Afghan president threatens NATO with war

http://rt.com

Published: 31 May, 2011, 14:28 Kabul: Kabul on May 31, 2011 (AFP Photo / Shah Marai)

Kabul: Afghan President Hamid Karzai speaks during a press conference at the Presidential palace in Kabul on May 31, 2011 (AFP Photo / Shah Marai)

The president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, warned that Kabul may view the NATO-led coalition as an occupying force, recalling the Afghan people’s experience in dealing with occupants, unless NATO stops killing civilians. The harsh words came on Tuesday in response to an aerial strike, which killed at least nine people in the southern Helmand province last week, most of them children. “NATO must learn that air strikes on Afghan homes are not allowed and that Afghan people have no tolerance for that anymore,” Karzai told reporters at a news conference in Kabul. “If they don’t stop air strikes on Afghan homes, their presence in Afghanistan will be considered as an occupying force and against the will of the Afghani people.” Karzai stressed that he had warned the NATO command after similar incidents “a hundred times” and that the situation must now change. NATO responded to Karzai’s statements on Tuesday, saying the aerial strikes will not stop because “they continue to be necessary,” Associated Press reported. Spokeswoman for the alliance Oana Lungescu said the Afghan president’s concerns are taken very seriously and that NATO makes every effort to avoid civilian casualties. Earlier on Monday the command of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) expressed its condolences over the civilian deaths in the Saturday air strike. Major General John Toolan, ISAF commander for south-western Afghanistan, stressed that the strike was aimed at a compound, where Taliban gunmen were hiding and that presence of civilians there was not known to the NATO troops until after the attack. The ISAF routinely uses air strikes in their anti-insurgency campaign in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan. The tactics helps the coalition minimize its own casualties, but occasionally leads to civilian deaths. Both Kabul and Islamabad have been increasingly vocal about their citizens dying in NATO’s bombings.

Image of War’s Pain

http://www.uruknet.info From the Rockland Coalition for Peace & Justice May 27, 2011 The over 8-year war/occupation in Iraq, based on false pretenses, has cost the lives of 4,452 U.S. soldiers and over a million Iraqi civilians. Among them were Samar Hassan’s parents. A front page article in the New York Times (5/7/11) read “The image of Samar, then 5 years old, screaming and splattered in blood after American soldiers opened fire on her family’s car in the northern town of Tal Afar in January 2005, illuminated the horror of civilian casualties.” Now 12-year-old Samar lives on the outskirts of Mosul with relatives. The trauma left Samar and her siblings wounded psychologically. Ali, Samar’s brother-in-law, said, “I’ve taken them many times to the hospital, where they get pills” for emotional problems. He says Samar’s 8-year-old brother, Muhammad, talks to himself when he is alone. “When we go out and see a family, they get sad,” he said. Sometimes he finds the children in a room together, crying. “When they remember the accident, it’s like they just died.” Sarah Leah Whitson, director of the Middle East and North Africa division for Human Rights Watch, remembers crying when she first saw the photo in a newspaper, and having to explain the image to her children. “At the time, I thought it captured perfectly the horrors of the war that was not really understood by Americans,” she said. “Everything in that girl’s face symbolized what I felt all Iraqis must feel.” She added, “I wonder what life will be like for this girl?” Samar had never seen the picture until this week, but she said she understood that it showed the world “the sad thing that is happening in Iraq.” Near the end of the interview, she pointed to a family photograph on the wall. “I always dream about my father and mother and brother,” she said. Bring All The Troops and Contractors Home Now! Join our 443rd Peace Vigil to end the wars! Every Saturday, 1-3 pm, at Rte. 59 & Middletown Rd. in Nanuet, NY For info: www.rocklandaction.org

:: Article nr. 78140 sent on 28-may-2011 23:12 ECT
www.uruknet.info?p=78140

Ron Paul House Floor Speech: Republic Almost Completely Dead

Note :

Beware of coorporative sellouts who promise peace and change and hope .

the doors will be now wide open for World War 3 !

…………bring it on Obomba !

Infowars.com
May 27, 2011

The Defense Authorization Act or H.R. 1540, aka The Forever War Act of 2012, was overwhelmingly approved by the House of Representatives earlier today on a vote of 322 to 96.

The Senate will now vote on its own version and then the two bills will need to be reconciled before going to Barry Obama for his signature into law.

The law authorizes the United States to use military force anywhere it says there are terrorists, including within the borders of our own country. It represents the largest hand-over of unchecked war authority from Congress to the executive branch in modern American history.

The founders were seriously opposed to handing this much power over to executive, fearing tyranny. If enacted into law, this provision will make Obama a dictator who can wage war without the consent of the American people.

.

.

FBI Targeting Political Activists as Terrorists

9/11 and the Conquest of Iraq

http://dprogram.net

March 1st, 2011

“It’s a system that lies automatically, at every level from bottom to top – from sergeant to commander in chief – to conceal murder.” Daniel Ellsburg, Secrets, (Viking, 2002)

“Beneath all the fakes and lies and all the mental aberrations, however deeply hidden or wildly deformed, the truth still breaks through, still glitters, still breathes.” (Mihail Sebastian, Romanian playwright, as quoted by Nickolson Baker, Human Smoke, Simon & Schuster, 2008)

(FireDogLake) – In the movie, Fair Game, about the travails of Valerie Plame, and her outing as a CIA agent by the Bush administration, Sean Penn, in the character of Joe Wilson, Plame’s husband, exhorts a group of students to “Demand the Truth!” Yet, very few of us have demanded to know the truth about 9/11 and the attacks on the World Trade Center. We have been content with the officially sanctioned explanation. Those who are not so content are ridiculed as “conspiracy theorists.”

It was a conspiracy – 9/11.  That is indisputable. There is no “lone gunman” to confuse matters. To say anything meaningful about 9/11, you have to be a conspiracy theorist. It is only a question of whose theory of the conspiracy you are prepared to believe. It is incredible that anyone still believes anything the Bush administration said about that tragic day.

 

The Center for Public Integrity identified 935 lies, (no doubt, a conservative estimate) Bush/Cheney and their neocon enablers told to justify attacking and occupying Iraq. And, they lied about many other things as well: domestic surveillance, the “war on terror,” torture, the Plame affair, etc. The list is endless.  Yet, our minds recoil at the idea that they lied about the events of 9/11. This is because the implications are just too terrible to contemplate. We are left with Osama Bin Laden, because this is the person the Bush administration identified as the master-mind of these events. To have any other theory of 9/11 labels you a crank or a nut case, and if you are a professional person, raising troubling questions about 9/11 events can get you into a heap of trouble as Prof. Steven E. Jones of Brigham Young University found out to his dismay.

Even men and women of otherwise critical judgment on most issues shrink from drawing  troubling conclusions from the context and results of the 9/11 attacks. Looking over the edge of the precipice makes us squirm; it’s through the looking glass and we really don’t want to go there. That’s why people so often get angry when questions about 9/11 are raised. However dubious the official explanations, they have a patina of authority that is intended to tranquilize and deflect attention. We are invited not to dig deeper, to go about our business, have a nice afternoon at the mall and don’t think too hard about the entire panorama of events that unfolded on September 11^th and what they mean.

Naomi Klein in her excellent book, The Shock Doctrine, The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, (Metropolitan Books, 2007) writes that the shock of September 11^th, “opened up a period of deep disorientation and regression that the Bush administration expertly exploited.”  They capitalized on the fear generated by 9/11, “not only to launch the ‘War on Terror’ but to ensure that it is an almost completely for-profit venture.”  It provided them with an opportunity to do something that would have been impossible without 9/11: “wage privatized wars abroad and build a corporate security complex at home.” Yet, we are told there was no pre-planning involved; it was not that, “the administration deviously plotted the crisis,” but, as Ms. Klein says, they prayed for the crisis like “drought-struck farmers pray for rain,” or Christian-Zionists pray for the rapture. This may be a plausible explanation for the 9/11 attacks if you believe in the power of prayer, instead of the ability of determined men to create their own opportunities.

The context for 9/11, and everything that followed from it, has been in front of us from the start. Zbigniew Brzezinski, in his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard, “American Primacy and its Geo-strategic Imperatives,” (Basic Books, 1997) laid out the arguments for US global hegemony, although he later seemed stunned by US actions in the Middle East. He argued that Eurasia, a huge area stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok, is the chessboard on which the struggle for global primacy continues to be played. The United States, a non-Eurasian player, had (prior to its occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq) its power deployed on three peripheries of the Eurasian continent, a dominant position that no state could challenge. Professor Brzezinski argued that America’s chief task is to maintain its “global primacy” over this vast area and, “to make certain that no state or combination of states gains the capacity to expel the United States from Eurasia or even to diminish significantly its decisive arbitrating role.”

Professor Brzezinski devoted particular attention to the Eurasian Balkans, which include nine countries: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia and Afghanistan. All of these countries, with the exception of Afghanistan, form part of the Caspian Sea Basin. Why are these countries important?  According to Professor Brzezinski, “the Central Asian region and the Caspian Sea basin are known to contain reserves of natural gas and oil that dwarf those of Kuwait, the Gulf of Mexico, or the North Sea.” He continues, “Access to that resource and sharing in its potential wealth represent objectives that stir national ambitions, motivate corporate interest, rekindle historical claims, revive imperial aspirations and fuel international rivalries.”

But, says Professor Brzezinski, there is a small problem: how to get the American public to sign on to the imperial venture of global dominance. Unfortunately, he says, “The attitude of the American public towards the external projection of American power has been much more ambivalent. The public supported America’s engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.” He notes that polls conducted in 1995 and 1996 highlighted the public’s preference for ‘sharing’ global power with others, “rather than for its monopolistic exercise.” He says that, “America is too democratic at home to be autocratic abroad. This limits the use of America’s power, especially its capacity for military intimidation.” Democracy, he laments, is “inimical to imperial mobilization,” except, “in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public’s sense of domestic well-being.”

The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) was established in the spring of 1997, by a group of now discredited  neo-conservatives, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and William Kristol among others. The goal of the group was to “promote American global leadership.” Their statement of principles included the assertion that, “The United States stands as the world’s most preeminent power. America has a vital role in maintaining peace and security in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. If we shirk our responsibilities, we invite challenges to our fundamental interests.”

In 2000, this group published a report titled: “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century.”  In short, “the United States faces no global rival. America’s grand strategy should aim to preserve and extend this advantageous position as far into the future as possible.” The document is a “blueprint for maintaining global US pre-eminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests.” Unfortunately, this could be a long process, they say, “absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.”

The idea of US pre-eminence was translated, once George W. Bush took office, into America’s foreign policy doctrine of “pre-emption,” of striking any country before it can become a threat to the global dominance of the United States. The report also provided a justification for the invasion and occupation of Iraq, stating: “The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.”  No word of weapons of mass destruction, bringing democracy to the Middle East or liberating oppressed Iraqis.

As Chalmers Johnson says (Nemesis, 2007), “It is clear today that the Bush administration intended, upon Saddam Hussein’s certain defeat, to create military bases in Iraq similar to those we built or took over in Germany and Japan after World war II. The covert purpose of our 2003 invasion was empire building – to move the main focus of our military installations in the Middle East from Saudi Arabia to Iraq, gain control over Iraq’s oil resources, and make that country a permanent Pentagon outpost for the control of much of the rest of the ‘arc of instability’.”

The analogy to Pearl Harbor, raised by both Brzezinski and the neocons, may be sheer coincidence or a telling prophecy, but the lessons of Pearl Harbor were etched on their minds. Right wing conspiracy theorists, as part of their on-going assault on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s legacy, have for years claimed that FDR and the American Government had prior intelligence about the planned Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. According to this scenario, Roosevelt left Pearl Harbor dangling, undefended, a poisoned pawn, to lure the Japanese to attack as a pretext for getting us into WWII.  The fact that none of the American aircraft carriers were in Pearl Harbor at the time of the attack, fuels the speculation. Robert B. Stinnett in his book, Day of Deceit “The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor,” argues that, “America had ample warning of the pending attack. At those same levels, it was understood that the isolationist American public would not support a declaration of war unless we were attacked first. The result was a plan to anger Japan, to keep the loyal officers responsible for Pearl Harbor in the dark, and thus to drag America into the greatest war of her existence.”

Was September 11^th 2001, also a “day of deceit?” Or was it, as neocon ideology would have it, “A Noble Lie?”

The events of 9/11 clearly provided a catalytic shock to the public’s sense of domestic well being. The national trauma of September 11, 2001, was the pivotal event, “the new Pearl Harbor”, that precipitated the American public’s support for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. As Tony Blair admitted, “… to be truthful about it there is no way we would have got the public consent to have suddenly launched a campaign on Afghanistan but for what happened on 11 September,” (Commons Select Committee on Liaison, 16 July 2002). And, the “neoconservatives would not have been able to implement their war agenda had it not been for the trauma of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which filled the American people with fear and anger…” Stephen J. Sniegoski,  The Transparent Cabal, “The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East and the National Interest of Israel,” Engima Editions, 2008)

Was 9/11, then, an elaborately contrived Reichstag fire, or like Pearl Harbor, a poisoned pawn held out to provide the rationale for a strategic war for oil, global dominance and/or the advancement of American/Israeli interests in the Middle East?

Dare we even think in such terms? Would a government contemplate attacking or allowing its own citizens to be attacked? The military certainly has considered such false-flag operations in the past. We know from James Bamford’s book, Body of Secrets (Anchor Books, April 2002), that, “… the Joint Chiefs of Staff drew up and approved plans for what may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government. In the name of anticommunism, they proposed launching a secret and bloody war of terrorism against their own country in order to trick the American public into supporting an ill-conceived war they intended to launch against Cuba.”

While some dismiss the significance of these plans as part of “normal” military contingency planning, Bamford tells us that Operation Northwoods, had the written approval of the Chairman and every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It called for innocent people to be shot on American streets, for boats carrying refuges fleeing Cuba to be sunk on the high seas, for a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, D.C., Miami, and elsewhere. People would be framed for bombings they did not commit, planes would be hijacked. Using phony evidence, all of it would be blamed on Castro, thus providing an excuse, as well as the public and international backing needed to launch a war against Cuba.

We also now know that the Anthrax attacks contained in letters sent to key Democratic senators such as Tom Daschle, following 9/11, were a false flag operation because the letters themselves were written to appear as if they originated from some foreign Islamic group. The letter to Daschle said: “You cannot stop us. We have this Anthrax. You die now, Are you afraid?  Death to America. Death to Israel. Allah is Great.”  The anthrax originated in a highly secure government lab and only someone within the government with a top-level security clearance could have gained access to this very specific material. It certainly wasn’t accessible to any foreign terrorist groups.  But, as the Daily News reported on 2 August 2008, “In the immediate aftermath of the 2001 anthrax attacks, White House officials repeatedly pressed FBI Director Robert Mueller to prove it was a second-wave assault by Al Qaeda. “They really wanted to blame somebody in the Middle East,” a retired senior FBI official told The Daily News.

When the space shuttle Columbia burned up during its return to earth, killing all seven astronauts on board, the first reaction of the government was to establish an independent board of enquiry to determine what went wrong. This is how the government usually responds whenever tragic events overtake our society. People want to know what happened – who’s to blame?  Were there technical malfunctions or human errors that caused the tragedy? Contrast this response with the actions of the Bush administration in the wake of September 11, 2001, when more than 3000 of our fellow citizens were murdered at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Rather than immediately set up an independent, expert level investigation, the Bush administration dithered, delayed and stonewalled, asserting that a public enquiry would compromise national security and detract from the war on terrorism. As Vincent Bugliosi says in, “The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder,” (Vanguard Press, 2008) “George Bush never wanted (and did everything he could to stop) any investigation of how and why the tragedy happened, and what could be done to prevent it from happening again!!”

Although Congress established a joint committee in February 2002, months went by before it held its first hearings on September 18, 2002, a full year after 9/11. Kristen Breitweiser, the wife of one of those killed in the Trade Center, appeared before the committee and pleaded for the creation of an independent blue ribbon panel to investigate. When the joint committee finally submitted its report in December 2002, 28 pages concerning the possible involvement of foreign governments in 9/11were redacted by the Bush Administration. Were these, by any chance, the same list of foreign governments that collaborated with the CIA in its covert war against the Soviets in Afghanistan? In this regard, see Charlie Wilson’s War, the book, not the movie, by George Crile.

As former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds subsequently reported, the US maintained ‘intimate relations’ with Bin Laden, and the Taliban, right up to “that day of September 11.”  These ‘intimate relations’ included using Bin Laden for ‘operations’ in Central Asia, including Xinjiang, China, and involved using al Qaeda and the Taliban in the same manner “as we did during the Afghan and Soviet conflict,” that is, fighting ‘enemies’ via proxies.

Moreover, Ms. Edmonds’ three and a half hour testimony to the 9/11 Commission has been entirely suppressed, reduced to a single footnote, which refers readers to her classified testimony. In an interview, she says that the information that was classified in her case specifically identifies that the US was using Bin Laden and the Taliban in Central Asia, including in Xinjiang.  Ms. Edmonds says that in suppressing her testimony, the US government claims that it is protecting ” ‘sensitive diplomatic relations,’ protecting Turkey, protecting Israel, protecting Pakistan, protecting Saudi Arabia…”

After a great deal of protest and prodding by 9/11 family members, the Bush administration finally agreed to a Commission, which was not established until November 15, 2002. The sincerity of this gesture was immediately cast in doubt, however, when they tried to appoint Henry Kissinger, as Chairman of the Commission. Kissinger is a figure whose veracity is so tainted that only the most credulous could believe that this was a good faith effort to find the truth, rather than an effort at cover up. Mercifully, Mr. Kissinger resigned from the Commission shortly thereafter, owing to his reluctance to disclose the names of his consulting clients. It was only in mid-December 2002, that Bush named former New Jersey Governor, Thomas Keane, to head the Commission. However, with a budget allocation of only $3 million, compared with the $40 million spent on Monica Lewinsky, the Commission was financially hobbled from the start.

But leaving aside, financial limitations and time constraints, Philip Shenon in his book, The Commission (Hachette Book Group, 2008) documents how tainted the 9/11 Commission and its final report really were, although that is not his conclusion.  What is clear is that the Bush administration played the Commission likely a finely tuned instrument, ensuring that no finger would be pointed in its direction. The Commission composed of representatives from the two political parties, rather than experts and specialists, was structurally flawed from the start. It’s every deliberation and finding was held hostage to political considerations, and any inconvenient truths were filtered out before they saw the light of day.

Even if the Commission were not suspect because of its political composition; its Executive Director, Philip Zelikow certainly made it so. Not only was he a close friend of Condoleeza Rice before he was employed by the Commission, he was immediately hired by her as a State Department counselor when the Commission finished its work. More alarmingly, however, he was the guy who codified the neocon pre-emption doctrine as “The National Security Strategy of the United States,” which laid the groundwork for attacking Iraq. He made repeated attempts during the course of the Commission’s work to weave in a link between Iraq and Al-qaeda to bolster the Bush administration’s justification for the invasion. He also maintained regular, secret contacts with Karl Rove while serving as the Executive Director. Yet, we are asked to believe that the Commission report is an entirely credible account of what happened on that fateful day. As Mr. Shenon recounts, in the end, the Report, “was almost all good news for the White House.”

There is no space here to parse the details of what happened on September 11, many people have done that[1], continue to do that, and it’s not much more productive than trying to agree on what happened in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963. In these cases, the devil is not in the detail, but in the big picture of what happened after the event itself. Anyone looking at President Kennedy’s  murder from outside the country would immediately identify it as a coup d’état that irreversibly changed the leadership of the American government and altered our political history. Of course, we don’t speak in such terms in this country, because political correctness doesn’t allow it; coups don’t happen in America. It is as James Douglass writes, “The Unspeakable.” The “system” has to be protected at all costs, so we maintain our silence and censor our thoughts, lest we lose our jobs, reputations or social standing. Only the “lunatic fringe” has other ideas.

The same is true of 9/11.  We have to step back and look at the big picture of what happened after that day. Whose agenda was implemented as a result of 9/11 – the Bush/Cheney neocon agenda or the agenda imputed to Osama Bin Laden? If Bin Laden’s agenda was to mobilize the Islamic world on a grand jihad against the infidels, he failed miserably and brought untold calumny on the heads of Muslims everywhere. It is difficult to identify even one thing that Osama Bin Laden might have achieved by these attacks. In fact, Bush’s invasion of Iraq did  more to weaken the United States and to mobilize radical jihadists than anything Bin Laden did, or could have done.

On the other hand, the attacks were apparently very beneficial for Israel, if Benjamin Netanyahu is to be believed. The Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv reported on April 16, 2008 that Netanyahu told an Israeli audience, “We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq, … swung American public opinion in our favor.” Justin Raimondo adds that ‘The American invasion and occupation of the Mesopotamian heartland has empowered the Israelis as never before – and now they are on the offensive, carving out a greatly expanded sphere of influence …,’ (as quoted by Stephen J. Sniegoski).

For America, the main outcome of the 9/11 attacks, as we can see now, was the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Iraq is the smoking gun of 9/11. We know that on the very day of 9/11, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were already urging an assault on Iraq without a shred of evidence that Iraq was involved in the attacks.  At every stage, leading up to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and right until this day, Bush/Cheney and the neocons have conjured up the ghosts of 9/11 to justify and advance this one agenda – Afghanistan was just a sideshow and remained such, until President Obama made the tragic mistake of escalating the conflict there.  Not one element of their agenda could have worked without 9/11. As Vincent Bugliosi says, “if there had been no 9/11 there would have been no war in Iraq, certainly not one the American people would have approved of.” Was it just a matter of sublime coincidence, that Bin Laden provided the neocons with the catalyst they needed as a pretext for unleashing their plans on the world? Was it chance or planning?

There are many who might say, it’s best to let sleeping dogs lie, that nothing can be gained by reopening investigations and discussions about what happened on September 11th.  But knowing the truth of what happened, however painful, is essential because so much of what we are doing in the world has been justified on the grounds that this was an attack by foreign terrorists when the truth may be much more sinister. It may be that we can never know the whole truth about 9/11, any more than we can about the Kennedy assassination, but much about 9/11 still remains hidden and unexplored because of the manner in which the 9/11 Commission carried out its work. It might have been hoped that once Bush/Cheney finally left office, it would be possible to have a new enquiry, free from partisan politicians, to pursue many of the issues not adequately explored, or covered up by the Keane/Zelikow Commission. But this now appears to be a vain hope given the Obama administration’s unwillingness to take a hard look at the past.  9/11 remains buried under the officially sanctioned explanations, because, as a people, not only have we failed to demand the truth, it may be that we really don’t want to know the truth.

---

[1] See especially, Paul Thompson’s, The Terror Timeline, Harper Collins, 2004. Or go to, http://www.historycommons.org/project.jsp?project=911_project

Source: Fire Dog Lake

.

Terrorist Who Trained London Bombers Was Working For US Government

http://redactednews.blogspot.com 

“Radical Islam” is a creature of the US military-industrial complex

Paul Joseph Watson | Prison Planet.com
Monday, February 14, 2011

While talking heads like Glenn Beck continue to invoke the threat of radical Islam, they habitually ignore the blindingly obvious, that radical Islam is a creature of the US military-industrial complex. Case in point – the terrorist who trained the London bombers was a US informant and has been freed after serving only four and a half years of a possible 70-year sentence.

Citing his “exceptional co-operation,” in working with US authorities, a New York Judge released Mohammed Junaid Babar despite him pleading guilty to five counts of terrorism, an outcome that has, “Raised questions over whether Babar was a US informer at the time he was helping to train the ringleader of the 7 July tube and bus bombings,” reports the London Guardian.

Babar admits to consorting with high level “Al-Qaeda” terrorists, as well as “providing senior members with money and equipment, running weapons.” He also set up a training camp in Pakistan in 2003 where alleged 7/7 ringleader Mohammad Sidique Khan learned bomb-making techniques.

“Graham Foulkes, a magistrate whose 22-year-old son David was killed by Khan at Edgware Road underground station in 2005, said: “People get four and a half years for burglary. They can get more for some road traffic offences. So for an international terrorist who’s directly linked to the death of my son and dozens and dozens of people to get that sentence is just outrageous.”

But Babar’s release makes perfect sense given the fact that he was likely working for US authorities as an informant while training one of the alleged London bombers.

“A remark from the sentencing judge that Babar “began co-operating even before his arrest”, has raised the possibility, supported by other circumstantial evidence obtained by the Guardian, that he may have been an informant for the US government before his detention by the FBI in April 2004,” writes the Guardian’s Shiv Malik, who in a separate article goes into greater depth on how, “Babar may have been working for the US security services while pretending to be a jihadi – allegations that could imply serious failures to prevent the 7 July bombings.”

The Guardian article describes how a top US terrorism lawyer has seen sealed evidence in the case which “suggests Babar could have been working for the US authorities before his arrest in April 2004.”

“Having reviewed the court transcript himself, bereaved father Graham Foulkes said: “There’s a hint from one or two of the sentences [in the transcript] that do strongly suggest [Babar's] co-operation was going well beyond his official arrest. And it looks as if the Americans may well have known in detail what Babar was up to in Pakistan [at the time] and that is a very, very serious matter.”

The fact that Babar has served less than 5 years for playing a crucial role in attacks which killed 52 people and injured hundreds more clearly indicates that he is being rewarded by US authorities for his involvement in the 7/7 bombings.

Lest we forget that the the so-called mastermind behind the 7/7 London bombings, Haroon Rashid Aswat, was a British intelligence asset. Former Justice Dept. prosecutor and terror expert John Loftus revealed that the so called Al-Muhajiroun group, based in London, had formed during the Kosovo crisis, during which fundamentalist muslim leaders (Or what is now referred to as Al-Qaeda) were recruited by MI6 to fight in Kosovo.

The revelations about Babar once again underscore the myopic and ludicrous assertions of people like Glenn Beck, who constantly invoke the threat of radical Islam, particularly in the context of recent events in Egypt, while failing to point out that radical Islam is being fostered and fomented by the US military-industrial complex.

Almost every single major terror plot over the last decade plus blamed on “radical Islam” has had the combined or individual fingerprints of US, British, Canadian and Israeli intelligence agencies and federal law enforcement bodies all over it.

9/11

Every single shred of evidence concerning the alleged 9/11 hijackers points to the fact that they were patsies controlled by informants working for the US government.

The US Special Operations Command’s Able Danger program identified the hijackers and their accomplices long before 9/11, but when the head of the program, Colonel Anthony Shaffer, tried to pass the information on to the 9/11 Commission, he was gagged and slandered and the vital information his team had passed on was ignored and buried.

Curt Weldon, Former U.S. Republican Congressman and senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, documented how the US government tracked the hijackers’ movementsbefore 9/11.

Louai al-Sakka, the man who trained six of the hijackers, was a CIA informant. A number of the other alleged hijackers were trained at US air bases. In the months prior to 9/11, alleged hijackers Khalid Almidhar and Nawaf Alhazmi were renting rooms in a house owned and lived in by an FBI informant.

In a 2002 article entitled The Hijackers We Let Escape, Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman documented how, “The CIA tracked two suspected terrorists to a Qaeda summit in Malaysia in January 2000, then looked on as they re-entered America and began preparations for September 11.”

The fact that there were numerous Al-Qaeda affiliated terrorists involved in the pre-planning stages of 9/11 is unsurprising given former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds’ testimony that Bin Laden was working for the US right up until the day of 9/11.

On the very morning of 9/11, the money man behind the alleged hijackers, Pakistan’s ISI Chief Mahmoud Ahmad, was meeting with U.S. government and intelligence officials.

Indeed, even after 9/11, the so-called spiritual leader of the very hijackers who allegedly slammed Flight 77 into the Pentagon, Anwar al-Awlaki, was himself invited to dine with Pentagon top brass mere months after the attack.

UNDERWEAR BOMBER

Al-Awlaki was later involved in directing the underwear bomber, who was allowed to board the plane by order of the US State Department aided by a well-dressed man who got Abdulmutallab on the airliner despite the fact that he was on a terror watch list and had no passport. Eyewitness and Delta 253 passenger Kurt Haskell subsequently blew the whistle to state that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was given the bomb by the US government to create a pretext for the implementation of naked body scanners and boost the TSA’s budget.

FORT HOOD SHOOTING

Fort Hood shooter Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan repeatedly communicated with alleged Al-Qaeda leaders for nearly a year before his rampage. The FBI knew Hasan was sending emails to terrorists, but they did nothing, allowed him to remain on a U.S. Army base, and even invited him to participate in Homeland Security exercises. Hasan was also being handled by US agent Al-Awlaki.

FORT DIX

Lawyers in a case relating to the much vaunted 2007 terror plot to attack Fort Dix and kill “as many soldiers as possible” concluded that FBI informants were the key figures behind the operation and that the accused, six foreign-born Muslims, were merely bungling patsies. US agent Al-Awlaki was again involved in training the would-be terrorists.

TORONTO PLOT

The “Toronto 18″ terrorists turned out to be “a bunch of incompetent guys who were primarily misled by a delusional megalomaniac”. The explosive fertilizer material the terrorist cell apparently planned to use was in fact purchased by an informant working for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, agents of which had radicalized the group. US agent Al-Awlaki was again involved in the plot.

PORTLAND PLOT

The man accused of attempting to blow up a Christmas tree in Portland’s Pioneer Courthouse Square, Mohamed Osman Mohamud, was a befuddled patsy, groomed and radicalized from start to finish by the FBI as part of a radicalization and entrapment program. Shortly after news of the attempted bombing broke, it emerged that the FBI had provided Mohamud with a fake bomb, van, and cell phone (to be used as a detonator) in the incident, as well as thousands of dollars in cash at every step of the plot.

MUMBAI MASSACRE

The man accused of being the mastermind behind the 2008 Mumbai massacre, David Headley,was a US government informant and was also at one time on the payroll of the Central Intelligence Agency.

SHOE BOMBER

Hundreds of terror suspects have been convicted in civilian federal courts, including convicted shoe bomber Richard Reid who attended the Finsbury Park Mosque in North London. The Finsbury imam at the time was Abu Hamza al-Masri who began working with British Security Services in 1997.

MIAMI PLOT

In the media-lauded Miami terror case in 2007, the supposed ringleader Narseal “Prince Marina” Batiste “had heard of Al-Qaeda, but wasn’t sure what it stood for. The FBI instigators made Batiste swear loyalty to al-Qaida; then had him call on his local buddies to form an ‘Islamic army’ in Miami. None had military training. Some could barely read. But Batiste assured the group in the midst of its collective marijuana buzz of greatness ahead,” wrote Saul Landau.

These were the men who comedian John Stewart referred to as “seven dipshits in a warehouse” after Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had ludicrously told the press that the group of semi-retarded gang-bangers had planned to “wage a ground war against America”.

NEW YORK SYNAGOGUE BOMB PLOT

A group of so-called Muslim terrorists were busted in New York for supposedly planning to blow up synagogues in the Bronx and shoot down military airplanes flying out of the New York Air National Guard base. The men were provided with fake explosives and inactive missiles by an FBI informant, reported the Christian Science Monitor. Two of the ringleaders of the “deadly” plot which was endlessly hyped by the media turned out to be semi-retarded potheads, exactly as we had predicted would be the case due to the innumerable past cases with the exact same modus operandi.

I could go on for pages and pages listing details of ever major terror plot since and indeed before 9/11 that were blamed on “radical Islam” yet in fact turned out to be completely contrived by the FBI, CIA, Canadian or British authorities.

It is a glaring and manifestly provable fact that radical Islam is being manufactured and provoked by the US military-industrial complex in order to provide itself with an enemy to justify billions every year in weapons sales along with giant federal government slush funds that enrich the coffers of public-private partnerships while crushing the constitutional rights of American citizens.

Glenn Beck is completely accurate when he says that radical Islam represents a direct threat to the future of freedom in the west. The ultimate “clash of civilizations” is a very real possibility. But by deliberately obscuring the fact that radical Islam is a creature of the US military-industrial complex, a bastard child of the new world order that is being strengthened by our own governments to be used as a weapon against us, Beck and others who regurgitate the same rhetoric are misleading Americans into thinking that radical Islam itself is the new world order, when in fact radical Islam is merely a tool of the new world order, being from its very inception completely owned and controlled by the US military-industrial complex.

Source: http://www.prisonplanet.com/terrorist-who-trained-london-bombers-was-working-for-us-government.html

Posted by [Redacted] at 2/14/2011 03:30:00 PM

.

France denies 2011 Afghan troop surge

found on : http://www.aopnews.com

Alain Juppe

Press TV / February 9, 2011

France has decided not to send additional troops to Afghanistan in 2011 as US-led soldiers struggle to rein in the nine-year-old war in the country.

“We have “…….”   around 4,000 soldiers in the field and we do not intend to increase that,” AFP quoted French Defense Minister Alain Juppe as saying during his meeting with US Defense Secretary Robert Gates in Washington on Tuesday.

Juppe, however, noted that France will continue to redeploy some of its troops from around Sarobi — located between Kabul and Jalalabad in Kabul Province — in order to pave the way for handing over the security missions to Afghan forces.

The French minister further expounded on his country’s contribution to the war in Afghanistan.

“This is already a considerable effort by France because we have been in Afghanistan from the beginning” of the US-led occupation of the war-wracked country in 2001.

Asked about France’s response in case the US requests additional troops, Juppe replied, “I stated clearly that we do not have that capacity.”

He made the remarks at a time when the number of attacks on US-led forces in Afghanistan has significantly increased over the past months amid growing public outcry over the increase in the number of civilian casualties as a result of ongoing NATO offensives in the Asian country.

In 2010, as many as 711 foreign troops, including 53 French soldiers lost their lives in Afghanistan — an average of two a day — which is by far greater than the annual toll of 521 during 2009.

The Afghan interior ministry recently said that last year saw an increase in the number of civilian deaths since the US-led invasion.

The ministry stated that more than 2,000 civilians lost their lives in violence across Afghanistan, making 2010 the deadliest year ever for civilian casualties in war-hit country.

On Jan 6, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates ordered an extra 1,400 Marines to southern Afghanistan in an attempt to fend off Taliban militants returning from neighboring Pakistan.

The surge comes despite an earlier promise by US President Barack Obama to withdraw American forces from Afghanistan by July 2011.

FLASHBACK : Obama: “You Can Take That To The Bank”

http://dailybail.com/home

 

Video – Obama’s broken promises

The federal government borrowed 43 cents of every dollar spent in the 2010 budget.  The cost of war is bankrupting the United States…

—

Cut defense first…

Max Pappas, the vice president of public policy at FreedomWorks and Benjamin H. Friedman, a research fellow at the Cato Institute discuss the possibility of defense cuts and how to move forward. To date, the only US administration to cut defense spending during war time was the Nixon administration.

—

Tea Party supports Defense cuts…

Video – Rand Paul on budget cuts

Earlier today…

• Super Bowl Flyover Costs Taxpayers $450,000

• Total Cost Of Wars Exceeds $2.5 Trillion – No Worries! US Media ‘Fluff’ Numbing Nation, Robbing Next Generation

• HOLY GENERATIONAL WAR — U.S National Debt Will Be $19.6 Trillion By 2015 According To New Treasury Report

 

 

 

White Terrorist Ignored by MSM

http://dprogram.net

(RussiaToday) – Last week an ex-Army veteran from California was arrested for driving to Detroit’s largest mosque with a trunk full of explosives. Police then found Roger Stockham inside his car, outside the Islamic Center of America with a load of M-80′s and other explosives in his trunk. The mainstream media has ignored this story. Alyona asks Georgetown University Professor Christopher Chambers why the media only cares about Muslim Terrorists.

.

Taliban release video alleging to show the damage done to people’s homes by NATO troops.

http://www.uruknet.info

AlJazeera.net

 

Taliban release anti-NATO video The Taliban has released a video alleging to show the damage done to people’s homes by NATO troops. January 22, 2011 The Taliban in Afghanistan is taking aim at US and NATO forces, this time through pictures. It has released a video alleging to show the damage done to people’s homes by NATO troops. The video’s release comes amid rising criticism of foreign troops, and how they are handling the issue of compensation. NATO has agreed to reimburse those who suffered during Operation Omaid, a clearing operation for new roads to be laid or mines and bombs to be destroyed. Al Jazeera’s Sue Turton reports from Kandahar. .

Top Secret America: Expensive, Chaotic and Dangerous

http://www.thenewamerican.com Written by Bob Adelmann

Wednesday, 22 December 2010 16:00

1 Last July the Washington Post published a three-part story on “the huge security buildup in the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.” This week, the Post published “Monitoring America,” the fourth installment of its “Top Secret America” series, describing security efforts at the local level. After two years of research, hundreds of interviews, and thousands of hours poring over documents, the Washington Post investigation was unable to determine anything for sure — except, of course, that the security system is massive: The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 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…. 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 system now spreads over more than 10,000 locations, employs an estimated 1 million people, and involves 1,300 government organizations and almost 2,000 private companies. And yet, it was virtually helpless in the face of the Fort Hood shooter or the Christmas Day bomber, both of whom had left tracks that had gotten buried under volumes and reams of incoming and irrelevant data. The study did reveal Top Secret America’s mind-numbingly complex operations. In a moment of candor, retired U. S. Army Lt. General John Vines, who was asked to review just part of the system, exclaimed: I’m not aware of any agency with the authority, responsibility or a process in place to coordinate all these interagency and commercial activities. The complexity of this system defies description. And the growth of the agencies tasked with keeping the country safe (the mission defined as “defeating transnational violent extremists”) is astonishing. The Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency has more than doubled since 2002, the National Security Agency has doubled in size, and the number of FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces jumped from 35 to 106. The researchers could provide only rough estimates of the cost of the operation: $40 billion was committed by Congress nine days after the attacks, followed by an additional $36 billion in 2002, $44 billion in 2003 — “and that was only a beginning.” The number of agencies involved in “Top Secret America” (TSA) grew from 24 at the end of 2001, with 37 more being added in 2002, 36 new ones in 2003, and successively larger additions in the following years, for a total, so far, of 263 organizations created in the wake of the attacks. After reviewing the Washington Post’s findings last July, retired Admiral Dennis Blair succinctly summed up the effort: “After 9/11, when we decided to attack violent extremism, we did as we so often do in this country: the attitude was, if it’s worth doing, it’s probably worth overdoing.” At the end of its study, one was left with the impression of enormous waste, inefficiency, and mind-boggling complexity — all in the name of freedom. As Warren Mass pointed out, the real danger of such a massive intelligence operation was ignored entirely: “the danger posed to our freedom by building [such a] powerful secret intelligence network that’s exempt from Congressional oversight … the only power Congress maintains over them is control of their budgets.” Thus was laid the groundwork for the next effort at the Washington Post which was published this week: “Monitoring America.” The dangers to individual citizens as a result of Top Secret America are now in full public view. The web of agencies involved in intelligence-gathering has grown to “4,058 federal, state and local organizations, each with its own counterterrorism responsibilities and jurisdictions,” and it now collects, stores and analyzes information about thousands of U. S. citizens and residents, many of whom have not been accused of any wrongdoing. [Emphasis added.] The Post found that the technologies and techniques which were “honed for use on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan have migrated into the hands of law enforcement agencies in America. The FBI is building a database with the names and … personal information … of thousands of U. S. citizens and residents whom a local police officer or a fellow citizen believed to be acting suspiciously. (Emphasis added.) The Post’s findings paint a picture of a country at a crossroads, where long-standing privacy principles are under challenge by these new efforts to keep the nation safe. As one example, in Memphis the technology now allows police officers to “troll” for suspects through the use of a military-grade infrared camera mounted in the cruiser. The camera moves eerily from side to side, scanning for license plates and then analyzing the results instantly. Suddenly, a red light flashed on the cruiser’s screen along with the word “warrant.” “Got a live one!” an officer called out: “Let’s do it!” The Maricopa, Arizona, County Sheriff’s Facial Recognition Unit uses the same technology provided by L-1 Identity Solutions in war zones to record 9,000 biometric digital mug shots every month. Predator drones fly over the Mexican and Canadian borders, courtesy of the U. S. Customs and Border Protection Agency, taking pictures with real-time, full-motion video cameras. When quizzed informally about these drones, the senior military official involved in directing military operations in Desert Shield and Desert Storm told the author that these drones “had the capability not only of seeing someone make an ATM withdrawal, but could determine the amount of the withdrawal and the name and address of the individual making the withdrawal.” And these are just a few examples. Others exist but could be not revealed to the researchers. Memphis Police Department Director Larry Godwin said, “We have got things now that we didn’t have before. Some of them we can talk about. Some of them we can’t.” There’s fingerprint technology as well. Fingerprints from crime records are entered into the FBI’s data base located in Clarksburg, West Virginia. Those fingerprints are stored along with others collected by American authorities from prisoners in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iraq and Afghanistan. As the authors chillingly observed: “There are 96 million sets of fingerprints in Clarksburg, a volume that government officials view not as daunting but as an opportunity.” (Emphasis added.) Myra Gray, head of the Defense Department’s Biometrics Identity Management Agency, explained that this year, for the first time, the FBI, the DHS and the Defense Department will be able to search each other’s fingerprint databases: “Hopefully, our relationship with these federal agencies — along with state and local agencies will be completely symbiotic.” And so, despite the enormous amounts of money unceremoniously dropped into the laps of agencies tasked to “defeating transnational violent extremists,” with no concern for or accountability about how that money is being spent, little attention is being paid to the jeopardy faced by innocent citizens who have been targeted for a “suspicious activity,” which the government has defined as “observed behavior reasonably indicative of pre-operational planning related to terrorism or other criminal activity.” Being lost in all these efforts to keep citizens safe is the loss by those citizens of their rights to be “secure in the persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” .

GORDON DUFF: GOV. JESSE VENTURA PROVES 9/11 COVER-UP, WILL AMERICA’S GOVERNMENT FALL?

December 18, 2010 posted by Gordon Duff · Leave a Comment

“thought it was a bomb…walked out through the hole..burning wreckage..no plane parts…threatened to keep silent”

FORMER VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY ACCUSED OF ENGINEERING PENTAGON ATTACK

DONALD RUMSFELD CITED AS POSSIBLE ACCOMPICE

By Gordon Duff STAFF WRITER/Senior Editor

Confirmed sources in the Nigerian government tell us, in order to keep former Vice President Cheney out of prison for crimes involving Nigeria, $500,000,000 in bribes have been promised, negotiated by former President George H.W. Bush.   Now, only a day later, Cheney faces possible charges, so many charges they can only be imagined, for planning the Pentagon attack on 9/11.  TV host, Jesse Ventura, former Navy Seal, former Governor of Minnesota, on a one hour documentary on prime-time American television, makes an open and shut criminal case tying Cheney, Rumsfeld and officials throughout the US government with complicity in the planning, execution and subsequent cover-up of the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon.

YouTube – Veterans Today -

According to experts on 9/11, engineers, pilots, intelligence officers and members of our military, Jesse Ventura “hit the nail on the head.”  Ventura, using evidence developed over 9 years by hundreds of individuals, outlines the utter impossibility of the government’s cover story on 9/11 and systematically debunks it using testimony and scientific evidence.

Ventura cites, in an interview with a 9/11 commissioner, a possible motive for the Pentagon attack being included with the attacks on the World Trade Center.  $2,300,000,000,000, yes 2.3 billion US dollars had disappeared, cited only the day before in a televised statement by Secretary Rumsfeld, money “gone missing” from the Pentagon’s accounting.  The are of the Pentagon hit by a missile or destroyed by explosives or both contained all records of this missing money.

NO PLANE, NO WAY, NOT EVEN CLOSE

Ventura proves, beyond any doubt that no airplane every hit the Pentagon.  As the video shows, not even a highly trained airline pilot was capable of the maneuvers claimed.  Long before, it had been proven that the 757 was incapable the task, either the maneuvers or the speed and trajectory.  The plane would have come apart, there is no disagreement with this and hasn’t been for some time, yet nothing had been done.  Why?

It is also clearly shown that there is absolutely no evidence of any kind showing a plane hit the Pentagon, no wreckage, no bodies, no luggage.  Items claimed to have been taken to Dover Air Force Base, bodies, plane parts, were never at the Pentagon as both video and testimony prove.

There is also proof that the government threatened witnesses, telling them to support the “aircraft scenario.”

NO MUSLIMS, NO HIJACKERS, NO BOX CUTTERS, ALL PROVEN LIES FINALLY

The basis for the conspiracy theory regarding Muslim hijackers with box cutters was based on supposed phone calls made by Barbara Olson, wife of Bush Solicitor General.  Solicitor General Olson claimed he talked to his wife on a cell phone, spoke with her at length, while she described the hijackings as now dramatized by Hollywood.  When it was proven that a cell phone is incapable of making such calls, Olson claimed it was a “seat back phone.”  When it was proven that there were no seat back phones on American Airlines 757 aircraft, nothing further was asked.

Then investigations shows he received one call, lasting “0″ seconds.  Ventura questions as to whether Olson was duped or complicit?  Should he be arrested too?  Was his wife, Barbara, ever really on the plane?

Then Ventura looks into the flight itself.  Not only was the flight recorder “dead” but during the flight itself, the transponder was turned off.  Even more suspicious, the plane disappeared from radar for 28 minutes.

There is no discussion of this 28 minutes, but speculation, perhaps no longer speculation, has long been that the flight landed.  As to what happened then, we cannot guess, or can we.  One of my friends, a former Pentagon official, had a friend on that aircraft.  Not long ago, he asked me.

“Gordon, what do you think happened to him, do you think he was executed?  Bullet in the brain as they stepped off the plane or something even worse?”

Ventura didn’t go there.  None of us want to.  It requires visualizing a scene out of Auschwitz.

Can Americans be so brutal, so devious, so traitorous?  It isn’t just Jesse Ventura that is willing to risk his life to bring it out, Fox News journalist Geraldo Rivera, several weeks ago, debunked the Building 7 collapse at the World Trade Center as “controlled demolition.”

YouTube – Veterans Today -

9/11 COMMISSION DUPED, ADMITS THERE WAS NO REAL INVESTIGATION AT ALL

Commission video’s redacted to remove testimony by the Secretary of Transportation, transcripts altered, witnesses blocked, evidence, tons of evidence of government conspiracy withheld, this is the case against the government.  Threats, intimidation, going on for years, this is proven.  Were there more than threats, murders, “heart attacks” or threats against families?  Ventura proves the Pentagon was a government conspiracy, he “names names.”  Geraldo makes any other explanation for Building 7 other than “controlled demolition” pure insanity.

IGNORING EVIDENCE, PROOF OF DICTATORSHIP OR ARE ARRESTS PLANNED?

It isn’t as though the evidence presented by Governor Ventura and Geraldo Rivera or even the other stories, Judge Napolitano’s revelations of knowledge of the attacks as early as 9/11, was new.  All has been know, all highly credible and all systematically ignored, attacked by the press, suppressed by courts, officials at every level.

9/11 and the recent revelations aren’t proof of a conspiracy by 2 men, or Israel.  It is proof that there never was an Al Qaeda and that the deaths, two wars, the 9/11 deaths and the carnage across the world wrought by the United States was part of a criminal conspiracy, one that could only be perpetrated by a dictatorship under the guise of representative democracy.

Everything we have seen, and millions around the world have watched, nobody can ignore it anymore, it all says that what has happened is something no American would allow, not if this still were America.  Jesse Ventura proved something startling to most, suspected by some.  He proved that, at some point in our past, 10 years, more, we don’t know, our government was overthrown.

MORE WIKILEAKS, MORE ASSANGE, MORE 9/11 COVER-UP

The strongest and most vocal opponent of a new 9/11 investigation is Julian Assange of Wikleaks.  If any individual outside the US government were to be named as most complicit in a 9/11 cover-up, it would be Julian Assange.

YouTube – Veterans Today -

Everything since then, certainly 9/11 and now, the news about Iran and, especially Wikileaks, all subterfuge.  When former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinsky cited Wikileaks on a PBS interview, televised nationally, that Wikileaks was the word of an intelligence agency, Israel never reported it or responded.  Instead, they attributed Brzezinski’s quote to me:

“Speaking to Haaretz, Duff added that ‘it sticks out like a sore thumb that WikiLeaks is obviously concocted by an intelligence agency.’”

This is what Brzezinski told Judy Woodruff of PBS:

ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: But I think the most serious issues are not those which are getting the headlines right now. Who cares if Berlusconi is described as a clown. Most Italians agree with that. Who cares if Putin is described as an alpha dog? He probably is flattered by it.

The real issue is, who is feeding Wikipedia on this issue — Wiki — Wiki — WikiLeaks on this issue? They’re getting a lot of information which seems trivial, inconsequential, but some of it seems surprisingly pointed. …The very pointed references to Arab leaders could have as their objective undermining their political credibility at home, because this kind of public identification of their hostility towards Iran could actually play against them at home.

It’s, rather, a question of whether WikiLeaks are being manipulated by interested parties that want to either complicate our relationship with other governments or want to undermine some governments, because some of these items that are being emphasized and have surfaced are very pointed.

And I wonder whether, in fact, there aren’t some operations internationally, intelligence services, that are feeding stuff to WikiLeaks, because it is a unique opportunity to embarrass us, to embarrass our position, but also to undermine our relations with particular governments.

BUSH, OBAMA, CONTINUING DICTATORSHIP, CONTINUING COVER-UP, CONTINUING WAR

Barak Obama ran for president on a platform based on justice, ending the wars and bringing accountability to government after 8 years of scandals, deceit and what can only be called “hooliganism and piracy.”  Instead, he has done nothing, the wars continue, drugs are flowing from Afghanistan even faster than before, 9/11 evidence, now overwhelming and impossible ignore is still ignored.

Americans looking for reform wonder if Bush left at all.  Those complicit are, though few admit it, disturbed by seeing America led by an African American.  The visible public face on the very well financed attacks on President Obama are all very much based on race hatred.  Who would want a return to policies enacted by the least successful president in American history, George W. Bush, who left office with an approval record listed at 22%.  Many would find a number lower, even half, more credible.  President Clinton, after surviving impeachment for lying about sexual misconduct left office with 68% approval.

Even through the assaults on President Obama, many financed by the Koch brothers,  tied to ultra-nationalists in Israel, whether there was a real change of government is not clear.  As Jesse Ventura pointed out, while Vice President Dick Cheney was getting reports of a plane approaching the Pentagon, seemingly even orchestrating the attack himself, President Bush was in Florida reading to school children.  Two years of Obama have been similar, too similar.

What can we assume from this?  Is, in fact, the President of the United States no longer Commander in Chief?  Did our government hand itself over to “shadow” rule with Bush or did it happen earlier, after President Reagan’s dementia made him unable to manage the cabal that surrounded him?

The headline on today’s New York Times:

SENATE BLOCKS BILL FOR ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT STUDENTS

The headline on today’s Washington Post:

TOP US SPY REMOVED AFTER THREATS

What is “their” message?  Certainly not “never again.”  In fact we know that “again” is just around the corner, an Iran war with or without a new 9/11, planned and executed by the same folks, older, not wiser and certainly more pathologically insane and murderous.

..and we continue to allow it.

 

.

Wikileaks: Iran Selectively Targeted by Media

http://tv.globalresearch.ca

.

Gareth Porter: Media selecting cables that support Iran narrative.

 

Gareth Porter is a historian and investigative journalist on US foreign and military policy analyst. He writes regularly for Inter Press Service on US policy towards Iraq and Iran. Author of four books, the latest of which is “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam”.

Iran terror attacks: MI6, Mossad, CIA

http://www.voltairenet.org

The British daily The Independent has confirmed the role of the spy agencies of Israel, Britain and the US in the recent terror attacks on two Iranian nuclear scientists.

 

2 December 2010 From Tehran (Iran) Tools Print Send Countries Iran Themes Covert Action

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad attends a press conference in Tehran, capital of Iran, Nov 29, 2010. Ahmadinejad said Monday that West and Israel were behind the terror attack on two Iranian scientists. (Xinhua/Ahmad Halabisaz) In an article quoting the Zionist commentator on strategic issues, terrorism and intelligence, Yossi Melman, the daily said three “not seemingly related” events took place recently, which are in fact closely connected. The three were the publication of classified US State Department documents by WikiLeaks, assassination attempts on two Iranian nuclear scientists, which left one of them killed and the other wounded and the appointment of Tamir Pardo as the new head of Mossad, Tel Aviv’s foreign espionage agency. The report said the three developments are “part of the endless efforts by the Israeli intelligence community, together with its Western counterparts including Britain’s MI6 and America’s CIA” to obstruct Iran’s civilian nuclear program. This is while Iran said following the attacks that it does not rule out a possible connection between assassinations and last month comments by UK spy chief, John Sawers. Foreign ministry spokesman, Ramin Mehmanparast told reporters in Tehran it is undeniable that certain western countries are backing anti-Iran terrorist groups and facilitating their activities. Mehmanparast was referring to comments by MI6 chief on October 28 who said “diplomacy alone would not be enough to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program”. “Stopping nuclear proliferation cannot be addressed purely by conventional diplomacy. We need intelligence-led operations to make it more difficult for countries such as Iran to develop nuclear technology,” Sawers said. Now evidence is being heaped against Britain and its allies over their role in the terrorist operations. According to The Independent, “most experts” on Middle East politics and Mossad history “would agree” that the role of the Zionist regime in the attacks is “obvious”, though no organization has yet claimed responsibility for the bombings. Majid Shahriari, an Iranian nuclear scientist, was martyred while driving to his workplace in the Iranian capital of Tehran when two unidentified terrorists on a motorcycle approached his car, placed a bomb on the vehicle and detonated the device. Majid Shahriari (above) was killed, and Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani (below) injured, in bomb blasts. In a separate terror plot, Fereydoun Abbasi Davani and his wife were injured when terrorists threw a bomb at his car as he was parking the vehicle but the two managed to save their lives. The daily said Mossad is known for using similar assassination techniques including in the 1995 assassination of leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Dr Fathi Shkaki. This is while, former CIA officer Bruce Riedel who has worked for 30 years as an operative and analyst on Afghanistan and Pakistan has confirmed Mossad’s role in a host of assassinations in different countries across the world. Riedel wrote in a separate article for The Independent “Mossad, has a long history of using targeted killings to attack the enemies” of the Zionist Israeli regime. Riedel said the spy agency has carried out many such attacks in the 1970’s and 80’s using the Israeli army’s elite commando units or car bombs and assassins. He added Iran is now “at the top of Israeli concerns” as it is supporting the main resistance movements against the Zionist regime, Hamas and Hezbollah”. Riedel also said “it is conceivable” that Mossad has carried out the terrorist operations in Iran as it has been recently involved in the assassination of Hezbollah senior commander Imad Mughniyah and the assassination of a top Hamas member in Dubai. Iran has several times accused Britain of spying on its nuclear facilities and the last month remarks by MI6 chief who said they are “using intelligence-led approaches” against the country’s nuclear activities validate such accusations. Now in the context of the comments by Melman on the efforts by Mossad, MI6 and CIA toward the common goal of disrupting Iran’s civilian nuclear program, it is also “conceivable” that Britain at least provided the perpetrators of the terrorist attacks with the needed intelligence leading to the assassination attempts. == Related article: ’Israel behind murder of Iranian particle physicist’, Voltaire Network, 27 January 2010. .   .

An Amazing Speech on Terrorism

http://dprogram.net

FLASHBACK : Al Ciada , Made in USA

9/11 and the Holocaust; how Much Truth does the Truth Require?

http://dprogram.net

Posted by sakerfa on October 28th, 2010

(Reflections) – Dog Poet Transmitting…….

As if there were any doubt, in any way, anymore, about two critical circumstances that shape our world, there should be none now. We can be very fundamental about this. We can go to rank and file. We can go to bedrock and we can also be certain that the truth will not be hid for long now. Not only is 9/11 the litmus test but we have the right to inquire about anything because of the cost it has brought everyone but the ones who did it. For them it is all massive profit.

Kevin Bracken is a hero. Kenneth O’Keefe is a hero too but you can find out about O’Keefe on your own. These videos bring something to light in ways that even a moron can find reason to be convinced of. One of them is mass media. The same mass media owned by those who were behind both events.

This 9/11 and this curious foundation for so much in our present day are doing nasty things in their parents beds while their friends listen outside the door. What does it take to wake you up world? Should I take a hammer and go from door to door, town to town, country to country and bang on it so that you can recognize that you have been turned into one if the people in that bed and all of the people listening outside the door?

I don’t know how anyone will take what I write anymore after the most recent Smoking Mirrors. The early comments made me feel like I was going with that same hammer and begging door to door. I was, but it wasn’t about money or apples. It was about the truth. In the meantime, people who are fighting for the truth are also fighting with each other and I can’t find a side to be completely on the side of so I can only fight for the truth herself and hope it will somehow bring those of us who are together to a place of greater strength and joined in our common struggle.

There is no one who is reading this right now, or who ever will, who is not affected by these two events. All of us should take this personally. Very few of us got a real apple through the barbed wire while a psychopathic few were getting all of the apples for themselves and raising their own livestock on the livestock’s own land for the purpose of harvesting organs because their own organs will not function because there is no integrity in them. I think this is the real reason that they are behind all of this organ harvesting. There are so few of them and so many organs. Think about it. It is ugly and evil and pornographic beyond description and your imagination doesn’t even want to go there.

I am confident now that there is no way that the truth can be kept from us. I feel like I can even see the future and that is a scary thing. It should come as no surprise that Jon Faine from the first video looks like Steven Spielberg. I shouldn’t have to be doing this. You should be doing this. Kevin Bracken and Kenneth O’Keefe are doing this. Max Keiser is doing this and we are all doing something by degrees and on levels within the dimensions of our enterprises but it is not enough. Please do what you can, every one of you, from every location to bring into being just a little more of the naked truth even if you have to rip the clothes from her body.

I’m trying to get to my olive groves and reap my small harvest which costs more than any olive oil would in any store but it’s the real thing and somehow you can’t get that in a store. Meanwhile I am experiencing some of the most terrific pain in my life due to gallstones that have come about because I lost so much weight during all those events in Italy earlier this year. Now I am told I should have my gall bladder removed because this stone is too big to pass. I believe I can pass it with an ayurvedic remedy which I should be out getting the ingredients for but I am writing this instead. I’m pretty much out of my mind and I guess the most recent link pays proof to that. I’m also going back to Italy to do the same thing, more or less so, let’s all do our best. I’m told that if I don’t do something about this stone that it will kill me. That’s not a bad price given the circumstances being outlined here.

The pain is terrific and it is no less than what I deserve. My main concern while writing this is that this be seen as a metaphor or analogy for something else. It’s all true but that is not my motive. Can it be any less clear that we should all do our best? Kenneth O’Keefe is risking his life. It’s what he does. Kevin Bracken is risking his reputation and all that he stands for in the minds of the people who believe in him. We all need to take this into account.

If ever I wished I had some Special K and that it was legal, that time is now (grin). I have never seen such strange days as I now find myself in. I can only be so grateful that I have a loving consort and some really good friends who don’t have much themselves but who have been willing to share what there is with me. Doesn’t it always go to show that those with the least somehow are most willing to give the most, while those with too much to even know how much that is, cannot be motivated to share at all?

In times of darkness even those without much are being constrained from sharing and from working together because of differences in perception and opinion. If only they would put those things aside then we would all have a lot more to share and we could do so much more. We are making mountains out of molehills while our enemies are turning those molehills into bullets and the blazing truth in the first two links of this posting should convince everyone to shut up and see to their own shortcomings.

People talk a lot about being a Christian but when it comes to behaving like one, they don’t seem to have what it takes. People talk about being a Muslim or whatever it is that they are but practicing it seems to be more than what they are capable of. I feel like taking that hammer and going from head to head right now, instead of from door to door and screaming “Wake up”!

I can’t live other people’s lives for them. I can only live my own and I’m not doing that as effectively as I could either. I suppose it’s karma and maybe some amount of my own selfishness and laziness but if my respect for anyone else counts for anything then I expect you will try to do the right thing now so that we can all be a little more like Kevin Bracken and Kenneth O’Keefe.

I should have been on the road already and days ago been where I am supposed to be. It must be the grace of the divine that kept me here because I can’t imagine what kind of a nightmare I would have found myself in on the road by now. Then again, maybe I wouldn’t have a gall bladder now and that would be okay too. Now I risk losing so many of the olives I was going there to get because of the timeline. It’s absurd really. It’s too bad I don’t have someone here to drive down with me because that would solve a lot of problems but maybe that would cause some too (grin). It’s a dilemma and no mistake about that.

Think people! Study those first two videos and tell me if it could be any more clear what has been going on and what IS going on and tell me what you think you ought to do and even what I ought to do. Mercifully, my pain has backed off for the last few hours and I can’t be grateful enough for that. It is a humbling affair and a teaching moment about things I have taken for granted a little too much on occasion. Maybe I have taken you for granted and I think maybe you have taken me for granted too. Remember, although all of what I am saying is as true as those videos, this is also a metaphor and an analogy and an appeal for all of us to pay a little more attention, to do a little more and to try a little harder so that we don’t turn into what the enemy wants us to. Let’s turn into what we are capable of by finding that Kevin Bracken and Kevin O’Keefe within us instead of the Julian Assange or the Alex Jones that we don’t need right now. Let’s not be our own worst enemies.

Let’s not see too little too late. Let’s not die by inches and degrees the way a coward does. Let’s do the right thing while we have the time instead of spending forever in hindsight and regret for what we could have been and done.

End Transmission…….

Source: Reflections in a Petri Dish

.

The War On Terror is a Fraud

http://www.sott.net

Paul Craig Roberts
Sott.net
Fri, 15 Oct 2010 16:31 CDT

© Unknown

Does anyone remember the “cakewalk war” that would last six weeks, cost $50-$60 billion, and be paid for out of Iraqi oil revenues?

Does anyone remember that White House economist Lawrence Lindsey was fired by Dubya because Lindsey estimated that the Iraq war could cost as much as $200 billion?

Lindsey was fired for over-estimating the cost of a war that, according to Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, has cost 15 times more than Lindsey estimated. And the US still has 50,000 troops in Iraq.

Does anyone remember that just prior to the US invasion of Iraq, the US government declared victory over the Taliban in Afghanistan?

Does anyone remember that the reason Dubya gave for invading Iraq was Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, weapons that the US government knew did not exist?

Are Americans aware that the same neoconservatives who made these fantastic mistakes, or told these fabulous lies, are still in control of the government in Washington?

The “war on terror” is now in its tenth year. What is it really all about?

The bottom line answer is that the “war on terror” is about creating real terrorists. The US government desperately needs real terrorists in order to justify its expansion of its wars against Muslim countries and to keep the American people sufficiently fearful that they continue to accept the police state that provides “security from terrorists,” but not from the government that has discarded civil liberties.

The US government creates terrorists by invading Muslim countries, wrecking infrastructure and killing vast numbers of civilians. The US also creates terrorists by installing puppet governments to rule over Muslims and by using the puppet governments to murder and persecute citizens as is occurring on a vast scale in Pakistan today.

Neoconservatives used 9/11 to launch their plan for US world hegemony. Their plan fit with the interests of America’s ruling oligarchies. Wars are good for the profits of the military/security complex, about which President Eisenhower warned us in vain a half century ago. American hegemony is good for the oil industry’s control over resources and resource flows. The transformation of the Middle East into a vast American puppet state serves well the Israel Lobby’s Zionist aspirations for Israeli territorial expansion.

Most Americans cannot see what is happening because of their conditioning. Most Americans believe that their government is the best on earth, that it is morally motivated to help others and to do good, that it rushes aid to countries where there is famine and natural catastrophes. Most believe that their presidents tell the truth, except about their sexual affairs.

The persistence of these delusions is extraordinary in the face of daily headlines that report US government bullying of, and interference with, virtually every country on earth. The US policy is to buy off, overthrow, or make war on leaders of other countries who represent their peoples’ interests instead of American interests. A recent victim was the president of Honduras who had the wild idea that the Honduran government should serve the Honduran people.

The American government was able to have the Honduran president discarded, because the Honduran military is trained and supplied by the US military. It is the same case in Pakistan, where the US government has the Pakistani government making war on its own people by invading tribal areas that the Americans consider to be friendly to the Taliban, al Qaeda, “militants” and “terrorists.”

Earlier this year a deputy US Treasury secretary ordered Pakistan to raise taxes so that the Pakistani government could more effectively make war on its own citizens for the Americans. On October 14 US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ordered Pakistan to again raise taxes or the US would withhold flood aid. Clinton pressured America’s European puppet states to do the same, expressing in the same breath that the US government was worried by British cuts in the military budget. God forbid that the hard-pressed British, still reeling from American financial fraud, don’t allocate enough money to fight America’s wars.

On Washington’s orders, the Pakistani government launched a military offensive against Pakistani citizens in the Swat Valley that killed large numbers of Pakistanis and drove millions of civilians from their homes. Last July the US instructed Pakistan to send its troops against the Pakistani residents of North Waziristan. On July 6 Jason Ditz reported on antiwar.com that “at America’s behest, Pakistan has launched offensives against [the Pakistani provinces of] Swat Valley, Bajaur, South Waziristan, Orakzai,and Khyber.”

A week later Israel’s US Senator Carl Levin (D,MI) called for escalating the Obama Administration’s policies of US airstrikes against Pakistan’s tribal areas. On September 30, the Pakistani newspaper, The Frontier Post, wrote that the American air strikes “are, plain and simple, a naked aggression against Pakistan.”

The US claims that its forces in Afghanistan have the right to cross into Pakistan in pursuit of “militants.” Recently US helicopter gunships killed three Pakistani soldiers who they mistook for Taliban. Pakistan closed the main US supply route to Afghanistan until the Americans apologized.

Pakistan warned Washington against future attacks. However, US military officials, under pressure from Obama to show progress in the endless Afghan war, responded to Pakistan’s warning by calling for expanding the Afghan war into Pakistan. On October 5 the Canadian journalist Eric Margolis wrote that “the US edges closer to invading Pakistan.”

In his book, Obama’s Wars, Bob Woodward reports that America’s puppet president of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari, believes that terrorist bombing attacks inside Pakistan for which the Taliban are blamed are in fact CIA operations designed to destabilize Pakistan and allow Washington to seize Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.

To keep Pakistan in line, the US government changed its position that the “Times Square Bombing” was the work of a “lone wolf.” Attorney General Eric Holder switched the blame to the “Pakistani Taliban,” and Secretary of State Clinton threatened Pakistan with “very serious consequences” for the unsuccessful Times Square bombing, which likely was a false flag operation aimed at Pakistan.

To further heighten tensions, on September 1 the eight members of a high-ranking Pakistani military delegation in route to a meeting in Tampa, Florida, with US Central Command, were rudely treated and detained as terrorist suspects at Washington DC’s Dulles Airport.

For decades the US government has enabled repeated Israeli military aggression against Lebanon and now appears to be getting into gear for another Israeli assault on the former American protectorate of Lebanon. On October 14 the US government expressed its “outrage” that the Lebanese government had permitted a visit by Iranian President Ahmadinejad, who is the focus of Washington’s intense demonization efforts. Israel’s representatives in the US Congress threatened to stop US military aid to Lebanon, forgetting that US Rep. Howard Berman (D,CA) has had aid to Lebanon blocked since last August to punish Lebanon for a border clash with Israel.

Perhaps the most telling headline of all is the October 14 report, “Somalia’s New American Primer Minister.” An American has been installed as the Prime Minister of Somalia, an American puppet government in Mogadishu backed up by thousands of Ugandan troops paid by Washington.

This barely scratches the surface of Washington’s benevolence toward other countries and respect for their rights, borders, and lives of their citizens.

Meanwhile, to silence Wikileaks and to prevent any more revelations of American war crimes, the “freedom and democracy” government in DC has closed down Wikileaks’ donations by placing the organization on its “watch list” and by having the Australian puppet government blacklist Wikileaks.

Wikileaks is now akin to a terrorist organization. The American government’s practice of silencing critics will spread across the Internet.

Remember, they hate us because we have freedom and democracy, First Amendment rights, habeas corpus, respect for human rights, and show justice and mercy to all.

.

Indian Leader: “From the Very Beginning, the 9/11 Attacks Were Very Doubtful…”

http://dprogram.net

Posted by sakerfa on October 14th, 2010

(PakistanObserver) – An Indian leader Saturday said that the US, and Zionists were the prime suspects of 9/11 attacks. In an exclusive interview with IRNA Asif Mohd Khan, Member of the Legislative Assembly of Delhi said: “US should respond those hundreds of unanswered questions which indicated that the September 11 attacks in 2001 were either intentionally allowed to happen or were orchestrated by the US and Zionists”. Expressing his full support for the stands taken by the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Indian leader urged UN as well as Obama administration to formate a fact-finding committee to probe into the events.

A fortnight ago Ahmadinejad in a speech to the UN General Assembly in New York, raised the issue of the many conspiracy theories still surrounding 9/11. He had also proposed that a fact-finding mission be set up by the UN to investigate the events. Asif said that subsequent attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq provided the fodder to the suspicion that US might have attack to justify military action in the Middle East.

Quoting to some of the surveys after the attacks, Indian leader said that such beliefs have currency even in the United States. In 2006, a Scripps Howard poll of 1,010 Americans found 36 percent thought it somewhat or very likely that US officials either participated in the attacks or took no action to stop them. “From the very beginning 9/11 attacks were doubtful, but after seeing the events in later years, the suspicions grown that it was their own operation to find a pretext to hit Muslim countries’, said Asif. Nations, thinkers and politicians around the globe suspect that it’s not a strange thing that the US staged something like this in their own country to achieve a big objective’, he added.

The Indian leader said that the US actions and polices were always controversial. Afghanistan was attacked on the pretext of 9/11 attacks while Iraq was attacked on the pretext that it had Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs). Although both the pretexts were proved wrong.

Source: Pakistan Observer

related dprogram posts :

Evidence Refutes the Official 9/11 Investigation: The Scientific Forensic Facts

.

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?”

.

Surprise — The Very Dark Side of U.S. History

http://www.alternet.org

Many Americans view their country and its soldiers as the “good guys” spreading “democracy” and “liberty” around the world. It just ain’t so.

October 8, 2010 |

Editor’s Note: Many Americans view their country and its soldiers as the “good guys” spreading “democracy” and “liberty” around the world. When the United States inflicts unnecessary death and destruction, it’s viewed as a mistake or an aberration.

In the following article Peter Dale Scott and Robert Parry examine the long history of these acts of brutality, a record that suggests they are neither a “mistake” nor an “aberration” but rather conscious counterinsurgency doctrine on the “dark side.”

There is a dark — seldom acknowledged — thread that runs through U.S. military doctrine, dating back to the early days of the Republic.

This military tradition has explicitly defended the selective use of terror, whether in suppressing Native American resistance on the frontiers in the 19th Century or in protecting U.S. interests abroad in the 20th Century or fighting the “war on terror” over the last decade.

The American people are largely oblivious to this hidden tradition because most of the literature advocating state-sponsored terror is carefully confined to national security circles and rarely spills out into the public debate, which is instead dominated by feel-good messages about well-intentioned U.S. interventions abroad.

Over the decades, congressional and journalistic investigations have exposed some of these abuses. But when that does happen, the cases are usually deemed anomalies or excesses by out-of-control soldiers.

But the historical record shows that terror tactics have long been a dark side of U.S. military doctrine. The theories survive today in textbooks on counterinsurgency warfare, “low-intensity” conflict and “counter-terrorism.”

Some historians trace the formal acceptance of those brutal tenets to the 1860s when the U.S. Army was facing challenge from a rebellious South and resistance from Native Americans in the West. Out of those crises emerged the modern military concept of “total war” — which considers attacks on civilians and their economic infrastructure an integral part of a victorious strategy.

In 1864, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman cut a swath of destruction through civilian territory in Georgia and the Carolinas. His plan was to destroy the South’s will to fight and its ability to sustain a large army in the field. The devastation left plantations in flames and brought widespread Confederate complaints of rape and murder of civilians.

Meanwhile, in Colorado, Col. John M. Chivington and the Third Colorado Cavalry were employing their own terror tactics to pacify Cheyennes. A scout named John Smith later described the attack at Sand Creek, Colorado, on unsuspecting Indians at a peaceful encampment:

“They were scalped; their brains knocked out; the men used their knives, ripped open women, clubbed little children, knocked them in the head with their guns, beat their brains out, mutilated their bodies in every sense of the word.” [U.S. Cong., Senate, 39 Cong., 2nd Sess., "The Chivington Massacre," Reports of the Committees.]

Though Smith’s objectivity was challenged at the time, today even defenders of the Sand Creek raid concede that most women and children there were killed and mutilated. [See Lt. Col. William R. Dunn, I Stand by Sand Creek.]

Yet, in the 1860s, many whites in Colorado saw the slaughter as the only realistic way to bring peace, just as Sherman viewed his “march to the sea” as necessary to force the South’s surrender.

The brutal tactics in the West also helped clear the way for the transcontinental railroad, built fortunes for favored businessmen and consolidated Republican political power for more than six decades, until the Great Depression of the 1930s. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Indian Genocide and Republican Power."]

Four years after the Civil War, Sherman became commanding general of the Army and incorporated the Indian pacification strategies — as well as his own tactics — into U.S. military doctrine. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan, who had led Indian wars in the Missouri territory, succeeded Sherman in 1883 and further entrenched those strategies as policy. [See Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide.]

By the end of the 19th Century, the Native American warriors had been vanquished, but the Army’s winning strategies lived on.

Imperial America

When the United States claimed the Philippines as a prize in the Spanish-American War, Filipino insurgents resisted. In 1900, the U.S. commander, Gen. J. Franklin Bell, consciously modeled his brutal counterinsurgency campaign after the Indian wars and Sherman’s “march to the sea.”

Bell believed that by punishing the wealthier Filipinos through destruction of their homes — much as Sherman had done in the South — they would be coerced into helping convince their countrymen to submit.

Learning from the Indian wars, he also isolated the guerrillas by forcing Filipinos into tightly controlled zones where schools were built and other social amenities were provided.

“The entire population outside of the major cities in Batangas was herded into concentration camps,” wrote historian Stuart Creighton Miller. “Bell’s main target was the wealthier and better-educated classes. … Adding insult to injury, Bell made these people carry the petrol used to burn their own country homes.” [See Miller's "Benevolent Assimilation."]

For those outside the protected areas, there was terror. A supportive news correspondent described one scene in which American soldiers killed “men, women, children … from lads of 10 and up, an idea prevailing that the Filipino, as such, was little better than a dog. …

“Our soldiers have pumped salt water into men to ‘make them talk,’ have taken prisoner people who held up their hands and peacefully surrendered, and an hour later, without an atom of evidence to show they were even insurrectos, stood them on a bridge and shot them down one by one, to drop into the water below and float down as an example to those who found their bullet-riddled corpses.”

Defending the tactics, the correspondent noted that “it is not civilized warfare, but we are not dealing with a civilized people. The only thing they know and fear is force, violence, and brutality.” [Philadelphia Ledger, Nov. 19, 1900]
In 1901, anti-imperialists in Congress exposed and denounced Bell’s brutal tactics. Nevertheless, Bell’s strategies won military acclaim as a refined method of pacification.

In a 1973 book, one pro-Bell military historian, John Morgan Gates, termed reports of U.S. atrocities “exaggerated” and hailed Bell’s “excellent understanding of the role of benevolence in pacification.”

Gates recalled that Bell’s campaign in Batanga was regarded by military strategists as “pacification in its most perfected form.” [See Gates's Schoolbooks and Krags: The United States Army in the Philippines, 1898-1902.]

Spreading the Word

At the turn of the century, the methodology of pacification was a hot topic among the European colonial powers, too. From Namibia to Indochina, Europeans struggled to subdue local populations.

Often outright slaughter proved effective, as the Germans demonstrated with massacres of the Herrero tribe in Namibia from 1904-1907. But military strategists often compared notes about more subtle techniques of targeted terror mixed with demonstrations of benevolence.

Counterinsurgency strategies were back in vogue after World War II as many subjugated people demanded independence from colonial rule and Washington worried about the expansion of communism. In the 1950s, the Huk rebellion against U.S. dominance made the Philippines again the laboratory, with Bell’s earlier lessons clearly remembered.

“The campaign against the Huk movement in the Philippines … greatly resembled the American campaign of almost 50 years earlier,” historian Gates observed. “The American approach to the problem of pacification had been a studied one.”

But the war against the Huks had some new wrinkles, particularly the modern concept of psychological warfare or psy-war.

Under the pioneering strategies of the CIA’s Maj. Gen. Edward G. Lansdale, psy-war was a new spin to the old game of breaking the will of a target population. The idea was to analyze the psychological weaknesses of a people and develop “themes” that could induce actions favorable to those carrying out the operation.

While psy-war included propaganda and disinformation, it also relied on terror tactics of a demonstrative nature. An Army psy-war pamphlet, drawing on Lansdale’s experience in the Philippines, advocated “exemplary criminal violence — the murder and mutilation of captives and the display of their bodies,” according to Michael McClintock’s Instruments of Statecraft.

In his memoirs, Lansdale boasted of one legendary psy-war trick used against the Huks who were considered superstitious and fearful of a vampire-like creature called an asuang.

“The psy-war squad set up an ambush along a trail used by the Huks,” Lansdale wrote. “When a Huk patrol came along the trail, the ambushers silently snatched the last man on the patrol, their move unseen in the dark night. They punctured his neck with two holes, vampire-fashion, held the body up by the heels, drained it of blood, and put the corpse back on the trail.

“When the Huks returned to look for the missing man and found their bloodless comrade, every member of the patrol believed the asuang had got him.” [See Lansdale's In the Midst of Wars.]

The Huk rebellion also saw the refinement of free-fire zones, a technique used effectively by Bell’s forces a half-century earlier. In the 1950s, special squadrons were assigned to do the dirty work.

“The special tactic of these squadrons was to cordon off areas; anyone they caught inside the cordon was considered an enemy,” explained one pro-U.S. Filipino colonel. “Almost daily you could find bodies floating in the river, many of them victims of [Major Napoleon] Valeriano’s Nenita Unit. [See Benedict J. Kerkvliet, The Huk Rebellion: A Study of Peasant Revolt in the Philippines.]

On to Vietnam

The successful suppression of the Huks led the war’s architects to share their lessons elsewhere in Asia and beyond. Valeriano went on to co-author an important American textbook on counterinsurgency and to serve as part of the American pacification effort in Vietnam with Lansdale.

Following the Philippine model, Vietnamese were crowded into “strategic hamlets”; “free-fire zones” were declared with homes and crops destroyed; and the Phoenix program eliminated thousands of suspected Viet Cong cadre.

The ruthless strategies were absorbed and accepted even by widely respected military figures, such as Gen. Colin Powell who served two tours in Vietnam and endorsed the routine practice of murdering Vietnamese males as a necessary part of the counterinsurgency effort.

“I recall a phrase we used in the field, MAM, for military-age male,” Powell wrote in his much-lauded memoir, My American Journey. “If a helo [a U.S. helicopter] spotted a peasant in black pajamas who looked remotely suspicious, a possible MAM, the pilot would circle and fire in front of him. If he moved, his movement was judged evidence of hostile intent, and the next burst was not in front, but at him.

“Brutal? Maybe so. But an able battalion commander with whom I had served at Gelnhausen [West Germany], Lt. Col. Walter Pritchard, was killed by enemy sniper fire while observing MAMs from a helicopter. And Pritchard was only one of many. The kill-or-be-killed nature of combat tends to dull fine perceptions of right and wrong.”

In 1965, the U.S. intelligence community formalized its hard-learned counterinsurgency lessons by commissioning a top-secret program called Project X. Based at the U.S. Army Intelligence Center and School at Fort Holabird, Maryland, the project drew from field experience and developed teaching plans to “provide intelligence training to friendly foreign countries,” according to a Pentagon history prepared in 1991 and released in 1997.

Called “a guide for the conduct of clandestine operations,” Project X “was first used by the U.S. Intelligence School on Okinawa to train Vietnamese and, presumably, other foreign nationals,” the history stated.

Linda Matthews of the Pentagon’s Counterintelligence Division recalled that in 1967-68, some of the Project X training material was prepared by officers connected to the Phoenix program. “She suggested the possibility that some offending material from the Phoenix program may have found its way into the Project X materials at that time,” the Pentagon report said.

In the 1970s, the U.S. Army Intelligence Center and School moved to Fort Huachuca in Arizona and began exporting Project X material to U.S. military assistance groups working with “friendly foreign countries.” By the mid-1970s, the Project X material was going to armies all over the world.

In its 1992 review, the Pentagon acknowledged that Project X was the source for some of the “objectionable” lessons at the School of the Americas where Latin American officers were trained in blackmail, kidnapping, murder and spying on non-violent political opponents.

But disclosure of the full story was blocked near the end of the first Bush administration when senior Pentagon officials working for then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney ordered the destruction of most Project X records. [See Robert Parry's Lost History.]

Living Dangerously

By the mid-1960s, some of the U.S. counterinsurgency lessons had reached Indonesia, too. The U.S. military training was surreptitious because Washington viewed the country’s neutralist leader Sukarno as politically suspect. The training was permitted only to give the United States influence within the Indonesian military which was considered more reliable.

The covert U.S. aid and training was mostly innocuous-sounding “civic action,” which is generally thought to mean building roads, staffing health clinics and performing other “hearts-and-minds” activities with civilians. But “civic action” also provided cover in Indonesia, as in the Philippines and Vietnam, for psy-war.

The secret U.S.-Indonesian military connections paid off for Washington when a political crisis erupted, threatening Sukarno’s government.

To counter Indonesia’s powerful Communist Party, known as the PKI, the army’s Red Berets organized the slaughter of tens of thousands of men, women and children. So many bodies were dumped into the rivers of East Java that they ran red with blood.

In a classic psy-war tactic, the bloated carcasses also served as a political warning to villages down river.

“To make sure they didn’t sink, the carcasses were deliberately tied to, or impaled on, bamboo stakes,” wrote eyewitness Pipit Rochijat. “And the departure of corpses from the Kediri region down the Brantas achieved its golden age when bodies were stacked on rafts over which the PKI banner proudly flew.” [See Rochijat's "Am I PKI or Non-PKI?" Indonesia, Oct. 1985.]

Some historians have attributed the grotesque violence to a crazed army which engaged in “unplanned brutality” or “mass hysteria” leading ultimately to the slaughter of some half million Indonesians, many of Chinese descent.

But the recurring tactic of putting bodies on gruesome display fits as well with the military doctrines of psy-war, a word that one of the leading military killers used in un-translated form in one order demanding elimination of the PKI.

Sarwo Edhie, chief of the political para-commando battalion known as the Red Berets, warned that the communist opposition “should be given no opportunity to concentrate/consolidate. It should be pushed back systematically by all means, including psy-war.” [See The Revolt of the G30S/PKI and Its Suppression, translated by Robert Cribb in The Indonesian Killings.]

Sarwo Edhie had been identified as a CIA contact when he served at the Indonesian Embassy in Australia. [See Pacific, May-June 1968.]

US Media Sympathy

Elite U.S. reaction to the horrific slaughter was muted and has remained ambivalent ever since. The Johnson administration denied any responsibility for the massacres, but New York Times columnist James Reston spoke for many opinion leaders when he approvingly termed the bloody developments in Indonesia “a gleam of light in Asia.”

The American denials of involvement held until 1990 when U.S. diplomats admitted to a reporter that they had aided the Indonesian army by supplying lists of suspected communists.

“It really was a big help to the army,” embassy officer Robert Martens told Kathy Kadane of States News Service. “I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that’s not all bad. There’s a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment.” Martens had headed the U.S. team that compiled the death lists.

Kadane’s story provoked a telling response from Washington Post senior editorial writer Stephen S. Rosenfeld. He accepted the fact that American officials had assisted “this fearsome slaughter,” but then justified the killings.

Rosenfeld argued that the massacre “was and still is widely regarded as the grim but earned fate of a conspiratorial revolutionary party that represented the same communist juggernaut that was on the march in Vietnam.”

In a column entitled, “Indonesia 1965: The Year of Living Cynically?” Rosenfeld reasoned that “either the army would get the communists or the communists would get the army, it was thought: Indonesia was a domino, and the PKI’s demise kept it [Indonesia] standing in the free world. …

“Though the means were grievously tainted, we — the fastidious among us as well as the hard-headed and cynical — can be said to have enjoyed the fruits in the geopolitical stability of that important part of Asia, in the revolution that never happened.” [Washington Post, July 13, 1990]

The fruit tasted far more bitter to the peoples of the Indonesian archipelago, however. In 1975, the army of Indonesia’s new dictator, Gen. Suharto, invaded the former Portuguese colony of East Timor. When the East Timorese resisted, the Indonesian army returned to its gruesome bag of tricks, engaging in virtual genocide against the population.

A Catholic missionary provided an eyewitness account of one search-and-destroy mission in East Timor in 1981.

“We saw with our own eyes the massacre of the people who were surrendering: all dead, even women and children, even the littlest ones. … Not even pregnant women were spared: they were cut open. …. They did what they had done to small children the previous year, grabbing them by the legs and smashing their heads against rocks. …

“The comments of Indonesian officers reveal the moral character of this army: ‘We did the same thing [in 1965] in Java, in Borneo, in the Celebes, in Irian Jaya, and it worked.” [See A. Barbedo de Magalhaes, East Timor: Land of Hope.]

The references to the success of the 1965 slaughter were not unusual. In Timor: A People Betrayed, author James Dunn noted that “on the Indonesian side, there have been many reports that many soldiers viewed their operation as a further phase in the ongoing campaign to suppress communism that had followed the events of September 1965.”

Classic psy-war and pacification strategies were followed to the hilt in East Timor. The Indonesians put on display corpses and the heads of their victims. Timorese also were herded into government-controlled camps before permanent relocation in “resettlement villages” far from their original homes.

“The problem is that people are forced to live in the settlements and are not allowed to travel outside,” said Msgr. Costa Lopes, apostolic administrator of Dili. “This is the main reason why people cannot grow enough food.” [See John G. Taylor, Indonesia's Forgotten War: The Hidden History of East Timor.]

Public Revulsion

Through television in the 1960-70s, the Vietnam War finally brought the horrors of counterinsurgency home to millions of Americans. They watched as U.S. troops torched villages and forced distraught old women to leave ancestral homes.

Camera crews caught on film brutal interrogation of Viet Cong suspects, the execution of one young VC officer, and the bombing of children with napalm.

In effect, the Vietnam War was the first time Americans got to witness the pacification strategies that had evolved secretly as national security policy since the 19th Century. As a result, millions of Americans protested the war’s conduct and Congress belatedly compelled an end to U.S. participation in 1974.

But the psy-war doctrinal debates were not resolved by the Vietnam War. Counterinsurgency advocates regrouped in the 1980s behind President Ronald Reagan, who mounted a spirited defense of the Vietnamese intervention and reaffirmed U.S. resolve to employ similar tactics against leftist forces especially in Central America. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Guatemala: A Test Tube for Repression."]

Reagan also added an important new component to the mix. Recognizing how graphic images and honest reporting from the war zone had undercut public support for the counterinsurgency in Vietnam, Reagan authorized an aggressive domestic “public diplomacy” operation which practiced what was called “perception management” — in effect, intimidating journalists to ensure that only sanitized information would reach the American people.

Reporters who disclosed atrocities by U.S.-trained forces, such as the El Mozote massacre by El Salvador’s Atlacatl battalion in 1981, came under harsh criticism and saw their careers damaged.

Some Reagan operatives were not shy about their defense of political terror as a necessity of the Cold War. Neil Livingstone, a counter-terrorism consultant to the National Security Council, called death squads “an extremely effective tool, however odious, in combatting terrorism and revolutionary challenges.” [See McClintock's Instruments of Statecraft.]

When Democrats in Congress objected to excesses of Reagan’s interventions in Central America, the administration responded with more public relations and political pressure, questioning the patriotism of the critics. For instance, Reagan’s United Nations Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick accused anyone who took note of U.S.-backed war crimes of “blaming America first.”

Many Democrats in Congress and journalists in the Washington press corps buckled under the attacks, giving the Reagan administration much freer rein to carry out brutal “death squad” strategies in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua.

What is clear from these experiences in Indonesia, Vietnam, Central America and elsewhere is that the United States, for generations, has sustained two parallel but opposed states of mind about military atrocities and human rights: one of U.S. benevolence, generally held by the public, and the other of ends-justify-the-means brutality embraced by counterinsurgency specialists.

Normally the specialists carry out their actions in remote locations with little notice in the national press. But sometimes the two competing visions – of a just America and a ruthless one – clash in the open, as they did in Vietnam.

Or the dark side of U.S. security policy is thrown into the light by unauthorized leaks, such as the photos of abused detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq or by revelations about waterboarding and other torture authorized by George W. Bush’s White House as part of the “war on terror.”

Only then does the public get a glimpse of the grim reality, the bloody and brutal tactics that have been deemed “necessary” for more than two centuries in the defense of the purported “national interests.”

Peter Dale Scott is an author and poet whose books have focused on “deep politics,” the intersection of economics, criminality and national security. (For more, go to http://www.peterdalescott.net/) Robert Parry is a veteran Washington investigative journalist. (For his books, go to http://www.neckdeepbook.com)

.

The Video the US Military doesn’t want you to see! ★★★★★

Assad, Hakim urge unity govt. in Iraq

http://www.presstv.ir

Tue Oct 5, 2010 7:32PM

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has once again called for the formation of an Iraqi national unity government as the war-stricken country continues to suffer from political turmoil.

Assad and visiting leader of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI) Ammar al-Hakim discussed “the ongoing dialogue between the various parliamentary blocs to find a solution to the formation of an Iraqi government,” SANA reported on Tuesday.

The two officials stressed the “importance of forming a national unity government that represents all the Iraqi people.”

Hakim also expressed gratitude for Syria’s support for the people of Iraq and the Syrian government’s eagerness to establish the best of relations with the war-torn country.

Hakim belongs to the Iraqi National Alliance (INA) coalition which came third in Iraq’s March 7 parliamentary elections.

Iraq’s political gridlock began following the March poll, in which no single party was able to win enough seats in the parliament to establish a majority.

Earlier on Friday, the newly-formed National Alliance (NA) selected incumbent Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki as its candidate for the country’s premiership.

The NA is a merger of Maliki’s Shia-led State of Law coalition and the Iraqi National Alliance (INA).

FBI Targets US Palestine Activists

http://www.commondreams.org

Published on Thursday, September 30, 2010 by Al Jazeera English

Searches, subpoenas, but no charges for anti-war activists ‘providing support to terrorists’ in Colombia and Palestine.

by Chris Arsenault

Tracy Molm sometimes has a hard time paying rent, so it came as a surprise when American security forces banged on her door at 7am one morning, and searched her apartment under suspicions she provided material support to a terrorist organisation.

Warrants indicate that investigators believe Molm and at least seven other activists from the Minnesota anti-war committee and other groups provided material support to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and rebels from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), groups the US considers terrorist organisations.

“My assumption is that material support means money and guns, but they [police] wouldn’t explain anything,” Molm told Al Jazeera. “I think the real thing is that they are trying to intimidate those of us who are standing in solidarity with the people of Palestine and Colombia.”

Activists from Minneapolis and Chicago have been subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury investigation in October, after coordinated police raids on September 24.

Activists say they are trying to educate the public about suffering caused by US foreign policy (GALLO/GETTY)

No charges

Despite the searches and seizures of computers, cheque books, mobile phones, documents and photographs, Molm and other activists have not been charged with committing a crime.

“The searches were conducted pursuant to a warrant issued by a federal judge,” Royden Rice, a special agent with US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in Chicago, told Al Jazeera.

“No arrests have been made or charges filed in connection with this investigation,” he said, leading activists to call the searches a trolling expedition targeting Americans who object to their government’s foreign policy ventures.

More than 200 people demonstrated in Minnepolis on Monday, denouncing the raid, according to the Minnesota Daily, while at least 100 rallied in Chicago on Tuesday to support the anti-war activists. More demonstrations are planned in other American cities and activists expect the numbers to increase drastically, as they only had three days to plan the first round of protests.”The FBI does not investigate any person or group because of their political views,” said agent Rice. “We investigate allegations that federal criminal law has been violated.”

‘Suppressing political activity’

Bernardine Dohrn, a law professor at Northwestern University in Chicago, thinks the police are trying to do one of two things. “Either it is a fishing expedition, as there is not enough evidence to indict [formally charge] anyone; or it is an attempt to suppress political activity. Neither are good news,” she said.

As a legal scholar, Dohrn worries about the vague nature of national security laws instituted after the September 11, 2001 attacks on US targets.

“If you write articles, is that material support [for terrorists]? If you contribute resources for computers or healthcare clinics in occupied territories, or territories resisting government control, is that material support?”

She says grand jury investigations, the legal manoeuvre activists are facing, represent a way to “circumvent other constitutional protections.”

People who appear before a grand jury “cannot bring in a lawyer. It is the prosecutor, you [the person being investigated] and a group of grand jurors … in short it is a coercive method to get information.”

Jessica Sundin, a clerical worker at the University of Minnesota, also had her belongings taken by security forces in the coordinated searches and seizures. Like Molm, she denies providing material support to any group and says she has done nothing illegal or unethical.

She believes that the “biggest task of our anti-war movement [in the US] is to educate our own people.”

Visit to an occupied country

In that spirit, Molm and other American activists travelled to Palestine in 2004 to see the conditions there for themselves. “Every day people [in occupied lands] go through checkpoints with guns pointed at their heads and they have this horrendous situation, but they continue to live and laugh,” she said.

“The occupation of Palestine is as brutal as it is because US tax dollars, my tax dollars, support that. Sending people there to bring back [personal] accounts and pictures is important to building solidarity.”

Israel, the power responsible for occupying Palestinian land, received $2.55bn in American military aid in 2009, according to the US State Department. That number is expected to increase to $3.15bn per year from 2013 to 2018.

“I don’t know why it would be a crime to have a scarf with the Palestinian flag on it, but they [police] took that,” she said.

As for Colombia, the country has received at least $5bn in US military aid since 1999.

Amnesty International USA, a human rights group, said it “has been calling for a complete cut off of US military aid to Colombia for over a decade due to the continued collaboration between the Colombian Armed Forces and their paramilitary allies.”

Justifying terror cash

Rather than a vast attempt by security forces to intimidate critics of US foreign policy, the searches may have a simpler motive: an excuse for police to justify the massive infusions of federal cash they received under the pretext of ‘fighting terrorism.’

“In Minnesota [the state containing Minneapolis where most searches took place] a lot of money was put into anti-terrorism efforts,” says Sheila Regan, a reporter with the TC Daily Planet who has been covering issue for a local audience.

“It has one of the biggest terrorism bureaucracies anywhere; they [security forces] need something to do to justify their salaries,” she told Al Jazeera.

Like other subpoenaed activists, Molm works for a group called Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which had been critical in organising major demonstrations against the US war in Vietnam back in the 1960s and 70s.

Dohrn was a national leader of the group from 1966-70 and has direct experience with the grand jury subpoenas which a new generation of activists is now facing.

“When I was called before a grand jury and refused to collaborate … I went to jail and was released eight months later by the same judge, who said ‘apparently there is no evidence against you.’ It is a strange way to have to prove your innocence.”

Back in the anti-war movement of the 1960s, a few US activists did travel to Vietnam to see the affects of B52 bombers, toxic Agent Orange and support for the western-backed government in South Vietnam.

Jane Fonda, the former activist and work-out video queen, famously stood next to an anti-aircraft gun with North Vietnamese communists, and decried the US for what she called its “illegal” bombing campaign against the country.

New activist tools

But today, travelling to places which face foreign military interference – Palestine or Colombia, Iraq or Afghanistan, Somalia or Yemen – is far easier, due in part, to technological innovations and the cheap prices for transportation fostered by global capitalism.

Travel makes human connections easier. And activists in the US say they are struggling to educate average people about injustices committed, in their name, in places far from Minnepolis or Chicago.

When Molm went to Palestine in 2004, she says the American media were not at all interested in the public talks she gave or the “injustices” she witnessed. “Now I have major media stations asking what I saw there. Now I can talk about home demolitions and [Israel's separation] wall.”

On this front, she says, the grand jury subpoena may prove helpful in the battle for the hearts and minds of average Americans.

© 2010 Aljazeera.net

International Law Expert: Ahmadinejad is Right about 9/11!

http://www.intifada-palestine.com

An international lawyer says many now question the truth behind the 9/11 attacks, and that American citizens are demanding an international probe into the incident.

Source: Press TV

“Ahmadinejad is absolutely rational and correct on this, that the American people are now coming to the point of demanding an international inquiry (into the 9/11 attacks), ” Franklin Lamb told Press TV. [Listen to Franklin Lamb's radio interview with Kevin Barrett of Muslims for 9/11 Truth.)

The Beirut-based lawyer was referring to remarks by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in his address to the 65th UN General Assembly that the 9/11 incident might have been the result of an inside job in the United States.

"This call [for an international investigation] didn’t start in the Middle East. It stated more than a year ago in Canada, in Europe, in Latin America, and increasingly in America itself,” he continued.

“There are just too many questions raised by architects, by pilots, by experts, by engineers, by [US Department of] Homeland Security employees and the FBI,” the international lawyer reiterated.

“There is every reason to have an inquiry and the [US President Barack] Obama administration should join this call, not oppose it,” he underlined.

The lawyer added what President Ahmadinejad said was a ‘logical proposal’ and that “the president of Iran is now in synchronization with the majority of the American people.”

* * *

“Only 16 per cent of respondents say the government headed by U.S. president George W. Bush is telling the truth on what it knew prior to the terrorist attacks, down five points since May 2002.” Angus Reid poll, 2006

Source: Muslims for 9/11 Truth

related :

September 11: Towards a UN inquiry commission

.