Topic: WorldNetDaily
Every original WorldNetDaily article raises the question, "How does this serve WND's biases and/or financial interests?" That is perhaps doubly so for anything written by Aaron Klein, followed by the question, "What is Aaron Klein hiding about his sources?"
Thus, with Klein's WND articles (on Dec. 18, Dec. 20 and Dec. 21) featuring Nir Gouaz -- who Klein describes only as an "Israeli businessman" who is president of a company called Caesar Global Securities -- accusing the law firm where former Secretary of State James Baker worked of helping a South Korean company collect money owed to it from Iraq, using Gouaz's company as "a middleman to bypass U.S. sanctions on Iraq." WND's bias motive is pretty clear: it aims to discredit Baker and, thus, the Iraq Study Group he co-chaired. As we've noted, Klein has already trotted out his terrorist buddies to praise the ISG plan.
On to our next question: Who is Nir Gouaz?
Turns out he, and his company, are a bit on the murky side. Caesar Global Securities has no active website (a scrap of an old site can be found in the Google cache), and it's unclear exactly what it does. Another Google cache scrap reports on a company called Caesar Global Industries, with Gouaz as president, with the following interests: "Diamonds, Energy, Food Supply, Security, Telecommunication, Waste Management and Recycling, Business Development, Debt Collection, Cree Electric Car." Also of note is the following:
Since 1989, Caesar Global Ltd. mine and export diamonds, along with gold from Zaire/Congo, Sierra Leone and Angola under special authorization from the Local governments as part of the Diamonds for Commodities program.
Our turnover at the peak of the program was 160 million US dollars a year, and our biggest diamond ever export was measured at 363 carats for a single gem stone bought and exported by Nir Gouaz in July, 1988 in Kinshasa, Zaire.
Which brings us to this report by the Diamonds and Human Security Project on the diamond industry in Sierra Leone. In it is the following observation:
By the time Sierra Leone’s war broke out in 1991, the country’s then President, Joseph Momoh, had begun to shift away from Lebanese businessmen, towards Israelis. This was encouraged by Israel, which was eager to cut off Lebanese funding for anti-Israeli armed factions in the Middle East. It turned out, however, that Momoh’s new Israeli friends, among them Shaptai Kalmanovitch (of the LIAT Company), and later Nir Guaz (of the SCIPA group), were crooked, with ties to organized crime syndicates. SCIPA, which lasted longer that LIAT, was suspected of financing illegal as well as legal diamond exports, but the Israelis were generally viewed more favourably than the Lebanese. They paid far better prices to miners for their finds, and they imported rice and machinery which they sold at affordable prices.
[...]
Indeed, so popular did SCIPA become, that some Lebanese schemed with corrupt police officials to have the company driven out of the country. SCIPA’s boss, Nir Gouaz, was arrested on fake currency-related charges, detained and then deported. The Lebanese mogul, Jamil, had by then gone into self-exile in the UK, after a foiled coup plot that involved some his close friends in government, but the plot against SCIPA was contrived by his close associates in Freetown.
So, it appears that Gouaz has been involved in some shady dealings of his own. It is, of course, unsurprising that Klein would not share that with his readers; after all, as we've documented, he has whitewashed the violent extremism of Israeli's Kahane movement, members and sympathizers of which he has regularly interviewed.
Perhaps before WND flogs this story further, Klein might want to share with his readers the full story about Nir Gouaz.
