Category Archives: History

The Commencement Controversy and the Real Mumia

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By Kevin Price

Source: TruthThroughStruggle

Three weeks ago I visited imprisoned journalist, Mumia Abu-Jamal, at SCI-Mahanoy in Pennsylvania. I’ve been visiting with Mumia, sometimes regularly, for the last decade. Despite the polarizing rhetoric from those who’ve fought for three decades for Mumia’s state sanctioned murder, the man I met is one of the kindest, funniest, and most intelligent people I’ve had the pleasure to know. The first time I visited with Mumia, on death row at SCI-Greene in 2004, the conversation was so engaging that the visit was halfway over before I realized his hands had been shackled the whole time. After years of organizing around his case I knew he was a brilliant thinker, but I was pleasantly surprised by his sense of humor and silliness.

I learned of Mumia’s case as a teenager in 1997, when my world was rocked by reading his gripping book documenting death row life, “Live From Death Row.” The same week I purchased his newly released collection of musings, essays, and poems, “Death Blossoms.” I stayed up all night reading it, inspired by the empathy and insight coming through the pages. At that point I was a freshmen in high school and had begun to get politicized by an active punk scene in Norfolk, VA. Mumia’s writing opened my eyes to worlds I had never even considered. I started organizing heavily for a new trial for Mumia as well as working on many other causes and movements. After over 15 years studying this case I know that his trial was a travesty of justice (as does Amnesty International and many international governing bodies) and I believe that he is innocent.

In person and in his writings Mumia rarely focuses on his own case, instead focusing on broad international struggles for justice. On our most recent visit we talked about books we’re reading, world events, and mutual friends. For a few years he’s been studying musical composition and when I told him that I didn’t know how to read music he spent an hour passionately explaining the basics to me. I learned a lot. These visits have been some of the most educational hours of my life. It’s easy, absorbed in conversation, to forget that we are in a prison. It’s hard to comprehend that this man was nearly put to death on two separate occasions and that the mere mention of his name will send many into a fit of rage. If they actually met Mumia they wouldn’t recognize him next to the violent cop-killer straw man the media built in his image. Mumia has been characterized by much of the mainstream media as an unrepentant murderer. When word got out that an audio recording by Mumia would be the commencement address at Goddard College this Sunday, Fox News and other media pundits manufactured a media controversy.

Over the years I’ve seen a lot of backlash by the Fraternal Order of Police and others who want Mumia dead. When Rage Against the Machine and the Beastie Boys organized a massive benefit show in his defense there was media uproar and pressure to shut down the show. When Mumia was made the first honorary citizen of Paris, France since Pablo Picasso, and Saint-Denis, France named a street after him, the US House of Representatives passed HR 1082 condemning Mumia and Saint-Denis, France. The hysteria over having Mumia as the commencement speaker at Goddard is just the most recent in a long series of similar media spectacles. This one hits a bit closer to home for me because I graduated from Goddard College in 2012 and have friends who will be graduating this Sunday. I love Goddard and am very protective of it. Conversations with Mumia were part of the catalyst for my enrolling in Goddard. He attended Goddard in the 70s and finished his degree there in 1995, knowing he might be executed before graduation.

It’s difficult to watch a person that you love and respect routinely slandered in the media. Goddard College and their graduating students have been condemned for their decision and attacked as well. I’m impressed with the way the school and the graduating students are defending their decision. There are a number of symbolic reasons it’s valuable to have Mumia speak at commencement. The United States is the largest jailer in the world history, with over 2,000,000 people in the prison system. Racism plays a key role in deciding who will be convicted and the sentence they will receive, and as a result black men are incarcerated at vastly disproportionate numbers. The lack of educational opportunities and diminishing job options are a huge factor in our sky rocketing rates of imprisonment. If we seek to change these conditions I can think of no better speaker than Mumia Abu-Jamal, an accomplished academic, and brilliant black man who is wrongfully convicted. With the rampant police murders of black people, notably Eric Garner and Mike Brown, it’s important to publicly assert that black lives matter and that the victims of police brutality and judicial misconduct must be defended.

These are wonderful symbolic reasons to celebrate the choice of Mumia as a commencement speaker. However, Mumia is not a symbol. He is a man who was wrongfully held in solitary confinement on death row for nearly 30 years and is now being wrongfully held in general population with no legal possibility for parole. He has children who have had children in the years he’s been away. He is a man with a brilliant mind and an unstoppable pen. Those who oppose him have been fighting for decades to silence his voice. Yet every week, often twice a week, Mumia continues work as a journalist, writing and recording audio commentaries over the prison phone calls. With so much at stake it only seems right that we listen.

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To hear Mumia’s commentaries go to http://www.prisonradio.org

For more information on who Mumia is, his case and his writings go to http://www.freemumia.com

Ready Or Not… The unsustainable status quo is ending

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By Chris Martenson

Source: Peak Prosperity

I have to confess, it’s getting more and more difficult to find ways of writing about everything going on in the world.

Not because there’s a shortage of things to write about — wars, propaganda, fraud, Ebola — but because most of the negative news and major world events we see around us are symptoms of the disease, not the disease itself.

There are only so many times you can describe the disease, before it all becomes repetitive for both the writer and the reader. It’s far more interesting to get to the root cause, because then real solutions offering real progress can be explored.

Equally troubling, in a world where the central banks have distorted, if not utterly flattened, the all important relationship between prices, risk, and reality, what good does it do to seek some sort of meaning in the new temporary arrangement of things?

When the price of money itself is distorted, then all prices are merely derivative works of that primary distortion. Some prices will be too high, some far too low, but none accurately determined by the intersection of true demand and supply.

If risk has been taken from where it belongs and instead shuffled onto central bank balance sheets, or allowed to be hidden by new and accommodating accounting tricks, has it really disappeared? In my world, risk is like energy: it can neither be created nor destroyed, only transformed or transferred.

If reality no longer has a place at the table — such as when policy makers act as if the all-too-temporary shale oil bonanza is now a new permanent constant — then the discussions happening around that table are only accidentally useful, if ever, and always delusional.

Through all of this, the big picture as described in the Crash Course grows ever more obviously clear: we are on an unsustainable course; economically, ecologically, and — most immediately worryingly  — in our use of energy.

So let’s start there, with a simple grounding in the facts.

By The Numbers

Humans now number 7.1 billion on the planet and that number is on track to rise to 8 or 9 billion by 2050. Already ‘energy per capita’ is stagnant across the world and has been for a few decades. If the human population indeed grows by 15-25% over the next three and a half decades, then net energy production will have to grow by the same amount simply to remain constant on a per capita basis.

But can it? Specifically, can the net energy we derive from oil grow by another 15% to 25% from here?

Consider that, according to the EIA, the US shale oil miracle will be thirty years in the rear-view mirror by 2050 (currently projected to peak in 2020). And beyond just shale, all of the currently-operating conventional oil reservoirs will be far past peak and well into their decline. That means that the energy-rich oil from the giant fields of yesteryear will have to be replaced by an even larger volume of new oil from the energetically weaker unconventional plays just to hold things steady.

To advance oil net energy on a per capita basis between now and 2050, we’ll have to fight all of the forces of depletion with one hand, and somehow generate even more energy output from energetically parsimonious unconventional sources such as shale and tar sands with the other hand.

These new finds…they just aren’t the same as the old ones. They are deeper, require more effort per well to get oil out, and return far less per well than those of yesteryear. Those are just the facts as we now know them to be.

In 2013, total worldwide oil discoveries were just 20 billion barrels. That’s against a backdrop of 32 billion barrels of oil production and consumption. Since 1984, consuming more oil than we’re discovering has been a yearly ritual. To use an analogy: it’s as if we’re spending from a trust fund at a faster rate than the interest and dividends are accruing. Eventually, you eat through the principal balance and then it’s game over.

Meanwhile, even as the total net energy we receive from oil slips and our consumption wildly surpasses discoveries, the collective debt of the developed economies has surpassed the $100 trillion mark — which is a colossal bet that the future economy will not only be larger than it is currently, but exponentially larger.

These debts are showing no signs of slowing down. Indeed, the world’s central banks are doing everything in their considerable monetary power to goose them higher, even if this means printing money out of thin air and buying the debt themselves.

Along with this, the demographics of most developed economies will be drawing upon badly-underfunded pension and entitlement accounts — most of which are literally nothing more substantial than empty political promises made many years ago.

These trends in oil, debt and demographics are stark facts all on their own. But when we tie these to the obvious ecological strains of meeting the needs of just the world’s current 7.1 billion, any adherence to the status quo seems worse than merely delusional.

Here’s just one example from the ecological sphere. All over the globe we see regions in which ancient groundwater, in the form of underground aquifers, is being tapped to meet the local demand.

Many of these reservoirs have natural recharge rates that are measured in thousands, or even tens of thousands, of years.

Virtually all of them are being over-pumped. The ground water is being removed at a far faster rate than it naturally replenishes.

This math is simple. Each time an aquifer is over-pumped, the length of time left for that aquifer to serve human needs diminishes. Easy, simple math. Very direct.

And yet, we see cultures all over the globe continuing to build populations and living centers – very expensive investments, both economically and energetically – that are dependent for their food and water on these same over-pumped aquifers.

In most cases, you can calculate with excellent precision when those aquifers will be entirely gone and how many millions of people will be drastically impacted.

And yet, in virtually every case, the local ‘plan’ (if that’s the correct word to use here) is to use the underground water to foster additional economic/population growth today without any clear idea of what to do later on.

The ‘plan’ such as it is, seems to be to let the people of the future deal with the consequences of today’s decisions.

So if human organizations all over the globe seem unable to grasp the urgent significance of drawing down their water supplies to the point that they someday run out, what are the odds we’ll successfully address the more complex and less direct impacts like slowly falling net energy from oil, or steadily rising levels of debt? Pretty low, in my estimation.

Conclusion

Look, it’s really this simple: Anything that can’t go on forever, won’t.  We know, financially speaking, that a great number of nations are utterly insolvent no matter how much the accounting is distorted. Said another way: there’s really no point in worrying about the combined $100 trillion shortfall in Social Security and Medicare, because it simply won’t be paid.

Why? It can’t, so it won’t. The promised entitlements dwarf our ability to fund them many times over. There’s really not much more to say there.

But the biggest predicament we face is that steadily-eroding net energy from oil, which will someday be married to steadily-falling output as well, can’t support billions more people and our steadily growing pile of debt.

Just as there’s no plan at all for what to do when the groundwater runs out besides ‘Let the folks in the future figure that one out,’ there’s no plan at all for reconciling the forced continuation of borrowing at a faster rate than the economy can (or likely will be able to) grow.

The phrase that comes to mind is ‘winging it.’

The wonder of it all is that people still turn to the same trusted sources for guidance and as a place to put their trust. For myself, I have absolutely no faith that the mix of DC career politicians and academic wonks in the Fed have any clue at all about such things as energy or ecological realities.  Their lens only concerns itself with money, and the only tradeoff concessions they make are between various forms of economic vs. political power.

If the captains supposed to be guiding this ship are using charts that ignore what lies beneath the waterline, then you can be sure that sooner or later the ship is going to strike something hard and founder.

I’m pretty sure the Fed’s (and ECB’s and BoJ’s and BoE’s) charts resemble those of medieval times, with “Here be dragons” scrawled in the margins next to a series of charts of falling stock prices and unwinding consumer debt.

So there we are. The globe is heading from 7.1 billion to 8 or 9 billion souls, during a period of time when literally every known oil find will be well past its peak. Perhaps additional shale finds will come along on other continents to smooth things out for a bit (which is not looking likely), but it’s well past time to square up to the notion that cheap oil is gone. And with it, our prospects for the robust and widespread prosperity of times past.

ISIS War Is Peace: Obama Vs. Orwell

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By Aaron Dykes and Melissa Melton

Source: Truthstream Media

“We must declare war on war, so the outcome will be peace upon peace.”

This is what our Nobel Peace Prize Winning President said in front of the UN General Assembly on September 24, 2014 — the same day  U.S. military weapons hit some 168 targets including a dozen oil refineries in Syria…

It’s as if Obama is trying to reconcile his peace prize with his legacy of war by arguing that the U.S. is not at a traditional war (because the U.S. is always at war) but just as we go to yet another war, we’re actually at a war against war in the name of peace.

So…war is peace.

Ever read a book called 1984 written by George Orwell?

From The Corbett Report:

Propaganda, Brainwashing, Playing Dumb to Avoid the Truth

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By Prof. Edward Curtin

Source: Global Research

“And we are all mortal” JFK – June 10, 1963 – American University

Not long after uttering those words in his startling and prophetic commencement address, President John F. Kennedy was publicly executed by terrorists operating from deep within the shadows of the secret state. A symbolic universe was shattered that day and a sense of fear and terror was unleashed into American society. The natural human fear of death was multiplied a thousand-fold as post-traumatic denial settled over the country and the Warren Commission released its fabrications fifty years ago this September 24th. (Did it win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction that year?)

That fear is the air we breathe today. We are choking on fear; trembling.

In a previous article,, I suggested that Americans are propagandized on two levels: culturally and politically. The elite work to scare and discombobulate regular people in various ways. Call it propaganda, brain-washing, mind-control, double-speak, etc. The result is to try and reduce people to muddled, frightened messes. These manipulative machinations generally work.

But there is a crucial flip side to this. Many, many people want to be deceived. They choose to play dumb, to avoid a confrontation with truth. They want to be nice (Latin, nescire, not to know, to be ignorant) and to be liked. They want to tuck themselves into a safe social and cultural framework where they imagine they will be safe. They choose to live in what Jean Paul Sartre called bad faith (mauvaise foi): He put it as follows:

“In bad faith it is from myself that I am hiding the truth.” But with this “lie” to myself, “the one to whom the lie is told and the one who lies are one and the same person, which means that I must know in my capacity as deceiver the truth which is hidden from me in my capacity as the one deceived.”

Such bad faith allows people to fabricate a second act of bad faith: that they are not responsible for their ignorance of the truths behind governments’ and corporate media’s lies and propaganda.

But why? Why this widespread flight from seeking truth? What is at the core of this denial?

For while the mainstream media does the bidding of the power elite, there is ample alternative news and analyses available on the internet from alternative sources. It doesn’t take a genius to learn how to research important issues and to learn how to distinguish between bogus and genuine information. It takes a bit of effort, and, more importantly, the desire to compare multiple opposing viewpoints and untangle the webs the Web weaves. We are awash in information and both good and bad reporting, but it is still available to the caring inquirer. The problem is the will to know. But why, why the refusal to investigate and question; why the indifference? Stupidity? Okay, there is that. Ignorance, there is that. Willful ignorance, ditto. But there are many very intelligent people who adamantly refuse to entertain alternative possibilities to the reigning orthodoxies.

I, as do many others, know many such people who will yes me to death and then never fully research issues. They will remain in limbo or else wink to themselves that what may be true couldn’t be true. They close down. Why? To take one example of sound, rational advice usually dismissed, last year Professor James Galbraith of the University of Texas at Austin wrote, concerning the JFK assassination – and without foreclosing the issue – that one could readily arrive at a fair conclusion by a slow, careful study, including close attention to sources and footnotes. But few dare to follow such advice for an event that is paradigmatic for so much that has followed. Why this lack of will? Why the excuses?

This is a great dilemma and frustration faced by those who seek to convince people to take an active part in understanding what is really going on in the world today, especially as the United States wages war across the globe and the Obama administration expands and modernizes its nuclear weapons capabilities.

I believe there is a way to simplify the seeming complexity of this issue without being simplistic.

I think the answer was given forty years ago by Ernest Becker in his 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning (non-fiction) masterpiece, The Denial of Death. In that book Becker wanted to simplify a great deal of “needless intellectual complexity” about why people behave as they do. He felt we were “choking on truth” as a result of a plethora of brilliant writing and discoveries. He wanted to get to the heart of the matter, to cut through verbosity while “the mind is silent as the world spins on its age-old demonic career.” He wanted to simplify without being simplistic.

His book is far from simplistic. It is deep and complicated. His conclusion, however, is simple.

It is the terror of death and the consequential denial of that reality that motivates so much human behavior. People kill out of this fear, they shrink from life and truth because of it, and they live in bad faith because of it. Born dying and knowing it, humans devise a thousand and one ways to shield themselves from this truth. And in the forefront of this great fear lie so many smaller “deaths.” Becker uncovers them all. The fear of ultimate death generates many children: the fear of disease and health obsessions, of terrorists, of the powerful, of standing up for oneself without experts, of speaking out, of being an individual, of disagreeing emphatically with government propaganda about major events, etc. The person powerfully motivated by death fear refuses to seek truth; it’s too overwhelming. Excuses are always at hand. Becker writes:

He accepts the cultural programming that turns his nose where he is supposed to look; he doesn’t bite the world off in one piece as a giant would, but in small manageable pieces, as a beaver does. He uses all kinds of techniques, which we call the ‘character defenses’: he learns not to expose himself, not to stand out; he learns to embed himself in other-power, both of concrete persons and of things and cultural commands; the result is that he comes to exist in the imagined infallibility of the world around him. He doesn’t have to have fears when his feet are solidly mired and his life mapped out in a ready-made maze. All he has to do is plunge ahead in a compulsive style of drivenness in the ‘ways of the world’ that the child learns and in which he lives later as a kind of grim equanimity – the ‘strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting’ – as (William) James put it. This is the deeper reason that Montaigne’s peasant isn’t troubled until the very end, when the Angel of Death, who has always been sitting on his shoulder, extends his wing. Or at least until he is startled into dumb awareness.

In The Denial of Death Becker distills all manner of exculpatory reasoning to its essence: fear. Fear of death leads to cowardly submission to unjust authority and untruth. The modern person, he writes, “is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness, or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thing.” We need, he concludes, the creation of new heroisms that affirm life. Drawing on Soren Kierkegaard, he suggests that we need to become “knights of faith.” This is easier said than done. He doesn’t say how to do so because he doesn’t know how.

But there are people who do; who have. President John Kennedy was one of them, as James Douglass makes clear in his brilliant work, JFK and the Unspeakable.

“In his final months, the president spoke with his friends about his own death with a freedom and frequency that shocked them. Some found it abnormal. Senator George Smathers said, ‘I don’t know why it was, but death became kind of an obsession with Jack.’ Yet if one understood the pressures for war and Kennedy’s risks for peace, his awareness of his own death was realistic. He understood systemic power. He knew who his enemies were and what he was up against. He knew what he had to do, from the turn away from the Cold War in his American University address, to negotiating peace with Khrushchev and Castro and withdrawing troops from Vietnam. Conscious of the price of peace, he took the risk. Death did not surprise him.”

It is a rare person who will say with JFK, “I have no fear of death.” His favorite poem was, “Rendevous,” by Alan Seeger, whose first and last lines run as follows: “I have a rendezvous with Death….And to my pledged word am true, I shall not fail that rendezvous.” Jackie memorized it and would recite it back to him over the years. Five year old Caroline once surprised him in the Rose Garden during a meeting with the National Security Council by reciting by heart the poem to him and a stunned group of advisers. Kennedy was a rare and very courageous individual, one of Kierkegaard’s knights of faith. In his struggle against the forces of war and death, he adopted Lincoln’s prayer as his own which he kept on a slip of paper, “I know there is a God – and I see a storm coming. If he has a place for me, I believe that I am ready.”

Maybe those of us who flee from truth out of fear would do well to meditate on such a man’s courage. And on the cowards who killed him. And on the Warren Commission, accomplices after- the-fact who wrote the fictional account of his murder.

Ernest Becker told us the truth: fear of death is for cowards. But even cowards are responsible. There is no escaping that.

The Wretched Tenure of Attorney General Eric Holder

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Eric Holder

Going…going…almost gone, but let’s not forget him

By Dave Lindorff

Source: This Can’t Be Happening!

Good riddance!

Eric Holder has announced that he is leaving his post of Attorney General, which he has sullied and degraded for six years.

A corporate lawyer with the A-list Washington and Wall Street law firm Covington & Burling, Holder will be remembered for his timid defense of civil rights, his overseeing. and even encouragement of the massive militarization of the nation’s police forces, his anti-First Amendment efforts to pursue not just whistleblowers but the journalists who use them, threatening both with jail and in fact jailing a number of them (particularly in the case of whistleblower extraordinaire Edward Snowden, and Wikileaks journalist Julian Assange, both of whom reportedly face US treason charges), and his weak enforcement of environmental protection laws.

But Holder, who came into his position as the nation’s top law enforcement officer in early 2009 at the start of the Obama administration and at the height of the financial crisis, will be best remembered for his overt announcement that there would be no attempt to prosecute the criminals at the top of the nation’s biggest so-called “too-big-to-fail” banks, whose brazen crimes of theft, deceit, fraud and perjury during the Bush/Cheney years and beyond sank not just the US but the global economy into a crisis which is still with us.

Holder not only did not make any effort to put Wall Street’s banking titans behind bars for their epic crimes; he did not even make them step down from their exalted and absurdly highly compensated executive positions when his office reached negotiated settlements with the banks in civil cases involving those crimes — civil cases that in almost all cases allowed the banks to settle without even having to admit their guilt. (His ludicrous excuse: punishing these criminal executive might jeopardize the banks’ stocks and hurt “innocent” shareholders!) Nor was this legal benevalence limited to purely financial crimes. Banks like Citicorp and HSBC, which were found to have knowingly laundered millions — even billions — of dollars in drug money for drug cartels, were also allowed by Holder to escape with petty fines, and no prosecution of a single bank executive.

As the US Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) notes in its response to word that Holder is leaving as AG [1], his Justice Department generally even allowed the Banks that were fined to deduct those fines from their taxes as a business expense — something that ordinary citizens are not allowed to do by the IRS, and which Holder could have barred the banks from doing.

No surprise there. Among the clients of Holder’s old law firm are both Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. The firm also has since 2010 had a lobbying services contract with Xe Services, the murderous mercenary firm formerly known as Blackwater Worldwide whose bloody abuses in Iraq were so monstrous the company had to change its name (but not its methods) in order to keep obtaining mercenary services contracts from the US government.

It is being suggested that Holder may opt to go back to his old post as a partner at Covington & Burling, which would be the final, though hardly surprising, insult to the American people, providing a particularly galling example of Washington’s revolving door between government regulators and enforcers and the industries that they were supposed to be regulating or keeping honest.

God, how far we have fallen from the days when Ramsey Clark was attorney general, and left to become a leading critic of Washington’s imperial government at home and abroad!

At this point the Obama Administration is little more than a place holder until the next presidential election in 2016. President Obama, who campaigned as a fire-breathing liberal who would restore constitutional government, end the Bush/Cheney wars, re-open the government so that transparency instead of secrecy would be the default position, and take decisive action against climate change, has abandoned all those false promises.

The illegal and unconstitutional wars continue in Iraq and Afghanistan, and are now being expanded into Africa and Syria and, at least by proxy, but most dangerously, to Ukraine. Civil liberties are under attack at least as severely as they were back in the McCarthy period, with whistleblowers being jailed, with the president asserting the unfettered right to order the killing without trial of American citizens, and with a spying system in place run by the National Security Agency that is monitoring and storing, by its own admission, virtually all electronic communications of the American people. The government is also as closed and secret in its operation as it has been since 1974, when it was broadened following the Watergate and Cointelpro scandals, and is certainly less transparent and open than it was even under Bush/Cheney. The Obama administration has also done little to nothing about tackling carbon emissions despite the president’s lies to the contrary in his address to the UN.

In all of this extraordinary list of treachery and cowardice, Holder has played his sycophantic role as a defender of corporate America, of white privilege, and of Washington power. He has been both the John Ashcroft and the Alberto Gonzalez of the Obama administration. (Actually, that comparison is unfair to John Ashcroft, who at least was a man of conviction — repellent as some of those convictions may have been. In Holder’s case, we have a man not of principle, but who is simply a corporate lawyer, ready to do his clients’ bidding, however sordid and corrupt.)

Given the depths of unpopularity to which President Obama has sunk after six years of selling out his own electoral base and catering to the interests of the rich and powerful, the military establishment and neo-con right-wing of the Washington policy elite, it is safe to say that Holder’s replacement, still unknown, will be no better, though given Holder’s tenure it’s also hard to imagine his successor being much worse either.

So good riddance to Holder. But it will be worth while, and indeed important, to watch carefully this departing Obama official’s behavior back in the private sector, from under which rock he emerged to be attorney general six years ago.

Terronoia Theater Presents: Staged ISIS Attacks

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Image (from Land Destroyer Report): The FBI has an impressive portfolio of intentionally created, then foiled terror plots. Its methods include allowing suspects to handle both real and inoperable weapons and explosives. These methods allow the FBI to switch entrapment cases "live" at any moment simply by switching out duds and arrests with real explosives and successful attacks. Because the FBI uses "informants," when attacks go live, these confidential assets can be blamed, obfuscating the FBI's involvement.

Image (from Land Destroyer Report): The FBI has an impressive portfolio of intentionally created, then foiled terror plots. Its methods include allowing suspects to handle both real and inoperable weapons and explosives. These methods allow the FBI to switch entrapment cases “live” at any moment simply by switching out duds and arrests with real explosives and successful attacks. Because the FBI uses “informants,” when attacks go live, these confidential assets can be blamed, obfuscating the FBI’s involvement.

Provoking war abroad raises specter of staged attacks at home.

By Tony Cartalucci

Source: Land Destroyer Report

The FBI has foiled yet another entirely fabricated terror threat of its own creation, with missing mechanisms in two firearms provided to a potential terrorist being the only thing that prevented this latest case of entrapment from going “live.”

A Rochester man, Mufid A. Elfgeeh, is accused by the FBI of attempting to provide material support to ISIS (undercover FBI agents), attempting to kill US soldiers, and possession of firearms and silencers (provided to him by the FBI). The FBI’s own official press release stated (emphasis added):

According to court records, Elfgeeh attempted to provide material support to ISIS in the form of personnel, namely three individuals, two of whom were cooperating with the FBI. Elfgeeh attempted to assist all three individuals in traveling to Syria to join and fight on behalf of ISIS. Elfgeeh also plotted to shoot and kill members of the United States military who had returned from Iraq. As part of the plan to kill soldiers, Elfgeeh purchased two handguns equipped with firearm silencers and ammunition from a confidential source. The handguns were made inoperable by the FBI before the confidential source gave them to Elfgeeh.

What is perhaps more chilling are the details of Elfgeeh’s plans to kill US soldiers. The FBI’s press release stated (emphasis added):

Court documents also indicate that Elfgeeh first discussed the idea of shooting United States military members in December 2013 when he told CS-2 that he was thinking about getting a gun and ammunition, putting on a bulletproof vest, and “just go[ing] around and start shooting.” In February 2014, Elfgeeh told CS-2 that he needed a handgun and silencer. Elfgeeh later gave CS-2 $1,050 in cash to purchase two handguns equipped with silencers and ammunition. On May 31, 2014, CS-2 delivered the two handguns equipped with silencers and ammunition to Elfgeeh. After Elfgeeh took possession of the items, he was arrested by members of the Rochester Joint Terrorism Task Force. Elfgeeh is currently being held in custody.

Elfgeeh’s plans are also – coincidentally – verbatim, the dream scenario of Washington’s warmongers currently attempting to sell a war that will straddle both sides of the Syrian-Iraqi border, allow the US to provide terrorists operating in Syria with air support, and lead to punitive operations against the Syrian government for attacking US-backed terrorists with the final objective being long-sought after regime change in Damascus.

With serial beheadings failing to raise Western public support necessary for an expedient intervention in Syria, more insidious provocations appear to be in the works. Setting the stage, a CBS/Associated Press story titled, “Former Deputy CIA Director: ‘I Would Not Be Surprised’ If ISIS Member Shows Up To US Mall Tomorrow With AK-47,” would claim immediately after the initial James Foley execution video that:

“The short-term concern is the Americans that have gone to fight with ISIS and the west Europeans that have gone to fight with ISIS could be trained and directed by ISIS to come to the United States to conduct small-scale attacks,” Morell stated. “If an ISIS member showed up at a mall in the United States tomorrow with an AK-47 and killed a number of Americans, I would not be surprised.”

 Morell warned that over the long-term the extremist group could be planning for a 9/11-style attack that killed thousands of Americans.

Elfgeeh’s entrapment is only the beginning. Staged “terror raids” in Australia are also ratcheting up hysteria ahead of an actual event of mass murder carried out on Western soil. The BBC would report in their article, “Australia raids over ‘Islamic State plot to behead’,” that:

Police have carried out anti-terror raids in Sydney sparked by intelligence reports that Islamic extremists were planning random killings in Australia.

PM Tony Abbott said a senior Australian Islamic State militant had called for “demonstration killings”, reportedly including a public beheading.

The raids, with at least 800 heavily-armed officers, led to 15 arrests.

The cartoonish nature of the plot – beheading a random member of the public before draping an ISIS flag over their body – is meant to provoke maximum fear and anger first, then maximum support for Australia’s continued involvement in Wall Street and London’s hegemonic ambitions in the Middle East. Likewise, the Rochester arrest made by the FBI amid their own terror plot, serves only to incite fear across the public and irrational support for intervention in Syria that will, in fact, lead to further support of extremists as well as the destruction of the only institution in the region truly fighting terrorism – the Syrian Arab Army.

A Functioning Firing Pin Away From a Staged Mass Shooting

The FBI has a long list of foiled terror plots of its own creation. More disturbingly are the plots they conceived but “accidentally” allowed to go “live.” One might recall the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. FBI agents, according to the New York Times, were indeed overseeing the bombers that detonated a device killing six and wounding many more at the World Trade Center.

In their article, “Tapes Depict Proposal to Thwart Bomb Used in Trade Center Blast,” NYT reported:

Law-enforcement officials were told that terrorists were building a bomb that was eventually used to blow up the World Trade Center, and they planned to thwart the plotters by secretly substituting harmless powder for the explosives, an informer said after the blast.

The informer was to have helped the plotters build the bomb and supply the fake powder, but the plan was called off by an F.B.I. supervisor who had other ideas about how the informer, Emad A. Salem, should be used, the informer said.

The account, which is given in the transcript of hundreds of hours of tape recordings Mr. Salem secretly made of his talks with law-enforcement agents, portrays the authorities as in a far better position than previously known to foil the Feb. 26 bombing of New York City’s tallest towers. The explosion left six people dead, more than 1,000 injured and damages in excess of half a billion dollars.

Considering the 1993 bombing and the fact that the FBI literally oversaw the construction and deployment of a deadly bomb that killed 6, it is clear that the FBI can at any time through design or disastrous incompetence, turn one of their contrived entrapment cases into a live terror attack. One can only guess at how many similar FBI operations are currently taking place within the United States involving ISIS sympathizers – any one of which could be turned into a live terror attack provided the weapons handed over to potential terrorists are functioning, just as the bomb was in 1993 when it was driven into the lower levels of the World Trade Center.

Everything from a mass shooting to a bombing, and even an Operation Northwoods-style false flag attack involving aircraft could be employed to provide Wall Street and London with the support it needs to accelerate its long-stalled agenda of regime change and reordering in both Syria and across the Iranian arc of influence. Readers may recall Operation Northwoods, reported on in an ABC News article titled, “U.S. Military Wanted to Provoke War With Cuba,” which bluntly stated:

In the early 1960s, America’s top military leaders reportedly drafted plans to kill innocent people and commit acts of terrorism in U.S. cities to create public support for a war against Cuba. 

Code named Operation Northwoods, the plans reportedly included the possible assassination of Cuban émigrés, sinking boats of Cuban refugees on the high seas, hijacking planes, blowing up a U.S. ship, and even orchestrating violent terrorism in U.S. cities.

That the FBI and Australian authorities are coordinating staged security operations in tandem on opposite ends of the globe to terrify their respective populations into line behind an impending war with Syria suggests a new “Operation Northwoods” of sorts is already being executed. Staged executions on cue by ISIS in the Middle East of US and British citizens at perfectly timed junctures of the West’s attempt to sell intervention both at home and abroad also reek of staged mayhem for the sole purpose of provoking war. Could grander and ultimately more tragic mayhem be in store? As ABC News’ article on Operation Northwoods suggests, there is no line Western special interests will hesitate to cross.

With the West attempting to claim ISIS now has a “global” reach, the US and its partners’ attempts to obfuscate the very obvious state-sponsorship it is receiving will become exponentially more difficult. That the FBI is admittedly stringing along easily manipulated, malevolent patsies who at any time could be handed real weapons and sent on shooting sprees and/or bombings, Americans, Europeans, and Australians would be foolish to conclude that their real enemy resides somewhere in Syria and not right beside them at home, upon the very seats of Western power.

ISIS Beheadings on Cue from US & UK?

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By Finian Cunningham

Source: The 4th Media

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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