Added: 03. Deczember 2009
War on Terror
Tony Blair ‘knew Iraq did not have WMD before war started’
How may people have died for nothing (except more profit for the elite)?
And in Afghanistan it’s the same thing:
– Former UK ambassador Craig Murray:
Murray alleged that in the late 1990s the Uzbek ambassador to the US met with then-Texas Governor George W. Bush to discuss a pipeline for the region, and out of that meeting came agreements that would see Texas-based Enron gain the rights to Uzbekistan’s natural gas deposits, while oil company Unocal worked on developing the Trans-Afghanistan pipeline.
“The consultant who was organizing this for Unocal was a certain Mr. Karzai, who is now president of Afghanistan,” Murray noted.
“There are designs of this pipeline, and if you look at the deployment of US forces in Afghanistan, as against other NATO country forces in Afghanistan, you’ll see that undoubtedly the US forces are positioned to guard the pipeline route. It’s what it’s about. It’s about money, it’s about oil, it’s not about democracy.”
– Former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury Paul Craig Roberts:
Amb. Murray learned too much and was fired when he vomited it all up. He saw the documents that proved that the motivation for US and UK military aggression in Afghanistan had to do with the natural gas deposits in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. The Americans wanted a pipeline that bypassed Russia and Iran and went through Afghanistan. To insure this, an invasion was necessary. The idiot American public could be told that the invasion was necessary because of 9/11 and to save them from “terrorism,” and the utter fools would believe the lie.
Missiles shown by Iraq just before the invasion to rebut claims about its arms
Intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have access to weapons of mass destruction was received by the Government ten days before Tony Blair ordered the invasion of Iraq, the inquiry into the war was told yesterday.
Inspectors in Iraq had also told the Foreign and Commonwealth Office that they believed that Saddam might not have chemical and biological weapons. But with British and US troops massed on the border, the new intelligence was dismissed.
Sir William Ehrman, the Foreign Office’s director-general of defence and intelligence at the time, told the inquiry that information was receivedjust before the invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003. “We did at the very end, I think on March 10, get a report that chemical weapons might have remained disassembled and Saddam hadn’t yet ordered their assembly,” he said. “There was also a suggestion that Iraq might lack warheads capable of effective dispersal of agents.”
Sir William said that it had not made any difference to the case for war. “I don’t think it invalidated the point about the programmes he had,” he said. “It was more about use. From the counter-proliferation point of view it just proved [Saddam] had been lying and that he had prohibited items.”
Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, told the Foreign Office at the end of February 2003 that Saddam might not have weapons of mass destruction, the inquiry was told. Mr Blair continued to say there was a risk to national security from WMD without mentioning the new intelligence.
Read moreTony Blair ‘knew Iraq did not have WMD before war started’
CIA Secret ‘Torture’ Prison Found at Fancy Horseback Riding Academy Outside Vilnius, Lithuania
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– US Spy Agencies Buy Stake in Firm That Monitors Blogs, Twitter and Even Amazon Book Reviews
The CIA built one of its secret European prisons inside an exclusive riding academy outside Vilnius, Lithuania, a current Lithuanian government official and a former U.S. intelligence official told ABC News this week.
Outside Lithuania the CIA used a former barn to interrogate al Qaeda members.
Where affluent Lithuanians once rode show horses and sipped coffee at a café, the CIA installed a concrete structure where it could use harsh tactics to interrogate up to eight suspected al-Qaeda terrorists at a time.
“The activities in that prison were illegal,” said human rights researcher John Sifton. “They included various forms of torture, including sleep deprivation, forced standing, painful stress positions.”
Lithuanian officials provided ABC News with the documents of what they called a CIA front company, Elite, LLC, which purchased the property and built the “black site” in 2004.
Lithuania agreed to allow the CIA prison after President George W. Bush visited the country in 2002 and pledged support for Lithuania’s efforts to join NATO.
“The new members of NATO were so grateful for the U.S. role in getting them into that organization that they would do anything the U.S. asked for during that period,” said former White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, now an ABC News consultant. “They were eager to please and eager to be cooperative on security and on intelligence matters.”
Former UK ambassador: CIA sent people to Uzbekistan for extreme torture, to be ‘raped with broken bottles,’ ‘boiled alive’ and ‘having their children tortured in front of them’
This is a MUST-READ.
This is “winning the hearts and minds of people” in action. This is how the US creates real terrorists.
Soldiers wake up! You die for nothing in Afghanistan except corporate profit benefiting only the elite.
The following videos were posted to YouTube by the Real News Network on Oct. 26 and Nov. 4, 2009.
The CIA relied on intelligence based on torture in prisons in Uzbekistan, a place where widespread torture practices include raping suspects with broken bottles and boiling them alive, says a former British ambassador to the central Asian country.
Craig Murray, the rector of the University of Dundee in Scotland and until 2004 the UK’s ambassador to Uzbekistan, said the CIA not only relied on confessions gleaned through extreme torture, it sent terror war suspects to Uzbekistan as part of its extraordinary rendition program.
“I’m talking of people being raped with broken bottles,” he said at a lecture late last month that was re-broadcast by the Real News Network. “I’m talking of people having their children tortured in front of them until they sign a confession. I’m talking of people being boiled alive. And the intelligence from these torture sessions was being received by the CIA, and was being passed on.”
Former UK ambassador Craig Murray
Human rights groups have long been raising the alarm about the legal system in Uzbekistan. In 2007, Human Rights Watch declared that torture is “endemic” to the country’s justice system.
Murray said he only realized after his stint as ambassador that the CIA was sending people to be tortured in Uzbekistan, country he describes as a “totalitarian” state that has never moved on from its communist era, when it was a part of the Soviet Union.
Suspects in Uzbekistan’s gulags “were being told to confess to membership in Al Qaeda. They were told to confess they’d been in training camps in Afghanistan. They were told to confess they had met Osama bin Laden in person. And the CIA intelligence constantly echoed these themes.”
“I was absolutely stunned — it changed my whole world view in an instant — to be told that London knew [the intelligence] coming from torture, that it was not illegal because our legal advisers had decided that under the United Nations convention against torture, it is not illegal to obtain or use intelligence gained from torture as long as we didn’t do the torture ourselves,” Murray said.
IT’S THE PIPELINE, STUPID
Murray asserts that the primary motivation for US and British military involvement in central Asia has to do with large natural gas deposits in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. As evidence, he points to the plans to build a natural gas pipeline through Afghanistan that would allow Western oil companies to avoid Russia and Iran when transporting natural gas out of the region.
Murray alleged that in the late 1990s the Uzbek ambassador to the US met with then-Texas Governor George W. Bush to discuss a pipeline for the region, and out of that meeting came agreements that would see Texas-based Enron gain the rights to Uzbekistan’s natural gas deposits, while oil company Unocal worked on developing the Trans-Afghanistan pipeline.
“The consultant who was organizing this for Unocal was a certain Mr. Karzai, who is now president of Afghanistan,” Murray noted.
How a lawyer unearthed US torture documents
Now revealing the TRUTH has become a recruitment beacon for Al-Qaeda!
“Truth never damages a cause that is just.”
– Mahatma Gandhi
“It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself. ”
– Thomas Jefferson
“Truth is treason in the empire of lies. Let the revolution begin!”
– Ron Paul
Jameel Jaffer dug up torture memos.
One of the key figures behind the cascade of documents detailing torture and abuse within America’s global “war on terror” happens to be a Canadian-born graduate of Toronto’s Upper Canada College.
Jameel Jaffer, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer born in London, Ont., was instrumental in filing and fighting an unlikely Freedom of Information Act request that eventually unearthed thousands of pages of secret documents which illustrated damning evidence of U.S. government complicity in violations of international humanitarian law.
“A lot of the documents describe abuses that are really horrific,” he said in an interview. “It was hard to believe that these incidents had occurred in facilities run by the United States.”
Jaffer told the Star last night that this type of lengthy and expensive legal muck-raking is unlikely to occur in Canada because grants and funding are so scarce. “There are people doing this kind of work in Canada and they have a tough job,” he said.”
The request was filed by Jaffer and fellow ACLU lawyer Amrit Singh – daughter of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh – in October 2003, before the disturbingly iconic Abu Ghraib prison photographs emerged. When those photos came out in April of 2004, they spurred Jaffer and Singh to press their request in court, which is sometimes the only way to successfully pursue an FOI request.
Six years later, more than 130,000 pages of previously classified evidence has trickled out; much of it has been seized upon by critics of America’s seemingly unending global war on terrorism.
The documents uncovered by Jaffer and Singh are a gruesome testament to the grim realities of the post-9/11 world: they revealed fissures between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the military over how to treat detainees at Guantanamo Bay; vivid descriptions of conditions within the CIA’s overseas “black site” prisons, where detainees were sent without trial; the Justice Department “torture memos,” which revealed prominent U.S. officials had essentially signed-off on torture; and autopsies of prisoners who died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The evidence has been seized upon by supporters of the war as well, who say Jaffer and the ACLU have given a propaganda weapon and recruitment beacon for Al Qaeda.
“In general, I think our position is that national security is increasingly used as a pretext to suppress information that would embarrass government officials and information related to criminal activity,” Jaffer told the Star. “And we think that the abuse of national security for those ends is something that, in the end, jeopardizes not just security but democracy as well, and that’s really what motivates a lot of these cases.”
It is Obamageddon
Click on image to enlarge.
‘Obama bin Bush’. Change you can believe in!
– The No.1 trend forecaster in the world: Gerald Celente: It is Obamageddon:
“The Obama administration is bankrupting the nation.”
– Paul Craig Roberts: Tent City America; The Expiring Economy
The Celente thesis: war as the “solution” to economic depression
An American president is launching the most ambitious, the most expensive, and certainly the most dangerous military campaign since the Vietnam War – and the antiwar movement, such as it is, is missing in action. After a long and bloody campaign in Iraq and the election of a U.S. president pledged to get us out, our government is once again revving up its war machine and taking aim at yet another “terrorist” stronghold, this time in Afghanistan. Yet the antiwar movement’s motor seems stuck in the wrong gear, making no motions toward mounting anything like an effective protest. What gives?
We shouldn’t doubt the scope of the present war effort. Make no mistake: the Obama administration is radically ramping up the stakes in the “war on terrorism,” which, though renamed, has not been revised downward, as the Washington Post reports:
“As the Obama administration expands U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, military experts are warning that the United States is taking on security and political commitments that will last at least a decade and a cost that will probably eclipse that of the Iraq war.”
There are always “warnings” in the beginning, aren’t there? For some reason, however, they are never heeded. Instead, we just barrel ahead, undaunted, into the tall grass where ambush awaits us. War opponents predicted the Iraq invasion would prove unsustainable – and we were right. We said that, far from greeting us with cheers and showers of roses, the Iraqis would soon be shooting at us and demanding our ouster – and we were right. We said the rationale for war was based on a series of carefully manufactured and marketed lies – and that was the truth, now wasn’t it? Yet it seems we are caught in an endlessly repetitive nightmare, where the same prophetic voices are being drowned out by a chorus of “responsible” voices – to be followed by an all-too-familiar disaster.
The problem, however, is that the scale of these disasters seems to be increasing exponentially. As Gerald Celente, one of the few economic forecasters who predicted the ’08 crash, put it the other day, “Governments seem to be emboldened by their failures.” What the late Gen. William E. Odom trenchantly described as “the worst strategic disaster in American military history” – the invasion of Iraq – is being followed up by a far larger military operation, one that will burden us for many years to come. This certainly seems like evidence in support of the Celente thesis, and the man who predicted the 1987 stock market crash, the fall of the Soviet Union, the dot-com bust, the gold bull market, the 2001 recession, the real estate bubble, the “Panic of ’08,” and now is talking about the inevitable popping of the “bailout bubble,” has more bad news:
“Given the pattern of governments to parlay egregious failures into mega-failures, the classic trend they follow, when all else fails, is to take their nation to war.”
As the economic crisis escalates and the debt-based central banking system shows it can no longer re-inflate the bubble by creating assets out of thin air, an economic and political rationale for war is easy to come by; for if the Keynesian doctrine that government spending is the only way to lift us out of an economic depression is true, then surely military expenditures are the quickest way to inject “life” into a failing system. This doesn’t work, economically, since the crisis is only masked by the wartime atmosphere of emergency and “temporary” privation. Politically, however, it is a lifesaver for our ruling elite, which is at pains to deflect blame away from itself and on to some “foreign” target.
Sibel Edmonds ‘Bombshell’: Osama Bin Laden Worked for US Until 9/11
Flashback:
– Government Insider: Bush Authorized 9/11 Attacks:
“This (9/11) was all planned. This was a government-ordered operation. Bush personally signed the order. He personally authorized the attacks. He is guilty of treason and mass murder.”
“Bush personally ordered it to happen. We have some very incriminating documents as well as eye-witnesses, that Bush personally ordered this event to happen in order to gain political advantage, to pursue a bogus political agenda on behalf of the neocons and their deluded thinking in the Middle East..”
Edmonds expert fills in details from recent BRAD BLOG interview with noted, gagged FBI translator/whistleblower…
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During my recent interview with FBI translator-turned-whistleblower Sibel Edmonds on the Mike Malloy Show, a caller had asked her opinion on whether she believed 9/11 to have been “an inside job”.
Edmonds replied by first specifying “As I have done for the past 7 or 8 years, I have basically stuck with what I know, first-hand, directly, my own knowledge, based on my own experience, based on what I obtained, which is not a lot, but it is extremely important.”
After explaining the difference between what she does and doesn’t know first hand, she went on to explain: “I have information about things that our government has lied to us about. I know. For example, to say that since the fall of the Soviet Union we ceased all of our intimate relationship with Bin Laden and the Taliban – those things can be proven as lies, very easily, based on the information they classified in my case, because we did carry very intimate relationship with these people, and it involves Central Asia, all the way up to September 11.” …
Her complete response, pulled from the lengthy interview (full, commercial-free audio here) has been transcribed by Luke Ryland, perhaps the world’s foremost expert in all things Sibel Edmonds related.
Today in a highly-recommended diary at dKos, Ryland filled in a good junk of details from Edmonds’ references, reporting that her comments are, in fact, a “bombshell”…
Former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds dropped a bombshell on the Mike Malloy radio show, guest-hosted by Brad Friedman (audio, partial transcript).
In the interview, Sibel says that the US maintained ‘intimate relations’ with Bin Laden, and the Taliban, “all the way until that day of September 11.”
These ‘intimate relations’ included using Bin Laden for ‘operations’ in Central Asia, including Xinjiang, China. These ‘operations’ involved using al Qaeda and the Taliban in the same manner “as we did during the Afghan and Soviet conflict,” that is, fighting ‘enemies’ via proxies.
As Sibel has previously described, and as she reiterates in this latest interview, this process involved using Turkey (with assistance from ‘actors from Pakistan, and Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia’) as a proxy, which in turn used Bin Laden and the Taliban and others as a proxy terrorist army.
After filling in many of the details, with scores of informational links to support the allegations, Ryland summarizes thusly:
The bombshell here is obviously that certain people in the US were using Bin Laden up to September 11, 2001.
It is important to understand why: the US outsourced terror operations to al Qaeda and the Taliban for many years, promoting the Islamization of Central Asia in an attempt to personally profit off military sales as well as oil and gas concessions.
The silence by the US government on these matters is deafening. So, too, is the blowback.
Read his full diary here, along with the (currently) 445 comments in response to it.
By Brad Friedman on 7/31/2009 1:07PM
Source: The Brad Blog
Paul Craig Roberts: The American Puppet State
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review.
This article is a must read.
President George W. Bush was in his stand-up comedian role when he declared that he wanted to be remembered as a fighter for human rights.
Seldom has a fighter for human rights amassed Bush’s death toll. According to Information Clearing House, Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq has resulted in 1,297,997 dead Iraqis. Millions more have been wounded, and millions are displaced. Bush’s legions have taken out weddings, funerals, kid’s soccer games, hospitals, and mosques.
And that’s before we come to Afghanistan.
In Afghanistan “we don’t do body counts” declared a commander of Bush’s imperial legions. But the thousands of dead civilians and school children have rallied Afghans to the Taliban, whose lightly armed fighters have retaken most of the country from the Unipower.
The Taliban doesn’t have an air force, or cluster bombs, or drones, or “smart missiles,” or tanks, or satellite capability. The Taliban has Afghan resistance to occupation.
Bush was fighting for human rights in 2006 when he prevented for one month the civilized world from stopping Israel’s massive bombing of Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure and civilian neighborhoods. Israel had intended to clear Hezbollah out of southern Lebanon in order to steal that part of the country for its water resources. When the vaunted Israeli Army was defeated and put to rout by a few lightly armed Hezbollah guerrillas, Israeli rage took the Israeli defeat out on Lebanon’s civilian population–from the air, of course. The murder of Lebanon’s civilian population was enabled by the American weapons with which Israel is flooded.
Now Israel is bombing civilians in Israel’s Gaza Ghetto. Nothing has been spared. Not the hospitals, the university, or the children. Again, President Bush, to America’s everlasting shame, is blocking the civilized world’s attempt to force a halt to the Israeli aggression against the civilian population in Gaza.
If only Bush were merely a stand-up comedian. In truth, he is a puppet. A puppet of Zionist Israel.
Israel rejects EU calls for ceasefire
Israel rebuffed a call from visiting European foreign ministers on Monday for an immediate ceasefire in its Gaza offensive, as troops engaged in their heaviest clashes with Hamas fighters and the civilian death toll mounted. At least 14 children were reported to have been killed.
Speaking after a meeting with a European Union delegation that included foreign ministers from the Czech Republic, France and Sweden, Tzipi Livni, the Israeli foreign minister, said: “A necessary war on terror does not end with an agreement. We don’t sign agreements with terror; we fight terror.”
Pakistani troops fire on US soldiers near Afghan border, reports say
Security officials say soldiers were trying to enter South Waziristan by helicopter
Pakistani soldiers near the Afghan border. Photograph: Matiullah Achakzai/EPA
Pakistani troops opened fire on US soldiers trying to enter the country’s lawless tribal area today, according to reports, marking a dangerous further deterioration in relations between the two anti-terror allies.
Details of the incident, in South Waziristan, are unclear. According to local security officials and tribesmen, however, two US helicopters breached Pakistani airspace in the early hours but were forced to retreat when they came under fire.
The US forces were likely to have been on a hit-and-withdraw mission against suspected militants in the area, similar to the first documented US ground raid into the tribal territory earlier this month, when choppers flew in commandos. That enraged the Pakistani army and public.
Read morePakistani troops fire on US soldiers near Afghan border, reports say
Marching Off Into Tyranny
By Paul Craig Roberts
Paul Craig Roberts [email him] was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by French President Francois Mitterrand.
___________________________________________________________________________________
In last weekend’s edition of CounterPunch, Alexander Cockburn updates the ongoing persecution of Sami Al-Arian by federal prosecutors. Al-Arian was a Florida university professor of computer science who was ensnared by the Bush Regime’s need to produce “terrorists” in order to keep Americans fearful and, thereby, amenable to the Bush Regime’s assault on US civil liberties.
McCain suggests military-style invasion modeled on the surge to control crime
Today, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) spoke to the National Urban League, a group “devoted to empowering African Americans to enter the economic and social mainstream.” When an audience member asked him how he planned to reduce urban crime, McCain praised Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s efforts in New York Cirty before invoking the military’s tactics in Iraq as the model for crime-fighting:
McCAIN: And some of those tactics – you mention the war in Iraq – are like that we use in the military. You go into neighborhoods, you clamp down, you provide a secure environment for the people that live there, and you make sure that the known criminals are kept under control. And you provide them with a stable environment and then they cooperate with law enforcement, etc, etc.
Listen here:
Now that our military experts advocate approaching the “war on terror” with more policing and intelligence gathering, McCain wants to approach urban policing with more military power. (HT: Political Radar)
Read moreMcCain suggests military-style invasion modeled on the surge to control crime
Secret “War on Terror” Prison on Diego Garcia Confirmed
The existence of a secret, CIA-run prison on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean has long been a leaky secret in the “War on Terror,” and recent revelations in TIME — based on disclosures by a “senior American official,” who was “a frequent participant in White House Situation Room meetings” after the 9/11 attacks, and who reported that “a CIA counter-terrorism official twice said that a high-value prisoner or prisoners were being interrogated on the island” — will come as no surprise to those who have been studying the story closely.
The news will, however, be an embarrassment to the US government, which has persistently denied claims that it operated a secret “War on Terror” prison on Diego Garcia, and will be a source of even more consternation to the British government, which is more closely bound than its law-shredding Transatlantic neighbor to international laws and treaties preventing any kind of involvement whatsoever in kidnapping, “extraordinary rendition” and the practice of torture.
Read moreSecret “War on Terror” Prison on Diego Garcia Confirmed
CENTCOM’s Master Plan and U.S. Global Hegemony
Many people deny that the U.S. government presides over a global empire. If you speak of U.S. imperialism, they will fancy that you must be a decrepit Marxist-Leninist who has recently awakened after spending decades in a coma. Yet the facts cannot be denied, however much people’s ideology may predispose them to distort or obfuscate those facts.
How can a government that maintains more than 800 military facilities in more than 140 different foreign countries be anything other than an imperial power? The hundreds of thousands of troops who operate those bases and conduct operations from them, not to mention the approximately 125,000 sailors and Marines aboard the U.S. warships that cruise the oceans, are not going door to door selling Girl Scout cookies. United States of America is the name; intimidation is the game.
Red Cross finds Bush administration guilty of war crimes
In a secret report last year, the Red Cross found evidence of the CIA using torture on prisoners that would make the Bush administration guilty of war crimes, The New York Times reported Friday.
The Red Cross determined the culpability of the Bush administration after interviewing prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, according to the article.
Prisoner Abu Zubaydahwho said he had been waterboarded, “slammed against the walls” and confined in boxes “so small he said he had to double up his limbs in the fetal position.”
The information comes from a new book written by Jane Meyer, who has frequently published articles concerning counter-terrorism in The New Yorker.
The book is titled “The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals,” and will be released next week.
Mayer cited “sources familiar with the report” to explain the confidential document as a warning “that the abuse constituted war crimes, placing the highest officials in the U.S. government in jeopardy of being prosecuted.”
Read moreRed Cross finds Bush administration guilty of war crimes
THE DECLINE AND FALL OF AMERICA (The Movie)
The shocking new full length film that will change the way you look at our once great country and what America has become today. After the pre-release viewing of the movie on 01/21/08, many people compared it to Aaron Russo’s “Freedom To Fascism”.
B.A. Brooks is currently writing his new book “Total Disclosure” which will compliment this movie. The book is to be released sometime in 2008. Download this movie now and pass it along anywhere and everywhere that you can. Burn it on CDs and DVDs for your friends and family. Upload it to every single site that you know of and help spread the word. Thank you all, B.A. Brooks
Produced by: B.A. Brooks – www.uaff.us
Source: YouTube
Related articles and videos:
– Government Insider: Bush Authorized 9/11 Attacks
– Loose Change Final Cut
– 9/11 False Flag
– Rumsfeld: Why not another 9/11?
– USA Military Officers Challenge Official Account of September 11
– Democrats Have Legalized Bush’s Crimes
– Critics Demand Resignation of U.N. Official Who Wants Probe of 9/11 ‘Inside Job’ Theories
– Iraq war: former Bush aide admits manipulating opinion
State-Sponsored Terror: British and American Black Ops in Iraq
Shining Light on the “Black World”
In January of 2002, the Washington Post ran a story detailing a CIA plan put forward to President Bush shortly after 9/11 by CIA Director George Tenet titled, “Worldwide Attack Matrix,” which was “outlining a clandestine anti-terror campaign in 80 countries around the world. What he was ready to propose represented a striking and risky departure for U.S. policy and would give the CIA the broadest and most lethal authority in its history.” The plan entailed CIA and Special Forces “covert operations across the globe,” and at “the heart of the proposal was a recommendation that the president give the CIA what Tenet labeled “exceptional authorities” to attack and destroy al Qaeda in Afghanistan and the rest of the world.” Tenet cited the need for such authority “to allow the agency to operate without restraint — and he wanted encouragement from the president to take risks.” Among the many authorities recommended was the use of “deadly force.”
Further, “Another proposal was that the CIA increase liaison work with key foreign intelligence services,” as “Using such intelligence services as surrogates could triple or quadruple the CIA’s effectiveness.” The Worldwide Attack Matrix “described covert operations in 80 countries that were either underway or that he was now recommending. The actions ranged from routine propaganda to lethal covert action in preparation for military attacks,” as well as “In some countries, CIA teams would break into facilities to obtain information.”[1]
P2OG: “Commit terror, to incite terror… in order to react to terror”
In 2002, the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board (DSB) conducted a “Summer Study on Special Operations and Joint Forces in Support of Countering Terrorism,” portions of which were leaked to the Federation of American Scientists. According to the document, the “War on Terror” constitutes a “committed, resourceful and globally dispersed adversary with strategic reach,” which will require the US to engage in a “long, at times violent, and borderless war.”As the Asia Times described it, this document lays out a blueprint for the US to “fight fire with fire.” Many of the “proposals appear to push the military into territory that traditionally has been the domain of the CIA, raising questions about whether such missions would be subject to the same legal restraints imposed on CIA activities.” According to the Chairman of the DSB, “The CIA executes the plans but they use Department of Defense assets.”
Specifically, the plan “recommends the creation of a super-Intelligence Support Activity, an organization it dubs the Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group (P2OG), to bring together CIA and military covert action, information warfare, intelligence and cover and deception. For example, the Pentagon and CIA would work together to increase human intelligence (HUMINT) forward/operational presence and to deploy new clandestine technical capabilities.” The purpose of P2OG would be in “‘stimulating reactions’ among terrorists and states possessing weapons of mass destruction, meaning it would prod terrorist cells into action, thus exposing them to ‘quick-response’ attacks by US forces.”[2] In other words, commit terror to incite terror, in order to react to terror.
The Los Angeles Times reported in 2002 that, “The Defense Department is building up an elite secret army with resources stretching across the full spectrum of covert capabilities. New organizations are being created. The missions of existing units are being revised,” and quoted then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as saying, “Prevention and preemption are … the only defense against terrorism.”[3] Chris Floyd bluntly described P2OG in CounterPunch, saying, “the United States government is planning to use “cover and deception” and secret military operations to provoke murderous terrorist attacks on innocent people. Let’s say it again: Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush and the other members of the unelected regime in Washington plan to deliberately foment the murder of innocent people–your family, your friends, your lovers, you–in order to further their geopolitical ambitions.”[4]
“The Troubles” with Iraq
Read moreState-Sponsored Terror: British and American Black Ops in Iraq
Britain and US ‘complicit in war crimes by Ethiopian military’
The British and US governments are complicit in war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the Ethiopian army in the Ogaden region of the Horn of Africa, a human rights group has claimed.
A report by Human Rights Watch details allegations of rape, torture and public execution carried out by Ethiopian soldiers against civilians in the predominantly Somali Ogaden area, where Ethiopia is fighting a fierce counter-insurgency campaign. The battles intensified last year after an attack by rebels of the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) on a Chinese-run oil plant in the town of Obole. The ONLF killed more than 70 civilians, including nine Chinese.
In response, Ethiopia stepped up its military crackdown in the eastern province, referred to by some ethnic Somali Muslims as Western Somalia. Witnesses say Ethiopian forces have burnt dozens of villages to the ground – a claim apparently confirmed by satellite images released by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
According to Human Rights Watch, people accused of aiding the ONLF have executed, often in public, while hundreds more have been detained in military barracks and tortured.
“The Ethiopian army’s response to the rebels has been to viciously attack civilians in Ogaden,” said the group’s spokeswoman, Georgette Gagnon. “These atrocities amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
Ethiopia’s Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi, was once held up as a poster boy for African governance, taking a prominent role in Tony Blair’s Commission for Africa. But since 2005, he has claimed victory in a flawed election and clamped down on political opposition. Up to 200 people protesting against the result were killed by security forces and 100 were charged with treason.
Despite claims of authoritarianism and war crimes in both Ogaden and neighbouring Somalia, British aid for Ethiopia has more than doubled since 2005 to £130m. The US has also increased its support for the army, which it sees as a strong regional ally in the “war on terror”.
Read moreBritain and US ‘complicit in war crimes by Ethiopian military’
In ‘Spies for Hire,’ U.S. Security Gets Outsourced
It’s become a $50 billion a year industry: Corporations like Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed Martin, and IBM are being paid to do things the CIA, the National Security Agency and the Pentagon usually do, including analysis, covert operations, electronic surveillance and reconnaissance.Investigative journalist Tim Shorrock details the outsourcing of U.S. intelligence in his new book, Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing.
Shorrock has covered the intersection of business and national security for over 25 years, writing for such publications as The Nation, Mother Jones and Salon.com, among others.
On May 9, 2006, John Humphrey, a former CIA officer making his way up the management ladder of one of the nation’s largest intelligence contractors, made a stunning disclosure to Intelcon, a national intelligence conference and exhibition at a hotel in Bethesda, Maryland. Outsourcing, Humphrey declared, was out of control. Contractors deployed in Iraq and other hotspots overseas were making decisions and handling documents that, in earlier times, had been the sole responsibility of U.S. military and intelligence officers. This had caused a “paradigm shift” in the relationship between government and the private sector, and left companies like his in an untenable position.
Five years ago, “you’d never have a contractor supporting an operation on the field where they’re making a recommendation to an officer,” said Humphrey. Nor would you find a contractor “making little contributions here and there” in the reports intelligence officers sent back to Washington. “This concerns me a lot, the way these lines are blurring,” he went on. “We shouldn’t be involved in some of these intelligence operations, or the planning, or the interrogations and what have you.” Unless government started taking more responsibility in the field, he warned, the “blowback” for the contracting industry could be profound.
The intelligence professionals in the room looked stunned. They had just sat through two days of upbeat discussions about the annual $10-billion expansion of U.S. intelligence budgets and the opportunities that money presented for defense contractors, information technology vendors, and former national security officials who still held their top secret security clearances. Upstairs in the exhibition hall, thirty-five companies were displaying the latest high-tech spying equipment and competing to recruit new employees, who could earn up to three times government pay by migrating to the private sector. Words like “blowback” did not come easily at such gatherings.
Pentagon Expands Propaganda Reach With Foreign “News” Websites
The Pentagon is expanding “Information Operations” on the Internet with purposefully set up foreign news websites that are designed to look like independent media sources but in reality are nothing more than direct military propaganda.
“The Pentagon is setting up a global network of foreign-language news websites, including an Arabic site for Iraqis, and hiring local journalists to write current events stories and other content that promote U.S. interests and counter insurgent messages.”
The websites at http://www.balkantimes.com, http://www.magharebia.com and http://mawtani.com are three of the said Pentagon run operations aimed at people in the Balkans, North Africa and Iraq.
The front pages of the sites appear to be populated with regionalized news stories, but the disclaimers buried within the sites and accessible only via small links at the bottom of the pages reveal that all three are run by the US Department of Defense.
See screenshots below for the disclaimers (click to link through):
The Mawtani.com disclaimer is in Arabic. It reads:
“(Mawtani.com is) sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense to support the resolution No. 1723 (of the) Security Council of the United Nations. (Mawtani.com) highlights and emphasizes the move towards greater regional stability through bilateral and multilateral cooperation … and the steps taken by governments towards stability in Iraq.”
Though Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England commented that the sites are “an essential part of (their) responsibility … to shape the security environment in their respective areas.”, other Pentagon spokesmen have claimed that the sites’ content is not intended as propaganda, but is “a counter to extremist propaganda … with truth.”
Michael Vickers, the assistant secretary of Defense in charge of special operations commented that the websites are designed to counter enemies on the internet who put out information that is not in keeping with the interests and goals of the U.S. military:
“It’s important to … engage these foreign audiences and inform,” Vickers said. “Our adversaries use the Internet to great advantage, so we have the responsibility of countering (their messages) with accurate, truthful information, and these websites are a good vehicle.”
Since when has the federal government and its war machine military been concerned with promoting the truth?
Read morePentagon Expands Propaganda Reach With Foreign “News” Websites
Crime Is Terrorism Believes Sheriff Candidate
The blurring of lines between crime and terrorism continues. According to section 802 of the Patriot Act, minor criminal offenses can be interpreted as terrorism by government officials. The recent implementation of Operation Sudden Impact in Memphis and surrounding areas had various people from federal, state and local law enforcement agencies go on a fishing expedition searching for terrorists. The operation resulted in the issuance of several traffic tickets, the confiscation of a small amount of drugs but failed to catch any terrorists. It was nothing more than a martial law training operation because the real terrorists are actually funded by high level government black operations. The U.S. House of Representatives last year passed HR 1955 the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 which if gets signed into law will give the government a blank check to potentially classify certain belief systems as terrorism. As horrible as all of these things are, we now have a candidate running for Sheriff in Florida’s Orange County using the slogan “Crime is Terrorism”. Malone Stewart proudly displays this slogan on his web site and in his campaign signs. There is no question that the lines between criminality and terrorism are quickly being erased and if this continues the government will just accuse people who don’t like what they are doing of being terrorists and haul them away to FEMA run death camps.
Below is a photo of one of Mr. Stewart’s campaign signs a reader sent to us which shows clearly that he is running his campaign using the slogan “Crime is Terrorism”.
Obviously crime is not terrorism, but if we have people in positions of authority that buy into the terror war fraud and believe that crime is terrorism, we are in a great deal of trouble. The Military Commissions Act which was passed into law in 2006 allows the government to strip people of their citizenship and hold them indefinitely with no due process if they are accused of being a terrorist. What better way to hold American citizens who are protesting against the government than by utilizing the powers in the Military Commissions Act combined with what’s in the Patriot Act and eventually with what’s in HR 1955. Assuming HR 1955 gets passed, the government will literally have the power to jail American citizens indefinitely for having a belief system that the government disapproves of.
Mr. Stewart’s campaign slogan automatically disqualifies him from being taken seriously as a candidate for Sheriff. The war on terror is a fraud designed to setup a police state and to get everybody spying on one another with the notion that everybody is a potential terrorist. It is clear that Mr. Stewart has bought into this idea with this ridiculous campaign slogan. If anybody reading this resides in Florida’s Orange County we encourage you not to support this man for Sheriff. Crime is not terrorism.
By: Lee Rogers – 23 April, 2008
Source: Intelstrike
PENTAGON CAMPAIGN: Retired officers have been used to shape terrorism coverage from inside the TV and radio networks
A PENTAGON CAMPAIGN Retired officers have been used to shape terrorism coverage
from inside the TV and radio networks.
Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand
Correction Appended
In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded “the gulag of our times” by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from United Nations human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure.
The administration’s communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo.
To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.
Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.
Bush Given Authority To Sexually Torture American Children
The “horror of the shrieking boys” gets a rubber stamp from the boot-licking U.S. Congress & Senate as America officially becomes a dictatorship
Paul Joseph Watson/Prison Planet.com | September 29 2006
Slamming the final nail in the coffin of everything America used to stand for, the boot-licking U.S. Senate last night gave President Bush the legal authority to abduct and sexually mutilate American citizens and American children in the name of the war on terror.
There is nothing in the “detainee” legislation that protects American citizens from being kidnapped by their own government and tortured.
Yale Law Professor Bruce Ackerman states in the L.A. Times, “The compromise legislation….authorizes the president to seize American citizens as enemy combatants, even if they have never left the United States. And once thrown into military prison, they cannot expect a trial by their peers or any other of the normal protections of the Bill of Rights.”
Similarly, law Professor Marty Lederman explains: “this [subsection (ii) of the definition of ‘unlawful enemy combatant’] means that if the Pentagon says you’re an unlawful enemy combatant — using whatever criteria they wish — then as far as Congress, and U.S. law, is concerned, you are one, whether or not you have had any connection to ‘hostilities’ at all.”
We have established that the bill allows the President to define American citizens as enemy combatants. Now let’s take it one step further.
Before this article is dismissed as another extremist hyperbolic rant, please take a few minutes out of your day to check for yourself the claim that Bush now has not only the legal authority but the active blessings of his own advisors to torture American children.
The backdrop of the Bush administration’s push to obliterate the Geneva Conventions was encapsulated by John “torture” Yoo, professor of law at Berkeley, co-author of the PATRIOT Act, author of torture memos and White House advisor.
During a December 1st debate in Chicago with Notre Dame professor and international human rights scholar Doug Cassel, John Yoo gave the green light for the scope of torture to legally include sexual torture of infants.
Cassel: If the president deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?
Yoo: No treaty.
Cassel: Also no law by Congress — that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo…
Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.
Read moreBush Given Authority To Sexually Torture American Children