There has been much hand-wringing of late in Official Washington about an editorial shakeup at The New Republic and the possibility that the century-old political magazine’s legacy will somehow be tarnished by its new owner. But the truth about The New Republic is that it has more blood on its hands than almost any other publication around, which is saying something.
In my four decades in national journalism – that’s two-fifths of The New Republic’s life – what I have seen from the magazine is mostly its smug advocacy for U.S. interventionism abroad and snarky putdowns of antiwar skeptics at home. Indeed, you could view The New Republic as the most productive hothouse for cultivating neoconservative dogma — and at least partly responsible for the senseless slaughter associated with that ideology.
Though The New Republic still touts its reputation as “liberal,” that label has been essentially a cover for its real agenda: pushing a hawkish foreign policy agenda that included the Reagan administration’s slaughter of Central Americans in the 1980s, violent U.S. interventions in Iraq, Syria and other Muslim countries for the past two decades, and Israel’s suppression of Palestinians forever.
Indeed, the magazine’s long-ago-outdated status as “liberal” has long served the cause of right-wingers. The Reagan administration loved to plant flattering stories about the Nicaraguan Contras in The New Republic because its “liberal” cachet would give the propaganda more credibility. A favorite refrain from President Ronald Reagan’s team was “even the liberal New Republic agrees …”
In other words, the magazine became the neocon wolf advancing the slaughter of Central Americans in the sheep’s clothing of intellectual liberalism. Similarly, over the past two decades, it has dressed up bloody U.S. interventionism in the Middle East in the pretty clothes of “humanitarianism” and “democracy.”
The magazine – which has given us the writings of neocons Charles Krauthammer, Fred Barnes, Steven Emerson, Robert Kagan and many more – has become a case study in the special evil that can come from intellectualism when it supplies high-minded rationalizations for low-brow brutality.
In the world of the mind, where The New Republic likes to think it lives, the magazine has published countless essays that have spun excuses for mass murder, rape, torture and other real-world crimes. Put differently, the magazine afforded the polite people of Official Washington an acceptable way to compartmentalize and justify the ungodly bloodshed.
Perhaps The New Republic had a different existence in the years before I arrived on the scene. I’ve heard some longtime New Republic lovers wax on about its era of thoughtful progressivism. But The New Republic that I encountered from the 1970s onward was the magazine of Martin Peretz, a nasty neocon who cared little about journalism or even thoughtful analyses, but rather pushed a dishonest and cruel agenda including crude insults against Muslims.
In his later years after moving part-time to Israel, Peretz began to expose more of his personal agenda. In one TNR blog post regarding the proposed Islamic community center in Lower Manhattan which prompted post-9/11 right-wing outrage, Peretz declared: “Frankly, Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims. And among those Muslims led by the Imam Rauf [the promoter of the Islamic center] there is hardly one who has raised a fuss about the routine and random bloodshed that defines their brotherhood.
“So, yes, I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.” (Facing accusations of racism, Peretz later issued a half-hearted apology which reiterated that his reference to Muslim life being cheap was “a statement of fact, not opinion.”)
A New York Times magazine profile of Peretz in 2011 noted that Peretz’s hostility toward Muslims was nothing new. “As early as 1988, Peretz was courting danger in The New Republic with disturbing Arab stereotypes not terribly different from his 2010 remarks,” wrote Stephen Rodrick.
Steven Emerson, one of Peretz’s favored TNR writers, also became notorious for similar Islamophobia as well as shoddy and dishonest journalism. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Unmasking October Surprise Debunker.”]
Ignoring the History
Yet, very little of this real history of The New Republic can be found in the mainstream media’s coverage of the recent staff revolt against plans by new owner (and Facebook co-founder) Chris Hughes to modernize the publication. Hughes’s new chief executive – former Yahoo official Guy Vidra – vowed to rebuild the magazine as a “vertically integrated digital media company.”
At the Washington Post, the New York Times and pretty much the entire MSM, there has been much rending of garments over these plans and the ouster of some top editors but almost nothing about what some of those now ex-TNR editors actually did.
One was longtime literary editor Leon Wieseltier, who was a prominent advocate for the Iraq War and a promoter of right-wing Zionism. Another was editor Franklin Foer, another hawkish intellectual. Their departures were followed by a walkout by a dozen or so members of the editorial staff, resignations from contributing columnists, an outraged letter from former TNR writers and furious columns by ex-TNR staffers.
“The New Republic is dead; Chris Hughes killed it,” wailed Post columnist Dana Milbank, another TNR alumnus.
On Monday, the 31-year-old Hughes took to the Post’s op-ed page to offer Official Washington something like a paper bag to control all the hyperventilating. He denied that he was behaving like some spoiled Silicon Valley rich kid imposing an Internet-style culture on an old-fashioned print publication, but rather was trying to save the institution.
“I came to protect the future of the New Republic by creating a sustainable business so that our journalism, values and voice — the things that make us singular — could survive,” Hughes wrote.
But the real question is: Does The New Republic deserve to survive? Wouldn’t it be appropriate that at least one neocon institution faced some accountability for the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, not to mention the other victims of reckless U.S. interventionism in the Middle East or the tens of thousands of murdered Central Americans during the Reagan years?
Though The New Republic’s apologists depict the magazine as an honorable place where “long-form journalism” thrived and “serious thinking” was nourished, the reality was actually much different. Indeed, much of the trivialization of U.S. journalism in the 1980s stemmed from the punchy opinions voiced by TNR columnists as they moonlighted as talking heads on the TV “shout shows,” like “The McLaughlin Group” and “Inside Washington.”
Many of the regulars on those media “food fights” came from The New Republic and lowered the intellectual level of Official Washington into a “thumbs up, thumps down” reductionism where political leaders were rated on scales of one to ten. Their well-compensated behavior was the opposite of true intellectualism or – for that matter – true journalism.
Phony Posture
The typical posture of these media-beloved neocons was to pretend that they were bravely standing up against some “liberal” orthodoxy, courageously daring to embrace the Nicaraguan Contras or other right-wing “freedom fighters” despite the danger of taking such principled stands.
The reality was that TNR’s writers were lining up behind the real power structure, standing with the Reagan administration and much of the major media while joining in the bullying of the relatively weak and vulnerable forces in Washington that went against this grain.
The phoniness of TNR’s pretend bravery was demonstrated by how the neocon commentators were rewarded with plum jobs, prominent op-ed slots, regular seats on the TV shows, lucrative speaking fees, book contracts, etc. The opposite was true for journalists who challenged the Reagan administration’s propaganda. They were the ones who faced real punishment.
Journalists who dared file critical stories about the U.S.-backed Salvadoran army or the CIA-trained Contra rebels found themselves reassigned or out on the street. The New York Times’ Raymond Bonner was the best known example after he was pulled out of Central America while under fierce right-wing attack for his accurate reporting on human rights atrocities in El Salvador.
In a similar case, the Reagan administration’s public diplomacy team browbeat National Public Radio for airing a story about a Contra massacre of farmworkers in northern Nicaragua. Sensitive to government strings on NPR’s funding, NPR executives appeased the administration by getting rid of foreign editor Paul Allen who had allowed the story to air.
Within a short time, Washington journalists understood that their route to professional success required them to swallow any propaganda from Reagan’s team, no matter how absurd.
That servility was on display when Reagan’s White House fumed over one human rights report citing 145 sworn affidavits signed by Nicaraguans who had witnessed Contra atrocities. Many of the witnesses described Contras slitting the throats of captives and mutilating their bodies.
In stepped The New Republic and one of its many pro-Contra writers, Fred Barnes, who countered the eyewitnesses by referencing the findings of a secret U.S. investigation which had absolved the Contras of many charges, he wrote. In a harsh article entitled “The Sandinista Lobby,” Barnes denounced the human rights community for hypocritically criticizing the innocent Contras and other pro-U.S. forces, while allegedly going soft on Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government.
But when I got hold of the investigative report in 1986, I found that it had been written by the CIA and was based on the word of the Contras themselves. One of the CIA’s key findings, supposedly debunking the slitting-throat allegations, was that the Contras said they could not have slit throats because they “are normally not equipped with either bayonets or combat knives.” The CIA failed to note that photographs of the Contras from that period showed them slouching off to battle carrying a variety of machetes and other sharp objects.
The absurdity of suggesting that the Contras could not have slit the throats of captives because they weren’t “normally” given knives should have been something a cub reporter would have laughed at. But clearly journalism was not what was going on at The New Republic where there was no interest in exposing the atrocities committed by the Contras. It was all about pushing a hawkish foreign policy and serving the Reagan agenda.
A Contra Exposé
That sort of behavior continued throughout the Reagan era with one notable exception in fall 1986 – when editor Jefferson Morley and investigative reporter Murray Waas asked me and my Associated Press colleague Brian Barger to expand the work that we had done exposing Oliver North’s secret Contra support network into a New Republic cover story.
Our article appeared in November 1986 while Peretz was out of town visiting Israel. But he soon weighed in after receiving a furious letter from then-Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Elliott Abrams, another arch-neocon. Abrams ostentatiously canceled his TNR subscription in protest of our article, and Peretz responded to Abrams’s complaint by excluding Waas from the magazine and putting Morley in the publisher’s doghouse.
The situation could have gotten worse for those who had a hand in bringing our story into the magazine, except that the Iran-Contra scandal broke wide open in November 1986, confirming that Barger and I had been right about North’s secret network. Abrams eventually pleaded guilty to misleading Congress (though he was later pardoned by President George H.W. Bush and was brought into President George W. Bush’s National Security Council to oversee Middle East policy, including the invasion of Iraq).
The New Republic’s pattern of playing fast and loose with the facts would eventually cause the magazine some embarrassment in 1998 when it was caught publishing a number of fabrications by writer Stephen Glass. But TNR never was held accountable for its support for atrocities in Central America, its pushing for illegal wars in the Middle East or its smearing of honest journalists and human rights investigators.
Though Peretz finally lost control of the magazine’s content in 2010, The New Republic has remained an important vehicle for pushing the neocon agenda. Earlier this year, TNR published a long exaltation to American interventionism by neocon Robert Kagan, a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century and a leading proponent for the Iraq War.
In the essay, “Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire,” Kagan “depicted President Obama as presiding over an inward turn by the United States that threatened the global order and broke with more than 70 years of American presidents and precedence,” wrote Jason Horowitz in the New York Times. “He called for Mr. Obama to resist a popular pull toward making the United States a nation without larger responsibilities, and to re-assume the more muscular approach to the world out of vogue in Washington since the war in Iraq drained the country of its appetite for intervention.”
President Barack Obama, who remains hypersensitive to criticism from well-placed and well-connected neocons, responded by inviting Kagan to lunch at the White House and shaping his foreign policy speech at West Point’s graduation in May to deflect Kagan’s criticism.
So, when you read the endless laments from the mainstream U.S. news media about the tragedy of having some Silicon Valley barbarians violating the sacred journalistic temple of The New Republic, you might reflect on all the suffering and death that the magazine has rationalized and intellectualized away.
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Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
Recently Israel’s department for her colonies of Australia and Canada dispatched new “anti-terror” legislation which will make it illegal for Australian and Canadian subjects of the Israeli Empire to “condone” so called “terrorism”.
In the above video Australia’s Zionist Attorney-General, George Brandis, can be viewed enabling such farcical anti-free-speech laws to be foisted upon the people of Australia without oversight, by refusing to answer critical questions from senators about the controversial legislation.
That Canada and Australia are governed out of the same colonial office in Tel Aviv was suggested when it was revealed that Prime Ministers John Howard and Stephen Harper had been given the same pro-Iraq-war script to read in 2003 (see below).
THE “TERRORIST” EVENTS of Wednesday October 22nd in Ottawa and two days earlier in St-Jean-sur-Richelieu bear all the hallmarks of a coordinated cross-border one-two punch false flag operation.
The first, the left jab hit-and-run killing of a Canadian soldier, would be the psychological softening up for the follow-up right cross, the killing of another Canadian soldier in Ottawa. Together they dazed the public to an extent that even the ostentatiously-iconic murder at the National War Memorial alone might not have achieved.
The context was within the intensification of the so-called “global war on terror” and in concert with the pro-military Stephen Harper government’s deployment of warplanes supposedly fighting “the terrorists” of the suddenly-emerging “Islamic State.” The first bombing sorties of Canadian F-18s took place hours after the violent acts of supposed “homegrown” and “self-radicalized” supporters of “Islamic jihad.”
Domestically the second outrage occurred on the very day the government was to introduce legislation giving the RCMP, CSIS and CSEC [FOOTNOTE: CSEC is changing its name (to CSE) so that it can continue to spy – and indeed do more spying abroad – but not have the word “Canada” associated with this spying. “Spy agency CSEC says goodbye to Canada” is the headline over an October 31stToronto Star story by Tonda MacCharles.
These coincidences of timing, I submit, are not coincidences at all but quite deliberately planned to maximize the intended impacts: greater public support for a new war in the Middle East, better chances for faster and less-questioned support in Parliament for the increased police and spy powers, and enhanced public approval ratings for the Harper government in the run-up to next year’s general election.
This article delves deeper into the timing including that the events happened, to the day, as military-intelligence “exercises” were taking place that precisely mirrored the “surprise” events. Other hallmarks include the prior involvement of government agents with both of the supposed jihadists, the fact that both were easy-to-manipulate “human wreckage” and the early “terrorism” branding led by the Prime Minister. Other hallmarks include the unfolding parade of memorable iconic elements and images, the “lone wolf” narratives, the dual role of the media in general to both to reinforce the official narrative and to fail to ask fundamental questions about it.
Ottawa shooter Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, especially, is tied to the “war on terror.” At the highest level of visibility, he’s a pawn marketed for public consumption to reinforce “global jihad” rhetoric.
On a subterranean level are two sets of fingerprints. One set shows the involvement of both Canadian and U.S. spy agencies and possibly other of the so-called “Five Eyes” (the others being the UK, Australia and New Zealand), not to mention the grotesquely corrupt FBI, with its record of mounting scores of false flag ops, that will be referred to later.
The second set of prints shows the work of the agencies’ gatekeeper “assets” in the media, in this instance in the USA as well as in Canada. They manipulate “the news.”
Telltale hallmarks of false flag ops
1 The timing – The exquisite timing of the National War Memorial outrage on the very day new laws were to be introduced by the Harper regime giving expanded powers to spook agencies – as well as additional cover for their “informants” so deep as to be impenetrable – is one hallmark of a world-class false flag op.
Added police powers at all times in any country, when an atmosphere of hysteria has been generated, are railroaded into laws in a flash, historically speaking. The new or expanded laws take decades to undo or ratchet down, if they ever are.
As Prof. Graeme MacQueen, author of an insightful and detailed new book, The 2001 Anthrax Deception: The Case for a Domestic Conspiracy, (Clarity Press, Inc., www.claritypress.com, ISBN 978-0-9860731-2-0; EBOOK 978-0-9860731-3-7) writes, the timing of the 2001 “anthrax letter attacks” or the “anthrax attacks” was just as the USA Patriot Act “was being hurried through Congress.” The notorious bill, propagandistically entitled “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism” Act, was signed into law October 26th, 2001, about three weeks after the first news of an “anthrax attack” broke. Bush followed up by giving his approval “to the first bulk domestic spying by the National Security Agency (NSA).” Such are the sea changes set into motion by perfectly-timed false flag ops.
Interestingly MacQueen notes that “gradually the hypothesis became widespread that the [anthrax] attacks were the second blow in a ‘one-two punch’ delivered by terrorists, the first blow having been the attacks of 9/11.”
Ottawa has gone the U.S. government one better by compressing the time between introduction of “anti-terror” legislation and a false flag “terror attack” to hours. Ottawa also subjected MPs and others on Parliament Hill to the sounds of gunfire amidst fearful uncertainty, in a fast-moving operation, again outdoing the Americans.
These events have also taken place during the lead-up to Remembrance Day. Government TV ads are in heavy rotation featuring World War I and World War II footage in black and white and colour, as well as video clips of Canadian peacekeepers. They send us to http://www.veterans.gc.ca/iremember. Stirring and nostalgic, these ads cannot be divorced from consideration of the impact of the Ottawa events. The ads (and much else) knit together in the public consciousness.
My wife and I almost always attend the Remembrance Day ceremonies at Toronto’s Old City Hall. (I posted a piece for this blog about the ceremonies in 2012) I tend to agree with predictions that turnout this year may exceed previous years. Remembrance Day speeches, as well as the whole setup of Remembrance Day ceremonies, tend to ennoble if not glorify war. This year the homilies are certain to make reference to the events in St-Jean-sur-Richeleau and Ottawa.
More than ever, this year the understandable sentiments of many will be channeled into reinforcing belief in the “reality” of the “war on terror.” Emotions will be manipulated into support for a militarized monopoly capitalist anti-life system of perpetual war and ever-increasing inequality.
Metrics are being reported that bear this out. A front-page story in The Globe and Mail on November 7th reports “a steady stream of support for the military in the days leading up to Remembrance Day.”
Under the headline “Poppy sales a sign support for military surging after attacks,” Tristan Simpson reports. “Legion officials say those events have become emblematic of a renewed patriotism – and have sparked an increase in military support.”
2 Prior “involvement” of agents of the state
“Prior contact” with alleged terrorists is a virtually guaranteed hallmark of false flag ops.
Both Zehaf-Bibeau and hit-and-run killer Martin Couture-Rouleau were “known to authorities.” As the main front page headline of the Toronto Star had it of Couture-Rouleau on October 22nd: “RCMP had suspect on their radar for months.”
On page A4 on the next day in the same paper, an edition dominated by 17 pages of coverage out of Ottawa, is a half-page devoted to how much “a Canadian security source” knew about Zehaf-Bibeau’s past.
The usual phraseology is that agents of CSIS or the RCMP “had been in contact with” the criminals or “had (these individuals) under surveillance” or “had been monitoring their activities.”
Is it entirely coincidental that both “terrorists” – as Harper labeled both early and often – were Quebeckers? Quebeckers as a generality are cool to Harper and his “war on terror” rhetoric. But they might be expected to warm up to his “national security” agenda on the basis of fear — insofar as they buy the official narratives.
Canadian authorities, it was reported, asked the FBI to assist in the investigation of the “terrorist” events in Canada. The FBI’s record shows that the assistance would most likely be in sharing with their buddies north of the border in the finer points of how to mount a false flag op. Investigative reporter Trevor Aaronson’s book The Terror Factory exposes the FBI’s inside role in creating “false flag terror.”
In a 2011 article in Mother Jones, Aaronson wrote:
Since 9/11, there have been hundreds of arrests of “terrorist suspects” and 158 prosecutions. Of all the reported “major terror plots,” only three can’t be directly tied to terror suspects who were directly recruited, trained and supplied by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Truth is, we also have questions about the other three.
In the case of the “anthrax attacks” the spider web of government agents and suspicious civilian players interacting with those initially put forward as anthrax terrorists and/or 9/11 “hijackers” was almost monolithic. Most were in Florida, within close geographic proximity. As MacQueen writes:
Academic researchers have largely tended to dismiss the Florida connections by accepting the FBI’s coincidence theory. … The question, however, is not whether actual hijackers were involved in sending out letters laden with anthrax spores: the question is whether fictions, verbal or enacted, were intentionally created to make this narrative seem credible. The [alleged hijackers] did not have anthrax, but the script portrayed them as likely to have it. [page 138]
The U.S. government repeatedly attempted to link the “anthrax attacks,” the “9/11 hijackers” and Iraq (remember Colin Powell’s now totally discredited dog-and-pony show at the UN?). But when those attempts fell apart, the domestic terror purveyors turned to Plan B, as MacQueen persuasively shows. Plan B was to finger a domestic “lone wolf,” scientist Bruce Ivins, who then became conveniently dead.
“The evidence suggests a grand plan, not an opportunistic foray,” writes MacQueen.
3 The chosen miscreants are “human wreckage”
It was Webster Tarpley, author of 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA who described the typical patsy recruited for manipulation by spy agencies as “human wreckage.”
It’s easy to understand how such individuals can easily be manipulated through bribes, other inducements, threats or psychological pressure up to and including sophisticated brain-washing techniques. These are known to have been developed by “spy” agencies over decades and in this country go back at least to the CIA’s self-admitted funding of “psychic driving” experiments under the Project MK-Ultra mind control program on unknowing civilians at McGill University from 1957 to 1964 under the direction of Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Ewen_Cameron).
Frequently mentally-disturbed people have been in trouble with the law. This was true of Zehaf-Bibeau and Couture-Rouleau. Zehaf-Bibeau was desperate, on the edge, unpredictable, wanted to die. Spy agencies find such people easily. The “chosen ones” will have Arabic names and be converts to Islam. Or have Middle East connections. Many combinations fill the bill to help the label “suspected terrorist” stick.
Run-ins with the law render disturbed individuals additionally vulnerable. Police or “intelligence” agents can promise to use their influence to gain shorter sentences if they’ve been convicted, more leniency if they’ve already been sentenced. Or get them off altogether. Conversely agents can threaten to use their influence to make things much worse for these individuals. Those promising or threatening often are in a position to deliver.
In this connection, the lead article in the Focus section of The Globe and Mail on October 25th by Doug Saunders actually describes, without his using the term, false flag ops by U.S. “authorities.”
It’s worth excerpting that section of his piece:
Authorities in the U.S. adopted the practice of catching lone-wolf figures in sting operations, in which they’d find disturbed young men online, provide them with prefabricated terror plots and (fake) weapons, and arrest them a moment before they were about to carry out their planned attack. This approach has been numerically successful – that is, it has intercepted a lot of putative terrorists – but many wonder if it’s simply making the problem worse, and turning police agencies into terrorism enablers.
“Often these are down-and-out losers in society who wouldn’t be able to pull off a decent attack on their own,” Dr. [Ramon] Spaaij, an Australian scholar with Victoria University and author of Understanding Lone Wolf Terrorism, says, “but the undercover police provide the weapons and suggest the targets … what that does is it has sown a lot of bad blood in Muslim communities – we’re out there preying on vulnerable young people and turning them into terrorists.”
What Saunders, whose body of work I happen to greatly admire, fails to note is that these “sting” (e.g., false flag) operations generate thousands of fear-inducing headlines; this may be their main purpose. Readers, listeners and viewers are led to believe that police have caught “real terrorists.” These false flag ops contribute the bulk of the “proof” for the so-called “war on terror.” It’s a continuous psychological assault and distortion of reality through manufacture of “reality.” The impact goes ‘way beyond “sowing bad blood in Muslim communities.” It’s a main driver of the fictional “war on terror.”
Besides, “bad blood” in Muslim communities would be one of the goals of the authors of this continuous fakery. This “bad blood” would fulfill at least two functions. One is to keep many Muslims in docile fear mode in which they can be more easily controlled. Second is that less docile Muslims, especially young unstable men, will react with anger and possibly go off the deep end. Perfect.
This is the same entrapment technique used to create the “Toronto 18.” And this is the same modus operandi the police use when they enable or program or bribe or threaten their patsies to cause violence.
As University of Guelph professor Michael Keefer wrote:
The theatrical arrests of 18 (mostly young) Muslims in Toronto in the Summer of 2006 reinforced media-driven paranoia that homegrown terrorists were everywhere. The unraveling of the case two years later exposes to view yet again the sinister and disgraceful behavior of Canada’s security intelligence apparatus, which has formed a habit of confecting false accusations of terrorism against Canadian citizens. The threat to Canadian society is not a bunch of Muslim boys playing paintball, it’s an ideologically driven government willing to curtail our civil liberties.
4 The “lone wolf” or “lone gunman” narrative
Without doubt there are instances of demented individuals who perform outrages single handed. The USA provides the most examples by far, with a plethora of berserk gunmen mowing down innocent citizens in malls, on college campuses and elsewhere.
In politically-charged false flag ops, by definition in virtually all cases agents in the shadows pull the levers to bring about the outrages. In the three highest profile assassinations of the last century and arguably most impactful historically, those of JFK, RFK and MLK, the establishment narrative has been that lone gunmen were responsible, in each case in the face of much evidence to the contrary. Lee Harvey Oswald was known to have worked for U.S. intelligence. He’s a classic “lone gunman” who wasn’t. Others include James Earl Ray, allegedly the killer of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who wasn’t, as proven in a civil trial in Memphis in 1999. The half white half black jury returned a verdict that civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. was the victim of an assassination conspiracy involving the CIA and the U.S. Army and did not die at the hands of an unaided lone gunman.
In the case of Zehaf-Bibeau the likelihood of enablers is rendered very high because of many unanswered questions. Among them, how did a deranged misfit living in shelters obtain both a gun and a car needed for him to go on his rampage?
5 “Lone wolves” tend to become quickly deceased
From Lee Harvey (“I am just a patsy”) Oswald to Rolando Galman (who gunned down Benigno Aquino, Jr., former Philippine Senator, as he stepped off his plane, and then himself was gunned down) to “Boston bomber” Tamerlan Tsarnaev, patsies or hired assassins tend to become deceased – quickly. Dead men tell no tales. Typically, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau and Martin Couture-Rouleau are no more.
In 2002 U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft named scientist Steven Hatfill a “person of interest” in connection with the “anthrax attacks” of a year before. As Graeme MacQueen writes: “The FBI concentrated on investigating him, publicly and aggressively. A year later Hatfill sued the Justice Department for libel and eventually he received $5.82 million in compensation…”
The FBI – presumably after a massive search for patsy material – decided in 2008 that the “anthrax killer” was Dr. Bruce Ivins, who had been working on an anthrax vaccine at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland.
“This time,” MacQueen writes, “the FBI faced no serious challenge from its chosen perpetrator because Ivins died shortly before he was to be charged with the crime. He was said to have committed suicide.” Tellingly, no autopsy was performed.
The death of an actual bona fide terrorist or, much more often the case, a recruited patsy (the classic being Oswald) obviates the possibility of a trial in a court of law (as distinguished from trial in the “court of public opinion”). Trial in a court of law carries with it the possibility of evidence emerging that could be damning to the state and the Crown’s case.
The bodies of killers, alleged killers or dead “terrorists” frequently are not dealt with appropriately. As Prof. John McMurtry of Guelph, author of The Cancer Stage of Capitalism: From Crisis to Cure, wrote in an October 29th essay: Zehaf-Bibeau “…went on a killing spree, with no known blood testing afterwards for the drugs he was evidently driven by, in the video record of his frenzied and super-charged behaviour, just as there was no known test of the body of crazed drive-over killer, Martin Couture-Rouleau. How extraordinary. How unspoken in the lavish profusion of other details… All such strange coincidences are part of the now familiar covert-state MO.”
The de facto executions of the killers or alleged killers are, however, less a necessity than a convenience to the national security state. This is because in those cases where the patsies, killers or alleged killers survive, their trials uniformly are fixed, as was the case with the “Toronto 18,” who rapidly became the Toronto nine, as charges were dropped against many of the teenaged “terror suspects.”
6 The branding
The St-Jean-sur-Richelieu events were instantly defined as “terrorism” by Prime Minister Stephen Harper in the House of Commons and thereafter were widely so defined by the military, by “intelligence experts,” RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson and by many media players. (There are honourable exceptions to the general rush to judgment within the media. We identify some later.)
The “anthrax attacks,” MacQueen writes, “were the result of a [domestic] conspiracy meant to help redefine the enemy of the West, revising the global conflict framework from the Cold War to the Global War on Terror.”
The events in Ottawa were not meant to replace the global-conflict framework but rather to reinforce the new 2001 model: “Islam” as the permanent mortal enemy of “the West.”
The rhetoric, like ad copy, is part and parcel of the branding.
Buzzwords (“war on terror,”), code words (“national security”), snarl words (“terrorists,” “radical Islam,” “threats”) and purr words (“our allies,” “security”) as semanticist S. I. Hiwakawa dubbed them, displace rational thought.
Equal in impact to that of language repetition, if not greater, were the iconic elements. The National War Memorial and Parliament are about as iconic as one can arrange in Canada. So to have the shooter start at one, then skedaddle over to the other on the same crazed mission is to do so on iconosteroids.
Add to that: two worthy soldiers representing Everyman, all Members of Parliament, the Prime Minister, a car-jacked driver, a hero in the person of the gun-toting Sergeant-at-Arms, the heart-wrenching footage of Corporal Cirillo’s five-year-old son wearing his father’s regimental hat, the corporal’s pet dogs, the grieving spouses and relatives and more.
It would be a mistake to overlook that the flesh and blood victims, Corporal Cirillo and Warrant Office Patrice Vincent, also were symbolic. They represent “Canada’s military,” “our men and women in uniform” who “serve our country” who “made the ultimate sacrifice.”
Many of the iconic themes of October 22nd were pre-echoed in the Toronto 18 trials, one of them being the alleged planning by the teen-aged patsies and dupes of “blowing up Parliament” and “beheading the prime minister.”
7 “Security exercises” and the false flag curiously overlap
A hallmark of false flag ops is that military, security, police or “intelligence” exercises precede or run simultaneously with a false flag operation. Run-throughs are necessary for all complex maneuvers. A drill also justifies assembling the human and other resources required.
Perhaps the most egregious exercise was the one admitted to be taking place at the time of the “London 7/7” tube “terror bombings” of July 7th, 2007. Peter Power, managing director of crisis management for the firm Visor Consultants, in a live interview on ITV News that was aired at 8:20 p.m. on the evening of the bombings, tells the host “… today we were running an exercise …. 1,000 people involved in the whole organization … and the most peculiar thing was that we based our scenario on simultaneous attacks on the underground and mainland station and so we had to suddenly switch an exercise from fictional to real.” Elsewhere he said the exercise specified the same stations that the “surprise bombers” targeted, which would qualify as one of the most far-fetched coincidences of all time.
On the day of 9/11 a minimum of five military drills were underway. One of them, Vigilant Guardian, involved the insertion of false radar blips onto radar screen in the Northeast Air Defense Sector, a fact that even made it into the fraudulent 9/11 Commission Report (although the others did not, which made the appearance of Vigilant Guardian a limited hangout).
All of which is relevant to what Mark Taliano wrote about the events in St-Jean-sur-Richelieu and Ottawa on October 31st: “The theory that U.S agencies were somehow implicated in the [Ottawa] tragedy is further reinforced by … Operation Determined Dragon, a joint Canada/U.S counter-terrorism drill…”
The first Canadian event, the fatal hit-and-run carried out by Couture-Rouleau, occurred on the first day of that drill, October 20th. From that day to 29th was the “execution phase” of a joint Canada-U.S.-NATO military-intelligence “linked exercise” named Determined Dragon 14 (in internal documents called “Ex DD 14”).
For details of Determined Dragon 14 one need look no further than the National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces website:
“Ex DD 14 will primarily focus on the lateral interface between NORAD, United States Northern Command (USNORTHCOM) and United States Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM) specifically in cyber and space domains,” visitors to the site are informed.
Among the strategic objectives specified on the are to “enhance
interagency partnerships” and to “institutionalize
battle procedures with partners such as regional
and component commanders, the Strategic Joint Staff,
the Associate Deputy Minister (Policy), and
the Canadian Forces Intelligence Command.” Another is
to enhance “bilateral planning with USNORTHCOM
and USSTRATCOM; and CJOC coordination with NORAD.
Under the heading “Linked Exercises” the Canadian site says that Ex DD 14 “is bound to other allied exercises by a common scenario and linked through multiple events:
Ex VIGILANT SHIELD, a NORAD-USNORTHCOM exercise focused on homeland defence and homeland security missions; and
Ex GLOBAL THUNDER, a USSTRATCOM-led exercise with the primary emphasis on exercising nuclear command and control capabilities.
It concludes that Ex DD 14 “offers an opportunity for regional joint task forces (RJTF) to leverage their own exercises.
For someone paying close attention to CBC-TV’s The National on October 25th, CBC senior correspondent Adrienne Arsenault came close to giving away the game. Anchor Peter Mansbridge begins by saying there are “lots of questions” about the day’s events. After he hears the usual line from regularly seen Ray Boisvert, “ex-CSIS,” Mansbridge turns to Arsenault, “who’s been looking at this whole issue of radicalization for the past year or so” and asks her what she can say. Arsenault replies:
They [Canadian authorities] may have been surprised by the actual incidents but not by the concepts of them. Within the last month we know that the CSIS, the RCMP and the National Security Task Force engaged in, I suppose they, ran a scenario that’s akin to a war games exercise if you will where they actually imagined literally an attack in Quebec, followed by an attack in another city, followed by a tip that that “hey some guys, some foreign fighters are coming back from Syria.” So they were imagining a worst case scenario. We’re seeing elements of that happening right now. … [Canadian authorities] may talk today in terms of being surprised but we know that this precise scenario has been keeping them up at night for awhile.” [my emphasis]
Mansbridge shows no interest in this remarkable statement by his senior correspondent.
But truth activist Josh Blakeney of the University of Lehbridge who also was one of the first out of the block in nailing these events as false flags, comments:
What an amazing coincidence that Canadian intelligence ran a drill envisioning an attack first in Quebec, then another city. What are the chances that these mock terror drills are just a coincidence? In nearly every instance of a major terrorist occurrence in the West, it has been revealed that intelligence services were conducting war games exercises mimicking the very events that later come to pass. And now we have confirmation that Canada’s intelligence services were doing the same thing.
All of which would seem to reflect adequate “information exchanges” with “our U.S. partner” and other “allies.” Yet Harper’s new “anti-terror” legislation will merge Canadian spooks and military even more into the global apparatus that can manufacture terror incidents pretty well anywhere any time.
8 Media manipulation on both sides of the border
On the crucial propaganda front the evidence is that “U.S. officials” initiated journalistic input, and government agents planted within the media on both sides of the border meddled with journalistic output.
Key mainstream media stories as well as tweets “disappeared.” Stories disappeared from Google. Both U.S. and Canadian mainstream reports were altered significantly. This could only be carried out by internal gatekeeper agents. Inputs and outputs left permanent fingerprints of the overt as well as behind-the-scenes manipulation.
Students of false flag operations have learned – just as regular detectives have learned in regard to standard non-political crimes – the first 24 or 48 hours provide critical evidence, before the criminals can begin covering their tracks.
Amy MacPherson of Free The Press Canada hit the ground running in those first hours and days. On Tuesday, October 23rd she posted a lengthy piece, carried the next day on GlobalResearch containing damning evidence of rolling censorship on social media including Twitter and in mainstream media including the Toronto Star and the CBC.
Equally if not more damning are her frame grabs showing that U.S. news outlets were fed information by “U.S. officials” identifying Zehaf-Bibeau as the Ottawa shooter prematurely, before Canadian media were able to identify him.
With accompanying grabs, MacPherson writes: “While Canadian news personalities were at police gunpoint, American outlets like CBS News and the [always suspect] Associated Press had a full story to sell, complete with the dead shooter’s name.”
At 10:54 a.m. Eastern, when the National War Memorial crime scene was not yet secured, CBS News stated: “The gunmen [sic] has been identified by U.S. officials to CBS News as Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, a Canadian national born in 1982.” MP Charlie Angus described gunshots around 10 a.m. American media had solved the murder 54 minutes later.
“By 4:58 p.m.” MacPherson notes, “the [CBS] story was edited to remove the shooter’s name, or any mention of the U.S. government’s knowledge.” She continues: “The only problem is no one could update the Google database quick enough with these changes, so the original information still appeared with general search results.
“The story was altered again in the evening, when the Canadian government allowed [her emphasis] the name of a shooter to be released and American media added law enforcement to their list of official sources. They also added a middle name, Abdul, to emphasize the suspect’s Islamic ties with an accusation of terrorism.”
She asks: “… how American intelligence knew the name of a ‘possible terrorist’ as the mayhem was still unfolding. How did Americans know when Canadians didn’t, and how was this information so widespread that American media and Google had access to distribute, but domestic reporters on the scene did not?
“Canadian parliamentary bureau chiefs didn’t possess the same information as their U.S. counterparts and faced the barrel of police guns as a press narrative was provided on their behalf by another country. If this is dubbed an act of terrorism that American sources had knowledge about to pre-report, then why weren’t steps taken to prevent the violence?”
Then there are the all-Canadian media anomalies. “The Toronto Star reported [that] multiple witnesses saw [Couture-Rouleau] with his hands in the air,” writes MacPherson, “when at least one police officer opened fire. They also say a knife was ‘lodged into the ground near where the incident occurred.’
“Well,” MacPherson continues, “that’s what the original story by Allan Woods, Bruce Campion-Smith, Joanna Smith, Tonda MacCharles and Les Whittington stated. A syndicated copy had to be located at theCambridge Times, because a newer, edited version at the Toronto Star appeared dramatically altered by Tuesday.”
That article (changed without disclosure) claims Couture-Rouleau was an Islamic radical who emerged from the vehicle with a knife in his hands. No mention of eyewitnesses who saw his hands in the air and the knife lodged in the ground (an image seen later on CBC-TV news).
As MacPherson writes: “The article was more than edited and qualifies as being replaced entirely, having lost its tone, facts and spirit from the original published version.
If it weren’t for smaller papers carrying The Star’s original syndicated content, there would be little or no proof of the first comprehensive version, she adds.
9 Failure of media to ask fundamental questions
These include, first and foremost: “Is it possible that agents of the state had a hand in this outrage?” This question might not be as difficult to raise as one might imagine. Suppose it were handled this way:
“There’s a long and well-documented history of authorities staging iconic events aimed at stampeding their publics into supporting government initiatives, especially initiatives supporting existing or proposed wars. Examples include Colin Powell’s introduction at the United Nations of alleged compelling proof – subsequently proven false – that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. [pause] Can it be ruled out definitively that behind-the-scenes actors in government circles in Canada had no hand whatsoever in the events of October 22nd?”
Of course, for any media person to ask such a question would pre-suppose that those who reach the level of Parliamentary correspondent or, higher still, anchor of a national news program would have developed deep skepticism based on hard-won knowledge of the history of such operations.
It would further pre-suppose that, had they developed such a grasp of history, they would be promoted to those levels.
What can we say? We can say: “These things ain’t going to happen.”
The “failure” to ask fundamentally important fully justified questions based on documented history known to many readers, listeners and viewers deserves extensive treatment in itself. The “failure” represents, from the point of view of a cover-up, success for the real perpetrators.
Such unasked questions are masked by the repetitive posing of essentially superficial questions and questions that beg answers. Press conferences are rife with the acceptance of the official line along with questions about minutiae within the line. One also hears a lot of really dumb and repetitive questions.
The graphically impressive front page of The Globe and Mail had it on October 23rd: “The murder of Corporal Nathan Cirillo, the storming of Parliament and the tough questions [my emphasis] arising from the chaos.”
The phrase “tough questions” in this context suggests – and their subsequent roll out reinforces – a central theme that buttresses the official line: that there have been “security lapses,” that these lapses are serious, that therefore “security agencies” need “more resources” to do their jobs “protecting our security” and “making us safe,” and so on and on.
Included among the questions most frequently trotted out by the media: “How can we strike a balance between “the need for greater security” on the one hand, and “the protection of privacy,” on the other.
This endlessly posed question has embedded within it several unexamined major premises, concealed significant historical facts and trends, as well as an ambiguity serving both concealments and that drives conclusions among readers, listeners and viewers that are ill-based, self-defeating and that inoculate those who are so manipulated against gaining greater understanding.
The premises include that privacy is ever and always a stand-alone good; that every person’s privacy is at risk equally with every other person’s; that privacy for each person or group means the same as for every other person or group; that in fact the two sides of the equation are security vs. privacy (as opposed, for instance, to security vs. freedom, although that equation – much more relevant – is raised fairly frequently) and that it is the good-faith activities of “security forces” that endanger “privacy.” Left out of the equation are the proven bad faith activities of “security forces.”
The concealments include that the threat to citizens can come from the good-faith actions of “security forces,” yes, but that in fact by a large preponderance come from rogue actions of “security forces” and “intelligence agencies,” both of which are virtually out-of-control now.
On protecting the identity of “intelligence sources
The historical record – not in the slightest acknowledged by the “security vs privacy” equation – shows conclusively that those most spied upon, whose personal security is threatened repeatedly, are those who question authority, those who are peaceful dissidents, those who seek and act for improvements to the status quo, specifically for more equality and justice, those who are left-of-centre up to and including revolutionaries. The danger posed to loss of privacy among those on the left is much greater than it is for those on the right or for those not politically involved at all, which is to say the vast majority of citizens. This historical record goes unaddressed in 99% or more of the discourse about the dangers of “loss of privacy.”
The large majority of people have little reason to fear the state, because they pose no perceived threat to the state. Accordingly, their need or wish to protect their privacy – for instance about their personal sex or financial lives – is of less interest to, is far less important to, the national security state than are the personal facts and political beliefs or acts of those on the left who pose a perceived threat to the status quo, however lawful or justified their words or actions may be.
Providing deeper, almost impenetrable, cover for informants, otherwise known colloquially as rats or ratfinks, is far from a pressing need for national security.
Rather, the history of informants shows that the majority, and in particular those who are chosen or come forward to “intelligence” agencies (or are assigned by these agencies), are owed much less protection from identity than they even now enjoy.
The case of RCMP informant Richard Young is just one that should give pause.
Young was recruited by the RCMP in British Columbia (he approached them) prior to 2007. He convinced them he had information on drug operations. An accomplished con man, he suckered the Mounties big time.
While they, through failure to carry out due diligence among other things, came under his spell he was taken under their witness protection program. Doing so is labour intensive and expensive. Under it, Young committed a murder, which is uncontested. The Mounties then did all in their considerable power to shield him from the consequences of that. This and more was documented by two CanWest reporters and then a Globe and Mail investigative team in 2007.
At the heart of the stupidity, naivete and wrong-doing by the RCMP was the continued insistence on protecting Young’s identity. Ultimately the Mounties’ failure and the harm done (wasted public money, a man getting away with murder under the protection of the RCMP, and the RCMP not properly held to account) were exposed by less than a handful of dedicated reporters.
A compelling but illegitimate reason for these agencies to seek total anonymity for their “informants” is that so many of these do not even qualify as such, but rather are individuals planted to manufacture false “intelligence” or carry out dirty tricks on targets chosen by these agencies. Documented history shows that typically the targets are law-abiding, well-informed, politically active (on the left) and even courageous citizens who nevertheless are considered “enemies of the state” by the security apparatus and its overlords.
Remember that the RCMP spied on Tommy Douglas to the extent that his dossier numbered 1,100 pages, only a few of which CSIS, which inherited the RCMP dossier, has released. The grounds for CSIS’s refusal are that it must protect the informants. This is the very group of unsavoury snitches that the Harper government wants to give deeper cover.
The otherwise much-touted need for transparency and accountability is not only forgotten within “terrorist threat” hysteria. It is turned on its head. It is claimed that transparency and accountability are threats to the public! And that anyone who suggests otherwise also is a threat. In a world of fear the good becomes bad and the bad becomes good.
The so-called “war on terror,” fed by the national security state to the public like slop to pigs, paves the way through regression to a world of “military tribunals” (an oxymoron), of Star Chambers, to a new Dark Ages.
Outcomes of this particular false flag op
√ It makes the task much harder for those warning the public of the dangers of the government’s legislation endowing intelligence agencies with greater powers, more resources, fewer restrictions and less transparency.
√ Providing the RCMP and other spy agencies with even more anonymity for informants is a particular danger, as noted at length above.
If the laws being pushed by Harper today go through, the RCMP, CSIS or CSEC in a similar case in the future would be even more enabled to waste the time of personnel and of other resources, and of taxpayer public money, for little or no gain in public safety or security.
√ Reduction of civil liberties: easier detentions, extraditions
√ Increased invasion of privacy
√ Intimidation of legislative branch, as happened in spades in the USA in response to the “anthrax attacks.”
√ More pressure on the judiciary to bow to omnipresent low-level “terrorism” hysteria
√ Marginalizing of both the legislative and judicial branches
√ Increased integration of Canadian spy agencies with those of “our” allies, so that the globalist integrated deception apparatus can operate even more freely and in ever more sophisticated ways.
√ Buttressing of the grand made-in-Washington pax Americana imperial design.
Honourable exceptions in the media
In fairness, quite a number of voices of reason, caution, skepticism and outright objection to the Harper government’s obvious exploitation of the events of the week of October 20th to forward its militaristic pro-American pro-Israeli agenda could be found. Unfortunately, as usual with false flags, these voices accepted the government’s version of what happened.
With this fundamental caveat in place, however, here are just a few individuals within the Canadian mainstream who made cogent arguments of dissent.
In the Toronto’s Star’s 17 pages of coverage on October 23rdMartin Regg Cohn cautioned: “The risk is that we will overreact with security clampdowns and lockdowns that are difficult to roll back when the threat subsides. The greater risk is that we will hunker down with over-the-top security precautions that pose a more insidious menace to our open society.” Tom Walkom pointed out the events were not unprecedented. In 1984 a disgruntled Canadian Forces corporal killed three and wounded 13 in Quebec’s national assembly. “We know,” Walkom continued, “that in a situation like this, facts are secondary,” and “at times like this, it is easy to lose all sense of proportion.” Haroon Siddiqui asked why, “if Martin Rouleau, a.k.a. Ahmad the Convert,” was in the crosshairs of CSIS and the RCMP for months, he was not being tailed. “Smoking out such suspects and throwing the book at them requires good policing, not wars abroad or the whipping up of fears at home for partisan political purposes.”
On October 27th in The Globe and MailElizabeth Renzetti quoted extensively from James Risen’s new book, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power and Endless War. “The war in question is the war on terror, which Mr. Risen, a Pulitzer-Prize winning security reporter for The New York Times, says has been used as an excuse to conduct a largely secret campaign to undermine Americans’ civil rights, spy on their communications and line the pockets of security consultants. As one reviewer said, it reads like a thriller – except, unfortunately, it’s not fiction.”
She quotes Risen: “Of all the abuses America has suffered at the hands of the government in its endless war on terror,” Mr. Risen writes, “possibly the worst has been the war on truth.”
On the same day in the Toronto StarTim Harper wrote: “Here’s a vote for the power of time and perspective.” “And here’s a vote of confidence in a Parliament that will not jump to conclusions in the heat of the moment and a government that will resist the temptation to use last week’s events as an impetus to move into new, unneeded realms.” “Before we move too far, time and perspective should force us to ask whether we were dealing with mental health issues last week rather than terrorism, even as the RCMP said Sunday it had ‘persuasive evidence’ that Michael Zehaf-Bibeau’s attack was driven by ideological and political motives.” “We must twin increased powers with increased oversight.”
On November 2nd, the Toronto Star published a long lead editorial headed “’Terrorism’ Debate: Get beyond the word.”
The second paragraph: “Down one path is a U.S.-like response to the perceived, though unsubstantiated, threat of terror: increased police powers and indiscriminate state snooping, the chipping away of civil liberties. This the way of the government.”
Down the other “is a more considered, deliberate approach that takes the rule of law as primary…” The choice, the editorial continues “ought to be fertile ground for a pivotal public debate but so far that conversation has been eclipsed by a lexicographical matter: whether we can rightly call the attack on Ottawa ‘terrorism.’”
It concludes: “As long as our leaders insist on reducing these complex issues to a binary debate over a slippery word, we cannot have the conversation we need nor choose the country we’ll become.”
Many writers of letters to the editors of these papers are in no mood to be panicked by inflated “terror” talk. “Denying [Zihaf-Bibeau and Couture-Rouleau] their passports had the equivalent effect of putting them in cages and poking at them with a sharp stick. They broke out and two soldiers are dead.” This was from a retired RCMP officer, in The Globe and Mail.
False flag events benefit the Canadian right
Some commentators to their credit have observed that these events as played are calculated to pay off domestically to increase the Harper government’s chances of re-election next year.
Harper now holds a couple of aces for a winning electoral hand. One is his rightwing anti-taxes stance tied to producing a federal money surplus whatever the cost to the environment, science, social services (including more help for the mentally ill) and more. Some of that surplus is already being earmarked in the highest-profile ways as bribes (with their own money) to Canadians with children.
Last week’s events now constitute another ace. Leaders seen as standing tall against a “family-friendly” external enemy almost always benefit electorally. But this second ace is a fixed card. In this game there are five aces: clubs, spades, hearts, diamonds and false flags.
Only when a politically relevant portion of Canada’s and the world’s people understand the dominant agenda-setting function of false flag operations can decent people the world over begin a successful effort to replace the vast global inequality-and-death structure with a life-sustaining and fair socio-economic structure.
As Prof. John McMurtry of Guelph put it on October 29th in an essay entitled “Canada: Decoding Harper’s Terror Game. Beneath the Masks and Diversions”: “If the stratagem is not seen through, the second big boost to Harper will be to justify the despotic rule and quasi-police state he has built with ever more prisons amidst declining crime, ever more anti-terrorist rhetoric and legislation, ever more cuts to life support systems and protections (the very ones which would have prevented these murderous rampages), and ever more war-mongering and war-criminal behaviours abroad.
Adds McMurtry: “Harper rule can only go further by such trances of normalized stupefaction now reinforced with Canadian blood.”
In New York City, the police are currently investigating hate crimes which occurred when the Israeli basketball team played in the city. At an arena where the team played, a Muslim woman was assaulted for wearing hijab and says she wants justice.
Outside of Brooklyn Borough Hall in New York City, friends and supporters of Nerden Mohsen Kiswani gathered to speak out about the recent incident, and say they want justice for what they call a “cowardly hate crime” perpetrated against her at Barclays Center earlier this month.
Kiswani was attacked by a group of Israeli men as she watched the basketball game. She was targeted because she was wearing hijab. After she was attacked, the police seemed under-interested, and let her attackers escape. Amin Hussein, a Palestinian-American lawyer, said that the atmosphere inside of Barclays Center, with Jewish fans gathering to support the Israeli team, was very frightening.
Kiswani’s attorney, Lamis Deek, pointed out that the ring-leader of the group that assaulted her was Leonard Petlakh, a well known Zionist activist and college professor. At the press conference, it was pointed out that after the incident Leonard Petlakh claimed Palestine protesters had assaulted him, and his allegations were widely circulated in the press. However, the New York City Hate Crimes Task Force determined after investigation that no hate crimes against Petlakh had taken place.
The FBI counter-terrorism division is calling on to Americans to report on fellow citizens engaged in suspicious activities to help identify possible terrorists, in the first place those connected to terrorist activities overseas.
In a statement published by the FBI on Tuesday, assistant director of the counter-terrorism division Michael Steinbach said the Bureau needs “the public’s assistance in identifying US persons, going to fight overseas with terrorist groups or who are returning home from fighting overseas.”
Any useful information about terror suspects can be sent to the FBI’s website or by calling 1-800-CALL-FBI, the agency announced.
Steinbach also asked the American public to help identifying a man from an IS propaganda video aimed at appealing to a Western audience.
In the 55-minute video, a masked man addressed a group of alleged Islamic State prisoners in Arab and English.
“Dressed in desert camouflage and wearing a shoulder holster, the masked man can be seen standing in front of purported prisoners as they dig their own graves and then later presiding over their executions,” the FBI said. His accent is believed to be North American, he added.
“We’re hoping that someone might recognize this individual and provide us with key pieces of information,” Steinbach said, adding: “No piece of information is too small.”
There have been a number of arrests of terror suspects made on American soil since the 9/11 attacks in 2001. Dozens of American citizens in recent years have joined various terrorist organizations, such as Al-Qaeda in Yemen, Taliban militants in Pakistan or the Al-Shabaab terrorist group in Somalia.
Yet now there is a new global international terrorist organization called the Islamic State (also known as ISIS or ISIL), that has captured large areas of Iraq and Syria, and is fighting with all of its neighbors: the Iraqi army, the Syrian army and Kurdish Peshmerga self-defense forces.
On Saturday, the FBI arrested Mohammed Hamzah Khan, 19, at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, who was preparing to board a flight to Vienna with the alleged intention of traveling to Syria via Turkey, and of joining the Islamic State terrorist organization.
“We are all witness that the western societies are getting more immoral day by day,” Khan wrote, explaining his motivations in a three-page letter to his parents discovered in his bedroom by FBI agents. “I do not want my kids being exposed to filth like this,” he wrote, the AP reported.
As of August, there were a reported 12,000 militants from 50 nations fighting in the ranks of the Islamic State militia, the US State Department estimated.
Recently, Twitter was abuzz with its latest agent provocateur tweeting in support of the orcs of our time, ISIS.
I’ve emblazoned the image with the word “Fake” in order to avoid spreading this nonsense unwittingly.
The tweets of this person declaring her undying devotion and love for ISIS from right here within the borders of the United States garnered some pretty ludicrous responses. After all, ignorance only begets ignorance.
In this crazed flurry of suggestions to bomb Mecca and Medina, to kill Muslims, and to even go as far as attempting to find and kill this girl, these folks overlooked a glaring detail that I was able to discern in 5 minutes. “Ahimla Jihada” is fake. Twitter apparently discovered this early on and any attempt to access the Twitter account @ahimla2 will reach this page:
So who is she? First and foremost, the name “Ahimla” doesn’t exist in any language on earth. Google it. All you will get are nutters plotting to kill this phantom or results thinking you misspelled the Indian city “Shimla”.
You won’t find a single person on earth named “Ahimla”. People have all kinds of crazy names. Frank Zappa named his kids Dweezil, Moon Unit, and even —as awesome as it is— Rodan. Ving Rhames named his kid Reignbeau. Yes. Pronounced “Rainbow”. David Duchovny named his kid…well…Kyd. But the twit behind this fake Twitter account had to use the one name that just didn’t exist on planet earth. Finally, the last name “Jihada”? That really took a lot of thought.
As for the picture, herein is something very sad and a lesson in sleuthing fabricated propaganda on the internet. Bookmark the URL https://www.tineye.com/ right now. Using this website you can upload any image and it will search the internet for every instance of the image and even similar images going back for years.
I always use this site whenever I get images over social media allegedly portraying atrocities committed in some crisis point of the world. A majority of the time those pictures end up being lifted from something completely unrelated to what they are purported to represent. Don’t get duped! I hope everyone will start using this site to verify the authenticity of images that make claims with an objective of manipulating public opinion.
In this case I was able to find the source of this poor girl’s image. It was taken on April 1, 2009, five years ago, by a photographer who thought this girl’s infectiously cute smile would make a great picture. It was lifted from his Flickr account. Here’s the link to the original post:
Note, that he titled the picture “Angel Face”. How both ironic and tragic is it that this young girl’s angelic face was used to represent such great evil by someone who can be described as no less than a diabolical liar. Not only is this innocent girl’s life in danger but there are clearly people ready to exact violence upon any girl who even looks like her. That would be any Muslim woman who wears a scarf.
In the end, there are two critical details to be gleaned from this:
First, in the absence of any American-Muslims supporting such terrorist organizations they found the need to fabricate such a person. American-Muslims deserve a pat on the back for this. We have all kinds of crazies just like anyone else, but we should be proud that these incognito Islamophobes couldn’t find a real extremist to retweet. They had to fabricate one.
Second, it should make everyone painfully aware of what we’re up against. There are dubious forces from an increasingly belligerent political Right [is Loonwatch unable to use the word Zionist?] who are out to brainwash, by hook or crook, the American public into hating their fellow citizens of the Muslim faith and to justify a foreign policy in the “10/40 Window” that has tarnished America’s reputation globally and needlessly puts our men and women in uniform in harm’s way. It’s high time we fight misinformation with information.
What’s your image of Denmark? Apart from the Little Mermaid, Carlsberg beer and H.C. Andersen perhaps something with decency, welfare, development aid, equality and peace?
Unfortunately, that image is outdated. During the last good 15 years Denmark has participated in wars on/in Yugoslavia and Afghanistan, it was an occupying country in Iraq for four years and a main bomber nation of Libya.
The government’s decision earlier today to send 7 F16s to fight with the U.S. increases the risk of terror actions against Denmark.
It must have been known for quite some time since, about a month ago, the Danish government decided to send a Hercules transport plane with humanitarian aid to Iraq. Most likely, it was a set-up because it was immediately changed into a Hercules transport plane + 55 soldiers to assist the U.S. and the Kurds.
Today’s decision is a violation of the UN Charter – the spirit of the Preamble as well as Article 1 which states that peace shall be established by peaceful means – and, later, only when everything has been tried and found in vain can a military action be decided.
Denmark must now calculate with Danish casualties and, even worse, with taking responsibility for scores of innocent civilians’ death – something that can’t be avoided when targeting individuals from the air.
The decision documents that Denmark has learnt nothing from the earlier – failed – wars and that it does not have alternative expertise.
The common sense, solidarity and humanity that characterised Denmark, at least to some extent, about 20 years ago is now eradicated and replaced by thoughtless militarism; its only guideline has been and is: Accept willingly and unconditionally what the US does and follow it when it calls upon you to do its dirty job – His Master’s Voice.
If you think I exaggerate: There is not one major policy or decision the last 30-40 years where Denmark has shown the courage to stand up against Washington.
Millions of dollars are allocated to state-financed research institutes, military analysis centres and mainstream thinking that “explains” and legitimizes the policies. (The only peace research institute, COPRI, which was very well evaluated by international scholars was destroyed by the government of Anders Fogh Rasmussen who also made Denmark an occupying power – only to be rewarded with the position of NATO Secretary-General).
It is my judgement that the decision to participate in the war on Iraq was the largest foreign policy blunder in Denmark since 1945.
I wrote ”Predictable Fiasco” in which the present situation in Iraq was predicted fairly precisely and I presented a 20-point plan on what to do instead of war.
Thus I don’t know how to characterise a decision by a Social Democratic-led government to go to war in Iraq for a second time!
PM Helle Thorning Schmidt presented the decision around lunch time today Friday September 26. Each of her arguments and assumptions were dubious, anti-intellectual and constructed to suit the event
1) She said that this was not a war because ISIS is not a state (!!) – now you know the level of what followed.
But this is war no matter what her spin doctors may have invented. Those who in the thousands will be killed – ISIS people as well as civilians – can’t see it as anything but war. And nothing but military equipment is being used.
2) As mentioned above, the decision violates the UN Charter.
3) Mission creep is already a fact. First, Denmark should send only humanitarian aid, then it changed to military aid and now 7 F16s – the next step is likely to be what is constantly denied and therefore rather safe to predict: Boots on the ground.
4) It will not be a short, limited affair – it could well last for years. ISIS may be relatively small in numbers but could grow fast – there is enough of hatred; it has a lot of funds from Western allies such as Saudi-Arabia, Qatar and Bahrein – who are playing a double game. And they have advanced weapons, a lot of it U.S.-produced, stolen from the Iraqis.
5) ISIS is the result of more than 100 years of Western arrogance in the region – wars, deceit, lies and agreements such as Sykes-Picot (1916) and Balfour – imposing of Western values, occupations (foremost Iraq), base-building, stealing of oil and coup d’etats. The list is long!
6) This action as a whole will only have one result: More terrorists. The entire ‘War on Terror’ is wrongly conceived from October 7, 2001. We can’t rid the world of terrorism by killing terrorists and ignoring the underlying causes any more than we can combat criminality by killing criminals.
Eventually there will be a blowback, a boomerang effect.
7) The Danish government now gives ISIS and others a perfect reason for targeting Denmark. It puts the security of the Danish citizens at risk – something that must be seen in relation also to the Muhammad caricatures as well as Denmark’s participation in the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.
While it is the first duty of a government to secure the lives and safety of its people, the Danish government does the opposite. To be loyal to Its Master’s Voice.
Add to this that Obama’s speech about how to combat ISIS was a manifest disappointment with neither strategy nor a vision for the future of the region. It boiled down to the bizarre: We kill people who kill people because it is wrong to kill people! (Deliver back that Nobel Peace prize medal, Mr. President!)
Finally, Denmark’s defence, security and foreign policy establishment increasingly looks like a one-party system with very little diversity.
All security research at its Institute for International Studies is financed by – you guessed it! – the Ministry of Defence. Not much research there on peace by peaceful means or alternative defence, peace-making, reconciliation, forgiveness etc.
Since 1975 when Denmark bought F16s a MIMAK has developed – a Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex with a degree of consent that is pathetic for a society that professes to be pluralist, democratic, humanist and open (-minded).
In particular, Denmark has been rewarded with lots of contracts for its booming military industry – and plans to waste at least US$ 5 billion on new fighter planes.
So, next week the Danish Parliament will – probably with one small left-wing party as dissenter – endorse that Denmark goes to war yet again, for a fifth time – only to cash in yet another fiasco (to be denied).
This only goes to show that democracy is forced to give in to militarism – because there is a considerable opinion in Denmark that does not support this and also did not support the four preceding wars.
Like in Norway and Sweden (exception in the latter: the xenophobic Sweden Democrats) those of us believing in international law and who have the idea that peace is better than war have no party anymore that represents our views.
In summary, the Denmark and the Norden you may think you know is changing and we need a debate about this moral and intellectual defeat under MIMAK in our countries.
But certainly people in the rest of the world who used to look up to Scandinavia should know and tell us what they think.
Rogue states, big and small, is a problem to the whole world. And the sooner they change, the better for all.
ISIS has become the scare du jour of world politics. While ISIS is a profoundly disturbing phenomenon for which the world should develop some sort of response, the problem is that the Islamist movement has become a useful foil for many varied political interests from Israel to the U.S. Islamophobes among the Euro-nationalist far-right and the U.S. Tea Party have latched onto ISIS as their political gravy train. Bibi Netanyahu, ever alert to memes he can exploit to promote Israel’s interests, made the memorable, and profoundly mendacious statement: “Hamas is ISIS and ISIS is Hamas.” Senator Bill Nelson, who has a huge elderly Jewish constituency and is allied closely with the Israel Lobby, said this today:
“Any group that sets them [sic] up as a religious caliphate and says that they will not stop until the black flag of ISIS is flying over the White House — I take that pretty seriously,” he said.
No ISIS leader has ever made such a statement. But Nelson appears to be watching FoxNews, because it claimed ISIS said so. The fact that a major national political leader would air such nonsense is disturbing. There is enough to hate about ISIS without making things up out of whole cloth.
Then we have the tried and true Wall Street Journal, always good for a bit of Islamophobic hysteria. This is the headline for Ryan Crocker’s op-ed: Islamic State Is Getting Stronger, and It’s Targeting America. The neo-cons are on the warpath demanding that we “eviscerate” ISIS, that we engage in some sort of a counter-jihad. Which is just what both the world and America need, yet another war against Islam in the Mideast.
Similarly, Israeli media have reported that a freed French journalist held hostage by ISIS identified the Belgian museum attacker as an adherent of ISIS. While the journalist, who worked for the right-wing French daily Le Point, did say Mehdi Nemmouche tortured and abused him and others while he was held in custody, he never made any statement about the alleged terrorist’s affiliations. So when Nemmouche left Syria was he affiliated with ISIS? Why did he leave? Had he broken with ISIS? Had ISIS broken with him? And if so, why?
The implication of this Israeli reporting was that the attack which killed two Israeli intelligence agents may’ve been the work of ISIS. In fact, no one knows whether Nemmouche was acting on his own or on behalf of another Islamist group. Any speculation to the contrary is just that.
Open Democracy has published an incisive piece raising uncomfortable similarities between ISIS and Israel’s religion-derived claims of authority and sovereignty.
All this leads to the next logical question: what threat does ISIS really pose to U.S. national interests? If it doesn’t pose such a threat, then what should our response to it be? Does it threaten other interests or values that are important to us? And what will be the outcome of any form of intervention we choose to take? … Full article
As the 13th anniversary of the crimes of September, 2001 approaches, the neoconservatives are shrieking from the rooftops – and effectively confessing that they were the real perpetrators of the 9/11-Anthrax false flag operation. (The neocons, you may recall, openly called for a “new Pearl Harbor” in September, 2000 – and got one exactly one year later.)
Every year at this time, the neocons orchestrate and hype a series of public relations stunts designed to magnify fears of “radical Islam” and reinforce their crumbling 9/11-Anthrax cover story. But this year’s propaganda campaign is so extreme that it represents a tacit confession: The neocons know that the truth about the 9/11-Anthrax operation is slowly closing in on them; so they are over-reacting by desperately trying to stoke the dying embers of the so-called War on Terror, in order to maintain the myth that Muslims (rather than neoconservative Zionists) attacked America in the autumn of 2001.
When a hysterical person exhibits guilty demeanor by trying too hard to blame a crime on someone else, that person is almost certainly the real perpetrator. As the neocons try much too hard to blame Islam for 9/11 and “terrorism” in general, their hysteria inadvertently reveals their own culpability. Like Shakespeare’s Lady MacBeth, the neoconservative movement has blood on its hands and “doth protest too much.”
This year, the shrill yelps of neocons unveiling their 9/11-Anthrax guilt are downright ear-splitting. Everywhere you look in the Zionist-dominated mainstream media, some neocon asset is hyping a ridiculous story about an “Islamic terrorist threat” – and tying it to the upcoming 9/11 anniversary.
Consider the preposterous legend, planted by neocons at Fox News then picked up by the rest of the media, that 11 missing Libyan jetliners may attack the USA on September 11th, 2014. The original Fox News story quotes an unnamed and probably imaginary US government official as saying: “There are a number of commercial airliners in Libya that are missing. We found out on September 11 what can happen with hijacked planes.”
The quote makes no sense. If Libyan commercial airliners were stolen by terrorists, they would not be making commercial flights, and therefore could not be hijacked. Additionally, commercial aircraft are (from a military perspective) big, fat, slow, and easy to locate, intercept, and if necessary shoot down.
Beginning more than a decade before 9/11, all of the hundreds of American commercial aircraft that significantly deviated from their course were intercepted by a fighter aircraft in about ten minutes…except for the four allegedly hijacked flights of September 11th, 2001. Those “hijacked” behemoths, we were told, lumbered unmolested through the skies of America for nearly two hours, while fighter jets were ordered to fly out over the Atlantic and circle aimlessly rather than defend Washington, DC.
The notion that Libyan commercial aircraft could threaten America is ludicrous. The story is a sick fantasy dreamed up by some neocon public relations firm. Its purpose is to subliminally reinforce the myth of the “radical Islamic terror threat” launched by the much larger neocon PR stunt of September 11th, 2001 and the follow-up anthrax letters.
It isn’t just Fox News hysterically hyping September terror. Newsmax, which like Fox is a neocon propaganda vehicle, has concocted a bizarre fantasy with another neocon group, Judicial Watch, about al-Qaeda and Islamic State (which are sworn enemies) teaming up to invade the US from Mexico. The Newsmax story is headlined: “‘Imminent’ Terror Attack Warning on US Border.” It begins: “Islamic State and al-Qaida terrorist cells are operating in a Mexican border town and are plotting to attack the United States with car bombs and improvised explosive devices.”
This story is not just self-evidently fictitious; it is downright insane. It seems that someone in a neoconservative PR office somewhere has overdosed on imagination pills.
The delusional legends of “11 Libyan jetliners” and “Mexican takfiri invaders” (like the fake beheadings of Mossad agents posing as journalists) are just the most recent examples of neocons spouting farcical fantasies to cover their 9/11-Anthrax tracks. They have been dreaming up these surreal anecdotes on a regular basis for almost 13 years, beginning just minutes after the attack on the World Trade Center, when an actor known as “Harley guy” – obviously hired by the 9/11 perpetrators – launched the preposterous fiction that the buildings’ explosive demolition was the accidental result of plane crashes and relatively minor fires ignited by an otherwise insignificant amount of jet fuel.
In his new book The 2001 Anthrax Deception, Canadian professor Graeme MacQueen shows how many of the guilt-revealing delusional tales spread by the neocons in the autumn of 2001 related to the anthrax component of the 9/11-Anthrax false flag operation. Most damningly of all, the neocons launched their fear-of-anthrax propaganda campaign before anyone but the perpetrators could have known about the anthrax letters!
Beginning on September 22nd, 2001 – two weeks before the first anthrax letters were discovered in October – the neoconservatives launched a wave of stories claiming that radical Muslims were going to attack America with anthrax, perhaps by dropping anthrax on Americans using crop duster airplanes. One of those neoconservative propagandists, Richard Cohen of the Washington Post, has publicly admitted that he began taking the anti-anthrax drug Cipro weeks before the anthrax attacks were known to anyone but the perpetrators.
In a 2008 Slate Magazine article Cohen foolishly bragged: “I had been told soon after Sept. 11th to secure Cipro, the antidote to anthrax. The tip had come in a roundabout way from a high government official, and I immediately acted on it. I was carrying Cipro way before most people had ever heard of it.”
Who were the “high government officials” who knew the anthrax attacks were coming – and who therefore must have been the real criminals behind the attacks? They included Dick Cheney and George Bush, who began taking Cipro on September 11th, 2001 even though the anthrax attacks would not be known to anyone but the perpetrators until October.
Why did Bush and Cheney begin taking Cipro on September 11th, 2001? They were told to do so by Jerome Hauer, a self-proclaimed expert on both bioterrorism and building collapses. Hauer ran New York’s Office of Emergency Management (OEM) on the 23rd floor of World Trade Center Building 7 prior to 9/11. Many researchers believe that the controlled demolitions of the Twin Towers were planned and set in motion from that OEM bunker in WTC-7; that WTC-7 was subsequently demolished to destroy evidence; and that Jerome Hauer was one of the key designers of the 9/11-Anthrax mass murders.
On the morning of September 11th – before anyone could possibly have known why the World Trade Center Towers had exploded into pyroclastic clouds of very fine dust – Jerome Hauer, like his hired actor “Harley guy,” appeared on television telling Americans that the skyscrapers had “just fallen down” due to the modest office fires ignited by jet fuel.
While the mainstream media are still trying to cover up 9/11-Anthrax, they have been forced to admit that most neocon stories fanning the flames of the so-called War on Terror have been lies. Some failed neocon lies planted in American newspapers include:
*”Mohammed Atta visited Saddam Hussein’s agents in Prague before 9/11.”
*”One of the alleged 9/11 hijackers was treated for anthrax.”
*”One of the hijacker’s bodies from Flight 93 tested positive for anthrax.”
*”Saddam Hussein obtained ‘yellowcake’ from Niger to build nuclear weapons.”
*”Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was planning to attack America.”
*”The Iraqis will welcome American invaders with flowers and candy, and American-occupied Iraq will quickly become a peaceful, prosperous, Israel-loving democracy – while Iraqi oil will pay for the war and push gasoline prices to historic lows.”
Though the Zionist-extremist neoconservatives have been caught lying dozens of times – and their lies have led to the deaths of more than a million innocent people – they have not yet been prosecuted for their crimes against humanity. So they keep lying in order to keep killing… and their lies keep getting shriller and more extreme as they “flee forward” to escape prosecution for their past misdeeds.
This neocon “flight forward” leads directly toward World War III. Only by prosecuting the neocon architects of 9/11-Anthrax, and thereby spectacularly discrediting the neoconservative philosophy of ultra-Machievellian deception, can we prevent the world from being reduced to radioactive rubble.
A PhD student from Saudi Arabia has been stabbed to death for wearing Islamic dress while walking to her university campus in Essex, northeast of London, a report says.
Nahid Almanea, 31, was stabbed 16 times on a footpath with officers believing that she was targeted for wearing a traditional Muslim dress, a long robe and a headscarf, the Huffington Post reported.
According to Essex police, Almanea died on the spot after receiving the knife wounds in her body, neck, head and arms.
The University of Essex said Almanea was a “very hard-working and conscientious” student and was expected to finish her studies later this year.
Her body was later transferred to Saudi Arabia’s al-Jawf Province where a large crowd gathered to take part in her funeral ceremony.
A 52-year-old man was reportedly arrested in connection with her death.
“This isn’t the first attack on a Muslim student and certainly is not the last on a member of the Muslim community in the UK. We will naturally wait for all evidence to become clear. However, if the attack turns out to be Islamophobic in nature because of her Muslim appearance, then it will correlate with the disturbing exponential increase in hate crimes against Muslims here in the UK,” said Omar Ali, president of the Federation of Student Islamic Societies (FOSIS).
The attack prompted strong reactions from people in the UK and Saudi Arabia, who all condemned such attacks on Muslims. Several Saudi nationals even called on the Saudi Embassy in London to suspend business ties with the UK.
What does an 86-year-old art photographer have in common with a young man with a video game habit?
Not just a proclivity for perfectly innocuous hobbies, unfortunately. These days, engaging in either activity can get the FBI on your case.
Today, the ACLU and our partners at Advancing Justice–Asian Law Caucus and Bingham McCutchen are taking the federal government to court over a surveillance program that targets people even if they are engaging in entirely innocent and constitutionally protected activity, and encourages religious profiling. As if that weren’t enough, the Suspicious Activity Reporting (SAR) program also violates the government’s own rules for the collection of criminal intelligence.
James Prigoff is one of our clients. He is 86 years old, and a renowned photographer of public art. He has lectured at universities and had his work exhibited at museums around the world. In 2004, he was stopped by security guards in Boston while attempting to take photos of a famous piece of public art called the Rainbow Swash, which is painted on a natural gas storage tank. Several months later, the FBI tracked him down at his house in Sacramento to question him about his activities in Boston.
Tariq Razak, a young scientist and Pakistani-American, is another plaintiff in our case. He became the subject of a SAR after a visit to a train depot in Santa Ana, California, where he had an appointment with the county employment resource center. He walked around the depot looking for the resource center, and his mother, who was wearing a hijab, accompanied him. He later discovered that this conduct led to a SAR describing him as “a male of Middle Eastern descent” who was suspicious because he was “constantly surveying all areas of the facility” and because he met up with a “female in a white burka head dress.”
Our other clients were also unfairly targeted, falling under government scrutiny for activities ranging from buying computers to playing video games. Several of them were profiled due to their perceived religious beliefs.
These “suspicious activities” may be absurd, but there’s nothing funny about the program. The Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Information Sharing Environment, a post-9/11 agency tasked with coordinating national security intelligence-sharing, have adopted lax standards for what constitutes “suspicious activity.” These standards violate a DOJ regulation from 1978 that prohibits law enforcement from sharing “intelligence” about individuals unless the information is supported by reasonable suspicion of criminal activity. The 1978 regulation was adopted in the wake of prior domestic surveillance abuses.
Predictably, eschewing those protections has turned back the clock. The government is ignoring sensible limits on criminal intelligence collection and actively encouraging not just law enforcement, but also private security guards, shopkeepers, hotel owners, and even neighbors, to collect and share information about innocent conduct.
For example:
Hotels are advised to be on the lookout for guests who “request specific room assignments or locations” or use “payphones for outgoing calls.”
Rental car companies are instructed that “providing multiple names” on rental paperwork is to be “considered suspicious.”
Hobby shops should be wary of customers with an “unusual interest” in remote-controlled aircraft and those who pay in cash.
The general public is cautioned to report “unusual activity,” including “people acting suspiciously” and “people in places where they do not belong.”
If “acting suspiciously” or being somewhere someone thinks you don’t “belong” is enough to put people into federal counter-terrorism databases, it’s no wonder the databases are full of irrelevant information and reports targeting Muslims, South Asians, and Arab Americans. As you may remember from last year, actual SARs we obtained through Public Records Act requests include reports with subjects like “Suspicious ME [Middle Eastern] Males Buy Several Large Pallets of Water.” It’s also no wonder law enforcement experts criticize the SAR program for “flooding” law enforcement with “white noise.”
Today our clients are challenging a program through which innocuous and even constitutionally protected activity is being reported as “suspicious” and leading to federal law enforcement scrutiny. This program not only violates federal privacy protections for “intelligence” sharing. It encourages a culture of fear and distrust, undermining our freedom with no known benefit to our safety.
As of April 7, nearly three thousand unarmed Christian, Muslim and secular Palestinians have been wounded, over three dozen are in critical condition and at least twenty-five unarmed protestors, including children have been assassinated by hundreds of Israeli snipers and heavily armed troops shooting tank shells into crowds of civilians protesting their decades of incarceration by the racist Israeli state.
The Israeli government praised the ‘restraint and morality’ of the IDF, as did the fifty-two Major Jewish American Organizations (MJAO) who largely control the US Congress. These grotesque massacres began during the Christian Holy Week on Good Friday and Easter, coinciding with the Jewish Passover. The self-righteous officials of the MJAO and their relatives and friends broke matzos at joyful Seders as the blood of Palestinians soaked into ground at the fence containing the largest open-air prison camp in history, Gaza.
While tribal loyalties bonded the Israeli and Jewish American leaders, the politicians of the Western oligarchic electoral regimes refrained from criticizing the shocking display of brute force and even defended Israel’s cold blood mass killings of Palestinian civilians in their Gaza prison.
This paper will discuss and analyze the reasons for Israel’s willing Western accomplices and the centrality of its fifth column in the United States.… continue
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Recently Israel’s department for her colonies of Australia and Canada dispatched new “anti-terror” legislation which will make it illegal for Australian and Canadian subjects of the Israeli Empire to “condone” so called “terrorism”.
Kiswani was attacked by a group of Israeli men as she watched the basketball game. She was targeted because she was wearing hijab. After she was attacked, the police seemed under-interested, and let her attackers escape. Amin Hussein, a Palestinian-American lawyer, said that the atmosphere inside of Barclays Center, with Jewish fans gathering to support the Israeli team, was very frightening.
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