The Skripal Affair – Another False Flag in NATO Litany to Criminalize Russia
By Finian CUNNINGHAM | Strategic Culture Foundation | 20.09.2018
If we start from a premise which understands that Britain and its NATO allies are capable of mounting false flag events in Syria with chemical weapons, then it is entirely possible that British secret services carried out a similar propaganda stunt in England with regard to former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal.
We also need to bear in mind that British state intelligence agencies are plausibly running a covert assassination program targeting Russian exiles living in Britain – for the purpose of incriminating Moscow.
Over the past two decades, more than a dozen Russian dissidents have met untimely deaths while residing in England, including Alexander Litvinenko and Boris Berezovsky. Their deaths provide propaganda fodder for the British to accuse Moscow of carrying out “revenge killings”.
However, the suspicious circumstances surrounding each death could more conceivably point to the British liquidating the Russian exiles as propaganda assets.
In the case of Sergei Skripal, the disgraced former Russian military intelligence officer was convicted in Russia of being a spy working for Britain’s MI6. He was exiled to England more than a decade ago as part of an espionage swap deal.
When Skripal was apparently poisoned in his resident town of Salisbury in southwest England on March 4, along with his adult daughter, Yulia, the British authorities immediately pointed the finger of blame at Russian President Vladimir Putin for allegedly ordering an assassination. The Kremlin was accused of dispatching agents who supposedly poisoned the Skripals with a deadly nerve agent.
The publication last week by Scotland Yard police of CCTV images showing two Russian men, Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, walking the streets of Salisbury on the weekend of the alleged attack was reported in the British media as “proof” of the supposed Kremlin assassination plot. The Skripal affair is conveniently portrayed as “one more” example of Putin’s “Kremlin killing machine”.
But let’s look at the whole affair from a different perspective. The following scenario draws on observations and evidence cited by sources such as former British ambassador Craig Murray, the informed analytical website Moon of Alabama, and US-based political analyst Randy Martin (in personal correspondence).
Let’s ask the following question: was Sergei Skripal’s propaganda usefulness to the British as an exiled spy at some later point seen by the British as being better served as a victim of an apparent poison-assassination. That is, as a victim of a false flag attack that was actually carried out covertly by the British state agents in order to give the Western-led anti-Russia media campaign a significant boost?
Recall the Salisbury incident occurred at the time when Putin won re-election as Russian president, and it was during the build-up to the 2018 World Cup tournament hosted by Russia.
There is evidence that Sergei Skripal may have been a drug addict. His movements on the Sunday of March 4 when he was found incapacitated on a public park bench in Salisbury along with daughter Yulia suggest he may have been fixing a drug habit. That day he and his daughter both reportedly switched off their cell phones as they visited parks in Salisbury and nearby Amesbury. The latter venue was also a haunt for the two heroin junkies Charlie Rowley and Dawn Sturgess who later became embroiled in the affair when both apparently were also poisoned with the same nerve agent. Sturgess died days later from her ailment in early July.
Was Skripal visiting venues on March 4 known for scoring drugs? The switching off of phones would indicate some kind of illicit behavior. Recall, too, that earlier on that day, Skripal was reportedly acting in a hurry and very agitated while lunching in a restaurant with his daughter, both of them leaving abruptly. Did he have a monkey on his back, pushing him to get his drug fix?
We can be sure that Skripal was being kept under surveillance by Britain’s MI5 and MI6 all during his decade-long exile in Britain. The postulated drug habit would have been known to his “handlers”.
Moving to cash in their espionage asset for propaganda value, it is possible that British state agents surreptitiously spiked Skripal’s drug fix with some incapacitating substance, such as fentanyl. Indeed, the distressed symptoms of the father and daughter later found in a park on the afternoon of March 4 by members of the public were initially reported as signs of drug overdose.
From that point on, it is contended here, the British secret services intervened as they had anticipated to take control of the “Skripal affair”.
While Sergei and Yulia were comatose in a secured hospital wing, it could have been possible for their blood samples to be doctored with a chemical weapon, the notorious Novichok, which was subsequently and hastily attributed to Russia. That attribution in the British media is wildly overplayed. The British chemical weapons facility at Porton Down is only a few miles away from Salisbury where the Skripals were hospitalized. Without doubt, Porton Down would have its own supply of organophosphate nerve agents, if not samples of Novichok. It is not a uniquely Russian chemical, as British politicians and media falsely imply.
There are gaping anomalies in the official British narrative of a Kremlin-directed “hit job” on Skripal with a deadly nerve agent, a claim which Moscow has vehemently denied.
For a start, Sergei and his daughter have, according to the British government, recovered from their ordeal. Yet, the British authorities were claiming that the alleged nerve poison, Novichok, was a super lethal toxin, multiple times more deadly than related organophosphate chemical weapons Sarin or Tabun. A single drop of Novichok on the skin would be enough to kill almost instantly, so it is claimed.
The official British narrative claims that the killer chemical was applied to the front door handle at the Skripal home. The two Russian men caught on CCTV and accused last week by the British of being Kremlin assassins were not in Salisbury until just before midday on March 4, according to the published CCTV time data. By that time, the Skripals had left the home and were not seen returning. That means the pair were stricken while away from the home, perhaps, as speculated here, while they were in the public park scoring a drug deal.
Plausibly, they were not assaulted with a chemical weapon, but with a spiked drug sample, which British state agents had arranged for the purpose of incapacitating them. In an incapacitated state, the Skripals could then be used as guinea pigs, whose bodily fluids could be contaminated to frame up Russia with a story of “assassination by Novichok”.
Here are some challenging questions: why have the Skripals seemingly gone into hiding since the alleged poison incident over six months ago?
Why did Yulia make only one public statement to the Reuters news agency – three months after the poison incident and apparently having recovered from her “lethal ordeal” – in which she expressed a desire to return to her native Russia? Yet since that one-off public statement nearly three months ago, Yulia or her father have not been seen since. Would she really express such a wish to go back to Russia if she believed the British claim that Russian state agents had just tried to assassinate her and her father?
Why have all official Russian requests for consular contact with Yulia been repeatedly denied by the British side, in flagrant violation of international law and diplomatic norms?
The implication is that the Skripals are being detained under duress by the British authorities who realize that the official version of a Kremlin assassination plot with Novichok might be fatally contradicted by the Skripals’ version of events. Hence the pair are being denied access to public communication.
What about the junkies Charlie Rowley and the late Dawn Sturgess? It is plausible that they were also set up in a covert poison attack by British intelligence using spiked drugs in order to “refresh” the anti-Russia propaganda stunt. Then the story about a perfume bottle containing Novichok was thrown in to the mix to conjure up a murder weapon discarded by alleged Kremlin assassins.
What about the two Russian men caught on CCTV in Salisbury on the weekend that the Skripals were apparently poisoned? Petrov and Boshirov upset the official British narrative by coming forward last week to give a media interview. They said they were ordinary civilians traveling under their own names, not aliases, as the British claimed. They said they are not Russian military intelligence, that they had no perfume bottle with Novichok nor any other substance on their possession in England, and that they were in Salisbury as weekend tourists.
Salisbury and its world-famous 13th century cathedral – reputed to be the most ornate in England – as well as nearby neolithic-age Stonehenge, attract millions of tourists from around the world each year, including many Russian nationals. It is not a stretch that British authorities scanned through reams of CCTV footage on the weekend of March 4, and got a lucky break to find Petrov and Boshirov walking the streets of Salisbury. The two men say they are caught up in a “fantastical coincidence”. More to the point, it seems, they are caught up in a British false flag to incriminate, demonize and delegitimize Russia.
The Skripal false flag is only one in a whole series of propaganda campaigns conducted by Western governments, their state intelligence and their ever-obliging news media in recent years. The alleged “annexation of Crimea”, the “covert invasion of Ukraine”, shooting down a Malaysian airliner, illicit doping of Olympic athletes, meddling in US and European elections, launching cyberattacks on Western power-grids, supporting “brutal dictator Assad” in Syria, among other malicious memes.
The litany of false flags to demonize Russia as a “pariah state” is itself indicative of relentless media orchestration by NATO governments.
The Skripal affair fits into this phenomenal propaganda effort.
Idlib: Lull Before the Hurricane
By Peter FORD, former UK ambassador to Syria | September 17, 2018
It appears that the Russians have pressed the pause button on their plans for an offensive alongside the Syrian government to retake Idlib. By the time they return to play mode the martial music may have changed.
New US policies for Syria
Without fanfare the US has just reformulated its position to create the conditions for it to launch devastating strikes on Syria no longer just on the pretext of alleged use of chemical weapons but on any ‘humanitarian’ pretext the US sees fit. In an interview with the Washington Post on 6 September, James Jeffrey, the hawkish new Special Envoy for Syria fresh from the neocon incubator of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, did not mince words:
“We’ve started using new language,” Jeffrey said, referring to previous warnings against the use of chemical weapons. Now, he said, the United States will not tolerate “an attack. Period.”
“Any offensive is to us objectionable as a reckless escalation” he said. “You add to that, if you use chemical weapons, or create refugee flows or attack innocent civilians.”
Jeffrey’s remarks were little noticed because he was that day announcing something else more immediately striking: a ‘new’ policy on Syria involving cancellation of Trump’s announced departure of US troops before the end of 2018 and in statement of a plan to stay on indefinitely until achievement of the twin goals of removing all trace of the Iranian presence in Syria and installation of a Syrian government which would meet US conditions – conditions which President Assad would by Jeffrey’s own admission not be likely to meet.
The headlines naturally focussed on this latest Washington folly – do they think Iran will up sticks as long as there is a single US soldier on Syrian soil, or that there is a Syrian Mandela waiting in the wings? – and the importance of the remarks about Idlib was missed. Yet those words may be about to bring the world to the brink of global war.
New doctrine for US intervention
What Jeffreys was saying was quite clear. That with or without alleged use of chemical weapons, a sudden exodus of frightened civilians from a part of Idlib, use of the fabled ‘barrel bombs’, or launch of a major offensive will be taken by the US as a trigger for drastic and probably sustained bombing aimed at bringing the government of Syria to its knees.
Until now successive US administrations have been careful to draw the red line for intervention in Syria at use of chemical weapons, presumably on the grounds that there is universal agreement and international law to the effect that use of prohibited weapons is taboo. WMD after all were the casus belli for Iraq, even if it turned out to be false. Now suddenly we have a new, broader and consequently more dangerous doctrine.
The State Department has not yet favoured the American public, Congress or anyone else with an explanation or justification for the change, but we can speculate. Can it be, for example, that US policy makers realise that when the next alleged use of chemical weapons occurs in Syria, as surely it will, it will be more difficult to sell intervention to the public than the first two times because the game has now been rumbled? Not only has the idea that the White Helmets might not be all they seem entered the bloodstream of media discourse, but the OPCW inspectors, able for once after Douma actually to visit a crime site, failed to find any proof of use of prohibited weapons. Add to that those pesky Russians unhelpfully telling the world exactly how and where the White Helmets were going to stage their next Oscar-winning performances. So why bother with all that rigmarole over chemical weapons when Western opinion is already sufficiently primed to accept any intervention whatever as long as it is somehow ‘humanitarian’ and doing down the evil Russians?
Responsibility to Protect
Step up ‘Responsibility to Protect’, the innocuous-sounding UN-approved doctrine beloved of interventionists of both Left and Right. Never mind that most legal scholars utterly reject the notion that this doctrine legalises armed aggression other than with Security Council approval or in self-defence. Was it not effectively invoked in the British government’s legal position statement provided at the time of the post-Douma strikes? (The US administration, knowing their audience, never bothered to provide any legal justification whatever.)
Slight snag: although the British government have preemptively sought with their legal statement to give themselves cover to commit acts of war on a whim, and without recourse to Parliament, as long as it can be dressed up as humanitarian, nevertheless there might be considerable disquiet in Parliament and possibly even among service chiefs were the government to appear to be about to launch strikes alongside the US had there not been even the appearance of a chemical weapons incident. For this reason it is likely that the British government will attempt to persuade the US not to give up just yet on chlorine.
Is it this new amplified threat – of strikes whether or not Assad obliges or appears to oblige with suicidal use of chlorine – which has given the Russians reasons to call off the dogs, pro tem at least? Probably not, because the Russians were taking it as read that fake chemical attacks were coming anyway. They will take note however that the US has just effectively lowered the bar on its own next heavy intervention in Syria and will not be deterred by any blowing of the gaff.
For those who naively but sincerely believed that if Assad laid off the chlorine he would not get bombed the world has suddenly become a lot more dangerous. For realists however the new doctrine merely removes a hypocrisy, or rather introduces an inflexion into the hypocrisy, whereby the itch felt by those salivating at the prospect of striking Syria, Russia and Iran can be masked as a humanitarian concern which goes beyond abhorrence of chemical weapons.
Petrov, Boshirov and the Burden of Proof
By Rob Slane | The Blog Mire | September 14, 2018
For some time now, I have been concerned that our generation has been busy burying some of the most cherished legal concepts that many of our forebears seemed to instinctively understand, and which were enshrined into English Common Law. Concepts such as innocent until proven guilty, and that the burden of proof rests with the prosecution to prove its case against the accused, rather than on the accused to prove his or her defense against the accusations.
My biggest initial gripe in the Salisbury case was that the British Government completely discarded these concepts and simply presented unsubstantiated accusations as if they were fact. Not only did this prejudice the investigation from the outset, but it went a long way towards poisoning the wells of justice. So much for their much vaunted “British Values”.
More recently, the same has been done again. The Metropolitan Police, The Crown Prosecution Service and Her Majesty’s Government (TMP/CPS/HMG) named two suspects in the case, stating that they had enough evidence to prosecute the men. They then presented at least some of that evidence, before — at least in the case of the Government and the media — then going on to treat the suspects as if it had been proven that they had brought something called “Novichok” into the country and had carried out an assassination attempt on 4th March at the home of Sergei Skripal at 47 Christie Miller Road, Salisbury.
But it has not been proven. Very far from it. Accusations are not convictions. Suspects are not culprits. And if we are going to pretend that the extraordinarily flimsy evidence against the two men — at least that presented in public — is enough to claim “case closed; culprits caught”, then we have basically torn up 1,000 years or so of legal history, and are pretty well lost as a nation.
All of which is a prelude to saying that whatever the two men said in their interview with Margarita Simonyan, the onus is absolutely not on them to make their case, nor to sound convincing, nor to defend themselves. No, the onus is absolutely on their accusers — TMP/CPS/HMG — to present the evidence they claim they have for their assertion that these men attempted to kill Sergei Skripal, Yulia Skripal and Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey.
And so if Petrov and Boshirov had stated in their interview that they went to Salisbury to see St. John’s Church in Lower Bemerton, where the great 17th century poet, George Herbert was minister, the Salisbury branches of Waitrose and Marks and Spencer’s, and Dauwalders coin and stamp shop, yes it would have been jolly strange, but it would also have been neither here nor there as far as the claims against them are concerned. Whether we find their claims plausible, totally implausible, or somewhere in between, I repeat: they are not the ones who need to convince us why they came to Salisbury and what they did there; it is TMP/CPS/HMG who need to convince us why they came to Salisbury and what they did whilst they were there, since they are the ones accusing.
I am aware that some will say this is not a courtroom, and that the claims so far have been made in the media and are therefore not subject to the same thresholds of evidence. However, the problem is that TMP/CPS/HMG:
A) Has presented its evidence (or at least part of it) in public, and
B) Has sent no further evidence to the Russian Attorney General, calling for the extradition of the men.
Which means that the accused — Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov — have presumably seen as much of the evidence against them as you and I have.
This is disturbing, and the reason given — that the Russian constitution does not allow for the extradition of suspects — is as pathetic as it is disingenuous. It is not TMP/CPS/HMG’s issue if the Russian Government refuses to extradite the suspects. The British side should simply present its evidence through the proper channels, but has instead chosen to do it through a press conference and the media, naming two men who under the law of the land are innocent until proven guilty. Having taken this course, they now have a duty to present the evidence they have against the men to the public.
As far as the interview itself goes, it was at least helpful in that it narrows things down to the following three possibilities:
1. The men are GU Intelligence Officers who came to Salisbury to assassinate Sergei Skripal by placing nerve agent on the handle of his front door. If this is the case, they were therefore lying through their teeth.
2. The men really did come to Salisbury on Saturday 3rd and Sunday 4th March as tourists. In which case not only are they telling the truth, but the claims against them are utterly false and contrived.
3. The men came to Salisbury, not as assassins, but to do something else which they cannot reveal, but they did so posing as tourists. In which case, there is an element of truth behind the tourist claims — they really did see the sights — but there is also an element of deception as they have not told the full story, even though it is not the one their accusers claim.
Much of the commentary in the British Press seems to assume that the onus is on Petrov and Boshirov to prove that 2 is true, and that 1 and 3 are false.
Not so. The onus is on TMP/CPS/HMG to back up their claims with evidence, which basically means proving that number 1 is true, and that numbers 2 and 3 are false.
And so when a Downing Street spokesperson dismissed the men’s story, saying it was an insult to people’s intelligence, this is a mealy mouthed smokescreen, and an insult to our intelligence, designed to obscure the basic fact that it is for TMP/CPS/HMG to back up their accusations, not for the two men they have accused to back up their defence
So although the question of what to make of Petrov’s and Boshirov’s claims is interesting, it is not the real one we should be asking. The real question is simply this: Have TMP/CPS/HMG presented credible evidence to back up their claims against the two? Let’s see.
The basic evidence they have advanced against them is as follows:
1. That they flew into London from Moscow on 2nd March, and flew back on 4th March.
2. That they visited Salisbury on 3rd and 4th March.
3. That they are GU Intelligence Officers.
4. That they visited the home of Sergei Skripal on 4th March, and there applied “Novichok” on the front door handle.
5. That traces of “Novichok” were found in the London hotel they were staying in.
Regarding points 1 and 2, both men have admitted that they are true. They did indeed fly into London from Moscow on 2nd March, and then back on 4th March. They did indeed visit Salisbury on 3rd and 4th March. So far then, the men agree with the assessment of TMP/CPS/HMG and the claims are therefore not incriminating.
Regarding point 3, although Theresa May claimed in her speech to the House of Commons that these men were GU officers (well, she said GRU), in his press conference of that same day, Neil Basu did not do the same. So far no evidence has been presented to back up Mrs May’s claim that the two men are intelligence officers; on the contrary, the fact that they turned out to have travelled under their real names, rather than using aliases, as alleged by the Metropolitan Police, if anything undermines the claim. As things stand, the assertion that they are GU officers is just that: an assertion backed up by nothing.
Regarding point 4, the Metropolitan Police showed a CCTV still of the two men walking near the Shell garage on Wilton Road at 11:48am on 4th March. Is this evidence that the two men went to Christie Miller Road to apply nerve agent to a door handle? No, it isn’t. It is evidence that they were on the Wilton Road at 11:48am and nothing more. Real evidence would be footage showing the two men at 47 Christie Miller Road just after noon on that day. If the Metropolitan Police want us to believe that the two men were there, they are going to have to do better than showing an image of them on a different street altogether. Perhaps even an image from the CCTV camera that Mr Skripal’s niece, Victoria, claims Mr Skripal had on his house.
And regarding point 5, if “Novichok” (or “Novichok or related agent” as Porton Down have referred to it) was found in the hotel room on 4th May:
Firstly, how on earth would the two men have left traces of it there and not in other places they visited?
Secondly, how did they themselves manage to avoid contamination?
Thirdly, why wasn’t the hotel immediately cordoned off when the discovery was made?
Fourthly, why were the guests who stayed in the hotel between the 4th March and 4th May not contacted and checked over?
Fifthly, why was the OPCW not informed?
And sixthly, why was the hotel owner not informed about nerve agent being found in his hotel until 6th September, when TV crews turned up outside his hotel?
In other words, unless a reasonable explanation for this clear negligence and failure to act responsibly can be given, we have every right to dismiss the claim that “Novichok” was found in the hotel room. I’m certainly not prepared to just accept the word of people who have acted in such a shoddy way as to not even inform the hotel owner of what was apparently found on his property, and nor should you.
To conclude, I don’t entirely know what to make of Petrov’s and Boshirov’s claims. The images of them in Salisbury City Centre, after the Metropolitan Police claim they had put “Novichok” on the door handle, do not remotely fit the bill of assassins having carried out their deed, but do possibly fit the bill of tourists looking around a city. On the other hand, their wandering up the Wilton Road certainly looks odd.
But as I say, they are under no obligation to prove their defence. The obligation is entirely on the shoulders of TMP/CPS/HMG to prove their case against the two men. And so far they have spectacularly failed to do so.
Lynch Mob Mentality
By Craig Murray | September 14, 2018
I was caught in a twitterstorm of hatred yesterday, much of it led by mainstream media journalists like David Aaronovitch and Dan Hodges, for daring to suggest that the basic elements of Boshirov and Petrov’s story do in fact stack up. What became very plain quite quickly was that none of these people had any grasp of the detail of the suspects’ full twenty minute interview, but had just seen the short clips or quotes as presented by British corporate and state media.
As I explained in my last post, what first gave me some sympathy for the Russians’ story and drew me to look at it closer, was the raft of social media claims that there was no snow in Salisbury that weekend and Stonehenge had not been closed. In fact, Stonehenge was indeed closed on 3 March by heavy snow, as confirmed by English Heritage. So the story that they came to Salisbury on 3 March but could not go to Stonehenge because of heavy snow did stand up, contrary to almost the entire twittersphere.
Once there was some pushback of truth about this on social media, people started triumphantly posting the CCTV images from 4 March to prove that there was no snow lying in Central Salisbury on 4 March. But nobody ever said there was snow on 4 March – in fact Borisov and Petrov specifically stated that they learnt there was a thaw so they went back. However when they got there, they encountered heavy sleet and got drenched through. That accords precisely with the photographic evidence in which they are plainly drenched through.
Another extraordinary meme that causes hilarity on twitter is that Russians might be deterred by snow or cold weather.
Well, Russians are human beings just like us. They cope with cold weather at home because they have the right clothes. Boshirov and Petrov refer continually in the interview to cold, wet feet and again this is borne out by the photographic evidence – they were wearing sneakers unsuitable to the freak weather conditions that were prevalent in Salisbury on 3 and 4 March. They are indeed soaked through in the pictures, just as they said in the interview.
Russians are no more immune to cold and wet than you are.
Twitter is replete with claims that they were strange tourists, to be visiting a housing estate. No evidence has been produced anywhere that shows them on any housing estate. They were seen on CCTV camera walking up the A36 by the Shell station, some 400 yards from the Skripals’ house, which would require three turnings to get to that – turnings nobody saw them take (and they were on the wrong side of the road for the first turning, even though it would be very close). No evidence has been mentioned which puts them at the Skripals’ House.
Finally, it is everywhere asserted that it is very strange that Russians would take a weekend break holiday, and that if they did they could not possibly be interested in architecture or history. This is a simple expression of anti-Russian racism. Plainly before their interview – about which they were understandably nervous – they prepared what they were going to say, including checking up on what it was they expected to see in Salisbury because they realised they would very obviously be asked why they went. Because their answer was prepared does not make it untrue.
That literally people thousands of people have taken to twitter to mock that it is hilariously improbable that tourists might want to visit Salisbury Cathedral and Stonehenge, is a plain example of the irrationality that can overtake people when gripped by mob hatred.
I am astonished by the hatred that has been unleashed. The story of Gerry Conlon might, you would hope, give us pause as to presuming the guilt of somebody who just happened to be of the “enemy” nationality, in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Despite the mocking mob, there is nothing inherently improbable in the tale told by the two men. What matters is whether they can be connected to the novichok, and here the safety of the identification of the microscopic traces of novichok allegedly found in their hotel bedroom is key. I am no scientist, but I have been told by someone who is, that if the particle(s) were as the police state so small as to be harmless to humans, they would be too small for mass spectrometry analysis and almost certainly could not be firmly identified other than as an organophosphate. Perhaps someone qualified might care to comment.
The hotel room novichok is the key question in this case.
Were I Vladimir Putin, I would persuade Boshirov and Petrov voluntarily to come to the UK and stand trial, on condition that it was a genuinely fair trial before a jury in which the entire proceedings, and all of the evidence, was open and public, and the Skripals and Pablo Miller might be called as witnesses and cross-examined. I have no doubt that the British government’s desire for justice would suddenly move into rapid retreat if their bluff was called in this way.
As for me, when I see a howling mob rushing to judgement and making at least some claims which are utterly unfounded, and when I see that mob fueled and egged on by information from the security services propagated by exactly the same mainstream media journalists who propagandised the lies about Iraqi WMD, I see it as my job to stand in the way of the mob and to ask cool questions. If that makes them hate me, then I must be having some impact.
So I ask this question again – and nobody so far has attempted to give me an answer. At what time did the Skripals touch their doorknob? Boshirov and Petrov arrived in Salisbury at 11.48 and could not have painted the doorknob before noon. The Skripals had left their house at 09.15, with their mobile phones switched off so they could not be geo-located. Their car was caught on CCTV on three cameras heading out of Salisbury to the North East. At 13.15 it was again caught on camera heading back in to the town centre from the North West.
How had the Skripals managed to get back to their home, and touch the door handle, in the hour between noon and 1pm, without being caught on any of the CCTV cameras that caught them going out and caught the Russian visitors so extensively? After this remarkably invisible journey, what time did they touch the door handle?
I am not going to begin to accept the guilt of Boshirov and Petrov until somebody answers that question. Dan Hodges? David Aaronovitch? Theresa May? Anybody?
UK Wants Skripal Hysteria to Soften Public Before Attacks in Syria – Scholar
Sputnik – September 14, 2018
Two men suspected by London of poisoning ex-spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury were interviewed by RT, and said they had visited Salisbury as tourists. Sputnik discussed the issue with Dr. George Szamuely, political analyst and author of “Bombs for Peace: NATO’s Humanitarian War on Yugoslavia”.
Sputnik: What is your take on London’s allegations that the Skripal attack was approved at a senior level of the Russian state? What would Russia gain from this?
Dr. George Szamuely: Well it’s very hard to tell what’s been going on behind the scenes, there’s obviously some attempt on the British authorities’ part to keep the Skripal hysteria going.
I think it is connected with the events taking place in Syria and the expectation that the United States, Britain and France are set to launch missile attacks on Syria, and I think that this is part of softening up the public in anticipation of these attacks.So at the very time that Russia is in the headlines associated with chemical weapons, lo and behold, chemical weapons are supposedly being used by the Syrian government, which itself is being backed by Russia. So I think this latest disclosure, if we can call it that, is really tied up with what’s going on in Syria.
Sputnik: What do you make of the fact that the Russians have not been allowed to be involved in the investigation, the Russian side was not given the information that they had on the perpetrators, they were not given their passport numbers, is that normal or do you see anything strange in that?
Dr. George Szamuely: No, I don’t think it’s at all normal, I think Russia had every reason to be rather upset about this.First of all, it isn’t normal for them not to have access to the two victims of the poisoning, certainly Yulia Skripal is a Russian citizen and, therefore, they have every need to talk to her, there’s been an attempted murder on her, and they’ve been denied that, and they’ve been denied all of the investigatory material on which the Russians can actually be able to provide their own assesment, their own analysis, to have their own input.
The British attitude towards Russia seems to be: just admit your guilt! You have to admit your guilt! — any other response is unacceptable, but in the meantime we’re not going to even show you any evidence upon which you can make any inferences, any evidence upon which you can conduct your own investigation.
See also:
UK Lied Saying That Names of ‘Suspects’ in Skripal Case Were Fictitious – Russian Foreign Ministry
‘Straight out of the RT propaganda machine’: MP attacked for urging UK military restraint in Syria
RT | September 12, 2018
Labour’s Emily Thornberry has come under fire on social media for simply asking the UK government not to rely on “open source intelligence from terrorist groups” in the event of a reported chemical attack in Syria.
Thornberry, Labour’s shadow foreign secretary, asked the government if they would consult Parliament before taking military action over reports of chemical weapon attacks in areas controlled by Al-Qaeda proxy Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a US-proscribed terrorist organization.
This prompted hysterical responses on social media, with one Twitter user claiming: “This is UK Labour guided by the spirit of Thomas Mair” – the far-right activist who murdered Thornberry’s fellow Labour MP Jo Cox. Another accused Thornberry of providing cover for Syrian President Bashar Assad’s alleged crimes.
Notice the pro-Kremlin, Islamophobic dogwhistle; notice the casual smearing of Syrian first-responders; and notice the complete absence of concern for the 3 million civilians trapped in Idlib. This is @UKLabour guided by the spirit of Thomas Mair. https://t.co/86Ql5aGYy8
— Idrees Ahmad (@im_PULSE) September 10, 2018
There were numerous references to this news organization, with accusations Thornberry was doing the work of “propaganda” outlets such as RT and Sputnik. There was even a charge of “genocide denying” leveled at the MP.
In turn, Thornberry’s position drew levels of support from both left-wing and right-wing critics of UK military involvement in Syria.
HTS are thought to have some 10,000 fighters in the last rebel stronghold – Idlib province, a region in Syria’s northwest along the Turkish border.
Upon reports of a potential chemical attack, Thornberry urged the UK to wait “until the chemical weapons inspectors, the OPCW [Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons], have visited those sites under the protection of the Turkish government, independently verified those reports and attributed responsibility for any chemical weapons used.”
“Relying on so-called open source intelligence provided by proscribed terrorist groups is not an acceptable alternative,” she said.
9/11 Was an Israeli Job
How America was neoconned into World War IV
By Laurent Guyénot • Unz Review • September 10, 2018
Technical impossibilities
Thanks to courageous investigators, many anomalies in the official explanation of the events of 9/11 were posted on the Internet in the following months, providing evidence that this was a false flag operation, and that Osama bin Laden was innocent, as he repeatedly declared in the Afghan and Pakistani press and on Al Jazeera.[1] The proofs of this appalling fraud have been accumulating ever since, and are now accessible to anyone willing to spend a few hours of research on the Web. (Although, while preparing this article, I noticed that Google is now making access to that research more difficult than it was five years ago, artificially prioritizing anti-conspiracy sites.)
For example, members of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth have demonstrated that it was impossible for plane crashes and jet fuel fires to trigger the collapse of the Twin Towers. Even Donald Trump understood this. In fact, speaking of “collapse” is perhaps misleading: the towers literally exploded, pulverizing concrete and projecting pieces of steel beams weighing several hundred tons hundreds of meters laterally at high speeds. The pyroclastic dust that immediately flooded through the streets, not unlike the dust from a volcano, indicates a high temperature mixture of hot gasses and relatively dense solid particles, an impossible phenomenon in a simple collapse. It is also impossible that WTC7, another skyscraper (47 stories), which had not been hit by a plane, collapsed into its own footprint at near free-fall speed, unless by “controlled demolition.”
Testimonies of firefighters recorded shortly after the events describe sequences of explosions just before the “collapse”, well below the plane impact. The presence of molten metal in the wreckage up to three weeks after the attack is inexplicable except by the presence of incompletely burned explosives. Firefighter Philip Ruvolo testified before Étienne Sauret’s camera for his film Collateral Damages (2011): “You’d get down below and you’d see molten steel—molten steel running down the channelways, like you were in a foundry—like lava.”
Aviation professionals have also reported impossibilities in the behavior of the planes. The charted speeds of the two aircraft hitting the Twin Towers, 443 mph and 542 mph, exclude these aircraft being Boeing 767s, because these speeds are virtually impossible near ground level. In the unlikely event such speeds could be attained without the aircraft falling apart, flying them accurately into the towers was mission impossible, especially by the amateur pilots blamed for the hijacking. Hosni Mubarak, a former pilot, said he could never do it. (He is not the only head of state to have voiced his doubts: Chavez and Ahmadinejad are among them.) Recall that neither of the black boxes of the jetliners was ever found, an incomprehensible situation.
And of course, there are the obvious anomalies of Shanksville and Pentagon crash sites: no plane or credible plane debris can be seen on any of the numerous photos easily available.
Inside Job or Mossad Job?
Among the growing number of Americans who disbelieve the official version of the 9/11 attacks, two basic theories are in competition: I called them “inside job” and “Mossad job”. The first one is the dominant thesis within the so-called 9/11 Truth movement, and blames the American government, or a faction within the American Deep State. The second one claims that the masterminds were members of a powerful Israeli network deeply infiltrated in all spheres of power within the US, including media, government, military and secret services.
This “Mossad job” thesis has been gaining ground since Alan Sabrosky, a professor at the U.S. Army War College and the U.S. Military Academy, published in July 2012 an article entitled “Demystifying 9/11: Israel and the Tactics of Mistake”, where he voiced his conviction that September 11th was “a classic Mossad-orchestrated operation.”
We can notice from the outset that incriminating Israelis or Arabs are both “outside job” theories (in fact, they are mirror images of each other, which is understandable in light of what Gilad Atzmon explains about Jewish “projected guilt”).[2] Before even looking at the evidence, “outside job” sounds more credible that “inside job”. There is something monstrous in the idea that a government can deceive and terrorize its own citizens by killing thousands of them, just for starting a series of wars that are not even in the nation’s interest. By comparison, a foreign power attacking the U.S. under the false flag of a third power almost seems like fair play. Indeed suspicion of Israel’s role should be natural to anyone aware of the reputation of the Mossad as: “Wildcard. Ruthless and cunning. Has capability to target U.S. forces and make it look like a Palestinian/Arab act,” in the words of a report of the U.S. Army School for Advanced Military Studies quoted by the Washington Times, September 10th, 2001 — the day before the attacks.
This is an important point, because it raises the question of how and why the 9/11 Truth movement has been led to endorse massively the outrageous “inside job” thesis without even considering the more likely thesis of an attack by a foreign power acting under an Islamic false flag—and what foreign power but Israel would do that?
Of course, the two dissenting theses do not necessarily exclude each other; at least, no one incriminating Israel denies that corrupted elements from the American administration or deep state were involved. The “passionate attachment” between Israel and the U.S. has been going on for decades, and 9/11 is one of its monstruous offsprings.
I can think of no better symbol of that reality than the marriage of Ted and Barbara Olson. Ted Oslon, after having defended Bush in the disputed 2000 election, had been rewarded with the post of Solicitor General (he also defended Dick Cheney when he refused to submit to Congress Enron-related documents). Barbara was a famous CNN reporter, but before that, she was born Barbara Kay Bracher of Jewish parents, educated at Yeshiva University School of Law, and hired by the legal firm WilmerHale, of which Jamie Gorelick, a future member of the 9/11 Commission, was also a member, and whose clients include powerful Israeli firms like Amdocs, a digital communication company charged with spying for Israel in the United States. On September 11, 2001, Barbara Olson alledgedly was on flight AA77, from which she made two telephone calls to her husband. Her calls were reported on CNN in the afternoon, and contributed to crystallize some details of the official story, such as the “box cutters” used as only weapons by the hijackers. Repeatedly invited on television shows after 9/11, Ted Olson frequently contradicted himself when questioned about the calls from his wife. In a 2006 report, the FBI identified only one call from Barbara Olson, and it was an unconnected call lasting 0 seconds. Like all other reported phone calls from desperate passengers (including the famous “Hi, Mom. This is Mark Bingham”), Barbara’s call was simply impossible, because the technology required to make high-altitude phone calls was not developed until 2004.[3]
9/11 was made possible by an alliance between secret worshippers of Israel and corrupted American elements. The question is: who, of the two, were the masterminds of this incredibly daring and complex operation, and for what “higher purpose”?
Another question is: why do those who keep repeating as a mantra “9/11 was an inside job” ignore totally the compelling evidence pointing to Israel? In other words, to what extent do they constitute a “controlled opposition” intended to cover up for Israel? Asking this type of question does not mean suspecting anyone who defends an erroneous or incomplete theory of being a hypocrite. Most people defending one theory or the other do so sincerely, based on the information to which they have access. I have myself been a believer in the official theory for 7 years, and in the “inside job” theory for 2 years, before progressively moving on to the present argument from 2010. On the other hand, we can assume that those who lead the public into error on a long term are not just mistaken but lying. In any case, it is legitimate to investigate the background of opinion makers, and when they are caught lying or distorting the truth, we can speculate on their motivation. I will come back to this issue at the end of the article.
The dancing Israelis
Researchers who believe Israel orchestrated 9/11 cite the behavior of a group of individuals who have come to be known as the “dancing Israelis” since their arrest, though their aim was to pass as “dancing Arabs.” Dressed in ostensibly “Middle Eastern” attire, they were seen by various witnesses standing on the roof of a van parked in Jersey City, cheering and taking photos of each other with the WTC in the background, at the very moment the first plane hit the North Tower. The suspects then moved their van to another parking spot in Jersey City, where other witnesses saw them deliver the same ostentatious celebrations.
One anonymous call to the police in Jersey City, reported the same day by NBC News, mentioned “a white van, 2 or 3 guys in there. They look like Palestinians and going around a building. […] I see the guy by Newark Airport mixing some junk and he has those sheikh uniforms. […] He’s dressed like an Arab.” The police soon issued the following BOLO alert (be-on-the-look-out) for a “Vehicle possibly related to New York terrorist attack. White, 2000 Chevrolet van with New Jersey registration with ‘Urban Moving Systems’ sign on back seen at Liberty State Park, Jersey City, NJ, at the time of first impact of jetliner into World Trade Center. Three individuals with van were seen celebrating after initial impact and subsequent explosion.”
By chance, the van was intercepted around 4 pm, with five young men inside: Sivan and Paul Kurzberg, Yaron Shmuel, Oded Ellner, and Omer Marmari. Before any question was asked, the driver, Sivan Kurzberg, burst out: “We are Israelis. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are your problem”.The Kurzberg brothers were formally identified as Mossad agents. All five officially worked for a moving company (a classic cover for espionage) named Urban Moving Systems, whose owner, Dominik Otto Suter, fled the country for Tel Aviv on September 14.[4]
This event was first reported the day after the attacks by journalist Paulo Lima in the New Jersey newspaper The Bergen Record, based on “sources close to the investigation” who were convinced of the suspects’ foreknowledge of the morning’s attacks: “It looked like they knew what was going to happen when they were at Liberty State Park”.The 579-page FBI report on the investigation that followed (partially declassified in 2005) reveals several important facts. First, once developed, the photos taken by the suspects while watching the North Tower on fire confirm their attitudes of celebration: “They smiled, they hugged each other and they appeared to ‘high five’ one another”. To explain their contentment, the suspects said they were simply happy that, thanks to these terrorist attacks, “the United States will take steps to stop terrorism in the world”. Yet at this point, before the second tower was hit, most Americans believed the crash was an accident. The five Israelis were found connected to another company called Classic International Movers, which employed five other Israelis arrested for their contacts with the nineteen presumed suicide hijackers. In addition, one of the five suspects had called “an individual in South America with authentic ties to Islamic militants in the middle east”. Finally, the FBI report states that the “The vehicle was also searched by a trained bomb-sniffing dog which yielded a positive result for the presence of explosive traces”.
After all this incriminating evidence comes the most puzzling passage of the report: its conclusion that “the FBI no longer has any investigative interests in the detainees and they should proceed with the appropriate immigration proceedings”. In fact, a letter addressed to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, dated September 25, 2001, proves that, less than two weeks after the events, the FBI federal headquarter had already decided to close the investigation, asking that “The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service should proceed with the appropriate immigration proceedings”. The five “dancing Israelis”, also known as “the high fivers”, were detained 71 days in a Brooklyn prison, where they first refused, then failed, lie detector tests. Finally, they were quietly returned to Israel under the minimal charge of “visa violation.” Three of them were then invited on an Israeli TV talk show in November 2001, where one of them ingenuously declared: “Our purpose was simply to document the event.”
The Israeli spy network
The five “dancing Israelis,” the only suspects arrested on the very day of the 9/11 attacks, were just the tip of an iceberg. In September 2001, the federal police were busy dismantling the largest Israeli spy network ever uncovered on American soil. In the summer preceding the attack, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) compiled a report which would be revealed to the public by the Washington Post on November 23rd, 2001, followed by a Carl Cameron’s four-part documentary broadcast on Fox News from December 11th, 2001. On March 14th, 2002, an article in French newspaper Le Monde signed by Sylvain Cypel also referred to the report, shortly before the French magazine Intelligence Online made it fully accessible on the Internet.[5] It said that 140 Israeli spies, aged between 20 and 30, had been arrested since March 2001, while 60 more were arrested after September 11. Generally posing as art students, they visited at least “36 sensitive sites of the Department of Defense.” “A majority of those questioned have stated they served in military intelligence, electronic signal intercept, or explosive ordnance units. Some have been linked to high-ranking officials in the Israeli military. One was the son of a two-star general, one served as the bodyguard to the head of the Israeli Army, one served in a Patriot mission unit.” Another, Peer Segalovitz, officer in the 605 Battalion of the Golan Heights, “acknowledged he could blow up buildings, bridges, cars, and anything else that he needed to.”[6]
Of special interest is the mention that “the Hollywood, Florida, area seems to be a central point for these individuals.”[7] More than 30 out of the 140 fake Israeli students identified before 9/11 lived in that city of 140,000 inhabitants. And this city also happens to be the place where fifteen of the nineteen alleged 9/11 Islamist hijackers had regrouped (nine in Hollywood, six in the vicinity), including four of the five supposed to have hijacked Flight AA11. What was the relationship between the Israeli spies and the Islamist terrorists? We were told by mainstream news that the former were monitoring the latter, but failed to report suspicious activities of these terrorists to American authorities. From such a presentation, Israel comes out clean, since a spy agency cannot be blamed for not sharing information with the country it is spying in. At worst, the Israeli Intelligence can be accused of “letting it happen”—a guarantee of impunity. In reality, the Israeli agents were certainly not just monitoring the future “hijackers,” but financing and manipulating them, before disposing of them. We know that Israeli Hanan Serfaty, who rented two flats near Mohamed Atta, had handled at least $100,000 in three months. And we also learned from the New York Times on February 19, 2009, that Ali al-Jarrah, cousin of the alleged hijacker of Flight UA93 Ziad al-Jarrah, had spent twenty-five years spying for the Mossad as an undercover agent infiltrating the Palestinian resistance and Hezbollah.
Israeli agents apparently appreciate operating under the cover of artists. Shortly before September 11, a group of fourteen Jewish “artists” under the name of Gelatin installed themselves on the ninety-first floor of the north tower of the World Trade Center. There, as a work of “street art,” they removed a window and extended a wooden balcony. To understand what role this piece of scaffolding may have played, it must be remembered that the explosion supposedly resulting from the impact of the Boeing AA11 on the North Tower took place between the ninety-second and the ninety-eighth floors. With the only film of the impact on the North Tower being that of the Naudet brothers, who are under suspicion for numerous reasons, many researchers are convinced that no aircraft hit this tower, and that the explosion simulating the impact was provoked by pre-planted explosives inside the tower.
Floors ninety-three to one hundred of the North Tower were occupied by Marsh & McLennan, whose CEO was Jeffrey Greenberg, son of wealthy Zionist (and financier of George W. Bush) Maurice Greenberg, who also happens to be the owner of Kroll Inc., the firm in charge of security for the entire World Trade Center complex on 9/11. The Greenbergs were also the insurers of the Twin Towers and, on July 24, 2001, they took the precaution of having the contract reinsured by competitors. In November 2000, the board of directors of Marsh & McLennan was joined by (Lewis) Paul Bremer, the chairman of the National Commission on Terrorism, who, on September 11, 2001, two hours only after the pulverization of the North Tower, would appear on NBC to name bin Laden as prime suspect, perfectly calm as 400 of his employees are missing (295 will finally be declared dead). “It is the day that will change our lives,” he said. “It is the day when the war that the terrorists declared on the US [. . .] has been brought home to the US.” In 2003, Bremer would be appointed administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq to level the Iraqi state to the ground and oversee the theft of almost a trillion dollars intended for its reconstruction.
The super-sayanim
With Goldberg and Bremer, we have reached the upper level of the conspiracy, comprising a number of influential Jewish personalities, working inside and outside the U.S. government — super-sayanim, so to speak. The most representative of those outside government is Larry Silverstein, the real estate shark who, with his partner Frank Lowy, leased the Twin Towers from New York City in the spring of 2001. The head of the New York Port Authority, who granted Silverstein and Lowy the lease, was none other than Lewis Eisenberg, another member of the United Jewish Appeal Federation and former vice-president of AIPAC. It appeared that Silverstein had made a disastrous deal, because the Twin Towers had to be decontaminated for asbestos. The decontamination process had been indefinitely postponed since the 1980s because of its cost, estimated at nearly $1 billion in 1989. In 2001, the New York Port Authority had been all too happy to shift responsibility to Silverstein.
Immediately after acquiring the Twin Towers, Silverstein renegotiated the insurance contracts to cover terrorist attacks, doubling the coverage to $3.5 billion, and made sure he would retain the right to rebuild after such an event. After the attacks, he took his insurers to court in order to receive double compensation, claiming that the two planes were two separate attacks. After a long legal battle, he pocketed $4.5 billion. Silverstein is a leading member of the United Jewish Appeal Federation of Jewish Philanthropies of New York, the biggest fundraiser for Israel (after the US government, which pays about $3 billion per year in aid to Israel). Silverstein also maintained “close ties with Netanyahu,” according to Haaretz (November 21, 2001): “The two have been on friendly terms since Netanyahu’s stint as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations. For years they kept in close touch. Every Sunday afternoon, New York time, Netanyahu would call Silverstein.” Besides being a powerful man, Larry is a lucky man: as he explained in this interview, every morning of the week, he had breakfast at the Windows on the World on top of the North Tower, but on September 11th, he had an appointment with his dermatologist.
Accomplices to the 9/11 false flag attack with strong Israeli connections should also be tracked at the other end of the trajectory of the planes reported to have crashed into the Twin Towers. Flights AA11 and UA175 took off from Logan Airport in Boston, which subcontracted their security to International Consultants on Targeted Security (ICTS), a firm based in Israel and headed by Menachem Atzmon, a treasurer of the Likud. So did Newark Airport where flight UA93 reportedly took off before crashing in Shanksville.
A serious investigation would follow many other trails, such as the Odigo instant messages received by employees at the WTC two hours before the plane crashes, as reported by Haaretz on September 27th, 2001. The first plane hit the WTC at the precise time announced, “almost to the minute,” admitted Alex Diamandis, vice-president of Odigo, headquartered in Israel. Also disturbing is the behavior of the American branch of Zim Israel Navigational, a maritime shipping giant 48% owned by the Jewish state (occasionally used as a cover for the Israeli secret services), which moved its offices from the WTC, along with its 200 employees, September 4th, 2001, one week before the attacks —“like an act of God, we moved”, said the CEO Shaul Cohen-Mintz when interviewed by USA Today, November 17th, 2001.
But of course, none of these trails were ever pursued. That is because the most powerful conspirators were at the highest level of the Justice Department. Michael Chertoff was head of the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice in 2001, and responsible, among many other things, for securing the release of the Israeli agents arrested before and after 9/11, including the “dancing Israelis.” In 2003, this son of a rabbi and of a Mossad pioneer would be appointed Secretary of Homeland Security, in charge of counter-terrorism on the American soil, which allowed him to control dissenting citizens and restrain access to the evidence under the pretext of Sensitive Security Information.
Another chief of the cover-up was Philip Zelikow, the executive director of the 9/11 presidential Commission established in November 2002. Zelikow is a self-styled specialist in the art of making “public myths” by “‘searing’ or ‘molding’ events [that] take on ‘transcendent’ importance and, therefore, retain their power even as the experiencing generation passes from the scene” (Wikipedia). In December 1998, he co-signed an article for Foreign Affairs entitled “Catastrophic Terrorism,” in which he speculated on what would have happened if the 1993 WTC bombing (already attributed to bin Laden) had been done with a nuclear bomb: “An act of catastrophic terrorism that killed thousands or tens of thousands of people and/or disrupted the necessities of life for hundreds of thousands, or even millions, would be a watershed event in America’s history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented for peacetime and undermine Americans’ fundamental sense of security within their own borders in a manner akin to the 1949 Soviet atomic bomb test, or perhaps even worse. … 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.” This is the man who controlled the governmental investigation on the 9/11 terror attacks. Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, who nominally led the commission, revealed in their book Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission (2006), that the commission “was set up to fail” from the beginning. Zelikow, they claim, had already written a synopsis and a conclusion for the final report before the first meeting. He controlled all the working groups, prevented them from communicating with each other, and gave them as sole mission to prove the official story; Team 1A, for example, was tasked to “tell the story of Al-Qaeda’s most successful operation—the 9/11 attacks.”
A tight control of mainstream media is perhaps the most delicate aspect of the whole operation. I will not delve into that aspect, for we all know what to expect from the MSM. For a groundbreaking argument on the extent to which 9/11 was psy-op orchestrated by MSM, I recommend Ace Baker’s 2012 documentary 9/11 The Great American Psy-Opera, chapters 6, 7 and 8.
Machiavellian meta-Zionists
If we move up to the very highest level of the conspiracy, we find ourselves in Tel Aviv. The preparation for 9/11 coincided with the coming to power of Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996, followed by Ehud Barak in July 1999, and Ariel Sharon in March 2001, who brought back Netanyahu as minister of Foreign Affairs in 2002 (with Netanyahu again becoming prime minister in 2009). It must be noted that both Netanyahu and Ehud Barak were temporarily out of the Israeli government in September 2001, just like Ben-Gurion at the time of Kennedy’s assassination (read my article on JFK). A few months before 9/11, Barak, a former head of Israeli military intelligence, was “recruited” as a consultant to a Mossad front company, SCP Partner, specializing in security and located less than seven miles from Urban Moving Systems.[8] One hour after the explosion of the North Tower, Barak was on BBC World to point the finger at bin Laden (the first to do so), and concluded: “It’s a time to launch an operational, complete war against terror.”
As for Netanyahu, we are not surprised to hear him boast, on CNN in 2006, of having predicted in 1995 that, “if the West doesn’t wake up to the suicidal nature of militant Islam, the next thing you will see is militant Islam bringing down the World Trade Center.” Netanyahu is exemplary of the ever closer “special relationship” between the US and Israel, which started with Truman and blossomed under Johnson. Netanyahu had lived, studied, and worked in the United States from 1960 to 1978, between his 11th and his 27th year—except during his military service—and again after the age of 33, when he was appointed deputy ambassador to Washington and then permanent delegate to the United Nations. Netanyahu appeared regularly on CNN in the early 1990s, contributing to the transformation of the world’s leading news channel into a major Zionist propaganda tool. His political destiny was largely planned and shaped in the United States, under the supervision of those we now call neoconservatives, and the only thing that distinguishes him from them is that, for public relations reasons, he does not possess American nationality.
“What’s a neocon?” once asked Bush 43 to his father Bush 41, after more than three years in the White House. “Do you want names, or a description?” answered 41. “Description.” “Well,” said 41, “I’ll give it to you in one word: Israel.”[9] That anecdote, quoted by Andrew Cockburn, sums it up. The neoconservative movement was born in the editorial office of the monthly magazine Commentary, which had replaced the Contemporary Jewish Record in 1945 as the press organ of the American Jewish Committee. “If there is an intellectual movement in America to whose invention Jews can lay sole claim, neoconservatism is it,” wrote Gal Beckerman in the Jewish Daily Forward, January 6, 2006. “It is a fact that as a political philosophy, neoconservatism was born among the children of Jewish immigrants and is now largely the intellectual domain of those immigrants’ grandchildren.”
The founding fathers of neoconservatism (Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, Donald Kagan, Paul Wolfowitz, Adam Shulsky) were self-proclaimed disciples of Leo Strauss, a German Jewish immigrant teaching at the University of Chicago. Strauss can be characterized as a meta-Zionist in the sense that, while an ardent supporter of the State of Israel, he rejected the idea that Israel as a nation should be contained within borders; Israel must retain her specificity, which is to be everywhere, he said in essence in his 1962 lecture “Why We Remain Jews.” Strauss would also approve of being called a Machiavellian, for in his Thoughts on Machiavelli, he praised the “the intrepidity of his thought, the grandeur of his vision, and the graceful subtlety of his speech” (p. 13). Machiavelli’s model of a prince was Cesar Borgia, the tyrant who after having appointed the cruel Ramiro d’Orco to subdue the province of Romania, had him executed with utter cruelty, thus reaping the people’s gratitude after having diverted their hatred onto another. Machiavelli, writes Strauss, “is a patriot of a particular kind: He is more concerned with the salvation of his fatherland than with the salvation of his soul” (p. 10). And that happens to be exactly what Jewishness is all about, according to Jewish thinkers such as Harry Waton: “The Jews that have a deeper understanding of Judaism know that the only immortality there is for the Jew is the immortality in the Jewish people” (read more here). As a matter of fact, in the Jewish World Review of June 7, 1999, Michael Ledeen, a neocon and founding member of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), assumed that Machiavelli must have been a “secret Jew,” since “if you listen to his political philosophy you will hear Jewish music.”
The neoconservatives of the first generation originally positioned themselves on the far left. Irving Kristol, one of the main editors of Commentary, had long claimed to be a Trotskyist. It was soon after the 1967 successful annexation of Arab territories by Israel that the Straussians experienced their conversion to right-wing militarism, to which they owe their new name. Norman Podhoretz, editor-in-chief from 1960 to 1995, turned from anti-war activist to defense budget booster in the early 70s. He gave the following explanation in 1979: “American support for Israel depended upon continued American involvement in international affairs—from which it followed that an American withdrawal into the kind of isolationist mood [. . .] that now looked as though it might soon prevail again, represented a direct threat to the security of Israel.” (Breaking Ranks, p. 336). Leading the U.S. into war for the benefit of Israel is the essence of the Machiavellian crypto-Zionists known deceptively as neoconservatives.
The Project for a new (((American))) Century
The story of how the neoconservatives reached the position of influence they held under George W. Bush is a complicated one, which I can only outline. They entered the state apparatus for the first time in the baggage of Rumsfeld and Cheney, during president Ford’s cabinet reshuffle known as the “Halloween Massacre,” following Nixon’s resignation. When the Cold War calmed down after America evacuated its troops from Vietnam in 1973, and the CIA produced reassuring analyses of the USSR’s military capabilities and ambitions, Rumsfeld (as Secretary of Defense) and Cheney (as Chief of Staff) persuaded Ford to appoint an independent committee, known as Team B, to revise upward the CIA estimates of the Soviet threat, and reactivate a war attitude in public opinion, Congress, and Administration. Team B was chaired by Richard Pipes and co-chaired by Paul Wolfowitz, both introduced by Richard Perle.
During the Democratic parenthesis of the Carter presidency (1976–80), the neoconservatives worked at unifying the largest number of Jews around their policies, by founding the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), which became the second-most powerful pro-Israel lobby after AIPAC. According to its “mission statement”, it is “dedicated to educating Congressional, military and civilian national security decision-makers on American defense and strategic interests, primarily in the Middle East, the cornerstone of which is a robust U.S.-Israeli security cooperation.” In 1980, the neocons were rewarded by Ronald Reagan for their support by a dozen posts in national security and foreign policy: Richard Perle and Douglas Feith to the Department of Defense; Richard Pipes at the National Security Council; Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, and Michael Ledeen in the State Department. They helped Reagan escalate the Cold War, showering billions of dollars on the military-industrial complex.
The long term planning of 9/11 probably started then. Isser Harel, founder of Israeli secret services (Shai in 1944, Shin Bet in 1948, Mossad until 1963) is reported as prophesizing in 1980, in an interview with Christian Zionist Michael Evans, that Islamic terrorism would end up hitting America in their “phallic symbol”: “Your biggest phallic symbol is New York City and your tallest building will be the phallic symbol they will hit”.[10] (A whole article would be needed to document and explain the revival of the Jewish gift of apocalyptic prophecy in recent decades.)
In 1996, during the Clinton years, the neoconservatives threw all their weight into their ultimate think tank, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), directed by William Kristol and Robert Kagan. PNAC recommended taking advantage of the defeat of communism to reinforce American hegemony by preventing the emergence of any rival. Their Statement of Principles vowed to extend the current Pax Americana, which entailed “a military that is strong and ready to meet both present and future challenges.” In its September 2000 report entitled Rebuilding America’s Defenses, PNAC anticipated that US forces must become “able to rapidly deploy and win multiple simultaneous large-scale wars.” This required a profound transformation, including the development of “a new family of nuclear weapons designed to address new sets of military requirements.” Unfortunately, according to the authors of the report, “the process of transformation […] is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.” It is certainly no coincidence that the three-hour-long blockbuster Pearl Harbor was released in the summer 2001, conveniently entrenching the “New Pearl Harbor” meme into the minds of millions.
PNAC’s architects played the American hegemony card by draping themselves in the super-patriotic discourse of America’s civilizing mission. But their duplicity is exposed in a document brought to public knowledge in 2008: a report published in 1996 by the Israeli think tank Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS), entitled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, written specifically for the new Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. The team responsible for the report was led by Richard Perle, and included Douglas Feith and David Wurmser, who figured the same year among the signatories of PNAC. As its title suggests, the Clean Break report invited Netanyahu to break with the Oslo Accords of 1993, which officially committed Israel to the return of the territories it occupied illegally since 1967. The new prime minister should instead “engage every possible energy on rebuilding Zionism” and reaffirm Israel’s right to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
In November 2000, Bush Jr. was elected under conditions that raised protests of electoral fraud. Dick Cheney, who had directed his campaign, named himself vice-president and introduced two dozens neoconservatives in foreign policy key positions. The State Department was entrusted to Colin Powell, but he was surrounded with neocon aides such as David Wurmser. As National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, a specialist of Russia with no expertise in the Middle East, was entirely dependent on her neocon adviser Philip Zelikow. William Luti and Elliott Abrams, and later Eliot Cohen, were also tasked with steering Rice. But it was mainly from within the Defense Department under Donald Rumsfeld that the most influential neocons were able to fashion US foreign and military policy. Richard Perle occupied the crucial position of director of the Defense Policy Board, responsible for defining military strategy, while Paul Wolfowitz became the “soul of the Pentagon” as deputy secretary with Douglas Feith as under secretary.
The Hanukkah miracle to start WWIV
After eight months in the presidency, Bush was confronted with the “catastrophic event,” the “new Pearl Harbor” that PNAC had wished for a year earlier. 9/11 was a real “Hanukkah miracle” for Israel, commented Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy and Israeli National Security Council chairman Uzi Dayan. Netanyahu rejoiced: “It’s very good […] it will generate immediate sympathy […], strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we’ve experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror.” On September 21, he published an op-ed in the New York Post entitled “Today, We Are All Americans,” in which he delivered his favorite propaganda line: “For the bin Ladens of the world, Israel is merely a sideshow. America is the target.” Three days later the New Republic responded with a headline on behalf of the Americans: “We are all Israelis now.” Americans experienced 9/11 as an act of hatred from the Arab world, and they felt an immediate sympathy for Israel, which the neoconservatives relentlessly exploited. One of the aims was to encourage Americans to view Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians as part of the global fight against Islamic terrorism.
It was a great success. In the years preceding September 11, Israel’s reputation had bottomed out; condemnations had been raining from around the world for its policy of apartheid and colonization, and its systematic war against Palestinian command structures. Increasing numbers of American voices questioned the merits of the special relationship between the United States and Israel. From the day of the attacks, it was all over. As Americans now intended to fight Arab terrorists to the death, they would stop demanding from Israel more reasonable, proportionate retaliation against Palestinian suicide bombers and rockets.
Instead, the president’s speeches (written by neocon David Frum) characterized the 9/11 attacks as the trigger for a world war of a new type, one fought against an invisible enemy scattered throughout the Middle East. First, vengeance must come not only against bin Laden, but also against the state harboring him: “We will make no distinction between those who committed these acts and those who harbor them” (Sept. 11). Second, the war extends to the world: “Our war on terror begins with Al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated” (Sept. 20). Third, any country that does not support Washington will be treated as an enemy: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists” (Sept. 20).
In an article in the Wall Street Journal dated November 20, 2001, the neoconservative Eliot Cohen dubbed the war against terrorism as “World War IV,” a framing soon echoed by other American Zionists (the odd choice of the name WWIV rather than WWIII comes, I suspect, from the neocons’ ethnocentric worldview, in which every world war is a step toward Greater Israel; since one major step was accomplished in 1967, the Cold War counts as WW3). In September 2004, at a conference in Washington entitled “World War IV: Why We Fight, Whom We Fight, How We Fight,” Cohen said: “The enemy in this war is not ‘terrorism’ […] but militant Islam.” Like the Cold War, the imminent world war, according to Cohen’s vision, has ideological roots, will have global implications, and will last a long time, involving a whole range of conflicts. The self-fulfilling prophecy of a new World War centered in the Middle East has also been popularized by Norman Podhoretz, in “How to Win World War IV” (Commentary, February 2002), followed by a second article in, “World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win,” (September 2004), and finally a book titled World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism (2007).[11]
The hijacked conspiracy and the controlled opposition
In the case of 9/11 as in the case of Kennedy, controlled opposition operates on many levels, and many honest scholars now realize that the 9/11 Truth movement itself is partly channeled by individuals and groups secretly aiming at drawing suspicions away from Israel. Such is certainly the case of the three young Jews (Avery, Rowe, and Bermas) who directed the film Loose Change (2005), the most widely watched 9/11 conspiracy film since its first version in 2005. They hitched their whole thesis on a comparison with the never carried-out false flag project Operation Northwoods (timely revealed to the public in May 2001 in James Bamford’s book Body of Secrets, written with the support of former NSA director Michael Hayden, now working for Michael Chertoff), but they failed to mention the attack on the USS Liberty, a well-documented false flag attack by Israel on its U.S. ally. They did not breathe a word about the neoconservatives’ loyalty to Israel, and treat anyone who cited the Israeli role in 9/11 as anti-Semitic. The same can be said of Bermas’s more recent film Invisible Empire (2010), also produced by Alex Jones: a compilation of anti-imperialist clichés focusing on the Bushs and the Rockefellers, without a single hint of the (((Others))).
It is interesting to note that the 9/11 scenario put forward by Loose Change had actually been prewritten by Hollywood: on the 4th of March, 2001, Fox TV broadcast the first episode of the series The Lone Gunmen, watched by 13 million Americans. The plot is about computer hackers working for a secret cabal within the U.S. government, who hijack a jet by remote control with the intent to crash it into one of the Twin Towers, while making it appear to have been hijacked by Islamic terrorists. At the last seconds, the pilots manage to regain control of the plane. The purpose of the failed operation was to trigger a world war under the pretext of fighting terrorism. Truthers of the “inside job” school fancy that this episode must have been written by some whistleblower inside Fox. Unlikely!
There is, of course, some truth in the “inside job” theory, as I said at the beginning. Israel (in the wider sense) would not be able to pull such an operation and get away with it, without complicity at the highest level of U.S. government. How does that work? Pretty much like for the Kennedy assassination, if you consider that the country was then ruled by its vice-president Dick Cheney, the president being a mere dummy (see Lou Dubose and Jake Bernstein, Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency, Random House, 2006). In my book JFK-9/11, I have proposed a plausible scenario of how Israel had in fact hijacked a smaller false flag attack on the Pentagon fabricated by the American Deep State, for the limited purpose of justifying the overthrow of the Talibans in Afghanistan, a goal fully supported by such “Great Gamers” as Zbigniew Brzezinski, but which didn’t in itself interest the neocons.
What the neocons wanted was a new war against Iraq and then a general conflagration in the Middle East leading to the crumbling of all the enemies of Israel, with Syria and Iran high on the list. So they outbid everyone and gave the operation the scale they wanted with the help of their New York super-sayan Silvertein. George W. Bush, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and other goyim who had been kept out of the loop, finding themselves embroiled in geopolitical machinations of global scope, could merely try to save face. On September 19 and 20, Richard Perle’s Defense Policy Board met in the company of Paul Wolfowitz and Bernard Lewis (inventor of the self-fulfilling prophecy of the “clash of civilizations”) but in the absence of Powell and Rice. They prepared a letter to Bush, written on PNAC letterhead, to remind him of his historic mission: “Even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism.”[12] This was an ultimatum. Bush was certainly aware of the leverage that the neocons had acquired over the major print and television media. He was obliged, under penalty of ending in the proverbial trash bin of history, to endorse the invasion of Iraq that his father had refused the Zionists ten years earlier.
As for Brzezinski and other genuine U.S. imperialists, their support for the invasion of Afghanistan made their timid protests against the Iraq war ineffective. It was a little late in February 2007 when Brzezinski denounced before the Senate “a historical, strategic and moral calamity […] driven by Manichaean impulses and imperial hubris.” In 2012 he declared, regarding the risk of conflagration with Iran, that Obama should stop following Israel like a “stupid mule.” He soon disappeared from the MSM, as a useful idiot no longer useful.
The “half truth” of the exclusively “inside job” theory, which denounces 9/11 as a false flag operation perpetrated by the American state on its own citizens, functions like a secondary false flag hiding the real masters of the operation, who are in fact agents in the service of a foreign nation. One of the aims of this inside-jobish controlled opposition is to force American officials to maintain the “bin Laden did it” masquerade, knowing that tearing apart the fake Islamic flag would only reveal the U.S. flag, not the Israeli flag. No longer controlling the media, they would not have the means to raise this second veil to expose Israel. Any effort to get at the truth would be political suicide. Everyone understands what is at stake: if one day, under mounting pressure from public opinion or for some other strategic reason, the mainstream media abandons the official bin Laden story, the well-rehearsed slogan “9/11 was an inside job” will have prepared Americans to turn against their own government, while the neocon Zionists will remain untouchable (Machiavelli’s method: make another accomplish your dirty ends, then turn popular vengeance against him). And God knows what will happen, if the government has not by then succeeded in disarming its citizens through Sandy Hook-type psy-ops. Government officials have little choice but to stick to the Al-Qaeda story, at least for the next fifty years.
After reaching this conclusion in JFK-9/11, I had the satisfaction of finding that Victor Thorn, in a book that had eluded me (Made in Israel: 9-11 and the Jewish Plot Against America, Sisyphus Press, 2011), had already expressed it in harsher terms: “In essence, the ‘9-11 truth movement’ was created prior to Sept. 11, 2001 as a means of suppressing news relating to Israeli complicity. By 2002–2003, ‘truthers’ began appearing at rallies holding placards that read ‘9-11 was an inside job.’ Initially, these signs provided hope for those who didn’t believe the government and mainstream media’s absurd cover stories. But then an awful realization emerged: The slogan ‘9-11 was an inside job’ was quite possibly the greatest example of Israeli propaganda ever devised. […] The mantra, ‘9-11 was an inside job’ is only partially true and is inherently damaging to the ‘truth movement’ because it shifts all attention away from Israel’s traitorous assault against America. […] Leaders of these fake 9-11 groups know the truth about Israel’s 9-11 barbarity. Their willingness to perpetuate or cover it up ultimately makes them as guilty and vile as those who launched the attacks. There are no degrees of separation in this matter. It’s a black-and-white issue. Tell the entire truth about Israel’s Murder, Inc. cabal, or sleep in the same infected bed as these murdering dogs lie in. […] Faux conspiratologists complain about the government and news sources not telling the truth, yet they’ve erected an utter blackout on data regarding Israel and 9-11.”
The missing .3 trillion
Some readers will complain that I am making a very complex operation appear too simple. I plead guilty: I have merely tried here to outline the case against Israel in the short scope of an article. But I am fully aware that creating Greater Israel through a world war fought by the U.S. might not have been the only consideration in the preparation of 9/11. Many private interests had to be involved. Yet I believe none of them interfered with Israel’s plan, and most of them supported it.
There is, for example, the missing gold in the WTC basement : $200 million were recovered from the estimated $1 billion stored: who took the rest? But that is nothing compared to the $2.3 trillion that were missing from the accounts of the Department of Defense for the year 2000, in addition to $1.1 trillion missing for 1999, according to a televised declaration made on September 10th, 2001, the day before the attacks, by Donald Rumsfeld. Just for comparison, this is more than one thousand times the colossal losses of Enron, which triggered a chain of bankruptcies that same year. All this money evaporated into thin air under the watch of William Cohen, Defense Secretary during Bill Clinton’s second term. In 2001, the man who was tasked to help track down the missing trillions was Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller) Dov Zakheim, a member of PNAC and an ordained rabbi. Practically, the mystery had to be resolved by financial analysts at Resource Services Washington (RSW). Unfortunately, their offices were destroyed by “al-Qaeda” the following morning. The “hijackers” or Flight AA77, rather than hitting the command center on the eastern side of the Pentagon, chose to attempt a theoretically impossible downward spiral at 180 degrees in order to hit the west side of the building precisely at the location of the accounting offices. The 34 experts at RSW perished in their offices, together with 12 other financial analysts, as is noted in the biography of the team leader Robert Russell for the National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial: “The weekend before his death, his entire office attended a crab feast at the Russell home. They were celebrating the end of the fiscal-year budget completion. Tragically, every person that attended that party was involved in the Pentagon explosion, and are currently missing”.
By an incredible coincidence, one of the financial experts trying to make sense of the Pentagon financial loss, Bryan Jack, was reported to have died at the precise location of his office, not because he was working there that day, but because he was on a business trip on Flight AA77. In the words of the Washington Post database: “Bryan C. Jack was responsible for crunching America’s defense budget. He was a passenger on American Airlines Flight 77, bound for official business in California when his plane struck the Pentagon, where, on any other day, Jack would have been at work at his computer”. Yahweh must have a sense of chutzpah!
Footnotes
[1] Philippe Broussard, “En dépit des déclarations américaines, les indices menant à Ben Laden restent minces,” Le Monde, September 25, 2001.
[2] Gilad Atzmon, Being in Time: a Post-Political Manifesto, Interlink Publishing, 2017 , p. 142.
[3] David Ray Griffin, 9/11 Contradictions, Arris Books, 2008, pp. 170-182; Webster Griffin Tarpley, 9/11 Synthetic Terror Made in USA, Progressive Press, 2008, pp. 321-324.
[4] Christopher Bollyn, Solving 9-11: The Deception That Changed the World, C. Bollyn, 2012, pp. 278–280.
[5] It is quoted here from Bollyn’s book and from Justin Raimondo, The Terror Enigma: 9/11 and the Israeli Connection, iUniverse, 2003.
[6] Christopher Bollyn, Solving 9-11: The Deception That Changed the World, C. Bollyn, 2012, p. 159.
[7] Justin Raimondo, The Terror Enigma: 9/11 and the Israeli Connection, iUniverse, 2003, p. 3.
[8] Christopher Bollyn, Solving 9-11: The Deception that Changed the World, 2012 , pp. 278-280.
[9] Quoted by Andrew Cockburn, who claims to have heard the anecdote from “friends of the family”, in Rumsfeld: His Rise, His fall, and Catastrophic Legacy, Scribner, 2011, p. 219.
[10] Michael Evans told of this prophecy in an interview with Deborath Calwell and in his book The American Prophecies, Terrorism and Mid-East Conflict Reveal a Nation’s Destiny), quoted in Christopher Bollyn, Solving 9-11: The Deception That Changed the World, C. Bollyn, 2012, p. 71.
[11] Stephen Sniegoski, The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel, Enigma Edition, 2008, p. 193.
[12] Stephen Sniegoski, The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel, Enigma Edition, 2008, p. 144.
Laurent Guyénot is the author of JFK-9/11: 50 years of Deep State, Progressive Press, 2014, and From Yahweh to Zion: Jealous God, Chosen People, Promised Land … Clash of Civilizations, 2018. (or $30 shipping included from Sifting and Winnowing, POB 221, Lone Rock, WI 53556).
9/11 Truth: War on Terror or “War on Democracy”? The Physical Intimidation of Legislatures
By Prof. Graeme McQueen | Truth and Shadows
Timely and incisive analysis, this is the text of a talk given by Prof. Graeme MacQueen at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, on November 18, 2015.
***
Good evening. I have two sets of introductory comments.
First, my aim tonight is not to prove each of my assertions with a wealth of evidence but to survey four cases briefly in order to reveal a pattern. If you feel I may be on to something it will be up to you to look at these cases in more detail.
Secondly, as a Canadian addressing other Canadians, I want to note that I am aware of the taboos this talk is violating. I will be making claims, and pointing out patterns, that are unwelcome in mainstream society today in Canada. The taboos are held in place with heavy silence and with ridicule, and they are, in my opinion, crucial to the maintenance of the “War on Terror”.
The taboos are strong in the media, the universities, and in all sectors of government. Since my theme today has to do with legislatures, and since we have just experienced a federal election in Canada, I will give two recent examples from the political arena.
Although the two examples concern the Liberal Party, I am not implying this party is alone in its observance of this taboo. As far as I can discover the taboo is found in all of Canada’s major political parties.
While the election campaign was in full swing there was much searching through the records of all candidates (their social media records, for example) by opposing parties for material that could be used to discredit them. It turned out that two Liberal candidates had at one point in the past expressed skepticism about the official account of 9/11. The discovery of this material immediately created a crisis. Both candidates quickly made formal public statements:
(a) “I want to be extremely clear. I do not question any aspects of what occurred during the tragic events on September 11th, 2001. Let there be no doubt about it.”
Maria Manna, Liberal candidate in British Columbia
(b) “Let’s be crystal clear: I have never and do not question the events which took place on Sept. 11, 2001.”
David Graham, Liberal candidate in Quebec
These are peculiar statements. They do not seem to have been written independently and they verge on the incomprehensible. What, after all, does it mean to say you do not question an event? The verb “question” would normally mean in such a context “to doubt.” But how can we doubt an event?
An event is what it is. Perhaps the writer of these statements is using the verb to mean, “to have questions about.” But surely the candidates are not bragging that they have no questions about the events of that day? Over one-third of Canadians and Americans, as revealed by numerous polls, have serious questions about the events of the day. Why would their representatives have no questions? How could it be a virtue to have no questions? Have the candidates studied these events deeply and resolved all questions? Even the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which produced the most detailed official account of the destruction of the World Trade Center, has admitted that it has been left with questions about these collapses. Perhaps Ms. Manna and Mr. Graham should explain to NIST how they have resolved all the confusions?
Or do these candidates mean they do not have any doubts about the official account of the events of 9/11? This would be a different statement altogether. And in this case, which account are they actually referring to? The Canadian government has no independent account of what happened on that day. A citizen’s petition for an independent investigation was rejected with contempt by Steven Blaney, the Minister of Public Safety under the Conservative government. So, is it the U.S. government’s account that the candidates are affirming? This account, to the extent that there is a single account, is the ultimate responsibility of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which was charged with investigating the crime. But do Ms. Manna and Mr. Graham even know what the FBI’s position is? Do they know, for example, that the FBI never even charged Osama bin Laden with the crimes of 9/11 because they had insufficient evidence? Do they know that the 9/11 Commission, tasked with writing a public report on the events of 9/11, made extensive use of the weakest of claims—claims made under torture?
Frankly, I do not think these candidates’ assertions have anything to do with evidence or reason. I believe they are best understood as loyalty oaths. I think they mean something like this:
“As far as this founding event in the War on Terror is concerned, we promise to accept as true, without investigation or critical inquiry, whatever Canadian authorities accept as true. If Canadian authorities, without conducting an investigation, have faith in statements made under torture and in unsupported claims made by a foreign intelligence agency, then we will share that faith.”
These loyalty oaths suggest that anyone who raises questions about the claims made by this foreign intelligence agency, and supported by acts that violate international law, will be excluded from the Canadian Parliament. Such people will not be permitted to represent the Canadian people or to help steer this country into the future. What a staggering notion.
The loyalty oaths I have been discussing serve well to introduce today’s talk because my theme is the bullying of legislatures in North America. But I wish to go beyond the sort of bullying indicated in loyalty oaths. I want to look at an even more gross form of bullying, the use of physical threat.
My basic claim is simple: physical intimidation of elected representatives, as suggested in the four instances I will discuss, is a core feature of the War on Terror. And this is a direct attack on representative democracy.
Intimidating the U.S. Congress in the fall of 2001
A. The 9/11 Events:
I begin with the attacks of September 11, 2001, crucial to the War on Terror.
Most of you remember these events and are aware of how shocking they were to the general population in North America. But perhaps you do not all recall the nature of the shock delivered to Congress.
Democrat Tom Daschle, who was Senate Majority Leader on September 11, 2001, recalls being at the Capitol with other members of Congress when the assaults on the Twin Towers took place. He watched them on television like most Americans, as stunned and puzzled as anyone. But his television viewing was interrupted when a guard ran into the room and announced that there was a plane headed toward the Capitol and that an immediate evacuation of the building was necessary. This was, says Daschle, the first time in history the entire U.S. Capitol had been evacuated. There appears to have been no clear protocol. Daschle says it was a scene of “total chaos.” Elected representatives, both senators and members of the House, fled in confusion. Many had difficulty getting reliable information about what was happening and did not know what to do or where to go. This was a frightened and intimidated legislature.
Later in the day, when things in Washington had settled down somewhat, many of those who had fled reassembled on the steps of the Capitol building. A few brief speeches were made, after which, as we can see and hear in precious video footage, members of Congress broke into a singing of God Bless America, followed by emotional embraces.
A powerful feeling of unity is evident in the record of this event. Tom Daschle said that he had never in his life experienced the sense of unity he felt on September 11, 2001. Like others on the steps of the Capitol that evening, he seems to have been almost euphoric. We were, he says, one family.
I draw your attention to the emergence of a pattern that is common in societies experiencing danger and that characterizes affected populations in the War on Terror.
First, there is the sense of threat. The population then goes through a phase of intense, felt unity.
Party loyalties and ideological divides are cast aside. There are solemn declarations, there is singing, there is the calling down of blessings on the nation, there is hugging and there are tears.
I am not mocking members of Congress, or any other group that unites under threat. This seems to be an aspect of our nature as human beings. But bear in mind that while these social adjustments may help a society gear up for a response to an attack, they can also leave a population vulnerable to manipulation. At such moments dissent is discouraged and critical thinking is in short supply. Passion and calls for loyalty are the order of the day.
The consequences can be very serious.
A photograph of George W. Bush and Tom Daschle, top Republican and top Democrat, embracing shortly after 9/11, tells the story. The act is a symbolic statement of unity, but like many symbolic statements it tells us a tale with very practical implications.
The U.S. Constitution gives to Congress the power to declare war. Aware of the desirability of involving Congress, the White House immediately took advantage of the shock delivered by 9/11 and asked Congress for a bill explicitly allowing the President to use armed force in response to the attacks. Tom Daschle was one of the few people who could have stopped such a bill. The Democrats had a majority in Senate and he, as Senate Majority Leader, could have urged them to vote as a bloc against the bill. But the hug indicates, the sense of being one family, the feeling of unity, was strong. Not only did Daschle not rise to the occasion and oppose such a bill, he immediately offered to put it forward, thus guaranteeing its acceptance.
This extremely dangerous legislation, “Authorization for Use of Military Force, 2001” was proposed to and passed by both House and Senate on September 14, 2001. There was only one vote against the bill—by Barbara Lee, later Chair of the Congressional Black Caucus. The bill provided cover for the immediate invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and simultaneous preparations for the invasion of Iraq. It also handed to Bush the power to decide who was responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
Remember: people who want war may purposely create a sense of threat and a feeling of unity. And they will typically do so in order to achieve a particular reaction. This is the triad I am drawing your attention to: Threat, Unity, Reaction.
The reaction may express itself outwardly in foreign policy or inwardly in domestic policy. Frequently, the outward and inward moves are simultaneous. Outwardly, the enraged nation throws itself on the nation or group it decides was responsible for the attack. Inwardly, the population agrees that this is a time for unity, not a time for debate and dissent but for gathering as one people, with the surrender of individual freedoms and civil rights as needed to mobilize for violence.
We do not need to speculate about whether this condition was achieved in the American people on 9/11. A poll was initiated on that very day, in the evening of 9/11. (Washington Post-ABC). According to those who conducted the poll, nearly nine in ten Americans supported military action against whoever was responsible for the attacks and two out of three Americans were willing to surrender civil liberties to fight terrorism.
Now, you may be thinking, what’s the big deal? The threat-unity-response triad makes sense: an attacked group unites and, when united, acts to deal with a serious threat. The triad is compatible with the official story of 9/11 and does not by itself mean that dissenters are right and that the day’s events were an inside operation.
You would be right in thinking that I have said nothing to this point that indicates the official story of 9/11 is false. My preliminary aim has been simply to point to the triad, which becomes visible again and again in the War on Terror—and to emphasize how populations and their elected representatives may, at such times, be vulnerable to manipulation.
Now, if we wish to go further and ask if 9/11 was a fraud we will need to look at the evidence. This is not difficult: fourteen years of research by a wide variety of people has given us plenty of evidence. In today’s talk, however, I am discussing four events, and I have little time to discuss details of 9/11. So let me restrict myself to a few brief comments.
Many of you will know, if you have looked into this issue even superficially, that the destruction of the World Trade Center, and especially of three buildings (WTC 1, 2 and 7), is regarded by many of us as providing the strongest evidence against the official account. I realize that many people “tune out” when building collapses are discussed (inner voice: “What do I know about buildings? My God, I hope they aren’t going to ask me to remember my high school physics!”). But there are very good reasons to pay attention to the destruction of these buildings.
Covert operations are typically characterized not only by lying, but by the laying down of false trails and the creation of pseudo-mysteries and diversion. So complex and contradictory is the evidence encountered that it is very often difficult to prove an event was based on deception even when we feel sure this is the case. When we do get such proof it makes sense to try to persuade people to look at it. The destruction of the WTC buildings is one such instance. In my view the official explanations of their destruction have been proven to be false. If you wish to read an admirable summary of the evidence against the official account of the WTC destruction, I refer you to a recent publication that can be obtained from the website of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth. It is entitled, Beyond Misinformation: What Science Says About the Destruction of World Trade Center Buildings 1, 2, and 7.
As this publication makes clear, the official account of the destruction of these buildings is based on repeated violations of the laws of physics and of basic principles of scientific investigation and thought. In contrast, the hypothesis that the three buildings were brought down by planted explosives and other agents of destruction is robustly supported. Evidence against the official account and in favor of the dissident account is copious, varied, and mutually corroborating.
But if these three buildings were brought down not by plane strikes but by controlled demolition, through preparations made well before the attacks, this means that the entire official narrative is false and the founding event in the War on Terror is a fraud. Moreover, since discovering that the official account is false is not actually difficult, we must assume that the U.S. government agencies that promote the fraudulent event, including the FBI, are aware of the fraud and have been engaged in a major cover-up. They are, at the very least, accessories after the fact.
Let me sum up my observations and claims to this point:
- Observation: there is a taboo in place in Canada (as in the U.S.) that punishes people, including members of Parliament, who raise questions about the FBI account of 9/11.
- Observation: a familiar pattern of human history becomes clear to those who study the 9/11 event: threat leads to feelings of unity, and feelings of unity facilitate and shape the reaction: (a) the sacrifice civil rights at home and (b) a willingness to use force against a perceived enemy.
- Observation: In the case of the 9/11 event in the U.S. the reaction phase encouraged (a) a willingness at home to surrender traditional rights and freedoms and (b) a willingness to use military force abroad.
- Claim: the 9/11 attacks were not carried out by Islamic extremists but were managed from within the U.S. to manipulate the population and to intimidate the U.S. Congress into supporting the reaction desired by the perpetrators.
B. The 2001 Anthrax attacks:
Very shortly after the 9/11 attacks there was a second set of attacks in the U.S. Envelopes containing deadly anthrax spores were sent through the mail.
This set of attacks appeared at the time to be the second punch in a one-two punch attack. After all, the attacks began a mere week after 9/11 and the perpetrators clearly wanted to be seen as the same Muslim extremists who had carried out the first attack.
Here, for example, is the letter sent to Senator Tom Daschle:
Note the date, 9/11, at the top. Note the attempt to look like a Muslim extremist. Most of the U.S. population assumed this was, indeed, a second blow by the same Muslim extremists alleged to have carried out the 9/11 attacks. We know this from a poll carried out in mid-October, 2001.
What were the effects of the anthrax attacks and who was the perpetrator?
The main effect was to keep up the momentum established by the 9/11 attacks. The external aspect of the reaction to 9/11 was directed toward those thought responsible: this reaction supported the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. The first bombs were dropped on Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, two days after the first death in the U.S. from anthrax. The anthrax attacks kept al-Qaeda and Afghanistan in the crosshairs.
And as October of 2001 progressed another possible perpetrator appeared on the scene. According to this hypothesis al-Qaeda was providing the foot-soldiers—the people who wrote the letters and mailed them—but the sophisticated anthrax spores had to have been produced by a state, which was collaborating with al-Qaeda in this deadly attack.
The enemy state was said to be Iraq.
The Iraq hypothesis flourished briefly in October and November of 2001 in partnership with the al-Qaeda hypothesis. During that period, as the invasion of Afghanistan proceeded, support was given to preparations for the invasion of Iraq.
But I spoke earlier of a pattern, and the pattern includes not only attack on enemy states but also sacrifice of civil rights at home. Here is where the anthrax attacks scored their biggest victory. Attorney General John Ashcroft had introduced what would later be called the Patriot Act shortly after 9/11 and had made it clear to Congress that he wanted it passed immediately. But there was resistance. Both the population at large and Congress began to recover from the 9/11 attacks, and as they did so their willingness to sacrifice civil rights began to diminish. The anthrax attacks saved the day for Ashcroft by ensuring that both population and Congress remained sufficiently intimidated to accept the Patriot act. The act was passed on October 26, 2001. The connection between its passage and the anthrax attacks is very clear.
There were two powerful Democratic senators whose actions were slowing down passage of the Patriot Act. One was Tom Daschle, whom I have mentioned previously. The second was Patrick Leahy, Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Anthrax letters were sent out to Daschle and Leahy immediately after they resisted a deadline for passage of the bill proposed by Vice-President Dick Cheney.
How odd that al-Qaeda and Iraq would have had a special hatred of Democratic senators who slowed down the Patriot Act!
But, of course, the anthrax letters were not sent by al-Qaeda and Iraq. According to what we have since learned, no Muslim had anything whatsoever to do with the attacks.
If you want to know more about this topic, please read my book, The 2001 Anthrax Deception. Since the publication of that book there have been further developments, including the emergence of a highly placed FBI whistle-blower, that have supported the book’s claims.
What do we know about the perpetrators? Studies of the physical characteristics of the anthrax spores quickly ruled out al-Qaeda and Iraq as sources of these spores and showed that the anthrax came from a highly secure laboratory within the U.S. military-industrial complex. This is not controversial, having been acknowledged by the FBI, the White House and the Department of Homeland Security.
So the perpetrators were not Muslim extremists but they pretended to be, and whoever they were they had access to the heart of the U.S. intelligence and military community. It is, therefore, clear that the anthrax attacks were an “inside job” and a “false flag operation.”
The true perpetrators are still at large, the FBI having led the public on a multi-year wild goose chase.
As far as the intimidation of Congress is concerned, the process started with 9/11 but was continued by means of the anthrax attacks. Concrete barricades and yellow crime scene tape marked off the Capitol. Congress members were told by the FBI not to wear their Congressional pins publicly or to use their Congressional license plates. They were told they must hide their identities as elected representatives.
When Tom Daschle’s office received an anthrax letter in mid-October the stuff was so sophisticated it contaminated the whole building. The Hart Senate building was closed down for several months while it was cleaned. Some senators remained without computer access and proper office space as the Patriot Act was being pushed through. The anthrax attacks ensured that the passage of the Patriot Act took place in an atmosphere of urgent and ongoing threat to Congress.
Now, note that the lies pushed in October-November of 2001 to frame Afghanistan and Iraq for the anthrax attacks (Iraq as sponsor, al-Qaeda as client) belonged to the same repository of lies that was used over a period of years to justify the 2003 attack on Iraq. The two main deceptions were (a) that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction” and (b) that Iraq was a sponsor of al-Qaeda.
The Centre for Public Integrity in the U.S. did a study a few years ago of these two sets of false statements. The study found that during the two years following 9/11 top Bush officials made 935 false statements on these two topics.
When Colin Powell gave his deceptive performance before the UN Security Council just before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, holding up his little vial of simulated anthrax, he was still making these two sets of false statements and he was still warning the world that Iraq might attack the U.S. with anthrax.
Intimidating Canadian legislatures, 2013-14
I now turn to a different country and to a time nearer the present. I have two incidents in Canada to discuss, the first situated in 2013 and the second in 2014.
A. The Provincial Legislature of British Columbia:
In 2013 Canadians learned that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had arrested two Muslims for attempting to set off three bombs on the grounds of the British Columbia legislature on Canada Day, July 1.
This event seemed to have confirmed dramatically the fears on which the War on Terror feeds: Islamic terrorism, as a threat to democracy both symbolic and real, is alive and well in North America.
But let us look more closely at the perpetrators.
The couple arrested, John Nuttall and Amanda Korody, had allegedly self-converted to Islam in 2011. According to Ian Mulgrew, journalist for the Vancouver Sun who attended the lengthy trial, “These new Muslim converts ‘discovered’ Islam in a Lower Mainland camouflage store while on a walkabout in an alcoholic haze.” Nuttall and Korody were not members of a Muslim community; in fact, we have been told that when they began talking about the need for jihad members of the B.C. Muslim community promptly reported them to police.
Mulgrew has described Nuttall and Korody as “impoverished, troubled drug addicts.”
After they were brought to the attention of police Nuttall and Korody “were befriended by an [RCMP] officer pretending to be an Arab businessman with extremist connections. Over the following months, he encouraged their Islamic militance and introduced them to other Mounties acting as jihadis.” Mulgrew refers to this exercise as a “stage-managed operation.” More than 240 members of the RCMP were involved in this exercise.
“Over the following months, the [RCMP] corporal [posing as their Muslim friend] encouraged their extremism, bought Nuttall a suit…paid him for meaningless jobs, gave him money for groceries, all the while pressing him to formulate a viable terrorist plot.”
On the audiotapes of police interactions with Nuttall, the RCMP mole can at one point be heard berating Nuttall for his “poorly researched plan to hijack a Via Rail passenger train in Victoria that no longer exists.” (The remarks are by Canadian Press journalist Geordon Omand.)
The evidence consistently suggests that Nuttall had been indulging in fantasies. His plans were not rooted in the real world. What was the RCMP response on learning this? On the undercover audiotapes the police mole, after criticizing him for his poor research, can be heard saying to Nuttall: “I’m here to make what you have in your head come true.”
In other words, people cannot be arrested in Canada for having violent fantasies, but the RCMP is permitted to turn these fantasies into reality so that an arrest can be made and the victim fed to the ever-hungry War on Terror.
Each of us may have our moment of special anger as we read the records of this case. My moment came when I read about Nuttall having an awakening of conscience in the weeks before the planting of the bombs.
“Until a couple of days ago, I didn’t clue in that people were going to die. I’ve never killed anybody. I’m not a murderer.”
At another point Nuttall says clearly that he needs spiritual counseling.
“I want to know in my heart that I did the right thing—I need some spiritual guidance.”
The RCMP mole, anxious to discourage these signs of an awakening of conscience, replies: “What’s this spiritual guidance going to give you?”
Nuttall says: “This is about my soul were talking about, my wife’s soul.”
“All of us,” intones the costumed RCMP officer, “we have our own destiny… Allah chooses it for us, we don’t choose it for ourselves.”
Here is the essence of entrapment. A citizen shows clear signs of being ready to back away from a not yet committed crime but the police, instead of encouraging this tendency, work to beguile, seduce, and trap the citizen into the commission of this crime.
But there was more. A frightening little videotape was found in which Nuttall and Korody, with faces hidden, exhorted people to carry out jihad and expressed inclinations toward martyrdom.
But who urged the couple to make the video? Who helped at every stage in its creation? Who filmed it? Who even supplied the black banner used as a backdrop? Why, the RCMP. The film was an RCMP production.
Neither the entrapment of this couple, nor even the assistance in making a martyrdom video, involves creativity on the part of the RCMP. Canada’s federal police have for some years been aping the FBI, which has a long record of such operations and has made them central to the War on Terror. Those of you who wish to look into this should read Trevor Aaronson’s book, The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism. If you do not have time to read the book, please watch Aaronson’s TED talk on the internet.
In the end, RCMP operatives convinced Nuttall to concentrate on a practical weapon, something he might actually be able to manage. They suggested he build pressure-cooker bombs and gave him advice on how to do it. They assured him they would supply the required explosive substance—to which he had no access.
Then they drove Nuttall around Victoria and found him a nice place to put the bombs—behind the bushes on the grounds of the B.C. legislature.
This case is so outrageous that even mainstream media have carried angry criticism of the RCMP. Journalist Ian Mulgrew has said: “this operation is redolent of a make-work project by the Mounties and the federal justice department to bolster the rhetoric of the prime minister.”
Consider Mulgrew’s statement. Let us give credit where credit is due: he is a mainstream Canadian journalist with the courage to say that the RCMP’s actions in this operation are not real policing at all (he calls them “pretend policing”) but a political act constructed to support the Conservative government’s involvement in the War on Terror. Everything I have seen about the case supports this claim.
The fact is that in Canada today, as in the U.S., federal police and intelligence agencies have politicized both policing and the courts. They have corrupted both sets of institutions. In doing so they are driven by, and in turn are supporting, an aggressive global conflict framework, the War on Terror, that is based on lies and deception.
And let me remind you of one aspect of the 2013 stage production that is often neglected. It involved the Canadian federal police encouraging a threat to a Canadian legislature.
B. The Parliament of Canada:
And now we arrive at the fourth and last case from the annals of the War on Terror to be reviewed today. This is the invasion of the Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa on October 22, 2014.
Senator Céline Hervieux-Payette has recalled her experience in her Senate office:
At 2:30 p.m., to cries of “Police,” my assistant opens the office’s main door. He comes face to face with soldiers aiming their machine guns at him and ordering him to put his hands in the air. One by one, our doors are opened and the soldiers point their guns at my other assistants who exit their offices, hands in the air, as if they were criminals… The door we go through is destroyed; glass has exploded all over the floor. The door across the hallway has also been knocked in. Glass litters the hallway. There are more than 50 people crammed into four offices, everyone talking to one another…
I sit near the open window. I’m breathing but stunned: parliamentarians are under the command of the military. Parliament is in the hands of the armed forces.
The persons holding the automatic weapons were almost certainly federal police officers, not members of the armed forces, but for our purposes today the distinction may not be important. Men in camouflage clothing with heavy boots, helmets, and automatic weapons would have been hard for most Canadians to identify. Let us simply say that security forces took control of Parliament. The image fits the theme of this talk very well.
But you are thinking: naturally they took control—an armed gunman was running down the hall shooting!
Yes, but let us look a bit more closely at the affair.
I want to begin by saying I do not pretend to have sorted out the facts of this attack. I am not in a position to say with confidence that the RCMP were complicit. But, in a report I have written on this incident, The October 22, 2014, Ottawa Shooting: Why Canadians Need a Public Inquiry, I do claim that (a) there are very serious unanswered questions about this series of incidents (I list 32 questions), (b) the RCMP have given both misleading and false information to the public and (c) in any serious inquiry the possibility of RCMP complicity would have to be considered.
The RCMP are, of course, the ones in charge of the investigation of the October 22, 2014 events. But this simply illustrates the dilemma faced by citizens in North America. The agencies charged with investigating acts of alleged Islamic terrorism have a proven record of incitement, entrapment and framing. They would, for this reason, be treated as suspects within an uncorrupted system of policing and litigation.
When we look for recognition of this obvious truth in mainstream North America media today we will seldom find it. I saw not a single person interviewed on television or radio, or quoted in mainstream newspapers, in Canada in the days after the October 22, 2014 attacks, who was willing to raise this as a serious possibility.
Drawing on the 2013 Canada Day case, we might ask our question this way: Could the 2014 impoverished drug addict from Vancouver (Zehaf-Bibeau) have been assisted by the RCMP the way the 2013 impoverished drug addict from Vancouver (Nuttall) was assisted? Could the two acts of intimidation of the people’s elected representatives have belonged to the same pattern of police behavior?
Before entering into the critical questioning of the mainstream account of October 22, I draw attention to the triad we have seen before: Threat, Unity, Reaction.
Let us begin with threat. After allegedly shooting Corporal Cirillo at the War Memorial the suspect, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, made it to the Centre Block of Parliament. The Conservative caucus, including Mr. Harper, was assembled behind a door on one side of the central Hall of Honour, while the New Democratic Party was assembled behind a door on the other side. To the astonishment and horror of the MPs, a barrage of shooting broke out in the Hall.
Globe and Mail reporter Josh Wingrove caught the gunfire (second volley) on his Blackberry, and the showing of this video footage gave the public a dramatic sense of what MPs, hunkered down behind poorly barricaded doors off the main hall, heard at that time.
Volley one, which had occurred prior to the volley caught on this video, had roughly the same number of shots as volley two.
So MPs certainly felt threatened. The danger was emphasized by the CBC, which said on October 22 that the perpetrator may have fired 30 shots in the Hall of Honour. John Baird, then the Minister of Foreign Affairs, said on Anderson Cooper’s TV show on October 23 that if Sergeant-at-Arms Kevin Vickers had not killed Zehaf-Bibeau a dozen people might have been killed.
It turned out these statements were based on fantasy. The evidence we now have suggests that the suspect, Zehaf-Bibeau, ran into Centre Block with two bullets in his rifle. His firearm was a lever-action hunting rifle—a model first produced in 1894. Zehaf-Bibeau’s goals at that point are not clear, but he fired his two bullets, hitting no one (security guard Samearn Son appears to have been hit in the leg by a ricochet) and at one point he declined to shoot a security guard he was facing at point blank range. In the space between volleys he seems to have loaded one more bullet in his rifle, which he fired—again hitting no one—just before dying in a hail of bullets less than two minutes after entering the building. He did not, therefore, shoot 30 times; he shot three times. And he was in no position to kill a dozen people. Of the roughly 59 shots heard by MPs, 56 were fired by police with semi-automatic 9mm handguns.
While it is important to sort out these facts, it remains true that the feeling of threat experienced by MPs was intense. They heard a huge barrage of shots, could not see what was going on, and felt at risk.
How about the next member of our triad, unity?
We have a remarkable piece of footage from the next day, October 23, fully as striking as the singing of God Bless America on the steps of the Capitol. Kevin Vickers, apparently one of the two men who killed Zehaf-Bibeau, was Sergeant-at-Arms and regularly carried the mace into Parliament. (The mace represents the authority of the Speaker and the right of the House, transmitted to it by the crown, to pass laws.) When Mr. Vickers entered Parliament with the mace on October 23 he was given a prolonged standing ovation by the House, with members of all political parties enthusiastically participating.
In addition to this particular symbolic statement of unity we saw in Canada the embraces familiar to us from the U.S. incidents of the fall of 2001. The Canadian Prime Minister signaled his trans-party solidarity with Mr. Trudeau of the Liberal Party and Mr. Mulcair of the NDP with hugs.
So we had threat and we had unity. The third element is reaction, which possesses two components. Internally, citizens and their representatives are all supposed to pull together, sacrificing civil rights or having them sacrificed on their behalf. Externally, they are to fling themselves at the enemy—whoever has been assigned that role.
In Prime Minister Harper’s speech on October 22 he made clear, albeit in genteel and delicate language, that he intended to move ahead on both fronts: to give more power to national security agencies at home while joining with allies in military action abroad.
This week’s events are a grim reminder that Canada is not immune to the types of terrorist attacks we have seen elsewhere around the world…this will lead us to strengthen our resolve and redouble our efforts and those of our national security agencies to take all necessary steps to identify and counter threats and keep Canada safe here at home, just as it will lead us to strengthen our resolve and redouble our efforts to work with our allies around the world and fight against the terrorist organizations who brutalize those in other countries with the hope of bringing their savagery to our shores. They will have no safe haven.
The forms this reaction took are well known. Internally we had the passage of a series of bills, including the famous Bill C-51. Externally, we found the victim of the War Memorial shooting, Corporal Cirillo, quickly exploited in Iraq.
So we have the triad found in the War on Terror in its autumn, 2001 manifestation. The presence of death in the October 22 events has guaranteed that the pattern will be deeply inscribed in people’s consciousness. The absence of killing in the B.C. bombers incident is, I am convinced, one of the reasons the incident has had relatively little impact in Canada. In fact, the lengthy court case associated with this incident—still not resolved as this talk is being given—has embarrassed the RCMP at the same time the lack of casualties has left the Canadian population uninterested. The operation cannot be called a success.
Would it not be tempting for police, after such a failure, to mount an operation in which there are deaths to draw people’s attention and where the perpetrator or patsy is killed in the operation so that there will never be a court case?
I am aware that I have to this point offered no evidence that the October 22, 2014 incident was planned or carried out with police complicity. Let me now, therefore, look at selected aspects of the RCMP’s performance and foreknowledge. In my view these are sufficiently peculiar, even if they were the only anomalies encountered, to justify a public inquiry. For other problematic issues in the case my report may be consulted.
I begin with a question: Where did the most blatant security failure occur, which allowed the suspect to make it into a building of Parliament after shooting Mr. Cirillo at the War Memorial? The answer is that the main security failure occurred between the time he emerged from his car in front of the bollards near East Block until the time he entered the doors of Centre Block. This zone was the responsibility of the RCMP. As he stepped onto Parliament Hill he was no longer the responsibility of the Ottawa police, and as he entered Centre Block he became the responsibility of House of Commons security. In between the RCMP was responsible.
Now, during that brief period when he was the responsibility of the RCMP he ran from the bollards along the grass in front of the East Block, his keffiya over the lower part of his face, his long hair flowing, and his Winchester rifle in his hands. He hijacked a black ministerial car in front of East Block. The driver got out and ran away at top speed. The suspect then got into the black car with his rifle and drove straight to Centre Block. On his way he passed two white RCMP vehicles. Neither moved to intercept him, although either one could have done so. Neither seems to have made a serious effort to catch him or intercept him on the rest of his journey to Centre Block, although they followed him to his destination.
I am not interested in blaming the officers in these two cars. The more important issue is the fact that the RCMP has such a thin and permeable line of security, not to mention a communications system that performed very badly. Two cars between the suspect and Parliament, each with one officer, neither of whom seemed to expect anything and neither of whom appeared to have heard the 911 calls from the War Memorial? Neither of whom appears to have been able to warn the House of Commons security, who were, therefore, caught off guard when Zehaf-Bibeau burst through the door?
We now know, thanks to a CBC access to information request, that the RCMP were short by at least 29 persons in their Parliament Hill security at that time. We also know that the extra patrols in the vicinity that the RCMP had mounted in mid-October due to various incidents had been halted two days before the October 22 incident.
Am I being a Monday morning quarterback? Will you object that it is all very well to bemoan this reduction of security in retrospect but that the RCMP could not possibly have known of the danger at the time? Well, I certainly would have thought that the killing of a soldier at Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu two days earlier by an apparent “terrorist” would have led to some tightening of security. But, beyond that, there were plenty of signs of danger.
We are now touching on one of the most explosive aspects of the October 22, 2014 case, namely advance warnings. If we turn to the RCMP and ask what was the stated and official position we find it set out very clearly. Commissioner Paulson said without hesitation that there had been “no advance warning.” Is this true? Consider the following list:
(1) October 8, 2014
Warning: potential “knife and gun” attacks inside Canada.
Source: NBC News, crediting US intelligence sources, in turn crediting Canadian authorities. The warning was quickly denied by Canadian authorities.
(2) October 17:
Warning: “heightened state of alert”
Source: Integrated Terrorism Assessment Centre (ITAC), which is housed at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) but has several partner organizations, including the RCMP.
(3) October 17:
Warning: “violent act of terrorism”
Source: Privy Council Office (PCO), which advises the Prime Minister.
(4) October 18:
Warning: ISIS considering attacks on uniformed law enforcement persons in Canada
Source: Criminal Intelligence Integrated Unit of the RCMP
(5) October 21:
Warning: [We do not know what is in this report, which the RCMP has refused to release, but it was apparently based on more than the lethal October 20 event in Quebec.]
Source: National Intelligence Coordination Centre, RCMP
(6) September to October, 2014, beginning about a month before the October 22 events
Warning: There was a war-gaming of “an attack in Quebec followed by an attack in another city” (CBC journalist Adrienne Arsenault called it the “precise scenario” that unfolded in October).
Source: Adrienne Arsenault, speaking on The National, CBC television, October 22, 2014. According to her the participants in the war game included CSIS, the RCMP, and the National Security Task Force.
We find, in short, that there were repeated warnings beginning at least a month before October 22 and growing more intense in the five days prior to the attacks. Such warnings are not at all normal in Canada. ITAC’s last similar warning had been issued about four years previously. As to the precision in timing of the warnings, Craig James, an official at the B.C. legislature, said that his office had been told “there may be a problem this week.” How extraordinary. There was, indeed, a problem “this week:” there was a lethal attack on the Monday (October 20) followed by a lethal attack on the Wednesday (October 22).
But the words of Craig James raise another issue: it is not merely the timing that is peculiar but also the institutions warned. With warnings going out to legislatures in Canada, how could the most important legislature at all have been left with no warning? As journalist Michael Smyth of The Province put it: “our provincial politicians [in B.C.] and legislative security staff were well-briefed by the feds here, but the RCMP in Ottawa got taken by surprise? What is wrong with this picture?”
What is more, consider the peculiarity in the October NBC warning. “Knife and gun” attacks inside Canada? Such attacks are very uncommon. Yet both on October 20 and October 22 large knives were found at the crime scene. Is this a coincidence?
Finally, we have the war-games exercise, which was found to be oddly prophetic when an attack in the province of Quebec (October 20) was followed by an attack in a second city (Ottawa, Ontario). It is true that part of the war-game scenario mentioned by Arsenault (a third incident with returnees from Syria) did not manifest itself, but there were certainly efforts, which involved RCMP lies, to tie both October suspects to Syria.
So, what are we to think of Mr. Paulson’s statement about “no advance warning?” Mr. Paulson was lying. Why? There are two main possibilities.
First, he may have been lying to disguise gross RCMP incompetence. To suggest this is to stay within the bounds of acceptable discourse, although even in this case there should be calls for Mr. Paulson’s resignation.
But how does the incompetence theory fit with the fact that the although the PCO document of October 17 explicitly called for maintaining patrols, the RCMP, after the issuing of the PCO document, actually halted a series of patrols they had been making in the vicinity of Parliament Hill? And why would the RCMP, after receiving a series of clear warnings, allow themselves to remain short-staffed on the scene to the tune of at least 29 officers? Moreover, since the PCO warning explicitly called for maintaining excellent communications, how is it that the RCMP neither received nor passed on, in a timely way, effective warnings that would have prevented the suspect’s assault on Centre Block?
The unspeakable possibility—the possibility that is outside the bounds of respectability and will not be mentioned by mainstream media and political representatives–is that Mr. Paulson denied receiving warnings of the attacks because the RCMP were complicit in the attacks.
It is not wise to pretend we know the truth about an incident when we do not. I do not pretend, in this talk or in my written report, to know with certainty whether the Royal Canadian Mounted Police was complicit in the October 22, 2014 attacks in Ottawa. But I do know that, given its history of complicity in establishing “terrorist” threats, as well as the serious anomalies and unanswered questions that stare us in the face when we investigate the October 22 events, the RCMP must be regarded as suspects.
Conclusions:
Let me end this talk by reiterating five points.
- There is a pattern, common enough in war and found in the War on Terror: Threat, followed by Unity, followed by Reaction, which has an internal and external dimension.
Whatever the value of this pattern to human survival at various times in our history, it can leave populations open to deception and manipulation.
- In the War on Terror deception and manipulation are exactly what we find. There is strong evidence that legislatures of the U.S. and Canada have been subjected to physical intimidation that has facilitated both the internal projects (repressive legislation) and the external projects (invasions and occupation) of the leaders of the War on Terror.
- A strong social taboo has been constructed that has hampered awareness of this deception and manipulation. The taboo extends through the population but is especially strong in legislatures, including the Parliament of Canada.
- This taboo ensures that our Canadian Parliament, like the U.S. Congress, is unfit to protect citizens from the deceptions and violence of the War on Terror and is even unable to protect itself.
- Of the four cases dealt with today, I regard complicity in the physical intimidation of legislatures by state agencies as established in three cases. In the fourth case, the events of October 22, 2014 in Canada, state-sponsored intimidation had not been established, but is a possibility that must be explored through investigation and research—formal and public if possible, but otherwise by members of civil society using all their intelligence and determination.
*
The text was edited by MacQueen for publication in Truth and Shadows. In addition to being a retired professor of Religious Studies and founder of McMaster’s Peace Studies program, MacQueen is the author of The 2001 Anthrax Deception: The Case For a Domestic Conspiracy.
Sources
Since this was a public talk rather than an article it included no notes. I directed the audience to websites where they could find more information.
9/11:
Websites important for understanding the destruction of the World Trade Center:
Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth:
(The booklet, Beyond Misinformation: What Science Says About the Destruction of World Trade Center Buildings 1, 2, and 7 (Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, 2015) can be purchased below:)
http://www.beyondmisinformation.org/#beyond-misinformation
Consensus 9/11: The 9/11 Best Evidence Panel:
The Journal of 9/11 Studies:
http://www.journalof911studies.com/
Anthrax:
There are several good books, but my own explores the relationship of the anthrax attacks to the 9/11 attacks more closely than other books: The 2001 Anthrax Deception: The Case For a Domestic Conspiracy (Clarity Press, 2014). This book also explores the intimidation of Congress by both sets of attacks.
http://www.claritypress.com/MacQueen.html
The two Canadian cases:
Information about the Nuttall-Korody case was obtained mainly from a series of articles by Vancouver Sun journalist Ian Mulgrew, who attended the couple’s trial and regularly posted articles about it.
Information about the events of October 22, 2014 can be found in my report, The October 22, 2014, Ottawa Shootings: Why Canadians Need a Public Inquiry (fall, 2015). The bibliography in that report includes both primary and secondary sources for those wishing to learn more. The report can be downloaded here:
http://democracyprobe.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/09021508.pdf
A slightly revised version is available here:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01C6DZU6W
Copyright © Prof. Graeme McQueen
Featured Video
Col Doug Macgregor: US Strategy in Iran NEVER ADMIT DEFEAT
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
Fact File : Civilian Internment 1939 – 1945
BBC – Compiled in 2003
Internment of civilian nationals belonging to opposing sides was carried out in varying degrees by all belligerent powers in World War Two. It was also the fate of those servicemen who found themselves in a neutral country.
At the outbreak of war there were around 80,000 potential enemy aliens in Britain who, it was feared, could be spies, or willing to assist Britain’s enemies in the event of an invasion. All Germans and Austrians over the age of 16 were called before special tribunals and were divided into one of three groups… continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- NATO’s Baltic Operation Aims to Curb Russian Cargo Traffic
- France’s New Nuclear Strategy to Weaken Security in Europe – Russian Foreign Ministry
- Col Doug Macgregor: US Strategy in Iran NEVER ADMIT DEFEAT
- IRNA denies 2nd round of negotiations: reports
- Israel attacks three nations for alleged backing of Iran
- Ex-intel officer questions Israeli strategy in Lebanon as losses mount
- Netanyahu’s ‘total victory’ to total flop
- REPORT: United States Now Global Outlier Ignoring Vaccine Injured as UK Inquiry Acknowledges Harms
- The Gratitude of the Captured
- Hezbollah denies involvement in deadly attack on UNIFIL in south Lebanon
- If Americans Knew
- Israeli soldier takes sledgehammer to Jesus statue in Lebanon – Daily Update
- Israel employs ‘Gaza tactics’ in Lebanon, destroying 1,000 homes per day – Daily Update
- Israel relegates another population to life in tents – Daily Update
- Senate again fails to block weapons to Israel
- Think the Iran war is a disaster? Blame these DC think tanks first.
- Number of Palestinian Prisoners Rises By 83% Since October 2023
- With multiple “ceasefires” in place, Israel keeps on killing in Gaza and Lebanon – Daily Update
- Mearsheimer: Israel Owns Trump
- Mark Levin and Jonathan Pollard Push for Nuking Iran
- TCN: America Enables Israel’s Crimes
- No Tricks Zone
- EV Industry Reached $70 Billion In Losses In 2024 Due To Delusional Green Ideologies
- Reality Check: Maldives Have Actually Grown In Size Or Remained Stable Over Recent Decades
- Abrupt Climate Change Also Occurred NATURALLY In The Past …25 Times During Last Ice Age
- Cave Discovery Reveals Today’s Desert Climates Were Recently Far Warmer, Wetter, Teeming With Life
- German Expert: Heat Dome Led To Record Temps In Western USA…Warmer In 1934, 1936
- New Study: No Linear Warming Or Glacier Retreat Along Northern Antarctic Peninsula Since 1980s
- An Inconvenient Tree: Uncovered In Alps… Europe Much Warmer Than Today 6000 Years Ago
- New Study Reports A 60% Slowdown In Greenland’s Ice Loss Rate In The Last Decade
- Low Intensity Tornado Wrecks Major Solar Farm, Creating A Potential Toxic Dump
- New Study Finds Warming Saves Lives…Cold Temperatures 12 Times More Deadly Than Excess Heat
Aletho News 