Head of IMF arrested and accused of sexual assault

[Ed Jewett]

Via http://www.legitgov.org/Strauss-Kahn-tea...icers-firm

The original link: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/2...8320110520

Exclusive: Strauss-Kahn team consults ex-CIA officers' firm

By Mark Hosenball
WASHINGTON | Fri May 20, 2011 7:01pm EDT
(Reuters) - The legal team defending former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn against sexual assault charges has informally sought public relations advice from a Washington consulting firm run by former CIA officers and U.S. diplomats, Reuters has learned.

TD International is the same company Strauss-Kahn, then a private citizen, hired in 2007 to advise him on how to navigate international and Washington politics in his bid to become managing director of the International Monetary Fund.

Documents filed in 2008 with the Foreign Agents Registration section of the U.S. Justice Department show that Strauss-Kahn, who is French, retained TD International as his "U.S.-based communications resource."

Strauss-Kahn, 62, who was seen as a front-runner for the French presidency until his arrest, has been charged with trying to rape a hotel housekeeper in New York. He has denied the charges and his lawyer has said he will plead not guilty.

A person familiar with the work TD International did for Strauss-Kahn in 2007 said his representatives consulted the firm informally after his arrest last Saturday and asked for advice related to his predicament.

If the firm at some point becomes formally involved in his defense, the source said, its role will be in helping other Strauss-Kahn advisors, including Paris-based public relations experts, engage in "crisis management."

But the source, who asked for anonymity, said the firm had not been formally engaged. A lawyer for Strauss-Kahn did not respond to a request for comment.

A spokesman for TD International told Reuters on Friday: "We don't comment on client relationships and activities. However, our past work with Dominique Strauss-Kahn is accurately reflected in (Justice Department) filings."

WORKING THE MEDIA

A contract between TD International and Strauss-Kahn, dated July 18, 2007, shows he hired the firm to "conduct a specific public relations campaign" and "work is to begin immediately and continue until ascendancy of client to head of IMF."

The contract says Strauss-Kahn was to pay the firm 20,000 euros, then equivalent to about $27,600.

According to the source, TD International helped advise Strauss-Kahn on U.S. and international political maneuvering related to the choice of a new IMF chief.

The global lender has always been headed by a western European but the former French finance minister's bid for the post was being challenged by Russia and a group of developing nations, who were strongly pushing their own candidates.

In addition to advising Strauss-Kahn on political matters, TD International introduced him to journalists from media such as the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times.

The 2007 contract was signed on TD International's behalf by Ronald Slimp, who the firm's website says was a former U.S. diplomat and trade negotiator.

The website describes the firm's founder, William Green, as a former diplomat who is fluent in French and "participated in the management of the Anglo-American and U.S.-Canadian intelligence relationships when posted to Washington."

The website identifies two other partners in the firm as former CIA officers.

Justice Department filings show TD International was also registered as the U.S. representative of Yulia Tymoshenko, a leader of the "Orange Revolution" in Ukraine and a one-time prime minister.

A 2007 press release posted on the firm's website says it was the "registered representative of Ms. Tymoshenko's political party."

(Additional reporting by Basil Katz, Brian Grow and Glenn Somerville; Editing by David Storey)

[Ed Jewett]

Regime Change at the IMF: The Frame-Up of Dominique Strauss-Kahn?

by Prof. Michel Chossudovsky

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?con...a&aid=24866


Gotta love the pix, too...

[Jan Klimkowski]

From Chossudovsky's piece:

The Frank G. Wisner Nicolas Sarkozy Connection

Strauss-Kahn was refused bail by Judge Melissa Jackson, an appointee and protégé of Michael Bloomberg, who in addition to his role as Mayor is a powerful figure on Wall Street.

Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. charged (using scanty evidence) Strauss-Kahn "with seven crimes, including attempted rape, sexual abuse, forcible touching and unlawful imprisonment".

Who is Cyrus Vance Jr.?

He is the son of the late Cyrus Vance who served as Secretary of State in the Carter administration.

But there is more than meets the eye. Nicolas Sarkozy's step father Frank G. Wisner II, a prominent CIA official who married his step mother Christine de Ganay in 1977 served as Deputy Executive Secretary of State under the helm of Cyrus Vance Senior, father of District Attorney Cyrus Vance Junior.

Is it relevant?

The Vance and Wisner families had close personal ties. In turn Nicolas Sarkozy had close family ties with his step father Frank Wisner (and his half brothers and sisters in the US and one member of the Wisner family was involved in Sarkozy's election campaign).

It is also worth noting that Frank G. Wisner II was the son of one of America's most notorious spies, the late Frank Gardiner Wisner (1909- 1965), the mastermind behind the CIA sponsored coup which toppled the government of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran in 1953. Wisner Jr. is also trustee of the Rockefeller Brothers Trust.

While these various personal ties do not prove that Strauss-Kahn was the object of a set-up, the matter of Sarkozy's ties to the CIA via his step father, not to mention the ties of Frank G. Wisner II to the Cyrus Vance family are certainly worth investigating. Frank G, Wisner also played a key role as Obama's special intelligence envoy to Egypt at the height of the January 2011 protest movement.

Did the CIA play a role?

Was Strauss-Kahn framed by people in his immediate political entourage including President Obama and Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner?

As Chossudovsky reminds us, it was Geithner who led the call for Strauss-Kahn's replacement as IMF chief:

The Obama administration has demanded his replacement by a more compliant individual. U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, former CEO of the New York Federal Reserve Bank is pushing for the replacement of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, "suggesting he can no longer perform his duties" as IMF Managing director.

"Geithner called for greater formal recognition by the IMF board that John Lipsky, the fund's second-in-command, will continue serving as temporary managing director for an interim period. Although Strauss-Kahn has yet to resign, sources say the IMF is in touch with his legal counsel to discuss his future at the organization."

[Magda Hassan]

If DSK had been one of 'their's' there would have been phone calls to the right people and large sums of money distributed. Like there is all the time.

[Ed Jewett]

Strauss-Kahn Screws Africa
by Greg Palast / May 21st, 2011

Now that I've dispensed with the obvious and obnoxious teaser headline, let's drop the towel and expose Dominique Strauss-Kahn's history of arrogant abuse. The truth is, the grandee of the IMF has molested Africans for years.

On Wednesday, the New York Times ran five count'em, FIVE stories on Strauss-Kahn, Director-General of the International Monetary Fund. According to the Paper of Record, the charges against "DSK," as he's known in France, are in "contradiction" to his "charm" and "accomplishments" at the IMF.

Au contraire, mes chers lecteurs.

Director-General DSK's cruelty, arrogance and impunity toward African and other nations as generalissimo of the IMF is right in line with the story told by the poor, African hotel housekeeper in New York City.

Let's consider how the housekeeper from Guinea ended up here in New York. In 2002, this single mother was granted asylum. What drove her here?

It began with the IMF rape of Guinea.

In 2002, the International Monetary Fund cut off capital inflows to this West African nation. Without the blessing of the International Monetary Fund, Guinea, which has up to half the world's raw material for aluminum, plus oil, uranium, diamonds and gold, could not borrow a dime to develop these resources.

The IMF's cut-off was, in effect, a foreclosure, and the nation choked and starved while sitting on its astonishing mineral wealth. As in the sub-prime mortgage foreclosures we see today, the IMF moved quickly to seize Guinea's property.

But the IMF did not seize this nation's riches for itself. Rather, it forced Guinea to sell off its resources to foreign corporations at prices much like the sale of furniture on the lawn of a foreclosed house.

The French, Americans, Canadians, Swiss (and lately, the Chinese) came in with spoons out and napkins tucked in under their chins, swallowing the nation's bauxite, gold and more. In the meantime, the IMF ordered the end of trade barriers and thereby ruined local small holders.

As a result of the IMF attack, Guineans who could, fled for freedom and food. This week, then, marked the second time this poor African was molested by the IMF.

Now we have the context of how these two, the randy geezer of globalization and the refugee ended up, in quite different positions, in that New York hotel room.

Since taking over the IMF in 2007, erstwhile "Socialist" Strauss-Kahn has tightened the screws in an attempt to maintain the free-market finance mania that ruined this planet in the first place. [That's worth a story in itself - and that's coming. Our team has a stack of inside documents from the IMF that we will be releasing in my new book in the Fall.]

DSK's lawyers say the relationship with the housekeeper was "consensual." But DSK says that about all IMF agreements with nations over whom it holds life and death powers. That's like saying a bank robbery is consensual so long as you don't consider the gun.

Whether it was agreed-upon sex or brutal rape, it could only have been "consensual" in the same way that the people of Guinea consented to IMF-ordered financial rapine.

The Times article quotes an IMF crony of Strauss-Kahn saying DSK gets his way by "persuasion" not "bullying." Tell that to the Greeks.

It was DSK who, last year, personally insisted on brutal terms for the so-called bail-out of Greece. "Strong conditionality" is the IMF term. Strauss-Kahn demanded not just a devastating cut in pensions and a deliberate increase in unemployment to 14%, but also the sell-off of 4,000 of 6,000 state-owned services. The DSK IMF plan allowed the financiers who set the financial fires of Greece to pick up the nation's assets at a fire-sale price.

The Strauss-Kahn demands were not "tough love" for Greece: The love was reserved solely for the vulture bankers who received the IMF funds but were not required to accept one euro in lost profit in return. DSK, despite the advice of many, refused to ask the banks and speculators to reduce their usurious interest charges that were at the root of Greece's woes.

Requiring Greece to sell assets, drop trade barriers, and even end the rule that Greek ships use Greek sailors has nothing to do with saving Greece, but everything to do with DSK's continuing the right-wing free-market mania that got this planet into trouble in the first place.

I do not consider it a stretch to say that a predator in the bank boardroom suite assumes his impunity applies to the hotel suite.

Greg Palast studied healthcare economics at the Center for Hospital Administration Studies at the University of Chicago. His investigative reports can be seen on BBC Television's Newsnight. Read other articles by Greg, or visit Greg's website.

This article was posted on Saturday, May 21st, 2011 at 8:00am and is filed under Corporate Globalization, Finance, Greece, Guinea, Imperialism.

http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/05/straus...more-32951

[Peter Lemkin]

I don't disagree with Palast, but for once I think he has lost sight of the larger picture. Yes, even a reformist in the IMF would still be horror from the viewpoint of developing nations and poor people everywhere. However, Palast seems to have missed the significance of who was chosen to replace him, how much worse the policies will now be, and how it was all done. Personally, I'd like to see the IMF, WB and all other such institutions of control destroyed. Until such a time, reformists are to be preferred over ultra-rightist bankers - and any patterns of reformers being eliminated [by set-up scandals or bullets, et al.] not ignored for their deep political significance and how they point to what forces are really in control and ascendancy.

[Magda Hassan]

Battle Over IMF Chief: Proxy War Over Power of Banks?

There's a fight afoot over who will be the next head of the IMF. Yours truly is not making odds on this one, save that Christine Lagarde is getting far and away the most attention in the media and more generally, a big push is on to have a European take the reins. The logic is that with the eurozone mess far and away the biggest priority, the new IMF chief needs to have credibility with the major actors, and that argues for a European choice.
The contrary camp is the "the countries formerly known as emerging" who point out that it is their turn to have an IMF head from one of their countries. The IMF has been led by a European since its inception. Even though votes have been rejiggered to give younger economies more weight, the mature ones still are in control of the outcome.
But what is intriguing are the arguments that follow, which reveal what the real stakes are. Crudely speaking, the advanced economies are far more bank friendly than their "emerging" counterparts. China is actively hostile to neoclassical economics and unfettered capital markets. Efforts to make China safe for investment bankers have been rebuffed. India sailed though the global financial crisis relatively well by having capital controls and heavily regulated banks. Pretty much any country that has taken IMF medicine (such as the countries caught in the Asian crisis, like Indonesia, South Korea, and Thailand) also sees the IMF as an enforcer for major capital market firms and international banks. Japan, as a military protectorate of the US, has limited degrees of freedom. Even so, during the Asian crisis, it pushed for a bailout within the region (ie, outside the IMF) and that idea was quickly slapped down by the US.
While the US and Europe have the voted to determine who gets the nod at the IMF, consider the open hostility to Western banks in this Guardian article (hat tip RN):

….in a letter to the G20 group of the world's largest economies Brazil's finance minister, Guido Mantega, said: "If the Fund wants to maintain its legitimacy, its managing director must be selected after broad consultation with the member countries."…
There are equally trenchant opinions among IMF insiders. One former senior official said: "The big danger here is if the Europeans just try to put their person in. For example, Christine Lagarde [France's finance minister]. That would be a disaster. The Europeans have their heads in the sand again and if they do it, there will be bad fallout."
"Christine Lagarde stands for protecting big banks. I know people like what she said to Jamie Dimon [chief executive of JP Morgan Chase] at Davos but she's the most pro-bank bailout of the lot.
"The Americans are going to try and put in [White House adviser] David Lipton as number two. Lipton is Mr Bank Bailout. He worked for Citigroup. If they put in Lagarde and Lipton, what does that say? We are going with the total bank protection plan. That would be a disaster."….
Beijing, like Brasilia, appears keen for someone from an emerging economy to run the IMF this time. Jiang Yu, a spokeswoman for the Chinese foreign minister, said on Thursday that the IMF's top executives should be appointed on the basis of "impartiality" and "merit". This came after the state-run China Daily newspaper reported Guo Tianyong, a leading Chinese economist, predicting that "Europe's history of chairing the IMF may be broken"

The open question is at what cost will the advanced economies incur in installing yet another European. The IMF has been tasked to play a bigger role in global surveillance, particularly in prodding countries to rebalance their economies and change other risk-creating practices. If both top and the number two posts at the IMF goes to Westerners, it's likely to produce simmering resentment and undermine cooperation on crisis prevention initiatives. The efforts to continue to make the world safe for big banks is coming at higher and higher cost, but no one in charge seems terribly concerned about the intermediate term, much the less the long term.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/05/b...banks.html

[Bernice Moore]

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/glimpse-ex-imf-...46075.html

AP sources: DNA found on hotel maid's shirt from alleged sexual attack matches ex-IMF leader -

[Peter Lemkin]

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/glimpse-ex-imf-...46075.html

AP sources: DNA found on hotel maid's shirt from alleged sexual attack matches ex-IMF leader -

In a set-up and/or false-flag op, are the police to be trusted to be neutral? Second, it is easy to fake [plant] such 'evidence' even before the 'maid' enters the room....or after. And how often [and how proper!] is such evidence told to the Press before trial! The man is all but sentenced before trial....maybe even that!

[Magda Hassan]

A tale of two rape charges

May 23, 2011 11:28 ED
By Naomi Wolf

The opinions expressed are her own.
With the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, then Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, New York City has abruptly become the scene of two very different official approaches to investigating sex-crime cases, one traditional and one new. The new approach so far appears to be reserved for Strauss-Kahn alone.
Consider the first case: the ongoing trial of two police officers, Kenneth Moreno and Franklin Mata, charged in the rape of a 27-year-old Manhattan woman. She was drunk, and, after helping her to enter her apartment, Moreno and Mata allegedly made a false emergency call so that they could return to her. At that point, the woman says, she woke periodically out of her intoxicated state to find herself being raped, face down, by Moreno, as Mata stood guard.
The alleged rape of a citizen by a police officer and the alleged collusion of another officer is surely a serious matter. But the charges and trial have followed an often-seen pattern: the men's supporters have vociferously defended their innocence (the presumption of which has been scrupulously upheld in the press); the victim's pink bra has been the subject of salacious speculation, and her intoxication has been used to undermine her credibility. As the wheels of justice grind unglamorously forward, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has made no public statement supporting the victim's side.
Moreover, Moreno and Mata have not been asked to strip naked for "evidence" photos, were not initially denied bail, and were not held in solitary confinement, and are not being strip-searched daily. Their entire case has followed the usual timetable of many months, as evidence was gathered, testimony compiled and arguments made.
Then there is the Strauss-Kahn approach. After a chambermaid reportedly told her supervisor at the elegant Sofitel hotel that she had been sexually assaulted, the suspect was immediately tracked down, escorted off a plane just before its departure, and arrested. High-ranking detectives, not lowly officers, were dispatched to the crime scene. The DNA evidence was sequenced within hours, not the normal eight or nine days. By the end of the day's news cycle, New York City police spokespeople had made uncharacteristic and shockingly premature statements supporting the credibility of the victim's narrative before an investigation was complete.
The accused was handcuffed and escorted before television cameras a New York tradition known as a "perp walk." The suspect was photographed naked, which is also unusual, initially denied bail and held in solitary confinement. The Police Commissioner has boasted to the press that Strauss-Kahn is strip-searched now multiple times a day also unheard-of.
By the end of the second day's news cycle, senior public officials had weakened the presumption of innocence, a cornerstone of any civilized society's justice system. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was calling for Strauss-Kahn's resignation from the IMF, and Bloomberg remarked, in response to objections to Straus-Kahn's perp walk, "don't do the crime." Whatever happened in that hotel room, Strauss-Kahn's career, and his presumption of innocence, was effectively over before any legal process had even begun.
If Strauss-Kahn turns out, after a fair trial, to be a violent sex criminal, may his sentence be harsh indeed. But the way in which this case is being processed is profoundly worrisome. In 23 years of covering sex crime and in a city where domestic workers are raped by the score every month, often by powerful men I have never seen the New York Police Department snap into action like this on any victim's behalf.
Harriet Lessel, executive director of the New York City Alliance Against Sexual Assault, agrees that this case has seen "a very quick and targeted response," and points out that rape is "a grossly underreported crime" in New York. Worse, she says, many victims under other circumstances believe that the criminal justice system is unresponsive to their needs and more oriented toward ensuring that the innocent are not convicted.
While Lessel is quick to add that New York has "some great police officers and prosecutors who really care," she says that the police do not normally issue public statements supportive of victims' credibility, let alone early on, as they did with Strauss-Kahn's accuser. Nor has she ever heard of someone being photographed naked as part of the evidence.
So what is happening here?
We now live in a world in which men like former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, who was investigating financial wrongdoing by the insurance giant AIG, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and Strauss-Kahn whose efforts to reform the IMF gained him powerful opponents can be, and are, kept under constant surveillance. Indeed, Strauss-Kahn, who had been the odds-on favorite to defeat Nicolas Sarkozy in next year's French presidential election, probably interested more than one intelligence service.
This does not mean that Strauss-Kahn is innocent or that he is guilty. It means that policy outcomes can be advanced nowadays, in a surveillance society, by exploiting or manipulating sex-crime charges, whether real or inflated.
In other words, ours is increasingly an age of geopolitics by blackmail. Why, after all, were U.S. operatives asked to secure the "biometrics" and DNA of subjects abroad, as some of the U.S. diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks were revealed?
After Strauss-Kahn's arrest, a caller to a New York radio talk show, who identified herself as a domestic worker in a New York luxury hotel, reported that "every week" a man in a towel accosts her, seeking sex. Another caller, a hotel manager, confirmed that this is a common way for male hotel guests to solicit sex. The New York Times flagged on its front page a report that hotel domestic workers are often targeted with clients' requests for sex in exchange for money.
Are these men disgusting predators soliciting desperate, underpaid women? Yes. Is knowing about this economy relevant to the charges against Strauss-Kahn? Maybe.
Unfortunately, such questions may never be investigated, much less answered, for this is not being treated as a typical New York City sex-crime case. The authorities, perhaps with their own agenda, have publicly asserted a foregone conclusion; and that kind of intervention ultimately diminishes the chance of any one of us being able to rely on what used to be real American due process of law.
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/20...e-charges/