Posted on 02/19/2010 3:52:54 PM PST by Cindy
Great. Our Muslim Fifth Column is in the freight-forwarding business. How convenient for them.
I don’t really understand the problem with a couple of playstations and digital cameras going out of the country. what is so “prohibited” about them—that can’t be gotten anywhere?? We are not talking about pulse-neutron tubes or Krytrons, after all. THOSE WOULD be something to worry about.
"...and Jomana Import Export owner Samer Mehdi is still at large."
Here's your answer:
"...announced the indictment of four individuals and three Miami businesses on charges involving the export of electronics to a U.S. designated terrorist entity in Paraguay."
You can’t ship anything to a designated terrorist entity.
Whether it’s peanuts or playstations.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3851730,00.html
“3 men charged in Miami with financing Hezbollah”
snippet: “Indictment says suspects ran companies using Miami port to move goods to Paraguay shopping center included on US banned list of suspected terrorist fundraising networks. Center’s owner, Muhammad Yusif Abdallah considered a senior Hezbollah leader in South American region”
Associated Press
Published: 02.19.10, 23:08 / Israel News
SNIPPET: “Three men were charged in an indictment unsealed Friday with illegally exporting electronics and video games to a South American shopping center that US officials claim funnels money to Hezbollah.
The men, along with a fourth still being sought in South America...”
Let’s see how “the one” responds to this.
MMMM...I had to hunt around to find the info.
Another “Friday” news dump. How convenient.
If you’d like to be on or off, please FR mail me.
..................
The Amish, again.
Play Stations and similar electronics can be adapted to perform tasks that are military related. One of the US armed services actually figured out a similar assembly of such “toys” was cheaper than buying a specially built unit for a certain weapons related task.
Paraguay has a region that is notorious for its Islamic related denizens. The bombing of a Jewish Center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in the 1990s (resulting in the largest number of Jews murdered outside of Israel) was traced back the the Cuidad del Este, or “City of the East” in Paraguay. Paraguayans are great folks, for the most part. The Islamists, not so much. This is a real threat, not a silly imagining of “toys for terrorists.”
You missed another point. There have been articles about PLO and Hamas/Hezbullah towns in the border areas of Paraguay and possibly Venezuela or Bolivia, etc.
No real concrete documentation has come out of this but the presence of a terrorist front operation in Paraguay might open up this whole can of worms.
Hope someone follows this story.
http://www.truthusa.com/IRAN.html
#
stepping back in time...
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1830742/posts
Hezbollah builds a Western base
MSNBC.com ^ | 5/9/07 | Pablo Gato and Robert Windrem
Posted on May 9, 2007 8:31:08 AM PDT by TheKidster
Hezbollah builds a Western base
MSNBC.com ^ | 5/9/07 | Pablo Gato and Robert Windrem
Posted on May 9, 2007 8:31:08 AM PDT by TheKidster
CIUDAD DEL ESTE, Paraguay - The Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia has taken root in South America, fostering a well-financed force of Islamist radicals boiling with hatred for the United States and ready to die to prove it, according to militia members, U.S. officials and police agencies across the continent.
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
http://www.truthusa.com/IRAN.html
stepping back in time...
Note: The following post is a quote:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1017762/posts
Revealed: The South American Connection (Terrorists)
The Telegraph (UK) ^ | 11-9-2003
Posted on November 8, 2003 5:37:38 PM PST by blam
Revealed: the South American connection
(Filed: 09/11/2003)
A lawless frontier is helping to finance Arab extremists. Philip Sherwell reports from Ciudad del Este, Paraguay
They work from dawn until dusk on the traffic-clogged Friendship Bridge that runs across the Parana River between the seedy Paraguayan city of Ciudad del Este and its neighbour, Foz do Iguacu in Brazil.
By foot, bicycle and motorcycle or packed into cars, vans and buses, the people known as “ants” criss-cross the bridge several times a day with sacks and boxes laden with counterfeit cigarettes, pirated CDs and computer software and fake designer clothes.
For each run, they earn about $1 (62p), their share of one of the world’s least regulated and most lucrative trading free-for-alls. The zone is known as the Triple Frontier, where Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina meet at a bend in the Parana near the horseshoe waterfalls of Iguacu. There are 80,000 journeys across the bridge each day.
To the north, on the man-made lake behind the Itaipu dam, smugglers skirt occasional Brazilian police vessels as they carry marijuana and cocaine by boat from Paraguay to Brazil and ship stolen vehicles back in the opposite direction. The money generated is near-impossible to calculate. Argentine officials believe that the figure for all cross-border transactions in the area could be $70 million (£44 million) each day.
Much of the business - legal and illegal - is controlled by a population of 30,000, mainly Shia Muslim Arabs who fled the Lebanese civil war. They run their enterprises from the shabby shopping malls and chaotic streets of Ciudad del Este but usually live in the more affluent Foz. Among them is a small but dedicated hardcore of militant Muslims. For years, often under the guise of charitable donations, millions of dollars have flowed from the Triple Frontier to Hizbollah, the Iranian-backed militant Lebanese Shi’ite faction. Money was also raised for Hamas, the Palestinian extremist group.
Despite a limited crackdown and handful of arrests by the Paraguayan authorities, David Aufhauser, the outgoing United States Treasury Department official on terrorist funding, last month described the Triple Frontier zone as home to a “rich marriage of drugs and terror”. A senior US State Department official said: “In terms of terrorist financing, the area is a black hole.”
The money trail is complex and difficult to trace but The Telegraph has learnt that American intelligence officials have electronically monitored cash transfers via banks in Sao Paulo and North America to a web of accounts in the Middle East linked to Hizbollah and Hamas. They also disclosed that the US has been using satellites to monitor telephone conversations in the area after learning that Middle East terror suspects were dialling so-called switching stations in Foz or Ciudad del Este and giving a password to have their calls re-routed to their destination.
The procedure made calls impossible to trace and avoided triggering interception mechanisms. More than a dozen switching stations have been found and closed down in recent months. To the frustration of the US, cracking down on the terror financing operations has been much more difficult, especially as Paraguay and Brazil want to resuscitate tourism at the falls and to avoid losing the Arabs’ business acumen.
Corruption is rampant and financial controls have been lax for so long that they verge on the non-existent. Money-laundering is conducted through myriad front companies, under-invoicing is endemic and the plethora of foreign exchange offices, money-wiring companies and commercial banks offer ample scope for moving large sums unnoticed.
A recent Brazilian customs investigation indicated the scale of illicit financial movements through the Triple Frontier. It concluded that between 1996 and 2000, an estimated $35 billion (£22 billion) had been moved illegally from Brazilian accounts held in Foz via a Paraguayan bank in neighbouring Ciudad del Este to New York. “It is easy to understand Ciudad del Este,” said a lawyer there. “All you need to know is that everyone here is a bandit.”
US and local intelligence have also traced visits by several terrorist leaders to the Triple Frontier and believe that it was used as a staging post in the attacks on Jewish targets in Buenos Aires in the early 1990s. Al-Qaeda has contacts in the region. Tourist posters of the waterfalls were found in safe houses in Afghanistan but reports of terrorist training camps in the jungle have been widely dismissed.
In the Paraguayan capital of Asuncion, Sobhi Fayad is serving six-and-a-half years for tax evasion, a hefty punishment in a country where financial crimes are a way of life. The Lebanese trader from Ciudad del Este is a shabby figure with a wheezing cough who looks a decade older than his 36 years. His true offence, according to US intelligence and Paraguayan prosecutors, is a leading role in collecting funds for Hizbollah from other Lebanese businessmen but the country has no anti-terrorism laws so Fayad was prosecuted for tax evasion - the same tactic used by the American authorities finally to jail the mobster Al Capone.
Although Fayad denies the allegations, claiming that he was framed by a Lebanese business rival, the Paraguayans say he moved $1.8 million (£1.1 million) to foreign bank accounts and recovered a certificate of thanks for his donations from Hassan Nasrallah, the Hizbollah leader. “The Americans just wanted scapegoats after the September 11 attack,” he told me during a brief meeting. “I was one of the unlucky ones.”
Ciudad del Este’s Arabs deny that they are harbouring terrorist supporters - although, in any case, Hizbollah is widely regarded as a legitimate political and military force. Fayad is a friend and former business associate of Assad Barakat, the alleged head of the Hizbollah fund-raising wing who is in jail in Brazil fighting extradition to Paraguay. The two men ran their computer games businesses from the Page Gallery in the heart of Ciudad del Este. When we visited it last week, we were quickly escorted off the premises by armed security guards.
Outside the nearby Islamic cultural centre, however, Tony Barakat was keen to defend his uncle. He said that he also had been framed, but then acknowledged that he had made “charitable” donations to Hizbollah. “Yes, some people here support the work of Hizbollah. We have to have guns, otherwise the Israelis would wipe us out. It is no crime that my uncle helped the orphans and widows of martyrs.”
Just across the border in Argentina, Roberto Ontiveros, head of the anti-terrorism unit, dismisses such remarks. “Millions of dollars are going to these so-called charities,” he said. “Just how many crutches and bandages can you buy?”
Regarding post no. 1:
http://www.investigativeproject.org/blog/#1807
“South Florida Indictment Indirectly Alleges Hizballah Support”
By IPT News | February 19, 2010 at 8:20 pm
SNIPPET: “Hizballah is never mentioned in the 19-page indictment, but it does cite the Treasury order which targeted alleged the terrorist group’s financiers “in the Triple Frontier of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay.””
Stepping back in time...
http://www.treasury.gov/press/releases/js1720.htm
FROM THE OFFICE OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS
June 10, 2004
js1720
“Treasury Designates Islamic Extremist, Two Companies Supporting Hizballah in Tri-Border Area”
###
###
Re post no. 17...
stepping back in time....
http://paraguay.usembassy.gov/hizballah_fundraising_network_in_the_triple_frontier2.html
TRI-BORDER AREA
“Hizballah Fundraising Network in the Triple Frontier”
U.S. TREASURY DEPARTMENT
OFFICE OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS
December 6, 2006
“Treasury Targets Hizballah Fundraising Network in the Triple Frontier of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay”
SNIPPET: “The U.S. Department of the Treasury today designated nine individuals and two entities that have provided financial and logistical support to the Hizballah terrorist organization. The designees are located in the Tri-Border Area (TBA) of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay and have provided financial and other services for Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) Assad Ahmad Barakat, who was previously designated in June 2004 for his support to Hizballah leadership.
“Assad Ahmad Barakat’s network in the Tri-Border Area is a major financial artery to Hizballah in Lebanon,” said Adam Szubin, Director of the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).”
Mennonites. Let’s not be Amish-bashers.
Thread Bump.
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