Bomb, Bomb Iran: Lessons From Iraq Unlearned
December 27, 2009 by admin
Filed under Featured, Jeremy R. Hammond
In a New York Times op-ed this week that advocates bombing Iran, the author, Alan J. Kuperman, director of the Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Program at the University of Texas at Austin, begins by suggesting that President Barack Obama should “sigh in relief that Iran has rejected his nuclear deal”.
In fact, Iran has said it is still open to discussion with the U.S. about its nuclear program, but that if meaningful dialogue is to continue, the threats of sanctions and military aggression must first cease.
The U.S., however, continues to threaten yet further sanctions, while also insisting that the threat of force must remain “on the table” — a threat of aggression that itself violates the U.N. Charter, which forbids member nations from threatening the use of force as a tool for leverage in international relations.
Kuperman’s reason for why Obama should be happy is that the deal, under which Iran would export uranium to Russia, which would enrich it to 20 percent (not the 90 percent required for weapons-grade uranium) and return it as fuel rods for use in Tehran’s research reactor, “was ill conceived from the start” since Iran would “thus be rewarded with much-coveted reactor fuel despite violating international law.”
His reference is to U.N. Security Council resolutions demanding that Iran halt its uranium enrichment activities. The problem with these resolutions, as Iran is not hesitant to point out, is that they themselves directly violate the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT), which clearly states that parties to the treaty have an “inalienable” right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes, and that the international community may take no action prejudicial towards that right.
The U.N. resolutions, needless to say, prejudice that “inalienable” right, particularly given the fact that there is no credible evidence that Iran has a nuclear weapons program – as both the U.S. intelligence community and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have pointed out.
In other words, under U.S. influence, the Security Council in this case has acted as a rogue body itself in violation of relevant treaties constituting international law and the very Charter under which it ostensibly operates.
Iran, on the other hand, remains in compliance with the terms of the NPT and is meeting its obligations in allowing the IAEA to monitor and inspect its nuclear program, despite much talk to the contrary.
Take the most recent example, the charge that Iran’s uranium enrichment facility near Qom, still under construction, was a violation of its obligation to declare any such facility prior to the beginning of construction. We’re told that Iran agreed to an updated version of its safeguards agreement with the IAEA containing a clause specifying that obligation.
What we’re not told is that at that time, Iran had agreed to implement the terms of the Additional Protocol and revised safeguards agreement on a strictly voluntary basis. The voluntary nature of Iran’s implementation of these measures was explicitly, and in writing (see the so-called Paris Agreement), recognized by the IAEA. Iran was under no legal obligation to do so and had done so simply as a “confidence-building measure”.
In return, Iran got nothing but further threats of sanctions and bombing. So it ended its voluntary observance of measures above and beyond that which was legally required of it.
The fact is that Iran has never ratified the revised safeguards agreement, as would be required for the revisions to be legally binding upon Iran. Under the safeguards agreement Iran has formally and legally obligated itself to, it need only declare such facilities six months prior to the introduction of nuclear material (i.e., introduction of uranium into enrichment centrifuges), which is exactly what Iran did in declaring the site several months ago.
In response to meeting its obligations under its safeguards agreement, the West responded by declaring that the “secret” site (an adjective irreconcilable with the fact Iran voluntarily declared it to the IAEA, but obligatorily used in the media anyways) was evidence of Iran’s intentions to manufacture nuclear weapons.
Summarily dismissed was Iran’s quite credible explanation for the site it voluntarily disclosed, which was that it was attempting to diversify its uranium enrichment capabilities under the threat of certain countries to bomb their nuclear facilities.
The demonization and punishment of Iran for its compliance with its obligations under international law is not entirely unlike the charges against Iraq that it was in violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions demanding it disarm because it had not disarmed, when in fact it had disarmed, and when in fact there was no credible evidence that it still possessed stockpiles or was still in production of weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
The IAEA, for its part, has continuously and consistently reported that it has verified Iran has diverted no nuclear materials towards a weapons program. Former Director General of the IAEA Mohammed ElBaradei, whose term ended just last month, has repeatedly said that there is no evidence Iran has a nuclear weapons program. His successor, Yukiya Amano, has made the same observation.
Then, of course, there is the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) from the U.S. intelligence community that stated Iran today has no nuclear weapons program, which according to Newsweek, is an assessment analysts still stand by. The NIE did claim that Iran once had such a program in the past, but that it ended it in 2003. The IAEA, on the other hand, recently issued a statement saying there is no evidence Iran ever had a weapons program.
Kuperman continues by suggesting that the goal of the international community should be to “compel” Iran “to halt its enrichment program”, which, he claims, the proposal to send its uranium abroad would not have done. It’s worth noting the fact that this is an explicit rejection of the NPT.
He adds, “In addition, the vast surplus of higher-enriched fuel Iran was to get under the deal would have permitted some to be diverted to its bomb program”, claiming that taking uranium from the fuel rods for further enrichment to weapons-grade “is a straightforward engineering task requiring at most a few weeks.”
The truth of the latter assertion aside, which is contrary to most reports on the subject and contrary to the whole supposed point of the deal, what’s notable here is the assumption that Iran has a “bomb program”, despite, as was the case with Iraq, the total lack of credible evidence to support the claim.
It’s enough in the mainstream corporate media simply to take Iran’s “bomb program” as a matter of faith. Evidence is simply not required, and it’s considered perfectly acceptable by the editors of the New York Times and other mainstream sources to print assumptions expressed as statements of fact.
Again, for those who don’t suffer from selective amnesia and aren’t prone to intentional ignorance, the kind of reporting we saw from the Times, et al, prior to the invasion of Iraq might perhaps serve as a lesson about the nature of the role U.S. corporate media play in “manufacturing consent” from the American public for U.S. foreign policies.
Kuperman next begs the question, “if the deal would have aided Iran’s bomb program, why did the United States propose it, and Iran reject it?” Oblivious to the fallacies underlying the question, his own answer is that “The main explanation on both sides is domestic politics.”
Obama simply wanted to “blunt Republican criticism that his multilateral approach was failing” and was seeking a short-term gain.
Iran, for its part, “rejected” the deal that, by Kuperman’s own account, would have helped it towards the presumed goal of achieving the bomb because “such a headlong sprint” towards that goal “is the one step most likely to provoke an international military response that could cripple the bomb program before it reaches fruition.”
In other words, while Israel regularly threatens that it won’t wait much longer for the U.S. to come to some agreement with Iran before it launches an attack against Iran’s nuclear sites that Iran’s possession of the bomb would surely deter, Iran is willing pass up an offer that would constitute “a headlong sprint” towards such a deterrent because doing so could actually jeopardize the possibility of it obtaining the bomb, since if Iran accepted the deal ostensibly designed to prevent it from being able to enrich uranium to weapons-grade, Israel would be even more likely to bomb their nuclear sites even sooner than if it Iran just rejects the proposal.
Truly, Kuperman has a dizzying intellect.
“In sum,” writes Kuperman, “the proposal would not have averted proliferation in the short run, because that risk always was low, but instead would have fostered it in the long run – a classic example of domestic politics undermining national security.”
In sum, Iran is damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t.
Thus, the bombing of Iran is a foreseeable and unavoidable consequence of the present U.S. policy towards Iran. This consequence, admittedly, might very well be disastrous, but the obvious solution – to alter U.S. policy – is simply inconceivable. A change of policy is off the table. The resort to violence is not.
It’s worth noting that Kuperman acknowledges that the “risk” of Iran obtaining the bomb anytime soon (assuming it actually is seeking it) “always was low”. This is an interesting admission given the tendency of Western media to portray Iran as being practically right on the verge of being able to manufacture a nuclear weapon.
Returning to Iran’s “rejection of the deal”, Kuperman suggests the so-called “rejection” was “likewise propelled by domestic politics – including last June’s fraudulent elections and longstanding fears of Western manipulation.”
The “fears of Western manipulation” is a valid enough observation, the fears warranted enough. But again, as with the presumption of an Iranian bomb program, it’s enough in U.S. mainstream media to assert the claim of “fraudulent elections” as fact, despite the spurious nature of the evidence for fraud and many strong indications that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad legitimately won, including polls conducted by Western organizations both prior to the vote and since showing strong support for his presidency.
Like the “rejection” of the deal, Kuperman goes on to repeat what has become another unquestioned part of the official narrative. Suggesting that President Ahmadinejad “initially embraced the deal because he realized it aided Iran’s bomb program”, he adds, “But his domestic political opponents, whom he has tried to label as foreign agents, turned the tables by accusing him of surrendering Iran’s patrimony to the West.”
The possibility that Iran has not accepted the deal because it consists of an implicit rejection of their right to enrich uranium for themselves is, like the thought of changing U.S. policy, simply inconceivable.
The claim that Ahmadinejad “initially embraced the deal”, only to “renege”, has become standard. But the claim, though widely reported, cannot stand up to scrutiny based on the actual facts that have been reported about the talks. Every indication is that Ahmadinejad himself was open to the proposal, which he continues to be, on the condition that the West cease its threatening and aggressive posture towards Iran, and that the Iranian negotiators during the talks agreed with the proposal on principle, in anticipation of further talks, without formally accepting the deal – something, Iran has pointed out, the negotiators were given no authority to do.
This is part of a larger narrative in Western media in which the Iranian leadership is fractured and the regime in a state of crisis due to the enormity of the opposition to Ahmadinejad’s rule (part of the “fraudulent elections” narrative). While there are elements of truth to this story line, it’s chiefly a product of wishful thinking and the willingness of commentators to succumb to their own propaganda.
Take, for example, reporting on the massive gathering of people honoring the influential Grand Ayatollah Hussein-Ali Montazeri upon his death just last week. The opposition, we were told, of whom Montazeri was a leader, effectively took over the rally and was able to turn it into a massive anti-regime protest. Evidence for this was given in the form of amateur videos apparently from cell phones posted to opposition websites showing close-up shots of protesters shouting anti-regime slogans and holding up anti-regime banners.
Wider video shots of the actual funeral march, however, showed only an enormous crowd solemnly and respectfully marching along with the casket, holding up only photos of the cleric, not anti-regime banners. (The London Times, a leading outlet for anti-Iran propaganda, acknowledges that, with no journalists in the country due to restrictions on foreign media operations, much of its reporting comes from anti-regime elements, but insists that its sources are trustworthy, essentially a “just trust us” assertion that depends upon the questionable trustworthiness of the Times itself as a source for news on Iran.)
“Under such domestic pressure, Mr. Ahmadinejad reneged”, claims Kuperman, and then “threatened to enrich uranium domestically to the 20 percent level.” Notice how remarks from Iranian leaders that Iran would do what it has an “inalienable” right to do as a party to the NPT is characterized by the verb “threatened”.
The underlying and familiar assumption is that the rules are set by Washington, not by treaties comprising the body of international law. A dubious enough assumption, but unquestionable in the mainstream.
Iran’s “rejection” of the proposal shows that it “cannot make even temporary concessions on its bomb program”, and therefore, “Since peaceful carrots and sticks cannot work,” – (more the stick than the carrot) – “and an invasion would be foolhardy, the United States faces a stark choice: military air strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities or acquiescence to Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons.”
There are numerous and obvious other options: to assume that evidence should be required of an Iranian nuclear program rather than establishing confrontational and aggressive policies based on the assumption that this is so; to cease from violating international law with threats of military aggression; to cease from deliberately isolating and provoking Iran and instead meaningfully engaging the country in a dialogue that actually recognizes Iran’s rights under the NPT; to live up to the additional obligation under the NPT for the U.S. and other nuclear-armed countries to provide member nations with nuclear technology for peaceful purposes, etc.
But it is simply inconceivable that mainstream sources like the Times would actually find “fit to print” such elementary alternatives.
Without reading further, the conclusion Kuperman would like his readers to draw (and here the headline, “There’s Only One Way to Stop Iran”, is relevant) is clear: obviously, we cannot acquiesce to Iran acquiring nuclear weapons; therefore the only logical choice is to bomb Iran.
To underscore the unacceptability of Iran obtaining the bomb, Kuperman employs a theme that should not be unfamiliar to Americans: “If Iran acquired a nuclear arsenal,” he writes, “the risks would simply be too great that it could become a neighborhood bully or provide terrorists with the ultimate weapon”.
He draws just short of saying that if we don’t bomb Iran, the consequences could come “in the form of a mushroom cloud”, the familiar official refrain prior to the invasion of Iraq – which had no nuclear program at all, much less a weaponized one (Kuperman states further in the article that this fact “eluded American intelligence until after the 2003 invasion”. U.S. intelligence analysts, we are apparently supposed to believe, never bothered themselves to read IAEA reports noting that the agency had completely dismantled Iraq’s nuclear program by the mid-90s).
And so we must bomb Iran. Now, “admittedly, aerial bombing might not work.” It could “backfire” by “undermining Iran’s political opposition, accelerating the bomb program or provoking retaliation against American forces and allies in the region.”
All three are credible consequences widely predicted among analysts. Iran may not have a nuclear weapons program now, but if it is bombed, the likelihood that it would withdraw from the NPT, move its nuclear weapons program underground, and begin work towards obtaining a nuclear deterrent to further such attacks would be increased in no inconsiderable measure.
Again, Iraq provides a useful lesson. It was a direct consequence of Israel’s bombing of Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981, according to the U.S.’s own intelligence assessments, that prompted Saddam Hussein to begin pursuing his nuclear program clandestinely and also to begin his pursuit to obtain nuclear weapons.
Kuperman actually mentions the Israeli attack on Iraq’s Osirak reactor to support his assertion that bombing Iran – the very thing he advocates – might actually result in Iran “accelerating” efforts to acquire a nuclear weapon, but he obscures the obvious lesson to be had from it by suggesting an opposite and much more dubious conclusion: that the bombing slowed down, rather than accelerated, Saddam’s efforts to obtain the bomb.
In other words, bombing Iran might predictably and admittedly result in the very thing the bombing would ostensibly be aimed at preventing. The obvious corollary is that the bombing would not really be carried out in order to prevent that end.
Again, further lessons from Iraq are instructive. Consider that the war ostensibly fought to make the world safer from WMD and to fight terrorism resulted in the single most probable situation, had Iraq actually had WMD, under which Saddam Hussein would have provided them to terrorists. Again, that was the assessment of the U.S. intelligence community prior to the invasion.
Fortunately, Iraq didn’t have WMD and so this never occurred. But among the direct consequences of the war that did occur was a considerable increase in the threat of terrorism, again according to the U.S.’s own intelligence assessments. Whereas prior to the invasion, terrorist attacks within Iraq were virtually unknown, since the war began, the Iraq people continue to be plagued by terrorism as a direct consequence of the war.
The war, analysts have observed, served as a virtual billboard for terrorist organizations to recruit individuals willing to commit acts of violence in response to U.S. foreign policy – just as U.S. support for Israeli crimes against the Palestinians was a principle causal factor for the 9/11 attacks, if we are to believe the stated grievances of the originally accused mastermind of those attacks himself.
Again, the corollary is obvious: the official reasons for committing such acts of aggression against foreign nations, if we presume leading policymakers are sane and rational, cannot possibly be the actual rationale for them. That is perfectly elementary, albeit a virtual heresy to actually point out in respectable circles.
The war against Iraq had nothing to do with WMD or terrorism. Equally elementary is the observation that U.S. policy towards Iran has nothing to do with preventing it from obtaining nuclear weapons.
A further example is NATO’s bombing campaign in 1999 against Yugoslavia, which was ostensibly carried out to end atrocities on the ground, but which instead resulted in a sharp escalation of the violence – a consequence of the bombing predicted by the NATO leadership.
Kuperman also happens to mention that campaign, but, again, as with his mention of Osirak, arrives at other conclusions. Here, ignoring perhaps the most obvious lessons from his own argument and examples, his conclusion is that “Iran’s atomic sites might need to be bombed more than once to persuade Tehran to abandon its pursuit of nuclear weapons.”
Bombing once won’t work, so Iran must be bombed repeatedly. This logic is akin to arguing that since poking a snake with a stick once might cause it to strike, it must be poked continually in order to prevent it from being able to do so.
Similarly, Kuperman draws other lessons from Iraq. “If nothing else,” he writes, “the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have shown that the United States military can oust regimes in weeks if it wants to.”
Indeed. But if we set aside intentional ignorance, other relevant lessons just might perhaps be drawn. Kuperman, rather like the Wizard of Oz telling Dorothy and friends to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, goes to extraordinary efforts to deflect attention away from these, though.
Casting aside some of the most obvious lessons from Iraq, Kuperman, having acknowledged the, shall we say, “drawbacks” of his proposed solution, concludes simply that air strikes “are worth a try.”
One might note the rather cavalier attitude towards the use of violence against civilian targets for political ends (the very definition of “terrorism”), an incitement to violence that might raise questions about the nature of American intellectual culture, and the moral values (or lack thereof) of the intelligentsia, if we bother to ponder on the subject.
Kuperman, needless to say, doesn’t. Instead, he has just one “final question”: “who should launch the air strikes?”
The obvious answer is Israel, which “has shown an eagerness” to bomb Iran, the option “some hawks in Washington favor” in order “to avoid fueling anti-Americanism in the Islamic world” – a rationale of astounding ignorance; the Islamic world surely would recognize that were Israel to bomb Iran, it would be with a “green light” from Washington, a wink and a nod. But never mind that.
Kuperman continues, however, with “three compelling reasons that the United States itself should carry out the bombings”, the obvious fueling of anti-Americanism and other predicted and potentially disastrous consequences aside. The U.S. has better equipment to do the job, could more credibly threaten “to expand the bombing campaign” (that is, to repeatedly bomb the country), and it would be an opportunity to send “a strong warning” to other countries.
This latter rationale for the U.S. bombing of Iran provides a more credible explanation for what the actual purpose of such a bombing would be.
Kuperman, in line with the official rationale for keeping the military “option” “on the table” – an explicit rejection of principle that force should be used only as a last resort, as well as a direct violation of international law – suggests the “strong warning” would be for “other would-be proliferators”.
Proliferation being obviously of little to no consideration to U.S. policymakers – an elementary observation drawn even from the arguments provided here – “proliferators” clearly isn’t the right word here. “Nations seeking to act independently from and in opposition to Washington” might be more accurate.
“The sooner the United States takes action” – that is, the sooner it bombs Iran – “the better”, concludes Kuperman.
At stake is U.S. “credibility”, in the Mafioso sense of the word. Washington simply can’t have a country defying its orders. That’s the bottom line. That’s the underlying foundation of the policy of the Obama administration, carried over from the policy of his predecessor.
But, of course, just as the war in Iraq couldn’t be sold to the American public on the basis of its actual rationale, expanding U.S. global hegemony, neither can the true reasons for Washington’s policies towards Iran be mentioned. It just wouldn’t do.
Better, as with Iraq, to construct nonsensical arguments dependent upon an extraordinary level of intentional ignorance and consisting at the most fundamental level of claims for which there is little, if any, evidence to support.
Whether the American public has learned the more obvious and crucial lessons from Iraq and has the moral integrity to act on them remains to be seen. But what is for certain is that without massive public pressure on Washington to alter its Iran policy, the U.S. will maintain a course the consequences of which might very well prove, as with Iraq, to be disastrous.
Jeremy R. Hammond is the editor of Foreign Policy Journal (www.foreignpolicyjournal.com), a website providing news, analysis, and opinion commentary from outside the standard framework offered by government officials and the mainstream corporate media. His articles have also been featured in numerous other online publications. He can be reached at: Jeremy@foreignpolicyjournal.com
Jeremy R. Hammond is a regular columnist for Underground Dissident
America Needs Pakistan’s Help — Again (Part 2)
December 27, 2009 by admin
Filed under Jeff Gates
Be not deceived by Barack Hussein Obama’s middle name or by the fact that he spent several childhood years in Indonesia. His political career is a product of a Westside Chicago Ashkenazi network with roots that trace directly back to organized crime of the 1920s.
Top fundraiser Penny Pritzker traces her family lineage to grandfather Abe and great-grandfather Nicholas who served as lawyers for organized crime. She declined a nomination as Secretary of Commerce in the Obama Cabinet, a post typically offered top fundraisers. Her confirmation hearings could have proved a political embarrassment by reminding us of the suspect origins of “our” latest president.
Clinton White House counsel Abner Mikva aptly described this high-profile product of the Chicago Outfit as “the first Jewish president.” Plus his Vice President, only a heartbeat from the reins of power, is the reliably obsequious Joe “I am a Zionist” Biden.
For his Secretary of State, Obama appointed a presidential rival, Hillary Clinton, whose political career traces to the same source. After serving as First Lady in the presidency of Arkansas native Bill Clinton, she fled to New York to run for the U.S. Senate knowing she could not win an election—any election—in Arkansas where she is widely reviled.
By staking out extreme pro-Israeli positions, she joined New York Senator Charles Schumer as, in practical effect, the second Jewish Senator from a key electoral state long dominated by this trans-generational criminal syndicate.
The chiefs of staff for Barack and Michele Obama are both Ashkenazim from Chicago, long a center of foreign espionage. That fact was recently reconfirmed by Federal Bureau of Investigation translator Sibel Edmonds when, from FBI wiretaps, she documented the close working relationship between the Israel Lobby and U.S. officials with power over policy making in the Middle East, including Richard Perle, Wolfowitz understudy Douglas Feith and key members of Congress.
Earlier this month, a Chicago man whose father was a Pakistani diplomat was charged with involvement in planning “India’s 911.” In practical effect, the murder of 166 people in Mumbai, India’s financial center, accelerated the destabilization of Pakistan by drawing troops out of the western provinces for redeployment along the eastern border with India. See: What is Israel’s Role in the Destabilization of Pakistan?
Why Outside Help Is Required
The same syndicate working to destabilize Pakistan is also destabilizing the U.S.—from the inside. That’s why ordinary Americans need the assistance of Pakistanis and others outside the U.S. to restore some semblance of representative government.
The confidence with which this game theory aggression progressed in plain sight could be seen in the behavior of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, a key Zionist insider. Four days after 9-11 while in a principals’ meeting at Camp David, a presidential retreat outside Washington, he proposed that the U.S. invade Iraq. At that time, the intelligence did not point to Iraqi involvement and Osama bin Laden was thought to be hiding in a remote region of Afghanistan.
On that same day, San Diego FBI Special Agent Stephen Butler interrogated Iraqi Munther Ghazal at his home near San Diego to determine if he was funding Mel Rockefeller with whom Ghazal traveled to Baghdad in early 1997. After meeting for several days with Nidhal al-Hamdani, a top nuclear physicist with oversight of Iraq’s mothballed nuclear weapons program, Rockefeller returned to the U.S. with a practical proposal for removing Saddam Hussein without this war and without triggering a violent and destabilizing insurgency.
Dr Hamadan talking to Saddam Hussain
When regional specialists at the U.S. Department of State declined to meet with him, he traveled to Ottawa in April 1997 where he met with Middle East specialists in the Canadian government to ensure a written record would confirm there was an alternative to war in Iraq—six years before the invasion. Instead of debriefing him, FBI agents sought to discredit him.
Though FBI agents interviewed Munther Ghazal numerous times, they have yet to meet with Mel Rockefeller. Four packages sent to the Phoenix divisional office of the FBI documenting ongoing treason and criminal stalking were returned, marked “refused.”
FBI Special Agent Butler cashed checks and paid rent for the two San Diego-based hijackers who piloted planes into the World Trade Center towers. The same Iman who counseled Major Nidal Hasan (with FBI knowledge) before he was transferred to Fort Hood—where he went on a shooting spree—alsoFax counseled the San Diego-based hijackers—likewise with FBI knowledge.
As of December 18, 2009, no one from either federal law enforcement or national security had debriefed Mel Rockefeller—eight years after 9-11. Had he been engaged in good faith in early 1997 after his return from Baghdad or in early 2001 after his return from Jakarta, the facts suggest that 9-11 might well have been prevented. Good faith engagement after 9-11 could have prevented the invasion of Iraq. Instead, extraordinary steps were taken to discredit him.
When President George H.W. Bush declined to invade Baghdad to remove Saddam Hussein during the 1991 Gulf War, Pentagon Under Secretary for Policy Paul Wolfowitz imposed a No-Fly Zone in northern Iraq. By the time that the invasion of March 2003 began, the Israeli Mossad had more than 100 agents deployed for a decade in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.
Intelligence reports of Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda were also traced to Mosul—reports that proved false. Mosul again emerged in November 2004 as a center of the insurgency that destabilized Iraq. That reaction precluded the speedy exit of coalition forces promised in Congressional testimony by senior war-planner Wolfowitz.
In the lead-up to the invasion, Wolfowitz assured policy-makers of a swift and welcome regime-change whose $50 billion cost would be recovered from the proceeds of Iraqi oil. Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz has since projected the total cost will exceed $3,000 billion, all of it borrowed. That total, 60 times the original estimate, includes $700 billion in interest paid on war-related debt.
See: A Closer Look at Israel’s Role in Terrorism
Ft. Hood: “Death By Political Correctness”?
Fort Hood Tragedy: The Real Story of the Terrorist “Mad Doctor Hasan”
Next in the series: Game Theory Warfare
Jeff Gates is author of Guilt By Association, Democracy at Risk and The Ownership Solution.
Visit his website at: www.criminalstate.com.
Jeff Gates is a regular columnist for Underground Dissident
America’s Terrorist Ally
December 12, 2009 by admin
Filed under Jeff Gates
A Closer Look at Israel’s Role in Terrorism…
“It’s very good….Well, it’s not good, but it will generate immediate sympathy (for Israel)”.
Response of former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when asked on September 11, 2001 what the attacks meant for U.S.-Israeli relations
Game theory war-planners rely on mathematical models to anticipate and shape outcomes with staged provocations. For the agent provocateur, the reactions to a provocation—as well as the reactions to those reactions—thereby become predictable within an acceptable range of probabilities.
With ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan poised to expand to Iran and Pakistan, it is time to take a closer look at how conflicts are catalyzed—by way of deception.
When Israeli game theorist Robert J. Aumann received the 2005 Nobel Prize in economic science, he conceded from Jerusalem, “the entire school of thought that we have developed here in Israel” has turned “Israel into the leading authority in this field.” A professor at the Center for the Study of Rationality at Hebrew University, Aumann’s Nobel lecture, titled “War and Peace,” expounded on the rationality of war.
With a well-modeled provocation, a target’s anticipated reaction can even become a weapon in the aggressor’s arsenal. In response to the provocation of 9-11, how difficult was it to foresee that the U.S. would deploy its military to avenge that attack? With U.S. intelligence “fixed” by well-placed insiders around a predetermined goal, how difficult was it to anticipate that the reaction to 9-11 could be redirected to wage war in Iraq?
The emotional component of a provocation plays a key role in game theory warfare. With the nationally televised mass murder of 3,000 people, a state of shock, grief and outrage made it easier for Americans to believe that a known Evil Doer in Iraq was responsible—regardless of the facts.
For false beliefs to displace real facts requires mental preconditioning so that a targeted population can be persuaded to put their faith in fictions. That conditioning enhances the probability of a successful deception. Those who deceived the U.S. to invade Iraq in March 2003 began a decade beforehand to lay the “mental threads” and make the requisite mental associations to advance that agenda.
Notable among those threads was the 1993 publication in Foreign Affairs of a theme-setting article by Harvard University professor Samuel Huntington. By the time his analysis appeared in book-length form in 1996 as The Clash of Civilizations, more than 100 think tanks were prepared to promote it. The result created a widely touted narrative—a thematic storyline—supporting a “clash consensus” five years before 9-11 provided a plausible rationale for war.
Also published in 1996 under the guidance of Richard Perle was A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm (i.e., Israel). A member since 1987 of the U.S. Defense Policy Board, this self-professed Zionist became its chairman in 2001.
As an adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Perle’s Pentagon advisory post provided a powerful insider position to shape the national security mindset around the removal of Saddam Hussein, a key theme of A Clean Break—released five years before 9-11. That same year Netanyahu addressed a joint session of Congress at the invitation of Newt Gingrich, the Christian Zionist Speaker of the House.
Murders, books, articles, think tanks and well-placed insiders are common components in a “probabilistic” model deployed by war-planning game theorists. Lawmakers are also a customary ingredient. They provide credibility and a facade of legitimacy—a critical element when inducing a nation to war with phony intelligence fixed around a preset agenda.
That role was eagerly filled by Senators John McCain, Joe Lieberman, a Jewish Zionist from Connecticut, and Jon Kyl, a Christian Zionist from Arizona, when they co-sponsored the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998. By promoting Israel’s 1996 agenda for Securing the Realm, their legislation laid yet another mental thread in the public mindset by calling for the ouster of Saddam Hussein—three years before 9-11.
The legislation also appropriated $97 million to promote their agenda. Distracted by mid-term Congressional elections and impeachment proceedings catalyzed by a well-timed presidential affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, Bill Clinton signed that Zionist agenda into law in October 1998—4-1/2 years before a U.S.-led invasion removed the Iraqi leader.
After 9-11, McCain and Lieberman became inseparable travel companions and irrepressible advocates for the invasion of Iraq. Striking a presidential pose aboard the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt in January 2002, McCain—a son and grandson of admirals—laid another mental thread when he waved an admiral’s cap and proclaimed, alongside Lieberman, “On to Baghdad.”
By Way of Deception
The confidence with which this game theory strategy progressed in plain sight could be seen in the behavior of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, another Zionist insider. Four days after 9-11 while in a principals’ meeting at Camp David, he proposed that the U.S. invade Iraq. At that time, the intelligence did not point to Iraqi involvement and Osama bin Laden was thought to be hiding in a remote region of Afghanistan.
On that same day, San Diego FBI Special Agent Stephen Butler interrogated Iraqi Munther Ghazal at his home near San Diego to determine if he was funding Mel Rockefeller, an American with whom Ghazal traveled to Baghdad in early 1997. After meeting for several days with a top nuclear physicist with oversight of Iraq’s mothballed nuclear weapons program, Rockefeller returned to the U.S. with a practical proposal for removing Saddam Hussein without this war and without triggering an insurgency.
When regional specialists at the U.S. Department of State would not meet with him, he traveled to Ottawa in April 1997 where he met with Middle East specialists in the Canadian government to ensure a written record was made to confirm there was an alternative to war in Iraq—six years before the invasion. Instead of debriefing him, FBI agents sought to discredit him. Though FBI agents interviewed Ghazal many times, they have yet to meet with Mel Rockefeller.
Agent Butler cashed checks and paid rent for the two San Diego-based hijackers who piloted planes into the World Trade Center towers. The same Iman counseling Major Nidal Hasan (with FBI knowledge) before he was transferred to Fort Hood also counseled the San Diego-based hijackers—with FBI knowledge. As of December 1, 2009, no one from the FBI or national security had debriefed Mel Rockefeller—eight years after 9-11.
See: Ft. Hood: “Death By Political Correctness”?
and Ft. Hood Tragedy: The Real Story of the Terrorist “Mad Doctor Hasan”
When President George H.W. Bush declined to invade Baghdad and remove Saddam Hussein during the 1991 Gulf War, Pentagon Under Secretary for Policy Paul Wolfowitz imposed a No-Fly Zone in northern Iraq. By the invasion of March 2003, the Israeli Mossad had agents deployed for a decade in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.
Intelligence reports of Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda were also traced to Mosul—reports that proved false. Mosul again emerged in November 2004 as a center of the insurgency that destabilized Iraq. That reaction precluded the speedy exit of coalition forces promised in Congressional testimony by senior war-planner Wolfowitz in the lead-up to the invasion.
An Inside Job?
The common pro-Israeli source of the phony intelligence that induced war in Iraq has yet to be acknowledged even though intelligence experts agree that deception on such a scale required a decade to plan, staff, pre-stage, orchestrate and—until now—cover up. The leaders of the 9-11 Commission conceded they were thwarted by Commission members adamantly opposed to hearing testimony on the hijackers’ motivation for 9-11: the U.S.-Israeli relationship.
The fictions reported as facts by mainstream media included Iraqi WMD, Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda, Iraqi meetings with Al Qaeda in Prague, Iraqi mobile biological weapons laboratories and Iraqi purchases of “yellowcake” uranium from Niger. Only the last claim was conceded as bogus prior to the invasion.
Only after the war began were the balance of the claims disclosed as false, flawed or outright fabricated. An attempt to punish former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Joe Wilson for his exposure of the phony yellowcake account led to a federal conviction of vice-presidential chief of staff Lewis Libby, another well-placed Zionist insider.
The multi-decade consistency of agent-provocateur fact patterns suggests that this game theory-modeled warfare includes the Israeli provocation that catalyzed the Second Intifada. An intifada is an uprising or, literally, a “shaking off” of an oppressor. The Second Intifada dates from September 2000 when Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon led an armed march to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount—one year before 9-11.
After a year of calm during which Palestinians believed that Israel was sincere about peace, suicide bombings recommenced. As Sharon conceded, his march was meant to demonstrate Israeli control over a site considered holy by Muslims worldwide. In response to this second failed attempt at “shaking off” Israeli domination, Sharon and Netanyahu observed that only when Americans “feel our pain” would they understand the plight of the victimized Israelis.
These Likud Party leaders commented that the requisite empathy (“feel our pain”) would require a weighted body count of 4,500 to 5,000 Americans lost to terrorism—the initial estimate of those who died in the twin towers of the World Trade Center—one year later.
In other words, only with pain could we identify with the Israelis. Does that mean that only with a mass murder could we be induced to respond with our military to advance their agenda? Was the U.S. response mathematically modeled at the Center for the Study of Rationality? Seven months after 9-11, Benjamin Netanyahu gave a speech in a U.S. Senate office building where he was introduced by Senators Jon Kyl and Joe Liebermn
American Valkyrie?
When successful, game theory warfare strengthens the agent provocateur while leaving the target discredited and depleted by the anticipated reaction. By game theory standards, 9-11 was a strategic success because the U.S.—by its response—was widely criticized for waging war on false pretenses. Only in hindsight did a deceived public realize that Iraq had nothing to do with that mass murder. However, that invasion had everything to do with “securing the realm.”
Our response (predictably) triggered a deadly insurgency with devastating consequences for Iraqis, the U.S. and a “coalition of the willing” led to war by a successfully duped U.S. From a game theory perspective, that insurgency was a predictable reaction in a nation populated by three long-feuding sects: Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds. A violent invasion led by a nation closely allied with Jewish nationalists only further fueled the flames of violence and extremism—another foreseeable outcome.
Until the U.S.-led invasion, peace was maintained by an unsavory dictator and former U.S. ally who was rebranded an Evil Doer in the lead-up to war. As the cost in blood and treasure from our “liberation” of Iraq expanded, the U.S. became overextended militarily, financially and diplomatically.
The sectarian violence unleashed in Iraq is precisely what Messrs. Rockefeller and Ghazal were cautioned against in early 1997 should Saddam Hussein be removed suddenly and violently. The 1.3 million Iraqi deaths from war-related causes exceeds the worst of Saddam Hussein’s atrocities. As any competent game theory war-planner knew, the strategic winner in this war was certain to be Tehran as the U.S. neutralized its key foe—and is now urged by Israel to wage war on Iran.
As the U.S.—the primary target of this deception—emerged in the foreground, the agent provocateur faded into the background. But only after catalyzing dynamics that steadily drained the U.S. of credibility, resources and resolve. This “probabilistic” Israeli victory also ensured widespread cynicism, insecurity, distrust and disillusionment along with a steadily declining capacity to defend our real interests.
Meanwhile the American public came under a system of oversight and surveillance packaged and sold as “homeland security.” This ominously titled operation includes rhetorical echoes of a WWII-era “fatherland” featuring a domestic security force completely alien to U.S. traditions. It is not yet clear whether this new agency was established to protect Americans. Or whether it is meant to shield from Americans those responsible for deceiving us to wage their wars.
In January 2003, Secret Service Agent Richard Sierze interrogated Mel Rockefeller at his home in Fresno, California after he sent an email to Florida Governor Jeb Bush. The email said, in effect, that if the governor’s brother (President George Bush) did not interview him on a public record prior to invading Iraq, he would do his best to ensure that lawful means were deployed to see the president executed for treason by a firing squad.
When questioned by Sierze, Rockefeller offered to have the agent speak with Dr. Glenn Olds, an adviser to four presidents, his senior adviser since 1994 and a former U.N. Ambassador who assisted him in entering Iraq through Jordon at a time when Americans were prohibited from traveling there. Sierze declined.
He also repeated his intent to see the president executed for treason and insisted that he be charged and taken before a federal magistrate to present evidence that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and that an alternative to war had been available since early 1997. Agent Sierze declined his demand to be arraigned in a U.S. Federal District Court—seven weeks before the invasion.
Agent Sierze should be interviewed to see if, in retrospect, he agrees that—had this advice been followed—the war in Iraq may well have been prevented. To date, no one with line responsibility has interviewed Mel Rockefeller on a public record. Why? The answer to that question would reveal those responsible for this ongoing deception.
The victims of these serial deceptions, including the families of those murdered in November at Fort Hood, may have a wrongful death cause of action against those with line responsibility who aided these operations by failing to engage the Rockefeller record in a timely fashion.
Foreseeable Futures
By manipulating the shared mindset, skilled game theory war-planners can wage wars on multiple fronts with minimal resources. One proven strategy: Pose as an ally of a well-armed nation predisposed to deploy its military in response to a mass murder.
In this case, the result destabilized Iraq while creating (predictable) crises that could be exploited to greater strategic advantage by expanding the conflict to Iran, another Israeli goal announced in A Clean Break—seven years before the invasion of Iraq.
Today’s mathematically model-able outcomes undermined U.S. national security by discrediting our leadership, degrading our financial condition and disabling our political will. In game theory terms, this devastation was perfectly predictable—within an acceptable range of probabilities.
Pakistan is primed to emerge as the next battleground for game theory war-planners. When India, an ally of Israel, became the nation honored by the Obama administration’s first state dinner, that occasion gave reason for concern due to the dynamics already at work in the background.
See “What Is Israel’s Role in the Destabilization of Pakistan?”
In the asymmetry that typifies modern warfare, those who are few in number have no alternative when pursuing an expansionist agenda but to wage their wars by way of deception. To maintain its perceived status as a perennial victim, Israeli aggression must proceed non-transparently. Its only option is to operate with duplicitous means, including leveraging the power of its insider influence to advance an agenda from the shadows.
Thus the strategic necessity that this extremist enclave befriend the U.S.—with the intent to betray that friendship to advance its geopolitical goals. Thus the strategic need to create a relationship of trust with a post-WWII super power—in order to defraud us. How else could Colonial Zionists wage their wars except with our military? How else could Jewish nationalists induce our aggression absent the widely shared belief that Israel is not an aggressor but a victim?
Winning Wars from the Inside Out
Game theory war-planners manipulate the shared mental environment by shaping the perceptions and impressions that become consensus opinions. With a combination of well-timed crises, fixed intelligence and a complicit media, policy-makers can be induced to support a predetermined agenda—not because lawmakers are Evil Doers but because the public mindset has been pre-conditioned to respond to manipulated thoughts, emotions and beliefs.
Without the mass murder of 9-11, would America’s credibility be in tatters and its creditworthiness in jeopardy? By steadily displacing facts with false beliefs, those duplicitous few-within-the-few amplify the impact of their deceit. By their steady focus on the mental environment, game theory war-planners can defeat an opponent with vastly superior resources.
Today’s intelligence wars are waged in plain sight and under the cover of shared beliefs. By manipulating consensus opinion, psy-ops wars can be won from the inside out by inducing a targeted populace to freely choose the very forces that imperil their freedom.
Thus in the Information Age the disproportionate power wielded by those with outsized influence in media, popular culture, think tanks, academia and politics—domains where Zionist influence is pervasive not only in the U.S. but also in other nations induced to war on false pretenses.
Germany offers a case study in manipulation of the public mindset in plain sight and under the banner of a free press. In 2003, Zionist media mogul Haim Saban acquired the second largest media conglomerate in Germany. Why? As Saban investment banker Steve Rattner explained his client’s motivation: “Because Germany is important to Israel.” Or, as Saban concedes: “I have only one issue and that issue is Israel.”
By 2005, Saban had succeeded in electing Angela Merkel as German Chancellor. She quickly became the European Union’s most reliable and forceful advocate for Israel. By November 2009, she was prepared to sponsor in Berlin an unprecedented joint session of the German and Israeli governments. Following his political success in Germany, Saban acquired in 2007 a controlling interest in Univision, a Latino-focused network serving the fastest-growing voting bloc in the U.S.
Media manipulation serves as an essential force-multiplier to wage intelligence wars from the periphery or, as with Haim Saban, in plain sight. At the operational core of such psy-ops are game theory war-planners skilled at personality profiling and masterful at anticipating responses to staged provocations and then incorporating those responses into their arsenal.
In the case of Iraq, our (mathematically) foreseeable response to 9-11 led, in practical effect, to Israel’s deployment of our military to invade Iraq. For aggressors adept at psy-ops warfare, facts are only an inconvenience to be overcome when waging war by way of deception. Thus the key role played by consensus-shapers featured in mainstream media outlets who focus not on informing the public but on mental conditioning.
For targeted populations dependent on facts and informed consent to protect their freedom and preserve the rule of law, such treachery poses the greatest possible threat. Yet even now many Americans believe that Israel is not an aggressor but a victim and even an ally despite facts confirming a multi-decade pattern of expansionist nationalism and geopolitical deception.
Adhering to an Enemy
The U.S. is far less secure than before 9-11. Tel Aviv clearly intends to continue its serial provocations as evidenced by its ongoing expansion of settlements and its continuing blockade of Gaza. Israel has shown no willingness to negotiate in good faith. With few exceptions, Barack Obama has named as senior advisers either Zionists are those known to be strongly pro-Israeli.
The greatest threat to world peace is not Islam. The most fundamental threat that underlies all others is our “special relationship” with a skilled agent provocateur. Without U.S. support for an enclave of nuclear-armed religious extremists, the common source of this threat could long ago have been identified and steps taken to ensure its containment.
In the same way that lengthy pre-staging was required to induce the U.S. to invade Iraq, a similar strategy is now underway to persuade the U.S. to invade Iran or support an attack by Israel. Pakistan is also now on the agenda of those marketing The Clash narrative with its vision of a perpetual war against “militant Islam.” Similar mental conditioning is again at work, including the high profile branding of the requisite Evil Doer: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinajad.
From its outset, the Zionist enterprise sought supremacy in the Middle East. To date, its alliance with the U.S. has enabled the deployment of American military might in pursuit of goals set by Jewish nationalists more than a half-century before a Christian Zionist U.S. president was induced to extend nation-state recognition. Harry Truman made that fateful decision despite his fears that Israel would become what Zionist lobbyists assured him it would not become—and what it immediately became: a racist and theocratic state.
Only one nation had the means, motive, opportunity and stable nation state intelligence required to take the U.S. to war in the Middle East while making it appear that Islam—not Israel—is the problem. When a long-deceived American public—especially the U.S. military—grasps the common source of this devastating duplicity, the response will shift the geopolitical landscape. The facts suggest that “sympathy for Israel” is not among the probable reactions.
If Barack Obama continues to cater to these extremists, this Nobel peace laureate can rightly be blamed when the next attack features the usual orgy of evidence pointing to a pre-staged Evil Doer. Should another mass murder occur, that incident may well be traceable to the U.S.-Israeli relationship and to the failure of our policy-makers to protect America—and world peace—from this enemy within.
Jeff Gates is author of Guilt By Association, Democracy at Risk and The Ownership Solution.
Visit his website at: www.criminalstate.com.
Jeff Gates is a regular columnist for Underground Dissident
Yeswecanistan
December 9, 2009 by admin
Filed under William Blum
All the crying from the left about how Obama “the peace candidate” has now become “a war president” … Whatever are they talking about? Here’s what I wrote in this report in August 2008, during the election campaign:
We find Obama threatening, several times, to attack Iran if they don’t do what the United States wants them to do nuclear-wise; threatening more than once to attack Pakistan if their anti-terrorist policies are not tough enough or if there would be a regime change in the nuclear-armed country not to his liking; calling for a large increase in US troops and tougher policies for Afghanistan; wholly and unequivocally embracing Israel as if it were the 51st state.
Why should anyone be surprised at Obama’s foreign policy in the White House? He has not even banned torture, contrary to what his supporters would fervently have us believe. If further evidence were needed, we have the November 28 report in the Washington Post: “Two Afghan teenagers held in U.S. detention north of Kabul this year said they were beaten by American guards, photographed naked, deprived of sleep and held in solitary confinement in concrete cells for at least two weeks while undergoing daily interrogation about their alleged links to the Taliban.” This is but the latest example of the continuance of torture under the new administration.
But the shortcomings of Barack Obama and the naiveté of his fans is not the important issue. The important issue is the continuation and escalation of the American war in Afghanistan, based on the myth that the individuals we label “Taliban” are indistinguishable from those who attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, whom we usually label “al Qaeda”. “I am convinced,” the president said in his speech at the United States Military Academy (West Point) on December 1, “that our security is at stake in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is the epicenter of violent extremism practiced by al Qaeda. It is from here that we were attacked on 9/11, and it is from here that new attacks are being plotted as I speak.”
Obama used one form or another of the word “extremist” eleven times in his half-hour talk. Young, impressionable minds must be carefully taught; a future generation of military leaders who will command America’s never-ending wars must have no doubts that the bad guys are “extremists”, that “extremists” are by definition bad guys, that “extremists” are beyond the pale and do not act from human, rational motivation like we do, that we — quintessential non-extremists, peace-loving moderates — are the good guys, forced into one war after another against our will. Sending robotic death machines flying over Afghanistan and Pakistan to drop powerful bombs on the top of wedding parties, funerals, and homes is of course not extremist behavior for human beings.
And the bad guys attacked the US “from here”, Afghanistan. That’s why the United States is “there”, Afghanistan. But in fact the 9-11 attack was planned in Germany, Spain and the United States as much as in Afghanistan. It could have been planned in a single small room in Panama City, Taiwan, or Bucharest. What is needed to plot to buy airline tickets and take flying lessons in the United States? And the attack was carried out entirely in the United States. But Barack Obama has to maintain the fiction that Afghanistan was, and is, vital and indispensable to any attack on the United States, past or future. That gives him the right to occupy the country and kill the citizens as he sees fit. Robert Baer, former CIA officer with long involvement in that part of the world has noted: “The people that want their country liberated from the West have nothing to do with Al Qaeda. They simply want us gone because we’re foreigners, and they’re rallying behind the Taliban because the Taliban are experienced, effective fighters.” 1
The pretenses extend further. US leaders have fed the public a certain image of the insurgents (all labeled together under the name “Taliban”) and of the conflict to cover the true imperialistic motivation behind the war. The predominant image at the headlines/TV news level and beyond is that of the Taliban as an implacable and monolithic “enemy” which must be militarily defeated at all costs for America’s security, with a negotiated settlement or compromise not being an option. However, consider the following which have been reported at various times during the past two years about the actual behavior of the United States and its allies in Afghanistan vis-à-vis the Taliban, which can raise questions about Obama’s latest escalation: 2
The US military in Afghanistan has long been considering paying Taliban fighters who renounce violence against the government in Kabul, as the United States has done with Iraqi insurgents.
President Obama has floated the idea of negotiating with moderate elements of the Taliban. 3
US envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, said last month that the United States would support any role Saudi Arabia chose to pursue in trying to engage Taliban officials. 4
Canadian troops are reaching out to the Taliban in various ways.
A top European Union official and a United Nations staff member were ordered by the Kabul government to leave the country after allegations that they had met Taliban insurgents without the administration’s knowledge. And two senior diplomats for the United Nations were expelled from the country, accused by the Afghan government of unauthorized dealings with insurgents. However, the Afghanistan government itself has had a series of secret talks with “moderate Taliban” since 2003 and President Hamid Karzai has called for peace talks with Taliban leader Mohammed Omar.
Organizations like the International Committee of the Red Cross as well as the United Nations have become increasingly open about their contacts with the Taliban leadership and other insurgent groups.
Gestures of openness are common practice among some of Washington’s allies in Afghanistan, notably the Dutch, who make negotiating with the Taliban an explicit part of their military policy.
The German government is officially against negotiations, but some members of the governing coalition have suggested Berlin host talks with the Taliban.
MI-6, Britain’s external security service, has held secret talks with the Taliban up to half a dozen times. At the local level, the British cut a deal, appointing a former Taliban leader as a district chief in Helmand province in exchange for security guarantees.
Senior British officers involved with the Afghan mission have confirmed that direct contact with the Taliban has led to insurgents changing sides as well as rivals in the Taliban movement providing intelligence which has led to leaders being killed or captured.
British authorities hold that there are distinct differences between different “tiers” of the Taliban and that it is essential to try to separate the doctrinaire extremists from others who are fighting for money or because they resent the presence of foreign forces in their country.
British contacts with the Taliban have occurred despite British Prime Minister Gordon Brown publicly ruling out such talks; on one occasion he told the House of Commons: “We will not enter into any negotiations with these people.”
For months there have been repeated reports of “good Taliban” forces being airlifted by Western helicopters from one part of Afghanistan to another to protect them from Afghan or Pakistani military forces. At an October 11 news conference in Kabul, President Hamid Karzai himself claimed that “some unidentified helicopters dropped armed men in the northern provinces at night.” 5
On November 2, IslamOnline.net (Qatar) reported: “The emboldened Taliban movement in Afghanistan turned down an American offer of power-sharing in exchange for accepting the presence of foreign troops, Afghan government sources confirmed. ‘US negotiators had offered the Taliban leadership through Mullah Wakil Ahmed Mutawakkil (former Taliban foreign minister) that if they accept the presence of NATO troops in Afghanistan, they would be given the governorship of six provinces in the south and northeast … America wants eight army and air force bases in different parts of Afghanistan in order to tackle the possible regrouping of [the] Al-Qaeda network,’ a senior Afghan Foreign Ministry official told IslamOnline.net.” 6
There has been no confirmation of this from American officials, but the New York Times on October 28 listed six provinces that were being considered to receive priority protection from the US military, five which are amongst the eight mentioned in the IslamOnline report as being planned for US military bases, although no mention is made in the Times of the above-mentioned offer. The next day, Asia Times reported: “The United States has withdrawn its troops from its four key bases in Nuristan [or Nooristan], on the border with Pakistan, leaving the northeastern province as a safe haven for the Taliban-led insurgency to orchestrate its regional battles.” Nuristan, where earlier in the month eight US soldiers were killed and three Apache helicopters hit by hostile fire, is one of the six provinces offered to the Taliban as reported in the IslamOnline.net story.
The part about al-Qaeda is ambiguous and questionable, not only because the term has long been loosely used as a catch-all for any group or individual in opposition to US foreign policy in this part of the world, but also because the president’s own national security adviser, former Marine Gen. James Jones, stated in early October: “I don’t foresee the return of the Taliban. Afghanistan is not in imminent danger of falling. The al-Qaeda presence is very diminished. The maximum estimate is less than 100 operating in the country, no bases, no ability to launch attacks on either us or our allies.” 7
Shortly after Jones’s remarks, we could read in the Wall Street Journal: “Hunted by U.S. drones, beset by money problems and finding it tougher to lure young Arabs to the bleak mountains of Pakistan, al-Qaida is seeing its role shrink there and in Afghanistan, according to intelligence reports and Pakistan and U.S. officials. … For Arab youths who are al-Qaida’s primary recruits, ‘it’s not romantic to be cold and hungry and hiding,’ said a senior U.S. official in South Asia.” 8
From all of the above is it not reasonable to conclude that the United States is willing and able to live with the Taliban, as repulsive as their social philosophy is? Perhaps even a Taliban state which would go across the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which has been talked about in some quarters. What then is Washington fighting for? What moves the president of the United States to sacrifice so much American blood and treasure? In past years, US leaders have spoken of bringing democracy to Afghanistan, liberating Afghan women, or modernizing a backward country. President Obama made no mention of any of these previous supposed vital goals in his December 1 speech. He spoke only of the attacks of September 11, al Qaeda, the Taliban, terrorists, extremists, and such, symbols guaranteed to fire up an American audience. Yet, the president himself declared at one point: “Al Qaeda has not reemerged in Afghanistan in the same numbers as before 9/11, but they retain their safe havens along the border.” Ah yes, the terrorist danger … always, everywhere, forever, particularly when it seems the weakest.
How many of the West Point cadets, how many Americans, give thought to the fact that Afghanistan is surrounded by the immense oil reserves of the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea regions? Or that Afghanistan is ideally situated for oil and gas pipelines to serve much of Europe and south Asia, lines that can deliberately bypass non-allies of the empire, Iran and Russia? If only the Taliban will not attack the lines. “One of our goals is to stabilize Afghanistan, so it can become a conduit and a hub between South and Central Asia so that energy can flow to the south …”, said Richard Boucher, Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs in 2007. 9
Afghanistan would also serve as the home of American military bases, the better to watch and pressure next-door Iran and the rest of Eurasia. And NATO … struggling to find a raison d’être since the end of the Cold War. If the alliance is forced to pull out of Afghanistan without clear accomplishments after eight years will its future be even more in doubt?
So, for the present at least, the American War on Terror in Afghanistan continues and regularly and routinely creates new anti-American terrorists, as it has done in Iraq. This is not in dispute even at the Pentagon or the CIA. God Bless America.
Although the “surge” failed as policy, it succeeded as propaganda.
They don’t always use the word “surge”, but that’s what they mean. Our admirable leaders and our mainstream media that love to interview them would like us to believe that escalation of the war in Afghanistan is in effect a “surge”, like the one in Iraq which, they believe, has proven so successful. But the reality of the surge in Iraq was nothing like its promotional campaign. To the extent that there has been a reduction in violence in Iraq (now down to a level that virtually any other society in the world would find horrible and intolerable, including Iraqi society before the US invasion and occupation), we must keep in mind the following summary of how and why it “succeeded”:
- Thanks to America’s lovely little war, there are many millions Iraqis either dead, wounded, crippled, homebound or otherwise physically limited, internally displaced, in foreign exile, or in bursting American and Iraqi prisons. Many others have been so traumatized that they are concerned simply for their own survival. Thus, a huge number of potential victims and killers has been markedly reduced.
- Extensive ethnic cleansing has taken place: Sunnis and Shiites are now living much more than before in their own special enclaves, with entire neighborhoods surrounded by high concrete walls and strict security checkpoints; violence of the sectarian type has accordingly gone down.
- In the face of numerous “improvised explosive devices” on the roads, US soldiers venture out a lot less, so the violence against them has been sharply down. It should be kept in mind that insurgent attacks on American forces following the invasion of 2003 is how the Iraqi violence all began in the first place.
- For a long period, the US military was paying insurgents (or “former insurgents”) to not attack occupation forces.
- The powerful Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr declared a unilateral cease-fire for his militia, including attacks against US troops, that was in effect for an extended period; this was totally unconnected to the surge.
We should never forget that Iraqi society has been destroyed. The people of that unhappy land have lost everything — their homes, their schools, their neighborhoods, their mosques, their jobs, their careers, their professionals, their health care, their legal system, their women’s rights, their religious tolerance, their security, their friends, their families, their past, their present, their future, their lives. But they do have their surge.
The War against Everything and Everyone, Endlessly
Nidal Malik Hasan, the US Army psychiatrist who killed 13 and wounded some 30 at Fort Hood, Texas in November reportedly regards the US War on Terror as a war aimed at Muslims. He told colleagues that “the US was battling not against security threats in Iraq and Afghanistan, but Islam itself.” 10 Hasan had long been in close contact with Anwar al-Awlaki, a US-born cleric and al Qaeda sympathizer now living in Yemen, who also called the US War on Terror a “war against Muslims”. Many, probably most, Muslims all over the world hold a similar view about American foreign policy.
I believe they’re mistaken. For many years, going back to at least the Korean war, it’s been fairly common for accusations to be made by activists opposed to US policies, in the United States and abroad, as well as by Muslims, that the United States chooses as its bombing targets only people of color, those of the Third World, or Muslims. But it must be remembered that in 1999 one of the most sustained and ferocious American bombing campaigns ever — 78 days in a row — was carried out against the Serbs of the former Yugoslavia: white, European, Christians. Indeed, we were told that the bombing was to rescue the people of Kosovo, who are largely Muslim. Earlier, the United States had come to the aid of the Muslims of Bosnia in their struggle against the Serbs. The United States is in fact an equal-opportunity bomber. The only qualifications for a country to become an American bombing target appear to be: (a) It poses a sufficient obstacle — real, imagined, or, as with Serbia, ideological — to the desires of the empire; (b) It is virtually defenseless against aerial attack.
Notes
- Video on Information Clearinghouse ↩
- For the news items which follow if not otherwise sourced, see:
- The Independent (London), December 14, 2007
- Daily Telegraph (UK) December 26, 2007
- The Globe and Mail (Toronto) May 1, 2008
- BBC News, October 28, 2009 ↩
- New York Times, March 11, 2009 ↩
- Kuwait News Agency, November 24, 2009 ↩
- Pakistan Observer (Islamabad daily), October 19, 2009; The Jamestown Foundation (conservative Washington, DC think tank), “Karzai claims mystery helicopters ferrying Taliban to north Afghanistan”, November 6, 2009; Institute for War and Peace Reporting (London), “Helicopter rumour refuses to die”, October 26, 2009 ↩
- IslamOnline, “US Offers Taliban 6 Provinces for 8 Bases“, November 2, 2009↩
- Washington Times, October 5, 2009, from a CNN interview ↩
- Wall Street Journal, October 13, 2009 ↩
- Talk at the Paul H. Nitze School for Advanced International Studies, Washington, DC, September 20, 2007. ↩
- Christian Science Monitor, November 17, 2009 ↩
William Blum is the author of:
- Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2
- Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower
- West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir
- Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire
Portions of the books can be read, and signed copies purchased, at www.killinghope.org
Email to bblum6@aol.com
William Blum is a regular columnist for Underground Dissident
The Rise Of The US Surveillance State
November 26, 2009 by admin
Filed under Brother Nathanael Kapner, Featured
CENTRALIZING POWER INTO THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH is yet another ploy of the powerful Zionist-Jewish network in America to consolidate their influence-peddling into a single power bloc.
The Jew-bought President Obama in his approach to National Security Agency surveillance, CIA renditions, drone assassinations, and military detention, has embraced the expanded executive powers championed by his predecessor, George W Bush and his Zionist-Jew enablers.
We should not be surprised then, when, in the midst of our fabricated “crisis society,” advanced surveillance methods developed in our recent wars migrate from Baghdad, Kandahar, and Tel Aviv to our own neighborhoods – ALL by Executive order with Congressional (a record number of Jews are now in Congress) approval.
US wars abroad have been living laboratories for the undermining of a free society at home, a process which has brought covert Counter-intelligence penetration to the homeland.
Wartime Geospatial intelligence mapping, unmanned reconnaissance & spy drones, portable wireless data transfer by satellite to a central biometric data base, microchip-tracking, facial/body imaging & movement profiling, electronic eavesdropping, iris scans, advanced camera technology, and disinformation tactics translate into an invasive internal security apparatus that is now being utilized in the War on Terror’s latest target, American citizens.
And Zionist Jews, both on Capitol Hill, the White House, US government agencies, and the myriads of Jewish organizations & lobbies, are plotting the destruction of our once free society and the throttling of the dissenting voice of White Gentile Americans through their beloved Jew-created agency, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with its security technology imported from US wars abroad.
Homeland Security/NSA now has a wiretapping program in place, code-named STELLAR WIND, interfaced with Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FINCEN); the Pentagon’s Counter-Intelligence Field Activity (CIFA)/Threat & Local Observation Notice (TALON); and FEMA database of American citizens, code-named MAIN CORE. All began operating in concert in 2002 to monitor anti-war groups such as the Quakers, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), Greenpeace, and alternative-news journalists. Wayne Madsen Report Here.
THE JEWS BEHIND HOMELAND SECURITY SPYING
US HOMELAND SECURITY LAUNCHED its most frightening spy maneuver in the discharge of Predator-B drones to patrol the North Dakota-Manitoba border that Congressional leaders, (the same ones who disavowed the recent Goldstone Report on Israeli war crimes), called America’s “weakest link.”
US border official, Michael Kostelnik, when describing “future drone operations” during the launching ceremonies, said that in these “dangerous times it’s more important than ever for both countries to know who and what is crossing the border.”
But who launches a $10 million drone to watch out for cows crossing the America-Canada border? The Jew-inspired US Homeland Security spy-on-you apparatus that’s who. See Future Drone Operations Here.
In conjunction with the US Justice Department in 2002, Homeland Security, led by the Talmudic Jew, Michael Chertoff, launched Operation TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System) which planned for millions of postal employees, American truckers, letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility employees and others to aid the government by spying on their fellow Americans.
Such citizen surveillance sparked strong protests, forcing Homeland Security and Talmudic Jew Senator Joseph Lieberman, who chaired the powerful Senate Government Operations Committee at the time & who opposed the patriotic protesters, to bury the program.
Lieberman, through Zionist TOTAL CONTROL of our Jew-bought Congress, who is currently Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, (how did a Talmudic Jew whose loyalties are to his own tribe NOT Americans become Chairman?), and Zionist Jew, Carl Levin, who is an Associate member of DHS and Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, (how did a Zionist Jew whose loyalties are to his own tribe NOT Americans become Chairman?), are now vigorously pushing the Patriot Act Extension Act. The current Act with all of its intrusions on our liberties expires the end of 2009.
The key sponsor of the Bill, is, of course, a Zionist Jew — Senator Dianne Feinstein — a member of the House Judiciary Committee and the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. (How did a Zionist Jew whose loyalties are to her own tribe NOT Americans become Chairman?)
The Bill allows for greater freedom of “government roving wiretaps to monitor suspects who may switch cell phone numbers” and to track “lone wolves” who “act on behalf of foreign powers.” (Jews like Lieberman, Levin, and Feinstein, are the “wolves” who act “on behalf of a foreign power” known as the State of Israel.) And, of course, Obama, pathological liar that he is, who promised to abolish the Patriot Act, supports the Jew-inspired Bill.
CYBER SECURITY & FREEDOM-HATING JEWS
IN A BID TO SEIZE CONTROL OF THE INTERNET, the freedom-hating Jew, Congressional Representative Jane Harman introduced with full support of Abraham Foxman of the Anti Defamation League, a Zionist “thought crime” legislation known as the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act.
The ACT proposed a national commission (made up of Jews of course) to “combat the threat posed by homegrown terrorists.” The Bill passed the House by an overwhelming 404 to 6 vote before stalling, and then dying, in a Senate slightly more mindful of civil liberties.
Harman’s legislation focused on “cyber security,” that is, Zionist control of the Internet, our last bastion of free speech, stating in the Bill in typical Zionist lying fashion:
“The Internet has aided in facilitating violent radicalization, ideologically based violence, and the homegrown terrorism process in the US by providing access to broad and constant streams of terrorist-related propaganda to American citizens.” View Harman’s Bill Here.
SENATOR JOSEPH LIEBERMAN announced his plans on October 30, 2009 for a “cyber security czar” to operate out of the White House in co-ordination with Homeland Security which Lieberman chairs. Lieberman’s agenda will give Zionists control of the Internet by manipulating with their billions of Jewish dollars only “one” White House “czar,” rather than numerous department heads. The following captures the essence of Lieberman’s plans:
“We need to establish a Cyber Security Coordinator within the Executive Office of the President. This position would have the authority to monitor civilian networks. Currently, Homeland Security has this responsibility by Executive Order but it lacks the direct cooperation from the White House to succeed.” View Entire Story Here.
Lieberman is acting in concert with the pending Cybersecurity Bill S. 773 which will give Obama “emergency powers” to control the Internet. The Bill grants Obama the authority to shut down all online traffic by taking control of private networks in the event of a “Cyber-Emergency.” The problem is, a “Cyber-Emergency” is not defined.
Zionist Jews fear the Internet. Why? Because it is the only venue that exposes their lies, their agendas, and their quest for world domination. They MUST be stopped!
http://www.realzionistnews.com/?p=463
Brother Nathanael Kapner is a “Street Evangelist” who grew up as a Jew and is now an Orthodox Christian.
You can visit his website at Real Zionist News. He can be reached at: bronathanael@yahoo.com
Brother Nathanael Kapner is a regular columnist for Underground Dissident
The Real Story Of The Terrorist “Mad Doctor Hasan”
November 18, 2009 by admin
Filed under Jeff Gates
Was Fort Hood really the target of a terrorist attack? The first clue to the real culprit emerged when Senator Joe Lieberman sought to blame this mass murder on the U.S. military. As chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security, he promised hearings on how the Pentagon protects its personnel from domestic terrorists. Will Lieberman, an avowed Zionist, use this incident to insist that the U.S. do more to protect Jewish nationalists? More importantly, what do his concerns mean for homeland security?
Joe Lieberman has an ally in Janet Napolitano, Secretary of Homeland Security. In April, this former Arizona governor warned about potential terrorism from U.S. troops returning from deployment in the Middle East. Though roundly attacked, she defended her position, calling it an “assessment not an accusation.” When Army Major Nidal Hasan killed U.S. troops on the nation’s largest military base, was this evidence of “militant Islam”? Or did this military psychiatrist snap under pressure while treating returning vets on a base averaging ten suicides a month? Is there an undisclosed agenda behind those seeking to portray this act as the work of “Islamo fascists”?
To answer these questions requires a grasp of how “assets” are deployed by those skilled at waging war by way of deception. An asset is someone who has been profiled in sufficient depth that-when placed in a pre-staged time, place and circumstance-the person can be relied on to behave consistent with their profile.
Best Story Wins
Since the end of the Cold War, the predominant geopolitical narrative has been The Clash of Civilizations and its military counterpart: The Global War on Terrorism. How better to advance that storyline than to kill American soldiers even before they leave the U.S.? What’s the motive?
Imagine if the intelligence that induced the U.S. to war was proven “fixed” around a preset goal. What if the common source of that treachery is poised to become transparent? If you were complicit in this deception (an act of treason), how would you obscure those facts? How would you sustain a “Muslim terrorist” narrative once the intelligence “facts” are exposed as pre-staged fictions meant to advance an undisclosed Israeli agenda?
For those marketing The Clash premise, Dr. Hasan’s psychotic break was a blessing. At Family Security Matters, President Carol Taber describes this incident as “the Ft. Hood terrorist attack” by an “Islamist gunman.” Editor Pam Meister promotes “the shocking TRUTH (sic) behind these attacks so that we might ward off those yet to come.” Executive Vice-President Linda Cohen, who also serves as a trustee of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), offers advice certain to appeal to Lieberman and Napolitano:
“No one is safe now. Not you, not the military, not your children, not office workers nor subway riders, nor anyone who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Is there a precedent for combining aberrant behavior and a mass murder to advance a preset agenda? Do you recall the sniper attacks around Washington, D.C. in October 2002?
Those murders commenced one day before debate began on Senate Resolution 46 proposed by Joe Lieberman to authorize the use of U.S. forces in Iraq. In the immediate aftermath of 9-11, Lieberman and Arizona Senator John McCain urged that the U.S. target not Al Qaeda but Iraq.
The nation’s capital became a city under siege when those attacks created insecurity and heightened anxiety as serial murders left ten dead and three wounded over a 10-day period. Those random shootings transformed the terror of 9-11 into a personal reality for Washington residents while Lieberman deployed phony intelligence to promote the invasion of a nation that had no hand in the mass murder of 9-11.
Assets and Sayanim
Once again: assets are profiled personalities catalyzed to act out known dysfunctions in ways that are advantageous based on the time, place and circumstances of their behavior. The totality of the facts suggests that Dr. Nidal Hasan may well have been such an asset.
Assets are typically identified, profiled and developed over lengthy periods of time. Their potential to act out a known personality disorder is held in reserve in the same way that a military commander holds troops in reserve for deployment at an opportune time.
How is an asset developed in plain sight and then tasked at the right moment? Only a careful investigation can identify those influences particular to Dr. Hasan, including what decisions led to his transfer to Ft. Hood and the circumstances there that triggered his behavior.
News reports to date are consistent with this analysis. For instance, his name appears as a participant for public briefings at the Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington University. As a registrant in the Obama presidential transition task force (“Thinking Anew-Security Priorities for the Next Administration”), he would have interacted with a team of nine “task force briefers.” Judging from their surnames, at least seven were Ashkenazim.
As a combat-stress psychiatrist, Dr. Hasan dealt daily with troubled vets at Walter Reed Hospital where the most grievously wounded are sent to recover, many of them amputees, disfigured or otherwise handicapped for life. While coping with that vicarious trauma, he was taunted for his Muslim beliefs and harassed for his Middle Eastern heritage even though he was born, raised and educated in the U.S..
Despite clear indications of internal turmoil, including repeated attempts to resign his commission, he was dispatched to a post known for its huge population of combat-stressed vets. He arrived anticipating orders to deploy to Afghanistan, realizing his worst nightmare. Meanwhile a commander-in-chief promising change made matters even worse in the region.
Israeli psy-ops rely on an extensive cadre of sayanim (Hebrew for volunteers) who are shielded from legal culpability by being told only enough to perform their narrow role when tasked to assist with operations on an as-needed basis. Otherwise, they gather and report useful intelligence. Thus the presence of sayanim throughout the U.S. government. A sayan may well have identified Nidal Hasan as a potential asset who could be developed and, as here, deployed.
At What Cost?
With evidence emerging that Israelis and pro-Israelis were the source of the sham intelligence that induced the U.S. to war, those responsible are scrambling to cover their tracks. Americans will soon realize what the facts confirm: Jewish nationalists deceived the U.S. in order to deploy our military to pursue Israel’s expansionist agenda for the Middle East.
Americans will soon awaken to the cost of this entangled alliance in blood and treasure. U.S. deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan have topped 6000 with well over one million Iraqis and Afghanis dead from the wars and from violence unleashed by those who manipulated this alliance to induce an invasion.
That brings us back to the uncomfortable but essential question: Was Homeland Security created to protect the U.S.? Or was it created to protect those who deceived the U.S.? Was this incident another example of the murderous misdirection deployed to pit Americans against Muslims to advance unacknowledged Zionist goals?
By shifting blame to the military, do Lieberman and Napolitano intend to use federal law enforcement to contain the outraged reaction of an informed public and an awakened military? Was Dr. Nidal Hasan a terrorist? Or was he a troubled pawn in an ongoing psy-ops campaign meant to revive a narrative that-like the fixed intelligence-was losing credibility?
Both the false intelligence and the anti-Muslim narrative feature a theme of fomenting hate and intolerance. On October 28th, President Obama signed into law ADL’s model hate crime legislation. Will that federal law now be deployed by Homeland Security to silence those who make transparent the common source of this deception?
How much longer before a long-deceived public-both in the U.S. and abroad-takes the steps required to ensure that never again is duplicity allowed to operate on such a scale?
Jeff Gates is author of Guilt By Association, Democracy at Risk and The Ownership Solution.
Visit his website at: www.criminalstate.com.
Jeff Gates is a regular columnist for Underground Dissident
The Nobel Prize, the Brand and the President
October 11, 2009 by admin
Filed under Gilad Atzmon
Imprisoned by the most dangerous Zionist guards…
People out there are divided whether it was a right decision to award Obama with a Nobel prize for peace. In fact, almost everyone around me is outraged, what ‘peace’ they ask, what about Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, Palestine? We are tired of promises they insist. The Nobel Prize committee on its part ‘highlighted Obama’s effort to support international bodies, build ties with the Muslim world, act in favour of nuclear disproliferation and fight Climate change’. Those who are unimpressed with Obama stress that the above is just ‘empty rhetoric’, nothing but ‘hot air’. “We want to see action, we demand facts on the ground”.
While Obama’s critics raise some valid points, they for some reason seem to fail to grasp the distinction between ‘Obama the Brand’ and ‘Obama the President’. The ‘Brand’ stands for hope and humanism. It tends to say the right things on the right occasions. It is ethically aware. It employs reason occasionally and it even manages to talk sense often enough. ‘Obama the Brand’ is, no doubt, a refreshing event in the Western political arena.
‘Obama the President’ is a different story altogether: It struggles, it fails to deliver, it fails to keep promises. It says things and does the opposite. ‘Obama the President’ is a politician and politicians are conditionally untrustworthy.
The failure of Obama to merge the ‘Brand’ and the ‘President’ into a continuous ethical reality is indeed a colossal tragedy. But it is not Just Obama’s tragedy, it is actually our own disaster. As much as the ‘Brand’ manages to spread some cheering humanist and universal statements, the ‘President’ is actually imprisoned by some of the most dangerous Zionist guards. ‘Obama the President’ has a big open bill to pay to the people who gave him the keys to his current white dwelling. In other words he has many Zionists to appease and another bunch of rabid Sayanim* that have managed to invade his office. To a certain extent, Obama’s failure to establish an adequate continuum between the ‘brand’ and the ‘president’ is due to the unfeasibility of a continuum between humanism and Zionism.
Unfortunately, Within the Western liberal discourse there is no obvious political means to confront the Zionist lobbies, and its infiltrators within the American administrations or any other Western democracy. Catastrophically enough, there is no practical or political means to stop the Wolfowitzes from taking us into another illegal genocidal war. Like in America, no one in British politics or media is courageous enough to elaborate on the close ties between Blair’s cabinet and his party’s leading fund raisers at the time when Britain was taken into a Zionist illegal war in Iraq. The West in general and the English Speaking Empire in particular have lost their survival instinct. It would be right to argue that within the post WWII Liberal discourse we lack the political apparatus to defend ourselves from the infiltration of Zionist foreign interests. By the time we are convinced that we have managed to silence one Wolfowitz, five Emanuel Rahms pop out in the background.
This is exactly where the Nobel Peace Prize comes into play. Rather than waiting for Obama to launch another Zionist war, rather than letting him nuke Iran just to make the Jewish state a ‘safer place’, they, the Nobel Prize committee have hopefully pulled him in: they gave him their biggest trophy in a very early stage of his presidential term. They basically bounded him to his ‘Brand’ i.e. hope, humanism, harmony and reconciliation. They told him, “listen to us Mr President, here is your trophy, once you accept it you may have to say NO to your Ziocons at home, for people with a peace medal cannot launch wars.” Obama may have to find some other policies to pursue peace rather than killing Muslims. Time will tell whether the Nobel Committee gamble justified itself. For the mean time we may have to agree that the Nobel Committee offered Obama an opportunity to bond the ‘Brand’ and the ‘President’ into a unified, dignified and ethical stand. Let’s hope that he takes the challenge.
As far as the Nobel Committee is concerned, this is probably the most clever thing to do. The committee should have thought about it a long time ago. Rather than waiting for too long, they should have awarded Blair and Bush in the immediate beginning of their terms. This could have saved the lives of millions of Iraqis and Afghans. They should also have considered awarding Shimon Peres with a Nobel Prize already in the 1950’s, this may have prevented him from building the Dimona nuclear reactor and later transforming it into a leading Zio-terminator. Henry Kissinger? Very much the same, they should have award him the peace medal on his Brit Mila (circumcision) ceremony when he was just 8 days old. This could have saved the lives of millions.
Nobel Prize for Peace should be used as a preventative means. Rather than wasting it on tedious humanists and boring peace lovers who do nothing but making the world nicer, we should better employ it in a preventative method. In current world affairs it should be used as an induced commitment to peace so we can avert the risk of Zionist wars.
If I read it correctly, the Nobel Peace Prize is there to help ‘Obama the Brand’ withstand the pressure posed on ‘Obama the President’ by his Ziocon ring.
Gilad Atzmon was born in Israel in 1963 and had his musical training at the Rubin Academy of Music, Jerusalem (Composition and Jazz). As a multi-instrumentalist he plays Soprano, Alto, Tenor and Baritone Saxes, Clarinet and Flutes. His album Exile was the BBC jazz album of the year in 2003. He has been described by John Lewis on the Guardian as the “hardest-gigging man in British jazz”. His albums, of which he has recorded nine to date, often explore political themes and the music of the Middle East.
Until 1994 he was a producer-arranger for various Israeli Dance & Rock Projects, performing in Europe and the USA playing ethnic music as well as R&R and Jazz.
Coming to the UK in 1994, Atzmon recovered an interest in playing the music of the Middle East, North Africa and Eastern Europe that had been in the back of his mind for years. In 2000 he founded the Orient House Ensemble in London and started re-defining his own roots in the light of his emerging political awareness. Since then the Orient House Ensemble has toured all over the world. The Ensemble includes Eddie Hick on Drums, Yaron Stavi on Bass and Frank Harrison on piano & electronics.
Also, being a prolific writer, Atzmon’s essays are widely published. His novels ‘Guide to the perplexed’ and ‘My One And Only Love’ have been translated into 24 languages.
Gilad Atzmon is a regular columnist for Underground Dissident
Visit his web site at http://www.gilad.co.uk
Anti-Empire Report
October 1, 2009 by admin
Filed under William Blum
Ridding The World of the Sickness of Pacifism…
Picture the scene: Afghanistan, two hijacked tankers filled with highly inflammable fuel, surrounded by a crowd of Afghans eager to syphon off some for free … What’s the last thing you want to do? Right — drop bombs on the tankers. That’s what a German military commander signaled an American drone airplane to do September 4. Kaboom!! At least 100 human beings incinerated. This incident has led to a lot of controversy in Germany, for Article 26 of Germany’s post-war Grundgesetz (Basic Law/Constitution) states: “Acts tending to and undertaken with intent to disturb the peaceful relations between nations, especially to prepare for a war of aggression, shall be unconstitutional. They shall be made a criminal offense.”
But NATO (aka the United States) can take satisfaction in the fact that the Germans have put their silly pacifism aside and acted like real men, trained military killers; although prior to this incident the Germans had engaged in some aerial and ground combat, there hadn’t been such a dramatic and publicized taking of civilian lives. Deutschland now has more than 4,000 soldiers in Afghanistan, the third largest contingent in the country after the US and Britain, and at home they’ve just finished building a monument to fallen members of the Bundeswehr (Federal Armed Forces), founded in 1955; 38 members (so far) have surrendered their young lives in Afghanistan.
In January 2007 I wrote in this report about how the US was pushing Germany in this direction; that circumstances at that time indicated that Washington might be losing patience with the pace of Germany’s submission to the empire’s needs. Germany declined to send troops to Iraq and sent only non-combat forces to Afghanistan, not quite good enough for the Pentagon warriors and their NATO allies. Germany’s leading news magazine, Der Spiegel, reported the following:
At a meeting in Washington, Bush administration officials, speaking in the context of Afghanistan, berated Karsten Voigt, German government representative for German-American relations: “You concentrate on rebuilding and peacekeeping, but the unpleasant things you leave to us.” … “The Germans have to learn to kill.”
A German officer at NATO headquarters was told by a British officer: “Every weekend we send home two metal coffins, while you Germans distribute crayons and woollen blankets.” Bruce George, the head of the British Defence Committee, said “some drink tea and beer and others risk their lives.”
A NATO colleague from Canada remarked that it was about time that “the Germans left their sleeping quarters and learned how to kill the Taliban.”
And in Quebec, a Canadian official told a German official: “We have the dead, you drink beer.” 1
Ironically, in many other contexts since the end of World War II the Germans have been unable to disassociate themselves from the image of Nazi murderers and monsters.
Will there come the day when the Taliban and Iraqi insurgents will be mocked by “the Free World” for living in peace?
The United States has also engaged in a decades-long effort to wean Japan away from its post-WW2 pacifist constitution and foreign policy and set it back on the righteous path of again being a military power, only this time acting in coordination with US foreign policy needs.
“Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.
“In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.” — Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution, 1947, words long cherished by a large majority of the Japanese people.
In the triumphalism of the end of the Second World War, the American occupation of Japan, in the person of General Douglas MacArthur, played a major role in the creation of this constitution. But after the communists came to power in China in 1949, the United States opted for a strong Japan safely ensconced in the anti-communist camp. It’s been all downhill since then. Step by step … MacArthur himself ordered the creation of a “national police reserve”, which became the embryo of the future Japanese military … Visiting Tokyo in 1956, US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles told Japanese officials: “In the past, Japan had demonstrated her superiority over the Russians and over China. It was time for Japan to think again of being and acting like a Great Power.” 2… various US-Japanese security and defense cooperation treaties, which, for example, called on Japan to integrate its military technology with that of the US and NATO … the US supplying new sophisticated military aircraft and destroyers … all manner of Japanese logistical assistance to the US in its frequent military operations in Asia … repeated US pressure on Japan to increase its military budget and the size of its armed forces … more than a hundred US military bases in Japan, protected by Japanese armed forces … US-Japanese joint military exercises and joint research on a missile defense system … the US Ambassador to Japan, 2001: “I think the reality of circumstances in the world is going to suggest to the Japanese that they reinterpret or redefine Article 9.” 3 … under pressure from Washington, Japan sent several naval vessels to the Indian Ocean to refuel US and British warships as part of the Afghanistan campaign in 2002, then sent non-combat forces to Iraq to assist the American war as well as to East Timor, another made-in-America war scenario … Secretary of State Colin Powell, 2004: “If Japan is going to play a full role on the world stage and become a full active participating member of the Security Council, and have the kind of obligations that it would pick up as a member of the Security Council, Article Nine would have to be examined in that light.” 4…
One outcome or symptom of all this can perhaps be seen in the 2005 case of Kimiko Nezu, a 54-year-old Japanese teacher, who was punished by being transferred from school to school, by suspensions, salary cuts, and threats of dismissal because of her refusal to stand during the playing of the national anthem, a World War II song chosen as the anthem in 1999. She opposed the song because it was the same one sung as the Imperial Army set forth from Japan calling for an “eternal reign” of the emperor. At graduation ceremonies in 2004, 198 teachers refused to stand for the song. After a series of fines and disciplinary actions, Nezu and nine other teachers were the only protesters the following year. Nezu was then allowed to teach only when another teacher was present. 5
Which brings us to Italy, the remaining member of the World War Two Tripartite, or Axis. Article 11 of the 1948 Italian Constitution says in part: “Italy rejects war as a means for settling international controversies and as an instrument of aggression against the freedoms of others peoples.” 6
But Washington laid claim early to Italy’s post-war soul. In 1948 the United States all but took over the Italian election campaign to insure the Christian Democrats (CD) defeat of the Communist-Socialist candidate. (And the US remained an electoral force in Italy for the next three decades maintaining the CD in power. The Christian Democrats, in turn, were loyal Cold-War partners.) 7 In 1949, the US saw to it that Italy became a founding member of NATO. This was not seen as a threat to Article 11 because NATO has always painted itself as a “defensive” organization, even in 1999 when it carried out a 78-day bombing of Yugoslavia as both Italy and Germany supplied military aircraft and a NATO air base at Aviano, Italy served as the main hub for the daily bombing runs. For decades, Italy has been the home of US military bases and airfields used by Washington in one military adventure after another from Europe to Asia.
There are now some 3,000 Italian soldiers in Afghanistan performing a variety of services which enables the United States and NATO to engage in their bloody warfare. And 15 Italian soldiers have also lost their lives in that woeful land. The pressure on Italy, as on Germany, to become full-fledged combatants in Afghanistan and elsewhere is unrelenting from their NATO comrades. 8
The Berlin Wall — Another Cold War Myth
Within a few weeks many of the Western media can be expected to turn on their propaganda machines to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, November 9, 1989. All the Cold War clichés about The Free World vs. Communist Tyranny will be trotted out and the simple tale of how the wall came to be will be repeated: In 1961, the East Berlin communists built a wall to keep their oppressed citizens from escaping to West Berlin and freedom. Why? Because commies don’t like people to be free, to learn the “truth”. What other reason could there have been?
First of all, before the wall went up thousands of East Germans had been commuting to the West for jobs each day and then returned to the East in the evening. So they were clearly not being held in the East against their will. The wall was built primarily for two reasons:
- The West was bedeviling the East with a vigorous campaign of recruiting East German professionals and skilled workers, who had been educated at the expense of the Communist government. This eventually led to a serious labor and production crisis in the East. As one indication of this, the New York Times reported in 1963: “West Berlin suffered economically from the wall by the loss of about 60,000 skilled workmen who had commuted daily from their homes in East Berlin to their places of work in West Berlin.” 9
- During the 1950s, American coldwarriors in West Germany instituted a crude campaign of sabotage and subversion against East Germany designed to throw that country’s economic and administrative machinery out of gear. The CIA and other US intelligence and military services recruited, equipped, trained and financed German activist groups and individuals, of West and East, to carry out actions which ran the spectrum from terrorism to juvenile delinquency; anything to make life difficult for the East German people and weaken their support of the government; anything to make the commies look bad.
It was a remarkable undertaking. The United States and its agents used explosives, arson, short circuiting, and other methods to damage power stations, shipyards, canals, docks, public buildings, gas stations, public transportation, bridges, etc; they derailed freight trains, seriously injuring workers; burned 12 cars of a freight train and destroyed air pressure hoses of others; used acids to damage vital factory machinery; put sand in the turbine of a factory, bringing it to a standstill; set fire to a tile-producing factory; promoted work slow-downs in factories; killed 7,000 cows of a co-operative dairy through poisoning; added soap to powdered milk destined for East German schools; were in possession, when arrested, of a large quantity of the poison cantharidin with which it was planned to produce poisoned cigarettes to kill leading East Germans; set off stink bombs to disrupt political meetings; attempted to disrupt the World Youth Festival in East Berlin by sending out forged invitations, false promises of free bed and board, false notices of cancellations, etc.; carried out attacks on participants with explosives, firebombs, and tire-puncturing equipment; forged and distributed large quantities of food ration cards to cause confusion, shortages and resentment; sent out forged tax notices and other government directives and documents to foster disorganization and inefficiency within industry and unions … all this and much more. 10
Throughout the 1950s, the East Germans and the Soviet Union repeatedly lodged complaints with the Soviets’ erstwhile allies in the West and with the United Nations about specific sabotage and espionage activities and called for the closure of the offices in West Germany they claimed were responsible, and for which they provided names and addresses. Their complaints fell on deaf ears. Inevitably, the East Germans began to tighten up entry into the country from the West.
Let’s not forget that Eastern Europe became communist because Hitler, with the approval of the West, used it as a highway to reach the Soviet Union and wipe out Bolshevism forever. After the war, the Soviets were determined to close down the highway.
In 1999, USA Today reported: “When the Berlin Wall crumbled, East Germans imagined a life of freedom where consumer goods were abundant and hardships would fade. Ten years later, a remarkable 51% say they were happier with communism.” 11
About the same time a new Russian proverb was born: “Everything the Communists said about Communism was a lie, but everything they said about capitalism turned out to be the truth.”
Health care: ignoring the huge red elephant in the room
In the frenzied search of recent months for a better way of delivering health care to the American people, the American media has often discussed health-care systems in other countries, particularly Europe. Usually, little, if anything, is mentioned about Cuba’s system, where everyone is covered, for everything, where pre-existing conditions do not matter, and no patient pays for anything; i.e., nothing at all. The reason the Cuban system is seldom mentioned in the mass media is probably that it’s kind of embarrassing that this otherwise poor country, laboring under the awful yoke of (choke, gasp) socialism, can deliver health care that most Americans can only dream of.
Now we have a new book by T.R. Reid, former correspondent for the Washington Post and commentator for National Public Radio. It’s called “The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care”. Reid does not avoid giving some credit to the Cuban system, but he makes sure that the reader knows that he’s not taken in by any commie propaganda. He refers to the Cuban government as “a totalitarian Communist fiefdom”, and adds: “In every country (except, perhaps, a police state like Cuba) there is one group of citizens who are not bound by the unified health care system: the rich.” 12 Thus, the fact that Cuba has an egalitarian health care system is made to seem like something negative, something one could expect to find only in a police state.
In discussing the World Health Organization’s giving Cuba high marks for fairness in its system, Reid points out: “Of course, fairness and equal treatment extend only so far; when Fidel Castro himself fell ill in 2007, medical experts were flown in from Europe to treat him.” 13 Aha! I knew it! Americans, and not just the right-wing crazies, would never accept a medical system where everyone got completely free care for all ailments if the president ever got any kind of special treatment. Would they? We could at least ask them.
Speaking of the right-wing crazies, there was a report in the New York Times which said: “Tomorrow night, getting right into the thick of the battle,” the president will “carry his message to the people in a nationwide television and radio speech” fighting for enactment of his health reform bill, which opponents tagged as “socialized medicine” and “an entering wedge for the takeover of private medicine by the federal government.” The president was John F. Kennedy, the program was Medicare, the Times story was published on May 20, 1962. Despite the speech, the effort failed until passage in 1964. 14
And speaking of the totalitarian communist socialist fascist Cuban police-state dictatorship, Mr. Reid and others might be interested in an article I wrote which demonstrates that during the period of its revolution, Cuba has enjoyed one of the very best human-rights records in all of Latin America.
But how to get past a lifetime of conditioning and reach the American mind with that message? At the recent convention of the AFL-CIO, the country’s leading labor organization, there was a very progressive resolution put forth calling for the right of all Americans to travel to Cuba and for an end to the US embargo against the island nation. But at the end of the resolution the authors reminded us that they’re Americans, calling upon Cuba “to release all political prisoners”. 15
To appreciate what’s wrong with that resolution one must understand the following: The United States is to the Cuban government like al Qaeda is to Washington, only much more powerful and much closer. Since the Cuban revolution, the United States and anti-Castro Cuban exiles in the US have inflicted upon Cuba greater damage and greater loss of life than what happened in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. Cuban dissidents typically have had very close, indeed intimate, political and financial connections to American government officials, particularly in Havana through the United States Interests Section. Would the US government ignore a group of Americans receiving funds from al Qaeda and/or engaging in repeated meetings with known leaders of that organization? In the past few years, the American government has arrested a great many people in the US and abroad solely on the basis of alleged ties to al Qaeda, with a lot less evidence to go by than Cuba has had with its dissidents’ ties to the United States, evidence gathered by Cuban double agents. Virtually all of Cuba’s “political prisoners” are such dissidents.
Notes
- Der Spiegel (Germany), November 20, 2006, p.24 ?
- Los Angeles Times, September 23, 1994 ?
- Washington Post, July 18, 2001 ?
- BBC, August 14, 2004 ?
- Washington Post, August 30, 2005 ?
- Wikipedia: “Article 11 of Italian Constitution” ?
- William Blum, “Killing Hope”, chapters 2 and 18 ?
- For further discussion of US opposition to Post-WW2 Axis pacifism, see “Former Axis Nations Abandon Post-World War II Military Restrictions“ ?
- New York Times, June 27, 1963, p.12 ?
- See Killing Hope, p.400, note 8, for a list of sources for the details of the sabotage and subversion ?
- USA Today, October 11, 1999, p.1 ?
- p.234 of Reid’s book ?
- Ibid., p.150-1 ?
- Washington Post, September 9, 2009 ?
- PDF of resolution ?
William Blum is the author of:
- Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2
- Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower
- West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir
- Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire
Portions of the books can be read, and signed copies purchased, at www.killinghope.org
Email to bblum6@aol.com
William Blum is a regular columnist for Underground Dissident
The ADL Thought Police
September 21, 2009 by admin
Filed under Jeff Gates
When sociology Professor Bill Robinson stared down the Anti-Defamation League, it looked like a victory for academic freedom. Yet was it? Robinson was portrayed as an anti-Semite because he sent an email to students featuring a photo essay critical of Israel that had circulated online for weeks. While University of California administrators dallied, the ADL and its international network turned up the heat—signaling academics worldwide they could be next.
It looked like progress when the faculty at UC Santa Barbara urged “changes in procedures to avoid improprieties and abuses in the future….” But was it? By then the ADL campaign had created the intended chilling effect. This silencing campaign was featured news for five time-critical months while a newly elected U.S. president was reassessing U.S.-Israeli relations. How can anyone calculate the full extent of the damage—not only to Robinson’s reputation and to the stature of the University of California but also to national security?
So where’s the victory? Clearly Robinson deserves acclaim for resisting pressure as the ADL deployed its most seasoned operatives, including Marvin Heir, a rabbi at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. Only an investigation can identify who mobilized the donor community that threatened UCSB Chancellor Henry Yang with the withdrawal of funds.
What was the motivation for this high profile intimidation campaign? Was the ADL driven simply by the discomfort that two students voiced on their receipt of his email criticizing Israeli policy? Or did the ADL network have its sights on a broader strategic goal?
Facts have since proven it was largely pro-Israelis who fixed the intelligence that manipulated the U.S. to invade Iraq. That same network has now mobilized to expand that war to Iran. A key barrier: the global condemnation of Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza. How does Tel Aviv limit the public relations fallout? On what leverage points should Israel focus to contain the censure while continuing to obscure Israel and pro-Israelis as the common source of this manipulation?
Aiding an enemy within?
The Founders faced a similar challenge during the Revolutionary War. How could they distinguish patriots from those loyal to a foreign nation? Knowing the vast risks that accompany betrayal, they lowered the evidentiary standard for treason. Guilt still required proof beyond a reasonable doubt but a conviction only required evidence of “adhering” to an enemy or giving them “aid and comfort.” To remove all doubt about the gravity of this capital offense, they even included those relaxed standards in Article III of the U.S. Constitution.
Fast-forward two centuries to the Information Age and consider the challenge of distinguishing friend from foe. With a new president sworn into office on a platform promising change, how should Tel Aviv continue to conceal the fact that it was pro-Israelis who deceived the U.S. to wage war in Iraq for the expansionist goals of Greater Israel?
During the Democratic presidential primaries, Senator Barack Obama promised no change in U.S.-Israeli relations. But that pledge was made while he and Hillary Clinton were vying for the pro-Israeli vote. What about now—particularly now that he knows Israel scheduled its assault on Gaza between Christmas and the Obama inaugural—knowing that interval would ensure Tel Aviv could operate largely free of official criticism?
Campaigning for president is one thing. Serving as commander in chief is another. What became of the prospects for change after this professor of constitutional law took a constitutional oath that obliged him to defend the U.S. from all enemies—both foreign and domestic?
Based on the success of pro-Israelis in inducing the U.S. to invade Iraq, how does this international network best expand this war to Iran? To succeed again, how can Tel Aviv best control the risk that facts unhelpful to its agenda find their way into the marketplace of ideas?
How about this for a psyops strategy: launch an intimidation campaign on a high-profile campus and portray a critic as an anti-Semite for sharing photos that had been circulating for weeks on the Internet. Then threaten his job, smear his reputation, put him in fear of his physical safety and threaten to withhold critical funding. Then see if on-campus critics still dare to speak out.
While the Faculty Senate should be commended for its stance, one must ask: what took so long? And what will be done to ensure that never again is a professor on any University of California campus subjected to such abuse with the complicity of university administrators? What steps will be taken to ensure this conduct does not recur on campuses nationwide?
Where was UC President Mark Yudof as this intimidation campaign progressed with such well-timed success? What role was played by the pro-Israeli bias of his wife, Judith, the immediate past president of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism representing 760 synagogues?
Where was the Board of Regents while this silencing campaign advanced between the invasion of Gaza and President Obama’s White House meeting with Likud Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu? Did Board of Regents chairman Richard Blum harbor an undisclosed bias that precluded him shutting down this ADL operation? How about his wife, pro-Israeli U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee? What role did bias play in a community-wide smear campaign led by Arthur Gross-Schaefer, a Santa Barbara rabbi?
Was this only an offense against a courageous professor who fought on while university administrators retreated? Or was this assault more strategic? The Faculty Senate cannot on its own correct these wrongs because key offenders remain beyond their reach. What they can—and must—do is dismiss any faculty member complicit in this operation, condemn any university administrator who failed to act promptly and rebuke complicit operatives in the community.
The reputation of Prof. Robinson was only grist for the same mill that churned out the phony intelligence required to induce the U.S. to war in Iraq. That same network of deceit now seeks to catalyze war with Iran. Robinson was not the target. His reputation was collateral damage. The target was the mindset of academics that—because of this assault—hesitated to criticize Israel.
Until steps are taken to deter future offenses, these psychological operations (psyops) will continue and the reputation of the U.S. will continue to be collateral damage. Most ominous of all, those who wage war “by way of deception” (the motto of the Israeli Mossad) will continue to displace the facts on which self-governance depends. Progress must be measured by how many educators grasp that what was done to one could be done to all.
Education – The ultimate battlefield
In unconventional warfare, the battlefield is the shared field of consciousness. Where does a “consensus” reside? That’s where battles are now waged for public opinion. Those who targeted University of California, Santa Barbara Professor Bill Robinson know that victory flows to those most adept at influencing the consensus mindset. Few know that better than the Anti-Defamation League.
For seasoned combatants, the psyops challenge lies in how best to displace facts with beliefs. The only modern component of this ancient craft is the means for taking such manipulation to global scale. The duplicity is the same regardless whether the operation creates a shared belief in Iraqi WMD, a shared consensus in the infallibility of unfettered financial markets or a shared opinion that Israel is a democracy and an ally. All false yet all widely believed to be true.
Robinson was smeared as an anti-Semite for sharing a photo essay with his students that was critical of Israeli policy. That essay first appeared in Adbusters, a magazine subtitled The Journal of the Mental Environment. That essay has since been posted on a website maintained by UCSB students in defense of academic freedom: http://sb4af.wordpress.com/robinson-case/
Kalle Lasn, founding editor of Adbusters, is a graphic artist who eventually awoke to the harm he was doing as an advertising executive. An Estonian, he saw firsthand how the Soviets exerted virtual control by manipulating the mental environment. In March 2004, Lasn published an article in Adbusters pointing out that, whereas less than two percent of Americans are Jewish, 26 of the top 50 neoconservatives advocating war in Iraq are Jewish (52%).
He titled the article: “Why Won’t Anyone Say They’re Jewish?” By ADL standards, that meant he was an “anti-Semite”—just for asking the question. What’s since been confirmed is that the bulk of those who fixed the intelligence around that predetermined goal were either Jewish or assets developed by operatives who were Jewish.
Displacement is how warfare is waged in the Information Age: displacing facts with beliefs. Why would anyone expect otherwise? Jewish critics of Israeli policy are “self-hating.” Non-Jewish critics are anti-Semites, Jew haters and/or Holocaust deniers. Although those charges are fast losing their potency from overuse, their toxicity still retains enough force to silence critics—as shown by the global traction gained by this thought control operation on a University of California campus.
Sir Gerald Kaufman, British founder of Independent Jewish Voices, uses his position as a Member of Parliament to criticize Israeli policy. Members of his family perished at the hands of the Nazis and in the Holocaust. As one of the U.K.’s harshest critics of Israeli policies, he routinely compares the Jewish state’s treatment of Palestinians to Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews—the same analogy for which Robinson (also Jewish) was smeared as an anti-Semite.
Kaufman’s heartfelt speech on Israel’s incursion into Gaza, given on the floor of the House of Commons, is a must-see for those concerned that criticism of Israeli policy remains absent on the floor of the U.S. Congress. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMGuYjt6CP8 [Readers can draw their own conclusions as to who would be motivated to corrupt this YouTube version of his remarks.]
The psyops specialists who coordinated this on-campus silencing campaign know where modern wars are waged: in the shared mindset. The war fought to invade Iraq was waged in the mental environment long before U.S. troops invaded Iraq. Now the U.S. appears guilty by its association with an extremist enclave infamous worldwide for its prowess at waging war by way of deception—and for its aptitude at deceiving the U.S. to fight those wars.
The U.S. invaded Iraq only after facts were displaced by manipulated beliefs. The litany of manufactured beliefs is long and varied: Iraqi WMD, Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda, Iraqi meetings with Al Qaeda in Prague, Iraqi acquisition of yellowcake uranium from Niger and the list goes on. None were factual; all were deployed to deceive. And to advance an Israeli agenda.
Remember the campaign to discredit Joe Wilson overseen by (Jewish) White House operative Lewis Libby, Vice President Cheney’s Chief of Staff? A former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, Wilson was targeted by Libby for exposing the phony intelligence on uranium from Niger. Campaigns to deceive and discredit have long been key weapons in the Israeli arsenal of deceit.
Remember how Colin Powell was dispatched by pro-Israeli war-planners to the U.N. Security Council just weeks before the March 2003 invasion? Why Powell? To associate his hard-earned credibility with what we now know was false intelligence about Iraq’s mobile biological weapons laboratories. At every turn we find the displacement of facts with beliefs to manipulate decision-makers. That operation successfully discredited not only Powell and the U.S. but also the U.N., an organization that Tel Aviv fears may yet hold Israel accountable for its conduct under international law.
Intelligence on which the U.S. relied was fixed by pro-Israelis in pursuit of a predetermined agenda: the expansionist goals for Greater Israel. Phony intelligence persuaded Washington decision-makers to dispatch the U.S. military to wage a preemptive war not for American interests but for Tel Aviv. When waging unconventional warfare, by the time you see troops on the ground, those complicit are often pre-staging the next venue—as now with the Israeli push to attack Iran.
The ADL-coordinated intimidation campaign launched on the UCSB campus reflects the face of fascism in the Information Age. To respond effectively, the Senate Faculty must provide the tools that enable those targeted to grasp how facts are displaced with induced beliefs—in plain sight and, to date, with legal impunity. No one likes to be deceived. Once “the mark” grasps how they were manipulated, they will see for themselves who is complicit and why. That’s when long overdue accountability can begin.
To focus only on the means (such as the attack on Robinson) leaves the end obscure. And leaves the mark—including UC students—without the tools required to defend against such duplicity. For educators, that shortcoming would transform this potential triumph into an academic tragedy.
Jeff Gates is author of Guilt By Association, Democracy at Risk and The Ownership Solution.
Visit his website at: www.criminalstate.com.
Jeff Gates is a regular columnist for Underground Dissident
What Role Did the U.S.-Israeli Relationship Play in 9/11?
September 13, 2009 by admin
Filed under Featured, Jeff Gates
On the day of the 9/11 attacks, former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was asked what the attack would mean for US-Israeli relations. His quick reply was: “It’s very good….Well, it’s not good, but it will generate immediate sympathy (for Israel).”
Intelligence wars rely on mathematical models to anticipate the response of “the mark” to staged provocations. Reactions thereby become foreseeable—within an acceptable range of probabilities. When Israeli mathematician Robert J. Aumann received the 2005 Nobel Prize in economic science, he conceded that “the entire school of thought that we have developed here in Israel” has turned “Israel into the leading authority in this field.”
With a well-planned provocation, the anticipated response can even become a weapon in the arsenal of the agent provocateur. In response to 9/11, how difficult would it have been to foresee that the U.S. would deploy its military to avenge that attack? With fixed intelligence, how difficult would it be to redirect that response to wage a long-planned war in Iraq—not for U.S. interests, but to advance the agenda for Greater Israel?
The emotionally wrenching component of a provocation plays a key role in the field of game theory war planning where Israel is the authority. With the televised murder of 3,000 Americans, a shared mindset of shock, grief and outrage made it easier for U.S. policy-makers to believe that a known Evil Doer in Iraq was responsible, regardless of the facts.
The strategic displacement of facts with induced beliefs, in turn, requires a period of “preparing the mindset” so that “the mark” will put their faith in a pre-staged fiction. Those who induced the March 2003 invasion of Iraq began “laying mental threads” and creating agenda-advancing mental associations more than a decade earlier.
Notable among those threads was the 1993 publication in Foreign Affairs of an article by Harvard professor Samuel Huntington. By the time his analysis appeared in book-length form in 1996 as The Clash of Civilizations, more than 100 academies and think tanks were prepared to promote it, pre-staging a “clash consensus”—five years before 9/11.
Also published in 1996 under the guidance of Richard Perle was A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm (meaning Israel). A member since 1987 of the U.S. Defense Policy Advisory Board, this self-professed Zionist became its chairman in 2001. As a key adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Perle’s senior Pentagon post helped lay the required foundation for removing Saddam Hussein as part of a Greater Israel strategy, a key theme of A Clean Break—released five years before 9-11.
A mass murder, articles, books, think tanks and Pentagon insiders, however, are not enough to manage the variables in a “probabilistic” war-planning model. Supportive policy makers are also required to lend the appearance of legitimacy and credibility to an operation justified by intelligence fixed around a pre-determined agenda.
That role was eagerly filled by Senators John McCain, Joe Lieberman, a Jewish Zionist from Connecticut, and Jon Kyl, a Christian Zionist from Arizona, when they co-sponsored the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998. Echoing Tel Aviv’s agenda in A Clean Break, their bill laid another mental thread in the public mindset by calling for the removal of Saddam Hussein—three years before 9-11.
The legislation also appropriated $97 million, largely to promote that Zionist agenda. Distracted by mid-term Congressional elections and by impeachment proceedings commenced in reaction to a well-timed presidential affair involving White House intern Monica Lewinsky, Bill Clinton signed that agenda into law October 31, 1998—five years before the U.S.-led invasion that removed Saddam Hussein.
After 9/11, John McCain and Joe Lieberman became inseparable travel companions and irrepressible advocates for the invasion of Iraq. Looking “presidential” aboard the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt in January 2002, McCain laid another key thread when he waved an admiral’s cap while proclaiming, alongside Lieberman, “On to Baghdad.”
By Way of Deception
The chutzpah with which this game theory strategy progressed in plain sight could be seen in the behavior of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, another Zionist insider. Four days after 9/11, in a principals’ meeting at Camp David, he proposed that the U.S. invade Iraq. At that time, the intelligence did not yet point to Iraqi involvement and Osama bin Laden was thought to be hiding in a remote region of Afghanistan.
Frustrated that President George H.W. Bush declined to remove Saddam Hussein during the 1991 Gulf War, Wolfowitz proposed a No-Fly Zone in northern Iraq. By 2001, the Israeli Mossad had agents at work for a decade in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. Intelligence reports of Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda also came from Mosul—reports that later proved to be false. Mosul again emerged in November 2004 as a center of the insurgency that destabilized Iraq. That reaction precluded the speedy exit of coalition forces promised in Congressional testimony by senior war-planner Wolfowitz.
The common source of the fixed intelligence that induced America to war in Iraq has yet to be acknowledged even though intelligence experts agree that deception on such a scale required a decade to plan, staff, pre-stage, orchestrate and, to date, cover up. The two leaders of the 9/11 Commission report conceded they were stopped by Commission members from hearing testimony on the motivation for 9/11: the U.S.-Israeli relationship.
The fictions accepted as generally accepted truths included Iraqi WMD, Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda, Iraqi meetings with Al Qaeda in Prague, Iraqi mobile biological weapons laboratories and Iraqi purchases of “yellowcake” uranium from Niger. Only the last fact was conceded as phony in the relevant time frame. All the rest were disclosed as false, flawed or fixed only after the war began. An attempt to cover-up the yellowcake account led to the federal prosecution of vice-presidential chief of staff Lewis Libby, another well-placed Zionist insider.
Did game theory-modeled pre-staging also include the Israeli provocation that led to the Second Intifada? An intifada is an uprising or, literally, a “shaking off” of an oppressor. The Second Intifada in Palestine dates from September 2000 when Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon led an armed march to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount—one year before 9/11.
After a year of calm—during which Palestinians believed in the prospects for peace—suicide bombings recommenced after this high-profile provocation. In response to the uprising, Sharon and Netanyahu observed that only when Americans “feel our pain” would they understand the plight of the victimized Israelis. Both Israeli leaders suggested that shared mindset (“feel our pain”) would require in the U.S. a weighted body count of 4,500 to 5,000 Americans lost to terrorism, the initial estimate of those who died in the twin towers of New York City’s World Trade Center—one year later.
The American Valkyrie?
When successful, game theory warfare strengthens the agent provocateur while leaving the mark discredited and depleted by the anticipated reaction to a well-timed provocation. By game theory standards, 9/11 was a strategic success because the U.S. was portrayed as irrational for its reaction—the invasion of Iraq—that triggered a deadly insurgency with devastating consequences both for Iraq and the U.S.
That insurgency, in turn, was an easily modeled reaction to the invasion of a nation that (a) played no role in the provocation, and (b) was known to be populated by three long-warring sects where an unstable peace was maintained by a former U.S. ally who was rebranded an Evil Doer. As the cost in blood and treasure expanded, the U.S. became overextended militarily, financially and diplomatically.
As “the mark” (the U.S.) emerged in the foreground, the agent provocateur faded into the background. But only after catalyzing dynamics that steadily drained the U.S. of credibility, resources and resolve. This “probabilistic” victory also ensured widespread cynicism, insecurity, distrust and disillusionment along with a declining capacity to defend its interests due to the duplicity of a game theory-savvy enemy within.
Meanwhile the American public fell under a regime of oversight, surveillance and intimidation marketed as “homeland” security. This domestic operation even features rhetorical hints of a WWII “fatherland” with clear signs of a force alien to the U.S. with its welcome embrace of open dissent. Is this operation meant to protect Americans or to shield those responsible for this insider operation from Americans?
By manipulating the shared mindset, skilled game theory war-planners can wage battles in plain sight and on multiple fronts with minimal resources. One proven strategy: Pose as an ally of a well-armed nation predisposed to deploy its military in response to a mass murder. In this case, the result destabilized Iraq, creating crises that could be exploited to strategic advantage by expanding the conflict to Iran, another key Israeli goal announced in A Clean Break—seven years before the invasion of Iraq.
Which nation benefitted from the deployment of coalition forces to the region? Today’s mathematically model-able outcome undermined U.S. national security by overextending its military, discrediting its leadership, degrading its financial condition and disabling its political will. In game theory terms, these results were “perfectly predictable”—within an acceptable range of probabilities.
In the asymmetry that typifies today’s unconventional warfare, those who are few in numbers must wage war by way of deception—non-transparently and with means that leverage their impact. Which nation—if not Israel—fits that description?
Treason in Plain Sight?
Game theory war-planners manipulate the shared mental environment by shaping perceptions and creating impressions that become consensus opinions. With the aid of well-timed crises, policy-makers fall in line with a predetermined agenda—not because they are Evil Doers or “imperialists” but because the shared mindset has been pre-conditioned to respond not to the facts but to manipulated emotions and consensus beliefs. Without the murder of 3,000 on 9/11, America’s credibility would not now be damaged and the U.S. economy would be in far better shape.
By steadily displacing facts with what “the mark” can be induced to believe, the few-within-the-few amplify the impact of their duplicity. By steady manipulation of the public’s mindset, game theory war-planners can defeat an opponent with vastly superior resources by inducing those decisions that ensure defeat.
Intelligence wars are waged in plain sight and under the cover of widely shared beliefs. By manipulating consensus opinion, such wars can be won from the inside out by inducing a people to freely choose the very forces that imperil their freedom. Thus in the Information Age the disproportionate power wielded by those with outsized influence in media, pop culture, think tanks, academia and politics—domains where Zionist influence is most rampant.
Induced beliefs act as a force-multiplier to wage intelligence wars from the shadows. At the operational core of such warfare are those masterful at anticipating the mark’s response to a provocation and incorporating that response into their arsenal. For those who wage war in this fashion, facts are only a barrier to overcome. For those nations dependent on facts, the rule of law and informed consent to protect their freedom, such insider treachery poses the greatest possible threat to national security.
America is far less safe than before 9/11. Tel Aviv clearly intends to continue its serial provocations, as evidenced by its ongoing expansion of the settlements. Israel has shown no sign of a willingness to negotiate in good faith or to take the steps required to make peace a possibility. To date, Barack Obama appears unwilling to name senior appointees who are not either Zionists are strongly pro-Israeli. The greatest threat to world peace is not terrorists. The greatest threat is the U.S.-Israeli relationship.
In the same way that a decade of pre-staging was required to plausibly induce the U.S. to invade Iraq, a similar strategy is now underway to persuade the U.S. to invade Iran or to support and condone an attack by Israel. The same duplicity is again at work, including the high profile branding of the requisite Evil Doer. From its very outset, the Zionist enterprise focused on hegemony in the Middle East. Its entangled alliance with the U.S. enabled this enterprise to deploy American might for that purpose.
Only one nation had the means, motive, opportunity and stable nation state intelligence required to take the U.S. to war in the Middle East while also making it appear that Islam is the problem. If Barack Obama continues to defer to Tel Aviv, he can rightly be blamed when the next attack occurs in the U.S. or the European Union featuring the usual orgy of evidence pointing to a predetermined target. Should another mass murder occur, that event will be traceable directly to the U.S.-Israeli relationship and the failure of U.S policy-makers to free America from this enemy within.
Jeff Gates is author of Guilt By Association, Democracy at Risk and The Ownership Solution.
Visit his website at: www.criminalstate.com.
Jeff Gates is a regular columnist for Underground Dissident














