New evidence shows CIA held prisoners in Lithuania
Reprieve | January 16, 2015
New analysis and previously unpublished documents released by legal charity Reprieve show that the CIA held prisoners in Lithuania in 2005 and 2006, contrary to official denials.
In a dossier and briefing submitted to the Lithuanian Prosecutor today, Reprieve reveals how the newly declassified US Senate Report on CIA detention correlates with flight data and contracting documents; and demonstrates that prisoners were moved into Lithuania in February and October 2005, and out of Lithuania to Afghanistan in March 2006.
A previous investigation by Lithuanian prosecutors, shelved in 2011, concluded that the CIA built a facility in a converted stable outside Vilnius, but argued there was no evidence that prisoners were ever held in it.
Reprieve’s analysis, combined with material in the declassified report, now shows that several prisoners were held in the site – called “Violet” in the Senate report – before it was closed down on 25 March 2006.
Flights through Lithuania were organised by Computer Sciences Corporation working alongside several operating companies under the auspices of a series of contracts first set up in 2002. The companies used multiple techniques to disguise their routes, and border guards were prevented from checking their cargo. Partial and incorrect routes for the planes were recorded by a Lithuanian inquiry. Reprieve determined the correct routes of the aircraft by cross-referencing a broader range of data sources and matched their dates to disclosures in the Senate report.
Reprieve investigator Crofton Black said: “The Lithuanian authorities have long hidden behind a smokescreen of increasingly implausible deniability. This new dossier shows beyond reasonable doubt that CIA prisoners were held incommunicado in Lithuania, contrary to European and domestic law. Reprieve looks forward to assisting the Lithuanian prosecutor in his further investigations.”
Baghdad 1950. Paris 2015?
False Flag Attacks by Zionists Against Fellow Jews…
Left: Zionist agent in Iraq, Naeim Giladi, circa 1947; right: Iraqi Jews arrive in Israel 1951
By Richard Edmondson | Fig Trees and Vineyards | January 14, 2015
It is said that there is nothing new under the sun.
Jewish leaders talking up the threat of “anti-Semitism” in order to induce Jews to immigrate to Israel is of course not new. Such talk emanating in the immediate aftermath of what appear to have been false flag attacks by Zionists against fellow Jews–this also is not new.
“To all the Jews of France, all the Jews of Europe, I would like to say that Israel is not just the place in whose direction you pray, the state of Israel is your home,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said over the weekend in the wake of the attacks in Paris.
Netanyahu is certainly up on his Jewish history, but for those of the rest of us who may not be quite as well-versed, here is a little primer.
In the years 1950-51, the city of Baghdad was hit by a series of explosions targeting Iraqi Jews. The attacks caused property damage, injuries, and deaths, creating panic in the Jewish population. At the time the bombings were blamed upon Arab nationalists, raising fears of anti-Semitism and giving rise to a desire by Jews to immigrate to Israel–which of course, at precisely that same time, was in the process of displacing Palestinians and attempting to expand its Jewish population.
What follows is a timeline of events in Baghdad excerpted from a book written and published in the 1990s by an Iraqi Jew named Naeim Giladi. I’ll say a little bit more below about who Giladi was, but for right now just consider the timeline as he presents it:
Six months later-the exact date was March 19, 1950-a bomb went off at the American Cultural Center and Library in Baghdad, causing property damage and injuring a number of people. The center was a favorite meeting place for young Jews.
The first bomb thrown directly at Jews occurred on April 8, 1950, at 9:15 p.m. A car with three young passengers hurled the grenade at Baghdad’s El-Dar El-Bida Café, where Jews were celebrating Passover. Four people were seriously injured. That night leaflets were distributed calling on Jews to leave Iraq immediately.
The next day, many Jews, most of them poor with nothing to lose, jammed emigration offices to renounce their citizenship and to apply for permission to leave for Israel. So many applied, in fact, that the police had to open registration offices in Jewish schools and synagogues.
On May 10, at 3 a.m., a grenade was tossed in the direction of the display window of the Jewish-owned Beit-Lawi Automobile Company, destroying part of the building. No casualties were reported.
On June 3, 1950, another grenade was tossed from a speeding car in the El-Batawin area of Baghdad where most rich Jews and middle class Iraqis lived. No one was hurt, but following the explosion Zionist activists sent telegrams to Israel requesting that the quota for immigration from Iraq be increased.
On June 5, at 2:30 a.m., a bomb exploded next to the Jewish owned Stanley Shashua building on El-Rashid street, resulting in property damage but no casualties.
On January 14, 1951, at 7 p.m., a grenade was thrown at a group of Jews outside the Masouda Shem-Tov Synagogue. The explosive struck a high-voltage cable, electrocuting three Jews, one a young boy, Itzhak Elmacher, and wounding over 30 others. Following the attack, the exodus of Jews jumped to between 600-700 per day.
Zionist propagandists still maintain that the bombs in Iraq were set off by anti-Jewish Iraqis who wanted Jews out of their country. The terrible truth is that the grenades that killed and maimed Iraqi Jews and damaged their property were thrown by Zionist Jews.
The paragraphs above come from Giladi’s book, Ben Gurion’s Scandals: How the Haganah and the Mossad Eliminated Jews, originally published in 1992. An except from the book can be found here, and includes details about the Baghdad bombings as well as a number of other interesting items, including Giladi’s own immigration to Palestine and what he witnessed there. You’ll note, in the timeline, his reference to leaflets being distributed on the same day of the April 8 bombing. That leaflet read in part, “Call to the Jews: To all the tribe of Zion living in Babylon.” It goes on to encourage an exodus out of Iraq:
“For the second time in the history of the diaspora, we have an opportunity to leave. We encourage you to hurry and leave. Today the Jews are in a new era of the history of the diaspora.”
Giladi was born in Iraq in 1929 and became a committed Zionist in his late teens. Later in life he disavowed Zionism, renounced his Israeli citizenship, and moved to the US. His change of heart began when, as a young Jewish immigrant, shortly after arriving in Israel, he encountered “institutionalized racism,” against both Palestinians as well as Arabic or Mizrahi Jews.
The principal interest Israel had in Jews from Islamic countries was as a supply of cheap labor, especially for the farm work that was beneath the urbanized Eastern European Jews. Ben Gurion needed the “Oriental” Jews to farm the thousands of acres of land left by Palestinians who were driven out by Israeli forces in 1948.
At the time in question, the early 1950s, Israel was ethnically cleansing the Ashkelon area and forcing Palestinians who lived there into the Gaza Strip. Farms were indeed taken over, and so, yes, there was a need for cheap labor, and Jews from Iraq provided a good source. And to make sure that the new arrivals were wholly dependent upon their earnings as laborers, Israel saw to it that they were forced, for the most part, to leave their property and possessions behind in Iraq. According to Giladi:
…the pro-British, pro-Zionist puppet el-Said [Nouri el-Said, the Iraqi prime minister–ed.]saw to it that all of their possessions were frozen, including their cash assets. (There were ways of getting Iraqi dinars out, but when the immigrants went to exchange them in Israel they found that the Israeli government kept 50 percent of the value.) Even those Iraqi Jews who had not registered to emigrate, but who happened to be abroad, faced loss of their nationality if they didn’t return within a specified time. An ancient, cultured, prosperous community had been uprooted and its people transplanted to a land dominated by East European Jews, whose culture was not only foreign but entirely hateful to them.
Giladi passed away in 2010, but his conclusions–that the Baghdad bombings were perpetrated by Zionist Jews–are shared by a number of modern historians and writers, including Uri Avnery, who wrote that, “After the disclosure of the Lavon Affair… the Baghdad affair became more plausible.” But perhaps most interesting was the assessment given by career CIA officer Wilbur Crane Eveland:
In attempts to portray the Iraqis as anti-American and to terrorize the Jews, the Zionists planted bombs in the U.S. Information Service library and in synagogues. Soon leaflets began to appear urging Jews to flee to Israel. . . .
Although the Iraqi police later provided our embassy with evidence to show that the synagogue and library bombings, as well as the anti-Jewish and anti-American leaflet campaigns, had been the work of an underground Zionist organization, most of the world believed reports that Arab terrorism had motivated the flight of the Iraqi Jews whom the Zionists had “rescued” really just in order to increase Israel’s Jewish population.
The above is quoted by Giladi and is derived from Eveland’s memoir, Ropes of Sand: America’s Failure in the Middle East, published in 1980.
An Iraqi court went on to find 20 people, all members of the Iraqi Zionist underground, guilty of carrying out the bombings. Two were sentenced to death, and the rest received lengthy prison terms. But by this time the Jewish population of Iraq had been greatly reduced. Giladi says that 125,000 Iraqi Jews ended up immigrating to Palestine, leaving just 6,000 remaining. It also resulted in a split in Giladi’s own family; while Giladi himself made the journey, his parents, he says, were not fooled by the false flag events and remained behind in Iraq.
***
While a good many analysts have concluded that the recent attacks in Paris were a false flag operation, carried out most likely by Israel, others have expressed dubiousness on the matter. Certainly Israeli false flag operations are well documented, but a line would surely be drawn at targeting Jews in such attacks–this seems to be the reasoning. The events in Baghdad 65 years ago, however, would apparently refute this notion. If something is “good for the Jews” collectively, as a whole, then it can apparently be justified even should it be brought about at the expense of individual Jews–that at least seems to be the thinking on the matter by some Jews or Jewish leaders at any rate. Maybe, though, this should come as no surprise, and here I’m reminded of the words of Caiaphas, the chief priest at the time of Jesus: “You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish.”
I highly recommend Giladi’s book excerpt in its entirety, if you have the time, for it makes for fascinating reading. You can also click here to see a video featuring an interview with the author that was conducted in 1994.
Meanwhile Israeli officials continue urging French Jews to make “aliyah” to Israel.
“Due to the impossible security situation [for French Jews], Israel has a responsibility to allocate all necessary resources to facilitate the aliyah and absorption of Jews from France,” said Knesset member Yoni Chetboun.
Other Israeli officials have also spoken out.
“Your place, Jews of France, is with us,” said Rabbi Eli Ben-Dahan, Religious Affairs minister, speaking at a Jewish Home party rally.
“We are all shocked at the recent wave of anti-Semitic attacks in France,” said Knesset member Motti Yogev. “To all our Jewish brothers in France we call: Come and make Aliyah to Israel! Here is your home – our home.”
Another Israeli politician, Yair Lapid, seemed to be going out of his way to push the alarm buttons.
“I don’t want to speak in terms of Holocaust, but…” he said, “European Jewry must understand that there is just one place for Jews, and that is the State of Israel.”
All of this is obviously having an effect. The leader of a Paris synagogue is predicting that between 14,000 and 15,000 French Jews will immigrate to Israel in 2015, and indeed hundreds are reported to have flocked to an “aliyah fair” held on Sunday.
French Jews attend an “aliyah fair” held in Paris on Sunday, Jan. 11, just two days after an attack on a kosher market. A series of such fairs are scheduled as part of an Israeli policy called “France First.”
Is not the holding of an “aliyah fair” just two days after an attack on a kosher market pretty much the equivalent or on a par with the aforementioned leaflets printed by the Zionist underground in Baghdad 65 years ago?
Is there anything new under the sun?
By the way, additional aliyah fairs are scheduled this week for Marseilles and Lyon, with more to come in February and March. The organizing of such events is said to be part of a new Israeli policy–overseen by the Ministry of Immigration Absorption–called “France First.” The implications of such a policy are somewhat alarming. If France is “first,” who’s next? Will attacks similar to the ones last week begin to occur in other countries with large Jewish populations?
No word on whether Netanyahu dropped by the fair in Paris on Sunday, although he was in the city participating in the giant anti-terrorism march–this of course despite the fact that he had been specifically requested by the French government not to come. One person who did pop into the fair, however, was Natan Sharansky, chairman of the Jewish Agency, who had accompanied the prime minister to Paris from Israel.
In his remarks, Sharansky assured the potential immigrants that “the Jewish Agency embraces the French Jewish community at this difficult time and is extending its full support by helping provide for the physical security of Jewish communities across France, increasing our assistance to any individual who wishes to immigrate to Israel, and working to ease immigrants’ integration into the Israeli workforce and Israeli society.”
Translation: don’t worry. The United States will pay for it.
The calls for Jewish immigration today are, of course, motivated by different needs from those of 65 years ago. Recently the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics released figures showing that the number of Palestinians throughout historical Palestine will exceed the Jewish population by the end of the year 2020. The figures have been challenged by Israeli academics, who insist the Palestinian statistics are flawed, although certainly the “demographic threat” has been an ongoing Zionist concern.
But prompting an upswing in Jewish immigration probably would not have been the only, and maybe not even the prime, consideration in carrying out the Paris attacks–that is assuming the attacks were a false flag. Other writers have suggested a number of other motivations including payback for France’s support for Palestinian statehood at the UN. (One wonders: was Israel’s “France First” policy adopted before or after the UN vote?)
What is clear, of course, is that terrorist organizations and terrorist armies are being supported by some of the most powerful nations on earth, and that these forces are being used to advance certain geopolitical objectives. The likelihood that such elements will be mobilized in some way in future false flag attacks in Western cities has to be considered high.
Persecuted French revisionist scholar: Charlie Hebdo Before and After
On the Contrary | January 14, 2015
Dr. Robert Faurisson, the courageous octogenarian dean of European revisionists who has been repeatedly beaten, prosecuted, jailed and heavily fined in France for publishing doubts about the authenticity of the sacred relics of Holocaustianity, offers his insights into the situation in France in the aftermath of the attacks in Paris.
_________________________________________________________________________________
To Michael Hoffman:
These killings in Paris, at the office of Charlie Hebdo and elsewhere – with 20 dead in all, among whom five were Jews – rightly arouse widespread indignation but Jewish organizations have immediately exploited this indignation for their benefit. They forget that, in large part, it’s been under the pressure of international and French-Jewish groups that France has hastily engaged in all sorts of military expeditions causing so many deaths in the Arab-Muslim world. They forget this country’s responsibility for the creation of the bogus “State of Israel” – soon afterwards arming it with nuclear weapons – and in the appalling fate of the Palestinian people since at least 1948; as well as the presence of Benjamin Netanyahu at Sunday’s rally in Paris which was an affront to an entire Arab-Muslim world. Jewish organizations in France live in anger and war; that being the case, how can they be surprised if their adversaries live in anger and war as well?
Such killings may bring to mind a number of murders committed by Jews who subsequently became “heroes” of Jewish history. On February 25, 1994 Baruch Goldstein, an Israeli army physician armed with an assault rifle, shot dead 24 Muslim worshipers and wounded 125 at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron before being subdued and killed there himself. Goldstein’s nearby tomb is a pilgrimage site for many Jews.
The hysteria we are witnessing now in France, in this month of January 2015, has a precedent: that of May 1990 and the “profanation of the Carpentras cemetery” when Judaic graves were said to have been vandalized. It was the exploitation of that event that made it possible to intimidate the French parliament into enacting a law called “The Fabius-Gayssot Act” of July 13, 1990 — punishing by a term of imprisonment of from one month to one year and a fine of up to 300,000 francs (45,000 euros), along with several other sanctions — those who dispute “the existence of crimes against humanity” (that is, essentially, crimes against Jews), as defined and punished in 1945-1946 by a body that the winners of the recent war had dared to name the “International Military Tribunal” (three lies in three words) of Nuremberg. This law, totally contrary to the French constitution, came into effect by appearing in the Journal Officiel de la République Française of July 14, 1990, anniversary of the storming of the Bastille.
It was due to a fabrication on the part of the Socialist president of the French parliament, Jewish millionaire Laurent Fabius, which he conveyed to a national television audience, alleging that a Jewish cadaver in the Carpentras cemetery had been taken out of its grave and impaled through the rectum with a pole — that the French were stampeded into outrage and indignation which was cleverly exploited: Catholic authorities rang the great bell of Notre-Dame in Paris as a sign of an extraordinary sacrilege having occurred. The Socialist French President François Mitterrand led a march through the center of Paris at the head of the vast crowd of demonstrators. We have now, on January 11, 2015, seen the same scenario repeated in the same place: the Catholic Archbishop having taken the initiative of ringing the Notre-Dame’s bells, and Laurent Fabius, architect of the suppression of the rights of freedom of expression of revisionists in France, in the front rank of the “protesting” dignitaries marching through the streets — our Socialist President François Hollande together with Netanyahu — all supposedly in the cause of freedom of expression.
Moreover, those Jewish organizations pose as being in support of freedom of opinion and expression but, in reality, what they are demanding is increased repression against “Holocaust denial.” Revisionism has made significant progress in recent years here in France, thanks especially to the Internet. Certain Jewish organizations therefore, are working for laws aimed at the censorship of the Internet, of the Ferench-African comedian Dieudonné (who has some 80 legal proceedings pending against him), of the revisionists and of a number of other unbowed men and women.
In conclusion and for want of time, I shall allow myself just three remarks in response to the questions which you sent by e-mail: 1) the name Charlie-Hebdo has, apparently, nothing to do with Charles de Gaulle; it comes, I believe, from the Peanuts character Charlie Brown.
2) Gayssot is the surname of a former Communist MP and government minister, and the Fabius-Gayssot Act is sometimes called the “Faurisson Law” or “Lex Faurissoniana”; I have lost count of the times I’ve been ordered to pay fines or damages on the grounds of this law; other revisionists have been thrown into prison or, like Vincent Reynouard, a father of nine, will be returning to prison. For my part, I’ve endured ten physical assaults – of which eight took place in France. French police have carried out numerous searches and seizures, or attempted seizures, at my home. These police have often refused to protect me in the presence of threats and danger.
3) I hope to be able, before long, to send you an English version of my nine-page article (with illustrations) which I wrote on December 31, 2014. It is entitled: In 70 years, no forensic study proving the existence and operation of the “Nazi gas chambers”!
I dedicated this study to Professor Ben Zion Dinur (1884-1973), founder of Yad Vashem in 1953, who was forced to resign in 1959 for having preferred scientific history to Judaic memory.
http://robertfaurisson.blogspot.fr/2009/03/memoire-juive-contre-histoire-ou.html
I thank you, dear Michael, and congratulate you on the work you have done over so many years, and in such difficult conditions, for the just cause of historical revisionism.
Robert Faurisson, January 13, 2015
CIA Flashback: “We’ll Know Our Disinformation Program Is Complete When Everything the American Public Believes Is False”
By Melissa Melton | Truthstream Media | January 13, 2015
“We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.”
That creepy quote above has been widely attributed to Former CIA Director William Casey.
Casey was the 13th CIA Director from 1981 until he left in January 1987. He died not long after of a brain tumor in May 1987. Dead men tell no tales, as they say.
But did William Casey really say this quote?
The quote itself has been passed around extensively on the Internet, and some people claim Casey never really said it because the only main source it traces back to is late political researcher and radio show host Mae Brussell.
Brussell was the host of the radio show Dialogue: Conspiracy. She got her start when, as a radio show guest, she questioned the official JFK assassination story and the Warren Commission Hearings by suggesting that Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t the only person involved in Kennedy’s murder. Perhaps the propagandized label of “conspiracy theorist” is the reason why people question the quote Brussell often repeated.
However, Brussell is not the only person that can be attributed to this sharing quote.
Someone posted this meme on Quora back in 2013 with the note, “A disclaimer: I just like Quorans debunking or showing the stupidity behind some of the worst FB memes.”
This is a new trend lately, people trying to debunk old (and most especially, establishment damaging) quotes.
This time, however, someone who claims to have been there when Casey said it showed up to validate the quote:
“I am the source for this quote, which was indeed said by CIA Director William Casey at an early February 1981 meeting of the newly elected President Reagan with his new cabinet secretaries to report to him on what they had learned about their agencies in the first couple of weeks of the administration. The meeting was in the Roosevelt Room in the West Wing of the White House, not far from the Cabinet Room. I was present at the meeting as Assistant to the chief domestic policy adviser to the President. Casey first told Reagan that he had been astonished to discover that over 80 percent of the ‘intelligence’ that the analysis side of the CIA produced was based on open public sources like newspapers and magazines. As he did to all the other secretaries of their departments and agencies, Reagan asked what he saw as his goal as director for the CIA, to which he replied with this quote, which I recorded in my notes of the meeting as he said it. Shortly thereafter I told Senior White House correspondent Sarah McClendon, who was a close friend and colleague, who in turn made it public.”
Barbara Honegger
Not only does Honegger claim he said it, but apparently he said it in response to what he saw as his goal as CIA Director!
This statement was further backed by an email posted by Quora user Greg Smith from Honegger regarding the quote which is consistent and apparently prompted her to tell the story above:
“Seriously — I personally was the Source for that William Casey quote. He said it at an early Feb. 1981 meeting in the Roosevelt Room in the West Wing of the White House which I attended, and I immediately told my close friend and political godmother Senior White House Correspondent Sarah McClendon, who then went public with it without naming the source…”
So there you go. Guess it boils down to he said she said, except when she says it, it’s because she was actually there…
The year 1981 was an interesting one for Director Casey. He just so happened to be under investigation and fighting to keep his new job over various seedy dealings that came to light; among them were claims he approved a plan to overthrow Libya’s Moammar Qaddafi to instill a shadow government. (Oh I know, our government would never do that, would they?)
The agency’s plan, according to an article in the July 27, 1981 Gettysburg Times, involved toppling Qaddafi via what else?
Disinfo:
“Newsweek Magazine reported the covert operation was designed to overthrow Khadafy through a ‘disinformation’ campaign to embarrass him, creation of a counter government to challenge his leadership and a paramilitary campaign.”
(Wow. A lot of that sounds eerily familiar… 2011, anyone?)
That same year, investigative journalist Jack Anderson published this piece in the September 22, 1981 Santa Cruz Sentinel discussing the troubling CIA disinformation campaign being waged against Americans:
Anderson points out the CIA’s “triple assault on the public’s right to know” included 1) trying to shut off channels of information to the electorate, 2) seeking criminal penalties against reporters whose stories might identify CIA operatives, and the third which Anderson called most troubling, 3) spreading “disinformation” to news agencies.
And who else does Anderson specifically call out in this disinfo campaign but new CIA Director William Casey:
“Now along comes Bill Casey, the doddering CIA director, with the argument that the government has the right to mislead the public by planting phony stories in the press.”
Oh really? So the good director not only talked about his disinformation campaign but actually argued for the government’s right to wage it against the American people?
The plan involved getting around the ban on CIA operations on domestic soil by planting disinfo stories in foreign news outlets that were routinely picked up by American mainstream media agencies. Anderson also points out the various rumors and false stories going around surrounding the goings on in Libya at the time…
The bottom line here is, if anyone in our government was going to make the above disinformation statement and specifically in 1981, all available evidence points to no better person who would have likely said it than Casey.
Finally on an aside, there seems to be this mission lately to memory hole quotes or muddy the water about who said what and change history.
In this particular instance, someone who was there when William Casey said the line in question and claims to have literally heard the words come out of the man’s mouth with her own ears as he said it is vouching that this quote is true.
Then again, this is the same agency on record behind the government’s MKUltra mind control program
Even so, people still went into the Quora thread afterwards to claim — with absolutely no evidence whatsoever as they were not personally there — the quote is false.
So, in a bitter twist of the saddest irony possible, it would seem the contents of the quote itself are also true.
Taking a Meaningless Progressive Stand in Congress
By Dave Lindorff | This Can’t Be happening! | January 12, 2015
The Democrats are showing their true colors now that they have lost control of both houses of Congress.
Suddenly, with the assurance that they don’t have to worry about being taken seriously, the “party of the people” has come forward with a proposal to levy a 0.1% tax on short-term stock trades, particularly on high speed trading.
Don’t get me wrong. A stock-trade tax is a great, and long-overdue idea. In fact, such a tax, which could raise some $800 billion in revenue over a decade, should probably be bigger than just 0.1%, and targeted more directly at high speed trading. (Most experts agree high-speed trading has been undermining any semblance of a fair market for stocks and bonds by handing an outsized advantage to companies that have access to huge computers that can make enormous trades, front-running other investors by getting into and out of the market in microseconds, so why not levy a graduated trading tax that is progressively higher the shorter the time period an investment is held?)
The point is that this trading tax is something that progressives have been calling for now for years, if not longer, but while they were in a position to actually make it happen, Democrats in Congress were silent about it.
Now though, with Republicans, who are dead-set against a tax on stock trading, in control of Congress so that there is no chance of passage, the Democrats as a party are calling for it, with Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) planning to introduce the measure this week as part of an ironically named “action plan” to combat income inequality which would also include a measure to cut $2000 in income taxes for families earning less than $200,000 a year, and to more nearly triple the child care credit.
If the Democrats had passed such measures back when they had the White House and both Houses of Congress, back in 2009 or 2010, they wouldn’t be looking at a Republican Congress today. If they’d proposed such measures last year, when they still at least controlled the Senate, they wouldn’t have lost the Senate last November.
But of course, if they had made these proposals when there was a chance of them becoming law, the Democrats in Congress would have lost all the fat campaign donations and other legal bribes that they receive from Wall Street banks, brokerages and hedgefunds.
Now it’s safe for them to make those proposals as part of their “inaction plan.” The fat cats on Wall Street know they’re not serious, and will continue to buy them in 2016, when you won’t see them making these kinds of populist proposals anymore.
It’s all part of a long-running game in which the Democratic Party pretends to be the party of the working person, while actually being just another pro-capitalist party, working hand-in-glove with the Republicans to continue sucking the life out of the American middle class and the poor to enrich the wealthiest 1% of Americans who already control some 40% of the nation’s assets, and the wealthiest 10%, who control as much national wealth as the other 90% of us put together.
Meanwhile, the real people to watch in Congress are those Democrats who are going to vote with the ruling Republicans in House and Senate to allow pro-rich and pro-capitalist measures to get to a vote, and to provide the votes to over-ride any vetoes by President Obama. Behind all the anti-inequality talk, these are the people who really represent the leadership and the political bedrock of the Democratic Party.
We got an early look at what is coming last week, when a group of 13 Democratic senators (the scabs clearly visible on their exposed flesh), voted with an almost unanimous Republican bloc, to defeat an amendment offered by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) that would have stripped a measure weakening the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory law out of an already pro-financial corporate bail-out bill extending federal backing for terrorism coverage in insurance policies. The vote killing the Warren amendment passed 66-31 meaning there were only three abstentions. Without the 13 Democratic votes against fellow Democrat Warren, her amendment would have passed because of a 60-vote requirement for amendments.
Keep an eye on those 13 Democrats. Given that the Republicans now have 54 seats in the Senate, they only need an extra six votes from Democrats to move bills and amendments to a vote, and only 13 votes to override a presidential veto.
Here, for reference, are the 13 members of the Senate Democratic caucus who killed the Warren amendment:
Michael Bennet (D-CO)
Tom Carper (D-DE)
Bob Casey (D-PA)
Joe Donnelly (D-IN)
Martin Heinrich (D-NM)
Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND)
Angus King (I-ME)
Amy Klobuchar (D-MN)
Joe Manchin (D-WV)
Claire McCaskill (D-MO)
Gary Peters (D-MI)
Debbie Stabenow (D-MI)
Jon Tester (D-MT)
They of course are not the only pro-corporate Democratic senators. There are plenty more who can be counted on to vote to further enrich the rich and empower the powerful when called upon to do so — people like Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) and Cory Booker (D-NJ) for example.
This will be important when, later this year, we see Republicans in Congress putting forwards bills to gut Social Security and Medicare, to step up military funding, and to further undermine environmental, banking and worker safety regulation, for example.
JE NE SUIS PAS CHARLIE
The Extremely Dark and Unexamined Underside of the Charlie Hebdo Affair
By John Chuckman | Aletho News | January 13, 2015
We hear much about bloody events in Paris being an attack upon western traditions and freedom of the press, and I am sorry but such claims are close to laughable, even though there is nothing remotely funny about mass murder. It certainly is not part of the best western tradition to insult the revered figures of major religions. You are, of course, technically free to do so in many western countries – always remembering that in many of them, a wrong target for your satire will get you a prison term for “hate crimes” – but it does represent little more than poor judgement and extremely bad taste to exercise that particular freedom. What Charlie Hebdo does is not journalism, it is sophomoric jokes and thinly disguised propaganda. Hebdo’s general tone and themes place it completely outside the mythic tableau of heroic defender of free speech or daring journalism, it being very much a vehicle for the interests of American imperialism through NATO.
Of course, the best western traditions don’t outlaw what garments or symbols people may wear for their beliefs, as France has done. Note also the history of some of the politicians making grandiose statements about freedom of the press. Nicolas Sarkozy was involved a number of times in suppressing stories in the press, even once getting a journalist fired. Sarkozy is a man, by the way, who took vast, illegal secret payments from the late Muammar Gaddafi and from France’s richest heiress to secure his election as president. David Cameron had police seize computers at Guardian offices and allows Julian Assange to remain cooped in the Embassy of Ecuador to avoid trumped-up charges in Sweden. Cameron is also best buddies with Rupert Murdoch, the man whose idea of journalism appears to be what he can dredge up to exchange for what he wants from government. His Fox News in the United States enjoys a reputation for telling the truth only by sheer accident. Barack Obama is a man transfixed by secrecy and ready to use all of his powers to punish those who tell the truth, a man who holds hundreds in secret prisons, and a man who regularly oversees the extrajudicial execution of hundreds and hundreds of people in a number of countries.
The parade celebrating the good things of western tradition – which Obama missed but which saw now-potential presidential candidate Sarkozy shove his way to the front – also included such luminaries as the Foreign Minister of Egypt’s extremely repressive government, which, even as the minister marched proudly, held innocent journalists in prison simply for writing the truth. The Prime Minister of Turkey was there celebrating, a man who has put a number of journalists in jail. Celebrating rights and freedoms also was King Abdullah of Jordan who once saw a Palestinian journalist sentenced to hard labor for writing so simple a truth as that the king was dependent upon Israel for power.
We shouldn’t forget, too, that Israel targeted and killed a number of journalists in its Gaza invasions, that the United States’ forces in Iraq targeted and killed a number of journalists, and that “NATO” deliberately targeted Serbia’s state television service with bombing, killing many civilians. Free speech and western traditions, indeed.
There are more doubts and questions in the Charlie Hebdo affair than there will ever be answers. In part this is because the French security forces silenced witnesses, killing three assumed perpetrators in a display which seems to say that Dirty Harry movies are now part of French training programs.
And then we have the sudden death by apparent suicide of a police commissioner in charge of the investigation just as he was writing his report alone at night, an event which received little mainline press coverage. A man in his forties in the midst of likely the biggest case of his career just decides to kill himself?
We should all be extremely suspicious of a trained killer, seen as being informed and exceedingly efficient at his work, leaving behind his identity card in an abandoned car. It really is a touch more serendipity than we would credit in a mystery story. We should all be extremely suspicious of men so obviously well trained in military techniques, about men who were well informed about schedules at the offices they attacked, and about men heavily armed in the center of Paris. People serving in notorious killer outfits like America’s SEALs or Britain’s SAS rarely achieve such complete success as twelve victims, all shot dead, and an easy get-away.
And just to add to the confusion we have the video of one of the armed men shooting a police officer lying on the sidewalk. The armed man, face covered, lowers his AK-47 to within a couple of feet of the victim’s head and fires. The head goes down, but we see no blood. Have you ever seen photos of someone shot in the head with a high velocity weapon? That’s what the Zapruder film is about, and the results are more like an exploding pumpkin than a death at the end of a stage play.
We need to be more than suspicious about anyone or any event which has any connection with ISIS. ISIS is one of the terror groups assembled, armed, and supplied by Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the United States for the deliberate and wanton destruction of Syria. The two brothers killed in Paris both fought in Syria. It certainly would be easy enough for someone to have obtained an ID card there from one of them. Remember, the excesses of ISIS we all read about – at least those that aren’t clearly staged propaganda stunts such as video of a hostage beheading – are the direct result of assembling large bands of cutthroats and fanatics, arming them, and setting them loose to terrorize someone else’s country.
It is the simplistic view of ISIS that the involved intelligence services want us to have that it is a spontaneous fanatical rebellion in favor of one extreme interpretation of Islam. Despite many recruits for ISIS holding what are undoubtedly genuine fanatical beliefs, they almost certainly have no idea who actually pays their salaries or provides their equipment – that is simply the way black intelligence operations work. And those participating in such operations are completely disposable in the eyes of those running them, as when the United States bombs some in ISIS who perhaps exceeded their brief.
Every society has some percentage of its population which is dangerously mad, and if such people are gathered together and given weapons, their beliefs are almost beside the point, except that they provide the targeting mechanism used by those doing the organizing.
We should all be extremely suspicious about any event when a man such as Rupert Murdoch is quoted afterward saying, “Muslims must be held responsible for jihadist cancer,” as he was in The Independent. In case you forgot, Murdoch is a man whose news organizations for years lied, stole, and violated a number of laws to obtain juicy tidbits for his chain of cheesy mass-circulation newspapers. Murdoch also is a man who has had the most intimate and influential relationships with several prime ministers including that smarmy criminal, Tony Blair, and that current mindless windbag and ethical nullity, David Cameron. Publicity from large circulation newspapers, which can swing at a moment’s notice from supporting to attacking you, plus campaign contributions buy a lot of government compliance. Murdoch also is one of the world’s most tireless supporters of Israel’s criminal excesses.
And speaking of David Cameron, Murdoch’s made man in Britain, David felt compelled to chime in on the Hebdo publicity extravaganza with, “Muslims face a special burden on extremism….” Now, why would that be? No less than Murdoch’s creepy words, Cameron’s statement is an indefensible thing to say.
Who has a special burden for the massacre of students at Columbine High school in Colorado? Who has a special burden for Israeli Baruch Goldstein who murdered 29 Palestinians as they worshipped? Do Noweigians bear a special burden for Anders Breivik, who shot 69 people, mostly children, perhaps the most bizarre mass murderer of our times? Does the American Army bear a special burden for Timothy McVeigh’s horrific bombing in Oklahoma City, killing 168, he and his associates having met in Fort Benning during basic training, two of them having been roommates? Perhaps, in both these latter cases, Christianity bears a special burden since these people were exposed to that religion early in life? As was Hitler, as was Stalin, as was Mussolini, as was Franco, as was Ceaușescu, as was Pinochet, and countless other blood-drenched villains?
The late Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, was responsible for a great many murders, including about a hundred people bombed in a terror attack on the King David Hotel. He also was responsible for the assassination of the distinguished Swedish diplomat, Count Folke Bernadotte, and he started the invasion of Lebanon which eventually left thousands dead, but you’ll have a hard time finding him described anywhere as a “Jewish terrorist” or finding prominent people asking who has a special responsibility for his extraordinarily bloody career.
There is something hateful and poisonous in conflating the religious background of a criminal or mentally unbalanced person and his violent crime. We seem to do this only in cases involving violent men with Muslim backgrounds. Why? How is it possible that even one decent Muslim in this world has any responsibility for the acts of madmen who happen to be Muslim? This gets at one of the deep veins of hate and prejudice in western society today, Islamophobia, a vein regularly mined by our “free” press and by our ‘democratic” governments. Our establishment having embraced Israel’s excesses and pretensions, we have been pushed into worshiping the mumbo-jumbo of Islamic terror, a phenomenon virtually invented in Israel and perpetuated by Israel’s apologists as a way of stopping anyone from asking why Israel does not make peace, stop abusing millions of people, and return to its recognized borders.
Well, we do have an entire industry exploiting every event which may be imagined as terror. I read an interview with the great cartoonist, Robert Crumb, who happens to live in France. When asked if any other journalists had approached him on the topic of controversial cartoons, he said that there weren’t any journalists in America anymore, just 250,000 public relations people. That is precisely the state of American journalism. It digs into nothing, at least nothing of consequence, working full time to manage the public’s perceptions of government and its dreadful policies, from murdering innocents with drones and remaining quiet on the many American and Israeli atrocities of recent decades to manipulating fears of “terrorism” and saying little about such domestic horrors as the many hundreds of citizens shot dead by American police every single year.
The French government is reported to have been quite concerned about Benjamin Netanyahu showing up at the Paris march and making volatile speeches, and they specifically asked him not to come. At first, Netanyahu’s own security service, Shin Bet, agreed that he should not go because the parade in the streets represented a difficult security situation. But neither the host government’s formal request nor the security service’s concerns can stop a man like Netanyahu. France was advised he would come, and the French made their displeasure clear by saying they would then also invite Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestine Authority to the parade, which they did.
Netanyahu not only marched for the cameras at the front rank of a parade where he had no business, he made arrangements with the families of four Jewish victims for an all-expense-paid showy funeral in Jerusalem. None of the victims was even an Israeli citizen, yet at this writing they have all been buried there with pomp and plenty of publicity. But Netanyahu didn’t stop there, he went on to make speeches that the French and other European Jews should leave their countries, riddled with anti-Semitism, and come to Israel, their true homeland. In diplomatic terms, this was what is termed unacceptable behavior which in almost any other case would get you thrown out of a country. In ordinary terms, it was outrageous behavior, much like seeing a seriously drunken guest loudly insulting his host at a party to which he was not even invited.
The ineffectual current President of France, François Hollande, sent notice to Jerusalem that the four dead shop victims were being awarded the Légion d’Honneur, France’s highest honor. The nation’s highest honor, founded by Napoleon over two hundred years ago for exceptional contributions to the state, awarded for the act of being murdered by thugs? Simply bizarre.
I don’t pretend to understand everything involved in this complex set of events, but it is unmistakable that we are being manipulated by a number unscrupulous and unethical people who use murder victims and the public’s natural sympathies for them as board pieces in some much larger game.
There is even a trivial side to these bloody events with many Parisians carrying signs which read “Je suis Charlie,” surely the kind of asininity posing as deep feeling that long has been established in the United States where Walmart teddy bears and plastic flowers with cheap slogans are regularly tossed in piles here and there as memorials to this or that. Perhaps Euro-Disney has had a more devastating influence on French culture than I realized.
What Hebdo execution video really shows
By Jonathon Cook | The Blog from Nazareth | January 13, 2015
I am well aware that I’m stepping into a hornet’s nest by posting this video, which is going viral. Those who wish to silence all debate have an easy card to play here, accusing me of buying into a conspiracy theory. There’s only one problem: unlike the video-maker, I have few conclusions to draw about what the significance of this video is in relation to the official story. That is not why I am posting it.
But it does, at least to my mind and obviously a lot of other people’s, judging by how quickly it’s spreading, suggest that Ahmed Merabet, the policeman outside the Charlie Hebdo office, was not shot in the head, as all the media have been stating.
That said, it does not prove much more. It doesn’t prove that Merabet did not die at the scene. Maybe he bled to death there on the pavement from his earlier wound. It certainly doesn’t prove that the Kouachi brothers were not the gunmen or that the one who fired missed on purpose. Maybe he just missed.
Nor does the video’s removal from most websites prove that there is some sort of massive cover-up going on. Ideas of good taste, especially in the immediate aftermath of a massacre close to home (ie here in the West), can lead to a media consensus that a video is too upsetting. That can occur even if it does not show blood and gore, simply because of what it implies. Herd instinct in these instances is very strong.
But the unedited video clip does leave a sour taste: because unless someone has a good rebuttal, it does indeed seem impossible that an AK-47 bullet fired from close range would not have done something pretty dramatic to that policeman’s head. And if the video is real – and there doesn’t seem much doubt that it is – it clearly shows nothing significant happened to his head either as or after the bullet was fired.
So what points am I making?
The first one is more tentative. It seems – though I suppose there could be an explanation I have overlooked – that the authorities have lied about the cause of the policeman’s death. That could be for several probably unknowable reasons, including that his being executed was a simpler, neater story than that he bled to death on the pavement because of official incompetence (there already seems to have been plenty of that in this case).
The second point is even more troubling. Most of the senior editors of our mainstream media have watched the unedited video just as you now have. And either not one of them saw the problem raised here – that the video does not show what it is supposed to show – or some of them did see it but did not care. Either way, they simpy regurgitated an official story that does not seem to fit the available evidence.
That is a cause for deep concern. Because if the media are acting as a collective mouth-piece for a dubious official narrative on this occasion, on a story of huge significance that one assumes is being carefully scrutinised for news angles, what are they doing the rest of the time?
The lesson is that we as news consumers must create our own critical distance from the “news” because we cannot trust our corporate media to do that work for us. They are far too close to power. In fact, they are power.
Official narratives are inherently suspect because power always looks out for itself. This appears to be a good example – whether what it shows is relatively harmless or sinister – to remind us of that fact.
UPDATE:
I’m still trying to imagine a plausible explanation for the video. I’m no ballistics expert, so I’m firmly in the land of conjecture. But I wonder whether, if the bullet hit the pavement close to Merabet’s head, it might have been possible for bullet fragments to hit him, possibly killing him.
This possibility (assuming it is one) does not invalidate the point of my post. If it was indeed the case, certainly no media outlet has suggested that the guman missed Merabet and that he died from the exploding fragments.
This isn’t meant to raise technical, or gruesome, details of the case. It is to suggest that western journalists do not report fearlessly and independently when they examine events being narrated by official sources. They mostly regurgitate information on trust, because they trust the authorities to be telling the truth. They do the same when the acts of official enemies are being examined – they again turn to official sources on their side. In short, most journalists have no critical distance from the events they are reporting on our behalf.
What interests me about this video is this: As journalists we’re too often loath to examine the available evidence, especially if it questions official sources. We repeat what we are told by the authorities. From the viewing figures, it seems millions of ordinary people are watching this clip and wondering what it shows. If history is any guide, their need for a plausible explanation (and there may, of course, be one) will be ignored. We are treated simply as consumers – passive ones – of news. In that sense, journalism is not accountable to the people it is supposed to serve. It is deferential to power.
That leaves us, ordinary news consumers, in a position of either blindly trusting our own officials too or trying to work things out for ourselves. You would hope that the issues raised by this video get aired by journalists as part of establishing greater trust in our profession and proof of our independence. Instead, I expect it will simply be consigned the “conspiracy theory” bin.
Pentagon Refuses to Release Unclassified 1987 Report about Israel’s Nuclear Program and Super Computers
By Noel Brinkerhoff and Danny Biederman | AllGov | January 13, 2105
A think tank researcher has been fighting with the Pentagon to get a 1987 report on Israel’s nuclear program and supercomputers released despite the fact that the document in question is not classified.
Grant Smith, founder of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy, Inc., first asked the Department of Defense (DoD) to release the report (“Critical Technology Issues in Israel and NATO Countries”) three years ago through a Freedom of Information Act request.
Last fall, after numerous delays by the DoD, Smith went to court to force the report’s disclosure.
Defense lawyers contend it was necessary for officials to ask Israel to review the report before complying with Smith’s request—an unusual move on the part of a U.S. agency involving an American FOIA issue.
Meanwhile, the judge hearing the FOIA case, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, has wondered why it has taken three years without a decision by the Pentagon.
“I’d like to know what is taking so long for a 386-page document. The document was located some time ago,” Chutkan said in November, according to Courthouse News Service. “I’ve reviewed my share of documents in my career. It should not take that long to review that document and decide what needs to be redacted.”
The report may contain details about an internal debate nearly 30 years ago among U.S. officials about whether Washington should authorize the sale of a Cray supercomputer to a coalition of Israeli universities.
“The United States approved the sale of powerful computers that could boost Israel’s well-known but officially secret A-bomb and missile programs,” wrote the author of a 1995 Risk Report article about the Cray controversy that cited the Pentagon document. “A 1987 Pentagon-sponsored study found that Technion University, one of the schools in the network, was helping design Israel’s nuclear re-entry vehicle. U.S. officials say Technion’s physicists also worked in Israel’s secret weapon complex at Dimona.”
Smith’s effort “to get hold of the Pentagon report is set against the backdrop of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty,” wrote Janet McMahon at Courthouse News Service. “Israel has not signed the treaty. Iran, on the other hand, has signed the treaty.”
The current negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program is part of that backdrop. “The reason this would be seen as controversial is you have this real concerted push for Iran to come clean on its nuclear program and to relinquish its infrastructure,” Foundation for Defense of Democracies VP Jonathan Schanzer told the Washington Examiner. He said he saw “no reason” why the U.S. government would authorize the report’s release, but adding that if it was released, it would probably not affect the Pentagon’s publicly ambiguous stance regarding Israeli nuclear capabilities.
Smith has grown frustrated over the government’s stalling on the issue, saying: “So what we’ve seen most recently is that the government is now coming up with novel ways to try and delay this by talking about mandatory disclosure reviews. We don’t think it’s meaningful that their captive think tank may have signed NDAs. Perhaps they even have a sock puppet in the Pentagon that signs NDAs on their behalf. It would be the same from our perspective.”
To Learn More:
DOD Fights Researcher Over Access to Report on Israel’s Nuclear Needs (by Janet McMahon, Courthouse News Service )
Legal Battle To Publish Unclassified DOD Report On Israeli Nukes Nears End (by Sarah Westwood, Washington Examiner )
Nine Questions About the Paris Attacks
By Kevin Ryan | Dig Within | January 11, 2015
Mainstream media are busily promoting a familiar narrative for last week’s terrorist attacks in Paris. As usual this narrative demonizes Islam, calls for a reduction in civil rights, and bolsters existing military aggressions. However, a growing number of serious questions have arisen about the attacks. Until such questions are answered, citizens must consider that these events might be another pretext for an ongoing political agenda.
The Paris attacks are reported to have occurred in two parts. The first was the January 7th shooting of twelve people in and around the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a tabloid that often published offensive cartoons including some about the Prophet Mohammad. The second attack occurred the next day and was said to be the work of Amedy Coulibaly, a 32-year old Senegalese Frenchman who began shooting police officers at the scene of an accident and then took hostages in a Kosher grocery.
Some parts of the story have already proven to be inaccurate. For example, FOX News and NBC falsely reported that two of the suspects were in custody, based on information from “two consistently reliable U.S. counterterrorism officials.” One 18-year old widely reported to be a suspect turned himself in (145 miles away) and was released 50 hours later due to insurmountable contradictions.
Questions that remain unanswered include the following.
- The Charlie Hebdo gunmen, identified by police as brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi, were said to display professional training as if they were highly-skilled Special Operations soldiers. They were calm and controlled, well equipped, and well trained. Exactly where did they get their training and high-tech equipment?
- Coulibaly was identified by DNA testing in only two hours. Although rapid DNA tests can be performed in a matter of hours, a match requires DNA from the suspect. How did the testing match with this man in such a short time? Did authorities have his DNA or was it already in a database? In either case, how did that happen?
- Videos quickly showed two people in the Hebdo getaway car with one in the driver’s seat. Why did authorities name and interrogate a third suspect (who turned out to not be involved) as the getaway car driver?
- Why would the Koachi brothers wear balaclavas (i.e. ski masks) to hide their identity and then simply leave Said’s national ID card in the car? If they took the time to hide their faces, why would they bring their IDs with them?
- Why did the masked attackers work to make sure they were quickly portrayed as Muslims and members of al Qaeda during the attacks? Witnesses said one shouted to onlookers—”Tell the media it was al-Qaeda in Yemen.” Other videos and reports indicate that they repeatedly shouted “Allahu Akbar” and proclaimed that they were avenging the Prophet Mohammad. Who benefits from this?
- How did the attackers escape (to the northeast—the longest route through Paris) despite the police having raised the “alarm level for the greater Paris area to its highest level.” Did they have logistical support?
- Why does the video of the shooting of victim Ahmed Merabet, reportedly killed by a shot to the head, suggest that he was not shot in the head?
- How did Helric Fredou die? A Paris police commissioner conducting the investigation, Fredou died while preparing a report on the crimes. And why did Western media not report his death for at least three days?
- The alleged Kosher grocery gunman, Amedy Coulibaly, met with the President of France just a few years ago. What are the odds of such a coincidental meeting and does the connection relate to the attacks?
Many people have become skeptical about mainstream accounts of terrorism. This is due to the fact that authorities, like the FBI or CIA, are often found to be involved in some way and the events always support political agendas. Therefore it is not surprising to hear people claiming that intelligence agencies were involved in these attacks, or that the attacks related to political manipulations that would “shore up France’s vassal state status to Washington.”
Whatever the truth, it seems wise to consider all possibilities when mainstream media promote stories that feed the war machine and reduce freedom. Refraining from judgment until the facts are clearer is always the best approach.
Iran FM rejects Der Spiegel claims as ‘ridiculous’
Press TV – January 11, 2015
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has rejected as “ridiculous” a report by the website of Germany’s Der Spiegel weekly claiming that Tehran is helping Syria build nuclear weapons.
Speaking at a Sunday news conference with visiting Cypriot Foreign Minister Ioannis Kasoulides in Tehran, Zarif said such claims are part of a scaremongering campaign targeting the Islamic Republic’s peaceful nuclear work, paving the way for adopting wrong policies vis-à-vis Syria.
In an article published on Friday, Der Spiegel claimed that the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is making efforts to build nuclear bombs, adding that Damascus may be getting assistance from the Islamic Republic to produce nuclear arms.
The top Iranian diplomat further described the claims as “ridiculous” and said such reports are aimed at inciting fears and promoting Iranophobia in the international community.
Iran has repeatedly voiced opposition to the possession of nuclear weapons either on its soil or anywhere else in the world, said Zarif, adding that Tehran favors the removal of all nuclear arms as they are to the detriment of everyone.
“Based on the fatwa by Leader [of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei], we have never been and will never be after nuclear weapons,” added the Iranian foreign minister.
The United States, Israel and some of their allies have repeatedly accused Iran of pursuing non-civilian objectives in its nuclear energy program.
Iran strongly rejects the allegations that it is seeking to develop nuclear weapons. Tehran says it needs the nuclear program for peaceful purposes, including generating electricity and producing radio-isotopes for medical purposes.
Charlie Hebdo Massacre: Another Staged Event to Incite War and Destroy Freedom?
By Brandon Martinez | Non-Aligned Media | January 11, 2015
The “Islamists” strike again – at least that’s what those who stand behind the latest outrage in Paris want us to believe.
On Wednesday, two masked gunmen wielding AK-47s stormed the headquarters of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical newspaper based in Paris, France, assassinating the entire leadership of the paper. Twelve people were killed in the ensuing rampage, mostly Charlie Hebdo employees and a few policemen. Days later, four more random civilians were gunned down at a kosher supermarket by two other militants allegedly connected to the shooters in Paris.
Sporadically shouting “Allah Akbar” throughout the duration of their onslaught, the two attackers were caught on video making a spectacle of themselves as they paraded down the Paris street guns blazing. It is typically unusual for terrorists to immediately make it known who they are and what they stand for before concluding their dirty work, an anomaly the mainstream media refuses to emphasize for obvious reasons.
Other anomalies are cause for skepticism. How did the terrorists get ahold of military-grade weaponry undetected? Journalist Gearoid O Colmain told Russia Today that the two deceased suspects, French-born Said and Cherif Kouachi, had received military training from militants in Syria and had also traveled to Yemen to meet with al-Qaeda leaders there. And yet the pair was able to return to France without interference from authorities. Other reports indicate that the brothers were known and being monitored by French intelligence, but were still able to obtain the necessary armaments to conduct Wednesday’s attack without a hiccup.
In a Jan. 8 article, Sputnik News reported: “Said and Cherif Kouachi, two brothers in their 30s who are suspected of committing the [Charlie Hebdo] terror attack, have been known to France’s General Directorate for Internal Security and the prefecture of Police of Paris, Le Point news magazine said Thursday.” The Sputnik article further revealed that in 2008 Cherif Kouachi had been arrested and sentenced to a prison term of three years for attempting to recruit others to fight for al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Others contend some aspects of the Paris shooting were completely staged like a scene from a Hollywood action movie. Ali Şahin, a Turkish MEP and member of the ruling AKP party, echoed this view, citing the mysterious absence of street traffic where the shooting took place, and the odd lack of blood or recoil when a Paris cop was shot point blank by one of the gunmen.
In an op-ed for Press TV, analyst Kevin Barrett calls into question the dubious story that authorities found IDs left behind in the terrorists’ get-away car, which led police to quickly identify the suspects. Barrett contends that such a ‘mistake’ would not be made by sophisticated terrorists, but rather bears the markings of a false flag deception aimed at implicating Muslims.
“Al-Qaeda in Yemen” is officially being blamed for the Charlie Hebdo massacre, an unusual detour from ISIS or ‘Islamic State’ (IS) as it is now called, which has been the go-to bogeyman for neoconservative talking heads on the mass media for months.
According to a Fox News report, “Cherif Kouachi told a French TV station before Friday’s raid at an industrial park that he was sent by Al Qaeda in Yemen and had been financed by the cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.” The same report goes on to admit that al-Awlaki was “killed by a U.S. airstrike in Yemen in 2011,” but failed to explain how a dead man was able to finance and direct an attack four years after his death.
Many questions about the Paris attack remain and will likely go unanswered by the subservient sell-outs who populate mainstream media outlets.
Western Foreign Policy and Muslim Discontent
Even if we were to presuppose that a group of Muslims carried out a terrorist attack like the one we saw in Paris, one question journalists and reporters should be asking is ‘why would Muslims be angry enough to want to harm France and its citizens?’ To evade this essential line of inquiry, the prevailing script contends that it was Charlie Hebdo’s anti-Islamic cartoons, which depict Islam’s prophet Mohammed in a derogatory manner, that motivated the attack, and nothing else — a convenient narrative for France’s political class whose militaristic foreign policy warrants scrutiny.
Following the lead of Washington and Tel Aviv, France has as of late pursued staunchly anti-Muslim foreign policies, yet it befuddles journalists to ask why Muslims are upset with the present pro-American, pro-Israeli puppet regime in Paris?
It cannot be overlooked that America and France led the NATO onslaught against Libya in 2011, bombarding civilians and infrastructure in the name of “liberating” the predominately Muslim North African country from a ‘dictator.’ Thanks to the US, Britain, France, Canada and other rogue states, Libya – once a boon of progress in an otherwise bleak part of the world – is now a failed state plagued by terrorism and civil war. The stability and prosperity that Libyans once enjoyed under Gaddafi is nothing but a distant memory as the country is teetering on collapse whilst NATO-backed Takfiri gangs and warlords wrestle for control of Tripoli.
Many have also forgotten that the French invaded Mali, a Muslim-majority country in West Africa, in January of 2013 to put down the rise of armed groups opposed to France’s puppet regime in Bamako. Add to that France’s unyielding support of Israel and its terroristic policies against the Palestinians.
In the case of real Muslim violence directed at France and other NATO member states, it would be wise to broach the underlying causes of Muslim discontent, rather than objectifying it with stale neocon propaganda memes about ’72 virgins in heaven’ and other inanities.
Could it be that the Muslim world has suffered a litany of Western military invasions over the past few decades, causing the deaths and displacement of a few million Muslims, which may lie behind the deep-seated consternation and disdain emanating from that part of the world? Or do they simply ‘hate us for our freedoms,’ as neocon warmongers and Zionists assure us?
An average intellect could easily deduce the above puzzle, but those are queries that few in the degenerated ‘mainstream’ dare to raise with any serious vigor.
Islamic Extremism: A Manufactured Enemy?
So now we’ve seen attacks in Ottawa, Sydney and Paris within a relatively short period of time. Is it reasonable to believe that this recent string of ‘lone-wolf jihadist’ attacks across the West have been organic occurrences, cooked up in the deranged minds of mad-men? Or is there something more sinister at work?
Many analysts are questioning the dubious timing and nature of all of these incidents, which come at just the right moment to lend credence to the US-led coalition against ISIS. It is nothing short of miraculous that just as various Western countries gear up for military strikes against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, ‘terror incidents’ hit their respective homelands right on cue to give the politicians their belated ‘casus belli’ for joining the campaign to be rid of ISIS.
In any case, the West’s crusade against ISIS is as counterfeit as it is comical. The West’s ‘fight against ISIS’ is not truly aimed at combatting the militant group, but rather at destabilizing the region as a whole to further weaken and disorientate Israel’s rivals. Al-Qaeda, ISIS, al-Nusra Front — they are all outgrowths of the same poisonous American-Zionist imperial tree. Washington and Tel Aviv have routinely sponsored Takfiri zealots against regimes they seek to depose, the latest victims being Bashar al-Assad in Syria and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. These armed radical groups have served a two-tiered purpose for their clandestine backers in America and Israel: firstly, they provide a pretext for the US and its lapdogs to invade the Middle East; secondly, they act as scare-crows to corral public opinion behind the interventions, providing a replenishing source of patsies and dupes that can take the fall for false flag attacks engineered by the state.
After each and every one of these terror events, Western governments have immediately enacted legislation which increases the powers of the secret services and police, effectively establishing a police/surveillance state aimed at cracking down on civilian dissent against government policies. Extirpating the ‘war on terror’s’ critics at home, while attacking Israel’s enemies abroad – what a perfect brew for the masterminds of this global strategy of tension operating under the guise of ‘Jihadism.’
“Free Speech” to Bash Muslims, but not Zionists
In response to the atrocity in Paris, French politicians and other Western leaders have been pontificating about Western ‘values’ and have selectively invoked ‘freedom of speech.’ “We live in a free and open democracy which has freedom of speech,” the West’s dishonest leaders say. “Radical Muslims don’t believe in ‘our values,’ hence the necessity to fight them overseas” is the standard establishment talking point, trotted out time and again by the professional script readers fronting as presidents and prime ministers.
The hypocrisy is stunning. Like most of Europe today, France is certainly not a bastion of freedom of speech, having implemented numerous draconian laws over the years, especially the infamous “Gayssot Act” which criminalizes opinions that contradict official World War II and ‘holocaust’ historiography. French revisionists such as Robert Faurisson, Vincent Reynouard and others who have questioned the “Six Million” mythology have been jailed and fined extortionate amounts of money by the French state for their dissident historical viewpoints. The existence of such repressive laws in France unveils the duplicity of the newfound love of free speech being expressed by the likes of French President Francois Hollande and his ministers.
Taking a page out of Stalin’s playbook, the French regime recently banned pro-Palestine protests, even going so far as to prosecute a number of prominent pro-Palestinian activists as “hate criminals.” And while France’s reprobate leaders fully sanction and even encourage satirical assaults upon Islam and Muslims in the name of “free speech” – not to mention lobbing bombs on Muslims in places like Libya and Mali – these same miscreants have outlawed any parodying of Zionism and Jewish privilege.
While championing Charlie Hebdo’s anti-Muslim cartoons as “free expression,” France’s mealy-mouthed political class have simultaneously led a ceaseless witch-hunt against French comedian Dieudonne, whose anti-Zionist parodies have angered the country’s Jewish ruling class. French authorities have enacted stiff bans against the wildly popular Dieudonne, preventing him from performing at public venues across the country under penalty of prison time and fines. Britain too has banned the comic from entering that country on the grounds that his famous “Quenelle” gesture resembles a Nazi salute and is therefore ‘anti-Semitic.’
In reference to Dieudonne, French President Francois Hollande himself pledged to use every means at the disposal of his government to “fight against the sarcasm of those who purport to be humorists but who are actually professional anti-Semites.” In Hollande’s Orwellian France, “free speech” is reserved only for those who defame Islam, whereas critics of Zionism and Jewish exceptionalism are first stigmatized and then criminalized – a tribute to the real power behind the throne of that once-free country.
Copyright 2015 Brandon Martinez
Planted ID card exposes Paris false flag
By Kevin Barrett | Press TV | January 10, 2015
French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve says the terrorists who attacked Charlie Hebdo would never have been caught had they not made one fatal mistake: They conveniently left an ID card in their abandoned getaway car.
Since when did criminals leave their identification cards in abandoned getaway cars?
An ordinary citizen, taking no precautions, might accidentally leave a wallet or purse in their parked car. I have driven automobiles approximately 50,000 times in my life, and I think my wallet might have slipped out of my pocket and fallen into the crack between the driver’s seat and the door…once.
What are the odds that skilled terrorists who have just carried out an ultra-professional special-forces style attack will accidentally leave their ID card in the abandoned getaway car? Answer: Effectively zero.
So why are police reporting an event that cannot have happened?
Assuming that French police really did find “terror suspect” Said Kouachi’s ID card in an abandoned getaway car, that ID card must have been planted by someone wishing to incriminate Kouachi. Even the legendary French idiot detective, Inspector Clouseau, could not fail to make this thunderingly obvious inference.
The discovery of Kouachi’s ID does not implicate him; it exonerates him. It shows that he is an innocent patsy who is being framed by the real perpetrators of the attack.
Police and intelligence agencies routinely plant evidence to support false narratives, convict innocent people, and exonerate themselves. American police who kill unarmed citizens often plant a gun on the corpses to support their claims of having killed in self-defense. Such throw-down guns, which the police call “ham sandwiches,” are kept in police locker rooms and carried in police cars in case they are needed.
Likewise, throw-down ID cards and other “incriminating” documents are routinely used by the military, intelligence, and special forces professionals who orchestrate false flag operations. Consider the ludicrously-obvious planted evidence used in the mother of all false-flag operations: the September 11th, 2001 inside job.
Intelligence agents planted not just one, but two “magic suitcases” designed to incriminate Mohamed Atta, the innocent patsy framed for the crimes of September 11th. According to Der Spiegel’s book Inside 9/11: What Really Happened, the first Atta suitcase was handed to German police by a self-described “good Samaritan burglar.” The so-called burglar claimed to have stolen Atta’s suitcase during the course of a burglary and discovered terrorism-related information in it. As an honorable citizen, this kind-hearted burglar felt compelled by his conscience to deliver the suitcase to the authorities.
According to Der Spiegel, the German police, not being fools, knew that the self-styled burglar was not really a burglar at all, but an intelligence agent planting fake evidence against Atta. Der Spiegel quotes German police as saying: “The only question is, which intelligence agency was he working for?” (“CIA and Mossad,” answered former German Intelligence Minister Andreas Von Bülow in his book The CIA and September 11th.)
Despite its absurd origins, this suitcase full of fabricated documents provides virtually the only purported evidence supporting the official story of Atta’s supposed terrorism-related activities in Germany. Aside from the good Samaritan burglar’s suitcase, it seems that the original Egyptian Atta – the one in Germany – was a gentle, shy, sensitive, soft-spoken architecture student with no connections to terrorism of any kind. Yet the “Atta” who made a spectacle of himself in Florida before 9/11, staging memorable public scenes while all but wearing an “I am an al-Qaeda terrorist” sign around his neck, was a coarse, obscene, violent loudmouthed braggart who dated strippers, disemboweled kittens, and spoke fluent Hebrew.
The Hebrew-speaking Atta’s second and better-known “magic suitcase” was the one he allegedly checked in on his early morning flight from Portland, Maine to Boston on September 11th, 2001. According to the 9/11 Commission Report, the suitcase was miraculously preserved and delivered to the authorities when it somehow failed to make the transfer from Atta’s Portland-to-Boston commuter flight onto Flight 11, which Atta supposedly piloted into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Had the suitcase been transferred as it should have been, we are told, it would have been destroyed in a fireball at the World Trade Center.
This magic suitcase provided the only evidence allowing authorities to identify the alleged 19 hijackers within 24 hours of the event. (None of the 9/11 passenger lists contained any Arab names; no airline employees remember having ticketed or boarded any of the alleged hijackers; and none of the hundreds of security cameras at Boston’s Logan Airport, Washington D.C.’s Dulles Airport, or Newark Airport took a single authenticated frame of any of the 19 Arabs blamed for 9/11.)
This suitcase not only contained a list of the 19 patsies, but also Atta’s supposed last will and testament. (Why would a suicide hijacker check his will onto a doomed plane?) Britain’s dean of Middle East journalism Robert Fisk has ridiculed Atta’s alleged will, pointing out that it begins with a botched bismillah: “In the name of God, myself, and my family…” No Muslim would ever write such a thing. As Fisk suggests, the document purporting to be Atta’s will must have been forged by an incompetent intelligence agent. The suitcase was obviously planted.
And that is not just Robert Fisk’s opinion. Seymour Hersh, the dean of American investigative journalism, quotes a senior US intelligence source as saying, with regard to Atta’s magic suitcase: “Whatever trail was left was left deliberately—for the FBI to chase.”
Atta’s two magic suitcases are not the only examples of clumsily-planted 9/11 evidence. Another is the “magic passport” of alleged 9/11 hijacker Satam al-Suqami. That passport, looking as pristine as the “magic bullet” of the JFK assassination, was allegedly discovered by an anonymous individual, with no chain of custody, near the two flat spots of smoking ground where two 110-story towers somehow exploded into very fine dust.
But Atta’s magic suitcases, the magic passport, beside the most pathetically-planted 9/11 item of them all: The “Fatty Bin Laden confession video” supposedly discovered in December 2001 by an anonymous US soldier in Jalalabad, and delivered with no chain of possession to be brandished by the Bush Administration as supposed proof of Bin Laden’s guilt.
Professor Bruce Lawrence, a respected expert on Bin Laden, has categorically stated of this video: “It’s bogus!” Lawrence adds that his many acquaintances in the US intelligence community’s Bin Laden units know that the video is bogus – but are afraid to say so in public, because they are afraid of the implications of Bin Laden’s innocence.
These and other examples show that the intelligence agents who orchestrate false-flag terror spectacles often do not even bother to disguise the blatantly-fabricated nature of the planted evidence used to implicate patsies.
So we should not be terribly surprised when the French police tell us – with a straight face – that a highly professional fleeing terrorist would leave his ID card in an abandoned getaway car.
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Confronting the Threat of Ethnic Bioweapons
By Tony Cartalucci – New Eastern Outlook – 29.11.2017
The United States Air Force’s 59th Medical Wing’s molecular biology branch recently was revealed to have been collecting specifically Russian RNA and synovial (connective) tissue samples, prompting fears in Russia of a possible US directed ethnic-specific bioweapons program. … continue
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