The Archers of Okcular

Syria - The Turning Of The Tide

noreply@blogger.com (Alien) — Sat, 18 May 2013 19:01:00 +0000

UN General Assembly Vote Reflects Shift In Syrian Public Opinion

By Franklin Lamb

18 May, 2013
Countercurrents.org

Homs, Syria: It’s not hard to find critics of the Assad government in the Governorate (Muhafazat) of Homs or for that matter, to varying degrees in Syria’s other thirteen Governorates according to Syrian analysts interviewed by this observer and reports from human rights groups including lawyers representing dissidents in Syria. However, after nearly 27 months of turmoil, the public opinion pendulum is markedly shifting back in support of the current regime.

One international political result was registered at the United Nations this past week when a US-Qatari-Saudi drafted General Assembly Resolution that was designed to increase pressure on the Assad government stumbled badly and fell far short of what the Saudi Ambassador to the UN and other US allies predicted would be an overwhelming vote in favor.

Effect of shift in popular opinion in Syria

Over the past four or five months it has become increasingly clear that public opinion in Syria is shifting for reasons that include, but are not limited to the following:

While inflation at the grocery stores in probably the most common complaint heard from a cross-section of society here, the population is adapting somewhat to higher prices and it appears to credit the government for efforts, some successful, to soften the impact of the illegal US-led sanctions that target this same Syrian population for purely political reasons to achieve regime change.

While Syrians demand dignity and freedom from oppressive security forces and an end to corruption, as all people do in this region and beyond, they are witnessing a return to near normalcy with respect to supplies of electricity, benzene, mazout fuel oil, bus schedules, schools, and a host of public services such as garbage collection, street sweeping, park maintenance, and sympathetic traffic cops who are rather understanding of short-cuts taken by drivers and pedestrians due to “the situation”.

In addition, public service announcement and even text messages demonstrate that the government is aware of the degree of suffering among the population, accept partial blame, and are focusing on remedial measure and crucially, ending the crisis with its horrific bloodshed. One observes here a definite trend of the pulling together of a high percentage of Syrians who share a very unique history and culture and who are deeply connected to their country and who are increasingly repelled by the continuing killing from all sides including the recent barbarisms of body mutilations and summary executions videotaped and broadcast on Utube by jihadist elements. The latter who these days come from nearly three dozen countries, paid for and indoctrinated by enemies of Syria’s Arab nationalism and deep rooted pillar of resistance to the occupation of Palestine.

In addition, many among Syria’s 23 million citizens, who initially supported the uprising following government reaction to event in Deraa in March 2011, now have serious second thoughts about who exactly would replace the current government. Events in Syria are also making plain that the army is still loyal to the Assad government, and according to Jane’s Defense Weekly, is actually gaining experience and strength as well as the well-known fact that as western diplomats are admitting, the “opposition militias” are hopelessly fractured, turning one another, many essential mafia outfits, and beginning to resemble their fellow jihadists from Libya, Chechnya and in between.

Opinion in Damascus and surrounding areas visited this past week, confirms this observers experience the past five months of a sharp and fairly rapid shift in opinion that now strongly favors letting the Syrian people themselves decide, without outside interference, whether the Assad regime will stay, and indeed, whether, the Baathist party will continue to represent majority opinion, not through wanton violence but rather via next June’s election. Many express confidence in the run up to this critical vote, noting that the election will be closely monitored by the international community to assure fairness.

Perhaps aided by the current glorious May weather, a certain optimism, that was more scarce in the past, pervades many neighborhoods.

For different reasons, foreign powers, including the USA, Turkey, European Union, the UK Jordan and even the majority population of the six Gulf Cooperation Council family run countries, according to Pew Research, are shifting their earlier positions which were based in part of the US administration, NATO, and Israeli assurances that the Assad government would surely fall quickly, “A matter of days, not weeks” US President Obama promised. That was two years ago.

As noted above, this trend has accelerated since the UN General Assembly vote with last weeks which did not go as planned on the biased and politicized non-binding draft resolution on Syria.

The public reaction in Syria and across the Middle East is substantially that the “Friends of Syria” non-binding GA resolution contradicts the reality on the ground, backs terrorism in Syria and hinders the international efforts to help achieve a political solution to the crisis in this country. Only 107 states voted in favor of the resolution, 12 against while 59 countries, mostly from Africa and Latin America, abstained from voting.

One reason the vote fell short of the 130 favorable votes that the basically same resolution garnered the past two times is that it is widely viewed as ignoring the crimes and atrocities committed by the armed jihadist groups in Syria and the flow of thousands of international terrorists backed by the West, the Gulf states and Turkey who provide them with weapons and money. According to the Russian delegate, backed by several other speakers, “the resolutions ignores all the terrorists’ heinous crimes and denounces what it called the escalation of the attacks by the Syrian government”. Afterward one Latin American Permanent Representative told Inner City Press that the count would have been below 100 if not for some “last minute arm-twisting.” As it turned out, 15 countries didn’t vote at all, opting to “get coffee,” as one African Permanent Representative put it before the vote.

Syria’s Ambassador al-Jaafari exposes a hoax in the Gulf

Syria’s permanent Envoy to the UN Bashar al-Jaafari said his country regretted the adoption of a biased and unbalanced UN resolution, thanking the countries that rejected the resolution “for their responsible positions which support the UN principles and the international law articles”. He noted that the decrease in the number of countries that voted in favor and the increase of numbers of those who abstained from voting indicates the growing international understanding of the reality of what is happening in Syria due to the foreign interference, support of terrorism, the spread of extremism and incitement besides the refusal of dialogue.

“We rely on the UN and its member states to support Syria and its people against the culture of extremism and terrorism, and to encourage the comprehensive national dialogue to peacefully resolve the Syrian crisis.” he said. In a statement released after the vote on the UN draft resolution on Syria, al-Jaafari He said that the French delegation had foiled the issuance of a number of UN press releases to condemn the terrorist acts committed by al-Qaeda-linked armed groups in Syria which claimed the lives of thousands of Syrians as it foiled a UN release to condemn the attempt of assassination of the Syrian Premier.

After Qatar’s ambassador spoke in favor of the resolution his country drafted (and re-drafted several time), Ja’afari revealed that there existed an e-mail, from the representative of the Syrian opposition given to Syria’s embassy in Qatar, showing Qatar’s involvement in the kidnapping of UN peacekeepers by the Yarmouk Martyrs Brigade. He read out a phone number from the e-mail as several Gulf diplomats grimaced or scowled, and three left the Chamber.

Visibly stunned, the UK Permanent Representative Lyall Grant called the whole matter “deeply confusing”. Another Permanent Representative, from a militia contributing country, said that if true, it’s “very problematic.” The reasons include the fact that UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon had just thanked Qatar for its roles in the release of the UN Peacekeepers the earlier kidnapping of whom the Qatari government may have planned, paid for and executed.

Meanwhile, Ban Ki-moon’s spokesperson Martin Nesirky said he would not disclose any more about the “negotiations to free the peacekeepers or who was behind the crime.”

Score a major diplomatic victory for Syria’s UN Ambassador al-Jaafari as public opinion shifts in favor of the Assad government and both pressure as well as optimism build in the run-up to the Geneva II conference being organized by the White House and the Kremlin.

Franklin Lamb is doing research in Syria and Lebanon and can be reached c/o fplamb@gmail.com

Peace Prizedent Obomba's Legacy

noreply@blogger.com (Alien) — Fri, 17 May 2013 18:14:00 +0000

Obama's Legacy

Secrecy, Drones, Prisons and Kill Lists

by ALYSSA ROHRICHT

On Monday, the Associated Press revealed that the Department of Justice used subpoenas to obtain phone records of its editors and reporters from April and May 2012. The records were obtained due to the investigation and supposed leak to the AP last year that the CIA had ”thwarted an ambitious plot by al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen to destroy a U.S.-bound airliner using a bomb with a sophisticated new design around the one-year anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden.” The , published on May 7, 2012, cites unnamed officials as sources. The piece also notes that AP had received information regarding the thwarted plot the week previous to publishing, but had agreed per requests by the White House and the CIA to hold the information because the “sensitive intelligence operation” was still in progress. Once officials said that those concerns were put to rest, the AP published the story.

The story was co-written by reporters Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman along with contributions from Kimberly Dozier, Eileen Sullivan and Alan Fram. They, along with their editor, Ted Bridis, had both their personal and work phone records seized from April-May 2012, in addition to general AP office numbers.

But who could be surprised? From the very start of Obama’s presidency, he and his administration have managed to take the Bush-era attack on civil liberties and not just continue them, but in many cases, significantly expand them (Lena Groeger and Cora Currier of ProPublica have created a fantastic interactive list here). The AP phone records story, while certainly significant, is not the first time the Obama administration has acted above the law. Glenn Greenwald wrote for a piece in The Guardian.

“And then there are the two War on Terror presidents. George Bush seized on the 9/11 attack to usher in radical new surveillance and detention powers in the PATRIOT ACT, spied for years on the communications of US citizens without the warrants required by law, and claimed the power to indefinitely imprison even US citizens without charges in military brigs.

His successor, Barack Obama, went further by claiming the power not merely to detain citizens without judicial review but to assassinate them…He has waged an unprecedented war on whistleblowers, dusting off Wilson’s Espionage Act of 1917 to prosecute more than double the number of whistleblowers than all prior presidents combined. And he has draped his actions with at least as much secrecy, if not more so, than any president in US history.”

What is clear is that Obama’s legacy is shaping up to be one rife with assaults on civil liberties, government secrecy, and broken promises. Here are my top ten:

1. National Defense Authorization Act or NDAA: Signed into law by Obama, it authorizes the U.S. government to carry out “counter-terrorism” domestically and detain INDEFINITELY and WITHOUT TRIAL any U.S. citizen who is suspected of any sort of suspicious activity that could be deemed terrorism or supporting terrorism. And what’s more, these U.S. citizens could be shipped to one of our extraordinary rendition sites across the globe – sites like Guantánamo Bay.

2. Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan: Both U.S. citizens. Both killed in Yemen by a U.S. drone strike on September 30th, 2011. Anwar al-Awlaki was specifically targeted on Obama’s kill list. Neither was officially charged. Neither given a trial. Neither convicted of any crime.

3. Abdulrahman al-Awlaki: Just two weeks after al-Awlaki and Khan were killed, al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, was also killed in a U.S. drone strike in Yemen. Robert Gibbs, former White House press secretary and a senior adviser to Obama during his reelection campaign said, when asked about the boy’s killing, that he “should have a far more responsible father.”

4. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA): In 2008, then-Senator Obama voted for FISA, which allows for warrantless wiretapping of international communications by the NSA. In December of 2012, Obama extended it for another five years.

5. Patriot Act: In May, 2011, Obama renewed much of the Patriot Act, including wiretaps and the “lone wolf” provision which allows government surveillance of individuals even if they are not known to be affiliated with a terrorist organization.

6. Drone Strikes: During Bush’s presidency, there were about 45 drone strikes in Pakistan. During Obama’s first year as president, there were 53. Under Obama’s presidency, drone strikes also expanded to Yemen. Additionally, the New York Times reported that the Obama administration, “counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.”

7. Whistleblowers: The Obama administration has charged more people under the Espionage Act than all past presidents…combined. Six have been charged under the law thus far: Thomas Drake, former senior executive at the NSA, Shamai K. Leibowitz, former FBI translator, Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, a nuclear proliferation specialist, former CIA agent John Kiriakou, Jeffrey Sterling, former CIA officer, and…

8. Bradley Manning: Pfc Bradley Manning, the sixth in the list of those charged under the Espionage Act, has now spent over three years in jail without trial for releasing classified documents to the website Wikileaks. The documents he released exposed lies and corruption by U.S. government officials, killings of civilians, torture in Iraq, drone strike cover-ups, and abuse of children by U.S. government contractors abroad. They included the Collateral Murder video, showing a U.S. Apache helicopter gunning down over a dozen people in Baghdad in 2007, including civilians and two Reuter’s employees, photojournalist Namir Noor-Eldeen and his driver Saeed Chmagh. Also released were the Iraq War Logs, chronicling reports from 2004-2009 of thousands of cases of prisoner torture and abuse filed against coalition forces in Iraq. The reports include gruesome description of people being whipped with cables, sexually assaulted, urinated on, and hung from the ceiling on hooks. In addition, the War Logs added 15,000 civilian deaths to the known body count, totalling over 150,000 people, of which about 80% were civilian.

9. Spying on Muslim Communities: Under the Obama administration, the NYPD and the CIA have joined together to spy on communities of Muslims in the U.S. using “human mapping” or racial and religious profiling, and in 2011, AP reported the use of “mosque crawlers” or informants used to monitor sermons and other areas where groups of Muslims are known to frequent.

10. Guantánamo Bay: During Obama’s first campaign for the presidency, he promised to close down Guantánamo Bay, a promise he quickly abandoned. Now, further controversy is surrounding the prison as prisoners, some who have been detained for over a decade and many who have even been cleared for release, have gone on hunger strike. Of the 166 prisoners at Guantánamo, at least 130 are refusing to eat as part of a hunger strike that began this February. At least 20 prisoners are being force-fed, which the United Nations Human Rights Commission considers torture.

This list is by no means exhaustive. I didn’t mention the 11th anniversary that occurred last October of Operation Enduring Freedom, marking over a decade of involvement in Afghanistan. I didn’t mention the past six years of fighting terror in Somalia. I didn’t mention that we have been dropping drones on Pakistan for the past nine years. Then of course, there is the War on Drugs in Latin America – a war that we have been waging to no end for decades, costing the U.S. billions of dollars and an untold number of lives. I didn’t mention that we are militarily involved in an estimated 60% of the world’s nations. I didn’t mention Obama’s record deportations of illegal immigrants that far exceeds the Bush-era deportations. And these things will continue because we ignore them. The right is distracted by the government “coming for their guns.” The left is complacent because a Democrat is in office. Meanwhile, our government continues to act as if it is above the rule of law. If Obama’s legacy is one of secrecy, egregious assaults on civil liberties, and drone strikes around the world, our legacy is one of ignorance, stupidity and complacency. I’m still not sure which is worse.

Alyssa Rohricht maintains Crash Culture and can be reached at aprohricht@msn.com.

National Socialism US/Obama Style

noreply@blogger.com (Alien) — Mon, 13 May 2013 12:52:00 +0000

Obama Makes Black Liberation Speech an Act of Terrorism

Black Panther activist Assata Shakur on most wanted terrorists list

By Margaret Kimberley

Global Research, May 08, 2013

Black Agenda Report

Region: USA

Theme: Police State & Civil Rights

The announcement that the FBI added Assat Shakur to the list of most wanted terrorists was initially mystifying, a real life example of the shock doctrine. Shakur has been a fugitive ever since 1979 and was granted asylum by Cuba in 1984. It seemed inexplicable that the government would reinitiate searching for a 65-year old woman who had already been at large for more than thirty years. Yet the FBI made a grand show of the announcement, complete with a black agent at the podium and a phalanx of New Jersey state troopers. Not only was Shaukur added to the most wanted terrorist list but the government added $1 million to the $1 million bounty already in place.

Because of Barack Obama, Assata Shakur now faces the possibility of being kidnapped or murdered by the United States government. She may be held indefinitely without being charged or tried. Not only is she in danger, but because of Obama anyone who does as little as publicly defend her may potentially face the same fate.

It is the terrorist label which puts her and her supporters at greatest risk. The Patriot Act made giving “material support to terror” a federal offense which not only is punished very harshly, but is so amorphous as to mean anything the government chooses it to mean. In the Supreme Court decision which began the material support onslaught, a group attempting to teach peaceful activism was found nonetheless guilty because they had contact with the group designated as terrorist. The justices ruled that their intentions were of no consequence.

The only people safe in speaking of or contacting Shakur are those who mean her harm, and a bounty of $2 million will increase the number of persons who fall into that category. Not only is it important to resist the government and defend Shakur but also to name the villain in this story and that person is none other than Barack Obama.

One cannot be separated from the other. It is sad to see the continued effort to excuse Obama’s crimes and let him off the hook on so many occasions, but in the case of Assata Shakur the disingenuousness is particularly dangerous. Barack Obama has made manifest his predecessor’s desire to create a truly fascist machinery in this country. He resurrected the all but dead espionage act to prosecute whistle blowers and at a rate unknown under previous administrations. George W. Bush claimed the right to imprison anyone he wanted but Obama claims the right to kill anyone he wants.

On a recent broadcast of Democracy Now Angela Davis and attorney Lennox Hinds spoke quite eloquently about Shakur’s plight yet neither of them managed to mention the words Barack or Obama. The omission made the rest of their words meaningless. The justice department is Obama’s justice department. The FBI is his FBI and any and all of its decisions must get the green light straight from the president. If Assata Shakur or anyone else is labeled a terrorist by the United States government it is with Barack Obama’s express permission.

Assata Shakur could well end up dead at Obama’s hands like Anwar al-Awlakki and his sixteen year old son. Cuba may be attacked on the pretext of capturing Shakur. No president since John F. Kennedy has attempted an actual military assault on Cuban soil. Obama is known for his ability to go where other presidents have dared not. He killed Gaddafi and overthrew the Libyan government. Why wouldn’t he try the same with Cuba?

The significance of the renewed attack on Assata Shakur is not just of international significance. Obama is making a point about black America and those few who still dare to speak out against their nation’s domestic and international policy. Immediately after announcing the increased bounty and terrorist designation the FBI posted billboard sized wanted posters in Newark, New Jersey.

It seems a strange thing to do when Shakur is living thousands of miles away in Cuba. Of course the billboards are not meant to capture Shakur but to send a not so subtle message about the state of black liberation. Simply put, there won’t be any talk of black liberation. The Shakurs of the world who weren’t imprisoned, killed off by Cointelpro or bought off, have to be destroyed once and for all and any memory of them must be disappeared as well.

Assata Shakur will be used as a lesson to everyone else who didn’t get the memo. Obama’s election meant that any and all discussion of a black agenda will not only be ignored but will be consciously destroyed.

Time will tell if Cuba can withstand fifty years of attack from the United States and defend Assata Shakur and its right under international law to grant her asylum. The nearly forgotten Shakur has brought to our attention the imperial designs of America towards the rest of the world and why the people who have that power chose Barack Obama as their president.

Margaret Kimberley‘s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well as at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.

Red Line For Zionist Entity (Israel)

noreply@blogger.com (Alien) — Wed, 08 May 2013 10:35:00 +0000

Russia Not to Tolerate Further Israeli Attacks on Damascus

TEHRAN (FNA)- Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, while in Shanghai, was given a sharp dressing-down by Russian President Vladimir Putin, a warning that Russia would not tolerate further Israeli attacks on Damascus and would respond.

Putin did not say how, but he did announce he had ordered the acceleration of highly advanced Russian weapons supplies to Syria.

Israeli Debkafile’s military sources disclosed that the Russian leader was referring to S-300 anti-air systems and the nuclear-capable 9K720 Iskander (NATO named SS-26 Stone) surface missiles, which are precise enough to hit a target within a 5-7 meter radius at a distance of 280 kilometers.

In his phone call to Netanyahu, the Russian leader advised the prime minister to make sure to keep this in mind.

Since Syrian air defense teams have already trained in Russia on the handling of the S-300 interceptor batteries, they can go into service as soon as they are landed by one of Russia’s daily airlifts to Syria. Russian air defense officials will supervise their deployment and prepare them for operation.

Moscow is retaliating not just for Israel’s air operations against Syria but in anticipation of the Obama administration’s impending decision to send the first US arms shipments to the Syrian rebels.

Intelligence agencies in Moscow and the Middle-East take it for granted that by the time Washington goes public on this decision, some of the Syrian rebel factions will already be armed with American weapons.

That the measure was in the works was signified by the introduction Monday by chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee Bob Menendez of legislation allowing the US to provide arms and military training to the Syrian rebels.

US military instructors have been working with Syrian rebels at training camps in Jordan and Turkey for some months. So putting the arms in their hands only awaited a decision in Washington, the Israeli website alleged.

Putin’s message to Netanyahu was intended to reach a wider audience than Jerusalem, such as Barack Obama in Washington and President Xi Jinping in Beijing ahead of Netanyahu’s talks there Tuesday.

CIA/UNICEF Official - A Somali Is Worth 10c-a-Day

noreply@blogger.com (Alien) — Tue, 07 May 2013 18:00:00 +0000

The UN And 250,000 Dead Somalis

By Thomas C. Mountain

07 May, 2013

Countercurrents.org

The UN has announced that in 2010-2012, including the Great Horn of

Africa Drought period, at least 250,000 Somalis starved to death.

Most of those who died from starvation were internally displaced

persons, displaced in the main by the military invasion and occupation

of southern Somalia by the UN backed Ethiopian Army and then the AU

“peacekeepers”, today some 25,000 strong.

When I last wrote about starvation in Somalia I spoke of the UN

budgeting 10 cents a day for food aid to feed each Somali refugee. Its

called a “budget shortfall” as in “we want to help but we just don't

have the money”.

Yet during this period of mass starvation of the Somali people the UN

and its western overlords spent over $1 billion funding its military

“peacekeeping mission” in what's left of the country.

$1 billion for war and 250,000 Somalis left to starve to death?

Maybe knowing that the head of the largest UN food aid “ngo” in

Somalia, UNICEF, is Anthony “Tony” Lake, formerly National Security

Advisor of the USA and once nominated to be Director of the CIA can

help one understand why this happened.

Tony Lake is the one who so infamously stated he “regretted” not doing

anything while knowing full well mass murder was going on in Rwanda on

his watch as Bill Clinton’s right hand man in 1994. CIA to UNICEF?

Should one be suprised to find mass starvation under his watch in

Somalia?

Today, while the propaganda machines in the western media speak of

“peace and democracy coming to Somalia for the first time in a

generation” they some how forget how Somalis themselves brought peace

to Mogadishu in 2006 only to see the UN backed Ethiopian invasion send

it all up in smoke.

The television news channels may trot out a few tame Somalis to spout

rhetoric about “Somalis running the show” behind the cameras stand

“peacekeepers” armed to the teeth by the UN backed by the

banktatorships in the west.

The fact is no power no matter how strong can bring peace to Somalia

from without, only the Somali people, left alone to sort out their own

problems can do so. In 2006 the Union of Islamic Courts succeeded for

the first time in 15 years to no avail due to armed intervention

ordered by the USA and its minions in the UN. This externally funded

and directed armed conflict continues to drive hundreds of thousands

of Somalis from their land and homes leaving them to starve on the

UN’s bounty of 10 cents a day.

And all the while more arms pour into Somalia from the west with Pax

Americana demanding that any and all paper restrictions on such be

lifted, all in the name of the “war on terror”, really a “war of

terror”, a war on the Somali people whose main misfortune turns out to

be that they live smack in the middle of the Horn of Africa astride

the “Gate of Tears”, Baab Al Mandeb, where the Indian Ocean meets the

Red Sea through which the largest economies in the world depend on to

ship their goods.

Writing about the enormous, inhuman crimes committed by the UN in the

Horn of Africa has become almost to painful to continue to do. But

when the UN sends its talking heads to tell the world that a quarter

million more Somalis died these past two years, died by mass

starvation what choice does one have but to once again raise a voice

in protest for turning your head away from the television and

pretending not to hear is simply not a decision I for one can live

with.

Thomas C. Mountain is the most widely distributed independent

journalist in Africa, living and reporting from Eritrea since 2006. He

can be reached at thomascmountain_at_yahoo_dot_com.

The Forth Reich - USA Today

noreply@blogger.com (Alien) — Mon, 06 May 2013 12:25:00 +0000

You Are The Hope

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

Global Research, May 02, 2013

Url of this article:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/you-are-the-hope/5333734

If there is hope, dear readers, you are it.

You are motivated to find truth.

You can think outside the box. You can see through propaganda.

You are the remnant with the common sense that once was a common American virtue. You come to this site, because you get explanations that are not agenda-driven, that are not BS, that are not right-wing or left-wing, conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat. You get explanations based on my lifetime of unique education and experience. Some of you are young enough to be equipped with the energy and courage to organize whatever resistance there may be to the Gestapo State that is descending on the United States of America.

Until the George W. Bush Regime, I never thought that it could happen here. I could not imagine law professors and Department of Justice (sic) officials writing legal memos justifying, in the name of a hyped “war on terror,” the termination of civil rights for United States Citizens. We were the land of the free. The Constitution was our bedrock. Yet, the Constitution and Bill of Rights were easily taken away from the inattentive American people.

The Constitution did not protect native inhabitants and slaves who were not considered part of the American population, but the universal suppression in the US of non-whites’ rights produced in the end the civil rights movement that brought moral awareness of the wrongs and successfully hitched its cause to the founding documents of the country.

Where today is moral awareness as Washington bombs civilian populations around the globe? Where is the moral conscience of the the civil rights movement as the First Black President, the first member of the oppressed class to sit in the Oval Office, validates the Bush Regime’s assertion of the right of the unaccountable executive to ignore habeas corpus and due process? Not satisfied with this crime, Obama asserted the right of the executive branch to murder any citizen suspected, without proof being offered to a court, of undefined “support of terrorism.” Today all Americans have fewer rights than blacks had prior to the Civil Rights Act.

Anything, including a column critical of war and the police state, can be declared to be “in support of terrorism.” As the tyrant Bush put it: “You are with us, or you are against us.”

The print and TV media and many Internet sites got the message: Serve Washington’s agenda, and will you will prosper. Advertisers and the CIA will pump money into your coffers. Challenge us and you will be demonized and could face a military tribunal, indefinite detention, or assassination. Bradley Manning and Julian Assange are being persecuted for telling the truth.

So far, Washington has convinced the public that Washington’s terror is mainly limited to Muslims, who are obligingly demonized by print, TV, and much of the Internet media. However, if Muslim American citizens lack civil liberty, so do all other American citizens. Those who are safe are those who ally with the tyrant and remain subservient.

To ally with the tyrant, a United States citizen must have no moral conscience, no sense of justice, no compassion for the innocent and dispossessed. These are the worst kind of Americans; yet, they are the only ones who can succeed in the present environment.

Every time I write a column that is the truth or the truth as I am able to discover it, instead of hawking the propaganda line, I move up on the list of those who are persona non grata in the Empire.

A writer can find himself demonized and declared a kook simply by reporting findings from distinguished scientists, high-rise architects, structural engineers, first responders, and an international collection of high government officials. Not too long ago a writer or reporter for the Huffington Post discovered to his surprise that Pat Buchanan and I disagreed with all the wars that had been launched to protect us from terrorism. He asked me for an interview, and I agreed.

An hour or so after the interview was posted on the Huffington Post, I received an emergency call or email. He had been criticized for interviewing me, “for giving you a forum when you are a 9/11 sceptic.” He was unsure that it was possible for a Reagan presidential appointee to be a 9/11 sceptic and asked if I was.

I replied that I had reported the findings of scientists, architects, engineers, and the public testimony of first responders, because I thought these were qualified people whose opinions at least ranked equally with the politicians on the 9/11 Commission and the talking heads on Fox “News” and CNN, none of whom could pass a high school test in the laws of physics, much less high-rise architecture and structural engineering.

The Huffington Post writer panicked. Instead of taking down the interview, he felt impelled to assure readers and his boss that he had been deceived. He wrote at the beginning and ending of the interview that he did not know he was interviewing someone about the Iraq War who had given ink to those conspiracy theorists who raised questions about the truthfulness of the US government. He wrote that my views on the wars should be disregarded, because I wrote that scientists, architects, engineers, and first responders provided evidence contrary to the government’s claims.

And there you have it.

The Huffington Post has far more readers than I do, and far more money. There is no limit on the ability of the Huffington Post to tell and sell the lies of the Agenda.

I can remember when I was a Wall Street Journal editor and columnist, a Business Week columnist, a Scripps Howard News Service columnist and appeared regularly in the major mainstream print media and even from time to time on TV talking head programs. Today, the editor or producer who gave me a forum would be fired instantly, and they all know it.

It is discouraging that after so many transparent lies and orchestrations–weapons of mass destruction, al-Qaeda connections, Iranian nukes–the majority of Americans still believe the government. Americans are even buying into the line that Syria is ruled by a brutal dictator whose overthrow justifies Washington’s alliance with its 9/11 enemy, al-Qaeda, in order to overthrow a secular ruler who constrains al-Qaeda.

Washington has come full circle. Its enemy is now its ally. Washington wasted trillions of dollars and countless lives in eleven years of war and constructed a domestic police state all in order to combat al Qaeda with whom Washington is now allied against the Syrian government.

The public’s response to the Boston Marathon Bombing is even more discouraging. Not even King George and his Redcoats could achieve what Homeland Security just pulled off–locking down 100 square miles of Boston and its suburbs with heavily armed troops tramping through citizens’ homes barking harsh orders, all justified by a hunt for one 19-year old suspect. It was the Third Reich’s Gestapo in operation right here in “freedom and democracy” America. Ron Paul is correct that the suspension of civil liberty is a greater threat than the bombing. Note the government’s euphemism for martial law–”shelter-in-place.”

Two brothers have been convicted in the media and by the Obama Regime, including the president’s own words, of a bombing without the public ever being presented with any evidence except anonymous unattributed reports and a film of the alleged brothers walking with backpacks, which were ubiquitous.

I am old enough to remember when it was impermissible for government and media to convict a person prior to the jury’s verdict. Americans once lived in a free country governed by the rule of law in which a person was innocent until proven guilty.

What was the reason or evidence for naming the brothers suspects? Was any reason given, or was the film of the two walking with backpacks simply shown over and over, hour after hour, day after day, with the media reporting that these are the suspects. In other words, was it beat into your brain that they were suspects because there they are in the film? If not, why was the same film shown repeatedly? Fox “News” was still showing the film on April 26, eleven days after the bombing and might still be showing it. Did you experience: “Here are the suspects. See them. They have backpacks. See. We know that they are suspects, because, see, there they are.”

When is the last time the media investigated anything? A good candidate for investigation is the post-bombing rampage the brothers allegedly went on, robbing a 7/11 store (later contradicted by local police), killing a campus policeman, shooting a transit cop, high-jacking a SUV and releasing the owner.

Why would terrorists seeking to escape in order to strike again call attention to themselves in such outlandish ways and release a car-jacked owner to alert the police of the tag number? If the brothers were willing to kill police with gunfire and innocents with bombs, why release the guy whose vehicle they stole so he could inform the police of the license plate and make the brothers’ capture easier? What is the evidence, other than “reports from authorities,” that these events occurred or had any more connection to the brothers than the falsely reported 7/11 robbery that local police disavowed? Why does the US media simply accept whatever government authorities say?

Where is the evidence of a first shoot-out and a second shoot-out? The second shoot- out consisted of the authorities bombarding a motionless youth bleeding from wounds in a boat with multiple volleys of stun grenades and then multiple gunshots. The unconscious 19 year old was unarmed and unable to respond to the boat owner who discovered him. As he lies there, he is shot many times, including through the throat, and is on life support. But the very next day, according to the presstitute media, he is providing hand-written confessions.

Was the purpose of the reports of a murderous rampage to create fear among the population so that they would accept martial law and home invasions by armed troops ordering American citizens out of their homes with hands over their heads on the pretext that they might be harboring the Boston Marathon Bomber?

The videos of the street celebration in which Bostonians thank the police and of the two Boston families, if not scripted by actors, shows Americans who far from opposing the police state welcome it. A father says that he with his daughter in his arms was forced out of his home by troops pointing automatic rifles at their heads, but that he was thankful for the safety the police provided him by violating every civil right that the Constitution gave him. A woman says it was scary but that “the police are just doing their jobs.” Are Americans now so brainwashed that they attribute their safety to the presence of a Gestapo Police State?

Why have detention facilities been built? Why did Homeland Security purchase a billion or more rounds of ammunition? Why does Homeland Security have 2,700 tanks and a para-military force? Why aren’t these questions being investigated?

The US Constitution is the product of 900 years of human efforts to restrain brutal government and to make government subject to law. It only took Bush and Obama eleven years to get rid of it.

US Is Zionist Satrap

noreply@blogger.com (Alien) — Thu, 02 May 2013 17:40:00 +0000

Kennedy, the Lobby and the Bomb ~ by Laurent Guyénot

Exactly fifty years ago a crucial episode in the history of “U.S. democracy” took place, an epic struggle whose outcome influenced the future of the entire world. Guyénot Laurent revisits those events and reminds us of what was at stake at that important moment in history.

Kennedy and the AIPAC
In May 1963, the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations opened an investigation into the covert activities of foreign agents on U.S. soil, focusing in particular on the American Zionist Council and the Jewish Agency for Israel. [1] The investigation was prompted by a report from the Chairman of that standing Committee, Senator J. William Fulbright, written in March 1961 (declassified in 2010), stating: “In recent years there has been an increasing number of incidents involving attempts by foreign governments, or their agents, to influence the conduct of American foreign policy by techniques outside normal diplomatic channels.” By covert activities, including “within the United States and elsewhere,” Fulbright was referring to the 1953 “Lavon Affair” [2], where a group of Egyptian Jews was recruited by Israel to carry out bomb attacks against British targets, which were to be blamed on the Muslim Brotherhood so as to discredit Nasser in the eyes of the British and Americans.

The Senate investigation brought to light a money laundering racket through which the Jewish Agency (indivisible from the State of Israel and a precursor to the Israeli Government) was channelling tens of millions of dollars to the American Zionist Council, the main Israeli lobby in the United States. Following this investigation, the Department of Justice, under the authority of Attorney General Robert Kennedy, ordered the American Zionist Council to register as “agents of a foreign government,” subject to the requirements of the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, involving the close monitoring of its activities.

This attempt to counter Israel’s growing interference in U.S. politics undoubtedly enjoyed the support of the President. At the time when he was still a young journalist covering the United Nations inaugural conference, John Kennedy was troubled by Israel’s ability to buy politicians, up to and including the President himself. By recognizing the State of Israel on May 15, 1948, (just ten minutes after its official proclamation) despite the unanimous disapproval of his government, President Harry Truman not only gained a place in biblical history (“Truman’s historic act of recognition will remain forever inscribed in golden letters in the 4000-year history of the Jewish people”, declared the Israeli ambassador), he also pocketed two million dollars to revitalize his re-election campaign. “That’s why our recognition of Israel was rushed through so fast,” Kennedy told his friend novelist and essayist Gore Vidal [3].

In 1960, John Kennedy himself received a financial aid offer from the Israeli lobby for his presidential campaign. He decoded Abraham Feinberg’s proposal for his journalist friend Charles Bartlett in the following terms: “We know your campaign is in trouble. We’re willing to pay your bills if you’ll let us have control of your Middle East policy.” Bartlett recalls Kennedy’s promise that “if he ever did get to be President, he was going to do something about it [4].” Between 1962 and 1963, he submitted seven campaign finance reform bills but all were defeated by the influential groups they sought to restrain.

All government efforts to stymie the corruption of American democracy by Israeli agents were stopped short by Kennedy’s assassination and his brother’s replacement at the Department of Justice by Nicholas Katzenbach. The American Zionist Council evaded foreign agent status by dissolving and renaming itself American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Ten years later (April 15, 1973), Fulbright commented on CBS: “Israel controls the U.S. Senate. [...] The great majority of the Senate of the U.S. – somewhere around 80 percent – are completely in support of Israel; anything Israel wants Israel gets.” AIPAC continued the same practices, dodging any sanction even when its members were caught red-handed in acts of espionage and high treason. In 2005, two AIPAC officials, Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman, were acquitted after having received from a member of the Pentagon Office of Special Plans, Larry Franklin, documents classified as Secret-Defense which they transmitted to a senior Israeli official.

In 2007, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt demonstrated in their book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy that AIPAC and less prominent pro-Israel lobbies were the main cause of the war in Iraq and, more broadly, the determining factor in the foreign policy of the U.S. in the Middle East. Considering that nothing has changed, there is no reason to believe that the government of Benjamin Netanyahu will not also obtain from the United States the destruction of Iran that it consistently clamors for.

On October 3, 2001, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was reported by Kol Yisrael radio to have said to his Foreign Minister Shimon Peres that “We, the Jewish people control America, and the Americans know it.” His successor Benjamin Netanyahu gave a demonstration of that on May 24, 2011, before the U.S. Congress, when members of both houses stood up to cheer him 29 times, in particular after each of the following remarks: “In Judea and Samaria, the Jewish people are not foreign occupiers“; “No distortion of history could deny the 4000- year-old bond between the Jewish people and the Jewish land“; “Israel will not return to the indefensible boundaries of 1967”; “Jerusalem must never again be divided. Jerusalem must remain the united capital of Israel.”

Kennedy, the bomb and Dimona

Had Kennedy lived, Israel’s influence would most certainly have been curbed on yet another front, that of nuclear weapons. By the early 1950s, David Ben Gurion, who combined the functions of prime minister and defense minister, had engaged his country in the secret manufacturing of nuclear weapons, diverting the Atoms for Peace cooperation program, naively launched by Eisenhower, from its intended goals. Briefed by the CIA about the real purpose of the Dimona facility as soon as he moved into the White House, Kennedy put heavy pressure on the Israelis not to pursue it. He demanded that Ben Gurion open up Dimona for regular inspections, at first in person in New York in 1961, then through formal and increasingly insistent letters. In the last one, dated June 15, 1963, Kennedy urged that a first visit should take place immediately, followed by regular visits every six months, otherwise “This Government’s commitment to and support of Israel could be seriously jeopardized [5].” The reaction to this message was astonishing: Ben Gurion resigned on June 16, thus avoiding receipt of the letter. As soon as the new Prime Minister Levi Eshkol took office, Kennedy sent him a similar letter, dated July 5, 1963.

Kennedy’s intention was not to deprive Israel of a power which was reserved to the United States and its NATO allies. The President’s approach was part of a much more ambitious project, which he had announced on September 25, 1961, nine months after taking office, before the General Assembly of the United Nations: “Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be inhabitable. Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us. [...] It is therefore our intention to challenge the Soviet Union, not to an arms race, but to a peace race – to advance together step by step, stage by stage, until general and complete disarmament has been achieved [6].” The message was well received by Nikita Khrushchev, who responded favorably in a 26-page confidential letter dated September 29, 1961, delivered through secret channels. After the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis, the nuclear war that was narrowly avoided thanks to their composure brought the two heads of State even closer to the awareness of their shared responsibility to liberate humanity from the nuclear threat. Khrushchev sent Kennedy a second private letter in which he expressed the hope that at the end of Kennedy’s eight years of presidency, “we could create good conditions for peaceful coexistence on earth and this would be highly appreciated by the peoples of our country as well as by all other peoples [7].” Despite other crises, Kennedy and Khrushchev continued this secret correspondence, now declassified, comprising a total of 21 letters in which the intention to abolish nuclear weapons was a prominent concern.

In 1963, negotiations led to the first limited test ban treaty prohibiting nuclear weapon tests in the atmosphere, outer space and underwater, which was signed on August 5, 1963, by the Soviet Union, the United States and the United Kingdom. Six weeks later, on September 20, 1963, Kennedy manifested his pride and hope before the United Nations: “Two years ago I told this body that the United States had proposed and was willing to sign a limited test ban treaty. Today that treaty has been signed. It will not put an end to war. It will not remove basic conflicts. It will not secure freedom for all. But it can be a lever, and Archimedes, in explaining the principles of the lever, was said to have declared to his friends: ’Give me a place where I can stand and I shall move the world.’ My fellow inhabitants of this planet, let us take our stand here in this Assembly of nations. And let us see if, in our own time, we can move the world to a just and lasting peace [8].” In his last letter to Kennedy, handed to U.S. Ambassador Roy Kohler but which was never forwarded to the addressee, Khrushchev also took pride in this first historic treaty that “has injected a fresh spirit into the international atmosphere.” He formulated other proposals, borrowing Kennedy’s words: “Their implementation would clear the road to general and complete disarmament and, consequently, to the delivering of the peoples from the threat of war [9].”

For Kennedy, the nuclear weapon was the negation of all historical efforts to civilize war by sparing civilians. He said to his friend and assistant Kenneth O’Donnell during his campaign for the Test Ban Treaty, “I keep thinking of the children, not my kids or yours, but the children all over the world.” In his televised speech on July 26, 1963, he reiterated: “This treaty is for all of us. It is particularly for our children and our grandchildren, and they have no lobby here in Washington [10].”

In the sixties, nuclear disarmament was a realistic goal. Only four countries had a nuclear weapon. There was a historic opportunity to be seized, and Kennedy was determined not to pass it up. “I am haunted by the feeling that by 1970, unless we are successful, there may be ten nuclear powers instead of four, and by 1975, fifteen or twenty [11],” he uttered prophetically during his press conference of March 21, 1963. While all NATO member states and countries of the communist bloc were following the example of the USA and the USSR and taking a first step towards nuclear disarmament, Israel was acting secretly on its own, and Kennedy was determined to prevent it.

Kennedy’s death a few months later eased the pressure on Israel. Johnson chose to turn a blind eye on the activities at Dimona. John McCone, the CIA director appointed by Kennedy, resigned in 1965, complaining of Johnson’s lack of interest in the subject. Israel acquired its first bomb around 1967, without ever admitting it. Nixon was just as unconcerned as Johnson, while his National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger privately expressed his satisfaction at the idea of having friendly Israel as a nuclear ally. Nixon, who ushered the “deep state” into the White House so to speak, played a double game: at the same time as he publicly supported the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty (which was not a U.S. initiative), he sent a contradictory top-secret National Security Decision Memorandum (NSDM-6) saying: “There should be no efforts by the United States government to pressure other nations [...] to follow suit. The government, in its public posture, should reflect a tone of optimism that other countries will sign or ratify, while clearly disassociating from any plan to bring pressure on these countries to sign or ratify [12].”

According to 2011 figures from SIPRI (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute), there are today across the world about 20,000 nuclear bombs with an average power 30 times that of Hiroshima, which equals 600,000 times Hiroshima. Of these, 1,800 nuclear warheads are on alert, i.e. ready to be launched in only a few minutes. With less than 8 million people, Israel is the world’s sixth nuclear power.

“If the President had his way, there would be a nuclear war each week [13],” Kissinger was reported to have said. In the 1950s, Nixon had recommended to Eisenhower the use of the atomic bomb in Indochina and Korea.

It was not until 1986, with the publication in the Sunday Times of photographs taken by Israeli technician Mordechai Vanunu inside Dimona, that the world discovered that Israel had secretly developed the atomic bomb. After being kidnapped by the Israeli secret services, Vanunu was convicted of the charge of “betraying state secrets.” He spent 18 years in prison, including 11 in complete isolation. Since his release in 2004, he is prohibited from leaving Israel and communicating with foreign countries.

Johnson and the USS Liberty

Kennedy would not be remembered in Tel Aviv as a friend of Israel. In addition to his attacks against the outrageous lobbying activities of Israel and its nuclear power ambitions, Kennedy defended the right of return of the 800,000 Palestinian refugees expelled from their neighborhoods and villages in 1947-48. On November 20, 1963, his delegation to the United Nations called for the implementation of Resolution 194 crafted for this purpose. Kennedy probably never got the chance to read Israel’s hysterical reactions in the newspapers: two days later, he was dead. Johnson’s rise to power was greeted with relief in Israel: “There is no doubt that, with the accession of Lyndon Johnson, we shall have more opportunity to approach the President directly if we should feel that U.S. policy militates against our vital interests,” considered Israeli newspaper Yedio Ahoronot. Far from reproaching Israel for its ethnic cleansing, Johnson fully embraced the myth of “a land without people for a people without a land“, even going so far as to compare in front of a Jewish audience, “Jewish pioneers building a house the desert” with his own ancestors colonizing the New World – which, in fact, unintentionally underscored the equivalence between Israel’s denial of its ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and the denial by the Americans of their own genocide history.

While Kennedy had cut down aid to Israel, Johnson increased it from 40 million to 71 million and to 130 million the following year. While the Kennedy administration had authorized the sale of a limited number of defensive missile batteries to Israel, under Johnson more than 70% of the aid was earmarked for military equipment, including 250 tanks and 48 Sykhawkoffensive aircraft. Military aid to Israel reached 92 million in 1966, more than the total of all previous years combined. Conversely, by denying them U.S. aid, Johnson forced Egypt and Algeria to turn to the Soviet Union to maintain and upgrade their defense systems. In June 1967, Johnson gave Israel a “yellow light” for its so-called “preventive” war against Egypt, by a letter dated 3 June, when he assured Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol of his determination to “protect the territorial integrity of Israel [...] and provide as effective American support as possible to preserve the peace and freedom of your nation and the area.”

Kennedy’s death deeply affected the Arab world, where his portrait graced many homes. “Now, De Gaulle is the only Western head of state on whose friendship the Arabs can rely,” said Gamal Abdul Nasser. While reducing aid to Israel, Kennedy had generously provided grain to Egypt as part of the Food for Peace program. For that country, the short-lived presidency of John F. Kennedy will have been an enchanted interlude, a dream shattered all too soon. In 1954, under Eisenhower, Egypt had been the target of false flag terrorist acts perpetrated by Israel in order to “break the West’s confidence in the existing Egyptian regime [and] to prevent economic and military aim from the West to Egypt [14],” according to the very words of the head of military Intelligence (Aman) Benjamin Givli in a secret, today declassified, telegram. The accidental ignition of an explosive device led to the exposure of the conspiracy, sparking the scandal which became known as the “Lavon Affair” after defense minister Pinhas Lavon, a scandal which was quickly stifled by Israel and the United States. Prime Minister Moshe Sharett, who advocated a moderate brand of Zionism, respectful of international rules, acknowledged at that time (but only in private) the irresistible rise of extremists, among which he included future President Shimon Peres, who “wants to frighten the West into supporting Israel’s aims“and that “raises terrorism to the level of a sacred principle [15].”

Kennedy’s death gave free rein to this Machiavellian terrorism which Israel has developed into an art form. Two days before the end of the Six Day War, the Israeli army launched against the USS Liberty the most famous and disastrous of its false flag attacks. On the sunny day of June 8, 1967, three unmarked Mirage bombers and three torpedo boats flying an Israeli flag bombed, strafed and torpedoed for 75 minutes this NSA (National Security Agency) ship -unarmed, floating in international waters and easily recognizable – with the obvious intention of leaving no survivors, machine-gunning even the lifeboats. They only stopped at the approach of a Soviet ship, after killing 34 crew members, mostly engineers, technicians and translators. It is assumed that if they had succeeded in sinking the ship without witnesses, the Israelis would have attributed the crime to Egypt, so as to drag the United States into war on the side of Israel.

According to Peter Hounam, author of Operation Cyanide: Why the Bombing of the USS Liberty Nearly Caused World War III (2003), the attack on the Liberty was secretly authorized by the White House as part of the project labeled Frontlet 615, “a secret political arrangement in 1966 by which Israel and the U.S. had vowed to destroy (Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser).” The orders issued by the White House that day, which delayed the rescue mission by several hours, suggest that Johnson not only covered up the Israelis post-facto, but also conspired with them. Oliver Kirby, the NSA Director for Operations at the time, reported to journalist John Crewdson of the Chicago Tribune (October 2, 2007) that the communications transcripts from the Israeli planes intercepted by the NSA and sent to Washington immediately, left no doubt as to the identity of the attackers, and about the fact that they were aware it was a U.S. target before the attack: “I’m willing to swear on a stack of Bibles that we knew they knew [that it was a U.S. ship].” Unmasked, Israel claimed it was a case of mistaken identity and offered its apology, which Lyndon Johnson meekly accepted on the grounds that “I will not embarrass our ally.” When, in January 1968, Johnson received Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol to Washington and then invited him to his Texas ranch, relations were cozy.

Israel will have drawn a lesson of impunity whose influence on its future behavior should not be underestimated: the price for failure in a false-flag operation against the United States is zero. In fact, failure is impossible, since the Americans will themselves step in to cover up Israel’s crimes. Better yet, Johnson rewarded Israel by lifting any restriction on military equipment: weapons and U.S. aircraft immediately flocked to Tel Aviv, soon turning Israel into the top customer of the U.S. military industry.

Laurent Guyénot

The End Of NATO/FUKUS Proxy War In Syria Is Close - Salute The Syrian Arab Army

noreply@blogger.com (Alien) — Wed, 01 May 2013 20:25:00 +0000

West’s WMD Lies Fray as Syrian Army Overruns Terrorist Proxies

Absurd "chemical weapons" claims begin to fall apart amidst NATO's desperate bid to save its collapsing terror front in Syria.

By Tony Cartalucci

Global Research, April 30, 2013

Land Destroyer

Region: Middle East & North Africa

Theme: US NATO War Agenda

In-depth Report: SYRIA: NATO'S NEXT WAR?

According to the White House itself, there is no evidence that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons of any kind during the two year conflict the West itself has created and continues to perpetuate. Indeed, a letter from the White House via the Washington Post exposed just how tenuous the evidence actually is (emphasis added):

Our intelligence community does assess with varying degrees of confidence that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale in Syria, specifically the chemical agent sarin. This assessment is based in part on physiological samples. Our standard of evidence must build on these intelligence assessments as we seek to establish credible and corroborated facts. For example, the chain of custody is not clear, so we cannot confirm how the exposure occurred and under what conditions. We do believe that any use of chemical weapons in Syria would very likely have originated with the Assad regime.

The US and its allies have declared the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government a “red line,” that if crossed would incur a direct military intervention which may include air and missile strikes, the establishment of a Libyan-style no-fly-zone, and perhaps even a ground invasion. Surely, the Syrian government would gain nothing from using chemical weapons if by doing so, would give the West a war it has been seeking with Syria and its ally Iran for over a decade.

Image: Chemical weapons were used extensively during the 8 year Iran-Iraq War during the 1980′s. Despite vast quantities of chemical agents being used, both mustard and nerve gas, these “weapons of mass destruction” would only constitute 2-3% of all of the war’s casualties. Not only has the West lied about Syria using chemical weapons, but they have once again lied to the world about the threat posed by such weapons in the first place.

Syria is Already Winning the War… With Conventional Weapons

Additionally, by all accounts, including now even the Western media, the Syrian Arab Army has turned the tide and is overrunning NATO’s Al Qaeda proxies across the country, including in areas considered “rebel held.” Idlib in particular has seen several stunning victories for the Syrian government, despite the province’s proximity to NATO-member Turkey, who is openly shipping torrents of weapons, cash, and terrorists over the border.

In the Independent’s article titled, “They may be fighting for Syria, not Assad. They may also be winning: Robert Fisk reports from inside Syria,” it was reported that:

The army believe they are at last winning back ground from the Free Syrian Army and the al-Nusra Islamist fighters and the various al-Qa’ida satellites that now rule much of the Syrian countryside. From Point 45 they are scarcely a mile and a half from the Turkish frontier and intend to take the ground in between. Outside Damascus they have battled their way bloodily into two rebel-held suburbs. While I was prowling through the mountaintop positions, the rebels were in danger of losing the town of Qusayr outside Homs amid opposition accusations of the widespread killing of civilians. The main road from Damascus to Latakia on the Mediterranean coast has been reopened by the army.

The Independent continues with a very telling remark (emphasis added):

Bashar’s Special Forces now appear confident, ruthless, politically motivated, a danger to their enemies, their uniforms smart, their weapons clean. Syrians have long grown used to the claims by Israel – inevitably followed by the Washington echo machine – that chemical weapons have been used by Bashar’s forces; as an intelligence officer remarked caustically in Damascus: “Why should we use chemical weapons when our Mig aircraft and their bombs cause infinitely more destruction?”

The True Nature of Chemical Warfare – Lessons From the 1980′s Iran-Iraq War

MiGs, artillery, and superior ground forces are indeed vastly more effective than chemical weapons used on any scale, especially in the minute quantities the US is attempting to accuse the Syrian government of using. For a Western population weaned on Hollywood movies, ridiculous TV shows, and an endless torrent of misinformation from their corporate media news outlets, chemical weapons have been portrayed as “weapons of mass destruction,” with even small amounts causing catastrophic devastation.

Under the best conditions and with vast amounts of chemical agents, large casualties can be produced. But history has shown that generally, anything less than these circumstances would be a waste of time, resources, and of course in Syria’s case, politically and strategically unjustifiable.

A document produced by the US Marine Corps, titled, “Lessons Learned: The Iran-Iraq War” under “Appendix B: Chemical Weapons,” a comprehensive look at the all-out chemical warfare that took place during the devastating 8 year conflict is carefully documented. Several engagements are studied in detail, revealing large amounts of chemical agents deployed mainly to create areas of denial.

The effectiveness and lethality of chemical weapons is summarized in the document as follows (emphasis added):

Chemical weapons require quite particular weather and geographic conditions for optimum effectiveness. Given the relative nonpersistence of all agents employed during this war, including mustard, there was only a brief window of employment opportunity both daily and seasonally, when the agents could be used. Even though the Iraqis employed mustard agent in the rainy season and also in the marshes, its effectiveness was significantly reduced under those conditions. As the Iraqis learned to their chagrin, mustard is not a good agent to employ in the mountains, unless you own the high ground and your enemy is in the valleys.
We are uncertain as to the relative effectiveness of nerve agents since those which were employed are by nature much less persistent than mustard. In order to gain killing concentrations of these agents, predawn attacks are best, conducted in areas where the morning breezes are likely to blow away from friendly positions.
Chemical weapons have a low kill ratio. Just as in WWl, during which the ratio of deaths to injured from chemicals was 2-3 percent, that figure appears to be borne out again in this war although reliable data on casualties are very difficult to obtain. We deem it remarkable that the death rate should hold at such a low level even with the introduction of nerve agents. If those rates are correct, as they well may be, this further reinforces the position that we must not think of chemical weapons as “a poor man’s nuclear weapon.” While such weapons have great psychological potential, they are not killers or destroyers on a scale with nuclear or biological weapons.

According the US military’s own conclusions, the use of chemical weapons only enhance conventional warfare, but are not suitable for wiping out large swaths of enemy troops. Their effectiveness is such that the Syrian government could not justify their use, thus risk incurring direct Western military intervention. Therefore, for what strategic purpose would the Syrian Arab Army deploy chemical agents on a “small scale?” If the Syrian military already holds the initiative with far more effective conventional weapons, what purpose besides inviting the West to intervene militarily, could using quantities of chemical agents far too small to achieve any tactical gain serve?

A Desperate Fabrication – Remember “Curveball”

Conversely, it appears much more likely that such “small scale” use of chemical agents has been used to fabricate a badly needed justification for war with Syria, and open the door for the West to intervene on behalf of a devastated proxy force that is being finally swept away by the Syrian Arab Army.

Almost immediately after the US and its allies attempted to accuse Syria of using chemical weapons on a “small scale,” global backlash recalled similar allegations, which turned out also to be fabricated, in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

In the British Independent’s 2012 article, “Man whose WMD lies led to 100,000 deaths confesses all: Defector tells how US officials ‘sexed up’ his fictions to make the case for 2003 invasion,” it was stated:

A man whose lies helped to make the case for invading Iraq – starting a nine-year war costing more than 100,000 lives and hundreds of billions of pounds – will come clean in his first British television interview tomorrow.

“Curveball”, the Iraqi defector who fabricated claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, smiles as he confirms how he made the whole thing up. It was a confidence trick that changed the course of history, with Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi’s lies used to justify the Iraq war.

He tries to defend his actions: “My main purpose was to topple the tyrant in Iraq because the longer this dictator remains in power, the more the Iraqi people will suffer from this regime’s oppression.”

The Independent continues:

But Mr Janabi, speaking in a two-part series, Modern Spies, starting tomorrow on BBC2, says none of it was true. When it is put to him “we went to war in Iraq on a lie. And that lie was your lie”, he simply replies: “Yes.”
US officials “sexed up” Mr Janabi’s drawings of mobile biological weapons labs to make them more presentable, admits Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, General Powell’s former chief of staff. “I brought the White House team in to do the graphics,” he says, adding how “intelligence was being worked to fit around the policy”.

How “intelligence was being worked to fit around the policy,” indeed is the most important aspect of the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, and is without doubt what is being done in Washington, Doha, Riyadh, and Tel Aviv in regards to Syria now.

Those behind the current conspiracy against Syria hope that the public possesses no understanding whatsoever regarding chemical weapons and their true tactical utility as well as their many limitations. They hope that the public never fully realizes that “small scale” use is essentially an admission that the weapons were not used tactically, but at best, used to fabricate a pretext for war by the West and its terrorist proxies.

As the West realizes how politically unsustainable yet another war waged on a blatantly false pretense will be, it may turn to even uglier options in order to topple the Syrian government and to save face after a humiliating stand-down from their “red line.” The West’s legitimacy has long since been exhausted. Its reputation has been permanently disfigured by special interests that have commandeered and abused it.

While Syria and its allies continue to fight against this proxy-war of aggression, it is incumbent upon the rest of us to identify the corporate-financier special interests behind this war, boycott and permanently replace them with local solutions. If allowed to succeed in grave injustices against the Syrian people, these interests will be emboldened to abuse, exploit, and torment others, including those within their own borders.

Zionist Degenerates At The Heart Of US Body Politic

noreply@blogger.com (Alien) — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 17:21:00 +0000

Pushing Al Qaeda To Take On Hezbollah

By Franklin Lamb

28 April, 2013
Countercurrents.org

Beirut: “This is one damn fine idea, what took us so long to see a simple solution that was right in front of our eyes for Christ’s sake”, Senator John McCain of “Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” and “no-fly zones for Syria” notoriety, reportedly demanded to know from Dennis Ross during a recent Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) brain storming session in Washington DC.

Ross, a founder of WINEP with Israeli government start up cash (presumably reimbursed unknowingly, one way or another by American taxpayers) and currently WINEPs “Counselor”, as in “consigliere” reportedly responded to the idea of facilitating Al Qeada to wage jihad against Hezbollah with the comment: “Shiites aren’t the only ones seeking death to demonstrate their ‘resistance’ to whatever. Plenty of other Muslims also want to die as we saw last week in Boston. Let ‘em all go at it and Israel can sweep out their shit when it’s over.”

One Congressional staffer attending the WINEP event emailed to Beirut: “Dennis spoke in jest—well I assumed he did- but who knows anymore? Things are getting ever crazier inside some of these pro-Israel ‘think tanks’ around here.”

Featured on the front page of its 4/25/13 edition, the Zionist compliant New York Times writes that the Assad regime is apparently recovering but, “it must be understood that for all of the justified worries about the (al Qaeda affiliated) rebels “Assad remains an ally of Iran and Hezbollah.”

The Times adopts the views of Islamophobe, Daniel Pipes, who recommends that the US try to keep the two sides in Syria fighting as long as possible until they destroy each other. Pipes, now serving as an advisor to John McClain, wrote in the Washington Times of 4/11/13 “ Evil forces pose less danger to us when they make war on each other. This keeps them focused locally, and it prevents either one from emerging victorious and thereby posing a greater danger. Western powers should guide enemies to a stalemate by helping whichever side is losing, so as to prolong their debilitating conflict.”

Both Jeffrey Feltman, U.N. Under-Secretary General for Political Affairs and Susan Rice, U.S. Permanent Representative to the U.N, have at a minimum impliedly joined in the intriguing idea of sic’ing Jabhat al Nusra on the Party of God. This scheme, if launched, would be Feltman’s 14th attempt to topple Hezbollah and defeat the Lebanese National Resistance to the occupation of Palestine since he first arrived in Beirut from Tel Aviv in 2005 to become US Ambassador to Lebanon. This observer, among others in this region sense that given the aura still enveloping the American Embassy here, that Jeffrey never really left his Lebanese ambassadorial post and continues to occupy this position from his new UN office.

This week Feltman warned that the spillover of Syria’s war continues to be felt in Lebanon as Susan Rice, echoed him and condemned Hezbollah for “undermining the country’s “dissociation policy.” The latter being a bit obscure in meaning but connoting something like sitting around doing nothing while this country is being shelled by jihadists from among the 23 countries currently fighting in Syria. Feltman informed the media on 4/22/13 that “The Secretary-General is concerned by reports that Lebanese are fighting in Syria both on the side of the regime and on the side of the opposition, hopes that the new government will find ways to promote better compliance by all sides in Lebanon with the “disassociation policy.”

Given current divisions in Lebanon that will not happen anymore than Lebanon’s June 9th Parliamentary elections will be held on time.

For her part, Susan lectured the UN Security Council that “Hezbollah actively enables Assad to wage war on the Syrian people by providing money, weapons, and expertise to the regime in close coordination with Iran.” This position was expressed also through a statement by US. State Department spokesman, Patrick Ventrell, who said that Washington “has always been clear concerning Hezbollah’s shameful role and the support it is providing for the Syrian regime and the violence it is inducing in Syria.” Ventrell added: “We were clear from the start concerning the destructive role played by Iran as well as the Iranian role.”

Several Israeli agents in Congress are today promoting a Jabhat el Nusra-Hezbollah war even as the Obama administration terror-lists the jihadist group. Meanwhile, Senator Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.), McCain’s neocon Islamaphobe acolyte, goes a bit further and explains to Fox News, once Assad falls and Hezbollah is out of the picture “We can deal with these (jihadist) fellas.”

Recent history in Libya instructs otherwise. As Turkish commentator Cihan Celik recently noted: “A divorce with al-Nusra will not be easy in Syria.”

The past two years in Libya, that shadow of a country, reveals countless examples, three witnessed firsthand by this observer, during the long hot summer of 2011. What we saw was Gulf sponsors and funders offering young men, often unemployed, $ 100 per month, free cigarettes, and a Kalashnikov to do jihad. Plenty down and out lads still accept these offers in Libya, as they do in Syria. One reason why the militias proliferated so quickly in Libya and never melted away was the phenomenon of a wannabe jihadists deciding to be a leader and recruiting perhaps a brother or two, maybe a few cousins or tribe members, and presto, they have created a militia with power they never dreamed of. Their new life can offer many perceived benefits from running rough shod over the civilian populations and setting up myriad mini but potent criminal enterprises specializing in kidnappings, robberies, drugs, trafficking in women, and assassinations for cash. How many of these young men have turned in their weapons in Libya and returned to their former lives? Or will do so when instructed by the likes of McCain or Graham?

On 4/24/13 Jabhat Al-Nusra Front intensified its threats to officials here including the Lebanese president by releasing a challenge from its media office: “…we inform you – and you may think of that as a warning or an ultimatum – that you must take immediate measures to restrain Hezbollah, otherwise, the fire will reach Beirut. If you do not abide by this within 24 hours, we will consider that you are taking part in the massacres committed by the Hezbollah members and we will unfortunately have to burn everything in Beirut.” In addition they are calling for Jihad and the establishment of the “Resistance Factions for Jihad against the Regime in Syria” and also in Saida and Tripoli, Lebanon.

Israeli officials appear to be in agreement with the Ross/Pipes proposal to arrange for Al Qeada to launch a war against Hezbollah. The Director for External Affairs at “The Mosche Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, repeatedly claimed that the Shia are the real threat to Israel, not the Sunni and with the least threat coming from the Gulf monarchs. He offered the view recently that “Israel is now a partner of the Sunni Arab states.” Indeed, Israel hopes that Hezbollah will forget Israel when tasked with trying repel Al Nusra and other al Qaeda affiliate attacks.

According to various Israel officials who have issued statements on the subject, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan and several other members of the Arab League constitute an “alliance of anxiety for Israel” because they claim that “Sunni Arabs are not as competent as the Shia and Iran and as a result they express doubts that Israel can rely on the Sunni states in the same way that the Sunni states can reply on Israel.”

In a documentary about the Iraq war, an American soldier explains: “Actually, we don’t really have much of a problem with the Sunnis. It’s the Shias who we are afraid of. The problem has something to do with their leader who was killed centuries ago and these fellas are willing to lay their life down for the guy. Anyhow, that is what they told us in Special Ops class.”

Al Nusra fighters currently occupying parts the south west areas of Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in south Damascus, recently expressed eagerness to fight Hezbollah which they claim would give them credibility with Sunni Muslims and, oddly, in this observers view, “ credibility with western countries”, who supposedly are al Qaeda’s sworn enemies. It’s sometimes hard to know who precisely is whose enemy these days in Syria as the rebels continue using areas east and southwest of Damascus as rear bases and as gateways into the capital.

Despite boasts to the contrary from Jihadist types in Syria and Lebanon, it is not clear to this observer if Jihadist and al Qaeda-affiliated groups living among Hezbollah communities in Lebanon like Fatah al Islam, Jund al Sham or Osbat al Ansar which have been here for years would actually join the Zionist promoted anti-Hezbollah jihad.

But it is evident that some Lebanese Islamists and jihadists directly connected to al Qaeda do have the ability to target Hezbollah. Elements from each of these groups are startling to associate and identify with al Nusra inspired partly by the latter’s successful military operations of Jabhat al Nusra in Syria. Again, we saw the same thing in Libya. Enthusiastic, ambitious young men who want to improve their lot in life try to go with a winner. According to sources in the Ain al Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp, jihadist leaders such as Haytham and Mohammed al Saadi, Tawfic Taha, Oussama al Shehabi and Majed al Majed are recruiting followers and fighters in Lebanon and offer a ticket out the the squalid army surrounded, Syrian refugee inflated camp.

Homs-based media activist Mohammad Radwan Raad claims that “the embattled residents of the rebel-controlled Homs province town of Al-Qusayr welcome Saida, Lebanon based Sunni Sheikh Ahmad al-Assir’s call for Jihad in Syria.” Claims Raad, “Al-Qusayr residents welcome Assir’s call and hope the Lebanese people help kick out Hezbollah members in the area…We need anyone who can get rid of them.” This week Assir urged his followers to join Syrian rebels fighting troops loyal to President Bashar al-Assad and Lebanese Shiite movement Hezbollah. Al-Qusayr has been under rebel control for more than a year and on the scene reports indicate that it is about to be returned to central government control.

In response, two Salafist Sunni Lebanese sheikhs urged their followers to go to Syria to fight a jihad (religious war) in defense of Qusayr’s Sunni residents. “There is a religious duty on every Muslim who is able to do so… to enter into Syria in order to defend its people, its mosques and religious shrines, especially in Qusayr and Homs,” Sheikh Ahmed al-Assir told his followers. For now, experts say, such calls on the part of Lebanon’s Salafists are largely bluster because the movement is far from able to wield either the arsenal or the fighting forces of Hezbollah.

Local analysts like Qassem Kassir argue that Jabhat al Nusra and friends are not organized enough to fight against Hezbollah in a conventional war, but they could cause great damage by organizing bomb attacks against the Party of God’s bases and militants. The latter would be enough initially for Ross and WINEP and their Zionist handlers. Creating chaos in Lebanon being one of their goals but more importantly weakening the National Lebanese Resistance led by Hezbollah and also challenging Syria and Iran.

In a recent speech, Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah offered his party’s view about a promoted Sunni-Shia clash with Al-Nusra, AlQaida and all the groups which flocked to Syria, saying that what was wanted of them by those who sent them was to kill and get killed in Syria, in a massacre which will only serve the enemies of the Arabs and Muslims.

The coming months will reveal to us if the several pro-Zionist Arab regimes and Islamophobes including those at WINEP and other Israel first “think-tanks” are delusional in believing a “simple solution” in John McCain’s words, to those resisting the Zionist occupation of Palestine would be to assist Jabhat el Nusra type jihadists to make war against Hezbollah. And whether they could defeat Hezbollah or even whether Jabhat al Nusra and friends are capable of igniting yet another catastrophe in this region.

Franklin Lamb is doing research in Lebanon and Syria and can be reached c/o fplamb@gmail.com

Welcome to “War on Terror” White Merika … we’re all Syrians now ~ Photo Blog

noreply@blogger.com (Alien) — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 17:02:00 +0000

Washington’s Blog

Did the Military and Police Go Too Far in Locking Down Boston and Conducting Involuntary Door-to-Door Searches?

The above are real pictures of military and police locking down Boston and searching door-to-door for the Boston bomber in Watertown, Massachusetts.

And here’s a video of the involuntary searches and evacuations:

Senator Rand Paul and other congressmen subsequently said they would have approved of armed drones going in as well to help take out the suspect.

We have no idea yet whether or not the suspect is in fact guilty of terrorism in Boston. But it is important to remember – as Glenn Greenwald points out – the FBI has been “positive” about the guilt of numerous people who were totally innocent:

As so many cases have proven – from accused (but exonerated) anthrax attacker Stephen Hatfill to accused (but exonerated) Atlanta Olympic bomber Richard Jewell to dozens if not hundreds of Guantanamo detainees accused of being the “worst of the worst” but who were guilty of nothing – people who appear to be guilty based on government accusations and trials-by-media are often completely innocent. Media-presented evidence is no substitute for due process and an adversarial trial.

The FBI also said it was positive that Bruce Ivins was the anthrax killer (after falsely accusing 2 other people of being the culprits). However, the National Academy of Science found that the FBI failed to prove its case.

Of course, it turns out that the bombing suspect didn’t have a single weapon when all of the troops were sent in and police shot hundreds of rounds at him. He also never robbed a 7-11, as was claimed at first.

Indeed, the high-tech manhunt for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has reminded a lot of people of Running Man … the distopian Arnold Schwarzenegger movie where – after Schwarzenegger is framed – high-tech assassins are sent out to get him.

Again, we are not saying that Tsarnaev is innocent. We have no idea of his innocence or guilt.

But sending in overwhelming military and police force to get one 19-year old under ever-shifting explanations makes me a little nervous.

Many Americans assume that this was just a one-time emergency. After all, a terrorist who had allegedly killed and wounded many innocents was on the run … and had supposedly thrown more pressure cooker bombs at police.

Many other Americans are saying that this was a very overt foreshadowing of martial law … of which many top government officials have warned.

But there are many other negative consequences which stem from over-reactions to terror. For example – after 9/11 – many Americans were so scared that they supported a war in Iraq that will actually backfire and increase terrorism. Indeed, if the Boston suspect did it, it was likely because we invaded Iraq and have launched wars throughout the Middle East.

And the Iraq war was so expensive (as much as $5 to 6 trillion dollars) that it helped make us broke … which further weakensnational security.

As Andrew Napolitano writes in the conservative publication Reason … which was heartily supported by liberal site Reddit:

The American people made a pact with the devil in the weeks and months following 9/11 when they bought the Bush-era argument that by surrendering liberty they could buy safety. But that type of pact has never enhanced either liberty or safety, and its fruits are always bitter.
***
The pact with the devil occurred in the fall of 2001, when then President George W. Bush and Congress decided that they would use the machinery of the federal government to secure safety, rather than liberty. So, the Bush-inspired Patriot Act permits federal agents to write their own search warrants, and the Bush-inspired new FISA statutes permit search warrants of some Americans’ phone calls without a showing of probable cause as the Constitution requires, and the Bush-era intimidation of telephone service providers permitted our overseas spies to snoop on our domestic phone calls. None of this has enhanced safety, and all of it has diminished liberty.
***
In the Obama administration, the devil has demanded more. In the past five years, we have seen federal spies capturing the keystrokes on our computers, local police using federal dollars to install cameras and microphones on nearly every street corner, and, the latest lamentable phenomenon, the use of false emergencies to undermine freedom.
***
Think about this: The governor of Massachusetts, the superintendent of the Massachusetts State Police, the mayor of Boston, the Boston police commissioner, and the head of the Boston FBI office all proclaimed on Saturday morning that the danger had passed and Boston and its suburbs could return to normal. Yet the attorney general in Washington told his FBI agents in Boston to disregard those officials and instead pretend that the public safety was still jeopardized and then expand a 10-second window to 72 hours.

And see this.

In addition, disproportionate fear can be a corrosive force in our lives. Fear makes us unable to think straight. As we noted in 2008, in a piece called Get a Grip, America:

Former deputy national intelligence officer for transnational threats, a 23-year senior CIA analyst, who “drafted or was involved in many of the government’s most senior assessments of the threats facing our country [and who] devoted years to understanding and combating the jihadist threat”, writes today in the Washington Post that the neocons have whipped us into an irrational fear of the terrorism. In reality, “Osama bin Laden and his disciples are small men and secondary threats whose shadows are made large by our fears” and our leaders.
This is no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention. The BBC produced a documentary called The Power of Nightmares in 2005 that showed that politicians were greatly exaggerating the terrorist threat for political ends.
***
Because so many Americans got their panties in a wad about the boogeyman, we have allowed our basic rights and liberties to be taken away, allowed the executive branch to seize dictatorial powers and ignore Congress and the courts, allowed an illegal war be launched which has destroyed our economy … and has actually crippled our real national security (torture and imperial wars create real terrorists and push away our allies).

Of course, Obama – like Bush – claims that tyrannical measures are necessary to fight the war on terror. But FBI agents and CIA intelligence officials, constitutional law expert professor Jonathan Turley, Time Magazine, Keith Olbermann and the Washington Post have all said that U.S. government officials “were trying to create an atmosphere of fear in which the American people would give them more power”, and even former Secretary of Homeland Security – Tom Ridge – admits that he was pressured to raise terror alerts for political purposes … to help Bush win reelection.

In fact, fear of terror makes people stupid … people are actually much more likely to be killed by much more boring and mundane causes than terrorism.

Ryan Sager points out:

The war is in our minds, between being scared of our shadows and keeping the true threat in perspective.
***
Fear is a powerful weapon — and there’s no reason the American president should act as a force multiplier for Al Qaeda.

And as professor Scott Atran notes:

To terrorize and destabilize, terrorists need publicity and our complicity. With publicity, even failed terrorist acts succeed in terrorizing; without publicity, terrorism would fade away … By amplifying and connecting relatively sporadic terrorist acts into a generalized “war,” the somewhat marginal phenomenon of terrorism has become a primary preoccupation of our government and people.

Our founding fathers advised us not to panic:

Those who would trade safety for freedom deserve neither.
– Thomas Jefferson

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
- Benjamin Franklin

Boston Bombing Bombs

noreply@blogger.com (Alien) — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 07:54:00 +0000

Boston Bombing: Even the MSM has to Admit the Official Story Doesn’t Work – Magic Bullet Theory in the Making

Posted on April 28, 2013 by willyloman

by Scott Creighton

Found this on NBC “News’ today… they’re trying to fix a little problem we noticed a couple days ago… that is, the federal affidavit claims that both brothers rode in the stolen SUV with the secret witness all the way to Watertown. But if that’s the case, how come the witness says something else (now) and there happens to be images of the shootout with both the SUV and the Green Honda parked in the street (with nothing stopping them from getting away from the cops at the other end)

“After the Cambridge shooting, the suspects carjacked a Mercedes 350 SUV at gunpoint, according to a federal affidavit. Both suspects rode in the SUV to Watertown, the affidavit says.
However, photographs obtained by NBC News and eyewitness accounts given to NBC News producers indicate that both a green Honda and black Mercedes SUV were parked at the scene of the Watertown shooting. Several people who were near the scene that night said the Honda was positioned behind the Mercedes.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been moved from the hospital to a federal prison at Fort Devens, Mass., the government said on Friday.” NBC News

Massachusetts State Police conducted a reenactment of the scene to see if they could figure out their little problem.

Below is the text of the affidavit and as you can see, there is no mention of the SUV and the other car going to Watertown. This is based on the statement given to the police by the secret witness and police statements from those who supposedly chased the SUV. If they were chasing two cars, don’t you think they would have noticed it:

I base the allegations set forth in paragraphs 18 through 27 on information that has
been provided to me by fellow law enforcement officers, including members of the JTTF and state
and local law enforcement who responded to the crime scenes, as well as on publicly available
information that I deem reliable.
18. At approximately 5:00 p.m. on April 18, 2013, the FBI published video and
photographic images of Bomber One and Bomber Two on its web site. Those images were
widely rebroadcast by media outlets all over the country and the world.
19. Near midnight on April 18,2013, an individual carjacked a vehicle at gunpoint in
Cambridge, Massachusetts. A victim of the carjacking was interviewed by law enforcement and
provided the following information. The victim stated that while he was sitting in his car on a
road in Cambridge, a man approached and tapped on his passenger-side window. When the
victim rolled down the window, the man reached in, opened the door, and entered the victim’s
vehicle. The man pointed a firearm at the victim and stated, “Did you hear about the Boston explosion?” and “I did that.” The man removed the magazine from his gun and showed the victim
that it had a bullet in it, and then re-inserted the magazine. The man then stated, “I am serious.”
20. The man with the gun forced the victim to drive to another location, where they
picked up a second man. The two men put something in the trunk of the victim’s vehicle. The
man with the gun took the victim’s keys and sat in the driver’s seat, while the victim moved to the
front passenger seat. The second man entered the victim’s vehicle and sat in the rear passenger
seat. The man with the gun and the second man spoke to each other in a foreign language.
21. While they were driving, the man with the gun demanded money from the victim,
who gave the man 45 dollars. One of the men compelled the victim to hand over his ATM card
and password. They then drove to an ATM machine and attempted to withdraw money from the
victim’s account. The two men and the victim then drove to a gas station/convenience store in the
vicinity of816 Memorial Drive, Cambridge. The two men got out of the car, at which point the
victim managed to escape.
22. A short time later, the stolen vehicle was located by law enforcement in Watertown,
Massachusetts. As the men drove down Dexter Street in Watertown, they threw at least two small
improvised explosive devices (“IEDs”) out of the car. A gun fight ensued between the car’s
occupants and law enforcement officers in which numerous shots were fired. One of the men was
severely injured and remained at the scene; the other managed to escape in the car. That car was
later found abandoned a short distance away, and an intact low-grade explosive device was
discovered inside it. In addition, from the scene of the shootout on Laurel Street in Watertown,
the FBI has recovered two unexploded IEDs, as well as the remnants of numerous exploded IEDs.

As you can see, no mention of the second car and they both rode in the car with the victim. But here is the second car in the photographs:

Here are the rest of those images.

The Washington Post published a version of the secret witness’ story which is similar, but not entirely to the official version.

According to the report, one of the brothers jumped out of a Honda Civicand reached in through the front passenger side window of the SUV, opened the door and pointed a silver colored semi-automatic pistol at the driver.
The gunman then ordered him to drive to Watertown and was followed by the Honda, the report said.
Once in Watertown, the victim was ordered to slide over to the passenger side, the report said. The two brothers then removed luggage from the Honda and loaded it into the trunk of the Mercedes, the report said.
From there, one of the brothers drove the Mercedes while the second sat behind the victim, the report said. Washington Post

In this version, both brothers pick up the victim at the original carjacking having jumped out of the Green Honda. But instead of riding together, one follows behind in that car til the get to Watertown where they stop for some reason, take luggage out of the Honda, put it in the SUV and then they all go on from there. Again, ditching the Honda.

There are a lot of glaring problems with the official story but this one is pretty big. How do you miss another car altogether? How do you miss two guys hijacking your car instead of one?

Also notice… in the official story, the two brothers are in the car and the victim never drives… but in his story, the gunman makes him drive all the way to Watertown. In the official story he only made it as far as Cambridge.

The only place the officials could have gotten that story to begin with is from the secret witness/victim. He’s the only one who was there and was still alive or not incapacitated. That wasn’t a statement from the younger brother so it could ONLY have come from the victim. But it was wrong. Demonstrably wrong.

How did he forget he drove to Watertown? How did he forget the first time telling the story about the green Honda that followed them? How could he forget the other brother getting in the car? How could the cops explain the second car in the wild bombs-going-off car chase?

When a witness screws up this badly, it’s a big deal. Details this large aren’t missed easily not by witnesses and not by police officers chasing black SUVs tossing bombs out the windows.

Is there another magic bullet theory in the making?

God's Will

noreply@blogger.com (Alien) — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 07:48:00 +0000

If you want to go to heaven, you had better get busy overthrowing Syria — love, Israel

Paul Craig Roberts

The United States government has been at war for eleven years. The US military destroyed Iraq, leaving the country and millions of lives in ruins and releasing sectarian blood-letting that had been kept in check by the secular Saddam Hussein government. On any given day in “liberated” Iraq, the death toll is as high as during the height of the US attempted occupation.

In Afghanistan eleven years of US attempted occupation has had no more success than a decade of Soviet occupation. The Afghans are still not worn down despite more than two decades of war with the two superpowers. Like the Soviets, the Americans have managed to kill many women, children, and village elders, but precious few warriors. In place of the Soviet puppet government there is Washington’s puppet government. That is the only change, and Washington’s puppet is no more secure than the Soviet one was.

In Libya, Washington used its corrupt NATO puppets and CIA-recruited bandits to overthrow another stable government, that of Muammar Gaddafi, leaving Libya mired in sectarian violence. A stable prosperous country has simply been destroyed by western governments that profess human rights values and condemn China and Russia for not having any.

Washington has also been killing civilians with drones and air strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, two countries with which Washington is not at war but has purchased the governments, paying the Pakistani and Yemeni governments for the right to murder their citizens and destabilizing both countries in the process.

And now in Syria Washington is at work destroying another stable secular government headed by a British trained eye doctor.

Washington’s eleven years of illegal aggression against Muslim countries–war crimes according to the Nuremberg trials of Nazis–have resulted in civilian deaths far in excess of military casualties and in a domestic American police state that has destroyed the rule of law and the constitutional protections of US citizens. Washington and its presstitutes have emphasized that these costs are necessary to save Americans from al-Qaeda terrorists, none of whom have ever been apprehended in the United States.

Having listened to the propaganda line pumped out by Washington and its Ministry of Propaganda for eleven years, imagine my astonishment when I saw two juxtaposed headlines: “Al-Nusra pledges allegiance to al-Qaeda” (BBC) and “Move to Widen Help for Syrian Rebels Gains Speed in West” (NY Times). Al-Nusra is the main military component of the “Syrian rebels,” and it has allied itself with our mortal enemy–Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda.

Wait a minute! Our government told us for eleven years that we blew trillions of dollars on wars to protect Americans from al-Qaeda, endangering Social Security, Medicare, the social safety net, the dollar’s exchange value, the credit rating of the US Treasury, and our civil liberties in order to save America from al-Qaeda terrorists. So why is Washington now supporting al-Qaeda’s overthrow of the secular, non-Islamist government in Syria which has never ever done anything whatsoever to Americans!?

The New York Times presstitutes, Michael R. Gordon and Mark Landler, elevated the terrorist al-Qaeda organization to the status of “the Syrian opposition.” At a lunch meeting hosted by Washington’s puppet, British Foreign Secretary William Hague, and US Secretary of State John Kerry, “the Syrian opposition,” aka al-Qaeda, requested antiaircraft and antitank weapons. A senior Washington official said: “Our assistance has been on an upward trajectory, and the president (Obama) has directed his national security team to identify additional measures so that we can increase assistance.”

US Secretary of State John Kerry announced a $123 million “defense aid package” to “the Syrian opposition” that now includes al-Qaeda. Washington had already sent $117 million in “food and medical supplies” to “the Syrian opposition,” and ordered its Middle Eastern puppets to send arms. Note the Orwellian language: support for an outside terrorist force seeking to destroy a government and a people is called a “defense aid package.”

On April 11 the establishment French newspaper, Le Monde, reported that the al-Nosra organization affiliated with al-Qaeda is the dominant force in “the Syrian opposition,” not democratic revolutionaries. Despite this fact, Washington’s puppets, France and Britain, are pushing the European Union to send arms to the al-Qaeda affiliated “Syrian opposition.” And Senator John McCain wants US airstrikes on Syrian government forces with whom the US is not at war, in order to provide air cover for al-Qaeda’s takeover of Syria.

Meanwhile, the Islamist Shiites, whom the Americans left in control of Iraq, have announced that they have joined the battle against the American-supported al-Qaeda forces seeking to radicalize Syria.

So far at last count, the UN reports that the military attack on Syria organized by Washington’s proxies has killed 70,000 people. But americans are preoccupied with the Boson Marathon bombing, which killed 3.

Once again “the indispensable people” are bringing death and destruction to an entire country in order to bring to the dead “freedom and democracy.” No Syrian asked for this “liberation” from his life.

Be a Proud American. We are doing our duty to our rightful hegemony over the world and to Israel, which has purchased our government. It is our right to be the hegemonic power on the planet earth, and that includes the Mediterranean Sea. Therefore it is Washington’s right to overthrow Syria in order to get rid of the Russian naval base there. The Romans would never have put up with a foreign power having a naval base in the Mediterranean, and we can do no less, unless we are some kind of pansy state afraid of our own shadow. The Mediterranean was mare nostrum–our sea–for the Romans. Now it is our sea, and by god we are going to claim it by overthrowing Syria.

Israel, of course, was given the rights to “Greater Israel” by God himself–who am I to question the Christian Zionist preachers who are growing fat on Israeli money–and part of “Greater Israel” is the river in southern Lebanon that supplies precious water.

Hizbollah, provisioned by Syria and Iran has prevented Israel from confiscating southern Lebanon in order to acquire the water rights that God gave them. Therefore, to fulfill our obligations as Israel’s puppet, we are required to destroy both Syria and Iran so that Hizbollah is isolated and out of the way and “Greater Israel” can be created.

The Christian Zionist churches in the US repeat this message every Sunday. If you don’t believe it, you are some kind of anti-american anti-semite and should be exterminated. Or you could be a despicable Muslim terrorist to be waterboarded into confession. Homeland Security will make short work of you just like they did to those Russian Muslim terrorists in Boston who tried to blow up the Marathon race.

I mean, really, how can we indispensable people bring freedom and democracy to the world if the Russians have a naval base in our sea? How can we project strength if we project such weakness by permitting a foreign power’s presence in our exclusive sphere of influence many thousands of miles away from our borders. Don’t forget, America’s borders are the world’s borders. It says so in our song–”From sea to shining sea.” Don’t forget it.

Of course, we don’t want to go head-to-head with another well armed nuclear military power, but the way around that is to demonize the Syrian government and Russia for supporting an eye doctor who is “a brutal dictator” who is resisting an Islamist al-Qaeda takeover of Syria financed by Washington. Our masters in Washington can use the UN and all our well-paid puppet states to pressure the Russians to shut up and get out of our way. I mean, really, does Putin want all those Russian NGOs that we finance to bring their operatives out onto the streets in Moscow and bring down his government? I mean, really, who does Putin think he is standing up to our god-given hegemony over the world, much less Israel’s god-given hegemony over the Middle East? I mean, Putin is in for it, and so are those goddamn Chinese. I mean, really, who do they think they are? Americans? Don’t those Chinks know about our control of the Pacific? I mean, really, are they out to lunch?

And, I mean, really, how can all us get to heaven if we don’t do God’s will and deliver the Middle East to Israel as Israel says the scriptures require. I mean, really, do you want to oppose God and burn in hell? Instead of all those virgins Muslims promise you, you will be devoured by fire. You better get on the right side before you die.

I mean, really, who wants this fate. We had better get rid of Syria sooner than ordered.
If we don’t do what Israel tells us God requires, we are finished. That’s for sure.

Lessons Never Learned

noreply@blogger.com (Alien) — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 14:48:00 +0000

When Will We Ever Learn?

By Franklin Lamb

26 April, 2013
Countercurrents.org

Beirut -- This observer has no idea if the American Ambassador here in
Beirut , Maury Connolly or Secretary of State John Kerrey has ever listened to
Marlene Dietrich's classic October 1965 performance of Pete Seeger's “Where
Have All The Flowers Gone,” still stunning, deeply moving and available
on the Internet.

But on this 30th anniversary of the bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut I
found myself near the old embassy site on the sea front for personal reasons,
and stepped down the block below the American University of Beirut
to meet a friend at Starbucks. When I entered, maybe the 5th time in my life
I have been to a Starbucks since I don't drink coffee and for political reasons
tend to avoid the chain, I noticed someone was playing Dietrich's classic.

Having just read reports in the Lebanese media concerning the
American Ambassador and Secretary of State's political comments
on the embassy events, three decades on, Marlene's
enchanting, deep voiced, “When will they every learn,?” numbed me.

Kerry slammed Hezbollah in the Lebanese media, saying “On this
30th anniversary of the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon,
the United States celebrates 30 years of close cooperation with the people of
Lebanon that proves the enemies of democracy failed,” he said from
Washington, "especially at the people-to-people level, and this proves the
terrorists' goals were not achieved.”

For her part, U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon Maura Connelly said the bombing
opened a new chapter in America 's history in the Middle East . Connelly said
the explosion taught Americans that “peaceful intentions were not enough to
protect us from those who would use terror to achieve their aims in the
Middle East .”

What both officials avoid mentioning is the subject of who was committing
the terrorism in Lebanon when these events, including the US Marine
Barracks and the Embassy again in 1984, occurred.

Regarding Hezbollah, which would not be a formed organization ready to
announce itself publicly until 1985, CIA operative Robert Baer and his team
assigned to investigate the Embassy bombing concluded there was not
enough reliable evidence to support the theory that the Party of God was
responsible. Among the more than three dozen militias of various persuasions
operating in Beirut alone in the early 1980's, only Islamic Jihad claimed
responsibility.

The American officials also failed to take into consideration the fact, never
denied by Washington , that at that time the US Embassy had the largest
contingent of CIA agents working out of the Embassy and performing
command and control functions for the US Marine base in South Beirut , more
in fact than in any other capital city except Moscow . When the US Embassy
became a command post, by the terms of the 1961 Vienna Convention on
Diplomatic relations it lost its protected status.

The US Marines as a hostile military force in Lebanon never had adequate
protection, and by targeting civilians, its base near the airport became a
legitimate target. Contrary to the political spin put on the event, there
was no terrorism involved in the operation.

The reason is because, despite Reagan administration claims, and this
week's assertion by Ambassador Connelly, the US forces were not “a neutral
peacekeeping unit” as hyped. Rather, they were enemy combatants fighting
and killing on one side of a civil war conflict. When the battleship New
Jersey 's shells killed hundreds of people, mostly Shiites and Druze, that fact
was clear. It's not surprising that in his memoir, General Colin Powell,
at the time an assistant to Caspar Weinberger noted that "When the shells
started falling on the Shiites, they assumed the American ‘referee' had taken
sides."

Some examples. On 14 December, 1983 the New Jersey fired 11 projectiles
from three of her 16 inch (406 mm) guns at the rate of three per minute each
at positions inland of Beirut. These were the first 16 inch shells fired for effect
anywhere in the world since New Jersey ended her time on the gunline in
Vietnam in 1969.

( photo: US Pentagon. The New Jersey opens fire on an enemy position off the coast of Beirut 9 January 1984 . New Jersey 's shells were sometimes fired from 16 inch (406mm) guns at the rate of four per minute and killed hundreds of Lebanese civilians, mostly Shiites and Druze since arriving at Beirut on 9/23/82 ). The ships on board arsenal included 21,000 shells.)

According to news accounts by reporters in Beirut at the time, the New
Jersey bombardment sometimes began at 1:25 P.M. and ended at 11 P.M.
followed by American fighter-bombers which could be heard flying over
Beirut in search of targets.

On September 19, 1983 , the New Jersey and other US warships began shelling
Druze, Syrian and Palestinian positions in the Chouf Mountains outside
Beirut . The battleship New Jersey with its 2,700 pound shells ("flying
Volkswagens") led the action. And on 8 February 1984 , the New Jersey fired
almost 300 shells at Druze and Shi'ite positions in the hills overlooking Beirut .
More of the massive projectiles rained down on the Bekaa valley east of
Beirut and constituted the heaviest shore bombardment since the Korean War.

The inaccuracy of New Jersey 's guns was a scandal in US government circles
and was consistently called into question. An investigation, led by Marine
colonel Don Price, into New Jersey 's gunfire effectiveness in Lebanon found
that many of the ship's shells had missed their targets by as much as 10,000
yards (9,144 meters) and therefore may have inadvertently killed civilians.
Records and oral hearings of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the
matter could not be clearer, and Secretary Kerrey and Ambassador Connelly
know this. Tim McNulty, a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune based in
Lebanon at the time wrote: "Everybody loved the New Jersey until she fired
her guns. Once she fired, it was obvious she couldn't hit anything,” Well,
as the citizens of Lebanon know, it did indeed hit things. Mainly innocent
civilians, their property and Lebanon 's infrastructure.

As Secretary of State Kerrey knows well from his nearly three decades in the
US Senate and his four years (2009-2013) as Chairman of the Foreign
Relations Committee the actions of the USS New Jersey itself was arguably
terrorism and some experts in the International Law Bureau of the Pentagon
have said as much.

This observer lived for more than a year in the Chouf village of Choueifat , a
beautiful place set high above the remains of the US marine barracks, the
Beirut airport and the Mediterranean Sea where the USS Jersey and other US
Sixth fleet warships are normally positioned when they come calling on
Lebanon .

Neighbors still recall what some here call, “the terror days of USS New
Jersey” and its shelling with both 26 inch and 19 inch shells, the former
weighing up to 2,700 pounds. Clearly visible around Choueifat and dozens of
other smaller towns, are the remains of houses and buildings not yet repaired
from the devastation caused by the intense shelling. Also visible at various
locations are indications that unexploded shells even now remain imbedded
in the ground.

One wonders if as part of the "special enduring friendship between the
United States and Lebanon on a people to people level” that the president
might order the Pentagon to defuse and remove these huge unexploded
bombs. If so he would distinguish his administration from that of the
occupiers of Palestine who for more than three decades have targeted various
parts of Lebanon with American supplied and US taxpayer-paid weapons,
including literally millions of US-made cluster bombs during the 33 day
Israeli aggression in 2006.

(Photo: AFP with permission. The remains of an American journalist and her unborn son are removed from the rubble of the US Embassy on 4/18/82 . Janet Lee Stevens, 32 years old at the time of her death, was Ph.D. student in Arabic literature at the University of Pennsylvania and she loved her experience in Lebanon and enthusiastically wrote her twin sister back in Atlanta, Georgia that in Lebanon, she was doing “the best writing I have done in my life, because here one must do one's utmost.” “Devoted to the cause of Palestine . Humane, talented, self-reliant, ambitious, fearless, and rebellious,” is how one former Lebanese editor described Janet.)

Janet Lee Stevens, hours before her death.

It is certainly appropriate to honor the victims of the 1983 US Embassy
bombing but it is no less appropriate to honor the other tragedies in Lebanon
during this period under review that precipitated it. In her closing remarks
this week, Ambassador Connelly noted that in her opinion, “the bombing of
the US Embassy taught us the stakes of involvement in this region.”

Has it?

As we contemplate another “neutral peacekeeping presence” being
planned in Washington for Syria , we gravely doubt that it has.

When will we ever learn?

Franklin Lamb is doing research in Lebanon and Syria and can be reached c/o fplamb@gmail.com

You Couldn't Make This Stuff Up

noreply@blogger.com (Alien) — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 13:29:00 +0000

Boston Bombing: Uncle Ruslan married daughter of top CIA official

Posted on April 27, 2013 by willyloman

((H/T – Kate) Daniel Hopsicker over at Madcow Morning News has produced yet another outstanding article on the connections between the Boston bombing, the Tsarnaev brothers, Uncle Ruslan Tsarni and the CIA. The connections are remarkable and obvious when you take the time to look at them. Days ago I theorized that the uncle set up his own brother’s sons to take the fall for this black op and it would appear that is exactly what happened. I say that they were set up to take the fall and not actually the ones who planted the bombs because if they had been used in that capacity, there would have been photos of them dropping their bags. Fact is, photos like that do not exist, so I stand by my original theory, someone called them to meet downtown at a certain time, probably at the Back Bay Social Club and it was probably their uncle whom they were supposed to meet. Considering how quickly he rushed to get in front of a camera and state they did it on Thursday and how he is trying to finger any website that suggests the CIA is behind terrorism across the globe, it seems pretty obvious that he had an agenda from the beginning and was never taken by surprise during this entire ordeal. Uncle Ruslan was connected to CIA front group USAID, he was running a front business helping launder Russian oligarch’s stolen cash, and it turns out he was also connected with Halliburton)

by Daniel Hopsicker, Madcow Morning News

The uncle of the two suspected Boston bombers in last week’s attack, Ruslan Tsarni, was married to the daughter of former top CIA official Graham Fuller

The discovery that Uncle Ruslan Tsarni had spy connections that go far deeper than had been previously known is ironic, especially since the mainstrean media’s focus yesterday was on a feverish search to find who might have recruited the Tsarnaev brothers.

The chief suspect was a red-haired Armenian exorcist. They were fingering a suspect who may not, in fact, even exist.

It was like blaming one-armed hippies on acid for killing your wife.

Ruslan Tsarni married the daughter of former top CIA official Graham Fuller, who spent 20 years as operations officer in Turkey, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Hong Kong. In 1982 Fuller was appointed the National Intelligence Officer for Near East and South Asia at the CIA, and in 1986, under Ronald Reagan, he became the Vice-Chairman of the National Intelligence Council, with overall responsibility for national level strategic forecasting.

At the time of their marriage, Ruslan Tsarni was known as Ruslan Tsarnaev, the same last name as his nephews Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the alleged bombers.

It is unknown when he changed his last name to Tsarni.

What is known is that sometime in the early 1990’s, while she was a graduate student in North Carolina, and he was in law school at Duke, Ruslan Tsarnaev met and marriedSamantha Ankara Fuller, the daughter of Graham and Prudence Fuller of Rockville Maryland. Her middle name suggests a reference to one of her father’s CIA postings.

The couple divorced sometime before 2004.

Today Ms. Fuller lives abroad, and is a director of several companies pursuing strategies to increase energy production from clean-burning and renewable resources.

On a more ominous note, Graham Fuller was listed as one of the American Deep State rogues onSibel Edmonds’ State Secrets Privilege Gallery,. Edmonds explained it featured subjects of FBI investigations she became aware of during her timeas an FBI translator.

Criminal activities were being protected by claims of State Secrets, she asserted. After Attorney General John Ashcroft went all the way to the Supreme Court to muzzle her under a little-used doctrine of State Secrets, she put up twenty-one photos, with no names.

One of them was Graham Fuller.

“Congress of Chechen International” c/o Graham Fuller

A story about a Chechen oik exec/uncle pairing up with a top CIA official who once served as CIA Station Chief in Kabul sounds like a pitch for a bad movie.

But the two men may have been in business together.

In 1995, Tsarnaev incorporated theCongress of Chechen International Organizations in Maryland, using as the address listed on incorporation documents 11114 Whisperwood Ln, in Rockville Maryland, the home address of his then-father-in-law.

It is just eight miles up the Washington National Pike from the Montgomery Village home where “Uncle Ruslan” met—and apparently wowed, the press after the attack in Boston.

The Washington Post yesterday called him a “media maven,” while nationally syndicated Washington Post columnist Ester Cepeda , in a piece with the headline “The Wise Words of Uncle Ruslan” opined that he was her choice for “an award for bravery in the face of adversity.”

Success through indirection, mis-direction, redirection, and protection

Uncle Ruslan’s spy connections go far deeper than was already known, which was that he spent two years working in Kazakhstan for USAID.

But the mainstream media was lookng the other way.

Under the headline “Did ‘Misha’ influence Tsarnaevs? In Watertown, doubts,” USA Today reported: “Misha. A new name has emerged in the Boston Marathon bombing case—one familiar to the family of the two young men accused of the atrocity and apparently of interest to the Russian and American security services as well.”

Ruslan Tsarni was the first to bring up the supposed man’s supposed name. Or rather, he brought up a first name: Misha. But it was enough. We were off to the races…

Attention all cars: Be on lookout for chubby Armenian exorcist

Tsarni described Misha to CNN as being “chubby, a big guy, big mouth presenting himself with some kind of abilities as exorcist . . . having some part-time job in one of the stores, not married. All of the qualifications of a loser, just another big mouth.”

According to Uncle Ruslan, Misha was the man who over a considerable period of time had radicalized Tamerlan.

It seemed strange, then, that in contrast to his “you are there” verbal picture of the man, even with all his supposed concerns, and given his high level of education and abundant resources (Big Sky Energy was paying him in excess of $200,00 a year, according to documents filed with the SEC) Ruslan had somehow never found out just who the bad guy was.

He never got a name, something that in spook-dom is considered something of afaux pas. Then again, no one else had either.

Worse, Tsarni’s vivid description seemed to be taken from personal observation, from, in other words…real life. But that isn’t possible. Tsarni had stated he hadn’t been physically in the presence of his Boston relatives since December 2005. And Misha, if he existed, didn’t show up on the scene until 2008 at the earliest.

Still, just a few days later, the entire family began chiming in. Misha anecdotes were flying fast & furious, and the nation’s scribblers were busy uncritically scribbling down their every word.

Maybe their Twitter account got hacked again?

No performance was nearly as masterful, however, as that of the Associated Press.

“Bomb suspect influenced by mysterious radical,” reported the Associated Press.

“Tamerlan’s relationship with Misha could be a clue in understanding the motives behind his religious transformation and, ultimately, the attack itself,” reported the Associate Press. Only to take it all back in the very next line.

“Two U.S. officials say he had no tie to terrorist groups.”

The AP’s “story” about the mysterious “Misha” was 1145 words, long enough for an editor to squeeze in a caveat.

“It was not immediately clear whether the FBI has spoken to Misha or was attempting to,” the national wire service reported. “Efforts over several days by The Associated Press to identify and interview Misha have been unsuccessful.”

The big difference: when you do it, its conspiracy theory. When wedo it, its informed speculation.

In any other context, this might be seen as the rankest kind of “conspiracy theory.” But, apparently, when the Associated Press does it, its news.

Then Uncle Ruslan made a clear mis-step.

“An uncle of the alleged bombers claims that Misha, an Armenian convert to Islam, had a huge influence on the elder brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Describing him as an “Armenia exorcist, Tsarni said, “Somehow he just took his brain.”

Armenians are a deeply-rooted Christian community, which is proud of the fact that their country was the first in the world to adopt Christianity as state religion in 301 AD.

Moreover this is the week every year when they remember the Armenian Holocaust, when as many as 1,000,000 Armenians were slaughtered by Turkish Muslims.

In the large and close-knit Boston Armenian community, a red-bearded Armenian named Misha becoming a radicalized Muslim would stand out.

“I’ve never heard of him, nor has anyone that I know,” Hilda Avedissian, executive director at the Armenian Cultural & Educational Centre.

So what if the guy was involved with biggest bank fraud in history?

“For an Armenian to convert to Islam is like finding a unicorn in a field,” Nerses Zurabyan, 32, an information technology director who lives in nearby Cambridge told USA Today.

The report reveals that the bomber’s Uncle, made famous for his outspoken condemnation of his nephew’s which aired repeatedly on international news networks, is a well-connected oil executive who at one point worked for a Halliburton shell company used as a front to obtain oil contracts from the Kazakh State.

Ruslon Tsarni was implicated in an investigation involving the laundering and theft of $6 billion. But everybody loves Uncle Ruslon. At least most of America’s mainstream media does.

There has, to date, been no speculation at all about whether an uncle of the men suspected of the bombing who had been involved in international intrigue at the hightest levels, and who married the daughter of a top CIA official, might warrant a closer look.

It’s enough, isn’t it, to turn even reasonably rational adults into—gasp!—conspiracy theorists.

“News,” someone once wrote, “is selection. And selection is always based on an ideology and agenda, which is something to remember next time you watch, listen or read the ‘news.’”

Too true.

FUKUS/NATO Desperate To Salvage War On Syria

noreply@blogger.com (Alien) — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 06:35:00 +0000

As 'Archers' predicted more than a year ago, the multi-ethnic Syrian Arab Army has not collapsed - the population at large continues to support their president and the evil, illegal assault on Syria has failed. There is only one option left for the West - invent more lies of WMD and launch an air assault to 'free the Syrian people from tyranny and bring them democracy NATO style'
US Unveils Iraq WMD "Curveball-Style" Lies Vs. Syria

As NATO terror front collapses in Syria, US attempts to justify intervention by drumming up familiar WMD lies.

Image: From Independent's "Man whose WMD lies led to 100,000 deaths confesses all: Defector tells how US officials 'sexed up' his fictions to make the case for 2003 invasion." In retrospect, the corporate-media has no problem admitting the insidious lies that were told to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq - the lead up to the war was another story. A verbatim repeat of these admitted lies are being directed at Syria amidst the West's failure to overthrow the government with terrorist proxies.

April 25, 2013 (LD) - The last two weeks have seen a series of victories for the Syrian Army across Syria. It appears that 2 full companies of so-called "Free Syrian Army" fighters have been annihilated near Damascus, while government forces have restored order in parts of Homs and along the previously porous Lebanese-Syrian border.

Time has run out for the West, and it appears that they are desperately seeking any excuse to rescue their failing proxy war. When urgent, but otherwise unjustified military intervention is needed, a "humanitarian" pretext is usually invented - as it was in Libya. Failing that, as the West has already clearly done in Syria, an even more tenuous narrative has been resurrected from its well-earned grave. CNN has reported in their article, "Hagel: Evidence of chemical weapons use in Syria," that:

U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced Thursday that the United States has evidence that chemical weapons have been used in Syria.

This comes a couple of days after an Israeli intelligence official said Damascus was using weapons banned under international law against its own people in the country's civil war. Syria has said rebels have used chemical weapons.
U.S. President Barack Obama has said the Syrian government's use of chemical weapons against its own people in the country would be a "game changer."

Astonishingly, the West is attempting to repeat tales of "WMD's" in Syria, just as it infamously did in Iraq. In the Washington Post's "U.S. intelligence agencies: Assad used chemical weapons ‘on a small scale’," the nature of this "evidence" is elaborated on (emphasis added):

Hagel said the intelligence agencies’ assessment was reached with “varying degrees of confidence,” meaning that they lacked proof or overwhelming evidence. He said the conclusion was “reached within the last 24 hours” and that the White House delivered a letter outlining the findings to Congress Thursday morning.

A letter from the White House via the Washington Post exposed further just how tenuous the evidence actually is (emphasis added):

Our intelligence community does assess with varying degrees of confidence that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale in Syria, specifically the chemical agent sarin. This assessment is based in part on physiological samples. Our standard of evidence must build on these intelligence assessments as we seek to establish credible and corroborated facts. For example, the chain of custody is not clear, so we cannot confirm how the exposure occurred and under what conditions. We do believe that any use of chemical weapons in Syria would very likely have originated with the Assad regime.

Physiological samples indicating sarin - in other words - samples taken from people exposed to sarin, could have been produced in a number of ways. It is confirmed that Libya's chemical weapon stockpiles included sarin and mustard gas. In the Washington Post's 2011 "Libya's poison gas unaffected by turmoil, official says," it was stated:

Experts believe that Libya destroyed about 3,300 bombshells designed to carry mustard and sarin gas chemicals years ago, as part of its deal to end decades of economic and diplomatic isolation with the West.

But some 10 metric tons of mustard sulfate and sarin gas precursor remain stockpiled in barrels at three locations in the Libyan desert south of Tripoli, where Moammar Gaddafi has holed up in a last-ditch fight to keep from being overthrown.

Many experts worry that the barrels are ripe for picking by terrorists linked to al-Qaeda.

Of course, since 2011, it is now confirmed that the so-called "Libyan rebels" were actually Al Qaeda terrorists operating under the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) which has been confirmed to have subsequently traveled to Syria to join Al Qaeda's al-Nusra franchise in NATO's proxy war there.

It is just as likely that NATO's proxy forces brought along with them not only small arms and cash from Libya, but also heavier weapons, including possibly chemical weapons - and specifically - sarin and mustard gas.

Image: (via the Guardian) "Chemical containers in the Libyan desert. There are concerns unguarded weapons could fall into the hands of Islamist militants. Photograph: David Sperry/AP" As increasing evidence reveals Libyan fighters and weapons are pouring into Syria, it seems the West is preparing to preempt or leverage the inevitability that Libya's chemical arsenal has also found its way into the besieged nation.

....

Considering that the Syrian government knows the use of chemical weapons would basically hand the moral, strategic, and geopolitical initiative over to the West, and in light of its recent gains made using conventional weapons and tactics, it makes it all the more likely any real sarin to be found and used in Syria was the work of NATO proxies attempting to produce a plausible casus belli. Terrorists operating in Syria have already been caught using other chemical weapons.

And yet still, despite all of this doubt, the Western political establishment has hailed the so-called "findings" as the "game changer" required to green-light US military intervention.

Remember "Curveball"

It is absolutely imperative to recall the propaganda campaign conducted prior to invading Iraq in 2003. Chemical weapons were also used as a pretext for an otherwise unjustified war. The "intelligence" used by Hagel's predecessors was admittedly fabricated on-demand.

In the British Independent's article, "Man whose WMD lies led to 100,000 deaths confesses all: Defector tells how US officials 'sexed up' his fictions to make the case for 2003 invasion," it stated:

A man whose lies helped to make the case for invading Iraq – starting a nine-year war costing more than 100,000 lives and hundreds of billions of pounds – will come clean in his first British television interview tomorrow.

"Curveball", the Iraqi defector who fabricated claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, smiles as he confirms how he made the whole thing up. It was a confidence trick that changed the course of history, with Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi's lies used to justify the Iraq war.

He tries to defend his actions: "My main purpose was to topple the tyrant in Iraq because the longer this dictator remains in power, the more the Iraqi people will suffer from this regime's oppression."

We can already envision the establishment defending in hindsight its next "noble lie" to unseat "the tyrant in Syria."

The Independent continues:

But Mr Janabi, speaking in a two-part series, Modern Spies, starting tomorrow on BBC2, says none of it was true. When it is put to him "we went to war in Iraq on a lie. And that lie was your lie", he simply replies: "Yes."

US officials "sexed up" Mr Janabi's drawings of mobile biological weapons labs to make them more presentable, admits Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, General Powell's former chief of staff. "I brought the White House team in to do the graphics," he says, adding how "intelligence was being worked to fit around the policy".

How "intelligence was being worked to fit around the policy," indeed is the most important aspect of the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, and is without doubt what is being done in Washington, Doha, Riyadh, and Tel Aviv in regards to Syria now.

The "Curveball-style" lies told about Iraq are now being repeated about Syria by an increasingly unhinged West who has tried every trick in the book, and is flipping back to the beginning to start over again. The question is, can the world afford to be led down this path again, knowing exactly where it ends? Nations and people outside the Wall Street-London international order are tasked with foiling this criminal war of aggression - unable this time to plead ignorance to the West's true intentions.

FBI - In Up To Their Necks

noreply@blogger.com (Alien) — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 19:34:00 +0000

Were the Tsarnaev Brothers Set Up by an FBI Confidential Informant? Looks that way

Posted on April 20, 2013 by willyloman

by Scott Creighton

Why would the FBI need to enlist our help to identify someone they fully investigated less than 2 years ago?

If you take the statements made by the family members of the Tsarnaev brothers separately you come to the understanding that something is horribly wrong with the official story of what happened at the Boston marathon bombing. You just can’t put your finger on it.

But if you take the time to consider all of their statements together as a whole alongside the FBI’s own acknowledgement of their investigation into the older brother and then recall what we know about the Craft International assets on site under the cover of being there in an official capacity, what you come to conclude is that it looks like the FBI used a confidential informant (CI) to lure the brothers to the finish line of the Boston marathon so they could be set up as the patsies for this false flag event. Not to have them be complicit in the bombing but just to put them in the wrong place at the right time so they could be framed for this attack.

Using CIs to manipulate”terrorism” patsies is Standard Operating Procedure for the FBI
The FBI admits the Tsarnaev brothers were investigated 2 years before asking for help identifying them!
A mother’s love
A father’s anger
Mystery “Mentors” manipulated Tamerlan
Conclusion

In fact… it couldn’t be clearer.

1. Using CIs to manipulate”terrorism” patsies is Standard Operating Procedure for the FBI

The first thing to remember is that this is the task of the FBI these days. They use CIs, people with criminal charges hanging over their heads, to lure unsuspecting, often half-witted dupes into entrapment plots that the FBI can then foil and claim they saved us from a terrorist attack they themselves made. There are multiple examples of even the main stream media exposing this fact on both sides of the artificial ideological divide in the press. Greenwald and many others have written about this standard operating procedure of the FBI much better than I have and to more critical acclaim. But perhaps the most well known example of this being exposed even by the main stream is the Judge Napolitano segment on Fox News.

The constitutionality of this practice is not up for debate any longer. What they are doing as an institution is immoral and unethical. They essentially hire the dregs of society with your tax dollars to go out and effectively find dupes they can manufacture and terrorist plot around. These men effectively become contractors for the Justice Department and have a proven history of criminal behavior of the worst kinds. They are threatened with the prosecution of whatever crimes they have committed and told to produce said plots for cash and freedom, or face the justice system for what they have done. On all accounts, from every angle, it is one of the most despicable misuses of federal authority one can imagine in a free society.

The fact that it happens routinely in their ongoing domestic “war on terror” is not up for debate. It is not a controversial “conspiracy theory”. It is well documented fact. They manipulate targets through the use of CIs.

2. The FBI admits the Tsarnaev brothers were investigated 2 years before asking for help identifying them!

They do not always enlist the CIs to go out and find random dupes to be lured into a plot. Sometimes they send them after specific targets.

In the case of the Tsarnaev brothers we know they were on the radar of the FBI for nearly two years. We know this not because the FBI came forward and offered up that information on Thursday when they released their pictures and asked us to help them identify them, but because their mother went on RT on April the 19th and told the world that they had been investigated by the FBI years ago. Immediately following that interview, the FBI put up a statement confirming that fact, almost as if they expected it might happen.

“In response to this 2011 request, the FBI checked U.S. government databases and other information to look for such things as derogatory telephone communications, possible use of online sites associated with the promotion of radical activity, associations with other persons of interest, travel history and plans, and education history. The FBI also interviewed Tamerlan Tsarnaev and family members. The FBI did not find any terrorism activity, domestic or foreign, and those results were provided to the foreign government in the summer of 2011. The FBI requested but did not receive more specific or additional information from the foreign government” FBI official statement

Let that sink in for a few moments.

Why would the FBI need us to identify these suspects for them on Thursday of this past week when in fact they had spent considerable time investigating them less than two years ago?

They claim tips came in and that is what identified them, but I did not see anyone from 4Chan or Reddit discover that bit of information.

Also, all the work being done on the internet prior to the FBI’s official request on Thursday did not turn up those two guys as suspects. There were many others who were closer and more suspicious looking, but those two guys were first brought to light by the FBI, out of nowhere, as if they had some insight prior to the request for information.

But that is speculative. What we know is this: on Thursday the FBI asked us for help identifying someone they have already spent considerable time investigating. We were promised videos of them planting bombs which never materialized. And it seems the FBI suddenly knew who they were despite the fact that the online search was going nowhere.

Was the FBI deliberately covering up their previous involvement with these two young men? It seems that way. It seems obvious that is what they were doing.

Why?

3. A mother’s love

On April 19th just prior to the FBI releasing their official statement, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, the mother of the two suspects, went live on RT and told the world that the FBI had investigated her sons and found nothing. But she also stated that the investigation CONTINUED and that the agent actually made contact with her several times, once even saying her boys were being “radicalized” to which she flatly denied that accusation.

Her revelation forced the FBI to post their press release about their extended contact with the boys and it opened up a rather stunning debate, all for the wrong reasons. People were writing that the FBI should have been MORE invasive and thus they could have stopped all of this but what they didn’t acknowledge is the simple fact that the contact may very well have been ongoing… all the way up to the bombing.

4. A father’s anger

That same day the father was interviewed and he said flat out that his sons had been set up by the “secret services” meaning the CIA or the FBI or NSA.

(By the way, it is just those agencies, the CIA the FBI and the NSA who are making up the “special interrogation team” that will be interrogating Dzhokhar Tsarnaev now that they have denied him his miranda rights.)

‘‘In my opinion, my children were set up by the secret services because they are practising Muslims,’’ Anzor Tsarnaev told the Interfax news agency on Friday from the North Caucasus Russian city of Makhachkala.” SMH

5. Mystery “Mentors” manipulated Tamerlan

“I strongly believe they were just puppets and executors of something of bigger scale,” Ruslan Tsarni

The uncle who said earlier that these boys did not deserve to live and called them “losers” may have inadvertently provided us with the strongest eye witness evidence to date that the Tsarnaev brothers were under the influence of “mentors” who brought them to that location at that time as part of a bigger plan. Something on a “bigger scale”.

The uncle can hardly be considered a family member making things up to help the brothers out of this jam. He has been nothing but hostile toward them since it all began. But what he says in this interview, though he may THINK he is helping the official story, when you take all the rest of it into consideration, it completely exposes something entirely different.

The uncle of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects told TODAY Saturday that he believes Dzhokar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev were pawns in a deadly scheme.
“I strongly believe they were just puppets and executors of something of bigger scale,” Ruslan Tsarni told Savannah Guthrie.
He said Dzhokar, the younger of the brothers, was “used by his older brother. He’s just another victim of his older brother. He victimized others, but he’s been used by his older brother.”
Tsarni, a Maryland resident who is the brother of the suspects’ father, believes Tamerlan, 26, who died in a confrontation with police early Friday morning, was radicalized by others. He noted that the suspects were in his house as children, and recalled a surprising transformation the last time he saw Tamerlan in 2009.
“There certainly were mentors,’’ Tsarni said. “I was shocked when I heard his words, his phrases, when every other word he starts sticking in words of God. I question what he’s doing for work, (and) he claimed he would just put everything in the will of God. It was a big concern to me. He called me ‘confused’ when I started explaining to him, make yourself useful to yourself and to your family and maybe you’ll have extra to share with everybody else.
“It wasn’t devotion, it was something, as it’s called, being radicalized. Not understanding what he is talking (about). He is just using words for the sake of the words and not understanding the meaning of it.’’
The suspects’ parents told NBC News they believe their sons were framed. Tsarni said a family acquaintance told him there was an outside influence on Tamerlan.
“He said there is someone who brainwashed him, some new convert to Islam,’’ Tsarni said. “I would like to stress (the acquaintance was) of Armenian descent.’’ Scott Stump, TODAY

Who were these outside influences? Were they FBI CIs assigned to work Tamerlan as a potential asset to be flipped into some future entrapment plot?

The FBI had made contact, investigated them and continued contact thereafter. And the time frame fits with what the uncle was saying.

6. Conclusion

Could the FBI have green-lighted the Tsarnaev brothers as potential dupes just like they have to so many other young men in the recent past and then had their CI set them up to take the fall for this staged mass casualty event?

All it would have taken would be for the CI to call up Tamerlan and invite him and his brother to a late lunch downtown. Told them to meet him near the finish line at a certain time. That’s it. And there they are.

When you look at what he is saying, about knowing someone was influencing the young man, and you look at what the FBI did during the investigation and their history of setting people up as fall guys for their own plots and plans, you have to come away with at least a strong suspicion that these two men were handled by an FBI CI and brought to their destiny with destruction to serve a certain role in all of this.

Boston Bombing: Craft International Trained Men at Bombing Location Before Attack

Craft International operatives were in position waiting but what they needed was a patsy much like the ones the FBI is so good at creating. And after all, it’s the FBI who will be investigating anyway.

So when the spotters on the roofs confirmed the Tsarnaev brothers had arrived, the operation was set in motion.

The FBI distanced themselves from the two at the start by pretending to need us to identify the boys and as soon as the mother mentioned they had known them, they had a press release ready to go as if they just remembered. This behavior in itself is more than incriminating.

And now that we have confirmation from the belligerent uncle that mysterious “mentors” were guiding and using the boys, I don’t think we can come to any other conclusion than the FBI sent those boys there to take the blame.

The Boston Bombings in Context: How the FBI Fosters, Funds and Equips American Terrorists

noreply@blogger.com (Alien) — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 18:27:00 +0000

The Boston Marathon bombing has provoked shock, grief and outrage from around the world. After decades of conditioning, the public automatically equates such terrorism with Muslim radicals. But the evidence shows that every major terror plot on American soil in the past 10 years has been fostered, funded and equipped by one organization: the FBI.

People around the world watched in horror this week as explosions rocked the finish line of the Boston Marathon, turning a day of sportsmanship and celebration into one of shock, grief and outrage. As with all such events, the desire to discover who was behind this cowardly act has driven many into a speculative frenzy. And, in a sad reminder of the indoctrination that the Western world has been under for over a decade now in the mythical “war of terror,” it did not take long at all before the collective finger of the mob was pointed squarely in the direction of Muslim terrorists.

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Within hours of the blast, fear spread throughout the international Muslim community that the bombing would be connected to an Islamist extremist. A Libyan Twitter user touched a nerve—and received thousands of retweets and worldwide media coverage—by tweeting “Please don’t be a ‘Muslim.’” The backlash began shortly thereafter, with the New York Post falsely implying that a Saudi national was being questioned for his possible role in the attack. The next day, a plane departing Boston Logan Airport returned to the gate and two passengers were forcibly removed because they had been overheard speaking Arabic before takeoff.

As data continues to pour in regarding the bombing and who may be behind it, it is instructive to take a moment to step back and consider this knee-jerk tendency to conclude that this is the work of Islamic radicals. In the minds of millions of Americans, bombs targeting innocents on US soil are inextricably linked with the image of the bearded, turban-wearing boogeyman that has become the shorthand for evil in this age of terror.

This association is not only incorrect, it is dangerously incorrect because it signally fails to identify the one unifying thread between all of the recent terror plots in the US. Lurking behind the shadowy armies of would-be jihadis in the popular imagination is the sober reality that every single major terror bust in the United States since 9/11 has sourced back to the same group, a single entity that has in every single case funded, equipped and even incited the would-be terrorists into action: the FBI.

In 2005, federal prosecutors charged Michael Reynolds, a 47 year old drifter living with his elderly mother, of attempting to wage jihad on the US by blowing up fuel facilities. In reality, his plan for jihad was little more than a series of conversations he had on a Yahoo! Chat room with a US judge posing as a militant. He was arrested after agreeing to meet with an FBI informant who had promised him $40,000 for his cause, and two months later the FBI quietly announced he was likely mentally ill. He was eventually convicted and is curently serving 25 years in jail.

In 2007 the so-called “Fort Dix Six” were nabbed in a much-hyped FBI terror bust after allegedly hatching a plan to attack a US military base and kill the soldiers there. At the time, a 26-page indictment revealed that the group had “no rigorous military training” and “did not appear close to being able to pull off an attack.” The next year it was revealed that the FBI informant who had infiltrated the group had in fact offered to organize the members and lead the plot itself.

In 2009 the Newburgh Four were arrested for an alleged plot to blow up synagogues and shoot down military airplanes in Newburgh, New York. The group was a ragtag bunch of poor black men, at least one of whom was mentally unstable and stored his own urine in jars around his apartment. The group’s fifth member, Shahad Hussein, turned out to be an FBI informant who had promised the members hundreds of thousands of dollars to carry out the plot. In sentencing the defendants, Federal Judge Colleen McMahon said:

“[The government] created acts of terrorism out of [the defendant's] fantasies of bravado and bigotry, and then made those fantasies come true. The government did not have to infiltrate and foil some nefarious plot – there was no nefarious plot to foil.”

In November 2010 the FBI busted the so-called Portland Christmas Tree Bomber, who was allegedly attempting to bomb the lighting ceremony at Portland’s Pioneer Courthouse Square. “The threat was very real,” the FBI intoned at the time. “Our investigation shows that Mohamud was absolutely committed to carrying out an attack on a very grand scale.” The alleged bomber, Arthur Balizan, turned out to be a teenager who bragged to undercover agents that he could get a gun because he was a “rapper” and wrote an article on workout tips for jihadis.

In 2011 the FBI arrested a man that they themselves had supplied with a remote controlled plane and C4 explosives in a harebrained attempt to bomb the Pentagon. In 2012 they busted another would-be jihadi that they again had supplied with a fake gun and suicide vest. Also in 2012 the FBI busted a group of five “anarchists” who were allegedly going to bomb a bridge in the Cleveland area, although it was quietly admitted that the FBI informant who had infiltrated the group had in fact initiated the contact with them and been present at the meetings where they developed the plan to blow up the bridge.

One of the most ridiculous examples of this pattern dates back to 2006, when the DOJ attempted to make it seem as if they had just nabbed a group of dangerous jihadis who were preparing a full ground war against the United States.

The picture that is painted by these facts is as overwhelming as it is difficult for much of the public to comprehend. The conclusion, nevertheless, is incontrovertible: that without the FBI, many of the so-called “terrorist cells” that have been hatching their inept, bumbling schemes against the United States for decades might never have existed at all.

Despite what many would believe, this conclusion is not even controversial. Rather, it has been backed up time and again by evidence in the official record and multiply attested to by FBI insiders and whistleblowers themselves.

Given all of this damning history and insider whistleblowing, it is vital that the Western public break out of their media-induced programming and question the core assumptions of the war on terror paradigm that we have been programmed with for decades now. If there is to be speculation at all over events like these, and if there is any group that has to present a thoroughgoing case for why it is NOT responsible for this atrocity, surely it is the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Having been at the heart of so many terror plots in the past, both the hilariously inept and the chillingly successful, how could the public refuse to even interrogate the organization that has the most to answer for?

The simple fact of the matter is that the history of the modern age of terrorism has proven time and again that the FBI is the prime suspect in any terrorist atrocity that takes place on American soil. Let us all keep this in mind as the details of the investigations into this (and all other) American terrorist incidents begins to emerge.

Thatcher - Eulogising The Monster

noreply@blogger.com (Alien) — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 17:54:00 +0000

Thatcher's Funeral: Dead End Journey Of The British Working Class
By Colin Todhunter
12 April, 2013 Countercurrents.org

Next Wednesday, Margaret Thatcher’s funeral procession will wind its way through the streets of central London. Although Thatcher has not been accorded an official ‘state funeral’, it’s the next best thing. The ceremonial funeral for Thatcher in St Paul's Cathedral will be backed by a huge display of police and armed forces, who will line the route. The coffin will be carried on a gun carriage drawn by six horses. Guns will be fired at one-minute intervals near the Tower of London.

The mourning of a life passed, the celebration of a life lived. And, if you believe in such things, a send off to the next world or life… or something like that. But what is Britain (or, more aptly, the Establishment) actually remembering or celebrating here?

The Establishment’s celebration of Thatcher

Apparently, Margaret Thatcher is to be admired because she was a strong leader, a woman of conviction, the first woman who made it to the top of the political ladder and a woman who made Britain ‘great’ once more by retaking the Falklands, standing up to the USSR and fighting for British interests in Europe. For many, Thatcher was the embodiment of strength and principle, and that is why she is a ‘divisive’ figure. Even her divisiveness was due to her perceived ‘virtues’.

Apart from media images of some people celebrating the fact she is dead and a few interviews with former miners or miners’ wives who endured the full force of Thatcherism in the 1980s, the mainstream media has gone out of its way to portray Thatcher in a positive light over the past week.

The special recall parliamentary session portrayed Thatcher as a great national figure. Some 100 Labour MPs stayed away as Millionaire PM David Cameron declared that "she made this country great again." Cow-towing to the Establishment, Labour leader Ed Miliband, the son of the Marxist academic Ralph Miliband, described Thatcher as "a great and towering figure."

Such sycophantic drooling has become par for the course for Labour leaders, however, as both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown admired Thatcher and adopted her policies without question. And as out of touch with ordinary sentiment as ever, Tony Blair said the celebrations of Thatcher's death "in pretty poor taste" and told people to "show some respect."

But is it any surprise that there is no respect from Thatcher's victims, many of whom she described as the “enemy within”? These were ordinary folk who belonged to trade unions and fought tooth and nail to protect their livelihoods and communities from the devastating effects of Thatcher’s policies.

In the real world, in the country that exists beyond the gentlemen’s clubs, the boardrooms, the Blairesque world of highly paid consultancies, the corridors of power in Whitehall and Westminster, the self enclosed world of the Oxbridge dominated BBC, the comfy chat shows and the steel and glass towers of London’s finance sector, others have been strident in their condemnation of Thatcher.

Beyond the eulogies

As reported by the Morning Star newspaper, Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn declared that the coverage of Thatcher's death by most of the media was "beyond absurd." Another Labour MP David Winnick recalled that Thatcher's "highly damaging" policies "caused immense pain and suffering to ordinary people."

MP Ian Lavery stated: "I feel very personally about what Thatcher did to my family, my friends and my colleagues, not to mention the people I represent in Parliament."

Mick Appleyard, a miner and elected National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) official in Yorkshire mining village whose economy was totally dependent on the pit, stated that Thatcher “killed my village," which is now "a low-wage, menial wage economy for those who are lucky enough to find jobs.” He says there's nothing for young people: they turn to drugs and drink because there's nothing else.

And NUM general secretary Chris Kitchen says that she will never be forgiven for the disaster she inflicted on the mining industry, on our communities, and on the miners.

But such views and impacts are not unique to England’s former mining communities.

Under Thatcher, my hometown of Liverpool lost much of its industry and it lost it quickly. Unemployment skyrocketed and people were forced to claim welfare. But they had to ‘prove’ they were ‘looking for work’ in order to get their unemployment benefits. Looking for work that no longer existed. The futlity of Thatcherism.

In this respect, Liverpoolwas certainly not unique.

In the 1960s, the city had undergone a slum clearance programme and had shifted whole neighbourhoods to newly built towns and housing projects beyond the city boundaries. There were already huge tracts of land lying empty as a result. With factories closing down in the 80s, even more land was freed up. Part of this land has now been covered with low density housing and trendy part empty debt-bubble apartment blocks, but large areas have been grassed over and ‘landscaped’ - the trendy euphemism for windswept urban wasteland.
Today, unemployment remains high and people are still being disciplined to look for jobs that have either long disappeared over the horizon or are now being ‘trimmed’ even more under the lie of ‘austerity’. It mirrors the lie that says we must mortgage the present for a better tomorrow that will never come and hammered home with the time-work discipline mentality of the Industrial Revolution. The devil finds work for idle hands, you know - but not for the idle rich of course. Thatcher and her ministers were always keen on harking back to the virtues of ‘good old’ Victorian values.

And this is Thatcherism’s real legacy.

It continues today and is being perpetuated by the current Cameron government. As if things couldn’t get much worse for those thrown on the scrapheap as their jobs were scrapped due to outsourcing and automation under the lie of ‘efficiency’ but the reality of profiteering, just about every aspect of the ‘me-first’ culture of individualism (Thatcher said that there was no such thing as ‘society’) now encourages the individual to indulge in an acquisitive materialism whose message is relentless. The thinking is that ‘you’ – the unemployed, the working classes, the great, great grandchildren of the cannon-fodder ‘heroes’ sacrificed en masse by the British Establishment on the blood-soaked battlefields of countless imperialist wars – must aspire to live like a multi-millionaire footballer, even though you never will or can because we threw you overboard years ago. This was never intended by to be a ‘land fit for heroes’ of the working class variety (or for their offspring).

In many of those urban wastelands of England’s ‘green and pleasant land’, what we are left with are jobless people who, as Thatcher once encouraged us all to be, became good free market entrepreneurs by turning to the illegal drugs economy to make a living from supplying their wares to dull the misery of the masses. Heroin very conveniently flooded the streets in the 1980s, the whisper is courtesy of our ‘spymaster’ saviours.

The outlook is bleak. Many young people in these areas now growing up won’t have a job, a job of any meaningful form at least. They will be following in the footsteps of their fathers who did not have a job and their fathers who also had no job. Like their fathers, they too will be stigmatised due to no fault of their own. And yet the moribund system’s mantra of endless growth based on consumerism and the need to engage in meaningless forms of work that the system demands necessary remains the Holy Grail, which is implicit within every mind-warp commercial, every politician’s cynical utterance and every highly-paid mainstream media political commentator’s solution for saving the nation.

It is implicit in every innuendo, condemnation and insinuation directed towards a person who does not have a job or does not display the appropriate trappings of conspicuous consumption. To be called a ‘chav’ in Britain is to bear the brunt of such a tirade of negative evaluation. Chav represents a media-fuelled demonisation of sections of the working class who were three decades ago sacrificed on the altar of Margaret Thatcher’s treachery. The ridiculing of the ‘undeserving poor’ that since Victorian times have hurt the unscrupulous, hypocritical sensibilities of England’s middle and upper classes who have led and supported more unimaginable butchery on the global battlefields of Empire than any number of working class people who have fallen foul of ‘Middle England’s’ sanctimonious bleatings about decency and morality.

What is really being celebrated?

What is really being celebrated when especially Establishment figures eulogise about Thatcher is the destruction of organised labour and the capacity of ordinary people to challenge the hegemony of the elite interests that Thatcher served so well.

Thatcherism wasn’t about making the economy efficient and putting an end to supposedly inefficient sectors like coal and steel. Today taxpayers subsidies are lavished on the armaments industry, on the private sector in general via grants from the Department of Trade and Industry (the corporate dole office), via supplementing low paid workers’ wages whose employers rake in billions of pounds worth of profits and elsewhere throughout the economy, not least of course the big banks. But this is not to be discussed – much easier to point the finger at benefit claimants at the bottom of the heap. Much easier to hark back to inefficient industries that conveniently required a good old dose of union busting.

The Morning Star, Britain’s only genuine left wing daily newspaper, provided a realistic assessment of Thatcher’s legacy by saying that she represented big business and the rich, despite pitching her propaganda at small businesses and aspiring working people. She equated home ownership with having capital and therefore being a capitalist and projected profits-guaranteed sell-offs of utilities as creating a "share-owning democracy."

The paper goes on to place the Thatcher ‘housing revolution’ into context too by stating that for the nearly two million people who bought their council houses at knockdown prices, this was, for most of them, a great deal as rising house prices left them cash-rich.

But the downside of right-to-buy and refusal to build new council homes to rent has left five million people rotting on council waiting lists or forced into the eager arms of greedy private landlords.

As for Thatcher's much vaunted share-owning democracy, the Morning Star is also unequivocal by arguing that, athough the fire sales of utilities and demutualisation of building societies quadrupled the number of people holding shares, the total continues to decline as small shareholders sell up or hold a stake in a single company. Moreover, the newspaper states, the traditional financial elite concentrates its grip on share ownership and the benefits of speculation, while the working class suffers ever-rising charges imposed by the privatised sector.

It concludes its evaluation of the Thatcher legacy by saying that her legacy is too bitter to warrant a claim to national mourning.

“The Thatcher governments inflicted enormous damage on the fabric of British society. Many working-class communities were torn apart by mass unemployment, poverty, drugs and alcohol abuse as the result of Tory policies. She and her regime waged war against organised labour at home, privatised valuable utilities, locked Britain into the European Union and revived the readiness to engage in imperialist wars abroad." Communist Party general secretary Robert Griffiths in ‘The woman who tore Britain apart’, 8th April, Morning Star.

Colin Todhunter : Originally from the northwest of England, Colin Todhunter has spent many years in India. He has written extensively for the Deccan Herald (the Bangalore-based broadsheet), New Indian Express and Morning Star (Britain). His articles have also appeared in various other newspapers, journals and books. His East by Northwest website is at: http://colintodhunter.blogspot.com

When Is A Chemical Weapon Not A Chemical Weapon? When 'Our' Side Use it

noreply@blogger.com (Alien) — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 13:41:00 +0000

U.S.
Military Official Calls Khan al-Asal Attack a “creative use of a
caustic agent” “but not a chemical weapon”. History Disagrees

Posted on March 22, 2013 by willyloman

by Scott Creighton

Israeli minister: It’s clear that chemical weapons were used in Syria

Game-changer: Syria’s ‘probability’ of using chemical warfare

Obama warns Syrians on use of chemical weapons

The UN has announced they are going to be investigating the chemical weapons attack in Syria.

In the wake of the chemical weapon attack in Khan al-Asal in the
northern province of Aleppo which killed 25 people and injured another
110, many of the victims being children, ( all being civilians) an
unnamed U.S. military official has declared that the United
States no longer considers it to have been a chemical weapons attack but
instead they classify it as a “creative use of a caustic agent”

As I will show, history disagrees with the unnamed official. Funny
isn’t it that as soon as they can’t blame Assad for the use of chemical
weapons in Syria, they decide it wasn’t actually a chemical weapon that
was used.

“Syria claimed rebels used chemical weapons in an attack
Tuesday in Khan al-Asal in the northern province of Aleppo. State-run
media blamed rebels for the attack, which it said killed 25 people and
injured more than 110 others…

… Analysts believe it’s possible people in the video were
deliberately exposed to a “caustic” agent such as chlorine. But that
would not be the same as using a chemical weapons as defined by
international treaties, such as a nerve or blister agent.

“Something went down, but it was short of a chemical weapon,” a
senior State Department official told CNN. The official was speaking on
condition of anonymity for the same reason as the other two officials.

NATO and U.S. radar or satellite intelligence also do not indicate there was a launch of a missile at the time Syrians say the alleged attack occurred, according to the military official.

“The fact that it’s not a weapon doesn’t mean it’s not some creative use of a caustic agent,” the official said.” CNN

So as soon as they determined that they couldn’t frame the Syrian
government for this monstrous chemical attack, they reverse course and
claim in fact it ISN’T a chemical attack at all, it’s just a creative
use of a deadly chemical.

In 1915 the Germans used chlorine gas on the French troops at
Langemark-Poelkapelle. On August 6 of that same year, German troops
used chlorine gas against Russian troops defending the Fortress of
Osowiec. It was also used a couple times by “insurgents” against local
populations in 2007 in Iraq.

In those attacks it was certainly referred to as the use of a chemical weapon and
that was only a few years ago. Coincidentally, the same fighters we
used to call “insurgents” in Iraq when they were fighting our troops are
now called “freedom fighters” in Syria and they are being trained by
our troops. And they are the same ones who used chlorine as a chemical
weapon back then. Cute huh?

“Insurgents exploded a truck carrying chlorine gas canisters Wednesday — the second such “dirty” chemical attack in two days…” MSNBC Feb. 2007

So contrary to the unnamed military official’s opinion, the use of
chlorine gas as in this application is in fact a “chemical weapon”.
There may be more powerful ones and more efficient ones, but it has been
used as a weapon of warfare for over a century.

US/NATO Arming Al Qaeda Terrorists With WMD

noreply@blogger.com (Alien) — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 14:35:00 +0000

SYRIA: US-NATO Backed Al Qaeda Terrorists Armed with WMDs. Chemical Weapons against the Syrian People

By Tony Cartalucci

Global Research, March 19, 2013

Url of this article:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/syria-us-nato-backed-al-qaeda-terrorists-using-wmds-chemical-weapons-against-the-syrian-people/5327507

After a 10 year war/occupation in Iraq, the death of over a million people including thousands of US soldiers, all based on patently false claims
of the nation possessing “weapons of mass destruction,” (WMDs), it is
outrageous hypocrisy to see the West arming, funding, and politically
backing terrorists in Syria who in fact both possess, and are now using
such weapons against the Syrian people.

At least 25 are reported dead
after a chemical weapons attack targeting Syrian soldiers was carried
out by NATO-backed terrorists in the northern city of Aleppo.

Aleppo is located near the Syrian-Turkish border. Had Libya’s looted
stockpiles of chemical weapons been shipped to Syria, they would have
passed through Turkey along with weapons sent from Libya by the US and thousands of Libyan terrorists who are admittedly operating inside Syria, and would most likely be used to target cities like Aleppo.

Worse yet, any chemical weapons imported into the country would
implicate NATO either directly or through gross negligence, as the
weapons would have passed through NATO-member Turkey, past US CIA agents
admittedly operating along the border and along side Western-backed terrorists inside Syria.

Libya’s WMD’s are in Terrorist Hands

Libya’s arsenal had fallen into the hands of sectarian extremists
with NATO assistance in 2011 during the culmination of efforts to
overthrow the North African nation . Since then, Libya’s militants led
by commanders of Al Qaeda’s Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) have armed sectarian extremists across the Arab World, from as far West as Mali, to as far East as Syria.

In addition to small arms, heavier weapons are also making their way
through this extensive network. The Washington Post in their article, “Libyan missiles on the loose,” reported:

“Two former CIA counterterrorism officers told me last
week that technicians recently refurbished 800 of these man-portable
air-defense systems (known as MANPADS)
— some for an African jihadist group called Boko Haram that is often
seen as an ally of al-Qaeda — for possible use against commercial jets
flying into Niger, Chad and perhaps Nigeria.”

While undoubtedly these weapons are also headed to Niger, Chad, and
perhaps Nigeria, they are veritably headed to Syria. Libyan LIFG
terrorists are confirmed to be flooding into Syria from Libya. In November 2011, the Telegraph in their article, “Leading Libyan Islamist met Free Syrian Army opposition group,” would report:

Abdulhakim Belhadj, head of the Tripoli Military Council
and the former leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, “met with
Free Syrian Army leaders in Istanbul and on the border with Turkey,”
said a military official working with Mr Belhadj. “Mustafa Abdul Jalil
(the interim Libyan president) sent him there.”

Another Telegraph article, “Libya’s new rulers offer weapons to Syrian rebels,” would admit

Syrian rebels held secret talks with Libya’s new
authorities on Friday, aiming to secure weapons and money for their
insurgency against President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, The Daily
Telegraph has learned.

At the meeting, which was held in Istanbul and included Turkish
officials, the Syrians requested “assistance” from the Libyan
representatives and were offered arms, and potentially volunteers.

“There is something being planned to send weapons and even Libyan
fighters to Syria,” said a Libyan source, speaking on condition of
anonymity. “There is a military intervention on the way. Within a few
weeks you will see.”

Later that month, some 600 Libyan terrorists would be reported to have entered Syria to begin combat operations and have been flooding into the country ever since.

Image: Libyan Mahdi al-Harati of the US State Department, United Nations, and the UK Home Office (page 5, .pdf)-listed
terrorist organization, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG),
addressing fellow terrorists in Syria. Harati is now commanding a Libyan
brigade operating inside of Syria attempting to destroy the Syrian
government and subjugate the Syrian population. Traditionally, this is
known as “foreign invasion.”

….

Washington Post’s reported “loose missiles” in Libya are now turning
up on the battlefield in Syria. While outfits like the Guardian, in
their article “Arms and the Manpads: Syrian rebels get anti-aircraft missiles,”
are reporting the missiles as being deployed across Syria, they have
attempted to downplay any connection to Libya’s looted arsenal and the
Al Qaeda terrorists that have imported them. In contrast, Times has
published open admissions from terrorists themselves admitting they are
receiving heavy weapons including surface-to-air missiles from Libya.

In Time’s article, “Libya’s Fighters Export Their Revolution to Syria,” it is reported:

Some Syrians are more frank about the assistance the
Libyans are providing. “They have heavier weapons than we do,” notes
Firas Tamim, who has traveled in rebel-controlled areas to keep tabs on
foreign fighters. “They brought these weapons to Syria, and they are
being used on the front lines.” Among the arms Tamim has seen are
Russian-made surface-to-air missiles, known as the SAM 7.

Libyan fighters largely brush off questions about weapon transfers,
but in December they claimed they were doing just that. “We are in the
process of collecting arms in Libya,” a Libyan fighter in Syria told the
French daily Le Figaro. “Once this is done, we will have to find a way to bring them here.”

Clearly NATO’s intervention in Libya has left a vast, devastating arsenal in the hands of sectarian extremists, led by US State Department, United Nations, and the UK Home Office (page 5, .pdf)-listed
terrorist organization LIFG, that is now exporting these weapons and
militants to NATO’s other front in Syria. It is confirmed that both
Libyan terrorists and weapons are crossing the Turkish-Syrian border,
with NATO assistance, and it is now clear that heavy weapons, including
anti-aircraft weapons have crossed the border too.

The Guardian reported in their November 2011 article, “Libyan chemical weapons stockpiles intact, say inspectors,” that:

Libya’s stockpiles of mustard gas and chemicals used to
make weapons are intact and were not stolen during the uprising that
toppled Muammar Gaddafi, weapons inspectors have said.

But also reported that:

The abandonment or disappearance of some Gaddafi-era weapons has
prompted concerns that such firepower could erode regional security if
it falls into the hands of Islamist militants or rebels active in north
Africa. Some fear they could be used by Gaddafi loyalists to spread
instability in Libya.

Last month Human Rights Watch urged Libya’s ruling national
transitional council to take action over large numbers of heavy weapons,
including surface-to-air missiles, it said were lying unguarded more
than two months after Gaddafi was overthrown.On Wednesday the UN
secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, said the UN would send experts to Libya
to help ensure nuclear material and chemical weapons did not fall into
the wrong hands.

And while inspectors claim that Libya’s chemical weapons are in the “government’s” hands and not “extremists’,” it is clear by the Libyan government’s own admission, that they themselves are involved in sending fighters and weapons into Syria.

It remains to be seen where these chemical weapons came from. Should
they appear to be from Libya’s arsenal, NATO, especially the US and
Turkey, would be implicated in supplying Al Qaeda terrorists with WMDs,
the very scenario the West has been paralyzed in fear over for the past
10 years, has given up its liberties, and spilled the blood of thousands
of its soldiers to prevent.

The implications of Western-backed terrorists using chemical weapons,
regardless of their origin, has cost the West its already floundering
legitimacy, jeopardized its institutions, and has further shook the
confidence of the many shareholders invested in them – politically,
financially, industrially, and strategically. Such shareholders would be
wise to begin looking for exits and cultivating alternatives outside
the Wall Street-London international order.

US/NATO Fuck-Pigs Bringing 'Freedom' To The Oppressed People Of Syria

noreply@blogger.com (Alien) — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 19:05:00 +0000

In Honor of Operation Iraqi Freedom Anniversary USA proxy terrorist army kill more innocent people with Chemical Attack on Syria

you people make me
physically ill …. i find it very ironic that 300 terrorists just came
back from Jordan to Syria after being trained by USA and this happens …
coincidence i think not, not every one is as naive or apathetic as
merikans, don’t forget that

25 Killed by Rocket with Chemical Materials Fired by Terrorists in Aleppo Countryside

ALEPPO,(SANA)- Terrorists on Tuesday launched a rocket containing chemical materials on Khan al-Asal area in Aleppo Countryside.

Initial information
indicated that about 16 citizens were killed, and 86 others were
injured, most of them are in critical condition.

Later, the death toll due to the firing of the rocket rose up to 25 martyrs.

Palestinian Holocaust

noreply@blogger.com (Alien) — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 15:29:00 +0000

65 Years Ago: The Green Light For Zionism’s Ethnic Cleansing Of Palestine

By Alan Hart

11 March, 2013

Alanhart.net

I find myself wondering
how many of our present day leaders, President Obama in particular, are
aware of what happened in Palestine on 10 March 65 years ago.

On that day in 1948, two months before Israel’s
unilateral declaration of independence in defiance of the will of the
organized international community as it then was at the UN, Zionism’s
in-Palestine political and military leaders met in Tel Aviv to formally
adopt PLAN DALET, the blueprint with operational military orders for the
ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

They did not and never would refer to the crime they authorised as ethnic cleansing. Their euphemism for it was “transfer”.

As noted in an excellent anniversary briefing paper
by IMEU (the American-founded Institute for Middle East Understanding),
from the earliest days of modern political Zionism its advocates
grappled with the problem of creating a Jewish majority state in a part
of the world where Palestinian Arabs were the overwhelming majority of
the population.

The earliest insider information we have on
Zionism’s thinking is from the diary of Theodor Herzl, the founding
father of Zionism’s colonial-like enterprise. He wrote:

“We shall try to spirit the penniless population
across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit
countries, while denying it any employment in our own country…
expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly
and circumspectly.”

Those words were committed to paper by Herzl in 1895
but they were not published (in other words they were suppressed) until
1962.

By August 1937 “transfer” was a discreet but hot
topic for discussion at the 20th Zionist Congress in Zurich,
Switzerland. All in attendance were aware that the process of
dispossessing the Palestinian peasants (the fellahin) mainly by
purchasing land from absentee owners had been underway for years.
Referring to this David Ben-Gurion, who would become Israel’s first
prime minister, said:

“You are no doubt aware of the (Jewish National
Fund’s) activity in this respect. Now a transfer of a completely
different scope will have to be carried out. In many parts of the
country new settlement will not be possible without transferring the
Arab fellahin…Jewish power (in Palestine), which grows steadily, will
also increase our possibilities to carry out this transfer on a large
scale.”

A year later Ben-Gurion told a meeting of the Jewish Agency that he supported compulsory transfer. He added:

“I don’t see anything immoral in it.”

In my view that’s a most revealing statement. It
tells us – does it not? – that Ben-Gurion, the Zionist state’s founding
father, was a man with no sense of what was morally right and wrong.

Joseph Weitz was the director of the Jewish National
Fund’s Lands Department which was responsible for acquiring the land
for Zionism’s enterprise in Palestine. One of his diary entries for
December 1940 reads as follows:

“There is no way besides transferring the Arabs from
here to the neighbouring countries, and to transfer all of them, save
perhaps for (the Arabs of) Bethlehem, Nazareth and Old Jerusalem. Not
one village must be left, not one (Bedouin) tribe. And only after this
transfer will the country be able to absorb millions of our brothers and
the Jewish problem will cease to exist. There is no other solution.”

Plan Dalet called for:

“Mounting operations against enemy population
centres located inside or near our defensive system in order to prevent
them from being used as bases by an active armed force. These operations
can be divided into the following categories:

“Destruction of villages – setting fire to, blowing
up, and planting mines in the debris – especially those population
centres which are difficult to control continuously.

“Mounting search and control operations according to
the following guidelines: encirclement of the village and conducting a
search inside it. In the event of resistance, the armed force must be
destroyed and the population must be expelled outside the borders of the
state.”

Before the Zionist state declared itself to be in
existence on 14 May 1948, more than 200 Palestinian villages had already
been emptied and about 175,000 Palestinians were already refugees. Some
had fled in fear; others were expelled by Zionist forces.

The prime fear factor was the slaughter by Zionist
terrorists of more than 100 Palestinian men, women and children at Deir
Yassin near Jerusalem. As Arthur Koestler was to write, the “bloodbath”
at Deir Yassin was “the psychologically decisive factor in the
spectacular exodus of the Arabs from the Holy Land and the creation of
the Palestinian refugee problem.”

It was, however, Menachem Begin, Zionism’s terror
master and subsequently prime minister, who provided the most vivid
description of how well the slaughter at Deir Yassin served Zionism’s
cause. In his book The Revolt, he wrote:

“Panic overwhelmed the Arabs of Eretz Israel.
Kolonia village, which had previously repulsed every attack of the
Haganah (the underground Jewish military organization that became the
Israeli Army), was evacuated overnight and fell without further
fighting. Beit-Iksa was also evacuated. These two places overlooked the
road and their fall, together with the capture of Kastel by the Haganah,
made it possible to keep open the road to Jerusalem. In the rest of the
country, too, the Arabs began to flee in terror, even before they
clashed with Jewish forces… The legend of Deir Yassin helped us in
particular in the saving of Tiberias and the conquest of Haifa… All the
Jewish forces proceeded to advance through Haifa like a knife through
butter. The Arabs began fleeing in panic, shouting ‘Deir Yassin!’”

Three decades later, in an article for The American
Zionist, Mordechai Nisan of the Truman Research Centre of the Hebrew
University in Jerusalem expressed his concern about the failure to
understand the major significance of terrorism in the struggle for
Jewish sovereignty. He wrote: “Without terror it is unlikely that Jewish
independence would have been achieved when it was.”

After the Zionist state declared itself to be in
existence, its government set up an unofficial body known as the
“Transfer Committee”. Its job was to oversee the destruction of
Palestinian towns and villages and/or their repopulation with Jews. The
purpose of this Zionist strategy was to prevent dispossessed
Palestinians returning to their homes.

By 1949 more than 400 Palestinian towns and villages
had been systematically destroyed or taken over by Israeli Jews; and at
least 750,000 Palestinians were refugees, dispossessed of their land,
their homes and their rights.

In his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Ilan
Pappe, Israel’s leading “revisionist” (meaning honest) historian,
documents in detail Zionism’s systematic reign of terror which, from
December 1947 to January 1949, included 31 massacres. (Deir Yassin was
only the first). In a videoed conversation with me in 2008, which can be
viewed in the Hart of the Matter series on my site (www.alanhart.net),
Ilan said this:

“Probably more surprising than anything else was not
the silence of the world as Zionist ethnic cleansing was taking place
in Palestine, but the silence of the Jews in Palestine. They knew what
had happened to Jews in Nazi Europe, and some might even have seen it
for themselves, yet they had no scruples in doing almost the same thing
to the Palestinians.”

On this 65th anniversary of the authorization of the
ethnic cleaning of Palestine, the questions I would like to see put to
our leaders today, President Obama in particular, are the following:

Are you aware of Plan Dalet?

If not, why not?

If you are aware of it, could it not said be said
that your refusal to call and hold Zionism to account for its crimes
makes you (and your predecessors) complicit in those crimes by default?

Alan Hart has been engaged with events in the Middle
East and their global consequences and terrifying implications – the
possibility of a Clash of Civilisations, Judeo-Christian v Islamic, and,
along the way, another great turning against the Jews – for nearly 40
years… Alan is author of "Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews" - http://www.alanhart.net

NATO-Backed Terrorists Target Kindergarten Bus

noreply@blogger.com (Alien) — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 11:51:00 +0000

Child Martyred, Nine Injured after Targeting Kindergarten Microbus by Terrorists

DAMASCUS COUNTRYSIDE,(SANA)-
Terrorists on Sunday targeted a kindergarten microbus near Dahiat
al-Assad Roundabout in Harasta in Damascus Countryside as a child was
martyred and nine children were injured, some of them are in a critical
situation.

Challenging the Washington Consensus

noreply@blogger.com (Alien) — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 16:36:00 +0000

March 07, 2013

Hugo Chavez and Me

by TARIQ ALI

Once I asked whether he preferred enemies who hated him because
they knew what he was doing or those who frothed and foamed out of
ignorance. He laughed. The former was preferable, he explained, because
they made him feel that he was on the right track. Hugo Chávez’s death did not come as a surprise, but that does not make it easier to accept. We have lost one of the political giants of the post-communist era. Venezuela,
its elites mired in corruption on a huge scale, had been considered a
secure outpost of Washington and, at the other extreme, the Socialist
International. Few thought of the country before his victories. After
1999, every major media outlet of the west felt obliged to send a
correspondent. Since they all said the same thing (the country was
supposedly on the verge of a communist-style dictatorship) they would
have been better advised to pool their resources.

I first met him in 2002, soon after the military coup instigated by
Washington and Madrid had failed and subsequently on numerous occasions.
He had asked to see me during the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre,
Brazil. He inquired: “Why haven’t you been to Venezuela? Come soon.” I
did. What appealed was his bluntness and courage. What often appeared as
sheer impulsiveness had been carefully thought out and then, depending
on the response, enlarged by spontaneous eruptions on his part. At a
time when the world had fallen silent, when centre-left and centre-right
had to struggle hard to find some differences and their politicians had
become desiccated machine men obsessed with making money, Chávez lit up
the political landscape.

He appeared as an indestructible ox, speaking for hours to his people
in a warm, sonorous voice, a fiery eloquence that made it impossible to
remain indifferent. His words had a stunning resonance. His speeches
were littered with homilies, continental and national history, quotes
from the 19th-century revolutionary leader and president of Venezuela Simón Bolívar,
pronouncements on the state of the world and songs. “Our bourgeoisie
are embarrassed that I sing in public. Do you mind?” he would ask the
audience. The response was a resounding “No”. He would then ask them to
join in the singing and mutter, “Louder, so they can hear us in the
eastern part of the city.” Once before just such a rally he looked at me
and said: “You look tired today. Will you last out the evening?” I
replied: “It depends on how long you’re going to speak.” It would be a
short speech, he promised. Under three hours.

The Bolívarians, as Chávez’s supporters were known, offered a political programme that challenged the Washington consensus: neo-liberalism at home and wars abroad. This was the prime reason for the vilification of Chávez that is sure to continue long after his death.

Politicians like him had become unacceptable. What he loathed most
was the contemptuous indifference of mainstream politicians in South
America towards their own people. The Venezuelan elite is notoriously
racist. They regarded the elected president of their country as uncouth
and uncivilised, a zambo of mixed African and indigenous blood
who could not be trusted. His supporters were portrayed on private TV
networks as monkeys. Colin Powell had to publicly reprimand the US
embassy in Caracas for hosting a party where Chávez was portrayed as a
gorilla.

Was he surprised? “No,” he told me with a grim look on his face. “I
live here. I know them well. One reason so many of us join the army is
because all other avenues are sealed.” No longer. He had few illusions.
He knew that local enemies did not seethe and plot in a vacuum. Behind
them was the world’s most powerful state. For a few moments he thought
Obama might be different. The military coup in Honduras disabused him of all such notions.

He had a punctilious sense of duty to his people. He was one of them.
Unlike European social democrats he never believed that any improvement
in humankind would come from the corporations and the bankers and said
so long before the Wall Street crash of 2008. If I had to pin a label on
him, I would say that he was a socialist democrat, far removed from any
sectarian impulses and repulsed by the self-obsessed behaviour of
various far-left sects and the blindness of their routines. He said as
much when we first met.

The following year in Caracas I questioned him further on the
Bolívarian project. What could be accomplished? He was very clear; much
more so than some of his over-enthusiastic supporters: ”I don’t believe
in the dogmatic postulates of Marxist revolution. I don’t accept that we
are living in a period of proletarian revolutions. All that must be
revised. Reality is telling us that every day. Are we aiming in
Venezuela today for the abolition of private property or a classless
society? I don’t think so. But if I’m told that because of that reality
you can’t do anything to help the poor, the people who have made this
country rich through their labour – and never forget that some of it was
slave labour – then I say: ‘We part company.’ I will never accept that
there can be no redistribution of wealth in society. Our upper classes
don’t even like paying taxes. That’s one reason they hate me. We said:
‘You must pay your taxes.’ I believe it’s better to die in battle,
rather than hold aloft a very revolutionary and very pure banner, and do
nothing … That position often strikes me as very convenient, a good
excuse … Try and make your revolution, go into combat, advance a little,
even if it’s only a millimetre, in the right direction, instead of
dreaming about utopias.”

I remember sitting next to an elderly, modestly attired woman at one
of his public rallies. She questioned me about him. What did I think?
Was he doing well? Did he not speak too much? Was he not too rash at
times? I defended him. She was relieved. It was his mother, worried that
perhaps she had not brought him up as well as she should have done: “We
always made sure that he read books as a child.” This passion for
reading stayed with him. History, fiction and poetry were the loves of
his life: “Like me, Fidel is an insomniac. Sometimes we’re reading the
same novel. He rings at 3am and asks: ‘Well, have you finished? What did
you think?’ And we argue for another hour.’”

It was the spell of literature that in 2005 led him to celebrate the
400th anniversary of Cervantes’s great novel in a unique fashion. The
ministry of culture reprinted a million copies of Don Quixote
and distributed them free to a million poor, but now literate,
households. A quixotic gesture? No. The magic of art can’t transform the
universe, but it can open up a mind. Chávez was confident that the book
would be read now or later.

The closeness to Castro has been portrayed as a father-son
relationship. This is only partially the case. Last year a huge crowd
had gathered outside the hospital in Caracas, where Chávez was meant to
be recuperating from cancer treatment, and their chants got louder and
louder. Chávez ordered a loudspeaker system on the rooftop. He then
addressed the crowd. Watching this scene on Telesur in Havana, Castro
was shocked. He rang the director of the hospital: “This is Fidel
Castro. You should be sacked. Get him back into bed and tell him I said
so.”

Above the friendship, Chávez saw Castro and Che Guevara in a
historical frame. They were the 20th-century heirs of Bolívar and his
friend Antonio José de Sucre.
They tried to unite the continent, but it was like ploughing the sea.
Chávez got closer to that ideal than the quartet he admired so much. His
successes in Venezuela triggered a continental reaction: Bolivia and
Ecuador saw victories. Brazil under Lula and Dilma did not follow the
social model but refused to allow the west to pit them against each
other. It was a favoured trope of western journalists: Lula is better
than Chávez. Only last year Lula publicly declared that he supported
Chávez, whose importance for “our continent” should never be
underestimated.

The image of Chávez most popular in the west was that of an oppressive caudillo.
Had this been true I would wish for more of them. The Bolívarian
constitution, opposed by the Venezuelan opposition, its newspapers and
TV channels and the local CNN, plus western supporters, was approved by a
large majority of the population. It is the only constitution in the
world that affords the possibility of removing an elected president from
office via a referendum based on collecting sufficient signatures.
Consistent only in their hatred for Chávez, the opposition tried to use this mechanism in 2004 to remove him.
Regardless of the fact that many of the signatures were those of dead
people, the Venezuelan government decided to accept the challenge.

I was in Caracas a week before the vote. When I met Chávez at the
Miraflores palace he was poring over the opinion polls in great detail.
It might be close. “And if you lose?” I asked. “Then I will resign,” he
replied without hesitation. He won.

Did he ever tire? Get depressed? Lose confidence? “Yes,” he replied.
But it was not the coup attempt or the referendum. It was the strike
organised by the corrupted oil unions and backed by the middle-classes
that worried him because it would affect the entire population,
especially the poor: “Two factors helped sustain my morale. The first
was the support we retained throughout the country. I got fed up sitting
in my office. So with one security guard and two comrades I drove out
to listen to people and breathe better air. The response moved me
greatly. A woman came up to me and said: ‘Chávez follow me, I want to
show you something.’ I followed her into her tiny dwelling. Inside, her
husband and children were waiting for the soup to be cooked. ‘Look at
what I’m using for fuel … the back of our bed. Tomorrow I’ll burn the
legs, the day after the table, then the chairs and doors. We will
survive, but don’t give up now.’ On my way out the kids from the gangs
came and shook hands. ‘We can live without beer. You make sure you screw
these motherfuckers.’”

What was the inner reality of his life? For anyone with a certain
level of intelligence, of character and culture, his or her natural
leanings, emotional and intellectual, hang together, constitute a whole
not always visible to everyone. He was a divorcee, but affection for his
children and grandchildren was never in doubt. Most of the women he
loved, and there were a few, described him as a generous lover, and this
was long after they had parted.

What of the country he leaves behind? A paradise? Certainly not. How
could it be, given the scale of the problems? But he leaves behind a
very changed society in which the poor felt they had an important stake
in the government. There is no other explanation for his popularity.
Venezuela is divided between his partisans and detractors. He died
undefeated, but the big tests lie ahead. The system he created, a social
democracy based on mass mobilisations, needs to progress further. Will
his successors be up to the task? In a sense, that is the ultimate test
of the Bolívarian experiment.

Of one thing we can be sure. His enemies will not let him rest in
peace. And his supporters? His supporters, the poor throughout the
continent and elsewhere, will see him as a political leader who promised
and delivered social rights against heavy odds; as someone who fought
for them and won.

Tariq Ali is the author of The Duel: Pakistan on the Flightpath of American Power. He can be reached at tariq.ali3@btinternet.com.

Was Sadat A Traitor?

noreply@blogger.com (Alien) — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 13:28:00 +0000

What Really Happened in the “Yom Kippur” War?

by ISRAEL SHAMIR

Moscow

Here
in Moscow I recently received a dark-blue folder dated 1975. It
contains one of the most well-buried secrets of Middle Eastern and of US
diplomacy. The secret file, written by the Soviet Ambassador in Cairo,
Vladimir M. Vinogradov, apparently a draft for a memorandum addressed to
the Soviet politbureau, describes the 1973 October War as a collusive
enterprise between US, Egyptian and Israeli leaders, orchestrated by
Henry Kissinger. If you are an Egyptian reader this revelation is likely
to upset you. I, an Israeli who fought the Egyptians in the 1973 war,
was equally upset and distressed, – yet still excited by the discovery.
For an American it is likely to come as a shock.

According to the Vinogradov memo (to be published by us in full in the Russian weekly Expert
next Monday), Anwar al-Sadat, holder of the titles of President, Prime
Minister, ASU Chairman, Chief Commander, Supreme Military Ruler, entered
into conspiracy with the Israelis, betrayed his ally Syria, condemned
the Syrian army to destruction and Damascus to bombardment, allowed
General Sharon’s tanks to cross without hindrance to the western bank of
the Suez Canal, and actually planned a defeat of the Egyptian troops in
the October War. Egyptian soldiers and officers bravely and
successfully fought the Israeli enemy – too successfully for Sadat’s
liking as he began the war in order to allow for the US comeback to the
Middle East.

He
was not the only conspirator: according to Vinogradov, the grandmotherly
Golda Meir knowingly sacrificed two thousand of Israel’s best fighters –
she possibly thought fewer would be killed — in order to give Sadat his
moment of glory and to let the US secure its positions in the Middle
East. The memo allows for a completely new interpretation of the Camp
David Treaty, as one achieved by deceit and treachery.

Vladimir
Vinogradov was a prominent and brilliant Soviet diplomat; he served as
ambassador to Tokyo in the 1960s, to Cairo from 1970 to 1974,
co-chairman of the Geneva Peace Conference, ambassador to Teheran during
the Islamic revolution, the USSR Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs and
the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation. He was a
gifted painter and a prolific writer; his archive has hundreds of pages
of unique observations and notes covering international affairs, but the
place of honor goes to his Cairo diaries, and among others,
descriptions of his hundreds of meetings with Sadat and the full
sequence of the war as he observed it unfold at Sadat’s hq as the big
decisions were made. When published, these notes will allow to
re-evaluate the post-Nasser period of Egyptian history.

Vinogradov arrived to Cairo for Nasser’s funeral and remained there as the Ambassador.

three year war

He
recorded the creeping coup of Sadat, least bright of Nasser’s men, who
became Egypt’s president by chance, as he was the vice-president at
Nasser’s death. Soon he dismissed, purged and imprisoned practically all
important Egyptian politicians, the comrades-in-arms of Gamal Abd el
Nasser, and dismantled the edifice of Nasser’s socialism.

Vinogradov
was an astute observer; not a conspiracy cuckoo. Far from being
headstrong and doctrinaire, he was a friend of Arabs and a consistent
supporter and promoter of a lasting and just peace between the Arabs and
Israel, a peace that would meet Palestinian needs and ensure Jewish
prosperity.

The pearl of his archive is the file called The Middle Eastern Games.
It contains some 20 typewritten pages edited by hand in blue ink,
apparently a draft for a memo to the Politburo and to the government,
dated January 1975, soon after his return from Cairo. The file contains
the deadly secret of the collusion he observed. It is written in lively
and highly readable Russian, not in the bureaucratese we’d expect.

Two
pages are added to the file in May 1975; they describe Vinogradov’s
visit to Amman and his informal talks with Abu Zeid Rifai, the Prime
Minister, and his exchange of views with the Soviet Ambassador in
Damascus. Vinogradov did not voice his opinions until 1998, and even
then he did not speak as openly as in this draft. Actually, when the
suggestion of collusion was presented to him by the Jordanian prime
minister, being a prudent diplomat, he refused to discuss it.

The
official version of the October war holds that on October 6, 1973, in
conjunction with Hafez al-Assad of Syria, Anwar as-Sadat launched a
surprise attack against Israeli forces.

They
crossed the Canal and advanced a few miles into the occupied Sinai. As
the war progressed, tanks of General Ariel Sharon crossed the Suez Canal
and encircled the Egyptian Third Army.

The ceasefire negotiations eventually led to the handshake at the White House.

For
me, the Yom Kippur War (as we called it) was an important part of my
autobiography. A young paratrooper, I fought that war, crossed the
canal, seized Gabal Ataka heights, survived shelling and face-to-face
battles, buried my buddies, shot the man-eating red dogs of the desert
and the enemy tanks. My unit was ferried by helicopters into the desert
where we severed the main communication line between the Egyptian armies
and its home base, the Suez-Cairo highway. Our location at 101 km to
Cairo was used for the first cease fire talks; so I know that war not by
word of mouth, and it hurts to learn that I and my comrades-at-arms
were just disposable tokens in the ruthless game we – ordinary people –
lost. Obviously I did not know it then, for me the war was a surprise,
but then, I was not a general.

Vinogradov
dispels the idea of surprise: in his view, both the canal crossing by
the Egyptians and the inroads by Sharon were planned and agreed upon in
advance by Kissinger, Sadat and Meir. The plan included the destruction of the Syrian army as well.

At first, he asks some questions:

“how
the crossing could be a surprise if the Russians evacuated their
families a few days before the war? The concentration of the forces was
observable and could not escape Israeli attention. Why did the Egyptian
forces not proceed after the crossing but stood still? Why did they have
no plans for advancing? Why there was a forty km-wide unguarded gap
between the 2d and the 3d armies, the gap that invited Sharon’s raid?
How could Israeli tanks sneak to the western bank of the Canal? Why did
Sadat refuse to stop them? Why were there no reserve forces on the
western bank of the Canal?”

Vinogradov
takes a leaf from Sherlock Holmes who said: when you have eliminated
the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
He writes:

“These
questions can’t be answered if Sadat is to be considered a true patriot
of Egypt. But they can be answered in full, if we consider a
possibility of collusion between Sadat, the US and Israeli leadership – a
conspiracy in which each participant pursued his own goals. A
conspiracy in which each participant did not know the full details of
other participants’ game. A conspiracy in which each participant tried
to gain more ground despite the overall agreement between them.”

Sadat’s Plans

Before the war Sadat was at the nadir of his power: in Egypt and abroad he had lost prestige. The least educated and least charismatic of Nasser’s followers, Sadat was isolated. He needed a war, a limited war with Israel that would not end with defeat.
Such a war would release the pressure in the army and he would regain
his authority. The US agreed to give him a green light for the war,
something the Russians never did. The Russians protected Egypt’s skies,
but they were against wars. For that, Sadat had to rely upon the US and
part with the USSR. He was ready to do so as he loathed socialism.

He did not need victory, just no defeat;
he wanted to explain his failure to win by deficient Soviet equipment.
That is why the army was given the minimal task: crossing the Canal and
hold the bridgehead until the Americans entered the game.

Plans of the US

During
decolonisation the US lost strategic ground in the Middle East with its
oil, its Suez Canal, its vast population. Its ally Israel had to be
supported, but the Arabs were growing stronger all the time. Israel had
to be made more flexible, for its brutal policies interfered with the US
plans. So the US had to keep Israel as its ally but at the same time
Israel’s arrogance had to be broken. The US needed a chance to “save”
Israel after allowing the Arabs to beat the Israelis for a while. So the
US allowed Sadat to begin a limited war.

Israel

Israel’s
leaders had to help the US, its main provider and supporter. The US
needed to improve its positions in the Middle East, as in 1973 they had
only one friend and ally, King Feisal. (Kissinger told Vinogradov that
Feisal tried to educate him about the evilness of Jews and Communists.)
If and when the US was to recover its position in the Middle East, the
Israeli position would improve drastically. Egypt was a weak link, as Sadat
disliked the USSR and the progressive forces in the country, so it
could be turned. Syria could be dealt with militarily, and broken.

The
Israelis and Americans decided to let Sadat take the Canal while
holding the mountain passes of Mittla and Giddi, a better defensive line
anyway. This was actually Rogers’ plan of 1971, acceptable to Israel.
But this should be done in fighting, not given up for free.

As
for Syria, it was to be militarily defeated, thoroughly. That is why the
Israeli Staff did sent all its available troops to the Syrian border,
while denuding the Canal though the Egyptian army was much bigger than
the Syrian one. Israeli troops at the Canal were to be sacrificed in
this game; they were to die in order to bring the US back into the
Middle East.

However,
the plans of the three partners were somewhat derailed by the factors
on the ground: it is the usual problem with conspiracies; nothing works
as it should, Vinogradov writes in his memo to be published in full next
week in Moscow’s Expert.

Sadat’s
crooked game was spoiled to start with. His presumptions did not work
out. Contrary to his expectations, the USSR supported the Arab side and
began a massive airlift of its most modern military equipment right
away. The USSR took the risk of confrontation with the US;
Sadat had not believed they would because the Soviets were adamant
against the war, before it started. His second problem, according to
Vinogradov, was the superior quality of Russian weapons in the hands of
Egyptian soldiers — better than the western weapons in the Israelis’
hands.

As
an Israeli soldier of the time I must confirm the Ambassador’s words.
The Egyptians had the legendary Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifles, the best gun in the world, while we had FN battle rifles that hated sand and water. We dropped our FNs and picked up their AKs at the first opportunity. They
used anti-tank Sagger missiles, light, portable, precise, carried by
one soldier. Saggers killed between 800 and 1200 Israeli tanks. We had old 105 mm recoilless jeep-mounted rifles, four men at a rifle (actually, a small cannon) to fight tanks. Only new American weapons redressed the imbalance.

Sadat did not expect the Egyptian troops taught by the Soviet specialists to better their Israeli enemy – but they did.

They crossed the Canal much faster than planned and with much smaller losses.

Arabs beating the Israelis – it was bad news for Sadat. He overplayed his hand. That is why the Egyptian troops stood still, like the sun upon Gibeon, and did not move. They
waited for the Israelis, but at that time the Israeli army was fighting
the Syrians. The Israelis felt somewhat safe from Sadat’s side and they
sent all their army north. The Syrian army took the entire punch of Israeli forces and began its retreat. They asked Sadat to move forward, to take some of the heat off them, but Sadat refused. His army stood and did not move, though there were no Israelis between the Canal and the mountain passes.

Syrian
leader al Assad was convinced at that time that Sadat betrayed him, and
he said so frankly to the Soviet ambassador in Damascus, Mr Muhitdinov,
who passed this to Vinogradov. Vinogradov saw Sadat daily and asked him in real time why he was not advancing. He received no reasonable answer: Sadat muttered that he does not want to run all over Sinai looking for Israelis, that sooner or later they would come to him.

The Israeli leadership was worried: the war was not going as expected. There were big losses on the Syrian front, the Syrians retreated but each yard was hard fought;
only Sadat’s passivity saved the Israelis from a reverse. The plan to
for total Syrian defeat failed, but the Syrians could not effectively
counterattack.

This was the time to punish Sadat: his army was too efficient, his advance too fast, and worse, his reliance upon the Soviets only grew due to the air bridge. The Israelis arrested their advance on Damascus and turned their troops southwards to Sinai.

The
Jordanians could at this time have cut off the North-to-South route and
king Hussein proposed this to Sadat and Assad. Assad agreed
immediately, but Sadat refused to accept the offer. He
explained it to Vinogradov that he did not believe in the fighting
abilities of the Jordanians. If they entered the war, Egypt would have
to save them. At other times he said that it is better to lose the whole
of Sinai than to lose a square yard on the Jordan: an insincere and
foolish remark, in Vinogradov’s view. So the Israeli troops rolled southwards without hindrance.

During
the war, we (the Israelis) also knew that if Sadat advanced, he would
gain the whole of Sinai in no time; we entertained many hypotheses why
he was standing still, none satisfactory. Vinogradov explains it well:
Sadat ran off his script and was waited for US involvement. What he got
was the deep raid of Sharon.

This
breakthrough of the Israeli troops to the western bank of the Canal was
the murkiest part of the war, Vinogradov writes. He asked Sadat’s
military commanders at the beginning of the war why there is the forty km wide gap between the Second and the Third armies and was told that this was Sadat’s directive. The gap was not even guarded; it was left wide open like a Trojan backdoor in a computer program.

Sadat
paid no attention to Sharon’s raid; he was indifferent to this dramatic
development. Vinogradov asked him to deal with it when only the first
five Israeli tanks crossed the Canal westwards; Sadat refused, saying it was of no military importance, just a “political move”,
whatever that meant. He repeated this to Vinogradov later, when the
Israeli foothold on the Western bank of became a sizeable bridgehead.
Sadat did not listen to advice from Moscow, he opened the door for the Israelis into Africa.

This
allows for two explanations, says Vinogradov: an impossible one, of the
Egyptians’ total military ignorance and an improbable one, of Sadat’s
intentions. The improbable wins, as Sherlock Holmes observed.

The Americans did not stop the Israeli advance right away, says Vinogradov, for they wanted to have a lever to push Sadat so he would not change his mind about the whole setup.
Apparently the gap was build into the deployments for this purpose. So
Vinogradov’s idea of “conspiracy” is that of dynamic collusion, similar
to the collusion on Jordan between the Jewish Yishuv and Transjordan as
described by Avi Shlaim: there were some guidelines and agreements, but
they were liable to change, depending on the strength of the sides.

Bottom line

The US “saved” Egypt by stopping the advancing Israeli troops. With the passive support of Sadat, the US allowed Israel to hit Syria really hard.

The US-negotiated disengagement agreements with the UN troops in-between made Israel safe for years to come

(In a different and important document, “Notes on Heikal’s book Road to Ramadan”,
Vinogradov rejects the thesis of the unavoidability of Israeli-Arab
wars: he says that as long as Egypt remains in the US thrall, such a war
is unlikely. Indeed there have been no big wars since 1974, unless one
counts Israeli “operations” in Lebanon and Gaza.)

The US “saved” Israel with military supplies.

Thanks to Sadat, the US came back to the Middle East and positioned itself as the only mediator and “honest broker” in the area.

Sadat
began a violent anti-Soviet and antisocialist campaign, Vinogradov
writes, trying to discredit the USSR. In the Notes, Vinogradov charges
that Sadat spread many lies and disinformation to discredit the USSR in
the Arab eyes.

His main line was:

“the USSR could not and would not liberate Arab soil while the US could, would and did.”

Vinogradov
explained elsewhere that the Soviet Union was and is against offensive
wars, among other reasons because their end is never certain.

However,
the USSR was ready to go a long way to defend Arab states. As for
liberation, the years since 1973 have proved that the US can’t or won’t
deliver that, either – while the return of Sinai to Egypt in exchange for separate peace was always possible, without a war as well.

After
the war, Sadat’s positions improved drastically. He was hailed as hero,
Egypt took a place of honor among the Arab states. But in a year,
Sadat’s reputation was in tatters again, and that of Egypt went to an
all time low, Vinogradov writes.

The Syrians understood Sadat’s game very early: on October 12, 1973 when the Egyptian troops stood still and ceased fighting, President Hafez el Assad said to the Soviet ambassador that he is certain Sadat was intentionally betraying Syria. Sadat
deliberately allowed the Israeli breakthrough to the Western bank of
Suez, in order to give Kissinger a chance to intervene and realise his
disengagement plan, said Assad to Jordanian Prime Minister Abu
Zeid Rifai who told it to Vinogradov during a private breakfast they had
in his house in Amman. The Jordanians also suspect Sadat played a crooked game, Vinogradov
writes. However, the prudent Vinogradov refused to be drawn into this
discussion though he felt that the Jordanians “read his thoughts.”

When
Vinogradov was appointed co-chairman of the Geneva Peace Conference, he
encountered a united Egyptian-American position aiming to disrupt the
conference, while Assad refused even to take part in it.

Vinogradov
delivered him a position paper for the conference and asked whether it
is acceptable for Syria. Assad replied: yes but for one line. Which one
line, asked a hopeful Vinogradov, and Assad retorted:

“the line saying “Syria agrees to participate in the conference.”

Indeed the conference came to nought, as did all other conferences and arrangements.

Though
the suspicions voiced by Vinogradov in his secret document have been
made by various military experts and historians, never until now they
were made by a participant in the events, a person of such exalted
position, knowledge, presence at key moments. Vinogradov’s notes allow
us to decipher and trace the history of Egypt with its
de-industrialisation, poverty, internal conflicts, military rule tightly
connected with the phony war of 1973.

A
few years after the war, Sadat was assassinated, and his hand-picked
follower Hosni Mubarak began his long rule, followed by another
participant of the October War, Gen Tantawi.

Achieved
by lies and treason, the Camp David Peace treaty still guards Israeli
and American interests. Only now, as the post-Camp David regime in Egypt
is on the verge of collapse, one may hope for change. Sadat’s name in
the pantheon of Egyptian heroes was safe until now. In the end, all that
is hidden will be made transparent.

Postscript.
In 1975, Vinogradov could not predict that the 1973 war and subsequent
treaties would change the world. They sealed the fate of the Soviet
presence and eminence in the Arab world, though the last vestiges were
destroyed by American might much later: in Iraq in 2003 and in Syria
they are being undermined now. They undermined the cause of socialism in
the world, which began its long fall. The USSR, the most successful
state of 1972, an almost-winner of the Cold war, eventually lost it.
Thanks to the American takeover of Egypt, petrodollar schemes were
formed, and the dollar that began its decline in 1971 by losing its gold
standard – recovered and became again a full-fledged world reserve
currency. The oil of the Saudis and of sheikdoms being sold for dollars
became the new lifeline for the American empire.

Looking back, armed now with the Vinogradov Papers, we can confidently mark 1973-74 as a decisive turning point in our history.

ISRAEL SHAMIR has been sending dispatches to CounterPunch from Moscow.