The bank HSBC has had ties with al Qaeda financers who assisted with 9/11 attack

[Kantor]

richardhutnik said:

Kantor said:

Galaki said:
Fine the bank and then what?
Why not jail or execute the bankers involved and confiscate all the assets?
When rewards' much higher than the risk, it's going to keep happening.

This is equivalent to implementing the death penalty for shoplifting.

Yes, it discourages the crime. But it's extremely disproportionate.

Maybe I don't understand what the article is saying, but is providing services to one 9/11 hijacker the same as assisting with the 9/11 attack?

The bank had ties to financiers that assisted the terrorists who did 9/11.  

As for as comparing what people did being equivalent to shoplifting, the penalty is arguably to extreme, but the crime you said is far less severe than it what it was.  Do you consider what Madoff did merely shoplifting?  Wiping out life savings of people, tanking the economy causing people to go in a downward spiral is far beyond shoplifting.

Go look at the fallout.  If it wasn't so bad, there wouldn't be fallout.

We weren't talking about Madoff. Madoff is a scumbag. Still probably not worthy of the death penalty though, just life imprisonment. If you have the death penalty, you do have to keep it for the most severe crimes (Breivik, Holmes, Bin Laden and so on).

A lot of this seems very vague to me.

What was the nature of these "ties"? Were there senior executives tied to the financiers? Does being tied mean that they would meet up for coffee every week or that they once had a meeting four years ago?

How did the financiers "assist" the terrorists? Did they know what was going to happen? How much money did they provide? Did they have an ideological reason for doing this?

This whole story needs a lot more context.