Legal threat to coalcares.org (THE YES MEN) from Peabody Energy

The following letter has been sent to lawyers for Peabody Energy in response to their threat:

Dear Andrew Baum, Foley Lardner LLP, and Peabody Energy,

Thank you for your thoughtful letter demanding that we remove Peabody’s name from www.coalcares.org and cease falsely suggesting that Peabody cares about kids made sick by coal.

Your threat, although entirely baseless (see this response, and the EFF's blog post later today), did make us realize one thing: that Peabody, despite being our country's largest coal producer, and one of the largest lobbyists against common-sense policy, accounts for a mere 17% of U.S. coal production. The remaining 83% comes from 28 other companies, who are, every bit as much as Peabody, giving kids asthma attacks and other illnesses.

As even you may agree, the root of the problem is not Peabody, but rather our system of subsidies, regulations, and lobbying that lets your whole industry continue its lethal work. To make this clear, we have changed every instance of the word “Peabody” on www.coalcares.org to a rotating selection of the names of other large U.S. coal producers who, like Peabody, also need to be stopped from killing kids.

Very truly yours,
Coal is Killing Kids and the Yes Lab
coalcares@yeslab.org, (314) 472-5539

P.S. You suggest in your letter that “Peabody has a First Amendment right not to be involved with the dissemination of a message with which it does not agree,” a statement which, while completely untrue, does recall the World Resources Institute’s longstanding demand that you cease falsely attributing to them the nonsense statistic that “for every 10-fold increase in per-capita energy use, individuals live 10 years longer.” As the WRI notes:

First, WRI has never made such an assertion and has never done analysis to that effect. Second, this conclusion ignores critical factors related to energy production and human health. WRI’s longstanding support for a global transition to cleaner, low-carbon energy is well-documented.
We would be grateful if you would stop misquoting WRI and issue a corrective statement within the next 24 hours.

Osama and the real Dalai Lama

By Peter Lee

LOS ANGELES - In reporting on remarks of the Dalai Lama during his visit to the University of California in Los Angeles on May 3, the LA Times ignited something of a media firestorm.

Under the headline, "Dalai Lama suggests Osama bin Laden's death was justified", Mitchell Landsberg wrote:

[I]n an appearance Tuesday at USC, [the Dalai Lama] appeared to suggest that the United States was justified in killing Osama bin Laden.

As a human being, Bin Laden may have deserved compassion and even forgiveness, the Dalai Lama said in answer to a question about the assassination of the al-Qaeda leader. But, he said, "Forgiveness doesn't mean forget what happened ... If something is serious and it is necessary to take

 

counter-measures, you have to take counter-measures." [1]

That started the ball rolling:

NPR: A Symbol Of Compassion, Dalai Lama Hints Bin Laden's Killing Was Justified. [2]

Stephen Jenkins at the Guardian: It's not so strange for a Buddhist to endorse killing; the Dalai Lama's attitude to Bin Laden's death should not be too surprising - Buddhism is not as pacifist as the West fantasizes [3]

AFP: Dalai Lama 'says bin Laden killing justified' [4]
Jeffrey Goldberg at the Atlantic: Dalai Lama Suggests Approval for Bin Laden Killing. [5]

Michael Crowley at Time: Clearly, the precise legalities involved in killing bin Laden are murky ... But unless you are opposed to capital punishment in the absolute, or believe that we are compelled to put on trial any terrorist we are able to capture, the morality is less complicated. Heck, even the Dalai Lama isn't bothered. [6]

Jay Leno's monologue: This is my favorite thing; in an address at USC the other day, the Dalai Lama seemed to suggest that killing Bin Laden was okay. That's when you know you're a bad guy, when the Dalai Lama's going, "I didn't see nothing." [7]

Actually, the real story was less-than-stellar reportage.

Landsberg did get one thing right:

The audience, which included some 3,000 USC students, responded to his message respectfully, even adoringly. Afterward, however, some complained that they had trouble understanding him; the Dalai Lama often speaks about thorny concepts in accented English, sometimes relying on a translator to fill in gaps.

Include Landsberg as one of the audience with an understanding problem. I know, because I was there.

During the question and answer following his remarks at the Galen Center, the Dalai Lama responded to an submitted question as to whether "ensuring justice was more important than being compassionate" in the case of the death of Osama bin Laden. Specifically, was it OK to celebrate his death because, in the official US formulation, he had been "brought to justice"?

This was not a particularly difficult question for the Dalai Lama, and he responded:

Now here must make distinction between actor and action. His actions of course destructive ... they must bring him into justice way. But actor - as human being, as human brother, we must show compassion, sense of concern for his well-being.

In other words, something along the lines of "love the sinner but hate the sin".

The "justice way", in this context, looks like the working of the criminal justice system in dealing with Bin Laden's actions, not some kind of morally endorsed retribution on Bin Laden's person.

Once the "justice way" formalities were out of the way, the Dalai Lama was definitely not suggesting that shooting Bin Laden in the head was a suitable exercise of compassion.

The Dalai Lama continued on in this vein for a couple minutes, saying:

The basis of forgiveness does not mean forget what happened ... but because of that action, keep ill-feeling toward that person, wrong.

So, celebrating Bin Laden's death, definitely wrong.

Things then got somewhat more ambiguous, at least for some listeners.

The Dalai Lama moved on from the actor to his or her actions, to clarify that compassion for Bin Laden didn't mean doing nothing about his destructive actions:

So towards action - destructive action - we must take appropriate action to stop that...if something serious and necessary to take counter-measures, you have to take countermeasures.

It was clear that the Dalai Lama considers flying airplanes into buildings filled with thousands of people as the kind of "destructive actions" that should be stopped with "counter-measures" if possible. Presumably, if Bin Laden had taken up a weapon and the SEALS had shot him in self-defense and in a "more in sorrow than in anger" kind of way, the Dalai Lama would also have approved.

However, it can be stated with a high degree of confidence that the Dalai Lama did not consider the killing of Bin Laden to be "justified" - ie deserved and appropriate punishment for his crimes.
In fact, the Dalai Lama addressed the Bin Laden issue in 2006. In an interview in Dharamsala, India - home to his exiled Tibetan government, he told the Alice Thomson of the UK's Daily Telegraph that terrorists must be treated humanely:

"Otherwise, the problem will escalate. If there is one Bin Laden killed today, soon there will be 10 Bin Ladens. Awesome. Ten Bin Ladens killed, the hatred is spread; 100 bombed, and 1,000 lose members of their families." [8]

After the kerfuffle, the Tibetan government in exile issued a flash news item summarizing the Dalai Lama's remarks. Concerning the Bin Laden question, it stated:

The first question was on His Holiness' emphasis on compassion as a basis of ethics. It asked whether in some situation ensuring justice is more important than being compassionate to the perpetrator of a crime. It referred to the news of the death of Osama Bin Laden and the celebrations of it by some, and asked where compassion fit in with this and ethics. In his response, His Holiness emphasized the need to find a distinction between the action and the actor.

He said in the case of Bin Laden, his action was of course destructive and the September 11 events killed thousands of people. So his action must be brought to justice, His Holiness said. But with the actor we must have compassion and a sense of concern, he added. His Holiness said therefore the counter measure, no matter what form it takes, has to be compassionate action. His Holiness referred to the basis of the practice of forgiveness saying that it, however, did not mean that one should forget what has been done. [9]

Not good enough for the Margherita Stancati of the Wall Street Journal's Chinarealtime blog, who sniffed:

The question explicitly referred to Osama bin Laden, who was killed Sunday night during a US raid in Pakistan's town of Abbottabad.

This placed the Dalai Lama - a man who famously frowns at the idea of killing mosquitoes - in the position of either having to compromise his unflinching commitment to non-violence or publicly declaring his compassion for the world's most wanted terrorist. In a poorly-orchestrated PR move, he managed to do both. [10]

Actually, the Dalai Lama made a point of stating he squashed an occasional mosquito as a way of saying that human forbearance has its limits, even for living Buddhas. Violence is an inevitable element of human existence; the goal is to understand its roots, appreciate its karmic costs, and take measures to reduce it.

Depending on one's degree of pessimism, one can either view the affair as evidence of further decline in standards of stenography and reportage, America's alarming need for enthusiastic, universal validation of its killing of Bin Laden, or a demonstration of the admirable efficiency of the world's press in exploiting the Dalai Lama's global popularity to create a faux controversy and fill a news hole.

Fortunately, the University of Southern California has now posted the Youtube video of the Dalai Lama's remarks, so interested viewers can judge for themselves.

The Bin Laden question appears at around the 45:00 mark. [11]

Notes
1. Dalai Lama suggests Osama bin Laden's death was justified, LA Times, May 4, 2011.
2. A Symbol Of Compassion, Dalai Lama Hints Bin Laden's Killing Was Justified, NPR, May 4, 2011.
3. It's not so strange for a Buddhist to endorse killing, Guardian, May 11, 2011.
4. Dalai Lama 'says bin Laden killing justified', AFP, May 4, 2011.
5. Dalai Lama Suggests Approval for Bin Laden Killing; Human Rights Watch Condemns, The Atlantic, May 4, 2011.
6. Why Was Bin Laden Shot?, Time, May 4, 2011.
7. Steven Tyler interview on Leno, M&C, May 7, 2011.
8. 'Westerners are too self-absorbed', Telegraph, Apr 1, 2011.
9. His Holiness Talks About Secular Ethics and Human Development at University of Southern California, Central Tibetan Administration (in exile), May 4, 2011.
10. Dalai Lama in bin Laden Quandary, Wall Street Journal, May 5, 2011.
11. Secular Ethics, Human Values and Society: The Dalai Lama at the USC Galen Center, YouTube, May 5, 2011.


Peter Lee writes on East and South Asian affairs and their intersection with US foreign policy.

Pakistani-Indian nuclear war seen as real possibility

With the breakdown of relations between Washington and Islamabad over recurring U.S. drone attacks inside Pakistan and the controversy over the U.S. Special Forces raid on Abbottabad that allegedly killed Osama Bin Laden, western intelligence agencies have concluded that a Pakistani-Indian nuclear exchange is now a distinct possibility.

Intelligence sources have also told WMR that Pakistan has recently updated its nuclear target list for India. The Indian high-technology city of Bangalore, which hosts a number of IT firms that provides outsourced jobs for U.S. companies for Indian employees,  has been added to Pakistan's list of targets to be hit in a first wave Pakistani pre-emptive to retaliatory nuclear attack.

India is expected to add some 50 million highly-skilled jobs to its work force in the next decade, with many of the jobs located in the Bangalore high-tech center. A nuclear attack by Pakistan on Bangalore would all but wipe out India's high-tech capabilities, dealing a severe blow to India's economy.

Pakistan still maintains its nuclear attack protocol of avoiding striking Indian cities with large Muslim populations.

Western defense officials are also concerned about new security guarantees given by China to Pakistan as a shield from either Indian or U.S. aggression. China could retaliate against both India and the U.S. Seventh Fleet in Asian waters if an attack by either country were launched against Pakistan.

British spy was assassinated by Mossad team

WMR's well-placed British sources report that Gareth Williams, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) employee who was seconded to the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI-6) and whose badly decomposed body was found stuffed into a sports bag in an MI-6 safe house in the Pimlico neighborhood of London on August 23, 2010, was a victim of a professional Mossad hit team.

The London Metropolitan Police and FBI are continuing to investigate Williams's death as "suspicious and unexplained." Williams's body was discovered in the security-protected MI-6 flat on Alderney Street, not far from MI-6 headquarters. The MI-6 safe house was protected by a fingerprint recognition and retinal scan access system, according to our sources. The safe house was registered to a labyrinth of MI-6 front companies to hide the identity of the actual owners of the residence. The safe house flat's owner was registered in the British Virgin Islands to a company called New Rodina, which was not listed in registered companies in the United Kingdom. The legal representative for New Rodina was a London law firm called Park Nelson, which has ceased to exist. WMR has learned that the safe house's actual owner was incorporated in the Dominican Republic.

Williams had worked for MI-6 on secondment from GCHQ for a year and he had recently visited the National Security Agency (NSA) before his body was discovered.

Immediately after Williams's body was discovered there were leaks to the British media that suggested that Williams died from a "sex game" that had gone wrong. Williams's body was embalmed before a full autopsy could be performed that would helped answer some of the questions raised by Williams's parents, who live in Wales. Leaks to the media of bizarre sexual activities that result in the "accidental" deaths of high-level intelligence and political murder victims represents a classic British intelligence ploy that is intended to ward off demands for full investigations by the next-of-kin.

Williams was a mathematics child prodigy who earned his first college degree in mathematics at age 17. He was one of GCHQ's top experts in encryption.

WMR has learned from our British intelligence sources that Williams was brought to MI-6 from GCHQ in Cheltenham to participate in a major investigation of Israeli Mossad penetration of GCHQ's and MI-6's encrypted communications networks, including those of GCHQ that process signals intelligence (SIGINT) intercepts of communications. Williams visited NSA a number of times to help the American SIGINT agency conduct an investigation of the extent to which Mossad was able to penetrate NSA systems via  interfaces, such as the Zircon instant messaging network, with GCHQ networks.

A "Mediterranean looking" young man and woman, believed to be between 20 and 30 years of age, are suspects in Williams's death, now believed by British police to have been due to poisoning. "Mediterranean" is a politically-correct code phrase used by British police to describe the Israeli Mossad hit team. The FBI uses a similar code phrase, "Middle Eastern-looking," to describe Israeli spies in the United States. The Mossad duo was last seen entering the MI-6 residence where Williams lived in July 2010.

Some British intelligence officials are privately fuming over the cover-up of the details of Williams's murder and Israel's involvement in it. They have promised to exact severe revenge on Israel in a "quiet manner" but one that will leave Tel Aviv under no doubt that it is in retaliation for Mossad's murder of one of Britain's ace intelligence officers.

As for NSA, the penetration of GCHQ by Mossad has endangered America's own encrypted signals intelligence and cyber-warfare networks with the possibility that Israel has had or continues to have access to America's most delicate classified information.

"Wag the Dog" is a training film for the Obama White House

President Obama anxiously kept the media and the world waiting on the evening of May 1 for what later turned out to be his announcement that he ordered a US Navy SEAL team to attack the compound of Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Obama claimed that the SEALs had shot and killed Bin Laden in a firefight.

The reason for the delay of Obama's announcement, according to WMR's sources, had nothing to do with national security but to alert Obama's student supporters at George Washington and Howard universities in Washington, DC to marshal a group of Obama fans to gather at Lafayette Park in front of the White House in a "flash mob" to stage a pep rally for Obama after his announcement. The "Wag the Dog"-inspired demonstration was planned by Obama's political adviser David Plouffe.

MS-NBC's dutiful bleating Obama sycophant, Rachel Maddow, showed a flash mob gathered in Lafayette Park shouting "USA! USA!" while she proceeded to lambast Pakistan for providing sanctuary to Bin Laden and other top Al Qaeda leaders. Of course, Maddow, was merely parroting the new neocon line that Pakistan must be the next nation to be rendered like a kosher chicken in the Maddow kitchen.

Plouffe, of course, arranged for brand new American flags to be distributed to the college students for the widely-televised "impromptu" demonstration. The new, just unfolded American flags appeared faster than the new Libyan royalist flags showed up in Benghazi, Libya after the uprising against Muammar Qaddafi.

The Obama vs. Osama television show continued into the weekend, with the Pentagon releasing a video, said to be captured, along with tera-bytes of other computer data, from Bin Laden's ramshackle lair in Abbottabad. But the White House originally said that Bin Laden's compound was a $1 million dollar "mansion." Obama's counter-terrorism adviser John O. Brennan, the former CIA official who helped craft the agency's kidnapping, rendition, and torture program, was responsible for much of the White House bombast, which later had to be recanted by White House press secretary Jay Carney. It was Brennan's firm, The Analysis Corporation, that had rifled through Obama's passport files at the State Department in January 2008. It now appears that it is Brennan who is Obama's current CIA control officer, the latest in a series of CIA handlers who have "run" Obama since his days at Occidental College in Los Angeles.

It is now apparent that the phony "hit" on Osama was known to only a few White House, CIA, and Pentagon officials, particularly the Air Force, which appears to be under the control of the cabal that is waging a devious information war on behalf of a continued war agenda by the Obama administration. Just two hours after Obama was said to have authorized the "hit" on Bin Laden, RAI television of Italy caught Obama handing a piece of paper to Air Force General Burke E. "Ed" Wilson at Cape Canaveral, Florida where the President landed after touring tornado-ravaged Alabama. After slipping Wilson the piece of paper, the general hands another piece of paper back to Obama. The fact that Obama was using a courier system, keeping whatever was on the pieces of paper away from the official White House communications systems, including the extremely limited access Planning and Decision Aid System (PDAS) that is used to support the operational capabilities to the Joint Staff at the Pentagon and and Combatant Commanders (COCOMs), indicates that Obama, the Air Force cabalists, and the CIA did not trust other elements of the Department of Defense and even the White House Communications Agency to be aware of the plans for Pakistan. Anyone with access to the White House communications systems would have "all-source" and "multi-compartmented" access and requisite security clearances. It is noteworthy that PDAS was used by Vice President Dick Cheney and a limited group of other officials to communicate during the 9/11 attacks.

 

A White House staff photograph issued after the assault on Bin Laden showed Air Force Brigadier General Marshall B. "Brad" Webb operating a laptop, which was said to be involved with providing a live video feed of the attack on Bin Laden's compound from the SEAL team in Pakistan. Webb is the assistant commanding general of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, also home to the Army's Civil Affairs & Psychological Operations Command, which, in the past, has supplied interns who helped craft news stories for CNN's Atlanta headquarters and National Public Radio in Washington.

Senior administration officials gathered in the White House Situation Room were shown intently looking at scenes of the attack on a video screen. Later, it was revealed that the live video feed had gone down prior to the photograph being taken. WMR has learned from news photographers in Washington that the Situation Room photograph was carefully stage-managed by White House staff. Standing among the senior administration officials was the gaunt figure of Brennan, a man who exudes as much warmth as the "cigarette smoking man" in the X-Files.

Webb is a 2008 graduate of the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) in Greensboro, North Carolina. As previously reported in WMR's exposé of Obama and his family's past ties to the CIA, the CCL, according to CIA files, was linked to the CIA's Political Psychology Division, renamed the Political Psychology Center in 1984 by another individual with Obama, Webb, and Brennan in the Situation Room, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. In 1984, Gates was the deputy director for intelligence of the CIA.

CIA records show that past graduates of CCL training programs include former National Security Agency (NSA) director Admiral Noel Gayler, and William Verity, Jr., the former chairman of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and a director at Business International Corporation (BIC) in Manhattan. BIC, a known CIA front company, employed Obama for about a year after his graduation from Columbia in 1983. Verity became Secretary of Commerce in the Reagan administration after Malcolm Baldrige was stormed to death by his horse during a rodeo. CCL is also linked to the Tavistock Institute of London, the "group think" organization that specializes in the type of flash mob operation that took place outside of the White House on the evening of May 1, in addition to operations that support "sock puppet" inundation of Internet sites that question official government story lines.
The Tavistock Institute has long been linked with the CIA's MK-ULTRA and Projects BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE mind control and brain-washing operations, conducted by the CIA's top scientist for such matters, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb. Much of the records about MK-ULTRA and other CIA programs was destroyed on the order of CIA director Richard Helms in 1972. BLUEBIRD documents describe what the CIA was trying to accomplish with behavioral modification in the early 1950s: "Can we 'alter' a person’s personality? Can we devise a system for making unwilling subjects into willing agents and then transfer that control to untrained agency agents in the field by use of codes or identifying signs?" In other words, the movie "The Manchurian Candidate," was not purely a fictional account within the CIA's research and scientific community. One of Helms's five favorite universities for the CIA's behavioral science program was the University of Hawaii, the alma mater of Obama's mother, Kenyan father, and Indonesian step-father.
Obama and Brennan will undoubtedly gain further control over the Pentagon when Leon Panetta, an Obama loyalist, transfers from the CIA to the Secretary of Defense office. Another Obama loyalist is Air Force chief of staff, General Norton Schwartz, who may be tapped to become Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Neocons in Washington affectionately call the general, "Nortie" Schwartz. The former Air Force Secretary's chief adviser, John P. Wheeler III, was an integral part of the Air Force chain-of-command through his work on the Air Force's cyber-warfare and related information warfare programs. Wheeler continued his cyber-warfare work at MITRE Corporation after leaving the Pentagon.

Wheeler would have also worked with Dr. Lani Kass, a former Israeli Air Force officer who skyrocketed into a major position in the Air Force hierarchy. Whatever Wheeler knew about the de facto alternate Air Force chain of command went with him to the grave. Wheeler's body was discovered in a Wilmington, Delaware landfill on New Year's Eve last year. Although ruled a homicide, Wheeler's widow has accused Wilmington and Delaware law enforcement law enforcement officials of dragging their feet in the investigation of her husband's death. Delaware's Attorney General also happens to be the son of Vice President Biden, Joseph "Beau" Biden III.

The Lies of Abbottabad
The entire story of the raid on Abbottabad has been a series of lies and half-truths:

-- Bin Laden was first said to have resisted with weapons. It was later revealed that Bin Laden offered no  resistance. Bin Laden, or the man who may have served as his double in U.S. intelligence-produced video tapes since 2001, was also reported to have offerred to surrender before he was shot and killed.
-- According to Brennan, Bin Laden was said to have been buried at sea in accordance with Islamic traditions. Yet, Islamic scholars and clerics said if someone dies on land, they must be buried on land.
-- Obama administration officials stated that Pakistan was not informed of the operation beforehand. Yet Abbottabad residents reported that Pakistani government officials ordered residents of the military cantonment town to turn off their lights and remain indoors at the same time U.S. and Pakistani helicopters were first spotted by residents in the area.
-- SEAL team members and the CIA were not able to get a voice recording of "Bin Laden" before he was killed. Nor could a height be determined of Bin Laden because the strike force had no tape measure. After Brennan stated there was a 99.9 percent certainty that from DNA and other forensics that the man killed was Bin Laden, a military official at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan, where the "Bin Laden" body was transported, said the degree of certainty was 95 percent. In other words, certainty decreased, not increased, after a more thorough post-mortem examination at Bagram. The comparative DNA used to identify Bin Laden was said to have been obtained from Bin Laden's sister, after she died from cancer. However, Rep. Mike Rogers, chairman of the house Intelligence Committee, later said DNA samples were used from a number of Bin Laden's relatives.
-- Facial recognition technology used on Bin Laden's corpse at Bagram drove the degree of certainty down to 90 percent.
-- Brennan stated that US forces also killed Bin Laden's son Khalid in the attack. The White House later said it was another Bin Laden son, Hamza, who was killed. Bin Laden's wife, Amal al-Sadeh, was reported by the White House to have been shot and killed while trying to shield Bin Laden. The story was later changed to her being shot in the leg while lunging at one of the SEAL team members.
-- Obama refused to release photos of Bin Laden's body, the burial at sea (from which a determination of the height of Bin Laden could be made since the body was said to have been buried in a simple shroud from a lower deck of the USS Carl Vinson, or the actual military assault on the compound.
-- The compound was originally reported to have been a $1 million mansion. The photographs after the attack show a much less stately abode, one that has been estimated at worth $250,000 or less. Local residents reported they never heard the occupants of the compound speak Bin Laden's native Arabic but only Pashto.

And why would a primarily Pashto-speaking household have a cable or dish satellite television feed that offered only Arabic-language news channels in a primarily Urdu- and Pashto-speaking community? A close look at the elderly "Bin Laden" channel surfing his television shows only Arabic language stations being offered for favorite selection, except for the rock music station DJTV from France, BBC World, and Al Jazeera English.


In addition to Al Jazeera Arabic, Bin Laden's channel surfing favorite options starting from 001 include BBC Arabic, Al Arabiya, Iqraa TV from Saudi Arabia, Al Hiwar from London, ANB TV from Lebanon, Dubai TV, Al Emarah from the UAE, MBC Maghreb, France 24 Arabic, Future TV from Lebanon, Al Anwar TV from Kuwait, Deutsche Welle Arabic, Al Alam from Iran, Sharjah TV, Qatar TV, Saudi 1 TV, Kuwait TV, Libya TV, Sudan TV, Oman TV, LBC Lebanon, and Al Wakrah TV from Qatar (Sports). Pakistan TV (PTV) offers an Arabic service but it was not one of Bin Laden's favorites. In fact, Bin Laden's channel options are more in keeping with those offered in the Gulf states, perhaps Qatar where the U.S. Central Command has a large base that includes psychological warfare elements.

What's next? Hint: You won't like the answer
After neocons and Obama faux liberal Democratic media dragoons began to blame Pakistan for harboring Bin Laden, these same circles began calling for sanctions on Pakistan, as well as seizing Pakistan's nuclear weapons so that they could not fall into the hands of "Al Qaeda" or Bin Laden sympathizers.

The dubious WikiLeaks had previously provided an indication of the staged raid on and killing of Bin Laden. On April 25, five days before the raid on Abbottabad, The Daily Telegraph (UK), known to pander to neocon interests, published an article stating that according to State Department cables it obtained from WikiLeaks, enhanced interrogation of 700 detainees at Guantanamo revealed that Al Qaeda would unleash a "nuclear hellstorm" on the West if Bin Laden were ever captured or assassinated. Five days later, after Bin Laden was killed, there were immediate concerns raised by neocons, many reflecting media talking points originating from Tel Aviv and New Delhi, about the security of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. The report had the added effect of legitimizing Brennan's rendition and torture program, since the information allegedly was derived form the use of torture. The case was being made for the "ticking nuclear bomb" scenario previously used to convince doubters of torture whether they would still be opposed to the technique if it meant that a ticking nuclear bomb could be located and disarmed.

The CIA and its predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), have long been involved in helping to produce movies in Hollywood to further the propaganda and mind control goals of the U.S. intelligence community and the Pentagon. Frank Wisner Sr., the creator of Project MOCKINGBIRD, pressed a number of Hollywood moguls into service to support the Cold War propaganda efforts of the CIA. Among those recruited for MOCKINGBIRD were producers Daryl Zanuck of 20th Century Fox, Howard Hughes of RKO,  and Cecille B. DeMille of Paramount, as well as director John Ford. "Predictive programming" was a major component of MOCKINGBIRD's propaganda operations. Many of Steven Spielberg's and Jerry Bruckheimer's movies point to the strong possibility that Wisner's Cold War operations in Hollywood continue to this day.

In fact, since 1996, the CIA has maintained an Entertainment Liaison Office that interfaces with Hollywood on film production. The office's first director was Chase Brandon, a 25-year veteran of the CIA's Clandestine Service who also happens to be a cousin of actor Tommy Lee Jones.
Alan Watt defines "predictive programming" as "the power of suggestion using the media or fiction to create a desired outcome." The WikiLeaks cables about an Al Qaeda nuclear attack was not the only predictive programming operation that occurred in April.

It should be recalled that on March 4, 2001, Fox aired an episode of the X Files spin-off, "The Lone Gunmen," in which the actual scenario for the 9/11 attacks was revealed. In the episode, a Boeing 727, en route to Boston, was hijacked by a shadowy group of U.S. government plotters intent on crashing the plane into the World Trade Center and blaming it on an anti-American despot to drag the United States into war and increase weapons sales. The plot was called "Scenario 12D." The Boeing had its autopilot commandeered from the ground. Unlike the actual 9/11 events, the control of the plane was restored at the last minute to the pilot. "The Lone Gunmen" series was canceled in June 2001.



On April 1, Hollywood released a movie, filmed in Canada and without the support of the Chicago Film Office, Chicago Police Department, or Illinois Film Office, called "Source Code." Film credits do thank the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune, both owned by neocon interests, for their assistance. David Axelrod, Obama's former political adviser who is currently running Obama's re-election campaign, is a former reporter and columnist for the Tribune. Axelrod reportedly continues to exercise political influence over the newspaper. The movie's theme is that a "lone wolf" terrorist builds a nuclear dirty bomb and is planning to detonate it in a white van parked in downtown Chicago with an estimated death count of 2 million people. Before the terrorist detonates the bomb, he blows up a morning Chicago commuter train after it departs the Glenbrook station, killing all aboard. The train bombing and dirty bomb are said to be one of a series of attacks in Chicago.

Although the doubled-decked commuter train  is called "CCR - Chicago Commuter Rail" - in the film, it is clearly a Chicago Metra commuter train. The bomb is detonated by two cell phones attached to a bomb. The plot is discovered by a top secret remote viewing program, code named "Beleaguered Castle" run out of Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada. One of the series of playing cards that is used to put the remote viewer in trance state is the Queen of Spades. In the film, "The Manchurian Candidate," the trigger card is the Queen of Diamonds. One of the passengers on the targeted commuter train, a professional comedian, is heard telling a joke about "Barack and Michelle."




The remote viewing program in "Source Code" is called "Beleaguered Castle." The Chicago Water Tower is often called "The Castle."
Among the computer files seized from Bin Laden's compound was intelligence that indicated that in February 2010, Al Qaeda was making plans to attack America's rail system. Attacks on rail hubs and rail lines and bridges were said by Homeland Security officials to be in the "aspirational phase."

Chicago appears to replacing New York as the "aspirational" target for the next false flag terrorist attack, one that will all but assure Obama's re-election.

Obama's former chief of staff, the mercurial Rahm Emanuel, will be sworn in as Mayor of Chicago on May 16. Emanuel's team will include a number of individuals who would relish the idea of a false flag terror attack in America's "Second City."



"Al Qaeda" files, Hollywood predictive programming, and dubious WikiLeaks cables setting the stage for an attack involving Chicago's rail transit system.
After spending $45 million in federal funds on the Project Shield, designed to cover Cook County with stationary and mobile security cameras, the cameras have been found not to work, according to a February 16 article in the Chicago Sun-Times. The FBI is supposedly investigating the security debacle.

Emanuel's police superintendent is Garry McCarthy, the deputy commissioner of operations of the New York Police Department under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Before he became the police chief of Newark, New Jersey, McCarthy threatened two Palisades Interstate Parkway policemen for issuing his daughter a parking ticket in 2005. McCarthy and his wife were arrested after they confronted the officers who issued their daughter the ticket. McCarthy was also handcuffed during the confrontation withe the two officers. McCarthy and his wife were later convicted for obstruction of traffic during their melee with the police officers. McCarthy's bombast certainly matches that of Emanuel.

Emanuel's head the Chicago Office of Emergency Management and Communications is Gary Schenkel, a 29-year veteran of the Marine Corps. According to the December 23, 1999, Chicago Sun-Times, Schenkel, a sharpshooter, "was one of 80 Marines spending three days in Chicago touring bridges and sewers as they studied how to work in urban combat zones" in 1998. The Chicago operation was part of the Marine's "Urban Warrior Advanced Warfighting Experiment." Schenkel took part in similar exercises during the late 1990s in Oakland-Alameda, California; Jacksonville, Florida; New York City; and Charleston, South Carolina. Schenkel headed up the Federal Protective Service (FPS), part of the Department of Homeland Security, in the George W. Bush administration. During his tenure as chief of the FPS, agents of the Government Accountability Office were able to sneak bomb making components into federal buildings with security levels just below those implemented for the White House.

William Daley, the brother of outgoing Mayor Richard Daley, is serving as White House chief of staff. Presidential adviser Valerie Jarrett, who was born in 1956 in Shiraz, Iran. Her father, William Bowman, a geneticist and pathologist, is believed by some Iran experts to have been a CIA clandestine services officer. The Bowmans moved from Shiraz to London in 1961 and to Chicago in 1963. Shiraz was a hotbed of support for Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq, ousted by the CIA in 1953 in Operation Ajax.

Dr. Bowman was reportedly part of a U.S. program that sent Americans to Iran to help with economic development, a program that is similar to the CIA program that saw Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, providing economic assistance and training to Indonesians following the 1965 CIA coup against President Sukarno. In the case of Bowman, he and the Americans were likely providing more than assistance to Iranians. Shiraz was not only a center of support for ousted Prime Minister Mossadeq but also a major center of activity for Iran's Tudeh (Communist) Party, which called for nationalization of Iran's oil industry. A decade before Stanley Ann Dunham was helping to finger Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) members for Indonesian army death squads, Bowman, possibly assisted by his wife, were in a location where Tudeh and pro-Mossadeq forces could also be identified for the dreaded Iranian secret police, the SAVAK, which set up shop with assistance from the CIA and Mossad in 1957. Nemazee, a supporter of the Shah, was born in India to Iranian parents and was a resident of Washington, DC in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Bowman's cover was the Nemazee Hospital established in Shiraz by Mohamed Nemazee. On August 29, 2009, Nemazee's son, Hassan Nemazee, chairman of Nemazee Capital and brother-in-law of Britain's ambassador to France, was arrested for defrauding Citibank and other banks of $292 million in loans. Nemazee Capital also had a past partnering agreement with AIG, the CIA-linked insurance giant that Obama arranged to bail out with federal money. Namazee was convicted last year of fraud was sentenced to 12 and a half years in prison. Hassan Nemazee was nominated by President Clinton to be U.S. ambassador to Argentina but Clinton suddenyl withdrew the nomination amid congressional opposition. Hassan Nemazee was a major donor to the presidential campaigns of John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and forked over $50,000 to President Obama's Inaugural Committee.

On April 14, 2011. WMR reported on a flurry of suspicious maritime liens filed agianst the U.S. Department of Treasury by leading Chicago and Illinois officials: "WMR has discovered that although less than 100 maritime liens had been filed in Cook County since 1985, since March 28 of this year, 11 maritime liens have been filed in Cook County against the U.S. Treasury Department.

Such a development could be easily explained away, except when examining the names of the maritime lien filers in the order that they were filed. It is not known who some of the individuals are who filed the liens since March 28, but they are also listed:

W. Smith (unknown affiliation)

Lisa Madigan (Attorney General of Illinois)

C. Wallace (unknown affiliation)

Richard Michael Daley (outgoing Mayor of Chicago)

Chicago Police Deptartment

Thomas G. Byrne (Commissioner of the Chicago Streets & Sanitation Department; ex-Chicago Police Department)

Catherine Hennessy (affiliation unknown, possibly Chicago Police Department)

Pat Quinn (Governor of Illinois)

Milton R. Sees (former Illinois Department of Transportation Secretary)

Jesse White (Secretary of State of Illinois)

Ernie Dannenberger (Director of Vehicle Service Department of the Illinois Secretary of State's office)

Filing maritime liens against the US Treasury Department might indicate the future movement of U.S. Navy and/or Coast Guard vessels into Chicago's ports. However, the question looms: As Rahm Emanuel prepares to take over as mayor of Chicago, why was there a sudden flurry of maritime liens filed by top city and state officials a few weeks after Emanuel captured the mayor's seat in the election?"
According to the "intelligence" gleaned from the captured "Al Qaeda" computer files from Abbottabad, attacks on the U.S. rail system were planned for September 11, 2011, the tenth anniversary of the plane attacks on the United States. A handwritten note from February 10, 2010, mentions the possibility of rail attacks on a train on a bridge on the the 10th anniversary of the September 11, 2001.

Chicago should remain ever-vigilant against its new mayor and his cronies, suspicious Israelis masquerading as art students, office/furniture movers, kiosk vendors, and those who speak fluent Arabic and who claim to be security consultants, as well as suspicious financial transactions, and security training exercises planned for the city, especially those involving the Chicago Transit Authority and Metra. The London 7/11 attacks on London transit targets were conducted during an anti-terrorism exercise. One thing that can be said about the architects of false flag terrorist attacks is that they seldom stray from their master playbook.

Welcome to the post-Osama world By Pepe Escobar

THE ROVING EYE
Welcome to the post-Osama world
By Pepe Escobar

To follow Pepe's articles on the Great Arab Revolt, please click here.

United States President Barack Obama, riding high in the polls, his re-election virtually assured, is now free to bask in the glow of his all-American victory in the global "war on terror", which his administration had rechristened "overseas contingency operations" (OCO). The Osama Bin Laden hit on Monday was indeed an OCO - a swift, overseas "kinetic military action" surmounting innumerable contingencies such as the violation of the aerial space of a theoretically sovereign nation.

Yet US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's first reaction was to stress the "war on terror" in fact goes on forever, true to the spirit of the Pentagon's own slogan, "The Long War". That applies especially to the ultra-strategic AfPak theater. It's as if commander-in-chief Obama could not but be a regal prisoner in a labyrinth not of his own making.

The White House's move to break out of the labyrinth was to paradoxically go ballistic and seal the death of the 9/11 trauma, capitalized by the George W Bush administration as a license to kill evil - be it in itself or in the form of an axis - and thus affirm Jeffersonian freedom. From 2001 to 2008, those were the years when the hyperpower - on a mission from God and focused as a laser on a Hegel/Fukuyama "end of history" - simply trampled over international law.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were supposed to be only the first two stops on the way to redemption (then there would be the road to Damascus, Tehran and even Tripoli ...) What was christened as The Greater Middle East project was supposed to smash "terror" and the regimes that sheltered it; the Taliban Afghanistan and - in the neo-con vision - Saddamist Iraq. Others would inevitably fall like dominoes.

Almost a decade after 9/11 - and with the Bush "dead or alive" promise finally fulfilled Terminator-style - where does the former hyperpower goes next?

The strategic chessboard has completely changed. It's hard to exercise hyperpower hegemony when you know China will overtake you as the world's number one economy, possibly as soon as 2016 - and when you're drowning in debt to, who else, strategic competitor China. Yet you're still overextended military, and your never-ending "war on terror", not to mention two-and-a-half wars, are costing trillions of dollars, paid up by, who else, your top banker China.

Your soft power is not as seductive as it used to be - although your hi-tech creativity is still matchless; and most of all nobody in the developing world, starting with the BRICS group, gives any credence to your Washington Consensus anymore.

And the winner is ... China
So for now the winner of the "war on terror" is China, which for a number of reasons, paramount among them the Deng Xiaoping motto "to get rich is glorious", is now close to the point where it was for 18 of the past 20 centuries, that is, on top.

Obama may be accused of many things - including of being a Nobel Peace Prize warmonger. But he's also a smart intellectual. The president has surveyed the landscape and has seen how America's Paul Kennedy-diagnosed imperial overextension has accelerated its decline. And he also has seen how in the process the US was totally corroded by the specter of "Islamic terror".

And that may lead us to the answer of the magic bullet question about the timing of the Bin Laden hit.

When 9/11 happened, music genius Karlheinz Stockhausen said - to the outrage of millions of Americans - that "this was the greatest work of art the world has ever seen." He had a point as 9/11 - in terms of its impact upon the collective unconscious of mankind, almost to the point of paralysis - reduced Albert Speer's and Leni Riefenstahl's specials to child's play.

So to symbolically kill the "war on terror" - which was invented because of 9/11 - Obama had to (literally) kill the (alleged) perpetrator, be it real or not, guilty or not, a clone or not. Thus the hit, the swift disposal of the body, no photos, end of the movie, no credits rolling; a tight cinematic narrative. The obvious holes in the plot, as in any Hollywood blockbuster, are deemed irrelevant; what matters is success at the box-office - and we move on.

Like a basketball-playing Freudian, Obama went for the kill, the reason of the whole trauma. He identified it as the only way to start anew - as in trying to end the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq and start concentrating on what really matters for the US; investments in education and infrastructure, the dire state of the economy.

There's no guarantee Obama's "cure" will work. Millions of Americans may - and are - feeling the boost, as if the whole country ingested a tsunami of Red Bull. The key question is whether jihadism will disappear for good from the current geopolitical landscape.

In fact even before the Bin Laden hit it had already been defeated by history - as in the great 2011 Arab revolt affirming, unequivocally, the Arab world's will to welcome democracy, not suicide bombers.

Obama's "cure" will face monstrous contradictions. Drones kill civilians in the Pakistani tribal areas while the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's "humanitarian" war kills civilians in Libya. Humanitarian warmongers silent in the face of the appalling repression in Bahrain and the House of Saud getting away with conducting an anti-democracy counter-revolution all across the Persian Gulf.

If Bin Laden - and Muammar Gaddafi - may be selected for diplomacy by targeted assassination, why not the ghastly dictatorship in Myanmar, or Islam Karimov in Uzbekistan? Moreover, the Pentagon will keep fighting with all its might to keep its Long War going on forever.

Obama the psychoanalyst has just baptized a new, post-Osama world. Let's see how America reacts, or if it's soon back to the couch.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

SPECIAL REPORT. You only live twice -- The fakery of the deaths of America's "Most Wanted"

President Obama has said that he will not authorize the release of photographs purporting to show the body of Osama bin Laden. Obama claims that he does not want the photos to "inflame tensions" in the Muslim world.

The United States has not always been so reticent to release photos of its dead quarry of "most wanted" men. On July 22, 2003, the Pentagon reported that a US Special Operations team, not unlike the one that allegedly killed Osama Bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, engaged in a firefight with Saddam Hussein's two sons, Uday and Qusay Hussein, at a safehouse in Mosul. After a four-hour battle, the Pentagon reported that Uday and Qusay, along with Qusay's 14-year old son, Mustapha, were killed while resisting apprehension. The Pentagon propaganda machine claimed that dental records proved that it was Uday and Qusay who the Special Operations team had killed. And to prove their case, the U.S. military released gruesome photos of the bodies of Uday and Qusay.


Left to right: Post-autopsy photos of Qusay and Uday Hussein. Upper row, Uday Hussein alive and dead. Lower row: Qusay Hussein alive and dead.
Then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld defended his decision to release the Uday and Qusay photos. He said, ""This is an unusual situation. This regime has been in power for decades. These two individuals were particularly vicious individuals. ... They are now dead. ... The Iraqi people have been waiting for confirmation of that and they in my view deserve having confirmation of that . . . It was not a close call for me."

On December 30, 2006, Uday and Qusay's father, former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, was executed by hanging. A camera phone video showed Saddam being led to the gallows and a rope being put around his neck. However, the video never showed Saddam's actual hanging. On December 13, 2003, Saddam was supposedly captured in a "spider hole" in ad-Dawr, near his hometown of Tikrit, in a mission code-named "Operation Red Dawn," named after an anti-Soviet right-wing propaganda movie from the 1980s.

But why did President Bush land on the USS Abraham Lincolnon May 1, 2003 under a banner that stated "Mission Accomplished?"  Coincidentally, it was the same day eight years later that President Obama would declare that U.S. forces killed Osama Bin Laden. Bush was well aware that the Husseins died on April 7, 2003 at the Mansour restaurant. All that was left was to come up with a series of cover stories to cover up the violation of previous presidential orders prohibiting the assassination of foreign leaders.


Left to right: "Saddam" being pulled from spider hole, "Saddam" with noose around his neck, a photo of the dead "Saddam."
The Pentagon had no problem allowing photos of the dead Husseins to be transmitted worldwide. There was no U.S. angst over the "propaganda" value some people might have attached to the photos or anti-American retaliation. There was a simple reason for the United States government to permit the release of the photos of the Husseins: the circumstances under which they supposedly died was a fabrication.

The Bush administration and the complicit corporate media conspired to sell the deaths of the Husseins to cover-up for the fact that the three Husseins actually died on April 7, 2003 after a B-1 bomber dropped four Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) bombs on the Al Sa-ah Restaurant in the Mansour District of Baghdad.

Rumsfeld, who was Secretary of Defense on February 18, 1976, when President Gerald Ford signed Executive Order 11905, prohibiting the assassination of foreign leaders. Rumsfeld knew he was on legal thin ice in permitting the Air Force to take out Saddam Hussein, the legal head of state of Iraq. The anti-assassination order was renewed by President Jimmy Carter's Executive Order 12036 and reaffirmed by President Ronald Reagan's Executive Order 12333. Rumsfeld knew he had to cover his tracks legally for the events of April 7, 2003 in the skies over Baghdad.

The B-1 had been issued orders to drop its payload on a weapons station north of Baghdad. However, the plane's pilot received orders to return back to Baghdad. "This is the big one," is what the pilot, Air Force Captain Chris Wachter, heard over his headphones. Wachter's mother told WMR about the series of events that occurred on April 7, 2003, and compared them to the fakery of the killing of "Osama Bin Laden."

What changed the mission for the B-1, code-named "Swede 72," was intelligence that had been received by a joint team of CIA, Delta Force, and Grey Fox units operating in Baghdad. Through the interception of the Racal Jaguar cell phones used by the three Husseins, the U.S. intelligence teams were able to pinpoint the location of the Husseins at the Al-Sa-ah restaurant. Swede-72 was to drop its payload on the restaurant. Saddam had acquired the supposedly secure phones from the British firm Racal after the first Gulf War. However, unknown to Saddam, the Racal phones had a security backdoor that permitted Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and its allies at the U.S. National security Agency to track the phones. The Husseins were sitting ducks after using their phones at the restaurant.

In fact, after US Central Command (CENTCOM) commander General Tommy Franks personally heard the Husseins talking on their phones, he issued orders for Swede-72 to turn around and hit the Baghdad restaurant.  Franks ordered Swede-72's pilot to check his coordinates with a specific order, "Don't miss."

In killing Saddam Hussein, the Bush administration violated the Executive Order 12333 prohibiting political assassinations of foreign leaders. The Order states "no employee of the United States government shall engage in or conspire to engage in political assassinations."

After Swede-72 dropped its JDAM payload, the three ongoing communications on the Husseins' cell phones simultaneously ceased. The cell phones were as dead as their owners. After Swede-72 returned to its home base, reportedly in Oman, a live feed television link-up was established with their command. The crew of Swede-72 was told by their commander, "You got him. You got Saddam and his two boys!"

Later, the crew of Swede-72 was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross by Air Force Cbief of Staff General T. Michael Moseley. The citation read that the crew received the award for "completely destroying one of the principle targets of the campaign."

The firefight that "killed" Uday and Qusay in Mosul and the subsequent capture of Saddam, his internment at Camp Cropper in Baghdad, and his trial and "execution" were cheaply-made Hollywood-like productions to cover up what occurred on April 7. The man who argued during the trial with a virtually unknown judge and the man who was defiant to his "hanging" was one of Saddam's many doubles. According to Pravda, after meeting the prisoner "Saddam" in Qatar, Saddam's wife, Sajida Heiralla Tuffah, revealed that the man she met was not her husband. Saddam's reputed mistress for some 30 years, Parisoula Lampsos, told ABC News that the man who was captured in the spider hole was not Saddam Hussein.
One such double, a man who calls himself Mikhael Ramadan, which may be a CIA cover name to bolster his federal witness protection program status in northern Virginia, wrote a book called, "In the Shadow of Saddam." On the back cover of the book sits Ramadan, very much a Saddam doppelganger. Ramadan, who may have really been Makhluf Ramadhan, defected to the United States in 1999.

The "Wanted" photo of Saddam circulated by the US Army in Iraq differed greatly from the man pulled from the spider hole outside of Tikrit. The Saddam "double" had an underbite and front teeth that clearly showed decay while the real Saddam had an overbite and immaculate teeth, courtesy of the best dental work his wealth could buy.

WMR has learned from informed sources that the December 2003 newspaper photograph of Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi meeting Saddam Hussein in a jail cell was also a disinformation event. Chalabi met with one of Saddan's doubles. The newspaper that published the Chalabi-Saddam photo, Al-Moutamar, is owned by Chalabi. Chalabi's nephew Salem Chalabi, a lawyer colleague of arch-neocon and Zionist Douglas Feith, was involved in the prosecution of "Saddam," and the judge who sentenced "Saddam" to death, Munir Haddad, was a hand-picked crony of Chalabi. Chalabi, no stranger to disinformation campaigns, was the person who shopped the fraudster "Curveball" to U.S. intelligence to push bogus claims that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.

The killing of Saddam Hussein and his sons at the outset of the Iraq War was no secret. On May 7, 2003, the Baltimore Sun reported on a speech given by Vice President Dick Cheney. The Sunreported, "'I think we did get Saddam Hussein,' Cheney told a capacity crowd at McFarlane Auditorium at Southern Methodist University. 'He was seen beinbg dug out of the rubble and wasn't able to breathe.'" White House chief of staff Andy Card told a radio audience, "I believe he [Saddam] is dead." General Franks stated that they had positively identified by DNA and "forensic tests" the Saddam pulled from the rubble of the Baghdad restaurant. It is the same claim now being offered by the Obama White House as proof that Bin Laden was killed in Pakistan.

Other media reports on Saddam's death came from UPI, which, on April 13, 2003, reported: "Last Wednesday we went out on a limb in UPI analysis and concluded the evidence was overwhelming that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was already dead, his foul body obliterated last Monday by the four 2,000 pound bunker-busting bombs unloaded on him courtesy of the U.S. Air Force. The 'wicked witch' is indeed dead." The same day as the UPI article, Al Jazeera reported: "Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein has been killed during the night of April 7-8 as a result of a bombing raid on the Al-Mansour District of Baghdad." And from Fox News, a virtual echo chamber for the Bush administration, came the following: "U.S. officials told Fox News there's a chance they could know as soon as Tuesday whether Saddam is dead. They said some early indications are positive but they are very preliminary. There's a strong chance we got Saddam and probably both sons, senior U.S. officials told Fox News. The official said the CIA provided the intelligence that led to the strike."

The fakery does not end with Saddam and his sons. On April 12, 2003, the Sydney Morning Herald, among other media sources, reported that Saddam’s half-brother Barzan al-Tikriti was killed as a result of military action. However, the media later reported that Barzan had been hanged after a guilty conviction in January 2007. Headlines read "Witness: Executed man’s ‘head just snapped off.'" The only problem is that Barzan was already dead. There was no trial and there was no hanging. It was all made up.

The story on Saddam began to change when the always dubious Time magazine reported: "The U.S. isn't known to have any DNA on Saddam." The story was changing fast and the corporate media and its professional stenographers began to alter reality as they have done so many times in the past and currently, as witnessed in just the past few days.

After a U.S. bomb reportedly killed Muammar Qaddafi's son and three grandsons in Tripoli, the Obama administration claimed that showing the blown-to-pieces corpses of Qaddafi's family members was insufficient proof to confirm that the Obama administration, like its predecessor, violated the law by targeting the residence of Qaddafi's son, where the Libyan leader and his wife were present just prior to the U.S. attack. Yet Obama and his advisers want the world to believe that Osama Bin Laden was killed without photographic evidence. Bin Laden's body was said to have been dumped at sea and the story about Bin Laden's "killing" has changed as fast as the original reports about the death of Saddam Hussein and his two sons in Baghdad.

The Pakistani Urdu-language newspaper Ausafis quoting a neighbor of the so-called "mansion" where Bin Laden was allegedly killed that the house was owned by a Pakistani of Pashtun descent. was built in 2005, and was the home to a number of the owner's family members. The neighbor said neither he nor his neighbors ever saw or heard any inkling that Bin Laden was in the house. Senior Pakistani officials echoed the claim made in November 2007 by the late Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto that Bin Laden had died or been killed elsewhere and years before the alleged Abbottabad killing, for which the Obama administration has provided no credible evidence other than their "word," which in the history of recent administrations, is not worth very much in the credibility market.

On January 19, 2002, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf told CNN that he believed Bin Laden had died from kidney failure. Musharraf said, "We know that he [Bin Laden] donated two dialysis machines to Afghanistan. One was specifically for his own personal use." Musharraf added, "And the photographs that have been shown of him on television show him extremely weak. . . . I would give the first priority that he is dead." One of the dialysis machines was delivered to Bin Laden's base in Kandahar. Current Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari said in 2009 that Bin Laden was dead.

General Franks, the chief of CENTCOM, did not dismiss Musharraff's comments out-of-hand. Franks said none of his intelligence reports could confirm or deny that Bin Laden had died from kidney failure. Franks said, "Bin Laden could be alive, dead, or in Afghanistan or not . . . right now, I honestly don't know where he is."

In 2008, former CIA officer Robert Baer said of Bin Laden's status, "Of course he's dead." In 2002, FBI counterterrorism chief Dale Watson said Bin Laden was "probably dead."

This editor previously reported that Bin Laden had been spirited away from Pakistan in December 2001 to his native Hadhramaut homeland of South Yemen where he died attended by members of his family and tribe. In a purpiorted video tape made in early December 2001, Bin Laden was frail and ashen. Bin Laden's left arm appeared to be immobilized in a manner that indicated he may have had a stroke.

In a February 1999, article in The Guardian, former CIA counter-terrorism chief Vince Cannistraro asserted that Bin Laden's kidney failure resulted from a Saudi poisining attempt in 1998. Cannistraro said, "The Saudis hired someone among his followers to poison him, probably in November [1998]. He suffered kidney failure but recovered, at least partially." That report was followed up by a February 15, 1999, story in the Saudi-owned newspaper Al Hayat that Bin Laden was suffering kidney pain.

French media reported that Bin Laden received kidney treatment from the urology department of the American Hospital in Dubai on July 4, 2001. Bin Laden was visited in his hospital room by the Dubai CIA station chief, Larry Mitchell, a report the CIA later vehemently denied. Bin Laden had arrived from Quetta, Pakistan with his personal physician and nurse, as well as four security guards. In January 2002, CBS News reported that on September 10, 2001, the night before the attacks, for which Bin Laden was never charged by the FBI, the leader of "Al Qaeda" received kidney dialysis in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.

On December 26, 2001, the Egyptian newspaper al-Wafd published the following obituary notice for Bin Laden: "News of Bin Laden's Death and Funeral 10 days ago. Islamabad -A prominent official in the Afghan Taleban movement announced yesterday the death of Osama bin Laden, the chief of al-Qa'da organization, stating that bin Laden suffered serious complications in the lungs and died a natural and quiet death. The official, who asked to remain anonymous, stated to The Observer of Pakistan that he had himself attended the funeral of bin Laden and saw his face prior to burial in Tora Bora 10 days ago. He mentioned that 30 of al-Qa'da fighters attended the burial as well as members of his family and some friends from the Taleban. In the farewell ceremony to his final rest guns were fired in the air. The official stated that it is difficult to pinpoint the burial location of bin Laden because according to the Wahhabi tradition no mark is left by the grave. He stressed that it is unlikely that the American forces would ever uncover any traces of bin Laden."

Just as with Saddam and his sons, the United States saw fit to disclose the death of Bin Laden in order to gain political and intelligence advantage. In the case of Bin Laden, the U.S. is now applying maximum pressure on Pakistan, which is being accused by many circles of being complicit with Bin Laden and "Al Qaeda."

And, as with Saddam, the United States may have decided to kill one of Bin Laden's doubles. Many people were thought to be Bin Laden in the months after 9/11. The Halifax (NS) Daily News of May 24, 2002, reported that excited villagers in eastern Uganda seized a tall and bearded man and turned him into local authorities believing him to be Bin Laden. The man was, in fact, a Ugandan look-alike. Apparently, the Ugandans were hoping to snare the $25 million bounty offered up by the United States as a reward for capturing the Al Qaeda leader.

There is strong evdience that Bin Laden may have died before or shortly after 9/11 and that he has been used by the U.S. intelligence community and the neo-conservative cabal that has infected, like a cancer, the American body politic. Bin Laden became "Public Enemy Number One," pulled right out of central casting, and developed into the main enemy by corporate news media "journalists", who have acted merely as cast "extras" in a series of stage-managed productions for television.

In the late 1990s, before the total corruption of television news, there were clues reported about Bin Laden's imminent demise from a number of ailments, including hepatitis-C, renal failure, liver cancer, diabetes, extremely low blood pressure, and Marfan Syndrome, a connective tissue disease that affects taller people and drastically shortens an individual's life span. Bin Laden was 6 foot, four inches tall. The Pentagon and CIA refused to disclose details of Bin Laden's health, citing their medical summaries of Bin Laden's health status as classified.

On June 17, 1999, ABC News' John McWethy reported, "officials say there is growing evidence that he [Bin Laden] suffers from a degenerative condition known as Marfan Syndrome, which limits his mobility and may put him at high risk of heart attack or stroke."

On February 27, 2000, the New York Post reported that Bin Laden was in a poor physical condition and that two doctors from the United Arab Emirates were smuggled into Jalalabad, Afghanistan to treat his worsening kidney condition. Arab newspapers reported that Bin Laden was going to hand over control of Al Qaeda ro his deputies. After 9/11, reports of Bin Laden's ill-health were suddenly dropped by the media. The stock footage from the 1990s of a healthy Bin Laden emerging from a cave with a satellite phone was shown over and over again. However, after the Russian assassination of Chechen President Dzhokar Dudayev in 1996, after coordinates of the Chechen leader's satellite phone were passed to Russian Air Force planes who launched an air-to-ground missile, Bin Laden ditched his own satellite phone with the number 00873682505331, instead resorting to the use of couriers, one of which was identified by U.S. intelligence, a nugget that ultimately led to Bin Laden in Abbottabad, or so we are led to believe.

When it comes to blatant propaganda and lying on a grand scale, there's not a dime's worth of difference between George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Jr. However, what is galling is that U.S. servicemen who served in Swede-7 and Navy SEAL Team 6 have permitted themselves to be used as movie extras in bad Hollywood-inspired dramas. At least they should request Screen Actor's Guild wages in return for selling out the American people and the U.S. Constitution they swore to defend.

Show us the shooter By Pepe Escobar

THE ROVING EYE
Show us the shooter
By Pepe Escobar

To follow Pepe's articles on the Great Arab Revolt, please click here.

Show us the Navy SEALs hero who did the double-tapping on Osama bin Laden - the one-two in the head to make sure the target of a hit job is out - after a "firefight" the signs of which are virtually absent in that squalid "mansion" in Abbottabad.

Show us the greatest hero of modern American history, the man who shot America's public enemy number one, the most evil terrorist in the history of the Universe who masterminded the most spectacular attack of all time against the US.

Parade him on Ground Zero and in downtown Manhattan, give him

 
a row of Purple and rainbow-colored Hearts, make him a partner of Goldman Sachs, get him on Oprah, Rush and Anderson Cooper, induct him into the Rock'n Roll Hall of Fame.

If you're Republican, make him run for president; unlike Donald "that fox on his head" Trump or Sarah "I can see Pakistan from my house" Palin, he would actually turn President Barack Obama into collateral damage. Or at least crown him secretary of defense - supreme purveyor of the targeted assassination as the paramount tool of international diplomacy.

Take two
Rewind to the cliffhanger scene in all its Hi-Def glory - broadcast live to the situation room in Washington.

The hero, fully equipped, pumped up, is face to face with the real Osama bin Laden, unarmed, just out of bed, trapped in a drab room. There's no possible escape; the whole compound is "secured". This is it - the moment America has been dreaming about since September 11, 2001.

The rehearsal took place hundreds of times before during the everlasting "war on terror". The procedure was to immobilize the suspect, put a bag over his head, transfer him to a helicopter (there were three outside, one had already crashed), then to a military base, and then, in an orange jumpsuit, straight to Gitmo.

Now the hero is face to face with the man who caused the "war on terror" itself to exist. And what does he do? Not a shot in the arm, leg or knee. Not even a casually tossed stun grenade. No extraordinary rendition - what is this good for anyway if it does not apply to public enemy number one?

The hero double-taps the fugitive - codename "Geronimo" (a native who defied the Empire; talk about defiling native-Americans once again). This is the way the biggest, costliest manhunt ever ends; not with a prolonged bang, but with two golden bullets. Good guy snuffs bad guy. Dirty Harry snuffs the punk.

So no one in the world will ever know. How "Geronimo" became a Central Intelligence Agency asset - and how the "friendship" developed during the 1980s. How he escaped from Tora Bora - or how the Pentagon let him escape. How he lived in Pakistan all these years, undisturbed. Why did he "hate us".

And most of all how he "masterminded" 9/11. Which branch - or branches, or individuals - of the US intelligence network knew about it in advance, and let it happen. How a bunch of Arabs with box-cutters and crappy flying skills turned jets into missiles and destroyed the Twin Towers (plus building 7) and a chunk of the mighty Pentagon.

Who in the world would dare not to be glued for months to the most stirring trial of all time?

There are reasons to believe the entities - the system - that arranged the hit would not be very pleased. So the verdict is guilty as (not) charged - and termination by a bullet in the head. It's never been so easy to create a wasteland and call it "justice".

As for the rest of us, we'll spend the rest of our lives in the dark.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

Bin Laden: Body buried at sea, shoddy proof of death -- another "Made in Hollywood" performance from "Ari Gold"

Years after Public Enemy Number One, Osama Bin Laden, was reportedly killed in the mountains of the Afghan-Pakistani border region or died from kidney failure in his native Hadhramaut region of Yemen, President Obama pulled the Bin Laden rabbit out of his political hat during a Sunday late-night television address, when many Americans were already watching the tube, thus increasing Obama's market share for his "surprise announcement." After all, Obama, who has close links to Oprah Winfrey and Rahm Emanuel's super-Hollywood agent brother, Ari Emanuel, depicted as the vile "Ari Gold" in fiction, is well-aware of TV Sunday prime time ratings.

So, in a few words, Obama announced that Bin Laden had been killed by a U.S. team that caught the wily Saudi Arabian terrorist mastermind by surprise. Bin Laden was not caught in a cave or some other underground facility in Waziristan but in a $1 million walled-off estate in Abbottabad, a military cantonment where a number of active and retired members of Pakistan's military and intelligence community lived. Abbottabad is also home to Pakistan's version of West Point, the Kakul Military Academy, where the firefight between U.S. Navy SEALS and Bin Laden's security guards allegedly took place a mere 800 meters away. 

Up until the 1980s, the mountains around Abbottabad were dotted with small U.S. National Security Agency (NSA)/U.K. Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) listening posts in places like Bada Bier and Parachinar were used to eavesdrop on signals from the Soviet Union and China. It was a time period when Bin Laden was operating his mujaheddin forces in Afghanistan under the aegis of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency and its CIA overseers.
Abbottabad is also very familiar to the CIA and U.S. Special Forces, which operated from the nearby Kalabagh air force base, which has reportedly been used in the past by U.S. Special Operations forces, including U.S. Marines. Why Bin Laden would want to locate a massive safe house in the heart of Pakistani and American counter-insurgency and intelligence activity is curious.

Bin Laden's body was reported by the Pentagon to have been buried somewhere in the north Arabian Sea from the aircraft carrier, USS Carl Vinson. The Pentagon has assured the public that they confirmed Bin Laden's identity through DNA sampling and are "100 percent" certain that the body they buried in the sea was that of Bin Laden. The question remains as to where Bin Laden's comparative DNA samples were obtained over the past several years when the terrorist mastermind was supposedly a phantom-like fugitive.

However, the word from WMR sources at NSA is that no signals intercepts, from Pakistan or U.S. military sources, indicate that the man shot to death in Abbottabad was Osama Bin Laden. After the so-called killing of Bin Laden, operators were deluged with intercepted chatter about Bin Laden having been killed. However, not once did signals intercept operators, linguists and intelligence analysts based in Pakistan, Afghanistan, NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland, or on ships offshore -- who would have been cleared for and involved with the top secret mission to kill Bin Laden -- pick up any intelligence about Bin Laden prior to his reported assassination by the U.S. Special Forces "kill" team acting on the direct orders of President Obama. 

George W. Bush and other neo-con leaders, like Obama, have often pulled the Bin Laden rabbit out of their hat, years after reports of the Al Qaeda leader's death in either thr Afghanistan-Pakistan border region or Yemen. On September 7, 2007, WMR reported: "'Osama bin Laden' supposedly appears in a new videotape with a dyed and trimmed beard and talking about Democratic control of Congress and the coming to power of Nicolas Sarkozy in France and Gordon Brown in Britain. 'Bin Laden' also refers to George W. Bush as the 'leader of Texas.' He also talks of the Democrats' failure to 'stop the war.' "Bin Laden,' who once recommended William Blum' s book 'Rogue State,' is back in the Book-of-the-Month Club business in plugging Noam Chomsky and ex-CIA 'Bin Laden Unit' chief Michael Scheuer. 'Bin Laden' also mentions 'neoconservatives' like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Richard Pearl [sic], meaning Richard Perle. He also refers to Colin Powell and Richard Armitage and 'their blood history of murdering humans.' Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair also gets honorable mention. 'Bin Laden' also states that President John Kennedy was killed and 'corporations were the primary beneficiary of his killing.' Days before a huge anti-war march in Washington, on September 15, Bin Laden states that carrying 'anti-war placards' in the streets is of no use. As if expecting that many people will view the tape as a fake, the neocon media and their usual 'sources' and 'experts' are already claiming that it is quite common for Arab mean to dye their beards to make themselves look younger."

On September 9, 2007, WMR reported on how "Al Qaeda" video and audiotapes are transmitted to the news media as authentic: "The so-called 'Osama Bin Laden tape' was not only transmitted via the auspices of the Search for International Terrorist Entities (SITE) Institute, a Washington, DC-based research institute with links to Israeli right-wing Likud elements, but U.S. intelligence officials are now claiming that large portions of the 'Bin Laden' speech were written by Los Angeles native Adam Gadahn, born Adam Pearlman, (aka Azzam the American), the number three man in charge of Al Qaeda, whose grandfather, Carl K. Pearlman, was a member of the board of the Anti Defamation League (ADL), an important component of the Israeli Lobby in the United States. Carl Pearlman, a prominent California urologist, was the chairman of the Orange County Bonds for Israel campaign and the United Jewish Welfare Fund. SITE and an Israeli intelligence front operation in Washington, MEMRI (the Middle East Media Research Institute), are closely linked. MEMRI has been responsible for mis-translating several speeches made by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. SITE's director is Rita Katz, an Iraq-born Jew who moved to Israel after her father was executed by Saddam Hussein's government for spying for the Mossad. She emigrated to the United States from Israel in 1997. Katz worked for the U.S. Treasury Department in its pursuit of Muslim charity funds in the United States in Operation Green Quest and as a consultant for the FBI. The main coordinator for Green Quest was the then-head of the Justice Department's Criminal Division, Michael Chertoff. 

Not surprisingly, the Zawahiri tape ridiculing Obama was made available by the SITE Intelligence Group in Washington. 
Our September 9, 2007 report continued: "The delivery of the latest 'Bin Laden' video was reported by the Associated Press as follows: 'the 30-minute video was obtained by the SITE Institute, a Washington-based group that monitors terrorist messages, and provided to the Associated Press.' In the past, Bin Laden videos were sent to Al Jazeera and other Arab media sources directly. The first news of the video's release came on the al-Sahab web site, where 'Al Qaeda' has previously posted messages. Last year, a leaked French intelligence report stated that Bin Laden died of typhoid fever in Pakistan. There are other reports that after the US attack on Afghanistan, Bin Laden was spirited out of Afghanistan to his native Hadhramaut region of Yemen, where he later died of kidney failure surrounded by his close and extended family members. Bin Laden's post-9/11 presence in Hadhramaut was hinted to by reputable Israeli intelligence sources in discussions with this editor in 2002. The speed at which the corporate media accepted the obviously bogus 'Bin Laden makeover' tape is amazing. However, considering the links between the neocon disinformation machinery in Washington, DC and the corporate media, it may not be so surprising when put into context."
 
After years of lies from the U.S. government about Saddam Hussein's non-existent weapons of mass destruction, including "intelligence" about mobile biological weapons trailers from a known fraudster code named "Curveball"; bogus Niger documents on Iraq's possession of yellow cake uranium; bogus Iraq Oil Ministry documents on Iraqi payoffs to Western political leaders under the UN's Oil-for-Food program; and, more recently, false charges from Obama's ambassador to the UN that Muammar Qaddafi's troops in Libya were ingesting Viagra tablets before raping women, the public should be wary of a president who shows every tendency to lie as much as his three immediate predecessors: Bush II, Clinton, and Bush I. The White House is, perhaps, the greatest source of lies and disinformation in the world today, topping anything similar that may emanate from Pyongyang or Tripoli. There is no reason for any sane person to believe that anything Mr. Obama says is true. But Obama's supporters wasted no time in proclaiming that Bin Laden's killing ensures Obama's re-election next year.