Scott Rickard: Panama Papers scandal only tip of the iceberg

Press TV has interviewed Scott Rickard, a former American intelligence linguist in Orlando, to discuss a massive leak of confidential documents dubbed the “Panama Papers” which allegedly implicates government heads and the rich in setting up tax havens to hide their wealth.

The following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: As you just heard, this is quite widespread, the scandal has already toppled the Icelandic prime minister but tell us a bit more about what your initial reaction to this is when you look at such a large cache of intelligence or information being leaked out this way?

Rickard: I see this is the wolves are eating their own. This leak comes as no surprise to me. This type of activity has been going on for some time. Manuel Noriega, a close friend of United States and the United States drug cartels in Colombia was laundering money all the time back in the 80s and the 70s for the CIA.

I am interested to see any of these accounts out of the 500,000 accounts, any of these should be linked back to CIA shell companies that were operating back in those days and in fact when you look at the people that are involved in this, you look at Beth Wilkinson, Beth Wilkinson is basically the attorney for Hillary Clinton and her email scandal and all of the individuals in the State Department.   

Beth was the one that actually prosecuted Manuel Noriega and we certainly have not heard anything from Manuel Noriega since his prosecution because he absolutely knows where all these bodies are buried when we are talking about the details of the individuals that are involved here.

I think this is just the tip of the iceberg. I think that the way that the media portrayed it and tried to focus on Iceland and tried to focus on Putin and Assad, that was very unfair the way that was first handled because I think when we drill down into this information what we are going to see, we are going to see actual direct ties into the intelligence community in the United States, direct ties into the money laundering scams which by the way Panama is only about 15th on the money laundering countries around the world. The United States is number 3. We are one of the top money laundering countries in the world and in fact when you look at the amount of money that has been laundered like this, we are talking 20 to 30 trillion dollars that is involved here.

So this is a very large scandal and if it is actually 40 years worth of papers to go back with these Panama Papers, there will be some major implications not only within the current leadership but within past operations with the intelligence operations. So this is a tremendous amount of leak, it is an amazing leak and I think that what we see here is the wolves are eating their own.     

Press TV: You did mention that of course this is just the tip of the iceberg. However, you felt that the mainstream media has been a bit unfair in what parts of this leak gets covered specifically when it comes to Vladimir Putin for example. So when it comes to implications, who is it going to affect if the media chooses to focus on just a select few individuals?

Rickard: That is exactly right. Unfortunately in the Western media what we will see is that they will use it once again as a tool to misguide the people and focus the information in a way that furthers the agenda of the individuals that are actually implicated in this.

So yes, this has been totally misrepresented from the beginning and I hope that because of the openness of the journalist community as it begins to open up more and more with programs like Press TV and other internet capable journalists that we will see more details coming up and they will get just as much coverage in the mainstream media as they have unfortunately misrepresented what Putin and Assad have been involved in.

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