Timing is everything, they say. Never more so was it crucial in the case of Alexei Navalny, currently coming out of a coma in the Charité hospital in Berlin, Germany, where he was transferred last month from Omsk in Russia after collapsing on a plane. Timing in this detective story is vital to understanding the motive behind the alleged poisoning.
For the West, it is a cut and dried case. Navalny, the Russian opposition activist, was poisoned by a nerve agent ‘Novichok’, probably in a cup of tea he drank at Omsk airport. The German military, after liaising with scientists at the UK’s Porton Down laboratory, came to that conclusion after carrying out tests. The implication is that the Russian state is responsible. In what was an unusually defiant tone, Angela Merkel said that Germany was awaiting answers from the Russian government regarding Navalny’s plight. Heiko Maas, the German Foreign Minister, went further at the weekend to say that he hoped Russia would come up with a response to the allegations of Novichok poisoning, or it could affect the completion of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project.
And herein lies the rub for the western version of events. For if the Russian state was indeed guilty of poisoning Navalny, why on earth would it allow his transfer to Germany? And why would it carry out such a criminal act during the last phase of the Nord Stream pipeline project, in which so much has been invested? Politically and geopolitically, such an act would absolutely backfire. By eliminating an opposition member such as Alexei Navalny, it would no doubt produce a furious reaction from both foreign powers and domestic opposition, only encouraging anti-government activism.
So why therefore have we not seen protestors take to the streets in Russia in support of Navalny? Partly, it is because many Russians are sceptical of the West’s allegations. Given that Russia would have so much to lose from such a state-sponsored act, the motivation is not there. There are just as many holes in the western narrative as there were with the Skripal case back in 2018. As was the case back then, the Russian state was accused of the poisoning of ex double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, yet no evidence of Russian state involvement was provided. We have yet to hear from the doctors treating Navalny in the Charité hospital in Berlin, just as we didn’t hear from those involved in the Skripal case. As in the Skripal case, the timing of the incident couldn’t be worse for the Kremlin. Then, it was just before the Russian world cup; in this case, it is just before the completion of Nord Stream 2 and when the Trump administration has spoken of meeting with Putin later this year. Why would the Russian state risk such an act at this time? Furthermore, if it was the nerve agent Novichok, a potent chemical up to eight times stronger than VX, why were other people around Navalny not affected? And why did he not exhibit any of the spasms associated with such nerve agents?
On the contrary, as the doctors treating him in Omsk reported, there was no indication that Navalny was suffering from poisoning by a nerve agent. They suggested various possibilities, including one of a pancreatic disorder which would fit the results of the investigations carried out, and the symptoms exhibited. Why the German experts have come up with a completely different diagnosis is not clear, as they have not released any information. The lack of transparency and in particular, lack of communication with Moscow on the detail of analyses taken, only adds to scepticism about the western narrative.
Furthermore, it’s worth considering Navalny’s popularity and reach within Russia. According to a recent poll by Levada, the opposition activist would gain around 2% of the vote in a presidential election was to be held, compared to 56% who would re-elect Vladimir Putin. In a further survey which asked people to select a candidate which they trusted the most, Navalny only came 7th, with Vladimir Putin in 1st place. Such polls reflect the consistently high approval ratings Vladimir Putin has had for years now. Navalny on the other hand, has not gained the popularity he might have hoped given his years of journalism and anti-government activism – another reason why we haven’t seen demonstrations on the streets of Moscow since his hospitalisation. Why would the Kremlin seek to annihilate someone who didn’t pose any real threat to established power?
If Navalny was indeed poisoned, then we have to look elsewhere for a motive. And here the old adage ‘Cui Bono?’ comes to mind. In the last week the headlines have been dominated by the idea that the Navalny poisoning could end the Nord Stream pipeline. What is more interesting however is the extent to which the current US administration has been fixated with the idea of stopping Nord Stream 2, no matter what. And don’t take my word for it. Mike Pompeo himself said in July this year that the US would ‘do everything’ it could to prevent Nord Stream 2. He told the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee “We need further tools. We’re prepared to use those tools should you provide them to us”. Just what exactly these tools would consist of, other than support for sanctions, is unclear. But it’s no secret that the US has tried everything in the book to stop this pipeline which would guarantee Europe’s energy supply and greatly reduce US chances of competing and exporting its own fracked gas. From sanctions, to pressurising companies and individuals, no stone has been left unturned. Now, by some twist of fate, an issue has arisen to put maximum pressure on the German government to abandon the project. The timing is extraordinary.
We don’t know yet what happened to Alexei Navalny; there just hasn’t been enough evidence released. Until it is, the western narrative cannot be taken at face value, there are simply too many things that don’t add up.
Johanna Ross is a journalist based in Edinburgh, Scotland.
In 2016, The Corbett Report released the 9/11 Suspects series in individual installments. Now, as we approach the 19th anniversary of the 9/11 false flag, The Corbett Report is proud to re-release the documentary as a single upload. This release features updated visuals courtesy of video editor Broc West. Please spread the word about this important information.
CLICK HERE for the audio podcast version of this documentary.
TRANSCRIPT:
9/11 was a crime. This should not be a controversial statement, but given how 9/11 was framed as a terrorist attack or even an “act of war” from the very moment that it occurred, it somehow is. If we lived in a world of truth and justice, 9/11 would have been approached as a crime to be solved rather than an attack to be responded to.
Let’s imagine for a moment that we did live in such a world. If there were some crusading District Attorney who actually wanted to prosecute the crimes of 9/11, how would he begin? Where would he start to unravel a plot so immense, one involving so many layers of obfuscation and the active collusion of some of the most powerful members of the perennial ruling class of America, the deep state?
Like a prosecutor trying to bring down a mafia kingpin, it is unlikely that such an investigation would start by bringing the suspected mastermind of the plot to trial. Such a vast and intricate operation would be picked apart from the outside, starting with people on the periphery of the plot who could be forced to testify under oath and who could provide leads further up the ladder. As more and more of the picture was filled in, the case against the inner clique who ran the operation would begin to strengthen, and, gradually, more and more central figures could be brought to trial
We may not live in a world where such a criminal investigation is taking place, but we are trying the crimes of 9/11 in the court of public opinion. There are still untold millions who think of 9/11 truth as a fringe movement driven by rash speculation and unwarranted leaps of logic. So what if we “prosecuted” some of these peripheral figures—the ones who are demonstrably and provably involved in the events of that day or the cover up of those crimes—in that court of public opinion?
Over the course of The Corbett Report’s existence, I have looked at many figures who no doubt feature more prominently in the 9/11 plot itself from an operational standpoint: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Larry Silverstein, Dov Zakheim, Paul Bremer, Richard Armitage. Today we will look at some of the other suspects in that crime; not ringleaders or masterminds, not even people who were likely to know about the plot ahead of time. But those who helped cover up those crimes for the real perpetrators.
After stepping down as mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani tried to launch himself as a national political leader on the back of the single defining event of his career.
In the end he failed miserably, with voters immediately seeing his ploy for what it was: base political pandering.
But what many do not realize is that Giuliani’s case is not just that of another ghoulish politician parading on the corpses of those who died on his watch for his own political gain.
On the day of 9/11, while the remains of the twin towers and WTC7 were still smoldering, one of Mayor Giuliani’s first concerns was clearing away the evidence from the crime scene.
RUDY GIULIANI: We were able to move 120 dump trucks out of the city last night, which will give you a sense of the work that was done overnight.
1st NY RESIDENT: It’s wild out here. They just keep coming look! It doesn’t stop. There’s more, I keep thinking it’s the end but it’s not.
Despite reassurances that the rapid removal of the evidence from Ground Zero was important for “emergency access,” this process went far beyond merely clearing a path for rescue workers. As Erik Lawyer, founder of Firefighters for 9/11 Truth points out, the massive operation to haul away over 1.5 million tons of debris and to sell much of the steel to Chinese firm Baosteel at discount prices was not just an overzealous approach to clearing the area, but was itself a crime.
ERIK LAWYER: 9/11 was the greatest loss of life and property damage in U.S. fire history. This should of been the most protected, preserved, over-tested and thorough investigation of a crime scene in world history. Sadly it was not. What was it? Well, we know from their (NIST) admission the majority of the evidence was destroyed. Like Richard (Gage) said, (in) 22 years of experience I’ve seen a lot of crime scenes, I’ve never seen anything like this in my life.I was out at the site, I saw trucks leaving faster than anywhere I’ve ever seen but I accepted it at the time and for years I accepted it because it was a recovery and rescue operation and that’s normal to have something like going. Again, we’d never seen anything like it but that was expected.
What I didn’t know for years was what was going on behind the scenes was that evidence was being destroyed when it was shipped off. By their own admission, the NIST investigation of Tower 7 had no physical evidence. How do you investigate a crime when you’ve destroyed all the evidence? It doesn’t make sense.
They also admit that they refused to test for explosives or residue of thermite. Now this is what I’m going to go into real quickly is that there are national standards for for an investigation. That’s what all of us are asking fir. An investigation that follows national standards and holds people accountable.
Needless to say, an investigation of the 9/11 crime scene following the national investigation standards has never been conducted and never will be as Giuliani oversaw the illegal destruction of the evidence itself.
To add insult to this injury, in 2003 New York City Medical Examiner Charles Hirsch revealed that in the mad scramble to get rid of the crime scene evidence, human remains from the World Trade Center had been left at the Fresh Kills landfill where the debris was sorted and the steel was sold. In 2007 Eric Beck, a senior supervisor of the recycling facility that sifted the debris, admitted that some of those human remains ended up in a mixture that was used to pave roads and fill potholes in New York City.
But as grotesque as such revelations are, they are not the most shocking part of Giuliani’s 9/11 story.
In the late 1990s the Mayor oversaw the creation of a state-of-the-art $13 million emergency command center to coordinate the city’s disaster recovery and response efforts. Located on the 23rd floor of World Trade Center Building 7, just across Vesey Street from the Twin Towers, the center—dubbed by local press at the time as “Giuliani’s bunker”—included reinforced, bulletproof, and bomb-resistant walls, its own air supply and water tank, beds, showers to accommodate 30 people, and three backup generators. It could be used to monitor all of New York’s emergency communications frequencies and was staffed 24 hours a day.
And yet, remarkably, on the morning of 9/11, neither Mayor Giuliani nor any other city personnel or police or fire department officials were in the bunker after the Twin Tower strikes.
BARRY JENNINGS: As I told you guys before it was very, very funny. I was on my way to work and the traffic was excellent, I received a call that a small Cessna had hit the World Trade Center. I was asked to go and man the Office of Emergency Management.
Upon arriving into the OEM EOC, we noticed that everybody was gone. I saw coffee that was on a desk, the smoke was still coming off the coffee. I saw half-eaten sandwiches.
So why wasn’t the Mayor and the city’s emergency personnel in the location that had been purpose built for just such an event? According to Giuliani, they had been told to evacuate because they had been given a warning that the Twin Towers were going to collapse. A warning that was evidently not passed on to any of the emergency personnel that were still working in the buildings.
RUDY GIULIANI: I went down to the scene and we setup headquarters at 75 Barkley Street, which was right there with the Police Commissioner, the Fire Commissioner, the head of Emergency Management and we were operating out of there when we we’re told that the World Trade Center was going to collapse.
And it did collapse before we could actually get out of the building. So we were trapped in the building for 10-15 minutes and finally found an exit, got out, walked North and took a lot of people with us.
Giuliani in his own words has admitted that he was warned that the World Trade Center was going to collapse. This despite the fact that there was no possible way for this to be predicted in the first hour of the unfolding disaster. Even more incredibly, despite being given this warning, no effort was made to pass it on to the police, firefighters and other responders who were still working in and around the buildings.
When, precisely, was this warning given, and by whom? Why, despite acting on this warning himself, did Giuliani make no effort to pass the warning on to others?
Predictably, when confronted with these questions by activists during his 2008 presidential campaign, Giuliani merely smiled and denied that he had ever received such a warning.
SABRINA RIVERO: You reported to Peter Jennings that on 9/11 that you knew that the World Trade Center Towers were going to collapse. No steel structure has ever in history has ever collapsed due to a fire.
How come the people in the building weren’t notified and who else knew about this and how do you sleep at night?
RUDY GIULIANI: Ma’am, I didn’t know that the towers were going to collapse.
TOM FOTI: You reported it Peter Jennings. You indeed said that you were notified that the towers were going to collapse while you were inside. Not sure exactly where you were prior to, but you said it on ABC video with Peter Jennings in an interview, that you were aware that the towers were going to collapse in advance.
We’d like to know who told you the towers were going to collapse in advance, Sir?
We’d also like to know who else you told?
RUDY GIULIANI: Well the fact is that I didn’t realize that the towers would collapse. I never realized that.
So where was the Mayor on 9/11? On Pier 92, which was already set up as a functional command center due to a full-scale emergency “drill” by FEMA that, by a remarkable coincidence, had been scheduled for the following day.
RUDY GIULIANI: . . . and we selected Pier 92 as our Command Center. The reason Pier 92 was selected as the Command Center was because on the next day, on September 12th, Pier 92 was going to have a drill. It had hundreds of people here from FEMA, from the Federal Government, from the State Emergency Management Office and they were getting ready for a drill for a bio-chemical attack. So that was going to be the place they were going to have the drill, the equipment was already there. So we were able to establish a Command Center there within 3 days that was 2 and a half to 3 times bigger than the Command Center that we had lost at 7 World Trade Center and it was from there that the rest of the search and rescue effort was completed.
Mayor Giuliani oversaw the illegal destruction of the 9/11 crime scene and is criminally liable for the deaths of hundreds of emergency workers for not passing on prior warnings about the collapses of the Twin Towers.
It is no wonder, then, that the Fire Department of New York so passionately detest Giuliani for his actions in disgracing their fallen brothers and covering up the 9/11 crime.
HAROLD A. SCHAITBERGER: Rudy Giuliani has used the horrible events of September 11th, 2001, to create a carefully crafted persona. But the fact is what Rudy portrays is not a full picture of the decisions made that led, in our view, to the unnecessary deaths of our FDNY members and the attempt to stop the dignified recovery of those lost.
The urban-legend of “America’s Mayor” needs to be balanced by the truth.
So what is the reward for Giuliani’s criminal actions on 9/11? An offer to become the head of the Department of Homeland Security in the event of a Trump presidency, of course.
This is the state of American politics, and this is precisely why a true investigation of what happened on 9/11 never has, and never will, be conducted by the US government itself.
Suspect #2: Christine Todd Whitman
The “dust lady” photo has become one of the iconic images of 9/11. The image of a woman, shocked and disoriented, completely covered in dust from the demolition of the Twin Towers, brings the nearly incomprehensible events of that day down to a human scale.
But of course the “dust lady” was not the only one to feel the effects of the blanket of dust that descended on Manhattan after the towers fell. In the hours, days, and weeks that followed, thousands upon thousands of victims, first responders, emergency personnel, clean up crews, and residents were subjected to the poisonous stew of asbestos, benzene, mercury, lead, cadmium and other particulates from which many are now dying.
CBS REPORTER: Dr. David Prezant, Chief Medical Officer with the New York Fire Department, spent 7 years examining more than 10,000 fire-fighters. Those who were at the World Trade Center site after 9/11 and those who weren’t.
DR. DAVID PERZANT: And we found an increase in all cancers, combined. A 19% increase in cancers compared to the non-exposed World Trade Center group.
ABBY MARTIN: Talk about the most pressing medical issues facing 9/11 first responders right now.
JOHN FEAL: Cancer. In the beginning, in the first few years it was respiratory but now it’s cancers and this is just the first wave of cancers, the blood cancers, the leukemias, the organ cancers but in 5 or 10 more years you’re going to see the asbestos cancers. There will be another wave of cancers and like I tell everybody, this is a generation long issue and a generation long illness.
KEN GEORGE: Every morning I wake up I gotta take 33 pills within the course of the day. At 47 years old I have lungs of an 80 year old man that would’ve been a smoker. People say you have to forget about 9/11 and I say how could I forget about 9/11 when every morning I gotta take this medication and walk around with an oxygen tank.
If the brave men and women who had rushed to the World Trade Center in the chaotic days after 9/11 to help with the search and rescue had done so knowing the risks they were facing, that would be one thing. But of course they did not. They had been given false assurances by Christine Todd Whitman, the EPA administrator who assured the public just days into the clean up that the air was safe to breathe.
CHRISTINE TODD WHITMAN: We know asbestos was in there, was in those buildings. Lead is in the those buildings. There are the VOC’s [Volatile Organic Compounds], however, the concentrations are such that they don’t pose a heath hazard.
As the weeks and months dragged on, Whitman, the EPA and its officials made statement after statement after statement reaffirming that contaminant levels were “low or non-existent” and that the air quality in Manhattan posed “no public health concern.”
We now know that these reassurances were outright lies. On September 18th, the very same day that Whitman and the EPA were encouraging New Yorkers to return to work, the agency detected sulfur dioxide levels in the air so high that “according to one industrial hygienist, they exceeded the EPA’s standard for a classification of ‘hazardous.’” By that time, first responders were already reporting a range of health problems, including coughing, wheezing, eye irritation and headaches.
The evidence continued to pour in that there were serious health concerns for those in and around Manhattan, but the information was suppressed almost as quickly as it was discovered. When a local lab tested dust samples from near the WTC site and found dangerous concentrations of fiberglass and asbestos, the New York State Department of Health warned local labs that they would lose their licenses if they processed any more “independent sampling.” When US Geological Survey scientists began performing tests on their own dust samples, they were shocked at the “alphabet soup of heavy metals” they found in it. They forwarded this information to the EPA, but the agency continued to assure the public that there was no evidence of long term health risks.
As scientists, industrial hygenists, and even other government officials began to accuse the EPA of covering up the true extent of the problem in New York, the agency continued with its dogged assertion that the air was safe to breathe.
It wasn’t until 2003 that the EPA’s own Inspector General revealed that the White House had been editing the agency’s press releases all along, finding that “the White House Council on Environmental Quality influenced, through the collaboration process, the information that EPA communicated to the public through its early press releases when it convinced EPA to add reassuring statements and delete cautionary ones.”
When new documents were released to the public in 2011 on the eve of the 10th anniversary of 9/11, it was discovered that this editing was even worse than originally feared.
ANTHONY DePALMA: There were clear warnings. Specifically on Water Street, which for those people in this area know is not far from Wall Street, that showed that the levels of contaminates in the air was too high people to go back. That (warning) was removed which was bad enough and then replaced with a recommendation that people go back to work. They were urged to go back. Even thought the early samples were showing that there were high-levels of contaminates.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And you point out also that in many cases they (EPA) were telling people that is was safe before they had even finished conducting initial tests.
ANTHONY DePALMA: In one email exchange that happens on the 13th (of September), so it’s just a day and a half later, the people in Washington at the White House Council on Environmental Quality are telling the people up here, “Hey, Christine Whitman is coming up. She’s going to talk to reporters because all of the results so far have been so positive.”
Well, all of the results so far showed almost nothing because there were almost no results and yet they were committed to this message of reassurance despite the facts. And that’s not the way it should happen.
Outraged at the fact that they had been lied to and their lives put at risk, residents and workers in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn sued Whitman and the EPA in 2004. In a 2006 ruling allowing the class action lawsuit to proceed, Judge Deborah A. Batts of Federal District Court in Manhattan excoriated Whitman, finding that her baseless assurances that the air was safe “increased, and may have in fact created, the danger” to people living and working in the area. Ruling that the EPA did, in fact, make “misleading statements of safety” about the air quality, Judge Batts said: “The allegations in this case of Whitman’s reassuring and misleading statements of safety after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks are without question conscience-shocking.”
Batts’ decision was overturned by a panel of judges in 2008, who ruled that misleading the public and contributing to the health problems and deaths of untold Ground Zero workers was not conscience shocking enough to override her immunity from prosecution as a federal agent.
If Whitman has a conscience at all, it is evidently not shocked by any of these accusations. She has not only never conceded guilt or even expressed sorrow for the ongoing sickness and deaths that her action helped bring about, she has repeatedly defended the actions of herself and the EPA in general.
CHRISTINE TODD WHITMAN: Statements that EPA officials made after 9/11 were based on the judgement of experienced environmental and health professionals at the EPA, OSHA and the CDC, who had analyzed the test data that 13 different organizations and agencies were collecting in Lower Manhattan.
I do not recall any EPA scientist or experts responsible for viewing this data ever advising me that the test data from Lower Manhattan showed that the air or water proposed long-term health risks for the general public.
Whitman’s lies are not just those of another self-serving politician looking to save their job or stay out of jail. They are the lies of someone who has contributed to the deteriorating health and even the death of thousands of innocent men and women.
For the victims of Christine Todd Whitman, the EPA, the White House Council on Environmental Quality, and all of the other agencies and officers who lied to the public about the health risks in New York, 9/11 is not a single day of horror that occurred a decade and a half ago. It is a slowly unfolding nightmare, one that every day brings them one step closer to their grave.
The “dust lady” is one of the icons of the tragedy of that day. Should it be any surprise, then, that she, too, was ravaged by 9/11 related diseases and ultimately died of cancer last year?
She was not the first person to die from the aftermath of 9/11. And, thanks to Christine Todd Whitman and the liars at the EPA who have consigned untold thousands to a similar fate, she will not be the last.
DAVID MILLER: My name is David Miller. On September 11, 2001, along with hundreds of my fellow troops I went to Ground Zero. No one asked us. No orders were given. We went because our city, our country, our neighbors were under attack and we knew what to do, or at least we thought we did.
On September 13th we marched back in, in groups of twos and threes at first and then dozens until there must of been more than 200 of us. Carrying ropes, ladders, tools of every kind back into the smoke and the poison and rubble were we reached an intersection with hundreds of civilians cheering us on. Our uniforms were torn and soiled, our resolve was simple. To stay and dig as long as we had any hope to save anybody.
I want to tell you about how sick some of these brave men and women have become. I want to tell about how the Mayor refused to accept the fact that not dozens, not hundreds but many thousands of us were contaminated, sickened and poisoned by the most toxic combinations of building materials in the history of disaster relief and that for 5 terrible years he ignored that fact. 5 years of our family members watching us drop dead.
And every time Popular Mechanics calls the people of this movement, nuts, these propagandists—professional liars and tools who can not even by any stretch of the imagination be considered journalists—strike another nail into the coffin of another rescue worker
It took President Bush an extraordinary 441 days after 9/11 to establish a commission to investigate the events of September 11, 2001. And it was not just the case that Bush was slow in acting; he actively resisted any investigation for as long as he could, taking the extraordinary and unprecedented step of personally asking Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle to limit Congress’ investigation into those events.
But the most unmistakable sign that Bush was only interested in appointing a cover up commission to “investigate” the largest attack on US soil in modern history was his initial choice for commission chairman.
PRESIDENT BUSH: Today I’m pleased to announce my choice for commission chairman: Dr. Henry Kissinger.
REPORTER: Dr. Kissinger, do you have any concerns about once the commission begins it work and fingers point to valuable allies, say Saudi Arabia for example, what policy implications could this have for the United States particularly at this delicate time?
HENRY KISSINGER: I have been given every assurance by the President that we should go where the facts lead us.
Not even the New York Times could believe that Henry Kissinger, the consummate Washington insider, could pretend to conduct an independent fact-finding investigation into 9/11. “It is tempting to wonder if the choice of Mr. Kissinger is not a clever maneuver by the White House to contain an investigation it long opposed,” The Times editorialized after the announcement.
Kissinger may have been prepared for such polite disagreement with his appointment. But he was not prepared to meet the 9/11 widows whose tireless efforts had forced the creation of the commission in the first place.
NARRATOR: Several family members approached Kissinger and requested a meeting at his office in New York. Prior to the meeting Kristen Breitweiser conducted a thorough investigation of Kissinger’s potential conflicts of interest.
PATTY CASAZZA: Probably much to the chagrin of some of the people in the room, Lorie (Van Auken) asked some very poignant questions. “Would you have any Saudi-Amercian clients that you would like to tell us about?” and he was very uncomfortable kind of twisting and turning on the couch and then she asked, “whether he had any clients by the name of Bin-Laden?” And he just about fell off his couch.
NEWS REPORTER: Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, stepped down from the position Friday.
MINDY KLEINBERG: We thought the meeting went well.
Kissinger was dethroned and the commission went ahead under chairman Thomas Kean and vice chair Lee Hamilton. But while Kissinger’s appointment and resignation received all the attention, the White House was busy slipping another agent into the commission through the back door.
In January of 2003, just weeks after Kissinger stepped down, it was quietly announced that Philip D. Zelikow would take on the role of executive director. As executive director, Zelikow picked “the areas of investigation, the briefing materials, the topics for hearings, the witnesses, and the lines of questioning for witnesses.” In effect, this was the man in charge of running the investigation itself.
So who was Philip Zelikow? The commission’s press release announcing his position described him as “a man of high stature who has distinguished himself as an academician, lawyer, author and public servant.” Although they noted his position at the University of Virginia and his previous role as executive director for the National Commission on Federal Electoral Reform, curiously missing from this brief bio are the multiple conflicts of interest that show how the Bush administration essentially put one of its own in charge of investigating how the Bush administration “failed” on 9/11.
In 1995 he coauthored a book with Bush’s national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice.
He was part of the transition team that helped the Bush administration take over the White House from the Clinton administration.
He was even a member of Bush’s post-9/11 Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.
But perhaps most incredibly, Zelikow actually authored the Bush administration’s 2002 “National Security Strategy” that outlined the preemptive war doctrine that would be used against Iraq. This, however, is something that not even 9/11 commissioners Kean or Hamilton themselves knew at the time the commission was formed.
PHILIP SHENON: (Philip) Zelikow was the author of a very important document issued by the White House in September 2002 that really turned military doctrine on it’s head and said that the United States could become involved in preemptive war, preemptive defense. That we could attack a nation that didn’t pose an immediate military threat to this country. And obviously in September of 2002 it sure appeared that that document was being written with one target in mind: Iraq.
Now as I say, the author of the document at the time was anonymous. We didn’t know that Philip Zelikow had written this thing and that becomes known I think widely on this day, if only in the final months of the 9/11 Commission investigation and it appeared to pose yet another conflict of interest for Zelikow.
MICHAEL DUFFY: Just to be clear, the pre-emptive doctrine comes out in September of 2002. The Commission is created formally in . . .
SHENON: December 2002.
DUFFY: . . . and do Kean and Hamilton, when they hire Zelikow, are they aware of his role as the author of the preemptive doctrine?
These conflicts of interest were not merely theoretical. After the victims’ family members discovered Zelikow’s links to the Bush administration, he was forced to recuse himself from the proceedings of the commission (which he himself was directing) that had to do with the Bush White House transition or the National Security Council.
Hearing of Zelikow’s appointment, former counter terrorism czar Richard Clarke (who Zelikow helped to demote during the Bush transition), remarked that “The fix is in,” wondering aloud: “Could anyone have a more obvious conflict of interest than Zelikow?”
When the 9/11 victims’ family members discovered Zelikow’s links, they protested his appointment. But unlike with Kissinger, this time their concerns were dismissed and Zelikow plowed ahead.
As even Zelikow himself admits, his ties to the very figures he was supposedly investigating are a legitimate concern, and any real investigation of the 9/11 cover up would begin with him.
PHILIP ZELIKOW: There’s a whole welter of conspiracy theories about 9/11 floating around the internet, on videocasettes. There’s a whole cottage industry in this, which if you haven’t read much about it then you’re a fortunate person. I get a lot of this. I actually figure very largely in a number of key conspiracy theories. [Laughter]
No, to be fair, I worked with Condi Rice, right? I worked with her in the administration of Bush 41, so I guess I could be read as a plausible henchman executing a cover up. And it’s a legitimate concern, especially if I hadn’t had 81 other staffers keeping their eagle eye on me.
The most remarkable example of Zelikow’s dictatorial control came in March 2003, just three months into the commission’s 16-month investigation began. It was at that time, before the commission had even convened a single hearing, that Zelikow, along with long-time associate and commission consultant Ernest May, co-wrote a complete outline of the final report.
DAVID RAY GRIFFIN: Before the staff even had its first meeting, Zelikow had written, along with his former professor, Ernest May, a detailed outline of the commission’s report, complete, as Shenon put it, with chapter headings, sub-headings, and sub-sub-headings. When Kean and Hamilton were later shown this outline they worried that it would be seen as evidence that the report’s outcome had been predetermined, so the three of them decided to keep it a secret from the rest of the staff.
When the staff did finally learn about this outline a year later they were alarmed. Some of them circulated a parody entitled ‘The Warren Commission Report: Preemptive Outline.’ One of its chapter headings read: ‘Single Bullet: We Haven’t Seen the Evidence Yet, But Really, We’re Sure.’ The implication was that the crucial chapter in the Zelikow-May outline could have been ‘Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda: We Haven’t Seen the Evidence Yet, But Really, We’re Sure.’
So what exactly did Zelikow do as executive director?
He allowed information in the commission’s final report derived from illegal CIA torture sessions, despite not having access to the evidence of those sessions themselves (which were later illegally destroyed). This included the testimony of alleged “9/11 mastermind” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who was waterboarded 183 times in a single month, whose children were kidnapped by the CIA, who was told that his children were going to be tortured with insects, and who eventually confessed to a whole series of plots, including bombing a bank that didn’t exist at the time he was arrested. More than one quarter of the footnotes in the final commission report source from this torture testimony, and as Zelikow himself admitted, “quite a bit, if not most” of the commission’s information on the 9/11 plot itself came from this testimony.
Zelikow denied interviews and documents to staffers investigating the Saudi connection to the attacks, eventually firing one of them and removing the text of their investigation from the final report.
He worked behind his own staffer’s back to stop them from serving the Pentagon a subpoena to answer about information NORAD was withholding from the commission.
He sat on a proposal to open a criminal investigation into FAA and military officials who lied to the commission for months, and then forwarded that proposal not to the Justice Department, who could have brought criminal charges, but to the Inspector General, who could not.
Col. ANTHONY SHAFFER: After the initial disclosure, Dr. Zelikow came to me at the end of the meeting, gave me his card and said: “What you said today is critically important. Very important. Please come see me when you return to Washington, D.C.”
I returned to Washington, D.C., January 2004, call in, they say “We want to see you, stand by.” Nothing happens.
A week goes by. I call again, they say: “We don’t need you to come in. We have all the information on Able Danger we need, thank you anyway.” And that was where it ended.
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Alright, so the information that you told Dr. Zelikow in Afghanistan about the CIA interfering with your ability to provide actionable intelligence to the United States government–intelligence that might have helped them find out who caused, 9/11–you were not permitted to testify about it?
From the initial outline to the final report, Zelikow carefully guided the process, hiring and firing the staff, directing their research efforts, deciding on witnesses, scrubbing information, and shielding his former colleagues in the White House from criticism.
But perhaps more remarkable than the fact that “the fix was in” from the moment he took over the commission and began working on the predictive outline of the final report, is that he had in fact written about 9/11 and its eventual aftermath in 1998, three years before September 11th.
In an article entitled “Catastrophic Terrorism: Tackling the New Danger,” written for the Council on Foreign Relations’ Foreign Affairs in November 1998, Zelikow and co-authors Ashton Carter and John Deutsche ask readers to imagine a catastrophic act of terrorism like the destruction of the World Trade Center.
Like Pearl Harbor, the event would divide our past and future into a before and after. The United States might respond with draconian measures scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects and use of deadly force. More violence could follow, either future terrorist attacks or U.S. counterattacks. Belatedly, Americans would judge their leaders negligent for not addressing terrorism more urgently.
Zelikow’s amazing prediction becomes somewhat less remarkable when we learn his own self-described expertise in the creation and management of “public myth.” In a separate 1998 article on public myths, Zelikow identifies “generational” myths that are “formed by those pivotal events that become etched in the minds of those who have lived through them,” before noting that the current set of public myths, formed during the New Deal in 1933, are currently fading.
Convenient for Zelikow, then, that the “Pearl Harbor” event that would define the next “generational” myth, known as the “War on Terror,” would arrive just three years later, and that he would be in charge of the commission tasked with creating and managing the public perception of that myth.
Indeed, given his central role in the cover up of 9/11 and deflecting concern away from legitimate 9/11 suspects, any true investigation into the events of September 11th would involve a thorough interrogation of Philip D. Zelikow.
Suspect #4: Robert Baer
A 21 year veteran of the CIA, Robert Baer is billed as “one of America’s most elite intelligence case officers.” Having worked field assignments in Lebanon, Sudan, Morocco, Iraq and other international hotspots, he was praised by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh as “perhaps the best on-the-ground field officer in the Middle East.”
He has written multiple books based on his experiences with the agency. He has worked as a consultant on documentary and television projects. He regularly appears as a commentator on CNN and other news outlets, and he writes a regular column on intelligence matters for Time. George Clooney’s character in Syriana, Bob Barnes, is based on Baer and his experiences with the CIA.
“… and 90% of what’s left is in the Middle East. This is fight to the death.”
“I think we’ve got something that utilizes your … specific skills set.
“His moneys in a lot of dark corners.”
CLOONEY: “I want you to take him from his hotel, drug him, put him in the front of a car and run a truck into him at 50 miles an hour.”
Robert Baer retired from the CIA in 1997 and received the agency’s Career Intelligence Medal the following year.
In short, he is a serious and well-respected career intelligence official.
All of this makes it particularly stunning that in 2008 he told a team of citizen journalists in Los Angeles that he knew a man who “cashed out” the day before 9/11.
JEREMY ROTHE-KUSHEL: …the last thing I want to leave you with is the National Reconnaissance Office was running a drill of a plane crashing into their building and you know they’re staffed by DoD and CIA…
ROBERT BAER: I know the guy that went into his broker in San Diego and said ‘cash me out, it’s going down tomorrow.’
JEREMY ROTHE-KUSHEL: Really?
ROBERT BAER: Yeah.
STEWART HOWE: That tells us something.
ROBERT BAER: What?
STEWART HOWE: That tells us something.
ROBERT BAER: Well his brother worked at the White House.
Given Robert Baer’s experience and training, it is difficult to comprehend just how significant the information that he just casually admits here really is. We are left with only two possibilities: either Baer is lying, or he has direct knowledge of someone “whose brother worked at the White House” who had foreknowledge of the 9/11 plot. There is no middle ground here.
The man Robert Baer claims to know is at least an accessory before the fact to the crimes of 9/11, if not an actual accomplice or co-conspirator in those crimes. By failing to report this information to the investigative authorities, Baer leaves himself open to being an accessory after the fact to those same crimes.
Title 18 Section 3 of the US Code defines the criteria for an “Accessory After the Fact” to a crime committed against the United States:
Whoever, knowing that an offense against the United States has been committed, receives, relieves, comforts or assists the offender in order to hinder or prevent his apprehension, trial or punishment, is an accessory after the fact.
Given the exceptionally grave nature of this admission and its repercussions, one would suppose that Baer has been questioned by other media and/or the FBI and made to discuss in detail precisely who it was who cashed out and how he knew about the 9/11 plot in advance. But one would be wrong. Since making this stunning admission to the cameras of We Are Change Los Angeles, no one has ever asked Baer for more information about the case.
So what does Robert Baer say about the possibility of a 9/11 inside job?
I myself have felt the pull of the conspiracy theorists — who believe that 9/11 was an inside job, somehow pulled off by the U.S. government. For the record, I don’t believe that the World Trade Center was brought down by our own explosives, or that a rocket, rather than an airliner, hit the Pentagon. I spent a career in the CIA trying to orchestrate plots, wasn’t all that good at it, and certainly couldn’t carry off 9/11. Nor could the real pros I had the pleasure to work with.
But just one year before he gave a very different answer to Thomas Hartmann on his radio show.
THOMAS HARTMANN: So are you personally of the opinion, obviously you can’t speak for the CIA or your previous activities with the agency, but are you of the opinion that there was an aspect of “inside job” to 9/11 within the U.S. Government?
ROBERT BAER: There’s that possibility. The evidence points at it.
HARTMANN: And why is not being investigated?
BAER: Why isn’t the WMD story being investigated? Why hasn’t anybody been held accountable for 9/11? I mean, we held people accountable after Pearl Harbor. So why has there been no change of command, why have there been no political repercussions? Why has there not been any sort of exposure on this? It really makes you wonder.
So why is Robert Baer hiding the identity of a 9/11 accomplice or co-conspirator? And will the FBI be asking him for details of this story any time soon? Until the American public show some interest in this shocking admission, it is unlikely that anything will happen.
Suspect #5: Gen. Ralph Eberhart
According to the official story of September 11, 2001, four hijacked airliners flew wildly off course over the most sensitive airspace in the United States for 109 minutes without being intercepted by a single fighter jet. As Commander-in-Chief of the North American Aerospace Defense Command on 9/11, General Ralph Eberhart was in charge of the largest failure to defend North American airspace in history.
Rather than accepting blame for his command’s complete lack of response that morning, however, or even expressing regret about what had occurred, General Eberhart instead spent the rest of his career attempting to pin the blame for this failure squarely on the FAA.
GEN. EBERHART: You’ve read a lot over the last two and a half years about what NORAD did and did not do that morning and should have done in the years and months leading up to that attack. Ground truth is that NORAD was charged to support the FAA in the event of a hijacking. Our role was to respond to the request from FAA to get airborne, fly, shadow the hijacked airplane, say whether the hijacked airplane was following the instructions of the air traffic controller, of FAA, and in the terrible situation that that plane crashed, or that airplane exploded in mid-air, document that tragedy.
Although Eberhart’s version of events was cemented into place as the official story of 9/11 propounded by the 9/11 commission, they are in fact self-serving lies.
In Eberhart’s version of events, NORAD is completely subordinate to the FAA. In reality, however, NORAD is specifically tasked with dealing with such events itself, not waiting passively for FAA orders. NORAD’s own regulations for dealing with hijacked jets specifically state that “FAA Authorization for Interceptor Operations is not used for intercept and airborne surveillance of hijacked aircraft within the [continental United States].”
These standard operating procedures were not merely theoretical, or some obscure regulation that would have been unfamiliar to the four-star general in charge of defending American airspace. In the year 2000 alone, NORAD scrambled fighters in response to “unknowns”–pilots who didn’t file or diverted from flight plans or used the wrong frequency–129 times.
Perhaps even more remarkable, however, is that Eberhart and NORAD offered not one, not two, not three, but four separate timelines of their complete lack of response that morning. The first, offered by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers just two days after the attacks during his confirmation hearings in the Senate, claimed that not a single fighter was scrambled to intercept any of the airliners until after the incident at the Pentagon. One week later, NORAD released a partial timeline that indicated they had in fact received advance notification about three of the planes with as much as 20 minutes warning, more than enough time for the planes to have been intercepted. A third story emerged in May 2003; this time, NORAD was only contacted about Flight 175 at 9:05, 3 minutes after it crashed into the south tower. The official story, found in the 9/11 Commission’s final report, was that NORAD received no advance notice of any of the flights. Eberhart and the military were completely exonerated.
However, Eberhart had testified in October 2001 that NORAD had been notified about Flight 77 at 9:24 AM. The 9/11 Commission determined that this was a lie. Regardless of the truth or untruth of any of these accounts, the simple fact is that, according to the 9/11 Commission itself, Eberhart had lied to Congress, which is in fact a crime. By the 9/11 Commission’s own account, Eberhart should have been tried.
But Eberhart’s lies do not end there.
GEN. EBERHART: Many people will talk about that they knew that there was going to be an attack. They knew that people were going to take over an aircraft and fly it into a building. I can tell you that there was no credible intelligence at that time to go build a defense against that type of attack. Tragically, we were wrong. We were wrong.
(Source: Homeland Defense in the Global War on Terrorism)
Once again, Eberhart’s depiction of events is a self-serving and easily demonstrable lie.
Not only had NORAD envisioned such a scenario, they had been training for it extensively in the years leading up to 9/11. Between October 1998 and September 2001, NORAD had conducted 28 exercise events involving hijackings. At least five of those hijack scenarios involved “a suicide crash into a high-value target.” Furthermore, at least six of the exercises took place completely within American airspace, putting to rest the oft-heard excuse that NORAD wasn’t prepared for threats from within the US.
Another note that would be of interest to prosecutors looking at potential foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks pertains to Eberhart’s dual role as Commander-in-Chief of US Space Command, where he was responsible for setting something called the “Infocon threat level.” Established in March 1999, the Infocon threat level was designed as a measure of the threat to Defense Department computer systems and networks and different levels required different protocols for securing communications and information systems. At 9:09 PM on September 10, 2001, less than 12 hours before the attacks began, Eberhart reduced Infocon to Level 5 , the lowest threat level, making it easier for hackers to compromise Defense Department systems and controls. Eberhart has never been asked about this change in the public record.
There are a laundry list of other questionable actions that Eberhart took on 9/11:
His failure to implement military control over US airspace.
His decision to drive from Peterson Air Force Base to NORAD’s Cheyenne Mountain Control Center at 9:30 AM, right in the middle of the attack, despite knowing this would involve loss of communication for part of the drive, and the fact that it took him 45 minutes to complete the 30 minute trip.
His decision to ground all fighter jets by ordering them to battle stations instead of ordering them to scramble at 9:49 AM.
The official story of 9/11 is a lie. But Eberhart’s story is a lie within that lie, designed to absolve himself and other members of the US military charged with defending American airspace that morning from the most catastrophic failure in that mission in their history. And not only did Eberhart survive with his career intact, he was praised as a “9/11 hero” and moved into the private sector after leaving NORAD in 2004, as chairman and board member of a number of companies that directly benefited from the post-9/11 police state and the post-9/11 war on terror.
Ralph E. Eberhart remains at large.
Suspect #6: The Dancing Israelis
DAN RATHER: Some evil is just … it can’t be explained.
DAVID LETTERMAN: Are these people happy? Are they joyous now? Are they celebrating? Thank God?
DAN RATHER: Oh absolutely, they’re celebrating. There’s one report, this has not been confirmed but there is several eye[witness] reports that there was a cell, one of these cells across the Hudson River. And they got on the … this is the report and I emphasize that I don’t know this for a fact but there’s several witnesses who say this happened. They got on the roof of a building to look across, they knew what was gonna happen. They were waiting for it to happen and when it happened they celebrated. They jumped for joy.
In the days after 9/11, while Ground Zero continued to smolder, millions heard Dan Rather and various media outlets repeat vague and unconfirmed reports of arrests that took place that day. These rumors held that Middle Eastern men, presumably Arabs, were arrested in explosive-packed vans in various places around the city on September 11th, and that some had even been photographing and celebrating those events. What most do not realize is that those reports were not mere rumors, and we now have thousands of pages of FBI, CIA and DOJ reports documenting those arrests.
MARIA: I grabbed my binoculars and I’m trying to look at the Twin Towers but what caught my attention was down there I see this van parked and I see 3 guys on top of the van. They seemed to be taking a movie and I could see that they were like happy and laughing. They didn’t look shocked to me, you know what I mean? They didn’t look shocked.
The men were spotted shortly after 8:46 AM, yet somehow at this early stage, just minutes after the first plane strike on the World Trade Center, they were already positioned in a parking lot in Liberty State Park, taking pictures of the towers and celebrating. They left the scene shortly after being spotted and at 3:31 PM the FBI issued an all points bulletin advising officers in the Greater New York area to be on the lookout for a “White, 2000 Chevrolet van…with ‘UrbanMovingSystems’ sign on back.”
At 3:56 PM, the van was spotted traveling eastward on State Route 3 in New Jersey and pulled over by Officer Scott DeCarlo and Sgt. Dennis Rivelli of the East Rutherford police department. Inside they found five men: Sivan Kurzberg and his brother, Paul, Yaron Shmuel, Oded Ellner, and Omar Marmari.
BERNICE STEGERS: A major terrorist man-hunt began and, just 6 hours after the attack, the van was stopped at a roadblock by patrolman Scott De Carlo.
SCOTT De CARLO: We were asked to detain the van and the passengers. They were just removed from the vehicle, patted down for safety precautions and detained.
I think once the FBI arrived, one of them stated that they were on our side or something to that effect.
According to the police report of the incident, Sivan Kurzberg told Officer DeCarlo: “We are Israeli. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem.”
Their official story: they were just Israeli tourists working for a moving company who had heard about the first World Trade Center strike and rushed to get a better view of the events.
BERNICE STEGERS: They told interrogators they were working for Urban Moving, a shipping and storage firm run by an Israeli businessman, who often employed Israeli students without work permits. The men say there was an innocent explanation for what was found in the van. and their behavior on 9/11. They were, they say, “simply on a working holiday.”
PAUL KURZBERG: We heard in the news that one of the plane was crashing down the buildings and we thought it was an accident at the beginning. So, we went up to the roof of Urban Moving and we saw the building burning.
YARON SCHMUEL: There is a better view from a building in Jersey that is up a hill, straight-line to the World Trade Center. We decided to go up there, it’s 2-3 minutes from the office, stand over there and take some pictures. Everyone wants pictures like this in his camera.
Although this narrative is still trotted out when the story of the dancing Israelis is raised in the media, it is an easily demonstrable lie.
FBI reports confirm that the men were not taking somber pictures of a horrific event. When their 76 pictures were developed, they revealed the men had indeed been celebrating; smiling, hugging each other, and high-fiving. One of the pictures even featured Sivan Kurzberg holding a lighter up with the burning tower in the background.
And these were no ordinary tourists. Oded Ellner had $4,700 stuffed into his sock. They lied to the police about where they had been that morning. They were carrying plane tickets for immediate departure to different places around the globe. The FBI confirmed that two of the men had ties to Israeli intelligence and came to suspect that they had indeed been on a mission for the Mossad.
And of course, after returning to Israel Ellner claimed on national Israeli TV that they had been sent there “to document the event.”
ODED ELLNER (Translation): And at that point we were taken for another round of questioning. This time related to us allegedly being members of Mossad.
The fact of the matter is, we are coming from a country that experiences terror daily. Our purpose was to document the event.
Their purpose was to “document the event”? But how could they possibly have known what “event” they were documenting at that point, before the second plane strike when those few who even knew about the situation had assumed it to be an accident or pilot error?
And when did they arrive at the parking lot to “document the event” anyway?
The FBI reports show how the men gave confused and often conflicting accounts of when and how they learned about what was happening and when they arrived at the parking lot. Oded Ellner even said they had arrived their shortly after 8:00 AM, which would have been 45 minutes before the attacks even began [see page 45 here]. This is in line with one of the eyewitnesses that had placed their Urban Moving Systems van at the parking lot at 8:00 AM [see page 33 here]. How could they have been in place and ready to “document the event” unless they knew what was about to happen?
Anyway you cut it, this story is unbelievable. Men with documented connections to Israeli intelligence and working in the United States without appropriate permits were detained after having been caught celebrating the attack on the World Trade Center at a time when no one knew that the WTC strike was an attack. So surely these men are locked behind bars to this day, right? Surely they were transferred to Guantanamo and held without trial for 15 years as part of the “War on Terror,” weren’t they?
No. They were immediately transferred to federal custody, held for 71 days, and then deported back to Israel. The owner of the “Urban Moving Systems” company that had employed them, Dominik Suter, was investigated by the FBI, too. They concluded that “Urban Moving may have been providing cover for an Israeli intelligence operation” and even seized records and computer systems from the company’s offices. When they went back to question him again on September 14th, he had fled back to Israel.
And what about the dancing Israelis’ pictures themselves? The Justice Department destroyed their copies on January 27, 2014.
And these intelligence agents on an intelligence mission who were there to “document the event” of 9/11 before anyone knew 9/11 was taking place? Don’t worry, they were just spying on Arab terrorists.
ELIZABETH VARGAS: And while the FBI or certain sources might believe that in fact they were Israeli intelligence, they don’t believe that the US was a target. That they were actually investigating Muslim groups?
JOHN MILLER: They believe if this was an intelligence operation by Israel, that it was focused on the Islamic groups and charities that raise money for groups that are considered by US Law Enforcement and others terrorist groups. You’ll note that after September 11th, the US moved on many of these groups with indictments, arrests, raids on their headquarters, something that hadn’t happened prior to this.
ELIZABETH VARGAS: These are groups that Israel believe have been funding Hamas and other terrorists organizations?
JOHN MILLER: Groups that are responsible for most of the suicide bombings there.
But this story is not merely preposterous on its face; even the implications of this story are themselves preposterous. If indeed the “official story” is a ridiculous lie, then are we to believe that these crack Israeli Mossad operatives who were presumably aware of the attack that was about to take place had been sent to photograph the burning tower from a parking lot across the Hudson River? And that these specially trained intelligence professionals on their super secret mission were celebrating, high-fiving and going out of their way to be noticed in performance of their task? This is equally preposterous.
The only other possible conclusion is that these men were serving merely as a distraction. That they were not there to photograph for Israeli intelligence one of the most heavily photographed scenes in the world on that morning, but instead to be noticed and arrested as a way to divert attention from a much bigger and more sinister story.
So if they were meant to distract from a bigger story, what story could that possibly be?
BRIT HUME: It has been more than 16 years since a civilian working for the Navy was charged with passing secrets to Israel. Jonathan Pollard pled guilty to conspiracy to commit espionage and is serving a life sentence. At first Israeli leaders claimed Pollard was part of a rogue operation but later took responsibility for his work.
Now, Fox News has learned some US investigators believe that there are Israelis again very much engaged in spying in and on the US. Who may have known things they didn’t tell us before September 11th. Fox News correspondent Carl Cameron has details in the first of a 4 part series.
CARL CAMERON: Since September 11th more than 60 Israelis have been arrested or detained. Either under the new PATRIOT anti-terrorism law or for immigration violations.
A handful of active Israeli military were among those detained, according to investigators, who say some of the detainees also failed polygraph questions when asked about alleged surveillance activities against and in the Unites States.
There is no indication that the Israelis were involved in the 9/11 attacks but investigators suspect that the Israelis may have gathered intelligence about the attacks in advance and not shared it. A highly placed investigator said there are “tie-ins” but when asked for details he flatly refused to describe them saying: “Evidence linking these Israelis to 9-11 is classified. I cannot tell you about the evidence that has been gathered. It is classified information.
Asked this week about another sprawling investigation and the detention of 60 Israelis since September 11th, the Bush administration treated the questions like hot potatoes.
ARI FLEISCHER: I would just refer you to the Department of Justice with it. I’m not familiar with the report.
COLIN POWELL: I’m aware that some Israeli citizens have been detained. With respect to why they are being detained and the other aspects of your question, whether it’s because they are in intelligence services or what they were doing, I will defer to the Department of Justice and the FBI to answer that.
CARL CAMERON: Beyond the 60 apprehended or detained and many deported since September 11th, another group of 140 Israeli individuals have been arrested and detained in this year. In what government documents describe as, “An organized intelligence gathering operation designed to “penetrate government facilities.” Most of those individuals said they had served in the Israeli military, which is compulsory there, but they also had, most of them, intelligence expertise and either worked for AMDOCS or other companies in Israel that specialize in wiretapping. Earlier this week the Israeli Embassy here in Washington denied any spying against or in the United States.
[. . .]
BRIT HUME: Carl, what about this question of advanced knowledge of what was going to happen on 9/11? How clear are investigators that some Israeli agents may have known something?
CARL CAMERON: Well it’s very explosive information obviously and there is a great deal of evidence that they say they have collected. None of it necessarily conclusive. It’s more when they put it all together a big question they say is, “How could they have not have known?” Almost a direct quote, Brit.
The most phenomenal part of this report is not that it was eventually erased from the web by Fox News itself, but that it ever made it to the air at all. In December of 2001, Fox News investigative reporter Carl Cameron filed an explosive 4-part series that went in-depth into an Israeli art student spying ring that had been under investigation before 9/11, extensive Israeli wiretapping of sensitive US government communications, and the 60 Israeli spies that were detained in the wake of the September 11th attacks. Unsurprisingly, the story was quickly dropped and no mainstream journalists dared to continue probing into the matter.
This is the real story of Israeli spies and 9/11; not some vague rumours about some dancing Israelis but an FBI dragnet that swept up the largest foreign spying ring ever caught red-handed on American soil. And although the FBI were convinced that these spies knew about 9/11 in advance, their investigations were stifled and the issue was swept under the rug. Rather than making Israel enemy number one in the war on terror, Israel remains to this day the US’ “most important ally.”
HILLARY CLINTON: And if I’m fortunate enough to be elected President, the United States will re-affirm we have a strong and enduring national interest in Israels security.
DONALD TRUMP: In 2001, weeks after the attacks on New York City and on Washington and frankly the attacks on all of us, attacks that were perpetrated by the Islamic fundamentalists, Mayor Rudy Giuliani visited Israel to show solidarity with terror victims. I sent my plane because I backed the mission for Israel 100%.
But perhaps this is understandable. After all, we all remember how Yasser Arafat gloated about 9/11 and said it was good for Palestinians, right?
Oh wait, that wasn’t Yasser Arafat. It was Benjamin Netanyahu.
AMY GOODMAN: The Israeli newspaper, Maariv, has reported Israels former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has publicly said the September 11th attacks have been good for Israel. Netanyahu said:
“We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq.”
DONALD TRUMP: My name is Donald Trump and I’m a big fan of Israel. And frankly a strong Prime Minister, is a strong Israel and you truly have a great Prime Minister in Benajim Netanyahu, there’s nobody like him. He’s a winner, he’s highly respected, he’s highly thought of by all.
And people really do have great, great respect for whats happened in Israel.
So vote for Benjamin, terrific guy, terrific leader, great for Israel.
Given that the ultimate consequence of 9/11 was the beginning of a now 15 year long struggle to transform the Middle East, a struggle that the neocons that went on to populate the Bush administration had been openly advocating since the “Clean Break” policy paper in the mid-1990s, it isn’t hard to see how the September 11th attacks were indeed a boon for Israel. But information linking Israeli spies to advance knowledge of 9/11 remains “classified information.”
In a world of true justice, the dancing Israelis and other Israeli spies with insider advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks, who openly celebrated those attacks, would be the targets of the “war on terror,” not its beneficiaries.
The Black Revolution is in full swing in the U.S. Over the next sixty days we will be treated to the greatest political show on Earth as the Democrats and their handlers in The Davos Crowd pursue the biggest lie since Climate Change.
The events of 2020 are lining up for a climax to this story that ends with only one outcome, a contested election which fuels a coup attempt after the election results come in on November 3rd.
And because of this now obvious plan, setting up a false flag around the election is the most likely means to produce election results close enough to support this course of action.
I’m not the only one thinking in these terms at this point. Joaquin Flores, writing for Fort Russ, mused similarly last week. As the polls shift towards Donald Trump and the Democrats run around concocting fairy tales after allowing Joe Biden out of his gimp cellar long enough for people to see how far he has fallen mentally, I’m nearly convinced this is likely.
Color revolutions unfold in predictable stages. The first stage is destroying the local economy. Usually this means the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury pull back on available dollars through tight monetary policy and sanctions to create mass unemployment in the target nation.
Then foment violence from the youth who are disproportionately affected by the economic destruction after NGO’s lay the ideological foundation for revolution. Use the most convenient pretext. In the U.S. it means stoking racism and hatred of ‘the rich.’
Pick a color under which to unite them, in this case black and blame the leader for every single bad thing that happens, which is usually the work of agent provocateurs who amplify the organic frustration into targeted attacks which are then amped up by the media into a news story.
If the leader is stupid he acts like any garden-variety paranoid dictator by clamping down on the violence making him easy prey for the media to brand him a dictator.
Then bringing a mob to the capital is easy, because now there are too many people to be effectively policed and the potential for violence to boil the whole thing into a coup is very real.
All of this works if the oligarchs who run the political system of the target country are on board with this. In the U.S., it’s obvious from the response from all major corporations they approve this message. Note how it failed in Belarus recently for lack of this corporate sponsorship.
Looking at the way the Democrats have positioned themselves for this election it is clear that they are preparing the field for this outcome after election day.
They used the lockdowns to create an army of ready-made protestors with nothing else to do and little hope for the future.
They structured all aid to the middle class to run out during the height of the election campaign while blocking any further assistance even though the Treasury Dept. raised nearly $2 trillion to deploy as support and stimulus.
The media endlessly stoked fear over COVID-19 to push voters to consider mailing their votes in (or create the illusion that is what will happen) to delay certification of the election on election night.
But to his credit, President Trump hasn’t acted the way he was supposed to. He has governed this chaos exactly the way a majority of Americans want him to, as a Federalist. Even though he has the authority to do so, he’s refrained from sending Federal troops into rioting cities, laying bare just how much local authorities are aiding the violence.
He didn’t institute national lockdowns and draconian restrictions due to COVID-19, instead offering aid and allowing the data to eventually vindicate him to the point where even the CDC is now backtracking on how dangerous the virus actually is.
And his opponents in New York, for example, now look like out-of-touch, lying grandma murderers.
Eventually crisis fatigue sets in, people adjust to the new circumstances and the worst parts of their fear abate. And even if they don’t look at the new data, they realize enough costs have been born and it’s time to move on with our lives.
That’s what is now showing up in the polling data, even though it is still highly suspect. And this puts Trump in the driver’s seat for the election on November 3rd. As of today, the election looks like it is his to lose.
And yet the Democrats insist that the election will not be resolved on election day. In fact, it’s obvious they are prepping the narrative that Trump will only appear to win on election night but, in fact, the torrent of mail-in ballots will change the outcome of the election over the next few days.
Of course, this would fly in the face of decades of electoral statistics where the outcome of the election is almost certainly decided by the time 25% of the votes have been counted and a run-rate to completion can be calculated.
A top Democratic data and analytics firm told “Axios on HBO” it’s highly likely that President Trump will appear to have won — potentially in a landslide — on election night, even if he ultimately loses when all the votes are counted.
Why this matters: Way more Democrats will vote by mail than Republicans, due to fears of the coronavirus, and it will take days if not weeks to tally these. This means Trump, thanks to Republicans doing almost all of their voting in person, could hold big electoral college and popular vote leads on election night….
… By the numbers: Under one of the group’s modeling scenarios, Trump could hold a projected lead of 408-130 electoral votes on election night, if only 15% of the vote by mail (VBM) ballots had been counted.
And that’s what concerns me most. Because if all of this prep work has failed and Trump clearly wins an electoral college victory, but they are planning to harvest votes for days afterwards, how do they shift the dynamic back in Biden’s favor between now and then to keep the election close enough for them to steal?
More violence is how.
We are two weeks away from White House Siege beginning on September 17th. Organized by Adbusters, which is a front for George Soros’ partner in crime, David Brock and Media Matters For America, White House Siege is a planned 50-day protest in Lafayette Square in Washington D.C., ostensibly to protest President Trump ‘stealing the election.’
This is a ready-made recipe for a Maidan-like orgy of violence in the nation’s capital to create a false flag event which reflects badly on Trump. Think snipers on rooftops shooting both protestors and cops similar to what happened on the Maidan square in Kiev in 2014.
D.C. is not a state. It’s not governed by the same rules as the states, where the Governors are in charge.
Trump can, and in my mind should, as a matter of strategy, take control over D.C. to keep the possibility of violence to a minimum. D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser is trying to walk back her support of the protests after the violence after the Republican National Convention by urging U.S. Attorneys in D.C. to charge the people the police arrest.
This is Bowser trying to publicly keep Trump from doing exactly what I just said he should do. Because with cities looted and burned, with Democrat politicians losing the respect of their constituencies they have no political legs left to stand on.
Governor Andrew Cuomo in New York said in a press conference Trump better bring an army if he plans to set foot in his state. This is tantamount to sedition, for which a case can be made by nearly every major Democrat for statements made in the past six months.
“He better have an army if he thinks he’s gonna walk down the street in New York. New Yorkers don’t want to have anything to do with him,” the Democrat said, all but threatening the commander-in-chief.
Meanwhile Cuomo is now the target of a Dept. of Justice investigation into his handling of the COVID-19 crisis while Trump withholds Federal funds from the state, which prompted Cuomo’s bravado.
Between this and Speaker Nancy Pelosi calling Republicans “domestic enemies of the state” is the kind of language you don’t come back from. The Democrats and the U.S. Deep Stat are all in on removing Trump from office by any means necessary.
I don’t think the worst of the violence is behind us after Kenosha. I think the worst is still in front of us.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg will convene an emergency meeting on Friday to discuss the situation involving Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny, the alliance’s spokeswoman, Oana Lungescu, said on Thursday.
Navalny is currently undergoing treatment in a German hospital after suffering a medical emergency in late August. Berlin on Wednesday said that a German military laboratory possessed undeniable proof of the 44-year-old’s intoxication with a nerve agent from the Novichok group. The Russian Foreign Ministry noted in response that the German government’s claims of Navalny’s poisoning lacked evidence and added that it was perplexing why Berlin first addressed the EU, NATO and third parties, such as the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, instead of contacting Russia directly.
Lungescu took to Twitter to announce the upcoming meeting.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said earlier in the day that there had been no contacts between Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Angela Merkel on the issue of Navalny. He also noted that Russia was interested in shedding the light on the situation as much as anyone else, however, Germany did not provide any information.
EU Urges Russia to Cooperate With OPCW in Navalny Case for Impartial Probe, Borrell Says
The European Union urges Russia to cooperate with the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in the situation with Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny to ensure an impartial international investigation, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said in a statement.
“The European Union condemns in the strongest possible terms the assassination attempt on Alexei Navalny. … The European Union calls upon the Russian Federation to fully cooperate with the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to ensure an impartial international investigation,” the statement says.
The EU is calling for an international response to the situation with Navalny and reserves the right to impose sanctions, Borrell added.
The EU will continue to closely monitor the situation and consider possible implications, he said.
The only Lockerbie bombing convict is one step closer to his guilty verdict being overturned, however, posthumously. Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi died at home in Tripoli on 21 May, 2012, while protesting his innocence until his last breath. The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) allowed the family to proceed with an appeal to clear his name. The case was sent to the High Court of Justiciary, Scotland’s highest criminal court, and a date for the final hearing has been scheduled to start on 24 November.
His 27-year-old son Ali, who is leading the family’s long and arduous fight to clear his father’s name, is certain that justice will prevail this time and that his late father’s verdict will be reversed. During a telephone conversation in Tripoli last Monday, he assured me: “My father’s name will certainly be cleared this time.”
The family’s lawyer Aamer Anwar, a distinguished Scottish lawyer who volunteered to take the case, in a series of emails confidently communicated to me: “We have a robust appeal.”
Winning this time seems certain. Professor Robert Black, a Scottish law authority, and the mind behind the first Lockerbie court setup in the Netherlands in May 2000, agrees with this analysis. He believes the Scottish court will “overturn the verdict” against Al-Megrahi, however, on the “narrower ground” of the crown prosecutor “withholding materials” from the defence team that could have helped establish Al-Megrahi’s innocence from the outset. Professor Black is “disappointed” that the court might not go as far as “to find that no reasonable court would have convicted Al-Megrahi.” He added, “I hope I’m wrong about this” – which would restore some of the Scottish judiciary’s reputation tarnished by the Lockerbie case and its aftermath.
The Lockerbie bombing, since 1988, became negatively synonymous with Libya, Gaddafi and its entire population. Gaddafi, firmly believing in their innocence, refused to hand over his accused citizens, Lamin Fhimah and Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi, to stand trial in the UK. This led the United Nations (UN) to adopt a series of sanction resolutions, including Resolution 731, passed on 21 March, 1992, with harsh economic and political punitive measures that not only isolated Libya, but made life extremely difficult for its entire population.
The long-held belief that the late Gaddafi was behind the attack still echoes within Western mainstream media, despite the mounting evidence to the contrary emerging over the years.
Now, it can be disclosed that Libya’s Government of National Accord (GNA), the only UN-recognised authority in the country, wants the mud to keep sticking to Gaddafi, Libya and its people too. The GNA is not enthusiastic about this latest development. The GNA have, illegally, cut the funding for the case over the last three years.
Al-Megrahi’s son Ali and the family lawyer are puzzled as to why the GNA cut funding at this critical junction of the case – when winning seems all but certain.
Lawyer Anwar does not disqualify the assumption that the GNA came under pressure from both the UK and the US to steer away from the case. The British and American narrative of the Lockerbie tragedy has always been that Libya is responsible and “that narrative must be maintained”, Anwar informs me.
However, suspension of defanging goes much deeper within the GNA, where corruption is rampant. A Scottish consultant to the legal team, speaking on condition of anonymity, yesterday clarified: “I believe funding is still budgeted, but the money disappears before getting to its intended final destination.”
Despite writing several times to the GNA to resume funding to meet the substantial mounting legal fees, Anwar received no replies until a few months ago, when his consultant was told that the GNA did not receive any messages relating to the funding of the case.
However, the consultant strongly disputes this, asserting that she “personally” handed over the file to the “highest official in the GNA” in a December 2017 meeting in Tripoli. When asked if “the highest official” meant Fayez Al-Sarraj, the GNA’s prime minister, she replied: “You think about it.”
It is not wholly unusual for the GNA to take such a position. Part of the political legitimacy in new Libya rests on the claim that Gaddafi was a supporter of international terror, and the Lockerbie bombing must have been his evil work too.
In November of 2019, the GNA’s Minister of Justice Mohamed Lamlum, personally stood before the International Criminal Court (ICC) to ask Saif Al-Islam, Gaddafi’s son, to face trial before the ICC, tarnishing the very judiciary he is supposed to protect and defend. Gaddafi Junior is wanted by the ICC for his – broadly disputed – role in quelling the 2011 troubles that ended his father’s rule over Libya.
According to different legal experts, the Libyan state is obliged to help its citizens abroad by all means necessary, including through funding in the event of legal issues. The Lockerbie case is much more than a petty case about a Libyan citizen, but it concerns the entire nation, its history and its reputation. This should elevate the case to a “national cause” for all Libyans, according to Anwar.
Indeed, Libyans across the political spectrum now consider the Lockerbie case a national issue and that Libya must continue funding the legal team, just as it did before 2011.
During the Gaddafi era, the government even established a consulate in Glasgow to closely monitor the case, and to help Al-Megrahi’s family who had to relocate to Scotland to be near their father while in jail.
It is not clear if the GNA will honour its legal obligations towards its own citizen, Al-Megrahi, albeit posthumously, but the legal team is not surrendering. They have already established a liaising team inside Libya to follow up with the chaotic authorities in Tripoli.
A group of volunteers inside and outside Libya are gearing up to explore other funding avenues if the GNA continues to reject meeting its legal obligations. In any eventuality, Al-Megrahi’s reputation, and that of Libya, will soon be restored.
MOSCOW – A provocation of Western special services cannot be ruled out in the situation with Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny, the head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Agency (SVR) Sergey Naryshkin said Thursday.
“This cannot be excluded,” Naryshkin said when asked if the situation with Navalny could be a provocation of Western special services.
Regarding the statement of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko that Germany’s claim of Navalny’s poisoning was based on false information, the SVR head said that “if president Lukashenko said so, he had reasons to do so.”
Earlier in the day, Lukashenko said during a meeting with Russian Prime Minister Mishustin that a phone call between Warsaw and Berlin was intercepted by Belarusian radar intelligence, showing that Merkel’s statements on Navalny were false in order to “make sure Putin won’t interfere in Belarusian affairs.”
“I for one, see this as a possibility,” Naryshkin said.
“Yesterday’s statement by the German authorities raises more questions than it gives answers,” Naryshkin said, stressing that Russian doctors had carried out all tests before Navalny was transferred to a clinic in Berlin and they found no poison in his system.
Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny remains at the Charite hospital in Berlin after he was flown there from Russia’s Omsk on 22 August. On Wednesday, German doctors said that Navalny’s health condition remains serious. “The symptoms triggered by what has been confirmed as poisoning with a cholinesterase inhibitor are waning. The reason for this is a gradual regeneration of cholinesterase activity,” the clinic said in a statement.
Navalny fell gravely ill during a flight from Tomsk to Moscow on 20 August. Following an emergency landing in Omsk, he was taken to a local hospital where for the next 44 hours doctors fought for his life. According to Russian doctors, they did not rule out poisoning at the beginning but after multiple tests were conducted they found no traces of poisonous substances in Navalny’s system. They suggested that his condition was caused by an abrupt drop of glucose in his blood due to a metabolic imbalance.
Germany is treating the Navalny case as an “attempted murder by poisoning,” and is waiting for Russia to explain its position and provide answers, Chancellor Angela Merkel announced Wednesday.
Speaking to reporters shortly after Berlin’s announcement that a toxicology test had shown ‘undeniably’ that Navalny had been poisoned by “a chemical nerve agent of the Novichok group,” Merkel said that there are now “very serious questions that only the Russian government can answer and must answer.”Merkel confirmed that the Russian ambassador to Germany had been informed about the test results, and said that “we now expect that the Russian government will make a declaration on this incident.”
Calling the information about Navalny’s alleged poisoning “depressing,” Merkel added that her government would consult with its NATO allies and Germany’s European Union partners on how to respond.
“We will inform our partners in the EU and NATO on the results of the test. We will have a joint discussion… and make a decision on a proportionate [response] in a joint statement,” the chancellor said.
Russia Responds
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov responded to the German government’s new allegations later Wednesday, saying that no traces of any poisonous substances were found in Navalny’s system before his transfer to Germany.
The Russian Foreign Ministry issued a separate statement, saying its diplomatic mission in Berlin hadn’t received any information or documents regarding Navalny, and accused Germany of making ‘loud statements’ without any evidence to back them up.
The ministry added that it made sense for Germany to appeal to the EU and NATO if its main goal was to substitute “some pre-prepared ‘response measures'” for normal cooperation.
Navalny’s Treatment in Germany
Navalny was flown to Germany from a hospital in Omsk, Russia, where he was hospitalized on August 20 after falling into a coma during a Moscow-bound flight from Tomsk. The politician and blogger, arguably the best-known Russian opposition figure in the West, was transfered to Berlin aboard a chartered jet on August 22 for further treatment, and granted the status of ‘chancellor’s guest’ by Merkel, ostensibly ‘for protection’.
Navalny’s spokesperson began speculating that he may have been poisoned almost immediately after he fell ill. However, doctors in Omsk said no traces of poison were present in the blood and urine samples they had taken. Later, doctors postulated that Navalny may have a metabolic condition which caused a severe drop in his blood sugar levels and led him to lose consciousness and go into a coma. Navalny reportedly didn’t eat or drink before boarding the flight or on the plane, apart from tea purchased for him at the cafe in Tomsk’s airport.
Novichok
The so-called ‘Novichok’ group of binary chemical weapons was developed in the USSR between the 1970s and early 1990s in an effort to maintain parity with the US chemical weapons programme. The agents were never called ‘Novichok’ by Soviet or Russian biowarfare specialists, and were given their names by Western experts after the USSR’s collapse.
‘Novichok’ made international headlines in March 2018, after former GRU officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were found unconscious on a park bench in Salisbury, southern England. The UK almost immediately blamed the Russian government of ‘poisoning’ the Skripals, and announced that ‘Novichok’ had been used in the attack. Moscow, categorically denied the allegations, asked for access to the investigation, and pointed out that it had destroyed the last of its Soviet-era chemical weapons stockpiles in 2017 under the supervision of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Russian officials and media also pointed out that the US and its allies, including Britain, have had access to ‘Novichok’s’ formulas since the late 1990s. Nevertheless, London and its allies responded to the alleged attack with new sanctions and expulsions of Russian diplomats, prompting Moscow to respond in a tit-for-tat fashion. The Skripals have since disappeared from public view, with UK media reporting that they may have fled to New Zealand. Viktoria Skripal, Sergei Skripal’s niece, said she had no information to corroborate these reports and has repeatedly asked to be allowed to contact her family members.
Our early August prognosis published by SCF on August 23rd, that Joe Biden would not concede the election even if Trump wins, was confirmed by Hillary Clinton herself on August 25th.
This piece will follow up on the strategy involved in that piece, and develop these in light of John Podesta’s election war-game and the situation in Kenosha, Wisconsin. In the Kenosha situation, we have armed groups on both sides, creating a volatile situation in what increasingly looks like a pre-civil war scenario. All together, we can now see the following is evident:
Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential bid now depends on a combination of a.) severe social media and search engine censorship of book-burning proportions, b.) signs from the military that they will back Biden (per John Podesta ) on the heels of c.) an inconclusive election (mailed-out blank ballots), and d.) (the Soros wing of) BLM’s ability engage in rioting and to pose as Trump-like supporters (QAnon and adjacent, such as ‘Save The Children’) in order to e.) conduct a dangerous or illegal public stunt (false flag).
Trump’s deep campaign has revolved around Christian, Gnostic, and New Age themes, which (with regard to the latter two) intersect themes of spirituality previously in the domain of the coastal left. These will form the substrate of a focus on this election being a contest of Good vs. Evil, of Light vs. Dark, of the champions of children against sexual predators, as well as anti-war and anti-vax themes; wherein ‘war mongers’ like ‘Hillary Clinton’, alleged child abusers like ‘John Podesta’, and regulatory capturers of healthcare like ‘Bill Gates’, serve as anthropomorphic reifications of unadulterated evil.
This is a novel phenomenon, and does not represent pre-Trump Republican tropes and organizing issues. Mainstream Republican tropes were represented at the RNC convention, and work to establish a continuity – even if ill fitted – between traditional conservatism (previously opposed to Trump) and Trump’s hardcore base.
[Image – Alleged Soros-BLM posing as a pro-Trump ‘Save the Children’ demonstration in what some fear foreshadows a false flag]
The Coup – Color Revolution and Arab Spring
Past political contests after the assassination of Kennedy appear to be based upon a consensus on key issues on international relations among elected officials, because the permanent administration had consensus on these themselves. But the rise of Trump, and the great lengths a part of the permanent administration has gone to frustrate his efforts, strongly indicate that there is now a political crisis and division so great, at the level of leadership, that all the soft-power and coup methods (used by the CIA abroad) are now being used within the U.S. against the executive branch.
A part of this permanent administration appears to back Trump, or rather Trump appears to be ‘their candidate’, and this may well in part explain his electoral success in 2016 despite what appeared as overwhelming odds to the contrary.
Perhaps the most visible permutation of this division and crisis were events in the deserts of Syria and Iraq, where Pentagon backed Kurdish YPG forces fought against CIA backed ISIS forces, with Americans in the employ of these institutions embedded on either side, firing at each other and taking losses. It would make sense that to military intelligence, such an incoherent and openly corrosive dynamic would need to be finally headed off.
Therefore, all of the lessons drawn from the Color Revolution, Fourth Generational Warfare (4GW), counter-insurgency and hybrid warfare, learned in our study of the events of Yugoslavia, Occupy Wall Street, BLM, Libya, Syria, Egypt, Ukraine, Brazil, Venezuela and lately Belarus, all become necessary reading in order to understand the absolutely destabilized position that the U.S. finds itself in as we approach the 2020 election.
We should expect, in line with the color-springs tactic, that police will engage in the killings of black men, orchestrated by police secret societies operating on behest of the permanent administration (known colloquially and hereafter as the ‘deep state’). These will be timed in such a way for maximum utility with regard to high/low points in the campaigns of the two candidates.
Kenosha On Fire
Such an incident just occurred on August 23rd in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in the shooting of a black man, Jacob Blake. Standard and divisive motifs followed: the event was not clear cut, and definitive aspects of the case are open to interpretation and subject to confirmation bias in the public’s eye. This will provoke reaction and polarization, with the nuances and facts of the situation and its context often traded in for political expedience. Pro law enforcement types more closely associated with conservative politics will say the shooting was justified prior to a hearing of the facts, and will include biographical information about Blake which demonstrates his past criminal offenses, while ignoring that these past offenses do not form the basis for legitimizing a ‘summary execution’. Likewise, anti-police liberals will condemn the shooting as racist and unjustified, without regard to the views on race of the police involved, and without a review of the actual facts that anti-Trump corporate media was reluctant to expose but which were contained in the police report. At the same time, there is a long history of police falsifying evidence and statements to justify shootings such as these.
Note that the governor of Wisconsin, the Democrat Tony Evers, is the one who declared a state of emergency for Covid-19 and an unpopular lockdown. He is a career government bureaucrat, and was met by a mobilization of armed citizens against those diktats. Yet the fall-out and riots in the aftermath of the Blake shooting, of which the Evers-mandated high unemployment (per lockdown) forms the substrate but yet expressed through BLM/Antifa riots, will be blamed on Trump, whose years in public service can be counted on a single hand, and whose general efforts have been to end the lockdown and ‘re-open the economy’. Evers will not call on rioters to observe social distancing, and will call the armed detachments involved in arson and looting, ‘protesters’, and the constitutionalist militias who deployed to protect the rights of both protestors (from police excess) and civilians (from protestor-arsonists) as ‘right wing’.
The increasing emergence of ‘armed peaceful protestors’, an Orwellian oxymoron as a phrase in itself, first appeared in the Syrian conflict, where American corporate media and fake-left publications like Counterpunch regularly referred to armed Al Qaeda/ISIS/FSA groups engaged in shootings and killings as ‘peaceful protesters’.
[Video, Photo – an ‘armed peaceful protestor’ stands off with an armored Sheriff vehicle.]
In our past pieces, we have explored the mechanisms that the DNC and the permanent administration will use to nullify or falsify the outcome of the 2020 U.S. presidential election in November. This included the use of Democrat governors in certain states, as we previously wrote, to declare a state winner so that its electors go to Biden, in manufactured cases where the desired vote by state citizens could not be determined. It included the use of NGO employees, Labor/BLM/Antifa activists alongside contact tracers to use the coronavirus and social upheaval around manufactured racial justice issues to interfere with voters’ access to polls, and voters’ use of mailed-out ballots and ballot harvesting schemes.
In a separate piece published on FRN, this author explained that for the Trump strategy against the riots to work, would require a plan that involved the co-opting of the BLM hashtag by his supporters. This would mean a separation of the BLM from Antifa, the latter being a designated terrorist group.
We explained there that this approach would be similar to that taken by Russia and Syria in the Syrian war, where certain Free Syrian Army (FSA) units had to be separated from ISIS, so that these FSA units could be considered ‘legitimate opposition’ (a change of tact in itself, previously all armed opposition were considered illegitimate by the Syrian government), and even incorporated into joint attacks with the Syrian Arab Army (SAA – Assad’s forces) against ISIS.
Of particular interest will be how the public and courts view the actions of Kenosha Guard militia member Kyle Rittenhouse. These two videos, the news commentary dubbed over and to the contrary, show Rittenhouse acting in self-defense. It also shows that those with him provided first responder assistance to the man who pulled a gun on Rittenhouse and who was subsequently shot in the arm.
Censorship
We now know, per the New York Times, that Facebook execs have been meeting to implement a strategy to censor information that Donald Trump has won the 2020 election, because of the working contingency plan (which appears to still be in operation) that Biden will declare victory regardless of a determinable outcome, as we previously wrote. This, however as we explained, would result in a vote in the Congress and Senate where it is likely that Nancy Pelosi may assume the presidency.
Simultaneously, Facebook execs have had a difficult time pushing against a terrified DNC which has been making irrational demands to further censorship.
Why are the DNC’s Censorship demands on Facebook irrational?
The DNC demands are fear-based and reactionary, and while Facebook execs have been happy to do the bidding of the DNC and pro-deep state Republicans (still a majority), they know the requests to further censor pro-Trump twitter accounts are known to produce the opposite effect. This is confirmed by the known science on the subject.
Studies of social revolutions and regime legitimacy show that further censorship in an environment where citizens have access to alternate informational lines, only erodes the legitimacy of the regime. Such a study was conducted on how the DDR tried to cover up the mass exodus of citizens into West Germany some thirty years ago [Sometimes Less Is More: Censorship, News Falsification, and Disapproval in 1989 East Germany . Christian Gläßel Katrin Paula , 2019].
Facebook execs called upon MIT to conduct a study to help establish their case, and a layman’s version of these conclusions were published in MIT’s online magazine Technology Review in a piece titled, It’s Too Late to Stop QAnon with Fact Checks and Account Bans.
In this article by MIT, it is reported that: “Friedberg, who has studied the movement deeply, says he believes it is “absolutely” too late for mainstream social-media platforms to stop QAnon, although there are some things they could do to, say, limit its adherents’ ability to evangelize on Twitter.”
Like the study of the DDR and regime legitimacy, the DNC finds that the more they push for censorship, the more popular the pro-Trump conspiracy theories grow.
What appears to be a work-around for this conundrum the deep state faces, is a new development, where the Soros wing of BLM has been instructed to stage at least one rally (so far) in Chicago that took place during the week of August 17th. In this, a group wearing what looked like Soros wing BLM uniforms actually carried placards associated with QAnon – such as WWG1WGA, #SaveTheChildren, #EndHumanTrafficking, and were replete with signs calling for ‘ending the pedophile Satanic cabal’.
Podesta’s Simulation Sees Public Looking to Military for a Sign
Of particular interest is that John Podesta recently ran a simulation on the DNC’s approach and response to election 2020, where he played the role of Biden. This war-game exercise was covered by David Frum for the Atlantic. Despite its counter-factual ‘facts’ and erroneous presumptions (poll based, etc.), the findings were startling.
Neither side would concede, courts would be too slow to act, Antifa and QAnon groups would clash in the streets, and the actions of the military, in either direction, or as with the National Guard – as deployed by the Justice Department under AG Barr, would be the deciding factor.
In that simulation there were a total of 67 players who met on Zoom in the first week of June 2020. This was composed of high-profile critics of President Donald Trump, including law professors, retired military officers, former senior U.S. officials, political strategists, attorneys, and cable news room editors.
We have to reiterate that Podesta, playing the role of Biden, understands that the real outcome of the election will therefore be the position that the military takes.
A wing of Trump’s supporters – Qanon – are adamant that military intelligence, or at least an operation within the NSA, will not only back Trump, but have been backing Trump since before the 2016 election. They believe this partly explains Trump’s victory despite what they see as an election ‘rigged’ by Clinton – thereby explaining Clinton’s otherwise unfounded confidence that she would win by a landslide in that fateful election now four years ago.
On the other side have been several notable members of the deep state, such as Colin Powell and former CIA chief John Brennan.
This all gels with the insider information that we have written about from SEIU, which as explained previously, forms the nexus between the Biden ground campaign and its GOTV, Bernie’s ‘Our Revolution’ and ‘Working Families Party’, Antifa, and BLM.
Conclusion
The likelihood that the 2020 election will not produce an agreed winner, barring effective active measures from Trump, is nearly certain. Based on the Northop/Standard model, Trump has an over 90% chance at winning an election if following the rules in place in the past dozen election cycles. This explains why the DNC has introduced as many X factors as possible – a politicized Covid-19 response, slanted news which riles up reliable protest movement assets towards rioting and looting, and a mailed-out ballots scheme which is indistinguishable in effect from known problem vote riggings techniques like ballot harvesting.
Because there are so many variables, possible counter measures, and new ‘X factors’ that can be introduced, this is a developing story with no clear outcome now estimable. If it is true that the NSA is backing Trump, then this provides strong reason to believe that this candidate will emerge the winner out of the fray. In either event, future X factors are almost certain.
Masaya, Nicaragua – An extraordinary leaked document gives a glimpse of the breadth and complexity of the US government’s plan to interfere in Nicaragua’s internal affairs up to and after its presidential election in 2021.
The plan,[1] a 14-page extract from a much longer document, dates from March-April this year and sets the terms for a contract to be awarded by USAID (a “Request for Task Order Proposal”). It was revealed by reporter William Grigsby from Nicaragua’s independent Radio La Primerisima[2] and describes the task of creating what the document calls “the environment for Nicaragua’s transition to democracy.” The aim is to achieve “an orderly transition” from the current government of Daniel Ortega to “a government committed to the rule of law, civil liberties, and a free civil society.” The contractor will work with the “democracy, human rights, and governance (DRG) sub-sectors” which in reality is an agglomeration of NGOs, think tanks, media organizations and so-called human rights bodies that depend on US funding and which – while claiming to be independent – are in practice an integral part of the opposition to the Ortega government.
To justify such blatant interference, a considerable rewriting of history is needed. For example, the document claims that the ruling Sandinista party manipulated “successive” past elections so as to win “without a majority of the votes.” Then after “manipulating the 2016 presidential elections” to similar effect, it was warned by the Organization of American States (OAS) that there had been various “impediments to free and fair elections” as a result of which the OAS requested “technical electoral reforms.” What the document omits, however, are the overall conclusions of the OAS on the last elections. Although it identified “weaknesses typical of all electoral processes,” the OAS explicitly said that these had “not affected substantially the popular will expressed through the vote.” In other words, the nature of Daniel Ortega’s victory (he gained 72% of the popular vote) made any minor irregularities irrelevant to the result: he won by an enormous margin. The leaked document makes clear that the US is worried that the same might happen again and aims to stop it.
Not surprisingly, the document also rewrites recent history, saying that the “uprising” in 2018 (which had strong US backing) was answered by “the government’s brutal repression” of demonstrations, while it ignores the wave of violence and destruction that the opposition itself unleashed. The economic disruption it caused is still damaging the country, even though (pre-pandemic) there were strong signs of recovery. USAID, however, has to paint a picture of a country in crisis “… broadening into an economic debacle with the potential to become a humanitarian emergency, depending on the impact of the COVID-19 contagion on Nicaragua’s weak healthcare system.” Someone casually reading the document, unaware of the real situation, might get the impression that, in Nicaragua’s “crisis environment,” regime change is not only desirable but urgently required. The reality – that Nicaragua is at peace, has so far coped with the COVID-19 pandemic reasonably well, and hasn’t suffered the severe economic problems experienced by its neighbors El Salvador and Honduras – is of course incompatible with the picture the US administration needs to present, in order to give some semblance of justification for its intervention.
A long history of US intervention
Given the long history of US interference in Nicaragua, going back at least as far as William Walker’s assault on its capital and usurption of the presidency in 1856, the existence of a plan of this kind is hardly surprising. What’s unusual is that someone has made it publicly available and we can now see the plan in detail. Of course, the US has long developed a tool box of regime change methods short of direct military intervention, such as when it sent in the marines in the 1920s and 1930s or illegally funded and provided logistical support for the “Contra” forces in the 1980s. It now has more sophisticated methods, using local proxies, which are deniable in the unlikely event that they will be exposed by the international media (which normally displays little interest, being much more interested in electoral interference by Russia than it is in Washington’s disruption of the democratic processes).
The latest escalation in intervention began under the Obama presidency and continued under Trump, although the motivation probably has more to do with the US administration’s ongoing concerns about the success of the Ortega government’s development model since it returned to power in 2007 and began a decade of renewed social investment. Oxfam summarized the problem in the memorable title it gave to a 1980s report about Nicaragua: The Threat of a Good Example. Between 2005 and 2016, poverty was reduced by almost half, from 48 percent to 25 percent according to World Bank data. Nicaragua had a low crime rate, limited drug-related violence, and community-based policing. Over the 11 years to 2017, Nicaragua’s per-capita GDP increased by 38 percent—more than for any of its neighbors. Its success contrasted sharply with the experience of the three “Northern Triangle” countries closely allied to the US. While Nicaragua became one of the safest countries in Latin America, neighboring Guatemala, El Salvador and particularly Honduras saw soaring crime levels, rampant corruption and rapid growth in the drug trade that prevented social progress and produced the “migrant caravans” that began to head north towards the US in 2017.
The US administration’s efforts in 2016 and 2017, building on long experience of manipulating Nicaraguan politics, appeared to produce results in April 2018. The first catalyst for action by US-funded groups was an out-of-control forest fire in a remote reserve, inaccessible by road.[3] The tactics were clear: take an incident with potential to get young people onto the streets, blame the government for inaction (even though the fire was almost impossible to control), whip up people’s anger via social media, organize protests, generate critical stories in the local press, enlist support from neighboring allies (in this case, Costa Rica) and secure hostile coverage in the international media. All of these tactics worked, but before the next stage could be reached (protesters being repressed by the Ortega “regime”) the forest fire was extinguished by a rainstorm.
A week later, the opposition forces were unexpectedly given a second opportunity. The government announced a package of modest social security reforms, and quickly faced new protests on the streets. The same tactics were deployed, this time with much greater success. Violence by protesters on April 19 (a police officer, a Sandinista supporter and a bystander were shot) brought inevitable attempts by the police to control the protests, leading to rapid escalation. Media messages proliferated about students being killed, many of them false. Only a few days later the government cancelled the social security reforms, but by now the protests had (as planned) moved on to demanding the government’s resignation. The full story of events in April-July 2018, and how the government eventually prevailed, is told in Live from Nicaragua: Uprising or Coup?
A section of the report
Laying the groundwork for insurrection
How were the conditions for a coup created? The aims of US government funding in Nicaragua and the tactics they paid for in this period were made surprisingly clear in the online magazine Global Americans in 2018, which is partly funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).[4] Arguing (in May 2018, at the height of the violence) that “Nicaragua is on the brink of a civic insurrection,” the author Ben Waddell, who was in Nicaragua at the time, pointed out that “US support has helped play a role in nurturing the current uprisings.”
His article’s title, Laying the groundwork for insurrection,[5] was starkly accurate in describing the ambitions behind the NED’s funding program, which had financed 54 projects in Nicaragua over the period 2014-17 and has continued to do so since then. What did the projects do? Like the recently leaked document, NED promotes ostensibly innocuous or even apparently beneficial activities like strengthening civil society, promoting democratic values, finding “a new generation of democratic youth leaders” and identifying “advocacy opportunities.” To get behind the jargon and clarify the NED’s role, Waddell quotes the New York Times (referring to the uprisings in Egypt, where NED had also been active):[6]
“… the United States’ democracy-building campaigns played a bigger role in fomenting protests than was previously known, with key leaders of the movements having been trained by the Americans in campaigning, organizing through new media tools and monitoring elections.”
In the case of Nicaragua, the NED’s funding of groups opposed to the Sandinista government began in 1984, giving the lie to their aim being to “promote democracy” since that was the year in which Nicaragua’s revolutionary government held the country’s first-ever democratic elections. Waddell makes it clear that the NED’s efforts continued, years later:
“… it is now quite evident that the U.S. government actively helped build the political space and capacity in Nicaraguan society for the social uprising that is currently unfolding.”
The NED is not the only non-covert source of US funding. Another is USAID, which describes its role in the 2018 uprising in similar terms to the NED. Not long before he exposed the new document, William Grigsby was able to publish lists of groups and projects in Nicaragua funded by USAID and by the National Democratic Institute (NDI).[7] He showed that upwards of $30 million was being distributed to a wide range of groups opposed to the government and involved in the violence of 2018, and that in the case of the NDI at least this funding continued into 2020.
Last year, Yorlis Gabriela Luna recounted for COHA her own experiences of how US-funded groups trained young people, in particular, and influenced their political beliefs in the build-up to 2018.[8] She explained how social networks and media outlets were “capable of fooling a significant portion of Nicaragua’s youth and general population.” She explained how the groups used scholarships to learn English, diploma programs, graduate studies, and courses with enticing names like “democratic values, social media activism, human rights and accountability” at private universities, “to attract and lure young people.” She went on to explain how exciting events were organised in expensive hotels or even involving trips abroad, so that young people who had never before been privileged in these ways developed a sense of “pride,” belonging, and “group identity,” and as a result “wound up aligning themselves with the foreign interests” of those who funded the courses and activities.
The new task during and after the pandemic
Two years after the failed coup attempt, what are the organizations that receive US funding now supposed to do? The new document is full of jargon, requiring the contractor (for example) to engage in “targeted short-term technical and analytical activities during Nicaragua’s transition that require rapid response programming support until other funds, mechanisms, and actors can be mobilized.” The work also requires “longer-term programs, which will be determined as the crisis evolves.” Preparation is required for the possibility that “transition [to a new government] does not happen in an orderly and timely manner.” The contractor will have to prepare “a roster of subject matter experts in Nicaragua” to provide short term technical assistance, “regardless of the result of the 2021 election, even in the event of the Sandinistas ‘winning fairly’.” The document is full of requirements like being able to offer “a rapid response” and “seize new opportunities,” emphasizing the urgency of the task. In other words, a fresh attempt is underway to destabilize Daniel Ortega’s government and, in the event that this doesn’t work, and even should the Sandinistas win the next election fairly, as the document admits is a possibility, US attempts at regime change are stepping up a gear.
Who will carry this out? The document places much emphasis on “maintaining” and “strengthening” civil society and improving its leadership, which appears to refer to the numerous NGOs, think tanks and “human rights” bodies which receive US funding. At one point the document asks “what should donor coordination, the opposition, civil society, and media focus on?” – clearly implying that the contractor has a role in influencing not just these civil society groups but also the media and political parties.
Not surprisingly, the document has been interpreted as a new plan to destabilize the country. Writing in La Primerísima, Wiston López argues that the plan’s purpose is “to create the conditions for a coup d’état in Nicaragua.”[9] Brian Wilson, the VietNam veteran severely injured in the 1980s when attempting to stop a freight train carrying supplies to the “Contra,” and who lives in Nicaragua, concludes that the US now realizes that Ortega will win the coming election.[10] In response, the “US has launched a brazen, criminal and arrogant plan to overthrow Nicaragua’s government.”
Supposing that there is a clear Sandinista victory in 2021, will the US nevertheless refuse to accept the result? Having implied that the OAS had serious criticisms of the last election when this was not the case, the document implies that it will be pressured to take a different attitude next time, saying that “whether the OAS decides to pick up the pressure on electoral reform again will be an important international pressure point.” No doubt the US will try to insist that the OAS must be election observers, and if this is refused it will allow the legitimacy of the election to be called into question, if the result is unfavorable to US interests. Many question whether the OAS is even qualified to have an observer role any longer, however, after the serious harm it did to Bolivian democracy in 2019 by casting doubts on what experts considered a fair election and, in effect, instigating a coup.[11] This document creates legitimate concern that the US government would like to use the OAS to prevent another government that is not to its liking from winning an election, as it did so recently in Bolivia.
Not only must conditions be created to replace the current government, but once this is achieved the changes must extend to “rebuilding” the institutions of government, including the judicial system, police and armed forces. After the widespread persecution of government officials, state and municipal workers and Sandinista supporters that occurred in 2018, it is not surprising that this is interpreted as requiring a purge of all the institutions and personnel with Sandinista sympathies. As Wilson says, “the new government must immediately submit to the policies and guidelines established by the United States, including persecution of Sandinistas, dissolving the National Police and the Army, among other institutions.”
USAID makes it clear that it is internal pressure in Nicaragua that might eventually provoke a coup d’état, so it calls on its agents to deepen the political, economic and also the health crisis, taking into account the context of COVID-19. The US State Department recently awarded an extra $750,000 to Nicaraguan non-government bodies as part of its global response to COVID-19, and this includes “support for targeted communication and community engagement activities.”[12] As López points out in Popular Resistance, “Since March the US-directed opposition has focused 95% of their actions on attempting to discredit Nicaragua’s prevention, contention, and Covid treatment. However, this only had some success in the international media and is now backfiring since Nicaragua is the country with one of the lowest mortality rates in the continent.”[13] The Johns Hopkins University’s world map of coronavirus cases currently shows Nicaragua with 3,672 cases compared with 17,448 in El Salvador, 42,685 in Honduras and 51,306 in Guatemala.[14] Even though higher figures produced by Nicaragua’s so-called Citizens’ Observatory[15] are regularly cited in the international media, they currently show just 9,044 “suspected” cases, still far below the numbers in the “Northern triangle” countries.
What will the opposition do next?
COHA has already documented the disinformation campaign taking place against Nicaragua during the pandemic and how this has been repeated in the international media. So far, however, warnings of the health system’s collapse have proved to be unfounded.[16] If, as happened with the Indio Maíz fire and the social security protests in 2018, the opposition fails in its attempt to use the pandemic to destabilize the Ortega government, what will it do next? A recent incident shows that attempts to seize on events to spur a crisis will continue. On July 31, a fire occurred in Managua’s cathedral. The fire department responded quickly and put out the blaze within ten minutes, but a crucifix and the chapel where it stood were badly damaged. Within minutes opposition newspaper La Prensa reported that “an attack” had occurred involving a “Molotov cocktail” and that the government or its supporters were implicated.[17] This was echoed by other local and international media, opposition parties, the Archbishop of Managua, and by one of the NGOs which received USAID funding.[18] Despite the lack of any evidence to back up the media stories, the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights (UNHCR) also condemned the incident, obviously implying that it was an attack on human rights.[19]
Yet a police investigation quickly established that there was no evidence at all of any foul play, or that petrol or explosive materials were involved.[20] Their investigations pointed instead to a tragic accident involving lighted candles and the alcohol spray being used as a disinfectant as part of the cathedral’s anti-COVID-19 precautions. The Catholic Church has already announced that the damaged chapel will be restored to its former state. However, the damage that has been done to the government’s national and international reputation, and to its highly politicized relationship with the Catholic Church, will be more difficult to repair.
Sometimes the news cycle and the geo-political cycle simply part company. This is one such occasion – the devastation of Beirut Port. What happened there is destined to constitute a major geo-political event – whatever way its sequellae should cascade out and shape the future. There are good, historic reasons for this parting of the ways: One (which explains the regional silence), is that we have not yet had the forensics. Yes, satellite photos galore, but not the nitty-gritty from the ground. Not the forensics.
The main stream media is in a hurry to ‘shape’ its story of the explosion in advance of the Special Tribunal verdict on the death of Rafic Hariri (now due on 18 August), and which is expected to indict Hizbullah members. Yet there are still many unanswered questions. It will be a further few days until these forensics become available from the site. They will of course be contested, and may resolve very little.
Against this silence, awaiting word from key players, the western and Israeli media headlines are churning out ‘everything you need to know’, and their ‘wrap-ups’ from Beirut. It is however, far from wrapped-up. More questions arise as the days pass. And the region has a collective memory of such geo-political inflection points.
The ‘popular’ 1953 uprising against PM Mossadegh, which transpired to be an MI6/CIA coup, and which – subsequently – was to usher in the game-changing Iranian Revolution; the 2005 assassination of Rafic Hariri, which led to Syria’s exit from Lebanon – and on flimsy computer patterning of calls (of unknown content) on ‘families’ of cell phones – was institutionalised into shaping the culpability of Hizbullah, and concomitantly, the movement’s widespread terrorist designation. (Hizbullah has, from the outset, disputed the western/international narrative on the Hariri assassination).
Yet the truth is, that what happened to Rafic Hariri remains still obscured in the fog of partisan war (as maybe will be the fate of this week’s Beirut devastation). In Syria, the Chemical Weapons story for Douma became another ‘turning point’, amidst the roar of U.S. Tomahawk missiles (as Assad became a Chemical Weapons pariah). Yet, documents from the OPCW in last days show the chemical weapons claim was a fabrication.
Yes, the region has good cause to pause. On the one hand, we have not had the forensics on the Port explosion, and on the other, we have Trump’s assertion – later reiterated by him – that he was told by his military generals that what happened in Beirut was “an attack” (a bomb). The President did not “speculate” that it was an attack. He said plainly that his generals had told him so.
This statement cannot entirely be air-brushed out of the calculus. And nor can the exact mirroring of the strangely unified ‘shape’ and mushroom effect of the Beirut main explosion with a similar ‘unexplained explosion’ some months ago in Syria – be discounted. And finally, there is the question: Were there three explosions?
So, we await what is likely to be a perfectly binary outcome. Either the devastation resulted from culpable negligence by the port security authorities, or was a bold attempt to audaciously ‘explode’ the current regional dynamics; to re-shape narratives and radically to re-cast geopolitics. Both are possible.
What then? The Israeli narrative is that the destruction in Beirut will cause the Lebanese population to rise up against Hizballah, and will demand that its munitions be removed away from population centres. (Israel of course would welcome the visibility into Hizbullah’s arsenals that this would entail). The scheduling of an emergency UNSC meeting for Monday, and calls to place Lebanon under international supervision, suggest that western states will be seeking to use the crisis further to weaken and constrain Hizbullah.
March 14th will seek to capitalise on what has happened to mobilise the Lebanese against Hizballah, but it is unlikely to get the domestic resonance that others may anticipate. The port of Beirut historically has been a Sunni patrimony. It has no single security structure, and these latter are no friend to Hizbullah. The port is also open to inspection by UNIFIL. If the management of the facility were to be characterised, it would be said to be one of decay and rampant venality. It is possible that this – culpable negligence leading to accident – was responsible fully or partially, for what happened.
If so, it would seem that public anger may focus more on the corrupt Za’im (the ‘capos’ of the system that have been ravaging the economic structure for their own enrichment for decades), than necessarily be directed at Hizbullah. Indeed, the present government may have a tough time to survive – even though it was not in office at the time any negligence may have occurred. That responsibility belongs to the Old Guard.
Were it to transpire that Trump was broadly correct, and that what occurred was an attack of some sort, it would not be hard to answer to the question cui bono? Israeli journalists are already preening themselves over the ‘event’s auspicious timing: That “Lebanon [now] is bound to implode”, and that the explosion’s ‘shockwaves’ will discomfort Hizbullah for a long time to come, but more especially in advance of the Special Tribunal report.
One Israeli journalist added that the explosion “at Lebanon’s main port sends a warning message to Iran, too, who only about a month ago said it would deploy ships and oil tankers to Lebanon. There were even talks of a vessel that would host a power station, which would give Beirut electricity … Israel and the United States in particular, fear these ships, if they do make it to Lebanon, would start a regular supply line not only of oil, flour and medicine, but also of weapons, ammunitions and missile parts”.
Much then, hangs on the forensics: Was this a bold ‘false flag’ initiative to upturn the strategic status quo (of the kind on which Israel once prided itself), hiding beneath, and making use of a publicly known vulnerability at the Beirut port – the storage of 2,700 kg of ammonium nitrate – in order to destroy Hizbullah’s strategic place in the region, and to shift politics in an unexpected new direction (favourable to Israel)?
Or, a further example of Lebanese élite lassitude and venality, caring only for themselves and nothing for the well-being of its people?
If the former, and events presage a renewed attempt to crush Hizbullah, the new regional paradigm indeed may be explosive.
Upon reading Australia’s new defense strategy, one might think its authors believe they are surrounded by nations invaded and destroyed by China with Australia next in line.
The “threat” of China – the articles and the new defense strategy argue – requires Australia to spend billions on weapons bought from the United States and to depend more heavily on the US for Australia’s protection.
Yet in the same breath, Australia’s media openly admits that up until now, Australia’s military has spent much of its time contributing to America’s many and still-ongoing wars of aggression around the globe from Libya and Syria to Iraq and Afghanistan. Most recently, Washington has recruited Australia to help bolster its presence in the Strait of Hormuz in an effort to menace Iran as well.
In one of the above mentioned articles it’s admitted that:
For decades Australia has been quick to send troops, naval vessels and planes to help the United States wage wars on distant shores.
Despite all but admitting the US – not China – is engaged in a global campaign of armed aggression and that Australia is a willing accomplice – Australia’s new defense strategy points the finger at China as the ultimate global threat.
A likely explanation for this contradictory worldview among Australian policymakers is the possibility that deep-pocketed lobbyists from Washington still hold more sway over Australia’s political levers than Australian businesses and certainly the Australian public – and plan to collectively squeeze Australia for billions in arms sales for missiles and other weapon systems pointed at what is otherwise Australia’s largest and most important economic partner – China.
Not only does this fill up the coffers of corporations like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and others, but Australia’s apparently hostile posture toward China will most certainly taint relations between the two nations, creating further conflict, and requiring continued and increased weapon sales well into the future.
Should any conflict erupt between the US and China, Australia will find itself a much closer target than the US – a sacrificial pawn of sorts that will bear the full brunt and consequences of any potential US-Chinese hostilities.
Well-Timed “Cyber Attacks” Help Sell an Otherwise Unappealing Defense Strategy
The new defense strategy – long in the works – was unveiled only after a healthy dose of recent and mysterious “cyber attacks” Australian security agencies attributed with no evidence to China.
Again – the irony here is that the US has by far demonstrated itself to be as much a threat in cyberspace as it is to sovereign nations and their physical territory, and much more so than China.
Regarding Australia specifically, a 2013 Guardian article titled, “NSA considered spying on Australians ‘unilaterally’, leaked paper reveals,” would note that a:
The US National Security Agency has considered spying on Australian citizens without the knowledge or consent of the Australian intelligence organisations it partners with, according to a draft 2005 NSA directive kept secret from other countries.
The US National Security Agency (NSA) has been revealed to have compromised communications worldwide, hacked the phones of national leaders both friend and foe, infiltrated and created backdoors in Western-manufactured high tech hardware, and carried out offensive cyber attacks against nations around the globe.
There is also a growing body of evidence that suggests many attacks attributed to nations like Russia and China – like the one recently carried out against Australia – were either fabricated entirely, or in fact carried out by actors in the US itself.
But what better way is there to sell the otherwise unpopular idea of Australia buying billions of dollars of weapons from America and poisoning relations with China than to cite an alleged act of aggression from China that is nearly impossible to attribute one way or the other? The Western media’s clout has in the past and continues to be much more persuasive than fact or common sense in the short-term.
Other analysts have pointed out Australia’s new defense policy is out of touch with reality. It will also do much more to undermine Australia’s national security than underwrite it.
While it is sensible for nations to ensure they have a credible deterrence against all forms of aggression regardless of the nation of origin, Australia’s defense posture has it facing a nation clearly more interested in economics than conquest, and facing away from a nation not only openly and repeatedly carrying out aggression worldwide, but one increasingly turning on its own allies for not exhibiting enough zeal against its many and multiplying enemies.
While Australia commits billions to buying American weapons and buying into Washington’s continued and growing confrontation with China – in the end – Australia will need to pick between fading with the US economically or finally accepting China’s rise regionally and globally and Australia’s role as a partner with China rather than part of America’s “primacy” over it.
Again – the irony here is of course that the most likely threat to Australia’s national security will not be from a rising China eager to do business with Australia, but a scorned Washington seeking increasingly aggressive means to force Australia back into its traditional role of buttressing US primacy.
Today the Federal Court of Appeals for the First Circuit vacated the death sentence concocted for one of the alleged bombers of the alleged Boston Marathon bombing of April, 2013, seven years ago. Some years ago John Remington Graham and I demonstrated conclusively that the FBI’s own evidence proved conclusively that, even if there really was a bombing for which there is much exposed false evidence, the Tsarnaev brothers were not involved. You can find our analysis in my articles archive on my website.
We succeeded in getting our evidence of their innocence in front of the federal appeals court, and we were stunned when the court accepted it as part of the record. We have been hopeful ever since. Me less than John Remington Graham. As a retired defense attorney and public prosecutor and, undeniably, an expert on the US, Canadian, and unwritten British constitutions, Jack, as he is known, hoped that the judges would not accept our evidence of the Tsarnaev brothers’ innocence unless the judges intended to act on it. I myself did not see how they could possibly have the courage to blow up one of the hoaxes used to sustain the fabricated “terrorist threat.” Have you noticed how this “terrorist threat” went away? Why did it go away if it were real? It wasn’t real, and it served its purpose at the time. Now we have new threats, China, American white supremacy, Trump, and new hoaxes—Russiagate, George Floyd’s death at racist white police hands, etc.
The federal appeals court for the First Circuit has disappointed us by only vacating Dzhokhar’s death sentence and not his false conviction. Dzhokhar’s appointed attorney cooperated with the prosecution in convicting him. The lack of representation is sufficient to overturn his conviction. Dzhokhar’s appointed attorney did not raise the question of the FBI’s own evidence that the brothers were innocent. She entered the trial with a guilty plea on behalf of her client. In other words, a trial was not needed. A plea bargain could have been arranged instead. The unnecessary trial itself was a hoax for public relations purposes. The appointed attorney was part of the setup that convicted an innocent person for reasons of a hidden agenda. She put her career before truth. That is what people do in a society that has lost its way. We see it all around us. Truth is the greatest enemy of the ruling class. The presstitutes, professors, and corporations that serve the ruling class, in exchange, enjoy financially comfortable lives, unlike 80% of Americans. The way to succeed in America is to be a whore for the Establishment.
The First Circuit’s ruling does not free Dzhokhar. The ruling instructs the lower federal district court to hold a new trial to determine Dzhokhar’s punishment. I think that this is all the federal appeal court dared to do.
Nevertheless, the federal appeals court ruling opens a wedge by admitting that something was wrong, and Dzhokhar’s punishment has to be reconsidered in a new trial. If there were attorneys and bar associations that served justice rather than career and money, they could use the opening provided by the First Circuit to blow up the hoax conviction of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev together with the hoax false flag Boston Marathon Bombing. This, I think, is the message from the US Appeals Court of the First Circuit. The Appeals Court opens the opportunity, but if no one cares, the Appeals Court is not going to take the hit for declaring an innocent person innocent.
A country whose lawyers no longer will fight for justice, but only for money, is a lost and destroyed country.
Fifteen of the 9/11 “hijackers” from Saudi Arabia were CIA agents working for the United States government, which was seeking to destroy the Middle East for Israel and to double the American military budget, says Dr. Kevin Barrett, an American academic who has been studying the events of 9/11 since late 2003…. continue
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