Yearly Archives: 2014

ISIS Beheadings on Cue from US & UK?

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By Finian Cunningham

Source: The 4th Media

The gruesome beheading of a British aid worker by the ISIS terror group in Syria over the weekend provoked a stern warning from Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron who vowed to “hunt down the murderers” for their “act of pure evil”.

The British victim was named as David Haines, a 44-year-old aid worker, who had been held hostage in Syria for many months. A graphic video released by his killers shows Haines kneeling on the ground dressed in an orange jumpsuit as a masked executioner severs his throat with a knife. The dead man’s prone body is then filmed with a decapitated, bloody head placed on the corpse’s back.

Some analysts have disputed the veracity of the video, saying it is a fake. But Haine’s foreboding demeanor and his final words spoken to the camera tend to verify the recording as genuine. The British government has also stated that it believes the footage to be authentic.

Haines was the third Westerner to be apparently murdered by the ISIS militants in the past four weeks using the same macabre ritual.Earlier this month, on September 3, a video showed American journalist Steven Sotloff also being decapitated in the same grisly manner. Two weeks before that, another abducted American citizen, James Foley, also a journalist, met the same grim fate at the hands of his captors.

A fourth man, another British national named as Alan Hemming, is feared to be the next ISIS victim, with unconfirmed video footage of his execution also posted this weekend.

The shocking scenes of brutality have sparked public outrage in the US and around the world. President Barack Obama addressed the nation in a prime-time television broadcast last week in which he declared that American forces would track down and destroy the ISIS terrorists. The group is also known by the alternative acronyms IS or ISIL, referring ostensibly to an aspired fundamentalist Islamic caliphate that incorporates Iraq and Syria.

At the same time that Obama was addressing the nation, US secretary of state John Kerry was in the Middle East drumming up support for an American-led international coalition to launch military strikes against ISIS, whose strongholds are in northern Iraq straddling the border with eastern Syria.

ISIS has been a prominent force among a myriad of militant cohorts that have been waging war against the Syrian state since March 2011. There is substantial evidence that Western governments have been covertly supporting ISIS and other extremists under the guise of assisting the “moderate rebels” for the ultimate purpose of destabilizing the Assad government of Syria and regime change. Assad is a staunch ally of Russia and Iran, and therefore is in the Western crosshairs for regime change.

But latterly ISIS has gained notoriety for its kidnapping and murder of Western citizens.

The newly formed US-led coalition against ISIS includes 10 Arab countries comprising Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan as well as the Persian Gulf kingdoms of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman.

Paradoxically, it may seem, Saudi Arabia and Qatar have been accused of being leading financial sponsors of the extremist groups fighting in Syria, including ISIS. But this link is not so paradoxical when the covert Western-designated role of the terror group is understood, as we shall see.

Washington has also, not surprisingly, garnered the support of Britain, France, Germany, Canada and Australia for its supposed anti-ISIS coalition.

A meeting this week in Paris will allegedly firm up military tactics on how the US-led coalition will carry out its putative strikes. So far, Washington has said that it will not be committing ground troops as in the previous Iraq War (2003-2012) and the ongoing US-led campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Obama said the modus operandi against ISIS would be like its “counter-terror operations in Yemen and Somalia”, where US air power is assisted by “partners on the ground”.

The fledgling Iraqi government of Prime Minister Haider al Abadi has welcomed the US air strikes. Since last month, American warplanes have launched nearly 150 bombing raids on suspected ISIS positions in northern Iraq. Last week saw the widening of these US air strikes to include western Iraq near Haditha. Because of Baghdad’s approval, the US-led coalition has legal cover to operate in Iraq. But this is not the case in neighboring Syria.

The Syrian government of President Bashar al Assad has not given its consent to the American plans, nor has it been consulted. Washington claims that Assad has no legitimacy or right to sovereignty because it alleges his “regime” has been repressing the civilian population – a claim that is contradicted by the re-election of Assad as president in June with a massive 88.7 per cent majority based on a voter turnout of 73.4 per cent.

Damascus has pointed out that any US military action in its territory – even if that action is against the enemy ISIS network – will amount to aggression against the Syrian state.

The objective legal position was also stipulated by the Russian government this week. Moscow said that, without Syrian government consent or a United Nations Security Council mandate, any US-led air strikes inside Syria would be “a gross violation of international law”.

Nevertheless, Obama has unequivocally stated that his proposed military coalition will conduct attacks on ISIS bases inside Syria. The legal implications of that contingency, however, appear to be unnerving the main US NATO allies – Britain, France and Germany.

In Berlin last week both the German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and his British counterpart Philip Hammond issued categorical statements saying that their countries would not be carrying out air strikes in Syria.

Hammond, like Steinmeier, gave full backing to US strikes against ISIS in Iraq, but he told the Reuters news agency: “Let me be clear: Britain will not be taking part in any air strikes in Syria. We have already had that discussion in our parliament last year and we won’t be revisiting that position.” Britain’s top diplomat added that the “legal permissiveness” of military operations in Iraq and Syria was completely different.

Hammond was referring to the vote in the British parliament last year in which MPs voted overwhelmingly against Britain joining a proposed American military intervention in Syria, following the deadly chemical weapons attack near Damascus on August 21.

Washington was lining up air strikes on Syria to purportedly avenge the killing of hundreds of civilians from poisonous gas. That incident was blamed on the armed forces of the Assad government but it was subsequently shown to be the covert work of anti-government militants, aimed at contriving as a false flag outrage to elicit Western military intervention.

The British parliament was therefore vindicated in its vote against military intervention in Syria, and that vote put paid to Washington’s plans back then. It signaled a rare British dissent in the “special relationship” with Washington, where Britain is usually a reliable junior partner for American militarism overseas.

At the time of the Westminster vote at the end of August 2013, British leader David Cameron was visibly downcast at the rejection of the proposed intervention in Syria. Given that the British government is a major player in the US-led regime-change conspiracy in Syria, Cameron’s dismay was understandable.

This week on the day after Hammond made the announcement in Berlin of non-intervention in Syria, he appeared to be over-ruled by his boss in 10 Downing Street. David Cameron contradicted his foreign minister by telling British media that “nothing had been ruled out” for Britain’s participation in the American-led anti-ISIS coalition. Cameron was clearly indicating that British fighter jets might indeed launch air strikes inside Syria.

Such a move would over-turn the British parliament’s landmark vote outlawing military intervention in Syria. It would also negate the majority sentiment of the British public, which has been trending strong opposition to their government becoming embroiled militarily in Syria.

However, graphic videos of extremists slicing off the head of a British aid worker could be a decisive turning point. It’s hard to imagine a more repugnant act of cruel depravity to turn public opinion away from its erstwhile opposition to war toward giving consent for military action to, as Cameron put it, “hunt down this pure evil”.

Note too that in recent weeks Western governments and their mass media have been raising security concerns about Western “jihadists” returning to their home countries to carry out terror missions. Australia’s government of Tony Abbott is the latest to put its country on “high alert”. Abbott told media this weekend that his government was also sending a 600-man military force to the Middle East to join the US-led coalition, and he cited the barbaric beheading of the British national as part of the reasoning for the Australian deployment.

The macabre video executions have also overturned anti-war public feeling in the US. When Obama was planning to launch air strikes in Syria last year following the chemical weapons incident, polls showed that a big majority – 70 per cent – of Americans were opposed to any intervention. That opposition, plus the British parliament’s rejection, was a major factor in why Obama backed down then on his proposed military strikes during September 2013.

But after the latest videos showing two American journalists being brutally slain, US public opinion, according to recent polls, is now strongly in favour of Obama’s anti-ISIS bombing coalition; not just operating in Iraq, but more significantly, the American public wants the coalition to go after ISIS inside Syria too. Thus, where the chemical weapons horror last year failed to convince the American public to give its approval for US air strikes in Syria, the beheading of American hostages has succeeded.

For Washington and its close London ally, the British public is a crucial constituency to also win over. It seems more than a coincidence that ISIS has now carried out the same sickening execution of a British national as it did with the two Americans. President Obama said after the videoed slaying of Briton David Haines that the US “stands shoulder-to-shoulder” with the British people.

The question is this: are these shocking executions, with their highly stylised graphic videos, being used to manipulate public consent for Western military intervention in Syria? In that case, ISIS is not acting in some apparent rogue fashion, turning on its Western intelligence masters, but rather it is obeying orders as usual as part of a macabre charade to facilitate Western military intervention.

Once again, what we are seeing is a variation of “humanitarian pretext” to pave the way for the covert, ulterior agenda of Western-orchestrated regime change in foreign countries. That ploy was used previously by NATO forces in former Yugoslavia at the end of the 1990s and more recently in Libya during 2011.

It is well documented that ISIS, IS or ISIL, is a terror network created by US, British and Saudi military intelligence going back to the early years of the Iraq War beginning in 2003, when the group played a vital role in fomenting sectarian strife in Iraq to the advantage of the Western occupying armies.The network has antecedents in Western collusion with radical Islamist mercenaries in Afghanistan during the 1980s against the former Soviet Union, which led to the formation of Al Qaeda, and also in Chechnya in the mid-1990s.

ISIS leader Abu Bakr Baghdadi is known to be a US intelligence asset, according to a former senior Al Qaeda operative, Nabil Naim, among other sources. Former CIA personnel have also disclosed that ISIS, like Al Qaeda, was set up to further geopolitical goals for Washington and its allies in the Middle East. These goals include regime change in target countries, such as Syria, and perpetuating the money-spinning American military-industrial complex by creating an endless security threat. Officially, the network may be a proscribed terror organization and “an enemy of the state”. But in the underworld of black operations, ISIS is a covert instrument of US government and corporate interests.

Given the strategic importance of the US-led regime-change objective in Syria – and in particular the importance of obtaining public support for military intervention in that country – it is not beyond the realm of possibility that the ISIS network is carrying out beheadings of Western citizens on the orders of its handlers in the CIA and Britain’s MI6. Perhaps even, the outward political leadership in Washington and London, Obama and Cameron, are unaware of their own dark forces at work, which gives their public reactions of indignation an air of authenticity and credibility.

Indeed, the evident political consequences from the latest execution of Briton David Haines and Americans Jim Foley and Steven Sotloff are strongly indicative of a Western psychological operation. That makes Washington and London culpable of murdering their own citizens for geopolitical expediency. These victims are sacrificial lambs in the foulest sense.

 

First Female US Presidential Candidate Victoria C. Woodhall (b. September 23, 1838 d. June 9, 1927)

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Legal Contender….Victoria C. Woodhull: first woman to run for president

By Susan Kullman

Source: The Women’s Quarterly (Fall 1988)

On the 150th anniversary of her birth, September 23, 1988, Victoria Claflin Woodhull was largely lost to history. She still is. Few Americans even recognize her name. Yet “The Woodhull” was once one of the best known women in America — the first woman to run for President and the first to open a bank on Wall Street. Nineteenth-century Americans thrilled to news stories about her exploits. Admirers pored over her weekly newspaper and scooped up her books, pamphlets, and photographs. Her lectures left thousands spellbound.

bewitching brokers

Woodhull worked under the assumption that a “woman’s ability to earn money is better protection against the tyranny and brutality of men than her ability to vote.” She and her younger sister Tennessee Claflin invaded Wall Street to achieve their economic independence. Newspapers hailed America’s first female stockbrokers as “The Queens of Finance” and “The Bewitching Brokers.” Susan B. Anthony applauded the arrival of women in Wall Street in 1870 as “a new phase of the woman’s rights question.”

Woodhull, Claflin & Co., Bankers and Brokers, opened with the silent backing of America’s wealthiest financier, railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt. Their earnings bankrolled Woodhull’s presidential campaign and helped finance her newspaper. With this venture, Woodhull demonstrated her ability as a woman – a married mother of two – to “successfully engage in business.”

Born in 1838, Woodhull witnessed the abolition of slavery and the birth of the dream of racial equality in America. Three months after invading Wall Street, she announced her intention to run for President in one of New York City’s largest daily newspapers. When the thirty-one year old petticoat politician threw her cock’s feather cap into the ring, men of color sat in Congress and several State legislatures. Sexual equality seemed as likely to her as women’s liberation would appear a century later.

queens of the quill

The sister brokers launched Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly a month later. Initially published as a campaign sheet, the newspaper quickly took on a larger agenda. It evolved into a radical political, economic, and social open forum that shaped Woodhull’s budding reform crusade. The sixteen-page weekly newspaper claimed twenty thousand subscribers and ran for six years.

The “Queens of the Quill” highlighted the lessons they learned on Wall Street. Muckrakers at heart, they published exposés on stock swindles, insurance frauds, and corrupt Congressional land deals. Reports of outrageous scams did not stop more reputable brokerage firms and banks from advertising on the Weekly’s front page.

Above all, the newspaper addressed issues that concerned women with unusual frankness. It advanced the editors’ shared vision that women could live as men’s equals in the work place, political arena, church, family circle, and bedroom. The words and deeds of ordinary and extraordinary women filled the Weekly’s columns.

woman’s rights advocate

Woodhull’s experience as a lobbyist and businesswoman taught her how to penetrate the all-male domain of national politics. A year after she set up shop in Wall Street, she preempted the opening of the 1871 National Woman Suffrage Association’s third annual convention in Washington. Suffrage leaders postponed their meeting to listen to the female broker address the House Judiciary Committee. Woodhull argued that women already had the right to vote – all they had to do was use it – since the 14th and 15th Amendments granted that right to all citizens. The simple but powerful logic of her argument impressed some committee members. Suffragists saw her as their newest champion. They applauded her statement: “women are the equals of men before the law, and are equal in all their rights.”

Woodhull catapulted to the leadership circle of the suffrage movement with her first public appearance as a woman’s rights advocate. Although her Constitutional argument was not original, she focused unprecedented public attention on suffrage. Following Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Woodhull was the second woman to petition Congress in person. Newspapers reported her appearance before Congress. The Time magazine of its day, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, printed a full-page engraving of Woodhull, surrounded by prominent suffragists, as she delivered her argument.

queen of the rostrum

Woodhull invigorated the Cause and became one of the movement’s most articulate speakers. Her Lecture on Constitutional Equality attracted thousands. Newspapers cited her as “the ablest advocate on Woman Suffrage, a woman of remarkable originality and power.” When the Judiciary Committee issued a minority report supporting Woodhull’s position, suffragists distributed thousands of copies throughout the nation.

contemporary supporters and critics

For the most part, those who knew Woodhull personally were willing to accept her “money and brains and unceasing energy” for the Cause. Susan B. Anthony, Isabella Beecher Hooker, Belva Lockwood, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and other women’s rights leaders befriended her, some for the rest of their lives. Others were offended by her clairvoyant practices, her divorce from her first husband, and the peculiar extended family that she supported in her fashionable Manhattan mansion.

Bestselling author Harriet Beecher Stowe was her most renowned critic. Chagrined by Woodhull’s magnetic blue eyes, rural Ohio speech, and “indelicate” style and behavior, Stowe spoofed her as Miss Audacia Dangereyes, the “advanced woman of the period.” In her novel My Wife and I, the wife applauds her father when he lambasts the idea of a woman running for President with the sentiment:

“…no woman that was not willing to be dragged through every kennel, and slopped into every dirty pail of water, like an old mop, would ever consent to run as a candidate. Why it’s an ordeal that kills a man. And what sort of a brazen tramp of a woman would it be that could stand it, and come out of it without being killed? Would it be any kind of a woman that we should want to see at the head of our government?”

In response to being judged by different standards than male politicians and reformers, Woodhull intensified and expanded her reform agenda.

With Constitution in hand, the Queens of Finance attempted to vote in the 1871 elections. Though turned away from the polls, their effort inspired nationally-circulated Harper’s Weekly to print a half-page illustration showing “Mrs. Woodhull Asserting Her Right to Vote.”

bourgeois feminist

A month after the “Queens of the Quill” attempted to vote, their Weekly provided the public with the first English translation of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto published in America. The editors tried to demonstrate their ability to lead the American branch of Marx’s First International Workingmen’s Association. Ironically, not Wall Street profits but the sisters’ devotion to equality between the sexes prompted Marx’s London Council to throw Woodhull and Claflin out of the IWA.

“free lover”

Woodhull’s suffrage lecture marked the beginning of a public speaking career that spanned the next few decades. The “Queen of the Rostrum” spoke about women’s rights, finance, labor and capital, spiritualism, and sexual relations. Her most popular lectures focused on what she called “social freedom.” Sensitized by her own divorce from the alcoholic she married at the age of fourteen, Woodhull denounced legal and religious arguments for enduring a rotten marriage. She compared social freedom to freedom of religion. While she claimed to be a “monogamist,” Woodhull defended the right of others to decided what later generations would call their own lifestyles.

Irritated by her social freedom lecture, popular cartoonist Thomas Nast lampooned Woodhull as “Mrs. Satan” in a full-page engraving for Harper’s Weekly. Nast’s cartoon showed a tired, ragged young woman walking along the edge of a rocky cliff with babe in arms. She carries another child and her drunk husband on her back. A demonic Victoria Woodhull, horned and winged, holds a sign up to the woman: “BE SAVED BY FREE LOVE.” The wife’s response: “Get thee behind me, (Mrs.) Satan! I’d rather travel the hardest path of matrimony than follow your footsteps.”

Woodhull’s message struck a chord in some hearts. One of the largest public assemblies in New York’s history, some 3000, was “cordially disappointed at the high moral ground and limited license which the speaker’s definition of Freedom would allow.” In Boston, Woodhull was “listened to with deference, encouraged with much applause, and retired with the verdict of all that she had spoken much truth.” The Pittsburgh Dispatch called her “the most prominent woman of our time.” Two months later, Woodhull presented the keynote speech at a national suffrage convention.

presidential campaign

In the midst of all this, Woodhull pursued her Presidential campaign [with running mate Frederick Douglass]. She published a 250-page collection of essays that spelled out her position on the problems facing the nation. A leading writer and reformer, Theodore Tilton, wrote Woodhull’s authorized campaign biography. She had a comprehensive platform, two campaign committees, a campaign button, and a bona fide nominating convention. She challenged incumbent Ulysses S. Grant and his Democratic opponent Horace Greeley.

The Equal Rights Party selected her as their standard bearer six months after Woodhull first delivered her social freedom speech. Their convention stands as the largest, most representative third party gathering of the 1872 election. Fifteen hundred men and women lent their voices to Woodhull’s nomination by acclamation.

Woodhull’s support came from suffragists, land and labor reformers, peace and temperance people, Internationalists, and spiritualists. The Equal Rights Party platform supported women’s right to vote, work, and love freely; nationalization of land; cost-based pricing to reduce excessive profits; a fairer division of earnings between labor and capital; the elimination of exorbitant interest rates; and free speech and a free press.

Practical movements, Woodhull learned, alarm “cowardly hearts” more than speeches and publications. Her “impending revolution” was quashed soon after the convention. Unforeseen reprisals devastated her personal life, business, and reform activities. Unable to secure housing in Manhattan, she and her family spent weeks sleeping on the floor of her newspaper office. Her twelve-year-old daughter assumed an alias to attend school without harassment. Financial difficulties forced the suspension of Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly for four months.

the Beecher-Tilton scandal

The newspaper resumed publication with an acerbic revelation of the editors’ personal and financial difficulties. Renewing the crusade against hypocrisy in high places, the Weekly printed two explicit exposés. One detailed the extramarital affairs of Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, who cuckolded his personal friend, colleague, and parishioner, writer Theodore Tilton – Woodhull’s first biographer. The other focused on a licentious stockbroker, Luther Challis, who boasted about his conquests of innocent young girls. The “scandal issue” created a national sensation.

In an ironic twist of fate, the first woman to run for President spent Election Eve behind bars. Reverend Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s younger brother, was one of the nation’s most prominent clergymen. His supporters retaliated quickly. Woodhull and Claflin were arrested for using the U.S. mails to “utter obscene publication” in the Challis article. Woodhull described her arrest as an attempt by the government to “establish a precedent for the suppression of recalcitrant Journals.”

The Queens of the Quill became the targets of one of YMCA reformer Anthony Comstock’s earliest censorship campaigns. They spent weeks in various New York City jails, paid more bail – over $60,000 for an alleged misdemeanor – than Tammany Hall’s corrupt “Boss” Tweed, and faced charges related to the scandal issue for nearly two years. Their defense of themselves and the Bill of Rights reached the public through the Weekly and Woodhull’s public lectures. The sisters were found innocent on the obscenity counts in 1873, and innocent of libel in the Challis article in 1874.

Victoria Claflin Woodhull Martin’s legacy

Burned out, Woodhull and Claflin moved to England a few years later. They remained there for the rest of their lives. Both married wealthy men and lived comfortably into the twentieth century. They lectured occasionally and continued to publish. But their zealous reform spirit never recovered to pre-scandal heights.

Victoria Woodhull promoted changes that frightened, embarrassed, or in some cases delighted her contemporaries. She challenged several male-dominated organizations and institutions. She attempted to change society’s views about sexuality and family structure. She tried to use existing law and the political system to achieve a more egalitarian society, and felt the brunt of the establishment when she overstepped propriety and subjected social relations to the same kind of muckraking she used to expose unethical business practices.

Women who threaten patriarchal institutions are particularly vulnerable to being obscured and misunderstood. Her opponents – and there were many – discredited Woodhull and the issues she raised about sexual politics in nineteenth-century America. With few exceptions, historians ignore Woodhull or question her sincerity. Most writers emphasize her notoriety to the point of overshadowing her serious abilities, her notable accomplishments, and her provocative dreams.

Victoria Woodhull’s comet-like career as an American social reformer may have been unequaled by her contemporaries in its scope, in its intensity, and in its visions of equality and justice. Hers is a legacy worth reclaiming.

ISIS, Weapons Makers, Thugs Benefit from Bombing

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Residents inspect damage at a site hit by what activists said were barrel bombs dropped by forces of Syria's President Assad in Aleppo

By David Swanson

Source: Washington’s Blog

President Obama is bombing the opposite side in Syria from the side he swore we needed to attack one year ago, and those pleased by this declare that he is “doing something.”

U.S. polls suggest that the same people recognize that this something will make the U.S. more likely to be attacked and nonetheless favor this action. This is unthinking fear produced by slick beheading videos for audiences too distracted to notice that the Iraqi government, Saudi government and numerous other U.S. friends and allies behead. And are we to imagine that when Obama kills a 16 year old American and the 6 kids near him his head remains intact? Should we pretend that the people being killed by U.S. missiles right now aren’t losing their heads?

This action is illegal under the UN Charter, Kellogg-Briand Pact, and U.S. Constitution. This action is immoral as it fuels violence that needs to be reduced. This action is knowingly, maddeningly counterproductive, guaranteed to build hostility to the United States, which is already so hated that ISIS openly advocates for a U.S. attack on it. This action by this White House is what ISIS wants and what weapons makers want. It is not what the people of Syria or Iraq or the world want. It further shreds the rule of law while dumping gasoline on a fire of U.S. creation.

What’s needed is, contrary to what your television suggests, not to “do nothing” or love beheadings. What’s needed is an arms embargo. The U.S. ships 79% of the weapons shipped to the Middle East, not counting the weapons of the U.S. military. An arms embargo could be 79% successful with just one country participating, and others could certainly be brought to do so.

What’s needed is actual aid on a massive scale, restitution to the people of the region for the crimes of the U.S. government. An aid program sufficient to make the United States beloved rather than hated would cost a lot less money than the missiles and bombs for which price seems to be no concern at all.

What’s needed is diplomacy. The U.S. government is happy to talk with Syria or Iran or Russia when the object is war. Why can it not talk to them when the object is peace?

Our Constitutional scholar Nobel peace laureate no-dumb-wars end-the-mindset president will be protested today at the White House and at his appearance in New York, and should be protested everywhere he goes.

Congress members should not know a moment’s peace, but should be taught that cowardice is not a campaign strategy. None who voted for weapons to Syria should be returned to Washington next year.

War as a first resort, as our biggest public program, as the be all and end all of U.S. foreign policy is a form of insanity that has no redeeming feature. War is our top destroyer of the natural environment, of the economy, of civil liberties, of self-governance, and of morality. This is a case of a doctor trying to cure the world while suffering from a deadly and highly infectious disease that in his own mind is the epitome of health.

You can’t cure war fever with more war. You can only get to peace through peace.

Stop the bombing.

Probing the SITE Intelligence Group

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beheading2

By James F. Tracy

Source: The Memory Hole

Since mid-August 2014 major news organizations have conveyed videos allegedly found online by the SITE Intelligence Group. Unsurprisingly the same media have failed to closely interrogate what the private company actually is and whether the material it promotes should be accepted as genuine.

The Search for International Terrorist Entities Intelligence Group was co-founded by Rita Katz in 2001. Katz is an Iraqi-born Jew. Her father, an Israeli spy, was executed by Iraqis as a result of his intelligence activities.

In 2003 Katz authored a book, Terrorist Hunter: The Extraordinary Story of a Woman Who Went Undercover to Infiltrate the Radical Islamic Groups Operating in America, which she published using the pseudonym, “Anonymous.”

In the book Katz explains how she took on the trappings of a Muslim woman to infiltrate the meetings of radical Muslim terrorists. The plot is unlikely, especially when one considers that such secret fundamentalist gatherings are almost always segregated along gender lines and no woman, however elaborate her costume, would be granted entry without her identity being firmly established.

SITE Intelligence Group consists of Katz and two “senior advisers,” one of whom is Bruce Hoffman, the Corporate Chair in Counterterrorism and Counterinsurgency at the RAND Corporation and former director of the RAND’s Washington DC office.

The SITE Intelligence Group “constantly monitors the Internet and traditional media for material and propaganda released by jihadist groups and their supporters,” the company’s website announces. “Once obtained, SITE immediately translates the material and provides the intelligence along with a contextual analysis explaining the source of the material and its importance to our subscribers.”[1]

In 2003 and 2004, though claiming to be a 501c3 non-profit, SITE received more than $500,000 from the US government. Also in the early 2000s Katz received $150,000 from the FBI for consulting services.[2] A Guidestar search for nonprofits yields no recent records for SITE, suggesting how it has abandoned its non-profit status and now relies on corporate and individual subscriptions for revenue. In 2005 the private mercenary contractor Blackwater hailed SITE as “an invaluable resource.”[3]

The majority of “jihadist groups” operate one or more media outlets that produce and publish  “the group’s multimedia, and in some cases, communiqués and magazines,” SITE explains on its website. “These media units involve production teams and correspondents who report directly from the battlefield, and craft propaganda to indoctrinate and recruit new fighters into the group’s ranks.” SITE provides no direct links to the jihadist groups’ websites or multimedia productions from its own platform.[4]

Katz describes SITE as geared toward international Islamic jihad. In fact, it performs an international function akin to what a Southern Poverty Law Center or Anti-Defamation League do domestically–ferreting out and publicizing terrorist and “extremist” threats. “[W]e at SITE for over a decade monitor, search, and study the jihadists online,” she explains.

We have been studying and monitoring the jihadists online, which also as they get more sophisticated, we follow their techniques and study them. And based on that, we could predict where they will be uploading their video.

After all, we have to remember that much of this propaganda is being posted online. Their releases are released online [sic]. So they have to be able to use certain locations to upload their releases before they are published.[5]

Though routinely overlooked in the flurry of front-page coverage corporate media have allotted the three beheading videos–the most recent of which featured British aid worker David Cawthorne Haines–it is common knowledge that SITE uncannily secures terrorist statements and videos well before the US’s wide array of lavishly-funded intelligence services.

For example, as the Washington Post reported in 2007,

[a] small private intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month, and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7 … It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had it until the al-Qaeda release. Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun downloading it from the company’s Web site. By midafternoon that day, the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast worldwide.[6]

The video later proved to be fraudulent.

With the above in mind, one may ask, If parties within a US presidential administration or the State Department sought to bypass the potential scrutiny of a wide-ranging intelligence community concerning such matters, while simultaneously providing itself with the means to effectively propagandize the American public toward a broader end, what better way than to contract the services of an entity such as SITE?

If there is some merit in the above appraisal, the arrangement is now being pushed to an extreme by the Obama administration to pave the road toward a long-sought goal: war with Syria’s Bashar Al Assad regime. Indeed, services such as SITE’s are a potent and valuable means for moving public opinion, as they have done in recent weeks concerning military action against the Islamic State. Along these lines, a decade ago both John Kerry and George W. Bush credited the latter’s re-election to a surreptitious appearance by Osama bin Laden via video tape several days before the vote.[7]

Playing a role similar to SITE, IntelCenter acts as an intermediary between Al-Qaeda’s supposed media arm, As-Sahab, and major media. In other words, “they acquire the tapes and pass them on to the press, and have occasionally even predicted when tapes would be released beforehand,” Paul Joseph Watson reports.

“IntelCenter is run by Ben Venzke, who used to be the director of intelligence at a company called IDEFENSE, which is a Verisign company. IDEFENSE is a web security company that monitors intelligence from the Middle East conflicts and focuses on cyber threats among other things. It is also heavily populated with long serving ex-military intelligence officials.[8]

As noted, news outlets seldom see fit to closely analyze SITE or Katz concerning their research and function as conduits for terrorist propaganda. A LexisNexis search for SITE Intelligence in the article content of US newspapers and major world publications over the past two years produces 317 items—an admittedly low figure given the prominence of SITE’s recent disclosures. Yet a similar search for “Steven Sotloff” alone yields over 1,000 newspaper stories and 600 broadcast transcripts, suggesting the sensationalistic usage and effect of SITE’s data and how neither SITE nor Katz are called upon to explain their specific methods and findings.

Indeed, a similar search for “SITE Intelligence” and “Rita Katz” yields only 26 entries over a two year period. Of these, 14 appear in the Washington Post, a publication with well-established links to US intelligence. Four New York Times articles feature the combined entities.

In a CNN on the heels of the Sotloff beheading, Katz explains how again SITE curiously surpassed the combined capacities of the entire US intelligence community in securing the Sotloff footage.

“The video shows the beheading of Steven Sotloff,” Katz cautiously begins after being queried on the document’s authenticity.

The location from where the video was obtained from is the location where ISIS usually uploads their original videos to [sic]. The video shows a clear message from ISIS that follows the same message that it had before. And in fact within a short time after our release, ISIS’ account on social media indicated that within a short time they would be releasing the video, only we actually had that video beforehand and were able to beat them with the release.

This unusual statement alongside SITE’s remarkable abilities, in addition to the fact that it is a past government contractor that has been caught spreading dubious information, should put news outlets on guard concerning virtually anything the organization produces.

Undoubtedly this is a great deal to ask from a news media that all too frequently participate in orienting public opinion toward war, a feat it has once again accomplished with the aid of SITE.

The interests and alliances of the transnational entities owning such media make them poised to profit from the very geopolitical designs drawn up by SITE’s corporate and government clients–the most important of which may be those seeking to broaden Middle Eastern conflict. No doubt, the widescale acceptance of such propaganda is also the result of the vastly diminished critical capacities of the broader public, now several decades in the making.

Notes

[1] “Services,” SITE Intelligence Group, , accessed September 15, 2014,

[2] Berni McCoy, “So, a ‘Charitable Organization’ Released the bin Laden Video,” Democratic Underground, September 10, 2007, http://journals.democraticunderground.com/berni_

[3] “SITE Institute,” Sourcewatch.org, Center for Media and Democracy, n.d.

[4] “Media Groups,” SITE Intelligence Group, n.d., accessed September 15, 2014.

[5] Karl Penhaul, Pamela Brown, Alisyn Camerota, Don Lemon, Paul Cruickshank, “Joan Rivers on Life Support; Chilling Words From ISIS Terrorist; How to Fight Radical Recruitment” (transcript), CNN, September 2, 2014.

[6] Joby Warrick, “Leak Severed a Link to Al Qaeda Secrets,” Washington Post, October 9, 2007.

[7] Paul Joseph Watson, “Another Dubious Osama Tape Appears When the Neo-Cons Need It Most,” Prisonplanet.com, July 16, 2007.

[8] Ibid. See also, Kurt Nimmo, “Sotloff Video Found by Group Responsible For Releasing Fake Osama Bin Laden Video,” Infowars.com, September 3, 2014.

Soul Resonance and Music

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Many interesting insights on the nature and power of music in a recent article posted at Montalk.net. Tom’s writings on his site are steeped in knowledge on physics, spirituality, and multidisciplinary research on a number of academic and esoteric fields of study. The piece excerpted below is no exception, begining with an exploration of the various cultural, environmental, physiological and emotional factors forming one’s musical preferences, continuing onto effects of music on soul, spirit, and psychology and concluding with speculation on the origins, evolution and future of music:

Introduction

There are subjective and objective reasons why you might prefer one song over another. Subjective reasons include:

  • Tradition: because that is what you heard while growing up. Your preference then arises from habit and identification with your family and culture. You derive pleasure from safety, comfort, and familiarity. Folk and country music feature this prominently.
  • Identity: because the song is a token representation of some subculture you have invested your social identity into, whereby the music is more a fashion accessory or emblem displayed before others. You derive satisfaction from the reactions you get from others. Anything associated with a distinctive look such as rap, punk, goth, country, and metal can serve this function.
  • Sentiment: because you hear a song during a meaningful or emotional time in your life, and the two become linked together in your mind. The song will then trigger those same emotions when heard again in the future. Like a scent of perfume bringing back fond memories, you derive pleasure from the sentimental effect this brings. Pop songs, especially ballads frequently played on the radio, appeal to this factor.

Alone, these factors have little to do with the intrinsic musicality of the song. They merely project subjective values upon what is heard.

True music is measured by the degree to which its melody, harmony, rhythm, and texture in and of themselves evoke an objective response in us. For example, a minor chord sounds sad without us ever needing to be conditioned to feel that. Infants can distinguish between harmonious and dissonant chords well before their enculturation. A beat can make us clap or tap our foot without having to be taught to do so, as seen in babies who bend their knees and bounce to the music instinctively. Similarly, an odd pattern of strange sounds can make us tilt our heads in curiosity.

Some objective responses stimulate the intellect, some the physical body, and some the emotional and spiritual aspects of our being. So in addition to the aforementioned subjective reasons for musical preference, there are also objective ones:

  • Intrigue: your intellect is aroused by the originality, quirkiness, or complexity of a song. You find amusement in being stirred from boredom, apathy, or jadedness by its novelty. Experimental electronica, noise, and math rock focus exclusively on this aspect.
  • Groove: the song’s beat and rhythm stimulate the motor and speech areas of your brain, provoking you to dance. You derive pleasure from the endorphins released through physical movement, from the social approval and camaraderie present when dancing with others, and it simply feels good being physically motivated and energized by the sonic equivalent of a stimulant drug.
  • Resonance: there is something within a song that stimulates something within you at the emotional, spiritual, archetypal level. It evokes a response according to how much we inwardly resonate with that song’s combination of melody, harmony, rhythm, and texture.

Songs typically represent a mixture of all the above. When a song combines several factors, it has greater impact and wider appeal:

  • A bit of emotional resonance goes a long way toward building associative conditioning, which then amplifies the apparent emotional intensity of the song and leads to a strong sentimental effect. This is the basis of sappy ballads played on radio stations throughout the 70s and 80s.
  • Groove enhances intellectually fascinating songs by adding some physical energy, making it both interesting and fun, with many examples to be found in electronic music.
  • Groove combined with tradition makes for a high dance factor, as can be heard in Eastern European folk dances, samba and salsa, Mexican polka, American hoedowns and country line dancing.
  • Identity, groove, intrigue, and resonation of anger may be found in most forms of nu metal, djent, screamo, grindcore, etc.

Musical Preferences

We know that people differ in the degree to which they respond to a song. Some may not identify with the tradition being represented; some find its intellectual complexity confusing and irritating; some only desire groove and find little appeal in a slow emotional ballad; some do not have within their souls the aspects that a song is aiming to resonate; some never had a meaningful or emotional experience linked with a particular song that, for someone else, has much sentimental value.

So when different people respond differently to the same song, understand that in regard to the objective factors, the difference involves only the degree to which that factor is present in that person. A quirky and complex experimental piece might arouse much interest in one person, little interest in another, and strong disinterest in a third. When a song has groove, one person will dance uncontrollably, another will only tap his or her foot, and another with no sense of rhythm will fold his arms in boredom. When a song resonates the emotion of happiness, one person will have tears in her eyes, another will merely feel uplifted, and another might not care for feeling happy at the moment. It’s about varying degrees on the same scale.

On the other hand, the subjective factors have no such consistency:

  • One man hears a song during his first kiss, another just prior to the car accident that killed his wife. The same song by association will evoke a smile in the first and sadness in the latter.
  • The same rap song brings a sense of belonging and identity to one person and a sense of hatred or contempt against black culture in another.
  • Negative association can be so strong that it overrides the intrinsic resonance value of a song. One person likes metal because it resonates his inner sense of valor and strength, another hates it solely because her abusive ex-boyfriend was in a metal band.

Strong antipathy against certain music is usually due to a combination of lack of resonance, negative conditioned associations, clash against one’s tradition or subcultural affiliation, and dislike of the bodily responses induced by a song’s texture and rhythm (such as strong dance beats coming off as licentious to the prudish, or distorted guitars grating the ears of those who prefer comfort and gentleness).

So the question arises, what does musical preference say about a person? Here are some possibilities:

  • If you like a song solely because of tradition, identification, or sentimentalism then that simply indicates the nature of the experiences and social influences you have been imprinted with. It says very little about your inner being. How can it, if resonance to a song’s intrinsic musicality played no part in your always listening to it or singing it?
  • If you like a song solely for its intellectual intrigue, then that merely indicates you haven’t really heard something like it before. It is something new, surprising, and thus amusing. If the song is complex and abstract, maybe it says you have an active intellect that enjoys abstract sensory stimulation. But it says nothing about your soul.
  • If you like songs solely for their groove, then you’re probably a kinesthetic person with good hand-eye coordination and a healthy motor-speech system in the brain. It speaks more to your physiological and neurological composition than anything.

These factors don’t provide much insight into your inner emotional, spiritual, archetypal composition. For that, we must look at the resonance factor, whereby something in music resonates something in you. In other words, pure communication from song to soul.

Soul Resonance

Our internal compositions differ; we don’t all have the same emotional resonance spectrum. A song can only resonate what is there to be resonated, and if a portion of one’s inner spectrum is absent, then the corresponding qualities of the song will not be noticed, let alone felt. Like two people with different types of color blindness, it’s possible for one person to see something in a song that the other cannot, and vice versa. This kind of difference is not due to a difference in subjective projection or association, but inner perception of what is objectively there.

So what we’re really talking about here is soul resonance characteristics, meaning the unique spectrum of emotions, themes of experience, and pathways to fulfillment that you most deeply respond to and yearn for. These can be glimpsed by asking yourself the following questions:

  • What are your deepest priorities?
  • What brings you the greatest fulfillment?
  • What motivates your existence?
  • What completes you as a being?

The answers may correspond to the music you resonate with most. Esoterically, the answers to these questions also correspond to the “story of your life.” The same soul resonance characteristics that are touched by music are also touched by your inner responses to life events. In fact, it is these resonance characteristics that synchronistically attract such events in the first place through quantum-metaphysical processes. Thus the theme of your life, the nature of your soul, and the musical qualities of the songs you resonate with all share correspondence.

Read the full article with audio examples at http://montalk.net/metaphys/265/soul-resonance-and-music

Saturday Matinee: Goodbye 20th Century

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“Goodbye 20th Century” (1998) is a twisted but ambitious Macedonian film (directed by Darko Mitrevski and Aleksandar Popovski) connecting three allegorical tales from different eras. In the first segment, a man cursed with immortality in a post-apocalyptic world encounters a trickster who may hold the key to ending his existence. A shorter segment follows depicting the tragic first wedding captured on film in 190o. The film concludes in 1999 when a man in a Santa suit’s interruption of a military wake has violent consequences for all involved.

For English subtitles, click on the “cc” button near the bottom right corner of the video window.

The Path to Eternity

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By Mark Anthony Rockeymoore

Source: Sacred Space in Time

Thoughts are things. Energy that becomes words, then actions. Are your thoughts generally positive or negative? Your words, your actions? Do you see the positive in life more naturally, or the negative?

Given enough time and repeated attention, thoughts take on a life of their own. We become haunted by fears that take over our lives. Collective thoughts haunt the collective mind. Individual fears become our lives and collective fears become the world we live in.

Positive thoughts create a positive life, even in a world of negativity. Individually and collectively we each are responsible for the world we co-create. For our thoughts, words and actions. Starting the day concentrating on the good things in our lives we fundamentally alter the trajectory of our experience as perception determines words and actions.

The multiverse, the universe, the galaxy, the solar system and the world are all thoughts in the mind of God. And the same thing applies to our lives. We create them within this larger structure, based upon conditions unique to each of us. How we choose to perceive our lives, positively or negatively, determines the course of our paths and fundamentally alters our possibilities.

There is no greater purpose in life than to live consciously. To consider thoughts, words and actions carefully. To live according to your deepest purpose, aligned to the truths you have discovered during the course of your own experience. To hone thought to the point of utter clarity, to speak precisely, to act decisively.

Looking at your life right this moment, can you tell how far you are along that path? Does your answer to that question satisfy you? Do your regrets outweigh your joys? If they do, you know exactly what you must do. The only thing left then, is to determine how.

The answer arises with the question. Query yourself and commit yourself to living according to your deepest understanding. Regrets will then pass away with this shift in perception and the recognition that life’s lessons are ongoing and there is no final test, just continuous growth along the path to eternity.