Thursday, July 28, 2011
CIA penetrating Chna's "soft under-belly"
China has warned the U.S. that it will not tolerate continued spy flights of U.S. reconnaissance aircraft near its airspace. The Obama administration has countered that spy flights, like the U-2 flight recently intercepted by Chinese Sukhoi-27 fighters in the Straits of Taiwan, will continue.
The Obama administration appears intent on ratcheting up tensions with China. With Indian government acquiescence. Washington recently hosted a conference of leading Tibetan religious and political figures, including the Dalai Lama, the Karmapa, and the prime minister of the Tibetan government-in-exile, which is based in Dharamsala, India. President Obama angered the Chinese further by meeting with the Dalai Lama.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has also adopted a confrontatonal approach with China concerning competing claims by China and Southeast Asian nations over disputed islands in the South China Sea.
The CIA has been authorized by the Obama White House to increase its penetration of tribal groups in Southeast Asia, along the Chinese southern border, in what could be described as China's "soft under-belly." Increased U.S. military cooperation with Vietnam also poses a threat to China's southern border with the CIA seeking intelligence-gathering facilities in northern Vietnam, near the Chinese border. The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has similar facilities in Mongolia, near the northern border of China.
WMR's Southeast Asian sources have reported that the CIA is increasing its influence operations among various tribal groups in northern Thailand and Burma that have historical ties to their fellow tribal members across the border in China's southern provinces of Guangxi and Yunnan.
The CIA, mostly through financial aid funneled through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), is providing support, including that which has been described by those on the ground in northern Thailand, as "military" in nature, to various tribal groups, including the Akha, Tai Lue, N'tin, Hmong, and Khamu tribes in Nan province along the Thai border with Laos, as well as Doi Wawi Chinese, Karen, Lahu, Yao, Hmong, in the Wawi Valley District and Burmese Kachin and Karen tribal members who are refugees living in camps close to the border with Burma. The CIA influence operations in around the Golden Triangle border intersection of Burma, Thailand, and Laos, according to our sources, are being carried out through the aegis of Baptist missionaries in northern Thailand and in the Mekong River region. At least one Baptist missionary active with tribes in northern Burma, was identified as CIA by the Burmese government and expelled.
USAID funds are being funneled to non-governmental organization (NGO) entities in northern Thailand, including the Mekong Minority Foundation, which receives USAID funding, according to our sources, from the Christian Tearfund charitable group, which is also active in east Africa, Haiti, Ivory Coast, Zimbabwe, Pakistan, and Sudan. USAID funds are also being pumped into tribal groups in China's Yunnan province through Bless China International (BCI).
The CIA has had an off-and-on relationship with two professions that have been historically exempted from intelligence activities: missionaries and journalists. However, since 9/11, the CIA has renewed its use of both professions to carry out its covert activities, an activity that places bona fide missionaries and journalists in jeopardy abroad.
The Obama administration has adopted a much more hostile military and intelligence posture toward China than existed with the previous Bush administration.
Another "smoking gun" Breivik link to Israel
Although the mainstream corporate media and even a few "alternative news" websites are ignoring the proven links between Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik and Israel, yet another "smoking gun" connection between the pro-Zionist mass murderer and Israel has emerged.
Ninety minutes before Breivik was reported to have detonated a huge fertilizer-fuel bomb in the government district of downtown Oslo and then proceeding to Utoya island dressed as a uniformed police officer to massacre scores of youth attending a Norwegian Labor Party jamboree, he sent an email containing a 1500-page rambling manifesto to Isak Nygren, a member of the far-right, anti-Islamic and anti-Roma (gypsy), and pro-Zionist Sweden Democrats (SD) political party. Among Breivik's writings is this quote: "So let us fight together with Israel, with our Zionist brothers against all anti-Zionists, against all cultural Marxists/multiculturalists."
Who is Isak Nygren? One will not see any mention of him in the English-language corporate media. Nygren is a pro-Israeli SD activist who is only 21 years old but has already run for municipal-level political office in his native province of Sodermanland and municipality of Katrineholm, Sweden. It is also noteworthy that Nygren was not in Sweden when he received Breivik's e-mail but, according to the July 24 edition of Sweden's Nyheter newspaper, was in Israel living on a kibbutz. The location of the kibbutz was not reported. There are other reports on Internet websites that Nygren is Jewish.
The only English-language media that reported Breivik's connection to Nygren is Die Presse of Vienna, Eskiltuna-Kurinen of Sweden,Sveriges Radio, Expo magazine of Sweden, the Berliner Zeitung of Germany, and Kurier of Austria. To its credit, Nyheter is the only media outlet that officially reported on Breivik's connections to Nygren, in addition to Nygren's current presence in Israel.
The media blackout of Breivik's Israeli connections is largely the result of marching orders sent out from the Israel and Zionist lobby. The orders are clear: there will be no mention of Breivik's pro-Israeli stance nor his connections to individuals like Nygren. Attention to Breivik's Israeli and Jewish connections would expose Mossad's infiltration of neo-Nazi groups and political parties to turn them away from anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial and into anti-Islamic and pro-Israeli pressure movements.
Nygren has stated that he is pro-Israel. However, he is also a member of the neo-Nazi Nordic Alliance, which has branches in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. There are now reports that last year Breivik attended a rally of the English Defense League (EDL) in London to hear Dutch Freedom Party leader Geert Wilders, an ardent anti-Muslim and supporter of Israel, to address the gathering. There are other reports that Breivik met with the leadership of the EDL and Wilders. The EDL's Swedish offshoot is the Swedish Defense League, which counts Nygren as one of its activists. In September 2010, the Danish leftist newspaper Arbejder pointed to possible links between Nygren and the xenophobic far-right Danish People's Party of Pia Kaersgaard, which provides parliamentary support for the current center-right Danish government.
Nygren's blog states that he has no connections with Breivik. However, in response to a request from a reporter for Austria's ORF television network about Breivik's use of .at domains to send e-mail to an entity called the "Vienna School," Nygren, from Israel, refused to cooperate. The reporter pointed out that in Austria, most e-mail addresses do not use the .at country domain for Austria but addresses like gmx.mail and other commercial addresses.
Nygren was interviewed by Sweden's English-language publication, Expo, and said he is opposed to mixed marriages between European women and "niggers, Asians, etc." Nygren also opposes adoption by Swedish parents of non-white children from abroad. Nygren has advocated for the expulsion of Roma (gypsies) from Sweden and the mandatory "re-eduction" of Swedish Muslims. Last February, Nygren, according to the SVT Swedish television network, said, "As long as you do not live in Sweden so I do not care. I'm not attracted to the Negroes."
The EDL, SD, Wilders, Nygren, and Zionists in the United States like Pam Geller, who Breivik admires, are all attempting to distance themselves from the Norwegian mass murderer. The "lone wolf" appellation being conferred on Breivik by his Zionist and neo-Nazi friends, as well as the English-speaking corporate media, is now neing undermined by reports of law enforcement investigations of Breivik's network, including the two additional operating cells he mentioned in an Oslo court room on July 25. The police investigations extend beyond Norway to France, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Austria, Poland, and other countries.
However, the corporate media is still insisting that Breivik is a deranged single actor. Although, he is clearly deranged, even some alternate news outlets, while believing Breivik could not have acted alone, are continuing to ignore Breivik's connections to Israel and Zionist groups, pushing fanciful notions of involvement by NATO, Freemasons, and the Illuminati in Breivik's massacre.
One question is not being asked: Why is a correspondent who supports Breivik's thoughts on Muslims and non-whites in a kibbutz in Israel and not answering questions in a police station in Sweden?
Monday, July 25, 2011
After Oslo: Time to Crack Down On Mossad Terrorism
| Wayne MADSEN (USA) | 25.07.2011 | 09:05 |
 Israel’s most secret and tried-and-true weapon is the “false flag” terrorist attack.State-sponsored terrorism is defined by Encyclopedia Britannica as the “systematic use of violence to create a general climate of fear in a population and thereby to bring about a particular political objective [and] is employed by governments -- or more often by factions within governments -- against that government's citizens, against factions within the government, or against foreign governments or groups.” On July 22, a bomb, said to be an Oklahoma City-type explosive device, crafted with fertilizer and diesel fuel, blew up in downtown Oslo, Norway, in the heart of the government district. Shortly thereafter, a man dressed in a Norwegian police uniform opened fire on a Labor Party youth camp on the island of Utoya in Tyri fjord. Access to the island was by boat only. Over 100 people were killed in the twin terror attacks. Almost immediately, the world’s corporate media began pushing the story that those who were responsible for the blast and mass shooting were associated with “Al Qaeda” and other radical Islamist groups. CNN’s Washington, DC chief anchor Wolf Blitzer, a former spokesman for the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) lobby and a correspondent for the Jerusalem Post, began his late afternoon program by pointing to “Al Qaeda” and radical Islamists as the chief culprits for the terrorist attacks in Norway. CNN paraded out a number “experts,” in actuality, propagandists for the Israeli agenda linked to neo-conservative outlets and the Pentagon’s “terrorism industrial complex,” before the cameras to advance the radical Islamist meme even as Norwegian authorities pinned blame on the attack on at least one perpetrator, a Norwegian named Anders Behring Breivik. CNN constantly showed footage of frightened people in downtown Oslo running for their lives from the site of the blast, as well as still photograph of a pall of light-brown smoke over downtown Oslo. Of course, CNN’s intention was to evoke memories of the 9/11 attack in Manhattan. Breivik, who sometimes anglicized his name as Andrew Berwick in his numerous web postings, was said to be a right-wing Islamophobe who sympathized with Zionism and who was a Freemason… Breivik was also reported to be a fundamentalist Christian but he adopted a stance against the Lutheran Church, the state church of Norway, and argued for a “collective” counter-reformation to return the Protestant churches to the control of the Vatican and the Pope. Breivik lambasted the Lutheran Church and other mainstream Protestant churches, condemning “Priests in jeans who march for Palestine.” More incredibly, the London tabloid of Rupert Murdoch’s scandal-plagued News International, The Sun, went to press with the following false headline: “Norway’s 911: ‘Al Qaeda’ Massacre.” On March 29, 2011, Harvard Law School’s extremist Zionist Professor Alan Dershowitz penned a piece in the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal, a newspaper that actively discriminates against the hiring of non-Jews as reporters and editors in violation of U.S. civil rights and equal opportunity employment laws, in which he called Norway anti-Semitic. Dershowitz cited as an example former Norwegian Prime Minister Kare Willock’s criticism of President Barack Obama’s choice of Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff because he is Jewish. In fact, Emanuel’s pro- Israeli sympathies as a former member of the Israel Defense Force are what prompted many political observers in Washington and elsewhere to question his primary loyalty to the United States. A network of Israeli bloggers pushed a claim of responsibility on a previously-unknown group called Ansar al-Jihad al-Alami (the Helpers of the Global Jihad). The group’s claims were picked up and run by several corporate media outlets and then pulled when it was discovered the claim was a hoax. Mossad has a program to distribute bogus claims of responsibility for Islamist terrorist attacks via “Jihadist” websites that are actually operated by the Mossad and a network of “hasbaratchiks,” Israeli and foreign Jews who act as propagandists on the web. These hasbara (propaganda) agents and volunteers operate through such programs as Megaphone and GIYUS (“Give Israel Your United Support.”) After the attempt to blame the Norway attacks on Islamists failed, the “hasbaratchiks” shifted to “sock puppet” troll mode, posting comments on blogs that criticized allegations that Mossad and Zionists were behind the Norway attacks, emphasizing that such beliefs were “anti-Semitic” and wild “conspiracy theories.” Some Israeli “sock puppets” even offered lunatic suggestions that Breivik was planted by Islamists to make Israel and Zionists look bad. When the “Islamist” connection to the holocaust in Norway was shown to be non-existent after Norwegian security and police agencies began looking at the evidence, the corporate media switched its propaganda line from “radical Islam” being responsible to “far –right extremism” opposed to multiculturalism and immigration in Europe as the culprit. Even outlets that in the past had been known for their independence from the corporate media line, including Al Jazeera and RT [formerly known as Russia Today], echoed the line that Breivik primarily represented right-wing opposition to Muslim immigrants in Europe. Al Jazeera repeated the line that Breivik was a “lone madman,” the insinuation being that he was not linked to any wider network. While Breivik certainly was associated with the far-right xenophobic elements in Norway, Europe, and North America, there was no mention by the corporate media of his admiration for such American Zionist Islamophobes as Richard Pipes and Pam Geller. Geller led the bigoted anti-Muslim campaign against an Islamic Center near the site of “Ground Zero,” the former World Trade Center site, in lower Manhattan. Breivik posted a number of his anti-Muslim and pro-Zionist screeds on the Norwegian website www.document.no, which is operated by Hans-Kristian Rustad, a Norwegian pro-Israeli journalist. No corporate media outlets reported that the brand of far-right extremism of Breivik is closely associated with Zionist-supported far-right anti-immigrant political parties and movements in Western Europe, including the mis-named Progress Party of Norway, the Dutch Freedom Party of Islamophobe Geert Wilders, the Sweden Democrats, Finland’s True Finns Party, the Danish People’s Party, the English Defense League, the Pro-Germany Citizen’s Movement, and a pan-Nordic fascist terrorist group called “Nordiske.” Breivik also expressed support for the Tea Party in the United States… The European anti-Muslim xenophobic network is linked to the notorious publication of Prophet Muhammad cartoons by the neo-conservative Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten and Norway’s Dagbladet. The Euro-xenophobes are supported by the longtime Zionist Bernard-Henri Levy, the French philosopher who is a friend of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and disgraced former International Monetary Fund managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn. It is noteworthy that Levy is one of the major backers of the Libyan rebels fighting Muammar Qaddafi. Norway announced it was pulling its aircraft from the NATO campaign in Libya at the end of July. Norway also announced its support for Palestine’s sovereignty resolution in the UN General Assembly in September. As more and more evidence pointed to Oslo being yet another example of a state-sponsored terrorist attack by Israel’s Mossad, the corporate media studiously avoided mentioning how the Norwegian government through its recent actions, had become a major problem for Israel and its allies abroad, especially on the Palestine sovereignty issue… In addition, Norwegian police and intelligence are painfully aware of Mossad’s past operations in Norway, including the infamous Lillehammer Affair in 1973. On July 21, 1973, Mossad agents assassinated Ali Hassan Salameh, a Moroccan waiter in Lillehammer, wrongly believing he was the operations chief for the Palestinian terrorist group “Black September.” Norwegian police arrested the Mossad agents who killed Salameh and uncovered an intricate network of Mossad safe houses, phone numbers, and Norwegian sleeper agents for Mossad. Just as was the case with the coordinated bombings of Madrid trains on March 22, 2004 and London buses and trains on July 7, 2005, viewed by European security services as being the work of not “Al Qaeda” but domestic “radicals,” there was no link to Islamist radicals with the attacks in Norway. However, there was every indication that the attack on Norway was intended to shake up the Norwegian population and damage the reputation of the left-of-center Norwegian government of Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg. The corporate media insisted that Breivik was solely responsible for Norway’s worst violent attack since World War II. Norwegian police reports that a second gunman, described as having “thick dark hair and a non-Nordic appearance,” were suppressed in much of the corporate media. The time line of the Oslo attack causes anyone’s imagination to be stretched on being sold a “lone gunman/bomber” theory. At 3:26 pm Oslo time a massive car bomb was detonated outside the office of the Prime Minister of Norway. Since July 22 was a public holiday, there were relatively few people inside the Prime Minister’s office or the surrounding offices of the Petroleum and Energy Ministry and the VG [Verdens Gang] newspaper, Norway’s largest paper. As police responded to the downtown Oslo blast, Breivik was said to have taken a boat the Utoya island dressed as a policeman and began opening fire on young members of the Norwegian Labor Party youth camp meeting. The shooting allegedly began at 4:50 pm. Norwegian SWAT team “Delta” had trouble getting a helicopter started and struggled to find a boat to get to Utoya island. The SWAT team finally arrived on the island at 6:20 pm only to find scores of the next generation of Norwegian Labor Party leaders dead. Breivik calmly surrendered to the police. When Breivik arrived on Utoya he told police on the island that he was there for a routine security check following the bombing in downtown Oslo. Norway’s Acting Police chief Sveinung Sponheim said the police were still investigating whether Breivik was acting with a larger network. Sponheim’s revelation countered the “lone wolf” theory advanced by corporate media outlets in Western nations. Norway’s coalition Labor-Socialist Left government has been seen as hostile to the interests of Israel and the United States. There is now a widespread belief that the terrorist attack against Norway was engineered to shock erstwhile peaceful Norway, a nation where police generally still patrol the streets unarmed, into adopting the police state tactics of the United States, Israel, Britain, and other Western nations. Norway’s pro-Palestinian foreign policy also irked the Zionist and the far-right anti-Islamic factions in Europe and North America, as well as the governments of Israel and the United States. In a move that complements American and Israeli propaganda that Norway has not stepped up to the surveillance state model imposed by other Western governments, the suspicious WikiLeaks decided to release U.S. State Department cables from the U.S. embassy in Oslo that criticized Norway for not recognizing the “Al Qaeda” threat and maintaining an insufficient security apparatus to combat Islamist terrorism and Pakistani immigrants. The Barack Obama-appointed U.S. ambassador in Oslo, Barry White, who is Jewish and received a 2005 award from the pro-Israel American Jewish Committee, complained that the Norwegian Police Security Service (PST) rejected two twelve-person British MI-6 intelligence surveillance teams to monitor an “Al Qaeda” cell in Norway. Last November, the Norwegian government was shocked to learn that the U.S. embassy was operating a Surveillance Detection Unit in Oslo that was monitoring Norwegian citizens. Norwegian Justice Minister Knut Storberget said he was not informed of the presence of the U.S. spy unit in Oslo, which employed retired Norwegian police and intelligence officials. The Norwegian Data Protection Commissioner, Bjorn Erik Thon, said he had never seen such an intelligence operation in Norway. White complained that Norwegian security officials were apathetic and incompetent in dealing with the Islamist “terrorist threat.” The failure of the Norwegian SWAT team to quickly respond to the massacre on Utoya may indicate that Norway’s law enforcement and security networks and command-and-control systems had been interfered with by infiltrators with knowledge of the Norwegian systems. Those retired police and intelligence officials working for the U.S. embassy’s surveillance unit are likely suspects in sabotaging the Norwegian police reaction capabilities on 7/22. Just 48 hours before the bombing in Oslo, police units were engaged in a terrorist bombing exercise at the Oslo Opera House, near what would later be “ground zero.” In addition, in the days before the terrorist bombing, there was suspicious sewer work being conducted in the area near the Prime Minister’s office. In March, the leader of the Socialist Left, Kristen Halvorsen, the Minister of Education of Norway and a former Finance Minister, called for military action against Israel if it attacked Gaza. The Socialist Left and Labor Party, along with the Norwegian Peace Association and the Norwegian energy and telecommunications union, strongly support the Boycott Israel campaign, which includes backing the pan-European Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) committee and an embargo on arms sales to the Jewish state. In August 2010, the Norwegian pension fund divested in two Israeli companies controlled by Israeli billionaire Lev Leviev, Africa Israel Investments and its subsidiary Danya Cebus. Halvorsen had recently met with a delegation of American Jews who complained about Norway’s “anti-Semitism,” the tired and worn-out canard used by Zionists in confronting anti-Israeli sentiment around the world. In January, Halvorsen and her husband, Christo Halvorsen, a producer for the Norsk Rikskringkasting (NRK) television and radio network, took part in an anti-Israel and U.S. march in Oslo where picket signs with phrases like “USA and Israel: Axis of Evil” appeared. The Halvorsens and NRK were subjected to a vicious campaign launched by Zionists and the Israel Lobby in Norway. Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre of the Labor Party has been criticized by the Israel Lobby and Zionists for comparing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews. Støre has also called for the demolition of Israel’s “Separation Wall” that runs through Palestinian territory on the West Bank, a stance that has earned him enmity and hatred from Israel’s government and their Zionist allies in the West. Store paid a visit to Utoya before the massacre. The Foreign Minister was on the island as some of the Labor Party youth were participating in a “Boycott Israel” demonstration. The city of Trondheim was criticized by Israel for funding a trip to the UN in New York for Norwegian students to participate in a play called the “Gaza Monologues.” Israel also blasted Norway for distributing a film called “Tears of Gaza.” After Israel offered assistance to Norway, including forensic and medical assistance, as well as the evacuation of the wounded from the 7/22 attack, Norway declined the offer. The rejection of assistance from Israel indicates that the Norwegian government was suspicious of the offer from Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak. Other Israeli military teams in the West Bank have been accused of trafficking in human organs, an expose brought to light by the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet in August 2009. That same month, Israel’s anti-Arab and anti-Muslim Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman accused Sweden and Norway of anti-Semitism, adding the outrageous charge that Norway was pro-Nazi, even though Norway’s anti-Muslim and pro-Zionist activists were affiliated with neo-Nazi organizations. On December 11, 2010, a suspicious terrorist explosion took place in downtown Stockholm, injuring two people and blamed on a Swedish-Iraqi suicide bomber. The bombing took place two weeks after the Swedish media reported that a Surveillance Detection Unit, operated form the U.S. embassy in Stockholm, was spying on Swedish citizens. In the past few months, the Mossad has committed blatant acts of espionage and possible other terrorist attacks against nations it perceives as pro-Palestinian. During last year’s devastating earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, a team of Mossad agents was caught in the city. One of the agents died in the quake. The Mossad agents were found with multiple passports and thumb drives believed to have been used to download sensitive data from New Zealand government computer systems. New Zealand’s Prime Minister John Key, who seemingly came from obscurity in New Zealand politics and whose Jewish mother immigrated from England, disregarded claims of Mossad espionage during the quake, even though he spoke to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu four times on the day of the quake, after the dead Mossad agent was discovered by New Zealand police and intelligence. New Zealand’s Southland Times was criticized by New Zealand’s Jewish community and Israel for promoting “conspiracy theories,” the typical modus operandi for pro-Israeli Jews, known as sayanim and katsas, who are used by Israel abroad as propaganda and espionage agents. Ironically, Key was meeting with Obama at the White House as the bombing and shootings were occurring in Norway. Key was believed to have attended the homo-erotic annual meeting of a men-only fraternity composed of American and foreign political and business elitists at the secluded Bohemian Grove in northern California, a conclave that also saw the attendance of Israel’s most notorious agent-of-influence in America, Henry Kissinger, who also serves as Obama’s “special envoy” to the Russian leadership. Key’s Labor Party predecessor, Helen Clark, was the subject of criticism in leaked 2004 State Department cables from the U.S. embassy in Wellington for cracking down on a Mossad team’s acquisition of forged New Zealand passports. Once again, the cable leaks were courtesy of the suspect WikiLeaks operation. One of the Mossad perpetrators, Zev William Barkan, who fled New Zealand to avoid arrest, had also been reported in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, where he and other Israelis were producing pornographic and “snuff” movies, in which unsuspecting vagrants were murdered on camera. In Egypt, Mossad agents have been accused by the present government of fomenting riots between Muslims and Coptic Christians. A recent explosion of seized Iranian weapons and ammunition being stored at a Cypriot naval base, a blast that killed the head of the Cypriot Navy, remains suspicious. The blast followed the decision of Cyprus’s left-of-center government to recognize the sovereignty of Palestine. The resulting public outrage over the blast resulted in the resignation of pro-Palestinian Foreign Minister Markos Kyprianou and a major political embarrassment for Cyprus’s president Dimitris Christofias, a member of the Communist AKEL party. Mossad is a master at false-flag terrorist attacks designed to alter perceptions and punish opponents of Israeli policy. The fingerprints of Israeli intelligence are all over the 9/11 attacks on the United States, the 3/22 train bombings in Madrid, the 7/7 transit bombings in London, and, now, the 7/22 attacks in Norway… While the Israeli-influenced corporate media has droned on and on about the dangers of Islamist terrorism, it is now obvious that the major threat to public safety comes from the State of Israel, a rogue nation that does not hesitate to murder the innocent to achieve its sordid political aims. |
9/11: Who Really Benefited? Fact and Not Fiction... by Captain America
We bring to the attention of our readers this provocative review of the strategic and corporate interests behind 9/11 including Wall Street, the Texas oil companies and the defense contractors.
The statements in this article are corroborated by numerous studies, books, news articles and research reports published since September 2001.
In the course of almost ten years, Global Research has conducted a detailed review and analysis of the 9/11 attacks, focussing on their broad implications as well as their historical significance. See our 9/11 and the War on Terrorism Dossier
Michel Chossudovsky, July 24, 2011
Forget so-called conspiracy theories. Instead look at reality. Dare ask yourself who actually seems to have benefited from the 9-11 calamity. In light of the debt ceiling debates and the continuous corrupt politics as usual of Washington D.C., it is time for the American people, and individual states of this federation, to look at a troubling set of facts. It seems there were “several” beneficiaries of 9-11 that don’t exactly fit the story line we were constantly fed by the propaganda machine and mainstream media as to how to connect the dots (which we were rhetorically asked to do).
Here is a list of peoples that benefited. Most of this list is factual. Some are more opinion but with strong support in reality-based argument:
1) The New York Port Authority was having difficulty renting out space in the Twin Towers. More importantly there was a huge asbestos liability. Surprisingly these Towers were sold to a new owner Larry Silverstein just three months prior—who managed to get an insurance contract for a big payout if any of the Tower buildings got hit by an airplane. This is a fact.
2) Our first international move was to bomb Afghanistan under the assumption that people there were involved. So the heroin industry of Afghanistan came back to life in a big way—that is international and local drug cartels rediscovered a gold mine of money supply. Bin Laden and the Taliban, because of their religious fanaticism, pretty much closed down the trade to a trickle. But after the bombing shake-up, people connected with the heroin trade in Central Asia reaped billion dollars rewards—including money-laundering groups of financiers—such as banksters, etc. (And this is pretty much all the U.S. military/ intelligence has really accomplished—despite all the rhetoric and high-sounding goals about exporting democracy.) This is fact and not fiction.
3) Investors of profitable corporations connected to the military industrial complex made a killing (pun intended). Obviously war has been profitable for some industries for eons as we are told by most war historians profits are an inevitable consequence of war for merchants of death yet they say profit is “not” the driving force behind war. Think again. For our American culture, since at least the Vietnam War, it seems to have become the driving force. (What else does America still manufacture?) Prior to 9/11 there was little in the way of war material inventories being depleted. But soon after 9/11 this all changed. In fact some corporate stocks immediately went up in value—as did some military contracts. Note as well that after the cold war both the Pentagon and the Intelligence apparatus should have cut their budgets in half. (But then no one would have been promoted and the Pentagon would have lost some of its clout.) That did not happen. Rather the budgets doubled in size. How is that for financial austerity? This is fact and not fiction.
4) Some powerful industry leaders and think tank politicos believed it was necessary for certain “companies” to “control” various strategic resources such as oil and gas. And not surprisingly the very countries in which we declared a war against terrorists are surprisingly the same countries that contain such resources—especially in the Middle East.
Gas and oil reserves are coveted by every industrial civilization and every military as a necessity. For example, there was a plan to build an oil pipeline through Afghanistan and Pakistan to ship out from the Indian ocean—requiring stable societies that don’t sabotage pipelines. Nevertheless despite things not going as planned oil companies for whatever reason reaped huge profits. Fact and not fiction.
5) Advocates, such as Paul Bremer, for extreme laissez faire economic policies, attempted to rewrite an Iraqi constitution to promote a free market system of neo-liberal economic principles to make it especially easy for foreign nations to own Iraq’s resources. And if you do your research you will come to learn that the U.S. did not have any gripes with Saddam Hussein until he kicked oil companies out of Iraq because they wanted to take the lion’s share of the profits. He nationalized oil. This is fact and not fiction.
6) Israel benefited by having one of their neighboring enemies, namely Saddam Hussein and his standing army, weakened and preoccupied. It is not a coincidence that advocates and newspaper pundits most defensive about our invasion happen to be strong advocates of Israel’s right-wing will. Evidence clearly shows that some Israeli supporters were part of the culture of deception to take us to war with Iraq—as they are now working to take us to war with Iran with a similar pattern of phony intelligence. Equally it is a fact that whatever Middle East group harbors hostility toward Israel is now considered terrorist in nature to Americans. It is a fact that the Israeli lobby pushed hard for war with Iraq.
7) Right-wing politicos, especially Christian and Judaic, who like to promote prejudice against anything Muslim and Arab benefited. Since 9-11 there has been a constant propaganda war against Muslims throughout Western countries. (This is not to argue that Americans should not be wary of foreign motives.) But the fact is that those who do not wish Muslims to have influence in this culture have clearly wages a major propaganda campaign for Westerners to fear and distrust a huge segment of the world’s population—as a “cultural clash” or clash of civilizations like the medieval era of The Crusades. This is to say that Israel’s enemies have become our enemies as “neocon” propaganda campaign harps on “Islamo-fascism,” “Islamo-extremism,” and “Islamo-fanaticism”. Meanwhile this event is used to further persuade Americans Israel is America’s “natural” ally and partner against the forces of evil. (Yet rightwing Israelis too are not willing to separate Church and State and so they discriminate against those not Jewish. Therefore they too do not share our democratic values of equality for “all” people—like many of the theocratic countries in the Middle East.) This is opinion but it still reflects reality.
8) Politically motivated people with the desire to use “fear,” namely terrorism, as an excuse to curtail and destroy civil liberties and freedoms normally honored in democratic countries. We have become more a fascist state with Homeland Security surveillance. This curtailment is similar to those who continue to try to censor free speech—and make it more difficult to have the right to “associate” via technologies such as the Internet. Such mentality has allowed spying on citizens by “privatized” corporations not accountable to the tax paying public who pay organizations to secretly spy and keep records on its own citizenry. Obama and his team have done nothing to make real, substantive changes, and in fact have reinforced this tyranny. The curtailment of our freedoms is fact and not fiction.
9) Some international political operatives willing to take American bribe money in exchange to playing and saying our tune have benefited, such as some political factions in the Middle East who equally play they game with our tax dollars—including journalists who will write and say whatever Uncle Sam wants as long as there is a brick of one hundred dollar bills as “disappeared” just like military contracts that did not get performed—but were still played. This could also include those creating phony websites to spew messages or take credit for events done by others.
10) People with a desire to destroy the political strength and good will of the American people and government. Our country is no longer looked upon as a “positive” force for democracy. Further our economy has been severely damaged by corrupt forces willing to sacrifice real national security to greedy and self-interested ends. We are seen as the rogue state by too many. It doesn’t seem to bother some profiting that America goes broke invading foreign countries—irrespective of what the rest of the world thinks—and what could be a long term disaster—if not a World War 3. (It almost seems like a deliberate foil to destroy military preparedness and to weaken our security.) Furthermore, those who believe in a two class system benefited because the wealth investor class, including most of the Congress and Senate, are “not” sending their kids to die—rather they rely on a volunteer military of lower and middle class kids that can’t find jobs or have few prospects to go to school.
11) Along with this financial bust is a drive to destroy liberal notions of any kind of welfare for the less fortunate—save welfare for corrupt corporations. While it is true that there is no free lunch (unless you live in the beltway) there is also way too much scorn for people who are not super-rich as deserving some kind of humanity.
Perhaps Obama should let the country default. Perhaps individual states “should” give serious consideration to secede from the Union. It has become one massive failure anyway. This litany is as contentious as the list of grievances in the Declaration of Independence written over two hundred years ago. And there is good reason to modify our current banking system and the Federal Reserve.
The U.S. Congress, like most pseudo-liberal chicken lefties, who have not had the guts to look seriously at what likely happened on 9/11, or why, have succumbed to the cowardliness of voting to not close the U.S. gulag. They are more afraid of their own lost of stature than they are of honoring the rights of law and justice. Meanwhile the legal system—id est lawyers—have been far too compliant.
This is to say that the U.S. is being strangulated by corporate America and its finance sector. This is a form of slavery to be manipulated into doing things under false assumptions. Why the ultra rich became even more so, they “own” Congress with their bribery of lobby money and especially the Republican party—despite all the Tea Party advocates.
You may not like these realities. Few do. So go ahead and continue to shun all “theories” about 9-11 as mere skewed imagination. Because while it is true that 99.99% of the Government is innocent that doesn’t mean a relatively small, but high-ranking cabal, could not have been involved—especially given all the security transgressed and air force stand down that ensued.
Still it is easy to point fingers at identifiable groups of people as over-generalizations. Nevertheless many people looked the other way to not notice the dots the machine was drawing was itself tainted—which had its own wisdom of reticence. But where are we to go as a culture if we continue to play blind?
You can believe in fantasy as most people choose—because in the short term it feels easier. But it may turn out to be worse in the longer term with both parties being irremediably corrupt. More importantly to the sell out of our human rights to corporations with laws like Citizens United vs. the Federal Elections Commission.
Good Luck to all people who think they know something because they have been conditioned to believe what they currently do. Yet ask yourself how many Muslims actually benefited? Then ask that irrespective of who did it, does it not seem that our culture has some issues to contend with and some bureaucracy to address besides the liberal agenda? If lawyers don’t start making more noise we could have some serious problems.
Al-Qaeda's Christian mirror
THE ROVING EYEAl-Qaeda's Christian mirrorBy Pepe Escobar
Imagine if Anders Behring Breivik, the 32-year-old pale, blond, blue-eyed, 100% Norwegian, gun-crazy ultra right-wing Christian fundamentalist responsible for the car bombing in Oslo and the meticulous targeted assassinations at the island of Utoya that killed 93 people, was a Muslim immigrant.
One does not even have to imagine it - as the concentric Western circles of the Islamophobia industry immediately attributed the massacre in Norway to "al-Qaeda", until facts got in the way.
Wait a minute. "Targeted assassinations?" It had to cross the killer's mind that if the Barack Obama administration could do it - in AfPak, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, all in the name of Western civilization - there's nothing to prevent a cool Scandinavian from exercising the same rights on his own soil.
The overlapping strands of al-Qaeda ideology can be examined in detail in volumes such as Al-Qaeda in Its Own Words, edited by Gilles Kepel and Jean-Pierre Milelli, and published in English by Harvard University Press. Lone Breivik also concocted his own hefty, 1,500-page hate manifesto [1], titled 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, where he equally thrashes liberalism, multiculturalism and "cultural Marxism", which are allegedly destroying European Christian civilization.
As much as al-Qaeda - under the ideological guidance of now leader Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri - embarked on defensive (and occasionally offensive) jihad against Christians and Jews, Breivik calls for no less than a Christian jihad to defend Europe from yet another Muslim invasion.
The return of the Christian crusaders
What reveals that Breivik is no lone freak is that the ideology behind the manifesto overwhelmingly condemns not only Islam per se, Muslim immigration in Europe, and multiculturalism, but also all the neo-Nazi, racial supremacist rants against these "evils".
Breivik, the mass bomber who loves crappy Eurovision songs and the US cop show The Shield, and owns legitimate licenses for a Glock pistol, an automatic rifle and a shotgun is a typical convert of the new, slightly more sophisticated pan-European ultra-right narrative - according to which the battle for the soul of Europe will be fought on cultural grounds.
After a brief visit to Denmark and southern Sweden in the autumn of 2010, I had already touched on these broader themes in Letter from Islamophobistan (Asia Times Online, October 22, 2010).
Breivik goes one step ahead by weaponizing the new thinking - according to which it's not a question of Muslims being biologically inferior to the Christian West; the problem is the tenets of Islam are absolutely incompatible with the West.
It's all about culture. "They" don't share "our values" and our way of life. As a shrewd public relations move, this culturalist explanation is bound to attract even moderate Europeans.
Breivik and his ilk blame Western parliamentary democracy as a whole - political correctness included - for allowing Muslims in Europe to establish themselves as Trojan horses. Everything and everyone is a threat - from al-Qaeda to the bureaucratic European Union (EU) and the multicultural United Nations (UN). Breivik and his kind are Huntingtonesque all the way - fearing a clash of civilizations right at home.
No wonder the next logical step was for Breivik to become a modern-day version of the Knights Templars extolled in his rambling manifesto - and thus set an example. The Knights' agenda; to "seize political and military control of Western European countries and implement a cultural conservative political agenda".
"Al-Qaeda" - or the nebula of franchises and copycats commonly bundled as "al-Qaeda" - does not have the resources to attack Europe, and this is not the priority anyway; the priority is AfPak, Central Asia and India, as detailed by al-Qaeda's military commander Ilyas Kashmiri. But the priority of Christian fundamentalist terror is definitely Europe. And the attacks will come via loners such as Breivik as well as organized groups.
Western progressives must be on red alert. Taboos will have to be smashed - especially by identifying the contorted but most of the time crude strategies employed by ultra-right Christian fundamentalism and Zionists to foment Islamophobia in the West.
For instance, both Islamophobes and hardcore Zionists see the Israeli subjugation of Palestine as Israel defending itself in a clash of civilizations. Model disciple Breivik hails notorious American Islamophobes such as Pam Geller and Daniel Pipes as much as he abhors Norwegian support for an independent, sovereign Palestinian state.
Breivik wrote, "It's very hypocritical to treat Muslims, Nazis and Marxists different from each other. They are all supporters of hate-ideologies. Not all Muslims, Nazis and Marxists are conservative; most of them are moderate. But does it matter?"
It doesn't; fascism is an equal-opportunity seducer. There will be blood - a lot more blood, as Europe confronts its own heart of darkness. Beware the return - en masse - of the pale blue-eyed Christian crusader.
Note
1. See key extracts here
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.
Friday, July 22, 2011
SPECIAL REPORT. UN representative in Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello, assassinated in 2003 by U.S. operatives
SPECIAL REPORT. UN representative in Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello, assassinated in 2003 by U.S. operatives
On August 19, 2003, at 5:37 pm, a van exploded at the Canal Hotel in Baghdad, the headquarters for the UN Peace Mission for Iraq. The blast ripped through a wall of the building causing a side of the building to collapse. Twenty-two UN employees were killed in the blast, blamed by the U.S. occupation forces and echoed by the corporate media on a suicide bombing. An additional 100 people inside the building, including U.S. military personnel, were injured. Trapped under the rubble but alive for a number of hours before he died of his injuries was Sergio Vieira de Mello, a Brazilian diplomat who was the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Other UN staff members killed in the blast included nationals of Egypt, Britain, Italy, United States, Spain, Canada, Iraq, Iran, Jordan, and the Philippines.
In an exclusive to WMR, a senior U.S. flag rank officer in Baghdad at the time of the bombing of the UN mission has revealed that the bomb blast that killed de Mello and his colleagues was not a suicide attack but the result of a remote-controlled bomb placed in the van that was parked directly next to de Mello's office inside the U.S. military-controlled access zone. U.S. rescue teams were under orders not to excavate de Mello from the rubble of the Canal Hotel until after it was determined that he was dead.
The U.S. flag rank officer had met with de Mello on August 18. During the meeting, de Mello told the high-ranking U.S. Army officer that he was compiling evidence of U.S. troops in Iraq torturing Iraqi detainees. The Army officer relayed de Mello's concern up the chain-of-command. The next day, de Mello was dead, along with 21 members of his UN mission. A second bombing of the UN mission the following month resulted in the UN withdrawing its 600 member mission from Iraq. The authorization for the twin bombings of the UN mission came from the highest levels of the Bush White House, according to our source. However, in typical fashion, responsibility for the bombings came from "Al Qaeda's" chief in Iraq, Abu Musab Zarqawi.
Zarqawi was said to have been killed in a targeted precision-guided bombing of his safe house in Iraq by U.S. Air Force F-16s.
De Mello also expressed concern to the U.S. officer about outside actors involved in torture in Iraq, elements later identified as Israelis. The torture by U.S. forces of Iraqi detainees was not reported by the media until April 2004.
De Mello was the highest-ranking victim of a terrorist assassination since Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN mediator in Palestine, was killed by Zionist terrorists in 1948 and UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold's plane was shot down over Northern Rhodesia by Belgian mercenaries from Katanga that were linked to the CIA.
In 2008, the UN General Assembly voted to designate August 19 as World Humanitarian Day in honor of those UN workers who were killed in Baghdad. In light of the revelation that the Bush White House ordered the assassination of de Mello and members of his staff, the day should be known as World Humanitarian and Awareness of U.S. Sponsored Terrorism Day.
On August 19, 2003, at 5:37 pm, a van exploded at the Canal Hotel in Baghdad, the headquarters for the UN Peace Mission for Iraq. The blast ripped through a wall of the building causing a side of the building to collapse. Twenty-two UN employees were killed in the blast, blamed by the U.S. occupation forces and echoed by the corporate media on a suicide bombing. An additional 100 people inside the building, including U.S. military personnel, were injured. Trapped under the rubble but alive for a number of hours before he died of his injuries was Sergio Vieira de Mello, a Brazilian diplomat who was the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Other UN staff members killed in the blast included nationals of Egypt, Britain, Italy, United States, Spain, Canada, Iraq, Iran, Jordan, and the Philippines.
In an exclusive to WMR, a senior U.S. flag rank officer in Baghdad at the time of the bombing of the UN mission has revealed that the bomb blast that killed de Mello and his colleagues was not a suicide attack but the result of a remote-controlled bomb placed in the van that was parked directly next to de Mello's office inside the U.S. military-controlled access zone. U.S. rescue teams were under orders not to excavate de Mello from the rubble of the Canal Hotel until after it was determined that he was dead.
The U.S. flag rank officer had met with de Mello on August 18. During the meeting, de Mello told the high-ranking U.S. Army officer that he was compiling evidence of U.S. troops in Iraq torturing Iraqi detainees. The Army officer relayed de Mello's concern up the chain-of-command. The next day, de Mello was dead, along with 21 members of his UN mission. A second bombing of the UN mission the following month resulted in the UN withdrawing its 600 member mission from Iraq. The authorization for the twin bombings of the UN mission came from the highest levels of the Bush White House, according to our source. However, in typical fashion, responsibility for the bombings came from "Al Qaeda's" chief in Iraq, Abu Musab Zarqawi.
Zarqawi was said to have been killed in a targeted precision-guided bombing of his safe house in Iraq by U.S. Air Force F-16s.
De Mello also expressed concern to the U.S. officer about outside actors involved in torture in Iraq, elements later identified as Israelis. The torture by U.S. forces of Iraqi detainees was not reported by the media until April 2004.
De Mello was the highest-ranking victim of a terrorist assassination since Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN mediator in Palestine, was killed by Zionist terrorists in 1948 and UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold's plane was shot down over Northern Rhodesia by Belgian mercenaries from Katanga that were linked to the CIA.
In 2008, the UN General Assembly voted to designate August 19 as World Humanitarian Day in honor of those UN workers who were killed in Baghdad. In light of the revelation that the Bush White House ordered the assassination of de Mello and members of his staff, the day should be known as World Humanitarian and Awareness of U.S. Sponsored Terrorism Day.
Saturday, July 16, 2011
Action Alert, July 16th- Call State Dept Emergency Operations Center about Conditions on The Audacity of Hope!
Action Alert, July 16th-
Call State Dept Emergency Operations Center
about Conditions on The Audacity of Hope!
Contact:
Ann Wright 011 30 694 165 7310
Regina Carey 011 30 694 203 6296
Jenny Linnell 011 30 694 224 6648
Athens, July 16, 2011 - Day 16 of the imprisonment of the U.S. Boat to Gaza, The Audacity of Hope, at a U.S. Embassy shared pier near Piraeus, Greece, just outside of Athens.
The U.S. Embassy has done absolutely nothing to help us in 100 + degree heat at a U.S. Government shared pier! No shore power, no alternatives provided (like another pier). No consular visits to see the conditions for themselves. NOTHING, ABSOULTELY NOTHING!!!
This weekend, please call the State Department 202-647-4000 and ask for the 24 hour Emergency Operations Center. Tell them that 3 people are still enduring the inhumane, dangerous conditions on the boat.
All are women--2 Americans and 1 UK citizen. They are:
Regina Carey (http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2011/07/06/18683952.php) from San Rafael, California, is a consultant specializing in strategic planning and planned giving. In her lifetime commitment to human rights she has focused her time and energy to the Rights of the Indigenous (original people), Water Rights and Peace. She is a co-founder of the Black/Jewish Dialogue Group in Marin County, California. She has been an active participant in the World Social Forum and the UN Conference Against Racism (Durban, South Africa).
Crew member Jenny Linnell, is a British citizen from Devon, England, and was a Free Gaza crew member in 2008 on the first boat that broke the naval blockade of Gaza. She stayed in Gaza for a year and worked with the International Solidarity Movement. Her exit from Gaza into Egypt a year later took over 6 weeks because she had arrived by boat. She holds a "Day Skipper" license from the Royal Yachting Association and founded a sailing collective called "Learning the Ropes".
Ann Wright is a former U.S. diplomat with 16 years in the State Department and Deputy Chief of Mission (Deputy Ambassador) at 4 U..S Embassies (Sierra Leone, Micronesia, Afghanistan and Mongolia) and who got the State Department's award for Heroism for her actions protecting civilians during the civil war in Sierra Leone. She resigned in March, 2003 in opposition to Bush's war on Iraq.
Call State Dept Emergency Operations Center
about Conditions on The Audacity of Hope!
Contact:
Ann Wright 011 30 694 165 7310
Regina Carey 011 30 694 203 6296
Jenny Linnell 011 30 694 224 6648
Athens, July 16, 2011 - Day 16 of the imprisonment of the U.S. Boat to Gaza, The Audacity of Hope, at a U.S. Embassy shared pier near Piraeus, Greece, just outside of Athens.
The U.S. Embassy has done absolutely nothing to help us in 100 + degree heat at a U.S. Government shared pier! No shore power, no alternatives provided (like another pier). No consular visits to see the conditions for themselves. NOTHING, ABSOULTELY NOTHING!!!
This weekend, please call the State Department 202-647-4000 and ask for the 24 hour Emergency Operations Center. Tell them that 3 people are still enduring the inhumane, dangerous conditions on the boat.
All are women--2 Americans and 1 UK citizen. They are:
Regina Carey (http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2011/07/06/18683952.php) from San Rafael, California, is a consultant specializing in strategic planning and planned giving. In her lifetime commitment to human rights she has focused her time and energy to the Rights of the Indigenous (original people), Water Rights and Peace. She is a co-founder of the Black/Jewish Dialogue Group in Marin County, California. She has been an active participant in the World Social Forum and the UN Conference Against Racism (Durban, South Africa).
Crew member Jenny Linnell, is a British citizen from Devon, England, and was a Free Gaza crew member in 2008 on the first boat that broke the naval blockade of Gaza. She stayed in Gaza for a year and worked with the International Solidarity Movement. Her exit from Gaza into Egypt a year later took over 6 weeks because she had arrived by boat. She holds a "Day Skipper" license from the Royal Yachting Association and founded a sailing collective called "Learning the Ropes".
Ann Wright is a former U.S. diplomat with 16 years in the State Department and Deputy Chief of Mission (Deputy Ambassador) at 4 U..S Embassies (Sierra Leone, Micronesia, Afghanistan and Mongolia) and who got the State Department's award for Heroism for her actions protecting civilians during the civil war in Sierra Leone. She resigned in March, 2003 in opposition to Bush's war on Iraq.
Thursday, July 07, 2011
Bradley Manning, American Hero Four Reasons Why Pfc. Bradley Manning Deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Not a Prison Cell
By Chase Madar
We still don’t know if he did it or not, but if Bradley Manning, the 24-year-old Army private from Oklahoma, actually supplied WikiLeaks with its choicest material -- the Iraq War logs, the Afghan War logs, and the State Department cables -- which startled and riveted the world, then he deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom instead of a jail cell at Fort Leavenworth.
President Obama recently gave one of those medals to retiring Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who managed the two bloody, disastrous wars about which the WikiLeaks-released documents revealed so much. Is he really more deserving than the young private who, after almost ten years of mayhem and catastrophe, gave Americans -- and the world -- a far fuller sense of what our government is actually doing abroad?
Bradley Manning, awaiting a court martial in December, faces the prospect of long years in prison. He is charged with violating the Espionage Act of 1917. He has put his sanity and his freedom on the line so that Americans might know what our government has done -- and is still doing -- globally. He has blown the whistle on criminal violations of American military law. He has exposed our secretive government’s pathological over-classification of important public documents.
Here are four compelling reasons why, if he did what the government accuses him of doing, he deserves that medal, not jail time.
1: At great personal cost, Bradley Manning has given our foreign policy elite the public supervision it so badly needs.
In the past 10 years, American statecraft has moved from calamity to catastrophe, laying waste to other nations while never failing to damage our own national interests. Do we even need to be reminded that our self-defeating response to 9/11 in Iraq and Afghanistan (and Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia) has killed roughly 225,000 civilians and 6,000 American soldiers, while costing our country more than $3.2 trillion? We are hemorrhaging blood and money. Few outside Washington would argue that any of this is making America safer.
An employee who screwed up this badly would either be fired on the spot or put under heavy supervision. Downsizing our entire foreign policy establishment is not an option. However, the website WikiLeaks has at least tried to make public scrutiny of our self-destructive statesmen and -women a reality by exposing their work to ordinary citizens.
Consider our invasion of Iraq, a war based on distortions, government secrecy, and the complaisant failure of our major media to ask the important questions. But what if someone like Bradley Manning had provided the press with the necessary government documents, which would have made so much self-evident in the months before the war began? Might this not have prevented disaster? We’ll never know, of course, but could additional public scrutiny have been salutary under the circumstances?
Thanks to Bradley Manning’s alleged disclosures, we do have a sense of what did happen afterwards in Iraq and Afghanistan, and just how the U.S. operates in the world. Thanks to those disclosures, we now know just how Washington leaned on the Vatican to quell opposition to the Iraq War and just how it pressured the Germans to prevent them from prosecuting CIA agents who kidnapped an innocent man and shipped him off to be tortured abroad.
As our foreign policy threatens to careen into yet more disasters in Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, and Libya, we can only hope that more whistleblowers will follow the alleged example of Bradley Manning and release vital public documents before it’s too late. A foreign policy based on secrets and spin has manifestly failed us. In a democracy, the workings of our government should not be shrouded in an opaque cloud of secrecy. For bringing us the truth, for breaking the seal on that self-protective policy of secrecy, Bradley Manning deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
2: Knowledge is powerful. The WikiLeaks disclosures have helped spark democratic revolutions and reforms across the Middle East, accomplishing what Operation Iraqi Freedom never could.
Wasn’t it American policy to spread democracy in the Middle East, to extend our freedom to others, as both recent American presidents have insisted?
No single American has done more to help further this goal than Pfc. Bradley Manning. The chain reaction of democratic protests and uprisings that has swept Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Syria, Yemen, and even in a modest way Iraq, all began in Tunisia, where leaked U.S. State Department cables about the staggering corruption of the ruling Ben Ali dynasty helped trigger the rebellion. In all cases, these societies were smoldering with longstanding grievances against oppressive, incompetent governments and economies stifled by cronyism. The revelations from the WikiLeaks State Department documents played a widely acknowledged role in sparking these pro-democracy uprisings.
In Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, and Yemen, the people’s revolts under way have occurred despite U.S. support for their autocratic rulers. In each of these nations, in fact, we bankrolled the dictators, while helping to arm and train their militaries. The alliance with Mubarak’s autocratic state cost the U.S. more than $60 billion and did nothing for American security -- other than inspire terrorist blowback from radicalized Egyptians like Mohammad Atta and Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Even if U.S. policy was firmly on the wrong side of things, we should be proud that at least one American -- Bradley Manning -- was on the right side. If indeed he gave those documents to WikiLeaks, then he played a catalytic role in bringing about the Arab Spring, something neither Barack Obama nor former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates (that recent surprise recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom) could claim. Perhaps once the Egyptians consolidate their democracy, they, too, will award Manning their equivalent of such a medal.
3: Bradley Manning has exposed the pathological over-classification of America’s public documents.
“Secrecy is for losers,” as the late Senator and United Nations Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to say. If this is indeed the case, it would be hard to find a bigger loser than the U.S. government.
How pathological is our government’s addiction to secrecy? In June, the National Security Agency declassified documents from 1809, while the Department of Defense only last month declassified the Pentagon Papers, publicly available in book form these last four decades. Our government is only just now finishing its declassification of documents relating to World War I.
This would be ridiculous if it weren’t tragic. Ask the historians. Barton J. Bernstein, professor emeritus of history at Stanford University and a founder of its international relations program, describes the government’s classification of foreign-policy documents as “bizarre, arbitrary, and nonsensical.” George Herring, professor emeritus at the University of Kentucky and author of the encyclopedic From Colony to Superpower: A History of U.S. Foreign Policy, has chronicled how his delight at being appointed to a CIA advisory panel on declassification turned to disgust once he realized that he was being used as window dressing by an agency with no intention of opening its records, no matter how important or how old, to public scrutiny.
Any historian worth his salt would warn us that such over-classification is a leading cause of national amnesia and repetitive war disorder. If a society like ours doesn’t know its own history, it becomes the great power equivalent of a itinerant amnesiac, not knowing what it did yesterday or where it will end up tomorrow. Right now, classification is the disease of Washington, secrecy its mania, and dementia its end point. As an ostensibly democratic nation, we, its citizens, risk such ignorance at our national peril.
President Obama came into office promising a “sunshine” policy for his administration while singing the praises of whistleblowers. He has since launched the fiercest campaign against whistleblowers the republic has ever seen, and further plunged our foreign policy into the shadows. Challenging the classification of each tightly guarded document is, however, impossible. No organization has the resources to fight this fight, nor would they be likely to win right now. Absent a radical change in our government’s diplomatic and military bureaucracies, massive over-classification will only continue.
If we hope to know what our government is actually doing in our name globally, we need massive leaks from insider whistleblowers to journalists who can then sort out what we need to know, given that the government won’t. This, in fact, has been the modus operandi of WikiLeaks. Our whistleblower protection laws urgently need to catch up to this state of affairs, and though we are hardly there yet, Bradley Manning helped take us part of the way. He did what Barack Obama swore he would do on coming into office. For striking a blow against our government’s fanatical insistence on covering its mistakes and errors with blanket secrecy, Bradley Manning deserves not punishment, but the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
4. At immense personal cost, Bradley Manning has upheld a great American tradition of transparency in statecraft and for that he should be an American hero, not an American felon.
Bradley Manning is only the latest in a long line of whistleblowers in and out of uniform who have risked everything to put our country back on the right path.
Take Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the Pentagon Papers, a Pentagon-commissioned secret history of the Vietnam War and the official lies and distortions that the government used to sell it. Many of the documents it included were classed at a much higher security clearance than anything Bradley Manning is accused of releasing -- and yet Ellsberg was not convicted of a single crime and became a national hero.
Given the era when all this went down, it’s forgivable to assume that Ellsberg must have been a hippie who somehow sneaked into the Pentagon archives, beads and patchouli trailing behind him. What many no longer realize is that Ellsberg had been a model U.S. Marine. First in his class at officer training school at Quantico, he deferred graduate school at Harvard to remain on active duty in the Marine Corps. Ellsberg saw his high-risk exposure of the disastrous and deceitful nature of the Vietnam War as fully consonant with his long career of patriotic service in and out of uniform.
And Ellsberg is hardly alone. Ask Lt. Colonel (ret.) Darrel Vandeveld. Or Tom Drake, formerly of the National Security Agency.
Transparency in statecraft was not invented last week by WikiLeaks creator Julian Assange. It is a longstanding American tradition. James Madison put the matter succinctly: “A popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or, perhaps both.”
A 1960 Congressional Committee on Government Operations report caught the same spirit: “Secrecy -- the first refuge of incompetents -- must be at a bare minimum in a democratic society… Those elected or appointed to positions of executive authority must recognize that government, in a democracy, cannot be wiser than the people.” John F. Kennedy made the same point in 1961: “The very word ‘secrecy’ is repugnant in a free and open society.” Hugo Black, great Alabaman justice of the twentieth-century Supreme Court had this to say: “The guarding of military and diplomatic secrets at the expense of informed representative government provides no real security for our Republic.” And the first of World-War-I-era president Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points couldn’t have been more explicit: “Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.”
We need to know what our government’s commitments are, as our foreign policy elites have clearly demonstrated they cannot be left to their own devices. Based on the last decade of carnage and folly, without public debate -- and aggressive media investigations -- we have every reason to expect more of the same.
If there’s anything to learn from that decade, it’s that government secrecy and lies come at a very high price in blood and money. Thanks to the whistleblowing revelations attributed to Bradley Manning, we at least have a far clearer picture of the problems we face in trying to supervise our own government. If he was the one responsible for the WikiLeaks revelations, then for his gift to the republic, purchased at great price, he deserves not prison, but a Presidential Medal of Freedom and the heartfelt gratitude of his country.
Chase Madar is a lawyer in New York and a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books, the American Conservative magazine, CounterPunch.org, and Le Monde Diplomatique. His next book, The Passion of Bradley Manning, will be published by O/R Books this fall. He is covering the Bradley Manning case and trial for TomDispatch.com. To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which Madar discusses the Manning case, click here, or download it to your iPod here.
Copyright 2011 Chase Madar
We still don’t know if he did it or not, but if Bradley Manning, the 24-year-old Army private from Oklahoma, actually supplied WikiLeaks with its choicest material -- the Iraq War logs, the Afghan War logs, and the State Department cables -- which startled and riveted the world, then he deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom instead of a jail cell at Fort Leavenworth.
President Obama recently gave one of those medals to retiring Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who managed the two bloody, disastrous wars about which the WikiLeaks-released documents revealed so much. Is he really more deserving than the young private who, after almost ten years of mayhem and catastrophe, gave Americans -- and the world -- a far fuller sense of what our government is actually doing abroad?
Bradley Manning, awaiting a court martial in December, faces the prospect of long years in prison. He is charged with violating the Espionage Act of 1917. He has put his sanity and his freedom on the line so that Americans might know what our government has done -- and is still doing -- globally. He has blown the whistle on criminal violations of American military law. He has exposed our secretive government’s pathological over-classification of important public documents.
Here are four compelling reasons why, if he did what the government accuses him of doing, he deserves that medal, not jail time.
1: At great personal cost, Bradley Manning has given our foreign policy elite the public supervision it so badly needs.
In the past 10 years, American statecraft has moved from calamity to catastrophe, laying waste to other nations while never failing to damage our own national interests. Do we even need to be reminded that our self-defeating response to 9/11 in Iraq and Afghanistan (and Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia) has killed roughly 225,000 civilians and 6,000 American soldiers, while costing our country more than $3.2 trillion? We are hemorrhaging blood and money. Few outside Washington would argue that any of this is making America safer.
An employee who screwed up this badly would either be fired on the spot or put under heavy supervision. Downsizing our entire foreign policy establishment is not an option. However, the website WikiLeaks has at least tried to make public scrutiny of our self-destructive statesmen and -women a reality by exposing their work to ordinary citizens.
Consider our invasion of Iraq, a war based on distortions, government secrecy, and the complaisant failure of our major media to ask the important questions. But what if someone like Bradley Manning had provided the press with the necessary government documents, which would have made so much self-evident in the months before the war began? Might this not have prevented disaster? We’ll never know, of course, but could additional public scrutiny have been salutary under the circumstances?
Thanks to Bradley Manning’s alleged disclosures, we do have a sense of what did happen afterwards in Iraq and Afghanistan, and just how the U.S. operates in the world. Thanks to those disclosures, we now know just how Washington leaned on the Vatican to quell opposition to the Iraq War and just how it pressured the Germans to prevent them from prosecuting CIA agents who kidnapped an innocent man and shipped him off to be tortured abroad.
As our foreign policy threatens to careen into yet more disasters in Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, and Libya, we can only hope that more whistleblowers will follow the alleged example of Bradley Manning and release vital public documents before it’s too late. A foreign policy based on secrets and spin has manifestly failed us. In a democracy, the workings of our government should not be shrouded in an opaque cloud of secrecy. For bringing us the truth, for breaking the seal on that self-protective policy of secrecy, Bradley Manning deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
2: Knowledge is powerful. The WikiLeaks disclosures have helped spark democratic revolutions and reforms across the Middle East, accomplishing what Operation Iraqi Freedom never could.
Wasn’t it American policy to spread democracy in the Middle East, to extend our freedom to others, as both recent American presidents have insisted?
No single American has done more to help further this goal than Pfc. Bradley Manning. The chain reaction of democratic protests and uprisings that has swept Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Syria, Yemen, and even in a modest way Iraq, all began in Tunisia, where leaked U.S. State Department cables about the staggering corruption of the ruling Ben Ali dynasty helped trigger the rebellion. In all cases, these societies were smoldering with longstanding grievances against oppressive, incompetent governments and economies stifled by cronyism. The revelations from the WikiLeaks State Department documents played a widely acknowledged role in sparking these pro-democracy uprisings.
In Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, and Yemen, the people’s revolts under way have occurred despite U.S. support for their autocratic rulers. In each of these nations, in fact, we bankrolled the dictators, while helping to arm and train their militaries. The alliance with Mubarak’s autocratic state cost the U.S. more than $60 billion and did nothing for American security -- other than inspire terrorist blowback from radicalized Egyptians like Mohammad Atta and Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Even if U.S. policy was firmly on the wrong side of things, we should be proud that at least one American -- Bradley Manning -- was on the right side. If indeed he gave those documents to WikiLeaks, then he played a catalytic role in bringing about the Arab Spring, something neither Barack Obama nor former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates (that recent surprise recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom) could claim. Perhaps once the Egyptians consolidate their democracy, they, too, will award Manning their equivalent of such a medal.
3: Bradley Manning has exposed the pathological over-classification of America’s public documents.
“Secrecy is for losers,” as the late Senator and United Nations Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to say. If this is indeed the case, it would be hard to find a bigger loser than the U.S. government.
How pathological is our government’s addiction to secrecy? In June, the National Security Agency declassified documents from 1809, while the Department of Defense only last month declassified the Pentagon Papers, publicly available in book form these last four decades. Our government is only just now finishing its declassification of documents relating to World War I.
This would be ridiculous if it weren’t tragic. Ask the historians. Barton J. Bernstein, professor emeritus of history at Stanford University and a founder of its international relations program, describes the government’s classification of foreign-policy documents as “bizarre, arbitrary, and nonsensical.” George Herring, professor emeritus at the University of Kentucky and author of the encyclopedic From Colony to Superpower: A History of U.S. Foreign Policy, has chronicled how his delight at being appointed to a CIA advisory panel on declassification turned to disgust once he realized that he was being used as window dressing by an agency with no intention of opening its records, no matter how important or how old, to public scrutiny.
Any historian worth his salt would warn us that such over-classification is a leading cause of national amnesia and repetitive war disorder. If a society like ours doesn’t know its own history, it becomes the great power equivalent of a itinerant amnesiac, not knowing what it did yesterday or where it will end up tomorrow. Right now, classification is the disease of Washington, secrecy its mania, and dementia its end point. As an ostensibly democratic nation, we, its citizens, risk such ignorance at our national peril.
President Obama came into office promising a “sunshine” policy for his administration while singing the praises of whistleblowers. He has since launched the fiercest campaign against whistleblowers the republic has ever seen, and further plunged our foreign policy into the shadows. Challenging the classification of each tightly guarded document is, however, impossible. No organization has the resources to fight this fight, nor would they be likely to win right now. Absent a radical change in our government’s diplomatic and military bureaucracies, massive over-classification will only continue.
If we hope to know what our government is actually doing in our name globally, we need massive leaks from insider whistleblowers to journalists who can then sort out what we need to know, given that the government won’t. This, in fact, has been the modus operandi of WikiLeaks. Our whistleblower protection laws urgently need to catch up to this state of affairs, and though we are hardly there yet, Bradley Manning helped take us part of the way. He did what Barack Obama swore he would do on coming into office. For striking a blow against our government’s fanatical insistence on covering its mistakes and errors with blanket secrecy, Bradley Manning deserves not punishment, but the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
4. At immense personal cost, Bradley Manning has upheld a great American tradition of transparency in statecraft and for that he should be an American hero, not an American felon.
Bradley Manning is only the latest in a long line of whistleblowers in and out of uniform who have risked everything to put our country back on the right path.
Take Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the Pentagon Papers, a Pentagon-commissioned secret history of the Vietnam War and the official lies and distortions that the government used to sell it. Many of the documents it included were classed at a much higher security clearance than anything Bradley Manning is accused of releasing -- and yet Ellsberg was not convicted of a single crime and became a national hero.
Given the era when all this went down, it’s forgivable to assume that Ellsberg must have been a hippie who somehow sneaked into the Pentagon archives, beads and patchouli trailing behind him. What many no longer realize is that Ellsberg had been a model U.S. Marine. First in his class at officer training school at Quantico, he deferred graduate school at Harvard to remain on active duty in the Marine Corps. Ellsberg saw his high-risk exposure of the disastrous and deceitful nature of the Vietnam War as fully consonant with his long career of patriotic service in and out of uniform.
And Ellsberg is hardly alone. Ask Lt. Colonel (ret.) Darrel Vandeveld. Or Tom Drake, formerly of the National Security Agency.
Transparency in statecraft was not invented last week by WikiLeaks creator Julian Assange. It is a longstanding American tradition. James Madison put the matter succinctly: “A popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or, perhaps both.”
A 1960 Congressional Committee on Government Operations report caught the same spirit: “Secrecy -- the first refuge of incompetents -- must be at a bare minimum in a democratic society… Those elected or appointed to positions of executive authority must recognize that government, in a democracy, cannot be wiser than the people.” John F. Kennedy made the same point in 1961: “The very word ‘secrecy’ is repugnant in a free and open society.” Hugo Black, great Alabaman justice of the twentieth-century Supreme Court had this to say: “The guarding of military and diplomatic secrets at the expense of informed representative government provides no real security for our Republic.” And the first of World-War-I-era president Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points couldn’t have been more explicit: “Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.”
We need to know what our government’s commitments are, as our foreign policy elites have clearly demonstrated they cannot be left to their own devices. Based on the last decade of carnage and folly, without public debate -- and aggressive media investigations -- we have every reason to expect more of the same.
If there’s anything to learn from that decade, it’s that government secrecy and lies come at a very high price in blood and money. Thanks to the whistleblowing revelations attributed to Bradley Manning, we at least have a far clearer picture of the problems we face in trying to supervise our own government. If he was the one responsible for the WikiLeaks revelations, then for his gift to the republic, purchased at great price, he deserves not prison, but a Presidential Medal of Freedom and the heartfelt gratitude of his country.
Chase Madar is a lawyer in New York and a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books, the American Conservative magazine, CounterPunch.org, and Le Monde Diplomatique. His next book, The Passion of Bradley Manning, will be published by O/R Books this fall. He is covering the Bradley Manning case and trial for TomDispatch.com. To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which Madar discusses the Manning case, click here, or download it to your iPod here.
Copyright 2011 Chase Madar
Sunday, July 03, 2011
Saturday, July 02, 2011
Libya: Unending American hostility
The American media has done its best to dismiss or ignore Libyan charges that NATO/US missiles have been killing civilians (the people they're supposedly protecting), at least up until the recent bombing "error" that was too blatant to be covered up. But who in the mainstream media has questioned the NATO/US charges that Libya was targeting and "massacring" Libyan civilians a few months ago, which, we've been told, is the reason for the Western powers attacks? Don't look to Al Jazeera for such questioning. The government of Qatar, which owns the station, has a deep-seated animosity toward Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and was itself a leading purveyor of the Libyan "massacre" stories, as well as playing a military role in the war against Tripoli. Al Jazeera's reporting on the subject has been so disgraceful I've stopped looking at the station.
Alain Juppé, Foreign Minister of France, which has been the leading force behind the attacks on Libya, spoke at the Brookings Institution in Washington on June 7. After his talk he was asked a question from the audience by local activist Ken Meyercord:
"An American observer of events in Libya has commented: 'The evidence was not persuasive that a large-scale massacre or genocide was either likely or imminent.' That comment was made by Richard Haass, President of our Council on Foreign Relations. If Mr. Haass is right, and he's a fairly knowledgeable fellow, then what NATO has done in Libya is attack a country that wasn't threatening anyone; in other words, aggression. Are you at all concerned that as NATO deals more and more death and destruction on the people of Libya that the International Criminal Court may decide that you and your friends in the Naked Aggression Treaty Organization should be prosecuted rather than Mr. Gaddafi?"Monsieur Juppé then stated, without attribution, somebody's estimate that 15,000 Libyan civilians had been killed by pro-Gaddafi forces. To which Mr. Meyercord replied: "So where are the 15,000 bodies?" M. Juppé failed to respond to this, although in the tumult caused bt the first question, it was not certain that he had heard the second one. (For a counter-view of the Libyan "massacre" stories, see this video.)
It should be noted that, as of June 30, NATO had flown 13,184 air missions (sorties) over Libya, 4,963 of which are described as strike sorties. You can find the latest figures on the Allied Command Operations website.
If any foreign power fired missiles at the United States would Barack Obama regard that as an act of war? If the US firing hundreds of missiles at Libya is not an act of war, as Obama insists (to avoid having to declare war as required by US law), then the deaths resulting from the missile attacks are murder. That's it. It's either war or murder. To the extent there's a difference between the two.
It should be further noted that since Gaddafi came to power in 1969 there has virtually never been a sustained period when the United States has been prepared to treat him and the many positive changes he's instituted in Libya and Africa with any respect. For a history of this hostility, including the continual lies and scare campaigns, see my Libya chapter in Killing Hope.
America and its perpetual quest for love
Why can't we "get some of the people in these downtrodden countries to like us instead of hating us."The United States is still wondering, and is no closer to an understanding than Good Ol' Ike was almost 60 years ago. American leaders still believe what Frances Fitzgerald observed in her study of American history textbooks: "According to these books, the United States had been a kind of Salvation Army to the rest of the world: throughout history, it had done little but dispense benefits to poor, ignorant, and diseased countries. ... the United States always acted in a disinterested fashion, always from the highest of motives; it gave, never took." 2
– President Dwight D.Eisenhower, in a March,1953 National Security Council Meeting 1
In 2007 I wrote in this report about the US military in Iraq:
I almost feel sorry for them. They're "can-do" Americans, accustomed to getting their way, accustomed to thinking of themselves as the best, and they're frustrated as hell, unable to figure out "why they hate us", why we can't win them over, why we can't at least wipe them out. Don't they want freedom and democracy? ... They're can-do Americans, using good ol' American know-how and Madison Avenue savvy, sales campaigns, public relations, advertising, selling the US brand, just like they do it back home; employing psychologists and anthropologists ... and nothing helps. And how can it if the product you're selling is toxic, inherently, from birth, if you're totally ruining your customers' lives, with no regard for any kind of law or morality, health or environment. They're can-do Americans, accustomed to playing by the rules — theirs; and they're frustrated as hell.Here now the Google Cavalry rides up on its silver horse. Through its think tank, Google Ideas (or "think/do tank"), the company paid for 80 former Muslim extremists, neo-Nazis, U.S. gang members and other former radicals to gather in Dublin June 26-28 ("Summit Against Violent Extremism", or SAVE) to explore how technology can play a role in "de-radicalization" efforts around the globe. Now is that not Can-do ambitious?
The "formers," as they have been dubbed by Google, will be surrounded by 120 thinkers, activists, philanthropists and business leaders. The goal is to dissect the question of what draws some people, particularly young people, to extremist movements and why some of them leave.
The person in charge of this project is Jared Cohen, who spent four years on the State Department's Policy Planning staff, and is soon to be an adjunct fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), focusing on counter-radicalization, innovation, technology, and statecraft. 3
So ... it's "violent extremism" that's the big mystery, the target for all these intellectuals to figure out. ... Why does violent extremism attract so many young people all over the world? Or, of more importance probably to the State Department and CFR types: Why do violent extremists single out the United States as their target of choice?
Readers of this report do not need to be enlightened as to the latter question. There is simply an abundance of terrible things US foreign policy has done in every corner of the world. As to what attracts young people to violent extremism, consider this: What makes a million young Americans willing to travel to places like Afghanistan and Iraq to risk their life and limbs to kill other young people, who have never done them any harm, and to commit unspeakable atrocities and tortures?
Is this not extreme behavior? Can these young Americans not be called "extremists" or "radicals"? Are they not violent? Do the Google experts understand their behavior? If not, how will they ever understand the foreign Muslim extremists? Are the experts prepared to examine the underlying phenomenon — the deep-seated belief in "American exceptionalism" drilled into every cell and nerve ganglion of American consciousness from pre-kindergarten on? Do the esteemed experts then have to wonder about those who believe in "Muslim exceptionalism"?
This just in! American leaders do have feelings!
Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai's criticism of US and NATO forces in his country grows more angry and confrontational with each passing week. Recently, US Ambassador Karl Eikenberry was moved to reply to him: "When Americans, who are serving in your country at great cost — in terms of lives and treasure — hear themselves compared with occupiers, told that they are only here to advance their own interest, and likened to the brutal enemies of the Afghan people ... they are filled with confusion and grow weary of our effort here. ... We begin to lose our inspiration to carry on."That certainly may apply to many of the soldiers in the field. But oh, if only American military and political leaders could really be so offended and insulted by what's said about them and their many wars.
Eikenberry — who has served in Afghanistan a total of five years as a senior US Army general and then as ambassador — warned that if Afghan leaders reach the point where they "believe that we are doing more harm than good," then Americans may "reach a point that we feel our soldiers and civilians are being asked to sacrifice without a just cause," and "the American people will ask for our forces to come home."
Well, if Eikenberry is really interested, a June 8 BBC World News America/Harris Poll found that 52% of Americans believe that the United States should move to get its troops out of Afghanistan "now", with only 35% believing that the troops should stay; while a Pew Research Center poll of mid-June showed 56% of Americans favor an "immediate" pullout.
"America has never sought to occupy any nation in the world," the ambassador continued. "We are a good people." 4
How nice. Reminds me of US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, after the 1999 78-day bombing of the helpless people of the former Yugoslavia, a war crime largely instigated by herself, when she declared: "The United States is good. We try to do our best everywhere." 5
Do these grownups really believe what comes out of their mouths? Does Mr. Eikenberry actually think that "America has never sought to occupy any nation in the world"? Sixty-six years after World War II ended, the United States still has major bases in Germany and Japan; 58 years after the end of the Korean War, tens of thousands of American armed forces continue to be stationed in South Korea; for over a century, the United States has occupied Guantanamo Bay in Cuba against the fervent wishes of the Cuban people. And what other term shall we use to describe the American presence in Iraq for more than eight years? And Afghanistan for almost ten?
George W. Bush had no doubt: The Iraqis are "not happy they're occupied," he said. "I wouldn't be happy if I were occupied either." 6
However, the current Republican leader in the House, John Boehner appears to be a true believer. "The United States has never proposed establishing a permanent base in Iraq or anywhere else," he affirmed a few years ago. 7
If 18th century Americans could resent occupation by the British, when many of the Americans were British themselves, then how much easier to understand the resentment of Iraqis and Afghans toward foreign occupiers.
An excerpt from William Blum's memoir of the 1960s-1970s: West-Bloc Dissident
What our natural enemies didn't do to us, we naturally did to ourselves, as did many of the other underground newspapers and movement groups in the '60s: disagreements developed, factions formed, and, eventually, a split that rent the organization hopelessly in two — the left's traditional circular firing squad.Putting it in the broadest terms, there were two species of activists in these large dysfunctional families who kept bumping heads, here, there, and everywhere. We can call them the "politicos" and the "yippies" (subspecies: hippies, anarchists).
The politicos placed their faith in organization and in the intellect — a mass movement, "vanguard" political parties, hierarchies and leaders, heavy on meetings, ideology, and tracts, at times doctrinaire sounding, using words and ideas to convince the great middle class, if not the great unwashed. There were theories to justify these tactics, theories based on class analysis, presented with historical annotation to certify their viability; theories that Norman Mailer disparagingly referred to as "the sound-as-brickwork-logic-of-the-next-step in some hard new Left program."
The yippies looked upon all this with unconcealed impatience, scorn, and unbelief. Said a yippie to a politico back then: your protest is so narrow, your rhetoric so boring, your ideological power plays so old fashioned ...
Let's listen to Jerry Rubin, certainly the yippies' most articulate spokesperson:
The long-haired beast, smoking pot, evading the draft, and stopping traffic during demonstrations is a hell of a more a threat to the system than the so-called "politicos" with their leaflets of support for the Vietcong and the coming working class revolution. Politics is how you live your life, not whom you vote for or whom you support.The most important political conflict in the United States for Rubin was not of classes, but "the generational conflict". "The respectable middle-class debates LBJ while we try to pull down his pants."
Is [American society] interested in reform, or is it just interested in eliminating nuisance? What's needed is a new generation of nuisances. A new generation of people who are freaky, crazy, irrational, sexy, angry, irreligious, childish, and mad ... people who burn draft cards, people who burn dollar bills, people who burn MA and doctoral degrees, people who say: "To hell with your goals", people who proudly carry Vietcong flags, people who re-define reality, who re-define the norm, people who see property as theft, people who say "fuck" on television, people who break with the status-role-title-consumer game, people who have nothing material to lose but their bodies ... What the socialists like the SWP and the Communist Party, with their conversions of Marxism into a natural science, fail to understand is that language does not radicalize people — what changes people is the emotional involvement of action.Hardly anyone, of course, fit precisely and solely into either of these classifications, including Jerry Rubin. Much of the yippie "party line" was to be taken metaphorically, unless one's alienation had reached the level of an alien, while most politicos were independent of any political party.
Ray Mungo, one of the founders of Liberation News Service, later wrote of LNS:
It is impossible for me to describe our "ideology," for we simply didn't have one; we never subscribed to a code of conduct or a clearly conceptualized Ideal Society ... And it was the introduction of formal ideology into the group which eventually destroyed it, or more properly split it into bitterly warring camps.When Mungo speaks of "formal ideology", he's referring to the "politicos" who joined LNS after its inception. These people, whom he refers to as "the Vulgar Marxists", as opposed to his own "anarchist" camp ...
believed fervently in "the revolution", and were working toward it — a revolution based on Marx and Lenin and Cuba and SDS and "the struggle"; and people were supported only on the basis of what they were worth to the revolution; and most of the things in life which were purely enjoyable were bourgeois comforts irrelevant to the news service, although not absolutely barred. ... Their method of running the news service was the Meeting and the Vote, ours was Magic. We lived on Magic, and still do, and I have to say it beats anything systematic."Mungo would have one believe that ideology is a "thing" introduced from the "outside", like tuberculosis, that is best to avoid. I would argue, however, that "ideology" is nothing less than a system of ideas in one's head, whether consciously organized or not, that attempts to answer the questions: Why is the world the way it is? Why is society the way it is? Why are people the way they are? And what can be done to change any of this? To say you have no ideology comes dangerously close to saying that you have no opinions on — and perhaps no interest in — such questions. Ray Mungo, I believe, was overreacting to people whom he saw as too systematic and who didn't appreciate his "Magic".
Just as I knew instinctively that I wasn't a Quaker or a pacifist, I knew I wasn't a yippie, hippie or anarchist, which didn't mean that I couldn't enjoy and even take part in some of their antics. Jerry Rubin was mistaken in my case, as in many others — language, spoken and print, had played a major role in my radicalization; equally indispensable had been the sad state of the world, but it was language which had illuminated and brought home to me the sad state of the world and proffered explanations for why it was the way it was.
During the American Revolution, Thomas Paine's Common Sense, which sold hundreds of thousands of copies in the first few months of 1776, used language suffused with both reason and emotion to argue powerfully the case for independence, to strike convincingly at one of the greatest obstacles to separation: American veneration of royalty; and to point out that beyond the politics and legalities of the conflict, the colonies were sources of profit the crown would never voluntarily relinquish. This message clarified the revolution for thousands of confused rebels who had been debating points of law with London. Imagine if Paine had been a yippie instead of a politico — his primary message might have been to pull down the king's pants.
It was the movement's politicos who stayed the course, continuing to be activists well past the '60s, while Rubin's long-haired beast and Mungo's Magic people — lacking the convictions of their courage — could more likely be found in the '70s sitting cross-legged at the feet of the newest-flavor guru, probing interpersonal relations instead of international relations, or seeking fulfillment through vegetarianism, "the land", or Rolfing. By the '80s they had evolved into yuppies.
Notes
- New York Times, August 10, 2003 ↩
- Frances Fitzgerald, America Revised (1980), pp.129, 139 ↩
- Foreign Policy, "State Department Innovator Goes to Google", September 7 2010; Washington Post, June 24, 2011 ↩
- Washington Post, June 19, 2011↩
- Washington Post, October 23, 1999 ↩
- Washington Post, April 14, 2004 ↩
- United Press International, July 26, 2007 ↩
William Blum is the author of:
- Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2
- Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower
- West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir
- Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire
Friday, July 01, 2011
Napoleon "Sarkonaparte's" neo-colonialist designs for Africa
The NATO war on Libya is largely the brainchild of the ideological descendant of Napoleon Bonaparte, the "little Corsican." The "little Hungarian" Nicolas Sarkozy has now violated the UN Security Council's Resolution 1973 by directly providing Libyan rebels battling the central government forces of Muammar Qaddafi with weapons.
Sarkozy's move on Libya, has the not-so-secret backing of Israel via the private "shuttle diplomacy" of Sarkozy's friend Bernard-Henri Levy, an ardent Zionist who knows that one of the proposed homes for the Zionist state was in the Green Mountains in Cyrenaica, near Benghazi. Levy, who was born into a Sephardic Jewish colonialist household in French Algeria, bears the unmistakable and common "pied-noir" brand of antipathy toward Arabs. Levy negotiated a 30-year lease for an Israeli base in eastern Libya from the rebel National Transitional Council and a promise of recognition of Israeli by the rebels if they gain control of Tripoli. The goal of Levy and Sarkozy is to bring Libya into a neo-colonialist French African realm that will not only consolidate the French hold on the former French African colonies but expand French influence into Libya, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
After French forces invaded Ivory Coast to depose President Laurent Gbagbo in favor of their hand-chosen candidate Alassane Ouattara, a former deputy director of the International Monetary Fund and former governor of the Central Bank of Western African States, the contrivance that mints and circulates the Communauté financière d'Afrique franc (CFA franc), Sarkozy and the French military assigned French officers to "assist" Ouattara in governing Ivory Coast. The CFA franc is the neo-colonialist monetary unit that France uses to dominate the economies and political affairs of Ivory Coast, Benin, Togo, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, and Guinea-Bissau.
French and French-backed troops of Ouattara's "Republican Forces of Cote d'Ivoire" now guard Gbagbo and his top ex-government officials who are being held under arrest by Ouattara's government. The Ouattara government is considering asking the International Criminal Court, which has indicted and issued arrest warrants for Qaddafi and his son Seif al Islam al-Qaddafi, to also indict Gbagbo. However, no one is asking for the indictment of Ouattara, whose forces have killed some 95 Ivorians since April when the civil war between Ouattara and Gbagbo ended. Many Gbagbo supporters form the south of the country remain in exile in Liberia and Togo, fearful to return lest they face retribution from Ouattara's thugs from the north of the country. Sarkozy and French billionaires Martin Bouygues and Rothschild bank alumnus Vincent Bollore attended Ouatarra's swearing -in ceremony in May. Meanwhile, French military officers are re-organizing Ivory Coast's armed forces to purge Gbagbo supporters and make the force compatible with NATO and the US Africa Command (AFRICOM), the command that will eventually re-colonize Africa for NATO. The French invasion and occupation of Ivory Coast had the support of the UN, ,much as the NATO attack on Libya has been done with the cover of UN support.
French Prime Minister Francois Fillon is die in Ivory Coast in July 14, French Bastille Day, to consolidate Paris's hold over the country.
The Undersecretary General of the UN for Political Affairs is Lynn Pascoe, whose foreign service career in Beijing, Moscow, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, and Taipei suggests ties to the CIA, has been a champion of Ouattara and the Libyan rebel forces.
Ouattara's wife, Dominique Folloroux-Ouattara, like Bernard-Henri Levy, was born into a Jewish pied-noir French colonial family in Algeria, owns AICI of Paris, a property management company with real estate holdings in Ivory Coast, Gabon, Burkina Faso (where Alassane Ouattara was born), and Cannes. AICI is also the North American franchisee for Jacques Dessange beauty salons and products. As the property manager for long-time Ivory Coast President Felix Houphouet-Boigny, Folloroux was believed to have also been his mistress. After Houphouet-Boigny, who died in 1993, became feeble, Folloroux married Ouattara in 1991 in Paris. The wedding was attended by none other than the billionaire friend of Sarkozy, Martin Bouygues. What is of major interest to the billionaires who support Sarkozy is Ivory Coast's huge cocoa industry. For Folloroux-Ouattara's Zionist friends, the interest in Ivory Coast has to do less with chocolate bars and more with gold bars and diamonds.
Ivorian and Libyan sources have told WMR that what helped trigger the French-backed military invasions of Ivory Coast and Libya, which the French have now escalated to include weapons deliveries to Libyan rebel forces, was the support by Gbagbo for Qaddafi's plan to establish a gold-backed African currency unit that would replace the Paris-controlled CFA franc in its former West African colonies. Sarkozy and his billionaire and Zionist friends became alarmed at the prospect and Levy was dispatched to meet with the rebels and secure early French recognition, the first by any nation, for their Benghazi-based "government."
One of those interested in the Qaddafi idea was Philippine-Henri Dacoury-Tably, the former Ivorian governor of the Central Bank of West Afrucan States, the post previously held by Ouattara. Dacoury-Tabley now finds himself imprisoned and charged by Ouattara's government with "infractions against private banks and the Central Bank of West Africa." It is obvious that the worst "crime" against the international bankers was to unhinge West Africa's economy from the Rothschild banking houses of Paris, London, and New York. The threat to the banks is also part of the reason why Qaddafi is under attack by the very countries where the Rothschild banks dominate: France, Britain, Italy, Sweden, and the United States -- with Israel smiling in the background.
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