In the February Issue: pdf
Obama Authorizes Economic War on Venezuela
By Wayne MadsenChavez Accuses US of Triggering Haiti Earthquake
By Matt SullivanA Possible Cure for Multiple Sclerosis
Italian Surgeon Claims High Success Rate Against MS
By Sheila Casey Read the article here.US Sole Opponent of UN Anti-Nazi Resolution
By Carla Stea Read the article here.Two Hit, Three Down - The Biggest Lie
National Academy of Science member and Distinguished Professor endorses
David Ray Griffin's work exposing the truth of 9/11
By Lynn Margulis
Read the article here.
In the January Issue:
Obama Declares War On Pakistan
By Webster G. TarpleyScience Scandal of the Century
The World’s Most Influential Climate Scientists Get Caught "Fudging" the Data
By Matt SullivanFlight 77 Blackbox: Cockpit Door Never Opened During 9/11 "Hijacking"
By Sheila CaseyScience Scandal of the Century
The World’s Most Influential Climate Scientists Get Caught "Fudging" the Data
By Matt Sullivan / Rock Creek Free PressClimategate is shaping up to be the biggest science scandal in a generation. Given that the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is being used to argue for radical changes in the economic and energy policies of every government on earth, affecting literally trillions of dollars of tax and economic policy, the stakes literally could not be higher. And the scientists involved in the scandal are the world’s top climate scientists; the driving forces behind the UN’s IPCC (Inter Governmental Panel on Climate change).
In mid-November, someone anonymously uploaded a ZIP file to the internet containing over a thousand e-mails and other data and program source code files totaling over 61MB lifted from the servers of the top British Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. It is not clear if the leak is the work of an outside hacker or the work of a whistle-blower from within.
While the leak was immediately a big story on the internet, most corporate-controlled media outlets initially attempted to downplay the controversy. For the first few weeks, the major TV outlets wouldn’t even report the story. In fact, the BBC received the leaked documents first in October, but decided to sit on the story. The one outlet that did promote the story was FOX News, probably because the story fit their existing editorial slant and GOP talking points.
Most corporate print and on-line sources, such as TIME, Huffington Post, The Atlantic, and many others have attempted to downplay the controversy, attributing the seemingly damning quotes from the e-mails to “innuendo and smear campaigns” or saying that they were “taken out of context”. White House spokesman Gibbs even characterized the flap as “silly”.
Unfortunately for them, the archive of over 1000 e-mails provides ample context for the damning quotes and you don’t need to be a scientist to recognize when people are discussing the fudging of results, destruction of data and underhanded manipulation of the peer-review process. Also unfortunately for them, the more you do know about the science, the more damning the revelations become. This controversy is not going away.
Read the full length article here.
Flight 77 Blackbox: Cockpit Door Never Opened During 9/11 "Hijacking"
By Sheila Casey / Rock Creek Free Press
Pilots for 9/11 Truth has reported that the data stream from the flight data recorder (FDR) for American Airlines flight 77, which allegedly struck the Pentagon on 9/11, shows that the cockpit door never opened during the entire 90 minute flight. The data was provided by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which has refused to comment.
The FDR is one of two “black boxes” in every commercial airliner, which are used after accidents to help determine the cause of a crash. One black box records flight data, the other records voice data (everything said in the cockpit during the flight). With those two sets of data, NTSB investigators can usually piece together the events that led to a crash. The status of the door to the cockpit is checked every four seconds throughout a flight and relayed as a simple 0 or 1, where 0=closed and 1=open, with approximately 1,300 door status checks performed during AA77’s 90 minute flight. Every one of those door status checks shows as a 0, indicating that the door to the cockpit never opened during the entire flight.
Read the full length article here.
Obama Declares War On Pakistan
By Webster G. Tarpley
Washington DC, Dec. 11 — Obama’s West Point speech of December 1 represents far more than the obvious brutal escalation in Afghanistan — it is nothing less than a declaration of all-out war by the United States against Pakistan. This is a brand-new war, a much wider war now targeting Pakistan, a country of 160 million people armed with nuclear weapons. In the process, Afghanistan is scheduled to be broken up. This is no longer the Bush/Cheney Afghan war we have known in the past. This is something immensely bigger: the attempt to destroy the Pakistani central government in Islamabad and to sink that country into a chaos of civil war, Balkanization, subdivision and general mayhem. The chosen strategy is to massively export the Afghan civil war into Pakistan and beyond, fracturing Pakistan along ethnic lines. It is an oblique war using fourth-generation or guerrilla warfare techniques to assail a country which the United States and its associates in aggression are far too weak to attack directly. In this war, the Taliban are employed as US proxies. This aggression against Pakistan is Obama’s attempt to wage the Great Game against the hub of Central Asia and Eurasia or more generally.
US Deterred From Open War By Pakistan’s Nukes
The ongoing civil war in Afghanistan is merely a pretext, a cover story designed to provide the United States with a springboard for a geopolitical destabilization campaign in the entire region which cannot be publicly avowed. In the blunt cynical world of imperialist aggression à la Bush and Cheney, a pretext might have been manufactured to attack Pakistan directly. But Pakistan is far too large and the United States is far too weak and too bankrupt for such an undertaking. In addition, Pakistan is a nuclear power, possessing atomic bombs and medium range missiles needed to deliver them. What we are seeing is a novel case of nuclear deterrence in action. The US cannot send an invasion fleet or set up airbases nearby because Pakistani nuclear weapons might destroy them. To this extent, the efforts of Ali Bhutto and A.Q. Khan to provide Pakistan a deterrent capability have been vindicated. But the US answer is to find ways to attack Pakistan below the nuclear threshold, and even below the conventional threshold. This is where the tactic of exporting the Afghan civil war to Pakistan comes in.
The architect of the new Pakistani civil war is US Special Forces General Stanley McChrystal, who organized the infamous network of US torture chambers in Iraq. McChrystal’s specific credential for the Pakistani civil war is his role in unleashing the Iraqi civil war of Sunnis versus Shiites by creating “al Qaeda in Iraq” under the infamous and now departed double agent Zarkawi. If Iraqi society as a whole had lined up against the US invaders, the occupiers would have soon been driven out. The counter-gang known as “al Qaeda in Iraq” avoided that possibility by killing Shiites, and thus calling forth massive retaliation in the form of a civil war. These tactics are drawn from the work of British General Frank Kitson, who wrote about them in his book Low Intensity Warfare. If the United States possesses a modern analog to Heinrich Himmler of the SS, it is surely General McChrystal, Obama’s hand-picked choice. McChrystal’s superior, Gen Petraeus, wants to be the new Field Marshal von Hindenburg — in other words, he wants to be the next US president.
The vulnerability of Pakistan which the US and its NATO associates are seeking to exploit can best be understood using a map of the prevalent ethnic groups of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and India. Most maps show only political borders which date back to the time of British imperialism, and therefore fail to reflect the principal ethnic groups of the region. For the purposes of this analysis, we must start by recognizing a number of groups. First is the Pashtun people, located mainly in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Then we have the Baluchis, located primarily in Pakistan and Iran. The Punjabis inhabit Pakistan, as do the Sindhis. The Bhutto family came from Sind. (see map)
Pashtunistan
The US and NATO strategy begins with the Pashtuns, the ethnic group from which the so-called Taliban are largely drawn. The Pashtuns represent a substantial portion of the population of Afghanistan, but here they are alienated from the central government under President Karzai in Kabul, even though the US puppet Karzai passes for a Pashtun himself. The issue involves the Afghan National Army, which was created by the United States after the 2001 invasion. The Afghan officer corps are largely Tajiks drawn from the Northern Alliance that allied with the United States against the Pashtun Talibans. The Tajiks speak Dari, sometimes known as eastern Persian. Other Afghan officers come from the Hazara people. The important thing is that the Pashtuns feel shut out.
The US strategy can best be understood as a deliberate effort at persecuting, harassing, antagonizing, strafing, repressing, and murdering the Pashtuns. The additional 40,000 US and NATO forces which Obama demands for Afghanistan will concentrate in Helmand province and other areas where the Pashtuns are in the majority. The net effect will be to increase the rebellion of the fiercely independent Pashtuns against Kabul and the foreign occupation, and at the same time to push many of these newly radicalized mujaheddin fighters across the border into Pakistan, where they can wage war against the central government in Islamabad. US aid will flow directly to war lords and drug lords, increasing the centrifugal tendencies.
On the Pakistani side, the Pashtuns are also alienated from the central government. Islamabad and the army are seen by them as too much the creatures of the Punjabis, with some input from the Sindhis. On the Pakistani side of the Pashtun territory, US operations include wholesale assassinations from unmanned aerial vehicles or drones, murders by CIA and reportedly Blackwater snipers, plus blind terrorist massacres like the recent ones in Peshawar which the Pakistani Taliban are blaming on Blackwater, acting as a subcontractor of the CIA. These actions are intolerable and humiliating for a proud sovereign state. Every time the Pashtuns are clobbered, they blame the Punjabis in Islamabad for the dirty deals with the US that allow this to happen. The most immediate goal of Obama’s Afghan-Pakistan escalation is therefore to promote a general secessionist uprising of the entire Pashtun people under Taliban auspices, which would already have the effect of destroying the national unity of both Kabul and Islamabad.
Baluchistan
The other ethnic group which the Obama strategy seeks to goad into insurrection and secession is the Baluchis. The Baluchis have their own grievances against the Iranian central government in Tehran, which they see as being dominated by Persians. An integral part of the new Obama policy is to expand the deadly flights of the CIA Predators and other assassination drones into Baluchistan. One pretext for this is the report, peddled for example by Michael Ware of CNN, that Osama bin Laden and his MI-6 sidekick Zawahiri are both holed up in the Baluchi city of Quetta, where they operate as the kingpins of the so-called “Quetta Shura.” Blackwater teams cannot be far behind. In Iranian Baluchistan, the CIA is funding the murderous Jundullah organization, which was recently denounced by Tehran for the murder of a number of top officials of the Iranian Pasdaran Revolutionary guards. The rebellion of Baluchistan would smash the national unity of both Pakistan and Iran, thus helping to destroy two of the leading targets of US policy.
Obama’s Rube Goldberg Strategy
Even Chris Matthews of MSNBC, normally a devoted acolyte of Obama, pointed out that the US strategy as announced at West Point very much resembles a Rube Goldberg contraption. (In the real world, “al Qaeda” is of course the CIA’s own Arab and terrorist legion.) In the world of official US myth, the enemy is supposed to be “al Qaeda.” But, even according to the US government, there are precious few “al Qaeda” fighters left in Afghanistan. Why then, asked Matthews, concentrate US forces in Afghanistan where “al Qaeda” is not, rather than in Pakistan where “al Qaeda” is now alleged to be?
One elected official who has criticized this incongruous mismatch is Democratic Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, who said in a television interview that ‘Pakistan, in the border region near Afghanistan, is perhaps the epicenter [of global terrorism], although al Qaeda is operating all over the world, in Yemen, in Somalia, in northern Africa, affiliates in Southeast Asia. Why would we build up 100,000 or more troops in parts of Afghanistan included that are not even near the border? You know, this buildup is in Helmand Province. That’s not next door to Waziristan. So I’m wondering, what exactly is this strategy, given the fact that we have seen that there is a minimal presence of al Qaeda in Afghanistan, but a significant presence in Pakistan? It just defies common sense that a huge boots on the ground presence in a place where these people are not is the right strategy. It doesn’t make any sense to me.’ Indeed. ‘The Wisconsin Democrat also warned that US policy in Afghanistan could actually push terrorists and extremists into Pakistan and, as a consequence, further destabilize the region: “You know, I asked the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mullen, and Mr. Holbrooke, our envoy over there, a while ago, you know, is there a risk that if we build up troops in Afghanistan, that will push more extremists into Pakistan?” he told ABC. “They couldn’t deny it, and this week, Prime Minister Gilani of Pakistan specifically said that his concern about the buildup is that it will drive more extremists into Pakistan, so I think it’s just the opposite, that this boots-on-the-ground approach alienates the Afghan population and specifically encourages the Taliban to further coalesce with Al Qaida, which is the complete opposite of our national security interest.”’ Of course, this is all intentional and motivated by US imperialist raison d’état.
Malick: “Did Obama Declare War On Pakistan?”
Obama’s speech did everything possible to blur the distinction between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which are after all two sovereign states and both members of the United Nations in their own right. Ibrahim Sajid Malick, US correspondent for Samaa TV, one of the largest Pakistan television networks, called attention to this ploy: ‘Speaking to a hall full of cadets at the US Military Academy of West Point, President Barack Obama almost seemed like he might be declaring war on Pakistan. Every time he mentioned Afghanistan, Pakistan preceded mention…. Sitting at the back benches of the hall at one point I almost jumped out of my chair when he said: “the stakes are even higher within a nuclear-armed Pakistan, because we know that al Qaeda and other extremists seek nuclear weapons, and we have every reason to believe that they would use them.” I was shocked because a succession of American officials recently confirmed that the Pakistani arsenal is secure.’ This article is entitled “Did Obama Declare War On Pakistan?”, and we can chalk the question mark up to diplomatic discretion. During congressional hearings involving General McChrystal and US Ambassador Eikenberry, Afghanistan and Pakistan were simply fused into one sinister entity known as “Afpak” or even “Afpakia.”
In the summer of 2007, Obama, coached by Zbigniew Brzezinski and other controllers, was the originator of the unilateral US policy of using Predator drones for political assassinations inside Pakistan. This assassination policy is now being massively escalated along with the troop strength: “Two weeks ago in Pakistan, Central Intelligence Agency sharpshooters killed eight people suspected of being militants of the Taliban and al Qaeda, and wounded two others in a compound that was said to be used for terrorist training…. The White House has authorized an expansion of the CIA’s drone program in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas, officials said this week, to parallel the president’s decision…to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. American officials are talking with Pakistan about the possibility of striking in Baluchistan for the first time — a controversial move since it is outside the tribal areas — because that is where Afghan Taliban leaders are believed to hide.” The US is now training more Predator operators than combat pilots.
Blackwater Accused In Peshawar Massacre Of Women And Children
The CIA, the Pentagon, and their various contractors among the private military firms are now on a murder spree across Pakistan, attacking peaceful villages and wedding parties, among other targets. Blackwater, now calling itself Xe Services and Total Intelligence Solutions, is heavily involved: ‘At a covert forward operating base run by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, members of an elite division of Blackwater are at the center of a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and al Qaeda operatives, “snatch and grabs” of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan, an investigation by The Nation has found. The Blackwater operatives also assist in gathering intelligence and help direct a secret US military drone bombing campaign that runs parallel to the well-documented CIA predator strikes, according to a well-placed source within the US military intelligence apparatus.’
As shocking as Scahill’s report is, it must nevertheless be viewed as a limited hangout, since there is no mention of the persistent charges that a large part of the deadly bombings in Peshawar and other Pakistani cities are being carried out by Blackwater, as this news item suggests: “ISLAMABAD Oct. 29 (Xinhua) — Chief of Taliban movement in Pakistan Hakimullah Mehsud has blamed the controversial American private firm Blackwater for the bomb blast in Peshawar which killed 108 people, local news agency NNI reported Thursday.” This was blind terrorism designed for maximum slaughter, especially among women and children.
US Also At War With Uzbekistan?
Scahill’s report also suggests that US black ops have reached into Uzbekistan, a post-Soviet country of 25 million which borders Afghanistan to the north: ‘In addition to planning drone strikes and operations against suspected al Qaeda and Taliban forces in Pakistan for both JSOC and the CIA, the Blackwater team in Karachi also helps plan missions for JSOC inside Uzbekistan against the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, according to the military intelligence source. Blackwater does not actually carry out the operations, he said, which are executed on the ground by JSOC forces. “That piqued my curiosity and really worries me because I don’t know if you noticed but I was never told we are at war with Uzbekistan,” he said. “So, did I miss something, did Rumsfeld come back into power?”’ Such are the ways of hope and change.
The role of US intelligence in fomenting the Baluchistan rebellion for the purpose of breaking Pakistan apart is also confirmed by Professor Chossudovsky: ‘Already in 2005, a report by the US National Intelligence Council and the CIA forecast a “Yugoslav-like fate” for Pakistan “in a decade with the country riven by civil war, bloodshed and inter-provincial rivalries, as seen recently in Baluchistan.” (Energy Compass, 2 March 2005). According to the NIC-CIA, Pakistan is slated to become a “failed state” by 2015, “as it would be affected by civil war, complete Talibanization and struggle for control of its nuclear weapons”. (Quoted by former Pakistan High Commissioner to UK, Wajid Shamsul Hasan, Times of India, 13 February 2005)…. Washington favors the creation of a “Greater Baluchistan” which would integrate the Baluch areas of Pakistan with those of Iran and possibly the Southern tip of Afghanistan, thereby leading to a process of political fracturing in both Iran and Pakistan.’ The Iranians, for their part, are adamant that the US is committing acts of war on their territory in Baluchistan: “TEHRAN, Oct. 29 (Xinhua) — Iran’s Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani said …that there are some concrete evidences showing US involvement in recent deadly bomb explosions in the country’s Sistan-Baluchistan province, the official IRNA news agency reported. …. The deadly suicide attack by Sunni rebel group Jundallah (God’s soldiers) occurred on October 18 in Iran’s Sistan-Baluchistan province near the border with Pakistan when the local officials were preparing a ceremony in which the local tribal leaders were to meet the military commanders of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).
US Goal: Cut The Pakistan Energy Corridor Between Iran, China
Why would the United States be so obsessed with the breakup of Pakistan? One reason is that Pakistan is traditionally a strategic ally and economic partner of China, a country which the US and British are determined to oppose and contain on the world stage. Specifically, Pakistan could function as an energy corridor linking the oil fields of Iran and possibly even Iraq with the Chinese market by means of a pipeline that would cross the Himalayas above Kashmir. This is the so-called “Pipelinestan” issue. This would give China a guaranteed land-based oil supply not subject to Anglo-American naval superiority, while also cutting out the 12,000 mile tanker route around the southern rim of Asia. As a recent news report points out: ‘Beijing has been pressuring Tehran for China’s participation in the pipeline project and Islamabad, while willing to sign a bilateral agreement with Iran, has also welcomed China’s participation. According to an estimate, such a pipeline would result in Pakistan getting $200 million to $500 million annually in transit fees alone. China and Pakistan are already working on a proposal for laying a trans-Himalayan pipeline to carry Middle Eastern crude oil to western China. Pakistan provides China the shortest possible route to import oil from the Gulf countries…. The pipeline, which would run from the southern Pakistan port of Gwadar and follow the Karakoram highway, would be partly financed by Beijing. The Chinese are also building a refinery at Gwadar. Imports using the pipeline would allow Beijing to reduce the portion of its oil shipped through the narrow and unsafe Strait of Malacca, which at present carries up to 80% of its oil imports. Islamabad also plans to extend a railway track to China to connect it to Gwadar. The port is also considered the likely terminus of proposed multibillion-dollar gas pipelines reaching from the South Pars fields in Iran or from Qatar, and from the Daulatabad fields in Turkmenistan for export to world markets. Syed Fazl-e-Haider, “Pakistan, Iran sign gas pipeline deal,” Asia Times, 27 May 2009. This is the normal, peaceful economic progress and cooperation which the Anglo-Americans are hell-bent on stopping.
Oil and natural gas pipelines from Iran across Pakistan and into China would carry energy resources into the Middle Kingdom, and would also serve as conveyor belts for Chinese economic influence into the Middle East. This would make Anglo-American dominion increasingly tenuous in a part of the world which London and Washington have traditionally sought to control as part of their overall strategy of world domination.
US domestic propaganda is already portraying Pakistan as the new home base of terrorism. The four pathetic patsies going on trial for an alleged plot to bomb a synagogue in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx in New York City had been carefully sheep-dipped to associate them with the shadowy and suspicious Jaish-e-Mohammad, allegedly a Pakistani terrorist group. The same goes for the five Moslems from Northern Virginia who have just been arrested near Lahore in Pakistan.
India And Iran
As far as the neighboring states are concerned, India under the unfortunate Manmohan Singh seems to be accepting the role of continental dagger against Pakistan and China on behalf of the US and the British. This is a recipe for a colossal tragedy. India should rather make permanent peace with Pakistan by vacating the Vale of Kashmir, where 95% of the population is Moslem and would like to join Pakistan. Without a solution to this issue, there will be no peace on the subcontinent.
Regarding Iran, George Friedman, the head of the Stratfor outlet of the US intelligence community recently told Russia Today that the great novelty of the next decade will be an alliance of the United States with Iran directed against Russia. In that scenario, Iran would cut off oil to China altogether. That is the essence of the Brzezinski strategy. It is urgent that the antiwar movement in the United States regroup and begin a new mobilization against the cynical hypocrisy of Obama’s war and escalation policy, which suprasses even the war crimes of the Bush-Cheny neocons. In this new phase of the Great Game, the stakes are incalculable.
Webster G. Tarpley is an economic historian, radio host and author of 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA, Obama, The Postmodern Coup and Surviving The Cataclysm and other books.
In the December Issue:
Spurred by AIPAC, US House Denounces Goldstone Report on Israeli War Crimes in Gaza
When the Israel Lobby goes on red alert, it becomes the Jewish Lobby
By Wayne Madsen
Two votes this month show that when backed to the wall, the powerful Israel Lobby can become even more powerful when it marshals the resources of the worldwide Jewish Lobby. The two lobbies went into red alert status over the UN report of well-respected South African judge Richard Goldstone, who is Jewish, a self-described Zionist, and trustee of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The report recommends an independent investigation into Israeli actions in what the report stated amounted to “war crimes, possibly crimes against humanity.” Israel’s invasion of Gaza, code named “Cast Lead,” resulted in the deaths of over 1400 Palestinians, many of them children and women.
The reaction of the “twin lobby” to the Goldstone report was quick and fierce. On cue, the Anti-Defamation League’s whiny Abe Foxman let loose with a barrage of criticism of Goldstone. From other quarters, Goldstone was accused of being “anti-Semitic” and a “self-hating Jew.” The same sort of vitriolic name-calling had been meted out by the Lobby to Mary Robinson, the former Irish President, who served as UN Human Rights Commissioner.
The Israel Lobby, whose political backbone comes from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), had introduced into the House of Representatives resolution H.R. 867, which called on the Obama administration not only to reject the Goldstone report, also known as “Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict,” but block any further consideration of it by the United Nations. On November 3, the House resolution passed by a lopsided 344-36 vote.
AIPAC was supported in its last-minute blitzkrieg of the House by like-minded organizations, including the American Jewish Committee, Jewish Federations of North America, Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), and the Zionist Organization of America.
AIPAC, through its power over campaign donations from wealthy Jews in the United States, can ram any legislation through Congress at a moment’s notice. And H.R. 867 was time-sensitive. AIPAC and its allies had to send a message to the Obama administration that it and The Lobby expected strong American opposition to the upcoming UN General Assembly vote on accepting the Goldstone report. The UN vote took place two days later and passed 114 to 18, with 44 abstentions and 16 nations not voting.
With the power of the World Jewish Congress, the European Jewish Congress, and other pressure groups arrayed against them, many small countries dependent on World Bank and International Monetary Fund (both controlled by pro-Israelis, Robert Zoellick and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, respectively), were forced to vote against Goldstone, abstain, or simply not vote at all. Israel proclaimed that the 18 nations that voted against Goldstone represented a “moral majority.” Israel, headed up by an expansionist and xenophobic government, in which avowed racist and gangster Avigdor Lieberman serves as Foreign Minister, received a seal of approval not only from the Obama administration but US ambassador to the UN Susan Rice, mentored by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and Alejandro Daniel Wolff, Rice’s deputy, reportedly cajoled various UN delegations to either vote no on Goldstone, abstain, or miss the vote entirely.
However, some countries, like some members of the House, stood up to the immense twin Lobby to vote for Goldstone and reject the threats made by the Lobbies’ arm twisters and thumb breakers.
Among those who defied AIPAC and its allies were Representatives Keith Ellison (D-MN), Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), Ron Paul (R-TX), Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), Geoff Davis (D-KY), Lynn Woolsey (D-CA), Barbara Lee (D-CA), Charles Boustany (R-LA), Jim McGovern (D-MA), Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Maurice Hinchey (D-NY), John Dingell (D-MI), and George Miller (D-CA). Perhaps the greatest courage was shown by Representative Bob Filner (D-CA), who is Jewish, and voted against AIPAC. Previously, Filner admitted the power of AIPAC to punish those members of the House who defied it. Filner cited the electoral losses of Representative Cynthia McKinney (D-GA) and Earl Hilliard (D-AL), who were defeated in their respective Democratic primaries after out-of-state money from wealthy Jewish circles poured into the campaign coffers of their opponents. Representative Donna Edwards (D-MD), who also voted against the AIPAC resolution, faces a similar AIPAC-inspired challenge next year.
Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist. He is a regular political and national security commentator on Russia Today, and has also appeared on Fox News ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, CNN, BBC, al Jazeera, and MS-NBC. Madsen is the author of Jaded Tasks: Big Oil, Black Ops & Brass Plates and Overthrow a Fascist Regime on $15 a Day.
One in Four Homeless a Veteran
In the November Issue:
Anthrax Attack Spawned in Military Bioweapons Lab
The Government has admitted the 2001 Anthrax Letters were a false-flag attack originating from within the US military bio-weapons program.
Photo - Defense contractor, Battelle, practices emergency biological response drill with firemen.
By Barry Kissin / RCFP
On September 16 and 17, 2008, the House and Senate Judiciary Committees respectively, conducted “Amerithrax oversight” hearings consisting of questioning FBI Director Robert Mueller. Despite widespread concern about the integrity of Amerithrax, the colloquy during these hearings was largely feeble. Congressman Nadler did manage to ask the $64,000 question. Salon.com journalist Glen Greenwald recounted this as follows:
“Nadler asked one of the most central questions in the anthrax case: he pointed out that the facilities that (unlike Ft. Detrick) actually have the equipment and personnel to prepare dry, silica-coated anthrax are: 1) the US Army’s Dugway Proving Ground and 2) the Battelle Corporation, the private CIA contractor that conducts substantial research into highly complex strains of anthrax. Nadler asked how the FBI had eliminated those institutions as the culprits behind the attack. After invoking generalities to assure Nadler that the FBI had traced the anthrax back to Bruce Ivins’ vial (which didn’t answer the question), Mueller’s response was this: I don’t know the answers to those questions as to how we eliminated Dugway and Battelle. I’ll have to get back to you at some point.
“Nadler then pleaded: please try to get back to us with the answer quickly. Mueller replied: ‘Oh, absolutely Congressman.’”
Shortly thereafter, Nadler’s question was put into writing and sent to the FBI with other questions from the House Judiciary Committee. Nadler’s question read:
“How, on what basis, and using what evidence did the FBI conclude that none of the laboratories it investigated were in any way the sources of the powder used in the 2001 anthrax attacks, except the US Army Laboratory at Fort Detrick, Maryland? Please include in your answer why laboratories that have been publicly identified as having the equipment and personnel to make anthrax powder, such as the US Army’s Dugway Proving Grounds in Dugway, Utah and the Battelle Memorial Institute in Jefferson, Ohio, were excluded as possible sources.”
Seven months went by before the FBI responded.
Read the full length article here.
Japan Quits GWOT
As The Creek reported in a Project Censored award winning story in February 2008, the Japanese legislature has debated whether to accept the US theory of 9/11 as justification for the Global War on Terror (GWOT). Japanese legislator Yukihisa Fujita argued at the time that the attacks of 9/11 were an inside job intended to justify US agression in Afghanistan and beyond. At issue was the Japanese support of the GWOT and the American war in Afghanistan by using Japanese navy refueling ships in the Indian Ocean to refuel American war ships.
Fujita’s party, the Democratic Party, won recent elections in September. New Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama has opposed the refueling mission, saying Japan should take humanitarian measures to help Afghanistan restore peace.
Japan’s defense ministry announced in October that Japan will end its nearly 8-year-old refueling mission in support of US-led operations in Afghanistan.
Defense Minister Toshimi Kitazawa said Japan would pull out its two naval ships from the Indian Ocean in January 2010; “The law will expire in January. We will solemnly withdraw based on the law,”
Also in the November Issue:
Paul Craig Roberts p. 3
Editorial Cartoons p. 3
History’s Lessons p. 6
Wayne Madsen p. 6
Book Review p. 6
John Pilger p. 7
Download the PDF file to read the complete issue.
In the October Issue:
Obama Worked for the CIA
New Details on Obama’s CIA-Front EmployerBy Wayne Madsen / Wayne Madsen Report
WMR has obtained additional details on Business International Corporation (BIC), the CIA front company where President Obama spent a year working after graduating from Columbia University in 1983.
BIC used journalists as non-official cover agents around the world. The firm published weekly and fortnightly newsletters for business executives, including Business International, Business Europe, Business Latin America, and Business Asia.
On February 24, 2009, WMR reported: “For one year, Obama worked as a researcher in BIC’s financial services division where he wrote for two BIC publications: “Financing Foreign Operations” and “Business International Money Report”, a weekly newsletter.
An informed source has told WMR that Obama’s tuition debt at Columbia was paid off by BIC. In addition, WMR has learned that when Obama lived in Indonesia with his mother and his adoptive father Lolo Soetoro, the 20-year-old Obama, who was known as ‘Barry Soetoro,’ traveled to Pakistan in 1981. He was hosted by the family of Muhammadmian Soomro, a Pakistani “Sindhi” who became acting President of Pakistan after the resignation of General Pervez Musharraf on August 18, 2008. WMR was told that the Obama/Soetoro trip to Pakistan, ostensibly to go ‘partridge hunting’ with the Soomros, related to unknown CIA business. The covert CIA program to assist the Afghan mujaheddin was already well underway at the time and Pakistan was the major base of operations for the CIA’s support . . . BIC had long been associated with CIA activities. BIC was founded by Eldridge Haynes, a self-professed liberal Democrat. The BIC headquarters was located at the prestigious address of 1 Dag Hammarskjold Plaza in Manhattan.”
Through its contacts with leading liberals around the world, BIC sought to recruit those on the left as CIA agents and assets. BIC documents obtained by WMR describe a series of top level “round tables” between US business and intelligence chiefs and government leaders around the world, including Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Selassie, and 83 ministers and officials of 33 multinational organizations in Addis Ababa in 1969; Colombian President Carlos Lleras Restrepo and business and labor leaders of six Andean Bloc countries in 1968 and 1972; Argentine President General Juan Carlos Ongania and his junta in 1966; Spanish dictator Francisco Franco and his cabinet in 1962 and 1967; Brazilian President Emilio Medici in 1970; and Indonesian dictator Suharto and his cabinet in 1968 and 1972.
Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, and his father, Barack Obama, Sr., met at the University of Hawaii in 1960 in a Russian-language class. At the time, the CIA and Britain’s MI-6 were concerned about Soviet penetration of Kenya’s independence movement. Kenya became independent of Britain in 1963.
After marrying Indonesian national Lolo Soetoro, Dunham moved with Barack Obama, Jr. to Indonesia in 1966, just as the Suharto dictatorship was consolidating its hold on power, which included the massacre of some 1 million Indonesian Communists. Dunham left Indonesia in 1972, returning to Hawaii with her son. Dunham periodically made trips back to Indonesia, as well as to Pakistan, while working for the Ford Foundation and the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the latter commonly used by the CIA for official cover agents.
Dunham Soetoro was in Indonesia when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Barack Obama visited Lahore, Pakistan, where his mother worked as a “consultant,” in 1981. According to a declassified Top Secret CIA document titled “Worldwide Reaction to the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan”, dated February 1980, Indonesia became a hotbed of anti-Soviet students demonstrations after Moscow’s invasion of Afghanistan. The report states, “Indonesian students have staged several peaceful demonstrations in Jakarta and three other major cities. They have also demanded the recall of the Soviet Ambassador because of remarks he made to a student delegation on 4 January and have called for a severance of Soviet-Indonesian relations.”
CIA files also contain a report on the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations (1971-1973), which is possibly pertinent to the agency’s involvement in Indonesia. One of the participants in the Chicago CFR’s 1971 conference in Oak Brook was Zbigniew Brzezinski, who would later become President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser, the chief architect of the US support for the Afghan mujaheddin, and one of Obama’s professors at Columbia University.
On April 27, 1973, the Chicago CFR sponsored a seminar titled “Indonesia Today,” according to the CFR Chicago report maintained in CIA files. Present were “four representatives of the Center for Strategic International Studies in Jakarta” who discussed in presented papers Indonesia’s role in Southeast Asia. One of the participants was Soetaryo Sigit, Indonesia’s Minister of Mines.
The CFR report also states that the Atlantic Conference series that attracted the same high-level participants as BIC, was started in 1965 under the auspices of CFR Chicago by Joseph Slater of the Ford Foundation. The Ford Foundation employed Dunham in Indonesia.
CIA files also contain a single page from the “Chicago Buyers Guide.” Listed on the page is the address and phone number for Business International Corporation in Chicago: One IBM Plaza, Suite 1420, 60611. 321-0300.
Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist, author and syndicated columnist. His latest books are Jaded Tasks: Big Oil, Black Ops & Brass Plates and Overthrow a Fascist Regime on $15 a Day. His website is WayneMadsenReport.com
In the September Issue:
Empire, Obama and America's Last Taboo
A Speach by John Pilger, Socialism 2009, San Francisco, July 4, 2009
Transcribed by Elaine Sullivan / RCFP
Two years ago I spoke at "Socialism in Chicago" about an invisible government which is a term used by Edward Bernays, one the founders of modern propaganda. It was Bernays, who in the 1920s invented public relations as a euphemism for propaganda. And it was Bernays, deploying the ideas of his uncle Sigmund Freud, who campaigned on behalf of the tobacco industry for women to take up smoking as an act of feminist liberation calling cigarettes "tortures of freedom". At the same time he was involved in the disinformation which was critical in overthrowing the Arbenz government in Guatemala. So you have the association of cigarettes and regime change. The invisible government that Bernays had in mind brought together all media: PR, the press, broadcasting, advertising and their power of branding and image making. In other words, disinformation.
And I suppose I would like to talk today about this invisible government's most recent achievement, the rise of Barrack Obama and the silencing of much of the left. But all of this has a history, of course and I'd like to go back, take you back some forty years to a sultry and, for me, very memorable day in Viet Nam. I was a young war correspondent who had just arrived in a village in the Central Highlands called Tuylon. My assignment was to write about a unit of US Marines who had been sent to the village to win hearts and minds. "My orders," said the Marine Sergeant, "are to sell the American way of liberty, as stated in the Pacification Handbook, this is designed to win the hearts and minds of folks as stated on page 86." Now, page 86 was headed in capital letters: WHAM (winning hearts and minds). The Marine Unit was a combined action company which explained the Sergeant, meant, "We attack these folks on Mondays and we win their hearts and minds on Tuesdays." He was joking, of course, but not quite. The Sergeant, who didn't speak Vietnamese, had arrived in the village, stood up on a Jeep and said through a bullhorn: "Come on out everybody we've got rice and candies and toothbrushes to give you." This was greeted by silence. "Now listen, either you gooks come on out or we're going to come right in there and get you!" Now the people of Tuylon finally came out and they stood in line to receive packets of Uncle Ben's Miracle Rice, Hershey Bars, party balloons, and several thousand toothbrushes. Three portable, battery operated, yellow, flush lavatories were held back for the arrival of the colonel. And when the colonel arrived that evening, the district chief was summoned and the yellow, flush lavatories unveiled. The colonel cleared his throat and took out a handwritten speech, "Mr. District Chief and all you nice people," said the colonel, "what these gifts represent is more than the sum of their parts, they carry the spirit of America. Ladies and gentlemen there's no place on Earth like America, it's the land where miracles happen, it's a guiding light for me and for you. In America, you see, we count ourselves as real lucky as having the greatest democracy the world has ever known and we want you nice people to share in our good fortune." Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, even John Winthrope sitting upon a hill got a mention. All that was missing was the Star Bangled Banner playing softly in the background. Of course the villagers had no idea what the colonel was talking about, but when the Marines clapped, they clapped. And when the colonel waved, the children waved. And when he departed the colonel shook the Sergeant's hand and said: "We've got plenty of hearts and minds here, carry on Sergeant." "Yes Sir." In Viet Nam I witnessed many scenes like that.
I'd grown up in faraway Australia on a cinematic diet of John Wayne, Randolph Scott, Walt Disney, and Ronald Reagan. The American way of liberty they portrayed might well have been lifted from the WHAM handbook. I'd learned that the United States had won World War II on its own and now led the free world as the chosen society. It was only later when I read Walter Lippmann's book, Public Opinion, a manual of the invisible government, that I began to understand the power of emotions attached to false ideas and bad histories on a grand scale.
Now, historians call this exceptionalism, the notion that the United States has a divine right to bring what it calls "liberty" to the rest of humanity. Of course this is a very old refrain. The French and British created and celebrated their own civilizing missions while imposing colonial regimes that denied basic civil liberties. However, the power of the American message was, and remains, different. Whereas the Europeans were proud imperialists, Americans are trained to deny their imperialism. As Mexico was conquered and the Marines sent to Nicaragua, American textbooks referred to an Age of Innocence. American motives were always well meaning, moral, exceptional, as the colonel said, "There was no ideology" and that's still the case.
Americanism is an ideology that is unique because its main feature is its denial that it is an ideology. It's both conservative and it's liberal. And it's right and it's left. And Barack Obama is its embodiment. Since Obama was elected leading liberals have talked about America returning to its true status as, "a nation of moral ideals". Those are the words of Paul Krugman, the liberal columnist of The New York Times. In the San Francisco Chronicle, columnist Mark Morford wrote, "Spiritually advanced people regard the new president as a light worker who can help usher in a new way of being on the planet." Tell that to an Afghan child whose family has been blown away by Obama's bombs. Or a Pakistani child whose house has been visited by one of Obama's drones. Or a Palestinian child surveying the carnage in Gaza caused by American "smart" weapons, which, disclosed Seymour Hersh, were re-supplied to Israel for use in the slaughter, and I quote; "Only after the Obama team let if be known, it would not object." The man who stayed silent on Gaza is the man who now condemns Iran.
In a sense, Obama is the myth that is America's last taboo. His most consistent theme was never "change", it was power. "The United States," he said, "leads the world in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good. We must lead by building a 21st century military to ensure the security of our people and advance the security of all people." And there is this remarkable statement, "At moments of great peril in the past century our leaders ensured that America, by deed and by example, led and lifted the world; that we stood and fought for the freedoms sought by billions of people beyond our borders." Words like these remind me of the colonel in the village in Viet Nam, as he spun much the same nonsense.
Read the full transcript here.
"At a time of universal deceit," wrote George Orwell, "telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
Turkish Intelligence Blackmailing Sitting Member of House of Representatives
By Wayne Madsen/ Wayne Madsen Report
Former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds testified August 15th that while she was working for the FBI she was aware of bribes being made by the Turkish government to elected and former members of Congress, as well as senior officials of the executive branch, including the Department of State. Edmonds was subpoenaed by the Ohio Election Commission in a case brought against Ohio Democratic House of Representatives candidate David Krikorian by incumbent Ohio Republican Representative Jean Schmidt. Schmidt alleges in her complaint to the Commission that Krikorian made “false statements” in his 2008 independent race against her.
Edmonds named Rep. Schmidt as one of the recipients of Turkish government bribes along with former House Speakers Dennis Hastert (R-IL), Dick Gephardt (D-MO), and brief House Speaker Robert Livingston (R-LA), as well as Representative Dan Burton (R-IN) and former Representative Stephen Solarz (D-NY). Also named are Brent Scowcroft, former National Security Adviser under George H. W. Bush and Gerald Ford, and former George W. Bush State Department Political Undersecretary, Marc Grossman.
Edmonds was fired from her FBI job after she complained to her superiors about Turkish intelligence infiltration of the translation branch of the bureau; she was exonerated in a report by the FBI’s Inspector General.
Edmonds’ testimony also dealt with Turkish and Israeli joint operations to engage in smuggling nuclear technology from the US. In particular, the Turkish espionage and influence-peddling ring was heavily involved in the Bush White House “outing” the covert identities of CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson and her Brewster Jennings & Associates, non-official, CIA- cover firm.
Perhaps the most explosive part of the deposition involved the Turkish government being engaged in a sexual blackmail operation against a sitting member of the House of Representative. In what the FBI termed a “hooking process,” an American-Turkish Council (ATC) female operative enticed a female member of the House into a lesbian sexual encounter at a Washington, DC townhouse. A Turkish intelligence surveillance team had placed surveillance bugs throughout the townhouse, including the bedroom and captured the lesbian tryst on tape, according to Edmonds’s testimony.
WMR has learned that the House member in question is Representative Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), a strong supporter of AIPAC and Israel and a close political ally of President Obama and his chief of staff Rahm Emanuel.
Read the full story here.
Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist, author and syndicated columnist and a regular commentator on Russia Today TV. His columns have appeared in the Miami Herald, Houston Chronicle, Philadelphia Inquirer, Columbus Dispatch, Sacramento Bee, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and many other papers.
Cash for Clunkers
The Deep State Does Not Respond To FOIA Requests
A Profile of 9/11 Researcher Aidan Monaghan
By Sheila Casey / RCFP
In an attempt to get to the bottom of what really happened on 9/11, citizen investigator Aidan Monaghan has filed dozens of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with federal agencies such as the FBI, SEC, Department of the Navy, and the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey. Agency after agency has refused to comply with his requests, instead claiming that the information cannot be found, does not exist, was never properly filed, or even, from the FAA, that it was simply "not in a position to release said records at this time."
The Freedom of Information Act was signed into law by President Johnson in 1966. It mandates that information held by federal agencies must be made available to any citizen requesting it, unless that information is exempt. The Act specifies nine reasons why any given piece of information could be exempt, such as invasion of personal privacy, trade secrets, anything related to the supervision or regulation of financial institutions, and anything that could compromise either law enforcement or national security. In addition, the FBI has put an exemption on all of their 9/11 information and will release information only if compelled to do so by a lawsuit, of which Monaghan has filed two.
Despite the persistent stonewalling, Monaghan has turned up some interesting discrepancies. While it was widely reported in the media that the flight data recorder (FDR) also known as the "black box," for American Airlines Flight 77 (the plane that allegedly hit the Pentagon on 9/11) was found at 4 am on September 14, 2001, the file containing the FDR data was dated over four hours earlier. In other words, the data from the FDR was downloaded prior to the FDR being found.
When Monaghan filed a Request for Correction with the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), and pointed out this disparity, his request was denied and an explanation offered that the file was created as a routine procedure prior to finding the FDR. However the FDR file indicates three parameters: date created, date modified, and date accessed. The "date created" and "date modified" fields are both listed as 11:45:38 pm on September 13, 2001, indicating that no data was added later, after the FDR was found. The "date accessed" field is blank.
This is, Monaghan says, "sufficient reason to wonder if the information is faked."
Monaghan has also established that the NTSB does not have either serial or part numbers for the FDRs from American Airlines Flight # 77 or United Airlines Flight # 93 (which allegedly crashed in Shanksville, PA). This is highly unusual, in fact, according to Monaghan, there is only one other occasion in the past 20 years when the NTSB report for a airplane crash did not contain the part and serial numbers for the FDR. That was, oddly enough, exactly ten years earlier, on September 11, 1991, when a Continental Express flight broke up in mid-air, killing 14 people, when the horizontal stabilizer failed. The accident was blamed on the negligence of Continental's maintenance and inspection crew.
The NTSB's own handbook indicates that the part number and serial number of the FDR are required for data readout of the FDR. The NTSB did not have this information, giving us another reason to question how the FDR data was created.
Read the full story here.
Sheila Casey is a DC-based journalist. Her work has appeared in The Denver Post, Reuters, Chicago Sun-Times, Dissident Voice and Common Dreams. She blogs at http://www.sheilacasey.com
In the August Issue:
Webster Tarpley responds to Ellen Brown’s article about hyperinflation in the July issue
The Second Wave of The Depression: Hyperinflation Likely
By Webster Tarpley
July 15, 2009
The second wave of the world economic depression is coming soon. Larry Summers, the economics czar of the Wall Street puppet regime currently in power in Washington, recently confessed to the Financial Times in an unguarded moment: “I don’t think the worst is over ....” A few weeks earlier, Jacques Attali, who served in the 1980s as the main economics adviser to French President Mitterrand, told an audience at the International Economic and Financial Forum (FIEF) in Paris that the world might well soon face a planetary Weimar “in the form of a hyperinflationary depression similar to the German events of 1922 - 1923.
During the last world economic depression, the first wave came in the form of the famous New York Stock market crash of October 1929. But this was only the beginning, and hardly the main event. The world depression of the 1930s was made irreversible by the British bankruptcy of September 1931, when the Bank of England ceased gold payment. At that time, the vast majority of international trade was financed by pounds sterling bills of exchange drawn on London. When the British Pound began to float through a series of competitive devaluations, the lack of a stable reserve currency — and not the US Hawley-Smoot tariff — strangled world trade, thus making that depression as severe as it was. British default in turn undermined the US banking system, setting the stage for the banking panic which ravaged the United States in 1932 and 1933, to the point that not a single bank in the country was still operating by the time Franklin D. Roosevelt assumed the presidency in March of 1933. The United States would almost certainly have been lashed by additional waves of depression had it not been for the banking triage implemented by the Roosevelt administration during the bank holiday, and for other New Deal measures which succeeded in mitigating the Depression. Other countries, notably Germany, went into a permanent depression which was expressed in a series of military campaigns which aimed at the economic looting of the other countries of Europe. Whatever the ideological fanatics of the discredited Austria and Chicago schools of economic analysis may claim, there is no automatic business cycle capable of lifting the modern world out of serious economic disintegration. The depression will end when adequate New Deal style policies are implemented, and not before, as I show in my new book, the second edition of Surviving the Cataclysm.
TODAY: BETWEEN 1929 AND 1931
Today, therefore, we are, so to speak, in the trough between the October 1929 wave (which corresponds to the derivatives crisis and banking panic of 2008) and the September 1931 wave, which this time around is highly likely to take the form of a hyperinflationary dollar crisis, or in other words a hyper stagflation and depression of the world economy radiating out from Wall Street and the City of London. What then might be the leading characteristics of the next wave of the current world economic breakdown crisis?
Read the full story here.
Webster Tarpley is an economic historian, radio host and author of 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA, Obama, The Postmodern Coup and Surviving The Cataclysm and other books.
More Brits Think Government Behind 7/7 London Bombings
By Matt Sullivan / RCFP
After four years, rumors swell in London that the British Government had a hand in the terrorist attacks of 7/7. Three Tube stations and a bus were struck with bombs that morning.
The government’s official story, that the attacks were staged by four British Muslims, inspired by al Qaeda but unaffiliated with any specific group is being rejected by growing numbers of Brits.
The official story is weak: four British Muslims — Mohammad Sidique Khan, 30, Shehzad Tanweer, 22, Jermaine Lindsay, 19, and Hasib Hussain, 18 — blew themselves up using explosives cooked up in their bath tub, killing 56 and injuring 700 on three Tube trains and a double-decker bus.
They had traveled on a mainline train from Luton into King’s Cross Thameslink Station in London, each carrying a heavy backpack of explosives.
At least that’s the version of events as presented by a high-level Parliamentary inquiry and a government report, which were published in May 2006, ten months after the events.
One immediate problem was that the accused bombers just didn’t seem to be the type.
They were family men, one a teacher, another played cricket the night before; not the actions a fundamentalist jihadist bent on suicide the following day. After viewing the Closed Circuit videos of the men, the police said they looked like “happy hikers”, laughing and joking and carrying heavy bags.
London Anti-Terrorist Police admitted that the bombers “did not fit the preconceived terrorist profile.”
They parked a rental car outside the train station and paid to park for seven days, then purchased round-trip tickets to London. The suspects were seen to be arguing with cashiers, walking in and out of shops, including McDonalds, and “bumping into people” in the minutes before the blasts — hardly the behavior of people who are in the final crucial moments of planning a terror attack in which they will be killed, and who wish to go unnoticed.
“I’ve seen the CCTV footage of these people. They do not appear to be on their way to commit any crime at all,” a London Metropolitan Police representative said.
“The roundtrip tickets, the fact that one of them spent a lot recently repairing his car and one of them had a family and was the teacher of the disabled and underprivileged children, it doesn’t ring right,” said Paul Beaver, a security and defense expert in London with close police contacts. “If you had that much commitment, how are you going to take your life? It’s happened in Palestine, but these people were brought up in the UK.” (Watson, Prison Planet)
Almost immediately after release of the official report, people noticed that there were problems with the official time-line as well.
Read the full story here.
In the July Issue:
Researchers Release 9/11 Pentagon Attack Report
By Sheila Casey / RCFP
Among 9/11 truth activists, there is little disagreement about what happened at the World Trade Center and at Shanksville. Although it’s not possible to know all the details of what transpired until there is an independent, impartial investigation, there is wide agreement among 9/11 researchers that World Trade Center buildings 1, 2 and 7 were brought down by controlled demolition and that the hole in the ground that was presented to us as the crash site of flight 93 in Shanksville does not contain the remnants of an airplane.
But when it comes to the Pentagon, the truth community has yet to reach a consensus, and 9/11 forums are filled with bitter arguments from proponents of one view or another. It is assumed by most savvy 9/11 activists that the truth movement has been infiltrated by intelligence agents tasked with crippling activists in any way possible, and that many of the most strident arguments come, not from sincere researchers, but from disinformation agents intent on spreading confusion and discord. These agents are in a position to know the truth about what happened and can be expected to mount vigorous arguments against that truth, the better to keep the movement divided and to prevent a clear, cogent message about the false flag attack at the Pentagon from reaching the masses.
To many activists, the Pentagon attack stands as the single most incriminating feature of 9/11. The official conspiracy theory (OCT) would have us believe that the world’s only superpower, with the most powerful military that has ever existed, was unable to defend its own headquarters 51 minutes after the north WTC tower had been hit, 34 minutes after the south WTC tower had been hit, and 41 minutes after the FAA knew that there was an emergency aboard flight 77 (the plane that supposedly hit the Pentagon). Regarding flight 77, Wikipedia states:
“By 08:56, the flight was turned around, and the transponder had been disabled. The FAA was aware at this point that there was an emergency aboard the plane. By this time, American Airlines Flight 11 had already crashed into the World Trade Center, and United Airlines Flight 175 was known to have been hijacked and within minutes of also striking the World Trade center.”
Where was America’s air defense during the 41 minutes after it was known that flight 77 was hijacked and before the Pentagon was attacked?
Read the full story here.
US and British Stoke Iran Unrest
Caught in a deception. BBC misrepresents photo of Ahmadinejad rally as opposition protest. Was it part of a propaganda campaign?
By Matt Sullivan / RCFP
In the heat of the election controversy in Iran, the BBC was caught in a rather embarrassing misrepresentation. In a page one story, the BBC claimed that thousands of followers of opposition candidate Mousani turned out to rally in defiance of official bans on such demonstrations. As proof, the BBC displayed a photo of a sea of placard-carrying supporters. The only problem: the photo was actually of Ahmadinejhad supporters at a government-sanctioned rally in Tehran.
The deception was exposed when the LA Times published a nearly identical photo which included a smiling, waving Ahmadinejhad in the foreground.
Was this embarrassing slip up just sloppy reporting on the part of the BBC or is something more sinister afoot?
Could the government-run British media monopoly be engaged in public “perception management” and propaganda?
It wouldn’t be the first time.
During the fall of Baghdad in 2003, BBC broadcast the famous “mass uprising” in which Iraqis toppled the Saddam Hussein statue. Only later did a wide-angle view of the event surface showing a mere handful of Iraqis orchestrated by US troops in what was clearly a staged photo-op event.
On September 11, 2001, the BBC famously reported the collapse of World Trade Center 7 more than twenty minutes before the building actually fell. Remarkably, the building can be seen standing tall in the background behind the reporter on the scene. Even more remarkable, the satellite feed from the live shot becomes fuzzy and the signal is “lost” just seconds before the building actually collapses. The BBC has no creditable explanation, as they claim to have ‘lost the tapes” of that broadcast. (Thankfully it is preserved on the internet.)
The use of propaganda to destabilize foreign countries is a well used tactic of US and British intelligence.
As reported in the Washington Post, Sunday Telegraph and elsewhere, in May 2007 President George W. Bush signed “A non-lethal Presidential Finding” (fatwa) on plans for a propaganda and disinformation campaign intended to destabilize and eventually topple the Iranian regime. The plan also included efforts to manipulate the country’s currency and international financial transactions.
The CIA would also supply communication equipment to enable opposition groups in Iran to bypass internet censorship.
It has also been reported by Seymour Hersh, among others, that the CIA is secretly funding militant ethnic separatist groups (terrorists) inside Iran.
In the past year there has been a wave of unrest: including bombing and assassinations of soldiers and government officials by Kurds in the west of the country, Azeris in the north, and Ahwazi Arabs in the southwest and Baluchis in the southeast.
Fred Burton, former US State Department Counter-terrorism agent, recently told the Sunday Telegraph. “The latest attacks inside Iran fall in line with US efforts to supply and train Iran’s ethnic minorities to destabilize the Iranian regime.”
On June 1, 2009, Iran hung a terrorist named Nasrollar Zehi for a bomb attack that killed eleven Revolutionary Guards in Zahedan. The Fars News Agency reported that the weapons used in the attack were British and US made.
The US admits to secretly funding opposition terrorists in Iran, and the Iranian government confirms it. George W. Bush authorized funding of propaganda and disinformation campaigns against Iran, and the BBC, by their actions, would seem to confirm this, too.
In the June Issue:
Pulitzer Prize Winning Story News Networks Won’t Report
By Matt Sullivan / RCFP
The Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting was awarded last month to David Barstow of the New York Times but you didn’t hear a word about it from the TV and cable networks. The reason for their silence is obvious; they don’t want you to know what Barstow revealed: that the networks have been active participants in a Pentagon sponsored propaganda campaign intended to sell the Iraq and Afghanistan wars (among other things) to the American public.
In the words of the Pulitzer Committee, Barstow’s prize was “for his tenacious reporting that revealed how some retired generals, working as radio and television analysts, had been co-opted by the Pentagon to make its case for the war in Iraq, and how many of them also had undisclosed ties to companies that benefited from policies they defended.”
The prize-winning stories appeared in The New York Times on April 20, 2008 and November 29, 2008 and were the product of a three year “Freedom of Information” effort to wrench documentation of the propaganda effort out of the Department of Defense (DoD).
Barstow revealed Pentagon documents that repeatedly refer to the military analysts as “message force multipliers” or “surrogates” who could be counted on to deliver administration themes and messages to millions of Americans as if were their their own opinions.
The Pentagon-controlled pundits, most of them retired generals, were given hundreds of classified Pentagon briefings, provided with Pentagon-approved talking points and flown at Pentagon expense to Iraq and other sites. But this extraordinary access came with a condition. “Participants were instructed not to quote their briefers directly or otherwise describe their contacts with the Pentagon.” In their television appearances, the military analysts did not disclose their ties to the Pentagon, let alone that they were its surrogates. The military analysts were little more than puppets for the Pentagon. In the words of Robert S. Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret who was a Fox News military analyst, “It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you.’”
David Barstow wrote, “Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.”
The blatant refusal of the TV and cable news organizations involved to even mention what Barstow uncovered in his reporting, reveals a lot about the depth of the networks’ involvement in the deception. In fact, many of the Pentagon sponsored “analysts” named in Barstow’s story are still employed, still being given air time and are still spinning their views at the very same cable news outlets that now refuse to inform viewers about this Pulitzer Prize winning story.
NBC’s Brian Williams is singled out for particular criticism from Media Matters. “For his refusal to inform his readers about this now-Pulitzer-winning story is particularly notable given his direct personal involvement in the secret, joint attempts by NBC and McCaffrey to contain PR damage to NBC from Barstow’s story, compounded by the fact that NBC was on notice for these multiple conflicts as early as April, 2003, when The Nation first reported on them.” In fact, in the very same broadcast in which Williams concealed from his viewers any mention of the Pulitzer Prize winning story about the Pentagon propaganda program, he hosted commentary from one of the retired generals involved in that propaganda program.
Glenn Greenwald reported in Salon magazine that “CNN ran an 898-word story on the various Pulitzer winners — describing virtually every winner — but was simply unable to find any space even to mention David Barstow’s name, let alone inform their readers that he won the Prize for uncovering core corruption at the heart of CNN’s coverage of the Iraq War and other military-related matters. No other major television news outlet implicated by Barstow’s story mentioned his award, at least as far as I can tell.”
Even Congress has gotten involved, since government propaganda directed at the American public is clearly illegal. When Barstow’s stories first ran in April of 2008, Congress members were so concerned that 45 of them signed a letter requesting that the office of DoD Inspector General (IG) investigate the charges including claims that some of the retired generals had financial ties to defense contractors who benefited from their appearances.
In January of 2009 the IG released a report saying that its investigation could find no evidence of a concerted effort to assemble a group of talking heads who could be depended on to talk up DoD policy, and could not identify any retired military analysts (RMA’s) who had used their role in the imbedded analyst program to benefit a company with which they had ties.
Congressional critics called the report a “whitewash”.
On May 5, the Defense Department Inspector General’s office announced that it was withdrawing its report on the Pentagon pundit program, even taking the unusual step of removing the file from its website. “Shortly after publishing the report ... we became aware of inaccuracies in the data,” states the withdrawal memo from the Inspector General’s office. The office’s internal review of the report — which it has “refused to release,” according to the Times — “concluded that the report did not meet accepted quality standards.” The report relied on “insufficient or inconclusive” evidence, the memo admits. The Pentagon pundit program “has been terminated, and responsible senior officials are no longer employed by the Department.”
While the Defense department has withdrawn the whitewash report it is still refusing to investigate the propaganda program. While it says the program has been terminated we still have the Pentagon sponsored pundits appearing regularly on the “news”. While Congress complains, they have not taken action. Unsurprisingly, the networks refuse to cover their own criminal behavior. Now it’s up to Congress to demand that the Government Accountability Office and the Federal Communications Commission pursue real investigations on this (and any other) media propaganda programs.
Spanish Government Divided Over Indicting Bush Administration Torturers
By Sheila Casey / RCFP
An internationally renowned Spanish judge is attempting to prosecute six former Bush officials for their role in allowing torture at the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Despite being urged by the Spanish Attorney General to drop the case, Judge Baltasar Garzon has submitted the case to a lottery system which will now assign it at random to one of six high court judges. As one of those high court judges, Garzon has a one in six chance of getting the case back. Spain has jurisdiction in the case because five Spanish citizens or residents claim to have been tortured at Guantanamo Bay.
The language used by Spanish Attorney General Conde-Pumpido, such as calling the case “fraudulent,” has led some observers to conclude that Conde-Pumpido bowed to pressure from the Obama administration. The AG also said: “If one is dealing with a crime of mistreatment of prisoners of war, the complaint should go against those who physically carried it out.”
US Attorney General Eric Holder said that he isn’t going to prosecute any Central Intelligence Agency employees who water-boarded suspects. Holder said that it would be unfair to prosecute those who actually carried out acts of torture because it was considered legal at the time by the Justice Department. Holder also said the US would defend the CIA torturers against attempted prosecutions from overseas.
The 1984 Convention Against Torture states: “An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture…” Both Spain and the US are signatory to the Convention, which the US was involved in negotiating.
Judge Baltasar Garzon is well known as a fearless crusader against tyranny and torture. Garzon had Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet served with an arrest warrant while he was visiting Britain in 1998. During 17 years in office, Pinochet ordered the murders of thousands of his political enemies and the torture and imprisonment of tens of thousands of others.
Read the full story here.
Noted For The Record Without Comment
Scientists Find Explosives in World Trade Center Dust
By Matt Sullivan / RCFPScientists have detected flecks of undetonated explosives in four samples of dust from the World Trade Center catastrophe. A paper just published in the peer-reviewed Open Chemical Physics Journal describes the findings of nine scientists after 18 months of work.
The paper is titled “Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe”. The primary authors are Niels Harrit, professor of chemistry at the University of Copenhagen, and Jeffrey Farrer, professor of Physics at Brigham Young University (BYU), Provo, Utah.
The research was initiated when Dr. Steven Jones, then also at BYU, observed small red/grey chips in the magnetic fraction of dust he was analyzing from the WTC disaster. The scientists studied four independently collected samples of dust. One sample was collected by a Manhattan resident about ten minutes after the collapse of the second WTC tower, two samples were collected the next day, and a fourth was collected about a week later. The properties of these chips were analyzed using optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray energy dispersive spectroscopy (XEDS), and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC).
After careful study of the material the scientists concluded that the red component of the bi-layer chips is a
high-tech explosive nano-material known as super-thermite. The material is composed of ultra-fine grains of
iron oxide intimately mixed with nano-sized aluminum metal in a matrix of silicon and organic compounds.
While these chips are very small (typically less than a millimeter) tests show that the material is highly
energetic and can be ignited to produce a micro-explosive effect. The observed properties and composition of the
thermitic material appears to match the published descriptions of nano-thermite fabricated at the Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory and elsewhere. These high-tech explosives were relatively new at the time of the disaster, with
some of the first published descriptions appearing in the literature in the late 1990s.Read the full story here.
View Open Chemical Physics Journal article here.
Eyewitnesses Contradict Pentagon 9/11 Story
BY SHEILA CASEY / RCFP
Two California men who call themselves the Citizen Investigation Team (CIT) have compiled impressive video evidence that the plane seen flying towards the Pentagon on the morning of September 11, 2001 could not have caused the death and damage at the Pentagon, nor the damage to five light poles outside the Pentagon.
Frustrated with the inability of 9/11 researchers to do anything other than speculate about what really happened that day, Craig Ranke and Aldo Marquis decided to take matters into their own hands. They have repeatedly flown in from southern California, canvassed the area near the Pentagon on foot to find people who saw a plane just prior to the fireball, and then quizzed these eyewitnesses extensively on camera to establish exactly what they saw, when they saw it and where they saw it from.
Their research is summarized at their website: thepentacon.com, as well as in four DVDs containing interviews with 13 witnesses who attest that they saw a plane fly to the north of the Citgo gas station on Pentagon property, not south of the Citgo station as required by the official story.
CIT had each witness draw the flight path he witnessed on a map; the compilation from all the witnesses is shown in the photo above. The yellow curved lines clustered together toward the top of the map are from the witnesses; the single straight line angling up from the bottom edge of the map is the official flight path of the plane, as described by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB).
Taken together, the 13 witnesses deliver a devastating blow to the official story about the Pentagon attack.
Read the full story here.
Cheney Directed Assassination Ring
BY MATT SULLIVAN / RCFPInvestigative journalist Seymour Hersh revealed during a talk at the University of Minnesota, March 10, that Dick Cheney orchestrated assassination squads directly out of the office of the vice president.
Here is what Hersh said: “After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet. That does happen.
“Right now, today, there was a story in The New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command — JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him [Cheney].
“Congress has no oversight of it. It’s anexecutive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leader, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths.
“Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.” Interestingly, Hersh gives us two pieces of information here. First he tells us that the CIA has been “deeply involved” in domestic operations; something that is forbidden by law. And second, he reveals that the office of vice president has been directing assassination squads abroad, also clearly illegal underdomestic and international law.
Read the full story here.
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