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Friday the Thirteenth in Paris and the Ugly Truth of State Terror

By John Chuckman | Aletho News | November 19, 2015

Mass murder, as that which just occurred in Paris, is always distressing, but that does not mean we should stop thinking.

Isn’t it rather remarkable that President Hollande, immediately after the event, declared ISIS responsible? How did he know that? And if he was aware of a serious threat from ISIS, why did he not take serious measures in advance?

Within days of Friday 13, French forces assaulted an apartment with literally thousands of bullets being fired, killing a so-called mastermind, Abdelhamid Abaaoud. Just how are you instantly elevated to the rank of “mastermind”? And if security people were previously aware of his exalted status, why did they wait until after a disaster to go after him?

Well, the ugly underlying truth is that, willy-nilly, France for years has been a supporter of ISIS, even while claiming to be fighting it. How do I know that? Because France’s foreign policy has virtually no independence from America’s. It could be described as a subset of American foreign policy. Hollande marches around with his head held stiffly up after getting off the phone at the Élysée Palace, having received the day’s expectations from Washington. He has been a rather pathetic figure.

So long as it is doing work the United States wishes done, ISIS remains an American protectorate, and regardless of Hollande’s past rhetoric, he has acted according to that reality. But something may just have changed now.

It is important to note the disproportionate attention in the West to events in Paris. I say disproportionate because there are equally ugly things going on in a number of places in the Middle East, but we do not see the coverage given to Paris. We have bombs in Lebanon and Iraq. We have daily bombings and shootings in Syria. We have cluster bombs and other horrors being used by Saudi Arabia in Yemen. And of course, there are the ongoing horrors of Israel against Palestinians.

We have endless interviews with ordinary people in Paris, people who know nothing factual to help our understanding, about their reaction to the terror, but when was the last time you saw personal reactions broadcast from Gaza City or Damascus? It just does not happen, and it does raise the suspicion that the press’s concern with Paris is deliberately out of proportion. After all, Israel killed about twenty times as many people in Gaza not very long ago, and the toll was heavily weighted with children, many hundreds of them. Events in Paris clearly are being exploited for highly emotional leverage.

Leverage against what? Arabs in general and Muslims in particular, just part of the continuing saga of deliberately-channeled hate we have experienced since a group of what proved (after their arrest) to be Israeli spies were reported on top of a truck, snapping pictures and high-fiving each other as the planes hit the World Trade Center in 2001. What those spies were doing has never been explained to the public. I’m not saying Israel is responsible for 9/11, but clearly some Israeli government interests were extremely happy about events, and we have been bombarded ever since with hate propaganda about Muslims, serving as a kind of constant noise covering the crimes Israel does commit against Palestinians and other neighbors.

It is impossible to know whether the attack in Paris was actually the work of ISIS or a covert operation by the secret service of an ISIS supporter. The point is a bit like arguing over angels on a pinhead. When you are dealing with this kind of warfare – thugs and lunatics of every description lured into service and given deadly toys and lots of encouragement to use them – things can and do go wrong. But even when nothing goes wrong in the eyes of sponsors for an outfit like ISIS, terrible things are still happening. It’s just that they’re happening where the sponsors want them to happen and in places from which our press carefully excludes itself. Terrible things, for example, have been happening in the beautiful land of Syria for four or five years, violence equivalent to about two hundred Paris attacks, causing immense damage, the entire point of which is to topple a popularly-supported president and turn Syria into the kind of rump states we see now in Iraq.

A covert operation in the name of ISIS is at least as likely as an attack by ISIS. The United States, Israel, Turkey, and France are none of them strangers to violent covert activities, and, yes, there have been instances before when a country’s own citizens were murdered by its secret services to achieve a goal. The CIA pushed Italian secret services into undertaking a series of murderous attacks on their own people during the 1960s in order to shake up Italy’s “threatening” left-wing politics. It was part of something called Operation Gladio. Operation Northwoods, in the early 1960s, was a CIA-planned series of terrorist acts on American civilians to be blamed on Cuba, providing an excuse for another invasion. It was not carried out, but that was not owing to any qualms in the CIA about murdering their own, otherwise no plan would have ever existed. The CIA was involved in many other operations inside the United States, from experiments with drugs to ones with disease, using innocent people as its subject-victims.

There have been no differences worth mentioning between Hollande’s France and America concerning the Middle East. Whatever America wants, America gets, unlike the days when Jacques Chirac opposed the invasion of Iraq, or earlier, when de Gaulle removed France’s armed forces from integration within NATO or bravely faced immense hostility, including a coup attempt undertaken by French military with CIA cooperation, when he abandoned colonialism in Algeria.

If anything, Hollande has been as cloyingly obsequious towards America’s chief interest in the Middle East, Israel, as a group of Republican Party hopefuls at a Texas barbecue fund-raiser sniffing out campaign contributions. After the Charlie Hebdo attack, Hollande honored four Jewish victims of the thugs who attacked a neighborhood grocery store with France’s highest honor, the Legion of Honor. I don’t recall the mere fact of being murdered by thugs ever before being regarded as a heroic distinction. After all, in the United States more than twenty thousand a year suffer that fate without recognition.

Israel’s Netanyahu at the time of the Charlie Hebdo attack actually outdid himself in manic behavior. He barged into France against a specific request that he stay home and pushed himself, uninvited, to the front row of the big parade down the Champs-Élysées which was supposed to honor free speech. He wanted those cameras to be on him for voters back home watching.

Free speech, you might ask, from the leaders of Egypt, Turkey, the UAE, and Israel, who all marched in front? Well, after the free-speech parody parade, the Madman of Tel Aviv raced around someone else’s country making calls and speeches for Jewish Frenchmen to leave “dangerous” France and migrate “home” to Israel. It would in fact be illegal in Israel for someone to speak that way in Israel to Israelis, but illegality has never bothered Netanyahu. Was he in any way corrected for this world-class asinine behavior? No, Hollande just kept marching around with his head stiffly up. I guess he was trying to prove just how free “free speech” is in France.

But speech really isn’t all that free in France, and the marching about free speech was a fraud. Not only is Charlie Hebdo, the publication in whose honor all the tramping around was done, not an outlet for free speech, being highly selective in choosing targets for its obscene attacks, but many of the people marching at the head of the parade were hardly representatives of the general principle.

France itself has outlawed many kinds of free speech. Speech and peaceful demonstrations which advocate a boycott of Israel are illegal in France. So a French citizen today cannot advocate peacefully against a repressive state which regularly abuses, arrests, and kills some of the millions it holds in a form of bondage. And Hollande’s France enforces this repressive law with at least as much vigor as Israel does with its own version, in a kind of “Look, me too,” spirit. France also has a law which is exactly the equivalent of a law against anyone’s saying the earth is flat: a law against denying or questioning the Holocaust. France also is a country, quite disgracefully, which has banned the niqab.

Now, America’s policy in the Mideast is pretty straightforward: subsidize and protect its colony Israel and never criticize it even on the many occasions when it has committed genuine atrocities. American campaign finance laws being what the are, politics back home simply permits no other policy. The invasion of Iraq, which largely was intended to benefit Israel through the elimination of a major and implacable opponent, has like so many dark operations backfired. I call the invasion a dark operation because although the war was as public as could be, all of America’s, and Britain’s, supposed intelligence about Iraq was crudely manufactured and the reasons for undertaking an act which would kill a million people and cripple an entire country were complete lies.

America’s stupid invasion created new room for Iran to exert its influence in the region – hence, the endless noise in Israel and Saudi Arabia about Iran – and it led directly to the growth of armed rabble groups like ISIS. There were no terrorists of any description in Saddam’s Iraq, just as there were no terrorists in Gadhafi’s Libya, a place now so infested with them that even an American ambassador is not safe.

Some Americans assert that ISIS happened almost accidentally, popping out of the dessert when no one was looking, a bit like Athena from the head of Zeus, arising from the bitterness and discontents of a splintered society, but that view is fatuous. Nothing, absolutely nothing, happens by accident in this part of the world. Israel’s spies keep informed of every shadowy movement, and America always listens closely to what they say.

It is silly to believe ISIS just crept up on America, suddenly a huge and powerful force, because ISIS was easy for any military to stop at its early stages, as when it was a couple of thousand men waving AK-47s from the backs of Japanese pick-up trucks tearing around Iraq. Those pick-up trucks and those AK-47s and the gasoline and the ammunition and the food and the pay required for a bunch of goons came from somewhere, and it wasn’t from Allah.

A corollary to America’s first principle about protecting Israel is that nothing, absolutely nothing, happens in Israel’s neighborhood that is not approved, at least tacitly, by the United States. So whether,

in any given instance of supply and support for ISIS, it was Israel or Saudi Arabia or Turkey or America – all involved in this ugly business – is almost immaterial. It all had to happen with American approval. Quite simply, there would be hell to pay otherwise.

As usual in the region, Saudi Arabia’s role was to supply money, buying weapons from America and others and transshipping them to ISIS. Ever since 9/11, Saudi Arabia has been an almost pathetically loyal supporter of America, even to the extent now of often cooperating with Israel. That couldn’t happen before an event in which the majority of perpetrators proved to be Saudi citizens and which led to the discovery that large amounts of Saudi “go away” money had been paid to Osama bin Laden for years. But after 9/11, the Saudis feared for the continuation of their regime and now do what they are told. They are assisted in performing the banking function by Qatar, another wealthy, absolute state aligned with the United States and opposing the rise of any possibly threatening new forces in its region.

Of course, it wasn’t just the discoveries of 9/11 that motivated Saudi Arabia. It intensely dislikes the growing influence of Iran, and Iran’s Shia Muslim identity is regarded by Sunni sects in Saudi Arabia in much the way 17th century Protestantism was viewed by an ultramontane Catholic state like Spain. The mass of genuine jihadists fighting in Syria – those who are not just mercenaries and adventurers or agents of Israel or Turkey or the Saudis – are mentally-unbalanced Sunni who believe they are fighting godlessness. The fact that Assad keeps a secular state with religious freedom for all just adds to their motivation.

ISIS first achievement was toppling an Iraqi government which had been excessively friendly to Iran in the view of Israel, and thereby the United States. Iraq’s army could have stopped them easily early on but was bribed to run away, leaving weapons such as tanks behind. Just two heavy tanks could have crushed all the loons in pick-up trucks. That’s why there was all the grotesque propaganda about beheadings and extreme cruelty to cover the fact of modern soldiers running from a mob. ISIS gathered weapons, territory, and a fierce reputation in an operation which saw President al-Maliki – a man disliked by the United States for his associations with Iran and his criticism of American atrocities – hurriedly leave office.

From that base, ISIS was able to gain sufficient foothold to begin financing itself through, for example, stolen crude sold at a discount or stolen antiquities. The effective splitting up of Iraq meant that its Kurdish population in the north could sell, as it does today, large volumes of oil to Israel, an unheard of arrangement in Iraq’s past. ISIS then crossed into Syria in some force to go after Assad. The reasons for this attack were several: Assad runs a secular state and defends religious minorities but mainly because the paymasters of ISIS wanted Assad destroyed and Syria reduced in the fashion of Iraq.

Few people in the press seem to have noted that ISIS never attacks Israel or Israeli interests. Neither does it attack the wheezingly-corrupt rulers of Saudi Arabia, the Islamic equivalent of ancient Rome’s Emperor Nero. Yet those are the very targets a group of genuine, independent warrior-fundamentalists would attack. But ISIS is not genuine, being supplied and bankrolled by people who do not want to see attacks on Israel or Saudi Arabia, including, notably, Israel and Saudi Arabia. ISIS also is assisted, and in some cases led, by foreign covert operators and special forces.

There does seem to be a good deal of news around the idea of France becoming serious in fighting ISIS, but I think we must be cautious about accepting it at face value. Putin is reported as telling ship commanders in the Mediterranean to cooperate and help cover the French aircraft carrier approaching. Hollande keeps calling for American cooperation too, as Putin has done for a very long time, but America’s position remains deliberately ambiguous. A new American announcement of cooperation with Turkey in creating a “safe zone” across the border with northern Syria is a development with unclear intentions. Is this to stop the Kurds Erdogan so despises fighting in the north of Syria from establishing themselves and controlling the border or is it a method for continued support of ISIS along the that border? Only time will tell.

I do think it at least possible Hollande may have come around to Putin’s view of ISIS, but America has not, and the situation only grows more fraught with dangerous possibilities. I’ve long believed that likely America, in its typically cynical fashion, planned to destroy ISIS, along with others like al-Nusra, once they had finished the dirty work of destroying Syria’s government and Balkanizing the country. In any event, Israel – and therefore, automatically, America – wants Assad destroyed, so it would be surprising to see America at this point join honestly with Putin and Hollande.

America has until now refused Russia any real support, including such basic stuff as sharing intelligence. It cooperates only in the most essential matters such avoiding attacks on each other’s planes. It also has made some very belligerent statements about what Russia has been doing, some from the America’s Secretary of Defense sounding a lot like threats. Just the American establishment’s bully-boy attitude about doing anything which resembles joining a Russian initiative does not bode well.

After all, Putin has been portrayed as a kind of Slavic Satan by American propaganda cranking stuff out overtime in support of Ukraine’s incompetent coup-government and with the aim of terrifying Eastern Europe into accepting more American weapons and troops near Russia’s border, this last having nothing to do with any Russian threat and everything to do with America’s aggressive desire to shift the balance of power. How do you turn on a dime and admit Putin is right about Syria and follow his lead?

And there are still the daily unpleasant telephone calls from Israel about Assad. How do you manoeuvre around that when most independent observers today recognize Assad as the best alternative to any other possible government. He has the army’s trust, and in the end it is the Syrian army which is going to destroy ISIS and the other psychopaths. Air strikes alone can never do that. The same great difficulty for Hollande leaves much ambiguity around what he truly means by “going to war against ISIS.”

It is an extremely complicated world in which we live with great powers putting vast resources towards destroying the lives of others, almost killing thousands on a whim, while pretending not to be doing so. We live in an era shaped by former CIA Director Allen Dulles, a quiet psychopath who never saw an opportunity for chaos he did not embrace.

The only way to end terror is to stop playing with the lives of tens of millions in the Middle East, as America has done for so long, and stop supporting the behaviors of a repressive state which has killed far greater numbers than the madmen of ISIS could dream of doing, demanding instead that that state make peace and live within its borders. But, at least at this stage, that is all the stuff of dreams.

November 19, 2015 Posted by | False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Paris 13/11: Operation Gladio?

By Vanessa Beeley | thewallwillfall | November 18, 2015

“Where no counsel is, the people fall, but in the multitude of counselors there is safety.” – Mossad Motto 

~

On the 13th November 2015 during the Paris attacks, 4.1 million people submitted their personal details to the Facebook Safety App, 360 million people received Facebook messages reassuring them of their friends and family’s safety. This information may well have been deposited into an Israeli intelligence bank.

Paris 13/11 aftershocks.

As the dust settles and the pall of grief envelops the scenes of the 13/11 Paris attacks, information begins to seep through the inevitable cracks in the mainstream media, security apparatus narrative.

Very few “subversive” media outlets in France do as good a job of deconstruction as Panamza.  Their reporting on the Charlie Hebdo affair blazed a trail of evidence to counter the sprawling inaccuracies of the “official” storyline. Their articles over the last two days have motivated my investigation into the insidious drivers possibly behind the 13/11 attacks on the French capital.

Unsurprisingly the common denominator connecting both Charlie Hebdo and Paris 13/11 appears to be the covert involvement of the Israeli security apparatus.

Lets return to the scene of mayhem and bloodshed in Paris on Friday night. The panic that spread like wildfire across social media, tearful messages and desperate attempts to connect with loved ones, suspected to be in the firing zone.

Then suddenly, Facebook “sympathetically” employed its Safety Check APP, to enable terrified families to reconnect with their missing relatives and to reassure themselves of their safety as the bullets ricocheted off the walls & streets of Paris.

The Safety Check APP was originally named the Disaster Message Board and was introduced on October 15, 2014.  Its first major deployment was on Saturday April 25 2015 in the wake of the April 2015 Nepal Earthquake.  The tool has since been utilised after the May 2015 Nepal earthquake and the Pacific Hurricane Patricia October 2015.

The 13/11 Paris attack was the first time that this Safety Check APP was deployed for an “unnatural” disaster.  Over 4.1 million people checked in with friends and relatives, a total of 360 million people received messages that their loved ones were “safe”.

Alex Schultz: Facebook’s vice president of Growth:

“We chose to activate Safety Check in Paris because we observed a lot of activity on Facebook as the events were unfolding. In the middle of a complex, uncertain situation affecting many people, Facebook became a place where people were sharing information and looking to understand the condition of their loved ones… This activation will change our policy around Safety Check and when we activate it for other serious and tragic incidents in the future. We want this tool to be available whenever and wherever it can help.”

Wonderful, I hear you exclaim! Wonderful for whom?

Times of Israel :

“During the 24 hours after the terror attack, 4.1 million people checked in with friends and relatives using Facebook Safety Check, a technology developed by Facebook Israel’s research and development department,” said a spokesperson for Facebook Israel. “A total of 360 million people received messages that their loved ones were safe.”

guy rosen and roi tiger.jpg

Roi Tiger and Guy Rosen of Onavo

The Facebook Safety Check was designed by Roi Tiger, currently Director of Engineering at Facebook, previously Co-Founder, with Guy Rosen, of Onavo which was bought by Facebook in October 2013.

Perhaps coincidence but this acquistion slots neatly into the timeline with the long since debunked Ghouta Chemical weapons claims against the Syrian Government and the seed funding of White House, UK Foreign Office, CIA, Soros backed and funded Syria Civil Defence Group aka the White Helmets.

Roi Tiger

Roi Tiger Facebook Profile Picture.

Roi Tiger is a graduate of IDC Herzliya, Tel Aviv, a “non profit” education organisation dedicated to the promotion of Zionist ideology and the fortification of the illegal state of Israel.

IDC HERZLIYA is committed to the fundamental values of a free and tolerant society, while maintaining a Zionist philosophy – first and foremost, freedom of the individual for self-realization in all realms of thought and action, while striving to strengthen the State of Israel.

Roi Tiger then went on to join the IOF Elite 8200 division, an Israeli Intelligence Corps responsible for collecting signal intelligence (SIGINT) and code decryption, described in 2010 by Le Monde diplomatique, as a massive spying operation. Also in 2010, implicated by US Intelligence in Operation Orchard, the 2007 Israeli air strikes on an alleged nuclear reactor in the Deir Ezzor region of Syria.

Full background to this 2007 Israeli illegal incursion into Syrian airspace here.

So, when people innocently clicked “safe” or put a name of their loved ones into the search box of the Facebook Safety app, it is quite probable that they fed a stream of information directly into the Israeli Intelligence data banks.

Internet.org.jpg

Web front page of Internet.org

Onavo, a relatively small start-up comprising 40 employees, was based in Tel Aviv and was bought by Mark Zuckerburg as part of his all consuming internet.org project which has as its objective, to create universal access to the Internet.

The significance of this purchase is manifold.

It is Facebook’s first foray onto Israeli territory.  In 2012 they purchased Face.com,  an Israeli company focused on powerful facial recognition but this had not precipitated an actual base in Israel.  With the acquisition of Onavo, Facebook Israel was born.

According to TechCrunch, there’s no official figure attached to the deal, but Israeli paper Calcalist reports between $150-200 million and other sources put the figure closer to $100 million. Whether the real sum is closer to the low end or the high end of that range, it’s a massive amount of money for Onavo, which started three years ago and has previously raised around $13 million in venture funding.  – www.digitaltrends.com

This purchase of Onavo and the development of the Safety APP will give Facebook increased capability of compiling one of the most extensive personal data bases in existence in the world today.

On November 11th, 2 days before the Paris attacks, Facebook published a blog report.

“This report, which covers the first half of 2015, provides information about the number of government requests we receive for data, as well as the number of pieces of content restricted for violating local law in countries around the world where we provide service. The report also includes updated information about the national security requests we received from US authorities under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and through National Security Letters.

Overall, we continue to see an increase in content restrictions and government requests for data globally. The amount of content restricted for violating local law increased by 112% over the second half of 2014, to 20,568 pieces of content, up from 9,707. Government requests for account data increased across all countries by 18% over the same period, from 35,051 requests to 41,214″

The full report is here. This is a deliberate policy of obscurantism by Facebook. When one reads their data policy it is obvious that there are no restraints on information sharing. Their figures cannot truthfully reflect the number of Government requests in France that would have spiked, following Charlie Hebdo and even if they do, out of a claimed 2,500+ Government requests for information, only a meagre 295 were “restricted” with very little explanation of what “restricted” actually means.

France FB

“We restricted access in France to content reported under local laws prohibiting Holocaust denial and the condoning of terrorism.”

This statement is rendered portentous by the wave of arrests and house searches sweeping France before the blood is even dry on the streets of Paris and certainly prior to the conducting of a full and objective investigation into the perpetrators of the “greatest atrocity committed on French soil since WWII.” This, according to media pundits reporting from Paris as the propaganda wagon rolls smoothly into its habitual groove.

It must be noted that this deliberately emotive media claim is an insult to the 200+ Algerians massacred by Paris police, during protests against France’s brutal neocolonialist war in Algeria, on the streets of Paris in 1961. Colonialist selective memory fails to honour the ghosts of these  oppressed and marginalised souls, forbidden from protesting the genocide of their people and punished for daring to stand in solidarity with Algerian resistance against French hegemony. Paris police dumped the murdered bodies into the cold waters of the Seine, over 11,500 Algerians were arrested, beaten, starved and later tortured in the Palais des Sports.

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.

As Patrick Henningsen states in his recent 21st Century Wire article: Orwell’s Razor:  All of 21Wire’s predictions come true days after “Paris Attacks”

“Debate on Govt Spying and Privacy Rights, now off the table. As expected, politicians looking to appear ‘tough on terror’ and the growing gaggle of security lobbyists, and other assorted corporate fascists, have called for something akin to a ‘European Patriot Act’ – an end to the ‘Post-Snowden’ debate over bulk data collection and privacy – covering issues like NSA and GCHQ blanket spying on all citizens, and imposing more regulations and government monitoring of mandatory manufacturer ‘back doors’ for computers, mobile phones, gaming consoles, and also calls to make encryption illegal, except for government.”

riot police

“Special” police forces in St Denis, Paris 18/11/2015

CIA & Intelligence Connections

We must also take into consideration the worrying Cyber security developments in the UK:

Lord Mendelsohn: We welcome the appointment of the former British ambassador to Israel, Matthew Gould, who will have a key role in cyber security inside the Cabinet Office – a very useful and important position – Look Who’s in Charge of UK Government Cyber Security.

Matthew Gould, self proclaimed “passionate Zionist”, first Jewish British Ambassador in Tel Aviv and co creator of the controversial UK Israel Tech-Hub which was established to:

“Promote partnerships in technology and innovation between Israel and the UK, and is the first initiative of its kind for the British government and for an embassy in Israel. The hub’s creation followed an agreement between prime ministers David Cameron and Binyamin Netanyahu to build a UK-Israel partnership in technology.”

For full details on this burgeoning UK-Israel cyber marriage, read this excellent piece by Stuart Littlewood.washington.jpeg

Now lets add a little more spice into the evolving narrative.

Two weeks prior to the 13/11 attacks on the 27th of October 2015, Washington Post columnist, David Ignatius was moderator for the CIA-GW [George Washington University] Conference.

Included on the panel of the “Shared 21st Century International Mission” were:

CIA Director John Brennan, former UK MI6 Chief John Sawers, Director of the French Directorate for External Security Bernard Bajolet, and former Israeli National Security Advisor Yaacov Amidror

Perhaps even more concerning is the subliminal message that can be interpreted from DGSE Director, Bernard Bajolet’s remarks, endorsed by CIA Director John Brennan.

“The Middle East will never go back to how it was.  Syria and Iraq will never retrieve their pre-existing features and culture

Syria is already “partitioned”. The Syrian regime only controls a tiny part, perhaps less than one third of the country established post WWII.

The North is under Kurdish control and “we” have the central region under ISIS control [I have deliberately translated the French exactly as it was written]

The situation in Iraq is the same.”

John Brennan:

“When I look at the devastation in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen it is hard to envisage a central government that would be capable of controlling and governing these post WWII territories.

It appears that the partitioning plan for the Middle East is resisting all efforts to reduce its holy grail status. The partitioning plan that best serves the Israeli Yinon plan for Greater Israel and ensures permanent sectarian strife and division in countries bursting at the seams with economic, resource and geopolitical jewels for the Imperialist crown.

The timing of this conference, a mere two weeks prior to the 13/11 Paris attacks that would almost certainly propel France and allies towards increased intervention in Syria & ensure revived calls for a No Fly Zone, must be considered a little more than purely coincidental.

Conclusions

While we must stress that no concrete conclusions may be drawn at this stage, previous Gladio operations, and we would include Charlie Hebdo in that list, lead us to see very clear parallels emerging between the events surrounding Paris 13/11 and those preceding other such attacks.

The omnipresence of the Israeli Intelligence apparatus in its many forms should, at least, motivate us to suspect foul play and to question the white noise mainstream media accounts. The tsunami of propaganda, the conversion of all icons to a French flag, even including Skype heart emoticons, must ring alarm bells.

Experience teaches us that, propaganda is intrinsically linked to government agendas and that terror attacks invariably engender an increase in global oppression, conflict, sectarian division and the suffering of the very peoples universally judged and condemned by scraps of evidence that bear no resemblance to the truth.

As Sayed Nasrallah has said we are living in the age predicted by George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, the propaganda serves to ensure our rapid descent through the layers of social conditioning, from regionalism to individualism, a state of mind where there is potential for the fabric of society to be shredded and scattered into the winds of the brewing “perfect storm”

“A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.” – Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Police and pigeon

St Denis, Paris 18/11/2015.

Police forces operate in Saint-Denis on Wednesday, November 18. Police say two suspects in last week’s Paris attacks, a man and a woman, have been killed in a police operation north of the capital.

November 19, 2015 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, False Flag Terrorism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

One civilian dead, four injured in southeast Turkey clashes

Press TV – November 16, 2015

At least one civilian has been killed and four others have been injured in new clashes between Turkish security forces and members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Turkey’s southeastern province of Mardin.

Police sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the clashes broke out in the city of Nusaybin, situated 792 kilometers (492 miles) east of the capital, Anakara, on Sunday.

A 44-year-old woman was killed during the exchange of gunfire. Her daughter and son along with two men were also wounded.

On Sunday, 10 PKK members surrendered to security forces elsewhere in southeast Turkey.

The Turkish military announced that the Kurdish militants turned themselves in to police in the town of Silopi, in the province of Sirnak.

Turkey has been engaged in a large-scale military campaign against the PKK in its southern border region in the recent past. The Turkish military has also been conducting offensives against the positions of the PKK in northern Iraq.

The operations began in the wake of a deadly July 20 bombing in the southern Turkish town of Suruc, an ethnically Kurdish town located close to border with Syria. Over 30 people died in the Suruc attack, which the Turkish government blamed on Takfiri Daesh terrorists.

After the bombing in Suruc, the PKK militants, who accuse the government in Ankara of supporting Daesh, engaged in a series of supposedly reprisal attacks against Turkish police and security forces, in turn prompting the Turkish military operations.

November 16, 2015 Posted by | Militarism, Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Putin: ISIS financed from 40 countries, including G20 members

RT | November 16, 2015

President Vladimir Putin says he’s shared Russian intelligence data on Islamic State financing with his G20 colleagues: the terrorists appear to be financed from 40 countries, including some G20 member states.

During the summit, “I provided examples based on our data on the financing of different Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) units by private individuals. This money, as we have established, comes from 40 countries and, there are some of the G20 members among them,” Putin told the journalists.

Putin also spoke of the urgent need to curb the illegal oil trade by IS.

“I’ve shown our colleagues photos taken from space and from aircraft which clearly demonstrate the scale of the illegal trade in oil and petroleum products,” he said.

“The motorcade of refueling vehicles stretched for dozens of kilometers, so that from a height of 4,000 to 5,000 meters they stretch beyond the horizon,” Putin added, comparing the convoy to gas and oil pipeline systems.

It’s not the right time to try and figure out which country is more and which is less effective in the battle with Islamic State, as now a united international effort is needed against the terrorist group, Putin said.

Putin reiterated Russia’s readiness to support armed opposition in Syria in its efforts to fight Islamic State.

“Some armed opposition groups consider it possible to begin active operations against IS with Russia’s support. And we are ready to provide such support from the air. If it happens it could become a good basis for the subsequent work on a political settlement,” he said.

“We really need support from the US, European nations, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran,” the president added.

Putin pointed out the change in Washington’s stance on cooperation with Moscow in the fight against the terrorists.

“We need to organize work specifically concentrated on the prevention of terrorist attacks and tackling terrorism on a global scale. We offered to cooperate [with the US] in anti-IS efforts. Unfortunately, our American partners refused. They just sent a written note and it says: ‘we reject your offer’,” Putin said.

“But life is always evolving and at a very fast pace, often teaching us lessons. And I think that now the realization that an effective fight [against terror] can only be staged together is coming to everybody,” the Russian leader said.

According to Putin, first of all it should be decided which groups in Syria can be considered terrorist organizations and which can be attributed to an armed, but still legitimate part of the Syrian opposition.

“Our efforts must be concentrated on the battle with terrorist organizations.”

Putin also disagreed with Western criticism of Russia’s actions in Syria, where the country has been carrying out a large-scale air campaign against Islamic State and other terror groups since September 30.

“It’s really difficult to criticize us,” he said, adding that Russia has repeatedly asked its foreign partners to provide data on terrorist targets in Syria.

“They’re afraid to inform us on the territories which we shouldn’t strike, fearing that it is precisely where we’ll strike; that we are going to cheat everybody,” the president said.

“Apparently, their opinion of us is based on their own concept of human decency,” he added.

Putin told the media that Russia has already established contact with the Syrian opposition, which has asked Moscow not carry out airstrikes in the territories it controls.

November 16, 2015 Posted by | War Crimes | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Paris was tragic, yet global terrorism from the USA mass-murder machine is ignored

Truth News Media | November 14, 2015

The recent events in Paris were undoubtedly horrific, and our thoughts are with those affected by these atrocious acts. The victims and their families, innocent people who did not volunteer to fight in any war, these defenseless civilians were attacked in the most heinous way possible.

And while the world’s media turns its gaze to Paris, there is another act of terrorism happening every day that the corporate media chooses to ignore.

It seems the main export of the USA and UK is terrorism, but sugar coated and wrapped in the PR-friendly guise of ‘promoting democracy’ and ‘protecting our freedoms’, making the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians easier to swallow, or more frequently, completely ignore.

Perhaps ironically then, is the fact that these acts are of course illegal and a violation of international law, and the sad truth is that these rouge nations, the USA and UK themselves are the biggest threats to freedom and democracy. We are witnessing doublespeak in action.

To date, the USA has been responsible for the deaths of at least 20 million people since the end of World War II, in 37 nations. A report by James A. Lucas of Counter Currents explains:

This study reveals that U.S. military forces were directly responsible for about 10 to 15 million deaths during the Korean and Vietnam Wars and the two Iraq Wars. The Korean War also includes Chinese deaths while the Vietnam War also includes fatalities in Cambodia and Laos.

The American public probably is not aware of these numbers and knows even less about the proxy wars for which the United States is also responsible. In the latter wars there were between nine and 14 million deaths in Afghanistan, Angola, Democratic Republic of the Congo, East Timor, Guatemala, Indonesia, Pakistan and Sudan.

These figures do not include the full figures of more recent violations, such as drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Afghanistan.

Statistics obtained by the Bureau Investigates reveal that approximately 2,464 – 7,177 people have been murdered in these nations. It is also estimated that 90% of those killed in these attacks are innocent civilians.

Make no mistake, each one of these 500-plus drone strikes is nothing less than a tax-payer funded terrorist attack.

At the time of publication, there are also a high number of deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan as a result of the illegal invasions, which has cost in excess of a staggering $1,500,000,000,000.

1,455,590 Iraqis have been murdered to date, and at least 91,000 Afghans.

This means nothing to the corporations who profit from global terrorism.

While the little amount of corporate media coverage that is devoted to exposing profiteering remains largely focused on oil firms, there are trillions of dollars being made in the supply of arms.

Companies such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing and BAE Systems as well as many others – often with government connections, are raking in billions of dollars from government contracts.

For example, Lockheed Martin received $36 billion in contracts in a single year.

So while my heart goes out to the victims and families of those affected by the despicable acts carried out in Paris, should we not also turn our outrage and contempt for these cowardly acts towards our own governments – who not only obliterate innocent lives on a daily basis, but actually allow profiteering from mass-murder, resulting in a never-ending cycle of destruction that we’re funding with our taxes.

The ending of terrorism begins with us.

November 15, 2015 Posted by | Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Paris Attacks: A Perfect Pretext For NATO To Mobilize in Syria and Iraq

21st Century Wire | November 14, 2015

To anyone who is really paying attention, the real agenda behind this ‘terror’ event in Paris – is a NATO-sponsored intervention in Syria and northern Iraq.

Also, for the time being, the following will now be buried: any talk of preserving privacy rights in the west, any debate on mass surveillance and bulk data collection, any vocal opposition against mandatory biometric ID’s in Europe, any criticism of Israel’s continued squeeze on the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the overdue Iraq War Inquiry in Britain, and of course – any political opposition to an increased western military presence in Syria, Iraq (and any where else).

RT America reports:

Numerous reports are linking the devastating terrorist attacks in Paris, which left over 150 civilians dead in the French capital, to the Islamic State. But what would such a connection mean for France and, potentially, for NATO? Journalist and international analyst Patrick Henningsen (21st Century Wire ) talks with Sean Thomas about the global impact of the Paris attacks…

November 14, 2015 Posted by | Deception, Video | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Most Americans oppose sending ground troops to fight ISIL: November 4-8 Poll

Press TV – November 14, 2015

Americans are more likely to oppose deploying US ground troops against the Daesh (ISIL) terrorist group in Iraq and Syria as the US considers sending more boots on the ground, a new poll finds.

The latest data are from a November 4-8 Gallup poll that shows 53 percent of Americans oppose sending US ground troops to these countries while 43 percent support the idea.

US President Barack Obama authorized the deployment of “fewer than 50” special forces to Syria on October 30, reversing a longstanding refusal to put US boots on the ground.

“The fairly low level of Americans’ support for deploying ground troops could be related to their reluctance to engage in another major military commitment in Iraq, or elsewhere for that matter,” Gallup said.

A majority of Americans continue to describe the Iraq War as a mistake and have tended to express less support for recent US military involvements.

A US-led coalition has been bombing purported Daesh targets in Syria and Iraq for over a year, but the air campaign has been largely ineffective.

Senior US military officials have said that the US will require “boots on the ground” in Syria and Iraq in order to retake territory from the Daesh.

US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said recently that more US troops could “absolutely” be deployed to Syria if the Pentagon identifies more “capable local forces” that can fight against Daesh.

Earlier this month, US Air Force Lieutenant General Charles Brown said that Washington and its allies will increase airstrikes inside Iraq and Syria in the coming weeks.

November 14, 2015 Posted by | False Flag Terrorism, Militarism | , , , , | Leave a comment

Paris attack may be false flag operation: Analyst

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Press TV – November 14, 2015

The US and France may blame the Syrian government for the Paris attack and start bombing Syria indiscriminately, Edward Corrigan told Press TV on Saturday.

The attacks in Paris, France, could possibly be a “false flag” operation so that the US and its allies can intensify the bombing campaign against Syria, says a political commentator.

A witness told The Associated Press that the shooters shouted “Allahu Akbar” (God is the Greatest) in Arabic as they massacred scores of diners and concert-goers in the French capital.

“Just because somebody goes and says Allahu Akbar doesn’t mean they’re Muslim, it may mean it’s a false flag,” Edward Corrigan told Press TV on Saturday.

The United States and France may blame the Syrian government for the attack and start bombing Syria indiscriminately, Corrigan said.

“You’re going to see a lot of destruction of infrastructure; you’re going get a lot of civilians killed, you’re going to see a massive overreaction like we saw with 9/11, which of course gave the Americans the impetus to invade and attack Iraq, kill over a million Iraqis,” he added.

“Of course Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 but that of course got lost in the smoke and haze.”

Over 150 people were killed in multiple coordinated attacks on Friday in one of the deadliest assaults to hit the French capital since the World War II.

US President Barack Obama condemned the “outrageous” terrorist attacks in Paris, and promised the United States stands ready to provide whatever assistance is necessary to the French government and people.

Obama also called French President François Hollande Friday night. “The two leaders pledged to work together, and with nations around the world, to defeat the scourge of terrorism,” the White House said in a statement.

The terror attacks came just hours after an interview aired in which Obama boasted about recent successes against the Daesh (ISIL) terrorist group. “I don’t think they’re gaining strength,” Obama told ABC News’ “Good Morning America.” “We have contained them.”

Police in major US cities have stepped up security in the wake of the Paris attacks. Officials in New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia said there was no intelligence indicating any threats, but were taking security precautions.

November 14, 2015 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism | , , , , | Leave a comment

Review of PBS Frontline’s The War Behind Closed Doors

By Hadding Scott | Occidental Quarterly | November 8, 2015

While I was in the midst of trying to publicize the Jewish instigation and the folly of invading Iraq in early 2003 as an occasional writer of scripts for American Dissident Voices,  PBS Frontline presented a rather helpful documentary called The War Behind Closed Doors, written by Michael Kirk, and coproduced by Michael Kirk and Jim Gilmore.

The introduction to The War Behind Closed Doors is quite promising, with Frontline’s narrator stating: “Over two decades, they had served three presidents, and argued for one big idea, that the United States must project its power and influence throughout the world. This is the story of how they set out to change American foreign policy in the days immediately after the tragedy of September 11th.” Then, to be more specific about what that means, the intro includes a clip of former CIA analyst Kenneth Pollack saying: “And it does seem very clear that this group seized upon the events of September 11th to resurrect their policy of trying to go after Saddam Hussein and a regime-change in Iraq.” This was a documentary that would clarify who was responsible for the drive for war against Iraq: Neoconservatives — which meant that that the war was not fundamentally about oil.

The documentary describes the path to invasion of Iraq (which seemed imminent but had not yet occurred when the program aired on 20 February 2003) as a struggle between Neoconservatives (also calling themselves “Neo-Reaganites” or “hawks”) led by Paul Wolfowitz, and “pragmatists” or “realists” ostensibly led by Colin Powell. The Neoconservative position was that Saddam Hussein’s government must be destroyed, while the pragmatists, without disputing the Neoconservatives’ provocative claims about Saddam Hussein, advocated containment as the appropriate response.

Brent Scowcroft (a pragmatist who had been an advisor to George H.W. Bush) is shown explaining to an interviewer that George H.W. Bush had deliberately left Saddam Hussein in power in 1991, contrary to what the Neoconservatives had wanted, because it was desirable to preserve a balance of power between Iraq and Iran, and because overthrowing Saddam Hussein might lead to various negative consequences — reasons that in hindsight make excellent sense.

The interviewer, and some other Jewish commentators in the documentary — Kenneth Pollack and Richard Perle — speak as if the goal of the 1991 war had been to remove Saddam Hussein from power, but Scowcroft is adamant that it was not.

LOWELL BERGMAN: I thought we had two interests. One was to evict the Iraqi army from Kuwait, but the other really was to get Saddam out—

BRENT SCOWCROFT: No.

LOWELL BERGMAN: —of power.

BRENT SCOWCROFT: No, it wasn’t.

LOWELL BERGMAN: Well, either covertly or overtly.

BRENT SCOWCROFT: No. No, it wasn’t. That was never — you can’t find that anywhere as an objective, either in the U.N. mandate for what we did or in our declarations, that our goal was to get rid of Saddam Hussein. [PBS Frontline transcript]

The widespread belief that the goal of the 1991 war had been to eliminate Saddam Hussein was supported by the hyperbolic propaganda that had been used. The comparisons of Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler started in the mass-media. In late 1990 President Bush joined the trend by comparing Saddam Hussein (unfavorably) to Hitler, because of the supposed brutality of the Iraqi troops in Kuwait (AP, 2 November 1990).  There was a tendency to see everything in terms of this Hitler comparison, from “He gassed his own people!” to  supposedly unprovoked invasions of neighboring states. Given that President George H.W. Bush had engaged in and never repudiated that kind of crazed propaganda, the first Bush Administration would necessarily be seen as having failed to fulfill a moral imperative when, ultimately, they did the practical thing by leaving Saddam Hussein in power.

In fact, George H. W. Bush did call for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and then refrained from supporting such an effort, as the Neocons have charged. This can be seen either as disingenuous war-rhetoric or as vacillation between the influences of the pragmatists (Scowcroft) and the Neoconservatives (Wolfowitz), or as a combination of the two.

Immediately after the 1991 war, Paul Wolfowitz (as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy) authored a set of military guidelines that would justify preventive war — in other words, war against a state that had not attacked and was not threatening to attack, but might attack someday if not attacked first. Recall that in 1981 the State of Israel had been condemned by the UN Security Council for “preventive war” in its attack on the Osirak nuclear reactor, with the Reagan Administration’s ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick,  also voting to condemn. The President of the Security Council, Porfirio Muñoz Ledo, explained:

The reasons on which the Government of Israel bases its contention are as unacceptable as the act of aggression it committed. It is inadmissible to invoke the right to self-defense when no armed attack has taken place. The concept of preventive war, which for many years served as justification for the abuses of powerful States, since it left it to their discretion to define what constituted a threat to them, was definitively abolished by the Charter of the United Nations. [Security Council Official Records, S/PV.2288 19 June 1981]

Wolfowitz was now advocating that the government of the United States adopt the uninhibited belligerence of the State of Israel, using military strikes to maintain hegemony against merely suspected (or perhaps imagined) threats.

Information about the Wolfowitz Doctrine was leaked to the news media by people within the administration who opposed it, and it became a source of embarrassment. Dick Cheney was ordered to rewrite Wolfowitz’s guidelines in a way that eliminated the option of unilateral preventive war.

Neoconservative William Kristol however commends the Wolfowitz Doctrine, declaring that Wolfowitz was “ahead of his time.” The narrator explains: “One day there would be a more receptive president, and another opportunity.”

That more receptive president was not Bill Clinton.

The narrator implies that George W. Bush was chosen as the likely successor to Bill Clinton as early as 1998, and that a group of “foreign-policy wisemen” including Wolfowitz on one hand and Colin Powell on the other, attempted to groom him for that position.

This period, when the struggle for the mind of George W. Bush occurred, shows most clearly that invading Iraq was not the idea of George W. Bush. William Kristol states that Bush was not immediately supportive of the Neoconservatives’ aggressive foreign policy: “I wouldn’t say that if you read Wolfowitz’s defense policy guidelines from 1992 and read most of Bush’s campaign speeches and his statements in the debates, you would say, ‘Hey, Bush has really adopted Wolfowitz’s worldview.’” Thus the pragmatists initially prevailed over the Neoconservatives, so that George W. Bush, in the period before the election, was advocating a reduced role for American military forces in the world.

The narrator says that Bush’s foreign policy during the first few months of his administration was “stalled between the two competing forces” — stalled between the Neocons and the pragmatists. Kristol indicates that this continued until the 9-11 attacks: “I think you could make a case that on September 10th, 2001, that it’s not clear that George W. Bush was in any fundamental way going in our direction on foreign policy.”

A pivotal moment, following the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, came when Bush delivered a speech that evening that included the line: “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.”

The War Behind Closed Doors treats this as a highly important utterance. Obviously it is important, since rumors that some government harbors or supports terrorists are easy to generate, and were in fact generated. The narrator says: “The hawks welcomed the president’s phrase, ‘those who harbor’ terrorism.” Richard Perle is quoted praising the speech.

David Frum, Bush’s Canadian-born Jewish speechwriter, also praises the speech:

Within 48 hours, he had made the two key decisions that have defined the war on terror. First, this is a war, not a crime. And second, this war is not going to be limited to just the authors of the 9/11 attack but to anyone who assisted them and helped them and made their work possible, including states. And that is a dramatic, dramatic event. And that defines everything.

What Frontline fails to mention is that it was Frum who insisted on that crucial line in Bush’s speech. One week before PBS Frontline aired its documentary, The Nation magazine had already revealed that detail:

It was not, alas, “a war speech.” It did, though, contain the line about making “no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.” And Frum cannot resist informing us he had been the one to insert that thought into every draft of the speech. [David Corn, “Who’s in Charge?” The Nation, 13 February 2003; emphasis added]

This casts a very interesting light on another comment from Frum about the speech: “When he laid down those principles, I don’t know whether he foresaw all of their implications, how far they would take him. I don’t know if he understood fully and foresaw fully the true radicalism of what he had just said.”

Who was really making the big decisions for which Frum liked to give Bush so much credit? Frum had put words into Bush’s mouth and then said that he was not sure that Bush had understood the implications. The picture that we get, by adding just a bit of information that Frontline had omitted, is that George W. Bush was pushed into belligerent posturing by his Jewish advisors.

The pragmatists continued to push the idea of going after terrorists rather than governments; Powell for example spoke of “persuading” governments that might be harboring terrorists. But the fact that the President had already talked about going after governments had created an expectation that was difficult to oppose.

Meanwhile the false notion that Iraq was unfinished business was revived. (Obviously such an evil man must be doing evil things.) The notion that Iraq was somehow a “state sponsor of terrorism” (having been taken off the list of state sponsors of terrorism by the Reagan Administration in 1982, but reinstated amid the war-propaganda of 1990) was bandied about.

Dick Cheney is a favorite target for leftist critics of the War on Terror, and for the John Birch Society, who want a scapegoat that allows them to avoid saying anything critical of Jews. Very often, Cheney is represented as a key “Neocon.” In fact Cheney had worked with the Neoconservatives at various times since the days of “Team B” during the Ford Administration. But William Kristol described Cheney’s position at the beginning of George W. Bush’s presidency thus: “Cheney is a complicated figure and, obviously, a very cautious and reticent figure, so hard to know what he thinks in his heart of hearts. I think he had feet in both camps, so to speak.” In other words, Cheney was not initially committed to the Neoconservative position on Iraq.

George W. Bush adopted the doctrine of preventive war that had been advocated by “the brains” of the Neoconservative outfit, Paul Wolfowitz (see here, p. 41ff, for a portrait of Wolfowitz’s Jewish identity and connections). From this, given 15 years of demonization-propaganda against Saddam Hussein and a little nudging from Jews like David Frum who were positioned to influence George W. Bush, the invasion of Iraq followed.

At the time when The War Behind Closed Doors aired, the Neoconservatives were getting their way and enjoying practically unanimous support for their project, and perhaps it was overconfidence that motivated William Kristol to claim for his Neoconservative movement such unequivocal responsibility for the imminent war. There was always obfuscation about who had agitated for war, with many habitually blaming the oil industry or other economic interests, because such explanations fit their leftist theory about how the world works. It was extremely useful that PBS Frontline documented that it was in fact Neoconservatives who spent more than a decade agitating for that war, and also, if it did not explain exactly who these Neoconservatives were, at least gave some indications about who they were not.

There are however some negative aspects to The War Behind Closed Doors, the worst of them being the propaganda spouted by Jewish television-host Ted Koppel’s Jewish son-in-law, Kenneth Pollack, who also happened to be a former CIA analyst, a sometime member of the National Security Council and various think-tanks, and author of a pro-war book, The Threatening Storm, that was especially influential with liberals. (Pollack had excellent liberal credentials, having served in the Clinton administration; he was also indicted for spying on behalf of Israel, but the indictment was dropped under less than convincing circumstances.) Although supposedly giving an expert outsider’s perspective on the Neoconservatives’ agitation for war, and seeming to criticize the Neoconservatives in some ways, the most important part of what Pollack said really supported the Neoconservatives’ project. I suspected that Pollack was Jewish when I first saw the program in 2003 because of the general thrust of what he was saying, but now it is confirmed.

In the section of PBS Frontline’s The War Behind Closed Doors about Bill Clinton, Pollack promotes the idea that Saddam Hussein really was developing WMDs behind the backs of the UN’s weapons-inspectors, and tries to portray the clashes in the 1990s between Iraqi officials and the UN’s inspectors as the expression of some kind of psychological strategy on Saddam Hussein’s part for undermining “containment.” Frontline should have pointed out that there was no direct evidence for any ongoing WMD-program. It was all speculation, based, as Pollack says, on the fact that the Iraqis gave the inspectors trouble. But the friction between inspectors and Iraqi authorities was easily explained with the fact that the inspection-team, infiltrated by agents of the CIA, appeared to have been used to try to orchestrate a coup:

But one of the problems is, is that you have a situation, in June of 1996, where the United States is fomenting a coup against Saddam Hussein, a coup based upon Special Republican Guard units. At the same time, you have an UNSCOM inspection, UNSCOM 150, which is in Iraq, creating a confrontation by inspecting Special Republican Guard sites.  [Scott Ritter, PBS Frontline: Spying on Saddam, 27 April 1999].

These known facts should have been brought to bear on Pollack’s statements.

The Newsweek of 24 February 2003, four days after this documentary aired, quoted Saddam Hussein’s son, General Hussein Kamel, as telling an interrogator in 1995: “All weapons — biological, chemical, missile, nuclear — were destroyed.” Pollack, with his positions in government as a supposed expert on Iraq, should have known about this.

It is the major fault of The War Behind Closed Doors that it allows Pollack’s claims in support of the WMD accusation to go undisputed.  Pollack admitted after the invasion that he had been wrong (“I made a mistake based on faulty intelligence.”  New York Times Magazine, 24 October 2004), but it is worse than being wrong: he was either a liar or incompetent. The failure to challenge Pollack’s statements is a crucial omission in PBS Frontline’s presentation, because the proposition that Saddam Hussein had been 100% successful in circumventing weapons-inspections was essential to the argument for war. Add the claim that weapons-inspections were not working (and probably could not work) to the premise that Saddam Hussein is “another Hitler,” and it becomes self-evident that one must go to war.

November 9, 2015 Posted by | Deception, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, Video, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

‘US-led coalition disjointed in fighting ISIS as some members have own plans’ – Iraq’s ex-PM

RT | November 8, 2015

The US-led coalition has been “unbelievably” inefficient in fighting the terror group Islamic State, possibly because some members have their plans for the terrorists, Iraq’s former PM told RT.

Nouri al-Maliki, who stepped down as the head of the Iraqi government last year and remains a vice-president, believes that Iraq was targeted by a “regional conspiracy” and is at risk of breaking up. He also said inviting Russia to target Islamic State targets in Iraq could play a positive part in the debacle.

Describing the effort of the international coalition led by the US to cripple ISIS fighters in Iraq, Maliki said it was “inefficient”.

“It’s unbelievable and unacceptable that more than 60 nations comprising this coalition that have the most modern aircraft and weapons at their disposal have been conducting their campaign in Iraq for 14 months and IS still remains in the country,” he told RT’s Arabic-language sister-channel Rusiya Al-Yaum.

Maliki cited the loss of the city of Ramadi and the major oil refining center Baiji to ISIS, both of which happened after the coalition started bombing the terrorists, as proof that not enough is being done by the coalition.

“Some members of the coalition have their own strategies that account for ISIS either continuing to exist or being destroyed. They also consider what would happen after ISIS’s destruction. I believe they are indecisive, trying to calculate what happens. What will be the situation in Iraq, in the region, will the map look the same? Or maybe ISIS is a key instrument for changing the situation in Iraq and the region?” he asked.

Maliki says Russia helped Iraq in the aftermath of the fall of Mosul to the Islamic State by providing weapons and may help more by expanding to Iraq its bombing campaign in Syria. He said the Russian effort had proven to be efficient.

“The Russian involvement in Syria and the intensive bombings have stopped the offensive of many terrorist groups. This involvement hurt the terrorists a lot and inspired the Syrian troops. Russia’s actions also stunned the international coalition. In just days and weeks Russia delivered strikes against major terrorist positions in Syria. And where is the international coalition of more than 60 nations that had achieved nothing in 14 months in Iraq?” he said.

Maliki said the Iraq government is dragging its feet on inviting Russia, partially due to pressure from the US.

“If somebody has a strong position in the region and then another nation starts using its capabilities the former party is naturally concerned. It was believed that Russia’s presence in the region was over. But now Russia has a comeback to fight terrorism alongside Iraq and Syria. And a situation where decision, which could be previously taken unilaterally, should now be taken in partnership, causes concern,” Maliki said.

November 8, 2015 Posted by | Deception, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Turkish plans to attack Islamic State excuse for hitting Kurds

RT | November 6, 2015

Ankara is worried about possible Kurdish-American collaboration after the backing the Kurds got from Moscow, says Dr. Jamal Wakim, Professor of History and International Relations at Lebanese University.

Turkey says it will carry out a military operation against ISIS in the near future, without specifying when.

RT: Turkey’s already carrying out air strikes. What kind of military operation does it have in mind now?

Dr. Jamal Wakim: Well, I believe that Turkey’s declaration that it intends to launch a military operation against ISIL is a mere cover up for its real intention to wage a war against the Kurds. It is on the Kurds and against the PKK [Kurdistan Workers’ Party] militants. Especially that Turkey is worried now; mainly Erdogan is worried about the prospects of Kurdish-American collaboration after the backing that the Kurds got from Moscow.

In this case the Kurds of Turkey, who are spread over 40 percent of Eastern Anatolia, will be in a better position to pressure for getting their own rights within Turkey on the one hand, and maybe they can push for autonomy or even independence as they claimed in the past four decades. So that is why I believe that the real intention is to wage a war against the Kurds and marginalize them at the time when the Kurds are getting support from both the US and Russia at the same time.

RT: Turkey has been using its air strikes to take out Kurdish targets. Is fighting ISIL just a pretext?

Dr. JW: In the past two years the main support that ISIL got was from Turkey. Mainly there were media reports in the West about logistical support, about using Turkish airports – ISIL militants would go to Turkish airports and then go by land to Northern Syria and Iraq. When Turkey declared that it was launching attacks on ISIL, actually its main attacks were on the Kurds of Northern Syria.

There were even media reports that said that ISIL served the purpose of Turkey to clear out the Kurds from Northern Syria, especially in the case of Kobani at one point, and to target the Christian population that is considered as hostile to Turkish influence in Northern Syria. That is why I don’t believe that the intention of Turkey is really to fight ISIL.

November 7, 2015 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , , | Leave a comment

Who Will Blink in Syria? Russia? Or the US?

By Paul Larudee | Dissident Voice | November 5, 2015

The first to die will be US troops. Russians will be made to appear as the killers, but the agents will probably be ISIS, Al-Qaeda (aka al-Nusra), Turks, or the Americans themselves. I’m not ruling out that the Russians might actually do the job, especially if the Americans order their 50 soldiers to the most likely Russian bombing targets and then dare the Russians to hit them. But most likely, the US will do the job itself and not take a chance that the Russians might miss.

Those dead American soldiers are needed as bargaining chips so as to up the ante. Next, Russians have to die, with or without a mutual secret agreement to that effect.

The strategy is based upon the assumption that if the stakes become high enough, the other side will back down. It is called brinkmanship, and its best known example was the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. One or both sides may believe that they are bluffing, but if their bluff is called are they really going to back down? Or are they going to up the ante so much that they end up in a real war, where they are required to respond to the other’s actions with ever-escalating effect?

I do not think the Russians will blink. They have had enough of American encroachment. They will not stand for further NATO poaching of their erstwhile Warsaw Pact allies, and certainly not in Ukraine, which is to Russia roughly as Canada is to the US. Similarly, the port of Tartus in Syria is Russia’s only Mediterranean naval base, and Syria is currently its only ally in the Arab world. Russia has much more at stake than the US, and is therefore much less likely to back down. In fact, Russia has clearly made a major commitment to the preservation of Syria, and waited a long time before doing so, which is another sign that they will not shrink soon from their decision to stay the course.

On the American side, the stakes are much less well defined. Syria is part of the post-USSR assertion of US global dominance, as advocated mainly by the neoconservative strategic movement, closely allied with Israeli and Zionist interests, which benefits from the Israel Lobby clout in the US. From its base in the Congress and the National Security Agency, this movement has made inroads into the intelligence services, the State Department and the Department of Defense, mainly at the top echelons. (Elected and appointed positions are the most vulnerable to lobbyist penetration.)

Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the neocons argued that the US should use its military might to mold the world into US-controlled fiefdoms. Plans for such domination have been variously described in the “Clean Break” proposal, the “Project for a New American Century”, and the “New Middle East”. They begin with the destruction (aka “regime change”) of seven Middle Eastern countries, of which Iraq and Libya are considered successfully catastrophic outcomes, and a model for what is to be done to Syria.

Part of the purpose is to remove “bad examples” of nations that refuse to open their economies to U.S. exploitation and to accept US direction of their foreign policy, regardless of their own national interests. Iran and Syria are current examples of such countries, as were Libya and Iraq prior to their destruction. If these objectives happen to coincide with the Israeli policy of destroying the countries in its neighborhood, we may be forgiven for thinking that this is not mere coincidence.

Also on the American side, the stakes are ruled to a greater extent by domestic politics. Having championed the cause of regime change in Syria, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are loathe to appear weak or indecisive, and thus vulnerable to Republican criticism. In any case, they rely heavily on the Israel Lobby, which appears willing to sacrifice America’s fortune and youth on the altar of Israeli interests.

Despite these considerations, the American motives are not as strong as those of Russia. The problem is, neither is American leadership. There is a clear way out of this confrontation, with a face-saving agreement, if only the US will allow it to happen. It is for Russia and the US to cooperate in eliminating ISIS, al-Qaeda and their allies, cutting off US support for these terrorist organizations, forcing US allies Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and others to do the same, and jointly convening a peace conference that brings indigenous Syrian groups together to negotiate an agreement that allows all sides to claim victory (even if it is something of a charade, as are most such agreements).

Brinkmanship is unnecessary. It is dangerous, and it is not a solution. Vladimir Putin is ready to achieve a negotiated outcome that protects Russia’s interests and ends US encroachment. Assad has never been an enemy of the US, and he is the current choice of the vast majority of the Syrian people, whether enthusiastically or reluctantly (as in most countries). The United States will be able to claim victory over its terrorist enemies as well as a compromise over the form of government in Syria, and a new positive working relationship with Russia. The Israelis will be upset that we have not done enough killing for them, but they will get over it, in the same way that they are reluctantly learning to live with the US-Iran settlement on nuclear development.

It shouldn’t be a question of who blinks first, but of having the option to continue blinking at all.

Paul Larudee is one of the founders of the Free Gaza and Free Palestine Movements and an organizer in the International Solidarity Movement.

November 6, 2015 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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