‘Blackwater/Xe behind Pakistan unrest’
Press TV – April 22, 2010
The former leader of Pakistan’s opposition party Jamaat-e-Islami has accused the US security firm Blackwater/Xe of being behind the unrest in the country.
Speaking to reporters in Peshawar, Qazi Hussain Ahmad said that the situation in the country would never improve if the government in Islamabad continued to be the frontline ally of Washington.
“The rulers have been fighting the US war in our own streets, which is fanning unrest,” he added.
On Wednesday, Jamaat-e-Islami chief Syed Munawar Hassan told Press TV that Pakistan’s alliance with the US was the main reason behind a surge in bomb attacks across the country.
“The notorious Blackwater agents are behind the bomb and suicide attacks in our country as the US wants to destabilize Pakistan… after invading neighboring Afghanistan,” he said.
The people of Pakistan are united against the US and are ready to force the government to end its alliance with Washington on the so-called war against terror, he added.
Unlearned lessons from the Steven Hatfill case
By Glenn Greenwald | April 21, 2010
Andrew Sullivan rightly recommends this new Atlantic article by David Freed, which details how the FBI and a mindless, stenographic American media combined to destroy the life of Steven Hatfill. Hatfill is the former U.S. Government scientist who for years was publicly depicted as the anthrax attacker and subjected to Government investigations so invasive and relentless that they forced him into almost total seclusion, paralysis and mental instability, only to have the Government years later (in 2008) acknowledge that he had nothing to do with those attacks and to pay him $5.8 million to settle the lawsuit he brought. There are two crucial lessons that ought to be learned from this horrible — though far-from-rare — travesty:
(1) It requires an extreme level of irrationality to read what happened to Hatfill and simultaneously to have faith that the “real anthrax attacker” has now been identified as a result of the FBI’s wholly untested and uninvestigated case against Bruce Ivins. The parallels are so overwhelming as to be self-evident.
Just as was true for the case against Hatfill, the FBI’s case against Ivins is riddled with scientific and evidentiary holes. Much of the public case against Ivins, as was true for Hatfill, was made by subservient establishment reporters mindlessly passing on dubious claims leaked by their anonymous government sources. So unconvincing is the case against Ivins that even the most establishment, government-trusting voices — including key members of Congress, leading scientific journals and biological weapons experts, and the editorial pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall St. Journal — have all expressed serious doubts over the FBI’s case and have called for further, independent investigations.
Yet just as was true for years with the Hatfill accusations, no independent investigations are taking place. That’s true for three reasons.
First, the FBI drove Ivins to suicide, thus creating an unwarranted public assumption of guilt and ensuring the FBI’s case would never be subjected to the critical scrutiny of a trial — exactly what would have happened with Hatfill had he, like Ivins, succumbed to that temptation, as Freed describes:
The next morning, driving through Georgetown on the way to visit one of his friends in suburban Maryland, I ask Hatfill how close he came to suicide. The muscles in his jaw tighten.
“That was never an option,” Hatfill says, staring straight ahead. “If I would’ve killed myself, I would’ve been automatically judged by the press and the FBI to be guilty.”
Second, the American media — with some notable exceptions — continued to do to Ivins what it did to Hatfill and what it does in general: uncritically disseminate government claims rather than questioning or investigating them for accuracy. As a result, many Americans continue to blindly assume any accusations that come from the Government must be true. As Freed writes, in a passage with significance far beyond the Hatfill case:
The same, Hatfill believes, cannot be said about American civil liberties. “I was a guy who trusted the government,” he says. “Now, I don’t trust a damn thing they do.” He trusts reporters even less, dismissing them as little more than lapdogs for law enforcement.
The media’s general willingness to report what was spoon-fed to them, in an effort to reassure a frightened public that an arrest was not far off, is somewhat understandable considering the level of fear that gripped the nation following 9/11. But that doesn’t “justify the sliming of Steven Hatfill,” says Edward Wasserman, who is the Knight Professor of Journalism Ethics at Washington and Lee University, in Virginia. “If anything, it’s a reminder that an unquestioning media serves as a potential lever of power to be activated by the government, almost at will.“
No matter how many times the Government and media jointly disseminate outright lies to the American citizenry — remember Iraq, or Jessica Lynch’s heroic Rambo-like firefight with Evil Iraqi Villains, or Pat Tillman’s death at the hands of Al Qaeda Monsters, or all the gloriously successful air strikes and raids on Terrorists that never happened? — that propagandistic process never weakens. As a result, many Americans (especially when their party is in power) simply place blind faith in whatever the Government claims (even when the claims are issued anonymously and accompanied by no tested evidence). Hence, the Government claims it knows that Ivins is the anthrax killer; the American media largely affirms that claim; and, for so many people, that’s the end of the story, no matter how many times that exact process has so woefully misled them and no matter how many credible and even mainstream sources question it.
Third, the Obama administration is actively and aggressively blocking any efforts to investigate the FBI’s case against Ivins through an Obama veto threat, based on the Orwellian, backward claim that such an investigation “would undermine public confidence” in the FBI’s case “and unfairly cast doubt on its conclusions.” As explained in a letter to the Obama administration by Rep. Rush Holt, the former physicist who represents the New Jersey district from which the anthrax letters were sent:
The Bureau has asserted repeatedly and with confidence that the “Amerithrax” investigation is the most thorough they have ever conducted — claims they made even as they were erroneously pursuing Dr. Steven Hatfill. . . . Many critical questions in this case remain unanswered, and there are many reasons why there is not, nor ever has been, public confidence in the investigation or the FBI’s conclusions, precisely because it was botched at multiple points over more than eight years. Indeed, opposing an independent examination of any aspect of the investigation will only fuel the public’s belief that the FBI’s case could not hold up in court, and that in fact the real killer may still be at large.
The anthrax attacks were one of the most significant political events of this generation — as significant as the 9/11 attack, if not more so, in creating the climate of fear that prevailed (and still prevails) in the U.S., which, in turn, spawned so much expansion of government power. It is worth remembering what happened in the Hatfill case in order to be reminded of just how inexcusable it is that there has been no independent investigation of the case against Ivins and that the current administration is now aggressively and quite strangely blocking any efforts to do so.
(2) More generally, it is hard to overstate the authoritarian impulses necessary for someone — even in the wake of numerous cases like Steven Hatfill’s — to place blind faith in government accusations without needing to see any evidence or have that evidence subjected to adversarial scrutiny. Yet that is exactly the blind faith that dominates so many of our political debates.
Throughout the Bush years, anyone who argued against warrantless surveillance, or torture, or lawless detention and rendition, was met with this response: but this is all being done to Terrorists. What they actually meant was: these are people accused by the Government, with no evidence or trials, of being Terrorists. But the authoritarian mind, by definition, recognizes no distinction between “Our leaders claim X” and “X is true.” For them, the former is proof of the latter. Identically, those who now argue against due-process-free presidential assassinations of American citizens and charge-less indefinite detentions are met with a similar response: but these are dangerous people who are trying to kill Americans, when what they actually mean is: Obama officials claim, with no evidence shown and no process given, that these are dangerous people trying to kill Americans. The authoritarian mind refuses to recognize any distinction between those two very different propositions.
No matter how many Steven Hatfills there are — indeed, no matter how undeniable is the evidence that the Government repeatedly accused people of being Terrorists who were no such thing, even while knowing the accusations were false — the authoritarians among us continue to blindly recite unproven Government accusations (but he’s a Terrorist!) to justify the most extreme detention, surveillance and even assassination policies, all without needing or wanting any due process or evidence. No matter how many times it is shown how unreliable those kinds of untested government accusations are (either due to abuse or error), there is no shortage of people willing to place blind faith in such pronouncements and to vest political leaders with all sorts of unchecked powers to act on them.
Al-Qaeda Chief In Iraq: Captured, Killed, Never Actually Existed, Re-Captured, Now Killed Again
Steve Watson | Prisonplanet.com | April 19th, 2010
U.S. and Iraqi officials have today announced that two “Al-Qaeda in Iraq” leaders have been killed in an air strike carried out by American troops. A major flaw in the story that seems to have been overlooked, is that both of the men have already been reported captured and killed on several occasions, with U.S. officials also having previously declared one of them a “fictional character” that was invented by the other!
The Washington Post reports:
The deaths of Abu Ayyub al-Masri, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, and Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, the head of an umbrella group that includes al-Qaeda in Iraq, should disrupt insurgent attacks inside the country, officials said. Their slayings could also provide Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki (pictured above) with a decisive political boost at a critical time.
“The death of these terrorists is potentially the most significant blow to al-Qaeda in Iraq since the beginning of the insurgency,” Gen. Ray Odierno, the top commander of U.S. troops in Iraq said in a statement. “There is still work to do but this is a significant step forward in ridding Iraq [of] terrorists.”
The two insurgent leaders were said to have been killed on Saturday in a night raid involving Iraqi and American forces.
United States military officials confirmed that Iraqi security forces had killed the two men. “The death of these two terrorists is a potentially devastating blow to Al Qaeda in Iraq,” the American command said in a statement.
He (the Iraqi prime minister) said the house was destroyed, and the two bodies were found in a hole in the ground where they had apparently been hiding.
Bizarrely, the Reuters piece quotes the Iraqi prime minister pinpointing the location of the raid as “a house in Thar-Thar, a rural area 50 miles west of Baghdad that is regarded as a hotbed of Qaeda activity”, however, the Washington Post report quotes U.S. officials saying the raid occurred “a few miles southwest of Tikrit”. If you look at a map of Iraq, those two descriptions do not entirely add up, unless you consider “a few miles” to be over 100. Certainly a more specific location could have been given.
However, that is perhaps the least of the problems surrounding this story.
Anyone who reads the news should be feeling a profound sense of déjà vu, because almost a year ago to the day, al-Baghdadi was reported captured by Iraqi security forces. His arrest was confirmed by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, the same man now purporting that Baghdadi has been killed in a raid.
Al-Baghdadi was the replacement al-CIA-da boogie man for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was also previously reported captured and killed on several occasions, after al-Zarqawi was laid to rest for good by the PR arm of the Pentagon in 2006.
The announcement of al-Baghdadi’s capture year ago, jarred with multiple previous reports over a two years period, detailing his arrest, his death and even questioning his existence altogether.
In March 2007, the Interior Ministry of Iraq claimed that al-Baghdadi had been captured in Baghdad. This was reported by AP and picked up by the likes of CNN, whose report stated that another insurgent had positively confirmed al-Baghdadi’s identity.
The U.S. military denied that al-Baghdadi was in their custody, however, and one day later Iraqi officials retracted their statements regarding his arrest.
Indeed this back and forth announcement of capture and later retraction occurred three times in the space of one week.
Then one month later, on May 3, 2007, the Iraqi Interior Ministry announced that al-Baghdadi had been killed by American and Iraqi forces north of Baghdad.
However, in July 2007, the U.S. military declared that al-Baghdadi had never actually existed and was, for all intents and purposes, a myth.
A reportedly high ranking “Al Qaeda in Iraq” detainee identified as Khaled al-Mashhadani, then claimed that al-Baghdadi was a fictional character created to give an Iraqi face to a foreign-run terror group, and that the “Islamic State of Iraq” was a “virtual organisation in cyberspace” created by al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Ayub al Masri.
The person claiming to be Baghdadi continued to release video and audiotapes attacking U.S. occupation of Iraq, but refused to show his face.
The U.S. military’s claim that Baghdadi is a fictitious character was then challenged in May 2008 after a police chief in Haditha said Baghdadi’s real identity is Hamed Dawood Mohammed Khalil al Zawi. “He was an officer in the security services and was dismissed from the army because of his extremism,” the police chief told al Arabiya television.
A year later, in April 2009, following his latest capture, the Iraqi government displayed a picture of Baghdadi for the first time, adding that they were attempting to glean information from him.
The Al Qaeda-linked group the Islamic State of Iraq denied the government reports that al-Baghdadi had been captured, and according to the SITE Institute, released a “genuine” recording of Baghdadi announcing that he was still at large.
But Iraqi officials then released a video of Baghdadi’s interrogation, in which he claimed responsibility for the bombing of a Shia shrine in Samarra in February 2006, and also described how his terrorist group was funded.
However, tapes and messages continued to be released throughout 2009 in the name of Baghdadi, claiming that he had not been captured and spurring on militants in Iraq. Up to the present day in 2010, such messages continued to be reported on by mainstream sources, such as the Associated Press, without any explanation as to how a captured terrorist could be releasing the material.
Now Baghdadi has been reported killed again!
The story becomes even more intriguing given that the second man reported to have been killed and found in a ditch last Saturday was Abu Ayub al Masri – the “creator” of the fictional character of al-Baghdadi.
Al Masri himself was also reported to have been killed in May 2007. He then rose from the dead to be captured in May 2008 in a joint US-Iraqi operation.
Prime Minister al-Maliki’s presumed amnesia over the fact that he already annouced Baghdadi captured less than twelve months ago becomes more suspect when you take into account that he is trying to negotiate support for his State of Law coalition following parliamentary elections in which it emerged only as the second largest bloc.
Presumably the ridiculous loose ends of this soap opera will now be tied off and memory holed – although we cannot put it past al Masri and his imaginary friend to rise from the grave one more time a year down the line, particularly given that the Baghdadi character keeps being resurrected and acknowledged by the Iraqi government, the U.S. military and the mainstream media.
This saga is another example of how a manufactured smoke and mirrors propaganda veils reality. The “war on terror” mantra continues to be propagated as justification to wage permanent occupation and control over the middle east by the global elite.
Already Joe Biden is parading around, announcing the news as a “devastating blow” delivered to Al Qaeda.
Al Qaeda in Iraq, al Zarqawi, al Baghdadi and the legions of other al qaeda operatives who have been reportedly captured and killed over and over are used as interchangeable PR tools.
Are or were any of them ever real? Possibly. Was there more than one Baghdadi? Maybe. However those facts matter little now.
Once again 99% of the corporate media will no doubt enthusiastically champion the latest killings as a key victory in the continuing war on terror, and the majority of Americans who even notice will not take a second glance at the ludicrous back story.
Rounded Up: Artificial Terrorists and Muslim Entrapment after 9/11 :: Book Review ::
(Image: The Troy Book Makers)
By Mirza A. Beg | December 16, 2009
In the wake of 9/11, the Bush Justice Department arrested almost 1,200 Muslims throughout the United States. They were ordinary American immigrants, mostly of Arab origin. The evidence at best was flimsy based on someone’s vendetta or in some cases neighbor’s paranoia.
Within a week the Justice Department unveiled the infamous “USA Patriot Act”. Congress passed it in early October 2001 over the objection of many thoughtful Americans. The word USA PATRIOT is an acronym designed to pull at American heart strings. It stands for ‘Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism’
None of the arrested were ever brought to trial; although a few were summarily deported at the slightest irregularity in their immigration documents. Many were tortured. Exactly how many were tortured and how badly is a secret under the aegis of the “Patriot act”. Perhaps some day it will come out.
Overnight Muslim organizations became suspect. FBI undercover operations were taken in stride by most Muslims as a part of the job of the FBI to protect the citizens. But what unfolded in many cases was incitement and entrapment by implanted agent Muslim provocateurs with shady pasts, in trouble with the law.
On August 5, 2004, the lead national news was that two Muslims associated with the Albany Mosque were arrested in a terrorist plot. There names were Yassin Muhiddin Aref and Mohammed Mosharref Hossain.
The book, Rounded Up: Artificial Terrorists and Muslim Entrapment after 9/11, is written by Dr. Shamshad Ahmed, a professor of Physics, who established the Masjid As-Salam in 1980 and serves as its president. He knew the two victims of entrapment to be honest decent people. It is essentially a short account of Yassin Muhiddin Aref, an immigrant from the Kurdish part of Iraq and Mohammed Mosharref Hossain from Pakistan, their background and how were they entrapped by the FBI.
Why they were entrapped is best known to the government or perhaps it is not even known to them. It is just possible that because they could not convict any of the 1,200 arrested, they tried random entrapment under the “one percent Cheney doctrine”, that is if the law enforcement authorities suspected someone of having a 1% chance of supporting terrorism, America would treat him as if he were 100% a terrorist. Once the process was in motion, the Justice Department did not back down because the conviction was under the Kafkaesque “Patriot Act”.
The chapters are generally arranged chronologically from the day of the FBI raid on the Mosque (Masjid) on the 5th of April 2004, with a few flash back chapters describing the establishment of the mosque and how the author met the two victims of the FBI sting.
Dr. Shamshad in this book exposes the “Catch 22” nature of the infamous “Patriot Act”. One would expect that by planting an informer, the FBI had a clear case. No, the case lasted three years, and all the delays were by the FBI asking extensions to prepare their case. The defense was kept in the dark even about the exact charges. Every piece of information had to be pried out after lengthy court petitions. Occasionally when they succeeded, the information was so redacted to be almost useless. Even the judges ruling, why the information was classified, was classified and the defendant was denied access. In essence the “Patriot Act” renders the justice of a Kangaroo Court, so well described by Franz Kafka in his dark novel “The Trial”.
Parts of the transcribed taped evidence by the Pakistani informer that were procured after long court battles are in the Appendixes of the book. They clearly show, it was the informer who kept on badgering the victims to say and do things that could be construed as illegal. At times the victims objected to his proposals as immoral and un-Islamic. He persisted, and on occasions the victims appear to be humoring the informer. The case rested on Musharraf Hossain being induced to take a loan from the informant at very favorable terms. The fact that the informer could launder his money and perhaps buy Chinese made rockets Hussain did not condone. Though the informant wanted the loan to be unrecorded, Hossain insisted on the propriety of it being recorded .The only crime for which Yassin Aref was roped in at the time was that as a friend he acted as witness to that loan.
Aref’s command of English was not very good. It often appears that he was not quite clear about the tenor of the conversation. The conversations with Hossain were often in Urdu and the FBI’s paid translator intentionally mistranslated taxes to terrorist. In 2005, a raid on a Kurdish camps in Iraq yielded a tape recording where someone seems to refer to Aref almost ten years earlier by a word in Kurdish that translates as elder brother. But if one wanted to stretch the meaning, it could be commander. Only this nebulous translation was presented to the jury to prove that he was a militant.
Dr. Shamshad Ahmad presents a very cogent account of the atmosphere in Albany during the publicity and the trial of the two defendants. On the one side the right-wing talk radio was in overdrive demonizing the Muslim and Arab community as has become very familiar nationwide. The politicians such a Governor Pataki also took advantage of the situation. But the author also very lucidly portrays the support they got from thoughtful Americans, including some in the clergy in the best of American traditions. They not only joined the vigils in support of the defendants but gave material help and wrote petitions.
The balanced and thoughtful reporting of the Albany Times Union was exemplary. The author has included many of the incisive cartoons by John deRosier castigating the bizarre nature of the case. Those cartoons are indeed worth the proverbial thousand words.
The lawyers worked assiduously towards an impossible task of defending the accused where parts of the charges, the evidence and even the rationale judge’s rulings are reminiscent of a Kangaroo court without the clowns. Stephen Downs who voluntarily joined the case pro bono and has written the forward to this book worked especially hard in the best tradition of the American legal system.
In the introduction of the book Dr. Ahmad has described his own conservative education in a Madarsa where he learned his basic values of Islamic decency and caring. From his short narration of his background, it becomes clear that one can be conservative in the best sense of the words as well as a progressive with liberal values as well. He has dedicated this book to the peace and justice loving humanitarians, and the proceeds from this book go to help the victims of the justice system gone awry in the shadow of the unpatriotic, “Patriot Act”.
9/11 victim families want civil trials for terror suspects
Press TV – April 2, 2010
Family members of those killed in the September 11, 2001 terror attacks have urged US President Barack Obama to live up to earlier promises and try terror suspects in civilian court.
The September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, a group of more than 200 family members of 9/11 victims, said they prefer the suspects currently held at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba to stand trial in US federal criminal courts rather than before military commissions.
In an emotional four-minute long video appeal, the group warned the US president against “buckling to political pressure” over the trial venue for the alleged 9/11 plotters.
The group argued that, while there have been hundreds of successfully completed terrorism-related trials in federal criminal courts, military commissions have only managed to wrap up three cases related to terrorism.
Donna Marsh O’Connor, a Peaceful Tomorrows member who lost her pregnant daughter on the attack against the World Trade Center, criticized the horse-trading politics surrounding terrorist trials in the US.
Reflecting disappointment with an alleged deal in which the White House would drop plans for civilian trials in exchange for Republican support for the closure of the detention camp at Guantanamo, O’Connor called on Obama to reject any such compromise.
“As 9/11 families, we have suffered greatly and waited almost nine years to see justice done with our own eyes,” she said.
“We understand that you face political pressure to back down. We ask that you do not allow fear and prejudice to govern your decision — as we are not afraid. We know our country is strong enough to hold on to our values in the face of terrorism,” she added.
New poll: About 1 in 3 Americans thinks 9/11 was “a big fabrication”
By Kevin Barrett | March 21, 2010
A new poll has shown that about 1 in 3 Americans — roughly 100 million people — think 9/11 was “a big fabrication.” The poll was evidently commissioned and/or conducted by anti-9/11-truth forces, as demonstrated by the headline: “Americans Disagree with Iranian President on 9/11 ‘Fabrication.'” By framing the issue as one of agreement or disagreement with media-demonized Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and focusing on those who disagreed, Angus Reid Public Opinion was spinning the story as hard as it could possibly be spun. But all the spin in the world can’t hide the fact that these are the biggest MIHOP* numbers yet!
According to the new Angus Reid 9/11 poll, 26% of Americans say flat-out that 9/11 was “a big fabrication,” while 12% more aren’t sure. Splitting the difference with the not-sures, we arrive at 32% either flat-out believing or leaning toward MIHOP. Taking into consideration the obvious pollster bias, and the psychological tendency of poll respondents to disguise their real beliefs in order to avoid pejorative labels like “conspiracy theorist” or “Ahmedinejad supporter,” we must conclude that the real numbers are considerably higher.
Compare the Angus Reid poll with the scientific poll conducted by Voice Broadcasting, Inc. for my Congressional campaign, which found that one out of three Wisconsin District 3 voters either thought the 9/11 WTC “collapses” were actually controlled demolitions, or that we needed a new investigation to find out.
* MIHOP = Made It Happen on Purpose (i.e. “they did it”) as opposed to LIHOP = “Let It Happen On Purpose.”
Policing thought in America: Why can’t we discuss the events of 9/11?
By Jim Fetzer | Online Journal | March 22, 2010
The brain trust that calls itself “The Huffington Post” has disgraced itself and shown the “progressive left” is a cowardly fraud by removing a column guest written by Jesse Ventura about 9/11.
The official explanation from no less than Arianna Huffington, presumably, is “Editor’s Note: The Huffington Post’s editorial policy, laid out in our blogger guidelines, prohibits the promotion and promulgation of conspiracy theories — including those about 9/11. As such, we have removed this post.” Maybe no one explained to these worthies that if any one were to write about 9/11, they would be writing about a conspiracy theory, since the government’s own “official account” is only the most outrageous. And, as Jesse’s new book, AMERICAN CONSPIRACIES (2009) elucidates, there have been many throughout our history.
Conspiracies are as American as apple pie. All they require are two or more individuals acting together to bring about an illegal end. When a couple of guys knock off a 7/11, they are engaged in a conspiracy, even if they are subsequently charged with armed robbery instead. Most America conspiracies are economic, like Enron, WorldCom, and Halliburton. Bernie Madoff comes to mind, since he can’t possibly have done it alone. Since the “official account” maintains that 19 Islamic fundamentalists hijacked four commercial carriers, outfoxed the most sophisticated air defense system in the world, and perpetrated these atrocities under the control of a guy in a cave in Afghanistan, it is a conspiracy theory, too.
Apparently that subject is taboo at The Huffington Post. But if that is the case, then many important events are not going to be covered there. Conspiracies to murder political leaders are far older than the assassination of Julius Caesar and include attempts on the lives of Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Truman. Four of those involved in the Lincoln conspiracy were hanged from the same gallows at the same time. Consider the range of events that could not be understood absent conspiracies as David Mantik, M.D., Ph.D., listed them in his chapter, “The Silence of the Historians,” MURDER IN DEALEY PLAZA (2000), page 402:
Foreign Targets/Assassination Conspiracies (20th Century): Franz Ferdinand / Rajiv Gandhi / Louis Mountbatten / Czar Nicholas II / Adolf Hitler / Rafael Trujillo / Salvadore Allende / Charles DeGaulle / Benigo Aquino / Anwar Sadat / Luis Colosio / Leon Trotsky / Ngo Dinh Diem / Rene Schnneideer / Nhu / Jacobo Arbenz / Grigorli Rasputin / Fidel Mohammed Mossadegh / Castro / Pancho Villa / Ngo Dihn Patrice Lumumba / Pope John Paul II / Saddam Hussein / Manuel Noriega.
Egad! What would Shakespeare have had to write about but for plots against the kings and queens of England? And in the US (20th Century), the list would be extended to include John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Watergate, Abscam, Iran-Contra, Senator Paul Wellstone, Cpl. Pat Tillman, and many others as well, if you consider the evidence. So if the American press is not even willing to investigate conspiracies, we are going to be unable to begin to understand our own history, including the stories that appear on virtually every page of The New York Times, as I documented in “Thinking about ‘Conspiracy Theories’: 9/11 and JFK,” accessible via Google and published in my book, THE 9/11 CONSPIRACY: THE SCAMMING OF AMERICA (2007). What would history be without them?
The Huffington Post is not the only prominent offender. Even amazon.com has refused to carry the DVD of a conference on “The Science and Politics of 9/11: What’s Controversial, What’s Not,” that I organized in Madison, Wisconsin, 5-7 August 2007. It runs 14-½ hours and includes presentations and discussion about many aspects of 9/11. A publisher tired to market it on amazon.com and found it was suppressed:
Dear Jim
Bad news.
I tried to put it up on Amazon, but the thought controllers have blocked it.
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ASIN: 1615774629
Product Name: The Science and Politics of 9/11: What’s Controversial. What’s Not.
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As a former Marine Corps officer and retired professor of philosophy, I am at a loss as to what has become of this once-great country of ours. Are we so afraid of the examination of what our government has told us about “the pivotal event of the 21st century” that even progressive publications like The Huffington Post and presumably impartial business operations like amazon.com refuse to publish a column by the former governor of Minnesota or to carry the DVD of a meeting of experts on different aspects of the case? What is there to be afraid of, unless the official account is a house of cards that will collapse if it is critically scrutinized?
And that indeed appears to be the case. According to the “official account” of the destruction of the Twin Towers, the planes hit the buildings, the resulting fires weakened the steel, and a pancake collapse of one floor upon another ensued. But that description is not remotely consistent with the gross observable photo evidence. The buildings appear to be tuning into millions of cubic yards of fine dust:
“Revealing new aerial photos of 9/11 attack released”
James Fetzer, VoltaireNet, 18 February 2010
“New 9/11 Photos Released”
James Fetzer, 10 February 2010
Does this look remotely like a “pancake collapse” to you? A set of 9/11 photos were recently released which, when they are temporally sequenced, provide a glimpse of what was actually going on, which was no “pancake collapse.” Every American deserves to see that the “official account” cannot even accommodate the gross appearance of the Twin Towers as they were destroyed even below ground level.
No one knows exactly how this was done, It appears to have required a highly sophisticated combination of conventional and unconventional means. Once you understand that the sequence of events these photos display cannot have been the result of a “pancake collapse,” that there was no “collapse” at all as these two 500,000-ton buildings were converted into very fine dust, but that some complex form of a demolition under control was taking place and you begin to grasp why not even The Huffington Post or amazon.com can allow you the least glimpse of what actually happened on 9/11. It was indeed “the scamming of America” and the reasons appear to have had nothing to do with Islam or “Arab hijackers.”
James H. Fetzer, McKnight Professor Emeritus, University of Minnesota, Duluth; Founder, Scholars for 9/11 Truth; Editor, Assassination Science; and Co-Editor, Assassination Research, maintains a blog on 9/11 and other “false flag” attacks.
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Huffington Post’s Ventura Censorship Backfires
TPM | March 16, 2010
Did you know that Adam Lambert has a bulge in his crotch? Were you aware that the world’s shortest man recently died? Are you informed enough to know that Jessica Simpson says men are “undressing her with their eyes”?
Sorry, let me rephrase all that: Do you give a shit about any of that retarded “news”? I sure as hell don’t, but these were among the many absurd storys I found on the front page of a tabloid called the Huffington Post.
As far as genuine news goes the Huffington Post has some bizarre standards. Jesse Ventura honored the ragsheet by writing a great piece for them. The former Navy Seal and former Governor explained why over 1,000 Architects and Structural Engineers have come together to demand a new investigation regarding the collapse of three high-rise buildings on 9/11. It was a fact filled article that clearly explained the main technical issues that motivated the experts to demand a new investigation. Unfortunately, Ventura was informed that the article did not meet the high standards of the Huffington Post’s editorial policy.
Jesse Ventura blew it. He probably should have talked about the Engineers crotches, and included some bulge pictures. Maybe that would have put the article in line with the pathetic tabloid’s standards. Who knows. Maybe the Navy seal needed to include some discussion of a deformed midget Architect who was dying. That might have made Huffington’s day.
Either way, the censorship backfired and blew up in Arianna Huffington’s puffy face. Thousands of web pages have proudly stepped up to the plate and printed Ventura’s excellent article. Good websites. The article ended up getting way more exposure. Maybe the best thing is that Huffington’s censorship is now well known, and they have been fully exposed as the pathetic rag-sheet they are.
All is well that ends well.
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American naifs bringing ruin to other lands
By Paul Craig Roberts | Online Journal | March 18, 2010
According to news reports, the U.S. military is shipping “bunker-buster” bombs to the U.S. Air Force base at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. The Herald Scotland reports that experts say the bombs are being assembled for an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
The newspaper quotes Dan Piesch, director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at the University of London: “They are gearing up totally for the destruction of Iran.”
The next step will be a staged “terrorist attack,” a “false flag” operation as per Operation Northwoods, for which Iran will be blamed. As Iran and its leadership have already been demonized, the “false flag” attack will suffice to obtain US and European public support for bombing Iran. The bombing will include more than the nuclear facilities and will continue until the Iranians agree to regime change and the installation of a puppet government. The corrupt American media will present the new puppet as “freedom and democracy.”
If the past is a guide, Americans will fall for the deception. In the February issue of the American Behavioral Scientist, a scholarly journal, Professor Lance DeHaven-Smith writes that state crimes against democracy (SCAD) involve government officials, often in combination with private interests, that engage in covert activities in order to implement an agenda. Examples include McCarthyism or the fabrication of evidence of communist infiltration, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution based on false claims of President Johnson and Pentagon chief McNamara that North Vietnam attacked a U.S. naval vessel, the burglary of the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in order to discredit Ellsberg (the Pentagon Papers) as “disturbed,” and the falsified “intelligence” that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction in order to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
There are many other examples. I have always regarded the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Office Building in Oklahoma City as a SCAD. Allegedly, a disturbed Tim McVeigh used a fertilizer bomb in a truck parked outside the building. More likely, McVeigh was a patsy, whose fertilizer bomb was a cover for explosives planted inside the building.
A number of experts dismissed the possibility of McVeigh’s bomb producing such structural damage. For example, General Benton K. Partin, who was in charge of U.S. Air Force munitions design and testing, produced a thick report on the Murrah building bombing which concluded that the building blew up from the inside out. Gen. Partin concluded that “the pattern of damage would have been technically impossible without supplementary demolition charges at some of the reinforced concrete bases inside the building, a standard demolition technique. For a simplistic blast truck bomb, of the size and composition reported, to be able to reach out on the order of 60 feet and collapse a reinforced column base the size of column A7 is beyond credulity.”
Gen. Partin dismissed the official report as “a massive cover-up of immense proportions.”
Of course, the general’s unquestionable expertise had no bearing on the outcome. One reason is that his and other expert voices were drowned out by media pumping the official story. Another reason is that public beliefs in a democracy run counter to suspicion of government as a terrorist agent. Professor Laurie Manwell of the University of Guelph says that “false flag” operations have the advantage over truth: “research shows that people are far less willing to examine information that disputes, rather than confirms, their beliefs.” Professor Steven Hoffman agrees: “Our data shows substantial support for a cognitive theory known as ‘motivated reasoning,’ which suggests that rather than search rationally for information that either confirms or dis-confirms a particular belief, people actually seek out information that confirms what they already believe. In fact, for the most part people completely ignore contrary information.” Even when hard evidence turns up, it can be discredited as a “conspiracy theory.”
All that is necessary for success of “false flag” or “black ops” events is for the government to have its story ready and to have a reliable and compliant media. Once an official story is in place, thought and investigation are precluded. Any formal inquiry that is convened serves to buttress the already provided explanation.
An explanation ready-at-hand is almost a give-away that an incident is a “black ops” event. Notice how quickly the U.S. government, allegedly so totally deceived by al Qaida, provided the explanation for 9/11. When President Kennedy was assassinated, the government produced the culprit immediately. The alleged culprit was conveniently shot inside a jail by a civilian before he could be questioned [in an open courtroom]. But the official story was ready, and it held.
Professors Manwell and Hoffman’s research resonates with me. I remember reading in my graduate studies that the Czarist secret police set off bombs in order to create excuses to arrest their targets. My inclination was to dismiss the accounts as anti-Czarist propaganda by pro-communist historians. It was only later when Robert Conquest confirmed to me that this was indeed the practice of the Czarist secret police that the scales fell from my eyes.
Former CIA official Philip Giraldi in his article, “The Rogue Nation,” makes it clear that the U.S. government has a hegemonic agenda that it is pursuing without congressional or public awareness. The agenda unfolds piecemeal as a response to “terrorism,” and the big picture is not understood by the public or by most in Congress. Giraldi protests that the agenda is illegal under both U.S. and international law, but that the illegality of the agenda does not serve as a barrier. Only a naif could believe that such a government would not employ “false flag” operations that advance the agenda.
The U.S. population, it seems, is comprised of naifs whose lack of comprehension is bringing ruin to other lands.
Dr. Roberts was Assistant Secretary U.S. Treasury, Associate Editor Wall Street Journal, Columnist for Business Week, Senior Research Fellow Hoover Institution Stanford University, and William E. Simon Chair of Political Economy in the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, D.C.
Copyright © 1998-2007 Online Journal
Obama threatens to veto greater intelligence oversight
By Glenn Greenwald | March 16, 2010
One of the principal weapons used by the Bush administration to engage in illegal surveillance activities — from torture to warrantless eavesdropping — was its refusal to brief the full Congressional Intelligence Committees about its activities. Instead, at best, it would confine its briefings to the so-called “Gang of Eight” — comprised of 8 top-ranking members of the House and Senate — who were impeded by law and other constraints from taking any action even if they learned of blatantly criminal acts.
This was a sham process: it allowed the administration to claim that it “briefed” select Congressional leaders on illegal conduct, but did so in a way that ensured there could be no meaningful action or oversight, because those individuals were barred from taking notes or even consulting their staff and, worse, because the full Intelligence Committees were kept in the dark and thus could do nothing even in the face of clear abuses. The process even allowed the members who were briefed to claim they were powerless to stop illegal programs. That extremely restrictive process also ensures irresolvable disputes over what was actually said during those briefings, as illustrated by recent controversies over what Nancy Pelosi and other leading Democrats were told about Bush’s torture and eavesdropping programs. Here’s how Richard Clarke explained it in July, 2009, on The Rachel Maddow Show:
MADDOW: Do you think that the current system, the gang of eight briefing system, allows the CIA to be good at spying and to be doing their work legally?
CLARKE: I think briefings of the gang of eight, those very sensitive briefings, as opposed to the broader briefings – the gang of eight briefings are usually often a farce. They catch them alone, one at the time usually. They run some briefing by them.
The congressman can‘t keep the briefing. They can‘t take notes. They can‘t consult their staff. They don‘t know what the briefings are about in advance. It’s a box check so that the CIA can say it complied with the law. It‘s not oversight. It doesn‘t work.
To their credit, Congressional Democrats — over the objections of right-wing Republicans — have been attempting since the middle of last year to fix this serious problem, by writing legislation to severely narrow the President’s power to conceal intelligence activities from the Senate and House Intelligence Committees and abolish the “Gang of Eight” process. After all, those Committees were created in the wake of the intelligence abuses uncovered by the Church Committee in the mid-1970s, and their purpose is “to provide vigilant legislative oversight over the intelligence activities of the United States to assure that such activities are in conformity with the Constitution and laws of the United States.” But if they’re not even told about what the Executive Branch is doing in the intelligence realm, then they obviously can’t exert oversight and ensure compliance with the law — which is the purpose of keeping them in the dark, as the last decade demonstrated.
Yet these efforts to ensure transparency and oversight have continuously run into one major roadblock: Barack Obama’s threat to veto the legislation. Almost immediately after leading Democrats on the Intelligence Committee unveiled their legislation last year, the Obama White House issued a veto threat with extremely dubious (and Bush-replicating) rationale: such oversight would jeopardize secrecy and intrude into “executive privilege.” In response to Obama’s veto threat, Democrats spent the last nine months accommodating the White House’s objections by significantly diluting their legislation — their new bill would actually retain the “Gang of Eight” briefings but impose notification and other oversight requirements — and two weeks ago the House passed that diluted bill.
But no matter: as Walter Pincus reports today in The Washington Post, Obama is now threatening to veto even this diluted bill, and is echoing GOP talking points when doing so:
The White House has renewed its threat to veto the fiscal 2010 intelligence authorization bill over a provision that would force the administration to widen the circle of lawmakers who are informed about covert operations and other sensitive activities. . . .
In a letter sent to the senior members of the intelligence panels, Office of Management and Budget Director Peter R. Orszag said Gang of Eight notifications are made in only “the most limited of circumstances” affecting “vital interests” of the United States, arguing that the new requirement would “undermine the president’s authority and responsibility to protect sensitive national security information.”
Orszag also opposed a Senate bill provision that required notification of “any change in a covert action,” which he described as setting up “unreasonable burdens” on the agencies, particularly the CIA . The House bill also requires notification of intelligence “significant undertakings,” a term that Orszag described as “vague and uncertain.”
Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), ranking minority member of the House intelligence panel, noted that the White House objections were similar to those raised by Republicans, especially regarding notifications provisions. . . .
Orszag wrote that the notification provisions were one of three items in the bills that would draw a veto recommendation from the president’s advisers. Another such provision would give the Government Accountability Office legal authority to review practices and operations throughout the intelligence community. The White House contends that broadening the GAO’s purview would upset current relations with the office, which already has access to some intelligence activity, and adversely affect oversight relationships between the committees and the community. The provision would also permit any committee of Congress with an arguable claim of jurisdiction over an intelligence activity to request a GAO investigation of that activity.
In other words, the Obama White House — just as was true for the Bush White House, and using the same rationale — does not want any meaningful oversight (i.e., briefings beyond the absurd Gang of Eight sham) on whether it’s breaking the law in the conduct of its intelligence activities. One of the Intelligence Community’s most loyal Congressional servants — Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein — told The Post that she thinks a deal can be worked out with the White House, meaning that the bill needs to be diluted even further, to the point of virtual nothingness, in order for the White House to accept it.
It’s critical to note that this is far from an abstract concern, because the Obama administration has almost certainly been hiding intelligence activities from the Intelligence Committees, thus ensuring it operates without oversight. Read this October, 2009 article from The Hill — headlined: “Feingold sees similarities between Bush and Obama on intelligence sharing” — in which Senate Intelligence Committee Member Russ Feingold explains “his suspicion that the Obama administration is continuing some of the stonewalling practices of the George W. Bush administration when it comes to providing full intelligence briefings to the relevant committees in Congress.” And indeed, all year long, there’s been a series of disclosures about highly controversial intelligence programs that appear to be “off-the-books” and away from the oversight of the Intelligence Committee. In late January, it was revealed that the President was maintianing a “hit list” of American citizens he had authorized to be assassinated far from any “battlefield,” followed by yesterday’s story describing the use of shadowy private contractors to collect intelligence in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
All of this is sadly consistent with the Obama administration’s devotion to extreme levels of secrecy and resistance to oversight. Last month, Eli Lake reported that Obama has simply failed to make a single appointment to, or even activate the budget of, the The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, the body created pursuant to the report of the 9/11 Commission to safeguard civil liberties in intelligence activities; it has thus been completely dormant. And, with a few very mild exceptions, Obama — since he was inaugurated — has affirmately embraced one radical secrecy doctrine after the next that used to be controversial among Democrats (back when Bush used them).
The refusal of the Bush administration to brief the Intelligence Committees on its most controversial intelligence programs was once one of the most criticized aspects of the Bush/Cheney obsessions with secrecy, executive power abuses, and lawlessness. The Obama administration is now replicating that conduct, repeatedly threatening to veto legislation to restore real oversight.
UPDATE: Marcy Wheeler notes what is probably the worst part of all of this, something I consider truly despicable: the administration is also threatening to veto the bill because it contains funding for a new investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks, on the ground that such an investigation — in the administration’s words — “would undermine public confidence” in the FBI probe of the attacks “and unfairly cast doubt on its conclusions.”
As I’ve documented at length, not only are there enormous, unresolved holes in the FBI’s case, but many of the most establishment-defending mainstream sources — from leading newspaper editorial pages to key politicians in both parties — have expressed extreme doubts about the FBI’s case and called for an independent investigation. For the administration to actively block an independent review of one of the most consequential political crimes of this generation would probably be its worst act yet, and that’s saying quite a bit.
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Alarmist climate science as a textbook example of groupthink
By Paul MacRae | May 1, 2012
A while ago, I received an email from a friend who asked:
How can many, many respected, competitive, independent science folks be so wrong about [global warming] (if your [skeptical] premise is correct). I don’t think it could be a conspiracy, or incompetence. … Has there ever been another case when so many ‘leading’ scientific minds got it so wrong?
The answer to the second part of my friend’s question—“Has there ever been another case where so many ‘leading’ scientific minds got it so wrong?”—is easy. Yes, there are many such cases, both within and outside climate science. In fact, the graveyard of science is littered with the bones of theories that were once thought “certain” (e.g., that the continents can’t “drift,” that Newton’s laws were immutable, and hundreds if not thousands of others).
Science progresses by the overturning of theories once thought “certain.” … continue
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- It’s The Cold, Stupid! Cold 20 Times More Lethal Than Heat, Multiple Studies Show
- European Institute For Climate And Energy: “Climate Debate is Seldom About Science”
- New Study: The Climate May Be 5 Times More Sensitive To Solar Forcing Than Commonly Assumed
- EV Industry Reached $70 Billion In Losses In 2024 Due To Delusional Green Ideologies
- Reality Check: Maldives Have Actually Grown In Size Or Remained Stable Over Recent Decades
- Abrupt Climate Change Also Occurred NATURALLY In The Past …25 Times During Last Ice Age
- Cave Discovery Reveals Today’s Desert Climates Were Recently Far Warmer, Wetter, Teeming With Life
- German Expert: Heat Dome Led To Record Temps In Western USA…Warmer In 1934, 1936
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