also a non-resident Senior Fellow, for the US and Europe at the famous Brookings Institute. Yes... The same institute where Tsipras gave his speech. During the speech, which was broadcasted live on C-SPAN, the official channel of Capitol Hill, and according to reports many prominent businessmen apparently attended. The same corporate community also (mysteriously) attended his speech at Columbia University a few days later as well.
The report on Parapolitika also notes that some rumors even claim that Speckhard played a major role in unlocking the doors for Tsipras, especially at the CSIS (Center for Strategic and International Studies), which is considered to be one of the top think tanks in the US.
The aforementioned institution is well known in Greece, since Mr. Lavrentiadis, who apparently funded one of its divisions (or the unit of Southeast European Studies), had organized an event at the Astir Palace in Vouligmenni where characters such as Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzezinski were also present.
Who is Brzezinski? Here is where it gets really interesting. Although the article in "Parapolitka" did not go into details about this man (assuming that the reader already knows what and why) we here at HellasFrappe decided to google his name and we discovered that Brzezinski is a Polish American political scientist, geostrategist, and statesman who served as United States National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1981.
Sounds harmless enough, but googling his name a little bit more, we also discovered an article on opednews which more or less presents him as being the equivalent of Henry Kissinger. Here is a small portion of the article which should be read by all:
Only three appointed high government officials have run sixty years of war on small vulnerable nations, that were previously plundered under military occupation by colonial powers for centuries?
Three spooks, John Foster Dulles (aided by his equally corrupt brother Allen, head of the CIA), Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, chosen by David Rockefeller to oversee the deaths of tens of millions of men, women and children, murdered in their own small beloved countries, as often as not in their own towns, villages and homes - millions more dying in violent aftermaths of US crimes against Congo, Guatemala, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Indonesia, Libya and many other places. (Congo alone accounts for from between six and fifteen million dead since the US led Belgians and other Europeans in destroying it as a nation.
In every single case of US mayhem (that's if totaled up reaches many multi-holocaust proportions), civil war, fomented by the US itself, has been used as a pretext for unlawful barbaric criminal intervention by US Armed Forces, most often prepared by a corporate business dutiful CIA using its far flung network of banks, media, double agents and cooperating NGOs.
Civil wars! Capitalist empires of Europe had been stimulating them under the axiom "Divide and Conquer' since the first Portuguese armed merchant ships set sail, funded by enterprising investors in the fifteenth century.
From the earliest days of investor managed crimes of savage European forces (and later those of the US) falling upon ancient civilizations and cultures, there have been many famous devilishly clever lead investors cleverly creating wars of assured investment profitability. The most infamous in modern history were David's grandfather John Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan. Check the article at
OpedNews -
Read on, the article only gets better.
The Unknown Trip to San Fransisco
During his trip to the US, Alexis Tsipras did not formally meet with representatives of the Greek Diaspora, since he chose not to adhere to protocol which calls for a prior meeting with the Archbishop of America. Instead the leader of SYRIZA preferred to come into contact with other influential characters who he knew could open other doors for him.
On his first day in the US he chose to make a quick (and hush hush) ten-hour trip to San Francisco, where he met known businessman Angelo Tsakopoulos (Phil Angelides, who has served as chairman of the Democratic Party of California and responsible for public property of the state was also present at this meeting). Angelo Tsakopoulos (born 1936) is a prominent real estate developer in Sacramento, California and the founder and owner of AKT Development.
Mr. Tsakopoulis is one of the main backers of the Democratic party and a proud supporter of Barack Obama. He is also a personal friend of Bill Clinton and Constantine Mitsotakis, and the current Prime Minister, Antonis Samaras. His family donated millions of dollars to charity the most notable of which was his donation to the University of Stanford to create the office of Greek Studies titled "Constantine Mitsotakis."
The inauguration took place in the presence of the Mitsotakis family in 2007. The ART Group, is now operated by his children, Helen and Kyriakos, and his son, Marko Kounalakis.
It should be reminded that Mr. Kounalakis was also a member of the same Institute with Andreas Papandreou, or the other brother of George Papandreou. In fact Andreas had organized a conference on Climate Change and Energy Security (i4cense) in late October 2010. The event was co-organized by the Kyriakos Grivas' C&C company, which specializes in public relations. Grivas is a businessman known for his connections to the New Democracy party, the "Financial Times", and the European Investment Bank. Note that the i4cence institute was noted by the president of the Independent Greek party, Mr. Panos Kammenos, for being involved in the case of controversial CDS.
The Discreet Support of Gianna Angelopoulou-Daskalaki
During Tsipras' visit, Gianna Angelopoulou-Daskalakis' circle of friends also made their presence. Besides, Angelopoulou was apparently discreetly opening the doors for Tsipras' on the other side of the Atlantic. Thus, it can not be considered a coincidence that the president of the Greek-American Institute (AHI), Nick Larigakis also played a significant role in Tsipras's trip to the US. Also, another central figure who was also present at the AHI event was to honor Tsipras was none other than Mr. George Mermelas, the alleged owner of the well known lobbying and public relations institution/company "Greek Dream".
Mr. Mermelas was a close friend to PASOK leader Evangelos Venizelos, when he was Minister of Culture (under the Simitis government). During the '90s the present leader of PASOK had handsomely funded Mr. Mermelas through the Ministry of Culture to promote Greece at Disney World in Orlando, Florida. Mrs. Gianna Angelopoulou-Daskalaki did the same thing during the Athens games. In fact she continues to fund Mermelas' institution. The institution has even held a special event in the US in her honor.
The Bottom Line
The bottom line is, that once upon a time Tsipras was accusing these elites in the Greek Parliament and today he is being photographed next to them.
This little tet-a-tet, claims the news site "Parapolitika" apparently was not received with the same enthusiasm from his fellow party members, in fact it manifested a "mini" mutiny, since both the "Avgi" newspaper (which is SYRIZA's newspaper) as well as the radio station which political backs SYRIZA chose not to cover this encounter at all. In fact it totally ignored the subject altogether and even disputed the photos. And all this for good reason, because the presence of these two particular former senior US diplomats at the event is connected with a series of obviously "shady" and "controversial" scenarios that occurred in Greece over the years and which either cost the lives of several people or destroyed the lives of millions.
"POWER" is just around the corner
Indeed Tsipras' trip to the US stirred up problems within the SYRIZA party and the wider political fora, but abroad, Tsipras showed that he was ready to take a step back on all the allegations he once made against Greece's corrupt elite. Today it is more than obvious that if he ever was to seize power, he would certainly be faced with handling extremely difficult situations, and certainly that is why he made such a dramatic shift in his political strategy. Because let us face it, the US doesn't do anyone favors and not expect a back rub in return.
Of course for all this to happen he has to make some radical changes in his party, but this cannot occur without repercussions, especially from the so-called powerful and radical left. Many will disagree, and some others may even detach themselves from SYRIZA, but to Tsipras this is a small price to pay since he now wants to conquer the country's leadership.
Of course mum is the word -as far as the photo is concerned- from Greece's mainstream media, only "Parapolitika" and "Kourdistoportocali" reported the news, as well as a series of other news sites and blogs.
Folks... Greece is definitely heading down a dark and shady road. It is obvious that the Americans are promoting Tsipras and will probably help him in any way they can. They did the same for George Papandreou and there were rumors in Athens before he assumed office in 2009 that a team was here working closely with him on how to improve his image. Just the thought of Tsipras assuming Greece's leadership has been a frightening thought by itself because we know what his stance is on our national issues and what type of foreign policy he plans to follow. What is even more shocking is that Panos Kammenos (the leader of the Independent Greeks Party) actually wants to side with Tsipras and overthrow the government. How can Kammenos do that knowing that Tsipras is 100 percent against everything he has been preaching about?
Yup. Greece is headed for a storm cloud.
Stay tuned frappers.
References
http://hellasfrappe.blogspot.com.au/2013...-with.html