Tag Archives: 9/11

On the Edge of a Nuclear Abyss

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By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

Two days after Russia attacked Ukraine and the day before Vladimir Putin put Russia on nuclear alert, I wrote a little article whose first sentence was: “Not wanting to sound hyperbolic, but I am starting to conclude that the nuclear madmen running the U.S./NATO New Cold War they started decades ago are itching to start a nuclear war with Russia.”

It was an intuition based on my knowledge of U.S./Russia history, including the U.S engineered coup in Ukraine in 2014, and a reading of current events.  I refer to it as intuition, yet it is based on a lifetime’s study and teaching of political sociology and writing against war.  I am not a Russian scholar, simply a writer with a sociological, historical, and artistic imagination, although my first graduate academic study in the late 1960s was a thesis on nuclear weapons and why they might be someday used again.

It no longer sounds hyperbolic to me that madmen in the declining U.S. Empire might resort, like rats in a sinking ship, to first strike use of nuclear weapons, which is official U.S. policy.  My stomach is churning at the thought, despite what most experts say: that the chances of a nuclear war are slight.  And despite what others say about the Ukraine war: that it is an intentional diversion from the Covid propaganda and the Great Reset (although I agree it achieves that goal).

My gut tells me no; it is very real, sui generis, and very, very dangerous now.

The eminent scholar Michel Chossudovsky of Global Research agrees that we are very close to the unthinkable.  In a recent historical analysis of U.S.-Russia relations and nuclear weapons, he writes the following before quoting Vladimir Putin’s recent statement on the matter. “Vladimir Putin’s statement on February 21st, 2022 was a response to U.S. threats to use nuclear weapons on a preemptive basis against Russia, despite Joe Biden’s “reassurance” that the U.S. would not be resorting to ‘A first strike’ nuclear attack against an enemy of America”:

Let me [Putin] explain that U.S. strategic planning documents contain the possibility of a so-called preemptive strike against enemy missile systems. And who is the main enemy for the U.S. and NATO? We know that too. It’s Russia. In NATO documents, our country is officially and directly declared the main threat to North Atlantic security. And Ukraine will serve as a forward springboard for the strike.” (Putin Speech, February 21, 2022, emphasis added)

Putin is absolutely correct.  It is why he put Russia’s nuclear forces on full alert.   Only those ignorant of history, which sadly includes most U.S. Americans, don’t know this.

I believe that today we are in the greatest danger of a nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, something I vividly remember as a teenager.  The same feelings return.  Dread.  Anxiety.  Breathlessness.  I do not think these feelings are misplaced nor they are simply an emotional response. I try to continue writing on other projects that I have started but feel stymied.  The possibility of nuclear war, whether intentional or accidental, obsesses me.

In order to grasp this stomach-churning possibility within the context of Ukraine, we need to put aside all talk of morality, rights, international law, and think in terms of great power politics, as John Mearsheimer has so clearly articulated.  As he says, when a great power feels its existence is threatened, might makes right. You simply can’t understand world politics without thinking at this level.  Doing so does not mean justifying the use of might; it is a means of clarifying the causes of wars, which start long before the first shots are fired.

In the present crisis over Ukraine, Russia clearly feels existentially threatened by U.S./NATO military moves in Ukraine and in eastern Europe where they have positioned missiles that can be very quickly converted to nuclear and are within a few minutes range of Russia. (And of course there are U.S./NATO nuclear missiles throughout western and southern Europe.)  Vladimir Putin has been talking about this for many years and is factually correct.  He has reiterated that this is unacceptable to Russia and must stop. He has pushed for negotiations to end this situation.

The United States, despite its own Monroe Doctrine that prohibits another great power from putting weapons or military forces close to its borders, has blocked its ears and kept upping the ante, provoking Russian fears. This fact is not in dispute but is shrugged off by U.S./NATO as of little consequence.  Such an attitude is pure provocation as anyone with a smidgeon of historical awareness knows.

The world was very lucky sixty years ago this October when JFK and Nikita Khrushchev negotiated the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis before the world was incinerated.  Kennedy, of course, was intensely pressured by the military and CIA to bomb Cuba, but he resisted.  He also rejected the insane military desire to nuke the Soviet Union, calling such people crazy; at a National Security Council meeting on September 12, 1963, when the Joint Chiefs of Staff presented a report about a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union which they wanted for that fall, he said, “Preemption is not possible for us.”

Such leadership, together with the nuclear test ban treaty he negotiated with the USSR that month, inter alia (such treaties have now been abrogated by the U.S. government), assured his assassination organized by the CIA.  These days, the U.S. is led by deluded men who espouse a nuclear first strike policy, which tells one all one needs to know about the danger the world is in. The U.S. has been very sick with Russia hatred for a long time.

After the terror of the Cuban Missile Crisis, many more people took the threat of nuclear war seriously.  Today very few do.  It has receded into the ”unimaginable.” In 1962, however, as James W. Douglass writes in JFK and the Unspeakable:

Kennedy saw that, at least outside Washington, D.C., people were living with a deeper awareness of the ultimate choice they faced.  Nuclear weapons were real.  So, too, was the prospect of peace.  Shocked by the Cuban Missile Crisis into recognizing a real choice, people preferred peace to annihilation.

Today the reality of nuclear annihilation has receded into unconsciousness. This despite the recent statements by U.S. generals and the U.S. Ukrainian puppet Zelensky about nuclear weapons and their use that have extremely inflamed Russia’s fears, which clearly is intentional. The game is to have some officials say it and then deny it while having a policy that contradicts your denial.  Keep pushing the envelope is U.S. policy.  Obama-Biden reigned over the U.S. 2014 coup in Ukraine, Trump increased weapon sales to Ukraine in 2017, and Biden has picked up the baton from his partner (not his enemy) in this most deadly game.  It is a bi-partisan Cold War 2, getting very hot.  And it is the reason why Russia, its back to the wall, attacked Ukraine.  It is obvious that this is exactly what the U.S. wanted or it would have acted very differently in the leadup to this tragedy.  All the current ringing of hands is pure hypocrisy, the nihilism of a nuclear power never for one moment threatened but whose designs were calculated to threaten Russia at its borders.

The media propaganda against Russia and Putin is the most extreme and extensive propaganda in my lifetime.  Patrick Lawrence has astutely examined this in a recent essay, where he writes the same is true for him:

Many people of many different ages have remarked in recent days that they cannot recall in their lifetimes a more pervasive, suffocating barrage of propaganda than what has engulfed us since the months that preceded Russia’s intervention. In my case it has come to supersede the worst of what I remember from the Cold War decades.

Engulfed is an appropriate word.  Lawrence rightly points to this propaganda as cognitive warfare directed at the U.S. population (and the rest of the world) and notes its connection to the January 2021 final draft of a “diabolic” NATO study called “Cognitive Warfare.”  He quotes it thus: “The brain will be the battlefield of the 21st century,” . . . “Humans are the contested domain. Cognitive warfare’s objective is to make everyone a weapon.”

This cognitive warfare, however, has a longer history in cutting edge science.  For each successive decade beginning with the 1990s and a declaration from President (and ex-Director of the CIA) George H. W. Bush that the 1990s would be the Decade of Brain Research, presidents have announced additional decades long projects involving the brain, with 2000-2010 being the Decade of Behavior Project, followed by mapping of the brain, artificial intelligence, etc. all organized and funded through the Office of Science and Technology Project (OSTP) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).  This medical, military, and scientific research has been part of a long range plan to extend MK-Ultra’s mind control to the population at large under the cover of medical science, and it has been simultaneously connected to the development and funding of the pharmaceutical industries research and development of new brain-altering drugs.  RFK, Jr. has documented the CIA’s extensive connection to germ and mind research and promotion in his book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health.  It is why his book is banned from the mainstream media, who do the prime work of cognitive warfare for the government.  To put it clearly: these media are the CIA.  And the issue of U.S. bio-weapons research and development is central to these many matters, including in Ukraine.

In other words, the cognitive warfare we are now being subjected to has many tentacles connected to much more than today’s fanatical anti-Russian propaganda over Ukraine.  All the U.S. wars of aggression have been promoted under its aegis, as have the lies about the attacks of September 11, 2001, the economic warfare by the elites, the COVID crisis, etc.  It’s one piece.

Take, for example, a book written in 2010 by David Ray Griffin, a renown theologian who has written more than a dozen books about 9/11.  The book is Cognitive Infiltration: An Obama Appointee’s Plan to Undermine the 9/11 Conspiracy Theory.  It is a critique of law professor Cass Sunstein, appointed by Obama to be the Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.  Sunstein had written an article with a plan for the government to prevent the spread of anti-government “conspiracy theories” in which he promoted the use of anonymous government agents to use secret “cognitive infiltration” of these groups in order to break them up; to use media plants to disparage their arguments.  He was particularly referring to those who questioned the official 9/11 narrative but his point obviously extended much further.  He was working in the tradition of the great propagandists.  Griffin took a scalpel to this call for cognitive warfare and was of course a victim of it as well.  Sunstein has since worked for the World Health Organization (WHO) on COVID psychological responses and other COVID committees.  It’s all one piece.

Sunstein’s wife is Samantha Power, Obama’s Ambassador to the United Nations and war hawk extraordinaire.  She gleefully promoted the U.S. destruction of Libya under the appellation of the “responsibility to protect,”  a “humane” cover for imperialism.  Now she is Biden’s Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), an arm of the CIA throughout the world.  It’s all one piece.

The merry-go-round goes round and round.

I have gone off on this slight tangent to emphasize how vast and interconnected are the players and groups on Team Cognitive Warfare.  They have been leading the league for quite some time and are hoping their game plan against Team Russia will keep them there.  So far they are winning, as Patrick Lawrence says:

Look at what has become of us. Most Americans seem to approve of these things, or at least are unstirred to object. We have lost all sense of decency, of ordinary morality, of proportion. Can anyone listen to the din of the past couple of weeks without wondering if we have made of ourselves a nation of grotesques?

It is common to observe that in war the enemy is always dehumanized. We are now face to face with another reality: Those who dehumanize others dehumanize themselves more profoundly.

Perhaps people are too ignorant to see through the propaganda. To have some group to hate is always “uplifting.” But we are all responsible for the consequences of our actions, even when those actions are just buying the propaganda and hating those one is told to hate. It is very hard to accept that the leaders of your own country commit and contemplate unspeakable evil deeds and that they wish to control your mind. To contemplate that they might once again use nuclear weapons is unspeakable but necessary if we are to prevent it.

I hope my fears are unfounded.  I agree with Gilbert Doctorow that the Ukraine-Russia war separates the sheep from the goats, that there is no middle ground.  This is not to celebrate war and the death of innocent people, but it does demand placing the blame squarely where it belongs and not trying to have it both ways.  People like him, John Mearsheimer, the late badly missed Stephen Cohen, Ray McGovern, Scott Ritter, Pepe Escobar, Patrick Lawrence, Jack Matlock, Ted Postol, et al. are all cutting through the propaganda and delivering truth in opposition to all the lies.  They go gentile with fears of nuclear war, however, as if it is somewhat possible but highly unlikely, as if their deepest thoughts are unspeakable, for to utter them would be an act of despondency.

The consensus of the experts tends to be that the U.S. wishes to draw the Russians into a long protracted guerrilla war along the lines of its secret use of mujahideen in Afghanistan in 1979 and after. There is evidence that this is already happening. But I think the U.S. strategists know that the Russians are too smart for that; that they have learned their lesson; and that they will withdraw once they feel they have accomplished their goals. Therefore, from the U.S./NATO perspective, time is reasonably short and they must act quickly, perhaps by doing a false flag operation that will justify a drastic response, or upping the tempo in some other way that would seem to justify the use of nuclear weapons, perhaps tactical at first.

I appreciate the input of the Russia experts I mentioned above.  Their expertise dwarfs mine, but I disagree. Perhaps I am an excitable sort; perhaps I am one of those Patrick Lawrence refers to, quoting Carl Jung, as too emotional and therefore incapable of clear thinking. (I will leave the issue of this long held but erroneous western philosophical belief in the division of emotions and thoughts for another day.)  Perhaps I can’t see the obvious that a nuclear war will profit no one  and therefore it cannot happen. Yet Ted Postol, MIT professor of technology and international security, while perhaps agreeing that an intentional nuclear war is very unlikely, has been warning of an accidental one for many years.  He is surely right on that score and well worth listening to.

But either way, I am sorry to say, perhaps because my perspective is that of a generalist, not an expert, and my thinking is informed by art as much as social science and history, my antennae pick up a very disturbing message. A voice tells me that the danger is very, very real today.  It says:

Beware, we are on the edge of a nuclear abyss.

Covid: A Collision of Historical and Scientific Illiteracy

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By Kevin Ryan

Source: The Burning Platform

It’s been a year since I’ve written anything for this blog. The reason, frankly, is that I have been at a loss for words. What has happened to human society in the last two years has been, for anyone with an understanding of history, beyond belief.

Of course, it should not be beyond belief because we know history repeats itself. And in the last two years it has been repeating with a vengeance.

I spent 18 years working to understand, and help others understand, the crimes of September 11, 2001. Those crimes were never honestly investigated apart from the work of independent researchers. The official accounts are widely known to be false and those who have taken the time to look deeper have found that there are good reasons to believe that people within government and major corporations were involved in planning and executing the attacks.

September 11th was a deception used by rich and powerful people to steal resources, consolidate power, and control the masses. It was just one example of such a mass deception.  Others include the following.

  • The CIA’s assassination of JFK
  • The false Gulf of Tonkin incident that escalated the CIA’s war in Vietnam
  • The deceptions used to justify the 1991 Gulf War
  • The government-sponsored 2001 anthrax attacks
  • Claims of weapons of mass destruction used to justify the second invasion of Iraq
  • The many manufactured terrorist events following 9/11
  • Previously hyped pandemics, including the 2005 “Bird Flu” and 2009 “Swine Flu” that were grossly exaggerated by the World Health Organization for the benefit of big pharma companies

Along with these conveniently over-looked crimes, the last 18 months have shown that the 9/11 lie was not taken seriously. Anyone who still believes that governments and media care about our health has forgotten that deep state actors murdered thousands of citizens on 9/11. The corporate media and corporate-owned governments then covered it up so that a million more could be murdered to steal resources and control people.

Historical illiteracy is largely to blame for the Covid scare although much of that illiteracy is by choice, through willful ignorance of events that cause cognitive dissonance. The examples cited above are but a few in the long history of deceptions used by governments to drive the agendas of the powerful few. People who ignore these historical facts not only turn a bind eye to history, they ignore painfully obvious features of current affairs including that “terrorism” has mysteriously disappeared.

People don’t want to acknowledge the fact that we do not live in democratic societies any longer. Yet today the world is fully run by an oligarchy and that oligarchy wants us to be diverted and outraged about superficial things while staying ignorant or silent on issues important to us like the following.

  • Indefinite detention without charges at Guantanamo Bay
  • Unwarranted mass surveillance
  • Voting machine hacking and election theft
  • Failure to prosecute the crimes of previous administrations (e.g. drone killings targeting weddings and funerals, torture at CIA black sites)
  • The increasing totalitarian censorship of dissenting views

Some people have accepted or ignored the poverty and famine being driven by the reckless response to Covid. And they have also ignored that the people driving the Covid scare have a history of crimes against humanity.  Not the least of these are Bill Gates, who has monopolized healthcare and has tried to buy off the media, and Anthony Fauci, who is known for having killed nearly 200,000 HIV patients with the toxic drug AZT.

How has the public’s willful ignorance been established so easily?  The Covid crimes were carefully practiced beforehand through a series of exercises conducted by governments and corporations since 9/11. And the operation builds upon elements utilized in all the previous government crimes against humanity.  Here are three primary components.

  1. As has been demonstrated through all of history, the most effective way to dumb down a population is through fear.  Communism, terrorism, WMDs, virus… it all works the same way. This basic feature of the Covid scare is one of many features and outcomes that it shares with previous psychological operations.
  2. Censorship is another hallmark of authoritarian tyranny and we are seeing it raised to a new level in the media today. Any doctor or scientist who has spoken out about the obvious lack of scientific scrutiny applied to the Covid scare has been blocked on social media and ignored or smeared on television, radio, and in print.
  3. In America the most useful tool driving willful ignorance has been the narrative behind the phony 2-party system in politics. The Covid scare works in part because many Americans are easily controlled through the farcical theater of “right-left” identity politics. Today if you want “the left” to take a position, all that is needed is to frame it as opposition to Trump.  Control of “the right” is just as easy. This works despite the fact that we are ruled by an oligarchy that does the same things no matter who is in office.

Added to this formula of fear, censorship, and cartoonish politics has been the complete abandonment of science. Scientific illiteracy is known to be quite high in America, but that has become the case for many nations and today anyone with a lab coat and a pointer promoted by the media is accepted as a scientific authority. What people often forget is that it was doctors, not soldiers, who committed the worst crimes in Nazi Germany. These days it is just as easy to buy a doctor or a scientist as it is to buy a politician.

Scientific literacy in America took a giant leap downward after 9/11. The absurd anti-scientific approach taken by the government for the destruction of the Word Trade Center buildings was either accepted or left unquestioned by many Americans. No doubt the death of science with respect to 9/11 was a key step in enabling the Covid scam.

Here are a few examples of how people around the world abandoned science when it came to Covid.

  1. The PCR test for Covid infection in the U.S., which was used in many other countries as well, did not identify a unique coronavirus. In other words, the test had a high rate of false positives. Still, people accepted the narrative of “cases” that drove the fear.
  2. The policy endorsed by the WHO and the CDC that attributed Covid as a cause of death for anyone who tested positive using the false PCR test, no matter what their actual cause of death was, dramatically inflated the number of deaths attributed to Covid.
  3. Both the word vaccine and the word pandemic were redefined by agencies like the WHO to enable the Covid scare.
  4. The “vaccines” are experimental gene therapies that are making people sick and killing them. Those bought into the vaccine narrative responded to this fact with the diversionary claim that the Covid drugs do not change your DNA. But most gene therapies do not change your DNA. Instead, they provide a functioning gene in addition to your DNA. More importantly, all the Covid “vaccines” provide genetic material that drives the production of toxic spike proteins that cause blood clotting, endothelial tissue damage, antibody dependent enhancement, and death.
  5. The Emergency Use Authorizations under which these Covid drugs were granted temporary approvals were based on fraudulent attacks against long-established, effective treatments like Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine.  The suppression of these effective drugs is responsible for the deaths of the patients who did die from Covid (instead of just with Covid).

How do we go forward realizing that many of our friends, family, and coworkers have decided to remain willfully ignorant of history and science and the facts about the Covid psychological operation?

It is a difficult question but one that has a few clear answers. First, we must stop parroting the absurd official narrative regarding Covid. It is an illness that has a 99.7% survival rate for the elderly and higher for everyone else. And it is very obviously a tool of propaganda in a psychological operation that exhibits all the features and outcomes of previous psychological operations. So, the first step is to not accept or repeat the nonsense narrative.

Secondly, since social media and other corporate media are completely compromised and engage in censorship of any facts related to Covid, we must reach people directly. This means speaking out locally, and contacting your city, county, and state government representatives to oppose the Covid agenda.

There are creative ways to resist as well. For example, if you are forced to wear a mask in public areas in order to conduct your life, put a message on the mask that lets like minded people see you. Something like “Mind Control” or “You stay safe, I’ll stay free” would work.

Finally, realizing that this will all get much worse before it gets better, plan to reduce your dependence on goods and services controlled by the oligarchy. If you can, get off the grid. In other words, find alternative sources of power, food, water, and the other necessities of life before the ultimate tool of control—the vaccine passport—limits your access.

The psychological operations of the media and political establishment are ramping up. They’re targeting every weakness of the gullible public, from its scientific and historical illiteracy to its most banal prejudices, in order to inflame superficial separations from the farcical left/right division to racial tensions. They know us better than we know ourselves.

Let’s resist these provocations and see if we can establish control groups within this corrupt system that can survive and educate future generations.

Kevin Ryan is a chemist, former laboratory director, and prominent voice in the 9/11 Truth movement. You can read more his work at his blog. You can also watch his testimony to the Toronto Hearings on 9/11 here, his video on the parallels between 9/11 and Covid here and his interview as part of our Covid19/11 series here.

Saturday Matinee: From JFK To 911 Everything Is A Rich Man’s Trick

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Source: Top Documentary Films

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy lingers as one of the most traumatic events of the twentieth century. The open and shut nature of the investigation which ensued left many global citizens unsettled and dissatisfied, and nagging questions concerning the truth behind the events of that fateful day remain to this day. Evidence of this can be found in the endless volumes of conspiracy-based materials which have attempted to unravel and capitalize on the greatest murder mystery in American history.

Now, a hugely ambitious documentary titled Everything is a Rich Man’s Trick adds fuel to those embers of uncertainty, and points to many potential culprits whose possible involvement in the assassination has long been obscured by official historical record.

Authoritatively written and narrated by Francis Richard Conolly, the film begins its labyrinthine tale during the era of World War I, when the wealthiest and most powerful figures of industry discovered the immense profits to be had from a landscape of ongoing military conflict. The film presents a persuasive and exhaustively researched argument that these towering figures formed a secret society by which they could orchestrate or manipulate war-mongering policies to their advantage on a global scale, and maintain complete anonymity in their actions from an unsuspecting public. Conolly contends that these sinister puppet masters have functioned and thrived throughout history – from the formation of Nazism to the build-up and aftermath of September 11.

The election of President Kennedy in 1960 represented a formidable threat to these shadowy structures of power, including high-profile figures within the Mafia, crooked politicians, and the world’s most influential and notorious war profiteers. Thus, a plot was hatched which would end Kennedy’s reign prior to any chance of re-election, thereby restoring the order and freedoms of these secret societies.

At nearly three and a half hours, Everything is a Rich Man’s Trick examines a defining event of our times from a perspective not often explored. While it may or may not win over viewers who remain skeptical of mass-scale conspiracy, it presents its findings in a measured and meticulous manner which demands attention and consideration.

Who’s to Blame for Losing Afghanistan?

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By Peter Van Buren

Source: We Meant Well

Who should we blame for losing Afghanistan? Why blame anyone?

Did anyone expect the U.S. war in Afghanistan to end cleanly? If so, you bought the lies all along and the cold water now is hitting sharp. While the actual ending is particularly harsh and clearly spliced together from old clips of Saigon 1975, those are simply details.

Why blame Biden? He played his part as a Senator and VP keeping the war going, but his role today is just being the last guy in a long line of people to blame, a pawn in the game. That Biden is willing to be the “president who lost Afghanistan” is all the proof you need he does not intend to run again for anything. Kind of an ironic version of a young John Kerry’s take on Vietnam “how do you ask the last man to die for a mistake?” Turns out, it’s easy: call Joe.

Blame Trump for the deal? One of the saddest things about the brutal ending of the U.S.-Afghan war is we would have gotten the same deal — just leave it to the Taliban and go home — at basically any point during the last 20 years. That makes every death and every dollar a waste. Afghanistan is simply reverting, quickly, to more or less status quo 9/10/01 and everything between then and now, including lost opportunities, will have been wasted.

Blame the NeoCons? No one in Washington who supported this war was ever called out, with the possible exception of Donald Rumsfeld who, if there is a hell, now cleans truck stop toilets there. Dick Cheney walks free. The generals and diplomats who ran the war have nice think tank or university jobs, if they are not still in government making equally bad decisions. No one has been legally, financially, or professionally disadvantaged by the blood on their hands. Some of the era’s senior leaders — Blinken, Rice, Power, Nuland — are now working in better jobs for Biden. I’d like to hope they have trouble sleeping at night, but I doubt it.

George Bush is a cuddly grandpa today, not the man who drove the United States into building a global prison archipelago to torture people. Barack Obama, who kept much of that system in place and added the drone killing of American citizens to his resume, remains a Democratic rock god. Neither man nor any of his significant underlings has expressed any regret or remorse.

For example, I just listened to Ryan Crocker, our former ambassador to Iraq and Afghanistan, on CNN. Making myself listen to him was about as fun as sticking my tongue in a wood chipper. Same for former general David Petraeus and the usual gang of idiots. None of them, the ones who made the decisions, accept any blame. Instead. they seem settled on blaming Trump because, well, everything bad is Trump’s fault even if he came into all this in the middle of the movie.

In the end the only people punished were the whistleblowers.

No one in the who is to blame community seems willing to take the story back to its beginning, at least the beginning for America’s latest round in the Graveyard of Empires (talk about missing an early clue.) This is what makes Blame Trump and Blame Biden so absurd. America’s modern involvement in this war began in 1979 when Jimmy Carter, overreacting to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to prop up what was already a pro-Soviet puppet government, began arming and organizing Islamic warriors we now collectively know as “The Taliban.”

People who want to only see trees they can chop down and purposely want to miss the vastness of the forest ahead at this point try to sideline things by claiming there never was a single entity called “The Taliban” and the young Saudis who flocked to jihad to kill Russians technically weren’t funded by the U.S. (it was indirectly through Pakistan) or that the turning point was the 1991 Gulf War, etc. Quibbles and distractions.

If Carter’s baby steps to pay for Islamic warriors to fight the Red Army was playing with matches, Ronald Reagan poured gas, then jet fuel, on the fire. Under the Reagan administration the U.S. funded the warriors (called mujaheddin if not freedom fighters back then), armed them, invited their ilk to the White House, helped lead them, worked with the Saudis to send in even more money, and fanned the flames of jihad to ensure a steady stream of new recruits.

When we “won” it was hailed as the beginning of the real end of the Evil Empire. The U.S. defeated the mighty Red Army by sending over some covert operators to fight alongside stooge Islam warriors for whom a washing machine was high technology. Pundits saw it as a new low-cost model for executing American imperial will.

We paid little attention to events as we broke up the band and cut off the warriors post-Soviet withdrawal (soon enough some bozo at the State Department declared “the end of history.” He teaches at Stanford now) until the blowback from this all nipped us in the largely unsuccessful World Trade Center bombing of 1993, followed by the very successful World Trade Center bombing on September 11, 2001. Seems like there was still some history left to go.

How did U.S. intelligence know who the 9/11 culprits were so quickly? Several of them had been on our payroll, or received financing via proxies in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, or were inspired by what had happened in Afghanistan, the defeat of the infidels (again; check Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, the Mughal Empire, various Persian Empires, the Sikhs, the British, et al.)

If post-9/11 the U.S. had limited itself to a vengeful hissy fit in Afghanistan, ending with Bush’s 2003 declaration of “Mission Accomplished,” things would have been different. If the U.S. had used the assassination of Osama bin Laden, living “undiscovered” in the shadow of Pakistan’s military academy, as an excuse of sorts to call it a day in Afghanistan, things would have been different.

Instead Afghanistan became a petri dish to try out the worst NeoCon wet dream, nation-building across the Middle East. Our best and brightest would not just bomb Afghanistan into the stone age, they would then phoenix-it from the rubble as a functioning democracy. There was something for everyone: a military task to displace post-Cold War budget cuts, a pork-laden reconstruction program for contractors and diplomats, even a plan to empower Afghan women to placate the left.

Though many claim Bush pulling resources away from Afghanistan for Iraq doomed the big plans, it was never just a matter of not enough resources. Afghanistan was never a country in any modern sense to begin with, just an association of tribal entities who hated each other almost as much as they hated the west. The underpinnings of the society were a virulent strain of Islam, about as far away from any western political and social ideas as possible. Absent a few turbaned Uncle Toms, nobody in Afghanistan was asking to be freed by the United States anyway.

Pakistan, America’s “ally” in all this, was a principal funder and friend of the Taliban, always more focused on the perceived threat from India, seeing a failed state in Afghanistan as a buffer zone. Afghanistan was a narco-state with its only real export heroin. Not only did this mean the U.S. wanted to build a modern economy on a base of crime, the U.S. in different periods actually encouraged/ignored the drug trade into American cities in favor of the cash flow.

The Afghan puppet government and military the U.S. formed were uniformly corrupt, and encouraged by the endless inflow of American money to get more corrupt all the time. They had no support from the people and could care less. The Afghans in general and the Afghan military in particular did not fail to hold up their end of the fighting; they never signed up for the fight in the first place. No Afghan wanted to be the last man to die in service to American foreign policy.

There was no way to win. The “turning point” was starting the war at all. Afghanistan had to fail. There was no other path for it, other than being propped up at ever-higher costs. That was American policy for two decades: prop up things and hope something might change. It was like sending more money to a Nigerian cyber-scammer hoping to recoup your original loss.

Everything significant our government, the military, and the MSM told us about Afghanistan was a lie. They filled and refilled the bag with bullhockey and Americans bought it every time expecting candy canes. Keep that in mind when you decide who to listen to next time, because of course there will be a next time. Who has not by now realized that? We just passively watched 20 years of Vietnam all over again, including the sad ending. So really, who’s to blame?

Everything points to Thierry Meyssan being right today

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By challenging the official version of the 9/11 attacks, Thierry Meyssan opened a worldwide debate. But the essence of his book on the subject was a political science study predicting the evolution of the United States after these crimes. The problem is not how the attacks were committed, but why the US reacted that day by violating its own Constitution, why it implemented in the following days very deep reforms of its institutions that changed its nature. Thierry Meyssan had predicted the transformation of the American Empire that we are seeing with the planning of the fall of Kabul. Everything he predicted has been confirmed over the last twenty years.

By Thierry Meyssan

Source: VoltaireNet.org

At the end of 2001, I published a series of articles on the attacks of September 11, 2001, followed by a book in March 2002 [1]. The book was translated into 18 languages and opened a worldwide debate questioning the veracity of the official US narrative. However, the international press refused to discuss my arguments and launched a campaign accusing me of “amateurism” [2], “conspiracy theory” [3], and “denial” [4].

Above all, the US authorities and their supporters reduced my work to the first few pages of my book: the challenge to the official version of the attacks. But it is a work of political science aimed at denouncing what these false-flag attacks would make possible: the surveillance of Western populations and the endless war in the wider Middle East. In this article, I will therefore review what has been learned about these attacks over the past 20 years, but more importantly, I will check whether my predictions from 2002 were correct or not.

THE BLACK HOLE OF 9/11

If we are asked what happened on 9/11, we will all visualise the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. We have forgotten many other things, such as the insider trading in the shares of the affected airlines, the fire in the Old Eisenhower Building, or the collapse of a third tower in the World Trade Center.

What is most astonishing is that almost no one remembers that at 10am, Richard Clarke triggered the ’Continuity of Government Plan’ [5]. At that very moment, President Bush and Congress were suspended from office and placed under military protection. President Bush was taken to an air base in Nebraska where the CEOs of the upper floors of the Twin Towers had been since the previous evening [6]; and Congress to the Greenbrier megabunker. Power fell into the hands of the “Continuity Government”. It was in the Raven Rock Mountain megabunker (’Site R’) [7]. Power was not returned to the civilians until the end of the day.

Who exactly were the members of this ’Continuity Government’ and what did they do during the time they were in power? We still don’t know. The members of Congress who asked the question were not allowed to hold a session of their assembly on the subject.

Please understand that until we have clarification, the 9/11 controversy will continue. The procedure implemented on September 11 was designed by President Eisenhower at a time when nuclear war was feared. If he, the Speakers and a majority of Congress were killed, there would be no constitutional powers. The military would logically have to assume the continuity of government. But this was obviously not the case on that day. Not one elected official was dead. The transfer of power was therefore unconstitutional. It was strictly speaking a coup d’état.

THE ATTACKS OF SEPTEMBER 11

In my book and afterwards, I hypothesised about what really happened on that day. But this is irrelevant to my point. The people who perpetrated this crime wanted to create a shock comparable to Pearl Harbor, as the members of the Project for a New American Century wrote earlier, so that they could change the way the United States lives and functions. So they told us a tall tale that we swallowed without flinching. But :

• To this day, there is no evidence of the 19 designated hijackers on board the hijacked planes. They were not on the lists of passengers on board the planes released by the airlines on the same day. The videos of the hijackers at the airport were not taken in New York, but at other airports where they were transiting.

• To date, there is no evidence that the 35 telephone communications between passengers on the hijacked flights and the ground existed [8]. This applies both to the conversation attributed to the brave passenger who allegedly attacked the hijackers on UA 93, and to the conversation testified to by US Solicitor General Theodore Olson with his wife on AA 77. In contrast, at the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui (accused of being the 20th hijacker who would not have boarded the plane), the FBI testified that none of the planes had phones in the armrests, that passengers should have used mobile phones, that cell phones at the time could not work at altitudes above 5,000 feet, and that the records provided by the phone companies did not show any of the communications mentioned – including that of Attorney General Olson.

• To date, there is no physical explanation for the collapse of three of the World Trade Center towers onto their own footprints (i.e. vertically). The Twin Towers were hit by two planes, but were not shaken. However, their fuel would have run down the vertical beams and melted them. A third tower was destabilised by the fall of the first two to its side. It too would have collapsed, not laterally, but vertically. It should be noted that no explanation was given for the lateral explosions heard by the firemen and widely filmed, nor for the vertical beams that were severed and not melted; two pieces of evidence attesting not to an accidental but to a controlled demolition. It should also be noted that no collapse of skyscrapers has ever been observed, either before or after 9/11, following a large-scale fire… and that no one has learned the lessons of this attack and therefore changed the way such buildings are constructed to prevent such a catastrophe. Finally, the photographs taken by firefighters of “pools” of molten steel and those taken by FEMA (the disaster management agency) of the melting rocks in which the foundations were built are inexplicable according to the official version.

• To date, there is no evidence that an airliner hit the Pentagon. Already the next day, the fire brigade had given a press conference at the Pentagon during which they had attested that they had not found anything suggestive of a plane. The authorities, who had issued a vengeful statement against my book, announced that they had collected many parts of the plane and reconstructed it in a hangar. Then they stopped communicating on this subject. Moreover, the families of the passengers of the plane in question, after having been scandalised by my words, changed their minds when they were given back funeral urns, claiming to have identified the bodies of their relatives thanks to their fingerprints (which would have been totally destroyed during fires at those temperatures). Some refused to sign the confidentiality agreement offered to them in exchange for large compensation payments.

WIDESPREAD SURVEILLANCE OF WESTERN POPULATIONS

In the days following the attacks, the Bush Administration had Congress vote on an anti-terrorist code, known as the USA Patriot Act. This is a very large piece of legislation that had been drafted over the previous two years by the Federalist Society (of which Solicitor General Theodor Olson and Attorney General John Ashcroft were members). It suspends the Bill of Rights in cases of terrorism.

At the time of the formation of the United States, there were two opposing groups. The first, around Alexander Hamilton, drafted the Constitution to set up a system comparable to the British monarchy, but with governors instead of nobles. The second, around Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, only accepted the Constitution after it had been amended to prevent the use of Reason of State. These 10 amendments are called the Bill of Rights. Their suspension challenges the balance on which the United States was founded. It gives power to the first group, the descendants of the ’Pilgrim Fathers’, the Puritans exiled from England. President Bush is a direct descendant of one of the 41 signatories of the “Mayfower Pact” (1620).

In order to implement the USA Patriot Act, a new department was created, the Homeland Security Department, which brings together various existing agencies. It has a political police force capable of spying on any citizen. According to the Washington Post, which revealed this in 2011, it has hired 835,000 civil servants, 112,000 of whom are secretly employed [9], making the United States the most Orwellian country on the planet. The way this department works was revealed in 2013 by Edward Snowden. Snowden not only provided information about the NSA’s foreign eavesdropping system, but also about domestic mass surveillance in the US. He now lives as a political refugee in Russia.

This system, although less documented, is gradually spreading to all Western states, through the ’Five Eyes’ [10] and Nato.

THE “ENDLESS WAR”: FROM 9/11 TO THE FALL OF KABUL

A month and a half after the attacks, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld created the Office of Force Transformation, which he entrusted to Admiral Arthur Cebrowski. The idea was to change the very function of the Armed Forces. The Rumsfeld/Cebrowski doctrine [11] is a reform as important as the creation of the Pentagon after the 1929 crisis. This time, it is about adapting to financial capitalism. From now on, the United States will no longer try to win wars, but on the contrary to make them last as long as possible; this is what President Bush’s expression “endless war” means. Their aim will be to destroy local state structures so that natural wealth can be exploited without having to endure political control; as Colonel Ralph Peters summed it up: “Stability is America’s enemy” [12].

This is exactly what has just happened in Afghanistan. The war started there just after 9/11. It was only supposed to last a few weeks, but it never stopped. The Taliban victory that we have just witnessed was organised by the United States itself in order to make the conflict last even longer. That is why President Biden has just said that the US did not go into Afghanistan to build a state, as it did in Germany and Japan after the Second World War. Joe Biden had, during his meeting in Geneva with Vladimir Putin, rejected the endless war. However, he has just relaunched it, aligning himself with the Rumsfeld/Cebrowski doctrine like Barack Obama.

None of the conflicts that began after 9/11 have ended. On the contrary, instability has taken hold in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen and Lebanon. One can of course call these conflicts “civil wars” and accuse their leaders of being “dictators”, or explain nothing at all, but the fact remains that they were stable before Western intervention and that Gaddafi’s Libya and Aoun’s Lebanon were US allies when their misfortunes began.

Vice President Cheney had set up a secret group in the White House to design the development of the National Energy Policy. He was convinced that oil would run out in the medium term. This is why the United States destroyed states in order to be able to exploit their oil in the long term, but not now. Moreover, the Rumsfeld/Cebrowski doctrine states that one should not fight globalised powers such as Russia and China. On the contrary, they should be given access to the natural resources they have conquered, but they should be forced to pay royalties to the US in order to exploit them.

By publishing a number of internal US military reports, Julian Assange has not revealed any sensitive information. But all these documents show that the Pentagon has never been interested in winning the post-9/11 wars. Assange was persecuted to the point of insanity.

To wage these wars, the Pentagon secretly created clandestine Special Forces: 60,000 soldiers without uniforms [13]. They are capable of assassinating anyone in any country without leaving any trace. Bob Woodward revealed the “Global Attack Matrix” operation, decided three days after the attacks [14]. Wayne Madsen published the names of the first victims in Papua, Nigeria, Indonesia and Lebanon [15].

CONCLUSION

All my predictions have been verified over the last 20 years. Unfortunately, few people have seen how the world has changed. Most refuse to make the connection between the revelations of one side and those of the other and to see the responsibility of the Western democracies for the crimes committed in the wider Middle East.

The problem remains the same: we cannot admit that the criminal is close to us.

Translation
Roger Lagassé

[1] L’Effroyable imposture, Thierry Meyssan, Carnot (2002). Second edition, revised and corrected L’Effroyable imposture suivie du Pentagate prefaced by General Leonid Ivashov (who was acting chief of the general staff of the Russian armed forces on September 11, 2001), Demi-Lune, 2006. English Version : The Big Lie. Version en español : La Gran Impostura.

[2] According to my detractors, I had not been at the scene, as a ” true journalist ” would have had to. But the United States had banned access to the three “crime scenes” for reasons of ” national security ” and for years no journalist, from absolutely no media, had access to them. So the reproach of ” amateurism ” would have to apply not only to me but also to all the journalists who repeated the official version.

[3] The adjective ” conspiratorial ” began to be used in the 1960s to designate those who questioned the official thesis of the lone sniper who supposedly assassinated President Kennedy and denounced that what he did was a conspiracy. possible that assassination.

[4] Indeed, I deny the official version of the attacks of September 11, 2001. But the term ” denialism ” actually alludes to an extreme right-wing current – whose ideas I have always fought – that denies the will of the Nazis to perpetrate the genocide of the Jews in Europe.

[5] Against All Enemies, Inside America’s War on Terror, Richard Clarke, Free Press, 2004.

[6] Like every year, Warren Buffet – who was then the richest man in the world – gave a charity dinner in Nebraska. But, something that had never happened before, that day the annual dinner was not organized in a large hotel but … in a military base. The invited company bosses had given their New York employees the day off, which explains the relatively low death toll in the collapse of the Twin Towers.

[7] A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq and the abuse of America’s intelligence agencies, James Bamford, Anchor Books (2004).

[8] «¿Quién inventó las falsas llamadas telefónicas desde los aviones secuestrados el 11 de Septiembre?», por Giulietto Chiesa, Megachip-Globalist (Italia) , Red Voltaire , 28 de julio de 2013.

[9] Top Secret America : The Rise of the New American Security State, Dana Priest & William M. Arkin, Little, Brown and Company (2011).

[10] The “Five Eyes” or Five Eyes is the name of the alliance of services for eavesdropping and interception of global communications in which Australia, Canada, the United States, New Zealand and the United Kingdom participate. in 1941 by the Atlantic Charter.

[11] “The Rumsfeld/Cebrowski doctrine”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Roger Lagassé, Voltaire Network, 25 May 2021.

[12] “Stabiliy American’s Ennemy”, col. Ralph Peters, Parameters #31-4 (winter 2001).

[13] “Exclusive : Inside the Military’s Secret Undercover Army”, William M. Arkin, Newsweek, May 17, 2021.

[14] Saturday, September 15, At Camp David, Advise and Dissent, Bob Woodward & Dan Balz, Washington Post, January 31, 2002.

[15] «J’accuse – Bush’s Death Squads», Wayne Madsen, Makingnews.com, January 31, 2002.

20 Years of Government-Sponsored Tyranny: The Rise of the Security-Industrial Complex from 9/11 to COVID-19

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By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people in — and the West in general — into an unbearable hell and a choking life.”—Osama bin Laden (October 2001), as reported by CNN

What a strange and harrowing road we’ve walked since September 11, 2001, littered with the debris of our once-vaunted liberties. We have gone from a nation that took great pride in being a model of a representative democracy to being a model of how to persuade a freedom-loving people to march in lockstep with a police state.

Our losses are mounting with every passing day.

What began with the post-9/11 passage of the USA Patriot Act  has snowballed into the eradication of every vital safeguard against government overreach, corruption and abuse.

The citizenry’s unquestioning acquiescence to anything the government wants to do in exchange for the phantom promise of safety and security has resulted in a society where the nation has been locked down into a militarized, mechanized, hypersensitive, legalistic, self-righteous, goose-stepping antithesis of every principle upon which this nation was founded.

Set against a backdrop of government surveillance, militarized police, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, eminent domain, overcriminalization, armed surveillance drones, whole body scanners, stop and frisk searches, police violence and the like—all of which have been sanctioned by Congress, the White House and the courts—our constitutional freedoms have been steadily chipped away at, undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded.

The rights embodied in the Constitution, if not already eviscerated, are on life support.

Free speech, the right to protest, the right to challenge government wrongdoing, due process, a presumption of innocence, the right to self-defense, accountability and transparency in government, privacy, press, sovereignty, assembly, bodily integrity, representative government: all of these and more have become casualties in the government’s war on the American people, a war that has grown more pronounced since 9/11.

Indeed, since the towers fell on 9/11, the U.S. government has posed a greater threat to our freedoms than any terrorist, extremist or foreign entity ever could.

While nearly 3,000 people died in the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government and its agents have easily killed at least ten times that number of civilians in the U.S. and abroad since 9/11 through its police shootings, SWAT team raids, drone strikes and profit-driven efforts to police the globe, sell weapons to foreign nations (which too often fall into the hands of terrorists), and foment civil unrest in order to keep the security industrial complex gainfully employed.

The American people have been treated like enemy combatants, to be spied on, tracked, scanned, frisked, searched, subjected to all manner of intrusions, intimidated, invaded, raided, manhandled, censored, silenced, shot at, locked up, denied due process, and killed.

In allowing ourselves to be distracted by terror drills, foreign wars, color-coded warnings, pandemic lockdowns and other carefully constructed exercises in propaganda, sleight of hand, and obfuscation, we failed to recognize that the U.S. government—the government that was supposed to be a “government of the people, by the people, for the people”—has become the enemy of the people.

Consider that the government’s answer to every problem has been more government—at taxpayer expense—and less individual liberty.

Every crisis—manufactured or otherwise—since the nation’s early beginnings has become a make-work opportunity for the government to expand its reach and its power at taxpayer expense while limiting our freedoms at every turn: The Great Depression. The World Wars. The 9/11 terror attacks. The COVID-19 pandemic.

Viewed in this light, the history of the United States is a testament to the old adage that liberty decreases as government (and government bureaucracy) grows. Or, to put it another way, as government expands, liberty contracts.

This is how the emergency state operates, after all, and we should know: after all, we have spent the past 20 years in a state of emergency.

From 9/11 to COVID-19, “we the people” have acted the part of the helpless, gullible victims desperately in need of the government to save us from whatever danger threatens. In turn, the government has been all too accommodating and eager while also expanding its power and authority in the so-called name of national security.

This is a government that has grown so corrupt, greedy, power-hungry and tyrannical over the course of the past 240-plus years that our constitutional republic has since given way to idiocracy, and representative government has given way to a kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves) and a kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled career politicians, corporations and thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of American citizens).

What this really amounts to is a war on the American people, fought on American soil, funded with taxpayer dollars, and waged with a single-minded determination to use national crises, manufactured or otherwise, in order to transform the American homeland into a battlefield.

Indeed, the government’s (mis)management of various states of emergency in the past 20 years has spawned a massive security-industrial complex the likes of which have never been seen before. According to the National Priorities Project at the progressive Institute for Policy Studies, since 9/11, the United States has spent $21 trillion on “militarization, surveillance, and repression.”

Clearly, this is not a government that is a friend to freedom.

Rather, this is a government that, in conjunction with its corporate partners, views the citizenry as consumers and bits of data to be bought, sold and traded.

This is a government that spies on and treats its people as if they have no right to privacy, especially in their own homes while the freedom to be human is being erased.

This is a government that is laying the groundwork to weaponize the public’s biomedical data as a convenient means by which to penalize certain “unacceptable” social behaviors. Incredibly, a new government agency HARPA (a healthcare counterpart to the Pentagon’s research and development arm DARPA) will take the lead in identifying and targeting “signs” of mental illness or violent inclinations among the populace by using artificial intelligence to collect data from Apple Watches, Fitbits, Amazon Echo and Google Home.

This is a government that routinely engages in taxation without representation, whose elected officials lobby for our votes only to ignore us once elected.

This is a government comprised of petty bureaucrats, vigilantes masquerading as cops, and faceless technicians.

This is a government that railroads taxpayers into financing government programs whose only purpose is to increase the power and wealth of the corporate elite.

This is a government—a warring empire—that forces its taxpayers to pay for wars abroad that serve no other purpose except to expand the reach of the military industrial complex.

This is a government that subjects its people to scans, searches, pat downs and other indignities by the TSA and VIPR raids on so-called “soft” targets like shopping malls and bus depots by black-clad, Darth Vader look-alikes.

This is a government that uses fusion centers, which represent the combined surveillance efforts of federal, state and local law enforcement, to track the citizenry’s movements, record their conversations, and catalogue their transactions.

This is a government whose wall-to-wall surveillance has given rise to a suspect society in which the burden of proof has been reversed such that Americans are now assumed guilty until or unless they can prove their innocence.

This is a government that treats its people like second-class citizens who have no rights, and is working overtime to stigmatize and dehumanize any and all who do not fit with the government’s plans for this country.

This is a government that uses free speech zones, roving bubble zones and trespass laws to silence, censor and marginalize Americans and restrict their First Amendment right to speak truth to power.

This is a government that persists in renewing the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which allows the president and the military to arrest and detain American citizens indefinitely based on the say-so of the government.

This is a government that saddled us with the Patriot Act, which opened the door to all manner of government abuses and intrusions on our privacy.

This is a government that, in direct opposition to the dire warnings of those who founded our country, has allowed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to establish a standing army by way of programs that transfer surplus military hardware to local and state police.

This is a government that has militarized American’s domestic police, equipping them with military weapons such as “tens of thousands of machine guns; nearly 200,000 ammunition magazines; a million hollow-point bullets; thousands of pieces of camouflage and night-vision equipment; and hundreds of silencers, armored cars and aircraft,” in addition to armored vehicles, sound cannons and the like.

This is a government that has provided cover to police when they shoot and kill unarmed individuals just for standing a certain way, or moving a certain way, or holding something—anything—that police could misinterpret to be a gun, or igniting some trigger-centric fear in a police officer’s mind that has nothing to do with an actual threat to their safety.

This is a government that has created a Constitution-free zone within 100 miles inland of the border around the United States, paving the way for Border Patrol agents to search people’s homes, intimately probe their bodies, and rifle through their belongings, all without a warrant. Nearly 66% of Americans (2/3 of the U.S. population, 197.4 million people) now live within that 100-mile-deep, Constitution-free zone.

This is a government that treats public school students as if they were prison inmates, enforcing zero tolerance policies that criminalize childish behavior, and indoctrinating them with teaching that emphasizes rote memorization and test-taking over learning, synthesizing and critical thinking.

This is a government that is operating in the negative on every front: it’s spending far more than what it makes (and takes from the American taxpayers) and it is borrowing heavily (from foreign governments and Social Security) to keep the government operating and keep funding its endless wars abroad. Meanwhile, the nation’s sorely neglected infrastructure—railroads, water pipelines, ports, dams, bridges, airports and roads—is rapidly deteriorating.

This is a government that has empowered police departments to make a profit at the expense of those they have sworn to protect through the use of asset forfeiture laws, speed traps, and red light cameras.

This is a government whose gun violence—inflicted on unarmed individuals by battlefield-trained SWAT teams, militarized police, and bureaucratic government agents trained to shoot first and ask questions later—poses a greater threat to the safety and security of the nation than any mass shooter. There are now reportedly more bureaucratic (non-military) government agents armed with high-tech, deadly weapons than U.S. Marines.

This is a government that has allowed the presidency to become a dictatorship operating above and beyond the law, regardless of which party is in power.

This is a government that treats dissidents, whistleblowers and freedom fighters as enemies of the state.

This is a government that has in recent decades unleashed untold horrors upon the world—including its own citizenry—in the name of global conquest, the acquisition of greater wealth, scientific experimentation, and technological advances, all packaged in the guise of the greater good.

This is a government that allows its agents to break laws with immunity while average Americans get the book thrown at them.

This is a government that speaks in a language of force. What is this language of force? Militarized police. Riot squads. Camouflage gear. Black uniforms. Armored vehicles. Mass arrests. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Batons. Strip searches. Surveillance cameras. Kevlar vests. Drones. Lethal weapons. Less-than-lethal weapons unleashed with deadly force. Rubber bullets. Water cannons. Stun grenades. Arrests of journalists. Crowd control tactics. Intimidation tactics. Brutality. Contempt of cop charges.

This is a government that justifies all manner of government tyranny and power grabs in the so-called name of national security, national crises and national emergencies.

This is a government that exports violence worldwide, with one of this country’s most profitable exports being weapons. Indeed, the United States, the world’s largest exporter of arms, has been selling violence to the world in order to prop up the military industrial complex and maintain its endless wars abroad.

This is a government that is consumed with squeezing every last penny out of the population and seemingly unconcerned if essential freedoms are trampled in the process.

This is a government that routinely undermines the Constitution and rides roughshod over the rights of the citizenry, eviscerating individual freedoms so that its own powers can be expanded.

This is a government that believes it has the authority to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation, the Constitution be damned.

In other words, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is not a government that believes in, let alone upholds, freedom.

Bring All the Troops Home: Stop Policing the Globe and Put an End to Endless Wars

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By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“Let us resolve that never again will we send the precious young blood of this country to die trying to prop up a corrupt military dictatorship abroad. This is also the time to turn away from excessive preoccupation overseas to the rebuilding of our own nation. America must be restored to a proper role in the world. But we can do that only through the recovery of confidence in ourselves…. together we will call America home to the ideals that nourished us from the beginning.”—George S. McGovern, former Senator and presidential candidate

It’s time to bring all our troops home.

Bring them home from Somalia, Iraq and Syria. Bring them home from Germany, South Korea and Japan. Bring them home from Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Oman. Bring them home from Niger, Chad and Mali. Bring them home from Turkey, the Philippines, and northern Australia.

It’s not enough to pull American troops out of Afghanistan, America’s longest, bloodiest and most expensive war to date.

It’s time that we stop policing the globe, stop occupying other countries, and stop waging endless wars.

That’s not what’s going to happen, of course.

The U.S. military reportedly has more than 1.3 million men and women on active duty, with more than 200,000 of them stationed overseas in nearly every country in the world.

Those numbers are likely significantly higher in keeping with the Pentagon’s policy of not fully disclosing where and how many troops are deployed for the sake of “operational security and denying the enemy any advantage.” As investigative journalist David Vine explains, “Although few Americans realize it, the United States likely has more bases in foreign lands than any other people, nation, or empire in history.”

Don’t fall for the propaganda, though.

America’s military forces aren’t being deployed abroad to protect our freedoms here at home. Rather, they’re being used to guard oil fields, build foreign infrastructure and protect the financial interests of the corporate elite. In fact, the United States military spends about $81 billion a year just to protect oil supplies around the world.

The reach of America’s military empire includes close to 800 bases in as many as 160 countries, operated at a cost of more than $156 billion annually. As Vine reports, “Even US military resorts and recreation areas in places like the Bavarian Alps and Seoul, South Korea, are bases of a kind. Worldwide, the military runs more than 170 golf courses.”

This is how a military empire occupies the globe.

After 20 years of propping up Afghanistan to the tune of trillions of dollars and thousands of lives lost, the U.S. military may have finally been forced out, but those troops represent just a fraction of our military presence worldwide.

In an ongoing effort to police the globe, American military servicepeople continue to be deployed to far-flung places in the Middle East and elsewhere.

This is how the military industrial complex, aided and abetted by the likes of Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and others, continues to get rich at taxpayer expense.

Yet while the rationale may keep changing for why American military forces are policing the globe, these wars abroad aren’t making America—or the rest of the world—any safer, are certainly not making America great again, and are undeniably digging the U.S. deeper into debt.

War spending is bankrupting America.

Although the U.S. constitutes only 5% of the world’s population, America boasts almost 50% of the world’s total military expenditure, spending more on the military than the next 19 biggest spending nations combined.

In fact, the Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety.

The American military-industrial complex has erected an empire unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope, one dedicated to conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth.

Since 2001, the U.S. government has spent more than $4.7 trillion waging its endless wars.

Having been co-opted by greedy defense contractors, corrupt politicians and incompetent government officials, America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $32 million per hour.

In fact, the U.S. government has spent more money every five seconds in Iraq than the average American earns in a year.

Future wars and military exercises waged around the globe are expected to push the total bill upwards of $12 trillion by 2053.

Talk about fiscally irresponsible: the U.S. government is spending money it doesn’t have on a military empire it can’t afford.

As investigative journalist Uri Friedman puts it, for more than 15 years now, the United States has been fighting terrorism with a credit card, “essentially bankrolling the wars with debt, in the form of purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds by U.S.-based entities like pension funds and state and local governments, and by countries like China and Japan.”

War is not cheap, but it becomes outrageously costly when you factor in government incompetence, fraud, and greedy contractors. Indeed, a leading accounting firm concluded that one of the Pentagon’s largest agencies “can’t account for hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of spending.”

Unfortunately, the outlook isn’t much better for the spending that can be tracked.

A government audit found that defense contractor Boeing has been massively overcharging taxpayers for mundane parts, resulting in tens of millions of dollars in overspending. As the report noted, the American taxpayer paid:

$71 for a metal pin that should cost just 4 cents; $644.75 for a small gear smaller than a dime that sells for $12.51: more than a 5,100 percent increase in price. $1,678.61 for another tiny part, also smaller than a dime, that could have been bought within DoD for $7.71: a 21,000 percent increase. $71.01 for a straight, thin metal pin that DoD had on hand, unused by the tens of thousands, for 4 cents: an increase of over 177,000 percent.

That price gouging has become an accepted form of corruption within the American military empire is a sad statement on how little control “we the people” have over our runaway government.

Mind you, this isn’t just corrupt behavior. It’s deadly, downright immoral behavior.

Americans have thus far allowed themselves to be spoon-fed a steady diet of pro-war propaganda that keeps them content to wave flags with patriotic fervor and less inclined to look too closely at the mounting body counts, the ruined lives, the ravaged countries, the blowback arising from ill-advised targeted-drone killings and bombing campaigns in foreign lands, or the transformation of our own homeland into a warzone.

That needs to change.

The U.S. government is not making the world any safer. It’s making the world more dangerous. It is estimated that the U.S. military drops a bomb somewhere in the world every 12 minutes. Since 9/11, the United States government has directly contributed to the deaths of around 500,000 human beings. Every one of those deaths was paid for with taxpayer funds.

The U.S. government is not making America any safer. It’s exposing American citizens to alarming levels of blowback, a CIA term referring to the unintended consequences of the U.S. government’s international activities. Chalmers Johnson, a former CIA consultant, repeatedly warned that America’s use of its military to gain power over the global economy would result in devastating blowback.

The 9/11 attacks were blowback. The Boston Marathon Bombing was blowback. The attempted Times Square bomber was blowback. The Fort Hood shooter, a major in the U.S. Army, was blowback.

The U.S. military’s ongoing drone strikes will, I fear, spur yet more blowback against the American people. The latest drone strike reportedly killed seven children, ages 2 to 10, in Afghanistan.

The war hawks’ militarization of America—bringing home the spoils of war (the military tanks, grenade launchers, Kevlar helmets, assault rifles, gas masks, ammunition, battering rams, night vision binoculars, etc.) and handing them over to local police, thereby turning America into a battlefield—is also blowback.

James Madison was right: “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” As Madison explained, “Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes… known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.”

We are seeing this play out before our eyes.

The government is destabilizing the economy, destroying the national infrastructure through neglect and a lack of resources, and turning taxpayer dollars into blood money with its endless wars, drone strikes and mounting death tolls.

Clearly, our national priorities are in desperate need of an overhauling.

At the height of its power, even the mighty Roman Empire could not stare down a collapsing economy and a burgeoning military. Prolonged periods of war and false economic prosperity largely led to its demise. As historian Chalmers Johnson predicts:

The fate of previous democratic empires suggests that such a conflict is unsustainable and will be resolved in one of two ways. Rome attempted to keep its empire and lost its democracy. Britain chose to remain democratic and in the process let go its empire. Intentionally or not, the people of the United States already are well embarked upon the course of non-democratic empire.

This is the “unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex” that President Dwight Eisenhower warned us more than 50 years ago not to let endanger our liberties or democratic processes.

Eisenhower, who served as Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, was alarmed by the rise of the profit-driven war machine that emerged following the war—one that, in order to perpetuate itself, would have to keep waging war.

We failed to heed his warning.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, there’s not much time left before we reach the zero hour.

It’s time to stop policing the globe, end these wars-without-end, and bring the troops home.

7 lies about Afghanistan

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A scene of panic at Kabul airport as former CIA collaborators try to escape the revenge of the Afghan people.

In covering the fall of Kabul, the Western media are mindlessly repeating seven lies of Western propaganda. By misrepresenting the history of Afghanistan, they mask the crimes committed in that country and make it impossible to foresee the fate that Washington has written for it. And if the Taliban were not the most wicked…

By Thierry Meyssan

Source: Voltairenet.org

French President Emmanuel Macron and US President Joe Biden addressed their nation on the capture of Kabul by the Taliban on August 15, 2021.

1.- THE AFGHAN WAR IS NOT A RESPONSE TO 9/11, IT WAS PLANNED BEFORE THE ATTACKS

According to these two politicians, the sole purpose of the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was to “pursue those who attacked us on September 11, 2001, and to ensure that al-Qaeda could not use Afghanistan as a base for further attacks. » [1]

Joseph Goebbels, the Propaganda Minister of the Third Reich, is said to have said that “A lie repeated ten times remains a lie; repeated ten thousand times, it becomes the truth.” But the facts are stubborn and, whatever Mr Macron and Mr Biden may think, the 2001 war was decided in mid-July 2001, when the Berlin negotiations between the United States and the United Kingdom on the one hand and the Taliban, not the Afghan government, on the other failed. Pakistan and Russia were observers at these secret talks. The Taliban delegation entered Germany in violation of the UN Security Council’s travel ban. After the failure of these negotiations, Pakistani Foreign Minister Naiz Naik returned to his country and sounded the alarm. Pakistan then looked for new allies. It offered China a gateway to the Indian Ocean (what we see today with the ’Silk Road’). The United States and the United Kingdom began to amass their troops in the area: 40,000 men in Egypt and almost the entire British fleet in the Arabian Sea. It was only after this arrangement was put in place that the attacks of September 11th took place.

2. AL-QAEDA IS NOT A THREAT FOR THE ANGLO-SAXONS, BUT AN INSTRUMENT

According to President Biden: “Our mission to reduce the terrorist threat of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and to kill Osama bin Laden has been a success.

However, it was the director of France’s foreign secret services, Alexandres de Marenches, who proposed to his US counterpart within the framework of the Pinay Circle [2] to provoke a Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in order to trap them there [3]. President Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzeziński, sought out anti-communist billionaire Osama Bin Laden in Beirut and asked him to lead Arab mercenaries in a terrorist campaign against the Afghan communist government [4]. Bin Laden was in Beirut to meet with former Lebanese President Camille Chamoun, a member of the World Anti-Communist League [5]. Washington chose Bin Laden for two reasons: First, he was a member of a secret society, the Muslim Brotherhood, which allowed him to recruit fighters; second, he was one of the heirs to the largest construction company in the Arab world. As such, he had the men and know-how to turn the underground rivers of the Hindu Kush into military communication routes.

Later, the same Osama bin Laden served as a military adviser to the Bosnian president, Alija Izetbegović, in 1992-94. His fighters followed him there. They abandoned the name “Mujahideen” for the “Arab Legion”. His camp was visited by Russian commandos, who were taken prisoner there. However, before they were arrested, they had time to search his command room and found that all the military documents were written in English and not in Arabic. [6]

Later still, Osama Bin Laden used his fighters for one-off operations. He solicited them by choosing them according to his needs from his “roster”, in Arabic “Al-Qaeda” (القاعدة).

It is therefore indisputable that Osama Bin Laden was for many years an agent of the United States. However, the latter claim that he turned against them, which nothing, absolutely nothing, proves. In any case, Osama bin Laden was seriously ill. He needed daily care in a sterile room. He was therefore taken care of in the American hospital in Dubai in July 2001, as revealed by Le Figaro [7]. This information was denied by the said hospital, but was confirmed to me by Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyane (the current President of the United Arab Emirates) who assured me that he had visited him there in the presence of the local CIA chief of staff. Finally, Osama bin Laden was treated at the military hospital in Rawalpindi (Pakistan) [8] where he died in December 2001. His funeral took place in Afghanistan, attended by two representatives of the British MI6 who wrote a report on the matter.

Also indisputably opposing the theory that Osama bin Laden had turned against his CIA employers was the fact that until 1999 – i.e. after the attacks attributed to him against the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia and the US embassies in Nairobi (Kenya) and Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) – he had a public relations office in London. It was from this office that he launched his Call to Jihad against Jews and Crusaders.

The fact that for ten years we have heard and seen recordings of people claiming to be Osama Bin Laden only deceives those who want to believe: the Swiss experts of the Dalle Molle Institute of Perceptive Artificial Intelligence, which at the time was used by the big banks in sensitive cases, were formal. These recordings are forgeries (including the one released by the Pentagon in which he claims responsibility for the 9/11 attacks) and do not correspond to the real Bin Laden. If facial and voice recognition was a speciality at the time, it is now a common technique. You can check for yourself with software that is available everywhere.

After Bin Laden’s death, Ayman al-Zawahiri became the emir of Al Qaeda. He still holds this position. The latter – who had supervised the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat – lived for several years after 2001 in the US embassy in Baku (Azerbaijan). [9] He was, at least in that period, the only person who could be considered a terrorist. He was, at least during this period, protected by the US Marines. His current whereabouts are unknown, but there is no reason to believe that he is no longer under US protection.

3- THE US DOES NOT FOCUS ON “COUNTER-TERRORISM”, BUT FUNDS AND ARMS TERRORISM

President Biden explained at length, during his speech on the fall of Kabul, that the United States was not there to build states, but only to fight terrorism.

The phrase ’fight against terrorism’ has been repeated for twenty years, but that does not make it more meaningful. Terrorism is not a flesh-and-blood opponent. It is a method of combat. All the world’s armies can use it in certain circumstances. During the Cold War, the two blocs used it extensively against each other.

Since President George W. Bush (the son) declared the ’war on terror’ (i.e. the ’war on war’), the use of this military technique has been increasing. Westerners first think of attacks in a few large cities, but the worst has been achieved with the creation of small terrorist states in the wider Middle East up to the sinister ’Islamic State of the Levant’ (Daesh) and now the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.

Afghans, Iraqis, Libyans and Syrians initially believed the US narrative of events, but they are under no illusion. After 20 years of war, they have understood that the United States does not want to do any good. Washington does not fight terrorism, but creates, finances and arms groups that practice terrorism.

4- THE TALIBAN DID NOT FIGHT A WAR, THEY TOOK WHAT THE US GAVE THEM

Presidents Macron and Biden are playing dumb about the Taliban’s “takeover of Kabul”. According to them, “Afghan political leaders have given up and fled the country. The Afghan army has collapsed, sometimes without even trying to fight. But how did they flee, if not with Western military aircraft? And the Afghan army did not “sometimes seek to fight”, it was the other way round: it only “sometimes” sought to fight. The Afghan borders were among the most secure in the world. US soldiers recorded everyone’s identity with electronic means, including iris recognition.

The Afghan army consisted of 300,000 men – more than the French armies – who were very well trained by the US, France and others. It was over-equipped with sophisticated equipment. All its infantry had body armour and night vision systems. It had a very capable air force. In contrast, the Taliban has no more than 100,000 men, which is three times less. They are hooligans in sandals and armed with Kalashnikovs. They had no air force – they suddenly have one today with trained pilots from who knows where -. If there had been fighting, they would have been defeated for sure.

The regime change was decided under President Donald Trump. It was to take place on May 1st. But President Joe Biden changed that timetable to change history. He used the delay to set up military bases in the neighbouring countries and send at least 10,000 mercenaries. He has mobilised the Turkish army, which is already present in the country, but which no one is talking about. The latter has already recruited at least 2,000 jihadists living in Idleb (Syria) and continues to hire them.

It is important to remember that during the war against the Soviets, the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, was already a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and the leader of a militia, the Millî Görüş (the one that today opens mosques in Germany and France). It was in this double capacity that he came to kneel before Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the Afghan leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and future Prime Minister. Hekmatyar subsequently pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda, which did not prevent him from running in the 2019 Afghan presidential election under US protection.

The allies began repatriating their nationals several months ago. They thought they would have time before September 11th, or at worst before midnight on August 30th. But Washington decided otherwise by choosing August 15th, the date of India’s bank holidays. This was a warning to New Delhi, which does not appreciate the fact that President Ghani’s Pashtuns are being replaced by those of Emir Akhundzada, even though they support other ethnic groups.

The scenes of panic we saw at Kabul airports reminded us of those in Saigon during the US defeat in Vietnam. It is indeed quite the same. The Afghans clinging to the aircraft are not mostly translators from Western embassies, but agents of “Operation Omega” set up under President Obama [10] . They are members of the Khost Protection Force (KPF) and the National Directorate of Security (NDS), counter-insurgency auxiliaries, like the Vietnamese of “Operation Phoenix”. They were responsible for torturing and killing Afghans opposed to the foreign occupation. They committed so many crimes that the Taliban were like choirboys [11].

Soon we will see a completely different landscape in Afghanistan.

5. THE US DID NOT LOSE AFGHANISTAN TO CHINA, BUT FORCED CHINESE COMPANIES TO ACCEPT ITS PROTECTION

The US has not lost anything in Afghanistan because it does not want to establish peace there. They don’t care about the one million deaths they have caused there in 20 years. They just want that region to be unstable, that no government can control the exploitation of the natural resources there. They want companies, from whatever developed country, to be able to exploit them only by accepting their protection.
This is the Hollywood-popularised scheme of the globalised world, protected by a compound, with special forces going abroad to monitor exploitation sites in wilderness areas.

This strategy was developed by Donald Rumsfeld, George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense, and Admiral Arthur Cebrowski, who had already computerized the US military. On September 11, 2001, it became the way of thinking of the US military staff. It was popularised by Cebrowski’s deputy, Thomas Barnett, in his book The Pentagon’s New Map [12].

It was this paradigm shift that President Bush called ’War Without End’. By this he meant that the US would forever be fighting terrorism, or rather forever instrumenting terrorist groups to prevent political organisation in these regions.

Yes, Chinese companies are already mining in Afghanistan, but from now on they will have to pay a price to the US or be subjected to terrorist attacks. So what if it’s a racket?

6- WESTERNERS DO NOT DEFEND THE ENLIGHTENMENT AGAINST OBSCURANTISM, BUT RATHER INSTRUMENTALISE IT

The first lady of the United States, Laura Bush, made us all cry by telling us the story of little girls massacred by the Taliban because they dared to wear nail polish. But the truth is quite different.

When President Carter, Zbigniew Brzeziński and Alexandre de Marenches supported the Afghan Islamists in 1978, they were fighting the communists who were opening schools for girls. Because for them the fight against the USSR’s allies came before human rights. Similarly today, President Biden and his Secretary of State Antony Blinken support the Taliban because, for them, controlling access to the natural wealth of the wider Middle East comes before human rights. And they are doing the same in Iraq, Libya and Syria.

The US has not only supported Islamists in war-torn countries. For example, it put General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, in power in Pakistan to use his country as a rear base for anti-Soviet fighters. He overthrew democracy, hanged President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and re-established Sharia law. President Bhutto’s daughter, Benazir Bhutto, who was Pakistan’s prime minister in the 1990s, was also assassinated by the Taliban.

There is no need to go back over the crimes of the Western counter-insurgency, the panic of their collaborators at Kabul airports is enough.

If Islamism and secularism have been used to manipulate the Afghans and to smoke out the West, political life in Afghanistan is not based on these concepts, but first and foremost on ethnic divisions. There are about fifteen of them, the largest of which, the Pashtuns, are also strongly represented in Pakistan. It is still a tribal country and not yet a nation. Other ethnic groups are supported by other countries in the region because they are also present there.

7- FRANCE HAS NOT ALWAYS SUPPORTED US CRIMES IN AFGHANISTAN, BUT ONLY SINCE PRESIDENT SARKOZY

According to President Emmanuel Macron: “President Jacques Chirac, as early as October 2001, decided that France should participate in international action, in solidarity with our American friends and allies who had just suffered a terrible attack on their soil. With a clear objective: to combat a terrorist threat that was directly targeting our territory and that of our allies from Afghanistan, which had become the sanctuary of Islamist terrorism”. [13]

It is a distracting way to erase a characteristic French conflict. In October 2001, President Chirac violently opposed the participation of the French army in the Anglo-Saxon occupation of Afghanistan. He only authorised deployment under UN Security Council Resolution 1386. The French soldiers were indeed under the orders of Nato, but as part of the International Security and Assistance Force (ISAF). They were only involved in reconstruction assistance. They did not take prisoners, but eventually arrested fighters and immediately handed them over to the Afghan government. It was President Nicolas Sarkozy who changed this status and made France complicit in the crimes of the United States. It is because of this change that France is currently exfiltrating members of the Khost Protection Force (KPF) and the National Directorate of Security (NDS). And it will probably pay the price.