Steven Gaal
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Libya to become just like a failed Iraq,IMHO Steven Gaal
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"the outcome in Iraq remains uncertain",Ayad Allawi, a former prime minister of Iraq, leads the largest political
bloc in Iraq’s Parliament.(article by him after Waduge)
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The “democracy” denied to Iraq & lessons for nations been overthrown
Posted on August 29th, 2011
Shenali Waduge
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Iraq was invaded illegally, occupied illegally & Saddam Hussein its erstwhile leader was sentenced to death illegally. That was the West’s democracy for Iraq. That the West freed Iraq from its “dictator” was all that really mattered & post-war Iraq in short is nothing but miserable. Dissent in Saddam’s rule might have meant death, democracy post-Saddam means one can talk but no one listens or reacts. Where lies the difference for the people?
The Iraq war was a concocted one. The strategy used was the excuse of weapons of mass destruction while a puppet-UN endorsed inspectors & slapped the country with numerous resolutions, trade embargoes & sanctions, the very ingredients that lay the foundations for leadership change in countries. All these notions were orchestrated to perfection with international media playing their part by ensuring that their countrymen & opposition legislatures backed the calls for invasions. Locally, infiltration of people, arousing of public emotions was easy to garner in a country that had warring factions within (Sunni-Shiates) & people who could easily be aroused to think that deposing Saddam would usher in a new era & a new beginning for them. The stage was set & the drama unfolded with sensationalized stories telecast the world over with journalists & media competing for the best coverage & relaying of on the spot news.
A dictator becomes a “dictator” abhorred by his countrymen when he has overused his authority & power. These are good lessons for such leaders overstepping their power because they have come to equate power as their right. Such have been the countries that the West have been quick to ear mark & target for overthrowing these countries has been an easy effort to enter & dislodge these leaders. It is these very citizens who end up helping the overthrow take place, thus the non-requirement for stretched military equipment or personnel & the use of their own to minimize the casualties to their own countrymen. Collateral damage is what the West would call this. The countries where these leaders become “dictators” are often rich in natural resources which are one reason why they end up misusing the mandate given to them & becoming power hungry & their stooges & families end up devastating the country to which they are supposed to function as custodians.
Therefore, Iraq & all other countries of the world need to realize that the leaders that they vote must lead only for a certain term only, that there is a limit to misusing his own country wealth at the cost of the tax payers money & that any time more than that in office naturally leans towards bad & unethical leadership practices. It is a natural phenomena but one that is being artfully used to effect a far worse dictatorship through the arrival of Western neo-capitalist regime totally degrading society & the countries that the West occupy & overthrow. Most of these very countries have all been previously occupied during colonial times which has meant most of their natural resources have been fleeced & the current trend is to repeat that same policy once more.
We are all aware that the West did the unpardonable in the manner it invaded & occupied Iraq & the objective was never about destroying weapons of mass destruction or even ridding the country of Saddam & most importantly liberating its people. As a one time CIA agent, it would not have been difficult for Saddam to function in a similar role once more & Saddam himself until his last days may have revisited his own past & his own guilt at the wrongs to his own people, to the people of Iran & Kuwait must surely have haunted him.
If we are to believe the telecasts by international media & the journalists on ground during the last days prior to the fall of Iraqi forces & the capture of Saddam Hussain, viewers would be awed by the public outcry for the capture of Saddam & more importantly the jubilation of the Allied troops that had come to save them. If any country should be saved by the West it should be Palestinians suffering in Gaza for years as a result of Israeli. What does the US do instead – it vetoes Resolutions brought against Israel in the UN.
Now here lies the anticlimax & this is where the crux of the invasions & overthrowing actually rests.
Governments, leaders, dictators or whatever other names the West calls these people ruling a nation have been overthrown in carefully orchestrated maneuverings & operations on the grounds that the people of these countries are promised “freedom”, “democracy”, a new life, a new beginning, to be treated like humans….& now comes the most important question what type of “democracy” & “freedom” or a better life have these people got or been given by the West after they have overthrown the “dictator”?
It is the lack of answering this all important question that demands the West not to use these false clichés of “freedom from dictators” as an excuse. No sooner these “dictators” are overthrown the first thing the West ends up doing is to tap the natural resources, take over the economic hubs & privatize all channels that will supply their countries a steady flow of monetary returns & economic gain. All those who played an indirect role in aiding the West by providing support end up just turning their heads away. Therefore, when we all know Iraq was a mistake it is good to now ask whether Libya is going to be another – where the consequences to the future of the people of these countries were never part of the strategy or overall plan!
Let us look at things from the people’s perspective. In Iraq, naturally a large number of Iraqi’s suffered from Saddam in a country divided by tribal factions whether they all belonged to the Islam faith. Therefore, when developed countries like US, UK & its allies made it known publicly that they were going to free the Iraqi people from a dictator who would object? It is what they got in return for that jubilation that actually matters post-Saddam & it is the guilt that these countries did not deliver & more importantly never really planned to deliver is what matters in this whole exercise of overthrowing Governments.
What makes the reality far worse is that UN bodies & international media two supposedly “independent” bodies simply watch these same blueprints take place repeatedly in different parts of the continent & the numbers are rising & what is worse is that these “independent” bodies have become part of this exercise itself.
Do people of this world have anywhere they can reach out for justice? NO.
Iraq is a failure because there was never a plan to rebuild Iraq. A country like US & UK & its allies do not commit trillions of dollars if all areas & angles are not calculated & looked at. There are think tanks & strategists & counter strategists that look at different ways countries & leaders can be overcome. There is no one plan in place & for every plan there is always immediate alternatives therefore it is very clear that all that was planned in the invasion was the deposing of Saddam Hussein. The occupation has been only a strategic goalpost to show that America has the mettle to exist in the Middle East. Operation Libya cannot be far different. The mistake if any is to supply arms to Libyans & the dangers of that mistake may be seen in the forthcoming days if not now as it appears no one knows who is shooting whom. Libya is a risk to the US who has pocketed $1.3trillion for the Iraq & Afghanistan operation. All these investments are likely to see their fruits only in future. In Kosovo now independent almost all its oil now belong to US interests, those that were euphoric about “freedom” find themselves unemployed or employed as prostitutes as it has become the city of the red light trade. Bombings means a boost to the construction trade & US construction industry will see a boom just like they experienced in Iraq. US security firms will also be flourishing just like they did in Iraq. In 2007, there were 180,000 US private contractors working in Iraq. This is capitalism at its best being practiced at the cost of innocent civilians who have jumped from the frying pan into the fire!
As of Jun 2011, there are 46,000 US troops in Iraq. All other nations have withdrawn their troops. It is estimated that civilians deaths hover around 600,000. If death by Saddam was feared, since February 2004 daily insurgent attacks have risen drastically & on some days over 150 deaths have taken place. Since US occupation in 2001 there have been 2.2million internally displaced Iraqis while a further 2.25m are living as refugees in Syria & Jordan. There is no demand for resettlement or rehabilitation by any world body upon the US or its allies certainly not like that which Sri Lanka is experiencing despite within a short span of 2 years resettling almost 96% of all internally displaced Tamils. Iraqi unemployment rate is almost 60%. 28% of Iraqi children are suffering from chronic malnutrition. 70% of Iraqi’s are without adequate water supplies.
The best example for the loss of Iraqi people’s freedom can be seen in the fact that 40% of Iraqi professionals have left the country since 2003. Where there were 34,000 physicians before 2003, by 2005, 12000 had left Iraq & 2000 had been murdered. Where is the freedom that the Iraqi’s had been promised? Freedom for Iraqi’s does not connote to mean that they all flee their country!
What of the US troops themselves. Over 32,000 have been wounded with over 20% having serious brain & spinal injuries. Over 30% of US troops are suffering mental health problems. Does any of these ills really matter to administrations or the real culprits that bankroll all the ills that take place around the world. Political leaders unfortunately are in reality just stooges themselves & that is the anticlimax about democracy…..a lot of nice words & clichés but nothing more.
Let us now wonder what the people of Libya think. Gaddafi was no CIA puppet. He was allied to countries & movements fighting imperialism. He nationalized oil & developed the Libyan economy. Libya is Africa’s 3rd largest oil producer & has 44.3billion barrels. The punishment was the bombing of Libya in 1986 killing his infant daughter which not many media cared to even publish. Knowing the threats to Libya Gaddafi even opened Libya’s economy to foreign banks, corporations & agreed to the infamous IMF SAP programs of privatizing state enterprises & cutting state subsidies on food….Sri Lanka please take note. As a result Libyans are suffering from the same high prices & unemployment other countries that are having “rebellions” are suffering from. The NTC that is spearheading the calls for “freedom” in Libya are all long-standing agents of imperialism…Sri Lanka too has its set of such agents.
It is not hard to deduce that all of the efforts to overthrow Governments whatever type of governance has taken place in these countries are done so purely on the basis of acquiring the wealth of these nations. The calls for removal of these “despots” or “dictators” are mere slogans helped greatly by the mass media that provides the visuals of sensationalism to justify the overthrowing by painting the perfect picture of saviors against despots. It took no time for Mubarak of Egypt, the one time darling of the West to be portrayed with so much hatred by the media with no reminder to the public that he was an agent of the West. This is what is likely to happen to all other political leaders who think they will remain the darlings of the West & continue corrupt leadership.
In any democracy where people come to power on the strength of a vote it is natural that almost half the nation will not vote in favor of the overall winner. This is certainly not basis for any country to say that a leader is opposed & plans set to overthrow him.
The countries that are currently earmarked for regime change will know from diplomatic statements where their countries are heading for & this alone should suffice to ensure the country is set in order & issues that are likely to be used as excuses are properly taken care of. Corruption being one excuse is a perfect area to ensure that politicians, their stooges & the corrupt public service immediately function as they should & not as they want to run for the repercussions are far more dangerous in the present context. Sri Lanka & Sri Lankans in particular need to be cautious at all times. There are none more patriotic than one’s own countrymen & we must remember this always. Outsourcing freedom should never be a prerogative at any time.
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The Forgotten Battlefield
Published: 5 settembre 2011
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By Ayad Allawi
Ayad Allawi, a former prime minister ofIraq, leads the largest political
bloc in Iraq’s Parliament.
As the Arab Spring drives change across our region, bringing the hope of
democracy and reform to millions of Arabs, less attention is being paid to
the plight of Iraq and its people. We were the first to transition from
dictatorship to democracy, but the outcome in Iraq remains uncertain. Our
transition could be a positive agent for progress, and against the forces of
extremism, or a dangerous precedent that bodes ill for the region and the
international community.
Debate rages in Baghdad and Washington around conditions for a U.S. troop
extension beyond the end of this year. While such an extension may be
necessary, that alone will not address the fundamental problems festering in
Iraq. Those issues present a growing risk to Middle East stability and the
world community. The original U.S. troop “surge” was meant to create the
atmosphere for national political reconciliation and the rebuilding of
Iraq’s institutions and infrastructure. But those have yet to happen.
More than eight years after Saddam Hussein’s regime was overthrown, basic
services are in a woeful state: Most of the country has only a few hours of
electricity a day. Blackouts were increasingly common this summer. Oil
exports, still Iraq’s only source of income, are barely more than they were
when Hussein was toppled. The government has squandered the boon of high oil
prices and failed to create real and sustainable job growth. Iraq’s economy
has become an ever more dysfunctional mix of cronyism and mismanagement,
with high unemployment and endemic corruption. Transparency International
ranks Iraq the world’s fourth-most-corrupt country and by far the worst in
the Middle East.
The promise of improved security has been empty, with sectarianism on the
rise. The Pentagon recently reported an alarming rise in attacks, which it
blamed on Iranian-backed militias. The latest report to Congress by the U.S.
special inspector general for Iraqi reconstruction notes that June was the
bloodiest month for U.S. troops since 2008 and concludes that Iraq is more
dangerous than it was a year ago. Regrettably, Iraq’s nascent security
forces are riddled with sectarianism and mixed loyalties; they are barely
capable of defending themselves, let alone the rest of the country.
Despite failing to win the most seats in last year’s elections, Prime
Minister Nouri al-Maliki clung to power through a combination of Iranian
support and U.S. compliance. He now shows an alarming disregard for
democratic principles and the rule of law. Vital independent institutions
such as the election commission, the transparency commission and Iraq’s
central bank have been ordered to report directly to the office of the prime
minister. Meanwhile, Maliki refuses to appoint consensus candidates as
defense and interior ministers, as per last year’s power-sharing agreement.
The government is using blatant dictatorial tactics and intimidation to
quell opposition, ignoring the most basic human rights. Human Rights Watch
reported in February on secret torture prisons under Maliki’s authority. In
June, it exposed the government’s use of hired thugs to beat, stab and even
sexually assault peaceful demonstrators in Baghdad who were complaining
about corruption and poor services. These horrors are reminiscent of
autocratic responses to demonstrations by failing regimes elsewhere in the
region, and a far cry from the freedom and democracy promised in the new
Iraq.
Is this really what the United States sacrificed more than 4,000 young men
and women, and hundreds of billions of dollars, to build?
The trend of failure is becoming irreversible. Simply put, Iraq’s failure
would render every U.S. and international policy objective in the Middle
East difficult to achieve, if not impossible. From combating terrorism to
nuclear containment to energy security to the Middle East peace process,
Iraq is at the center. Our country is rapidly becoming a counterweight to
all positive efforts to address these issues, instead of the regional role
model for democracy, pluralism and a successful economy that it was supposed
to be.
It is not too late to reverse course. But the time to act is now. Extending
the U.S. troop presence will achieve nothing on its own. More concerted
political engagement is required at the highest levels to guarantee the
promise of freedom and progress made to the Iraqi people, who have suffered
and sacrificed so much and are running out of patience.
It is necessary, and achievable, to insist on full and proper implementation
of the power-sharing agreement of 2010, with proper checks and balances to
prevent abuse of power, and full formation of the government and its
institutions on a nonsectarian basis. Malign regional influences must be
counterbalanced. Failing these steps, new elections free from foreign
meddling, and with a truly independent judiciary and election commission,
may be the only way to rescue Iraq from the abyss. This solution is
increasingly called for by Iraqi journalists and political leaders and on
the street.
The invasion of Iraq in 2003 may indeed have been a war of choice. But
losing Iraq in 2011 is a choice that the United States and the rest of the
world cannot afford to make.
By Ayad Allawi
Ayad Allawi, a former prime minister ofIraq, leads the largest political
bloc in Iraq’s Parliament.
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This post I started I had in a file named Bill Kelly. Golly I was right.
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Make No Mistake: NATO committed War Crimes in Libya
Make No Mistake: NATO committed War Crimes in Libya
Make No Mistake: NATO committed War Crimes in Libya
http://tv.globalresearch.ca/2011/08/make-no-mistake-nato-committed-war-crimes-libya
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link http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=26328
link http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=26329
link http://tv.globalresearch.ca/2011/09/tripoli-and-after-natorebel-liberation
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and http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=26255
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Bill did you forget the prime directive ?? follow the $money$
While NATO members, led by France, piously proclaimed at the onset of their military offensive in Libya that their concerns were solely humanitarian, a covert tussle to gain a commanding lead in developing the country’s energy riches in light of Colonel Gaddafi’s departure is well underway.
The Libyan economy depends primarily upon revenues from the oil sector, which contribute about 95 percent of export earnings, 25 percent of GDP, and 80 percent of government revenue.
Prior to the outbreak of conflict, Libya was exporting about 1.3-1.4 million barrels per day from production estimated at roughly 1.79 million barrels per day, of which approximately 280,000 barrels per day were indigenously consumed. But analysts believe that with reconstruction Libya could soon be exporting 1.6 million barrels per day of high-quality, light crude.
But current production is the proverbial mere drop in the bucket. Libya has the largest proven oil reserves in Africa with 42 billion barrels of oil and over 1.3 trillion cubic meters of natural gas. Causing oil company executives from Houston to Beijing to drool on their Gucci loafers, only 25 percent of Libya’s territory has been explored to date for hydrocarbons.
Libya is already Europe’s single largest oil supplier, the second largest oil producer in Africa and the continent’s fourth largest natural gas supplier and already dominates the Southern Mediterranean’s petroleum sector. According to the Libyan National Oil Corporation (NOC), more than 50 international oil companies are already present in the Libyan market.
So, peering into Libya’s future, who’s actually ahead?
France, apparently.
On 3 April a letter was allegedly sent by Libya's National Transitional Council (NTC) to a coalition partner, Qatari Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, which mentioned that France would take "35 percent of crude oil...in exchange for its total and permanent support" of the NTC. France’s Liberation daily reported on Thursday that it had a copy of the letter, which stated that the NTC’s Information Minister Mahmoud Shammam, would negotiate the deal with France. In 2010 France was the second purchaser of Libyan oil after Italy, with over 15 percent of its “black gold” imported from Tripoli.
Zut alors!
The number one National Transition Council, Moustapha Abdeljalil recently reported that the States would be rewarded" according to support "given to the insurgents.
While NTC head Mustafa Abdel Jalil has not hidden the fact that the NTC would assign a higher priority for reconstruction and the allocation of oil contracts to countries that supported their uprising, remarking that nations would be rewarded "according to the support" given to the insurgents, the NTC’s UK representative, Guma al-Gamaty, said that future oil contracts would be granted "on the basis of merit, not patronage. The contracts will be concluded in a transparent manner. "
French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe solemnly denied during a radio interview any knowledge of a "formal" or specific deal but brightly added that it would be "logical" for countries like France, which helped the NTC in its struggle against Gaddafi, to take part in reconstruction.
French President Nicholas Sarkozy was the major European advocate for armed intervention in Libya and his administration was the first officially to recognize the NTC as "the sole, legitimate representative of the Libyan people" and the country’s sole governmental authority, as well as lobbying other nations to recognize the NTC.
Seeking a share of “la gloire,” France was also the first state to commence attacks on 19 March against Gaddafi’s armed forces in Benghazi and along with fellow NATO member Britain, have since provided the majority of the military equipment and personnel used during NATO’s operations in Libya. Going into grey areas of international law in its eagerness to oust Gaddafi France also supplied some weaponry to opposition forces in Libya, a move that came under harsh criticism because of the total arms embargo imposed by the UN Security Council on arms deliveries to any side in the conflict.
NTC’s Paris-based envoy Mansour Sayf al-Nasr denied that such a letter had been sent or that any such pledge had been given. But no one was backpedalling more furiously than Information Minister Shammam, who intoned that such an arrangement was unthinkable.
“It's a joke. It's false,” Shammam said.
Well, if you cannot believe an Information Minister, who can you trust? Sleazy journalists? It will certainly be interesting to see how the issue plays out in the days ahead, and if France does indeed get it 35 percent cut of the loot, which at present production rates, would average about 500,000 barrels per day.
John C.K. Daly of OilPrice.com
Global Research Articles by John C. K. Daly
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Libyan Rebels Round Up Blacks, Put Them In Prison Camps
NATO-backed Libyan rebels are rounding up thousands of innocent black migrants and taking them to prison camps as part of mass reprisals that include reports of indiscriminate killings, mistreatment and torture, as the humanitarian veneer of the wests military intervention quickly crumbles.
Migrant blacks and sub-Saharan Africans comprise one third of the entire Libyan population, and a minority were hired by Gaddafi as mercenary fighters, but rebels are treating them all as enemy combatants, with reports of abuse, murders and mass arrests increasing in volume.
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Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
NATO-backed Libyan rebels are rounding up thousands of innocent black migrants and taking them to prison camps as part of mass reprisals that include reports of indiscriminate killings, mistreatment and torture, as the humanitarian veneer of the wests military intervention quickly crumbles.
Migrant blacks and sub-Saharan Africans comprise one third of the entire Libyan population, and a minority were hired by Gaddafi as mercenary fighters, but rebels are treating them all as enemy combatants, with reports of abuse, murders and mass arrests increasing in volume.
Rebel forces and armed civilians are rounding up thousands of black Libyans and migrants from sub-Sahara Africa, accusing them of fighting for ousted strongman Moammar Gadhafi and holding them in makeshift jails across the capital, reports the Associated Press.
The AP story notes that virtually all of the victims are innocent migrant workers and have not fought for Gaddafi, but rebels are still rounding them up and interning them in sports stadiums and other prison camps simply on the basis of their skin color.
At least 5,000 men have been detained, but human rights groups put the figure far higher.
However, the abuse goes way beyond mass roundups. African Union chairman Jean Ping told the Washington Post there was clear evidence of reprisal murders. They are killing people, normal workers, mistreating them, he stated. The story also relates how 500 Darfuris are are desperately trying to get out of Libya…. they very much fear for their lives because of the color of their skin, according to Richard Sollom, deputy director of Physicians for Human Rights.
Amnesty International investigators have also witnessed abuses at the Central Tripoli Hospital, including men being dragged from hospital beds and detained, while also witnessing unidentified dead bodies of black men being transported to the morgue.
The London Independent also reported on how Amnesty representatives witnessed rebels dumping the decomposing bodies of 30 men, almost all of them black, after they were killed outside a makeshift hospital which bore the symbol of the Islamic Crescent.
The killings have been spurred by apparently overblown, or downright false rumors that Gaddafi had hired black African mercenaries from Chad and elsewhere to act as executioners of Libyan civilians, gunning them down in cold blood during protests, writes Rick Moran.
The potential for abuse, torture and indiscriminate killings of black migrant Libyans to escalate into a substantial program of racial ethnic cleansing carried out by radical Islamist rebels, who are being led by Al-Qaeda terrorists, is why the African Union has refused to support NATOs act of regime change.
LINK http://www.prisonplanet.com/libyan-rebels-round-up-blacks-put-them-in-prison-camps.html
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++*** PLEASE SEE THE ABOVE POST FOR MORE OF THE "CASE CLOSED" RESPONSE TO a mr len colby. Sorry,the response had to be in two parts. ++***
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LOL more crackpot switcheroo, thanks for proving my point and changing the subject once again. Gee an anonymously written article with no citations on an obscure anonymously run website which at best pays it journalists 2 5 Euros per article but seem mostly to be staffed by volunteers. You really are getting desperate. But even IF true Israelis posting pro-Israeli stuff is something else entirely. Still waiting for you to post evidence the DoD or any other US agency is paying people to post on English language websites
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Sir, I am not a crackpot. The EDUCATION FORUM has allow you to call me: idiot,moron,stupid,slow,crackpot,malodorous,ect,ect. It is time for you to reflect/pause and stop your name calling.
-------------------------------------*** How do you say it in your world of nonconspiracy,
'case closed'. ?
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This is a two post response. PLEASE SEE POST JUST BELOW THIS ONE. THANKS Steven GAAL.
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mr colby asks if he has to 'spell it out for me'. No mr colby,I can spell,"you are wrong,case closed".
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One again your links provide little if any backing for your thesis. Reread them and see if you can figure it out for yourself, or do I have to spell it out for you?
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Did you know that the WAR DEPARTMENT/DOD have/are very PROACTIVE against
propeace and proworkers from 1917 to the present ?? Golly, gee someone claiming
to have a history degree and ACLU work would know this.
Past is prologue making a truth out of an historical trend. Do you see a trend ?? Think like a child ??
link http://redactednews.blogspot.com/2011/02/why-is-government-creating-army-of-fake.html
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Why Is the Government Creating an Army of Fake People on the Internet? We Know.
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U.S. Gov‘t Software Creates ’Fake People’ to Spread Message via Social Networking
Whenever I shop on the internet, I skip right over the positive reviews of products and go straight for the bad ones, figuring the company probably paid some hack to sit and create fictional names and post fake glowing five-star reviews for their products to dupe unsuspecting customers. But what if the federal government could operate this way?
What if the government had the ability to pass its own information through false mediums to unsuspecting citizens?
The U.S. government recently offered private intelligence companies contracts to create special software to it help manage a number of “fake” profiles on social media websites.
The contract opportunity (PDF) — posted last summer atFedBizOpps.gov — actually calls for the development of an “Online Persona Management Service” for the U.S. Air Force, a software that would help a single user manage a variety of distinct fake profiles online. According to the contract proposal, the software could be deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, but there is no guarantee it would not be used domestically as well.
Why is this only now coming to light?
Recently leaked** email files from the private security firm HBGary reveal internal discussions of how one person could use the software to create an army of fake profiles. In essence, it allows a small group of people to appear to be many.
According to the contract, the software would enable the government to shield its fake identity by employing a number of false signals to make it appear that the profile belongs to a real person. Additionally, software technicians could manipulate unique IP addresses to make it look like the profile originated from anywhere around the globe.
“A single user could manage unique background information and status updates for up to 10 fake people from a single computer,” The Enquirer notes.
Included in the leaked emails was a specific proposal on how to use Facebook to spread government messages.
“Those names can be cross-referenced across Facebook, twitter, MySpace, and other social media services to collect information on each individual. Once enough information is collected this information can be used to gain access to these individuals social circles. …
Even the most restrictive and security conscious of persons can be exploited. Through the targeting and information reconnaissance phase, a person’s hometown and high school will be revealed. An adversary can create a classmates.com account at the same high school and year and find out people you went to high school with that do not have Facebook accounts, then create the account and send a friend request.
Under the mutual friend decision, which is where most people can be exploited, an adversary can look at a targets friend list if it is exposed and find a targets most socially promiscuous friends, the ones that have over 300-500 friends, friend them to develop mutual friends before sending a friend request to the target. To that end friend’s accounts can be compromised and used to post malicious material to a targets wall. When choosing to participate in social media an individual is only as protected as his/her weakest friend.”
The leaked emails also include messages from sister company HBGary Federal’s CEO Aaron Barr saying, “There are a variety of social media tricks we can use to add a level of realness to all fictitious personas… Using hashtags and gaming some location based check-in services we can make it appear as if a persona was actually at a conference and introduce himself/herself to key individuals as part of the exercise, as one example.”
[Related RedactedNews] (You can go to the main link above to read these 4 stories.)
"911Blogger.com" Accused: Is Leading 9/11 Truth Site Working For The Other Side?
9/11 Censorship with Sunstein Leanings - Lt Col. Shelton Lankford: CIT and the Pentagon “Controversy”
John Writes: Why I left 911Blogger and Kevin Ryan Calls the Creek "Despicable"
Kill Switch Beta: Government Blocks 84,000 Websites From You but Not DoD Child Porn
Additional emails sent back-and-forth among HBGary employees also shed disturbing light on how the software could be manipulated to infiltrate groups, data mine, and even bombard discussion sites with orchestrated government messages — a.k.a. propaganda.
One employee wrote, “and now social networks are closing the gap between attacker and victim, to the point I just found (via linked-in) 112 females, wives of service men, all stationed at Hurlbert Field FL – in case you don’t know this is where the CIA flies all their “private” airlines out of. What a damn joke – the U.S. is no longer the super power in cyber, and probably won’t be in other areas soon.”
Barr also predicted a steady rise in clandestine or secret government operations to stem the flow of sensitive information. “I would say there is going to be a resurgence of black ops in the coming year as decision makers settle with our inadequacies… Critical infrastructure, finance, defense industrial base, and government have rivers of unauthorized communications flowing from them and there are no real efforts to stop it.”
“I don’t know about you, but this concerns me greatly,” Daily Kos blogger Happy Rockefeller writes. “It goes far beyond the mere ability for a government stooge, corporation or PR firm to hire people to post on sites like this one. They are talking about creating the illusion of consensus. And consensus is a powerful persuader.”
Gawker’s Adrian Chen asks: Why is the military creating an army of fake people on the internet?
The request was for 50 licenses, which means the Air Force hoped to create up to 500 fake Internet people. The request was filled in June, which means these fake people could be roaming the ‘net right now.
“WTF Dude?” one HBGary employee emailed to another. “This is posted on open source. Are you f***ing serious?”
Apparently this type of government contract is generally negotiated behind closed doors.
Given the importance of social media nowadays — namely the influence the networking sites have had on organizing protests and spreading information — this kind of technology could potentially become a very powerful social weapon.
—————–
**The emails were reportedly leaked by Anonymous, one of the world’s most notorious underground hacking groups. Recently, the group caught national attention after hacking sites of companies which cut off ties to the online site WikiLeaks. Anonymous also revealed that HBGary colluded with Bank of America in a plot to disrupt WikiLeaks. As a result, a number of security firms have cut ties with HBGary.
“Anonymous used to be all about disrupting the Web sites of companies that helped block WikiLeaks’ funding. Now it’s starting to act like WikiLeaks itself,” Forbes recently noted.
Revealed: Air Force ordered software to manage army of fake virtual people
Raw Story Update (below): HBGary Federal among bidders
These days, with Facebook and Twitter and social media galore, it can be increasingly hard to tell who your "friends" are.
But after this, Internet users would be well advised to ask another question entirely: Are my "friends" even real people?
In the continuing saga of data security firm HBGary, a new caveat has come to light: not only did they plot to help destroy secrets outlet WikiLeaks and discredit progressive bloggers, they also crafted detailed proposals for software that manages online "personas," allowing a single human to assume the identities of as many fake people as they'd like.
The revelation was among those contained in the company's emails, which were dumped onto bittorrent networks after hackers with cyber protest group "Anonymous" broke into their systems.
In another document unearthed by "Anonymous," one of HBGary's employees also mentioned gaming geolocation services to make it appear as though selected fake persons were at actual events.
"There are a variety of social media tricks we can use to add a level of realness to all fictitious personas," it said.
Government involvement
Eerie as that may be, more perplexing, however, is a federal contract from the 6th Contracting Squadron at MacDill Air Force Base, located south of Tampa, Florida, that solicits providers of "persona management software."
While there are certainly legitimate applications for such software, such as managing multiple "official" social media accounts from a single input, the more nefarious potential is clear.
Unfortunately, the Air Force's contract description doesn't help dispel suspicions. As the text explains, the software would require licenses for 50 users with 10 personas each, for a total of 500. These personas would have to be "replete with background , history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographacilly consistent."
It continues, noting the need for secure virtual private networks that randomize the operator's Internet protocol (IP) address, making it impossible to detect that it's a single person orchestrating all these posts. Another entry calls for static IP address management for each persona, making it appear as though each fake person was consistently accessing from the same computer each time.
The contract also sought methods to anonymously establish virtual private servers with private hosting firms in specific geographic locations. This would allow that server's "geosite" to be integrated with their social media profiles, effectively gaming geolocation services.
The Air Force added that the "place of performance" for the contract would be at MacDill Air Force Base, along with Kabul, Afghanistan and Baghdad. The contract was offered on June 22, 2010.
It was not clear exactly what the Air Force was doing with this software, or even if it had been procured.
Manufacturing consent
Though many questions remain about how the military would apply such technology, the reasonable fear should be perfectly clear. "Persona management software" can be used to manipulate public opinion on key information, such as news reports. An unlimited number of virtual "people" could be marshaled by only a few real individuals, empowering them to create the illusion of consensus.
You could call it a virtual flash mob, or a digital "Brooks Brothers Riot," so to speak: compelling, but not nearly as spontaneous as it appears.
That's precisely what got DailyKos blogger Happy Rockefeller in a snit: the potential for military-run armies of fake people manipulating and, in some cases, even manufacturing the appearance of public opinion.
"I don't know about you, but it matters to me what fellow progressives think," the blogger wrote. "I consider all views. And if there appears to be a consensus that some reporter isn't credible, for example, or some candidate for congress in another state can't be trusted, I won't base my entire judgment on it, but it carries some weight.
"That's me. I believe there are many people though who will base their judgment on rumors and mob attacks. And for those people, a fake mob can be really effective."
It was Rockefeller who was first to highlight the Air Force's "persona" contract, which was available on a public website.
A call to MacDill Air Force Base, requesting an explanation of the contract and what this software might be used for, was answered by a public affairs officer who promised a call-back. No reply was received at time of this story's publication.
Other e-mails circulated by HBGary's CEO illuminate highly personal data about critics of the US Chamber of Commerce, including detailed information about their spouses and children, as well as their locations and professional links. The firm, it was revealed, was just one part of a group called "Team Themis," tasked by the Chamber to come up with strategies for responding to progressive bloggers and others.
"Team Themis" also included a proposal to use malware hacks against progressive organizations, and the submission of fake documents in an effort to discredit established groups.
HBGary was also behind a plot by Bank of America to destroy WikiLeaks' technology platform, other emails revealed. The company was humiliated by members of "Anonymous" after CEO Aaron Barr bragged that he'd "infiltrated" the group.
A request for comment emailed to HBGary did not receive a reply.
Update: HBGary Federal among bidders
A list of interested vendors responding to the Air Force contract for "persona management software" included HBGary subsideary HBGary Federal, further analysis of a government website has revealed.
Other companies that offered their services included Global Business Solutions and Associates LLC, Uk Plus Logistics, Ltd., NevinTelecom, Bunker Communications and Planmatrix LLC.
Posted by [Redacted] at 2/20/2011 03:24:00 AM
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Labels: cognitive infiltration, facebook, fedbizopps, hbgary, us cyber command
3 comments:
911NewsCentral.com said...
This story is PUBLISHED at 911NewsCentral.com!
February 20, 2011 4:36 AM
Anonymous said...
MacDill: NGA/CIA ops @ MacDill # Social Software Training - Several agencies in the Intelligence community, most notably CIA and NGA, have developed training programs to provide time to integrate social software tools into analysts' daily work habits. These classes generally focus on the use of Intellipedia to capture and manage knowledge, but they also incorporate the use of the other social software tools. These include blogs, RSS, and social bookmarking. The courses stress immersion in the tools and instructors encourage participants to work on a specific project in Intellipedia. The courses also expose participants to social media technologies on the Internet.
February 28, 2011 2:09 AM
Anonymous said...
you'd think with a 24 hour, multiple channel news cycle, we'd get some actual damn news once in awhile.
++++++++++++++++ooo
Steven Gaal would say to Anonymous, "I agree 100%.
There are also trolls on the net that mimic 100% the
establishment story repeating the lies,24/7".
++++++++++++++++ooo
-
Abe Foxman of the AntiDefamation League issued a press release yesterday, James Fetzer," vicious antisemite.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^oooooooo^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Breaking: Israel and ADL Coverup of 9/11 Exposed
Abe Foxman Acolyte Taken to the Woodshed By Veterans Today
By Gordon Duff, Senior Editor
(Editors note: Consider this a lesson plan for anyone confronted with an ADL gatekeeper)
For the months leading up toward this disastrous period in Israeli history, the break in relations with Turkey, hundreds of thousands of Israeli Jews demonstrating for real democracy, the flood of evidence tying Israel to 9/11, the UN condemnation of Israel for the Freedom Flotilla killings and the upcoming UN vote on Palestine, Veterans Today Senior Editor, Gordon Duff along with columnist James Fetzer are confronted with what clearly is shown to be a 9/11 denialist pretending to be a peace activist.
During a recitation of talking points from Abe Foxmans ADL (Anti-Defamation League), an organization we believe has been tasked with covering up Israels involvement in 9/11, total mayhem breaks out. Amid a flood of deflections, accusations of antisemitism and outright falsehoods, what can only be considered a clandestine spokeperson for the New World Order is stopped in his tracks:
YouTube - Veterans Today - link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6nwZS5X7GA
Note that the video edits out additional charges of antisemitism and references to the holocaust. However, enjoy what you are allowed to see.
In retaliation for this confrontation, Abe Foxman of the AntiDefamation League issued a press release yesterday condemning Veterans Today, Gordon Duff, James Fetzer, Alan Sabrosky and Kevin Barrett as vicious antisemites.
Our take?
Shakespeare says it best, as is so often the case:
The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
Hamlet Act 3, scene 2, 222230
This oft misquoted line from Shakespeare, used in the context we note, makes the point well
If there were any doubt of Israels complicity in 9/11, we have put those doubts to rest.
As Abe Foxman pointed out so aptly on his website, www.adl.org, the issues of Israeli involvement in 9/11 must be addressed, not through childish accusations and bad prose, as the ADL is best known for, but extradition, trials and executions.
-
To be complete here is another look at CLARKE. THANKS SG
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^++++++++^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^*****
######################oooooooo###################*****
From: link http://digwithin.net/2011/08/20/clarke/
LINK http://911blogger.com/news/2011-08-20/questions-richard-clarke-cog-uae-and-bcci
Posted on August 20, 2011 by ultruth
The author is indebted to the good people at History Commons for their “Complete 9/11 Timeline.” If a reference is not evident below, it can probably be found there.
A recent interview with former “Counterterrorism Czar,” Richard Clarke, is making a splash in the alternative media.[1] In this interview, Clarke speculates about CIA malfeasance related to the pre-9/11 monitoring of two alleged September 11 hijackers. This interview is somewhat interesting due to Clarke’s vague suggestion that the CIA had courted 9/11 suspects as sources, but it is far more interesting for what was not said with regard to Clarke’s personal history and associations.
The seeming point of these new statements from Clarke is that the CIA might have withheld information from him, the FBI, and the Department of Defense (DOD) in the twenty months leading up to the 9/11 attacks. Clarke is not suggesting that the CIA did this maliciously, but only that his good friend, George Tenet, and two others made a mistake in their approach. Clarke says of these CIA leaders — “They understood that al Qaeda was a big threat, they were motivated, and they were really trying hard.” The mild twist that Clarke now puts on the story is that the CIA’s diligent effort to secure much needed sources within the al Qaeda organization was pursued without any suspicion that these sources might turn out to be “double agents.”
Clarke claims that if the CIA had simply told him, the FBI and the DOD, “even as late as September 4th, [2001]” they would have “conducted a massive sweep, we would have conducted it publicly, we would have found those assholes. There’s no doubt in my mind. Even with only a week left.”
There are many obvious problems with these new claims from Clarke. For one thing, the evidence we have indicates that FBI headquarters did everything it could to protect the alleged 9/11 hijackers in the months leading up to 9/11. Another spectacularly obvious problem is that those “assholes” lived with an FBI asset for at least four months and there are reasons to believe the FBI knew that. More importantly, Richard Clarke personally thwarted two of the attempts the CIA made to capture Osama bin Laden (OBL) in the two years before 9/11. It seems disingenuous at best that Clarke would say he didn’t have enough information to capture two of OBL’s underlings in 2000 when he was responsible for preventing the capture of OBL just the year before.
In an attempt to make sense of these matters, we should take a closer look at Richard Clarke. His own history might shed some light on why he is trying to confuse us today.
Not just another COG
Clarke began his government career in the Ford Administration’s DOD as a nuclear weapons analyst. At the time, several characters that were central to the events of 9/11 were in the highest positions of that administration. Toward the end of that era, White House chief of staff Dick Cheney and DOD secretary Donald Rumsfeld were fighting a war of public perception to preserve the increasingly unpopular aspects of the CIA. Nuclear policy was a big issue at the time as well, and at least one of Clarke’s closest colleagues in later years, Paul Wolfowitz, worked to present false “Team B” information.
After getting his MA from MIT, Clarke went on to become President Reagan’s Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence. In this role, Clarke negotiated US military presence in Egypt, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. He asked these foreign governments for “access” agreements and the right to enhance existing facilities. As a result, the US moved large numbers of contractors into Saudi Arabia. One such contractor, Bernard Kerik, the New York City police commissioner and “9/11 hero” who had worked for Morrison-Knudsen’s Saudi group in the mid-seventies, went back for another three year tour as the “the chief investigator for the royal family of Saudi Arabia.”[2]
During his half a dozen years in Reagan’s State department, Clarke called Morton Abramowitz, the Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research, his boss and mentor. Abramowitz, who was said to be influential in the career of Clarke, had worked as Assistant Secretary for Defense under Donald Rumsfeld in the seventies when Clarke worked in the DOD. Abramowitz left his position at State in 1989 to become the Ambassador to Turkey. The next person for whom Abramowitz was boss and mentor was his Deputy Ambassador, Marc Grossman, who is a 9/11 person of interest according to Sibel Edmonds.
In 1984, Clarke was selected to take part in one of the most highly classified programs of the Reagan Administration. This was the highly secret Continuity of Government (COG) program run by the National Program Office that continued up to and after the attacks of September 11.[3] The members of the COG group included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Oliver North, George H.W. Bush, Kenneth Duberstein, James Woolsey, and Richard Clarke. Although Cheney and Rumsfeld were not government employees throughout the twenty years that Clarke participated in this official government program, they both continued to participate anyway.
COG was developed to install a shadow “government in waiting” to replace the US Congress and the US Constitution in the event of a national emergency like a nuclear war. The first and only time that COG was put into action was when Richard Clarke activated it during the 9/11 attacks. Clarke had been the one, in 1998, to revise the COG plan to use it as a response to a terrorist attack on American soil. Apparently, COG and the shadow government these men created are still in play to this day. [4]
In 1989, Clarke was appointed by George H.W. Bush to be the Assistant Secretary of State for Politico-Military Affairs, under James Baker. Clarke was in this position until 1992, and his role was to link the Department of Defense and the Department of State by providing policy in the areas of international security, security assistance, military operations, defense strategy, military use of space, and defense trade. One important aspect of his job during this time was that Clarke coordinated State Department support of Operation Desert Storm and led the efforts to design the international security structure after the Gulf War.
Throughout the years of the George H.W. Bush Administration, Clarke worked intimately with many people who should be investigated with regard to the events of 9/11 and the crimes that followed. This included:
James Baker, the Secretary of State who went on to join the Carlyle Group
Donald Rumsfeld, the State Department “Foreign Policy Consultant” who was Chairman Emeritus of the Carlyle Group at that time, and Secretary of Defense on 9/11
Dick Cheney, the Reagan Secretary of Defense who, later as Vice President, coordinated the response to the 9/11 attacks
Paul Wolfowitz, the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy who, in the week before 9/11, ran meetings with Pakistani ISI General Ahmed
Duane Andrews, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence who left to run SAIC
Robert Gates, the CIA Director who was implicated in the Iran-Contra crimes and later also worked with SAIC
Senate Intelligence Committee representatives George Tenet and William Cohen, the latter of whom, in 1997, dramatically reduced the number of jet fighters protecting the US
And Reagan advisor, Richard Armitage, who participated in the failed air defense teleconference on 9/11
According to his book, Clarke remembers that “Wolfowitz and I flew on to Bahrain, Abu Dhabi and Salaleh” to coordinate relations with the UAE, at Cheney’ request. Over the following decade, Clarke negotiated many deals with the Emirates, essentially becoming an agent of the UAE, and he was “particularly close to the UAE royal family.”[5]
Not long after Clarke began going there, the royal family of Abu Dhabi took over full ownership of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). BCCI is significant relative to 9/11 because it was involved in funding terrorists in the late 1980s and was linked to the Pakistani intelligence network from which several alleged 9/11 conspirators came including Khalid Sheik Mohammed. In fact, Time magazine reported that, relative to BCCI — “You can’t draw a line separating the bank’s black operatives and Pakistan’s intelligence services.”[6]
More importantly, there are strong suspicions that the CIA was involved in the founding of BCCI.[7] The CIA connection to the origins of the BCCI terrorist network is interesting in this context because the royal family of the UAE was also said to have played a primary role in the creation of BCCI. As the official US government report on the subject pointed out — “There was no relationship more central to BCCI’s existence from its inception than that between BCCI and Sheikh Zayed and the ruling family of Abu Dhabi.”[8]
As stated before, Clarke’s friends in the UAE royal family not only created the BCCI terrorist network, they took it over when the Bank of England shut it down. “By July 5, 1991, when BCCI was closed globally, the Government of Abu Dhabi, its ruling family, and an investment company holding the assets of the ruling family, were the controlling, and official “majority” shareholders of BCCI — owning 77 percent of the bank. But since the remaining 23 percent was actually held by nominees and by BCCI’s alter-ego ICIC, Abu Dhabi was in fact BCCI’s sole owner.”[9]
Not long after this, in 1992, Clarke was named to the National Security Council staff as Special Assistant to the President for Global Affairs and chairman of the Interagency Counterterrorism Committee. One might think that Richard Clarke’s close relationship to the royal family of the UAE, and this new role as the NSC head of counterterrorism, might have posed a slight conflict of interest. But no one seemed to notice.
Similarly, few have noticed that the attacks attributed to al Qaeda began just before the first Bush Administration left office. It was in December, 1992, that al Qaeda (as such) is said to have first committed an act of terrorism by bombing US troops in Yemen. Attacks and plots in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, and many others places located near the production and transport routes of fossil fuels have been attributed to al Qaeda since that time.[10]
Clarke was not interested in pursuing the BCCI terrorist network and, instead, he had a different approach to combating terrorism. In 1993, the United States began a practice known as “rendition.” Throughout the rest of the world, rendition is known as torture. Interestingly, the policy behind this program was proposed by Richard Clarke, who worked to get “snatch teams” in place to kidnap suspects for torture. The success of Clarke’s rendition proposal led to today’s US program of secret kidnappings and torture around the world.
In September 1994, high-ranking UAE and Saudi government ministers, such as Saudi Intelligence Minister Prince Turki al-Faisal, began frequent bird hunting expeditions in Afghanistan. It was reported that — “They would go out and see Osama, spend some time with him, talk with him, you know, live out in the tents, eat the simple food, engage in falconing, some other pursuits, ride horses.” Two members of the UAE royal family that participated in these trips were Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum and Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, ruler of the UAE.[11]
As these UAE meetings with OBL occurred, Clarke’s relationship with the UAE royals blossomed. At the same time, he engaged in apparent preparations for terrorist events on US soil. In 1998, he chaired a tabletop exercise in which a Learjet filled with explosives would be flown on a suicide mission into a target in Washington, DC. At a conference in October 1998, Clarke predicted that America’s enemies “will go after our Achilles’ heel” which is “in Washington. It is in New York.” That was quite a prediction.
Clarke had updated the COG plans in early 1998, to ensure that the shadow government would be put in power in the event of a terrorist attack like the one he predicted that year (and that occurred in 2001). National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, who was later caught stealing documents that had been requested by the 9/11 Commission, was the one to suggest that Clinton create the new Counterterrorism Czar position that Clarke would fill at the time of his prediction. Berger was also the one to introduce Clarke’s COG partner, James Woolsey, to Clinton. Woolsey went on to become Clinton’s CIA director.
In early February 1999, Clarke met with Al Maktoum, one of the UAE royals who was known to hunt with Bin Laden, in the UAE. Al Maktoum was a big supporter of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. And although people often forget, two of the 9-11 hijackers were citizens of the UAE and the vast majority of money supporting the attacks flowed through the UAE.
The 9/11 Commission Report has six references to the UAE, most of which can be found on page 138. One of these suggests that “but for the cooperation of the UAE, we would have killed Bin Ladin two years in advance of September 11.”
Therefore it is difficult to understand why the leading authority on counterterrorism in the US would be meeting, and maintaining close personal relationships, with the UAE friends of Bin Laden just two years before 9/11. This was three years after Bin Laden had first declared holy war against the United States,[12] and one year after his more recent such proclamation.[13]
It is more difficult to understand why Clarke was personally behind the failure of two CIA attempts to kill or capture Bin Laden in 1999. The first of these occurred just a few days after Clarke’s visit to the UAE. The CIA obtained information that OBL was hunting with UAE royals in Afghanistan at the time, and President Clinton was asked for permission to attack the camp. Clarke voted down that plan, and others within the US government speculated that his ties to the UAE were behind his decision.[14]
The next month, when the CIA had tracked Bin Laden’s whereabouts again and was prepared to take him out during another of the Afghanistan hunting trips, Richard Clarke took it upon himself to alert his UAE friends about the CIA monitoring their meetings with Bin Laden. Of course, the UAE royals tipped off Bin Laden and the US lost another opportunity to kill or capture its number one enemy.[15] Considering that CIA plans are top secret national security priorities, and that OBL was wanted for the bombings in East Africa, Clarke’s action should have been seen as treason.
Somehow, Clarke’s two efforts to keep OBL from being captured or killed in 1999 slipped his mind when he testified to the 9/11 Commission. Apparently, these events were also not important enough for Clarke to mention when recently discussing the two “asshole” hijackers whose presence in the US he now says the CIA kept from him and the FBI.
Who knew about Almihdar and Alhazmi?
Interestingly, although only two of the alleged 9/11 terrorists were said to be from the UAE, those being Marwan al-Shehhi and Fayez Banihammad, others of the alleged hijackers, including Almihdar, Alhazmi, and Ziad Jarrah, spent time in the UAE. And as stated before, the vast majority of money that financed the attacks flowed through the UAE.
The new interview with Clarke begins with discussion of the CIA’s monitoring of a January, 2000 meeting in Malaysia among top al Qaeda operatives. Khalid Almihdar and Nawaf Alhazmi attended the meeting, as did Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and several other al Qaeda leaders. Clarke claims in the interview that the CIA followed the alleged 9/11 hijackers out of the meeting in Malaysia but then lost them in Bangkok. Two months later, Almidhar and AlHazmi arrived in Los Angeles, according to the CIA, and Clarke says many CIA agents knew about this.
Clarke claims that the CIA — “stopped [information about Almihdar and Alhazmi] from going to the FBI and the Defense Department.” He then cryptically states — “We therefore conclude that there was a high level decision, in the CIA, ordering people not to share that information” and “I would have to think it was made by the Director [Tenet]”. To clarify why he suddenly thinks this lack of information sharing was unusual, Clarke says — “You have to understand…we were close friends, he called me several times a day, and shared the most trivial of information.”
But it was not only the CIA that knew about this meeting and the attendees. According to the Director of the National Security Agency (NSA), Michael Hayden — “In early 2000, at the time of the meeting in Kuala Lumpur, we had the Alhazmi brothers, Nawaf and Salem, as well as Khalid Almihdar, in our sights. We knew of their association with al-Qaeda, and we shared this information with the [intelligence] community.” The NSA knew about these guys well before that, however, because an early 1999 NSA communications intercept referenced “Nawaf Alhazmi,” so it was clear that the NSA knew about him for more than two years before 9/11. Oddly enough, the Washington Post reported that Alhazmi, Almihdar and four of the other alleged hijackers were “living, working, planning and developing all their activities” near the entrance to NSA headquarters in Laurel, Maryland, in the months prior to the 9/11 attacks.[16]
Alhazmi had been seen in San Diego as early as 1996 and he traveled extensively throughout the US, spending time in Cody, Wyoming and Phoenix, Arizona, and making a truck delivery to Canada. He and Alhazmi lived openly in the United States, using their real names and credit cards. They had season passes to Sea World and the San Diego Zoo and liked to hang out at a nude bar in San Diego. They went to a flight school there and said they wanted to learn how to fly Boeings. Instructor Rick Garza of Sorbi’s Flying Club turned down that request because he said they were “clueless”, didn’t even know how to draw an airplane and could not communicate in English.
Alhazmi even worked at a Texaco gas station, although he didn’t need the money because someone in the UAE was regularly sending him thousands of dollars.
The money Alhazmi received was said to come from a UAE citizen named Ali Abdul Aziz Ali (a.k.a. Ammar al Baluchi), who was the nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and cousin of Ramzi Yousef. Apparently, a majority of money that came to the hijackers was transferred through Ali Abdul Aziz Ali or another UAE citizen named Mustafa al-Hawsawi. The 9/11 Commission reported that Ali “helped them with plane tickets, traveler’s checks, and hotel reservations“, and “taught them about everyday aspects of life in the West, such as purchasing clothes and ordering food.“
Whether he was protecting his UAE friends or not, Clarke failed to act on information about al Qaeda operatives living in the US, just one month before the meeting in Malaysia. After an al Qaeda “millennium plot” was said to be broken up in Jordan, Clarke authorized an investigation of one of the plotters, Khalil Deek, who lived in Anaheim, CA for most of the 1990s. The investigative team reported to Clarke and the NSC directly in December, 1999, stating that Deek’s next door neighbor was operating an al Qaeda sleeper cell in Anaheim. No action was taken by Clarke or the NSC.
A few months later, in April 2000, Clarke was quoted in the Washington Post as saying that terrorists – “will come after our weakness, our Achilles Heel, which is largely here in the United States.” Although this was a bold statement, it was unfortunate that Clarke did not have time to track down and capture the terrorists that he knew were living and plotting in the US.
The bombing of the USS Cole, which took the lives of 17 American sailors, occurred in October, 2000. It was reported by the Washington Post that Almihdar had received training in Afghanistan in 1999 along with the operatives who were responsible for the Cole bombing. The Guardian reported that the Prime Minister of Yemen accused Almihdar of being “one of the Cole perpetrators.”
At the time, Clarke was part of a high level meeting to discuss the response to the Cole bombing, which included William Cohen, George Tenet, the State Department coordinator for counterterrorism, Michael Sheehan, and several others. In this meeting, Clarke was the hawk, proposing attacks throughout Afghanistan in response. None of the voting attendees supported Clarke’s plan and, after the meeting, Sheehan told Clarke – “What’s it going to take to get them to hit al-Qaeda in Afghanistan? Does al-Qaeda have to hit the Pentagon?”[17] Once again, that was quite a prediction.
In May 2001, the CIA gave its photos of the January 2000 Malaysian meeting to an intelligence operations specialist at FBI headquarters. One of the photos was of Almihdar, who FBI Director Mueller would later say was likely responsible for coordinating the movements of all the non-pilot hijackers. In June 2001, FBI and CIA officials discussed these photos and one FBI agent remembers that Almihdar was mentioned in these discussions.
Phoenix FBI agent Ken Williams wrote a memo to FBI headquarters, in July 2001, saying that Bin Laden’s followers were going to flight schools to train for terrorist attacks. If the FBI had followed through on this, it would have found Alhazmi very easily, as he had been reported as staying in Phoenix with Hani Hanjour over a period of months from January to June 2001. The memo was reviewed by the agency’s Bin Laden and Islamic extremist counterterrorism units, but it has been reported that neither Attorney General John Ashcroft nor newly appointed FBI Director Robert Mueller briefed President Bush and his national security staff about these revelations. Of course, this was well before the September 4th date that Clarke now claims was the best chance for him and the FBI to have first found out.
Zacarias Moussaoui visited Malaysia too, and stayed at the same condominium where the January 2000 meeting took place. The owner of the condo even signed letters that convinced the INS to allow Moussaoui into the US. Alhazmi and Almihdar were referenced in papers that the FBI confiscated, in August 2001, from Moussaoui when he was arrested. FBI headquarters refused multiple requests from the FBI agents pursuing the case to search Moussaoui ‘s possessions. Those confiscated possessions and papers would have immediately led the FBI agents to Atta, Almihdar, Alhazmi and the other alleged hijackers.
But the FBI had to know about these alleged hijackers well before that, because Alhazmi and Almihdar lived with an FBI informant, Abdussattar Shaikh, for at least four months in late 2000. Shaikh was a “tested” asset working with the local FBI. Shaikh had regular visits from Mohammed Atta and Hani Hanjour as well, and even introduced Hanjour to a neighbor. [18]
Newsweek reported that, once, when Shaikh was called by his FBI agent handler, Shaikh said he couldn’t talk because Almihdar was in the room. This suggests that the FBI knew full well that this future 9/11 hijacker was living with an FBI asset. But a more damning fact is that the FBI refused to allow the 9/11 Congressional Inquiry to interview either Shaikh or his FBI handler.
The FBI absolutely knew about the movements of these alleged 9/11 hijackers. In January, 2001, it was the FBI that gave information to the CIA about how USS Cole bombing operatives had delivered money to al Qaeda planners at the time of the January 2000 Malaysia meeting. CNN reported, in 2002, that “At that point, the CIA – or the FBI for that matter – could have put Alhazmi and Almihdar and all the others who attended the meeting in Malaysia on a watch list.”
In the new interview, Clarke further speculates that the reason that the CIA information was not shared with him, the DOD and the FBI was because CIA (i.e. Cofer Black as of June, 1999) was courting these two as sources within al Qaeda. Some might wonder why Clarke never thought of his good friends within the UAE royal family, who met with OBL regularly, as sources on al Qaeda. Surely people who met with OBL personally in the two years before 9/11, and were big supporters of al Qaeda like Clarke’s friend, Al Maktoum, might have some information to provide!
In any case, Clarke goes on in the interview to suggest that Tenet and Black might have recruited Alhazmi and Almihdar (who had been accused of perpetrating the USS Cole bombing) as inside sources on al Qaeda. To the CIA’s chagrin, Clarke implies, they at some point became double agents. It is amazing that Clarke insinuates that Black and Tenet were too dim-witted to see that these two Saudis might also be working for the Saudis. Clarke appears to be making the absurd suggestion that a CIA director could not predict that the Saudi, who arranged housing for Alhazmi and Almihdar, arranged payments for them, and arranged to move them to San Diego, might have turned them into double agents.
When Alhazmi and Almihdar arrived in Los Angeles in early 2000, they were met by a strange benefactor named Omar Al-Bayoumi who brought them to Parkwood Apartments in San Diego. It is Al-Bayoumi that Clarke is referring to when he suggests the — “Saudi has connections to the Saudi government, and some people believe that this guy was a Saudi intelligence officer. If we assume that this Saudi intelligence officer was the handler for these two, then presumably he would have been reporting to the CIA office in Los Angeles. There was a strong relationship between the CIA director and the minister of intelligence of Saudi Arabia [Prince Turki al Faisal].”
Better questions about strong relationships
Ignoring Clarke’s own strong relationship to the UAE, and therefore to the BCCI network, support for the Taliban and al Qaeda, and OBL, one interviewer then asked: “How long do you think it would take [the CIA] to decide — this isn’t working”? Clark replied: “I don’t know. I do know that in August of 2001 they decide they’re gonna tell the FBI.”
This remark refers to the idea that it was not until August 21 that the FBI figured out that al Qaeda operatives were in the United States. This claim is transparently false as we know they were, at the very least, aware of Moussaoui and the Phoenix memo saying that terrorists were taking flight lessons in the US. But in August, it was said that an FBI analyst assigned to the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center suddenly determined that Alhazmi and Almidhar had entered the US in January 2000.
Additionally, on August 23, 2001, the Israeli Mossad gave US officials an urgent warning in the form of a list of terrorists known to be living in the US and panning to carry out an attack in the near future. The list included the names of Alhazmi, Almihdra, Alshehhi and Atta.
An “all points bulletin” was issued that same day, instructing the FBI and other agencies to put Alhazmi and Almihdar on the watch list. Doing so would have made certain that these two were caught before the attacks. The FBI did not do so, however. The FBI did not even use this information to check national databases of bank records, drivers license records or the records of the credit cards that were used to purchase the 9/11 tickets. These facts seem to render Clarke’s new, vague insinuations moot, because the FBI wasn’t going to act on such information no matter what it was told.
In yet another example, on August 28, a report was received by the New York FBI office requesting that an investigation be conducted “to determine if Almihdar is still in the United States.” FBI headquarters immediately turned down the request. An FBI agent wrote an email in response, saying “someday someone will die [because of this]. Let’s hope the [FBI’s] National Security Law Unit will stand behind their decisions then, especially since UBL [Osama bin Laden] is now getting the most protection.”
All this was before September 4th, the date that Clarke now says would have given plenty of time for him and the FBI to catch Alhazmi and Almihdar, if only they had known the two were in the US. But those of us who have been looking into the events of 9/11 and the history behind those events are not likely to put much credence in Mr. Clarke’s new tale.
Clarke’s most recent interviewers didn’t seem too troubled by his statements though, and one of them finished off asking –“ Have you asked George Tenet, Cofer Black or Richard Blee about any of this after the fact?” Clarke responded: “No”.
The second interviewer then asked –” Kind of the facts tripped out to you over time, right, over these investigations”? A smirking Clarke replied — “Took a while.”
For the rest of us, it will still take a while to get to the bottom of all this and Mr. Clarke’s interview does not appear to help. In the meantime, here are a dozen questions for whoever conducts Clarke’s next interview:
Is the COG plan that you and Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Oliver North, George H.W. Bush, Kenneth Duberstein, and James Woolsey created, and that you implemented on 9/11, still in effect?
Do you have any information on how your friends in the UAE royal family used the terrorist network BCCI after they bought it?
Do you have any explanation for how you could have predicted in 1998, at the same time that you updated the COG plan to be a response to a terrorist attack, that America’s enemies “will go after our Achilles’ heel” which is “in Washington. It is in New York.”?
When you met with UAE Defense Minister Al Maktoum in February 1999, just days before the CIA planned to kill or capture Bin Laden as he was meeting with UAE royals, who else did you meet with?
Why did you vote down the CIA plan to kill or capture Bin Laden while he was hunting with UAE royals in February 1999?
Why did you expose the CIA’s secret plan, without approval from the CIA or the president, to kill or capture Bin Laden in March 1999 as he was meeting with UAE royals again?
Don’t you think those two actions on your part were far more detrimental to the United States than any of your current, vague speculations?
Did you ever communicate with NSA Director, Michael Hayden, between January 2000 and the attacks of 9/11? If so, why did you not, in your recent interview, accuse him of withholding information on Alhazmi and Almihdar? He has spoken openly of having known about their presence in the US and said that he did share it with the intelligence community.
Why did you take no action in December 1999, as “Counterterrorism Czar”, when you and the NSC were given evidence that Khalil Deek’s next door neighbor was operating an al Qaeda sleeper cell in Anaheim, CA?
You appear to be saying that neither you nor the FBI knew that Almihdar and Alhazmi lived with Abdussattar Shaikh, a tested FBI asset, for at least four months in the year 2000. Is that correct and, if so, don’t you think that contradicts your claim in this interview that – “I know how all this stuff works, I’ve been working it for 30 years. You can’t snowball me on this stuff.”?
Do you know why the FBI would not allow Abdussattar Shaikh or his FBI handler to be interviewed as part of the 9/11 investigation?
These days, when you’re talking with your UAE friends in your own offices in the UAE, do you ever discuss 9/11, the hijackers that spent their time there, and the UAE money that financed the 9/11 attacks?
Clarke currently works with his COG partner and former CIA Director, James Woolsey, at Paladin Capital, which has offices in New York and the UAE. Clarke is also the chairman of Good Harbor Consulting, where he is in partnership with many people who are making a fortune off the war on terror. Good Harbor Consulting has had an office in Abu Dhabi since 2008, and Clarke is known to have a “big footprint” in the UAE.[19]
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[1] Interview with Richard Clarke, SecrecyKills.com, http://secrecykills.com/
[2] NYPD Confidential, Charm school for top cops, May 6, 1996, http://nypdconfidential.com/columns/1996/960506.html
[3] Peter Dale Scott, Continuity of Government: Is the State of Emergency Superseding our Constitution?, GlobalResearch.ca, November 24, 2010, http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=22089
[4] Peter Dale Scott, ‘Continuity of Government’ Planning: War, Terror and the Supplanting of the U.S. Constitution, Japan Focus, http://www.japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3362
[5] History Commons 9/11 Timeline, Profile: Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=zayed_bin_sultan_al_nahyan_1
[6] Jonathan Beaty and S.C. Gwynne, Scandals: Not Just a Bank, September 2, 1991, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,973732-4,00.html
[7] Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin, False Profits: The Inside Story of BCCI, The World’s Most Corrupt Financial Empire, Houghton Mifflin, 1992
[8] The BCCI Affair: A Report to the Committee on Foreign Relations United States Senate, December 1992, Abu DhabiI: BCCI’S founding and majority shareholders, http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1992_rpt/bcci/14abudhabi.htm
[9] Ibid
[10] Congressional Research Service, Terrorist Attacks by Al Qaeda, March 31, 2004, http://www.fas.org/irp/crs/033104.pdf
[11] History Commons 9/11 Timeline, Profile: United Arab Emirates (UAE), http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=united_arab_emirates
[12] PBS News Hour, Bin Laden’s Fatwa, August, 1996, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/terrorism/international/fatwa_1996.html
[13] PBS News Hour, Al Qaeda’s Fatwa, February 23, 1998, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/terrorism/international/fatwa_1998.html
[14] Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, Penguin Books, 2004, pp 447-450
[15] The 9/11 Commission Report, 2004, p 138, http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report.pdf
[16] History Commons 9/11 Timeline, Profile: United Arab Emirates (UAE), Context of ‘August 2001: Six 9/11 Hijackers Live Near Entrance to NSA’, http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a0801nsaentrance
[17] Richard Miniter, Losing Bin Laden: How Bill Clinton’s Failures Unleashed Global Terror, Regnery Publishers, 2003
[18] History Commons 9/11 Timeline, Alhazmi and Almihdhar: The 9/11 Hijackers Who Should Have Been Caught, http://www.historycommons.org/essay.jsp?article=essaykhalidandnawaf
[19] Intelligence Online, Richard Clarke’s Big Footprint in United Arab Emirates
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PAST is prologue in 3 parts.
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***++++**** The War Depratment/DOD from 1917 till today spies on the people who have views that are propeace or proworker.
Only a child would think they are not on the net this second and not just 'looking' but POSTING propaganda. ***
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PART 1 .............. from 1917
LINK
http://www.upress.state.ms.us/books/1360
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LINK http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1355/is_n23_v83/ai_13594212/
April 5,1993
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Reports Army spied on King, other black leaders - Martin Luther King, Jr
The Army began spying on Black Americans more than 75 years ago in a campaign that was centered on Southern churches and covered three generations of Dr. Martin Luther King's family, according to a published report.
The spying, which involved the Army's Green Berets, involved King's maternal grandfather, Rev. A.D. Williams, who was pastor of a Baptist church in Atlanta. It continued to include King's father, Rev. Martin Luther King, Sr., and the the slain civil rights leader himself, The Commercial Appeal of Memphis reported.
The newspaper didn't indicate when the spying stopped, but said it also involved such prominent members of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement as H. Rap. Brown and Stokely Carmichael.
The Commercial Appeal said its findings were the result of a 16-month investigation that included a review of classified documents and meeting notes from government and private archives, as well as more than 200 interviews with Army agents living in this country and Mexico.
The spying was conducted, the newspaper said, because of the Army's conviction that Black Americans were ripe for subversion by German agents during World War I and later by Communists and anti-war groups.
While previous surveillance of U.S. civil rights leaders has been documented, most has involved the work of the FBI and local police agencies, rather than the military. The spying during the 1960s civil rights era was conducted during the time when the Army fretted over growing unrest at home while much of its resources were committed to fighting the Vietnam War, the newspaper said.
"The Army was over a barrel," Maj. Gen. William P. Yarborough, the Army's top spy in the mid-'60s, said in an interview.
"Blacks were using the uncertainty of the Vietnam period and taking advantage of it. You couldn't expect people to be rational and look at this in a cool way. We were trying to fight a war at the same time where the home base was being eroded."
Atlanta Congressman John Lewis promptly urged Chairman Ron Dellums of the House Armed Services Committee and Chairman Sam Nunn of the Senate Armed Services Committee to probe the spying charges. "This disclosure dramatizes how deeply the disease, the stain and scars of racism were embedded in the American society," Lewis said. He added: "It's frightening and eerie to believe that the U.S. government. . .started spying on Dr. King when he was only 18 years old and a student at Morehouse College."
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PART 2
The Lawless State
The crimes of the U.S. Inteligence Agencies
by Morton Halperin, Jerry Berman, Robert Borosage, Christine Marwick
Penguin Books, 1976
In July 1969, the Department of Defense opened a new war room in the basement of the Pentagon. Staffed by some 180 people and packed with all the latest equipment -data processing machines, closed circuit television, teletype networks, elaborate situation maps-the new operation was a marvel of military technology. The most striking aspect, however, was not the imposing technology, but the purposes that were being served. This was not a regular command center but a very special operation-a "domestic war room," the headquarters of the Directorate for Civil Disturbance Planning and Operations. It was the coordinating center for the Pentagon's domestic war operations.
The office, now known as the Division of Military Services, played a central role in the military's widespread intelligence operations against the American people, a sweeping campaign of civilian surveillance which ultimately affected more than 100,000 citizens. In the fall of 1968, there were more Army Counter-lntelligence Analysis Branch personnel assigned to monitor domestic citizen protests than were assigned to any other counter-intelligence operation in the world, including Southeast Asia and the Vietnam War.' In the later part of the 1960s and early 1970s, 1,500 army plainclothes intelligence agents with the services of more than 350 separate offices and record centers watched and infiltrated thousands of legitimate civilian political organizations. Data banks with as many as 100,000 entries each were maintained at intelligence headquarters at Fort Holabird, Maryland, and at Fourth Army headquarters at Fort Sam Houston, Texas.
As with the FBI and other intelligence agencies, citizens and organizations singled out by military surveillance were those who exercised their right to speak out: the oppressed minorities, advocates of reform, and those on the political "left." The growth of the army intelligence bureaucracy paralleled the growth of dissident protest movements through the 1960s. Military intelligence undercover agents focused on the civil rights movement of the early 1960s, and then moved to the New Left anti-Vietnam War coalitions of later years. No political gathering, no matter how small, was considered insignificant. No distinction was made between groups preaching violent action and those advocating peaceful dissent. Even the most established and nonviolent groups such as the NAACP and the American Friends Service Committee became targets of military surveillance.
With the exception of the FBI, the military intelligence services collected more information on American politics in the sixties than any other federal agency. The army conducted a full-scale Pentagon operation within the United States, and the figures and attitudes reflect this approach. Where a civilian agency might have opened a hundred files, the military created a thousand; the army established CONUS and CONARC intelligence commands, and then reorganized and reinitiated them as USAINTC, the Directorate of Civil Disturbance Planning, and the Division of Military Support. They ran operations with such code names as GARDEN PLOT, ROSE BUSH, PUNCH BLOCK, STEEP HILL, LANTERN SPIKE, QUIET TOWN, GRAM METRIC, and CABLE SPLICER; and they developed intelligence "compendiums," a "mug book," daily, weekly and monthly intelligence summaries, special reports, "city packets," contingency and alternative contingency plans, computerized filing systems, and crossover index files to information. All were based on agent spot reports, radio intercepts, incident and personality files, newspaper clippings and data from numerous civilian sources. Each level of the military hierarchy tried to placate its superiors by collecting as much or more information than the task required, whether it was of any importance or not. The attitude pervading these army operations was best stated by Robert E. Jordan III, general counsel to the army: "the people on the other side were essentially the enemy. The army conducted a de facto war against all citizen protest, legitimate and illegitimate, violent and peaceful, white and black.
p160
THE 1960s INTELLIGENCE CAMPAIGN
With the rise of citizen protest and the involvement of federal troops to control demonstrations during the 1960s- especially in the area of civil rights-the scope and focus of the military's domestic intelligence operations expanded greatly. Often justified as necessary to enforce federal desegregation laws, these intelligence activities were in fact directed primarily against one side of the conflict: the black-civil rights protesters whom the military had ostensibly been called in to protect. Neither white segregationists nor local law enforcement plans or tactics interested the , military as much as did black civil rights groups and their leaders.
p163
By the late 1960s, the direct political nature of military intelligence operations was quite explicit. A telling indication of this was the February 1968 annex to the army's Civil Disturbance Plan, where "dissident elements" and "subversives" were clearly identified as primary targets of surveillance. The activities of the peace movement were judged "detrimental" to the United States, and American antiwar activists were viewed as possible conspirators manipulated by foreign agents. This search for foreign influence within the antiwar and civil rights movements was equally evident in an October 1967 request to the National Security Agency by General William Yarborough seeking "Indications that foreign governments or organizations acting as agents of foreign governments are controlling or attempting to control or influence the activities of U.S. 'peace' groups and 'Black power' organizations. Yarborough also requested available information on identities of United States individuals and organizations in contact with foreign agents, and advice given by agents of foreign governments to groups and foreign agencies seeking to control or influence United States organizations. Yarborough and the army were certain that dissent could not occur without foreign orchestration.
No evidence linking these movements to foreign powers was found, but this did not prevent army officials from continuing to amass files on civilian groups. Military officials viewed civil rights protests and antiwar movements, as programs to overthrow the government rather than legitimate expressions of popular opposition.
p166
In violation of federal statutes, a representative of army intelligence sat on the interagency Intelligence Evaluation Committee, and the army's general counsel served on the Law Enforcement Policy Committee. The army also created a master plan, known as GARDEN PLOT, which provided an outline for standardized procedures to be used for handling civil disturbances by the National Guard, regular armed forces, and civilian authorities. Based on preparations for future disturbances, GARDEN PLOT trained troops for possible deployment, and taught military and civilian leaders how to control these activities in a "war-room" setting. The DOD's domestic war room and twenty-four-hour-per-day monitoring of civilian disturbances were central aspects of GARDEN PLOT.
Military management training was brought to the local level and involved the FBI and other civilian officials. As far back as 1962, J. Edgar Hoover gave the army complete access to FBI files without charges for clerical or computer time, in exchange for the army's agreement to conduct biannual seminars in the philosophy and use of riot-control techniques for more than 200 FBI agents and officials. War games were held to practice coordination. In the U.S. Sixth Army area-including California, Washington, Oregon, Nevada, and Arizona-Cable Splicer III, a GARDEN PLOT operation, simulated demonstrations by radical "leftist" groups on imaginary campuses and high schools along the Pacific Coast. The names selected for the mock groups in these war games indicate the usual targets of military intelligence: "the Scholars Democratic League, on the campuses; the International Brotherhood of Labor Reform, among the blue collar workers; and the International Fraternity of Progress of Non-Caucasian, among the minority groups.
Just twenty-one days after federal troops killed four Kent State students during an anti-Vietnam War demonstration, 1,700 military, civilian, and corporate officials met to discuss an after-action report on the war game. Major corporations represented included the Bank of America, Lockheed, Boeing, Sylvania, Pacific Gas and Electric, Pacific Telephone and Telegraph, Standard Oil of California, Jet Propulsion Laboratories, SCM, Dictaphone, and the John Hancock Mutual Life lnsurance Co.
p168
with CIA Operation CHAOS and other illegal secret intelligence programs, only public exposure and the threat of congressional action led to the termination of military surveillance activities. Christopher Pyle, a former army intelligence officer, revealed the scope of the military's domestic intelligence activities in the January 1970 issue of the Washington Monthly, charging that "the Army had assembled the essential apparatus of a police state." Several earlier evaluations within the army had expressed "reservations" about the programs or judged them unnecessary and out of control, but it took the Pyle article and widespread public pressure to curb the growth of army spying on American citizens.
Once the wide scope of military domestic activities became clear, it was evident that they had violated both specific statues and the long-standing Anglo-Saxon tradition separating civil law enforcement and the military. The Posse Comitatus Act, originally enacted in 1878, makes it illegal for anyone to use "any part of the Army" to enforce civil laws without a presidential proclamation, and then only as a "last resort," where state and local officials are unable to maintain order. Whether the president and high-level civilian leadership were aware of the widespread military activity throughout the 1960s remains unclear. After examining the matter in as much detail as documents then (and now) available make possible, the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights was able to conclude only that "the highest levels of the Departments of Defense and Justice were or should have been informed."
... military intelligence operations against-American citizens did not end with the 1971 revelations. The practices have continued-though reduced- and the bureaucratic structure remains in place. The current DOD directive governing "Acquisition of Information Concerning Persons and Organizations Not Affiliated with the Department of Defense," issued on December 8, 1975, still contains the same loopholes as previous directives. For example, with the specific approval of the secretary of defense, information may be "acquired which is essential to operational requirements flowing from the mission . . . to assist civil authorities in dealing with civil disturbances." As the Senate Judiciary Committee reported in 1976.
... similar imprecise language in earlier directives was in large part responsible for the abuses of the past. The threat" exception is a loophole that has the potential to nullify the general restrictions embodied in the directive.
In the past, the military has regularly been called in to control civil disturbances and monitor the political activities of American citizens. Despite recent disclosures and guidelines, the potential for rebuilding the domestic war room has been preserved. The teletypes and data processing machines, silent now, may be readied to whir into action at the first sign of domestic protest.
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PART 3
link http://www.huffingtonpost.com/amy-goodman/obamas-military-is-spying_b_246655.html
Amy Goodman
Host, executive producer of Democracy Now!, NYT bestselling author, syndicated columnist
Posted: July 28, 2009 08:20 PM
Obama's Military Is Spying on U.S. Peace Groups
Anti-war activists in Olympia, Wash., have exposed U.S. Army spying and infiltration of their groups, as well as intelligence gathering by the U.S. Air Force, the federal Capitol Police and the Coast Guard.
The infiltration appears to be in direct violation of the Posse Comitatus Act preventing U.S. military deployment for domestic law enforcement, and may strengthen congressional demands for a full-scale investigation of U.S. intelligence activities, like the Church Committee hearings of the 1970s.
Brendan Maslauskas Dunn asked the City of Olympia for documents or e-mails about communications between the Olympia police and the military relating to anarchists, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) or the Industrial Workers of the World (Dunn's union). Dunn received hundreds of documents. One e-mail contained reference to a "John J. Towery II," who activists discovered was the same person as their fellow activist "John Jacob."
Dunn told me: "John Jacob was actually a close friend of mine, so this week has been pretty difficult for me. He said he was an anarchist. He was really interested in SDS. He got involved with Port Militarization Resistance (PMR), with Iraq Vets Against the War. He was a kind person. He was a generous person. So it was really just a shock for me."
"Jacob" told the activists he was a civilian employed at Fort Lewis Army Base, and would share information about base activities, which could help PMR organize rallies and protests against public ports being used for troop and Stryker military vehicle deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan. Since 2006, PMR activists have occasionally engaged in civil disobedience, blocking access to the port.
Larry Hildes, an attorney representing Washington activists, says the U.S. attorney prosecuting the cases against them, Brian Kipnis, specifically instructed the Army not to hand over any information about its intelligence-gathering activities, despite a court order to do so.
Which is why Dunn's request to Olympia and the documents he obtained are so important. The military is supposed to be barred from deploying on U.S. soil, or from spying on citizens.
Christopher Pyle, now a professor of politics at Mount Holyoke College, was a military intelligence officer. He recalled: "In the 1960s, Army intelligence had 1,500 plainclothes agents watching every demonstration of 20 people or more. They had a giant warehouse in Baltimore full of information on the law-abiding activities of American citizens, mainly protest politics."
Pyle later investigated the spying for two congressional committees: "As a result of those investigations, the entire U.S. Army Intelligence Command was abolished, and all of its files were burned. Then the Senate Intelligence Committee wrote the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 to stop the warrantless surveillance of electronic communications."
Reps. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., Rush Holt, D-N.J., and others are pushing for a new, comprehensive investigation of all U.S. intelligence activities, of the scale of the Church Committee hearings, which exposed widespread spying on and disruption of legal domestic groups, attempts at assassination of foreign heads of state, and more.
Demands mount for information and accountability for Vice President Dick Cheney's alleged secret assassination squad, President George W. Bush's warrantless wiretapping program, and the CIA's alleged misleading of Congress. But the spying in Olympia occurred well into the Obama administration (and may continue today). President Barack Obama supports retroactive immunity for telecom companies involved in the wiretapping, and has maintained Bush-era reliance on the state secrets privilege. Lee and Holt should take the information uncovered by Brendan Dunn and the Olympia activists and get the investigations started now.
LINK Declassified Docs Reveal Military Operative Spied on WA Peace Groups, Activist Friends Stunned
Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
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LOL more “crackpot switcheroo”, thanks for proving my point and changing the subject once again. Gee an anonymously written article with no citations on an obscure anonymously run website which at best pays it “journalists” 2 – 5 Euros per article but seem mostly to be staffed by volunteers. You really are getting desperate. But even IF true Israelis posting pro-Israeli stuff is something else entirely. Still waiting for you to post evidence the DoD or any other US agency is paying people to post on English language websites
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A desperate person lives in BRAZIL
link http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2008/03/report-recruit/
Military report: secretly ‘recruit or hire bloggers.’
By Amanda Terkel on Mar 31, 2008 at 9:09 pm
Noah Shachtman at Danger Room finds a 2006 report written for U.S. Special Operations Command that suggests ways the military should deal with the blogosphere. One suggestion is for the military to hire bloggers to “pass the U.S. message“:
Information strategists can consider clandestinely recruiting or hiring prominent bloggers or other persons of prominence…to pass the U.S. message. … On the other hand, such operations can have a blowback effect, as witnessed by the public reaction following revelations that the U.S. military had paid journalists to publish stories in the Iraqi press under their own names. People do not like to be deceived, and the price of being exposed is lost credibility and trust.
An alternative strategy is to “make” a blog and blogger. The process of boosting the blog to a position of influence could take some time, however, and depending on the person running the blog, may impose a significant educational burden, in terms of cultural and linguistic training before the blog could be put online to any useful effect. Still, there are people in the military today who like to blog.
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LINK http://fuzzilicious.blogspot.com/2006/01/im-being-recruited-by-army.html
I'm Being Recruited by the Army?!
[Two big points: 1) The only people being paid in this are the employees of the PR firm that is contacting bloggers. Bloggers are being offered no compensation of any kind for participating! 2) I am not a milblog and I have no idea why I was contacted when I usually get under 100 hits as day. Go read Blackfive or Sensing if you want to see "pro-war" blogs contacted by the PR firm who have actual impact and visibility in the blogosphere.]
Blackfive and Donald Sensing have "gone public" with an offer they've received to participate in a public relations/information program of the U.S. Army.
I also received that offer, much to my surprise. In fact, I couldn't imagine why I would be on the radar screen of such a program, so I figured it was a scam. But I checked with a big milblogger who said that he knew several who had received it and it checked out as legit. Here's the email I received:
Hi, Lioness. I’m writing from a PR firm on behalf of the U.S. Army. We’re contacting a few bloggers to test a new outlet for public information. The Army believes that military blogs are a valuable medium for reaching out to soldiers. To that end, the Army plans to offer you and selected bloggers exclusive editorial content on a few issues you’re likely to be interested in. If you do decide you are interested in receiving this material, whether you choose to write about what we send you is, of course, entirely up to you.
Like I said, we’re only contacting a handful of bloggers at this time. If you are interested, please let me know, and we’ll send you further information as it becomes available. Either way, thanks for your time.
________________
Charlie Kondek
Account Executive
Web Producer
Hass MS&L
This morning I replied to Mr. Kondek and asked for more information about the program. I'm still not sure what to think of it, but at this point I'm following Blackfive and Sensing's lead.
As to explaining how I appeared on their list of prospective bloggers for this program, I'm largely at a loss. I'm not on any milblog list, and I certainly have a "modest" size readership. Perhaps they found Valour-IT and traced it back to here? The milblogger I first consulted about this suggested I should consider it quite the compliment. We'll see, I guess...
I'm certainly interested to learn what other bloggers have received this offer...
Update: Instapundit apparently approves. H/T John Donovan.
Update II: This has apparently developed into quite the tempest in a teapot.
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Typical crackpot switcheroo, you started this thread claiming Darpa was doing this and that the sources you cited supported this.
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Guess Colby's emotional response is because the whole thread is toooooo
close to home.
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Israel paying agents to post pro Israel Propaganda on Internet forums & blogs!
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Posted by EU Times on Dec 29th, 2009
The Foreign Ministry unveiled a new plan this week: Paying talkbackers to post pro-Israel responses on websites worldwide. A total of NIS 600,000 (roughly $150,000) will be earmarked to the establishment of an Internet warfare squad.
The Foreign Ministry intends to hire young people who speak at least one language and who study communication, political science, or law or alternately, Israelis with military experience gained at units dealing with information analysis.
Beyond the fact that these job requirements reveal a basic lack of understanding in respect to the dynamics of the online discourse the projects manager argued that adults dont know how to blog they are not too relevant either. An effective talkbacker does not need a law degree or military experience. He merely needs to care about the subject he writes about.
The sad truth is that had Israeli citizens believed that their State is doing the right thing, they would have made sure to explain it out of their own accord. Without being paid.
Foreign Ministry officials are fighting what they see as a terrible and scary monster: the Palestinian public relations monster. Yet nothing can be done to defeat it, regardless of how many foolish inventions will be introduced and how many bright communication students will be hired.
The reason is that good PR cannot make the reality in the occupied territories prettier. Children are being killed, homes are being bombed, and families are starved. Yet nonetheless, the Foreign Ministry wants to try to change the situation. And they have willing partners. Where do I submit a CV? wrote one respondent. Im fluent in several languages and Im able to spew forth bullxxxx for hours on end.
Continue
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"Im fluent in several languages and Im able to spew ...", QUOTE ABOVE LINKED REPORT.
Ah, yes,tooooooo close to home. THANKS STEVEN GAAL
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RELATED THANKS SG
September 7, 2009
9/11 Training Exercise Planned for Simulated Plane Crash Five Minutes before Pentagon Attack Took Place
Five minutes before the Pentagon was hit on September 11, 2001, a training exercise being run by a US intelligence agency just over 20 miles from the Pentagon was set to include the scenario of a small private jet plane crashing into a building. It is unclear whether the scenario was played out, or if the exercise had been called off by that time.
***** SEE LINK BELOW *****
link http://www.scribd.com/doc/18663225/T8-B16-Misc-Work-Papers-Fdr-NRO-Exe
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Is Colby just working to disinform ?? Why do I ask this ? Its a real and serious question for any GOOGLE work at all (any) would confirm what I have posted.
Wired is considered a very main stream media source not some coinspiracy blogger site. Any GOOGLE search would confirm what I posted. I post some blogger sites because they are briefer and many times a eaiser read. Yes they may be linking in a subpar manner ,however, they progress what the forum main purpose should be . . +THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH.....since Colby oddly on this particular issue (++ false gov promoted posting ++) is totally wrong....one can with ease be logically led to ask the question in my first reply sentence. "Is Colby just working to disinform?" +++ THANKS sg
LOL you have yet to provide evidence I am wrong about this issue.
LINK https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=6ef12558b44258382452fcf02942396a&tab=core&_cview=0%%%%%%%%%%%%%%########o########%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
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link http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/07/darpa-wants-social-media-sensor-for-propaganda-ops/
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Pentagon Wants a Social Media Propaganda Machine
By Adam Rawnsley
July 15, 2011 |
2:40 pm |
Categories: DarpaWatch
Please cite the passage of the Wired article indicated that the DoD, or any other USG agency/department etc., has people post, using false identities, on forums and other social media sites aimed at people in developed countries as opposed to ones in which the US is involved in combat operations. Did you even bother to read it according to the article to program was:
1) still in the planning stages, the DoD was soliciting bids from private contractors,
2) apparently not aimed at people in developed countries Darpas announcement talks about using SMISC [in] the environment in which [the military] operates and where it conducts operations. That strongly implies its intended for use in sensing and messaging to foreign social media.'
It seems to be more concerned with tracking than creating memes.
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Mr.Colby believes that DARPA will publicly release all their operations on the internet. Really to think that way is to think like a child....really....now you do get hints. However there does seem to be a plan by government for 911 disinformation placed on the internet.
see link below
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Obama advisor Sunstein's "Conspiracy Theory" : Proposals for Silencing Dissent, Misrepresenting the 911 Truth Movement
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" Government agents (and their allies) might enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories by raising doubts about their factual premises, causal logic or implications for political action. "
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see link http://americansjourney.blogspot.com/2010/01/obama-advisor-sunsteins-conspiracy.html
Page 14: " We can readily imagine a series of possible responses.
1. Government might ban conspiracy theorizing."
Note: OK so although the geniuses from Harvard know an open society is the best protection against misguided government secrecy they make this proposal banning free speech - which is an inalienable right. A Harvard Law Professor? Send this clown back to school - somewhere else!
Page 14:
"2. Government might impose some kind of tax, financial or otherwise, on those who disseminate such theories."
Note: By "such theories" Sunstein means those that he and others blessed with special DNA can instinctively tell are "false conspiracy theories" - such as the one he imagines is held by the 911 Truth movement. See above videos where Gage distinctly states that he doesn't have a complete theory. Gage uses an analogy describing the 911 Truth movement as that of a detective who after walking into a room, finds a body and several shell casings. The detective doesn't need a complete theory to perform a thorough investigation. The detective, in order to find perpetrator/s must consider ALL hypotheses, not just the hypothesis Harvard Law Pontiffs anoint, and letting the scientific method and good police work lead to the truth.
Page 14:
" 3. Government might itself engage in counterspeech, marshaling arguments to discredit conspiracy theories."
Note: Methinks Sunstein protests too much. Counterspeech as he describes is already impemented. But the government agents will lose this battle because when one argues against the truth one ultimately must rely on logical fallacies which are self-defeating.
Page 14:
" 4. Government might formally hire credible private parties to engage in counterspeech"
Note: They already are but they are running into the same problems stated in paragraph above. Radio and TV personalities are backing away from these tactics because they backfire when the truth comes out - ratings drop - TV and Radio shills lose credibility.
Page 14:
" 5. Government might engage in informal communication with such parties, encouraging them to help. ... our main policy idea is that government should engage in cognitive infiltration of the groups that produce conspiracy theories, which involves a mix of 3, 4, and 5.
Page 22:
" Government agents (and their allies) might enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories by raising doubts about their factual premises, causal logic or implications for political action. "
Note: The Harvard Law Professor's 29 page paper "Conspiracy Theory" defines a conspiracy theory as:
"an effort to explain some event or practice by reference to the machinations of powerful people, who have also managed to conceal their role."
So let me get this straight: Harvard Law Professor is proposing government sanctioned conspiratorial acts directed at the 911 Truth Movement while simultaneously proposing that people who know that their government commits conspiratorial acts are "dangerous" and must be pre-emptively silenced.
Page 16:
"According to an anonymous State Department official in charge of anti-disinformation, "a great deal of harm can result 'when people believe these lies and then act on the basis of their mistaken beliefs.' "
Note: This is great information from Sunstein - and I wish to add that I have information from an anonymous State Department official too! I was told by this anonymous top secret source that there are some Harvard Law Professors with absolutely no respect for the United States Constitution committed to the employment of scare tactics to trample on the Bill of Rights.
Page 29:
" Some conspiracy theories create serious risks. They do not merely undermine democratic debate; in extreme cases, they create or fuel violence. If government can dispel such theories, it should do so."
Note: I wonder how having a debate about a conspiracy or not is a bigger risk to democratic debate than the proposals this goof from Harvard is proposing?
Finally:
Consider this excerpt from John Adams' book "A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America against the attack of M. Turgot"
Considering his interpretation of what our Founding Fathers intended for our Republic, and his portrayal of the 911 Truth movement - do you think Sunstein has good judgement? Do you think he will be a champion of your liberties? Do you think he gives good advice? Does it seem like he thinks he is better than you?
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http://curezone.com/forums/fm.asp?i=1851904
Except for I believe a plane hit the Pentagon, I support Tarpley's views.
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here is the direct MP3 link below spooky
o
http://www.americanfreedomradio.com/archive/Truth-Jihad-32k-082411.mp3
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link ED FORUM with 46 list. You can for a better formatted list GOOGLE "46 Drills of 911", its spreading around the net.
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Blee helped early and late (just before 911) by hiding/delaying/disinforming on AQ/911 people.
Blee part of a Secret Team ??? You see just after planning 911 the plotters had to be protected. Blee helps them flee.
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Link below shows numerous attempts by CIA to stop investigations.
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samples of link datum
(1)
January 12, 2000: CIA’s Bin Laden Unit Chief Falsely Claims Malaysia Surveillance Is Continuing
Richard Blee, head of Alec Station, the CIA’s bin Laden unit, gives an incorrect briefing to his CIA superiors about surveillance of al-Qaeda operatives in Southeast Asia. He claims that Malaysian authorities and the CIA are continuing to monitor al-Qaeda operatives who gathered for a summit in Kuala Lumpur (see January 5-8, 2000). In actual fact, three of the summit’s attendees, Khalid Almihdhar, Nawaf Alhazmi, and Khallad bin Attash, have already left Kuala Lumpur for Bangkok and have disappeared there (see January 8, 2000). The 9/11 Commission will say that Blee is “unaware at first even that the Arabs had left Kuala Lumpur, let alone that their trail had been lost in Thailand” and that he “may not have known that in fact Almihdhar and his companions had dispersed and the tracking was falling apart.” These statements will be sourced to an interview with Blee in December 2003 and contemporary CIA documents. However, Alec Station is well aware of the departure of the three men, as it was notified of this and sent a follow-up cable on January 9 telling the CIA station in Bangkok to find them there (see January 9, 2000). It is unclear why Blee gives such an inaccurate briefing, but he gives a similar one two days later (see January 14, 2000), after Alec Station is again reminded that the three radicals are in Thailand, not Malaysia (see January 13, 2000). [9/11 Commission, 7/24/2004, pp. 181, 354, 502
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(2)
January 14, 2000: CIA’s Bin Laden Unit Chief Again Falsely Claims Malaysia Surveillance Is Continuing
Richard Blee, head of Alec Station, the CIA’s bin Laden unit, again wrongly informs his CIA superiors about surveillance of al-Qaeda operatives in Southeast Asia. Repeating a claim made in a briefing two days previously (see January 12, 2000), he says that Malaysian authorities and the CIA are continuing to monitor al-Qaeda operatives who gathered for a summit in Kuala Lumpur (see January 5-8, 2000). In actual fact, three of the summit’s attendees, Khalid Almihdhar, Nawaf Alhazmi, and Khallad bin Attash, have already left Kuala Lumpur for Bangkok (see January 8, 2000). Alec Station is well aware of the departure of the three men, as it was notified of their departure and sent a follow-up cable on January 9 telling the CIA station in Bangkok to find them there (see January 9, 2000). In addition, one day before this briefing the CIA station in Bangkok sent Alec Station a cable saying it was unable to locate the men in Thailand (see January 13, 2000). The 9/11 Commission will also point out that “there is no evidence of any tracking efforts actually being undertaken by anyone after the Arabs disappeared into Bangkok.” It is unclear why Blee gives such an inaccurate briefing. [9/11 Commission, 7/24/2004, pp. 181, 354]
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See supporting datum below.
No matter what Flocco said before. Flocco is right ,Bush was in business with
Khalid bin Mahfouz (20 % holder of BCCI) and note Khalid bin Mahfouz connected to OBL.
You see just after Secret Team BCCI ends OBL/Zawahiri form a type of new BCCI,
called the ,"Botherhood Group."
Zawahiri takes BCCI account money to form said "Brotherhood Group" Now 911myth people say the
911 meeting of GHWB and OBL's brother was not really a private meeting. Yes but,it was a
Carlyle Group meeting. Carlyle group benefited by 911 see ++++
link http://911review.com/articles/ryan/carlyle_kissinger_saic_halliburton.html
So yes GHWB was at a big meeting with brother of OBL,but that viewpoint is a distraction.
OBL's brother is meeting with powerful people who benefited from 911, ON 911 !! The 911myth people try to distract from the larger picture. This is a debating tactic. Golly,gee, Colby is a 911myth man. Do you see a trend ????
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History Commons timeline
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1988: Bin Ladens Bail Out George W. Bush?
Prior to this year, President George W. Bush is a failed oilman. Three times, friends and investors have bailed him out to keep his business from going bankrupt. However, in 1988, the same year his father becomes president, some Saudis buy a portion of his small company, Harken, which has never performed work outside of Texas. Later in the year, Harken wins a contract in the Persian Gulf and starts doing well financially. These transactions seem so suspicious that the Wall Street Journal in 1991 states it raises the question of… an effort to cozy up to a presidential son. Two major investors in Bushs company during this time are Salem bin Laden and Khalid bin Mahfouz. Salem bin Laden dies in a plane crash in Texas in 1988. [intelligence Newsletter, 3/2/2000; Salon, 11/19/2001] Salem bin Laden is Osamas oldest brother; Khalid bin Mahfouz is a Saudi banker with a 20 percent stake in BCCI. The bank will be shut down a few years later and bin Mahfouz will have to pay a $225 million fine (while admitting no wrongdoing) (see October 10, 2001)). [Forbes, 3/18/2002]
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Early 1990s-Late 1996: Bin Laden Frequently Travels to London, According to Various Sources
The 1999 book The New Jackals by journalist Simon Reeve will report that in the early 1990s, bin Laden was flitting between Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, London, and Sudan. Reeve does not say who his sources are for this statement. [Reeve, 1999, pp. 156]
Bin Laden had concluded an arms deal to purchase ground-to-air missiles for anti-Soviet fighters at the Dorchester Hotel in Central London in 1986 (see Mid-1986).
Bin Laden allegedly visits the London mansion of Saudi billionaire Khalid bin Mahfouz around 1991 (see (1991)).
Bin Laden allegedly travels to London and Manchester to meet GIA militants in 1994 (see 1994).
One report claims bin Laden briefly lived in London in 1994 (see Early 1994).
Similarly, the 1999 book Dollars for Terror by Richard Labeviere will claim, According to several authorized sources, Osama bin Laden traveled many times to the British capital between 1995 and 1996, on his private jet.
The book will also point out that in February 1996, bin Laden was interviewed for the Arabic weekly al-Watan al-Arabi and the interview was held in the London house of Khalid al-Fawwaz, bin Ladens de facto press secretary at the time (see Early 1994-September 23, 1998). [Labeviere, 1999, pp. 101]
An interview with bin Laden will be published in the Egyptian weekly Rose Al Yusuf on June 17, 1996. The interview is said to have been conducted in London, but the exact date of the interview is not known. [Emerson, 2006, pp. 423]
In a book first published in 1999, journalist John Cooley will say that bin Laden seems to have avoided even clandestine trips [to London] from 1995. [Cooley, 2002, pp. 63]
Labeviere, however, will claim bin Laden was in London as late as the second half of 1996, and, according to several Arab diplomatic sources, this trip was clearly under the protection of the British authorities. [Labeviere, 1999, pp. 108]
After 9/11, some will report that bin Laden never traveled to any Western countries in his life. On the other hand, in 2005 a British cabinet official will state that in late 1995 bin Laden actually considered moving to London (see Late 1995).
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(1991): Bin Laden Allegedly Stays at London Estate of Saudi Billionaire
Shortly after 9/11, the London Times will report that Osama bin Laden stayed at the London estate of Saudi billionaire Khalid bin Mahfouz. Sources close to the bin Mahfouz family say that about 10 years ago, when bin Laden was widely regarded as a religious visionary and defender of the Muslim faith, he visited the property and spent two or three days on the estate, relaxing in its open-air swimming pool, walking in the grounds and talking to bin Mahfouz. What the men discussed remains a mystery. Bin Mahfouz was a major investor in the criminal Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), which is closed down around this time (see July 5, 1991). [London Times, 9/23/2001] Bin Laden was also heavily invested in BCCI at the time (see July 1991). There are other reports of bin Laden visiting London around this time (see Early 1990s-Late 1996), and even briefly living there (see Early 1994). The name bin Mahfouz appears on the Golden Chain, a list of early al-Qaeda financial supporters (see 1988-1989). Bin Mahfouz denies any terrorist link to bin Laden.
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After July 1991: Bin Laden, Al-Zawahiri, and Muslim Brotherhood Benefit from Collapse of BCCI, Form New Financial Network to Replace It
In July 1991, the criminal BCCI bank is shut down (see July 5, 1991), and Osama bin Laden apparently loses some of his fortune held in BCCI accounts as a result (see July 1991). But while bin Laden loses money, he and his future second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri gain influence. Other Islamist militants have been heavily relying on BCCI for their finances, and in the wake of BCCIs collapse they are forced to bank elsewhere. Author Roland Jacquard will later claim that following [the banks closure], funds [are] transferred from BCCI to banks in Dubai, Jordan, and Sudan controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood. Some of the money [is] handed back to organizations such as the FIS [a political party in Algeria]. Another portion [is] transferred by Ayman al-Zawahiri to Switzerland, the Netherlands, London, Antwerp, and Malaysia. [Jacquard, 2002, pp. 129] Author Adam Robinson will come to similar conclusions, noting that when BCCI collapses bin Laden has just moved to Sudan, which is ruled by Hassan al-Turabi, who has similar Islamist views to bin Laden. Robinson writes, Without a system by which money could be transferred around the world invisibly, it would be relatively simple for terrorist funds to be traced. Dealing with this crisis fell to al-Turabi. In desperation he turned to Osama.… The future of the struggle could come to rest on Osamas shoulders. Over the next several months, bin Laden and a small team of financial experts work on a plan to replace the functions of BCCI. Bin Laden already knows many of the main Islamist backers from his experience in the Afghan war. During the summer of 2001 he discreetly made contact with many of the wealthiest of these individuals, especially those with an international network of companies.… Within months, Osama unveiled before an astonished al-Turabi what he called the Brotherhood Group. This is apparently a reference to the Muslim Brotherhood. Robinson says this group is made up of 134 Arab businessmen with a collective wealth of many billions of dollars. The network will effectively replace BCCI for Islamist militants. [Robinson, 2001, pp. 138-139] A French report shortly after 9/11 will confirm that bin Ladens network largely replaces BCCI (see October 10, 2001). Right around this time, bin Laden is seen at the London estate of Khalid bin Mahfouz, one of the major investors in BCCI (see (1991)).
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1995-1998: Alleged Ties Between Al-Qadi Charity and Terrorist Groups Are Uncovered; No Action Taken
Beginning in 1995, evidence begins to appear in the media suggesting that a Saudi charity named the Muwafaq Foundation has ties to radical militants. The foundation is run by a Saudi multimillionaire named Yassin al-Qadi.
In 1995, media reports claim that Muwafaq is being used to fund mujaheddin fighters in Bosnia (see 1991-1995).
Also in 1995, Pakistani police raid the foundations Pakistan branch in the wake of the arrest of WTC bomber Ramzi Yousef (see February 7, 1995). The head of the branch is held for several months, and then the branch is closed down. [Chicago Tribune, 10/29/2001]
A secret CIA report in January 1996 says that Muwafaq is has ties to the Al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya militant group and helps fund mujaheddin fighting in Bosnia and at least one training camp in Afghanistan (see January 1996).
In February 1996, bin Laden says in an interview that he supports the Muwafaq branch in Zagreb, Croatia (which is close to the fighting in neighboring Bosnia). [Guardian, 10/16/2001]
A senior US official will later claim that in 1998, the National Commercial Bank, one of the largest banks in Saudi Arabia, ran an audit and determined that the Muwafaq Foundation gave $3 million to al-Qaeda. Both al-Qadi and the bank later claim that the audit never existed. Al-Qadi asserts he has no ties to any terrorist group. [Chicago Tribune, 10/29/2001] In 2003, former counterterrorism tsar Richard Clarke will elaborate on this allegation, saying to a Senate committee, Al-Qadi was the head of Muwafaq, a Saudi relief organization that reportedly transferred at least $3 million, on behalf of Khalid bin Mahfouz, to Osama bin Laden and assisted al-Qaeda fighters in Bosnia. [uS Congress, 10/22/2003] (Note that bin Mahfouz, a Saudi billionaire, denies that he ever had any sort of tie to bin Laden or al-Qaeda and has not been officially charged of such ties anywhere.) [bin Mahfouz Info, 11/22/2005]
Al-Qadi will claim that he shut down Muwafaq in 1996, but it is referred to in UN and German charity documents as doing work in Sudan and Bosnia through 1998. [Guardian, 10/16/2001; BBC, 10/20/2001]
Shortly after 9/11, the US Treasury Department will claim that Muwafaq funded Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK)/Al-Kifah (the predecessor of al-Qaeda), al-Qaeda, Hamas, and Abu Sayyaf (a Philippines militant group with ties to al-Qaeda), and other militant Islamic groups. [FrontPage Magazine, 6/17/2005]
However, despite all of these alleged connections, and the fact that the US will officially label al-Qadi a terrorism financier shortly after 9/11 (see October 12, 2001), the Muwafaq Foundation has never been officially declared a terrorist supporting entity. An October 2001 New York Times article will say that the reason, administration officials said, was the inability of United States officials to locate the charity or determine whether it is still in operation. But the same article will also quote a news editor, who calls Muwafaqs board of directors the creme de la creme of Saudi society. [New York Times, 10/13/2001]
October 10, 2001: Report: Bin Ladens Financial Network Is Successor to the BCCI Bank
A 70-page French intelligence report claims: The financial network of [Osama] bin Laden, as well as his network of investments, is similar to the network put in place in the 1980s by BCCI for its fraudulent operations, often with the same people (former directors and cadres of the bank and its affiliates, arms merchants, oil merchants, Saudi investors). The dominant trait of bin Ladens operations is that of a terrorist network backed up by a vast financial structure. The BCCI was the largest Islamic bank in the world before it collapsed in July 1991 (see July 5, 1991). A senior US investigator will later say US agencies are looking into the ties outlined by the French because they just make so much sense, and so few people from BCCI ever went to jail. BCCI was the mother and father of terrorist financing operations. The report identifies dozens of companies and individuals who were involved with BCCI and were found to be dealing with bin Laden after the bank collapsed. Many went on to work in banks and charities identified by the US and others as supporting al-Qaeda. About six ex-BCCI figures are repeatedly named, including Saudi multi-millionaire Ghaith Pharaon (see October 10, 2001). The role of Saudi billionaire Khalid bin Mahfouz in supporting bin Laden is emphasized in the report. In 1995, bin Mahfouz paid a $225 million fine in a settlement with US prosecutors for his role in the BCCI scandal. [Washington Post, 2/17/2002] Bin Laden lost money when BCCI was shut down, but may have benefited in the long term as other militants began relying on his financial network instead of BCCIs (see July 1991 and After July 1991). Representatives of bin Mahfouz will later argue that this report is false and was in fact prepared by Jean-Charles Brisard and not the French intelligence service. Bin Mahfouz has begun libel proceedings against Mr. Brisard, claiming that he has made unfounded and defamatory allegations, and denies that he has ever supported terrorism. [Kendall Freeman, 5/13/2004 ]
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August 15, 2002: 9/11 Victims Relatives File Lawsuit Against Alleged Saudi Al-Qaeda Financiers
More than 600 relatives of victims of the 9/11 attacks file a 15-count, $1 trillion lawsuit against various parties they accuse of financing al-Qaeda and Afghanistans former Taliban regime. The number of plaintiffs will quickly increase to 2,500 after the suit is widely publicized. Up to 10,000 were eligible to join this suit. The lawsuit does not allege that Saudi defendants directly participated in the 9/11 attacks, or approved them. Instead, it is alleged they helped fund and sustain al-Qaeda, which enabled the attacks to occur. [Washington Post, 8/16/2002; Newsweek, 9/13/2002] Defendants named include:
The Saudi Binladin Group, the conglomerate owned by the bin Laden family. [CNN, 8/15/2002]
The National Commercial Bank, one of the largest banks in Saudi Arabia. [Associated Press, 8/15/2002]
The government of Sudan, for letting bin Laden live in that country until 1996. [Washington Post, 8/16/2002]
The World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY). [Washington Post, 8/16/2002]
The SAAR Foundation. [Washington Post, 8/16/2002]
Al-Rajhi Banking & Investment Corp., which the plaintiffs contend is the primary bank for a number of charities that funnel money to terrorists. (This bank will later be dismissed from the suit (see November 14, 2003-September 28, 2005).) [Washington Post, 8/16/2002]
The Benevolence International Foundation. [Washington Post, 8/16/2002]
The International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO) and its parent organization, the Muslim World League (MWL). The suit claims that the IIRO gave more than $60 million to the Taliban. [Washington Post, 8/16/2002]
Khalid bin Mahfouz, one-time prominent investor in the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) who had to pay a $225 million fine following the collapse of that bank. It is claimed he later operated a bank that funneled millions of dollars to charities controlled by al-Qaeda. (Mahfouz denies supporting terrorism and has filed a motion to dismiss the complaint.) [Washington Post, 8/16/2002
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How does any of this tie Turki al-Faisal and Bush Sr. to the CIA's failure to inform other agencies about the presence of the AQ members in the US?
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PART ONE PART ONE PART ONE
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Bin Laden's Brother-in-law Had Close Ties to Bush
Tom Flocco *
AmericanFreePress.net * And Scoop.co.nz
August 28, 2002
No need to read beyond the byline, among other things Flocco has claimed:
- Barbara Oslen was arrested on the non-existent Polish-Austrian border, bearing a Vatican passport and counterfeit securities in the extinct Italian Lira (misspelled Lyra").
- the Bushes (Pappa Doc and Jr.), the Clintons (Bill and Hillary) and "Mike" Harari (a retired Mossad agent) were spotted personally tampering with John-John’s plane the night before it crashed.
- “A Chicago grand jury has indicted the President and Vice-President of the United States along with multiple high officials in the Bush administration”
- “Florida Rep. Katherine Harris Dead in Plane Crash”
- “CIA, French intelligence kill 4, capture 5 Israelis in NY subway attack”
- Hunter S. Thompson committed suicide due to his ties to the “White House child sex ring” he and Larry King made a “child murder-sex film”
http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=10456&view=findpost&p=109914
The 2nd article does not help Gaal much either. The author seems to fully accept that OBL and AQ carried out the attacks and promots the LIHOP theory. But she did not mention al-Turki and failed to do much to tie either Bush to OBL other than pointing out the families had business dealing which is already known. Her most startling claim was that:
“At the same time [the 1980’s], the United States trained and armed troops in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets. The United States and Saudi Arabia spent about $40 billion on the war in Afghanistan, recruiting, supplying, and training nearly 100,000 radical mujahideen from forty Muslim countries, including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Algeria, and Afghanistan itself. Among the recruits were Osama bin Laden and his followers”
She cited a book by Michael Parenti who in turn cited an essay in the Guardian written by Indian novelist Arundhati Roy. Roy wrote:
“Someone recently said that if Osama bin Laden didn't exist, America would have had to invent him. But, in a way, America did invent him. He was among the jihadis who moved to Afghanistan in 1979 when the CIA commenced its operations there. Bin Laden has the distinction of being created by the CIA and wanted by the FBI.”
http://books.google.com/books?id=KeIXW5DgYA4C&q=54
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/sep/29/september11.afghanistan
Roy never said directly that OBL (let alone his followers) was “trained and armed” by the CIA only that they “created” him but she failed to document or justify that claim. Based on her Wikipedia bio Roy has no expertise in Afghanistan, AQ, OBL, the CIA, intel agencies, Islam, Islamic fundamentalism, terrorist/insurgent groups etc. etc. the overwhelming majority of her writing especially before she wrote that was fiction and social commentary.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arundhati_Roy
Several experts far more qualified than Parenti and Roy contradicted them.
http://911myths.com/index.php/Bin_Laden_CIA_links
It’s quite ironic that Gaal cited Daily Kos after he cited after he started a thread claiming it is a CIA disinfo site. His link did even work because he cut and pasted it from a site where it was dead as well. His extensive research doesn’t even include clicking on the links he cuts and pastes to see if they work, let alone verify their contents.
"Part 3" offers nothing new, the Bush and BL family "ties" are old hat.
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No need to read beyond the byline,among other things Colby claims
+ no conspiracy JFK assassination.
+ no conspiracy RFK assassination
+ no conspiracy MLK assassination
+ no conspiracy 911 involving government agencies/people
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Nothing Flocco stated was refuted by Colby.Colby is just making a debating point. No real
search for the truth. ( I will provide information in a post just after this backing up
Flocco.)
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I have called Daily Kos a disinformation site. Disinformation is picturesquely described
as false baloney sandwiched between two pieces of truth bread.The Daily Kos does have some
truth. Colby again is making a debating point.
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Colby's ad hominem attack on Roy makes me raise my eyebrows. Colby made a list of things
she does not have an, "expertise". One must ask," Does Colby have said expertise on/in
Afghanistan,CIA,intell agencies,Islamic fundamentalism" ?? BTW I used her because I liked
the way she wrote. We have in this attack on Roy another Colby debating point.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ooooooooo^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Debating point,debating point,debating point. Colby treats the forum as a hobbyist debating
society. Colby did not mention the Safari Club. The Sarari Club is what conspiracy
researchers call a ,"Secret Team".The Safari Club had no governmental approbation. The
Safari Club was outside of the POTUS,Congress, and all but a few members of intell agencies.
(the intell people who knew, WERE THE SECRET TEAM) The Safari Club involved GHWB,the Saudi Intell.
Chief,assassination,terrorism,and money laundering. Large conspiracy do exist contrary to
Mr.Colby.The Saudi Intell Chief stated that he was a thirty year friend of GHWB. Colby
purposefully ignored the Safari Club. This non-response to this datum is a debating tactic.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^oooooooo^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Colby states that the Bush/BL family ties are,"old hat". Since Clarke's coming out with new
charges that Saudi intell ties to 911 were covered up,the historical context of the head of
Saudi intell/GHWB in a SECRET TEAM makes the "old hat" a "new hat". A secret team beyond
AQ did 911. Colby's dismissal of the Bush/BL ties as ,"old hat", is a debating tactic.
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See a trend ?? Its hard to believe Colby is searching for the truth.
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Please see the next following post. THANKS Steven Gaal
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Labour party tracks Ken Livingstone supporters with hidden web bugs accessible by USA tracking companies and US Government
By wtwuon August 28, 2011 10:32 AM
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Spy Blog readers may recall our criticism of US style political campaigning web services "as used to help President Barack Obama get elected":
How sneakily are Blue State Digital tracking NGO political campaign emails ?
Several UK NGO's looked at this technology and chose to make use of it, without using its most privacy endangering features such as the use of hidden "web bug" graphics in HTML emails.
Just in case you thought that the Labour party has somehow changed its penchant for control freakery and mass surveillance, the iPad wielding apparatchiks have now launched a campaign website for the odious Ken Livingstone in his attempt to get re-elected as Mayor of London called http://yourken.org
The social media integrated web based political campaign service which the yourken.org website is using is called NationBuilder.com based in California, USA.
Snazzy integrated political campaign tools - but no privacy
To a political campaign or other non government organisation, this commercial service offers some snazzy tools, setting volunteer activists goals to achieve in terms of organising events or spreading the campaign message. there are blog pages and Google Maps showing where registered supporters are located , with tools to graphically "turf carve your voter file" amongst different local organisers etc. There is integration..... ( see more in link above THANKS sg)
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THE 46 DRILLS, OPERATIONS, WAR GAMES, AND ACTIVITIES OF 9/11
From 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA by Webster Tarpley, author of the brand-new “46 Drills of 9/11.” Webster Tarpley is the author of 9/11: Synthetic Terror: Made in USA, which uses 9/11 as the springboard to a comprehensive theory of false-flag terrorism.
PREPARATION AND DEVELOPMENT PRE 911
Drill
Date
Scenario
1 NORAD Between 1991 and 2001 Foreign hijacked airliner crashing into famous US building
2 White House, Richard Clarke 1998 Terrorists load Lear Jet with explosive, attack Washington DC
3 NORAD 1999-2001 Hijacked aircraft hit many targets, including WTC, MASCAL
4 Able Danger: DIA, US-SOCOM, LIWA Dec. 1999-2001 Manipulate al Qaeda; data mining (patsy control)
5 Stratus Ivy: DIA Dec. 1999-2001 (?) Operate on patsies “out of the box” (patsy control)
6 Door Hop Galley: DIA (?) Dec. 1999-2001 (?) Still secret (patsy control?)
7 Proactive Pre-emptive Operations Group (P2OG) unknown “Stimulating reactions” of terrorists (patsy control)
8 NORAD (NEADS) Exercises: UN HQ, NYC October 16, 2000 Terrorist crashes Federal Express plane into UN HQ NYC
9 NORAD (NEADS) Exercises: UN HQ NYC October 23, 2000 Terrorist crashes FedEx plane with WMD into UN HQ NYC
10 Pentagon MASCAL exercise Oct. 24-28, 2000 Commercial aircraft hits Pentagon, MASCAL
11 FAA drill December, 2000 Scenario: a chartered flight out of Ohio that had turned its transponder off
12 Positive Force ’01: NORAD plus a dozen agencies; worldwide April 17-26, 2001 COG; attacks on transportation; one scenario: terrorist group hijacking commercial airliner and flying it into Pentagon (Pentagon attack)
13 Unified Vision ’01: US JFCOM; US CENTCOM; US SOCOM: 40 agencies May 7-24, 2001 Invasion of Afghanistan and Pakistan (prepared Operation Enduring Freedom)
14 Red Ex (Recognition, Evaluation, and Decision-Making Exercise); NYC OEM; FDNY; NYPD; FEMA; FBI May 11, 2001 Plane crashes and building collapses in New York City (WTC attack, demolition)
15 Amalgam Virgo ’01: US-Canada multi-agency drill; NORAD; SEADS; Coast Guard, Army, Navy June 1-2, 2001 UAV drone launched from rogue freighter in Gulf of Mexico or cruise missile from barge in Atlantic Ocean; Joint Based Expeditionary Connectivity Center (JBECC) mobile radar command center tested. (Pentagon attack)
16 Mall Strike 2001, Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania (near Shanksville); 600 local first responders and emergency managers June 16, 2001 Toxic chemical agent and the simulated release of radiation and radiological contamination; (indoctrination of first responders).
17 FAA Drill: FBI Miami field office, Miami-Dade County Police Department. Summer 2001 Varig airlines Boeing 767 hijacked over Florida
18 Ft. Belvoir, Davison Army Airfield helicopter base MASCAL June 29, 2001 Scenario based on plane hitting Pentagon (indoctrination of first responders).
19 US Department of Transportation Hijacking Exercise August 31, 2001 US Dept. of Transportation Crisis Management Center drilled hijacks; simulated cell phone calls.
20 NORAD, NEADS (Vigilant Guardian) September 6, 2001 Tokyo to Anchorage flight hijacked by “Mum Hykro” to Vancouver and San Francisco
PRE-9/11 PREPARATION AND DEVELOPMENT (continued)
Drill
Date
Scenario
21 NORAD, NEADS (Vigilant Guardian) September 6, 2001 Seoul to Anchorage flight hijacked by “Lin Po” to Seattle
22 NORAD, NEADS (Vigilant Guardian) September 9, 2001 UK to NYC flight hijacked, blown up
23 NORAD SEADS NEADS (Vigilant Guardian) September 10, 2001 Ilyushin IL-62 from Cuba hijacked by asylum seekers, lands at Dobbins Air Force Base in Georgia
ON 9/11
Drill
Date
Scenario
24 FBI training exercise in Monterey, California for FBI/CIA Anti-Terrorist Task Force Through 9/11 Diverts top FBI, CIA anti-terrorist and special operations agents and heavy equipment away from Boston, NYC, Washington DC
25 NORAD annual readiness drill, Cheyenne Mountain, CO (Vigilant Guardian) 9/11 Full ‘battle staff’ levels to test entire organization
26 Vigilant Guardian: NORAD, NEADS, US-Canada 9/11 Live-fly hijacking and air defense; hijack multiplication, diversion and confusion
27 NORAD/JCS Vigilant Warrior Through 9/11 Reported by Richard Clarke
28 Operation Southern Watch Through 9/11 Diverts 174th Fighter Wing, New York Air National Guard, to Sultan Air Base, Saudi Arabia, to impose no-fly zone over southern Iraq
29 Operation Northern Watch Through 9/11 Diverts 6 fighters from Langley AFB sent to Incirlik AFB, Turkey to impose no-fly zone over northern Iraq
30 Operation Northern Vigilance Through 9/11 Diverts fighters, 350 personnel to Alaska and northern Canada to counter a Russian bomber drill
31 Operation Northern Guardian, Keflavik AFB, Iceland Through 9/11 Diverts fighters from Langley Air Force Base (Virginia) deployed to Keflavik AFB, Iceland to counter a Russian bomber drill
32 Red Flag, Nellis AFB, Nevada: 100 pilots 9/11 Diverts most F-15s of 71st Fighter Squadron, Langley AFB, VA; DC ANG’s 121st Fighter Squadron of Andrews Air Force Base also depleted.
33 Andrews AFB local drill 9/11 Diverts 3 F-16s to North Carolina
34 National Reconnaissance Office drill, Chantilly, Virginia 9/11 Simulated plane crash into high-rise government building; satellite imaging (WTC attack)
35 Tripod II, New York City 9/11 Response to biochemical attack; run from backup command center at Pier 92, Hudson River.
36 Fort Meyer VAEducation Centertraining drill for local firemen 9/11 Assembled and indoctrinated Pentagon first responders.
37 Timely Alert II, Fort Monmouth, New Jersey 9/11 Indoctrination of WTC first responders.
38 World Trade Center Emergency Drill, Fiduciary Trust Co., 97th floor, South Tower 9/11 Meeting called to assemble and silence unreliable outside contractors?
ON 9/11 (continued)
Drill
Date
Scenario
39 Global Guardian, STRATCOM: Offutt AFB, Nebraska; Barksdale AFB, Louisiana; Minot AFB, North Dakota; Whiteman AFB, Missouri. 9/11 Nuclear warfighting; Armageddon. (deterrence of Russia and China during invasion of Afghanistan and Pakistan)
40 Amalgam Warrior 9/11 Large live-fly air defense and air intercept, tracking, and surveillance drill; air defense against foreign retaliation.
41 Crown Vigilance, Air Combat Command 9/11 No details known.
42 Apollo Guardian, US Space Command 9/11 No details known.
43 AWACS drill, ordered by NORAD commander Gen. Larry Arnold 9/11 Two AWACS aircraft from Tinker AFB, Oklahoma sent over Washington DC and Florida; surveillance of capital and president during coup.
44 Global Guardian Computer Network Attack 9/11 Enemy forces “war dialed” STRATCOM’s telephone and fax systems; “bad insider” has access to key C³ system (missile launch option)
45 STRATCOM Strategic Advisory Committee, Offutt AFB, Nebraska; Andrews AFB, MD; Wright-Patterson AFB, Dayton, Ohio. 9/11 Three E-4B National Airborne Operations Center planes (Doomsday or Looking Glass) airborne; passengers include Brent Scowcroft; Warren Buffet at Offutt. (Committee. of Public Safety option?)
IN ADVANCED PREPARATION ON 9/11
Drill
Date
Scenario
46 Amalgam Virgo ‘02 Scheduled for June 2002 Air defense, interception, surveillance, and pursuit drill; Delta 757 with real Delta pilots, actors as passengers, FBI as hijackers – deviated from Salt Lake City to Hawaii; Canadian police to hijack DC-9 near Vancouver BC
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artist: Phish lyrics
title: 46 Days
album: Round Room
Leigh Fordham sold me out
46 days and the coal ran out
Please come round here another day
Sit yourself down when you're ready to stay
She dug down when they took the town
Lookin' for clues but they couldn't be found
Leigh found out she was ready to roam
47 days and the coal came home
Taste the fear
For the devil's drawing near
-
Golly its a whole DOD program. Again Mr. Colby dosent do his research.
Thats rich coming from someone who doesnt bother to click the links of the swaths of text he cuts and pastes to this forum even in the OPs (opening posts) of thread. Get back to us when you have evidence that the DoD, or any other USG agency/department etc., has people post, using false identities, on forums and other social media sites aimed at people in developed countries as opposed to ones in which the US is involved in combat operations.Your evidence should be verified by reliable sources not just depend on the speculation of bloggers or forum posters.
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Is Colby just working to disinform ?? Why do I ask this ? Its a real and serious question for any GOOGLE work at all (any) would confirm what I have posted.
Wired is considered a very main stream media source not some coinspiracy blogger site. Any GOOGLE search would confirm what I posted. I post some blogger sites because they are briefer and many times a eaiser read. Yes they may be linking in a subpar manner ,however, they progress what the forum main purpose should be . . +THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH.....since Colby oddly on this particular issue (++ false gov promoted posting ++) is totally wrong....one can with ease be logically led to ask the question in my first reply sentence. "Is Colby just working to disinform?" +++ THANKS sg
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link http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/07/darpa-wants-social-media-sensor-for-propaganda-ops/
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Pentagon Wants a Social Media Propaganda Machine
By Adam Rawnsley
July 15, 2011 |
2:40 pm |
Categories: DarpaWatch
You dont need to have 5,000 friends of Facebook to know that social media can have a notorious mix of rumor, gossip and just plain disinformation. The Pentagon is looking to build a tool to sniff out social media propaganda campaigns and spit some counter-spin right back at it.
On Thursday, Defense Department extreme technology arm Darpa unveiled its Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program. Its an attempt to get better at both detecting and conducting propaganda campaigns on social media. SMISC has two goals. First, the program needs to help the military better understand whats going on in social media in real time particularly in areas where troops are deployed. Second, Darpa wants SMISC to help the military play the social media propaganda game itself.
This is more than just checking the trending topics on Twitter. The Defense Department wants to deeply grok social media dynamics. So SMISC algorithms will be aimed at discovering and tracking the formation, development and spread of ideas and concepts (memes) on social media, according to Darpas announcement.
Not all memes, of course. Darpas not looking to track the latest twists on foul bachelor frog or see if the Taliban is making propaganda versions of courage wolf. Instead, it wants to see what ideas are bubbling up in among social media users in a particular area say, where American troops are deployed.
More specifically, SMISC needs to be able to seek out persuasion campaign structures and influence operations developing across the social sphere. SMISC is supposed to quickly flag rumors and emerging themes on social media, figure out whos behind it and what. Moreover, Darpa wants SMISC to be able to actually figure out whether this is a random product of the hivemind or a propaganda operation by an adversary nation or group.
Of course, SMISC wont be content to just to hang back and monitor social media trends in strategic locations. Its about building a better spin machine for Uncle Sam, too. Once SMISCs latches on to an influence operation being launched, its supposed to help out in countermessaging.
Darpas announcement talks about using SMISC the environment in which [the military] operates and where it conducts operations. That strongly implies its intended for use in sensing and messaging to foreign social media. It better, lest it run afoul of the law. The Smith-Mundt Act makes pointing propaganda campaigns at domestic audiences illegal.
What exactly SMISC will look like it its final form is hard to say. At the moment, Darpa is only in the very beginning stages of researching its social media tool. Theyre focused on researching the brains of the program the algorithms and software thatll identify, locate and make sense of social media trends.
For that, they need some social media data to play around with and test on. Darpa wants bidders to create it in one of two ways. Bidders can round up a few thousand test subjects willing to let their social media data be a guinea pig for SMISCs software. Alternatively, they can rope in some consenting test subjects for a massively multiplayer role playing game in which generating social media data is a key part of gameplay.
SMISC is yet another example of how the military is becoming very interested in whats going on in the social media sphere. Darpa has plans to integrate social media data into its manhunt master controller, Insight. NATO has already been paying keen attention to Twitter, using data from the micro-blogging service as an intel source to aid in bomb targeting decisions.
Darpas presolicitation offers a very vaguely-sourced anecdote spelling out how SMISC could be used. It details how a social media rumor about the location of a particularly reviled individual identity and location undisclosed almost led a lynch mob to storm a house in search of him. Authorities who happened to be paying attention to the Internet rumor were fortunate enough to spot it in time to intervene. In this telling of SMISCs potential applications, the software could be used to as a tripwire to stop potentially dangerous social media campaigns in their tracks.
But were sure you and the Pentagon can think of a lot less anodyne uses for Darpas social media propaganda tool.
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this link provides a deeper context of WIRED article.
link http://red-pill.org/military-web-social-media-consulting/
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BLACK RIVER CROSSING FROM MEXICO TO BROWNSVILLE ?? Mr. Parker,Is there a map for this area ? thanks sg
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'Golly you have to (have to !) investigate posters. IMHO especially those who' make such absurdly stupid posts that one has to wonder if they arent really far-right fanatics trying to bring discredit on those who question the PTB.
If one clicks through the links they discover that IF the info is correct a single employee of a security firm hired by the law firm of PR firm hired by the Chamber of Commerce (not DoD) created a single false identity and she only seems to have posted on Twitter and LinkedIn. Once again Gaal seems to have copy and pasted something without even bothering to look at the supporting links
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Golly its a whole DOD program. Again Mr. Colby dosent do his research.To quote the blog below,"Government propagandists, their hired private contractors and useful idiots are creating downvote bots or scripts to bury stories which question the government". Good ,Golly, Miss,Molly !!!........reminds me of someone ????. .......
wink^^^^^^^^o^^^^^^^
link http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2011/07/pentagon-seeks-to-manipulate-social.html
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Pentagon Seeks to Manipulate Social Media for Propaganda Purposes?Submitted by George Washington on 07/20/2011 19:12 -0400
On Thursday, Defense Department extreme technology arm Darpa unveiled its Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program. Its an attempt to get better at both detecting and conducting propaganda campaigns on social media. SMISC has two goals. First, the program needs to help the military better understand whats going on in social media in real time particularly in areas where troops are deployed. Second, Darpa wants SMISC to help the military play the social media propaganda game itself.
This is more than just checking the trending topics on Twitter. The Defense Department wants to deeply grok social media dynamics. So SMISC algorithms will be aimed at discovering and tracking the formation, development and spread of ideas and concepts (memes) on social media, according to Darpas announcement.
***
SMISC needs to be able to seek out persuasion campaign structures and influence operations developing across the social sphere. SMISC is supposed to quickly flag rumors and emerging themes on social media, figure out whos behind it and what. Moreover, Darpa wants SMISC to be able to actually figure out whether this is a random product of the hivemind or a propaganda operation by an adversary nation or group.
Of course, SMISC wont be content to just to hang back and monitor social media trends in strategic locations. Its about building a better spin machine for Uncle Sam, too. Once SMISCs latches on to an influence operation being launched, its supposed to help out in countermessaging.
***
SMISC is yet another example of how the military is becoming very interested in whats going on in the social media sphere.
Indeed, as I wrote in February:
I noted in 2009, in an article entitled Does The Government Manipulate Social Media?:
The U.S. government long ago announced its intention to fight the net.
As revealed by an official Pentagon report signed by Rumsfeld called Information Operations Roadmap:
The roadmap [contains an] acknowledgement that information put out as part of the militarys psychological operations, or Psyops, is finding its way onto the computer and television screens of ordinary Americans.
Information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and Psyops, is increasingly consumed by our domestic audience, it reads.
Psyops messages will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public, it goes on.
***
Strategy should be based on the premise that the Department [of Defense] will fight the net as it would an enemy weapons system.
Indeed, the Pentagon publicly announced years ago that it was considering using black propaganda in other words, knowing lies.
CENTCOM announced in 2008 that a team of employees would be [engaging] bloggers who are posting inaccurate or untrue information, as well as bloggers who are posting incomplete information.
The Air Force is now also engaging bloggers. Indeed, an Air Force spokesman said:
We obviously have many more concerns regarding cyberspace than a typical Social Media user, Capt. Faggard says. I am concerned with how insurgents or potential enemies can use Social Media to their advantage. Its our role to provide a clear and accurate, completely truthful and transparent picture for any audience.
In other words, the government is targeting social media, including popular user-ranked news sites.
In addition, when you look at what the Israeli lobby has done with Megaphone software to automatically vote stories questioning Israel down and to send pro-Israel letters to politicians and media (see this, this and this), you can start to see how the U.S. military an even larger and better-funded organization could substantially influence voting on social news sites with very little effort.
Moreover,the military has outsourced many projects to private contractors. For example, in Iraq, much of the fighting has been outsourced to Blackwater. And governmental intelligence functions have largely been outsourced to private companies.
It is therefore not impossible that the government is hiring cheap labor to downvote stories on the social media sites which question the government, and to post pro-government comments.
(other governments and large companies astroturf online as well. See this, this and this.)
I pointed out the same month:
Government propagandists, their hired private contractors and useful idiots are creating downvote bots or scripts to bury stories which question the government.
***
One free, simple scripting program to create automatic downvotes of certain topics or news posters is called Greasemonkey, which is commonly used on large social news sites such as Reddit.
For example, there are some 2,480 hits [now past 9,000] for the google search site:reddit.com greasemonkey downvote. This is some 2,480 times that Reddit users are publicly admitting to using greasemonkey (see also this).
Propaganda agents obviously arent going to publicly brag about what they are doing, and you can bet that their use of downvote bots is much greater. Moreover, they probably have more sophisticated software than Greasemonkey.
Today, Raw Story reports that the Air Force ordered software to manage army of fake virtual people:
Internet users would be well advised to ask another question entirely: Are my friends even real people?
In the continuing saga of data security firm HBGary, a new caveat has come to light: not only did they plot to help destroy secrets outlet WikiLeaks and discredit progressive bloggers, they also crafted detailed proposals for software that manages online personas, allowing a single human to assume the identities of as many fake people as theyd like.
The revelation was among those contained in the companys emails, which were dumped onto bittorrent networks after hackers with cyber protest group Anonymous broke into their systems.
In another document unearthed by Anonymous, one of HBGarys employees also mentioned gaming geolocation services to make it appear as though selected fake persons were at actual events.
There are a variety of social media tricks we can use to add a level of realness to all fictitious personas, it said.
Government involvement
Eerie as that may be, more perplexing, however, is a federal contract from the 6th Contracting Squadron at MacDill Air Force Base, located south of Tampa, Florida, that solicits providers of persona management software.
While there are certainly legitimate applications for such software, such as managing multiple official social media accounts from a single input, the more nefarious potential is clear.
Unfortunately, the Air Forces contract description doesnt help dispel their suspicions either. As the text explains, the software would require licenses for 50 users with 10 personas each, for a total of 500. These personas would have to be replete with background , history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographacilly consistent.
It continues, noting the need for secure virtual private networks that randomize the operators Internet protocol (IP) address, making it impossible to detect that its a single person orchestrating all these posts. Another entry calls for static IP address management for each persona, making it appear as though each fake person was consistently accessing from the same computer each time.
The contract also sought methods to anonymously establish virtual private servers with private hosting firms in specific geographic locations. This would allow that servers geosite to be integrated with their social media profiles, effectively gaming geolocation services.
The Air Force added that the place of performance for the contract would be at MacDill Air Force Base, along with Kabul, Afghanistan and Baghdad. The contract was offered on June 22, 2010.
It was not clear exactly what the Air Force was doing with this software, or even if it had been procured.
Manufacturing consent
Though many questions remain about how the military would apply such technology, the reasonable fear should be perfectly clear. Persona management software can be used to manipulate public opinion on key information, such as news reports. An unlimited number of virtual people could be marshaled by only a few real individuals, empowering them to create the illusion of consensus.
***
Thats precisely what got DailyKos blogger Happy Rockefeller in a snit: the potential for military-run armies of fake people manipulating and, in some cases, even manufacturing the appearance of public opinion.
I dont know about you, but it matters to me what fellow progressives think, the blogger wrote. I consider all views. And if there appears to be a consensus that some reporter isnt credible, for example, or some candidate for congress in another state cant be trusted, I wont base my entire judgment on it, but it carries some weight.
Thats me. I believe there are many people though who will base their judgment on rumors and mob attacks. And for those people, a fake mob can be really effective.
***
Team Themis [tasked by the Chamber of Commerce to come up with strategies for responding to progressive bloggers and others] also included a proposal to use malware hacks against progressive organizations, and the submission of fake documents in an effort to discredit established groups.
HBGary was also behind a plot by Bank of America to destroy WikiLeaks technology platform, other emails revealed. The company was humiliated by members of Anonymous after CEO Aaron Barr bragged that hed infiltrated the group.
Gaming social media is only one propaganda technique employed by the government:
Famed Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein says the CIA has already bought and paid for many successful journalists
The New York Times discusses in a matter-of-fact way the use of mainstream writers by the CIA to spread messages
A 4-part BBC documentary called the Century of the Self shows that an American Freuds nephew, Edward Bernays created the modern field of manipulation of public perceptions, and the U.S. government has extensively used his techniques
The Independent discusses allegations of American propaganda
And one of the premier writers on journalism says the U.S. has used widespread propaganda
-
PART THREE PART THREE PART THREE
this link very, very, very good overview
link http://www.fromthewilderness.com/timeline/AAsaudi.html
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By the time George W. Bush was elected, the House of Saud transferred large amounts of money to the House of Bush in deals involving dozens of companies. At least $1.4 billion in investments and contracts went to companies in which the Bushes and their allies held prominent positions. (Craig Unger, House of Bush; House of Saud) link http://www.angelfire.com/ca3/jphuck/Book28.html
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George W. Obama?
The Saved and the Sacked
By DAVID BROMWICH
Is it too soon to speak of the Bush-Obama presidency?
The record shows impressive continuities between the two administrations, and nowhere more than in the policy of "force projection" in the Arab world. With one war half-ended in Iraq, but another doubled in size and stretching across borders in Afghanistan; with an expanded program of drone killings and black-ops assassinations, the latter glorified in special ceremonies of thanksgiving (as they never were under Bush); with the number of prisoners at Guantanamo having decreased, but some now slated for permanent detention; with the repeated invocation of "state secrets" to protect the government from charges of war crimes; with the Patriot Act renewed and its most dubious provisions left intact -- the Bush-Obama presidency has sufficient self-coherence to be considered a historical entity with a life of its own.
The significance of this development has been veiled in recent mainstream coverage of the national security state and our larger and smaller wars. Back in 2005-2006, when the Iraqi insurgency refused to die down and what had been presented as "sectarian feuding" began to look like a war of national liberation against an occupying power, the American press exhibited an uncommon critical acuteness. But Washington's embrace of "the surge" in Iraq in 2007 took that war off the front page, and it -- along with the Afghan War -- has returned only occasionally in the four years since.
This disappearance suited the purposes of the long double-presidency. Keep the wars going but normalize them; make them normal by not talking about them much; by not talking about them imply that, while "victory" is not in sight, there is something else, an achievement more realistic and perhaps more grown-up, still available to the United States in the Greater Middle East. This other thing is never defined but has lately been given a name. They call it "success."
Meanwhile, back at home...
The usual turn from unsatisfying wars abroad to happier domestic conditions, however, no longer seems tenable. In these August days, Americans are rubbing their eyes, still wondering what has befallen us with the president's "debt deal" -- a shifting of tectonic plates beneath the economy of a sort Dick Cheney might have dreamed of, but which Barack Obama and the House Republicans together brought to fruition. A redistribution of wealth and power more than three decades in the making has now been carved into the system and given the stamp of permanence.
Only a Democratic president, and only one associated in the public mind (however wrongly) with the fortunes of the poor, could have accomplished such a reversal with such sickening completeness.
One of the last good times that President Obama enjoyed before the frenzy of debt negotiations began was a chuckle he shared with Jeff Immelt, former CEO of General Electric and now head of the president's outside panel of economic advisers. At a June 13th meeting of the president's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, a questioner said he assumed that President Obama knew about the difficulties caused by the drawn-out process of securing permits for construction jobs. Obama leaned into the microphone and offered a breezy ad-lib: "Shovel ready wasn't as, uh, shovel-ready as we expected" -- and Immelt got off a hearty laugh. An unguarded moment: the president of "hope and change" signifying his solidarity with the big managers whose worldly irony he had adopted.
A certain mystery surrounds Obama's perpetuation of Bush's economic policies, in the absence of the reactionary class loyalty that accompanied them, and his expansion of Bush's war policies in the absence of the crude idea of the enemy and the spirited love of war that drove Bush. But the puzzle has grown tiresome, and the effects of the continuity matter more than its sources.
Bush we knew the meaning of, and the need for resistance was clear. Obama makes resistance harder. During a deep crisis, such a nominal leader, by his contradictory words and conduct and the force of his example (or rather the lack of force in his example), becomes a subtle disaster for all those whose hopes once rested with him.
The philosopher William James took as a motto for practical morality: "By their fruits shall ye know them, not by their roots."
Suppose we test the last two and a half years by the same sensible criterion. Translated into the language of presidential power -- the power of a president whose method was to field a "team of rivals" and "lead from behind" -- the motto must mean: by their appointments shall ye know them.
Let us examine Obama, then, by the standard of his cabinet members, advisers, and favored influences, and group them by the answers to two questions: Whom has he wanted to stay on longest, in order to profit from their solidity and bask in their influence? Which of them has he discarded fastest or been most eager to shed his association with? Think of them as the saved and the sacked. Obama's taste in associates at these extremes may tell us something about the moral and political personality in the middle.
The Saved
Advisers whom the president entrusted with power beyond expectation, and sought to keep in his administration for as long as he could prevail on them to stay:
1. Lawrence Summers: Obama's chief economic adviser, 2009-2010. As Bill Clinton's secretary of the treasury, 1999-2001, Summers arranged the repeal of the New Deal-era Glass-Steagall Act, which had separated the commercial banks -- holders of the savings of ordinary people -- from the speculative action of the brokerage houses and money firms. The aim of Glass-Steagall was to protect citizens and the economy from a financial bubble and collapse. Demolition of that wall between savings and finance was a large cause of the 2008 meltdown. In the late 1990s, Summers had also pressed for the deregulation of complex derivatives -- a dream fully realized under Bush. In the first years of the Obama era, with the ear of the president, he commandeered the bank bailouts and advised against major programs for job creation. He won, and we are living with the results.
In 2009-2010, the critical accessory to Summers's power was Timothy Geithner, Obama's treasury secretary. Most likely, Geithner was picked for his position by the combined recommendations of Summers and Bush's Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. The latter once described Geithner as "a very unusually talented young man," and worked with him closely in 2008 when he was still president of the New York Fed. At that time, he concurred with Paulson on the wisdom of bailing out the insurance giant AIG and not rescuing Lehman Brothers. Obama for his part initiated several phone consultations with Paulson during the 2008 campaign -- often holding his plane on the tarmac to talk and listen. This chain is unbroken. Any tremors in the president's closed world caused by Summers's early departure from the administration have undoubtedly been offset by Geithner's recent reassurance that he will stay at the Treasury beyond 2011.
Postscript: In 2011, Summers has become more reformist than Obama. On The Charlie Rose Show on July 13th, he criticized the president's dilatoriness in mounting a program to create jobs. Thus he urged the partial abandonment of his own policy, which Obama continues to defend.
2. Robert Gates: A member of the permanent establishment in Washington, Gates raised to the third power the distinction of massive continuity: First as CIA director under George H.W. Bush, second as secretary of defense under George W. Bush, and third as Obama's secretary of defense. He remained for 28 months and departed against the wishes of the president. Gates sided with General David Petraeus and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen in 2009 to promote a massive (called "moderate") escalation of the Afghan War; yet he did so without rancor or posturing -- a style Obama trusted and in the company of which he did not mind losing. In the Bush years, Gates was certainly a moderate in relation to the extravagant war aims of Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and their neoconservative circle. He worked to strengthen U.S. militarism through an ethic of bureaucratic normalization.
His approach has been endorsed and will be continued -- though probably with less canniness -- by his successor Leon Panetta. Without a career in security to fortify his confidence, Panetta is really a member of a different species: the adaptable choice for "running things" -- without regard to the nature of the thing or the competence required. Best known as the chief of staff who reduced to a semblance of order the confusion of the Clinton White House, he is associated in the public mind with no set of views or policies.
3. Rahm Emanuel: As Obama's White House chief of staff, Emanuel performed much of the hands-on work of legislative bargaining that President Obama himself preferred not to engage in. (Vice President Joe Biden also regularly took on this role.) He thereby incurred a cheerless gratitude, but he is a man willing to be disliked. Obama seems to have held Emanuel's ability in awe; and such was his power that nothing but the chance of becoming mayor of Chicago would have plucked him from the White House. Emanuel is credited, rightly or not, with the Democratic congressional victory of 2006, and one fact about that success, which was never hidden, has been too quickly forgotten. Rahm Emanuel took pains to weed out anti-war candidates.
Obama would have known this, and admired the man who carried it off. Whether Emanuel pursued a similar strategy in the 2010 midterm elections has never been seriously discussed. The fact that the category "anti-war Democrat" hardly exists in 2011 is, however, an achievement jointly creditable to Emanuel and the president.
4. Cass Sunstein: Widely thought to be the president's most powerful legal adviser. Sunstein defended and may have advised Obama on his breach of his 2008 promise (as senator) to filibuster any new law that awarded amnesty to the telecoms that illegally spied on Americans. This was Obama's first major reversal in the 2008 presidential campaign: he had previously defended the integrity of the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act against the secret encroachment of the National Security Agency (NSA).
At that moment, Obama changed from an accuser to a conditional apologist for the surveillance of Americans: the secret policy advocated by Dick Cheney, approved by President Bush, executed by NSA Director Michael Hayden, and supplied with a rationale by Cheney's legal counsel David Addington. In his awkward public defense of the switch, Obama suggested that scrutiny of telecom records and their uses by the inspectors general in the relevant agencies and departments should be enough to restore the rule of law.
When it comes to national security policy, Sunstein is a particularly strong example of Bush-Obama continuity. Though sometimes identified as a liberal, from early on he defended the expansion of the national security state under Cheney's Office of the Vice President, and he praised the firm restraint with which the Ashcroft Justice Department shouldered its responsibilities. "By historical standards," he wrote in the fall of 2004, "the Bush administration has acted with considerable restraint and with commendable respect for political liberty. It has not attempted to restrict speech or the democratic process in any way. The much-reviled and poorly understood Patriot Act, at least as administered, has done little to restrict civil liberty as it stood before its enactment." This seems to have become Obama's view.
Charity toward the framers of the Patriot Act has, in the Obama administration, been accompanied by a consistent refusal to initiate or support legal action against the "torture lawyers." Sunstein described the Bush Justice Department memos by John Yoo and Jay Bybee, which defended the use of the water torture and other extreme methods, in words that stopped short of legal condemnation: "It's egregiously bad. It's very low level, it's very weak, embarrassingly weak, just short of reckless." Bad lawyering: a professional fault but not an actionable offense.
The Obama policy of declining to hold any high official or even CIA interrogators accountable for violations of the law by the preceding administration would likely not have survived opposition by Sunstein. A promise not to prosecute, however, has been implicit in the findings by the Obama Justice Department -- a promise that was made explicit by Leon Panetta in February 2009 when he had just been named President Obama's new director of the CIA.
As head of the president's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, with an office in the White House, Sunstein adjudicates government policy on issues of worker and consumer safety; yet his title suggests a claim of authority on issues such as the data-mining of information about American citizens and the government's deployment of a state secrets privilege. He deserves wider attention, too, for his 2008 proposal that the government "cognitively infiltrate" discussion groups on-line and in neighborhoods, paying covert agents to monitor and, if possible, discredit lines of argument which the government judges to be extreme or misleading.
5. Eric Holder: Holder once said that the trial of suspected 9/11 "mastermind" Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a New York City courtroom would be "the defining event of my time as attorney general." The decision to make KSM's a civilian trial was, however, scuttled, thanks to incompetent management at the White House: neither the first nor last failure of its kind. The policy of trying suspected terrorists in civilian courts seems to have suffered from never being wholeheartedly embraced by the administration's inside actors. Local resistance by the New York authorities was the ostensible reason for the failure and the change of venue back to a military tribunal at Guantanamo. No member of the administration besides Holder has been observed to show much regret.
During his 30-month tenure, in keeping with Obama's willingness to overlook the unpleasant history of CIA renditions and "extreme interrogations," Holder has made no move to prosecute any upper-level official of any of the big banks and money firms responsible for the financial collapse of 2008. His silence on the subject has been taken as a signal that such prosecutions will never occur. To judge by public statements, the energies of the attorney general, in an administration that arrived under the banner of bringing "sunshine" and "transparency" to Washington, have mainly been dedicated to the prosecution of government whistle-blowers through a uniquely rigorous application of the Espionage Act of 1917. More people have been accused under that law by this attorney general than in the entire preceding 93 years of the law's existence.
Again, this is a focus that Bush-era attorney generals John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales, and Michael Mukasey might have relished, but on which none would have dared to act on so boldly. Extraordinary delays in grand jury proceedings on Army Private Bradley Manning, suspected of providing government secrets to WikiLeaks, and Julian Assange, who ran that website, are said to have come from a protracted attempt to secure a legal hold against one or both potential defendants within the limits of a barbarous and almost dormant law.
6. Dennis Ross: Earlier in his career, Obama seems to have cherished an interest in the creation of an independent Palestinian state. In Chicago, he was a friend of the dissident Middle East scholar Rashid Khalidi; during his 2007 primary campaign, he sought and received advice from Robert Malley, former special assistant to President Clinton for Arab-Israeli affairs, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter. Both were "realist" opponents of the expansionist policy of Israel's right-wing coalition government, which subsidizes and affords military protection to Jewish settlements on the occupied West Bank.
Under pressure from the Israel lobby, however, Obama dissociated himself from all three chosen advisers.
Ross, as surely as Gates, is a member of Washington's permanent establishment. Recruited for the Carter Defense Department by Paul Wolfowitz, he started out as a Soviet specialist, but his expertise migrated with a commission to undertake a Limited Contingency Study on the need for American defense of the Persian Gulf. An American negotiator at the 2000 Camp David summit, Ross was accused of being an unfair broker, having always "started from the Israeli bottom line."
He entered the Obama administration as a special adviser to Hillary Clinton on the Persian Gulf, but was moved into the White House on June 25, 2009, and outfitted with an elaborate title and comprehensive duties: Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for the Central Region, including all of the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, Pakistan and South Asia. Ross has cautioned Obama to be "sensitive" to domestic Israeli concerns.
In retrospect, his installation in the White House looks like the first step in a pattern of concessions to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that undid Obama's hopes for an agreement in the region. Here, caution precluded all inventiveness. It could have been predicted that the ascendancy of Ross would render void the two-state solution Obama anticipated in his carefully prepared and broadly advertised speech to the Arab world from Cairo University in June 2009.
7. Peter Orzag: Director of the Office of Management and Budget from January 2009 to August 2010, Orzag was charged with bringing in the big health insurers to lay out what it would take for them to support the president's health-care law. In this way, Orzag -- along with the companies -- exerted a decisive influence on the final shape of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010. In January 2011, he left the administration to become vice chairman of global banking at Citigroup. A few days out of the White House, he published an op-ed in the New York Times advising the president to extend the Bush-era tax cuts for the top 2% of Americans -- adding that Obama should indicate that the cuts would continue in force only through 2012. Obama took the advice.
8. Thomas Donilon: National Security Adviser and (after the departure of Gates) Obama's closest consultant on foreign policy. Donilon supported the 34,000 troop-escalation order that followed the president's inconclusive 2009 Afghanistan War review. He encouraged and warmly applauded Obama's non-binding "final orders" on Afghanistan, which all the participants in the 2009 review were asked formally to approve. (The final orders speak of "a prioritized comprehensive approach" by which the U.S. will "work with [Afghan President Hamid] Karzai when we can" to set "the conditions for an accelerated transition," to bring about "effective sub-national governance," and to "transfer" the responsibility for fighting the war while continuing to "degrade" enemy forces.)
Donilon comes from the worlds of business, the law, and government in about equal measure: a versatile career spanning many orthodoxies. His open and unreserved admiration for President Obama seems to have counted more heavily in his appointment than the low opinion of his qualifications apparently held by several associates. As Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs during the Clinton administration, he helped arrange the eastward expansion of NATO after the Cold War: perhaps the most pointless and destructive bipartisan project of the epoch. He was Executive Vice President for Law and Policy at Fannie Mae, 1999-2005.
The Sacked
Advisers and nominees with views that were in line with Obama's 2008 election campaign or his professed goals in 2009, but who have since been fired, asked to resign or step down, or seen their nominations dropped:
1. General James Jones: Former Marine Corps Commandant and a skeptic of the Afghanistan escalation, Jones became the president's first National Security Adviser. He was, however, often denied meetings with Obama, who seems to have looked on Gates as a superior technocrat, Petraeus as a more prestigious officer, and Donilon as a more fervent believer in the split-the-difference war and diplomatic policies Obama elected to pursue. Jones resigned in October 2010, under pressure.
A curious point: Obama had spoken to Jones only twice before appointing him to so high a post and seems hardly to have come to know him by the time he resigned.
2. Karl Eikenberry: Commander of Combined Forces in Afghanistan before he was made ambassador, Eikenberry, a retired Lieutenant General, had seniority over both Petraeus and then war commander General Stanley McChrystal when it came to experience in that country and theater of war. He was the author of cables to the State Department in late 2009, which carried a stinging rebuke to the conduct of the war and unconcealed hostility toward any new policy of escalation. The Eikenberry cables were drafted in order to influence the White House review that fall; they advised that the Afghan war was in the process of being lost, that it could never be won, and that nothing good would come from an increased commitment of U.S. troops.
Petraeus, then Centcom commander, and McChrystal were both disturbed by the cables -- startled when they arrived unbidden and intimidated by their authority. Obama, astonishingly, chose to ignore them. This may be the single most baffling occasion of the many when fate dealt a winning card to the president and yet he folded. Among other such occasions: the 2008-2009 bank bailouts and the opening for financial regulation; the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the opportunity for a revised environmental policy; the Fukushima nuclear plant meltdowns and a revised policy toward nuclear energy; the Goldstone Report and the chance for an end to the Gaza blockade. But of all these as well as other cases that might be mentioned, the Eikenberry cables offer the clearest instance of persisting in a discredited policy against the weight of impressive evidence.
Ambassador Eikenberry retired in 2011, and Obama replaced him with Ryan Crocker, the Foreign Service officer brought into Iraq by Bush to help General Petraeus manage the details and publicity around the Iraq surge of 2007-2008.
3. Paul Volcker: Head of the Federal Reserve under Presidents Carter and Reagan, Volker had a record (not necessarily common among upper-echelon workers in finance) entirely free of the reproach of venality. A steady adviser to the 2008 Obama campaign, he lent gravity to the young candidate's professions of competence in financial matters. He also counseled Obama against the one-sidedness of a recovery policy founded on repayment guarantees to financial outfits such as Citigroup and Bank of America: the policy, that is, favored by Summers and Geithner in preference to massive job creation and a major investment in infrastructure. "If you want to be a bank," he said, "follow the bank rules. If Goldman Sachs and the others want to do proprietary trading, then they shouldn't be banks." His advice -- to tighten regulation in order to curb speculative trading -- was adopted late and in diluted form. In January 2010, Jeff Immelt, CEO of General Electric, which paid no federal taxes that year, replaced him.
4. Dennis Blair: As Director of National Intelligence, Blair sought to limit the expansion of covert operations by the CIA. In this quest he was defeated by CIA Director Leon Panetta -- a seasoned infighter, though without any experience in intelligence, who successfully enlarged the Agency's prerogatives and limited oversight of its activities during his tenure. Blair refused to resign when Obama asked him to, and demanded to be fired. He finally stepped down on May 21, 2010.
Doubtless Blair hurt his prospects irreparably by making clear to the president his skepticism regarding the usefulness of drone warfare: a form of killing Obama favors as the most politic and antiseptic available to the U.S. Since being sacked, Blair has come out publicly against the broad use of drones in Pakistan and elsewhere.
On his way out, he was retrospectively made a scapegoat for the November 2009 Fort Hood, Texas, killing spree by Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Hasan; for the "underwear" bomber's attempt to blow up a plane on its way to Detroit on Christmas day 2009; and for the failed Times Square car bombing of May 2010 -- all attacks (it was implied) that Blair should have found the missing key to avert, even though the Army, the FBI, and the CIA were unable to do so.
5. James Cartwright: As vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Cartwright passed on to Obama, and interpreted for him, a good deal of information that proved useful in the Afghanistan War review. Their friendship outlasted the process and he came to be known as Obama's "favorite general," but Cartwright stirred the resentment from both Petraeus and Mullen for establishing a separate channel of influence with the president. Like Eikenberry, he had been a skeptic on the question of further escalation in Afghanistan. His name was floated by the White House as the front-runner to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs after the retirement of Mullen. Informed of the military opposition to the appointment, Obama reversed field and chose Army Chief of Staff General Martin Dempsey, a figure more agreeable to Petraeus and Mullen.
6. Dawn Johnsen: Obama's first choice to head the Office of Legal Council, a choice generally praised and closely watched by constitutional lawyers and civil libertarians. Her name was withdrawn after a 14-month wait, and she was denied a confirmation process. The cause: Republican objections to her writings and her public statements against the practice of torture and legal justifications for torture.
This reversal falls in with a larger pattern: the putting forward of candidates for government positions whose views are straightforward, publicly available, and consistent with the pre-2009 principles of Barack Obama -- followed by Obama's withdrawal of support for the same candidates. A more recent instance was the naming (after considerable delay) of Elizabeth Warren as a special advisor to organize the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, followed by the decision in July not to nominate her as the first director of the bureau.
Avoidance of a drag-out fight in confirmation hearings repeatedly seems to be the recurrent motive here. Of course, the advantage of such a fight, given an articulate and willing nominee, is the education of public opinion. But in every possible instance, President Obama has been averse to any public engagement in the clash of ideas. "Bottom line is that it was going to be close," a Senate Democratic source told ABC's Jake Tapper when Johnsen's name was withdrawn. "If they wanted to, the White House could have pushed for a vote. But they didn't want to 'cause they didn't have the stomach for the debate."
Where the nomination of an "extreme" candidate might have hardened the impression of Obama as an extremist, might not a public hearing have helped eradicate the very preconception that a frightened withdrawal tends to confirm? This question is not asked.
7. Greg Craig: For two years special counsel in the Clinton White House, he led the team defending the president in the impeachment proceedings in Congress. Craig's declaration of support for Obama in March 2007 was vital to the insurgent candidate, because of his well-known loyalty to the Clintons. Obama made him White House Counsel, and his initial task was to draw up plans for the closing of Guantanamo, a promise made by the president on his first day in the Oval Office. But once the paper was signed, Obama showed little interest in the developing plans. Others were more passionate. Dick Cheney worked on a susceptible populace to resurrect old fears. The forces against closure rallied and spread panic, while the president said nothing. Craig was defeated inside the White House by the "realist" Rahm Emanuel, and sacked.
8. Carol Browner: A leading environmentalist in the Clinton administration, Browner was given a second shot by Obama as director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy. She found her efforts thwarted within the administration as well as in Congress: in mid-2010 Obama decided that -- as a way to deal with global warming -- cap-and-trade legislation was a loser for the midterm elections. Pressure on Obama from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to heed business interests served as a strong incitement in forcing Browner's resignation after the democratic "shellacking" in midterm elections, a result that his quiet abandonment of cap-and-trade had failed to prevent. The White House had no backup plan for addressing the disaster of global warming. After Browner's resignation in March 2011, her position was abolished. Since then, Obama has seldom spoken of global warming or climate change.
Moral and Political Limbo
The Obama presidency has been characterized by a refined sense of impossibility. A kind of suffocation sets in when a man of power floats carefully clear of all unorthodox stimuli and resorts to official comforters of the sort exemplified by Panetta. As the above partial list of the saved and the sacked shows, the president lives now in a world in which he is certain never to be told he is wrong when he happens to be on the wrong track. It is a world where the unconventionality of an opinion, or the existence of a possible majority against it somewhere, counts as prima facie evidence against its soundness.
So alternative ideas vanish -- along with the people who represent them. What, then, does President Obama imagine he is doing as he backs into one weak appointment after another, and purges all signs of thought and independence around him? We have a few dim clues.
A popular book on Abraham Lincoln, Team of Rivals, seems to have prompted Obama to suppose that Lincoln himself "led from behind" and was committed to bipartisanship not only as a tactic but as an always necessary means to the highest good of democracy. A more wishful conceit was never conceived; but Obama has talked of the book easily and often to support a "pragmatic" instinct for constant compromise that he believes himself to share with the American people and with Lincoln.
A larger hint may come from Obama's recently released National Strategy for Counterterrorism, where a sentence in the president's own voice asserts: "We face the world as it is, but we will also pursue a strategy for the world we seek." If the words "I face the world as it is" have a familiar sound, the reason is that they received a trial run in Obama's 2009 Nobel Prize speech. Those words were the bridge across which an ambivalent peacemaker walked to confront the heritage of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King with the realities of power as experienced by the leader of the only superpower in the world.
Indeed, Obama's understanding of international morality seems to be largely expressed by the proposition that "there's serious evil in the world" -- a truth he confided in 2007 to the New York Times conservative columnist David Brooks, and attributed to the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr -- combined with the assertion that he is ready to "face the world as it is." The world we seek is, of course, the better world of high morality. But morality, properly understood, is nothing but a framework for ideals. Once you have discharged your duty, by saying the right words for the right policies, you have to accommodate the world.
This has become the ethic of the Bush-Obama administration in a new phase. It explains, as nothing else does, Obama's enormous appetite for compromise, the growing conventionality of his choices of policy and person, and the legitimacy he has conferred on many radical innovations of the early Bush years by assenting to their logic and often widening their scope. They are, after all, the world as it is.
Obama's pragmatism comes down to a series of maxims that can be relied on to ratify the existing order -- any order, however recent its advent and however repulsive its effects. You must stay in power in order to go on "seeking." Therefore, in "the world as it is," you must requite evil with lesser evil. You do so to prevent your replacement by fanatics: people, for example, like those who invented the means you began by deploring but ended up adopting. Their difference from you is that they lack the vision of the seeker. Finally, in the world as it is, to retain your hold on power you must keep in place the sort of people who are normally found in places of power.
David Bromwich writes on civil liberties and America's wars for the Huffington Post. His latest essay, "How Lincoln Explained Democracy," appeared recently in the Yale Review.
This article originally appeared on TomDispatch.
Copyright 2011 David Bromwich
posted in fair use
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DOD infiltrate left-leaning groups critical of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s policies
link http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x4965720
GOLLY ,you have to (have to !) investigate posters. IMHO especially those who promulgate establishment stories/policies. sg
wink
Libyan Rebels Round Up Blacks, Put Them In Prison Camps
in Political Discussions
Posted · Edited by Steven Gaal
KELLY QUOTE Now its Libya is another Iraq, when in fact nobody invaded Libya and no foreign government troops will occupy it, as was done in Iraq. END KELLY QUOTE
WEll some ANGLO/AMERICAN special forces ARE (ARE) THERE, but........but....but....
ooooooooooo oooooooooooooooooo oooooooooooooooooo
Kelly thinks no boots on ground ++ HISTORY SAYS THIS PROBABLY WONT HAPPEN.
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Libya: NATO Acquires Military Outpost In Third Continent
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Global Research, August 31, 2011
link http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=26327
Libya: Another country for NATO to take root in
Interview conducted John Robles on August 27 with Rick Rozoff, the manager of the Stop NATO website and a Correspondent of Global Research at www.globalresearch.ca
Can you shed a little light on the situation in Libya, in particular with NATO?
As you know, I’m in Chicago, not in Tripoli, so I’m observing events from afar. Yet there is an old Roman expression which says the game is best viewed by the spectator. So, what I have to say I think is trying to situate developments in Libya, whatever they are on the ground, within both a regional and an international context.
And, within that framework, we know that the African Union has refused recognition to the so-called Transitional National Council, consisting of what by all accounts is a fairly motley, heterogeneous grouping of anti-government forces in Libya, aided and abetted by major NATO powers like France, Britain, the U.S. and Italy and by Persian Gulf monarchies like Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.
So, the fact that the African continent, on which Libya is located, has collectively refused recognition to the new rebel regime is significant, as is the fact that the Russian Foreign Ministry has voiced its concerns and its opposition to any plans that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization may entertain for placing troops on the ground in Libya, ostensibly under the guise of a peacekeeping or stabilization force, but also more prominently voiced some concerns about the prospect of NATO military facilities being authorized by the forces opposed to Gaddafi.
Would you characterize everything that you have heard and seen as a true revolution of the people or is it some sort of a western-backed insurgency in your opinion?
The latter is acknowledged by universal accord, even by those celebrating the apparent overthrow of the government in Libya as a triumph of “people’s power” democracy or however they choose to phrase it. What is unquestionable is the fact that, whatever the nature of the rebel coalition is, it would never have succeeded in consolidating support outside of Libya, much less moving into the capital, if it had not been for over 21,000 NATO air missions since March 31 and almost 8,000 combat air sorties in the same period of time. Additionally, more and more information is emanating from sources in Europe, newspapers in Britain and elsewhere, that special operations troops, special forces, from several major NATO countries, including the CIA which is acting in the streets of Tripoli, are actively involved in combat operations on the ground.
Are they hunting Gaddafi or providing air support for the rebels?
There is no question about both. The intent of United Nations Resolution 1973 adopted in March to “use all means necessary to protect Libyan civilians” had been extended and in essence violated by France, Britain, Italy, the U.S., Canada and other major NATO nations to wage what can only be characterized as a war against the incumbent government in Libya, and this includes, according to NATO’s own statistics, over 21,000 air missions flown over Libya since March 31, of which almost 8,000 are combat sorties. And what is documented even in Western news sources, Western newspapers for example, is that as recently as today Muammar Gaddafi’s hometown has been attacked by NATO warplanes and earlier, a couple of days ago, the major governmental compound in Tripoli was attacked by as many as 64 missiles.
These attacks are coordinated with the military activities of rebel groupings, so that NATO basically bombs them into areas, including the capital and other cities in Libya. The coordination of NATO’s aerial bombing and naval blockade of Libya with rebel forces is unquestionably an act of participation on behalf of one of the belligerent forces against the other – the government of Libya. And in that sense it’s a perfect parallel to what happened in Yugoslavia in 1999, where NATO bombed the country mercilessly for 78 days in coordination and in conjunction with the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army.
You mentioned that some people from Global Research.ca are in Libya, in Tripoli, and they are trapped in a hotel there.
Actually, the international press corps is there. But there are particular concerns about Canadian-based journalist Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya of Global Research and French journalist Thierry Meyssan of the Voltaire Network, who have voiced concerns about their well-being. Their position is very well-known as not parroting the official line of the Western countries, and that information I’m sure has been passed on by establishment Western journalists within the hotel to rebel forces in Tripoli. And there is concern by the two journalists I’ve mentioned that their lives may be in danger.
What do you see as NATO’s role in Libya after Gaddafi is gone?
Time will tell. But assuming previous Yugoslav and Afghan precedents as a likely scenario, we have a lot to go on. We have the fact that the Turkish Foreign Minister announced yesterday that NATO’s role will continue in Libya after the installation of the rebel government, the so-called Transitional National Council.
And similar soundings have emanated from major figures and NATO countries that suggest, far from NATO’s role ending, it may in a certain sense just be beginning. And that parallels almost identically what happened in Yugoslavia in 1999 and what has happened in Afghanistan in the past decade, where NATO bombs itself into a country and sets up military bases and doesn’t leave. The U.S. still maintains Camp Bondsteel in the contested Serbian province of Kosovo, which is a large, expansive base, by some accounts the largest overseas military facility built by the US since the war in Vietnam. And it remains there over 12 years after the end of the 78-day bombing campaign against Yugoslavia.
Similarly, the U.S. has substantially upgraded air bases in Afghanistan, including those bordering Central Asian nations and close to the Iranian border, and there is no indication they are ever going to abandon them, as they are not going to abandon military bases in Iraq and other places. It’s a lot easier to bring NATO into one’s country or have it forced in than to get it out.
Rick Rozoff is a frequent contributor to Global Research.