In the explosive “Vault 7” CIA secrets published by WikiLeaks on Tuesday, the organization has warned that the CIA, among a myriad of other intrusive exploits, has been investigating ways to hack and manipulate the control systems of cars and trucks for use in covert operations.
According to WikiLeaks, the CIA’s interest in hacking vehicles is not specified, but could be used in sinister ways, including assassinations.
“As of October 2014 the CIA was also looking at infecting the vehicle control systems used by modern cars and trucks,” WikiLeaks said in a statement. “The purpose of such control is not specified, but it would permit the CIA to engage in nearly undetectable assassinations.”
Many current vehicles are now mainly controlled by computer systems — including brake control, air bags, acceleration, steering, door locks, and other vital systems.
In 2014, hackers Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek using their laptops while in the car, took over a Jeep Grand Cherokee driven by a reporter for Wired, as they were traveling on the highway. The demonstration was shocking, and lead to the recall of 1.4 million vehicles. The previous year, hackers compromised a Ford Escape and a Toyota Prius, while sitting in the backseat.
The vehicle hacking reports were contained in the first batch of CIA leaks, titled “Year Zero.” Wikileaks published 8,761 documents and files which they claim are from the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence in Langley, Virginia.
WikiLeaks has a 100-percent track record for publishing authentic documents.
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has also chimed in on the issue, tweeting, “Still working through the publication, but what @Wikileaks has here is genuinely a big deal. Looks authentic.”
In the West, even among people who consider themselves not susceptible to government-corporate media propaganda, any wild story about North Korea can be taken as credible. We should ask ourselves why that is the case, given what we know about the history of government and media fabrications, often related to gaining our acquiescence to a new war.
The corporate media reports North Korean agents murdered Kim Jong Nam with a banned chemical weapon VX. They fail to add that the US government is not a signatory to the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention. They rarely note the Malaysian police investigating the case have not actually said North Korea is connected to his death.
The story of his death or murder raises a number of serious questions. North Korea says Kim Jong Nam was not murdered, but suffered from heart problems, high blood pressure and diabetes, required constant medication, and this caused his death. The North Korean diplomat in Malaysia Ri Tong-il “cited the postmortem examination conducted by Malaysian health authorities, claiming that the postmortem showed Jong-nam died of a heart attack.”
Malaysian authorities conducted two autopsies, the second after the first said to be inconclusive in identifying a cause of death, before announcing well over a week later that VX was involved.
What was going on here? And why weren’t the autopsies made open to others besides Malaysian officials?
Why was the South Korean government the first country to come out quickly after Kim’s February 13 death to blame North Korea for murdering him with the VX nerve weapon – before Malaysia had determined anything? The Malaysian autopsy was not complete until February 23, ten days later.
Why did these two women charged with murder travel several times to South Korea before this attack occurred?
Why was the only North Korean arrested in the case released for lack of evidence?
The two women did not wear gloves, but had the liquid directly on their hands. “The police said the four North Korean suspects who left the country the day of the killing put the VX liquid on the women’s hands.” They later washed it off. Why did none of them die or even get sickened by it? No reports say they went to the hospital.
“Malaysian Inspector-General of Police Khalid Abu Khalid said the women knew they were handling poisonous materials during the attack… leading forensic toxicologists who study murder by poison… question how the two women could walk away unscathed after deploying an agent potent enough to kill Kim Jong Nam before he could even make it to the hospital.”
“Tens of thousands of passengers have passed through the airport since the apparent assassination was carried out. No areas were cordoned off and protective measures were not taken.”
Why, if a highly deadly VX used to kill Kim, did the terminal remain open to thousands of travelers, and not shut down and checked for VX until February 26, 13 days later?
Health Minister Subramaniam Sathasivam said “VX only requires 10 milligrams to be absorbed into the system to be lethal,” yet he added that there have been no reports of anyone else being sickened by the toxin.
DPRK’s Ri Tong-il said in his statement, “How is it possible” the two ladies survived? “How is it possible” no single person in the airport got contaminated? “How is it possible” no nurse, no doctor, no police escorting Kim after the attack were affected?
Why does Malaysia, which acknowledges Kim Jong Nam is Kim Jong Un’s half-brother, make the outrageous demand that Kim’s body won’t be released to North Korea until a close family member provides a sample of their own DNA?
From what we are told, the story does not add up.
Ri Tong-il asked in his same statement “Why is South Korea trying so hard [to blame the DPRK] in this instance? They have a great political crisis inside South Korea [which is quite true] and they need to divert people’s attention,” noting also that the two women involved traveled to South Korea and that South Korea blamed the North for murder by VX the very day it happened.
Ri Jong-choi, the released North Korean, “accused police of threatening to harm his family unless he confessed to the killing of the half brother of North Korea’s leader, calling it a plot to tarnish his country’s honor… Police never said what they believed Ri’s role was in the attack.”
“He also said Malaysian authorities told him at one point that if he confessed his guilt he would be able to stay in Malaysia.”
Stephen Lendman also gives a plausible explanation:
Here’s what we know. North Korean senior representatives were preparing to come to New York to meet with former US officials, a chance for both sides to discuss differences diplomatically, hopefully leading to direct talks with Trump officials.
The State Department hadn’t yet approved visas, a positive development if arranged.
Reports indicate North Korea very much wanted the meeting to take place. Makes sense. It would indicate a modest thaw in hostile relations, a good thing if anything came of it.
So why would Pyongyang want to kill Kim Jong-nam at this potentially sensitive time, knowing it would be blamed for the incident, talks likely cancelled?
Sure enough, they’re off, Pyongyang accused of killing Kim, even though it seems implausible they planned and carried out the incident, using agents in Malaysia to act as proxies.
Is it possible that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un decided to murder his apolitical brother, choosing to do so by using a banned highly toxic agent in public, under video cameras in a crowded airport of a friendly country? Instead of say, doing it by easier means in the North Korean Embassy’s guesthouse in Kuala Lumpur, where the New York Times said his brother sometimes stayed?
We are not supposed to doubt what we are spoon fed, that Kim Jong Un is some irrational war-mongering madman who has instituted a reign of terror. A safer bet is this is a new attempt to beat the drums of war against North Korea and its allies.
It’s official: The Corbett Report is fake news and the most unreliable source in the media. So says Le Monde and dozens of other “fake news checking” websites that are telling the masses what to think, and what they shouldn’t even look at in the first place.
Among those reacting to Trump’s selective Muslim ban while it was in effect in the US was “No Place For Hate,” a brand created by the Anti-Defamation League and retailed by synagogues and other Jewish organizations across the country. The ADL explicitly supports advocacy and activism for Israel. “No Place For Hate” operates under their banner.
On February 3, 2017 the steering committee of “No Place for Hate” in Falmouth, Massachusetts wrote a letter to the editor stating that the Trump administration’s “misguided policies foster an environment of fear toward others and encourage expression of bias.” They continue, “we are especially concerned about the religious bias implicit in this ban that may only serve to increase anti-Muslim sentiments, as well as prejudice against other religious minorities.”
Though the rabbi and others who signed this letter may have been sincere, it is hard to avoid the hypocrisy of any group which advocates for Israel saying it is “concerned” about bias against Muslims. Israel was built on bias against Muslims. It is practiced day in and day out there, with home demolitions, stealing of Palestinian land, military attacks on Gaza, almost daily executions of Palestinians in the streets of the West Bank, and an entire program of genocide since 1948. Further, Israel has exported bias against Muslims to the rest of the world, especially the west, so that it can justify its colonial project in Palestine and get the US and Europe to destroy nearby Muslim-majority lands for the sake of its other project — Greater Israel. The starting point of this campaign was blaming Arabs and Muslims for the false flag attacks of September 11, 2001. Israeli agents from the Bush-era neoconservatives to the Mossad were central in the planning of September 11. If any Arabs or Muslims were involved, they were involved as patsies. A large number of false flag attacks have been blamed on Muslims in the years since, in much the same way, just to keep the momentum going. No place for hate? Israel wrote the book!
Making this possible is an amazing feat of propaganda. While Israel organizes the attacks on Muslims in Asia and Africa, it tells the ADL to lead the defense of Muslims in the US. The criminal pretends to the role of his victim’s best friend. He steals with one hand while offering to help with the other. He bombs Gaza while leading a worldwide struggle for human rights. He profits from the African slave trade and then takes up the cause of African American civil rights. He leads the neoconservative warmongers, and at the same time leads the antiwar left. He creates the wars and also the opposition to those wars. He spies on the US, and he claims the US as his closest ally.
Israel has lasted so long on the world stage because it is an expert at deceit. It is so good at deceit that it can commit monstrous crimes in broad daylight and have the world believe Israel was the victim. The Zionist preempts criticism of Israel by convincing the world that such criticism is a hate crime, and gets laws passed to prevent it. On its website the ADL boasts that “45 states and the District of Columbia have enacted hate crimes laws based on (or similar to) ADL’s model.”
Perhaps this is the motive behind “No Place For Hate”: the real haters must appear to be the leading opponents of hate. If an organization gets itself into the position of defining what hate is and who is doing it, it is in a good position to make sure that the power it represents — racist Israel — is never accused. Has the ADL ever called out Israel for genocide in Palestine? Of course not. What about administrative detention? What about home demolitions? No. The ADL was created so that it could facilitate Israel’s genocide against Palestinians, and make sure the perpetrators never get blamed.
Several years ago, in this same small town in Massachusetts, the venue of a film group was shut down for its screening of Occupation 101, a documentary about the realities of life for Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. The opposition was anonymous. Pressure was brought to bear on the board overseeing the venue. Although a number of bureaucratic explanations were given, the final explanation was that the movie was “hate speech.” The same scenario has played out all over the country. Free speech is shut down on the basis of a construct promoted by organizations like the ADL, specifically to protect Israel. “No Place For Hate” is used as a weapon against free speech, dressed in liberal guise.
Perhaps the purpose of Jewish activism for human rights is, as the letter above says, protecting “other religious minorities” — namely, their own. Many Jews have been outspoken on the cause of Palestine because they know a crime has been committed, and they know that retribution may come. Those who are not witting participants have a guilty conscience. Some may wish to deny, some may wish to bargain, some may wish to obstruct, some may wish to shift the blame, but they all act out of guilt. It is up to those who have suffered in the many wars for Israel to decide what justice should be rendered — most notably, the Palestinians, but also the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Lebanon, Sudan, Yemen, and Iran. It is certain, however, that the ones who have set themselves up as the arbiters of human rights — the ADL among them — are the ones who should actually be on trial.
Following Saturday’s charges come Sunday’s denials.
On Saturday in a series of tweets Donald Trump accused his predecessor Barack Obama of wiretapping his office in Trump Tower. A few hours later Obama responded with a statement published by his spokesman which neither admitted nor denied the wiretap but which said that Obama himself had never ordered surveillance within the US on anyone.
Then came an interview for NBC by Obama’s former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. In it in carefully chosen words Clapper said that he had “no knowledge” of any FISA court authorising wiretaps of Trump Tower, and that no section of the US intelligence community which he supervised had carried out such a wiretap.
Some sections of the media – especially in Britain the BBC and the Guardian – have reported these denials in a way that gives the impression to a casual viewer or reader that Clapper has denied the existence of the wiretap outright. This is certainly not so. Clapper’s careful words were
[For the part of the national security apparatus that I oversaw] there was no such wiretap activity mounted against the president, the president-elect at the time, or as a candidate, or against his campaign….. I can’t speak for other authorized entities in the government or a state or local entity (bold italics added)
In words which have received far less publicity, Clapper also denied that he had seen any evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, and said that the report on Russian interference in the election submitted to Obama and Trump, a redacted version of which was provided to Congress, and a further redacted (and content free) version of which was made public, made no such claim
Clapper was also asked on “Meet the Press” if he had any evidence that the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russian government while the Kremlin was working to influence the election.
“Not to my knowledge,” Clapper said, based on the information he had before his time in the position ended.
“We did not include anything in our report … that had any reflect of collusion between members of the Trump campaign and the Russians. There was no evidence of that included in our report,” he said. “We had no evidence of such collusion.”
A few hours after Clapper’s comments, there appeared an article in The New York Times drawing on the usual anonymous sources. This claimed that shortly after the President published his tweets on Saturday FBI Director Comey contacted the Justice Department to say that the President’s claim that Obama had ordered Trump’s phone in Trump Tower wiretapped was false, and asked the Justice Department to publish a retraction (as of the time of writing the Justice Department has published no such retraction).
In a comment which I see as intended to goad Comey into publishing his own statement denying the President’s claims, The New York Times questions why he has not done so
It is not clear why Mr. Comey did not issue a statement himself. He is the most senior law enforcement official who was kept on the job as the Obama administration gave way to the Trump administration. And while the Justice Department applies for intelligence-gathering warrants, the F.B.I. keeps its own records and is in a position to know whether Mr. Trump’s claims are true. While intelligence officials do not normally discuss the existence or nonexistence of surveillance warrants, no law prevents Mr. Comey from issuing the statement.
As I recall, The New York Times initially also made the very strange claim that because Jeff Sessions has recused himself from the investigation into the Trump campaign’s alleged contacts with Russia, Comey was finding it difficult to find anyone in the Justice Department competent to handle his request.
That cannot be true since Sessions’s statement on Friday made it clear that it would be the acting Deputy Attorney General Dana Boente who would henceforth be supervising the investigation and who Comey would therefore be dealing with. I notice that the current version of the story in The New York Times no longer makes this claim.
It is always difficult (and perhaps unwise) to comment on something someone is reported to have said based on accounts of what that person is reported to have said which are provided anonymously and at second hand. Assuming however that The New York Times story is true (as I believe) and assuming that Comey’s concerns are also being reported accurately (which with some qualifications I also believe) then Comey is not actually denying that a wiretap took place, merely that Obama ordered it. Here is the first paragraph of The New York Times report
The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, asked the Justice Department this weekend to publicly reject President Trump’s assertion that President Barack Obama ordered the tapping of Mr. Trump’s phones, senior American officials said on Sunday. Mr. Comey has argued that the highly charged claim is false and must be corrected, they said, but the department has not released any such statement.
This is of course what Obama said in his statement on Saturday, and which (as I have already pointed out) is almost certainly true
The statement does not deny that Donald Trump’s office in Trump Tower was wiretapped. Nor does it deny that Donald Trump’s ‘associates’ (a flexible word the precise meaning of which has never been made clear) or members of his campaign team were placed under surveillance.
Instead it indirectly denies that Obama himself or people working directly under him in the White House ordered these actions. It does so by denying they have ever ordered surveillance of any US citizen, something which by the way is almost certainly true.
The statement hints than any order to wiretap Donald Trump’s office or for carrying out surveillance on Donald Trump’s ‘associates’ was the work of officials in the Justice Department, and it seeks to shift responsibility – or blame – onto them.
This too is almost certainly true. (bold italics added)
On the face of it therefore Comey’s comments – if they are being reported accurately – do not add anything to what following Obama’s statement of Saturday we already know.
Certain other comments attributed to Comey in The New York Times article are attracting less attention, though they are actually very interesting.
Firstly, it seems that what drove Comey to contact the Justice Department is concern that Donald Trump’s tweets on Saturday implied that the FBI by wiretapping his office had broken the law.
Mr. Comey, who made the request on Saturday after Mr. Trump levelled his allegation on Twitter, has been working to get the Justice Department to knock down the claim because it falsely insinuates that the F.B.I. broke the law, the officials said.
Comey’s concern here is entirely legitimate. As I have said previously, if there was a wiretap and if it was authorised by a court after an application made in the proper way by the Justice Department, then the wiretap was legal. Comey is absolutely right to want to set the record straight about this. Presumably in the absence of a public statement that will be done over the course of the Congressional inquiries which the President has now requested.
The second point is even more interesting, which is that The New York Times story again essentially confirms that the FBI investigation into the alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia is drawing a blank.
In addition to being concerned about potential attacks on the bureau’s credibility, senior F.B.I. officials are said to be worried that the notion of a court-approved wiretap will raise the public’s expectations that the federal authorities have significant evidence implicating the Trump campaign in colluding with Russia’s efforts to disrupt the presidential election. (bold italics added)
This is very twisted language which shows that The New York Times is not reporting this part of the story straightforwardly. However the meaning is clear enough. The FBI is worried that the more discussion of its investigation there is – extending all the way to discussions by no less a person than the President himself of court approved wiretaps – the more people will fall for the false ‘no smoke without fire’ argument, and will feel let down by the FBI when it eventually announces that its investigation has drawn a blank.
This is an entirely valid concern, and is one of several reasons why such investigations are supposed to be confidential.
This is the second confirmation within a few hours from people who have held posts within the national security bureaucracy that the endlessly repeated claims of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia are not supported by evidence. The first was made by Clapper (see above) and the second was made anonymously to The New York Times by officials of the FBI.
These admissions follow a continuous pattern of admissions from officials within the national security bureaucracy now stretching back months that inquiries into claims of collusion by the Trump campaign and Russia are drawing a blank.
Not only in the present paranoid atmosphere are these admissions being ignored, but the security agencies are being constantly bullied to divert more and more resources into more and more inquiries to find the evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia which officials of the security agencies repeatedly say is not there.
Students of political witch-hunts eg. the Popish Plot in Seventeenth Century England, the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, or the McCarthyite witch-hunts of the 1950s, will recognise the phenomenon.
The position therefore as of the time of writing is that Obama has denied – though in a very convoluted way – that he ordered a wiretap (though he has hinted that if there was a wiretap it was the Justice Department which requested it), Comey is reported as having also denied that Obama ordered a wiretap, and Clapper has denied that the part of the bureaucracy that he supervised sought or carried out a wiretap.
These are not denials that a wiretap took place. Neither are they admissions that it did take place. I have repeatedly warned against the logical error of inferring a positive from a negative, and of treating a denial of one thing as an admission of something else. What it is fair to say is that the fingers are being pointed towards Obama’s Justice Department, and that so far its senior officers – Loretta Lynch and Sally Yates – are staying silent.
If Obama ordered Trump Tower wiretapped as Donald Trump claims, evidence may or may not be easily obtained.
If FISA court authorization occurred, a congressional inquiry could prove it. If conducted warrantless by the NSA, CIA or FBI, verifying Trump’s claim will be much harder.
Cooperation by agency heads would be needed. NSA director Admiral Michael Rogers is an Obama administration holdover. So is FBI head James Comey. CIA director Mike Pompeo is a Trump appointee.
If Obama got FISA court authorization to wiretap Trump Tower, or a server the building uses for electronic communications located anywhere, court records would verify it.
Still, it’s unproved so far if spying on Trump occurred, and if so, whether it stemmed from FISA court authorization or by other means.
The NSA, CIA and FBI notoriously conduct warrantless surveillance. Post-9/11, the NSA was authorized by a GW Bush executive order to warrantlessly spy on phone and other electronic communications in the name of national security.
Monitoring internally and abroad followed, a clear Fourth Amendment violation, prohibiting searches and seizures without judicial authorization – based on probable cause.
In 2012, Congress extended warrantless spying, constitutional law ignored. The FISA Amendments Reauthorization Act passed both houses overwhelmingly.
Obama signed it into law. Warrantless spying was extended for another five years. GW Bush and Obama authorized the NSA to eavesdrop on Americans lawlessly.
The CIA and FBI operate the same way extrajudicially. Constitutional protections no longer apply. Rogue governance does what it pleases – the way all police states operate.
It’s bad enough to spy on ordinary Americans, quite another on a major party presidential candidate if hard evidence proves it.
According to a NYT report, FBI director Comey “asked the Justice Department this weekend to publicly reject President Trump’s assertion that President Barack Obama ordered the tapping of Mr. Trump’s phones” – citing the usual unnamed “senior American officials.”
Comey, an Obama holdover, said Trump’s charge is false, according to The Times. The FBI and Justice Department declined to comment.
If a FISA warrant was issued, it would have likely come through the DOJ or the FBI it administers. A statement by AG Jeff Sessions, another senior department official, or Comey would confirm or deny if one or the other agencies was involved. So far, no public comment by either.
Over the weekend, Trump reportedly said “(t)his will be investigated. It will all come out. I will be proven right.”
For starters, he should publicly reveal what he knows, any evidence he’s aware of, putting meat on the bones of his serious accusation.
One thing’s clear. This story has a long way to go. How it’ll end remains uncertain.
Former US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has said on NBC’s ‘Meet the Press’ show that he is unaware of any evidence that the Russian government colluded with the Trump campaign during the US election, but still believes contacts existed.
“We didn’t include evidence in our report that had any reflection of collusion between members of the Trump campaign and the Russians. There was no evidence of that included in our report,” Clapper said, referring to a paper compiled by the NSA, FBI and CIA, together with the office of the DNI.
When asked if such proof even existed, he said: “Not to my knowledge.”
The show’s host, Chuck Todd, continued to press the issue, asking: “If [evidence] existed, it would have been in the report?”
Clapper answered that “this could have unfolded or become available in the time since I left the government. But at the time, we had no evidence of such collusion.”
Todd hinted that the public could start wondering if the situation is “all just smoke,” given the absence of a “smoking gun.”
“Well, that’s a good question. I don’t know,” Clapper responded. “I do think, though, it is in everyone’s interest, in the current president’s interests, in the Democrats’ interests, in the Republican interests, the country’s interest to get to the bottom of all of this, because it’s such a distraction. And certainly the Russians have to be chortling about the success of their efforts to sow dissension in this country.”
Clapper, however, still appeared unable to put his finger on where to look for any proof of the alleged “dissension-sowing.”
Asked if he still believed the Trump-Russia collusion claims, Clapper stated: “Yes, I do.”
Clapper is not the first to face questions over the issue of any substantial proof – or the lack thereof – of the Trump-Russia allegations.
At the end of February, the House Intelligence Committee chief, Rep. Devin Nunes, told journalists that they “still haven’t seen any evidence” of “any phone calls [between the Trump campaign and Russian officials]” but mysteriously added: “It doesn’t mean they don’t exist.”
Moscow has repeatedly denied allegations of contact with the Trump campaign, with the Kremlin spokesman lamenting that it’s become difficult to distinguish fact from fiction in the US media.
“Those reports are not based on concrete facts,” Dmitry Peskov said in mid-February, commenting on claims made by the New York Times and CNN, among others. Peskov noted that “there are five different sources in the story and none are named. So you see, really laughable stories are now given a go.”
“[America’s treatment of me] is a crime that history will never forgive.” – Omar Abdel Rahman
Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the “blind sheik”, died on the morning of February 18, 2017, near the 24th anniversary of the 1993 WTC bombing. He was an innocent victim of the US agenda to create a new enemy by engineering events that would make terrorism virtually synonymous with “Islamic fundamentalism”.
Sheik Rahman attained national fame in Egypt while he was on trial for inciting the 1981 assassination of former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. With a passionate moral integrity, he courageously attacked the government during his two days on the stand; the intensive trial media gave him a national platform that made him famous throughout the Muslim world. His sermons were taped and traded throughout Egypt.
While he was vindicated of the charges against him, President Mubarak’s government ominously refused to give the necessary certification of the verdict and eventually drove Sheik Rahman out of Egypt. The Sheik went to Afghanistan, where he helped the CIA recruit Arab fighters to serve with the US-backed mujahadeen (he would lose at least one of his own sons there), and the Sheik was reportedly on the CIA payroll.
Sheik Rahman came to the US in 1990, hoping to remain until he could safely return to Egypt. According to Benjamin Begin in a 1993 Israel Today newsletter, Rahman’s mosques were infiltrated by FBI and Mossad operatives and would be the source of recruitment for their operations.
The World Trade Center explosion occurred on Friday, February 26th, 1993. The Sheik was soon declared deportable when some of those charged were identified as members of his mosques. The sheik was in the FBI’s crosshairs; the FBI offered Egyptian intelligence agent Emad Salem over one million dollars to entrap him.
The cagey Salem, who had become a trusted member of the Sheik’s inner circle, was aware of the obligation that the Sheik had as spiritual leader to respond to congregants’ needs. Salem blindsided the sheik by going to his home after midnight on a Sunday, pretending to be in a spiritual crisis. He claimed that he felt guilty for his years in the Egyptian military and needed to atone for his actions by attacking a target in the US — such as the United Nations. The sheik tried to fob him off and talked him out of that terrorist target; he suggested that a US military target would be more appropriate, but he told Salem to “slow down” — to cool off. Salem went home happy.
The Joint Anti-Terror Task Force and the Justice Department were allegedly dubious about whether they had evidence that would convict Rahman. The Sheik had repeatedly and publicly denounced the bombing of the WTC and claimed that he had nothing to do with it. Those who heard Emad Salem’s recorded attempt to incriminate the Sheik didn’t think it was persuasive enough to stand up in court. The FBI had tapped the Sheik’s telephones from two weeks before the WTC explosion until June, 1993; there was no evidence of any wrongdoing. The INS said he was complying with the requirements of his deportation appeal. Authorities noted that incarcerating the Sheik would be expensive because of his diabetes. A detention until appeals were completed could have lasted for months — if not for years.
Attorney General Janet Reno, who had publicly been reluctant to charge the Sheik, finally succumbed to the political pressure: pressure that also came from the Egyptian government, which still felt threatened by the Sheik’s popularity. Egyptian officials, afraid that Rahman would be deported to Egypt, wanted him safely incarcerated in the US. On July 1st, 1993, the Justice Department, while avoiding making any criminal charge, decided to take the Sheik into custody – “indefinite administrative detention” — on immigration charges.
The Egyptian conundrum
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was afraid of Rahman’s popularity and influence; he appeared to be worried about suffering the same fate as the Shah of Iran, deposed by a popular religious leader. Mubarak banned tapes of Sheik Rahman’s sermons; those found with copies were subject to up to five years in jail. Three thousand copies of a newspaper Al-Hayat that featured a March interview with Rahman were confiscated, and Rahman’s mosque in Fayoum was empty, guarded by a police agent.
While the Egyptian government had initially asked the Clinton administration to hold the Sheik to make sure he was not deported to Egypt, they changed their minds when they were informed that under the immigration charges, the sheik could accept his deportation voluntarily and go to any country that would take him, which could make him even more of a threat to the Mubarak government. After intense discussions, the US agreed to accept Egypt’s official extradition request, which it claimed would take precedence over the deportation charge. The only hitch was that appeals might take as long as eight years.
Mubarak was livid. He reminded the U.S. that he had hosted an Arab summit before the 1991 US-led invasion of Iraq which brought most of the Arab world onside, providing important “optics” for the engineered invasion.
Egyptian authorities were also outraged that two employees of the US Embassy had met earlier that year with prominent members of the Islamic Group, which regarded Sheik Rahman as their spiritual leader. The US seemed to be hedging its bets on Egyptian leadership so that it would not be caught out in Egypt as it had been in Iran, when Khomeini was swept into power. To add insult to injury, there was even a Congressional effort to cut back on US aid to Egypt.
President Mubarak then demonstrated to the Clinton administration who was in charge of Egypt. On July 8th, the Egyptian government hanged seven followers of Sheik Rahman for attacks against foreign tourists and for conspiring to overthrow the Mubarak government. It was the largest number of executions for a political crime in more than four decades, and it would be the start of a brutal campaign against dissidents that would last until the 2011 Arab Spring.
After witnessing Mubarak’s treatment of the Muslim Brotherhood, it was evident that Rahman’s supporters were powerless; Rahman was expendable.
US rejects political asylum for Rahmanbut can’t extradite him to Egypt
Meanwhile there were unforeseen complications with U.S. efforts to extradite Rahman to Egypt. While the Board of Immigration Appeals rejected Rahman’s appeal for political asylum, it appeared that his appeals would eventually reach the Supreme Court. Also, State Department officials realized that the 100-year old extradition treaty between the US and Egypt did not permit extradition based on “any crime or offense of political character.” While one official claimed that US courts were not limited by treaties, another noted that the treaty strengthened Rahman’s case for political asylum.
The Egyptian plan to ensure that Sheik Rahman would be placed under their control hit another challenge at the end of July when Afghanistan’s Prime Minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar offered his country as a refuge for the Sheik. The Sheik’s lawyers realized that deportation might be the only way for the sheik to regain his freedom, so they contacted the office of U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White to request his deportation.
White’s office sat on the sheik’s deportation request while trying to accommodate Egypt’s demand for permanent control of the sheik. The problem was that those who were deported were free to go to any country that would accept them, but Egypt did not want the sheik in Afghanistan, where he would be free to communicate with his followers.
The “seditious conspiracy” solution
The sheik’s lawyers were still waiting for a response when, a week later, on August 25th, 1993, Attorney General Janet Reno issued an indictment for Sheik Rahman along with 14 others for “seditious conspiracy”, an obscure charge employed against political dissidents.
The 20-count, 27-page indictment claimed that one terrorist organization [which started in 1989, the year before the sheik arrived in the U.S.] was behind all of the plots and that Sheik Rahman, while not directly involved with the acts, was the “mastermind” who explicitly gave the orders. The listed plots included: plans to attack American military installations; plans to murder F.B.I. agents; plans to seize hostages to help release jailed conspirators; the 1990 killing of Rabbi Meir Kahane; the 1991 killing of Alkifah Center President Mustafa Shalabi; the 1993 WTC bombing [ambiguously included, since there was currently a separate trial for that]; the June “landmarks bombing plot”; and the plot to assassinate President Hosni Mubarak. The New York Times featured a map of the presumed terrorist targets; it appeared that New York City was under a Muslim siege.
The “seditious conspiracy” charge, which had been created to target Confederates at the end of the Civil War, was defined as when two or more people “conspire to overthrow, put down, or destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them.” Experts noted that the broad nature of the conspiracy indictment, which did not require connecting a defendant to any specific act of violence and allowed prosecutors to bring in evidence not related to terrorist acts, made it possible to convict people with little proof (let alone evidence) of guilt. Criminal defense experts claimed that the Government was framing the case as much on the defendants’ beliefs as on any acts they may have committed.
Defense lawyers were also disturbed by the Government’s piling up of charges on a socially-isolated and demonized group, especially reviving the Kahane case just two years after El Sayid Nosair had been acquitted. Claiming that the indictment was an attempt to “create an atmosphere of fear and intimidation“, defense lawyer Ronald Kuby noted that, “What they have done is take every allegation, every rumor, every loose end and created a vast mythical Islamic conspiracy. They have created a case that is so big and complicated that it is impossible to defend, impossible to understand, and impossible for any of these defendants to get a fair trial.”
Emad Salem’s tapes
Defense lawyers claimed that Emad Salem entrapped their clients by hiring them for his plots, then taped them making incriminating statements. Salem’s tapes, on which most of this trial would be based, would also include two FBI admissions of overseeing the provision of the WTC explosives. Ron Kuby requested that all of Salem’s tapes collected as evidence (which also showed the FBI’s unsavory ways of doing business) be released in their entirety to the public to expose the case as a conspiracy to frame the defendants. Judge Michael B. Mukasey, (who would be named Attorney General in 2007), refused to allow the tapes to be made public.
The seditious conspiracy trial would be delayed until January, 1995, and corresponded in time to the televised O.J. Simpson trial, which contributed to its lack of media coverage, despite being touted as the terror trial of the century. The year and a half between the defendants’ arrests and their trial gave the Government and courts time to strip the sheik and other defendants of Constitutional rights, including the Sixth Amendment right to counsel, the Fourth Amendment right against unwarranted search and seizure, and other basic freedoms. The homes of two of Rahman’s paralegals would be raided for information against him, and dissident reading material found in defendants’ homes that was deemed “anti-American” or showed “hatred of Jews” could be used as evidence against them.
The seditious conspiracy trial
As with the first World Trade bombing trial, there would be no change of venue, the jury would be unsequestered and — supposedly to protect them from Muslim terror threats — would be identified only by number; their names would never be made public. None of the jury was Muslim.
The media during the entirety of this trial would be filled with various terror stories. The seditious conspiracy trial had barely started when the “mastermind” of the WTC bombing, Ramzi Yousef, arrived in New York with huge media fanfare. Mukasey asked the jury on the day after Yousef’s arrival if their opinions were changed by this media coverage. He immediately determined that they weren’t, but ignored the subsequent barrage of prejudicial media exposure that lasted throughout this trial. Some of Yousef’s publicity should have helped the defendants because Yousef, who didn’t know sheik Rahman, made statements that should have exonerated Rahman and others. Unfortunately Yousef refused to testify at this trial and Judge Mukasey would not permit the defense counsel access to Yousef’s documents that the FBI had taken.
The Oklahoma City bombing, which occurred six weeks later in mid-April, was initially claimed to be similar to the WTC bomb, and due to Muslim terrorism. Mukasey “assumed” that the jury would not be affected by the anti-Muslim media, although the defendants received heightened physical protection in their detention center.
That June, the actual driver of the bomb-laden Ryder van came to media attention and in August, there was media fanfare with his extradition to the U.S.
Sheik Rahman’s (nonexistent) Constitutional rights
Prosecution attention turned to the Sheik’s sermons to show his attitude towards the U.S. as well as his leadership in the Muslim community. Many of the Sheik’s sermons, which encouraged the devout to fight enemies of Islam and God, were read out in an effort to criminalize what should have been his freedoms of speech and belief.
Mukasey barred witnesses that would have shown the role of politics behind the arrest of Sheik Rahman, that would have testified that Rahman was not the radical that the media had described, and that would have provided a clearer understanding of Muslim terms (such as jihad and fatwa) that were being used against the defendants. Mukasey’s rulings were devastating to the Sheik’s defense.
The defense lawyers tried to introduce sealed material from the previous WTC trial that would show the lengths to which the FBI had gone to implicate as well as convict the previous defendants in the World Trade Center trial. Although that material was not produced, FBI scientist Fredrick Whitehurst’s subsequent testimony about the FBI’s incompetence, perjury and obstruction of justice that facilitated the convictions of the four charged in the WTC bombing did tell part of that story.
The Government’s desperation to find damaging information on Sheik Rahman was evident in the arrest of his paralegal at the end of April. The authorities’ claim that Nasser Ahmed’s overstay on a student visa “just came to our attention”, was contradicted by an FBI agent’s message to Ahmed that if he did not cooperate with the FBI, he would be deported to Egypt. After being charged with “secret evidence” and spending three years in solitary confinement, Ahmed would not be released until 1999.
The verdicts
Since this trial showed that there was little evidence that any of the defendants were guilty of any untried crime that had taken place, the prosecution tried to criminalize Islam; it described the defendants as a frightening “jihad army”: foreigners of a mysterious, militant culture. Judge Mukasey assured the jurors they could find that there was a single conspiracy despite the differing defendants and plots, “so long as you find that some of the conspirators continued for the entire duration of the conspiracy to act for the purposes charged in the indictment.”
After deliberating for seven days, the jury returned on October 1, 1995 with guilty verdicts for 48 out of the 50 charges. Sheik Rahman’s lawyer Lynne Stewart broke down and cried.
The defense cries “foul” and calls for a mistrial
The defense counsel immediately called for a mistrial because they believed that the problems with the trial were so egregious. It was clear that the FBI made use of Egypt’s intelligence agent as an agent provocateur to carry out its own agenda. Some defendants claimed that exculpatory conversations were missing from the tapes; the FBI admitted that they had “briefly” returned the tapes to Salem after they had been entered as evidence.
Judge Mukasey told the defense lawyers that he would consider their request to hold a post-trial hearing on the issue of whether he should overturn the convictions. But on January 10, 1996, he rejected the defense motion to throw out the convictions of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and nine others, claiming that there was no proof that the evidence that Salem had destroyed would have helped exonerate the defendants. Mukasey ignored Salem’s obvious motive for destroying evidence and the FBI’s interest in wanting him to do it.
Mukasey was determined to make an example of these “terror” defendants. While the sentence for seditious conspiracy was 20 years, Mukasey used that as a starting point, and added the other charges on top of that. He used his discretionary powers to make each part of the sentences sequential rather than concurrent; the sentences ranged from 30 years to life.
Sheik Rahman was sentenced to life. Worse, the government silenced Rahman even further by new “Special Administration Measures” which allowed them to essentially isolate him totally. To facilitate that agenda, it taped what were supposed to be his private conversations with his lawyer Lynne Stewart, and would imprison her for trying to circumvent the restrictions.
The obscure conspiracy law came into its own
The prosecution congratulated itself on its use of the seditious conspiracy charge. The verdict showed that the conspiracy law provided them with an easy venue to obtain verdicts with little evidence and for which no crimes had occurred. The conspiracy charge would become the mechanism to convict Muslims in future terror trials because of the low standards required of any individual’s involvement.
The price
This trial demonstrated how the efforts of the government, the courts and the media — particularly the New York Times — ensured that the Muslim defendants could not obtain a fair trial. The New York Times enabled convictions in all of these related trials by maligning the defendants with anonymous government leaks, generally using biased and inflammatory language to describe them, and invariably assuming their guilt.
The injustice of these convictions and the fruitless appeals have been clear to those following the cases. While few Americans seem to be aware of the injustice, it has not been lost on the worldwide Muslim community. There were various actions designed to free Sheik Rahman, including the 2005 kidnapping of the four Christian Peacemaker Team members in Iraq: Tom Fox (who died), James Loney, Norman Kember and Harmeet Singh Sooden.
The world lost a passionate voice for moral integrity with the silencing of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, and his death before attaining justice was tragic. His passing should provide Americans the opportunity to understand how FBI-monitored acts were used to eliminate Constitutional rights to freedom of speech, freedom of belief, the right against unreasonable search and seizure, the right to counsel, and protection from cruel and unusual punishment. By ignoring the elimination of Muslim rights, Americans are laying the groundwork for the elimination of their own.
We have changed the headline of this news story to better reflect its content. Since its publication, former Intercept reporter Juan Thompson was arrested and charged with making bomb threats against Jewish Community Centers and the Anti-Defamation League.
Reckless US Russia bashing is reminiscent of US propaganda preceding all its wars, vilifying targeted countries and their leaders before attacking them.
The possibility of the world’s dominant nuclear powers clashing militarily should terrify everyone. Nuclear armageddon could follow.
Permanent wars reflect longstanding US policy. The Russian Federation never attacked another nation, fostering world peace and stability instead, threatening no other countries, despite Big Lies claiming otherwise.
Russia’s ambassador to Washington, Sergey Kislyak, is a distinguished diplomat, not an intelligence agent. He joined the Soviet Foreign Affairs Ministry in 1977, serving in many positions – most recently as Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister from 2003 – 2008, since then as envoy to America.
Yet CNN outrageously called him “one of Russia’s top spies and spy-recruiters in Washington” – a disgraceful fake news accusation, related to its coverage of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, having spoken to Kislyak one or more times while serving on the Senate Armed Services Committee.
CNN’s alleged sources: the usual unnamed US officials, past and present, reporting no evidence, the aim part of a diabolical anti-Russia, anti-Trump plot.
The stakes are huge. If officials close to him are eliminated, he’ll be too weak to govern effectively, perhaps more vulnerable to impeachment and removal from office than already.
If he goes, the last vestiges of a free society will go with him, coup d’etat dictatorship replacing him.
If Russia bashing passes a threshold of no return, war between the world’s dominant nuclear powers could follow.
Most Americans are mindless about what’s going on, manipulated by relentless fake news, failing to distinguish between fact and fiction.
Most oppose Trump, according to polls. Most nonsensically believe Russia threatens America. The notion is pounded into the public mind constantly, in NYT and other broadsheet feature stories, round-the-clock on cable television.
Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov blasted accusations about Kislyak, saying “(y)ou and I have not heard a single statement by the US special services about our ambassador” – just “bogus media speculations that keep fanning tensions,” adding:
“The only piece of advice that I can give is that in a situation like this, avoid reacting to all such anonymous, baseless fake news stories and rely only on official statements by genuine officials.”
If Americans don’t awaken to the clear and present dangers they face and resist, the price for their indifference will be full-blown tyranny – perhaps nuclear war to follow, the ultimate nightmare.
RT’s and Sputnik’s Editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan commented on the recent “fake news” accusations by French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron’s office toward the two media outlets.
Earlier, Macron’s ally Richard Ferrand claimed that RT and Sputnik were publishing false rumors about the candidate and favoring other participants of the presidential race.
Macron’s advisor Munir Manzhubi also accused the media outlets of spreading false information, however, without providing any evidence to support his allegations.
“We are flattered that Macron’s team continues to build its election campaign solely on lies about RT and Sputnik. Not comme il faut, but quite funny,” Simonyan said, commenting on the issue.
Following the allegations, Sputnik’s press service released a statement, saying that the statements made by Macron’s team are another attempt to manipulate public opinion. Sputnik stressed that it always covers facts and real opinions expressed by people involved in election campaigns regardless of whether anyone finds them unacceptable.
Earlier, French lawmaker and member of the Republican party Nicolas Dhuicq told Sputnik that, in his opinion, journalists of Sputnik news agency and the RT broadcaster are often more professional than their western colleagues when it comes to the fair transmission of speakers’ comments and news.
“Personally, I have no difficulties with RT or Sputnik. When I am interviewed by those two broadcasters in French or in English, I am asked a variety of questions and always have the time to express my ideas and my words, most of the time, are faithfully transmitted. In a contrary, when I recently encountered French TV teams, I had an experience when out of 30 minutes-long interview only seconds were taken and, of course, the parts which were taken had no links to the context or the rest of my speech,” Dhuicq told Sputnik on Friday.
Sputnik and RT have repeatedly become subjects of criticism among European politicians for allegedly producing fake news and spreading propaganda. At the same time, many European residents and experts view the media outlets as alternative sources of information and classify the West’s attempts to undermine their credibility as censorship and crackdown on the freedom of speech.
The ongoing clashes between the factions that make up the US political elite keep getting more and more absurd. And annoyingly, as no particular fan of Donald Trump, I keep finding myself in the position of having to fight his corner.
In this instance it is about wire-tapping. Donald Trump tweeted out that the Obama’s previous administration had pulled a Watergate and had his office phones monitored during the election. As yet there is no proof, something everyone from CNN to the Guardian to The NYTwere very eager to point out.
In fact, every single MSM source that covered this story mentioned the lack of evidence in the headline:
Somebody get these guys a thesaurus.
Whilst simultaneously quoting the other side of the story, without feeling the need to be quite so thoroughly honest:
Don’t worry everyone… Obama denied it. So that settles that.
And honestly, yes, there is (as yet) no proof. There may not be any proof, ever. It’s a possibility that Trump simply made it up. Politicians make things up all the time. I doubt one word in fifty spoken in Washington DC has any kind of basis in fact.
There is, indeed, no proof. However, there is quite a large piece of evidence, one that the media seem to have neglected to mention.
This is where we need to have a quick reality check, because it seems our friends in the media have forgotten:
The Obama administration spied. A lot.
They spied on American civilians, foreign nationals, domestic political figures, and international heads of state. They monitored our internet histories and our phone calls and read our e-mails. None of this is disputed. Obama did one of his hokey phony apologies about it. He almost certainly used the word “folks”.
This was famously reported exclusively in the Guardian just 4 years ago. They stood by their serious journalism back then… right up until GCHQ told them to smash their hard drives with a sledgehammer. Edward Snowden (perhaps you remember him?) is currently hiding-out in Russia for telling us all about it. Luke Harding, a Guardian star reporter, wrote a not-very-good book about it. It seems odd they’ve all forgotten.
The refutation of Trump’s claim, offered by former Obama admin. officials went roughly as follows:
No President can order a wiretap. Those restrictions were put in place to protect citizens from people like you. https://t.co/lEVscjkzSw
There was also this statement from an Obama spokesperson.
The argument being that Barack Obama can’t have ordered a wire-tap on Donald Trump… because it would exceed his legal authority. Now, I’m all for living in a world where the US Government, and all the elected and unelected officials there-in, act only according to their legal authority. It would be a nice world…a lot of people would still be alive that, currently, are not.
But time has shown, hundreds (if not thousands) of times over the past few decades, that legality is not an obstacle to an American political establishment driven to protect their financial interests and military empire.
Torture camps, extraordinary renditions, drone executions, funding of terrorist groups, targeting of civilians, use of cluster munitions, use of chemical weapons, use of depleted uranium, terrorist attacks, mass surveillance and all out wars of conquest are all very, very illegal. That has never been a problem.
To suppose that adding illegal wire taps on presidential candidates to this list is a line they would not cross is naive to the point of insanity.
It is inherently ridiculous to openly acknowledge the existence of a massive (illegal) surveillance network, and not assume that bombastic, populist political opponents would be at the top the target list.
In summary: of course the Obama administration spied on Donald Trump. They spied on everybody.
It’s very important we don’t let them shove that fact down the memory-hole.
Recent disclosures by the Zionist regime show that some 2,069 British nationals were serving in the IDF as of March 2025, according to Freedom of Information (FoI) requests submitted to the occupation forces (1,686 dual British-Israeli, plus 383 multinational). We cannot tell from the figures how many of these were already settler colonists and intend to stay in the colony, and how many will return or have returned to the UK. Presumably, those returning to the UK will number far fewer than 2,000, since many are known to have become permanently residents of the colony.
Additionally, the IDF figures only provide a snapshot, and do not tell us how many have served in the Jewish supremacist military either before or after March 2025. One way into the question of how many genocidaires are living in Britain is to ask how many current British residents were born in the Zionist colony. There is data on that, as we shall see. … continue
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From The Intercept on February 28, 2017:
