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Monday, March 16, 2009

The "dirty bomb" that disappeared - WikiLeaks

The "dirty bomb" that disappeared

From Wikileaks

March 8, 2009
The curious tale of an Obama hating, cashed up, nuclear Timothy McVeigh from Maine.


By Julian Assange (investigations editor)

It has all the makings of a great story. But outside of the US state of Maine and select counter-terrorism circles, you won't have heard about it. For this is a story with all the right ingredients but one wrong ingredient.

On the right side is a leaked FBI intelligence report, Obama's inauguration, a multi-million dollar trust fund, a woman, uranium, thorium, the first attempt to build a "dirty bomb" on US soil, and, of course, murder.

On the wrong is the body of James G. Cummings, white supremacist millionaire, found in his Belfast home on December 9, 2008, shot to death.

After local police attended the scene, the FBI moved in and sealed off the building. Men in protective suits descended on the home but police refused to comment about what they found. Mrs. Cummings was taken into custody.

Then on January 12, 2009, Wikileaks revealed a confidential FBI field intelligence report on the incident as part of a Presidential inauguration threat analysis.[1]

According to the FBI report, Cummings had four lots of one gallon containers of bomb-grade hydrogen peroxide, uranium, thorium (also radioactive), lithium metal, thermite, aluminum powder, beryllium (radiation booster), boron, black iron oxide and magnesium ribbon.

While the radiation levels from Cummings initial device would have not have been physically significant compared to its explosive and toxic effects, had Cummings set off the device in Washington DC, during Obama's Presidential inauguration, its psychogenic effect may have hospitalized thousands.

The FBI states it also seized literature on how to build “dirty bombs” and information about cesium-137, strontium-90 and cobalt-60 and other radioactive materials.

There was also evidence linking Cummings to white supremacist groups, including Cummings' membership application to the US National Socialist (Nazi) party.

Local tradesmen who worked at the Cummings home told Maine reporters that Cummings was an ardent admirer of Adolf Hitler and had a collection of Nazi memorabilia around the house, including a prominently displayed flag with a swastika. Cummings claimed to have pieces of Hitler’s personal silverware and place settings.[2]

Though the Associated Press independently confirmed the Wikileaks FBI report, no-one outside of the Maine press (and Wikileaks) wanted to tell their readers about the first credible "dirty bomb" plot on US soil.

Why hasn't the story been picked up by the national press?

Perhaps the media has simply tired of "dirty bombs"? Not at all!

There have been at least 1,264 media references to "dirty bomb" in the past month. A mere 23, or 1.8%, relate to the Cummings case--despite it being the only real plot among them.[3]

Of the 23 Cummings references 21 are local Maine media and two are from security industry magazines.

The same time period saw 409 blog references, Some 76, or 19%, relate to the Cummings case--ten times the ratio of organized media.[4]

However, 78 out of 79 bloggers simply copied text from Maine's paper of record, the Bangor Daily News (BDN) which followed up the Wikileaks document with a strong traditional press investigation. The 79th also wondered about the media silence outside of Maine.

Conservatives apparently didn't want to draw attention to a radioactive, wealthy version of Timothy McVeigh coming from their own sphere, although nearly every day during Bush's reign saw "dirty bombs" hyped as the ultimate threat.

The left didn't want to repeat another "dirty bomb" story, the likes of which Republicans had used to drive hundreds of billions of dollars into Republican dominated military and security contractors.

Those same contractors normally would have comprised a lobby to get the story out--and counter-terrorism dollars in--but their message lines were finely honed to hype threats posed by militant Islam and radical anti-capitalist greens.

Libertarians all over had conditioned themselves to oppose reportage that might lead to reactionary state controls.

The FBI wasn't talking and the Maine government tried to play incident down, under the rubric that they had protected Maine citizens at all times, despite apparently having had no conception of the Cummings plot.

Journalists of various hues at influential east coast outlets could have pushed the story had there been enough prestige incentive to overcome other allegiances, but because Wikileaks and BDN were "first" there was no such incentive. If there were journalism awards to be had, they'd be going to Maine journalists and Wikileaks.

And there you have it. The first "dirty bomb" plot on US soil, cut short only by a Shakespearean murder. But until now, you probably never heard about it, because only a few had incentives to tell you.

But the Belfast dirty bomber is just one drop from an ocean of truth that is unreported, not repeated, and does not enter into civil discourse, because it is not perceived to be profitable to talk about, regardless of how profitable it may be to hear.

Yet it is from these shared perceptions that we form the structure of civilization itself. Every government, every law, every regulation and every constitution is its product. Hence the quality of civilization is predicated on the degree to which civil discourse is a fair representation of the world we live in.

That is why the revelation of primary source knowledge, from which everything else follows, is so important. Its limits are the limits of civilization itself.

Source document

See

References

  1. [[Washington DC Regional Threat and Analysis Center report re Inauguration, 16 Jan 2009]]
  2. Parts for 'dirty bomb' found in slain US man's home
  3. According to Google News: http://news.google.com/
  4. According to the most comprehensive blog search engine, Icerocket: http://icerocket.com/


http://wikileaks.org/wiki/The_%22dirty_bomb%22_that_disappeared


Surging Towards Disaster in the "Afpak Theatre"

From Wikileaks

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February 22, 2009

By Tom Burghardt[1]

On February 18, President Barack Obama ordered 17,000 additional U.S. troops deployed to Afghanistan. Obama's announcement will result in a major escalation of America's bloody occupation of that war-ravaged country.

Currently, some 36,000 U.S. troops are in Afghanistan, including some 6,000 sent in early January under orders by the outgoing Bush regime. In addition to U.S. forces, 32,000 troops from other NATO countries and a mix of "private military contractors" (armed mercenaries) occupy the Central Asian nation.

When coupled with increasingly bellicose rhetoric from the Pentagon and military strikes inside Pakistan, the prospects for regional war--with incalculable risks for the people of Central- and South Asia--have put paid Obama's electoral hyperbole that his would be a "change" administration.

In a brief written statement issued Tuesday by the White House, Obama declared that "the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan demands urgent attention and swift action. The Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan, and al Qaeda supports the insurgency and threatens America from its safe-haven along the Pakistani border."

Responding to "a months old" request by "General McKiernan and supported by Secretary Gates, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Commander of Central Command," Obama will soon dispatch a Marine Expeditionary Brigade (8,000 troops), an Army Stryker Brigade (4,000 soldiers) and 5,000 support troops.

Claiming that increased troop levels "will contribute to the security of the Afghan people," the White House studiously ignores reports from the United Nations, international human rights organizations--and from NATO itself--that the number of civilians killed by all armed actors increased dramatically over the previous year.

A confidential report titled "Metrics Brief, 2007-2008," was published by Wikileaks. Prepared by U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) and the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) for Afghanistan, the 12 page dossier "reveals that civilian deaths from the war in Afghanistan have increased by 46% over the past year." According to the global whistleblowers,

The report shows a dramatic escalation of the war and civil disorder. Coalition deaths increased by 35%, assassinations and kidnappings by 50% and attacks on the Kabul based Government of Hamid Karzai also more than doubled, rising a massive 119%.
The report highlights huge increases on attacks aimed at Coalition forces, including a 27% increase in IED attacks, a 40% rise in rifle and rocket fire and an increase in surface to air fire of 67%.
According to the report, outside of the capital Kabul only one in two families had access to even the most basic health care, and only one in two children had access to a school. ("Wikileaks releases NATO report on civilian deaths," Wikileaks, Press Release, February 16, 2009)

While the majority of civilian deaths were attributed by the United Nations to the criminal actions of the Taliban and the Afghan-Arab database of disposable Western intelligence assets known as al-Qaeda, some 828 of 2,118 civilians killed in 2008 were the result of indiscriminate attacks by the Afghan military, U.S. Air Force bombing and berserker American Special Forces units engaged in "counterterrorism" and "counternarcotics" operations. According to The New York Times,

The report singled out special forces and other military units operating outside the normal chains of command. That means their presence and movements are not always known by regular field commanders.
Special forces groups like Navy Seals and paramilitary units operated by the CIA often conduct raids in Afghanistan, and often at night.
The report also said that airstrikes that went awry were often those that were called in by troops under attack.
The United Nations report helps shed light on one of the most divisive issues between the American-led coalition and the Afghan government of Mr. Karzai. (Dexter Filkins, "Afghan Civilian Deaths Rose 40 Percent in 2008," The New York Times, February 18, 2009)

The growing carnage on the ground reflects the political crisis facing the new administration as capitalism's economic meltdown compel our corporatist masters to grab as much of the world's resources as possible to stanch the economic bleed out.

But as in Iraq and the Middle East generally however, the Obama administration's "surge" across Central Asian will prove quixotic--and deadly.

Kyrgyzstan Gives America the Boot

As the politico-military situation rapidly deteriorates, how the Pentagon will keep "surged" troops resupplied is fast becoming a looming nightmare.

With critical supply routes from Pakistan cut by Afghan Talibs and Pakistani Taliban fighters, who have launched coordinated attacks with Central Asian and Arab al-Qaeda guerrillas, the virtual closure of the Khyber Pass in the North-West Frontier Province has fueled a growing logistical crisis. Prior to last December's offensive by insurgents, some 75% of supplies for NATO forces flowed into Afghanistan along this route.

Adding to NATO's headaches, on February 18 Kyrgyzstan's rubber-stamp parliament voted to close the Manas Airbase near the capital Bishkek. According to The Guardian, Wednesday's vote followed "a backroom deal two weeks ago between the country's president, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, and Russia's president, Dmitry Medvedev."

The Americans have six months to pack up and vacate the premises.

The kleptocratic Bakiyev regime has been promised a $2.15 billion loan and a debt write-off by Moscow in a move intended to wrest concessions from the United States to keep the military hardware flowing. Asia Times reported February 20,

In the end, transit salvation for the US and NATO is indeed coming from no one else but Russia--but on Moscow's terms: this means Russia possibly using its own military planes to airlift the supplies. A deceptively charming Medvedev has been on the record identifying "very positive signs" in the new US-Russia chess match. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has been on the record saying transit of US and NATO non-military supplies through Russia begins in effect only a few days after the 20th anniversary of the Soviets leaving Kabul. (Pepe Escobar, "Obama, Osama and Medvedev," Asia Times Online, February 20, 2009)

As investigative journalist Pepe Escobar points out, "the price" that the United States and NATO will pay to have their supplies arrive from Russia is being made painfully clear to Washington: "no more encirclement, no more NATO extension, no more anti-missile shield in the Czech Republic and Poland for protection against non-existent Iranian missiles. All this has to be negotiated in detail."

But in a potential move seen as a maneuver to bypass Moscow, The Independent reported that "the new US administration had indicated that it was prepared to talk to Iran about the Afghan situation."

No friend of the Sunni-based insurgency next door, nor of U.S.-backed jihadi groups such as Jundullah attacking from Pakistan, Tehran may be willing to cut a deal with Washington. Independent journalist Kim Sengupta writes that "Italy, which assumes the presidency of the G8 this year, said that Tehran would be invited to participate in a summit on Afghanistan. The Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said: 'We want to consider how to involve Iran, not whether to involve Iran'."

But how this will play out may be determined by America's stationary aircraft carrier in the Middle East, Israel, and that country's "naval task force" in Washington, the powerful Israel lobby. And with Benjamin Netanyahu's far-right Likud party given the nod by Israeli President Shimon Peres "to take the lead" in forming the next government, it's an even bet that Bibi may cut a deal with Avigdor Lieberman's neofascist Yisrael Beiteinu party. Netanyahu and Lieberman have both threatened to bomb Iran's civilian nuclear facilities, and have called that nation Israel's number one "national security threat."

While Washington's chattering classes prattle on about the need to "fight them over there, so we don't have to fight them here," the sad reality for the Afghan people is that the Obama administration and their corporatist masters don't give a hoot about their suffering, the unprecedented "surge" in heroin production, the rise and rise of organized crime-linked "Islamic fundamentalists," or for that matter, bringing al-Qaeda to ground. It's all hot air designed to get the American people on-board as imperialism escalates the "right war" in Central- and South Asia.

With the 9/11 attacks as a backdrop--and pretext--for carrying out a long-planned military intervention to conqueror Afghanistan, either through proxies (remember the enthusiasm in petroleum board rooms when the Taliban seized Kabul in 1996!) or now, by installing a narco regime amenable to American demands, the unspoken project remains what it has always been: the "sole superpower's" hegemonic control over the vast oil and gas reserves of Central Asia.

Pakistan, Jihadis and America's Killer Drones

Meanwhile, on the "Pak" side of the "Afpak theatre" America's former "best friends forever," the Pakistani Taliban grouped under the banner of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and the Tehrik Nifaz Shariat-i-Muhammadi (Movement for the Enforcement of Islamic Law, TNSM) have been doing some "surging" of their own.

Having successfully concluded a "truce" with the government of President Asif Ali Zardari in the North-West Frontier Province's Malakand District, the nominally secular Pakistan Peoples Party has ceded the political ground to Army and Inter Services Intelligence agency-linked militants with long-standing ties to international terrorist outfits and drug trafficking cartels. In other words, American allies.

But before the ink on the agreement had even dried, a television journalist with Pakistan's Geo network, Musa Khan Khel, covering TNSM head honcho Maulana Sufi Mohammed's triumphant entry into Mingora February 17, was brutally murdered. Riddled with bullets, his nearly decapitated body was found on the side of a road shortly after the TNSM leader announced that "peace" had come to the Swat Valley. Khel, according to reports, had been seeking an interview with TTP "emir" Maulana Fazlullah.

The News reported February 20 that TNSM leaders are meeting with their TTP counterparts to seal the deal to lay down their arms in lieu of the imposition of Sharia law in Malakand.

In 2001, the "peacemaker" and self-proclaimed "Sharia-lover" had led some 10,000 untrained volunteers across the border into Afghanistan to fight the American-led narcotrafficking Northern Alliance during the initial stages of the U.S. invasion. Drawn from madrassas across Pakistan as disposable cannon-fodder for the ISI, thousands were killed.

In the aftermath of the TTP and the Army's bloody operations Swat lay in ruins, its people terrorized and its infrastructure all but destroyed. Describing the region as a "hell-hole of bodies and ruin," The Sunday Times reports that

In the former mountain resort of Malam Jabba, where skiing thrived when the surrounding Swat Valley was an international attraction, one can still see the remnants of the Pakistan Tourism Development Corporation's flagship hotel. The building was blown up by the Taliban because it was being used for "un-Islamic activities".
Hundreds of other hotels in the valley have been destroyed or forced to close after threats from the militants. (Daud Khattakis, "Into a Taliban wasteland of blood and fear," The Sunday Times, February 22, 2009)

But the destruction of critical infrastructure that fueled the region's economy is but the visible manifestation of a virtual reign of terror that grips Swat Valley. Khattakis writes:

What I found in Swat was a hell-hole. Suicide bombings, car bombs and artillery have scarred the valley's roads and buildings. The charred remains of hospitals and even a madrasah (seminary) litter the landscape.
Nearly 200 schools have been destroyed, all girls over the age of eight are banned from lessons and, in a symbol of the Taliban's hatred of learning, the public library in Mingora has been wrecked.
The Taliban have banned music and dancing, television and internet cafes. Women cannot leave home without wearing a burqa, the all-encompassing robe. Justice has been enforced with floggings and public executions. (The Sunday Times, ibid.)

In the heart of Mingora's bazaar, Green Square is now known as Khooni Chowk, or bloody square "because of the public executions carried out there by Taliban who leave the bullet-riddled bodies of police and soldiers for all to see."

One wonders what justification "Sharia-lover" Sufi Mohammed and his sociopathic son-in-law Fazlullah have for butchering whole families, including children, who simply wish to be left in peace?

According to multiple reports in the Pakistani media, since the TTP's violent take over of the region, organized crime gangs have flourished and car-jackings, armed robberies, kidnappings, rapes and murders as well as an explosive increase in the drug trade have turned Swat into an post-apocalyptic landscape. Like their American counterparts in crime, the message of TTP "emirs" seems to be: "Kill 'em all, and let God sort them out."

But here as elsewhere, the rise of reactionary fundamentalism has far more to do with failing state structures than with religious enthusiasm. Incapable of providing food, employment, housing and health care to its citizens, Pakistani elites, like corporate grifters everywhere, undermine their position by selling-off economic assets to well-connected cronies and ceding educational and social welfare services to "faith-based" groups, as in the U.S.

In this context, The Nation reported February 18 that the Cabinet Committee on Privatization approved the (fire) sale sell-off of some 21 state-owned enterprises, including "four power companies and other state-owned entities including SME Bank, National Power Construction Company, Pakistan Railways and Pakistan Post."

Utterly bankrupt and bereft of imagination when its comes to ameliorating the horrendous economic and social hardships faced by Pakistani workers and farmers, the bourgeois PPP government following "advice" from their mentors in Washington, will instead line the pockets of their "constituents," the multinational corporations and the comprador elites who do their bidding.

The Swat truce follows revelations by The Times that the "CIA is secretly using an airbase in southern Pakistan to launch the Predator drones that observe and attack al-Qaeda and Taleban militants on the Pakistani side of the border with Afghanistan."

While the Pakistani government has demanded that the U.S. halt drone attacks in the area, The Times discovered "that the CIA has been using the Shamsi airfield--originally built by Arab sheikhs for falconry expeditions in the southwestern province of Baluchistan--for at least a year."

The New York-based whistleblowing intelligence and security website Cryptome published a series of satellite images as part of their "Eyeball" series on February 18. One image, captured in 2006 before construction of a huge hangar meant to conceal America's robot killing machines was completed, show Predator drones on the Shamsi air strip.

According to Cryptome's anonymous correspondent, "This is a very capable base facility with a large hangar in addition to the two Predator support hangars. Nearby is a large secured compound (appears empty) which could support up to a battalion of special ops and associated command and control. The large parking area inside the compound is perfect to land choppers and leave with relative security. All security measures seem fresh."

As I reported February 16, "U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, dropped a bombshell when she revealed that CIA Predator drones are flown from an airbase in Pakistan." Feinstein's disclosure came during hearings February 12 before the Senate Intelligence Committee. While the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) have refused to comment, unnamed "U.S. intelligence officials" described the senator's statement as "accurate."

Despite these revelations, Pakistan's Defense Minister Chaudry Ahmad Mukhtar continues to deny "that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is controlling drone attacks from the Shamsi base in Balochistan, and said Pakistan had no secret understanding with the US to use bases in Pakistan to carry out attacks in the Tribal Areas, according to a February 20 report in Daily Times.

Mukhtar said: "Certain news reports claiming that the CIA runs predator flights from the Shamsi Airbase in Balochistan are baseless ... Pakistan has no such understanding with the US to allow it to use its bases for predator attacks."

How the Defense Minister squares his denial with inescapable facts on the ground is another matter entirely. But revelations over the CIA's use of Shamsi Airbase may be the least of the Defense Ministry's problems.

"In a dramatic development," according to The News, "three prominent Pakistani militant commanders--Baitullah Mehsud, Hafiz Gul Bahadur and Maulvi Nazeer--on Friday set aside their differences and promised to jointly fight their enemy in future."

Two of the three Pakistani Taliban leaders were considered "pro-government" and had been recruited to fight Mehsud's TTP and their al-Qaeda allies but have since been alienated from the state due to persistent Predator attacks by the CIA from bases provided by Pakistan. The News reports,

If the three men, who now rule South and North Waziristan tribal region in true sense, got united, they could give a tough time to the government in future.
The militants from Wana said now they had understood Pakistan's divide and rule policy, and decided to get united and fight together against it in future. "Pakistan caused more losses to the Mujahideen than the US. It handed over 700 Arab Mujahideen to the US and jailed our people," the commander alleged. (Mushtaq Yusufzai, "Top militant commanders resolve rift," The News, February 21, 2009)

Islamabad's double-game with the imperialist Dracula on the one hand and the jihadi Frankenstein on the other demonstrates, if nothing else, the impervious nature of the existing political system to "change" on all sides of the "Afpak problem."

Barring a dramatic transformation of the political state of affairs, the bill for American and Pakistani duplicity is coming due, and it will be the people of South Asia who will pay a heavy price.

Thanks to Tom Burghardt for covering this issue. Copyright remains the aforementioned.

http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Surging_Towards_Disaster_in_the_%22Afpak_Theatre%22



The End of the Affair? The BND, CIA and Kosovo's Deep State

From Wikileaks

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By Tom Burghardt (Antifascist Calling)


When three officers of Germany's foreign intelligence service the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), were arrested in Pristina November 19, it exposed that country's extensive covert operations in the heart of the Balkans.

On November 14, a bomb planted at the office of the European Union Special Representative was detonated in downtown Pristina. While damage was light and there were no injuries, U.N. "peacekeepers" detained one of the BND officers hours after the blast when he was observed taking photos of the damaged building. Two of his colleagues waited in a car and acted as lookouts. The officer named these two colleagues as witnesses that he was in his office at the time of the attack.

That office, identified by the press as the "private security firm" Logistics-Coordination & Assessment Service or LCAS, in reality was a front company for BND operations. Its premises were searched three days later and the trio were subsequently arrested and accused by Kosovan authorities of responsibility for bombing the EU building. As a result of the arrests, the BND was forced to admit the real identities of their agents and the true nature of LCAS.

A scandal erupted leading to a diplomatic row between Berlin and Pristina. The German government labeled the accusations "absurd" and threatened a cut-off of funds to the Kosovo government. A circus atmosphere prevailed as photos of the trio were shown on Kosovan TV and splashed across the front pages of the press. Rumors and dark tales abounded, based on leaks believed by observers to have emanated from the office of Kosovo's Prime Minister, the "former" warlord Hashim Thaci, nominal leader of the statelet's organized crime-tainted government.

When seized by authorities one of the BND officers, Andreas J., demonstrated very poor tradecraft indeed. Among the items recovered by police, the operative's passport along with a notebook containing confidential and highly incriminating information on the situation in Kosovo were examined. According to media reports, the notebook contained the names of well-placed BND informants in the Prime Minister's entourage. According to this reading, the arrests were an act of revenge by Thaci meant to embarrass the German government.

But things aren't always as they seem.

On November 29, the trio--Robert Z., Andreas J. and Andreas D.--departed Kosovo on a special flight bound for Berlin where they "will face a committee of German parliamentarians who have taken an interest in their case," according to an account in Spiegel Online.

More curious than a violent attack on the streets of Pristina, a city wracked by gangland killings, car hijackings, kidnappings and assaults is the provenance of the bomb itself. In other words, why would German intelligence agents attack their own? But before attempting to answer this question, a grim backstory to the affair rears its ugly head.


An Agency Mired in Scandal

This latest scandal comes as yet another blow to the BND considering August's revelations by the whistleblowing website Wikileaks that Germany's external intelligence agency had extensively spied on journalists. Like their counterparts at the CIA, the BND is forbidden by law from carrying out domestic operations.

According to Wikileaks documents, journalists working for Focus Magazine and Der Spiegel were collaborators in a scheme by the agency to learn their sources as well as obtaining information on left-wing politicians, including Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) leaders Gregor Gysi and Andreas Lederer.

Indeed Focus Magazine journalist Josef Hufelschulte, code name 'Jerez, wrote articles based on reports provided by the BND "intended to produce favorable coverage." Wikileaks correspondent Daniel Schmitt and investigations editor Julian Assange comment that, "The document in general shows the extent to which the collaboration of journalists with intelligence agencies has become common and to what dimensions consent is manufactured in the interests of those involved."

In November, Wikileaks published a subsequent document obtained from the telecommunications giant T-Systems. In addition to revealing two dozen secret IP addresses used by the BND for surveillance operations, the document provides "Evidence of a secret out of control BND robot scanning selected web-sites. In 2006 system administrators had to ban the "BVOE" IP addresses to prevent servers from being destroyed." Additionally, Wikileaks revealed the "activity on a Berlin prostitution service website--evidence that intelligence seductions, the famed cold-war 'honeytrap', is alive and well?"

While the document does not spell out who was running the sex-for-hire website, one can't help but wonder whether Balkan-linked organized crime syndicates, including Kosovan and Albanian sex traffickers are working in tandem with the BND in return for that agency turning a blind eye to the sordid trade in kidnapped women.


Kosovo: A European Narco State

When Kosovo proclaimed its "independence" in February, the Western media hailed the provocative dismemberment of Serbia, a move that completed the destruction of Yugoslavia by the United States, the European Union and NATO, as an exemplary means to bring "peace and stability" to the region.

If by "peace" one means impunity for rampaging crime syndicates or by "stability," the freedom of action with no questions asked by U.S. and NATO military and intelligence agencies, not to mention economic looting on a grand scale by freewheeling multinational corporations, then Kosovo has it all!

From its inception, the breakaway Serb province has served as a militarized outpost for Western capitalist powers intent on spreading their tentacles East, encircling Russia and penetrating the former spheres of influence of the ex-Soviet Union. As a template for contemporary CIA destabilization operations in Georgia and Ukraine, prospective EU members and NATO "partners," Kosovo should serve as a warning for those foolish enough to believe American clichs about "freedom" or the dubious benefits of "globalization."

Camp Bondsteel, located on rolling hills and farmland near the city of Ferizaj/Urosevac,is the largest U.S. military installation on the European continent. Visible from space, in addition to serving as an NSA listening post pointed at Russia and as the CIA's operational hub in the Balkans and beyond, some observers believe that Andreas J.'s notebook may have contained information that Camp Bondsteel continues to serve as a CIA "black site." One motive for rolling up the BND intelligence operation may have been U.S. fears that this toxic information would become public, putting paid U.S. claims that it no longer kidnaps and tortures suspected "terrorists."

When NATO partners Germany and the U.S. decided to drive a stake through Yugoslavia's heart in the early 1990s during the heady days of post-Cold War triumphalism, their geopolitical strategy could not have achieved "success" without the connivance, indeed active partnership amongst Yugoslavia's nationalist rivals. As investigative journalist Misha Glenny documented,

Most shocking of all, however, is how the gangsters and politicians fueling war between their peoples were in private cooperating as friends and close business partners. The Croat, Bosnian, Albanian, Macedonian, and Serb moneymen and mobsters were truly thick as thieves. They bought, sold, and exchanged all manner of commodities, knowing that the high levels of personal trust between them were much stronger than the transitory bonds of hysterical nationalism. They fomented this ideology among ordinary folk in essence to mask their own venality. As one commentator described it, the new republics were ruled by "a parastate Cartel which had emerged from political institutions, the ruling Communist Party and its satellites, the military, a variety of police forces, the Mafia, court intellectuals and with the president of the Republic at the center of the spider web...Tribal nationalism was indispensable for the cartel as a means to pacify its subordinates and as a cover for the uninterrupted privatization of the state apparatus. (McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008, p. 27)

Glenny's description of the 1990s convergence of political, economic and security elites with organized crime syndicates in Western intelligence operations is the quintessential definition of the capitalist deep state.

In Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, Peter Dale Scott describes how the deep state can be characterized by "the symbiosis between governments (and in particular their intelligence agencies) and criminal associations, particularly drug traffickers, in the stabilization of right-wing terror in Vietnam, Italy, Bolivia, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, and other parts of the world." Indeed, "revelations in the 1970s and 1980s about the 'strategy of tension,' whereby government intelligence agencies, working in international conjunction, strengthened the case for their survival by actually fomenting violence, recurringly in alliance with drug-trafficking elements."

Scott's analysis is perhaps even more relevant today as "failed states" such as Kosovo, characterized by economic looting on an industrial scale, the absence of the rule of law, reliance on far-right terrorists (of both the "religious" and "secular" varieties) to achieve policy goals, organized crime syndicates, as both assets and executors of Western policy, and comprador elites are Washington's preferred international partners.

For the ruling elites of the former Yugoslavia and their Western allies, Kosovo is a veritable goldmine. Situated in the heart of the Balkans, Kosovo's government is deeply tied to organized crime structures: narcotrafficking, arms smuggling, car theft rings and human trafficking that feeds the sex slave "industry." These operations are intimately linked to American destabilization campaigns and their cosy ties to on-again, off-again intelligence assets that include al-Qaeda and other far-right terror gangs. As investigative journalist Peter Klebnikov documented in 2000,

The Kosovar traffickers ship heroin exclusively from Asia's Golden Crescent. It's an apparently inexhaustible source. At one end of the crescent lies Afghanistan, which in 1999 surpassed Burma as the world's largest producer of opium poppies. From there, the heroin base passes through Iran to Turkey, where it is refined, and then into the hands of the 15 Families, which operate out of the lawless border towns linking Macedonia, Albania, and Serbia. Not surprisingly, the KLA has also flourished there. According to the State Department, four to six tons of heroin move through Turkey every month. "Not very much is stopped," says one official. "We get just a fraction of the total." ("Heroin Heroes," Mother Jones, January-February 2000)

Not much has changed since then. Indeed, the CIA's intelligence model for covert destabilization operations is a continuing formula for "success." Beginning in the 1940s, when the Corsican Mafia was pegged by the Agency to smash the French Communist Party, down to today's bloody headlines coming out of Afghanistan and Pakistan, global drug lords and intelligence operators go hand in hand. It is hardly surprising then, that according to a report by the Berlin Institute for European Policy, organized crime is the only profitable sector of the Kosovan economy. Nearly a quarter of the country's economic output, some <82>550 million, is derived from criminal activities.

Though the role of the United States and their NATO partners are central to the drama unfolding today, the BND affair also reveals that beneath the carefully-constructed faade of Western "unity" in "Freedom Land," deep inter-imperialist rivalries simmer. As the socialist journalist Peter Schwarz reports,

Speculation has since been rife about the background to the case, but it is doubtful whether it will ever be clarified. Kosovo is a jungle of rival secret services. In this regard, it resembles Berlin before the fall of the Wall. The US, Germany, Britain, Italy and France all have considerable intelligence operations in the country, which work both with and against one another. Moreover, in this country of just 2.1 million inhabitants, some 15,000 NATO soldiers and 1,500 UN police officers are stationed, as well as 400 judges, police officers and security officers belonging to the UN's EULEX mission. (Peter Schwarz, "Kosovo's Dirty Secret: The Background to Germany's Secret Service Affair," World Socialist Web Site, December 1, 2008)

Into this jungle of conflicting loyalties and interests, international crime syndicates in close proximity--and fleeting alliance--with this or that security service rule the roost. It is all the more ironic that the Thaci government has targeted the BND considering, as Balkan analyst Christopher Deliso revealed:

In 1996, Germany's BND established a major station in Tirana...and another in Rome to select and train future KLA fighters. According to Le Monde Diplomatique, "special forces in Berlin provided the operational training and supplied arms and transmission equipment from ex-East German Stasi stocks as well as Black uniforms." The Italian headquarters recruited Albanian immigrants passing through ports such as Brindisi and Trieste, while German military intelligence, the Militaramschirmdienst, and the Kommando Spezialkrfte Special Forces (KSK), offered military training and provisions to the KLA in the remote Mirdita Mountains of northern Albania controlled by the deposed president, Sali Berisha. (The Coming Balkan Caliphate, Westport: Praeger Security International, 2007, p. 37)

But as Schwarz observed, why would the Thaci government risk alienating the German state, given the fact that after the U.S., Germany "is the second largest financial backer of Kosovo and ranks among the most important advocates of its independence." Why indeed?

According to Balkan Analysis, the International Crisis Group (ICG) funded by billionaire George Soros' Open Society Institute (OSI) and closely aligned with "liberal interventionists" in the United States, were instrumental in arguing that the United States and Germany, should guarantee "future stability," by building up the Kosovo Protection Corps (TMK), the KLA's successor organization, into a well-equipped army. Towards this end, the U.S. and Germany, in addition to arming the organized crime-linked statelet, have provided funds and equipment for a sophisticated military communications center in the capital.

Speculation is rife and conflicting accounts proliferate like mushrooms after a warm rain. One theory has it that senior Kosovan politicians were angered by BND criticisms linking KLA functionaries, including personal associates of Thaci and the Prime Minister himself, with organized crime. Tellingly, Schwarz reports, this "is contrary to the position taken by the CIA."

Is the affair then, merely a falling-out among thieves on how the spoils will be divided?


The CIA: Drugs & Thugs International

As noted above, U.S. destabilization programs and covert operations rely on far-flung networks of far-right provocateurs and drug lords (often interchangeable players) to facilitate the dirty work for U.S. policy elites and American multinational corporations. Throughout its Balkan adventure the CIA made liberal use of these preexisting narcotics networks to arm the KLA and provide them with targets. In their public pronouncements and analyses however, nary a harsh word is spoken.

According to the CIA, by any standard Kosovo's economy is a disaster, but that doesn't prevent the Agency from seeing "significant progress"!

Over the past few years Kosovo's economy has shown significant progress in transitioning to a market-based system, but it is still highly dependent on the international community and the diaspora for financial and technical assistance. Remittances from the diaspora--located mainly in Germany and Switzerland--account for about 30% of GDP. Kosovo's citizens are the poorest in Europe with an average annual per capita income of only $1800--about one-third the level of neighboring Albania. Unemployment--at more than 40% of the population--is a severe problem that encourages outward migration. (Central Intelligence Agency, The World Factbook, November 20, 2008)

Needless to say, one unmentionable "fact" disappeared from the CIA's country profile is the statelet's overwhelming dependence on the black economy. I suppose this is what the Agency means when it lauds Kosovo's transition to a "market-based system"!But as former DEA investigator and whistleblower Michael Levine, author of The Big White Lie, told B92, one of the wings of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was "linked with every known narco-cartel in the Middle East and the Far East", and that almost every European intelligence service and police has files on "connections between ethnic Albanian rebels and drug trafficking". And dare I say by extension, the CIA itself.

One bone of contention which could have led Thaci and his henchmen to seek revenge against his erstwhile German allies was a 67-page BND analysis about organized crime in Kosovo. As Schwarz noted the dossier, produced in February 2005 and subsequently leaked to the press, "accuses Ramush Haradinaj (head of government from December 2004 to March 2005), Hashim Thaci (prime minister since January 2008) and Xhavit Haliti, who sits in the parliament presidium, of being deeply implicated in the drugs trade."

According to the BND report, "Regarding the key players (e.g., Haliti, Thaci, Haradinaj), there exists the closest ties between politics, business and internationally operating OC [organized crime] structures in Kosovo. The criminal networks behind this are encouraging political instability. They have no interest in building a functioning state, which could impair their flourishing trade." (WSWS, op. cit.)

Haradinaj, an American protegee, became Prime Minister in 2004. However, he was forced to resign his post in March 2005 when the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia indicted him for crimes against humanity. Among other things, Haradinaj was accused of abducting civilians, unlawful detention, torture, murder and rape. Schwarz notes he was acquitted in April 2008 "for lack of evidence, after nine out of ten prosecution witnesses died violently and the tenth withdrew his statement after narrowly escaping an assassination attempt." Talk about friends in high places!

Mirroring evidence uncovered by journalists and investigators regarding the control of the drugs trade by 15 Albanian crime families, the Berlin Institute for European Policy laid similar charges against Thaci, stating that real power in Kosovo is wielded by 15 to 20 family clans who control "almost all substantial key social positions" and are "closely linked to prominent political decision makers."

According to Spiegel, when the BND operation was run to ground with the possible connivance of the CIA, its secret network of informants, instrumental to gaining insight into the interconnections amongst state actors and organized crime were compromised. The BND's Department Five, responsible for organized crime wrote a confidential report linking Thaci as "a key figure in a Kosovar-Albanian mafia network."

Department Two, according to Spiegel, was responsible for telecommunications surveillance. In 1999, the BND launched operation "Mofa99," a wiretap intercept program that targeted high-ranking members of the KLA--and exposed their links to dodgy criminal syndicates and Islamist allies, al-Qaeda. The program was so successful according to Spiegel that since then, "the BND has maintained an extensive network of informants among high-ranking functionaries of the KLA and the Kosovar administration."

Functionaries in possession of many dangerous secrets and inconvenient truths!

As researcher and analyst Michel Chossudovsky wrote back in 2001, among the "inconvenient truths" unexplored by Western media is the close proximity of far-right Islamist terror gangs and planetary U.S. destabilization operations.

Since the Soviet-Afghan war, recruiting Mujahedin ("holy warriors") to fight covert wars on Washington's behest has become an integral part of US foreign policy. A report of the US Congress has revealed how the US administration--under advice from the National Security Council headed by Anthony Lake--had "helped turn Bosnia into a militant Islamic base" leading to the recruitment through the so-called "Militant Islamic Network," of thousands of Mujahedin from the Muslim world.

The "Bosnian pattern" has since been replicated in Kosovo, Southern Serbia and Macedonia. Among the foreign mercenaries now fighting with the KLA-NLA are Mujahedin from the Middle East and the Central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union as well as "soldiers of fortune" from several NATO countries including Britain, Holland and Germany. Some of these Western mercenaries had previously fought with the KLA and the Bosnian Muslim Army. (Michel Chossudovsky, "Washington Behind Terrorist Assaults in Macedonia," Global Research, September 10, 2001)

Fast forward seven years and one can hypothesize that the BND, stepping on the CIA's toes and that agency's cosy intelligence "understanding" with Mafia-linked KLA fighters and al-Qaeda assets, would have every reason to sabotage the BND's organized crime operations--not that the German military intelligence service's hands are any cleaner!

While we may never know all the facts surrounding this curious affair, one thing is certain: the role played by powerful Mafia gangs as a source for black funds, intelligence assets and CIA "agents of influence" will continue. Administrations come and go, but like motherhood and apple pie the shadowy workings of America's deep state is an eternal verity you can count on!


First appeared in Antifascist Calling. Thanks to Tom Burghardt and Antifascist Calling for covering this document. Copyright remains with the aforementioned. Contact antifascist-calling.blogspot.com for reprint rights.

Source document

See also

http://wikileaks.org/wiki/The_End_of_the_Affair%3F_The_BND%2C_CIA_and_Kosovo%27s_Deep_State


now for some humour..

Secret Ritual of Alpha Epsilon Pi, a collegiate Jewish fraternity.

reading of 23rd Psalm (Greek numbering: Psalm 22) The Lord is my Shepherd...
blindfold, dark room,
"big brother .. will become your lifetime friend.."

http://wikileaks.org/leak/secret-ritual-of-alpha-epsilon-pi-fraternity.pdf

A comedy!




Friday, March 13, 2009

GLADIO, Pope Assassination, CIA

24 February - SFO Film Festival screens GLADIO!!


Bulgaria / New book about the assassination of John Paul II

"The truth about the assassination of John Paul II" - a book under that title, written by French journalist Bulgarian origin Rumiana Ugarczinskiej, presented on Thursday in Sofia.

Ugarczinska teaches criminology at the Institute of the University of Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3 She wrote a book in France loud "KGB and the assault on Europe" and "Gazprom - the threat from Russia. "

The image “http://www.nndb.com/people/460/000027379/mehmet-ali-agca-CLOSE.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.http://thekludges.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/050404_agca_vmed_9awidec.jpghttp://wwwimage.cbsnews.com/images/2005/04/03/image685128x.jpg
Mehmet Ali Agca Born: 9-Jan-1958 Birthplace: Yesiltepe, Turkey
Pope John Paul II


In preparing a book on the assassination of the Polish Pope, the author repeatedly he traveled to Turkey, including in the family pages zamachowca Mehmet Ali Agcy. Examined the archives in Italy, Germany, France, USA and Bulgaria, met with current and former employees of the special services of these countries.

"The truth about the assassination is that no one wants the truth" - believes Ugarczinska. "No one at hand is not the truth about how Agca and his colleagues within 18 months traveled all over Europe - east and west. Traces of attack passes through Sofia, but do not lead to it" - said the author during a book presentation.

"Bułgarowi it is difficult to analyze one of the biggest puzzles twentieth century. When this begins to write Bulgarian, always a suspicion of bias. That is why decided not to contradict the so-called. Trace of the Bulgarian, and show what really happened. Hence the title of the book" - Ugarczinska indicated.

"Bulgarian thread is missing, it was invented by the CIA" - added, stressing that all of its work is the proof. The book relies on, inter alia, on interviews with former high-ranking employee of the CIA.

According to journalist, traces of an attack in Turkey and Italy to keep the secret NATO structure, called "Stay Behind", which was established in order to neutralize the impact of prokomunistycznych and leftist forces in the Alliance. This was the secret structure, operating without control by the authorities, who over the years was under the influence of various interest groups - whether the organization of mafia masońskich. Masons? Masonry? mansonic?

The Italian branch of the structure known as "Gladio" is a lot of people implicated in the scandals around the Vatican bank Ambrosia, lodge P-2, as well as opponents of the pope simply-Pole. The existence of "Gladio" was first publicly revealed Giulio Andreotti in 1992 - says Ugarczinska.

GLADIO - carnage in Bologna by CIA



The coup, according to the author, was inspired by Turkish and Italian right-wing extremists, linked to the special services of both countries. Agca, and all his colleagues, who traveled with him around Europe and helped him in organizing the coup, have become the organization of the gray wolves, "financed by the Turkish mafia and related special services. With the help of Agca escaped from prison a year before the attack - claims the author of the book.

GLADIO and MEDIA-DOCTRINE



Matter to which the author also points out, is the silence of the then Soviet Union. Moscow behaved in a very wstrzemięźliwie after the coup. There was no high-defending campaign in Bulgaria. According Ugarczinskiej, the reason is that the channels pass through Bulgaria smuggling drugs and weapons through m.in Turkish mafia. According to the author, Sofia had a tacit approval for these operations, but when came to light, Moscow distanced itself from Bulgaria.

Based on the book Rumiana Ugarczinskiej in France was a documentary TV film.

Ewgenia Manołowa





POLISH ORIGINAL

http://wyborcza.pl/1,91446,6373960,Bulgaria__Nowa_ksiazka_o_zamachu_na_Jana_Pawla_II.html



Bułgaria/ Nowa książka o zamachu na Jana Pawła II
PAP
2009-03-12, ostatnia aktualizacja 2009-03-12 12:55
"Prawda o zamachu na Jana Pawła II" - książkę pod tym tytułem, autorstwa francuskiej dziennikarki bułgarskiego pochodzenia Rumiany Ugarczinskiej, zaprezentowano w czwartek w Sofii.
Ugarczinska wykłada w instytucie kryminologii uniwersytetu Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3. Napisała głośne we Francji książki "KGB i szturm na Europę" oraz "Gazprom - zagrożenie z Rosji".

Przygotowując książkę o zamachu na polskiego papieża autorka wielokrotnie jeździła do Turcji, w tym w rodzinne strony zamachowca Mehmeta Ali Agcy. Badała też archiwa we Włoszech, Niemczech, Francji, USA i Bułgarii, spotykała się z obecnymi i byłymi pracownikami służb specjalnych tych państw.

"Prawdą o zamachu jest to, że nikt nie chce tej prawdy" - uważa Ugarczinska. "Nikomu nie jest na rękę prawda o tym, jak Agca i jego koledzy w ciągu 18 miesięcy jeździli po całej Europie - wschodniej i zachodniej. Ślady zamachu przechodzą przez Sofię, lecz nie prowadzą do niej" - powiedziała autorka w czasie prezentacji książki.

"Bułgarowi jest trudno analizować jedną z największych zagadek XX wieku. Gdy o tym zaczyna pisać Bułgar, zawsze powstaje podejrzenie o stronniczość. Dlatego postanowiłam nie dementować tzw. śladu bułgarskiego, a pokazać, co naprawdę się wydarzyło. Stąd tytuł książki" - zaznaczyła Ugarczinska.

"Bułgarskiego wątku nie ma, on został wymyślony przez CIA" - dodaje, podkreślając, że cała jej praca jest na to dowodem. W książce powołuje się m.in. na rozmowy z byłym wysokim rangą pracownikiem CIA.

Według dziennikarki, ślady zamachu w Turcji i we Włoszech prowadzą do tajnej struktury NATO o nazwie "Stay Behind", powołanej w celu neutralizowania wpływu prokomunistycznych i lewicowych sił w państwach Sojuszu. Była to sekretna struktura, działająca bez kontroli ze strony władz, która z biegiem lat znalazła się pod wpływem różnych grup interesów - mafii czy organizacji masońskich.

Z włoskim odgałęzieniem tej struktury zwanym "Gladio" związanych jest wiele osób, zamieszanych w skandale wokół watykańskiego banku Ambrosiano, lożą masońską P-2, a także po prostu przeciwników papieża-Polaka. Istnienie "Gladio" ujawnił publicznie były premier Giulio Andreotti w 1992 roku - twierdzi Ugarczinska.

Zamach, według autorki, był inspirowany przez prawicowych tureckich i włoskich ekstremistów, związanych ze służbami specjalnymi obu państw. Agca i wszyscy jego koledzy, którzy jeździli z nim po Europie i pomagali mu w organizacji zamachu, należeli do organizacji "Szare wilki", finansowanej przez turecką mafię i związanej ze służbami specjalnymi. Z ich pomocą Agca uciekł z więzienia rok przed zamachem - uważa autorka książki.

Sprawą, na którą autorka również zwraca uwagę, jest milczenie ówczesnych władz ZSRR. Moskwa zachowywała się bardzo wstrzemięźliwie po zamachu. Zabrakło głośnej kampanii w obronie Bułgarii. Według Ugarczinskiej, powodem jest fakt, że przez Bułgarię przechodziły kanały przemytu narkotyków i broni, za pośrednictwem m.in tureckiej mafii. Według autorki, Sofia miała milczące zezwolenie na te operacje, lecz w chwili, gdy wyszły na jaw, Moskwa zdystansowała się od Bułgarii.

Na podstawie książki Rumiany Ugarczinskiej we Francji powstał dokumentalny film telewizyjny.

Ewgenia Manołowa


Mehmet Ali Ağca (born January 9, 1958) is a Turkish assassin, who shot and wounded Pope John Paul II on May 13, 1981. After serving 19 years of incarceration in Italy, he was deported to Turkey, where he is serving another life sentence for the murder of Abdi İpekçi, a left-wing journalist, in 1979. Ağca has described himself as a mercenary with no political orientation, although he is known to have been a member of the Turkish ultra-nationalist Grey Wolves organization.

After this training he went to work for the far-right Turkish Grey Wolves, who were at the time destabilizing Turkey, which led to a military coup in 1980. Opinions differ on whether the ultra-nationalist Grey Wolves were being used by the CIA or the Bulgarian Secret Service. According to Kendal Nezan of the Kurdish Institute of Paris, they were infiltrated and manipulated by Gladio "stay-behind" networks, a NATO clandestine structure.[1]

On February 1, 1979 in Istanbul, under orders from the Grey Wolves, he murdered Abdi İpekçi, editor of the moderate left-wing newspaper Milliyet. He was caught due to an informant and was sentenced to life in prison. After serving six months, he escaped with the help of Abdullah Çatlı, second-in-command of the Grey Wolves and a prominent Gladio operative, and fled to Bulgaria, which was a base of operation for the Turkish mafia. According to investigative journalist Lucy Komisar, Mehmet Ali Ağca had worked with Abdullah Çatlı in this 1979 assassination, who "then reportedly helped organize Ağca's escape from an Istanbul military prison, and some have suggested Çatlı was even involved in the Pope's assassination attempt". According to Reuters, Ağca had "escaped with suspected help from sympathizers in the security services".[2] Lucy Komisar added that at the scene of the Mercedes-Benz crash where Çatlı died, he was found with a passport under the name of "Mehmet Özbay" — an alias also used by Mehmet Ali Ağca

ERGENEKON!

Gladio mentioned in US press .. well, sort of


GLADIO TURKEY FINANCIAL TIMES



Beginning in August 1980 Ağca began criss-crossing the Mediterranean region, changing passports and identities, perhaps to hide his point of origin in Sofia, Bulgaria. He entered Rome on May 10, 1981, coming by train from Milan.

According to Ağca's later testimony, he met with three accomplices in Rome, one a fellow Turk and two Bulgarians, with operation being commanded by Zilo Vassilev, the Bulgarian military attaché in Italy. He said that he was assigned this mission by Turkish mafioso Bechir Celenk in Bulgaria. Le Monde diplomatique, however, has alleged that the assassination attempt was organized by Abdullah Çatlı "in exchange for the sum of 3 million marks", paid by Bechir Celenk to the Grey Wolves.[4]

According to Ağca, the plan was for him and the back-up gunman Oral Çelik to open fire in St. Peter's Square and escape to the Bulgarian embassy under the cover of the panic generated by a small explosion. On May 13 they sat in the square, writing postcards waiting for the Pope to arrive. When the Pope passed, Ağca fired several shots and critically wounded him, but was grabbed by spectators and Vatican security chief Camillo Cibin and prevented from finishing the assassination or escaping. Four bullets hit John Paul II, two of them lodging in his lower intestine, the others hitting his left hand and right arm. Two bystanders were also hit. Çelik panicked and fled without setting off his bomb or opening fire.

Several theories exist concerning Mehmet Ali Agca's assassination attempt. One, strongly advocated since the early 1980s by Michael Ledeen among others, is that the assassination attempt had originated from Moscow and that the KGB instructed the Bulgarian and East German secret services to carry out the mission. The Bulgarian Secret Service was allegedly instructed by the KGB to assassinate the Pope because of his support of Poland's Solidarity movement, seeing it as one of the most significant threats to Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe.

Ağca himself has given multiple conflicting statements on the assassination at different times. Attorney Antonio Marini stated: "Ağca has manipulated all of us, telling hundreds of lies, continually changing versions, forcing us to open tens of different investigations".[4] Originally Ağca claimed to be a member of the Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), but they denied any ties to him.

Ergenekon ...

The "Bulgarian Connection"

Then KGB Director Yuri Andropov, was convinced that the Pope John Paul II’s election was the product of an Anglo-German conspiracy orchestrated by Zbigniew Brzezinski to undermine Soviet hegemony in largely Catholic Poland and ultimately to precipitate the collapse of the entire Soviet Union. The Pope’s announcement of a pilgrimage to Warsaw fueled Andropov’s apprehension, with Andropov issuing a secret memorandum to Soviet schoolteachers:[5]

The Pope is our enemy. . . . Due to his uncommon skills and great sense of humor he is dangerous, because he charms everyone, especially journalists. Besides, he goes for cheap gestures in his relations with the crowd, for instance, [he] puts on a highlander’s hat, shakes all hands, kisses children, etc. . . . It is modeled on American presidential campaigns. . . . Because of the activities of the Church in Poland our activities designed to atheize the youth not only cannot diminish but must intensely develop. . . . In this respect all means are allowed and we cannot afford sentiments.[5]

Ali Agca had made several trips to Sofia, Bulgaria, and stayed in a hotel favored by the Bulgarian (DS). In Rome he had also had contacts with a Bulgarian agent whose cover was the Bulgarian national airline office. Soon after the shooting, Sergei Antonov, a Bulgarian working in Rome for Balkan Air, was arrested based on Ağca's testimony and accused of being the Bulgarian agent who masterminded the plot. In 1986, after a three-year trial, he was found not guilty. According to the CIA's chief of staff in Turkey, Paul Henze, he later stated that in Sofia, he was once approached by the Bulgarian Secret Service and Turkish mafiosi, who offered him three million German mark to assassinate the Pope.[6]

The Bulgarians chose Ağca to supply themselves with plausible deniability; choosing a member of the Grey Wolves that had been involved with the local KGB in drug smuggling routes through Bulgaria to Western Europe would distance themselves because of the implausibility of the link.[7]

The Bulgarian secret services have always protested their alleged involvement and argued that Ağca's story was an anti-Communist plant placed by the Italian secret service (SISMI), and the CIA.[8]

According to Ferdinando Imposimato, an Italian prosecutor in charge of the assassination investigation, Ağca has confirmed the KGB and the Bulgarian involvement during their many private conversations in 1997-2000, tying it to the mysterious 1998 murder of Colonel Alois Estermann, a Swiss Guard. Ferdinando Imposimato has alleged a link with the East German secret service.


Deep state ...

Gladio CIA ...

CIA directed ...

Untouchable ... untouchable-secret-mossad-false-flag


The Mitrokhin Commission's claims

According to Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, documents recovered from former East German intelligence services confirm the 1981 assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II was ordered by the Soviet KGB and assigned to Bulgarian and East German agents with the Stasi to coordinate the operation and cover up the traces afterwards, however, Markus Wolf, former Stasi spy-master, has denied any links, and claimed the files had already been sent in 1995.[9]

In March 2006, the controversial Mitrokhin Commission, set up by Silvio Berlusconi and headed by Forza Italia senator Paolo Guzzanti, supported once again the Bulgarian theory, which had been denounced by John Paul II during his travel to Bulgaria. Senator Guzzanti claimed that "leaders of the former Soviet Union were behind the assassination attempt", alleging that "the leadership of the Soviet Union took the initiative to eliminate Pope John Paul" because of his support for Solidarity, relaying "this decision to the military secret services" (and not the KGB).[10] The report's claims were based on recent computer analysis of photographs that purported to demonstrate Antonov's presence in St Peter's Square during the shooting and on information brought by the French anti-terrorist judge Jean-Louis Bruguière, a controversial figure whose last feat was to indict Rwandese president Paul Kagame, claiming he had deliberately provoked the 1994 Rwandan Genocide against his own ethnic group in order to take the power.[11] According to Le Figaro, Bruguière, who is in close contacts as well with Moscow as with Washington DC, including intelligence agents, has been accused by many of his colleagues of "privileging the reason of state over law." [12]

Both Russia and Bulgaria condemned the report. "For Bulgaria, this case closed with the court decision in Rome in March 1986," Foreign Ministry spokesman Dimitar Tsanchev said, while also recalling the Pope's comments during his May 2002 visit to Bulgaria.[13] Senator Guzzanti said that the commission had decided to re-open the report's chapter on the assassination attempt in 2005, after the Pope wrote about it in his last book, Memory and Identity: Conversations Between Millenniums. The Pope wrote that he was convinced the shooting was not Ağca's initiative and that "someone else masterminded it and someone else commissioned it". The Mitrokhin Commission also claimed current Prime minister of Italy, Romano Prodi, was the "KGB's man in Italy". At the end of December 2006, Mario Scaramella, one of the main informer of senator Guzzanti, was arrested and charged, among other things, of defamation. Rome's prosecutor Pietro Salvitti, in charge of the investigations concerning Mario Scaramella, cited by La Repubblica, showed that Nicolò Pollari, head of SISMI, the Italian military intelligence agency and indicted in the Imam Rapito affair, as well as SISMI n°2, Marco Mancini, arrested in July 2006 for the same reason, were some of the informers, alongside Mario Scaramella, of senator Paolo Guzzanti. Beside targeting Romano Prodi and his staff, this "network", according to Pietro Salvitti's words, also aimed at defaming General Giuseppe Cucchi (current director of the Cesis), Milan's judges Armando Spataro, in charge of the Imam Rapito case, and Guido Salvini, as well as La Reppublica reporters Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe D'Avanzo, who discovered the Yellowcake forgery affair.[14] The investigation also showed a connection between Scaramella and the CIA, in particular through Filippo Marino, one of Scaramella's closest partners since the 1990s and co-founder of the ECPP, who lives today in the US. Marino has acknowledged in an interview an association with former and active CIA officers, including Robert Lady, former CIA station chief in Milan, indicted by prosecutor Armando Spataro for having coordinated the abduction of Abu Omar, the Imam Rapito affair [15]


GLADIO - state terror has means and motive

Other theories

Some people, notably Edward S. Herman, co-author with Frank Brodhead of The Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian Connection (1986), and Michael Parenti, felt Ağca's story was dubious, noting that Ağca made no claims of Bulgarian involvement until he had been isolated in solitary confinement and visited by Italian Military Intelligence (SISMI) agents. On September 25, 1991, former CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman (now Senior Fellow at the Center for International Policy) revealed that his colleagues, following hierarchical orders, had falsified their analysis in order to support the accusation. He declared to the US Senate intelligence committee that "the CIA hadn't any proof" concerning this alleged "Bulgarian connection" [1] Neither the Severino Santiapichi court, nor the investigation by judge Franco Ionta, found evidence that that SISMI planted Ağca's story. A French lawyer, Christian Roulette, who authored books blaming Western intelligence agencies for the assassination attempt, testified in court that documentary evidence he referred to actually did not exist.[16][17][18][19]

The Bulgarian secret services have always protested their alleged involvement and argued that Ağca's story was an anti-Communist plant placed by the Grey Wolves, the Italian secret service, and the CIA - all three of whom had co-operated in NATO's secret Gladio network.[8] Gladio was at the time involved in Italy's strategy of tension, also followed in Turkey by Counter-Guerrilla, the Turkish branch of Gladio. The Pope's assassination would hereafter have taken place in this frame. Edward Herman has argued that Michael Ledeen, who was involved in the Iran-Contra Affair and had alleged ties to the Italian P2 masonic lodge also linked to Gladio, was employed by the CIA to propagate the Bulgarian theory.[20] Indeed, Le Monde diplomatique alleged that Abdullah Çatlı, a leader of the Grey Wolves, had organized the assassination attempt "in exchange for the sum of 3 million German Marks" for the Grey Wolves.[21] In Rome, Catli declared to the judge in 1985 "that he had been contacted by the BND, the German intelligence agency, which would have promised him a nice sum of money if he implicated the Russian and Bulgarian services in the assassination attempt against the Pope". According to colonel Alparslan Türkes, the founder of the Grey Wolves, "Catli has cooperated in the frame of a secret service working for the good of the state".[1]

Another theory, described in the Gordon Thomas's book Gideon’s Spies: Mossad’s Secret Warriors, rejects the KGB, Turkish and Bulgarian connections. According to Thomas, a British specialist on intelligence, the assassination was ordered by Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini as a first act of Jihad, the Muslim holy war, against Christianity and the Occident. This theory is based on the following elements: The Grey Wolves organization was pro-Iranian; Mehmet Ali Ağca was trained in Iran; the text of a 1979 letter sent to the press by Mehmet Ali Ağca just after he killed a Turkish journalist used formulas such as "Supreme Commander of the Crusaders" that are directly taken from Khomeini's style, while Ağca is nearly illiterate. The 1983 Pope visit to his aggressor in jail was aimed to confirm this theory, just uncovered by the Israeli intelligence agency.

Finally, Jack Chick claims that Pope John Paul II, a good Communist for many years, engineered his own assassination in 1981 to shame Islam into warming relations with the Vatican, since the would-be killer was a Muslim. This was because the Catholic Church's Vatican Islam Conspiracy to create Islam and make its leader Muhammed their ultimate warrior backfired against them.



On June 26, 2000 Pope John Paul II released the "Third Secret of Fatima"[citation needed] in which he claimed that Ağca's assassination attempt was the fulfillment of this Secret. May 13 (the date of the assassination attempt) is the anniversary of the first apparition of the Virgin Mary to the three children of Fatima, something the pope has always regarded as significant, attributing his survival on that day to her protection. Some doubt the Church's full disclosure of the contents of this Secret, believing that it actually predicted the Apocalypse. While in prison on remand, Ağca was widely reported to have developed an obsession with Fatima and during the trial claimed that he was the second coming of Jesus Christ and called on the Vatican to release the Third Secret.

On March 31, 2005, just two days prior to the Pope's death, Ağca gave an interview to the Italian newspaper La Repubblica.[23] He claimed to be working on a book about the assassination attempt. La Repubblica quoted Ağca claiming at length that he had accomplices in the Vatican who helped him with the assassination attempt, saying "the devil is inside Vatican's wall". He also said:

"Many calculating politicians are worried about what revealing the complete truth would do. Some of them fear that the Vatican will have a spiritual collapse like the Berlin Wall. Let me ask, why don't the CIA, the Sismi, the Sisde and other intelligence agencies reveal the truth about the Orlandi case?
Q: They say it's because there is still some uncertainty in the Emanuela Orlandi case.
Ağca: In the 1980's, certain Vatican supporters believed that I was the new messiah and to free me they organized all the intrigue about Emanuela Orlandi and the other incidents they won't reveal."

Emanuela Orlandi, the daughter of a Vatican employee, disappeared at age 15 on June 22, 1983. Anonymous phone calls offered her release in exchange for the release of Ağca. Archbishop Paul Marcinkus was alleged to be part of the kidnapping, although no charges were ever laid.

A week after this interview, Associated Press reported Ağca denying having made such claims.

WTC - Hologramme Ghostplane

Saturday, March 07, 2009

Bush and Cheney commit war crimes, are they still crimes?

"If Bush and Cheney commit war crimes and everyone knows it,
but does nothing, are they still crimes?"
Jonathan Turley

Jonathan Turley’s rhetorical question gets to the heart of one of the biggest problems with our country (and many other countries as well): We sanitize our history to the point where we can believe in and present a version to the world that is vastly at odds with reality. While that serves the purpose of making many Americans feel better about their country, and also serves the purpose of maintaining the status quo, it greatly impedes progress towards making ourselves a better country. You can’t learn from your mistakes as long as you don’t recognize them. And they will be repeated over and over again until we learn from them.

While Jonathan Turley and many others are focused right now on the crimes of the Bush administration, as well they should be, we should also recognize that this pattern is nothing new. The powers that be have been sanitizing U.S. history since its inception.

At least we’ve made some progress. Most Americans now recognize slavery as an evil, though we were told at the time when slavery was legal in our country that it was good for our slaves, and that they appreciated it. Some far right wingers, such as Pat Buchanan, even today try to push that old line.

Notwithstanding some degree of progress with regard to events of the distant past, the sanitization of history has never stopped in our country. Here are some examples:


The beginnings of U.S. overseas imperialism

U.S. overseas imperialism began in 1893 when we made Hawaii an American protectorate, and it really got going with the Spanish-American war, beginning in 1898. Our rationale for the Spanish-American War was that Spain blew up an American battleship (the cause was never determined) and to bring freedom to the Cuban people, who were fighting a rebellion against Spain.

We won the war and promptly declared control over the former Spanish colonies of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Unlike Cuba and Puerto Rico, the Filipinos didn’t give in so easily. A three and a half year vicious guerilla war ensued, resulting in the deaths of 16 thousand Filipino guerillas, 20 thousand Filipino civilians and 4,374 American soldiers. I’ve discussed this issue in much greater detail in this post.

Yet few Americans learn that our country has in many respects acted as an imperialist power for much of its history. Our ruling elite indignantly deny or ignore that charge whenever they hear it. Imperialism is hard to admit to, since it is inconsistent with the principles upon which our country was founded.


The effect of FDR’s New Deal on the Great Depression

When Franklyn Roosevelt began his presidency in 1933, our nation was in the midst of the greatest depression in our history. Our annual gross domestic product had been nearly cut in half since the Stock Market Crash of three and a half years previously, and unemployment stood at 25%. Within four years of taking office, GDP rose to about 90% of where it had been prior to the Stock Market Crash. In FDR’s first term in office our country experienced a 5.3% increase in jobs – the greatest percent increase in jobs of the past 20 presidential terms, from 1929 to 2009. As a result, the unemployment rate was approximately cut by more than 40% by the end of his first term. By 1941, prior to the onset of World War II, the unemployment rate had declined to below 10%.

The New Deal was so successful that it lasted for several decades, during which median family income rose steadily (in 2005 dollars) from $22,499 in 1947 to more than double that, $47,173 by 1980. This period has thus been referred to by Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman as the “greatest sustained economic boom in U.S. history” – a boom that produced a large and vibrant middle class in our country for the first time.

Yet, we have long been told that it was not the New Deal, but rather World War II that brought us out of the Great Depression. Today, right wingers go way further, telling us that the New Deal did nothing at all to help us, or even that the New Deal prolonged the Great Depression.

The reason for all this is clear. The New Deal, while making life far better for the vast majority of Americans by leveling the playing field, substantially cut into the wealth and power of our ruling elite. They have been striving ever since then to revise history, so as to make dismantling of the New Deal politically feasible and prevent it from making a comeback. I discuss this issue in much greater detail in this post.


The overthrow of numerous leftist governments during the Cold War

The Cold War (1945-91) was sold to the American people as a fight against totalitarian Communism. There is some truth to that assertion. The Soviet Union, against which the Cold War was conducted, was indeed a totalitarian state and did have expansionist impulses (though much less than we believed or claimed at the time).

But U.S. involvement in the Cold War was much more than a fight against the Soviet Union. We repeatedly used the Cold War as an excuse to overthrow sovereign governments that were not in any way controlled by the Soviet Union. In almost all instances, we overthrew leftist governments and replaced them with right wing dictatorships that were friendlier to the interests of the ruling elite in our country, but which had disastrous consequences for the indigenous people of the countries that we overthrew. Some early examples included Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Indonesia (1965), and Chile (1973). Our long involvement in Vietnam (1954-73) was the consequence of the fact that we refused to accept the Geneva Conference Agreements, which officially ended the war between France and Vietnam in 1954, and provided for general elections which were to bring about the unification of Vietnam. Instead, knowing that elections would result in a Communist victory, we intervened to prevent the elections from taking place, against the wishes of most of the Vietnamese people. As described in William Blum’s article, “A Concise History of US Global Interventions, 1945 to the Present”, the United States intervened in eleven different South and Central American countries during the Cold War, including Guatemala, Costa Rica, British Guyana, Ecuador, Brazil, Peru, Chile, Bolivia, Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. A more detailed account of this issue is discussed in this post.


The assassination of John F. Kennedy

There is so much evidence that the assassination of John F. Kennedy involved a conspiracy rather than a lone gunman, that entire sections of U.S. bookstores are devoted to that evidence.

In my opinion, the best – and fairly conclusive – evidence is the medical evidence concerning JFK’s hospital stay at Parkland Hospital in Dallas. The medical evidence is thoroughly detailed in James Lifton’s book, “Best Evidence” and summarized in my DU post of 2004. It all boils down to whether the bullets causing the two wounds (the throat wound and the fatal head wound) came from the back or the front. If they both came from the back, that is consistent with the lone gunman theory, since the presumed assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was (supposedly) found in a book depository that faced the President from the back, shortly after the assassination. But if either of the bullets came from the front (in the direction of the grassy knoll), then the lone gunman theory is clearly impossible, since nobody claims that Oswald was facing toward the President’s front at the time of the shooting.

As a matter of fact, both of the bullets came from the front. Nine physicians and a nurse who treated the President at Parkland hospital are quoted as saying that the fatal wound produced a large hole (5-7 centimeters by one account) in the back right side of the head. The skull at the back of the head was noted to have “exploded outwards”. All of the physicians characterized this wound as an exit wound, largely because exit wounds are almost always considerably larger and more destructive than entrance wounds. Those who saw the throat wound (four physicians plus the nurse) also characterized that wound as coming from the front.

But this medical evidence and much much more was virtually ignored, both by the Warren Commission and by a Senate Committee that later investigated the assassination in the 1970s. Therefore, official U.S. history says that JFK was assassinated by a lone gunman. Believing that a carefully constructed conspiracy was employed to assassinate a popular U.S. president would tend to make the American people angry and suspicious of authority.

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Operation Northwoods

Operation Northwoods was a 1962 plan by the American military, led by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Lyman Lemnitzer, to incite a war against Cuba. It involved various false flag actions, including such terrorist activities as the shooting down of an American passenger plane by the U.S. military, which would be blamed on Cuba. Fortunately, the American Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, vetoed the plan. The documentation of this plan was first published in 1998.

Though this operation had to be officially acknowledged by the U.S. government, you hardly ever hear it mentioned – especially in light of the 9/11 attacks on our country, which appear to some as highly reminiscent of Operation Northwoods. Few Americans have ever heard of it. It would seriously tarnish the image of our country to know that our own government planned to kill U.S. citizens in order to incite a war. I wonder if it’s ever appeared in a standard U.S. history textbook.


The “October Surprise” of 1980

Investigative journalist Robert Parry conducted extensive investigations and produced a documentary that suggested that the Reagan/Bush presidential campaign team of 1980 negotiated with the Iranian government to postpone the release of their American hostages prior to the 1980 U.S. presidential election. The evidence included more than two dozen witnesses to the negotiations and documentary evidence of shipments of U.S. arms to Iran. The purpose of the plot was to embarrass the Carter administration, thus ensuring a Reagan/Bush victory over then President Carter.

Not surprisingly, Parry’s investigation and allegations were “debunked” in two articles, one by The New Republic and one by Newsweek, which purported to have found an alibi for William Casey, the Reagan/Bush campaign chairman, regarding his role in the plot. But Parry spoke with participants at the conference that had been established for Casey’s alibi, and they all agreed that Casey was not there, thus debunking the alibi. So we have several conference participants versus a single alibi. No matter. Neither the New Republic nor Newsweek ever issued a retraction.

Nevertheless a special House Task Force was created in 1992, which was chaired by Lee Hamilton (the same one who co-chaired the 9-11 Commission), who was well known for his “bi-partisanship”. While acknowledging that the original alibi, which placed Casey in London on July 28, 1980, was bogus, the Committee proceeded to find another alibi, this one placing Casey in Bohemian Grove, California, during the weekend of July 26th. Documentary evidence was later found to debunk that alibi as well, but the House Task Force refused to acknowledge that. Therefore, the House Task Force report of January 13, 1993, purportedly debunked the October Surprise Conspiracy theory for all time.

But shortly after the House Task Force shipped their report off to the printers, a cable report based on KGB sources arrived from Moscow that supported the October Surprise Conspiracy. Consequently, a Democratic member of the task force, Mervyn Dymally, submitted a dissent complaining of many factors that combined to lead the Task Force to exonerate the Reagan/Bush team on extremely shaky grounds. Lee Hamilton threatened Dymally and then had some of Dymally’s staff fired, which convinced Dymally to withdraw his dissent. See this post for a much more detailed description of this sordid episode.

Thus it is that the successful efforts of a presidential campaign to sabotage a presidential election by prolonging the release of American hostages held by a foreign government – a clear act of treason – simply never happened. I doubt that you will find this episode in any standard American history textbook. After all, it would be extremely upsetting to many Americans to be made aware that the election of two future presidents was made possible through an act of treason.


Buying U.S. politicians

All but the most naïve of the American citizenry know that the wealthy and powerful in our country routinely influence our local and national elections through huge campaign contributions. And they also know that they are generally well rewarded for their “contributions”. And they also know that bribery is presumably against the law in our country. Yet, on the rare occasion that our politicians are actually accused of bribery, our news media makes a great big deal over it, as if bribery is actually a rare event in American politics. I discuss this situation in more detail in this post.

There are a few dots to connect here, but any reasonable assessment of American politics tells us that bribery is routinely used to buy and sell elections in our country. So routine is it that it is actually built into our system and legalized. But that fact is never overtly spoken of. To do so would imply that our system of government is as much or more an aristocracy than it is a democracy. And that would contradict what we learn in school.


Iran-Contra

On July 19th, 1979, a popular uprising by the revolutionary Sandinista Party overthrew the repressive dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza. Former members of Somoza's National Guards and other war criminals formed in opposition to the Sandanistas, and they became known as the Contras. Supporting the Contras in their efforts to take over Nicaragua was one of the primary goals of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, despite abundant evidence of repeated atrocities perpetrated by the Contras.

In addition to the Reagan administration funding the Contras, it used the CIA to assist them in their carnage, including the mining of Nicaragua’s harbors. By the mid-1980s, the Contra war had produced 14,000 casualties, including 3,000 dead children and adolescents, and 6,000 children had become war orphans.

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The Boland Amendments were a series of laws passed by Congress beginning in 1982 for the purpose of cutting off funding and other support to the Contras by the Reagan administration. The Reagan administration basically ignored the orders of Congress, continuing to fund and support the Contras through various means, most notoriously by selling military weapons to Iran in return for assistance in obtaining the release of American hostages in Lebanon – a scandal that became known as Iran-Contra.

Investigations were later held into this scandal, with consequent indictments of a long list of high level Reagan administration officials, most notably including the Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger, who was later pardoned by President George H.W. Bush. However, neither the President nor the Vice President was ever fully investigated in connection with Iran Contra, nor did Congress ever attempt to impeach them for their role in the scandal.

As Jonathan Turley has facetiously implied, since there were no charges or even an attempted impeachment against President Reagan, as far as our history is concerned the President committed no crime. Either the Iran-Contra scandal never occurred, or if it did, it wasn’t such a bad thing after all.


The 9/11 attacks

There are a ton of inconsistencies in the 9/11 Commission’s version of how a nation that spent hundreds of billions of dollars annually on its military was unable to defend itself against a bunch of terrorists flying airplanes. The best book I’ve read on the subject is “The 9/11 Commission Report – Omissions and Distortions” by David Ray Griffin. I discuss some of the many problems with the 9/11 Commission’s version of events here.

One of the best bits of supporting evidence that the U.S. military was ordered to stand down and allow the attacks to proceed without opposition involves the unhindered attack on the Pentagon by Flight 77. The testimony before the 9/11 Commission of Norman Minetta, U.S. Secretary of Transportation, regarding a meeting he was having with Dick Cheney shortly before the Pentagon was hit, is especially perplexing. Here is Mineta’s account:

During the time that the airplane was coming in to the Pentagon, there was a young man who would come in and say to the Vice President, “The plane is 50 miles out.” “The plane is 30 miles out.” And when it got down to “the plane is 10 miles out,” the young man also said to the Vice President, “Do the orders still stand?” And the Vice President turned and whipped his neck around and said, “of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?”

This testimony is on record. Nobody can say that it didn’t happen. Yet, the 9/11 Commission virtually ignores it in their assessment of the evidence. Unbelievably, they interpret Mineta’s testimony to indicate that Cheney had ordered the shooting down of Flight 77. But if that was the case, then why wasn’t it shot down, and even more important, why would NORAD claim that it hadn’t even been notified about Flight 77 until four minutes before the Pentagon was hit?

The 9/11 attack on our country has gone down in official U.S. history as simply being an attack by foreign terrorists, with no complicity on the part of our own government, despite all the evidence to the contrary.


The 2000 and 2004 presidential elections

The 537 vote presidential election victory of 2000 for George W. Bush over Al Gore was stolen by a large number of means. In one of the most corrupt decisions in U.S. Supreme Court history, the vote counting was stopped before the votes had been fully recounted. A later recount of the votes by a consortium of newspapers showed a Gore victory of about 29 thousand votes. In addition, the Florida Governor’s office used a computer program to illegally disenfranchise tens of thousands of mostly black and Democratic voters. And there was much more, which you can read about in this post.

In 2004, George Bush was again declared the winner, despite exit polls that showed John Kerry to have won a substantial popular and electoral vote victory, as well as a good deal of evidence of electronic vote switching that favored Bush. In testimony before the Democratic staff of the House Judiciary Committee, computer programmer Clint Curtis said that he was requested in 2000 by Republican operative Tom Feeney to “develop a prototype of a voting program that could alter the vote tabulation in an election and be undetectable”. The investigator who looked into Curtis’ allegations appeared to have made great headway in his investigation shortly before he unfortunately committed “suicide” under very suspicious circumstances. And most important of all, there was a preponderance of evidence that hundreds of thousands of mostly Democratic voters were illegally scrubbed from the voter rolls in Ohio – the state that gave the election to Bush by a margin far smaller than the numbers of disenfranchised voters.

Yet, according to official U.S. history, none of this ever happened. To acknowledge any of this would undermine faith in U.S. democracy.

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Iraqi Civilian deaths in the Iraq War and occupation

The U.S. news media rarely mentions Iraqi civilian deaths that occurred during our Iraq War and occupation. When they do, it is always based on ridiculously low estimates. When the Bush administration was asked about this they said “We don’t do body counts”. Since they don’t do body counts, there is only one reliable way to estimate the number of dead Iraqis – a scientific study.

The latest scientific study estimates that there have been over one million Iraqi deaths due to the American invasion and occupation. Most of these have been violent deaths, and most have been civilians. The death toll amounts to about 4% of the total Iraqi population before the war.

But our government has never acknowledged this. How would such an acknowledgment comport with the claim that a major purpose of the Iraq invasion was to bring freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people?


Bush administration crimes

The crimes of the Bush administration are numerous. The quickest way to summarize them is to look at the 35 articles of impeachment that Dennis Kucinich presented to the U.S. House of Representatives:

Articles I – XIII: Creating a propaganda campaign and lying to the American people and Congress in order to build a false case for war against Iraq; then invading and occupying Iraq, in violation of U.S. and international law and in the absence of any good reason whatsoever; then failing to provide our troops with the body armor they needed, falsifying accounts of US troop deaths, and establishing permanent military bases in Iraq.

Article XIV: Exposing a covert CIA agent.

Articles XV-XVI: Providing immunity from prosecution to criminal contractors in Iraq and recklessly wasting US tax dollars on contractors in Iraq.

Articles XVII-XX: Indefinitely detaining our prisoners, including children, without charges or any legal rights, torturing them, and kidnapping people and transporting them to other countries to be tortured.

Article XXI: Lying to the American people and Congress, with the goal of overthrowing the Iranian government.
Article XXII: Creating secret laws.
Article XXIII: Violating the Posse Comitatus Act
Articles XXIV – XXV: Spying on American citizens in violation of our 4th Amendment.
Article XXVI: Announcing intent to violate duly enacted laws with signing statements.
Article XXVII: Failure to comply with Congressional subpoenas.
Article XXVIII - XXIX: Tampering with free and fair elections and corruption of the administration of justice.
Article XXX: Misleading Congress and the American people in an attempt to destroy Medicare.
Article XXXI: Failure to plan for or adequately respond to Hurricane Katrina.
Article XXXII: Obstructing efforts to address global climate change.

Article XXXIII - XXXV: Failure to respond to the 9/11 attacks on our country; then endangering the health of first responders and obstructing investigation into the attacks.

That brings us back to Jonathan Turley’s question: “If Bush and Cheney commit war crimes and everyone knows it, but does nothing, are they still crimes?” And the answer is, no they are not crimes. Because if they are crimes, then surely somebody would prosecute them – except in some sort of Orwellian society where “Nobody is above the law”, and yet if you are a U.S. president there in no crime that warrants prosecution.


Where we are now

The powers that be have so many ways to control us. First and foremost, they shove their own version of reality down our throats – the one that they believe will keep us placid and accepting of the status quo. Since the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which facilitated corporate monopoly control over the news media, it became much easier for them to do this – although now the Internet has gone a long way towards counteracting that power.

They also do it through our school system. In November 1994, the National Council for History Standards (NCHS) proposed National Standards for United States History, as voluntary guidelines for national curricula in history for grades 5-12. As explained by Gary Nash, who led the effort, these standards were meant “to provide students with a more comprehensive, challenging, and thought-provoking education in the nation's public schools”, and included “a new framework for critical thinking and active learning” and “repeated references to primary documents that would allow students to read and hear authentic voices from the past”. That was too much for those who preferred a sanitized version of U.S. history. Lynn Cheney’s criticism of the document as containing “multicultural excess”, a “grim and gloomy portrayal of American history”, “a politicized history”, and a disparaging of the West, was typical. The U.S. Senate rejected the document in 1995 by a vote of 99-1.

Those of us who question the sanitized version of history are called “conspiracy theorists”, in the hope of marginalizing us and thereby preventing us from spreading our suspicions to normal people. The vast majority of our politicians take great care to avoid having the “conspiracy theorist” label heaped on them.

Many millions of Americans are now very upset by the fact that the Obama administration has expressed little or no interest in prosecuting the Bush administration for its unprecedented criminal activity. We have pointed out that if the perpetrators of those crimes, including Bush and Cheney, are not held accountable for them, we will be setting a terrible precedence that will enable future presidents to do something similar. The ultimate effect will be to have a society in which high government officials operate beyond the law – in others words, a dictatorship.

The complete truth is a little more complicated than that. Allowing the Bush administration to get away with their crimes will not be setting a precedent, since that precedent has already been set. What it will do is extend an existing precedent to unprecedented levels – levels so high that they could hardly have been imagined by the framers of our Constitution. What we have now is an opportunity to reverse that terrible precedent.

If our elected leaders don’t show much interest in doing that, then it’s up to the American people to demand that they do so. If the American people fail to do that, then they will continue to live with the sanitized version of history that makes them feel so comfortable that they are willing to close their eyes and their minds rather than face reality as it is. I believe that in that case there will be terrible consequences to pay – if not now, then not too far in the future.

Time for change's Journal
Twelve Things that Never Happened in U.S. History

Fri Mar 06th 2009, 11:50 PM