Head of IMF arrested and accused of sexual assault

[Peter Lemkin]

Ah, great timing for the accused....after his chances to reform the IMF and stop the rape of Greece et al....or become President of France. Not that I love the man or his ideas, but it seems clear that of his class, he was more moral than the others. Somehow, I begin to doubt this was all coincidence...... hock: :nono: Even if they release him with NO charges and say 'sorry', his life is destroyed.....which I think was the plan! :gossip:

[Jan Klimkowski]

The American incident increasingly looks like a sting, and quite possibly a geopolitical sting.

The article below states that Strauss-Kahn will face fresh sex assault charges on his return to France.

This could be another geopoltical sting.

Or

It could be a genuine case brought by an outraged victim.

And

It may reveal that Strauss-Kahn's enemies knew his weaknesses, and how to exploit them in New York.

Strauss-Kahn faces new test as French writer moves to file sex assault lawsuit

Lawyer for Tristane Banon says writer will formally accuse ex-IMF chief of attempted rape at 2002 interview

Associated Press in Paris guardian.co.uk, Monday 4 July 2011 15.47 BST

The lawyer for a French journalist and writer claims she will file a lawsuit accusing former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn of attempted rape.

Lawyer David Koubbi told the Associated Press that Tristane Banon will file the suit on Tuesday in Paris.

Banon has described an encounter in 2002 in which Strauss-Kahn allegedly sexually assaulted her.

Strauss-Kahn was arrested in New York in May on charges that he tried to rape a hotel maid. Strauss-Kahn, who vigorously denied wrongdoing, was released without bail last week after questions emerged about the maid's credibility.

Koubbi had said in the past that they would not file a lawsuit until the US trial was finished. He said on Monday that they had decided to move forward now instead of waiting.

Banon came forward after Strauss-Kahn's arrest on 14 May in New York. She accused him of wrenching open her bra and trying to unbutton her jeans in 2002. Lawyer David Koubbi said Banon had been dissuaded at the time from filing charges by her mother, a regional councillor in Strauss-Kahn's Socialist party.

Before Koubbi's announcement, the country was divided on whether it wanted Strauss-Kahn back in public life: two polls showed an almost even division between those who thought he should return, and those who believed his political career was over.

A poll released on Monday found that 51% of French people found that Strauss-Kahn no longer had a political future, versus 42% who thought he did.

Another poll published on Sunday conducted by Harris Interactive for Le Parisien showed 49% wanted Strauss-Kahn to return to French politics.

[Danny Jarman]

After reading about the new French claims it certainly seems like he is on someones hit list.

[Peter Lemkin]

Mounting Evidence that Dominique Strauss Kahn was Framed

by Michel Chossudovsky

Global Research, July 7, 2011

While the media has gone to arms length to obfuscate the matter, there is mounting evidence that Dominique Strauss Kahn was framed.

According to media reports, the 32-year-old Guinean Sofitel housemaid received the modest sum of 100,000 dollars paid into her bank account. The New York Times acknowledges the payment but fails to analyze the source of these payments. In an utterly confused statement, the NYT suggests that the money was deposited in the housemaid's account by her Guinean boy friend who is serving time in a high security prison:

According to the two officials, the woman had a phone conversation with an incarcerated man within a day of her encounter with Mr. Strauss-Kahn in which she discussed the possible benefits of pursuing the charges against him. The conversation was recorded.

That man, the investigators learned, had been arrested on charges of possessing 400 pounds of marijuana. He is among a number of individuals who made multiple cash deposits, totaling around $100,000, into the woman's bank account over the last two years. The deposits were made in Arizona, Georgia, New York and Pennsylvania.

The investigators also learned that she was paying hundreds of dollars every month in phone charges to five companies. The woman had insisted she had only one phone and said she knew nothing about the deposits except that they were made by a man she described as her fiancé and his friends. (NYT, July 1, 2011, emphasis added)

The bank records of the housemaid, not to mention the record of her telephone calls, are known to police investigators, yet both the media and the prosecutors have failed to reveal the identity of the persons who instigated these money transfers.

The reports suggest that they may be "drug related", thereby casually dismissing the likelihood that the money could have been part of the framing of DSK. The reports also mention that the money deposits were made "over the last two years", thereby conveying the impression that they bear no relationship to the DSK affair.

The exact timing of these money transfers including the identity of senders are known to police investigators. Why has this information not been released?

If the 100,000 dollars had indeed been deposited into her bank account in the course of the last two years, why on earth would she be working as a housemaid?

Regime change at the IMF

Why was the substance of the housemaid's false accusations not released at an earlier stage? Who was protecting her?

Why did the media wait to reveal information which confirms DSK's innocence.

This information was known to the prosecutors at an early stage of the investigation, yet it was only released after the appointment of France's Finance Minister Christine Lagarde as Managing Director of the IMF.

Lagarde's candidacy was confirmed and accepted on June 26th. Her mandate was confirmed on June 28th following a decision of the IMF's 24 member executive board.

Lagarde is an appointee of Wall Street and the US banking establishment. Her candidacy had been approved by U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on the 28th of June:

"I am pleased to announce our decision to support Christine Lagarde to head the IMF," Geithner said in a statement hours before the 24-member IMF executive board was expected to select her as its managing director.

Careful timing. In a bitter irony, the report from the prosecutor proving DSK's innocence was released on the day following the IMF's executive board decision instating Lagarde as Managing Director of IMF for a five year term.

The frame-up has visibly succeeded. Who instructed prosecutors not to release this information until after the appointment of Lagarde as IMF Chief?

If this information had been revealed a few days earlier, Lagarde's candidacy as IMF chief might have been questioned.

Regime change at the IMF has been speedily implemented, not to mention the implications of the DSK affair in relation to the French presidential elections.

Christine Lagarde commenced her five year term as IMF Managing Director on July 5th at the height of Greece's debt crisis.

Sofar, the likely hypothesis of a frame-up directed against DSK is not being touched upon by the mainstream media.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Hmmmmm

Christine Lagarde faces inquiry over €285m payout for Sarkozy ally

Judge orders investigation into controversial decision made by new IMF chief in 2007 when she was French finance minister

Angelique Chrisafis in Paris guardian.co.uk, Thursday 4 August 2011 16.01 BST

A French court has ordered a formal investigation into whether the IMF head Christine Lagarde abused her position when she was finance minister in allowing a huge state settlement to a businessman friend of President Nicolas Sarkozy.

The court of justice of the republic, a special tribunal qualified to judge ministers, ruled there were grounds to examine Lagarde's role in arbitrating in favour of the controversial tycoon Bernard Tapie in 2008.

Tapie, the former owner of the football club Olympic Marseille and Socialist minister, served a seven-month jail term in 1997 for match-fixing and has a tax fraud conviction. In recent years he has made a remarkable public comeback as an actor, singer, chatshow host and prominent supporter of the president.

The Largarde investigation concerns a decades-long legal dispute Tapie had with a former state-owned bank which he claimed cheated him when handling the 1993 sale of his Adidas sports empire.

In 2007, Lagarde ended the dispute by ordering a special panel of judges to arbitrate an out-of-court settlement.

They ruled that Tapie should receive €285m (£247m) in damages from the public purse, a ruling that scandalised opposition politicians.

A judicial inquiry will now examine Lagarde's decision to order arbitration instead of letting the Tapie affair be decided by the courts. It will also consider whether she refused expert advice to appeal against the huge payout, simply allowing Tapie to walk away with his cheque.

The French inquiry into Lagarde is likely to drag on for years and could cast a shadow over her leadership of the IMF. At the end of the investigation, judges will decide whether she should face trial. Lagarde has denied any misconduct in the case.

Lagarde, a lawyer who was one of Sarkozy's most popular ministers, took over leadership of the IMF in Washington on 5 July after the former head, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, resigned amid allegations he attempted to rape a New York hotel maid.

Lagarde's lawyer, Yves Repiquet, immediately issued a statement saying the French judicial inquiry would not affect her IMF duties. "This procedure is in no way incompatible with the current functions of the managing director of the IMF," he said.

The statement was supported by a similar comment from the IMF board, which said: "It would not be appropriate for the board to comment on a case that is currently before the French judiciary. However, the board is confident that she will be able to effectively carry out her duties as managing director."

[Magda Hassan]

Wonder why this CIA tool is involved?

What Really Happened to Strauss-Kahn?

December 22, 2011

Edward Jay Epstein

[/url]





[url=http://www.nybooks.com/multimedia/view-photo/2831] Philippe Wojazer/Reuters
Dominique Strauss-Kahn and his wife, Anne Sinclair, in the courtyard of their Paris residence, September 2011


May 14, 2011, was a horrendous day for Dominique Strauss-Kahn, then head of the International Monetary Fund and leading contender to unseat Nicolas Sarkozy as president of France in the April 2012 elections. Waking up in the presidential suite of the Sofitel New York hotel that morning, he was supposed to be soon enroute to Paris and then to Berlin where he had a meeting the following day with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. He could not have known that by late afternoon he would, instead, be imprisoned in New York on a charge of sexual assault. He would then be indicted by a grand jury on seven counts of attempted rape, sexual assault, and unlawful imprisonment, placed under house arrest for over a month, and, two weeks before all the charges were dismissed by the prosecutor on August 23, 2011, sued for sexual abuse by the alleged victim.
He knew he had a serious problem with one of his BlackBerry cell phoneswhich he called his IMF BlackBerry. This was the phone he used to send and receive texts and e-mailsincluding for both personal and IMF business. According to several sources who are close to DSK, he had received a text message that morning from Paris from a woman friend temporarily working as a researcher at the Paris offices of the UMP, Sarkozy's center-right political party. She warned DSK, who was then pulling ahead of Sarkozy in the polls, that at least one private e-mail he had recently sent from his BlackBerry to his wife, Anne Sinclair, had been read at the UMP offices in Paris.[SUP]1[/SUP] It is unclear how the UMP offices might have received this e-mail, but if it had come from his IMF BlackBerry, he had reason to suspect he might be under electronic surveillance in New York. He had already been warned by a friend in the French diplomatic corps that an effort would be made to embarrass him with a scandal. The warning that his BlackBerry might have been hacked was therefore all the more alarming.
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At 10:07 AM he called his wife in Paris on his IMF BlackBerry, and in a conversation that lasted about six minutes told her he had a big problem. He asked her to contact a friend, Stéphane Fouks, who could come to his home on the Place des Vosges and who could arrange to have both his BlackBerry and iPad examined by an expert in such matters. He had no time to do anything about it that morning. He had scheduled an early lunch with his twenty-six-year-old daughter Camille, a graduate student at Columbia, who wanted to introduce him to her new boyfriend. After that, he had to get to JFK Airport in time to catch his 4:40 PM flight to Paris.
He had finished packing his suitcase just before noon, according to his own account, and then took a shower in the bathroom, which is connected to the bed in the suite by an interior corridor. According to the hotel's electronic key records, which were provided to DSK's lawyers, Nafissatou Diallo, a maid, had entered the presidential suite (room 2806) between 12:06 and 12:07 PM (such records are only accurate to the nearest minute).[SUP]2 [/SUP]Ordinarily, cleaning personnel do not enter a room to clean when a guest is still in it. According to DSK's account, his bags were visible in the foyer when he emerged naked from the bathroom into the interior corridor. At this point, according to his account, he encountered the maid in the corridor by the bathroom. (The maid, for her part, says she encountered him coming out of the bedroom.) Phone records show that by 12:13 PM he was speaking to his daughter Camille on his BlackBerry. The call lasted for forty seconds.
What took place between DSK and the maid in those six to seven intervening minutes is a matter of dispute. DNA evidence found outside the bathroom door showed her saliva mixed with his semen. The New York prosecutor concluded that a "hurried sexual encounter" took place and DSK's lawyers have admitted as much, while claiming that what happened was consensual. The maid has brought a civil suit claiming he used force. It is not clear when she left the room since key card records do not show times of exit. What is known is that DSK called his daughter on his IMF BlackBerry at 12:13 to tell her he would be late.
After DSK completed his call, he dressed and put on his light black topcoat. He carried with him only one small overnight bag and a briefcase (which contained his iPad and several spare phones) and took the elevator to the lobby. At 12:28 PM the hotel security cameras show him departing. He had to go eight blocks to the McCormick & Schmick's restaurant on Sixth Avenue between 51st and 52nd Street. He was delayed by heavy traffic on Sixth Avenue. The restaurant camera shows that he arrived at 12:54.
Camille was with her new boyfriend. They had a quick meal, and at 2:15 PM, according to the restaurant's surveillance cameras, DSK got in another taxi to go to the airport. Almost immediately, he discovered that his IMF BlackBerry was missing. It was the phone he had arranged to have examined for bugs in Paris and it was the phone that contained the earlier text message warning him about the interception of his messages. At 2:16 PM he called Camille, who had also just left the restaurant, on his spare BlackBerry and had her go back to the restaurant to search for it. Camera footage at the restaurant shows her crawling under the table. At 2:28 PM she sent him a text message saying that she could not find it. So DSK continued on to the airport.
Back at the Sofitel, meanwhile, Nafissatou Diallo, the maid he had encountered in the presidential suite, had told hotel security that she had been sexually assaulted by a client in that suite. A thirty-two-year-old immigrant from Guinea, she had been working at the Sofitel for three years. At 2:30 PM she was shown a photograph of DSK by the hotel's security people. According to the official bill of particularsthe statement of the basic facts of the case filed by the prosecutorsthe police had apparently not yet fully taken over the case, even though the encounter between DSK and Diallo had occurred over two hours earlier.
Mike King
A schematic drawing of the twenty-eighth floor of the Sofitel New York, with the presidential suite, room 2806, that was occupied by Dominique Strauss-Kahn on May 13 and 14. The nearby room 2820 was entered at least three times on May 14 by the Sofitel maid Nafissatou Diallo.


Part of the delay in bringing in the police may have been the result of Diallo's not immediately voicing her complaint. After she had left DSK in the presidential suite around 12:13 PMthe time of his call to Camilleshe remained on the VIP floor. The hotel's electronic key records indicate that at 12:26 PM she entered 2820, another VIP suite on the same floor that she had already entered several times earlier that morning. Then, one to two minutes later, she went back to the now empty presidential suite. A few minutes after that, she encountered another housekeeper, her supervisor, in the corridor. In the course of their conversation, Diallo asked the supervisor what would happen if a hotel guest took advantage of a hotel employee. Initially, Diallo told her that this was only a hypothetical question; but then, when pressed further, she said that she had been assaulted by the guest in the presidential suite. The supervisor then brought her to the head of housekeeping, Renata Markozani, who reentered the presidential suite with Diallo at 12:42, according to the key records, and notified the hotel's security and management personnel. At 12:52 PM, Diallo is seen arriving at the hotel's security office on the ground floor, located near the 45th Street entrance. She is wearing a beige uniform, and is accompanied by Renata Markozani, whom she towers over. (She is five feet ten inches tall.)
Shortly thereafter the hotel's own security team was augmented by John Sheehan, a security expert who is identified on LinkedIn as "director of safety and security" at Accor, a part of the French-based Accor Group, which owns the Sofitel. Sheehan, who was at home in Washingtonville, New York, that morning, received a call from the Sofitel at 1:03 PM. He then rushed to the hotel. While en route, according to his cell phone records, he called a number with a 646 prefix in the United States. But from these records neither the name nor the location of the person he called can be determined. When I called the number a man with a heavy French accent answered and asked whom I wanted to speak with at Accor.[SUP]3[/SUP]
The man I asked to talk toand to whom I was not put throughwas René-Georges Querry, Sheehan's ultimate superior at Accor and a well-connected former chief of the French anti-gang brigades, who was now head of security for the Accor Group. Before joining Accor Group in 2003, he had worked closely in the police with Ange Mancini, who is now coordinator for intelligence for President Sarkozy. Querry, at the time that Sheehan was making his call to the 646 number, was arriving at a soccer match in Paris where he would be seated in the box of President Sarkozy. Querry denies receiving any information about the unfolding drama at the Sofitel until after DSK was taken into custody about four hours later.
Another person at the Accor Group whom Sheehan might have alerted was Xavier Graff, the duty officer at the Accor Group in Paris. Graff was responsible that weekend for handling emergencies at Accor Group hotels, including the Sofitel in New York. His name only emerged five weeks later when he sent a bizarre e-mail to his friend Colonel Thierry Bourret, the head of an environment and public health agency, claiming credit for "bringing down" DSK. After the e-mail was leaked to Le Figaro, Graff described it as a joke (it resulted, however, in his suspension as director of emergencies by the Accor Group). Even jokes can have a basis. In this case the joke was made by the person who was directly responsible for passing on information to his superiors, including the head of security at Accor, René-Georges Querryinformation that, if acted on by informing the American authorities, could have helped destroy DSK's career. But like Querry, Graff denied receiving any calls or messages from New York until later that evening, telling a French newspaper that the failure to inform him was an "incredible miss" ("loupé").
By the time Sheehan was called by the hotel at 1:03 PM, Diallo was seated on a bench in the hotel's ground floor service area, just off the service entrance on 45th Street. Behind her was a "Dutch door," with the upper half opened, that led to the hotel's security office. Surveillance camera footage shows her entering the area with a tall unidentified man at 12:52 PM. She mains there until 2:05 PM. At 12:56, she is joined there by Brian Yearwood, the large, heavy-set man who is the hotel's chief engineer. Yearwood had just come down from the presidential suite on the twenty-eighth floor, which he had entered at 12:51, according to the key records. Yearwood remained close to Diallo as she spoke to Adrian Branch, the security chief for the hotel, who remained behind the half-shut door of the security office. She can be seen gesturing with her hands for about four minutes, pointing to different parts of her body over and over again, suggesting she was telling and retelling her story.
At 1:28, Sheehan, still on the way to the hotel, sent a text message to Yearwood. And then another text message to an unidentified recipient at 1:30. At 1:31one hour after Diallo had first told a supervisor that she had been assaulted by the client in the presidential suiteAdrian Branch placed a 911 call to the police. Less than two minutes later, the footage from the two surveillance cameras shows Yearwood and an unidentified man walking from the security office to an adjacent area. This is the same unidentified man who had accompanied Diallo to the security office at 12:52 PM. There, the two men high-five each other, clap their hands, and do what looks like an extraordinary dance of celebration that lasts for three minutes. They are then shown standing by the service door leading to 45th Streetapparently waiting for the police to arrivewhere they are joined at 2:04 PM by Florian Schutz, the hotel manager.
Mike King
A schematic drawing of the first floor of the Sofitel New York, based on plans registered with the New York City Department of Buildings


A minute later, at 2:05 PM, the footage shows two uniformed police officers arriving and then accompanying Diallo to an adjoining office. It is unclear if the police officially took over the case at this time or later. There is so far no explanation for why the security staff had delayed the call to the NYPD that would lead a scandal involving the possible future president of France. What is clear is that they did so just three minutes after receiving a message from Sheehan. Nor is it clear why the two men were celebrating.
The police arrived, according to the hotel's security camera footage, at 2:05 PM. They then can be seen escorting Diallo to a room across from the security office. There is an unexplained discrepancy here concerning the information in the bill of particulars, which says that at approximately 2:30 PM, "a photograph of the defendant was shown to the witness [i.e., Diallo] by hotel security without police involvement." If so, even after leaving the bench (and video surveillance) and going to a room with the police, she remained in the custody of Sofitel security. I asked both Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne and Deputy Inspector Kim Royster why, according to the bill of particulars, the police were not officially involved at this point, but they declined to comment.
More than an hour later, at 3:28 PM, the police took her to St. Luke's Hospital, where she was medically examined and they then formally interviewed her. She described to them a brutal and sustained sexual attack in which DSK locked the suite door, dragged her into the bedroom, and then dragged her down the inner corridor to a spot close to the bathroom doora distance of about forty feetand, after attempting to assault her both anally and vaginally, forced her twice to perform fellatio. After that, she fled the suite. As has been seen, according to the electronic key information, and to the record of DSK's call to his daughter showing him speaking to her at 12:13, we can reasonably conclude that any such actions could have taken place only within a period of six or seven minutes, between 12:0607 and 12:13, when he called his daughter.
At 3:01 PM, as DSK was approaching the airport, he was still attempting to find his missing phone. He attempted to call it from his spare but received no answer. What he did not know was that at 12:51, according to the records of the BlackBerry company, it had been somehow disabled. At 3:29 PM, evidently unaware of what was happening at the Sofitel, he called the hotel from the taxi, saying, according to the police transcript, "I am Dominique Strauss-Kahn, I was a guest. I left my phone behind." He then said he was in room "2806." He was asked to give a phone number, so that he could be called back, after 2806 was searched for his phone.
When he was called back thirteen minutes later, he spoke to a hotel employee who was in the presence of police detective John Mongiello. The hotel employee falsely told him that his phone had been found and asked where it could be delivered. DSK told him that he was at JFK Airport and that "I have a problem because my flight leaves at 4:26 PM." He was reassured that someone could bring it to the airport in time. "OK, I am at the Air France Terminal, Gate 4, Flight 23," DSK responded. So the police rushed to the airport. At 4:45 PM, police called DSK off the plane and took him into custody.
DSK was then jailed and indicted by a grand jury on seven counts, including attempted rape, sexual abuse, and unlawful imprisonment. The court eventually dropped all the charges against him because the prosecutors found that the complainant, Diallo, had proven to be an untruthful witness. They wrote in the motion for dismissal that "the nature and number of the complainant's falsehoods leave us unable to credit her version of events beyond a reasonable doubt." They said that she "has given irreconcilable accounts of what happened," and had lied not only to the prosecutors but under oath to the grand jury about her whereabouts after the encounter. She stated that she had hid in the hall after leaving the presidential suite, and entered no other room on the twenty-eighth floor until she told another maid about the attack (which was approximately fifteen minutes later).
Bryan Smith/ZUMA Press/Corbis
The Sofitel hotel, West 44th Street, New York, May 2011


When asked why she had not used her pass key to go into another room, she said they all had "Do Not Disturb" signs on the door. After her grand jury testimony, prosecutors discovered that this was false when the hotel belatedly provided them with the electronic key records showing that Diallo had entered room 2820 at 12:26 PM, after her encounter with DSK. The same record also showed that she had also entered room 2820 prior to her encounter with DSK at a time when the occupant had not checked out and may have been in the room. Why she concealed visiting 2820 was "inexplicable" to the prosecutors, who noted in their motion for dismissal that if she had mentioned her visits to 2820, it would have been declared part of the crime scene and searched by the police. But she did not do so.
Nor were DSK's lawyers able to find an explanation. When they attempted to learn the identity of the occupant of 2820, Sofitel refused to release it on grounds of privacy. Given Diallo's conflicting accounts, all that we really know about what happened in the nearby room 2820 is that Diallo went there both before and after her encounter with DSK and then omitted the latter visit from her sworn testimony to the grand jury. We still do not know if there was anyone in 2820 when she entered it again following the encounter with DSK or if, prior to the police arriving, anyone influenced her to omit mention of room 2820.
The Sofitel electronic key record, which the hotel did not turn over to the prosecutors until the next week, contained another unexplained anomaly. Two individuals, not one, entered DSK's suite between 12:05 and 12:06 PM while he was showering. Each used a different key card entry. The key card used at 12:06 belonged to Diallo; the key card used at 12:05 belonged to Syed Haque, a room service employee who, according to his account, came to pick up the breakfast dishes. If he did so, he would have turned left and gone to the dining room. But Haque has refused to be interviewed by DSK's lawyers, so his precise movements have not been made public. Since the key cards do not register the time of exit, it cannot be determined from them if both parties were in the room at the same time or, for that matter, at the time of Diallo's encounter with DSK.
DSK's BlackBerry, with its messages, is still missing. Investigations by both the police and private investigators retained by DSK's lawyers failed to find it. While DSK believed he had left it in the Sofitel, the records obtained from BlackBerry show that the missing phone's GPS circuitry was disabled at 12:51. This stopped the phone from sending out signals identifying its location. Apart from the possibility of an accident, for a phone to be disabled in this way, according to a forensic expert, required technical knowledge about how the BlackBerry worked.
From electronic information that became available to investigators in November 2011, it appears the phone never left the Sofitel. If it was innocently lost, whoever found it never used it, raising the question of by whom and why it was disabled at 12:51. In any case, its absence made it impossible for DSK to checkas he had planned to doto see if it had been compromised. Nor was it possible to verify from the phone itself the report he received on May 14 that his messages were being intercepted. So we cannot confirm the warning to DSK that he was under surveillance on that disastrous day.
One vexing mystery concerns the one-hour time gap in reporting the alleged attack on Diallo. After she said that she had been the victim of a brutal and sustained sexual assault, it is hard to understand how the security staff would have ruled out that she might require immediate medical attention. But as has been seen, until 1:31, several minutes after receiving a message from Sheehan, the security staff did not make the 911 call. She did not arrive at St. Luke's Hospital until 3:57 PM, nearly four hours after the alleged attack. We do not know what decisions were made during that one-hour interval or how they influenced what was to later unfold with such dramatic impact.
By the time the 911 call was finally made, the hotel's management was presumably aware of the political explosion and scandal DSK's arrest would cause. DSK could no longer be a challenger to Sarkozy. Such considerations, and the opportunities they presented, may have had no part whatever in the hotel's handling of the situation, but without knowing the content of any messages between the hotel managers in New York and the security staffs in New York or Paris, among others, we cannot be sure. Meanwhile, several mysteries remain. Was there anyone in room 2820 besides Diallo during and after the encounter with DSK? If so, who were they and what were they doing there; and why, in any case, did Diallo deny that she'd gone to the room? Because she denied it, the police, according to the prosecutor's recommendation for dismissal, did not search 2820 or declare it a crime scene. And where, if it still exists, is the BlackBerry that DSK lost and feared was hacked?
All we know for sure is that someone, or possibly an accident, abruptly disabled it from signaling its location at 12:51 PM. DSK himself has not explained why he was so concerned about the possible interception of his messages on this BlackBerry and its disappearance. According to stories in Libération and other French journals on November 11, 2011, DSK sent text messages on a borrowed cell phone to at least one person named in the still-unfolding affair involving the Carlton Hotel in Lille, a scandal in which corporations allegedly provided high-class escort women to government officials. (DSK denies that he was connected to the prostitution ring.) If DSK sent these messages, may he also have received embarrassing messages back on his own BlackBerry that could have been damaging to his reputation and political ambitions? Or his concern could also have proceeded from other matters, such as the sensitive negotiations he was conducting for the IMF to stave off the euro crises. Whatever happened to his phone, and the content on it, his political prospects were effectively ended by the events of that day.

1. 1 These statements, along with others in this article, were confirmed by sources who prefer to remain anonymous but are known to the author, who has shared his information with the editors. ↩
   
2. 2 For this article, along with court and other legal documents, I had access to Sofitel electronic key swipe records, time-stamped security camera videotapes, and records for a cell phone used on the day of May 14 by John Sheehan, a security employee of Accor, the company that owns the Sofitel hotel. ↩
   
3. 3 I had access to the record of only one cell phone used by the Accor Group's security man, John Sheehan. Neither Sheehan nor the hotel's security director, Adrien Brand, returned my calls. Through an assistant Brian Yearwood, the hotel's chief engineer, said he had no comment. ↩
   
   http://media.nybooks.com/strauss.html
   
   
   

[Peter Lemkin]

It could well have been an intel op to get him out of becoming French President.....now the question is was it the CIA, the French intelligence or both.

[Jan Klimkowski]

The IMF, the French secret service, mechanics dancing around high-fiveing at how easy their sting was....

Not even a honey trap. Just tawdry filth.

The entire global intelligence community apparently knew that DSK was a "rutting chimpanzee", arrogantly unable to keep his boner in his trousers.

When They decided to get him, it was ridiculously simple.

Fuck 'em all.

[Ed Jewett]

The IMF, the French secret service, mechanics dancing around high-fiveing at how easy their sting was....

Not even a honey trap. Just tawdry filth.

The entire global intelligence community apparently knew that DSK was a "rutting chimpanzee", arrogantly unable to keep his boner in his trousers.

When They decided to get him, it was ridiculously simple.

Fuck 'em all.

... and therein lies a small chunk of deep political insight & wisdom {perhaps we can join forces with a pharmaceutical company and get that stuff in a gel capsule to ingest like a super-food that gradually re-builds the neuro-synaptically grounded rebuilding and healing ATP} that suggests that there is indeed a hand in the glove... One finger runs the press, one finger runs one nation's intel units, and one finger runs another's, and the fourth finger in the marionettist's hands controls a sophisticated global surveillance system... and just a small handful of marionettists, whose eyes are above the vision of the viewing audience, can control 40-50 sources of "input" and more. Oh what a show...!

[Jan Klimkowski]

My eyes glaze with suspicion when I hear the phrase "A Wall Street Journal investigation".

So, with a big health warning, here (via Zero Hedge) is the story being channelled through the WSJ.

If it contains any truth, the story does provide a clear motivation for the "fixing" of DSK, jailed and marginalized through deliberate exploitation of his arrogance and libido...

At a closed-door meeting in Washington on April 14, Europe's effort to contain its debt crisis began to unravel.

Inside the French ambassador's 19-bedroom mansion, finance ministers and central bankers from the world's largest economies heard Dominique Strauss-Kahn, then-head of the International Monetary Fund, deliver an ultimatum.

Greece, the country that triggered the euro-zone debt crisis, would need a much bigger bailout than planned, Mr. Strauss-Kahn said. Unless Europe coughed up extra cash, the IMF, which a year earlier had agreed to share the burden with European countries, wouldn't release any more aid for Athens.

...

It was to be Europe's fateful spring. A Wall Street Journal investigation, based on more than two dozen interviews with euro-zone policy makers, revealed how the currency union floundered in indecisionfailing to address either the immediate concerns of investors or the fundamental weaknesses undermining the euro. The consequence was that a crisis in a few small economies turned into a threat to the survival of Europe's common currency and a menace to the global economy.

...

The April meeting ended inconclusively.