Paul Rigby

Left temple entry

1) Elm St eyewitness:

Norman Similas: “I could see a hole in the President's left temple...,” Jack Bell, “10 Feet from the President,” NYT, 23 November 1963, p.5, citing “‘I saw president fall’ – Willowdale man,” Toronto Daily Star, (All Star Night edition), Friday, 22 November 1963, pp.1&13

2) Parkland medical staff:

a) Dr. Robert McClelland: "The cause of death was due to a massive head and brain injury from a gunshot wound of the left temple," Commission Exhibit 392. [‘Admission Note,’ written 22 Nov 1963 at 4.45 pm, reproduced in WCR572, & 17WCH11-12: cited in Lifton’s Best Evidence, p.55; and Meagher’s Accessories After the Fact, pp.159-160.]

Dr. Marion Jenkins: "I don't know whether this is right or not, but I thought there was a wound on the left temporal area, right in the hairline and right above the zygomatic process," 6WH48. [Cited by Sylvia Meagher, Accessories After The Fact: The Warren Commission, The Authorities, & The Report (New York: Vintage Books, 1992 reprint), p. 40.]

c) Dr. Robert Shaw: "The third bullet struck the President on the left side of the head in the region of the left temporal region and made a large wound of exit on the right side of the head," Letter from Dr. Shaw to Larry Ross, "Did Two Gunmen Cut Down Kennedy?", Today (British magazine), 15 February 1964, p.4.

d) Dr. David Stewart: “This was the finding of all the physicians who were in attendance. There was a small wound in the left front of the President’s head and there was a quite massive wound of exit at the right back side of the head, and it was felt by all the physicians at the time to be a wound of entry which went in the front,” The Joe Dolan (Radio) Show, KNEW (Oakland, California), at 08:15hrs on 10 April 1967. (Cited by Harold Weisberg. Selections from Whitewash (NY: Carroll & Graf/Richard Gallen, 1994), pp.331-2.)

3) Parkland non-medical staff:

Father Oscar Huber: “terrible wound” over Kennedy's left eye [AP despatch, Philadelphia Sunday Bulletin, 24 November 1963]*

4) Bethesda: Drs. Humes & Boswell:

“The autopsy documents also provide some cryptic indications of damage to the left side of the head. The notorious face-sheet on which Dr. J. Thornton Boswell committed his unfortunate 'diagram error' consists of front and back outlines of a male figure. On the front figure, the autopsy surgeons entered the tracheotomy incision (6.5 cm), the four cut-downs made in the Parkland emergency room for administration of infusions (2 cms. Each), and a small circle at the right eye, with the marginal notation '0.8 cm,' apparently representing damage produced by the two bullet fragments that lodged there. Dr. Humes testified that the fragments measured 7 by 2 mm and 3 by 1 mm respectively (2H354). Although he said nothing about the damage at the left eye, the diagram shows a small dot at that site, labeled '0.4 cm' (CE 397, Vol XVII, p.45). Neither Arlen Specter, who conducted the questioning of the autopsy surgeons, nor the Commission members and lawyers present asked any questions about this indication on the diagram of damage at the left eye.

Turning back to the male outline of the figure – the one Dr. Boswell did not realize would become a public document even though it had to be assumed at the time of the autopsy that findings would become evidence at the trial of the accused assassin – we find a small circle at the back of the head about equidistant from the ears and level with the top of the ears. Apparently this represents the small entrance wound which the autopsy surgeons and the Warren Commission say entered the back of the head and exploded out through the right side, carrying large large segments of the skull. But an arrow at the wound on the diagram points to the front and left and not to the front and right.

A forensic pathologist who was asked to interpret this feature said that it signified that a missile had entered the back of the head traveling to the left and front. As if in confirmation, an autopsy diagram of the skull (CE 397, Vol XVII, p.46) shows a large rectangle marked '3 cm' at the site of the left eye, with a ragged lateral margin, seemingly to indicate fracture or missing bone.

The autopsy surgeons were not questioned about any of the three diagram indications of bullet damage at the left eye or left temple. Nevertheless, when Dr. Jenkins testified that he thought there was a wound in the left temporal area, Arlen Specter replied, 'The autopsy report disclosed no such developments,'” Sylvia Meagher. Accessories After the Fact: The Warren Commission, The Authorities & The Report (NY, Vintage Books, 1992 reprint), pp.161-2.

5) JFK shot in the face/front of the head/forehead:

a) Alan Smith: “The car was ten feet from me when a bullet hit the President in the forehead…the car went about five feet and stopped,” Jack Bell, “Eyewitnesses describe scene of assassination: Sounds of shooting brought car to a halt,” NYT, 23 November 1963, p.5.

James Chaney: “When the second shot came, I looked back in time to see the President struck in the face,” Anthony Summers’ The Kennedy Conspiracy (London: Sphere, 1992), p.23, citing, on p.543, an “unidentified film interview in police station and taped interview for KLIF, Dallas, on record ‘The Fateful Hours,’ Capitol Records.” See also: 22 November 1963, WFAA-TV, video packet, & Houston Chronicle, 24 November 1963.

c) Dr. Perry: “When asked to specify the nature of the wound, Dr. Perry said that the entrance wound was in the front of the head,” Post-Dispatch News Services, “Priest Who Gave Last Rites ‘Didn’t See Any Sign of Life,’” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 24 November 1963, p.23A; also Associated Press despatch, shortly after 2 pm, quoted by WOR Radio, New York, at 2:43 pm, CST (Fred Newcomb & Perry Adams. Murder from Within, p.154, n.58): ‘Dr. Perry said the entrance wound—which is the medical description—the entrance wound was in the front of the head’” See also: AP, “Treatment Described,” Albuquerque Tribune, 22 November 1963, p.58: “When asked to specify, Perry said the entrance wound was in the front of the head.”

"Manufactured Dissent": The Financial Bearings of the "Progressive Left Media"

By Prof. James F. Tracy

http://www.globalres...xt=va&aid=32179

Global Research, August 3, 2012

Since the early 2000s US-based "left-progressive" media that purport to be independent have received tens of millions in grants and contributions while they have ignored some of the most important news stories of our time. History suggests a relationship between elite philanthropic sponsorship of such outlets and self-censorship toward pressing events and issues while concurrently maintaining a public semblance of issue-oriented rebellion and dissent.

Why do the self-proclaimed left-progressive “independent” media repeatedly overlook, obfuscate or otherwise leave unexamined some of the most momentous geopolitical and environmental events of our time—September 11^th and related false flag terror events, the United Nations’ "Agenda 21," the genuinely grave environmental threats posed by the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe, geoengineering (weather modification), and the dire health effects of genetically modified organisms?[1] In fact, these phenomena together point to a verifiable transnational political economic framework against which a mass social movement could readily emerge.

Yet over the past decade the actual function of such journalistic outlets has increasingly been to "manufacture dissent"--in other words, to act as the controlled opposition to the financial oligarchs and an encroaching scientific dictatorship that to an already significant degree controls the planet and oversees human thought and activity. Indeed, many alternative media outlets that appear to be independent of the power structure are funded by the very forces they are reporting on through their heavy reliance on the largesse of major philanthropic foundations.

With the across-the-board deregulation of the transnational financial system in the late 1990s and consequent enrichment of Wall Street and London-based investment banks and hedge funds, the resources of such foundations and charities have increased tremendously. Consequently, the overall funding of "activist" organizations and "alternative" media has climbed sharply, making possible the broadly disseminated appearance of strident voices speaking truth to power. In fact, the protesters and journalists alike are often tethered to the purse strings of the powerful. As a result,

The efforts of financial elites to influence left-progressive political opinion goes back a century or more. In the early 1900s, for example, the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations decisively shaped the trajectory of elementary and higher education. Yet a less-examined development is how such influence extended to the mass media. A specific instance of such interests seeking to influence the Left community specifically is the establishment of The New Republic magazine at a decisive time in US history.

Purchased Political Opinion: The Founding of The New Republic

Throughout the twentieth century powerful financial interests have sought to anticipate and direct American left wing social movements and political activity by penetrating their opinion-shaping apparatus. This was seldom difficult because progressives were usually strapped for funds while at the same time eager for a mouthpiece to reach the masses. In 1914 Wall Street’s most powerful banking house, J.P. Morgan, was willing to provide both. “The purpose was not to destroy, dominate, or take over but was really threefold,” historian Carroll Quigley explains.

As an example, in 1914 Morgan partner and East Asia agent Willard Straight established The New Republic with money from himself and his wife, Dorothy Payne Whitney of the Payne Whitney fortune. "’Use your wealth to put ideas into circulation,’ Straight had told his wife. ‘Others will give to churches and hospitals.’"[4]

The idea of funding such an organ partly developed between the wealthy couple after they read Herbert Croly’s The Promise of American Life, in which the well-known liberal author assailed the foundations of traditional Progressivism, with its Jeffersonian doctrine of free enterprise and inclination for decentralized, unrestrictive government. In such a laissez-faire arrangement, Croly reasoned, the strong would always take advantage of the weak. “Only a strong central government could control and equitably distribute the benefits of industrial capitalism. ... guided by a strong and farsighted leader.” Toward this end Croly proposed a “constructive” or “New Nationalism”, and a medium to reach a captive audience could promote such ideals on a regular basis.[5]

As Croly recalls, Straight

Straight designated Croly editor-in-chief of The New Republic's and the young socialist writer Walter Lippmann, who by his mid-twenties was an adviser to presidents and a member of the shadowy Round Table Groups, was approached to be a founding editorial board member and subsequently entrusted with gearing the American readership toward a more favorable view of Britain.

Croly later noted how Straight was hardly liberal or progressive in his views. Rather, he was a regular international banker and saw the magazine’s purpose “simply [as] a medium for advancing certain designs of such international bankers, notably to blunt the isolationism and anti-British sentiments so prevalent among many American progressives, while providing them with a vehicle for expression of their progressive views in literature, art, music, social reform, and even domestic polices.”[7]

Following establishment of The New Republic, Straight considered purchasing The New York Evening Post or The Washington Herald. "He longed for a daily newspaper," Croly recalls, "which would communicate public information in the guise of news as well as in the guise of opinion and which would be read by hundreds of thousands of people instead of only tens of thousands, to serve as his personal medium of expression."[8]

Straight and Payne Whitney’s son, “Mike” Straight, carried on The New Republic through the 1940s in close alignment with Left and labor organizations, even providing Henry Wallace with a position on the editorial staff in 1946 and backing Wallace’s 1948 presidential bid.

With Willard Straight’s early death in 1918 another Morgan partner, Tom Lamont, apparently became the bank’s representative to the Left, supporting The Saturday Review of Literature in the 1920s and 1930s, and owning the New York Post from 1918 to 1924. Lamont, his wife Flora, and son Corliss were major patrons to a variety of Left concerns, including the American Communist Party and Trade Union Services Incorporated, which in the late 1940s published fifteen union organs for CIO unions. Frederick Vanderbilt Field, another well-heeled Wall Street banker, sat on the editorial boards of The New Masses and the Daily Worker—New York’s official Communist newspapers.[9]

Progressive-Left Media's Financing Today

Since the 1990s the framework for guiding the Left has developed into a vast combine of powerful, well-funded philanthropic foundations that function on the behalf of their wealthy owners as a well-oiled mechanism of opinion management. Such philanthropic entities oversee formidable wealth that today's heirs to the Straight and Payne Whitney tradition seek to shield from taxation while. At the same time they are able to employ such resources to influence political thought, discourse, and action. Further, following the broad-based 1999 protests of the World Trade Organization in Seattle, global elite interests recognized the importance of developing the means to “manufacture dissent.”

Such foundations no doubt exert at least subtle influence over the editorial decisions of the vulnerable progressive media beholden to them for financing. This is partially due to the personnel of the foundations themselves. The task of doling out money frequently falls to foundation officials who are retired political advocates with certain notions about what organizations should be funded and, moreover, how the money should be spent. As Michael Shuman, former director of the Institute for Policy Studies observed in the late 1990s,

“A number of program officers at progressive foundations are former activists who decided to move from the demand to the supply side to enjoy better salaries, benefits and working hours. Yet they still want to live like activists vicariously... by exercising influence over grantees through innumerable meetings, reports, conferences and “suggestions” . . . Many progressive funders treat their grantees like disobedient children who need to be constantly watched and disciplined.”[10]

Doling out grant money to a journalistic outlet is especially controversial since genuine journalism is inherently political given its inclination toward pursuing and examining the decisions and policies of power elites. As Ron Curran of the Independent Media Institute notes, money from foundations “has engendered a climate of secrecy at IAJ (Institute for Alternative Journalism n/k/a Independent Media Institute [iMI]) that’s in direct conflict with IAJ’s role as a progressive media organization.” He continues, “the only money nonprofits can get these days is from private foundations–and those foundations want to control the political agenda.”[11]

If funding is any indication of sheer influence over progressive media, that influence has grown by leaps and bounds at the foremost left media outlets since the 1990s. For example, between 1990 and 1995 the four major progressive print news outlets, The Nation, The Progressive, In These Times, and Mother Jones received a combined $537,500 in grants and contributions. In 2010, however, The Nation Institute (The Nation) alone received $2,267,184 in funding, The Progressive took in $1,310,889, the Institute for Public Affairs (In These Times) accepted $961,015, and the Foundation for National Progress (Mother Jones) collected $4,725,235.[12] These figures are for grants and contributions alone and do not include revenue generated from subscription sales and other promotions. Alongside the overall compromised nature such funding can bring, the tremendous increase over the past decade suggests one reason for why specific subject matter that is off-limits for coverage or discussion.

With the development of the internet several new alternative-progressive outlets have emerged between the late 1990s and early 2000s, including Alternet, Democracy Now, and satellite channel Link TV. Recognizing their influence a vast array of “public support” has likewise made these multi-million dollar operations alongside their print-based forebears.

For example, between 2003 and 2010 Democracy Now has taken in $25,577,243—an annual average of $3,197,155, with 2010 assets after liabilities of $11,760,006. Between 2006 and 2010 the Pacific News Service received $26,867,417, or $5,373,483 annually. The Foundation for National Progress (Mother Jones) brought in $46,623,197, or $4,662,320, and Link TV raised $54,839,710 between 2001 and 2009 for average annual funding of $6,093,301.(Figure 1)

Media Organization 501© 3 Total Support 2001-2010 Average Annual Support 2001-2010 Net Assets After Liabilities (2010) Democracy Now

Productions Inc. Yes $25.577,243 (from 2003) $3,197,155 $11,760,006 Schumann Center for Media and Democracy Yes NA $3,471,682 (2010) $33,314,688 Nation Institute (The Nation) Yes $22,246,533 $2,224,653 $4,798,831 Pacific News Service Yes $26,867,417 (2006-2010) $5,373,483 $712,011 Foundation for National Progress (Mother Jones) Yes $46,623,19

-$1,189,040 The Progressive Yes $8,702,146 $870,215 $5,493,782 Link TV Yes $54,839,710 (excludes 2010) $6,093,301 $1,533,308 Institute for Public Affairs (In These Times) Yes $4,469,119 (excludes 2006, 2007) $558,640 -$114,532 Institute for Independent Media (Alternet) Yes $14,441,678 $1,444,168 $900,585

Figure 1. Grants, Gifts, Contributions, and Membership Fees of Select “Independent Progressive” Media or Media-Related Organizations 2001-2010 (unless otherwise noted). Based on 2001-2010 IRS Form 990s.

Bill Moyers’ Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, which funds The Nation Institute and online news organ Truthout, has net assets of $33,314,688 and brought in $3,471,682 in 2010 income.[13] Because these organizations assert under their 501c3 status that they have no overt political agenda, all income is untaxed.[14] Nor are they required to list the sources of their funding—even especially generous contributions. As the early 1990s grant figures for The Nation, The Progressive, In These Times, and Mother Jones suggest, nickel-and-dime contributions constitute a small percentage of such outlets' overall "public" support.

Funding and Self-Censorship / Conclusion

Given the extent of foundation funding for left-progressive media, it is not surprising how such venues police themselves and proceed with the wishes of their wealthy benefactors in mind. As Croly observed concerning The New Republic, the Straights and Payne Whitneys "could always withdraw their financial support, if they ceased to approve of the policy of the paper; and in that event it would go out of existence as a consequence of their disapproval."[15] Indeed, this is the left news media's greatest fear.

In light of these dynamics and the big money at stake the progressive media's censorial practices are understandable. At the same time self-censorship involves a fairly implicit set of social and behavioral processes. As Warren Breed discovered several decades ago, journalists' socialization and workplace routinization constitute a process whereby newsworkers themselves internalize the mindset and wishes of their publishers, thereby making overt censorship unnecessary.[16]

We may conclude that a similar process is in play when today's "progressive" journalists and their editors share or accept many of the same interests, sentiments and expectations of those who hold the purse strings--and who would likely disapprove of attending to certain "controversial" or "conspiratorial" topics and issues.

With this in mind the foremost concern with such media is the uniform declaration of their "alternative" and "independent" missions--claims that are as problematic and misleading as Fox News' "fair and balanced" mantle. A more appropriate (and honest) moniker for the foundation-funded press is a caveat emptor-style proclamation: "The following content is intended to impart the illusion of empowerment and dissent, yet can leave you uninformed of the most pressing issues of our time, in accordance with the wishes of our sponsors."

Notes

More on Milchan, the noted liberal humanitarian, devotee of Kennedy's policies in the Middle East; and the patriotic arms smuggler who risked all to produce Oliver Stone's JFK:

http://www.richardsi...smuggling-ring/

I seriously doubt he was a devotee of Kennedy's policies in the Middle East since one of Kennedy's policys was to prevent Israel from obtaining nuclear weapons.

I think you could be on to something here, Mike. Which begs two obvious questions:

Why would a senior Israeli spy, engaged in furthering the very nuclear proliferation in the Middle East that Kennedy strove so bravely (and correctly) to prevent, work to champion the Garrison case?

What was there in the film project for the Israelis and their US allies?

Interesting piece on JFK's Executive Producer, Arnon Milchan, the noted "liberal" arms dealer, Mossad officer, and propagandist for white-ruled South Africa:

http://radioislam.or.../lasttycoon.htm

Los Angeles Magazine, April 2000

The Last Tycoon by Ann Louise Bardach

As the Los Angeles Times coyly put it, "Milchan has also worked in arms consulting." Throughout the 1970s, '80s and even up until the Gulf War in 1991, Milchan was Israel's foremost weapons procurer, brokering deals for such prized superweapons as the Hawk missile and the famous Scud-foil of the Gulf War, the Patriot--"everything from nuclear triggers to rocket fuel to guidance systems," according to NBC News. At different times in his career, his Israeli company, Milchan Brothers, has represented arms manufacturers such as Raytheon, North American Rockwell, Beechcraft, Bell Helicopter and Magnavox. Or, as Milchan downplays it, "there were a bunch of them." Nevertheless, he bristles at being called an arms dealer. "I'm their rep in Israel," he says emphatically. "I get a fee, a commission. I'm not even the buyer. I'm an agent. Never, ever, ever," he says, growing visibly irritated, did he sell to countries other than Israel. "I want to make that point, because I know some people would label me an arms dealer.

More on Milchan, the noted liberal humanitarian, devotee of Kennedy's policies in the Middle East; and the patriotic arms smuggler who risked all to produce Oliver Stone's JFK:

http://www.richardsi...smuggling-ring/

FBI Documents Confirm Involvement of Hollywood Mogul in Israeli Nuclear Smuggling Ring

by Richard Silverstein on July 21, 2012

Tikun Olam

This story sort of snuck up on me. I admit I read Grant Smith’s original story at Antiwar.com and at first it seemed so outlandish that it was hard to credit. But now Israeli media is picking up on the story and that lends it much more credibility. The gist is this: in the 1970s, Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan, who then worked for Israeli intelligence, recruited a U.S. engineer, Richard Smyth, to become an arms smuggler on Israel’s behalf. With the help of Israeli intelligence and Ministry of Defense (MOD) funding, the two establish a front company which began trading with an Israeli company, Heli Trading. At the time, according to FBI report, Bibi Netanyahu worked for the company and met Smyth frequently:

Smyth was also put in contact with Benjamin Netanyahu, who worked at Heli Trading Company. According to the FBI report, “Smyth and [Netanyahu] would meet in restaurants in Tel Aviv and in [Netanyahu's] home and/or business. It was not uncommon for [Netanyahu] to ask Smyth for unclassified material.”

One of the ways Milchan cultivated his spy recruits, including Smyth, was by wining and dining them at fancy restaurants and inviting them to star-studded Hollywood parties. Suitably enough, one of Milchan’s biggest hits was Pretty Woman.

Milchan and Smyth’s ring secured highly sensitive krytron triggers which were shipped to Heli Trading and then given to the MOD to be used for development in Israel’s nuclear weapons program. The operation was called “Project Pinto.” Smith claims that Israel has slapped a gag order that prevents the “ringleader” of the Heli Trading smuggling scheme from speaking about it. I’ve asked Smith to identify this individual and verify the claim of a gag order, but haven’t yet heard a reply from him.

Keep in mind that these are precisely the sort of triggers that the MEK and Mossad trumpeted to the Times of London that Iran was seeking for its nuclear program. The documents the Times produced were found to be fakes. Yet another example of the trustworthiness of the MEK as an intelligence source. What’s important here is that in the 1970s Israel was doing precisely what it falsely claimed Iran was doing only a few years ago. The only difference is that there are incontrovertible facts supporting Israel’s smuggling project, while there are fabricated Israeli-inspired claims regarding Iran.

The basis for Grant Smith’s charges are recently declassified FBI reports of an investigation of the ring that lasted from 1985-2002. In 1972, Smyth set up a U.S. front-company, which bought over 800 triggers and exported them to Heli Trading. According to The Marker, Milchan was the president of Heli Trading. The deal was financed on the Israeli end directly by the Ministry of Defense. In addition, Smyth procured chemical propellants for use in Israeli ballistic missile program.

The FBI discovered the scheme and began questioning both Smyth and the Israeli government. Once the U.S. engineer realized he’d been exposed, he appealed in vain for help from the Israeli government, which turned him down, since it was being asked about the deals too. Before he could be charged, Smyth fled the U.S. to Spain. In the 1980s, he was arrested there in 2001 as the subject of an Interpol Red warrant. On his return, he cooperated with the government, which convicted and sentenced him to 3 1/2 years in prison for violation of the Arms Export Control Act. As an aside, it’s instructive that a U.S. citizen who sold nuclear triggers to Israel got a jail sentence only slightly longer than the 20-month sentence Shamai Leibowitz received. Who did more damage to this country and endangered the security of the Middle East more?

Milchan’s role is also interesting. He worked for Israel’s economic espionage agency, LAKAM, under the direction of Mossad master-spy Rafi Eitan. Eitan also “ran” Jonathan Pollard and had a short tenure as Israel’s political flavor de jour where he founded the short-lived and now defunct Pensioner’s Party. He later went on to produce the Power Rangers movie franchise and 120 feature films. One wonders whether it was Israeli intelligence which set him up initially in the film business as a front for whatever activities he was doing on Israel’s behalf. Shimon Peres was also one of Milchan’s proteges.

Manufactured Realities: The Truth About The Arab Spring by Bill Noxid

To understand the #iranElection operation is to understand the whole. As the manufactured “Arab Spring” has marched across the Middle East toppling governments in Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt, and Libya, and as operations continue in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Bahrain, Myanmar, and many others, the original goal of the #IranElection prototype (destabilization and regime change) has manifest over and over with exponentially increasing destruction, death, and deception. The Occupy, Anarchy, and Anonymous subdivisions of this operation have caused untold destruction and divisions across Europe and the United States as this operation methodically turns governments against their people and people against their governments, just as they turn Sunni against Shia and Shia against Sunni across the Middle East. This global remote control puppetry continues to train myriad divisions of false flag terrorist groups responsible for unspeakable acts as the usual suspects are scapegoated without any validation whatsoever, as mainstream media remains little more than the propaganda wing of the operation – offering no critical analysis of the ongoing fraud.

I realise this isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but for the few souls interested in reading further, Luís Nuno Rodrigues’"Today's Terrorist is tomorrow's statesman: the United States and Angolan Nationalism in the early 1960s," * offers a partial but fascinating insight into the point at which Kennedy’s hopes for a radically different approach to Africa ran into the conflicting objectives of the Warfare State, and CIA assets such as Holden Roberto. Worth bearing in mind what is not in Rodrigues’ essay: Roberto was seemingly talent-spotted by a CIA “missionary” and groomed, initially at least, by a CIA-front based in Zurich

*Portuguese Journal of Social Science Volume 3 Number 2. © Intellect Ltd 2004.Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/pjss.3.2.115/0

Abstract:

In the early 1960s, the US government and some private organizations developed close contacts with Angolan nationalist movements. In Washington, this policy gained momentum with the new African policy followed by the Kennedy administration in 1961. Kennedy wanted to extend the ‘new frontier’ to Africa and his administration adopted a policy of favouring self-determination and independence of former colonial territories in that continent. This African policy had several aspects, from the votes and public statements in the United Nations to the increased investment in educational programmes for future African leaders and to the close contacts with those leaders and organizations that could play a decisive role in the future of African nations.

Gullion on the need to take action against Portuguese support for Tshombe, April 1963:

Tshombe has troops, some aircraft, and money in Angola and has secretly consulted with Portuguese authorities in Angola. The US should develop all the information it can about this situation and take appropriate means to block any Portuguese assistance to renewed secession. If there is any renewed attempt at secession we should support the UN in suppressing it.

http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v20/d419

Two of the CIA team who worked so assiduously to scupper Kennedy and Gullion in the Congo:

Sam Adams, an inward and, at the time, aimless nouveau poor classmate who traced his lineage back to the Adamses of the Revolutionary War, remembered David Halberstam as an unapproachable "big man on campus." Adams would go on to a quite different kind of career filled with remarkable coincidences that might have tied the two together. In the CIA, Adams ran the Congo desk at Langley. where, like a medieval monk, he methodically tabulated random intelligence reports and compiled remarkably accurate counts of the Katanganese rebels Halberstam wrote about. In Vietnam, he took on a similar chore. Within the establishment, Adams became one of the most tenacious silent rebels of the Vietnam era, contrasting with his classmate's most visible challenge. Twenty-five years after the graduation of the Class of '55, the Harvard reunion book carried a full page of exploits under HALBERSTAM, DAVID. Under ADAMS, SAMUEL it printed not a word. The two men would meet for the first time five years later -thirty years after Harvard -in a courtroom in New York's Foley Square during the celebrated libel trial of Gen. William C. Westmoreland vs. CBS. The meeting was somewhat awkward, the two men having traveled such oddly similar life paths in such different psychological garb.

http://aliciapatters...m-making-critic

Too bad Gullion is so old here.

I agree, but at least it gave the interested the chance to hear him, perhaps for the first time.

For a much richer picture of Gullion and the Congo, there’s Richard D. Mahoney's seminal and startling Ordeal in Africa, which desperately needs reprinting (or “kindling”) in a more affordable edition.

And for anyone interested in seeking confirmation as to how radical a departure Kennedy’s policies in Africa were, Luis Rodrigues' A New African Policy? JFK and the crisis in Portuguese Africa * is both complementary and useful – ignoring for one moment the giant lacuna where the CIA should be - on the domestic complexities and pressures which faced the White House. The contrasting US approach to Africa under Eisenhower is weighed critically, much to Kennedy’s advantage, here: http://web.jmu.edu/h...nbeck-paper.pdf

* International Conference “The End of Empires? Cold War Diplomacy, Trajectories of Development and the Formation of the Third World,” organized by the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies and the Department of History (Brown University) and the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, May 2011

Also note, once LBJ took over the Congo effort, Gullion was out.

You can see LBJ's point: America was, after all, menaced imminently by vast hordes of yellow dwarves with knives.

In the months after the assassination, very few people even suspected that there may have been secret service involvement in the conspiracy.

Some unquestionably did, Mark, though not from the Left (as far as I have been able to establish); and those whose criticisms and scepticism did make into print were pretty much ignored by the first generation of researchers:

The more this publisher thinks about the murder of President Kennedy, the more angry we get at the unnecessary stupidity of the whole performance. This is the way it’s done in some cheap ‘banana republic,’ not in the United States. This newspaper makes no claim on being an expert on security matters, but how this terrible crime could have happened simply defies common sense.

First of all, as we said in our editorial yesterday, the bullet-proof glass around the President should have been up. The job of the Secret Service is to protect the President’s safety. However, supposing for some reason the glass could not be up. Then certainly there should have been four or five Secret Service men standing together should to shoulder on the back of the car, forming a living wall of flesh between the President and the bullet of any would-be murderer.

No one wants to see the back of a President’s head – except, in this case, the murderous assassin. Yet, this obvious safety precaution was not taken. There is nothing new in this idea. Secret Service men have traditionally interposed their bodies between the President and danger. In Pittsfield, Mass., early in the century, a Secret Service man lost his life when he threw himself between an incoming trolley car, which, through a blunder, crashed into a carriage carrying President of the United States Theodore Roosevelt. As a result, while the President was shaken up and badly bruised, he was not killed, although the gallant Secret Service man was.

What ought to happen is that there should be a full-scale investigation by an appropriate congressional committee as to just how good the Secret Service guarding the President of the United States really is. Frankly, looking back over the record, this newspaper is not very impressed…This record of presidential assassinations is a national disgrace!

William Loeb, editorial, “Investigate the Secret Service,” The Manchester Union-Leader, Tuesday, 26 November 1963, pp.1 & 17

A calculated leak (and one that has the ring of authenticity) now reveals the findings of the autopsy that was done on the body of President Kennedy.

Post mortem findings answered many puzzling details about the wounds that took the life of the President, but the central riddle of the assassination remains and is emphasized.

This is, of course, the question that the country cannot forget, and cannot be expected to forget: How was our President permitted to become a sitting target for a methodical (almost leisurely) sniper?

Shortly after the murder of Mr. Kennedy, it was written here: "The autopsy findings on Mr. Kennedy have not been made public, and may never be, but suppose the first wound was not mortal? Then the lax protection that permitted a second bullet to strike home becomes a great historical scandal."

Now we learn that the first shot did cause a wound that was not likely to kill. It struck the President high in the shoulder, from behind, causing considerable damage to the massive muscles of the neck and shoulder. But in the opinion of pathologists who examined the President's body, the first shot did not cause injury calculated to be fatal.

The second shot fired by the assassin struck Gov. John Connally. The third shot inflicted the wound that killed Mr. Kennedy by smashing away the back of his head.

The confusion over the wounds was caused by a fragment of the third bullet that coursed down through the President's head and exited through his throat approximately at the collar line. Because it was a small fragment that had spent much of its velocity before it emerged, it caused a wound which seemed to be characteristic of an entry wound.

The wound in Mr. Kennedy's shoulder was not even seen by the doctors at Parkland Hospital in Dallas. A glance at the damage to Mr. Kennedy's skull and brain was sufficient to convince them that there was no remote hope of saving him; thus they merely went through the motions of starting supportive therapy while waiting for an electrocardiograph device to be attached to the President's body.

Now it is known that the first wound was one which a healthy adult was likely to survive, and the question becomes more compelling than ever. Why was the President's bodyguard so remote that the assassin had ample time for a second shot (that struck Gov. Connally), and the third shot that killed the President?

Films show us that it was not until some measurable period after the third shot that a Secret Service agent, helped by the tragically heroic figure of the First Lady, leaped onto the back of the automobile. This agent, Clinton J. Hill, had been riding on the running board of the automobile next behind the President's car. He was cited for his bravery in seeking to shield Mrs. Kennedy and the President with his body, but by then it was an eternity too late for Mr. Kennedy.

It seems reasonable to speculate that if (as is frequently done) a Secret Service agent had been riding on the tail step of the President's automobile the third might never have struck home.

This circumstance becomes particularly damning in the light of the citation issued to Secret Service agent Rufus Youngblood, who was assigned to the Vice President's car in the motorcade.

"Mr. Youngblood was riding in the front seat of the Vice President's limousine when the assassination occurred," the citation reads. "Upon hearing the first shot, Mr. Youngblood instantly vaulted across the front seat of the car, pushed the Vice President to the floor, and shielded the Vice President's body with his own…"

It seems impossible to conclude other than that the protection accorded to the Vice President that black day in Dallas was of a higher order that that given to President Kennedy. The commission headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren must learn the reasons behind this appalling lapse, and it must reveal them to the American people.

Richard Starnes, "Kennedy: Whose Fault?" The New York World-Telegram & Sun, 19 December 1963, p.13

There was considerable "surprise" registered in the UK press at the "performance" of Kennedy's SS unit. Two examples follow:

The assassination of President Kennedy will mean a review of British security measures for the Queen, the Royal Family, and senior Ministers.

The hidden flaw in the American security screen must be identified to ensure its elimination from British plans.

Scotland Yard senior officers responsible for such guards are deeply shocked by news of the assassination. They have spent years, in liaison with the world’s police through Interpol, in perfecting safety measures.

FBI Efficiency: Unsuspected loophole

Presidential visits to Britain have meant in the past valuable co-operation with the FBI. The efficiency of the American security service is highly praised in the Metropolitan Police.

Full reports of the murder of the President will be studied today by the Yard’s Special Branch.

The unsuspected loophole in the American security curtain is known as the X-factor.

Yard Amazement: Bodyguard beaten

Among Yard officers last night was evident amazement that the formidable FBI bodyguard, all picked marksmen, could be beaten. Unspoken, but equally evident, was the fear “This could happen here.”

Royal appearances in Britain during recent years have been marked by a growing informality. This attitude, beloved by the crowds, has nevertheless meant grave and additional problems for the Yard and provincial police.

For Royal and Ministerial personal security plans are based upon countering attack or interference from the individual, rather than the group. Crowd control, where a gunman could be difficult to spot, is always a major problem.

John Owen, “Overhaul of Security by Britain,” Daily Telegraph, Saturday, 23 November 1963, p.7

The body of President Kennedy tonight lies in repose in the White House and, 1,200 miles away in Dallas, a young ex-Marine denies that he is the gunman assassin.

This has been America’s Day of Mourning. All share a sorrow at “this heavy blow to people who hold dear the cause of peace.” Those are Mr. Khrushchev’s words in a cable to Washington. Words that have been echoed a thousand times by world leaders and the world’s common folk.

For this has been America’s Day of Questioning, too. Foremost is the question: What went wrong with security? Why did the President’s special bodyguard, reinforced by 350 policemen, fail?

Secret Service agents had been in Dallas for a fortnight before President Kennedy arrived. They checked every point along the route. They checked known trouble-makers.

But still an assassin’s bullet killed the President as a bodyguard pounded his fists in frustration.

Agents have always said that a president in an open car in a city street is at his most vulnerable as a target. To combat the menace, they build up a city-by-city picture dossier of men on police crank and criminal lists.

They memorise faces, so that they can pick them out in crowds. Their orders are: Never watch the President. Watch the people and crowds around him. They are also sworn to throw themselves in front of the President at first indication of gunfire.

Worried security men are asking if more stringent security in Dallas could have saved Mr. Kennedy from being struck – by TWO bullets, it was learned today.

Sunday Citizen Correspondents, “Security Storm: Why Did It Happen?” Sunday Citizen & Reynolds News, Sunday, 24 November 1963, pp.1&32

United Nations Oral History

Interview with:Edmund Gullion

Conducted May 8, 1990, in 4 parts

(United States of America, 1913 – 1998)

Diplomat

A career ambassador, Edmund Gullion had been appointed United States Ambassador to the newly recognized Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1961 and had left that post in 1964. He then became dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

Retired at the time of the interview conducted on 8 May 1990, Mr. Gullion shares his personal experiences as Ambassador to the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the political climate during that dramatic period in United Nations history.

Just before a freeway sign, the driver began to slow down the presidential limousine.

Suddenly, a shot came from the top of Elm St., now a half block in back of the President. A Secret Service agent in the Vice-President's follow-up car had raised his left hand out of the partly open left, rear window. A revolver was fired skyward.

The crowd's attention was distracted from the presidential limousine by the sudden explosion…

The Decoy Shot

As the motorcade approached Elm St., an amateur photographer focused his movie camera on the presidential limousine and the front of the depository building. His lens also caught the Vice-President's follow-up car, the third car behind the limousine. This was perhaps a minute before the first shot was fired. The Vice-President's follow-up car was approaching the left-hand turn into Elm St. when both of its rear doors opened, six to eight inches (Fig. 3-2). According to the film, no one got in or out of the car.

One witness, standing on the southeast corner of Elm and Houston Streets, saw the follow-up car's open doors. After it turned the corner, he "…heard the first report…" which he thought was a car's backfire. The Texas Highway Patrolman who was driving the Vice-President's car thought the shot "…appeared to come from the right rear of the Vice-President's car."

Many witnesses said that the first shot sounded like a "firecracker" or a "backfire" in the street.

Altgens' sixth photograph of those he took in Dealey Plaza (Fig. 3-3) tends to support the contention that someone in the motorcade fired a gun into the air at the intersection of Elm and Houston Streets, when the limousine was about 100 feet down Elm St.

Altgens' photograph, which was taken about three seconds after the decoy shot was fired, when enlarged (Fig. 3-4) shows Secret Service agent Warren W. Taylor, in the rear left seat, of the Vice-President's follow-up car. His arm is outside of the open car door; the configuration of his hand suggests he is holding a gun. Those people in the car immediately behind smelled gunpowder.

Altgens' photograph also shows Lyndon Johnson leaning forward apparently in the process of getting down at a point in time when others in the motorcade seem unaware of any danger (Fig. 3-5). One witness, who stood on the curb of Elm St. during the shooting, said, "wasn't that rather odd that Johnson was on the floor before the shot sounded?"

The Smell of Gunsmoke

In addition to the eyewitnesses and ear witnesses, there were also nose witnesses to the murder.

Those who smelled gunpowder at the scene of the shooting helped to pinpoint the source of the shots. Placed on a map (Fig. 3-7), they were within the path of the motorcade or near Elm St. The motorcade headed west down Elm St. into a modest breeze.

Motorcycle escort officer Billy J. Martin, riding one half car length from the left rear fender of the Presidential limousine, recalled, "You could smell the gunpowder…you knew he wasn't far away. When you're that close you can smell the powder burning, why you - you've got to be pretty close to them…you could smell the gunpowder…right there in the street."

“Nose” witnesses

Senator Ralph W. Yarborough rode in the second car behind the limousine. He smelled gunpowder in the street and said it clung to the car throughout the race to Parkland Hospital.

Two cars behind Yarborough was the Cabell car. Mrs. Cabell said that she "…was acutely aware of the odor of gunpowder." She added that Congressman Ray Roberts, seated next to her, had mentioned it also.

According to Tom C. Dillard, two cars behind the Cabell car, he "…very definitely smelled gunpowder when the cars moved up at the corner of Elm and Houston Streets."

Vergie Rackley stood in front of the depository building. "She recalled that after the second shot she smelled gunsmoke…"

At the time of the shots, patrolman Joe M. Smith moved from the intersection of Elm and Houston Streets toward the triple underpass. When interviewed at that time, he stated that he smelled gunpowder near the underpass.

Patrolman Earle V. Brown, stationed 100 yards west of the underpass, stated that he heard the shots and then smelled gunpowder as the car sped beneath him.

A police officer who was on the sixth floor of the depository shortly after the shooting failed to smell any gunpowder there.

One newspaper summed it up: "…seconds later the cavalcade was gone. The area still reeked with the smell of gunpowder." Shots from the sixth floor of the depository building would have caused no gunpowder smell in the street.

Fred T. Newcomb & Perry Adam. Murder From Within (Bloomington, In: AuthorHouse, 2011), chapter 3: Execution, 44, 50, 57-58

The fact that Triage Nurse Bertha Lozano smelled gunpowder as JFK and Connally were wheeled past her at Parkland implies that there was a firearm discharged in the limousine and that particulate matter was embedded in someone's clothing - otherwise she would not have smelled gunpowder.

Doug Horne to Bill Kelly

Please note that advance orders for my “instant” book on the case, Disappearing Nate: The Abduction, Torture, and Certain Execution of an American Dissident, will be honoured, albeit after a brief delay while I rewrite bits of it entirely, and count the Langley wedge. It will now appear under the slightly tweaked title of Reappearing Nate: Conspiraloon Hysteria in the Age of the Internet. There are some additional small changes.

The publisher will not now be The Ainsdale Self-publishing Society (print-run: 10) but rather Random Souse (initial print-run: 200,000).

Noam Chomsky has agreed to write a forward – provisionally entitled Cargo Cultists in the Age of Stone – prefaced by approving comments from a diverse range of Guardian columnists, ranging from legendary parliamentary sketch-writer Simon Legge-Over, to Jon Goat-Ronson and Marina Hyde-White. Timothy Garter-Sash has already completed the afterword, The Triumph of the Chatham House Hyphenates, which will appear in green ink.

To my further astonishment, discussions about serialisation rights are apparently well advanced, with the Huffington Post, Fanity Vair, and The Sun on Sunday, pulling clear of the chasing pack; while Amy Goodman wants me on Democracy Tomorrow; and the BBC’s world-renowned bastion of uncompromising investigative journalism, Propagandarama, has scheduled an extended interview for inclusion in its latest in-depth exploration of a Kennedy assassination, The Mary Jo Files: Was Teddy a Serial Killer?

No changes are proposed, you will be relieved to learn, to the unpaginated photographic section at the original book’s heart. This remarkable portfolio, depicting the world’s elite snatch squads and their most feared members, remains entirely as originally supplied in a plain brown envelope by Mr Robert Morrow and the Siliconika Photographic Agency of Bangkok.

I hope Rich Dellarosa is hearing this interview by Jim Maars of William Remon (sp?) from heaven. It gives one hope that the true nature of the shooting may yet surface before the rest of us die-- in the form of the "other film." All the eyewitness testimony to the limo stop has been explained away due to the bastard film at the Archives. It's time for the charade to end, and if it takes French intelligence to bring us the truth, mon Dieu, vive le France! (if I have said it correctly).

A wind may yet blow through America, Daniel, don't despair

To commemorate its fiftieth anniversary, the Columbia Journalism Review exhumed from its archives Maurice W. Schonfeld’s

The Shadow of a Gunman: An account of a twelve-year investigation of a Kennedy assassination film

The author, managing editor of UPI Newsfilm, the film service of United Press International, at the time President Kennedy was killed, had added a second Epilogue, dated 22 November 2011, to a piece originally published in the Review’s combined July-August 1975 issue. The update’s penultimate paragraph, containing a fascinating tit-bit which I’ve highlighted, ran as follows:

Originally, UPI Newsfilm had blown the Muchmore film up to 16mm, slow-moed it, stop-motioned it and delivered prints with scripts to all its clients. The original was turned over to the UPI still picture service, which sent frames from it to its clients. It later cut into the film to print other stills for inclusion in its best-selling book on the day of the assassination. The film was never fully restored.

This was compelling and, seemingly, due to the source, definitive: The original Muchmore had ceased to exist as a film no later than late-December 1963, and for many years after that, with the publication of the joint UPI-American Heritage Magazine commemorative work, Four Days: The Historical Record of the Death of President Kennedy, a work, it should be noted, of quite astonishing tedium.

It was also quite surprising, as according to the FBI in February 1964, based on conversations the previous day with senior people in UPI rather well-placed to know, the original was still intact, and residing happily in a New York bank vault, a full two months after being cut up.

Sometimes I really don’t know which is the more remarkable – those slippery media types, or the strange assassination films which passed through their hands.

The CIA was dragged before a congressional committee to explain the intel failure in Bogota. But the Bogotazo worked in favor of the US in that it successfully (but falsely) linked what happened to Communist influence and thereby signed up many Latin American countries to an Anti-Communist union. And the CIA? It walked away from the committee, not with its tail between it's legs, as it should have - but with more power to act unilaterally.

Historians - who should all hang their heads in shame - have long regarded the Hungarian Uprising as a CIA intel failure. Yet the NSC had issued a report in 1953 stating that it wanted to create situations which would provoke "open Soviet intervention" - which again - is exactly what happened. It was only a "failure" to protect the sickening truth.

http://reopenkennedy...garian-uprising

Those are just two examples. But if you go through the list, you'll find that the MIC got what it wanted each time - as a direct result of these "failures". That doesn't mean they were all orchestrated by US intel, however (though some certainly were).

Outstanding; and of considerable relevance to the Dallas coup.

An interesting hypothesis from David Lifton. Three questions in response:

1) To which location where others suspected of involvement taken that day? Where, for example, was Molina taken?

2) Why, if Lovelady was detained for the reasons outlined in David's speculation, is there no mention of this perfectly harmless episode within either his own statements, or those of the FBI etc?

3) Why, if Lovelady was as described, the consistent and determined efforts of the DPD to prevent any of the early critics from interviewing and photographing him?

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25829

The US-Al Qaeda Alliance: Bosnia, Kosovo and Now Libya. Washington’s On-Going Collusion with Terrorists

by Prof. Peter Dale Scott

Global Research, July 29, 2011

The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol 9, Issue 31 No 1, August 1, 2011

Twice in the last two decades, significant cuts in U.S. and western military spending were foreseen: first after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and then in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. But both times military spending soon increased, and among the factors contributing to the increase were America’s interventions in new areas: the Balkans in the 1990s, and Libya today.1 Hidden from public view in both cases was the extent to which al-Qaeda was a covert U.S. ally in both interventions, rather than its foe.

U.S. interventions in the Balkans and then Libya were presented by the compliant U.S. and allied mainstream media as humanitarian. Indeed, some Washington interventionists may have sincerely believed this. But deeper motivations – from oil to geostrategic priorities – were also at work in both instances.

In virtually all the wars since 1989, America and Islamist factions have been battling to determine who will control the heartlands of Eurasia in the post-Soviet era. In some countries – Somalia in 1993, Afghanistan in 2001 – the conflict has been straightforward, with each side using the other’s excesses as an excuse for intervention.

But there have been other interventions in which Americans have used al-Qaeda as a resource to increase their influence, for example Azerbaijan in 1993. There a pro-Moscow president was ousted after large numbers of Arab and other foreign mujahedin veterans were secretly imported from Afghanistan, on an airline hastily organized by three former veterans of the CIA’s airline Air America. (The three, all once detailed from the Pentagon to the CIA, were Richard Secord, Harry Aderholt, and Ed Dearborn.)2 This was an ad hoc marriage of convenience: the mujahedin got to defend Muslims against Russian influence in the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, while the Americans got a new president who opened up the oilfields of Baku to western oil companies.

The pattern of U.S. collaboration with Muslim fundamentalists against more secular enemies is not new. It dates back to at least 1953, when the CIA recruited right-wing mullahs to overthrow Prime Minister Mossadeq in Iran, and also began to cooperate with the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood.3 But in Libya in 2011 we see a more complex marriage of convenience between US and al-Qaeda elements: one which repeats a pattern seen in Bosnia in 1992-95, and Kosovo in 1997-98. In those countries America responded to a local conflict in the name of a humanitarian intervention to restrain the side committing atrocities. But in all three cases both sides committed atrocities, and American intervention in fact favored the side allied with al-Qaeda.

The cause of intervention was fostered in all three cases by blatant manipulation and falsification of the facts. What a historian has noted of the Bosnian conflict was true also of Kosovo and is being echoed today in Libya: though attacks were “perpetrated by Serbs and Muslims alike,” the pattern in western media was “that killings of Muslims were newsworthy, while the deaths of non-Muslims were not.”4 Reports of mass rapes in the thousands proved to be wildly exaggerated: a French journalist “uncovered only four women willing to back up the story.”5 Meanwhile in 1994 the French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy (BHL) traveled to Bosnia and fervently endorsed the case for intervention in Bosnia; in 2011 February BHL traveled to Benghazi and reprised his interventionist role for Libya.6

In all of the countries mentioned above, furthermore, there are signs that some American and/or western intelligence groups were collaborating with al-Qaeda elements from the outset of conflict, before the atrocities cited as a reason for intervention.. This suggests that there were deeper reasons for America’s interventions including the desire of western oil companies to exploit the petroleum reserves of Libya (as in Iraq) without having to deal with a troublesome and powerful strong man, or their desire to create a strategic oil pipeline across the Balkans (in Kosovo).7

That the U.S. would support al-Qaeda in terrorist atrocities runs wholly counter to impressions created by the U.S. media. Yet this on-going unholy alliance resurrects and builds on the alliance underlying Zbigniew Brzezinski’s 1978-79 strategy of provocation in Afghanistan, at a time when he was President Carter’s National Security Adviser.

In those years Brzezinski did not hesitate to play the terrorist card against the Soviet Union: he reinforced the efforts of the SAVAK (the Shah of Iran’s intelligence service) to work with the Islamist antecedents of al-Qaeda to destabilize Afghanistan, in a way which soon led to a Soviet invasion of that country.8 At the time, as he later boasted, Brzezinski told Carter, “We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.”9

CIA Director William Casey continued this strategy of using terrorists against the USSR in Afghanistan. At first the CIA channeled aid through the Pakistani ISI (Interservices Intelligence Service) to their client Afghan extremists like Gulbeddin Hekmatyar (today one of America’s enemies in Afghanistan). But in 1986, “Casey committed CIA support to a long-standing ISI initiative to recruit radical Muslims from around the world to come to Pakistan and fight with the Afghan Mujaheddin.”10 CIA aid now reached their support Office of Services in Peshawar, headed by a Palestinian, Abdullah Azzam, and by Osama bin Laden. The al-Kifah Center, a U.S. recruitment office for their so-called Arab-Afghan foreign legion (the future al Qaeda), was set up in the al-Farook mosque in Brooklyn.11

It is important to recall Brzezinski’s and Casey’s use of terrorists today. For in Libya, as earlier in Kosovo and Bosnia, there are alarming signs that America has continued to underwrite Islamist terrorism as a means to dismantle socialist or quasi-socialist nations not previously in its orbit: first the USSR, then Yugoslavia, today Libya. As I have written elsewhere, Gaddafi was using the wealth of Libya, the only Mediterranean nation still armed by Russia and independent of the NATO orbit, to impose more and more difficult terms for western oil companies, and to make the whole of Africa more independent of Europe and America.12

Support for the mujahedin included collusion in law-breaking, at a heavy cost. In the second part of this essay, I will show how government protection of key figures in the Brooklyn al-Kifah Center left some of them free, even after they were known to have committed crimes, to engage in further terrorist acts in the United States -- such as the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993.

The U.S.-al-Qaeda Alliance in Libya

The NATO intervention in Libya has been presented as a humanitarian campaign. But it is not: both factions have been committing atrocities. Thanks in part to the efforts of the well-connected p.r. firm the Harbour Group, working on behalf of the Benghazi opposition’s National Transitional Council [NTC], Americans have heard many more press accounts of atrocities by pro-Gaddafi forces in Libya than by the Benghazi opposition.13 But in fact, as the London Daily Telegraph reported,

Under rebel control, Benghazi residents are terrorized, many "too frightened to drive through the dark streets at night, fearing a shakedown or worse at the proliferating checkpoints."

Moreover, about 1.5 million black African migrant workers feel trapped under suspicion of supporting the wrong side. Numbers of them have been attacked, some hunted down, dragged from apartments, beaten and killed. So-called "revolutionaries" and "freedom fighters" are, in fact, rampaging gunmen committing atrocities airbrushed from mainstream reports, unwilling to reveal the new Libya if Gaddafi is deposed.14

Thomas Mountain concurs that “Since the rebellion in Benghazi broke out several hundred Sudanese, Somali, Ethiopian and Eritrean guest workers have been robbed and murdered by racist rebel militias, a fact well hidden by the international media.”15 Such reports have continued. Recently, Human Rights Watch accused the rebels of killing Gaddafi supporters who were just civilians and looting, burning and ransacking pro-Gaddafi supporters' houses and areas.16

Americans and Europeans are still less likely to learn from their media that among the groups in the Benghazi transitional coalition, certainly the most battle-seasoned, are veterans of the Al-Jama'a al-Islamiyyah al-Muqatilah bi-Libya (Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, or LIFG). The importance of the LIFG contingent in the TNC has been downplayed in a recent issue of the International Business Times:

The LIFG is a radical Islamic group which has been fighting small scale guerrilla warfare against Gaddafi for almost a decade. Much of the LIFG leadership came from soldiers who fought against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan, as part of the Mujahedeen. Since the beginning of the uprising reports said that some of the LIFG has joined the TNC rebel movement on the ground, and many accused the fighters of having links to Al-Qaeda, which the LIFG has since denied.

Previously however, the LIFG had stated that its ultimate goal is to install an Islamic state inside Libya, which given the fact that many of its fighters are now on the side of the TNC is quite worrying. However as the LIFG is reported to have a fighting force of no more than a few thousand men, it is believed it will not be able to cause much trouble within the opposition.17

It remains to be seen whether a victorious TNC would be able to contain the Islamist aspirations of the ruthless jihadist veterans in their ranks.

There are those who fear that, from their years of combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, the battle-hardened LIFG, although probably not dominant in the Benghazi coalition today, will come to enjoy more influence if Benghazi ever gets to distribute the spoils of victory. In February 2004, then-Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee that "one of the most immediate threats [to U.S. security in Iraq] is from smaller international Sunni extremist groups that have benefited from al-Qaida links. They include ... the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group."18 In 2007 a West Point study reported on “the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group's (LIFG) increasingly cooperative relationship with al-Qaeda, which culminated in the LIFG officially joining al-Qaeda on November 3, 2007."19

Although Britain and the US were well aware of the West Point assessment of the hard-core LIFG in the Benghazi TNC coalition, their special forces nevertheless secretly backed the Benghazi TNC, even before the launch of NATO air support:

The bombing of the country came as it was revealed that hundreds of British special forces troops have been deployed deep inside Libya targeting Colonel Gaddafi’s forces – and more are on standby….

In total it is understood that just under 250 UK special forces soldiers and their support have been in Libya since before the launch of air strikes to enforce the no-fly zone against Gaddafi’s forces.20

There are also reports that U.S. Special Forces were also sent into Libya on February 23 and 24, 2011, almost a month before the commencement of NATO bombing.21

UK support for the fundamentalist LIFG was in fact at least a decade old:

Fierce clashes between [Qadhafi's] security forces and Islamist guerrillas erupted in Benghazi in September 1995, leaving dozens killed on both sides. After weeks of intense fighting, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) formally declared its existence in a communiqué calling Qadhafi's government "an apostate regime that has blasphemed against the faith of God Almighty" and declaring its overthrow to be "the foremost duty after faith in God." This and future LIFG communiqués were issued by Libyan Afghans who had been granted political asylum in Britain.... The involvement of the British government in the LIFG campaign against Qadhafi remains the subject of immense controversy. LIFG's next big operation, a failed attempt to assassinate Qadhafi in February 1996 that killed several of his bodyguards, was later said to have been financed by British intelligence to the tune of $160,000, according to ex-MI5 officer David Shayler.22

David Shayler’s detailed account has been challenged, but many other sources reveal that UK support for Libyan jihadists long antedates the present conflict.23

Even more ominous for the future than the nationalistic LIFG may be the fighters from the more internationalist Al Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQIM) who have seized the opportunity presented by the war to enter the conflict, and equip themselves from Gaddafi’s looted armories.24 AQIM presents a special concern because of recent reports that, like other al Qaeda associates from Afghanistan to Kosovo, it is increasingly financed by payoffs from regional drug traffickers.25

In short, the NATO campaign in Libya is in support of a coalition in which the future status of present and former al-Qaeda allies is likely to be strengthened.26 And western forces have been secretly supporting them from the outset.

The U.S.-al-Qaeda Alliance in Bosnia

Similarly, Clinton’s interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo were presented as humanitarian. But both sides had committed atrocities in those conflicts; Like the western media, Washington downplayed the Muslim atrocities because of its other interests.

Most Americans are aware that Clinton dispatched U.S. forces to Bosnia to enforce the Dayton peace accords after a well-publicized Serbian atrocity: the massacre of thousands of Muslims at Srebrenica. Thanks to a vigorous campaign by the p.r. firm Ruder Finn, Americans heard a great deal about the Srebrenica massacre, but far less about the beheadings and other atrocities by Muslims that preceded and helped account for it.

A major reason for the Serb attack on Srebrenica was to deal with the armed attacks mounted from that base on nearby villages: “intelligence sources said it was that harassment which precipitated the Serb attack on the 1,500 Muslim defenders inside the enclave.”27 General Philippe Morillon, commander of the UN troops in Bosnia from 1992 to 1993, testified to the ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia) that Muslim forces based in Srebrenica had “engaged in attacks during Orthodox holidays and destroyed villages, massacring all the inhabitants. This created a degree of hatred that was quite extraordinary in the region”28 According to Prof. John Schindler,

Between May and December 1992, Muslim forces repeatedly attacked Serb villages around Srebrenica, killing and torturing civilians; some were mutilated and burned alive. Even pro-Sarajevo accounts concede that Muslim forces in Srebrenica…murdered over 1,300 Serbs…and had “ethnically cleansed a vast area.29

Former U.S. ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith later admitted in an interview that the U.S. administration was aware of “small numbers of atrocities” being committed by the foreign mujahedin in Bosnia, but dismissed the atrocities as “in the scheme of things not a big issue.”30

Other sources reveal that Washington gave a tacit green light to Croatia’s arming and augmentation of the Muslim presence in Srebrenica.31 Soon C-130 Hercules planes. some but not all of them Iranian, were dropping arms to the Muslims, in violation of the international arms embargo which the U.S. officially respected. More Arab-Afghan mujahedin arrived as well. Many of the airdrops and some of the mujahedin were at Tuzla, 70 kilometers from Srebrenica.32

According to The Spectator (London), the Pentagon was using other countries such as Turkey and Iran in this flow of arms and warriors:

From 1992 to 1995, the Pentagon assisted with the movement of thousands of Mujahideen and other Islamic elements from Central Asia into Europe, to fight alongside Bosnian Muslims against the Serbs. …. As part of the Dutch government’s inquiry into the Srebrenica massacre of July 1995, Professor Cees Wiebes of Amsterdam University compiled a report entitled ‘Intelligence and the War in Bosnia’, published in April 2002. In it he details the secret alliance between the Pentagon and radical Islamic groups from the Middle East, and their efforts to assist Bosnia’s Muslims. By 1993, there was a vast amount of weapons-smuggling through Croatia to the Muslims, organised by ‘clandestine agencies’ of the USA, Turkey and Iran, in association with a range of Islamic groups that included Afghan Mujahideen and the pro-Iranian Hezbollah. Arms bought by Iran and Turkey with the financial backing of Saudi Arabia were airlifted from the Middle East to Bosnia — airlifts with which, Wiebes points out, the USA was ‘very closely involved’.33

Cees Wiebes’ detailed account, based on years of research, documents both the case for American responsibility and the vigorous American denials of it:

At 17.45 on 10 February 1995, the Norwegian Captain Ivan Moldestad, a Norwegian helicopter detachment (NorAir) pilot, stood in the doorway of his temporary accommodation just outside Tuzla. It was dark, and suddenly he heard the sound of the propellers of an approaching transport aircraft; it was unmistakably a four engine Hercules C-130. Moldestad noticed that the Hercules was being escorted by two jet fighters, but could not tell their precise type in the darkness. There were other sightings of this secretive night-time flight to Tuzla Air Base (TAB). A sentry who was on guard duty outside the Norwegian medical UN unit in Tuzla also heard and saw the lights of the Hercules and the accompanying jet fighters. Other UN observers, making use of night vision equipment, also saw the cargo aircraft and the fighter planes concerned. The reports were immediately forwarded to the NATO Combined Air Operations Center (CAOC) in Vicenza and the UNPF Deny Flight Cell in Naples. When Moldestad phoned Vicenza, he was told that there was nothing in the air that night, and that he must be mistaken. When Moldestad persisted, the connection was broken.

The secretive C-130 cargo aircraft flights and night-time arms drops on Tuzla caused great agitation within UNPROFOR and the international community in February and March 1995. When asked, a British general responded with great certainty to the question of the origin of the secret supplies via TAB: ‘They were American arms deliveries. No doubt about that. And American private companies were involved in these deliveries.’ This was no surprising answer, because this general had access to intelligence gathered by a unit of the British Special Air Services (SAS) in Tuzla. The aircraft had come within range of this unit’s special night vision equipment, and the British saw them land. It was a confirmation that a clandestine American operation had taken place in which arms, ammunition and military communication equipment were supplied to the ABiH. These night-time operations led to much consternation within the UN and NATO, and were the subject of countless speculations.34

Wiebes reports the possibility that the C-130s, some of which were said to have taken off from a US Air Force base in Germany, were actually controlled by Turkish authorities.35 But U.S. involvement was detected in the elaborate cover-up, from the fact that US AWACS aircraft, which should have provided a record of the secret flights, were either withdrawn from duty at the relevant times, or manned with US crews.36

A summary of Wiebes’ exhaustive report was published in the Guardian:

The Dutch report reveals how the Pentagon formed a secret alliance with Islamist groups in an Iran-Contra-style operation.

US, Turkish and Iranian intelligence groups worked with the Islamists in what the Dutch report calls the "Croatian pipeline". Arms bought by Iran and Turkey and financed by Saudi Arabia were flown into Croatia initially by the official Iranian airline, Iran Air, and later in a fleet of black C-130 Hercules aircraft.

The report says that mojahedin fighters were also flown in, and that the US was "very closely involved" in the operation which was in flagrant breach of the embargo. British secret services obtained documents proving that Iran also arranged deliveries of arms directly to Bosnia, it says.

The operation was promoted by the Pentagon, rather than the CIA, which was cautious about using Islamist groups as a conduit for arms, and about breaching the embargo. When the CIA tried to place its own people on the ground in Bosnia, the agents were threatened by the mojahedin fighters and the Iranians who were training them.

The UN relied on American intelligence to monitor the embargo, a dependency which allowed Washington to manipulate it at will.37

Meanwhile the Al-Kifah Center in Brooklyn, which in the 1980s had supported the “Arab-Afghans” fighting in Afghanistan, turned its attentions to Bosnia.

Al-Kifah’s English-language newsletter Al-Hussam (The Sword) also began publishing regular updates on jihad action in Bosnia….Under the control of the minions of Shaykh Omar Abdel Rahman, the newsletter aggressively incited sympathetic Muslims to join the jihad in Bosnia and Afghanistan themselves….The Al-Kifah Bosnian branch office in Zagreb, Croatia, housed in a modern, two-story building, was evidently in close communication with the organizational headquarters in New York. The deputy director of the Zagreb office, Hassan Hakim, admitted to receiving all orders and funding directly from the main United States office of Al-Kifah on Atlantic Avenue controlled by Shaykh Omar Abdel Rahman.38

One of the trainers at al-Kifah, Rodney Hampton-El, assisted in this support program, recruiting warriors from U.S. Army bases like Fort Belvoir, and also training them to be fighters in New Jersey.39 In 1995 Hampton-El was tried and convicted for his role (along with al-Kifah leader Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman) in the plot to blow up New York landmarks. At the trial Hampton-El testified how he was personally given thousands of dollars for this project by Saudi Crown Prince Faisal in the Washington Saudi Embassy.40

About this time, Ayman al-Zawahiri, today the leader of al Qaeda, came to America to raise funds in Silicon Valley, where he was hosted by Ali Mohamed, a U.S. double agent and veteran of U.S. Army Special Forces who had been the top trainer at the Al-Kifah mosque.41 Almost certainly al-Zawahiri’s fund-raising was in support of the mujahedin in Bosnia, reportedly his chief concern at the time. (“The Asian edition of the Wall Street Journal reported that, in 1993, Mr. bin Laden had appointed Sheik Ayman Al-Zawahiri, the al-Qaeda's second-in-command, to direct his operations in the Balkans.”)42

Wiebes’ detailed report and the news stories based on it corroborated earlier charges made in 1997 by Sir Alfred Sherman, top adviser to Margaret Thatcher and co-founder of the influential rightwing nationalist Centre for Policy Studies, that “The U.S. encouraged and facilitated the dispatch of arms to the Moslems via Iran and Eastern Europe -- a fact which was denied in Washington at the time in face of overwhelming evidence.”43 This was part of his case that

The war in Bosnia was America's war in every sense of the word. The US administration helped start it, kept it going, and prevented its early end. Indeed all the indications are that it intends to continue the war in the near future, as soon as its Moslem proteges are fully armed and trained.

Specifically, Sherman charged that in 1992 Acting Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger had instructed Warren Zimmerman, U.S. Ambassador in Belgrade, to persuade Bosnian President Izetbegovic to renege on his agreement to preserve Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian unity, and instead accept American aid for an independent Bosnian state.44

The U.S.-al-Qaeda Alliance in Kosovo

This raises the disturbing question: were some Americans willing to ignore the atrocities of the al-Kifah mujahideen in Bosnia in exchange for mujahideen assistance in NATO’s successive wars dismantling Yugoslavia, the last surviving socialist republic in Europe? One thing is clear: Sir Alfred Sherman’s prediction in 1997 that America “intends to continue the war in the near future” soon proved accurate, when in 1999 American support for al-Qaeda’s allies in Kosovo, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), led to a controversial NATO bombing campaign.

As was widely reported at the time, the KLA was supported both by the networks of bin Laden and al-Zawahiri, and also by the traffic in Afghan heroin:

Some members of the Kosovo Liberation Army, which has financed its war effort through the sale of heroin, were trained in terrorist camps run by international fugitive Osama bin Laden -- who is wanted in the 1998 bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa that killed 224 persons, including 12 Americans.45

According to former DEA agent Michael Levine, the decision of Clinton to back the KLA dismayed his DEA contacts who knew it to be a major drug-trafficking organization.46 As Ralf Mutschke of Interpol testified to Congress,

In 1998, the U.S. State Department listed the KLA as a terrorist organization, indicating that it was financing its operations with money from the international heroin trade and loans from Islamic countries and individuals, among them allegedly Usama bin Laden. Another link to bin Laden is the fact that the brother of a leader in an Egyptian Djihad organization and also a military commander of Usama bin Laden, was leading an elite KLA unit during the Kosovo conflict. [This is almost certainly Zaiman or Mohammed al-Zawahiri, one of the brothers of Ayman al-Zawahiri.] In 1998, the KLA was described as a key player in the drugs for arms business in 1998, "helping to transport 2 billion USD worth of drugs annually into Western Europe". The KLA and other Albanian groups seem to utilize a sophisticated network of accounts and companies to process funds. In 1998, Germany froze two bank accounts belonging to the "United Kosova" organization after it had been discovered that several hundred thousand dollars had been deposited into those accounts by a convicted Kosovar Albanian drug trafficker.47

According to the London Sunday Times, the KLA’s background did not deter the US from training and strengthening it:

American intelligence agents have admitted they helped to train the Kosovo Liberation Army before Nato's bombing of Yugoslavia. The disclosure angered some European diplomats, who said this had undermined moves for a political solution to the conflict between Serbs and Albanians. Central Intelligence Agency officers were ceasefire monitors in Kosovo in 1998 and 1999, developing ties with the KLA and giving American military training manuals and field advice on fighting the Yugoslav army and Serbian police.

When the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which co-ordinated the monitoring, left Kosovo a week before airstrikes began a year ago, many of its satellite telephones and global positioning systems were secretly handed to the KLA, ensuring that guerrilla commanders could stay in touch with Nato and Washington. Several KLA leaders had the mobile phone number of General Wesley Clark, the Nato commander.48

According to former U.S. Army Captain David Hackworth, later Newsweek's contributing editor for defense, former US military officers in the private U.S. military contractor MPRI (Military Professional Resources Incorporated) not only trained KLA personnel, but even fought alongside them.49 This reinforced earlier reports that MPRI personnel had also been involved in training Croatians at the time of the illicit Croatian arms pipeline to Bosnia.50

After Kosovo, Sherman repeated his warnings against “expanding American hegemony”, exercised through NATO with varying degrees of partnership and subordination of other players. …. The process commenced with the deliberate break-up of Yugoslavia, led by Germany and acquiesced in by the other European Union members and the United States (1991). It progressed with sanctions against Serbia for attempting to help the western Serbs (1992). In Bosnia America's early involvement sparked off civil war (the Zimmerman Visit to Izetbegovic, in the aftermath of the Lisbon Agreement), and it eventually matured into the bombing campaign of 1999 and the occupation of Kosovo.51

Others suspected that America’s involvement was motivated by its desire to see a new Trans-Balkan pipeline and a new U.S. military base in the Balkans to defend it. Although such critics were initially ridiculed, both predictions soon proved true. The U.S.-registered AMBO corporation, headed by former BP executive Ted Ferguson, began construction of a pipeline from Albania to Macedonia in 2007.52 And nearby is a semi-permanent U.S. Army base, Camp Bondsteel, that can hold up to 7000 soldiers.

In 2007, President George W. Bush created a new United States Africa Command, U.S. AFRICOM. But its HQ at present is in Stuttgart, Germany. This has led to speculation on the Internet that America has its eyes on Libya’s international airport, which the U.S. Air Force had operated as Wheelus Air Force Base until its ouster in 1970.

II. From the First WTC Bombing to 9/11: The Domestic U.S. Fallout from Collusion with Terrorists

The fact that Americans have had repeated recourse to al-Qaeda Islamists as assets in their expansive projects does not constitute proof that there is any long-term systematic strategy to do so, still less that there is a secret alliance.

I believe rather that America is suffering from a malignant condition of military power run amok – power which, like a malignant cancer, tends to reproduce itself at times in ways counterproductive to larger goals. Those who are appointed to manage this vast power become inured to using any available assets, in order to sustain a sociodynamic of global intervention that they are, ironically, powerless to challenge or turn around. The few dissenters who try to do so are predictably sidelined or even ejected from the heights of power, as not being “on the team.”

Those in Washington who decided to assist terrorists and drug traffickers seem not to have considered such “externalities” as the domestic consequences from official dealings with criminal terrorist networks that are global in scope. Yet the consequences were and are real, for the Islamist terrorists that were protected by the US in their subversion of order in Kosovo and other countries were soon being protected inside the US as well. As former DEA agent Michael Levine reported of the KLA-linked drug networks, “These guys have a network that's active on the streets of this country.... They're the worst elements of society that you can imagine, and now, according to my sources in drug enforcement, they're politically protected.”53

In other words, Kosovars were now enjoying the de facto protection in their U.S. drug trafficking that had earlier been enjoyed by the CIA’s Chinese, Cuban, Italian, Thai, and other ethnic assets dating from the 1940s.54

Mother Jones reported in 2000, after the NATO bombing in support of the KLA that Afghan heroin, much of it distributed by Kosovar Albanians, now accounted for almost 20 percent of the heroin seized in America -- nearly double the percentage taken four years earlier.55 Meanwhile in Europe, it was estimated that “Kosovo Albanians control 40% of Europe's heroin.”56 In addition there is a near universal consensus that the outcome of the war in Bosnia left al-Qaeda’s jihadists much more strongly entrenched in the Balkans than they had been earlier. In the words of Professor John Schindler, Bosnia, “the most pro-Western society in the umma [Muslim world],” was “converted into a Jihadistan through domestic deceit, violent conflict, and misguided international intervention.”57

It is too soon to predict with confidence what will be the domestic fallout or “blowback” from NATO’s empowerment of Islamists by creating chaos in Libya. But the domestic consequences of similar U.S. interventions in the past are indisputable, and have contributed to major acts of terrorism in this country.

American protection for the Al-Kifah mujahedin support base in Brooklyn led to interference in domestic U.S. law enforcement. This enabled mujahedin recruits at al-Kifah to plot and/or engage in a number of domestic and foreign terrorist attacks on America. These attacks include the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the so-called “New York landmarks plot” of 1995, and the Embassy attacks of 1998 in Kenya and Tanzania. Involved in all of these events were terrorists who should have been rounded up earlier because of crimes already committed, but were allowed to stay free.

Central to all of these attacks was the role of Ali Mohamed, the former U.S. Special Forces double agent at al-Kifah, and his trainees. Ali Mohamed, despite being on a State Department Watch List, had come to America around 1984, on what an FBI consultant has called “a visa program controlled by the CIA.”58 So did the “blind Sheik” Omar Abdel Rahman, the leader of al-Kifah; Rahman was issued two visas, one of them “by a CIA officer working undercover in the consular section of the American embassy in Sudan.”59

Ali Mohamed trained al-Kifah recruits in guerrilla tactics near Brooklyn. This operation was considered so sensitive that the New York police and the FBI later protected two of the recruits from arrest, when they murdered the Jewish extremist Meir Kahane. Instead, the New York Police called the third assassin (El Sayyid Nosair) a “lone deranged gunman,” and released the other two (Mahmoud Abouhalima and Mohammed Salameh) from detention. This enabled Abouhalima and Salameh, along with another Ali Mohamed trainee (Nidal Ayyad) to take part three years later in the first (1993) bombing of the World Trade Center.60

Prosecutors protected Ali Mohamed again in the 1994-95 “Landmarks” trial, when Omar Abdul Rahman and some of Mohamed’s trainees were convicted of conspiring to blow up New York buildings. In that case the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, named Ali Mohamed as an unindicted co-conspirator, yet allowed him to remain free. When the defense issued a subpoena for Mohamed to appear in court, the prosecutor intervened to avoid Mohamed’s having to testify.61

Ali Mohamed was well aware of his protected status, and used it in early 1993 to obtain his release when detained by the RCMP at Vancouver Airport. As this episode has so ignored in the US press, I will quote the account of it in Canada’s premier newspaper, the Toronto Globe and Mail:

The RCMP had their hands on one of the key insiders of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist network, but he was released after he had Mounties call his handler at the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Ali Mohamed, a Californian of Egyptian origin who is believed to be the highest ranking al-Qaeda member to have landed in Canada, was working with U.S. counterterrorist agents, playing a double or triple game, when he was questioned in 1993. Mr. Mohamed now is in a U.S. prison.

"The people of the RCMP told me by midnight that I can go now," Mr. Mohamed — who confessed in the United States to being a close bin Laden associate — wrote at the time in an affidavit shown Wednesday to The Globe and Mail.

The incident happened after customs agents at Vancouver International Airport detained Essam Marzouk, an Egyptian who had arrived from Damascus via Frankfurt, after they found him carrying two forged Saudi passports.

Mr. Mohamed, who was waiting to pick him up at the airport, inquired of the police about his friend's detention. That made the RCMP curious about Mr. Mohamed, but he dispelled their suspicions by telling them he was a collaborator with the FBI.62

The Globe and Mail story makes it clear that in 1993 Mohamed already had a handler at the FBI, to whom the RCMP deferred. Patrick Fitzgerald, in his statement to the 9/11 Commission, gave a quite different story: that Mohamed, after returning from Nairobi in 1994, applied for a job “as an FBI translator.”63 The difference is vital: because the FBI told the RCMP to release Mohamed, he was then able to travel to Nairobi and plan for bombing the U.S. Embassy there.

According to author Peter Lance, by 2007 Fitzgerald had enough evidence to arrest and indict Mohamed, but did not. Instead he interviewed Mohamed in California, along with an FBI agent, Jack Cloonan. After the interview Fitzgerald chose not to arrest Mohamed, but instead to tap his phone and bug his computer. Lance asks a very relevant question: did Fitzgerald fear that ”any indictment of al Qaeda’s chief spy would rip the lid off years of gross negligence by three of America’s top intelligence agencies”?64

One month after the Embassy bombings, Ali Mohamed was finally arrested, on September 10, 1998. Yet when Fitzgerald handed down thirteen indictments two months later, Mohamed’s name was not among them. Instead Fitzgerald again allowed him to avoid cross-examination in court by accepting a plea bargain, the terms of which are still partly unknown. Specifically we do not know the term of Mohamed’s sentence: that page of his court appearance transcript (p. 17) is filed under seal.65

As part of the plea bargain, Mohamed told the court that at the personal request of bin Laden, he did surveillance on the U.S. Embassy in Kenya, “took pictures, drew diagrams, and wrote a report” which he personally delivered to bin Laden in the Sudan.66 Patrick Fitzgerald, the prosecutor who negotiated the plea bargain, testified at length about Mohamed to the 9/11 Commission, who concluded in their Report (p. 68) that Mohamed “led” the embassy bombing operation. Ironically, the Embassy bombing is the official reason today why Zawahiri (like bin Laden before him) is wanted by the FBI, with a $25 million bounty on his head.

But the American public has been denied the right to learn about Ali Mohamed’s involvement in other terrorist events. Particularly relevant would be his involvement in 9/11. As his FBI handler Cloonan later reported, Mohamed explained to him that he personally trained the accused hijackers in how to seize planes:

He [had] conducted training for al Qaeda on how to hijack a plane. He ran practical exercises in Pakistan and he said, “This is how you get a box cutter on board. You take the knife, you remove the blade and you wrap it in [word blacked out] and put it in your carry-on luggage.” They’d read the FAA regulations. They knew four inches wouldn’t go through. “This is how you position yourself,” he said. “I taught people how to sit in first class. You sit here and some sit here.” He wrote the whole thing out.67

Conclusion

At present America is in the midst of an unprecedented budget crisis, brought on in large part by its multiple wars. Nevertheless it is also on the point of several further interventions: in Yemen, Somalia, possibly Syria or Iran (where the CIA is said to be in contact with the drug-trafficking al-Qaeda offshoot Jundallah),68 and most assuredly in Libya.

Only the American public can stop them. But in order for the people to rise up and cry Stop! there must first be a better understanding of the dark alliances underlying America’s alleged humanitarian interventions.

This awareness may increase when Americans finally realize that there is domestic blowback from assisting terrorists as well. The long elaborate dance between Mohamed and his Justice Department overseers makes it clear that the handling of terrorists for corrupt purposes corrupts the handlers as well as the terrorists. Eventually both the handlers and the handled become in effect co-conspirators, with secrets about their collusion both parties need to conceal.

Until the public takes notice, that concealment of collusion will continue. And as long as it continues, we will continue to be denied the truth about what collusions underlay 9/11.

Worse, we are likely to see more terrorist attacks, at home as well as abroad, along with more illegal, costly, and unnecessary wars.

Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Drugs Oil and War, The Road to 9/11, and The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War. His most recent book is American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection and the Road to Afghanistan. His website, which contains a wealth of his writings, is here.

Peter Dale Scott is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

Notes

1 Cf. Telegraph (London), “Defence Cuts in Doubt over Libya, Says Military Adviser,“ April 7, 2011, “The Libyan crisis has raised doubts about the Coalition’s defence review and could force ministers to reverse cuts including the scrapping of Britain’s Harrier jump jets, a senior military adviser has said,” (link).

2 Scott, The Road to 9/11, 163-65.

3 Scott, The Road to 9/11, 44-45; citing Robert Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game, 109-11; Saïd Aburish, A Brutal Friendship, 60-61; Miles Copeland, The Game Player, 149-54. Cf. Ian Johnson, “Washington’s Secret History with the Muslim Brotherhood,” New York Review of Books, February 5, 2011.

4 John R. Schindler, Unholy Terror: Bosnia, Al-Qa’ida, and the Rise of Global Jihad, 71, 81. According to Schindler, “CNN repeatedly showed images of ‘dead Muslims’ killed by Serbs that were actually Serbs murdered by Muslims” (92).

5 Schindler, Unholy Terror, 91.

6 Schindler, Unholy Terror, 179-80; Christian Science Monitor, March 28, 2011. In 1994 BHL presented Bosnian leader Izetbegovich to French President Mitterand; in 2011 BHL arranged for three Benghazi leaders to meet French President Sarkozy. Cf. “Libyan rebels will recognise Israel, Bernard-Henri Lévy tells Netanyahu,” Radio France Internationale, June 2, 2011, “Libya’s rebel National Transitional Council (NTC) is ready to recognise Israel, according to French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, who says he has passed the message on to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,” (link).

7 For Big Oil’s complaints with Gaddafi, see Peter Dale Scott, "The Libyan War, American Power and the Decline of the Petrodollar System", Asian-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, April 27, 2011.

8 Scott, Road to 9/11, 77; citing Diego Cordovez and Selig S. Harrison, Out of Afghanistan: The Inside Story of the Soviet Withdrawal (New York: Oxford University Press, 16), 16.

9 Scott, Road to 9/11, 72-75; quoting from "Les Révélations d'un Ancien Conseilleur de Carter: ‘Oui, la CIA est Entrée en Afghanistan avant les Russes...’" Le Nouvel Observateur [Paris], January 15-21, 1998: “B[rzezinski]: [On Jul 3, 1979] I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.… Q: And neither do you regret having supported Islamic fundamentalism, which has given arms and advice to future terrorists?

B: What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?”

10 Ahmed Rashid, Taliban, 129. According to the Spanish author Robert Montoya, the idea originated in the elite Safari Club that had been created by French intelligence chief Alexandre de Marenches in 1976, bringing together other intelligence chiefs such as General Akhtar Abdur Rahman of ISI in Pakistan and Kamal Adham of Saudi Arabia (Roberto Montoya, El Mundo [Madrid], February 16, 2003).

11 Scott, Road to 9/11, 139-40; citing Steven Emerson, American Jihad, 131-32.

12 Peter Dale Scott, "The Libyan War, American Power and the Decline of the Petrodollar System", Asian-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, April 27, 2011.

13 “PR firm helps Libyan rebels to campaign for support from US,” The Hill.com, April 12, 2011.

14 Rob Crilly, Daily Telegraph (London), March 23, 2011; quoted in Stephen Lendman, “Planned Regime Change in Libya,” SteveLendmanBlog, March 28, 2011. Cf. Los Angeles Times, March 24, 2011.

15 Morris Herman, “Rebel Militias Include the Human Traffickers of Benghazi,” Foreign Policy Journal, July 28, 2011, quoting Thomas C. Mountain.

16 Anissa Haddadi, “Does the Transitional Council Really Represent Libyan Democracy and Opposition to Gaddafi?” International Business Times, July 20, 2011.

17 Haddadi, “Does the Transitional Council Really Represent Libyan Democracy and Opposition to Gaddafi?” International Business Times, July 20, 2011.

18 Center for Defense Information, “In the Spotlight: The Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG),” January 18, 2005. That the LIFG is pursuing its own goals may explain the rebel seizure of anti-air force missiles from captured Gaddafi armories: these missiles, useless against Gaddafi (who no longer has an air force) are apparently being shipped out of Libya for sale or use elsewhere (New York Times, July 15, 2011).

19 December 2007 West Point Study, quoted in Webster Tarpley, “The CIA’s Libya Rebels: The Same Terrorists who Killed US, NATO Troops in Iraq,” Tarpley.net, March 24, 2011.

20 Daily Mail (London), March 25, 2001, link; cited in Lendman; “Planned Regime Change in Libya.”

21 Akhtar Jamal, “US UK, French forces land in Libya,” Pakistan Observer, February 2011.

22 Gary Gambill, "The Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), Jamestown Foundation," Terrorism Monitor, May 5, 2005; citing Al-Hayat (London), 20 October 1995 [“communiqué”]; "The Shayler affair: The spooks, the Colonel and the jailed whistle-blower," The Observer (London), 9 August 1998; Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquié, Ben Laden: La Verite interdite (Bin Ladin: The Forbidden Truth). Cf. also Annie Machon, Spies, Lies and Whistleblowers: MI5, MI6 And the Shayler Affair (Book Guild Publishing, 2005) [shayler].

23 E.g. Washington Post, October 7, 2001: “Over the years, some dissidents suspected by foreign governments of involvement in terrorist acts have been protected by the British government for one reason or another from deportation or extradition.... In the past, terrorism experts say, Britain benefited significantly from its willingness to extend at least conditional hospitality to a wide range of Arab dissidents and opposition figures .... Mustafa Alani, a terrorism expert at the Royal United Services Institute for Defense Studies, a London think tank, said [Anas] al-Liby was probably left in legal limbo by the British government, allowing him to be used or discarded as circumstances permitted.”

24 “Sahelian Concern Deepens over Libya, AQIM,” Sahel Blog, May 2, 2011. According to the Los Angeles Times, AQIM vowed on February 24, 2011 to “do whatever we can” to help the rebel cause. (Ken Dilanian, “US Finds no Firm Al Qaeda Presence in Libya Rebellion,” Los Angeles Times, March 24, 2011). Cf. “Libya rebels not anti-West, but Qaeda a worry-group,” Reuters, March 29, 2011; “The Evolving Threat of al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb,” Strategic Forum, National Defense University; CNN World, February 25, 2011.

25 Andre Lesage, “The Evolving Threat of al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb,” Strategic Forum, National Defense University; CNN World, February 25, 2011, 6. Cf. “Rogue planes flying drugs across Atlantic; Al-Qaeda Links;,” National Post, January 14, 2014; “Latin drug lords find allies in African Islamists,” Washington Times, November 17, 2009.

26 A story in the New York Times (“Exiled Islamists Watch Rebellion Unfold at Home,”

July 19, 2011) reports that KIFG members of the TNC “have renounced Al Qaeda.” But it supplies no independent evidence that their politics have changed.

27 Michael Evans, "Muslim soldiers 'failed to defend town from Serbs,'" Times (London), July 14, 1995.

28 Richard Palmer. “What Really Happened in Bosnia,” theTrumpet.com, July 12, 2011.

29 Schindler, Unholy Terror, 87; quoting from Jan Willem Honig and Norbert Both, Srebrenica: Record of a War Crime, 79.

30 John Rosenthal, “The Other Crimes of Bosnia,” BigPeace.com, June 2, 2011; summarizing interview of Galbraith by J.M. Berger, “Exclusive: U.S. Policy on Bosnia.Arms Trafficking.”

31 Schindler, Unholy Terror, 182-83; “Exclusive: U.S. Policy on Bosnia Arms Trafficking”; Cees Wiebes, Intelligence and the War in Bosnia 1992 1995 (Munster: LIT Verlag, 2003), 166-69.

32 “Allies and Lies,” BBC OnLine, June 22, 2001; Wiebes, Intelligence and the War, 183. Also present at Tuzla was an American who introduced himself as “Major Guy Sands,” and who claimed to have been a ten-year veteran of the Vietnam War. Cf. a Swedish report from Tuzla, of an American there who made no secret of his Special Forces background (Brendan O'Shea, Crisis at Bihac: Bosnia’s Bloody Battlefield [stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton, 1998], p. 159). For reports of foreign mujahedin in or near Tuzla, see Kohlmann, Al-Qaida’s Jihad in Europe, 74, 155, 164.

33 Brendan O’Neill, “How We Trained al-Qa’eda,” Spectator (London), September 13, 2003.

34 Wiebes, Intelligence and the War in Bosnia, 177.

35 Wiebes, Intelligence and the War, 187, 196; citing Cameron Spence, All Necessary Measures, 99-104.

36 Wiebes, Intelligence and the War, 184, 197.

37 “US used Islamists to arm Bosnians,” Guardian, April 22, 2002. Contrast the very different claim by Richard Clarke, Against All Enemies, 140: “The U.S. also blocked Iranian and al Qaeda influence in the country [bosnia].”

38 Kohlmann, Al-Qaida’s Jihad in Europe, 39-41; citing Steve Coll and Steve LeVine, “Global Network Provides Money, Haven,” Washington Post, August 3, 1993. Cf. Schindler, Unholy Terror, 121-22.

39 Scott, Road to 9/11, 149-50; Kohlmann, Al-Qaida’s Jihad in Europe, 45, 73-75.

40 Scott, Road to 9/11, 149.

41 Lawrence Wright: “Zawahiri decided to look for money in the world center of venture capitalism-Silicon Valley. He had been to America once before, in 1989, when he paid a recruiting visit to the mujahideen's Services Bureau branch office in Brooklyn. According to the F.B.I., he returned in the spring of 1993, this time to Santa Clara, California, where he was greeted by Ali Mohamed, the double agent.” For more about Ali Mohamed, and specifically how the FBI once told the RCMP not to detain him (this freeing Mohamed to plan the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kenya), see Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11, 147-60.

42 Ottawa Citizen, December 15, 2001.

43 Sir Alfred Sherman, Speech at International Conference, America’s Intervention in the Balkans, February 28-March 2, 1997. html

44 Cf. Schindler, Unholy Terror, 74: Izetbegovic “decided to scrap the initiative, with the apparent encouragement of Warren Zimmermann [sic].” (Cf. 109-10). Zimmerman has denied that he so persuaded Izetbegovic, writing in a letter to the New York Times “that he had urged Izetbegovic to ‘stick by his commitments,’” (Steven L. Burg and Paul Shoup, The War in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 114).

45 Washington Times, May 4, 1999. Frank Viviano, “Drugs Paying for Conflict in Europe,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 10, 1994: “Narcotics smuggling has become a prime source of financing for civil wars already under way -- or rapidly brewing -- in southern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean, according to a report issued here this week. “The report, by the Paris-based Observatoire Geopolitique des Drogues, or Geopolitical Observatory of Drugs, identifies belligerents in the former Yugoslav republics and Turkey as key players in the region's accelerating drugs-for-arms traffic. “Albanian nationalists in ethnically tense Macedonia and the Serbian province of Kosovo have built a vast heroin network, leading from the opium fields of Pakistan to black-market arms dealers in Switzerland, which transports up to $2 billion worth of the drug annually into the heart of Europe, the report says. More than 500 Kosovo or Macedonian Albanians are in prison in Switzerland for drug- or arms-trafficking offenses, and more than 1,000 others are under indictment.”

46 Michael Levine, New American, May 24, 1999; quoted in Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, The War on Truth, 41.

47 Ralf Mutschke, testimony to Committee on the Judiciary, December 13, 2000.

48 Sunday Times (London), March 12, 2000: “Agim Ceku, the KLA commander in the latter stages of the conflict, had established American contacts through his work in the Croatian army, which had been modernised with the help of Military Professional Resources Inc, an American company specialising in military training and procurement. This company's personnel were in Kosovo, along with others from a similar company, Dyncorps [sic], that helped in the American-backed programme for the Bosnian army.”

49 David Hackworth, “Wanted: Guns for Hire,” Hackworth.com, July 9, 2001. Cf. James R. Davis, Fortune’s Warriors: Private Armies and the New World Order, 112; P.W. Singer, Corporate Warriors, 219.

50 Wiebes, Intelligence and the war in Bosnia 1992 – 1995, 190; Observer, November 5, 1995. J.M. Berger reports from declassified documents that MPRI’s contract with Bosnia was arranged via a private company headed by neocon Richard Perle: “Controversial neocon philosopher Richard Perle led an obscure nongovernmental organization tasked with hiring a private company to run the U.S. State Department's "Train and Equip" program in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1996.

Perle's group, the "Acquisition Support Institute," hired Military Professional Resources Inc., essentially a professional mercenary company nearly as controversial as Perle himself. It's not at all clear what or whom is responsible for the Institute, or why a "non-governmental, non-profit organization" would be responsible for selecting the recipient of a massive State Department contract on one of the most sensitive issues of the day.

Equipped with a collection of retired military officers, MPRI set itself up as a virtual extension of the U.S. government in both Croatia and Bosnia, as documented in an extensive set of Freedom of Information Act documents I will be publishing over the next several weeks.

MPRI operatives were given the run of the country -- receiving payments and arms from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other Muslim countries, which underwrote operations to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

In many cases, these payments were brokered directly by the State Department. In some instances, funds and arms were routed into Bosnia without State's explicit approval but often with its knowledge, as documented in the newly declassified records. Unauthorized assistance appears to have come from Pakistan, UAE and Turkey, among others.” (Richard Perle, MPRI and Bosnian Arms Shipments,” Intelwire, February 7, 2007).

51 Sir Alfred Sherman, “The Empire for the New Millenium?” The Centre for Peace in Balkans, May 22, 2000.

52 Cf. the cynical comments of the Swiss analytical group Zeit-Fragen: (Current Concerns, “Where’s the 8th Corridor?” September/October 2001): “By creating a trouble spot in Kosovo the USA is able to control Albania and with it the planned AMBO pipeline…. The USA is showing a conspicuous interest in controlling these strategic transport corridor links in the Balkans. They prohibited a project scheduled to be constructed through Serbia, and they offered Rumania 100 million dollars to move the route of the planned SEEL pipeline (South Eastern European Line) further north, to Hungary. The Italian firm ENI had planned this pipeline project using existing pipeline infrastructure in Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia. The USA bombarded the Yugoslavian section of this infrastructure with remarkable doggedness.”

53 Michael Levine, New American, May 24, 1999; quoted in Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, The War on Truth, 41.

54 For details, see Scott, American War Machine, 84, 123, 151, etc.; Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 167.

55 Peter Klebnikov, “Heroin Heroes,” Mother Jones, January/February 2000. Clinton at the same time mounted a vigorous campaign against Colombian heroin, increasing the demand for Afghan heroin. As Klebnikov noted, “some White House officials fear Kosovar heroin could replace the Colombian supply. ‘Even if we were to eliminate all the heroin production in Colombia, by no means do we think there would be no more heroin coming into the United States,’ says Bob Agresti of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. ‘Look at the numbers. Colombia accounts for only six percent of the world's heroin. Southwest Asia produces 75 percent.’"

56 Patrick Graham, “Drug Wars: Kosovo’s New Battle,” National Post, April 13, 2000.

57 Schindler, Unholy Terror, 324. Cf. Cristopher Deliso, The Coming Balkan Caliphate (New York: Praeger, 2007).

58 Scott, Road to 9/11, 152-53; citing Paul L. Williams, Al Qaeda, 117; Boston Globe, February 3, 1995, “Figure Cited in Terrorism Case Said to Enter U.S. with CIA Help.”

59 Bergen, Holy War, Inc., 67; cf. Williams, Al Qaeda, 117.

60 Scott, Road to 9/11, 154-56, 160. Cf. Robert L. Friedman, “The CIA and the Sheikh,” Village Voice, March 30, 1993: “As Jack Blum, investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee, put it: "One of the big problems here is that many suspects in the World Trade Center bombing were associated with the Mujahadeen. And there are components of our government that are absolutely disinterested in following that path because it leads back to people we supported in the Afghan war.”

61 Scott, Road to 9/11, 156-57; citing J.M. Berger, Ali Mohamed: An Intelwire Sourcebook, 235-36.

62 Estanislao Oziewicz and Tu Thanh Ha, “Canada freed top al-Qaeda operative,” Globe and Mail (Toronto), November 22, 2001. A Lexis-Nexis search for “Ali Mohamed” + Vancouver yields no relevant entries.

63 Patrick Fitzgerald, Testimony before the 9/11 Commission, Twelfth Public Hearing, June 16, 2004.

64 Peter Lance, Triple Cross, 274-77.

65 United States District Court, Southern District of New York, “United States of America v. Ali Mohamed,” S (7) 98 Cr. 1023, October 20, 2000, link, 17; in J.M. Berger, Ali Mohamed, 294.

66 United States District Court, Southern District of New York, “United States of America v. Ali Mohamed,” S(7) 98 Cr. 1023, 27; in Berger, Ali Mohamed, 304.

67 FBI agent Jack Cloonan, summarizing a post-9/11 interview with Ali Mohamed, in William F. Jasper, “Unleashing a Terrorist,” New American, November 26, 2007. Cf. Lance, Triple Cross, 382.

68 Paul Joseph Watson, “U.S. Attacks Iran Via CIA-Funded Jundullah Terror Group,” NOW Observer, October 20, 2009.

Murdoch's media empire is better viewed as an intelligence operation created with specific political goals in mind. You start making progress on understanding the issues involved when you begin assessing the hacking as spying...

Or fabricating:

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Murdoch phone hacking and 7/7 Investigation

From: "J7: The July 7th Truth Campaign"

To: homeaffcom@parliament.uk

Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2011

To the members of the Home Affairs Select Committee

The revelations of phone hacking by News International calls into question the role of the police and the Murdoch press during the investigation into the London Bombings on July 7th 2005.

A Times report written by Daniel McGrory and dated 25/08/2005:

The youngest of the July 7 bombers, he made three desperate telephone calls begging for help from the other members of the terror cell minutes before he blew himself up on a London bus.

The frantic last messages are seen by Scotland Yard as vivid proof that the British-born Muslim extremists intended to die in the attacks.

Knowing that all four men were supposed to synchronise the timing of the explosions, Hussain ran out of King’s Cross Underground station and tried to reach his accomplices by mobile telephone.

It was just before 9am, but by then all his fellow bombers were already dead. The other three had triggered their devices within seconds of one another at 8.50am.

Hussain is believed to have first called Mohammad Sidique Khan, 30, the alleged leader of the group, saying: “I can’t get on a train. What should I do ?” Then in quick succession he left the same message for Shehzad Tanweer and Jermaine Lindsay as, clearly agitated about his next move, he hurried away from the station.

A police source who has heard the telephone calls said: “His voice was getting more and more frantic with each call.” Investigators could tell from his breathless voice that Hussain was walking fast as he made these calls.

Source: The Times 25th August 2005

These messages were not played nor even were they claimed to exist during the recent 7/7 Inquests.

We need to know:

Did the Times hack the phone messages of the 4 accused of 7/7?

Who was the ‘police source’ who gave this information to the Times?

Why did the 7/7 Inquests not have an opportunity to hear these messages?

Why did the 7/7 Inquests not refer to these messages?

Regards

J7: the July 7th Truth Campaign

Posted by Bridget at 7/12/2011 10:35:00 AM

http://77inquests.blogspot.com/2011/07/murdoch-phone-hacking-and-77.html

Murdoch's media empire is better viewed as an intelligence operation created with specific political goals in mind. You start making progress on understanding the issues involved when you begin assessing the hacking as spying.

It's somewhat like the Time/Life situation in the 50's and 60's -- Henry and Claire Booth have these little magazines which operate as propaganda vehicles and sometimes even more.

Well said, John. In fact, if one recalls the campaign against Harold Wilson, and compares it to that waged against Gordon Brown, we appear to be looking at a more or less identical operation - only we must substitute News International for BOSS and Gordon Winter. In both instances, MI5 (and GCHQ) melted into the background, permitting the bugging, burgling and blagging to run unchecked, presumably as intended. How MI5 and GCHQ have evaded scrutiny in the face of hacking on this (industrial) scale beggars belief. But the former is doubtless too busy celebrating the wholesale discrediting of the Met's counter-terrorism directorate to spare much time for a public accounting.

Gordon Brown must have felt the Sun was out to destroy him

News that the Sun obtained details of the former prime minister's son's illness will confirm his entourage's worst suspicions

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/jul/11/gordon-brown-sun-destroy?INTCMP=SRCH

The news that the Sun newspaper obtained details from the medical records of Gordon Brown's disabled son, Fraser, is likely to confirm the worst suspicions of the Brown entourage that News International has long been morally corrupt, but also determined to destroy him politically.

Ever since the Sun dramatically withdrew its support from Labour in September 2009, Brown has no doubt felt the paper not just betrayed him, but killed his premiership. Like Tony Blair, he had done his best to cultivate good relations with the Murdoch executives, just as he had worked hard over the years to persuade Paul Dacre at the Daily Mail that he was a moral and serious figure.

The loss of the Sun's support mattered less for its editorial comment than for the way in which the paper then slanted its daily coverage, for instance, pursuing Brown for letting down British troops in Afghanistan.

But it would seem the loss of trust between Brown and News International preceded the Sun's defection. Two months earlier, after Guardian revelations about phone hacking and the mounting evidence of a News International cover-up, Brown started to agitate for a judicial inquiry. For at least a fortnight he was in discussion with the home secretary, Alan Johnson. Brown and Lord Mandelson held discussions with Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of the Guardian, to get a clearer understanding of the scandal.

Labour says Sir Gus O'Donnell, head of the civil service, blocked the inquiry. The civil service says O'Donnell resisted Brown's idea on the basis that it would be drawing the judiciary into a political process less than a year before a general election. Johnson also found himself hemmed in by civil servants, so he looked at whether an independent investigation could be launched into the original police investigation. The plan for an inquiry fell away.

After the election Brown continued to be concerned by phone hacking, encouraging lines of inquiry, firing off emails and closely following the course of a New York Times investigation into the scandal, that was finally published in September 2010.

It was around then that Brown wrote privately to the Metropolitan Police to ask whether his phone had been hacked. His suspicion was that his phone had been hacked between 2005 and 2007 when he was chancellor. By January this year, as the fact of his inquiry became known, the Met had not replied.

Some observers, even former cabinet colleagues, thought Brown's concern was the result of him still coming to terms with his electoral defeat. But it would appear Brown was convinced that, but for the opposition of News International, he might have been able to garner enough votes to form a viable coalition with the Liberal Democrats. If he had launched the judicial inquiry while in office, perhaps he could have exposed his tormentors.

That view might have been fuelled by one of his closest allies, Tom Watson, Labour MP for West Bromwich East, one of the politicians who has stuck to the News International story most doggedly. Indeed, some wrongly believe Watson's pursuit of this issue is solely driven by his loyalty to Brown.

Watson quit his job as a defence minister in 2006 as part of a battle to dethrone Tony Blair and install Brown. He believes those actions made him an enemy of Rebekah Brooks, then editor of the Sun, and a supporter of Tony Blair.

In a speech to the annual conference of the GMB last month, Watson recalled: "I was told then that Rebekah Brooks, then the editor of the Sun, now the chief executive of News International, would never forgive me for what I did to her Tony. They said she would pursue me for the rest of my life.

"They have; I can tell you from personal experience it's not very nice."

Watson rejoined the government, but in April 2009 the Sun wrongly accused him of being involved in an operation run by Damian McBride, Brown's spin doctor, to smear Conservatives. The Sun refused to withdraw its allegation and, around the same time, strangers started to look through the bins at Watson's home.

He said: "When the neighbours complained that this time their bins had also been gone through, my family was at breaking point. When our three-year-old hid behind the sofa because there was another nasty man at the door, I snapped."

In June 2009 Watson quit the governmentA week before he attended his first select committee hearing on 14 July that year, the Guardian published its story that News International had paid more than £1m to victims of phone hacking. Watson, already in litigation against the Sun, suddenly found himself drawn into a direct battle with News International.

His first committee taking evidence was with executives from News International, the organisation he was suing. He faced a choice. He explained: "When you're faced with that daily fear, you really only have two choices: give in and get out, or give as good as you get."

At that first evidence session, Tom Crone, legal manager of News Group Newspapers, the NI subsidiary that published the News of the World and the Sun, tried to prevent Watson sitting on the inquiry because he was suing NI. Parliamentary legal counsel told Crone that Watson would not be removed. In October 2009 the Sun was forced to accept in the high court that its story about Watson had been wrong.

From there on, Watson decided he had a cause.. He said: "I stood up in parliament and, for the first time, I told the truth that dare not speak its name – that we were scared, that the whole of British politics had been terrified into silence, become complicit in a cover-up of the illegal methods of a corporate beast that was out of control."

As the scale of the intrusion into Brown's privacy becomes known, Watson looks vindicated.

A piece that wouldn't look out of place in Ramsay & Dorril's Smear: Wilson and the Secret State (London: Fourth Estate, 1991): http://www.amazon.co.uk/Smear-Wilson-Secret-Stephen-Dorril/dp/0586217134

Brehm, however, was just as sure there was a shot after the head shot. And said so from the beginning.

Brehm's initial description, as it appeared in the first post-assassination edition of the Dallas Times Herald:

Drehm seemed to think the shots came from in front or beside the President. He explained the President did not slump forward as if he would have after being shot from the rear.

“President Dead, Connally Shot,” The Dallas Times Herald, 22 November 1963, p.2 [cited by Joachim Joesten. Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy? (London: Merlin Press, 1964), p.176.]

More important than your believing in anecdotal evidence, Daniel, you are believing in cherry-picked anecdotal evidence from a witness first interviewed decades after the incident in question.

And you don't cherry-pick, Pat? Remarkable: You must be the only one of us without sin.

As shown many times on this forum, the closest eyewitnesses, in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, DID NOT claim the limo came to a full stop and that during this stop someone blew the back of JFK's head off.

The eyewitness evidence, when taken as a whole, is clear. The limo slowed and the top of JFK's head exploded... This, not coincidentally, is exactly what is shown in the Z-film.

Quite the reverse is true: The Warren Commission ignored those witnesses who should be in the Z-fake, but aren't. The one fake, the inquiry, reinforced the other, the film, as witnesses who were called were badgered into resiling from their initial claim that the presidential limo came to a complete halt.

How is it that Gaddafi hasn't done anything to us? You don't count the bombing of the German disco to kill Americans, or the bombing of the plane over Lockerbie?

I don't count the Lockerbie bombing for the good and proper reason that the trial of Abdelbaset Al Megrahi was a rigged and corrupt farce:

24 May 2011

The Quiet Storm

She is quiet of voice and slight in stature, but to lawyers everywhere she is Supergirl. With a case history that includes overturning miscarriages such as the Guildfour Four and Birmingham Six, she has turned her attention to Scotland’s shame: The Megrahi case. Steven Raeburn reports.

http://www.firmmagazine.com/features/932/The_Quiet_Storm.html

The conviction of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi was almost universally derided from the moment it was confirmed, after an uncertain and unconvincing show trial, transparently controlled by the intelligence services of the nations who, as Nelson Mandela said, should not have been permitted to act as complainer, judge and executioner in their own cause. Since then, the Scottish authorities, with the evident complicity of successive UK governments in Westminster, have collaborated to frustrate, delay, thwart and exhaust the efforts of campaigners as diverse as John Pilger, Kate Adie, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Miscarriages of Justice Organisation, our own Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, the families of the deceased, Noam Chomsky, Robbie the Pict, Tam Dalyell, Christine Grahame, and a practical army of journalists who have satisfied themselves and staked their own reputations on their belief that the conviction is unsound. And now their ranks have been joined quietly and without ceremony by a legal heroine to many, the powerfully unassuming, devastatingly effective and always understated mistress of justice, Gareth Peirce.

Her own landmark cases included the exposure of top-down state corruption that convicted the innocent Guildford Four and Birmingham Six, and her involvement in Pan Am 103 was prompted in part by her learning that the same discredited personnel whose flawed evidence was instrumental in driving those innocents to jail under a juggernaut of deceit, were also the providers of the key flawed evidence in the Megrahi case.

Her intervention adds to factors, including the unprecedented fourth hearing at the Holyrood Petitions committee of evidence in the case, that may yet lead to a heavily resisted, inevitably embarrassing, can-of-worms-openingly necessary inquiry into the entire miserable, seedy affair.

“One of the ways out of ever reopening a case that has gone wrong is to find an avenue where someone or something else can bear responsibility,” Peirce told The Firm.

“For instance, in the case of the Birmingham Six or Guildford Four, where for years and years and years, successive courts of appeal and politicians refused to take on responsibility for reopening it, the excuse was always: ‘a jury looked at this - the jury is the arbiter of fact in our jurisdiction’. And of course it would be very wrong to disturb the verdict of the jury, who saw and heard all the evidence. That was a device that was resorted to year after year to excuse not reopening these cases, even when they screamed out for it. So one way is to hide behind that.

“Observing Lockerbie, there is some of the same. We hear that the High Court judges heard the case and the appeal judges reinforced the decision, and therefore that is how it should stand. There is that excuse for suggesting that the tribunal of fact was in the best position to know. Whereas in each of these cases it is very clear that for one reason or another it wasn’t, and didn’t know half the picture.”

The failings in Scots legal culture to have the ability to correct the stain it created shows either the malleability of the rule of law, or the nefarious will of the civil service and rogue elements of the Crown Office to bully a pliant system that has demonstrably inadequate checks and balances. Perhaps a combination of both is at fault, given the ease with which the emergency Cadder legislation contained a prefabricated sting in the tail that seemed designed to frustrate any future judicial consideration of the case against Megrahi. A case which has crumbled when tested against logic & neutral scrutiny of the available evidence.

The Petitions Committee, in its last hearing prior to the Scottish election, proposed to include the call for an inquiry into the in-tray of the post May 5th assembly. Peirce however does not have full confidence that the will to convene an inquiry at Government level is greater than the will to frustrate one.

“There is an extra factor here. Scotland and England both say the other is the responsible jurisdiction, even when it is very clear that you cannot compartmentalise responsibility for what went wrong,” she says.

“Because you have two countries involved, each is passing the parcel to the other. The letter from the Scottish Government to the petitions committee says that in law, under the Inquiries Act, that Scotland cannot have an inquiry unless it is on a devolved issue, and the criminal justice system would be a devolved issue. But the letter adds that there are international implications, and therefore any inquiry should either be joint with England, or in England.

“There is a lot of truth in that, but as we saw with Megrahi’s return to Libya, Westminster claimed it was all the responsibility of Scotland, leaving Kenny MacAskill out on a limb. Yet, there is Blair busy with Gadaffi, desperately imploring Libya to make an application under the Prisoner Transfer Agreement. There are layers and layers of deceit here.”

Layers and layers of deceit...

It is that last, self evident truth that many Scottish citizens find quite difficult to come to terms with; the effort required to maintain the fiction of the Crown case, and the active will of the participants to sustain a fragile and fantastic deception. What she and those who have inquired with any rigour into this affair can see clearly, is that the effort and consensual coordination between the Governments of Washington, London, Tripoli and Edinburgh, and their functionaries at successive levels of responsibility from ministerial to Police level, have been engaged with some vigour in precisely that. And it is nothing new, being a reality she first encountered in the 1970s.

“In the most notorious cases, everyone played their part, absolutely everybody,” she says.

“The lawyers who represented the defenders were disastrously inadequate, or worse. Defence experts failed them, police were fabricating evidence as well as extracting false confessions from brutality. Forensic scientists were cooking the books, and judges from start to finish were either turning a very blind eye or actively assisting the prosecution to get convictions and sustain the convictions year after year.

“A big part of the blame lies within those who form the criminal justice system. It looks as if in the prosecution of the Lockerbie case, the defendants met the same fate, even to the extent of the same personnel featuring, in the person of the forensic scientists.”

It must indeed have taken some particular effort to ensure that the principal forensic analyst, Thomas Hayes, employed by the Crown to testify against Abdelbaset Al Megrahi was the very same discredited analyst who was proven to have fabricated his evidence in the manufactured case against the Guildford Four. It was he and Alan Feraday who testified that the key forensic evidence, a fragment of circuit board, not only survived the explosion of Pan Am 103 (which global scientific opinion, including the EU explosives consultant John Wyatt concluded was impossible) but left handy traces of clothing connected to a shop in Malta, the owners of which provided the most tenuous and hedged identification that could be conceived, and were later paid in millions of dollars by the US government for their assistance. Or perhaps connivance.

“That was the most shocking revelation to me,” Peirce says.

“Exactly the same forensic scientists who produced the wrongful conviction of Guiseppe Conlon, the Maguire family and of Danny McNamee, and had been stood down for the role they played. Yet here they were.

“Without them, there wouldn’t have been a prosecution, far less a conviction in Lockerbie.

“If you don’t expose it, it will go on and on. What shocked me most was that I thought that all that had been gone through on Guildford and Birmingham, the one thing that had been achieved was that nobody would be convicted again on bad science. But yet in the Lockerbie case, it isn’t just the same bad science, it is the same bad scientists.”

Shame on the Crown to have fooled us once. Shame on us, that we let it happen again, as the saying goes.

In another transparent effort at information management, the Crown Office, in its media promulgations, persists in reiterating that Al Megrahi remains convicted of the worst terrorist atrocity to have taken place on British soil, yet ignores the subsequent referral of the case back to court by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, on the basis that a miscarriage of justice may have occurred. The subsequent manoeuvrings between Westminster, Tripoli, British oil companies and Holyrood have demonstrated that Al Megrahi’s return to Libya, whilst ostensibly a compassionate matter, had far more to do with realpolitik and expediency than anyone concerned is prepared to admit.

Peirce has accumulated an extraordinary reputation for upending convictions that resulted in a miscarriage of justice. The real sting in the tale is that the obvious injustice of holding an innocent man in jail has been effectively neutered & replaced with politically convenient ire about his stubborn good health and the manner of his welcome in Libya. However, far from neutralising seekers of the truth in this case, the very evident display of the realities of the geopolitics of convenience has galvanised campaigners, family members and indeed Peirce herself into working to see the ever more flaccid case against Megrahi is overturned.

“It sounds that the conviction has reached that point. The SCCRC referred the case to the Court of Appeal, and would not have done that lightly,” she says.

“The reference to the court was made because a miscarriage of justice may have taken place. It would not have done that in a million years of it did not have a significant basis to do so.

“What is really, really regrettable here is that that opportunity, unless it is put into reverse, is just going to sit there. If the families who lost relatives have been cheated of knowing precisely how, why and who, then that is not good for anything or anyone. Al Megrahi went, and the appeal finished, so there is not that momentum to carry it through in the way there would have been if there were someone wrongly convicted and imprisoned, who had the opportunity to air out all the facts.”

The unfolding turmoil in Libya again provided further examples of global realpolitik, as Libya’s emergent leader apparent Abdel Jalil told an enthusiastic world media something they almost universally repeated without any conditionality or qualification; that Colonel Gadaffi was behind the Pan Am 103 atrocity. At the time of publication, neither he nor fellow regime confidante, former intelligence chief Moussa Koussa, have elaborated on those sweeping statements, nor offered the vaguest indication of what sort of evidence or testimony might support such a claim. Scotland’s own Crown Office emerged from a highly choreographed meeting with Koussa and have yet to emit a peep about what was discussed, and are evidently none the richer in terms of useful information. And Koussa left the country not in handcuffs, but aboard an executive jet from an RAF airbase, just as he arrived. If any of this manoeuvring strikes you as suspicious, it may be worth considering the scale and horror of the secret the four governments are taking quite considerable collective effort to avoid revisiting in either a judicial or public forum.

“It may be that because of what happened recently in Libya it may be worth looking at everything in the round,” Peirce says.

“We need an inquiry into how our government was encouraging all these accommodations and alliances with Libya. What was going on? This is much bigger than Lockerbie. What makes our foreign policy tick? Let’s look at the chronology, let’s look at how, for better or worse, the prosecution of he Lockerbie case might fit into that or not.

“Looking at the whole construct, there is going to be a lot of data to be found, that may not be comfortable to find, but we ought to know.”

There are further parallels that align this case with Peirce’s experience in miscarriage cases connected with the modern Irish troubles. The notorious Widgery report into the events of “bloody Sunday” shored up a flawed and fictitious version of events that was sustained and reinforced by successive Governments for a generation and beyond. It was only during 2010 that a lengthier, more honest appraisal resulted in a climbdown, admission of deceit and apology, which ultimately brought credit and respect to David Cameron, the political clock having moved on so far. Events surrounding the Pan Am 103 case are still too current and the deceit still too recent for such a reversal to bring credit upon anyone. Earlier this year for example, the Justice for Megrahi campaign, including noted academic Professor Robert Black QC concluded that then Lord Advocate Elish Angiolini had given flawed legal advice to the Scottish Government. It is hardly surprising that none in the Scottish civil service establishment are rushing to participate in exposure of their own culpability. However the Chilcott Inquiry, following the drip feed of revelations about the illegality of the Iraq invasion is precedent for the possibility that effort can be made to secure the truth in a shorter timeframe.

“The recent history in Westminster; all of the advice about the Iraq war, the advice about what constitutes torture, what is complicity in torture, advice about Geneva conventions, Guantanamo detentions - it has all served political expediency and has all been bad. Bad legally bad morally, bad factually," she says.

“We have lost our way, and to some extent deliberately gone the wrong way. There comes a time when you should stop and say ‘This is all wrong and we have to put it right’. The Lockerbie case is screaming out for that. Perhaps the point comes when the embarrassment is greater to do nothing than it is to do something.”

The matter has recently been before the United Nations, and given the lack of resolution in the Megrahi appeal, the European Union may still have an interest and role to play. The UN observer Hans Kochler, who said the manipulated conduct of the trial itself amounted to a criminal offence, could still have a locus to move for an EU level inquiry.

“It is an attractive thought, but I am not sure that wouldn’t lead to further evasion of responsibility,“ Peirce says.

“The will to actually achieve it would be even more blunted from outside. Because of the clear, disastrous mess the Libyan connection has been, it demands self analysis. If there were at both [scottish and English]ends sufficient initiative to say at least let us set up the beginnings of a joint inquiry, in the hands of one completely trusted, completely neutral external examiner, just to look at the nuts and bolts that are there to see, to see if a full scale inquiry should be recommended; if there should, then both countries should able to do that.

“I am quite sure that if anyone had the will to say that Lockerbie and the relationship with Gadaffi has been spectacularly disastrous, perhaps the most disastrous relationship that the UK has had with anyone, for a very, very, very long time, and within its recent history we can see so much has gone awry that has distorted our foreign policy, domestic policy and our judicial integrity, then that is too much and we want to learn something from it, so that it doesn’t repeat itself.”

In the period since the Megrahi conviction was referred back to the High Court, not only have the campaigners - galvanised behind the spearhead of Dr Jim Swire, but comprising many others from across the world - persistently sustained their efforts, but a second generation of the children of those affected by the case have publicly engaged with the efforts to expose the realities of this case, including Al Megrahi’s daughter, Aisha, in whose name her father’s case could theoretically proceed in the event of his death.

“If any case is ever reopened, it is usually down to the absolute dogged stamina of one or two people who wont take no for an answer,” Peirce says.

“And there are people in this case who won’t let go of it, and interestingly, they are the people who are the most well informed, who went through the whole trial at Kamp Zeist and know the detail. They formed their views on data and information, not second hand knowledge. If anything achieves the reopening, it will be that.

“In the past it hasn‘t needed any more people than that to lever an opening into something that seemed shut tight forever. All of this is screaming out for an inquiry. The ingredients that make up the prosecution’s case are really so rotten. They can’t and they shouldn’t sustain the weight of a presumed safe finding. You can see that they are utterly contaminated. They have no integrity.

“The forensic findings lack all the ingredients that should make them safe. The continuity of exhibits is all over the place. The only other pillar on which it is held up is this non-identification. It is just a catastrophe. The whole edifice is rotten, and it is astonishing it was ever stood up in the first place.”

Peirce has pledged to continue to assist the families of the bereaved affected by the Pan Am 103 event and its Orwellian aftermath. Ever modest of her own contribution, not only to this case but the others to which she is associated, it is her own humility that is the overriding emotion that she attaches to her interest in this long lasting stain of shame on the nation.

“I see a terrifying reproduction of other really awful circumstances. It is a pretty exact repetition of injustices that have gone before. I suppose because I can see that, I can see the way the replication is exact down to the same detail, it is my responsibility to at least explain that much,“ she says.

“If the families can use that perspective, then of course that is there for them. I perhaps feel ashamed that I have not done more. I feel very, very badly that I have not contributed more, and want to contribute more from any perspective I have that is constructive and useful.”

And it is her belief, shared by the UK families affected by these events, that it better to know the awful truth, than a palatable falsehood.

“Even in the most terrible cases, there is often always the reaction that you shouldn’t be storing up this terrible thing for the victims or families of those who lost relatives. That happened with the Guildford bombs. However, when the truth finally came out, there wasn’t an outcry from the families at all to say that they would have preferred the miscarriage hadn’t been uncovered.”

Almost twenty three years have passed since the event that charred Lockerbie, with each of them marked by ongoing deceit and sustained resistance from those whose reputations are at risk of foundering once their actions and inactions are exposed. Some have already sought refuge in secure retirement, whilst others have risen to positions of considerable power in the Crown, civil service and Government establishments. Ever steadily, the weight of damaging information increases. The edifice of the conviction secured by malfeasance has long since crumbled, although its remains are still clung on to with desperation by an ever diminishing few. The official vacuum left by the present interregnum cannot be sustained whilst Peirce and others work to get closer to the truth.

History has taught us that the day of truth is coming.

Instead of blowing Libyan women and children to smithereens, the US government could be ensuring its own kids have a roof over their heads, and enough food in their bellies to sleep at night. A Commie-type proposal, no doubt:

Hard times generation: homeless kids

The far-right extremists of NATO at work:

The Sorman Massacre

For once, Thierry Meyssan is not offering us a clinical analysis of geo-political developments. He is reporting on facts that he witnessed firsthand: the story of his friend, Engineer Khaled K. Al-Hamedi. A story of horror and blood where NATO embodies the comeback of barbarism.

Voltaire Network, Tripoli (Libye), 3 July 2011

http://www.voltairenet.org/The-Sorman-massacre

It was a family celebration, the Libyan way. Everyone had gathered to celebrate the third birthday of little Al-Khweldy. The grand-parents, the brothers and sisters and cousins were crowding inside the family house located in Sorman, 70 Kms West of the capital: a big garden where small houses had been built for the various members of the family, plain, one-floor houses.

No big luxury, just the simplicity of desert people. A quiet and harmonious atmosphere. The grand-father, Marshall Al-Khweldy Al-Hamedi, used to raise birds here. - He is a hero of the Revolution who took part in the overthrow of the monarchy and in his country’s liberation from colonial exploitation. All are very proud of him. - The son, Khaled Al-Hamedi, President of IOPCR, one of the most important Arab humaitarian associations, used to raise does. About thirty children were running around among the animals.

They were also preparing the wedding of his brother Mohammed, gone to the front lines to fight against NATO-trained foreign mercenaries. The ceremony was to take place here in a few days’ time. His fiancee was already beaming.

Nobody noticed that, among the guests, a spy had sneaked in. He was pretending to twitter his friends. In reality, he had just marked the targets and was relaying them through the social network at NATO Headquarters.

The next day, during the night of 19 to 20 June 2011, at around 2.30 am, Khaled went back home after having visited and assisted compatriots who had fled the Alliance’s bombings. He was close enough to his house to hear the hissing of missiles and their explosions.

NATO fired eight of them, of 900 kilos each. The spy had placed markers in each house, including the children’s bedrooms. The missiles were dropped a few seconds apart. The grand-parents had time to get out of their house before it was destroyed. It was already too late to rescue the children and grand-children. When the last missile hit their house, the Marshall had the instinctive reaction to shield his wife with his body. They had just stepped out of the door when they were flung fifteen meters away by an explosion. But they survived.

When Khaled arrived, there was only devastation. His wife, whom he loved so much, and the child she was bearing were gone. His children, for whom he would have given anything, were crushed by the explosions and collapsing ceilings.

The houses were left in ruins. Twelve mutilated bodies were lying under the rubble. The does, hit by fragments, were agonising in their pen.

The neighbours who rushed to their rescue silently searched through the debris for any sign of life. Unfortunately, there was no hope. The children didn’t stand a chance of escaping the missiles. The corpse of a beheaded child is extracted. The grand-father is reciting verses of the Coran. His voice is firm, he does not cry. His pain is too strong.

Meanwhile, in Brussels, NATO spokespersons declared to have bombed the headquarters of pro-Ghaddafi militia in order to protect the civilian population from the tyrant who is repressing it.

It is not known how the whole thing was planned by the targets committee, nor how the chiefs of NATO’s general staff followed the unfolding of the operation. What is clear is that the Atlantic Alliance, with its spruced-up generals and right-thinking diplomats, has decided to murder the chidren of Libyan leaders to break their psychological resistance.

Since the XIIIth century, European theologists and jurists have prohibited the assassination of families. Only the mafia has broken this absolute taboo. The mafia and now NATO.

On 1st July, when 1.7 million people were demonstrating in Tripoli to defend their country against foreign aggression, Khaled went to the front to bring relief to refugees and the injured. Snipers were waiting for him. They tried to kill him. He was seriously injured; however, according to the doctors, his life is no longer in danger.

NATO’s dirty work is not yet finished.

"Bipartisan foreign policy" makes a mockery of our absurd two-party system, which in reality is one party- the war party, the globalist party. We have absolutely no business in Libya, much as we have no business in Iraq, Afghanistan or Yemen. We have become the Great Satan, bombing and occupying foreign countries, and killing untold number of civilians in the process.

Obama the great "peace" candidate is now at war with four harmless, tiny nations. The last president to reject war was JFK, who did it multiple times during his administration. In fact, JFK may be the ONLY sitting president who rejected the call to war. That's one of the main reasons I still admire him so much.

With the worst economy in our nation's history, a disastrous inequity between the haves and have nots, abysmal lack of jobs, and a crumbling infrastructure, the last thing we should be doing is enforcing our idea of "freedom" on other countries at the point of a gun. We have huge problems to address at home.

That's so sensible you'll never get anywhere in US politics, Don.