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John Gross denies existence of molten metal

John Gross, one of the lead engineers of the NIST report is quesitoned about the existance of molten steel at the WTC building, the collapse of Building 7, and also explains how the NIST report did not do any analysis concerning the physical collapse of all three buidlings. John Gross was asked to come speak at the University of Texas at Austin by the Phil. M. Ferguson fund.

September 12, 2011 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | Leave a comment

Turn off. Tune out. Unplug. Disbelieve.

By Greg Felton | September 10th, 2011

The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.

Winston Smith, Ministry of Truth, Oceania

And so it begins.

The compulsory veneration of the seminal event 10 years ago that gave us our national security state will dominate our media and be pounded into our consciousness. In newspapers, on TV and on radio we will be assaulted by endless replays of the World Trade Centre collapse, interviews with survivors or bereaved relatives, stories of pain and suffering, heroic portrayals of rescuers, and moralizing about the need to defend our freedoms.

We will have drummed into us, subtly and not so subtly, the official story of how the U.S. was attacked by Muslim terrorists, and why we citizens must, for our own safety, willingly accept sacrifices to our civil liberties, the evisceration of the rule of law, the deaths of our soldiers in needless aggressions, and the mutation of our civilian police from law enforcers to law breakers.

There will be no proper context, factual analysis or intelligent debate because the commemoration is designed to impose obedience to authority, not foster understanding. If this sounds too bizarre for words, it shouldn’t; history is full of events that become moralized and take on a life of their own. The WTC attack, like the Crucifixion and the Holocaust™, is just another moralized historical event around which a moral absolutism is built. That absolutism engenders its own political authority to propagate the core belief and coerce public obedience to it. Those who reject the manufactured reality to seek the truth, suffer ostracism, slander, torture or even death. Truth is the enemy of the state.

In each of these three examples, a prominent death has been exploited to coerce public obedience to a political authority. The Christian Church uses the icon of the crucified, and then risen, Jesus to compel Christians into self-identify with it accepting that Jesus died for them.

But why would Jesus go out of his way to be tortured and put to death in such a gruesome manner? That question cannot be discussed freely because it invites alternate theories about Jesus’ nature and motives, many of which are contained in the gnostic gospels.

Imposing belief in the literal truth of the Crucifixion and Resurrection had nothing to do with Jesus, but everything to do with the Church, whose political authority is based not on the history of Jesus but on the myth of Jesus. Since a myth cannot withstand scrutiny because it has no rational foundation, so the Church can only defend its power by waging war on free belief and massacring its critics, even heterodox Christians.

The Zionism Church (a.k.a. Israel and The Lobby) exploits Hitler’s persecution of Jews to sermonize about Jewish victimhood. The emotional blackmail of Jewish suffering includes the mantra of 6 million dead, gas chambers, Western guilt for not saving Jews, and the belief that Jews need a “homeland” to be free from persecution.

But are not Jews today persecuting Palestinians, and do not Palestinians deserve a homeland for the same reason? Can’t ask that question! If you doubt or in anyway weaken the canonical verities of the 6 million dead, the gas chambers, and the need for Israel you’re not only a heretic but an “anti-Semite,” and deserving of whatever persecution or violence that is inflicted on you. Israel is based on myths, not fact, and the fear of having those myths uncovered lies behind the Zionist persecution of free belief [or even examination] and Palestinian rights.

The Terrorism Church (a.k.a. Project for the New American Century) has exploited the WTC attack to instill in us the myth that Muslim terrorists flew hijacked aircraft into the WTC and Pentagon, killing thousands of innocent Americans. The need to defend the U.S. from subsequent attacks made necessary the USA PATRIOT Act, which superseded the Constitution, and gave us our security-obsessed state.

But if Muslims in aircraft did all that, what explains all those explosions in the buildings below the level of impact, and the inability of a steel-framed structure to withstand a simple fire the way WTC1 did on Feb. 14, 1975? For that matter why would Muslims commit an act of violence knowing full well what the retribution would be? Way out of bounds! Any question about what happened and who was responsible invites analyses of the official absurdity, which the public is supposed to accept as holy writ. We can’t have a police-state if we don’t fear Muslims, and if we don’t fear Muslims, we need to ask who else could have planned and carried out the attack. That leads us to Israeli involvement, which is verboten.

The ability to believe an absurdity is easy if you accept the given zero-sum frame of reference between good and evil. If the absurdity is presented as “good,” then criticisms can be neatly compartmentalized and dismissed as “evil.” When George W. Bush said the Muslims attacked because they hate American freedoms, he reduced these alleged hijackers to evil stereotypes.

When a person or cause is stigmatized as evil, defence becomes impossible. This is why otherwise intelligent people cry “conspiracy theory” when faced with facts about the absurdity of the WTC narrative. To listen to a dissenting opinion would amount to respecting the devil. To foster this image, these “churches” promote hatred of the “other”: Jews killed Jesus; Nazis killed Jews; and Muslims attacked the WTC. (Though Nazis did kill Jews, this good/evil dogma does not recognize the Zionist Jews who helped run the concentration camps and prop up the Nazi regime.)

Without a convenient scapegoat for people to vent their hatred, and without the image of the state as society’s saviour, belief in the absurdity will collapse. It is here we see how official demonization of “terrorist” Muslims is similar to the daily “Two Minutes Hate” orgy in George Orwell’s 1984. The object of the hate is Emmanuel Goldstein, the number one “enemy of the people.” Goldstein was never proven to be a real person, but the daily hate hurled at his image reinforced public loyalty and dependence to the state security apparatus.

As you read this except from 1984, note how Orwell’s depiction of Goldstein as a contrived object of hatred closely resembles our depiction of Osama bin Laden:

Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even—so it was occasionally rumoured—in some hiding-place in Oceania itself…. What was strange was that although Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers, in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were in spite of all this, his influence never seemed to grow less. Always there were fresh dupes waiting to be seduced by him. A day never passed when spies and saboteurs acting under his directions were not unmasked by the Thought Police. He was the commander of a vast shadowy army, an underground network of conspirators dedicated to the overthrow of the State.

As if on cue, Israel’s Canadian satrap Stephen Harper gave official sanction to hatred of Muslims in an interview with the CBC. After Sept. 11, 2001, he said the major threat to Canada was still “Islamicism”—a nonsense propaganda term meant to incite public hatred of Muslims and sympathy for the state. To emphasize the point, Harper claimed that Canada even had “homegrown” Islamic radicals, necessitating a return to arbitrary police-state powers to execute warrantless arrests and coerce testimony from witnesses. According to the CBC, neither the police or prosecutors had a reason to make use of these powers, but now we’re supposed to believe they do have a reason?

“WTC Victim–Hate Week” reaches its nauseating crescendo on Sunday, but unlike Oceania, Canada has no law to compel citizens to take part. It is therefore the duty of every rational human being not to participate in this orgy of fraud. Wherever you find yourself: Turn off. Tune out. Unplug. Disbelieve.

~

Greg Felton is an investigative journalist specializing in the Middle East, Canadian politics, the media, and language. He holds a Master’s Degree in political science from the University of British Columbia and speaks French, Russian, and Mandarin. He is author of The Host and The Parasite: How Israel’s Fifth Column Consumed America.

September 10, 2011 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

Venezuela Rejects New U.S. Sanctions against High-Ranking Officials

Venezuelanalysis.com | September 9th 2011

Merida – On Thursday the Venezuelan government “strongly rejected” a U.S. Treasury Department decision to sanction four members of the country’s political and military establishment, calling the move “another expression of the imperial and arrogant character by which these institutions act against our countries.” The declaration came in response to the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) that placed four Venezuelan nationals on an updated list of “Specially Designated Nationals” accused of arming leftist guerrillas in neighboring Colombia.

The four men “sanctioned” by the U.S. Treasury Department are socialist lawmaker and former Caracas mayor Freddy Bernal, Latin American assemblyman Amilcar Figueroa, Army General Cliver Alcala, and intelligence office Ramon Isidro Madriz Moreno.

According to a U.S. Treasury press release, the four have acted “for or on behalf of the narco-terrorist organization the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), often in direct support of its narcotics and arms trafficking activities.”

The men join three other high-ranking Venezuelan officials already on the U.S. list: General Henry Rangel Silva, General Hugo Carvajal, and former interior minister Ramon Rodriguez Chacin.

While no concrete evidence was provided to demonstrate the men’s “support” for the Colombian guerrillas, the U.S. decision prohibits U.S. citizens from “engaging in transactions” with the men and places a freeze on “any assets that they may have under U.S. jurisdiction.”

In response to the OFAC decision, Venezuelan Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro called the United States a “sick society” that is responsible for “this sickness of narco-trafficking.” He accused the U.S. of attempting to serve as “a kind of global police to judge decent citizens of our country” and called the move “abusive.”

Venezuela’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs later issued a public statement in which it affirmed the “sanctions” are “part of the permanent defamatory campaigns orchestrated in the imperial power centers of the United States, precisely aimed at nourishing hostile policies against our homeland.”

Responding to the U.S. decision, sanctioned PSUV lawmaker Freddy Bernal called the move an “attack on the homeland” that was aimed at harming the “process underway” in Venezuela that seeks “liberation through socialism.”

Bernal said he was “proud” of the U.S. classification, since Bolivian President Evo Morales and Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa had received similar accusations, and told reporters he “could care less about the U.S. government” since he had no foreign bank accounts, properties abroad, and had no interest in visiting the United States in the near future.

With respect to all four men sanctioned, Bernal said the U.S. was looking to “disqualify those of us who have been the most loyal soldiers (to Chavez) and who have taken on the consequences associated to a Bolivarian loyalty and dignity.”

“The objective of the U.S. Empire,” said Bernal, “is to create the conditions to attack Venezuela and justify doing so with these lies.”

In recent years, the U.S. and Colombian governments have repeatedly accused the government of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez of supporting the FARC insurgency in its decades-long war against the Colombian government. During the presidency of Colombia’s Alvaro Uribe (2002 – 2010), accusations by Uribe led Venezuela’s Chavez to increase his country’s military presence along the border with Colombia in “defensive preparation” for war with Colombia.

In 2008, after the Colombian military carried out an armed raid against FARC rebels hidden in Ecuadorian territory, relations worsened.

After the raid, the Colombian government said it had “uncovered” numerous documents on the laptop computer of assassinated FARC Commander Raul Reyes, document they said proved Venezuela’s support for the armed insurgency.

More commonly referred to as the “FARC Files,” these documents were later found “inadmissible” by the Colombian Supreme Court which said it could not be certain the files were not tampered with by members of the Colombian security forces.

While the U.S. Treasury Department did not provide any concrete evidence linking the four Venezuelan nations to the FARC insurgency, an article in the Washington Post suggests the accusations are based on the same “FARC Files.”

The “Specially Designated” Four

Freddy Bernal, considered a “leader” of the ruling the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), served as mayor of Caracas from 2000 to 2008. He began his political career as a member of Chavez’s Fifth Republic Movement (MVR) and was first elected to the country’s National Assembly in 1998. A year later, he was elected to the Venezuelan Constitutional Assembly, which drafted the Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela (1999). In April 2002, during the failed military coup against democratically-elected president Hugo Chavez, Bernal played a key role in mobilizing pro-Chavez forces against the military government installed in the Miraflores Presidential Palace.

Bernal was an outspoken supporter of the formation of the PSUV (2007) and was elected to the Venezuelan National Assembly in last year’s parliamentary elections. He currently leads government efforts to reduce gun violence in the country, including draft legislation against easy access to guns and ammunition.

Amilcar Figueroa is a Venezuelan historian, former guerrilla fighter, and active member of the PSUV’s leadership in Caracas. He was elected to represent Venezuela at the Latin American Parliament for the 2006 – 2011 period and served as the organizations Alternate President from 2006 to 2008. In 2009, a Colombian court accused Figueroa of providing support to the FARC, based on information said to have been found in the “FARC Files.”

Cliver Alcala is Major General of the Fourth Armored Division of the Venezuelan Army, one of the country’s most important army units, and Ramon Isidro Madriz Moreno is an officer of the Bolivarian Intelligence Service (SEBIN), Venezuela’s national intelligence agency.

September 10, 2011 Posted by | Deception, Progressive Hypocrite | Leave a comment

Noam Chomsky Believes 9/11 Lies

September 9, 2011 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular, Video, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

Obama’s Jobs Plan

Moon of Alabama | September 9, 2011

Obama’s jobs plan:

  • “We will continue to falsely diagnose a solvency crisis as a normal liquidity recession.” (I would otherwise have to demand credit write downs from those criminal banksters who pay for my reelection bid.)
  • “We will cut the payroll taxes which pay for social security.” (This will make it easier to later gut the whole program.)
  • “We will pay for that by later cutting Medicare and Medicaid.” (See how I never lose sight of my original aims.)
  • “We also ask the Congress super-committee to find more ways to cut spending.” (Time for the cat food commission to earn its name.)
  • “We will give tax breaks to companies that hire workers.” (Just fire them from those well payed jobs, rehire them for less and get another tax break. What’s not to like here?)
  • “We will give some money to the cities and towns so they can keep more policemen on their payrolls.” (We will need those when the people eventually start to revolt.)
  • “We will put up $10 billion of the people’s money toward a public-private infrastructure bank. (Here is some upfront money for the banksters to privatize more of the now public owned space.)
  • “We will also offer money to rehab vacant and foreclosed houses that are now owned by the banks.” (They never really wanted those houses so why should they pay for them?)
  • “We ask Congress to pass this immediately.” (Please don’t give anyone time to find out what really is behind these ideas.)

September 9, 2011 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Economics, Progressive Hypocrite | Leave a comment

Too Many Inconvenient Truths

By Guy Somerset  | Taki’s Magazine | August 26, 2011

On July 18, 2011, Sean Hoare was found mysteriously deceased by London police. This is notable for two reasons.

The first reason is that Hoare was a primary whistle-blower in the unfolding crisis at News Corporation. The scandal has implicated multitudes in illegal and immoral electronic eavesdropping on everyone from an abducted teenager to Prince William and his brother.

The second and far more ominous reason is because Sean Hoare’s demise was not suspicious in any way. The London police, though already implicated in the scandal for widespread corruption through bribe-taking and callow complicity in shuttering earlier eavesdropping investigations, assure us it is so.

Naturally, only the pitifully paranoid or unsettlingly obsessed would doubt this claim.

Everyone knows whistle-blowers are by far the most likely people to generally have poor timing in all matters of corporeal termination. At the most inopportune times they are prone to hang themselves, have inconvenient heart attacks, overdose on pills, and get into car accidents in which the other parties mysteriously vanish.

“In novels and films the hero is lauded for his efforts at illuminating this world’s evils. In reality the hero is usually not identified at all, except perhaps by his remains.”

Thus, absolutely no one else was involved in Sean Hoare’s accident. It is a certainty that this will be deemed a former narcotics abuser’s drug overdose. Simple as that. We know this because we are told so (and we know to heed the master’s halt). Here are a few historical examples to erase all doubt.

DR. DAVID KELLY

Dr. David Kelly was a British scientist and expert in biological warfare employed by the British Ministry of Defence. He also became a very inconvenient figure when he met for an unauthorized discussion with a BBC reporter about the true state of the government’s dossier concerning Iraq’s supposed stockpiles of chemical weapons.

Dr. Kelly disputed claims that Iraq had the capability to fire biological weapons within 45 minutes, a major British argument for invading Iraq the second time. While Kelly said he believed it likely Iraq secreted some modicum of chemical weapons following international inspections, he was dubious as to their extent and immediate threat. Following his own inspections in Iraq, Kelly became more certain of his suspicions and spoke to a reporter from The Observer to state that Iraq did not possess mobile germ-warfare laboratories and that Iraqi claims of such devices being innocuous hydrogen-balloon production facilities were entirely accurate.

Yet what might have turned into an embarrassment for the British government and a serious impediment to its second war on Iraq was all but erased from memory when Dr. Kelly decided to kill himself. Despite numerous supportive letters and emails, a supposedly despondent Kelly went for his usual evening walk and ingested 29 painkiller tablets. Then for good measure, he cut his wrists. No one saw him do it and his family says they didn’t believe it, but what would they know? Kelly was gone, along with any hope of others in similar positions coming forward to prevent thousands of deaths and billions squandered. Naturally, Dr. Kelly’s keen sense of timing made it a good day for government and gun-sellers the world over.

COMMERCE SECRETARY RON BROWN

Ron Brown was United States Secretary of Commerce in the first Clinton Administration, appointed following exceptionally successful fundraising. He perished in a 1996 air crash near Croatia. Weather was claimed to have been the cause, though anyone who took the extra step of investigating would have learned the storms were not nearly so severe as initially stated. Following the accident, no public contact was made for a full 10 hours. Rescuers, much as they would later be during the JFK, Jr., disappearance, were directed toward the opposite direction of the crash site. When they finally reached the scene, a flight attendant was said to be upright and conscious (but died of a broken neck before reaching the hospital).

When additional rescue crews arrived, everyone was dead. Witnesses at Brown’s autopsy claimed he had what appeared to be a bullet hole in his temple region. Obviously, they must have been mistaken. It was merely the age-old “Whistle-Blowers’ Malady” which had struck. Ron Brown (who had already stated if he was going to jail, he wasn’t “going alone”) had been under investigation by US independent counsel and nearing indictment before Congress to answer charges of corruption followed up with widely rumored interrogation regarding the Clintons’ questionable financial dealings.

KAREN SILKWOOD

Karen Silkwood was a woman who worked at the Kerr-McGee nuclear plant near Crescent, Oklahoma. As a member of the Oil, Chemical & Atomic Workers Union’s bargaining committee, she was assigned to investigate health and safety issues. Apparently there were innumerable violations at the plant, most notably those of exposing workers to contamination. As a consequence, Silkwood testified before the Atomic Energy Commission. Later that year, she was found to have plutonium contamination 400 times the legal limit. Following decontamination she was deemed to have similar levels of poisoning the next day, despite having been assigned only paperwork at the plant. On a third day her levels of radiation were even higher, to the point she expelled contaminated air from her lungs as she breathed. A decontamination team was sent to her home, which was determined to be heavily exposed to radiation.

Silkwood by then had assembled a wealth of paperwork on the conditions at Kerr-McGee, including her own plutonium poisoning, which was found to have originated from a section of the plant she had not been able to access for at least four months. A meeting was set with a reporter from The New York Times and a national official from her union. Yet that night, as she drove en route from a local union meeting, she had a fatal car accident. Naturally, sleeping pills were found on the scene and the police deemed the cause due to a weary driver. Certainly no official report has ever been altered and no surreptitious injection ever made to a person’s body.

Authorities discounted skid marks on the road, damage on the rear of Silkwood’s auto, and microscopic paint chips belonging to another vehicle. All the documentation she was carrying concerning Kerr-McGee’s supposedly dangerous and criminal operations mysteriously disappeared. Still, only the paranoid regard this case as other than an accident. In no way related to the abuses she helped expose, grounds at the plant were still being decontaminated 25 years on.

RUDOLF HESS

Rudolf Hess was the longest-held prisoner of World War II. He was interned at Landau Prison until 1987 when, like all inconvenient figures, he hanged himself with electrical cord. Nothing should be made of the fact that the 93-year-old Hess was physically unable to raise his hands above his head. No mention should be made of the overwhelming evidence that in 1941 he had embarked from Germany on his way to Scotland to meet with members of the highest levels of British establishment after the fall of France in an attempt to end the war before it reached catastrophic levels of devastation. (The earliest period of that conflict was called the “Phoney War.”)

Moreover, one is requested to ignore the verified reports that not long before the incident, even Winston Churchill’s cabinet came quite close (save Winston) in voting to end hostilities and sue for peace before widespread destruction ensued. As to Hess, upon landing short of his destination he requested to be taken to the Duke of Hamilton. Unfortunately for the course of Western Civilization, this was denied and his cache of documents was removed from him. For the next several decades he was held (in isolation) far longer than those who actually committed wartime atrocities. As a possible release neared, he killed himself with no witnesses, though in 2008 Hess’s medical caretaker publicly stated the British SIS had aided Hess in exiting the mortal plane. Though immediately fired for this outrageous act of honesty, that man has thankfully not otherwise suffered.

All of the above people died by accident. Although they knew things that powerful people preferred they did not know, none of them was inconvenient to the powers that be. None of them had millionaires and politicians as enemies.

This is clearly the best of all possible worlds. Neither business nor government has any but the noblest intentions. Decent people are always rewarded justly and richly, and no one ever gets killed for doing the right thing.

Thus, we know that the one man with a semblance of conscience in the Murdoch hacking case had a simple narcotics overdose. Any contrary notion is idiotic, conspiratorial, and laughable.

In novels and films the hero is lauded for his efforts at illuminating this world’s evils. In reality the hero is usually not identified at all, except perhaps by his remains.

And now if the author will be excused, one must need return to bright coloring books, composition of cheerful songs concerning equality, and the reading of fairy tales and fables.

September 8, 2011 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

“Free Tripoli” – just don’t mention the corpses

By Lizzie Phelan | Pravda | September 6, 2011

The war on Libya has not only been a war that has vindicated NATO’s claim to the most powerful military force on earth, capable of imposing its will through sheer aggression wherever it sees fit, but it has also been a war that has reasserted the western mainstream media’s power to not just fabricate events but to create.

The first media victory was when it got away with claiming that Gaddafi’s government was attacking it’s own citizens in Tripoli from the air, a claim which formed part of the pretext for NATO’s intervention and also served to create panic and anger amongst the city’s residents. No one was held to account when later Russian intelligence satellites and visits from independent observers to the areas alleged to have been targeted, revealed no evidence that such attacks had taken place.

One of the most powerful lies was churned out by none other than British Foreign Secretary William Hague who claimed in the first days of the crisis that Gaddafi had fled to Venezuela. The Libyan government admitted repeatedly that their media was wholly incompetent and unable to provide alternative information at the time, with the result that the people of Libya like the rest of the world believed the claims that were being made. In this instance the result was to create a sense even amongst his traditional support base that they had been abandoned and betrayed. Of course Mr Hague made no apology for such irresponsible remarks when soon after Gaddafi showed his face in the streets of Tripoli.

More recently, the BBC has yet to apologise for using blatantly fake footage from a demonstration in India claiming it was in Tripoli’s Green Square, as part of their evidence that the city had fallen.

Such fabrications continued throughout the six months, as the media reported that areas had been “captured” by the rebels, when in reality, these areas had been blitzed from the air and the sea by NATO rockets with the sole aim of destroying any threat of resistance to its allies the rebels.

As the alliance bombed the rebels’ path to Tripoli, on its way massacring at least 85 civilians in the Zlitan town of Majer, the leaders of hundreds of the country’s tribes, including the largest, Wafalla, Tarhouna, Washafana and Zlitan, reasserted their determination to defend their areas, and to descend on Tripoli should it come under threat.

Meanwhile, the masses of men and women of Tripoli who turned out in rallies against the rebels, felt confident that should the rebels show up in their city they would be able to defeat them with the arms that Gaddafi’s government had been issuing to them since the beginning of the crisis.

Now many of those people have been massacred, have fled or are in hiding. They may or may not have underestimated the ruthless might of NATO, but the media’s narrative that Tripoli fell without resistance is contested by the fact that it took the massacre of thousands and at least five days to establish tentative TNC control of the capital as well as by eyewitnesses accounts of what happened during those five days and beyond.

From the beginning of the fighting in Tripoli on August 20th when I and 35 other journalists became trapped inside the Rixos hotel, it was virtually impossible to get a clear idea of what was happening on the streets outside. Throughout that period the sounds of bombs, gunfire and other heavy weaponry was almost non-stop, with shrapnel and bullets occasionally making their way inside the hotel. But like the rest of the world, the only information we had, apart from the odd moments of communication with contacts inside the city, was from the mainstream international media.

Since my release, I have begun to collate information from residents in the capital in the absence of information from sources which are recognized internationally as “independent”. The following report is based on these accounts and the sources identity must be kept confidential due to the systematic targeting of anyone who betrays disloyalty to the rebels, which as I experienced myself, includes challenging their version of events in the media.

On the first day, rebels from sleeper cells inside Tripoli emerged and began attacking checkpoints manned by Libyan special forces. As is the pattern with their advance into areas on the way to the capital they faced a swift initial defeat. But the first images emerging around the world of the rebels inside Tripoli NATO ensured it would not be short lived. The organisation sanctioned to “protect civilians”, rapidly moved to bomb all checkpoints in the densely packed city. The vast majority of these were manned by volunteers – ie ordinary citizens that had been armed with Kalashnikovs since the beginning of the crisis – so that the rebels could easily move into the city by sea and by road. (see attached image of mother and 17 year old daughter, both volunteers manning checkpoint in Tripoli.)

This was followed by masses of youth and other residents in the capital pouring into the streets to defend their city as they had pledged to do during mass rallies.

The following day, NATO responded with intensified aggression. Eyewitnesses report that during this day, the broadcasting station in Tripoli was bombed, killing dozens. Shortly after the rebels claimed control of Libyan TV and the international media dutifully repeated the claim, blocking any mention of how the takeover had occurred.

Adding to the media’s campaign of confusion, reports of Gaddafi’s sons being caught and that Gaddafi along with other family members had fled the country continued to beam out of televisions across the world.

Having become accustomed to such psychological operations designed to weaken the people’s support for the government by making them believe it had betrayed them, masses defied the reports and marched to Green Square. From inside the Rixos, during the short periods when phone access was revived, my contacts in the city who were in Green Square at the time, informed me that Muammar Gaddafi had been seen driving through the city in his army fatigues urging people to remain strong and not be deceived by the west’s relentless propaganda. This has since been reported by further contact with other residents who were in the streets at the time.

Following relentless bombardment, the masses were pushed back to Gaddafi’s compound Bab al-Azizia where they resisted the rebels’ advance for a further 24 hours. It was during this time that Saif al-Islam, who until then the media and International Criminal Court had been insisting was captured and arrested, showed up at the Rixos hotel where we were trapped. Calm and confident, he took out a group of journalists to Bab al-Azizia where upon their return, they confirmed seeing thousands in and around the compound waving the green flag, including as the tribes had pledged, from their people across the country.

But like the peaceful march in the western mountains on July 24th which was attacked by NATO and the rebels, the masses in Bab al-Azizia were broken up by NATO bombing an entrance for the rebels and attacks by Apache gunships.

The same fate was visited upon gatherings in Green Square. Bab al-Azizia alone was reported to have been bombed 63 times during that time.

With both Green Square and Bab-Alzizia now in control of the rebels, the resistance continued in areas like Tripoli’s poorest neighbourhood Abu Saleem, which a few weeks previously had held a mass demonstration against the NATO aggression and in support of the Jamahiriya. Fighting against the rebels also raged on in Salah Eldeen and El Hadba.

Armed with Kalashnikovs and Rocket Propelled Grenades, the citizens of these areas fighting 8,000 kg bombs, Apache gunships, US, European and UAE special forces and the rebels laden with NATO’s sophisticated weaponry, became part of the carnage and piles of bodies were reported to line the streets.

Since then, any area known to have supported Gaddafi has reportedly been bombed or been subjected to homes and apartments being burnt and looted. And even the mainstream media has been unable to ignore the systematic targeting and lynching of anyone with black skin. It is widely known that Gaddafi’s opponents deeply loathed his rhetoric and policies in support of Black Africa.

With Sirt, Sabha and Beni Walid being amongst the last areas still flying the green flag high, the rebels claim to be giving these a deadline before they resort to a “military response”, implying that in the meantime, a non-military avenue will be pursued. Yet again, the media fail to highlight that the rebels’ ally, NATO, has been openly bombing these areas.

The same media has unquestioningly swallowed NATO’s line that the targets have been exclusively “Gaddafi’s forces”, in the face of evidence before their very eyes to the contrary and in the absence of any independent investigation into the death toll of the 30,000 bombs estimated to have been dropped over the past six months.

The last concrete figures on the second day of fighting put the death toll in 12 hours of fighting in Tripoli alone at 1,300 with 900 injured. Far from Tripoli falling without resistance these figures suggest that Tripoli fell with the masses resisting being massacred.

As in Zlitan, Zawiya and elsewhere, the same atrocities as those committed in Tripoli, are being carried out in Beni Walid and Sirt with the complete silent complicity of journalists and “independent” observers on the ground. This is “free Libya”, so long as the thousands of dead and in hiding upon which it is based goes unmentioned.

September 7, 2011 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, War Crimes | Leave a comment

The Pending US-Colombia Free Trade Agreement: False Claims Versus Hard Realities

By James Jordan, National Co-Coordinator for the Alliance for Global Justice | September 6, 2011

With a little more than a year till the 2012 elections the White House and Congressional leadership are anxious to pass pending Free Trade Agreements (FTA) as soon as possible. Most worrisome of all is the pending FTA between the US and Colombia. Corporate leaders and US and Colombian government officials with their public relations operatives are peddling lie after lie to justify passage.

The following guide put together by The Alliance for Global Justice will help people to better understand and counter the falsehoods they will be hearing and countering in the coming weeks.

Distinguishing between fact and fiction with claims regarding the pending US-Colombia Free Trade Agreement

CLAIM: Passing the FTA will put the US in a better position to pressure Colombia to improve its labor and human rights record.

REALITY: US intervention in Colombia has caused more problems than it has helped and the FTA would only make things worse. Recent investigations by the Colombian Attorney General have uncovered extensive US involvement regarding domestic spying by former President Álvaro Uribe’s administration. Information was shared with and analyzed by embassy staff and domestic spying programs were funded by the CIA. Activities included gaining access to the bank accounts, following the families and bugging the offices of Colombian magistrates.

Targets also included labor leaders. According to an August 20, 2011 Washington Post article, “Another unit that operated for eight months in 2005, the Group to Analyze Terrorist Organization Media, assembled dossiers on labor leaders, broke into their offices and videotaped union activists. The United States provided equipment and tens of thousands of dollars, according to an internal DAS report, and the unit’s members regularly met with an embassy official they remembered as ‘Chris Sullivan.'”

Furthermore, through Plan Colombia, the US and Colombia adopted policies that reject dialogue and negotiations for peace in favor of a military solution for the country’s ongoing civil war, on which the US has spent over $7 billion since 2000. The result has been massive displacement of rural populations, military scandals and murder and disappearances, yet no path opened toward resolution. Meanwhile, non-military aid has more often than not been used to fund programs that augment war and repression.

There is no reason whatsoever to believe that the quest for peace and human rights in Colombia would be bettered by increasing US influence through passage of the pending FTA.

CLAIM: Colombia has already made significant progress in its labor rights record and it deserves for the US to pass the FTA as a reward for Colombia’s “good behavior”.

REALITY: Colombia continues to lead the world in the number of unionists murdered, year after year registering more assassinations than the rest of the world combined. In 2008 there were 48 unionists murdered, in 2009 there were 29 and in 2010, there were 51, 19 of whom were members of teachers unions. In 2009 the rate of impunity for labor and other political assassinations was 95.6%. In 2010 that rate had gone up to 98.5%, and in 2011 a court study showed the rate to have risen to over 99%.

US corporations are guilty of increasing the violence against unionists. Drummond Coal Company, based in Birmingham, Alabama, was caught making payments to death squads that assassinated union leaders. Chiquita Banana was found guilty in US court and fined for paying death squads, and Coca-Cola has long been implicated in assassinations of unionists at its bottling company.

CLAIM: The Labor Action Plan agreed on by the Obama and Santos administrations has granted important concessions and protections to Colombian unions, and passage of the FTA will help assure that this plan is truly implemented.

REALITY: There is no enforcement mechanism for the concessions in the plan. Furthermore, an AFL-CIO statement says, “…the Labor Action Plan fails to include commitments with regard to collective bargaining in the public sector, collective bargaining above the enterprise level, or collective bargaining over pensions.” Most worrisome is that workers are supposed to accept, on good faith, that anti-labor violence and better worker conditions will be assured in the future. But with 3,000 unionists killed in the past 25 years, there’s no good faith left.

CLAIM: Colombia has already made significant progress in its human rights record and it deserves for the US to pass the FTA as a reward for Colombia’s “good behavior”.

REALITY: Since Santos has taken office, members of the political opposition have been assassinated on an average of one every three days. The estimated number of disappearances has risen from around 50,000 to more than 61,000.

While roughly half of Colombia’s people live in poverty and half of its children are not in school (estimates vary from as low as 43% to 65% for both), Colombia has the second highest defense budget in Latin America, following the much bigger Brazil. Instead of building schools, the government has been engaged in a 11 year project, with US funding, to build a series of new prisons to accommodate an explosion in incarceration, including a 300% increase in political arrests.

The Colombian government holds well over 7,500 political prisoners. Only 500 to 1,000 of these are Prisoners of War. The vast majority are in jail for legal and nonviolent resistance. Some 5,000 of these captives are from rural populations. The most common charge against political prisoners is that of “Rebellion”. Comparatively, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) are holding somewhere between 10 and 20 captives.

CLAIM: Passage of the US-Colombia FTA will help bring peace and stability to Colombia and will renew the confidence of would-be investors.

REALITY: If recent behavior is any indication, the administration of President Santos and the Colombian military have no interest in peace. Nor does the US government, as long as it insists on the military solution to Colombia’s conflict.

From August 12-15, 2011, more than 20,000 peasant, indigenous and Afro-Colombian community members, along with representatives from the Catholic Church, national and international human rights defenders and leaders of social and labor movements, gathered for a National Encounter for the Land and Peace. While the conference was commencing, the Colombian military began a commencement of its own, undertaking an indiscriminate and unprovoked bombardment of the municipality of Chaparral, Tolima.

While the Encounter was still underway, Pres. Santos declared the door to negotiations was “closed” and that he had “the key and the key is in my pocket”. That same weekend, Santos went on to say that “Advocacy for peace is harmful.”

In the weeks preceding and including the Encounter, seven peasant labor leaders and one human rights defender were arbitrarily arrested in Putumayo with no reasons given nor charges made. And in the two weeks following the Encounter, there have already been a number of assassinations, assassination attempts and disappearances of members of the political opposition and unionists.

The best way to increase investor confidence in Colombia is not through war and repression nor via neoliberal trade agreements. What is needed is dialogue that brings together all major sectors of Colombian society to work out a political solution to the conflict. That is the only way to foster an atmosphere of real stability.

CLAIM: The US-Colombia FTA, along with Santos administration’s agrarian reform plan, will help develop the rural infrastructure, create new jobs for farm workers, and help reestablish displaced farming families.

REALITY: After some 13 years of Plan Colombia, an estimated 4 to 5 million persons have been forcibly displaced, 60% of these being from farming families and 60 to 70% being women and girls. During the first ten years of Plan Colombia (1998 to 2008), 760,000 peasant families were forcibly removed from over 13.5 million acres. Conversely, paramilitary death squads now control some 10 million acres of the country’s most fertile land. In almost all cases where there has been massive displacement, the vacuum has been filled by big landowners, narco-traffickers, agribusinesses and transnational mining and energy corporations.

The Santos agrarian reform plan does more to consolidate displacement and land loss than to make up for it. Farmers who come from families that have cultivated plots for generations are being asked to show titles in areas where titles have never been used or kept. Much of the dispossessed farm land has been replaced by African Palm plantations. Farming families from these areas who are participating in the agrarian reform are being told that they will have to wait until the plantations reap a full crop before they can return. That is a process that takes up to 10 years. Since African Palm plantations are notorious for leaving the soil depleted, when these farmers come back to their plots, they will be trying to raise crops on wasted terrain. Ultimately, only a minority of displaced farmers will be able to return to their land, while ownership will be consolidated for a majority of the interests that have benefited most from the forced removal of rural people.

CLAIM: The US-Colombia FTA, as well as pending FTAs with Panama and South Korea, will bring jobs to workers in all the involved countries.

REALITY: Neoliberal free trade policies have been a big part of the reason that economic crises are taking place all over the world and have led to ever widening gaps between the rich and the poor. Colombia has the second largest gap between the rich and the poor in South America and the eighth largest worldwide, according to the World Bank’s World Development Institute. The FTA will make matters worse.

For US workers, FTAs have not lead to more and better jobs, but to blighted, failing cities where industries once thrived and to rural areas where it has become almost impossible for family farms to survive. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) maintains that KORUS will make the US trade deficit with Korea twice as bad, up to $26.9 billion annually within seven years. This will result in 888,000 jobs lost as a result of Korean imports. If one figures in employment created by increased US exports and jobs lost because of the already existing deficit with South Korea, there are some 200,000 jobs that will be lost. The EPI predicts a US-Colombia FTA will result in a loss of 55,000 jobs.

CLAIM: The US Congress and President Obama were elected to listen to, represent and serve the people of the US and to act in their best interests.

REALITY: According to a poll conducted by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal in 2010, the number of US residents surveyed who believe FTAs hurt the country went up to 53% from 32% in 1999. And this unhappiness with FTAs reaches across political perspectives. The NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, as well as a separate poll that same year by the Pew Research Center, show that over 60% of both Tea Party sympathizers and union families oppose FTAs. And both Tea Partiers and union members vote at higher rates than the general public. So who is the White House and Congressional Leadership listening to if it is not We, The People?

Will Congress and the White House listen to the US people and stop trying to pass these harmful FTAs? One thing is for sure…they are sure to pass them if we don’t stand up and tell them not to.

September 7, 2011 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Economics, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

Satire: Experts’ stunning confession proves controlled demolition NOT responsible for 9/11 WTC destruction

By Carmen Yarrusso | Intrepid Report | September 6, 2011

Nobody can deny the neat collapse of three World Trade Center buildings into their footprints at nearly free-fall speeds looks exactly like so-called “controlled demolition.” And yes, high-rise fires (many bigger, more intense, and longer lasting than those at the WTC) had never come close to bringing down a modern steel-framed building until it happened THREE times in one day on 9/11. But just because something looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, smells like a duck, tastes like a duck, and wears a tee shirt that reads: I’M A DUCK, YOU IDIOT!!!!, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a duck.

Thirty courageous experts from the handful of elite companies that implode modern steel-framed buildings have released a stunning joint confession that strongly disputes the claim that controlled demolition was used to destroy the three WTC buildings. They call themselves Licensed Implosion Authorities Renouncing Stupidity (LIARS).

Here’s the LIARS press release:

We, the Licensed Implosion Authorities Renouncing Stupidity (LIARS), are patriotic Americans who come forward on this solemn tenth anniversary of the 9/11 disaster to emphatically refute the absurd notion that controlled demolition brought down the WTC buildings. We’re well aware the information we’re exposing guarantees we’ll be condemned and ostracized by the controlled demolition industry; in fact, our lives may be in danger. But America needs to know the truth.

The sad truth is this: the few elite companies that implode large steel-framed buildings are guilty of massive fraud. The typical months of preparation, the careful placing of thousands of explosives, and the meticulous timing of explosions are COMPLETELY unnecessary. Consider the following facts from Controlled Demolition, Inc.’s website describing the tallest building ever imploded using controlled demolition, Detroit’s 439 ft J. L. Hudson Department Store:

  • a 21-man crew needed three months to investigate the complex and four more months to complete the implosion design
  • the steel support columns weighed over 500 lb/ft, with up to 7.25 inch thick laminated steel flanges and 6 inch thick webs
  • each column was analyzed to determine the actual load it carried and then cutting torches were used to carefully scarf-off the steel plates in order to use smaller charges to cut the remaining steel
  • the steel support columns were severed using a complex delay system to keep hundreds of thousands of tons of debris within the building’s 420 ft by 220 ft footprint
  • a 12-person crew took 24 days to place 4,118 separate charges in 1,100 locations on support columns on 9 levels. 36,000 ft of detonating cord and 4,512 non-electrical delay elements were used for the implosion initiation system using 2,728 lb of explosives

Demolition company insiders have long known that all this elaborate preparation is just for show to inflate their profits. They’ve always claimed it’s necessary to carefully sever ALL the main support columns at the lower levels to get the structure to fall straight into its footprint.

The American people must be told there’s absolutely no need to weaken the support columns at the lower levels. In fact, there’s no need to do ANYTHING AT ALL to the lower floors of a modern steel-framed building. Just randomly sever several support columns on a few floors near the TOP of the structure, ignite a few small short-lived oil fires to weaken a few horizontal supports, and watch the building quickly fall straight into its footprint.

It doesn’t matter much which few floors near the top or which support columns are chosen. The South tower had support columns randomly severed between floors 78 to 84 and the North tower had support columns randomly severed between floors 94 to 98. The lower 80 or 90 floors of these buildings were UNTOUCHED by explosives or cutting torches. Yet both buildings fell neatly into their footprints.

WTC Building 7 illustrates the fraud perpetrated by our industry even more dramatically than the collapse of the twin towers. Being only 47 stories, it didn’t even require severing of a few support columns. All it needed was some relatively small isolated fires to bring it straight down into its footprint.

The American people should ask themselves this: If this very simple, somewhat random method of imploding tall buildings isn’t reliable, how can you explain that it worked perfectly THREE TIMES on the same day?

We could have been using these simple techniques for all buildings imploded over the years. This for-profit fraud by our industry has wasted millions in demolition costs and, worse yet, caused the vast majority of Americans to erroneously believe it takes months of preparation and meticulously placed and timed explosives (especially on lower floors) to neatly collapse a steel-framed building into its footprint.

The 9/11 disaster certainly looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, smells like a duck, tastes like a duck, and wears a tee shirt that reads: I’M A DUCK, YOU IDIOT!!!!, but trust us, the LIARS, it’s not a duck.

Carmen Yarrusso lives on a river in a small town in New Hampshire. He often writes about uncomfortable truths.

September 6, 2011 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism | Leave a comment

Japan’s ex PM feared uninhabitable Tokyo – Fukushima update

Penny For Your Thoughts | September 6, 2011

What does Kan know that would cause him to have these thoughts?

Japan’s former premier Naoto Kan feared Tokyo would be rendered uninhabitable by the Fukushima nuclear crisis, he said in an interview published on Tuesday in which he recalled the ‘spine-chilling’ thought.
He added it would have been ‘impossible’ to evacuate all of the 30 million people in the event of a mass exclusion zone encompassing Tokyo

Are these the thoughts of an irrational man?

Or are these thoughts borne out of an access to information and knowledge that the general public is not allowed to know?

One has to wonder?

And the multiple problems with Fukushima rage on.

Of course you would never know it, judging by the mainstream media.

Just like nothing is going on…

So here are a couple of the latest news stories:

Tepco to build wall off Fukushima Daiichi Plant

The operator of the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant plans to build an iron wall on the ocean side of the plant to prevent radioactive water from leaking into the sea. Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) said more than 110,000 tons of highly radioactive water remains in the basements of reactor buildings at the plant.

The utility will use thousands of iron pipes to create an 800-meter-long wall surrounding the water intakes of 4 reactor facilities, NHK Japan’s website reported.

Don’t know if or how well this will work out?

Additionally there is a problem with tons of radioactive waste just piling up!

Growing piles of contaminated sewage, located hundreds of kilometers from Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear meltdown, are loaded with high levels of radioactive cesium, and the government has yet to come up with a policy for the country’s latest crisis. Tons of alarmingly high levels of radioactive cesium are being reported at a sewage treatment facility in Saitama, located more than 150 miles southwest of Fukushima, site of the triple nuclear meltdown last March after a devastating earthquake and tsunami.

Japan currently has more than a dozen sewage treatment plants currently faced with the same predicament and the government has yet to institute a policy in dealing with the quickly growing problem.

A Japanese delegation has headed to Chernobyl

A Japanese delegation will visit the ill-fated Chernobyl nuclear plant to study its experience in clean-up operations, speaker of Japan’s House of Representatives Takahiro Yokomichi said here.

The Japanese delegation wants to have first-hand information about the situation at the Chernobyl plant and to learn whatever lessons possible to prevent any such accidents, and to make use of Ukraine’s experience in the clean-up operations after the accident at the Fukushima nuclear plant, Yokomichi said yesterday.

Interesting article from a few days ago…

Why Fukushima is worse then Chernobyl

“Japan has been slow to admit the scale of the meltdown. But now the truth is coming out.”

While it is true that Japan has been very, very slow to admit the scale of meltdown, it is highly unlikely the “truth” is now forthcoming.
The fact of the matter is the radiation from Fukushima, that virtually covers the planet, is to dam hard to hide!

September 6, 2011 Posted by | Deception, Nuclear Power | Leave a comment

Financial Times betrays Thomas Friedman

By Belén Fernández | Pulse Media | September 5, 2011

Today marks the release of yet another book by Thomas Friedman, the New York Times’ prolific foreign affairs columnist whose articles over the years have exposed such trends as the “collective madness” of Palestinians and the progress in Mexican baby namesto more NAFTA-friendly alternatives than Juan, such as Alexander and Kevin.

Friedman’s latest book, endearingly titled That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back, is coauthored by Friedman’s “intellectual soulmate”, the foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum—a longtime staple of Friedman columns and a purveyor of such predictable notions as that “The real threat to world stability is not too much American power. It is too little American power”.

Despite having admitted to an audience in Istanbul that his two previous bestsellers—The World Is Flat and Hot, Flat, and Crowded, marketed as wakeup calls concerning globalization and clean energy, respectively—really “have nothing to do with technology or environment at heart” and are instead “basically cries of the heart to get my country focused on fixing itself”, Friedman managed to advertise That Used to Be Us as “the first book I’ve really written about America” during an interview with Fox’s Don Imus earlier this year.

Slightly more surprising than Friedman’s continuing habit of self-contradiction is a recent less-than-favorable review of the new book on the website of the Financial Times, the institution that in 2005 partnered with Goldman Sachs to bestow upon Friedman the first annual £30,000 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award for The World Is Flat. Friedman responded to the honor by referring to the pair as “two such classy organizations”, before finally conceding two years after the 2008 financial crisis that Goldman Sachs is perhaps in fact “utterly selfish”.

The FT.com review notes that the phrase “that used to be us” was appropriated from a statement by Barack Obama, in which the president lamented that “it makes no sense for China to have better rail systems than us, and Singapore having better airports than us”. FT.com refrains from pointing out that Obama’s complaints in this case are themselves presumably appropriated from Friedman’s own experiences with Chinese trains and Singaporean airports, given the columnist’s de facto position as presidential adviser.

Friedman’s incestuous relationship with centers of capitalist power does not, however, prevent him from being portrayed in the FT.com review as essentially defying reality with his new book by “reinforc[ing] the illusions of [American] exceptionalism” and immunity from historical patterns, and by promoting the “idea that a third-party movement could somehow enable America to avoid the decline that eventually overtakes every great power”.

Friedman will likely remain undeterred in his eternal quest to restore US glory and global domination. However, he may desire a more creative title for his next book than, for example, That Really Used to Be Us: How America Has Fallen Even Further Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back.

He might thus consider issuing an anthology of previously published excerpts entitled Thomas Friedman Recycled—which would additionally underscore his unwavering commitment to environmentalism and the notion that reform in the Arab world can be achieved by combining a “geo-green” strategy with the neoconservative strategy of contaminating the earth with depleted uranium munitions.

My book The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work will be released by Verso on Nov. 1.

September 5, 2011 Posted by | Deception, Environmentalism, Islamophobia | Leave a comment

Palmer Panel Needs Little Common Sense

By Richard Lightbown | Palestine Chronicle | September 4, 2011

The report of the UN Panel of Inquiry on the Gaza Flotilla Incident which was finally released on 2 September is an example of how dangerous a thing ‘a little learning’ can be.

Put into an ivory tower in New York far away from the scene of the crime and restricted to what information the Turkish and Israeli governments fed it, the Panel has exhibited a naïve understanding of the situation in Gaza. In a large part this was the result of the Panel’s implicit belief in the Turkel Report. This report by Israel’s commission of inquiry on the incident was the central part of the Israeli submission. While it boasts an impressive pedigree the report is actually a false witness that is intended to deceive. Despite hearing evidence on the adverse impacts of the closure from doctors who worked in Gaza the report ignored or rejected their evidence in favour of an undisclosed late submission from the military coordinator. Testimony by Israeli passengers on the Mavi Marmara of mistreatment of passengers and the honourable treatment of captured Israeli soldiers was ignored; as was testimony relating to the on-going occupation.

An explanation on the application of the Geneva Conventions to the blockade was rejected in favour of an opinion by Prof Rosenne that was written in 1946, three years before the Geneva Conventions were adopted. Testimony that all commercial sea traffic to Gaza has been prohibited since the beginning of the occupation in 1967 seems to have fallen on deaf ears or empty heads. Much of Turkel is based on written testimony, hearsay evidence and evidence from secret sources that cannot be verified.

It is also self-contradictory, as on a number of points relating to allegations of the use of firearms by passengers, which is a major theme of the report for which no dependable evidence has ever been produced. This report is a major work of misinformation yet it was accepted by the UN Panel without question.

Regrettably the Panel also exhibited its own bias towards Israel. (But after all the vice-chair Alvaro Ulribe was a major purchaser of Israeli arms while President of Columbia, and he is a recipient of the American Jewish Committee’s ‘Light Unto The Nations’ award. The conflict of interest was never explained.) When asserting that Israel has a need to defend itself by imposing the blockade the Panel made a number of references to the firing of rockets from Gaza. While these terror attacks against civilians are very real they do not occur in a vacuum. Yet the report contains no mention of the everyday shooting attacks against Palestinian farmers and fishermen, no mention of the routine bulldozing of crops and buildings and no censure of the widespread attacks on medical facilities and personnel during the war of 2008/9. In fact Gazans get very little mention in this report at all, despite being central to possibly the most important contemporary human rights struggle on the planet and an essential consideration for understanding what the struggle to defeat the blockade is all about.

In condemning flotilla organizers for indulging in a “dangerous and reckless act” the report refers to the offer to transfer all the cargos to Ashdod for onward transport to Gaza. Admittedly this was subsequently done with much fanfare for some of the goods taken from the flotilla. What is not clear is whether the prefabricated buildings and construction materials, amounting to more than half of the total cargos, was ever transferred to Gaza. What has been reported is that at least one truckload of goods was dumped in landfill in the Negev, that new computers intended for educational use in Gaza were stolen as were substantial amounts of cash intended for charitable causes, while mobility scooters were delivered without their batteries. Previous cargoes from the Spirit of Humanity and the Tali have similarly been lost. The Panel was naïve to put its faith in the goodwill of the Israeli authorities while rushing to condemn the flotilla organizers for recklessness.

It is on such unsafe assumptions and false points that the Panel’s endorsement of the legitimacy of the blockade is based. In expressing his dissenting opinion at the end of the report Mr Özdem Sanberk declared that “common sense and conscience dictate that the blockade is unlawful”. Common sense however is not always a very common commodity.

In considering the composition of the flotilla the panel is critical of the number of passengers travelling with such a humanitarian flotilla; seemingly unaware of the importance of publicity to humanitarian activity. This complaint also overlooks the importance of solidarity to the people of Gaza in their enclosure, and fails to acknowledge that many of the passengers were carrying large sums of money for charitable causes along with personal presents and good wishes for orphans and individuals. The importance of this psychological assistance should not be undervalued or belittled.

Although the authors of the report seem to be poorly informed on some matters of the raid, such as the change of course by the Mavi Marmara after the attack began (when the ship turned to go due west at full speed and might reasonably have been allowed to depart the area without capture) they are generally more accurate with their descriptions and assumptions in this section. One might reasonably ask why they did not question the fact that Israel has never released infrared footage taken at the time when the first helicopter arrived over the ship (when commandos are accused of firing on passengers from the helicopter before rappelling onto the ship), but they have at least faced up to the evidence they have seen. Thus the criticism of the level of violence used by the commandos is robust, and this is an unimportant point. Israel had been forced to gamble its public image on this report and it will not be pleased with comments such as “The loss of life and injuries resulting from the use of force by Israeli forces […] was unacceptable.” Later the report adds “There was significant mistreatment of passengers by Israeli authorities […]. This included physical mistreatment, harassment and intimidation, unjustified confiscation of belongings and the denial of timely consular assistance.” The US and Israel had tried to get the UN Human Rights Council to pull its excellent investigation in favour of the UN Panel. This report was seen as a safer option than the thorough professional body that was assembled in Geneva. In that assessment they have been correct, but even so the perpetrators have been strongly criticised. Despite this being the work of amateurs (and in places incompetent bunglers) it is not a whitewash. Israel cannot hide behind this report and it cannot proudly show it off to the world community. For that minor piece of justice we should be grateful.

For the authors of this report there is little to be pleased about. Their ultimate goal has been described as “positively affect[ing] the relationship between Turkey and Israel, as well as the overall situation in the Middle East”. This was always a difficult call. Nevertheless some amelioration of the diplomatic situation might have been hoped for. The immediate aftermath to the release of this report has seen a strong reaction in Turkey to the refusal of the Israeli Government to apologise for the deaths and injuries to Turkish citizens. Turkey will now downgrade its diplomatic and economic relations with Israel and seems intent on dramatically upgrading its support for the people of Gaza. From its declarations so far it would seem that Mr Erdoðan’s government has little time for the recommendations of the Panel that the blockade should be respected and that humanitarian missions should follow established procedures in consultation with the Government of Israel. Maybe he is right given that respect for these procedures has only seen a long term decline in conditions in Gaza. Perhaps a little more common sense from the Panel may have helped the realpolitik of confronting harsh realities in Gaza as a means to aiding prospects for peace in the region.

~

– Richard Lightbown is a writer and researcher. He has previously written reviews on the UN Human Rights Council Fact-Finding Mission report and the Turkel Commission Report Part 1.

September 5, 2011 Posted by | Deception, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Leave a comment

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