The corporate media don’t like Donald Trump. They used to like him a lot; in fact, Big Business Media are responsible for making this minor multi-millionaire into a household name. But Trump is on their hit list, nowadays, because the Republican presidential candidate insists on telling his own lies, rather than sticking to the list of official lies parroted by corporate media every minute of every day.
Donald Trump told a really “HUGE” – as he would put it – lie when he claimed to have watched thousands of Muslims cheering in Jersey City, New Jersey, as the World Trade Center came down on 9/11. Every corporate news outlet in the country rushed to debunk Trump’s fictitious account. The Washington Post offered psychological theories for why Trump gets away with telling fantastic lies. The New York Times said there was no evidence that Jersey City Muslims cheered the destruction on 9/11. CNN said it never happened. And, they were right.
However, by making only a partial correction of Donald Trump’s prevarication, the corporate media were telling their own lie about what happened on 9/11. There was, in fact, celebration in Jersey City on that fateful morning, and the incident did, briefly, make a major news splash. But the people doing the cheering weren’t Muslims: they were five young Israelis in a white moving van, who were observed in Liberty Park ecstatically taking pictures of themselves framed against the smoking ruins of the Twin Towers. As ABC News reported, the five were later arrested at gunpoint near the New Jersey Giants football stadium. Most U.S. intelligence sources believed the men were Israeli spies, and that their “moving company” was an Israeli intelligence cover. They were detained for a while, and then deported.
“Who is the biggest liar?”
In the year before 9/11 scores of young Israelis posing as “art students” were arrested after penetrating U.S. Defense Department and other classified sites. Both stories made national news. The corporate media could not have avoided running across articles on the “cheering Israelis” when they set about debunking Donald Trump’s “cheering Muslims” account. But, not one of them dare to mention that, yes, some people were seen celebrating 9/11 at Liberty State Park in Jersey City.
I was in a different part of the park on 9/11 morning, alone except for two young Israelis with very expensive cameras, carrying phony New Jersey press credentials, who claimed to be Polish but spoke Hebrew to each other. The two young men were giddy with joy at the destruction that the three of us were observing across the Hudson River.
Later that day, I learned from local and national news outlets about the five Israelis who were dancing with delight about a mile upriver from me and the two other Israelis. Articles about Israelis celebrating 9/11 would have come up in any search to correct Donald Trump’s tall tale – but the corporate media kept that part of the story from the public. They censored their own correction of Donald Trump. So, who is the biggest liar? Trump, who lies to advance his own personal interests, or the U.S. corporate media, who lie to the people on behalf of the State of Israel, and Zionism.
A week now after the attacks in Paris that news broadcasters keep telling us has “changed the world forever”, it looks less and less likely that this was a straightforward ISIL terrorist attack and more likely that something much more sinister may have gone on.
And not just a staged, false-flag operation, but a pre-fabricated, mass Psy-Op designed to bring about radical changes and to shape or re-configure public perception and psychology.
It has become evident to me *why* it was Paris and why it was Friday 13th; the answers are unsettling. I will get to the significant occult symbolism shortly.
But any time we’re told over and over again that something “has changed the world forever”, we’re best served to be suspicious. In regard to terror attacks, the only other time this mass psychological conditioning has occurred was with 9/11, which probably did change the world forever and which we were repeatedly *told* would change the world forever. Other terror attacks have simply been treated as precisely that: as terror attacks – 7/7, Boston, and others weren’t sold to us as ‘world changing’ or historic, but just as terrorism.
The 13/11 Paris attack seemed pre-packaged from the start as something much more important. This is mass psychological programming we’re witnessing right now; and everyone should pay attention so they can observe how it works.
The mainstream media all over the Western world was on virtual 24-hour Paris coverage for days. In the UK, BBC News 24 reported on virtually nothing else. On Sunday, I watched even the UK’s Channel 4 news do a one-hour news special from Paris, forsaking all other world news. It didn’t show or report on anything new that hadn’t already been reported on the Saturday, but seemed to exist purely to amplify the mass hysteria and sense of historic, world-changing drama.
This weekend, the English Premier League was to play the French anthem before all football matches.
Facebook asking all its billions of users whether they wanted to change their icon to incorporate the French flag?
On the one hand, it’s a nice sentiment to show solidarity with the Paris victims. On the other hand, where was this sentiment in previous tragedies or losses of life? The Houla massacre in Syria? The relentless Saudi-led decimation of Yemen? The downing of a Russian passenger plane in the Sina? Five years of civilian casualties in Syria? ISIL massacres in Iraq last year? Or even natural disasters like earthquakes or tsunamis? Why is it only for Paris that Facebook tries to guilt-trip its scores of users into showing solidarity? To be fair, I was surprised by how many people seemed to react badly to this and ask the same question; but maybe that’s just the circles I tend to roll in, because I did see lots of users changing their icons like they were told to. You Tube, Amazon and others got in on the symbolism too.
This psychological operation was best exemplified by the lighting-up of various landmarks across the world in French colors, again to show solidarity. This actually seemed to happen suspiciously quickly in some cases, particularly the World Trade Center site.
Again, this was never done for the quarter-of-a-million dead in Syria or for the children of Yemen, or for the thousands of Palestinians killed by Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip last year, etc. And I don’t believe it’s just because ‘white lives matter’ or anything like that, but more specifically because we are all *meant* to have focused deeply on Paris and what we’re told was happening.
These aren’t just friendly gestures. These images and gestures are designed to imprint themselves onto our minds, to shape our psychology.
We’re supposed to believe and always remember that Friday 13th 2015 ‘changed the world forever’, just as 9/11 changed the world forever. And we’re supposed to understand that the whole civilised world (including Qatar, which hilariously also lit up a landmark in French colors, despite being a primary funder of ISIL and terrorism) has united against this terrible, demonic ‘threat’ to civilisation and that we’re all together in both accepting the official narrative of what happened and in regarding ourselves and our societies as somehow the great ‘victim’ of the entire narrative.
It’s this mass identification with victimhood that is the main part of the Psy-Op. Never mind the hundreds of thousands dead in Syria on account of Western-funded terrorism. Never mind the million-plus Iraqis dead from Western, US-led aggression or the permanent erasing of the nation of Libya from existence by a French-led, illegal military operation. And most of all, never mind the fact that ‘ISIS’ is largely our creation.
No, the West is the victim; wealthy and eternal Paris, just like wealthy, eternal New York, is the victim.
Everyone is told, both overtly and subliminally, ‘focus all of your grief and sympathy here’ in Paris or New York and not in Aleppo or Mosul, Tripoli or Gaza.
That’s the Psy-Op. People are so mass-media reliant that they’ll only mourn who they’re told to mourn, while they’ll vilify who they’re told to vilify, and they’ll come together in their masses to mark one tragedy, while entirely ignoring another tragedy going on elsewhere. Now this mass-media manipulation goes on all the time, of course, and not just in terms of the CIA’s famous ‘Operation Mockinbird’ program; but every now and then major events like Paris or 9/11 are created to more aggressively, more overtly, focus everyone’s attention and emotion, so that the great masses of people can all be hypnotically, subliminally and overtly conditioned by the same event and the same symbols and at the same moment in time.
That shared, collective trauma is a shared, collective psychological conditioning that can inform our world-view on an emotional and subliminal level, even if our *intellect* thinks there’s something not right about the narrative.
Wikepdia defines Psy-Ops as ‘planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of governments, organizations, groups, and individuals’. That’s as good a description as you could get of what appears to have happened in Paris.
This has looked more and more like a planned psy-op, a scripted drama, a trauma-based collective hypnosis, as the days have passed; all perfectly designed to draw everyone in and create a permanently resonating ‘moment in time’ that everyone will look back to as a justification for whatever is going to happen now or later. 9/11 served the same purpose, so that no matter what happened in Iraq or in the War on Terror, people – especially Americans – could look back to 9/11 and their collective emotional trauma, with all its accompanying images, as justification for anything the American military-industrial complex and Neo-Con regime subsequently did. That’s partly why George W. Bush was able to win a second term (even though he hadn’t actually won his first term), and why the American State Department is able to continue peddling nonsensical, insane ideas and statements with a straight face and why mainstream media is able to play out ludicrously fake narratives. Because ‘Never Forget 9/11’.
It’s a way of shutting down debate by forcing everyone to focus on symbols, catchphrases and emotions (and permanent association of specific emotions with those symbols). ‘Pray For Paris’, ‘Je Suis Charlie’, ‘Never Forget’, etc, are all designed to be emotional triggers or ‘trigger-words’.
Hypnosis often works a similar way; by what are known as ‘key words’ or ‘triggers’. A simple trigger word or trigger phrase can be employed by a hypnotist to evoke specific associated feelings or perceptions in their subject.
All that’s necessary is for the trigger word, phrase or symbol to be firmly planted in the subject’s emotional memory and psychology first. Events like 9/11 and 13/11 can be therefore be seen in many ways as a mass hypnosis almost on a par with the Nuremberg Rallies.
Don’t misunderstand; I’m not comparing the modern French or American states with Nazism in any moral or ideological terms; I’m simply talking about the power of imagery and dramatic moments as psychological conditioning. The power of mass hypnosis centering around ideas or symbols was something masterfully used by the Nazis. At Hitler’s personal request, a 31-year-old actress and movie director named Leni Riefenstahl filmed an entire week-long rally, producing an extraordinary film record, utilising many unique camera angles and dramatic lighting effects. Riefenstahl’s finished masterpiece was called Triumph of the Will.
It was a similar business after the Charlie Hebdo attack, which involved mass gatherings, a popular catchphrase, and mass solidarity events in different parts of the world. I wrote back then that the ’emotionally-charged issue is serving to engulf the masses in the fog of a trauma-based emotional reaction (further amplified by the experience and imagery of the marches in Paris and elsewhere) and is preventing people from looking beyond that fog’.
That is even more the case now in the wake of this latest attack, where it isn’t only the large gatherings and vigils or the minute’s silence, but the evocative visual stimuli of world landmarks and the social conditioning of Facebook icons. The message all of this instills isn’t just about fearing terrorists, but it is designed to also instill the idea that Western societies – in this instance the great symbolic city of Paris – are the innocent victims in everything that’s happening in the world and that anything Western states do in response is merely justified retaliation. ‘Pray For Paris’, because Paris is the victim; don’t pray for Syrians, because that’s where the Bad Guys came from.
Even children who’ve been seeing all this coverage are going to be conditioned by it to view the world a certain way, just as lots of children on 9/11 were conditioned for life.
Another interesting thing about hypnosis is that it can be induced via crippling fear. In human terms, it’s a much more psychologically complex version of the trance-like state you can induce in certain animals, like a mouse, by startling it with sudden movement or noise. Fear and anxiety can also make people more docile, more susceptible to things they might otherwise not be. This is particularly relevant in France, a society that, in normal circumstances, cherishes liberty above all else.
Fear and trauma also don’t allow you to think straight or reason properly. Many of the people who were attacked in Paris on Friday 13th probably have even had their suspicions about the emerging narrative. But when you’re abruptly caught up in terrifying or horrific events like that and you’re shaken and traumatised, all you want is to be safe and to be assured of your safety. In all the confusion and panic of Friday 13th, it is impossible to tell how many people caught up in the events of that night were crisis actors and how many were complete innocents with no idea what was going on; certainly some of them, especially some of those we’ve seen on film, were actors (in the same vein as in the Boston Marathon bombing), but the majority probably had no idea what was happening and might not have thought they were under attack by ‘ISIS’ until they got home and turned on the TV and were told.
Had they not been told they’d been attacked by ISIL, they might’ve been telling a very different story about what happened. This is already evident in some of the eyewitness testimony we’ve had that contradicts the official narrative.
The celebrity involvement is also tediously employed to further glamorise the drama and make it all the more relatable for a dumbed-down, celebrity-obsessed TV audience, particularly in America. This is seen in scripted dramas like an American TV personality claiming his daughter was at the Stade de France and then later saying she was at the Bataclan. It all seems to be part of a real-world ‘movie’ production being played out. What I have observed, disturbingly (and reluctantly), in the past week is that masses of people, not just in France but everywhere, are being psychologically programmed.
You, your children, your grandmother, even your little kitty-kat, are all being majorly mind-fucked. I was too; but only for about an hour. As soon as it became obvious they had no footage whatsoever of any explosions at the Stade de France, I was thankfully snapped out of any mass-induced trance immediately.
Furthermore, ‘ISIS’ itself is a massive Psy-Op designed to create fear and anxiety in the West and exacerbate racial and cultural tension and mistrust, all the while being used to achieve Geo-political objectives in Libya (already accomplished), Syria (pending), and the rest of the Middle East (as per the Zionist/Yinon Plan and US/Neo-Con agenda). Lebanon will be next, but no one cares because we’re all too busy watching Paris.
‘ISIS’ is in fact the ultimate Psy-Op. Even the name ‘ISIS‘ was invented by Western media, probably following directions from intelligence agencies. The jihadists in Iraq and Syria call themselves ‘ISIL’, and the Arabs call them by the derogatory name ‘Daesh’; ‘ISIS’ is a Psy-Op name the media continues to use because it has occult connotations and ancient connotations of the Egyptian Goddess, and – I suspect – because it phonetically sounds very similar to ‘SS’ when you say it, bringing to mind associations with the Nazi Stormtroopers. Things like this work on a subliminal level, but help to convince the broader population that ‘ISIS’ is the new ‘SS’ and that a Third World War may be necessary, just as the Second World War was.
And the idea is frequently put across now that this is a grave threat to Western society on a par with the Nazis and that this attack in Paris was the worst since World War II.
‘ISIS’ also has its menacing black-flag symbol that terrifies peace-loving people in the West, just as the Nazi swatsika became a symbol of evil decades ago; even though the swastika itself, prior to the Nazis, wasn’t a negative symbol at all – just as the Koranic script on the ‘ISIS’ flag doesn’t represent anything remotely ‘evil’, but is made to seem so. It is intended to terrify and program people on multiple levels, some of it overt, some of it subliminal. Daily ‘ISIS’ stories in mainstream newspapers are part of the long-playing Psy-Op, designed to condition people to be afraid of this terrible, inhuman threat from the East.
And in actual fact, the emergence of ISIL in the Middle East in many ways was also a Psy-Op conducted against populations in parts of Iraq and Syria (and Libya subsequently), with populations being – certainly in the early stages – terrified by what they were seeing and the stories they were hearing. This was something I touched upon when writing about Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Last summer, when I first heard that a mysterious figure named ‘Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’ was being declared “the leader of all Muslims everywhere” by ‘Islamic State’ propagandists, it was one of the most disturbing things I had heard in a while; but I also clearly recognised it as a major, major piece of psychological warfare being conducted against Muslims in part of Iraq, Syria and beyond, and that it was cleverly rooted in Islamic prophecy concerning the End of the World. It was all designed to confuse, terrify and even bewitch some people, particularly young men, in those places; because here comes an ultra-violent group, spouting prophecy, massively funded, armed with Western weapons and vehicles, clearly supported from the outside by powerful backers, and declaring a holy, puritan Caliphate – that in itself is a big-time Psy-Op. According to a Brigadier General Kevin Bergner, a chief American military spokesman of the Iraq campaign, Baghdadi never even existed and was actually a fictional character whose audio-taped declarations were provided by an elderly actor.
Even the name Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is designed to be divisive and inflammatory; as the original ‘Abu Bakr’ was the first Caliph of the first Caliphate and is also seen as a symbol of the schism between Sunni and Shia Islam.
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So it can be seen that a major psychological conditioning has been going on right across the board, engulfing minds and collective mind-sets in different parts of the world, most of it regarded as ‘post-9/11’. But the Friday 13th attacks in Paris and the subsequent outpouring of emotion, fear and anxiety, coupled with the heavy symbolism and focus is all designed to be a massive hypnotic/brainwashing amplifier that works at different levels of consciousness, some subtle, some overt.
And some of it occult in nature; which is the level at which the symbolism speaks to those ‘in the know’, but is missed by the majority of us plebeians.
Some non-linear thinking exposes possibilities that might explain why Paris was the site of the attacks, why Friday 13th was the chosen date, what is invoked or signified in the locations chosen, and what it may all be about.
It may be worth noting, as some others have, that Friday 13th is a date of occult significance, partly because it was the date the Knights Templar were betrayed and massacred in Paris in 1307, from which point – according to the legends – the Order’s occult or secret knowledge went underground to be preserved only by secret societies. It is believed by some – and possibly incorrectly – that the Templars were Satanists. That may be more a case of politically-motivated demonisation from the era (the authorities wanted a reason to steal the Templars’ immense wealth), but what certainly is accepted is that they were an Order of great occult significance.
These curiosities are in addition to the broader fact that Paris itself is historically a city of great occult or esoteric significance, a capital city for secret societies, and, like Washington DC and the City of London, believed by many to be laid out according to esoteric symbolism. In fact, Washington DC’s unique design was the work of Frenchman Pierre Charles L’Enfant. The esoteric city-plan of Paris and its national monuments was the subject of a book by Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock called Talisman: Sacred Cities, Secret Faith.
Even aside from that, however, the Knights Templar are particularly significant because they were the first international banking elite/cartel and were a model not only for subsequent and current secret societies but also for subsequent banking elites. The Templars also financed European Crusades and wars of aggression in the Middle East and oversaw the theft of wealth from the Muslim world, so they have great significance right across the board. It is also thought by many that these Crusades, conducted by barbaric religious fanatics from Europe (the ‘Daesh’ of their day, if you like), were what provoked Islamic societies into becoming more aggressive. This was at a time when the Islamic world was still quite close in time to its ‘Golden Age’, in which science, philosophy, medicine and astronomy had flourished and cities like Damascus, Cairo and Baghdad were great seats of learning while most of Europe was still mired in religious intolerance and persecution, with brutal inquisitions going on and people being burnt or tortured left, right and centre.
The date Friday 13th – especially in regard to the city of Paris – is highly symbolically significant. But the Templars aren’t the only factor. The Church of Saint Peter of Montmartre (pictured above) is the oldest surviving church in Paris and was held to be the location at which the vows were taken that led to the founding of the Society of Jesus, better known as the Jesuit Order. Jesuit conspiracy theories, particularly the earliest ones, often focused on the personality of Adam Weishaupt, a Professor of Canon Law at a Jesuit school who went on to found the Bavarian Order of the Illuminati.
I’ve usually kept a distance from modern fascination with ‘the Illuminati’ or the occult in general; I don’t particularly regard ‘the occult’ with any kind of disapproval or see it through any religious lens, so conspiracy-lore ‘Illuminati’ obsession isn’t something that has particularly interested me. However, there are times – and this Paris business is one of those times – where the symbolism and connection is so obvious that it becomes difficult to ignore it, even for someone who prefers to steer clear of it.
Wikipedia further highlights that Weishaupt was accused of being ‘the secret leader of the New World Order, and even of being the Devil himself’.
Now, let me just state this: the issue is not whether people like you or I believe in these religious or even occult concepts or realities, but it’s about understanding that *other people* and organisations *do* believe in these things. And in their world, all these things are symbolically significant and have symbolic/esoteric power. It’s the same reason that it is significant that Princess Diana was killed close to the site of the ancient Temple of Diana in Paris. I don’t demonise the ‘occult’ any more than I would demonise Christianity or Islam; in all three cases, my problem is with what specific organisations, networks and people are doing, and not about what belief system or mythology they happen to be co-opting or abusing in order to do it.
What’s fascinating is that both the Knights Templar and the Jesuit Order are claimed by contrary theorists to be both the source of Freemasonry and of the modern banking elite; and in regard to the city of Paris, both the Templars and Jesuits are historically significant.
But get this: getting back to the Jesuit Order and the Church of Saint Peter of Montmartre; according to its traditional history, the church was founded by Saint Denis in the third century, and moreover, Théodore Vacquier, the first municipal archaeologist of Paris, identified remains on the site belonging to the ancient Temple of Mars, from which Montmartre took its name. Mars was of course the God of War; and if there was one immediate thing these Paris attacks brought about it was Francois Hollande’s declaration that this was “an act of war” and France now would wage war in Syria. Hollande is known to be a high-ranking Masonic figure, and indeed French politics and high office are known to be riddled with masons; and to such men, symbols, invocations and reenactments are hugely important.
In that context, we can also note that the band playing at the Bataclan theatre on Friday 13th – the Eagles of Death Metal – are led by a musician who calls himself ‘the Devil’ (and who, like a lot of famous musicians, has been seen in recent years making occult signals and symbols – it’s only certain musicians and celebrities who seem to do this, probably because they’re very low-level initiates or fodder in secret fraternities), and more remarkably that the song they were reported to have been playing at the moment the unknown gunmen came in and began the massacre was titled ‘Kiss the Devil’, which begins with the lyrics ‘Who’ll love the Devil/Who’ll sing his song?’
Both the date of the attack and the nature of the performers at the Bataclan have led some to suggest the massacre was an occult or Satanic ‘blood sacrifice’ carried out as a symbolic sacrifice by those ‘in the know’; this could’ve therefore been, in part, a sacrifice to Mars, the God of War – and moreover as the event with which to literally *declare war*, as Hollande of course immediately did.
If you think I’m going off on one here, please note that the illegal operation to invade Iraq (2003) and the illegal operation to destroy Gaddafi and Libya (2011) both occurred on March 19th, and March 19th is the traditional date that celebrates the Roman goddess of war, Minerva; and Minerva is thought by some to be a particularly revered mythical figure in Masonic societies. According to John Robison’s Proofs of a Conspiracy (published in 1798), the third degree of the Bavarian Illuminati was called ‘Minerval’ or ‘Brother of Minerva’, in honour of the goddess. Later, this title was also adopted as the first level of initiation for the world-famous, notorious occultist/Satanist Aleister Crowley’s OTO rituals.
Robison was a renowned and accomplished Scottish physicist and mathematician and professor of philosophy. Following the French Revolution, Robison was suspicious about what had really been behind it and he had become disenchanted with elements of the Enlightenment; his 1798 book accused Freemasonry of having been infiltrated by Weishaupt’s ‘Order of the Illuminati’.
The full, original title of his work was Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe.
And further, ‘Saint Denis’ (which, as explained above, is symbolic of the Jesuit church in Paris) is where the Stade de France is located and was also the location the alleged ISIL terrorists were holed up in and the site of the subsequent deadly raid that saw the remaining ‘perpetrators’ killed a few days ago.
So, as I said, even when – like me – you’re someone who usually resists this kind of area of discussion, there comes a point where the symbolism is so pronounced that you can’t really ignore it anymore.
What’s even more fascinating than all of that, however, is the pre-existing connection between the city of Paris and the goddess Isis. Paris was thought to be a center for the worship of Isis and the location of a major Temple of Isis.
As early as the 15th century AD, Parisian historians believed that the city of Paris owed its very name to Isis.
In 1512, the French historian Lemaire de Belge reported that an idol of the goddess Isis had been worshipped in the Abbey of St. Germain-des-Pres in Paris. The same belief was reported by Gilles Corrozet, the first historian to produce a comprehensive guide of the city. In 1550 Corrozet wrote, ‘… coming to the imposition of the name (of Paris), it is said that there, where stands St. Germain-des-Pres was a temple of Isis of whom it is said was the wife of the great Osiris or Jupiter the Just. The statue (of Isis) having come in our times, of which we recall… This place is called the Temple of Isis and, for the nearby city, this was called Parisis… meaning near the Temple of Isis‘.
New York’s iconic Statue of Liberty, for that matter, is regarded a statue of Isis that was gifted by French Freemasons to the American Freemasons who were the Founding Fathers.
So the manufactured ‘ISIS‘ coming to literally the city of Isis (Paris) to allegedly carry out attacks is just ridiculously rich in occult symbolism. The goddess Isis is, by all accounts, a favorite of occult or Masonic societies (and remember the jihadists don’t call themselves ‘ISIS’, but ISIL, and before that they were called simply ‘Al-Qaeda in Iraq’). For the record, I’m not saying there’s anything inherently wrong with the worshipping of the Egyptian goddess; it would seem as valid a religious belief as any.
But with all of that as context, the Paris attacks of Friday 13th look very different to what they’re portrayed as.
Whether or not there were any actual ‘jihadists’ on the ground (and there may well have been), when one examines the symbolism and its historic context, what we are looking at might well have been a symbolic false-flag massacre designed not only to pave the way for war, but to signal and announce an occult-inspired push towards what John Robison cited centuries ago as Weishaupt’s and the Bavarian Illuminati’s ‘New World Order’ model. The attack invoked all the necessary symbolic markers – the Templars, the Jesuits, the Bavarian Illuminati and the ‘New World Order’ concept, the God of War, the literal ‘sacrifice’ to the symbolic ‘Devil’ at the Bataclan, and so on.
And that would be why all the deliberate symbolism was invoked – to deliberately signal that fact to all ‘those in the know’, while letting the rest of us think this was simply the work of those terrible, disaffected and stupid, radicalised teenagers.
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Before I sound like a clichéd conspiracy theorist, however, I’d like to clarify that I don’t necessarily view ‘Masons’ as inherently a negative force, nor do I think a demonisation of the original, eighteenth century Bavarian Illuminati is necessarily historically accurate. The original movement, which was quickly suppressed, seemed to be an intellectual movement to oppose state abuses of power and the excessive influence of religion on public life; and excessive demonisation of Adam Weishaupt may have simply been a case of religious extremists objecting to the Enlightenment and the growth of reason and intellect.
A society or fellowship being secretive isn’t a reason to demonise it; sometimes the secrecy and secret handshakes and signals are necessary for safety purposes; in pre-Enlightenment Europe the church and the enforcers of religious orthodoxy were entirely intolerant of intellectuals and free-thinkers and intelligent people were therefore forced to conduct their gatherings and pursuits in secrecy. It would be comparable to if a ‘guild of liberals’ or a ‘fellowship of reformists’ were to form in modern-day Saudi Arabia – they’d have to meet in secret and develop secret language and vetting procedures to avoid being arrested and even executed.
The question, however, in my view is whether later offshoots or societies simply adopted or co-opted the ‘Illuminati’ ideology (just like co-opting ancient esoteric imagery like Isis, Egyptian mysteries, Roman gods, etc) and developed it in a different, sinister direction. In essence, all ideals or movements, no matter how noble in the first instance, are eventually hijacked or subverted – that is simply the way of the world. This can be seen in all religions, in most political movements, and classically in numerous states or governments that have been based on a high ideal or system only to later become corrupt, oppressive institutions that no longer resemble their original purpose or character.
With that in mind, it seems reasonable to consider that although the original thinkers and individuals behind the early ‘Illuminati’ or secret societies may have been entirely of noble intent and looking to the good of all society, subsequent perversions or subversions of those societies may well be a more sinister force, with collegiate fraternities (Skull and Bones), gentlemen’s clubs (Bohemian Club), and think tanks (Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission), all being movements of darker intent in the typical conspiracy-lore sense and trying to bring about a ‘New World Order’ based not on the original ideas or ideals but on something altogether more corrupt and sinister; as I said, all movements are eventually corrupted or degraded from within and all high-minded principles co-opted by ambitious men.
I also, for the record, don’t wish to sound like an anti-occult, right-wing religious fundamentalist, as nothing could be further from the truth; I actually have great interest in the ‘occult’, as well as in old mythologies and mystery traditions, including the Isis mythology. And I have no religious or other type of bias and consider myself always a neutral, objective observer.
But in the context of all the symbolism highlighted above, it is more than interesting to note what has happened since last week’s attacks. Rarely has a move towards the classic ‘New World Order’ model seemed so blatant as it seems right now in France.
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Vanessa Beeley, on the Wall Will Fall, has just also put up a very good analysis, which also focuses on controversies over Facebook employing its ‘Safety Check App’ during the Paris operation and an explanation of why this probably wasn’t the friendly or sympathetic act that Facebook wants Parisians to think it was. She also makes the crucial point that ‘The 13/11 Paris attacks with all the accompanying media frenzy will surely lead us further down the path to the implementation of Patriot Act equivalents in Europe’.
In the United States, September 11th 2001 – the Neo-Cons’ predicted and desired “Pearl Harbour” – established a “permanent state of emergency” (the Patriot Act), allowing it to make radical changes domestically and also to launch several imperialist wars of aggression. France’s state of emergency could be paving the way for France and Europe to follow/adopt, or perhaps more accurately to come into line with, the American model.
Francois Hollande gave an historic speech at Versailles on Monday before the upper and lower houses of parliament – only the third time this has happened since 1848 – to declare “France is at war”. The bombing of Syria, on the surface of it, may be an assault on the ‘ISIL’ strongholds, but ultimately this renewed French military operation, in concert with American operations, is aimed at the removal of the Syrian state and the reconfiguration of the country.
France has not only sent out hundreds of its own troops again into the streets, but EU troops, we’re now told, could be sent to France. The EU has opened the door to even Britain sending troops or other specialists to France as part of this ‘state of emergency’. The French state has cited ‘Article 42’, which compels other EU states to send support, including military support.
All of this being to combat a rag-tag group of teenage terrorists that France, NATO, the United States and its allies created in the first place.
Meanwhile the deployment of army soldiers and possible Special Forces could also pave the way for more militarization to come, not limited to France. Earlier this year when the Charlie Hebdo attacks occurred, it wasn’t just France that deployed armed soldiers into the streets, but Belgium followed suit. If further terrorist attacks are to occur in Europe, this all may multiply and spread, drawing us towards the deployment of an ‘EU Army’. The elite Special Reconnaissance Regiment (SRR) are reported to be backing up undercover armed police officers to protect the UK in the wake of the Paris attacks. More than 60 soldiers, including SAS and SRR personnel were deployed after a high-level security meeting was held at MI5.
Moreover, Francois Holland has said the French constitution may need to be altered in order to deal with this terrorist threat, as the country is being prepared for potentially draconian policies, including the possibility of expelling foreigners considered a threat. With the state of emergency stated to extend over three months, the president seeks to expand his own powers and the powers of the state. This is comparable to what is happening in once-secular Turkey, where the ruling AKP government has stated intentions to alter Turkey’s secular constitution, partly in order to combat the very terrorist threat that the Turkish state itself has been enabling against Syria.
Some, even in France, see the dangers of this. “If you give the president powers that have been reserved practically for civil war, that is extremely serious,” said Adrienne Charmet, campaign director for a French digital-rights group, la Quadrature du Net.
These attacks have also occurred only a few months after legislators passed sweeping new surveillance laws affording the government expanded powers to closely monitor the mobile phone and Internet communications of its citizens, including monitoring phone calls and emails without the authorization of a judge. The same law requires Internet service providers to retain and provide mass data on the Web-browsing and general Internet habits of millions of people to intelligence agencies. All of this might be a very effective way of fighting terrorism and thwarting future attacks; but that’s assuming of course that there have been any genuine terrorist attacks.
France has essentially been maneuvering to go the US/NSA route and establish a surveillance super-state based on the American model; a route it can now follow with virtually unanimous public support thanks to the Friday 13th attacks. And where France leads, the EU might follow; and in that scenario, we’ll end up with a NSA-style surveillance super-state that spans the entire Western world, backed up on the ground by armed troops with expanded powers to arrest, confine or eliminate people.
In France, the talk is already of people being legally arrested without trial or charges and about law-enforcement agencies being allowed to break into people’s houses at any time of night and without any search or arrest warrants. This essentially turns parts of France into a situation comparable to occupation-era Iraq.
These are Orwellian ideas, to say the least – and in a society that is traditionally seen as the bastion of libertarian principles.
This isn’t a joke; these powers and the intention behind them allows the state to legally act as ‘thought police’ and to go after anyone it wants at any time it wants, without needing a justification. And the main vehicle for this expansion of control is the Internet. In his 1928 book, The Open Conspiracy, H. G. Wells offered blueprints for a world revolution and ‘world brain’ to establish a technocratic world state and planned economy.
Further to this, as France moves further towards inevitable thought-policing and curtailing of freedom of speech, Hollande has equated “conspiracy theories” to Nazism and is calling for government regulations to prevent the sharing or publishing of any views deemed as ‘dangerous thought’ by the state. Hollande isn’t alone in this implicated maneuver; British Prime Minster David Cameron has already publicly stated that so-called ‘conspiracy theories’ (for ‘conspiracy theories’, read anything that challenged the official narratives) should be deemed as “extremist” and equivalent to “terrorist” and should be stopped/policed on the basis of ‘national security’.
Thierry Meyssan covers that subject more fully on the Voltaire Network. But this is serious, serious territory we’re now in. The alternative media and independent journalism has been a major problem for geo-political and psy-op conspirators for some time, having played a substantial role in exposing the corporate-media misinformation and the various agendas, from the fraud of 9/11 to the false narratives of the War in Syria. Eliminating as much of this alternative media as possible is a major part of the agenda.
It seems therefore that every element of progression needed to move us into the ‘new world order’ paradigm has been serviced by the Friday 13th attacks in Paris.
And the idea that France, and Paris particularly, would be at the centre of this push is in keeping with all the symbolic significance I highlighted earlier, and also in keeping with the historical precedents in regard to the Templars, the Jesuits, the Masonic traditions, and the banking system. Again, for the record, I’m not saying the original Templars, Jesuits or Masons were dark conspirators, but that they are evoked by modern conspirators as powerful symbols and markers.
Also, further ‘terror attacks’, as we’re being constantly told, are imminent. There is almost certainly going to be a major attack in either the UK or the United States very soon, which will serve to reinforce everything evoked or accomplished in the Paris attacks and will therefore hasten any such agenda further.
Moreover, if we are now being pushed towards a changing world order, people in general are now so scared and unsettled that they’re more likely to embrace it than to resist it. As previously suggested, people are currently in the grip of a trauma-based collective conditioning that Friday 13th was probably designed to create and which the mass media has been excessively working to cement.
This entire paradigm was in fact very lucidly laid out by George Lucas in his Star Wars saga, which is easily viewed as a story about false-flag wars in which one source is controlling both sides of the conflict, the ultimate purpose being to end a democratic Republic and turn it into an imperial dictatorship. In the Star Wars saga, it is via a carefully arranged false-flag war that the republic is placed into a ‘state of emergency’ and the political conspirator is granted ’emergency powers’, setting him up as a dictator and paving the way for a totalitarian regime that lasts decades.
This is a particularly good video on Star Wars as a parable for false-flag terrorism and the New World Order, which is really worth a watch. And for anyone who’s never seen the Star Wars prequels, I’d highly recommend you look past the Jar Jar Binks problem and do so. George Lucas in fact clearly had a vision of Star Wars as not just a fantasy or even just a morality play, but as a warning. In fact even in his early notes for early drafts for the first movie in 1977, he wrote that the Empire was “America ten years from now”.
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The actual reality is that ‘ISIS’ *isn’t* any kind of existential threat to ‘the West’, to Europe, to France or to civilisation, certainly nothing like on the level of 1930s fascism or the dangers of the Cold War.
‘ISIS’ is in fact simply a manufactured bogeyman, its rank-and-file consisting mostly of teenagers or disenfranchised young men who’ve been overly influenced by a mixture of Salafist indoctrination, violent, war-based computer gaming and intelligence-agency manipulation.
‘ISIS’ could be completely eliminated with little more than a sustained police-style investigation to identify and arrest recruiters, identify and cut off the sources of financing, identify the people buying oil from them, and identify the source of the arms supplies and put a stop to it. The air-strikes wouldn’t even be necessary. Of course, there’s probably a reason such investigations aren’t conducted; because no government wants to conduct an investigation in which they’d have to implicate or prosecute elements of its own state or call into question the activities of many of its allies. And any genuine investigation of the ISIL nightmare would lead any genuine investigator ultimately not to simply Baghdad or Syria, but to Qatar, Riyadh, Washington, Brussels and other problematic sources.
‘ISIS’ is an existential threat only in one part of the world and that’s the Middle East. It is an existential threat to the people and the nation of Syria and to Iraq and to post-Gaddafi Libya, even to parts of Egypt and possibly Lebanon. In those places, it is a matter of life and death; and not the life and death of just people, but of entire nations, national identities and cultures. But of course ISIL wouldn’t *be* there at all but for the US-led invasion of Iraq, US-led covert ops in Syria and the French-led NATO decimation of Libya.
But in terms of Europe or Western civilisation, ISIL is only a ‘threat’ to whatever extent it is enabled or allowed to be by the real orchestrators of the entire conspiracy. What now appears to be being played out is a very bloody, very disgusting pantomime for various purposes; we may in fact be approaching a Rubicon from which it might be very difficult to turn back.
An American scholar and journalist in Wisconsin says not only was the Zionist regime the primary force behind the 9/11 attacks, it was Israeli spies working for Mossad – not Arab Muslims – who celebrated the burning Twin Towers on September 11, 2001.
Dr. Kevin Barrett, a founding member of the Scientific Panel for the Investigation of 9/11, made the remarks in an interview with Press TV on Monday, a day after an international Jewish organization based in the US denounced Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s claim that dozens of Arab Muslims cheered as the World Trade Center collapsed on September 11 as unsubstantiated.
“It is unfortunate that Donald Trump is giving new life to long-debunked conspiracy theories about 9/11,” the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) said in a statement on Sunday, after Trump said in an interview with ABC News that there were “people over in New Jersey that were watching it, a heavy Arab population that were cheering as the buildings came down.”
The ADL statement said there is no basis for Trump’s claim, calling it irresponsible and factually challenged. “This seems to be a variation of the anti-Semitic myth that a group of Israelis were seen celebrating as the Twin Towers fell.”
Commenting to Press TV, Dr. Barrett said the Anti-Defamation League is “correct that Trump is factually challenged when he talks about the Arabs celebrating the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11th.”
“But he in fact is referring to a true story, which is that Israeli spies working for the intelligence agency Mossad were in fact arrested after they were caught celebrating the September 11th attacks,” he added.
Sivan Kurzberg led Israeli spies
“They were set up to film the World Trade Center attacks before the first plane hit. They wildly celebrated the flaming and then exploding Twin Towers. They photographed themselves flicking cigarette lighters in front of the burning and exploding buildings,” he stated.
“And then they were arrested. They were held for forty or so days. They failed lie detector tests, and they then returned to Israel. They went on television and admitted that they were there to ‘document the event’, that is Israeli spies led by Sivan Kurzberg are on record in the Israeli mainstream media, bragging that they were sent to New York to document the event,” he said.
“And that means that the people they were working for, namely the Israeli government, were complicit in the event. Apparently the Anti-Defamation League doesn’t know that, because they are saying that Trump’s comment blaming the Arabs appears to be a mixed up version of what they are calling the ‘myth’ of the dancing Israelis celebrating their success on 9/11. But that’s not a myth,” Dr. Barrett emphasized.
“It’s been reported reliably in all kinds of mainstream media, including the Bergen New Jersey Record, which first exposed the story. The leading Jewish newspaper in the United States, The Forward, and Israeli media – including the television show in which Kurzberg brags about being sent to New York to document the event, that was coming up on September 11th,” he pointed out.
“So, the Anti-Defamation League, which is actually an Israeli propaganda outfit, is essentially running a misdirection ploy. They are trying to discredit ‘conspiracy theories’ about 9/11, because they know full well that the government of Israel was the prime force behind the attacks on September 11th,” the analyst explained.
Jewish group lying about 9/11
“The Anti-Defamation League is lying when they are calling it a myth. It isn’t a myth. And every place from the Jewish newspaper The Forward to the Israeli media, even to Fox News, which ran an investigative series by Carl Cameron, admits that this actually happened. Mossad agents were caught red-handed celebrating the success of their destruction of their World Trade Center by controlled demolition on September 11th, 2001,” Dr. Barrett concluded.
The September, 11, 2001 attacks, also known as the 9/11 attacks, were a series of strikes in the US which killed nearly 3,000 people and caused about $10 billion worth of property and infrastructure damage.
US officials assert that the attacks were carried out by 19 al-Qaeda terrorists but many experts have raised questions about the official account.
They believe that rogue elements within the US government, such as former Vice President Dick Cheney, and foreign intelligence agencies orchestrated the 9/11 attacks in order to accelerate the US war machine and advance the Zionist agenda.
Dr. Barrett and other eminent scholars have argued that the 9/11 attacks were carried out through a “controlled demolition” technique by placing explosive material inside the twin towers, causing the structures to collapse on themselves in a matter of seconds.
What do the globalists do when they want to create, reignite and keep their war on terror fought indefinitely? They simply carry out a series of false flag attacks using Muslim terrorist stooges as their hired guns to do their damage. That’s what 9/11 was all about in the US, 7/7 in UK, the 3/11 train attack in Spain, the Hebdo Paris attack last January, and now this latest Paris encore reenactment part two.
In any unsolved crime the first question asked is who benefits by motive with an actual means to execute the crime?
In all of these tragic false flag events the global elite benefits in multiple ways. And it most definitely has the means by issuing marching orders to its owned and operated national governments, its favorite being the militaristic, brutal American Empire.
The elite’s agenda to polarize and destabilize the world politically and militarily manifests through the US foreign policy of regime change, nonstop war through divide and conquer methodology (i.e., Shiites vs. Sunnis, Euro-nationals vs. foreign migrants, Christians vs. Muslims, light skins vs. dark skins) and economic austerity through unpayable high interest from predatory IMF bank loans to debtor nations from both the developing and developed world. Through global theft and destruction, the ruling elite reigns supreme in absolute power.
For decades after World War II US-NATO-Western European allies conspired and perpetrated state sponsored terrorism murdering their own citizens through a protracted series of Gladio operations originally designed to falsely accuse Communist groups in Italy. Spanning over thirty years with violent incidents throughout Europe and Turkey, Gladio-like false flag operations never stopped. Gladio at home took the form of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff’s Operation Northwoods that JFK abruptly halted, partially resulting in his own self-undoing, killing the diabolical military plot of murdering innocent US citizens in Miami and Washington DC in order to blame and start a war against Cuba. The US especially but numerous governments have regularly engaged in false flag operations killing their own to trigger wars, shape public opinion, conceal and divert attention away from citizens ever catching on to the dirty lowdown truth.
The Friday the 13th Paris massacres were highly organized, committed by heavily armed, closely monitored terrorist professionals unleashed onto an unsuspecting, culturally diverse group of young Paris victims. The coordinated attacks seem to carry all the earmarks as state of the art false flag terrorism having had lots of previous practice, most notably the Paris Charlie Hebdo edition. But the growing anomalies stacking up once again turn out to be no different from its predecessors.
All have promoted the same globalist agenda toward unlimited invasive authoritarian surveillance used to bring about increasing draconian measures in order to gain absolute tyrannical control over the populace. At the same time it exploits xenophobia and Islamophobia among its citizenry that in turn increase hatred and tensions laying the groundwork for potential civil war. Today the elite is skillfully working its proven divide and conquer formula perfectly. In one fell swoop it creates the unstable conditions fomenting civil unrest and violent backlash that then increasingly justify oppressive, over-the-top counterterrorism and police state tactics that obliterate human rights.
Finally, false flag terrorism launches a militarized backed by a globally legislative crackdown targeting all dissidence and activism exposing the governments’ false narrative of lies and propaganda, labeling and criminalizing the dissenting truth as homegrown terrorism.
The surreptitiously obtained Syrian passport found so quickly after the fact in Paris has become a false flag trademark used in both Charlie Hebdo and 9/11. Because this pattern proved a serious liability for establishing any credibility, it was later disclosed that the passport actually came off the body of “a Syrian refugee,” as if that made MSM any more believable.
Even before the passport fiasco, the alleged terrorist’s quote from a supposed witness “this is for Syria” was obviously disclosed by mainstream media to shape and manipulate public opinion into quickly blaming Syria, ISIS and Syria’s targeted leader Assad. And then long before any of this alleged (dis)info began surfacing, barely an hour into the attacks while still actively underway, President Hollande kept repeating three times in the next several hours what appeared to be his scripted lines already declaring that France was at war against already identified terrorist attackers from Syria before any investigation had even begun. This rapid sequence of events smacked of false flag.
Furthermore, like the Hebdo attack earlier this year, reports immediately commenced disclosing that French intelligence had long been tracking the perpetrators prior to the attacks. Former antiterrorist judge Marc Trevidic in a Sunday interview claimed that French authorities knew of an impending terrorist attack being planned by Islamic State jihadists “at a French rock concert” as early as August.
The judge had cross-examined militants three months earlier who revealed this rather critically important piece of information. This strongly suggests French intelligence had prior knowledge of the Friday night massacres. Turkey also warned the authorities in France twice about one of the three alleged suicide bombers but The Guardian reported that France only contacted Turkey for information after the Paris attacks. Again, it seems more than plausible that French security forces knew about the planned attacks but purposely failed to stop them or may have even played a sinister role in allowing them to occur.
A couple of other striking parallels with 9/11, when the BBC reporter announced that Building 7 went down 20 minutes prior to the event, the Paris attack was described on twitter dated a full two days in advance of the November 13th killings. Also Wikipedia within two hours from the very onset of the attacks already had posted a fully detailed account complete with footnotes specifying “Syria” being mentioned by a witness, “5 or 6 terrorists”, and “3 suicide bombers” all from the get-go pointing to the big bad Muslim villains yet again. The clinching evidence was Wikipedia running an early story version at 23:06 specifying:
In a televised statement at approximately 23:58 (local time), French President François Hollande declared
a state of emergency and closing of borders for the whole of France.
For that announcement on Wikipedia to be made nearly an hour prior to Hollande’s actual statement could suggest that Wikipedia was in fact being used by the French authorities as an information disseminator of a preplanned event, right away establishing an official narrative from the outset that Arab terrorists from Syria were the guilty murderers behind the attacks far in advance of the start of even a preliminary investigation.
It’s also been recently learned like in several previous false flags that security forces in Paris were simultaneously undergoing another live action emergency drill earlier that same day (as in Charleston, Baltimore, Boston, 9/11). Patrick Pelloux, an emergency medical services specialist and one of the first responders to the attacks, confirmed in a radio interview that a live drill had been conducted that morning of the 13th. These co-occurring government events timed perfectly to overlap so called acts of terrorism cannot be considered purely co-incidental.
Adding more weight to the false flag suspicion is the fact that just two weeks prior to Friday’s attack on October 29thCIA Director John Brennan met with his French counterpart along with UK’s MI6 former chief and former Israeli national security advisor. Additionally on Monday Brennan admitted that the international intelligence community expected a terrorist attack in Europe. Just as the Islamic terrorist mercenaries always “accidentally on purpose” leave their calling cards behind, so are the dirty CIA-Mossad fingerprints left indelibly written all over virtually every state sponsored terrorism on this planet. For years it’s been repeatedly demonstrated that US and Israeli intelligence forces have been covertly working directly with the Islamic State jihadists. NSA documents show that ISIS leader El Baghdadi was trained by Mossad. A recently captured IDF colonel was caught leading Islamic State forces. Overwhelming evidence has proven the US-Israeli-Saudi-Turkish-Gulf State connection to ISIS terrorists, documenting this intimate partnership in the manufactured war on terror.
In late September after Putin outed Obama’s fake war against ISIS at the UN, then throughout October actually destroying ISIS where Obama only pretended, the lost face of a humiliated Emperor’s new clothes turned US war policy in the Middle East completely topsy-turvy. Obama’s dubious leadership sank to an international all-time low when Putin exposed America’s deliberately failed MENA policy. Allied nations were cutting their losses and announcing plans to pull out of Syria. US Empire of Chaos and Destruction was fast losing its global control, its coercive power to subjugate its Euro-puppets into blind submission seriously and overtly eroding. On top of that, while Europe is still reeling from the refugee mass migration crisis directly caused by the US imperial aggression, they were marveling over grandmaster Putin’s bold stroke of finally kicking some Islamic State ass. Stalwart US Euro-ally Germany was already shifting gears warming its relations with Russia, unwilling to follow Washington’s disastrous lead down doomsday road.
So what do the neocon goons in full damage control mode come up with?
While US-Israel are holding joint military exercises in the Sinai desert, did they coordinate with ISIS to make sure it shoots down the Russian airliner as immediate Putin payback? Then came Defense Secretary Carter’s Russia bashing threats from the Ronald Reagan Library followed just hours later a few miles away with the Trident missile’s Saturday night LA bright light show seen around the world as an exclamation threat to Russia and China to back off from challenging the US Empire’s global hegemony.
The DC warmongers are growing increasingly desperate, afraid of losing both their full spectrum dominance in the world as well as their precious proxy terrorist ally while Putin’s aid to Assad is putting the final kibosh on their fanatical Obsessive Compulsive Disorder regime change operation.
So Brennan meets up with French and Israeli intelligence to conjure up the next Paris false flag. And since Hollande’s been Washington’s loyal go-to lackey with Hebdo already under his belt, heading up France’s active role in the imperialistic assault on both Libya and Syria, with Paris terrorism #2 France now becomes US Empire’s key catalyst to pull off another massive 9/11-like attack, in fact the biggest in France since WWII and be the justified driving force behind this newest “coalition of the willing” stepping up its next phase of war in Syria against both Assad and Putin. US bombs being dropped over Syria are now being joined by bombs from French jets as well as Israeli and Saudi warplanes. Timed purposely on the heels of the Paris tragedy, the ongoing G-20 meeting with the world’s most powerful nations in Turkey has turned into a war council to drum up intensified world war effort against nemeses Assad and Putin.
But the Western bombs are making sure that they do not destroy ISIS nor ISIS-controlled oil refineries selling black market oil to NATO member Turkey. Nor are they attacking the critical ISIS supply line in northern Syria that extends back into Turkey. It’s all too obvious that a renewed, heavily fortified allied offensive aggressively going head-to-head with Syrian and Russian forces clearly risks igniting a broader War.
Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate and former US Army officer. He has written a manuscript based on his unique military experience entitled Don’t Let The Bastards Getcha Down. It examines and focuses on US international relations, leadership and national security issues.
Over the past 15 years the US has been engaged in a series of wars, which has led many writers to refer to the ‘rise of militarism’ – the growth of an empire, built primarily by and for the projection of military power – and only secondarily to advance economic imperialism.
The rise of a military-based empire, however, does not preclude the emergence of competing, conflicting, and convergent power configurations within the imperial state. These factions of the Washington elite define the objectives and targets of imperialist warfare, often on their own terms.
Having stated the obvious general fact of the power of militarism within the imperialist state, it is necessary to recognize that the key policy-makers, who direct the wars and military policy, will vary according to the country targeted, type of warfare engaged in and their conception of the war. In other words, while US policy is imperialist and highly militaristic, the key policymakers, their approach and the outcomes of their policies will differ. There is no fixed strategy devised by a cohesive Washington policy elite guided by a unified strategic vision of the US Empire.
In order to understand the current, seemingly endless wars, we have to examine the shifting coalitions of elites, who make decisions in Washington but not always primarily for Washington. Some factions of the policy elite have clear conceptions of the American empire, but others improvise and rely on superior ‘political’ or ‘lobbying’ power to successfully push their agenda in the face of repeated failures and suffer no consequences or costs.
We will start by listing US imperialist wars during the last decade and a half. We will then identify the main policy-making faction which has been the driving force in each war. We will discuss their successes and failures as imperial policy makers and conclude with an evaluation of “the state of the empire” and its future.
Imperial Wars: From 2001-2015
The current war cycle started in late 2001 with the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. This was followed by the invasion and occupation of Iraq in March 2003, the US arms support for Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 2006, the proxy invasion of Somalia in 2006/7; the massive re-escalation of war in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2007-2009; the bombing, invasion ‘regime change’ in Libya in 2011; the ongoing proxy-mercenary war against Syria (since 2012), and the ongoing 2015 Saudi-US invasion and destruction of Yemen. In Europe, the US was behind the 2014 proxy putsch and violent ‘regime change’ in Ukraine which has led to an ongoing war against ethnic Russian speakers in south-east Ukraine, especially the populous industrial heartland of the Donbas region.
Over the past 15 years, there have been overt and covert military interventions, accompanied by an intense, provocative military build-up along Russia’s borders in the Baltic States, Eastern Europe (especially Poland), the Balkans (Bulgaria and Romania) and the mammoth US base in Kosovo; in Central Europe with nuclear missiles in Germany and, of course, the annexation of Ukraine and Georgia as US-NATO clients.
Parallel to the military provocations encircling Russia, Washington has launched a major military, political, economic and diplomatic offensive aimed at isolating China and affirming US supremacy in the Pacific.
In South America, US military intervention found expression via Washington-orchestrated business-military coup attempts in Venezuela in 2002 and Bolivia in 2008, and a successful ‘regime change’ in Honduras in 2009, overthrowing its elected president and installing a US puppet.
In summary, the US has been engaged in two, three or more wars since 2001, defining an almost exclusively militarist empire, run by an imperial state directed by civilian and military officials seeking unchallenged global dominance through violence.
Washington: Military Workshop of the World
War and violent regime change are the exclusive means through which the US now advances its foreign policy. However, the various Washington war-makers among the power elite do not form a unified bloc with common priorities. Washington provides the weapons, soldiers and financing for whichever power configuration or faction among the elite is in a position, by design or default, to seize the initiative and push their own war agenda.
The invasion of Afghanistan was significant in so far as it was seen by all sectors of the militarist elite, as the first in a series of wars. Afghanistan was to set the stage for the launching of higher priority wars elsewhere.
Afghanistan was followed by the infamous ‘Axis of Evil’ speech, dictated by Tel Aviv, penned by presidential speech-writer, David Frum and mouthed by the brainless President Bush, II. The ‘Global War on Terror’ was the thinly veiled slogan for serial wars around the world. Washington measured the loyalty of its vassals among the nations of Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America by their support for the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. The Afghan invasion provided the template for future wars. It led to an unprecedented increase in the military budget and ushered in Caesar-like dictatorial presidential powers to order and execute wars, silencing domestic critics and sending scores of thousands of US and NATO troops to the Hindu Kush.
In itself, Afghanistan was never any threat and certainly no economic prize for plunder and profit. The Taliban had not attacked the US. Osama Bin Laden could have been turned over to a judicial tribunal – as the governing Taliban had insisted.
The US military (with its Coalition of the Willing or COW) successfully invaded and occupied Afghanistan and set up a vassal regime in Kabul. It built scores of military bases and attempted to form an obedient colonial army. In the meantime, the Washington militarist elite had moved on to bigger and, for the Israel-centric Zionist elite, higher priority wars, namely Iraq.
The decision to invade Afghanistan was not opposed by any of Washington’s militarist elite factions. They all shared the idea of using a successful military blitz or ‘cake-walk’ against the abysmally impoverished Afghanistan as a way to rabble rouse the American masses into accepting a long period of intense and costly global warfare throughout the world.
Washington’s militarist elites fabricated the link between the attacks on 9/11/2001 and Afghanistan’s governing Taliban and the presence of the Saudi warlord Osama Bin Laden. Despite the ‘fact’ that most of the ‘hijackers’ were from the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and none were Afghans, invading and destroying Afghanistan was to be the initial test to gauge the highly manipulated and frightened American public’s willingness to shoulder the burden of a huge new cycle of imperial wars. This has been the only aspect of the invasion of Afghanistan that could be viewed as a policy success – it made the costs of endless wars ‘acceptable’ to a relentlessly propagandized public.
Flush with their military victories in the Hindu Kush, the Washington militarists turned to Iraq and fabricated a series of increasingly preposterous pretexts for war: Linking the 9/11 ‘jihadi’ hijackers with the secular regime of Saddam Hussein, whose intolerance for violent Islamists (especially the Saudi variety) was well documented, and concocting a whole fabric of lies about Iraqi ‘weapons of mass destruction’ which provided the propaganda basis for invading an already disarmed, blockaded and starved Iraq in March 2003.
Leading the Washington militarists in designing the war to destroy Iraq were the Zionists, including Paul Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams, Richard Perle, and a few Israel-centric Gentile militarists, such as Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. The Zionists had a powerful entourage in key positions in the State Department, Treasury and the Pentagon.
There were ‘outsiders’ – non-Zionists and militarists within these institutions, especially the Pentagon, who voiced reservations – but they were brushed aside, not consulted and ‘encouraged’ to retire.
None of the ‘old hands’ in the State Department or Pentagon bought into the hysteria about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, but to voice reservations was to risk one’s career. The manufacture and dissemination of the pretext for invading Iraq was orchestrated by a small team of operatives linking Tel Aviv and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz’s Office of Special Plans, a tight group of Zionists and some Israelis headed by Abram Shulsky (Sept. 2002-June 2003).
The US war on Iraq was an important part of Israel’s agenda to ‘re-make the Middle East’ to establish its unchallenged regional hegemony and execute a ‘final solution’ for its own vexing ‘Arab (native Palestinian) problem’: It was made operational by the powerful Zionist faction within the Executive (White House), which had assumed almost dictatorial powers after the attack on 9/11/2001. Zionists planned the war, designed the ‘occupation policy’ and ‘succeeded wildly’ with the eventual dismemberment of a once modern secular nationalist Arab state.
In order to smash the Iraqi state – the US occupation policy was to eliminate (through mass firings, jailing and assassination) all high level, experienced Iraqi civil, military and scientific personnel – down to high school principals. They dismantled any vital infrastructure (which had not been already destroyed by the decades of US sanctions and bombing under President Clinton) and reduced an agriculturally advanced Iraq to a barren wasteland which would take centuries to recover and could never challenge Israel’s colonization of Palestine, let alone its military supremacy in the Middle East. Naturally, the large Palestinian Diaspora refugee population in Iraq was targeted for ‘special treatment’.
But Zionist policymakers had a much larger agenda than erasing Iraq as a viable country: They had a longer list of targets: Syria, Iran, Lebanon and Libya, whose destruction was to be carried out with US and NATO blood and treasure (and not a single Israeli soldier).
Despite the fact that Iraq did not even possess a functioning air force or navy in March 2003 and Afghanistan in late 2001 was rather primitive, the invasions of both countries turned out to be very costly to the US. The US completely failed to benefit from its ‘victory and occupation’, despite Paul Wolfowitz’ boasts that the pillage of Iraq’s oil fields would pay for the entire project in a ‘few months’. This was because the real Zionist plan was to destroy these nations – beyond any possibility for a quick or cheap imperialist economic gain. Scorching the earth and salting the fields is not a very profitable policy for empire builders.
Israel has been the biggest winner with no cost for the ‘Jewish State’. The American Zionist policy elite literally handed them the services of the largest and richest armed forces in history: the US. Israel-Firsters played a decisive role among Washington policy-makers and Tel Aviv celebrated in the streets! They came, they dominated policy and they accomplished their mission: Iraq (and millions of its people)was destroyed.
The US gained an unreliable, broken colony, with a devastated economy and systematically destroyed infrastructure and without the functioning civil service needed for a modern state. To pay for the mess, the American people faced a spiraling budget deficit, tens of thousands of American war casualties and massive cuts in their own social programs. Crowning the Washington war-makers’ victory was the disarticulation of American civil and constitutional rights and liberties and the construction of a enormous domestic police state.
After the Iraq disaster, the same influential Zionist faction in Washington lost no time in demanding a new war against Israel’s bigger enemy – namely Iran. In the ensuing years, they failed to push the US to attack Tehran but they succeeded in imposing crippling sanctions on Iran. The Zionist faction secured massive US military support for Israel’s abortive invasion of Lebanon and its devastating series of blitzkriegs against the impoverished and trapped people of Gaza.
The Zionist faction successfully shaped US military interventions to meet Israel’s regional ambitions against three Arab countries: Yemen, Syria, and Libya. The Zionists were not able to manipulate the US into attacking Iran because the traditional militarist faction in Washington balked: With instability in Afghanistan and Iraq, the US was not well positioned to face a major conflagration throughout the Middle East, South Asia and beyond – which a ground and air war with Iran would involve. However, the Zionist factions did secure brutal economic sanctions and the appointment of key Israel-Centric officials within the US Treasury. Secretary Stuart Levey, at the start of the Obama regime, and David Cohen afterwards, were positioned to enforce the sanctions.
Even before the ascendancy of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Tel Aviv’s military objectives after Iraq, including Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, and Yemen had to be spaced over time, because the non-Zionist factions among Washington’s elite had been unable to integrate occupied Afghanistan and Iraq into the empire.
Resistance, armed conflict and military advances in both Afghanistan and Iraq never ceased and are continuing into their 2nd decade. As soon as the US would withdraw from a region, declaring it ‘pacified’, the armed resistance would move back in and the local sepoys would defect to the rebels or take off for London or Washington with millions in pillaged loot.
‘Unfinished wars’, mounting casualties and spiraling costs, with no end in sight, undermined the agreement between the militarist and the Zionist factions in the Executive branch. However, the massively powerful Zionist presence in the US Congress provided a platform to bray for new and even bigger wars.
Israel’s vicious invasion of Lebanon in 2006 was defeated despite receiving massive US arms supplies, a US funded ‘Iron Dome’ missile defense system and intelligence assistance. Tel Aviv could not defeat the highly disciplined and motivated Hezbollah fighters in South Lebanon despite resorting to carpet bombing of civilian neighborhoods with millions of banned cluster munitions and picking off ambulances and churches sheltering refugees. Israelis have been much more triumphal murdering lightly armed Palestinian resistance fighters and stone-throwing children.
Libya: A Multi-faction War for the Militarists (without Big Oil)
The war against Libya was a result of multiple factions among the Washington militarist elite, including the Zionists, coming together with French, English and German militarists to smash the most modern, secular, independent state in Africa under President Muammar Gaddafi.
The aerial campaign against the Gaddafi regime had virtually no organized support within Libya with which to reconstruct a viable neo-colonial state ripe for pillage. This was another ‘planned dismemberment’ of a complex, modern republic which had been independent of the US Empire.
The war succeeded wildly in shredding Libya’s economy, state, and society. It unleashed scores of armed terrorist groups, (who appropriated the modern weapons of Gaddafi’s army and police) and uprooted two million black contract workers and Libyan citizens of South Saharan origin forcing them to flee the rampaging racist militias to the refugee camps of Europe. Untold thousands died in rickety boats in the Mediterranean Sea.
The entire war was carried out to the publicly giddy delight of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her ‘humanitarian interventionist’ lieutenants (Susan Rice and Samantha Power), who were utterly ignorant as to who and what the Libyan “opposition” represented. Eventually, even Hillary’s own Ambassador to Libya would be slaughtered by … the same victorious US-backed ‘rebels’ (sic) in the newly liberated Bengazi!
The Zionist faction destroyed Gaddafi (whose capture, grotesque torture and murder was filmed and widely disseminated), eliminating another real adversary of Israel and supporter of Palestinian rights. The US militarist faction, which led the war, got nothing positive – not even a secure naval, air, or training base – only a dead Ambassador, millions of desperate refugees flooding Europe, and thousands of trained and armed jihadists for the next target: Syria.
For a while Libya became the main supply-line for Islamist mercenaries and arms to invade Syria and fight the secular nationalist government in Damascus.
Once again the least influential faction in Washington turned out to be the oil and gas industry, which lost lucrative contracts it had already signed with the Gaddafi regime. Thousands of highly trained foreign oil workers were withdrawn. After Iraq, it should have been obvious that these wars were not ‘for oil’!
Ukraine: Coups, Wars, and Russia’s ‘Underbelly’
With the US-orchestrated coup and intervention in Ukraine, the militarist factions once again seized the initiative, establishing a puppet regime in Kiev and targeting Russia’s strategic ‘soft underbelly’. The plan had been to take over Russia’s strategic military bases in Crimea and cut Russia from the vital military-industrial complexes in the Donbas region with its vast iron and coal reserves.
The mechanics of the power grab were relatively well planned, the political clients were put in power, but the US militarists had made no contingencies for propping up the Ukrainian economy, cut loose from its main trading partner and oil and gas supplier, Russia.
The coup led to a ‘proxy war’ in the ethnic-Russian majority regions in the south east (the Donbas) with four ‘unanticipated consequences’. 1) a country divided east and west along ethno-linguistic lines, (2) a bankrupt economy made even worse by the imposition of an IMF austerity program, (3) a corrupt crony capitalist elite, which was ‘pro-West by bank account’, (4) and, after two years, mass disaffection among voters toward the US puppet regime.
The militarists in Washington and Brussels succeeded in engineering the coup in Ukraine but lacked the domestic allies, plans and preparations to run the country and successfully annex it to the EU and NATO as a viable country.
Apparently the militarist factions in the State Department and Pentagon are much more proficient in stage managing coups and invasions than in establishing a stable regime as part of a New World Order. They succeed in the former and fail repeatedly in the latter.
The Pivot to Asia and the Pirouette to Syria
During most of the previous decade, traditional global strategists in Washington increasingly objected to the Zionist faction’s domination and direction of US war policies focused on the Middle East for the benefit of Israel, instead of meeting the growing challenge of the new world economic superpower in Asia, China.
US economic supremacy in Asia had been deeply eroded as China’s economy grew at double digits. Beijing was displacing the US as the major trade partner in the Latin American and African markets. Meanwhile, the top 500 US MNCs were heavily invested in China. Three years into President Obama’s first term the ‘China militarist faction’ announced a shift from the Middle East and the Israel-centric agenda to a ‘pivot to Asia’, the source of 40% of the world’s industrial output.
But it was not profits and markets that motivated Washington’s Asia faction among the militarist elites – it was military power. Even trade agreements, like the TransPacific Partnership (TPP), were viewed as tools to encircle and weaken China militarily and undermine its regional influence.
Led by the hysterical Pentagon boss Ashton Carter, Washington prepared a series of major military confrontations with Beijing off the coast of China.
The US signed expanded military base agreements with the Philippines, Japan, and Australia; it participated in military exercises with Vietnam, South Korea, and Malaysia; it dispatched battleships and aircraft carriers into Chinese territorial waters.
The US confrontational trade policy was formulated by the Zionist trio: Secretary of Commerce, Penny Pritzker, Trade Negotiator Michael Froman (who works for both the Asia militarist and Zionist factions), and Treasury Secretary Jake Lew. The result was the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), involving 12 Pacific countries while deliberating excluding China. Washington’s Asian militarist faction planned to militarize the entire Pacific Basin, in order to dominate the maritime trade routes and, at a moment’s notice, choke off all of China’s overseas markets and suppliers – shades of the series of US provocations against Japan leading up to the US entering WW2.
The ‘Asia-militarist faction’ successfully demanded a bigger military budget to accommodate its vastly more aggressive posture toward China.
Predictably, China has insisted on defending its maritime routes and has increased its naval and air base building and sea and air patrols. Also, predictably, China has countered the US-dominated TPP by setting-up a one hundred billion dollar Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), while contributing to the multi-billion dollar BRICS Bank. Meanwhile, China even signed a separate $30 billion dollar trade agreement with Washington’s strategic ‘partner’, Britain. In fact, Britain followed the rest of the EU and joined the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank – despite objections from Washington’s “Asia faction”.
While the US depends heavily on its military pacts with South Korea and Japan, the latter nations have been meeting with China – their most significant trading partner – to work on expanding and deepening economic ties.
Up until 2014, the “business-with-China faction” of the Washington elite played a key role in the making of US-Asia policy. However, they have been eclipsed by the Asia militarist-faction, which is taking US policy in a totally different direction: Pushing China out as Asia’s economic superpower and escalating military confrontation with Beijing now heads Washington’s agenda.
Ashton Carter, the US Defense Secretary, has China, the second most important economy in the world in the Pentagon’s ‘cross-hairs’. When the TPP failed to curtail China’s expansion, the militarist faction shifted Washington toward a high risk military course, which could destabilize the region and risk a nuclear confrontation.
The Pirouette: China and Syria
Meanwhile in the Levant, Washington’s Zionist faction has been busy running a proxy war in Syria. The pivot to Asia has had to compete with the pirouette to Syria and Yemen.
The US joined Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the Gulf Emirates, and the EU in sponsoring a replay of the Libyan ‘regime change’ — sponsoring proxy terrorists from around the globe into invading and devastating Syria. Damascus has been attacked from all sides for the ‘crime’ of being secular and multi-ethnic; for being pro-Palestinian; for being allied with Iran and Lebanon; for having an independent foreign policy; and for maintaining a limited representative (but not necessarily democratic) government. For these crimes, the West, Israel and the Saudis would have Syria fractured into an ethnically cleansed ‘tribal state’ – something they had accomplished in Iraq and Libya.
The US militarist faction (personified by Secretary of Defense Carter and Senators McCain and Graham) have funded, trained and equipped the terrorists, whom they call ‘moderates’ and had clearly expected their progeny to follow Washington’s directions. The emergence of ISIS showed just how close these ‘moderates’ stuck to Washington’s script.
Initially, the traditional militarist wing of Washington’s elite resisted the Zionist faction’s demand for direct US military intervention (American ‘boots on the ground’). That is changing with recent (very convenient) events in Paris.
Warfare: From Piecemeal Interventions to Nuclear Confrontation
The Washington militarists have again committed more US soldiers to Iraq and Afghanistan; American fighter planes and Special Forces are in Syria and Yemen. Meanwhile, US naval armadas aggressively patrol the coasts of China and Iran. The militarist-Zionist ‘compromise’ over Syria was comprised of an initial contingent of 50 US Special Forces to join in ‘limited’ combat roles with (“loyal” sic) Islamist mercenaries – the so-called moderates. There are commitments for greater and heavier weaponry to come, including ground to air missiles capable of shooting down Russian and Syrian military jets.
Elite Factional Politics: An Overview
How does the record of these competing factions, formulating US imperial war policies in the Middle East over the past 15 years stack up? Clearly there has been no coherent imperial economic strategy.
The policy toward Afghanistan is remarkable for its failure to end the longest war in US history – over 14 years of occupation! The recent attempts by US-led client NATO forces to withdraw have been immediately followed by military advances by the nationalist-Islamist resistance militia – the Taliban, which controls much of the countryside. The possibility of a collapse of the current puppet in Kabul has forced the militarists in Washington to retain US bases – surrounded by completely hostile rural populations.
The Afghan war’s initial appearance of success triggered new wars – inter alia Iraq. But taking the long view, the Afghan war, has been a miserable failure in terms of the stated strategic goal of establishing a stable client government. The Afghan economy collapsed: opium production (which had been significantly suppressed by the Taliban’s poppy eradication campaign in 2000-2001) is the now predominant crop – with cheap heroin flooding Europe and beyond. Under the weight of massive and all pervasive corruption by ‘loyal’ client officials – the Afghan treasury is empty. The puppet rulers are totally disconnected from the most important regional, ethnic, religious and family clans and associations.
Washington could not ‘find’ any viable economic classes in Afghanistan with which to anchor a development strategy. They did not come to terms with the deep ethno-religious consciousness rooted in rural communities and fought the most popular political force among the majority Pashtu, the Taliban, which had no role in the attack on ‘9/11’.
They artificially slapped together a massive army of surly illiterates under Western imperial command and watched it fall apart at the seams, defect to the Taliban or turn their own guns on the foreign occupation troops. These “mistakes”, which accounted for the failure of the militarist faction in the Afghanistan war were due, in no small part, to the pressure and influence of the Zionist faction who wanted to quickly move on to their highest priority, a US war against Israel’s first priority enemy – Iraq – without consolidating the US control in Afghanistan. For the Zionists, Afghanistan (envisioned as a ‘cake-walk’ or quick victory) was just a tool to set the stage for a much larger sequence of US wars against Israel’s regional Arab and Persian adversaries.
Before the militarists could establish any viable order and an enduring governmental structure in Afghanistan, attention shifted to a Zionist-centered war against Iraq.
The build-up for the US war against Iraq has to be understood as a project wholly engineered by and for the state of Israel, mostly through its agents within the US government and Washington policy elite. The goal was to establish Israel as the unchallenged political-military power in the region using American troops and money and preparing the ground for Tel Aviv’s “final solution” for the Palestinian ‘problem’; total expulsion…
The US military and occupation campaign included the wholesale and systematic destruction of Iraq: Its law and order, culture, economy and society – so there would be no possibility of recovery. Such a vicious campaign did not resonate with any productive sector of the US economy (or for that matter with any Israeli economic interest).
Washington’s Zionist faction set about in a parody of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge to identify and destroy any competent, experienced Iraqi professional, civil servant, scientist, intellectual, or military official capable of re-organizing and re-building the county and war-battered society. They were assassinated, arrested, tortured, or driven into exile. The occupation deliberately encouraged religious parties and traditional tribes to engage in inter-communal massacres and ethnic cleansing. In other words, the Zionist faction did not pursue the traditionally understood policy of empire building which would incorporate the second tier functionaries of a conquered state to form a competent client regime and use Iraq’s great oil and gas wealth to build its economy. Instead they chose to impose a scorched earth policy; setting loose organized sectarian armies, imposing the rule of grotesquely corrupt ex-pats and placing the most venal, sectarian clients in positions of power. The effect has been to transform the most advanced, secular Arab country into an ‘Afghanistan’ and in less than 15 years destroying centuries of culture and community.
The goal of the ‘Zionist strategy’ was to destroy Iraq as Israel’s regional rival. The cost of over a million Iraqi dead and many millions of refugees did not prick any conscience in Washington or Tel Aviv.
After all, Washington’s traditional ‘militarist faction’ picked up the bill (costing hundreds of billions) which they passed on to the American taxpayers (well over one trillion dollars) and used the deaths and suffering of tens of thousands of American troops to provide a pretext for spreading more chaos. The result of their mayhem includes the specter of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which they may consider to be a success – since hysteria over ISIS pushes the West ‘closer to Israel’.
The sheer scale of death and destruction inflicted on the Iraqi population by the Zionist faction led to thousands of highly competent Ba’athist officers, who had survived ‘Shock and Awe’ and the sectarian massacres, to join armed Islamist Sunnis and eventually form the ISIS. This group of experienced Iraqi military officers formed the strategic technical core of ISIS which launched a devastating offensive in Iraq in 2014 – taking major cities in the north and completely routing the US-trained puppet armies of the ‘government’ in Baghdad. From there they moved into Syria and beyond. It is fundamental to understanding the roots of ISIS: The Zionist faction among US militarist policymakers imposed a deliberate ‘scorched earth’ occupation policy, which united highly trained nationalist Ba’athist military officers with young Sunni fighters ,both locals and increasingly foreign jihadist mercenaries. These deracinated members of the traditional Iraqi nationalist military elite had lost their families to the sectarian massacres; they were persecuted, tortured, driven underground, and highly motivated. They literally had nothing left to lose!
This core of ISIS leadership stands in stark contrast to the colonial, corrupt, and demoralized army slapped together by the US military with more cash than morale. ISIS quickly swept through half of Iraq and came within 40 miles of Baghdad.
The US militarist faction faced military defeat after eight years of war. They mobilized, financed, and armed their client Kurdish mercenaries in northern Iraq and recruited the Shia Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani to appeal to the Shia militia.
ISIS exploited the Western-backed Islamist uprising in Syria and extended their sweep well across the border. Syria had accepted a million Iraqi refugees from the US invasion, including many of Iraq’s surviving experienced nationalist administrative elite. The US militarists are in a dilemma – another full-scale war would not be politically feasible, and its military outcome uncertain… Moreover the US was aligned with dubious allies – especially the Saudis – who had their own regional ambitions. Turkey and Saudi Arabia, Israel and the Kurds were each eager to expand their power territorially and politically.
In the midst of this, the traditional Washington militarists are left with no overall viable imperialist strategy. Instead they improvise with faux ‘rebels’, who claim to be moderates and democrats, while taking US guns and dollars and ultimately joining the most powerful Islamist groups – like ISIS.
Throwing a wrench into the machinery of Israeli-Saudi hegemonic ambitions, Russia, Iran and Hezbollah have sided with the secular Syrian government. Russia finally moved to bomb ISIS strongholds – after identifying a significant ISIS contingent of militant Chechens whose ultimate aims are to bring war and terror back to Russia.
The US-EU war against Libya unleashed all the retrograde mercenary forces from three continents (Africa, Asia and Europe) and Washington finds itself with no means to control them. Washington could not even protect its own consulate in their ‘liberated’ regional capital of Benghazi – the US ambassador and two intelligence aides were killed by Washington’s own ‘rebels’. The competing and cooperating factions of the Washington militarist elite placed Libya on a steaming platter: Serving up invasion, regicide and hundreds of thousands of refugees, which they did not bother to even ‘season’ with any plan or strategy – just unadulterated scorched earth against another opponent of Zionism. And a potentially lucrative strategic neo-colony in North Africa has been lost with no accountability for the Washington architects of such barbarism.
Latin America: The Last Outpost of the Multi-Nationals
As we have seen, the major theaters of imperial policy (the Middle East and Asia) have been dominated by militarists, not professional diplomats-linked to the multi-national corporations. Latin America stands as something of an exception. In Latin America, US policymakers have been guided by big business interests. Their main focus has been on pushing the neo-liberal agenda. Eventually this has meant promoting the US-centered ‘free trade’ agreements, joint military exercises, shared military bases, and political backing for the US global military agenda.
The ‘militarist faction’ in Washington worked with the traditional business faction in support of the unsuccessful military coups in Venezuela (2002 and 2014), the attempted coup in Bolivia 2008, and a successful regime change in Honduras (2010).
To harass the independent Argentine government which was developing closer diplomatic and trade ties with Iran, a sector of the US Zionist financial elite (the ‘vulture fund’ magnate Paul Singer) joined forces with the Zionist militarist faction to raise hysterical accusations against President Cristina Kirchner over the ‘mysterious’ suicide of a Israel-linked Argentine prosecutor. The prosecutor, Alberto Nisman, had devoted his career to ‘cooking up a case’ against Iran with the aid of the Mossad and CIA for the unsolved, bombing the Buenos Aires Jewish community center in 1994. Various investigations had exonerated Iran and the Nisman Affair was an intense effort to keep Argentina from trading with Iran.
The Washington business faction operated in a mildly hostile Latin America for most of the past decade. However, it was able to recover influence, via a series of bilateral free trade agreements and took advantage of the end of the commodity cycle. The latter weakened the center-left regimes and moved them closer to Washington.
The ‘excesses’ committed by the US backed military dictatorships during the nineteen sixties through eighties, and the crisis of the neo-liberal nineties, set the stage for the rise of a relatively moderate business-diplomatic faction to come to the fore in Washington. It is also the case that the various militarist and Zionist factions in Washington were focused elsewhere (Europe, Middle East and Asia). In any case the US political elite operates in Latin America mostly via political and business proxies, for the time being.
Conclusion
From our brief survey, it is clear that wars play a key role in US foreign policy in most regions of the world. However, war policies in different regions respond to different factions in the governing elite.
The traditional militarist faction predominates creating confrontations in Ukraine, Asia and along the Russian border. Within that framework the US Army, Air Force, and Special Forces play a leading, and fairly conventional, role. In the Far East, the Navy and Air Force predominate.
In the Middle East and South Asia, the military (Army and Air Force) factions share power with the Zionist faction. Fundamentally the Zionists dictate policy on Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine and the militarists follow.
Both factions overlapped in creating the debacle in Libya.
The factions form shifting coalitions, supporting wars of interest to their respective power centers. The militarists and Zionists worked together in launching the Afghan war; but once launched, the Zionists abandoned Kabul and concentrated on preparing for the invasion and occupation of Iraq, which was of far greater interest to Israel.
It should be noted that at no point did the oil and business elite play any significant role in war policy. The Zionist faction pushed hard to secure direct US ground intervention in Libya and Syria, but was not able to force the US to send large contingents of ground troops due to opposition from the Russians as well as a growing sector of the US electorate. Likewise, the Zionists played a leading role in successfully imposing sanctions against Iran and a major role in prosecuting banks around the world accused of violating the sanctions. However, they were not able to block the military faction from securing a diplomatic agreement with Iran over its uranium enrichment program – without going to war.
Clearly, the business faction plays a major role in promoting US trade agreements and tries to lift or avoid sanctions against important real and potential trade partners like China, Iran and Cuba.
The Zionist faction among Washington elite policymakers takes positions which consistently push for wars and aggressive policies against any regime targeted by Israel. The differences between the traditional militarist and Zionist factions are blurred by most writers who scrupulously avoid identifying Zionist decision-makers, but there is no question of who benefits and who loses.
The kind of war which the Zionists promote and implement – the utter destruction of enemy countries – undermines any plans by the traditional militarist faction and the military to consolidate power in an occupied country and incorporate it into a stable empire.
It is a serious error to lump these factions together: the business, Zionist, and various militarist factions of the Washington policy making elite are not one homogeneous group. They may overlap at times, but they also differ as to interests, liabilities, ideology, and loyalties. They also differ in their institutional allegiances.
The overarching militarist ideology which permeates US imperialist foreign policy obscures a deep and recurrent weakness – US policymakers master the mechanics of war but have no strategy for ruling after intervening. This has been glaringly evident in all recent wars: Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine, etc. Improvisation has repeatedly led to monumental failures: from financing phantom armies to bleeding billions to prop-up incompetent, kleptocratic puppet regimes. Despite the hundreds of billions of public money wasted in these serial disasters, no policymaker has been held to account.
Long wars and short memories are the norm for Washington’s militarist rulers who do not lose sleep over their blunders. The Zionists, for their part, do not even need a strategy for rule. They push the US into wars for Israel, and once having destroyed ‘the enemy country’ they leave a vacuum to be filled by chaos. The American public provides the gold and blood for these misadventures and reaps nothing but domestic deterioration and greater international strife.
A fictional “scenario” of multiple bomb attacks on London’s underground took place at exactly the same time as the bomb attack on July 7, 2005.
Peter Power, Managing Director of Visor Consultants, a private firm on contract to the London Metropolitan Police, described in a BBC interview how he had organized and conducted the anti-terror drill, on behalf of an unnamed business client.
The fictional scenario was based on simultaneous bombs going off at exactly the same time at the underground stations where the real attacks were occurring:
POWER: At half past nine this morning we were actually running an exercise for a company of over a thousand people in London based on simultaneous bombs going off precisely at the railway stations where it happened this morning, so I still have the hairs on the back of my neck standing up right now.
HOST: To get this quite straight, you were running an exercise to see how you would cope with this and it happened while you were running the exercise?
POWER: Precisely, and it was about half past nine this morning, we planned this for a company and for obvious reasons I don’t want to reveal their name but they’re listening and they’ll know it. And we had a room full of crisis managers for the first time they’d met and so within five minutes we made a pretty rapid decision that this is the real one and so we went through the correct drills of activating crisis management procedures to jump from slow time to quick time thinking and so on.
(BBC Radio Interview, 7 July 2005)
In response to the flood of incoming email messages, Peter Power –who is a former senior Scotland Yard official specializing in counterterrorism– responded in the form of the following “automatic reply”:
“Thank you for your message. Given the volume of emails about events on 7 July and a commonly expressed misguided belief that our exercise revealed prescient behaviour, or was somehow a conspiracy (noting that several websites interpreted our work that day in an inaccurate / naive / ignorant / hostile manner) it has been decided to issue a single email response as follows:
It is confirmed that a short number of ‘walk through’ scenarios planed [sic] well in advance had commenced that morning for a private company in London (as part of a wider project that remains confidential) and that two scenarios related directly to terrorist bombs at the same time as the ones that actually detonated with such tragic results. One scenario in particular, was very similar to real time events.
However, anyone with knowledge about such ongoing threats to our capital city will be aware that (a) the emergency services have already practiced several of their own exercises based on bombs in the underground system (also reported by the main news channels) and (b) a few months ago the BBC broadcast a similar documentary on the same theme, although with much worse consequences [??]. It is hardly surprising therefore, that we chose a feasible scenario – but the timing and script was nonetheless, a little disconcerting.
In short, our exercise (which involved just a few people as crisis managers actually responding to a simulated series of activities involving, on paper, 1000 staff) quickly became the real thing and the players that morning responded very well indeed to the sudden reality of events.
Beyond this no further comment will be made and based on the extraordinary number of messages from ill informed people, no replies will henceforth be given to anyone unable to demonstrate a bona fide reason for asking (e.g. accredited journalist / academic).
There was nothing “routine” in the so-called “walk through” scenarios. Visor’s mock terror drills (held on the very same day as the real attack) was by no means an isolated “coincidence”. Power’s email response suggests that mock drills are undertaken very frequently, as a matter of routine, and that there was nothing particularly out of the ordinary in the exercise conducted on July 7th, which just so happened to coincide with the real terror attacks.
There have indeed been several documented high profile cases of mock terror drills in the US and the UK, held prioror on exactly the same day and at the same time as the actual terror event. In the three previous cases reviewed below, the mock drills bear a canny resemblance to the real time terror attacks.
1. CIA Sponsored Exercise on the Morning of 9/11
On the morning of September 11 2001, within minutes of the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the CIA had been running “a pre-planned simulation to explore the emergency response issues that would be created if a plane were to strike a building”. The simulation was held at the CIA Chantilly Virginia Reconnaissance Office.
The Bush administration described the event as “a bizarre coincidence”. The matter was not mentioned by the media.(AP, 22 August 2002)
The CIA sponsored simulation consisted in a “scheduled exercise” held on the morning of September 11, 2001, where “a small corporate jet crashed into one of the four towers at the agency’s headquarters building after experiencing a mechanical failure.” (Quoted in Associated Press, 22 August 2002.)
The news concerning the 9/11 Chantilly aircraft crashing simulation was hushed up. It was not made public at the time. It was revealed almost a year later, in the form of an innocuous announcement of a Homeland Security Conference. The latter entitled “Homeland Security: America’s Leadership Challenge” was held in Chicago on September 6, 2002, barely a few days before the commemoration of the tragic events of 9/11.
The promotional literature for the conference under the auspices of the National Law Enforcement and Security Institute (NLESI) stated what nobody in America knew about. On the morning of 9/11, the CIA was conducting a pre-planned simulation of a plane striking a building. One of the key speakers at the National Law Enforcement and Security Institute conference was CIA’s John Fulton, Chief of the Strategic War Gaming Division of the National Reconnaissance Office a specialist in risk and threat response analysis, scenario gaming, and strategic planning.
On the morning of September 11th 2001, Mr. Fulton and his team at the CIA were running a pre-planned simulation to explore the emergency response issues that would be created if a plane were to strike a building. Little did they know that the scenario would come true in a dramatic way that day. Information is the most powerful tool available in the homeland security effort. At the core of every initiative currently underway to protect our country and its citizens is the challenge of getting the right information to the right people at the right time. How can so much information from around the world be captured and processed in meaningful and timely ways? Mr. Fulton shares his insights into the intelligence community, and shares a vision of how today’s information systems will be developed into even better counter-terrorism tools of tomorrow. (Ibid)
2. October 2000 Mock Terror Attack on the Pentagon
In late October 2000 (more than ten months prior to 9/11), a military exercise was conducted which consisted in establishing the scenario of a simulated passenger plane crashing into the Pentagon. The Defense Protective Services Police and the Pentagon’s Command Emergency Response Team coordinated the exercise. According to a detailed report by Dennis Ryan of Fort Myer Military Community’s Pentagram, “the Pentagon Mass Casualty Exercise, as the crash was called, was just one of several scenarios that emergency response teams were exposed to on Oct. 24-26 [2000]“:
The fire and smoke from the downed passenger aircraft billows from the Pentagon courtyard. Defense Protective Services Police seal the crash sight. Army medics, nurses and doctors scramble to organize aid. (…) Don Abbott, of Command Emergency Response Training, walks over to the Pentagon and extinguishes the flames. The Pentagon was a model and the “plane crash” was a simulated one.
On Oct. 24, there was a mock terrorist incident at the Pentagon Metro stop and a construction accident to name just some of the scenarios that were practiced to better prepare local agencies for real incidents.
(Dennis Ryan, “Contingency planning, Pentagon MASCAL exercise simulates scenarios in preparing for emergencies”, MDW NEWS 3 Nov 2000.)
3. Britain’s Atlantic Blue, April 2005
In Britain, there were several documented exercises of terror attacks on London’s underground system.
In addition to the 7/7 exercise conducted by Visor Consultants, a similar mock terror drill on London’s transportation system entitled “Atlantic Blue” was held in April 2005, barely three months prior to the real attacks. In 2003, a mock terror drill labelled OSIRIS 2 was conducted. It consisted, according to Peter Power in testing the “equipment and people deep in the Underground of London”. It involved the participation of several hundred people. (Interview with Peter Power, CTV, 11 July 2005).
“Atlantic Blue” was part of a much larger US sponsored emergency preparedness exercise labelled TOPOFF 3, which included the participation of Britain and Canada. It had been ordered by the UK Secretary of State for the Home Department, Mr. Charles Clarke, in close coordination with his US counterpart Michael Chertoff.
The assumptions of the Visor Consultants mock drill conducted on the morning of July 7th were similar to those conducted under “Atlantic Blue”. This should come as no surprise since Visor Consultants was involved, on contract to the British government, in the organisation and conduct of Atlantic Blue and in coordination with the US Department of Homeland Security.
As in the case of the 9/11 simulation organized by the CIA, the July 7, 2005 Visor mock terror drill, was casually dismissed by the media, without further investigation, as a mere “coincidence”, with no relationship to the real event.
Foreknowledge of the 7/7 Attack?
According to a report of the Associated Press correspondent in Jerusalem, the Israeli embassy in London had been advised in advance by Scotland Yard of an impending bomb attack:
Just before the blasts, Scotland Yard called the security officer at the Israeli Embassy to say they had received warnings of possible attacks, the official said. He did not say whether British police made any link to the economic conference.(AP, 7 July 2005)
Israeli Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was warned by his embassy not to attend an attend an economic conference organized by the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE) in collaboration with the Israeli embassy and Deutsche Bank.
Netanyahu was staying at the Aldridge Hotel in Mayfair. The conference venue was a few miles away at the Great Eastern Hotel close to the Liverpool subway station, where one of the bomb blasts occurred.
Rudolph Giuliani’s London Visit
Rudolph Giuliani, who was mayor of New York City at the time of the 9/11 attacks, was staying at the Great Eastern hotel on the 7th of July, where TASE was hosting its economic conference, with Israel’s Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as keynote speaker.
Giuliani was having a business breakfast meeting in his room at the Great Eastern Hotel, close to Liverpool Street station when the bombs went off:
“I didn’t hear the Liverpool Street bomb go off,” he explains. “One of my security people came into the room and informed me that there had been an explosion. We went outside and they pointed in the direction of where they thought the incident had happened. There was no panic. I went back in to my breakfast. At that stage, the information coming in to us was very ambiguous.” (quoted in the Evening Standard, 11 July 2005.)
Israeli Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Rudolph Giuliani knew each other. Giuliani had officially welcomed Netanyahu when he visited New York City as Prime Minister of Israel in 1996. There was no indication, however, from news reports that the two men met in London at the Great Eastern. On the day prior to the London attacks, July 6th, Giuliani was in North Yorkshire at a meeting.
After completing his term as mayor of New York City, Rudi Giuliani established a security outfit: Giuliani Security and Safety. The latter is a subsidary of Giuliani Partners LLC. headed by former New York head of the FBI, Pasquale D’Amuro.
After 9/11, D’Amuro was appointed Inspector in Charge of the FBI’s investigation of 9/11. He later served as Assistant Director of the Counterterrorism Division at FBI Headquarters and, Executive Assistant Director for Counterterrorism and Counterintelligence. D’Amuro had close links to the Neocons in the Bush adminstration.
It is worth noting that Visor Consultants and Giuliani Security and Safety LLC specialize in similar “mock terror drills” and “emergency preparedness” procedures. Both Giuliani and Power were in London at the same time within a short distance of one of the bombing sites. While there is no evidence that Giuliani and Power met in London, the two companies have had prior business contacts in the area of emergency preparedness. Peter Power served on the Advisory Board to the Canadian Centre for Emergency Preparedness (CCEP), together with Richard Sheirer, Senior Vice President of Giuliani and Partners. who was previously Commissioner at the NYC Office of Emergency Management, and Director of New York City Homeland Security. (See CCEP)
Concluding Remarks
One should not at this stage of the investigation draw hasty conclusions regarding the mock terror drill of a terror attack on the London underground, held on the same day and at the same time as the real time attacks.
The issue cannot, however, be dismissed. One would expect that it be addressed in a serious and professional fashion by the police investigation and that the matter be the object of a formal clarification by the British authorities.
The issue of foreknowledge raised in the Associated Press report also requires investigation.
More generally, an independent public inquiry into the London bomb attacks is required.
… Since the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January, from which 16 people died, Paris-area ambulance crews and emergency personnel have taken part in regular exercises designed to test their readiness for possible attacks. One such exercise was held on Friday morning, the day of the latest terror attacks. In a twist of fate, the simulated emergency was a mass shooting, according to Dr. Mathieu Raux, emergency room chief at the Pitié-Salpetrière hospital in Paris. … Full article
The New York Times led the propaganda behind 9/11 and the 9/11 Wars. It did so by ignoring many of the most relevant facts, by promoting false official accounts, and by belittling those who questioned the 9/11 events. The Times eventually offered a weak public apology for its uncritical support of the Bush Administration’s obviously bogus Iraq War justifications. However, it has yet to apologize for its role in selling the official account of 9/11, a story built on just as many falsehoods. Instead, the newspaper continues to propagandize about the attacks while putting down Americans who seek the truth about what happened.
The New York “newspaper of record” has published many articles that promote official explanations for the events of 9/11. These have included support for the Pancake Theory, the diesel fuel theory for WTC 7, claims based on the torture testimony of an alleged top al Qaeda leader, and accounts of NORAD notification and response to the hijackings. Since then, U.S. authorities have said that none of those explanations were true. However, the Times never expressed regret for reporting the misleading information.
Instead, the Times continued to sell every different official explanation. When a new government theory for destruction of the WTC was put forth, it was immediately promoted. The newspaper never reported any critical analysis of the official accounts, despite the fact that all of them, including the final reports for the Twin Towers and WTC 7, have been proven to be wrong.
When the fourth story for how the North American air defenses failed—the one that said U.S. military officers had spent three years giving “false testimony,” the Times pushed it as fact. Its article on the subject simply closed the matter with the statement that “someone will still have to explain why the military, with far greater resources and more time for investigation, could not come up with the real story until the 9/11 commission forced it to admit the truth.” The idea that military officers might have started out telling the truth, thereby leaving very sensitive questions to be answered, and that the 9/11 Commission was now being false, apparently never occurred to the editors.
Meanwhile, the newspaper has made considerable efforts to belittle Americans who question the official account of 9/11.
In June 2006, the Times published a snarky account of a grassroots conference of 9/11 investigators. The article focused on sensational descriptions of the participants, including what it called “a longhaired fellow named hummux who, on and off, lived in a cave for 15 years.’’ The fact that Dr. hummux was a PhD physicist who had worked on the Strategic Defense Initiative for 20 years was not mentioned. The Times simply distorted his experience living with a Native American tribe and falsely stated that he had lived in a cave. No mention was made of serious, undisputed facts that were presented at the conference.
A few months later, at the fifth anniversary of 9/11, the Times published another propaganda article in support of the politically timed reports from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The article began by declaring that those who questioned 9/11 were “an angry minority,” while minimizing a national Scripps Howard poll, published just a month earlier. The poll showed that “More than a third of the American public suspects that federal officials assisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or took no action to stop them so the United States could go to war in the Middle East.” That is, the number of Americans who thought that federal officials were behind the attacks (36%) was on par with the percentage of Americans who had voted for the president. Yet the Times inferred that it was only a small fraction of the population who questioned 911.
The September 2006 article promoted one Brent Blanchard as a demolition expert, implying that his recent essay refuted any suggestions that the WTC buildings were demolished. As I told the reporter Jim Dwyer, when he interviewed me for the article, “Mr. Blanchard may be a good photographer, but the uninformative bluster that fills the first two and a half pages of this piece, and a good deal throughout the paper, shows that he is not a good writer.” The fact that Blanchard was only a photographer and not a demolition expert was not mentioned by Dwyer, nor was my point-by-point refutation of Blanchard’s limited arguments. Instead, Dwyer purposefully ignored the evidence and ended his article with another quote from Blanchard.
More recently, perhaps in response to another large billboard posted right outside the Times offices, the newspaper has renewed its 9/11 propaganda efforts. In one new article, reporter Mark Leibovich wonders “why is it good to tell the truth but bad to be a ‘Truther’.” Leibovich turns to former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer for support. Of course, the article does not refer to Fleischer’s curious behavior on the morning of 9/11, which stands among the unresolved questions. Instead, Fleischer’s input is that he uses the term “truther” as an epithet, “floating a notion and letting it hang there to absorb sinister connotations.” Leibovich goes on to portray 9/11 questioning as just another form of ridiculous “trutherism” that is “stranger than fiction.“
Leibovich and his colleagues at the Times continue to suggest that they are unaware of the many incredible facts about 9/11 that call out for critical investigation. At this point, however, that level of ignorance is not believable and the Times’ track record shows that it will never take an honest and objective approach to the events of 9/11. As one former Timesreporter stated, the paper’s slogan that it provides all the news ‘fit to print’ really means that it provides all the news that’s fit to serve the powerful. And as long as the needs of the powerful differ from the needs of the people, the truth will be something that is unavailable at the New York Times.
People sometimes wonder why is it important to investigate the alleged hijackers and others officially accused of committing the 9/11 crimes. After all, the accused 19 hijackers could not have accomplished most of what happened. The answer is that the official accounts are important because they are part of the crimes. Identifying and examining the people who created the official 9/11 myth helps to reveal the ones who were responsible overall.
The people who actually committed the crimes of September 11th didn’t intend to just hijack planes and take down the buildings—they intended to blame others. To accomplish that plan the real criminals needed to create a false account of what happened and undoubtedly that need was considered well in advance. In this light, the official reports can be seen to provide a link between the “blaming others” part of the crimes and the physical parts.
Pushing the concept of “Islamic Terrorism” was the beginning of the effort to blame others, although the exact 9/11 plan might not have been worked out at the time. This concept was largely a conversion of the existing Soviet threat, which by 1989 was rapidly losing its ability to frighten the public, into something that would serve more current policy needs. Paul Bremer and Brian Jenkins were at the forefront of this conversion of the Soviet threat into the threat of Islamic terrorism. Both Bremer and Jenkins were also intimately connected to the events at the World Trade Center.
The concerted effort to propagandize about Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden (OBL) seems to have begun in earnest in 1998. That’s when the African embassy bombings were attributed to OBL and the as-yet unreported group called Al Qaeda. The U.S. government responded with bombings of Sudan and Afghanistan and, with help from the New York Times, began to drum up an intense myth about the new enemy.
“This is, unfortunately, the war of the future,” Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said. “The Osama bin Laden organization has basically declared war on Americans and has made very clear that these are all Americans, anywhere.”
In retrospect, it is surprising that this was the first reference to Al Qaeda in the New York Times, coming only three years before 9/11. More surprising is that The Washington Post did not report on Al Qaeda until June 1999, and its reporting was highly speculative about the power behind this new threat.
“But for all its claims about a worldwide conspiracy to murder Americans, the government’s case is, at present, largely circumstantial. The indictment never explains how bin Laden runs al Qaeda or how he may have masterminded the embassy bombings.”
Despite this skepticism from The Post, the reports about Al Qaeda continued in an odd mixture of propaganda and doubt. For example, The Timesreported on the trial of the men accused of the African embassy attacks in May 2001. That article contradicted itself saying that “prosecutors never introduced evidence directly showing that Mr. bin Laden ordered the embassy attacks” and yet that a “former advisor” to Bin Laden, one Ali Mohamed, claimed that Bin Laden “pointed to where a truck could go as a suicide bomber.” The fact that Mohamed had worked for the U.S. Army, the FBI, and the CIA was not mentioned.
Other facts were ignored as well. That OBL had worked with the CIA and that Al Qaeda was basically a creation of CIA programs like Operation Cyclone were realities that began to fade into the background. By the time 9/11 happened, those facts were apparently forgotten by a majority of U.S. leaders and media sources. Also overlooked were the histories of people like Frank Carlucci and Richard Armitage, who played major roles in Operation Cyclone and who remained powerful players at the time of the 9/11 attacks.
In the two years before 9/11, the alleged hijackers were very active within the United States. They traveled extensively and often seemed to be making an effort to be noticed. When they were not trying to be noticed, they engaged in distinctly non-Muslim behavior. Mohamed Atta’s actions were erratic, in ways that were similar to those of Lee Harvey Oswald, and Atta appeared to be protected by U.S. authorities.
Meanwhile, leading U.S. terrorism experts seemed to be facilitating Al Qaeda terrorism. Evidence suggests that U.S. intelligence agency leaders Louis Freeh and George Tenet facilitated and covered-up acts of terrorism in the years before 9/11. Both of their agencies, the CIA and FBI, later took extraordinary measures to hide evidence related to the 9/11 attacks. And both agencies have made a mockery of the trial of those officially accused of helping OBL and the alleged hijackers.
Counter-terrorism leader Richard Clarke inexplicably helped OBL stay out of trouble, protecting him on at least two occasions. Clarke blatantly failed to follow-up on known Al Qaeda cells operating within the United States. After 9/11, Clarke was among those who falsely pointed to Abu Zubaydah as a top leader of Al Qaeda. Zubaydah’s torture testimony was then used as the basis for the 9/11 Commission Report.
Former CIA operative Porter Goss created the first official account of what happened on 9/11, along with his mentor Bob Graham. This was the report of the Joint Congressional Inquiry, produced by the intelligence oversight committees of the U.S. Congress. It was greatly influenced by people who should have been prime suspects. For example, Richard Clarke was the one in charge of the secure video conference at the White House that failed miserably to connect leaders and respond to the attacks. In the Joint Inquiry’s report, Clarke was cited as an authoritative reference 46 times. CIA director George Tenet was cited 77 times, and Louis Freeh was cited 31 times.
Therefore it is imperative that the people who worked to create the background story behind OBL and the accused hijackers be investigated for their roles in the 9/11 crimes. This includes not only those who were figureheads behind the official reports, but more importantly the ones who provided the evidence and testimony upon which those reports were built. The alleged hijackers and their associates should also be of considerable interest to 9/11 investigators. That’s because what we know about them was provided by people who we can assume were connected to the crimes and what we don’t yet know about them can reveal more of the truth.
I’m writing from Guantánamo Bay, where pre-trial proceedings in the military commissions prosecution of the 9/11 defendants have restarted after an 18-month delay. It has been a faltering start, to say the least: Within ten minutes of the first hearing, the agenda was derailed. Again.
One of the defendants, Walid Bin Attash, asked about the procedures that would allow him to represent himself because he could not trust the independence of the military commission, including his lawyers. All the parties then had to grapple with how self-representation would work in this novel context. But lurking behind these dilemmas is the real issue that has so often derailed the military commissions: the government’s use of secrecy in what it presents as a public death penalty trial.
As we have pointed out for years, the military commissions are unfair, unconstitutional, and plagued by excessive secrecy. These challenges make it extraordinarily difficult for the defense attorneys to do their job. And they make it even harder for defendants to exercise the right to represent themselves meaningfully.
There are straightforward logistical impossibilities for defendants if they attempt to represent themselves. They are held virtually incommunicado in “Camp 7” at Guantánamo, a secret prison within a secretive prison holding detainees who were tortured at the CIA’s secret black sites. Defendants cannot file motions, consult a law library, communicate with (or even learn the names of) witnesses, or compile confidential legal documents.
The defendants also face the unique challenge of representing themselves when they have been tortured by the government that seeks to kill them, continue to be subjected to a “controlled chaos strategy of changing the rules all the time” that serves to retraumatize them, and are denied rehabilitation to help them cope with the effects of their torture. Conditions at Camp 7 reportedly exacerbate the continued effects of CIA torture. Bin Attash declared at the beginning of this week’s hearings that “we are still in the black sites” before the judge, Army Col. James Pohl, cut him off.
The results of torture are quite visible at the trial: As an observer, one of the most difficult aspects of these hearings is watching the guards place a particularly frail defendant, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, each morning on a chair equipped with a special pillow. As the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report documents, al-Hawsawi was subjected to “rectal exams conducted with ‘excessive force’” while detained at a secret CIA prison. CIA records indicate that the result was “chronic hemorrhoids, an anal fissure, and symptomatic rectal prolapse.” He now weighs less than 100 pounds and sometimes bleeds on his clothing. His medical records, like so much else at Guantánamo, are kept secret even from his counsel.
But perhaps the single biggest obstacle to self-representation is government secrecy. Defendants in the military commissions are not permitted to see classified evidence. That’s the case even if the government tries to use it to put them to death, and even if it could help their case. How can someone defend themselves when they can’t see the evidence? This problem isn’t confined to the self-representation context; even security-cleared defense counsel at Guantánamo are sometimes kept in the dark about relevant evidence.
These difficulties could be left for another day, suggested the judge. Perhaps, if a defendant chooses to represent himself, the military commissions could muddle through whatever problems cropped up along the way. Maybe the most obviously unfair scenarios would never come to pass, he hypothesized. At that point, former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld entered the frame: Are concerns about the viability of self-representation in the military commissions merely a case of “unknown unknowns”?
So many questions arise when you try to invent justice as you go along.
The government has chosen to sidestep our tried and true federal courts and created a novel death penalty court here at Guantánamo. Without a doubt, there are a great number of unknown unknowns in this unprecedented proceeding. But as counsel for Ammar al-Baluchi observed, “there are huge known unknowns.” Given the government’s repeated and acknowledged efforts to rely on secret evidence and simultaneously hide that same evidence from the accused — and the public — a wide array of problems for a defendant who seeks to represent himself are easily predictable.
As David Nevin, counsel for defendant Khalid Sheik Mohammad, has explained, secrecy is “the live wire of this case.” At some point, Nevin suggested, the court will have to decide if it wants this trial to be a “real case” or merely a fundamentally unfair exercise of government power. And whether it’s a “real case” depends in part on whether the government succeeds in hiding from the American public the details of some of the most important trials in our history.
Perhaps the moment that most perfectly encapsulated the week of hearings so far happened at the end of the second day. Defense counsel had submitted a motion containing information that the government had decided was so secret that special permission was required to read it. But the government had not cleared the judge himself to know the information. After consulting with the court security officer, the judge refused to accept the defense’s submission.
“It’s hard for me to know what it is without knowing what it is,” he said. The same could be said for the military commission itself.
The truth about the September 11, 2001 terror attacks would not only destabilize the American political system but it would also take down the US as a global empire, an American scholar says.
Dr. Kevin Barrett, a founding member of the Scientific Panel for the Investigation of 9/11, made the remarks in an interview with Press TV on Tuesday, while commenting on the ongoing feud between Republican presidential candidates Donald Trump and Jeb Bush over the 9/11 attacks.
On Friday, Trump blamed former US President George W. Bush for the September 11, 2001 attacks. On Sunday, Trump said that if he had been president in 2001, his immigration policy would have kept al-Qaeda terrorists from attacking the US.
In response, Bush said his brother, George W. Bush, is not responsible for the 9/11 attacks. “Look, my brother responded to a crisis, and he did it as you would hope a president would do.”
“He united the country,” Bush told CNN. “He organized our country, and he kept us safe. And there’s no denying that. The great majority of Americans believe that.”
Bush deserves blame for 9/11
Dr. Barrett said everyone in the United States believes that George W. Bush deserves blame for the September 11, 2001 attacks.
“Ever since 9/11, many Americans, between one-third in some polls who say that the US government under Bush perpetrated the 9/11 attacks or intentionally let them happen in order to trigger war in the Middle East, and up to 90 percent of Americans in other polls, who say that they don’t really believe or fully believe the official story of 9/11, this issue has been a smoldering barrel of political dynamite, “he said. “And now it’s smoldering a little bit harder, and it might just go off.”
“According to Jeb Bush, the brother of George Bush, Jeb being the apparent favorite candidate to win the Republican nomination for president, at least until Trump emerged, Jeb is now on the defensive, arguing that his brother George W. Bush was not responsible and there’s no blame for the 9/11 attacks,” he added.
“Of course, this is an issue that Jeb cannot possibly win on, because no matter how you analyze the 9/11 attacks, whether you’ve done the full investigation using alternative sources, such as the magisterial work of Dr. David Ray Griffin, to learn that in fact the 9/11 attacks were not a surprise attack by a foreign enemy, they were in fact an inside job, a spectacular public relations stunt designed to create a neoconservative policy coup d’etat and launch a series of wars that would primarily benefit Israel,” he said.
“But whether you’ve done the search and figure that out or not, you have to admit that Bush was clearly responsible for 9/11 even if he was not actively complicit in this coup d’etat,” Dr. Barrett noted.
“And even if you refuse to admit that it was a coup d’etat, it’s obvious that Bush should be blamed for what happened,” he stated.
The September, 11, 2001 attacks, also known as the 9/11 attacks, were a series of strikes in the US which killed nearly 3,000 people and caused about $10 billion worth of property and infrastructure damage.
US officials assert that the attacks were carried out by 19 al-Qaeda terrorists but many experts have raised questions about the official account.
They believe that rogue elements within the US government, such as former Vice President Dick Cheney, orchestrated or at least encouraged the 9/11 attacks in order to accelerate the US war machine and advance the Zionist agenda.
Bush receives CIA briefing
“In August of 2001, George W. Bush received the president’s daily briefing from the CIA, and it was headlined, ‘Bin Laden determined to attack in the United States’. Bush whipped his neck around and angrily screamed, ‘Well, you’ve covered your ass now,’” Dr. Barrett said.
“Of course, the ungenerous interpretation of this is that Bush knew full well that plans were proceeding apace for the big public relations event in September, and he did not appreciate the CIA briefer covering his posterior while passing the buck up to the president,” he added.
“The other interpretation would be that Bush is just such a complete fool and idiot that his outburst had no real meaning, and he should be blamed for 9/11 not as a complicit perpetrator, or someone who intentionally knew it was coming and let it happen, but rather someone whose incompetence was so overwhelming that somehow he caused the entire military defense system of the United States to have an unprecedented collapse,” he continued.
The American scholar went on to say that “the bottom line here is that it’s obvious to everyone in the United States that George W. Bush deserves blame for 9/11.”
“The only question is whether because he was insanely incompetent and somehow magically projected his grotesque incompetence on the rest of the government and then saw everyone who was incompetent get promoted or was it something much, much worse. But the reality is it was much, much worse,” he emphasized.
“And if this political dynamite bomb goes off, it’s not just going to take out the Bush family, which has been the most corrupt organized crime family in America running the drug dealings at the CIA, among other things, but it’s going to take down the whole political system as we know it today, and possibly going to take down the US as a global empire,” he observed.
“That’s one reason everybody in the US here is afraid to open up this can of worms, but that actually would be a very good thing; nothing better could possibly happen to the planet than for this can of worms to get opened, and for the US empire to be taken down, and for something more in line with the ideals of America’s founding fathers to rise up out of the ashes,” Dr. Barrett concluded.
A recent book written by veteran CIA officers describes how deception can be identified by simple observational techniques. In Spy the Lie: Former CIA Officers Teach You How to Detect Deception, authors Philip Houston, Michael Floyd, and Susan Carnicero outline a number of verbal and visual behavioral clues that are demonstrated by people who lie in response to questioning. These proven techniques for recognizing deception can be easily applied to see that U.S. leaders have lied repeatedly about the attacks of 9/11.
The authors make clear that there are two important guidelines to employ when analyzing these verbal and visual clues. First, timing is important. Due to the fact that people think ten times faster than they speak, the behaviors are more important when the first one occurs within five seconds of the question. Secondly, when the behavioral clues occur in groups of two or more, called clusters, they are more indicative of deception on the part of the person being questioned. The more clues exhibited, the more clear the deception becomes.
Let’s take a look at some examples.
In a December 15, 2001 press conference, President George W. Bush was asked an unexpected question about 9/11. In a remarkably delayed response, Bush exhibited both a verbal clue for deception, the failure to answer, and a visual clue called an anchor-point movement. The latter is when the anxiety raised by the question causes the person questioned to shift his body to relieve physical instability. As Bush replied, he shook his head, moved his hands, and seemed to be shuffling his feet uncomfortably.
Reporter: Do you agree or disagree with the RNC that [a question of your advanced knowledge of 9/11] borders on political hate speech?
Bush: Uh, yeah, there’s time for politics and, uh, you know… time for politics and, uh… I, uh, it’s an absurd insinuation.”
If the reporter had been a CIA interrogator, like any of the three authors of the book, this response would have raised an immediate red flag that the issue needed further examination.
In April 2004, Bush was asked a question about why he could only meet with the 9/11 Commission if Vice President Cheney was with him. He responded in a stuttering, repetitive fashion that demonstrated the “failure to answer” clue as well as something called non-specific denial, in which the question is refuted with unrelated verbiage. As Bush repeated his diversionary answer, he also smiled—another indication of deception when dealing with any serious subject matter.
Reporter: “Why are you and the vice president insisting on appearing together before the 9/11 Commission?”
Bush: “Because the 9/11 Commission wants to ask us questions. That’s why we’re meeting and I look forward to meeting with them and answering their questions.”
Reporter: “My question was why are you appearing together, rather than separately, which was their request?”
Bush: “Because it’s a good chance for both of us to answer questions, that the 9/11 Commission is, uh, looking forward to asking us, and I’m looking forward to answering them.”
Not long after Bush and Cheney finally agreed to their unrecorded, secretive interview with 9/11 Commission members, Bush’s national security advisor Condoleezza Rice gave testimony under oath. In that testimony, she demonstrated at least six of the CIA’s verbal clues to deception including isolated denial, selective memory, an overly specific answer, and a process or procedural response. Rice was also seen going into attack mode, responding to Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste with, “I believe you had access,” and using inconsistent statements. She said that a presidential brief was titled “Bin Laden determined to strike inside U.S.” and yet also that no warnings of strikes inside the U.S. were received.
In addition to these highly deceptive behaviors, Rice gave a huge hint in her testimony that exemplifies something the book calls the “truth in the lie.” When Ben-Veniste asked her about Al Qaeda cells in the United States. She said,
Rice: “I remember very well that the president was aware that there were issues inside the United States. He talked to people about this. But I don’t remember the Al Qaeda cells as being something that we were told we needed to do something about.”
This extended answer suggested that the White House knew about Al Qaeda cells operating in the United States but that Rice and others were expected to do nothing about them. Ben-Veniste did not pursue the question further. This is not surprising given other lines of questioning in which Ben-Veniste engaged. Here’s an example with General Michael Canavan, who was supposed to be the “hijack coordinator” on 9/11—the one person most responsible for preventing, and initially responding to, the hijackings.
Ben-Vensite: What is your understanding of the first time FAA notified NORAD of the fact that this was a possible hijack or that it had deviated from course, or that there was some anomaly about Flight 77 in the context of everything else that was going on that day?
Canavan: Here’s my answer—and it’s not to duck the question. Number one, I was visiting the airport in San Juan that day when this happened. That was a CADEX airport, and I was down there also to remove someone down there that was in a key position. So when 9/11 happened, that’s where I was. I was able to get back to Washington that evening on a special flight from the Army back from San Juan, back to Washington. So everything that transpired that day in terms of times, I have to—and I have no information on that now, because when I got back we weren’t—that wasn’t the issue at the time. We were— when I got back it was, What are we going to do over the next 48 hours to strengthen what just happened?
Although video is not available for Canavan’s testimony, it’s clear that he was using deceptive verbal behaviors. He failed to answer the actual question, he engaged in perception qualifiers and an overly specific response, and he gave non-answer statements. Because Ben-Veniste immediately dropped the question it is unknown, to this day, who was serving in the critical role of hijack coordinator on 9/11.
There are many more examples of deceptive answers from U.S. leaders regarding 9/11. When asked why an outline was created for the 9/11 Commission Report before the investigation began, Chairman Thomas Kean immediately ran away and went into attack mode. When asked about the CIA’s tracking of two of the alleged hijackers, CIA director George Tenet, who was undoubtedly trained in detecting deception, demonstrated many of the CIA’s clues that he was being deceptive.
One more example is instructive. This involves John Gross, who was the author of both the most critical FEMA World Trade Center (WTC) report and the most critical WTC report from the National Institute of Standards and Technology. When asked a question during a presentation he was giving, Gross responded with multiple behaviors that the CIA would find deceptive.
Questioner: “I’m curious about the pools of molten steel that were found in the bottom of the towers.”
Gross (Anchor-point movements, non-answer statement, going into attack mode): “I am, I am too…. tell me about it. Have you seen it?
Questioner: “Well, not personally but eyewitnesses there found huge pools of molten steel beneath the towers and, uh, scientists, some scientists, think that the collapse of the buildings could [sic] have melted all that steel. And a physics professor, Steven Jones, found evidence of a thermite residue, which would explain how the buildings collapsed by means of pre-planted explosives. So have you analyzed the steel for any of those residues?
Gross (Reluctance to answer, Anchor-point movements): “First of all, let’s go back to your basic premise that there was, uh, a pool of molten steel. Um, I know of absolutely nobody, no eyewitnesses, who have said so, nobody has produced it. I was on the site, I was on the steelyards, so I can’t, I don’t know that that’s so.”
When further questioned about the collapse of WTC Building 7, Gross made inconsistent statements and engaged in hand-to-face activity, another two of the deceptive behaviors noted by the CIA. This is not surprising to people who have studied events at the WTC, however, because Gross would have needed to be grossly negligent in his observance of evidence to have not known about the molten metal at the WTC site.
As seen above, the 9/11 Commission hearings and other statements by 9/11 investigation leaders provide a treasure trove of opportunities for people to practice detecting deception. Of course, the 9/11 Commission Report demonstrates many of the same clues for deception that CIA officers would highlight. Its lies of omission are many and its reliance on deceptive language like “we found no evidence” is another clue.
Interestingly, the authors of Spy the Lie introduce their book by recalling the 9/11 attacks in a way that suggests that their deception-identifying skills are needed to avoid such tragedies. Yet these three experts on deception don’t question the official narrative of 9/11 at all and apparently have never seen any evidence for deception in that narrative or its origins. This fact may be the result of extreme bias—with the CIA officers unable to question their own agency. Or maybe it exemplifies a high level of self-deception, perhaps suggesting a sequel to the book.
In any case, the official account of 9/11 continues to provide a most powerful way to see just how much people deceive each other and themselves. When it comes to 9/11, experts on scientific fraud can’t see the most glaring example, journalists can’t see the most obvious examples of negligent reporting, and the CIA’s most skilled detectors of deception can’t see when they are deceived. Since many of us can see these things, we should work harder to reveal the truth because deception is at the root of many of the world’s problems.
Media interest in Saudi Arabian connections to the crimes of 9/11 has centered on calls for the release of the 28 missing pages from the Joint Congressional Inquiry’s report. However, those calls focus on the question of hijacker financing and omit the most interesting links between the 9/11 attacks and Saudi Arabia—links that implicate powerful people in the United States. Here are twenty examples.
When two of the alleged 9/11 hijackers, Khalid Al-Mihdhar and Nawaf Al-Hazmi, came to the U.S. in January 2000, they immediately met with Omar Al-Bayoumi, a suspected Saudi spy and an employee of a Saudi aviation company. Al-Bayoumi, who was the target of FBI investigations in the two years before 9/11, became a good friend to the two 9/11 suspects, setting them up in an apartment and paying their rent.
Al-Mihdhar and Al-Hazmi then moved in with a long-time FBI asset, Abdussattar Shaikh, who was said to be a teacher of the Saudi language. Shaikh allowed them to live in his home for at least seven months, later saying that he thought they were only Saudi students. In an unlikely coincidence, both Al-Bayoumi and Shaikh also knew Hani Hanjour, the alleged pilot of Flight 77. Although Shaikh was reported to be a retired professor at San Diego State University, the university had no records of him. He was then said to be a professor at American Commonwealth University but that turned out to be a phony institution. During the 9/11 investigations, the FBI refused to allow Shaikh to be interviewed or deposed. The FBI also tried to prevent the testimony of Shaikh’s FBI handler, which occurred only secretly at a later date. Despite having a very suspicious background, the FBI gave Shaikh $100,000 and closed his contract.
Journalist Joseph Trento claimed that an unnamed former CIA officer, who worked in Saudi Arabia, told him that Alhazmi and Almihdhar were Saudi spies protected by U.S. authorities.
After being appointed CIA Director in 1997, George Tenet began to cultivate close personal relationships with officials in Saudi Arabia. Tenet grew especially close to Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to the United States. Bandar and Tenet often met at Bandar’s home near Washington. Tenet did not share information from those meetings with his own CIA officers who were handling Saudi issues at the agency. These facts are among the reasons to suspect that Tenet facilitated the crimes of 9/11.
Bernard Kerik, the New York City police commissioner at the time of 9/11, spent three years working in Saudi Arabia in the 1970s. He then spent another three years in Saudi Arabia in the 1980s as the “chief investigator for the royal family.” It was Kerik who first told the public that explosives were not used at the World Trade Center (WTC) in a news conference. It was also his police department that was said to have discovered a passport that fell from one of the burning towers, providing dubious evidence identifying one of the alleged hijackers.
One of the two major contractors hired to manage the cleanup of debris at Ground Zero—Bovis Lend Lease—had previously built the Riyadh Olympic stadium in Saudi Arabia.
The other primary cleanup company at Ground Zero—AMEC Construction—had just completed a $258 million refurbishment of Wedge 1 of the Pentagon, which is exactly where Flight 77 was said to impact that building. AMEC had a significant presence in Saudi Arabia for decades, working for the national oil company, Saudi Aramco.
After 9/11, former FBI director Louis Freeh, whose agency failed to stop Al Qaeda-attributed terrorism from 1993 to 2001, became the personal attorney for George Tenet’s dubious cohort, Prince Bandar. Sometimes called “Bandar Bush” for his close relationship to the Bush family, Bandar was the Saudi intelligence director from 2005 to 2015.
The company that designed the security system for the WTC complex, Kroll Associates, had strong connections to Saudi Arabia. For example, Kroll board member Raymond Mabus, now Secretary of the Navy, was the U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia in the 1990s. Control of WTC security speaks to the question of how explosives could have been placed in the three tall buildings that were demolished on 9/11.
All four of the contractors that were involved in implementing Kroll’s security design for the WTC had done significant business in the Saudi kingdom. Stratesec, the company that installed the overall electronic security system at the WTC complex, had also managed security for Dulles airport, where Flight 77 took off, and for United Airlines, which owned two of the three other planes. For many reasons, the company’s managers should be primary suspects in the crimes of 9/11. Stratesec was in partnership with a large Saudi engineering and construction company to develop and conduct business in Saudi Arabia.
Another interesting connection between Stratesec and Saudi Arabia was that, in the years leading up to 9/11, Stratesec held its annual shareholders’ meetings in an office that was leased by Saudi Arabia. This was an office in the Watergate Hotel occupied by the Saudi Embassy (run by Prince Bandar).
The Bush and Bin Laden-financed Carlyle Group owned, through BDM International, the Vinnell Corporation, a mercenary operation that had extensive contracts and trained the Saudi Arabian National Guard. Several of Stratesec’s key employees, including its operating manager Barry McDaniel, came from BDM. In 1995, BDM’s Vinnell was one of the first targets of Al Qaeda, in Saudi Arabia.
In the 1990s, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), run by Dick Cheney’s protégé Duane Andrews, trained the Saudi Navy and instructed Saudi military personnel at its company headquarters in San Diego. SAIC had a greater impact on counterterrorism programs in the United States than any other non-government entity and it profited greatly from 9/11.
While SAIC was training the Saudi Navy, the Carlyle/BDM subsidiary Vinnell Corporation was training the Saudi Arabian National Guard. Simultaneously, Booz Allen Hamilton was managing the Saudi Marine Corps and running the Saudi Armed Forces Staff College.
Salomon Smith Barney (SSB), the company that occupied all but ten floors of WTC building 7, was taken over by Citigroup in 1998 after Citigroup was taken over by Saudi Prince Alwaleed, in a deal brokered by The Carlyle Group. Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney joined the advisory board for SSB just after Citigroup’s takeover and they only resigned in January 2001 to join the Bush Administration.
The Saudi government was sued by thousands of 9/11 victim’s family members due to the suspicion that Saudi Arabia helped to finance Al Qaeda. The Saudis hired the law firm of Bush Administration insider James Baker to defend them in that lawsuit.
The 9/11 families’ lawsuit against Saudi royals was thrown out on a technicality related to the ability to sue a foreign government and, later, the Obama Administration backed the Saudis during the appeal.
The world’s leading insurance provider, Lloyd’s of London, filed a lawsuit alleging Saudi involvement in the 9/11 attacks. Lloyd’s dropped the lawsuit just days later without explanation.
After 9/11, it became clear that Saudi officials were supporting terrorism. For example, in the case of the would-be “underwear bomber,” it was revealed that the suspect was working for the CIA and Saudi intelligence.
Saudi Prince Bandar has been accused of coordinating an international ring of terrorism in his role as Saudi intelligence chief. From Egypt to Libya, and now in Syria, evidence suggests that Bandar Bush has led a network of terrorists around the globe, with U.S. support.
Therefore it is not surprising that people who hear claims of Saudi involvement in 9/11 wonder why the discussion remains so limited and always avoids the glaring implications those claims should entail.
Now that the U.S. and Saudi Arabia have “reset” their rocky relationship, calls by U.S. leaders to release the “28 pages” may very well die down. Since the new Saudi King came to the U.S. a few weeks ago, the two governments have rediscovered that they are “close allies” and many new deals are in the works. It remains to be seen what cards U.S. and Saudi leaders will play in the ongoing game of terror and deception but discussions of hijacker financing will probably be left behind.
Human trafficking is certainly one of the most monstrous mass criminal activities ever undertaken by other humans (although calling them “humans” is a bit of a stretch). And yet, there’s a special kind of this deeply repulsive crime that pushes it to diabolical proportions – child trafficking. Underage kids, particularly those who were abandoned, sold or have very poor/abusive family backgrounds, are by far the most vulnerable group. The depraved criminals who engage in such illicit activities specifically target unfortunate children and given there are millions of them all around the globe, particularly in war-torn areas, the “recruitment pool” is effectively endless. Unfortunately, the demand on the black market also seems to be constant and growing, making it a very lucrative and appealing prospect for criminals. … continue
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Israeli Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Rudolph Giuliani knew each other. Giuliani had officially welcomed Netanyahu when he visited New York City as Prime Minister of Israel in 1996. There was no indication, however, from news reports that the two men met in London at the Great Eastern. On the day prior to the London attacks, July 6th, Giuliani was in North Yorkshire at a meeting.
