Patrick Byrne’s Deep Capture was an important expose of the subversion of the major financial media; it also documented corrupt ties between the big banks and the speculators.

Now it has been shut down temporarily, reports EconomicPolicyJournal.com. The URL returns a blank page.

I will be adding links  as I find more.

[Sorry. I won’t be adding links to any of its pages. I read the court order and some of the current defamation law in Canada. It seems that even hyperlinks by a third-party, sans commentary, can be construed as defamatory.  There you go. You can yell the vilest invective all day long at ordinary people. But serious financial or political stories? Then watch for libel litigation, court injunctions, gag orders, and legal threats.

So copy or link to any scraped or republished pages at your own peril. You might have to defend yourself in Vancouver at your own expense.]

My own sense is that there is more involved here than simply Mr. Nazerali’s wounded reputation.

Two other sites shut down recently, The new Sanity Check by Bob O’Brian (aka The Easter Bunny) and Christoph Amberger’s Green Laser Reviews.

Note: The old Sanity Check (upto 2006) is still up.

They are all connected to the financial crisis, but I won’t be saying more about them to avoid any problems. If you want more information, I suggest you do your own research, bearing in mind that most of the links relevant to understanding what happened have been removed.

All three helped me a great deal in figuring out parts of the financial crisis, but it would be wise to understand that doing google searches alone isn’t going to help you do that. They had compiled a number of fascinating and suggestive facts, but putting them together in a way that can stand up in court or hold off libel suits is a different cup of tea altogether.

The investigative journalist is always on the losing end of the deal, fighting the ticking clock tracking down footnotes strong enough to hold up in court, and, if the footnotes do hold up, running risks to himself and his family.

Not a good deal. Which is why I don’t dabble in investigative stuff as such, but prefer analyzing the broader picture.

I notice by the way that Judd Bagley hasn’t been named.  I’m guessing it’s because his research was meticulous to the point of over-kill. He analyzed wikipedia manipulation technically to prove that interested financial journalists and a wikipedia cabal were controlling the message on a number of subjects, including naked short selling. Other subjects said to be controlled are 9-11 research and Zionism.

Here is Stockwatch’s Mike Caswell:

“Vancouver promoter Altaf Nazerali has won a court order that has at least temporarily shut down the deepcapture.com website. He complained that the site, which purports to expose stock market wrongdoing, posted material portraying him as a criminal and a fraud artist. The order, handed down in the Supreme Court of British Columbia on Wednesday, Oct. 19, instructs the site’s host to block access to any material referring to Mr. Nazerali and prohibits the domain’s registrar from allowing a transfer of the domain.

While it is not clear how much of deepcapture.com directly referred to Mr. Nazerali, attempts to access any part of the site only returned a blank screen on Friday. The order was granted without any prior notice to deepcapture.com. Unless extended, it remains in effect until Dec. 2, 2011.

Nazerali’s claim

The order came the same day that Mr. Nazerali filed a notice of claim against the site and its operators. He claimed that deepcapture.com linked him with Mafia figures and an associate of Osama bin Laden, among others. The defendants included naked short-selling conspiracist Patrick Byrne, who is the publisher of the site. (Mr. Byrne is also the chief executive officer of Internet retailer Overstock.com Inc.) Also a defendant was Illinois resident Mark Mitchell, who the suit identified as the author of much of the material that Mr. Nazerali complained of.

According to the suit, deepcapture.com posted the defamatory material in a series of chapters. One, dated July, 2011, stated that Mr. Nazerali was an important figure at Bank of Credit and Commerce International, “the massive criminal enterprise that did business with everyone from La Cosa Nostra and the Russian Mafia to Colombian drug cartels.” His business partners, as listed in the passage, included Mufti al Abbar, “chief market manipulator for Muammar Qadaffi,” and “an impressive number of securities traders who are also narco-traffickers (such as Paul Combs, until Combs was whacked by Nazerali’s mobster friend Egor Chernov).”

Another chapter claimed that Mr. Nazerali’s associates included Yasin al Qadi, “Osama bin Laden’s favorite financier.” It also linked with other Middle Eastern figures. “Nazerali, recall, has working relationships with … members of Al Qaeda’s Golden Chain, the regime in Iran, Pakistan’s ISI, the chief of Saudi intelligence, the ruler of Dubai, the royals of Abu Dhabi, La Cosa Nostra, the Russian Mafia, and others in the Milken network.”

Comment

Obviously, I don’t want to link anything from Deep Capture’s webcache, but there are links going back to 2002 that you can research for yourself.