Update: Sharp End International. Spy alert.

I wrote on 5-1-08 that I found something strange with a referrer who turned out not to be a referrer but Private military company named: Sharp End International (who comes up with these names, Jeez).

I promised an update if I found some more information.

Well here goes:

I send a link to the 911 blogger site and to the pilots for 9/11 truth and on the 911 blog site a blogger going by the name of Peter came up with something interesting and I decided to pursue his train of thought. To him the site sounded more like a front for the NSA, and he suggested that since New Zealand was part of the illegal spying group Echelon I might find something there and he also gave me a link. 

http://cryptome.org/nsa-cryptome.htm

In order to see how I might find out if the company was a front for the NSA I went to a couple of other PMC sites to see what was different on these sites as compared with the SEI site.

Well for starters all of the known PMCs had real addresses and actively advertised their product and made themselves very accessible to the public. Also they had very neutral land corporate looking sites. Blackwater Worldwide clearly has had some good advise from the boys at Burston & Marstellers, because after their almost Nazi color scheme website they now sport a corporate white background and boring color scheme. And they are now in the peace keeping business. They have real world addresses and can be reached simply with a telephone call.

Blackwater Worldwide, KBR, MPRI Headquarters, Northrop Grumman, to name few.
Additionally the wikipedia has huge amounts of information available and again headquarters and business are known. Also if you google Raytheon or Triple canopy or any of them the search result are staggering.

In the case of SEI none of the above applies. There are only three results in google. Their website, a very small wikipedia entry which is tagged for fast removal and one article by this blog. The site shows photo’s of situations they have clearly not been involved in like the protection of Paul Bremer III as he was protected by Blackwater and some of the photos are of explosions and other violent events and there is only one way to contact them and that is through e-mail. It is not known were they are based and only in the wikipedia is their main source of personnel mentioned. These happen to be Australian and New Zeland ex-special forces.
The site and the fact that the name is not known on the web may be the result of a very bad PR strategy and in and off it self may be of no consequence but when I followed Peters second suggestion something very interesting came up. 

If you follow the link he gave me, you get directed to a site that has a lot of information about an illegal spy system called Eschelon. This came prominently in the news in the late 90s and there were hearings about it in the European parliament in the first half of 2001. One of the people instrumental in bringing its existence and the New Zealand involvement to light was investigative journalist Nicky Hager. What he brought to light amongst others was that the US Government had lured the NZ government into an agreement to install the spying compound without telling them that the Americans would also have access to all the data that was collected. He even testified for the European Eschelon commission. He wrote a book called Secret powers and some articles on the subject. And here is an excerpt of the book.

It is this system that is currently used to trawl through the vast amounts of telephone and e-mail traffic and is was Bush who extended the use of the system to trawl for data concerning “terrorism”.

As I wrote before I also run another blog which collects articles about international finance and it’s connection to NZ. My main interest in this is the fact that a New Zealander called John Key wants to become the next prime minister of New Zealand. John Key is a man who likes to describe himself as being from humble beginnings. He grew up in a one parent family and still made it as an international investment banker. In my calculation he was only 26-27 when he was head hunted in 1987 by the Bankers trust. This bank became embroiled in huge scandals as Proctor & Gamble were able to proof that the bank fostered a culture of ruthlessness and its employees frequently abused their position of trust to lure customers into worthless or costly deals and additionally they pioneered in the bonds and derivatives business that now threatens to bankrupt banks, financial institutions and poor home owners alike. When John Key left the bank in 1995 the bank had just collapsed and John Key went to work for Merrill Lynch were according to his website he was both head of European bonds and derivatives and foreign exchange. His colleagues had a term of endearment for him. They called him “the smiling assassin”. He renewed his membership to the National party (Right wing neoliberal and through it’s previous leader Don Brash, also a banker and Governor of the NZ federal reserve bank, connected to founding members of PNAC and the likes)

It was in 1999 that the Federal reserve of new York requested he become an advisor to them, a function he held until he left NY to enter politics in march 2001. His residence was officially in London but in a speech he states that he spend most of the time he worked for ML in New York. In fact two of the people he hired to work for him and his boss were amongst the victims of the 9/11 attacks. When he came home he was reported to be good for some NZ $ 40.000.000,-. Not bad for a kiwi from a social housing project. I have not finished my investigation into John Key but I hope that you can see why I’m not particularly interested in seeing this man succeed.

And now it becomes really interesting. In order for me to get whatever I could find, if it was worth it, into the public eye, I wanted to approach a journalist. And since mutual friends thought it was good idea if the two of us met I was given the telephone number and e-mail address of none other than Nicky Hager. I approached him and showed him my blog sites and promised to sent him whatever I could dig up on John Key. Now this does not mean that any of this will ever reach print but the fact is that since then I’ve send him the odd e-mail with my findings. By the way Nicky Hager states that like him John Key is from a middle class background and as such exaggerates his “poor boy made good” image.
Additionally I have been mentioning John Key on my blog aotearoa a wider perspective.

So there you have it. All of it might be pure coincidence, or somebody is curious and my blogs showed up on a “key word” list.

Constitutional scholar: 9/11 ‘highly convenient’ in allowing Bush to expand power

A constitutional scholar says President Bush and his administration were working to expand their spy powers months before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which provided a “highly convenient” opportunity to dramatically strengthen law enforcement and surveillance authority.

“This administration was seeking a massive expansion of presidential power and national security powers before 9/11. 9/11 was highly convenient in that case,” George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley told Keith Olbermann on Countdown Monday night. “I’m not saying that they welcomed it, but when it happened, it was a great opportunity to seize powers that they have long wanted at the FBI.”

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