Friday 28 October 2005

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: Doing Israel's Bidding

by Kurt Nimmo

Israel's Likudites could not ask for more: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, has called for Israel to "be wiped off the map," thus underscoring the Zionist argument that Muslims want to kill all Jews or at least push them into the sea. Of course, this will never happen, nor should it. Most people with common sense simply want Israel to stop punishing the Palestinians for the fact they have lived in Palestine, centuries before European Zionists decided to steal their land. Most rational people want peace between Israel and the Palestinians, that is to say Israel must go back to the 1967 borders and allow the Palestinians to form their own state. This will not happen anytime soon and Ahmadinejad gives the Zionists further excuse to make sure it doesn't, thus prolonging and extending the crisis in the Middle East.

As F. William Engdahl writes (A Century Of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order), the Pahlavi dynasty in Iran was overthrown by British intelligence and the CIA, working on a script devised by the neolib "geostrategic" planner Zbigniev Brzezinski, and Ayatollah Khomeini was installed in 1979 for the simple reason Islam is more easily stage managed than pan-Arab nationalism (as well, the Shah had violated his client status when it was discovered he was about to build German designed nuclear reactors). "Covert connections between the new Iranian theocratic leadership and the incoming Reagan administration in the US were demonstrated by the so-called October Surprise, which spelled the end of Jimmy Carter's presidency, and the guns-for-hostages deal, also known as the Iran-Contra scandal," writes Margo Kingston.

"According to U.S. administration officials, funds for [Hamas] came from the oil-producing states and directly and indirectly from Israel," Richard Sale of United Press International wrote in 2002. "The PLO was secular and leftist and promoted Palestinian nationalism. Hamas wanted to set up a transnational state under the rule of Islam, much like Khomeini's Iran." It should be noted that Hamas evolved from cells of the Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwan al-Muslimeen), a fanatical Wahabbi organization long ago penetrated by British intelligence and then put to use by the CIA.

In fact, the Muslim Brotherhood remains an important asset for the United States, as demonstrated by the fact the "State Department has drawn up a memo calling for direct and permanent political dialogue with the banned Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt," according to the Egyptian newspaper al-Sharq al-Awsat. "The memo recommends that after reaching common understandings with the Muslim Brotherhood, Washington should pressure the Egyptian government to let the group members speak out their minds freely and play a role on the country's political landscape, according to the sources." In other words, the United States would likely support a fanatical Wahabbi government in Egypt, same as they supported a fanatical Wahabbi government in Afghanistan (i.e., the Taliban) prior to nine eleven, the same way Israel supported Hamas. Obviously, a tyrannical and extremist Islamic government in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East is preferable to a secular government because the latter is susceptible to democracy-and democracy is the last thing the United States and Israel want in the Middle East, regardless of Bush's bombastic nonsense about freedom.

And thus an extremist and tyrannical government in Iran is doing precisely what the globalist neolibs, Bush and Sharon want-making sure there is never peace in the Middle East. It took the neocon Zalmay Khalilzad-Unocal flunky and former Taliban cheerleader-about ten minutes to respond, probably having to struggle mightily to contain his glee at Ahmadinejad's remarks. "Of course, we are opposed to Iranian policies with regard to Israel, we are opposed with regard to the nuclear policy, with regard to their support of terror, with regard to their negative policies in Iraq," he said, making sure to encapsulate the entire neocon enchilada.

In fact, the entire neocon and kill-the-Muslims community responded post haste to the Iranian president's useful (as in useful idiot) commentary. "With this tirade coming from the top and going to the youth, it can hardly be believed that the Roadmap to Peace is going anywhere but into the black hole of history," J. Grant Swank, Jr. wrote on the MichNews site. Not unpredictably, the Horowitz disciple, Steven Plaut, over on the Moonbat Central blog, where warmongers daily chomp at the bit to kill Muslims, has called for Iran to be destroyed. "The reasons why it makes sense to topple [he means bomb] the Iran in Iran [sic] keep piling up."

As if to send the message all Muslims instinctively hate Jews and want to kill them, at approximately the same time the news of Ahmadinejad's comments hit the media megaphones, a "Palestinian suicide bomber slipped into a school-holiday crowd lining up for sandwiches at a popular falafel stand today, setting off a thunderous blast that killed five people, wounded more than 20, and dimmed hopes for diplomatic progress in the wake of Israel's withdrawal from the Gaza Strip," the Los Angeles Times reports. "The Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the bombing, saying it was carried out to avenge the killing of a senior Islamic Jihad commander by Israeli undercover troops two days earlier during a raid in the West Bank town of Tulkarem."



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Tuesday 25 October 2005

Syria is being Set Up to Fail

A Leaked Letter from Washington

Here is a most extraordinary letter from Syria's Ambassador in Washington Imad Mustapha to Congresswoman Sue Kelly, which has come into my possession. It explains how the American Administration has been stonewalling Syrian cooperation on a host of issues. It explains how Syria is being set up to fail so that the US can isolate it and carry out a process of regime-change at the expense of Iraqi stability and the lives of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians. It explains how the US administration's policy of forcing regime change in Syria is trumping the need to save lives in Iraq.

I also have the letter written by Congresswoman Sue Kelly, and signed by 100 fellow congressmen, which was originally sent to Ambassador Mustapha on Sept. 30, 2005 and which elicited this reply. It is short and reiterates the usual administration complaints about the lack of Syrian cooperation with the war on terror and effort to stabilize Iraq. I have not had the time to type it in - but it is a demonstration of the US government's failure to appreciate how it is being railroaded by the administration into a confrontation with Syria. One must read Imad Mustapha's response, copied here, to appreciate just how the railroading is taking place.

For over a year Syria has been trying to cooperate with the West on the Iraq border, on the issue of terrorism finance, on the issue of stopping Jihadists from getting into Syria, on intelligence sharing, and on stabilizing Iraq.

Washington has consistently refused to take "Yes" as an answer. Why? The only credible reason is because Washington wants regime change in Syria. The US administration is sacrificing American soldiers in Iraq in order to carry out its program of "reforming the Greater Middle East." Two US policies are clashing head to head - the one is stabilizing Iraq and the other is the reform of the greater Middle East. President Bush is placing his democracy policy over his Iraq policy. This is costing American and Iraqi lives.

The world press has failed to get this story, although it has been staring them in the face for months. Human rights activists in Syria have documented for a long time how Syria is arresting Islamists, cracking down on Syrians who go to Iraq to fight by arresting their family members and jailing the fighters when they return from Iraq. Read Razan Zeitouneh's story about Syria's "Preemptive War" against Islamists here. The Syrian secret police have been terrorizing would be terrorists in Syria for many months now. The US has cut off all intelligence sharing with Syria despite repeated Syrian attempts to cooperate on this most important issue. Rumsfeld refused a Syria delegation of top border officials permission to meet with their Iraq and American counterparts just two months ago. Read the story here.

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Why the Furore over Valerie Plame's Outing

by Trowbridge H. Ford

Whenever a major covert operation goes terribly wrong - what happens more often than not - its operatives immediately take drastic steps to stem the danger of disastrous consequences, believing that they may well distract the media and the public from learning what really was being attempted. In these cases, any false explanation is far better than being forced to admit what really happened. While people who have never been in intelligence work, or disinforming sources always claim reassuringly that disclosing the truth from the outset will largely defuse the scandal, they, either diliberately or ignorantly, don't know what they are talking about. Claims of another cock-up are always better than an admission of another reckless plot having gone wrong.

For example, when President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas - the plotters hoping to connect the murder by means of Lee Harvey Oswald's going to Cuba afterwards to Fidel Castro - the elaborate conspiracy was ruined by one small oversight - the failing to test fire the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle which was purchased, and placed in the Texas School Book Despository where Oswald worked by persons feigning to be he or an apparent alias, especially Jack Ruby's helper Larry Crafard. Consequently, when it seems Richard Cain - a corrupt policeman connected to Chicago Mafioso Sam 'Momo' Giancana, and brought into the plot by Ruby - used the rifle to kill JFK, he almost killed Texas Governor John B. Connally because he had no way of knowing that it fired high and to the right of the intended target.

The foul-up was well demonstrated when Connally belatedly discovered that he too had been hit, exclaiming: "Oh, no, no, no. My God, they are going to kill us all." (Hearings before the President's Commission..., vol. IV, p. 133) There probably would have been no unexpected hiccup to the plot if this had turned out to be true - as the Governor would have been in no position to make a fuss - but Connally managed to survive, threatening to get those who had apparently double-crossed him.

This caused the immediate arrest of LHO at the Texas Theater, and the attempt by Ruby during the District Attorney's press conference to connect him to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, only to discover that Oswald had an alibi for the shootings - he was standing in front of the Despository building when the shots were fired in Dealey Plaza. When the AP photographer James Altgens' photo of the shooting appeared in newspapers the next day - Director Hoover concluding that there was no chance of convicting him of the assassination - Ruby, feigning distress over the assassination, was belatedly obliged to shoot him, causing the cover up to begin in earnest, totally at Oswald's expense.

Its agenda was to suggest that the guilty Oswald was still part of a plot, a rabid anti-communist one - what New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison suggested Clay Shaw aka Clay Bertrand had arranged within the city's anti-Castro Cubans with help from renegade elements of the CIA. Director Hoover dissuaded Garrison from going further with his investigation while he made it look as if the Bureau was deeply involved in the murder. All the while, the Agency was keeping quiet about its role in the assassination, and destroying all evidence implicating it in it. By the time the Warren Commission started its investigation, the trail of the assassins was so muddied up that no one could sort it out.

Another conspiracy - the plot to eliminate Iraq's President, Saddan Hussein - was obliged to take a completely unexpected course in order to prevent similar blowback. Of course, the plot to ouster the Iraqi dictator, unlike the JFK one, was not criminal according to any domestic law, either American or British, and the plan certainly did not seem immoral, given the character of Saddam's regime, and its potential threat to its neighbors, and beyond, If, in fact, Saddam was rearming with weapons of mass destruction to settle scores with those powers which had frustrated his attempt to take over Kuwait, the elimination of his regime seemed in the interest of everyone.

In the build-up of intelligence to justify the removal, the findings and its assessment by Dr. David
Kelly had been paramount. Kelly had joined the MOD's facility at Proton Down in 1984 as its chief microbiologist after having worked for several years at Oxford's NERC Institute of Virology. While there, he grew to have the gravest suspicions of what Iraqi scientists, especially Dr. Rihad Taha, were doing at British research facilities, and knew from on site inspections in Iraq and Russia, and his dealings with other scientists just what Saddam had attempted before, and what, it seems, he was again capable of. In his work and travels as an UNSCOM inspector, Kelly developed close relations with many reporters, especially the BBC's Tom Mangold, Judith Miller of The New York Times, and investigative journalist Gordon Thomas.

When the Iraqi dictator refused the let UNSCOM back into the country in 1997, and Clinton started the bombing campaign to degrade Iraq's alleged biological weapons program (Operation Desert Fox), Kelly became the authoritative, secret source for these writers and others in their work on Iraq's WMD.

Mangold, in Plague Wars, showed that Kelly - who had taught him everything he ever learned about biological warfare, and was confident that he could solve the problem of the unpaid national debt if only given the job - was the driving force behind Washington's attempt to stop the terrorists, especially biological ones, before they killed the President and millions of Americans in horrible deaths. In the beginning of the book, Mangold proclaimed: "Iraq is fully capable of producing terrorist quantities of biological agents on demand." (For more on this, see my article "Only Iraq Can Deny Bush Re-election" in the Trowbridge Archive.)

Miller - who, along with Stephen Engelberger and William Broad, also of The New York Times, wrote Germs: The Ultimate Weapon - put America's problems much more clearly in Saddam's court, claiming that he, thanks to intelligence from Kelly, was only feigning to go along with wholesale disarmmament demanded by the armistice concluded at the end of the Gulf War. Iraq still had 150 bombs and warheads, filled with chemical and biological agents, from before the war, Kelly contended, which could be made operational within 45 minutes, and were capable of striking with prohibited missiles all its neighbors, especially Israel. The threat was made most convincing by SOD William Cohen claiming at a press conference that five pounds of anthrax spores could wipe out half Washington's population if properly delivered.

Little wonder that when Washington and London decided to take out the Iraqi regime - after the 9/11 attacks which were coupled with the delivery of anthrax letters to several members of Congress, and killed several postal workers in the process - that Miller's services were much in demand by the White House, especially given the hiatus of reliable intelligence from the country because of the departure of the UNSCOM inspectors. The NYT reporter joined NSA Condi Rice, her deputy Stephen Hadley, White House insiders Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, Karl Rove and Karen Hughes, and many others in the newly formed White House Iraq Group (WHIG) whose duty was to find evidence of Saddam's WMD, and see that it was disseminated to the public in order to justify the preemptive war against Iraq.

And Miller did not disappoint it in performing her role, as Franklin Foer has described in his June 2004 article, "The Source of the Trouble," for New York Magazine, though the title itself leaves much to be desired, being the source of subsequent problems. In her articles for the paper, she supplied grim confirmation of what the Iraqi Dossier was claiming - Saddam had drones which could spray enough anthrax to kill a million people in a city under the right conditions, probably gained possession of a virulent strain of smallpox from the defunct USSR, maintained
storage and transport facilities to provide reagents wherever and whenever required, provided antidotes for sarin and VX gases to his own population in case of a dirty war, and was looking again to gain a nuclear capability by obtaining alumimum tubes for the diffusion of Niger uranium ore - what Cheney claimed most excitedly on Meet the Press proved that Iraq was not disarming.

Washington and London kept up their drum beat for war, though there was no new intelligence to support its claims. Former ambassador Joe Wilson, a Poppy Bush appointee, had been sent to Niger by DCI George Tenet in February 2002 to check on claims that it was helping Iraq gain a nuclear capability, but he came up with nothing. The Bush and Blair administrations, though,
ignored his report. Of course, Saddam had let the inspectors back into Iraq by then, but they continued to find nothing positive to confirm the claims of the Iraq Dossier - only stating that Iraq could not establish what had happened to missing material. Iraq itself supplied vast material, trying to allay Anglo-American fears about its WMD, but it too was dismissed as totally unreliable.

The status of Anglo-American intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs was well demonstrated when Secretary of State Colin Powell delivered his address in February 2003 before the Security Council, calling for Iraq to cough up the known material or face it being done by force. While the resolution failed to pass - thanks to the disclosure that Washington and London had bugged the UN deliberations of the waverers in the hope of manipulating them into acquiescence - Powell reiterated for those assembled what Judy Miller had itemized in her columns for The Times. The most persuasive moment in his presentation - what he later admitted was the worst one of his whole career - was when he held up the test tube, filled with a white powder - reminiscent of what the legislators had been sent back in September 2001, allegedly from Al-Qaeda - stating that such a small amount in the hands of Iraqi terrrorists could kill tens of thousands of people.

No sooner had the dust from the war settled than Miller was embedded with the Pentagon's top-secret Mobile Exploitation Team (MET) in Iraq to find the suspected WMD but it too came up with nothing, as did subsequent investigating teams. She even sat in on the initial debriefing of Jamal Sultan Tikriti, a relative of Saddam's, but nothing telling resulted. Still WHIG and a similar group in Downing Street kept up the pressure that the missing weapons would ultimately be found.

These officials had the greatest confidence that the key to unlocking the secrets rested with the capture of Dr. Taha, or as Kelly chose to call her "Dr. Germ", the link between Al-Qaeda and Iraq. Gordon Thomas wrote a series of articles, notably "Dr. Germ and the Poisons of Death," tying up Saddam's biological weapons program with intelligence from the CIA, MI6 and the Mossad which corroborated everything Kelly had feared and suspected.

Then Kelly, much like Oswald back in New Orleans during the summer of 1963, realized vaguely that he was being set up to take the fall for the Iraqi misadventure. While the ex-Marine had been most eager to go to the USSR as a Manchurian Candidate to decapitate the Soviet leadership, especially Nikita Khrushchev, he was not prepared to turn on JFK, his President, when his minders decided that he was the source of the problem - as was demonstrated when Oswald refused to be rapidly hyponzied to assassinate him by Dr. George White in New Orleans. (For details, see John Marks, The Search for the 'Manchurian Candidate', pp. 202-3, and note at the bottom of p. 244.) While Kelly, a similarly dedicated but more important civil servant, was willing to do whatever was necessary to get rid of the rogue Saddam, he still most unwilling to be misused by his superiors for whatever they saw fit, especially if it were at the expense of his knowledge and competence.

Consequently, Kelly - stung by the indication that he was the source of the exaggerated intelligence to suit his alleged Coalition employers, especially Israel - started speaking out boldly to reporters Andrew Gilligan and Susan Watts of the BBC. On May 22, 2003, he met Gilligan at the Charing Cross Hotel, and disclosed that the 45-minute claim about Iraq's ability to launch a strategic WMD attack was a gross mispresentation of the time required and the kind of attack which could occur - a 'sexing' up of the intelligence, Kelly claimed, by Blair's spokesman Alastair Campbell. By the time Gilligan was obliged to testify before the Commons' Select Committee on Foreign Affairs four weeks later, there had been so many claims and counterclaims about the source that there was no longer any doubt that it was Kelly.

Four days after Gilligan testified, on June 23rd, and the transcript of the hearing had been published, Miller had a surprise meeting with Libby, Cheney's chief of staff, and they discussed apparently how to minimize the damage he could cause. Until Kelly was finally outed by the MOD, Miller would keep track to Kelly's movements, and let Libby know what was in the offing.

During the next two weeks, Kelly admitted to his line manager that he had talked to Gilligan on May 22nd, and a week later, after the former inspector had been twice interviewed by him and the MOD's Personnel Director, his name was indirectly leaked to the press, causing Kelly to flee to the West Country in search of security.

The outing of Kelly provided Miller and the White House with a way of diverting the media and the public from what was really happening while a permanent solution to the Kelly problem was being achieved. On July 6th, former Ambassador Wilson managed to have his complaints about the Niger claims, "What I Didn't Find in Niger," published in The Times - denouncing the whole search as a fraud, based upon lies.

Then Miller met Libby twice, hitting upon the idea of outing Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA operative who had gone out of her way to see that Wilson was given the task, and that the administration had outed her in order to get back at Wilson for his scathing report. Miller then told the story to Robert Novak who published it on July 14th, but it was already making the rounds in Washington, thanks particularly to the efforts by Kove and Time reporter Matt Cooper, obliging Patrick Fitzgerald, the US attorney in Chicago, to be appointed as a special prosecutor to seek the prosecution of the leakers of Plame's identity - a felony.

While America was completely absorbed in this process, Kelly was murdered, thanks, in part, to more input by Miller. She learned that Kelly was planning to quit his job at the MOD, return to Iraq for more research into its alleged WMD, and write a book for an Oxford publisher about the whole scandal. Kelly, in telling her so, was completely oblivious of the fact that she was his greatest nemesis.

Later the same day, Kelly was bushwhacked by a gang, apparently a Mossad kidon, when he
went for a walk in Oxfordshire, and on July 18th his body was found, all battered and bruised because of the struggle he had put up. Five days later, Miller wrote an obituary of Kelly for The Times, "Scientist Was the 'Bane of Proliferator'," failing to make mention of how well she knew him, and of his warning her of the "many dark actors" threatening him as he set out on his final walk.

Since then, the cover ups have gathered apace, with the British public being subjected to the Hutton Inquiry's whitewash of Kelly's murder, and the Butler Inquiry just obfuscating the scandal further. Kelly's killing for alleged purposes of national security was never even considered, much less investigated because of its international dimensions and possible repercussions In America, inquiries have followed a similar course. Instead of inquiries investigating how officials, particularly Libby, Rove, Cheney and possibly even the President, aided and abetted an assassination, they settled for making it a battle between press freedom and national security - what Miller ably assisted by refusing to hand over to the Special Prosecutor the notes of her meetings with Libby.

After Miller had spent 85 days in jail in the name of press freedom, she agreed to hand them over to Fitzgerald, provided he limited his inquiries to what they had discussed - a demand he incredibly agreed to. It was only thanks to the log of people who entered the Executive Office Building, where Libby's office is, that the Secret Service was able to establish the Miller had met with him on June 23rd - what neither Miller nor Libby had mentioned to the FBI or the Special Prosecutor's grand jury. Miller then produced her alleged notes of the meeting - what understandably contained no mention of Kelly and what they were thinking of doing to him.

At this point, it seems that Libby will probably be indicted for perjury, obstruction of justice, and the like in the investigation of the outing of Plame - forcing him to resign from office - and then he might be joined by former CIA operatives Duane 'Dewey' Clarridge, Alan Wolfe, Michael Ledeen and others for passing along Ahmed Chalabi's convenient fabrications about Iraq's WMD, especially the forged report that the Italian secuirty service had put together about Niger supplying Saddam with 'yellow cake'.

Rest assured, there will be no mention of Kelly in any of this, and the blowback will go no higher than Libby.

Case For WTC Tower Demolition Sealed By Griffin

Theologian Says Controlled Demolition is Now a Fact, Not a Theory

In two speeches to overflow crowds in New York last weekend, notable theologian David Ray Griffin argued that recently revealed evidence seals the case that the Twin Towers and WTC-7 were destroyed by controlled demolition with explosives. Despite the many enduring mysteries of the 9/11 attacks, Dr. Griffin concluded, "It is already possible to know, beyond a reasonable doubt, one very important thing: the destruction of the World Trade Center was an inside job, orchestrated by terrorists within our own government."

On Oct. 15th and 16th, New Yorkers filled two venues to hear the prominent theologian and author of two books on 9/11 give a presentation entitled "The Destruction of the Trade Towers: A Christian Theologian Speaks Out." Dr. Griffin has continued to blaze a trail of courage, leading where most media and elected officials have feared to tread. His presentation went straight to the core of one of the most powerful indictments of the official story, the collapse of the towers and WTC 7.

Dr. Griffin included excerpts from the firemenís tapes which were recently released as a result of a prolonged court battle led by victimís families represented by attorney Norman Siegel and reported in the NY Times. He also included statements by many witnesses. These sources gave ample testimony giving evidence of explosions going off in the buildings. A 12 minute film was shown for the audiences, who saw for themselves the undeniable evidence for controlled demolition.

Dr. Griffin listed ten characteristics of the collapses which all indicate that the buildings did not fall due to being struck by planes or the ensuing fires. He explained the buildings fell suddenly without any indication of collapse. They fell straight into their own footprint at free-fall speed, meeting virtually no resistance as they fell--a physical impossibility unless all vertical support was being progressively removed by explosives severing the core columns.

The towers were built to withstand the impact of a Boeing 707 and 160 mile per hour winds, and nothing about the plane crashes or ensuing fires gave any indication of causing the kind of damage that would be necessary to trigger even a partial or progressive collapse, much less the shredding of the buildings into dust and fragments that could drop at free-fall speed.

The massive core columns--the most significant structural feature of the buildings, whose very existence is denied in the official 9/11 Commission Report--were severed into uniform 30 foot sections, just right for the 30-foot trucks used to remove them quickly before a real investigation could transpire.

There was a volcanic-like dust cloud from the concrete being pulverized, and no physical mechanism other than explosives can begin to explain how so much of the buildings' concrete was rendered into extremely fine dust. The debris was ejected horizontally several hundred feet in huge fan shaped plumes stretching in all directions, with telltale "squibs" following the path of the explosives downward.

These are all facts that have been avoided by mainstream and even most of the alternative media. Again, these are characteristics of the kind of controlled demolitions that news people and firefighters were describing on the morning of 9/11. Those multiple first-person descriptions of controlled demolition were hidden away for almost four years by the City of New York until a lawsuit finally forced the city to release them. Dr. Griffin's study of these accounts has led him beyond his earlier questioning of the official story of the collapses, to his above-quoted conclusion: The destruction of the three WTC buildings with explosives by US government terrorists is no longer a hypothesis, but a fact that has been proved beyond a reasonable doubt.

Itís important to note that Dr. Griffin is one of many prominent intellectuals--including the likes of Gore Vidal, Howard Zinn, Peter Dale Scott, Richard Falk, Paul Craig Roberts, Morgan Reynolds and Peter Phillips--who have seen through the major discrepancies of the official explanation of 9/11 and have risen to challenge it. These brave individuals represent the tip of an ever-growing iceberg of discreet 9/11 skeptics. Indeed, 9/11 skepticism appears to be almost universal among intellectuals who have examined the evidence, since there has not yet been a single serious attempt to refute the case developed by Dr. Griffin and such like-minded thinkers as Nafeez Ahmed and Mike Ruppert. As for the general public, polls have shown that a strong majority of Canadians (63%, Toronto Star, May '04) and half of New Yorkers (Zogby, August 2004) agree that top US leaders conspired to murder nearly 3,000 Americans on 9/11/01.

How, then, can the mainstream US media continue to ignore the story of the century? Perhaps the best answer was given by Dr. Griffin himself in the conclusion of his talk, and is worth quoting at length:

"The evidence for this conclusion (that 9/11 was an inside job) has thus far been largely ignored by the mainstream press, perhaps under the guise of obeying President Bushís advice not to tolerate "outrageous conspiracy theories." We have seen, however, that it is the Bush administrationís conspiracy theory that is the outrageous one, because it is violently contradicted by numerous facts, including some basic laws of physics.

"There is, of course, another reason why the mainstream press has not pointed out these contradictions. As a recent letter to the Los Angeles Times said:

"'The number of contradictions in the official version of . . . 9/11 is so overwhelming that . . . it simply cannot be believed. Yet . . . the official version cannot be abandoned because the implication of rejecting it is far too disturbing: that we are subject to a government conspiracy of "X-Files" proportions and insidiousness.'

"The implications are indeed disturbing. Many people who know or at least suspect the truth about 9/11 probably believe that revealing it would be so disturbing to the American psyche, the American form of government, and global stability that it is better to pretend to believe the official version. I would suggest, however, that any merit this argument may have had earlier has been overcome by more recent events and realizations. Far more devastating to the American psyche, the American form of government, and the world as a whole will be the continued rule of those who brought us 9/11, because the values reflected in that horrendous event have been reflected in the Bush administrationís lies to justify the attack on Iraq, its disregard for environmental science and the Bill of Rights, its criminal negligence both before and after Katrina, and now its apparent plan not only to weaponize space but also to authorize the use of nuclear weapons in a preemptive strike.

"In light of this situation and the facts discussed in this lecture---as well as dozens of more problems in the official account of 9/11 discussed elsewhere---I call on the New York Times to take the lead in finally exposing to the American people and the world the truth about 9/11. Taking the lead on such a story will, of course, involve enormous risks. But if there is any news organization with the power, the prestige, and the credibility to break this story, it is the Times. It performed yeoman service in getting the 9/11 oral histories released. But now the welfare of our republic and perhaps even the survival of our civilization depend on getting the truth about 9/11 exposed. I am calling on the Times to rise to the occasion.

Dr. Griffinís speech given at the University of Wisconsin earlier this year, entitled "9/11 and the American Empire," was broadcast twice on C-SPAN. In late September Dr. Griffin was asked to give expert testimony at hearings sponsored by Cynthia McKinney and the Congressional Black Caucus investigating the 9/11 Commission Report. He is currently Professor Emeritus at Claremont College in California.

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Tuesday 18 October 2005

More Highly Credible Whistle Blowers Identifying Global 'Al-Qaeda' Terrorism as State Controlled

Forget what the media are telling you, forget what the politicians are telling you. Ask yourself the following simple question any time there's a terrorist attack: Qui Bono? Who Benefits? Ask that question and you will reach the same conclusions I did. This whole "terrorism" thing is a sham, a cover and one big giant LIE from beginning to firey end!

Looking back at the Bali bombing and new whistleblowers

by Paul Joseph Watson


During an interview for an Australian documentary, former Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid unequivocally fingered the Indonesian authorities as the true culprits behind the 2002 Bali bombings.

Wahid said the authorities were acting at the behest of Western intelligence agencies.

Other sources used for the documentary were adamant that there were no Al-Qaeda affiliated terrorist groups in existence that were not controlled by intelligence agencies.

Indonesia has become renowned for rampant corruption and state involvement in terrorist atrocities. Sources told the film makers that government connected establishment figures are carrying out an agenda of depopulation in the targeted areas by lowering the value of property and resources, then buying it on the cheap.

The United States government had advance knowledge of the October 12 2002 Bali bombing. They passed that knowledge on to the Taiwanese government and told them to keep the information top secret.

Hours before the bombing took place, the US withdrew all its administrative staff and diplomats from Indonesia, citing a 'security threat'. The British government also received the same warning but this wasn't passed on to any relevant authority or the hundreds of victims carelessly making their way to a beach party.

The plastic explosives used in the attack were of military origin and were used primarily by the US military.

Immediately after the bombing, the FBI, the Australian Secret Service and British secret police swooped in to the bomb site and ruthlessly took charge of the investigation, much to the anger of the Indonesian authorities and the Balinese police.

Why were they so eager to take control? Were they attempting to cover their tracks and lead the other unwitting investigators away from any other conclusion but that the bombing was carried out by suicide bombers?

The very organization blamed by the authorities for the bombing responded by saying the attack was the work of the CIA, Mossad and Australian Secret Service.

Back in July we released an article which called for, "all governments who still operate outside of the control of the Globalists to come forward and join humanity in unveiling the real terrorists who are attempting to deform the world into a prison planet."

This was a plea for all credible whistleblowers, and especially those within government, to shine a spotlight on the true face of terrorism,

"We are calling on all whistleblowers to reveal themselves now and stand with us in the corner of truth and the future of this species. These bastards are indiscriminate killers and withholding information only paints a bigger target on your forehead. Your words need to be heard."

"On a governmental level the challenge is here before you. Either scream from the rooftops about government orchestrated terrorism or sit back and watch your country become a victim of it as it is wrestled away from your hands and placed in the domain of a black and cancerous global dictatorship."

Since this article the crescendo if credible individuals blowing the whistle on government sponsored terror has increased.

After British SAS officers were caught dressed in Arab garb, shooting at police and, according to some sources, allegedly driving a car filled to the brim with explosives, the Iranian government came out and accused the US and Britain of staging car bombings in Iraq and also being behind bombings in Iran in an attempt to destabilize the government.

Meanwhile, in the US, the so-called threat to attack the New York Subway was admitted to be a hoax. This of course was only released after Mayor Bloomberg's approval ratings had increased and sufficient attention had been distracted away from the imminent indictments of top Bush administration officials.

The Globalists are reeling and exposure of government sponsored terror has them on the ropes. Some developments might even tempt us to speculate that they have backed off using terror to attempt further seizures of power. The Globalists are like junkies, every terror attack has less and less of a fear impact on the general public. Therefore the attacks need to increase in scale to have any real impact. However, increasing the scale only increases the size of the Globalists' dirty fingerprints all over the crime. They are frozen by the fear of being caught.

Is the move to push Bird Flu as the new boogeyman a shift away from the terror paradigm? It is possible but we should never underestimate the audacity of the Globalists.

The end goal remains the same. The complete militarization of America, the confiscation of every citizen's firearms, and the brutal desecration of liberty as we know it.

Full story...

Monday 17 October 2005

Judges liken terror laws to Nazi Germany

Judges are saying it, police chiefs are saying it and those of us who comment on such things out here on the Net have been saying it. This country is turning into a police state and people seem to be blissfully unaware of it. Every day sees more attacks on civil liberties and the politicians harping on about how it's necessary to protect ourselves from terrorism. But our war in Iraq is making the terrorism more likely because we running around pissing people off left, right and centre. Talk about an Orwellian nightmare!!!

A powerful coalition of judges, senior lawyers and politicians has warned that the Government is undermining freedoms citizens have taken for granted for centuries and that Britain risks drifting towards a police state. One of the country's most eminent judges has said that undermining the independence of the courts has frightening parallels with Nazi Germany.

Senior legal figures are worried that "inalienable rights" could swiftly disappear unless Tony Blair ceases attacking the judiciary and freedoms enshrined in the Human Rights Act.

Lord Ackner, a former law lord, said there was a contradiction between the Government's efforts to separate Parliament and the judiciary through the creation of a supreme court, and its instinct for directing judges how to behave. He cautioned against "meddling" by politicians in the way the courts operate.

"I think it is terribly important there should not be this apparent battle between the executive and the judiciary. The judiciary has been put there by Parliament in order to ensure that the executive acts lawfully. If we take that away from the judiciary we are really apeing what happened in Nazi Germany," he said.

Lord Ackner added that the Government's proposals to hold terrorist suspects for three months without charge were overblown. "The police have made a case for extending the two weeks but to extend it to three months is excessive."

Lord Lester QC, a leading human rights lawyer, expressed concern that the Government was flouting human rights law and meddling with the courts.

"If the Prime Minister and other members of the Government continue to threaten to undermine the Human Rights Act and interfere with judicial independence we shall have to secure our basic human rights and freedoms with a written constitution," he said.

Lord Carlile, a deputy High Court judge, warned against the whittling away of historic civil liberties. "We have to be acute about protecting what is taken for granted as inalienable rights. In the United States the Patriot Act included a system whereby a witness to a terrorist incident can be detained for up to a year. This is in the land of the free."

The senior barrister remarked that judges had now replaced MPs as the defenders of basic human rights.

Full story...

Friday 14 October 2005

Torture and misery in name of freedom

by Harold Pinter who yesterday won the Nobel Prize for Literature

The great poet Wilfred Owen articulated the tragedy, the horror - and indeed the pity - of war in a way no other poet has. Yet we have learnt nothing. Nearly 100 years after his death the world has become more savage, more brutal, more pitiless.

But the "free world" we are told, as embodied in the United States and Great Britain, is different to the rest of the world since our actions are dictated and sanctioned by a moral authority and a moral passion condoned by someone called God. Some people may find this difficult to comprehend but Osama Bin Laden finds it easy.

What would Wilfred Owen make of the invasion of Iraq? A bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of International Law. An arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public. An act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading - as a last resort (all other justifications having failed to justify themselves) - as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands upon thousands of innocent people.

An independent and totally objective account of the Iraqi civilian dead in the medical magazine The Lancet estimates that the figure approaches 100,000. But neither the US or the UK bother to count the Iraqi dead. As General Tommy Franks of US Central Command memorably said: "We don't do body counts".

We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery and degradation to the Iraqi people and call it " bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East". But, as we all know, we have not been welcomed with the predicted flowers. What we have unleashed is a ferocious and unremitting resistance, mayhem and chaos.

You may say at this point: what about the Iraqi elections? Well, President Bush himself answered this question when he said: "We cannot accept that there can be free democratic elections in a country under foreign military occupation". I had to read that statement twice before I realised that he was talking about Lebanon and Syria.

What do Bush and Blair actually see when they look at themselves in the mirror?

I believe Wilfred Owen would share our contempt, our revulsion, our nausea and our shame at both the language and the actions of the American and British governments.

Adapted by Harold Pinter from a speech he delivered on winning the Wilfred Owen Award earlier this year

Full story...

Free Enterprise, Science and 'Intelligent Design'

by Trowbridge H. Ford

Things are happening so fast these days that it is hard simply to keep up with them, much less understand what is really going on. With all kinds of disasters - earthquakes, hurricanes, and the like - occurring, and a myriad of explanations - global warming, divine intervention, and human design - offered about their cause, it is hardly surprising that most people don't have a clue as to what to make of it, much less adopt any kind of agenda for getting a handle on the problem. The world seems to be undergoing revolutionary changes on many fronts, and the public is simply at a loss about what to do.

Perhaps, a way to take the measure of the problem is to discuss what most people, at a bare minimum, think about the world and how they are prepared to deal with its worst problems; what science, engineering and international institutions are prepared to do about them; and what kind of belief system the world's media is vaguely trying to impose on the fallout in order to reassure the world's populations about the future. This approach seems most called for since most of the time the media just engages in a hit-or-miss approach to the whole problem. Instead of jokes, avoidance and red-herrings, we need some kind of integrated answer to what is happening.

As I indicated in my last article about the subject, the classical economists are the best place to start, but instead of talking about what they wanted to achieve - free enterprise - this time we should look at how they hoped to achieve it. For English speakers, the essentials can be found in the works of Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham and Robert Malthus. They provide the necessary insights into how they planned to change a world dominated by state control and mercantilism into one where individuals could accummulate wealth with security despite the dangers of nature, resulting in populations which would experience increasingly stable economic prosperity.

Smith, in The Wealth of Nations - to end practice where governments interferred in a most destructive way in almost everything people did - called for them to give vent to the natural rights of all men so that they could have the liberty to do what would benefit them most, and, ultimately, society as a whole would flourish. The free competition Smith envisioned was not an unbridled one, though, where anything went, but one regulated by law to ensure that basic standards were maintained. Property must be protected against theft, and contracts enforced so that there is stability in the market. In Smith, government is little more than an umpire in a most open game - leading people to call the desired establishment a "night-watchman state".

While Bentham did not disagree with this agenda, he found it too simplistic, and uncertain. Goods could not simply be acquired, and retained. There were risks in taking things from nature, and there was no guarantee, without an established body of law about the whole process, that one's efforts would not be ruined somehow by others. As Bentham indicated in the opening paragraph of An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation: "Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne."

By pain and pleasure, he did not mean a simple hedonism, based upon sensation, but intelligent perceptions of the mind about all the opportunities and dilemmas of life. Free enterprise did not mean simply competition with other producers but controlled production in which the legislator worked to benefit one and all. There could be interference in enterprise when it protected the society as a whole, the interests of one who was being adversely effected by another's enterprise, and the essential needs of the people, especially food, were threatened because it was only by satisfying the subsistence of all that abundance became possible.

This very likely clash between population and basic production, agriculture, led Parson Robert Malthus to write his classic but hardly original Principles of Population during the midst of the Napoleonic Wars. After stating the dubious maxim that populations increase at a geometric rate while agriculture only at an arithmetic one, he discussed all the positive checks nature provided to population growth - floods, storms, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, disease, pestilence, famines, wars and the like - and the prudent steps individuals should take to eliminate or at least reduce their impact - abstinence from sex until one could afford to marry, abortion, infanticide, etc. Unlike the French philosoph Condorcet from whom the Anglican minister borrowed his theory, though, he did not include birth control as a check on population.

Charles Darwin's Origin of Species changed science dramatically by applying Malthus's ideas about global free competition for man to all of nature. "The motive force of evolution, according to him," Bertrand Russell wrote A History of Western Philosophy, "is a kind of biological economics in a world of free competition." (p. 726) Those individuals in a particular species who possessed the best traits, given their environment, were determined to win the struggle for existence over their less fortunate kin - demonstrating that they were the fittist to survive. Genetic make-up, instead of acquired characteristics, was what determined the winners among any species, and Sigmund Freud and his followers showed that evolution determined
even the innermost make-up - the wants - of man's mind.

While some, especially in the Americas, applied the teachings of Darwin to society, others, particularly Karl Marx and his followers, re-examined man's history, concluding that it directed a far different destiny for man - one which went from each according to his needs, to each according to his wants. Instead of man being locked into an increasingly destructive competition, he was on the way to a world of evermore opportunity and freedom, thanks to a blending of British economics with Friederich Hegel's philosophy of history. Now that industrial production had been established, Marx concluded, the wage-earner would simply take it over, and distribute goods in a much fairer, abundant way.

The wars of the 20th century changed all that. While decimating the best and the brightest of generations, and destroying vast amounts of wealth, they unleashed new levels of population upon the world which would fall prey to more checks upon their sustained growth.
The wars ruined any chance of the Progressive movement in America taming its Social Darwinism - what sought to increase, institutionalize, and legitimize the inequalities of nature's competition - while Europe's socialism was eviserated by the threat and promise of the embattled Soviet Union. "The tragedy of the October revolution," Eric Hobsbawn explained in The Age of Extremes, "was that it could only produce its kind of ruthless, brutal command socialism." (p. 498) And in the process, the arsenal of war had been made much greater and deadlier.

About the extreme which killed communism, nazism, and fascism, though, Hobsbawn was much less categorical, claiming that it was a mixture of weakened capitalism, and liberal democracies which would at least tolerate the continued existence of "...the more divinely inspired fundamentalist regimes." (p. 575) This seems a vast understatement of what
capitalism and American-led Western governments are capable of, and engaged in. The Americans and their British allies are quite clearly similarly divinely inspired - reclaimed creationists - who are prepared to do whatever it takes to achieve the kind of world God has instructed them to do. Bush, Blair and their followers are ideologues of the most dangerous kind, as Gorbachev learned while dealing with their predecessors. They were prepared to do with WMD whatever was required to get rid of the godless communists.

And Washington and London had gone far beyond MAD - mutually assured destruction - in dealing with the alleged red menace. First through surprises, and then with an overwhelmingly powerful weaponry, they were sure that they could prevail in any confrontation with any enemy, whether it be communists or Islamists. And their confidence was fundamentally based upon the fact that the world simply did not know their agenda, and what they were prepared to use, if necessary. It was not until the election of George W. Bush that the neocons were finally ready to play their hand no matter what was required.

While the Americans and the British demonstrated their tactical military superiority in the Gulf wars, their strategic monopoly in WMD - what started with Washington's weather wars with Castrol's Cuba after the Missile Crisis settlement left the regime in place - was only known to their inventors and operators. What started with simply a plan of hydro-meterological attacks on the island, hoping to starve the Cubans into overthrowing Castro, ultimately developed into a system of geological attacks which could cause massive tsunamis and earthquakes on command, almost anywhere in the world - and America is now even in the process of closing this small gap.

I was reminded of this last Saturday after I had shortly before finished my last article on this subject, indicating that Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England was now engaged in the process that Wolfowitz had directed before. It was Wolfowitz apparently who directed the massive earthquake against Bam, Iran's ancient treasure, killing tens of thousands when the mullahs were apparently stoking up the resistance in Iraq after its being freed from Saddam, and were threatening to close the Straits of Hormoz, a most vulnerable link in the shipment of oil for global capitalism. Then, it seems, Wolfowitz directed the unprecedented earthquake near the Straits of Malacca - another Christmas greeting - when more terrorists were apparently threatening them, killing ten times as many Muslims.

It was now England's turn to direct the campaign on cue, and he did not miss a beat. No sooner had Pakistan's President Pervey Musharraf been interviewed on CBS's Sixty Minutes, stating in no uncertain terms that Osama bin-Laden would beat him in any democratic election, and that the border with Afghanistan was completely under his control - with the tribal chiefs so scared that they would not even talk about his possible presence there - than the Pakistani capital of terrorist-dominated Kashmir was struck with the most devastating earthquake in its history, killing 40,000 people, and wiping out the next generation of possible Pakistani terrorists.

The earthquake was an essential component of the new US-Pakistani strategic partnership, as it was the only thing which could give Musharraf's coup-based government real legitimacy - what he reminded 60 Minutes reporter Steve Kroft of when he joshed about Osama winning any free and fair election. Musharraf grabbed power in 1999, and managed to stay on right after the earthquake in Iran. Thanks to two nearly successful asssassination attacks on December 14th and 25th - and how he managed to survive is still a mystery - he was able to pressure the Pakistan Parliament and four provincial assemblies to give him a vote of confidence - what he interpreted Article 41(8) of the Constitution justifying his staying on until 2007, and what many members of Parliament, mostly Muslims, protested by walking out.

Hardly had the dust started settling from the gigantic quake than American Ambassador to Pakistan Ryan Crocker - who replaced Wolfowitz for the position when it was thought his remaining in Washington as Rumsfeld's deputy to direct the war on terror was essential despite his vast mistakes in pacifying Iraq - started giving grants, assistance, and loans to the beleaguered country - complementing what Wolfowitz's regional expert at the World Bank was now supplying at the expense of more long-term investment. To give legitimacy to the efforts, Secretary of State Condi Rice made an unplanned visit to Islamabad, arrriving as the proper emissary of the President, and promising to do whatever it takes for Pakistan to defeat the terrorists.

England, in short, is well and truly teaching the terrorists the lessons of nature and history, and one can just wonder where he may strike next. Will it be an earthquake in Damascus, or another one in Iran, one even closer to the Straits? In any case, while people are talking about the possibilities of nuclear attacks on and/or by Iran, and the need of its nuclear disarmament, the Pentagon is doing, it seems, the work necessary for winning the war on terrorism by other means - as the American President says, no matter how long, and how destructive it may be - as God, it seems, has turned out to be an avenging neocon.

Tuesday 11 October 2005

Bush, Blair compared to Nazi war criminals

History is not going to be nice to us...

A former chief UN weapons inspector has compared British Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President George Bush to the Nazi war criminals who started World War II.

Scott Ritter, a former US marine, said the US and Britain's "aggressive warfare" in Iraq was similar to German actions in Europe 66 years ago.

"Both these men could be pulled up as war criminals for engaging in actions that we condemned Germany in 1946 for doing the same thing," he said. "Tony Blair and George Bush are guilty of the crime of planning and committing aggressive warfare."

He said both leaders would be in a much better position if they had received the backing of the international community by the passing of the infamous second UN resolution.

Mr Ritter also said the "special relationship" between Britain and the US left British honour as nothing more than a "disregarded mistress".

He said the sharing of information was a one-way system, with the US benefiting from UK intelligence.

"Britain gets nothing, other than to say they are America's closest ally in Europe," he said.

Mr Ritter, who was a UN weapons inspector in Iraq between 1991 and 1998, was speaking at Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London.

He said intelligence services had been correct to say Iraq's missile program had been destroyed soon after the first Gulf conflict of 1991.

But he said the aim of the US Government was never to settle at disarmament but enforce regime change - the removal of Saddam Hussein.

He said the origins of such a policy came from president George Bush snr who, in the run up to the first Gulf War, described Saddam as the "Middle Eastern equivalent of Adolf Hitler".

Mr Ritter told how he delivered a report in 1992 stating Iraq's missile program had been eliminated. But, he said, the news was met with "stony silence" and he was told Iraq still possessed 200 missiles.

The inspectors returned to try to track down the weapons, which never materialised.

Full story...

Monday 10 October 2005

Weather War?

New evidence suggests US & Russia are embroiled in an illegal race to harness the power of hurricanes & earthquakes

The huge mushroom cloud soared skywards, the captain was gripped by fear, believing his plane was about to be engulfed by the fall-out from a nuclear explosion. After declaring mayday and ordering his crew to don oxygen masks, the experienced pilot had the presence of mind to record that the cloud measured an estimated 200 miles in diameter and was tipped by an eerie light, like nothing he had seen before. Eventually, it soared harmlessly into the atmosphere, leaving the passenger jet to continue safely on its journey from Anchorage, in Alaska, to Tokyo.

But far below, a fleet of fishing boats trawling the sea between Japan and the Soviet Union was drenched by a violent but short-lived downpour before the weather suddenly cleared. Nuclear tests and volcanic activity were later ruled out but scientists concluded that this was not a natural phenomenon. More than two decades later suspicion still exists that the stunned airline crew and fishermen in 1973 were witnessing a sinister Cold War experiment, in which water from the Sea of Japan was blown into the air to create clouds and rain.

British government papers, just released by the National Archives, show that throughout the Seventies there was deep mistrust between the two superpowers over environmental warfare. The documents reveal that both the US, which led the field, and the Soviet Union had secret military programmes with the goal of controlling the world's climate. "By the year 2025 the United States will own the weather, " one scientist is said to have boasted.

Since then, a United Nations treaty has been signed which bans environmental warfare, such as causing earthquakes, melting the polar ice caps and altering climate. But some experts believe that clandestine work to create the ultimate weapon of mass destruction continues.

These claims are dismissed by sceptics as wild conspiracy theories and the stuff of James Bond movies but there is growing evidence that the boundaries between science fiction and fact are becoming increasingly blurred. The Americans now admit that they invested L12million over five years during the Vietnam war on "cloud seeding" - deliberately creating heavy rainfall to wash away enemy crops and destroy supply routes on the Ho Chi Minh trail, in an operation codenamed Project Popeye.

It is claimed that rainfall was increased by a third in targeted areas, making the weather-manipulation weapon a success. At the time, government officials said the region was prone to heavy rain.

However this sort of rain-making experiment was nothing new. In Britain, it has been alleged that before the devastating Lynmouth floods in Devon in 1952, the RAF had been conducting secret rain-making tests. Aircraft showered clouds with silver iodide, on which water droplets formed, became heavy and eventually fell to the ground as rain. In the next 12 hours nine inches of rain fell - 250 times the normal amount for August - and 35 people were killed.

Former North Devon MP Tony Speller, then a 22-year-old soldier who helped in the relief effort, sought answers from the MoD.

"I have no doubt they were seeding in the area because there were RAF log books to prove it, " he says now. "Of course the MoD denied any knowledge but that is not to say it did not happen."

Speller, now 76, adds: "I doubt we will ever know the truth."

Early work on climate control was crude and unpredictable but it is claimed that both the Americans and Russians continued to experiment behind closed doors even after the UN ban in the mid-Eighties, and both now possess sophisticated systems which are capable of controlling the weather - with potentially devastating results.

In the US, the technology was developed under the high-frequency active auroral research programme ( HAARP) - originally part of Ronald Reagan's controversial Star Wars defence system. Based in Gokoma, Alaska, the weapon operates by beaming powerful radio waves into the upper atmosphere to alter weather patterns. Some experts claim the system is already up and running, while others say it won't be ready for another 20 years.

Michel Chossudovsky, professor of economics at the University of Ottawa in Canada, who has studied official military documents about HAARP, is in no doubt that the weapon is ready.

"There are very clear statements by the US Air Force to the effect that weather modification technology is available. HAARP will be fully operational by next year and could be used in actual military situations, " he says.

"To claim this system has any nonmilitary purposes is twisting the truth.

I don't think there are any peaceful applications - it is a weapon of mass destruction, capable of major climatic disturbance. Part of the beauty is that the enemy might never know that a weapon had been used. I believe the UN agreement is certainly being violated."

He claims that at least one British firm has been involved in its development.

"It is time people began focusing on these weapons instead of concentrating solely on global warming, " Chossudovsky adds. "Both are a serious threat."

The Russians are thought to have their own "weather steering" system, called Woodpecker, involving the transmission of low-frequency waves which are capable of disrupting the atmosphere and altering the path of the jet stream. It is claimed that a prolonged drought in California in the Eighties was caused by the blocking of warm, moist air for many weeks.

According to Damian Wilson, a physicist with the Met Office, controlling climate is a reality but not a precise science. "Clearing fog by dropping dry ice into clouds is a proven technique which has been around for decades, " he says.

"Large amounts of research have been invested in seeding clouds to generate rain and it is done in countries where there are water shortages. The problem is that it is unpredictable and you need clouds to start with. The technology does not exist to make rain fall from clear blue skies so it cannot be used in the desert to end droughts and famines."

WILSON believes it is possible to alter the course of a hurricane, which could have enormous life-saving potential. The current mayhem in the Caribbean and America's Eastern seaboard also shows what a destructive weapon a well-targeted storm could prove.

The Americans used cloud seeding to try to control a hurricane in 1947 but the tactic backfired when it picked up strength and hit Savannah, Georgia.

It is known that the US carried out further hurricane-manipulation experiments between 1962 and 1983, under the codename Project Stormfury, after it was calculated that a single hurricane contained as much energy as all the world's power stations combined. More recent projects have involved pouring tens of thousands of gallons of vegetable oil on to the sea.

"Hurricanes gather their strength from the warm sea surface, " says Wilson. "By spreading a large film of oil on the sea it would reduce the intensity by cooling the surface. In theory it is possible to change the path of the hurricane this way. It would not surprise me if military research into controlling the weather goes on. As we suffer more summer droughts in the south-east of England I would also expect to see pressure for cloud seeding to be introduced in this country."

It is not just the weather that has attracted the attention of the military.

Full story...

Friday 7 October 2005

Why Loyalist Jim Gray Was Assassinated

by Trowbridge H. Ford

Everyone should really wonder what it takes today to become a reporter, and what a person really does, once he or she is hired. While the profession always speaks so highly of what it takes to become one, and so glowingly of what individual ones like Paul Foot, Duncan Campbell, and Peter Taylor have achieved, their followers still seem to be totally unprepared for what they are supposed to do, and unwilling to do little more than crank out the most superficial stories when called upon - achieving much less than the proverbial hacks of the golden age of journalism a century ago.

Of course, there are all kinds of parochial limitations on any reporter, as I learned when I last worked as one. You would have thought being a sport editor of a small weekly would have been a most unrestricted job where one was free to report events as one saw fit, but you would be wrong.

When I questioned how the football coaches were managing the players of the local high school team, I was told to just be a cheerleader. And when I continued to question their performance, the editor arranged for some else to cover the games. When I became interested in what a nationally-known sports writer nearby was saying about a continuing basketball scandal at North Carolina State, I was told that he lived over the town line where the publishing company had another paper, and to forget about it. Then there was a similar conclusion to a damage suit that the lacrosse coach of a neighboring town brought against the one who coached the local team after a game resulted in a melee in which he had a tooth knocked out.

When I finally quit in frustration, and left the States, I was informed of what a former British visitor to the town for a year wrote for The Independent after she returned to Britain. She has most concerned about how the local high school was run overall, and stated so in no uncertain terms. I thought that the editor would be interested in the assessment, and would at least say something about it in the hope of improving conditions, only to be told, after I persisted in the matter, the old refrain from the Vietnam War: "Love it or leave it!"

This all comes to mind when reading stories about the assassination of Jim Gray, the
former brigadier of the East Belfast company of the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), who was shot five times a few days ago by two masked gunmen when he returned to his father's house in the Knockwood Park area of the city. The most colorful Gray had been removed from his post for drug-dealing, it seems, in the spring, and was out on bail while awaiting trial for alleged money-laundering - what many suspected he would escape from by telling tales on the criminal activities of his former friends.

The picture in the press was universally of an aged godfather, falling foul with his former criminal associates, as this sample of reporting shows:

"There is a long tradition within the UDA, especially in East Belfast, of internecine warfare." - The Boston Globe.

"One source close to the UDA said there had been allegations circulating that Gray had been passing information to the security forces." - The Belfast Telegraph.

"There has been some talk about a big push against the UDA leadership by the security forces." - The Belfast Telegraph.

"During his terror reign, he amassed plenty of enemies, and police probing his financial affairs, former loyalist allies were desperate to silence him." - Irish Examiner.

"Jim Gray was the UDA's flamboyant east Belfast brigadier known for his 'bling' jewelry and colourful dress sense - before his terror empire came crumbling down around him." - The Belfast Telegraph.

"He pushed drugs not just in his pubs but to children. He stashed away large amounts of money." - The Independent.

"It was only a matter of time for Gray. Many believed he was prepared to tout for a lighter sentence." - News Letter.

Nowhere in the accounts was mention made of the four independent inquiries that former Canadian judge Peter Cory had recommended in which British authorities - the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the Northern Ireland Office, the Army and the security services - were suspected of having colluded with republican and loyalist paramilitaries in notorious murders. They concerned the killings of Belfast solicitors Pat Finucane and Rosemary Nelson, the Loyalist Volunteer Force's Billy 'King Rat' Wright in the Maze Prison, and Catholic Robert Hamill in Portadown.

Regarding the horrific bombing which claimed Nelson's life at her home in Lurgan, County Armagh on March 15, 1999, the "Joint NGO Statement for an Independent Inquiry into the Killing of Human Rights Defender, Rosemary Nelson" reported: "Loyalist paramilitaries claimed responsibility for her murder." About who she was, Peter Harclerode wrote in Secret Soldiers: Special Forces in the War Against Terrorism: "A prominent figure, her support for the nationalist cause had led to her visiting Downing Street for a discussion with Prime Minister Tony Blair, and her abilities as a lawyer were such that she was respected within her profession as well as throughout the nationalist community." (p. 184)

Given Nelson's reputation, London was obliged to agree to an inquiry into her assassination when no one was even charged with the crime, much less convicted of it, especially in light of her complaints, and its failure to implement the recommendations of the UN's Special Rapporteur for protecting lawyers facing intimidation. Nelson complained before her murder that she was receiving death threats which the Royal Ulster Constabulary refused to investigate, much less take seriously, preferring instead to harass and intimidate her itself. And the Northern Ireland Office neither worked to insure her safety nor to implement the Special Rapporteur's recommendations.

Last November, Secretary of State Paul Murphy established an independent inquiry to investigate her murder despite the limitations the new legislation imposed upon it, and agreed to the expansion of its mandate to include not only collusion by the RUC and NIO but also the British Army and the security services. The panel is chaired by Sir Anthony Morland, the judge who presided over the trial of the two youths who murdered the Bulger boy, assisted by Sir Anthony Burden and Dame Valerie Strachan. For the past six months, it has been investigating Nelson's murder, and is scheduled to hold public hearings shortly.

Gray's assassination has blown a great big hole in what was being attemped, as he obviously knew the most about what happened to Nelson, if he and his men did not actually carry it out themselves. Gray was the most important UDA brigadier still on the loose at the time, and was deeply committed to getting the Republicans who had assassinated Wright two years before in prison. Nelson had represented many of them, especially Padraig Wilson, before they were themselves imprisoned, and so she was clearly the best target available.

Moreover, Gray knew what happened to brigadiers who did not take getting PIRA Council members seriously enough. Back in 1988 when Wilson and others were still on the loose, East Belfast brigadier Jim Pratt Craig was suspected, along with the UDA's intelligence chief and Force Research Unit mole Brian Nelson, of not doing enough to get them. Nelson was subjected to violent interrogation by the Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF) for answers, and while he passed, Craig did not when his turn came. The UDA, convinced that he had worked with Wilson through intermediary Tommy McCreery to kill various loyalists, especially the infamous Lennie Murphy, shot him dead on October 15, 1988.

Now there will be no tales from Gray, thanks to the Police Service of Northern Ireland not providing him any protection, and their predecessors in the RUC and the occupants of Downing Street, past and present, can breathe a bit better. And the press can continue its cub reporter work.

Thursday 6 October 2005

Wolfowitz, Disaster Reconstruction and Mature Capitalism

by Trowbridge H. Ford

While most educated people have some knowledge of the development of nationalism, socialism, and communism, they have little idea of what liberalism aka capitalism attempted, starting over 200 years ago, and why its ideals were subverted or minimized by the demands of its competing ideologies until recently. As peoples were politically organized under nation-states, and gave their allegiances to them because of their willingness to satisfy at least some of their basic needs, the goals of the philosophes - the 18th-century intellectuals, mostly French in origin and economic in their orientation - were sacrificed as Europe and America sought national self-determination.

Instead of having a world - described ultimately by Britain's theorist of utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham, in which individuals calculated their well-being rationally in terms of what gave them pain and pleasure rather than what government, the renmants of a most irrational past, dictated upon the basis of various social and legal fictions, Europe's dynastic regimes managed to hang on, directing affairs in ways which still benefited their aristocratic elites while continuing to keep the masses at bay. Thanks to the accompanying industrial revolution, the competing countries soon were engaging in so much oversaving that they exported money into less developed areas of the world, resulting in a wild imperial scramble.

As long was the developing world was dependent upon these competing nation-states, the proponents of utilitarianism - those who wanted to replace the defense of property, and the propagation of natural rights by all kinds of ultilitarian considerations - were just unintentionally preparing, as Bertrand Russell wrote in A History of Western Philosophy, "...the way for the doctrines of socialism." (p. 773) Bentham applied a deterministic psychology of man, and a morality based upon sensation to devise a democratic system where the legislator, with proper
administration, could achieve the greatest happiness for the greatest number by manipulating people's minds so that they would avoid pain.

There was nothing hostile in what the Utilitarians wanted to what the classical economics, especially Adam Smith, were calling for. "In both Bentham and Smith," Ross Harrison
explained in Bentham, "the area in which it is held that there should be unimpded pursual of private interest is bound by a context of law and government." (p. 122) The Scotsman was just confident that unimpeded pursuit of individual interests would result in natural harmony, while Bentham believed that the legislator - being responsible to the people, and building up a body of law which promoted stable consumption - would insure that an artificial identity of interests prevailed.

The prospects of the Utilitarians aka Philosophical Radicals were largely overshadowed by the claims of socialists, however, once it was established that labour - thanks to what Karl Marx and his followers made of the claims of the classsical economics about the origin of property - was the source of value, making the rapid increase in the mechanization of production a most bitter dispute about who should own it or how its profits should be distributed. The two World Wars of the 20th century just intensified the confrontation as they necessitated a vast
increase in the power of the state, and industry. The means of production became the great providers of society, and who owned and/or controlled them became the great determinant of whether it was free enterprise or communist.

In the process, the great bureacracies running the state and industry became the pillars of society and the determiners largely of what they did and why. Of course, the confrontation between the West and the Soviet bloc - the Cold War - fixed their agendas by insuring that the former's corporate capitalism and the latter's state capitalism essentially dominated what was produced, insuring that labor's needs were recognized, and were taken care of through state education, health, and pension programs aka the welfare state.

The military and its suppliers of weapons for the superpowers became so essential to the process that they became institutionalized in the state to guarantee that the political process satisfied their long-term needs, conveniently called national security, since a minimum safety net had been provided for their societies at large.

Once the New Deal reforms of Franklin Roosevelt's administration were in place, and WWII was fought and won, the great changes in Washington concerned the emasculation of the Presidency, the replacement of cloak-and-dagger intelligence by a pre-emptive one capable of getting any covert operation done, and enabling the citizens to consume so wildly that oversaving would never again be a problem. The Congress was no longer be a problem since the Representatives and Senators were elected at odd times, and representated such small sections of the country that they were already well coopted into the warfare state by the demands of their electors that they too get a piece of the action. The courts, especially the Supreme Court, had been largely reduced to resolving claims of citizens against increasingly intrusive and punitive legislation, thanks to the selection of accommodating judges.

While most people think the Presidency is so powerful - given that its occupant is the only national official elected by the whole country, and the pious chants by underlings of a sitting one in need of protecting him at all costs when some operation - like Watergate - goes terribly wrong, the President himself has steadily lost power in determining what the government in Washington does since WWII, and his loss of power was complemented by that of the Central Intellligence Agency despite what conspiracy theorists claim. The post-WWII world just not tolerate the personal arrangements that FDR and his confidants at the State, War and Navy Departments had put together to bring America out of the Great Depression, and into the global conflict.

The institutional changes in Washington could be seen, starting with Truman when the conduct of the Korean War almost led to his impeachment and removal from office for
removing General MacArthur after his insubordination triggered Red China's entry into the conflict. The President had to rely upon General Walter 'Beetle' Smith, Ike's former chief of staff, in various ways to keep the gungho Joint Chiefs of Staff from the Pentagon, and the newly-established, covert-oriented CIA in line during the growing crisis.

While Eisenhower avoided some to the problems the growing national secuirty establishment was causing, given his military background, he still delegated too many responsibilities to subordinates he trusted, particularly DCI Allen Dulles who replaced Smith, and who had some standing with the bureaucracies concerned. They managed to overthrow clandestinely the democratically elected government in Iran and the leftist government of Jacobo Arbenz ín Guatemala because of the tenuous hold they had on power. The CIA still committed too many
covert operations behind Ike's back, especially the ill-fated U-2 spying mission by Gary Powers, inducing him to warn of the dangers of the growing military-industrial complex when he was leaving.

The great undoing of the President's power occurred during JFK's presidency when he and his Whiz Kids, especially the new SOD Robert McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk, failed to follow the script that the Agency had prepared for the Bay of Pigs invasion - what Ike had alluded to in his Farewell Address. Kennedy, as the elected Chief executive, thought that it was in his power to call the shots in such matters, overruling the Agency when it wanted the Pentagon committed to achieving the result its cloak-and dagger tactics could not achieve.

When the process continued during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Agency and the Pentagon
started plotting the President's assassination - an operation intended to make it look like the Soviets and the Cubans had done it, resulting in the Pentagon getting rid of Castro's regime.

Not only did they arrange the contrived downing of Captain Glenn Hyde U-2 while on a flight over Cuba on Nov. 20th (aka the Secrets of the Florida Straits) - what amounted to the revocation of the crisis settlement if Castro had done it - but also made it look like Major James Chenault had been kidnapped by his supporters in Venezuela as part of a hemispheric powerplay. Then there was the Second Naval Guerrilla Operation that the Agency's E. Howard Hunt had put together with renmants of the Bay of Pigs forces in Honduras, and Operation Americas that Al Haig had arranged with Latin banana republics to rectify the situation with the overthrow of the Cuban regime.

While the wounding of Governor Connally - whether it was deliberate or accidental - who helped, along with former Vice President Richard Nxion, set up JFK in Dallas prevented the plot from going further, as he was threatening to get those who had apparently double-crossed him, the lesson was not lost on succeeding Presidents who knew how things worked, Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter proving the rule with the blowback he received from the Agency and the Pentagon for not knowing his place. The Tonkin Gulf incident made LBJ and his now hawkish McNamara prisoners of the national security state which wanted victory in Vietnam. Nixon's working with it, through his increasingly expanded national security apparatus surrounding his National Security Adviser, was the cause of his undoing, once the CIA-assisted Watergate break-in started being exposed.

Behind the scenes, the national security state, increasingly embedded in the Pentagon, was using its resources to make Third World governments totally dependent upon it, a process which guaranteed the eroding of their commitment to their populations just to keep up with making the payments. Stressing the dangers of apparent Soviet threats, the governments were obliged to buy all kinds of weapons to counter them, and then when they fell behind in servicing their debts, they were forced to make all kinds of concessions to companies in the military-industrial complex to keep their heads above water. The whole process has been well described in John Perkins' The Confessions of an Economic Hit Man - what enhanced economic power all over the place at the expense of government control and individuals rights.

In the States, conservative interests started working behind the scenes so that they would ultimately take over the whole system. Based upon the Council of Foreign Relations, and bolstered by an increasing number to Think Tanks, they continually stressed that America was being taken over by communist interests, based in the United Nations, and radical measures must be taken to stop it before it was too late. If selling them arms so that they could engage in regional wars did not stop the threat, then the government should think of altering the weather so that famines and the like could reduce the number of potential enemies in China, the Middle East and around the Indian Ocean. (See, for example, Henry Kissinger's 1974 National Security Study Memorandum 200.)

By the time Ronald Reagan was elected President, the new system was well-established, and it was time to take on the responsibility of getting rid of the Second World countries: the Soviet bloc, its satellites and supporters. The basic change was demonstrated in revamping the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) - what Carter had created to coordinate disaster relief, and civil defense planning - under 'General' Louis Giuffrida's leadership to make secret wartime contingency plans for the implementation of martial law, once WWIII broke out.

Actually, there was hardly a need to do much at all as the communist states were already in the greatest disarray because of crushing military, economic and psychological competition, causing their regimes to have little social support. Moscow had simply run out of gas, and its leadership increasingly knew it.

Instead of allowing this to play itself out peacefully, the Reagan administration, thanks to the most distorted input and action from the Pentagon and the CIA despite congressional opposition, went all out in planning a showdown with the Soviets, and engaging in wild R & D, especially in mass mind-control and weather-making, which would insure ultimate military triumph. While the showdown did not pan out - as my articles in the Trowbridge Archive about the assassination of Sweden's statminister Olof Palme and its fallout, especially the spying for the Soviets by various agents involved in Operation Courtship, have shown - Washington still proceeded with the development of new weapons technology even after the Soviet system collapsed, anticipating the need of challenging what still remained unconnected to international capitalism of the Second and Third worlds.

The struggle to achieve this commenced during the 1990s in the States, but the first Bush and Clinton administrations were too bogged down with their own problems, and too uncertain about success to do it with the vigor required. Bush was too concerned about blowback from Iran-Contra - what had been increased by the CIA's downing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie before he had assumed office - and Clinton was too plagued by problems back in Arkansas to give the war on terrorism his full attention. Still, America managed to provoke a war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq with the intention of at least covering up the West's support of terrorism in the region, allowing the dictator to stay on for fear that it would fall apart without him.

The delay just intensified the military potential and organization of global capitalism to finish remaking the world.

With the election of George H. W. Bush, the process commenced in earnest, though its timing was upset by the miscalculations surrounding the 9/11 hijackings, as I have explained in several articles. Instead of its being the fuse for a pre-emptive war, across the board, against the impediments to the new capitalist order, it just resulted in the removal of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, and the beginning of martial law at home, administered by the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Still, all the key players - Vice President Cheney, SOD Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, Navy Secretary Gordon England, NSA Condi Rice, UN Ambassador John Negroponte, DCI George Tenet, Chief of Naval Operations Vern Clark and others - were in place to move dramatically ahead when conditions were right.

After the ouster of Saddam's regime, and the DHS was up and running under Tom Ridge, the key players and a few new recruits moved to action stations. The most important one was the return of England, a most eager proponent of the New American Century, to the Navy Department. After this most efficient administrator had made the DHS into a bureaucratic dinosaur, apparently on purpose, he returned as the 73rd Navy Secretary to put all the new technology of warfare to work, especially the ability to make gigantic earthquakes. England, like the troublesome Lehman, believed that the Navy was sovereign when it came to making war.

Then the last stronghold against the new order, Colin Powell's State Department, was saddled with the new Office of Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization, headed by former American Ambassor to the Ukraine Carlos Pascual whose duty was to do worldwide what Wolfowitz had been doing in post-war Iraq. "After a cataclysmic event," Naomi Klein explained in "The Rise of Disaster Capitalism" in the May 2nd issue of The Nation, "governments will usually do whatever it takes to get aid dollars - even if it means racking up huge debts and agreeing to sweeping policy reforms." Disasters could now not only achieve the results of wars without the proverbial collateral damage but also pave the way for most lucrative, post-war outcomes for the victors.

Things started rolling when the Navy apparently caused - as I explained in my article "Weather-Making, Katrina, and the Gulf Tragedy" - the Indian Ocean earthquake on Boxing Day, 2004, resulting in the tsunamis which killed nearly 300,000 people in countries, most Muslim, plagued by terrorism. This one was specifically intended to solve the threat of rogues in Aceh rendering the Straits of Malacca inoperative, as straits around the world are the most vulnerable links now in global capitalism. Secretary England put the operation in these terms when he delivered a Christmas message to the sailors: "...we believe that liberty is the design of nature; we believe that liberty is the direction of history."

Then hurricanes Katrina and Rita brought the process home to America. Whatever caused them - and perhaps the Gulf area is so heated by previous manipulations of the weather since 1995 that almost any hurricane entering the area will become a Category V one - the fallout brought disaster capitalism to its shores. With the DHS, FEMA, and state and local government being found sadly lacking, the Pentagon is simply taking over, and at the expense of what is left of the social safety net. As Rep. Mike Pense, Republican-Indiana and chairman of the Republican Study Group, explained: "The desire to bring conservative, free-market ideas to the Gulf Coast is white hot..."

Meanwhile, Wolfowitz, who had been confirmed as President of the World Bank, dashed off a letter to President Bush after the hurricane struck, launching, in typical disaster reconstruction fashion, "...fund raising and volunteer efforts to help assist the victims of Katrina and their families. We are in direct contact with several charitable organizations, including the Red Cross, so that we can respond further in terms of contributions of blood or food items, should the need arise." One can just wonder what sacrifices the populace will have to make ultimately in terms of government help for such dire assistance.

Condi Rice, ecstatic over the wonderful opportunities the tsunamis presented for doing nature's work in the Third World, appointed - once she was appointed to replace Colin Powell - Bush crony Karen Hughes as a kind of roving ambassador to spread the word to those who had still not gotten the message, and accepted the kind offer of Wolfowitz's girl friend, Shaha Ali Riza, on loan to the Near East Bureau's Office of Partnership, headed by Vice President Cheney's daughter Liz, to make the spreading of globalization more effective. To replace Wolfowitz as Deputy Secretary of Defense, England was named acting DSOD, as of April 7th, entrusted with carrying out the lessons of nature and history for the rest of the terror-prone,
underdeveloped world.

The world, especially the people in America and Britain, better wake up to what is really happening instead of just engaging in avoidance, question-begging and groundless activity or they will soon discover that affairs have become simply too hot to handle.