How America was neoconned into World War IV
Technical impossibilities
Thanks to courageous investigators, many anomalies in the official explanation of the events of 9/11 were posted on the Internet in the following months, providing evidence that this was a false flag operation, and that Osama bin Laden was innocent, as he repeatedly declared in the Afghan and Pakistani press and on Al Jazeera.[1] The proofs of this appalling fraud have been accumulating ever since, and are now accessible to anyone willing to spend a few hours of research on the Web. (Although, while preparing this article, I noticed that Google is now making access to that research more difficult than it was five years ago, artificially prioritizing anti-conspiracy sites.)
For example, members of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth have demonstrated that it was impossible for plane crashes and jet fuel fires to trigger the collapse of the Twin Towers. Even Donald Trump understood this. In fact, speaking of “collapse” is perhaps misleading: the towers literally exploded, pulverizing concrete and projecting pieces of steel beams weighing several hundred tons hundreds of meters laterally at high speeds. The pyroclastic dust that immediately flooded through the streets, not unlike the dust from a volcano, indicates a high temperature mixture of hot gasses and relatively dense solid particles, an impossible phenomenon in a simple collapse. It is also impossible that WTC7, another skyscraper (47 stories), which had not been hit by a plane, collapsed into its own footprint at near free-fall speed, unless by “controlled demolition.”
Testimonies of firefighters recorded shortly after the events describe sequences of explosions just before the “collapse”, well below the plane impact. The presence of molten metal in the wreckage up to three weeks after the attack is inexplicable except by the presence of incompletely burned explosives. Firefighter Philip Ruvolo testified before Étienne Sauret’s camera for his film Collateral Damages (2011): “You’d get down below and you’d see molten steel—molten steel running down the channelways, like you were in a foundry—like lava.”
Aviation professionals have also reported impossibilities in the behavior of the planes. The charted speeds of the two aircraft hitting the Twin Towers, 443 mph and 542 mph, exclude these aircraft being Boeing 767s, because these speeds are virtually impossible near ground level. In the unlikely event such speeds could be attained without the aircraft falling apart, flying them accurately into the towers was mission impossible, especially by the amateur pilots blamed for the hijacking. Hosni Mubarak, a former pilot, said he could never do it. (He is not the only head of state to have voiced his doubts: Chavez and Ahmadinejad are among them.) Recall that neither of the black boxes of the jetliners was ever found, an incomprehensible situation.
And of course, there are the obvious anomalies of Shanksville and Pentagon crash sites: no plane or credible plane debris can be seen on any of the numerous photos easily available.
Inside Job or Mossad Job?
Among the growing number of Americans who disbelieve the official version of the 9/11 attacks, two basic theories are in competition: I called them “inside job” and “Mossad job”. The first one is the dominant thesis within the so-called 9/11 Truth movement, and blames the American government, or a faction within the American Deep State. The second one claims that the masterminds were members of a powerful Israeli network deeply infiltrated in all spheres of power within the US, including media, government, military and secret services.
This “Mossad job” thesis has been gaining ground since Alan Sabrosky, a professor at the U.S. Army War College and the U.S. Military Academy, published in July 2012 an article entitled “Demystifying 9/11: Israel and the Tactics of Mistake”, where he voiced his conviction that September 11th was “a classic Mossad-orchestrated operation.”
We can notice from the outset that incriminating Israelis or Arabs are both “outside job” theories (in fact, they are mirror images of each other, which is understandable in light of what Gilad Atzmon explains about Jewish “projected guilt”).[2] Before even looking at the evidence, “outside job” sounds more credible that “inside job”. There is something monstrous in the idea that a government can deceive and terrorize its own citizens by killing thousands of them, just for starting a series of wars that are not even in the nation’s interest. By comparison, a foreign power attacking the U.S. under the false flag of a third power almost seems like fair play. Indeed suspicion of Israel’s role should be natural to anyone aware of the reputation of the Mossad as: “Wildcard. Ruthless and cunning. Has capability to target U.S. forces and make it look like a Palestinian/Arab act,” in the words of a report of the U.S. Army School for Advanced Military Studies quoted by the Washington Times, September 10th, 2001 — the day before the attacks.
This is an important point, because it raises the question of how and why the 9/11 Truth movement has been led to endorse massively the outrageous “inside job” thesis without even considering the more likely thesis of an attack by a foreign power acting under an Islamic false flag—and what foreign power but Israel would do that?
Of course, the two dissenting theses do not necessarily exclude each other; at least, no one incriminating Israel denies that corrupted elements from the American administration or deep state were involved. The “passionate attachment” between Israel and the U.S. has been going on for decades, and 9/11 is one of its monstruous offsprings.

I can think of no better symbol of that reality than the marriage of Ted and Barbara Olson. Ted Oslon, after having defended Bush in the disputed 2000 election, had been rewarded with the post of Solicitor General (he also defended Dick Cheney when he refused to submit to Congress Enron-related documents). Barbara was a famous CNN reporter, but before that, she was born Barbara Kay Bracher of Jewish parents, educated at Yeshiva University School of Law, and hired by the legal firm WilmerHale, of which Jamie Gorelick, a future member of the 9/11 Commission, was also a member, and whose clients include powerful Israeli firms like Amdocs, a digital communication company charged with spying for Israel in the United States. On September 11, 2001, Barbara Olson alledgedly was on flight AA77, from which she made two telephone calls to her husband. Her calls were reported on CNN in the afternoon, and contributed to crystallize some details of the official story, such as the “box cutters” used as only weapons by the hijackers. Repeatedly invited on television shows after 9/11, Ted Olson frequently contradicted himself when questioned about the calls from his wife. In a 2006 report, the FBI identified only one call from Barbara Olson, and it was an unconnected call lasting 0 seconds. Like all other reported phone calls from desperate passengers (including the famous “Hi, Mom. This is Mark Bingham”), Barbara’s call was simply impossible, because the technology required to make high-altitude phone calls was not developed until 2004.[3]
9/11 was made possible by an alliance between secret worshippers of Israel and corrupted American elements. The question is: who, of the two, were the masterminds of this incredibly daring and complex operation, and for what “higher purpose”?
Another question is: why do those who keep repeating as a mantra “9/11 was an inside job” ignore totally the compelling evidence pointing to Israel? In other words, to what extent do they constitute a “controlled opposition” intended to cover up for Israel? Asking this type of question does not mean suspecting anyone who defends an erroneous or incomplete theory of being a hypocrite. Most people defending one theory or the other do so sincerely, based on the information to which they have access. I have myself been a believer in the official theory for 7 years, and in the “inside job” theory for 2 years, before progressively moving on to the present argument from 2010. On the other hand, we can assume that those who lead the public into error on a long term are not just mistaken but lying. In any case, it is legitimate to investigate the background of opinion makers, and when they are caught lying or distorting the truth, we can speculate on their motivation. I will come back to this issue at the end of the article.
The dancing Israelis
Researchers who believe Israel orchestrated 9/11 cite the behavior of a group of individuals who have come to be known as the “dancing Israelis” since their arrest, though their aim was to pass as “dancing Arabs.” Dressed in ostensibly “Middle Eastern” attire, they were seen by various witnesses standing on the roof of a van parked in Jersey City, cheering and taking photos of each other with the WTC in the background, at the very moment the first plane hit the North Tower. The suspects then moved their van to another parking spot in Jersey City, where other witnesses saw them deliver the same ostentatious celebrations.
One anonymous call to the police in Jersey City, reported the same day by NBC News, mentioned “a white van, 2 or 3 guys in there. They look like Palestinians and going around a building. […] I see the guy by Newark Airport mixing some junk and he has those sheikh uniforms. […] He’s dressed like an Arab.” The police soon issued the following BOLO alert (be-on-the-look-out) for a “Vehicle possibly related to New York terrorist attack. White, 2000 Chevrolet van with New Jersey registration with ‘Urban Moving Systems’ sign on back seen at Liberty State Park, Jersey City, NJ, at the time of first impact of jetliner into World Trade Center. Three individuals with van were seen celebrating after initial impact and subsequent explosion.”
By chance, the van was intercepted around 4 pm, with five young men inside: Sivan and Paul Kurzberg, Yaron Shmuel, Oded Ellner, and Omer Marmari. Before any question was asked, the driver, Sivan Kurzberg, burst out: “We are Israelis. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are your problem”.The Kurzberg brothers were formally identified as Mossad agents. All five officially worked for a moving company (a classic cover for espionage) named Urban Moving Systems, whose owner, Dominik Otto Suter, fled the country for Tel Aviv on September 14.[4]

This event was first reported the day after the attacks by journalist Paulo Lima in the New Jersey newspaper The Bergen Record, based on “sources close to the investigation” who were convinced of the suspects’ foreknowledge of the morning’s attacks: “It looked like they knew what was going to happen when they were at Liberty State Park”.The 579-page FBI report on the investigation that followed (partially declassified in 2005) reveals several important facts. First, once developed, the photos taken by the suspects while watching the North Tower on fire confirm their attitudes of celebration: “They smiled, they hugged each other and they appeared to ‘high five’ one another”. To explain their contentment, the suspects said they were simply happy that, thanks to these terrorist attacks, “the United States will take steps to stop terrorism in the world”. Yet at this point, before the second tower was hit, most Americans believed the crash was an accident. The five Israelis were found connected to another company called Classic International Movers, which employed five other Israelis arrested for their contacts with the nineteen presumed suicide hijackers. In addition, one of the five suspects had called “an individual in South America with authentic ties to Islamic militants in the middle east”. Finally, the FBI report states that the “The vehicle was also searched by a trained bomb-sniffing dog which yielded a positive result for the presence of explosive traces”.
After all this incriminating evidence comes the most puzzling passage of the report: its conclusion that “the FBI no longer has any investigative interests in the detainees and they should proceed with the appropriate immigration proceedings”. In fact, a letter addressed to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, dated September 25, 2001, proves that, less than two weeks after the events, the FBI federal headquarter had already decided to close the investigation, asking that “The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service should proceed with the appropriate immigration proceedings”. The five “dancing Israelis”, also known as “the high fivers”, were detained 71 days in a Brooklyn prison, where they first refused, then failed, lie detector tests. Finally, they were quietly returned to Israel under the minimal charge of “visa violation.” Three of them were then invited on an Israeli TV talk show in November 2001, where one of them ingenuously declared: “Our purpose was simply to document the event.”
The Israeli spy network
The five “dancing Israelis,” the only suspects arrested on the very day of the 9/11 attacks, were just the tip of an iceberg. In September 2001, the federal police were busy dismantling the largest Israeli spy network ever uncovered on American soil. In the summer preceding the attack, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) compiled a report which would be revealed to the public by the Washington Post on November 23rd, 2001, followed by a Carl Cameron’s four-part documentary broadcast on Fox News from December 11th, 2001. On March 14th, 2002, an article in French newspaper Le Monde signed by Sylvain Cypel also referred to the report, shortly before the French magazine Intelligence Online made it fully accessible on the Internet.[5] It said that 140 Israeli spies, aged between 20 and 30, had been arrested since March 2001, while 60 more were arrested after September 11. Generally posing as art students, they visited at least “36 sensitive sites of the Department of Defense.” “A majority of those questioned have stated they served in military intelligence, electronic signal intercept, or explosive ordnance units. Some have been linked to high-ranking officials in the Israeli military. One was the son of a two-star general, one served as the bodyguard to the head of the Israeli Army, one served in a Patriot mission unit.” Another, Peer Segalovitz, officer in the 605 Battalion of the Golan Heights, “acknowledged he could blow up buildings, bridges, cars, and anything else that he needed to.”[6]
Of special interest is the mention that “the Hollywood, Florida, area seems to be a central point for these individuals.”[7] More than 30 out of the 140 fake Israeli students identified before 9/11 lived in that city of 140,000 inhabitants. And this city also happens to be the place where fifteen of the nineteen alleged 9/11 Islamist hijackers had regrouped (nine in Hollywood, six in the vicinity), including four of the five supposed to have hijacked Flight AA11. What was the relationship between the Israeli spies and the Islamist terrorists? We were told by mainstream news that the former were monitoring the latter, but failed to report suspicious activities of these terrorists to American authorities. From such a presentation, Israel comes out clean, since a spy agency cannot be blamed for not sharing information with the country it is spying in. At worst, the Israeli Intelligence can be accused of “letting it happen”—a guarantee of impunity. In reality, the Israeli agents were certainly not just monitoring the future “hijackers,” but financing and manipulating them, before disposing of them. We know that Israeli Hanan Serfaty, who rented two flats near Mohamed Atta, had handled at least $100,000 in three months. And we also learned from the New York Times on February 19, 2009, that Ali al-Jarrah, cousin of the alleged hijacker of Flight UA93 Ziad al-Jarrah, had spent twenty-five years spying for the Mossad as an undercover agent infiltrating the Palestinian resistance and Hezbollah.
Israeli agents apparently appreciate operating under the cover of artists. Shortly before September 11, a group of fourteen Jewish “artists” under the name of Gelatin installed themselves on the ninety-first floor of the north tower of the World Trade Center. There, as a work of “street art,” they removed a window and extended a wooden balcony. To understand what role this piece of scaffolding may have played, it must be remembered that the explosion supposedly resulting from the impact of the Boeing AA11 on the North Tower took place between the ninety-second and the ninety-eighth floors. With the only film of the impact on the North Tower being that of the Naudet brothers, who are under suspicion for numerous reasons, many researchers are convinced that no aircraft hit this tower, and that the explosion simulating the impact was provoked by pre-planted explosives inside the tower.
Floors ninety-three to one hundred of the North Tower were occupied by Marsh & McLennan, whose CEO was Jeffrey Greenberg, son of wealthy Zionist (and financier of George W. Bush) Maurice Greenberg, who also happens to be the owner of Kroll Inc., the firm in charge of security for the entire World Trade Center complex on 9/11. The Greenbergs were also the insurers of the Twin Towers and, on July 24, 2001, they took the precaution of having the contract reinsured by competitors. In November 2000, the board of directors of Marsh & McLennan was joined by (Lewis) Paul Bremer, the chairman of the National Commission on Terrorism, who, on September 11, 2001, two hours only after the pulverization of the North Tower, would appear on NBC to name bin Laden as prime suspect, perfectly calm as 400 of his employees are missing (295 will finally be declared dead). “It is the day that will change our lives,” he said. “It is the day when the war that the terrorists declared on the US [. . .] has been brought home to the US.” In 2003, Bremer would be appointed administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq to level the Iraqi state to the ground and oversee the theft of almost a trillion dollars intended for its reconstruction.
The super-sayanim
With Goldberg and Bremer, we have reached the upper level of the conspiracy, comprising a number of influential Jewish personalities, working inside and outside the U.S. government — super-sayanim, so to speak. The most representative of those outside government is Larry Silverstein, the real estate shark who, with his partner Frank Lowy, leased the Twin Towers from New York City in the spring of 2001. The head of the New York Port Authority, who granted Silverstein and Lowy the lease, was none other than Lewis Eisenberg, another member of the United Jewish Appeal Federation and former vice-president of AIPAC. It appeared that Silverstein had made a disastrous deal, because the Twin Towers had to be decontaminated for asbestos. The decontamination process had been indefinitely postponed since the 1980s because of its cost, estimated at nearly $1 billion in 1989. In 2001, the New York Port Authority had been all too happy to shift responsibility to Silverstein.
Immediately after acquiring the Twin Towers, Silverstein renegotiated the insurance contracts to cover terrorist attacks, doubling the coverage to $3.5 billion, and made sure he would retain the right to rebuild after such an event. After the attacks, he took his insurers to court in order to receive double compensation, claiming that the two planes were two separate attacks. After a long legal battle, he pocketed $4.5 billion. Silverstein is a leading member of the United Jewish Appeal Federation of Jewish Philanthropies of New York, the biggest fundraiser for Israel (after the US government, which pays about $3 billion per year in aid to Israel). Silverstein also maintained “close ties with Netanyahu,” according to Haaretz (November 21, 2001): “The two have been on friendly terms since Netanyahu’s stint as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations. For years they kept in close touch. Every Sunday afternoon, New York time, Netanyahu would call Silverstein.” Besides being a powerful man, Larry is a lucky man: as he explained in this interview, every morning of the week, he had breakfast at the Windows on the World on top of the North Tower, but on September 11th, he had an appointment with his dermatologist.

Accomplices to the 9/11 false flag attack with strong Israeli connections should also be tracked at the other end of the trajectory of the planes reported to have crashed into the Twin Towers. Flights AA11 and UA175 took off from Logan Airport in Boston, which subcontracted their security to International Consultants on Targeted Security (ICTS), a firm based in Israel and headed by Menachem Atzmon, a treasurer of the Likud. So did Newark Airport where flight UA93 reportedly took off before crashing in Shanksville.
A serious investigation would follow many other trails, such as the Odigo instant messages received by employees at the WTC two hours before the plane crashes, as reported by Haaretz on September 27th, 2001. The first plane hit the WTC at the precise time announced, “almost to the minute,” admitted Alex Diamandis, vice-president of Odigo, headquartered in Israel. Also disturbing is the behavior of the American branch of Zim Israel Navigational, a maritime shipping giant 48% owned by the Jewish state (occasionally used as a cover for the Israeli secret services), which moved its offices from the WTC, along with its 200 employees, September 4th, 2001, one week before the attacks —“like an act of God, we moved”, said the CEO Shaul Cohen-Mintz when interviewed by USA Today, November 17th, 2001.
But of course, none of these trails were ever pursued. That is because the most powerful conspirators were at the highest level of the Justice Department. Michael Chertoff was head of the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice in 2001, and responsible, among many other things, for securing the release of the Israeli agents arrested before and after 9/11, including the “dancing Israelis.” In 2003, this son of a rabbi and of a Mossad pioneer would be appointed Secretary of Homeland Security, in charge of counter-terrorism on the American soil, which allowed him to control dissenting citizens and restrain access to the evidence under the pretext of Sensitive Security Information.
Another chief of the cover-up was Philip Zelikow, the executive director of the 9/11 presidential Commission established in November 2002. Zelikow is a self-styled specialist in the art of making “public myths” by “‘searing’ or ‘molding’ events [that] take on ‘transcendent’ importance and, therefore, retain their power even as the experiencing generation passes from the scene” (Wikipedia). In December 1998, he co-signed an article for Foreign Affairs entitled “Catastrophic Terrorism,” in which he speculated on what would have happened if the 1993 WTC bombing (already attributed to bin Laden) had been done with a nuclear bomb: “An act of catastrophic terrorism that killed thousands or tens of thousands of people and/or disrupted the necessities of life for hundreds of thousands, or even millions, would be a watershed event in America’s history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented for peacetime and undermine Americans’ fundamental sense of security within their own borders in a manner akin to the 1949 Soviet atomic bomb test, or perhaps even worse. … Like Pearl Harbor, the event would divide our past and future into a before and after. The United States might respond with draconian measures scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects and use of deadly force.” This is the man who controlled the governmental investigation on the 9/11 terror attacks. Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, who nominally led the commission, revealed in their book Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission (2006), that the commission “was set up to fail” from the beginning. Zelikow, they claim, had already written a synopsis and a conclusion for the final report before the first meeting. He controlled all the working groups, prevented them from communicating with each other, and gave them as sole mission to prove the official story; Team 1A, for example, was tasked to “tell the story of Al-Qaeda’s most successful operation—the 9/11 attacks.”
A tight control of mainstream media is perhaps the most delicate aspect of the whole operation. I will not delve into that aspect, for we all know what to expect from the MSM. For a groundbreaking argument on the extent to which 9/11 was psy-op orchestrated by MSM, I recommend Ace Baker’s 2012 documentary 9/11 The Great American Psy-Opera, chapters 6, 7 and 8.
Machiavellian meta-Zionists
If we move up to the very highest level of the conspiracy, we find ourselves in Tel Aviv. The preparation for 9/11 coincided with the coming to power of Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996, followed by Ehud Barak in July 1999, and Ariel Sharon in March 2001, who brought back Netanyahu as minister of Foreign Affairs in 2002 (with Netanyahu again becoming prime minister in 2009). It must be noted that both Netanyahu and Ehud Barak were temporarily out of the Israeli government in September 2001, just like Ben-Gurion at the time of Kennedy’s assassination (read my article on JFK). A few months before 9/11, Barak, a former head of Israeli military intelligence, was “recruited” as a consultant to a Mossad front company, SCP Partner, specializing in security and located less than seven miles from Urban Moving Systems.[8] One hour after the explosion of the North Tower, Barak was on BBC World to point the finger at bin Laden (the first to do so), and concluded: “It’s a time to launch an operational, complete war against terror.”
As for Netanyahu, we are not surprised to hear him boast, on CNN in 2006, of having predicted in 1995 that, “if the West doesn’t wake up to the suicidal nature of militant Islam, the next thing you will see is militant Islam bringing down the World Trade Center.” Netanyahu is exemplary of the ever closer “special relationship” between the US and Israel, which started with Truman and blossomed under Johnson. Netanyahu had lived, studied, and worked in the United States from 1960 to 1978, between his 11th and his 27th year—except during his military service—and again after the age of 33, when he was appointed deputy ambassador to Washington and then permanent delegate to the United Nations. Netanyahu appeared regularly on CNN in the early 1990s, contributing to the transformation of the world’s leading news channel into a major Zionist propaganda tool. His political destiny was largely planned and shaped in the United States, under the supervision of those we now call neoconservatives, and the only thing that distinguishes him from them is that, for public relations reasons, he does not possess American nationality.
“What’s a neocon?” once asked Bush 43 to his father Bush 41, after more than three years in the White House. “Do you want names, or a description?” answered 41. “Description.” “Well,” said 41, “I’ll give it to you in one word: Israel.”[9] That anecdote, quoted by Andrew Cockburn, sums it up. The neoconservative movement was born in the editorial office of the monthly magazine Commentary, which had replaced the Contemporary Jewish Record in 1945 as the press organ of the American Jewish Committee. “If there is an intellectual movement in America to whose invention Jews can lay sole claim, neoconservatism is it,” wrote Gal Beckerman in the Jewish Daily Forward, January 6, 2006. “It is a fact that as a political philosophy, neoconservatism was born among the children of Jewish immigrants and is now largely the intellectual domain of those immigrants’ grandchildren.”
The founding fathers of neoconservatism (Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, Donald Kagan, Paul Wolfowitz, Adam Shulsky) were self-proclaimed disciples of Leo Strauss, a German Jewish immigrant teaching at the University of Chicago. Strauss can be characterized as a meta-Zionist in the sense that, while an ardent supporter of the State of Israel, he rejected the idea that Israel as a nation should be contained within borders; Israel must retain her specificity, which is to be everywhere, he said in essence in his 1962 lecture “Why We Remain Jews.” Strauss would also approve of being called a Machiavellian, for in his Thoughts on Machiavelli, he praised the “the intrepidity of his thought, the grandeur of his vision, and the graceful subtlety of his speech” (p. 13). Machiavelli’s model of a prince was Cesar Borgia, the tyrant who after having appointed the cruel Ramiro d’Orco to subdue the province of Romania, had him executed with utter cruelty, thus reaping the people’s gratitude after having diverted their hatred onto another. Machiavelli, writes Strauss, “is a patriot of a particular kind: He is more concerned with the salvation of his fatherland than with the salvation of his soul” (p. 10). And that happens to be exactly what Jewishness is all about, according to Jewish thinkers such as Harry Waton: “The Jews that have a deeper understanding of Judaism know that the only immortality there is for the Jew is the immortality in the Jewish people” (read more here). As a matter of fact, in the Jewish World Review of June 7, 1999, Michael Ledeen, a neocon and founding member of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), assumed that Machiavelli must have been a “secret Jew,” since “if you listen to his political philosophy you will hear Jewish music.”
The neoconservatives of the first generation originally positioned themselves on the far left. Irving Kristol, one of the main editors of Commentary, had long claimed to be a Trotskyist. It was soon after the 1967 successful annexation of Arab territories by Israel that the Straussians experienced their conversion to right-wing militarism, to which they owe their new name. Norman Podhoretz, editor-in-chief from 1960 to 1995, turned from anti-war activist to defense budget booster in the early 70s. He gave the following explanation in 1979: “American support for Israel depended upon continued American involvement in international affairs—from which it followed that an American withdrawal into the kind of isolationist mood [. . .] that now looked as though it might soon prevail again, represented a direct threat to the security of Israel.” (Breaking Ranks, p. 336). Leading the U.S. into war for the benefit of Israel is the essence of the Machiavellian crypto-Zionists known deceptively as neoconservatives.
The Project for a new (((American))) Century
The story of how the neoconservatives reached the position of influence they held under George W. Bush is a complicated one, which I can only outline. They entered the state apparatus for the first time in the baggage of Rumsfeld and Cheney, during president Ford’s cabinet reshuffle known as the “Halloween Massacre,” following Nixon’s resignation. When the Cold War calmed down after America evacuated its troops from Vietnam in 1973, and the CIA produced reassuring analyses of the USSR’s military capabilities and ambitions, Rumsfeld (as Secretary of Defense) and Cheney (as Chief of Staff) persuaded Ford to appoint an independent committee, known as Team B, to revise upward the CIA estimates of the Soviet threat, and reactivate a war attitude in public opinion, Congress, and Administration. Team B was chaired by Richard Pipes and co-chaired by Paul Wolfowitz, both introduced by Richard Perle.
During the Democratic parenthesis of the Carter presidency (1976–80), the neoconservatives worked at unifying the largest number of Jews around their policies, by founding the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), which became the second-most powerful pro-Israel lobby after AIPAC. According to its “mission statement”, it is “dedicated to educating Congressional, military and civilian national security decision-makers on American defense and strategic interests, primarily in the Middle East, the cornerstone of which is a robust U.S.-Israeli security cooperation.” In 1980, the neocons were rewarded by Ronald Reagan for their support by a dozen posts in national security and foreign policy: Richard Perle and Douglas Feith to the Department of Defense; Richard Pipes at the National Security Council; Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, and Michael Ledeen in the State Department. They helped Reagan escalate the Cold War, showering billions of dollars on the military-industrial complex.
The long term planning of 9/11 probably started then. Isser Harel, founder of Israeli secret services (Shai in 1944, Shin Bet in 1948, Mossad until 1963) is reported as prophesizing in 1980, in an interview with Christian Zionist Michael Evans, that Islamic terrorism would end up hitting America in their “phallic symbol”: “Your biggest phallic symbol is New York City and your tallest building will be the phallic symbol they will hit”.[10] (A whole article would be needed to document and explain the revival of the Jewish gift of apocalyptic prophecy in recent decades.)
In 1996, during the Clinton years, the neoconservatives threw all their weight into their ultimate think tank, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), directed by William Kristol and Robert Kagan. PNAC recommended taking advantage of the defeat of communism to reinforce American hegemony by preventing the emergence of any rival. Their Statement of Principles vowed to extend the current Pax Americana, which entailed “a military that is strong and ready to meet both present and future challenges.” In its September 2000 report entitled Rebuilding America’s Defenses, PNAC anticipated that US forces must become “able to rapidly deploy and win multiple simultaneous large-scale wars.” This required a profound transformation, including the development of “a new family of nuclear weapons designed to address new sets of military requirements.” Unfortunately, according to the authors of the report, “the process of transformation […] is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.” It is certainly no coincidence that the three-hour-long blockbuster Pearl Harbor was released in the summer 2001, conveniently entrenching the “New Pearl Harbor” meme into the minds of millions.
PNAC’s architects played the American hegemony card by draping themselves in the super-patriotic discourse of America’s civilizing mission. But their duplicity is exposed in a document brought to public knowledge in 2008: a report published in 1996 by the Israeli think tank Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS), entitled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, written specifically for the new Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. The team responsible for the report was led by Richard Perle, and included Douglas Feith and David Wurmser, who figured the same year among the signatories of PNAC. As its title suggests, the Clean Break report invited Netanyahu to break with the Oslo Accords of 1993, which officially committed Israel to the return of the territories it occupied illegally since 1967. The new prime minister should instead “engage every possible energy on rebuilding Zionism” and reaffirm Israel’s right to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
In November 2000, Bush Jr. was elected under conditions that raised protests of electoral fraud. Dick Cheney, who had directed his campaign, named himself vice-president and introduced two dozens neoconservatives in foreign policy key positions. The State Department was entrusted to Colin Powell, but he was surrounded with neocon aides such as David Wurmser. As National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, a specialist of Russia with no expertise in the Middle East, was entirely dependent on her neocon adviser Philip Zelikow. William Luti and Elliott Abrams, and later Eliot Cohen, were also tasked with steering Rice. But it was mainly from within the Defense Department under Donald Rumsfeld that the most influential neocons were able to fashion US foreign and military policy. Richard Perle occupied the crucial position of director of the Defense Policy Board, responsible for defining military strategy, while Paul Wolfowitz became the “soul of the Pentagon” as deputy secretary with Douglas Feith as under secretary.
The Hanukkah miracle to start WWIV
After eight months in the presidency, Bush was confronted with the “catastrophic event,” the “new Pearl Harbor” that PNAC had wished for a year earlier. 9/11 was a real “Hanukkah miracle” for Israel, commented Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy and Israeli National Security Council chairman Uzi Dayan. Netanyahu rejoiced: “It’s very good […] it will generate immediate sympathy […], strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we’ve experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror.” On September 21, he published an op-ed in the New York Post entitled “Today, We Are All Americans,” in which he delivered his favorite propaganda line: “For the bin Ladens of the world, Israel is merely a sideshow. America is the target.” Three days later the New Republic responded with a headline on behalf of the Americans: “We are all Israelis now.” Americans experienced 9/11 as an act of hatred from the Arab world, and they felt an immediate sympathy for Israel, which the neoconservatives relentlessly exploited. One of the aims was to encourage Americans to view Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians as part of the global fight against Islamic terrorism.
It was a great success. In the years preceding September 11, Israel’s reputation had bottomed out; condemnations had been raining from around the world for its policy of apartheid and colonization, and its systematic war against Palestinian command structures. Increasing numbers of American voices questioned the merits of the special relationship between the United States and Israel. From the day of the attacks, it was all over. As Americans now intended to fight Arab terrorists to the death, they would stop demanding from Israel more reasonable, proportionate retaliation against Palestinian suicide bombers and rockets.
Instead, the president’s speeches (written by neocon David Frum) characterized the 9/11 attacks as the trigger for a world war of a new type, one fought against an invisible enemy scattered throughout the Middle East. First, vengeance must come not only against bin Laden, but also against the state harboring him: “We will make no distinction between those who committed these acts and those who harbor them” (Sept. 11). Second, the war extends to the world: “Our war on terror begins with Al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated” (Sept. 20). Third, any country that does not support Washington will be treated as an enemy: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists” (Sept. 20).
In an article in the Wall Street Journal dated November 20, 2001, the neoconservative Eliot Cohen dubbed the war against terrorism as “World War IV,” a framing soon echoed by other American Zionists (the odd choice of the name WWIV rather than WWIII comes, I suspect, from the neocons’ ethnocentric worldview, in which every world war is a step toward Greater Israel; since one major step was accomplished in 1967, the Cold War counts as WW3). In September 2004, at a conference in Washington entitled “World War IV: Why We Fight, Whom We Fight, How We Fight,” Cohen said: “The enemy in this war is not ‘terrorism’ […] but militant Islam.” Like the Cold War, the imminent world war, according to Cohen’s vision, has ideological roots, will have global implications, and will last a long time, involving a whole range of conflicts. The self-fulfilling prophecy of a new World War centered in the Middle East has also been popularized by Norman Podhoretz, in “How to Win World War IV” (Commentary, February 2002), followed by a second article in, “World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win,” (September 2004), and finally a book titled World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism (2007).[11]
The hijacked conspiracy and the controlled opposition

In the case of 9/11 as in the case of Kennedy, controlled opposition operates on many levels, and many honest scholars now realize that the 9/11 Truth movement itself is partly channeled by individuals and groups secretly aiming at drawing suspicions away from Israel. Such is certainly the case of the three young Jews (Avery, Rowe, and Bermas) who directed the film Loose Change (2005), the most widely watched 9/11 conspiracy film since its first version in 2005. They hitched their whole thesis on a comparison with the never carried-out false flag project Operation Northwoods (timely revealed to the public in May 2001 in James Bamford’s book Body of Secrets, written with the support of former NSA director Michael Hayden, now working for Michael Chertoff), but they failed to mention the attack on the USS Liberty, a well-documented false flag attack by Israel on its U.S. ally. They did not breathe a word about the neoconservatives’ loyalty to Israel, and treat anyone who cited the Israeli role in 9/11 as anti-Semitic. The same can be said of Bermas’s more recent film Invisible Empire (2010), also produced by Alex Jones: a compilation of anti-imperialist clichés focusing on the Bushs and the Rockefellers, without a single hint of the (((Others))).
It is interesting to note that the 9/11 scenario put forward by Loose Change had actually been prewritten by Hollywood: on the 4th of March, 2001, Fox TV broadcast the first episode of the series The Lone Gunmen, watched by 13 million Americans. The plot is about computer hackers working for a secret cabal within the U.S. government, who hijack a jet by remote control with the intent to crash it into one of the Twin Towers, while making it appear to have been hijacked by Islamic terrorists. At the last seconds, the pilots manage to regain control of the plane. The purpose of the failed operation was to trigger a world war under the pretext of fighting terrorism. Truthers of the “inside job” school fancy that this episode must have been written by some whistleblower inside Fox. Unlikely!
There is, of course, some truth in the “inside job” theory, as I said at the beginning. Israel (in the wider sense) would not be able to pull such an operation and get away with it, without complicity at the highest level of U.S. government. How does that work? Pretty much like for the Kennedy assassination, if you consider that the country was then ruled by its vice-president Dick Cheney, the president being a mere dummy (see Lou Dubose and Jake Bernstein, Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency, Random House, 2006). In my book JFK-9/11, I have proposed a plausible scenario of how Israel had in fact hijacked a smaller false flag attack on the Pentagon fabricated by the American Deep State, for the limited purpose of justifying the overthrow of the Talibans in Afghanistan, a goal fully supported by such “Great Gamers” as Zbigniew Brzezinski, but which didn’t in itself interest the neocons.

What the neocons wanted was a new war against Iraq and then a general conflagration in the Middle East leading to the crumbling of all the enemies of Israel, with Syria and Iran high on the list. So they outbid everyone and gave the operation the scale they wanted with the help of their New York super-sayan Silvertein. George W. Bush, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and other goyim who had been kept out of the loop, finding themselves embroiled in geopolitical machinations of global scope, could merely try to save face. On September 19 and 20, Richard Perle’s Defense Policy Board met in the company of Paul Wolfowitz and Bernard Lewis (inventor of the self-fulfilling prophecy of the “clash of civilizations”) but in the absence of Powell and Rice. They prepared a letter to Bush, written on PNAC letterhead, to remind him of his historic mission: “Even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism.”[12] This was an ultimatum. Bush was certainly aware of the leverage that the neocons had acquired over the major print and television media. He was obliged, under penalty of ending in the proverbial trash bin of history, to endorse the invasion of Iraq that his father had refused the Zionists ten years earlier.
As for Brzezinski and other genuine U.S. imperialists, their support for the invasion of Afghanistan made their timid protests against the Iraq war ineffective. It was a little late in February 2007 when Brzezinski denounced before the Senate “a historical, strategic and moral calamity […] driven by Manichaean impulses and imperial hubris.” In 2012 he declared, regarding the risk of conflagration with Iran, that Obama should stop following Israel like a “stupid mule.” He soon disappeared from the MSM, as a useful idiot no longer useful.
The “half truth” of the exclusively “inside job” theory, which denounces 9/11 as a false flag operation perpetrated by the American state on its own citizens, functions like a secondary false flag hiding the real masters of the operation, who are in fact agents in the service of a foreign nation. One of the aims of this inside-jobish controlled opposition is to force American officials to maintain the “bin Laden did it” masquerade, knowing that tearing apart the fake Islamic flag would only reveal the U.S. flag, not the Israeli flag. No longer controlling the media, they would not have the means to raise this second veil to expose Israel. Any effort to get at the truth would be political suicide. Everyone understands what is at stake: if one day, under mounting pressure from public opinion or for some other strategic reason, the mainstream media abandons the official bin Laden story, the well-rehearsed slogan “9/11 was an inside job” will have prepared Americans to turn against their own government, while the neocon Zionists will remain untouchable (Machiavelli’s method: make another accomplish your dirty ends, then turn popular vengeance against him). And God knows what will happen, if the government has not by then succeeded in disarming its citizens through Sandy Hook-type psy-ops. Government officials have little choice but to stick to the Al-Qaeda story, at least for the next fifty years.
After reaching this conclusion in JFK-9/11, I had the satisfaction of finding that Victor Thorn, in a book that had eluded me (Made in Israel: 9-11 and the Jewish Plot Against America, Sisyphus Press, 2011), had already expressed it in harsher terms: “In essence, the ‘9-11 truth movement’ was created prior to Sept. 11, 2001 as a means of suppressing news relating to Israeli complicity. By 2002–2003, ‘truthers’ began appearing at rallies holding placards that read ‘9-11 was an inside job.’ Initially, these signs provided hope for those who didn’t believe the government and mainstream media’s absurd cover stories. But then an awful realization emerged: The slogan ‘9-11 was an inside job’ was quite possibly the greatest example of Israeli propaganda ever devised. […] The mantra, ‘9-11 was an inside job’ is only partially true and is inherently damaging to the ‘truth movement’ because it shifts all attention away from Israel’s traitorous assault against America. […] Leaders of these fake 9-11 groups know the truth about Israel’s 9-11 barbarity. Their willingness to perpetuate or cover it up ultimately makes them as guilty and vile as those who launched the attacks. There are no degrees of separation in this matter. It’s a black-and-white issue. Tell the entire truth about Israel’s Murder, Inc. cabal, or sleep in the same infected bed as these murdering dogs lie in. […] Faux conspiratologists complain about the government and news sources not telling the truth, yet they’ve erected an utter blackout on data regarding Israel and 9-11.”
The missing .3 trillion
Some readers will complain that I am making a very complex operation appear too simple. I plead guilty: I have merely tried here to outline the case against Israel in the short scope of an article. But I am fully aware that creating Greater Israel through a world war fought by the U.S. might not have been the only consideration in the preparation of 9/11. Many private interests had to be involved. Yet I believe none of them interfered with Israel’s plan, and most of them supported it.
There is, for example, the missing gold in the WTC basement : $200 million were recovered from the estimated $1 billion stored: who took the rest? But that is nothing compared to the $2.3 trillion that were missing from the accounts of the Department of Defense for the year 2000, in addition to $1.1 trillion missing for 1999, according to a televised declaration made on September 10th, 2001, the day before the attacks, by Donald Rumsfeld. Just for comparison, this is more than one thousand times the colossal losses of Enron, which triggered a chain of bankruptcies that same year. All this money evaporated into thin air under the watch of William Cohen, Defense Secretary during Bill Clinton’s second term. In 2001, the man who was tasked to help track down the missing trillions was Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller) Dov Zakheim, a member of PNAC and an ordained rabbi. Practically, the mystery had to be resolved by financial analysts at Resource Services Washington (RSW). Unfortunately, their offices were destroyed by “al-Qaeda” the following morning. The “hijackers” or Flight AA77, rather than hitting the command center on the eastern side of the Pentagon, chose to attempt a theoretically impossible downward spiral at 180 degrees in order to hit the west side of the building precisely at the location of the accounting offices. The 34 experts at RSW perished in their offices, together with 12 other financial analysts, as is noted in the biography of the team leader Robert Russell for the National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial: “The weekend before his death, his entire office attended a crab feast at the Russell home. They were celebrating the end of the fiscal-year budget completion. Tragically, every person that attended that party was involved in the Pentagon explosion, and are currently missing”.
By an incredible coincidence, one of the financial experts trying to make sense of the Pentagon financial loss, Bryan Jack, was reported to have died at the precise location of his office, not because he was working there that day, but because he was on a business trip on Flight AA77. In the words of the Washington Post database: “Bryan C. Jack was responsible for crunching America’s defense budget. He was a passenger on American Airlines Flight 77, bound for official business in California when his plane struck the Pentagon, where, on any other day, Jack would have been at work at his computer”. Yahweh must have a sense of chutzpah!
Footnotes
[1] Philippe Broussard, “En dépit des déclarations américaines, les indices menant à Ben Laden restent minces,” Le Monde, September 25, 2001.
[2] Gilad Atzmon, Being in Time: a Post-Political Manifesto, Interlink Publishing, 2017 , p. 142.
[3] David Ray Griffin, 9/11 Contradictions, Arris Books, 2008, pp. 170-182; Webster Griffin Tarpley, 9/11 Synthetic Terror Made in USA, Progressive Press, 2008, pp. 321-324.
[4] Christopher Bollyn, Solving 9-11: The Deception That Changed the World, C. Bollyn, 2012, pp. 278–280.
[5] It is quoted here from Bollyn’s book and from Justin Raimondo, The Terror Enigma: 9/11 and the Israeli Connection, iUniverse, 2003.
[6] Christopher Bollyn, Solving 9-11: The Deception That Changed the World, C. Bollyn, 2012, p. 159.
[7] Justin Raimondo, The Terror Enigma: 9/11 and the Israeli Connection, iUniverse, 2003, p. 3.
[8] Christopher Bollyn, Solving 9-11: The Deception that Changed the World, 2012 , pp. 278-280.
[9] Quoted by Andrew Cockburn, who claims to have heard the anecdote from “friends of the family”, in Rumsfeld: His Rise, His fall, and Catastrophic Legacy, Scribner, 2011, p. 219.
[10] Michael Evans told of this prophecy in an interview with Deborath Calwell and in his book The American Prophecies, Terrorism and Mid-East Conflict Reveal a Nation’s Destiny), quoted in Christopher Bollyn, Solving 9-11: The Deception That Changed the World, C. Bollyn, 2012, p. 71.
[11] Stephen Sniegoski, The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel, Enigma Edition, 2008, p. 193.
[12] Stephen Sniegoski, The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel, Enigma Edition, 2008, p. 144.
Laurent Guyénot is the author of JFK-9/11: 50 years of Deep State, Progressive Press, 2014, and From Yahweh to Zion: Jealous God, Chosen People, Promised Land … Clash of Civilizations, 2018. (or $30 shipping included from Sifting and Winnowing, POB 221, Lone Rock, WI 53556).
September 10, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Israel, Middle East, United States, Zionism |
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Fox News has accused an Iranian civil aviation company of smuggling arms into Lebanon, destined for the Hezbollah militant group, using “clandestine routes” said to have been uncovered by Western intelligence. Iran makes no secret of its political support for the Shia group but has vehemently denied supplying them with weapons.
In a recent report, Fox claimed, citing unnamed intelligence sources, that two “rare and unusual” flights by Qeshm Fars Air, a cargo hauler, were made from Tehran to Beirut recently, one of them making a short layover in Damascus. As possible evidence of wrongdoing, Fox cited the planes’ trajectories, with the flight paths allegedly avoiding parts of western Syria.

© Photo : FlightRadar24/Google Maps

One plane’s route showing that it passed over northern Lebanon after a brief layover in Damascus
Overlooking the idea that Qeshm Fars Air may have routed its planes this way out of security concerns, given that Syria is a war zone, Fox claimed, citing a “regional intelligence source,” that Iran was “testing and defying the West’s abilities” to track its alleged weapons smuggling.
Speaking to Sputnik Persian, Dr. Seyed Hadi Afghahi, a Middle Eastern affairs observer and former diplomat who has served in the Iranian Embassy in Lebanon, said that Fox’s coverage was not surprising, given their role in the American political and media landscape.
“First off, let’s recall what interests Fox News represents. This is one of the media mouthpieces sponsored by the US Department of Defense. Its senior executives consist of cadres representing the Zionist lobby in the US, or receive instructions from Tel Aviv,” Afghahi said.
“Second: why does Fox News cite ‘Western intelligence services’ without giving specifics, or the name of the service, for example, MI6? The channel offers very vague information without specifying even the name of the service which could confirm or deny such statements. This sort of reporting speaks for itself. Either documents must be presented, or reliable sources identified, which can confirm what the channel says.”
Finally, Afghahi said that given the fact that this was not the first time that Fox has been accused of spreading false stories, “the informational content presented, which isn’t supported by evidence, cannot be taken at face value.”
Who Benefits?
According to Dr. Afghahi, the more important aspect in the smuggling story is finding out what concrete goals Fox may be pursuing. Afghahi believes that the situation in the Syrian province of Idlib, the last major stronghold of extremist militants, and Syrian Army plans to liberate the territory, is the real “stick in the craw” for the US and Israel at this time. The “arms smuggling” story, in this light, is just an excuse for Western intervention in Syria against Damascus and its allies, including Iran and Hezbollah.
“Today, the region is in a very difficult and sensitive situation,” the observer stressed. “The operation to liberate Idlib, where terrorist groups and even the Turkish army are still operating, is approaching; this causes discontent among certain parties, who would like to prevent such an operation from being carried out. This, first and foremost, includes the United States, which uses its informational, strategic, military and political resources to engage in sabotage. Moreover, the US has officially warned that if the Syrian Army were to be joined by the forces of its allies, Iran and Hezbollah, this would constitute an escalation of the situation in the region, result in increased casualties, and possibly even the use of chemical weapons by Assad’s forces.”
Washington, according to Afghahi, “is distraught” over the fact that the victory over terrorism in Syria will be won by Bashar and his allies Iran, Hezbollah and Russia, and not by the US. “This fact is a great disappointment to the US and its allies. Therefore, they are preparing the groundwork, using all possible levers of influence, including spreading fake news, to ensure that this doesn’t happen.”
Ultimately, Afghahi emphasized that by pushing the smuggling narrative, Fox is working to provide both Washington and Tel Aviv with a pretext to strike Iranian advisers and Hezbollah fighters in Syria, where the latter have assisted in Damascus’s fight against terrorism.
September 6, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Wars for Israel | Israel, Lebanon, Syria, United States, Zionism |
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Speech by Hezbollah Secretary General Sayed Hassan Nasrallah on August 14, 2018, for the celebration of the twelfth anniversary of the 2006 victory.
Transcript:
The 2006 War and ISIS, two US Projects for Israel’s Sake
I seek refuge in God against the stoned devil.
In the Name of God, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.
Praise be to God, Lord of the Worlds, and prayers and salutations be upon our Master and Prophet, the Seal of the Prophets Muhammad, upon his pure and noble family, his chosen and faithful companions and all the Prophets and Messengers.
Peace be upon you all, and God’s mercy and His blessings.
O my brothers and sisters, I congratulate you on this day, the day of our historic and divine victory that God, in His benevolence, has granted you and Lebanon, the peoples of our region and the (Arab and Muslim) Community, thus registering a clear victory that upset many equations.
First, my thanks to God the Most High, who has protected us, supported us and granted us victory, pouring on us His Benefits that are impossible to count. And I thank and salute all those who have shaped this victory and took part (in one way or another) in shaping and achieving it, be they men of the Resistance, of the army and security forces, of the various factions of the Resistance, martyrs, wounded, prisoners and their families, refugees, steadfast and patient people and all those who made sacrifices, current and past Presidents, religious, political, military and security leaders, parties, forces, movements, committees, organizations, media, all the brave people of Lebanon and of the entire Arab and Islamic world, and all around the world. And special thanks are due to those who firmly stood by our side during this war, namely the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Syrian Arab Republic for their historical position alongside us.
O my brothers and sisters… I read the thanks quickly, and by the grace of God, the titles will be inclusive [of all those who contributed to the victory] so I’m not forced to mention (them one by one) in detail.
We celebrate this anniversary today (the victory of 2006), which is dear to us. It’s been twelve years since we won this victory, and we emphasize the importance of the celebration of this occasion. Similarly, God willing, we will celebrate in a few days in the city of Hermel the first anniversary of the Second Liberation (of Lebanon) –we must also hold the celebration of this date dear– against terrorism and takfiri groups.
And just as we were victorious during the July (2006) War, I wish to state that what happened for seven years and until now is a Great July (2006) War on the entire region, aiming to achieve the same objectives, the same project and the same hopes that the July 2006 War endeavoured to achieve. And as we came out of the July 2006 war victorious, we will come out soon, with God’s grace, victorious in this Great (World) War against our region and against the Resistance Axis in our region, to celebrate this divine, historical and major victory, which is close, very close, and will happen very soon.
We stress the importance of this celebration in order to emphasize the importance of the feat accomplished, to honor those who shaped this feat –the fighters, the martyrs, those who have made sacrifices and their leaders, the honorable, loyal and sincere people–, to root this victory in the feelings, culture and (collective) consciousness, to open the horizon and give new hopes against the waves of despair and humiliation, in the face of the inhibition of wills and appeals to surrender, to draw lessons and to consolidate our points of strength.
Today… As I speak today and I am going to make another speech in a few days (dedicated to the August 2017 Liberation from ISIS), I will discuss the 2006 war and the regional situation together as a single point, with a part I will complete in my next speech in Hermel, and I will say a few words about the internal situation (in Lebanon), and I also will complete them in my speech in Hermel.
If we go back to 2006, everyone remembers that the objectives of the war were to achieve the American project at the time, which was led by George Bush and his administration, after they occupied Afghanistan and Iraq and arrived at the borders of Syria and the Islamic Republic (of Iran). There was a major project in the region, for which targets were set. The 2006 war was fundamental in this project, and when it failed, the project collapsed with it.
Of course, afterwards, they made new studies and new careful calculations, and have engaged in a new plan. So there was a plan for the US hegemony project aiming to crown Israel as a fundamental, leading and axial element in the (project of a) New Middle East. The plan fell apart when we came out victorious in the 2006 war, when the Resistance in Gaza came out victorious, when Syria and Iran stood steadfast, and they then developed a new plan, the one against which we have fought in recent years and to this day.
Let us return to the 2006 plan. I am not doing a journalistic analysis, I am talking about things we have experienced and which were required from us. Remember, the purpose of this war was to end the Resistance once and for all, to annihilate it, either militarily or by forcing us to surrender, and that is what was required from us during the first days of the war: “Give up your weapons, all your weapons for the war to end.” But we were not only required to disarm. “Accept multinational forces…” Not international forces, not forces from the United Nations, but forces directly dependent on the US administration, like those who occupied Iraq in 2003. “Accept multinational forces at the Lebanese border with (occupied) Palestine, multinational forces at Lebanon’s border with Syria, and multinational forces at the airport and port of Beirut. In short, accept a new occupation that will be designated as the multinational forces, and hand us over both (Israeli soldiers) prisoners unconditionally.”
If Lebanon had fallen, it was planned to continue the project in the same year in Syria in 2006, and against the Palestinian Resistance in Gaza. But the (victorious) Resistance of Lebanon postponed the war against Gaza by two years. And it was planned to besiege Iran to isolate it and then strike it and put an end to this (Resistance) Axis, and forever. Such was (the plan) in 2006.
The (victorious) Resistance of Lebanon made these objectives and plan collapse, and pushed back the aspirations of the United States and Israel in our region for several years, taking us into a new battle, and caused very significant developments: it not only foiled the objectives (of the enemy), but it caused very important developments. It increased the power of the Resistance in Lebanon, Gaza, Palestine, Syria, Iran, Iraq, and (all) the region.
This victory took place, and no one (kindly) granted it to us: it is neither the Security Council, nor the UN, nor the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, nor the Arab League nor the Arab regimes that shaped this victory, but it was a blessing of God Almighty and Exalted and of the sacrifices of our people, of his patience and of his (victorious) Resistance, and thanks to the fact that he stayed on his land and came back to it (very promptly, as soon as the cease-fire was declared), thanks to the blood of its martyrs, the courage of its Mujahideen and fighters, and the steadfastness of the political position. We arrived at a new stage. I will not talk (any longer) about 2006, and I now turn to the current situation.
Well, today, during these “seven terrible years” (cf. Qur’an 12, 48), they brought the region into war, and even into several wars, all aimed at achieving the same previously stated objectives. And their axis is Israel, their goal is Israel and the strengthening and rooting of Israel (in the region) and his consecration as the (undisputed) master of this region. Therefore I will allow myself to speak (at length) about the situation in the region in relation to Israel. That is to say, where are they today, and where do we stand, even if it takes a bit of time, because we lead a battle for awareness, for will, for hope: today, these are the real titles of the battle waged in recent years, during those years and in the coming years.
So we will consider Lebanon in terms of the fight against Israel, as well as Syria, Palestine, Gaza and (all) the region. For all that happened aimed to serve Israel and its interests. I will not talk about the situation seven years ago (beginning of the war in Syria), but from where we are after those seven years, that also are seven years of steadfastness, strength, endurance, sacrifice and bloodshed (for our cause). Where is their project, where are they, and where are we, what are the position and situation of the Resistance Axis?
Hezbollah is stronger than Israel
Let’s start with Israel and Lebanon. How are things between Israel and Lebanon since 2006 to date, in 2018? It is clear that Israel is deterred (from any aggression against Lebanon). This Israel who, all his life, was attacking Lebanon for the most trivial reasons –its planes were bombing the south, the Bekaa, the North, Mount Lebanon, even the heart of the capital. You all remember the situation before 1982 and after 1982. But things have changed, and Israel does no such thing today. And it’s not because of good manners (allegedly acquired by) Israel, but thanks to the (deterrent) equation imposed by the Resistance.
Today, Israel, since 2007 to date, continually rebuilds and refounds itself in the light of its (2006) defeat and of the consequences of this defeat. They reviewed their combat doctrine, their military strategies and tactics –each time a new Chief of staff takes office, he writes a new strategy for the Israeli army–, their structure, the training of their forces, they have reconsidered their facilities and equipment and weapons, they continually hold maneuvers since 2006 and until yesterday, yesterday, there were maneuvers in the north.
Why? Why all these maneuvers, these reconsiderations, etc.? Because they consider that in Lebanon, there is a force that worries them (greatly), and that is to them, in their words, a “great threat” the “main threat”, and they are preparing to face it (at their best). (Throughout its history), when did we find Israel behaving this way towards Lebanon? (Never before 2006).
Israel hides itself behind the walls (it erected at the border) with Lebanon. They work constantly on their home front, and set out their fears at this level. Today, in every action –and I am not revealing secrets, even their media speak of it–, Israel considers (the risks of strikes against) the electricity, gas, oil, its gas facilities, the colonies, the depth, etc., because they know that in front of them, there is a serious, powerful and capable enemy. And I will conclude on this in a decisive sentence.
Israel carries out a (diligent) monitoring of the forces of the Resistance. Since 2006, they gather information about us, our weapons, the number of our fighters, our actions, our expertise. And when we went to Syria, they watched us (constantly), (worried) about our new acquisitions in experience and expertise in Syria. And as regards Lebanon (Hezbollah), it takes a very serious and very important place in their calculations.
Until we come to… Throughout its existence, Israel had never erected defenses in northern (occupied) Palestine. If defensive measures were required, it was in southern Lebanon (because Israel was always on the offensive). For the first time in the history of the Zionist entity, defensive lines are built in the north of Palestine to face the project of Liberation of Galilee (announced by Hezbollah). And Israel holds annual military exercises to prepare for that prospect. And field measures are taken and constantly reviewed and improved.
Until a few days ago, as part of the (recent) maneuvers in the north (of occupied Palestine), a senior officer in the Israeli army –this is reported by Israeli newspapers, not myself– said: “Hezbollah is the most powerful army in the Middle East after the Israeli army, because it has this, this, this and that.” Of course, I do not agree with him on this estimate. We do not consider that Hezbollah is the most powerful army in the Middle East after the Israeli army, but this statement expresses how the Israeli enemy sees this Resistance he wanted to eradicate during the July 2006 war.
Today, in 2018, this Resistance is, as I have always said and repeated every year, and allow me to repeat it again today, and the important thing is that the Israeli enemy knows very well that it is the strict, the undeniable truth: yes, the Resistance in Lebanon today, in its arms, its equipment, its capabilities, the number of its fighters, its cadres, its power, its expertise, its experiences, its faith, its determination, its courage and its will is stronger than ever since its launch in this region (in 1982)!
Certainly, Israel can threaten (us with war) every day. Remember, just weeks after the end of the July (2006) war, Israel threatened Lebanon with a vengeful war that was (supposedly) approaching fast. But you can count (the years of peace) with me: where is this war that Israel (continually) threatened us with and for which it asserted itself ready, having supposedly fixed all its shortcomings and faults, promising that it would shortly launch a new war against Lebanon? They threatened us (with war) in 2007, and 2007 has passed (peacefully). (Same thing in) 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, etc., until 2018. For 12 years, Israel has threatened us (permanently) to launch a war (imminently). But while they threaten to launch a war (against us), at the same time, they continue to evoke the fact that the Resistance becomes stronger (by the day) and that its (fire)power is increasing, until one of their officers said that Hezbollah is the most powerful army in the region after the Israeli military.
I want to tell him that we are not the most powerful army in the region after the Israeli military, leave this subject aside, because it is not precise, and we do not want to create problems (by competing) with the armies of the region. But let me say to that senior Israeli officer, on (the date of the commemoration of) the July (2006) War, that Hezbollah is stronger than the Israeli army! The Resistance in Lebanon is stronger than the Israeli army!
For either in 2000 or in 2006, it was never a question of manpower, equipment, quantity, capabilities, weapons or rockets / missiles. Today we have more faith in the righteousness of our cause than you have in your false, usurping cause. Today we are more willing to sacrifice than your miserable army and society, living in worry with many problems and in many files. Today we have more faith and confidence than ever in our God, our Creator and He who granted us victory, ever since God the Almighty and Majestic created us. Today we have more faith, trust and confidence in His Promise of victory addressed to the patients and sincere fighters. This sincerity, this faith and patience, we have them more than ever because of the accumulation of experiences.
When the Commander of the Faithful, Imam Ali –peace be upon him–, said in one of his maxims: “War is (like) a debate, sometimes we have the advantage, and sometimes the enemy has the advantage, until God sees our sincerity, then He gives us victory and defeats our enemy.” He did not say “until God sees our weapons, our missiles / rockets, our equipment and our fighters”, but “until God sees our sincerity”. This sincerity, this authenticity and this faith, with which the people of the Resistance, the men of the Resistance and the families of the Resistance fought in 2006, today are bigger, stronger and more rooted (than ever).
And so your calculations are wrong (O Israel): we are not (necessarily) stronger than the other armies (of the region), but we are stronger than you. That’s all regarding Israel (and Lebanon).
Defeated in Syria, Israel begs for the withdrawal of Iran and Hezbollah
Secondly, Israel and Syria. (The United States and Israel) had planned to topple Syria in 2006 if the Resistance in Lebanon had fallen (in the July war). For if the Resistance had been defeated in 2006, they planned to bring multinational forces in Lebanon –because the Israeli army could not have stayed after the war–, US, French, English, Italian forces, etc. These forces were supposed to settle in Lebanon, close the border between Lebanon and Syria and besiege Syria to make it fall. This did not happen. The past seven years (of war) have therefore befallen in order to topple Syria in another way, namely the global war that was launched against Syria.
I will mention only Syria from Israel’s point of view. Israel is a full partner of the project of war against Syria since 2011, and fully participates in decision-making and in the US-Saudi-Western plan. On the ground, Israel has provided all the necessary support to the armed groups in southern Syria, all the logistical & medical support, weapons, food and information, up to occasional military interventions to help these groups. And we all remember, during the last seven years, the statements by Israeli officials who said that President Assad would fall within 3 or 5 months and that the interest of Israel was the fall of the regime. Today, there are people (analysts, journalists, officials) in the Gulf or elsewhere who philosophize about the fact that Israel would never have said anything like that, but anyone can refer to the archives of the past seven years, during which all the leaders of the usurper entity, without exception, expressed hopes that President Assad and the Syrian regime would fall, and that they’d see these (terrorist) groups replace them. The Syrian opposition, who visited the Zionist entity, brought pledges (of friendship), and regarded Israel as a friend, and Israel hoped to see Damascus become an allied or friendly capital instead of being an enemy capital. All this is common knowledge.
Israel had high hopes, during the last seven years of war against Syria, (betting) on the fall of the regime and its replacement by a regime that would hasten towards resolution of disputes with Israel. Israel built hopes on the destruction of the Syrian Army in a way that it could not recover from in the future. Israel built hopes on the fact that the Syrian opposition, which according to their calculations was to seize power, would hasten to conclude (peace) agreements with it. Israel built hopes on the fact that those Syrians who self-identify as “opposition” would give up the Golan Heights (to Israel) in a future agreement. And Israel built hopes on the fact that the international community would give it the Golan and would recognize it as belonging to it because of the developments in Syria, whether the war continued or the regime was overthrown. But what is the situation today? Because we speak about the present.
Such were their hopes, and they worked (relentlessly) to achieve them for seven years, but today, those hopes have been scattered to the four winds. The world is not prepared to give them the Golan –maybe Trump would be willing to recognize (the Golan as Israel’s) but the international community and the world today are (humbly) standing in line to restore relations with Syria and the Syrian State. And for your information, in this line, security services worldwide outnumber diplomats, because today, the world is afraid of the return to their country of tens of thousands (of terrorists) that they have brought to Iraq and Syria from all the over world. What will they do there (attacks, etc.)? That’s why they need Syria and security cooperation with Syria. The world will not give the Golan to Israel nor recognize it as Israel’s, neither in a unilateral gesture, nor under pressure from Trump.
Israel built its hopes on the fall of the Syrian State, but the State maintained itself. Israel hoped the Syrian army would crumble, but yesterday, (Avigdor) Lieberman (Israeli Minister of War) himself said that –these are his words, not mine– it seems that the Syrian Army will return a larger and more powerful army than ever, and during these seven years, it tremendously gained in experience. And everyone knows that the battles fought in Syria (against terrorists) require great minds, unalterable wills and colossal capabilities.
Moreover, before the war, Israel feared the Syrian Army in Syria –there was also the Syrian people that they underestimate, but they are mistaken–, but after the war, Iran and Hezbollah are now added to them. Iran and Hezbollah (are now in Syria). This is a (stunning) failure for Israel. This poses a (huge) problem for Israel. And that is why today, Netanyahu, every day, absolutely every day, (when he speaks) about Syria, he now accepted as a fact the maintenance of the Syrian regime, leaders and even Army, but the battle he leads today, the political battle that he is currently leading like a beggar, is that Iran should not remain in Syria, and Hezbollah should not remain in Syria. And I saw that some journalists and analysts claimed that I was about to announce today the withdrawal of Hezbollah from Syria. Tell me, in what (illusory) world do you live? What (kind of nonsense) do you read or watch (on TV)? If someone gives you such information, then he is making fun of you. Such is the problem of Israel today. How is he going to get Iran out of Syria? How will he get Hezbollah out of Syria?
And see the degree of impudence. Israel, who is defeated Syria, seeks to impose its conditions and requirements! You lost. You are defeated. You failed. You lost your bet. Your hopes are scattered to the four winds. And you (think you can) impose your conditions? Of course, I can not say “my dear” to Israel (even ironically). You think you can impose your own terms? On whom do you think you can impose them? On the victorious Syrian leaders? On Iran, on Hezbollah, on the Resistance Axis?
So much for Syria regarding Israel. Now let us speak about Israel in (occupied) Palestine…. Because all this war was fought for Israel, and such is Israel’s situation today. They (miserably) failed here and there, they are (very) worried about this and that, this and that frightens them, they beg for such and such thing…
For example, to return to Lebanon, behind the scenes, you know that there is a lot of US pressure on the Lebanese State to settle the issue of the land and maritime boundary with Israel. But in whose interest? In the interest of Lebanon? No way. They want to settle the issue of the (Lebanese-Israeli) land and maritime boundary in the (exclusive) interest of Israel. And when we speak of the maritime boundary, it also means (the resources in) oil and gas. But that time is over. The time when Israel was imposing its conditions on Syria, the time when Israel was imposing its conditions in Lebanon (is over), even if Israel is (fully) supported by the United States and one hundred United States. This is not an impulsive or emotional statement. This is confirmed by the facts during decades of confrontation, of victorious Resistance, of sacrifice and blood spilled.
Trump and Bin Salman’s “Deal of the century” Failed
Now let us consider (the situation) in Gaza, in Palestine and primarily in Gaza. Despite the destructive war, despite the severe blockade… The United States, Israel and their allies expected Gaza to surrender, and that in exchange for food, medicine, electricity and (drinkable) water, Gaza gives them absolutely everything and accepts the “Deal of the century” and anything else required from them, and accepts any resolution (of the conflict), even at the expense of Palestinian rights. But Gaza has not submitted, has not surrendered and has not signed (the Deal), despite the fact that the whole world has forsook them. The whole world has abandoned them.
And more, Gaza reinstated and upheld the equation of the Resistance, responding to (missile) strikes with strikes, to blood with blood, to fire with fire This is why today, this Israel that strives to convince us that he is the strongest and is about to attack us so that we accept all that he wants to impose, is in a major deadlock even against Gaza. During the debates within the enemy government (in restricted committee), the Ministers are killing and insulting each other because they are lost in their choices against Gaza. Against Gaza the besieged, Gaza the starved, Gaza the abandoned by the whole world, Israel that you claim to be the most powerful army in the Middle East is completely disoriented. One of them said it is best to uphold a truce, even at the cost of concessions (easing of the blockade) to Gaza because we can not move towards war. Another retorted that if one moves towards a truce and grants concessions (to Gaza), maybe the same thing as with the Lebanon will happen, and Gaza will become stronger year after year. Yet another –of course they are all Ministers– exclaims that they must launch a destructive war against Gaza, but someone asks if he considered the retaliation (of the Resistance in Gaza) and recalled that wars were conducted without achieving any results. Yet another promotes the invasion of Gaza and a new occupation, and someone reminds him that they have left Gaza recently. Israel is completely lost, confused and deadlocked. And this is against Gaza. Why? Because Gaza resists, as one man, despite the existing disputes (between Palestinian factions). Gaza makes sacrifices every day, especially every Friday. All this is happening against Gaza.
And it confirms the limits of the power of Israel. Even if they have an (over-armed) military and the most powerful Air force in the region, it does not mean that Israel is almighty. It does not mean that he can do whatever he wants. It does not mean that we are nothing, that we are zero, that they can erase us, that we are out of the equation. Never. Things are not so.
As for Israel, and the Deal of the century, with the arrival in power of Trump, –in this topic, allow me to express myself with even more frankness than I usually do–, with the arrival of Trump in power in the United States, and of Mohammad Bin Salman in power in Saudi Arabia, and with the assumption that the region was heading towards collapse and that the Resistance Axis was going to be eradicated, they concocted the odious Deal of the century, that we all know today, and the best that Israel could ever dream of is that this agreement is realized. For it gives them Al-Quds (Jerusalem) in a final and everlasting way, irrespective of what is located above or below ground, what is east or what is west, they take all Al-Quds, the refugee issue is erased, the existence of Israel in the region is normalized (by relations with all Arab countries) and the Palestinians get a State which is not a State, within a small and narrow extent of territory.
For two years, some have been trying to impose on the peoples and governments of our region the idea that the Deal of the century is a Decree impossible to escape, and that we cannot but accept it. But who says that? Every time they were making agreements and were developing catastrophic solutions (for Palestine), they came to the peoples of the region, to the Resistance movements and governments in the region, stating that this was an inevitable Decree that nobody could prevent. But the truth is quite different.
Today, in light of the developments that have occurred so far… Some believe –and this is an opinion that matters, issued by leading experts and political and strategic thinkers– that the deal of the century is over, that it failed, and that we are just waiting for this to be announced. For my part, I will not say that, because the issue needs further reflection, study and time, but I can tell you that this Deal of the century that Trump wants to impose with all his arrogant strength, and in which he wants to swing a big country in the region that is the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, along with other countries, this agreement faces real problems. And there’s a very good chance, if we insist on the equations (of Resistance) which we always talk about, that this agreement will collapse, now more than ever. What are the proofs of this? Why (is it that I can say that)?
First, the unanimous rejection of the Palestinian people towards the Deal of the century. Throughout Palestine, there is no faction, authority, power or popular Resistance, no Palestinian or Palestinian side that supports this agreement. That’s the first point. There is no Palestinian leader, man or representative of the Palestinian people that would agree to sign an agreement giving Al-Quds (Jerusalem) to Israel and making it the eternal capital of Israel. No way. And they (all) announced that. An agreement without Palestinian signature (has no value). Even if they were to impose it by force. If Palestine does not sign, the agreement can not function. And it (really) surprised them. They may have counted on the fact that by putting pressure on the Palestinians, terrorizing them and starving them, or by promising them money or some projects (port, airport…), some Palestinian would come sign such a Deal. (But they were bitterly disappointed).
Second, the fact that the Resistance Axis stood steadfast, that Iran resisted, the victory of Iraq against ISIS crazies & Wahhabi movements funded by the United States and Saudi Arabia, the victory of Syria, the fact that Yemen stood firm, all this extended Axis (from Palestine to Iran), not to mention the developments in Lebanon (victory of the Hezbollah alliance in the elections). All this has its influence. You were getting ready to impose an agreement on the assumption that there would be no more Resistance, Resistance Axis or countries of the Resistance. This is what you imagined a few years ago. But now, the facts are very different from your expectations.
And third, the crisis in the United States themselves, who figure they can come and impose the Deal of the century on the peoples and governments of the region, while they have (serious) problems even with their allies and friends, whether Europe or Turkey –you follow the evolution of this crisis every day–, not to mention Russia and China.
Also, among the most important things that push the Deal of the century to fail, and here I ask you to be pay attention, (I have to mention) the decline of the regional Axis led by Saudi Arabia in the region. This Axis is pushed back and it weakens. What is the proof of that? I speak only of (undeniable) facts, they are accessible, and field data reported by the media. Why?
First, this regional Axis failed completely in Syria, it’s over. It’s (game) over for them. Yes, there is still Idlib, and if it is not over by then, I will speak about it on Sunday (August 26) in Hermel. This Axis has failed in Iraq. This Axis has failed to push the world to besiege Iran and to impose (international) sanctions on Iran with Trump. And this Axis has failed in its war in Yemen.
Today, let me tell you, from my Dahiyeh (southern suburb of Beirut) in Lebanon, to the innocent victims (Dahyan) of Sa’dah, Yemen. O dear, noble and worthy people, especially the families of children who were martyred, know with certainty that those who killed you are the same as those who killed our children in Dahiyeh and in Qana. Those who have shed the blood of your wives and children are the same as those who have shed our blood in Lebanon. The same weapons, the same Axis, the same countries, the same determination, the same decision, and the same behavior. And just as the blood of our children and women triumphed in Lebanon, the blood of your children and wives will triumph in Yemen. Because behind this blood stand truth and justice, as well as (real) men and (authentic) leaders who will not forgive these criminals and bloodthirsty murderers, those who behead all feelings, all morality and all honor. When this Axis arrives at this level of atrocious massacres in Yemen, this is a clear message that militarily, it has failed, that the military option is over. They lost the war, but they want to avenge themselves on the people who inflicted this defeat on them.
And internal crises in Saudi Arabia, the crisis in the Gulf and within the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC)… The open crisis is with Qatar, but there are also hidden crises within the OIC. (And see the situation) with Canada, because of a minor problem. Now, whether it is because of this problem or in order to please Trump (who is in conflict with Canada), this question should be studied more closely (to respond). Canada has merely raised the issue of human rights and political prisoners with Saudi Arabia, and it caused (an indignant reaction like) Judgment Day in Saudi Arabia, which has denounced interference in its internal affairs, recalled its ambassador and expelled Canada’s, ended the scholarships… They geared up for confrontation and turned everything upside down because of this (alleged) Canada interference in Saudi internal affairs. And this while Saudi Arabia intervenes, fights and supports fighters in Syria and Iraq, is interfering in Iranian affairs, openly announces a war without mercy against Yemen and interferes in all the details of Lebanese affairs –and we all remember the day they arrested the constitutional Prime Minister of Lebanon, just like that. They allow themselves to interfere (wherever they want), but if anyone in the world dares to say: “Respect human rights and release those political prisoners”, they dump on him all the thunders of heaven. What is this mentality? Where are they going?
Anyway, they are experiencing (major) crises. Even with Turkey, they have a serious problem. Because Turkey is convinced that Saudi Arabia and the UAE were involved in the recent coup. Even with the Muslim world, they are in crisis. I give you an example, so that you understand what will happen to the Deal of the century.
In Malaysia, there was a head of government who was with the Saudi dynasty, an instrument of Saud, to whom they gave huge sums of money, and who worked for them for many years, but he was defeated in the elections, and is now behind bars, accused of corruption. And a new government is now in place, with a position (very) different vis-à-vis Saudi Arabia, the war against Yemen, sanctions against Iran, relations with Iran, the US administration, the Palestinian cause, the issue of Al-Quds (Jerusalem). Members of the Malaysian government have a (very) different position (towards all these issues).
And it is the same situation in Pakistan, the country where Saudi Arabia has also spent billions of dollars: the leader of the previous government, who was an instrument of Saudi Arabia, is behind bars, charged with corruption. And provided they do not foment a coup against them, a government will be formed and it will have a very different position (from that of Saudi Arabia) on the issue of Al-Quds, Palestine, Gaza, Yemen, Iran and the United States. This is the situation. This (Saudi-Israeli-American) Axis is (clearly) in decline. Let no one give us headaches with the daily lies of TV satellite channels from the Gulf. Lies, lies, lies, lies, lies, lies, until eventually people believe them. Such is the real regional situation. This Axis is declining.
The image of Saudi Arabia today in the Arab-Muslim world and elsewhere, for which it has spent billions of dollars, so that it is presented as the Kingdom of Good, today, in the consciousness of the world, what is it the Kingdom of? The Kingdom of those who sent these ISIS-crazies and takfiris, movements who destroyed the Arab and Muslim world, who perpetrated the most heinous crimes in the Arab and Muslim world and threaten the safety worldwide. What is their image with the war in Yemen? The siege, cholera, famine… And then they dare to say they provide (Yemen) with support on the issue of cholera, opening a corridor so that (the sick) can be treated. And up to their support for the Deal of the century, about which it is said that they would have backed off. Very good. Why are they backing off? Because they understood that (signing) this agreement would be a suicidal action.
Two more words about the regional situation. Israel and its internal crises: the corruption of the Prime Minister (Netanyahu), the disappearance of the historical leaders, persistent conflicts between parties, generalized anxiety, lack of confidence in the future. The atmosphere created by the media is only intended to reassure them and to keep them in the land they usurped. And also their Nation-State Law (institutionalizing the superiority of Jews). I do not have time to comment it in detail, but it will have a major impact on this entity.
In light of all these facts, we develop our position today. What happened in 2006 and what happened for 7 years aimed to allow the United States to seize this region, to root Israel permanently and to impose a resolution (of the Palestinian issue). Today, in 2018, I claim that this project has failed, or is about to fail definitively, with the Grace of God.
The Resistance Axis triumphs, US sanctions are an admission of impotence
What is the lesson to draw from all that (I have just described)? Now I come to the conclusion. (The United States) have now only one way (to attack us). They know that wars lead to no result. Yesterday, His Eminence Imam (Khamenei), the Leader, may God preserve him, as he was speaking about the United States, said there would be no war. The US, Israel and this (Saudi) Axis know well that wars lead to no result, and they know that they will be defeated in any war they’d launch (against us), because they were defeated in the current wars and continue to be defeated.
The US-Saudi alliance, assisted by (Gulf and West) States, failed (miserably) in Yemen against the Yemeni people, who has modest resources, but great men and women. This alliance, which also failed in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, and has succeeded nowhere, knows that (any war will be disastrous). One of the benefits of the current situation is that wars are (now) left aside. Let no one threaten us with war, or believe he can scare us by evoking the prospect of wars. Anyway, if someone wants to start a war, he is most welcome. He will be well received. We are not afraid of war, it does not worry us. We are ready and we shall come out victorious with the Grace of God. It’s a certainty. Therefore it seems that the idea of resorting to war was discarded. What do they want to do instead? Two things, and the first leads to the second.
The first is sanctions. Within the Resistance Axis, Iran is today the main force. Iran stood alongside the Iraqi people against ISIS, and in Iraq, ISIS was a Saudi-American project. Iran stood by Syria against all the takfiri movements who fought as part of a US-Saudi project. Iran stood by Lebanon during the 2006 war, before 2006 and after 2006. And Iran has stood by Palestine and Gaza and continues to stand by their side. And the position of Iran with regard to what is happening in Yemen and in the region is clear. (The Saudi-Israeli-American axis) therefore wants to target Iran. It is not possible for them to launch a war against Iran, so they imposed sanctions on Iran, in the hope that the Iranians are affected, the currency collapses, the social and economic situation becomes difficult, that disturbances are fomented inside Iran and that the Iranian people be pushed to overthrow the regime, so that the US can present themselves as the saviors and redeemers. And they think that if they pressure Iran, the whole (Resistance) Axis will weaken, (all) those who rely on Iran, count on it and are supported by it. Iran will get isolated, Hezbollah will be subjected to sanctions, as well as Syrian and Iraqi officials, something they have already done, etc., in order to besiege them financially, economically, etc. And this is supposed to weaken them and force them to back off and renounce (the Resistance).
And the second thing is to push to internal unrest in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and elsewhere. In Lebanon, I say it between brackets, and I will return to it in a moment in my last section on the internal situation, you must know that everything that is written in social networks and in the media, all the requests addressed to Hezbollah (to act) in the sectors of economy, development, finances and services, those who make them do not all have good intentions. There are people who have different intentions. There are people who try to make us bear the responsibility for this situation of which we are not responsible, or if we are responsible of it, it is only to a certain extent, in order to stir up trouble in our popular base and in our society. Therefore, the last hope of Trump, Israel and all those who stand with them is sanctions.
And about sanctions, there is a great effort in the media, and the image (of the potential impact of sanctions) that is presented is not realistic. And on August 14, the day of commemoration of the victory, my duty is to clarify this point to you and to all who listen to me, wherever they are. This Iran to which Trump imposes economic sanctions, I say this on the basis of information and very precise data in my possession, I tell you that they build their dreams, their strategy and project on the fact that this will lead Iran to internal unrest and the overthrow of the regime. But these are illusions, chimeras that have no place in reality. I remind you that in 1979, when the Islamic Revolution led by Imam Khomeini, may God sanctify him, triumphed, the arrogant Western world said that the regime would collapse within 6 months, but it stood 6 months despite sanctions and the global blockade. Then they said it was going to collapse in a year, but it stood firm. Then they said two years, but it stood. Then they imposed the 8 years war (launched by Iraq). And the whole world was with Saddam Hussein, except Syria and a small number of countries. The whole world (was against Iran). Even those who are now our allies in Syria. Even the Soviet Union was with Saddam Hussein. Even China was with Saddam Hussein. The whole world was with Saddam Hussein. And Iran fought for 8 years, with its bare chest and its empty hands, but with faith and popular will. Iran is under sanctions since the triumph of the Islamic Revolution in 1979. True, Trump strengthens the sanctions, but sanctions date from 1979. And Iran has remained, and will soon celebrate the 40th anniversary of the triumph of the Islamic Revolution, despite all the conspiracies of the world and the (hostile) neighborhood (Saudi Arabia, Gulf).
I say this (with certainty) o my brothers and sisters, o those who profess and believe in the posture of justice and truth of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the equations of the region, in the fate of the region and its future, the Islamic Republic of Iran in our region today is stronger than ever, and it is even the first power. And they can not reduce its power or presence or hurt it. The regime of Iran is powerful, strong, determined and rooted, and protected by its people. Those who nourish these hopes (to end the regime) are dreaming awake and do not know the Iranian people. They have failed to know this people for 40 years and will not succeed in 100 years. And they do not know His Eminence Imam (Khamenei), the Leader, and they do not know the officials of the Islamic Republic. They are still ignorant, foolish and stupid.
And all their past actions have not led to the weakening of Iran; on the contrary, Iran has continued to strengthen. All the stupid actions of the US administration and their instruments in the region against Iran or the region led Iran to become increasingly powerful both inside and in the region. To prove it in detail would be long, but the evidence is clear for all.
And also in our case, regarding all our (Resistance) Axis in the region, I do not claim that the sanctions have no impact, of course they have an impact, we should not deny it. But sanctions will have no impact on our determination, our will and steadfastness, nor diminish our strength. Impose all the sanctions you want. Today, we possess in terms of strength –and they begin to wonder what will be the effect of sanctions on the financial situation of Hezbollah–, we possess in terms of strength, infrastructure, cadres, men and capacity which will allow us to overcome these difficulties, with the Grace of God.
In light of all that I have just presented, I conclude before saying a few words about the internal situation in Lebanon, to draw the lesson from all this. The lesson of all this, all the past, present, and what is to come, I want to say on this August 14, 2018, 12 years after the 2006 war: O Lebanese, O honorable people, O the noblest people, most worthy and most glorious of peoples, O peoples and masses of the Resistance, we were (already) stronger (than our enemies) and we became (even) stronger. Let no one try to make us believe that we are weak. Let no one imagine that if a crisis happens, or if we have a problem here or there, and some nonsense and insults appear (in the media and social networks), it may alter our soul, our determination, our will and our strategy.
These United States, whose projects and actions turned out to be failure after failure, I say to you today, (you) are unable to launch wars like the ones they have launched in the past (Iraq, Afghanistan…). And this Israel is unable to launch wars like the ones he has launched in the past (Lebanon, Gaza, Syria, Egypt…). And now, with our victory in Iraq, with our victory in Syria coming very soon, as the fighting will end in a few days, weeks or months (at most), with the heroic resistance of Yemen, with all the developments in our region, and with the leaders and people in Iran holding out, remaining firmly attached to their position, their foundations, their principles and their doctrine, we are now stronger than ever, and capable of shaping more victories and (positive) developments, with the help of God Almighty and the Exalted. […]
Full transcript (except for the last section about Lebanon’s internal affairs).
Translation: unz.com/sayedhasan
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September 5, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Gaza, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Middle East, Pakistan, Palestine, Sanctions against Iran, Syria, United States, Yemen, Zionism |
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Exercising control from inside the government
Referring to Israel during an interview in August 1983, U.S. Navy Admiral and former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Thomas Moorer said “I’ve never seen a President — I don’t care who he is — stand up to them. It just boggles the mind. They always get what they want. The Israelis know what is going on all the time. I got to the point where I wasn’t writing anything down. If the American people understood what a grip these people have got on our government, they would rise up in arms. Our citizens certainly don’t have any idea what goes on.”
Moorer was speaking generally but he had something specific in mind, namely the June 8, 1967, Israeli attack on the American intelligence ship, U.S.S. Liberty, which killed 34 American crewmen and wounded 173 more. The ship was operating in international waters and was displaying a huge stars and stripes but Israeli warplanes, which had identified the vessel as American, even strafed the life rafts to kill those who were fleeing the sinking ship. It was the bloodiest attack on a U.S. Naval vessel ever outside of wartime and the crew deservedly received the most medals ever awarded to a single ship based on one action. Yes, it is one hell of a story of courage under fire, but don’t hold your breath waiting for Hollywood to make a movie out of it.
President Lyndon B. Johnson, may he burn in hell, had ordered the recall of U.S. carrier planes sent to aid the stricken vessel, saying that he would prefer the ship go to the bottom rather than embarrass his good friend Israel. Then came the cover-up from inside the U.S. government. A hastily convened and summarily executed board of inquiry headed by Admiral John McCain, father of the senator, deliberately interviewed only a handful of crewmen before determining that it was all an accident. The sailors who had survived the attack as well as crewmen from Navy ships that arrived eventually to provide assistance were held incommunicado in Malta before being threatened and sworn to secrecy. Since that time, repeated attempts to convene another genuine inquiry have been rebuffed by congress, the White House and the Pentagon. Recently deceased Senator John McCain was particularly active in rejecting overtures from the Liberty survivors.
The Liberty story demonstrates how Israel’s ability to make the United States government act against its own interests has been around for a long time. Grant Smith of IRMEP, cites how Israeli spying carried out by AIPAC in Washington back in the mid-1980s resulted in a lopsided trade agreement that currently benefits Israel by more than $10 billion per year on the top of direct grants from the U.S. Treasury and billions in tax exempt “charitable” donations by American Jews.
If Admiral Moorer were still alive, I would have to tell him that the situation vis-à-vis Israeli power is much worse now than it was in 1983. He would be very interested in reading a remarkable bit of research recently completed by Smith demonstrating exactly how Israel and its friends work from inside the system to corrupt our political process and make the American government work in support of Jewish state interests. He describes in some detail how the Israel Lobby has been able to manipulate the law enforcement community to protect and promote Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s agenda.
A key component in the Israeli penetration of the U. S. government has been President George W. Bush’s 2004 signing off on the creation of the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence (OTFI) within the Department of the Treasury. The group’s website proclaims that it is responsible for “safeguarding the financial system against illicit use and combating rogue nations, terrorist facilitators, weapons of mass destruction (WMD) proliferators, money launderers, drug kingpins, and other national security threats,” but it has from its founding been really all about safeguarding Israel’s perceived interests. Grant Smith notes however, how “the secretive office has a special blind spot for major terrorism generators, such as tax-exempt money laundering from the United States into illegal Israeli settlements and proliferation financing and weapons technology smuggling into Israel’s clandestine nuclear weapons complex.”
The first head of the office was Undersecretary of Treasury Stuart Levey, who operated secretly within the Treasury itself while also coordinating regularly both with the Israeli government as well as with pro-Israel organizations like AIPAC, WINEP and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD). Levey also traveled regularly to Israel on the taxpayer’s dime, as did his three successors in office.
Levey left OTFI in 2011 and was replaced by David Cohen. It was reported then and subsequently that counterterrorism position at OTFI were all filled by individuals who were both Jewish and Zionist. Cohen continued the Levey tradition of resisting any transparency regarding what the office was up to. Smith reports how, on September 12, 2012, he refused to answer reporter questions “about Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons, and whether sanctioning Iran, a signatory to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, over its internationally-inspected civilian nuclear program was an example of endemic double standards at OTFI.”
Cohen was in turn succeeded in 2015 by Adam Szubin who was then replaced in 2017 by Sigal Pearl Mandelker, a former and possibly current Israeli citizen. All of the heads of OTFI have therefore been Jewish and Zionist. All work closely with the Israeli government, all travel to Israel frequently on “official business” and they all are in close liaison with the Jewish groups most often described as part of the Israel Lobby. And the result has been that many of the victims of OTFI have been generally enemies of Israel, as defined by Israel and America’s Jewish lobbyists. OTFI’s Specially Designated Nationals And Blocked Persons List (SDN), which includes sanctions and enforcement options , features many Middle Eastern Muslim and Christian names and companies but nothing in any way comparable relating to Israel and Israelis, many of whom are well known to law enforcement otherwise as weapons traffickers and money launderers . And once placed on the SDN there is no transparent way to be removed, even if the entry was clearly in error.
Here in the United States, action by OTFI has meant that Islamic charities have been shut down and individuals exercising their right to free speech through criticism of the Jewish state have been imprisoned. If the Israel Anti-Boycott Act succeeds in making its way through congress the OTFI model will presumably become the law of the land when it comes to curtailing free speech whenever Israel is involved.
The OTFI story is outrageous, but it is far from unique. There is a history of American Jews closely attached to Israel being promoted by powerful and cash rich domestic lobbies to act on behalf of the Jewish state. To be sure, Jews who are Zionists are vastly overrepresented in all government agencies that have anything at all to do with the Middle East and one can reasonably argue that the Republican and Democratic Parties are in the pockets of Jewish billionaires named Sheldon Adelson and Haim Saban.
Neoconservatives, most of whom are Jewish, infiltrated the Pentagon under the Reagan Administration and they and their heirs in government and media (Doug Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby, Richard Perle, Bill Kristol) were major players in the catastrophic war with Iraq, which, one of the architects of that war, Philip Zelikow, described in 2004 as being all about Israel. The same people are now in the forefront of urging war with Iran.
American policy towards the Middle East is largely being managed by a small circle of Orthodox Jews working for presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner. One of them, David Friedman, is currently U.S. Ambassador to Israel. Friedman, a bankruptcy lawyer who has no diplomatic or foreign policy credentials, is a Zionist Jew who is also a supporter of the illegal settlements on the West Bank and a harsh critic of other Jews who in any way disagree with the Israeli government. He has contributed money to settlement construction, which would be illegal if OTFI were doing its job, and has consistently defended the settlers while condemning the Palestinians in speeches in Israel. He endlessly and ignorantly repeats Israeli government talking points and has tried to change the wording of State Department communications, seeking to delete the word “occupied” when describing Israel’s control of the West Bank. His humanity does not extend beyond his Jewishness, defending Israel’s shooting thousands of unarmed Gazan protesters and the bombing of schools, hospitals and cultural centers. How he represents the United States and its citizens who are not dual nationals must be considered a mystery.
Friedman’s top adviser is Rabbi Aryeh Lightstone, who is described by the Embassy as an expert in “Jewish education and pro-Israel advocacy.” Once upon a time, in an apparently more enlightened mood, Lightstone described Donald Trump as posing “an existential danger both to the Republican Party and to the U.S.” and even accused him of pandering to Jewish audiences. Apparently when opportunity knocked he changed his mind about his new boss. Pre-government in 2014, Lightstone founded and headed Silent City, a Jewish advocacy group supported by extreme right-wing money that opposed the Iran nuclear agreement and also worked to combat the nonviolent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. He is reportedly still connected financially with anti BDS groups, which might be construed as a conflict of interest. As the Senior Adviser to Friedman he is paid in excess of $200,000 plus free housing, additional cash benefits to include a 25% cost of living allowance and a 10% hardship differential, medical insurance and eligibility for a pension.
So, what’s in it all for Joe and Jill American Citizens? Not much. And for Israel? Anything, it wants, apparently. Sink a U.S. warship? Okay. Tap the U.S. Treasury? Sure, just wait a minute and we’ll draft some legislation that will give you even more money. Create a treasury department agency run exclusively by Jews that operates secretly to punish critics of the Jewish state? No brainer. Meanwhile a bunch of dudes at the Pentagon are dreaming of new wars for Israel and the White House sends an ignorant ambassador and top aide overseas to represent the interests of the foreign government in the country where they are posted. Which just happens to be Israel. Will it ever end?
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is www.councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
September 4, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Wars for Israel | Gaza, Israel, Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, Palestine, United States, Zionism |
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Following the liberation of Daraa in the south, Idlib remains the “world’s largest open prison” for some three million people and the last terrorist stronghold in Syria.
“Anything that is actively promoted by the US will not affect the determination of the Syrian people and Syrian army’s plans to clear Idlib and finally put an end to terrorism in Syria,” Syrian Foreign minister Walid Muallem said in an interview.
According to him, the US accusations about alleged plans regarding chemical attacks have become questionable in the eyes of public opinion and are just an excuse for a possible attack on Syria.
“We, the people and leadership of Syria, would like to end the conflict today, but the intervention of Western countries headed by the US makes it difficult,” Muallem said.
Muallem emphasized that the US presence in Syria is illegal and Washington can in no way justify it.
“The US presence has claimed the lives of thousands of Syrian and every time terrorists were besieged by the Syrian Arab Army, Washington provided them with protection. It became clear that Washington’s main objective was to prolong the crisis in Syria in the interests of Israel,” the minister said.
On August 22, US National Security Adviser John Bolton stated that Washington and its partners would respond in a “swift and appropriate manner” to any verified chemical weapons use in Idlib or elsewhere in Syria.
Separately, US State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said that the United States “will respond to any verified chemical weapons use in Idlib or elsewhere in Syria… in a swift and appropriate manner.”
The Russian Defense Ministry, when commenting on the situation, accused the US and its allies of attempting to use a chemical weapons provocation planned by militants in Idlib as a pretext to launch an attack on Syrian government forces.
In August, Russian officials warned of a conspiracy by terrorists to launch an alleged chemical attack in order to provoke Western retaliation against the Syrian government.
According to Russian Defense Ministry’s spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, a group of militants, who had been prepared by the Olive Group, had conspired to stage the rescue of victims of a chemical weapons attack in Idlib.
After media reports alleging a chemical attack had been carried out in the Syrian city of Douma in April, Western countries immediately accused the Syrian government of being behind the attack.
Following the accusations, the US, the UK, and France launched over 100 missiles on multiple targets in the country in response to the alleged use of chemical weapons.
Damascus denied the accusations and said that the Jaish al-Islam terror group had staged the attack to encourage foreign intervention in Syria.
September 2, 2018
Posted by aletho |
False Flag Terrorism, Illegal Occupation, Wars for Israel | Syria, United States |
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According to the Russian proverb, “Repetition is the mother of learning.” This positive message of perseverance and practice is doubtless known to every Russian schoolchild; however, it is a lost on reform-minded American politicians. Those who promise and fail to bring about fundamental reform show little capacity to learn from their failure. Instead, they chant the same slogans and pious incantations and start over as if nothing had happened, as if the promise to reform were enough. This fixation with rhetoric over realism gives rise to another saying: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.”
Those who pay the price for this insanity are Americans desperate for someone, anyone, to provide a viable alternative to the oligarchic establishment that has turned their country into a police state. Repeated failures are debilitating and disillusioning because they end up destroying hope and perpetuating oligarchic power. Two events illustrate this.
The first took place on Jan. 22, 2009, when President-elect Barack Obama signed an executive order that, among other things, made good on a bold campaign promise to close the Guantánamo Bay torture/detention facility. Throughout out his two terms in office, Obama made this promise repeatedly as if repetition would make it come about. Obama did so even as he approved the Pentagon’s appropriations for the coming fiscal year, knowing full well that it included Congressional obstructions to closing it. To register his disapproval, to say nothing of his acquiescence, Obama appended signing statements to the appropriations orders. Typical is this one from Dec. 31, 2011:
I have signed the [National Defense Authorization Act] … despite having serious reservations with certain provisions that regulate the detention, interrogation, and prosecution of suspected terrorists. … Section 1027 renews the bar against using appropriated funds for fiscal year 2012 to transfer Guantanamo detainees into the United States for any purpose. I continue to oppose this provision, which intrudes upon critical executive branch authority to determine when and where to prosecute Guantanamo detainees, based on the facts and the circumstances of each case and our national security interests. (emphasis added)
According to Obama, the failure to close the facility was Congress’s fault, but since he tolerated Congressional obstruction, his protestations meant little. To make matters worse, Obama knew all along he had executive authority to close down Guantánamo Bay with or without Congress’s approval, as he implied at a December 2015 press conference:
I think we can make a very strong argument that it doesn’t make sense for us to be spending an extra $100 million, $200 million, $300 million, $500 million, a billion dollars, to have a secure setting for 50, 60, 70 people. And we will wait until Congress has definitively said no to a well-thought-out plan with numbers attached to it before we say anything definitive about my executive authority here. (emphasis added)
Congress had “definitively said no” numerous times, so this feint towards collaborative problem-solving amounted to empty posturing. Obama’s real opposition was not Congress but those who used Congress to sabotage the closure of Guantánamo Bay, which just happens to hold alleged terrorists associated with the Sept. 11, 2001, attack.
The second failed promise of reform is most commonly associated with then-presidential candidate Donald Trump. On Oct. 18, 2016, less than a month before the election, he announced plans to take action against lobbyists and the unseemly undemocratic power they wield in Washington D.C. Among other things, Trump planned to broaden the definition of “lobbyist” to include consultants and advisors, prevent lobbyists from raising campaign contributions and “bar senior executive branch officials from ever lobbying on behalf of a foreign government.” He saw such people as undemocratic and corrupt, especially the deep-pocketed foreign and domestic interests associated with the Clintons and the Clinton Foundation.
Trump’s campaign rallying cry for this reform was, “It’s time to drain the swamp,” and he seemed to be the ideal person to do it: an outsider who earned the Republican nomination because the party was so intellectually ossified and riddled with incompetents, it was incapable of putting forward a credible candidate. Even though the metaphor of a swamp for Washington D.C. is technically inaccurate, the image of a disease-generating wetland swarming with dangerous, predatory creatures was successful because it depicted the public’s long-standing image of the federal government.

“Drain the Swamp” is not unique to Trump or his party, though. On May 21, 2018, Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Shumer used “swamp” against Trump in the run up to the mid-term elections: “The swamp has never been more foul, or more fetid, than under this president.” This, in turn, hearkened back to Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s 2006 invocation to “drain the swamp” of Republican government. There are still other repetitions, one going back to Benito Mussolini!
Like Obama’s crusade to close Guantánamo Bay, Trump’s crusade to drain the swamp failed. This was to be expected. In 2000, independent presidential candidate Pat Buchanan gave the definitive explanation: ‘’Neither Beltway party is going to drain this swamp: it’s a protected wetland; they breed in it; they spawn in it.” There can be little doubt who Buchanan meant by “they”. Time and again on the public affairs show The McLaughlin Group, he spelled it out in unambiguous language, as in these excerpts:
- “There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in The Middle East – the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States.” (Aug. 26, 1990)
- “Capitol Hill is Israeli occupied territory.” (June 15, 1990)
- “If you want to know ethnicity and power in the United States Senate, 13 members of the Senate are Jewish folks who are from 2 percent of the population. That is where real power is at….” (Feb. 2, 2007)
Israel’s Proxies in Congress:

Note that almost all these legislators are Democrats.
Source: www.investmentwatchblog.com/89-of-our-senators-and-congress-hold-dual-citizenship-citizenship-with-israel (March 21, 2018).
Buchanan’s observations are common knowledge, as is the fact that U.S. politicians prostrate themselves annually before the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and that scores of legislators are Israel/U.S. dual citizens. Obama’s and Trump’s reforms did not and could not succeed because the U.S.’s Zionist overlords did not allow it. Closing Guantánamo Bay and bringing its inmates to U.S. prisons would have drawn attention to the U.S.’s sadistic treatment of Muslims to cover up Israel’s role in the Sept. 11 attacks. In the swamp, Israel-firsters are the apex predators and overwhelmingly support the Democratic Party, so Trump’s promise to drain the swamp was a non-starter because it posed an existential threat to Israel.
It’s worth remembering that Trump was not Israel’s choice to be its new American satrap. The swamp had to co-opt him, and it did so successfully. Even though he ran on a campaign of ending counterproductive military aggression, in April 2017 and April 2018 Trump bombed Syria for Israel and received widespread approval in the pro-Israel mass media. He also reversed decades of U.S. policy by acceding to Zionist demands that the U.S. move its embassy to Jerusalem, thereby violating long-standing international law. The appointments of Zionists Mike Pompeo to Secretary of State and John Bolton to National Security Advisor in 2018 essentially confirmed his political surrender to the “swampocracy”.
Unless, a reformer is prepared to attack the impediments to reform instead of talking about its symptoms, any talk of fighting corruption or injustice is a cruel joke. One courageous, principled reformer who stands up to the Zionist imperial machinery is British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. For his efforts, he is vilified and subjected to Zionist-led subversion within his party, but despite these and other vilifications, like the empty, fabricated epithet “anti-Semite,” he will not back down. North Americans have nobody like Corbyn to look up to. It seems that only when politicians are about to leave office and have nothing to lose do they find the courage they lacked when their political careers mattered. As I wrote in The Host & The Parasite––How Israel’s Fifth Column Consumed America:
On May 20, 2004, retiring Sen. Ernest Hollings unleashed a fusillade from the Senate floor denouncing the coercive and corrosive power of The Lobby: “You can’t have an Israel policy other than what AIPAC gives you around here… I can tell you, no President takes office—I don’t care whether it is a Republican or a Democrat—that all of a sudden AIPAC will tell him exactly what the policy is, and Senators and members of Congress ought to sign letters… I didn’t like to keep it a secret, maybe; but I can tell you now, I will challenge any one of the other 99 Senators to tell us why we are in Iraq, other than what this policy is here. It is an adopted policy, a domino theory of The Project For The New American Century.” (p. 482)
Taking aim at the Zionist infrastructure entails an element of personal and professional risk, but the price for acquiescence is slavery. Americans, and Canadians, will not regain control of their countries until Zionists are recognized as the enemy, and that entails not letting them get away with conflating “Zionist” with “Jew,” squawking “anti-Semitism” or invoking the “Holocaust ®”. In the next part, I will show how this admonition applies even more strongly to political activists, who seem to prefer flogging their own biases to working for the common good.
August 31, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | AIPAC, Guantanamo, Human rights, United States |
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Iranian Defense Minister Amir Hatami visited Damascus Aug. 26-27 in order to have a new military cooperation agreement signed. The move is evidently a response to US and Israeli demands to withdraw Iranian forces from Syria. No details have been provided about the document’s content but it’s logical to surmise it contains a list of mutual obligations in the event that the Iranian military is attacked in Syria.
The deal mentions Iran’s role in the reconstruction of Syria’s defense industry, thus ending any hopes that its military presence in that country will end. According to the Iranian defense chief, the “defense and technical agreement” provides for the continued “presence and participation” of Iran in Syria. He added that an agreement had been reached with Syria that Iran would have “presence, participation, and assistance” in the reconstruction and that “no third party will be influential in this issue.”
The agreement was signed just as the Russia-Turkey-Iran summit was announced, which is scheduled for Sept. 7 in Tehran. Such events normally require thorough preparations. The parties are expected to reach an agreement on further joint steps to achieve progress in Syria. It’s important to align their positions before the UN talks in Geneva, which are slated for Sept. 11-12. UN Special Envoy Staffan de Mistura has invited the “big three” to participate. They can come up with joint initiatives while the US has nothing to offer but its demands for Iran’s withdrawal. It risks being left out in the cold, while diplomatic efforts initiated by other states bear fruit.
This turn of events will hardly be welcome news for those who would like to stymie the peace efforts and impose their own conditions for reaching any settlement of the problem.
The need to end Iranian assistance to Lebanon’s Hezbollah was emphasized during last week’s visit of US National Security Adviser John Bolton to Israel. The parties did not declare war on Iran, but there is no way to stop the supplies from reaching Hezbollah in Lebanon without cutting off the land routes going through Syria. The US official insisted before the visit to Israel that the withdrawal of Iran’s forces from Syria is a prerequisite to any resolution of the conflict.
The US and its allies in Syria find it important to scuttle Syria’s plans to liberate the province of Idlib from the rebels. A false-flag chemical attack is expected to be staged soon, to create a pretext for military action. Once Syria and Iran are in the same boat, it makes no difference which of them is attacked first or where. There have been media reports that a large-scale military operation is in the works and can be expected in August or September.
There is no way to know what exactly Mr. Bolton discussed with the Israeli authorities during his visit to Jerusalem on Aug. 19 but the reports about the military activities at the US al-Shaddadi base in the Syrian province of al-Hasakah emerged soon afterward. The facility has been reported to have been updated to enable the landing and takeoff of heavy cargo aircraft. Ayn al-Arab (Kobani) has also been expanded. In August, shipments of ammunition and military hardware were delivered to several US-controlled facilities in Syria and Iraq. Radars have been transported to the SDF-controlled areas east of the Euphrates River.
Meanwhile, several thousand militants with heavy weaponry and armored vehicles in Syria’s Idlib province are getting ready to launch an offensive against government-controlled regions of Hama and Aleppo. The attack will be targeted at Syrian as well as Iranian and pro-Iranian forces that have been invited in by the Syrian government.
It looks like plans are underway to force Syria to plunge into turmoil once again. In reality, the combat actions have already started. The US and Israel conducted their first joint operation against the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Quds Force and the Iraqi Shiite Khata’ib Hezbollah, their allies, on Aug. 23 near Abu Kamal, which is situated on the highway between Syria and Iraq. President Trump has said so many times and on so many occasions that he wants the Americans to leave Syria but US foreign policy is known for its flip-flops. Whatever is said today may be forgotten tomorrow.
This time, Lebanon may become a new front. It’s widely believed that a war between Israel and Hezbollah is inevitable. In February, US and Israeli troops held an exercise to practice for a potential war with Hezbollah in Lebanon, a country that holds a military agreement with Russia. The offshore drilling contracts Lebanon has signed with other countries, without solving its border dispute with Israel, are spurring the war preparations.
Syria and Iran have defied pressure and demonstrated their resolution not to bow but to protect their right to make independent decisions. They are offering a challenge. If the defense agreement just signed between those two allies provokes a military conflict, it will most certainly spill over to other countries, such as Yemen, Lebanon, and Iraq. It would lead to a long, protracted, and costly war.
August 29, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Wars for Israel | Hezbollah, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, United States, Zionism |
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The International Court of Justice has begun hearing a lawsuit brought by Iran against new US sanctions ordered by the Trump administration.
Iran last month lodged a complaint with the Hague-based tribunal, arguing that the sanctions violate the terms of a 1955 friendship treaty between the two countries.
The country opened a lawsuit Monday demanding the UN’s top court order the suspension of the renewed US sanctions.
“The United States is publicly propagating a policy intended to damage as severely as possible Iran’s economy and Iranian nationals and companies,” Iran’s lawyer Mohsen Mohebi told the court.
“This policy is nothing but naked economic aggression against my country,” he said, adding “Iran will put up the strongest resistance to the US economic strangulation, by all peaceful means.”
Tehran has called on the United Nations court to order the immediate lifting of the sanctions, and demanded compensation for damages incurred in their wake.
Sanctions had been lifted under a 2015 nuclear agreement between Iran and six other countries – the US, Germany, France, Britain, China and Russia.
President Donald Trump unilaterally pulled the US out of the deal with Iran in May and pledged to reimpose the most restrictive sanctions on the country.
Washington reinstated the first batch of sanctions in early August and will re-impose the second batch in November which will primarily be meant to undermine Tehran’s oil exports.
The United States’ lawyers will present their arguments on Tuesday. They are expected to argue that the ICJ should not have jurisdiction in the dispute.
The oral arguments, essentially a request by Iran for a provisional ruling, will last for four days, with a decision to follow within a month.
The ICJ was set up in 1946 to resolve international disputes. Its rulings are binding but on rare occasions they have been ignored by certain countries, chiefly the United States.
The US will respond formally in oral arguments on Tuesday, reportedly arguing that the United Nations court should not have jurisdiction in the dispute.
US lawyers will reportedly claim that the friendship treaty signed before the Islamic Revolution in 1979 is no longer valid and that the sanctions Washington has levied against Tehran, do not violate it anyway.
August 27, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Wars for Israel | Iran, Sanctions against Iran, United Nations, United States |
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And the Russian Warning Over Syria
As a new military confrontation over Syria is impending, thought out by Israel, prepared by the British and executed by the US, the West’s future depends greatly upon two mavericks, the US President Donald Trump and the UK Opposition Leader Jeremy Corbyn. These two men are as different as you can make. One is for capitalism, another one is a socialist, but both are considered soft on Russia, at least they do not foam at the mouth hearing Putin’s name. Both are enemies of Wall Street and the City, both stand against the Deep State, against NATO, both are enemies of globalism and of world government. One is a friend of Israel, another is a friend of Palestine, but both are charged with racism and anti-Semitism.
It is a quaint peculiarity of our time, that anti-Semitism is considered the great and unforgivable sin, trading places with Christ Denial. Negative attitude to Christ-denying Jews had been de rigueur at its time, and the Church, or its Tribunal, the Inquisition, had tried the charged. Nowadays, the heavily Jewish MSM is the accuser, the judge and jury, considering anti-Jewish attitude as a worst sort of racism. The two leaders aren’t guilty as charged, but the MSM court dispenses no acquittals.
Racism is indeed an ugly trend (though greed is worse), and hatred of Jews qua Jews is not nice, either. (You wouldn’t expect a different answer from the son of Jewish parents, would you?) Jews are entertaining, clever, cunning, sentimental and adventurous folk, able to do things. They can be good, that’s why the Church wants to bring them to Christ. If they were inherently bad, why bother with their souls? Are Jews greedy? Everyone would sell his grandma for a fistful of dollars, but only a Jew would actually deliver, say Jews. Jews tend to preach and claim high moral ground, but that is a tradition of the Nation of Priests. However, universalism and non-racism is not their strong point, and it is amazing that they appointed themselves the judges on racism.
Nazis were against Jews, ergo, Jews are the pukka anti-Nazis, this is the logic behind the appointment. It is easier to deal with ethnic or racial categories than with ideas. However, an easier way can lead to wrong results, as we shall prove by turning… no, not to bad Netanyahu or Sharon, but to the best of Jews.
Would you call “a leftist and a liberal” a man who wants to create a reservation for Blacks, a separate state for Blacks, to give them the voting rights in this separate state? A man whose motto was “you are there; we are here”? Hardly. Depending on his colour, you’d probably describe him a white racist, or a member of the Nation of Islam. But for Jews, there are different standards.
The recently demised Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery had been eulogised royally. Many Israelis came to part with him before his body was cremated and the ashes spread on Tel Aviv seashore. Mass media from all over the world, statesmen, politicians, activists dedicated many words to his memory. A brave man, a noble spirit, a fighter for peace, all that was said, and all that was true. But this the most progressive, the most left-liberal man in the whole of Israel was the godfather of the Separation Wall; he coined the slogan “you are there; we are here”. He did not want to live with Arabs in one state. He pushed for creation of ghetto for non-Jews.
He was fine to visit Arabs, to play chess with Arafat as he did during the siege; to defend them if they were mistreated by Jewish lowlifes. But to live with them as equal? No, no way. Avnery’s attitude was that of an old-time Boer Nationalist, a Bantustan creator. He would find himself at home with founders of Rhodesia.
There was a practical and pragmatic reason: Avnery and his ilk had robbed Palestinians of their lands and their livelihood in 1948, expelled them from their homes, corralled them into reservations, and split the booty. They became rich. They did not want to allow refugees back and give up the stolen loot, oh no.
Avnery believed peace was possible, for the Arabs should be grateful if they were left in peace in their Bantustans. He was for peace with Hamas, for he was sure they also will gratefully accept keeping what’s they’ve got.
This is the Israeli Left: people who had got enough of Arab goods, and do not need more.
Avnery’s adversaries weren’t Arabs; they were Jews who arrived in Palestine at a latter stage. They didn’t share in the Big Robbery of 1948; they wanted to get something for themselves.
This is the Israeli Right: people who want to squeeze more out of Palestinians, even if it means armed conflict will go on.
The common ground of Israeli Left and Israeli Right is their unwillingness to give Palestinians freedom and restore the stolen goods. The difference is that the Left, wealthy Jews, wanted to leave Palestinians in peace in their Bantustans. The Right, poorer Jews, want to keep squeezing Palestinians.
The late Mr Avnery greatly disliked the poorer Jews that migrated to Palestine after 1948. He denied they were mistreated by his pals. The talk about Oriental (or Sephardi) Jews being exploited and abused upon arrival annoyed him immensely.
He was, however, a very nice man. Regretfully I must admit that wealthy men looking for peace (even while keeping their booty) are more pleasant than poor guys keen on robbing somebody else.
Uri Avnery was one of the best of his kind. But he was not a liberal, nor a non-racist, neither a leftist by a long shot. As Ron Unz made a point in his widely read piece on Jews and Nazis, he was a living example of a Jew informed by Nazi Germany. He was brought up there; and upon arrival to Palestine, he joined a fascist terrorist group that courted Nazi Germany. He wrote in fascist newspapers, he actively participated in ethnic cleansing, and he freely admitted that.
His attitude to Arabs was similar of Adolf Eichmann to Jews in 1930s, mutatis mutandis. As Unz correctly stated, Eichmann was a big fan of Jews and a top liaison with Zionists at that time. He wanted Jews to prosper, just not in Germany. Avnery wanted Arabs to prosper, but on the other side of the border.
If he was the best, you can imagine the average of Israeli Left (Israeli Right is even worse). The previous leader of Israeli Labour, Mr Isaac Hertzog, became the head of the Jewish Agency and declared that his main task is to fight “the plague of mixed marriages”, that is marriages between Jews and non-Jews. The present leader of Israeli Labour, Avi Gabbay, told a meeting of party activists that “the Arabs have to be afraid of us”. He added: “They fire one missile – you fire 20. That’s all they understand in the Middle East”. He also vowed to never enter into a coalition with the non-Jewish party (the Joint List, a Knesset group representing Palestinian citizens).
Such views are totally unacceptable for any mainstream party in the US or the UK. Probably they are too radical for KKK, too.
Now sit tight and prepare yourself for a shock. This Israeli Labour Party, which would be considered a Nazi party elsewhere, decided to cut ties with Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party for British Labour is “anti-Semitic”, they said. It is a shame that Corbyn hasn’t been the one to take this step first. If you maintain ties with any Israeli party, you should have no problem to fraternise with Hollywood Nazis, let alone the Ku Klux Klan. And Jeremy Corbyn quite correctly compared Zionists with Nazis. Now he is being skinned alive by British Jews.
They ran the same front page in their three newspapers saying that Corbyn is an existential threat to British Jews, because he does not agree with their definition of anti-Semitism. He is not anti-Jewish, but he doesn’t worship the Jew. And he is not a Jew. A young British Jewish Labour voter regretted that Ed Miliband, the Jewish former Labour leader, is not in power, for “there wouldn’t be Brexit, there wouldn’t be Jeremy Corbyn, and we’d just have a lovely Jewish prime minister.” Isn’t it a racist sentiment? But Jews are pukka anti-racists…
Corbyn had been trying his best to accommodate the Jews. He expelled his staunch supporters whenever the Jews demand their heads. He is going to a compromise after a compromise, he denounced the Jews who stayed with him despite community pressure. All in vain, because the Jews care little about definitions, but they are worried about Corbyn’s hostility to banksters, by his excessive (in their eyes) sympathy to British workers and by his unwillingness to fight wars for Israel. They can’t say that openly, that is why they keep pushing anti-Semitism button hoping to unseat Corbyn and return Blair-2.
My respected friend Jonathan Cook, the great British journalist based in Nazareth, summed it up well:
“Besieged for four years, Corbyn has been abandoned. Few respected politicians want to risk being cast out into the wilderness, like Ken Livingstone, as an anti-Semite. Corbyn himself has conceded too much ground on anti-semitism. He has tried to placate rather than defy the smearers.”
Cook points out that by conceding ground, Corbyn betrayed Palestinians and betrayed anti-Zionist Jews who were expelled by droves from Labour. Even Tony Greenstein, a Jewish nationalist though anti-Zionist, had been expelled; the same Tony Greenstein who attacked me and Gilad Atzmon for our anti-Semitism (I responded to him here). He was also sent home packing. The late Hajo Meyer, a Holocaust survivor and defender of Palestinian rights, a personal friend of Corbyn, had been denounced. Palestinians were betrayed, and we should care about them more than about Jewish fine feelings.
But why should we give a damn about Corbyn and/or Palestinians if we aren’t British voters? I’ll tell you.
In the British establishment, pro-Jewish forces decided to side with the Washington War Party to push us close to war. The recent visit of the British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt (the man on the shortlist of Israel’s agents within the British establishment) to Washington where Hunt delivered a speech calling for full-out war on Russia, “has been read as an intervention on the side of the anti-Russian faction in the split and divided US administration”, said the Guardian.
The speech is just an opening, missiles will follow soon. Today, I was informed by my contacts, the Russians have delivered a demarche to the State Department, warning the Americans to desist from their plans to attack Syria. Russian intelligence learned that eight tanks containing chlorine have been delivered to Halluz village of Idlib province where the group of specially trained militants has already been deployed in order to simulate the rescue of the victims of chemical attack. The militants were trained by the British private military company Olive (which had merged with the American Constellis Group.
The operation, the Russians say, had been planned by the British intelligence services to justify an impending airstrike directed against Syrian military and civil infrastructure. For this strike, USS The Sullivans guided missile destroyer with 56 cruise missiles onboard arrived to the Persian Gulf, and the US Air Force bomber B-1B with 24 cruise Air-to-Surface Missiles had been flown to the Al-Udeid air base in Qatar.
The idea is Israeli, the operational plans are British, weapons and vessels are American, and a possibility for confrontation grows stronger each day. The success of Corbyn would put a stop to these plans of war. But will he have a chance?
Ron Unz wrote that the British establishment together with Organised Jewry were able to push unwilling America into the world wars twice, and perhaps they will be able to repeat this feat a third time. It seems that the Question of Palestine, one of the reasons for America’s entry into the world wars, is likely to unleash another war.
Who is the master and who is the slave of the two, Organised Jewry or English establishment? This is the-chicken-and-the-egg dilemma, and there are conflicting answers.
* Indiana University Professor of Geography, Mohameden Ould-Mey provided strong arguments that the English were the Master. I presented his case here.
* The opposing view is that of the late Times correspondent Douglas Reed, presented in his Controversy of Zion, a cryptic book. Proponents of both views had been banned beyond marginalizing. You are just not allowed to ponder it.
I do not intend to rule who is right; however, the moot area where the twain intersect is definitely a trouble spot. Conservative Friends of Israel and Labour Friends of Israel are the groups within this intersection. Their desire for war against Russia sends us a powerful signal of danger.
On the opposing side, there are two intersecting groups: (1) friends of Palestine, and (2) opponents of Jews.
The racial and tribal anti-Semites are of little value, for they are not particularly bright and are easily misled and manipulated. They do not like Jewish noses, but who cares?
But people rejecting globalism, rule of the banks, neoliberalism, impoverishment of native workers, uprooting, Christ-denial, mass migration and population replacement, the “invite and invade” mode – are the core of the resistance. They are called “anti-Semites”, even if they never mention Jews, even if they are Jewish.
Some people who strongly reject this paradigm prefer to dismiss a thought of Palestine. Bannon and his ilk, the British Nationalists never fail to express their admiration of Israel. It shows they are immoral and dishonest. As long as you choose between Banksters’ rule and Zionists’ yoke, you will get both.
Palestine is the heart of the matter. Palestine is why the Jews want the attack on Syria.
Palestine is the tool allowing us to unmask the racist nature of our adversary and defeat him. This is the way to compassion and the way to Christ. If the only escape from the anti-Semitism label leads through betrayal of Christ and Palestine, I’d rather bear this label with pride.
Trump and Corbyn are coming to the point from different sides. They are fighting a strong and well-entrenched adversary. Both are tired, both are full of imperfections, but they offer us a chance to save our beautiful world from destruction. It would be silly if they fail for antisemitism scare.
P.S. The first ever trial of a Holocaust Denier in Russia is taking place now in Perm, the Doctor Zhivago city. Roman Yushkov, a Perm University Professor, had been sacked; his social accounts erased, his YouTube presentations removed; there is practically no publicity at all. He re-posted an article expressing doubt of the amount of Jewish dead, and a local resident of Habad Chassid House reported him to authorities. There is no law forbidding H denial in Russia, but there is a law forbidding to cause inter-ethnic wrangle. The verdict is expected on September 4. You can write to Prof Yushkov <roman@prpc.ru>
Israel Shamir can be reached at adam@israelshamir.net
August 27, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Donald Trump, Israel, Jeremy Corbyn, Palestine, UK, United States, Uri Avnery, Zionism |
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The Justice Department of the United States charged two people with circumventing US sanctions against Iran, discretely working on behalf of Iran’s government to conduct surveillance on Israeli and Jewish facilities inside the country, and attending MEK events in the US to collect intelligence.
The Justice Department’s National Security Division announced the charges Monday evening.
Ahmadrea Doostdar, 39, of Iranian and US citizenship, and Majid Ghorbani, 59, of Iranian citizenship and whose residence was California, are the two individuals named in the indictment.
Among the alleged offenses ascribed to Doostdar and Ghorbani are collecting identifying information on American citizens who are members of the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), a group that seeks to overthrow Iran’s current leadership. The group, which has been described as a “cult” by the Washington Post and others, pays John (“Bomb Iran”) Bolton tens of thousands of dollars to speak at MEK rallies, and was designated a terrorist group by the United States Department of State from 1993 to 2012, when Bolton reportedly was able to lobby for its removal.
“In or about July 2017, Doostdar traveled to the United States from Iran in order to collect intelligence information about entities and individuals considered by the government of Iran to be enemies of that regime, including Israeli and Jewish interests, and individuals associated with the MEK, a group that advocates the overthrow of the current Iranian government,” the DOJ said with respect to the indictment.
The DOJ alleges that Ghorbani took pictures at an MEK rally in New York last September and that Doostdar paid him $2,000 cash for 28 pictures during a meeting in Los Angeles a few months later. Ghorbani would later attend the MEK’s rally in Washington, DC, in May 2018 where he “appeared to photograph certain speakers and attendees, which included delegations from across the United States.”
The Justice Department noted that Ghorbani and Dootsdar engaged in a conspiracy to defraud the US.
“Doostdar and Ghorbani are alleged to have acted on behalf of Iran, including by conducting surveillance of political opponents and engaging in other activities that could put Americans at risk,” DOJ’s John Demers said in the August 20 announcement.
August 20, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Wars for Israel | Iran, MEK, United States, Zionism |
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Those who pay attention to what is going on — as opposed to passively consuming the obsessions of MSM — know that the Clinton-related material published by Wikileaks emerged from leaks, not hacks. Assange has stated in no uncertain terms that the Russian government was not responsible for providing the material Wikileaks published, and his friend Craig Murray — a whistleblower hero who exposed the torture practiced by the government of Uzbekistan while he was British ambassador there — indicates that he has direct knowledge that the DNC and Podesta Wikileaks releases derived from leaks, not hacks. In fact, he met with one of the people involved in September of last year in Washington D.C.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2017/01/03/julian-assange-russian-government-not-source-leaked-emails/96106052/
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4034038/Ex-British-ambassador-WikiLeaks-operative-claims-Russia-did-NOT-provide-Clinton-emails-handed-D-C-park-intermediary-disgusted-Democratic-insiders.html
https://consortiumnews.com/2016/12/18/a-spy-coup-in-america/
And Wikileaks has just tweeted an audio recording of Seymour Hersh in which he indicates that, according to an FBI source he considers “unbelievably accurate and careful, he’s a very high-level guy”, there is an FBI report indicating that the FBI examined Seth’s computer and determined that Seth was the Wikileaks DNC source. Whether or not Hersh’s source is correct — Hersh has not published this info, and refuses to be interviewed on it — it is not conceivable, at least to those of us who appreciate Wikileaks’ integrity, that Wikileaks would have tweeted this if Seth weren’t their source.
https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/892510925244203008
Now, just in time for the anniversary of Seth Rich’s death, forensic analyses — by the pseudonymous ‘Forensicator” — have clarified that the “Guccifer 2.0” releases of DNC material in September 2016 resulted from local downloads, via thumbdrive or LAN, of DNC computer files, rather than hacks from a distant location such as Russia or Romania — contrary to the assertions of our intelligence community; the rate of data transfer, as of mid-2016, was far too great for a remote hack to be responsible.* Indeed, the rate was precisely what one would expect if the download had occurred via USB2.0 memory stick, and cyberexpert/journalist Adam Carter has argued that the downloaded files displayed “FAT filesystem anomalies” likewise pointing to a memory stick download. Moreover, time stamps reveal that this data transfer occurred on the East Coast.
Of no less importance is the fact that the metadata of some of the released Guccifer 2.0 files (those released on June 15th) had been intentionally altered to leave clues that Russian hackers may have accessed the material, in a clear effort to falsely implicate Russians in the hacking of those files. The clear implication is that someone affiliated with the Clinton campaign or DNC created the persona of Guccifer 2.0 to trick our gullible intelligence agencies into concluding that Russian hacks had been responsible not only for the Guccifer 2.0 releases, but for the WIkileaks releases as well — thereby devaluing them in the eyes of the American public. “Guccifer 2.0”, of course, topped off the scam by claiming he was the Wikileaks source.
https://consortiumnews.com/2017/07/24/intel-vets-challenge-russia-hack-evidence/
http://g-2.space/
http://g-2.space/distortions/
https://theforensicator.wordpress.com/guccifer-2-ngp-van-metadata-analysis/
http://disobedientmedia.com/2017/07/new-research-shows-guccifer-2-0-files-were-copied-locally-not-hacked/
https://www.reddit.com/r/WayOfTheBern/comments/6mgjuy/implications_of_recent_analyses_by_adam_carter/
https://www.thenation.com/article/a-new-report-raises-big-questions-about-last-years-dnc-hack/
As Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity have emphasized, the timeline of Guccifer 2.0’s first appearance is curious. On June 12, Wikileaks announced that it would soon be releasing Clinton-related emails. On June 14, the DNC announces that it has been hacked. On June 15, the DNC cybercontractor Crowdstrike announced that it had found malware on the DNC computer which they suspect originated from Russia, and, in seeming coordination, Guccifer 2.0 proclaimed that he was the hacker who supplied Wikileaks with its Clinton material — posting documents that had had “Russian fingerprints” implanted in their metadata. (And why would a hacker genuinely working for the Russian government go out of his way to advertise himself?) Then the main trove of DNC material subsequently released by Guccifer 2.0 on his website was downloaded locally from DNC computers on July 5th — five days before Seth Rich was murdered by hitmen. These facts are consistent with the thesis that the DNC, or someone affiliated with the DNC, hoaxed our intelligence services to blame the Wikileaks releases on Russia. Could they then have gotten rid of someone who could have spoiled this narrative?
Possible collusion between Crowdstrike and Guccifer 2.0 is suggested by the fact that, in their June 14th announcement, the DNC indicated — presumably based on claims by Crowdstrike — that the hacker had targeted Trump Opposition Research. This was indeed one of the documents that Guccifer 2.0 released the following day. Adam Carter refers to the Crowdstrike claim about Trump Opposition Research being targeted as “specious”, as they “never demonstrated or explained” how they could have known this. Carter concludes that this likely indicates collusion between Crowdstrike and Guccifer 2.0, and suggests that perhaps the persona of Guccifer 2.0 was created by someone at Crowdstrike. (And it hardly seems likely that Crowdstrike would have concocted such a scam without the knowledge and encouragement of top officials at the DNC. Though this brings up an interesting alternative possibility — could Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and her felonious IT specialist Imran Awan have conceived and executed Guccifer 2.0? It’s not clear whether Awan has the requisite measure of sophistication.) Another peculiarity is this: if Guccifer 2.0 was employed by the Russian government to damage Hillary and help Trump, why would one of the first documents he released be Trump Opposition Research?!
http://g-2.space/
Furthermore, Carter’s analysis of the times of G2.0’s tweets and blog publications points to someone in the U.S. rather than Russia — unless he was bizarrely nocturnal.
http://g-2.space/g2tweettimes/
Carter also discusses linguistic research which demonstrates that, in his communications, Guccifer 2.0 makes a very amateurish effort to impersonate a native Russian attempting to speak English, being very inconsistent in his linguistic errors. His overall impression of Guccifer 2.0 is encapsulated in this description: “A donkey in a bear costume”. In his latest update, Carter notes: “The only language expert willing to be cited without being anonymous was professor M.J. Connolly from Boston College and he stated that Guccifer 2.0 lacked any traits he would expect to see from a Russian communicating in English!”
http://g-2.space/sixmonths/
Here is another reason to suspect that Crowdstrike was behind Guccifer 2.0. The “Russian fingerprints” added to the June 15th releases of Guccifer 2.0 consisted of the name “Felix Edmundovich”, written in the Cyrillic alphabet. This is clearly a reference to the founder of the Soviet secret police (OGPU), Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Dzerzhinsky)
How many American computer geeks would know the name of the founder of OGPU? One American who likely would is Shawn Henry, co-founder and President of Crowdstrike, who previously worked under Robert Mueller (!) as the FBI’s assistant director for counterintelligence.
https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/news/pressrel/press-releases/shawn-henry-named-executive-assistant-director-of-the-criminal-cyber-response-and-services-branch
In an interview with a journalist from Motherboard/Vice News, Guccifer 2.0 described the technique he used to hack the DNC servers. Carter points out that the cybersecurity firm ThreatConnect has analyzed this claim, and found it to be technically impossible. It is unclear whether Guccifer 2.0 has any hacking skills whatever.
Here’s a great new video about the Guccifer 2.0 affair by “Panda Bear” that I strongly recommend:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZNAbPNKCKk&t=0s
For clarity, it’s important to note that, contrary to the assertions of some enthusiastic commentators, the forensic findings of Forensicator and Adam Carter pertain only to the releases of Guccifer 2.0, cannot prove that the DNC server was not hacked, and have no clear relevance to the DNC emails released by Wikileaks or the activities of Seth Rich. These issues must be addressed with other lines of evidence. What these forensic analyses do strongly point to is that people affiliated with the DNC consciously hoaxed our intelligence community to try to paint Hillary as a victim of Russian perfidy, with Wikileaks as their devious accomplice. And they also reveal that, in pointing to Guccifer 2.0 as the source for the DNC Wikileaks releases, our “intelligence community” has once again demonstrated its gross and criminal incompetence.
There were also files taken from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee that were published prior to the election on Guccifer 2.0’s own website. (Is the DCCC collaborating with the DNC in this scam?) This episode has received little attention, and in any case, if the goal of the Russian government was to impede Clinton’s election, why would they care about the DCCC? Who believes Russia would want to elect more Republicans? In any case, if Guccifer 2.0 was indeed the source of these leaks, they weren’t hacked by Russians, so let’s move on.
Finally, there is DC Leaks, which, beginning in July of last year has released purloined info on a diverse range of targets, including the former commander of NATO, Senators McCain and Graham, the Soros Foundation, and personal info of 200 Democratic lawmakers. This has received little media commentary, possibly because it is hard to see how this effort was an attempt to influence the election. Nonetheless, the cybersecurity firm ThreatConnect claims that DC Leaks is a front for the hacker group Fancy Bear, which they claim is linked to Russian intelligence. They also think that Guccifer 2.0 is involved. Sounds a lot like the analyses that linked the Guccifer 2.0 and Wikileaks releases to Russian intelligence — and we’ve seen how credible those analyses were.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DCLeaks
Then there was the NSA document leaked by Reality Winner, in which it is “assessed” that Russians at the behest of the Kremlin targeted a number of local government operations in spearphishing operations just prior to the election. Scott Ritter has carefully analyzed the NSA document and demonstrated that the NSA agents responsible had nothing but speculation to link these spearphishing attacks to the Russian government.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/leaked_nsa_report_short_on_facts_proves_little_in_russiagate_case_20170607
Recent claims that Russia tried to hack into 21 state electoral databases prior to the election have been skewered by Gareth Porter, who shows that, in the only one of these attacks that was successful, the perpetrators merely extracted personal information saleable to criminal networks, without making any effort to alter electoral data. Evidently the work of cybercriminals, not Russian government operatives.
http://original.antiwar.com/porter/2017/07/03/foisting-blame-cyber-hacking-russia/
The Department of Homeland Security is now posting retractions of these claims:
https://www.apnews.com/10a0080e8fcb4908ae4a852e8c03194d?utm_campaign=SocialFlow&utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=APCentralRegion
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-09-28/clear-dhs-was-wrong-california-says-russians-did-not-hack-voting-systems
https://theintercept.com/2017/09/28/yet-another-major-russia-story-falls-apart-is-skepticism-permissible-yet/
And cyberexpert Jeffrey Carr has determined that the criminals involved were English speakers.
https://medium.com/@jeffreycarr/az-and-il-state-board-of-elections-were-attacked-by-english-speaking-hackers-82c0528de9ee
Alleged claims from our intelligence agencies that Russia was responsible for election interference in Germany and France have been debunked by the intelligence agencies in those countries:
https://caucus99percent.com/content/are-russian-hackers-under-your-bed
Last month, CNN reported that “Russian hackers had breached Qatar’s state news agency and planted a fake news report that contributed to a crisis among the US’ closest Gulf allies, according to US officials briefed on the investigation…. US officials say the Russian goal appears to be to cause rifts among the US and its allies.”
http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/06/politics/russian-hackers-planted-fake-news-qatar-crisis/index.html
But now, as reported by WaPo, US officials have concluded that the UAE had arranged this hacking to demonize Qatar:
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-qatar-report-idUSKBN1A200H
(The story on CNN, of course, is that UAE denies this: http://edition.cnn.com/2017/07/17/middleeast/uae-qatar-report/index.html. Cue the laughter: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-07-16/cnn-caught-faking-news-again-us-intel-accuses-uae-not-russia-orchestrating-qatari-ha).
But What About all that “Evidence”?
But what about all the “evidence” our intelligence agencies have for Russia’s nefarious election interference?
Official claims in this regard began with the release of this joint statement by DHS and ODNI on Oct. 17 of last year:
“The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations. The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process. Such activity is not new to Moscow — the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there. We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.”
Note how James Clapper, with the backing of Jeh Johnson of DHS, imperiously represented his views as those of “The U.S. Intelligence Community”. Hillary Clinton subsequently seized on this to make the hyperbolic self-serving claim that “17 intelligence agencies” had reached this conclusion — a claim that was echoed by our servile MSM until it recently was retracted by the New York Times.
The supposedly definitive statement of our intelligence agencies on alleged Russian election interference was an Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA), a de-classified summary of which was released on Jan. 6th. As subsequently admitted by Clapper in congressional testimony, this assessment was not a formal National Intelligence Estimate, which would have required the participation of all intelligence agencies and would have included any dissenting opinions, but rather represented the opinions of a couple dozen intelligence operatives hand-picked (likely by Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, and John Brennan of the CIA) from the CIA, NSA, and FBI.
It is useful to understand these things about Clapper: He played a key role in convincing the nation that Saddam had ample stores of WMDs before our Iraq invasion. When these WMDs failed to appear, he stated that Saddam had had them shipped to Syria just prior to the invasion (subsequently debunked). He lied under oath before Congress and the nation regarding surveillance of American citizens by the NSA. And in a recent interview with Chuck Todd, he revealed himself to be a near-psychotic Russiaphobe, claiming that Russians were virtually “genetically programmed” to foment chaos for us.
https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/us-anti-russia-sentiment-is-built-on-racism-xenophobia-homophobia-and-demagoguery-b1ebef57ddb6
So what do you think is going to be the outcome when a psychotic Russophobe is allowed to hand-pick the members of an intelligence panel intended to evaluate alleged Russian meddling? As acclaimed investigative journalist Robert Parry noted:
“Yet, as any intelligence expert will tell you, if you “hand-pick” the analysts, you are really hand-picking the conclusion. For instance, if the analysts were known to be hard-liners on Russia or supporters of Hillary Clinton, they could be expected to deliver the one-sided report that they did.”
https://consortiumnews.com/2017/05/23/new-cracks-in-russia-gate-assessment/
As to the unclassified report itself, the most cogent observation is that it provides no hard evidence whatever to back up its conclusion that Russian operatives had interfered in our election on the orders of Vladimir Putin. Rather hilariously, over half of its length is devoted to splenetic venting about the Russia-sponsored TV network RT, which nefariously had featured Third Party political debates and criticisms of fracking — and of course the seditious ravings of that evident Kremlin puppet Larry King. If RT constitutes vile and unacceptable election interference, what have we been doing with Voice of America for decades?
Most tellingly, the declassified ICA barely mentions Wikileaks, and provides no clue as to how it was concluded that Wikileaks received its Clinton-related emails from Russian sources. The key point of the Russiagate narrative is not just that Russians were hacking the DNC and John Podesta, but that, at the behest of the Russian government, they were transferring their booty to Wikileaks for release to the public. In his congressional testimony, Clapper seemed to admit that the link between Russia and Wikileaks was speculative:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2AbrMEmD9k
It is hard to escape the conclusion that our intelligence agencies have no hard evidence whatever that Wikileaks received its Clinton-related emails from sources commissioned by the Russian government. And of course Assange, who presumably knows how he got the material he himself published — and has far greater credibility than Clapper could ever have — vehemently denies this.
In the run-up to the Iraq invasion, our intelligence agencies at least deigned to convey to us some “evidence” that Saddam did indeed still have WMDs. In the present instance, they are effectively just saying “Trust us”. In the context of the fact that our intelligence agencies used wholly bogus evidence to propel us into an Iraq involvement that led to the death, maiming, or exile of literally millions of people in Iraq — not to mention thousands of American deaths and casualties, and catastrophic expense — anyone in our government or our media who is willing to just “trust” a hand-picked cabal of intelligence agents on an issue that may foment a new Cold War with the second-leading nuclear power, is engaging in gross criminal negligence.
The credibility of the report’s conclusions can be judged by this key passage:
“We assess with high confidence that Russian military intelligence … used the Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com to release US victim data obtained in cyber operations publicly and in exclusives to media outlets and relayed material to WikiLeaks.”
https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf
As we have seen, “Guccifer 2.0” is someone on the East Coast, with local access to the DNC computers, who is doing a rather half-assed job of appearing to be Russian — “A donkey in a bear costume”. So much for their “high confidence”.
In formulating its ICA, the panel relied on the conclusions of a private cyber company, Crowdstrike, with respect to alleged hacking of the DNC server, because the DNC had repeatedly refused to turn their server over to the FBI — and the FBI had failed to subpoena it. Crowdstrike was recruited for this purpose by the Clinton campaign, and had previous associations with Hillary Clinton. Its founders are affiliated with the Atlantic Council, a think tank known for its virulently anti-Russia stances. Its previous effort to incriminate Russia in a hacking attack has been shown to be wholly erroneous.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/03/23/cybersecurity-firm-that-attributed-dnc-hacks-to-russia-may-have-fabricated-russia-hacking-in-ukraine/
As to the “logic” which Crowdstrike employed to impute hacking of the DNC to Russian intelligence, it appears to have been puerile. Here are the comments of Scott Ritter:
“CrowdStrike claimed that the presence of the X-Agent malware was a clear ‘signature’ of a hacking group — APT 28, or Fancy Bear — previously identified by German intelligence as being affiliated with the GRU, Russian military intelligence…. The CrowdStrike data is unconvincing. First and foremost, the German intelligence report it cites does not make an ironclad claim that APT 28 is, in fact, the GRU. In fact, the Germans only ‘assumed’ that GRU conducts cyberattacks. They made no claims that they knew for certain that any Russians, let alone the GRU, were responsible for the 2015 cyberattack on the German Parliament, which CrowdStrike cites as proof of GRU involvement. Second, the malware in question is available on the open market, making it virtually impossible to make any attribution at all simply by looking at similarities in ‘tools and techniques.’ Virtually anyone could have acquired these tools and used them in a manner similar to how they were employed against both the German Parliament and the DNC…. The presence of open-source tools is, in itself, a clear indicator that Russian intelligence was not involved.”
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/time-to-reassess-the-roles-played-by-guccifer-2-0-and-russia-in-the-dnc-hack/
Cyberexpert Jeremy Carr fully agrees:
“It is both foolish and baseless to claim, as Crowdstrike does, that X-Agent is used solely by the Russian government when the source code is there for anyone to find and use at will.
Once malware is deployed, it is no longer under the control of the hacker who deployed it or the developer who created it. It can be reverse-engineered, copied, modified, shared and redeployed again and again by anyone. In other words — malware deployed is malware enjoyed!
If the White House had unclassified evidence that tied officials in the Russian government to the DNC attack, they would have presented it by now. The fact that they didn’t means either that the evidence doesn’t exist or that it is classified.
If it’s classified, an independent commission should review it because this entire assignment of blame against the Russian government is looking more and more like a domestic political operation run by the White House that relied heavily on questionable intelligence generated by a for-profit cybersecurity firm with a vested interest in selling “attribution-as-a-service”
https://medium.com/@jeffreycarr/fbi-dhs-joint-analysis-report-a-fatally-flawed-effort-b6a98fafe2fa.
More recently, he has stated:
“There is not now and never has been a single piece of technical evidence produced that connects the malware used in the DNC attack to the GRU, FSB or any agency of the Russian government.”
https://consortiumnews.com/2017/08/18/russia-gates-evidentiary-void/
Indeed, he is so irate regarding the impact on international affairs of the flawed logic employed by Crowdstrike that he demands an investigation of them:
“I think there should be commission that reviews the technical evidence which is being sold to the US government by and for profit by the cyber security companies like Crowdstrike. I think this deserves a deeper investigation, because based upon invalid assumptions and lack of proof they have created an international strain in international relations between the US and Russia,” said Carr.
https://www.rt.com/op-edge/372888-investigate-russian-hacking-contractor/
If you had a friend who was trying to solve a murder, and he told you: “We know that the victim was killed with a gun, and the Mafia uses guns, so we know that the Mafia killed him,” you would rightly conclude that your friend was a bit half-witted. Yet Crowdstrike, using quite analogous “logic”, while throwing around technical terms that are obscure to people who aren’t cyberexperts, receives awed respect from MSM journalists.
A further indication of the intellectual acumen of Crowdstrike is their response to a reporter from the Washington Times when they were asked to comment on the blockbuster VIPS report on Guccifer 2.0.:
“‘We find the argument unsubstantiated and inaccurate, based on a fundamental flaw,’ a company spokesman said.
The CrowdStrike spokesman said that by July 5 all malware had been removed from the DNC network and thus the hackers copied files that were already in their own systems.”
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/jul/27/with-robert-mueller-fbi-gets-second-chance-to-insp/
Uh, precisely how would the existence or nonexistence of hacking malware on a computer influence one’s ability to download data on a thumbdrive?!!
Here’s another oddity about Crowdstrike: As of May 5th, they had installed their supposedly state-of-the-art anti-hacking program Falcon on this server — and yet the latest of the DNC emails which Wikileaks released was created on May 25th.
Steve McIntire writes:
“There were no fewer than 14409 emails in the Wikileaks archive dating after Crowdstrike’s installation of its security software. In fact, more emails were hacked after Crowdstrike’s discovery on May 6 than before. Whatever actions were taken by Crowdstrike on May 6, they did nothing to stem the exfiltration of emails from the DNC.”
https://climateaudit.org/2017/09/02/email-dates-in-the-wikileaks-dnc-archive/
Of course, there is nothing at all odd about this if the Wikileaks emails stemmed from a leak.
However, Crowdstrike has subsequently characterized its installation of Falcon as a measure to monitor ongoing hacking. Alperovitch of Crowdstrike has referred to Falcon as “monitoring software”:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4376628/New-questions-claim-Russia-hacked-election.html#ixzz4iZEpGDmk
Allegedly, Crowdstrike took definitive measures to cleanse the DNC servers and institute new passwords on the weekend of June 10–12. Are we expected to believe that they just monitored ongoing hacking for a month while doing nothing to stop it? Here’s an analogy: You are informed that a gang rape is in progress. Instead of immediately sending the police, you send photographers (apparently without film).
However, Crowdstrike’s own promotional literature refers to Falcon as software for preventing hacking:
https://web.archive.org/web/20160428142131/https://www.crowdstrike.com/products/
So is Crowdstrike throwing its own top-of-the-line product under the bus to maintain the credibility of the claim that hackers provided Wikileaks with the DNC emails?
Cyberexpert Adam Carter suspects that Crowdstrike might have been involved in creating the Guccifer 2.0 fraud. The purposely tainted Guccifer 2.0 releases, in conjunction with Crowdstrike’s conclusion that Russian agents had hacked the DNC, could have readily led unsuspecting intelligence agents to indict the Russians.
http://g-2.space/
Oh, and guess who the DCCC hired to investigate its breach?
http://www.rollcall.com/news/politics/dccc-hacked-in-series-of-cyber-attacks-against-democratic-groups
Another key difficulty with the ICA has been raised by William Binney, a co-founder of the NSA’s SIGINT Automation Research Center. He indicates that if the DNC had been hacked, the NSA would know precisely when this had happened, and where the data had gone:
“Because NSA can trace exactly where and how any “hacked” emails from the Democratic National Committee or other servers were routed through the network, it is puzzling why NSA cannot produce hard evidence implicating the Russian government and WikiLeaks. Unless we are dealing with a leak from an insider, not a hack, as other reporting suggests. From a technical perspective alone, we are convinced that this is what happened.”
https://consortiumnews.com/2017/01/06/the-dubious-case-on-russian-hacking/
Intriguingly, it was the NSA which indicated that they were only “moderately confident” about the ICA’s conclusion.
And finally, there’s the intriguing detail that the declassified ICA contains a preamble indicating that the “assessments” it provides are not necessarily equivalent to “facts”. In other words, they are “best guesses”. Ray McGovern has pointed out that, in spyspeak, “assess” effectively means “guess”. So those trumpeting the “proven” election interference by Russia are relying on the guesses of a couple of dozen people hand-selected by the virulent Russophobe James Clapper.
Getting back to the issue of whether Seth Rich was the source of the DNC Wikileaks releases: In one corner we have Julian Assange and Craig Murray, who have sacrificed their freedom and their career (respectively) for their insistence on spreading (inconvenient) truth. Nothing ever released by Wikileaks has been found to be fraudulent. Assange states without qualification that the Russian government was not responsible for his DNC releases, Murray states bluntly that both the DNC and Podesta emails Wikileaks releases resulted from internal leaks, not hacks (having met personally with one of the sources), and Assange, both by direct statements and by re-tweeting key reports, is implying as strongly as he can without saying so directly that Seth is a Wikileaks source. Assange and Murray have direct knowledge of their DNC source if anyone does. Celebrated journalist Sy Hersh indicates that an anonymous FBI source he values highly indicates he has seen an FBI analysis of Seth’s computer which concludes that Seth provided the DNC material to Wikileaks via a drop box. And — for what it’s worth (which might not be much, but we’ll see) — Kim Dotcom also claims to have evidence that Seth was a Wikileaks source. (He states that he cannot come forward with this evidence without getting an immunity deal, because otherwise he could be subject to legal sanctions for participating in the leaking.)
In the other corner, we have committed Russophobes James Clapper, John Brennan, and a group of hand-picked acolytes who assess (guess) that Russian hackers — including Guccifer 2.0 — were the Wikileaks source. They obviously have no direct knowledge in this regard, and they have made this assessment despite the fact that no federal agency has been allowed to analyze the DNC server; the private company which made the assessment which they rely on likewise has a strong political bias. They also provide no clue whatever as to how they have concluded that the alleged hacks were transferred to Wikileaks. Their declassified ICA has been ridiculed by independent cyberexperts for failing to provide any hard evidence whatever. Their conclusion that Guccifer 2.0 is a Russian hacker is an evident farce. Clapper is notorious for his misjudgments prior to and following the Iraq invasion, and also perjured himself under oath to Congress. Both Clapper and Brennan have strong motivation to slam Russia.
And yet virtually all of our MSM and political class accept as a matter of course the conclusions of the ICA, and ridicule as a “conspiracy theorist” anyone who even broaches the possibility that Seth could be the Wikileaks source. Of course, these are the same people whose sycophantic credulity enabled the grossly criminal and catastrophic Iraq invasion — so why be surprised?
Topping it all off, of course, is that the key crime that the Russians are alleged to have committed — a crime that has been likened to an “act of war” by some over-the-top commentators — was to provide the American public with true facts regarding the ways in which the DNC, in violation of its charter, leaned over backwards to favor Hillary Clinton over her rivals in the 2016 primary — and also finally gave us access to Hillary’s Wall Street speeches in which she helpfully clarified that she had two sets of views — those for the public, and those for her donors, who clearly were the ones that really mattered. (Of course, it’s not as though percipient observers didn’t know these things already.) Isn’t it the role of our MSM to be providing such “interference”?
Craig Murray has summed much of this up in a recent excellent essay:
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2017/07/stink-without-secret/
And the fabulous Caitlin Johnstone has assembled a voluminous summary of pertinent facts on Russiagate here:
https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/the-index-of-russiagate-debunkery-f5b6f4101dd0
But the Russian Trolls!
But wait — there’s still the 1,000 Russian trolls, paid by the Kremlin to spread “fake news”TM to the gullible American public. As far as I know, the only source for this is a statement by Sen. Mark Warner of the Intelligence Committee, referring to unspecified “reports”:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/russian-trolls-hilary-clinton-fake-news-election-democrat-mark-warner-intelligence-committee-a7657641.html
Hillary embellished this narrative at a recent sit-down comedy performance at the 2017 Code Conference — for which she received rave reviews:
https://www.recode.net/2017/5/31/15722218/hillary-clinton-code-conference-transcript-donald-trump-2016-russia-walt-mossberg-kara-swisher
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4560344/Hillary-Trump-colluded-Russia-create-fake-news.html
http://observer.com/2017/06/hillary-clinton-insults-voters-fake-news-russia-election-involvement/
After repeating her by-then-debunked lie about the “17 intelligence agencies”, she focused on the Russian trolls and bots who had helped to tank her campaign:
“So the Russians… could not have known best how to weaponize that information unless they had been guided. Guided by Americans and guided by people who had polling and data information.”
Her implication was of course that the people providing this guidance were the Trump campaign. And apparently this guidance was so astute that, according to Warner, the trolls targeted the rust-belt states that Hillary gave short shrift to. According to tweeter Maple Cocaine — “Pretty big indictment of the Hillary campaign when the fucking Kremlin knew to campaign in Wisconsin but she didn’t.”
https://extranewsfeed.com/help-me-find-the-1-000-russian-twitter-trolls-that-outsmarted-clinton-in-key-battleground-states-6b5d9d415641
Of course, it’s hard to see how, with tens of millions of Americans active on social media, a thousand or so Russian trolls could have had a significant impact — how many of those pestilential buggers did David Brock employ on Hill’s behalf? — but who needs logic.
A rather hilarious variation on this theme is the claim that Russian troll armies were actually writing the “fake news” stories that denigrated Hillary during the campaign:
“The House and Senate Intelligence Committees are looking into the rash of anti-Clinton fake news that originated in Russia and was spread online by Trump supporters in advance of last year’s election.”
http://secondnexus.com/politics-and-economics/investigators-fake-news-now-center-trump-russia-probe/
Apparently, Russian fabulists are supposed to have dreamed up Pizzagate, the neurological problems which Hillary is hiding, the lengthy lists of Clinton opponents who have died mysteriously, Clinton’s raving fits and abuse of Secret Service agents, and just about every story denigratory to Clinton that the MSM won’t touch. Should we give our fellow Americans so little credit for perceptiveness and creative imagination? This has now truly degenerated to the level of farce.
And note the title of this story: Investigators: “Fake News Now at Center of Trump Russia Probe”. Which suggests that at that point we really ARE down to the 1,000 Russian trolls.
I can see the scenario now: “Vladimir Vladimirovich, what are your suggestions for this week’s troll assault?” “Our young friend Donald Donaldovich informs me that Wisconsin, especially the Milwaukee area, could be a fertile ground for the Pizzagate fantasy that Kuryakin dreamed up last month. Give that a try.”
Robert Parry notes: “As for the relatively small number of willfully produced ‘fake news’ stories, none appear to have traced back to Russia despite extensive efforts by the mainstream U.S. media to make the connection. When the U.S. mainstream media has tracked down a source of ‘fake news’, it has turned out to be some young entrepreneur trying to make some money by getting lots of clicks.”
Rather hilariously, Parry discusses a fake news website created by an unemployed Georgian student in Tbilisi who was trying “to make money by promoting pro-Trump stories. The owner of the website, 22-year-old Beqa Latsabidse, said he had initially tried to push stories favorable to Hillary Clinton but that proved unprofitable so he switched to publishing anti-Clinton and pro-Trump articles whether true or not.”
https://consortiumnews.com/2017/07/28/the-dawn-of-an-orwellian-future/
A vastly hyped claim that a variety of fake accounts, presumed to be associated with the Internet Research Agency of St. Petersburg, had spent a total of about $100K over 2 years to purchase about 3,000 ads on Facebook (annual revenue $27 billion) to promote Trump’s election, allegedly at the behest of the Russian government, has devolved into farce, as Facebook acknowledged that “The vast majority of ads run by these accounts didn’t specifically reference the U.S. presidential election or voting for a particular candidate.” Yet Sen. Warner gravely assures us that this may just be “the tip of an iceberg”.
http://www.moonofalabama.org/2017/09/the-russian-influence-story-falls-apart-a-new-fairy-tale-is-needed.html
I will rapidly skip over the “Trump campaign colluded with the Russians” fantasy because it surpasseth understanding how the Russians would need the permission or guidance of Trump if they did indeed intend to interfere. And yet this has been the chief obsession of our MSM for lo these many months.
This narrative got its start when, in light of claims by intelligence experts that Russia, China, and other nations had very likely hacked Hillary’s private server during her tenure as Secretary of State — and the fact that Hillary’s crew had managed to bleach-bit out of existence tens of thousands of Hillary’s “personal” emails then under court subpoena (with no legal consequences) — Trump joked that Russia should hand over those deleted emails to us to expedite our legal process. The Clinton campaign, echoed by the MSM, chose to interpret this as a treasonous request that Russia hack Hillary’s server — an interpretation that was particularly absurd in light of the fact that Hillary’s SOS server had been offline for many months.
The latest variant on this theme is consternation over a meeting Trump Jr. had with a Russian lawyer whom he was informed had dirt on Clinton which the Russian government was eager to spread. Alas, the lawyer had no such dirt, she denies that she is affiliated with the Russian government or is acting at their direction, and the email which proposed this meeting was from a British music promoter whose credentials as a Kremlinologist are a mite suspect. Moreover, the MSM breathlessly pushing this revelation have neglected to mention that friends of the Clinton campaign paid money to Russian sources — via “piss dossier” entrepreneur Christopher Steele — to invent imaginative slanders of Trump, which, incredibly, were appended to the classified version of the ICA by Clapper.
https://consortiumnews.com/2017/07/10/forgetting-the-dirty-dossier-on-trump/
It seems to me that that is the documented Russian interference in the election.
And now it is alleged that the music promoter who lied to Trump Jr. when setting up the meeting, as well as the Russian lawyer who attended, are associates of GPS Fusion, the company which concocted the Trump “piss dossier”. Sheer coincidence?
http://www.independent.co.uk/News/world/americas/us-politics/trump-jr-russian-lawyer-steele-dossier-natalia-veselnitskaya-gps-fusion-a7834541.html
Michael Tracey has detected a pattern to the seemingly endless wave of evanescent pseudo-scandals regarding Trump campaign contacts with Russians that have consumed MSM discourse for months:
https://medium.com/theyoungturks/the-basic-formula-for-every-shocking-russia-trump-revelation-e9ae390d9f05
Even if we were to presume that the Russian government did interfere in our recent election, the fact that millions of Americans immediately jumped to the conclusion that Trump and his associates had treasonously acted as co-conspirators in these efforts — in the absence of any evidence, simply because Hillary had suggested it — does not speak well of the intellectual integrity or even sanity of the American public.
But we’re still left with the issue of the 1,000 paid Russian trolls. Surely Clapper can provide us with the names and addresses of these demons — they seem to be in Russia, or Macedonia, or somewhere else sinister; and we want to see the receipts for their payments. Come on James, this is all you’ve got left — you’d better not blow this.**
And by the way, WHERE THE HELL IS MY PAYMENT, VLAD?!
A Personal Coda
So why I am so hellbent on driving a stake through the heart of the Russiagate hoax?
Here’s my perspective. Russia and the Russian people are not our enemies. Our true enemies are the people who are trying to brainwash us into despising and fearing the Russians.
Watch this speech by Bernie delivered to Congress a quarter century ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDOycQrRXUU
Bernie recognized that the collapse of the Soviet Union was our chance to turn away from our catastrophically expensive militarism, and to devote more of our attention and finances to meeting the real needs of the American people. And that goal is still a worthy one.
Russia is not threatening to invade the Baltics or re-establish the Soviet empire — such an aspiration would be totally insane. With respect to Ukraine, the reason there was a Ukrainian civil war is that, after Yanukovich had negotiated a deal with the EU to hold accelerated elections, after which he would step down — a deal which Putin wholly endorsed — neo-Nazi troops stormed the Kiev government buildings, establishing a coup government which the US immediately recognized — thereby rendering moot the Yanukovich/EU deal that would have prevented civil war. After the coup government quickly dropped official recognition of the Russian language, and neo-Nazi gangs burned to death dozens of Russophiles in Odessa, eastern Ukraine rose up in revolt. (What do you think would happen in fly-over America if a coup in Washington DC installed Hillary as President?) Russia helped to make sure their Russian-speaking compatriots in east Ukraine had enough arms to defend themselves from the battalions sent to crush them.
In Crimea, which had been part of the Russian empire for nearly 200 years and where nearly everyone grows up speaking Russian, the duly elected Crimean parliament held a referendum in which the people overwhelmingly endorsed rejoining Russia. The Crimean parliament then petitioned Russia for reunification, which the Russian government gladly assented to. (However, they did not agree to annex any of eastern Ukraine proper). Russia never invaded Crimea, because tens of thousands of Russian troops were already stationed there under a longstanding agreement with Ukraine; Crimea hosts Sevastopol, Russia’s only southern port. Most Americans don’t know, because MSM has never told them, that Khrushchev inexplicably gave Crimea to the Ukrainian SSR in the 1950s without asking the permission of the Crimean people. Most Crimeans consider themselves Russians, a minority are native Tatars (whom Stalin oppressed and exiled) — almost none consider themselves Ukrainian. And the Crimeans appreciate that Russia has a relatively stable economy, whereas Ukraine is now a basket case.
And with respect to Syria, the Russians are acting legally in response to a legitimate request from the Syrian government; they are trying to prevent Syria from being overrun by the psychotic jihadi hordes who have infiltrated Syria and are armed and funded by the CIA, the Saudis, and other bad actors. Only a very small percentage of the so-called “rebels” are actually Syrian. Our MSM have brainwashed the American people on this issue as well as on so much else.
In fact, it is WE who have antagonized Russia. We have completely welshed on the promise we gave Gorbachev that, in return for East Germany being allowed to unite with West Germany and join NATO, we wouldn’t move NATO “a single inch” to the east. Instead, since Bill Clinton’s administration we have expanded NATO steadily to the east, until it is on Russia’s doorstep. The desire of the neocons to now incorporate Ukraine into NATO is a bridge too far for Russia — they will only accept so much humiliation. And Russia sees our ringing of their country with ABMs — under the transparently phony pretext of protecting Europe from nonexistent Iranian nuclear missiles — as an effort to establish first strike capacity. This terrifies the Russians — and should terrify us too, because who knows what the Strangeloves in our Deep State are capable of.
And we in recent years are largely responsible for a string of catastrophic, illegal wars, motivated by capitalist venality and justified with lies, that have devastated much of the Middle East and North Africa. Russia as well as other nations have decried these wars as illegal, but their concerns have fallen on deaf ears.
So tell me what is so terrible about Russia, another capitalist nation that would like to do good business with us, and which reached out to help us after 9/11? Okay, so they have some growing up to do when it comes to gay rights, but 50 years ago we were very backward on that issue too. We should respond by showing them a good example. If their political system is still somewhat authoritarian — that’s their problem to cope with, not ours; it’s not as though our effective plutocracy is ideal. And we are in official alliance with some countries that are grossly authoritarian and horrific on human rights.
And perhaps we should remember and appreciate the fact that it was the incredible heroism and sacrifice of the Russian people that was primarily responsible for the allied victory over Hitler in WWII.
Consider also the treasures of music and literature with which Russia has gifted world civilization.
As to the Russian people themselves, check out these flash mob videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oacelnX3VSQ
N.B.: Irving Berlin was a Russian émigré.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwsAEK7xQDY
These are the people we’re supposed to fear?!
The reason the Deep State needs us to hate Russia is so that we will continue to plow tons of money into the massive boondoggle of NATO — which should have dissolved after the Warsaw pact was dissolved. And hatred and fear is absolutely great for arms sales. Plus Israel wants us to hate Russia because Russia is allied with nations that oppose the land grab of Greater Israel. None of this has anything to do with the real needs of the American people — except for those engaged in weapons production.
The real danger of a new Cold War is not only the massive diversionary expense, but the fact that it greatly increases the risk for a catastrophic nuclear exchange to be triggered accidentally — an exchange that potentially could wipe out not only human civilization, but much of life on earth, owing to nuclear winter. Such accidents nearly occurred several times during the previous Cold War. As long as both we and the Russians have massive nuclear arsenals, it’s very smart indeed for us to get along well with them. Caitlin Johnstone has discoursed eloquently on this point.
https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/nuclear-war-is-as-great-a-threat-as-ever-and-the-elites-are-playing-games-with-our-lives-34813e974dd0
What is especially galling about Russiagate to me is that fact that it is the Democrats that are driving this hysteria. Traditionally, during the Cold War, it was the Democrats who were less hawkish — now the situation is flipped on its head, thanks to the fact that Trump’s common sense tells him that getting along with Russia is smart. (God knows I’m no fan of the unqualified buffoon Trump, but his instincts on Russia are on target. Whether the neo-cons whom he inexplicably has appointed to his administration allow him to make any progress on this score remains to be seen.)
Here’s an idea — how about we take to heart Rodney King’s admonition — “Why can’t we all get along?” Step back and realize that, in many ways we really do have a wonderful world. We can enjoy Thai cuisine, Russian and German symphonies, fine French wines, fuel-efficient Japanese cars, American jazz and popular music, world soccer, Italian opera, the range of American sports, English drama, Chinese art, Jamaican reggae — the fusion of all the world’s great cultures can give us a very rich life. With a few notable but rather paltry exceptions like the jihadi psychotics of ISIS, the peoples of the world are eager to get along with each other and collaborate in making the world better for all of us. They are eager to cooperate in minimizing the damage done by global warming, to establish trade deals that protect the interests not only of plutocrats, but of workers, consumers, and the environment, to enjoy the cultural riches which each society can bring to the table. We need to minimize the scourge of war by returning to the principles of international law — which our own great Eleanor Roosevelt helped to establish. The baseless hysteria of Russiagate has no place in such a world — nor does the neo-con-fueled obsession of the US to dominate all other nations by force of arms. Let’s get our act together America, and join the rest of the world in mutual respect and appreciation. Let’s fight our wars on soccer fields, basketball courts, and in Olympic stadia. Let’s just be cool.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
*With respect to the Guccifer 2.0 data transfer event discussed here, Scott Ritter has pointed out that forensic analysis cannot prove that the computer from which these data were transferred was a DNC computer; in other words it is theoretically possible that the data involved had been transferred from the DNC earlier, and that the transfer analyzed reflected subsequent transfer of these data from one storage device to another. If this rather dubious (but possible) scenario were true, it would evidently negate the importance of the data transfer speed. However, the conclusion stands that this transfer occurred on the East Coast of the US, and hence did not involve Russian hackers. If we assume that Russian hackers had accessed this data at an earlier date, why would this data subsequently be transferred between two devices on the US East Coast, prior to its ultimate publication? And the counterargument that Guccifer 2.0 might have altered time zone settings on his computer to mask Russian involvement, is impossible to square with the fact that, in June, he was falsifying clues to point to Russia.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/time_to_reassess_roles_of_guccifer_20_and_russia_in_dnc_hack_20170727
The intelligence agencies’ claim that Guccifer 2.0 is a Russian hacker lacks any credibility whatever.
**On the heels of Robert Mueller’s indictment of 13 Russians for “election meddling” — which occasioned a barrage of outraged bloviating from our MSM, likening the Russian action to “an act of war” — the highly astute German political analyst who goes by the nom de plume “Moon of Alabama” has decisively clarified our understanding of the Russian trolls:
http://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/02/mueller-indictement-the-russian-influence-is-a-commercial-marketing-scheme.html
The trolls affiliated with Internet Research Agency created dozens of web pages catering to specific points of view or interests, often associated with certain assumed personas; they drove viewers to these pages with provocative ads or social postings; and they made money by selling ad space on the pages. This perfectly explains why the content posted by the trolls was so chaotic in focus: they were trying to harvest eyes from as many market segments as possible, to meet the needs of every potential client. This diversity of focus has been interpreted as “sowing chaos” — as opposed to “stimulating interest in public affairs” — in line with the dictates of Deep State Russophobia.
There is no evidence — or claim in the Mueller indictment — that the activities of the Internet Research Agency were directed or funded by the Russian government.
The indictment pinpoints 13 Facebook ads placed by the trolls — out of some 3,000 total — which bashed Hillary or supported Trump; the placement of these ads did indeed break the law because it is not legal for foreigners to buy ads advocating for or against candidates during an election. If these ads were purchased for the average price the trolls paid for Facebook ads, they would have cost about $500. The other ad purchases (leaving out of consideration ads boosting Hillary or denigrating Trump which the indictment may purposely have failed to mention, so as to sustain its phony narrative) were legal, as were the trolls’ other social media posts. So the MSM currently expects us to believe that about $500 in online ads placed by Russians not affiliated with the Russian government are, in the words of some pundits, a second Pearl Harbor.
And it is important to note that these 13 electioneering ads represented a miniscule fraction of the trolls’ online postings. There is zero reason to believe that swinging the election to Trump was a key goal of the trolls, as the VP for advertising at Facebook admits:
https://twitter.com/robjective/status/964680122950234112
So Mueller has hilariously misconstrued a profit-seeking troll farm as a felonious foreign influence campaign. (Or at least that is what he affects to believe.)
So at this point, 7 month after the first draft of this essay, with the Russian troll issue at last put to rest, it seems clear that there never was any there there — that Russiagate is a hoax and paranoid fantasy from first to last. No, Russia did not provide Assange with the DNC/Podesta emails — it was a leak, not a hack. No, the Russian government did not try to hack into US voter rolls — cybercriminals were seeking saleable personal info. No, the Russian government did not employ an army of internet trolls to sway the election — a profit-seeking private Russian troll farm was creating a chaotic range of web personas to sell online advertising. These interpretations are by far the most rational based on the information at hand. The reason why Trump is convinced that Putin is convinced that Russia did not interfere is that — Russia did not interfere.
A straightforward corollary is that suspicions that the Trump campaign assisted or promised to reward the Russian government for its non-existent interference, are farcical. The now-20-month-long investigation of the Trump campaign for its non-collusion was necessarily motivated and driven by lies and paranoid fantasies, and entailed gross violations of the 4th Amendment right to privacy. The fomenters of this witch hunt must be criminally scanctioned, as a warning to those in our Deep State who might be tempted to victimize others in this way.
Those that knowingly hoaxed the public to create the interference narrative, and those in the Deep State and MSM who propagated the narrative publicly out of careerism, with a total lack of intellectual integrity, making no effort at rational analysis of the facts at hand, I view as war criminals.

Note: Published originally on the Way of the Bern subreddit.
Mark McCarty is a biomedical theoretician/applied nutritionist who occasionally dabbles in political writing when he becomes sufficiently appalled and terrified.
August 20, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Militarism, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | CIA, FBI, Hillary Clinton, Internet Research Agency, James Clapper, NATO, NSA, United States |
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The dramatic, and seemingly unstoppable, surge of Taliban offensives across Afghanistan is proof that the US is fast becoming the latest foreign power to succumb to failure in a land known for for being the “graveyard of empires”.
But unlike past empires defeated in Afghanistan, the US stands out as singularly contributing to its own ill-fate through excessive blundering and its legacy of criminal duplicity.
In particular, Washington’s obsession with confronting neighboring Iran and plotting regime change in Tehran could well be the tipping point in Afghanistan. The point, that is, where the US tips itself into a strategic, military grave it has been digging in Afghanistan over the past two decades.
After 17 years of US military occupation costing the US taxpayer trillions of dollars, the Taliban insurgents seem to be able to launch spectacular attacks at will against the Washington-backed government in Kabul. By any measure, that portends a historic defeat for Washington’s imperial ambitions. And not just in Afghanistan.
Over the past week, a strategic city, Ghazni, only 150 kms south from the capital was under Taliban occupation for several days before the militants appeared to make a tactical retreat to surrounding areas.
Then in the capital, Kabul, on Thursday, the Taliban mounted a gun battle on a military-intelligence training base, as if to underline the ineffectualness of US-backed security forces. A military intelligence base caught in a surprise attack?
Further north, in Faryab province, an Afghan National Army base was reportedly over-run by militants with the apparent loss of 30 troops and the remaining 70 captured. Provincial elders said the base was easily captured by the Taliban because it lacked reinforcements, ammunition and food. So much for US support.
Recall that Afghanistan was supposed to be the “Soviet Union’s Vietnam”. That was how US planners like Zbigniew Brzezinski gleefully referred to Afghanistan and their nefarious scheme to inflict on the Soviets what the US had ignominiously suffered in Vietnam only a few years earlier. In 1979, Soviet troops were lured into the Central Asian country to prop up an allied government in Kabul coming under attack from US-backed tribal fighters, the Mujahideen.
Like British imperial troops a century before, the Soviets suffered defeat in the rugged mountains of Afghanistan at the hands of fearless fighters.
Of course, the Soviets were not just up against Afghans. The CIA had weaponized the Mujahideen with Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and other sophisticated munitions. Along with Britain’s MI6, the Saudis and Pakistani military intelligence, the Afghan insurgents were turned into a jihadist army which later evolved into the Al Qaeda terror network.
The irony is, however, that the “Soviet Vietnam” has now turned into another US quagmire – an American Vietnam redux.
Following the September 11 terror attacks in 2001 on New York City and Washington DC, the George W Bush administration rushed into Afghanistan in an act of revenge against Al Qaeda – the very organization that the Americans had earlier helped create.
Nearly 17 years later, the US military is still bogged down in Afghanistan with no viable exit plan in sight. The war is officially America’s longest war, surpassing the duration of the Vietnam War (1964-75).
Although US casualties are much less than was incurred in Southeast Asia, the financial cost of Afghanistan to the US economy is crippling, estimated to be up to $5 trillion, along with the Iraq war. That’s a quarter of the US total national debt of $21 trillion.
US military operations were officially supposed to end in 2014 during the Obama administration. When Donald Trump ran for the presidency in 2016, one of his winning pledges to voters was to scale back US wars. Last year, however, Trump acceded to Pentagon advice to revamp military involvement in Afghanistan, albeit under the guise of “training and support” for local forces.
As this past week’s audacious attacks by the Taliban demonstrates, the US-backed government forces are fighting a losing war. Vast areas of the country are outside of their control. Even the capital appears vulnerable to heavily-mounted raids.
Moreover, the situation can only get worse for the US and its Afghan surrogates.
What may be a decisive factor is the Trump administration’s criminal policy of aggression towards neighboring Iran. In myopic fashion, Washington’s desire to squeeze Iran with “crushing” economic sanctions is liable to rebound, by significantly worsening the security conditions in Afghanistan for US-backed forces.
That’s because as the US imposes tougher sanctions on Iran, following Trump’s abandonment of the international nuclear treaty in May this year, the deteriorating Iranian economy will have a direct deleterious impact on Afghanistan. Thousands of migrant Afghan workers rely on Iran for employment. Their salary remittances are reportedly a major lifeline for families back in Afghanistan.
With the Iranian economy already faltering under US sanctions, droves of unemployed expatriate Afghan workers can be expected to pack up and leave, cutting off the remittances that sustain much of Afghanistan’s economy.
A further impact from Washington’s sanctions on Iran is that landlocked Afghanistan will not be able to avail of Iranian sea ports for imports and exports. Trump is threatening secondary sanctions on any country continuing to do business with Iran. Unless, the US gives Afghanistan a waiver, it will be cut off from commercial ties with Iran and its trading routes to the Indian Ocean.
So, as the US-imposed economic pressure on Iran intensifies through ratcheting up of sanctions – Washington wants a total oil embargo by November – the inevitable result will be worsening social conditions in Afghanistan for the general population there. That lamentable outcome, it is reasonable to assume, will only boost popular support for the Taliban, making the US-backed Afghan forces even more insecure and ineffectual in their operations.
A third factor is that Iran could exercise a more malicious option by increasing military support covertly to the Taliban. Iran is reckoned to have developed a formidable arsenal of advanced missile technology. This week, for example, Tehran showcased a new radar-evading ballistic missile.
Given that the Americans are trying to destroy the Iranian government through vicious economic measures, it would not be at all surprising if Tehran fought back by supplying the Taliban fighters with devastating fire power to hit US forces.
Thus, by running a sanctions vendetta against Iran in the calculation that the economic pain might elicit social unrest and regime change, Washington is likely to end up inflicting serious blowback on its military campaign in Afghanistan.
America’s longest overseas war could turn out to be its most ignominious and wasteful. That’s saying something given the dozens of dirty wars that the US has engaged in over the past century. The repercussions for US global standing cannot be underestimated.
It not only ran a nearly two-decade war in Afghanistan, which was arguably illegal from the very outset, resulted in tens of thousands of casualties and was financially ruinous for the US economy, but the supposed almighty US power will have been defeated in the graveyard of empires largely by its own criminality, stupidity and arrogance.
Finian Cunningham (born 1963) has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. Originally from Belfast, Northern Ireland, he is a Master’s graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in newspaper journalism. For over 20 years he worked as an editor and writer in major news media organizations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. Now a freelance journalist based in East Africa, his columns appear on RT, Sputnik, Strategic Culture Foundation and Press TV.
August 16, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Illegal Occupation, Wars for Israel | Afghanistan, Sanctions against Iran, United States |
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