North Korea’s Understandable Fears
By James Bradley | Consortium News | September 10, 2016
‘Near the ceasefire line’ (Photo by Pete Souza)
North Korea carried out its fifth nuclear test on Friday, drawing condemnation from President Obama and a charge from the Pentagon that the test was a “serious provocation.” Ho-hum, here we go again.
Every year, America pays its vassal-state South Korea huge sums of U.S. taxpayer money to mount 300,000-man-strong military “games” that threaten North Korea. North Koreans view images that never seem to make it to U.S. kitchen tables: hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of U.S. armaments swarming in from the sea, hundreds of tanks and thousands of troops – their turrets and rifles pointed north – and nuclear-capable U.S. warplanes screaming overhead.
But when a young dictator straight out of central casting responds to U.S. threats with an underground test on North Korea’s founding day, it’s the number-one story on the front page of the New York Times.
Let’s connect some dots. Washington and their note takers in the American press constantly tell us that crazies in Pyongyang and Tehran are nuclear threats. The misplaced, but easily sold, fears of the “North Korean missile threat” and the “Iran missile threat” allows the Pentagon to install “defensive” missile systems in South Korea and Eastern Europe which actually amount to offensive systems targeting Beijing and Moscow (by making first strikes against China and Russia more feasible).
We need to look beyond the simplistic, race-based cartoon-like scaremongering to see that far more reality-based and frightening is the nuclear threat posed by the United States.
President Obama — the Nobel Prize winner who pledged to lead a nuclear-free world — has committed over $1 trillion dollars to modernize America’s nuclear arsenal. Almost unreported by the press, we have been spending a bundle to make nukes “usable,” by miniaturizing them. And to top it off, Obama has maintained a “first use” option for the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un
Forget the tin-pot dictator with a bad crew-cut who leads an impoverished country. Here’s for some really scary reading:
Obama’s Trillion-Dollar Nuclear-Arms Train Wreck
Obama plans to retain first-use nuclear option
New U.S. Nuclear Bomb Moves Closer to Full-Scale Production
THAAD: A Major Security Risk for the ROK
James Bradley is author of several bestsellers including Flyboys and Flags of Our Fathers. His most recent book is The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia.
Demonize and Distract: Sanitizing Syria for the Masses
By Jason Hirthler | CounterPunch | September 9, 2016
Summoning the Humanitarian Pretext
The arch pragmatist Machiavelli once wrote that, “If you watch the ways of men, you will see that those who obtain great wealth and power do so either by force or fraud, and having got them they conceal under some honest name the foulness of their deeds.” You couldn’t pen a better description of the relationship between the imperial corporate state and its supplicant media. Once the coffers of vulnerable nations are ransacked by American wars of aggression, it is the media that sweeps the crimes of state beneath a carpet of piety. The truth may come out in due time, although it is always ex post facto. Thanks to the the coordination between the corporate sector, the state, and the media, the American doctrinal system is largely a self-contained narrative. It comes complete with a smooth internal logic. Corporations set priorities, the state produces a storyline that rationalizes the pursuit of those priorities, and the media distributes and reifies the storyline until it is gospel. This is no surprise, since the corporations own the politicians and the presses. Yet one way to examine the functioning of this kind of systemic propaganda is by looking at some of the keywords on which the stories hinge.
The foul deeds Machiavelli mentioned now principally occur in the Middle East, where vast resources lie and where power may be usefully projected deep into Eurasia. The Syrian proxy war between forces east and west is a nice example of how the dissimulations initiated in Washington are disseminated through the MSM. For instance, The New York Times, and its deputies in the vast clearinghouses of state propaganda, would have us believe that the White House is supporting freedom-loving rebels in Syria who are politically moderate and fighting for their lives in a civil war against a despotic regime led by an evil optometrist, Bashar al-Assad.
But we know that the entire Syrian fiasco was engineered by the CIA with cash, guns, and training, and unceasing support from the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) at our behest. It is a long-standing neoconservative plan to break the so-called Shia Crescent that runs from Lebanon through Syria to Iran. These are, of course, the independent-minded states that have thus far refused to accept either Israeli colonization of Palestinian land or permit Western-backed energy projects to take shape on their territory. Hence the need to dismember them into tiny, feckless statelets that pose no challenge to either Tel Aviv or Washington.
But this is hidden behind the fog of war and a domestic haze of media nuance. This entire conflict could reasonably be said to hinge on a single phrase: “moderate rebels.” The words “moderate” and “rebel” make all the difference in the telling of this fable. The truth is that we have hijacked Arab Spring discontent and festooned it with brigades of terrorist mercenaries procured from around the Middle East and Asia, all with the singular mandate to take down the Assad government. Tens of thousands of jihadists have been injected by NATO into a multi-confessional state governed by an elected leader who won a larger percentage of the electorate than our liberal messiah Barack Obama.
But this more truthful interpretation of events is unacceptable. To concede that the White House is now backing al-Qaeda terrorists in an effort to capsize a Middle Eastern democracy would implode the religion of American exceptionalism on which elite power depends. Thus the media cannot point out that the Pentagon’s recent admission of having troops in Syria violates the Nuremberg Principles on wars of aggression as well as the United Nations Charter. Omissions of this kind are what prevent average Americans from a) knowing what we’re really doing; and b) resisting it.
Demonize and Distract
But it isn’t enough to simply cloak our own crimes in the holy cloth of exceptionalism. We must defame our enemies. We must plant false flags in their soil now so that we can bury bombs in them later. It happens the same way every time. ‘Shocking’ discoveries are made about one of our most reviled enemies, usually provided by a defector with a farcical alias (think “Curveball”). Instantaneous mainstream reports issue a coordinated condemnation of the country in question. Each media outlet chooses a particular keyword to drive home the horror. Popular terms include “crimes against humanity”, “war crimes”, the words “industrial scale” in front of any noun or verb, the word “mass” in front of any noun or verb, “brutal crackdown”, “regime”, and so on. Grisly images are plastered across the front pages of the MSM. Often the images are fakes or are from unrelated incidents.
Once the reader has been stupefied, at least one columnist or politician will draw a deep breath, and then ‘draw comparisons’ to either Hitler and Auschwitz or Slobodan Milosevic and mass graves. (Recently Milosevic was declared innocent of all genocidal charges by the International Criminal Tribunal on Yugoslavia, albeit years after he died in prison after being denied medical treatment by his civilized captors. This process of posthumous exoneration is now practiced on an “industrial scale” by Obama’s drone assassination when various innocents are discovered to have been innocent after they’ve been “terminated”.)
Not only is the supposedly noble Syrian uprising a fraud, but so is our equally principled goal of wiping ISIS from the face of the earth, if the facts on the ground are of any import. Washington has gone after ISIS in a strangely half-hearted way. Why hasn’t it provided air cover for Syrian Arab Army when its helicopters were rendered useless by terrorist TOW missiles? Missiles sold by the United States to Saudi Arabia, likely for the express purpose of funneling them to al Nusrah and other rogue bandits in Syria. Why did the U.S. not immediately attack ISIS-controlled oil wells and oil trading routes–ISIS’ chief source of funding–as Russia did on its entry into the conflict? Why did the Obama administration produce a record-setting arms deal with the Saudis, the leading proselytizer of Wahhabism in the world? Why do we refuse to work with Moscow or the SAA or Iran? Why do we not share grids and intelligence and join their joint operations room in Baghdad?
Isn’t it obvious? We have different goals. We want Assad out and a daft, pliant puppet in charge, presiding over a vast arsenal of domestic police, ready to crush resistance on contact. Of course, any such resisters would be legitimate freedom fighters, as are the Palestinians. But the media takes care to call Palestinians “terrorists” and called citizens resisting the Iraqi occupation “insurgents”. Words matter. They shade the story and bring neutral readers over to the side of empire. They blame the victim for the violence that victimized them.
The dissimulation becomes even clearer when you realize that ISIS emerged from an American interrogation camp in Iraq, in a way that suggests CentCom was more than happy to release radicalized Islamists into the wild. To what purpose? The failed state in Libya and the collapsing scenery of the Syrian state provide plenty of fodder for speculation.
The Wages of Propaganda
Thanks to years of conditioning by the media, the population will do little to resist the escalation to come. Eventually the Syrian “regime” to be eventually overthrown by relentless American-backed violence. Hillary Clinton will win the election and gain control of the Oval Office. As Glen Ford wrote at Black Agenda Report, Clinton will “… ride into the White House on a warhorse”. She is the thinking man’s neocon, unlike President Bush, who represented the anti-intellectual strain of the American character, and Barack Obama, whose reluctance to pour troops into Arab prairie fires was widely predictably condemned as a sign of weakness.
Hillary is neither stupid nor soft. She will doubtless find a useful pretext by which to declare a no-fly zone in Syria, which would inhibit the efficacy of Russia’s campaign against various terrorist clans. (A House resolution is already afoot to lay the groundwork.) She will move more troops into the polder of northern Syria, violating all kinds of charters and conventions and declarations with an icy mixture of contempt and indifference. (See the UN Charter, Geneva Conventions, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for the bootless scraps of paper she will trample.) Perhaps most importantly, she will green light the transport of more arms, ammunition, and psychopaths into Syria to make a push for Damascus in the hopes of repeating the Libyan calamity.
Should that project succeed, Hillary will quite possibly ‘discover’ that Iran has been violating its bogus nuclear agreement with the P5 +1. Anonymous administration sources will be “troubled” by the development. This isn’t idle speculation. For lack of a better title, the long-term strategy for the “new world order,” as George H.W. Bush put it, is contingent on splitting the Shia Crescent, removing Iran as a regional antagonist, then moving farther into Eurasia to control Sino-Russian development. And we know how a confrontation with Tehran would play out. With rabid spittle cresting his white beard, Wolf Blitzer will escort numberless brigadier generals through The Situation Room to reassure Americans that the bearded mullahs in Qom are indeed a fearsome clan. Hillary will threaten, and perhaps use, tactical nuclear weapons (B-61s) on Iranian nuclear sites, backed by either a UN Security Council resolution of dubious authority or a coalition of the bullied, bought, and willing. As the mushroom cloud envelops the region in radioactive waste, Israel will be seen fastidiously colonizing more West Bank land, Benjamin Netanyahu rubbing his hands in frenzied anticipation, a dogeared copy of the Yinon plan stuffed in his jacket pocket. Saudi Arabia’s Deputy and Crown Princes will celebrate the fall of their hated rivals. Laconic onlookers in Washington and Europe will shrug and say nothing. CIA plants in D.C. will fastidiously distance Hillary’s bombs from Hiroshima’s, and Tel Aviv will move against Hezbollah in a final confrontation, since the Shia Crescent will by then be nothing more than a few shards of Mesopotamian culture atop a flaming midden.
With the Middle East finally brought “to heel,” as Hillary once proposed doing to young black boys, the ground will have been cleared for the pulse-racing showdown with Russia itself, the greatest thorn in Washington’s side. With Assad out of the way and Tehran chastened, the Kremlinologists and conspiracy theorists can be set loose to harrow the public into a state of high anxiety about the “expansionist” state to the East. NATO will inch closer to Russian borders and shout that Russia is moving closer to NATO. Destabilization will proceed apace. It will be called “democracy promotion” and will be paid for by fronts called “endowments”. Sanctions will tighten the economic screws. Verbal salvos will hit targets on either side of the water. New proxy wars will be touched off. Only a giant peace movement or stray asteroid could prevent something like this from happening. Perhaps the BRICS will halt the spread of empire with a collective stance, but Washington is agile if not artful at executing its core strategy to destabilize, divide, and rule its rivals. Until then, if you want to know what contempt looks like, look at this picture of Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin meeting at the G20 in China last week. The tenor of tomorrow is written all over their faces.
Jason Hirthler is a veteran of the communications industry and author of The Sins of Empire: Unmasking American Imperialism. He lives in New York City and can be reached at jasonhirthler@gmail.com.
Guardian “Facebook fact-check ” on 9/11 – every bit as poor as you would expect
By Catte | OffGuardian | September 10, 2016
The Guardian is no better at telling the truth about the nature of the 9/11 debate than about Syria, Ukraine or indeed anything. Its recent bid at being both social-media savvy and weirdly Orwellian, “Facebook Fact Check”, has this little snippet up atm:
The paper they are referring to is On the Physics of High Rise Building Collapses, which we have published here, and the “professor” who, according to them, “left Brigham Young University in disgrace” is of course physicist Steve Jones, who was the subject of a hostile media campaign after he and his BYU research team claimed to have discovered evidence of nanothermite in tiny “red gray chips” found in the dust from the WTC explosions.
For the record, Jones’ research work on the red gray chips has been challenged, but never debunked, and his experiments have been replicated successfully by independent researchers elsewhere in the world, such as Mark Bazile. Jones was suspended from his teaching duties and then offered “early retirement” by BYU in 2006 in the midst of the media campaign against him.
BYU’s reasons for this action were never publicly disclosed but the Guardian’s claim that Jones was “disgraced” is little more than a sleazy bit of innuendo, so gross it doesn’t even appear in the sourced WaPo article, which does at least try to be a tad objective. “Disgrace” is just the Graun’s own little bit of tabloidese. Because tabloid is all it seems to do now.
Jones’ three co-authors are described in this piece as “a retired professor and two longterm 9/11 truthers.” I guess the Graun didn’t want to admit two of them are structural engineers as well as being “truthers”?
When the (ironically named?) “fact-check” briefly discusses the physics of 9/11, it’s simply to offer yet more deception. The investigation by serious professionals of the still not fully explained and extraordinary triple collapses on 9/11 is listed along with claims we didn’t go to the Moon and some random nonsense about Hillary Clinton, presumably in some attempt to discredit by proximity. Instead of honestly addressing the very real areas of uncertainty which the scientists of NIST have quite openly admitted, the Graun does what many other agenda-driven “debunkers” do and tries to reframe the issue as being between “settled science” (to borrow a term) on one side and crazy, discredited or otherwise unreliable kooks on the other.
This, we need to clearly understand, is a purely propagandist ploy meant to convince only the under-informed “masses” (ie us), and not those on either side versed in the real issues. If you read their report and other commentaries, the experts of the National Institute of Standards and Technology are well aware that the explanation they have produced for the 9/11 building collapses is neither complete nor beyond rational question. They are well aware there is plenty of room for science-based interrogation and counter-hypothesis.
But for some reason it seems to be very important to the manufacturers of consent that we, the public, are not made aware of these continuing and probably understandable uncertainties. So, through outlets such as the Guardian (and many others) they disseminate simplistic statements, soundbites and frank lies, designed to convince people that what is uncertain, poorly explained and capable of interpretation is simple, settled, dusted and done.
The link the Guardian provides that is alleged to “disprove” all such “conspiracy theories” is to the 2005 Popular Mechanics article that did indeed claim to do this. The Guardian doesn’t mention that this article has itself been “debunked” and makes several provably false assertions.
If the fire-induced collapse explanation for the events of 9/11 is really beyond debate, why do outlets such as the Graun (and indeed Popular Mechanics) not make this self-evident by simply allowing both sides to place their evidence before the public on their pages, so that readers can make up their own minds? Outlets don’t need to take a side and defend it. In fact they work best when they try to avoid this and do their best to offer argument from all sides.
We aren’t claiming Jones and his co-authors are ultimately correct. We’re just pointing out that scientific truth doesn’t need to be defended by spin or censorship or grotesque ad hominem.
9/11 Crimes and Israel
The Kevin Barrett-Chomsky Dispute in Historical Perspective – Twelfth part of the series titled “9/11 and the Zionist Question” – Read the Eleventh part here
By Prof. Tony Hall | American Herald Tribune | August 19, 2016
Jonathan Kay’s designation of “conspiracists” as victims of an “incurable disease” marks a dramatic low point in the history of North American journalism. This abuse of language and people with the aim of stoking up fear and hatred is on a par with Kay’s malicious characterization of 9/11 as a crime of Islam (p. 167). As discussed below, Kay made this astonishing slur of a major world religion and all its two billion adherents in the context of his condemnation of Muslim academic Kevin Barrett.
Obviously the crimes of 9/11 were not the crimes of any religion. They were crimes committed by many individuals whose actions were well orchestrated by a powerful directing hand. The intention was to achieve a complex array of immediate and long-term objectives. The immensely complex and sophisticated 9/11 operation could not have been achieved without the involvement of state, military and corporate protagonists.
Certainly the elaborate 9/11 crime could not be the work of a small band of Muslim extremists acting independently to cut through the most formidable national defense apparatus ever assembled with the quixotic hope of creating a worldwide Islamic caliphate. That interpretation is as absurd as it is insulting to the intelligence of rational human beings still capable of independent thought.
The peddling of this concocted myth of Islamic culpability for the crimes of 9/11 represents a monumental case study in the systematic defrauding of the public. Those like Jonathan Kay who advance and defend the religious fable of 9/11 as a crime of Islam are deeply implicated in the work of a ruthless criminal cabal whose top priority seems to be to advance the imperialist agenda of Greater Israel, Eretz Israel. The great mass of evidence points to the engineering of the 9/11 crimes by partisans of Likudnik Israel. Since 2001, they seem to have succeeded in significantly expanding Zionist influence over the course of global geopolitics by manufacturing a new transnational enemy for the military-industrial complex of the post-Soviet West.
In my view there is no other logical way of viewing the 9/11 event in terms of the forensic evidence of whose fingerprints are most evident all over the 9/11crime scene. This 9/11 crime scene is ultimately global in extent, even as its antecedents stretch far back into history, but particularly the history of Israel’s current ruling party led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The roots of Netanyahu’s Likud Party lie in Revisionist Zionism, the faction of Israel’s founders most intent on expanding Israel’s boundaries eastward to the Euphrates River. This plan of territorial expansion to create Greater Israel, Eretz Israel, remains integral to the aspirations of Israel’s current ruling coalition.
Through Irgun and the Stern Gang, the proponents of a Greater Israel mounted very calculated acts of heavily publicized terrorism, including at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946. The Jewish terrorists’ immediate goal was to push the British government to withdraw from its mandate to govern Palestine. Once the playing of the terrorism card proved successful in forcing the British out of Palestine, the way was opened for the creation of the Jewish State of Israel in 1947 and 1948. Drawing on the ideas of his father as one of the originators of Revisionist Zionism, Benjamin Netanyahu himself has been a major theorist on the subject of how to play the terrorism card in global geopolitics. Netanyahu’s basic approach is readily apparent from the title of his oft republished book, Terrorism: How the West Can Win. The book’s genesis goes back to the hosting by the Netanyahu family of the Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism in 1979.
If the true culprits of 9/11 are ever to be brought to trial, Jonathan Kay’s overzealous promotion of the 9/11 religious fable, like Netanyahu’s published work on terrorism, offers valuable evidence for the prosecution. So too can Chomsky’s interventions on 9/11 be pictured in a similar light.
Kay in particular violates all tenets of civil debate with his rhetorical extremes. Especially reprehensible are his equation of 9/11 skepticism with mental illness and his characterization of the horrific event as a crime of Islam. By invoking the specter of disease to smear those seeking to break through the massive deceptions embedded in the 9/11 cover up, Kay conspicuously violates the rationalist principles of the Enlightenment tradition, a tradition he demeans even as he claims to defend it (p. 315).
You will read “Does Kevin Barrett Seek to “Absolve Islam of a Terrible Crime”?” in the next part.
Dr. Hall is editor in chief of American Herald Tribune. He is currently Professor of Globalization Studies at University of Lethbridge in Alberta Canada. He has been a teacher in the Canadian university system since 1982. Dr. Hall, has recently finished a big two-volume publishing project at McGill-Queen’s University Press entitled “The Bowl with One Spoon”.
Jonathan Kay and the Israel First Movement
The Kevin Barrett – Noam Chomsky Dispute in Historical Perspective – Eleventh part of the series titled “9/11 and the Zionist Question” – Read the tenth part here
By Prof. Tony Hall | American Herald Tribune | August 12, 2016
Jonathan Kay began his literary career in 1998 as a founding member of the editorial board of Canada’s National Post. Kay worked under Conrad Black and his Israeli-American partner, Richard Perle. Perle was an executive member of the advisory board of Black’s Hollinger International, which oversaw one of the world’s largest English-language newspaper chains based in North America, Great Britain and Israel. A main objective of Hollinger Inc.’s Canadian flagship, the National Post, was to push the country’s political culture far enough rightward that the Christian Zionist politician, Stephen Harper, could take the reigns of the federal government. Canadian Prime Minister between 2006 and 2015, Harper swept into power riding the wave of political fervor originating in the 9/11 psychological operation.
Richard Perle is sometimes referred to as the Prince of Darkness. He is a frequent and unabashed proponent of “total war.” Perle was a PNAC member and lead author of the “Clean Break” document that in 1996 encouraged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to move away from negotiations with the Palestinians toward a more militant posture in the Middle East and globally. Quite likely Perle had a significant role in planning the 9/11 event.
After the Bush administration was delivered its new Pearl Harbor on September 11, 2001, Perle renewed his call for “total war.” In advancing this agenda, Perle helped lead the charge resulting in the US and UK-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Along with David Frum, another Canadian neocon spin doctor deeply implicated in the lies and crimes of 9/11, Perle co-authored the propaganda text, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror. One of the book’s key recommendations was for the United States to invade the Islamic Republic of Iran. Going back to his role in the formulation of the “Clean Break” document, Perle had long advocated the invasion of Iran as well as Iraq and Syria in his capacity as an influential adviser within Israel’s Netanyahu government.
In looking back in 2014 at his sixteen years at the National Post, Kay emphasized that his work on 9/11 infused his literary career with a “sense of purpose.” For a lot of “conservative pundits… this was our Spanish Civil War. The fate of Western Civilization was at stake.” Kay continues, “I became obsessed with 9/11. I read the Koran, hoping to gain insights into Osama Bin Laden’s mindset, travelled to conferences in Israel, joined a Washington, D.C.-based think tank devoted to protecting democratic countries from terrorism. [Foundation for the Defense of Democracies] I helped a former Mossad agent [Michael Ross] write his memoir, and then wrote a book about 9/11 conspiracy theories.” [1]
If Jonathan Kay’s journalistic crusade is conceived as his equivalent to fighting in the Spanish Civil War between 1936 and 1939, his position on 9/11 puts him on the side of the Falangists, on the side of Francisco Franco’s right-wing nationalist forces. As clearly displayed in the ultra-Zionist content of Among The Truthers and The Volunteer as well as his frequent columns in the National Post, Kay is an extreme nationalist whose highest priority is to advance the imperial reach of the Jewish state centered in the expansionary polity of Israel. Kay seems surprisingly candid in identifying himself as a partisan journalist spinning propaganda for the Israel First faction that now prevails inside the governing elites that rule Canada, the United States and all the NATO countries.
The Underground Asylum Imagined by Jonathan Kay
The difference between Noam Chomsky and Jonathan Kay in dealing with Kevin Barrett’s 9/11 work helps illuminate the complex dynamics of a many-faceted cover up campaign. Kay’s Among The Truthers, for instance, is based largely on detailed ad hominem attacks on those that do not accept the official narratives he seeks to advance and defend. Chomsky on the other hand avoids any reference to scholarship of those that have critically evaluated the evidence of what did or did not happen on 9/11. This treatment of his intellectual opponents as unworthy even of named recognition is made very clear in his failure to identify Dr. Barrett and his qualifications even as the MIT professor accused the former University of Wisconsin Lecturer of academic wrongdoing.
In Among The Truthers, Kay’s sponsors assigned him the task of developing the primary commemorative text created with an eye to maintaining Zionist control over the MSM discourse that would mark the tenth anniversary of 9/11. The task given Kay in the prelude to the commemorate events in 2011 was to extend the meme of “9/11 conspiracy theories” into new extremes of deceit and obfuscation through fear mongering, defamation, misrepresentation and guilt-by-association.
The text’s title well encapsulates the core features of the smear campaign that is so central to the strategy of preventing the public from realizing how severely and systematically we have been lied to. Kay’s fervid literary invention of a “Growing Conspiracist Underground of 9/11 Truthers” was meant to invoke connotations of darkness, dementia and concealment. Among the engineered mental pictures conjured up by the literary reference to a “Conspiracist Underground” are concocted media memes of Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network supposedly coordinating international havoc from elaborate networks of Eurasian terrorist caves.
Chomsky and Kay and the other 9/11 obfuscators consistently avoid dealing with the evidence. There is never any discussion, for instance, of the US government’s position that a catastrophic failure of intelligence flows, together with a complete breakdown of a whole series of emergency measure procedures, was the main cause of the 9/11 debacle. This narrative line is called into question by the fact that not one of the officials supposedly responsible for this alleged failure of intelligence and national defense was so much as reprimanded let alone fired. If the official narrative was true, why is it that the supposed incompetents actually received promotions?
There is never any effort to address huge anomalies like the fact, for instance, that the black boxes from the weaponized jet planes could not be found and yet passports of the alleged hijackers were miraculously located amidst the debris. There is never any real reckoning on the side of the obfuscators with the ongoing and blatantly illegal destruction of the forensic evidence of the 9/11 crimes.
This process starts under Michael Chertoff in his capacity as the person responsible for the US Justice Department’s criminal investigation of 9/11. Under Chertoff’s guidance this federal “investigation” quickly assumed the character of a federally orchestrated cover up. The destruction of evidence begins with the unseemly haste in the autumn of 2001 to dispose of the steel remnants of the three pulverized WTC towers. The twisted steel girders were quickly removed and sold off to scrap metal customers in China without prior forensic testing for signs of controlled demolitions. The quick destruction of evidence included the removal and destruction of human remains.
The saga of federal destruction of the evidence of the 9/11 crime, including the illegal destruction of the taped evidence of CIA torture in secret black site dungeons, extends to the proceedings currently underway in the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp. There, the military trial being pressed against the supposed “mastermind of 9/11” broke down in May of 2016 because a military judge improperly allowed the destruction of state evidence.
Kay’s excuse for not dealing with the evidence in Among The Truthers is to cite the supposed advice of a supposed New York editor who supposedly cautioned him, “debunking books don’t sell… Conspiracy theorists won’t believe you. And normal people don’t need to be told what you’re telling them. So you have no audience.” The implication here is that somehow “normal people” need not be burdened with knowledge of the evidentiary substance of what really happened. (p.320)
Kay effectively destroys his journalistic credibility with this startling declaration that he ignored the 9/11 evidence due to the marketing advice of his New York editor. From this very compromised position of surrender to the vagaries of media salesmanship, Kay launches into his pop psychology fakery profiling the inhabitants of his imagined underground realm. Those “conspiracists” that the author chooses to highlight are simply wrong because Jonathan Kay declares them to be wrong. No proof required. All those that have developed interpretations that do not conform with the Israeliocentric worldview of Jonathan Kay and his publishers in the Rupert Murdoch media empire are simply swept aside as members of “cults and cult-like movements.” (p.315)
The inhabitants of Kay’s invented realm are pronounced by their Inquisitor to be heretics and worse. Kay declares them to be common victims of an “incurable disease” against which young people require “inoculation” through the introduction of special curricula and programs in schools. In taking on the personae of a public health official charged to protect our youth from the spread of infectious conspiracy theories, is Kay, the self-proclaimed poseur, implicitly prescribing the quarantining of those with whom he disagrees?
You will read “9/11 Crimes and Israel” in the next part.
Endnotes
[1] Jonathan Kay, “My Life at the National Post and Why I’ll Miss It,” National Post, 21 November, 2014
Dr. Hall is editor in chief of American Herald Tribune. He is currently Professor of Globalization Studies at University of Lethbridge in Alberta Canada. He has been a teacher in the Canadian university system since 1982. Dr. Hall, has recently finished a big two-volume publishing project at McGill-Queen’s University Press entitled “The Bowl with One Spoon”.
The Guardian’s vernacular shield of Ukraine’s TV attack
The Ukrainian Inter TV Channel building in Kiev, which was set on fire on September 4, 2016. © Sputnik
RT | September 6, 2016
The Guardian’s report this week into an apparent arson attack on a Ukrainian TV station is the latest entry in the ‘do as we say, not as we do’ textbook of mainstream journalism.
After the Kiev offices of the building housing studios and offices of Ukrainian broadcaster Inter were set on fire by former military personnel, the British newspaper used copy from the Associated Press and the US state news agency RFE/RL, which has its own agenda, to report on the event. The added spin, however, is all their own.
The headline states: “Pro-Russia TV station in Kiev evacuated after fire.” For starters, there is no evidence that Inter TV, the channel affected, is especially favorable towards Moscow. In reality, Ukraine watchers believe it’s more pertinent to describe it as simply opposed to the current regime in Kiev. The comments beneath the Guardian’s own twitter post promoting the piece would appear to back that up.
Looking at the headline, the impression given is of the local authorities as good guys, practically saving the “pro-Russia” opposition. Quite a pleasant surprise, considering that the current government in Kiev allows private armies, representing nationalist and oligarchic interests – which often align – to run amok in the country and this is why episodes of this nature occur. How do we know there’s a connection? Why, Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov himself stated that it was former Ukrainian military personnel that carried out this attack. This statement is conspicuously missing from the Guardian piece altogether.
Isn’t it remarkable how oblique Western mainstream media’s language becomes when “their guys” are caught out doing something wrong?
The incident is reminiscent of the 2014 Odessa Trade Union building fire and the reaction to it. Back then the Guardian’s headline was “Ukraine clashes: dozens dead after trade union building fire.” There was no mention of the nationalist groups involved and the headline didn’t explain that all the deaths were on the anti-government side, once again dubbed “pro-Russian.” Despite the fact that no weapons were found in the building, Western media has pretty much ignored the massacre, in which 42 people died.
Many reports then referred to the building “catching” fire, as if by accident, and ignored ample video evidence of Molotov cocktails being hurled by the Kiev supporters.
In reporting on the story, The Guardian’s unquestioning reliance on RFE/RL text is particularly telling. After all, we regularly hear self-congratulatory boasting from the Western press about their commitment to objectivity, rejection of political agendas and a tradition of holding authority accountable – usually coupled with scolding of RT and other news outlets that dare to present an alternative interpretation of events. Well, RFE/RL is controlled by the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which is funded to the tune of nearly $800 million annually by the US government and its first listed principle is to “be consistent with the broad foreign policy objectives of the United States.”
Currently the primary aim of US policy in Ukraine is to support the Poroshenko adminstration, seemingly without any caveats, and presumably because the regime is useful for balancing Russia’s influence in the region.
So much for speaking truth to power, G.
Obama makes disguised threat to Russia on cyber warfare
Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with his US counterpart Barack Obama on the sidelines of the G20 Leaders Summit in Hangzhou on September 5, 2016. (AFP)
Press TV – September 5, 2016
President Barack Obama has warned Russia that the United States has “more capacity than anybody” when it comes to cyber warfare, saying hack attacks can not become “wild, wild, West.”
Obama made the remarks to reporters following the G20 conference in Hangzhou, China. The issue of Russian hackers being implicated in breaching US cyberspace was a key issue at the summit.
Though Obama didn’t identify specific instances, he said, “We have had problems with cyber intrusions from Russia in the past” and that the goal is to not to duplicate a “cycle of escalation” that has occurred in arms races of the past.
“What we cannot do is have a situation where this becomes the wild, wild West, where countries that have significant cyber capacity start engaging in unhealthy competition or conflict through these means,” the president said.
Making a subtle threat to Russia, Obama added, “Look, we’re moving into a new era here where a number of countries have significant capacities. And frankly we’ve got more capacity than anybody, both offensively and defensively.”
US officials have blamed Russia for the recent hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) servers, and law enforcement and intelligence agencies are reportedly concerned about the Kremlin trying to disrupt or undermine the presidential elections.
However, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has in the past rejected claims that Moscow was behind a recent hack of DNC servers.
In July, the WikiLeaks website released about 20,000 emails from the DNC, which showed that party leaders had purportedly sought to undermine the presidential campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders.
The revelation prompted DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz to announce her resignation.
The campaign of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton alleged that Russia had released the emails to influence the November presidential election.
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