Files Reveal US Sold Argentina Military Aircraft to Dump Bodies in Ocean
teleSUR | December 16, 2016
Declassified documents on Operation Condor reveal that the U.S. knew and assisted the Argentine dictatorship as it threw unconscious prisoners to their death in notorious “vuelos de la muerte,” or death flights.
Under the military dictatorship in Argentina, thousands of political opponents were drugged, tossed into aircraft and dumped in the Atlantic Ocean to drown.
According to Adolfo Scilingo, an Argentine naval officer during the dictatorship, the navy conducted death flights every Wednesday between 1977 and 1978, killing up to 2,000 people.
Newly released documents on Operation Condor, the 1970s covert efforts to topple and temper progressive governments outright in South America, show that the U.S. not only knew about the lethal flights — they provided military equipment.
An intelligence report, dated July 1978, states, “terrorists and subversives selected for elimination were now being administered injections of Ketalar.”
“Ketalar is administered in an intra-muscular injection to the prisoner as a preventive health measure, the subject rapidly loses consciousness and vital functions cease. Source alleges that subjects are then disposed of in rivers or the ocean.”
But despite being aware of the horrific death flights, the United States proceeded to sell Argentina army helicopters.
Two months after describing the “new drug” used to paralyze so-called terrorists, then-U.S. Vice President Walter Mondale met with Argentine dictator Jorge Rafael Videla in Rome.
Included in his meeting checklist was a reaffirmation to “improve relations, and to take steps that will lead to such improvement.”
It continues, “As a token of our interest we have taken steps to release export licenses for ambulance aircraft, army helicopters, airport radar equipment and other items.”
Reports suggest Argentina’s death flights began in 1976 and continued until 1983, killing thousands of political opponents — likely with the help of U.S. aircraft.
In 2016, Francisco Bossi, the mastermind of the death flights, confessed to murdering 6,000 people.
The revelations of U.S. involvement and support of the brutal dictatorship come after the Obama administration declassified 500 pages on repression in Argentina during the military regime.
The declassified documents have revealed the U.S. supported torture, tried to “liquidate” human rights activists and destabilize Latin American leftist governments.
RELATED:
New Operation Condor Files Show Terror, Torture in Argentina
The Democratic Party Allies with the CIA
By Renee Parsons | CounterPunch | December 15, 2016
It is nothing short of a massive paradox, bordering on the ridiculous, for the CIA to allege that Russian cyber attacks had influenced the outcome of the recent Presidential election “to favor one candidate over the other” and sought to “undermine confidence in the US electoral system.” Seriously?
For the CIA, of all ‘intel’ sources to make that claim; the least credible, the most culpable of indiscriminate destruction of sovereign nations throughout the world since 1947, some while struggling to become democracies, is directly out of their “How to Initiate Regime Change 101” playbook which has proven so effective in the last sixty years. (See “Legacy of Ashes: History of the CIA” by Tim Weiner) That is sixty years of some of the most unhinged elements in the intelligence gathering world, sixty years of malicious skullduggery as well as unbridled murders and treasonous assassinations including JFK for his efforts to dismantle the Deep State. (See The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA and the Rise of America’s Secret Government” by David Talbot)
And now the CIA has added a new, politically-motivated Chapter entitled ‘Regime Change at Home” including those democratically-challenged Democrats who refuse to accept responsibility for the election loss they themselves created, are now publicly identified as willing pawns and co-conspirators with the CIA. What a way to rebuild the party!
Last Friday, the ever reliable, CIA-accommodating WaPo, published yet another article totally dependent on anonymous sources and quoting from a ‘secret’ CIA assessment report. One might question what is the point of announcing the existence of a ‘secret’ document when the document itself is withheld from the public – presumably, in CIA lingo, purely for propaganda purposes.
While the WaPo reports that ‘intel agencies have identified individuals with connections to the Russian government” and that ‘those officials described the individuals as actors known to the intel community,” yet the public has not been apprised of any arrest warrants being issued or any requests for extradition. What does that tell you?
According to the Post, “CIA officials told Senators it is now quite clear that electing Donald Trump was Russia’s goal.” Fortunately, there is a bulk of the American public who are no longer taken in by the MSM “fake news” or the myopic Democratic party for that matter when it comes to matters of foreign policy.
Speaking of fake news, with the Propornot list identifying 200 websites that ‘reliably echo Russian propaganda” and Turning Point USA’s Professor Watchlist of 200 “left wing extremist” professors implicit as tools for Mother Russia, will those ‘journalist’ whose names appeared in the Podesta email rsvp list from Wikileaks step up and reveal whether they are also on the CIA payroll. Such disclosure would go a long way toward clarifying where Fake News is originating.
Until the ‘secret assessment’ is made available for public review or the factual, annotated evidence is presented regarding Russian electoral influence and specifically how that “influence” was responsible for HRC’s loss, the CIA should, as my grandfather would say, either “put up or shut up.”
The CIA’s allegations and its lack of substance were so unverifiable that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) which is responsible for the nation’s seventeen intel agencies, has refused to endorse the CIA’s assessment ‘due to a lack of conclusive evidence” that Russia intended to elect Trump with the FBI casting doubts on the CIA’s assertions as ‘fuzzy’ and ‘ambiguous’ despite the CIA’s level of “high confidence” with a “consensus” which is another way of saying the assertion was not unanimous.
The distinction here is that while every country in the industrialized world, including Russia and the United States conduct some level of cyber surveillance, there is no way to distinguish the ‘legal intent’ of that surveillance. While the FBI, as a law enforcement agency has a legal evidentiary standard to meet for a court of law, the CIA has no such constraint. In light of the FBI’s reluctance, retiring Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nv) has called for FBI Director James Comey to resign.
Challenging the CIA allegations has also come from former intel analyst and former UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray who has called CIA claims “bullshit.” “They are absolutely making it up” and putting himself in a potentially hazardous situation, he has said “I know who leaked them. I’ve met the person who leaked them, and they are certainly not Russian and it’s an insider. It’s a leak, not a hack…” An associate of Julian Assange, Murray further added that “I have watched incredulous as the CIA’s blatant lie has grown and grown as a media story – blatant because the CIA has made no attempt whatsoever to substantiate it. There is no Russian involvement in the leaks of emails showing Clinton’s corruption.”
But those critiques of the CIA assessment have not convinced the Democratic leadership on the House and Senate Intel Committees, Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Cal) and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Cal) from continuing to assert that “Based on briefings we have received, we have concluded that the Russian intelligence agencies are making a serious and concerted effort to influence the U.S. election,” as the Democratic party continues to rally around the CIA in its latest effort to subvert democratic rule.
It is clear where all this is leading… as the December 19th date for the Electoral College vote approaches, the essential point here is the invalidation of an otherwise legal election and the flimsy fomenting of a potential Constitutional crisis. The collusion between the MSM and the Democratic party has instigated an extraordinary crescendo of panic of those willing to have HRC assume the throne of hegemony, wars and international interventions that have become so second nature to the Democratic party.
Here’s a Bulletin: There is no Constitutional basis for the popular vote in Amendment XII (adopted 1804) of the Constitution. In other words, those partisans trying to flip the electoral votes because they don’t like the Nov. 8th result have no legal standing. While Jill Stein’s ill-considered recount attempt, perhaps prompted by her inability to poll more than 1% of the national total, cited a possible ‘foreign state’ hacking the election results came weeks after she sat at Vladimir Putin’s dinner table in Moscow. That recount has gleaned no such evidence.
As Talbot reported In Chessboard, soon after the Bay of Pig fiasco, former President Harry Truman confided to his biographer Merle Miller that “I think it was a mistake. If I’d known what was going to happen, I never would have done it. Eisenhower never paid any attention to it and it got out of hand. It’s become a government all of its own and all secret…that’s a very dangerous thing in a democratic society.” Prophetic words indeed. Truman, of course, was the author of what became the Central Intelligence Agency as authorized with adoption of the National Security Act of 1947.
In response to JFK’s assassination, Truman clearly felt the need to clarify why he set up the CIA with a December 22nd letter to the Washington Post entitled “Limit CIA Role to Intelligence.” Here are some of the most important excerpts beginning his letter with:
“I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency—CIA.”
“I decided to set up a special organization charged with the collection of all intelligence reports from every available source (Departments of State, Defense, Commerce, Interior) and to have those reports reach me as President without department “treatment” or interpretations.”
“… most important thing about this move was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or to lead the President into unwise decisions—and I thought it was necessary that the President do his own thinking and evaluating.”
“For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas.”
“I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue—and a subject for cold war enemy propaganda.”
“But there are now some searching questions that need to be answered. I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President.”
And then in a June, 1964 letter to the managing editor of Look magazine, Truman reiterated that “The CIA was set up by me for the sole purpose of getting all the available information to the President. It was not intended to operate as an international agency engaged in strange activities.”
If President-elect Trump is looking for another swamp ridden quagmire of which to drain, the CIA is a good place to start while restoring its original intent.
Renee Parsons has been a member of the ACLU’s Florida State Board of Directors and president of the ACLU Treasure Coast Chapter. She has been an elected public official in Colorado, an environmental lobbyist and staff member of the US House of Representatives in Washington DC. She can be found on Twitter @reneedove31
Media reporting on hacked DNC emails acted as ‘arms of Russian intelligence’ – White House
RT | December 15, 2016
White House press secretary Josh Earnest has accused media outlets which reported on the contents of the hacked DNC emails as being “arms of Russian intelligence,” once again accusing Moscow of being behind the cyberattack.
The statement was made during the White House press briefing on Wednesday, in response to New York Times reporter Gardiner Harris, who, siding with the official White House rhetoric, stated that “from the first days, investigators knew it had Russian ties.”
Harris then asked why it took until October for Washington to announce it believed the hack was carried out by Russia, when the cyberattack was confirmed in April.
“That delay covered most of the presidential election, causing months of coverage of the leaks that were not properly informed by a formal government statement that this was an act of foreign espionage,” he said.
“Wasn’t that a mistake to take so long?” Harris asked.
Earnest had a lengthy response to that question, stating that the US intelligence community wanted to have “high confidence” that the Russians were behind the hack before announcing it, and said it wanted to be “as specific as possible in putting forward that assessment.”
The press secretary went on to agree with a Wednesday New York Times article which stated that “every major publication, including the Times, published multiple stories citing the DNC and Podesta emails posted by WikiLeaks, becoming a de facto instrument of Russian intelligence.”
Continuing his response to Harris, Earnest said “… There’s no denying that those materials [emails] were stolen property… there was no denial on the part of the US government that somehow the DNC had not been hacked, so even as news organizations were reporting on this information, they were reporting on information that they knew had been stolen and leaked…”
“… Those are editorial decisions that are made by independent news organizations. But even the excellent report that was included in your newspaper today about this incident makes clear that news organizations in the united states essentially became the arms of Russian intelligence,” Earnest said.
However, author and journalist Chris Hedges, who worked for the New York Times for 15 years, told RT that the White House’s approach is “clearly a form of red-baiting.”
“It is a form of intimidation. It is a way to essentially paint elements of the press, including the mainstream press, as essentially complicit in treasonous activity. It’s quite disturbing,” he said.
Hedges went on to state that publishing such information is simply “part of the game.”
“The question is not whether the information was leaked, the question is whether for instance the Podesta emails are authentic or not. And if they’re authentic, you publish them. That’s how it works…” he said.
Hedges stressed that there is “no conclusive evidence that Russia was behind the leaks, but even if they were, the US government does this all the time…
“… I was given all sorts of information by the US government to tarnish and in some cases totally discredit figures or regimes that they wanted discredited.”
Despite consistent claims by the US government that Russia was behind the hack, not everyone is convinced that is the case. Earlier this week, former US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton suggested the hack could have been a false flag operation by the Obama administration.
Russia itself has dismissed the hacking allegations, as well as claims that it aimed to influence the US election, as “nonsense.”
“Does anyone seriously think that Russia can somehow influence the choice of the American people?” Putin asked in October. “Is America some sort of a banana republic?”
In November, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera that the “whole story is from the field of myth-making.”
The Abnormalization of Dissent
corbettreport | December 13, 2016
The spin, lies, manipulation and deceptions are coming so fast and thick it’s increasingly difficult to document them all, let alone analyze them. But in the broad sweep of recent events we can see a common theme emerging: the abnormalization of dissent. And when political ideology boils down to nothing more than “real” and “fake” the control of political discourse through language itself is almost complete. Can outright censorship be far behind?
SHOW NOTES: https://www.corbettreport.com/?p=20792
See also:
Israeli forces shoot Palestinian activist with rubber-coated steel bullet for taking photos
Ma’an – December 13, 2016
JERUSALEM – Israeli forces on Monday evening shot a Palestinian activist in the leg with a rubber-coated steel bullet during a raid in the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood of al-Issawiya while he was attempting to take photos and video footage in the neighborhood, according to a local committee.
Members of a local follow-up committee in al-Issawiya told Ma’an that committee member Muhammad Abu al-Hummus was “documenting Israeli violations and provocations” when an Israeli soldier “threatened to shoot him in the head if he didn’t leave.”
Shortly after the threat was made against him, another soldier then shot a rubber-coated steel bullet at Abu al-Hummus from an approximate distance of 25 meters, hitting him in the leg.
Prior to the shooting, Israeli forces and police officers had stormed the town and deployed in its alleys “in a provocative manner,” started stopping drivers, and arbitrarily issued a number of traffic fines to locals, according to the committee.
After being informed of the forces’ arrival into the town, Abu al-Hummus began taking photos and writing notes about their activities.
An Israeli police spokesperson was not immediately available for comment.
Israeli police and soldiers have come under heavy criticism over the past year for what rights groups have referred to as excessive use of force against Palestinians, including journalists and activists, who did not pose an immediate threat at the time they were injured.
Bakersfield police kill elderly man with dementia
RT | December 13, 2016
A retired cotton gin operator out for a walk was shot and killed by a Bakersfield, California police officer. Police were responding to a call about a man with a gun, but found no weapon anywhere near the scene.
Francisco Serna, 73, was shot and killed in the early hours of Monday after Bakersfield police responded to a 911 call about a man “outside with a gun, armed with a revolver,” local media reported.
After a witness pointed to Serna, one officer fired several rounds and killed him, Bakersfield PD spokesman Sergeant Gary Carruesco told KBAK.
Serna was declared dead at the scene, around 1:15am local time (09:15 GMT) on Monday, according to the Kern County coroner.
According to his family, Serna suffered from early stages of dementia and his medication made him paranoid. He often took a walk when he had trouble sleeping, the family said. Serna was in the neighbor’s driveway when police shot and killed him.
Eight shots were fired, the family told KERO.
“My dad did not own a gun. He was a 73-year-old retired grandpa, just living life,” Rogelio Serna told the Los Angeles Times. “He should have been surrounded by family at old age, not surrounded by bullets.”
Police had visited the Sernas twice before, because Francisco in his confusion activated a medical alarm, Rogelio Serna added.
The officer who shot Serna has not been named, and has been placed on administrative leave as is the policy in such situations.
Police searched the scene for a weapon, but found none, Sgt. Carruesco said.
Bakersfield is a city of around 365,000 in the San Joaquin Valley, halfway between Los Angeles and Fresno.
It’s Beginning to Smell a Lot Like Totalitarianism, and I Don’t Mean Russia
By F. William Engdahl – New Eastern Outlook – 13.12.2016
If we smell precisely the stench of the totality of steps taken in NATO countries in recent months, especially in the United States and the European Union, we can smell the stench of totalitarian rule or some would call it, fascism, being quietly imposed on our basic human freedoms. Some recent examples give pause for reflection as to where we are allowing our world to drift.
Let’s begin with a most ominous, bizarre, Jesuitical interview that the Roman Catholic Pope Francis gave to a Belgian paper December 7, comparing what he calls defamatory news to what he called the “sickness of coprophagia.” He stated:
QUESTION – A final question, Holy Father, regarding the media: a consideration regarding the means of communication…
POPE – The communications media have a very great responsibility…It is obvious that, given that we are all sinners, also the media can…become harmful… They can be tempted by calumny, and therefore used to slander, to sully people, especially in the world of politics. They can be used as a means of defamation: every person has the right to a good reputation, but perhaps in their previous life, or ten years ago, they had a problem with justice, or a problem in their family life, and bringing this to light is serious and harmful… This is a sin and it is harmful. A thing that can do great damage to the information media is disinformation: that is, faced with any situation, saying only a part of the truth, and not the rest. This is disinformation… Disinformation is probably the greatest damage that the media can do, as opinion is guided in one direction, neglecting the other part of the truth. I believe that the media should… not fall prey – without offence, please – to the sickness of coprophilia, which is always wanting to communicate scandal… And since people have a tendency towards the sickness of coprophagia, it can do great harm.
Coprophilia is defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “marked interest in excrement, especially the use of feces or filth for sexual excitement.” And coprophagia is eating feces by humans, literally, eating shit.
What people precisely, Holy Father, have a “tendency to towards the sickness of coprophagia”? Is this the dominant sickness of the human race? And if not, why do you make such a disgusting likeness between eating shit and citizens who read about politicians and their misdeeds or media that report on same? And who is to judge if factually true dissemination of facts about political figures from their past is relevant or not to help voters judge their character? I would say the comments are a perfect example of what he pretends to condemn.
Were it only a single, off-the-cuff remark by a religious figure, we could dismiss it along with claims such as the papal infallibility declaration proclaimed by the Vatican I on 18 July 1870. However, precisely because of such dogma and of the influence of the Roman Catholic Church and its Pope, notably in the countries of Western Europe, the United States and Latin America, such vague and dangerous remarks ought to be taken seriously as a signal of what lies ahead for the public freedom of speech.
“Fake News”
The papal comments on coprophagia and journalism come amid an explosion of charges in the USA and EU that Russia is planting “fake news” as it is now being called, about Hillary Clinton in the US media by way of certain alternative media. Robby Mook, Hillary Clinton’s former campaign manager, said “fake news” was a “huge problem” the campaign faced in the recent US election: “I still think we have to investigate what happened with Russia here. We cannot have foreign, and I would say foreign aggressors here, intervening in our elections. The Russian were propagating fake news through Facebook and other outlets, but look, we also had… Breitbart News, which was notorious for peddling stories like this.”
Online stories that claimed a Washington D.C. pizza restaurant, Comet Ping Pong, was used by candidate Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager John Podesta for child sex, the so-called “Pizzagate” Scandal, is now being used to drum up popular opinion for censorship of the Internet as well as Facebook and other social media.
Senior New York Times reporter David Sanger wrote a vague, anonymous “according to senior Administration sources,” article on December 9 under the headline, “Russia Hacked Republican Committee but Kept Data, US Concludes.” What we are seeing is precisely the kind of fake news that Hillary Clinton and the Pope talk about. But it is mainstream establishment media doing the fakery.
The fakery is being orchestrated by the highest levels of the mainstream media in collusion with NATO circles and intelligence agencies such as the CIA, which has saturated the ranks of mainstream media with their disinformation agents according to former CIA head William Colby, who once allegedly said, “The CIA owns everyone of any significance in the major media.”
The campaign will continue, likely with some horrendous stories about some psychopath taking a gun and bursting into Comet Ping Pong pizza place shooting innocent customers, because it was said he read in alternative media fake news about the pedophile ring. That already took place, but the man fired no shots. The population is being manipulated to accept extreme censorship of internet and other alternative media, something unimaginable just months ago.
Like clockwork, the “fake news” campaign has spread to the European Union. After announcing she will run again in 2017 for Chancellor, Angela Merkel spoke ominous words suggesting government censorship of independent “populist” (sic) media might be necessary: “Today we have fake sites, bots, trolls — things that regenerate themselves, reinforcing opinions with certain algorithms and we have to learn to deal with them.” She declared, “we must confront this phenomenon and if necessary, regulate it… Populism and political extremes are growing in Western democracies..” Her remarks came after Google and Facebook cut off ad revenue to what they declared to be “fake” news sites.
In the EU, especially Germany, populist has an implicit negative or even fascist connotation as in “right-wing populist” parties who oppose Merkel’s open door to war refugees policies, or who these days oppose almost anything her heavy-handed government puts forward.
War on Cash
Now if we begin to see stealth propaganda preparing us to accept severe clampdowns on the one remaining free media, the Internet and related social media, we can also see an equally ominous, indeed, totalitarian move to create acceptance for the idea we give up the right to hold paper money, giving private, often corrupt, banks total control over our money, and in turn giving government agencies total control over where we spend for what.
This is the so-called cashless society. Arguments put forward are that elimination of cash will be more convenient to consumers or that it will eliminate or greatly reduce organized crime and shadow economy that evades taxation. In the EU, Sweden has already virtually eliminated cash. Sweden cash purchases today are down to just three per cent of the national economy compared to nine per cent in the Eurozone and seven per cent in the US. Public buses don’t accept cash. Three of Sweden’s four largest banks are phasing out the manual handling of cash in bank branches. Norway is following the same path.
In France today, it’s now illegal to do cash transactions over €1,000 without documenting it properly. France’s finance minister Michel Sapin, in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, blamed the attacks on the ability of the attackers to “buy dangerous things with cash.” Shortly after the Hebdo attacks he announced capital controls that included the €1,000 cap on cash payments, down from €3,000, to “fight against the use of cash and anonymity in the French economy.” In high-inflation Eurozone €1,000 is not a huge sum.
Even in conservative Germany, a leading member of the Merkel coalition proposed to eliminate the €500 note and capping all cash transactions at €5,000. Some weeks later the European Central Bank, where negative interest rates are the order of the day, announced it would end issue of €500 notes by December 2018 arguing it made it too easy for criminals and terrorists to act.
And in the United States, as the campaign to sell skeptical citizens on cashless digital bank payments increases, JP Morgan Chase, the largest and one of the most criminal banks in the US, has a policy restricting the use of cash in selected markets. The bank bans cash payments for credit cards, mortgages, and auto loans; and it prohibits storage of “any cash or coins” in safe deposit boxes. So if you have a rare cold coin collection, you better stuff it in the mattress…
Negative Rates and Cashless Citizens
As long as cash–bills and coins of a national currency–are the basis of the economy, the central banks of the USA and EU as well as Japan, are unable to impose a severe negative interest rate policy much beyond the flirtation today by the ECB and Bank of Japan. If central bank rates were to go very negative, banks would be charging customers the absurd charge to make them pay to keep their cash on deposit or in savings at those banks. Naturally, people would revolt and withdraw in cash to invest in gold or other hard, tangible valuables.
Harvard economist and member of the Economic Advisory Panel of the Federal Reserve, Kenneth Rogoff, an advocate of the “war on cash,” noted that the existence of cash “creates the artifact of the zero bound on the nominal interest rate.” In his 2016 book, The Curse of Cash, Rogoff urged the Federal Reserve to phase out the 100-dollar bill, then the 50-dollar bill, then the 20-dollar bill, leaving only smaller denominations in circulation, much like what the mad Modi has just done in India.
Any serious observer of the world economy, especially of NATO nations in Europe and North America since the financial crisis of September 2008, would have to realize the current status quo of zero or negative central bank interest rates to prop up banks and financial markets is not sustainable. Unless cash is eliminated that is.
On April 5, 1933 President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 6102, “forbidding the Hoarding of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates within the continental United States.” That was rightly denounced by many as outright theft, confiscation of privately held gold, by the Government.
Radical solutions such as done by President Roosevelt in 1933, yet in a monetary order where gold no longer dominates, is clearly becoming more attractive to the major bankers of Wall Street and the City of London. Rather than confiscate citizens’ gold, today the Gods of Money would have to find a way to steal the cash of citizens. Moving to their “cashless” banking, limiting how much cash can be withdrawn and then eliminating cash entirely as Swedish banks are doing would enable tax authorities to have perfect totalitarian control on every citizen’s use of money. Moreover, governments could decree, as did FDR, that cash above certain levels must be taxed under some or another national declaration of emergency.
As such bold, radical moves advance, they would of course be vociferously attacked not on CNN or The New York Times or Financial Times or other mainstream media tied to those criminal financial institutions, but in alternative media. Keep in mind it was the uncritical New York Times and Washington Post that uncritically retailed the fake news that led to declaration of war on Iraq in 2003, namely that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction aimed at Washington. That war has spread death and destruction of a scale unimaginable. No one complained at the time about that fake news.
The protest over moves to confiscate citizens’ bank holdings would come through alternate, independent media such as Zero Hedge or countless others. Recently, US media uncritically republished a purported list of “fake news” blogs and websites prepared by Assistant Professor of Communications at Merrimack College, Melissa Zimdars. Zero Hedge was on it.
This is not about endorsing or not endorsing any alternative blog or website. It is about the essential freedom of us all to be able to read and decide any and all opinions or analyses and not to have government decide what I am or am not allowed to read. It’s about the freedom to keep privacy about what I choose to buy and not leave a digital trail that my bank could release to the tax authorities or to Homeland Security or the FBI, or sell to profiling consumer operations. Controlling public communication and controlling private money would go a long way to creation of the perfect totalitarian state. Not a good idea, I would say.
F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University.
Angela Merkel, desperate to stay in power, is now claiming Russian hackers are ready to attack Germany’s 2017 elections
By Alex Christoforou | The Duran | December 12, 2016
Remember when the Obama administration spied on German media as well as the German government, and specifically Angela Merkel.
The Duran remembers.
In 2015 CNN‘s Jake Tapper reported…
An investigation by the German parliament is raising questions on whether the Obama administration not only spied on journalists in that country, but also interfered in the exercise of the free press under the guise of U.S. national security.
That the NSA was spying on German officials is not new, though it continues to upset free press advocates and those with memories of repressive governments both Communist and Nazi. In 2013, the German magazine Der Spiegel, using information gleaned from files stolen and leaked by Edward Snowden, first reported that the NSA was intercepting German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone communications.
On Thursday, WikiLeaks released more information, presumably from that surveillance, from a conversation between Merkel and her personal assistant in October 2011, saying the Chancellor “professed to be at a loss” between two courses of action to take in the Greek financial crisis. The WikiLeaks release also suggested that the NSA was spying on German ministers in addition to Merkel. The U.S. ambassador to Germany, John Emerson, was summoned to meet with the Chancellery chief of staff, Peter Altmaier, to discuss the news.
Less observed this week was news that the NSA was eavesdropping not only on Merkel, but also in some capacity on Germany’s free press, specifically Der Spiegel.
Merkel appears to have forgiven and forgotten the FACT that the US hacked and spied on Germany.
American “factual” hacking of Germany… no problem. Russian “imaginary” hacking of Germany… problem.
Following on Obama’s “Russian hacker” witch hunt, Germany is also sounding the alarm bells of Kremlin influenced hacking meant to weaken Germany and the European Union.
Reuters reports that Germany’s domestic intelligence agency has reported an increase in Russian propaganda and disinformation campaigns “aimed at destabilising German society, and targeted cyber attacks against political parties.”
The German agency’s statement to Reuters seems to be perfectly timed with the CIA claim of Russian election hacking. Coincidence?
“We see aggressive and increased cyber spying and cyber operations that could potentially endanger German government officials, members of parliament and employees of democratic parties,” Hans-Georg Maassen, head of the BfV spy agency, said in statement.
Maassen, who raised similar concerns about Russian efforts to interfere in German elections last month, cited what he called increasing evidence about such efforts and said further cyber attacks were expected.
The agency said it had seen a wide variety of Russian propaganda tools and “enormous use of financial resources” to carry out “disinformation” campaigns aimed at the Russian-speaking community in Germany, political movements, parties and other decision makers.
The goal was to spread uncertainty, strengthen extremist groups and parties, complicate the work of the federal government and “weaken or destabilise the Federal Republic of Germany”.
The agency said it had seen a “striking increase” in spear-phishing attacks attributed to Russian hacking group APT 28, also known as “Fancy Bear” or Strontrium. It is the same group blamed for the hack of the U.S. Democratic National Committee this year and a cyber attack on the German parliament in 2015.
The attacks were directed against German parties and lawmakers and were carried out by government bodies posing as “hacktivists”, the agency said.
German officials have accused Moscow of trying to manipulate German media to fan popular angst over issues like the migrant crisis, weaken voter trust and breed dissent within the European Union so that it drops sanctions against Moscow.
But intelligence officials have stepped up their warnings in recent weeks, alarmed about the number of attacks.
Last month, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she could not rule out Russia interfering in Germany’s 2017 election through Internet attacks and misinformation campaigns.
*****
Russian officials have denied all accusations of manipulation and interference intended to weaken the European Union or to affect the U.S. presidential election.
For an economy in “tatters”, as Barack Obama famously noted, Russia sure has a lot of power in hacking election systems, and manipulating global media. Zerohedge adds…
Either Russian intelligence officials have suddenly become extremely efficient at disrupting national elections in the world’s largest democracies or the establishment leaders of those democracies have intentionally launched a coordinated, baseless witch hunt as a way to distract voters from their failed policies. We have our suspicions on which is more likely closer to the truth…
Like accusations made by Hillary and Obama in the U.S., German politicians, including Chancellor Angela Merkel, have asserted that Russian intelligence agents and media outlets have attempted to spread “fake news” in an effort to “fan popular angst over issues like the migrant crisis.” Of course, it can’t simply be that voters disagree with Merkel’s “open border” policies which have resulted in a massive influx of migrants that have been linked to increasing crime, terrorist attacks and sexual assaults on German citizens… that would just be silly and racist and xenophobic.
Democratic Losers and their Media Backers Seek a Scapegoat for Their Own Disaster
The fake campaign to blame ‘the Russians’
By Dave Lindorff | This Can’t Be Happening! | December 11, 2016
The New York Times and Washington Post, the nation’s two top national newspapers, have been breathlessly reporting of late, with little sign of any appropriate journalistic skepticism, on a purported massive and successful Russian conspiracy to throw the US election to their “favored” candidate, Donald Trump. But the Chicago Tribune has weighed in with a more measured piece, suggesting that while the CIA, a particularly secretive and politically driven organization, may be making that claim, the FBI is not convinced.
While even the Tribune sometimes ignores inserting the requisite “alleged” that should precede any reference to unproven claims that Russia is behind the hacking of the Democratic Party’s (and the Republican Party’s) email server, the paper does also note that Democrats in particular are “frustrated” by the “murky nature” of the FBI’s analysis, with outgoing Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), calling on FBI Director James Comey to resign.
The reason for the Democrats’ frustration is also made clear. As the Tribune reports:
With so much of the evidence about Russia’s alleged role in the election shrouded in secrecy because of strict classification rules, Democrats and Republicans in Washington who have access to the underlying intelligence say they have struggled to make their respective cases, leaving an already deeply divided public convinced that both sides are shading their conclusions to help the candidate they backed on Election Day.
The reality is that the CIA has presented no hard evidence that Russia is behind the hacking of the DNC’s or or Clinton’s private home server. The excuse is given that the Agency doesn’t want to disclose any of its sources, so the reader is left with the pathetic plea, from both the Agency and the White House: “Trust us.”
But why would anyone trust the CIA or the White House on anything? We’re talking about an agency and a Executive Branch that between them are known to have lied (during the GW Bush years) about anthrax labs in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, lied about what were aluminum tubes imported to make irrigation equipment being evidence of missile-building, lied about Iraq’s links to Al Qaeda, and (during the Obama years) lied about Syria’s government using Sarin gas on its own people in Damascus, lied about the details of the killing of Osama Bin Laden, lied about the role of a murderous CIA agent captured by Pakistani police while posing as a US consular employee, lied about the extent of National Security Agency Spying both at home and abroad, and lied about Russia invading Ukraine and shooting down a civilian Malaysian jumbo jet.
If one were to take a moment and think about what is being alleged here by Democrats — that a national presidential election was successfully subverted by the releasing of hacked emails showing major corruption and malfeasance by the Democratic Party leadership in undermining the fairness of the party’s presidential primary to benefit one candidate — Hillary Clinton — and to destroy the candidacy of her opponent Bernie Sanders — it should lead to one of two alternative conclusions.
Either the Russians did Americans a favor, by exposing the epic corruption of one of their two major parties and one of the candidates seeking to become president — something that a more independent and aggressive domestic media would have and should have done on their own, if not by hacking then by paying attention to, instead of ignoring and blacking out, what frustrated insiders like DNC Vice Chair Tulsi Gabbard, the Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii who quit in disgust saying the DNC was undermining the primaries on behalf of Clinton’s campaign. Or alternatively, we’re being told that our 240-year-old democracy is so shriveled and weak that an outside government can easily undermine it and manipulate the outcome as if we were some corrupt and fragile banana republic.
Either conclusion is rather pathetic and depressing to contemplate.
Meanwhile, the media feeding frenzy over unsubstantiated claims over Russian subversion of our last election ignores the reality that this kind of thing is something the US has been doing abroad at least since the end of World War II and the onset of the Cold War. Not content to just undermine elections through dirty tricks, fake news and secret payments in Europe, Latin America, later in Eastern Europe and Russia, and in Asia, the US has also fomented countless coups to overthrow or attempt to overthrow existing elected governments, most recently in Honduras, Ukraine, Venezuela and Brazil, and so has no grounds to complain by claiming that the Russians were allegedly doing the same thing here.
On the other hand, if the Democratic Party leadership had kept its hand off the scale during the primaries, and had not made such heavy-handed efforts to get major news organizations like the Times, MSNBC, the Daily News, Post and others to help it undermine Bernie Sanders, Sanders would have won both the party’s nomination and the presidency, and probably the Congress also into the bargain, and we wouldn’t be looking at a looming Trump presidency and Republican Congress.
Not only that, but with a genuinely popular candidate running for president in both parties (like it or not Trump was wildly popular among a significant segment of the population), no Russian propaganda campaign would have had a prayer of impacting voter opinion or the results of the voting.
If indeed there really was a Russian effort to swing this recent election, it could only have succeeded in a situation where the electorate was disgusted by its choices and was voting negatively for a lesser evil. And that situation only could arise where the two major parties were so corrupted that they were trying desperately to keep genuinely popular candidates from winning the nomination.
In fact that is what happened. The Republican leadership tried mightily to keep Donald Trump, a loose cannon who has disavowed many basic and long-held Republican principles, such as backing US empire and Israel, supporting any and all trade agreements, and viewing Russia as an existential enemy, from winning their party’s nomination. They failed, but not for lack of trying. The Democratic leadership tried everything, too, to prevent insurgent self-described “socialist” candidate Sanders from winning the nomination, and thanks to underhanded manipulation of the primaries, corrupt meddling in media coverage of Sanders, an anti-democratic voting block of locked-in “super delegates,” committed to backing Clinton whatever the result of the primaries, and some crooked efforts to depress voting in key primary states including New York and California, they succeeded in throwing the nomination to Clinton. She of course was doomed, by their very ham-handed interference in the primaries, to go on to lose the general election.
That corrupt fiasco has left Democratic Party leadership hacks and their backers in the corporate media with nothing to do but find a scapegoat for their disastrous performance, hence the fake “Russia-did-it” claims.
It’s a sad commentary on the pathetic decline of democracy in the United States, but is also a clarion call for a rebirth of grassroots democratic resurgence.
If there’s a bright spot in the new situation, it’s that progressives, socialists, radicals and disaffected citizens of all kinds now should have a clear understanding of how corrupt the Democratic Party really is.
One of two things must happen. That party must be completely swept clean of the hacks, frauds, crooks, compromisers and charlatans who populate its leadership and who hold most of the elected posts remaining in Democratic hands in Congress. Alternatively, the Democratic Party must be abandoned as unsalvageable, with progressive forces, from labor organizations, advocates of the poor and elderly, environmental activists, human rights and peace groups, women’s rights and minority rights organizations, civil libertarians and others rallying both to create something new to replace it, and organizing in the street to resist the new Trump government.
Any new left party needs to abandon the fraudulent tactics of so-called “identity politics,” in which a basically pro-corporate Democratic Party has sought to appease and cajole support for its corporatist candidates and agenda by catering to individual issues of various groups leaning its way by default. Instead, the really big issues need to be tackled head on: expanding Social Security, making Medicare universal for everyone of all ages, restoring genuine progressive taxation on the wealthy, ending foreign wars, closing overseas bases and slashing the military, obeying international law (including treaties with sovereign Native American nations), making public college free to all, nationalizing support for primary and secondary education so that all communities have well-funded, quality public schools, declaring a national mobilization to quickly end reliance upon fossil fuels to combat climate change, and creating jobs for everyone through a massive public spending program on job training and infrastructure repair and modernization.
These and other ideas are things that most Americans can and would get behind, not simply efforts to pander to various specific interest groups.
Do this and the Russians — assuming they even have been trying to manipulate our elections — wouldn’t have a chance of influencing anyone.
THE CIA MOVES TO INVALIDATE U.S. PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS BY BLAMING RUSSIAN HACKING
By The_Real_Fly | ZeroHedge | Dec 10, 2016
It’s happening. After careful analysis of all the media punditry and the ‘leaks’ coming out from the CIA, I can only conclude that there is a concerted effort taking place to invalidate the U.S. elections, in an effort to unseat Donald Trump. Last night the Washington Post reported a leak from inside the CIA, saying they had a report that showed evidence that Russia hacked the elections in order to elect Donald Trump. They’re being very specific about that point. Pay attention.
Source: Reuters
The CIA has concluded that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help President-elect Donald Trump win the White House, and not just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, the Washington Post reported on Friday.
Citing U.S. officials briefed on the matter, the Post said intelligence agencies had identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and others, including the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, to WikiLeaks.
The officials described the individuals as people known to the intelligence community who were part of a wider Russian operation to boost Trump and reduce Clinton’s chances of winning the election.
“It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected,” the Post quoted a senior U.S. official as saying. “That’s the consensus view.”
The Post said the official had been briefed on an intelligence presentation made by the Central Intelligence Agency to key U.S. senators behind closed-doors last week.
The CIA, in what the Post said was a secret assessment, cited a growing body of evidence from multiple sources. Briefers told the senators it was now “quite clear” that electing Trump was Russia’s goal, the Post quoted officials as saying on condition of anonymity.
In October, the U.S. government formally accused Russia of a campaign of cyber attacks against Democratic Party organizations ahead of the Nov. 8 presidential election.
President Barack Obama has said he warned Russian President Vladimir Putin about consequences for the attacks. But Russian officials have denied all accusations of interference in the U.S. election.
A CIA spokeswoman said the agency had no comment on the report.
In response to the Washpo article, the Trump campaign issued the following statement.
“These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction,” Trump’s representatives said in a statement attributed to the transition team. “The election ended a long time ago … It’s now time to move on and ‘Make America Great Again.'”
Bob Baer, former CIA and current ‘Hunting Hitler’ shill, said in an interview today that if the evidence regarding Russia hacking the elections are true, then the only logical thing to do is to hold new elections.
‘If the evidence is there, I don’t see any other way than to vote again.’
Bear in mind, this is all in response to the Wikileaks revelations about the abject corruptness of both the DNC and the Hillary Clinton camp, via the Podesta emails. Instead of offering an explanation for their egregious actions, the elite cadre inside of the Clinton camp have instead gone on the offensive to blame the messenger. The media is running with this story with long strides, not only suggesting that Russia hacked the elections, but also saying Trump was — in fact — a ‘witting asset’ of Moscow. What’s next, an arrest order for Trump and his campaign staff for being covert Russian spies?
‘This nation was attacked by a cyber warfare operation.’
Whatever happened to the smug certainty that the elections wouldn’t be rigged? I suppose what Obama meant was they wouldn’t be rigged had Hillary won, yes?
Paul Joseph Watson offers some valuable insight, in regard to the naked hypocrisy of America’s ruling elite:
Russia interfered in the election! (no evidence).
LEFT FREAKS OUT.
Saudi Arabia provably bankrolled Clinton’s campaign
MEH
Facebook is rolling out its censorship initiative
By Guilherme Schneider | The Duran | December 11, 2016
According to the latest news, Facebook began testing new tools to carry out its “censorship plan” with the convenient name of “tackling fake news.”
One of the tools being tested will enable users to inform Facebook if certain news stories are using “misleading language”. Some users posted images of a Facebook survey asking them the following question: “To what extent do you think that this link’s title withholds key details of the story?”
It is still unclear what kind of actions will be carried out after this additional user data is collected, but it is likely that some sort of a database, containing the list of “misleading” news websites, will be generated.
In a not so distant past, content curators from Facebook confirmed that they received direct orders from the company to decrease the relevance or even hide from the newsfeed stories and content with conservative language. While this happened in the US, similar stories have been reported in Brazil, the United Kingdom around the time of the Brexit, and in other countries.
Recently, there were other reports that Facebook developed a special software for the Chinese market, that would enable “third parties” to authorize the contents before posting it to the users’ timelines. The initiative would aim to lift the current ban of the social network in the country.
The main difference between this new software and the current content restrictions in some countries is that instead of reacting to a government request to hide some specific content, Facebook would be giving the option to some parties to censor and take down content before it is even posted on the network.
It is true that when you create a profile on Facebook or any other social network, you have to accept their terms and conditions in exchange of the “non-paid” use of their platforms. Most of these terms and conditions allow the social networks to analyze the information you are publishing and reading for several proposes, including targeted advertisements and many others, but is it ethical to take advantage of this information in order to define what content you should or should not see?
Since Snowden’s NSA information leak we know that we can be monitored at any given time by government agencies. The realization of this fact, however, didn’t stop us from using the same networks, nor did it prompt the closure of the NSA or other agencies involved in the perpetual recording and storage of our data.
But now we are entering a whole new level in which companies and governments will attempt to define what is right and wrong for us to see, read and talk about. What’s even more bizarre is that the CEO of Facebook could potentially run for office, while retaining control over one of the most popular social networks in the world, with the capability of retrieving and accessing anyone’s data without any sort of legal process or request.
This Orwellian trend is truly scary and we should really start questioning ourselves about the extent to which we are willing to continue handing out personal data and information to these networks.
Law Enforcement Uses Border Search Exception as Fourth Amendment Loophole
By Sophia Cope | EFF | December 8, 2016
In recent months, U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents have sought access to private data on the cell phones of two journalists. Such incidents are offensive because they threaten the independence of the press and pose specific risks to confidential sources. This government overreach also highlights how weak legal protections at the border for digital devices threatens the privacy of all travelers to and from the U.S., including Americans.
In October 2016, CBP airport agents denied Canadian photojournalist Ed Ou entry into the country, after detaining him for over six hours and seizing his three cell phones. According to Mr. Ou’s ACLU attorney, “When the officers returned the phones to him several hours later, it was evident that their SIM cards had been temporarily removed because tamper tape covering the cards had been destroyed or altered.” Similarly, in July, CBP airport agents detained U.S. citizen and Wall Street Journal reporter Maria Abi-Habib for an hour and a half. When they asked for her cell phones, she refused and referred them to the newspaper’s lawyers. Fortunately, the agents eventually released her without seizing or searching her devices.
Regular travelers are also at risk. We wrote an amicus brief in the case of Ali Saboonchi, a dual citizen of the U.S. and Iran whose cell phones and flash drive were seized at the U.S.-Canadian border after returning from a vacation to Niagara Falls. Mr. Saboonchi had been under investigation for violating the trade embargo with Iran and federal agents took advantage of his presence at the border to invoke the border search exception to the Fourth Amendment.
The Fourth Amendment generally requires the government to obtain a warrant from a judge, based on probable cause that evidence of a crime will be found, before seizing and searching personal property. Thus, if federal agents had wanted to confiscate and rifle through Mr. Saboonchi’s digital devices while he was at home in Maryland, they would have needed to obtain a probable cause warrant to do so.
Decades ago, as we discussed in our brief, the Supreme Court created the border search exception to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement, permitting government agents to search travelers’ luggage, vehicles or persons without a warrant and almost always without any individualized suspicion of wrongdoing.
The Supreme Court made clear, however, that a warrantless and suspicionless search must be for a discrete public interest purpose. Should a search instead be for the purpose of ordinary law enforcement, the government must first secure a probable cause warrant. For example, the government may set up a warrantless and suspicionless vehicle checkpoint to find drunk drivers for the narrow purpose of roadway safety (notwithstanding the fact that drunk drivers may be arrested and prosecuted)—but the government may not set up a warrantless and suspicionless vehicle checkpoint to find illegal narcotics, which amounts to uncovering “evidence of ordinary criminal wrongdoing.”
Thus the Supreme Court created the border search exception only for the narrow purposes of enforcing the immigration and customs laws, including ensuring that duties are paid on imported goods and that harmful people (e.g., terrorists) and harmful goods such as weapons, drugs, and infested agricultural products do not enter the country.
As we discussed in our Saboonchi brief, there is serious doubt as to whether searches generally of cell phones and similar digital devices meaningfully advance the narrow purposes of the border search exception so as to justify the categorical rule that no warrant or suspicion is required, especially in light of the significant privacy interests at stake.
The seizure and search of Mr. Saboonchi’s digital devices specifically was egregious because CBP agents used the border search exception as a loophole around the general Fourth Amendment rule. CBP agents were not acting to enforce the immigration and customs laws—but instead used Mr. Saboonchi’s presence at the U.S.-Canadian border as an excuse to conduct a warrantless search for the purpose of advancing a preexisting law enforcement investigation. Similarly, CBP agents seemed to use the journalists’ presence at international airports as an excuse to gather intelligence. CBP agents interrogated Mr. Ou about the “extremists” he had come into contact with as a journalist. And as Ms. Abi-Habib recounted, the CBP agent who asked for her cell phones stated, “We want to collect information,” presumably related to her foreign reporting.
Warrantless and suspicionless searches of digital devices at the border (or the functional equivalent of the border, such as international airports and other ports of entry) are particularly invasive given the vast amounts of personal information they can store or connect to in the “cloud”—beyond what any piece of traditional luggage can hold.
Courts have recognized the significant privacy interests in today’s digital devices, placing the law related to the border search exception in flux.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in U.S. v. Cotterman (2013) held that border agents needed to have reasonable suspicion—somewhere between no suspicion and probable cause—before they could conduct a “forensic” search, aided by sophisticated software, of the defendant’s laptop. Unfortunately, the court held that a manual search of a digital device is “routine” and so the standard border search rule applies (i.e., no warrant or suspicion is needed)—even though the privacy interests in any given device do not change.
The Supreme Court held in Riley v. California (2014) that the police may not invoke another exception to the warrant requirement, the search-incident-to-arrest exception, to search a cell phone possessed by an arrestee—instead, the government needs a probable cause warrant. The Court stated, “Our holding, of course, is not that the information on a cell phone is immune from search; it is instead that a warrant is generally required before such a search, even when a cell phone is seized incident to arrest.” The Riley Court focused on the vast amount of personal information stored on or accessible via modern devices: “The United States asserts that a search of all data stored on a cell phone is ‘materially indistinguishable’ from searches of these sorts of physical items. That is like saying a ride on horseback is materially indistinguishable from a flight to the moon… Modern cell phones, as a category, implicate privacy concerns far beyond those implicated by the search of a cigarette pack, a wallet, or a purse.”
While Riley was not a border search case, the Court’s ruling was reasonably broad, thus we argued in our Saboonchi brief that the border search exception should not apply to cell phones and similar digital devices.
In light of these decisions, CBP’s 2009 policy related to searching digital devices at the border is woefully out of date and should be updated.
However, we are eager to further the law in this area—to make it clear that the Riley decision applies at the border. So we are interested in hearing about instances where CBP agents search cell phones, laptops, tablets, or similar digital devices without consent (including whether they access “cloud” content such as social media profiles), either manually or with the aid of software, either at the land borders or following international flights and cruises.
In the meantime, to protect your data when traveling consider some of our quick tech tips, our longer border search whitepaper, our more recent set of tech tips related to encountering the police during protests, and our very comprehensive guide to Surveillance Self-Defense.
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From the Archives
The 9/11 “Double-Cross” Conspiracy Theory
BY LAURENT GUYÉNOT • UNZ REVIEW • SEPTEMBER 6, 2022
Is it true that “9/11 was an inside job”? Yes, insofar as Israel is “inside” the U.S. But for the 9/11 truthers who have identified Israel as the main perpetrators, “9/11 was an inside job” is at best a half-truth, and at worst an integral part of the Zionist operation, like a secondary flag sewn as a lining under the false flag of Islamism. Victor Thorn (1963-2017) wrote in his book 9/11 made in Israel: The Plot Against America (2011): “In essence, the ‘9-11 truth movement’ was created prior to Sept. 11, 2001 as a means of suppressing news relating to Israeli complicity. . . . The slogan ‘9-11 was an inside job’ was quite possibly the greatest example of Israeli propaganda ever devised.” In milder terms, it is “controlled opposition”.
A genuine truth movement would have pointed to Israel as the prime suspect from the start. From day one, it was obvious who would benefit. … continue
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