Zero for 40 at Predicting Attacks: Why Do Media Still Take FBI Terror Warnings Seriously?

By Adam Johnson

Source: FAIR

On Monday, several mainstream media outlets repeated the latest press release by the FBI that country was under a new “heightened terror alert” from “ISIL-inspired attacks” “leading up to the July 4th weekend.” One of the more sensational outlets, CNN, led with the breathless warning on several of its cable programs, complete with a special report by The Lead’s Jim Sciutto in primetime:

TerrorAlert

The threat was given extra credence when former CIA director—and consultant at DC PR firm Beacon Global Strategies—Michael Morell went on CBS This Morning (6/29/15) and scared the ever-living bejesus out of everyone by saying he “wouldn’t be surprised if we were sitting [in the studio] next week discussing an attack on the US.” The first piece of evidence Morell used to justify his apocalyptic posture, the “50 ISIS arrests,” was accompanied by a scary map on the CBS jumbotron showing “ISIS arrests” all throughout the US:

RecentISISArrests

But one key detail is missing from this  graphic: None of these “ISIS arrests” involved any actual members of ISIS, only members of the FBI—and their network of informants—posing as such. (The one exception being the man arrested in Arizona, who, while having no contact with ISIS, was also not prompted by the FBI.) So even if one thinks the threat of “lone wolf” attacks is a serious one, it cannot be said these are really “ISIS arrests.”  Perhaps on some meta-level, it shows an increase of “radicalization,” but it’s impossible to distinguish between this and simply more aggressive sting operations by the FBI.

In any event, this nuance gets left out entirely. As I’ve previously shown, in the media’s rush to hype the threat, the fact of FBI-manufactured—or at least “assisted”—terror plots is left out as a complicating factor altogether, and the viewer is left thinking the FBI arrested 50 actual ISIS sleeper cells.

Nevertheless, the ominous FBI (or Department of Homeland Security) “terror warning” has become such a staple of the on-going, seemingly endless “war on terror” (d/b/a war on ISIS), we hardly even notice it anymore. Marked by a feedback loop of extremist propaganda, unverifiable claims about “online chatter” and fuzzy pronouncements issued by a neverending string of faceless Muslim bad guys, and given PR cover by FBI-contrived “terror plots,” the specter of the impending “attack” is part of a broader white noise of fear that never went away after 9/11. Indeed, the verbiage employed by the FBI in this latest warning —“we’re asking people to remain vigilant”—implies no actual change of the status quo, just an hysterical nudge to not let down our collective guard.

There’s only one problem: These warnings never actually come to fruition. Not rarely, or almost never, but—by all accounts—never. No attacks, no arrests, no suspects at large.

Here’s a selection of previous FBI and DHS “terror warnings” over the past 14 years, not a single one of which actually predicted or foiled a terror attack:

October 2001: “Potential use of chemical/biological and/or radiological/nuclear weapons

November 2001: California bridges

February 2002: “Hollywood studios”

May 2002: Statue of Liberty

June 2002: “Around the Fourth of July holiday”

July 2002: Stadiums

August 2002: “Landmarks”

October 2002: “AQ to attack Amtrak

November 2002:Spectacular Al Qaeda attacks

February 2003: “Apartments, hotels, sports arenas and amusement parks

May 2003: “Possibility of multiple attacks”

May 2004: “Attempt to affect the outcome” of presidential election

July 2004: “Military facilities and large gatherings” on July 4th

August 2004: VA hospitals

January 2005: Dirty bomb

March 2005: US/Mexican border

October 2005: NYC & Baltimore subways

March 2006: “Sporting events”

June 2007: Colleges

December 2007:Shopping malls in Chicago and LA”

November 2008: “Al Qaeda to attack transit during Thanksgiving

November 2010: Mass transit in New York City

October 2011: “Americans in Europe” facing “commando-style AQ attack”

February 2011: “Financial institutions”

May 2011: “Threats of retaliation”

June 2011: Al Qaeda “hit list”

July 2011: “Private jets of executives” involved in drone manufacturing

September 2011: “Small planes”

September 2011: “New York City or Washington around…10th anniversary of 9/11

September 2011: Airports

March 2012: “Terrorist hacking”

August 2012: Anarchists blowing up bridge during Tampa RNC

September 2012: “Islamic violence over movie

August 2013: “San Fransisco on high alert

November 2013: “cyber attacks”

April 2014: “College students abroad”

December 2014: ISIS targeting Mississippi River bridge

December 2014: ISIS “sabotaging US military personnel” over social media

April 2015: ISIS targeting “parts of California

May 2015: ISIS targeting “military bases

A casual search reveals the FBI and DHS are a pitiful 0 for 40 warning of terror attacks—some of which were specifically about 4th of July threats, none of which materialized in any way. This should not be considered a comprehensive list of all threat warnings transmitted by media; I tried to narrow the scope to warnings that were at least in some way specific.

The actual terror attacks carried out on US soil—the Times Square bomber, “Underwear bomber,” Boston bombing and Garland attacks—were accompanied by no such warnings. (Nor were the often deadlier terrorist attacks by right-wing white terrorists–but terrorism in this category is rarely if ever the subject of FBI warnings.)

So why, a rational person may ask, does the media keeps repeating them if they’re wrong 100 percent of the time?

The problem is three fold:

  1. The FBI has all the incentive in the world to issue warnings and no incentive whatsoever to not issue warnings. Issuing warnings has no downside, while not doing so is all downside.
  2. The FBI, like all agencies of the government, does not operate in a political vacuum. Emphasizing the “ISIS threat” at home necessarily helps prop up the broader war effort the FBI’s boss, the president of the United States, must sell to a war-weary public. The incentive is to therefore highlight the smallest threats. This was a feature that did not go unnoticed during the Bush years, but has since fallen out of fashion.
  3. It has no actual utility. What does it mean to be “more vigilant”? It’s a vague call to alertness that officials, aside from “beefing up security” by local police, never quite explain what it means. If the FBI wanted to tell local police departments to up their security of the 4th of July weekend, surely they could do so quietly, without the chair of the House Committee on Homeland Security having to go on all major networks talking over b-roll of ISIS in apocalyptic terms.

When I brought up these objections up to CNN’s Sciutto, his response was less than satisfying:

fair question, the point is about the wider threat, FBI encourages people to attend events but be vigilant.

Yes, I would prefer warnings only when attacks were imminent. Which, of course, they never are. Because if they were, the government would actually attempt to stop them, rather than running a three-day PR tour. CNN‘s Jake Tapper, to his credit, would raise my concerns to Michael Chertoff later that day:

View image on Twitter

Ex-DHS head pushes back against terror warning skeptics http://cnn.it/1LyERVV 


While the attempt to introduce some skepticism is very much appreciated, Tapper missed the fundamental problem altogether. Next time he has on a Chertoff or a McCaul discussing a vague government terror warning, I’d like him to ask this simple question: “Has the FBI ever successfully warned, or foreshadowed in anyway, a terror attack in the United States? Because so far the count is 0 for 40+, and I’m curious what makes this time different.”

Put the burden of proof on those who are attempting to scare us, march our men and women off to war, and line their private security firm’s pockets. Don’t demand “FBI warning skeptics” disprove those in power; make those in power justify their own consistently discredited “warnings.”

If journalists still insist on disseminating these vague “threats,” I ask this question: How many false positives would be required for you to eventually stop doing so? Seventy? Two hundred?

Because 14 years on, I’m curious when, if ever, this media trope will ever end.

h/t Kevin Gosztola, who caught a 4th of July warning from 2004 I missed.\


Adam Johnson is an associate editor at AlterNet and writes frequently for FAIR.org. You can follow him on Twitter at @adamjohnsonnyc.

Never Mind FIFA, How about a Crackdown on the Banksters?

banker-thief

By Finian Cunningham

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

FIFA boss Sepp Blatter’s sudden resignation this week only days after being re-elected shows that the US campaign to bust the football federation over alleged financial corruption is probably going to intensify during the weeks and months ahead.

Blatter had been re-elected for the fifth time last Friday as the federation’s president. He had earlier brushed off calls for his resignation from the American and British governments, amid a storm of media allegations over corruption at the World Cup organising body. Now only four days after being re-elected, the FIFA chief executive is quitting, saying somewhat cryptically that he does not have a sufficient mandate in the world of football to continue at the helm of the organisation.

The dramatic bust in a Zurich hotel last week of FIFA executives is «just the beginning», top US law enforcement officials have warned. British authorities have also jumped on the bandwagon with their own announced probe into financial irregularities at the World Cup organiser.

With seven FIFA officials arrested so far and seven more indicted, and the US authorities vowing to pursue others in the footballing federation over alleged financial corruption, it can be anticipated that this scandal will run and run into interminable extra-time.

An ulterior political agenda behind the apparent American-led crackdown on the international footballing federation could very well be the desire by US and British governments to scupper the 2018 World Cup venue in Russia. Both the Americans and the British lost out when Russia won the bid back in 2010 to host the forthcoming quadrennial tournament, following last year’s event in Brazil. A re-run of the selection process would give the US and Britain a second chance to pitch their bids, and with a generated cloud hanging over Russia due to the FIFA scandal, they both stand a better chance of winning if it comes to a re-selection.

The sporting event is highly coveted, being the most popularly watched on the planet – even exceeding the Olympics. Billions of dollars are at stake for corporations, from construction, hospitality, sportswear and media. There is also the immense national prestige that comes with hosting the global spectacle.

A second, more important, political objective for Washington and its British ally is to augment their ongoing campaign to isolate Moscow over the Ukraine crisis. The West accuses Vladimir Putin’s government of annexing Crimea last year and they have mounted a barrage of economic sanctions on Russia seemingly in retribution. Washington and London have been most gung-ho among Western countries in pushing the anti-Russian agenda over Ukraine.

President Putin has shown no sign of weakening under this relentless Western pressure. Moscow denies any impropriety over Ukraine. Indeed, it accuses the West of fomenting an illegal coup in that country and of trying to use the resulting conflict as a way to destabilise Russia. Moscow has retaliated to Western sanctions by imposing its own bans on European trade exports and, in recent days, imposing travel restrictions on 89 European Union parliamentarians.

So, very plausibly, the Americans and their trusty British ally are using the issue of alleged corruption in World Cup organising body, FIFA, as a stalking horse to further get at Russia over the geopolitical tensions in Ukraine.

US law enforcement officials at the highest level – including attorney-general Loretta Lynch and FBI chief James Comey – say their investigation into FIFA will continue until all suspicions of corruption in the organisation are uncovered. This high-level US involvement in targeting FIFA strongly suggests a political direction being given by the Obama administration.

The concerted nature of the American corruption onslaught against FIFA also points to a top-level decision to go after the Swiss-based federation. The British government, from prime minister David Cameron to his foreign secretary Philip Hammond, quickly stepped into the FIFA scandal following the American lead, making highly unusual public calls for the federation’s president Sepp Blatter to resign.

Both the timing of the US-launched corruption probe – in the week of FIFA’s annual conference and leadership election – plus the way that senior American and British officials, not to mention the publicity of Western news media, have weighed-in to rebuke FIFA suggests that it is all part of a coordinated political campaign authored at the highest level of government. That, in turn, suggests that there is an ulterior political agenda behind the supposed criminal crackdown on FIFA, and that the ulterior agenda is the Western objective to undermine Russia.

Another measure for assessing the credibility of the US-led corruption campaign against FIFA is to put the alleged wrongdoing in perspective with other known spheres of financial corruption. Few people believe that FIFA is free from sleaze and dodgy kickbacks. With so much corporate advertising at stake and broadcasting rights for global media audiences, it would be naive to assume that large wads of money have not crossed palms with a wink and a nod.

The US authorities are throwing a book of charges at the organisation, ranging from bribery to commercial fixing, racketeering to tax evasion. It is claimed by the Americans that the corruption at FIFA amounts to $150 million.

That sounds like a lot of sleazy money, but this figure pales in significance to the amount of corruption and criminality attributable to Wall Street banks and other Western financial institutions. For example, British bank HSBC alone has been caught running tax evasion, money-laundering for drug cartels and other illicit schemes that is estimated at $180 billion – or more than a thousand-fold the scale of criminality alleged at FIFA.

Wall Street banks, including JP Morgan, are accused of massive, systematic rigging of gold price markets all in a shady bid to shield the US dollar value. That criminality, affecting the price of basic commodities and livelihoods for billions of people worldwide, is estimated to be in the order of trillions of dollars – or a thousand, thousand-fold the FIFA debacle.

Moreover, these same banks, along with a slew of other global names – Citibank, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Barclays, Deutsche Bank, Credit Agricole among many others – were all directly responsible for the explosion in toxic financial derivatives that made their executives multimillionaires but which led to the global financial and economic meltdown in 2008.

That meltdown – which persists seven years on from its inception – has resulted in millions of lives ruined from unemployment and the collapse of pensions and savings funds. Added to that are the myriad social hardships and crippled lives from the ensuing austerity imposed on the general Western public to pay for the financial catastrophe – a catastrophe that was deliberately and recklessly engineered by the major banks, hedge funds and other capitalist investment agencies.

As Michel Chossudovsky writes in his co-authored book, The Global Economic Crisis: «The meltdown of financial markets in 2008-2009 was the result of institutionalised fraud and financial manipulation. The ‘bank bailouts’ were implemented on the instruction of Wall Street, leading to the largest transfer of money wealth in recorded history, while simultaneously creating an unsurmountable public debt».

It is probable that generations of children to come will be forced to pay for the trillions of dollars of debt that was created by American and European banks, which have now been offloaded on to the public by governments in so-called «bail-outs». Make no mistake, thousands of people have already died from the austerity that Western governments have imposed on their public in order to pay for the corporate fraud, tax evasion, fixing and embezzlement that has taken place in front of our eyes on a massive scale in the order of trillions of dollars.

Yet in the face of this gargantuan, genocidal criminality not one board member or executive from the major banks involved in precipitating the global crash has been charged, let alone prosecuted or imprisoned. In fact, the Wall Street banking elite and their counterparts in the City of London are among the main political donors that helped to re-elect Barack Obama and David Cameron.

The belated focus of American and British authorities on the alleged wrongdoings at FIFA can thus be readily seen as both ludicrous and laughable when we compare that with the absolute dearth of interest by these same authorities in applying law enforcement where it ought to be applied – on the Wall Street and City of London banksters.

Obviously, then, the self-righteous campaign to «root out fraud at FIFA is just so much pious nonsense. The astounding hypocrisy of US and British authorities leaves one with the unmistakable conclusion that the whole media-driven campaign against FIFA is nothing but a self-serving and cynical political agenda. And top of that agenda is to score geopolitical points against Russia.

Until Washington and London governments go after priority financial crime in their midst, then anything they say about FIFA can be taken as very wide off the mark.

Garland Shooter Elton Simpson ‘Handled’ By Paid FBI Informant

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

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.

 

 

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

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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.

When It Becomes Serious, First They Lie–When That Fails, They Arrest You

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

When lying is no longer enough to gain compliance, then the organs of security are unleashed on dissent and resistance.

“When it becomes serious, you have to lie.” Jean-Claude Juncker simply gave voice to what the world’s leaders practice on a daily basis, because now it’s always serious.

 

And why is it now serious? Persuading tax donkeys and debt serfs that everything is going their way is now impossible without lies. Persuading the populace that the leadership is working on their behalf was jettisoned in the wake of the 2008 bailout of bankers and parasites.

Stripped of the artifice that they care about anything other than preserving the wealth of their cronies, global political leaders now rely on propaganda: narratives designed to manage expectations and perceptions, bolstered by carefully tailored official statistics.

Reliance on lies erodes legitimacy. As the rich get richer and the burdens on tax donkeys and debt serfs increase, the gulf between the official happy-story narrative and reality widens to the breaking point, and faith in the narrative and the leadership espousing it declines.

When 20% of the populace no longer believe the lies and begins questioning the state’s enforcement of the status quo, the government devotes its resources to punishing dissenters and resisters. Whistleblowers are charged with trumped-up crimes; those publicly refuting the status quo’s narrative of lies are harassed and discredited, and those who resist state enforcement of parasitic cronyism are set up, beaten, entrapped, investigated, interrogated and arrested once suitably Kafkaesque charges can be conjured up by the apparatchiks of enforcement.

Why 20%? It’s the Pareto Distribution (the 80/20 rule): the 20% of any populace that accepts a new trend, technology or narrative has an outsized influence over the other 80%.

Governments operate on the premise that propaganda and threats will always be enough to cow their populaces into compliance and bribes will induce complicity. When lies, bribes and threats no long work, the state unleashes its full pathological powers on dissent.

The last mass campaign of political suppression in the U.S. occurred in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when resistance to the war of choice in Vietnam reached mainstream proportions.

The U.S. government was accustomed to manipulating and managing the populace with very simple propaganda: Communism is our deadly enemy, we must fight it everywhere on the planet, etc. But when thousands of American service personnel started coming home in body bags from the latest “we must fight Communism everywhere because it’s dangerous to us” war in East Asia, this simplistic justification made no sense: what existential threat to the U.S. did a Communist Vietnam pose?

The U.S. has faced only two existential threats to its sovereignty since 1860: World War II (1941-45) and the potential for a nation-destroying nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The idea that the U.S. was existentially threatened by falling dominoes in East Asia was always ludicrous, and the U.S. status quo (the political leadership, the Deep State, private industry profiting from war, etc.) soon abandoned the absurd justification.

Vietnam was always more of a domestic-politics issue than a geopolitical one: the Democrats feared being perceived as being “weak on Communism” because that impacted the results of elections. Throwing treasure and American lives away in Vietnam was pure domestic politics from 1961-68 (once mired, Democrats feared being tagged as the party that “lost Vietnam”), and thereafter the treasure and lives were sacrificed on the equally contrived Nixon-Kissinger policy of avoiding losing geopolitical face with a withdrawal that amounted to surrender.

Though it is not well known, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was ordered to devote essentially all its resources to suppressing dissent in these years. Teams assigned to organized crime were reassigned to track down draft resisters and other political malcontents. COINTELPRO was a vast program devoted to illegally entrapping, beating up and undermining any and all political resistance to the war and the government’s increasingly heavy-handed oppression of dissent.

For more on COINTELPRO, please read War at Home: Covert action against U.S. activists and what we can do about it.

Simply put: when lies no longer work, governments freak out and devote their resources not to eliminating wars of choice, cronyism and corruption but to suppressing dissent and resistance to those policies.

The U.S. government has always been free to pursue wars of choice with its professional military, with little risk of widespread political blowback. A variety of “splendid little wars” have been waged, generally for conquest or enforcement of hemispheric hegemony. The government’s success in rallying the nation during World War II instilled a false confidence that merely raising the flag of existential threat would be enough to eliminate dissent and elicit compliance in the masses.

Vietnam was the first time the American public went through the process of buying the usual “threat” justification for war, questioning the threat and eventually rejecting the state’s narrative. The government responded by lashing out at its own citizenry, engaging in a full spectrum of illegal and blatantly immoral actions designed not to right wrongs or fix broken policies, but to suppress dissent and resistance to destructive policies and broken systems.

The U.S. government is not unique in this; on the contrary, all governments, by their very nature as concentrations of coercive power, will pursue the same path. Rather than confess the government is operated by cronies, for cronies, the machinery of the state will increasingly be turned on its citizenry.

Rendering unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s is no longer enough; abiding by the laws of the land are no longer enough. What the state demands is not just compliance with its countless laws and regulations, but absolute obedience to its narratives and policies.

 

Anyone who withholds obedience is quickly deemed a traitor–not to the nation or its Constitution, but to the state itself, which is ultimately a collection of cronies and self-serving vested interests protecting their fiefdoms at the expense of the citizenry.

When lying is no longer enough to gain compliance, then the organs of security are unleashed on dissent and resistance. This process is well under way in nation-states around the world.

If I had to pick the two key operative dynamics of the next 20 years, I would choose:

1. The over-expansion and implosion of credit/debt bubbles.

2. The over-reach of the central state as it seeks to win the hearts and minds of its people by ruthlessly suppressing dissent.

The two dynamics are of course causally connected. Central states depend entirely on credit bubbles for their financial survival, and on enforcing increasingly untenable official narratives for their legitimacy.

Both are unraveling, and will continue to unravel, no matter how many state resources are thrown at the symptoms of political illegitimacy, rather than at the root causes of that illegitimacy.

 

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

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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.

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.

Edward Abbey’s FBI File

ed-abbey

(Editor’s note: in honor of author/activist Edward Abbey, who was born on this day in 1927, you can learn a little more about his life through this overview of the FBI’s file on the courageous iconoclast beginning in his college days followed by a short video essay filmed in Moab.)

By David Gessner

Source: Orion Magazine

THE FILE BEGINS in 1947, when Abbey, just twenty and freshly back from serving in the army in Europe, posts a type-written notice on the bulletin board at the State Teacher’s College in Pennsylvania. The note urges young men to send their draft cards to the president in protest of peacetime conscription, exhorting them to “emancipate themselves.” It is at this point that Abbey becomes “the subject of a communist index card” at the FBI, and from then until the end of his life the Bureau will keep track of where Abbey is residing. They will note when he heads west and when, as acting editor of the University of New Mexico’s literary magazine, The Thunderbird, he decides to print an issue with a cover emblazoned with the words: “Man will not be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest!” The quote is from Diderot, but Abbey thinks it funnier to attribute the words to Louisa May Alcott. And so he quickly loses his editorship while the FBI adds a few more pages to his file. Also quoted in full in his files is a letter to the editor of the New Mexico Daily Lobo, in which he writes: “In this day of the cold war, which every day shows signs of becoming warmer, the individual who finds himself opposed to war is apt to feel very much out of step with his fellow citizens.” He then announces the need to form a group to “discuss implications and possibilities of resistance to war.”

The files contain interviews with fellow students and teachers at the University of New Mexico, who talk of Abbey’s “instability and poor judgment,” with one interviewee saying that, as an editor, Abbey showed “a stubborn ego, a taste for shocking the reader, a lack of maturity.” Abbey, according to other colleagues, was “indiscreet in his individualism” and “demonstrated a somewhat radical rebellious quality . . .” Though the interviews are mildly damning, no one questioned the subject’s loyalty to his country.

One wonders how Abbey would have fared these days. Would the FBI, or the NSA, have simply kept tabs on him or actually called him in for questioning? So many of his views, and so much of his personality, match just the sort of profile we have come to associate with our rather broad definition of domestic terrorism. It isn’t just his gun advocacy, or his monkey wrenching. It’s his belief that wilderness is a place where the last free men can retreat when the tyrants take over. He writes:

Democracy has always been a rare and fragile institution. . . . As social conflict tends to become more severe . . . there will inevitably be a tendency on the part of the authoritarian element—always present in our history—to suppress individual freedoms, to utilize the refined techniques of police surveillance (not excluding torture of course) in order to preserve—not wilderness!—but the status quo . . .

It’s a type of sentiment that anticipates our government’s reaction to 9/11. Thoreau said that under a government that unjustly imprisons its own, “the true place for the just man is also a prison.” Prison is exactly where Abbey’s monkey wrenching and FBI record might have landed him in today’s world.

Abbey’s beliefs in freedom and resistance, and his message of aggressive nonconformity, of screw-you freedom, were perfect for the ’60s and ’70s. But it’s hard to imagine that the same message would get a similar reaction today, or to see, at least at first, how his spirit might be adapted to fit our times. For instance, isn’t monkey wrenching dead as a legitimate possibility for the environmental movement? I must admit that in my own grown-up life as a professor and father I don’t blow a lot of things up. For most of us who care about the environment, Wallace Stegner provides a much more sensible model.

But I don’t want to be so quick to toss Abbey on the scrap heap. If the times have changed, Abbey’s ideas about freedom have in some ways never been more relevant. Many of the things that he foresaw have come to pass: we currently live in an age of unprecedented surveillance, where the government regularly reads our letters (now called e-mails) and monitors our movements. Abbey offers resistance to this. Resistance to the worst of our times, the constant encroaching on freedom and wildness. He says to us: Question them, question their authority. Don’t be so quick to give up the things you know are vital no matter what others say.

David Gessner is the author of nine books, including the forthcoming All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West from which this essay is adapted. He is the founder of the journal Ecotone.


Production notes by Ned Judge:
An eight minute film essay that I co-produced and directed with Ed Abbey in 1985. At the time I was working for a network magazine show. The executive producer took me to lunch one day. He told me that he was having trouble with his son who was 18. The son thought his dad was a corporate whore. He had told his father if he had any balls at all he’d put Ed Abbey on his show. That’s why the EP was talking to me. Would I see if it was possible? I had an acquaintance who knew Ed and he passed the request along. Ed responded that he’d give it a try. He signed the contract and wrote a script. We met in Moab and went out to Arches National Park to shoot some practice sessions with a home video camera. We would review them at the motel in the evening. After a day or two, Ed was feeling pretty comfortable on camera so we scheduled the shoot. We were all happy with the way it went. But then we ran head-on into network reality. Roger Mudd, the show’s host, was extremely negative about putting an “eco-terrorist” on the show. The executive producer had no choice but to cave. So this Abbey essay was put on the shelf and never aired. Abbey died 3 years later in March 1989.