Tag Archives: CIA

The Importance of the Official 9/11 Myth

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By Kevin Ryan

Source: Washington’s Blog

People sometimes wonder why is it important to investigate the alleged hijackers and others officially accused of committing the 9/11 crimes. After all, the accused 19 hijackers could not have accomplished most of what happened. The answer is that the official accounts are important because they are part of the crimes. Identifying and examining the people who created the official 9/11 myth helps to reveal the ones who were responsible overall.

The people who actually committed the crimes of September 11th didn’t intend to just hijack planes and take down the buildings—they intended to blame others. To accomplish that plan the real criminals needed to create a false account of what happened and undoubtedly that need was considered well in advance. In this light, the official reports can be seen to provide a link between the “blaming others” part of the crimes and the physical parts.

Pushing the concept of “Islamic Terrorism” was the beginning of the effort to blame others, although the exact 9/11 plan might not have been worked out at the time. This concept was largely a conversion of the existing Soviet threat, which by 1989 was rapidly losing its ability to frighten the public, into something that would serve more current policy needs. Paul Bremer and Brian Jenkins were at the forefront of this conversion of the Soviet threat into the threat of Islamic terrorism. Both Bremer and Jenkins were also intimately connected to the events at the World Trade Center.

The concerted effort to propagandize about Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden (OBL) seems to have begun in earnest in 1998. That’s when the African embassy bombings were attributed to OBL and the as-yet unreported group called Al Qaeda. The U.S. government responded with bombings of Sudan and Afghanistan and, with help from the New York Times, began to drum up an intense myth about the new enemy.

“This is, unfortunately, the war of the future,” Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said. “The Osama bin Laden organization has basically declared war on Americans and has made very clear that these are all Americans, anywhere.”

In retrospect, it is surprising that this was the first reference to Al Qaeda in the New York Times, coming only three years before 9/11. More surprising is that The Washington Post did not report on Al Qaeda until June 1999, and its reporting was highly speculative about the power behind this new threat.

“But for all its claims about a worldwide conspiracy to murder Americans, the government’s case is, at present, largely circumstantial. The indictment never explains how bin Laden runs al Qaeda or how he may have masterminded the embassy bombings.”

Despite this skepticism from The Post, the reports about Al Qaeda continued in an odd mixture of propaganda and doubt. For example, The Times reported on the trial of the men accused of the African embassy attacks in May 2001. That article contradicted itself saying that “prosecutors never introduced evidence directly showing that Mr. bin Laden ordered the embassy attacks” and yet that a “former advisor” to Bin Laden, one Ali Mohamed, claimed that Bin Laden “pointed to where a truck could go as a suicide bomber.” The fact that Mohamed had worked for the U.S. Army, the FBI, and the CIA was not mentioned.

Other facts were ignored as well. That OBL had worked with the CIA and that Al Qaeda was basically a creation of CIA programs like Operation Cyclone were realities that began to fade into the background. By the time 9/11 happened, those facts were apparently forgotten by a majority of U.S. leaders and media sources. Also overlooked were the histories of people like Frank Carlucci and Richard Armitage, who played major roles in Operation Cyclone and who remained powerful players at the time of the 9/11 attacks.

In the two years before 9/11, the alleged hijackers were very active within the United States. They traveled extensively and often seemed to be making an effort to be noticed. When they were not trying to be noticed, they engaged in distinctly non-Muslim behavior. Mohamed Atta’s actions were erratic, in ways that were similar to those of Lee Harvey Oswald, and Atta appeared to be protected by U.S. authorities.

Meanwhile, leading U.S. terrorism experts seemed to be facilitating Al Qaeda terrorism. Evidence suggests that U.S. intelligence agency leaders Louis Freeh and George Tenet facilitated and covered-up acts of terrorism in the years before 9/11. Both of their agencies, the CIA and FBI, later took extraordinary measures to hide evidence related to the 9/11 attacks. And both agencies have made a mockery of the trial of those officially accused of helping OBL and the alleged hijackers.

Counter-terrorism leader Richard Clarke inexplicably helped OBL stay out of trouble, protecting him on at least two occasions. Clarke blatantly failed to follow-up on known Al Qaeda cells operating within the United States. After 9/11, Clarke was among those who falsely pointed to Abu Zubaydah as a top leader of Al Qaeda. Zubaydah’s torture testimony was then used as the basis for the 9/11 Commission Report.

Former CIA operative Porter Goss created the first official account of what happened on 9/11, along with his mentor Bob Graham. This was the report of the Joint Congressional Inquiry, produced by the intelligence oversight committees of the U.S. Congress. It was greatly influenced by people who should have been prime suspects. For example, Richard Clarke was the one in charge of the secure video conference at the White House that failed miserably to connect leaders and respond to the attacks. In the Joint Inquiry’s report, Clarke was cited as an authoritative reference 46 times. CIA director George Tenet was cited 77 times, and Louis Freeh was cited 31 times.

Therefore it is imperative that the people who worked to create the background story behind OBL and the accused hijackers be investigated for their roles in the 9/11 crimes. This includes not only those who were figureheads behind the official reports, but more importantly the ones who provided the evidence and testimony upon which those reports were built. The alleged hijackers and their associates should also be of considerable interest to 9/11 investigators. That’s because what we know about them was provided by people who we can assume were connected to the crimes and what we don’t yet know about them can reveal more of the truth.

The Real Reason Brazil’s Democratically Elected Dilma Rousseff Was Impeached

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By Graham Vanbergen

Source: TruePublica

The real reason for the democratically elected leader of the largest country in South America being ‘impeached’ was not alleged corruption by its socialist president Dilma Rousseff, but more about Brazil’s elite power class and their media oligarchs who have failed time and time again to be democratically elected.

This by David Miranda from Brazil, The Guardian – “Slowly, the outside world has begun to see past the pleasing, two-dimensional caricature manufactured by its domestic press, and to recognise who will be empowered once Rousseff is removed. It has now become clear that corruption is not the cause of the effort to oust Brazil’s twice-elected president; rather, corruption is merely the pretext.

The story of Brazil’s political crisis, and the rapidly changing global perception of it, begins with its national media. The country’s dominant broadcast and print outlets are owned by a tiny handful of Brazil’s richest families, and are steadfastly conservative. For decades, those media outlets have been used to agitate for the Brazilian rich, ensuring that severe wealth inequality (and the political inequality that results) remains firmly in place.

But what most outside Brazil did not see was that the country’s plutocratic media had spent months inciting protests (while pretending merely to “cover” them). The protesters were not remotely representative of Brazil’s population. They were, instead, disproportionately white and wealthy: the very same people who have opposed the PT and its anti-poverty programmes for two decades.”

A New York Times article last week reported that “60% of the 594 members of Brazil’s Congress” – the ones voting to impeach Rousseff – “face serious charges like bribery, electoral fraud, illegal deforestation, kidnapping and homicide”. By contrast, said the article, Rousseff “is something of a rarity among Brazil’s major political figures: she has not been accused of stealing for herself”.

And from TruePublica columnist Stephen Lendman“President Dilma Rousseff’s ouster was orchestrated in Washington, complicit with corrupted Brazilian fascists – usurping power by removing her. Her impeachment was certain once the nation’s corruption-ridden Senate suspended her in May on trumped up budget-manipulation charges.

On August 31, it became official. Tyranny replaced Brazilian democracy. Telesur reported 49 senators voting for Rousseff’s impeachment “are themselves targets of criminal inquiries.” She committed no crimes. Nothing justified her removal. Allegations against her were fabricated. 

Wednesday’s vote combined tragedy and farce – annulling 54 million votes electing her, returning the country to fascist rule, a sad moment for millions of Brazilians deserving better.”

Back in May this year The Guardian also headlined with “Brazil minister ousted after secret tape reveals plot to topple President Rousseff” in which “The credibility of Brazil’s interim government was rocked on Monday when a senior minister was forced to step aside amid further revelations about the machiavellian plot to impeach president Dilma Rousseff.

Just 10 days after taking office, the planning minister, Romero Jucá, announced that he would “go on leave” following the release of a secretly taped telephone conversation in which he said Rousseff needed to be removed to quash a vast corruption investigation that implicated him and other members of the country’s political elite.”

A plot was hatched to put into power one Michel Temer. He has since been implicated by corruption allegations himself following the release of a plea-bargain testimony implicating him in an enormous scandal centered on the country’s state oil company that included funds being illegally diverted to his party.

Perhaps it should be of no surprise then that as The Wall Street Journal said “It was the first time Mr. Temer has been directly implicated in the blockbuster corruption investigation known as Operation Car Wash, which has ensnared dozens of high-profile business and political figures, including leading members of Mr. Temer’s Brazilian Democratic Movement Party, or PMDB.”

At the time of the WSJ report in June this year, Mr. Temer was leading a government with an 11.3% approval rating – woeful by any estimation. Even George W. Bush had an approval rating of 22% at the end of his disastrous tenure as President of the USA.

And ZeroHedge was clearly taking no prisoners with its headline Another US-Sponsored Coup? Brazil’s New President Was An Embassy Informant For US Intelligence – “the Temer presidency may be nothing more than the latest manifestation of the US state department’s implementation of yet another puppet government. We know this because earlier today, Wikileaks released evidence via a declassified cable that Brazil’s new interim president was an embassy informant for US intelligence and military.”

The ousting of Brazil’s democratically elected President is yet more evidence that money and power leads to corruption on a grand scale. A propaganda war was waged against the electorate by a tiny elite who own the media and are a part of what is now a plutocratic regime. Yet again, we see another ‘scalp’ for America’s neocon lust and blood campaign for global domination as the evidence suggests CIA involvement and government support.

Stripping the veneer off America’s propaganda menagerie

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By Wayne Madsen

Source: Intrepid Report

National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange have doubled down recently on the games being played in cyberspace by America’s cyberwarriors. Snowden suggests that many of NSA’s most damaging malware programs are now in the hands of America’s opponents, thanks to enterprising foreign counterintelligence hackers known as the Shadow Brokers. Snowden believes that the malware, including destructive programs such as Stuxnet, are being auctioned off, via Bitcoin payments, by the Shadow Brokers. Snowden stated that the malware was obtained through hacking from a murky NSA operation called the “Equation Group.”

Assange, fearful that a new Ecuadorian president will hand him over to a Clinton administration in 2017, claims to have more hacked bombshells to drop on Team Clinton, courtesy of weak security in Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign computer systems.

We have entered a new phase of cyberwarfare, one in which America’s (and Israel’s) most damaging computer hacking and disruption programs are available to anyone willing to pay in Bitcoins on the cyberblack market. The Democratic Party’s leaked emails, coupled with the leaked State Department cables, has Hillary Clinton in an outrage. These disclosures, along with the Snowden disclosures that illustrate how America spies on friend and foe, have stripped the veneer off of America’s propaganda menagerie. Two of the three culprits Mrs. Clinton would like to see in prison for the rest of their lives are, for the time being, outside of Gulag America. Snowden is enjoying political asylum in Russia and Assange has asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The third, Chelsea Manning, is serving a 35-year prison term at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas and allegedly recently attempted suicide.

Paul Ceglia, who claims to have been the co-founder of Facebook, says he is on the run from the CIA after he filed suit against Facebook and its owner Mark Zuckerberg. Although Zuckerberg admits to having a past business relationship with Ceglia, the US Justice Department criminally charged Ceglia for trying to defraud Facebook after the former associate of Zuckerberg brought a civil suit in federal court in Buffalo against the company. Interestingly, Facebook has donated more money to Hillary Clinton than any other presidential candidate. But what is really at issue in the bizarre case is that Ceglia claims that Facebook’s seed money came from the CIA’s venture capital firm IN-Q-TEL, a charge to which WMR can attest after compiling a massive list of CIA front companies and proprietaries in the soon-to-be-published book: “The Almost Classified Guide to CIA Front Companies, Proprietaries and Contractors.”

The CIA and its partners at Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and other social media firms have striven to control the new media in the same manner that the CIA controlled the “old media” through operations like MOCKINGBIRD. During the Cold War era, the CIA claimed that all the world’s ills were due to Communist front organizations that influenced the media. The truth is that the so-called “fronts” often provided actual accounts of the misdeeds of the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies. However, with U.S. newspapers, magazines, and broadcast networks carrying the water for the CIA, it was Langley’s interpretation of the news that made Western headlines. The “Communist” reports were relegated to the nether regions of “Soviet disinformation” campaigns and “active measures.” The CIA laughably put out a periodical report on such “disinformation” tactics. In reality, what was called “disinformation” was actually bona fide news.

Today, when the CIA wants to debase a news article, it uses such operations as Snopes.com and Wikipedia to engage in CIA disinformation tactics. Uncomfortable truthful news items are quickly dispatched with the term “conspiracy theory.” There is little doubt that Facebook, Wikipedia, and Snopes are part of a “new MOCKINGBIRD” designed for the digital age. Like them or not, Snowden, Assange, Manning, Ceglia, and others have pulled the veil off of the new MOCKINGBIRD.

A formerly secret February 1987 CIA report on Soviet disinformation tactics illustrates that what was described then as “propaganda” was, in fact, the truth.

  • The CIA called baseless charges in a Soviet book that Jonestown, Guyana was a CIA behavioral control operation. It was.
  • The Soviets accused Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) of having the goal of weaponizing outer space. Not only was that the goal then, but it remains the goal of present incarnations of SDI.
  • The Soviets and the Afghan president, Najibullah of the Afghan Communist Party, said that they reached out to 50,000 Afghan mujaheddin in Afghanistan and Pakistan, who agreed to lay down their arms and join a coalition government, with eight opposition parties joining the Communists. The CIA and Western media called the news bogus. It was true with television footage of Afghan refugees returning to their homeland from India. The Soviets wanted an internationally-guaranteed neutral Afghanistan before withdrawing their troops. The CIA wanted a radical Islamic Afghanistan from which to launch attacks on the southern Soviet Union. That decision came back to bite the United States on September 11, 2001.
  • The CIA accused the Sandinista government of Nicaragua and the Soviets of being behind the Christian “Evangelical Committee for Development Aid” as a Communist front group. If so, it would have been the first time Communists and Christian evangelicals broke bread together. The CIA’s charge was fatuously false.
  • The Soviets accused the U.S. of using Africans as test subjects for a new AIDS vaccine. This charge has been proven with Africans being used as “guinea pigs” for various new vaccines in programs funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Clinton Global Initiative, Pfizer Corporation, and other entities linked to CIA biological and genetic warfare operations.
  • Articles in two Bolivian newspapers that stated that the U.S. Information Service in La Paz was trying to recruit Bolivian journalists to write pro-Pentagon articles were deemed by the CIA to be bogus. The CIA charge was false and it included smearing the Federation of Bolivian Press Workers as a Communist front. That is the usual practice by the CIA when it’s caught red-handed.
  • The Soviet news agency Novosti was accused of running a false article, titled “The Relationship Between Journalists and the CIA: Hundreds of Them in International Press.” The article was spot on.
  • The CIA charged as Soviet disinformation charges that the CIA killed nine nonaligned leaders, including Indian Prime Ministers Indira and Rajiv Gandhi. In fact, the CIA has killed many more than nine nonaligned leaders.

In the digital world of YouTube, Facebook, Google, and other social and news media sites, the CIA continues its game of disinformation while accusing others of conducting the same game plan. Some three decades after the Cold War, the CIA’s charges of Soviet disinformation can now be seen as disinformation in their own right.

 

Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).

Yes, Hillary Clinton Served on the Board of a Company Who Funds ISIS

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By Alice Salles

Source: theAntiMedia.org

As the race for the White House heats up, WikiLeaks continues to unveil sensitive information showing ties between the Democratic Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, foreign governments, and corrupt companies.

In a recent tweet, WikiLeaks reported its unveiling of Clinton’s dubious ties to Lafarge, an American company owned by a French conglomerate that, between 2011 and 2013, paid taxes to the Islamic State (ISIS) in order to protect its cement factory 95 miles northeast of Aleppo, Syria. The arrangements were discovered by the French daily, Le Monde. The story became relevant once again after the Office of the Mayor of Paris recently struck a corporate partnership naming Lafarge as its main supplier.

Lafarge bought the cement plant in Syria in 2007, but in 2011, civil war broke out, forcing Lafarge to make the choice of paying the terrorist organization to continue production. The taxes were allegedly paid to ISIS middlemen and other rebel groups in Syria.

Another investigation carried out by Zaman al-Wasl, an independent news organization based in Syria, adds that Lafarge may have also bought oil from ISIS regularly.

On July 13, 2014, Zaman al-Wasl reported, Mamdooh al-Khalid, who served as the manager and sales manager of Lafarge Syria, “wrote to Bruno Pescheux, General Manager of Lafarge warning him about buying [f]uel from non-governmental company in areas out of the regime’s control.” If Bashar al-Assad’s regime discovered the deal, al-Khalid allegedly warned, the regime would not be pleased.

In a reply to al-Khalid, Pescheux “advised him to mention that Lafarge had done its best to get fuel from the government, and wondered about the previous requests for fuel from Homs refinery” before illegally buying fuel from ISIS in case the regime were to find out about the dealings.

According to The Canary, “Al-Wasl reported that the CEO of Lafarge Cement Syria, Frederic Jolibois, had personally instructed his firm to make payments to Isis.”

But the fact a private Western company has allegedly had dealings with ISIS is not the only worrying factor in this story.

According to an article from 2007 published by the Washington Post, Hillary Clinton was the Clinton family’s breadwinner in the early 1990s, when she was “earning more than $100,000 a year from her law firm salary and corporate board fees.” At the time, she served on Lafarge’s board, making about $31,000 a year from the company.

The report added that “[s]hortly before Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, Lafarge was fined $1.8 million by the Environmental Protection Agency for pollution violations at its Alabama plant.” As soon as Clinton was elected, however, the administration “reduced that fine to less than $600,000.” Hillary left the board in 1992 after her husband won the Democratic nomination.

According to an investigative report published in the 1980s by the American Spectator and used as a source by The Canary, Hillary Clinton was already involved with the firm when Lafarge helped to facilitate the CIA’s support for Saddam Hussein’s secret weapons program. At the time, Clinton “did legal work for Lafarge … [providing] key services for the covert arms export network that supplied Saddam Hussein.” The Canary added that the investigative report unveiled how “the Justice Department was told to bury the investigation” to “prevent exposure of that secret supply line, and collateral damage to Hillary Clinton.”

During the 2013 annual meeting of the Clinton Foundation, Lafarge’s Executive Vice President for Operations, Eric Olson, was a “featured attendee.” In both 2015 and 2016, Lafarge was listed as a donor to the Clinton Foundation.

As Paris accepts a bid from Lafarge to provide sand for this summer’s Paris-Plages event, an international corporate watchdog known as SumOfUs is now urging Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo to “immediately cut Paris’ partnership” with the company.

In a petition with nearly 40,000 SumOfUs member signatures, the group claims the partnership with Paris is “scandalous.” According to the SumOfUs campaign manager, Eoin Dubsky, this deal “should have never happened.”

“By partnering with Lafarge for this summer’s Paris-Plages event, the City of Paris is whitewashing the company’s obscene show of corporate greed that profits off the war and violence created by terrorists,” the SumofUs announcement reads.

 

Related Article: WikiLeaks Exposes Hillary’s Stunning Connection to ISIS — Mainstream Media Blackout Ensues

Hillary Clinton and American Empire

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By Rob Urie

Source: CounterPunch

Despite the lack of evidence linking Orlando mass murderer Omar Mateen to Daesh (ISIS) in any operational (direct) sense, the first inclination of U.S. Presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton was to renew American bombing of Syria, Iraq and Libya— the very nations that were destroyed by U.S. bombs directed by Mrs. Clinton and from whence Daesh arose. In so doing Mrs. Clinton made it evident that she is an unrepentant militarist whose bloodlust, combined with her longstanding interest in promoting American business interests, ties her to the U.S. imperial project of the last century and one-half. The precise moral difference between mass murders for personal and state reasons depends on a theory of the state at odds with this imperial project.

The company that employed Omar Mateen, G4S, is a British-based ‘security’ company that operates in 120 countries and as a ‘private’ supplier of public services to the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Army and to the very same State Department that Mrs. Clinton led as Secretary of State. The company advertises itself capable of ‘mitigating liability’ for the U.S. government— the ruse used by the CIA and other clandestine and quasi-clandestine government agencies to circumvent civil prohibitions on their activities by employing ‘private’ companies to carry them out. The NSA’s domestic surveillance programs tie to those of the FBI, DEA and CIA through this legalistic dodge. And ‘private contractors’ were behind some of the more grotesque slaughters in recent American wars.

The classical liberal separation of economic from political interests used to legitimate state violence is one that the Clintons have spent their ‘public’ careers undermining. As leading proponents of neoliberalism, the Clintons have spent three decades conflating ‘private’ interests with the public interest. In history this tie of U.S. business interests to U.S. military incursions runs from residual European imperialism, including genocide against the indigenous population and slavery, to direct wars, proxy wars, coups, assassinations, murders and particularly odious ‘wars of attrition.’ What is corruption in the liberal worldview is the nature of the capitalist-state acting in / on imperial interests in a Marxian frame. If this corruption is ‘solvable,’ such has yet to be demonstrated in the U.S.

Hillary Clinton’s use of the horrific crime in Orlando to instigate further crimes against untold innocents abroad is hidden behind manufactured fears of a lunatic and craven enemy (ISIS) that is in fact both a product of earlier U.S. atrocities across the Middle East and but a pale ghost of the savagery of combined U.S. actions in the region. The American leadership’s practice of creating crises that it must then ‘respond’ to led the way to the sequential slaughters, disruptions and dislocations that now finds substantial portions of the Middle East in ruins and millions of refugees flooding an increasingly xenophobic Europe. That this leadership never seems to learn from its ‘mistakes’ suggests motivations at work other than those presented at press conferences.

Where G4S, Omar Mateen’s employer, fits in is that Mr. Mateen was in many respects the perfect mercenary— ‘our psychopath’ if we were paying for his services. Murdering 49 people and wounding 50 more is, in addition to being an atrocity, a crime and a moral calamity, a complicated logistical feat. In 2004 U.S. Colonel James Steele was brought to Iraq, in a war that Bill Clinton publicly supported and Hillary Clinton voted for, to engineer like atrocities. Mr. Mateen’s crimes would have been business-as-usual in U.S. led slaughters of innocent civilians in Nicaragua and El Salvador in the 1980s and in Iraq in the 2000s. And G4S is precisely the type of ‘public-private partnership’ favored by the Clintons to ‘mitigate liability’ behind a veil of ‘private’ actions.

This isn’t to suggest that Hillary Clinton had any part in the murders carried out by Mr. Mateen. It is to suggest that in any human and / or moral sense she is congenitally unfit for public office. The most generous explanation of her support for George W. Bush’s criminal slaughter in Iraq is that she was misled by the manufactured evidence proffered by the Bush administration. That the war tied through history to the Clinton’s own sanctions against Iraq that resulted in half a million innocents dying from privation and to eight years of bombing that left much of the country in ruins suggests that Mrs. Clinton probably well understood that Iraq posed no threat to the U.S. in 2001. That the war was coincidentally a boon to Western business interests was / is as grotesque as it was predictable.

If conceptual clarity around these issues seems wanting here— that is the point. Neoliberalism as some unified theory of political economy ties through history to the Washington Consensus that in turn ties to American imperial history. Western imperialism— state-corporatism as division of the global economic spoils through insertion / assertion of ‘national’ interests, has five centuries of reasonably well defined history behind it. In this regard Donald Trump’s relative rhetorical reticence to use military force as a first choice is a threat to this imperial order whereas Hillary Clinton’s willingness to destroy an entire region of the world on a whim to benefit Exxon Mobil and Goldman Sachs makes her the ‘safe’ choice from the institutional perspective.

Washington Consensus precepts are:

*Fiscal discipline

*A redirection of public expenditure priorities toward fields offering both high economic returns and the potential to improve income distribution, such as primary health care, primary education, and infrastructure

*Tax reform (to lower marginal rates and broaden the tax base)

*Interest rate liberalization

*A competitive exchange rate

*Trade liberalization

*Liberalization of inflows of foreign direct investment

*Privatization

*Deregulation (to abolish barriers to entry and exit)

*Secure property rights

Against this imperial history the U.S. view that national elections are an internal matter places U.S. voters as the nominal ‘choosers’ of political economy for much of the world. In political terms, the 800+ military bases that the U.S. keeps around the globe serve as quasi-private security forces to assure repatriation of ‘profits’ for multi-national corporations in the form of resources, plentiful, cheap labor and the broader economy of imperial conquest. In fact, as opposed to theory, these profits are the reciprocal of the death, misery, subjugation and immiseration inevitably put forward by Western economists and politicians as the result of ‘free-choice’ by those on the losing end of American imperial fortune. That increasing numbers of Americans are on this losing end helps explain current (and heretofore slight) political unrest and its reciprocal in establishment support for Mrs. Clinton.

Hillary Clinton’s toxic jargon that “America never stopped being great” poses a seeming conundrum for her supporters who aren’t dedicated sociopaths. If U.S. wars in Southeast Asia, Central America, the Middle East and Northern Africa are evidence of this greatness, then what are the moral and political bases of such a judgment? Mrs. Clinton’s nostalgia for the days of alleged national unity following the attacks of September 11, 2001 is apparently for the erasure of the history that led to the attacks and not for unity per se. Conversely, given the absence of any operational link to Daesh, Omar Mateen could just as well have claimed that his crimes were motivated by Napoleon Bonaparte or Jesus Christ were ISIS not such a well-implanted foe.

Externally, and in contradiction of to the exceptionalists, the democratists and Western neoliberals, the U.S. is broadly considered the greatest threat to world peace on the planet. Brought to the fore in the current Presidential election cycle is that Western elites— inherited wealth, bailout-dependent bankers, the corporate lootocracy dependent on wildly goosed (by the Federal Reserve) asset prices and various and sundry agents, functionaries and court pleaders, are now well-understood to have interests diametrically opposed to those of the vast majority of Americans. The conceptual leap not yet taken by the American electorate is the international nature of this class divide.

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Chart: the bi-Party system of electoral control in the U.S. is put forward as representing majority political views when combined it represents less than one-third of voting-age political affiliation. In terms of global political reach, the American political leadership represents such a small minority’s interests that even relatively minor rebellions could quickly overwhelm it. Source: Gallup, Pew Research.

This international ‘footprint’ is fact regardless of whether or not Americans consider it when voting. Internal economic dislocations, such as jobs lost and stagnant wages from trade agreements, find their reciprocals in indigenous economies destroyed, in ‘developing market’ industries shut out through subsidized ‘competition,’ in IMF ‘workouts’ that place ownership of developing industries in Western hands and through commodification and expropriation of millennia of accumulated knowledge to be put back as alien product against the peoples and cultures that developed it. In this respect, the ‘Clinton model’ of sweatshop labor as economic development joins the ‘Obama model’ of subverting civil law in the interests of corporate-state plutocrats.

Calls to unify behind Hillary Clinton in her bid to become President pose the heavily engineered outcome of the Democratic primaries as the popular will. In this sense they are roughly analogous to the calls to unite behind George W. Bush following the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision in 2000. The Clintons paved the way for Mr. Bush’s brutal militarism much as Barack Obama maintained the institutional infrastructure of the ‘unitary Presidency’ and the capacity for launching criminal wars of opportunity. Between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, it is Mrs. Clinton who has the proven record as guardian of empire and imperial prerogative. Her unbridled militarism is an expression of this prerogative.

The question for Democrats is how evil can someone be to still be worthy of voting for? Alleged stark differences between Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush find very high degrees of synchronicity between their actual policies (and those of Barack Obama). And lest this be unclear, it is the Democratic establishment that chose Mrs. Clinton as its candidate (chart above), and not the politically and economically dispossessed electorate. The grift that American elections reflect the popular will, and therefore confer political legitimacy, contrasts with the facts that the dominant Parties are largely and increasingly unpopular and that the popular will bears no relation to the policies decided upon and enacted by the American political establishment.

Rob Urie is an artist and political economist. His book Zen Economics is published by CounterPunch Books.

Howell and Four Other Suspects Involved in Planned Sunday Massacres

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By Brenda Corpian

Source: Get Off the BS

Sources within the Santa Monica police department claim that James Wesley Howell, an Indiana man who was caught with explosives and weapons on Sunday Morning, told the Santa Monica police that as many as five people were involved in planned attacks on gay communities in both Florida and California.

According to the LA Times, Santa Monica Police Chief Jacqueline Seabrooks initially said on Twitter that the 20-year-old Indiana man (James Howell) told one of her officers after he was arrested that he wanted “to harm the Gay Pride event.”

However, after the FBI quickly took over the case, a Santa Monica police spokesman Saul Rodriguez indicated that Seabrooks was mistaken and offered that the Santa Monica detectives who were working the case are “not aware of what the suspect’s intentions were at this point.”

The official version of this story released by the LA Times falsely claims that on early Sunday, Santa Monica police received a call about a suspected prowler who was knocking on a resident’s door and window about 5 a.m. in the 1700 block of 11th Street, Santa Monica police said.

Patrol officers responded and encountered Howell, who was sitting in a car registered in Indiana, police said. Officers inspected the car and found three assault rifles, high-capacity ammunition and a 5-gallon bucket containing “chemicals capable of forming an improvised explosive device,” police said.

A law enforcement source who spoke on condition of anonymity said the contents of the bucket included Tannerite, an ingredient that could be used to create pipe bombs.

The source, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the ongoing investigation, said authorities also found camouflage clothing in the car.

Los Angeles County sheriff’s officials said the suspect told police he was going to the Pride parade to look for a friend. Authorities were looking for that individual.

The real truth of the story was released to a former Los Angeles County prosecutor who works for Get Off the BS by two Santa Monica police officers that have been issued gag orders under threat of Federal prosecution for talking further talking about the incident.

According to two department sources, Howell called the Santa Monica police on Sunday morning claiming that he needed protection from the CIA. Howell further elaborated to the dispatcher stating that he “had been set up by the CIA – they are going to kill me.”

According to Howell, he was in LA to meet with another person in a collaborated attack on the gay communities in both Florida and Los Angeles.

Howell additionally stated that, “everything has gone south. Dan was gone when I got here. They killed the leader of the Florida attack this morning. They are going to kill me. I need protection.”

According to sources within the police department’s investigation Howell indicated to officers who first made contact with him that Howell claimed he was one of five people involved in a planned Sunday attack on both the east and west coasts.

Howell stated that he was suppose to “hook up” late Saturday night with his contact in LA who was suppose to have more weapons and chemicals to mix with the Tannerite he was in possession of.

“When I got here, Dan was gone. I went to his apartment and he had cleared out….I tried calling him but he never answered me,” said Howell.

When questioned about the other four people involved in the plot, Howell was only familiar with the first names of three of the alleged suspects, naming his contact in LA – Dan and two of the three contacts in Florida, Omar and Brandy

Speaking of the suspect killed in the Pulse Bar massacre in Florida, Howell stated, “Omar was not suppose to be killed. They lied to us – Omar and Brandy were suppose to get away.”

When Howell was questioned about how he and his conspirators knew each other, he said that,

“We were all familiar with each other through an online fundamental Islamic knowledge seminary course[1] – we were recruited through the course and trained together at a camp in Virginia – we were taught how to shoot and make bombs – everyone knew their part – something went wrong….”

Before the officers could further question Howell, agents working for the Los Angeles office of the FBI quickly swept in and took over the case. Santa Monica detectives were never allowed to talk with Howell.

In summary, it appears that Howell was on his way to “hook up” with another conspirator (Dan) to set off explosives and shoot people at the gay pride parade in Hollywood California on Sunday.

Finding his contact missing when he got to LA and having heard that Omar Matteen had been killed by a FBI SWAT teem in Orlando, Howell determined he had been double crossed by the CIA and feared for his own life.

Howell was taken in to custody by the FBI before Santa Monica police officers could further question him about the motives behind killing gay people on both coasts of the US on Sunday.

However, in absence of further information and or anyone who will officially go on the record, there is no doubt that the America public is not being told the truth about the Orlando Florida shooting and the arrest of Howell on Sunday.

It is a shame that the Fed’s got to the Santa Monica police chief on Sunday before she was silenced, however we are very thankful that at least two officers have risked their jobs and freedom to reveal what she would of most likely Tweeted had the Fed’s not got to her.

 

Authors Comments:

The official story released by the LA Times would not have held up for long with most people. It will most likely either disappear or be amended by the Times.

The mainstream media’s version of the police showing up to a Santa Monica apartment because someone in the neighborhood allegedly claimed that a person was “knocking on a neighbors door and windows” is almost comical.

When they added the police found the suspect at the scene and discovered weapons and explosives in his car, I almost peed myself laughing.

I use to live in Santa Monica. The likelihood of the police showing up to the apartment over a suspected prowler call within 2 hours, is about one in ten million.

However, for arguments sake let us assume that the police hurried right over to the apartment and found Howell there. (LMAO)

The likelihood that Howell drove all the way from Indiana to California to be found by the Santa Monica police with explosives, ammunition, and assault rifles in plain view in his car is about one in ten trillion.

Would you like to make odds that it was just a “coincidence” as the mainstream media reports, that Howell armed to the teeth with assault rifles and explosives, was on his way to a gay pride parade the same day as the massacre in Florida?

Folks, for those who know me, you know that I don’t make up stories. Everything I have written is true. However, for those of you who don’t know me, please use your common sense in this matter – the mainstream media and the fed’s are lying in this matter – there is no way that Howell’s arrest and the shooting in Orlando Florida is a coincidence.

Everyone would be well advised to hide your weapons before the Fed’s come knocking at your door to take them.

 

Story updates:

Shortly after the posting of this story, USA News shed light on the Online Islamic Fundamental course Howell spoke of.

Omar Mateen Did Not Act Alone! Proof of False Flag Conspiracy

The Father of the Orlando Shooter Recently Visited Congress, State Department, Writes Open Letters To President Obama

He laughed as he shot us‘: Sole survivor of 30 hiding in gay club bathroom reveals how he was hit four times but escaped by climbing over friends’ bodies

Links between Shooting events. All CIA patsies.

Omar Mateen: Orlando gunman was familiar face at club, performer says

Trump Right Again Omar Matteens’ Wife Had Prior Knowledge Of Orlando Massacre

FBI Introduced Florida Shooter to “Informants”

The FBI, Not “ISIS,” Radicalized the Orlando Shooter

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Mateen-NYPD

By Tony Cartalucci

Source: Land Destroyer

As predicted, the FBI is revealed to have approached Orlando shooting suspect Omar Mateen in 2013 with informants posing as terrorists in an attempt to “lure” him into participating in a terrorist attack.

USA Today’s TC Palm reports in an article titled, “Exclusive: PGA Village residents want answers from security firm,” that (emphasis added):

The FBI launched an investigation into Mateen after Sheriff’s Office officials reported the incident to the agency. As part of its investigation, the FBI examined Mateen’s travel history, phone records, acquaintances and even planted a confidential informant in the courthouse to “lure Omar into some kind of act and Omar did not bite,” Mascara said. The FBI concluded Mateen was not a threat after that, Mascara said.

This is in line with the FBI’s practice of approaching and entrapping potential terror suspects by posing as terrorists themselves and aiding and abetting them in the planning and preparations for high-profile attacks. These undercover operations include everything from “casing out” potential targets, to the obtaining and training with actual, live explosives, to the purchasing of small arsenals of firearms including the sort of semi-automatic rifles and pistols used by Mateen during the Orlando shooting.

In addition to the FBI’s undercover operation, it is now also revealed that Mateen frequented the website of another FBI/CIA informant, Marcus Dwayne Roberson, a former US Marine, turned bank robber, turned US government informant.

While US politicians, law enforcement officials, and media networks attempt to claim Robertson’s extremist website, the “Timbuktu Seminary,” was his own independent project, the extent of his association with the US government makes this difficult, if not impossible to believe. Instead, it appears to be the perfect mechanism to feed the FBI’s entrapment pipeline, attracting and identifying possible suspects for the FBI to then approach and “investigate.”

The National Review’s article, “The Orlando Jihadist and the Blind Sheikh’s Bodyguard,” would report (emphasis added):

According to Fox News, Omar Mateen, the jihadist who carried out the mass-murder attack at a gay nightclub in Florida this weekend, was a student of Marcus Robertson, an Orlando-based radical Muslim who once served as a bodyguard to Omar Abdel Rahman — the notorious “Blind Sheikh” whom I prosecuted for terrorism crimes in the early to mid 1990s. 

The National Review also reported that (emphasis added):

In Robertson’s case, it is reported that he agreed to work for the government, gathering intelligence both overseas and in the United States. According to Fox, however, he was expelled from the covert informant program in early 2007 after attacking his CIA handler in Africa.

But Robertson’s stint with the CIA was not the only time he would work for the US government after his service in the US Marine Corps. The National Review leaves out the fact that before his dismissal from the CIA, he was an informant for the FBI between 2004 and 2007.

The Daily Beast in its article, “Was Orlando Shooter Omar Mateen Inspired by This Bank-Robbing Ex-Marine?,” would report (emphasis added):

“Plaintiff worked as a covert operator for the FBI Terrorist Task Force from 2004 until 2007, performing operations in the United Sates and internationally with and against suspected and known terrorist organizations,” Robertson says in court papers. 

Robertson remained in touch with American law enforcement and intelligence officials when he moved back to the United States, according to court papers filed by his attorney, “served as a confidential source in domestic terrorism investigations from Atlanta to Los Angeles.”

Is the American public expected to believe that a US government asset who received special training in the military and served as an informant and operative for both the FBI and the CIA would somehow, suddenly be allowed to drop off the US government’s radar and be allowed to run an extremist website in the United States?

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Image: How far do undercover FBI investigations go? How about building a van-bomb for a suspect after taking him to a public park to detonate real explosives? The FBI’s own affidavit reveals that is precisely what FBI informants did while investigating Portland, Oregon terror suspect Mohamed Osman Mohamud. Did the FBI’s attempts to lure the Orlando shooter, Omar Mateen, into committing a terror attack contribute in his radicalization? The FBI must answer to this.

Indeed, no American should believe this. Robertson was step one in Omar Mateen – the Orlando shooter’s – radicalization. The FBI’s attempt to pose as terrorists to lure Mateen into going along with a terrorist attack was step two. Though the FBI has so far failed to disclose the details of that investigation, comments made by FBI Director James Comey himself indicate that FBI informants may have worked on Mateen for up to 10 months.

Between exposure to Robertson’s extremist propaganda, honed after years of working as an informant and operative identifying and exposing terror suspects, and the FBI’s own informants over the course of months, if not years, it is clear that the US government and its “counterterrorism” measures radicalized Mateen – not “ISIS.”

The Guardian in its article, “CIA has not found any link between Orlando killer and Isis, says agency chief,” further highlights this blatant truth by reporting (emphasis added):

The Central Intelligence Agency chief has not been “able to uncover any link” between Orlando killer Omar Mateen and the Islamic State, despite Mateen’s stated allegiance to the jihadist group during Sunday’s LGBT nightclub massacre.

If Omar Mateen was a “homegrown terrorist,” the FBI served as the gardeners.

The American public must now demand the details of the FBI’s undercover work regarding Omar Mateen, as well as the truth behind any enduring ties between Robertson and the US government. If Robertson has no connections with the US government, an explanation as to why he is allowed to operate an extremist website on American soil must be provided.

For political and ideological opportunists attempting to seize upon the Orlando tragedy to uphold an example of “Islamic extremism,” it is especially ironic that the facts indicate that the act of terrorism was entirely divorced from “Islam,” and instead the result of America’s ongoing view of terrorism as a convenient and versatile geopolitical tool, rather than a threat to genuinely combat.

That quite literally every aspect that contributed to Omar Mateen’s radicalization is directly connected to the US government itself, illustrates just who the real threat is that American’s should fear – the threat within the halls of its own government – not “terrorists” dwelling beyond them.

CIA: The Corrupt and Ignorant Agency

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By Wayne Madsen

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

The American taxpayers have been fleeced for almost seventy years by a so-called «intelligence» agency that has systematically violated the US Constitution, broken practically every federal law on the books, and penetrated virtually every facet of American life. The Central Intelligence Agency’s creation was bemoaned by its creator, President Harry S Truman, who, in a fit of personal angst following the 1963 assassination of President John F Kennedy, wrote in a newspaper column, «I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations… I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment… and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere».

During a presidential election year, two of the three remaining major candidates – Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump – have given no indication that they will heed the words of President Truman. For example, Trump has indicated he will give the CIA authority to torture that even the CIA considers illegal.

As for Mrs Clinton, her zeal in supporting the violent overthrow and assassination of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 only gives added impetus to the out-of-control players inside the CIA to commit similar actions in a Clinton administration. Only Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders appears to channel the beliefs of Truman when it comes to reining in the CIA.

It is not known whether Trump, who has made favorable noises to interventionist neo-conservatives within the Republican Party, will stand by his comments that the war in Libya was a mistake. But Trump was one of the cheerleaders urging US intervention in 2011. He said, «Gaddafi in Libya is killing thousands of people, nobody knows how bad it is, and we’re sitting around. We have soldiers all over the Middle East and not bringing them to stop this horrible carnage… We don’t want to get involved and you’re going to end up with something like you’ve never seen before».

Trump, Mrs Clinton, and Obama were wrong about Libya and Gaddafi on all counts. Gaddafi was not killing «thousands of people». That was being done by the jihadist rebels supported by the CIA. The late US ambassador/weapons smuggler in Libya, Christopher Stevens, who was ironically killed by the very same jihadists with whom he was brokering deals to ship Libyan weapons to Syria, ensured that the latest NATO weaponry ended up in radical Islamist hands in Libya. It was these weapons that killed «thousands of people» – Libyan and African guest workers and their families – in a country wracked by a civil war manufactured by Mrs Clinton and CIA director General David Petraeus.

The CIA, in particular, had for decades, fantasized about overthrowing Gaddafi. Never did this most incompetent of US government agencies contemplate the effects of Gaddafi’s ouster: the spread of Saudi-financed jihadist terrorism across the Sahel region of Africa. The CIA’s fanciful notions that Gaddafi’s days were numbered were highlighted in a formerly Secret CIA report titled, «Libya: Will the Revolution Outlast Gaddafi?» Issued in June 1988, the report was obviously intended to bolster those within the Reagan administration who argued for a US military attack on Libya by taking advantage of what the CIA perceived was a weakened Gaddafi government at the end of the 1980s. The CIA, as usual, was extremely off-base in its assessment of Gaddafi’s staying power.

The CIA report states: «Gaddafi’s revolution has largely run its course, and he must rely on coercion to perpetuate his revolutionary vision». In fact, Libyans had the highest standard of living on the African continent with oil revenues being shared with the entire population. The CIA’s erroneous assessment of Libya in 1988 continued: «Just as Libya in 1969 was ripe for a change to a more nationalistic and activist regime, we believe it now ripe for a return to normality». The call for «regime change» by the CIA in 1988 was, in fact, a call for the return to the status quo ante of 1968: a Libya governed by a corrupt oligarchy led by a feeble monarch. Today, a motley crew of United Nations-selected Libyan gangsters governs the country as a «paper tiger» entity called the «Government of National Accord». Meanwhile, jihadists of Ansar al-Sharia govern Benghazi while the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) governs Sirte, Derna, and a swath of territory southeast of Tripoli, the Libyan capital.

Just as the destruction of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party and military infrastructures in Iraq following the US invasion and occupation led to the complete collapse of the Iraqi nation-state, the destruction of the four key institutions that united Libya under Gaddafi led to «failed state» status for the country. The CIA cited these key institutions in its 1988 report but no effort was made to preserve them after Gaddafi’s assassination by CIA-supported forces.

The four key institutions in Libya were, according to the CIA, the tribally-based security battalions, the regular Armed Forces, the Military Intelligence service, and the revolutionary committees. These institutions were wiped out in order that the CIA’s wish in 1988 could be realized: that Libya would return to the «normality» of 1968: government by a restored monarchy led by a pretender to the al-Senussi family’s throne once occupied by King Idris I. However, Libya became a polyglot of warring tribes and jihadists, many of the latter imported from conflict zones abroad.

Whether governed by a restored monarchy or a military-dominated successor regime, the CIA saw a post-Gaddafi government desiring «a more constructive relationship with the United States and the West». The CIA added, «Libyan successors probably would turn first to Western Europe for better economic relations and some arms. They also would be likely to seek greater US participation in the Libyan economy». However, after Gaddafi agreed to abandon his so-called «weapons of mass destruction» chemical and nuclear programs, the United States and Western Europe had a more constructive relationship with Libya and the country was wide open for Western economic investment. After Mrs Clinton, Petraeus, Obama, Britain’s David Cameron, and other Western leaders had their way with Libya, it is now a wasteland. The infrastructures of irrigation, road and air transport, social welfare, public education, health care, and employment for African guest workers lie in ruins. The clearly demented Mrs Clinton’s private e-mails show that she and her cabal of interventionists were clearly overjoyed by the misery that befell Libya and its people. When she was informed of Gaddafi’s brutal assassination, one that involved his sodomization, Clinton uttered the preamble to what may be called the «Hillary Doctrine» – «We came, we saw, he died!» She followed her declaration with her signature hideous cackling laughter.

The 1988 CIA report does not seem to care much for Gaddafi’s style of governance through some 2000 local «people’s congresses», described by the CIA as «a hybrid of a New England town meeting and a Bedouin tribal gathering». This demonstration of the «people’s will» in the Libyan «Jamahiriya» was anathema to the CIA’s goals for Libya, even Libya’s emulation of New England-style direct democracy.

A system of direct democracy in an Arab Muslim nation defied the CIA’s wish for the region, which was and remains an alliance of pro-US theocratic states governed by corrupt elites that wield power through US-equipped armed forces. The CIA report on Libya admits that initially, Gaddafi’s system of direct democracy and the exercising of the people’s will «actually worked». Only in the jaundiced view of the United States was such a system of government a threat, not only to US interests and goals, but to those of Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Morocco, and other corrupt and theocratic US client states in the region.