Posted on 02/20/2010 2:28:12 PM PST by MamaDearest
Cue the sad noise when Mario dies by mushroom: federal agents have charged three Miami businessmen with conspiring to smuggle videogame consoles to a shopping center in Paraguay that funds political terrorist group Hezbollah.
Khaled T. Safadi, Ulises Talavera, and Emilio Gonzalez-Neira were arrested Thursday following a nearly three-year investigation of their Miami-based export and freight-forwarding businesses. ICE agents working with the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force say the three falsified invoices and export paperwork and used a network of fake addresses to mask the true destination of thousands of Sony cameras and Playstations: the Galeria Page Mall in Cuidad del Este.
The U.S. Treasury has identified Galeria Page as the headquarters for Lebanon-based Hezbollah in the tri-border region of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay; they say the manager pays a regular quota to Hezbollah based on the center's sales.
Federal prosecutors say wire transfer payments to the Miami shippers from their contact at Galeria Page, Paraguayan national Samer Mehdi, were routed through various other business to conceal their origin. Mehdi has also been charged but remains at large.
A source said the alleged smuggling rind made "hundreds of millions" of dollars for Hezbollah. While Hezbollah is generally regarded in the Middle East as a resistance movement, the United States, among other countries, considers it a terrorist organization. The group has engaged in several armed conflicts with Israel and have been accused of a string of high-profile attacks against U.S., French, and Israeli forces in Lebanon.
The three Miamians face up to 35 years in prison each; Safadi's lawyer Michael Tein is already dismissively referring to the case as "the Great Sony PlayStation Caper."
"Believe it or not," he said, "this indictment actually charges these gentleman with supporting Hezbollah by shipping them Sony PlayStations. I guess that's a new type of weapon of mass destruction."
Doesn’t seem to bother Obama:
“Hezbollah started out as purely a terrorist organization back in the early ’80s and has evolved significantly over time. And now it has members of parliament, in the cabinet; there are lawyers, doctors, others who are part of the Hezbollah organization... And so, quite frankly, I’m pleased to see that a lot of Hezbollah individuals are in fact renouncing that type of terrorism and violence and are trying to participate in the political process [in Lebanon] in a very legitimate fashion. “ Barack Obama’s chief adviser on counter-terrorism, John Brennan, during a press conference at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington - August 6, 2009.
Obama's close personal interaction with Hezbollah and against Israel is IMHO one day going to define his presidency. Time and again his sympathies are with terrorists and terrorist organizations (bowing in subservience) and their "rights" while neglecting the oath of office he took not all that long ago and turning his back on America's allies and the citizens of this nation.
Bone headed reporter. Mario is not a playstation game.
Exactly what I thought! Also, mushrooms don’t kill him, they give him extra lives or make him bigger. Idiots. :(
there is a lot of stuff on the internet about the Playstation computer design, if you put a few of them together, makes a very fast supercomputer.
This is serious.
they say the manager pays a regular quota to Hezbollah based on the center's sales....the alleged smuggling ring made "hundreds of millions" of dollars for Hezbollah.
If they made "hundreds of millions" from the business, that's a *hell* of a lot of Playstations. Does this one mall in Paraguay sell enough Playstations to generate "hundreds of millions" of dollars?
Rented The Third Jihad from Netflix last night - it was very good. You and I see this alike - the number of Playstations being sold is gi-normous and it's no wonder the feds monitored it. Question is, why is Obama hiring people in the White House with ties to some of these terrorist organizations - one of them in Homeland Security?
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