Media outlets such as the WSJ recently started to peddle a narrative that the Nord Stream pipeline destruction in 2022 was allegedly orchestrated by a group of high-ranking Ukrainian officers led by Gen. Valery Zaluzhny.
Despite Western media efforts to implicate Ukraine, the United States still looks like the “main beneficiary and customer of the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline,” says German political analyst and independent journalist Dr. Gregor Spitzen.
“This has been clear from the very beginning, both in terms of the basic Roman law principle of ‘Cui bono?’ [who benefits?] and the statements by President Joe Biden and Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland that the US would not allow the pipeline to go into operation,” he tells Sputnik.
Efforts by German politicians and media to draw the attention away from the US by “throwing new and implausible versions into the information field,” while understandable – “if the US is found guilty of an act of state terrorism on the object of German property, the whole architecture of European security will collapse” – are still no less outrageous, Dr. Spitzen remarks.
“Germany’s attempts to pin the blame on Ukrainian saboteurs who acted without a clear mandate from their government, while at the same time taking President Zelensky out of harm’s way, looks legally flawless, but completely implausible,” Dr. Spitzen elaborates. “It can be predicted that the specific Ukrainians accused of sabotage will never be found. Either they will be found to have died of natural causes under suspicious circumstances, or they will have committed suicide.”
“This would be the best solution to the Nord Stream sabotage case. The pipeline is destroyed, US guilt is not proven, German politicians’ reputations are saved, Ukrainian political leaders are exonerated, and the specific perpetrators, who acted on their own initiative, are dead or missing,” he adds.
Former CIA operations officer Philip Giraldi also branded media efforts to pin the blame on Ukraine as a “cover story,” arguing that Kiev simply lacked the resources to carry out the Nord Stream bombing.
“The US did and had even stated its intention in advance to destroy the pipeline if Russia were to invade Ukraine. And there is also the involvement of Norway which is not plausible if it were a Ukrainian operation,” he said.
Both Spitzen and Giraldi suggested that the fact that the story about Ukraine’s alleged role in the Nord Stream bombing surfaced simultaneously in the US and German media hints at the likelihood of a coordinated effort to craft “an acceptable narrative regarding what took place,” as Giraldi put it.
“It suggests to me that they are coordinating some new approach in dealing with Ukraine and Zelensky though I am not sure what that might be,” Giraldi added.
Kiev had nothing to do with the explosions on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines, Mikhail Podoliak, a top adviser to Ukrainian leader, Vladimir Zelensky, has said.
Podoliak made the statement to Reuters on Thursday in response to a report by the Wall Street Journal, claiming that Zelensky authorized the September 2022 attack which ruptured the key energy infrastructure built to deliver Russian gas to Germany and the rest of Europe.
According to the US outlet’s sources, which included officers allegedly involved in the operation, Zelensky initially approved the attack on Nord Stream. He later tried to call it off under pressure from the CIA, but then Ukrainian commander-in-chief Valery Zaluzhny told him it could not be done as the sabotage group had already been dispatched and there was no way to contact it.
“Such an act can only be carried out with extensive technical and financial resources… and who possessed all this at the time of the bombing? Only Russia,” Podoliak told the agency.
Russia has ridiculed claims that it would destroy its own pipelines, which provided it with steady revenue. Top officials in Moscow, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, have previously pointed the finger at Washington, arguing that it stood to gain the most from the disruption of Russian gas supplies to the EU.
“Ukraine has nothing to do with the Nord Stream explosions,” Podolyak insisted, adding that Kiev did not gain any strategic or tactical advantage from the sabotage.
The report by the WSJ claimed that “a handful of senior Ukrainian military officers and businessmen” came up with the idea of blowing up the pipelines during a drinking party in May 2022, a few months after the outbreak of the conflict between Moscow and Kiev. The plotters believed that it would reduce Russia’s energy profits and make the EU less dependent on Moscow, it said.
Zaluzhny, who is now Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, told the outlet that claims of his – or Kiev’s – involvement in the destruction of Nord Stream were a “mere provocation.” A senior official in the Security Service of Ukraine, the SBU, also denied the report, insisting that Zelensky in particular “did not approve the implementation of any such actions on the territory of third countries and did not issue relevant orders.”
The WSJ said its reporting is partially corroborated by the findings of the German police investigation into the Nord Stream explosions. The German Federal Public Prosecutor issued a first arrest warrant in connection with the sabotage this week, according to local reports. The suspect is believed to be a Ukrainian citizen identified as ‘Vladimir Z’.
The newspaper suggested that the police investigation could “upend” relations between Kiev and Berlin, which has been Ukraine’s biggest backer in the EU amid the conflict with Russia.
In the months following the attacks of 9/11, the government laid the blame for orchestrating them on Osama bin Ladin. Then, after it murdered bin Ladin, the government decided that the true mastermind was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
By the time of bin Ladin’s death, Mohammed had already been tortured by CIA agents for three years at various black sites and charged with conspiracy to commit mass murder, to be tried before an American military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Mohammed and four other alleged conspirators have been awaiting trial since their arrivals at Gitmo in 2006. Since then, numerous government military and civilian prosecutors, as well as numerous military judges, have rotated into and out of the case. Two weeks ago, the government and the defendants agreed to a guilty plea in return for life in prison at Gitmo. Then, last week, the Department of Defense abruptly changed its mind and rescinded its approval of the guilty pleas.
Here is the backstory.
The concept of military tribunals for the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks was born in the administration of President George W. Bush, who argued that the attacks, though conducted by civilians on civilians, were of military magnitude and thus warranted a military response. Throughout the entire 22-year existence of the U.S. military prison at Gitmo, no one has been tried for causing or carrying out the crimes of 9/11. The government tried only one person for crimes related to 9/11. That was Zacarias Moussaoui, who pleaded guilty in federal court in Virginia to conspiracy for being the 20th hijacker and then was tried in a penalty phase trial where the jury chose life in prison.
Bush’s rationale not only brought us the fruitless and destructive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; it also brought a host of legal problems unforeseen by Bush and his revenge-over-justice colleagues. The first legal issue was conspiracy. Since Mohammed did not carry out the attacks, he could only be charged with planning them. But conspiracy is not a war crime, and thus no military tribunal could hear the case. So Congress came up with a historic first — a military tribunal that would try civilian crimes.
The next issue was where to try Mohammed and his colleagues. President Barack Obama wanted to close Gitmo, which costs $540 million annually, and try Mohammed and the others in federal courts. This would have been consistent with federal law and the U.S. Constitution. But Republicans in Congress viewed Mohammed as too dangerous to bring onto U.S. soil, and so Congress enacted legislation that prohibits the removal of Mohammed and the others to the U.S. for any purpose.
The prohibition on removal means that any life terms would need to be spent at Gitmo. It also means that there would be a legal obstacle to the execution of a death sentence, as Gitmo is not equipped to execute anyone.
Most troubling, however, is the government’s problem of how to address the issue of torture. Bush believed that military men on military juries would neither cringe at torture nor hesitate to impose a death sentence. Yet, when defendants at Gitmo, in non-9/11-related cases, described the torture that CIA agents and military officials had inflicted upon them, military jurors were repulsed at what they heard and recommended clemency even for those who caused deaths.
These events — filing legally baseless charges, prohibiting the removal of civilian defendants to civilian courts, and fear of the likely reaction of military jurors to testimony about torture — caused the prosecution team to rethink the entire idea of putting Mohammed on trial, and thus in March 2022, the government initiated secret plea-bargaining negotiations with defense counsel.
In large measure, government prosecutors — now the fourth team since 2006 — recognized that Bush’s torturers had so brutalized the defendants that their so-called voluntary confessions would likely be tossed by the trial judge or rejected by a jury. Moreover, there are serious ethical issues when lawyers defend torture — so serious that it could jeopardize their careers.
Why would the government agree to such a plea bargain for the persons it claims are the monsters who murdered 3,000 Americans on 9/11 and triggered all the horrors that followed those murders? What does the government fear?
What does it always fear? THE TRUTH.
Since the trial judge — the fourth judge on the case — had already accepted the guilty pleas before the DoD changed its mind, it is unclear if he will enforce them.
If he does not, one day there will be a trial. At trial, the defendants will be permitted to bring the government’s imperialistic wars, its tortures and its foreknowledge of 9/11 into the courtroom. The government knows that much of its behavior — from the CIA-orchestrated overthrow of a popularly elected prime minister of Iran in the early 1950s to the untruthful excuses for toppling Saddam Hussein — will show American foreign policy at its imperialistic and violent worst.
And the hours and weeks and months and years of repeated torture — all of it criminal — will undermine the case against Mohammed and the others.
This is what happens when the fabric of our legal system is interfered with for authoritarian reasons. The tragedy of 9/11 happened on Bush’s watch. What did the CIA know before 9/11? Bush compounded his ignorance and failures with boasts of bravado and torture — all of which have come back to haunt his current successor in the White House.
Defense and Justice Department lawyers have recognized that they cannot try this case without material damage to the scheme of American empire, built on death, lies and torture, without revealing the names and methods of the folks who did these horrible deeds and the lies of the presidents who authorized them — and without the truth coming out at last.
Given that we have all been born and raised under a national-security state form of governmental structure, no one in the mainstream press is batting an eyelash over Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s role in a plea bargain into which military prosecutors had entered with three men who are accused of participating in the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Walid bin Attash, and Mustafa al-Hawsawix. Austin scotched the plea bargain because it eliminated the possibility of a death sentence for the three men.
To be sure, there are some mainstream pundits who have expressed disagreement with Austin’s decision to cancel the plea bargain. But none of them question the very notion that a retired military general is making a major decision in a case involving criminal justice. That’s because the mainstream press, along with many Americans, has come to accept the normality and permanence of the judicial system that the Pentagon established in Cuba after the 9/11 attacks.
But the fact is that Austin’s role in a criminal prosecution is weird — extremely weird. A retired military general serving as U.S. Secretary of Defense has no more legitimate role in America’s criminal-justice system than he does in America’s public-school system.
The U.S. Constitution established one judicial system. It consists of U.S. District Courts, federal courts of appeals, and the U.S. Supreme Court. It encompasses both civil and criminal jurisdiction. Under the Constitution, when the U.S. government targets someone with criminal prosecution, it must do so within the rules and constraints of the federal-court system.
In other words, the Constitution did not set up two dual, competing criminal-justice systems — one run by civilians and one run by the military. It set up only one criminal-justice system. And that one judicial system is subject to the constraints of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, specifically the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments.
Contrary to popular opinion, terrorism is not an act of war. It is a criminal offense under the U.S. Code. When someone is charged with the crime of terrorism, the Constitution requires that he be treated like any other defendant in the federal-court system.
What happened after the 9/11 attacks, however, was that the military-intelligence establishment seized on the crisis, panic-filled environment to establish a brand new dual, competing judicial system at its imperial outpost in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Mind you, there was no constitutional authority for such a judicial system but given the climate of “emergency” and the dominant role that the national-security establishment had already come to play in America’s federal governmental system, the Pentagon knew that no one would interfere with its new judicial system.
Thus, under America’s dual, competing judicial systems, the military now decides how an accused terrorist is going to be handled. If the military decides that an accused terrorist, whether foreigner or American, should go into the constitutional system, that’s where he will go. In fact, there have been a number of criminal prosecutions for terrorism in America’s federal-court system, both before and after the 9/11 attacks.
However, if the military decides that an accused terrorist, including an American citizen, will instead be placed in the military’s judicial system at Gitmo, that’s where he will end up. That’s why the plea bargain into which the accused 9/11 planners entered was done with military prosecutors rather than with U.S. Attorneys and assistant U.S. Attorneys.
The difference between these two judicial systems is like day and night. In the constitutional system, the accused has the right to a speedy trial, the right to trial by jury, the right to confront and cross-examine witnesses, the right to be free from cruel and unusual punishments, and other procedural protections.
None of those protections exists for people who are shunted into the military’s judicial system at Gitmo. That’s why criminal defendants have been held there for some 20 years without a trial — there is no right to a speedy trial at Gitmo. The accused can also be convicted on hearsay evidence, which means that he has no right to confront and cross-examine witnesses. He can be tortured into confessing to his crimes. He has no right to trial by jury. Instead his guilt or innocence is determined by a military commission whose kangaroo-court-like verdict will inevitably turn on pleasing superior officers.
This entire dual, competing judicial system is about as weird as weird can get, including the fact that a retired military general now wields the authority to involve himself in plea bargains in criminal prosecutions. The fact that this weird judicial system has become a normal and permanent part of American life just goes to show how the national-security establishment controls, manages, and directs the federal government, with the other three branches simply playing a supportive role. SeeNational Security and Double Governmentby Michael J. Glennon.
On Saturday, an explosive fell onto a sports field in Majdal Shams in Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, killing 12 children. Israel blamed the Lebanese Shia movement Hezbollah. The group has denied the accusation.
Veteran war correspondent Elijah Magnier told Sputnik on Monday that what little information is available on the Golan Heights explosion that killed 12 Arab Druze Muslim children contradicts the official story offered by the Israeli government.
“First, [Israel has] refused any Western investigation by Israeli allies. So they don’t want anyone to investigate the type of rockets and/or the debris,” Magnier explained. “And the technical details of the explosions are very telling. The Falaq rocket that Hezbollah fires is a 50 kilogram explosive. Now, a warhead with such a quantity of explosive doesn’t leave the damage that was left by the explosion that happened in Golan Heights, [it would be] much bigger.”
Magnier, who has over 35 years of experience covering conflicts in Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, says that the evidence the Israelis have provided has been unconvincing.
“We have not seen any picture… of the guidance system, or any component that [we] need to understand what kind of rocket [or missile] that exploded in this place,” Magnier began. “They showed us two pieces with serial numbers that match the Falaq, but not on the same scene of the explosion. They’re completely different on a white plank. So, we don’t know where these pieces were taken from.”
“Normally, when the forensic team is on the scene, [they] take hundreds of photographs with every single piece before they touch anything. We haven’t seen all that, but we’ve seen a rush of accusing Hezbollah,” Magnier added.
“The diameter of the crater [from a Hezbollah Falaq rocket] can [be] between four to six meters and the depth can be… between 1.5 to 3 meters, which is not the case at all of the explosion we’ve seen,” Magnier described. “We’ve seen in this explosion only a small part of the fence [was] damaged and the other part of the fence is still intact. So, even the fragment of the explosion is different. The shrapnel is different.”
On Sunday, Israel bombed 12 settlements in Lebanon after saying that Hezbollah had crossed a “red line” in the attack. Hezbollah has vehemently denied it was involved. Magnier pointed out that they do not have a reason to attack Druze Muslims in Golan Heights, which is illegally occupied by Israel but still contains a large Muslim population.
“Hezbollah has thousands of civilian objectives [it could hit] that are close to the borders of Lebanon, and it can really destroy any village or any Israeli occupied city without the need to go to another village that is occupied by Druze Muslims who have [influence] in Syria and Lebanon and want to declare their support to the Palestinians,” argued Magnier, who added that Hezbollah has not been hitting civilian targets since it started shelling Israel in solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza.
Magnier argued that a faulty Israeli air defense missile was a more likely culprit in the Golan Heights explosion.
“I can say that there are malfunctioning missiles and there are malfunctioning rockets that can fall anywhere and these incidents are very frequent, in particular with the Israeli interception missiles, where they say that only 60 to 65% reach their target and the others miss,” he said. “A strong possibility… an Israeli interception missile of the type Tamir… they carry around 10 to 15 kilograms of explosive and they have a very similar impact to what we’ve seen in the pictures provided on the ground by the people of Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights.”
Magnier noted that the size of the crater matched what the Tamir could create and that there was still grass from the field around the crater, which would not happen with a larger Falaq rocket.
“Everything there indicates that we’re talking about a small-sized missile [and] not a big sized rocket of 50 kilograms.”
On Monday, US and Israeli media reported that an Israeli official said its response was still coming and that it would be “limited but significant” in order to avoid an all-out war.
“So, we understand that Netanyahu is really trying to avoid being involved in a war that he doesn’t know what the consequences would be. He can start, but he can’t end it,” concluded Magnier. “What is the ultimate objective [in attacking Hezbollah]? Destroy Lebanon? Destroy the airport? He will have his airport destroyed. Attack the Capital? He will have Tel Aviv destroyed. So this is where we see that things are not as smooth as the Israelis are trying to show.”
The Majdal Shams strike resulted in the tragic loss of 12 lives, all natives of the occupied Golan. What insights can we recover from the evidence gathered following yesterday’s incident?
Israeli regime authorities claimed on Saturday afternoon that Hezbollah launched a rocket at the occupied town of Majdal Shams, killing twelve civilians, including 10 children, in the process.
The Israeli military command even specified the type of rocket artillery shell used in the alleged attack, which it claimed was the Falaq-1 rocket.
On the other hand, the Islamic Resistance in Lebanon – Hezbollah fully denied any involvement and responsibility for a deadly strike on the village in the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan.
So where does the truth lie?
A brief analysis of the impact site and the video capturing the moment of the strike dismantles the Israeli narrative, bolstering Hezbollah’s account.
A few points must be made clear before analyzing the moment of the strike on Majdal Shams and the aftermath caused by the explosion.
First, Israeli officials said the Israeli occupation forces were able to identify the shell used in the attack as the Falaq-1 rocket, reportedly confirming their suspicions.
The Falaq-1 rocket is a rocket artillery shell with the following specifications:
240 mm caliber
1320 mm length
Estimated 10 km range
Maximum flight ceiling of 3.5 km
50 kg high explosive warhead
Solid-propellant rocket
Second, high-explosive warheads usually contain a mixture of explosives alongside components that would act as shrapnel propelled by the pressure caused by the aforementioned explosives. Following the moment of impact with the surface, a crater should be formed.
The size of this crater varies according to several factors, which include the mass of the explosives, the pressure generated by the warhead into the ground, and the surface’s composition, among other elements.
Third, the Falaq rocket exhausts the solid propellant less than two seconds after being fired.
Israeli Iron Dome interceptors record multiple failures since October
Another important nuance that would aid Hezbollah’s denial of involvement is the failure of Iron Dome interceptors, Tamir surface-to-air missiles, on several occasions in the past months.
This includes a crash of an Iron Dome interceptor in Tel Aviv in early December 2023 and a fire caused by an Israeli interceptor in occupied al-Jalil following a failed interception of a Hezbollah drone on July 25, 2024.
There are many such incidents, with some being captured live on camera, including an event in which an Israeli Tamir missile struck a hospital in Tel Aviv on November 6, 2023.
Several technical issues related to an Iron Dome battery could result in a catastrophic interception failure. These issues include a malfunctioning engagement radar, a faulty radar seeker, a defective self-detonation sensor, and a compromised motor, among other potential problems. The most dangerous of these are faults in self-detonating sensors, which leave operators unable to destroy rogue surface-to-air missiles.
Did an Israeli Tamir missile impact Majdal Shams?
It is highly probable that faults in a surface-to-air missile fired from an Iron Dome launcher just behind Majdal Shams caused the grave massacre.
Majdal Shams, which is among the towns and cities occupied by “Israel” in 1967, hosts a vast majority of Arab Syrian Druze and a minority of Israeli settlers. The town and other similar demographics, where natives are significantly represented, have not come under the direct fire of the Islamic Resistance in Lebanon since October 8, 2023.
Although the Resistance has launched highly precise weapons such as an anti-tank guided missile and drones at Israeli military positions in towns such as Arab al-Aramshe, it never fired unguided rocket artillery weapons at these towns.
Specifically, Majdal Shams has never come under an attack by Hezbollah, throughout the nearly 300 days of intense confrontations near the Lebanese-Palestinian border.
The Resistance has also not been shy of taking responsibility for mishaps in the past, such as an incident in the 2006 war on Lebanon when a rocket launched by Hezbollah fighters impacted a home in occupied al-Nasirah.
The attack took place on July 19, 2006, and the Secretary-General of Hezbollah Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah took the nearest opportunity amid the ongoing war to apologize to the family.
“To the family that was hit in al-Nasirah — on my behalf and my brothers’, I apologize to this family,” he said.
“Some events like that happen. In any event, those who were killed in al-Nasirah, we consider them martyrs for Palestine and martyrs for the nation. I pay my condolences to them.”
A corresponding crater
As for evidence collected from the impact site, the crater formed by the projectile is around 2 meters wide and a few centimeters deep. This indicates that the warhead that detonated in the area is far less than 50 kg and closer to the 10 kg range.
In comparison, a crater formed by a Falaq-1 rocket in Kiryat Shmona ripped through cement and caused extensive damage to nearby infrastructure as seen in this video.
The Falaq-1 rocket is among Hezbollah’s heaviest rocket artillery shells that can be fired from multiple rocket launchers and which can cause extensive damage to targets.
On the other hand, the crater seen in Majdal Shams could be more closely attributed to a Tamir missile.
The possibility that Hezbollah used a smaller caliber munition to conduct the attack is improbable, as it was Israeli authorities who claimed that the munition used in the attack was a Falaq-1 rocket.
Large flames produced by liquid propellant
Another aspect to examine is the relatively large amount of combustion that occurred as a result of the impact on the football field.
High-explosive warheads generally do not produce large fireballs upon detonation. Instead, they create a powerful blast wave and intense fragmentation. The explosion of an HE warhead primarily generates heat, shock waves, and shrapnel rather than a visible fireball. A large-sized and visible fireball is typically associated with the combustion of fuel, such as that found in rocket engines or fuel tanks.
A Tamir missile launched from a nearby position is likely to contain a substantial amount of fuel, as the air defense rocket was designed to fly for around 70 km. This means that the majority of the fuel meant for the missile’s flight after take-off detonated and produced the fireball seen in the video.
Despite Israeli assertions of a Hezbollah attack using a Falaq-1 rocket, substantial analysis points towards a malfunctioning Israeli Tamir interceptor missile as the more plausible cause of the explosion. The discrepancies in crater size, the nature of the explosion, and Hezbollah’s historical targeting patterns all support this alternative explanation. The true story behind the Majdal Shams explosion remains shrouded, but the evidence presented here offers a compelling case for reconsidering the initial narrative.
Contradictions on Trump’s attempted assassination pile up, with serious security breaches and officials claiming an investigation is needed to determine whether it was a matter of incompetence or malice.
To begin with, according to the ABC News, “law enforcement officials investigating the assassination attempt on Donald Trump told lawmakers Wednesday that 20 minutes passed between the time U.S. Secret Service snipers first spotted the gunman on a rooftop and the time shots were fired at the former president.” How can one explain that?
Moreover, it is a well-established fact now that onlookers alerted the authorities about the presence of an armed man on a nearby roof. One witness reported that to the BBC shortly after the incident.
In addition, local officials in Pennsylvania are complaining that the Secret Service, in an attempt to deflect blame, is throwing them “under the bus”. According to one local police officer: “The Secret Service came out here more than a month ahead of time and met with all the local agencies. They tell us exactly what to do, exactly what they want and exactly how they want it. It’s all on them.”
More intriguingly, several witnesses describe a second shooter, and there seems to be plenty of cell phone footage indicating that – while the Secret Service insist there was only one. According to a Times of Indiastory, “an audio forensic analysis conducted by experts from the National Center for Media Forensics at the University of Colorado in Denver suggests the possibility of a second shooter in the incident”. A CNN story in turn reports that “forensic analysis suggests that as many as three weapons were fired at the Trump rally.”
Stephen Bryen, security expert, takes the second shooter allegation seriously, and, in his Substack newsletter, he is calling for a “solid FBI investigation with Congressional oversight” on the matter. He adds that “there is a general consensus that security at the Trump Rally was poor”, and adds: “if the Secret Service actually approved all the security measures … we wonder, like millions of others no doubt, how could they overlook the rooftops.” Bryen is no fringe figure – he is a former Deputy Under Secretary of Defense, who writes for Newsweek, the Jewish Policy Center, and others.
Cory Mills, a member of the United States House of Representatives, takes the matter a bit further, saying an investigation on the Secret Service is needed to determine whether this was merely incompetence or rather malice, with an intent to neutralize Trump.
Cory Mills is a former military, and was a member of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) Combined Joint Task Force (CJTF) 20 in Iraq. He is also a defense contractor, who has earned a Master of Arts in international relations and conflict resolution from American Military University. Again, this is also no fringe figure, and his allegations raise eyebrows.
Given all the above, it is no wonder suspicions abound – the fact that Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle is very close to the Biden couple certainly doesn’t help. According to the New York Post, she “landed her role thanks largely to a close relationship with first lady Jill Biden.” In any other country, by the way, after such a scandal, the Secret Service director would have been fired already or would have resigned. One thing that hampers further scrutiny, however, is an American cultural trait, namely the distaste for “conspiracy theories” (which is rather ironic in a country where conspiracies abound). Here, some context is needed.
Most scholars concede that sometimes conspiracy theories (CT) are proven to be at least partly correct. A “true” or ideal CT is supposed to always be false – meaning that its narrative does not describe reality. However, what happens when new data changes the “official” story? For instance, nowadays it is known that in 1962 the US Department of Defense proposed a false flag operation (the Operation Northwoods), calling for CIA operatives to actually commit terrorist attacks against American civilians and military targets in American cities (with bombings and hijackings) and then using those to justify a Cuban invasion. Then President John F. Kennedy rejected the plan, but the proposal existed, and no one denies it.
It is thus not clear at all how a “correct” conspiracy theory (one which later happens to be proven true) differs from a false one. Was it a CT when critics argued that the US government had lied about the real motivations which led it to invade Iraq? Other authors define “conspiracy theories” in a more neutral manner as any hypotheses that try to explain an event by invoking a “conspiracy” – namely, a secret plan carried out by a group of people.
One should also be cautious as to avoid equating a mere CT (about anything) and a conspiratorial way of understanding society and history in general. The latter (conspiracism), implicitly holds that nothing ever happens by chance but rather everything (especially tragedies) happens by design. Conspiracies do exist but not everything is a conspiracy. On the other hand, in the face of a major politically charged event, when various contradictions pile up, it would be naïve to readily dismiss everything as a “coincidence” (I would describe it as a “coincidence theory”).
With Biden’s undeniable senility getting worse, it is becoming increasingly clear he is not fit to run for the presidency again – he can barely participate in a debate or give interviews. Given this, the question then, as I wrote, is how can he govern, or rather how come has he been governing thus? In other words, who has been doing all the governing? Some talk about a “ triumvirate”, referring to Biden’s close advisers Bruce Reed, Mike Donilon, and Steve Ricchetti – the matter is far from being clear, though. One can only imagine the amount of palace intrigue going on amid this “emperor clothes” scenario.
With the ongoing political crisis, any investigation on the Secret Service will be either weaponized by Republicans against Democrats or covered up by the latter, amid a major narrative war and claims about “conspiracy theories”. The crisis is thus also an epistemic one, so to speak.
This state of affairs can only further undermine the legitimacy of American institutions, with serious consequences for the country’s stability. With a suspicious murder attempt on a presidential candidate and an embarrassingly senile incumbent president, the rest of the world holds their breath while the politics within the Atlantic superpower has just gone mad.
If you, like Ancap94, have been getting into 9/11 Truth lately, you might want to know who had demolition access to the Twin Towers before 9/11. If so, boy does Kevin Ryan have some answers for you! Join James for today’s edition as he shines the light on Kevin Ryan’s groundbreaking article on “Demolition Access to the World Trade Center Towers,” the pre-9/11 WTC power down, and other long-forgotten bits of 9/11 conspiracy reality.
Video player not working? Use these links to watch it somewhere else!
At the start of June, Admiral Robert Bauer, head of NATO’s military committee, announced that the military alliance had finalised plans to recognise state-backed cyberattacks on its members as a dedicated pretext for activating Article 5. Reportedly “a joint decision of all allies,” from now on, foreign hacking blitzes can be countered with a collective NATO response, up to and including military measures. Bauer’s disclosure passed the media by entirely – but this is a seismic development, heralding a modern, digital form of ‘false flag’.
Article 5, which provides for collective defence in the event a NATO member is attacked, was a core component of the military alliance’s founding treaty. While it has been invoked just once – by the US, in the wake of 9/11, to invade Afghanistan – there have been efforts to spark it before and since. Most recently, in November 2022, the government of Ukraine falsely declared a missile fired by Kiev that struck Poland, killing two people, was Russian in origin.
The purpose of this deceit was undoubtedly to embroil NATO formally and directly in the proxy war. Wise to the ruse, US officials harshly rebuked President Volodmoyr Zelensky publicly for the World War-threatening fraud. Such incidents amply underline Article 5’s susceptibility to abuse. Yet apparently, military alliance chiefs – and the bloc’s members – are keen to ever-expand its terms, well-beyond its initial remit. Adding cyberattacks to the roster of grounds for collective response is a long-standing objective.
In August 2019, NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg authored a bombastic op-ed declaring the military alliance would “guard its cyber domain and invoke collective defence if required.” A “serious cyberattack” on one member state could be “treated as an attack against us all,” he wrote, triggering Article 5 in the process. Fast forward two years, and Keith Alexander, US National Security Agency director 2005 – 2014, called on the ‘Five Eyes’ global spying network to construct a global unified cyberattack “radar”:
“Imagine if we built a radar picture for cyber that covered not only what impacts Australia, but what impacts other countries, and we could share, in real time, threats that are hitting our countries… What we can do is share information and work together… Cyber is going to be hugely important for our future. It’s the one area where adversaries can attack Australia and the US without trying to cross the oceans… We have this anomaly: how are you gonna defend that which you can’t see?”
Alexander, who lied brazenly to the public about his agency’s spying capabilities – including while while testifying under oath to Congress – during his time as NSA chief, suggested this worldwide dragnet would contribute significantly to collective defence, in the obvious spirit of NATO’s Article 5. Given “proposals” for Orwellian, futuristic resources from Western politicians and military and intelligence officials almost invariably presage their real-world rollout, we can only assume in light of Bauer’s announcement such a “radar” is incoming.
‘Security Failures’
This interpretation is reinforced by Bauer observing how invoking Article 5 could only happen once it was confirmed a cyberattack was carried out by a state actor, not a private person or structure. “In that case, it would not be clear who to go to war with,” he added. It’s certainly a source of some relief that NATO is committed to securing clarity on “who to go to war with”, before launching a military “response” to a cyberattack.
However, these comments illuminate a very obvious, grave problem with adding cyberattacks to Article 5’s ambit. Identifying who or what is responsible for them to an absolute certainty is extremely difficult. This task is further complicated by a frequent lack of certainty over whether hackers operating from a particular state are doing so at the behest of authorities. For example, much has been made in Britain recently of Russian hacking group Qilin, which supposedly infiltrated NHS servers.
Mainstream media reports have universally framed Qilin as a malign instrument of the Kremlin, although whether Russian officials command the group, let alone even know of its existence, is far from clear. A representative iNews article refers to Qilin as “a syndicate made up of more than 100 groups…not believed to be under the direct control [emphasis added] of the Russian government.” Instead, Qilin is claimed to be “a useful tool of global disruption the Kremlin is happy to turn a blind eye to.”
Further muddying the picture, it has been confirmed that Western intelligence services can falsely attribute cyberattacks, with devastating effect. In 2017, CIA files published by WikiLeaks revealed how the Agency masks its hacking exploits, to make it appear another state actor was responsible. Dubbed ‘Marble Framework’, among other things the resource inserts foreign-language text into malware source codes to misdirect security analysts. The Framework can obfuscate in this manner via Arabic, Chinese, English, Farsi, Korean, and Russian.
Excerpt from leaked Marble Framework files
Moreover, CIA hackers employ crafty tricks and double bluffs to reinforce these bogus attributions, such as creating the appearance of attempts to conceal foreign-language text. Thus, forensic investigators are successfully conned into concluding even more strongly that the country framed by Langley is responsible. Unbelievably, this seismic disclosure prompted no Western journalist to reappraise the widely received narrative that Moscow’s GRU was responsible for the hack and leak of damaging Democratic National Committee emails in 2016.
That conclusion, universally reinforced by the Western media, was initially peddled by Matt Tait, a former GCHQ spy. He didn’t base his conclusions on anything technical, but “basic operational security failures” he detected on the part of the individual(s) who released the communications, including their computer username referencing the founder of the Soviet Union’s secret police, and “ham-fisted” attempts to pose as Romanian. Which is, of course, precisely how the CIA would cover its own tracks via Marble Framework.
‘Irrevocable Proof’
There has similarly been no mainstream discussion of why the Agency would seek to acquire and maintain this capability in the first place. Now that NATO considers cyberattacks an Article 5 matter, this question has never been a more urgent question, given the CIA’s extensive and deplorable history of false-flag operations to overthrow governments, and kickstart conflicts.
For example, in April 1953, the CIA and MI6 launched a welter of covert actions to undermine Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, in order to lay the foundations of his ouster. One key tactic in which the pair engaged was bombing mosques, and homes of prominent Muslim figures by operatives posing as members of Tehran’s Communist Party. A subsequent internal review of the coup noted that this incendiary activity mobilised Mullahs to take action against Mosaddegh.
These efforts were judged to have contributed to the “positive outcome” of the wider coup effort. Such a glowing appraisal of these false flag manoeuvres may have informed the dimensions of Operation Northwoods, a daring set of proposals under which the CIA would stage and commit acts of terrorism against US military and civilian targets. These could then be blamed on the government of Fidel Castro, precipitating all-out war with Cuba.
Potential false-flag actions outlined in extraordinary declassified documents include assassinating of Cuban immigrants on US soil, sinking boats ferrying Cuban refugees to Florida, shooting down US civilian airlines, blowing up US ships, and more. One specific element of Operation Northwoods is particularly relevant to consider in light of alleged state cyberattacks becoming Article 5 worthy. If the 1962 Mercury launch – the first US orbital spaceflight – went awry, Castro would be blamed by concocting:
“Irrevocable proof… the fault lies with the Communists… this to be accomplished by manufacturing various pieces of evidence which would prove electronic interference on the part of the Cubans.”
While Northwoods was ultimately rejected by President John F. Kennedy, the US military and intelligence community continued constructing false-flag blueprints thereafter. In 1963, a Pentagon policy paper advocated making it appear that Cuba had attacked a member of the Organization of American States (OAS), justifying US retaliation:
“A contrived ‘Cuban’ attack on an OAS member could be set up, and the attacked state could be urged to take measures of self-defense and request assistance from the US and OAS.”
Langley’s cyberattack connivances have surely only grown more sophisticated, and more complex to unravel, in the years since Marble Framework was publicly exposed. Pinning blame on a foreign country for a cyberattack it didn’t actually commit is no doubt even easier and more effective today. Resultantly, a false flag tripwire for Beijing, Moscow, or any other Washington-mandated ‘enemy’ state to unwittingly and unwillingly stumble over, triggering the outbreak of global war, has now been forged by NATO.
In corporate America, hostile takeovers are commonplace. They occur when an aggressor—a larger corporation or rich individuals—seizes control of a smaller corporation without asking permission.
What few recognize is that the United States itself has been subjected to a hostile takeover. Since the aggressor, the illegitimate settler colony known as “Israel,” is much smaller than the US, the takeover has necessarily been surreptitious.
As of June, 2024, Israel’s gradual takeover of the US has become obvious and undeniable—a proverbial “elephant in the living room.” In this election year, all three major presidential candidates compete for Israel’s favor, even as the whole world recoils from the zionist genocide of Gaza. The Democratic incumbent, Joe Biden, supplies the butcher Netanyahu with all the weapons he needs to massacre tens of thousands of Palestinian women and children, uttering only occasional peeps of pro forma protest in a lame attempt to mollify his base.
Biden’s Republican challenger, Donald Trump, openly supports the genocide and calls on Israel to “finish the job” (of massacring Palestinians). Most bizarrely of all, the independent challenger Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who offers a refreshing alternative to mainstream approaches on other issues, has staked out the most pro-genocide position of the three.
Kennedy’s position is puzzling for many reasons. As the “alternative” candidate, he might be expected to take an alternative position on Palestine, especially since it would markedly enhance his slim chances of becoming president. Young Americans oppose genocide and side with Palestine, as the ongoing campus protests demonstrate. If RFK Jr. harnessed that youthful energy by reversing course and announcing his support for Palestine, he would immediately gain tens or even hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic youthful volunteers who would start ringing doorbells and promoting his candidacy, just as anti-Vietnam-war students did for his father in 1968.
Since polls show that most Democratic voters oppose Biden’s pro-Israel stance, and that American public opinion overall is following world public opinion in the direction of ever-stronger support for Palestine, RFK Jr. could conceivably win a plurality of votes, and the presidency, by leading that shift. Instead, he has chosen to doom his candidacy by echoing the ultra-genocidal ravings of his handler, Rabbi Schmuley Boteach.
Though Kennedy decries the corrupt forces that have taken over America, and denounces the coups d’état that killed his father (1968) and uncle (1963), he seemingly fails to recognize who was behind the takeover and the killings. Kennedy knows and openly states that his father was not killed by the hypnotized Palestinian patsy Sirhan Sirhan. He acknowledges Sirhan’s innocence and has worked to free him from prison. But the significance of the fact that the perpetrators chose a Palestinian to falsely take the blame apparently escapes him.
In his blockbuster book, Brothers, David Talbot presents convincing evidence that Robert F. Kennedy was murdered because he was about to become president—and use the power of his office to bring to justice the killers of his brother, President John F. Kennedy. So, who were those killers? Michael Collins Piper’s Final Judgment makes a strong case that David Ben Gurion, the Israeli Prime Minister who resigned under pressure from JFK, and Israel’s CIA mole James Jesus Angleton, were the ringleaders. The motive: Prevent JFK from shutting down Israel’s nuclear program, and insert Israel’s asset Lyndon B. Johnson into office to oversee the 1967 land-grab war.
Anyone who doubts that Johnson was an Israeli asset needs to read Peter Hounam’s Operation Cyanide: How the Bombing of the USS Liberty Nearly Caused World War III. Hounem discovered evidence that then-President Johnson scrambled US nuclear bombers on highest-level alert more than one hour before the USS Liberty was attacked by Israel on June 8, 1967. Then when the ship miraculously stayed afloat, radioed for help, and identified its attackers as Israelis, the President of the United States issued a treasonous order: “I want that goddamn ship going to the bottom. No help. Recall the wings.”
Most Americans have no idea that Israel attempted to sink the unarmed US spy ship USS Liberty and murder its crew of 293 sailors so the attack could be falsely blamed on Egypt. Nor do they realize that the zionists succeeded in killing 34 sailors and wounding 171. Even less do they know that the sitting US president was complicit and yearned for the death of every one of those 293 American servicemen.
Why don’t more Americans know about the USS Liberty massacre? A draconian cover-up, in which surviving sailors were told to keep quiet or bad things would happen to their families, persisted for decades. Simultaneously the mainstream media published a smattering of ludicrous assertions that the Israelis had attacked the ship by accident. Those were rare exceptions to a general blackout on the topic.
Why would the media cover up such a sensational story? That question raises an even more basic one: Who controls the media? The president who followed Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, knew, but was afraid to talk about it in public. Privately, he discussed the matter with friends and advisors like the Rev. Billy Graham, who told Nixon that powerful Jews “are friendly to me because they know that I’m friendly with Israel. But they don’t know how I really feel about what they are doing to this country.” “You must not let them know,” Nixon replied.
“This stranglehold has got to be broken or the country’s going down the drain” Graham continued. Nixon: “Do you believe that?” Graham: “Yes, sir.” Nixon: “Oh boy. So do I. I can’t ever say that, but I believe it.”
Today, as we approach the 57th anniversary of Israel’s massacre of American sailors aboard the USS Liberty, the United States of America has gone even further down the drain than it was in 1972, when Nixon’s conversation with Graham took place. Today, anyone who mentions the extraordinary power of America’s 2% Jewish minority, specifically its organized lobby groups and sway over media, finance, politics and organized crime (which are not mutually exclusive categories) will be viciously smeared, their careers and reputations ruined by a group so powerful that it has prohibited any mention of its power.
Some try to avoid the smears by speaking of the “zionist lobby” rather than the “Jewish lobby.” But the distinction is largely semantic. Virtually all of the power of organized Jewry supports zionism, including every one of the 50 groups represented at the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Since the zionist entity defines itself as the “Jewish state” and its presumptive citizens as all Jews on Earth, regardless of where they live, calling its American contingent “the Jewish lobby” is reasonable and accurate—just as Irish-Americans who lobby for Ireland, albeit without the power of their Jewish counterparts, are an “Irish lobby.”
Others prefer the term “zionist” because it includes so-called Christian zionists like Billy Graham. But as the tapes of his conversations with Nixon show, Graham’s professed zionism was insincere. The only reason Graham pretended to support Israel was the same reason Nixon pretended to support Israel: Both men were terrified by the power of the Jews. And while there are, no doubt, some sincere Christian zionists, they are mere useful idiots in the quintessentially Jewish project of building an ever-expanding, ever-more-powerful Jewish state representing not just Israel’s Jewish citizens, but all the Jews of the world.
Looking back on the 1967 war and its context, including the USS Liberty massacre, one is struck by the Jewish state’s willingness to engage in risky and reckless behavior. Normally, if a small nation of just a few million people murdered a sitting US president, as Israel did in 1963, it might expect to be scrubbed from the face of the Earth. “Oy vey, if we get caught!” Israeli leader Golda Meir was reported to have said shortly after the JFK assassination. Meir also said, on two occasions, that Israel would destroy the world with nuclear weapons rather than accept military defeat. (The source for both statements was Meir’s personal friend, former lead Mideast BBC correspondent Alan Hart.)
Today, the zionist entity is still taking enormous risks—and pushing the world toward nuclear Armageddon. Its genocide of Gaza has cast it as the enemy of all humanity. Its repeated attacks on regional countries, and its assassinations of Iran’s top generals and suspected assassination of the Iranian president and foreign minister, have brought the Muslim East, and the world, to the proverbial precipice. And its complete death grip on power in America has destroyed the American republic and is driving the now-fascist US empire to destruction.
Like the brave soldiers on the wounded USS Liberty, who cobbled together makeshift communications equipment after the zionists had bombed their antenna, and managed to broadcast a message revealing the identity of their attackers, we need to piece together what is left of our Enlightenment-era free communications network and use it to inform the world who the enemy really is.
Being a college town, Palo Alto once offered a multitude of excellent new and used bookstores, perhaps as many as a dozen or so. But the rise of Amazon produced a great extinction in that business sector, and I think only two now survive, probably still more than for most towns of comparable size.
Amazon and its rivals have obviously become hugely beneficial book-buying resources that I frequently use, but they fail to offer the benefit of randomly browsing shelves and occasionally stumbling across something serendipitous. So I regularly stop by the monthly used book sale put on by Friends of the Palo Alto Library, whose offerings are also very attractively priced, with good quality paperbacks often going for as little as a quarter.
While browsing that sale a couple of weeks ago, I noticed a hardcover copy of Newsroom Confidential, a short 2022 insider account of mainstream journalism by Margaret Sullivan, who had spent four years as the Public Editor of the New York Times. I’d occasionally read her columns in that paper and had seen one or two favorable reviews of the book, so despite its pricey cost—a full $3—I bought and read it, hoping to get a sense of what she’d observed during her term as the designated reader-advocate at our national newspaper of record.
As she told her story, prior to joining the Times she had spent her entire career at the far smaller Buffalo News of her native city, eventually rising to become its editor. Although she’d been happy in that position, after eight years she decided to apply for an opening at the Times, and jumped at the offer when she received it.
Based upon her narrative, Sullivan seems very much a moderate liberal in her views, not too different from most others in her journalistic profession despite being raised in a family of more conservative blue-collar Catholics in Upstate New York. She opened the Prologue of her book by denouncing Donald Trump’s infamous “Stop the Steal” DC rally of early 2021 and she described the invasion of our Capitol by outraged Trumpists as “one of the most appalling moments in all of American history,” sentiments probably shared by at least 90% of her mainstream colleagues.
Born in 1957, Sullivan explained that as a first grader she and everyone else in her community had been horrified by the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, our first Catholic president. Less than a decade later, she was transfixed by the Watergate Scandal and the subsequent Senate hearings that led to the fall of President Richard Nixon. Like so many others of her generation, she had idolized Woodward and Bernstein, the crusading young reporters who broke the case and brought down a crooked president, especially admiring their portrayal by movie stars Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in the film version of All the President’s Men. Along with many other idealistic young Americans, Sullivan decided to embark upon a journalistic career as a consequence.
As far as I can tell, Sullivan seems to have been a committed and honest professional during the decades that followed, describing some of her mundane minor conflicts with colleagues but generally trying to tell their side of the story as well. As a lateral hire from a smallish Upstate newspaper, she had moved rather cautiously after joining the illustrious Times, and although she sometimes took a bit of pride in a few of her columns that attracted considerable readership or were widely Tweeted out, none of these much stuck in my mind.
As the end of her four year tenure approached, the Times tried to persuade her to extend it, but she preferred to move over to the Washington Post and become one of their media columnists.
The various tidbits of gossip she reported from those newspapers were hardly earth-shattering. She’d had a private dinner with top Times editor Jill Abramson one evening only to be shocked the next morning when the latter was summarily fired by the publisher, so she passed along the speculation about what combination of factors might have been responsible for that sudden purge. Abramson had been the first woman to serve as executive editor of the Times, and she was replaced by her deputy Dean Baquet, who became the first black to hold that post. Sullivan explained that the two had long had a contentious relationship, and many members of the newsroom speculated that Baquet had demanded that the Times leadership choose between the two of them. Apparently Abramson had a difficult personality while Baquet was much more charming, so even though he sometimes threw “temper tantrums” he was able to get away with such behavior, and he came out on top.
Although Sullivan never broke a major story nor won any important journalistic prize, she seemed very much a solid team-player rather than a prima donna and got along well with her professional colleagues. Therefore, I was hardly surprised that she was chosen to join the Pulitzer Prize Board in 2011 and eventually became executive director of a Columbia University center for journalist ethics.
Her book was a rather short one, so although I didn’t really get much out of it, it also hardly absorbed too many hours of my time. But what struck me in reading it was how a longtime editor and media columnist could have lived through some of the most shocking and dramatic events of the last sixty years without ever seeming to seriously question any of them. The Kennedy Assassinations of the 1960s, the 9/11 Attacks and the long War on Terror, the 2016 Russian election interference that put Donald Trump in the White House, the global Covid epidemic beginning in early 2020 and the massive social upheaval following the police murder of George Floyd later that same year—all those seminal incidents were discussed in her text yet she never seemed to entertain the slightest doubts about those standard narratives.
At one point she noted the striking collapse of public confidence in the honesty and reliability of American journalism, which had plummeted from around 72% soon after Watergate to just 36% these days. But she never asked herself whether the public might have a sound basis for such rapidly growing distrust of our media.
In reading Sullivan’s account of her journalistic career, two names from Shakespeare’s Hamlet came to mind: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Those two Danish courtiers had remained totally oblivious to the enormous events taking place around them and suffered a dire fate as a consequence, though they later became the protagonists of Tom Stoppard’s absurdist play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Although fifteen or twenty years ago, I might have shared Sullivan’s tendency to ignore any deeper realities of modern American history, her book was published in 2022 and I wondered whether she had ever seriously explored the full range of information available on the Internet during the decades she had spent as an editor and a media columnist.
As she casually described some of the watershed events of her lifetime, always seeming to take them entirely at face value, I smiled a bit since over the years I had carefully analyzed most of them in my own American Pravda series and usually come to very different conclusions. But what jumped out at me was her discussion of a much smaller incident from near the end of her tenure at the Times. Although that story has been almost totally forgotten, it filled nearly four pages of her short book, occupying almost as much space as Watergate and far more than the 9/11 Attacks.
In December 2015, terrorist gunmen had attacked the public employees of San Bernardino, California at their offices, killing fourteen and wounding more than twenty, the worst mass shooting in America since Sandy Hook three years earlier. Within hours, a massive local police mobilization had located, shot, and killed the Islamic fanatics responsible and all the details of the case are provided in a very comprehensive Wikipedia article that runs more than 19,000 words.
Sullivan became involved in a controversy over whether the pro-jihadi social media posts left by one of the killers had been correctly described by an anonymous government source, whose information was the basis of a provocative front page Times story that became an important element in the political debate. Her critical column made waves and even drew the involvement of her newspaper’s top editor before the matter was ultimately settled to her complete satisfaction.
At the time of that mass shooting, I was heavily focused upon the final stages of preparing my ultimately unsuccessful campaign for the Harvard Board of Overseers, but certain elements of that incident stuck in my mind, and although Sullivan never seemed to have questioned any of its strange details, I certainly did.
During the previous few years I’d grown increasingly suspicious of many of the watershed events of our country’s modern history, but I hadn’t yet launched my American Pravda series nor even published a single article outlining any of my conspiratorial views. However, certain elements of this mass shooting raised red flags in my mind, and I soon republished a short column by longtime libertarian writer Gary North highlighting some of those issues.
On December 2nd, public employees of San Bernardino County were holding a day-long training exercise and holiday party at their offices when a deadly attack suddenly began. According to all the eyewitnesses, three large white men, wearing ski masks and dressed head-to-toe in military-style commando-outfits suddenly burst into the gathering and began raking the terrified victims with gunfire from their assault-rifles, killing fourteen and wounding more than twenty others. Although after nine years many of the YouTube videos providing the statements of survivors are no longer available, the CBS Evening News phone interview with a seemingly very credible eyewitness is still on the Internet and worth viewing.
Some 300 local law enforcement officers were quickly mobilized and although they arrived too late to catch the perpetrators, they began patrolling the vicinity, hoping to find the killers before they struck again. Their efforts were soon rewarded and four hours later they located the black SUV driving less than two miles away, and after a massive gun-battle with hundreds of rounds fired, they shot the terrorists to death. Yet oddly enough, the slain culprits turned out to be a young Pakistani Muslim married couple living nearby, Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, whose six-month-old baby girl had fortunately been left at the home of her grandmother when the parents said they needed to drive to a doctor’s appointment.
Government officials and their media allies all soon declared the case closed, explaining that the Pakistani couple had apparently self-radicalized themselves by reading Islamicist tracts on the Internet and becoming followers of the dread ISIS terrorist movement. ISIS had been much in the news during 2015, allegedly responsible for staging numerous attacks all across Western countries.
But the total divergence between the two descriptions of the suspects seemed quite remarkable, especially once the news media revealed that Malik was a very short woman, standing barely five feet tall. In conversations and later posted comments, I joked that America’s ISIS foes were formidable indeed if they possessed the magical power to transform themselves from one very short woman into two large men and then back again.
Eyewitness testimony at horrific events is notoriously unreliable and although the shooters had been described as white based upon visible portions of their skin, the commando-outfits they were wearing would have concealed most of that, so such identification might have easily been mistaken. Perhaps many of the County employees were relatively short individuals from a Hispanic, Asian, or Middle Eastern immigrant background and they merely assumed that someone large and tall was more likely to be of white European ancestry. But a tiny woman looks very different from a large man and it’s hard to confuse two shooters with three. Even after the official narrative had congealed into its final form, the eyewitness interviewed by CBS News stuck to her story when later questioned by ABC News, saying “I know what I saw.”
The background of the terrorist couple also seemed quite odd. According to news accounts, Farouk had spent the previous five years working as a County food inspector, generally known as someone who got along well with others, with baffled co-workers saying that the young couple were “living the American dream.” Meanwhile, although she’d originally trained as a pharmacist, Malik had become a stay-at-home mom, apparently still nursing her six-month-old baby girl. While I suppose it’s possible that a young, nursing mother has sometimes gone on a wild terrorist rampage, I’d never previously heard of such a case.
A few years earlier I’d become friendly with a prominent mainstream academic and had been shocked to discover that for decades he had become a strong if silent believer in all sorts of “conspiracy theories.” Later that month I happened to have lunch with him and learned that he was also very skeptical of the official story of that terrorist massacre. He’d come of age during the Vietnam War era and served in the ROTC while a student at Harvard, training on weapons during those years. So he explained that a tiny woman such as Malik would have had a very hard time handling a powerful assault-rifle such as an AR-15, revealing another major hole in the official story.
We were also told that after staging their brutal massacre, the two married terrorists had behaved in a strange way. Instead of either fleeing the area or committing other attacks, they had apparently changed back into their civilian clothes and were later caught by the swarming law enforcement officers while slowly driving their vehicle a mile and a half from the crime scene. According to the media accounts, the Bonnie and Clyde terrorist couple had gone out in a blaze of glory, killed after engaging in a huge shootout with the pursuing police. But the photos seemed to show that the windows of their bullet-riddled SUV were tightly closed, and surely they would have rolled them down if they were firing their weapons at the officers chasing them.
Given these severe inconsistences, some conspiratorially-minded individuals naturally suggested that the two Pakistani Muslims had been selected as patsies for a terrorist false-flag attack organized by our government or its allies. But that hypothesis also seemed to make little sense to me. Why would the government stage a false-flag massacre involving three large gunmen and then try to pin the blame on a Pakistani immigrant and his very short wife?
Nine years have now passed and much of the video evidence has disappeared, so determining exactly what happened seems quite difficult. But at the time I believed that a completely unrelated shooting incident in the Los Angeles area a couple of years earlier provided some important insights for this case and I still think the same today.
During February 2013, a black former LAPD officer named Charles Dorner became outraged over what he regarded as his unfair treatment and he began an assassination campaign against other police officers and their families, eventually killing four victims and wounding three more before he was finally trapped in a huge manhunt and committed suicide. During the ten days of his rampage, police departments across much of Southern California were in a state of extremely high alert, mobilizing officers for guard duty outside the homes of those officials and their families that they believed might be among his next targets. But their trigger-happy fears of that deadly cop-killer led to some unfortunate accidents.
Very early one morning, the seven police officers guarding the home of an LAPD official noticed a nearby pickup truck driving in a suspicious manner. So mistakenly believing that it matched the description of Dorner’s vehicle, they fired without warning and riddled it with more than 100 bullets. But instead of Dorner, the occupants turned out to be an elderly Hispanic woman and her middle-aged daughter, who were out delivering the Los Angeles Times in that neighborhood as they did every morning. Less than a half-hour later, other police officers opened fire on another misidentified vehicle, injuring a white surfer who had been on his way to the beach. Fortunately, the victims of those mistaken police shootings all survived and they eventually received multi-million-dollar settlements from their lawsuits.
I think we should at least consider the possibility that Farook and Malik died for similar reasons. Their fatal mistake may have been that they were driving a black SUV that closely resembled the getaway vehicle of the attackers and doing so in an area filled with hundreds of fearful officers on the lookout for terrorist commandoes armed with assault weapons. The limited visual evidence seems to show their SUV was proceeding quietly along the road at normal speed before being attacked and perforated by hundreds of bullets from the police vehicles tailing them.
Obviously, this reconstruction is quite speculative, and Wikipedia summarizes the long list of media reports providing a cornucopia of highly-incriminating evidence. These describe the enormous arsenal of weapons and home-made bombs that the young immigrant couple had allegedly amassed in preparation for their terrorist rampage. So interested readers should weigh that supposed evidence against the seemingly contrary facts that I have described above.
However, consider that the massacre prompted President Barack Obama to broadcast a rare Oval Office address, his first in five years. Given our ongoing international war against the terroristic ISIS movement of the Middle East, any admission that our police had mistakenly shot and killed a young Pakistani couple with an infant daughter might have been hugely damaging to American national security. The alternate choice of fabricating a case against two already dead foreigners would hardly have been the worst crime ever committed by a government desperate to hide its severe embarrassment.
The number of victims in the San Bernardino attack had not been that large, but wider fears of international Islamicist terror attacks had probably been responsible for Obama’s national address on the incident. Indeed, 2015 produced a bumper-crop of such terrorist assaults, with the Wikipedia page devoted to the topic showing nearly 100 such incidents, far more than for any other year. Moreover, many of these attacks occurred in the West, stoking the enormous fears of domestic terrorism that may have helped explain the massive, trigger-happy local police response in San Bernardino.
Probably the highest-profile 2015 attack had taken place in early January at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical French magazine. That Jewish-dominated publication had long directed the crudest and most vicious insults against the deep religious beliefs of Christians and Muslims, and although the former took those barbs in stride, threats from the latter had been so numerous that the government stationed a police guard outside the premises. But when the attack finally came on January 7th, he proved helpless against the two assailants, clad in commando-outfits and heavily armed with assault-rifles. They forced their way into the building and quickly executed a dozen of the staff while wounding a similar number, then shot the guard on the street while escaping. The choice of dress, weapons, and style of the two attackers seemed rather similar to those who would attack the public employees of San Bernardino eleven months later.
Nearly all of France’s political class treated the brutal killing of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists and writers as an outrageous assault against France’s long Voltairean traditional of freedom of speech and the incident was widely described as France’s own “9/11 Attack.” Within a couple of days, the Islamicist killers responsible had been identified by the police, tracked down, and killed but the political reverberations continued. Two days later, Paris saw a gigantic march of two million protesting the attacks and denouncing Islamic extremism. More than 40 world leaders led that procession, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu taking a prominent but controversial place at the front, and similar protests of some 1.7 million additional people occurred elsewhere in the country. France contained a large Muslim population with immigrant roots and French leaders united to endorse a severe political crackdown on perceived Islamic extremism and those who supported it. The standard account of all these events is provided in the Wikipedia page that runs around 17,000 words.
As these important French events unfolded, I’d been reading very detailed coverage in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and initially accepted this entire narrative without question. But I soon discovered that others took a much more conspiratorial line, and a series of email exchanges with that same well-connected academic friend of mine brought those surprising possibilities to my attention, gradually winning me over to his perspective. Based upon some of his discussions with knowledgeable friends in France, he believed that there was a strong possibility that the attacks may have been some sort of government false-flag operation, aimed at justifying a sharp crackdown against political dissent, though the exact details were not at all clear. He also said that such suspicions were very widespread in certain French intellectual and political circles, but almost no one dared voice them in public.
Prompted by those claims coming from someone whose opinion I respected, I began noticing certain elements of the story that greatly multiplied my suspicions.
Much like their later counterparts in San Bernardino, the two terrorist attackers had been wearing face-masks and commando-outfits, and after killing their victims with bursts of assault-weapons gunfire they had easily escaped long before the French police could respond. The only reason that they were quickly identified and caught was that one of the terrorists had carelessly left his ID card behind in an abandoned getaway vehicle, a crucial fact oddly excluded from the very comprehensive Wikipedia article. This seemed a remarkably suspicious detail, eerily similar to the undamaged hijacker passport found on the streets of NYC after the fiery crash of the jetliners into the WTC towers during on September 11th, or the lost luggage of 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta that later provided a wealth of incriminating background material regarding the terrorist plot and his motives.
For many decades, former Presidential candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen had been the leader of France’s Far Right anti-Muslim political movement, and he had strong personal connections to the country’s military and security circles. Based upon his ideological beliefs, he might have been expected to welcome the anti-Muslim crackdown prompted by the terrorist massacre, but in an interview with Britain’s Daily Telegraph he said that the attacks seemed extremely suspicious to him and might have been a false-flag operation by some intelligence service. No other major English-language publication reported his surprising views and just a week or so later, Le Pen narrowly escaped death when his house suddenly caught fire, with that story also only being reported in the Telegraph. I later discussed these surprising developments in several comments, but the original articles themselves have now apparently vanished from the Telegraph archives, seemingly underscoring their significance. Naturally none of this information appears in the comprehensive Wikipedia articles on either the Charlie Hebdo attacks or Le Pen himself.
Wikipedia did devote a single sentence to another very odd development in the case. One day after the terrorist attack, the French police commissioner responsible for the investigation suddenly decided to commit suicide at his government office while preparing his official report, choosing to shoot himself in the head.
In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, France’s entire political leadership class declared themselves the absolute guarantors of the country’s freedom of speech and thought against the Islamic militants who challenged those sacred values. But the actual consequences that followed were somewhat different. Over the years France’s large Muslim population had become increasingly hostile to Israeli policy and Jewish influence, and such sentiments were now outlawed as constituting sympathy for terrorism, given that the alleged terrorists had come from that community and background. These harsh new prohibitions were enforced by a huge wave of arrests and investigations.
As an example of this ironic situation, consider the case of Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, a French-born citizen of half-African ancestry. Although he was one of the France’s most popular comedians, over the years his stinging criticism of overwhelming Jewish influence had caused him enormous legal and professional difficulties. So a few days after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, he posted some mocking comments on his Facebook page, noting that the same authorities who now loudly proclaimed their support for free speech had regularly persecuted him for his humor, and he was quickly arrested on charges of publicly supporting terrorism.
Later that same year, Kevin Barrett released We Are NOT Charlie Hebdo, his edited collection of about two dozen essays highlighting many of the strange and suspicious aspects of that important terrorist incident. I finally read it a couple of years ago and I would strongly recommend it as a very helpful balance to the version of events provided by the mainstream media and codified in Wikipedia. In doing so I am merely seconding the favorable verdict of Prof. Richard Falk of Princeton University, an eminent expert on international law and human rights policy.
Around that same time I also read two other books released by Progressive Press, a small alternative publisher located in Southern California. These both provided a highly-conspiratorial counter-narrative to the mainstream account of our struggle against the Islamicist terrorists of the Middle East.
A decade ago, the terroristic forces of ISIS had become notorious throughout that region and the entire world for their brutal atrocities. These were demonstrated in the videos they regularly released showing the horrific beheadings they inflicted upon their enemies in Syria and Iraq, and ISIS supporters were usually blamed for terrorist attacks in the West, including those in France and San Bernardino. As a result, ISIS allegedly became the primary target of American military operations in the Middle East, but our efforts seemed surprisingly ineffective.
However, a 2016 collection of articles and essays descriptively entitled ISIS Is Us told a very different story. A number of alternative writers and bloggers presented arguments that the CIA and our own regional allies such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Israel had actually been responsible for creating and equipping that fanatical group of Sunni Muslim jihadists, then deploying them as a means of overthrowing Syria’s Shiite-aligned government, an important Iranian ally.
Indeed, that project came very close to success until Russian military intervention in September 2015 helped to turn the tide, along with the ground forces already committed by the Shiite Hezbollah militia of Southern Lebanon. Although I’d regularly seen these arguments floating around in corners of the Internet, I found it useful to have them presented in the pages of a book.
Over the last couple of decades French journalist Thierry Meyssan has become an influential figure in left-wing, conspiratorial circles, and his 2002 book 9/11: The Big Lie was one of the earliest works attacking the official 9/11 narrative, quickly becoming a huge best-seller in France and soon translated into English. That publishing success led him to establish the VoltaireNetwebsite in Lebanon, which has maintained a strong focus on Middle Eastern issues while being sharply critical of Western policies.
In early 2019 he published Before Our Very Eyes: Fake Wars and Big Lies, adopting a very similar approach to the story of the “Arab Spring” and the Western use of Muslim Jihadists in attempts to overthrow the governments of Libya and Syria, with the former effort being successful. Although some of his claims were already known to me and seemed solidly documented, others were much more surprising. But although he provided a vast number of specific statements about important matters, he usually did so without providing any sources for his material, so it was difficult for me to judge its credibility. I assume that much of his information came from his personal contacts with various regional intelligence organizations, who obviously would have had vested interests in promoting their desired narratives, whether or not those happened to be true.
In many respects, I think these three books constituted the photographic inverse-image of Margaret Sullivan’s text, focusing exactly upon the conspiratorial elements of all the major stories that she herself had carefully avoided noticing during her decades of mainstream journalism. So I suspect that the truth lies somewhere between those two extremes.
It’s also quite possible that Sullivan knows or at least suspects far more than she indicated in her book and she was being less than candid with her readers. Positions in elite mainstream journalism or academia are difficult to obtain and can easily be lost if someone strays outside accepted boundaries. After all Jill Abramson had held the top position in all of American journalism and then was suddenly fired for unclear reasons. Times Opinion Editor James Bennet had been a leading candidate to run his newspaper but had suddenly been forced to resign merely for publishing a controversial op-ed by a leading Republican Senator. The forty-year Times career of prominent science journalist Donald McNeil came to an end when he made a few incautious remarks at an extracurricular student outing in Peru. All these individuals far outranked Sullivan and their transgressions were very minor ones compared to the deadly journalistic sin of becoming a suspected “conspiracy theorist.” Indeed, if Sullivan had raised any of the dangerous points I have discussed above, I doubt her manuscript would have even been accepted for publication.
I actually think that there exists evidence that some elite journalists may have much broader views on various issues than they would ever admit in print.
A couple of months after the very suspicious case of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, I decided to publish a highly-controversial analysis of Sen. John McCain’s Vietnam War record, an article that represented something of a sequel to Sydney Schanberg’s seminal expose of McCain’s role in the POW cover-up.
Although all my facts were drawn from fully mainstream sources—much of it from the Times itself—my analysis and conclusions were quite explosive, as indicated by a couple of my closing paragraphs:
Today when we consider the major countries of the world we see that in many cases the official leaders are also the leaders in actuality: Vladimir Putin calls the shots in Russia, Xi Jinping and his top Politburo colleagues do the same in China, and so forth. However, in America and in some other Western countries, this seems to be less and less the case, with top national figures merely being attractive front-men selected for their popular appeal and their political malleability, a development that may eventually have dire consequences for the nations they lead. As an extreme example, a drunken Boris Yeltsin freely allowed the looting of Russia’s entire national wealth by the handful of oligarchs who pulled his strings, and the result was the total impoverishment of the Russian people and a demographic collapse almost unprecedented in modern peacetime history.
An obvious problem with installing puppet rulers is the risk that they will attempt to cut their strings, much like Putin soon outmaneuvered and exiled his oligarch patron Boris Berezovsky. One means of minimizing such risk is to select puppets who are so deeply compromised that they can never break free, knowing that the political self-destruct charges buried deep within their pasts could easily be triggered if they sought independence. I have sometimes joked with my friends that perhaps the best career move for an ambitious young politician would be to secretly commit some monstrous crime and then make sure that the hard evidence of his guilt ended up in the hands of certain powerful people, thereby assuring his rapid political rise.
My piece received a very favorable response in alternative media circles. But to my considerable surprise, a week or two later I was contacted by a Times editor who solicited my participation in a symposium on college reform, my first appearance in several years. And the favorable reaction to my piece arguing that our elite colleges should abolish tuition prompted me to launch my campaign for the Harvard Board of Overseers at the end of that year.
Similarly, my enormous suspicions that our media was hiding the truth about both the Charlie Hebdo and San Bernardino terrorist attacks gradually convinced me that many other important stories were also being concealed or distorted by our mainstream media and I began thinking of expanding my original 2013 American Pravda article into an entire series. The July 2016 death of Sydney Schanberg prompted me to launch that series, which opened with the following paragraphs, perhaps helping to explain much of the bland and blinkered material in Sullivan’s book:
The death on Saturday of Sydney Schanberg at age 82 should sadden us not only for the loss of one of our most renowned journalists but also for what his story reveals about the nature of our national media.
Syd had made his career at the New York Times for 26 years, winning a Pulitzer Prize, two George Polk Memorial awards, and numerous other honors. His passing received the notice it deserved, with the world’s most prestigious broadsheet devoting nearly a full page of its Sunday edition to his obituary, a singular honor that in this degraded era is more typically reserved for leading pop stars or sports figures. Several photos were included of his Cambodia reporting, which had become the basis for the Oscar-winning film The Killing Fields, one of Hollywood’s most memorable accounts of our disastrous Indo-Chinese War.
But for all the 1,300 words and numerous images charting his long and illustrious journalistic history, not even a single mention was made of the biggest story of his career, which has seemingly vanished down the memory hole without trace. And therein lies a tale.
Could a news story ever be “too big” for the media to cover? Every journalist is always seeking a major expose, a piece that not merely reaches the transitory front pages but also might win a journalistic prize or even change the history books. Stories such as these appear rarely but can make a reporter’s career, and it is difficult to imagine a writer turning one down, or an editor rejecting it.
But what if the story is so big that it actually reveals dangerous truths about the real nature of the American media, portrays too many powerful people in a very negative light, and perhaps leads to a widespread loss of faith in our major news media? If readers were to see a story like that, they might naturally begin to wonder “why hadn’t we ever been told?” or even “what else might be out there?”
CEO of the Center for Integrated Unmanned Solutions spoke to Sputnik and explained that Ukrainian drone operators with combat experience will be highly sought after by American private military companies, as well as even more sinister organizations such as global terrorist networks.
The transfer of operating experience of FPV drones from Ukrainian troops to American private military companies and beyond will be a key factor of the global terrorist threat, Dmitry Kuzyakin, the general director of the Center for Integrated Unmanned Solutions, told Sputnik.
“The release of a huge number of Ukrainian servicemen with combat experience on FPV systems, which will ultimately lead to an increase in the global terrorist threat, is a major challenge to international security. They may already be transferring their [combat] experience to US private military companies, and further recipients are hard to predict – international terrorist organizations, criminal networks and so on,” Kyzyakin said.
The expert recalled that during his last visit to Kiev, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken inspected the drone production facility due to the fact that Ukrainian troops have extensive experience with FPV drones combat use.
“The FPV drone itself does not require any special know-how. We have dismantled US, European, Ukrainian drones, and we produce drones ourselves. Actually, any country from the US to Somalia can produce drones… Having combat experience is quite different, no one in the world except Russia and Ukraine actually has it,” he stressed.
Kuzyakin believes that the US is considering evacuating Ukrainian FPV drone operators from the front lines to train American troops.
“The experience of fighting not on a proving ground, but in blood and dirt. The experience of survival and victory. And more importantly, the experience of failure and loss. Apart from anything else, Blinken came for FPV drone operators, who will be evacuated by American private military companies so that they can train [US soldiers],” Dmitry Kuzyakin summed up.
By James Petras | Global Research | September 12, 2018
Introduction
Despite having the biggest military budget in the world, five times larger than the next six countries, the largest number of military bases – over 180 – in the world and the most expensive military industrial complex, the US has failed to win a single war in the 21st century.
In this paper we will enumerate the wars and proceed to analyze why, despite the powerful material basis for wars, it has led to failures. … continue
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Over the last couple of decades French journalist 
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