Relevant to 911? You better believe it.
From the Jerusalem Post: Published: June 1, 2007
The Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) may have been involved in the hijack
of an Air France plane in 1976 by Palestinian terrorists, according to
newly declassified British government documents released Friday. Some 100
passengers were held by hijackers at Entebbe airport in Uganda during an
eight-day ordeal that concluded when General Staff Reconnaissance Unit
(Sayeret Matkal) troops stormed the building where captives were held. 24
people died in the shoot-out, including three hostages, 20 Ugandans and
the commander of the rescue team, Yoni Netanyahu. The hijackers, from the
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the German
Baader-Meinhof gang, deamded the release of Palestinian prisoners. But
according to the newly released documents, the Shin Bet, and the PFLP are
alleged to have teamed up in an "unholy alliance" in an attempt to change
foreign policy in the Middle East. The allegation appeared in a document
written by official DH Colvin at the British embassy in Paris, quoting a
contact at the Euro-Arab Parliamentary Association, as the crisis unfolded.
"According to his information, the hijack was the work of the PFLP, with
help from the Israeli Secret Service, the Shin Bet," he wrote. "The
operation was designed to torpedo the PLO's (Palestine Liberation
Organization) standing in France and to prevent what they see as a growing
rapprochement between the PLO and the Americans. "Their nightmare is
that...one will witness the imposition in the Middle East of a Pax
Americana, which will be the advantage of the PLO (who will gain
international respectability and perhaps the right to establish a state on
evacuated territories) and to the disadvantage of the Refusal Front (who
will be squeezed right out in any overall peace settlement and will lose
their raison d'etre) and Israel who will be forced to evacuate occupied
territory. "Hence the unholy alliance of the hijacking." The document also
suggested that then Ugandan president Idi Amin may have been collaborating
with the hijackers. The document was released by the National Archives in
London
================
Jun. 1, 2007 12:23 | Updated Jun. 4, 2007 10:15
Peres: Claims Shin Bet involved in 1976 hijacking 'baseless'
By JPOST.COM STAFF
Vice Premier Shimon Peres vehently rejected claims Saturday that the Shin
Bet (Israel Security Agency) may have been involved in the hijacking of an
Air France plane in 1976 by Palestinian terrorists Peres, who was defense
minister at the time of the hijacking and Entebbe rescue, said the claims
which emerged in newly declassified British government documents on
Friday, were so outrageously baseless that they did not merit comment.
(and he commented anyway, so there *is* merit :-)
Some 100 passengers were held by hijackers at Entebbe airport in Uganda
during an eight-day ordeal that concluded when General Staff
Reconnaissance Unit (Sayeret Matkal) troops stormed the building where the
captives were held. Twenty-four people died in the shoot-out, including
three hostages, 20 Ugandans and the commander of the rescue team, Yoni
Netanyahu, brother of current opposition head Binyamin Netanyahu (Likud).
The hijackers, from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
(PFLP) and the German Baader-Meinhof gang, demanded the release of
Palestinian prisoners. But according to the newly released documents, the
Shin Bet and the PFLP are alleged to have teamed up in an "unholy
alliance" in an attempt to change foreign policy in the Middle East. The
allegation appeared in a document written by official DH Colvin at the
British embassy in Paris, quoting a contact at the Euro-Arab Parliamentary
Association, as the crisis unfolded. "According to his information, the
hijack was the work of the PFLP, with help from the Israeli Secret
Service, the Shin Bet," he wrote. "The operation was designed to torpedo
the PLO's (Palestine Liberation Organization) standing in France and to
prevent what they see as a growing rapprochement between the PLO and the
Americans.
"Their nightmare is that... one will witness the imposition in the Middle
East of a Pax Americana, which will be to the advantage of the PLO (who
will gain international respectability and perhaps the right to establish
a state on evacuated territories) and to the disadvantage of the Refusal
Front (who will be squeezed right out in any overall peace settlement and
will lose their raison d'etre) and Israel who will be forced to evacuate
occupied territory. Hence the unholy alliance of the hijacking." The
document also suggested that then Ugandan president Idi Amin may have been
collaborating with the hijackers. The document was released by the
National Archives in London.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull&cid=1180527980537
==============================================================================
Is it unreasonable to assume that the UK released the documents ON PURPOSE?
==============================================================================
Maybe they wanted to stop another LONDON 7/7 tube bombing. Netanyahu
*was* in London on 7/7:
There were reports of Israeli prior knowledge of the attacks. Israel's
finance minister, Binyamin Netanyahu was warned to stay in his hotel room
shortly before the blasts went off, instead of making his way to an hotel
adjacent to Liverpool Street station, close to one of the explosions.
http://web.archive.org/web/20050721080055/http://www.israelnationalnews.com/news.php3?id=85346
The Israeli Embassy claimed to have received a warning from Scotland Yard.
and stressed that the advanced Scotland Yard warning did not indicate that
Israel was the target. Scotland Yard later denied they had provided the
Israeli Embassy with any such warning.
An additional possibility is that the non-governmental group who carried
it out was a British fascist group with intelligence connections. It
certainly seems quite possible that, as with 9/11, people made a lot of
money out of advance knowledge of the coming attacks - in this case by
'shorting' the pound 10 cents against the dollar in the run-up to the 7th
July. See 'Who shorted the pound' and 'How did Greenspan know?'
MUST READ:
http://www.julyseventh.co.uk/july-7-hypotheses.html
OR:
The four men were chosen or lured in to be patsies in a classic 'false
flag operation' or frame-up by a network involved with one or more of the
intelligence services.
This theory is the one argued by Fintan Dunne of BreakForNews.
http://wagnews.blogspot.com/2005/07/how-black-ops-staged-london-bombings.html
Witnesses and survivors spoke of the damage to the floor of the trains
suggesting that the bombs had been underneath. Bruce Lait, a passenger on
the Aldgate train said:
"The policeman said 'mind that hole, that's where the bomb was'. The metal
was pushed upwards as if the bomb was underneath the train. They seem to
think the bomb was left in a bag, but I don't remember anybody being where
the bomb was, or any bag," [Survivor Bruce Lait as reported in Cambridge
News]
Guardian journalist Mark Honigsbaum also recorded several witnesses
speaking of explosions under the floor of the train, the floors of the
trains being torn up and floor tiles flying upwards.
Those who have studied 9-11 are particularly suspicious of the role of
former New York Mayor Guiliani both on that day and subsequently. Visor
Consultancy managing director Peter Power has co-addressed conferences
along with a business associate of Guiliani's principal business partner,
and Guiliani was in town on the morning of 7/7, based near Liverpool
Street station in the same Great Eastern Hotel as Netanyahu. The head of
London Transport, American Bob Kiley, is a member of the influential
Council on Foreign Relations and one-time CIA high-flyer, and his head of
London Underground is also a wealthy American executive.
Since September 2004 an Israeli company had become heavily involved with
the tube network, having been contracted by Metronet to supply the video
technology for platform surveillance and 'certain remote portions of the
track'.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/news.php3?id=69208
http://www.rense.com/general67/sisr.htm
This becomes of possible relevance if it is borne in mind how many Israeli
companies, like US or British, co-operate with or act as vehicles for
intelligence agencies. If the bombs weren't in backpacks inside the
carriages, but underneath them, then the powersurge, which was initially
reported by London Underground and Metronet and denied by the National
Grid, could have been used to detonate the bombs, and or knock out
video-systems? No CCTV footage was ever shown of any of the men at Kings
Cross Thameslink, Mainline or Underground stations, or getting on to the
relevant tubes/bus. It is unlikely that none of the cameras were working.
This image gallery shows how many cameras there are which should have
captured the men as they made their way from the Thameslink to the
mainline station:
The still photo we were shown from Luton Station is of extremely poor
quality, especially when compared with the plethora of sharp, moving
images from the supposed 'dummy run' of June 28th and of the alleged
perpetrators of the failed bombs of July 21st.
Hasib Hussain was caught on camera leaving Boots at 9am, yet according to
witness reports, King's Cross was already being evacuated at that time.
This image was not released until the day after the bombing in Bali, yet
the police must surely have been in possession of it from the same time
they had all the other imagery that they claim to have. Hussain was not
caught on the CCTV of the bus he allegedly bombed, since it was apparently
not working that day. A Stagecoach employee, after pointing out that the
No.30 was the only bus to be diverted from its usual route that day, said:
"CCTV gets maintained at least 2 or 3 times a week and can digitally store
up to 2 whole weeks worth of footage. This is done by a private
contractor....So when I heard that the CCTV wasn't working on a vehicle
that's no more than 2 years old since last June.....I'm sorry that's
rubbish, I work for the company I know different." Note: Independent
research by J7 researchers has since discovered that the story of the
Stagecoach employee is false and provably so, leading some to conclude
that the original story about only one bus being diverted from its usual
route may have been a piece of deliberate misinformation. At least two
other buses were in Tavistock Square on the morning of 7th July 2005 that
do not enter Tavistock Square as part of their usual route. These buses
were a number 205 directly ahead of the number 30 and a 390 ahead of the
205.
The only witness who claimed to have a clear description of the 'bus
bomber' clearly did not see Hasib Hussain that day.
http://www.faulkingtruth.com/Articles/CommentaryToo/1037.html
The identification of three of the four designated terrorists took place
at a remarkably early stage - July 12th - with only one or two of the
other 56 dead people identified. Some have asked how the police knew who
to connect up with whom, as only one of the bombers is said to have left
ID in two separate locations. The identification was initially made
through credit card details as opposed to mortal remains.
http://www.team8plus.org/forum_viewtopic.php?9.1439
Fintan Dunne asks if the men even got as far as Luton station that
morning, suggesting that the only evidence placing them there is possibly
faked.
http://wagnews.blogspot.com/2005/07/london-bombers-did-they-board-at-luton.html
http://wagnews.blogspot.com/2005/07/evidence-luton-cctv-image-is-fake.html
The men were reported by various media to have caught either the 07:40 or
the 07:48 train from Luton to Kings Cross Thameslink station. Evidence
supplied by Chris Hudson, Communications Manager of Thameslink Rail,
showed that they could not have caught the 07:40 as it had been cancelled.
The trains had been heavily disrupted that morning and the ones which ran
did not run on time. The BBc programme 'Horizon', reported that the men
took the 07:48. However, this train was delayed and would have arrived at
Kings Cross too late for the men to have been caught on CCTV at 8:26,
which is the time the police say the cameras caught them at the main
concourse.
It has been suggested the men may have caught an earlier train, which left
at 07:25, especially if they had already purchased tickets and moved
quickly through Luton station. However, the train would not have reached
the Thameslink station at Kings Cross until 8:23am. It is approximately an
eight minute walk between the Thameslink and Mainline stations, so again,
it is virtually impossible that they could have been caught on CCTV at
8:26. If it cannot be proven that the men took a train from Luton in order
to have got to Kings Cross by the time the police say they were there,
then it cannot be assumed that they are, in fact, the perpetrators.
People close to the men have spoken of how non political and westernised
the men were, despite reports of their apparent devotion to their
religion. Jamal Lindsay's mother told of how he cried when he watched the
events of 9/11, wondering how people could do such things. Tanweer's
friends told of how he wore his baseball cap to Mosque. A white British
teenage girl in Leeds told of her secret relationship with Hasib Hussain,
and Sidique Khan was widely regarded as extremely compassionate, not just
within the Muslim community but in the wider locality as well.
As the one with some links to the establishment, Khan may have been the
link person who recruited the others for some person or company who (he
didn't realise) was working for MI5 - and/or CIA - and/or Mossad.
http://www.blogigo.co.uk/socialdemocracynow/entry/43524
Ex MI5 officer David Shayler has spoken of how the secret services would
fund terrorist plots in order to frame a certain group or achieve a
political aim. In 1996, after being briefed about an MI6 funded plot to
assassinate Colonel Gadhafi of Libya, which failed, killing many innocent
civilians, Shayler submitted a series of articles blowing the whistle on
his previous employers because he could no longer be complicit with such
operations.
There are many Muslims all over the world tortured and locked up on flimsy
evidence simply to create a climate of fear and intimidation - for both
Muslims and non-Muslims alike. David and his partner Annie Machon, also a
former MI5 employee have information which points to the innocence of two
Palestinians, Samar Alami and Jawad Botmeh, now in their 10th year of a 20
year imposed prison sentence for explosives offences.
http://www.freesaj.org.uk/ (Click on MI5 cover-up confirmed)
MUST READ:
http://www.julyseventh.co.uk/july-7-hypotheses.html
If you read the eye-witness reports you could be excused to think that
exotic weapons, micro nukes, microwave bombs or some other science fiction
technology bombs were used:
http://www.julyseventh.co.uk/7-7-liverpool-street-aldgate.html
http://www.julyseventh.co.uk/7-7-edgware-road-paddington.html
July 7th as Machiavellian State Terror?
An article for J7 by Professor David MacGregor 1
Introduction
Early reports likened the 2005 July 7th London bombings to Nazi air
attacks on Britain more than sixty years earlier. A Sun leader on July 8
declared: "Our spirit will never be broken: Adolf Hitler's Blitz and his
doodlebug rockets never once broke London's spirit."2 The comparison
stuck, though the July explosions appear dwarfish beside savage Luftwaffe
devastation of London, Coventry and other civilian targets. Indeed ever
since September 11 media commentators have portrayed Islamic fanaticism as
an eruption of evil unprecedented since Hitler's bloody European rampage.
In this essay I want to draw a different parallel, though one that returns
to World War II aerial warfare and its relation to so-called
Islamofascism. July 7th resembles in many respects two other instances of
terror on a world-historical scale: the Dallas shooting of President John
F. Kennedy in 1963 and bin Laden's nightmarish September flights into the
Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Like these earlier incidents, the London
bombings may be an instance of what I have called Machiavellian state
terror, spectacular violence perpetrated against the state by elements of
the state itself.3 This form of terror advances domestic and/or foreign
policy goals of the established order, and may involve assaults (real or
fabricated) on the state's own military, on innocent civilians, or on
political leaders. Government sources and compliant media rush to blame a
convenient foe, whether another nation, a political or ethnic group, or a
"lone nut."
Success of such episodes of terror, especially in advanced capitalist
democracies, relies on inability or unwillingness of effective
oppositional power centres to challenge the official account. Both the
1964 Warren Report on the Kennedy assassination and the 9-11 Commission
Report issued 40 years later, offer profoundly flawed narratives.
Nevertheless, those responsible for protecting the public interest, such
as the media, or mainstream academic researchers, have embraced these
cover-ups as unvarnished truth. With regard to the 9-11 Report, for
example, Guardian columnist George Monbiot contends that dissenters
"permanently wreck their credibility" and present a "crazy distraction"
that endangers "popular resistance movements."4 Yet Monbiot admits the air
assaults could have been averted by the Bush administration. "I believe
that they were criminally negligent in failing to respond to intelligence
about a potential attack by al-Qaida, and that they have sought to
disguise their incompetence by classifying crucial documents."5
Incidentally, Monbiot's remarks are clearly not supported by the 9-11
Commission, which found no malfeasance on the part of the Bush White House.
It may be easier to recognize Machiavellian state terror when practiced by
nations other than our own. For example, The New York Times—a long-time
opponent of "conspiracy theory"—offered a sober appraisal of the Putin
government's possible involvement in terrorist bombing of apartment
buildings used to justify Russia's renewed hostilities against Chechnya.
"From the start, the bombings were viewed with suspicion, especially after
the discovery of federal agents planting what turned out to be explosives
in the basement of another building. (A training exercise, officials
finally said.) In Russian politics, the violence clearly played to the
advantage of hard-liners like Mr. Putin."6 The respected U.S. intelligence
site, Stratfor.com, surmised that recent highly-publicized attacks carried
out by ethnic Uighur separatists on the Chinese border may have been
manufactured by Beijing in order to curry favour with the United States as
an effective opponent of Islamic expansionism, and torpedo the nomination
of an Uighur activist for the Nobel Peace Prize. Besides, noted Stratfor,
"by raising the Uighur "terrorist" issue, Beijing can create a sense of
trouble and a rallying point for national unity without needing to
threaten its foreign relations."7
Events long in the past also may be less difficult to recognize as
instances of Machiavellian state terror. Anti-Japanese hysteria generated
by government and the press in the United States and Canada during World
War II justified internment of tens of thousands of American and Canadian
citizens and offered a rallying point for the war effort. Evidence of
potential Japanese terror attacks on North American soil was totally
imaginary, as now acknowledged. Far from offering opposition to a cruel
and racist policy, writers and intellectuals of every political stripe
supported "sending Japanese Americans [and Japanese Canadians] to
concentration camps." As historian Gary Okihiro observes, little was
learned from the inhuman treatment of ethnic Japanese. Thirteen years
after the belated Civil Liberties Act of 1988, accepting U.S.
responsibility for wartime ethnic cleansing, "Congress passed the U.S.A.
Patriot Act of 2001, under which racial and religious profiling enables a
secret and arbitrary government sponsored program of registration,
expulsion, and indefinite detention."8
The JFK Assassination, 9-11, and July 7th In the first few hours
following the Kennedy murder, suspicion fell on all three possible
culprits usually impugned during episodes of Machiavellian state terror: a
foreign state, a marginalized group (in this case, domestic Communists),
and then a lone nut.9 The spotlight shone briefly on Cuba and the Soviet
Union (as sponsors of "Communist assassin" Oswald), and then fatally
illuminated only Lee Harvey Oswald himself, an individual with ties to
both the former USSR and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (a CIA-front
whose ostensible goal was to encourage more congenial relations between
the United States and Cuba). Oswald's supposed Communist connections were
downplayed by the Warren Report, which famously denied any conspiracy.
Few, if any, mainstream historians query the Oswald story, but a growing
number recognize that Kennedy's assassination removed a serious obstacle
to escalation in Vietnam, a policy vigorously pursued by his successor
Lyndon Baines Johnson, after the 1964 U.S. election.10 As documented on
this site,11 the July 7th bombings helped weaken civil liberties in the
U.K, providing motivation for Tony Blair's ever more draconian anti-terror
legislation. The terror events also severely discombobulated the global
justice movement that had successfully raised issues of poverty, war and
atmospheric change at the Gleneagles G-8 Summit, opened the day before the
blasts.
Peter Dale Scott notes the striking similarities between the JFK murder
and 9-11, including "the ability of the government to establish a guilty
party or parties immediately, and the press and media consumption of that
product to the exclusion of all other possibilities."12 I would add that
these resemblances extend to the London bombings. In Dallas on 22
November, the FBI targeted Oswald within minutes of the assassination,
even though Oswald did not physically match his own description in the FBI
file. Police surrounded the Texas Theatre, where Oswald had secluded
himself, only seconds after he entered the movie house. In another feat of
astounding investigatory prowess, the FBI had identified the 9-11
hijackers before Tower Two collapsed at 9:59 am. The FBI list included
Flight 93 hijackers, even though NORAD "wasn't aware that Flight 93 had
been hijacked until 10:08, which is nine minutes later."13
Shortly after the 7/7 bombings, Tony Blair announced from the Gleneagles
G-8 Summit that terrorists had attacked the capital.14 The official story
jelled rapidly although police did not mention four perpetrators until
five days after the blasts.
The investigation led us to have concerns about the movements and
activities of four men, three of whom came from the West Yorkshire area.
We are trying to establish their movements in the run up to last week's
attacks, and specifically to establish if they all died in the
explosions.15
By July 18th the police had identified all the bombers to the press.16
Somehow police found identification for bomber Mohammad Sidique Khan at
three of the four bomb sites.17
Scott's remarks about the investigative parallels that join and extend
from JFK and 9-11, may also be true of July 7th.
So it's worth thinking about that for a moment, the two events together.
And then in the other cases that we know about, how the identity of the
person who is ultimately going to be identified as the culprit is
established at the very beginning - Sirhan Sirhan [alleged killer of
Robert F. Kennedy] the bag with the gun that identifies James Earl Ray
[supposed assassin of Martin Luther King] – it isn't investigative work
AFTER the assassination, that finds these people, it is just following up
what is already there, from the very beginning.18
There are similarities between 9-11 and 7-7 that do not apply to the
killing of President Kennedy. There was no training exercise on the
morning of 22 November in Dallas that mimicked the Dealey Plaza shooting,
for example, though a number of such exercises were in play on September
11, and at least one existed in London on July 7th.
Unlike the JFK assassination and 9-11, no commission has yet been formed
to investigate 7-7. As predicted by makers of the extraordinary
documentary Ludicrous Diversion, such an official body would, in all
likelihood, merely validate the official story. As with the Hutton Inquiry
on the "suicide" of Dr. David Kelly19, its task would be to conceal the
truth rather than reveal the facts. Philip Zelikow, now an advisor to
Condoleezza Rice and former executive head of the 9-11 Commission,
mentioned that the 9-11 Report did not make the same mistake as the Warren
Report. While the latter contained 26 volumes of documentary evidence that
proved very useful to assassination researchers, the 9-11 Commission
Report includes no primary evidence at all. Interestingly, Zelikow is also
in charge of the White House tapes recorded during JFK's thousand days in
power.20
The Anglo-American Heritage of Evil
No crime attributed to Islamic fundamentalism bears remote comparison with
Nazi destruction of the European Jews, or Hitler's grotesque reign of
terror against German political resistors, Poles, Slavs, Gypsies,
homosexuals, the disabled, and mentally challenged. Equally, the
melancholy Allied wartime experience—my subject in the following
paragraphs—looms over anything supposedly perpetrated by Islamofascism.
Anglo-American revocation of human values discloses a vein of calculated
cruelty recalling the worst excesses of the Roman Empire—though on a
colossal scale undreamt of by the ancients.21
Scientific eugenics likely played a role in plans by President Roosevelt
and Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau to castrate every German
male following Hitler's defeat.22 They decided against genital mutilation,
but hardly for reasons of compassion. A relentless five-year campaign of
aerial massacre had borne Germany to the abyss; a disembowled Reich would
never again challenge the new Imperium.
Philosopher A.C. Grayling compares the murderous Allied feint that leveled
Hamburg in 1943 with September 1123. Yet most of New York's social life
went on as usual when the Twin Towers collapsed into dust.24 The story was
different for Hamburg.
RAF bombers deliberately bypassed Hamburg one sweltering July night in
1943, but veered suddenly toward the city as civil defense units relaxed.
Bomber Command had known for some time that cities are easier to burn down
than blow up. Before the raid, fire engineers ordered fire insurance maps
precisely detailing the layout of Hamburg residences; they noted
flammability of various items in typical Hamburg homes, no doubt including
baby clothes and wooden cribs. "Operation Gomorrah," writes Jorg Friedrich
in the German best-seller, The Fire,
[m]elted between forty thousand and fifty thousand people. Seventy percent
of them were in the Hamburg-Mitte district, where the weapon achieved a
kill rate of 5.9 percent. In the strictly residential streets of
Hammerbrook, 36 percent of the residents were killed. Seven thousand
children and adolescents lost their lives, and ten thousand were orphaned
. . . The munitions had been unloaded in 43 minutes, and they were
followed by atmospheric reactions that raged for three hours with the
force of a Pacific hurricane. And then there was nothing left to burn.
Unable to protect itself, the city consumed itself. Nine hundred thousand
people fled the smoldering skeletons of buildings, in which the plague of
rats was the only thing left alive.25
Hamburg suffered a total of five major raids in late July and early August
1943. The second (described above) was the most devastating. Munitions
dropped in the raids were designed to kill and seriously injure civilians;
incendiary bombs included phosphorus that stuck to the skin, could not be
doused with water, and burned to the bone. Time-delayed munitions
disrupted rescue and fire-fighting efforts, ensuring maximum casualties.
The victims of the first attack [on Hamburg] were either blown up,
suffocated in air raid shelters from which the air had been sucked away,
or cremated instantly in the raging fires outside. Many bodies were found
so shriveled by the heat that adult corpses had shrunk to the size of
infants.26
The Hamburg raids "marked a beginning; the real beginning of the kind of
bombing campaign that the British government and its Air Force commanders
in the bomber force had been planning since early in the war." Hamburg
itself experienced 213 air raids; nothing was left but rubble by V-E day.
The 40,000 deaths from the July 1943 Hamburg raids, in addition to those
of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, are codes for the extremes of
what can be inflicted by force of arms. Not because of the rivers of shed
blood, but due to the quick, deadly breath with which life was taken from
the world.27
Hamburg was one of six German cities that suffered "five digit casualty
figures within a single raid . . . Kassel, Darmstadt, Pforzheim, Dresden,
and Sweinmunde."28 These deaths accounted for less than a third of total
civilian bombing casualties. The RAF targeted more than a thousand German
towns and cities; hundreds of thousands of civilians were massacred.
Victory over Nazi Germany was clearly inevitable by early 1943, but the
remorseless Anglo-American bombing campaign gathered momentum until the
closing weeks of the war. By May 1945 "40 percent of the seventy largest
cities had been demolished, mainly by bombing." A.C. Grayling remarks that
Anglo-American destruction of Germany and Japan amounts to culturecide,
the "concerted smashing" of a people, its cultural heritage and collective
memory.
Destroying cities meant—in addition to killing and traumatizing many
thousands of people—destroying monuments, libraries, schools and
universities, art galleries, architectural heritage, the cultural
precipate and the organs of corporate life that make an identifiable
society.29
Lessons for the July 7th Truth Campaign Facile comparisons of July 7th
with Hitler's air raids on England point to a more disturbing reality: the
Anglo-American capacity for boundless evil in pursuit of empire.
Demonization of the British Muslim community encouraged by the official
story of July 7th has its analogue in wartime hatred of Germans and
Japanese that countenanced erasure of whole peoples. The British public
dimly understood the horrific import of so-called area bombing, and many
applauded destruction of an entire culture. Yet this was not universally
true. Vera Brittain's courageous pacifism reminds us—as does the July 7th
Truth Campaign itself—that evil, provided the facts are known, can be
confronted and resisted. Commenting in 1944 on British press reports that
the people of Coventry were gratified by Germany's pulverization, she
wrote:
Do the inhabitants of Coventry really enjoy the thought that the citizens
of Hamburg—the most anti-Nazi city in the Reich, with its once large
Jewish population—have suffered 60 times as much as they did? Does it
really fill them with glee to reflect that sixty times their number of
children, expectant mothers, women in childbirth, invalids, and aged
people have perished in terror and anguish? . . . . What I do believe . .
. is that they either do not know the facts, or, where they suspect the
truth, they have consciously put shutters over the windows of their
imagination. Many deliberately turn their backs upon knowledge, ashamed
and fearful of accepting the realities which a determined facing of the
facts would disclose.30
Notes
1. David MacGregor [macgregor12b@mac.com] (PhD London School of Economics,
1978) is the author of a number of books and articles on Hegel and Marx.
He has also written two articles concerning the September 11 terrorist
attacks. He lives in Toronto. [return]
2. See the interesting analysis in Damien McGuinness, "British Papers:
'Our Spirit Will Never Be Broken,'" July 08, 2005, Der Spiegel
Onlinehttp://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,364306,00.html [return]
3. David MacGregor, "September 11 as 'Machiavellian State Terror,'" pp.
189-222 in Paul Zaremba, (ed.), The Hidden History of 9-11-2001, Research
in Political Economy, volume 23, Amsterdam: Elsevier Limited, 2006. See
also Webster Griffin Tarpley, 9/11 Synthetic Terror, Made in the USA,
Joshua Tree, California: Progressive Press, 3rd Edition, 2006. [return]
4. "A 9/11 conspiracy virus is sweeping the world, but it has no basis in
fact," The Guardian, Tuesday February 6, 2007 [return]
5. "9/11 fantasists pose a mortal danger to popular oppositional
campaigns,"
The Guardian, Tuesday February 20, 2007 [return]
6. Steven Lee Myers, "The World: There's a Reason Russians Are Paranoid,"
New York Times, December 3, 2006. [return]
7. "China: Exploiting the Uighur 'Terrorist Camp' Raid," Stratfor.com,
January 09, 2007. [return]
8. Linda Gordon and Gary Y. Okihiro, (eds.) Impounded: Dorothea Lange and
the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment, New York, W.W. Norton
and Company, 2006, pp. 6, 79-80. [return]
9. Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993.[return]
10. See, for example, James K. Galbraith, "Exit Strategy" Boston Review,
October/November 2003. (bostonreview.net/BR28.5/galbraith.html) [return]
11. The July 7th Truth Campaign, "Capitalising on Terror: Who is really
destroying our freedoms," February 25, 2007. [return]
12. Peter Dale Scott, JFK and 9/11 Insights from Studying Both," Coalition
on Political Assassinations, Dallas, November 18, 2006, Video
(http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7404458118476453937&hl=en). The
paper presented at the conference was made available by Scott to this
author. [return]
13. Peter Dale Scott, "JFK and 9/11." [return]
14. James Ball, "After the bombs: The key political events that followed
the London bombings," The Guardian, July 4, 2006.
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/attackonlondon/story/0,,1812299,00.html)
[return]
15. Metropolitan Police Service, "Press Conference, 5 pm July 12, 2005".
[return]
16. Metropolitan Police Service, "Latest News: Police investigation
continues into the 7/7 bombings," 18 July 2005. [return]
17. The July Seventh Truth Campaign, "July 7th Timeline of Events,".
[return]
18. "JFK and 9/11." [return]
19. Michael Chossudovsky "Who Ordered the Assassination of Dr. David
Kelly?" Global Research, February 26, 2007 (Global Research). [return]
20. See Joan Mellen, "The Kennedy Assassination and the Current Political
Moment," Talk at the 92nd Street Y, January 28, 2007
(http://www.joanmellen.net/truth.html). [return]
21. [British] Bomber Command and two US air forces had ravaged Germany as
no civilization had ever before …." Jorg Friedrich, The Fire: The Bombing
of Germany, 1940-1945, New York: Columbia University Press, 2006, p. 101.
[return]
22. Herman Knell, To Destroy A City: Strategic Bombing and its Human
Consequences in World War II, Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2003, p. 7.
[return]
23. Among the Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII
Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan, New York: Walker and Company,
2006, p. 278. [return]
24. Adam Gopnik, Through the Children's Gate: A Home in New York, New
York: Knopf, 2006. [return]
25. The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940-1945, New York: Columbia
University Press, 2006, pp. 96-7. [return]
26. Among the Dead Cities, pp. 20, 18. [return]
27. Jorg Friedrich, The Fire, p. 166. [return]
28. The Fire, p. 100. [return]
29. Grayling, Among the Dead Cities, pp. 168, 22. [return]
30. One Voice: Pacifist Writings from the Second World War, London:
Continuum, 2005, p. 117. [return]
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