Read (a) Conakry : plaque-tournante de l’Escroquerie internationale (b) Guinea Mining. Exploiting a State on the Brink of Failure

It turns out he was, himself, a big-time offender in the plundering of the country’s meager finances. Mahmoud belongs in the category of high level of corrupt officials: presidents, government ministers, administrations’ civil servants, who have ruined Guinea: from Sékou Touré to Alpha Condé, and everyone in between, i.e., Lansana Conté, Moussa Dadis Camara, Sékouba Konaté. Therefore, Mr. Thiam’s assessment couldn’t be more accurate. He knew where the bodies were buried!
In 2009 he left a job position at a New York City bank to answer the siren calls of the military junta of Dadis Camara. In Conakry he was appointed Minister of Mines… A year later, the newly “elected” president Alpha Condé decided not to keep Mr. Thiam in the  government. Soon after Mahmoud came back here to the USA… However, during his short tenure he had collected millions of dollars in bribery. He thought he had fooled everybody and that he had succeeded in stealing so much money from the Guinean people. Little did he know, perhaps, that the US Federal Government had an eye on the unscrupulous and rampant venality in Guinea. A salient case in point was President Obama’s State of the Union Address of 2010, in which he declared pointedly:

« That’s why we stand with the girl who yearns to go to school in Afghanistan; why we support the human rights of the women marching through the streets of Iran; why we advocate for the young man denied a job by corruption in Guinea. For America must always stand on the side of freedom and human dignity. (Applause.)  Always. (Applause.) »

Seven years after his heydays as a high-flying minister, and after Barack Obama’s public and generous stance, justice was served today with the sentencing of Mahmoud Thiam to seven years in a federal prison in America. Bien mal acquis ne profite pas… toujours !
I reproduce below the press release by the US Department of Justice.
Tierno S. Bah

A former Minister of Mines and Geology of the Republic of Guinea was sentenced today to seven years in prison, and three years of supervised release, for laundering bribes paid to him by executives of China Sonangol International Ltd. (China Sonangol) and China International Fund, SA (CIF).

Acting Assistant Attorney General Kenneth A. Blanco of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, Acting U.S. Attorney Joon H. Kim of the Southern District of New York, Assistant Director Stephen E. Richardson of the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division and Assistant Director in Charge William F. Sweeney Jr. of the FBI’s New York Field Office made the announcement.

Mahmoud Thiam, 50, of New York, New York, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Denise L. Cote of the Southern District of New York. Thiam was convicted on May 3, after a seven-day trial of one count of transacting in criminally derived property and one count of money laundering.

“Mahmoud Thiam engaged in a corrupt scheme to benefit himself at the expense of the people of Guinea,” said Acting Assistant Attorney General Blanco. “Corruption is a cancer on society that destabilizes institutions, inhibits fair and free competition, and imposes significant burdens on ordinary law-abiding people just trying to live their everyday lives. Today’s sentence sends a strong message to corrupt individuals like Thiam that if they attempt to use the U.S. financial system to hide their bribe money they will be investigated, held accountable, and punished.”

“As a unanimous jury found at trial, Thiam abused his position as Guinea’s Minister of Mines to take millions in bribes from a Chinese conglomerate, and then launder that money through the American financial system,” said Acting U.S. Attorney Kim. “Enriching himself at the expense of one Africa’s poorest countries, Thiam used some of the Chinese bribe money to pay his children’s Manhattan private school tuition and to buy a $3.75 million estate in Dutchess County. Today’s sentence shows that if you send your crime proceeds to New York, whether from drug dealing, tax evasion or international bribery, you may very well find yourself at the front end of long federal prison term.”

“Thiam abused his official position, but the outcome shows that no one is above the law,” said Assistant Director Stephen E. Richardson. “The FBI will not stand by while individuals attempt to live by their own rules and use the United States as a safe haven for their ill-gotten gains. I would like to applaud the dedicated investigators and prosecutors who have worked to hold those who have committed these crimes accountable for their illegal actions.”

“Today’s sentencing should remind the public that no matter who you are, or how much money you have, you’re not immune from prosecution. The FBI will continue to use all resources at our disposal to uncover crimes of this nature and expose them for what they really are,” said Assistant Director in Charge Sweeney

According to evidence presented at trial, China Sonangol, CIF and their subsidiaries signed a series of agreements with Guinea that gave them lucrative mining rights in Guinea. In exchange for bribes paid by executives of China Sonangol and CIF, Thiam used his position as Minister of Mines to influence the Guinean government’s decision to enter into those agreements while serving as Guinea’s Minister of Mines and Geology from 2009 to 2010. The evidence further showed that Thiam participated in a scheme to launder the bribe payments from 2009 to 2011, during which time China Sonangol and CIF paid him $8.5 million through a bank account in Hong Kong. Thiam then transferred approximately $3.9 million to bank accounts in the U.S. and used the money to pay for luxury goods and other expenses. To conceal the bribe payments, Thiam falsely claimed to banks in Hong Kong and the U.S. that he was employed as a consultant and that the money was income from the sale of land that he earned before he was a minister.

The trial evidence showed that the purpose of the bribes was to obtain substantial rights and interests in natural resources in Guinea, including the right to be the first and strategic shareholder with Guinea of a national mining company into which Guinea had to, among other things, transfer all of its stakes in various mining projects and future mining permits or concessions that the government decided to develop on its own. China Sonangol and CIF, through their subsidiaries, also obtained exclusive and valuable rights to conduct business operations in a broad range of sectors of the Guinean economy, including mining.

The FBI’s International Corruption Squads in New York City and Los Angeles investigated the case. Trial Attorney Lorinda Laryea of the Criminal Division’s Fraud Section and Assistant U.S. Attorneys Elisha Kobre and Christopher DiMase of the Southern District of New York prosecuted the case. Fraud Section Assistant Chief Tarek Helou and Trial Attorney Sarah Edwards, and Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Section Senior Trial Attorney Stephen Parker previously investigated the case. The Criminal Division’s Office of International Affairs also provided substantial assistance in this matter.

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• Propedeutics A (Maths, Physics)
• Propedeutics B (experimental sciences: chemistry, biology)
• Propedeutics C (literature, linguistics, humanities)

Based on the baccalaureate transcripts (Série A) from my high-school of Labe (Fuuta-Jalon), I was automatically placed in Propedeutics C. There I took the class taught by Belgian professor of linguistics, Ms. Claire Van Arenberg. She brilliantly exposed our young minds to Claude Shannon’s concepts and some of their implications. It was all theoretical, of course. However, her explanations registered front, center and back in my mind. And they stuck in there, never dimming or fading out.
Fast forward some 15 years later, to January 22, 1982. I arrived at JFK International Airport aboard the regular PanAm flight Dakar-New York. I was on my way to the University of Texas at Austin, as an assistant-professor and a recipient of a Fulbright-Hayes Research Fellowship in sociolinguistics. Upon settling down in the heart of the Lone Star State, my first shopping trophy was a tablet-size Sinclair 64kb RAM computer. It was a disappointment. So, I quickly returned it. Overlooking Radio Shack’s Tandy desktop computer, I purchased a 128K  Apple IIc, with external monitor. I connected it to a dot-matrix printer and 9.6 kbit/s modem. The two peripherals fetched hundreds of dollars. But, to me, they were worth their high price. For in Conakry, I had toiled for years as a co-publisher of Guinea’s journal, Miriya, Revue des sciences économiques et sociales. Preparation of each issue was a real pain. Armed with a typewriter, a pair of scissors and a glue container, we had to literally cut and paste words and letters during the pre and post-print phases. Consequently, the minute I saw a full screen word processor in action in Austin,  I was sold. Today, while I no longer have the peripheral devices, I still own the Mac IIc with its AppleWorks OS and its staple applications software (word processing, database, spreadsheet). And I can still turn it on and run it…
Better yet, I now manage my own Linux CentOS-based Virtual Private Server (VPS) built on the TCP/IP Stack with its standard array of servers (dns, web, ssh, wsftp, mail, etc.). It is home to my webAfriqa Portal, which includes ten public-facing websites. webAfriqa is dedicated to research and publishing information and knowledge about Fulɓe, Africa and its Diaspora. The server also hosts a dozen internal sandboxes, where I experiment and tinker with a variety of Content Management Systems, languages, tools, and utilities. This Open Source software environment includes WordPress, Drupal, DSpace, MySQL, MongDB, Solr, XHML, XML, CSS/Sass, JavaScript/jQuery, PHP, Python, JAVA, etc.)… It’s been a long, learning and enlightening journey, looking back from my first interface with a computer.
I find it fascinating that Shannon’s fundamental concept, the bit, belongs also in every day English. Two words embed it:  the nimble and the byte. The latter, too, predates the digital revolution since it was a currency in Medieval Europe.
The New Yorker‘s article pays tribute to Shannon’s creative genius. It unwittingly speaks for me. And it inherently expresses my intellectual debt and deep gratitude to the Father of the Information Age. It is a fitting salute from one of America’s premier journalistic and literary publications. I enjoyed reading it and I wholeheartedly second it.
Tierno S. Bah

Claude Shannon
the Father of the Information Age, Turns 1100100

Twelve years ago, Robert McEliece, a mathematician and engineer at Caltech, won the Claude E. Shannon Award, the highest honor in the field of information theory. During his acceptance lecture, at an international symposium in Chicago, he discussed the prize’s namesake, who died in 2001. Someday, McEliece imagined, many millennia in the future, the hundred-and-sixty-sixth edition of the Encyclopedia Galactica—a fictional compendium first conceived by Isaac Asimov—would contain the following biographical note:

Claude Shannon: Born on the planet Earth (Sol III) in the year 1916 A.D. Generally regarded as the father of the information age, he formulated the notion of channel capacity in 1948 A.D. Within several decades, mathematicians and engineers had devised practical ways to communicate reliably at data rates within one per cent of the Shannon limit.

As is sometimes the case with encyclopedias, the crisply worded entry didn’t quite do justice to its subject’s legacy. That humdrum phrase—“channel capacity”—refers to the maximum rate at which data can travel through a given medium without losing integrity. The Shannon limit, as it came to be known, is different for telephone wires than for fibre-optic cables, and, like absolute zero or the speed of light, it is devilishly hard to reach in the real world. But providing a means to compute this limit was perhaps the lesser of Shannon’s great breakthroughs. First and foremost, he introduced the notion that information could be quantified at all. In “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” his legendary paper from 1948, Shannon proposed that data should be measured in bits—discrete values of zero or one. (He gave credit for the word’s invention to his colleague John Tukey, at what was then Bell Telephone Laboratories, who coined it as a contraction of the phrase “binary digit.”)

“It would be cheesy to compare him to Einstein,” James Gleick, the author of “The Information,” told me, before submitting to temptation. “Einstein looms large, and rightly so. But we’re not living in the relativity age, we’re living in the information age. It’s Shannon whose fingerprints are on every electronic device we own, every computer screen we gaze into, every means of digital communication. He’s one of these people who so transform the world that, after the transformation, the old world is forgotten.” That old world, Gleick said, treated information as “vague and unimportant,” as something to be relegated to “an information desk at the library.” The new world, Shannon’s world, exalted information; information was everywhere. “He created a whole field from scratch, from the brow of Zeus,” David Forney, an electrical engineer and adjunct professor at M.I.T., said. Almost immediately, the bit became a sensation: scientists tried to measure birdsong with bits, and human speech, and nerve impulses. (In 1956, Shannon wrote a disapproving editorial about this phenomenon, called “The Bandwagon.”)

Although Shannon worked largely with analog technology, he also has some claim as the father of the digital age, whose ancestral ideas date back not only to his 1948 paper but also to his master’s thesis, published a decade earlier. The thesis melded George Boole’s nineteenth-century Boolean algebra (based on the variables true and false, denoted by the binary one and zero) with the relays and switches of electronic circuitry. The computer scientist and sometime historian Herman Goldstine hyperbolically deemed it “one of the most important master’s theses ever written,” arguing that “it changed circuit design from an art to a science.” Neil Sloane, a retired Bell Labs mathematician as well as the co-editor of Shannon’s collected papers and the founder of the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, agreed. “Of course, Shannon’s main work was in communication theory, without which we would still be waiting for telegrams,” Sloane said. But circuit design, he added, seemed to be Shannon’s great love. “He loved little machines. He loved the tinkering.”

For instance, Shannon built a machine that did arithmetic with Roman numerals, naming it THROBAC I, for Thrifty Roman-Numeral Backward-Looking Computer. He built a flame-throwing trumpet and a rocket-powered Frisbee. He built a chess-playing automaton that, after its opponent moved, made witty remarks. Inspired by the late artificial-intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky, he designed what was dubbed the Ultimate Machine: flick the switch to “On” and a box opens up; out comes a mechanical hand, which flicks the switch back to “Off” and retreats inside the box. Shannon’s home, in Winchester, Massachusetts (Entropy House, he called it), was full of his gizmos, and his garage contained at least thirty idiosyncratic unicycles—one without pedals, one with a square tire, and a particularly confounding unicycle built for two. Among the questions he sought to answer was, What’s the smallest unicycle anybody could ride? “He had a few that were a little too small,” Elwyn Berlekamp, a professor emeritus of mathematics at Berkeley and a co-author of Shannon’s last paper, told me. Shannon sat on Berlekamp’s thesis committee at M.I.T., and in return he asked Berlekamp to teach him how to juggle with four balls. “He claimed his hands were too small, which was true—they were smaller than most people’s—so he had trouble holding the four balls to start,” Berlekamp said. But Shannon succeeded in mastering the technique, and he pursued further investigations with his Jugglometer. “He was hacking reality,” the digital philosopher Amber Case said.

By 1960, however, like the hand of that sly machine, Shannon had retreated. He no longer participated much in the field that he had created, publishing only rarely. Yet he still tinkered, in the time he might have spent cultivating the big reputation that scientists of his stature tend to seek. In 1973, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers christened the Shannon Award by bestowing it on the man himself, at the International Symposium on Information Theory in Ashkelon, Israel. Shannon had a bad case of nerves, but he pulled himself together and delivered a fine lecture on feedback, then dropped off the scene again. In 1985, at the International Symposium in Brighton, England, the Shannon Award went to the University of Southern California’s Solomon Golomb. As the story goes, Golomb began his lecture by recounting a terrifying nightmare from the night before: he’d dreamed that he was about deliver his presentation, and who should turn up in the front row but Claude Shannon. And then, there before Golomb in the flesh, and in the front row, was Shannon. His reappearance (including a bit of juggling at the banquet) was the talk of the symposium, but he never attended again.

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