George Orwell’s guide to the news ……….

http://dprogram.net

November 29th, 2011

(RussiaToday) – The Western mainstream media falsifies the news resorting to euphemisms, half-truths and lies in the best (worst) style of George Orwell’s novel 1984. We all live in the unreal world of “Newspeak” used by the Global Power Elite to control our minds.

Man gets confused when things that happen around him and to him, or which are done in his name, cannot be properly grasped, understood or made sense of. Normally, such confusion leads to inaction. If you’re lost at night in the middle of a forest but you can still see the stars, then a bit of astronomical knowledge will at least quickly tell you which way is north. But if it’s cloudy or you’re ignorant of the constellations in starry heaven, then you might as well light up a fire and do nothing until dawn…. You’re Lost!

Today, mainstream media coverage uses programmed distortion, confusion, even outright lying when its Money Power masters order it to support the “official story” on any major political, economic or financial process. When looked at closely, however, the “official story” of things can be seen to be inaccurate, misleading, often hardly believable if not downright stupid.

Examples of this: Iraq’s inexistent WMD’s leading to the invasion and destruction of that country; global mega-banker bail-outs with taxpayer money; irrational US diplomatic, military, financial and ideological alignment to Israeli objectives; “we-killed-Osama-Bin-Laden-and-dumped-his-body-into-the-sea”; and the wide array of “whodunits” surrounding 9/11 in New York and Washington, 7/7 in London, the AMIA/Israeli Embassy attacks in Buenos Aires in 1992/1994, and – of course – that all time favorite: who shot JFK…?

These are but a few of the paradigmatic cases that have at least served to trigger millions of people to wake up and think with their own minds instead of the mainstream media’s! But unfortunately the vast majority of such cases are not so clear-cut. The vast majority of Newspeak lies are like knots, difficult to untie as they carry built-in complexity resembling Gordian Knots. And, as with all Gordian Knots, you need to cut right through them, and this requires swift and precise action plus a good measure of intellectual courage.

To give an example of what we say, let’s take a quick look at how a “Newspeak” operation works. It requires sequential planning, it requires time, it requires proper logistics, it requires “credible” spokespeople in public and private sectors, it requires choosing the right words and images at the right time and in the right circumstances.

So, let’s say the Global Power Elite – working through the governments of the US, UK, EU into which they are deeply embedded, and joint-venturing with a wide array of media outlets, defense companies, oil companies, security and construction companies, and powerful lobbies – decide that they wish to overrun and destroy a specific country… Libya, for example…

How do they ensure that “the international community” will just quietly look on (except for the still relatively small minority of voices that are increasingly raising hell against them)?

The Seven Step Mainstream Media Country Destruction Guide

1. First, they start by targeting a country ripe for “Regime Change”, and brand it a “rogue state”; then…

2. They arm, train, finance local terrorist groups through CIA, MI6, Mossad, Al-Qaeda (a CIA operation), drug cartels (often CIA operations) and call them “freedom fighters”; then…

3. As mock UN Security Council Resolutions are staged that rain death and destruction upon millions of civilians, they call it “UN sanctions to protect civilians”; then…

4. They spread flagrant lies through their “newsrooms” and paid journalists, and call it “the international community’s concerns expressed by prestigious spokespeople and analysts…” then…

5. They bomb, invade and begin to control the target country and call it “liberation”; then…

6. As the target country falls fully under their control, they impose “the kind of democracy that we want to see” (as Hillary Clinton before visiting Egypt and Tunisia on March 10, 2011), until finally…

7. They steal appetizing oil, mineral and agricultural reserves handing them over to Global Power Elite corporations, and impose unnecessary private banking debt and call it “foreign investment and reconstruction.”

Their keynotes are: Force and Hypocrisy, which they have used time and again to destroy entire countries, always in the name of “freedom”, “democracy”, “peace” and “human rights”. Utmost force and violence is used to achieve their ends and goals.

Their Elders recommended this many decades ago in a blueprint for World Domination written on a hoary manuscript of old…

“What did you say…? That you don’t want to be ‘liberated’ and ‘democratized’?!?”

“Then, take this Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Hanoi, Berlin, Dresden, Baghdad, and Basra!! Take that Tokyo, Gaza, Lebanon, Kabul, Pakistan, Tripoli, Belgrade, Egypt, El Salvador and Grenada!! And take that, Panama, Argentina, Chile, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Somalia, Africa!!”

Always bombing people to smithereens… Always, of course, in the name of “freedom”, “democracy”, “peace” and “human rights”

Adrian Salbuchi for RT

Source: Russia Today

Thierry Meyssan on the Invasion of Tripoli – Critical Eyewitness account (English) (Sept 2, 2011) ……..

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The Greatest Plot Against the Ron Paul Camp To Date ……

Posted on August 30, 2011 by dandelionsalad

by Sibel Edmonds
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Originally published by Boiling Frogs Post
August 30, 2011

Image by * OaklandMofo.com * via Flickr

Who ‘Really’ Is this Bruce Fein?

“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.” – Marcus Tullius Cicero

Last week, right after publishing my article on Congresswoman Schmidt and Bruce Fein’s brilliant foreign lobby money rechanneling-laundering scheme, and to my shock, I found out about this:

The Ron Paul 2012 Presidential Campaign announced today that constitutional and international law expert Bruce Fein will join the campaign as senior advisor on legal matters.

“Bruce Fein’s participation adds to our campaign’s already intellectual heft, enabling us to more broadly engage the conversation about constitutionality, civil liberties and the dangers to national security of an increasingly interventionist foreign policy,” said Ron Paul 2012 Campaign Chairman Jesse Benton.

While some at Rep. Paul’s Camp were busy celebrating and cheering the announcement as a brilliant strategic move, I was frantically gathering cases and research notes, corresponding with current and former colleagues from the intelligence community who had come to support Rep. Paul, and communicating with a few friends with Rep. Paul’s Campaign who were equally troubled by this development.

I understand the ‘cheering’ side of Paul’s camp as they have been excited and impressed by the in- writing-and-words-only side of Bruce Fein. Not so different than those who were fired up and sold on the in-words-only rhetoric and promises staged by President Obama. The Constitutional Scholar Fein and the Constitutional Expert Obama. A Great Penman Fein and the Great Orator Obama…and of course the contradicting realities and the contradicting facts.

However, in this case, there are already too many established facts and too much history on Mr. Fein, and way too many rational and realistic people among Paul supporters to ring the alarm bells and counter this great threat before it’s too late. I will go as far as calling the penetration of the Ron Paul camp by Bruce Fein ‘the greatest threat to Paul’s camp to date,’ and will make a solid case for this characterization based on glaring and alarming facts; facts and concerns shared by several loyal Paul advisors today.

Who is the real Bruce Fein? Why there are so many different versions of Fein – one contradicting the other? How do his real actions and intimate associations stand in stark contrast to Ron Paul? What is the most likely plot in planting Mr. Fein within Paul’s campaign?

Foreign Lobby & Influence Peddling

Ron Paul has been consistent and exemplary in his strongly held principles on the Foreign lobby and influence peddling; a rarity in the US Congress. He has displayed intense disdain for foreign lobbying and foreign influence. He even considers congressional ‘junkets’ as another means to be compromised: stressing that he would not travel abroad on agenda-driven foreigners’ dime: “I just think it’s unnecessary for congressmen to travel overseas, and the people in our district were on my side,” he said in an interview. “You don’t need to go to Bosnia to understand we have no business there.”

With Bruce Fein you have exactly the opposite stand. He has been a crusty foreign lobbyist making millions of dollars peddling his foreign bosses’ interests and influence in Congress and government agencies. For Fein it has never mattered who the foreign client or what their agenda. He does not care whether his foreign clients are criminals or terrorists or dictators. As long as they pay him handsomely he’ll sell their agenda and interest no matter what they may be. The words ‘principle’ or ‘taking a stand’ have never entered this foreign lobbyist’s dictionary or comprehension:

One minute, on behalf of one set of his foreign designated ‘terrorist’ bosses, Bruce Fein is busy selling the need for a genocide declaration by the US Congress against one nation:

“For the past year I have written about Bruce Fein in many articles that have been widely published and circulated. He is reportedly paid $100,000 per month to tell lies in Washington about the Government of Sri Lanka… Who are the American individuals backing this group? Where are they getting their money to pay Bruce Fein? Does former US Ambassador Blake have something to do with them…”

The next minute, on behalf of another well-known foreign mob boss, Bruce Fein is busy peddling influence and selling Congress his foreign bosses’ anti-genocide agenda:

“In 2007, Ayasli transferred $30 million in stock to fund a new endeavor, the nonprofit Turkish Coalition of America. The organization is headquartered in a Washington suite that has also been listed as the address for the Turkish Coalition USA PAC, the lobbying firm of Lydia Borland (who has represented the Turkish government), and the law firm of Bruce Fein and Associates (Fein comprises half of the Turkish American Legal Defense Fund)…”

“materials put out by the Turkish Coalition of America and authored by a lawyer, Bruce Fein, who now represents Schmidt in the complaint, say that Congresswoman Schmidt has on numerous occasions voiced her opposition to such resolutions and maintains that the historical question is not appropriate for Congress to legislate. The congresswoman, based on her independent research, does not believe the tragic events constitute genocide…”

Bruce Fein sees no problem with representing foreign groups like this:

Fein hit the jackpot in 1991 when he signed on to represent Mozambique’s notorious guerrilla army, RENAMO, which was seeking to overthrow its country’s leftist government. When Fein came on board, RENAMO’s reputation has hit bottom…

…

Even the Reagan and Bush administrations kept their distance from RENAMO, despite their anti-Communist rhetoric…

…

Fein, however, eagerly signed up to flack for Dhlakama’s terror army. Like most foreign lobbyists, he bilked his client for huge sums of money while performing virtually no work.

Mr. Fine, who now fakes and preaches non-interventionism and anti-influence peddling only to echo Ron Paul, in real life has been practicing the exact opposite:

“Now, Fein has returned to lobbying and is working for a client that has the dubious distinction of making RENAMO look good: The Sudan. That country’s government is barred from receiving U.S. foreign aid because of its support for terrorism and because of its revolting human rights record. Amnesty International reports that the Sudanese government not only assassinates and tortures its “enemies,” but that paramilitary forces have kidnapped scores of children, who are believed to be held in domestic slavery by their abductors or taken to camps in remote rural areas, where they are trained for military service”

Here is another on-the-spot description of Real Bruce Fein as a crusty “Beltway Prostitute”:

“Well, well, well. Wasn’t Bruce Fein just recently condemning the Government of Sri Lanka for trying to put an end to the LTTE? But this time he’s defending a sovereign government for protecting itself – rather than slandering it using falsehoods. Now you see what I mean when I earlier referred to Mr. Fein as a “Beltway prostitute.” He will accept money from anyone who can pay the price – regardless of where that money came from, or who his legal and public relations services might unjustly hurt. What an embarrassment to the US legal profession.”

You see, for Mr. Fein pimping the Congress on behalf of foreign clients is about dollars. Nothing more; nothing less. Whether it is advocating additional foreign aid for one country while our nation is being bankrupted, or dragging our Congress to get involved with domestic meddling and the affairs of another foreign country, Bruce Fein has never been about the United States’ interests; just the opposite. Give Fein the dollars and he’ll sign up to lobby for any one: terrorists, corrupt foreign governments, mobsters, assassins …

Long pocketed as a ‘lobbyist’ by Pakistan, Sudan, Turkey, Tamil, and others, Bruce Fein is the exact antithesis to Ron Paul’s principled position on issues related to foreign lobby, corruption and influence peddling in government.

Overt Neocon Ties & Covert Israel Pedigree

Ron Paul has been in staunch opposition and a counter to Neocon agendas and field players. Whether on the Israel lobby and agenda driving the hawkish currents in our nation today, or the corporate war machine interests guiding our foreign policy practices, Paul has consistently stood firm and unrelenting.

Mr. Fein’s public pedigree makes it fairly easy to spot his overt ties and links. For example: he has been an adjunct scholar with the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). By now I think the majority of Americans know about AEI’s claim to fame:

“AEI is the most prominent think tank associated with American neoconservatism, in both the domestic and international policy arenas.[10] Irving Kristol, widely considered a father of neoconservatism, is a senior fellow at AEI, and many prominent neoconservatives—including Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ben Wattenberg, and Joshua Muravchik—spent the bulk of their careers at AEI.”

A well-known couple of facts about AEI:

1- In order to be accepted by AEI, to become one of their scholars, proven neoconservative inklings and ties are the never-waivered prerequisites.

2- AEI seeks candidates who put Loyalty and Allegiance to Israel above all.

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt state in their controversial bestseller, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, that the tone of the right-leaning component of the Israel lobby results from the influence of the leaders of the two top lobby groups: AIPAC, and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. They go on to list, as right-leaning think tanks associated with the lobby, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and the American Enterprise Institute.

Acceptance to the tightly knitted and guarded AEI Neocon community also extends to family members and religious affiliations. Bruce Fein has passed both litmus tests in becoming a highly-regarded member of AEI. His wife, Mattie Fein, has been a vocal hawk, neocon propaganda distributor, and a very familiar face within the Beltway neocon community:

In 2007, Fein penned an opinion piece in the Washington Times calling on the United States to pledge military support to Iranian dissidents in the event of an uprising. Fein, whose father is of Iranian descent, was identified in the piece as the founder and president of the Institute for Persian Studies.

While Fein’s AEI and neocon connections and strong ties are overtly stated, his loyalties and allegiance to Israel and the Israel lobby are not; that is, until you start digging. A former AEI member who now works as a congressional aid stated, ‘Bruce Fein was liked and trusted there as ‘one of them,’ a real Jewish man loyal to Israel and its interests.’

Fein has been successful in playing both sides of this field, and keeping his Israel related activities and ties mainly covert. However, in 2010, Fein’s wife, Mattie Fein, began expressing the couple’s views on Israel and Israel’s interests less covertly. Some attribute that to Mattie Fein’s desperate need and her fierce competition with Harman over Israel lobby dollars. Here is Mattie’s response to the test question by the Zionist community:

7. Would you support Israel taking military action to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons? Under what circumstances?

The United States should support whatever Israel believes is justified by national security worries over Iran.

And here is Bruce Fein’s buddy from AEI, the scandalous John Bolton, who’s been backing the Fein couple including Mattie Fein’s fundraising and campaign:

I was privy to some of the logistics involved in setting up the fundraiser that Bolton held for Mattie’s campaign. It amazed me how quickly some establishment Republicans tried to steal the thunder of Bolton’s appearance through various subterfuges and poaching, and it is a credit to the man’s character and timber that he refused to be a part of it. He was there to endorse Mattie Fein against Jane Harman, and he wouldn’t let third parties screw that up.

Mattie Fein’s established Neocon pedigree, her hawkish propaganda and activities nicely echoes Bolton’s own.  Some liken the relationship to mentor-protégé dynamics that began with the marriage to Fein and entry into the AEI circle.

The Question of Ethics …or Lack of

Even Ron Paul’s foes would admit that he has been a man of principle throughout his life; both inside and outside his congressional career. Those who may disagree with his political platform and stand would acknowledge his adherence to ethical practices, whether in his personal-family life or career.

Bruce Fein’s career on the other hand, in contrast to his writings and well-played public role, has been driven by lucrative foreign lobbying deals, influence peddling in the halls of Congress, the State Department and the CIA, and all that mostly for foreign agendas directly in conflict with those of Americans. Not only that, his regard for ethics as an attorney appears to be nonexistent. In his most recent scandal involving indirect funneling of foreign lobby dollars to Rep. Jean Schmidt, he was determined to have been intentionally misguiding his client on the sources of $500,000 dollars in legal fees:

In a statement released on August 5, the House Ethics Committee ruled that Rep Jean Schmidt has received multiple improper gifts totaling $500,000 from the Turkish Coalition of America (TCA) between 2008 and 2010. The Committee ruled that Schmidt must pay the money back, However, she will not face sanctions by the House as she was able to pin the blame for her behavior on her attorneys Bruce Fein and David Saltzman

You can read the full report by the House Ethics Committee here. It remains to be seen whether anyone will go after Bruce Fein and his license for this highly scandalous case and ethics violations. His two possible explanations for this case would be: 1- I did not tell my client that my legal representation of her case was part of foreign lobby money funneling to her; 2- My client was fully aware of the foreign lobby bribery nature of my legal representation and services, but to protect her and my foreign bosses I took the blame. Under either explanation one glaring point remains clear, and that is the lack of ethics on behalf of the involved attorney-Bruce Fein. On the other hand, Mr. Fein appears to have had practice in riding ethics related scandals and waves. At least in the scandalous ethic violations case  involving Bruce Fein and his partner Ephraim Chukwuemeka Ugwuonye, Esq.

I started with that famous quote from Marcus Tullius Cicero because it applies to this report and the plots delivered from within. When it comes to Ron Paul’s Campaign no one would ever have to worry about known snakes and neocons like Paul Wolfowitz or Richard Perle. The enemy sent to you will be one who talks just like you; speaks your words and shouts your slogans. And does so very convincingly.

I have tried to be brief with carefully and well-sourced facts and cases to provide a factual profile for the real Bruce Fein. Considering the facts and who Mr. Fein is, and has been, why would he methodically go about attaching himself to Ron Paul and his campaign? After consulting with several well-respected and trust-worthy sources, the troubling answer was summed up in two possibilities:

1- This is a commonly used ploy by the establishment to penetrate Ron Paul and his camp which has been gaining momentum. This is where the plant carries inside information and strategic plans to the establishment, and simultaneously tries to exert negative influence over decision making and strategy-setting processes.

2- The plant willingly and knowingly becomes the fall-guy bringing down the target candidate. Highly damaging and scandalous information about the plant would be strategically released to the media-public, and the candidate suffers the ultimate consequences.

Personally I am leaning more towards the second possibility and here is why:

I was privy to the extensive rap sheet maintained on Mr. Fein, his foreign mob bosses and their operations at J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. Mr. Fein is well aware of this rap sheet and the FBI’s long-maintained operations. I know with certainty that if released by the FBI, whether partially or completely, it would be used as ongoing front-page headlines by the media, to bring down the entire Paul campaign before the primaries.

Ron Paul already has a highly-respected constitutional scholar who is articulate, eloquent, passionate, and most importantly, trust-worthy, clean, and from outside the poisonous capital beltway. That person is Tom Woods. Paul does not need this man Fein. He does not need this glitzy-oily foreign lobbyist who stands in total contrast to Paul’s platform.

I like Ron Paul. I support his stand on foreign policy related matters and his objectives on what need to be changed. I applaud Paul’s stand on our liberties, and I back his quest for a much smaller government. I have done so for years. Please don’t let the establishment succeed in their plot. Bruce Fein is the greatest threat to Paul’s movement to date. He would be a stain – a taint; not one easily removed after the fact. Please begin the countdown, and have Ron Paul remove this man from the campaign as a trusted advisor and insider. Let the countdown begin today; at this hour -at this very minute. Before it is too late.

see

Rep. Jean Schmidt Found Guilty of Accepting $500,000 in ‘Indirect’ Turkish Lobby Payment by Sibel Edmonds

Turkish Lobby on Dandelion Salad

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Libya / Breaking News: 21/08/2011 – rebel advances on Tripoli a fake! Disinformation campaign, RT ……

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The World Today: Exposing the Lies of Mainstream Media

The mainstream media is owned by bankers and corporate kingpins
Global Research, May 25, 2011
- 2011-05-21
“Truth has to be repeated constantly, because Error also is being preached all the time, and not just by a few, but by the multitude.  In the Press and Encyclopaedias, in Schools and Universities, everywhere Error holds sway, feeling happy and comfortable in the knowledge of having Majority on its side.”   –Goethe Dear Readers, Thank you for visiting Global Research! We are reassured to know that you have come to this site because you are looking to find the truth, the REAL truth behind the “news”, to understand the political, social and economic forces shaping the world you live in. Though Goethe made his insightful observation two hundred years ago, his words hold more meaning today than ever in history. Error can indeed be found throughout stories in the mainstream press, in ”official reports” and coming from the very mouths of world leaders, many “democratically” elected. But what even Goethe could not have predicted is the broad extent to which these errors are knowingly, deceptively and insidiously woven into our daily news, effectively subverting the masses and keeping them blind and apathetic to the empirically-driven motives of the world’s elite. If you are visiting this site, it is because you have realized that things aren’t “adding up”, that what world leaders and influential figures are telling us, as conveyed by mainstream media, does not accurately reflect the picture of the world today. You have seen that the only way to find the “truth” is to go to independent sources that aren’t funded and manipulated by corporate and political interests. The aims of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) and Global Research are to battle the tidal waves of misinformation and propaganda washing our minds on a daily basis. We have separated ourselves from the corporate-controlled mainstream news, whose only objective is to serve their corporate masters. We take no assistance from the major foundations such as Rockefeller, Ford, and MacArthur, who act as patrons (and thus pacifiers) of the alternative and critical voices challenging the forces of globalization. We do this in order to remain an independent voice, challenging all that needs to be challenged and exposing all that remains in the dark. Bringing light to a dimly lit world is no easy task, and though the aim and method is “independence,” we are, in fact, entirely dependent upon YOU, our readers. Without your support, we cannot continue our operations nor expand our horizons and opportunities. Global Research is indebted to our readers, and we are here for you and because of you. If you would like Global Research to continue and to grow, we need your support now more than ever. The mainstream media is owned by bankers and corporate kingpins. Not only that, but it has been historically and presently infiltrated by covert government agencies, seeking to deceive and propagandize their agendas. The CIA has long had associations with major mainstream news publications. By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc. The CIA even ran a training program “to teach its agents to be journalists,” who were “then placed in major news organizations with help from management.” At Global Research, we seek to not only expose and criticize the larger picture, but to point the finger at the media, itself, and examine who is lying, why they lie, and how they get away with it. To continue in our endeavours, we need our readers to continue in their support. One important and helpful thing that all of our readers can do is to help spread our name and information by “liking” our Facebook page here. We post articles daily that will appear in your news feed so that you don’t have to come to us, we can bring our information straight to you. “Like” our page and recommend us to your friends. Every bit helps! You can also support us by continuing to send us your much needed donations which allow us to continue our day-to-day operations and help us expand our scope and content. Supporting Global Research is supporting the cause of truth and the fight against media disinformation. Thank you. The Global Research Team For online donations, please go to the org. Globalresearch page . donate pic courtesy : www.venezuealanalysis.com

Flashback : Massmedia vs 9/11

http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net

by Christopher Bollyn

September 2, 2007
Final Edit – August 23, 2009

from Bollyn Website

The government and controlled media have lied to the public about 9-11 since the day it occurred.

Those who have discerned and exposed the lies about the “false flag” terror attacks and the fraudulent “War on Terror” have been treated like madmen and criminals.

It’s time for this criminal nightmare to end.

• Who controls the “hidden hand” in the U.S. mass media that censors and suppresses the crucial 9-11 evidence?
• What is the nexus connecting the architects of 9-11 with the mass media moguls who are covering up the truth?

Rupert Murdoch, a Jew,

is a supporter of Zionism and a friend of Israeli president Shimon Peres.

The on-going cover-up of the evidence of Israeli involvement in 9-11 and explosions in the World Trade Center by the U.S. mass media is indicative of a high-level connection between the architects of the “false flag” terror attacks and the media moguls who control the major news networks in the United States.

As a longtime observer of Israel and the Middle East, I have watched how the U.S. mass media has increasingly become an instrument of Israeli propaganda.

As Zionists have extended their grip on American media networks the major television, radio, film and print media outlets have effectively become propaganda tools of a foreign state – Israel – and are used to manipulate U.S. public opinion to support the Zionist agenda. The painfully obvious anti-Arab and anti-Islamic bias of Hollywood films and news-related programs has become ever more extreme as pro-Israel Zionists have achieved near total control of the U.S. mass media.

It needs to be understood that the Zionist conquest of the U.S. mass media did not simply happen by chance or as a result of natural market forces. It is the planned result of a long-term covert strategy put into effect decades ago by the government of Israel to control the news and entertainment networks that inform how Americans view Zionism, Israel, and the Middle East.

The Israelis realized that if they could control what Americans read, see, and hear about Zionism, Israel, and the Middle East then they would be able to control how they think.

Controlling U.S. public opinion is crucial to realizing the Zionist agenda.

Rupert Murdoch’s media empire acts as a Zionist propaganda network.

Zionist control of the major media networks has resulted in Americans getting an extremely distorted and biased view of the world, particularly of the Middle East and of such significant events as 9-11 and the “War on Terror.”

Understanding the strategy and the people behind Israel’s conquest of the American mass media is an essential step to recovering our national sovereignty.

As an independent journalist and researcher of 9-11, I have seen how Zionist-controlled media outlets are actively engaged in covering up the evidence of Israeli involvement in the “false flag” attacks of 9-11 and the Zionist-planned “War on Terror.” I have personally been subjected to years of slander and defamation from a host of Zionist-controlled news outlets, including CNN and FOX News, simply because I have investigated and written about the evidence of Israeli involvement.

Today, the United States of America is by all appearances an Israeli-occupied state. The U.S. Congress dutifully authorizes the annual payment of an immense tribute to Israel, some three thousand million dollars a year. Like a subservient colony, the United States provides hundreds of thousands of its young men and women to fight and die as mercenaries in Zionist-planned wars in the Middle East.

The tens of thousands of American and European christian soldiers and mercenaries fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan are very similar to the former Mamluks of Baghdad – captured “male white slaves” serving their Zionist rulers.

This dismal situation is, of course, not new. It has only become more obvious and extreme. The United States has provided more than $108 billion in direct aid to the state of Israel since 1949 (Washington Report, July 2006) and the U.S. State Dept. recently promised the Israeli military another $30 billion over the next ten years – a twenty-five percent increase.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of U.S. soldiers have died as a result of serving on or near the front lines in Israel’s wars. The 241 American marines killed in the Beirut bombing of 1983 and the 34 servicemen killed during the 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty are the first that come to mind.

More than 4,000 American men and women have died during the current phase, the occupation stage, of the nearly two-decade-long war against Iraq.

The U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq, an illegal war of aggression, is clearly a Zionist-planned war in which Americans and other mercenaries actually do the fighting – and dying.

WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE?

The obvious question is, where is the outrage?

Where is the spiritual, intellectual, and political resistance to this blatant exploitation of Americans and their national resources by a tiny foreign state with a militant and racist ideology? Why do patriotic Americans tolerate this abuse of the “land of the free and the home of the brave?”

While the power of the Israeli lobby (and an occasional murder) may explain the lack of any significant political resistance in the U.S. Congress to Zionist demands, it can not explain how the American population has come to accept this extremely bizarre and abusive relationship with a foreign state.

How has Zionist control of the United States been foisted onto the American people?

ZIONIST DECEPTIONS

Many Americans willingly accept the extremely one-sided and abusive relationship with Israel because they have internalized three fundamental Zionist deceptions, which have been forced into their brains by the controlled mass media.

• The first is the religious hoax that equates the modern state of Israel with the Israel of the Bible. This religious fraud elevates modern-day Israelis, regardless of their actual ethnicity, to being the rightful heirs of the Promised Land. Although this hoax is quickly revealed to anyone who actually reads Zionist history, it has been successfully foisted onto millions of extremely naive and gullible Christians. These misled and abused people are often referred to as christian Zionists.
  
• The second fundamental Zionist deception is that Israel is a “sister democracy” of the United States and that Israelis and Americans share the same “democratic” values. This lie is also quickly exposed by reading Israeli history or visiting Israeli-occupied Palestine. The only Americans who could possibly share Israeli values are those who believe in Jewish racism and supremacism – the central pillar of the Zionist worldview that is completely un-American.
  
• The third Zionist deception is that nineteen Arab Muslims under the leadership of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Osama bin Laden were behind the 9-11 attacks at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. This deception has been used to usher in the Zionist-planned “War on Terror,” which has brought U.S. and European troops into an extensive long-term Middle Eastern war.

• Why hasn’t the media interviewed the families of the nineteen suspected hijackers?
• Why does the media not demand an open trial for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged “mastermind” of 9-11, currently held by the U.S. in Guantanamo?
• Why is the media treatment of these people only as deep as their photos?

While the first two deceptions are primarily philosophical in nature and rather pointless to argue, the 9-11 deception is painfully real and something we allow to continue at our own peril.

“AUSCHWITZ OF THE MIND”

These Zionist deceptions, which are all demonstrably false, have been carefully planted and cultivated in the minds of millions of people through the devices of the Zionist-controlled media.

Zionist domination of the mass media and academia in the United States is so pervasive that Americans are subjected, like Truman Burbank in the film The Truman Show, to a constant barrage of multi-level deception, as if the entire population were living in a false construction – an “Auschwitz of the mind.”

Like the false world of Truman Burbank, the Zionist-created worldview is so overwhelming that it prevents many people from ever realizing that they are being held mentally captive. Even when we peel away the layers of deception and expose the fraud, somehow the show goes on. For the criminals in high places, the show must go on.

The first deception, the religious hoax of the Zionist state’s connection to the biblical Israel, is doctrine to television evangelists like Pat Robertson and his Christian Coalition, while the second and third have become “conventional wisdom” for the U.S. news and entertainment media.

Because millions of Americans have accepted and internalized these Zionist-created falsehoods, they are unable to understand the actual realities of the Middle East or the massive fraud of the “War on Terror.”

The controlled media is careful to censor any information that might disturb the perverse worldview of America’s forty million Christian Zionists who are kept in the darkness like children locked in a closet.

ZIONISM – “THE REAL ENEMY OF THE JEWS”

When, for example, the highly-regarded Israeli historian Avi Shlaim wrote his 2005 editorial entitled “Is Zionism today the real enemy of the Jews?” (below insert) his comments were published in the International Herald Tribune (IHT), which is read in 180 nations, but kept out of the pages of The New York Times, the domestic newspaper of its parent company.

A debate : Is Zionism today the real enemy of the Jews? by Avi Shlaim February 4, 2005 from TheNewYorkTimes WEbsite OXFORD, England — Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people and the state of Israel is its political expression. Israel used to be a symbol of freedom and a source of pride for the Jews of the Diaspora. Israel’s mistreatment of the Palestinians, however, has turned it into a liability and a moral burden for the liberal segment of the Jewish community. Some Jews, especially on the left, would go even further by linking Israel’s behavior to the upsurge of the new anti-Semitism throughout the world. Israel’s illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories since 1967 is the underlying problem. Occupation transformed the Zionist movement from a legitimate national liberation movement for the Jews into a colonial power and an oppressor of the Palestinians. By Zionism today I mean the ideological, ultra-nationalist settlers and their supporters in the Likud-led government. These settlers are a tiny minority but they maintain a stranglehold over the Israeli political system. They represent the unacceptable face of Zionism. Zionism does not equal racism, but many of these hard-line settlers and their leaders are blatant racists. Their extremism and their excesses have led some people to start questioning not just the Zionist colonial project beyond the 1967 borders but also the legitimacy of the state of Israel within those borders. And it is these settlers who also endanger the safety and well-being of Jews everywhere. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon personifies this xenophobic, exclusive, aggressive and expansionist brand of Zionism. One of the greatest accolades in Judaism is to be a rodeph shalom, a seeker of peace. Sharon is not that by any stretch of the imagination. He is a man of war and the champion of violent solutions. Sharon’s purpose is politicide: to deny the Palestinians any independent political existence in Palestine. His plan for withdrawal from Gaza is called “the unilateral disengagement plan.” It is not a peace plan but a prelude to the annexation of large chunks of the West Bank to Israel. Sharon, the unilateralist par excellence, is a Jewish Rambo — the antithesis of the traditional Jewish values of truth, justice and tolerance. Sharon’s government is waging a savage war against the Palestinian people. Its policies include the confiscation of land; the demolition of houses; the uprooting of trees; curfews, roadblocks and 736 checkpoints that inflict horrendous hardships; the systematic abuse of Palestinian human rights; and the building of the illegal wall on the West Bank, a wall that is as much about land-grabbing as it is about security. It is this brand of cruel Zionism that is the real enemy of what remains of liberal Israel and of the Jews outside Israel. It is the enemy because it fuels the flames of virulent and sometimes violent anti-Semitism. Israel’s policies are the cause; hatred of Israel and anti-Semitism are the consequences. There has been much talk in recent years about “the new anti-Semitism.” The argument, in a nutshell, is that the resurgence of anti-Semitism has little or nothing to do with Israel’s behavior. Anti-Zionism is merely a surrogate, so the argument runs, for bad, old-fashioned anti-Semitism. These arguments need to be addressed. First: What is anti-Semitism? Isaiah Berlin defined an anti-Semite as “someone who hates Jews more than is strictly necessary!” This mischievous definition has the merit of applying to all anti-Semitism, old as well as new. But we need to look beyond the labels. Is there a lot of classic anti-Semitism about? Yes. Is anti-Semitism spreading in Europe? Yes, at an alarming rate. Do some people use anti-Zionism as a respectable cover for their despicable Judeophobia? Alas, yes again. What is the relative weight of hatred of Israel on the one hand and Judeophobia on the other in the making of the new anti-Semitism? I don’t know. What I do know is that a lot of decent people, without any anti-Semitic baggage, are furious with Israel because of its oppression of the Palestinians. There is simply no getting away from the fact that attitudes toward Israel are changing as a result of its own shift towards the Zionism of the extreme right and of the radical rabbis. During the years of the Oslo peace process, Israel was in fact the favorite of the West because it was willing to withdraw from the occupied territories. Israel’s image today is negative not because it is a Jewish state but because it habitually transgresses the norms of acceptable international behavior. Indeed, Israel is increasingly perceived as a rogue state, as an international pariah, and as a threat to world peace. This perception of Israel is a major factor in the recent resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe and in the rest of the world. In this sense, Zionism today is the real enemy of the Jews. It is a tragedy that a state that was built as a haven for the Jewish people after the Holocaust is now one of the least safe places on earth for Jews to live in. Israel ought to withdraw from the occupied territories not as a favor to the Palestinians but as a favor to itself and to world Jewry for, as Karl Marx noted, a people that oppresses another cannot itself remain free.

Now, why would the New York Times, whose motto is “All The News That’s Fit to Print,” censor the viewpoint of a renowned Israeli historian writing on the causes of modern anti-Semitism?

What did Shlaim say that the editors at the Times thought was unfit for Americans to read?

“Israel’s image today is negative not because it is a Jewish state but because it habitually transgresses the norms of acceptable international behavior. Indeed, Israel is increasingly perceived as a rogue state, as an international pariah, and as a threat to world peace,” Shlaim, an Iraqi Jew who was born in Baghdad, wrote.

“This perception of Israel is a major factor in the recent resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe and in the rest of the world. In this sense, Zionism today is the real enemy of the Jews.”

When one understands that the primary function of the Zionist-controlled media is to keep Americans in the dark about the Middle East and Zionism, it becomes clear why Shlaim’s article was published in the international publication owned by the New York Times but kept from their U.S. readership.

Shlaim’s comments would have greatly disturbed the carefully cultivated Zionist worldview of millions of Americans – both Jews and Gentiles – an audience that is both protected and held captive.

THE MEDIA COVER-UP OF 9-11

As an independent journalist I have seen how many important stories have been covered-up or ignored by the controlled media.

I have written about many of these suppressed stories, such as the sinking of the Estonia, the downing of Flight TWA 800, and the dangers of depleted uranium.

At the top of my list, however, is the most egregious and criminal cover-up of the evidence of 9-11.

“Ninety-five percent of the work of the intelligence agencies around the world is deception and disinformation,” German intelligence expert Andreas von Bülow told me in December 2001.

This deception is widely propagated in the mainstream media creating an accepted version of events.

“Journalists don’t even raise the simplest questions,” he said. “Those who differ are labeled as crazy.”

After the London press conference during Jimmy Walter‘s 2005 European 9-11 Truth tour, two reporters from the BBC were eager to interview me.

“Why are you the only journalist who does not believe the official explanation of what happened on 9-11?” was their first question.

The BBC interviewing the author in London

“If that is the case,” I told them, “it is probably due to the fact that others who have questioned the official version have lost their jobs as a result.”

The van was leaving for the hotel so I decided to cut the interview short. I could see where the interview was heading.

When FOX News and CNN interviewed me on the pretense that they were interested in my 9-11 research and evidence, all they really wanted to do was to smear me as an anti-Semite.

In both cases the interviewers were clearly not at all interested in the 9-11 evidence or my research.

Alan Samuel Colmes, a Jewish talking head for Fox News,

was not interested in discussing the evidence of 9-11

but only in trying to smear the author as an anti-Semite.

“WOE BETIDE HIM…”

“The dissident cannot be taken seriously,” the veteran British journalist Roland Huntford wrote about the mass media in his book The New Totalitarians. “There is a range of tolerated opinions, and a narrow one it is: woe betide him who departs from it.”

While Huntford was writing about the controlled media of Sweden in the 1970s, his comments hold true for the Zionist-controlled mass media in the United States today, particularly when the subject is 9-11 or Israel.

I, for example, have paid a very high price for investigating and writing about the evidence that contradicts the government’s version of what happened on 9-11. The first attack came from the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith (ADL) in November 2001.

The ADL, a private organization dedicated to supporting Zionist and Israeli interests, first smeared the American Free Press, the newspaper I wrote for, as a,

“conspiratorial and anti-Semitic weekly newspaper,” which it said had “repeatedly turned to the subject of the 9-11 attacks as grist for its mill.”

The ADL then singled me out for my article, “Some Survivors Say Bombs Exploded Inside WTC” in which, the ADL said,

“Bollyn suggests that the ‘mainstream media’ is ignoring eyewitness accounts of bombs that exploded inside the World Trade Center before the collapse of the TwinTowers.”

Indeed, the first line of my article from September 2001 said exactly that:

Despite reports from numerous eyewitnesses and experts, including news reporters on the scene, who heard or saw explosions immediately before the collapse of the World Trade Center, there has been virtual silence in the mainstream media.

But, I asked,

• Why would an organization dedicated to Israeli and Jewish interests attack me, as a journalist, for writing about eyewitness reports of explosions in the World Trade Center?
• What did my writing about this extremely newsworthy subject have to do with Israel or Jews?

Had my BBC interview gone on, I might have asked why the BBC editors had ignored and censored the comments of their own reporter, Steve Evans, who had been in the SouthTower (WTC 2) when it was hit and who reported having observed a “series of explosions.” Shortly after the destruction of the WTC, the BBC interviewed Evans on their television news program based in London.

Because Evans’ observations were ignored by the BBC and not followed up, I wrote about his report of the explosions he felt in the SouthTower:

Evans was asked what he had seen:

“Its more what I felt really,” Evans said. “I was at the base of the 2nd tower, the second tower that was hit. There was an explosion – I didn’t think it was an explosion – but the base of the building shook. I felt it shake… then when we were outside, the second explosion happened and then there was a series of explosions…”

[At this point the London news anchor cut Evans off in mid-sentence rather than listen to Evans continue to describe the "series of explosions" that he saw and felt. Evans' microphone was turned down.]

But in a minute Evans returns to the “series of explosions” that he witnessed:

“We can only wonder at the kind of damage – the kind of human damage – which was caused by those explosions – those series of explosions,” Evans said.

Evans is a professional journalist and his observations of explosions in the second tower need to be taken into account by anybody looking into the cause of the catastrophe of September 11.

Many eyewitnesses reported similar explosions, but these reports, and what they suggest, are intentionally being censored and avoided by the very people who are supposed to be investigating the cause of the collapses. The same kind of censorship occurred with FOX News, CNN, and the leading U.S. news networks that had reporters at the World Trade Center.

Firsthand reports of explosions at the WTC from professional reporters were broadcast only once – and never picked up again, except by the much-despised “conspiracy theorists.”

The news reports that five Middle Eastern men were being sought or had been captured in New Jersey after they had videotaped themselves celebrating in front of the burning towers were treated in the same way.

The arrest of the five men, all Israelis, two of whom were known Mossad agents, was only reported in the Bergen Record (New Jersey) on September 12, 2001 – but never discussed or investigated by the national news networks.

ISRAELIS FOREWARNED

Likewise, the story of the Odigo text message warning of the attacks – before they occurred – was dropped into the media’s memory hole. The instant text messages, which were precise to the minute, had been sent via the Israeli-owned Odigo instant messaging service and had even been received by Odigo employees in Israel, but the story of Israelis having prior knowledge of the attacks was never discussed in the U.S. mass media.

How did the news editors at the BBC, FOX News, CNN, and the leading networks decide to censor their own reporters and avoid discussing certain aspects of 9-11?

Let’s look at this logically.

The 9-11 event was the biggest story these news editors had ever handled. Suffice it to say that the editorial decisions about how to cover 9-11 must have been made by the boss at the top.

Any decision to omit or censor reports about explosions at the World Trade Center or indications of Israeli involvement would have been made by the senior executive of each network. In the case of CNN it would have been Gerald M. Levin, the CEO of Time Warner, who acquired Turner Broadcasting in 1997. (Levin unexpectedly announced his resignation in December 2001, less than three months after 9-11.)

At FOX News the top decision maker would have been Rupert Murdoch, CEO of News Corporation. At ABC News it would have been Michael D. Eisner, CEO of Disney, the network’s parent company.

• Were the media moguls Murdoch, Levin, and Eisner involved in 9-11?
• How else could they know that certain aspects of the event needed to be suppressed by their news networks?

Their networks have been suppressing important information about 9-11 since the day of the event.

They have also been actively involved in a conspiracy to cover-up the truth.

• How can that be?
• Who is behind this cover-up?
• What occult power, what hidden hand, would be able to communicate with these men and influence them to suppress important reports and evidence from the terror attacks of 9-11?

ARNON MILCHAN – MOSSAD’S MAN IN THE MIDDLE

If one considers the known evidence of Israeli prior knowledge of 9-11, the Odigo text messages and the five arrested Mossad agents, for example, as indicative of Israeli state involvement in the crime, the identity of the occult power behind the cover-up is rather obvious.

The “hidden hand” suppressing the information about 9-11 would have to be a high-level person in the Israeli political-military intelligence establishment who also has very close relations with media kingpins like Murdoch, Levin, and Eisner.

Arnon Milchan (a.k.a. Milchen) is such a person.

While millions of Americans have watched his films, such as Pretty Woman and JFK, very few know that Arnon Milchan is a “best friend” of Shimon Peres (born Szymon Perski in Wiszniewo, Poland) the current Israeli president and godfather of Israel’s nuclear arsenal.

The Israeli movie producer Arnon Milchan (between Peres and Netanyahu) is a close friend of

Israel’s president Shimon Peres (“his first letter he wrote as president went to me”),

Defense Minister Ehud Barak, and Likud Party leader Binyamin (“Bibi”) Netanyahu.

Milchan, who began his career with the fertilizer/chemical company Milchan Brothers,

reportedly owns 30 companies in 17 countries involved in plastics, electronics, communications, and pharmaceuticals.

Milchan’s 40-year friendship with Peres, the man who oversaw the illegal development of Israel’s nuclear weapon program is key to understanding Milchan’s career as an undercover operative, weapons procurer, and film producer.

The fact that Milchan, the Hollywood producer, has been Israel’s “foremost weapons procurer” for decades, brokering deals for “everything from nuclear triggers to rocket fuel to guidance systems,” is seldom mentioned in the U.S. news media.

This is probably due to the fact that Milchan is also a “best friend” and business partner of Rupert Murdoch. He is also a friend a business partner with Levin (Warner Brothers) and Eisner.

“I consider him one of my best friends,” Milchan said about Murdoch, “and I think vice versa. We’re having a ball. He’s a very cool guy.”

“Kingpins like Warner Brothers’ Gerald Levin and Disney’s Michael Eisner are quick to return his calls,” the American Jewish journalist Ann Louise Bardach wrote about Milchan in her article ‘The Last Tycoon‘ in April 2000.

In 1997, after a six-year relationship with Warner Brothers, Milchan became a partner with Murdoch, selling him twenty percent of his film company, New Regency Productions, for $200 million. Murdoch also invested another $30 million in Regency Television.

Today, Murdoch’s equity partnership with Milchan is close to fifty percent.

“Milchan’s deal with Fox also assures him a level of financial security,” Bardach wrote. “With Murdoch’s $200 million investment and a subsequent $600 million line of credit from a team of banks led by Chase Manhattan, Milchan is well into mogul territory.

“Milchan’s tony offices occupy most of Building 12, right next door to the Executive Building on the Fox lot,” Bardach wrote. “And it is from this seat of power that Milchan is building an entertainment empire that could one day rival Murdoch’s.”

Peter Chernin, president and chief operating officer of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, left,

presents Arnon Milchan with a lifetime achievement award at an event celebrating

the 60th Anniversary of the state of Israel in Los Angeles on September 18, 2008.

Chernin, Murdoch, and Milchan have worked together for many years.

THE MILCHAN INFLUENCE

The Israeli influence in films and news media has profoundly affected the quality of news reporting and entertainment.

Israeli attitudes and ideas are now disseminated through national media outlets which reach the entire U.S. population on a daily basis. Israeli-made films often reveal hints or clues about actual crimes or criminal plots the Israeli producers are aware of.

One such project, The Lone Gunmen, produced by Milchan’s “best friend” Rupert Murdoch, had an uncanny resemblance to the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Was this Milchan’s influence? The Milchan-Murdoch partnership in television production may be key to understanding the genesis of the plot of the pilot episode of this short-lived television series. In the first episode a passenger airliner is hijacked by remote control and flown toward the World Trade Center.

Disaster is averted at the last minute by over-riding the computer program that has hijacked the plane.

The Lone Gunmen, produced by Rupert Murdoch in 2000, revealed an extremely uncanny prescience of 9-11(click above image).

During the same year it was made, Milchan was producing two television series in collaboration with Fox Television: Roswell, which aired on Warner Brothers network, and Malcolm in the Middle, which was aired on Fox. The Lone Gunmen pilot episode aired on FOX Television in March 2001.

Given the long, close, and extensive collaboration between Murdoch and Milchan, it seems fair to ask:

• Was Arnon Milchan the original source of the plotline for The Lone Gunmen?
• Why were the people involved in the production of this episode not investigated by the media?
• Why did the media ignore its own uncanny prescience, The Lone Gunmen episode, which mirrored reality six months later?
• Was the similarity between the Murdoch-produced show and reality too close for comfort?
• Was it too uncomfortable to discuss the origin of the idea for the show?

Apparently so.

Was the Israeli chemical magnate Arnon Milchan the author of

the plotline for The Lone Gunmen pilot episode in which a passenger airplane

was remotely hijacked and flown into the World Trade Center?

In Milchan’s highly-controversial film JFK (1991), directed by Oliver Stone, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy is ascribed to conspirators within the U.S. military-industrial complex.

Whose idea was this? Why is Arnon Milchan’s own connection with Itzhak Rabin, who was in Dallas on the day Kennedy was shot, not an issue here?

In his futuristic film Brazil (1985), directed by Terry Gilliam, terrorist explosions go off in cafes for no apparent reason, very much like the seemingly senseless terrorism that plagues occupied Iraq.

Is this Milchan’s influence?

“Anyone closely associated with Peres pretty well must be satanic,” Barry Chamish, a Canadian-Israeli wrote, “but Milchan produced a film that shows he has insider information.”

Chamish advises his readers to watch The Devil’s Advocate with Al Pacino to “understand the implication.”

“Milchan runs his company like a family business. Heading up New Regency Productions for him is his childhood friend David Matalon, whose parents were best friends with Milchan’s,” Bardach wrote.

“Daughter Alexandra [Milchan-Lambert] is vice president of production in Los Angeles.”

Matalon has served as president and CEO of New Regency Productions since 1995.

In 1986, Matalon, an Israeli co-founder of Tri-Star pictures, released a film entitled Iron Eagle, in which the aerial combat scenes were filmed entirely with the Israeli Air Force. The plot of this film is about how a few teenagers are able to steal U.S. military codes, aircraft, and information from under the noses of the military brass and run an entire military operation in which they bomb Libya without the knowledge of the military command.

This film gives some indication of the kind of projects and ideas the Israeli military has collaborated on with their fellow Israelis in Hollywood.

THE SECRETIVE MOGUL

“Averse to publicity and little known outside Hollywood” is how Arnon Milchan’s biography begins. “My idea of a good profile is no profile,” Milchan told Bardach.

Murdoch, Levin, and Eisner have obviously respected the Israeli’s wish, but why would a Hollywood mogul not want to be known to the public?

“Arnon Milchan has kept his secrets to himself,” Bardach wrote.

Arnon Milchan with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie

Indeed, very little is known about Milchan, Israel’s super weapons agent, except that he spends more time in Tel Aviv and France than he does in his office on the 20th Century Fox lot in Los Angeles, according to Bardach.

Now, why would a Hollywood movie producer spend more time in Tel Aviv, where no movies are being made, than in Hollywood?

POLISH ZIONIST ROOTS

Milchan was born on December 6, 1944, on the Zionist settlement of Rehovot, in what was then Palestine, according to his biography in Current Biography (2000). Rehovot, one of the earliest Zionist settlements, was founded in 1890 by Polish and Russian Jews, one of whom was Milchan’s paternal grandfather.

Rehovot has a street and a neighborhood named “Milchen”, no doubt in memory of his grandfather.

“My family’s been there for 500 years,” Milchan told Bardach.

“My grandfather was a very close friend of President [Chaim] Weizmann.”

Oddly, Bardach does not provide the name of his grandfather who was “a very close friend” of Israel’s first president. Nor does she give the name of the ancestors Milchan proudly claims have lived in Palestine for five hundred years.

“Milchan’s father was an enviable success story himself, having laid the sprinklers that irrigated Israel,” Bardach wrote. “Later, he would handle some of Israel’s lucrative military contracts, according to his son.”

Bardach continues:

However, it was young Milchan who put the company on the map internationally, after his father’s sudden death. Following a spot of schooling in London and Geneva, where he excelled in soccer and tennis, Milchan dropped out and returned to Israel. Soon, he struck gold.

By marketing a newly discovered nutrient that quadrupled citrus production, he brought his company stratospheric sales throughout the world.

“This is a man who made his fortune by screwing with nature,” says screenwriter Shawn Slovo, who began her career as Milchan’s secretary in 1977. “He’s the Israeli who made the desert bloom. Amazing when you think about it. He could have retired at the age of 22.”

Instead, like a kid racing around the Monopoly board, Milchan gobbled up another half dozen businesses–including electronics, chemicals, aerospace and plastics.

Still in his early twenties, he met the Shah of Iran and reportedly talked the wily Persian into dozens of contracts, one to build much of Tehran’s airport.

When one considers that Arnon Milchan, in his early twenties, was among the founders of Israel’s Labor Party in the 1960s with Shimon Peres, Moshe Dayan, and Teddy Kolleck, then one can appreciate that his contracts in Iran and his career in arms dealing and Hollywood have been done with the active collaboration of the Mossad.

“I’M AN AGENT”

Milchan is a,

“go-between for American weapons manufacturers and the Israeli government, thus playing a major role in the strengthening of the Israeli military,” according to Current Biography (2000).

“Throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and even up until the Gulf War in 1991, Milchan was Israel’s foremost weapons procurer, brokering deals for such prized superweapons as the Hawk missile and the famous Scud-foil of the Gulf War, the Patriot,” Bardach wrote.

“At different times in his career, his Israeli company, Milchan Brothers, has represented arms manufacturers such as Raytheon, North American Rockwell, Beechcraft, Bell Helicopter and Magnavox. Or, as Milchan downplays it, “there were a bunch of them.”

Nevertheless, he bristles at being called an arms dealer.

“I’m their rep in Israel,” he says emphatically. “I get a fee, a commission. I’m not even the buyer. I’m an agent.”

“What we do is send my people to the United States,” Milchan told Bardach, “so we know what these guys are talking about, and you go back and say to the buyer, ‘I think this guy has some interesting stuff. Would you meet with him?’ And then you arrange a meeting with the head of the [Israeli] air force and the head of this and the head of that.”

In 1992, Milchan was described by the Jerusalem Post as being “among the handful of Hollywood moguls with the muscle and money to single-handedly give the go-ahead for a new movie project.

The Mossad is undoubtedly the source of much of Milchan’s “muscle and money.”

Who pays Milchan’s commissions? Whether the commission is paid by the weapon’s vendor or by the state of Israel, the money going to Milchan is American money. He is paid either by the company or from the billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars provided to Israel for weapons every year.

In this way, Milchan, Mossad’s man in the middle, has been greatly enriched by U.S. weapons sales to Israel.

“BIG STAR” TO RAYTHEON

In 1975, for example, Milchan reportedly received an improper $300,000 commission paid by a Raytheon subsidiary for the sale of Hawk missiles.

Raytheon makes the Patriot and Hawk missile systems and key components of the Global Hawk. Of particular interest is Raytheon’s Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) which allow remote operators to pilot the Global Hawk from “thousands of miles away.” This is the kind of technology that is thought to have been used in the terror attacks of 9-11.

Terry Gilliam told Bardach that he’ll never forget a visit to the Paris Air Show with Milchan during the filming of Baron Munchausen.

“It was wonderful to see how the whole arms business worked,” Gilliam said. “Arnon was very psyched about the video games. He brought his son with him, who was then a teenager, to play the games, which can replicate the destruction of the planet. He took me to the Raytheon booth, and it was all showmanship. He was obviously a big star to Raytheon.”

“Growing up, I would read that he was an arms dealer; he was in the Mossad, and he was a movie producer,” his daughter Alexandra told Bardach.

She is married to a Scott Lambert, an agent with William Morris in Beverley Hills and graduate of American University in Washington, D.C. (Lambert happens to share the same name of a former Director of Manufacturing Systems at Raytheon.)

MODUS OPERANDI

When one looks at Milchan’s career as an Israeli agent who bought media outlets with dirty money one should consider that this may be the modus operandi he has employed to gain influence and outlets in the U.S. media market.

Money laundering could explain his ability to make huge deals and control media networks – and his desire for secrecy.

“He’s extremely powerful because he brings money to the table,” journalist Anita Busch wrote.

“He’s unique in that way. He’s got a credit line that’s astronomical, like, you know, almost a billion dollars.” Terry Gilliam, the director of Brazil, wondered where the money came from. “Arnon can be great, but when it comes to money there’s something – I don’t know – bits just don’t seem to connect.”

Charles McKeown, a film writer, had a hard time getting paid by the billion dollar Israeli.

“You just never know whether he was telling the truth or not,” McKeown said.

“The kind of deals he was in, the level of finance and the way he operated, seemed to me like a world upside down. I felt we were dealing with a sort of dangerous, shady quality.”

MONEY LAUNDERER

In 1975, the Israeli government headed by Yitzhak Rabin and Defense Minister Shimon Peres recruited Milchan to launder money from South Africa.

Milchan,

“has admitted laundering some of the more than $100 million spent by the South Africans during the 1970s in an attempt to improve the white government’s image abroad,” according to the authors of The Iran-Contra Connection.

Because both Israel and South Africa were ostracized in the 1970s,

“The money laundering was part of the two countries’ plan to buy newspapers and other media in various parts of the world,” his biography reads.

“The Rabin government recruited… Milchan to launder cash… to purchase influential publications,” Andrew and Leslie Cockburn wrote in their book Dangerous Liaison.

THE MIDDLEMAN

Milchan told Bardach he was asked by,

“prominent Israelis if ‘we can use your companies to make deals to buy newspapers.’ I said, ‘Sure. It sounds like fun.’ Basically, I was used as a middleman.”

A citizen of both Israel and Monaco, he is said to control thirty companies in seventeen countries, profiting in everything from film production to the weapons trade.

But, how does one man control thirty companies in seventeen countries? Clearly there must be an entire team behind these businesses.

Milchan’s team could be called Team Mossad.

“I’ll say it in my own words,” Milchan told Bardach. “I love Israel, and any way I can help Israel, I will. I’ll do it again and again. If you say I’m an arms dealer, that’s your problem. In Israel, there is practically no business that does not have something to do with defense.”

Milchan also funds Christian Zionist movements.

Milchan has reportedly contributed significantly to the Christian Coalition, an organization started by the Reverend Pat Robertson, a staunch supporter of Israel. He also underwrites the Israeli Network which transmits Israeli television programs to the United States and Canada via cable and satellite.

Milchan is also an owner of the Israeli television station known as Channel 10. The other owners are Ronald Lauder, who like Milchan owned about twenty-five percent, and Josef (Yossi) Maiman, who owns fifty-one percent and who has been with Channel 10 since it was founded in 2003. Rupert Murdoch bought nine percent of Channel 10 stock from Milchan and Lauder in 2006. Maiman, a Mossad agent, owns and controls a great deal of the gas fields of Turkmenistan.

One of the main goals of the occupation of Afghanistan is to build a pipeline to bring the Israeli-owned gas of Turkmenistan to India and China.

(Maiman and Lauder are both linked to the Mossad and 9-11. For more on Maiman read my article, “The Great Game: The War For Caspian Oil And Gas.” Information about Lauder can be found in “Mossad -The Israeli Connection To 9-11″)

SMUGGLING NUCLEAR TRIGGERS

Milchan should have been busted in 1985 for smuggling triggers for nuclear bombs, when a business associate, Richard Kelly Smyth, was indicted by a federal grand jury in Los Angeles on charges of smuggling 810 krytrons to Israel.

Because krytrons are used as detonators or triggers for nuclear weapons, their export is tightly regulated.

In 1973, Smyth started a company called Milco International, Inc., financed, according to the Washington Post, by Milchan, hence its name. Up to eighty percent of Milco’s business was reportedly with Milchan and Israel. In 1980, the federal indictment asserted, Smyth and Milco sent 610 krytrons to Israel without the necessary licenses, plus another 200 in 1982.

The 1985 indictment identified the Israeli buyers of the nuclear triggers as Heli Trading Ltd. and Milchan Brothers, two of Milchan’s Israel-based companies. Federal authorities told NBC News in 1993 that Milchan also shared in the profits derived from the sales.

Announcement of the indictments came four days after the Israeli Defense Ministry, reacting to news of the grand jury probe, admitted that it had the devices, known as krytrons. The krytrons were shipped between 1979 and 1983 to an Israeli firm under contract to the government for defense work.

The Israeli Ministry of Defense returned only 469 of the krytrons, and Smyth vanished a week before he was to appear for trial.

PROTECTING ISRAEL

Robert C. Bonner, the U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, refused to comment on questions about whether the Israeli government had been involved in the illegal actions.

State Department spokesman Edward Djerejian said,

“I can only note that the indictment does not mention any Israeli citizen.”

Djerejian added that the United States,

“has expressed its serious concern to the Israeli government about this alleged violation of U.S. law” and had been assured that Israel will cooperate with the continuing U.S. investigation “to the full extent permitted under Israeli law.”

“Smyth’s disappearance, and the unwillingness of Israeli officials to cooperate with U.S. investigators on the case, left federal authorities unable to proceed,” Robert Windrem of NBC News reported in July 2001.

Although Milchan is not mentioned in the indictment, a Milco employe, Gretel Siler, who identified herself as corporate treasurer of Milco, told the Washington Post that Milchan had been associated with Milco in various export transactions and had been involved in purchasing the krytrons from the manufacturer, EG&G, of Wellesley, Mass.

Milchan denied being involved in the $60,000 krytron deal, but told “60 Minutes” (CBS) that he had allowed the Israeli government to use his companies as conduits for trading with the United States.

“I’m not saying I’m an innocent person – but in this specific case, I knew nothing about it,” Milchan told Frank Rose of Premiere magazine.

In any case, Milchan was never charged in the case.

Robert Mainhardt, a nuclear scientist and former director of Milco, told “60 Minutes” that he had resigned after Milchan had asked him to obtain advanced nuclear reactor designs and a supply of uranium hexachloride, which is used in the enrichment of bomb-grade uranium. Mainhardt’s fellow directors at Milco, Arthur Biehl and Ivan Getting began to feel uneasy sometime in 1982, the Washington Post reported.

The Washington Post did a series of articles about this smuggling.

The most important excerpts are the following:

When they joined the board of directors of Milco International in 1980, Biehl and Getting recalled, they thought the company’s primary business was developing aerospace software for U.S. military and space programs.

They had been recruited by the company’s owner, Richard K. Smyth, while serving with him on an influential panel that advises the U.S. Air Force on advanced technologies, work that required them to have top-secret clearances.

But they soon realized that Smyth, a California-based computer expert, spent most of his time trying to buy equipment with military applications, including a uranium byproduct known as “green salt” that can be processed into weapons-grade uranium, for the government of Israel.

Often, they said, the sales were made through an Israeli middleman, Arnon Milchan, a flamboyant businessman who sold arms before becoming a producer of such popular movies as the recent Brazil.

“I didn’t have any evidence there was anything improper,” Biehl said. “I just thought it was a strange way to do business… I wondered why the Israelis were paying fees to (Milco and Milchan) when they could get the same equipment directly” using U.S. foreign aid.

In late 1982, Biehl and Getting resigned from Milco’s board of directors, in part because of their misgivings about Smyth’s dealings with Milchan and Israel.

Asked why Israel didn’t buy the krytrons through its 200-member procurement staff in New York, which buys military equipment with $1.8 billion in annual U.S. aid, Yossi Gal, spokesman with the Israeli Embassy in Washington DC, told the Post that Israel occasionally used “independent agents” to make purchases.

Under U.S. laws, Smyth needed a munitions license from the State Department to ship the krytrons overseas. If he had tried to obtain one, according to a knowledgeable State Department source, he would have been turned down because Israel has not signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

Smyth’s relations with Israel began in the early 1970s when he was working for North American Rockwell as a chief engineer in its avionics division and traveled to Israel to help set up a subsidiary. There, he met Milchan, who was Rockwell’s representative and “point man” with the Israeli government, according to an associate of Smyth from that period.

In January 1973, Smyth founded Milco while still working at Rockwell. His associate recalled Smyth once saying that Milchan provided money to start Milco; this associate said he believes that the name Milco was derived from Milchan.

At the time that Milco was founded, former U.S. intelligence officials said, the Central Intelligence Agency knew that Israel was working to perfect a solid-fuel tactical missile, known as the Jericho, that could carry nuclear warheads. In late 1973, Smyth’s associate recalled, he saw Milco order forms for several barrels of a butyl compound used to bind explosive powders into solid rocket fuel. Smyth said he was shipping the butyl to Milchan through another company he owned in Houston, the associate recalled.

Smyth’s next known contact with Israel occurred in 1975, about a year after he left Rockwell to run Milco full time. On Oct. 30 of that year, Smyth applied for a munitions license to ship 400 krytrons to Heli Trading Inc., Milchan’s company in Israel.

The application, which is filed in court records in Los Angeles, said that the “end user” would be Rehovot Instruments Ltd. and that the krytrons would be used as “remotely located intrusion detectors.”

Smyth filed the application after being told by an official from an unnamed U.S. intelligence agency that a license was required, according to court records.

Smyth met with the official and told him that,

“Arnon Milchan [had] requested that a certain number of krytrons be shipped to Israel,” according to a letter filed by William Fahey, the prosecutor in the current case.

Internal Milco records, provided by former Smyth associates, show that the company struggled financially from 1975 to 1980. It landed several small contracts for less than $25,000 with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Air Force for studies on computer software for avionics systems in advanced aircraft, the MX missile and a small ship defense missile called the Patriot.

It was also in 1980, the federal indictment alleged, that Milco sent 610 krytrons to Israel in 11 shipments without obtaining the needed licenses. Smyth bought them from EG&G in Salem, Mass., the sole producer of the switches in the United States.

In mid-1981, Smyth listed several contracts with Heli Trading to acquire training simulators for Hawk air defense missiles, a voice scrambler and lasers. He also cited “probable” contracts for a computerized flight control system for Israel’s Lavi fighter plane, and thermal batteries and gyroscopes.

James Russell, vice president of Incosym Inc., a maker of gyroscopes in Thousand Oaks, Calif., said he sold Milco several $10,000 gyroscopes in that period. Smyth told him the navigation aids would be used on Israeli navy patrol boats. Milco also won a flight control contract for the Lavi in 1983, according to a listing in Aviation Week magazine.

Smyth’s world started to crumble in early 1983 after someone broke into Milco’s offices and took several thousand dollars worth of computer and software equipment.

Because he was doing some classified U.S. government work and feared some records of it might have been stolen, Smyth wrote a lengthy report about the theft for the Pentagon and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, then-company attorney Brian R. Carter said.

Milco company records revealed that Milchan’s companies had ordered large quantities of missile-related equipment and materials between 1977 and 1982.

Among the nuclear items listed were the 810 krytrons, plus neutron generators, high-speed oscilloscopes and high-voltage condensers, according to a 1996 paper on Israel’s Nuclear Weapon Capability by the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control.

In August 1985, U.S. Customs subpoenaed the financial records linking Smyth and Milchan. The records were neither turned over nor found.

Smyth and his wife disappeared just days before his scheduled trial, which almost certainly would have involved Milchan.

“There were so many…indictments that they probably decided just to get out,” Mainhardt, who operates a security business in Dublin, California, said. “If I had to make a guess, I’d say they’re in Israel.”

“Let’s assume that there’s nothing that Israel and the United States do separately,” Milchan told Bardach. “Smyth, a U.S. fugitive for more than a decade, was last seen in Herzliya Pituach, an affluent suburb of Tel Aviv, where Milchan owns a home,” Bardach wrote in 2000.

In July 2001, Smyth was arrested in Malaga, Spain. Smyth pleaded guilty in December to one count of violating the Arms Export Control Act and one count of making a false statement to Customs agents. Prosecutors dropped twenty-eight other counts.

On April 29, 2002 Smyth was sentenced to forty months in federal prison and fined $20,000 for illegally exporting to Israel the devices that are used as triggers for nuclear weapons.

Smyth, 72, was immediately made eligible for parole at his sentencing.

MILCHAN AND PERES

“In Israel, Milchan spends much of his time with best friend Shimon Peres,” Bardach wrote.

She continued, “Milchan’s political connections would prove to be the foundation of his future empire. In addition to agriculture, there would be biotechnology, advertising, aerospace, and the biggest jackpot of them all – arms.”

Arnon Milchan is deeply engaged in chemicals and helped build Israel’s nuclear arsenal,

which was developed by his good friend Shimon Peres.

What does he know about the super-thermite that demolished the World Trade Center?

In 1953, at age thirty, Shimon Peres was appointed by Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, to become Director-General of the Ministry of Defense.

Within three years, Peres had laid the foundation for Israel’s nuclear weapon program, according to the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control. Peres started Israel’s program to develop nuclear power and nuclear weapons by convincing the French to help Israel build a secret nuclear reactor beginning about 1957. He chose France as the major supplier, arranged the sale of a nuclear reactor, and spent the next decade overseeing the construction of the Dimona nuclear weapon production complex.

Peres is the one who came up with Israel’s most often repeated nuclear declaration. At an April 1963 meeting in the White House, Peres responded to President John F. Kennedy’s questions about Israel’s nuclear program by saying:

“Israel will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East.”

Two years later, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol elevated Peres’s words to Israel’s official nuclear line.

Sources & Recommended Reading

Bardach, Ann Louise, “The Last Tycoon” Los Angeles Magazine, April 2000 http://www.bardachreports.com/articles/oa_20000400.html

Bollyn, Christopher, “Intel Expert Says 9-11 Looks Like A Hollywood Show” December 2001

Bollyn, “9/11: What Did Rupert Murdoch Know?” October 3, 2003

Bollyn, “Mossad – The Israeli Connection To 9-11″ April 14, 2005

Bollyn, “Some Survivors Say Bombs Exploded in WTC” September 2001

Bollyn, “‘Series of Explosions’ in WTC – BBC” June 28, 2002

Bollyn, “9-11 Mossad Agents Admit Mission: ‘Our Purpose Was to Document the Event’” June 28, 2002

Bollyn, “Why was Kobi Alexander Allowed to Flee? The Israeli Fugitive, Odigo, and the Forewarning of 9/11″ August 24, 2006

Bollyn, “The Great Game: The War For Caspian Oil And Gas” October 14, 2001

Lima, Paolo, “Five men detained as suspected conspirators,” Bergen Record, September 12, 2001 http://web.archive.org/web…/2bombvan200109125.htm

McArthur, Shirl, “A Conservative Estimate of Total Direct U.S. Aid to Israel: $108 Billion” Washington Report, July 2006 http://www.wrmea.com/archives/July_2006/0607016.html

Washington Post, “Computer Expert Used Firm to Feed Israel Technology” October 31, 1986

Washington Post, “L.A. Man Indicted in Export of Potential Nuclear Bomb Component to Israel” by John M. Goshko, May 17, 1985

Washington Post, “U.S. Asks to Inspect Israeli Atom Sites To Verify Use of Restricted Device” by John M. Goshko, May 15, 1985

Washington Post, “Israel Got U.S.-Made Devices” by John M. Goshko, May 14, 1985

Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, “Israeli Nuclear Program Pioneered by Shimon Peres,” The Risk Report, Volume 2 Number 4, July-August 1996 http://www.wisconsinproject.org/countries/israel/Israel-nuclear-peres.html

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IRAN: THE PHANTOM MENACE

http://desertpeace.wordpress.com

December 30, 2010 at 17:52 (Conspiracy Theories, Cover Up, Deception, Guest Post, Iran, Israel)

The Phantom Menace:
Fantasies, Falsehoods, and Fear-Mongering about Iran’s Nuclear Program

Submitted by Nima Shirazi

“To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary.”

- George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

Facts rarely get in the way of American and Israeli fear-mongering and jingoism, especially when it comes to anti-Iran propaganda. For nearly thirty years now, U.S. and Zionist politicians and analysts, along with some of their European allies, have warned that Iranian nuclear weapons capability is just around the corner and that such a possibility would not only be catastrophic for Israel with its 400 nuclear warheads and state-of-the-art killing power supplied by U.S. taxpayers, but that it would also endanger regional dictatorships, Europe, and even the United States.

If these warnings are to be believed, Iran is only a few years away from unveiling a nuclear bomb…and has been for the past three decades. Fittingly, let’s begin in 1984.

An April 24, 1984 article entitled “‘Ayatollah’ Bomb in Production for Iran in United Press International referenced a Jane’s Intelligence Defense Weekly report warning that Iran was moving “very quickly” towards a nuclear weapon and could have one as early as 1986.

Two months later, on June 27, 1984, in an article entitled “Senator says Iran, Iraq seek N-Bomb,” Minority Whip of the U.S. Senate Alan Cranston was quoted as claiming Iran was a mere seven years away from being able to build its own nuclear weapon. In April 1987, the Washington Post published an article with the title “Atomic Ayatollahs: Just What the Mideast Needs – an Iranian Bomb,” in which reporter David Segal wrote of the imminent threat of such a weapon.

The next year, in 1988, Iraq issued warnings that Tehran was at the nuclear threshold.

By late 1991, Congressional reports and CIA assessments maintained a “high degree of certainty that the government of Iran has acquired all or virtually all of the components required for the construction of two to three nuclear weapons.” In January 1992, Benjamin Netanyahu told the Knesset that “within three to five years, we can assume that Iran will become autonomous in its ability to develop and produce a nuclear bomb.”

Furthermore, a February 1992 report by the U.S. House of Representatives suggested that Iran would have two or three operational nuclear weapons by April 1992.

In March 1992, The Arms Control Reporter reported that Iran already had four nuclear weapons, which it had obtained from Russia. That same year, the CIA predicted an Iranian nuclear weapon by 2000, then later changed their estimate to 2003.

A May 1992 report in The European claims that “Iran has obtained at least two nuclear warheads out of a batch officially listed as ‘missing from the newly independent republic of Kazakhstan.’”

Speaking on French television in October 1992, then-Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres warned the international community that Iran would be armed with a nuclear bomb by 1999. The following month, the New York Times reported that Israel was confident Iran would “become a nuclear power in a few years unless stopped.”

The same year, Robert Gates, then-director of the CIA, addressed the imminent threat of Iranian nuclear weapons. “Is it a problem today?” he asked at the time, “probably not. But three, four, five years from now it could be a serious problem.”

On January 23, 1993, Gad Yaacobi, Israeli envoy to the UN, was quoted in the Boston Globe, claiming that Iran was devoting $800 million per year to the development of nuclear weapons. Then, on February 24, 1993, CIA director James Woolsey said that although Iran was “still eight to ten years away from being able to produce its own nuclear weapon” the United States was concerned that, with foreign assistance, it could become a nuclear power earlier.

That same year, international press went wild with speculation over Iranian nuclear weapons. In the Spring of 1993, U.S. News & World Report, the New York Times, the conservative French weekly Paris Match, and Foreign Report all claimed Iran had struck a deal with North Korea to develop nuclear weapons capability, while U.S. intelligence analysts alleged an Iranian nuclear alliance with Ukraine. Months later, the AFP reported Switzerland was supplying Iran with nuclear weapons technology, while the Intelligence Newsletter claimed that the French firm CKD was delivering nuclear materials to Iran and U.S. News and World Report accused Soviet scientists working in Kazakhstan of selling weapons-grade uranium to Iran. By the end of 1993, Theresa Hitchens and Brendan McNally of Defense News and National Defense University analyst W. Seth Carus had reaffirmed CIA director Woolsey’s prediction “that Iran could have nuclear weapons within eight to ten years.”

In January 1995, John Holum, director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, testified before Congress that “Iran could have the bomb by 2003,” while Defense Secretary William Perry unveiled a grimmer analysis, stating that “Iran may be less than five years from building an atomic bomb, although how soon…depends how they go about getting it.” Perry suggested that Iran could potentially buy or steal a nuclear bomb from one of the former Soviet states in “a week, a month, five years.”

The New York Times reported that “Iran is much closer to producing nuclear weapons than previously thought, and could be less than five years away from having an atomic bomb, several senior American and Israeli officials say,” a claim repeated by Greg Gerardi in The Nonproliferation Review (Vol. 2, 1995).

Benjamin Netanyahu, in his 1995 book “Fighting Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat the International Terrorist Network,” wrote, “The best estimates at this time place Iran between three and five years away from possessing the prerequisites required for the independent production of nuclear weapons.”

At the same time, a senior Israeli official declared, “If Iran is not interrupted in this program by some foreign power, it will have the device in more or less five years.” After a meeting in Jerusalem between Defense Secretary Perry and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, they announced that Iran would have a nuclear bomb in seven to 15 years.

On February 15, 1996, then-Israeli Foreign Minister Ehud Barak told members of the UN Security Council that Iran would be producing nuclear weapons by 2004.

On April 29, 1996, Israel’s then-Prime Minister Shimon Peres claimed in an interview with ABC that “the Iranians are trying to perfect a nuclear option” and would “reach nuclear weapons” in four years. By 1997 the Israelis confidently predicted an active Iranian nuclear bomb by 2005.

In March 1997, U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency director John Holum again attested to a House panel that Iran would develop a nuclear weapon sometime between 2005 and 2007.

The following month, according to a report in Hamburg’s Welt am Sonntag, the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) believed Iran had an active nuclear weapons development program and would be able to produce nuclear weapons by 2002, “although that timeframe could be accelerated if Iran acquires weapons-grade fissile material on the black market.” Eight days later, in early May 1997, a Los Angeles Times article quoted a senior Israeli intelligence official as stating that Iran would be able to make a nuclear bomb by “the middle of the next decade.”

On June 26, 1997, the U.S. military commander in the Persian Gulf, General Binford Peay, stated that, were Iran to acquire access to fissile material, it would obtain nuclear weapons “sometime at the turn of the century, the near-end of the turn of the century.”

In September 1997, Jane’s Intelligence Defense Review reported that former U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher declared, “we know that since the mid-1980s, Iran has had an organized structure dedicated to acquiring and developing nuclear weapons,” as then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned that the Iranian nuclear technology program “may be the most dangerous development in the 21st century.”

Writing in the Jerusalem Post on April 9, 1998, Steve Rodan claimed “Documents obtained by the Jerusalem Post show Iran has four nuclear bombs.” The next day, U.S. State Department spokesperson James Rubin addressed this allegation, stating, “There was no evidence to substantiate such claims.”

On October 21, 1998, General Anthony Zinni, head of U.S. Central Command, said Iran could have deliverable nuclear weapons by 2003. “If I were a betting man,” he said, “I would say they are on track within five years, they would have the capability.”

The next year, on November 21, 1999, a senior Israeli military official was quoted by AP reporter Ron Kampeas (who was later hired as Washington bureau chief for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency) saying, “Unless the United States pressures Russia to end its military assistance to Iran, the Islamic republic will possess a nuclear capability within five years.”

On December 9, 1999, General Zinni reiterated his assessment that Iran “will have nuclear capability in a few years.”

In a January 2000 New York Times article co-authored by Judith Miller, it was reported that the CIA suggested to the Clinton administration “that Iran might now be able to make a nuclear weapon,” even though this assessment was “apparently not based on evidence that Iran’s indigenous efforts to build a bomb have achieved a breakthrough,” but rather that “the United States cannot track with great certainty increased efforts by Iran to acquire nuclear materials and technology on the international black market.”

On March 9, 2000, the BBC stated that German intelligence once again believed Iran to be “working to develop missiles and nuclear weapons.” The Telegraph reported on September 27, 2000 that the CIA believes Iran’s nuclear weapons capability to be progressing rapidly and suggests Iran will develop an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching London or New York within the next decade. CIA Deputy Director Norman Schindler is quoted as saying, “Iran is attempting to develop the capability to produce both plutonium and highly enriched uranium, and it is actively pursuing the acquisition of fissile material and the expertise and technology necessary to form the material into nuclear weapons.”

By the summer of 2001, Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer was warning that Iran could have nuclear weapons by 2005 and that, sometime in the next decade, the Iranian nuclear program would reach a “point of no return,” from which time “it would be impossible to stop it from attaining a bomb.” By the end of the year, despite an inquiry into the questionable validity of Israeli intelligence regarding the Iranian nuclear program, Mossad head Efraim Halevy repeated the claim that Iran is developing nuclear and other non-conventional weapons.

In early 2002, the CIA again issued a report alleging that Iran “remains one of the most active countries seeking to acquire (weapons of mass destruction and advanced conventional weapons) technology from abroad…In doing so, Tehran is attempting to develop a domestic capability to produce various types of weapons — chemical, biological, nuclear — and their delivery systems.” Soon thereafter, CIA Director George Tenet testified before a Senate hearing that Iran may be able to “produce enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon by the end of this decade…Obtaining material from outside could cut years from this estimate.”

During his “Axis-of-Evil” State of the Union address on January 29, 2002, George W. Bush declared that Iran was “aggressively” pursuing weapons of mass destruction.

On July 29, 2002, U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Marshall Billingslea testified to the Senate that “Iran is aggressively pursuing nuclear weapons.” Three days later, after a meeting with Russian officials on August 1, U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham stated that Iran was “aggressively pursuing nuclear weapons as well as [other] weapons of mass destruction.” By the end of the year, White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer was reiterating U.S. concerns about, what he termed, Iran’s “across-the-board pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and missile capabilities.”

In an interview with CNBC on February 2003, U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton said that Iran is seeking technological assistance from North Korea and China to enhance its weapons of mass destruction programs. In April 2003, John Wolf, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State, accused Iran of having an “alarming, clandestine program.”

That same month, the Los Angeles Times stated that “there is evidence that Iran is developing nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction,” in a polling question regarding American attitudes toward Iran. The question followed, “Do you think the U.S. should or should not take military action against Iran if they continue to develop these weapons?” Fifty percent of respondents thought the U.S. should attack Iran.

The Telegraph reported on June 1, 2003 that “Senior Pentagon officials are proposing widespread covert operations against the government in Iran, hoping that dissident groups will mount a coup before the regime acquires a nuclear weapon.” The report contained a quote from a U.S. “government official with close links to the White House” as saying “There are some who see the overthrow of the regime as the only way to deal with the danger of Iran possessing a nuclear weapon. But there’s not going to be another war. The idea is to destabilize from inside. No one’s talking about invading anywhere.”

A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll taken in late June 2003 asked Americans, “How likely do you think it is that Iran is developing weapons of mass destruction?” 46% of those surveyed said “very likely,” while another 38% said “somewhat likely.” Only 2% replied “not at all likely.”

An August 5, 2003 report in the Jerusalem Post stated that “Iran will have the materials needed to make a nuclear bomb by 2004 and will have an operative nuclear weapons program by 2005, a high-ranking military officer told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.”

On October 21, 2003, Major General Aharon Ze’evi, Israel’s Director of Military Intelligence, declared in Ha’aretz that “by the summer of 2004, Iran will have reached the point of no return in its attempts to develop nuclear weapons.” A few weeks later, the CIA released a semi-annual unclassified report to Congress which stated Iran had “vigorously” pursued production of weapons of mass destruction and that the “United States remains convinced that Tehran has been pursuing a clandestine nuclear weapons program.”

By mid-November 2003, Mossad intelligence service chief Meir Dagan testified for the first time before the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee and said that Iran was close to the “point of no return” in developing nuclear arms.

In early 2004, Ken Brill, U.S. Ambassador to the IAEA, reiterated the American position that Iran’s nuclear efforts are “clearly geared to the development of nuclear weapons.” One year later, on January 24, 2005, Mossad chief Meir Dagan again claimed that Iran’s nuclear program was almost at the “point of no return,” adding “the route to building a bomb is a short one” and that Iran could possess a nuclear weapon in less than three years. On January 28, the Guardian quoted Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz stating the same thing. He warned that Iran would reach “the point of no return” within the next twelve months in its covert attempt to secure a nuclear weapons capability. A week later, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on CNN that Iran was “on a path of seeking a nuclear weapon,” but admitted that Iran was “years away” from building a nuclear bomb.

By August 2005, a “high-ranking IDF officer” told the Jerusalem Post that Israel has revised its earlier estimate that Iran would have a nuclear bomb by 2008, now putting the estimate closer to 2012. The same day, a major U.S. intelligence review projected that Iran was approximately ten years away from manufacturing the key ingredient for a nuclear weapon, doubling its previous estimate.

Two weeks later, however, Israeli military chief General Aharon Zeevi contradicted both the new Israeli and U.S. estimates. “Barring an unexpected delay,” he said, “Iran is going to become nuclear capable in 2008 and not in 10 years.”

In November 2005, Mohammad Mohaddessin, chair of the so-called National Council of Resistance of Iran (otherwise known as the Islamist/Marxist terrorist cult Mojahadeen-e Khalq, or MEK, which is currently designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the U.S. government) addressed a European Parliament conference and proclaimed that the “Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is determined to pursue and complete Tehran’s nuclear weapons program full blast…[and] would have the bomb in two or three years time.”

On January 18, 2006, Donald Rumsfeld told Fox News that Iran was “acquiring nuclear weapons.”

A CNN/USA Today/Gallup survey conducted in late January 2006 asked, “Based on what you have heard or read, do you think that the government of Iran is or is not attempting to develop its own nuclear weapons?” 88% of those polled said Iran is.

82% of respondents to a Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll taken around the same time believed “Iran wants to use the uranium for military purposes, such as to build a nuclear weapons program.” 68% thought “Iran currently has a nuclear weapons program,” an increase of 8% from the previous year.

CBS News reported on April 26, 2007 that “a new intelligence report says Iran has overcome technical difficulties in enriching uranium and could have enough bomb-grade material for a single nuclear weapon in less than three years.”

In late May 2007, IAEA head Mohammad El Baradei stated that, even if Iran wanted to build a nuclear weapon (despite all evidence to the contrary), it would not be able to “before the end of this decade or some time in the middle of the next decade. In other words three to eight years from now.” On July 11, 2007, Ha’aretz reported that “Iran will cross the ‘technological threshold’ enabling it to independently manufacture nuclear weapons within six months to a year and attain nuclear capability as early as mid-2009, according to Israel’s Military Intelligence.” The report also noted that “U.S. intelligence predicts that Iran will attain nuclear capability within three to six years.”

A Fox News/Opinion Dynamics opinion poll taken in late September 2007 found that 80% of Americans believed Iran’s nuclear program was for “military purposes.”

Israeli President Shimon Peres issued an official statement on October 18, 2007 that claimed “everyone knows [Iran's] true intentions, and many intelligence agencies throughout the world have proof that Iran is seeking to develop nuclear weapons for the purpose of war and death.”

Less than two months later, the New York Times released “Key Judgments From a National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s Nuclear Activity,” a consensus view of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies. The analysis, entitled “Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities,” concluded with “high confidence” that the Iranian government had “halted its nuclear weapons program” in 2003, “had not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007,” and admitted that “we do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons.” The NIE also found that “Iran does not currently have a nuclear weapon” and that “Tehran’s decision to halt its nuclear weapons program suggests it is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005.” Also included in the report was the assessment that, if Iran actually had a nuclear weapons program, “the earliest possible date Iran would be technically capable of producing enough HEU [highly enriched uranium] for a weapon is late 2009, but that this is very unlikely,” continuing, “Iran probably would be technically capable of producing enough HEU for a weapon sometime during the 2010-2015 time frame,” and adding that “All agencies recognize the possibility that this capability may not be attained until after 2015.”

A report released on February 7, 2008 by the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) asserted that Iran had tested a new, and more efficient, centrifuge design to enrich uranium. If 1,200 new centrifuges were operational, the report suggested, Iran could produce enough weapons-grade uranium for a bomb in one year.

Less than a week later, Israeli Prime Minster Ehud Olmert told reporters, “We are certain that the Iranians are engaged in a serious…clandestine operation to build up a non-conventional capacity.” Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, in a speech at West Point that Spring, claimed that Iran “is hellbent on acquiring nuclear weapons.”

On June 28, 2008, Shabtai Shavit, a former Mossad deputy director and influential adviser to the Israeli Knesset’s Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee, told The Sunday Telegraph that “worst-case scenario,” Iran may have a nuclear weapon in “somewhere around a year.”

In November 2008, David Sanger and William Broad of The New York Times reported that “Iran has now produced roughly enough nuclear material to make, with added purification, a single atom bomb, according to nuclear experts.” The article quoted nuclar physicist Richard L. Garwin, who helped invent the hydrogen bomb, as saying “They clearly have enough material for a bomb.” Siegfried S. Hecker of Stanford University and a former director of the Los Alamos weapons laboratory said in the report that the growing size of the Iranian stockpile “underscored that they are marching down the path to developing the nuclear weapons option,” while Thomas B. Cochran, a senior scientist in the nuclear program of the Natural Resources Defense Council declared, “They have a weapon’s worth.” Peter D. Zimmerman, a physicist and former United States government arms scientist, cautioned that Iran was “very close” to nuclear weapons capability. “If it isn’t tomorrow, it’s soon,” he said, indicating the threshold could be reached in a matter of months.

David Blair, writing in The Telegraph on January 27, 2009, reported that the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) “has said Iran is months away from crossing a vital threshold which could put it on course to build a weapon,” continuing that “Mark Fitzpatrick, the senior fellow for non-proliferation at the IISS, said: ‘This year, it’s very likely that Iran will have produced enough low-enriched uranium which, if further enriched, could constitute enough fissile material for one nuclear weapon, if that is the route Iran so desires.’”

On February 12, 2009, CIA Director-to-be Leon Panetta, told a Capitol Hill hearing, “From all the information I’ve seen, I think there is no question that [Iran is] seeking [nuclear weapons] capability.” Later that month, Benjamin Netanyahu, then a candidate for Israeli Prime Minister, told a Congressional delegation led by Maryland Senator Ben Cardin that “he did not know for certain how close Iran was to developing a nuclear weapons capability, but that ‘our experts’ say Iran was probably only one or two years away and that was why they wanted open ended negotiations.” Soon after that, Israel’s top intelligence official Amos Yadlin said Iran had “crossed the technological threshold” and was now capable of making a weapon.

In contrast to these allegations, National Intelligence director Dennis Blair told a Senate hearing in early March 2009 that Iran had only low-enriched uranium, which would need further processing to be used for weapons, and continued to explain that Iran had “not yet made that decision” to convert it. “We assess now that Iran does not have any highly enriched uranium,” Blair said.

Speaking in private with U.S. Congressmembers in late Spring 2009, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak “estimated a window between 6 and 18 months from now in which stopping Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons might still be viable.” In mid-June 2009, Mossad chief Meir Dagan said, “the Iranians will have by 2014 a bomb ready to be used, which would represent a concrete threat for Israel.”

On July 8, 2009, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, speaking at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, warned that the “window is closing” for preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. Mullen claimed that Iran was only one to three years away from successfully building a nuclear weapon and “is very focused on developing this capability.” A week later, Germany’s BND foreign intelligence agency declared Iran was capable of producing and testing an atomic bomb within six months.

The following month, on August 3, The Times (UK) reported that Iran had “perfected the technology to create and detonate a nuclear warhead” and “could feasibly make a bomb within a year” if given the order by head of state Ali Khamenei.

Meanwhile, a Newsweek report from September 16, 2009, indicated that the National Intelligence Estimate stood by its 2007 assessment and that “U.S. intelligence agencies have informed policymakers at the White House and other agencies that the status of Iranian work on development and production of a nuclear bomb has not changed.”

Nevertheless, both ABC News/Washington Post and CNN/Opinion Research Corporation polls taken in mid-October 2009 found that, “Based on what [they]‘ve heard or read,” between 87% and 88% of respondents believed Iran to be developing nuclear weapons.

In November 2009, during a private meeting between U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, Alexander Vershbow, and a number of senior Israeli defense officials in Israel, the head of Israel’s Defense Ministry Intelligence Analysis Production, Brigadier General Yossi Baidatz, “argued that it would take Iran one year to obtain a nuclear weapon and two and a half years to build an arsenal of three weapons.”

The Times (UK) reported on January 10, 2010 that retired Israeli brigadier-general and former director-general of Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission Uzi Eilam “believes it will probably take Iran seven years to make nuclear weapons,” despite the dire warnings from Major-General Amos Yadlin, head of Israeli military intelligence, who had recently told the Knesset defense committee that Iran would most likely be able to build a single nuclear device within the year.

In an interview with the U.S. military’s Voice of America on January 12, 2010, the director of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, Lieutenant General Ronald Burgess, said there was no evidence that Iran has made a final decision to build nuclear weapons and confirmed that the key NIE finding that Iran has not yet committed itself to nuclear weapons was still valid. “The bottom line assessments of the NIE still hold true,” he said. “We have not seen indication that the government has made the decision to move ahead with the program.”

Barack Obama, in his first State of the Union speech on January 27, 2010 claimed that Iran was “violating international agreements in pursuit of nuclear weapons.”

Speaking in Doha, Qatar on February 14, 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton addressed, what she called, “Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.” Although Clinton said that the United States was attempting to “influence the Iranian decision regarding whether or not to pursue a nuclear weapon,” she added that “the evidence is accumulating that that’s exactly what they are trying to do, which is deeply concerning, because it doesn’t directly threaten the United States, but it directly threatens a lot of our friends, allies, and partners here in this region and beyond.”

A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll, taken at the same time as Clinton’s Doha visit, revealed that 71% of Americans believed Iran already had nuclear weapons. Of those remaining respondents who didn’t think Iran already possessed a nuclear bomb, over 72% thought it either “very likely” or “somewhat likely” that “Iran will have nuclear weapons in the next few years.”

At an April 14, 2010 hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Lieutenant General Burgess, stated that Iran could develop a nuclear weapon within a year and in three years build one that could be deployed, despite having judged that Iran didn’t even have an active nuclear weapons program a mere four months earlier.

Perennial warmongers David Sanger and William Broad of the New York Times reported on May 31, 2010 that “Iran has now produced a stockpile of nuclear fuel that experts say would be enough, with further enrichment, to make two nuclear weapons.”

On June 11, 2010, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said that “Most people believe that the Iranians could not really have any nuclear weapons for at least another year or two. I would say the intelligence estimates range from one to three years.”

The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill on June 24, 2010, introduced by Democratic Congressman Jim Costa of California, that “condemn[ed] the Government of Iran’s continued pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability and unconventional weapons and ballistic missile capabilities.”

CIA Director Leon Panetta said on June 27, 2010, Iran would need two years to prepare two tested and operational nuclear weapons. “We think they have enough low-enriched uranium for two weapons,” Panetta told Jake Tapper of ABC News, continuing to explain that Iran would require one year to enrich the material to weapon-grade levels and “another year to develop the kind of weapon delivery system in order to make that viable.”

On July 22, 2010, nearly a third of House Republicans signed onto a resolution which stated that “Iran continues its pursuit of nuclear weapons” and “express[ed] support for the State of Israel’s right to defend Israeli sovereignty, to protect the lives and safety of the Israeli people, and to use all means necessary to confront and eliminate nuclear threats posed by the Islamic Republic of Iran, including the use of military force if no other peaceful solution can be found within reasonable time to protect against such an immediate and existential threat to the State of Israel.”

On August 19, 2010, the New York Times quoted Gary Samore, President Obama’s top adviser on nuclear issues, as saying that the U.S. believes Iran has “roughly a year dash time” before it could convert nuclear material into a working weapon.

Following the release of the latest IAEA report on Iran’s nuclear facilities, The Telegraph declared that Iran was “on [the] brink of [a] nuclear weapon,” had “passed a crucial nuclear threshold,” and “could now go on to arm an atomic missile with relative ease.”

In his attention-grabbing September 2009 cover story for The Atlantic, entitled “The Point of No Return,” Israeli establishment mouthpiece Jeffrey Goldberg wrote that, according to Israeli intelligence estimates, “Iran is, at most, one to three years away from having a breakout nuclear capability (often understood to be the capacity to assemble more than one missile-ready nuclear device within about three months of deciding to do so).”

Joint Chiefs chairman Mullen, speaking in Bahrain on December 18, 2010, said, “From my perspective I see Iran continuing on this path to develop nuclear weapons, and I believe that that development and achieving that goal would be very destabilizing to the region.”

A week ago, on December 22, 2010, the great prognosticator Sarah Palin wrote in USA Today that “Iran continues to defy the international community in its drive to acquire nuclear weapons.”

Just today, December 29, 2010, Reuters quotes Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Moshe Yaalon as claiming Iran would soon have a nuclear weapon. “I don’t know if it will happen in 2011 or in 2012, but we are talking in terms of the next three years,” he said, adding that in terms of Iran’s nuclear time-line, “we cannot talk about a ‘point of no return.’ Iran does not currently have the ability to make a nuclear bomb on its own.”

Despite all of these hysterical warnings, no evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program has ever been revealed. The IAEA has repeatedly found, through intensive, round-the-clock monitoring and inspection of Iran’s nuclear facilities – including numerous surprise visits to Iranian enrichment plants – that all of Iran’s centrifuges operate under IAEA safeguards and “continue to be operated as declared.”

As far back as 1991, then-Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Hans Blix, made it clear that there was “no cause for concern” regarding Iran’s attempts to acquire nuclear technology. Twelve years later, in an IAEA report from November 2003, the agency affirmed that “to date, there is no evidence that the previously undeclared nuclear material and activities referred to above were related to a nuclear weapons programme.” Furthermore, after extensive inspections of Iran’s nuclear facilities, the IAEA again concluded in its November 2004 report that “all the declared nuclear material in Iran has been accounted for, and therefore such material is not diverted to prohibited activities.”

During a press conference in Washington D.C. on October 27, 2007, IAEA Director-General El Baradei confirmed, “I have not received any information that there is a concrete active nuclear weapons program going on right now.” He continued, “Have we seen Iran having the nuclear material that can readily be used into a weapon? No. Have we seen an active weapons program? No.”

By May 2008, the IAEA still reported that it had found “no indication” that Iran has or ever did have a nuclear weapons program and affirmed that “The Agency has been able to continue to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material [to weaponization] in Iran.” On February 22, 2009, IAEA spokesperson Melissa Fleming even issued a statement clarifying the IAEA’s position regarding the flurry of deliberately misleading articles in the US and European press claiming that Iran had enriched enough uranium “to build a nuclear bomb.” The statement, among other things, declared that “No nuclear material could have been removed from the [Nantanz] facility without the Agency’s knowledge since the facility is subject to video surveillance and the nuclear material has been kept under seal.”

This assessment was reaffirmed in September 2009, in response to various media reports over the past few years claiming that Iran’s intent to build a nuclear bomb can be proven by information provided from a mysterious stolen laptop and a dubious, undated – and forged – two-page document. The IAEA stated, “With respect to a recent media report, the IAEA reiterates that it has no concrete proof that there is or has been a nuclear weapon programme in Iran.”

In his Annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, delivered on February 2, 2010, National Intelligence director Dennis Blair stated, “We continue to assess [that] Iran is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons in part by developing various nuclear capabilities that bring it closer to being able to produce such weapons, should it choose to do so. We do not know, however, if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons.”

In a Spring 2010 Unclassified Report to Congress on the Acquisition of Technology Related to Weapons of Mass Destruction, Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis Peter Lavoy affirmed that “we do not know whether Iran will eventually decide to produce nuclear weapons.”

Speaking with Charlie Rose in November 2010, Blair once again reiterated that “Iran hasn’t made up its mind” whether or not to pursue nuclear weaponry. On November 28, 2010, a diplomatic cable made available by Wikileaks revealed that, in December 2009, senior Israeli Defense Ministry official Amos Gilad told Undersecretary of State Ellen Tauscher that “he was not sure Tehran had decided it wants a nuclear weapon.”

Back in October 2003, the San Francisco Chronicle quoted former IAEA weapons inspector David Albright as saying, with regard to new reports about a possible Iranian nuclear weapons program revealed by the MEK, “We should be very suspicious about what our leaders or the exile groups say about Iran’s nuclear capacity.”

Albright continued, “There is a drumbeat of allegations, but there’s not a whole lot of solid information. It may be that Iran has not made the decision to build nuclear weapons. We have to be very careful not to overstate the intelligence.”

It appears that nothing much has changed in the past seven years, let alone the previous three decades.

Whereas the new year will surely bring more lies and deception about Iran and its nuclear energy program, more doublespeak and duplicity regarding the threat Iran poses to the United States, to Israel and to U.S.-backed Arab dictatorships, and more warmongering and demonization from Zionist think tanks, right-wing and progressive pundits alike, the 112th Congress and the Obama administration, the truth is not on their side.

“Facts are stubborn things,” John Adams said in 1770. “And whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”

Here’s hoping that, in 2011, the facts will begin to matter.

Happy New Year.

*****

UPDATE:

Just hours after this article was posted, United Press International published the findings of a new public opinion poll conducted by Angus-Reid. The poll found that 70% of respondents believe “the Government of Iran is attempting to develop nuclear weapons. Only 11 per cent of Americans do not believe that Iran is pursuing a nuclear program, while one-in-five (19%) are not sure.”

Originally posted AT

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Incipient Fascist State: America Has Gone Away – Paul Craig Roberts

http://dprogram.net

Posted by sakerfa on December 30th, 2010

(GlobalResearch) – Anyone who doesn’t believe that the US is an incipient fascist state needs only to consult the latest assault on civil liberty by Fox News (sic). Instead of informing citizens, Fox News (sic) informs on citizens. Jason Ditz reports (antiwar.com Dec. 28) that Fox News (sic) “no longer content to simply shill for a growing police state,” turned in a grandmother to the Department of Homeland Security for making “anti-American comments.”

The media have segued into the police attitude, which regards insistence on civil liberties and references to the Constitution as signs of extremism, especially when the Constitution is invoked in defense of dissent or privacy or placarded on a bumper sticker. President George W. Bush set the scene when he declared:  “you are with us or against us.”

Bush’s words demonstrate a frightening decline in our government’s respect for dissent since the presidency of John F. Kennedy.  In a speech to the Newspaper Publishers Association in 1961, President Kennedy said:

“No president should fear public scrutiny of his program, for from that scrutiny comes understanding, and from that understanding comes support or opposition; and both are necessary.  . . .  Without debate, without criticism, no administration and no country can succeed, and no republic can survive. That is why the Athenian law makers once decreed it a crime for any citizen to shrink from controversy. And that is why our press was protected by the First Amendment.”

The press is not protected, Kennedy told the newspaper publishers, in order that it can amuse and entertain, emphasize the trivial, or simply tell the public what it wants to hear. The press is protected so that it can find and report facts and, thus, inform, arouse “and sometimes even anger public opinion.”

In a statement unlikely to be repeated by an American president, Kennedy told the newspaper publishers: “I’m not asking your newspapers to support an administration, but I am asking your help in the tremendous task of informing and alerting the American people, for I have complete confidence in the response and dedication of our citizens whenever they are fully informed.”

The America of Kennedy’s day and the America of today are two different worlds. In America today the media are expected to lie for the government in order to prevent the people from finding out what the government is up to.  If polls can be believed, Americans brainwashed and programmed by O’Reilly, Hannity, Beck, and Limbaugh want Bradley Manning and Julian Assange torn limb from limb for informing Americans of the criminal acts of their government. Politicians and journalists are screeching for their execution.

President Kennedy told the Newspaper Publishers Association that “it is to the printing press, the recorder of man’s deeds, the keeper of his conscience, the courier of his news, that we look for strength and assistance, confident that with your help man will be what he was born to be: Free and Independent.”  Who can imagine a Bill Clinton, a George W. Bush, or a Barack Obama saying such a thing today?

Today the press is a propaganda ministry for the government. Any member who departs from his duty to lie and spin the news is expelled from the fraternity.  A public increasingly unemployed, broke and homeless is told that they have vast enemies plotting to destroy them in the absence of annual trillion dollar expenditures for the military/security complex, wars lasting decades, no-fly lists, unlimited spying and collecting of dossiers on citizens supplemented by neighbors reporting on neighbors, full body scanners at airports, shopping centers, metro and train stations, traffic checks, and the equivalence of treason with the uttering of a truth.

Two years ago when he came into office President Obama admitted that no one knew what the military mission was in Afghanistan, including the president himself, but that he would find a mission and define it. On his recent trip to Afghanistan, Obama came up with the mission: to make the families of the troops safe in America, his version of Bush’s “we have to kill them over there before they kill us over here.”

No one snorted with derision or even mildly giggled. Neither the New York Times nor Fox News (sic) dared to wonder if perhaps, maybe, murdering and displacing large numbers of Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen and US support for Israel’s similar treatment of Lebanese and Palestinians might be creating a hostile environment that could breed terrorists. If there still is such a thing as the Newspaper Publishers Association, its members are incapable of such an unpatriotic thought.

Today no one believes that our country’s success depends on an informed public and a free press. America’s success depends on its financial and military hegemony over the world. Any information inconsistent with the indispensable people’s god-given right to dominate the world must be suppressed and the messenger discredited and destroyed.

Now that the press has voluntarily shed its First Amendment rights, the government is working to redefine free speech as a privilege limited to the media, not a right of citizens. Thus, the insistence that WikiLeaks is not a media organization and Fox News (sic) turning in a citizen for exercising free speech. Washington’s assault on Assange and WikiLeaks is an assault on what remains of the US Constitution. When we cheer for WikiLeaks’ demise, we are cheering for our own.

Source: Global Research

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Wikileaks falling apart, Israel finally called out in congress, and other news – Ryan Dawson

Comment :

In this Video Ryan Dawson reflects (for the most) my own personal opinion  !

 

GORDON DUFF: THANK YOU, AUSTRALIA, FOR SUPPORTING 9/11 TRUTH

http://www.veteranstoday.com

October 22, 2010 posted by Gordon Duff · 32 Comments

 

BRACKEN SPEAKING AT RIGHTS CONFERENCE 

NEARLY THREE OUT OF FOUR AUSTRALIANS:  “9/11 A GOVERNMENT CONSPIRACY”

By Gordon Duff STAFF WRITER/Senior Editor

“72% of Australians cite 9/11 government conspiracy in poll.  How can a government get so out of touch with reality, so “snookered” by American pressure over the 9/11 coverup that it would wake up one morning looking totally idiotic to its own people?”

When Trades Hall council president and staunch conservative,  Kevin Bracken, on the ABC show “Talk Back” publicly aired his views on American government complicity in the 9/11 attacks, host Jon Faine attacked him violently on air, making every attempt to humiliate and silence Bracken.  Bracken, known for taking tough stances during his tenure as head of Australia’s Maritime Union, didn’t back down.

Bracken’s memorable response to ABC’s Jon Faine:

“Unfortunately cowards like you have set the political agenda in this country for too long.  I won’t be cowering down to bullies like yourself.”

Bracken, an outspoken Australian known for “telling it like it is” and “letting the chips fall where they may” made his position official in 2006, when he stated the following:

“If they want to stop terrorism they’ve got to look at who was really behind 9/11….It couldn’t have happened unless there was participation from key elements of the American military and government and security services. I am not saying the whole lot were involved. But I believe the official story for September 11 doesn’t stack up.”

Bracken could have been talking about Great Britain or the United States.  It took an Australian to put his reputation and career on the line, trusting in the judgement of the Australian people.  The Herald Sun took up the challenge and, for the first time, actually polled public opinion on 9/11, clearly asking whether they believed Bracken, that 9/11 was not a terrorist attack but a government conspiracy or the media pundits and members of the political opposition.

Seeing an opening, liberal opposition leaders attacked Bracken like a pack of wild dogs.  Victorian MP Josh Freydenburg advocating expelling Braken from Parliament while Julia Gillard the current Prime Minister called the Braken’s remarks “stupid and wrong’ and threatened retaliation.

BBC “ERROR” OUTRAGES MILLIONS 

Shadow Attorney General Robert Clark tried to “spin” Bracken’s 9/11 remarks into an attack on Australia’s armed forces.  Perhaps Clark’s remarks were the most shameful and despicable of all.

A day later, with poll results in, Clarke, Freydenburg and Gillard stand humiliated, their threats empty and their rhetoric ringing hollow.

When Kevin Bracken claimed he had the support of 50% of Australians when he said that solid scientific evidence left no other rational explanation that 9/11 wasn’t a terrorist act but a government conspiracy, he was wrong.  In a poll by the Herald Sun, 72% of Australians supported Bracken’s beliefs as “reasonable,” a surprise to Bracken and a total debunking of informal news estimates that reported “9/11 truthers” to be less than 10% of the population.  Minority party members, many closely aligned with the powerful Israeli lobby in Australia, found themselves “out in the cold.”

Braken’s point, that “conventional and accepted science” totally rejects the conclusions of the 9/11 report is, as Bracken points out, the basis for his belief that the American government itself is at the heart of the 9/11 attacks.  The Herald Sun poll, made several things clear:

• The Australian government is violently opposed to Bracken’s position, now shown to be one held by a majority of Australian citizens
• Accepting Bracken’s position is a clear rebuttal of a government “out of touch” with, not only its own citizens, but the “hard science” and evidentiary trail that began when the 9/11 Commission itself, cited criminal acts and proof of a conspiracy as “tainting” their findings
• Support of Bracken meant supporting the belief that the United States government, in order to pre-stage a war in the Middle East, a war proven unfounded and illegal, would stage an attack on its own soil

A NEW GROUP OF CONSPIRACY “BUFFS”…PROFESSIONALS

What attracted Bracken to looking at 9/11 as a moral watershed, science vs. dogma.  What set 9/11 aside from other challenges to questionable “official versions” of well known events were the groups that opposed the “party line.”  Instead of “fringe” elements, “9/11 truth” groups are made up of engineers, scientists, military and intelligence professionals, most at the height of their professions, impeccable credentials and excellent reputations.  In fact, few professionals are willing to debate “9/11 truthers” publicly.  At a professional level, believing in the government version of 9/11, the “boxcutter and pancaking building” version is considered bordering on idiocy.

Aligned against the professionals supporting “9/11 truth” are a few organizations dependent on government financing or tied directly to political lobbys profiting directly from the geopolitical fallout of 9/11, groups invested in what Bracken refers to as a “disinformation campaign.”  Despite continual warnings by President Obama that talk of government conspiracies are abuses of constitutional freedom of speech guarantees, if the internet is any gauge, the “official line” on 9/11 is also in deep trouble in the United States, although no media poll has ever been held.

FOX NEWS: “9/11 REPORT A WHITEWASH”United States. 

MAINSTREAM MEDIA IN AMERICA NOW CITES 9/11 COVERUP

Ten days ago, America’s largest and certainly most conservative news network, Fox News, owned by Australian magnate Rupert Murdoch, did something no news organization has done before, it directly challenged the official story on 9/11.  Fox host, Judge Napolitano invited Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, author of Operation Dark Heart, a highly controversial book on American intelligence practices, onto his show.  When questioned on 9/11, Shaffer informed Napolitano that he gave the 9/11 Commission direct testimony that there was full knowledge of the 9/11 attack as early as 1999, information omitted from the report.  Shaffer labeled 9/11 a “government conspiracy” in clear terms based on personal knowledge gained as an American intelligence officer.

Shaffer was followed by CIA “bin Laden” project chief, Michael Scheuer who, not only backed Shaffer’s claim but further reinforced the fact that the 9/11 Commission report was part of a cover-up of a government conspiracy.  These American intelligence specialists, with direct knowledge of 9/11, both agreed entirely with what Kevin Bracken had been saying since 2006 and did it on national television in front of an audience of millions.

Knowing this, the responses to Braken’s statements, demonstrating a position now very public in the US, a position not only accepted on national news but backed by top intelligence experts, could easily be characterized by Julia Gillard’s own words, “stupid and wrong” but this time applying to Gillard and those like her.

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Anti-Semitic? Not me, says Roger Waters

http://www.sott.net

Lewis Smith
Independent.co.uk
Mon, 04 Oct 2010 07:36 CDT

© Associated Press
The Pink Floyd bassist, main, was accused of anti-Semitism after using images of the Star of David in his show.

Pink Floyd star responds after Jewish group criticised his use of Star of David

Thirty years after being forced to fight off claims he was corrupting children with Pink Floyd’s The Wall album, Roger Waters has been driven to defend himself from allegations of anti-Semitism.

The bassist has launched a vigorous defence of his views and music after being accused by an American-Jewish rights agency of using images in his stage show that promoted stereotypes.

During a performance of “Goodbye Blue Sky” at the US leg of The Wall Live tour, which revives Pink Floyd’s hit 1979 album, a B52 bomber projected on to a backdrop is shown dropping symbols including the Star of David and a dollar sign, as well as a crucifix and logos for Shell and Mercedes.

Abraham Foxman, the director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), said using the dollar sign and the Star of David in sequence echoed the stereotype that Jews were avaricious.

Referring to criticism Waters has previously made of Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians, Mr Foxman said the musician should have “chosen some other way to convey his political views without playing into and dredging up the worst age-old anti-Semitic stereotype about Jews and their supposed obsession with making money”.

Waters, who was born in Surrey but has lived in the US for 10 years, said the slur was so serious he felt compelled to set the record straight in an open letter to The Independent.

“I watch the workings of politics here and particularly the Republican Party. They work with the axiom that you can tell as many lies as you want – and often the bigger the better – and eventually they will believed,” he said.

“If I don’t respond people will see the story and will come to believe I’m anti-Semitic, and I’m not. Nothing could be further from the truth. “

The images he chose to project during the show were selected because they are “representative of religious and national and commercial interests, all of which have a malign influence on our lives and prevent us from treating each other decently”.

Waters has spoken against Israeli policies and accused the ADL of painting critics as anti-Semitic.

“It’s a screen that they hide behind. I don’t think they should be taken seriously on that. You can attack Israeli policy without being anti-Jewish,” he said.

“It’s like saying if you criticise the US policy you are being anti-Christian. I’m critical of the Israeli policy of occupying Palestinian land and their policy of building settlements, which is entirely illegal under international law, and also of ghettoising the people whose land they are building on.

“It’s that foreign policy I’m against. It’s nothing to do with the religion.”

Waters, who will bring his concert tour to Britain next year, said in his letter the symbols projected during the performance of The Wall were intended to show the suffering caused to ordinary people by war.

The bassist pointed out, however, that there are many people in Israel who agree with his position and that he has had received a lot of support from Jews. He said: “There is a large movement inside Israel, young, Jewish Israeli citizens, and old ones too, who are against their government’s policy in the same way as in England when Tony Blair took us to war against Iraq on the coat-tails of George Bush.

“I’ve had an extraordinary response. We’ve had over 1,000 comments on my Facebook page.

“They are all extremely supportive. A lot of the comments I’ve had have been from Jews.”

His letter to The Independent

Dear Sir

In a recent news item on Foxnews/online, subsequently abridged in The Evening Standard, Abraham Foxman, head of the ADL, (Anti Defamation League) in the USA , accuses my new production of The Wall and by implication me, of anti-Semitism.

A serious charge that demands a response. Had Mr Foxman come to my show before passing judgement and commenting publicly he might, I hope, have held his peace, as there is no anti Semitism in The Wall Show. The song to which he refers, Good Bye Blue Sky, describes how ordinary people, military and civilians alike, suffer trauma in the aftermath of war.

The visuals that accompany the song show waves of B52 bombers dropping various symbols from bomb bays on a war ravaged landscape. The symbols are: in no particular order, a Crucifix, a Hammer and Sickle, a Star of David, A Crescent and Star, a Mercedes sign , a Dollar sign, and a Shell Oil sign.

Mr Foxman’s concern was that potentially the juxtoposition of a Star of David and a Dollar sign might incite hatred of Jews. Contrary to Mr Foxman’s assertion, there are no hidden meanings in the order or juxtaposition of these symbols.

The point I am trying to make in the song is that the bombardment we are all subject to by conflicting religious, political, and economic ideologies only encourages us to turn against one another, and I mourn the concommitant loss of life.

In so far as The Wall has a political message it is to seek to illuminate our condition, and find new ways to encourage peace and understanding, particularly in the Middle East .

Incidentally, being from England, I had never heard of the ADL until today, but I have googled them and I see from their mission statement of 1913 that their brief is not only to defend the Jewish people from defamation, but also, and I quote, ” to secure justice and fair treatment to all citizens alike and to put an end forever to unjust and unfair discrimination against and ridicule of any sect or body of citizens”.

Perhaps we should all focus on that lofty ideal and stop cowering in our corners throwing stones at one another.

Roger Waters

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Fox News: 9/11 Commission “a whitewash”

http://www.sott.net

Gordon Duff
Veterans Today
Sun, 10 Oct 2010 01:24 CDT

 

© Fox News

Do we all have to apologize to the Iranian president? Who’s going to tell Jon Stewart? Will he be less of a “bigot” now? Coincidences are piling up. Will he admit to his “anal/rectal confluence?”

Two weeks ago, President Ahmadinejad of Iran called for a UN investigation of 9/11. He was called a lunatic by President Obama. Now, Fox News, new owner of Farsi 1, Iran’s biggest entertainment network, has blown the lid off 9/11, calling it a “whitewash” and saying that the 9/11 Commissioners staged a coverup.

What can we say we have proven? Can we prove Israel was involved? No. Can we make a case, based on both direct testimony, documentary and circumstantial evidence, that they were involved and that failing to investigate this is part of a conspiracy? Yes.

Do we have to prove how it was done? No. Was Osama bin Laden involved? We don’t know. It depends. The only way he could have been involved is if he were still working for the CIA and under their control.

Who should the next guest be? Attorney General Eric Holder?

“Mr. Holder, based on what we have just heard from these two highly reliable sources, clear evidence of a massive criminal conspiracy within the United States government, how do you suggest dealing with this problem?”

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Globalist Mockingbird Media Attacks RT, Press TV as “Enemies”

http://dprogram.net

Posted by sakerfa on October 6th, 2010

(KurtNimmo) – Walter Isaacson, president and CEO of the globalist Aspen Institute, has declared Russia Today, Iran’s Press TV, and China’s CCTV as enemies.

In addition to heading up Aspen, an organization funded by the Carnegie Corporation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Ford Foundation, Isaacson was appointed by Barry Obama to be chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the organization that directs establishment propaganda for foreign audiences.

RT, formerly Russia Today, is financed by the Russian state budget and is accused by Der Spiegel and Reporters Without Borders of disseminating pro-Kremlin propaganda. Press TV is owned by Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting. CCTV, short for China Central Television, reports directly to high-level officials in the Chinese Communist Party and its Central Propaganda Department.

In a speech before Radio Free Europe, Isaacson slammed these news outlets as “autocratic” and said the global elite cannot allow itself to be “out-communicated,” in other words it cannot allow contrary points of view, especially if those views are expressed by nations states ruled by autocrats.

Radio Free Europe is a CIA front organization. The CIA and its Mockingbird media engaged in a charade called Crusade for Freedom that successfully persuaded thousands of Americans to donate millions of dollars to Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty and in doing so consider the spook propaganda outfit sort of like National Public Radio (also owned by the government).

As a paid minion of the global elite, it makes perfect sense that Isaacson would characterize the state-run competition as a portentous enemy. CBS, NBC, Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and dozens or other networks and newspapers fall under the sway of the bankster elite and their transnational corporations. The CIA was created by a group of Wall Street lawyers and their partners in the Pentagon. One of the first CIA operations was to corral the corporate media and turn it into a propaganda tool for the ruling elite. It has operated in that mode for over 60 years.

Of course, the real enemy of the ruling elite is the alternative media on the internet. Congress is now considering legislation to muzzle the alternative media. It is imperative that the globalists gain control over the non-corporate media and prevent alternative points of view from reaching people, even points of view from state media in Russia, China, and Iran that run counter to the propaganda of the ruling elite.

Source: Infowars

Mainstream Bullshit

from : http://www.sott.net

Archie Kennedy
MWC News
Thu, 16 Sep 2010 21:00 CDT

© MWC News

The media have a responsibility and that responsibility is to inform us of what’s going on. If a nuclear power plant is at risk of spreading nuclear death two miles from our town, it is the responsibility of the media to let us know that the danger exists and why it exists. To a certain extent, we put our trust in them. It is a social contract. They are there to inform us, to warn us, to let us know what’s going on. Who, what, where, when, and why; all the information we need regarding the forces that impact us in our daily lives is delivered on our doorsteps, it comes in through the cable. We sleep well knowing that no midnight asteroid is about to send us back to the Stone Age.

But can we? At this point, trusting mainstream media is not a rational or intelligent choice to make. You may have noticed. They are not always honest. They have lied by saying things that are not true, by not saying things that are true, and very often through spinning bullshit, which is slightly different than lying. Sometimes bullshit is worse than lies. It’s not that they have done so several times, or even often. It’s that they do it all the time and they do it consistently.

Economic Lies

Economists have been lying and continue to lie through a critical time as the world economy becomes increasingly volatile and we become vulnerable to financial devastation. At this point in time the media and countless so-called economists have lulled faithful believers with a pack of lies. They have done it in 2008 and 2009 and they continue with the same lies and backward analysis in 2010. The same economists, experts, and corporate shills that have led us to the doors of the economic slaughterhouse are portrayed as gurus that have the holy grail of economic wisdom and direction. They are the same shysters, criminals, and corporate shills that have orchestrated the biggest sell out in history.

When Wall Street falters, they get excited. When Main Street slides into the Third World, they barely notice. While America shivers over burning barrels, Obama fiddles in blissful ignorance; he seems a sort of ‘let them eat cake’ monarch. A reporter recently asked Obama about his efforts to curb poverty in America. Obama’s reply could have come from the mouth of any imbecile or stooge that just walked out of any neo-liberal seminar. Obama said, “The most important anti-poverty effort is growing the economy… It’s more important than any program we could set up. It’s more important than any transfer payment we could have.” Which is code for saying that the ruling class is the filter through which all spending must pass through? And it is implied, in all this that wealth emanates from the ruling class to the working classes and not the other way around. Will mainstream media even mention this or anything close? The short answer is ‘no’.

They are defining and will increasingly define poverty as ‘the New Normal’. And as America swirls down the toilet of depression, mainstream media bubbles along with cautious optimism that the stock market will continue to score enormous profits for the ruling class. Not once will they notice that what is good for Wall Street is bad for Main Street. To mention this class dichotomy is incorrect, politically.

War Lies

Even the most serious proponent of the substance and integrity of mainstream media would have to admit, when it comes to war, that the Pentagon, the President of the United States, and mainstream media make Orwell’s 1948 imagination seem prophetic. In 2010, doublespeak is expected and as you will read below, the infrastructure for constant surveillance is under construction. War is peace. What’s good is bad and what’s bad is good. The Iraq war ended but today, alternative media are reporting that American and Iraqi troops killed at least eight civilians in Fallujah, Iraq. American has no intention of leaving. It is just one more pack of lies. There is no end to the examples of doublespeak and outright lies that fill today’s media.

If you maintain a watch with war news stories collectors, like Anti War.com, you will see that atrocities happen in Afghanistan with sickening regularity. Civilians are killed by unmanned robots (drones) or NATO forces but mainstream media doesn’t report it or, if they do, they present it as just one more ‘whoops’ moment. American gangsters are running loose in uniform in Afghanistan and kill with impunity. A band of GI Joes has recently been found to have been cutting body parts off Afghan civilians they had killed for sport and had been keeping them for trophies. It was barely mentioned in mainstream media but you’d have to look for it. Imagine, for a moment, how the story would play if this was done by Cubans or Iranians. Do you think they’d notice?

The Americans have been bombing civilian populations in Pakistan with increasing regularity. In the past two days, according to Jason Ditz reporting for Anti-war.com, American drones have killed 37 people, one of which may belong to the Naquin Network, yet another group on that long list of enemies. The other victims are reported to be civilians or, people that have not conclusively been linked to the group.

In another very disturbing development, the American state is carrying out the extrajudicial execution of an American named Anwar al Awake who they allege is a terrorist. The individual case itself is alarming enough. The fact that it re-defines the scope of power of the American state however, is the real issue. Have mainstream media noticed? Currently, for mainstream media, the issue is about how to fight the legal battle against this bizarre development in American law. If they can kill their own citizens above the rule of law, we have entered a horrific new reality.

Then there is the sheer danger consequential to slaughtering, terrorizing and destroying whole nations. Media have the responsibility to let us know how badly the USA, the UK, Canada and all the other NATO participants have destroyed the cultures, livelihoods, and lives of the people they so routinely and mindlessly murder and maim. It is the same as the nuclear plant analogy. There will be consequences for us all. There will be future 9 11s and worse. And it will happen because of what we are doing now. If our tax dollars are in the service of whipping up hate around the world against us, we should know.

The media have been portraying the ongoing atrocities as an aberration; maybe it was rogue soldiers, maybe it was poor communication, maybe the victims were human shields. Victims are dismissed as ‘collateral damage’. What will not be discussed is the ugly and likely possibility that these victims are victims of collective punishment.

A dark and sinister reality had emerged within the American dream. Mainstream media isn’t reporting it; they are the maestros. The only objective views of this ‘new normal/World Order’ will be here in alternative media and if you indulge in reading or watching what you are reading at the moment (MWC News), chances are you have not swallowed the cool aid.

The State

Mainstream media is not just a simple money pig. It is much more than that. With the marriage of the corporation and the state fully consummated, it is natural for the corporate media to mouth the interests of both. Mainstream media has become a tool employed by those that want to tell you that the Western world needs to, more than anything else, shore up its security. In a similar vein to Hitler’s fire in the Reichstag, the billionaires that run the White House want us to be terrified.

They want a to funnel billions of tax dollars into their own pockets through the sale of weapons systems. As a result we have seen nine years of talking heads discussed, in very serious tones, the need for security. We are in a new age, we are told. Threatened by Muslim extremists. If you can remember the 60s, 70s or even well before then, you will know that terrorism or guerilla warfare has been around a long, long time and there is nothing new or more sinister today than there was in 1970. Terrorism is another word for guerilla warfare which is naturally adopted by those with little or no power.

This thrust is more threatening to freedom than we may notice at first. In a free society, the threat of danger is always present. It’s part of the social contract. Criminals run free until they have actually committed the crime; that’s the price of living in a free society.

Hyping ubiquitous threats has muted opposition to the construction of a massive, although unseen, state apparatus in the United States that would shame the USSR in its heyday. The Washington Post, to its credit, has recently reported vague parameters on the growing American state apparatus. In an article entitled “Top Secret America” Dana Priest and William Arkin report that the American government has created a massive underworld that “has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.”

Here is an excerpt from the article: “These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

The investigation’s other findings include:

• Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.
• An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.
• In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings – about 17 million square feet of space.” [Source]

Kudos to the Washington Post. Given the magnitude of the story however, it is almost hidden from view. Where are the talking heads? The hyped up concern about a Soviet style neighbour watching neighbour reality emerging in the USA?

The common narrative is not aimed to challenge this kind of ominous development. Instead, it is to continue to cry for the need for more security and less freedom. The story line shouts the need for an iron state apparatus.

Corporate media is becoming synonymous with state media, much like Pravda of the old USSR. Corporate media don’t just make money and parrot the wishes and plans of the ruling class. They also strive to indoctrinate and shape the rabble into a uniform and docile mass of petty chauvinism.

Ruling Class Media

The term, ‘ruling class’ has not been in common usage except for that band of serious Marxists selling papers at the university. However, there is no better description for the class that run government. They rule and they rule because they belong to those that are wealthy enough to tell politicians what to do. They are, properly, the ruling class.

They have their own specific interests and those interests happen to be against the interests of the rest of us. These interests include selling weapons, controlling resources, and dominating each and every corner of the world. Those munitions/oil billionaires that set the tone, the content, and the agenda for the media they also own and control. A small-town newspaper does not have the resources to hire investigative journalists and they pick up the main stories from the newswire. Those newswire stories are fed through the filters of the corporate media. Here, Noam Chomsky explains who sets the content and the agenda for the mainstream:

“The New York Times and CBS, for example. Well, first of all, they are major, very profitable, corporations. Furthermore, most of them are either linked to, or outright owned by, much bigger corporations, like General Electric, Westinghouse, and so on. They are way up at the top of the power structure of the private economy which is a very tyrannical structure. Corporations are basically tyrannies, hierarchic, controlled from above. If you don’t like what they are doing you get out. The major media are just part of that system.”

Chomsky also makes the point that the media has a specific motive and that motive is the audience itself. That is why news stories are very short and their patterns are quite simplistic. Short attention grabbing sound bites or pleasing optics are important. Content is also important but not in the way it should be. The main thrust of the business is not to inform, the business is about grabbing an audience and people are the product. Chomsky continues:

“Take the New York Times. It’s a corporation and sells a product. The product is audiences. They don’t make money when you buy the newspaper. They are happy to put it on the worldwide web for free. They actually lose money when you buy the newspaper. But the audience is the product. The product is privileged people, just like the people who are writing the newspapers, you know, top-level decision-making people in society. You have to sell a product to a market, and the market is, of course, advertisers (that is, other businesses). Whether it is television or newspapers, or whatever, they are selling audiences. Corporations sell audiences to other corporations. In the case of the elite media, it’s big businesses.” (Lifted from)

But there is more to this than selling audiences. You will notice that the media will make certain issues relevant and important. They will spin them out in a seamless drum beat to the corporate party line and with each other, sometimes word for word. For example, in the 90s the ruling class wanted to cut social programs in the USA and in Canada. The deficit was the ‘terrorist threat’ of the time. Right wing think tanks and bond rating agencies like Moody’s of New York suddenly had a lot to say about how societies are governed and how tax money is spent. You may argue; but the deficit was a real problem at the time and it has returned. Notice however that when tax dollars are spent on weapons systems, the media does not make an issue of the deficit. It is rarely mentioned, if at all. That is because those that control the media are the same people that profit from building weapons systems.

According to Peter Phillips, “The eleven largest or most influential media corporations in the United States are General Electric Company (NBC), Viacom Inc. (cable), The Walt Disney Company (ABC), Time Warner Inc.(CNN), Westinghouse Electric Corporation (CBS), The News Corporation Ltd. (Fox), Gannett Co. Inc., Knight-Ridder Inc., New York Times Co., Washington Post Co., and the Times Mirror Co. These eleven major broadcast and print media corporations now represent a major portion of the news information systems in the United States. For many people their entire source of news and information comes from these eleven corporations.” (Source)

General Electric is in the business of making battlefield computer systems. Their director, former senator Sam Nunn (who also directs Chevron/Texaco) isn’t likely to promote journalists that research his connections or to report any stories that work against the interests of NBC. He is not likely to be happy about his reporters making anti war statements either.

Steve Mizrach points out, “Opinion in our society must be carefully shaped and moulded within certain careful boundaries: those who transgress those boundaries are libel to wind up “extremists,” “ideologues,” “fanatics,” or “agitators. Now that dissidents in the U.S. can no longer be labelled ‘fellow travellers’ of the Moscow-run Commie conspiracy, the task has become more urgent. And how is it that consent, that most valuable of social products is manufactured?” (Source)

Mizrach points out that the following tactics are employed by what we may regard, realistically, as the enemy; that is, mainstream media. They mould opinion particularly on Sunday talk shows by parading the opinions of sycophants that are the mouthpieces that have been schooled within the hallowed halls of the University of Corporate Indoctrination.

These are bolstered by spin doctors, or, PR devils. “PR managers, known as “spin doctors” when working in government, are able to carefully craft speeches and advertisements which evoke powerful images in the American psyche, frequently using “power words” such as freedom, fairness, liberty, justice, and peacekeeping for policies which dominate, discriminate, imprison, exploit, and terrorize much of the rest of the world.” (Mizrach)

Mizrach also points out the real purpose of public opinion polls is not so much to measure public opinion as it is to shape it. They also employ academics and think tanks to shape and mould public opinion.

Together, these tools are used against us. They are more threatening an enemy to the citizens of Western nations than an army of bin Laden. They are used not only to shape public opinion. They are used to lie to us and to indoctrinate the impressionable and the young.

Class War

Non Americans look upon our American brothers and sisters and what they have served up on a daily basis under a disguise called ‘news’. We watched in incredulity as the American health care debate raged. The word socialist, we discovered, is a dirty word in America. Ignorant to a fault, the politicians and the media spun lies and distortions with wide eyed enthusiasm as if the rest of the world wasn’t watching. It looked like a Jerry Springer show, a pitiful crowd of beaten down as angry victims proudly showing their own ignorance to the world, utterly oblivious. But that is not America, it is a fraction of America and we find the same backward and angry lumpen attitudes everywhere. The difference is, in the USA, it is cultivated.

It should be obvious by now that we are on the losing side of a very aggressive class war. The ruling elites have the clear advantage. They are waging war on the rest of us and we, as a collective, are only dimly aware that it’s happening. CNN, Fox, and CTV are not telling. A large part of that ignorance is a result of their slick packaging and their endless supply of Presidents, Prime Ministers, and sexy stories. They are very good at slick visuals and clever sound bites. Their whole focus is on the packaging, the face. They have their reputation and influence. They have paid reporters that are on the scene. They have very little in terms of substance. For that, you turn to us; to alternative media.

It is hard for us to actually recognize them as our enemy. They have such pretty smiles and they tell such human and touching stories. But don’t ever forget; these useful idiots are aiming to impoverish you, to strip away your rights. It’s happening. They callously disregard the suffering of ‘collaterals’. They tell you that they are ensuring that you are ‘secure’ by whipping up hate all over the planet. The stunned mouthpieces don’t even know they are doing it. Some of the worst war crimes in living memory are enabled by these treacherous talking heads. They are taking part in the ultimate economic betrayal of America and the rest of the post-industrial world. They protect the ruling class and work for the benefit of that class against you and me. They are certainly our enemy. What is vital is that you and I recognize this. We can’t fight back as long as we allow ourselves to be lulled by the likes of Jerry Springer and CNN.

For our part, we have MWC News, Counterpunch, Democracy Now, and a large choice of alternative media outlets to seek out pertinent news, honest opinions, and insightful analysis. The internet is a genie let out of a bottle. This fluid and democratic flow of information is the blessing of this uncontrolled machine that sits before you. The corporations do not own or control this. They certainly have an advantage but on this front, our fight has just begun. We need to expand, to develop better tools and a wider audience. We need to fight back. Together we stand on the front lines. Recognize it.