subprime woes continue--bank of england bails out troubled northern rock bank--depositors line up to draw out funds

Customers queue to enter a Northern Rock branch

Panic grips Northern Rock customers for second day
15/09/2007 11h27



LONDON (AFP) - Hundreds of worried customers of embattled British bank Northern Rock began queuing outside their local branches at dawn Saturday as they scrambled to withdraw savings.

Long queues began forming as people gathered outside branches as early as 6:00 am (0500 GMT), according to Sky News television.

Panicking customers of Britain's fifth-biggest mortgage lender had begun to withdraw savings en masse Friday after the Bank of England bailed out the bank, taking out a reported billion pounds (two billion dollars, 1.45 billion euros).

Northern Rock said Friday it was facing severe difficulties raising cash to cover its liabilities amid the ongoing global credit squeeze.

The bank is the first major British financial institution to be hit severely by the global credit crunch sparked last month by a crisis in the US subprime, or high-risk, mortgage sector.

One couple had Friday mounted a sit-in protest at their Northern Rock branch in Cheltenham, central-western England, after being told they could not withdraw over the counter savings worth 1.0 million pounds as it was in an online account. Police had to be called in to remove them.


British newspapers Saturday pinned the blame on Northern Rock and even Prime Minister Gordon Brown, but welcomed the action taken by the Bank of England.

"A crisis requires fine judgements and the Bank's decision to act -- assuming it did not respond to political pressure -- looks reasonable," the Financial Times said in an editorial.

The business daily said the Bank should charge Northern Rock a sizeable penalty rate and tide it over until it could be sold.

The Daily Telegraph fingered the prime minister in its editorial.

"Gordon Brown must accept responsibility for this credit bubble: in his 10 years at the Treasury, he was happy to benefit from a sense of faux-prosperity based, not on rising productivity, but on house prices, loans and, to a degree, immigration," the broadsheet argued.

"A snap election, before people realise the full consequences of what he has done, is suddenly looking attractive again."

Brown has so far refused to rule out holding a general election in the coming months amid speculation he may gamble and seek an early mandate for his new government.



Under his predecessor Tony Blair, Brown's governing Labour Party won the May 2005 general election with a comfortable majority.

The Sun, Britain's biggest-selling daily, said Saturday that Northern Rock was not an innocent party.

"The bank has continued to lend customers five times their salary and 125 percent of their home's value despite all warnings of economic instability and an impending fall in house prices," read the tabloid's editorial.

"These crazy deals have kept the property bubble inflated for too long. They are almost certain to end now and house prices are sure to fall."

Shares in Northern Rock, which issued a profits warning on Friday, plunged 31.46 percent to 438 pence at the close, dragging the European banking sector lower as investors fretted over potential difficulties elsewhere.

Northern Rock, based in Newcastle, north-east England, warned its 2007 profits could be 147 million pounds lower than expected.

Analysts forecast that the troubled bank was very unlikely to go bust despite the spectre of a "bank run."

A bank run is when customers withdraw savings en masse due to fear that a lender will become insolvent, which can force the bank into bankruptcy.



Britain's finance minister, Alistair Darling, who authorised the Bank of England to help Northern Rock, called Friday for international action to help reduce the risk of this kind of financial turbulence reoccurring.

The Bank of England has made available an unspecified amount of cash to Northern Rock in the form of a liquidity facility.

Meanwhile Britain's financial regulator, the Financial Services Authority (FSA), Friday appealed for calm.

bush family nazi connections , wallstreet putsch , 9-11 Us reichstag fire & kennedy assassination connections

bush connections to jfk assassination

osama drops new video ...kidney dialysis machine and a recording studio in his cave...

Neo-Cons Enlist Bin Laden's Help To Counter 9/11 Truth
Discredited Pentagon-affiliated IntelCenter to release another dubious tape right when Bush needs it most, Osama pops up hours after new Zogby poll shows Americans want new 9/11 investigation for second time running
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Friday, September 7, 2007


The U.S. government, via its closely affiliated IntelCenter front, is to release a new tape of Osama Bin Laden on the sixth anniversary of 9/11 in a desperate ploy to counter 9/11 truth and a new Zogby poll that again proves the majority of Americans are highly suspect of the official story.

A pre-released image shows an apparently older looking Bin Laden with a dyed dark brown beard, meaning the individual in the tape is either a body double or the terror master has been using Grecian Formula 16 in between his dashing from cave to cave across the mountainous Pakistani border region.

But whether you think it's Bin Laden or not is really beside the point, if Bin Laden was dead it would be necessary to perpetuate the myth anyway, the thing to bear in mind here is that Osama has never failed in ensuring his tapes get released at the most politically opportune times - not for 'Al-Qaeda' - but for the Neo-Cons and the Bush administration.

In addition, the security services and IntelCenter have been caught on numerous occasions doctoring Bin Laden tapes and passing off footage they filmed as originating from Al-Qaeda, as well as claiming that 6-year-old footage is new material. Their credibility on this issue has been shot to pieces again and again and only the supremely naive or the witting dupe would lend any credence to the authenticity of this new tape. First and foremost, in the same vein as the History Channel hit piece, the tape is an attempt to rescue the tattered and torn credibility of the official 9/11 fairy tale, as well as providing a media distraction to obfuscate the 9/11 truth events that kick off today at ground zero and continue on into next week's anniversary.

A new Zogby International poll released yesterday shows that 51% of Americans (up from 45% last year) want Bush and Cheney to be directly investigated for their actions on 9/11 and 67% fault the 9/11 Commission for their failure to probe the anomalous collapse of WTC 7.

Hours after the release of the poll Bin Laden pops up and promises us a new editorial comment. Coincidence? Precisely the same thing happened last year. On May 23rd 2006, a Zogby poll was released showing nearly half of Americans wanted a new 9/11 investigation. The very next day, Bin Laden popped up to reinforce the official version and threaten new attacks. Can lightening strike twice in the same place?

The Osama tapes are about as genuine as a used car salesman convention, and have been proven fraudulent on countless occasions. They are nothing more than crude propaganda unleashed in a desperate move to put the genie of what really happened on 9/11 back in the bottle.

For those who still scoff at the notion that the Neo-Cons would be behind the release of the tapes, consider the fact that the Pentagon admitted that they undertook a "propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq," Musab Al-Zarqawi, which was targeted at the "U.S. home audience" and that the discovery of the program was followed by the release of a video tape featuring....you guessed it - Musab Al-Zarqawi.

The Washington Post even described how the Pentagon had concocted fake Al-Zarqawi letters boasting about suicide attacks and leaked them to Dexter Filkins of the New York Times, who splashed them on the front page the next day.

If the Pentagon had no qualms about faking communications from other Al-Qaeda leaders and passing them off as real to the U.S. media, then why would they refrain from doing the same with the Bin Laden tapes?

In our previous groundbreaking investigation, we exposed IntelCenter, the middleman between "Al-Qaeda's media arm" and the press, and the organization that routinely obtains the tapes, as little more than a Pentagon front group staffed by individuals with close connections to Donald Rumsfeld and the U.S. war machine.

Computer analyst Neal Krawetz discovered last month that the As-Sahab logo (the alleged media arm of Al-Qaeda) and the IntelCenter logo (a U.S. based private intelligence organization that "monitors terrorist activity") were both added to the Al-Qaeda videos at the same time. Though Krawetz re-affirmed his conclusion in an interview with Wired News, after the fact became public, he mysteriously recanted.

Krawetz original analysis, before he was obviously pressured to withdraw it, clearly suggests that IntelCenter is directly manufacturing the tapes and that "As-Sahab" is a contrived hoax to promulgate the myth that the tapes are coming from Al-Qaeda.

IntelCenter's denial of of this whole episode should be taken with a pinch of salt, for it was Ben Venzke's company that knowingly re-released 6 years old footage of Bin Laden that many quarters of the media treated as new. IntelCenter itself had released the same footage in October 2003 and it still appears dated as such on their own website.



The organization was also behind the so-called "laughing hijackers" tape, which was passed off as originating from Al-Qaeda's media arm, but was later exposed as being secret surveillance footage filmed by U.S. intelligence in 2000.

At upwards of $4,000 dollars a year in intelligence packages that are sold on their website, IntelCenter has a lucrative financial motive to keep the supply of Al-Qaeda tapes rolling.

For the Bush administration and the Neo-Cons, the tapes are routinely delivered on a silver platter at the most politically expedient moments, and a fresh injection on behalf of Bin Laden for the flagging war on terror on the 6th anniversary of 9/11 is precisely what Bush needs to help keep U.S. troops in Iraq until the next election, as Bush is quoted as holding out for in his own recent biography.

The last Bin Laden tape, despite later being proven as re-hashed footage originally filmed in 2001 that was actually released on two separate occasions before, emerged right at the time when the 6 months "wait and see" period after the surge was up and was used to mandate the endless occupation of Iraq.

Whether it's to justify a war, win an election or divert from a scandal, Bin Laden can always be relied upon to come up with the goods and save Bush's bacon.

Both Kerry and Bush attributed the President's 2004 re-election to Osama Bin Laden's appearance in a video tape just days before the vote. Veteran newsman Walter Cronkite mused that the whole farce was a Karl Rove orchestrated set-up.

On the eve of the Iraq war during Colin Powell's infamous presentation to the UN, an audio tape in which bin Laden claimed he was allied with Saddam Hussein surfaced, a gift-wrapped present for the Neo-Cons who had consistently been proven wrong in their assertion that there was a connection between Iraq and 9/11.

Ayman Al-Zawahiri appeared right on cue at the exact same time two years running, days before the State of the Union, to slam Bush as a "butcher" and a "failure." Like his right-hand man Osama, Al-Zawahiri's timing is impeccable! Right when Bush needs to reinforce the fear of the shadowy enemy each January to mute his critics before the big speech, Al-Zawahiri pops up with the goods.

Though such transparent and debase propaganda is still more than enough to fool the remnants of the semi-retarded, kool-aid drinking, Neo-Con cheerleaders out there, many Americans with more than three brain cells to rub together are starting to realize that they have been led on one almighty goose chase, and that no amount of fuzzy "Bin Laden tapes" are going to hold back the stampede of truth that at this time concentrates at ground zero - namely the protest actions and events taking place at ground zero over the next five days in the name of 9/11 truth.