Category Archives: black ops

Seymour Hersh Succumbs To Disinformation

Posted on by
Reply

fake_bin-laden

By Paul Craig Roberts

Source: PaulCraigRoberts.org

Seymour Hersh has published a long account of the homicide of Osama bin Laden:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n10/seymour-m-hersh/the-killing-of-osama-bin-laden
Hersh concludes that the Obama regime’s account of the killing of bin Laden is a total fabrication except for the fact that bin Laden was killed.

I do not believe Hersh’s story for three reasons. One reason is that bin Laden was suffering from disease that no one can survive for a decade. His death was widely reported in 2001. One reason is that even Hersh’s “true” account of “what really happened” is contradicted by eye witnesses and the initial Pakistani TV interviews of eye witnesses. One reason is that Hersh’s story is too convoluted for an assassination raid, a routine event. He exposes lies within lies, indecision within decision, payoffs within payoffs, and reports such a huge number of people with advance knowledge of the raid that it cannot possibly have been kept a secret.

I could add a fourth reason–the US government’s lack of credibility. Washington lies about everything. For example: Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, Assad’s use of chemical weapons, Iranian nukes, Russian invasion of Ukraine. If, as Hersh reports, lies comprise 99% of Washington’s tale of the raid in Abbottabad, why believe that 1% of the story is true and that bin Laden was killed. It is difficult to have murder without a body. The only evidence that bin Laden was killed is the government’s claim.

In my opinion, Washington’s disinformation agencies have finally managed to deceive Seymour Hersh with a concocted “inside story” that saves Washington’s claim of having murdered bin Laden by proving that the US government is an extraordinary liar and violator of law.

Hersh’s story does prove that the US government is a liar, but it does not prove that a
SEAL team murdered Osama bin Laden.

Related Article: Osama bin Laden: A dead nemesis perpetuated by the US government

Garland Shooter Elton Simpson ‘Handled’ By Paid FBI Informant

Posted on by
1

indexSource: 21st Century Wire

In our story released late last night, we posed this question to our readers:

“Were these supposed ‘dead gunmen’ part of the drill, or were they patsies handled by a counter-terrorism federal ‘informant’?“

We didn’t know it at the time, but it turns out that we were right.

Last night in the Dallas suburb of Garland, Texas, at Pam Geller’s “Muhammad Art Exhibit and Cartoon Contest”, two alleged “gunmen” were shot and killed by a Special Ops paramilitary ‘SWAT’ unit hired by the city of Garland to provide security for the controversial event.

It’s now been revealed that “gunman”, Elton Simpson, was already under surveillance by the FBI and was even the subject of a terror investigation. More importantly, we can also confirm Simpson was being handled by an FBI informant. Court papers filed in Arizona name the FBI undercover informant as Mr. Daba Deng, a Kenyan and who, from 2007, was paid $132,000 by the FBI to “become friends with Mr. Simpson”, and who appears to have groomed Simpson through a local mosque, and helped to develop Simpson’s ideas about “jihad”. Deng also helped to catch ‘Islamic convert’ Simpson on tape saying he wanted to travel to Somalia to join the terror orgaization al Shabaab. That recording was made on May 29, 2009, which shows Simpson telling his handler Deng, “It’s time to go to Somalia, brother… we gonna make it to the battlefield… it’s time to roll.” This recording was the basis for Simpson’s later FBI arrest, after which time he was ‘let off’ with 3 years probation.

The official misdirect device for this story can be found in a recent article from the Israeli-owned soft propaganda outlet, Vocativ, whose headline reads, “How Texas Terror Shooter Elton Simpson Avoided Prison In 2011″, which appears to be designed to pollute any inquiry by attempting to rationalize that Elton Simpson had avoided jail because a Judge was too lenient on this potential terrorist, furthering the popular talking point that somehow “the Feds dropped the ball.”

It is unknown exactly how far Deng had led Simpson in relation to yesterday’s attack, or if Simpson was assigned a new handler, but the revelation clearly demonstrates that not only have the FBI been aware of Simpson’s activities and movements for many years, but that the FBI has also had a hand in ‘managing’ Simpson. This fact should cast serious doubts on the official narrative being constructed about the Garland event being carried out by a bonafide and organic “home-gown jihadist” in America.

Authorities in Texas have identified the second “gunman” as Nadir Hamid Soofi (photo, above). It’s claimed that Soofi was Elton Simpson’s roommate and that they both shared an apartment in Phoenix, Arizona, and also attended the same mosque – the Islamic Center of North Phoenix. It is fairly certain that FBI informant Deng also knew and was interacting with Soofi as well.
We’re also meant to believe that just minutes before Simpson and Soofi launched their failed “terror attack”, they both posted Twitter messages and that ISIS Tweeters then joined-in to cheer them on, albeit, virtually.

SEE ALSO: Hebdo Redux in Garland, TX? ‘Mohammed Cartoon’ Shooting Reeks of a Staged False Flag

Not coincidentally, this is nearly the identical M.O. to the two dead ‘gunmen’ in the Charlie Hebdo shooting incident that took place in Paris earlier this year. 21WIRE reported back in January:

“At least one of the suspects was already “under surveillance” by French anti-terror authorities, and that his file was “shared with US security officials” as well. If this is indeed the case, then it’s highly improbable that the suspect would have staged his attack so easily. Once again, official admissions practically cancel out the official narrative.”

In addition to similarities to the Hebdo attack, it’s worth pointing out that in every high-profile US ‘terror bust’, the assailants had some connection beforehand to federal authorities. Only days after the media was beginning to close-out their round-the-clock Hebdo coverage, FBI agents concluded the frame-up of 20 year old Christopher Lee Cornell from Cincinnati, Ohio, claiming the youth was planning a “pipe bomb attack” against the nation’s Capitol in Washington DC, and that he was “linked to ISIS”, and that this was somehow an “ISIS-inspired attack”, only no attack actually took place.

The Guardian reported on the scale and scope of this trend in 2014:

“In some cases the FBI may have created terrorists out of law-abiding individuals by suggesting the idea of taking terrorist action or encouraging the target to act.”

The list of FBI-related ‘terrorist’ incidents inside the US is a long one. The formula for creating a ‘terror icon’ required a confidential informant to guide and manage the future “suspect” right up to the point of arrest, or in some cases, like the World Trade Center Bombing in 1993, the FBI have even allowed the terrorist incident to take place.

Other high-profile terror icons with informant and patsy stories include the other ‘Paris Shooter’, Amedi Coulibaby (see his compelling patsy-informant case here), ‘Ottawa Shooter’ Zehaf-Bibeau (see his patsy story here), ‘Boston Bomber’ Tamerlan Tsarnaev (see his FBI recruitment story here), ‘The Underwear Bomber’ Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (see his patsy story here), Buford Rogers (read his patsy-informant story here), Jerad Miller (read his patsy-informant story here), Naji Mansour (read his informant story here), Quazi Mohammad Nafis (read his informant story here), Mohamed Osman Mohamud (read his informant story here), ‘OKC Bomber’ Timothy McVeigh (read his informant story here).

In addition to these examples, we could also include last month’s ‘Queens of Brooklyn’ terror plot, Washington Metro bomb plot, the New York City subway bomb plot, as well as the Sears Tower bomb plot in Chicago, and last but certainly not least – the attacks of 9/11… where the alleged hijackers lived with an FBI informant.

Just a few reasons to question the official narrative in Garland, Texas.

HEAD of the FBI’s Anthrax Investigation Says the Whole Thing Was a SHAM

Posted on by
Reply

images

Source: Washington’s Blog

Agent In Charge of Amerithrax Investigation Blows the Whistle

The FBI head agent in charge of the anthrax investigation – Richard Lambert – has just filed a federal whistleblower lawsuit calling the entire FBI investigation bullsh!t:

In the fall of 2001, following the 9/11 attacks, a series of anthrax mailings occurred which killed five Americans and sickened 17 others. Four anthrax-laden envelopes were recovered which were addressed to two news media outlets in New York City (the New York Post and Tom Brokaw at NBC) and two senators in Washington D.C. (Patrick Leahy and Tom Daschle). The anthrax letters addressed to New York were mailed on September 18, 2001, just seven days after the 9/11 attacks. The letters addressed to the senators were mailed 21 days later on October 9, 2001. A fifth mailing of anthrax is believed to have been directed to American Media, Inc. (AMI) in Boca Raton, Florida based upon the death of one AMI employee from anthrax poisoning and heavy spore contamination in the building.

Executive management at FBI Headquarters assigned responsibility for the anthrax investigation (code named “AMERITHRAX”) to the Washington Field Office (WFO), dubbing it the single most important case in the FBI at that time. In October 2002, in the wake of surging media criticism, White House impatience with a seeming lack of investigative progress by WFO, and a concerned Congress that was considering revoking the FBI’s charter to investigate terrorism cases, Defendant FBI Director Mueller reassigned Plaintiff from the FBI’s San Diego Field Office to the Inspection Division at FBI Headquarters and placed Plaintiff in charge of the AMERITHRAX case as an “Inspector.” While leading the investigation for the next four years, Plaintiff’s efforts to advance the case met with intransigence from WFO’s executive management, apathy and error from the FBI Laboratory, politically motivated communication embargos from FBI Headquarters, and yet another preceding and equally erroneous legal opinion from Defendant Kelley – all of which greatly obstructed and impeded the investigation.

On July 6, 2006, Plaintiff provided a whistleblower report of mismanagement to the FBI’s Deputy Director pursuant to Title 5, United States Code, Section 2303. Reports of mismanagement conveyed in writing and orally included: (a) WFO’s persistent understaffing of the AMERITHRAX investigation; (b) the threat of WFO’s Agent in charge to retaliate if Plaintiff disclosed the understaffing to FBI Headquarters; (c) WFO’s insistence on staffing the AMERITHRAX investigation principally with new Agents recently graduated from the FBI Academy resulting in an average investigative tenure of 18 months with 12 of 20 Agents assigned to the case having no prior investigative experience at all; (d) WFO’s eviction of the AMERITHRAX Task Force from the WFO building in downtown Washington and its relegation to Tysons Corner, Virginia to free up space for Attorney General Ashcroft’s new pornography squads; (e) FBI Director’s Mueller’s mandate to Plaintiff to “compartmentalize” the AMERITHRAX investigation by stove piping the flow of case information and walling off task force members from those aspects of the case not specifically assigned to them – a move intended to stem the tide of anonymous media leaks by government officials regarding details of the investigation. [Lambert complained about compartmentalizing and stovepiping of the investigation in a 2006 declaration.  See this, this and this]

This sequestration edict decimated morale and proved unnecessary in light of subsequent civil litigation which established that the media leaks were attributable to the United States Attorney for the District of the District of Columbia and to a Supervisory Special Agent in the FBI’s National Press Office, not to investigators on the AMERITHRAX Task Force; (f) WFO’s diversion and transfer of two Ph.D. Microbiologist Special Agents from their key roles in the investigation to fill billets for an 18 month Arabic language training program in Israel; (g) the FBI Laboratory’s deliberate concealment from the Task Force of its discovery of human DNA on the anthrax-laden envelope addressed to Senator Leahy and the Lab’s initial refusal to perform comparison testing; (h) the FBI Laboratory’s refusal to provide timely and adequate scientific analyses and forensic examinations in support of the investigation; (i) Defendant Kelley’s erroneous and subsequently quashed legal opinion that regulations of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) precluded the Task Force’s collection of evidence in overseas venues; (j) the FBI’s fingering of Bruce Ivins as the anthrax mailer; and, (k) the FBI’s subsequent efforts to railroad the prosecution of Ivins in the face of daunting exculpatory evidence.

Following the announcement of its circumstantial case against Ivins, Defendants DOJ and FBI crafted an elaborate perception management campaign to bolster their assertion of Ivins’ guilt. These efforts included press conferences and highly selective evidentiary presentations which were replete with material omissions. Plaintiff further objected to the FBI’s ordering of Plaintiff not to speak with the staff of the CBS television news magazine 60 Minutes or investigative journalist David Willman, after both requested authorization to interview Plaintiff.

In April 2008, some of Plaintiff’s foregoing whistleblower reports were profiled on the CBS television show 60 Minutes. This 60 Minutes segment was critical of FBI executive management’s handling of the AMERITHRAX investigation, resulting in the agency’s embarrassment and the introduction of legislative bills calling for the establishment of congressional inquiries and special commissions to examine these issues – a level of scrutiny the FBI’s Ivins attribution could not withstand.

After leaving the AMERITHRAX investigation in 2006, Plaintiff continued to publicly opine that the quantum of circumstantial evidence against Bruce Ivins was not adequate to satisfy the proof-beyond-a-reasonable doubt threshold required to secure a criminal conviction in federal court. Plaintiff continued to advocate that while Bruce Ivins may have been the anthrax mailer, there is a wealth of exculpatory evidence to the contrary which the FBI continues to conceal from Congress and the American people.

Exonerating Evidence for Ivins

Agent Lambert won’t publicly disclose the exculpatory evidence against Ivins. As the New York Times reports:

[Lambert] declined to be specific, saying that most of the information was protected by the Privacy Act and was unlikely to become public unless Congress carried out its own inquiry.

But there is already plenty of exculpatory evidence in the public record.

For example:

  • Handwriting analysis failed to link the anthrax letters to known writing samples from Ivins
  • No textile fibers were found in Ivins’ office, residence or vehicles matching fibers found on the scotch tape used to seal the envelopes
  • No pens were found matching the ink used to address the envelopes
  • Samples of his hair failed to match hair follicles found inside the Princeton, N.J., mailbox used to mail the letters
  • No souvenirs of the crime, such as newspaper clippings, were found in his possession as commonly seen in serial murder cases
  • The FBI could not place Ivins at the crime scene with evidence, such as gas station or other receipts, at the time the letters were mailed in September and October 2001
  • Lab records show the number of late nights Ivins put in at the lab first spiked in August 2001, weeks before the 9/11 attacks

As noted above, the FBI didn’t want to test the DNA sample found on the anthrax letter to Senator Leahy.  In addition, McClatchy points out:

After locking in on Ivins in 2007, the bureau stopped searching for a match to a unique genetic bacterial strain scientists had found in the anthrax that was mailed to the Post and to NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, although a senior bureau official had characterized it as the hottest clue to date.

Anthrax vaccine expert Meryl Nass. M.D., notes:

The FBI’s alleged motive is bogus. In 2001, Bioport’s anthrax vaccine could not be (legally) relicensed due to potency failures, and its impending demise provided room for Ivins’ newer anthrax vaccines to fill the gap. Ivins had nothing to do with developing Bioport’s vaccine, although in addition to his duties working on newer vaccines, he was charged with assisting Bioport to get through licensure.

***

The FBI report claims the anthrax letters envelopes were sold in Frederick, Md. Later it admits that millions of indistinguishable envelopes were made, with sales in Maryland and Virginia.

***

FBI emphasizes Ivins’ access to a photocopy machine, but fails to mention it was not the machine from which the notes that accompanied the spores were printed.

FBI Fudged the Science

16 government labs had access to the same strain of anthrax as used in the anthrax letters.

The FBI admitted that up to 400 people had access to flask of anthrax in Dr. Ivins’ lab.  In other words, even if the killer anthrax came from there, 399 other people might have done it.

Moreover, even the FBI’s claim that the killer anthrax came from Ivins’ flask has completely fallen apart. Specifically, both the National Academy of Science and the Government Accountability Office – both extremely prestigious, nonpartisan agencies – found that FBI’s methodology and procedures for purportedly linking the anthrax flask maintained by Dr. Ivins with the anthrax letters was sloppy, inconclusive and full of holes.  They found that the alleged link wasn’t very strong … and that there was no firm link.  Indeed, the National Academy of Sciences found that the anthrax mailed to Congressmen and the media could have come from a different source altogether than the flask maintained by Ivins.

Additionally, the Ft. Detrick facility – where Ivins worked – only handled liquid anthrax.  But the killer anthrax was a hard-to-make dry powder form of anthrax.  Ft. Detrick doesn’t produce dry anthrax; but other government labs – for example Dugway (in Utah) and Batelle (in Ohio) – do.

The anthrax in the letters was also incredibly finely ground; and the FBI’s explanation for how the anthrax became so finely ground doesn’t even pass the smell test.

Further, the killer anthrax in the letters had a very high-tech  anti-static coating so that the anthrax sample “floated off the glass slide and was lost” when scientists tried to examine it.  Specifically, the killer anthrax was coated with polyglass and each anthrax spore given an electrostatic charge, so that it would repel other spores and “float”.   This was very advanced bio-weapons technology to which even Ivins’ bosses said he didn’t have access.

Top anthrax experts like Richard Spertzel say that Ivins didn’t do it. Spertzel also says that only 4 or 5 people in the entire country knew how to make anthrax of the “quality” used in the letters, that Spertzel was one of them, and it would have taken him a year with a full lab and a staff of helpers to do it. As such, the FBI’s claim that Ivins did it alone working a few nights is ludicrous.

Moreover, the killer anthrax contained silicon … but the anthrax in Ivins’ flask did not.  The FBI claimed the silicon present in the anthrax letters was absorbed from its surroundings … but Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories completely debunked that theory. In other words, silicon was intentionally added to the killer anthrax to make it more potent.  Ivins and Ft. Detrick didn’t have that capability … but other government labs did.

Similarly, Sandia National Lab found the presence of iron and tin in the killer anthrax … but NOT in Ivins’ flask of anthrax.

Sandia also found that there was a strain of bacteria in one of the anthrax letters not present in Ivins’ flask. (The bacteria, iron, tin and silicon were all additives which made the anthrax in the letters more deadly.)

The Anthrax Frame Up

Ivins wasn’t the first person framed for the anthrax attacks …

Although the FBI now admits that the 2001 anthrax attacks were carried out by one or more U.S. government scientists, a senior FBI official says that the FBI was actually told to blame the Anthrax attacks on Al Qaeda by White House officials (remember what the anthrax letters looked like). Government officials also confirm that the white House tried to link the anthrax to Iraq as a justification for regime change in that country. And see this.

People don’t remember now, but the “war on terror” and Iraq war were largely based on the claim that Saddam and Muslim extremists were behind the anthrax attacks (and see this and this)

And the anthrax letters pushed a terrified Congress into approving the Patriot Act without even reading it. Coincidentally, the only Congressmen who received anthrax letters were the ones who were likely to oppose the Patriot Act.

And – between the bogus Al Qaeda/Iraq claims and the FBI’s fingering of Ivins as the killer – the FBI was convinced that another U.S. government scientist, Steven Hatfill, did it.  The government had to pay Hatfill $4.6 million to settle his lawsuit for being falsely accused.

Ivins’ Convenient Death

It is convenient for the FBI that Ivins died.

The Wall Street Journal points out:

No autopsy was performed [on Ivins], and there was no suicide note.

Dr. Nass points out:

 

FBI fails to provide any discussion of why no autopsy was performed, nor why, with Ivins under 24/7 surveillance from the house next door, with even his garbage being combed through, the FBI failed to notice that he overdosed and went into a coma. Nor is there any discussion of why the FBI didn’t immediately identify tylenol as the overdose substance, and notify the hospital, so that a well-known antidote for tylenol toxicity could be given (N-acetyl cysteine, or alternatively glutathione). These omissions support the suggestion that Ivins’ suicide was a convenience for the FBI. It enabled them to conclude the anthrax case, in the absence of evidence that would satisfy the courts.

 

Indeed, one of Ivins’ colleagues at Ft. Deitrich thinks he was murdered.

Whether murder or suicide, Ivins’ death was very convenient for the FBI, as dead men can’t easily defend themselves.

 

 

Hillary Clinton: The International Neocon Warmonger

Posted on by
Reply

06

By Webster G. Tarpley

Source: Voltaire.net

Hillary Clinton has announced her candidacy for President of the United States. While the European press showers her with praise without thinking, Webster G. Tarpley recalls her balance sheet: in all circumstances, she supported war and corporate interests.

As the National Journal reported in 2014, even the pathetically weak anti-war left is not ready to reconcile with Hillary given her warmongering as Secretary of State. And with good reason. Scratching just lightly beneath the surface of Hillary Clinton’s career reveals the empirical evidence of her historic support for aggressive interventions around the globe.

Beginning with Africa, Hillary defended the 1998 cruise missile strike on the El Shifa pharmaceutical plant in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum, destroying the largest producer of cheap medications for treating malaria and tuberculosis and provided over 60% of available medicine in Sudan. In 2006 she supported sending United Nations troops to Darfur with logistical and technical support provided by NATO forces. Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi was outspoken in his condemnation of this intervention, claiming it was not committed out of concern for Sudanese people but “…for oil and for the return of colonialism to the African continent.”

This is the same leader who was murdered in the aftermath of the 2011 NATO bombing of Libya; an attack promoted and facilitated with the eager support of Mrs. Clinton. In an infamous CBS news interview, said regarding this international crime: “We came, we saw, he died.” As Time magazine pointed out in 2011, the administration understood removing Qaddafi from power would allow the terrorist cells active in Libya to run rampant in the vacuum left behind. Just last month the New York Times reported that Libya has indeed become a terrorist safe haven and failed state— conducive for exporting radicals through “ratlines” to the conflict against Assad in Syria.

Hillary made prompt use of the ratlines for conflicts in the Middle East. In the summer of 2012, Clinton privately worked with then CIA director and subversive bonapartist David Petraeus on a proposal for providing arms and training to death squads to be used to topple Syria just as in Libya. This proposal was ultimately struck down by Obama, reported the New York Times in 2013, but constituted one of the earliest attempts at open military support for the Syrian death squads.

Her voting record on intervening in Afghanistan and Iraq is well known and she also has consistently called for attacking Iran. She even told Fareed Zakaria the State Department was involved “behind the scenes” in Iran’s failed 2009 Green Revolution. More recently in Foreign Policy magazine David Rothkopf wrote on the subject of the Lausanne nuclear accord, predicting a “snap-back” in policy by the winner of the 2016 election to the foreign policy in place since the 1980s. The title of this article? “Hillary Clinton is the Real Iran Snap-Back.” This makes Hillary the prime suspect for a return to the madcap Iranian policies that routinely threaten the world with a World War 3 scenario.

Hillary Clinton is not only actively aggressing against Africa and the Middle East. She was one of the loudest proponents against her husband’s hesitancy over the bombing of Kosovo, telling Lucina Frank: “I urged him to bomb,” even if it was a unilateral action.

While no Clinton spokesperson responded to a request by the Washington Free Beacon regarding her stance on Ukraine, in paid speeches she mentioned “putting more financial support into the Ukrainian government”. When Crimea decided to choose the Russian Federation over Poroshenko’s proto-fascist rump state, Hillary anachronistically called President Putin’s actions like “what Hitler did in the ‘30s.” As a leader of the bumbled ”reset” policy towards Russia, Hillary undoubtedly harbors some animus against Putin and will continue the destabilization project ongoing in Ukraine.

Not content with engaging in debacles in Eastern Europe, she has vocally argued for a more aggressive response to what she called the “rollback of democratic development and economic openness in parts of Latin America.” This indicates her willingness to allow the continuation of CIA sponsored efforts at South American destabilization in the countries of Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina and Brazil.

It is one of the proud prerogatives of the Tax Wall Street Party to push out into the light the Wall Street and foundation-funded Democrats. The final blow to Hillary’s clumsy façade comes directly from arch-neocon Robert Kagan. Kagan worked as a foreign policy advisor to Hillary along with his wife, Ukraine madwoman Victoria Nuland, during Hillary’s term as Secretary of State. He claimed in the New York Times that his view of American foreign policy is best represented in the “mainstream” by the foreign policy of Hillary Clinton; a foreign policy he obviously manipulated or outright crafted. Kagan stated: “If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue…it’s something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else.” What further reason could any sane person need to refute Hillary? A vote for Hillary is a vote for the irrational return to war.

The “Giant Sucking Sound”: Clinton Gave US NAFTA and Other Free Trade Sellouts

“There is no success story for workers to be found in North America 20 years after NAFTA,” states AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka. Unlike other failures of his Presidency, Bill Clinton can not run from NAFTA. It was Vice President Al Gore, not a veto-proof Republican congress, who lobbied to remove trade barriers with low-wage Mexico.

The record of free trade is clear. Multinational corporations and Wall Street speculators realize incredible profits, wages remain stagnant in the US, poverty persists in the developing world, and the remaining industrial corporations in America and Canada are increasingly owned by Chinese, Indian and other foreign interests.

America’s free trade policy is upside down. Besides Canada, Australia and Korea, most of our “free” trade partners are low-wage sweatshop paradises like Mexico, Chile, Panama, Guatemala, Bahrain and Oman. The US does in fact apply tariffs on most goods and on most nations of origin – rates are set by the US International Trade Commission (USTIC), a quasi-public federal agency.

Since a German- or Japanese-made automobile would under USITC’s schedule be taxed 10% upon importation, Volkswagen and Toyota can circumvent taxation by simply building their auto assembly plants for the US market in Mexico. In Detroit, an auto assembly worker is paid between $14 and $28/hour, ($29,120-$58,240/yr); hard work for modest pay. In Mexico, the rate varies from $2-5/hour.

In China, all automobile imports regardless of origin are tariffed as high as 25%. This allows the Chinese to attract joint ventures with Volkswagen and Toyota, and to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, “keep the jobs, the cars and the money.”

NAFTA-related job loss is not a question of productivity, currency manipulation, “fair trade,” environmental standards, etc. While these issues are not trivial, free trade – as Lincoln’s advisor Henry C. Carey proved – is a matter of simple accounting. Can an American family survive on $4,160/year ($2/hr)? If not, cars and their components will be built in Mexico. If we want cars built in the United States, the only solution is a general tariff (import tax) reflecting the difference between those wage standards, like the very tariffs repealed by Bill Clinton.

In the United States the “runaway shop” under NAFTA and CAFTA has sent trade deficits and unemployment soaring while wages drop relative to the cost of living. Yet Mexico and other “partners” receive no benefit either. Many manufacturing sectors in Mexico pay wages lower than the equivalent sector in China. Mexico is now the world leader in illegal narcotics exportation and weapons importation. The poverty level between 1994 and 2009 remained virtually identical. (52.4% – 52.3%). The shipping of raw materials to Mexico comprise the majority of so called American “exports”. The finished products from these exports are assembled and sold back to the United States at slave labor prices.

Don’t expect Hillary to behave differently with the coming “Trans-Pacific Partnership,” which seeks to replace an ascendant China with less-developed Vietnam and Malaysia. Vietnam would overtake India-allied Bangladesh in the global apparel trade, and Malaysia has a high-tech manufacturing sector poised to rival China’s. With America’s manufacturing economy in shambles, the Clinton machine can now be redirected to geopolitical maneuvers.

 

Twenty Years Later: Facts About the OKC Bombing That Go Unreported

Posted on by
Reply

mcveigh601

By Kevin Ryan

Source: Washington’s Blog

Next week will mark the 20th anniversary of the terrorist bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which killed 168 people including 19 children. The mainstream media will undoubtedly focus its attention on Timothy McVeigh, who was put to death in June 2001 for his part in the crime. They might also mention Terry Nichols, who was convicted of helping McVeigh plan the bombing and is serving a life sentence without parole.

There will be less discussion about how the FBI spent years hunting for a man who witnesses say accompanied McVeigh on the day of the bombing. They called this accomplice John Doe #2 and theories about his identity range from an Iraqi named Hussain Al-Hussaini, to a German national described below, to a neo-nazi bank robber named Richard Guthrie. The Justice Department finally gave up its search and said it was all a mistake— that there was never any credible evidence of a John Doe #2 being involved.

That reversal demonstrates a pattern of cover-up by authorities and limited media coverage in the years since the crime. This week, accounts will not repeat early reports of secondary devices in the building, or reports of the involvement of unknown middle-eastern characters. There will also be little if any mention of the extensive independent investigation into the crime that was conducted by leading members of the OKC community. Here are seven more facts that will probably not see much coverage on the 20th anniversary.

  1. Attorney Jesse Trentadue began investigating the case after his brother Kenney was killed in prison, apparently having been tortured to death by the FBI in its search for John Doe #2. Trentadue’s investigation led to a federal judge nearly finding the FBI in contempt of court for tampering with a key witness. Trentadue now says, “There’s no doubt in my mind, and it’s proven beyond any doubt, that the FBI knew that the bombing was going to take place months before it happened, and they didn’t stop it.”
  1. Judge Clark Waddoups, who presided over the case brought by Jesse Trentadue, ruled in 2010 that CIA documents associated with the case must be held secret. These documents show that the CIA was involved in the OKC bombing investigation and the prosecution of McVeigh. This means that foreign parties were involved because the CIA is prohibited from interfering in purely domestic investigations.
  1. Andreas Strassmeir, a former German military officer, was suspected of being John Doe #2. Strassmeir became close friends with McVeigh and they were both associated with a neo-nazi organization located in Elohim City, OK. A retired U.S. intelligence official claimed that Strassmeir was “working for the German government and the FBI” while at Elohim City. Mainstream reports about the OKC bombing typically avoid reference to Strassmeir.
  1. Larry Potts was the FBI supervisor who was responsible for the tragedies at Ruby Ridge in 1992, and Waco in 1993. Potts was then given responsibility for investigating the OKC bombing. Terry Nichols claimed that McVeigh—who allegedly had been recruited as an undercover intelligence asset while in the Army—had been working under the supervision of Potts.
  1. Terry Yeakey, an officer of the OKC Police Department, was among the first to reach the scene and he was heralded as a hero for rescuing many victims. Yeakey was also an eyewitness to conversations and physical evidence that convinced him that there was a cover-up of the bombing by federal agents. Yeakey was committed to getting to the truth about what happened but a year after the bombing he was found dead off the side of a rural road. His death was ruled a suicide despite overwhelming evidence that he was murdered. Authorities reported that Yeakey, “slit his wrists and neck… then miraculously climbed over a barbed wire fence… walked over a mile’s distance, through a nearby field, and eventually shot himself in the side of the head at an unusual angle.” No weapon was found, no investigation was conducted, no fingerprints were taken, and no interviews were conducted. His family continues to fight for the truth about his death.
  1. Gene Corley, the engineer who was hired by the government to support its claims about the structural fire at the Branch Davidian complex in Waco, was brought in to investigate the destruction of the Murrah Building. Corley brought along three other engineers: Charles Thornton, Mete Sozen, and Paul Mlakar. Their investigation was conducted from half a block away—where they could not observe any of the damage directly—yet their conclusions supported the pre-existing official account. A few years later, within 72 hours of the 9/11 attacks, these same four men were on site leading the investigations at the Word Trade Center and the Pentagon.
  1. There are many other links between OKC and 9/11. For example, the alleged hijackers visited the OKC area many times and even stayed in the same motel that was frequented by McVeigh and Nichols. After both the OKC bombing and 9/11, building monitoring videos went missing, FBI harassment of witnesses was seen, and officials ignored evidence that did not support the political story. Additionally, numerous oddities link the OKC area to al Qaeda. In 2002, OKC resident Nick Berg was interrogated by the FBI for lending his laptop and internet password to alleged “20th hijacker” Zacarias Moussoui. Two years after this interrogation, Berg became world famous as a victim of beheading in Iraq. Investigators looking for clues about these connections will be particularly interested in two airports in OKC, the president of the University of Oklahoma, and the CIA leader who both monitored the alleged hijackers in Germany and was hired at the university just before 9/11.

On April 19, 2015, at the 20th anniversary of one of the worst terrorist attacks in history, citizens should be reminded that we don’t know what happened that day. We don’t know because officials have covered-up the crime for unknown reasons and most media sources will not challenge that cover-up.

Boston Marathon Bombings’ Guilty Verdict Exposed as a Gross Travesty of Justice

Posted on by
Reply

b_w0h3guiaatqhk

By Joachim Hagopian

With the official government narrative of the 9/11 attack filled with a plethora of lies that have since been subsequently exposed, the next biggest “war on terror” event on US soil that the feds failed to stop was the April 2013 Boston Marathon bombings. And now the lone living suspect from that horrific crime that killed three people, left 17 limbless and injured 264 victims (though that number’s been accused of being purposely inflated) has now been found guilty of all 30 counts after the jury’s 11 hour deliberation earlier this week. As we mark the second anniversary of this tragic event and the second and final phase of the trial beginning on Monday that will decide the fate of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev – whether he’ll live out the rest of his life in prison or be put to death, a critical review of preceding events and developments surrounding his high profile, extremely significant case seems both timely and much needed.

Despite Dzhokhar Tsarnaev pleading not guilty to the 30 counts (17 carrying the death penalty) he was charged within a week after the April 15th bombings last year, his lead defense attorney Judy Clark several days ago conceded to the jury that her client was guilty in her closing argument. Apparently blaming the dead brother whose due process was denied became Dzhokhar’s only defense strategy. The defense team insisted that he was coerced and bullied by his older brother into committing alleged acts of terrorism. Considering no real solid proof other than photos placing Dzhokhar and older brother Tamerlan both wearing backpacks at the scene of the crime where the two bombs exploded was even presented at the trial, no justice for either the Tsarnaevs nor the many victims can possibly come from this guilty verdict.

If the purpose of the US judicial system in criminal trials is to ensure that all factual evidence surrounding an alleged crime or crimes be accurately and fairly presented so that the jurors can properly assess the best semblance of the truth as presented by both prosecution and defense in order for the jury to adjudicate and decide a defendant’s true guilt or innocence, this trial was a complete travesty of justice. And if a basic tenet of the justice system in the United States holds that a defendant is considered innocent until proven guilty, then again this verdict outcome is an obscene farce and a shameful joke exposing America’s justice system for its gross injustice. Just as the 9/11 commission failed to adequately address and answer dozens of questions that its official narrative failed to deliver, and years earlier the Warren Commission failed JFK and America, so does the prosecution’s case of evidence of Tsarnaev’s guilt fail to be convincing, much less provide definitive and unequivocal proof that the 21-year old Chechen American with his brother committed the Boston Marathon crimes.

And the prime reason why is that so much of the testimony and so called evidence was based on the FBI and local law enforcement’s dishonest versions of events that were based near exclusively on the government’s one star witness’s faulty, changeable, non-credible accounting of events. The identity of this sole witness that even through the trial was never revealed, testified in court by his fake name “Danny.” Later it was learned that Danny’s real name was Dun Meng. A Chinese national finishing his masters at Northeastern University in engineering, during his alleged carjacking, Meng claimed that the deceased brother Tamerlan confessed that he and his younger brother were responsible for both the Marathon bombings as well as the murder of the MIT campus policeman.

Throughout his trial testimony, the key witness maintained constant eye contact with what seemed almost like his handler, Northeastern University criminology professor James Fox. Fox clearly acted as Meng’s coach and gatekeeper ensuring that Fox would be present in a tentative interview with WhoWhatWhy journalist Russ Baker though it turned out Fox made sure it never happened. In a television interview with the immigrant gas station attendant that Meng ran to when he escaped, it was Fox once again guarding his henhouse, making sure the attendant stayed on script, an odd role for a criminology professor. But in a case where the entire story was badly scripted by the feds, necessitating absolute control over all outgoing information to the public, Professor Fox was merely playing his part. And that part also included state propagandist. Samplings from articles he wrote for the Boston Globe, starting with his response to the difficulty of finding a cemetery that would accept Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s body, he wrote:

I truly understand and appreciate why many folks want nothing to do with the corpse of a man who apparently hated America and our way of life… If and when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were scheduled to die, his name and image would be plastered all over the news, further increasing his undeserved celebrity in the minds of those on the political fringe who view our government as evil and corrupt… The bombing seems to have been an attack against American life, not specifically American lives. Those killed and injured were unfortunate surrogates of the intended target: America and the freedoms we enjoy.”

When the strength of the state’s evidence to convict and execute a man relies solely on one incognito witness whose tightly controlled testimony repeatedly kept changing depending on whom he talked to, how can a guilty verdict be considered legitimate or fair? Virtually the entire guilt or innocence of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev rested on what this one alleged witness claimed, yet he kept changing his story on numerous occasions despite his gatekeeper’s best intentions.

The other so called incriminating evidence used against Dzhokhar was a bogus, totally unbelievable written confession that he is purported to have written in the dark on the inside wall of the boat he was hiding out in. Dzhokhar was supposedly laying there nearly bleeding to death from the alleged gunshot exchange with police a few hours earlier. Yet on video footage the young man is seen emerging unassisted from the boat appearing bloodless and uninjured only to be admitted minutes later to the emergency hospital room in critical condition suffering from a deeply sliced neck wound that prevented him from speaking for weeks. How did that happen while in police custody? And that came after a swarm of police shot a slew of bullet holes into the boat while Tsarnaev supposedly lay there gravely injured.

Just as the French authorities made sure that no prisoners were allowed to be taken alive in the alleged Hebdo Paris crime spree in January, nor in Osama bin Laden’s alleged execution in Pakistan in 2011, nor in the JFK assassination, that barrage of gunfire into that boat by FBI and/or local police was also intended to kill the only suspect. That way the government’s complicity, criminal involvement and subsequent cover-up would have conveniently been eliminated – wiped clean of any messy complications in the form of a suspect trial and the truth inadvertently leaking out. So the US government proceeds with a pseudo-trial that kept the defendant silent and unable to ever present his side of the story. In effect, he may as well have been silenced by the bullets intended to kill him.

Another of the dozens of discrepancies in this case is over how and when older brother Tamerlan actually died. A series of photos of a naked and handcuffed Tamerlan were taken as the police placed him into custody and inside a patrol car. Both CNN and the Boston Globe reported that Tamerlan was alive in police custody. Yet the feds’ official line was that after the brothers robbed a 7-Eleven, Tamerlan was killed in the Watertown shootout with the police while Dzhokhar backed the car over him as he made his temporary getaway. It can only be one or the other. The photos don’t lie. Cops do.

For so many incredulous inconsistencies to actually be accepted as convincing “evidence” while so many discrepant facts directly contradict state evidence, and then the “no questions asked” defense and mainstream media throughout the trial passively swallowing it hook, line and sinker in its rush to convict Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (trial being over in less than a month with 95 witnesses) is utterly preposterous and again, a complete and total miscarriage of justice. For nearly two years all the potential defense witnesses were constantly harassed, deported, jailed, and even killed, thus, virtually silencing any chance of a fair defense for Dzhokhar.

But then the propaganda lies built into this case from the start were designed to convict the brothers as the patsy fall guys all along. Going back to the JFK assassination and Lee Harvey Oswald, every false flag operation has its unwitting stooges who are used by the feds as props to take the sole blame. From President Obama to the FBI to their propagandist presstitutes, they were all publicly weighing in their guilty verdicts no sooner than the release of the photos that within days of the bombings identified the two brothers as the only prime suspects, thus prejudicing the entire case, effectively swaying Americans into believing that the one suspect still alive was guilty long before his trial ever began. And we know based on both Obama and the FBI’s track records that they both are constantly lying through their teeth and obviously cannot be trusted.  The overwhelming majority of American citizens per last August’s CNN poll, an all-time high of 87%, of Americans simply do not trust their own government, knowing that they are constantly being lied to every day. And with so many blatant holes in the state’s case, anyone half aware and informed of what’s been allowed to go down in the Boston Marathon bombings case would be near 100% certain that the government is once again producing an over-the-top false narrative designed to hide its own criminality. But then the US federal government’s become a militarized dictatorship, part of an international crime cabal that uses state propaganda as effectively as the Nazis ever did.

All kinds of unexplained anomalies are rampant throughout this case. A number of paid mercenaries from Craft International, a paramilitary private security contractor out of Texas (not unlike notorious Blackwater/aka Xe/aka Academi) were also spotted in photos wearing those same black colored government-issued-like backpacks. The question of whether any of them laid their backpack and its contents on the ground never quite came up in the trial. Apparently these guys were part of a Homeland Security training exercise that just happened to be training at the exact same time and place as the so called terrorists on that Boston Marathon day. Think about those odds, kind of like America’s entire national air defense on 9/11 conveniently being absent, purposely diverted to training exercises in the Atlantic just so the 9/11 false flag could be executed as planned. In Boston the unmistakable heavy presence of the military and special ops personnel assembled en-masse instantly on the scene after the marathon explosions is yet another giveaway indicating that the feds had something if not everything to do with this tragedy.

Clearly it was a training exercise alright, Bostonians was used as a guinea pig litmus test for assessing how a large US urban population of over a million people would react to a first practice, simulation dry-run of martial law in America, conveniently prepping us for what’s to come. The 2012 National Defense Authorization Act upheld by the US Supreme Court a year ago now permits the US military to invade our homes without warrant, arrest us without charges, and imprison us indefinitely without trial, legal representation or due process. After the marathon bombings the feds’ stand down order issued over an expansive, densely populated metropolitan area to remain in their homes while a massive police state-army dressed and armed for war against its own people without warrants entered thousands of homes with automatic weapons drawn in the largest, monster-scale manhunt in US history searching for one teenager from a family with whom the feds were already very familiar.

Perhaps the most respected independent news team that’s been diligently investigating the Boston Marathon bombings the last two years – WhoWhatWhy – has asserted that older brother Tamerlan was most likely an FBI informant. Through court motions last year Dzhokhar’s defense team submitted evidence that the FBI had approached the older Tsarnaev brother in an effort to recruit him to spy on his fellow Boston Chechen and Muslim community. The US intel community has a verifiably long history both here and around the globe of seeking out troubled youth and young people like the Tsarnaevs as informants in its worldwide clandestine operations.

The FBI and CIA’s common misuse of paying informants to entrap others globally into joining plots of terrorism was well documented in researcher-author Trevor Aaronson’s book The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism. Between 9/11 and 2011 he confirmed that 508 defendants were recruited by informants paid up to $100,000 in multiple sting operations. In fact, in all but only three high profile cases were the FBI and their informants not involved. Again, this demonstrates that the US government’s calling card around the world reads “Terrorism-R-US,” just another M.O. for squandering hard earned taxpayer dollars to keep its invented “war on terror” very much ongoing and alive forever.

What seems most probable are efforts by the FBI to recruit Tamerlan to become a snitch in the neocons’ self-serving war on terror. Yet this piece of crucial evidence has been purposely withheld from all court proceedings and MSM’s dubious, half-ass coverage. 26-year old Tamerlin was a down on his luck, unemployed boxer whose dream of Olympic gold had been shattered, married to a nurse’s aide working 60 hours a week to make ends meet. Yet WhoWhatWhy states that just two days prior to the bombings, Tamerlan could afford sending his mother in Russia $900 cash along with paying for the backpacks (or were they government issued?), ammunition and bomb-making materials. Yet this critical piece of information was also prohibited from further inquiry during the trial.

Of course the FBI predictably denied any Tsarnaev solicitation to become an informant. Prior to last month’s trial, the US Circuit Court judge presiding over the case explicitly ordered that the brother’s involvement with FBI not be allowed to enter his courtroom during the trial. It remains to be seen if Judge George A. O’Toole will permit the defense to present this critical information during the upcoming sentencing phase. Because the government has so much to hide and has failed to address so many discrepancies in the case for obvious high stakes reasons, it probably won’t be included, which of course only reinforces what many of us already know, that this trial is but a sham for police state propaganda and truth suppression.

Of all the receipts for typical everyday items purchased, the only receipts found in Tamerlan’s pockets were receipts for his self-incriminating bomb-making materials. That’s almost like finding the unblemished passport belonging to the lead 9/11 box-cutter a couple blocks from the towers’ ashes the day after, or the Hebdo gunman’s wallet with ID left carelessly on purpose in the cab so those terrorists could instantly be identified. This calling card pattern smacks of yet another inside job rendition with the same shabby, grubby fed fingerprints carelessly smudged all over it.

Another inconsistent weakness in the prosecution’s case was the sophistication required for making the “pressure-cooker” bombs used at the marathon. Supposedly Tamerlan learned off an al Qaeda internet website where the article’s authors mention the directions being beyond the scope of a novice. Throughout the trial, the prosecution team would go back and forth promoting the notion of the bombs’ complexity whenever it served their purpose. For example, as the reason used to justify the FBI interrogating Dzhokhar for two days straight without reading him his Miranda rights, the FBI suspected that others were also involved, partially based on the bombs seeming more than homemade-like. Yet whenever it would come up as a reason to mitigate seeking the death penalty, the notion of lone wolves would get drummed home every time.

The traces of bomb materials in Tamerlan’s apartment underwent the same flip floppy logic as a transparent prosecution ploy used to convict the younger brother. Three times the feds changed their tune on traces of the bomb material being found in the apartment and whether the brothers had outside help or not. These discrepancies consistently went unchallenged by the defense during the trial as if pre-scripted to let the shady government off the hook in its back and forth rendition of “truth,” protecting the feds’ cover-up lies of discrepancy in order to allow the US government to get away with its incriminating part.

The one thread of unfailing consistency throughout this entire two year story is the constant inconsistencies and the countless conspicuously avoided bottom line questions that smack of inside cover-up. Initially the Tsarnaevs were not the suspects. Apparently once the photos of the Tsarnaev brothers at the Boston Marathon were made public asking for help in identifying their names, overheard on a Boston police scanner and then scooped up immediately by social media network sources, the names Mike Mulugeta and Sunil Trapathi were erroneously identified as the suspects. The fact that the FBI knew who the two men in those photos were because they had previous dealings with them enough to place them on a no fly list, the FBI willfully lied to America pretending it needed the public’s assistance to identify them. And then the police put out false names of innocent people as suspects. Mike Mulugeta reportedly was shot dead though any actual accounts confirming his death are completely absent. However, East Indian American and Brown University student Sunil Trapathi who had been reported missing since mid-March was found floating face down in pond water in Providence, Rhode Island about a week after the Marathon explosions. What little information about his suspicious death was released through his family and the question of whether the death resulted from foul play is still largely unknown.

More bogus, planted propaganda against the brothers shortly after they were identified as the prime suspects was the FBI claim linking them to the triple murder case in Waltham, Massachusetts that took place on September 11th, 2011. Only during the trial did it come out that there existed absolutely no evidence that Tamerlan was involved. Yet the systematic damage of misinformation supporting the brothers’ guilt was already done, ensuring that in the court of public opinion the Tsarnaevs were guilty as charged right from the get-go.

Here the Tsarnaev brothers were supposedly on a no fly list acting as more evidence supporting prior contact with intelligence agencies, yet Tamerlan was permitted to fly to known terrorist hotbed Chechnya and neighboring Dagestan from January 21, 2012 to July 17, 2012. His family members insist he spent his entire time with family, among them a distant cousin who heads a non-violent organization critical of Western policies toward Islam. Yet his visit was used by prosecution as so called evidence that the older brother was “radicalized” there and came home an inspired terrorist seeking revenge on America.

A New York Times article dated April 20, 2013 suggests that Tamerlan was first approached by the FBI in January 2011 after a return trip from Russia. Russian intelligence services that monitored phone calls in Chechnya warned the FBI in March 2011 that Tamerlan was becoming a potential threat. Thus two plus years well in advance of the bombings, the FBI was already cognizant of Tamerlan’s extremist leaning activities. Yet the FBI allowed him to travel yet again to Russia despite being on a no fly list and less than nine months after his return from that final trip abroad, the Boston Marathon bombings occurred. This damning piece of government evidence makes the feds minimally guilty of criminal gross negligence if not actually a criminal accomplice.

Yet another despicable chapter to this tragic saga is the FBI’s murder of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s friend in Florida. Within weeks after the Boston bombings, an unarmed Ibragim Todashev was shot by an FBI agent previously reprimanded for excessive force as an Oakland police officer. Initially the FBI lied about the circumstances, falsely claiming Todashev wielded a knife. The victim’s family is suing the FBI for $30 million. Even after admitting the lie about the victim brandishing a weapon, the Justice Department (overseeing the FBI) and a Florida prosecutor cleared the murdering FBI agent of any wrongdoing. The official government’s response that in effect supports such egregious acts of violence toward innocent civilians strongly indicates that the victim knew too much and the crime syndicate’s answer for people aware of the feds’ evildoing is to systematically assassinate those who might incriminate the federal government. Neutralizing perceived threats is standard operating procedure.

As an aside, the Tsarnaev brothers’ uncle who went public shortly after the bombings blasting his nephews as “losers” was married for several years in the 1990’s to the daughter of well-known CIA career officer Graham Fuller. Fuller is the CIA architect for creating the Mujahedeen movement that fought the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980’s, the same outfit whose leader Osama bin Laden emerged as the so called 9/11  al Qaeda mastermind.  Fuller was a committed advocate for using Islamic fundamentalists as US proxy war mercenaries. Another coincidence that the CIA VIP’s son-in-law and his nephews came from Chechnya, a hotspot for separatist Muslim terrorist activity?

Once again the United States government appears to be at least complicit in another state crime against its own citizens… and then applying a media blackout to any real investigative reporting that would ask the dozens of questions to get to the truth. Even the defendant’s legal representation abandoned Tsarnaev’s right to a fair trial, and by co-opting to act in accordance with the government’s “no questions asked” implicitly applied gag-rule, it too is complicit in this heinous crime for neither seeking the truth nor any real justice for either the defendants or the scores of victims. The US crime cabal and its fabricated “war on terror” is perpetuated globally, both on US soil and around the world as an ongoing crime against humanity. The truth behind 9/11 is in-our-face, and so is the truth behind these Boston bombings. The criminals in Washington must pay for their crimes.

Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate and former US Army officer. He has written a manuscript based on his unique military experience entitled “Don’t Let The Bastards Getcha Down.” It examines and focuses on US international relations, leadership and national security issues. After the military, Joachim earned a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field for more than a quarter century. He now concentrates on his writing and has a blog site at http://empireexposed. blogspot. com/. He is also a regular contributor to Global Research and a syndicated columnist at Veterans Today.

Tsarnaev Guilty of 30 Counts in Boston Bombing Show Trial

Posted on by
Reply

show tri·al

noun
noun: show trial; plural noun: show trials

  1. a judicial trial held in public with the intention of influencing or satisfying public opinion, rather than of ensuring justice.

Yesterday Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was found guilty of all 30 counts he was charged for in the Boston Marathon bombing trial. For those following the case who think critically, this came as no surprise not because of any hard evidence proving Tsarnaev’s guilt, but because on the second day of the trial Tsarnaev’s attorney Judy Clarke declared Tsarnaev was guilty in her opening statement saving the state the time and effort of having to prove its case and answer numerous glaring unanswered questions such as the ones asked by WhoWhatWhy and 21st Century Wire.

Now that this particular show trial is over, the government and corporate media will attempt to brush all uncomfortable questions under the rug and, as with JFK, WACO, Oklahoma City Bombing, Columbine, 9/11, Sandy Hook, etc., it will be left to independent researchers and journalists to search for the truth.

For more information about the Boston bombing that the government/corporate-stream media has largely ignored, read this compendium of research and analysis from the Memory Hole blog: http://memoryholeblog.com/2014/04/13/boston-marathon-bombing-a-compendium-of-research-and-analysis/

Ferguson and the Logic of Neoliberalism

Posted on by
2

Ferguson-RiotA Political Economy Premised on Exploitation and Social Repression

By Rob Urie

Source: Counterpunch.org

While the U.S. Department of Justice report on racist policing practices in Ferguson, Missouri provides direct evidence for skeptical Whites that institutional racism is fact, limiting the investigation to Ferguson implausibly delimits the scope of race based repression in the U.S. Additionally, from slavery to convict leasing to funding the Ferguson city budget with fines and penalties overwhelmingly extracted from poor and middle class Blacks, the economic basis of police repression is isolated in an improbable present. And in fact, the ‘tricks and traps’ used by the Ferguson police for economic extraction closely resembles corporate practices of using contract law, state institutions and monopoly power to take economic resources from those who lack the social power to resist.

A cognitive challenge for White Americans (and ‘conservative’ Blacks) is the distance between facts like police repression in Ferguson and the mythology of capitalist democracy that we live by. Use of the police for economic extraction in Ferguson, for funding the town budget through racial repression, ties state power to economic power within the particular circumstances of American racial and economic history. In a most basic sense this integration reframes state-market relations claimed to relate capitalism to democracy. More broadly, the TPP and TIPP ‘trade’ deals being pushed by President Obama are a variation on the racist shakedown in Ferguson. Their intent is to replace state power with corporate power while leaving Western states intact to provide state services for the benefit of corporations and the illusion of democratic control.

Discovery of a police ‘black site’ in Chicago, the prevalence of racist violence by the police across the U.S., the return of debtor’s prisons and ‘civil forfeiture’ laws that allow the police to take belongings without evidence of a crime illustrate the growing lawlessness of the police. When tied to illegal surveillance carried out by the NSA, DEA and FBI against citizens and non-citizens alike and the extra-judicial powers claimed by Mr. Obama a picture of widespread state lawlessness emerges. When considered in the context of no criminal prosecutions for war crimes against the (George W) Bush administration or against prominent bankers in the financial and economic debacle of the last decade a picture of widespread elite lawlessness emerges. Clearly the state, including local police departments, exists for purposes other than enforcing fealty to the law.

Based on supporting economic theories it is superficially ironic that the resurgence of neo-liberalism since the 1970s is coincident with this growing integration of state and ‘private’ power. Premised on clearly delineated state and market roles, neo-liberalism was / is in theory the economic realm unhindered by state restrictions. This state-market delineation facilitates the facade that capitalism is related to democracy— political freedom in the realm of the political and economic freedom in the realm of the economic. As fact and metaphor the role of the Ferguson police using asymmetrical social power to take economic wealth from vulnerable citizens demonstrates the implausibility of this theorized differentiation in the realm of the political. And new debtor’s prisons (link above) have police and the prison system acting as collection agents for Payday Lenders.

The TPP and TTIP trade deals being pushed by Mr. Obama are designed with analogous levers for extorting wealth. The investor resolution clauses in TTIP have a supranational judiciary ruling on ‘investor’ lawsuits against governments for hypothetical lost profits and taxpayers on the hook for adverse rulings. The relative absence of remaining trade restrictions and tariffs is well covered territory. What remains to be accomplished with these ‘agreements’ is the consolidation of economic power as the power to extract wealth. As with proposals for tradable carbon credits, the ‘product’ of the agreements combines the right to extort by putting forward projects never intended to be built with guarantees against adverse economic developments.

The police in Ferguson used a particular social lever, the residual of slavery, for gratuitous racial repression and for economic extraction. Slavery is a social institution, but it most particularly is an economic institution. It is a social mechanism for accruing the product of slave labor to the slave master. And slavery in the U.S. was ‘legal’ until it wasn’t. Convict leasing was explicit use of ‘the law’ and the judicial system to force poor Blacks to work for little or no pay. ‘The law’ was used as an instrument of economic exploitation and extraction. The push back from Whites and conservative Blacks that the murdered Mike Brown was a criminal because he likely stole a box of cigars takes this same law at face value. This view of the law depends on a similarly improbable separation of political and economic realms as neo-liberal theory.

As political theory might have it, if all of the citizens of Ferguson were intended to benefit from city resources while poor and middle class Blacks were disproportionately forced to pay for them that represents economic taking by some citizens for the benefit of others. The racial character of this taking places it in history. The history of Western colonialism, neo-colonialism and imperialism places it in broader internal and external context. And this history is evidence that distinct realms of the economic and the political never described existing circumstance. The practical relevance is that it places the actions of the police in Ferguson, past and pending ‘trade’ agreements and global economic relations in the space where economic and political power act in an integrated social dimension.

The effect is to reframe ‘the law’ in terms of who is committing particular acts rather than the acts being committed. The police in Ferguson can murder with impunity and shake down citizens at their discretion to fund the city budget (and their paychecks) while poor and middle class Blacks are disproportionately murdered and sent to prison for similar acts. What is legal and what isn’t is determined by who has social power, not by the acts themselves. In a racist and classist society the law is codification of class and race interests. If a black citizen of Ferguson puts a gun to someone’s head and demands their valuables they are a criminal but if the same act is committed by a cop it is within the law. Here events in Ferguson are fact and metaphor— overwhelming evidence (links above) suggests that similar social relations exist across much of the country.

This view of the law has precedence in Richard Nixon’s contention that “when the President does it that means that it is not illegal.” Earlier precedence can be found in Nazi law and in the laws of fascist Italy in the 1930s and 1940s. This isn’t to call anyone who isn’t a self-proclaimed Nazi a Nazi. The precedence lies in the view that the law is the will of a leadership class, be it the Nazi leadership in Germany or city government in Ferguson. One problem with this theory is that it makes the law capricious and ultimately impossible to follow. Race based law enforcement criminalizes race, not nominally proscribed acts. Stories of the Chicago police department’s black site (link above) have political protesters and poor Blacks accused of no crimes taken there. If people can be arrested without evidence that a crime was committed then what is the difference in outcomes between committing and not committing crimes?

A relation of neo-liberalism to fascism can be made through replacement of civil governance with corporate governance that subordinates the rights and privileges of civil society to corporate interests. The investor-state dispute mechanisms (link above) being broadened and formally codified in the TTIP trade deal will be used to demand compensation for environmental regulations that keep drinking water safe and limit greenhouse gas emissions, the metaphorical equivalent of threatening to end the planet if we don’t pay up. Civil forfeiture has the police taking valuables they might want at the point of a gun if necessary. The Ferguson police shake down poor Blacks using the law as a weapon. At the same time a ruling elite has immunity from prosecution for well documented crimes.

Much of what is written here was well understood in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. It hardly seems an accident that this collective memory was lost to narrow ideological dogma. Across the country property taxes are being cut with partial differences made up through regressive fees and penalties. This fits the neo-liberal preference for property over labor incomes. And neo-liberal theory has no place for history because all acts within it take place in a temporally isolated present. This dissociates racist policing in Ferguson, Chicago, New York, Detroit and Philadelphia from the roles of the legislature, judiciary, police and prisons in reconstituting the economic exploitation of slavery under the guise of free choice in capitalist democracy. Race is the particular case in America; class is the broader expression of economic power.

The tension between the DOJ report (link above) on racist policing in Ferguson and the Obama administration’s broad support for neo-liberal policies will likely produce a tight circle drawn around events in Ferguson. Already supporters of police repression are raising the argument that the words “hands up, don’t shoot” never transpired. What bearing does precise wording have on a Black child being murdered by the police? And why wouldn’t Black youth have a right to be hostile to police who, as the DOJ reports concludes, are running a racist shakedown operation to force poor and middle class Blacks to fund city government? How would White readers react to being harassed, intimidated, disproportionately jailed and forced to pay for the privilege? Ultimately the problem is larger than Ferguson and social accountability should address political economy premised in exploitation and social repression.

Rob Urie is an artist and political economist. His book Zen Economics is written and awaiting publication.