Category Archives: False Flag

America created and supports the Islamic State

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By Stephen Lendman

Source: Intrepid Report

Obama’s so-called war to degrade and destroy Islamic State is a complete fabrication. Defeating it is simple. Stop recruiting, arming, funding, training and directing its elements.

Stop using terrorists as US proxy foot soldiers. Wage peace, not war. Isolated on its own, it’ll wither over time and disappear, or be too impotent to rampage like now.

Washington bears full responsibility for human floods fleeing war ravaged areas for safe havens anywhere. Bashar al-Assad told RT International the crisis is “not about that Europe didn’t accept them or embrace them as refugees. It’s about not dealing with the cause. If you are worried about them, stop supporting terrorists.”

“If we ask any Syrian today about what they want, the first thing they would say: ‘We want security and safety for every person and every family.’ The international community should unite around what the Syrian people want.”

Ongoing conflict can only be resolved “through dialogue and the political process [as well as] unit[y] in the struggle against terrorism.”

With an approval rating of 89%, Vladimir Putin is likely the world’s most popular leader—for supporting nation-state sovereignty, multi-world polarity and opposing America’s ruthless imperial agenda, waging endless wars on humanity.

He’s vilified in the West for forthrightly supporting world peace and stability, as well as wanting all conflicts resolved diplomatically and proposing workable solutions if adopted.

At the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) summit in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, he urged the international community to set aside geopolitical differences and unite against a common enemy.

“Extremists from many countries of the world, including, unfortunately, European countries, Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) undertake ideological and military training in the ranks of Islamic State,” he explained. “[C]ertainly we are worried that they could possibly return” and make trouble.

“Russia, as you know, has proposed to form a wide coalition to fight extremists without any delay. It should unite everyone who is ready and is already contributing to tackling terrorism.”

“If Russia had not been supporting Syria, the situation in the country would have been worse than in Libya and the refugee flow would have been even bigger.”

Moscow didn’t ravage and destroy Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Donbass, and other countries—or occupy any. It doesn’t use terrorist mercenaries as proxy foot soldiers—or wage endless wars on humanity.

It’s not responsible for exponentially growing human floods of desperate people fleeing war-torn areas for safe havens anywhere out of harm’s way.

It accepted over a million Ukrainian refugees fleeing Obama’s war on Donbass, treating them humanely, regularly supplying Donetsk and Lugansk with badly needed humanitarian aid—doing the same thing for Syrians.

Russia is Europe’s leading peace and stability proponent. Wherever America shows up, genocide, mass destruction and human misery follow.

Peace is anathema. So are democratic freedoms. America’s agenda intends a ruler/serf world unfit to live in—greed and rapaciousness triumphing over equity and justice for all.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. His new book as editor and contributor is “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.” Visit his blog at sjlendman.blogspot.com . Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network. It airs three times weekly: live on Sundays at 1PM Central time plus two prerecorded archived programs.

 

Follow the trail of facts, hints, and allegations—connect the dots

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By Edward Curtin

Source: Intrepid Report

“There were incidents and accidents/there were hints and allegations.”—Paul Simon

Children love to trace, to connect the dots, to make connections, but often the connections they make frighten adults who try to ignore their points or offer some ridiculous circumlocutions. Maybe we adults are much like children in our desires to make connections, but the thought of it frightens us.

Suppose we could for a while calm those fears and concentrate long enough to trace through the dim glimmerings of a faded pattern a clarifying story that would jolt us into an awareness that could change our lives and society. I offer here an arc of history that you may consider tedious. Try patience. I could yell, I could scream, I could try all the classical argumentation and logic that comes “naturally” to me. I could be a wise guy, amuse you, try to provoke you, curse, sing a song, stomp my feet—even write post-modern gibberish. As Andre Vltchek says, it’s hard—I’m putting it nicely—to get through, to have an impact that counts. We desperately want to believe in a world where we really are children and BIG Daddy (apologies to Burl Ives) has told the truth. Obviously I have reached some stern conclusions, but I think the conclusions follow from the facts. See what you think.

  • 1957, Massachusetts Senator John Kennedy delivers a Senate speech in support of the Algerian liberation movement, in support of African liberation generally, and against colonial imperialism. The speech causes an international uproar, and Kennedy is harshly attacked by Eisenhower, Nixon, John Foster Dulles, and even liberals such as Adlai Stevenson. He is praised in the third world.
  • 1959, George H. W. Bush moves his oil company—Zapata Offshore—to Houston, Texas. One of Zapata’s drilling rigs, Scorpion, having been moved from the Gulf of Mexico the previous year, is now operating 54 miles north of Cuba
  • 1960. On March 17, President Eisenhower approves the Bay of Pigs project.
  • 1961. On January 17, in anticipation of Kennedy’s inauguration in three days, the Belgian government in complicity with the CIA assassinates Congolese nationalist leader Patrice Lumumba. On February 13, a devastated Kennedy receives a belated phone call informing him of Lumumba’s murder.
  • 1961, April. More than a week before the CIA led Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba—code-named the Zapata Operation—the CIA discovers that the Soviets have learned the date of the invasion and informed Castro. Knowing the invasion is doomed in advance, the CIA Director Allen Dulles doesn’t tell Kennedy. When the invasion fails, the CIA blames JFK who angrily says he wants “to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.” Kennedy fires Dulles.
  • 1962. On June 13, Lee Harvey Oswald, ex-Marine and alleged traitor, returns from the Soviet Union with a loan from the State Department that also arranges for him, together with his Russian wife, to be met at the dock in Hoboken, New Jersey by Spas T. Raikin, an official of an anti-communist organization with extensive intelligence connections. Oswald soon moves to Dallas, Texas where, at the behest of the CIA, he is chaperoned around by CIA asset and George H. W. Bush’s old friend, George de Mohrenschildt.
  • 1963, June 10. JFK delivers his famous American University address calling for an end to “a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war.”
  • 1963. On October 11, Kennedy issues National Security Action Memorandum 263 calling for the withdrawal of 1,000 American troops from Vietnam by the end of 1963 and all of them by the end of 1965.
  • 1963, November 2. At the last minute JFK cancels his trip to Chicago to attend the Army-Air Force football game when it is learned that a four-man rifle team has plotted to assassinate him. The four are never charged or named, but an alienated ex-Marine scapegoat with CIA connections, Thomas Arthur Vallee, is arrested on a pretext. Vallee works in a building overlooking a dog-leg turn where JFK’s car was to pass.
  • 1963, November 22. JFK is shot in Dallas on a dog-leg turn at 12:30 P.M. and dies at 1 P.M. At 1:38 P.M. Walter Cronkite makes the first public announcement of the president’s death. At 1:45 P.M. George H. W. Bush, who is in Tyler, Texas an hour and a half southeast of Dallas, telephones Houston FBI agent Graham W. Kitchel to inform him that he’s heard gossip that a Houston man, James Parrot, has been talking about killing Kennedy when he comes to Houston (JFK had been in Houston the day before). Parrot is questioned and deemed harmless. Bush tells the FBI agent that he’ll be going to Dallas in the evening, though he fails to mention that he was there the night before. At 1:50 PM the Dallas police arrest Lee Harvey Oswald in the Texas theatre and charge him with the murder of Dallas police Officer J.D. Tippett. A few minutes after Oswald’s arrest and his exit out the front door to waiting police cars, a second Oswald is arrested in the theatre and surreptitiously taken out the back door. Later in the day Oswald is charged with also killing President Kennedy from behind from the 6th floor of the Texas School Book Depository. But the fatal shot to Kennedy’s head comes from the left front.
  • 1963. Two days later, Ruby kills Oswald, who claimed he was a patsy, in the Dallas police building. That same afternoon LBJ tells Henry Cabot Lodge that “I am not going to lose Vietnam.”
  • 1963, November 29. LBJ announces the formation of the Warren Commission whose key member is Allen Dulles, the former CIA Director fired by Kennedy.
  • 1963. On December 24, Johnson tells the Joint Chiefs of Staff: “Just get me elected, and then you can have your war.”
  • 1964, August. The fraudulent Tonkin Gulf Incidents and Tonkin Gulf Resolution. Johnson orders the bombing of North Vietnam. The Vietnam War starts in earnest.
  • 1964 ,September. The Warren Commission findings are made public. Oswald is declared the lone assassin with the magic bullet explanation being the key.
  • 1967. Martin Luther King delivers his Riverside Church speech—“A Time to Break Silence”—denouncing the Vietnam War and calling for opposition to it, while linking it to social and economic oppression at home.
  • 1968, April 4. Martin Luther King is assassinated in Memphis. The authorities blame it on James Earl Ray, a petty criminal loner.
  • 1968. On June 6 in Los Angeles, Senator Robert Kennedy. On the cusp of becoming the Democratic nominee for president, is assassinated. The accused lone assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, was standing in front and to the left of RFK. The autopsy shows Kennedy was killed by a bullet from behind and below that entered his head behind his right ear. Sirhan is subsequently convicted as the lone crazed gunman, despite many witnesses seeing a girl, in a polka dot dress, with a male companion, running down the back stairs of the hotel, shouting. “We shot him! We shot him! We shot Senator Kennedy.”
  • 1972, June 17. Five CIA employees and veterans of the Bay of Pigs operation are arrested inside the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee. Together with H. Howard Hunt (CIA) and G. Gordon Liddy, they are later indicted. The burglars are caught by a security guard who notices that these skilled undercover operatives have taped locks open from the outside so that the tape is showing.
  • The Watergate story is primarily reported by reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein who work at the Washington Post under Editor Ben Bradlee. Woodward had earlier served in Naval Intelligence, as had Bradlee, while Bradlee and the Washington Post have deep ties to the CIA and intelligence communities.
  • 1974, August 9. Nixon is forced to resign. He is the second president in eleven years to be removed from office. Gerald Ford, a former member of the Warren Commission assumes the presidency. Dick Cheney is named White House Chief of staff and Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense.
  • 1976, January 30. Having been nominated by Ford, George H. W. Bush assumes the directorship of the CIA, despite critics arguing that he has no intelligence experience. He serves in that capacity for 365 days.
  • 1976. George de Mohrenschildt, Oswald’s CIA chaperone and George H. W. Bush’s old friend, writes a letter to CIA Director Bush begging for help “we are being followed everywhere. . . .”
  • 1977, March 27. George de Mohrenschildt, about to be questioned by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, allegedly commits suicide in Florida.
  • 1979, November 4. Fifty-two Americans are taken hostage in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.
  • 1980. Ronald Reagan is elected president and George H. W. Bush, vice-president. It is later alleged that Bush, CIA officer Robert Gates, and CIA Director William Casey met secretly with Iranian officials in Paris before the election and made a secret deal to insure Reagan/Bush an election victory by not releasing the hostages before the vote. The hostages were subsequently released a few minutes after Reagan and Bush were sworn in on January 20, 1981.
  • 1985-88. The Iran-Contra scandal plays out as it is discovered that the Reagan administration was secretly selling arms to Iran in exchange for hostages and using the proceeds to illegally arm the anti-Sandinista rebels in Nicaragua in violation of the Boland amendment. Oliver North becomes the public face of the secret machinations while Reagan and Bush plead ignorance. Many are indicted, while Bush, when running for president in 1988, claims he was “out of the loop.”
  • 1988, July 16. In the midst of the presidential campaign pitting Bush against Dukakis, the Nation magazine publishes an article by Joseph McBride, “The Man Who Wasn’t There, ‘George Bush,’ CIA Operative.” The article centers around a newly discovered memo from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, dated November 29, 1963, concerning the JFK assassination and an oral briefing the bureau had given on November 23 regarding the assassination to “Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency.” A Bush spokesman denies it was candidate Bush.
  • 1988, July 3. The USS Vincennes shoots down in Iranian airspace civilian Iran Flight 655 killing 299, including 66 children. Vice President Bush says, “ I will never apologize for the U.S. I don’t care what the facts are . . . I’m not an apologize-for-America kind of guy.”
  • 1988. George H. W. Bush is elected president.
  • 1990-91. President Bush attacks Iraq, called the Gulf War, public and congressional support for which is given a huge boost on the testimony of a nurse who claims she witnessed Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait City hospital grabbing babies out of incubators and throwing them on the floor to die. It is later discovered that the “nurse” in question was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States and that she hadn’t lived in Kuwait at the time. Her story had been hatched by the Hill and Knowlton public relations firm and was a lie—a successful lie.
  • 1991, May 19. A few weeks after filming had begun on Oliver Stone’s movie, JFK, the Washington Post’s national security reporter George Lardner, Jr., writes a scathing review of the film based on a stolen copy of the first draft of the screenplay.
  • 1991, December 20. Stone’s film, JFK, is released.
  • 1991,0n December 24, President Bush grants pardons to six former members of the Reagan/Bush administration facing prosecution in the Iran-Contra scandal.
  • 1993-2000. President Bill Clinton bombs Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Sudan . . . killing untold numbers of people, while maintaining economic sanctions on Iraq.
  • 1996, May 12. On CBS’s Sixty Minutes, Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albrecht says that the deaths of over 500,000 Iraqi children as a result of the sanctions are worth it.
  • 1997. The Project for the New American Century, a neoconservative enterprise, three of whose signatories are Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Jeb Bush, is launched. Among other things, they call for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Ten signees of the statement of principles go on to serve in the George W. Bush administration.
  • 1999. On April 26, CIA headquarters was named the George Bush Center for Intelligence in honor of former president George H.W. Bush who served as CIA Director for 357 days.
  • 1999. A jury in Memphis, Tennessee returns a verdict in a civil trial brought by Martin Luther King’s family concluding that King was killed, not by James Earl Ray, but by a conspiracy involving agencies of the U. S. government and the Memphis police.
  • 2000, September. The Project for the New American Century releases a position paper, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” stating that the United States will not be able to enforce its will on Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Afghanistan and maintain a Pax Americana “absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.” The paper introduces a new word to refer to the United States of America—“the homeland.”
  • 2000, November. George W. Bush is elected president after a disputed ballot count and the intervention of the Supreme Court. Dick Cheney becomes vice-president and Donald Rumsfeld is named secretary of defense.
  • 2001, May 1. George W. Bush gives a major foreign policy speech at the National Defense University and says that the U.S.A. must be willing to “rethink the unthinkable,” giving public notice that the U. S. planned to withdraw from the ABM treaty. He warns against “weapons of mass destruction” and “weapons of terror” in the hands of rogue actors. The speech closely follows the reasoning of the PNAC paper of the previous year in urging an aggressive foreign policy. Cheney and Rumsfeld are in the audience.
  • 2001, June 22-23. Exercise Dark Winter takes place at Andrews Air Force base. The scenario involves anonymous threatening letters sent to mainstream media. The letters threaten more letters to come with anthrax. Judith Miller, author of Germs, and a notoriously deceptive Iraq war hawk for The New York Times, participates, playing Judith Miller of the New York Times.
  • 2001, September 11. The terrorist attacks in NYC and Washington, D.C. occur. The media immediately starts referring to them as another Pearl Harbor, a new Pearl Harbor. CBS News reports that before going to bed at night George W. Bush wrote in his diary, “The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today.” The site of the Twin Towers is first referred to as “ground zero,” a nuclear war term, by Mark Walsh, identified as a freelancer for Fox News by the Fox News interviewer on the street of lower Manhattan. Presciently anticipating the official explanation for the buildings collapse, Walsh adds that the towers obviously collapsed “mostly due to structural failure since the fires were too intense.”
  • 2001, September 12. The New York Times headlines a story: “Personal Accounts of a Morning Rush that Became the Unthinkable.” Another headline under the byline of future editor Bill Keller, Iraq war hawk, reads, “America’s Emergency Line: 9/11.” The endless emergency and war on terror begin. Henceforth, for the first time in American history, a very important day is referred to by numbers, not by name—an emergency phone number.
  • 2001, September 22. Tom Ridge is named director of the newly created Homeland Security and becomes in charge of politically motivated terror alerts.
  • 2001 September-October. Real and fake anthrax attacks occur. A sham investigation follows with the FBI eventually accusing government scientist Bruce Ivins on little to no evidence, resulting in Ivins alleged suicide.
  • 2001. Throughout the first three weeks of October the major media use the word “unthinkable” repetitively, echoing its association with nuclear war, just as the World Trade Center site is similarly referred to as “ground zero,” another nuclear term. A phony “anthrax” letter containing a harmless white powder, postmarked in St. Petersburg, Florida. On September 20, is sent to Tom Brokaw of NBC. The letter, not made public until October 22, after the media’s repeated use of the word “unthinkable,” begins: “The Unthinkabel” Sample Of How It Will Look. Judith Miller of the New York Times receives an anthrax threat letter also sent from St. Petersburg.
  • 2001, October 7. The U.S.A attacks Afghanistan.
  • 2001 October 27. The Patriot Act is passed.
  • 2001, December 4. George W. Bush says when he was outside the classroom in Florida on September 11, he “had seen this plane fly into the first building. There was a TV set on. . . .” Problem: No one saw the first plane hit the North Tower since it wasn’t televised live. Much later a tape someone had made was shown on television.
  • 2002, October 2. At the Cincinnati Museum Center President Bush gives a speech linking Saddam Hussein to the September 11 attacks and says that “we cannot wait for the final proof—the smoking gun—that that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” He urges the disarming of Iraq.
  • 2002-10. Regular color-coded terrorist alerts.
  • 2003, February. Secretary of State Colin Powell gives false testimony at the U.N., asserting that Iraq possesses chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction and must be confronted.
  • 2003, March. The U. S. attacks Iraq based on lies.
  • 2003-8. Bush wages war on Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. Homeland “security” leads to indefinite detention, black sites, torture, spying on Americans, the loss of constitutional rights, etc.
  • 2007, February 10. Barack Obama, having been a U.S. Senator for 2 years, 1 month, announces he is running for president.
  • 2008, September. An international financial meltdown occurs. The government claims it was unforeseen. The Bush administration bails out the big banks and financial institutions.
  • 2008, November. A seriously inexperienced Senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, comes out of nowhere to be elected president on a populist platform of “hope” and “change.” He receives more backing from Wall Street than his Republican rival. Liberals and progressives go wild for joy. Hope and change is proclaimed.
  • 2009. Lawrence Summers, former CEO of Goldman Sachs, takes up his position as head of Obama’s economic team. Timothy Geithner, former head of the New York Federal Reserve, whose father, Peter Geithner, oversaw the Ford Foundation’s programs in Indonesia developed by Obama’s mother, becomes secretary of the Treasury. And Robert Gates, former CIA Director and George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense continues in that position for Obama.
  • 2009, March. Obama meets with the CEOs of fifteen big banks and tells them that “my administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks. . . . I’m not out there to go after you. I’m protecting you.”
  • 2009. Obama intensifies the war on Afghanistan.
  • 2009, October 9. Obama is given the Nobel Peace Prize.
  • 2009, December. Obama sends 30,000 more American troops to Afghanistan, saying this “will bring this war to a successful conclusion.”
  • 2010. Obama vows to carry forward the Bush tax cuts for the richest Americans.
  • 2010 and ongoing. Obama chooses his drone war kill list every Tuesday; says the killing of American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki “is an easy one.”
  • 2011. Obama and partners attack Libya and brutally kill Muammar Gaddafi. Libya descends into chaos.
  • 2009 and ongoing. Obama attacks Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, etc. Does nothing to stop the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians. Supports and arms terrorists in Syria and other countries. Engineers a coup d’etat in Ukraine and supports neo-Nazi forces attacking eastern Ukraine. Encircles Russia with NATO troops and military exercises. Starts a new Cold War. Maintains military commissions and indefinite detention. Prosecutes more whistleblowers than all previous American presidents combined, but does not prosecute any banksters or torturers. Charges Edward Snowden, Thomas Drake, Jeffrey Sterling, Chelsea Manning, John Kiriakou, et al of violating the 1917 Espionage Act. Acquiesces in the military coup against the democratically elected leader of Egypt, Mohamed Morsi and his subsequent imprisonment. Spies on Americans and other countries. Maintains a national state of emergency and the Patriot Act with minor adjustments. Prosecutes “the war on terror” initiated by George W. Bush. Rules over a technological, computerized war of killing all over the globe and a technological, computerized spying apparatus here at home. And does all this and more with a smile.

It should be clear from this small portion of events over the years that there is a connecting link, that there is a bloody thread running through them connecting key players and the obvious ongoing presence of a secret structure that recruits its team to maintain this oppressive system. To see it should be gutsy child’s play. It is not an issue of either/or; we can’t explain how we have come to this terrifying situation of rule by a murderous, militarized national security apparatus serving the wealthy elites by concentrating on either individuals or structures. People such as Barack Obama, the Bushes, et al don’t emerge from thin air (though in Obama’s case it seems that way, and some have speculated on his CIA links). These people grow out of a system that has cultivated and nurtured them. They become spokesmen for the secretive and powerful monied forces some call the Deep State. (The scholar Peter Dale Scott sees a hidden link between the JFK assassination, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and 9/11.) Spokesmen, yes, but executive spokesmen; they are not innocent victims; they are free executioners. People and ongoing structures are intertwined. Individuals count, but so do structures. We are now living within a structure of non-stop and almost total propaganda that individuals, with the help of alternative structures of communication such as alternative media, can penetrate and understand, but only if they are willing to trudge through history that will allow for context and the connecting of dots. In the end, it takes desire and work. Many individuals concluding alike can lead to change. Connect and be outraged.

The psychiatrist Allen Wheelis once wrote a brilliant little book, called How People Change. His “childish” conclusion was that they change because they want to. Simple but true.

Edward Curtin is a sociologist and writer who teaches at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts and has published widely.

Living in a PNAC World: The Toxic Legacy of 9/11

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By Chris Floyd

Source: Empire Burlesque

In September 2000, an advocacy group called “Project for New American Century,” led by Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and others — published a “blueprint” for “transforming” America’s future. PNAC acknowledged that the “revolutionary” changes it envisaged could take decades to bring about — unless, they said, the United States was struck by “some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.” One year later, after the disputed election of George W. Bush, came the “catalyzing” event of the 9/11 attacks — which indeed “transformed” America’s future in many “revolutionary” ways.

Here are some of the changes PNAC called for in 2000, all of which came about after the “new Pearl Harbor” they had hoped for: An attack on Iraq. Vast increases in military spending. Planting new American bases all over the world. Embracing the concept of “pre-emptive war” and unilateral action as cornerstones of national strategy. Developing sophisticated new technologies to “control the global commons of cyberspace” by closely monitoring communications and transactions on the Internet. Pursuing the development of “new methods of attack – electronic, ‘non-lethal, biological…in new dimensions, in space, cyberspace and perhaps the world of microbes.”

Oddly enough, although “regime change” in Iraq was clearly a priority for PNAC, it had little to do with Saddam Hussein and his brutal rule. Instead, removing Saddam was tied to the larger goal of establishing a permanent U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf in order to “secure energy supplies” and preclude any other power from dominating the vital oil regions of the Middle East and Central Asia. The PNAC report puts it quite plainly:
“The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.”

This is why the Bush Administration offered a constantly shifting menu of rationales for the impending attack on Iraq: because the decision to remove Saddam was taken long ago, as part of a larger strategic plan, and had little to do with any imminent threat from the broken-backed Iraqi regime, which at that time was constantly bombed, partially occupied (with U.S. forces already working in the autonomous Kurdish territories) and swarming with UN inspectors. If the strategic need for the attack “transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein,” then almost any rationale will do.

The same desire to “secure energy supplies” and prevent any other power from gaining dominance in the oil regions also underlies current and recent US policies in Libya, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere. That’s why we see the same shifting rationales, see policies that on the surface seem to make no sense: we fight al Qaeda in Iraq, we support al Qaeda in Yemen and Syria; we say defeating ISIS is of supreme global importance, but we prevent other countries (Iran, Russia) from joining the fight; we push “regime change” to “liberate” Libya and Syria while partnering with one of most repressive, extremists nations on earth, Saudi Arabia, and arming other dictators like Sisi in Egypt. We are “fighting” terrorism while turning whole nations (Iraq, Libya, Syria) into swamps of ruin and violence where terrorism can breed. None of these contradictory rationales make sense on the surface. But viewed as part of an ongoing, bipartisan agenda of securing American dominance of economically strategic lands — and of “discouraging advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role” (as an earlier Cheney-Wolfowitz document put it) — it becomes easier to see a pattern in today’s howling chaos.

This is not “conspiracy theory.” These motives and agendas are out in the open, and always have been. Our bipartisan leaders eagerly trumpet them, and declare that it is our right and our duty to dominate the world in this way. What’s more, any actions we take to accomplish this — wars, regime change, intrusive surveillance, drone campaigns, death squads, torture, killing thousands of innocent people (mere “collateral damage”), fomenting more hatred and extremism, breaking our own laws, turning our own people into fearful cowards ready to throw away their liberties to “stay safe,” etc. — are automatically just and righteous, because we are “exceptional.”

So yes, the “transformations” wrought in American policy — and the American psyche — since that “new Pearl Harbor” have indeed been “revolutionary.” Post-9/11, we are all living in a PNAC world.

Note: The above post was adapted (and updated) from a much more detailed piece originally written in 2002, which can be found here.

 

Was Afghanistan’s Invasion Also Based on Lies?

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It’s Time for a Real Investigation

By Jack Balkwill

Source: Dissident Voice

There appears to be a bigger lie than “weapons of mass destruction.”  It’s not simply that the illegal invasion of Iraq was based on lies, but that the entire “war on terrorism” is likely based on lies.

We were told by our government that Afghanistan was invaded for giving shelter to Osama bin Laden, who was responsible for the 9/11 attacks.  Mainstream press have pushed this so repeatedly that “9/11″ and “Osama bin Laden” have become interchangeable.

While working on this piece I asked the first three people I ran into at my local grocery store “Who was responsible for the 9/11 attacks?,”  three times getting “Osama bin Laden” for replies.  This is not scientific, yet it makes one wonder how this would work out in national polling.

But what if bin Laden was not responsible for the 9/11 attacks despite the drumbeat of government officials and the corporate press?  What if there has been a rush to judgment to make it appear the Bush regime was taking definitive action?

The invasion of Afghanistan certainly wasn’t about the Taliban – the Bush regime gave the Taliban $43 million in “aid” only four months before the 9/11 attacks, so were on friendly terms.

Following are three reasons to question official sources on their casus belli for invading Afghanistan.

Attempts to Peacefully Resolve the Issue

First, before the invasion of Afghanistan, the Taliban offered to try bin Laden in exchange for evidence that he was responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

President Bush provided no evidence, and invaded Afghanistan instead.

After the start of the U.S. air campaign, the Taliban offered to send bin Laden to a third country for trial if evidence could be provided that he had been involved in the 9/11 attacks – a proposal the United States also promptly rejected.

Why not provide evidence, if it were available, to prevent a war?  It was obvious that the people of Afghanistan would defend their country from a foreign invasion, as they had since Alexander the Great invaded, and there would be a great loss of life (see Roman Empire, British Empire, USSR, etc.).

There can only be two answers– that there was no evidence supporting the cause for invasion, or that former President Bush is a psychopath who doesn’t care about human life, so contemptuously ignored the request for evidence.

Bin Laden’s Denials

Second, bin Laden denied, more than once, in the months following 9/11, that he was involved in the dirty deed.  Less than a week after the 9/11 attacks, al Jazeera quoted bin Laden:  “The U.S. government has consistently blamed me for being behind every occasion its enemies attack it.  I would like to assure the world that I did not plan the recent attacks, which seem to have been planned by people for personal reasons.”

In an interview with Pakistan’s Karachi Ummat on 28 September 2001, bin Laden was quoted,

Neither I had any knowledge of these attacks nor I consider the killing of innocent women, children, and other humans as an appreciable act. Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent women, children, and other people. Such a practice is forbidden ever in the course of a battle. … I have already said that we are against the American system, not against its people, whereas in these attacks, the common American people have been killed.

This is a translation from Arabic to Urdu to English, and may not be entirely clear.  But for those who believe bin Laden was lying, I would suggest they come up with a motive for such a lie.  The USA had offered a $25 million reward for information leading to his capture, and President Bush had threatened “I want justice, and there’s an old poster out West that says, ‘Wanted Dead or Alive,’” so bin Laden had nothing to gain from such a lie – he was condemned either way.  Bin Laden’s followers would have admired him as a great hero for having taken on the USA, so he had much to gain by accepting responsibility for the 9/11 attacks, were it a fact.

Demonization

Third, there was an extensive effort to demonize bin Laden, at times with apparently false charges.  Why would this be necessary for one who was guilty?

Our government and corporate media, as one on National Security State issues, made him out to be abominable, and without providing evidence, unceasingly assumed his guilt.  Recordings were blasted and headlined in Western corporate print and electronic media of bin Laden accepting responsibility for 9/11.  The public were not given the same eyeball-grabbing headlines when the recordings were proven to be likely bogus.

Here is a Guardian report showing that Swiss Scientists suggested that an audio tape of bin Laden taking responsibility was likely faked, although widely broadcast in the corporate press as evidence of his involvement in 9/11 attacks.

Here’s a BBC report showing how the “smoking gun” video may have been faked, again, after the corporate press hyped the video as incontrovertible evidence.

Conclusion

The official version, that 19 Arab hijackers were responsible, has flaws.  One flaw was that many of the alleged hijackers have been found alive and well since 9/11.  Of course, it may be that the hijackers used pseudonyms to conceal their identities.

But getting beyond these 19 Arabs is difficult because they are all dead and cannot be interviewed.  Official government investigations into 9/11, much of which are classified, look like reflexive actions to neatly tie up loose ends rather than serious inquiries.

Certainly, as Ward Churchill pointed out (and lost his job for raising the issue), Arabs had a clear motive for the 9/11 attacks, with the UN revealing, only two years earlier, that the sanctions pushed mainly by the USA on the people of Iraq resulted in over 500,000 deaths of children under age five, mostly Arab, and most Arabs were aware of this and seething with anger.

To jump to the conclusion that bin Laden was behind the 9/11 attacks causes one to wonder, “Why then did the FBI never bring charges against bin Laden for the hijackings and murders?  Why did the wanted posters (up to his death he was on the FBI ten most wanted list) not mention the biggest crime, though they mentioned smaller terrorist incidents as reasons for his being on the list?

We may never know if bin Laden was responsible for 9/11, but his involvement was used as the excuse for invading Afghanistan and slaughtering a massive number of people, based on the assumption that they gave bin Laden refuge.

Just as nobody has been charged with a crime for the illegal invasion of Iraq based on lies, it would appear that an investigation is in order involving the justification behind invading Afghanistan, starting with the matter of proof that bin Laden was directly involved.  The American people and the people of Afghanistan have every right to be presented with the evidence.

Jack Balkwill is an activist in Virginia. He can be reached at libertyuv@hotmail.com Read other articles by Jack.

Related article: Who Was Really Behind the 9/11 Attacks?

“Breaking the Fear Factor”: Opposing War, Financial Fraud and State Terrorism, Dismantling Propaganda

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By Peter Koenig

Source: Global Research

We are living in a (western) world dominated by neoliberal dictators, criminals and crooks. And many of us, impregnated with the human idiocy, as so well described by  Andre Vltcheck (The West Spreads Intellectual Idiocy) are every day deeper and deeper immersed into fear – fear of action, fear of what’s next – fear of losing our comfort zone. The western propaganda machine paid for by the corporate and financial oligarchy through the presstitute media is constantly indoctrinating the little we have left of our free-thinking brains.

Fear is everywhere. People who are afraid can easily be manipulated. People who are afraid obey. The system needs people who don’t resist. Renegades are potential drone targets. The Big Constant that pervades our western world with ambitions to also infiltrate Asia – is terrorism. Man-made terrorism – or better – elite-made terrorism; George Orwell would have called it Big Brother-made terrorism; terrorism with a particular purpose: spreading fear and submission.

On Friday, 21 August 2015, on a train from Amsterdam to Paris, according to the New York Times, “a heavily armed gunman opened fire aboard a packed high-speed train, traveling from Amsterdam to Paris [….] wounding several passengers before he was tackled and subdued” by two American military servicemen (on leave), who were helped by a third American. According to French officials, they “averted a mass killing.”- The gunman was armed with an automatic pistol, an AK47 and a knife (NYT annotation: AK47 is Al Qaeda’s preferred weapon). The Americans were coincidentally and suitably near to subdue the shooting 26 year-old Moroccan, a convenient Arab, who was taken into custody when the train stopped in Arras, France, just beyond the French-Belgian border. No doubt, he will be squeezed for confession. He may try to escape – and then may be shot death. Amen.

The French anti-terrorist unit took immediately charge of the investigation. The unit is known to work in utmost secrecy. Whatever news comes out of it is most likely ‘cooked’ to suit the system.

The NYT proclaims that the three Americans saved the train from a massacre. Nobody was killed. Just one of the American heroes was injured. Hollande thanked Obama for the brave Americans’ exemplary behavior and for preventing a train carnage. Propaganda all over. In America we trust – is dogma number one; dogma number two is – there is no save place on earth.

Fear everywhere, but America is there to help. Danger lingers at every corner. A terrorist may be just next door. Just give yourself up to Big Brother and he won’t let you down.

The first step towards sub-doing fear is asking yourself: Who invented and fabricated terrorism in the first place? In countries and entire regions ravaged by Washington incited wars and conflicts, terrorism is the expression of hopelessness, of wrath – of fighting back, when there is nothing left to lose. Look at the Middle East. A battlefield of nations destroyed by years of war – people living in ruins, in miserable squalor; some escape – and become the endless and EU loathed stream of refugees. According to the UN High Commissioner, there are more than 50 million refugees worldwide.

People take-up arms in self-defense. The west calls them terrorists. A term popularized by the media. A term that instills fear. – Imagine a world where the Judeo-Christian aggressors would suddenly see the light and stop spreading wars and conflicts and subjugating the world – peace would break out and settle in – terrorism, one of the key reasons for fear, would have no purpose to persist – fear would die, trust and solidarity would grow. The empires worst enemy: solidarity, friendship, and trust among people.

All wars and conflicts are multi-purpose. They boost the elite-dominated war industry; in the US more than 50% of GDP; they help dominate and subjugate people, exploit their resources, and are trailblazing a path towards Full Spectrum Dominance – world hegemony. They also help one of the ‘elite’s’ key objective – depopulating the world, so the elite may live longer with the ever scarcer resources of our gradually depleted planet. Reducing world population is a key objective of the Bilderberg Society – voiced by Henry Kissinger already in the 1960s. Recently I overheard one buddy telling another: I hate wars; but the only good thing about wars is – they reduce world population.

That is the horrendous level of immorality and greed to which humanity has sunk. – We the over-fed west may not get enough in an ‘overpopulated world’ (sic), therefore let’s reduce the human stock by killing off the under-people.

According to FAO – the UN Food and Agriculture Organization – with the current available agricultural technology Mother Earth could aliment at least 12 billion people, almost double of today’s world population. Fear and greed decimate our rational thinking. The me-me-me of abject western consumerism – and the fear of losing it – overwhelms our innate sense of human solidarity.

Remember the infamous Christmas Day 2009 ‘underwear bomber’ on a Northwest Airliner approaching Detroit wanting to detonate a plastic bomb sewed into his undies? He was suitably identified as a Nigerian Al Qaeda fighter and also conveniently and par hazard filmed by a passenger in the back row — This was such an amateurish attempt to spread fear, that after a short while even the media didn’t want to lose their ‘credibility’ (sic) and shut up.

Is there ever a thought among the fearful that such terrorists might be ‘planted’ by those who are served by the fear they cause?

A former CIA official recently admitted that virtually all so-called terror acts in the US and most of those in other parts of the world since (and including – added by me) 9/11 are false flags. With every false flag, the system can tighten its grip on the population under the pretext of ‘protection and security’. The populace literally asks for it – please protect us, please come to our houses, put them upside down and see whether there are terrorists hiding in our closets… that’s how the Boston people reacted after the April 2013 false-flag Marathon bombing.

Since 9/11 US citizens have lost more than 90% of their civil rights; first through the Patriot Act, then by subsequent extensions of police ‘protective measures’. Most US citizens are not even aware of the power they gave up to the police which has now the authority to invade people’s homes at will, without search warrant or explanation and then find anything justifying the arrest and indefinite confinement without trial of an inconvenient person. The ‘suspects’ are mostly Muslims. These days it’s easy selling to the brainwashed western world a Muslim as a criminal or terrorist.

Yet, the Boston Marathon false flag was of such low grade that anybody with a little bit of reason left, could recognize that the bombs were detonated by special forces with the mere purpose of implanting the notion that even a relatively progressive thinking university town like Boston is in danger of terrorism. Therefore let’s control the people, let’s not this ‘intellectual Boston crowd’ choose its own ways, abandoning the sinking ship. All sheep must be kept together in false solidarity, of course.

The two Chechnyan brothers were pre-identified, they had no clue what may eventually happen to them. They conveniently had a police record, maybe fabricated, to also hurt Russia, hitting two flies with the same stone. The Chechnyan ‘malfeasance’ could easily be sold to the public. One of the two alleged suspects was killed – and silenced – in an artificially created ‘shootout’. The other one is in solidarity confinement and is not allowed to talk, not even in court – condemned to die – soon to be silenced too.

Public events henceforth project fear. – People, please stand up against police and state-sponsored violence and terrorism! – Analyze for yourselves! Don’t believe the lies spread by the mainstream media. Yes, it takes a little effort, seeking out the truth and reading the news on internet – Global Research, Information Clearing House, Sputnik News, VNN, RT, TeleSUR, PressTV, CounterPunch, New Easter Outlook, The Saker – and many more – but it is one of the few chances you have to see the light and stand up for your rights – and get rid of fear.

The Boston false flag bombing, was followed by a similar horror event in Paris, in January this year. The Hebdo Charlie and related supermarket assault killed 17 people. It was opportunely planned at a notoriously anti-Muslim cartoon magazine, executed by CIA-Mossad forces in full connivance with the French secret service

(see http://www.globalresearch.ca/paris-charlie-the-shock-doctrine-par-excellence/5424960).

Two plus one ‘suspects’ with previous police records, were pre-identified. One of them ‘forgets or loses’ casually his ID in the get-away car – the only link the police has to the ‘terrorists’ – they find two, kill them at sight – so they won’t talk anymore. – The third related alleged assassin of a Jewish supermarket at the outskirts of Paris awaited the same fate: death by a police barrage of bullets. A blurred amateur video (maybe by now taken off internet) shows how a hand-cuffed individual is thrown before the wolves outside of the supermarket, to be riddled mercilessly with bullets. Nobody to talk. The truth remains ugly propaganda – propaganda for the system – a system that prevails over and feeds on terrorism. Millions of people, dulled by the event, walked the streets of European cities, solemnly parading placards lettered with “I am Charlie” — millions of people submitted – and still do – to a miserable lie – spreading and perpetuating fear.

Hollande had a justification to tighten the grip around France and within Paris – police everywhere, reducing civil liberties just a tad more – orders from the Washington masters. Being a nominal ‘socialist’ (sic), the emperor doesn’t quite trust him – as he may resent having been forced by the White House to abrogate his country’s lucrative sale of two Mistral type amphibious assault ships to Russia. To dampen any lingering sympathy for Russian President Putin, Hollande had to be reined in; and the spineless French leader (sic) did indeed cave in.

Fear is everywhere. European politicians are all afraid they may be in the crosshairs of the CIA or Pentagon or other US mercenary hit men if they don’t behave. A couple of days ago it was reported that Hollande is now also planning preventive drone assassinations, mimicking his brother-in-crime, Peace Nobel Laureate, Barack Obama. Imagine! – How far can you sink to lick – ehhh – the naked toes of the naked emperor. How far has our western civilization sunk in only the last 30 years – the onset of neoliberalism!

Fear commands everyone – almost. Fear is the public enemy number One – but it can be overcome – with courage, an open mind and foremost an awakened consciousness.

People feel reasonably happy. They feel protected. They gladly trade their civil rights for police and military protection. Terrorism is horrible and it is so unpredictable. It lurks everywhere. And nobody dares to question these bloody fabricated horror events. Nobody dares ask: what motivates the terrorists? How come their number has increased exponentially in the last 15 years? Terror sows more terror. Fear disseminates more fear. More fear facilitates more oppression and manipulation of people – and eventually more terrorism.

Take the massive flood of refugees engulfing Europe. The EU laments the ‘refugee crisis; seemingly not realizing that they helped making it. The Eurocrats cannot deal with the overwhelming influx of refugees. They use the bought media to make people afraid of them. The refugees come from these Arab countries the west is fighting for ‘freedom and democracy’. They are dark-skinned, poor and no-good. They steal our jobs, food and women. The human touch and solidarity of westerners has been annihilated long ago – by the neoliberal doctrine – that knows no mercy, only profit and power. Western powers don’t want these poor homeless beggars within their frontiers. What to do with them? They are a costly nuisance. Most of them are Muslims anyway. There is no space for them.

Would it ever occur to one of those high-flying, arrogant never elected Maastricht politicians to ask ‘why is this onslaught of refugees increasing by the day?’ – They may find the answer in front of their nose, in case they still have some left-over ticking brains. We, Europeans, in full complicity with war-mongering hegemonic Washington have helped destroy their countries, their economies, their jobs, torn apart their families, killed their children, have bombed their very homes to ashes – now they come to seek help from us. These poor people have no choice but asking their hangmen for a bit of mercy, for some crumbs of bread, for some rudimentary shelter. The raped seeks alms from the rapist. It’s the Stockholm syndrome. – Its fear from dying. Maybe the criminals who almost killed them have some humanity left, a bit of mercy – please.

What makes them tick – these criminal hegemonic politicians? Why are they so inhumanly selfish, greedy and violent? The public at large is afraid to even ask. Asking could produce answers that may derange one’s comfort zone. Better don’t ask and follow the rules. Let fear continue to rule.

The NYT also reports, “Stock prices around the world continued to plunge on Friday, threatening to end one of the longest bull runs in the history of the United States stock market.” Fear of losing money is spread. Such ‘market’ fluctuations, as most of us know, have little to do with ‘markets’, be it share or money markets. Money is fabricated by a mouse-click of a bank dishing out debt. Markets are manipulated by banks and political powers for monetary profit and political gains – and to sow fear – fear that something horrendously drastic may happen, may affect our fragile economy – and may foremost affect our stolen well-being. Yes, stolen. Our western riches have been stolen during hundreds of years of abject, murderous colonization of the southern hemisphere. And we continue colonizing them with our modern weapon – MONEY. When banks spread fear, it is to steal the money, pension funds, social systems from us, their faithful clients. Stealing from abroad is not enough.

Rather than fearfully shutting up – wake up! Dare stand up fellow citizen – against the white collar onslaught of fraud and exploitation, against corruption of our elitist neoliberal system! Get rid of those deceiving politicians – the scum of greed and power. Expose them. Neutralize them.

The US as well as the European Commission just enacted laws, allowing banks, effective immediately – to ‘rescue’ themselves by so-called ‘bail-ins’ – meaning, a bank that has overstretched and over-speculated itself into bankruptcy may literally save itself by stealing the money from its depositors and shareholders. – Why does such an edict – not really a law because those who designed the rule are unelected Eurocrats – not prompt an immediate run on the banks? – Why does nobody even protest? – Because people don’t know? Maybe. But Fear – sheer fear from being punished for ‘disobedience’ – is a better explanation.

Instead, our fear makes us trust that such ‘bail-ins’ will always happen to others. We so easily forget what happened only two years ago, in March 2013 to the people of Cyprus, when their deposits were decimated by the infamous ‘haircut’, administered by the highly indebted Cypriot banks, by order of the BCE, with full complicity of the Cypriot elites, who first transferred their fortunes abroad. It was like a trial run. How much would the populace swallow without (too much) protesting? – It worked. The rule is now institutionalized – and nobody says beep. – For fear that worse may follow? – Or for sheer comfort of not moving our butts.

The famous late Howard Zinn said civil disobedience is our – as in ‘we the people’ – strongest weapon against corporate and state injustice and abuse. Today’s version of this wisdom might be for the 99.99% of us, the people, to organize and infiltrate the reigning criminal system and breaking it down from within. Much like did and do the State Department funded Washington-based thinktanks (sic) – initiating the deadly and destructive ‘Arab Spring’, intruding and subverting the European Parliament with bought proxies and fake NGOs – and what they attempt to do in Russia and China, albeit unsuccessfully.

—

Back to the NYT article on the plunge of the US stock exchange. Finger-pointing of the guilty is of the order. The fear factor has to be substantiated and enhanced by fault of an ‘outsider’ – in this case China – which according to the NYT has ‘unexpectedly’ devalued its currency, a sign of a troubled economy and a bleak outlook for the economy of other large ‘developing countries’.

Let’s fear the Evil East. – No good may come from the east. The NYT has of course no explanation of truth. Namely that the Chinese Yuan had been artificially over-valued under pressure of the US, and kept within a 2% band of fluctuation by the Chinese authorities. This was also in line with China’s huge dollar reserves, some 1.6 trillion dollars. Relaxation of the fluctuation – letting the rate slide naturally to an expected 3% margin, would not only make China more competitive, but might enhance the currency’s international standing to eventually becoming a new currency in the IMF’s basket constituting the SDRs, or Special Drawing Rights. The SDR is an international virtual money that may be lent to countries which so desire, hence, better balancing the currency exchange risk of the loan. The current SDR basket is composed of only four ‘world’ currencies; the US dollar, the British Pound, the Euro and the Japanese Yen.

If the Yuan can keep its own by floating against other major currencies, chances are it may be admitted by the west-dominated IMF as the fifth currency to the SDR basket, thereby opening the door for the Chinese Yuan to become a major official world reserve currency. Washington may not like it, but may have little choice preventing the currency of the world’s strongest economy to become an officially admitted reserve currency.

—

Fear may also be the main reason for the Greek Tsipras Government 180 degree U-turn after the 62% NO vote on July 5 – No to austerity, No to more strangulation by the infamous troika – European Central Bank (ECB), European Commission (EC) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Not Germany, not the troika, are Greece’s strongest enemies; fear is. The Syriza government was pressured, blackmailed, coerced – and possibly even corrupted – into accepting an even more nefarious austerity package than the one against which Greeks voted with an overwhelming NO. If indeed enacted, the new debt commitment of € 86 billion will drive Greece’s debt to GDP ratio way above 200 % – and not one euro will flow into Greece’s economy, her social system, fighting unemployment, bringing back public hospitals, schools, water and electricity.

The Syriza Tsipras Government has committed an illegal act against Greece’s own Constitution which puts the people above parliament and above the executive – as a true democracy should. Tsipras’ anti-democratic act could be undone any time by a simple decision of the Supreme Court. According to international standards, Greece’s accumulated debt is fully illegal and could be erased by a mouse click, the same way it was created. Any contract – in this case debt – concluded under duress, coercion, corruption and / or blackmail does not stand up before an international court of law. This must have been known to the Tsipras government. Yet, Tsipras and his inner circle went to Brussels to ‘negotiate’ ignoring this chance. Instead they sold out their country to the banksters, let themselves be humiliated, ridiculed in the face of their own people, let alone the rest of the world.

Fear was most likely the engine for Tsipras’ behavior. Many of his Syriza colleagues left the government coalition. Ministers who didn’t agree with his politics were fired. He preferred succumbing to fear – fear of the potential wrath that might emanate from the corrupt and criminal EU; from greedy Germany whose neoliberalism is rapidly taking on the colors of Nazism. – German supremacy over Europe – again? – Maybe there were death-threats involved, who knows. It is common practice when power and resources are at stake.

However, a true leader has no fear. He or she stands tall with the moral and ethical obligation to defend the interests of the people who elected him or her. As did Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, Rafael Correa, Evo Morales, Cristina Kirchner, Lula, Dilma Rousseff and many more.

Traveling recently all over Greece fear was visible everywhere. When asked, why their inaction in the face of this shameful treason of their PM – no protests, the streets remained calm – the answer was almost uniformly – we are afraid. Afraid of what? Of the police; they shoot at us with rubber bullets, with water cannons – and we don’t know when the military will intervene.

In Delphi, the very town where democracy was born some 2,500 years ago, a shop owner confessed, democracy is dead, not only in Greece – but in Europe, in the world. With this backdrop, a new military takeover was according to him not far-fetched. The Tsipras betrayal was a boon for the rightwing, the Nazi-like ‘Golden Dawn’ – a perfect backing for a new military regime.

After the 1967 US-supported so-called Coup of the Colonels, Greece suffered seven years of a most repressive right wing military dictatorship, where full obedience was of the order, where people disappeared, where the communist party was forbidden and communists were prosecuted and killed, where anything resembling left-wing literature was censured, during which miniskirts, pop-music, long hair, the peace sign and the like were prohibited. This repressive regime has deeply marked the Greek population. They are afraid it may return. They are aware of their country’s vulnerability due to its importance for Washington, hosting the southern-most strategic NATO base. Any deviation of the Washington made and EC imposed rule may bring back the military horror – reminiscent of Costa Cavras’ 1969 extraordinary docudrama “Z”.

Now, the Tsipras Government has resigned – for fear of the domestic consequences of its actions? – A new interim government is to be prepared before the announced 20 September election. Will the radical break-away Syriza faction, the new Unity Party, be able to form a viable coalition and gather the necessary trust to win the coming September elections?

Will Greece after all be able to break the paralyzing streak of fear?

Will Greece set the new standard of fearlessness for the rest of Europe to follow? – Will Greece dare to go the only practical way – exit the unviable euro – go back to her drachma and revamp their economy with public banking for the benefit of the Greek people? – I trust Greece will dare take back her sovereignty, breaking the all-permeating Fear Factor and become a flagship of courage for Europe and for the world.

Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a former World Bank staff and worked extensively around the world in the fields of environment and water resources. He writes regularly for Global Research, ICH, RT, Sputnik News, TeleSur, The Vineyard of The Saker Blog, and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance . 

Uncle Sam’s Personal “Terror Factory”

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manufactured-terror

• New book documents how FBI built vast informant network to infiltrate Muslim communities and cultivate phony terrorist plots.

By John Tiffany

Source: American Free Press

If someone believes that most, or all, “terrorists” are invented and created by government agents provocateurs, would, or should, they be considered a “conspiracy theorist”?

In fact, agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have been busily creating terrorists out of what had been law-abiding individuals. The system features entrapment, sting operations, provocations and denial of due process, with anonymous juries, secret evidence and extensive pretrial detentions.

In the new book The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism, author Trevor Aaronson documents hundreds of Americans who have been hassled by the government as if they were terrorists. But how many actual terrorists have been caught by this grand effort? Aaronson was able to look at the data from 2001 to August 2011, a database of 508 defendants whom the government considered terrorists. Of the 508, 243 had been targeted due to an FBI informant. One hundred fifty-eight had been caught in sting operations, and 49 had been manipulated by an agent. The number of actual terrorists? Fewer than half a dozen.

In those scores of sting operations, almost every “terrorist” was uneducated, unsophisticated and economically strapped—hardly people likely to plan and launch terrorist operations without major help from the government. It’s called “creating crimes to solve crimes so they can claim a victory in the war on terror.”

The practice, started under President George W. Bush, has mushroomed under President Barack Hussein Obama, with more than 75 sting prosecutions in his first three years in office.

To catch a handful of dangerous hombres and a slew of patsies, the government has built the largest network of spies ever to exist in America, with 10 times as many “shoes on the street” today as during the heyday of J. Edgar Hoover. It spends $3 billion a year “fighting terrorism” and needs results to show to the media and Congress.

While the defendants may be broke, it’s not uncommon for informants to make $100,000 or more on a case—plus tens of thousands more if the case results in a conviction. Not surprisingly, the ranks of informants has grown explosively.

James J. Wedick, a retired FBI agent with 34 years of service, ventured to say that 90% of the cases seen in the last 10 years “are garbage,” and informants are unreliable sources and “the most dangerous individuals on the planet.”

He says it is not uncommon for the FBI to send well-heeled informants (with taxpayer money) into poor Muslim communities to try to trick cash-starved men into going along with their jihad-related entrapment schemes, knowing that these men are desperate for a job, a loan, free meals—anything that will help them support their families.

Writes Aaronson:

Congress allocates billions to the FBI to find terrorists and prevent the next attack. The FBI in turn focuses thousands of agents and informants on Muslim communities in sting operations that pull easily influenced fringe members of those communities into terrorist plots conceived and financed by the FBI. The Justice Department then labels those targets, who have no capacity on their own to commit terrorist acts and no connections to actual terrorists, as terrorists and includes them in data intended not only to justify how previous dollars were spent but also to justify the need for future counterterrorism funding.

FBI Tracked Chattanooga Shooter’s Family for Years

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By Tony Cartalucci

Source: Land Destroyer

Once again, another convenient shooting has helped supercharge anger, hatred, fear, and division across the Western World after an alleged “Islamist extremist” opened fire on and killed 4 US Marines at a recruiting station in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Without any knowledge of how the US has in fact created Al Qaeda and its many global affiliates, including vicious terrorist groups plaguing Southeast Asia, and the most notorious to date, the so-called “Islamic State” (ISIS), the American public will predictably react in a manner that will simply further justify America’s meddling across the globe amid its self-created and perpetuated “War on Terror.” It will also help in efforts to further tighten control over the American public itself, with increased justifications for expanding police state measures and future pushes to disarm the American people.

Yahoo News would report in their article, “Shootings at Chattanooga military facilities leave 4 Marines, gunman dead; act called ‘domestic terrorism‘,” that:

A U.S. official told the Associated Press that Abdulazeez had not been on the radar of federal law enforcement before Thursday’s shooting. 

But also added:

His father had been investigated several years ago for “possible ties to a foreign terrorist organization” and added to the U.S. terrorist watch list, according to a report in the New York Times, but that probe did not surface information about Abdulazeez, the paper said.

This means that yet another case of “domestic terror” has involved someone either investigated by the FBI, entrapped by an active FBI operation where FBI investigators posed as terrorist leaders and walked a patsy through every step of a terrorist attack before arresting them and thus “foiling” the attack, or linked directly to someone the FBI was investigating.

Ironically, the immense omnipresent police state the West has erected to combat the so-called “terrorist” threat, including the total surveillance of all communications online and across all telecommunication networks, at home and abroad under the National Security Agency (NSA) will only expand, despite it once again apparently failing, and despite attempts by special interests on Wall Street and in Washington to claim this latest attack “again” somehow circumvented these already sweeping measures.

Meanwhile, The US Continues Supporting Extremists Abroad

And while this latest attack is passed off as a “domestic terrorist attack” and the result of “Islamic extremists,” rather than a false flag event, the US continues to openly support the very “terrorists” it claims threatens its homeland and has inspired these sort of attacks.

Just recently, the Washington Post literally allowed a spokesman of Al Qaeda to defend his faction’s role in the fighting in Syria, and his condemnation of the United States for not rendering more aid for the cause of overrunning and destroying the Syrian nation – a goal the US itself is likewise pursuing.

Labib Al Nahhas, “head of foreign political relations” for terrorist organization Ahrar al-Sham, wrote in his Washington Post op-ed titled, “The deadly consequences of mislabeling Syria’s revolutionaries,” that:

Stuck inside their own bubble, White House policymakers have allocated millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars to support failed CIA efforts to support so-called “moderate” forces in Syria. But these “moderate” groups have proved to be a disappointment on nearly every count, not least of all in confronting the Islamic State.

He also states:

That question should prompt Washington to admit that the Islamic State’s extremist ideology can be defeated only through a homegrown Sunni alternative — with the term “moderate” defined not by CIA handlers but by Syrians themselves.

Essentially, the Washington Post afforded a terrorist organization space to make an appeal to the American public for military support. Ahrar al-Sham regularly coordinates with and fights within operations led by Al Qaeda’s Al Nusra Front, a US State Department designated terrorist organization from which ISIS itself sprung.

Al Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham are described as the “closest” of allies by Western think-tanks and media reports. It is also revealed that Ahrar al-Sham worked along side ISIS itself.

A Stanford University report under “Mapping Militant Organizations” explained (emphasis added):

Ahrar al-Sham quickly became one of the largest military organizations operating in Syria, and it has been active in efforts to unite the Islamist opposition under a single banner. It rejects the idea of Western intervention but sometimes works alongside Free Syrian Army brigades. It routinely cooperates with al-Nusra and, until relations soured in 2013, also worked with ISIS. In February 2014, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence called Ahrar al-Sham one of the three most effective rebel groups in Syria.

The Washington Post isn’t the only voice in the Western media promoting Al Qaeda. Foreign Policy in 2012 abhorrently proclaimed, “Two Cheers for Syrian Islamists: So the rebels aren’t secular Jeffersonians. As far as America is concerned, it doesn’t much matter.” As much as an admission that the US is backing what is essentially terrorism in Syria, the Foreign Policy article attempted even then to promote the alleged “pragmatism” of supporting Al Qaeda to eliminate America’s foreign enemies.

And while Foreign Policy and terrorists writing in the pages of the Washington Post demand more weapons and support from the West, it is already a documented fact that immense and constantly flowing supply convoys are streaming out of both NATO-member Turkey and US-ally Jordan’s territory, into Syria and Iraq, for the purpose of resupplying ISIS. This explains ISIS’ otherwise inexplicable ability to not only maintain its impressive fighting capacity as it simultaneously wages war against both the Syrian and Iraqi armies, but to expand its fighting to all fronts opposed to US regional hegemony.

This includes Yemen, Libya, and even Egypt where ISIS most recently managed to hit an Egyptian naval vessel with a missile. Foreign Policy would again weigh in. Their article, “Islamic State Sinai Affiliate Claims to Have Hit Egyptian Ship With Missile,” states:

The use of a guided missile to strike an Egyptian ship represents a higher level of technological sophistication than what has been previously observed in Sinai attacks. It is unclear, however, exactly what kind of missile was used in the attack, beyond the militant group’s claim that it was a guided munition.

Militant groups in the region have in the past used guided missiles to attack government ships in the Mediterranean. During the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, an Iranian anti-ship missile fired by the militant group struck the Israeli warship Hanit, badly damaging the vessel and killing four crew members.

Of course, Foreign Policy and others across the Western media will be quick to point out that Hezbollah is a state-sponsored militant organization which receives its weapons from Syria and Iran. The question then becomes how ISIS replicated this level of “technological sophistication,” and which state-sponsors put the missiles into their hands.

The US supporting Al Qaeda is not really news. Al Qaeda was initially a joint US-Saudi venture to create a mercenary army to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980’s. This mercenary army would again fight Russian interests in Serbia and Chechnya before eventually being used as the pretext for US invasions and occupations of both Afghanistan and Iraq from 2001 onward. In 2007, it was revealed that the US, Saudi Arabia, and Israel sought to use the terrorist organization to raise a proxy military front to overthrow Syria and Iran. The resulting bloodbath in Syria beginning in 2011 is the operational execution of this documented conspiracy.

Al Qaeda and its various affiliates serve both as a proxy mercenary front to strike where Western forces cannot, and a pretext to invade abroad. It also serves as a constant justification for increased tyranny at home. With the most recent shooting carried out by yet another target of the FBI’s “investigations,” and the predictable divisive backlash that will follow, it is assured that the American public will be further blinded to the fact that this so-called “Islamic extremism” was born in Washington and on Wall Street, in Riyadh and Tel Aviv, not in a mosque or springing forth from the pages of the Qu’ran.

In fact, the vast majority of the world’s Islamic people are locked in mortal combat with the West’s mercenary terrorist forces, with tens of thousands of them having shed their blood fighting Al Qaeda everywhere from Libya to Egypt, to Iraq and Syria. While the US attempts to pose as the leading power in the fight against extremism, its token airstrikes deep within Syrian territory are quickly undone by the torrent of supplies it itself oversees flooding into Syrian territory. For every fighter killed by a US airstrike, 10 more are being trafficked in through US and NATO-run networks stretching as far afield as Xinjiang, China.

The US presence in Iraq and Syria serves simply as one of several planned stepping stones to eventually and directly intervene militarily in toppling either or both governments, before moving on to Tehran.

The “War on Terror” is a fraud, and each “terrorist attack” a carefully orchestrated means of further perpetuating that fraud.

Jade Helm, Terrorist Attacks, Surveillance and Other Fairy Tales for a Gullible Nation

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TerrorAlert

By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then.” ― Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly

Once upon a time, there was a nation of people who believed everything they were told by their government.

When terrorists attacked the country, and government officials claimed to have been caught by surprise, the people believed them. And when the government passed massive laws aimed at locking down the nation and opening the door to total government surveillance, the people believed it was done merely to keep them safe. The few who disagreed were labeled traitors.

When the government waged costly preemptive wars on foreign countries, insisting it was necessary to protect the nation, the citizens believed it. And when the government brought the weapons and tactics of war home to use against the populace, claiming it was just a way to recycle old equipment, the people believed that too. The few who disagreed were labeled unpatriotic.

When the government spied on its own citizens, claiming they were looking for terrorists hiding among them, the people believed it. And when the government began tracking the citizenry’s movements, monitoring their spending, snooping on their social media, and surveying their habits—supposedly in an effort to make their lives more efficient—the people believed that, too. The few who disagreed were labeled paranoid.

When the government let private companies take over the prison industry and agreed to keep the jails full, justifying it as a cost-saving measure, the people believed them. And when the government started arresting and jailing people for minor infractions, claiming the only way to keep communities safe was to be tough on crime, the people believed that too. The few who disagreed were labeled soft on crime.

When the government hired crisis actors to take part in disaster drills, never alerting the public to which “disasters” were staged, the people genuinely believed they were under attack. And when the government insisted it needed greater powers to prevent such attacks from happening again, the people believed that too. The few who disagreed were told to shut up or leave the country.

Finally, the government started carrying out covert military drills around the country, insisting they were necessary to train the troops for foreign combat, and most of the people believed them. The few who disagreed, warning that perhaps all was not what it seemed, were dismissed as conspiracy theorists and quacks.

By the time the government locked down the nation, using local police and the military to impose martial law, there was no one left in doubt of the government’s true motives—total control and domination—but there was also no one left to fight back.

Now every fable has a moral, and the moral of this story is to beware of anyone who urges you to ignore your better instincts and trust the government.

In other words, if it looks like trouble and it smells like trouble, you can bet there’s trouble afoot.

For instance, while there is certainly no shortage of foul-smelling government activities taking place right now, the one giving off the greatest stench is Jade Helm 15. This covert, multi-agency, multi-state, eight-week military training exercise is set to take place from July 15 through Sept. 15 in states across the American Southwest.

According to official government sources, “Jade Helm: Mastering the Human Domain” is a planned military exercise that will test and practice unconventional warfare including, but not limited to, guerrilla warfare, subversion, sabotage, intelligence activities, and unconventional assisted recovery. The training exercise will take place in seven different southwestern states: California, New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, Texas, Utah and Nevada.

U.S. Army Special Operations Command will primarily lead this interagency training program but the Navy Seals, Air Force Special Operations, Marine Special Operations Command, Marine Expeditionary Units, 82nd Airborne Division, and other interagency partners will also be involved. Approximately 1,200 troops are expected to participate in these exercises.

The training is known as Realistic Military Training because it will be conducted outside of federal property. The exercises are going to be carried out on both public and private land, with the military reportedly asking permission of local authorities and landowners prior to land usage. The military map listing the locations that will host the exercise shows Texas, Utah, and the southern part of California as “hostile territory.” According to U.S. officials, these three areas are marked as hostile to simulate environments where American troops are viewed as the enemy. The other areas on the map are marked as permissive, uncertain (leaning friendly), or uncertain (leaning hostile).

Military officials claim that the southwestern states were chosen because this exercise requires large areas of undeveloped land as well as access to towns and population hubs. These states purportedly also provide a climate and terrain that is similar to that of potential areas of combat for the United States, particularly Iraq, Iran and Syria.

Now the mainstream media has happily regurgitated the government’s official explanation about Jade Helm. However, there is a growing concern among those who are not overly worried about being labeled conspiratorialists or paranoid that the government is using Jade Helm as a cover to institute martial law, bring about total population control, or carry out greater surveillance on the citizenry.

In the first camp are those who fear that Jade Helm will usher in martial law. These individuals believe that by designating the two traditionally conservative and Republican-dominated states, Utah and Texas, as hostile territory, while more Democratic states like Colorado and California are marked as friendly, the military plans to infiltrate the states with large numbers of gun owners and attempt to disarm them.

Adding fuel to the fire is the mysterious and sudden temporary closures of five Walmart stores in Texas, California, Oklahoma and Florida, two of which are located near Jade Helm training sites. Those in this camp contend that the military is planning to use the Walmart stores as processing facilities for Americans once martial law is enacted.

Pointing to the mission’s official title, “Jade Helm: Mastering the Human Domain,” there is a second camp that fears that the military exercises are merely a means to an end—namely total population control—by allowing the military to discern between friendly civilians and hostiles. This concern is reinforced by military documents stating that a major portion of Jade Helm training will be about blending in with civilians, understanding how to work with civilians, using these civilians to find enemy combatants, and then neutralizing the target.

In this way, the United States military is effectively using psychological warfare to learn how people function and how to control them.

As a study written by military personnel states, mastering the human domain, also known as identity processes, means “use of enhanced capabilities to identify and classify the human domain; to determine whether they are adversarial, friendly, neutral, or unknown.” The study later states that identity processes can be used to “manage local populations during major combat, stability, and humanitarian assistance and/or disaster relief operations.”

While the military has promised that the work they are doing is aimed for use overseas, we have seen first-hand how quickly the military’s weapons and tactics used overseas are brought home to be used against the populace. In fact, some of the nation’s evolutionary psychologists, demographers, sociologists, historians and anthropologists have been working with the Department of Defense’s Minerva Initiative to master the human domain. This security research includes “Understanding the Origin, Characteristics, and Implications of Mass Political Movements” at the University of Washington and “Who Does Not Become a Terrorist and Why?” at the Naval Academy Post Graduate School. Both studies focus on Americans and the different movements and patterns that the government can track to ensure “safety and security.”

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is also working to infiltrate churches across the country to establish a Christian Emergency Network, carry out emergency training exercises to prevent and prepare for disasters (active shooter drills and natural disaster preparedness), and foster two-way information sharing, while at the same time instituting a media blackout of their activities. As the DHS continues to establish itself within churches, a growing number of churches are adopting facial recognition systems to survey their congregations, identify and track who attends their events, and target individuals for financial contributions or further monitoring. As the partnership between churches and the DHS grows, their facial recognition databases may be shared with the federal government, if that is not already happening.

Finally, there is the third camp which fears that Jade Helm is merely the first of many exercises to be incorporated into regular American life so that the government can watch, study, and better understand how to control the masses. Certainly, psychological control techniques could be used in the future to halt protests and ensure that the nation runs “smoothly.”

It remains to be seen whether Jade Helm 15 proves to be a thinly veiled military plot to take over the country (one lifted straight out of director John Frankenheimer’s 1964 political thriller Seven Days in May), turn the population into automatons and psychological experiments, or is merely a “routine” exercise for troops, albeit a blatantly intimidating flexing of the military’s muscles.

However, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the problem arises when you add Jade Helm to the list of other troubling developments that have taken place over the past 30 years or more: the expansion of the military industrial complex and its influence in Washington DC, the rampant surveillance, the corporate-funded elections and revolving door between lobbyists and elected officials, the militarized police, the loss of our freedoms, the injustice of the courts, the privatized prisons, the school lockdowns, the roadside strip searches, the military drills on domestic soil, the fusion centers and the simultaneous fusing of every branch of law enforcement (federal, state and local), the stockpiling of ammunition by various government agencies, the active shooter drills that are indistinguishable from actual crises, the economy flirting with near collapse, the growing social unrest, the socio-psychological experiments being carried out by government agencies, etc.

Suddenly, the overall picture seems that much more sinister. Clearly, there’s a larger agenda at work here, and it’s one the American people had better clue into before it’s too late to do anything about it.

Call me paranoid, but I think we’d better take James Madison’s advice and “take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties.”