Category Archives: Psy-ops

The Alleged Assassination of Osama Bin Laden

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Today marks the 3rd anniversary of the alleged assassination of Osama Bin Laden. I emphasize the word “alleged” because claims from medical experts such as Dr. Steve R. Pieczenik assert he died in 2001 from Marfan syndrome. Others such as Pakistan President Benazir Bhutto (who was later assassinated) claimed Bin Laden was assassinated in 2002 by Omar Sheikh. Though it remains inconclusive exactly how Bin Laden died, what we may conclude with certainty is that the official story of his death is a lie. Ample evidence dismantling the official story of how Bin Laden died as well as some of the evidence “proving” Bin Laden was the mastermind behind 9/11 are contained in the following articles from WhatReallyHappened.com:

http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/bin_laden_death.html

http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/galleryoffakebinladens.php

Towards the End of U.S. Propaganda

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Source: Information Clearing House

The Anglo-Saxon Empire is based on a century of propaganda. It managed to convince us that the United States is “the land of the free” and that it engaged in wars to defend its ideals. But the current crisis over Ukraine has changed the rules of the game. Now Washington and its allies are not the only speakers. Their lies are openly challenged by the government and media of another major state, Russia. In the era of satellites and the Internet, Anglo-Saxon propaganda no longer works.

By Thierry Meyssan

Rulers have always tried to convince their subjects of the correctness of their actions, because crowds never follow men they know to be bad. The twentieth century has seen new ways of spreading ideas unburdened by the truth. Westerners trace modern propaganda to Nazi minister Joseph Goebbels. It is a way to forget that the art of distorting the perception of things was previously developed by Anglo-Saxons.

In 1916, the United Kingdom created Wellington House in London, followed by Crewe House. Simultaneously, the United States created the Committee on Public Information (CPI). Considering the First World War was between masses and no longer between armies, these organizations tried to intoxicate their own people as well as those of their allies and those of their enemies with propaganda.

Modern propaganda started with the publication in London of the Bryce Report on German war crimes, which was translated into thirty languages. According to this document, the German army had raped thousands of women in Belgium. The British Army was thus fighting against barbarism. At the end of the First World War it was discovered that the entire report was a hoax, made up of ​​false testimony with the help of journalists.

For his part, in the United States, George Creel invented a myth that World War II was a crusade by democracies for peace to protect the rights of humanity.

Historians have shown that World War I was responding to causes as deep and as profound, the most important being the competition between major powers to expand their colonial empires.

The British and U.S. bureaus were secret organizations working on behalf of their states. Unlike Leninist propaganda, which aspired to “reveal the truth” to the ignorant masses, the Anglo-Saxons sought to deceive in order to manipulate them. To this end, Anglo-Saxon state agencies had to hide and usurp false identities.

After the demise of the Soviet Union, the United States neglected propaganda and favoured public relations. It was no longer a matter of lying, but of holding journalists’ hands that they may see only what they are shown. During the Kosovo war, NATO appealed to Alastair Campbell, an adviser to the British Prime Minister to tell the press an uplifting dayly story. While journalists reproduced this story, the Alliance could bomb “in peace.” The story telling was less designed to lie than to distract.

However, story telling is back with a vengeance with the September 11 attacks : it consisted of focussing public attention on the attacks on New York and Washington so that people would not perceive the military coup organized that day : the transfer of the executive powers of President Bush to a secret military unit and the house arrest of all parliamentarians. This intoxication was especially the work of Benjamin Rhodes, now an adviser to Barack Obama.

In subsequent years, the White House installed a system of propaganda with key allies (the UK, Canada , Australia and of course Israel). Every day these four governments received instructions or pre-written speeches from the Office of global media to justify the war in Iraq or vilify Iran. [1]

For the rapid spread of its lies since 1989, Washington relied on CNN. Over time, the United States created a cartel of satellite information (Al- Arabiya , Al- Jazeera , BBC , CNN, France 24 , Sky) channels. In 2011, during the bombing of Tripoli , NATO surprisingly convinced Libyans that they had lost the war and that it was useless to continue resisting. But in 2012, NATO failed to replicate this model and to convince the Syrians that their government would inevitably fall. This tactic failed because the Syrians were aware of the operation carried out by international television in Libya and were able to prepare [2]. And this failure marked the end of the hegemony of the “information”cartel.

The current crisis between Washington and Moscow about Ukraine has forced the Obama administration to review its system. Indeed, Washington is now no longer the sole speaker, it must contradict the Russian government and media accessible anywhere in the world via satellite and Internet. Secretary of State John Kerry appointed a new deputy for propaganda, in the person of the former editor of Time Magazine, Richard Stengel [3]. Before taking the oath on April 15, he was already occupying his office and, on March 5, sent a “fact sheet” to major Atlanticist media on “10 counter-truths” that Putin would have pronounced on the Ukraine [4]. He reoffended on April 13 with a second sheet with “10 other counter-truths ” [5].

What strikes one in reading this prose is its ineptitude. It aims to validate the official history of a revolution in Kiev and discredit the Russian discourse on the Nazi presence in the new government. However, we know today that in fact this “revolution” was indeed a coup staged by NATO and implemented by Poland and Israel by mixing recipes for “color revolutions” and the “Arab spring”. [6] Journalists who received these files and relayed them are fully aware of the recordings of telephone conversations between the Assistant Secretary of State, Victoria Nuland and Minister for Estonian Foreign Affairs, Urmas Paets, on how Washington would change the regime at the expense of the European Union, and on the true identities of the Maidan snipers. In addition, they learned later revelations of the Polish weekly Nie about the training two months before the events of the Nazi rioters at the Academy of Polish police. As to denying the presence of Nazis in the new Ukrainian government, this amounts to a claim that the night is luminous. It is not necessary to go to Kiev but just to read the writings of the current ministers or listen to their remarks to see this is the case. [7]

Ultimately, if these arguments help give the illusion of a consensus in the large Atlanticist media, they have no chance of convincing curious citizens. Instead, it is so easy with the Internet to discover the deception that this type of manipulation cannot but further undermine Washington’s credibility.

The unanimity of the Atlanticist media on September 11 helped convince international public opinion, but the work done by many journalists and citizens, of which I was the precursor, showed the physical impossibility of the official version. Thirteen years later, hundreds of millions of people have become aware of these lies. This process will only grow with the new propaganda devices manipulated by the US. In short, all those who relay the arguments of the White House , including the governments and media of NATO, destroy their own credibility.

Barack Obama and Benjamin Rhodes , John Kerry and Richard Stengel act only in the short term. Their propaganda convinces the masses for only a few weeks and then helps create revulsion when the people understand they are being manipulated. Unwittingly, they undermine the credibility of the state institutions of NATO who consciously relay them. They forget that the propaganda of the twentieth century could only succeed because the world was divided into blocks that did not communicate with one another, and this monolithic principle is incompatible with the new means of communication.

The crisis in Ukraine is not over, but it has already profoundly changed the world : by publicly contradicting the President of the United States, Vladimir Putin has taken a step that henceforth prevents the success of U.S. propaganda.

Thierry Meyssan

French intellectual, founder and chairman of Voltaire Network and the Axis for Peace Conference. His columns specializing in international relations feature in daily newspapers and weekly magazines in Arabic, Spanish and Russian. His last two books published in English : 9/11 the Big Lie and Pentagate.

Translation – Roger Lagassé – Source – Al-Watan (Syria)

[1] “Un réseau militaire d’intoxication” , Voltaire Network, 8 December 2003.

[2] “NATO preparing vast disinformation campaign“, by Thierry Meyssan, Komsomolskaya Pravda , Voltaire Network, 10 June 2012.

[3] “TIME Magazine Managing Editor becomes new US propaganda chief“, Voltaire Network , 16 April 2014.

[4] “State Department Fact Sheet on Putin’s False Claims About Ukraine” , Voltaire Network , 5 March 2014.

[5] “Media Note by the U.S. Departement of State on Russian Support for Destabilization of Ukraine” , Voltaire Network , 13 April 2014.

[6] “Ukraine : la Pologne avait formé les putschistes deux mois à l’avance“, by Thierry Meyssan , Réseau Voltaire, 17 April 2014 .

[7] “Who are the Nazis in the Ukrainian government ?“, By Thierry Meyssan , Voltaire Network , 2 March 2014.

Inventing a ‘Russian Threat’: Washington’s Full-Spectrum Subversion

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By Mark Hackard

Source: 21st Century Wire

What do postmodern exhibitionists, Islamic holy warriors and marauding ultra-nationalists share in common?

Seemingly little, aside from the fact that these bizarre bedfellows are the star assets of US policy in Eurasia. And despite their use of very different tactics, they all are tasked with the same mission: to undermine Russia, the only great power consistently opposed to American hegemony.

The Sochi Diversion

Today East and West contemplate the possibility of war over the fate of Ukraine, but the popular narrative was tailored for just such a standoff well in advance. Any attentive reader of Western press sources over recent months will have noticed that a dramatic upswing of negative Russia coverage began after Vladimir Putin thwarted Washington’s planned assault on Syria last summer. For just one example of the establishment’s dissemination of absurd Russophobia, look no further than the recent spy film Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, which features Kremlin-directed Orthodox Christian suicide bombers attacking Mammonism’s Holy of Holies, the New York Stock Exchange.

As the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics got underway, executives at the six US media giants plus their counterparts at the BBC and elsewhere had a green light to inflict maximum damage. Journalists were looking to fan the flames of any possible scandal at the games, but the stories didn’t add up to their hype.

A number of issues were used to paint Russia in an unflattering light, one at times approaching caricature. Was there some amount of corruption, mismanagement and inefficiency in constructing the new Olympic village in Sochi? Few Russians would doubt it, yet were American reporters really so insular as to expect nothing less than Switzerland? Exposure of bribery and fraud, lest we forget, featured as the epilogue to squeaky-clean Salt Lake City’s 2002 Winter Games. Meanwhile, threats by Islamic terrorists – the same Mujahedin operatives serving as proxies of US policy from Libya and Syria to Kosovo and Chechnya – against the Black Sea resort were amplified considerably with helpful leaks from “concerned” officials in Washington, to the point of convincing American Olympians’ families to stay home in fear[i]. But where were such warnings before two Chechens with connections to US intelligence allegedly bombed the Boston Marathon in April of 2013?

The media’s favorite manufactured controversy at the Olympics, moreover, had nothing at all to do with winter sports. Western audiences were led to believe that Russia’s laws banning the promotion of sodomy to children had cast a sinister pall over the games; in an expression of unfeigned displeasure, President Barack Obama skipped attendance (Killing Pashtun and Yemeni villagers with drone-launched Hellfire missiles is praiseworthy – upholding any measure of traditional morality is not[ii]). Try as they might, the press corps could find no evidence of “oppression” of homosexuals at Sochi, with the gay American skater Johnny Weir stating that he was treated “fantastically” by the Russian people during his stay. Even State Department-sponsored provocateurs from the cultural Marxist outfit Pussy Riot, famous for previous acts of obscenity and sacrilege, made a sorry attempt at spectacle before beating a hasty retreat. Unfazed, the Russian national team would go on to win first place for both gold medals and the overall count.

Flashpoint: Ukraine

Western vitriol over the Sochi Olympics represents one component of an information campaign, itself part of a wider US-led geopolitical offensive against Moscow. A variety of policy instruments are used for the objective of “containment,” from NATO expansion and power projection to sanctions against Russian companies. Yet by far the most economical means in the quest to weaken and demoralize Russia has been covert action, operations run under plausible deniability and comprising a broad range of activities. From the years of the Cold War, the Trans-Atlantic establishment has built an entire covert-action apparatus that encompasses not only intelligence services and special units of the military, but also nationalist paramilitaries, crime syndicates, transnational terror networks and a host of well-funded NGOs deeply intertwined with academia, major corporations and the media. In other words, an arsenal for full-spectrum subversion[iii].

Secret wars are waged just as intensively as the overt ones, and on multiple fronts. All the commotion over the Olympics amounted to a distraction from the central theater of action – Ukraine. As the curtain closed on Sochi, political unrest in Kiev climaxed with the overthrow of the undoubtedly corrupt but still legitimate President Viktor Yanukovych by pro-Western forces on February 22nd. The liberal-nationalist coalition that took power through mass protests and street fighting enjoyed extensive support – both public and clandestine – from the United States government. Timed for precisely the moment when Russia’s leadership was absorbed with showcasing its Olympics to the world, the coup’s main objective was to finally incorporate Ukraine as an EU/NATO satrapy.  The Washington-Wall Street agenda envisions stripping the country of its agricultural and industrial wealth and the deployment of US missile defense architecture just a day’s drive from Red Square.

What the events of early 2014 show is how quickly “soft power” can transition to the hard variant; subversion makes inroads for aggression. Washington spent two decades and $5 billion to make Ukraine safe for Chevron and Exxon-Mobil, but now it is reaping far more than it anticipated. Moscow has moved decisively to secure its vital interests in the region, leading to Crimea and the key naval base of Sevastopol being reunited with Russia after 60 years of estrangement. And the Russian-oriented south and east of Ukraine are also rising against an illegitimate regime resolved on virtually giving away strategic assets to multinationals – while sending ultra-nationalist militias to enforce the sales[iv]. From the port of Odessa to the Don River Basin, both Russians and Ukrainians share one thousand years of a unified Eastern Slavic civilization, an ideal that endures in blood and spirit; this reality will long outlive predatory IMF “structural adjustments” and the deformed chauvinism on offer from the current junta in Kiev.

After twenty years of eastward encroachment, the US push into Ukraine is the logical application of a policy to cripple Russia’s recovery and attain unchallenged dominance over the Eurasian heartland and its natural resources. Several consecutive rounds of NATO enlargement, the criminal bombardment of Serbia and subsequent overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic, a string of CIA-orchestrated color revolutions in the former Soviet space and the 2008 Georgia War – far from isolated occurrences, these events show an ever-tightening ring of encirclement. For Kremlin strategists, the Maidan takeover in Kiev proved the point of no return; they’ve seen that the Pax Americana plays for keeps. With their very future on the line, the Russians are fighting back.

Targeted for destabilization, Russia has demonstrated the will to use force in order to protect its people and interests. Short of outright military action, it possesses formidable covert capabilities. The ruthless Cheka-KGB pioneered the practice of human intelligence, and we should remember that most of Ukrainian territory was once the arena of unrelenting partisan campaigns during the Second World War. Given Ukraine’s importance to Russia’s overall geopolitical position, it’s a safe assumption that the contemporary FSB and GRU have developed robust agent networks and operational infrastructure for just the sort of contingency that Moscow confronts today. At the same time, the West’s feverish search for spetsnaz troops in the country is wholly beside the point; resistance in the pro-Russian southeast is organic and growing.

Russia is perhaps the one nation preventing the United States from becoming the last empire, the progenitor of a tyrannical world-state; it is therefore positioned squarely on the front line of a sustained twilight struggle. Globalist oligarchs, the actual controllers of the liberal order, employ multiple vectors of subversion in their ferocious attack on faith, sovereignty and identity. Whether our telescreens depict jihadists wreaking destruction from the Levant to the Caucasus, cells of NGO “activists” waging psychological warfare through the propagation of deviance, or deranged Ukrainian nationalists bent on fratricide, we are assured that all are heroes marching in the grand cause of democracy.

Though retaining effective deterrence is essential for any independent state, the ultimate strength of a Third Rome resurgent lies in its eternal tradition, that ancient Christianity once adopted by a rough-hewn Viking ruler from Kiev. When the Russian lands were threatened by ideological aggression from the West some eight centuries ago, soldier-prince Aleksandr Nevsky defended his people with spirit and sword:

From Adam to the flood, from the flood to the division of tongues, from the mixing of tongues to the beginning of Abraham, from Abraham until Israel’s passing through the Red Sea, from Israel’s Exodus to the death of Tsar David, from the beginning of Solomon’s reign to Tsar Augustus, from the beginning of Augustus to Christ’s Birth, from Christ’s birth unto the Passion and Resurrection of Our Lord, from His Resurrection to His Ascension into heaven, from His Ascension into heaven until the reign of Constantine, from the beginning of Constantine’s reign to the First Council, from the First Council until the Seventh – all of this we know well, and from you we accept no doctrine.

In our age Russia is accused by American officialdom of “betraying the New World Order” when the New World Order is betrayal itself, the very crowning of modern apostasy. Let the words of Aleksandr Nevsky be the answer of every free and noble people to the masters of subversion: From you we accept no doctrine.

[i] Dmitro Yarosh, the leader of Ukraine’s fascist Right Sector, called upon the Chechen militant Doku Umarov to carry out terror attacks in Russia just weeks before the latter was killed in March by an FSB special unit. Ukrainian nationalists are known to have fought on the side of Chechen rebels during the 1990s and 2000s. One such figure, the now-deceased Oleksandr Muzychko, “Sashko Biliy,” tortured and murdered at least 20 captured Russian soldiers.

[ii] Coincidentally or otherwise, the top financial donors for the Human Rights Campaign, America’s premiere homosexual lobbying organization, are drone manufacturers from the military-industrial complex.

[iii] Many are unaware that the CIA is far from a simple intelligence service; like Britain’s MI5 and MI6, its business has been social engineering both at home and abroad. Under the guidance of tax-exempt foundations, its programs have included funding and promoting not just jihadists and nationalist paramilitaries, but control of the media, feminism, the arts, the psychedelic revolution and narcotics trade. This is only a short rendering of cases of dialectics in action, giving one nonetheless a more definite sense of the aims of the “New World Order.”

[iv] Another odd partnership forged on the Maidan against Moscow has been that of Right Sector and Ukrainian oligarch Igor Kolomoisky, the head of the European Jewish Congress and a prominent patron of Zionist causes.

–

Read this and more of Mark Hackard’s work at his online project, Soul of the East.

 Author Mark Hackard is an independent foreign policy analyst. He earned a BA in Russian Language from Georgetown University and an MA in Russian, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies from Stanford University. He studies the intersection of political culture, religion and strategic issues, which he approaches from a traditionalist-conservative position. Some of his major influences are Joseph de Maistre, Juan Donoso Cortes, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Rene Guenon and Fr. Seraphim Rose.

No Fly List Used by Government to Intimidate Activists and Recruit Informants

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The idea of a No Fly List has always been a flawed concept as a true terrorism prevention measure. If people are deemed too dangerous to be allowed to board a flight after being searched and/or scanned and having their bags x-rayed, why would it be okay to let them go free to attack somewhere else? If there’s not enough evidence to suggest they’d stage such attacks they should be allowed to fly. Of course preventing terrorism was merely a stated goal used to justify the unconstitutional No Fly List.

New revelations regarding the true purposes of the No Fly List have been revealed as a result of two recent lawsuits. In 2010, Panagacos v. Towery was filed by Julianne Panagacos and six other antiwar activists against government spy John Towery, who infiltrated at least four different organizations in the Northwest, Port Militarization Resistance, Students for a Democratic Society, the Industrial Workers of the World, and Iraq Veterans Against the War. New documents recently came to light as the result of a Public Records Act request which, according to a WSWS.org article, proved:

Towery attended a Domestic Terrorism Conference in 2007 at which “domestic terrorist” dossiers on antiwar and left-wing activists were distributed for police review. These individuals could later be targeted for state repression ranging from preventing them from boarding airplanes (if they were placed on the federal “no-fly” list) to preventive detention in the event of a mass roundup of supposed “terrorists.”

Of course this comes as no surprise to anyone following independent news sources (and especially activists), but it’s rare to see it supported by official documentation. The same article reveals how, like other instances of FBI entrapment, Towery attempted to recruit one of the plaintiffs in the suit as a terrorist patsy:

Crespo described how Towery had sought to entrap him by persuading him to buy guns and learn how to shoot. After seeming to befriend Crespo while attending antiwar meetings, Towery at one point visited him at home and showed him a gun and how to load and unload it. Later, he showed Crespo documents about military tactics and suggested making use of them in “our actions.” Subsequently, he gave Crespo a copy of a proposed article written from the perspective of the 9/11 hijackers. Fortunately, Crespo’s reaction to these approaches—which he described as “the weirdest thing in the world”—was to keep his distance.

Read the full article here: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/03/01/anti-m01.html?view=article_mobile

In a new article just posted at RT, another lawsuit in a New York federal court has revealed how the No Fly List has been used by the FBI to recruit Muslim informants:

FBI ‘intentionally and unlawfully’ used No Fly List to recruit Muslims as informers

By RT.com

The FBI used a no-fly list to recruit four US Muslims as informants, violating their constitutional rights to freedom of speech, association and religion. That’s the claim being made by four US Muslims in a New York federal court Tuesday.

Muhammad Tanvir, Jameel Algibhah, Naveed Shinwari and Awais Sajjad, who are between them either US residents or permanent US residents, are demanding that the FBI remove them from the no-fly list which contains the names of people who are not permitted to board a commercial aircraft for travel in or out of the United States, according to threat and intelligence reporting.

“This impermissible abuse of the No Fly List has forced Plaintiffs to choose between their constitutionally-protected right to travel, on the one hand, and their First Amendment rights on the other,” says the lawsuit.

One of the plaintiffs, Awais Sajjad, a lawful permanent US resident, learned that he was on a No Fly List in 2012 when he tried to board a flight to Pakistan. The FBI agents questioned Sajjad at the airport before releasing him. Soon they returned with an offer: he could work as an FBI informer and in return the agency would give him citizenship and compensation, the Washington Post reported.

When he refused, the bureau “kept him on the list in order to pressure and coerce Mr. Sajjad to sacrifice his constitutionally-protected rights,” says the lawsuit.

Meanwhile, three other complainants – Tanvir, Algibhah and Shinwari – said they were added to the list immediately after they refused to work as FBI informants for religious reasons.

Shinwari, a legal US resident from Omaha, Nebraska, said that after his arrival from his native country, Afghanistan, in 2012, he was twice detained and questioned by FBI agents who wanted to know if he knew anything about national security threats. He was soon put on the No Fly List, though he has never been convicted of a crime or posed a threat to national security, according to his lawyers.

In one of their visits, FBI agents wanted to know about the “local Omaha community, did I know anyone who’s a threat?” he says.

“I’m just very frustrated, [and I said] what can I do to clear my name?” says Shinwari. “And that’s where it was mentioned to me: you help us, we help you. We know you don’t have a job; we’ll give you money,” The Guardian reported him as saying.

Though Shinwari was allowed to fly within the United States in March, he still fears that if he flies to Afghanistan to see his wife and family, whom he hasn’t seen for at least two years, he might not be able to return.

“Defendants’ unlawful actions are imposing an immediate and ongoing harm on Plaintiffs and have caused Plaintiffs deprivation of their constitutional rights, emotional distress, damage to their reputation, and material and economic loss,” adds the lawsuit.

According to Jameel Algibhah, from the Bronx, New York, the FBI asked him to get access to a Queens mosque and even pose as an extremist in online forums.

“We’re the only ones who can take you off the list,” an unnamed FBI agent told him, Algibhah told The Guardian.

The fourth plaintiff, Muhammad Tanvir, started taking action against the FBI in October 2013, after he refused to spy on his local Pakistani community. Now he can’t visit his ailing mother.

Ramzi Kassem, associate professor of law at the City University of New York, told the Washington Post that “the no-fly list is supposed to be about ensuring aviation safety, but the FBI is using it to force innocent people to become informants.”

Meanwhile, the lawsuit seeks not only the plaintiffs’ removal from the no-fly list but also the establishment of a more robust legal mechanism to contest placement upon it.

“This policy and set of practices by the FBI is part of a much broader set of policies that reflect over-policing in Muslim-American communities,” said Diala Shamas, one of the lawyers for the four plaintiffs.

The FBI has not commented on the lawsuit.

Meanwhile, this is not the first No Fly List-related lawsuit against the FBI. In 2010 the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) attempted to sue US Department of Justice and the FBI over their barring of American citizens, including several veterans of the US military, who ended up on the No Fly List and have been denied entry to their own country.

The No Fly List was created by the US government’s Terrorist Screening Center (TSC) after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. In 2012, the list was extended to around 21,000 individuals.

The list, including US citizens and residents as well as foreigners, has been repeatedly criticized on civil liberties grounds, due to ethnic, religious, economic, political and racial discrimination. It has also raised concerns about privacy and government secrecy.

The ACLU called inclusion on a list a potentially “life-altering” experience, adding that “it is not at all clear what separates a ‘reasonable-suspicion-based-on-a-reasonable-suspicion’ from a simple hunch.”

Until March, no one had successfully convinced a court to force authorities to take them off the No Fly List. Rahinah Ibrahim, a Malaysian architect, became the first person ever removed from the notorious list after the managed to force officials to admit she had been placed on the list due to an error by the agency.

Related Podcast: On the 4/21/14 broadcast of the Project Censored radio show, host Mickey Huff is joined by  co-host Dr. Deepa Kumar and Dr. Arun Kundnani, author of The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror. The topic of the show is Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, from the national insecurity state to drone wars and beyond in the 21st century.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/Pcradiodos/PROJECT-CENSORED-041814.mp3

 

William K. Zabel on the Columbine Cover-Up

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To mark the 15th anniversary of Columbine, featured below are a mindblowing trio of interviews with William K. Zabel from the Binnall of America podcast examining oddities surrounding the Columbine either ignored or suppressed by corporate media:

4/20/09

http://host1.cyberears.com//13065.mp3

6/15/12:

http://host1.cyberears.com//16762.mp3

9/10/13:

http://host1.cyberears.com//21105.mp3

 

Saturday Matinee: Memorial Triple Feature

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Today happens to be the day of two pivotal events in American history: the WACO massacre (1993) and the Oklahoma City bombing (1995). In both cases there’s much evidence pointing towards state terrorism and cover-up. Two of the best documentaries which build convincing cases in support of this are “WACO: Rules of Engagement” and “A Noble Lie: Oklahoma City 1995”, both presented here in their entirety.

Lastly, I have recently and belatedly heard the news that whistleblower, investigative journalist and author of “Crossing the Rubicon” Michael C. Ruppert is dead. He reportedly killed himself last Sunday shortly after his final broadcast. Given the nature of Ruppert’s research it would be natural to suspect foul play, but the story is supported by the following statement from a close friend:

Sunday night following Mike’s Lifeboat Hour radio show, he was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. This was not a “fake” suicide. It was very well planned by Mike who gave us few clues but elaborate instructions for how to proceed without him. His wishes were to be cremated, and as of this moment, there are no plans for a memorial service. However, I will be taking his show this coming Sunday night, April 20, and the entire show will be an In Memoriam show for Mike with opportunities for listeners to call in. It was my privilege to have known Mike for 14 years, to have worked with him, to have been mentored by him, and to have supported him in some of his darkest hours, including the more recent ones. I am posting this announcement with the blessing of his partner Jesse Re and his landlord, Jack Martin. Thank you Mike for all of the truth you courageously exposed and for the legacy of truth-telling you left us. Goodbye my friend. Your memory will live in hour hearts forever. I have no more details to share than I am posting here. We should have much more information by Sunday night.

Carolyn Baker

Many including myself discovered Ruppert’s work through his early independent 9/11 research on his From the Wilderness website. A few years ago his work on Peak Oil was brought to a larger audience through the critically acclaimed documentery “Collapse” (2009). Rest in peace, Mike Ruppert.

The Boston Marathon Bombing’s Constructed Reality

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By James F. Tracy

Source: Memory Hole

“The only feeling that anyone can have about an event he does not experience is the feeling aroused by his mental image of that event … For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities.” Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion, 1922.

The careful coordination of information and visual representations governs the mass mind. The conditions for such are accentuated in times of perceived crisis. For a relatively brief period following the Boston Marathon bombing two sets of photographs emerged that actually depicted what appeared to have taken place at “ground zero,” where the first explosive device detonated. Each series of photos strongly suggests the execution of a mass casualty exercise.

The first set of photographs was taken by amateur sports photographer Benjamin Thorndike, whose employment as a financial advisor at FOC Partners on Boylston provided him with an ideal position. The second set was taken by graphic designer Aaron Tang, whose office is several doors down Boylston Street from FOC. In fact, Tang’s photos are especially revealing as they chronicle the unusual law enforcement and first responder reactions to the incident.

While Tang’s photos and personage are almost entirely absent from corporate news reportage and commentary, Thorndike and a handful of his more than two dozen photos receive sporadic consideration in the short-lived news cycle preceding 5:00PM on April 18, when the FBI revealed images of Tamarlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in the vicinity of the finish line.

The federal government and its major media appendages would then employ this dubious evidence vis-á-vis the Tsarnaevs’ non-American otherness to essentially indict the brothers in the court of public opinion. The spectre of Muslim terrorism–an important propaganda element of the “war on terror”–further legitimated the declaration of martial law in the greater Boston area, culminating in the extrajudicial killing of Tamarlan and the near-murder (so far as the public is lead to believe) of Dzhokhar.

The Boston bombing’s “forgotten” photographs are worthy of further consideration as they suggest the ways in which major news media operate in a de facto censorial fashion with the federal government to highlight certain phenomena while simultaneously rendering important artifacts down the memory hole. The images’ misuse or sheer absence arguably contributed to a major tragedy and miscarriage of justice.

Thorndike’s credentials alongside his bird’s eye perspective of America’s most horrendous terrorist attack since September 11 are of tremendous significance. With this in mind one would think major media would have been clamoring to disseminate his eyewitness account and series of photographs worldwide. Indeed, following the event Mr. Thorndike made himself readily available to the media for interviews.

Although the Associated Press circulating a select few of Thorndike’s photos, LexisNexis and Start Page web searches for “Ben Thorndike” and “Boston Marathon bombing” between the dates April 15, 2013 to May 15, 2013 reveal photo credits in only three US print publications within two weeks of the incident–the New York Daily News (April 17) the Boston Globe (April 18) and the New York Times (April 27)[1] each of which used the photo below; one European paper, the Scottish Express, also used the photos in two pieces.[2] The Globe was the sole outlet to publish remarks from Thorndike extending beyond a soundbite.[3]

As for broadcast outlets, the same search for transcripts reveals only four stories referencing Thorndike, none of which extend beyond a reference or brief interview excerpt. CNN published seven of Thorndike’s photos on its website, yet referenced them only once in subsequent broadcasts.[4]

Mr. Thorndike asserts that he was at his office building on Boylston almost directly above where the first explosion erupted on April 15, 2013. “Almost momentarily when I got there, directly in front of me, right in my sight-line, the explosion went off,” he said. “Just out of reflex, I had the camera on, had it in sports mode, which means I can shoot rapid-fire.” As CBS Boston reported,

“Thorndike shot a sequence of 25 photos right after the blast that shows injured and stunned victims on the ground below. But it was the behavior of one man — seen running from the scene — that prompted Thorndike to contact the FBI.”

“His reflex is to sprint away that really caught my eye [sic]” Thorndike recalls. “Everyone else in the photo is stunned, shocked and frozen,” he said. “It’s either someone who is badly burned, panicked and running, or they’re running for another reason.”[5]

The important fact overlooked, however, that the observed man is running with all limbs intact from the epicenter of a harrowing blast and its purportedly lethal wave of shrapnel.

Thorndike turned the photos over to FBI investigators, who repeatedly interviewed him concerning what he observed. The FBI was tight-lipped concerning the investigation, and what some media termed the “running away man” depicted in the photographs who remains unidentified.

Thorndike’s photographs of what transpired at “ground zero” of the Boston Marathon bombing event contrast sharply with the widely-circulated video footage from the Boston Globe, where the videographer appears to purposely arch the camera away from alleged bombing victims and activity on the sidewalk.

Although more than 260 individuals supposedly suffered injuries as a result of the bombings,[6] the high resolution photographs of both Thorndike and Tang indicate no more than three-to-four dozen persons in the immediate vicinity of the initial explosion, most of whom remain mobile in the immediate aftermath and are soon eclipsed in number by law enforcement and medical responders.

According to the CBS Boston report, “Thorndike and his co-workers fled soon after the photos were taken.” This is perhaps an unusual observation since journalists given that within seconds of the detonations the Boston Police locked down surrounding buildings in order to strictly control media access to the unfolding event. [See, for example, video here at 0:07-2:24].[7] CBS also curiously reports, “All the other bay windows in the office were blown out except the one where Thorndike stood.”[8]

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{Photo Credit: Benjamin Thorndike]

In terms of broadcast, with the exception of the more detailed interview highlighted above by CBS Boston, the novice photographer is given a soundbite on ABC and NBC newscasts, as the photos are presented and lightly touched upon.[9] For example, like Thorndike, NBC’s Pete Williams similarly references the man emerging from the center of the initial blast. “[Y]ou can see the impact of the blast has partially ripped his clothes away,” Williams remarks.[10]

Thorndike’s photos are also brought up twice on one specific CNN program by the cable channel’s “law enforcement analyst” Mike Brooks, who explains how the visual evidence from a typical crime investigation is handled. “What [federal law enforcement] have done,” Brooks remarks, is that

they will take this picture, any video that is along that route, and they will try to put together a timeline. Going back before, during and after and what they’ll do is they’ll take this video, and they will send it to Quantico. The FBI lab at Quantico has an engineering section. I have used them on a number of my cases to help enhance video and the technology has increased so much, you know, over the years–”[11]

What the FBI in fact proceeded to do with the assistance of major media was almost the exact opposite–focusing on the Tsarnaevs to the exclusion of all other agents and phenomena–and foregrounding these images alongside those of purported evidence and the injured to forthrightly incriminate the Tsarnaevs. The overall effect of this gross manipulation was evident in the jubilation exhibited by Boston residents upon Tamarlan’s murder and Dzhokhar’s capture; mass ecstasy eerily akin to the effect of a public lynching.

Events such as momentous political assassinations, the Tonkin Gulf, Oklahoma City, and 9/11 have suggested that government-corporate manipulation of the public for broader political ends is not difficult to achieve. Control over an event and the select use of stimuli elicits certain desired responses. This is particularly the case in a society that exercises almost unquestioning allegiance toward what Erich Fromm termed “anonymous authority.” The Boston Marathon bombing event suggests the end result of this blind faith; how such finely tuned stagecraft can mobilize a mass mentality to the degree that it misinterprets the implementation of martial law as a genuine representation of a public will.

Notes:

[1] Bev Ford, Greg B. Smith, and Larry McShane, “Police Narrow in on Two Suspects in Boston Marathon Bombing,” New York Daily News, April 17, 2013; Brian MacQuarrie, “Spectator’s Picture [sic] of Scene Draws Attention,” Boston Globe, April 18, 2013; Katharinie Q. Steelye and Ian Lovett, “After Attack, Suspects Returned to Routines, Raising No Suspicions,” New York Times, April 28, 2013.

[2] “Boston Terror Link to N-bomb at Olympics,” Scottish Express, April 21, 2013; “Did Hamza [sic] Inspire Boston Bombers?” Scottish Express, April 28, 2013.

[3] Sera Congi, “Photographer Discusses Images of Boston Marathon Bombing Blast,” CBS WBZ TV Boston, April 17, 2013.

[4] “After the Explosion: Moment by Moment,” CNN, April 17, 2013.

[4] Congi, “Photographer Discusses Images of Boston Marathon Bombing Blast.”

[5] Ibid.

[6] James F. Tracy, “The Boston Marathon Bombing’s Inflated Injury Tallies,” Global Research, May 11, 2013.

[7] PlasmaBurns, “Heroes Are Scripted – Boston Lies,” YouTube, January 11, 2014.

[8] Congi, “Photographer Discusses Images of Boston Marathon Bombing Blast.”

[9] Brian Williams, Anne Thompson, et al., “NBC News for April 16, 2013,” NBC; “Images of Bomb and Torn Backpack, Pressure Cooker with Ball Bearings,” ABC News Transcript, April 17, 2013; Anderson Cooper, Tom Fuentes, et al., “Reports On Bombing Arrest; Justice Department: No Arrest Made,” CNN, April 17, 2013; Mark Lauer, Savannah Guthrie, et al., “NBC News for April 17, 2013.”

[10] Lauer, Guthrie, et al., “NBC News for April 17, 2013.”

[11] Cooper, Fuentes, et al., “Reports On Bombing Arrest; Justice Department: No Arrest Made,” CNN, April 17, 2013.

For more information, read The Boston Marathon Bombing: A Compendium of Research and Analysis 4/13/14

New Cover-up in Boston Bombing Saga—Blaming Moscow

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By Russ Baker

Source: WhoWhatWhy.com

Maybe you heard: the Russians are responsible for the Boston Marathon Bombing. At least indirectly.

That’s what the New York Times says. Had the Russians told the Americans everything they knew about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the bombing might have been averted by the FBI. The Times knows this because it was told so by an anonymous “senior American official” who got an advance look at a report from the “intelligence community.”

***

Anyone who still entertains the fantasy that America is a vigorous, healthy democracy with an honest and reliable security apparatus and an honest, competent, vigilant media need only consider this major news leak just published as a New York Times exclusive. It pretty much sums up the fundamental corruption of our institutions, the lack of accountability, and the deep-dyed complicity of the “finest” brand in American journalism.

Killing Two Birds with One Stone

Just days before the first anniversary of the Boston bombing on April 15, some unnamed “senior American official” puts the blame for the bombing squarely on…Vladimir Putin.

It takes a keen understanding of certain members of the American media to know they will promote, without question, the latest “intelligence community” version of events. Which is that responsibility for the second largest “terror attack” after 9/11 should be pinned on the Russians, currently America’s bête noir over Ukraine.

Consider the cynical manipulation of public opinion involved here. The government permits, presumably authorizes, a high official—the Attorney General or someone of that status, perhaps even the Vice President—to leak confidential information for no apparent purpose beyond seeking to put a damper on legitimate inquiries into the behavior of the American government at the most fundamental level.

And the world’s vaunted “newspaper of record”—its brand largely based on insider access and the willingness of powerful figures to give it “hot stuff” in return for controlling public perceptions— shamelessly runs this leak with no attempt to question its timing or provenance.

Let’s look at what this article actually says. Here’s the opening paragraph:

The Russian government declined to provide the FBI with information about one of the Boston marathon bombing suspects two years before the attack that likely would have prompted more extensive scrutiny of the suspect, according to an inspector general’s review of how U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies could have thwarted the bombing.

And here’s the “takeaway”:

While the review largely exonerates the FBI, it does say that agents in the Boston area who investigated the Russian intelligence in 2011 could have conducted a few more interviews when they first examined the information.

The FBI agents also could have ordered turkey sandwiches instead of pastrami, which surely would have been a little healthier.

***

So, New York Times, should we trust the anonymous individual, or more importantly, the report that none of us have seen?

The report was produced by the inspector general of the Intelligence Community, which has responsibility for 17 separate agencies, and the inspectors general from the Department of Homeland Security and the Central Intelligence Agency.

Now, the Times doesn’t offer any useful context on why these reviews took place, beyond a pro forma effort to respond to complaints from a handful of congressional members (see this and this). The article does not address the quality or credibility of this “self-investigation” and the overall track record of these investigators. Nor does it express undue interest in why the report appears to have been finished just in time for the anniversary of the bombing.

In our view, the article is one hundred percent “stovepiping.” That’s when claimed raw intelligence is transmitted directly to an end user without any attempt at scrutiny or skepticism. This is irresponsible journalism, and it is the kind of behavior (from The New York Times again) that smoothed the way for the U.S. to launch the Iraq war in 2003.

The Times doesn’t even point out how self-serving the report is, coming from an “intelligence community” that has been publicly criticized for its actions leading up to the Boston Marathon bombing and its behavior since. (For more on the dozens of major reasons not to trust anything the authorities say about the Boston Bombing, see this, this, and this. For perspective on the media’s cooperation with the FBI in essentially falsifying the Bureau’s record throughout its history, see this).

Now let’s consider the core substance of the new revelations:

[A]fter an initial investigation by the F.B.I., the Russians declined several requests for additional information about Mr. Tsarnaev….

Did the Times ask the Russians about this? Did they find out if the Russians actually “declined” several requests, or whether they ever got back to the FBI?

The anonymous official notes one specific piece of evidence that the Russians did not share until after the bombing: that intercepted telephone conversations between Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his mother included discussions of Islamic jihad. The official speculates that this information might have given the FBI greater authority to conduct surveillance of the suspects.

However, the reality is that the Russians had already warned that Tamerlan was an Islamic radical, and it is not clear how this additional information would necessarily have provided anything truly substantive to add to a request for spying authority.

It’s also highly questionable, based in part on Edward Snowden’s revelations, whether the FBI or the NSA were actually adhering to such restrictions on spying anyway. Finally, it’s worth noting how truly remarkable it is that the Russians shared such intelligence at all. That they didn’t want to volunteer that they were capturing telephone calls is not that surprising, on the other hand.

Hiding the Real Story?

The Times does mention, almost in passing, what should have been the key point of an article: the timing of the “news” regarding the report:

It has not been made public, but members of Congress are scheduled to be briefed on it Thursday, and some of its findings are expected to be released before Tuesday, the first anniversary of the bombings.

This leak, which clears the FBI of all charges of incompetence or worse, comes just when the “American conversation” will again intensely focus on the nature of the “war on terror” and the trustworthiness of our vast secret state.

It also comes, most conveniently for the Bureau, at the precise moment when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s defense counsel has been seeking to learn the exact chronology and nature of the FBI’s interaction with the Tsarnaev family.

Months ago, we ran Peter Dale Scott’s rumination on whether the FBI could have recruited Tamerlan Tsarnaev as an informant, as it has done thousands of times before with other immigrants of a similar profile. Recently, the defense for Tamerlan’s younger brother, Dzhokhar, essentially claimed this was correct—that the Bureau at least attempted to recruit the older Tsarnaev. That has been cursorily reported by the major media, but no one seems to have connected the dots linking this claim to the new report that conveniently exonerates the FBI for failing to take action against the Tsarnaevs in time to stop the bombing.

A Curious Little Slip

As we have previously reported, it was the same duo of New York Times national security reporters, Schmidt and Schmitt, who had first, inadvertently it seems, raised a tremendously important question: when did the Tsarnaev family first come to the attention of the FBI?

The Russian warning to the US about Tamerlan Tsarnaev purportedly came in March 2011.

But according to an earlier article by Schmitt and Schmidt (along with a third reporter), the Bureau’s first contact with the Tsarnaevs came in January 2011. Though the Times did not make anything of this fact, it would be enormously consequential—because it would mean that the FBI was interacting with the Tsarnaevs two months before the Russians suggested the US take a close look at Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

If that was in error, the Times should have issued a correction. But it hasn’t. (Neither Schmidt nor Schmitt responded to WhoWhatWhy’s emails requesting comment.)

Interestingly, Schmidt and Schmitt, in subsequent articles, including the recent one, make no more mention of this early FBI contact. As it stands, the New York Times is on record of having asserted, again based on what sources told it, that the FBI was interacting with the Tsarnaevs before the Russians ever contacted it. If that early report was true, then by definition, the Inspector General’s report (and the leaked article about it) would be calculated parts of a cover-up about an FBI foul-up.

Conversely, if the early report was in error, then we need to know who provided it, or how they got that information wrong. Serious investigators know not to reject anomalies and “wrong” early reports as simply the result of haste or rumor without at least checking out the possibility that the early reports were right—but were later suppressed because they might cause problems to someone in power.

***

It is worth noting that the revelations in the new report—sure to be picked up by other media outlets that tend to repeat unquestioningly whatever the Times publishes—will be all the average American remembers about the FBI’s failure to prevent the Marathon bombing, and what may lie behind that failure.

Most members of the public will never know of the substantial indications that something is seriously wrong with what the government has put out about this affair. They will only recall that the FBI was somehow “cleared.” And they will probably remember that Putin’s Russia was somehow at fault.

In the final analysis, what we have just witnessed is the kind of arrant manipulation that shows the contempt of the “system” for the “people.” The “best” news organization gets another exclusive story. The US government gets to point its finger again at the Russian bogeyman. The FBI and the security apparatus get another free pass.

And the American people, once again, are fed pig slop and told to imagine sirloin.