PSYWAR - GLADIO TURKEY - EXEMPLARY!

Ergenekon's psychological warfare

Turks, it is said, have not made any significant contributions to technological developments. As technological progress is particularly visible on the battlefield, Turks, as a warrior nation, are said to have not much of a share in warfare technologies and tactics. This is not the case.


First, Turks invented the stirrup, important in that it changed the course of history by allowing nomadic communities to establish great empires. Furthermore, Turks adapted how wolves hunt their prey as a frequently used war tactic. The stirrup allowed riders to control horses using their legs, freeing their hands to shoot arrows. In this way, light cavalry was turned into a highly destructive force. The wolf trap tactic allowed Turkish armies to surround the enemy with a retreat in the center. Later, Turks managed to tackle the issue of financing a big central army by introducing a complex soil management system and eventually created the gigantic power of the Ottoman Empire.

What made Turks successful in battle is their ability to quickly adapt any military innovation developed anywhere around the world. Thus, the Ottoman Empire was quick to implement any development in modern weapon technology. Although Turks' traditions and government systems were very different from those of the modern West, one could not discern any visible difference when the armies of the two worlds collided.

Psychological warfare

The skills of Turks in using psychological warfare techniques -- invented by the US -- during the Cold War period were compatible with their long history of adapting war-related innovations. Thus, even though psychological warfare techniques suffered a loss in popularity after the end of the Cold War, the Turkish army continued to attach special emphasis to the technique.

Psychological warfare was originally invented for the purpose of conducting a propaganda campaign between the two blocs of the Cold War, which relied on ideologies, propaganda techniques and tools more than weapons. In a nutshell, propaganda activities where lies, libel, slander, conspiracies and other dirty methods are stealthily used to manipulate, change or control societies' behavior, thoughts and sentiments are collectively called psychological warfare.

Suppose you wish to convince people that the Soviets are evil and the US is good. If it is not sufficiently clear that the Soviets are evil, then you perform evil acts on behalf of the Soviets to make people believe that they are bad. Indeed, a paramilitary network has been established in order to carry out this war. Called the Counter-Guerrilla, this network waged psychological warfare against the Soviets and its ideology using psychological warfare and guerrilla tactics. Gladio is one of the most famous networks wielding psychological warfare methods, and Ergenekon, i.e., its Turkish version, has risen to popularity only recently.

Something different happened in Turkey. The frequent military coups afforded much functionality to this network. Thus, the military that established a system of tutelage over the civilian population and politics opted to conduct psychological warfare against the public instead of against the Soviets. So ours was a military that waged a war against its own people. For what purpose? To steer the country and manipulate politics. The debates on secularism and threats against the regime -- which were very common in the past and very rare nowadays -- served as the arsenal of this warfare.

There was a Psychological Warfare Department at the General Staff that had the mission of designing and manipulating civilian politics in the country. The "Relations with the Society Unit" served the same purpose in the National Security Council (MGK). These units were abolished when the MGK was turned into a more civilian organization. The General Staff's Psychological Warfare Department was renamed the Information Support Unit, which later prepared the infamous Appendix (Lahika) as well as the Action Plan to Fight Reactionaryism, which became popular as a result of the signature it carried rather than its content.

Ergenekon's war tactics

A document titled "National Media 2010" the police seized during a search of Odatv is one of these familiar psychological warfare texts. It is important as it was seized as part of a probe into a terrorist organization and constitutes the media component of the plans. Talking about this document is like catching the thief in the act or apprehending the assassin as he is about to pull the trigger. It makes the implementers of psychological warfare tactics angry because all the magic of their profession is lost. They are like false artists posing with their hammers and chisels in front of the statues mass produced at a factory. They naively ask, "Can't we raise objections to the Ergenekon case just because this is how it was written in the document?"

What was written in the document is about the intricacies of the psychological warfare: "In order to foil, discredit and neutralize evidence the other side has obtained during the judicial process, arguments developed by the defense authorities should be used. In this context, weak links and claims should be brought to the agenda and these should be identified with the overall lawsuit. In case of strong evidence and theses, the axis of the subject should be changed and gray and black propaganda elements should be used effectively."

Don't these sentences sound familiar to those closely monitoring the Ergenekon process? Since the beginning, efforts to discredit the Ergenekon case have been conducted in line with these techniques. Here is one recent example: The prosecutor asks Nedim Şener 50 questions. Let us now look at which newspapers and columnists single out only three of these 50 questions and ask, "Do these questions imply any offense?" Isn't this how the weak link is identified with the overall lawsuit? Under Article 153 of the Code on Criminal Procedure (CMK), the prosecutor may choose not to disclose some evidence. Despite this, who can say that attacking the prosecutor by looking at only three of 50 questions is an act of journalism? Is this an original comment?

During the Yiğit Bulut-anchored "Sansürsüz" (Uncensored) program on Habertürk TV, Mine Kırıkkanat criticized the legal system, saying the Ergenekon case was unlawful because it was processed by specially authorized courts. I asked her, "Do you know how specially authorized courts differ from normal courts?" Confused, she replied, "No, I don't know." A position on something you know nothing about can only be defended by memorization. And there should be a source of this memorization.

The fact that the Cold War's psychological warfare tactics are also employed in the documents seized at Odatv indicates that the dirty struggle for power is being maintained using the same methods. But does it work? This question should be answered by opinion leaders who wage war against the Ergenekon prosecutors and judges using these tactics, knowingly or not. And those who are under the influence of these tactics should realize how they are being used and for what purpose.

ERGUN BABAHAN
e.babahan --at- todayszaman.com

A fish smells from the get go

Turkey is a surreal country for observers from the outside. The nature of relations between the National Intelligence Organization (MİT), journalists and political parties are seldom seen, even in the movies.

The Republican People's Party (CHP) has a TV channel. It is trying to sell this channel to someone arrested as part of the Ergenekon case. The person who wants to purchase the channel is infamous for writing books about people's ethnic origins and publishing stories filled with allegations about journalists and politicians. The current CHP leader, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, meets with this person, bargains with him and promises to give him money from the party's account. In other words, he wants to give money to sell a channel operated by the party. The person, who is sure he is going to buy the channel, even goes and bargains with other journalists. Things get complicated when the former CHP leader Deniz Baykal intervenes. Kılıçdaroğlu steps in and asks for an appointment from Baykal, but he fails to convince Baykal on the sale of the channel. Upon this, a second tape plan is put into action. The second tape is related to the first tape, which featured Baykal allegedly during an intimate affair with a party deputy. A woman who works at the news portal that wants to purchase the channel is sent to Baykal to set a plot against him. This woman even asks Kılıçdaroğlu to help her in organizing the plot. This shows the scope of the relationship between Kılıçdaroğlu and Soner Yalçın, who Kılıçdaroğlu stood by when he was being arrested as part of the Ergenekon investigation. But Yalçın is a journalist that has many sides to him. Searches conducted at Yalçın's home and the home of MİT official Kaşif Kozinoğlu show that journalism and false intelligence gathering have become intermixed. There is concrete evidence and documents showing there was organized activity in progress. We always suspected there were some journalists who acted as agents and intelligence gatherers. But now there are documents that prove this is real. It is a development that will help those who say they don't understand what's happening in Turkey, including the US ambassador in Ankara and those who say freedom of the press is under threat, to better understand the bigger picture. Publically exposing the private information about the son of an influential person in the CHP is an indicator of how effectively Odatv was used in shaping the CHP party congress. There was an effort to use the same intimidation and assimilation tactics used in the CHP against the democratic segment of society. People were labeled as cronies and boot-lickers, and married men and women were subject to the vilest allegations. This was not done out of personal anger but rather with the purpose of punishing people within a particular system of discipline. The fact that this news portal, which has questionable connections, was deemed worthy of an award by the Turkish Journalists Association (TGC) provides a clear picture of the situation of the media in Turkey. This country has seized a historic opportunity in its fight against Gladio-like organizations. Ever since this case started, the assassinations of intellectuals have stopped, serving as the most obvious indication that the prosecutors are on the right track. The process we are witnessing today consists of efforts by the remaining parts of the organization to distort and obscure the case. It is for this reason we need to continue to watch developments objectively.

Obama & Friedman should be laughed out of town.

It's Not About the West, Mr. Friedman Distorting the Essence of the Great Arab Revolutions of 2011 By ESAM AL-AMIN March 4 - 6, 2011 "Orientalism is fundamentally a political doctrine willed over the Orient because the Orient was weaker than the West. . . As a cultural apparatus Orientalism is all aggression."                           ~ Edward Said In his book "Manufacturing Consent," Noam Chomsky discusses the role of the mainstream, corporate media in conditioning the public to conform to the views and policies of society's powerful ruling elite. Regarding these media outlets- as supposed to independent ones- he argues that "their role is quite different, it's diversion." He describes those who distort facts to suit the interests of the powerful as living "in a world of comforting illusion." They present a narrative that is more fiction than fact, one of fantasy rather than analysis. It's actually "a form of propaganda, which is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state," Chomsky argues. One such enabler is New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. His frequently shallow and eccentric analysis of events in the Middle East has been noted for many years, whether it is his deliberate misrepresentation of the Camp David negotiations in July 2000, or his hyped columns regarding alleged – and as it turned out non-existent- weapons of mass destruction in Iraq on behalf of the Bush administration in the prelude to the 2003 war. And now he's at it again, with his incredible contention that the revolutions sweeping the Arab World, from Tunisia Egypt, and Libya, to Yemen, Bahrain, and beyond are due to external factors. In Friedman's delusional world, the presence of decades-long repression, police state, corruption, poverty, economic strangulation, lack of infrastructure, or, in short, the collapse of the modern civil state in the Arab World for the benefit of thugs, thieves and Western underlings were not the real factors in the uprisings and revolutions of millions of Arabs from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf. In his column on March 2, 2011, Friedman gives five reasons for these great revolutions, none of which is true. He starts by ridiculously claiming that it was President Barack Obama who inspired the Youth in the streets of Tunisia, Egypt, and other countries because of his race, middle name, and his 2009 Cairo speech. Clearly such opinion is an ethnocentric and distorted view of the Arab Middle East. Obama may inspire minorities in the West, but why would his skin color or the religion of his forefathers inspire people in the Middle East? Former Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice did not inspire the Arab masses although they were also African Americans occupying high positions in government. On the contrary these Secretaries attained the Arabs' scorn because they represented a U.S. administration that invaded two Muslim countries, killing tens of thousands of Arabs and Muslims, with millions more suffering. Their administration used torture, carried out unjust prosecutions, and abused its power against Arabs and Muslims not only in Guantanamo Bay and other prisons around the world, but also inside the U.S. against many Muslim leaders and charitable organizations. Arabs are not so naïve as to be inspired by the symbolism of skin color or middle name. It is a government's policies and principles that inspire the oppressed whether in the U.S. or the Arab World. Undoubtedly people around the world had hoped that the election of Obama would bring a new dawn of American foreign policy that would not only reverse much of the previous administration's atrocious policies with regard to the Muslim World, but also institute pro-people policies against their dictators. Fascism version 2.0  - Bombing for Peace - Maming & Massacre Business But Obama has broken nearly every meaningful promise he made in his June 2009 Cairo speech (see my article Promises Made.. Promises Unkept). If anything, Obama is perceived as a big disappointment across the Arab World. He exhibits the image of a weak and ineffective leader, as in the case of closing Guantanamo, as well as an unprincipled and hypocritical politician with regard to the illegal Jewish settlements on occupied Palestinian lands. How could Obama inspire a small child, much less revolutionaries, when he has just vetoed in the U.N. Security Council his own declared policy that the Israeli settlements are illegal and must stop? During the 28 and 18 revolutionary days of continuous demonstrations in Tunisia and Egypt respectively, not a single statement by any opposition figure had mentioned Obama in a positive light. During the Tunisian revolution, Obama was MIA until the deposed Tunisian president left town on January 14. On Egypt, his administration kept wavering between asking Hosni Mubarak to leave and agreeing to keep him in power. In the beginning both his White House spokesperson and Secretary of State claimed that the Mubarak regime was stable before revising their assessment a few days later. When Obama's special envoy to Egypt Frank Wisner stated only days before Mubarak stepped down that he should stay as president until September, the following day Obama again reversed course to agree with Wisner. Freidman is fooling no one but himself if he thinks that Obama's flip-flop on Mubarak was lost on the Egyptian people. According to Friedman, the second factor that "fed the mass revolt" was Google Earth. This pitiful argument is based on a statement by a Bahraini man who supposedly looked at Google Earth and found out that Bahrain has "vast tracts of land" while he was living in a crowded home (at 257 square miles, Bahrain is one of the smallest countries in the world without really any vast tracts of land.) In fact, the genesis of the uprising in Bahrain lies in the country's repressive system in which a minority Sunni monarchy has been ruling with an iron fist a Shi'a majority for over two centuries. The fact that Bahrain serves as the headquarters of the U.S. navy's Fifth Fleet, where foreigners living there are given many privileges, including significant tract of lands, over the oppressed population, clearly did not cross Friedman's mind. People across the Arab world do not need Google Earth to know who has been looting their lands, resources, and wealth. Friedman then claims Israel as the third cause for the Arab revolts. He argues that since Israel tried a former president, prime minster, and chief-of-staff on criminal conduct and corruption, then surely the Arabs must have been inspired by this Israeli "democracy" and "transparency." The foolishness of this argument is that it is presented in a vacuum. In every decade since Israel's founding in 1948, scandals and investigations have forced many of its leaders out of office. David Ben Gurion, Pinhas Lavon, Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin, Ariel Sharon, and even the current PM Benjamin Netanyahu, had to resign or leave office under a cloud of suspicion or accusations. But such affairs never aroused the Arab masses. Only an ignorant or depraved mind could even consider such factor to inspire the Arab collective mind. For the majority of Arabs Israel represents an illegitimate and a racist regime that has been illegally occupying Arab lands for decades while mercilessly oppressing their Palestinian brethren. In the Arab street Israeli leaders are considered war criminals perpetrating dozens of massacres (for the latest see the Goldstone report and last year's Turkish flotilla). No revolutionary authority could seriously look up to Israel as an inspiring example. Further in his column, Friedman contends that somehow the spectacular Olympic games organized by China in 2008 helped inspire Egyptians to take to the streets. One wonders whether he wrote this while sober. Indeed, Egyptians are proud people with great civilizations behind them, but their revolution was about restoring their freedom and dignity. The China model of state-controlled prosperity at the expense of political freedom and human rights is not an inspiration to any Arab. But perhaps the greatest insult to the Arab revolutionaries is the last factor Friedman mentions as the source of inspiration to the Arab protesters, namely, the unelected Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority (PA), Salam Fayyad If anything Fayyad is viewed as a Western-imposed autocrat that could never be elected as a small town mayor. The only reason he is in power is due to the pressure applied on the president of the PA, Mahmoud Abbas (whose term by the way has already expired), by the U.S. and Israel. During the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt in January and February of this year,  not once has Fayyad or any PA official said anything positive about the Arab revolutions in the streets. On the contrary, they continued to lament in the media the loss of Mubarak. Since 2008 Fayyad has been coordinating with the Israeli occupation against his own citizens causing hundreds to be arrested and detained without charges, sometimes even tortured. In a speech before the pro-Israel think tank, the Washington Institute on Near East Policy (WINEP) in May 2009, Lt. General Keith Dayton, the former U.S. Security Coordinator in the West Bank, exposed the Palestinian PM when he said "I don't know how many of you are aware, but over the last year-and-a-half, the Palestinians have engaged upon a series of what they call security offensives throughout the West Bank, surprisingly well coordinated with the Israeli army." He further admitted that during the twenty-two day Israeli onslaught on Gaza in 2008/2009, Fayyad's security forces prevented Palestinians in the West Bank from organizing mass protests against the Israeli army, which ironically allowed for the reduction of the Israeli military presence in the West Bank in order to redeploy those troops to Gaza. Dayton added, "As a matter of fact, a good portion of the Israeli army went off to Gaza from the West Bank— think about that for a minute, and the (Israeli military) commander (of the West Bank) was absent for eight straight days." Moreover, in February  2010 Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak praised Fayyad for his security cooperation during a security conference in Herzliya. Incredibly he credited him with providing security for Israeli settlers in the illegal settlements in the West Bank. Barak told the conference, "The settlers are also saying that the security situation is better than ever, and that is thanks to the work of both sides." In the Muslim World today there are two kinds of leaders despised by the public: autocrats and dictators supported by the West such as Egypt's Mubarak and Tunisia's Ben Ali, and agents who were directly installed by the West like Afghanistan's Hamid Karzai. At the height of the Tunisian and Egyptian demonstrations, the Palestine Papers released by Al-Jazeera and comprising hundreds of confidential documents from the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, portrayed Fayyad as another hireling for the West and Israel. In the Arab world he is neither respected nor inspiring. One of the problems in Western media and political circles -as embodied by Friedman- is that great events somehow have to revolve around Western powerful elites in order for them to be meaningful. But the impressive Arab revolutions of 2011 are about the great awakening of the Arab people. It is their moment of glory. The sooner Western elites recognize this fact, the easier Orientalist stereotypes could be disposed of. In his great work, Us and Them, Jim Carnes asks whether racism "is promoted by a sense of inferiority that makes us want to dominate others to protect our turf and to seek a status with no competition?" Sadly Friedman's explanation of the proliferation of the Arab revolutions of 2011 positively answers that question. Esam Al-Amin can be reached at alamin1919  -at_- gmail.com

Jews and Blacks and Libya

HMLF: We had great Plenary Sessions. We opened it with our book The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, and it was a Plenary Session with the erudite scholars of the Nation of Islam that did the fantastic research from the pens of Jewish scholars, historians and rabbis to write a history that we believe not only Black people should know, but White people should know as well; and many Jews who do not know what happened to Black people.

The book came into existence not because we were looking for "controversy." The Muslims were so upset that every time my name was mentioned, it was mentioned that Farrakhan is an "anti-Semite." And because of that charge leveled over the last 25 years continuously, many things that we could have done successfully were interfered with because of that label. So the scholars and historians in The Nation decided that they would make a serious study of Jewish history to see whether that charge of "anti-Semitism" could be dispelled by a profound book on the truth from their lips, their pens, and their scholarship. So when they say that it is "all lies," it's "terrible," it's because they are afraid of the truth that is in it, that is so clear; and 1,800 footnotes, which any scholar can go back and read the writings out of which this book was developed.

And I humbly say that all of us as Black people, and Gentile Whites, and Asians and Hispanics: We have all read of the horror of the Holocaust. We know that something terrible happened under the Third Reich in Nazi Germany, and each of us reads it, hears it, sees documentaries on it; we have to know about it in all our classrooms so that this will never happen again, and no one will stand idly by on the sidelines while an entire ethnic or racial group is attacked.

So, we wanted America and the world to know that if we could study their tragic history, why shouldn't the American people know, and why shouldn't Black people know how we got into this condition and position?

CK: One of the things that I think you do, which I think is just great: You bring so many people together. When I was out in Rosemont at the venue for Saviours' Day, I saw so many people out there that I know aren't "Muslims"; and people of different colors. You mentioned the fact during your speech that there are a lot of Caucasian people that write to The Nation of Islam, asking for all kinds of information and so forth. Tell us about that.

HMLF: Because The Enemy has tried to make the people think that we're behind closed doors, planning insurrection and rebellion against the government of the United States, and White people and Jewish people, we decided to webcast our Sunday broadcast all over the world so that if people wanted to listen to what we teach, they can ... really see what we teach. We are not planning any evil.

In fact, when I was looking at the hearings that are going on in Washington, D.C. under the guidance of Peter King and Homeland Security, where they're talking about the "radicalization" of Muslims and terror groups. Well, The Nation of Islam has been here for 80 years and if anybody has a "beef," it should be us! But you don't find Black people throwing things, killing people, bombing bridges, talking like that! And I want America to know: If we in The Nation of Islam found somebody trying to blow up a bridge that would kill innocent people, you wouldn't have to call Homeland Security—by the time they got to us, he would need some kind of security!

We hate that kind of thing, the killing of innocent people "in the name of God or religion"! You may be angry, but how do you handle your anger, your frustration? This is where we live! This is where we breathe! These are the people that we live next to, and if we can't get along, there are ways that we can handle things. But to make bombs and kill innocent people? Heck no!

No, The Followers of Elijah Muhammad will stop that wherever we see it! We won't just "report" it, but we'll stop the hand of those that we know would do anything like that, that would kill innocent men, women and children no matter what their color is!

God is sufficient as The Avenger! So if it snowed like it did in Chicago on the 2nd of February, with winds blowing at 70 miles an hour, God didn't care whether you were "White" or "Black"—He dropped the snow on you! If you couldn't get out of your house, that's your problem; but it affected Black, it affected Brown, it affected Red, it affected Yellow; it affected rich, it affected poor, because that's the way God does! God is an "Equal Destroyer Opportunity Man"—so that's The One we need to be afraid of. Not somebody with a little bomb in their backpack!

CK: I want to talk a little about this "radicalization" hearing. We know about Peter King's background, of course; he's there now because the Republicans took over the House, and he's the head of the Homeland Security. We've got radicals in all groups, not just Muslims. What is your opinion of what is the purpose of what this whole thing was about?

HMLF: This hearing was very, very interesting because the great fear that is expressed is a fear that Muslims will begin to institute Sharia Law in the United States of America.

I humbly say that we [who are Muslims] live in America: We don't live in our own land where we are free to live the full extent of our faith, including Sharia Law, but we live in America. And the Honorable Elijah Muhammad said, "We respect the laws that govern this nation."

Yes, we are Muslims; and if we just lived The Moral Code of Islam, a lot of people would find it difficult. Imagine a nation of people that don't smoke: What happens to the tobacco industry? A nation of people who don't drink: What happens to the liquor industry; and the people arrested for drunk driving? What happens to the dope dealers, and the dope industry when you've got people so clean that you could drop a mound of cocaine in front of the mosque, and the Believers would sweep it up, burn it, destroy it—never sell it—because we want for our brother what we want for ourselves! And since we don't want it for ourselves, why would we want that for any member of the Human Family?

For instance: We do not display our women in a way that makes men lust after their beauty. When Allah says in the Qur'an to the woman, to lower the hems of your garment, and cover your bosom; and "do not display your adornments," we, as men, don't have the adornment that the female has. A breast is adornment; and the beautiful shape of the rear end is [adornment], "good to look at," so when you put that in a man's face, how can he think sanely? How can he think progressively? So the Muslim says, "No. Cover the woman." It protects her, but it also protects the man from the aggressive nature that a man has toward a woman who is unclad. And so these kinds of Teachings would benefit the society! This kind of Way of Life would increase the life span of the American people; decrease accidents on the highway!

Muslims are a blessing to America, and not a curse! However, when you have people who are so quote-unquote radicalized that they will strap a bomb on themselves because they're angry, and their grievances have not been addressed properly; then they wish to go out and harm innocent people. That kind of thing we have to speak against. And so I thought Peter King may have had some idea in mind, but, if you listen to (Congressional representative) Sheila Jackson Lee, if you listen to Danny Davis, if you listen to Congressman Keith Ellison, and you listen to people who are Muslims, they have nothing in their heart against the country in which they have been afforded an opportunity to become who they are, then they take umbrage at the fact.

After 9/11 the F.B.I. moved on Muslims, this is a fact! They broke into the homes of some immigrant Muslims, took their computers and whatnot. Muslims after 9/11—I'm speaking more of immigrant Muslims—felt that they were under siege! And that's why CAIR said, "Don't talk to the F.B.I." But under proper circumstances, why shouldn't you talk to the authorities if you have nothing to hide?

Well, we never talked to the F.B.I., but, they followed us; they came to our homes, and they tried to frighten us out of Islam! They would go to our neighbors, and show our neighbors pictures of us as though we were "criminals." And so the neighbors said, "My God! These Moslems—the F.B.I. came and left their card…" You know that the F.B.I. under J. Edgar Hoover targeted more than Muslims, they targeted Black leadership! Black groups! Nationalist groups! So, no: We didn't have any "good feeling" about the F.B.I.—why should we?

But if you come with respect, you get respect, and that is what we teach!

CK: Do you think that Chairman Peter King's idea was allegedly to do something "positive"? He made the comment that 80 percent of the mosques in the U.S. are run by "radical imams."

HMLF: Well, I'm sure they're moving gently and swiftly toward Louis Farrakhan and The Nation of Islam. We don't carry any weapons, but The Greatest Weapon that we have is in our mouth, and it is The Truth.

When you speak Truth, and you're unafraid of the consequences of speaking the Truth, people that have lied and have built their house on lies, fear Truth! They don't fear guns because they have bigger guns! But a Lie is always afraid when Truth comes in the room.

CK: Brother Minister, about Libya: France has now recognized a national transitional council; and then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is saying that they are telling the Libyan Embassy to leave out of D.C. What is your opinion as to what is happening with Libya?

HMLF: Muammar Gadhafi and the problem in Libya is much more complex than what the news is saying. Muammar Gadhafi has always been hated by Western, European, Neo-Colonial, Imperialistic governments.

That man, Muammar Gadhafi, came to power in Libya not in a coup that killed people—it was a bloodless coup. And when he took power, America was there, Britain was there; they had bases there! They controlled the sweetest crude oil in the world from Libya. And if you notice, when you study the "Marines" song: "From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli, we will fight our country's battle on the land and on the sea!"—what were you doing in Montezuma? And, what were you doing in Tripoli?

See, this attitude that somehow Western powers have a right to the resources of weaker nations in Africa, in Central and South America: Gadhafi rejected that notion. And, under Reagan's Administration, the media called him "the mad dog of the Middle East." Well, what do you do with "mad" dogs? You kill them.

I [have told the world] that in 1985 I had an Experience that the Honorable Elijah Muhammad said to me on that Wheel—you take it, or let it alone—that: "Reagan had met with his Joint Chiefs of Staff to plan a war." He didn't tell me where the war was gonna take place, or who the war was planned against, but he told me to hold a Press Conference and make it known that I got it from him, Elijah Muhammad, on The Wheel. Well, I didn't know exactly where this war was, but I kept watching how things developed. And while I was on a World Tour, I was in Belize in Central America, and President Reagan came on the television announcing that "no Americans should go to Libya"; "no Americans should do business with Libya"—that's when it started! When I got to Africa, by the time I was in Ghana, it crystallized for me that it was Libya that America was going to war with. So when I got to Benin, I sent my family home; got on a Russian jet and flew to Tripoli to warn Brother Gadhafi of what America was planning to do.

Yes, I did that! Why? Because that man was a friend of The Nation of Islam; he was a friend of Elijah Muhammad. He helped Elijah Muhammad get the mosque on Stony Island Avenue originally; he loaned us $5 million to put personal care products up for the members of the Nation of Islam. And I know Muammar Gadhafi as a revolutionary: I know him as a man that has helped governments throughout Africa; he helped the IRA, he helped others, so others did not like him for his revolutionary stand! He finally kicked out the British, he kicked out the Americans. He took the oil and then used it for the benefit of the Libyan people. And, he wrote in his Green Book that he saw the future of the world in the hands of Black people. So, to harm this man because you're angry with him …

Dear listeners, look: Whatever you may think of him, most of our thinking of great Black men, or White men that "power" does not agree with, the media has always been used to destroy their image and their reputation.

CK: I want to go right into the situation with our president, Commander-in-Chief Obama, and his treatment of the situation in Libya. I recall what you said on Saviours' Day, that "all of this turmoil that's going on in the world will come to your shores here in America," and then you told the president, "Be prepared, because it will be coming to your shores; to your door." Your advice to President Obama was to "remember the words you're making to other nations."

HMLF: Our dear brother has to be very, very careful in this decision that he and his Secretary of State, French President Nikolas Sarkozy, British Prime Minister David Cameron and others are planning. They would love to go into Libya and kill Brother Gadhafi, and kill his children as they did with Saddam Hussein and his sons, Qusay and Uday. You must remember, dear people of America, that whenever government wants you to think and act in a certain way that would bring justification to an action that they are already planning to make, they must make the person that they hate a "boogey man."

Now, nobody wants civil war—it is the bloodiest of all kinds of wars, because you are fighting your own brothers: You're fighting the people of your own language and culture and history. So, in every nation, brothers and sisters, there is dissatisfaction. And what the CIA does is go into a country and move among the people that are dissatisfied to stimulate a revolt against a leader that they don't like, because they want regime change.

When George W. Bush was president, he said they wanted "regime change" in Iran, and in Korea. How do you get regime change, honest America? How do you do that? The Congress of the United States voted to spend $150 million to replace the government in Iran that America doesn't like, so they send their agents in to work among the dissatisfied. So when Iran had this election, and the people in Iran rose up: They have legitimate grievances, all right—but stimulated from the outside. So President Obama didn't want to put his foot into that cage lest somebody say "America inspired it," because it was America's policy to destabilize that government.

Well, what about Libya? How much money is being spent to arm the so-called rebels? They're dissatisfied, but what is their "dissatisfaction" about? Do they have jobs? Yes. Do they have food? Yes. Has Gadhafi used the oil money to build Libya? Yes. Did Gadhafi use oil money and discover water under the Sahara Desert, and brought that water to the surface; and brought water from Benghazi all the way, to the border, almost, of Tunisia? Did he impose farming in the Desert so that they could feed their own people? Yes. Are there billions of dollars that he's spending building homes, building apartments for his people? Yes … So something is under this! And so when America, England, France, three Imperialist Powers, want to destabilize that country, is it that you're "so concerned"?

Listen to this Hypocrisy, American people! Is it that American government is "so concerned" over the blood that is being shed in Libya, but you looked the other way when the Israeli Defense Force was bombing the innocent people of Gaza, unarmed men, women and children? You looked the other way when the Israeli Defense Force went into Lebanon thinking that they were going to have an "easy" victory, then you had to come out with your tail between your legs? Don't tell me, and wise Black people or White people, that you're interested in Black suffering! Where were you in Rwanda? Where are you in The Congo? Why did you go to Darfur? Because oil is there! No … You don't want to "save" the Libyan people—that's your noble motive to hide your wicked agenda!

I warn you, In The Name of Allah, that this is more complex than what you think! Go into Libya if you want to. The Libyans do not want foreign occupation on their land. And when you make that kind of move, if you're not careful, you'll unite the Libyan people against you! Again, Gadhafi wasn't sitting in any tent, twiddling his thumbs over these last 10 years! This man has been investing in African development. This man has been moving throughout Africa. This man has friends all over the world! He may not be your friend—but, if you take him out, and kill him like he's some "rotten fella" that wants to kill his own people:

What did you, American government, do in Waco? What did you do when your people rose up? Did you talk 'em out of it? NO! They had weapons; you bombed them! What did you do in Philadelphia with the MOVE movement? Did you talk them out of their home, or did you bomb them? We didn't hear any "outcry" from you religious hypocrites that "love" the lives of human beings! You're a liar! And a hypocrite!

And I warn my brother, President Barack Obama: Don't you let these wicked demons move you in a direction that will absolutely ruin your future with your people in Africa and throughout the world! They don't like the way you handled (former Egyptian President Hosni) Mubarak! They don't like the way you're handling the situation in the Arab world!

So I would advise you to be careful; and move with wisdom and skill.

edited excerpts of the Honorable Louis Farrakhan's interview with WVON 1690 AM radio host Cliff Kelley in Chicago on Thursday, March 10, 2011. This important radio interview is the most recent of several Min. Farrakhan granted before and after his Saviours' Day 2011 address Feb. 27. The Final Call plans to run edited transcripts of interviews conducted with Karriem & Co. on WTWG 1050 AM in early February and an interview conducted very early this year with New York's 98.7 KISS FM Open Line Show over the next few weeks.

Obama Chomsky EL SALVADOR

Tomorrow, President Obama will visit the tomb of Archbishop Oscar Romero in El Salvador to pay his respects. Monseñor Romero, a champion of the poor and an advocate of peace, was shot to death on March 24, 1980 while celebrating Mass at a small chapel near his cathedral in San Salvador the day after giving a sermon in which he called for Salvadoran soldiers to stop the repression and to end the killing of their own people.

Oscar Romero's assassins were members of Salvadoran death squads, including two graduates of the School of the Americas. The 1993 United Nations Truth Commission report on El Salvador identified SOA graduate Major Roberto D'Aubuisson as the man who ordered the assassination. While we welcome President Obama's interest in visiting Archbishop Romero's tomb, a more fitting tribute to Romero's legacy would be the closure of the school that trained his murderers. President Obama's gesture rings hollow in the face of the continued U.S. support for repressive regimes such as Honduras that further U.S. interests and in the face of the continued funding for the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (also known as the School of the Americas), the U.S. military training facility that has left a trail of blood and suffering throughout the Americas.

The Past is the Present

While Obama tries to portray a change in the dismal history of US relations towards Latin America, no where is it clearer than in neighboring Honduras that the past is the present. Last Friday, Honduran teacher Ilse Velasquez became the latest victim of the repression unleashed by the illegitimate regime of Porfirio Lobo. She was hurled unconscious onto the pavement, then hit by a car, after being struck in the head by one of the many tear gas canisters shot by police into the peaceful crowd. Ilse was the sister of Manfredo Velasquez, a student leader tortured and killed by the Honduran military in 1981 who was the subject of a landmark trial at the InterAmerican court that led to the founding of COFADEH and significantly improved the ability of victims of human rights violations to demand justice from their governments

The common denominator in all of these incidents is the leading role of SOA graduates. The repressive Lobo came to power via illegitimate elections following a coup led by two SOA graduates against President Manuel Zelaya in 2009. One of SOA's most notorious graduates, General Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, was the head of the Honduran Armed Forces at the time of their murder of Manfredo Velasquez. He was also the founder of the brutal Battalion 3-16, whose tentacles continue to penetrate current Honduran repression. The person responsible for ordering police repression against peaceful protesters that led to Ilse's death on Friday is none other than the nephew of General Alvarez: Security Minister Oscar A. Martinez Guerrero, and a 1991 graduate of the SOA.

Stand with the People of the Americas

Join us in Washington, DC from April 4-11, 2011 for the Day of Action to Close the School of the Americas and to Resist U.S. Militarization. Click here for more information about the Days of Action.

Join the SOA Watch delegation to Honduras, from April 30 to May 9, so that we can bring our message of solidarity directly to the Honduras Resistance. Meet with Resistance leaders, human rights activists, journalists, workers and campesino organizations struggling to return democracy to their nation. Click here for more information about the delegation to Honduras.

Honduran Human Rights Defenders in Washington, DC - Contact your Member of Congress

A delegation of human rights defenders from Honduras (Bertha Oliva of COFADEH, Judge Guillermo Lopez, and Lucy Mendoza, staff of the Jesuit-sponsored ERIC Institute in Honduras) will be in Washington, DC tomorrow. Longtime SOA Watch friend Representative Jim McGovern is sponsoring a Congressional briefing for legislative aides on March 23rd at 10:30 a.m. in room 441 in the Cannon House Office Building. Please call the office of your Member of Congress today at and urge the foreign policy aide to attend the briefing. To find your senators' and representative's phone numbers, you may call the U.S. Capitol Switchboard at (202)224-3121 and ask for your senators' and/or representative's office.

Remember that telephone calls are usually taken by a staff member, not the member of Congress. Ask to speak with the foreign policy aide who handles the issue of U.S. policies towards Honduras and the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.

In the face of the ongoing SOA/ WHINSEC support for the repression in Honduras, Oscar Romero's last speech still rings true today:

"Brothers, you came from our own people. You are killing your own brothers. Any human order to kill must be subordinate to the law of God, which says, 'Thou shalt not kill'. No soldier is obliged to obey an order contrary to the law of God. No one has to obey an immoral law. It is high time you obeyed your consciences rather than sinful orders. The church cannot remain silent before such an abomination. ... In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose cry rises to heaven more loudly each day, I implore you, I beg you, I order you: stop the repression."
- Oscar Romero

The Crucifixion of EL SALVADOR

Noam Chomsky

For many years, repression, torture and murder were carried on in El Salvador by dictators installed and supported by our government, a matter of no interest here. The story was virtually never covered. By the late 1970s, however, the US government began to be concerned about a couple of things.

One was that Somoza, the dictator of Nicaragua, was losing control . The US was losing a major base for its exercise of force in the region. A second danger was even more threatening. In El Salvador in the 1970s, there was a growth of what were called "popular organizations"-peasant associations, cooperatives, unions, Church-based Bible study groups that evolved into self-help groups, etc. That raised the threat of democracy.

In February 1980, the Archbishop of EI Salvador, Oscar Romero, sent a letter to President Carter in which he begged him not to send military aid to the junta that ran the country. He said such aid would be used to "sharpen injustice and repression against the people's organizations" which were struggling "for respect for their most basic human rights" (hardly news to Washington, needless to say).

A few weeks later, Archbishop Romero was assassinated while saying a mass. The neo-Nazi
Roberto d'Aubuisson is generally assumed to be responsible for this assassination (among countless other atrocities). D'Aubuisson was "leader for-life" of the ARENA party, which now governs El Salvador; members of the party, like current Salvadoran president Alfredo Cristiani, had to take a blood oath of loyalty to him.

Thousands of peasants and urban poor took part in a commemorative mass a decade later, along with many foreign bishops, but the US was notable by its absence. The Salvadoran Church formally proposed Romero for sainthood.

All of this passed with scarcely a mention in the country that funded and trained Romero's assassins. The New York Times, the "newspaper of record," published no editorial on the assassination when it occurred or in the years that followed, and no editorial or news report on the commemoration.

On March 7, 1980, two weeks before the assassination, a state of siege had been instituted in El Salvador, and the war against the population began in force (with continued US support and involvement). The first major attack was a big massacre at the Rio Sumpul, a coordinated military operation of the Honduran and Salvadoran armies in which at least 600 people were butchered. Infants were cut to pieces with machetes, and women were tortured and drowned. Pieces of bodies were found in the river for days afterwards. There were church observers, so the information came out immediately, but the mainstream US media didn't think it was worth reporting.

Peasants were the main victims of this war, along with labor organizers, students, priests or anyone suspected of working for the interests of the people. In Carter's last year, 1980, the death toll reached about 10,000, rising to about 13,000 for 1981 as the Reaganites took command.

In October 1980, the new archbishop condemned the "war of extermination and genocide against a defenseless civilian population" waged by the security forces. Two months later they were hailed for their "valiant service alongside the people against subversion" by the favorite US "moderate," Jose Napoleon Duarte, as he was appointed civilian president of the junta.

The role of the "moderate" Duarte was to provide a fig leaf for the military rulers and ensure them a continuing flow of US funding after the armed forces had raped and murdered four churchwomen from the US. That had aroused some protest here; slaughtering Salvadorans is one thing, but raping and killing American nuns is a definite PR mistake. The media evaded and downplayed the story, following the lead of the Carter Administration and its investigative commission.

The incoming Reaganites went much further, seeking to justify the atrocity, notably Secretary of State Alexander Haig and UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick. But it was still deemed worthwhile to have a show trial a few years later, while exculpating the murderous junta-and, of course, the paymaster.

The independent newspapers in El Salvador, which might have reported these atrocities, had
been destroyed. Although they were mainstream and pro-business, they were still too undisciplined for the military's taste. The problem was taken care of in 1980-81, when the editor of one was murdered by the security forces; the other fled into exile. As usual, these events were considered too insignificant to merit more than a few words in US newspapers.

In November 1989, six Jesuit priests, their cook and her daughter, were murdered by the army. That same week, at least 28 other Salvadoran civilians were murdered, including the head of a major union, the leader of the organization of university women, nine members of an Indian farming cooperative and ten university students.

The news wires carried a story by AP correspondent Douglas Grant Mine, reporting how soldiers had entered a working-class neighborhood in the capital city of San Salvador, captured six men, added a 14-year-old boy for good measure, then lined them all up against a wall and shot them. They "were not priests or human rights campaigners," Mine wrote, "so their deaths have gone largely unnoticed"-as did his story.

The Jesuits were murdered by the Atlacatl Battalion, an elite unit created, trained and equipped by the United States. It was formed in March 1981, when fifteen specialists in counterinsurgency were sent to El Salvador from the US Army School of Special Forces. From the start, the Battalion was engaged in mass murder. A US trainer described its soldiers as "particularly ferocious....We've always had a hard time getting them to take prisoners instead of ears."

In December 1981, the Battalion took part in an operation in which over a thousand civilians were killed in an orgy of murder, rape and burning. Later it was involved in the bombing of villages and murder of hundreds of civilians by shooting, drowning and other methods. The vast majority of victims were women, children and the elderly.

The Atlacatl Battalion was being trained by US Special Forces shortly before murdering the Jesuits. This has been a pattern throughout the Battalion's existence-some of its worst massacres have occurred when it was fresh from US training.

In the "fledgling democracy" that was El Salvador, teenagers as young as 13 were scooped up in sweeps of slums and refugee camps and forced to become soldiers. They were indoctrinated with rituals adopted from the Nazi SS, including brutalization and rape, to prepare them for killings that often have sexual and satanic overtones.

The nature of Salvadoran army training was described by a deserter who received political asylum in Texas in 1990, despite the State Department's request that he be sent back to El Salvador. (His name was withheld by the court to protect him from Salvadoran death squads.)

According to this deserter, draftees were made to kill dogs and vultures by biting their throats and twisting off their heads, and had to watch as soldiers tortured and killed suspected dissidents-tearing out their fingernails, cutting off their heads, chopping their bodies to pieces and playing with the dismembered arms for fun.

In another case, an admitted member of a Salvadoran death squad associated with the Atlacatl Battalion, Cesar Vielman Joya Martinez, detailed the involvement of US advisers and the Salvadoran government in death-squad activity. The Bush administration has made every effort to silence him and ship him back to probable death in El Salvador, despite the pleas of human rights organizations and requests from Congress that his testimony be heard. (The treatment of the main witness to the assassination of the Jesuits was similar.)

The results of Salvadoran military training are graphically described in the Jesuit journal America by Daniel Santiago, a Catholic priest working in El Salvador. He tells of a peasant woman who returned home one day to find her three children, her mother and her sister sitting around a table, each with its own decapitated head placed carefully on the table in front of the body, the hands arranged on top "as if each body was stroking its own head."

The assassins, from the Salvadoran National Guard, had found it hard to keep the head of an 18-month-old baby in place, so they nailed the hands onto it. A large plastic bowl filled with blood was tastefully displayed in the center of the table.

According to Rev. Santiago, macabre scenes of this kind aren't uncommon. People are not just killed by death squads in El Salvador-they are decapitated and then their heads are placed on pikes and used to dot the landscape. Men are not just disemboweled by the Salvadoran Treasury Police; their severed genitalia are stuffed into their mouths. Salvadoran women are not just raped by the National Guard; their wombs are cut from their bodies and used to cover their faces. It is not enough to kill children; they are dragged over barbed wire until the flesh falls from their bones, while parents are forced to watch.

Rev. Santiago goes on to point out that violence of this sort greatly increased when the Church began forming peasant associations and self help groups in an attempt to organize the poor.

By and large, our approach in El Salvador has been successful. The popular organizations have been decimated, just as Archbishop Romero predicted. Tens of thousands have been slaughtered and more than a million have become refugees. This is one of the most sordid episodes in US history-and it's got a lot of competition.

***

from the book What Uncle Sam Really Wants, published in 1993
Odonian Press

CIA in Ivory Coast -- BBC human interest story without background

Ivory Coast's descent into 'madness'

The UN estimates more than 350,000 people have fled Abidjan

By John James BBC News, Abidjan

A bitterly disputed election result in the Ivory Coast is pulling the
country apart and has left the country divided.

The thick mahogany doors of the mansion stand ajar as young children
run in and out.

A trail of odd junk litters the yard. A small upturned table here,
papers there. The walls blackened by fire. A palatial home, ransacked
earlier by youths.

The police had been there already, eyewitnesses said - not to stop the
theft, but to load up their vehicles with the loot.

An estimated 20 homes belonging to government ministers and their
supporters were attacked last weekend in Abidjan.

The mistake these politicians made was to win November's election, and
then to insist that winning a vote meant you get to take over.

The former president did not like that. The new government may be able
to shelter under UN protection at a lagoon-side hotel, but their
homes, cars and families are fair game for the old government.

Destructive rage

This was a part of Africa that did not need handouts to develop, just
a few decent politicians.

Anger is rife on the streets of Abidjan

Instead it has seen a race to the bottom for power at any price, with
the very real threat of a return to civil war.

Ivorians witness the destruction with shock and incredulity.

My friend Bernard's work is linked to the port. He has lost his job -
as has everyone at his company - because almost nothing is being
shipped anymore.

Another friend, Aude, has lost her job running a restaurant - few
people eat out any more, in what was once one of Africa's culinary
capitals. The central bank closed a month and a half ago, private
banks two weeks ago.

The destructive rage is almost a madness.

Attacking mosques in a country roughly divided half-and-half between
Muslims and Christians who until now were living peacefully side by
side.

Emptying the army ammunition stores to hand out Kalashnikovs to
unemployed youths whipped up into anger by their patrons' propaganda.

Each side is using foreign mercenaries, then accusing the other side
of using foreign support.

At one of the city's many checkpoints, I am ordered out of the car as
young men with guns search for weapons.

They say they are doing their civic duty by blocking the flow of arms.
But I have never heard of them finding any and the only civilians
illegally carrying arms I have seen were the ones running the
roadblocks.

Both sides have burnt their victims alive. "You burn one, we'll burn
10," said one Gbagbo supporter at a barricade in Yopougon. A
generation ago if you asked a West African to think of a country that
meant stability and prosperity, the answer would have been Ivory Coast

In one chilling video, a pile of bodies writhe in pain after a
beating. Burning tyres and tables are placed on top of them to form an
evening bonfire. The police - clearly in shot, actually help out the
crowd.

Images of the violence, taken with mobile phone cameras, are everywhere.

At the moment the internet offers up a daily collection of horrors
from Ivory Coast - the families burned during an attack on their
village, the women out protesting peacefully for change mown down by
canon fire from a convoy of government vehicles leaving seven dead,
armed youths threatening death to the other side.

Tens of thousands have fled Ivory Coast, as the pro-Ouattara forces in
the north start to move south.

In Abidjan, an armed group in the northern suburb of Abobo, nicknamed
the "invisible commandos", has made the district a virtual no-go area
for the national security forces, which are still publicly loyal to
Laurent Gbagbo.

This so-called "autonomous republic of Abobo" is a telling sign that -
even with far superior weaponry - the pro-Gbagbo forces struggle to
control their own main city.

The UN says at least 200,000 have fled the district, many taking
shelter with families elsewhere, others in churches and mosques.

A generation ago if you asked a West African to think of a country
that meant stability and prosperity, the answer would have been Ivory
Coast.

At one prayer meeting I hear a woman cry out to God for a return to
the times when this was a land of hospitality and peace.

This is the country where I work, but it is also now home. I have
lived here for more than three years.

My wife is Ivorian, and only recently I picked up my own Ivorian
passport. At the same time I bought a house.

This remains a place of friendly people, amazing fresh fruit, long and
unspoilt tropical beaches, and, yes, it ought to have a bright future.

But at the moment, the place is being held hostage, and there seem to
be more atrocities committed every day. I wonder when my family should
evacuate. The dark clouds seem to be gathering.

Ivorians wanted one president but they got two, they wanted peace and
they got war, they were promised debt relief, but instead the country
defaulted on its debt, they wanted prosperity and the economy shut
down.

There is an important word here that I have never found the equivalent
for in English - "Yako". It is a deeply-felt way of saying, "I'm so
sorry".

Ivory Coast, "Yako".