Steven Gaal

EIR companion piece post # 1 ,HEART OF DARKNESS one of my favorites A century of British state-sponsored terror In 1996, EIR's coverage of the genocide in Africa, orchestrated and manipulated by the British Empire, with assistance from its modern-day pirates of raw materials cartels, included an excerpt from Heart of Darkness, the most famous work by Polish-British novelist Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) (see " `Heart of Darkness': A Glimpse at Colonialism in Action," EIR, Jan. 3, 1997). Conrad's first-hand view of colonialism in Africa was based on his 1889 journey along the Congo River as master of the ship Otago, and is one of the most chilling indictments of colonialism that this author has ever read. It was this excerpt of Heart of Darkness that prompted me to look afresh at another of Conrad's books, The Secret Agent (New York: The Penguin Group, 1983 reprint), written in 1907 about terrorism, police agents, and imperial powers. Conrad's powerfully written novel about political terrorism exposes the fact that for more than 100 years, the British have provided their territory as a haven for terrorists to plan attacks against other countries. As the accompanying dossier, delivered to U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, indicates, in the past several years, the British Crown, the Parliament, and the government have shunned requests for cooperation from 11 countries where brutal terrorist actions and mass murder have proven to have been planned in London. International pressure on Britain has led to attempts to change the laws in the British Parliament, but these efforts have been shot down in long-winded aristocratic rhetoric about Britain's tradition of providing a haven for victims of human rights violations. In Conrad's book, the central incident revolves around an international conference where the British were refusing to crack down against "political crimes." Such a conference did take place in 1898, in Milan. The Secret Agent reminds us that terrorism is surrogate warfare, and a part of British imperial policy, which intelligence operatives call the "Great Game." Conrad focusses his plot, however, not so much on the British use of terrorism against other imperial powers, as on the attempt by the aristocratic "First Secretary" of another country's embassy to stage a spectacular terrorist act in order to give the British a taste of their own medicine, and shake them into signing an international convention against providing a haven for "political" criminals. The bombing of the Royal Observatory Conrad's story, though a work of fiction, is rooted in a real incident, the bungled bombing of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich Park, London in 1894, according to Martin Seymour-Smith, who wrote an Introduction in 1984 to one Penguin edition of The Secret Agent. According to Seymour-Smith, the facts behind the real incident, known as the "Greenwich Bomb Outrage," were these: "A young man called Martial Bourdin was found in Greenwich Park, on a hill near the Royal Observatory `in a kneeling posture, terribly mutilated' on the evening of 15 February 1894. There had been an explosion; Bourdin had set it off, and in so doing had killed himself. He had blown off one of his hands, and his guts were spilling from his body; he died in hospital very soon afterwards. . . . Bourdin had a brother-in-law called H.B. Samuels, who edited an anarchist paper. Samuels was in fact, like Verloc [the main character in Conrad's book], a police agent and, again like Verloc, he accompanied his not very intelligent dupe to the park. Bourdin . . . in some way set off the explosive he was carrying, which was supplied by Samuels, acting as agent provocateur. . . . Anarchists were not responsible for the Greenwich Bomb incident; they were as frightened about it as they are in The Secret Agent." Conrad's book captures the arrogant disdain that the oligarchy has, to this day, for the "common people." In his story, the retarded brother-in-law of the oligarchy's secret agent, Verloc, is killed in the bungled bomb incident. In grief, the victim's sister apparently dies in a suicide, after killing her police-agent husband. Conrad wrote in 1920 that he received much criticism for writing such a "gloomy" piece, and came under suspicion as an anarchist sympathizer. No doubt, the secrets revealed in the book, even under the guise of fiction, were troublesome for the British and other countries which were facilitating terrorist acts. The tumultuous times in which the book was written included the assassinations of leaders who supported national sovereignty and republican ideas, including U.S. President William McKinley, gunned down by one of the British network's anarchists in 1901. Preparing for the 1898 Conference of Milan In the following excerpt, at the opening, Verloc is meeting his controller, the mysterious Mr. Vladimir, who lectures him: " `You give yourself for an "agent provocateur." The proper business of an "agent provocateur" is to provoke. As far as I can judge from your record kept here, you have done nothing to earn your money. . . .' " `Nothing!' exclaimed Verloc, stirring not a limb. . . . `I have several times prevented what might have been--' " `. . . Don't be absurd. The evil is already here. We don't want prevention--we want cure. . . . Isn't your society capable of anything else but printing this prophetic bosh. . . ? Why don't you do something? Look here. . . . You will have to earn your money. . . . No work, no pay. . . . When you cease to be useful you shall cease to be employed. Yes. Right off. Cut short. . . . You shall be chucked. . . . " `What we want is to administer a tonic to the Conference in Milan,' he [Vladimir] said airily. `Its deliberations upon international action for the suppression of political crime don't seem to get anywhere. England lags. This country is absurd with its sentimental regard for individual liberty. It's intolerable to think that all your friends have got only to come over to--' " `In that way I have them all under my eye,' Mr. Verloc interrupted, huskily. " `It would be much more to the point to have them all under lock and key. England must be brought into line. The imbecile bourgeoisie of this country make themselves the accomplices of the very people whose aim is to drive them out of their houses to starve in ditches. And they have the political power still, if they only had the sense to use it for their preservation. I suppose you agree that the middle classes are stupid? . . . What they want just now is a jolly good scare. This is the psychological moment to set your friends to work. I have had you called here to develop to you my idea.' "And Mr. Vladimir developed his idea from on high, with scorn and condescension, displaying at the same time an amount of ignorance . . . which filled the silent Mr. Verloc with inward consternation. . . . " `A series of outrages,' Mr. Vladimir continued, calmly, `executed here in this country; not only planned here--that would not do--they would not mind. Your friends could set half the Continent on fire without influencing the public opinion here in favour of a universal repressive legislation. They will not look outside their backyard here.' " The pathetic plot to entrap British public opinion is a miserable failure. The British Home Secretary covers up the entire affair; it seems that more than one of the members of Verloc's anarchist cell are on the payroll of the British. Seymour-Smith reports that in the real Conference of Milan in 1898, Britain refused to give up its role as "haven for the oppressed," continuing to serve as the planning ground for terrorism for the next 102 years. --Michele Steinberg

A Fascist party in full cry. Black-shirts smashing migrants' homes. Swastikas on the streets. No, not Germany in the Thirties: Greece 2012 By Sue Reid In Athens PUBLISHED: 19:34 EST, 17 October 2012 | UPDATED: 04:15 EST, 18 October 2012 Dressed in black shirts with faces hidden by helmets, ten men on motorbikes came to find him on a Saturday, after darkness fell. Finding the door bolted at his home in a pot-holed Athens side street, they smashed the windows, broke in and trashed the place. Then, their dirty work done, the neo-Nazi gang roared away into the hot evening. It had taken less than a minute for them to sound an ugly warning that foreigners were not welcome in Greece. Their target was Imam Shahbaz Siddiqi, a 42-year-old spiritual leader of the Greek capital’s 500,000 Muslims. ‘I was at the mosque praying when they searched for me the other night,’ he told me yesterday. ‘I thank God for that, or else I might now be dead. Scroll down for video Hatred: The far-right Golden Dawn uses fascist symbols. Almost a quarter of Greeks under 25 support the party ‘During the night I went three times to the police station to report the break-in. At the desk I was told that the officers did not have time to investigate my complaint. They were too busy. There is one law for the Greek people and another for us immigrants.’ The attack on Imam Siddiqi is the latest racist outrage by neo-Nazis in a country riddled with xenophobia. In an era of crushing debt and poverty, the immigrant is blamed for almost every Greek ill. On the same weekend, a young Pakistani immigrant, Hussein Abbas, was viciously attacked outside his home in Elefsina on the outskirts of Athens by the men in dark shirts. He ended up in hospital, his face smashed to a bloody pulp. So dangerous are the streets for foreigners that the U.S. State Department has sent out a warning to dark-skinned American visitors that they must be careful of their safety when they leave their hotels. A shocking internet video shows leaders of the anti-immigrant Far-Right Golden Dawn party — which has 18 MPs — marching into an ethnic street market at Rafina, an hour’s drive from Athens, destroying the stalls with wooden clubs and scattering the merchandise to the ground. ‘We found a few illegal immigrants selling their wares without permits,’ says Giorgos Germenis, one of the party’s MPs. ‘We did what our party has to do and then went to church to pay respects to the Madonna.’ Of course, it is not just immigrants who are subject to the fury of the Greek masses. Last week German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited Athens to taunts from 50,000 protesters, many waving swastikas and dressed in Nazi uniforms. Victim: Young Pakistani immigrant Hussein Abbas was set upon by a blackshirt gang There were banners proclaiming ‘From Hitler to Merkel’, which harked back to the hated Nazi occupation of Greece during World War II — and which surely made a mockery of the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to the EU last week. The German Chancellor, too, is blamed for the social turmoil crippling this country, which faces further austerity cutbacks on her orders and those of eurozone finance ministers. The descent of Greece into chaos could not be more different from the halcyon days after the country joined the European Union 31 years ago, and then milked the system for all its worth. Early retirement, generous state-paid pensions, countless millions on the public payroll and institutionalised tax fraud were a way of life. Hairdressers, for example, were listed among the 600 ‘professions’ allowed to retire at 50 with a state pension of 95 per cent of their final year’s earnings on account of the ‘arduous and perilous’ nature of their work. Now the big, fat EU gravy train has hit the buffers, drastic austerity measures mean pay rates and pensions have been slashed and taxes are going sky high in a frantic bid to balance the books. The retirement age is to be raised to 67. Greece is in its fifth consecutive year of recession, something that no European country has endured in the past 65 years, except in wartime. Half of the young are jobless and a third of stores in Athens have closed. And yet the EU is demanding a further £12 billion of spending cuts before they will hand over another emergency bailout of £35 billion to stop the country going bankrupt. Soup kitchens are feeding once well-to-do Athenians and homeless hostels are full of the middle class who have been forced to sell their homes and are struggling to take in what has befallen them so fast. Little wonder there is such anger on the streets. Some speculate that civil breakdown and the unravelling of democracy in Greece may be just around the corner. Tough times: Journalists on strike in Greece. The country is in its fifth consecutive year of recession, something that no European nation has endured in the last 65 years, except in wartime Last week as Chancellor Merkel visited, protests were outlawed in Athens. No one took the slightest notice of the rules, as Molotov cocktails were hurled by rioters at police guarding parliament and ordinary people cheered them on. It is from this cauldron of bewilderment and fury that the neo- Nazis and their triumphant party, Golden Dawn, have emerged with such sudden popularity. As 71-year-old Doukas Thanassis, queuing for lentils in a smart grey suit at a church-run soup kitchen in central Athens, told me defiantly: ‘I voted for the party. They are the only ones who help us in this time of trouble. ‘Every Wednesday you can buy the party’s newspaper at the local street kiosk. It prints a list of places where Golden Dawn hand out food and even medicines to the Greek people. They pay for ambulances to take us to hospital if we are ill.’ Mr Thanassis, the former head chef on a Greek cruise line who lives in a homeless hostel, adds: ‘These free gifts are only for us Greeks, not for foreigners. The meat in the sandwiches they give us is pork so the Muslim migrants don’t come and scrounge it. These foreigners shouldn’t be here anyway.’ Beside him, others in the queue nod approvingly. Even Prime Minister Antonis Samaras, leader of the New Democracy party (Centre Right) running an unruly coalition with Left-wingers, blames Greece’s woes on ‘waves of illegal immigrants’ from Pakistan, Bangladesh, India and north and sub-Saharan Africa, who smuggle themselves over the Turkish border for a new life. Mr Samaras says that with 1.5 million recent arrivals in a country of 11 million Greeks, the immigrants are ‘creating extremism’ and feeding the extraordinary popularity of Golden Dawn. When I visited Greece in May, Golden Dawn was a name that was barely whispered. Today the party has a foothold in parliament — with 18 of the 300 seats — and talk of the neo-Nazi party’s popularity is on everyone’s lips. In cafes, taxis and bars, Greeks of all ages and social backgrounds discuss the latest official poll prediction that Golden Dawn would claim 22 per cent of the vote — rather than the 6.9 per cent it garnered in June’s national poll — if a general election were called tomorrow. Almost a quarter of those under 25 support the party. If the same political swing was happening in Britain, it would mean that 60 Parliamentary seats would be in the hands of extreme Right-wingers. Summit: Greece's Prime Minister Antonis Samaras (right) and Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel (left) speak before their meeting in Athens earlier this month ‘And don’t compare these people to the British National Party or the English Defence League,’ a Greek professor warned recently. ‘They make the BNP look like Julie Andrews.’ It is an open secret that a Greek who thinks he has a problem with migrants can call a special number at Golden Dawn to get their brutal style of help. I was told the disturbing story of an Athenian lady of 60 whose central city apartment with wood floors and fine drapes was taken over by Pakistani and Bangladeshi squatters while she visited her family in Crete. She returned to find the door barred and graffiti at the entrance to the block telling the owner to stay away. She called the special number. A man on the line told her to stay with friends for a week and everything would be all right, so she took the advice. Seven days on, she went back to her apartment. The place was empty of the interlopers. The curtains had been cleaned, the floor polished, and she moved back in. Urban myth, ethnic cleansing or proof that Golden Dawn gets things done? Many Greeks prefer to believe the last of these. As 54-year-old Agnes Bakas, sitting in the sun at a coffee bar in Attika Square, Athens, said: ‘Every Athenian knows Golden Dawn will send their people to help a Greek.’ On the white wall behind her, a Nazi swastika is painted and the kiosk selling newspapers under the trees is a known meeting place for young Golden Dawn supporters who gather menacingly with their motorbikes and black shirts. But this does not bother Agnes. She says: ‘This square was full of immigrants, but Golden Dawn cleared them out. I was robbed seven times before that near my home down the road. Even my necklace was pulled from me by an African. I could not have sat here safely, even in the day, a year ago.’ Whatever the accuracy of her story, Golden Dawn has taken full advantage of claims of immigrant crime. The party has widespread support among the rank-and-file Greek police (the Golden Dawn vote soared at the polling booths near police stations in Athens) and peddles the line that 37 Greeks have been killed by immigrants in the past few years. Demonstration: Angela Merkel visited Athens to taunts from 50,000 protesters, many waving swastikas and dressed in Nazi uniforms A vicious attack and rape of a 15-year-old Greek girl by a Pakistani illegal migrant aged 23 on the island of Paros this summer played into the party’s hands. The Pakistani admitted the crime and the girl, battered over the head with a rock, is still in intensive care in a hospital near her home in Athens. Academics in Greece warn of disturbing parallels between the rise of the Right today in an economically crippled country indebted to the EU and the rise of the Nazis in the Thirties after hyper-inflation in Germany’s Weimar Republic led to economic collapse. Between the wars, you may recall, an indebted Germany was forced to make huge reparation payments to the victorious Allies of the Great War as a punishment for starting the conflict. The German people felt humiliated, just as the Greeks feel hostile to their eurozone masters and Mrs Merkel today. The Nazis claimed their first parliamentary seats even as they were garnering the local support of Germans by sending out gangs of ‘storm troopers’ to terrorise Jewish and immigrant communities and blame them for the troubles of the time. It sounds horribly familiar. As Nickos Dermetzis, a professor of political science at the Athens University, explains: ‘We have a major socio-economic crisis in which native Greeks are losing ground. You also have a rising number of immigrants, many illegal. ‘This is a volcanic situation where all the classic parameters for the flourishing of a Far-Right force such as Gold Dawn are present.’ Of course, it does not help that police are struggling to cope with the huge numbers of illegal immigrants arriving daily in Greece. Their sweeps of immigrants happen regularly in Athens and the port of Patras, a three-hour drive away, where a thousand immigrants doss down in disused factory buildings near the promenade. They wait, hoping to smuggle themselves on to freight and passenger ferries going to Italy. Ten days ago, 350 Afghanis, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis were picked up in Patras and put in holding centres. As one disgruntled resident, a man in his 50s living near the promenade, said: ‘They only took a few and so many are here. I am no racist, but this town used to be paradise. The police sweeps are a merry-go-round. The ones they took today will be back next week, wait and see.’ It is a viewpoint supported by Andreas Nicolacopoulos. The 59-year-old architect is a leading light in the Patras Golden Dawn party. ‘The Greek people don’t want illegal immigrants,’ he says. ‘They have to be deported to their own countries. We have to stop them coming in, too. We will lay landmines at the Turkish-Greek border to blow them up so they do not enter our country. We have promised our voters this.’ Golden Dawn also wants to make immigrant criminals serve double the prison terms of their Greek counterparts and introduce capital punishment for foreign murderers. Back in Athens, I meet Golden Dawn’s spokesman, MP Iliopoulos Panagiotis, at the Greek Parliament building. The face of this 34-year-old former internet marketing executive can be seen clearly on the video of immigrants being attacked at the market by Golden Dawn’s louts. Mr Panagiotis is in bullish form. He boasts that the party is so popular that at the next election it will be the second biggest in Greece. ‘In a few years, we expect to be the biggest of them all,’ he says. The party’s MPs arrogantly puff on cigarettes even though smoking is banned inside the parliament building. They wear black shirts with the word ‘Hooligans’ emblazoned in orange on the sleeve. They have tattoos on their arms. And on the walls are the blue flags stamped with the party’s swastika-style logo, an ancient Greek symbol. The official Golden Dawn line is that they are not Nazis, even neo-Nazis, but nationalists wanting to save Greece for the Greek. So what does Mr Panagiotis plan for illegal immigrants? ‘We will fly every one of them home,’ he says. ‘Even Pakistan would not dare shoot our planes down when their own people are on board and would be killed.’ And what does he think of the racist Golden Dawn gangs that systematically beat up those who were not born Greek? ‘We have a million supporters, some of them wilder elements. We cannot control them all,’ he says with a smirk. It is hard to believe that his words are those of an elected MP in the Parliament of a modern democracy. Yet anything is possible now in Greece, as the unpalatable face of fascism makes an unwelcome return to Europe.

How the government turned five stoner misfits into the world's most hapless terrorist cell. Rolling Stone Thunder rumbled and rain pattered on the leaves as Connor Stevens tramped through the darkness down a wooded path to the base of the Brecksville-Northfield High Level Bridge. A sad-eyed 20-year-old poet from the Cleveland suburbs, Stevens was crouched in the foliage, his baby face obscured by a bushy lumberjack's beard. Beside him ducked two friends from Occupy Cleveland – the group that had come to define Stevens and his place in the world – both as gaunt and grungy as Stevens himself. Farther up the trail, Stevens knew, three other comrades were acting as lookouts. Gingerly, the young men opened the two black toolboxes they'd carried down from their van. Inside were eight pounds of C4 explosives. They were actually going through with it. The six of them were going to blow up a bridge. That they were on the brink of something so epic was surprising, even to the crew, a hodgepodge of drifters plus a pair of middle-class seekers: quiet Stevens and puppyishly excitable Brandon Baxter, also 20. Anarchists who had grown disenchanted with the Occupy movement, which they considered too conservative, they yearned to make a radical statement of their own – to send a message to corporate America, its corrupt government and that invisible grid underlying it all, the System. They'd joined Occupy Cleveland in the fall, but over the winter they'd waited in vain for the group to pick a direction before finally taking matters into their own hands. For weeks they'd fantasized about the mayhem they'd wreak, puerile talk of stink bombs and spray paint that had anted up to discussion of all the xxxx they'd blow up if only they could. But the grandiosity of their hopes stood in stark contrast to their mundane routine. They spent their days getting stoned at their Occupy­subsidized commune in a downtown warehouse, squabbling over dish duty and barely making their shifts at the Occupy Cleveland info tent; when they managed to scrounge up a couple of cans of Spaghettios for dinner, it was celebrated as an accomplishment. If not for the help of their levelheaded comrade Shaquille Azir, who at this critical moment stood as lookout, hissing, "How much longer is this gonna take?" the plot might never have come together. The boys anxiously fiddled with the safety switch on one of the IEDs. Even on this April night, as they planted two bombs, the plan felt slapdash. No one knew how to handle the explosives. They had no getaway plan. At one point they'd discussed closing the bridge with traffic cones to minimize casualties – 13,000 vehicles crossed the bridge daily – but there was no mention of that now. Some of the accomplices weren't even clear on the evening's basic agenda. "Do we plant tonight and go boom tomorrow?" Baxter had asked in the van. "No, we're going to detonate these tonight," someone had clarified. The red light on the other IED winked on, signaling it was armed. "One is good to go," Stevens announced. "We just gotta do this one." A night-vision camera mounted nearby captured the boys' movements as they hunched around the second IED until its light shone. Then all six jogged back to the van, relief in their voices. "We just committed the biggest act of terrorism that I know of since the 1960s," Stevens said, as a recording device memorialized every word. All that was left now was for the boys to pick a location from which to push the detonators and go boom. They were feeling pretty good. They decided to go to Applebee's. Nothing was destined to blow up that night, as it turns out, because the entire plot was actually an elaborate federal sting operation. The case against the Cleveland Five, in fact, exposes not just a deeply misguided element of the Occupy movement, but also a shadowy side of the federal government. It's hardly surprising that the FBI decided to infiltrate Occupy; given the movement's challenge of the status quo and its hectic patchwork of factions – including ones touting subversive agendas – the feds worried it could become a terrorist breeding ground. Since 9/11, the federal Joint Terrorism Task Force has been charged with preventing further terrorist attacks. But anticipating and disrupting terrorist plots require both aggressive investigative techniques and a staggering level of collaboration and resources; to pull together the Cleveland case alone, the FBI coordinated with 23 different agencies. The hope, of course, is that the results make it all worthwhile: The plot is detected and heroically foiled, the evildoers arrested, and the American public sleeps easier. The problem is that in many cases, the government has determined that the best way to capture terrorists is simply to invent them in the first place. "The government has a responsibility to prevent harm," says former FBI counterterrorism agent Michael German, now the senior policy counsel for the ACLU. "What they're doing instead is manufacturing threatening events." That's just how it went down in Cleveland, where the defendants started out as disoriented young men wrestling with alienation, identity issues and your typical bucket of adolescent angst. They were malleable, ripe for some outside influence to coax them onto a new path. That catalyst could have come in the form of a friend, a family member or a cause. Instead, the government sent an informant. And not just any informant, but a smooth-talking ex-con – an incorrigible lawbreaker who racked up even more criminal charges while on the federal payroll. From the start, the government snitch nurtured the boys' destructive daydreams, egging them on every step of the way, giving them the encouragement and tools to turn their Fight Club-tinged tough talk into reality. To follow the evolution of the bombing plot under the informant's tutelage is to watch five young men get a giant federal-assisted upgrade from rebellious idealists to terrorist boogeymen. This process looks a lot like what used to be called entrapment. Continue reading at Rolling Stone...

The quoted phrase comes from your source, a political extremist, // END COLBY ================== NOT EXTREMIST TO ME Bill Van Auken From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search Bill Van Auken (born 1950) is a politician and activist for the Socialist Equality Party and was a presidential candidate in the U.S. election of 2004, announcing his candidacy on January 27, 2004. His running mate was Jim Lawrence. He came in 15th for the popular vote, receiving 1,857 votes. [1] In November 2006, Van Auken ran for the United States Senate seat held by Hillary Clinton[2]. He finished in fifth place, with 11,071 votes [3] Van Auken is a full time reporter for the World Socialist Web Site, and resides in New York City. In the U.S. presidential election, 2008 he was the vice presidential nominee of the same party.

And do you have any evidence for your accusation I have something against "Arab sources"? Or do you just make stuff up as you go along? Note That I have cited Ed Said on more than one occasion. // END COLBY THIS THREAD Hidden US-Israeli Military Agenda: "Break Syria into Pieces" BALKANIZE SYRIA ----------------------------- FREE SYRIAN ARMY TERRORISTS http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sG1-XUaZ8QU&feature=player_detailpage ========= Religious persecution & Geopolitics (focus Syria) (please see deep background at bottom) see http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=19388 ++++++++++++++ Syrian Christians Fight Off Rebels To Survive Persecution By Theodore Shoebat on September 28, 2012 in General From the Telegraph: For the past six weeks up to 150 Christian and Armenian fighters have been fighting to prevent Free Syrian Army rebels from entering Christian heartland areas of Aleppo. Last month the Syrian army claimed a ‘victory’ in removing FSA fighters from the historic Christian quarter of Jdeidah. But Christian militia fighters told the Daily Telegraph it was they who had first attacked the FSA there. “The FSA were hiding in Farhat Square in Jdeideh. The Church committees stormed in and cleansed the area. Then the Syrian army joined us. They claimed the victory on State television,” said George, who like many Christian refugees is too scared to give his full name. “The rebels were threatening the churches.” The area, defined by its boutique shops, narrow cobbled streets and the spires and cupolas of the Maronite, Orthodox and Armenian churches, had over the weeks become infiltrated with sniper positions and checkpoints, residents said. “FSA snipers were on the rooftops and they were attacking the Maronite church and Armenian residents there,” said a former clergyman calling himself John, now in Beirut, who said he had witnessed the battle. The battle for Aleppo has become bitter, with militant jihadist groups playing a more prominent role than in any other city. It has become increasingly scarred by accusations of atrocities on both sides, most recently the mass killing of 20 regime troops, whose bodies were displayed on a video apparently uploaded to the internet by a rebel militia. Residents of the city told The Telegraph that the city’s minorities feared that they would suffer the same fate as Christians in Iraq, who were heavily targeted by the sectarian violence that erupted after the 2003 war. “They are shouting ‘the Alawites to the graves and the Christians to Beirut,” said an Armenian mother of four who recently fled the city – a claim also made by several other Christian refugees. John said that contrary to reports Aleppo’s minority groups and wealthy residents were not all regime supporters. But he said they felt they had to protect themselves from ‘peasant immigrants’ who were using the war to destroy the city’s sophisticated heart. “I am not in support of the government, but the FSA are all a bunch of thugs and thieves. I watched them steal from a textile factory – they took everything; gas, materials, even the beading machines!” Increasingly on the offensive, Syrian rebels killed at least 18 soldiers in a car bomb and ground attack on a military position in neighbouring Idlib province, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. In Aleppo on Wednesday four Syrian Armenians were reported killed and 13 wounded in an ambush near the airport. The new UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi is to meet Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus on Thursday, in a last-ditch effort to rescue the country from civil war. Any military intervention looked to be firmly off limits on Wednesday. Philip Hammond, the defence secretary, made clear that Western countries would not consider such action whilst Russia and China continued to oppose it. Seeing little hope of change many Christians have already joined the hundreds of thousands who have fled the country. The UN High Commission for Refugees said 253,000 Syrians were now registered with them. Many Christians say they hold little hope of returning. —

American Intelligence officials are acknowledging that the bulk of the weapons flowing into Syria for the US-backed war to

This car was spotted near Grand Rapids, MI lp said... Today, saw a report that 2 of romney's sons spoke off the record with reporters and said that Seamus ran away at the end of his trip on mitt's car roof! Dogs Against Romney The Official Site of Dogs Against Romney founded 2007. Hi, I'm Rusty. Mitt Romney is mean to dogs. Help me get my message out about the Mitt Romney dog on roof story. Putting a dog on the car roof is abuse. Remember Crate-Gate. I ride inside. Mitt is Mean. Contribute to DogPAC.Dog on the Roof book. Saturday, October 13, 2012 The Mitt Romney Dog on Car Roof Story: An Introduction Rusty, Founder of Dogs Against Romney I have had many requests for a catch-all place for newbies to our cause to get caught up on the back-story behind Mitt Romney's cruelty toward the Romney family dog. Anyone who Google's "Mitt Romney dog" will find literally thousands of articles about it, but here I have collected some of what I consider to be the most succinct. Read these stories if you are new to Dogs Against Romney or, if you are a veteran member, share this link with your friends who don't yet know the truly revolting details of Romney's callousness toward poor Seamus, the Irish Setter. GO TO SITE FOR MANY LINKS http://www.dogsagain...roof-story.html

Ethnic Weapons For Ethnic Cleansing By Greg Bishop Report: Israel Develops New Weapons LONDON (AP) -- Israel is trying to identity genes carried only by Arabs that could be used to develop a biological weapon that would harm Arabs but not Jews, the Sunday Times reported. The newspaper attributed its report to unidentified Israeli military and Western intelligence sources. It said Israeli scientists are working to create a genetically modified bacterium or virus that only attacks people who carry certain genes. The paper said the weapon is seen as Israel's response to the threat of chemical and biological warfare from Iraq and could be spread by air or through the water supply. The newspaper said the program is based at the biological institute in Nes Tziyona, which it described as the main research facility for Israel's chemical and biological weapons. According to the report, researchers have pinpointed ``a characteristic in the genetic profile of certain Arab communities, particularly the Iraqi people.'' The idea of such research has provoked controversy in Israel because of parallels with the genetic experiments at Auschwitz by Nazi scientist Dr. Josef Mengele during World War II, the paper said. ``Morally, based on our history, and our tradition and our experience, such a weapon is monstrous and should be denied,'' Israeli parliament member Dedi Zucker is quoted as saying. Officials at Porton Down, Britain's biological defense facility, said such weapons were theoretically possible, the newspaper said If we are to believe a recent AP report culled from the Sunday Times (London) it would appear that the Israelis have announced or intentionally leaked a report that its military was considering the development of so-called "ethnic weapons." The info is credited to "unidentified Israeli military and Western intelligence sources" which generally brings up the red flags with regard to authenticity, and more likely, the motive for such leaks. The article ends with a comment from an unnamed source at Britain's "biological defense facility" that pathogens which can kill on the basis of ethnicity are "theoretically possible." This PR seemingly ignores the fact that this "theoretical possibility" was recognized over 25 years ago, if not before. It was originally brought to the attention of potential customers with the publication of an article in the Military Review of November 1970. This journal for command-level military personnel was published by the US Army Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The feature, entitled "Ethnic Weapons," authored by Carl A. Larson, outlines the history, desirability, and possibilities of engineered biological pathogens which would affect only those races which historically have no natural defense against certain "enzyme inhibitors." Larson is listed as head of the "Department of Human Genetics at the Institute of Genetics, Lund, Sweden" as well as a licensed physician. The Hippocratic oath was apparently not administered in Sweden when Larson received his accreditation. Larson explains that many of the chemical activities and functions within the human body are caused by the interactions of enzymes. One of the more significant activities enabled by enzyme chemical reactions are the contraction and relaxation of muscle tissue. If the activities of these enzymes are blocked, the victim will be paralyzed, even to the point of death by asphyxiation. Not coincidentally, the enzyme-blocking action of compounds called organophosphates were discovered in Germany in the 1930s when experimental insecticides killed the people unlucky enough to have used them. This discovery led to the mass production of a substance named "Trilon," later used to impressive effect in the extermination of groups of people the Nazis considered little more than insects. This substance and others of similar makeup became known as "nerve gas." A concentration of 40 milligrams per cubic meter can kill in about 10 minutes. Stronger agents were later developed which can do the job with a single drop on the skin. The author points out that genetic variation between races is mirrored in concurrent differences in tolerance for various substances. As an example, it has been noted that large segments of southeast Asian populations historically display a lactose intolerance, due to the near absence of the enzyme lactase in the digestive system. A chemical or biological weapon (CBW) which takes advantage of this genetic variance could conceivably kill or incapacitate entire populations, leaving invading armies relatively unscathed, as long as they are ethnically homogenous, or the at-risk members had at least been prepared to tolerate the attack. In effect, the poison or viruses would not be recognized by their bodies. The Sunday Times article states that Israeli researchers have "pinpointed 'a characteristic in the genetic profile of certain Arab communities, particularly the Iraqi people.'" This may be more palatable to westerners, since some consider the Iraqi race the enemy, and excluding other Arab gene pools might seem like a more "humane" way to carry on more studies. Larson is even more explicit in a way that would probably never make it into the mainstream press. In a passage that would make Doctor Strangelove proud, he muses uncontrollably on the possibilities of genetically-sensitive chemicals to subdue enemy populations: "Friendly forces would discriminatingly use incapacitants in entangled situations to give friend and foe a short period of enforced rest to sort them out. By gentle persuasion, aided by psychochemicals, civilians in enemy cities could be reeducated. The adversary would use incapacitants to spare those whom he could use for slaves." This was published in a serious, staid professional journal read by US military strategists. He concludes with the statement that "the functions of life [now] lie bare to attack." According to Charles Piller and Keith Yamamoto in their 1988 book Gene Wars, Larson's article was the first time that the subject of ethnically targeted CBWs was broached publicly, and that in "the military's private circles it was old news." The authors further state that in 1951 the Mechanicsburg, PA Naval Supply Depot was the site of a classified test using a benign organism delivered to personnel to mimic the behavior of an actual bioweapon: "According to documents declassified in the late 1970s, the site was chosen because 'Within this system there are employed large numbers of laborers, including many Negroes, whose incapacitation would seriously affect the operation of the supply system.'" The black workers in the Depot were supposedly more susceptible to a strain of Valley Fever than were whites, but instead of using the actual virus, a substitute fungal organism was used. Valley Fever is more often fatal to blacks than to whites. It was recently revealed that the truth and reconciliation hearings in South Africa had presented witnesses who testified that scientists working for the apartheid regime had pursued efforts along similar lines. Another possible example of field testing of ethnic weapons (or at least an interesting case for study by those interested in their development) may be the famed "Four Corners" virus, which seems only to affect Native Americans living in northern New Mexico and Arizona. Most reports identified or compared the disease to the Hantavirus, which killed victims relatively quickly following the occurrence of a prolonged fever and fluid which rapidly filled the lungs and asphyxiated the patient. Supposedly contracted through deer mice droppings, the mystery disease has claimed at least a dozen victims in the last ten years. The most recent outbreak occured this last summer, coming on the heels of El Niño, which the major news media blamed for the renewed threat. Some area residents believe that the virus may have been released either accidentally or intentionally from a bioweapons cache at Fort Wingate, an army facility a few miles east of Gallup. The munitions storage at Wingate is now officially closed. In the 28 intervening years since the Military Review article was published, the study of genetics has advanced to levels undreamed of by Dr. Larson at the time. The human genome project is slated to map all locations and functions of human DNA by early in the next century. There may be little reason to doubt that subtly selective and perhaps overtly unnoticeable biological agents can be introduced into a native population simply by flying over a chosen area with little more than a crop duster attached to the wings of a B52. The recent revelation that Israel may be working on their own bioagent based on well-known and tested principles may only be a psychological deterrent, but given the well-documented history of ethnic weapons, there is ample reason to suspect that the threat is not an idle one.

The Armageddon virus: Why experts fear a disease that leaps from animals to humans could devastate mankind in the next five years Warning comes after man died from a Sars-like virus that had previously only been seen in bats Earlier this month a man from Glasgow died from a tick-borne disease that is widespread in domestic and wild animals in Africa and Asia By John Naish PUBLISHED: 17:43 EST, 14 October 2012 | UPDATED: 07:35 EST, 15 October 2012 Armageddon: Scientists have warned that a global viral outbreak is inevitable within five years The symptoms appear suddenly with a headache, high fever, joint pain, stomach pain and vomiting. As the illness progresses, patients can develop large areas of bruising and uncontrolled bleeding. In at least 30  per cent of cases, Crimean-Congo Viral Hemorrhagic Fever is fatal. And so it proved this month when a 38-year-old garage owner from Glasgow, who had been to his brother’s wedding in Afghanistan, became the UK’s first confirmed victim of the tick-borne viral illness when he died at the high-security infectious disease unit at London’s Royal Free Hospital. It is a disease widespread in domestic and wild animals in Africa and Asia — and one that has jumped the species barrier to infect humans with deadly effect. But the unnamed man’s death was not the only time recently a foreign virus had struck in this country for the first time. Last month, a 49-year-old man entered London’s St Thomas’ hospital with a raging fever, severe cough and desperate difficulty in breathing. He bore all the hallmarks of the deadly Sars virus that killed nearly 1,000 people in 2003 — but blood tests quickly showed that this terrifyingly virulent infection was not Sars. Nor was it any other virus yet known to medical science. Worse still, the gasping, sweating patient was rapidly succumbing to kidney failure, a potentially lethal complication that had never before been seen in such a case. As medical staff quarantined their critically-ill patient, fearful questions began to mount. The stricken man had recently come from Qatar in the Middle East. What on earth had he picked up there? Had he already infected others with it? Using the latest high-tech gene-scanning technique, scientists at the Health Protection Agency started to piece together clues from tissue samples taken from the Qatari patient, who was now hooked up to a life-support machine. The results were extraordinary. Yes, the virus is from the same family as Sars. But its make-up is completely new. It has come not from humans, but from animals. Its closest known relatives have been found in Asiatic bats. The investigators also discovered that the virus has already killed someone. Searches of global medical databases revealed the same mysterious virus lurking in samples taken from a 60-year-old man who had died in Saudi Arabia in July. Scroll down for video Potentially deadly: The man suffered from CCHF, a disease transmitted by ticks (pictured) which is especially common in East and West Africa When the Health Protection Agency warned the world of this newly- emerging virus last month, it ignited a stark fear among medical experts. Could this be the next bird flu, or even the next ‘Spanish flu’ — the world’s biggest pandemic, which claimed between 50 million and 100 million lives across the globe from 1918 to 1919? In all these outbreaks, the virus responsible came from an animal. Analysts now believe that the Spanish flu pandemic originated from a wild aquatic bird. The terrifying fact is that viruses that manage to jump to us from animals — called zoonoses — can wreak havoc because of their astonishing ability to catch us on the hop and spread rapidly through the population when we least expect it. The virus's power and fatality rates are terrifying One leading British virologist, Professor John Oxford at Queen Mary Hospital, University of London, and a world authority on epidemics, warns that we must expect an animal-originated pandemic to hit the world within the next five years, with potentially cataclysmic effects on the human race. Such a contagion, he believes, will be a new strain of super-flu, a highly infectious virus that may originate in some far-flung backwater of Asia or Africa, and be contracted by one person from a wild animal or domestic beast, such as a chicken or pig. By the time the first victim has succumbed to this unknown, unsuspected new illness, they will have spread it by coughs and sneezes to family, friends, and all those gathered anxiously around them. Thanks to our crowded, hyper-connected world, this doomsday virus will already have begun crossing the globe by air, rail, road and sea before even the best brains in medicine have begun to chisel at its genetic secrets. Before it even has a name, it will have started to cut its lethal swathe through the world’s population. High security: The high security unit where the man was treated for the potentially fatal disease but later died If this new virus follows the pattern of the pandemic of 1918-1919, it will cruelly reap mass harvests of young and fit people. They die because of something called a ‘cytokine storm’ — a vast overreaction of their strong and efficient immune systems that is prompted by the virus. This uncontrolled response burns them with a fever and wracks their bodies with nausea and massive fatigue. The hyper-activated immune system actually kills the person, rather than killing the super-virus. Professor Oxford bases his prediction on historical patterns. The past century has certainly provided us with many disturbing precedents. For example, the 2003 global outbreak of Sars, the severe acute respiratory syndrome that killed nearly 1,000 people, was transmitted to humans from Asian civet cats in China. More... Man, 38, dies from deadly tropical disease after returning to the UK from Afghanistan Nine-year-old who turns YELLOW with anger: Brianna must spend 12 hours a day under UV lights because of rare condition In November 2002, it first spread among people working at a live animal market in the southern Guangdong province, where civets were being sold. Nowadays, the threat from such zoonoses is far greater than ever, thanks to modern technology and human population growth. Mass transport such as airliners can quickly fan outbreaks of newly- emerging zoonoses into deadly global wildfires. The Sars virus was spread when a Chinese professor of respiratory medicine treating people with the syndrome fell ill when he travelled to Hong Kong, carrying the virus with him. By February 2003, it had covered the world by hitching easy lifts with airline passengers. Between March and July 2003, some 8,400 probable cases of Sars had been reported in 32 countries. It is a similar story with H1N1 swine flu, the 2009 influenza pandemic that infected hundreds of millions throughout the world. It is now believed to have originated in herds of pigs in Mexico before infecting humans who boarded flights to myriad destinations. Once these stowaway viruses get off the plane, they don’t have to learn a new language or new local customs. Fears: Professor John Oxford at Queen Mary Hospital warns of a pandemic within the next five years Genetically, we humans are not very diverse; an epidemic that can kill people in one part of the world can kill them in any other just as easily. On top of this, our risk of catching such deadly contagions from wild animals is growing massively, thanks to humankind’s relentless encroachment into the world’s jungles and rainforests, where we increasingly come into contact for the first time with unknown viral killers that have been evolving and incubating in wild creatures for millennia. This month, an international research team announced it had identified an entirely new African virus that killed two teenagers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2009. The virus induced acute hemorrhagic fever, which causes catastrophic widespread bleeding from the eyes, ears, nose and mouth, and can kill in days. A 15-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl who attended the same school both fell ill suddenly and succumbed rapidly. A week after the girl’s death, a nurse who cared for her developed similar symptoms. He only narrowly survived. The new microbe is named Bas-Congo virus (BASV), after the province where its three victims lived. It belongs to a family of viruses known as rhabdoviruses, which includes rabies. A report in the journal PLoS Pathogens says the virus probably originated in local wildlife and was passed to humans through insect bites or some other as-yet unidentified means. There are plenty of other new viral candidates waiting in the wings, guts, breath and blood of animals around us. You can, for example, catch leprosy from armadillos, which carry the virus in their shells and are responsible for a third of leprosy cases in the U.S. Horses can transmit the Hendra virus, which can cause lethal respiratory and neurological disease in people. In a new book that should give us all pause for thought, award-winning U.S. natural history writer David Quammen points to a host of animal-derived infections that now claim lives with unprecedented regularity. The trend can only get worse, he warns. Quammen highlights the Ebola fever virus, which first struck in Zaire in 1976. The virus’s power is terrifying, with fatality rates as high as 90 per cent. The latest mass outbreak of the virus, in the Congo last month, is reported to have killed 36 people out of 81 suspected cases. According to Quammen, Ebola probably originated in bats. The bats then infected African apes, quite probably through the apes coming into contact with bat droppings. The virus then infected local hunters who had eaten the apes as bushmeat. Quammen believes a similar pattern occurred with the HIV virus, which probably originated in a single chimpanzee in Cameroon. 'It is inevitable we will have a global outbreak' Studies of the virus’s genes suggest it may have first evolved as early as 1908. It was not until the Sixties that it appeared in humans, in big African cities. By the Eighties, it was spreading by airlines to America. Since then, Aids has killed around 30 million people and infected another 33 million. There is one mercy with Ebola and HIV. They cannot be transmitted by coughs and sneezes. ‘Ebola is transmissible from human to human through direct contact with bodily fluids. It can be stopped by preventing such contact,’ Quammen explains. ‘If HIV could be transmitted by air, you and I might already be dead. If the rabies virus — another zoonosis — could be transmitted by air, it would be the most horrific pathogen on the planet.’ Viruses such as Ebola have another limitation, on top of their method of transmission. They kill and incapacitate people too quickly. In order to spread into pandemics, zoonoses need their human hosts to be both infectious and alive for as long as possible, so that the virus can keep casting its deadly tentacles across the world’s population. But there is one zoonosis that can do all the right (or wrong) things. It is our old adversary, flu. It is easily transmitted through the air, via sneezes and coughs. Sars can do this, too. But flu has a further advantage. As Quammen points out: ‘With Sars, symptoms tend to appear in a person before, rather than after, that person becomes highly infectious. Isolation: Unlike Sars the symptoms of this new disease may not be apparent before the spread of infection ‘That allowed many Sars cases to be recognised, hospitalised and placed in isolation before they hit their peak of infectivity. But with influenza and many other diseases, the order is reversed.’ Someone who has an infectious case of a new and potentially lethal strain of flu can be walking about innocently spluttering it over everyone around them for days before they become incapacitated. Such reasons lead Professor Oxford, a world authority on epidemics, to warn that a new global pandemic of animal-derived flu is inevitable. And, he says, the clock is ticking fast. Professor Oxford’s warning is as stark as it is certain: ‘I think it is inevitable that we will have another big global outbreak of flu,’ he says. ‘We should plan for one emerging in 2017-2018.’ But are we adequately prepared to cope? Professor Oxford warns that vigilant surveillance is the only real answer that we have. ‘New flu strains are a day-to-day problem and we have to be very careful to keep on top of them,’ he says. ‘We now have scientific processes enabling us to quickly identify the genome of the virus behind a new illness, so that we know what we are dealing with. The best we can do after that is to develop and stockpile vaccines and antiviral drugs that can fight new strains that we see emerging.’ But the Professor is worried our politicians are not taking this certainty of mass death seriously enough. Such laxity could come at a human cost so unprecedentedly high that it would amount to criminal negligence. The race against newly-emerging animal-derived diseases is one that we have to win every time. A pandemic virus needs to win only once and it could be the end of humankind. VIDEO: Signs and symptoms of Crimean-Congo Viral Hemorrhagic Fever... http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2217774/The-Armageddon-virus-Why-experts-fear-disease-leaps-animals-humans-devastate-mankind-years.html

Everything Hankey got is from MAJOR OUTLETS, Telegraph (Lyons), Boston Globe (Strachan), LA TIMES (rest) ++++++++++++++++++ 173 % a super red flag towards drug explanation.

Get back to us the US or UK are directly aiding AQ tied groups. //end Colby +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Get back to where you once belonged Get back, get back Get back to where you once belonged Beatles US intelligence admits Syria arms aid goes to Al Qaeda By Bill Van Auken 16 October 2012 American Intelligence officials are acknowledging that the bulk of the weapons flowing into Syria for the US-backed war to topple the regime of Bashar al-Assad are going into the hands of Al Qaeda and like-minded Islamist militias. A lead article appearing in the New York Times Monday confirms the mounting reports from the region that jihadist elements are playing an increasingly prominent role in what has become a sectarian civil war in Syria. “Most of the arms shipped at the behest of Saudi Arabia and Qatar to supply Syrian rebel groups fighting the government of Bashar al-Assad are going to hard-line Islamic jihadists, and not the more secular opposition groups that the West wants to bolster, according to American officials and Middle Eastern diplomats,” the Times reports. The article reflects the growing disquiet within US ruling circles over the Obama administration’s strategy in Syria and, more broadly, in the Middle East, and adds fuel to the deepening foreign policy crisis confronting the Democratic president with just three weeks to go until the election. In the distorted public debate between Democrats and Republicans, this crisis has centered around the September 11 attack on the US consulate and a secret CIA headquarters in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi that claimed the lives of the US ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens, and three other Americans. Republicans have waged an increasingly aggressive public campaign, indicting the Obama administration for failure to protect the American personnel. They have also accused the White House of attempting to cover up the nature of the incident, which the administration first presented as a spontaneous demonstration against an anti-Islamic video, before classifying it as a terrorist attack. In Sunday television interviews, Republicans pressed this line of attack while Democrats countered that it was a political “witch-hunt” and that the initial description of the attack was based on available intelligence at the time. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, appearing on the NBC news program “Face the Nation,” argued that the description of the fatal attack in Benghazi as a spontaneous event was politically motivated. The Obama reelection campaign, he charged, is “trying to sell a narrative that… Al Qaeda has been dismantled—and to admit that our embassy was attacked by Al Qaeda operatives undercuts that narrative.” What is involved, however, is not merely the disruption of an election campaign “narrative.” The events in Benghazi blew apart the entire US policy both in Libya and Syria, opening up a tremendous crisis for American foreign policy in the region. The forces that attacked the US consulate and CIA outpost in Benghazi were not merely affiliates of Al Qaeda, they were the same forces that Washington and its allies had armed, trained and supported with an intense air war in the campaign for regime-change that ended with the brutal murder of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi one year ago. Ambassador Stevens, who was sent into Benghazi at the outset of this seven-month war, was the point man in forging this cynical alliance between US imperialism and forces and individuals that Washington had previously branded as “terrorists” and subjected to torture, rendition and imprisonment at Guantanamo. The relationship between Washington and these forces echoed a similar alliance forged in the 1980s with the mujahideen and Al Qaeda itself in the war fostered by the CIA in Afghanistan to overthrow a government aligned with Moscow and to bloody the Soviet army. Just as in Afghanistan, the Libyan arrangement has led to “blowback” for US imperialism. Having utilized the Islamist militias to follow up NATO air strikes and hunt down Gaddafi, once this goal was achieved Washington sought to push them aside and install trusted assets of the CIA and the big oil companies as the country’s rulers. Resenting being cut out of the spoils of war, and still heavily armed, the Islamist forces struck back, organizing the assassination of Stevens. The Obama administration cannot publicly explain this turn of events without exposing the so-called “war on terror,” the ideological centerpiece of American foreign policy for over a decade, as a fraud, along with the supposedly “humanitarian” and “democratic” motives for the US intervention in Libya. Moreover, it is utilizing the same forces to pursue its quest for regime-change in Syria, which is, in turn, aimed at weakening Iran and preparing for a US-Israeli war against that country. And, as the Times article indicates, an even more spectacular form of “blowback” is being prepared. The Times quotes an unnamed American official familiar with US intelligence findings as saying, “The opposition groups that are receiving most of the lethal aid are exactly the ones we don’t want to have it.” The article points to the role of the Sunni monarchies in Qatar and Saudi Arabia in funneling weaponry to hard-line Islamists, based upon their own religious sectarian agendas in the region, which are aimed at curtailing the influence of Shia-dominated Iran. It attributes the failure of CIA personnel deployed at the Turkish-Syrian border in attempting to vet groups receiving weapons to a “lack of good intelligence about many rebel figures and factions.” What the article fails to spell out, however, is precisely what “secular opposition groups” exist in Syria that the US wants to arm. The Turkish-based leaderships of the National Syrian Council and the Free Syrian Army have little influence and are largely discredited inside Syria. A report issued by the International Crisis Group (ICG) on October 12 entitled “Tentative Jihad, Syria’s Fundamentalist Opposition” suggests that the so-called “secularist” armed opposition does not exist. It notes that, “the presence of a powerful Salafi strand among Syria’s rebels has become irrefutable,” along with a “slide toward ever-more radical and confessional discourse and… brutal tactics.” It cites the increasingly prominent role played by groups like Jabhat al-Nusra [the Support Front] and Kata’ib Ahrar al-Sham [the Freemen of Syria Battalions],” both of which unambiguously embraced the language of jihad and called for replacing the regime with an Islamic state based on Salafi principles.” Finally, it attributes the rising influence of these elements to “the lack of moderate, effective clerical and political leadership,” under conditions in which more moderate Sunni elements have opposed the so-called “rebels.” “Overall, the absence of an assertive, pragmatic leadership, coupled with spiraling, at times deeply sectarian, violence inevitably played into more hard-line hands,” the ICG report concludes. Increasingly, elements within the US ruling establishment are citing the growing influence of the Islamist militias in Syria as a justification for a direct US military intervention. Representative of this view is Jackson Diehl, the Washington Post’s chief foreign affairs editor and a prominent advocate of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. In an October 14 column, Diehl describes the situation in Syria as “an emerging strategic disaster” attributable to Obama’s “self-defeating caution in asserting American power.” “Fixed on his campaign slogan that ‘the tide of war is receding’ in the Middle East,” Diehl writes, “Obama claims that intervention would only make the conflict worse—and then watches as it spreads to NATO ally Turkey and draws in hundreds of al-Qaeda fighters.” Chiding Romney and the Republicans for focusing on the terrorist attack in Benghazi, Diehl notes that this is easier than asking “war-weary Americans” to contemplate yet another war of aggression. Nonetheless, he suggests, once the election is over, such a war will be on the agenda, no matter who sits in the White House.

Eyewitness Reports Of Explosions Before WTC Collapses Edmund McNally, WTC 2 victim, 97th floor Edmund McNally phoned his wife Liz twice following the aircraft impact. Mr McNally said in his second phone call "Liz, this was a terrorist attack. I can hear explosions below me.'' Louie Cacchioli, a firefighter assigned to Engine 47 in Harlem On the last trip up a bomb went off. We think there was bombs set in the building. Kim White, WTC 1 survivor, on 80th floor at time of impact We got down as far as the 74th floor [...] Then there was another explosion, so we left again by the stairwell. The above account ties in with the following news broadcast: 9/11 NBC News broadcast 211KB mp3 - to download file right click the link and select 'Save Target As' "Shortly after 9 o'clock [...] [Albert Turi the Chief of Safety for the New York Fire Department] received word of the possibility of a secondary device, that is another bomb going off. He tried to get his men out as quickly as he could, but he said there was another explosion which took place, and then an hour after the first hit, the first crash that took place, he said there was another explosion that took place in one of the towers here, so obviously according to his theory he thinks that there were actually devices that were planted in the building. One of the secondary devices he thinks that took place after the initial impact he thinks may have been on the plane that crashed into one of the towers. The second device, he thinks, he speculates, was probably planted in the building." One eyewitness whose office is near the World Trade Center told AFP that he was standing among a crowd of people on Church Street, about two-and-a-half blocks from the South tower, when he saw "a number of brief light sources being emitted from inside the building between floors 10 and 15." He saw about six of these brief flashes, accompanied by "a crackling sound" before the tower collapsed. Each tower had six central support columns. [ American Free Press] Note: See The Oklahoma City Bombing for an explanation of the "crackling sound". From the Rubble When the rescue team reached an area directly in front of Tower Two, Antonio said he'd take over the equipment cart Will had pushed from Building 5. [...] The team moved ahead. Scant minutes passed. Suddenly the hallway began to shudder as a terrible deafening roar swept over them. That's when Will saw the giant fireball explode in the street. Four survived by ignoring words of advice As he left the building, [Ronald DiFrancesco] saw a fireball rolling toward him. He put his arms in front of his face. He woke up three days later at St. Vincent's hospital. His arms were burned. Some bones were broken. His lungs were singed. But he was alive -- the last person out of the south tower. Photojournalists at Ground Zero David Handschuh: "Instinctively I lifted the camera up, and something took over that probably saved my life. And that was to run rather than take pictures. I got down to the end of the block and turned the corner when a wave — a hot, solid, black wave of heat threw me down the block. It literally picked me up off my feet, and I wound up about a block away". "Handschuh was thrown under a vehicle, which probably saved him from the falling debris, he said," according to the PDNonline story. Don Halasy: "As I turned to run, a wall of warm air came barrelling toward me. I tried to outrace it, but it swept me up and literally blew me into the wall of a building. By the time I regained my footing, a hailstorm of debris was falling from the sky." Trusses failing on floors 70+ of WTC 2, a building containing a minimal amount of fire, would not have caused a major explosion at the building's base. The above eyewitness accounts are corroborated by the 9/11 firefighters' transmissions on this page. Other firefighters also talk of an explosion before the collapse of WTC 1: 911 Tapes Tell Horror Of 9/11 Official: Battalion 3 to dispatch, we've just had another explosion. Official: Battalion 3 to dispatch, we've had additional explosion. Dispatcher: Received battalion command. Additional explosion. [...] Dispatcher: Battalion 5, be advised we're trying to contact Battalion 3 at this moment to report north tower just collapsed. 'Everyone was screaming, crying, running. It's like a war zone' In New York, police and fire officials were carrying out the first wave of evacuations when the first of the World Trade Centre towers collapsed. Some eyewitnesses reported hearing another explosion just before the structure crumbled. Police said that it looked almost like a "planned implosion" designed to catch bystanders watching from the street. An Eye-Witness Account of the World Trade Center Attacks from Neil deGrasse Tyson The following is taken from an email Neil deGrasse Tyson sent to his family and friends on 12 September 2001. Neil witnessed the attacks on the twin towers from his apartment only six blocks from the World Trade Center. "As more and more and more and more and more emergency vehicles descended on the World Trade Center, I hear a second explosion in WTC 2, then a loud, low-frequency rumble that precipitates the unthinkable -- a collapse of all the floors above the point of explosion. First the top surface, containing the helipad, tips sideways in full view. Then the upper floors fall straight down in a demolition-style implosion, taking all lower floors with it, even those below the point of the explosion." "I decide it's time to get my daughter, who was taken by the parents of a friend of hers to a small office building, six blocks farther from the WTC than my apartment. As I dress for survival: boots, flashlight, wet towels, swimming goggles, bicycle helmet, gloves, I hear another explosion followed by a now all-too familiar rumble that signaled the collapse of WTC 1, the first of the two towers to have been hit. I saw the iconic antenna on this building descend straight down in an implosion twinning the first." CBS News Eyewitness Describes 'Secondary Explosions' in the WTC 09:59 - WTC 2 [93KB mp3] 10:28 - WTC 1 [89KB mp3] TCM Breaking News Tuesday, September 11, 2001 Third explosion at World Trade Centre 2:59:08 PM [GMT] A huge explosion has occurred at the second of the two twin towers hit by planes in New York. The tower is now covered in smoke. Part of second tower collapses 3:02:21 PM [GMT] There are reports that a part of the second tower has collapsed after the new explosion. CNN live report: WTC 2 collapse Streamed RealMedia "There has just been a huge explosion" Minute by Minute with the Broadcast News ABC shows video of the southern tower of the WTC folding, noting it happened just moments ago. “My God, “ says Jennings, “We’re talking about massive casualties.” Jennings begins to speculate that in order to demolish a building, there must be detonation at its base. He seems to be suggesting further bombs. Reporter Don Dahler steps in to change the direction of the thinking, “The top part was totally involved…the weight at the top collapsed the building…there was no explosion at the bottom.” [...] Peter Jennings says “I’m still confused about what caused the building to collapse,” over powerful, close up video of the first tower breaking apart and falling. Ottawa Citizen Timeline of Chaos 9:59 a.m. Reports of another huge explosion, the third at the WTC. A "cascade of fire and sparks" as one of the towers collapses and disappears from the skyline. Two women react to a third explosion at the World Trade towers He was on the 81st Floor of Two World Trade Center "I was almost out. I got down to the lobby, right near the Border’s book store. And then there was this explosion. I don’t know, I just got thrown to the ground and all this stuff fell on top of me." 9/11 Survivor Stories: Sujo & Mini "So they escorted us thru the exit of World Trade 2 and I had just reached the revolving door of the building that I heard a loud explosion and the whole building collapsed. [...] When that explosion took place and the building was crumbling over me I could see the pics of my wife, my parents, grandmother loved ones flash thru my mind and now what a relief that we are alive."

Romney Is The Darkest Of Insider Operatives Can You Spell C-I-A? If Not, Let Me Help You, It's Easy By John Hankey 7-19-12 With Cheney & Bush Sr. cheerleading at the top of their lungs, you have to know that Romney is a very dark member of the the darkest innermost circle But there are a number of facts from the article below, from today's L.A. Times that show that he has been an operative of this group, groomed, guided, and nurtured since, at least, his first day at Bain Capital. 1) "Bain Capital was enmeshed in the largely opaque world of international high finance from its very inception." Where did Romney get all these international contacts? In Panama? Panama is where the CIA laundered it's drug money. You won't have any trouble, I don't think, finding documentation that the profits from the sale of cocaine were laundered in Panama. It was one of the main charges against Manuel Noriega, the Panamanian strongman that Bush Sr. overthrew (after Noriega stopped co-operating in the cocaine trafficking and money-laundering). You will have much more trouble documenting that all these cocaine profits were CIA profits - but it has been done for you by Gary Webb and others. (3:08 to 5:15 of this video nails it ) 2) The first outside investor in Bain was a leading London financier, Sir Jack Lyons, who made a $2.5-million investment through a Panama shell company set up by a Swiss money manager, further shielding his identity. Years later, Lyons was convicted in an unrelated stock fraud scandal. OK. So the first guy they recruited to invest in Bain was a crook. But not all crooked bankers are CIA, are they? No. But all CIA bankers are crooks. 3) That first investment fund — used to invest in start-up companies and leveraged buyouts — paid out a stunning 173% in average annual returns over a decade, He was just starting out. His average return was 173%. 8% is a good, sound return. Where does he get the inside information that allows for this kind of return? It is a centuries-old tradition that investment bankers deal in inside information. Which is why the CIA was headed and manned by investment bankers from day-1. Allan Dulles was an investment banker. Spying and stealing information was his bread and butter. Where was Romney getting the inside information that allowed this kind of return? Dude! They were money laundering! How else? Please! 4) At the time, U.S. officials were publicly accusing some exiles in Miami of funding right-wing death squads in El Salvador. Some family members of the first Bain Capital investors were later linked to groups responsible for killings, though no evidence indicates those relatives invested in Bain or benefited from it. "right-wing" death squads means "CIA," if you didn't know. "Some exiles in Miami of funding right-wing death squads." No. Here's how it works. The CIA approaches a wealthy right-winger. They tell him, "Invest in this CIA front. We're laundering money, and we need some front people, civilians, to give us cover. You will kick us back a certain portion of your outrageous profits." So the whole thing is a CIA operation. And it has to be kept dark because the books are utterly cooked, and the profits, 173%, would attract the attention of any prosecutor worth a half a nickel. You can't make such a return honestly 5) Romney "was the most confident executive I've ever come across," translation: He knew the fix was in on all his deals. 6) Romney and Bill Bain were initially "terrified of bringing in Central Americans," Strachan told the Boston Globe in August 1994. "They were afraid of drug money." Reassured by Strachan, Romney flew to Miami to meet the group in 1984. "My friends were impressed by Mitt and the team and signed up for 20% of the fund," Wait. Romney and Bain were initially terrified of drug money. This is Nicaraguan money, the heart of CIA drug operations. But Romney met with the investors and laid the investors' worries to rest. Who was worried, now? Romeny was terrified, so he flies to Miami to reassure the men he's terrified of. Right. Makes sense. This Strachan character is a lead to be investigated. 7) The last part of the article, about investors from El Salvador, is hardest to analyze. It's meant to be complex. The 9 or so wealthiest families in El Salvador ruled the country for centuries like it was their kingdom; and slaughtered union, community and political leaders with impunity, eventually sparking a civil war. The CIA moved in on the side of the rulers. Among the Bain investors were Francisco R.R. de Sola and his cousin Herbert Arturo de Sola, whose brother Orlando de Sola was suspected by State Department officials and the CIA of backing the right-wing death squads, according to now-declassified documents. The point is that Bain is tied to the families who are closest to the CIA and their death squads. Most of the money they put into Bain Capital was through corporations set up in Panama with names such as Velof Trust, Jolla and Universal Selling Co. ... In the 1980s, Panama was "the country of choice for foreigners wanting to make investments on a confidential basis," said Steven H. Hagen, a Miami lawyer who provides tax advice to offshore companies and international investors. I suppose this confidentiality might be explained as a means of tax evasion. What do you think at this point? 173% return? Bain was using the ruling elite to launder CIA drug money. Bet the farm on that. 8) Jack Hanley, former head of Monsanto Co., put in $1 million. "It seemed like a hell of a smart thing for me to do to ride their coattails," said Hanley, now 83. "I got rich." Wait. Got that? The head of Monsanto did not get rich by being the head of Monsanto. He got rich by investing with Romney. ! ? ! ? Let me spell it out for you. First comes C then comes I then the last letter is A Invest with confidence! You can't lose! The dice are loaded. The fix is in. Water runs uphill, time moves backwards, lone assassins kill progressive politicians. All in a day's work. latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-bain-creation-20120719,0,192124.story latimes.com Bain Capital started with help of offshore investors Mitt Romney's firm raised more than a third of its first investment fund from wealthy foreigners — who mostly used companies in Panama, then known for tax advantages and banking secrecy. By Joseph Tanfani, Melanie Mason and Matea Gold 3:00 AM PDT, July 19, 2012 Washington Bureau WASHINGTON — When Mitt Romney launched Bain Capital in 1984, he struggled at first to raise enough money for the untested venture. Old-money families like the Rothschilds turned down the young Boston consultant. So he and his partners tapped an eclectic roster of investors, raising more than a third of their first $37-million investment fund from wealthy foreigners. Most of the foreign investors' money came through corporations registered in Panama, then known for tax advantages and unusual banking secrecy. Previously unreported details, documented in Massachusetts corporate filings and other public records, show that Bain Capital was enmeshed in the largely opaque world of international high finance from its very inception. The documents don't indicate any wrongdoing, and experts say that such financial vehicles are common for wealthy foreign investors. But the new details come as President Obama has criticized Romney for profiting from Bain Capital's own offshore investment entities, which are unavailable to most Americans. The Romney campaign declined to comment on the specifics of Bain's early investors. Romney has argued that his offshore investments are entirely proper, and that he has paid all the U.S. taxes that he owes. The offshore funds do provide tax advantages for foreign investors, allowing Bain to attract billions of dollars. "The world of finance is not as simple as some would have you believe," Romney said in an interview this week with National Review Online. The first outside investor in Bain was a leading London financier, Sir Jack Lyons, who made a $2.5-million investment through a Panama shell company set up by a Swiss money manager, further shielding his identity. Years later, Lyons was convicted in an unrelated stock fraud scandal. About $9 million came from rich Latin Americans, including powerful Salvadoran families living in Miami during their country's brutal civil war. That first investment fund — used to invest in start-up companies and leveraged buyouts — paid out a stunning 173% in average annual returns over a decade, according to a prospectus prepared by an outside bank. It was the start of the private equity powerhouse that ultimately fueled Romney's political career. He now cites his experience at Bain as a chief qualification for the White House. Romney faced unusual complications when he launched Bain Capital, a spinoff of Bain & Co., the Boston consulting firm he joined when he graduated from Harvard Business School. At the time, U.S. officials were publicly accusing some exiles in Miami of funding right-wing death squads in El Salvador. Some family members of the first Bain Capital investors were later linked to groups responsible for killings, though no evidence indicates those relatives invested in Bain or benefited from it. Romney has said he checked the foreign investors' backgrounds. His campaign and Bain Capital declined to provide specifics. Alex Stanton, a spokesman for Bain Capital, said confidentiality rules barred him from commenting on the investors. "The hyperbole of political campaigns cannot change the fact that Bain Capital has operated with high standards of integrity and excellence, including compliance with all applicable laws and regulations regarding the vetting of our investors in consultation with experienced counsel and other advisors," he said. "Any suggestion to the contrary is baseless." Matt McDonald, a spokesman for the Romney campaign, also declined to discuss details of the original fund. "There were many investors who saw the opportunity of a firm that could help fix broken companies and help them grow." But when Romney and his partners started the firm, Bain & Co. founder Bill Bain — worried the new venture could fail — barred them from soliciting current clients or corporations that would have to publicly disclose the investment, according to an early Bain Capital employee. Bain partners put in $12 million of their own money, then sought the rest from wealthy individuals. Records show the first investment in Bain Capital — $1.25 million in June 1984 — was in the name of Jean Overseas Ltd., registered in Panama by Marcel Elfen, a Swiss money manager. Later, the investment was doubled. The Panamanian shell company apparently was a vehicle for Lyons, the British businessman and philanthropist. Lyons died in 2008. His son, David Lyons of Quebec, said in a phone interview that he had never heard of Jean Overseas, but he confirmed that his father was "absolutely" an early investor in Bain Capital and said that Elfen, who died last year, was his father's money manager. David Lyons said that wealthy Europeans like his father often invested through offshore shell corporations. "It allowed some confidentiality," he said. "It allowed a lot of things." Jack Lyons worked as an outside consultant for Bain & Co., but that ended when he and three others were charged in the Guinness Affair, a stock scandal that rocked Britain. Convicted of fraud in 1990, he was spared prison time due to his failing health, but was stripped of his knighthood. Romney and his partners also won over the money manager for one of California's wealthiest families, the Crockers, whose family trust put in $4.8 million. Romney "was the most confident executive I've ever come across," said William Swanson, who at the time managed the family's investments. Other early investors included Robert Maxwell, the British publishing baron, who invested $2 million. After his drowning death in 1991, investigators discovered Maxwell had stolen hundreds of millions of dollars from his company's pension funds. But early on, the fundraising was still falling short. Harry Strachan, a Bain Capital partner who was born in Costa Rica to American missionary parents, knew Central American businessmen through his involvement in a Harvard-backed business school in Nicaragua. Why not pitch to them? Romney and Bill Bain were initially "terrified of bringing in Central Americans," Strachan told the Boston Globe in August 1994. "They were afraid of drug money." Reassured by Strachan, Romney flew to Miami to meet the group in 1984. "My friends were impressed by Mitt and the team and signed up for 20% of the fund," Strachan wrote in his self-published memoir, "Finding a Path." He did not respond to requests for comment. The group included some of El Salvador's wealthiest people: coffee grower Miguel A. Dueñas; members of the De Sola family, also coffee exporters; and Ricardo Poma, whose family conglomerate now owns car dealerships and luxury hotels across Central America. Other investors included Frank Kardonski, who co-founded the Panama Stock Exchange, and Diego Ribadeneira, nowEcuador'sambassador to Peru. Most of the money they put into Bain Capital was through corporations set up in Panama with names such as Velof Trust, Jolla and Universal Selling Co. In the 1980s, Panama was "the country of choice for foreigners wanting to make investments on a confidential basis," said Steven H. Hagen, a Miami lawyer who provides tax advice to offshore companies and international investors. The use of an offshore corporation to invest in a U.S. business shields foreign investors from estate taxes, but not income taxes, Hagen said. At the time, El Salvador was being torn apart in a civil war that ultimately left tens of thousands dead. The Bain investors — some of whom had their plantations seized and family members targeted — were waiting out the war in Miami. "Many of them were trying to move their money elsewhere," said Jeffery M. Paige, a University of Michigan professor who wrote a book about the Salvadoran ruling class. "It was a difficult transition, and of course their investment outlets were limited." Among the Bain investors were Francisco R.R. de Sola and his cousin Herbert Arturo de Sola, whose brother Orlando de Sola was suspected by State Department officials and the CIA of backing the right-wing death squads, according to now-declassified documents. Orlando de Sola, who has denied supporting the death squads, is now serving a four-year prison term for unrelated fraud charges. In an interview at the prison in Metapan, El Salvador, he said he did not benefit from the family investment in Bain Capital. Before Bain, the family's holdings were based in El Salvador, he said. "I would say their relationship with Bain Capital was a step to diversify into foreign investments. But I insist to you, I was not part of it." The other Latin American investors declined or did not respond to requests to comment. Other early investors were happy to talk about their lucrative early bet. Jack Hanley, former head ofMonsanto Co., put in $1 million. "It seemed like a hell of a smart thing for me to do to ride their coattails," said Hanley, now 83. "I got rich."

So ........you cant contradict anything in post # 1

===================================================== ===================================================== ############################## RELATED http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=19389&hl=potus

OF NOTE FOREKNOWLEDGE DISCREDITS AIA,CREDITS GAGE < ON TOPIC video reposted post # 102 above ############################## STAND DOWN WITHOUT SAYING STAND-DOWN The 'Stand-Down Order' The shocking failure of the air defense system to protect New York City and the capital would seem to require either an incredible series of failures or an order to stop intercepts -- a stand-down order. Yet apparently there have been no cases of military officials disciplined for gross negligence surrounding 9/11/01, nor have there been publicized reports of commanders admitting to having received stand-down orders. If the stand-down order were disguised as a procedural change, and enacted well in advance, it might be hidden in plain sight. CJCSI 3610.01, dated July 31, 1997, required that all requests for assistance in hijackings be approved by the Secretary of Defense. An update to that order, CJCSI 3610.01, dated June 1, 2001, had an exception for emergencies that would seem to give commanders in the field autonomy in ordering intercepts. However, that exception did not cover requests for "potentially lethal assistance", the kind required to respond to the attack: (DODD 2025.15, Feb. 18, 1997) 4.4 The Secretary of Defense retains approval authority for support to civil authorities involving: use of Commander in Chief (CINC)-assigned forces (personnel units, and equipment) when required under paragraph 4.5, below; DoD support that will result in a planned event with the potential for confrontation with specifically identified individuals and/or groups or will result in the use of lethal force. 1 Hence, this order may have been the long-sought stand-down order. If it is true that the standing orders would have required approval by the Secretary of Defense for intercepts on 9/11/01, then, in theory, a defacto stand-down could have been implemented by the secretary simply failing to act during the crisis. However, it is doubtful that insiders planning the attack would have relied on the orders alone to assure that there was no effective military response to the attack. It was likely one of a number of "fixes" that included multiple war games planned on the day of the attack. Thus, even if commanders violated standing orders and ordered intercepts of the commandeered jetliners, they would face depleted interceptor resources and corrupted flight data. The following post starts with the June 1st order and goes on about Rumsfeld. It fails to note Reference D, explained in Jerry Russell's stand-down post, and fails to note the order which JCSI 3610.01A supersedes, JCSI 3610.01. e x c e r p t title: Criminal Mastermind: Donald Rumsfeld From: *San Francisco IMC* ----------------------------------------------------------------- *Criminal Mastermind: Donald Rumsfeld* by D. Rumsfeld /Thursday July 17, 2003 at 06:52 PM/ Download the actual Joint Chiefs of Staff Document this article is based on (Adobe PDF): http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/cjcsd/cjcsi/3610_01a.pdf Criminal Mastermind: Donald Rumsfeld (please help to disseminate this information) By Donald Rumsfeld's own admission, he was unaware of any threats to the Pentagon -- the building where he was located during the September 11th attacks -- until an aircraft crashed into the side of it, and he ran out "into the smoke" to see if it might be a "A bomb? I had no idea." (ABC News This Week, Interview 9/16/01). Well, that's a pretty tall tale by any standard. The New York Times reported that by 8:13am, the FAA was aware of the first hijacking out of Boston. The Pentagon explosion, which Donald Rumsfeld claimed he had "no idea," did not occur until approximately 9:37am, nearly an hour and a half later, this after two of the tallest buildings in the world were devastated. Note that a plane hijacked out of Boston can reach Washington D.C. as easily as it can reach New York City. It was widely reported that Pentagon personnel were indeed aware of the threats to their security, and they took security measures on that morning. But not the "Secretary of Defense." Why should the man charged with defending the United States of America concern himself with hijacked aircraft? There is a set of procedures for responding to hijackings. In particular, these procedures were changed on June 1, 2001 while Rumsfeld was in power as our Secretary of Defense, in a document called: "CHAIRMAN OF THE JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF INSTRUCTION, J-3 CJCSI 3610.01A" (http://www.dtic.mil/...si/3610_01a.pdf) "AIRCRAFT PIRACY (HIJACKING) AND DESTRUCTION OF DERELICT AIRBORNE OBJECTS" These are the standing orders to the military as to how to respond to hijackings over United States territory. The June 1 '01 document deliberately changed the existing policies. Previous directives were issued in 1997, 1986 and before. What is shocking about this entire sordid episode is the total disconnect between what Donald Rumsfeld's story alleges (ignorance of inbound hijacked aircraft), and what these Chief of Staff Instructions require of the Secretary of Defense: "b. Support. When notified that military assistance is needed in conjunction with an aircraft piracy (hijacking) emergency, the DDO, NMCC, will: (1) Determine whether or not the assistance needed is reasonably available from police or commercial sources. If not, the DDO, NMCC, will notify the appropriate unified command or NORAD to determine if suitable assets are available and will forward the request to the Secretary of Defense for approval in accordance with DODD 3025.15, paragraph D.7 (reference d)." "APPROVAL" The usage of the word "approval" is the major change here to the existing hijacking response procedures. While the text of the document tries to link this "approval" to the previous orders "DODD 3025.15," the approval is now required BEFORE providing any assistance at all. Previously, approval would be required to respond to a situation with lethal force. This June 1st update to the orders stopped all military assistance in its tracks UNTIL approval from Donald Rumsfeld (the "Secretary of Defense") could be granted -- which, by his own admission, it was not. Rumsfeld claimed total ignorance of the inbound aircraft that attacked the Pentagon (on the opposite side of the building complex, where a construction project had been underway) .* In this manner, fighter planes were held up from immediately responding to the hijacked commercial jets on September the 11th. The flight base commanders were ordered by the June 1st "Joint Chiefs of Staff Instruction" to wait for "approval" from the Secretary of Defense before they could respond to hijackings, where they would have routinely responded in the past. It's inconceivable that New York City could be struck by two wayward jumbo jets, and still over 30 minutes later there remained no defenses over the skies of Washington D.C., easily one of the most heavily defended places in the world. This reality led Anatoli Kornukov, the commander-in-chief of the Russian Air Force to say: "Generally it is impossible to carry out an act of terror on the scenario which was used in the USA yesterday. (...) As soon as something like that happens here, I am reported about that right away and in a minute we are all up." The Plot Thickens Enter the patsy. Rumsfeld wouldn't be a mastermind if he hadn't thought of a fall guy to take the blame, if needed. This brings us to Tom White, the former Enron executive, appointed to be Secretary of the Army, and more importantly the "executive agent for the Department of Defense" on May 31, 2001 -- ONE DAY BEFORE THE NEW HIJACKING INSTRUCTIONS WERE ISSUED! The first public statement of Donald Rumsfeld on September 11th, 2001 makes an issue of Tom White's "responsibility" for the situation: "Secretary of the Army Tom White, who has a responsibility for incidents like this as executive agent for the Department of Defense, is also joining me." (The Pentagon, Arlington, Virginia, September 11, 2001 6:42 P.M., http://www.patriotre...l/0911/DoD.html) It should be noted that Rumsfeld eventually fired White, allegedly for disagreeing about a weapons system. But, what about the introduction cited above? This is clearly an attempt to divert blame and responsibility away from the Secretary of Defense, and over to the "executive agent" a position that the general public would have no knowledge. That way, if inquisitive reporters started asking questions about the procedures and failures, Rumsfeld would have an easy scapegoat as to who the *real* person in charge of the situation should have been. Amazingly, no mainstream reporters bothered to investigate these matters at this level, and so the patsy wound up being unnecessary. The Joint Chiefs of Staff Instruction is explicit, however, and it mentions Rumsfeld's position and it requires his "approval." Just where was this "approval" on September 11th 2001? There is no mention of the Secretary of Defense approving anything related to the hijackings. The Vice-President (Cheney) is on record as approving the shooting down of the fourth plane over Pennsylvania. Whether or not the shoot-down occurred is not yet clear. But there is no connection whatsoever to the Secretary of Defense, whose "approval" is explicitly required before the military can respond to a hijacking incident over the USA, according to its own instructions. CHANGING THE RULES The 1997 procedures provided a clear way for the military to respond to an emergency such as a hijacking: "4.7.1. Immediate Response. Requests for an immediate response (i.e., any form of immediate action taken by a DoD Component or military commander to save lives, prevent human suffering, or mitigate great property damage under imminently serious conditions) may be made to any Component or Command. The DoD Components that receive verbal requests from civil authorities for support in an exigent emergency may initiate informal planning and, if required, immediately respond as authorized in DoD Directive 3025.1 (reference (g))." Rumsfeld went ahead and clouded the waters. The priority in the June 1st, 2001 directive is to place decision making power -- in the specific case of a hijacking -- into the hands of the Secretary of Defense. This is repeated in multiple paragraphs: "c. Military Escort Aircraft (1) When notified that military escort aircraft are needed in conjunction with an aircraft piracy (hijacking) emergency, the DDO, NMCC, will notify the appropriate unified command or USELEMNORAD to determine if suitable aircraft are available and forward the request to the Secretary of Defense for approval in accordance with DODD 3025.15, paragraph D.7 (reference d)." This creates the necessity for: 1) making a request to the Secretary of Defense, and 2) receiving approval before military aircraft may respond. The statement "to determine if suitable aircraft are available" is also suspicious. Can anyone imagine a situation where the United States of America does not have a "suitable aircraft" available to respond to a hijacked airliner? NORAD tried to spin such a story in the aftermath of September 11th. Supposedly, we just didn't have any fighter planes on the morning of September 11th. What were they all doing? Obviously we had planes available in Washington D.C., because press reports tell us about the "air cover" or "air cap" that went into effect just after the Pentagon was struck. Planes from Andrews Air Force base were in the sky "just minutes" after the Pentagon was struck. Why was no air cover available BEFORE the Pentagon was struck, Mr. Rumsfeld? After all, the "Secretary of Defense" is supposed to approve the launching of "Military Escort Aircraft." Did you? If not, why not? Also, if you take no interest in actually "defending" the people of America during an attack, why do you remain in your position as the Secretary of Defense? RUMSFELD SPINNING LIES Both Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice have maintained the fiction that: "RUMSFELD: (...) Never would have crossed anyone's mind that a commercial airline -- usually a hijacker who takes an airplane, of course, wants to get someplace or wants to make a statement or wants to go on television or wants to hold hostages, but this is a distinctly different behavior pattern than we've seen previously, and now, obviously, it's something we have to be attentive to." (NBC's Meet the Press, Washington, D.C., September30, 2001 http://www.patriotre...930/SoDNBC.html) This is a blatant lie, which can be disproved in numerous ways: 1) Threats of a suicide skyjacking were known at the Genoa G-8 summit in July of 2001. The Italian government ringed the city of Genoa and the airport with anti-aircraft guns and missiles because of a known Al Qaeda plot to assassinate George W. Bush and other world leaders. (LA TIMES, September 27, 2001) 2) The Pentagon had staged response exercises, "Mass Casualty Exercises" in the case of a crash by a jetliner, nearly a year before September 11th in October of 2000. 3) Since 1995, the FBI had been aware of "Project Bojinka" a plan by extremists to simultaneously seize and to crash multiple commercial jets as suicide weapons. This prompted investigations at US flight schools. 4) Numerous warnings from Britain, Egypt, Germany, Russia, Israel, Jordan and others alerted the US intelligence services that a plane would be used as a weapon to attack "prominent symbols of American power," including World Trade Center and the Pentagon, during the Summer of 2001. 5) A small Cessna plane actually did crash into the White House on September 12, 1994. 6) In 1994, suicidal Algerian hijackers plotted to use an Air France jetliner, loaded with fuel and dynamite as a deadly weapon and crash into the Eiffel Tower. 7) Another similar plan had Muslim militants hijack Pan Am Flight 76 in Pakistan in 1986 in order to attack Tel Aviv, Israel. The plane was stormed before take-off. 8) At the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics, "Black Hawk helicopters and US Customs Service jets were deployed to intercept suspicious aircraft in the skies over the Olympic venues," (LA Times). With the numerous reports that came out in May of 2002 of Bush Administration warnings prior to September 11th, it is the lack of action that is most telling. The American people were not warned. Instead lies were told that "no warnings" were ever received. When it became public knowledge that warnings were indeed received, the Bush Administration spin changed to "warnings weren't specific enough." This is also a lie. If US airport security screeners were given the type of information that was widely known in the intelligence community, then there is a good chance that thousands of lives could have been saved. But, in that case, we wouldn't have a "new Pearl Harbor." PRETEXT FOR AMERICAN AGGRESSION The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) is a Washington foreign policy "think tank" created in 1997 by Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Jeb Bush and others. Their policy papers are available on the web. In a document called "Rebuilding America's Defenses" they spell out pretty straightforwardly what it is they seek. The "neo conservatives" want nothing short of total world domination though military and financial supremacy. It is about the time that the PNAC was founded when Rumsfeld and others began to pressure President Clinton to invade Iraq. A January 1998 letter demands a new strategy of Clinton: "That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime from power." Iraq, the second largest oil reserve in the world, is a major strategic prize. And it is the strategic advantage that drives the ideologues such as Rumsfeld, confident in the belief that whatever means employed are justified in the pursuit of American "primacy" or dominance over the entire world. The Project for the New American Century will accept no challenge to American supremacy around the globe, and the policies they are now implementing support this belief. They intend to raise military expenditures to absurd levels, in a world where the United States already outspends the rest of the earth combined on military. What the September 11th attacks are then is stated explicitly in "Rebuilding America's Defenses." It is the "new Pearl Harbor." According to Rumsfeld and company, the United States of America would slowly become the unchallenged power of the world. But this process would be speeded up satisfactorily if some new external attack, "some catastrophic and catalysing event, like a new Pearl Harbor" were to occur. This concept is also state explicitly in "THE GRAND CHESSBOARD - American Primacy And It's Geostrategic Imperatives," Zbigniew Brzezinski, Basic Books, 1997. Both Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz traveled around the media after September 11 repeating the phrase "Pearl Harbor," and cementing it in people's minds. The "Pearl Harbor effect" is what is sought. An America gung-ho for war, for payback, for militarism, for sacrifice, for tears, for aggression, for the kind of violence witnessed at Hiroshima or Nagasaki if need be, this is the intended effect of September the 11th and ultimately the reason that day came to pass. These are the true reasons that the September 11th attacks remain uninvestigated, covered-up and classified. Motive, opportunity and means -- the only thing needed here is justice. Much ado was made in the press about John Walker Lindh, the "American Taliban" who fought in Afghanistan. On September 11, 2001, there was another Al Qaeda operative, a man who did more to help the attacks succeed than anyone else. It was not Osama bin Laden, but Donald H. Rumsfeld who has earned his place in the history books as the "American Taliban 2." Don't forget that it was Donald Rumsfeld shaking the hand of Saddam Hussein in 1983, even while it was known that the dictator ("Hitler revisited") was using prohibited poison gas weapons. Rumsfeld assisted Saddam Hussein both financially and militarily, never once bringing up any qualms about helping a "ruthless dictator who gasses his own people." page: sf.indymedia.org/print.php?id=1628578 References 1. <a class="offsite" href="http://www.dtic.mil/whs/directives/corres/pdf/d302515_021897/d302515p.pdf">Military Assistance to Civil Authorities, dtic.mil, 2/18/1997

DAD was a welfare QUEEN Mitt Romney’s father, George Romney, was public aid recipient as child after family fled Mexico By Alan Wirzbicki, Globe Staff Mitt Romney had harsh words for welfare recipients in a hidden-camera videotape from a May fundraiser that was leaked this week. But his own father was once among public aid recipients. As the Globe has previously reported, George Romney’s family fled from Mexico in 1912 to escape a revolution there, and benefited from a $100,000 fund established by Congress to help refugees who had lost their homes and most of their belongings. That fund may have been what Lenore Romney, George Romney’s wife and Mitt Romney’s mother, was referring to in a video that was posted online earlier this month but has received renewed attention in the wake of Mitt Romney’s comments. “[George Romney] was on welfare relief for the first years of his life. But this great country gave him opportunities,” Lenore Romney said in the video, which apparently dates back to George Romney’s 1962 run for governor of Michigan. In Mitt Romney’s remarks at the May fundraiser, he said that 47 percent of people are dependent upon government, and described that segment of the population as a lost cause, both as prospective GOP voters and more generally. “I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives,” he said. Alan Wirzbicki can be reached at awirzbicki@globe.com.

http://www.mathaba.net/data/sis/mi6-terrorism.html ========================================= PUT BRITAIN ON THE LIST OF STATES SPONSORING TERRORISM January 21, 2000. Click headings below for shortcut to sections. Put Britain on the list of states sponsoring terrorism Criteria for evaluating whether Britain should be sanctioned The case against Great Britain Groups banned by the United States are headquartered in London The 'fatwa'against American targets Attacks on Yemen Formal diplomatic protests to London Put Britain on the list of states sponsoring terrorism The following memorandum, dated Jan. 11, 2000, was prepared for delivery to U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. It is a request to launch an investigation, pursuant to placing Great Britain on the list of states sponsoring terrorism. To: Hon. Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State From: The Editors, Executive Intelligence Review C.C.: Hon. William Cohen, Secretary of Defense Hon. Janet Reno, Attorney General Hon. George Tenet, Director of Central Intelligence Hon. Louis Freeh, Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation Hon. Jesse Helms, Chairman, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Hon. Joseph Biden, Ranking Democrat, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Hon. Benjamin Gilman, Chairman, House International Relations Committee Hon. Sam Gejdenson, Ranking Democrat, House International Relations Committee This is a formal request for you to initiate a review of the role of the government of Great Britain in supporting international terrorism, to determine whether Britain should be added to the list of nations sanctioned by the United States government for lending support to international terrorist organizations. This issue has been recently highlighted, as the result of the December 1999 Indian Airlines hijacking, and the response of the British government to the request of one of the freed Kashmiri terrorists, Ahmed Omar Sheikh, to be given safe passage to England. Mr. Sheikh, a British national, was tried and convicted in India, for his role in the kidnapping of four British nationals and an American in 1995. He was sentenced to five years in prison in November 1998. Initially, the British government announced that it would provide Mr. Sheikh with safe passage to Britain, and would not prosecute him or make any effort to extradite him back to India. However, long before the Sheikh case, Executive Intelligence Review has documented a pattern of British involvement in harboring international terrorists, dating back to 1995. As of this writing, no fewer than a dozen governments--many of them leading allies of the United States--have filed formal diplomatic protests with the British Foreign Office, over specific instances of British official support for terrorist groups, targetting those nations. Criteria for evaluating whether Britain should be sanctioned U.S. Government policy on sanctions against states sponsoring terrorism has been set by a series of Congressional acts, including, but not limited to: the Export Administration Act of 1979 (EAAA), the Anti-Terrorism and Arms Export Amendments Act of 1989 (ATAEAA), the Arms Export Control Act (22 U.S.C. 2780), the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, the Omnibus Appropriations Act of 1996, and the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) of 1996. It is our understanding that, while the Congress has given the Secretary of State broad discretion in designating a country as a state sponsor of terrorism, the legislative history of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has specified seven criteria which should guide the Secretary's action. These criteria are: Does the state provide terrorists sanctuary from extradition or prosecution? Does the state provide terrorists with weapons and other means of conducting violence? Does the state provide logistical support to terrorists? Does the state permit terrorists to maintain safehouses and headquarters on its territory? Does the state provide training and other material assistance to terrorists? Does the state provide financial backing to terrorist organizations? Does the state provide diplomatic services, including travel documents, that could aid in the commission of terrorist acts? As of this writing, the State Department currently designates seven countries as state sponsors of terrorism: Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, Sudan, Cuba, and North Korea. In the case of Syria, which is presently engaged in peace negotiations with Israel, the primary reason the regime remains on the list is that several designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) are headquartered in Damascus. In the State Department Authorization Act of October 1991, specific procedures were spelled out for the President to remove a country from the list of state sponsors of terrorism. Congress has a 45-day period to pass a joint resolution overriding such a Presidential decision to remove a state from the list, which carries with it a number of significant sanctions. The case against Great Britain The following documentary time line is intended to provide an outline of the evidence that we wish the appropriate officials at the U.S. State Department to review, to make a determination whether Great Britain should be added to the list of states sponsoring terrorism, according to the criteria outlined above. In July 1998, a former British MI5 officer, David Shayler, revealed that, in February 1996, British security services financed and supported a London-based Islamic terrorist group, in an attempted assassination against Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi. The action, Shayler charged, in an interview with the British Daily Mail, was sanctioned by then-Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind. The incident described by Shayler did, in fact, occur. Although Qaddafi escaped without injury, the bomb, planted along a road where the Libyan leader was travelling, killed several innocent bystanders. In an Aug. 5, 1998 interview with BBC, Shayler charged, "We paid £100,000 to carry out the murder of a foreign head of state. That is apart from the fact that the money was used to kill innocent people, because the bomb exploded at the wrong time. In fact, this is hideous funding of international terrorism." According to Shayler's BBC interview, MI6 provided the funds to an Arab agent inside Libya, with instructions to carry out the attack. In fact, in 1996, a previously unknown Libyan "Islamist" group appeared in London to claim responsibility for the attempted assassination of Qaddafi. On June 25, 1996, a bomb blew up the U.S. military barracks in Dharan, Saudi Arabia, killing 19 American soldiers. The next day, Saudi expatriate Mohammed al-Massari, the head of the London-based Committee for the Defense of Legitimate Rights, was interviewed on BBC. He warned the United States to expect more terror attacks, which he described as "intellectually justified." The U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia "is obviously not welcomed by a substantial fraction of the population there," he warned, "and they are ready to go to the execution stand for it." He concluded, "There are so many underground parties--so many splinter groups, many of them made up of people who fought in Afghanistan. . . . I expect more of the same." Despite the fact that al-Massari has repeatedly called for the overthrow of the House of Saud and the creation of an Islamic revolutionary state, he has been given "exceptional leave" to remain in Britain. In April 1996, the British Home Office granted al-Massari a four-year refugee permit to remain on British soil. Al-Massari is allied with the well-known Saudi expatriate Osama bin Laden, who, to this day, maintains a residence in the wealthy London suburb of Wembly. And London is the headquarters of bin Laden's Advise and Reform Commission, run by the London-based Khalid al-Fawwaz. Bin Laden has been given regular access to BBC and a variety of major British newspapers, to spread his calls for jihad against the United States. Thus, in July 1996, bin Laden told the London Independent, "What happened in Khobar [the U.S. Army barracks that was bombed on June 25] is a clear proof of the enormous rage of the Saudi population against them. Resistance against America will spread in many places through Muslim lands." On Jan. 25, 1997, Tory Member of Parliament Nigel Waterson introduced legislation to ban foreign terrorists from operating on British soil. His "Conspiracy and Incitement Bill," according to his press release, would have for the first time banned British residents from plotting and conducting terrorist operations overseas. Waterson proposed the bill in the aftermath of a scandal over Britain providing safe haven for Saudi terrorist Mohammed al-Massari, who claimed credit for the bombing of U.S. military sites in Saudi Arabia in June 1996. On Feb. 14, 1997, Labour MP George Galloway succeeded in blocking Waterson's bill from getting out of committee. Galloway, in a speech before the committee that was printed in the House of Commons official proceedings, stated, "The Bill will change political asylum in this country in a profound and dangerous way. It will change a state of affairs that has existed since Napoleon's time. . . . We are all in favor of controlling terrorism in Britain. Surely not a single honorable Member has any truck with terrorism here, but we are talking about terrorism in other countries. . . . The legislation is rushed in response to a specific, and, for the government, highly embarrassing refugee case--that of Professor al-Massari, who was a thorn in the side of the government of Saudi Arabia. . . . By definition, a tyranny can be removed only by extraordinary measures. Inevitably, in conditions of extreme repression, the leadership of such movements will gravitate to countries such as ours where freedom and liberty prevail. The bill will criminalize such people, even though they have not broken any law in Britain or caused any harm to the Queen's peace in her realm. They will fall open to prosecution in this country under the Bill because they are inciting, supporting, or organizing events in distant tyrannies, which are clearly offenses under the laws of such tyrants." On Nov. 17, 1997, the Gamaa al-Islamiya (Islamic Group) carried out a massacre of tourists in Luxor, Egypt, in which 62 people were killed. Since 1992, terrorist attacks by the Islamic Group have claimed at least 92 lives. Yet, the leaders of the organization have been provided with political asylum in Britain, and repeated efforts by the Egyptian government to have them extradited back to Egypt have met with stern rebuffs by Tory and Labour governments alike. On Dec. 14, 1997, British Ambassador to Egypt David Baltherwick was summoned by Egypt's Foreign Minister Amr Moussa and handed an official note, demanding that Britain "stop providing a safe haven to terrorists, and cooperate with Egypt to counter terrorism." In an interview with the London Times the same day, the Foreign Minister "called on Britain to stop the flow of money from Islamic radicals in London to terrorist groups in Egypt, and to ban preachers in British mosques calling for the assassination of foreign leaders." The Times added that Moussa "was outraged by reports that £2.5 million had come from exiles in Britain to the outlawed Gamaa al-Islamiya," and noted that the Egyptian government "has blamed the Luxor massacre on terrorists funded and encouraged from abroad, and identified Britain as the main center for radicals plotting assassinations." To substantiate the charges against Britain, the Egyptian State Information Service posted a "Call to Combat Terrorism" on its official web site. The document read, in part, "Hereunder, is a list of some of the wanted masterminds of terrorism, who are currently enjoying secure and convenient asylum in some world capitals." The "wanted list" consisted of photographs and biographical data on 14 men, linked to the Luxor massacre and other earlier incidents of terrorism. The first seven individuals listed were all, at the time, residing in London. They are: Yasser al Sirri: "Sentenced to death in the assassination attempt on the life of former Prime Minister Dr. Atef Sidqi; founded the Media Observatory in London as mouthpiece for the New Vanguards of Conquest." Adel Abdel Bari: "At present, heads Egyptian Human Rights Defense Office, affiliated to Media Observatory in London, the mouthpiece for the outlawed Jihad Organization." Mustafa Hamzah: "Commander of the military branch of the outlawed `Islamic Group.' " Tharwat Shehata: "Sentenced to death in the assassination attempt on Dr. Atef Sidqi, former Prime Minister; associated with, and in charge of financing extremist elements abroad; involved in reactivating the outlawed `Jihad Organization' abroad." Osama Khalifa: "Accused no. 1 in the case involving domestic and foreign activities of the outlawed Islamic Group." Refa Mousa. Mohamed el Islambouli: "One of the principal leaders of the Islamic Group; sentenced to death in the case of the outlawed organization of `Returnees from Afghanistan.' " Groups banned by United States are headquartered in London Shortly before the Luxor massacre, on Oct. 8, 1997, the U.S. State Department, in compliance with the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1996, released a list of 30 Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs), banned from operating on U.S. soil. Of the 30 groups named, six maintain headquarters in Britain. They are: the Islamic Group (Egypt), Al-Jihad (Egypt), Hamas (Israel, Palestinian Authority), Armed Islamic Group (Algeria, France), Kurdish Workers Party (Turkey), and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (Sri Lanka). The Islamic Group, and its subsidiary arm, Islamic Jihad, are headquartered in London. In February 1997, the British government formally granted permission to Abel Abdel Majid and Adel Tawfiq al Sirri to establish Islamic Group fundraising and media offices in London, under the names International Bureau for the Defense of the Egyptian People and the Islamic Observatory. Abdel Majid was implicated in the October 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, and he subsequently masterminded the escape of two prisoners jailed for the assassination. In 1991, he fled to Britain and immediately was granted political asylum. He has coordinated the Islamic Group's overseas operations ever since. In fact, he was sentenced to death in absentia for the bombing of the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan in November 1995, in which 15 diplomats were killed. Abdel Tawfiq al Sirri, the co-director of the movement, has also been granted political asylum in Britain, despite the fact that he was also sentenced to death in absentia for his part in the 1993 attempted assassination of Egyptian Prime Minister Atif Sidqi. In September 1997, Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, who is in jail in the United States for his role in the Feb. 28, 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York, issued an order, as the spiritual leader of the Islamic Group, calling for an immediate cease-fire. The six members of the ruling council of Islamic Group residing in Egypt endorsed the Sheikh's order, but the remaining six council member, living in London, rejected the order. Two months later, the massacre at Luxor took place. Similarly, the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (GIA), which was responsible for the assassination of Algerian President Mohamed Boudiaf on June 29, 1992, has its international headquarters in London. Sheikh Abu Qatabda and Abu Musab communicate military orders to GIA terrorists operating in Algeria and France via the London-based party organ, Al Ansar. Sheikh Abu Qatabda was granted political asylum in Britain in 1992, after spending years working in Peshawar, Pakistan with various Afghani mujahideen groups. A third London-based GIA leader, Abou Farres, oversees operations targetted against France. He was granted asylum in Britain in 1992, after he was condemned to death in Algeria for acknowledging responsibility for a bombing at Algiers airport, which killed nine people and wounded 125. Farres was believed responsible, from his base in London, for the July-September 1995 string of blind terrorist acts in France, including bombings of three Paris train and subway stations and an open-air market. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), known as the "Tamil Tigers," have carried out a decade-long terror campaign against the government of Sri Lanka, in which they have killed an estimated 130,000 people. In addition, LTTE was responsible for the suicide-bomber murder of former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi on May 21, 1991, and the similar assassination of Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa on May 1, 1993. Since 1984, the LTTE International Secretariat has been located in London. The official spokesman for the Secretariat is Anton Balsingham, an Oxford University graduate and former British Foreign Office employee. The group's suicide-bomber division, the Black Tigers, which killed Rajiv Gandhi, is run by Pampan Ajith, out of LTTE London headquarters; another elite suicide-bomber cell, the Sky Tigers, which employs light aircraft, is coordinated by Dr. Maheswaran, also based in London. Most of the marching orders for terrorist operations in the Indian subcontinent are delivered from London, via a string of LTTE publications, including Tamil Nation and Hot Spring, published in London, and Network and Kalathil, published in Surrey. The organization's chief fundraiser and banker, Lawrence Tilagar, is also based in London. Similarly, the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, maintains its publishing operations in London, including its monthly organ, Filisteen al-Muslima. In 1996, this publication issued a fatwa (religious ruling), calling for terrorist attacks against Israel. On Feb. 25 and March 3, shortly after the fatwa was published, Hamas suicide bombers blew up two Jerusalem buses and a Tel Aviv market, killing 55 people. Funding of these terrorists, who are part of the military wing, Izeddin al Kassam, comes from London, where Interpal is the chief money arm of the group. In the case of the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), the British government played an even more direct role in supporting the 17-year war against the Turkish government by the Kurdish separatists. An estimated 19,000 people have been killed in Southeast Turkey since the PKK launched its terror war in 1983. In May 1995, after the PKK was expelled from Germany, for seizing control of Turkish diplomatic buildings in 18 European cities, the British government licensed MED-TV in London, through which the PKK broadcasts four hours a day into its enclaves inside Turkey, and all over Europe. In a March 1996 broadcast, PKK leader Apo Ocalan called for the execution of German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and his Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel. And when the PKK held its founding "parliament in exile" in Belgium in 1995, three members of the British House of Lords either attended or sent personal telegrams of endorsement. The three were Lord Hylton, Lord Avebury, and Baroness Gould. The same Lord Avebury has been an active backer of the Peru Support Group in London, which has served as a major international fundraising front for the Peruvian narco-terrorist group Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso). When Adolfo Héctor Olaechea was dispatched by Shining Path to London in July 1992, to establish the "foreign affairs bureau," he received a letter of recognition from Buckingham Palace, which he circulated widely. The letter read in part, "The private secretary is commanded by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth to acknowledge receipt of the letter from Mr. Olaechea, and to say that it has been passed on to the Home Office." In addition to the six FTOs who have their headquarters in Britain, an additional 16 groups on the State Department's 1997 list either receive funding from groups based in Britain, or receive military training and logistical support from groups operating freely from British soil. Those groups are: the Abu Nidal Organization (Palestinian Authority), Harkat ul-Ansar (India), Mujahideen e Khalq (Iran), Kach (Israel, Palestinian Authority), Kahane Chai (Israel, Palestinian Authority), Abu Sayyaf (Philippines), Hezbollah (Israel, Lebanon), Khmer Rouge (Cambodia), ELN (Colombia), FARC (Colombia), Shining Path (Peru), MRTA (Peru), Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (Israel, Palestinian Authority), Islamic Jihad-Shaqaqi (Israel, Palestinian Authority), Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (Israel, Palestinian Authority), PFLP-General Command (Israel, Palestinian Authority). The 'fatwa' against American targets On Feb. 10, 1998, a group of well-known London-based "Islamists" and Islamic organizations issued a fatwa, calling for terrorist attacks against American targets. It was signed by Saudi terrorist supporter Mohammed Al-Massari and Omar Bakri, head of the Al-Muhajiroon, and was endorsed by 60 organizations that are based in the United Kingdom. It instructed Muslims living in the United States: "You have first to renounce the residency or acquire citizenship, then start military activities if physically capable. You are then at liberty to fight them everywhere in the world or re-enter the realm clandestinely and wreak havoc, obviously facing charges as spy, terrorist, etc." On Feb. 23, 1998, a second fatwa was issued, entitled "World Islamic Front's Statement Urging Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders." It called for killing Americans because of their "occupation of the holy Arab Peninsula and Jerusalem" and their "oppressing the Muslim nations," and concluded, "in compliance with God's order, we issue the following fatwa to all Muslims: The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies--civilian and military--is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy Mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of the lands of Islam, defeated, and unable to threaten any Muslims. We--with God's help--call on every Muslim who believes in God and wishes to be rewarded to comply with God's order to kill the Americans." The fatwa, which was widely reported in the London-based Arabic daily Al Quds al Arabi, was signed by Sheikh Osama bin Laden, who, despite his current residence in Afghanistan, continues to maintain a lavish mansion in London; Ayman al Zawahiri, head of the Islamic Group behind the November 1997 massacre at Luxor, Egypt; Abu Yasser Rifai Ahmad Taha, another leader of the Islamic Group, residing in London; and Sheikh Mir Hamza, secretary of the Jamiat ul Ulema e, of Pakistan. The two fatwas were the subject of testimony by an official of the Central Intelligence Agency on Feb. 23, 1998, before the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, chaired by Sen. John Kyl (R-Ariz.). At Senator Kyl's request, the CIA Counterterrorism Center provided the subcommittee with a declassified memorandum, titled "Fatwas or Religious Rulings by Militant Islamic Groups Against the United States." The memorandum stated that "a coalition of Islamic groups in London, and terrorist financier Osama bin Laden, have issued separate fatwas, or religious rulings, calling for attacks on U.S. persons and interests worldwide, and on those of U.S. allies. . . . Both fatwas call for attacks to continue until U.S. forces retreat from Saudi Arabia and Jerusalem. The fatwa from the groups in london also calls for attacks until sanctions on Iraq are lifted. These fatwas are the first from these groups that explicitly justify attacks on American civilians anywhere in the world. Both groups have hinted in the past that civilians are legitimate targets, but this is the first religious ruling sanctifying such attacks." Two days before the Aug. 7, 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya, the Islamic Jihad issued a declaration, targetting American interests all over the world. The communiqué accused the CIA of cooperating with Egyptian officials to capture three members of the group in Albania, and extradite them to Egypt where they faced prosecution on capital offenses. Within hours of the two bombings, a number of London-based groups issued endorsements of the bombings. Supporters of Sharia, headed by Abu Hamza Al-Misri, an Egyptian who was convicted of a capital offense in Egypt, but who enjoys political asylum in London, issued one of the most virulent "endorsements." Omar Bakri, the head of Al-Muhajiroon, as well as the Islamic Observation Center, the Islamic Jihad organization's official propaganda and fundraising organization in London, also endorsed the bombings. The Islamic Observation Center was officially licensed by the British government in 1996 to carry out activities in Britain. Attacks on Yemen In the third week of December 1998, a London-based terrorist group was planning to launch operations to destabilize the Republic of Yemen. Members of the Ansar Al-Sharia, directed from London by Mustafa Kamel (a.k.a. Abu Hamza Al-Masri, a British citizen and former Afghansi "mujahid," who trains groups of young people for terrorist activities at his Finsbury Mosque in north London, were arrested on Dec. 23, 1998 in Yemen, as they were planning armed terrorist operations. These terrorists were in contact with the Islamic Army of Abeen-Aden (affiliated with the London-based Egyptian Islamic Jihad), which had kidnapped 16 British and Australian tourists a few days earlier. A rescue operation on Dec. 29 by the Yemeni security forces resulted in the kidnappers killing three British hostages and one Australian; 12 tourists were freed. British press and, later, government officials, accused the Yemeni security forces of "provoking the murders," because they refused to negotiate with the terrorists. In response, the Yemeni authorities did not mince words. In one day, Yemen kicked out the British Scotland Yard officers who had been invited to observe the investigations, withdrew its application to join the British Commonwealth, and announced that a group of British citizens had been arrested while attempting a massive terror-bombing campaign in Aden. On Jan. 25, Yemen President Ali Abdullah Saleh demanded from British Prime Minister Tony Blair that Abu Hamza Al-Masri be handed over for trial in Yemen on charges of carrying out terrorist acts in Yemen and several other Arab states. This was expressed in an official message Saleh sent to Blair, conveyed by the British Ambassador to Yemen, Victor Henderson. The London-based daily Al-Hayat reported that, according to government sources in Sanaa, Yemen's capital, the message from President Saleh stressed that the Yemeni government has the right to demand that the British government hand over Abu Hamza, and evidence and documents which prove its description of Abu Hamza as a "terrorist" and "extremist." However, British law does not consider it a crime for individuals and groups based in Britain to plan, incite, or conduct terrorist operations outside Her Majesty's domains. Abu Hamza's case is even more complicated, because he is not only an asylum seeker, but has British citizenship. The Yemeni request came in the context of investigations conducted by the Yemeni security authorities into the group whose members were arrested on Dec. 23, including five British citizens (one of them the son of Abu Hamza) and one French citizen, who were in possession of weapons and explosives and were said to be involved in carrying out "terrorist and destructive plans which undermine Yemen's security and stability." The Yemeni investigations found that Abu Hamza has relations with this group, in addition to his "firm links to the Islamic Army of Aden," led by Abu Hassan al-Muhdar, who is in custody. Al-Muhdar's group carried out the kidnapping of the tourists in December 1998. The Yemeni government sources added that the message of the Yemeni President to the British Prime Minister expressed Yemen's great regret over the "terrorist activities carried out by Abu Hamza al-Masri" and others from the British territories, acts which it said undermine Yemen's security and stability, as well as similar terrorist acts in several Arab states. Eight days earlier, Abu Hamza called for killing Yemeni officials if the Yemeni authorities sentenced the kidnappers to death. Replying to a question from the Qatari al-Jazira satellite TV network on Jan. 14, he said: "If Zein al-Abidin al-Muhdar were to be executed, there will be revenge acts and massacres." Abu Hamza stated in a televised debate on Jan. 18 that he had been contacted by the leader of the group that carried out the kidnapping before the rescue operation, "and asked me for advice." Abu Hamza accordingly issued a communiqué and threatened the Yemeni authorities. The target of these operations has been the government of the Republic of Yemen itself. Abu Hamza made this clear in the televised debate, in which he said that the ultimate goal is to overthrow the secular regime in Sanaa, and that there are supporters in Yemen who are ready to fight for establishing an Islamic state. Al-Muhdar, during his trial in Yemen, confirmed that the objective of his group is to overthrow every secular government in the region. Formal diplomatic protests to London This British harboring of international terrorist groups has not gone unnoticed by the nations that have been the targets of this brutality. To date, the British Foreign Office has received formal diplomatic protests from at least ten victimized countries. These include: EGYPT: British asylum for the Islamic Group and Islamic Jihad has been a persistent reason for Egyptian complaints to the British government. In April 1996, Egyptian Interior Minister Hasan al-Alfi told the British Arabic weekly Al-Wasat, "All terrorists come from London. They exist in other European countries, but they start from London." On Aug. 29, the government daily Al-Ahram reported that the British chargé d'affaires in Cairo was summoned by the Deputy Foreign Minister, and given a letter for Foreign Minister Malcolm Rifkind, protesting Britain's "double standard policy" and "support for international terrorism." An official of the Egyptian Foreign Ministry was quoted in the paper, saying, "The asylum law in Britain has provided a safe-haven for terrorists." Egypt has been particularly incensed that the British have allowed the Islamic Group/Islamic Jihad to use London as their home-base. Continual demands that Britain extradite Islamic Group leaders Adel Abdul Majid and Adel Tawfiq al Sirri back to Cairo, where they have been sentenced to death in absentia for terrorist crimes, have been rejected. On Feb. 13, 1997, Egyptian officials told Al-Hayat, that the Egyptian government remains "troubled" and "astonished" by Britain's decision to allow Abdul Majid to establish officially recognized centers in London, especially after the Egyptian Supreme Court released admissions from several members of the group, at the beginning of 1997, that they had received money and marching orders from Abdul Majid, to carry out bombings and assassinations throughout 1996. These same officials told the paper that "this only further supports Egypt's belief that London has become the most prominent center for anti-Egypt Islamic extremist groups," and that there will continue to be talks on the highest levels "to know the reasons that made the British government allow the establishment of that [islamic Group] office." Following the Luxor massacre, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak launched a personal international crusade to spotlight the role of the British government in harboring and sponsoring the terrorists who have targetted Egypt. ISRAEL: On March 3, 1996, after a Hamas bomb exploded in a Jerusalem market, killing a dozen people, and a second bomb exploded in Tel Aviv, Israel's ambassador to London met with Foreign Minister Rifkind to demand that Britain stop protecting the group. In an account of that confrontation, the London Express reported the next day, "Israeli security sources say the fanatics behind the bombings are funded and controlled through secret cells operating here. Only days before the latest terror campaign began, military chiefs in Jerusalem detailed how Islamic groups raised £7 million in donations from British organizations. The ambassador, Moshe Raviv, yesterday shared Israel's latest information about the Hamas operations. A source at the Israeli embassy said last night, `It is not the first time we have pointed out that Islamic terrorists are in Britain.' " The British Foreign Office officially responded to the Israeli ambassador: "We have seen no proof to support allegations that funds raised by the Hamas in the U.K. are used directly in support of terrorist acts elsewhere." In early September 1997, Shin Bet chief Ami Ayalon travelled to Britain, according to the Sunday Telegraph, after investigations determined that the two Hamas suicide bombers who killed 15 people in a Jerusalem market on July 30, arrived in Israel on British passports: "Israeli officials are said to have become increasingly frustrated by what they see as British foot-dragging in curbing the activities of Palestinian hard-liners. The Israeli government has made repeated calls for action to be taken against militants, said to be operating freely in the British capital." FRANCE: In late 1995, the GIA's London headquarters ordered a terror war against France, leading France to loudly protest to the British government, according to the Nov. 6, 1995 London Daily Telegraph, in an article entitled "Britain Harbours Paris Bomber." On Nov. 3, 1995, the French daily Le Figaro wrote, under the headline "The Providential Fog of London," of the GIA's bombing spree: "The trail of Boualem Bensaid, GIA leader in Paris, leads to Great Britain. The British capital has served as logistical and financial base for the terrorists." The next day, Le Parisien reported that the author of the GIA terror attack inside France was former Afghan mujahideen leader Abou Farres, who was given a residence visa in London, despite the fact that he was already wanted in connection with the bombing of the Algiers Airport. Farres's London-based organization, according to Le Parisien, recruits Islamic youth from the poor suburbs of Paris, and sends them to Afghanistan, where they are trained as terrorists. ALGERIA also filed strong protests to the British Foreign Office over the harboring of the GIA in London. PERU: The Peruvian government has made repeated requests to the British government, since 1992, demanding the extradition of Adolfo Héctor Olaechea, the London-based head of overseas operations for Shining Path, as well as the shutdown of its fundraising and support operations there. Both requests have been refused to this day. Moreover, in 1992, during the worst of the Shining Path offensive in Peru, Channel 4, of the Independent Broadcasting Authority, a dependency of the British Home Office, coordinated with Olaechea to send two journalists to Peru, where they contacted Shining Path units, and filmed a highly favorable report. The film was broadcast throughout Britain by Channel 4 on July 10, 1992, despite an official protest from the Peruvian government. TURKEY: On Aug. 20, 1996, the Turkish government formally protested to the British government for allowing the Kurdish Workers Party to continue its London-based MED TV broadcasts into Turkey, despite documentation that the broadcasts were being used to convey marching orders to PKK terrorists there. GERMANY: The Bonn government issued a diplomatic note to London, too, following a March 1996 MED TV broadcast in which PKK leader Apo Ocalan called for murdering German Chancellor Kohl and Foreign Minister Kinkel. According to the German press, the Interior Ministry stated concerning the London station: "We have requested our colleagues in neighboring countries in Europe to put measures into effect in order to not compromise internal security in our own country." LIBYA: On Feb. 7, 1997, the Libyan Foreign Ministry submitted an official protest to the British government, over Britain's permitting of the Militant Islamic Group to operate on British soil. The letter cited the recent assassination attempt against Colonel Qaddafi by members of the London-headquartered group, and read, in part, "The decision by Britain, which is a permanent member state of the [uN] Security Council, to shelter elements of that terrorist group who are wanted to stand trial in Libya and to enable them to openly announce their destructive intentions against a UN member state, namely Libya, . . . contravenes international charges and treaties." NIGERIA: On Feb. 28, 1997, the British government issued a denial that it had refused to extradite three Nigerians suspected of a series of bombings in the major city of Lagos in January 1997. The three men were leaders of the National Democratic Coalition (Nadeco). YEMEN: I n January 1999, the government of Yemen filed formal diplomatic protests with Britain for the harboring of the terrorists who carried out bombings and kidnappings. RUSSIA: On Nov. 14, 1999, the Russian Foreign Ministry filed a formal protest to Andrew Wood, Britain's Ambassador in Moscow, after two Russian television journalists were brutally beaten as they attempted to film a London conference, where bin Laden's International Islamic Front, Ansar as-Shariah, Al-Muhajiroon, and other Islamist groups called for a jihad against Russia, in retaliation for the Russian military actions in Chechnya. One of the victims of the beating, ORT cameraman Alexandr Panov, told Kommersant daily that he was "very surprised at the indifference of the British government. Some of the participants at the `charity' event were people wanted by Interpol, but Scotland Yard, although evidently aware of their residence [in Britain], does not react." On Nov. 10, 1999, the Russian government had already filed a formal diplomatic démarche via the Russian Embassy in London, protesting the attacks on the Russian journalists, and also the admissions by Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed, the head of the "political wing" of the bin Laden organization, Al Muhajiroon, that the group was recruiting Muslims in England to go to Chechnya to fight the Russian Army. Bakri's organization operates freely from offices in the London suburb of Lee Valley, where they occupy two rooms at a local computer center, and maintain their own Internet company. Bakri has admitted that "retired" British military officers are training new recruits in Lee Valley, before they are sent off to camps in Afghanistan or Pakistan, or are smuggled directly into Chechnya. On Nov. 20, 1999, the Daily Telegraph admitted, following the release of the U.S. State Department's updated list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations, that "Britain is now an international center for Islamic militancy on a huge scale . . . and the capital is the home to a bewildering variety of radical Islamic fundamentalist movements, many of which make no secret of their commitment to violence and terrorism to achieve their goals." INDIA: In December 1999, following the conclusion of the Indian Airlines hijacking, the Indian government protested the fact that British officials publicly stated that they would allow one of the freed Kashmiri terrorists, Ahmed Omar Sheikh, to return to London, because there "were no charges filed against him in Britain." The British government, facing growing international pressure, apparently has backed down from this decision.

NIST-Naudet-CUMULUS-Release: A forgery! Submitted by Sitting-Bull on Tue, 10/09/2012 - 9:21pm collapse sounds edited forgery Naudet NIST WTC 1 wtc 7 German researcher HerrKoenig recently discovered a forgery within the NIST CUMULUS Data-release, in the case of the WTC 1 collapse sound. Listen yourself: This one was taken from the Naudet documentary DVD, by extrating the sequence to WAV and converting it into MP3-Layer3, 320kbps, 48.000 Hz with AVS Audio Converter 7.1. http://www.911-archiv.net/category/4-artikel.html?download=22 This is from the NIST-release: http://www.911-archiv.net/category/4-artikel.html?download=24 As you can hear, both sounds are very different. What does this mean? The NIST Naudet video release was of very pool quality, and this was astonishing, because they did have an original high quality digital file (DV), converted it to VHS level, and by this way, one can forge the audio and time stamp and so on, as I was told. So this poor quality release delivers the methology to forge the audio. We can conclude that most likely there was something on the original DV-sound, both the Naudet brothers and NIST do not want us to hear. Why should NIST have forged the Audio at all? Only because THEY KNEW the Naudet brothers edited the sound beforehand, and with releasing the original DV-sound, explosions may be heard, so the need to hide it. The same goes for the WTC 7 collapse sound, which the Naudets edited, too. The Naudets/James Hanlon edited the CBS-recording of the WTC7-collapse: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&;v=eORGPHfBnhI NIST-Version #1 (with Boom-Sound): http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&;v=BZIgcA7I9a8 NIST-Version #2 (without Boom-Sond): http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&;v=bxur-UJpDLI achimspok found out in 2009, too, that the sound seems to be edited: So, we do remember, the only "evidence" why WTC 7 was not a controlled demolition, presented by NIST, was the claim no loud explosion sounds can be heard. With the possibility at hand that the audio sounds may have been edited and with so poor audio sources of the WTC 7 collapse overall, this claim seems to be quite bizarre. With this video, maybe the only one unedited at all. and the only one with the seconds before the penthouse collapse recorded, a loud Bah-Boom can be heard, NIST claims is in fact totally ridiculous. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJFpWINABzg&feature=youtu.be As I understand, "kawika" contributed to HerrKoenigs efforts. Red Dwarf contributed to my understanding of the audio converting process. Special thanks to HerrKoenig who discovered the forgery. It's the cover-up stupid! We should immediately call out NIST to release all tapes in the highest available quality, unedited and unaltered. As I learned 85% of all the tapes did have no right audio channel. If they do not comply they have something to hide!

REPOSTED WORKING VIDEO LINK “9/11 Inter­cepted'

#911Truth #WTFact No. 48: The NORAD Drills And What Happened To Our Fighter Jets July 26, 2012 +++++++++++++++ WTFact No. 48: The NORAD Drills And What Happened To Our Fighter Jets After read­ing about the far­ci­cal nature of the 9/11 Com­mis­sion report in WTFact #49, it should be more appar­ent how disin­gen­u­ous the effort of the com­mis­sion was. No mat­ter what your thoughts on the events of 9/11, one of the most notable unan­swered ques­tions cen­ters around the mas­sive mil­i­tary drills tak­ing place prior to and on Sep­tem­ber 11th. The oft repeated theme dur­ing the benign inves­ti­ga­tion was whether the exer­cises impacted the abil­ity to respond to the cri­sis. NORAD, North Amer­i­can Aero­space Defense Com­mand, is a joint orga­ni­za­tion of Canada and the United States that pro­vides aero­space warn­ing, air sov­er­eignty, and defense. The war games being con­ducted on the morn­ing of 9/11 were using many of the fighter jets that would have oth­er­wise been avail­able at air bases through­out the North­east. Some of the war games involved remark­ably sim­i­lar sce­nar­ios of air­lin­ers being flown into build­ings. The odds that a real event should occur the exact same day of a sim­i­lar drill or exer­cise are 1-in who knows how many zeros. This is a list of the exer­cises hap­pen­ing that day. Global Guardian — annual command-level exer­cise orga­nized by United States Strate­gic Com­mand in coöper­a­tion with Space Com­mand and NORAD. Vig­i­lant Guardian — semi­an­nual NORAD exer­cise that had been run­ning in con­junc­tion with Global Guardian for sev­eral days and which pos­tu­lated a bomber attack from the for­mer Soviet Union. Crown Vig­i­lance — Air Com­bat Com­mand Apollo Guardian — Space Command Amal­gam War­rior, also going on, was related to Vig­i­lant Guardian but there no known specifics. Coin­ci­den­tally, the Russ­ian 37th Air Army was also con­duct­ing its own major bomber exer­cises across the Arc­tic and Atlantic. Oper­a­tion Tri­pod, sched­uled for Sept. 12, was set up to “test the plan to dis­trib­ute antibi­otics to the entire city pop­u­la­tion dur­ing a bioter­ror­ism attack”. Richard Sheirer, direc­tor of the New York City mayor’s Office of Emer­gency Man­age­ment (OEM), had hired “over 1,000 Police Acad­emy cadets and Fire Depart­ment trainees to play ter­ri­fied civil­ians afflicted with var­i­ous med­ical con­di­tions, aller­gies, and panic attacks.” Var­i­ous indi­vid­u­als were invited to watch, includ­ing Mayor Rudolph Giu­liani, the police and fire com­mis­sion­ers, and rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the FBI and the Fed­eral Emer­gency Man­age­ment Agency (FEMA). This exer­cise didn’t nec­es­sar­ily detract from mea­sures related to hijacked planes, but they didn’t have far to go to help out with the real emer­gency that hap­pened. The Vig­i­lant Guardian exer­cise def­i­nitely caused some con­fu­sion that day which was ref­er­enced most famously in chap­ter 1, foot­note 116 of the 9/11 Com­mis­sion Report. After ini­tial FAA noti­fi­ca­tion of the hijacked planes, the NEADS oper­a­tor responded “Is this real world or exer­cise? FAA responds “No, this is not an exer­cise, not a test”. This is one of the more fre­quently heard clips of NORAD’s aware­ness. More curi­ously, the stan­dard oper­at­ing pro­ce­dures for deal­ing with hijacked air­lin­ers that had pro­tected this country’s air­space for decades, were not fol­lowed on Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001 because ear­lier in the year, on May 31, Sec­re­tary of State Don­ald Rums­feld made sweep­ing changes which, among other things, required his prior autho­riza­tion before mil­i­tary fighter jets could be scram­bled to inter­cept threats. In the first few days after 9/11, the mil­i­tary admit­ted that NORAD did not act until after the strike on the Pen­ta­gon at 9:38, although it was at 8:15 that morn­ing that Flight 11 was known to be in trou­ble. Inter­cep­tions usu­ally occur within 15 min­utes, but on 9/11, 80+ min­utes elapsed before any fight­ers were even air­borne. The stan­dard oper­at­ing pro­ce­dures on inter­cept­ing planes had worked flaw­lessly 100 or more times a year, why change them then? Sub­se­quently, when the NORAD record­ings were released and ana­lyzed, NORAD, the 9/11 com­mis­sion and the FAA were attempt­ing was to divert atten­tion from the high plau­si­bil­ity of a mil­i­tary stand down order, but the tapes con­firmed the FAA did notify NORAD. This Infowars arti­cle high­lights the decep­tion that the 10 mem­ber com­mis­sion said they received from the Pen­ta­gon orig­i­nally reported by the Wash­ing­ton Post. In August 2006, the Wash­ing­ton Post reported, “Some staff mem­bers and com­mis­sion­ers of the Sept. 11 panel con­cluded that the Pentagon’s ini­tial story of how it reacted to the 2001 ter­ror­ist attacks may have been part of a delib­er­ate effort to mis­lead the com­mis­sion and the pub­lic rather than a reflec­tion of the fog of events on that day, accord­ing to sources involved in the debate.” The report revealed how the 10-member com­mis­sion deeply sus­pected decep­tion to the point where they con­sid­ered refer­ring the mat­ter to the Jus­tice Depart­ment for crim­i­nal investigation. From the same arti­cle, there’s quotes from Thomas Kean and James Farmer respec­tively, show­ing the panel was chas­ing it’s tail and they knew it. “We to this day don’t know why NORAD [the North Amer­i­can Aero­space Com­mand] told us what they told us,” said Thomas H. Kean, the for­mer New Jer­sey Repub­li­can gov­er­nor who led the com­mis­sion. “It was just so far from the truth.… It’s one of those loose ends that never got tied.” Farmer him­self is quoted in the Post arti­cle, stat­ing, “I was shocked at how dif­fer­ent the truth was from the way it was described …. The [Norad air defense] tapes told a rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent story from what had been told to us and the pub­lic for two years…. This is not spin. This is not true.” If we’re to believe the 9/11 Report that the 19 fabled hijack­ers really pulled this off, they either got real lucky or had help to land on a day when most of the resources assigned to hijack­ings were unavail­able. That has to make you won­der. Here is another prime exam­ple from 9/11 Blog­ger of how the com­mit­tee wasted America’s time and hid the truth, in this case by plac­ing a lot of blame on the FAA. The NORAD time­line indi­cated that dur­ing the cri­sis hours of 9/11, the FAA became increas­ingly slower in deliv­er­ing alerts to NORAD. This seemed to shift the blame for the failed response to the FAA. As late as May 2003, Gen­eral Arnold of NORAD, sit­ting along­side Gen. Myers, pre­sented a slightly revised ver­sion of NORAD’s Sept. 2001 time­line, in tes­ti­mony to the Kean Com­mis­sion. He revealed for the first time that NORAD was alerted about the hijack­ing of Flight 93, which crashed in Penn­syl­va­nia, at 9:16 a.m., a full 47 min­utes before the claimed crash time at 10:03. But he stuck to the story about the other flights; in the case of AA77 which hit the Pen­ta­gon, the alert sup­pos­edly arrived at 9:24 am. The FAA dis­puted Gen. Arnold’s tes­ti­mony with a state­ment of May 21, 2003. The FAA claimed that regard­less of the offi­cial noti­fi­ca­tion times claimed by NORAD, phone bridges were estab­lished imme­di­ately after the ini­tial attack (at 8:46). NORAD was informed in real time through­out of all devel­op­ments, includ­ing about the plane that ulti­mately hit the Pen­ta­gon, the FAA said. Thus for more than a year the FAA has been in open dis­pute with NORAD on the issue of who informed whom and when about the Sept. 11 hijack­ings; unfor­tu­nately, this has never become the major media story it deserves to be. The Kean Com­mis­sion itself inter­vened in June 2004. In a staff state­ment deliv­ered at its final set of hear­ings (“Impro­vis­ing a Home­land Defense”), the Com­mis­sion out­lined a chronol­ogy that com­pletely ditched the time­line that NORAD had upheld for two years. It also effec­tively placed almost all of the blame for delayed air defense response on the FAA. Gens. Arnold and Myers, who tes­ti­fied to the Com­mis­sion that same morn­ing, were not held to account for hav­ing pre­sented an entirely wrong time­line a year ear­lier. Instead, they sim­ply thanked the Kean Com­mis­sion for clear­ing up the con­fu­sion. In return, one com­mis­sioner made a point of telling the gen­er­als they were not to blame; after all, it was all the FAA’s fault! A group of FAA offi­cials who tes­ti­fied in the sub­se­quent, final ses­sion stuck by their old defense that they had in fact pro­vided ade­quate and timely infor­ma­tion to NORAD via the phone bridges. As the hear­ings con­cluded, they still dis­puted both time­lines: the old one from NORAD, and the new one from the Kean Commission. The dis­crep­an­cies are read­ily appar­ent to any­one pay­ing atten­tion. With all these activ­i­ties tak­ing place, it’s easy to see that beyond the con­fu­sion, the sheer dis­tance most of these air­craft were from their nor­mal areas cre­ated large areas of unmanned air­space which is per­fect if you don’t want any inter­fer­ence or wit­nesses to sus­pi­cious plane behav­ior and flight paths. The fact that these dis­crep­an­cies did not raise more con­cern should put this in more con­text. To gain more clar­ity, watch any one of the videos below CBS News Keith Olber­mann USA Today and other “main­stream” arti­cles pointed out by Alex Jones The exer­cises explained by Loose Change The 47 min film “9/11 Inter­cepted“

UPDATED, SEEM HES HEADED FOR 1000 plus by election day. Chronicling Mitt's Mendacity, Vol. XXXVIII By Steve Benen - Fri Oct 12, 2012 2:20 PM EDT The broader concerns about Mitt Romney's comfort with dishonesty reached a milestone this week -- it got The Onion treatment. (Remember, this is satire. The quotes in this excerpt are not actual quotes.) For weeks many Beltway insiders had written off the Romney campaign as dead, saying the candidate had dug himself into too deep a hole with too little time to recover. However, with a month to go before ballots are cast, Romney has pulled even with President Obama, and the former Massachusetts governor credits his rejuvenated campaign to one, singular tactic: lying a lot. "I'm lying a lot more, and my lies are far more egregious than they've ever been," a smiling Romney told reporters while sitting in the back of his campaign bus, adding that when faced with a choice to either lie or tell the truth, he will more than likely lie. "It's a strategy that works because when I lie, I'm essentially telling people what they want to hear, and people really like hearing things they want to hear. Even if they sort of know that nothing I'm saying is true." "It's a freeing strategy, really, because I don't have to worry about facts or being accurate or having any concrete positions of any kind," Romney added. The satirical report added that Romney has vowed to continue to "just openly lie [his] ass off" until Election Day. It also "quoted" the Republican's campaign manager saying, "It's late in the game, but this campaign has finally found its groove. And that groove is lying. Bald-faced, make-no-apologies, dirty, filthy lying." Behind all great satire, of course, is a degree of truth -- or in this case, more than a degree. Consider, for example, the 38th installment of my weekly series, chronicling Mitt's mendacity. (This is the second longest list of the year -- and the quotes below are entirely real, not satire.) 1. At a town-hall forum in Mount Vernon, Ohio, Romney said of President Obama, "He said he was going to cut the deficit in half; he's doubled it." Romney is still having trouble with the definition of "double." The deficit on Obama's first day was $1.3 trillion. Last year, it was also $1.3 trillion. This year, it's projected to be $1.1 trillion. When he says the president "doubled" the deficit, as he has many times, Romney's lying. 2. At the same event, condemning the Affordable Care Act, Romney said, "We'll let people choose the plans they want, as opposed to the plan that the president thinks he and the bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., are going to impose on the American people." As Romney surely knows -- his state-based policy works the same way -- the whole point of the Affordable Care Act is to provide consumers with choices of private plans, made available through regulated exchanges. Giving people choices in place and "imposing" a plan are opposites. 3. Romney added, "[W]hen I went to the Olympics and helped guide the Olympics, I learned as well you got to balance the budget here or we'll be in real trouble." In context, Romney made it sound as if he balanced the Olympics' books through skill. In reality, he balanced his budget at the Olympics thanks to a taxpayer bailout. 4. In an interview with the editorial board of the Des Moines Register, Romney argued, "I know the Obama people are excited about trying to find a way to say, 'Oh, you're going to raise taxes on middle-income people,' and I keep pointing out, 'No, no.'" Yes, yes. 5. In the same interview, Romney said that under his proposed plan, "[W]e get to a balanced budget in eight, 10 years." No we don't. Romney says his plan "can't be scored," but independent budget analysts have found his agenda would make the deficit bigger, not smaller, and add trillions to the national debt. 6. Romney added that no abortion legislation is part of his agenda: "There's no legislation with regards to abortion that I'm familiar with that would become part of my agenda." Even his own aides said he didn't mean what he said. 7. In reference to the president, Romney said, "He wants to hire more school teachers. We all like school teachers. It's a wonderful thing. Typically, school teachers are hired by states and localities, not by the federal government. But hiring school teachers is not going to raise the growth of the U.S. economy over the next three-to-four years." Romney himself doesn't seem to believe this is true, since he said largely the opposite just last week. 8. In an interview with Wolf Blitzer, Romney said, "I want high income people to continue to pay the same share they do today." With rhetoric like this, Romney is playing a deeply deceptive game, and playing voters for fools. 9. In the same interview, citing a document from the National Federation of Independent Businesses, Romney said, "The president's plan, on the other hand, cuts 700,000 jobs." Oh, please. 10. Hoping to lower expectations for last night's debate, Romney said, "I don't know how Paul will deal with his debate. Obviously, the vice president has done, I don't know, 15 or 20 debates during his lifetime, experienced debater. This is, I think Paul's first debate. I may be wrong. He may have done something in high school, I don't know." Ryan has been in Congress for 14 years, and has participated in eight election debates before this week. 11. Romney also told Blitzer, "[M]y campaign is about 100 percent of the American people." I seem to recall watching a video in which Romney said it's not his "job" to "worry about" 47 percent of the population. 12. At his latest "major" foreign policy speech, delivered in Virginia, Romney said of the Middle East, "As the dust settles, as the murdered are buried, Americans are asking how this happened? How the threats we face have grown worse?" The threats we face haven't grown worse. In fact, the number of attacks on U.S. embassies is near an all-time low. 13. In the same speech, Romney said, "The president has not signed one new free trade agreement in the past four years." You've got to be kidding me. 14. Romney added, "The greater tragedy of it all is that we're missing an historic opportunity to win new friends who share our values in the Middle East." Did Romney miss the protests against the militants in Benghazi, featuring Libyans who consider the United States their "new friends" after Obama helped topple the Gadhafi regime? 15. Romney went on to say, "The president explicitly stated that his goal was to put daylight between the United States and Israel." That's not true. 16. On Iraq, Romney said, "The president ... failed to secure a responsible and gradual drawdown that would have better secured our gains." That's not what happened. 17. On Iran, Romney declared, "I will put the leaders of Iran on notice that the United States and our friends and allies will prevent them from acquiring nuclear weapons capability. I will not hesitate to impose new sanctions on Iran and will tighten the sanctions we currently have. I will restore the permanent presence of aircraft carrier task forces in both the Eastern Mediterranean and the Gulf region -- and work with Israel to increase our military assistance and coordination." Obama is already doing all of this. For Romney to suggest his approach would represent a new course is absurdly untrue. 18. On a related note, Romney said, "[W]hen millions of Iranians took to the streets in June 2009, when they demanded freedom from a cruel regime that threatens the world, when they cried out, 'are you with us or are you with them,' the American president was silent." That's really not even close to being accurate. 19. Romney complained, "The size of our Navy is at levels not seen since 1916." For months, Romney stopped repeating this bogus claim. Alas, it's back. 20. Romney added, "I'll roll back President Obama's deep and arbitrary cuts to our national defense that would devastate our military." Romney appears to be referring to cuts, which have not yet kicked in, and which were crafted by Romney's own party and endorsed by his own running mate. 21. Romney also denounced Obama's "politically timed retreat that abandons the Afghan people to the same extremists who ravaged their country." And in the same paragraph, Romney endorsed Obama's 2014 withdrawal timetable, offering a rare instance in which the GOP candidate debunked his own falsehood within seconds of saying it out loud. 22. At a campaign event in Van Meter, Iowa, Romney said, "I want to take that tax rate down. I want to take it from 35 percent to 28 percent and help American farmers and small business." Fewer than 3 percent of American farmers and small businesses pay the top marginal income tax rate, leaving a whole lot of farmers and small businesses without "help." 23. At the same event, Romney argued, "Now there are differences on regulations, by the way. And you know this. The regulatory burden under this administration has just gone, has just gone crazy." He may be surprised to learn that Obama approved fewer regulations in his first three years in office than Bush did in his first three years. 24. Romney went on to argue that Obama administration officials "of course, want to regulate dust." Actually, the truth is more complicated, and it's certainly not what Romney said. 25. Romney added, "Let me just also note that, you know, people have been waiting a long time for a farm bill. And the president has to exert the kind of presidential leadership it takes to get the House and the Senate together and actually pass a farm bill." For Romney to blame the president for a good bill House Republicans refuse to pass is ridiculous. 26. Romney went to say, "There are big differences between the president and me. He has no plan for rural America, no plan for agriculture." Romney doesn't have to agree with Obama's plan for rural America, but he shouldn't lie about its existence. 27. In the next breath, Romney added, "[Obama has] no plan for getting people back to work." Romney doesn't have to like the American Jobs Act, but he shouldn't lie about its existence. 28. At a campaign event in Apopka, Florida, Romney said about the president, "[W]hen he took office, instead of focusing on jobs, he instead focused on Obamacare." When Obama took office, the very first thing he focused on was jobs, approving an economic plan that ended the recession. 29. At the same event, Romney said, "[T]hey calculate, because of all that interest expense, and all the spending he's doing, that he's going to also raise taxes on middle-income families by an average of $4,000 per family." It takes some policy acrobatics to get to this claim, and it's still not true. 30. Romney added, "[A]s you know, the president has made it clear that he's going to go ahead with $716 billion in cuts to Medicare." As I suspect Romney knows -- he'd already endorsed these same cuts earlier in the year -- he's just not telling the truth. 31. Romney also said, "Gasoline prices are up twice what they used to be." To blame gas prices on the president's policies is ridiculously misleading. 32. Romney went on to argue, "You see, if the number of people, if the percentage of the American population that were in the workforce were the same today as the day he was elected, our unemployment rate would be above 11 percent." That's a nice effort to move the goalposts, but it's still wrong. 33. Romney also said, "And let me tell you, if this president keeps spending a trillion dollars or more than we take in, than we take in every year, you're going to see us on the road to Greece." For those who have even a passing familiarity with the Greek crisis, this is painfully untrue. 34. Romney also argued, "Obamacare ... kills jobs and small business." There is literally no evidence to support this claim in any way. Indeed, a big chunk of the Affordable Care Act goes to give small businesses a tax break. 35. In a tweet, Romney said, "The middle class can't afford four more years of [President Obama's] tax hikes." Obama has approved some of the largest middle-class tax cuts ever. 36. In his weekly podcast, Romney boasted, "My 'Plan for a Stronger Middle Class' will lead to rising incomes for everyone and create 12 million new jobs in my first term alone." Putting aside the pesky detail that Romney doesn't actually have a specific jobs plan, the fact remains that if we do nothing, we're on track to create 12 million new American jobs over the next four years anyway. 37. At a campaign event in Abingdon, Virginia, Romney said, "The road this president's put us on looks like Europe. Europe isn't working in Europe. It'll never work here." The irony is, Europe is trying to grow through austerity, just as Romney intends to do here. He's lying in a self-refuting sort of way. 38. In a campaign ad this week, Romney argues, "Since President Obama took office, there are over 450,000 more unemployed women." We haven't heard this one since April. It's still ridiculously deceptive. 39. And finally, with an important falsehood I missed last week, Romney argued, "Right now, the (Congressional Budget Office) says up to 20 million people will lose their insurance as Obamacare goes into effect next year." That is 100% wrong. Previous editions of Chronicling Mitt's Mendacity: Vol. I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII,XIII, XIV, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII, XIX, XX, XXI, XXII, XXIII, XXIV, XXV, XXVI, XXVII, XXVIII, XXIX, XXX, XXXI, XXXII, XXXIII, XXXIV, XXXV, XXXVI, XXXVII

Pants On Fire Mitt Romney tells 616 Lies in 33 Weeks September 8, 2012 ================================================ Some may recall the Pants On Fire George W. Bush doll that Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream put out in 2004 to illustrate the lies of the Bush administration. I own one and it still hangs proudly from my bookcase in my home office. However, the torch has been passed, and passed in a big way. I will have to remove the cowboy boots and hat, replace them with wingtips and add a bit of gray at the temples, maybe trade in the duds for a Brooks Brothers suit, and paste a picture of Mitt Romney’s face over the one on my Pants On Fire doll because Mitt has left George in the dust. In fact, Mitt has left every lying candidate this country has ever seen in the dust. Fred Clark is an evangelical blogger with some heavy-duty religious credentials, and that adds a particular gravitas to his August 29 blog detailing 533 lies told by Mitt Romney in 30 weeks. That’s right, 533 verifiable, checkable lies told by a candidate running for the top job in the country. To be fair, Mr. Clark isn’t the person who compiled the list. That task was accomplished by Steve Benen, and Benen is cited as the source in Clark’s blog. But Mr. Clark took the time to go through each of Mr. Benen’s articles, starting with the first salvo on January 6, 2012 in the Washington Monthly’s Political Animal Blog and wrapping up with the August 17, 2012 piece written for the Maddow Blog. Here is the list provided in Clark’s article: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII, XIX, XX, XXI, XXII, XXIII, XXIV, XXV, XXVI, XXVII, XXVIII, XXIX, XXX. Romney pollster Neil Newhouse famously proclaimed “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers.” This has proven to be true. Because even though Romney’s pants are ablaze, he continues to repeat and repeat and repeat the same lies over and over and over again. He and the Republican Party are counting on the until now proven fact that if one repeats a lie often enough, it becomes the truth. Even when it’s still a lie. And they just don’t care. In his blog, Mr. Clark invites scrutiny and then allows that some will pooh-pooh the assertions and wriggle around the lie to stretch it into something that resembles a weak imitation of the truth. However, as he points out, all of the lies cannot be whitewashed and at least half of those listed just can’t be explained away. And yet, because there’s always an and yet, those too will continue to be repeated and defended by people who refuse to see the truth. That refusal is evident when one examines the comments to Mr. Clark’s article. You might wonder what lies Romney has told since week 30, so I went looking for them. An additional 83 lies brings the grand total as of September 7 to 616 and still counting. Thank you, Mr. Benin, for doing such a great job! XXXI, XXXII, XXXIII And thank, you Fred Clark, for being an upstanding man who practices what he preaches, namely to keep the Ten Commandments, the ninth of which is Thou shalt not bear false witness. Now if only Mitt Romney would get the message. Ann Werner is a blogger and the author of CRAZY and Dreams and Nightmares. You can view her work at ARK Stories Visit her on Twitter @MsWerner and Facebook Ann Werne

Israel Loves Iran: a peace movement is born in Tel Aviv As Israel's leaders continue the drumbeat for war, protestors take to the streets. Tel Aviv: Protesters hold anti-war banners. Photograph: Getty Images If recent statements by Israel's leaders are anything to go by, a strike on Iran seems almost inevitable. Now, the drumbeat for war has led to the emergence of a nascent anti-war movement in the country. Over the weekend, about 1,000 protesters took to the streets of Tel Aviv to urge the government not to attack Iran's nuclear facilities. While the demonstration was relatively small, it appears to be in step with the public mood across the country. Israel Loves Iran, a Facebook group spreading a saccharine message of peace, has become a media sensation over the last fortnight. Attracting more than 40,000 followers, the group states: "To the Iranian people, To all the fathers, mothers, children, brothers and sisters. For there to be a war between us, first we must be afraid of each other, we must hate. I'm not afraid of you, I don't hate you." A YouTube video posted by one of the creators, graphic designer Ronnie Edry, has notched up well over 30,000 views. While the campaign has garnered the usual criticisms about "clicktivism" which makes little real difference, it is an important attempt to humanise the other side (sadly unusual in the Middle East), and an expression of the fact that much of the Israeli public do not support their government's stance on this issue. This is borne out by recent opinion polls, which show that a majority of Israelis oppose an attack on Iran. This month, a poll by Tel Aviv University's Guttman Centre found that 63 per cent of Israelis strongly or moderately oppose unilateral attack by Israel on Iran. Another poll, by Dahaf (an Israeli pollster), found that just 19 per cent supported a unilateral strike, while 42 per cent said they supported an attack only if it had US backing. Whether Israel's leaders take heed remains to be seen; even if the movement continues to gain traction, it seems unlikely.

Pamela Brown PLEASE NOTE ABOVE POST #2 and this from a email I sent below. NO OCTOBER SURPRISE RE: IRAN ########################## PDF future exercises, of note, USCENTCOM Iran Area ,EXERCISES YET TO BE DETERMINED (ME GREEN BELOW) http://pksoi.army.mil/conferences/sotew/documents/Partnership%20Guide%20Draft%2001%20Feb%202012.pdf Scheduling is coordinated through USCENTCOM. Dates and locations for (*= IRAN) AE 2013 and 2014 events have yet to be determined.