Just when you thought the mainstream media coverage couldn’t get anymore surreal.
Question: should ‘ISIS’ be considered a credible news source? Sadly, CNN does.
In the wake of the Paris Attacks, a most disturbing trend has suddenly emerged in the mainstream media’s ‘terror’ coverage – where CNN, FOX News, and other majors are now deferring to ISIS press releases as a primary news source.
Leading the charge on Wednesday was CNN’s intrepid reporter, Chris Cuomo, who seemed uncomfortably dazzled by a report in the latest English language issue of ‘ISIS Monthly’ aka DABIQ magazine (image, right), a glossy coffee table rag filled with colorful jihadi lifestyle features and career advice for aspiring young terrorists (if only it were a joke).
Schweppes Bomb
The DABIQ article proudly displays an image of a 16oz Schweppes Gold pineapple soda can with a few bits alongside it, claiming that this was the bomb that brought down Russia’s Metrojet Airbus A321 – a plane which broke up in midair 20 minutes into its journey after leaving Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt en route to St. Petersburg, Russia on Oct. 31st.
The DABIQ article goes on to reveal a grand plot (albeit, after the fact), saying, “After resolving to bring down a plane belonging to a nation in the American-led Western coalition against ISIS, the target was changed to a Russian plane”.
‘WORKING THEIR SOURCES’: Crack ‘journalist’ Chris Cuomo scored a major scoop from the ISIS propaganda magazine.
CNN even properly credits the terror group, as evidenced in the upper right hand corner ‘ISIS/Dabiq’.
Then comes the big DABIQ reveal: “A bomb was smuggled onto the airplane…”, although it doesn’t explain exactly how, or by whom. Seeing as the Sinai airline disaster took place almost 3 weeks ago, you’d think that ISIS might have boasted about this brilliant ‘job’ earlier. Maybe they were busy planning for Paris, or working on the magazine. Who knows. More reason to believe that the DABIQ article is nothing more than a very sick prank – unless of course you are a member of the mainstream media – then it’s good as gold.
‘What’s the take?’
Granted, most people are used to seeing this type of vapid reporting on TV, but it’s still astonishing to watch how CNN’s Cuomo seized upon his latest ‘scoop’ without even questioning the validity of the source. Later in their coverage, Cuomo tried to ‘walk it back’ somewhat, but still presented this ISIS propaganda as if it was actual ‘evidence’ of a bomb that brought down the Russian plane.
CHRIS CUOMO: “Joining us now is CNN’s Ian Lee. He’s in Cairo; he has the latest. Now, Ian, as you know, the early reporting was that this was a 1-kilogram explosive, that’d be about 2.2 pounds, certainly different than this soda can. What’s the take? ”
IAN LEE: “That’s right, this is a fairly primitive bomb. When you look at it, you do have that soda can. Now explosive experts have told CNN that that could hold about 500 grams, roughly a pound. But they say that’s enough to take down a plane. You also have the detonator and you have the switch.”
“Now we do not know if this is in fact the bomb. It could be ISIS trying to throw investigators off their trail. But all signs are pointing that that it was a bomb that took down the plane. Now, the one thing that is also very concerning about this bomb, it’s is that if you look at it, it cannot be remotely detonated. This was a suicide mission, if it was the bomb…”
CHRIS CUOMO: “Big point there at the end. Ian Lee, thank you very much for the reporting!”
‘TEAM COVERAGE’: David Soucie, Chris Cuomo and Josh Rogin (purple tie)
CNN then rolled out one of its many panels of ‘terror experts’, which on the occasion included Josh Rogin (Daily Beast ) and ‘Safety Analyst’ David Soucie, both of whom seemed to parrot Cuomo’s infatuation with the soda can images, all nodding in unison and seeming to agree that somehow, ‘Yes, it all makes sense Chris!’
Based on what’s been released so far from the official investigation into the Sinai airline crash, it’s clear that the soda can CNN and ISIS have been touting around this week could not have held the explosive material necessary to trigger the fatal explosion. According to Alexander Bortnikov, the head of Russia’s Federal Security Service, it’s estimated that the bomb TNT load was at least 2.2 lbs (1 kg). This would make DABIQ’s soda can claim even more impossible than it already is, unless of course, it was a Six Pack (now that would’ve been a real scoop!). Although CNN had access to this report at the time of their ‘Schweppes Bomb’ scoop, it didn’t slow down Cuomo and their crack news team from running with the ISIS version of events.
If ISIS says so, well then, that’s good enough for CNN.
Unfortunately, it didn’t stop there. CNN’s brain trust go on to ask, ‘is it possible that this soda can could have been detonated remotely?’, even though the crude switch looking like a detonator in the photo – looks nothing like a remote detonator. Hence, Ian Lee’s awkward deflection during his exchange with Cuomo.
Even if the DABIQ article were somehow true (and who in their right mind would root for that?), there is something very weird about western TV networks whose ‘expert’ panels are comprised mainly of ‘former’ CIA operatives, Pentagon staffers, think tank fellows and private security executives – who rely on information supplied by what is supposed to be a ruthless international terrorist outfit. It’s a little obvious how easy it would be to deliver misinformation and disinformation directly to millions of viewers worldwide. Funny that we find CNN right in the middle of that very uncomfortable junction, often doing most the PR heavy lifting for a dubious media production like DABIQ.
Interestingly, Schweppes Gold (non alcoholic) Soda Facebook page has 169,000 ‘likes’. Coincidentally (or not), its last post was on Oct 30th, some 24 hrs before the Sinai crash, showing a rather dark depiction of a Schweppes Gold can, presumably for Halloween.
Spooky.
At any rate, you can expect full-sized soda cans to be banned from the in-flight drinks trolley.
‘Maybe, Could Be, ISIS’
Although Russia’s Security Council now admits, “we can say definitely that this was a terrorist act…”, there is absolutely no proof that ISIS is responsible for this mid-air tragedy, other than an insistence by the media and Washington’s ‘intelligence community’ (‘probably is’, ‘seems like’, ‘could be’, ‘most likely is’, ‘has the fingerprints’ and ‘has all the hallmarks” etc.), the usual political innuendos, and of course, spurious online claims of credit by various social media accounts claiming to be run by ISIS affiliates.
What should be more worrying about this and other ‘virtual’ terrorist exhibitions and corresponding propaganda, is the fact none of these terrorist social media claims could ever stand-up as forensic evidence in any homicide case in any criminal court of law. For US and European media outlets and hapless politicians, that seems to be just fine though. In other words, when it comes to the emotive subject of ‘ISIS’, there is almost no burden of proof for the mainstream media and US-European policy makers, so long as ‘security officials believe’, or ‘we’re told that it’s very likely from the Islamic State’. That and the fact that there is no real independently verifiable comprehensive record which defines or quantifies ISIS, its membership, where they come from, from where their money and arms are derived and where they reside. Until such a study is done, we are told to just accept certain people’s word as gospel (keeping it vague seems to be the trick here).
Why is the bar so low? Part of the problem is that passes for journalism in the corporate mainstream media these days is a far cry from anything which might have been taught in journalism schools or on the job 30, or 40 years ago. More than other recent event, the coverage of the Paris Attacks by the big networks embodies this terminal condition, one in which we are witnessing an erosion of facts, context and any real challenges to official statements. Instead, all we get is a bevy of anchors, correspondents and ‘experts’ (many of whom openly flaunt their ‘insider’ affiliations as if that’s meant to instill confidence in the viewer’s mind). If you went to sleep in 1985 and woke up in 2015, and turned on the TV, you would think you were living a repeating scene out of Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil.
Magic Passport?
Earlier in the week, 21WIRE asked a reasonable question regarding the ‘magic passports’ of the supposed suicide bombers on site, one which seems to have evaded the whole of the mainstream media and even much of the alternative media. Simply: is it possible that the alleged ‘Syrian’ passport was likely planted at the scene of the crime? Indeed, that’s what some European officials are now admitting.
Without the ‘Syrian Passport’ leg of the official story, then the whole ‘Terrorists Are Sneaking in With the Migrants’ talking point rapidly disintegrates, and wouldn’t that be a shame.
One gets the feeling that either:
A. The mainstream media is playing a dark practical joke on the public. B. The mainstream media pundits and ‘anchors’ are too stupid to know the difference between what’s real, and what’s fabricated by ‘ISIS’, or someone else.
Either way, this is bad news for the public, especially in such an incendiary political environment where fear is the new order of the day, and where half the US political establishment is demanding a military “package” of ‘boots on the ground’ in Syria, which would almost certainly lead to a long-term occupation and wider region war in the Middle East.
The only thing we haven’t heard yet, is talk of deploying “nukes.” Judging by the looks of it, that’s not far off now.
It only takes some well-place disinformation and hysterical speculation to push this situation out of balance and into a regrettable state of all out war overseas, and at home. More than any other single entity, the mainstream media play the pivotal role in nudging public support either towards, or away from any war. In the age of mass media and consensus reality, they bear most of the responsibility in that troubling process.
So a message media elites… we can offer you some humble advice in these troubling times: a little restraint would go a long way.
In its effort to vet one of the leading GOP presidential candidates, Dr. Ben Carson, the New York Times didn’t properly vet its primary source in this vetting, former CIA officer Duane Clarridge—an indicted liar and overseer of Contra death squads in Central America.
While the Times’ Trip Gabriel briefly notes the former, he completely omits the latter, instead offering this starry-eyed description:
Mr. Clarridge, described by Mr. Carson’s top adviser, Armstrong Williams, as “a mentor for Dr. Carson,” is a colorful, even legendary figure in intelligence circles, someone who could have stepped out of a Hollywood thriller. He was a longtime CIA officer, serving undercover in India, Turkey, Italy and other countries, and sprinkles his remarks with salty language.
As head of Reagan’s CIA division in Latin America in the 1980s, Clarridge took part in the effort to overthrow Nicaragua’s Sandinista government by illegally supplying funds and arms to the Contras—a right-wing terrorist movement that committed brutal war crimes. This was not an unforeseen consequence, but the point of the operation; asked by CIA Director William Casey to come up with a strategy for dealing with the Sandinista revolution, Clarridge writes in his memoirA Spy for All Seasons :
My plan was simple:
Take the war to Nicaragua.
Start killing Cubans.
Clarridge acknowledges that his plan, “stated so bluntly, undoubtedly sounds harsh.”
He also boasts of having come up with the idea of mining Nicaragua’s harbors to interfere with shipping:
I remember sitting with a glass of gin on the rocks, smoking a cigar (of course), and pondering my dilemma, when it hit me. Sea mines were the solution…. To this day I wonder why I didn’t think of it sooner.
The mines were, as conservative icon Sen. Barry Goldwater pointed out, an “act of war”—and predictably resulted in the deaths of civilians, something that doesn’t trouble Clarridge overly much. Or, apparently, the New York Times.
The Times vaguely alludes to the Iran/Contra scandal but without mentioning what it entailed, namely that Clarridge had an operational involvement with terrorist death squads.
In addition to this bloodsoaked past, Clarridge has more recently been a freelance hit-list generator for the Defense Department in Afghanistan ( New York Times, 3/14/10)–part of what the Times referred to as “an off-the-books spy operation.”
The kid-glove treatment would even extend to ethnic slurs, which the Times glosses over without citing specifically. Gabriel quotes Clarridge dismissing the notion—spread by right-wing media—that there are Chinese troops in Syria, “using an ethnic slur for the Chinese.” If a top adviser to a leading presidential candidate is referring to Chinese people as “Chinks”—or the equivalent—isn’t that a newsworthy fact that the New York Times ought to report?
It’s not a surprise a New York Times Beltway insider like Trip Gabriel would whitewash Clarridge’s brutal resume to the point of unrecognizability, but it doesn’t make using a grotesque violator of human rights and a known liar to kneecap Carson any less sleazy. On the issue of policy knowledge, it is more than fair to point out Carson’s shortcomings. But the bigger story here—that a leading candidate’s primary international adviser is a CIA goon with a bloody (or as the Times would put it “colorful”) past—is buried in a story about a routine DC pissing match.
This is how America’s war crimes are laundered, by absorbing the most complicit and criminal into respectable circles by passing them off as “experts” with “legendary” pasts. The Times would have better served its readers by pointing out, in clear and honest terms, what this “colorful, even legendary” past amounted to. It would help put Clarridge’s testimony—and Carson’s potential nomination—into historical and moral context.
What do the globalists do when they want to create, reignite and keep their war on terror fought indefinitely? They simply carry out a series of false flag attacks using Muslim terrorist stooges as their hired guns to do their damage. That’s what 9/11 was all about in the US, 7/7 in UK, the 3/11 train attack in Spain, the Hebdo Paris attack last January, and now this latest Paris encore reenactment part two.
In any unsolved crime the first question asked is who benefits by motive with an actual means to execute the crime?
In all of these tragic false flag events the global elite benefits in multiple ways. And it most definitely has the means by issuing marching orders to its owned and operated national governments, its favorite being the militaristic, brutal American Empire.
The elite’s agenda to polarize and destabilize the world politically and militarily manifests through the US foreign policy of regime change, nonstop war through divide and conquer methodology (i.e., Shiites vs. Sunnis, Euro-nationals vs. foreign migrants, Christians vs. Muslims, light skins vs. dark skins) and economic austerity through unpayable high interest from predatory IMF bank loans to debtor nations from both the developing and developed world. Through global theft and destruction, the ruling elite reigns supreme in absolute power.
For decades after World War II US-NATO-Western European allies conspired and perpetrated state sponsored terrorism murdering their own citizens through a protracted series of Gladio operations originally designed to falsely accuse Communist groups in Italy. Spanning over thirty years with violent incidents throughout Europe and Turkey, Gladio-like false flag operations never stopped. Gladio at home took the form of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff’s Operation Northwoods that JFK abruptly halted, partially resulting in his own self-undoing, killing the diabolical military plot of murdering innocent US citizens in Miami and Washington DC in order to blame and start a war against Cuba. The US especially but numerous governments have regularly engaged in false flag operations killing their own to trigger wars, shape public opinion, conceal and divert attention away from citizens ever catching on to the dirty lowdown truth.
The Friday the 13th Paris massacres were highly organized, committed by heavily armed, closely monitored terrorist professionals unleashed onto an unsuspecting, culturally diverse group of young Paris victims. The coordinated attacks seem to carry all the earmarks as state of the art false flag terrorism having had lots of previous practice, most notably the Paris Charlie Hebdo edition. But the growing anomalies stacking up once again turn out to be no different from its predecessors.
All have promoted the same globalist agenda toward unlimited invasive authoritarian surveillance used to bring about increasing draconian measures in order to gain absolute tyrannical control over the populace. At the same time it exploits xenophobia and Islamophobia among its citizenry that in turn increase hatred and tensions laying the groundwork for potential civil war. Today the elite is skillfully working its proven divide and conquer formula perfectly. In one fell swoop it creates the unstable conditions fomenting civil unrest and violent backlash that then increasingly justify oppressive, over-the-top counterterrorism and police state tactics that obliterate human rights.
Finally, false flag terrorism launches a militarized backed by a globally legislative crackdown targeting all dissidence and activism exposing the governments’ false narrative of lies and propaganda, labeling and criminalizing the dissenting truth as homegrown terrorism.
The surreptitiously obtained Syrian passport found so quickly after the fact in Paris has become a false flag trademark used in both Charlie Hebdo and 9/11. Because this pattern proved a serious liability for establishing any credibility, it was later disclosed that the passport actually came off the body of “a Syrian refugee,” as if that made MSM any more believable.
Even before the passport fiasco, the alleged terrorist’s quote from a supposed witness “this is for Syria” was obviously disclosed by mainstream media to shape and manipulate public opinion into quickly blaming Syria, ISIS and Syria’s targeted leader Assad. And then long before any of this alleged (dis)info began surfacing, barely an hour into the attacks while still actively underway, President Hollande kept repeating three times in the next several hours what appeared to be his scripted lines already declaring that France was at war against already identified terrorist attackers from Syria before any investigation had even begun. This rapid sequence of events smacked of false flag.
Furthermore, like the Hebdo attack earlier this year, reports immediately commenced disclosing that French intelligence had long been tracking the perpetrators prior to the attacks. Former antiterrorist judge Marc Trevidic in a Sunday interview claimed that French authorities knew of an impending terrorist attack being planned by Islamic State jihadists “at a French rock concert” as early as August.
The judge had cross-examined militants three months earlier who revealed this rather critically important piece of information. This strongly suggests French intelligence had prior knowledge of the Friday night massacres. Turkey also warned the authorities in France twice about one of the three alleged suicide bombers but The Guardian reported that France only contacted Turkey for information after the Paris attacks. Again, it seems more than plausible that French security forces knew about the planned attacks but purposely failed to stop them or may have even played a sinister role in allowing them to occur.
A couple of other striking parallels with 9/11, when the BBC reporter announced that Building 7 went down 20 minutes prior to the event, the Paris attack was described on twitter dated a full two days in advance of the November 13th killings. Also Wikipedia within two hours from the very onset of the attacks already had posted a fully detailed account complete with footnotes specifying “Syria” being mentioned by a witness, “5 or 6 terrorists”, and “3 suicide bombers” all from the get-go pointing to the big bad Muslim villains yet again. The clinching evidence was Wikipedia running an early story version at 23:06 specifying:
In a televised statement at approximately 23:58 (local time), French President François Hollande declared
a state of emergency and closing of borders for the whole of France.
For that announcement on Wikipedia to be made nearly an hour prior to Hollande’s actual statement could suggest that Wikipedia was in fact being used by the French authorities as an information disseminator of a preplanned event, right away establishing an official narrative from the outset that Arab terrorists from Syria were the guilty murderers behind the attacks far in advance of the start of even a preliminary investigation.
It’s also been recently learned like in several previous false flags that security forces in Paris were simultaneously undergoing another live action emergency drill earlier that same day (as in Charleston, Baltimore, Boston, 9/11). Patrick Pelloux, an emergency medical services specialist and one of the first responders to the attacks, confirmed in a radio interview that a live drill had been conducted that morning of the 13th. These co-occurring government events timed perfectly to overlap so called acts of terrorism cannot be considered purely co-incidental.
Adding more weight to the false flag suspicion is the fact that just two weeks prior to Friday’s attack on October 29thCIA Director John Brennan met with his French counterpart along with UK’s MI6 former chief and former Israeli national security advisor. Additionally on Monday Brennan admitted that the international intelligence community expected a terrorist attack in Europe. Just as the Islamic terrorist mercenaries always “accidentally on purpose” leave their calling cards behind, so are the dirty CIA-Mossad fingerprints left indelibly written all over virtually every state sponsored terrorism on this planet. For years it’s been repeatedly demonstrated that US and Israeli intelligence forces have been covertly working directly with the Islamic State jihadists. NSA documents show that ISIS leader El Baghdadi was trained by Mossad. A recently captured IDF colonel was caught leading Islamic State forces. Overwhelming evidence has proven the US-Israeli-Saudi-Turkish-Gulf State connection to ISIS terrorists, documenting this intimate partnership in the manufactured war on terror.
In late September after Putin outed Obama’s fake war against ISIS at the UN, then throughout October actually destroying ISIS where Obama only pretended, the lost face of a humiliated Emperor’s new clothes turned US war policy in the Middle East completely topsy-turvy. Obama’s dubious leadership sank to an international all-time low when Putin exposed America’s deliberately failed MENA policy. Allied nations were cutting their losses and announcing plans to pull out of Syria. US Empire of Chaos and Destruction was fast losing its global control, its coercive power to subjugate its Euro-puppets into blind submission seriously and overtly eroding. On top of that, while Europe is still reeling from the refugee mass migration crisis directly caused by the US imperial aggression, they were marveling over grandmaster Putin’s bold stroke of finally kicking some Islamic State ass. Stalwart US Euro-ally Germany was already shifting gears warming its relations with Russia, unwilling to follow Washington’s disastrous lead down doomsday road.
So what do the neocon goons in full damage control mode come up with?
While US-Israel are holding joint military exercises in the Sinai desert, did they coordinate with ISIS to make sure it shoots down the Russian airliner as immediate Putin payback? Then came Defense Secretary Carter’s Russia bashing threats from the Ronald Reagan Library followed just hours later a few miles away with the Trident missile’s Saturday night LA bright light show seen around the world as an exclamation threat to Russia and China to back off from challenging the US Empire’s global hegemony.
The DC warmongers are growing increasingly desperate, afraid of losing both their full spectrum dominance in the world as well as their precious proxy terrorist ally while Putin’s aid to Assad is putting the final kibosh on their fanatical Obsessive Compulsive Disorder regime change operation.
So Brennan meets up with French and Israeli intelligence to conjure up the next Paris false flag. And since Hollande’s been Washington’s loyal go-to lackey with Hebdo already under his belt, heading up France’s active role in the imperialistic assault on both Libya and Syria, with Paris terrorism #2 France now becomes US Empire’s key catalyst to pull off another massive 9/11-like attack, in fact the biggest in France since WWII and be the justified driving force behind this newest “coalition of the willing” stepping up its next phase of war in Syria against both Assad and Putin. US bombs being dropped over Syria are now being joined by bombs from French jets as well as Israeli and Saudi warplanes. Timed purposely on the heels of the Paris tragedy, the ongoing G-20 meeting with the world’s most powerful nations in Turkey has turned into a war council to drum up intensified world war effort against nemeses Assad and Putin.
But the Western bombs are making sure that they do not destroy ISIS nor ISIS-controlled oil refineries selling black market oil to NATO member Turkey. Nor are they attacking the critical ISIS supply line in northern Syria that extends back into Turkey. It’s all too obvious that a renewed, heavily fortified allied offensive aggressively going head-to-head with Syrian and Russian forces clearly risks igniting a broader War.
Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate and former US Army officer. He has written a manuscript based on his unique military experience entitled Don’t Let The Bastards Getcha Down. It examines and focuses on US international relations, leadership and national security issues.
Over the past 15 years the US has been engaged in a series of wars, which has led many writers to refer to the ‘rise of militarism’ – the growth of an empire, built primarily by and for the projection of military power – and only secondarily to advance economic imperialism.
The rise of a military-based empire, however, does not preclude the emergence of competing, conflicting, and convergent power configurations within the imperial state. These factions of the Washington elite define the objectives and targets of imperialist warfare, often on their own terms.
Having stated the obvious general fact of the power of militarism within the imperialist state, it is necessary to recognize that the key policy-makers, who direct the wars and military policy, will vary according to the country targeted, type of warfare engaged in and their conception of the war. In other words, while US policy is imperialist and highly militaristic, the key policymakers, their approach and the outcomes of their policies will differ. There is no fixed strategy devised by a cohesive Washington policy elite guided by a unified strategic vision of the US Empire.
In order to understand the current, seemingly endless wars, we have to examine the shifting coalitions of elites, who make decisions in Washington but not always primarily for Washington. Some factions of the policy elite have clear conceptions of the American empire, but others improvise and rely on superior ‘political’ or ‘lobbying’ power to successfully push their agenda in the face of repeated failures and suffer no consequences or costs.
We will start by listing US imperialist wars during the last decade and a half. We will then identify the main policy-making faction which has been the driving force in each war. We will discuss their successes and failures as imperial policy makers and conclude with an evaluation of “the state of the empire” and its future.
Imperial Wars: From 2001-2015
The current war cycle started in late 2001 with the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. This was followed by the invasion and occupation of Iraq in March 2003, the US arms support for Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 2006, the proxy invasion of Somalia in 2006/7; the massive re-escalation of war in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2007-2009; the bombing, invasion ‘regime change’ in Libya in 2011; the ongoing proxy-mercenary war against Syria (since 2012), and the ongoing 2015 Saudi-US invasion and destruction of Yemen. In Europe, the US was behind the 2014 proxy putsch and violent ‘regime change’ in Ukraine which has led to an ongoing war against ethnic Russian speakers in south-east Ukraine, especially the populous industrial heartland of the Donbas region.
Over the past 15 years, there have been overt and covert military interventions, accompanied by an intense, provocative military build-up along Russia’s borders in the Baltic States, Eastern Europe (especially Poland), the Balkans (Bulgaria and Romania) and the mammoth US base in Kosovo; in Central Europe with nuclear missiles in Germany and, of course, the annexation of Ukraine and Georgia as US-NATO clients.
Parallel to the military provocations encircling Russia, Washington has launched a major military, political, economic and diplomatic offensive aimed at isolating China and affirming US supremacy in the Pacific.
In South America, US military intervention found expression via Washington-orchestrated business-military coup attempts in Venezuela in 2002 and Bolivia in 2008, and a successful ‘regime change’ in Honduras in 2009, overthrowing its elected president and installing a US puppet.
In summary, the US has been engaged in two, three or more wars since 2001, defining an almost exclusively militarist empire, run by an imperial state directed by civilian and military officials seeking unchallenged global dominance through violence.
Washington: Military Workshop of the World
War and violent regime change are the exclusive means through which the US now advances its foreign policy. However, the various Washington war-makers among the power elite do not form a unified bloc with common priorities. Washington provides the weapons, soldiers and financing for whichever power configuration or faction among the elite is in a position, by design or default, to seize the initiative and push their own war agenda.
The invasion of Afghanistan was significant in so far as it was seen by all sectors of the militarist elite, as the first in a series of wars. Afghanistan was to set the stage for the launching of higher priority wars elsewhere.
Afghanistan was followed by the infamous ‘Axis of Evil’ speech, dictated by Tel Aviv, penned by presidential speech-writer, David Frum and mouthed by the brainless President Bush, II. The ‘Global War on Terror’ was the thinly veiled slogan for serial wars around the world. Washington measured the loyalty of its vassals among the nations of Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America by their support for the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. The Afghan invasion provided the template for future wars. It led to an unprecedented increase in the military budget and ushered in Caesar-like dictatorial presidential powers to order and execute wars, silencing domestic critics and sending scores of thousands of US and NATO troops to the Hindu Kush.
In itself, Afghanistan was never any threat and certainly no economic prize for plunder and profit. The Taliban had not attacked the US. Osama Bin Laden could have been turned over to a judicial tribunal – as the governing Taliban had insisted.
The US military (with its Coalition of the Willing or COW) successfully invaded and occupied Afghanistan and set up a vassal regime in Kabul. It built scores of military bases and attempted to form an obedient colonial army. In the meantime, the Washington militarist elite had moved on to bigger and, for the Israel-centric Zionist elite, higher priority wars, namely Iraq.
The decision to invade Afghanistan was not opposed by any of Washington’s militarist elite factions. They all shared the idea of using a successful military blitz or ‘cake-walk’ against the abysmally impoverished Afghanistan as a way to rabble rouse the American masses into accepting a long period of intense and costly global warfare throughout the world.
Washington’s militarist elites fabricated the link between the attacks on 9/11/2001 and Afghanistan’s governing Taliban and the presence of the Saudi warlord Osama Bin Laden. Despite the ‘fact’ that most of the ‘hijackers’ were from the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and none were Afghans, invading and destroying Afghanistan was to be the initial test to gauge the highly manipulated and frightened American public’s willingness to shoulder the burden of a huge new cycle of imperial wars. This has been the only aspect of the invasion of Afghanistan that could be viewed as a policy success – it made the costs of endless wars ‘acceptable’ to a relentlessly propagandized public.
Flush with their military victories in the Hindu Kush, the Washington militarists turned to Iraq and fabricated a series of increasingly preposterous pretexts for war: Linking the 9/11 ‘jihadi’ hijackers with the secular regime of Saddam Hussein, whose intolerance for violent Islamists (especially the Saudi variety) was well documented, and concocting a whole fabric of lies about Iraqi ‘weapons of mass destruction’ which provided the propaganda basis for invading an already disarmed, blockaded and starved Iraq in March 2003.
Leading the Washington militarists in designing the war to destroy Iraq were the Zionists, including Paul Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams, Richard Perle, and a few Israel-centric Gentile militarists, such as Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. The Zionists had a powerful entourage in key positions in the State Department, Treasury and the Pentagon.
There were ‘outsiders’ – non-Zionists and militarists within these institutions, especially the Pentagon, who voiced reservations – but they were brushed aside, not consulted and ‘encouraged’ to retire.
None of the ‘old hands’ in the State Department or Pentagon bought into the hysteria about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, but to voice reservations was to risk one’s career. The manufacture and dissemination of the pretext for invading Iraq was orchestrated by a small team of operatives linking Tel Aviv and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz’s Office of Special Plans, a tight group of Zionists and some Israelis headed by Abram Shulsky (Sept. 2002-June 2003).
The US war on Iraq was an important part of Israel’s agenda to ‘re-make the Middle East’ to establish its unchallenged regional hegemony and execute a ‘final solution’ for its own vexing ‘Arab (native Palestinian) problem’: It was made operational by the powerful Zionist faction within the Executive (White House), which had assumed almost dictatorial powers after the attack on 9/11/2001. Zionists planned the war, designed the ‘occupation policy’ and ‘succeeded wildly’ with the eventual dismemberment of a once modern secular nationalist Arab state.
In order to smash the Iraqi state – the US occupation policy was to eliminate (through mass firings, jailing and assassination) all high level, experienced Iraqi civil, military and scientific personnel – down to high school principals. They dismantled any vital infrastructure (which had not been already destroyed by the decades of US sanctions and bombing under President Clinton) and reduced an agriculturally advanced Iraq to a barren wasteland which would take centuries to recover and could never challenge Israel’s colonization of Palestine, let alone its military supremacy in the Middle East. Naturally, the large Palestinian Diaspora refugee population in Iraq was targeted for ‘special treatment’.
But Zionist policymakers had a much larger agenda than erasing Iraq as a viable country: They had a longer list of targets: Syria, Iran, Lebanon and Libya, whose destruction was to be carried out with US and NATO blood and treasure (and not a single Israeli soldier).
Despite the fact that Iraq did not even possess a functioning air force or navy in March 2003 and Afghanistan in late 2001 was rather primitive, the invasions of both countries turned out to be very costly to the US. The US completely failed to benefit from its ‘victory and occupation’, despite Paul Wolfowitz’ boasts that the pillage of Iraq’s oil fields would pay for the entire project in a ‘few months’. This was because the real Zionist plan was to destroy these nations – beyond any possibility for a quick or cheap imperialist economic gain. Scorching the earth and salting the fields is not a very profitable policy for empire builders.
Israel has been the biggest winner with no cost for the ‘Jewish State’. The American Zionist policy elite literally handed them the services of the largest and richest armed forces in history: the US. Israel-Firsters played a decisive role among Washington policy-makers and Tel Aviv celebrated in the streets! They came, they dominated policy and they accomplished their mission: Iraq (and millions of its people)was destroyed.
The US gained an unreliable, broken colony, with a devastated economy and systematically destroyed infrastructure and without the functioning civil service needed for a modern state. To pay for the mess, the American people faced a spiraling budget deficit, tens of thousands of American war casualties and massive cuts in their own social programs. Crowning the Washington war-makers’ victory was the disarticulation of American civil and constitutional rights and liberties and the construction of a enormous domestic police state.
After the Iraq disaster, the same influential Zionist faction in Washington lost no time in demanding a new war against Israel’s bigger enemy – namely Iran. In the ensuing years, they failed to push the US to attack Tehran but they succeeded in imposing crippling sanctions on Iran. The Zionist faction secured massive US military support for Israel’s abortive invasion of Lebanon and its devastating series of blitzkriegs against the impoverished and trapped people of Gaza.
The Zionist faction successfully shaped US military interventions to meet Israel’s regional ambitions against three Arab countries: Yemen, Syria, and Libya. The Zionists were not able to manipulate the US into attacking Iran because the traditional militarist faction in Washington balked: With instability in Afghanistan and Iraq, the US was not well positioned to face a major conflagration throughout the Middle East, South Asia and beyond – which a ground and air war with Iran would involve. However, the Zionist factions did secure brutal economic sanctions and the appointment of key Israel-Centric officials within the US Treasury. Secretary Stuart Levey, at the start of the Obama regime, and David Cohen afterwards, were positioned to enforce the sanctions.
Even before the ascendancy of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Tel Aviv’s military objectives after Iraq, including Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, and Yemen had to be spaced over time, because the non-Zionist factions among Washington’s elite had been unable to integrate occupied Afghanistan and Iraq into the empire.
Resistance, armed conflict and military advances in both Afghanistan and Iraq never ceased and are continuing into their 2nd decade. As soon as the US would withdraw from a region, declaring it ‘pacified’, the armed resistance would move back in and the local sepoys would defect to the rebels or take off for London or Washington with millions in pillaged loot.
‘Unfinished wars’, mounting casualties and spiraling costs, with no end in sight, undermined the agreement between the militarist and the Zionist factions in the Executive branch. However, the massively powerful Zionist presence in the US Congress provided a platform to bray for new and even bigger wars.
Israel’s vicious invasion of Lebanon in 2006 was defeated despite receiving massive US arms supplies, a US funded ‘Iron Dome’ missile defense system and intelligence assistance. Tel Aviv could not defeat the highly disciplined and motivated Hezbollah fighters in South Lebanon despite resorting to carpet bombing of civilian neighborhoods with millions of banned cluster munitions and picking off ambulances and churches sheltering refugees. Israelis have been much more triumphal murdering lightly armed Palestinian resistance fighters and stone-throwing children.
Libya: A Multi-faction War for the Militarists (without Big Oil)
The war against Libya was a result of multiple factions among the Washington militarist elite, including the Zionists, coming together with French, English and German militarists to smash the most modern, secular, independent state in Africa under President Muammar Gaddafi.
The aerial campaign against the Gaddafi regime had virtually no organized support within Libya with which to reconstruct a viable neo-colonial state ripe for pillage. This was another ‘planned dismemberment’ of a complex, modern republic which had been independent of the US Empire.
The war succeeded wildly in shredding Libya’s economy, state, and society. It unleashed scores of armed terrorist groups, (who appropriated the modern weapons of Gaddafi’s army and police) and uprooted two million black contract workers and Libyan citizens of South Saharan origin forcing them to flee the rampaging racist militias to the refugee camps of Europe. Untold thousands died in rickety boats in the Mediterranean Sea.
The entire war was carried out to the publicly giddy delight of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her ‘humanitarian interventionist’ lieutenants (Susan Rice and Samantha Power), who were utterly ignorant as to who and what the Libyan “opposition” represented. Eventually, even Hillary’s own Ambassador to Libya would be slaughtered by … the same victorious US-backed ‘rebels’ (sic) in the newly liberated Bengazi!
The Zionist faction destroyed Gaddafi (whose capture, grotesque torture and murder was filmed and widely disseminated), eliminating another real adversary of Israel and supporter of Palestinian rights. The US militarist faction, which led the war, got nothing positive – not even a secure naval, air, or training base – only a dead Ambassador, millions of desperate refugees flooding Europe, and thousands of trained and armed jihadists for the next target: Syria.
For a while Libya became the main supply-line for Islamist mercenaries and arms to invade Syria and fight the secular nationalist government in Damascus.
Once again the least influential faction in Washington turned out to be the oil and gas industry, which lost lucrative contracts it had already signed with the Gaddafi regime. Thousands of highly trained foreign oil workers were withdrawn. After Iraq, it should have been obvious that these wars were not ‘for oil’!
Ukraine: Coups, Wars, and Russia’s ‘Underbelly’
With the US-orchestrated coup and intervention in Ukraine, the militarist factions once again seized the initiative, establishing a puppet regime in Kiev and targeting Russia’s strategic ‘soft underbelly’. The plan had been to take over Russia’s strategic military bases in Crimea and cut Russia from the vital military-industrial complexes in the Donbas region with its vast iron and coal reserves.
The mechanics of the power grab were relatively well planned, the political clients were put in power, but the US militarists had made no contingencies for propping up the Ukrainian economy, cut loose from its main trading partner and oil and gas supplier, Russia.
The coup led to a ‘proxy war’ in the ethnic-Russian majority regions in the south east (the Donbas) with four ‘unanticipated consequences’. 1) a country divided east and west along ethno-linguistic lines, (2) a bankrupt economy made even worse by the imposition of an IMF austerity program, (3) a corrupt crony capitalist elite, which was ‘pro-West by bank account’, (4) and, after two years, mass disaffection among voters toward the US puppet regime.
The militarists in Washington and Brussels succeeded in engineering the coup in Ukraine but lacked the domestic allies, plans and preparations to run the country and successfully annex it to the EU and NATO as a viable country.
Apparently the militarist factions in the State Department and Pentagon are much more proficient in stage managing coups and invasions than in establishing a stable regime as part of a New World Order. They succeed in the former and fail repeatedly in the latter.
The Pivot to Asia and the Pirouette to Syria
During most of the previous decade, traditional global strategists in Washington increasingly objected to the Zionist faction’s domination and direction of US war policies focused on the Middle East for the benefit of Israel, instead of meeting the growing challenge of the new world economic superpower in Asia, China.
US economic supremacy in Asia had been deeply eroded as China’s economy grew at double digits. Beijing was displacing the US as the major trade partner in the Latin American and African markets. Meanwhile, the top 500 US MNCs were heavily invested in China. Three years into President Obama’s first term the ‘China militarist faction’ announced a shift from the Middle East and the Israel-centric agenda to a ‘pivot to Asia’, the source of 40% of the world’s industrial output.
But it was not profits and markets that motivated Washington’s Asia faction among the militarist elites – it was military power. Even trade agreements, like the TransPacific Partnership (TPP), were viewed as tools to encircle and weaken China militarily and undermine its regional influence.
Led by the hysterical Pentagon boss Ashton Carter, Washington prepared a series of major military confrontations with Beijing off the coast of China.
The US signed expanded military base agreements with the Philippines, Japan, and Australia; it participated in military exercises with Vietnam, South Korea, and Malaysia; it dispatched battleships and aircraft carriers into Chinese territorial waters.
The US confrontational trade policy was formulated by the Zionist trio: Secretary of Commerce, Penny Pritzker, Trade Negotiator Michael Froman (who works for both the Asia militarist and Zionist factions), and Treasury Secretary Jake Lew. The result was the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), involving 12 Pacific countries while deliberating excluding China. Washington’s Asian militarist faction planned to militarize the entire Pacific Basin, in order to dominate the maritime trade routes and, at a moment’s notice, choke off all of China’s overseas markets and suppliers – shades of the series of US provocations against Japan leading up to the US entering WW2.
The ‘Asia-militarist faction’ successfully demanded a bigger military budget to accommodate its vastly more aggressive posture toward China.
Predictably, China has insisted on defending its maritime routes and has increased its naval and air base building and sea and air patrols. Also, predictably, China has countered the US-dominated TPP by setting-up a one hundred billion dollar Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), while contributing to the multi-billion dollar BRICS Bank. Meanwhile, China even signed a separate $30 billion dollar trade agreement with Washington’s strategic ‘partner’, Britain. In fact, Britain followed the rest of the EU and joined the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank – despite objections from Washington’s “Asia faction”.
While the US depends heavily on its military pacts with South Korea and Japan, the latter nations have been meeting with China – their most significant trading partner – to work on expanding and deepening economic ties.
Up until 2014, the “business-with-China faction” of the Washington elite played a key role in the making of US-Asia policy. However, they have been eclipsed by the Asia militarist-faction, which is taking US policy in a totally different direction: Pushing China out as Asia’s economic superpower and escalating military confrontation with Beijing now heads Washington’s agenda.
Ashton Carter, the US Defense Secretary, has China, the second most important economy in the world in the Pentagon’s ‘cross-hairs’. When the TPP failed to curtail China’s expansion, the militarist faction shifted Washington toward a high risk military course, which could destabilize the region and risk a nuclear confrontation.
The Pirouette: China and Syria
Meanwhile in the Levant, Washington’s Zionist faction has been busy running a proxy war in Syria. The pivot to Asia has had to compete with the pirouette to Syria and Yemen.
The US joined Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the Gulf Emirates, and the EU in sponsoring a replay of the Libyan ‘regime change’ — sponsoring proxy terrorists from around the globe into invading and devastating Syria. Damascus has been attacked from all sides for the ‘crime’ of being secular and multi-ethnic; for being pro-Palestinian; for being allied with Iran and Lebanon; for having an independent foreign policy; and for maintaining a limited representative (but not necessarily democratic) government. For these crimes, the West, Israel and the Saudis would have Syria fractured into an ethnically cleansed ‘tribal state’ – something they had accomplished in Iraq and Libya.
The US militarist faction (personified by Secretary of Defense Carter and Senators McCain and Graham) have funded, trained and equipped the terrorists, whom they call ‘moderates’ and had clearly expected their progeny to follow Washington’s directions. The emergence of ISIS showed just how close these ‘moderates’ stuck to Washington’s script.
Initially, the traditional militarist wing of Washington’s elite resisted the Zionist faction’s demand for direct US military intervention (American ‘boots on the ground’). That is changing with recent (very convenient) events in Paris.
Warfare: From Piecemeal Interventions to Nuclear Confrontation
The Washington militarists have again committed more US soldiers to Iraq and Afghanistan; American fighter planes and Special Forces are in Syria and Yemen. Meanwhile, US naval armadas aggressively patrol the coasts of China and Iran. The militarist-Zionist ‘compromise’ over Syria was comprised of an initial contingent of 50 US Special Forces to join in ‘limited’ combat roles with (“loyal” sic) Islamist mercenaries – the so-called moderates. There are commitments for greater and heavier weaponry to come, including ground to air missiles capable of shooting down Russian and Syrian military jets.
Elite Factional Politics: An Overview
How does the record of these competing factions, formulating US imperial war policies in the Middle East over the past 15 years stack up? Clearly there has been no coherent imperial economic strategy.
The policy toward Afghanistan is remarkable for its failure to end the longest war in US history – over 14 years of occupation! The recent attempts by US-led client NATO forces to withdraw have been immediately followed by military advances by the nationalist-Islamist resistance militia – the Taliban, which controls much of the countryside. The possibility of a collapse of the current puppet in Kabul has forced the militarists in Washington to retain US bases – surrounded by completely hostile rural populations.
The Afghan war’s initial appearance of success triggered new wars – inter alia Iraq. But taking the long view, the Afghan war, has been a miserable failure in terms of the stated strategic goal of establishing a stable client government. The Afghan economy collapsed: opium production (which had been significantly suppressed by the Taliban’s poppy eradication campaign in 2000-2001) is the now predominant crop – with cheap heroin flooding Europe and beyond. Under the weight of massive and all pervasive corruption by ‘loyal’ client officials – the Afghan treasury is empty. The puppet rulers are totally disconnected from the most important regional, ethnic, religious and family clans and associations.
Washington could not ‘find’ any viable economic classes in Afghanistan with which to anchor a development strategy. They did not come to terms with the deep ethno-religious consciousness rooted in rural communities and fought the most popular political force among the majority Pashtu, the Taliban, which had no role in the attack on ‘9/11’.
They artificially slapped together a massive army of surly illiterates under Western imperial command and watched it fall apart at the seams, defect to the Taliban or turn their own guns on the foreign occupation troops. These “mistakes”, which accounted for the failure of the militarist faction in the Afghanistan war were due, in no small part, to the pressure and influence of the Zionist faction who wanted to quickly move on to their highest priority, a US war against Israel’s first priority enemy – Iraq – without consolidating the US control in Afghanistan. For the Zionists, Afghanistan (envisioned as a ‘cake-walk’ or quick victory) was just a tool to set the stage for a much larger sequence of US wars against Israel’s regional Arab and Persian adversaries.
Before the militarists could establish any viable order and an enduring governmental structure in Afghanistan, attention shifted to a Zionist-centered war against Iraq.
The build-up for the US war against Iraq has to be understood as a project wholly engineered by and for the state of Israel, mostly through its agents within the US government and Washington policy elite. The goal was to establish Israel as the unchallenged political-military power in the region using American troops and money and preparing the ground for Tel Aviv’s “final solution” for the Palestinian ‘problem’; total expulsion…
The US military and occupation campaign included the wholesale and systematic destruction of Iraq: Its law and order, culture, economy and society – so there would be no possibility of recovery. Such a vicious campaign did not resonate with any productive sector of the US economy (or for that matter with any Israeli economic interest).
Washington’s Zionist faction set about in a parody of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge to identify and destroy any competent, experienced Iraqi professional, civil servant, scientist, intellectual, or military official capable of re-organizing and re-building the county and war-battered society. They were assassinated, arrested, tortured, or driven into exile. The occupation deliberately encouraged religious parties and traditional tribes to engage in inter-communal massacres and ethnic cleansing. In other words, the Zionist faction did not pursue the traditionally understood policy of empire building which would incorporate the second tier functionaries of a conquered state to form a competent client regime and use Iraq’s great oil and gas wealth to build its economy. Instead they chose to impose a scorched earth policy; setting loose organized sectarian armies, imposing the rule of grotesquely corrupt ex-pats and placing the most venal, sectarian clients in positions of power. The effect has been to transform the most advanced, secular Arab country into an ‘Afghanistan’ and in less than 15 years destroying centuries of culture and community.
The goal of the ‘Zionist strategy’ was to destroy Iraq as Israel’s regional rival. The cost of over a million Iraqi dead and many millions of refugees did not prick any conscience in Washington or Tel Aviv.
After all, Washington’s traditional ‘militarist faction’ picked up the bill (costing hundreds of billions) which they passed on to the American taxpayers (well over one trillion dollars) and used the deaths and suffering of tens of thousands of American troops to provide a pretext for spreading more chaos. The result of their mayhem includes the specter of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which they may consider to be a success – since hysteria over ISIS pushes the West ‘closer to Israel’.
The sheer scale of death and destruction inflicted on the Iraqi population by the Zionist faction led to thousands of highly competent Ba’athist officers, who had survived ‘Shock and Awe’ and the sectarian massacres, to join armed Islamist Sunnis and eventually form the ISIS. This group of experienced Iraqi military officers formed the strategic technical core of ISIS which launched a devastating offensive in Iraq in 2014 – taking major cities in the north and completely routing the US-trained puppet armies of the ‘government’ in Baghdad. From there they moved into Syria and beyond. It is fundamental to understanding the roots of ISIS: The Zionist faction among US militarist policymakers imposed a deliberate ‘scorched earth’ occupation policy, which united highly trained nationalist Ba’athist military officers with young Sunni fighters ,both locals and increasingly foreign jihadist mercenaries. These deracinated members of the traditional Iraqi nationalist military elite had lost their families to the sectarian massacres; they were persecuted, tortured, driven underground, and highly motivated. They literally had nothing left to lose!
This core of ISIS leadership stands in stark contrast to the colonial, corrupt, and demoralized army slapped together by the US military with more cash than morale. ISIS quickly swept through half of Iraq and came within 40 miles of Baghdad.
The US militarist faction faced military defeat after eight years of war. They mobilized, financed, and armed their client Kurdish mercenaries in northern Iraq and recruited the Shia Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani to appeal to the Shia militia.
ISIS exploited the Western-backed Islamist uprising in Syria and extended their sweep well across the border. Syria had accepted a million Iraqi refugees from the US invasion, including many of Iraq’s surviving experienced nationalist administrative elite. The US militarists are in a dilemma – another full-scale war would not be politically feasible, and its military outcome uncertain… Moreover the US was aligned with dubious allies – especially the Saudis – who had their own regional ambitions. Turkey and Saudi Arabia, Israel and the Kurds were each eager to expand their power territorially and politically.
In the midst of this, the traditional Washington militarists are left with no overall viable imperialist strategy. Instead they improvise with faux ‘rebels’, who claim to be moderates and democrats, while taking US guns and dollars and ultimately joining the most powerful Islamist groups – like ISIS.
Throwing a wrench into the machinery of Israeli-Saudi hegemonic ambitions, Russia, Iran and Hezbollah have sided with the secular Syrian government. Russia finally moved to bomb ISIS strongholds – after identifying a significant ISIS contingent of militant Chechens whose ultimate aims are to bring war and terror back to Russia.
The US-EU war against Libya unleashed all the retrograde mercenary forces from three continents (Africa, Asia and Europe) and Washington finds itself with no means to control them. Washington could not even protect its own consulate in their ‘liberated’ regional capital of Benghazi – the US ambassador and two intelligence aides were killed by Washington’s own ‘rebels’. The competing and cooperating factions of the Washington militarist elite placed Libya on a steaming platter: Serving up invasion, regicide and hundreds of thousands of refugees, which they did not bother to even ‘season’ with any plan or strategy – just unadulterated scorched earth against another opponent of Zionism. And a potentially lucrative strategic neo-colony in North Africa has been lost with no accountability for the Washington architects of such barbarism.
Latin America: The Last Outpost of the Multi-Nationals
As we have seen, the major theaters of imperial policy (the Middle East and Asia) have been dominated by militarists, not professional diplomats-linked to the multi-national corporations. Latin America stands as something of an exception. In Latin America, US policymakers have been guided by big business interests. Their main focus has been on pushing the neo-liberal agenda. Eventually this has meant promoting the US-centered ‘free trade’ agreements, joint military exercises, shared military bases, and political backing for the US global military agenda.
The ‘militarist faction’ in Washington worked with the traditional business faction in support of the unsuccessful military coups in Venezuela (2002 and 2014), the attempted coup in Bolivia 2008, and a successful regime change in Honduras (2010).
To harass the independent Argentine government which was developing closer diplomatic and trade ties with Iran, a sector of the US Zionist financial elite (the ‘vulture fund’ magnate Paul Singer) joined forces with the Zionist militarist faction to raise hysterical accusations against President Cristina Kirchner over the ‘mysterious’ suicide of a Israel-linked Argentine prosecutor. The prosecutor, Alberto Nisman, had devoted his career to ‘cooking up a case’ against Iran with the aid of the Mossad and CIA for the unsolved, bombing the Buenos Aires Jewish community center in 1994. Various investigations had exonerated Iran and the Nisman Affair was an intense effort to keep Argentina from trading with Iran.
The Washington business faction operated in a mildly hostile Latin America for most of the past decade. However, it was able to recover influence, via a series of bilateral free trade agreements and took advantage of the end of the commodity cycle. The latter weakened the center-left regimes and moved them closer to Washington.
The ‘excesses’ committed by the US backed military dictatorships during the nineteen sixties through eighties, and the crisis of the neo-liberal nineties, set the stage for the rise of a relatively moderate business-diplomatic faction to come to the fore in Washington. It is also the case that the various militarist and Zionist factions in Washington were focused elsewhere (Europe, Middle East and Asia). In any case the US political elite operates in Latin America mostly via political and business proxies, for the time being.
Conclusion
From our brief survey, it is clear that wars play a key role in US foreign policy in most regions of the world. However, war policies in different regions respond to different factions in the governing elite.
The traditional militarist faction predominates creating confrontations in Ukraine, Asia and along the Russian border. Within that framework the US Army, Air Force, and Special Forces play a leading, and fairly conventional, role. In the Far East, the Navy and Air Force predominate.
In the Middle East and South Asia, the military (Army and Air Force) factions share power with the Zionist faction. Fundamentally the Zionists dictate policy on Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine and the militarists follow.
Both factions overlapped in creating the debacle in Libya.
The factions form shifting coalitions, supporting wars of interest to their respective power centers. The militarists and Zionists worked together in launching the Afghan war; but once launched, the Zionists abandoned Kabul and concentrated on preparing for the invasion and occupation of Iraq, which was of far greater interest to Israel.
It should be noted that at no point did the oil and business elite play any significant role in war policy. The Zionist faction pushed hard to secure direct US ground intervention in Libya and Syria, but was not able to force the US to send large contingents of ground troops due to opposition from the Russians as well as a growing sector of the US electorate. Likewise, the Zionists played a leading role in successfully imposing sanctions against Iran and a major role in prosecuting banks around the world accused of violating the sanctions. However, they were not able to block the military faction from securing a diplomatic agreement with Iran over its uranium enrichment program – without going to war.
Clearly, the business faction plays a major role in promoting US trade agreements and tries to lift or avoid sanctions against important real and potential trade partners like China, Iran and Cuba.
The Zionist faction among Washington elite policymakers takes positions which consistently push for wars and aggressive policies against any regime targeted by Israel. The differences between the traditional militarist and Zionist factions are blurred by most writers who scrupulously avoid identifying Zionist decision-makers, but there is no question of who benefits and who loses.
The kind of war which the Zionists promote and implement – the utter destruction of enemy countries – undermines any plans by the traditional militarist faction and the military to consolidate power in an occupied country and incorporate it into a stable empire.
It is a serious error to lump these factions together: the business, Zionist, and various militarist factions of the Washington policy making elite are not one homogeneous group. They may overlap at times, but they also differ as to interests, liabilities, ideology, and loyalties. They also differ in their institutional allegiances.
The overarching militarist ideology which permeates US imperialist foreign policy obscures a deep and recurrent weakness – US policymakers master the mechanics of war but have no strategy for ruling after intervening. This has been glaringly evident in all recent wars: Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine, etc. Improvisation has repeatedly led to monumental failures: from financing phantom armies to bleeding billions to prop-up incompetent, kleptocratic puppet regimes. Despite the hundreds of billions of public money wasted in these serial disasters, no policymaker has been held to account.
Long wars and short memories are the norm for Washington’s militarist rulers who do not lose sleep over their blunders. The Zionists, for their part, do not even need a strategy for rule. They push the US into wars for Israel, and once having destroyed ‘the enemy country’ they leave a vacuum to be filled by chaos. The American public provides the gold and blood for these misadventures and reaps nothing but domestic deterioration and greater international strife.
Memphis, TN – An independent autopsy has found that 30-year-old Troy Goode died from being hog-tied face-down for an extended period of time. The Southaven, Mississippi police department tried to blame Goode’s death on LSD, but there is no scientific basis for this claim.
As we reported in July, Goode and his wife attended a concert in Southaven where they took LSD. Goode began acting funny in a parking lot, and someone thought it was necessary to call the police.
The cops’ answer was to hog-tie Goode and place him face-down, which is known to be a potentially deadly position.
Bystander footage shows Goode being hog-tied, thrashing around, and then being placed into an ambulance. Several onlookers state their disbelief that cops would place someone in this dangerous position, with one even saying it’s good they are getting video “in case he dies.” Goode was pronounced dead an hour after arriving at the hospital.
A friend of the family contacted the Free Thought Project and said that Goode was asthmatic and he was denied his inhaler. We were also told that cops threatened to arrest friends and family if they visited Goode at the hospital.
The family has never accepted the official story and believes that excessive force and the manner of restraint killed Goode.
Not wanting to wait six to eight months for a state autopsy to be performed, Goode’s family had an independent one performed. Attorney Tim Edwards released the results at a news conference in Memphis.
He was suffocating. His heart increased into what is called tachycardia. There is no scientific basis to attribute his death to LSD.
This was lethal force, putting someone in a prolonged hog-tied position. This was not a situation where a 300-pound man attacked a police officer in the dark. This was a science nerd.
The toxicology report … rules out any drug-related causes. That takes that off the table. LSD does not cause heart failure.
Edwards is seeking a civil rights investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice, and the family will file a lawsuit in January.
DeSoto County District Attorney John Champion declined to comment on the results of the independent autopsy. The DA and the police department will likely cling to the false excuse that LSD killed Troy Goode.
Southhaven Mayor Darren Musselwhite issued a statement defending the officers and said Goode posed a danger to himself and others. He also claims that Goode threatened officers and resisted arrest, and continued violent behavior in the ambulance. Musselwhite stated that Goode never said he couldn’t breathe, but the video and bystander reactions indicate that Goods was showing signs of distress.
The autopsy found no evidence of pre-existing disease that would have caused the death, and there is no known case of a person dying from LSD overdose. Troy Goode was having a bad trip, but it was the cops’ use of a dangerous restraint tactic that killed this husband and father.
HOLLANDE AND THE ROTHSCHILD BANKSTERS – François Hollande, seen here with David de Rothschild, appointed a Rothschild banker to manage the French ministry of economy in 2014. What does that say about Hollande’s loyalty?
“An act of war was committed by a terrorist army, DAESH [ISIS], a jihadist army, against France… An act of war prepared, planned, from outside, with outside complicity which an investigation will establish.” – French President François Hollande, November 14, 2015
“We need to work to find a political solution. Bashar al-Assad is not the solution, he is the problem.” – French President François Hollande, October 23, 2015
“In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way”. – Franklin D. Roosevelt
The Friday the 13th terror attacks in Paris seem to have accomplished exactly what they were meant to. They have seemingly given the French and the U.S. the right to attack “without mercy” ISIS forces in Syria. While the strikes are supposedly aimed at ISIS, the country taking the pounding is Syria.
There are basically two ways to view the terror attacks in Paris: they were, either, as French President François Hollande says, “an act of war… committed by a terrorist army, DAESH, a jihadist army,” – or they were something else.
The accepted view, promoted by the controlled media and accepted by world leaders, is that they were, exactly as Hollande says, “an act of war” carried out by DAESH (a.k.a. ISIS, ISIL, Islamic State). Based on this interpretation, U.S. A-10 Warthogs and French fighter jets have started bombing DAESH targets in Syria.
À quoi bon?
This raises the obvious question, what’s the point? Why would any militia carry out an outrageous terror atrocity against a very powerful nation that is well prepared, willing, and ready to wage war against it as a response?
This is a situation strikingly similar to 9-11, in which the predecessor of DAESH, Al Qaida, supposedly attacked the United States, opening the door for the pre-planned invasion of Afghanistan. How convenient.
We should ask: Do these so-called Islamic groups have a desire to commit mass suicide? With the French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle approaching Syria and with American A-10 Warthogs poised on the border ready for destroy anything on the ground, why would any Islamic group give such powerful forces a carte blanche reason to attack?
Is this not just a little too neat?
If you agree that this is too neat, there is the alternative view to be considered. That is that the Paris attacks are something other than what they appear to be and that the desired outcome was achieved by using a fraudulent input. That is to say that the terror attacks in Paris were, in fact, controlled and carried out by a hidden hand that used deception to produce the desired outcome. We are, after all, living in an era of massive deception.
Who might that be?
Given the fact that the fraudulent “War on Terror” is an Israeli construct dating back to the 1970s, the first suspect would have to be Israeli intelligence.
Why would they do that?
To advance the Israeli strategy known as the “War on Terror” – and destroy Syria in the process.
How would they do it?
By creating a cell of extremists who are cultivated and prepared to carry out such acts of violence.
Are there any indications that this is the case?
The fact that the Bataclan theatre was Israeli-owned until September 11, 2015, is one rather obvious clue. There are many others, such as the degree of knowledge held by the planners. For example, how did the terrorists know that the French president would be at the football game? And why did French SWAT teams wait for more than two hours to take action at the theatre?
Is Hollande part of the deception?
He could be, but I would tend to doubt it. Hollande is simply “in the pocket” of the Rothschild family and proved it by waging war in Mali on behalf of the Rothschilds and their gold interests in that poor African nation. In August 2014, Hollande appointed Emmanuel Macron, a Rothschild investment banker to head the French Ministry of Economy.
Hollande is a Rothschild puppet who does what his masters want. At this point they want him to attack Syria.
ROTHSCHILD PUPPET – François Hollande, seen here with Eric de Rothschild, serves the Rothschild family – not the Republic of France.
How does this affect the situation in Syria?
The Paris attacks bring France into the Syrian conflict, although their military actions in Syria are neither legal nor approved by the government of Syria. This increases the weight of the anti-Assad coalition vis-à-vis the Russians, who have been asked to intervene in Syria and are fighting in support of the Assad government.
The U.S. National Security Agency accessed the internal communications of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela and acquired sensitive data it planned to exploit in order to spy on the company’s top officials, according to a highly classified NSA document that reveals the operation was carried out in concert with the U.S. embassy in Caracas.
The March 2011 document, labeled, “top secret,” and provided by former NSA contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden, is being reported on in an exclusive partnership between teleSUR and The Intercept.
Drafted by an NSA signals development analyst, the document explains that PDVSA’s network, already compromised by U.S. intelligence, was further infiltrated after an NSA review in late 2010 – during President Barack Obama’s first term, which would suggest he ordered or at least authorized the operation – “showed telltale signs that things were getting stagnant on the Venezuelan Energy target set.” Most intelligence “was coming from warranted collection,” which likely refers to communications that were intercepted as they passed across U.S. soil. According to the analyst, “what little was coming from other collectors,” or warrantless surveillance, “was pretty sparse.”
Beyond efforts to infiltrate Venezuela’s most important company, the leaked NSA document highlights the existence of a secretive joint operation between the NSA and the Central Intelligence Agency operating out of the U.S. embassy in Caracas. A fortress-like building just a few kilometers from PDVSA headquarters, the embassy sits on the top of a hill that gives those inside a commanding view of the Venezuelan capital.
Last year, Der Spiegel published top-secret documents detailing the state-of-the-art surveillance equipment that the NSA and CIA deploy to embassies around the world. That intelligence on PDVSA had grown “stagnant” was concerning to the U.S. intelligence community for a number of reasons, which its powerful surveillance capabilities could help address.
“Venezuela has some of the largest oil and natural gas reserves in the world,” the NSA document states, with revenue from oil and gas accounting “for roughly one third of GDP” and “more than half of all government revenues.”
“To understand PDVSA,” the NSA analyst explains, “is to understand the economic heart of Venezuela.”
Increasing surveillance on the leadership of PDVSA, the most important company in a South American nation seen as hostile to U.S. corporate interests, was a priority for the undisclosed NSA division to which the analyst reported. “Plainly speaking,” the analyst writes, they “wanted PDVSA information at the highest possible levels of the corporation – namely, the president and members of the Board of Directors.”
Given a task, the analyst got to work and, with the help of “sheer luck,” found his task easier than expected.
It began simply enough: with a visit to PDVSA’s website, “where I clicked on ‘Leadership’ and wrote down the names of the principals who would become my target list.” From there, the analyst “dumped the names” into PINWALE, the NSA’s primary database of previously intercepted digital communications, automatically culled using a dictionary of search terms called “selectors.” It was an almost immediate success.
In addition to email traffic, the analyst came across over 10,000 employee contact profiles full of email addresses, phone numbers, and other useful targeting information, including the usernames and passwords for over 900 PDVSA employees. One profile the analyst found was for Rafael Ramirez, PDVSA’s president from 2004 to 2014 and Venezuela’s current envoy to the United Nations. A similar entry turned up for Luis Vierma, the company’s former vice president of exploration and production.
“Now, even my old eyes could see that these things were a goldmine,” the analyst wrote. The entries were full of “work, home, and cell phones, email addresses, LOTS!” This type of information, referred to internally as “selectors,” can then be “tasked” across the NSA’s wide array of surveillance tools so that any relevant communications will be saved.
According to the analyst, the man to whom he reported “was thrilled!” But “it is what happened next that really made our day.”
“As I was analyzing the metadata,” the analyst explains, “I clicked on the ‘From IP’ and noticed something peculiar,” all of the employee profile, “over 10,000 of them, came from the same IP!!!” That, the analyst determined, meant “I had been looking at internal PDVSA comms all this time!!! I fired off a few emails to F6 here and in Caracas, and they confirmed it!”
“Metadata” is a broad term that can include the phone numbers a target has dialed, the duration of the call and from where it was placed, as well as the Wi-Fi networks used to access the Internet, the websites visited and the times accessed. That information can then be used to identify the user.
F6 is the NSA code name for a joint operation with the CIA known as the Special Collection Service, based in Beltsville, Maryland – and with agents posing as diplomats in dozens of U.S. embassies around the world, including Caracas, Bogota and Brasilia.
In 2013, Der Spiegel reported that it was this unit of the U.S. intelligence bureaucracy that had installed, within the U.S. embassy in Berlin, “sophisticated listening devices with which they can intercept virtually every popular method of communication: cellular signals, wireless networks and satellite communication.” The article suggested this is likely how the U.S. tapped into German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone.
SCS at the U.S. embassy in Caracas played an active role throughout the espionage activities described in the NSA document. “I have been coordinating with Caracas,” the NSA analyst states, “who have been surveying their environment and sticking the results into XKEYSCORE.”
XKEYSCORE, as reported by The Intercept, processes a continuous “flow of Internet traffic from fiber optic cables that make up the backbone of the world’s communication network,” storing the data for 72 hours on a “rolling buffer” and “sweep[ing] up countless people’s Internet searches, emails, documents, usernames and passwords.”
The NSA’s combined databases are, essentially, “a very ugly version of Google with half the world’s information in it,” explained Matthew Green, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute, in an email. “They’re capturing so much information from their cable taps, that even the NSA analysts don’t know what they’ve got,” he added, “an analyst has to occasionally step in and manually dig through the data” to see if the information they want has already been collected.
That is exactly what the NSA analyst did in the case of PDVSA, which turned up even more leads to expand their collection efforts.
“I have been lucky enough to find several juicy pdf documents in there,” the NSA analyst wrote, “one of which has just been made a report.”
That report, dated January 2011, suggests a familiarity with the finances of PDVSA beyond that which was public knowledge, noting a decline in the theft and loss of oil.
“In addition, I have discovered a string that carries user ID’s and their passwords, and have recovered over 900 unique user/password combinations” the analyst wrote, which he forwarded to the NSA’s elite hacking team, Targeted Access Operations, along with other useful information and a “targeting request to see if we can pwn this network and especially, the boxes of PDVSA’s leadership.”
“Pwn,” in this context, means to successfully hack and gain full access to a computer or network. “Pwning” a computer, or “box,” would allow the hacker to monitor a user’s every keystroke.
A History of US Interest in Venezuelan Affairs
PDVSA has long been a target of U.S. intelligence agencies and the subject of intense scrutiny from U.S. diplomats. A February 17, 2009, cable, sent from the U.S. ambassador in Caracas to Washington and obtained by WikiLeaks, shows that PDVSA employees, were probed during visa interviews about their company’s internal operations. The embassy was particularly interested in the PDVSA’s strategy concerning litigation over Venezuela’s 2007 nationalization of the Cerro Negro oil project – and billions of dollars in assets owned by U.S. oil giant ExxonMobil.
“According to a PDVSA employee interviewed following his visa renewal, PDVSA is aggressively preparing its international arbitration case against ExxonMobil,” the cable notes.
A year before, U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters that the U.S. government “fully support the efforts of ExxonMobil to get a just and fair compensation package for their assets.” But, he added, “We are not involved in that dispute.”
ExxonMobil is also at the center of a border dispute between Guyana and Venezuela. In May 2015, the company announced it had made a “significant oil discovery” in an offshore location claimed by both countries. The U.S. ambassador to Guyana has offered support for that country’s claim.
More recently, the U.S. government has begun leaking information to media about allegations against top Venezuelan officials.
In October, The Wall Street Journal reported in a piece, “U.S. Investigates Venezuelan Oil Giant,” that “agents from the Department of Homeland Security, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies” had recently met to discuss “various PDVSA-related probes.” The “wide-ranging investigations” reportedly have to do with whether former PDVSA President Rafael Ramirez and other executives accepted bribes.
Leaked news of the investigations came less than two months before Dec. 6 parliamentary elections in Venezuela. Ramirez, for his part, has rejected the accusations, which he claims are part of a “new campaign that wants to claim from us the recovery and revolutionary transformation of PDVSA.” Thanks to Chavez, he added, Venezuela’s oil belongs to “the people.”
In its piece on the accusations against him, The Wall Street Journal notes that during Ramirez’s time in office PDVSA became “an arm of the late President Hugo Chavez’s socialist revolution,” with money made from the sale of petroleum used “to pay for housing, appliances and food for the poor.”
The former PDVSA president is not the only Venezuelan official to be accused of corruption by the U.S. government. In May 2015, the U.S. Department of Justice accused Diosdado Cabello, president of the Venezuelan National Assembly, of being involved in cocaine trafficking and money laundering. Former Interior Minister Tarek El Aissami, the former director of military intelligence, Hugo Carvajal, and Nestor Reverol, head of the National Guard, have also faced similar accusations from the U.S. government.
None of these accusations against high-ranking Venezuelan officials has led to any indictments.
The timing of the charges, made in the court of public opinion rather than a courthouse, has led some to believe there’s another motive.
“These people despise us,” Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said in October. He and his supporters argue the goal of the U.S. government’s selective leaks is to undermine his party ahead of the upcoming elections, helping install a right-wing opposition seen as friendlier to U.S. interests. “They believe that we belong to them.”
Loose Standards for NSA Intelligence Sharing
Ulterior motives or not, by the NSA’s own admission the intelligence it gathers on foreign targets may be disseminated widely among U.S. officials who may have more than justice on their minds.
According to a guide issued by the NSA on January 12, 2015, the communications of non-U.S. persons may be captured in bulk and retained if they are said to contain information concerning a plot against the United States or evidence of, “Transnational criminal threats, including illicit finance and sanctions evasion.” Any intelligence that is gathered may then be passed on to other agencies, such as the DEA, if it “is related to a crime that has been, is being, or is about to be committed.”
Spying for the sole purpose of protecting the interests of a corporation is ostensibly not allowed, though there are exceptions that do allow for what might be termed economic espionage.
“The collection of foreign private commercial information or trade secrets is authorized only to protect nation the national security of the United States or its partners and allies,” the agency states. It is not supposed to collect such information “to afford a competitive advantage to U.S. companies and U.S. business sectors commercially.” However, “Certain economic purposes, such as identifying trade or sanctions violations or government influence or direction, shall not constitute competitive advantage.”
In May 2011, two months after the leaked document was published in NSA’s internal newsletter, the U.S. State Department announced it was imposing sanctions on PDVSA – a state-owned enterprise, or one that could be said to be subject to “government influence or direction” – for business it conducted with the Islamic Republic of Iran between December 2010 and March 2011. The department did not say how it obtained information about the transactions, allegedly worth US$50 million.
Intelligence gathered with one stated purpose can also serve another, and the NSA’s already liberal rules on the sharing of what it gathers can also be bent in times of perceived emergency.
“If, due to unanticipated or extraordinary circumstances, NSA determines that it must take action in apparent departure from these procedures to protect the national security of the United States, such action may be taken” – after either consulting other branches of the intelligence bureaucracy. “If there is insufficient time for approval,” however, it may unilaterally take action.
Beyond the obvious importance of oil, leaked diplomatic cables show PDVSA was also on the U.S. radar because of its importance to Venezuela’s left-wing government. In 2009, another diplomatic cable obtained by WikiLeaks shows the U.S. embassy in Caracas viewed PDVSA as crucial to the political operations of long-time foe and former President Hugo Chavez. In April 2002, Chavez was briefly overthrown in a coup that, according to The New York Times, as many as 200 officials in the George W. Bush administration – briefed by the CIA – knew about days before it was carried out.
The Venezuelan government was not informed of the plot.
“Since the December 2002-February 2003 oil sector strike, PDVSA has put itself at the service of President Chavez’s Bolivarian revolution, funding everything from domestic programs to Chavez’s geopolitical endeavors,” the 2009 cable states.
Why might that be a problem, from the U.S. government’s perspective? Another missive from the U.S. embassy in Caracas, this one sent in 2010, sheds some light: Chavez “appears determined to shape the hemisphere according to his vision of ‘socialism in the 21st century,’” it states, “a vision that is almost the mirror image of what the United States seeks.”
There was a time when not so long ago when the U.S. had an ally in Venezuela, one that shared its vision for the hemisphere – and invited a U.S. firm run by former U.S. intelligence officials to directly administer its information technology operations.
Amid a push for privatization under former Venezuelan President Rafael Caldera, in January 1997 PDVSA decided to outsource its IT system to a joint a company called Information, Business and Technology, or INTESA – the product of a joint venture between the oil company, which owned a 40 percent share of the new corporation, and the major U.S.-based defense contractor Science Applications International Corporation, or SAIC, which controlled 60 percent.
SAIC has close, long-standing ties to the U.S. intelligence community. At the time of its dealings with Venezuela, the company’s director was retired Admiral Bobby Inman. Before coming to SAIC, Inman served as the U.S. Director of Naval Intelligence and Vice Director of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency. Inman also served as deputy director of the CIA and, from 1977 to 1981, as director of the NSA.
In his book, “Changing Venezuela by Taking Power: The History and Policies of the Chavez Government,” author Gregory Wilpert notes that Inman was far from the only former intelligence official working for SAIC in a leadership role. Joining him were two former U.S. Secretaries of Defense, William Perry and Melvin Laird, a former director of the CIA, John Deutsch, and a former head of both the CIA and the Defense Department, Robert Gates. The company that those men controlled, INTESA, was given the job of managing “all of PDVSA’s data processing needs.”
In 2002, Venezuela, now led by a government seeking to roll back the privatizations of its predecessor, chose not to renew SAIC’s contract for another five years, a decision the company protested to the U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation, which insures the overseas investments of U.S. corporations. In 2004, the U.S. agency ruled that by canceling its contract with SAIC the Venezuelan government had “expropriated” the company’s investment.
However, before that ruling, and before its operations were reincorporated by PDVSA, the company that SAIC controlled, INTESA, played a key role in an opposition-led strike aimed at shutting down the Venezuelan oil industry. In December 2002, eight months after the failed coup attempt and the same month its contract was set to expire, INTESA, the Venezuelan Ministry of Communication and Information alleges, “exercised its ability to control our computers by paralyzing the charge, discharge, and storage of crude at different terminals within the national grid.” The government alleges INTESA, which possessed the codes needed to access those terminals, refused to allow non-striking PDVSA employees access to the company’s control systems.
“The result,” Wilpert noted, “was that PDVSA could not transfer its data processing to new systems, nor could it process its orders for invoices for oil shipments. PDVSA ended up having to process such things manually because passwords and the general computing infrastructure were unavailable, causing the strike to be much more damaging to the company than it would have been if the data processing had been in PDVSA’s hands.”
PDVSA’s IT operations would become a strictly internal affair soon thereafter, though one never truly free from the prying eyes of hostile outsiders.
Even before the victims of the Paris attacks had been moved from the scene or their bodies identified, members of the US national security state began speculating that encryption was likely part of the reason the terrorists were able to plot and execute their deadly mission without getting caught. Former CIA director Mike Morrell was one of the many people who advanced this theory.
“I think what we’re going to learn is that these guys are communicating via these encrypted apps, this commercial encryption which is very difficult or nearly impossible for governments to break, and the producers of which don’t produce the keys necessary for law enforcement to read the encrypted messages,” he said.
Well, Morrell and his fellow deep state power-pushers appear to be wrong. New reports indicate that the attackers actually used text messages to communicate—plain text text messages.
But does it even matter? The point the spooks are trying to make is that encryption is too dangerous for a free society to tolerate. If bad guys use it to hurt us, it means law enforcement should be able to break encryption technology that billions of people on earth use to securely transfer money, communicate, and share sensitive data.
That’s absurd. Encryption is a tool. Like many tools, it can be used by people who have good motivations or bad ones. Every security specialist worth her salt says that weakening encryption, or installing “backdoors” for cops and spies, would actually put people at greater security risk. That’s because encryption is a security technology.
This time, when the spies tried to smear security technologies in the wake of these horrific murders, they were factually wrong—these attackers didn’t even encrypt their communications. But someday we will likely find evidence that other terrorists indeed did use encryption to plot their attack. It doesn’t matter. Those terrorists will probably also use cars, face to face communication, and walks in the woods to speak without risking that the prying ears of government agents can hear them. And furthermore, investigators in France—which last spring implemented broad new snooping powers—failed to intervene in the Paris plot when the attackers didn’t use encryption. In France, encryption was not the problem.
In the United States, the Fourth Amendment is supposed to protect us from unwarranted government intrusion into our private lives. That bedrock principle of American law makes it harder for police to figure out who is up to no good. That’s by design.
There may very well someday be a case where ISIS operatives use encryption tools to plan a nefarious attack. But when that day comes, the basic facts about encryption, security, and the law won’t have changed. Encryption protects the security of billions of transactions and communications every day—from hackers, foreign governments, and cops who skirt Fourth Amendment law by using stingrays to wiretap people’s private conversations.
When we are confronted with despicable acts like the Paris attacks, our response cannot be to throw our values out the window in a fearful stupor. There are people with bad intentions in the world, yes. But weakening our digital security in response to their violence has the ultimate effect of punishing ourselves. It won’t work, and it’s not smart. Remember that the next time you hear spies spewing fact-free hysteria before the blood has even dried.
The CIA and government officials around the world are using the Paris attacks to push brand new surveillance laws. And it was all planned in advance.
While democratic systems usually take months (if not years) to pass new laws and legislation, it only took a few days after the Paris attacks to slap honest citizens with more surveillance laws. Several organizations are indeed capitalizing on the fear and panic caused by the attacks to bring forth a brand new agenda that takes a bold new step towards total government surveillance. What’s worse: Leaked information proves that authorities were waiting on a terror attack to go forward with their plan.
In a leaked e-mail written by Robert S. Litt, the intelligence community’s top lawyer during the month August, the plan is clearly outlined: There is a lack of support for the banning of encrypted communications but a terror attack could quickly turn the tide.
“Although the legislative environment is very hostile today, it could turn in the event of a terrorist attack or criminal event where strong encryption can be shown to have hindered law enforcement.
Only a few months after this e-mail, a terror attack occurs in Paris. Only a few hours after the attacks, news strangely blamed “encrypted communications.” Only days after the attacks, officials are calling for… the banning of encrypted communications.
The New York police commissioner, Bill Bratton, called it a “game changer” and, insinuated new legislation that would outlaw encryption was necessary by adding: “[Encryption] is something that is going to need to be debated very quickly because we cannot continue operating where we are blind. – The Guardian, Intelligence agencies pounce on Paris attacks to pursue spy agenda
CIA Director John Brennan is also using the terror attacks to plead for unrestricted government surveillance of all communications, blaming “privacy groups” for hindering their job.
Then on Monday, in an epic episode of blame shifting, the CIA director, John Brennan, reportedly said privacy advocates have undermined the ability of spies to monitor terrorists. He explained:
“Because of a number of unauthorized disclosures and a lot of hand-wringing over the government’s role in the effort to try to uncover these terrorists, there have been some policy and legal and other actions that are taken that make our ability collectively, internationally to find these terrorists much more challenging,” adding that there is a “misrepresentation of what the intelligence security services are doing.”
Read Brennan’s comments carefully because they are very revealing. When he says “legal actions,” he’s referring to the fact that multiple federal courts have ruled that the government’s secret mass surveillance on millions of Americans is illegal. So it sounds like the CIA director is saying it’s a shame that intelligence agencies can’t operate completely above the law any more, and is scapegoating any failings on his agency’s part on accountability that is the hallmark of any democracy. (Though he still can apparently operate above the law.)
More importantly, Brennan’s comments are incredibly dishonest. The post-Snowden USA Freedom Act passed by Congress reformed exactly one of the countless mass spying programs the US runs. It was the one that sucked up the phone calls of Americans only, and here’s the thing: it has been active this whole time and isn’t scheduled to shut down until the end of the month. – Ibid.
Government officials in the UK are also capitalizing on fear to rush sweeping new laws.
“On the other side of the Atlantic, politicians in the United Kingdom, which already has the most expansive surveillance laws in the western world, are using the tragedy to attempt to rush through their even more invasive, new mass-spying bill that aims at allowing police to see the websites every citizen visits and to force companies like Apple to backdoor their encrypted tools.”– Ibid.
Not Effective
None of these laws have proven effective in preventing terror attacks. In fact, the Paris attacks took place six months after the enactment of a massive (and controversial) surveillance law in France.
Passed by the French Parliament in May in response to the attacks on the Paris-based magazine Charlie Hebdo, the law allows the government to monitor phone calls and emails of people suspected of connections to terrorism without the authorization of a judge.
But it goes further than that. The law requires Internet service providers to install “black boxes” that are designed to vacuum up and analyze metadata on the Web-browsing and general Internet use habits of millions of people using the Web and to make that data available to intelligence agencies.
In exceptional cases, the law allows the government to deploy what are called “ISMI catchers” to track all mobile phone communications in a given area. These catchers are basically designed to impersonate cell towers, but they intercept and record communications data from phones within its range, and can also track the movements of people carrying the phones.
Finally, the law allows government agents to break into the homes of suspected terrorists for the purpose of planting microphone bugs and surveillance cameras and installing keyloggers on their computers, devices that capture data on every keystroke and mouse click. – Recode, France Has a Powerful and Controversial New Surveillance Law
In short, after each traumatic event in the Western world (manufactured or not), attention is turned towards a very specific and targeted item that “needs to be addressed as soon as possible.” This item is, in fact, part of controversial law that is sitting on shelves until in can be passed insidiously, while the masses are struck with horror. It happened with the Patriot Act and, almost 15 years later, it is happening again. Their formula is “Order Out of Chaos” and it keeps working.
“Where no counsel is, the people fall, but in the multitude of counselors there is safety.” – Mossad Motto
~
On the 13th November 2015 during the Paris attacks, 4.1 million people submitted their personal details to the Facebook Safety App, 360 million people received Facebook messages reassuring them of their friends and family’s safety. This information may well have been deposited into an Israeli intelligence bank.
Paris 13/11 aftershocks.
As the dust settles and the pall of grief envelops the scenes of the 13/11 Paris attacks, information begins to seep through the inevitable cracks in the mainstream media, security apparatus narrative.
Very few “subversive” media outlets in France do as good a job of deconstruction as Panamza. Their reporting on the Charlie Hebdo affair blazed a trail of evidence to counter the sprawling inaccuracies of the “official” storyline. Their articles over the last two days have motivated my investigation into the insidious drivers possibly behind the 13/11 attacks on the French capital.
Unsurprisingly the common denominator connecting both Charlie Hebdo and Paris 13/11 appears to be the covert involvement of the Israeli security apparatus.
Lets return to the scene of mayhem and bloodshed in Paris on Friday night. The panic that spread like wildfire across social media, tearful messages and desperate attempts to connect with loved ones, suspected to be in the firing zone.
Then suddenly, Facebook “sympathetically” employed its Safety Check APP, to enable terrified families to reconnect with their missing relatives and to reassure themselves of their safety as the bullets ricocheted off the walls & streets of Paris.
The Safety Check APP was originally named the Disaster Message Board and was introduced on October 15, 2014. Its first major deployment was on Saturday April 25 2015 in the wake of the April 2015 Nepal Earthquake. The tool has since been utilised after the May 2015 Nepal earthquake and the Pacific Hurricane Patricia October 2015.
The 13/11 Paris attack was the first time that this Safety Check APP was deployed for an “unnatural” disaster. Over 4.1 million people checked in with friends and relatives, a total of 360 million people received messages that their loved ones were “safe”.
Alex Schultz: Facebook’s vice president of Growth:
“We chose to activate Safety Check in Paris because we observed a lot of activity on Facebook as the events were unfolding. In the middle of a complex, uncertain situation affecting many people, Facebook became a place where people were sharing information and looking to understand the condition of their loved ones… This activation will change our policy around Safety Check and when we activate it for other serious and tragic incidents in the future. We want this tool to be available whenever and wherever it can help.”
Wonderful, I hear you exclaim! Wonderful for whom?
“During the 24 hours after the terror attack, 4.1 million people checked in with friends and relatives using Facebook Safety Check, a technology developed by Facebook Israel’s research and development department,” said a spokesperson for Facebook Israel. “A total of 360 million people received messages that their loved ones were safe.”
The Facebook Safety Check was designed by Roi Tiger, currently Director of Engineering at Facebook, previously Co-Founder, with Guy Rosen, of Onavo which was bought by Facebook in October 2013.
Perhaps coincidence but this acquistion slots neatly into the timeline with the long since debunked Ghouta Chemical weapons claims against the Syrian Government and the seed funding of White House, UK Foreign Office, CIA, Soros backed and funded Syria Civil Defence Group aka the White Helmets.
Roi Tiger Facebook Profile Picture.
Roi Tiger is a graduate of IDC Herzliya, Tel Aviv, a “non profit” education organisation dedicated to the promotion of Zionist ideology and the fortification of the illegal state of Israel.
IDC HERZLIYA is committed to the fundamental values of a free and tolerant society, while maintaining a Zionist philosophy – first and foremost, freedom of the individual for self-realization in all realms of thought and action, while striving to strengthen the State of Israel.
Roi Tiger then went on to join the IOF Elite 8200 division, an Israeli Intelligence Corps responsible for collecting signal intelligence (SIGINT) and code decryption, described in 2010 by Le Monde diplomatique, as a massive spying operation. Also in 2010, implicated by US Intelligence in Operation Orchard, the 2007 Israeli air strikes on an alleged nuclear reactor in the Deir Ezzor region of Syria.
Full background to this 2007 Israeli illegal incursion into Syrian airspace here.
So, when people innocently clicked “safe” or put a name of their loved ones into the search box of the Facebook Safety app, it is quite probable that they fed a stream of information directly into the Israeli Intelligence data banks.
Web front page of Internet.org
Onavo, a relatively small start-up comprising 40 employees, was based in Tel Aviv and was bought by Mark Zuckerburg as part of his all consuming internet.org project which has as its objective, to create universal access to the Internet.
The significance of this purchase is manifold.
It is Facebook’s first foray onto Israeli territory. In 2012 they purchased Face.com, an Israeli company focused on powerful facial recognition but this had not precipitated an actual base in Israel. With the acquisition of Onavo, Facebook Israel was born.
According to TechCrunch, there’s no official figure attached to the deal, but Israeli paper Calcalist reports between $150-200 million and other sources put the figure closer to $100 million. Whether the real sum is closer to the low end or the high end of that range, it’s a massive amount of money for Onavo, which started three years ago and has previously raised around $13 million in venture funding. –www.digitaltrends.com
This purchase of Onavo and the development of the Safety APP will give Facebook increased capability of compiling one of the most extensive personal data bases in existence in the world today.
On November 11th, 2 days before the Paris attacks, Facebook published a blog report.
“This report, which covers the first half of 2015, provides information about the number of government requests we receive for data, as well as the number of pieces of content restricted for violating local law in countries around the world where we provide service. The report also includes updated information about the national security requests we received from US authorities under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and through National Security Letters.
Overall, we continue to see an increase in content restrictions and government requests for data globally. The amount of content restricted for violating local law increased by 112% over the second half of 2014, to 20,568 pieces of content, up from 9,707. Government requests for account data increased across all countries by 18% over the same period, from 35,051 requests to 41,214″
The full report is here. This is a deliberate policy of obscurantism by Facebook. When one reads their data policy it is obvious that there are no restraints on information sharing. Their figures cannot truthfully reflect the number of Government requests in France that would have spiked, following Charlie Hebdo and even if they do, out of a claimed 2,500+ Government requests for information, only a meagre 295 were “restricted” with very little explanation of what “restricted” actually means.
“We restricted access in France to content reported under local laws prohibiting Holocaust denial and the condoning of terrorism.”
This statement is rendered portentous by the wave of arrests and house searches sweeping France before the blood is even dry on the streets of Paris and certainly prior to the conducting of a full and objective investigation into the perpetrators of the “greatest atrocity committed on French soil since WWII.” This, according to media pundits reporting from Paris as the propaganda wagon rolls smoothly into its habitual groove.
It must be noted that this deliberately emotive media claim is an insult to the 200+ Algerians massacred by Paris police, during protests against France’s brutal neocolonialist war in Algeria, on the streets of Paris in 1961. Colonialist selective memory fails to honour the ghosts of these oppressed and marginalised souls, forbidden from protesting the genocide of their people and punished for daring to stand in solidarity with Algerian resistance against French hegemony. Paris police dumped the murdered bodies into the cold waters of the Seine, over 11,500 Algerians were arrested, beaten, starved and later tortured in the Palais des Sports.
The 13/11 Paris attacks with all the accompanying media frenzy will surely lead us further down the path to the implementation of Patriot Act equivalents in Europe.
As Patrick Henningsen states in his recent 21st Century Wire article: Orwell’s Razor: All of 21Wire’s predictions come true days after “Paris Attacks”
“Debate on Govt Spying and Privacy Rights, now off the table. As expected, politicians looking to appear ‘tough on terror’ and the growing gaggle of security lobbyists, and other assorted corporate fascists, have called for something akin to a ‘European Patriot Act’ – an end to the ‘Post-Snowden’ debate over bulk data collection and privacy – covering issues like NSA and GCHQ blanket spying on all citizens, and imposing more regulations and government monitoring of mandatory manufacturer ‘back doors’ for computers, mobile phones, gaming consoles, and also calls to make encryption illegal, except for government.”
“Special” police forces in St Denis, Paris 18/11/2015
CIA & Intelligence Connections
We must also take into consideration the worrying Cyber security developments in the UK:
Lord Mendelsohn: We welcome the appointment of the former British ambassador to Israel, Matthew Gould, who will have a key role in cyber security inside the Cabinet Office – a very useful and important position – Look Who’s in Charge of UK Government Cyber Security.
Matthew Gould, self proclaimed “passionate Zionist”, first Jewish British Ambassador in Tel Aviv and co creator of the controversial UK Israel Tech-Hub which was established to:
“Promote partnerships in technology and innovation between Israel and the UK, and is the first initiative of its kind for the British government and for an embassy in Israel. The hub’s creation followed an agreement between prime ministers David Cameron and Binyamin Netanyahu to build a UK-Israel partnership in technology.”
For full details on this burgeoning UK-Israel cyber marriage, read this excellent piece by Stuart Littlewood.
Now lets add a little more spice into the evolving narrative.
Included on the panel of the “Shared 21st Century International Mission” were:
CIA Director John Brennan, former UK MI6 Chief John Sawers, Director of the French Directorate for External Security Bernard Bajolet, and former Israeli National Security Advisor Yaacov Amidror
Perhaps even more concerning is the subliminal message that can be interpreted from DGSE Director, Bernard Bajolet’s remarks, endorsed by CIA Director John Brennan.
“The Middle East will never go back to how it was. Syria and Iraq will never retrieve their pre-existing features and culture
Syria is already “partitioned”. The Syrian regime only controls a tiny part, perhaps less than one third of the country established post WWII.
The North is under Kurdish control and “we” have the central region under ISIS control [I have deliberately translated the French exactly as it was written]
The situation in Iraq is the same.”
John Brennan:
“When I look at the devastation in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen it is hard to envisage a central government that would be capable of controlling and governing these post WWII territories.
It appears that the partitioning plan for the Middle East is resisting all efforts to reduce its holy grail status. The partitioning plan that best serves the Israeli Yinon plan for Greater Israel and ensures permanent sectarian strife and division in countries bursting at the seams with economic, resource and geopolitical jewels for the Imperialist crown.
The timing of this conference, a mere two weeks prior to the 13/11 Paris attacks that would almost certainly propel France and allies towards increased intervention in Syria & ensure revived calls for a No Fly Zone, must be considered a little more than purely coincidental.
Conclusions
While we must stress that no concrete conclusions may be drawn at this stage, previous Gladio operations, and we would include Charlie Hebdo in that list, lead us to see very clear parallels emerging between the events surrounding Paris 13/11 and those preceding other such attacks.
The omnipresence of the Israeli Intelligence apparatus in its many forms should, at least, motivate us to suspect foul play and to question the white noise mainstream media accounts. The tsunami of propaganda, the conversion of all icons to a French flag, even including Skype heart emoticons, must ring alarm bells.
Experience teaches us that, propaganda is intrinsically linked to government agendas and that terror attacks invariably engender an increase in global oppression, conflict, sectarian division and the suffering of the very peoples universally judged and condemned by scraps of evidence that bear no resemblance to the truth.
As Sayed Nasrallah has said we are living in the age predicted by George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, the propaganda serves to ensure our rapid descent through the layers of social conditioning, from regionalism to individualism, a state of mind where there is potential for the fabric of society to be shredded and scattered into the winds of the brewing “perfect storm”
“A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.” – Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
St Denis, Paris 18/11/2015.
Police forces operate in Saint-Denis on Wednesday, November 18. Police say two suspects in last week’s Paris attacks, a man and a woman, have been killed in a police operation north of the capital.
I generally feel that the questioning by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now could be a lot stronger, but today, she did ask a good question of Rep. Barbara Lee: “The U.S. has just sealed, the Obama administration, yet another arms deal with Saudi Arabia, in the last year signed the biggest arms deals in the history of the world with Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia behind a lot of the militant activism from al-Qaeda to ISIS. Do you condemn these sales?”
This is Lee’s full response: “Well, first, we need to reduce the sale of arms throughout the world. Also, I think when you look at the—for example, trying to rid Iran of the ability to develop nuclear weapons, we engaged in a strong, robust diplomatic effort. Many years ago, I introduced the first resolution calling for the end of no contact policy, for a special envoy and for us to begin to negotiate with Iran the elimination of their program of developing nuclear weapons. So far, those negotiations and that Iranian deal has worked. And so I think that we need to move in that direction in terms of diplomacy, in terms of trying to seek global peace and security without selling arms to all countries, because what you will have is an arms buildup throughout the world, and then weapons will be pointed at—each country will have weapons—of course, a nuclear weapon is the ultimate weapon—pointed in all directions. And so, we need to determine ways, as the president has done with regard to Iran, ways in which to engage to reduce the threats and to reduce the sale and the use of force and armaments and military weapons, because these can only make the world more dangerous.”
Notice Lee does not condemn the weapons sales to Saudi Arabia. Indeed, she doesn’t utter the word “Saudi”. Instead, she talks about alleged Iranian nuclear weapons designs — a total staple of officialdom — and speaks generally against arms sales.
Nor do the hosts highlight this. Juan Gonzalez, who I think often asks more probing questions that Goodman, immediately proceeded to ask a somewhat fawning question: “And I’m wondering what advice you might have to parliamentarians in France now, as France is going through the same kind of crisis that this country went through after the attacks of 2001. The president is now seeking authorization from the French Parliament for extraordinary measures in his country. What advice might you give to the parliamentarians of France?”
We’re not going to get very far if we’re looking to politicos for leadership who can’t condemn policies like the U.S. government has to the Saudis. And we’re not going to get very far if presumably tough, independent programs like “Democracy Now” can’t keep officials accountable about that.
At the Germany-based European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE) veteran, retired meteorologist Klaus-Eckard Puls flatly dismisses the assertion made by many leading officials that climate change is a driving force behind the wave of refugees now sweeping into Europe from the Middle East and Africa.
Germany Minister of Environment Barbara Hendricks recently blamed the refugee crisis on climate change, and urged countries to commit themselves to a binding Treaty in Paris with renewed vigor. Puls responded at EIKE.
Puls reminds us that even the IPCC has found no basis to support the claim. A number of skeptics view the claim as a desperate stretch designed to divert attention away from the real reasons: abject social and foreign policy failure. Recently the IPCC backed off from the speculative claims of climate driven refugees.
Puls writes that the “UN IPCC took back its analyses and prognoses on climate refugees in its last 2013/14 report” and that “the steppes and deserts are in fact ‘greening’”. At EIKE he provides the following chart which clearly shows that Africa is greening and that it is all part of a natural cycle:
Chart depicting Sahel Zone June-October precipitation from 1950 to 2010. Source K.E. Puls
Puls cites Spiegel, where in 2011 the UN took back its earlier 2005 projection of 50 million refugees by 2010. Spiegel writes:
The UN told SPIEGEL ONLINE that it is backing off its prognosis – in countries of the alleged danger zones populations are in fact growing. The corresponding prognosis has been removed from the UNEP site.”
That particular UN backpedaling incident took place back in 2011. Puls also writes that the latest UN IPCC 2013 report also distanced itself from the projections, seeing no scientific relationship. The claim that climate change is driving the refugee waves appears totally baseless and highly speculative.
While a new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder shows the risk of human conflict in East Africa increases somewhat with hotter temperatures and drops a bit with higher precipitation, it concludes that socioeconomic, political and geographic factors play a much more substantial role than climate change.”
Puls summarizes in his commentary:
When Ms. Hendriks makes up stories of climate refugees, it is all about her private Weltanschauung. It has nothing to do with reality – and also nothing to do with the statements of the IPCC because the IPCC finds no climate refugees, and even writes this (AR5 2013/14). The UNO/UNEP deleted such claims (made in 2005) from its website! The waves of refugees have many reasons – climate is not among them!”
By Stephen Sniegoski | My Catbird Seat | June 12, 2010
The claim that Israel serves as a valuable ally for the United States is made by both pro-Zionists and much of the anti-war and anti-Zionist Left that is influenced by Noam Chomsky. As a result of the Gaza flotilla massacre, which has caused a world-wide uproar against Israel, the value of Israel to the United States is being publicly questioned in more mainstream foreign policy forums. … continue
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Just when you thought the mainstream media coverage couldn’t get anymore surreal.
Then on Monday, in an epic episode of blame shifting, the CIA director, John Brennan, reportedly said privacy advocates have undermined the ability of spies to monitor terrorists. He explained:
Aletho News
