Baghdad 1950. Paris 2015?
False Flag Attacks by Zionists Against Fellow Jews…
Left: Zionist agent in Iraq, Naeim Giladi, circa 1947; right: Iraqi Jews arrive in Israel 1951
By Richard Edmondson | Fig Trees and Vineyards | January 14, 2015
It is said that there is nothing new under the sun.
Jewish leaders talking up the threat of “anti-Semitism” in order to induce Jews to immigrate to Israel is of course not new. Such talk emanating in the immediate aftermath of what appear to have been false flag attacks by Zionists against fellow Jews–this also is not new.
“To all the Jews of France, all the Jews of Europe, I would like to say that Israel is not just the place in whose direction you pray, the state of Israel is your home,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said over the weekend in the wake of the attacks in Paris.
Netanyahu is certainly up on his Jewish history, but for those of the rest of us who may not be quite as well-versed, here is a little primer.
In the years 1950-51, the city of Baghdad was hit by a series of explosions targeting Iraqi Jews. The attacks caused property damage, injuries, and deaths, creating panic in the Jewish population. At the time the bombings were blamed upon Arab nationalists, raising fears of anti-Semitism and giving rise to a desire by Jews to immigrate to Israel–which of course, at precisely that same time, was in the process of displacing Palestinians and attempting to expand its Jewish population.
What follows is a timeline of events in Baghdad excerpted from a book written and published in the 1990s by an Iraqi Jew named Naeim Giladi. I’ll say a little bit more below about who Giladi was, but for right now just consider the timeline as he presents it:
Six months later-the exact date was March 19, 1950-a bomb went off at the American Cultural Center and Library in Baghdad, causing property damage and injuring a number of people. The center was a favorite meeting place for young Jews.
The first bomb thrown directly at Jews occurred on April 8, 1950, at 9:15 p.m. A car with three young passengers hurled the grenade at Baghdad’s El-Dar El-Bida Café, where Jews were celebrating Passover. Four people were seriously injured. That night leaflets were distributed calling on Jews to leave Iraq immediately.
The next day, many Jews, most of them poor with nothing to lose, jammed emigration offices to renounce their citizenship and to apply for permission to leave for Israel. So many applied, in fact, that the police had to open registration offices in Jewish schools and synagogues.
On May 10, at 3 a.m., a grenade was tossed in the direction of the display window of the Jewish-owned Beit-Lawi Automobile Company, destroying part of the building. No casualties were reported.
On June 3, 1950, another grenade was tossed from a speeding car in the El-Batawin area of Baghdad where most rich Jews and middle class Iraqis lived. No one was hurt, but following the explosion Zionist activists sent telegrams to Israel requesting that the quota for immigration from Iraq be increased.
On June 5, at 2:30 a.m., a bomb exploded next to the Jewish owned Stanley Shashua building on El-Rashid street, resulting in property damage but no casualties.
On January 14, 1951, at 7 p.m., a grenade was thrown at a group of Jews outside the Masouda Shem-Tov Synagogue. The explosive struck a high-voltage cable, electrocuting three Jews, one a young boy, Itzhak Elmacher, and wounding over 30 others. Following the attack, the exodus of Jews jumped to between 600-700 per day.
Zionist propagandists still maintain that the bombs in Iraq were set off by anti-Jewish Iraqis who wanted Jews out of their country. The terrible truth is that the grenades that killed and maimed Iraqi Jews and damaged their property were thrown by Zionist Jews.
The paragraphs above come from Giladi’s book, Ben Gurion’s Scandals: How the Haganah and the Mossad Eliminated Jews, originally published in 1992. An except from the book can be found here, and includes details about the Baghdad bombings as well as a number of other interesting items, including Giladi’s own immigration to Palestine and what he witnessed there. You’ll note, in the timeline, his reference to leaflets being distributed on the same day of the April 8 bombing. That leaflet read in part, “Call to the Jews: To all the tribe of Zion living in Babylon.” It goes on to encourage an exodus out of Iraq:
“For the second time in the history of the diaspora, we have an opportunity to leave. We encourage you to hurry and leave. Today the Jews are in a new era of the history of the diaspora.”
Giladi was born in Iraq in 1929 and became a committed Zionist in his late teens. Later in life he disavowed Zionism, renounced his Israeli citizenship, and moved to the US. His change of heart began when, as a young Jewish immigrant, shortly after arriving in Israel, he encountered “institutionalized racism,” against both Palestinians as well as Arabic or Mizrahi Jews.
The principal interest Israel had in Jews from Islamic countries was as a supply of cheap labor, especially for the farm work that was beneath the urbanized Eastern European Jews. Ben Gurion needed the “Oriental” Jews to farm the thousands of acres of land left by Palestinians who were driven out by Israeli forces in 1948.
At the time in question, the early 1950s, Israel was ethnically cleansing the Ashkelon area and forcing Palestinians who lived there into the Gaza Strip. Farms were indeed taken over, and so, yes, there was a need for cheap labor, and Jews from Iraq provided a good source. And to make sure that the new arrivals were wholly dependent upon their earnings as laborers, Israel saw to it that they were forced, for the most part, to leave their property and possessions behind in Iraq. According to Giladi:
…the pro-British, pro-Zionist puppet el-Said [Nouri el-Said, the Iraqi prime minister–ed.]saw to it that all of their possessions were frozen, including their cash assets. (There were ways of getting Iraqi dinars out, but when the immigrants went to exchange them in Israel they found that the Israeli government kept 50 percent of the value.) Even those Iraqi Jews who had not registered to emigrate, but who happened to be abroad, faced loss of their nationality if they didn’t return within a specified time. An ancient, cultured, prosperous community had been uprooted and its people transplanted to a land dominated by East European Jews, whose culture was not only foreign but entirely hateful to them.
Giladi passed away in 2010, but his conclusions–that the Baghdad bombings were perpetrated by Zionist Jews–are shared by a number of modern historians and writers, including Uri Avnery, who wrote that, “After the disclosure of the Lavon Affair… the Baghdad affair became more plausible.” But perhaps most interesting was the assessment given by career CIA officer Wilbur Crane Eveland:
In attempts to portray the Iraqis as anti-American and to terrorize the Jews, the Zionists planted bombs in the U.S. Information Service library and in synagogues. Soon leaflets began to appear urging Jews to flee to Israel. . . .
Although the Iraqi police later provided our embassy with evidence to show that the synagogue and library bombings, as well as the anti-Jewish and anti-American leaflet campaigns, had been the work of an underground Zionist organization, most of the world believed reports that Arab terrorism had motivated the flight of the Iraqi Jews whom the Zionists had “rescued” really just in order to increase Israel’s Jewish population.
The above is quoted by Giladi and is derived from Eveland’s memoir, Ropes of Sand: America’s Failure in the Middle East, published in 1980.
An Iraqi court went on to find 20 people, all members of the Iraqi Zionist underground, guilty of carrying out the bombings. Two were sentenced to death, and the rest received lengthy prison terms. But by this time the Jewish population of Iraq had been greatly reduced. Giladi says that 125,000 Iraqi Jews ended up immigrating to Palestine, leaving just 6,000 remaining. It also resulted in a split in Giladi’s own family; while Giladi himself made the journey, his parents, he says, were not fooled by the false flag events and remained behind in Iraq.
***
While a good many analysts have concluded that the recent attacks in Paris were a false flag operation, carried out most likely by Israel, others have expressed dubiousness on the matter. Certainly Israeli false flag operations are well documented, but a line would surely be drawn at targeting Jews in such attacks–this seems to be the reasoning. The events in Baghdad 65 years ago, however, would apparently refute this notion. If something is “good for the Jews” collectively, as a whole, then it can apparently be justified even should it be brought about at the expense of individual Jews–that at least seems to be the thinking on the matter by some Jews or Jewish leaders at any rate. Maybe, though, this should come as no surprise, and here I’m reminded of the words of Caiaphas, the chief priest at the time of Jesus: “You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish.”
I highly recommend Giladi’s book excerpt in its entirety, if you have the time, for it makes for fascinating reading. You can also click here to see a video featuring an interview with the author that was conducted in 1994.
Meanwhile Israeli officials continue urging French Jews to make “aliyah” to Israel.
“Due to the impossible security situation [for French Jews], Israel has a responsibility to allocate all necessary resources to facilitate the aliyah and absorption of Jews from France,” said Knesset member Yoni Chetboun.
Other Israeli officials have also spoken out.
“Your place, Jews of France, is with us,” said Rabbi Eli Ben-Dahan, Religious Affairs minister, speaking at a Jewish Home party rally.
“We are all shocked at the recent wave of anti-Semitic attacks in France,” said Knesset member Motti Yogev. “To all our Jewish brothers in France we call: Come and make Aliyah to Israel! Here is your home – our home.”
Another Israeli politician, Yair Lapid, seemed to be going out of his way to push the alarm buttons.
“I don’t want to speak in terms of Holocaust, but…” he said, “European Jewry must understand that there is just one place for Jews, and that is the State of Israel.”
All of this is obviously having an effect. The leader of a Paris synagogue is predicting that between 14,000 and 15,000 French Jews will immigrate to Israel in 2015, and indeed hundreds are reported to have flocked to an “aliyah fair” held on Sunday.
French Jews attend an “aliyah fair” held in Paris on Sunday, Jan. 11, just two days after an attack on a kosher market. A series of such fairs are scheduled as part of an Israeli policy called “France First.”
Is not the holding of an “aliyah fair” just two days after an attack on a kosher market pretty much the equivalent or on a par with the aforementioned leaflets printed by the Zionist underground in Baghdad 65 years ago?
Is there anything new under the sun?
By the way, additional aliyah fairs are scheduled this week for Marseilles and Lyon, with more to come in February and March. The organizing of such events is said to be part of a new Israeli policy–overseen by the Ministry of Immigration Absorption–called “France First.” The implications of such a policy are somewhat alarming. If France is “first,” who’s next? Will attacks similar to the ones last week begin to occur in other countries with large Jewish populations?
No word on whether Netanyahu dropped by the fair in Paris on Sunday, although he was in the city participating in the giant anti-terrorism march–this of course despite the fact that he had been specifically requested by the French government not to come. One person who did pop into the fair, however, was Natan Sharansky, chairman of the Jewish Agency, who had accompanied the prime minister to Paris from Israel.
In his remarks, Sharansky assured the potential immigrants that “the Jewish Agency embraces the French Jewish community at this difficult time and is extending its full support by helping provide for the physical security of Jewish communities across France, increasing our assistance to any individual who wishes to immigrate to Israel, and working to ease immigrants’ integration into the Israeli workforce and Israeli society.”
Translation: don’t worry. The United States will pay for it.
The calls for Jewish immigration today are, of course, motivated by different needs from those of 65 years ago. Recently the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics released figures showing that the number of Palestinians throughout historical Palestine will exceed the Jewish population by the end of the year 2020. The figures have been challenged by Israeli academics, who insist the Palestinian statistics are flawed, although certainly the “demographic threat” has been an ongoing Zionist concern.
But prompting an upswing in Jewish immigration probably would not have been the only, and maybe not even the prime, consideration in carrying out the Paris attacks–that is assuming the attacks were a false flag. Other writers have suggested a number of other motivations including payback for France’s support for Palestinian statehood at the UN. (One wonders: was Israel’s “France First” policy adopted before or after the UN vote?)
What is clear, of course, is that terrorist organizations and terrorist armies are being supported by some of the most powerful nations on earth, and that these forces are being used to advance certain geopolitical objectives. The likelihood that such elements will be mobilized in some way in future false flag attacks in Western cities has to be considered high.
JE NE SUIS PAS CHARLIE
The Extremely Dark and Unexamined Underside of the Charlie Hebdo Affair
By John Chuckman | Aletho News | January 13, 2015
We hear much about bloody events in Paris being an attack upon western traditions and freedom of the press, and I am sorry but such claims are close to laughable, even though there is nothing remotely funny about mass murder. It certainly is not part of the best western tradition to insult the revered figures of major religions. You are, of course, technically free to do so in many western countries – always remembering that in many of them, a wrong target for your satire will get you a prison term for “hate crimes” – but it does represent little more than poor judgement and extremely bad taste to exercise that particular freedom. What Charlie Hebdo does is not journalism, it is sophomoric jokes and thinly disguised propaganda. Hebdo’s general tone and themes place it completely outside the mythic tableau of heroic defender of free speech or daring journalism, it being very much a vehicle for the interests of American imperialism through NATO.
Of course, the best western traditions don’t outlaw what garments or symbols people may wear for their beliefs, as France has done. Note also the history of some of the politicians making grandiose statements about freedom of the press. Nicolas Sarkozy was involved a number of times in suppressing stories in the press, even once getting a journalist fired. Sarkozy is a man, by the way, who took vast, illegal secret payments from the late Muammar Gaddafi and from France’s richest heiress to secure his election as president. David Cameron had police seize computers at Guardian offices and allows Julian Assange to remain cooped in the Embassy of Ecuador to avoid trumped-up charges in Sweden. Cameron is also best buddies with Rupert Murdoch, the man whose idea of journalism appears to be what he can dredge up to exchange for what he wants from government. His Fox News in the United States enjoys a reputation for telling the truth only by sheer accident. Barack Obama is a man transfixed by secrecy and ready to use all of his powers to punish those who tell the truth, a man who holds hundreds in secret prisons, and a man who regularly oversees the extrajudicial execution of hundreds and hundreds of people in a number of countries.
The parade celebrating the good things of western tradition – which Obama missed but which saw now-potential presidential candidate Sarkozy shove his way to the front – also included such luminaries as the Foreign Minister of Egypt’s extremely repressive government, which, even as the minister marched proudly, held innocent journalists in prison simply for writing the truth. The Prime Minister of Turkey was there celebrating, a man who has put a number of journalists in jail. Celebrating rights and freedoms also was King Abdullah of Jordan who once saw a Palestinian journalist sentenced to hard labor for writing so simple a truth as that the king was dependent upon Israel for power.
We shouldn’t forget, too, that Israel targeted and killed a number of journalists in its Gaza invasions, that the United States’ forces in Iraq targeted and killed a number of journalists, and that “NATO” deliberately targeted Serbia’s state television service with bombing, killing many civilians. Free speech and western traditions, indeed.
There are more doubts and questions in the Charlie Hebdo affair than there will ever be answers. In part this is because the French security forces silenced witnesses, killing three assumed perpetrators in a display which seems to say that Dirty Harry movies are now part of French training programs.
And then we have the sudden death by apparent suicide of a police commissioner in charge of the investigation just as he was writing his report alone at night, an event which received little mainline press coverage. A man in his forties in the midst of likely the biggest case of his career just decides to kill himself?
We should all be extremely suspicious of a trained killer, seen as being informed and exceedingly efficient at his work, leaving behind his identity card in an abandoned car. It really is a touch more serendipity than we would credit in a mystery story. We should all be extremely suspicious of men so obviously well trained in military techniques, about men who were well informed about schedules at the offices they attacked, and about men heavily armed in the center of Paris. People serving in notorious killer outfits like America’s SEALs or Britain’s SAS rarely achieve such complete success as twelve victims, all shot dead, and an easy get-away.
And just to add to the confusion we have the video of one of the armed men shooting a police officer lying on the sidewalk. The armed man, face covered, lowers his AK-47 to within a couple of feet of the victim’s head and fires. The head goes down, but we see no blood. Have you ever seen photos of someone shot in the head with a high velocity weapon? That’s what the Zapruder film is about, and the results are more like an exploding pumpkin than a death at the end of a stage play.
We need to be more than suspicious about anyone or any event which has any connection with ISIS. ISIS is one of the terror groups assembled, armed, and supplied by Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the United States for the deliberate and wanton destruction of Syria. The two brothers killed in Paris both fought in Syria. It certainly would be easy enough for someone to have obtained an ID card there from one of them. Remember, the excesses of ISIS we all read about – at least those that aren’t clearly staged propaganda stunts such as video of a hostage beheading – are the direct result of assembling large bands of cutthroats and fanatics, arming them, and setting them loose to terrorize someone else’s country.
It is the simplistic view of ISIS that the involved intelligence services want us to have that it is a spontaneous fanatical rebellion in favor of one extreme interpretation of Islam. Despite many recruits for ISIS holding what are undoubtedly genuine fanatical beliefs, they almost certainly have no idea who actually pays their salaries or provides their equipment – that is simply the way black intelligence operations work. And those participating in such operations are completely disposable in the eyes of those running them, as when the United States bombs some in ISIS who perhaps exceeded their brief.
Every society has some percentage of its population which is dangerously mad, and if such people are gathered together and given weapons, their beliefs are almost beside the point, except that they provide the targeting mechanism used by those doing the organizing.
We should all be extremely suspicious about any event when a man such as Rupert Murdoch is quoted afterward saying, “Muslims must be held responsible for jihadist cancer,” as he was in The Independent. In case you forgot, Murdoch is a man whose news organizations for years lied, stole, and violated a number of laws to obtain juicy tidbits for his chain of cheesy mass-circulation newspapers. Murdoch also is a man who has had the most intimate and influential relationships with several prime ministers including that smarmy criminal, Tony Blair, and that current mindless windbag and ethical nullity, David Cameron. Publicity from large circulation newspapers, which can swing at a moment’s notice from supporting to attacking you, plus campaign contributions buy a lot of government compliance. Murdoch also is one of the world’s most tireless supporters of Israel’s criminal excesses.
And speaking of David Cameron, Murdoch’s made man in Britain, David felt compelled to chime in on the Hebdo publicity extravaganza with, “Muslims face a special burden on extremism….” Now, why would that be? No less than Murdoch’s creepy words, Cameron’s statement is an indefensible thing to say.
Who has a special burden for the massacre of students at Columbine High school in Colorado? Who has a special burden for Israeli Baruch Goldstein who murdered 29 Palestinians as they worshipped? Do Noweigians bear a special burden for Anders Breivik, who shot 69 people, mostly children, perhaps the most bizarre mass murderer of our times? Does the American Army bear a special burden for Timothy McVeigh’s horrific bombing in Oklahoma City, killing 168, he and his associates having met in Fort Benning during basic training, two of them having been roommates? Perhaps, in both these latter cases, Christianity bears a special burden since these people were exposed to that religion early in life? As was Hitler, as was Stalin, as was Mussolini, as was Franco, as was Ceaușescu, as was Pinochet, and countless other blood-drenched villains?
The late Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, was responsible for a great many murders, including about a hundred people bombed in a terror attack on the King David Hotel. He also was responsible for the assassination of the distinguished Swedish diplomat, Count Folke Bernadotte, and he started the invasion of Lebanon which eventually left thousands dead, but you’ll have a hard time finding him described anywhere as a “Jewish terrorist” or finding prominent people asking who has a special responsibility for his extraordinarily bloody career.
There is something hateful and poisonous in conflating the religious background of a criminal or mentally unbalanced person and his violent crime. We seem to do this only in cases involving violent men with Muslim backgrounds. Why? How is it possible that even one decent Muslim in this world has any responsibility for the acts of madmen who happen to be Muslim? This gets at one of the deep veins of hate and prejudice in western society today, Islamophobia, a vein regularly mined by our “free” press and by our ‘democratic” governments. Our establishment having embraced Israel’s excesses and pretensions, we have been pushed into worshiping the mumbo-jumbo of Islamic terror, a phenomenon virtually invented in Israel and perpetuated by Israel’s apologists as a way of stopping anyone from asking why Israel does not make peace, stop abusing millions of people, and return to its recognized borders.
Well, we do have an entire industry exploiting every event which may be imagined as terror. I read an interview with the great cartoonist, Robert Crumb, who happens to live in France. When asked if any other journalists had approached him on the topic of controversial cartoons, he said that there weren’t any journalists in America anymore, just 250,000 public relations people. That is precisely the state of American journalism. It digs into nothing, at least nothing of consequence, working full time to manage the public’s perceptions of government and its dreadful policies, from murdering innocents with drones and remaining quiet on the many American and Israeli atrocities of recent decades to manipulating fears of “terrorism” and saying little about such domestic horrors as the many hundreds of citizens shot dead by American police every single year.
The French government is reported to have been quite concerned about Benjamin Netanyahu showing up at the Paris march and making volatile speeches, and they specifically asked him not to come. At first, Netanyahu’s own security service, Shin Bet, agreed that he should not go because the parade in the streets represented a difficult security situation. But neither the host government’s formal request nor the security service’s concerns can stop a man like Netanyahu. France was advised he would come, and the French made their displeasure clear by saying they would then also invite Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestine Authority to the parade, which they did.
Netanyahu not only marched for the cameras at the front rank of a parade where he had no business, he made arrangements with the families of four Jewish victims for an all-expense-paid showy funeral in Jerusalem. None of the victims was even an Israeli citizen, yet at this writing they have all been buried there with pomp and plenty of publicity. But Netanyahu didn’t stop there, he went on to make speeches that the French and other European Jews should leave their countries, riddled with anti-Semitism, and come to Israel, their true homeland. In diplomatic terms, this was what is termed unacceptable behavior which in almost any other case would get you thrown out of a country. In ordinary terms, it was outrageous behavior, much like seeing a seriously drunken guest loudly insulting his host at a party to which he was not even invited.
The ineffectual current President of France, François Hollande, sent notice to Jerusalem that the four dead shop victims were being awarded the Légion d’Honneur, France’s highest honor. The nation’s highest honor, founded by Napoleon over two hundred years ago for exceptional contributions to the state, awarded for the act of being murdered by thugs? Simply bizarre.
I don’t pretend to understand everything involved in this complex set of events, but it is unmistakable that we are being manipulated by a number unscrupulous and unethical people who use murder victims and the public’s natural sympathies for them as board pieces in some much larger game.
There is even a trivial side to these bloody events with many Parisians carrying signs which read “Je suis Charlie,” surely the kind of asininity posing as deep feeling that long has been established in the United States where Walmart teddy bears and plastic flowers with cheap slogans are regularly tossed in piles here and there as memorials to this or that. Perhaps Euro-Disney has had a more devastating influence on French culture than I realized.
What Hebdo execution video really shows
By Jonathon Cook | The Blog from Nazareth | January 13, 2015
I am well aware that I’m stepping into a hornet’s nest by posting this video, which is going viral. Those who wish to silence all debate have an easy card to play here, accusing me of buying into a conspiracy theory. There’s only one problem: unlike the video-maker, I have few conclusions to draw about what the significance of this video is in relation to the official story. That is not why I am posting it.
But it does, at least to my mind and obviously a lot of other people’s, judging by how quickly it’s spreading, suggest that Ahmed Merabet, the policeman outside the Charlie Hebdo office, was not shot in the head, as all the media have been stating.
That said, it does not prove much more. It doesn’t prove that Merabet did not die at the scene. Maybe he bled to death there on the pavement from his earlier wound. It certainly doesn’t prove that the Kouachi brothers were not the gunmen or that the one who fired missed on purpose. Maybe he just missed.
Nor does the video’s removal from most websites prove that there is some sort of massive cover-up going on. Ideas of good taste, especially in the immediate aftermath of a massacre close to home (ie here in the West), can lead to a media consensus that a video is too upsetting. That can occur even if it does not show blood and gore, simply because of what it implies. Herd instinct in these instances is very strong.
But the unedited video clip does leave a sour taste: because unless someone has a good rebuttal, it does indeed seem impossible that an AK-47 bullet fired from close range would not have done something pretty dramatic to that policeman’s head. And if the video is real – and there doesn’t seem much doubt that it is – it clearly shows nothing significant happened to his head either as or after the bullet was fired.
So what points am I making?
The first one is more tentative. It seems – though I suppose there could be an explanation I have overlooked – that the authorities have lied about the cause of the policeman’s death. That could be for several probably unknowable reasons, including that his being executed was a simpler, neater story than that he bled to death on the pavement because of official incompetence (there already seems to have been plenty of that in this case).
The second point is even more troubling. Most of the senior editors of our mainstream media have watched the unedited video just as you now have. And either not one of them saw the problem raised here – that the video does not show what it is supposed to show – or some of them did see it but did not care. Either way, they simpy regurgitated an official story that does not seem to fit the available evidence.
That is a cause for deep concern. Because if the media are acting as a collective mouth-piece for a dubious official narrative on this occasion, on a story of huge significance that one assumes is being carefully scrutinised for news angles, what are they doing the rest of the time?
The lesson is that we as news consumers must create our own critical distance from the “news” because we cannot trust our corporate media to do that work for us. They are far too close to power. In fact, they are power.
Official narratives are inherently suspect because power always looks out for itself. This appears to be a good example – whether what it shows is relatively harmless or sinister – to remind us of that fact.
UPDATE:
I’m still trying to imagine a plausible explanation for the video. I’m no ballistics expert, so I’m firmly in the land of conjecture. But I wonder whether, if the bullet hit the pavement close to Merabet’s head, it might have been possible for bullet fragments to hit him, possibly killing him.
This possibility (assuming it is one) does not invalidate the point of my post. If it was indeed the case, certainly no media outlet has suggested that the guman missed Merabet and that he died from the exploding fragments.
This isn’t meant to raise technical, or gruesome, details of the case. It is to suggest that western journalists do not report fearlessly and independently when they examine events being narrated by official sources. They mostly regurgitate information on trust, because they trust the authorities to be telling the truth. They do the same when the acts of official enemies are being examined – they again turn to official sources on their side. In short, most journalists have no critical distance from the events they are reporting on our behalf.
What interests me about this video is this: As journalists we’re too often loath to examine the available evidence, especially if it questions official sources. We repeat what we are told by the authorities. From the viewing figures, it seems millions of ordinary people are watching this clip and wondering what it shows. If history is any guide, their need for a plausible explanation (and there may, of course, be one) will be ignored. We are treated simply as consumers – passive ones – of news. In that sense, journalism is not accountable to the people it is supposed to serve. It is deferential to power.
That leaves us, ordinary news consumers, in a position of either blindly trusting our own officials too or trying to work things out for ourselves. You would hope that the issues raised by this video get aired by journalists as part of establishing greater trust in our profession and proof of our independence. Instead, I expect it will simply be consigned the “conspiracy theory” bin.
Nine Questions About the Paris Attacks
By Kevin Ryan | Dig Within | January 11, 2015
Mainstream media are busily promoting a familiar narrative for last week’s terrorist attacks in Paris. As usual this narrative demonizes Islam, calls for a reduction in civil rights, and bolsters existing military aggressions. However, a growing number of serious questions have arisen about the attacks. Until such questions are answered, citizens must consider that these events might be another pretext for an ongoing political agenda.
The Paris attacks are reported to have occurred in two parts. The first was the January 7th shooting of twelve people in and around the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a tabloid that often published offensive cartoons including some about the Prophet Mohammad. The second attack occurred the next day and was said to be the work of Amedy Coulibaly, a 32-year old Senegalese Frenchman who began shooting police officers at the scene of an accident and then took hostages in a Kosher grocery.
Some parts of the story have already proven to be inaccurate. For example, FOX News and NBC falsely reported that two of the suspects were in custody, based on information from “two consistently reliable U.S. counterterrorism officials.” One 18-year old widely reported to be a suspect turned himself in (145 miles away) and was released 50 hours later due to insurmountable contradictions.
Questions that remain unanswered include the following.
- The Charlie Hebdo gunmen, identified by police as brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi, were said to display professional training as if they were highly-skilled Special Operations soldiers. They were calm and controlled, well equipped, and well trained. Exactly where did they get their training and high-tech equipment?
- Coulibaly was identified by DNA testing in only two hours. Although rapid DNA tests can be performed in a matter of hours, a match requires DNA from the suspect. How did the testing match with this man in such a short time? Did authorities have his DNA or was it already in a database? In either case, how did that happen?
- Videos quickly showed two people in the Hebdo getaway car with one in the driver’s seat. Why did authorities name and interrogate a third suspect (who turned out to not be involved) as the getaway car driver?
- Why would the Koachi brothers wear balaclavas (i.e. ski masks) to hide their identity and then simply leave Said’s national ID card in the car? If they took the time to hide their faces, why would they bring their IDs with them?
- Why did the masked attackers work to make sure they were quickly portrayed as Muslims and members of al Qaeda during the attacks? Witnesses said one shouted to onlookers—”Tell the media it was al-Qaeda in Yemen.” Other videos and reports indicate that they repeatedly shouted “Allahu Akbar” and proclaimed that they were avenging the Prophet Mohammad. Who benefits from this?
- How did the attackers escape (to the northeast—the longest route through Paris) despite the police having raised the “alarm level for the greater Paris area to its highest level.” Did they have logistical support?
- Why does the video of the shooting of victim Ahmed Merabet, reportedly killed by a shot to the head, suggest that he was not shot in the head?
- How did Helric Fredou die? A Paris police commissioner conducting the investigation, Fredou died while preparing a report on the crimes. And why did Western media not report his death for at least three days?
- The alleged Kosher grocery gunman, Amedy Coulibaly, met with the President of France just a few years ago. What are the odds of such a coincidental meeting and does the connection relate to the attacks?
Many people have become skeptical about mainstream accounts of terrorism. This is due to the fact that authorities, like the FBI or CIA, are often found to be involved in some way and the events always support political agendas. Therefore it is not surprising to hear people claiming that intelligence agencies were involved in these attacks, or that the attacks related to political manipulations that would “shore up France’s vassal state status to Washington.”
Whatever the truth, it seems wise to consider all possibilities when mainstream media promote stories that feed the war machine and reduce freedom. Refraining from judgment until the facts are clearer is always the best approach.
Charlie Hebdo Massacre: Another Staged Event to Incite War and Destroy Freedom?
By Brandon Martinez | Non-Aligned Media | January 11, 2015
The “Islamists” strike again – at least that’s what those who stand behind the latest outrage in Paris want us to believe.
On Wednesday, two masked gunmen wielding AK-47s stormed the headquarters of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical newspaper based in Paris, France, assassinating the entire leadership of the paper. Twelve people were killed in the ensuing rampage, mostly Charlie Hebdo employees and a few policemen. Days later, four more random civilians were gunned down at a kosher supermarket by two other militants allegedly connected to the shooters in Paris.
Sporadically shouting “Allah Akbar” throughout the duration of their onslaught, the two attackers were caught on video making a spectacle of themselves as they paraded down the Paris street guns blazing. It is typically unusual for terrorists to immediately make it known who they are and what they stand for before concluding their dirty work, an anomaly the mainstream media refuses to emphasize for obvious reasons.
Other anomalies are cause for skepticism. How did the terrorists get ahold of military-grade weaponry undetected? Journalist Gearoid O Colmain told Russia Today that the two deceased suspects, French-born Said and Cherif Kouachi, had received military training from militants in Syria and had also traveled to Yemen to meet with al-Qaeda leaders there. And yet the pair was able to return to France without interference from authorities. Other reports indicate that the brothers were known and being monitored by French intelligence, but were still able to obtain the necessary armaments to conduct Wednesday’s attack without a hiccup.
In a Jan. 8 article, Sputnik News reported: “Said and Cherif Kouachi, two brothers in their 30s who are suspected of committing the [Charlie Hebdo] terror attack, have been known to France’s General Directorate for Internal Security and the prefecture of Police of Paris, Le Point news magazine said Thursday.” The Sputnik article further revealed that in 2008 Cherif Kouachi had been arrested and sentenced to a prison term of three years for attempting to recruit others to fight for al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Others contend some aspects of the Paris shooting were completely staged like a scene from a Hollywood action movie. Ali Şahin, a Turkish MEP and member of the ruling AKP party, echoed this view, citing the mysterious absence of street traffic where the shooting took place, and the odd lack of blood or recoil when a Paris cop was shot point blank by one of the gunmen.
In an op-ed for Press TV, analyst Kevin Barrett calls into question the dubious story that authorities found IDs left behind in the terrorists’ get-away car, which led police to quickly identify the suspects. Barrett contends that such a ‘mistake’ would not be made by sophisticated terrorists, but rather bears the markings of a false flag deception aimed at implicating Muslims.
“Al-Qaeda in Yemen” is officially being blamed for the Charlie Hebdo massacre, an unusual detour from ISIS or ‘Islamic State’ (IS) as it is now called, which has been the go-to bogeyman for neoconservative talking heads on the mass media for months.
According to a Fox News report, “Cherif Kouachi told a French TV station before Friday’s raid at an industrial park that he was sent by Al Qaeda in Yemen and had been financed by the cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.” The same report goes on to admit that al-Awlaki was “killed by a U.S. airstrike in Yemen in 2011,” but failed to explain how a dead man was able to finance and direct an attack four years after his death.
Many questions about the Paris attack remain and will likely go unanswered by the subservient sell-outs who populate mainstream media outlets.
Western Foreign Policy and Muslim Discontent
Even if we were to presuppose that a group of Muslims carried out a terrorist attack like the one we saw in Paris, one question journalists and reporters should be asking is ‘why would Muslims be angry enough to want to harm France and its citizens?’ To evade this essential line of inquiry, the prevailing script contends that it was Charlie Hebdo’s anti-Islamic cartoons, which depict Islam’s prophet Mohammed in a derogatory manner, that motivated the attack, and nothing else — a convenient narrative for France’s political class whose militaristic foreign policy warrants scrutiny.
Following the lead of Washington and Tel Aviv, France has as of late pursued staunchly anti-Muslim foreign policies, yet it befuddles journalists to ask why Muslims are upset with the present pro-American, pro-Israeli puppet regime in Paris?
It cannot be overlooked that America and France led the NATO onslaught against Libya in 2011, bombarding civilians and infrastructure in the name of “liberating” the predominately Muslim North African country from a ‘dictator.’ Thanks to the US, Britain, France, Canada and other rogue states, Libya – once a boon of progress in an otherwise bleak part of the world – is now a failed state plagued by terrorism and civil war. The stability and prosperity that Libyans once enjoyed under Gaddafi is nothing but a distant memory as the country is teetering on collapse whilst NATO-backed Takfiri gangs and warlords wrestle for control of Tripoli.
Many have also forgotten that the French invaded Mali, a Muslim-majority country in West Africa, in January of 2013 to put down the rise of armed groups opposed to France’s puppet regime in Bamako. Add to that France’s unyielding support of Israel and its terroristic policies against the Palestinians.
In the case of real Muslim violence directed at France and other NATO member states, it would be wise to broach the underlying causes of Muslim discontent, rather than objectifying it with stale neocon propaganda memes about ’72 virgins in heaven’ and other inanities.
Could it be that the Muslim world has suffered a litany of Western military invasions over the past few decades, causing the deaths and displacement of a few million Muslims, which may lie behind the deep-seated consternation and disdain emanating from that part of the world? Or do they simply ‘hate us for our freedoms,’ as neocon warmongers and Zionists assure us?
An average intellect could easily deduce the above puzzle, but those are queries that few in the degenerated ‘mainstream’ dare to raise with any serious vigor.
Islamic Extremism: A Manufactured Enemy?
So now we’ve seen attacks in Ottawa, Sydney and Paris within a relatively short period of time. Is it reasonable to believe that this recent string of ‘lone-wolf jihadist’ attacks across the West have been organic occurrences, cooked up in the deranged minds of mad-men? Or is there something more sinister at work?
Many analysts are questioning the dubious timing and nature of all of these incidents, which come at just the right moment to lend credence to the US-led coalition against ISIS. It is nothing short of miraculous that just as various Western countries gear up for military strikes against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, ‘terror incidents’ hit their respective homelands right on cue to give the politicians their belated ‘casus belli’ for joining the campaign to be rid of ISIS.
In any case, the West’s crusade against ISIS is as counterfeit as it is comical. The West’s ‘fight against ISIS’ is not truly aimed at combatting the militant group, but rather at destabilizing the region as a whole to further weaken and disorientate Israel’s rivals. Al-Qaeda, ISIS, al-Nusra Front — they are all outgrowths of the same poisonous American-Zionist imperial tree. Washington and Tel Aviv have routinely sponsored Takfiri zealots against regimes they seek to depose, the latest victims being Bashar al-Assad in Syria and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. These armed radical groups have served a two-tiered purpose for their clandestine backers in America and Israel: firstly, they provide a pretext for the US and its lapdogs to invade the Middle East; secondly, they act as scare-crows to corral public opinion behind the interventions, providing a replenishing source of patsies and dupes that can take the fall for false flag attacks engineered by the state.
After each and every one of these terror events, Western governments have immediately enacted legislation which increases the powers of the secret services and police, effectively establishing a police/surveillance state aimed at cracking down on civilian dissent against government policies. Extirpating the ‘war on terror’s’ critics at home, while attacking Israel’s enemies abroad – what a perfect brew for the masterminds of this global strategy of tension operating under the guise of ‘Jihadism.’
“Free Speech” to Bash Muslims, but not Zionists
In response to the atrocity in Paris, French politicians and other Western leaders have been pontificating about Western ‘values’ and have selectively invoked ‘freedom of speech.’ “We live in a free and open democracy which has freedom of speech,” the West’s dishonest leaders say. “Radical Muslims don’t believe in ‘our values,’ hence the necessity to fight them overseas” is the standard establishment talking point, trotted out time and again by the professional script readers fronting as presidents and prime ministers.
The hypocrisy is stunning. Like most of Europe today, France is certainly not a bastion of freedom of speech, having implemented numerous draconian laws over the years, especially the infamous “Gayssot Act” which criminalizes opinions that contradict official World War II and ‘holocaust’ historiography. French revisionists such as Robert Faurisson, Vincent Reynouard and others who have questioned the “Six Million” mythology have been jailed and fined extortionate amounts of money by the French state for their dissident historical viewpoints. The existence of such repressive laws in France unveils the duplicity of the newfound love of free speech being expressed by the likes of French President Francois Hollande and his ministers.
Taking a page out of Stalin’s playbook, the French regime recently banned pro-Palestine protests, even going so far as to prosecute a number of prominent pro-Palestinian activists as “hate criminals.” And while France’s reprobate leaders fully sanction and even encourage satirical assaults upon Islam and Muslims in the name of “free speech” – not to mention lobbing bombs on Muslims in places like Libya and Mali – these same miscreants have outlawed any parodying of Zionism and Jewish privilege.
While championing Charlie Hebdo’s anti-Muslim cartoons as “free expression,” France’s mealy-mouthed political class have simultaneously led a ceaseless witch-hunt against French comedian Dieudonne, whose anti-Zionist parodies have angered the country’s Jewish ruling class. French authorities have enacted stiff bans against the wildly popular Dieudonne, preventing him from performing at public venues across the country under penalty of prison time and fines. Britain too has banned the comic from entering that country on the grounds that his famous “Quenelle” gesture resembles a Nazi salute and is therefore ‘anti-Semitic.’
In reference to Dieudonne, French President Francois Hollande himself pledged to use every means at the disposal of his government to “fight against the sarcasm of those who purport to be humorists but who are actually professional anti-Semites.” In Hollande’s Orwellian France, “free speech” is reserved only for those who defame Islam, whereas critics of Zionism and Jewish exceptionalism are first stigmatized and then criminalized – a tribute to the real power behind the throne of that once-free country.
Copyright 2015 Brandon Martinez
Planted ID card exposes Paris false flag
By Kevin Barrett | Press TV | January 10, 2015
French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve says the terrorists who attacked Charlie Hebdo would never have been caught had they not made one fatal mistake: They conveniently left an ID card in their abandoned getaway car.
Since when did criminals leave their identification cards in abandoned getaway cars?
An ordinary citizen, taking no precautions, might accidentally leave a wallet or purse in their parked car. I have driven automobiles approximately 50,000 times in my life, and I think my wallet might have slipped out of my pocket and fallen into the crack between the driver’s seat and the door…once.
What are the odds that skilled terrorists who have just carried out an ultra-professional special-forces style attack will accidentally leave their ID card in the abandoned getaway car? Answer: Effectively zero.
So why are police reporting an event that cannot have happened?
Assuming that French police really did find “terror suspect” Said Kouachi’s ID card in an abandoned getaway car, that ID card must have been planted by someone wishing to incriminate Kouachi. Even the legendary French idiot detective, Inspector Clouseau, could not fail to make this thunderingly obvious inference.
The discovery of Kouachi’s ID does not implicate him; it exonerates him. It shows that he is an innocent patsy who is being framed by the real perpetrators of the attack.
Police and intelligence agencies routinely plant evidence to support false narratives, convict innocent people, and exonerate themselves. American police who kill unarmed citizens often plant a gun on the corpses to support their claims of having killed in self-defense. Such throw-down guns, which the police call “ham sandwiches,” are kept in police locker rooms and carried in police cars in case they are needed.
Likewise, throw-down ID cards and other “incriminating” documents are routinely used by the military, intelligence, and special forces professionals who orchestrate false flag operations. Consider the ludicrously-obvious planted evidence used in the mother of all false-flag operations: the September 11th, 2001 inside job.
Intelligence agents planted not just one, but two “magic suitcases” designed to incriminate Mohamed Atta, the innocent patsy framed for the crimes of September 11th. According to Der Spiegel’s book Inside 9/11: What Really Happened, the first Atta suitcase was handed to German police by a self-described “good Samaritan burglar.” The so-called burglar claimed to have stolen Atta’s suitcase during the course of a burglary and discovered terrorism-related information in it. As an honorable citizen, this kind-hearted burglar felt compelled by his conscience to deliver the suitcase to the authorities.
According to Der Spiegel, the German police, not being fools, knew that the self-styled burglar was not really a burglar at all, but an intelligence agent planting fake evidence against Atta. Der Spiegel quotes German police as saying: “The only question is, which intelligence agency was he working for?” (“CIA and Mossad,” answered former German Intelligence Minister Andreas Von Bülow in his book The CIA and September 11th.)
Despite its absurd origins, this suitcase full of fabricated documents provides virtually the only purported evidence supporting the official story of Atta’s supposed terrorism-related activities in Germany. Aside from the good Samaritan burglar’s suitcase, it seems that the original Egyptian Atta – the one in Germany – was a gentle, shy, sensitive, soft-spoken architecture student with no connections to terrorism of any kind. Yet the “Atta” who made a spectacle of himself in Florida before 9/11, staging memorable public scenes while all but wearing an “I am an al-Qaeda terrorist” sign around his neck, was a coarse, obscene, violent loudmouthed braggart who dated strippers, disemboweled kittens, and spoke fluent Hebrew.
The Hebrew-speaking Atta’s second and better-known “magic suitcase” was the one he allegedly checked in on his early morning flight from Portland, Maine to Boston on September 11th, 2001. According to the 9/11 Commission Report, the suitcase was miraculously preserved and delivered to the authorities when it somehow failed to make the transfer from Atta’s Portland-to-Boston commuter flight onto Flight 11, which Atta supposedly piloted into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Had the suitcase been transferred as it should have been, we are told, it would have been destroyed in a fireball at the World Trade Center.
This magic suitcase provided the only evidence allowing authorities to identify the alleged 19 hijackers within 24 hours of the event. (None of the 9/11 passenger lists contained any Arab names; no airline employees remember having ticketed or boarded any of the alleged hijackers; and none of the hundreds of security cameras at Boston’s Logan Airport, Washington D.C.’s Dulles Airport, or Newark Airport took a single authenticated frame of any of the 19 Arabs blamed for 9/11.)
This suitcase not only contained a list of the 19 patsies, but also Atta’s supposed last will and testament. (Why would a suicide hijacker check his will onto a doomed plane?) Britain’s dean of Middle East journalism Robert Fisk has ridiculed Atta’s alleged will, pointing out that it begins with a botched bismillah: “In the name of God, myself, and my family…” No Muslim would ever write such a thing. As Fisk suggests, the document purporting to be Atta’s will must have been forged by an incompetent intelligence agent. The suitcase was obviously planted.
And that is not just Robert Fisk’s opinion. Seymour Hersh, the dean of American investigative journalism, quotes a senior US intelligence source as saying, with regard to Atta’s magic suitcase: “Whatever trail was left was left deliberately—for the FBI to chase.”
Atta’s two magic suitcases are not the only examples of clumsily-planted 9/11 evidence. Another is the “magic passport” of alleged 9/11 hijacker Satam al-Suqami. That passport, looking as pristine as the “magic bullet” of the JFK assassination, was allegedly discovered by an anonymous individual, with no chain of custody, near the two flat spots of smoking ground where two 110-story towers somehow exploded into very fine dust.
But Atta’s magic suitcases, the magic passport, beside the most pathetically-planted 9/11 item of them all: The “Fatty Bin Laden confession video” supposedly discovered in December 2001 by an anonymous US soldier in Jalalabad, and delivered with no chain of possession to be brandished by the Bush Administration as supposed proof of Bin Laden’s guilt.
Professor Bruce Lawrence, a respected expert on Bin Laden, has categorically stated of this video: “It’s bogus!” Lawrence adds that his many acquaintances in the US intelligence community’s Bin Laden units know that the video is bogus – but are afraid to say so in public, because they are afraid of the implications of Bin Laden’s innocence.
These and other examples show that the intelligence agents who orchestrate false-flag terror spectacles often do not even bother to disguise the blatantly-fabricated nature of the planted evidence used to implicate patsies.
So we should not be terribly surprised when the French police tell us – with a straight face – that a highly professional fleeing terrorist would leave his ID card in an abandoned getaway car.
US, allies must be held accountable for ISIL terrorism: Analyst
Press TV – January 9, 2015
The United States and its allies should be held responsible for the ongoing ISIL terror activities in various parts of the world, the Imam of Masjid al-Islam in Washington tells Press TV.
Imam Abdul Alim Musa, who is a strong critic of US support for terrorism, said in an interview with Press TV that the American administration, the Israeli regime and the Al Saud monarchy must held accountable for ISIL terror operations because “they created these groups from very beginning.”
The analyst further stressed that the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Israel’s Mossad spy agency and the Saudi regime have been deeply involved in creation of the ISIL Takfiri group.
Musa further said the US and its western allies were using Zionist and Wahhabi ideologies to fuel terrorism, adding, “The origin of these groups is mainly Saudi Arabia.”
The analyst added that the Western countries have a long history of supporting the terrorists fighting against the government of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
The backers and controllers of the ISIL extremist group are using it to “promote Islamophobia” and “launch invasions,” the analyst said.
The ISIL militants have seized large swathes of land in Syria and Iraq. They have been carrying out heinous crimes against all communities in both neighboring Arab states.
Commenting on a recent terrorist attack targeting a French magazine, the Muslim scholar said the French support for anti-Syria militants and Paris’ pro-invasion policies were partly to blame for the deadly raid.
On Wednesday, masked gunmen stormed into the Parisian headquarters of the satirical weekly, Charlie Hebdo, gunning down a dozen people, including eight journalists, two police officers, a maintenance worker and a visitor.
Paris has been among the staunch supporters of the Takfiri militants operating against the Damascus government since March 2011.
America stumbles through another year, spreading chaos and trivia everywhere in its path
By John Chuckman | Aletho News | December 30, 2014
The Palestinians are seeking a vote in the United Nations’ Security Council on a resolution favoring their statehood, unquestionably a reasonable proposal in the minds of most of the world’s people. Of course, the United States, a permanent member of the Security Council, would automatically veto such a resolution, as it vetoes all efforts to restore order to the chaos of the Middle East. And of course, were such a resolution somehow miraculously to pass, Israel would simply ignore it, as it has ignored a long list of binding UN resolutions. But a veto and certain contempt are not enough for an upright, God-fearing Southern gentleman like US Senator Lindsey Graham. He busied himself recently with threatening America’s withholding funds from a United Nations that gets involved in the “peace process.” Imagine, the United Nations getting involved in peace? That is a chilling thought. Since the United States has a history of withholding its UN dues against its solemn treaty obligations to bully its way to certain changes, such threats do carry weight.
Senator Graham, regarded neither as an idealist nor a voice for peace, is only doing what so many American politicians do under the unbelievably corrupt, money-drenched American election system, and that is to make ridiculous public statements about the Middle East in return for generous dollops of campaign funds from the world’s most tireless political lobby, that for Israel. You might think that the lobby itself would tire of funding backwater blowhards demanding the other ninety-five percent of humanity play the game by America’s rules or America is picking up its marbles or chips or whatever and going home, but clearly it does not.
“The peace process” is the longest running farce on the planet, continuing for nearly fifty years. It might have been funny in the vein of The Mouse That Roared, but there is nothing remotely funny in the killing of thousands of people and the extreme abuse and hopelessness of millions. You just could not make a worse hash of a diplomatic and human welfare situation than America has made in the Middle East. And the situation has only intensified in its cruelty and injustice. Today, Israel openly and regularly steals homes in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. It threatens ancient Muslim shrines and desecrates some of them. It has savaged Gaza, the world’s largest open-air prison camp, twice, killing close to four thousand including nearly a thousand children. It has attempted to starve Gaza’s people out with a years-long embargo, and is making ugly noises about still another invasion. It is about to steal Syrian oil on the occupied Golan Heights, drilling there illegally, and it is busy arranging the theft of offshore natural gas that belongs to Gaza and Lebanon. It does all of this with complete impunity and not even a cross word from the likes of Senator Graham. I do think the Middle East provides the strongest possible evidence of the complete unsuitability of the United States to play a dominant role in international affairs. It is genuinely a case of the inmates running the asylum.
In another example of chaos mixed with farce, the United States pretends to fight ISIS in Iraq and Syria, and while that charade continues, planes loaded with American weapons keep flying out of Turkey to make the seeming lunatics even stronger. Indeed, the various ragtag factions trying to overthrow the Syrian government, cutthroats assembled by the US and its friends from all corners of the globe in a kind of hellish foreign legion, announced a new alliance, so telling Washington’s approved terrorists in the conflict from those who haven’t made the cut is more difficult than ever. Recently, one or another of the lunatic mobs shot down two fighter jets, and how do you think they managed that without American anti-aircraft missiles? Turkey’s certifiably unbalanced president, Tayyip Erdoğan, one day makes fiery speeches threatening Israel (to please the poor fools voting for him) and the next makes new secret deals with Israel. Remember, this is a man who just built a one-thousand room palace for himself – yes, that’s right, exactly one thousand rooms – and it is the ugliest, most pointless large structure built since the early Soviet era, a kind of gigantic sprawling warehouse incrusted with jewels and filled with porcelain.
Well, dippiness is no barrier to membership in a secret club in the region which includes the UAE, Saudia Arabia, and Israel, all lovingly assisted by the US. They are all governments who regard change as desirable only when it results in an even more rigid status quo, as in Egypt. Never mind the welfare of the region’s people or democracy or human rights or national boundaries. These guys resemble twelfth century lords seeing paupers cross their paths: they run them down and proceed to a rollicking good dinner in the great hall. The club is all about security for hereditary monarchs, security for America’s crusader fortress colony in the Middle East, and security for helper states in the American agenda. We’ve had many reports recently of secret air-freight flights between Tel Aviv and Abu Dhabi. We also have reports of flights out of Turkey into Syria. The never explained events at Benghazi were undoubtedly blowback from an operation collecting unemployed thugs and arms for secret shipment to Turkey and then into Syria. Saudi Arabia is voluntarily taking a bath by pushing oil prices down, a favor to the US and Israel and Turkey and a way of hurting Russia, Iran, Syria, and even Venezuela – all current members in good standing of Captain America’s ever-changing galaxy of villains – aka, the Axis of Evil. The US is willing to sacrifice for the time being its booming shale oil industry, whose more costly production requires higher prices than Saudi conventional crude, in return for the Saudi sacrifice.
Since both countries are desperate to hurt Russia, Iran, and Syria, the deal is a marriage made in Realpolitik heaven. Russia has helped Syria and does business with Iran, while Saudi Arabia and Israel hate Iran and Syria. The US has made a large investment in toppling Syria for Israel’s benefit, but the plan has been thwarted by Syrian endurance and Russian help. The plan also overlooked the loyalty of important Syrian societal groups to President Assad, but America often overlooks details as it attempts to reshape the world to its liking with bombs. Of course, there was also the precedent of Iraq, a bloody fiasco that achieved nothing but a million deaths and splintering a country into pieces. That splintering, by the way, continues with the ISIS fiasco: Iraq’s Kurds are being used against ISIS to strengthen their own region’s quasi-independence from Iraq.
The chaos the secret club-member countries have created in Syria – perhaps 200,000 killed and a couple of million refugees – appears not to bother them in the least, just so many paupers in the roadway when galloping home to dinner at the great hall. The victims do provide useful free material for the propaganda war being waged, the understanding implicit in America’s and Canada’s and Europe’s press being always that President Assad is responsible for the catastrophe. The US, and cheerleaders on the sidelines like Canada’s current dismal right-wing government, are doing virtually nothing for the refugees, or for the many civilians crippled or wounded. Ironically, Israel actually accepts for treatment in its northern medical facilities some of the very fanatics wounded in the dirty work. After all, it is ultimately Israel’s dirty work they do, regardless of their fanaticism. It’s a phenomenon we might call selective terrorism: fanatical killers who do America’s work, or Israel’s, are not treated as terrorists at all. No matter how many women and children you kill, no matter how many places you bomb, you only become a terrorist if you oppose the interests of America or Israel.
The toll in killed and wounded and homeless in Eastern Ukraine continues to mount. New punitive measures come regularly from Kiev, undoubtedly with American advice about possible vulnerabilities – after all, a top cabinet minister in the coup-created government is American. Only the other day we read reports of Ukrainian militia-types, the kind of right-wing thugs who helped the US overthrow an elected government in Kiev, blocking food traffic into the East. Attempting to starve people into submission is defined in international law as a war crime, but we hear no word of concern from America, just as we heard no word of concern for Israel’s original blockade of Gaza which actually included a calculated level of calories intended to just keep the population alive (since modified under intense secret international pressure).
In all these induced chaotic situations, we hear little or nothing from the UN, an institution which should be among the first condemning aggressive behavior. But the UN, despite the many differing private views of its members, is now in all official capacities under the thumb of the US. Its current Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, a candidate favored by America, is ineffectual and behaves at times almost as though he headed an organization having nothing to do with peace or human rights.
Well, there is some intimidating history. Boutros Boutros-Ghali was the only UN secretary-general not to be elected to a second term in office, and the reason was an American plan to be rid of him, one of Madeleine Albright’s glorious career achievements. America vetoed his second term because it was most unhappy when he did not embrace the bombing of Bosnia, and they disliked other of his views which tended to be thoughtful and compassionate. Earlier, Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, a much admired man, was assassinated in an engineered plane crash, said to have been the work of Belgian mining companies unhappy with the UN’s policies in Congo, a place the mining companies had drained of wealth for decades of brutal exploitation, but I think it unlikely anything of that nature happened without at least a nod of approval from Washington, which after all was a major customer for the products of Congo.
The evidence is piling up, despite delays and many irregularities in the official investigation into the crash of airline Flight MH-17 in Ukraine, that a Ukrainian pilot deliberately shot the plane down. His fighter jet is said to have been armed with air-to-air missiles on take-off, something completely out-of-the-ordinary in the conflict since Eastern Ukrainians have no air force. It returned, according to an eye-witness, with no missiles and the pilot muttering cryptic phrases. Of course, this would be the kind of act you might expect from people who used sniper rifles earlier this year to kill many hundreds of civilians in Maidan, the central square of Kiev, in order to terrorize the population and start the coup. But where is America’s voice in these grotesque doings? As Russia has patiently pointed out, an American spy satellite was virtually overhead at the time of the crash, so definitive evidence exists without a doubt but is not produced. But then neither is it produced for the destruction of Flight MH-370 in the Indian Ocean, an event it is virtually certain was the work of American forces at the secret Diego Garcia base as the plane came their way for whatever unknown reason.
The irregularities around Flight MH-17’s investigation include Malaysia, owners of the airline, being excluded from the group conducting the investigation and include the fact that segments of the wreckage were left behind at the crash site, and that after taking a very long time to get there in the first place, making manipulation of forensic evidence possible and even likely. We also have the absence of any American satellite or radar records, and we have not a word about the autopsy on the pilot, something which might solve the entire mystery, as from the discovery of Ukrainian missile fragments in his body.
What kind of world do we want to live in? One where coups and civil wars are engineered for the pleasure of others? One where airliners full of people are shot down deliberately? This is the chaos, and just part of it, America has bestowed upon us in the twenty-first century. I won’t even go into the financial tsunami it created in 2008 with the same lack of caution for others and concern about doing things correctly. The full impact of that has yet to strike us all.
But America brings laughable trivia, too. The President of the United States spending time and breath on the hacking of a private company’s web site? A Japanese company, no less? And turning the relatively trivial business of hacking, which happens every day now somewhere, into an international incident by blaming, almost certainly incorrectly, North Korea?
The President said the FBI had investigated and assured him that North Korea was responsible. What he didn’t tell us was that the FBI has a decades-long record of being wrong, seriously wrong, a great deal of the time. Given the FBI’s history, it certainly is in the running for the title of Most Incompetent Security Organization in the Western World, although, like other national security institutions in the United States, it is grossly over-funded with money gushing out like water from broken plumbing. Americans pay more per unit of misinformation than likely any other people on the planet.
Anyone familiar with the record of the FBI listens to assurances like the President’s with a sarcastic smile at best (see FOOTNOTE for a partial list of the FBI’s viciousness and incompetence over the years). Shortly after the president’s silly words, we had several world-class tech experts tell us why it could not have been North Korea, and I’ll take bets against the FBI on this one from anyone.
It likely was someone at Sony doing a publicity stunt to promote what by all reports is a dud of a film, but why should the man with the biggest job in the world join in? Consider also the fact that if you make what can be viewed as a threatening comment or presentation of any kind against the President of the United States, you will be visited and interviewed by the Secret Service, who will then keep you on file permanently. Why is it okay to make a movie about the assassination of North Korea’s president then, the subject of The Interview ? Sony certainly has a right to do stupidly foolish things, but it is more than a little muddled for the President, eagerly, to support it. Will he now address the rights of porn actors in California to work without condoms?
As I write this, a British newspaper reports that some Sony employees have been quietly dismissed. Reported also is the discovery of a web site strongly suggesting disgruntled employees. See what I mean about America overlooking the facts before it acts?
FOOTNOTE ON HOW WRONG AND DISHONEST THE FBI HAS BEEN: The FBI was wrong in claiming there was no such thing as the Mafia, something J. Edgar Hoover insisted for many years while he gambled at their racetracks and stayed at their resorts for free, some biographers believing Hoover had been compromised by the Mafia with photos of his secret gay, cross-dressing life. The FBI was wrong in focusing huge resources for many years on the pathetic American Communist Party, half of whose small membership is said to have consisted of FBI agents. The FBI was wrong about the threat of Albert Einstein, seeking his extradition for a time and checking the contents of his garbage to his dying day. The FBI was wrong about the danger of Dr. Martin Luther King, and it played judge and jury with his personal life. The FBI was wrong about Dr. Wen Ho Lee of Los Alamos being a spy, although it ruined his career. The FBI was wrong about the crash of TWA Flight 800, taking an inordinate amount of time trying to let public interest cool and avoid the obvious fact that the crash was an accidental shoot-down by the American military, there being a radar track showing something like a missile rising towards the plane. Despite its vast resources, the FBI never saw 9/11 coming. One of its own senior agents, Robert Hanssen, was one of the more damaging spies of modern times, a man whose carelessness in many details, classic indicators of a paid spy, went unnoticed for years. The FBI was wrong in the Atlanta Olympic bombing, ruining the life of another innocent man. It couldn’t have been more wrong in its handling of the sad kooks at Waco, effectively murdering them all. So, too, at the Ruby Ridge standoff where an FBI sniper killed a woman and her child needlessly. The FBI Crime Labs were cited in the 1990s by the Inspector General for misconduct and manipulating evidence, something many had suspected for years. The FBI specialized for years in hurting the reputations of those it didn’t like or those it merely suspected, as by asking questions at their place of work and neighborhood, not have any proof of wrong-doing. The FBI, at least under J. Edgar Hoover, held career-threatening information obtained by spying over the heads of many prominent congressmen and government leaders, effectively blackmailing them to do its bidding. It did the same with non-government officials where it felt so inclined. The FBI was wrong about the assassination of President Kennedy, it being the only investigative agency for the lamentable, embarrassing Warren Commission, thereby assuming at least equal responsibility for its inaccurate, dishonest report. Indeed, the FBI did not reveal at the time that Oswald secretly worked for them as a paid informant (since documented). It also lied about evidence a senior FBI agent destroyed after the assassination, a note Oswald had written.
Gaza, Syria, militarized cops, and ‘lone-wolf’ shootings: during a brutal year, 9/11 truth held its own
The people of Gaza experienced real terrorism during a siege that left 2,100 dead
By Craig McKee | Truth and Shadows | December 30, 2014
Gaza, ISIS, Syria, Ukraine, Ferguson, militarized cops, Malaysian planes, torture, drones, and “lone-wolf” shootings. It has been a tough year for the truth.
But in the midst of all the deception and brutality, it has been an intriguing year for the struggle to expose the lies of 9/11. The elusive breakthrough that 9/11 truthers fantasize about may not be coming any time soon, but there are encouraging signs on a number of fronts. There were also some disappointments, but even those don’t seem so bad if you subscribe to the idea that there’s no such thing as bad publicity.
A major highlight was the spectacular sight of an 89-foot wide electronic billboard in New York City’s Times Square repeatedly showing the destruction of WTC 7 throughout the month of September. An estimated two million New Yorkers saw the message. Who would have thought something like that would ever happen? This latest project was the initiative of Rethink 9/11 and Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, which were responsible for billboards in major cities around the world last year.
At the beginning of December we had the presentation of a petition asking the Canadian government to conduct a Parliamentary review of the evidence of 9/11. For years, no politician was willing to touch this subject or this petition in Canada until Green Party leader Elizabeth May agreed to present it to Parliament. Of course the likelihood of Parliament reviewing the evidence is about as good as Congress doing so in the U.S. But anything is positive that gets 9/11 into the news and lets people know that the movement continues to fight.
Unfortunately, May chose to tell the mainstream media that she only presented the petition because Parliamentary rules obligated her to do so. They don’t. She also said she doesn’t agree with the petition, which was regrettable but predictable. Any politician who shows any openness about 9/11 is going to get roasted in the media, and she was. But at least May was willing to take some political risk. Following up on the petition effort, AE911Truth has commissioned a poll of Canadians, asking them their views about 9/11.
Speaking of media, the High-Rise Safety Initiative launched by the New York Coalition for Accountability Now got 9/11 into the news even though it ultimately did not succeed in getting the initiative on to the New York City ballot. The goal was to force a change to the city charter obligating the Department of Buildings to investigate any building collapses going back to Sept. 11, 2001 (including Building 7 but not the twin towers).
The money was raised and the signatures were collected. It was quite an effort. But the courts did what they always do, dashing hopes for the time being. I know many truthers are quick to say that no official investigation will ever get to the truth of 9/11 – and that’s probably true – but the publicity the effort would produce would be worth it. Mayor Bill De Blasio calling the initiative “inappropriate after all the suffering that went on 9/11,” got the subject some welcome mainstream coverage.
The most hostile – and incoherent – attack on 9/11 truth occurred after AE9/11Truth distributed information pamphlets at the opening of the 9/11 Memorial and Museum at Ground Zero. The hook was that the pamphlets used the same design to offer an alternative view of what happened on 9/11. CNN’s Jake Tapper and his guest, Slate editor Emily Bazelon combined on a five-minute piece that made the usual gibberish about conspiracy theories seem intelligent.
My favorite quote from Bazelon: “You see these dark corners of the Internet where people pile on, and there’s this minute parsing of the technicalities of the supposed evidence, and more and more detail gets added and accumulated, and it kind of feeds on itself.”
Don’t you hate it when conspiracy theorists parse evidence and examine details?
Then there was the vicious maligning of Richard Gage and all truthers as being anti-Semitic hate mongers by the Canadian “news” network, Sun News. This came in an interview of Gage done by right wing hack Michael Coren in Toronto. I filed two complaints against Coren with the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council and waited more than six months for a decision from their adjudicating panel. I got an email from the national chair of the Council, Andrée Noel, saying that the complaint did not deal with anything that hadn’t been ruled on in the past, and that she had dismissed both complaints without giving them a hearing.
In an interview, Noel said that Coren’s accusation that Gage was a hate monger was “not unduly aggressive.” Riiiight. The only recourse left is to refer the complaint to the Canadian Radio and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). My expectations for that are not high.
The year produced some excellent research material relating to 9/11 in the form of books, films, and art. Graeme MacQueen published an important book, The 2001 Anthrax Deception: The Case for a Domestic Conspiracy, which explains the failure of the anthrax false flag and reveals how 9/11 was its twin false flag. This excellent book was the subject of a review on Truth and Shadows by Barrie Zwicker.
David Hooper also released his personal documentary The Anatomy of a Great Deception, which chronicles his awakening about 9/11 as well as offering an excellent overview of the evidence that the official story of what happened at the World Trade Center is false.
The most pleasantly unexpected bit of news was that a wonderful piece of 9/11 truth art was (inexplicably) accepted into the private collection of the “official” 9/11 Museum. And the best part is that the artist, Anthony Freda, is a prominent illustrator who works with mainstream media like the New York Times and Rolling Stone, but who is also an articulate voice on behalf of 9/11 truth. The donation of the art will also be featured in an upcoming documentary called Behind Truth Art by John Massaria.
The bigger picture in 2014
While progress on the 9/11 front was encouraging but slow, world events were neither and seemed to be filled with ever more contrived chaos, deception and violence. The supposed “war on terror” – which was truly launched by the 9/11 false flag deception – played out in the CIA-backed assault on Syria, and the appearance of ISIS, the latest Muslim “threat.” The convenient and implausibly sudden emergence of this well-funded and outfitted band of “extremists” has provided the West with all the excuse it needs to bomb Iraq and Syria. There were highly suspicious videos of beheadings and a highly unbelievable back story to explain ISIS, the latest excuse for more military action in the Middle East and the stripping away of more civil liberties at home.
The U.S. Senate torture report got lots of press in 2014, but of course that’s because it serves the illusion that terrorists are truly a genuine threat, and the most important issue is how we deal with them.
On the domestic front, there was the police state crackdown on protests in Ferguson, Missouri after a cop shot unarmed black 18-year-old Michael Brown. Not only did this focus attention on the targeting of blacks for police violence, but also on the militarization of police forces across America – a process that has been ongoing for two decades.
We’re being conditioned to accept police in military gear as being standard and normal. In the U.S., 2014 was a truly disturbing year during which a shocking number of individuals were killed by police, often for minor infractions or no infractions at all. The most visible of those was the choking of Eric Garner as he was held down by five New York City police officers. Finally, we had the killing of two NYPD cops, seemingly in retaliation for police violence.
And the number of “lone wolf” shootings (in some cases labelled terrorist attacks) continued to increase in 2014. While the media automatically accepted all of these as being authentic and focused on the emotional and sensational aspects of each, many alternative voices seriously questioned whether some of the shootings were either staged or perpetrated by organized entities rather than crazed extremists or disturbed loners.
We had the killings of two soldiers in Canada in October. There was the Santa Barbara shooting, the Portland shooting, the Las Vegas shooting, the LAX shooting, the Seattle shooting, the Vancouver shooting, the Moncton shooting, and finally the Sydney hostage taking and shooting.
In the case of the LAX event, a drill had been practised three weeks before using “the exact same scenario,” according to an LAPD spokesman. We learned that in the few weeks before the Canadian one-two punch, authorities had carried out an exercise simulating a terrorist attack in Quebec followed by one in a large Canadian city – exactly what happened. We found out that police in Melbourne, Australia had practised their response to a hostage taking in a cafe just six weeks before the real thing happened in Sydney. They had also held a drill a year before in Martin Square where the hostage taking would play itself out 12 months later.
With all this, the story that affected me more than any other was Israel’s brutal siege against Gaza, leaving 2,100 Palestinians dead, tens of thousands homeless, and turned large parts of the city to rubble. And while this human catastrophe was going on the Israeli government and its apologists in the U.S., Canada, and elsewhere were making the Orwellian claim that Israel was the victim, that Hamas was the aggressor, and that it was the Palestinians’ own fault for electing them.
Molten metal under Trade Center rubble could NOT have come from jet fuel
By Craig McKee | Truth and Shadows | October 24, 2010
When they can’t explain it, they do the next best thing.
They ignore it.
The U.S. government, the 9/11 Commission, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, FEMA and the mainstream media all do the same thing. When they can’t explain something that contradicts the official version of events on 9/11, they simply pretend the questions don’t exist.
Among the most crucial examples of this are the large pools of molten metal found under the rubble of the two twin towers of the World Trade Center and Building 7. The molten metal burned under the rubble for weeks, with the final fires not being extinguished until December of 2001, three months after the disaster.
The official story can’t explain this; it doesn’t even try. That’s because the molten metal points to a controlled demolition – explosive charges combined with a material that causes a chemical reaction creating extreme heat to cut through steel beams.
According to Brigham Young University physics professor Steven Jones, who has questioned the science of the official story, the most likely material to have been used to melt through the beams is thermite.
Thermite devices could have been wrapped around the steel girders diagonally to cut through them. They could have contributed, along with the explosives, to bringing the structure down. When ignited, thermite can reach temperatures of 4,500F in less than two seconds.
One of the by-products of the use of thermite is molten steel. Another is aluminum oxide, which shows itself as a fine white smoke. What did we have in the wake of the towers’ collapse? Molten steel and fine white “smoke.” There was so much of this smoke that it could be seen from the International Space Station.
FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, stated in its report that most of the jet fuel from the planes would have burned up in the initial impact or in the first minutes after impact.
So what was all that smoke coming from the towers and later the wreckage of the towers? Smoke poured out of the rubble for weeks as emergency workers attempted to extinguish the molten metal fires underneath.
The melting point for steel is about 2,800F while the maximum temperature that jet fuel can burn at is about 1,800F. Experts like Jones have pointed out that the black smoke coming from the towers indicates that the fire was oxygen starved and therefore was burning at a much lower temperature even than 1,800F.
How do we know the molten metal didn’t come from some underground source? We know this because there are photographs that clearly show molten metal flowing from the 81st floor of the South Tower BEFORE collapse. Some have tried to explain this by saying that it is molten aluminum from the planes.
Aluminum may glow at a high enough temperature but it’s ridiculous to suggest that aluminum burned underground for three months. Molten metal was found under Building 7, which was not hit by a plane. Those of you who refuse to consider the “demolition” possibility might want to try and explain where this molten metal came from.
By the way, the existence of these “hot spots” under all three buildings was confirmed by aerial thermal images taken by NASA in the first two weeks after 9/11.
As for proving that the molten steel was actually there, photographs show it, and even then New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani talked about it publicly. He talked about how the boots of emergency workers would melt after a few hours of clearing rubble.
Many other witnesses reported the presence of the molten pools under the building rubble. Leslie Robertson, one of the designers of the World Trade Center, reported molten metal running under the buildings 21 days after 9/11.
Public health adviser Ron Burger likened the pools to a volcano. Other workers say it looked like a foundry or that the metal “looked like lava.” Witnesses say they saw molten steel “dripping from beams and walls” in the basement of the towers. New York firefighters referred to “rivers of molten metal” under the rubble.
SOMEONE NEEDS TO EXPLAIN THIS.
The FEMA report also mentions sulfur residue on the steel beams of the towers after collapse. This also supports the controlled demolition theory because sulfur is used to lower the melting point of the steel. Sulfur combined with thermite creates thermate. This dramatically speeds up the melting of the steel.
If there’s a reasonable explanation for all of this, why haven’t we heard it? And if you’re wondering if the whole controlled demolition case might all rest on this, you can be assured it does not.
It’s just the beginning.
Security firm says Sony hack might have been an inside job
RT | December 25, 2014
Despite claims by the FBI that North Korea was behind the massive hack against Sony, several cybersecurity experts have come forward to raise questions about the allegation, with some suggesting that insiders at the company could be to blame.
One such expert, Kurt Stammberger from the Norse cybersecuirty firm, told CBS News that his team believes a woman identified only as “Lena” was heavily involved in the hack – not North Korea.
“We are very confident that this was not an attack master-minded by North Korea and that insiders were key to the implementation of one of the most devastating attacks in history,” he told the news outlet.
“Sony was not just hacked, this is a company that was essentially nuked from the inside,” Stammberger added.
Little is known about Lena, but Norse believes the woman is somehow linked with the hacking group behind the attack, known as the ‘Guardians of Peace.’ The firm also suspects the woman was a former employee of Sony who worked there for 10 years before leaving in May 2014.
According to Stammberger, Lena’s position in the company would have given her the access and knowledge needed to identify the servers that hackers ultimately stole troves of data from.
Stammberger didn’t completely rule out North Korea’s role in the cyber attack, but he told CBS that evidence pointing to the country could actually be a case of misdirection.
“There are certainly North Korean fingerprints on this but when we run all those leads to ground they turn out to be decoys or red herrings,” he said.
Last week, the FBI officially pinned the hack on North Korea, saying the breach involved lines of code, methods, and encryption algorithms previously developed by the country.
“Technical analysis of the data deletion malware used in this attack revealed links to other malware that the FBI knows North Korea actors previously developed,” the FBI said in its statement. “The FBI also observed significant overlap between the infrastructure used in this attack and other malicious cyber activity the US government has previously linked directly to North Korea.”
“Separately, the tools used in the SPE attack have similarities to a cyberattack in March of last year against South Korean banks and media outlets, which was carried out by North Korea.”
Still, some remain unconvinced. Cybersecurity expert Bruce Schneier wrote that the code used by the hackers seems “to point in all directions at once.” Looking at the evidence cited by the FBI, Schneier said it’s the kind that is “easy to fake, and it’s even easier to interpret it incorrectly.” He also cast doubt on the “insider threat” theory, arguing that such an individual wouldn’t need the hacking tools used to breach Sony’s servers.
Schneier noted that the FBI has not revealed all the reasons for its claim, though, and acknowledged that classified evidence could clearly point the finger at North Korea. Unless that evidence is known, it’s hard to say with any certainty.
Other possibilities include the idea that North Korea “co-opted” the initial attack after an embarrassing glut of information was made public, using that as an opportunity to strike Sony, as it was reeling and facing pressure to cancel ‘The Interview’ movie.
While Sony did cancel the premiere and release of ‘The Interview’ – a comedy which tells the story of a CIA plot to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong-un – it has since relented in the face of public criticism, which included harsh words from President Barack Obama. The movie is now available on streaming services and will be in theaters in limited release on Christmas Day.
Regarding the film’s release, a North Korean envoy to the United Nations said the country will condemn the decision but will not have any “physical reaction.” He added that the movie is an “unpardonable mockery of our sovereignty and dignity of our supreme leader.”
The diplomat also told the Associated Press that his country was not involved in the hack.
READ MORE:
FBI formally accuses North Korea in Sony hack
Senator urges Obama to host White House screening of ‘The Interview’
N. Korea threatens US, demands apology for Obama’s ‘reckless rumors’ of Sony hack
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From the Archives
Mutually Assured Delusion (MAD)
By Judith Curry | Climate Etc. | November 5, 2013
Groupthink: A pattern of thought charaterized by self-deception, forced manufacture of consent, and conformity to group values and ethics.
Groupthink: Collective Delusions in Organizations and Markets, by Roland Benabou, published in the Review of Economic Studies. Benabou also has a talk (ppt slides) on this subject.
First, a definition of groupthink (from the ppt slides):
Janis (1972)’s eight symptoms [of groupthink]:
- illusion of invulnerability
- collective rationalization
- belief in inherent morality
- stereotyped views of out-groups
- direct pressure on dissenters
- self-censorship
- illusion of unanimity
- self-appointed mind guards
Sound like any groups that we know? … continue
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