- European Cars Will Soon Slow Down Automatically If You're Speeding
In the next step toward becoming a utopian Brave New World at the hands of suffocating and dehumanizing regulation, all new cars sold in the UK and Europe will soon be fitted with speed-limiting devices, which will automatically stop drivers from exceeding the speed limit, according to the Guardian.
The concept is part of sweeping safety changes being implemented to vehicle safety rules that the EU has provisionally agreed to. Despite the fact that Britain may not be part of the EU when the rules take effect – they’re slated to be fully rolled out by 2022 – UK regulators have said they will mirror the safety standards across the Channel. The rules still need to be ratified by the European parliament, which could happen by September.
In addition to speed limiters, other features to be made mandatory in 2022 include automated emergency braking, electronic data recorders and improved visibility. The move is being described as “one of the biggest leaps forward in 50 years” for auto safety and it is estimated that it could save 25,000 lives by 2037.
The speed limiter device, called intelligent speed assistance (ISA), uses GPS and sign recognition to detect speed limits, and will sound a warning and automatically slow a vehicle down if it is exceeding the limit. Drivers will be able to “override” the device by pressing hard on the accelerator, the article says although that act may also quietly notify any nearby police. Some motorist groups have argued that speeding up can sometimes actually be the safer option, such as when a person needs to swiftly pass a vehicle ahead of it.
Antonio Avenoso, executive director of the European Transport Safety Council, told the Guardian: “There have only been a handful of moments in the last 50 years which could be described as big leaps forward for road safety in Europe. The mandatory introduction of the seatbelt was one, and the first EU minimum crash safety standards, agreed in 1998, was another. If last night’s agreement is given the formal green light, it will represent another of those moments, preventing 25,000 deaths within 15 years of coming into force.”
Joshua Harris, director of campaigns for road safety charity Brake, said: “These lifesaving measures come at a vital time, with road safety in a concerning period of stagnation with more than 70 people still being killed or seriously injured on British roads every day. The government must commit to adopting these lifesaving regulations, no matter what happens with Brexit.”
We also recently reported that Volvo was implementing new safety systems that would allow their vehicle to determine if a driver was impaired or distracted and then, in the case of a drunk driver, intervene on various levels and also “call the authorities”.
We’re sure that, especially for automobile aficionados, these limiters and new automated safety systems will bring the joy right back to driving.
- Can The EU Survive Its Own Censorship?
The EU’s new, comprehensive new Copyright Directive passed the European Parliament ensuring the way we use the Internet will change in the future.
And not for the better.
The controversial parts are Articles 11 and 13, the “link tax” and the “upload filter” requirements. For a good run down of how terrible these new rules are look anywhere on the internet but this article at Gizmodo (who I hope doesn’t charge me a link tax for doing so!) will do.
I would also watch this video from Dave Cullen, a resident of Ireland, i.e. the EU, as to what he thinks this means.
Dave makes a number of fantastic points about the ramifications of Articles 11 and 13 which I will not dispute.
The arrogance and pig-headedness of EU MEPs to push this through without even listening to arguments for Amendments speaks volumes as to how much this legislation was bought and paid for.
And you know who was doing the buying. The same folks currently behind destroying Brexit — The Davos Crowd. I don’t want to put too fine a point on this now, since I’ve covered all this recently (here) and in the past (here ).
Controlling The Wire
But there are very valid reasons why this push for control of information flow from the EU is yet another example of their desperations to keep control of what I’ve in the past called The Wire:
In short, The Wire is the main conduit through which we communicate with each other. Even money is The Wire. What are prices if not information about what we are willing to part with our money in exchange for?
Without The Wire modern society fails. So, government can’t shut it down but neither can it allow unrestrained access to it.Electricity, commerce, communications, everything, goes over The Wire.
This isn’t a radical concept but like all important ideas, once it is presented to you you can’t unsee it.Control of The Wire is the only fight that matters or has ever mattered in society. The Internet is The Wire writ large. Therefore, it only makes sense that control of it is paramount to maintaining any control over society at large.
The corporate oligarchs are in fear for their projects. They want desperately to maintain control. They’ve worked for decades to evolve the nation-state into the new shiny transnational superstate the EU exemplifies.
The new Copyright Directive is designed to erect barriers-to-entry and shut down opposition speech by outsourcing the enforcement to the platforms hosting the material.
And those platforms are only too happy to do this because they get to crowd out any potential competition. So, while their costs increase slightly, they are now immune to the competition which would grind out their margins to zero over time, as any unfettered market would.
Remember, that in all human endeavors profit is an ever-elusive thing. With incentives properly aligned someone is always attracted to the profit someone else is achieving and will figure out a way to build a better mousetrap, as it were, grinding out that profit.
If you can short-circuit this process via control of The Wire then you can guarantee a profit for your past work for far longer than you would otherwise.
This is known as rent.
Fake Property, False Choices
This is why the music and film industry want their IP protected from ‘fair use’ policies. They see the plummeting margins and want to continue charging on a per use/listen/view basis things they retain the copyright to far beyond the public’s willingness to pay them.
It’s too expensive for these companies to go after us individually. That doesn’t work except in very limited ways. Yes, they can de-platform Alex Jones or Sargon of Akkad ad hoc but with predictable backlash against it.
Enshrining it in law takes this, however, to another level. And it is a yet another Hobson’s Choice put before people to either accept regulation of these companies as public utilities — ensuring their monopoly status — or render the internet unusable.
This Directive is pure protectionism of legacy media producers be it news, music, film, etc. whose business models haven’t just collapsed they’re literally now subsidized by other profitable industries, i.e. the Washington Post is, effectively, an Amazon company.
So, in effect, Article 11 and 13 are just typical corporatist honey pots, at least in theory.
But it is all bad? Is the future to be this and more laws and controls like this?
Likely not.
IP Deflation
Let’s look specifically at the link tax. To do this we have to look at a worst-case scenario where the EU disregards all cross-border treaty and tax-enforcement issues and our governments go along with this nonsense.
So, I want to link to an article in Der Speigel to make some point about Angela Merkel.
To do so now, under Article 13, I have to get a license to link from them and pay a fee. Let’s call that fee €100. Instead of paying that fee my natural reaction would be to not link to it and just make reference to it.
I’ll quote it and not put in a link.
If that doesn’t work and WordPress takes my post down, I’ll screencap the relevant section of the article (4chan-style) and then not link to it. This requires a more sophisticated sniffer to figure out what I did.
And in the worst case if they figure that out, I’ll simply not even quote them anymore. And I’ll write the article in such a way that I don’t need to. They don’t get the traffic anymore. They never got the license fee.
The result is they fall in the Google search rankings.
And I get to keep my traffic up and my audience happy.
Who wins here? Me or them?
Me.
Especially if I keep my link license fee set for my content at what it’s worth, zero.
To me a link is free advertising. I know that each one is a gift that pays huge dividends. I cherish people who contact me for permission to scrape my work.
The whole point of what I do is to reach as wide an audience as possible. Why would I put up barriers to that?
You have to put this in perspective. Ninety five percent of the news you read is a restatement of a government or corporate press release. If you think someone can’t reprint government or corporate press releases for less than €100 a head you are crazy.
Just like it is in retail sales. Amazon is killing local retailers because easily cross-shopped items are simply more efficiently delivered without a brick and mortar storefront. The costs of maintaining it and people going to the central location is a waste of scarce, precious capital.
It’s an old model without a future.
News organizations that don’t add anything but only disseminate the same stuff but with a slightly different spin on it won’t be able to charge a dime for links. Functionally, for 95% of news, is there any difference between Yahoo!, MSN, CNN or FOX?
No.
If you produce something that is value-added people will figure out a way to justify to themselves paying for it. Advertising covers some of that cost. If they don’t it isn’t lost revenue, it was revenue you never had in the first place at that price.
In the Internet business eyeballs are everything. Losing eyeballs for link taxes is just bad business.
The Last War
So the EU just gave these sclerotic, dying industries everything they’ve ever wanted. But, in the long run, it will be their undoing as it will incentivize an entire generation of citizen journalists to fill in the niches and do primary research.
Moreover, it will be unenforceable at any practical level, as Dave Cullen points out. The EU will itself cause a cratering of traffic to and from its IP ranges.
As the cost of The Wire drops on a per megabyte basis, think 5G, so too does the cost to resist control of it. Lower bandwidth costs makes possible peer-to-peer networking and decentralized autonomous organizations that even the most hardened crypto-enthusiast haven’t conceived of yet.
And once there are no middle men to go after and turn into the copyright police, we’re back to them going after individuals again. At that point it’s game over.
That’s a long way off at this point and the present will be difficult, at best, to navigate. But we’re not flat-footed here. I do feel for guys like Dave Cullen who build great content and now are looking at real constraints.
I don’t envy them in the slightest.
But to me this feels like just another desperation move by old men fighting the last war to hold onto The Wire that’s slipping out of their fingers, writing laws out of date before they are even implemented.
* * *
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- DARPA Wants Nuclear Reactor Rockets For Deep Space Travel
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has requested immediate funding to demonstrate a nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) system in space, according to the Pentagon’s fiscal 2020 budget request, reported by Aviation Week & Space Technology.
DARPA’s budget request includes approximately $10 million to begin the new program in 1H20.
The new space program is called Reactor On A Rocket (ROAR), will develop a high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) propulsion system.
“The program will initially develop the use of additive manufacturing approaches to print NTP fuel elements…In addition, the program will investigate on-orbit assembly techniques (AM) to safely assemble the individual core element subassemblies into a full demonstration system configuration, and will perform a technology demonstration,” DARPA’s budget document states.
The propulsion system superheats liquid hydrogen in a nuclear reactor and propels the plasma out a rocket nozzle. HALEU is more efficient than NASA’s current chemical rockets, reducing flight time by a significant margin to deep space destinations.
According to Aviation Week, HALEU is being “developed as a fuel source for next-generation nuclear reactors, will use the fissionable isotope uranium-235 (U-235) with a concentration of more than 5% but less than 20%. This assay of U-235 is much lower than the 90% used in US naval reactors but also higher than the average 3-5% U-235 used in commercial reactors, allowing for smaller reactors.”
Breakthroughs in nuclear technology have enabled engineers to develop cheaper, lighter and dependable NTP systems than when NASA tested its Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application (NERVA) program in the 1960s.
Once the NTP system is mounted onto a rocket, DARPA is expected to pilot test missions into deep-space, but no timeframe has been given in the budget request.
The budget request also had no mention of what the flight demonstration mission would involve. Often dummy payloads are mounted within the capsule to avoid damaging expensive space probes.
Could DARPA’s ROAR program to mature nuclear rocket engines be for deep-space travel under President Trump’s new Space Force?
- Mueller's Record Of Framing Innocent People To Protect The Guilty
Authored by Eric Zuesse via CounterCurrents.org,
Kit Knightly, at the excellent news-site Off-Guardian, headlined on March 25th, “Mueller’s Sideshow Closes – But it has Served its Purpose”, and he concluded that the most credible hypothesis as to what the actual purpose of Mueller’s investigation was is to fool the American public to think that the U.S. Government is honest and trustworthy, and that its public officials are accountable to the public. Knightly thinks that it’s all just a con. But the purpose of the present article is simply to document the type of person that Mueller himself is — to document it from his actual record in various public offices that Mueller has held.
The Special Counsel Robert Mueller wasn’t able to obtain any convictions against Donald Trump as having in any way collaborated with Russia’s Government to win the 2016 Presidential election, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that Mueller was serving the public instead of serving some billionaires, known or unknown, here and/or abroad. Ever since the start of the “Russiagate” probes, the case against Russia has been based upon low quality, unreliable, ‘evidence,’ much if not all of which should be thrown out, unacceptable to present to any jury — and far less suitable for winning from a jury an actual conviction.
For example, according to the expert number-cruncher on election-polling, Nate Silver, writing 17 December 2018, “If you wrote out a list of the most important factors in the 2016 election, I’m not sure that Russian social media memes would be among the top 100. The scale was quite small and there’s not much evidence that they were effective.”
Soon thereafter, Aaron Maté headlined in The Nation on December 28th, “New Studies Show Pundits Are Wrong About Russian Social-Media Involvement in US Politics: Far from being a sophisticated propaganda campaign, it was small, amateurish, and mostly unrelated to the 2016 election.” Maté presented lots of evidence to back that up, and this evidence cast severe doubt upon the Russiagate charges that have been pursued and the indictments that have been obtained.
The Special Counsel Robert Mueller was publicly tasked, as the “Special Prosecutor,” to prove these charges and to achieve convictions on them so that President Trump could be forced out of office for colluding with Russia. If there had been collusion, then, of course, Trump had committed treason and would now be doomed. Instead, Mueller displayed dirt on some of Trump’s subordinates. Mueller was hired by Democrats to get a Republican President impeached by the House and then removed from office by the Senate, and then replaced by Vice President Mike Pence. Was Mueller selected on account of his record of honesty, his public trustworthiness, his skill in presenting cases and achieving convictions that don’t get thrown out by appeals courts or otherwise discredited? No. But it made no difference anywhay, because the entire Russiagate storyline he had been hired to prove was a complex string of speculations and outright lies, and Mueller wasn’t able to prove even enough of them to make a presentable (though still speculative and unproven) case. No matter: just as Republicans won’t acknowledge that George W Bush had lied through his teeth in order to fool Americans into invading and destroying Iraq, Democrats won’t acknowledge that they were deceived by their own political Party. The American public (both Parties of it) are apparently perfectly satisfied to be serial fools; they do it time and again (for examples: Libya 2011, Syria 2012-, and Yemen 2015-) — they require only that their own Party be the ones making suckers of themselves. This is the worst type of polarized public, the type that’s the biggest threat to the survival of democracy. Mueller has for decades been a cog in this corrupt bipartisan American political machine.
Here’s the story behind the story of the Special Counsel’s investigation — the story of Robert Swan Mueller III himself, over the decades:
— Part One
Robert Mueller has a lengthy record of framing innocent people, to protect the guilty, and some of those cases have even been overturned on appeal. Mueller’s present investigations into Donald Trump were headed by a prosecutor he hired, Andrew Weissmann, whose track-record of convictionswas so bad that one of his convictions even became overturned by a unanimous opinion from the U.S. Supreme Court. Weissmann had a track-record of evidence-rigging that’s at least as bad as Mueller’s, and maybe this is why Mueller hired him. Both men try to win cases via the press instead of via the laws and the Constitution. Upon his hire, the New York Times did a worshipful article on “Andrew Weissmann, Mueller’s Legal Pit-Bull”. His dirty tactics and overturned cases weren’t so much as even just mentioned there.
Mueller had been a major participant in helping the friend of the Saudi royals, FBI Director Louis Freeh, to transfer the 1996 Khobar Towers terrorist bombing case to Freeh’s then-friend James Comey, who promptly got the Sauds and Al Qaeda off the hook for that terror-bombing which Al Qaeda had done, which had killed 19 Americans. Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan headlined in the August 2011 Vanity Fair “The [Saudi] Kingdom and the [WTC] Towers”, and reported that, “On a flight home from Saudi Arabia in the late 1990s, F.B.I. director Louis Freeh told counterterrorism chief John O’Neill [who became one of the WTC 9/11 victims] that he thought the Saudi officials they had met during the trip had been helpful. ‘You’ve got to be kidding,’ retorted O’Neill, a New Jersey native who never minced his words. ‘They didn’t give us anything. They were just shining sunshine up your ass.’” That conversation had to do with the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing. The great investigative journalist Gareth Porter headlined on 26 June 2009, “EXCLUSIVE-PART 5: Freeh Became ‘Defence Lawyer’ for Saudis on Khobar”, and reported that, “once out of office, Freeh became virtually a defence lawyer for the Saudi regime on the Khobar Towers bombing.” PBS Frontline presented on 7 April 2009, “Extended Interview With Louis Freeh: Former FBI Director, now attorney to Prince Bandar”. The introduction stated: “As the head of his own global consulting firm, Freeh Group International, Louis Freeh has been hired by Prince Bandar as his legal representative on issues surrounding the Al-Yamamah arms deal.” (That was a corruption issue unrelated to the Khobar Towers case. So, Freeh’s services to the Saud family extended beyond merely the Khobar Towers case.) Comey’s FBI blamed the Khobar Towers bombing on Iran and Shiites, whom the Saudi royal family have hated ever since 1744. That achievement by the Freeh-Mueller-Comey trio established the U.S. Government’s Saudi mantra, that “Iran [not the Saud family itself] is the top state-sponsor of terrorism.” This, in turn, helped to produce what became the frame-up and $10.5 billion fine against Iran for its allegedly having caused the 9/11 attacks. The frame-up in the Khobar Towers case became cited there as ‘evidence’ in the blaming of Iran for the 9/11 attacks. The 9/11 case was thoroughly rigged to serve the Sauds, just like the Khobar case had been. Both Mueller and Comey were key operatives in that, too (as well as in deceiving the American public into believing that Saddam Hussein was also involved in the 9/11 plot). FBI investigators in the field had actually reported that the 9/11 attacks were at least partially funded from the private checking accounts of the Saudi Ambassador to the U.S., Prince Bandar, and his wife. Furthermore, the financial bag-man for Osama bin Laden said that Al Qaeda was overwhelmingly financed not only by Prince Bandar but by other Saudi Princes (including the one who became Saudi Arabia’s current King). And the U.S. President, George W. Bush, worked with the Sauds, to bring about 9/11. (Click onto those links to reach the evidence.) Mueller and his colleagues nailed Iran for 9/11, on the basis of some members of Al Qaeda having passed through Iran. (They had passed through many countries, including the U.S.) They successfully framed Iran, for what the royal family of Saudi Arabia (working with the U.S. President, Bush) had actually done. The Khobar Towers case was just one of the Mueller-Comey team’s frame-ups, but it’s the one that has had the most impact.
The evidence against the Saudi royals (and others in the U.S. Government Deep State) on the 9/11 matter is massive and it was summarily presented by the investigative journalists Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan in the August 2011 Vanity Fair, under the headline “The [Saudi] Kingdom and the [WTC] Towers”. Here are excerpts:
In sworn statements after 9/11, former Taliban intelligence chief Mohammed Khaksar said that in 1998 Prince Turki, chief of Saudi Arabia’s General Intelligence Department (G.I.D.), sealed a deal under which bin Laden agreed not to attack Saudi targets. In return, Saudi Arabia would provide funds and material assistance to the Taliban, not demand bin Laden’s extradition, and not bring pressure to close down al-Qaeda training camps. Saudi businesses, meanwhile, would ensure that money also flowed directly to bin Laden.
Special Relationships
After 9/11, Prince Turki would deny that any such deal was done with bin Laden. Other Saudi royals, however, may have been involved in payoff arrangements. A former Clinton administration official has claimed — and U.S. intelligence sources concurred — that at least two Saudi princes had been paying, on behalf of the kingdom, what amounted to protection money since 1995. The former official added, “The deal was, they would turn a blind eye to what he was doing elsewhere. ‘You don’t conduct operations here, and we won’t disrupt them elsewhere.’ ”
American and British official sources, speaking later with Simon Henderson, Baker Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, named the two princes in question. They were, Henderson told the authors, Prince Naif, the interior minister, and Prince Sultan. The money involved in the alleged payments, according to Henderson’s sources, had amounted to “hundreds of millions of dollars.” It had been “Saudi official money — not their own.” …
In spite of the fact that it had almost immediately become known that 15 of those implicated in the attacks had been Saudis, President George W. Bush did not hold Saudi Arabia’s official representative in Washington at arm’s length. As early as the evening of September 13, he kept a scheduled appointment to receive Prince Bandar at the White House. The two men had known each other for years. They reportedly greeted each other with a friendly embrace, smoked cigars on the Truman Balcony, and conversed with Vice President Dick Cheney and National-Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. …
The president would invite Crown Prince Abdullah to visit the United States, press him to come when he hesitated, and — when he accepted — welcome him to his Texas ranch in early 2002. Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice were there, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell and First Lady Laura Bush.
It seems that 9/11 barely came up during the discussions. Speaking with the press afterward, the president cut off one reporter when he began to raise the subject. …
Congress’s Joint Inquiry, its co-chair Bob Graham told the authors, had found evidence “that the Saudis were facilitating, assisting, some of the hijackers. And my suspicion is that they were providing some assistance to most if not all of the hijackers. … It’s my opinion that 9/11 could not have occurred but for the existence of an infrastructure of support within the United States. By ‘the Saudis,’ I mean the Saudi government and individual Saudis who are for some purposes dependent on the government — which includes all of the elite in the country.”
Those involved, in Graham’s view, “included the royal family” and “some groups that were close to the royal family.” … At page 396 of the Joint Inquiry’s report, in the final section of the body of the report, a yawning gap appears. All 28 pages of Part Four, entitled “Finding, Discussion and Narrative Regarding Certain Sensitive National Security Matters,” have been redacted. … The order that they must remain secret had come from President Bush. …
Former C.I.A. officer [John] Kiriakou later said his colleagues had told him they believed that what Zubaydah had told them about the princes was true. “We had known for years,” he told the authors, “that Saudi royals — I should say elements of the royal family — were funding al-Qaeda.”…
Polls suggest that the publicity about Iraq’s supposed involvement affected the degree to which the U.S. public came to view Iraq as an enemy deserving retribution. Before the invasion, a Pew Research poll found that 57 percent of those polled believed Hussein had helped the 9/11 terrorists. Forty-four percent of respondents to a Knight-Ridder poll had gained the impression that “most” or “some” of the hijackers had been Iraqi. In fact, none were. In the wake of the invasion, a Washington Post poll found that 69 percent of Americans believed it likely that Saddam Hussein had been personally involved in 9/11.
Of course, both Mueller and Comey were instrumental in deceiving the American public to believe that Saddam Hussein was involved with Al Qaeda and with 9/11. They were actively involved in blaming not only Iran, but Iran’s enemy Iraq, for 9/11.
Mueller has been indicting the innocent and protecting the guilty throughout his career, and so he’s a top go-to man for the most powerful guilty parties to appoint to ‘investigate’ a case.
— Part Two
Most of what goes on in a legal case is private and never becomes public. But sometimes a judge manages to see things that the public never gets to see. And, furthermore, sometimes even the press gets to see, and even to report, things that don’t fit with a ‘stellar’ lawyer’s stellar reputation amongst the holders of power.
Mueller’s first big impact was obscure and little-reported at the time. The Khobar Towers event was already four years in the past. The rabidly pro-Saudi and anti-Iranian FBI Director Louis Freeh was retiring just when President George W. Bush was coming into office, and Freeh chose Deputy Attorney General Robert Mueller to be the person to appoint Freeh’s replacement: James Comey. That’s the very person whom Freeh had wanted to get the job.
It’s hardly possible to understand Rubert Mueller’s role in America’s leadership without understanding his close relationship with James Comey, the mutual-benefit-society that their association, with each other, has been, ever since 2001.
On 30 May 2013, Mueller’s worshipful biographer Garrett M. Graff headlined at The Washingtonian, “Forged Under Fire — Bob Mueller and Jim Comey’s Unusual Friendship”, and he reported how the two men, Mueller and Comey, had become bonded together at the start of 2001, before 9/11, by the retiring FBI Director Louis Freeh’s determination to place the blame for the 1996 Khobar Towers terrorist bombing in Saudi Arabia, on Iran, and not on Al Qaeda or the Saud family. Graff wrote:
As the Bush administration took office in 2001, Freeh asked Bob Mueller, who was acting as John Ashcroft’s deputy attorney general, to transfer the case to Comey.
When he finally did so, Mueller called Comey with a warning: “Wilma Lewis [from the Clinton Administration] is going to be so pissed.” Indeed, Lewis blasted the decision, as well as both Freeh and Mueller personally, in a press release, saying the move was “ill-conceived and ill-considered.” But Freeh’s gambit paid off.
Within weeks, Comey had pulled together the indictment [against Iran]. During a National Security Council briefing at the White House, under the watchful gaze of Secretary of State Colin Powell, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Comey presented overwhelming evidence of Iran’s involvement.
On the eve of the expiration of the statute of limitations, fourteen individuals were indicted for the [1996] attack. Freeh, who stepped down the next day, said the indictment was “a major step.”
Bill Clinton’s people saw the case against Iran on Khobar as having been incredibly weak and concocted by the Sauds. Freeh accepted on pure faith the representations the Sauds made. Comey and Mueller did, too. This — the Sauds’ case — was the basis of the U.S. Government’s charge that Iran is ‘the top state-sponsor of terrorism’: the country that the Sauds hated thus became the country that received the blame for this bombing, which was done by Al Qaeda as a warning to the Saud family to expel U.S. military from Saudi Arabia.
The liberal Republican James Comey became the Senior Vice President and General Counsel of Lockheed Martin Corporation during 2005-2010, where his 2009 pay was $6,113,797. During that time, he also was a Director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s National Chamber Litigation Center, which works to support business interests in the courts, especially the interests of U.S.-based international corporations, including Lockheed Martin. Furthermore, as of 12 March 2010, Comey also had been granted 162,482 free shares of stock in Lockheed Martin, which number was higher than that of anyone except the Chairman, the CEO President, and an Executive Vice President; so, Comey was among the very top people at Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin’s largest foreign customer was the Saudi Government, which is 100% owned by the Saud family. Today, those Comey shares are worth $47,119,780 — after his five years with the company, plus nearly nine years of growth in that stock, from the war-producing policies that Comey had helped to initiate.
Then, Comey bought a $3M mansion in Connecticut and became the General Counsel and a Member of the Executive Committee at the gigantic hedge Fund, Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater Associates, in Connecticut, where Comey’s only publicly known pay was $6,632,616 in 2012. Dalio and Comey became very close — Dalio called Comey his “hero.” But Obama then hired the liberal Republican Comey as FBI Director in 2013, replacing the liberal Republican Mueller in that role, from which Obama’s successor President Trump fired Comey, and congressional Democrats then succeeded in getting Mueller assigned to become the Special Counsel who would supposedly investigate the legitimacy of that firing.
On 21 May 2013, Marketwatch bannered “Bridgewater Associates’ trades for Q2” and reported that
After a number of tech companies — including those we’ve mentioned [Microsoft, Oracle, and Intel]and EMC — the largest single-stock holding in the fund’s portfolio was its roughly 220,000 shares of Lockheed Martin LMT, +1.93%. The company recently reported an increase in earnings compared with the first quarter of 2012, but revenue was down slightly and there is a good deal of speculation that the business will be impacted by cuts in U.S. military spending. … Billionaire Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group reported a position of 1.2 million shares at the end of December.
Lockheed Martin is by far the largest U.S. ‘defense’ contractor, taking 8.3% of all U.S. Government purchases during 2015, as compared to #2 Boeing’s 3.8%, and #3 General Dynamics’s 3.1%.
Other than sales to the U.S. Government, the largest customer of Lockheed Martin is the Saud family, who own Saudi Arabia and own the world’s largest oil company, Aramco, and who hate Shia Muslims and especially hate Iran, which has the most Shia.
As Open Secrets has reported about Comey:
He left Bridgewater and became senior research scholar and Hertog Fellow on National Security at Columbia Law School in February 2013, and also joined the board of London-based HSBC Holdings. As the Center has reported, Comey maxed out his contributions to Mitt Romney in 2012 in an effort to unseat his new boss, and also gave to Obama’s 2008 opponent, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).
This is a team that’s pro-Saud and pro U.S. billionaires, and pro Israeli billionaires, but rabidly anti Iran and Russia and China, and looking for a fight — war and increased ‘defense’-spending — against any nation (such as Syria) that’s favorable toward those ‘enemies of America’.
As of August 2009: “HSBC is the largest and most widely represented international bank in the Middle East. … SABB is a Saudi joint stock company that is listed on the Saudi stock exchange (Tadawul). The HSBC Group has a 40% shareholding in SABB. … SABB is one of the largest banks in Saudi Arabia. … HSBC Saudi Arabia is HSBC’s investment banking arm in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, owned 60% by the HSBC Group and 40% by SABB.”
Neither HSBC nor SABB has any branch either in Iran or in Syria. HSBC Bank Middle East does have branches in Israel, and in the Palestinain Territories, and in nine Sunni Arab kingdoms, as well as in secular and democratic Lebanon, but not in Iran and Syria (the two Middle Eastern countries that the U.S. sanctions against — partly because of Comey’s decisions).
On January 26th, Russian Televison headlined “New Integrity Initiative leak: Make Muslims love NATO, target anti-frackers, plan for nuclear war”, and reported that, “A new batch of leaked files from the covert influence network exposes how the Integrity Initiative recruits high-flying businessmen for intel ops, shows UK Muslims ‘why NATO matters’ and prepares for nuclear conflict with Russia. … Two HSBC officials are on the list of intelligence assets, as part of a plan to attract talent from the City to serve as military intel experts.”
— Part Three
Ideology is definitely involved in this; and the U.S. Government — in its policies though generally not in its rhetoric — is the leader on the side of hereditary rule and of countries that are ruled by an alliance between state and church. These are countries that are ruled not by the public, but by the aristocracy, and the dominant clergy.
When Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeni took control in Shia Iran after overthrowing the Pahlavi Dynasty in 1979, he was reasserting something from the very origin of Shia Islam, which was the Battle of Karbala. Whereas Islam started as one faith in 610, the separation into Shia Islam and Sunni Islam started in 680, at the Battle of Karbala, where “Hussain (or Husayn) ibn Ali, the grandson of Muhammad, along with many other prominent Muslims, not only disapproved of Yazid’s nomination for Caliph (or leader of Islam) but also declared it against the spirit of Islam (because only an imam or cleric, a scholar of Islam, should lead the faith).” Yazid was the first hereditary Caliph; and Hussain, on principle, rejected hereditary dynasties. This Battle was between supporters (Sunnis) of monarchies (hereditary caliphs, or “kings”), versus opponents (Shia) of monarchies. “Husain ibn Ali believed the appointment of Yazid as the heir of the Caliphate would lead to hereditary kingship, which was against the original political teachings of Islam. Therefore, he resolved to confront Yazid.”Though there have been Shia dynasties (such as the Pahlavis), Khomeni’s Shia Iran raised up a revolutionary spirit within Islam threatening all dynasties, and the Saud family immediately feared this threat. This became an additional reason (besides the Saud family’s 1744 sworn eternal anti-Shia contract with the Wahhab clergy) for the Sauds to be opposed to post-1979 Iran.
The Sauds, and the other hereditary monarchies in the Islamic world (all of whom are major importers of U.S. weapons), are frightened by Shia, and by Shiism itself — Shia belief. There also are many Sunni followers who reject monarchy (hereditary/dynastic rule), even though Sunni Islam doesn’t itself reject dynastic rule, in any way. Unlike with Shiism, the rejection of monarchies isn’t, at all, a part of Sunni tradition. Furthermore, in Sunni monarchic countries, the aristocracy are funding clerics who accept monarchies. Therefore, the Sunni-Shia split, that was initiated in 680, escalated greatly after the 1979 Iranian revolution, which actually carried out a monarch’s defenestration — it therefore terrifies today’s Islamic monarchs (all of whom are Sunnis), but especially the Sauds, who are the most fundamentalist of all Sunni rulers. They are determined to conquer Iran. To protect their dynasty, for themselves and their descendants, they aim to destroy Iran, and conquer all Shia. Every single one of today’s monarchical Islamic countries is run and owned by a Sunni family. Each one of them is allied with the U.S., and they’re all among the largest foreign buyers of weapons from Lockheed Martin and other U.S. ‘defense’ contractors.
The United States Government supports Sunni Islam, which functions mainly by means of hereditary rule, by a family that has received the clergy’s blessing from God to rule that country, as Emir, King, or other monarch. Although Syria’s President, Bashar al-Assad, inherited his post from his father, that was only because the secular, non-sectarian Ba’ath Party, which had appointed his father, Hafez al-Assad, to lead the country, chose his son as the best person to succeed him, and it was not an assertion of the dynastic principle that Shia Islam intrinsically opposes. It certainly had nothing to do with the will of the local clergy. By contrast, the clergy in Saudi Arabia hold veto-power over the Saud family’s choice as to which of the Princes will become the next King. The clergy are called “Ulema,” and “Ulema, essentially they are the king maker. If — if the ulema say that you should not take power, you are not going to take power. And the ulema were important because they are the people who — who — who certify the Islamic legality.” That’s the way it is in fundamentalist-Sunni Saudi Arbia. The U.S., ever since at least 1949, has been trying to overthrow Syria’s secular Government and replace it with one that would be controlled by individuals who are selected by the fundamentalist-Sunni Saud family — intense haters of all Shia, and of Iran. After all: Iran is founded upon a rejection of dynastic rule.
Paragraph 101 of the U.S. judge’s 22 December 2011 “Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law”against Iran as being the cause of the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing states:
- On June 25, 1996, terrorists struck the Khobar Towers housing complex in Dharan, Saudi Arabia, with a powerful truck bomb, killing nineteen (19) U.S. servicemen and wounding some five hundred (500). … FBI investigators concluded the operation was undertaken on direct orders from senior Iranian government leaders, the bombers had been trained and funded by the IRGC [Iranian Republican Guard Corps] in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, and senior members of the Iranian government, including Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Intelligence and Security and the Supreme Leader’s office had selected Khobar as the target and commissioned the Saudi Hizballah to carry out the operation.
No solid evidence has ever been published — not even by the proponents — to support those allegations.
Even as late as 15 August 1996, the Sauds hadn’t yet thought up the ‘explanation’ that Iran had perpetrated the bombing, and the New York Times headlined “Saudi Rebels Are Main Suspects In June Bombing of a U.S. Base”, which reported that, “Prince Nayef said Saudi Arabia would make an announcement as soon as the investigation is completed. His comments were also viewed as refuting earlier suggestions by Secretary of Defense William J. Perry, who had said that Saudi investigations might point to an Iranian connection. Subsequently, the American official suggested he did not have direct evidence linking Iran to the bombing.” Clinton’s Defense Secretary Perry introduced the concept that Iran might be to blame. Furthermore, “Abdelbari Atwan, editor of Al Quds, said today that Saudi authorities ‘are still refusing to let United States investigators see the suspects.’”
Perry, who had introduced that false idea in 1996, casually said in 2007 that he no longer believed it was true. UPI reported on 6 June 2007: “A former U.S. defense secretary says he now believes al-Qaida rather than Iran was behind a 1996 truck bombing at an American military base. Former Defense Secretary William Perry said he had a contingency plan to attack Iran if the link had been proven, but evidence was not to either his nor President Bill Clinton’s satisfaction.” Having come up with the false idea that served as the basis for calling Iran “the top state sponsor of terrorism,” he quietly abandoned it 11 years later, 11 years too late, but the myth that he had introduced, was and still remains, official U.S. Government dogma. Louis Freeh had immediately accepted that false idea, and he blamed the Clinton Administration for not acting on the basis of it. Freeh had co-created this myth, along with Prince Bandar bin Sultan al-Saud, who was a buddy of both George W. Bush and of G.H.W. Bush. And Mueller and Comey carried through on Freeh’s intention: to blame Iran. U.S. international policies are based on such lies as that.
Here is Gareth Porter’s complete defenestration of that entire fraud against Iran:
—
Gareth Porter’s complete 22 June 2009 series on the Khobar Towers bombing:
- EXCLUSIVE — PART 1: Al Qaeda Excluded from the Suspects List http://archive.is/6ECdB
http://www.ipsnews.net/2009/06/exclusive-part1-al-qaeda-excluded-from-the-suspects-list/
- EXCLUSIVE — PART 2: Saudi Account of Khobar Bore Telltale Signs of Fraud http://archive.is/ALjJ5
- EXCLUSIVE — PART 3: U.S. Officials Leaked a False Story Blaming Iran http://archive.is/Alg07
http://www.ipsnews.net/2009/06/exclusive-part-3-us-officials-leaked-a-false-story-blaming-iran/
- EXCLUSIVE — PART 4: FBI Ignored Compelling Evidence of bin Laden Role http://archive.is/ZsbGO
http://www.ipsnews.net/2009/06/exclusive-part-4-fbi-ignored-compelling-evidence-of-bin-laden-role/
- EXCLUSIVE — PART 5: Freeh Became “Defence Lawyer” for Saudis on Khobar http://archive.is/i14yi
—
On 8 August 2015, the man whom the Sauds and the U.S. Deep State had been claiming to have been the planner and ringleader of the Khobar Towers bombing, Ahmed Ibrahim al-Mughassil, was allegedly captured in Beirut and sent to Riyadh for trial. However, nothing has been made public about or from him since that date. On 1 September 2015, Gareth Porter headlined “Who Bombed Khobar Towers? Anatomy of a Crooked Terrorism Investigation”, and he pointed out glaring evidence that this alleged capture of the ringleader was just more of the Saud and American lies, such as:
In order to build a legal case against Iran and Shi’a Saudis, Freeh had to get access to the Shi’a detainees who had confessed. But the Saudis never agreed to allow FBI officials to interview them. In early November 1998, Freeh sent an FBI team to observe Saudi secret police officials asking eight Shi’a detainees the FBI’s questions from behind a one-way mirror at the Riyadh detention center.
By then Saudi secret police had already had two and half years to coach the detainees on what to say, under the threat of more torture. But Freeh didn’t care. … [And,] Freeh made a deal with the Justice Department to remain FBI director long enough to get the indictment of Mughassil and twelve other Saudi Shi’a. The indictment [by Comey] was announced on June 21, 2001, Freeh’s last day as FBI director.
An excellent summary of the evidence that Khobar was a Sunni not a Shia event was posted online at the Pakistan Defence site, on 24 July 2016, and it included this:
The Sunni detainees over Khobar included Yusuf al-Uyayri, who was later revealed to have been the actual head of al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia. In 2003, al-Uyayri confirmed in al Qaeda’s regular publication that he had been arrested and tortured after the Khobar bombing.
A report published in mid-August 1996 by the London-based Palestinian newspaper Al Qods al-Arabi, based on sources with ties to the jihadi movement in Saudi Arabia, said that six Sunni veterans of the Afghan war had confessed to the Khobar bombing under torture. That was followed two days later by a report in the New York Times that the Saudi officials now believed that Afghan war veterans had carried out the Khobar bombing.
A few weeks later, however, the Saudi regime apparently made a firm decision to blame the bombing on the Saudi Shi’a.
So, America’s supposed ‘justification’ for hostility toward Iran — as opposed to American cooperation with Iran — is entirely fraudulent. It can be taken only on faith.
The Sauds block any outsiders from having access to the evidence, and have required the U.S. regime to trust their allegations on faith alone, but the U.S. authorities find that acceptable, and constantly recite that Saudi-American line. The families of the 19 American dead and the 372 wounded in that attack are simply being lied-to, by our own Government. The American Government (and not merely Al Qaeda) is those Americans’ enemy.
However, Khobar is hardly the only instance where Mueller has been key in assisting to create one of Big Brother’s lies. He worked hard to achieve many others.
— Part Four
On 19 June 2005, the AP headlined “Terror Expertise Not Priority at FBI,” and “FBI: Experience not needed in terror fight” and “FBI failed to seek terror expertise after Sept. 11.” Their John Solomon reported: “In sworn testimony that contrasts with their promises to the public, the FBI managers who crafted the post-Sept. 11 fight against terrorism say expertise about the Mideast or terrorism was not important in choosing the agents they promoted to top jobs. And they still do not believe such experience is necessary today. … ‘A bombing case is a bombing case,’ said Dale Watson, the FBI’s terrorism chief in the two years after Sept. 11. … The FBI’s current terror-fighting chief, Executive Assistant Director Gary Bald, said his first terrorism training came ‘on the job’ when he moved to headquarters to oversee anti-terrorism strategy two years ago. ‘You need leadership. You don’t need subject matter expertise,’ Bald testified. … ‘It is certainly not what I look for in selecting an officer for a position in a counterterrorism position.’” The next day, U.S. News & World Report headlined “Case Mismanagement,” about Bush’s FBI chief, Robert Mueller’s, having botched his promised computerization of his agency’s files: “The week began with tough talk from some former members of the 9/11 commission about what they characterize as the FBI’s failure to follow through on promises of fundamental reforms.” This computerization “project had 10 different FBI case managers who rejiggered the contract 36 times,” and so now “Mueller pulled the plug on the $170 million Virtual Case File system in March,” and his technology division “estimated the replacement costs at $792 million.” Then, on July 28th, the New York Times bannered “FBI’s Translation Backlog Grows,” and reported that, “The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s backlog of untranslated terrorism intelligence doubled last year, and the time it takes the bureau to hire translators has grown longer.”
On 20 September 2005, the Washington Post headlined “Recruits Sought for Porn Squad,” and reported: “The FBI is joining the Bush administration’s war on porn. … Early last month, the bureau’s Washington Field Office began recruiting for a new anti-obscenity squad. … The new squad will divert eight agents [from other assignments] … to gather evidence against ‘manufacturers and purveyors’ of pornography — not the kind exploiting children, but the kind that depicts, and is marketed to, consenting adults. ‘I guess this means we’ve won the war on terror,’ said one exasperated FBI agent, speaking on condition of anonymity. … ‘We must not need any more resources for espionage.’” Commented another agent — also anonymously — “Honestly, most of the guys would have to recuse themselves” from serving on this squad, because they have such “pornography” at home. The new squad was being demanded by Bush’s new Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales. “Christian conservatives, long skeptical of Gonzales, greeted the pornography initiative with what the Family Research Council called ‘a growing sense of confidence in our new attorney general.’” Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda would probably have seconded that endorsement, but they knew better than to say so publicly.
Bush’s people, FBI Director Mueller and Alberto Gonzales, and others, were efficiently doing their jobs for their White House boss, but he wasn’t efficiently doing his job to protect Americans from terrorists. On Saturday, 13 August 2005, the AP headlined “FBI Counterterror Head to Run New Division,” and reported, “Gary Bald, the FBI’s counterterrorism chief, was named director of the bureau’s new National Security Service on Friday, a day after a senator sharply criticized his lack of experience and knowledge of the Mideast and terrorism. … ‘Gary Bald brings to this new position a wide range of operational and leadership experience,’ … said FBI Director Robert Mueller.” Unfortunately, it was the wrong type of experience — but wrong experience is exactly what Bush wanted. It’s also what he had wanted as the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency when Hurricane Katrina struck, and it’s even what he wanted throughout the federal Government. In fact, he preferred to hire lobbyists, rather than tested-and-proven proven public servants. From time immemorial, kings have preferred lobbyists or the spokesmen for “aristocrats,” not representatives of the public.
On August 7th, the New York Times bannered “9/11 Group Says White House Has Not Provided Files,” and reported, “The White House has failed to turn over any of the information requested by the 10 members of the disbanded Sept. 11 commission in their renewed, unofficial investigation into whether the government is doing enough to prevent terrorist attacks on American soil, commission members said. … Thomas H. Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey who led the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission, said he was surprised and disappointed.” Three days later, the Times headlined “9/11 Panel Members Ask Congress to Learn if Pentagon Withheld Files,” and reported, “Members of the independent commission that investigated the Sept. 11 terror attacks called on Congress to determine whether the Pentagon withheld [from the commission] intelligence information showing that a secret American military unit had identified Mohammed Atta and three other hijackers as potential threats more than a year before the attacks. … ‘I think this is a big deal,’ said John F. Lehman, a Republican member of the commission. … ‘If this is true, somebody should be looking into it,’ said [fellow Republican member] Thomas H. Kean.”
Then, on 14 September 2005, the Times headlined “F.A.A. Alerted On Qaeda in ’98, 9/11 Panel Said,” and reported, “American aviation officials were warned as early as 1998 that Al Qaeda could ‘seek to hijack a commercial jet and slam it into a U.S. landmark,’ according to previously secret portions of a report prepared last year by the Sept. 11 commission.” The White House had “been battling for more than a year” to prevent the 9/11 Commission from making this information public, but “commission members complained that the deleted material contained information critical to the public’s understanding of what went wrong on Sept. 11,” and the White House was now finally partially relenting. “Commission officials said they were perplexed” at why the White House had prevented the Commission from including this information in their previously published report. These formerly redacted passages showed that the FAA had raised in 2000 the level of its terrorist warnings, and had kept these warnings high in 2001, but that after President Bush came into office, the FAA “allowed screening performance to decline significantly,” in the months right before the 9/11 attacks.
On Thursday 22 September 2005, the Times headlined “Senators Accuse Pentagon of Obstructing Inquiry on Sept. 11 Plot,” and reported: “Senators from both parties accused the Defense Department on Wednesday of obstructing an investigation into whether a highly classified intelligence program known as Able Danger did indeed identify Mohamed Atta and other future hijackers as potential threats well before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.” One of the few witnesses whom the Bush Administration permitted to testify to the Senate on this matter said that, by a (for the Bush Administration) fortunate coincidence, he had been “forced to destroy all the data, charts and other analytical product” concerning this operation. President Bush’s people were stonewalling the former 9/11 commission, the U.S. Senate, and anyone else who was trying to determine how far, deep, and wide, the President’s 9/11 lies had extended.
On 27 March 2005, Eric Lichtblau at the New York Times, headlined “THE REACH OF WAR: ARRANGED DEPARTURES; New Details on F.B.I. Aid for Saudis After 9/11” and reported that:
The episode has been retold so many times in the last three and a half years that it has become the stuff of political legend: in the frenzied days after Sept. 11, 2001, when some flights were still grounded, dozens of well-connected Saudis, including relatives of Osama bin Laden, managed to leave the United States on specially chartered flights.
Now, newly released government records show previously undisclosed flights from Las Vegas and elsewhere and point to a more active role by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in aiding some of the Saudis in their departure.
The F.B.I. gave personal airport escorts to two prominent Saudi families who fled the United States, and several other Saudis were allowed to leave the country without first being interviewed, the documents show.
The Saudi families, in Los Angeles and Orlando, requested the F.B.I. escorts. …
Bush has always been a famously arrogant man, who showed noticeable difficulty acknowledging whenever he botched. Is part of the reason for this that he simply didn’t feel that he had botched; is part of the reason that he was authentically satisfied with the Presidency he had wrought upon the U.S. throughout his two terms of office?
The signs of severe trouble in his Presidency were painfully evident since very early on — sufficiently severe to give any reasonable person cause to worry, even though this President exhibited no such signs of distress.
Shortly before the 2002 mid-term congressional elections, a major report on the war against terrorism was issued by a blue-ribbon commission, at the U.S. billionaires’ Council on Foreign Relations, and was widely publicized at the time, concluding that domestic security was being woefully underbudgeted by President Bush. Published on 24 October 2002, and titled “America — Still Unprepared, Still in Danger,” this report, to a nation about to vote for a new Congress, mentioned that more than a year after 9-11, the nearly 300,000 foreigners in the U.S. who had overstayed their visas were still here, and that — because of the President’s refusal to do anything to control guns — the FBI, under this gun-fanatic pro-NRA President, was still prohibited from cross-checking its database of gun-owners with its database of American terrorist suspects. The report also said that the “650,000 local and state police officials continue to operate in a virtual intelligence vacuum, without access to terrorist watch lists.” Furthermore, the report noted that a nuclear weapon could easily arrive unnoticed on any one of the 21,000 shipping containers entering each day into America’s 361 ports, but that only $92 million had been budgeted of the required $2 billion in stepped-up port security to prevent such a catastrophe. The President ignored these needs, because his $1.4 trillion-dollar tax-cut (going mainly to the nation’s wealthiest 2%) left no money to pay for it. Whereas the CFR represented nearly all of America’s billionaires, Bush’s Republican Party represented only the Republican ones. Perhaps the Democratic ones and a few of the Republican ones had pushed this report. Anyway: it was true.
On 27 October 2002, CBS “60 Minutes” reported that an FBI translator of Middle Eastern languages, Sibel Edmonds, was fired by the Bush Administration for doing too good a job of translating documents: her FBI superior had ordered her to be slower and less productive (major details of her case were provided by her, years later, on 21 June 2005, at www.antiwar.com/edmonds), but she disobeyed because she felt that the war against terrorism was urgent. She especially offended her boss by calling his attention to the mis-translations that had been intentionally done by one of her FBI colleagues, who turned out to have been spying against the U.S. for a certain Middle Eastern country. The FBI refused reporters’ questions. President Bush’s Attorney General John Ashcroft also had no comment. And the conscientious and industrious translator of Arabic languages, Ms. Edmonds, now had no job, while her FBI boss, who had fired her, was promoted by Bush. Subsequently (as was extensively documented at https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Sibel_Edmonds), Attorney General Ashcroft retroactively classified Ms. Edmonds’s public testimony and banned her from testifying in lawsuits that 9/11 families had brought against him. President Bush consistently opposed whistleblower-protection laws, and Ms. Edmonds was a whistleblower, who was now subject to retaliation from her former employer. On 6 July 2004, Judge Reggie Walton, whom George W. Bush had appointed to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, dismissed Edmonds’s case against Ashcroft, citing the alleged “state secrets privilege,” which Ashcroft had put forth. Subsequently, on 14 January 2005, the Minneapolis Star Tribune headlined “Government: FBI Translator’s Complaints Were Supported by Evidence, Witnesses,” and reported: “Evidence and other witnesses supported complaints by a fired FBI contract linguist who alleged shoddy work and possible espionage within the bureau’s translator program after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, according to a report Friday from the Justice Department’s senior oversight official. The department’s inspector general, Glenn Fine, said the allegations by former translator Sibel Edmonds ‘raised substantial questions and were supported by various pieces of evidence.’ Fine said the FBI still has not adequately investigated the claims.” And, still, George W. Bush and his Administration continued to ignore the charges, and to treat Edmonds as their enemy. They dragged out her agony: on 22 February 2005, the ACLU headlined “Administration Blinks; Admits Retroactively Classified Information Not Harmful to National Security.” The reason Ashcroft had cited for asserting the “state secrets privilege” was that making public this information would be “harmful to national security.” However, the Administration continued to deny to Edmonds a restoration of her employment, even though no excuse was now being provided for the denial. Meanwhile, the Middle Eastern spy whom Ms. Edmonds had exposed to the FBI fled the country and retaliated against her and her family, who now lived in constant fear. Ms. Edmonds sued the U.S. Government on 16 March 2005, under the Federal Tort Claims Act, seeking $10 million in damages for her now ruined life. She established a website, www.justacitizen.com, to post news about her case. Her investigative series there, “The Highjacking of a Nation,” employed publicly available, non-classified information, which probed the Saudi/Bush financial ties she believed stood behind her muzzling regarding the documents she had translated.
Meanwhile, to make the nation even more vulnerable, as the AP reported on 14 November 2002, “Nine Army linguists, including six trained to speak Arabic, have been dismissed from the military because they are gay. The soldiers’ dismissals come at a time when the military is facing a critical shortage of translators and interpreters for the war on terrorism.”
George W. Bush continued, in his second term, to sabotage the U.S. Government’s acquiring the Arabic translators it increasingly desperately needed: The lead story in he New York Times on 8 June 2005 opened: “The Central Intelligence Agency is reviewing security procedures that have led the agency to turn away large numbers of Arabic-language linguists and other potential recruits with skills avidly sought by the agency since the attacks of 2001.” A bit slow on the uptake there? This was now almost four years after 9/11. Unnamed “intelligence officials” were cited as the news sources — these people evidently feared retaliation from the U.S. President, for speaking out. This issue might never have become public if Democrats in Congress hadn’t pushed it. The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee said, of many of the applicants who had been turned away, “We have cut them out at our peril.” “Many of those rejected, the officials say, have been first-generation Americans who bring the linguistic facility and cultural knowledge that the C.I.A. has been trying to develop in seeking to improve its performance in penetrating terrorist organizations.” The Times reporter sought comment from the Administration. A CIA spokesperson responded: “We are taking a fresh look at the process.” Why didn’t they take that “fresh look” as soon as they knew that Al Qaeda was behind 9/11?
On 26 June 2006, Newsweek headlined “Smart, Skilled, Shut Out: Intel agencies are desperate for Arabic speakers. So why do they reject some of the best and brightest?” The reason was: “The security-clearance system is still stacked against some of the best linguists — those who learn their language natively.” Because of the far-Right Republican U.S. Government’s assumption that native Arabic speakers must be suspect, America’s “intelligence” agencies were favoring non-Muslims (Christians) who had studied Arabic in college. No wonder America’s penetration of terrorist cells was so disastrously poor. Then, on 27 July 2006, the AP headlined “Army Dismisses Gay Arabic Linguist,” and reported that among the 11,000 soldiers kicked out of the U.S. military under the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, “nearly 800 dismissed gay or lesbian service members had critical abilities, including 300 with important language skills. Fifty-five were proficient in Arabic,” including this soldier who was the subject of the article. He was trying to get the U.S. Army to stop sabotaging his career by revealing to prospective employers that he was gay — something he had kept secret until the Army discovered it and kicked him out. Under Bush, “Don’t ask, don’t tell” became simply: Ferret them out, hound them out, then destroy their future careers! This was one reason the U.S. remained largely deaf to Al Qaeda’s communications. This President was more concerned with carrying out the prejudices of Christians’ Bible than with carrying out his nation’s Constitutional duties.
Americans still for a long time loved Bush’s job-performance (and his public-approval now is so high that most Americans would think he couldn’t possibly have been so evil); he shared their religious values. So, in the mid-term elections on 5 November of 2002, he won unprecedented Republican gains, and control, in both houses of Congress, by posing as The Warrior-President who was campaigning against The Obstructionist Democrats. They got the rap, for his failures to protect Americans. And for the results from all of his lies — such as the invasion of Iraq, which the trashiest congressional Democrats (and not merely 98% of congressional Republicans) voted for (thus sharing in Bush’s lies).
— Part Five
Soon after the 2002 mid-term elections, Bush virtually abandoned the Afghan people: the BBC’s Michael Buchanan reported on 13 February 2003, under the heading, “Afghanistan omitted from US aid budget,” that even Republican congressmen were “shocked” at the President’s zeroing-out of Afghan-aid funds; and, as a result, “The United States Congress has stepped in to find nearly $300m in humanitarian and reconstruction funds for Afghanistan after the Bush administration failed to request any money in the latest budget.” And the yawning gap in the nation’s domestic security remained. As one of the nation’s thousands of Bush-unfunded local “first responders” to terrorism, Baltimore’s Mayor Martin O’Malley, noted, in a Houston Chronicle op-ed on 21 February 2003, “With the exception of some additional airport security, next to nothing has been invested in protecting America’s population centers or its economic infrastructure.” He went on to ask rhetorically, and then to answer, his own key questions about the President’s post-9-11 policies: “If our own teenage graffiti vandals can get to the chemical cars passing through American cities on our railroads, how hard could it be for al Qaeda? Not hard at all, when you consider there are five security guards monitoring CSX tracks between Richmond, Va., and Wilmington, Del., two fewer than there were on Sept. 11, 2001. If the drug cartels’ cocaine and heroin can still flow uninterrupted into America’s unprotected and uninspected ports, how hard could it be for … Osama bin Laden to smuggle a dirty bomb or a nuke? Not hard at all when, on average, 2 percent of America’s incoming port cargo is inspected, about the same percentage as on Sept. 11, 2001.” America’s President, obviously, had other priorities. And O’Malley boldly condemned those priorities, saying, “There is another dangerous, undeniable truth here: The federal government can’t invest in homeland security when the Treasury is bled dry by incessant tax cuts and the ensuing deficits they cause.”
On 31 March 2003, the New York Times editorialized against “Undercutting the 9/11 Inquiry,” and noted that, “the federal investigative committee so reluctantly supported by the White House” was shocked to find that it was unfunded by the White House, whose “assurances led them to believe needed funds would be included in the supplemental war budget sent to the Capitol last week. But the commission’s $11 million request was not there.”
The Bush-appointed, bipartisan, James Baker, Lee Hamilton, Iraq Study Group Report, was issued on 7 December 2006, and it stated: “All of our efforts in Iraq, military and civilian, are handicapped by … [the fact that] Our embassy of 1,000 has 33 Arabic speakers, just six of whom are at the level of fluency.” Furthermore, “As an intelligence analyst told us, ‘We rely too much on others to bring information to us, and too often don’t understand what is reported back because we do not understand the context of what we are told.’” On top of this, the Administration had been outright lying to the American public: “There is significant underreporting of the violence in Iraq. … A murder of an Iraqi is not necessarily counted as an attack. If we cannot determine the source of a sectarian attack, that assault does not make it into the database.”
Democratic Senator Bob Graham, after ten years on the Intelligence Committee, published in 2004 Intelligence Matters, and stated (p. 169): “Our investigators found a CIA memo dated August 2, 2002, whose author concluded that there is incontrovertible evidence that there is support for these terrorists within the Saudi government.” The book’s dustcover summarized highlights from the Senator’s book:
“At one point, a terrorist support network conducted some of its operations through Saudi Arabia’s U.S. embassy — and a funding chain for terrorism led to the Saudi royal family.
“In February 2002, only four months after combat began in Afghanistan, the Bush administration ordered General Tommy Franks to move vital military resources out of Afghanistan for an operation against Iraq — despite Franks’s privately stated belief that there was a job to finish in Afghanistan, and that the war on terrorism should focus next on terrorist targets in Somalia and Yemen.
“Throughout 2002, President Bush directed the FBI to limit its investigations of Saudi Arabia, which supported some and possibly all of the September 11 hijackers.
“The White House was so uncooperative with the bipartisan inquiry that its behavior bore all the hallmarks of a cover-up.
“The FBI had an informant who was extremely close to two of the September 11 hijackers, and actually housed one of them, yet the existence of this informant and the scope of his contacts with the hijackers were covered up.
“There were twelve instances when the September 11 plot could have been discovered and potentially foiled.
“Days after 9/11, U.S. authorities allowed some Saudis to fly, despite a complete civil aviation ban, after which the government expedited the departure of more than one hundred Saudis from the United States.
“Foreign leaders throughout the Middle East warned President Bush of exactly what would happen in a postwar Iraq, and those warnings went either ignored or unheeded.
“As a result of his Senate work, Graham has become convinced that the attacks of September 11 could have been avoided, and that the Bush administration’s war on terrorism has failed to address the immediate danger posed by al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas in Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia.”
Greg Palast, the investigative reporter for the BBC and Guardian, wrote in his 2003 The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (pp. 98-100) about George W. Bush’s policy, which Bush put into place right at the start of his Presidency, to squelch all intelligence investigations into the supply of money and weapons to Al Qaeda and other Islamic terrorists. Palast quoted from FBI memos marked “SECRET,” and also from a source who was “a top-level CIA operative who spoke with us on condition of strictest anonymity.” Palast wrote: “After Bush took office, he [my source] said, ‘there was a major policy shift’ at the National Security Agency. Investigators were ordered to ‘back off’ from any inquiries into Saudi Arabian financing of terror networks.” Furthermore, “The Khan Laboratories investigation had been effectively put on hold.” This was the crucial investigation into the activities of Dr. A.Q. Khan, who was the father of the Pakistani atomic bomb, and who was selling nuclear materials to Islamic groups outside Pakistan. Only after 9/11 did Bush permit these investigations to resume. Until at least 9/11, Bush was stifling ongoing intelligence work against Osama bin Laden. He seems to have been reluctant to permit spying upon Osama or any Saudi aristocrats. The Bushes shared an aristocratic outlook with their friends and business partners the Saudi royals. On 15 November 2002, Philip Taubman headlined an “Editorial Notebook” in the New York Times, “Inside the Saudi Royal Cocoon: A World Where Flattery And Servility Abound,” and he said that theirs was “a world so distorted by sycophancy that it would be a miracle if they could see the full dimensions of the problems Saudi Arabia faces. Obsequiousness oozes through the Saudi court like oil.” Taubman noted, however, that, “Fawning aides are hardly unique to Saudi Arabia. The White House has sometimes served as a protective bunker for presidents who were cut off from the country and surrounded by servile advisers.” Bush had been surrounded by that since birth, long prior to the White House’s “protective bunker.” He shared more in common with Osama bin Laden than he did with the victims of 9/11. One thing he shared with bin Laden was religious fundamentalism. Another was a belief that the only moral authority for laws is God — not democracy, not the will of the public.
Maybe the 9/11 families should have been suing President Bush instead of the Sauds.
When the 9/11 Commission was finally established — despite the President’s opposition, but largely under his control — one of the victim family members, Mindy Kleinberg, in testimony on 31 March 2003, available at www.9-11commission.gov/hearings/hearing1/witness_kleinberg.htm, presented a cogently documented argument to the effect that there existed serious reason to believe that the Bush Administration had actively impeded FBI, FAA, NORAD, and other federal agencies’ attempts to prevent the attacks. She made clear some reasons why the White House would wish to hinder this investigation, as they were in fact so obviously doing. An excellent book that fills in many of these blanks, but that leaves unanswered the questions that the Bush Administration succeeded in blocking, is the 2002 The War on Freedom, by Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed. Since that’s a superb work of comprehensive serious nonfiction portraying the U.S. leadership as assisting anti-U.S. terrorism, it was rejected by all major publishers, and the author was lucky even to find a publisher at all: the obscure Tree of Life Publications. However, that book’s conclusion was implicitly endorsed a year later (29 July 2003) by former White House Counsel John Dean at http://writ.findlaw.com/dean/20030729.html: “The 9/11 Report Raises More Serious Questions About The White House Statements On Intelligence”: “It seems very probable that those in the White House knew much more than they have admitted, and they are covering up their failure to take action” to prevent the 9/11 attacks.
Several articles are available on the web presenting strong evidence that the Bush Administration possessed overwhelming advance-warning to place the U.S. intelligence community on highest alert in August of 2001, for an almost certain huge attack being imminently planned by al Qaeda on targets inside America, using planes as bombs.
One category of such articles are major-media U.S. news reports from the period prior to the Administration’s clampdown on U.S. reporting about the Government’s foreknowledge of Al Qaeda’s plans. On 13 February 2001, UPI’s Richard Sale headlined “NSA Listens to bin Laden,” and revealed that the National Security Agency had decoded Al Qaeda’s encryption system and knew the contents of e-mails and phone calls from Osama bin Laden. Another was an NBC News report, on 1 October 2001, which the network soon removed from its website, but which remained widely quoted on the web, and which stated that, on September 9th, just two days prior to the attacks, Osama had informed his adoptive mother, Al Kalifa bin Laden, during a phone conversation with her, that, “In two days, you’re going to hear big news, and you’re not going to hear from me for a while.” NBC was reporting this not in order to raise questions about President Bush, but to counter-argue Osama’s public assertions that Osama wasn’t behind the 9/11 attacks. Perhaps also belonging in this same category, or else reflecting the more disciplined Bush propaganda period afterward, was a Knight Ridder report from Jonathan S. Landay, on 6 June 2002, headlined “NSA Didn’t Share Key Pre-Sept. 11 Information, Sources Say,” and which opened: “A secretive U.S. eavesdropping agency monitored telephone conversations before Sept. 11 between the suspected commander of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks and the alleged chief hijacker, but did not share the information with other intelligence agencies, U.S. officials said Thursday. The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the conversations between Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Mohammed Atta were intercepted by the National Security Agency.”
If the NSA, or else the CIA, did, in fact, hide such information from the White House, then President Bush should have immediately “cleaned house” at the respective Agency, which he didn’t do. More likely, therefore, is that Bush either received the information (despite his disavowals), or else that he wanted deniability of his possessing the information, and thus practically prohibited such reports from even reaching his desk. Either way, President Bush would have been co-responsible, along with Al Qaeda, for 9/11 — a conclusion that will be further documented. On 18 October 2003, the New York Times headlined “Early Warnings on Moussaoui Are Detailed,” and reported: “The Central Intelligence Agency warned its stations around the world in August 2001 that Zacarias Moussaoui had been arrested in Minnesota after raising suspicion at a flight school there and that he was a ‘suspect airline suicide hijacker.’” The attorney for the FBI’s Minneapolis field office, Coleen Rowley, joined local FBI agent Harry Samit, to urge Washington to check out Moussaoui, but the key FBI officials in Washington, David Frasca and Michael Maltbie, refused. Frasca and Maltbie ended up being promoted by the Bush Administration; Rowley and Samit were iced for their having tried to prevent the 9/11 attacks. Samit’s 70 urgent requests to Washington failed to obtain from Frasca and Maltbie anything but runarounds during the two weeks prior to 9/11.
Who was the FBI’s chief during that period? It was Robert Mueller. He led the FBI from 4 September 2001 to 4 September 2013. He was the coverup man, regarding the Sauds, the redirect-blame man, regarding Iraq and Iran.
In another category of documentation of the Administration’s advance warning of the 9/11 attacks are independent reports on the web bringing together the revelations from numerous other reliable sources. One such report, from Michael C. Ruppert, at fromthewilderness.com, on 22 April 2002, is titled “The Case for Bush Administration Advance Knowledge of 9-11 Attacks.” It assembled numerous indications that someone, or some group, possibly Al Qaeda itself, possibly Bush insiders, knew about the 9/11 attacks in advance, and were even set up to profit enormously from this advance knowledge. For example:
“A jump in UAL put options 90 times (not 90 percent) above normal between Sept. 6 and Sept.10, and 285 times higher than average on the Thursday before the attack. [CBS News, Sept. 26]
“A jump in American Airlines put options 60 times (not 60 percent) above normal on the day before the attacks. [CBS News, Sept. 26]
“No similar trading occurred on any other airlines. [Bloomberg Business Report, the Institute for Counterterrorism (ICT), Herzliyya, Israel citing data from the CBOE]
“Morgan Stanley saw, between Sept. 7 and Sept.10, an increase of 27 times (not 27 percent) in the purchase of put options on its shares. [ICT Report, ‘Mechanics of Possible Bin-Laden Insider Trading Scam,’ Sept. 21, citing data from the CBOE].
“Merrill-Lynch saw a jump of more than 12 times the normal level of put options in the four trading days before the attacks. [Ibid] …
“How much money was involved? Andreas von Bülow, a former member of the German Parliament responsible for oversight of … intelligence services estimated the worldwide amount at $15 billion, according to Tagesspiegel on Jan. 13. Other experts have estimated the amount at $12 billion. …
“Not a single U.S. or foreign investigative agency has announced any arrests or developments in the investigation of these trades, the most telling evidence of foreknowledge of the attacks. This, in spite of the fact that former Security and Exchange Commission enforcement chief William McLucas told Bloomberg News that regulators would ‘certainly be able to track down every trade.’”
The Bush Administration failed to pursue, at all, this goldmine trail of evidence. Robert Mueller failed to follow any of those leads.
If the inside investment group carrying out these transactions — and presumably profiting billions from them — was Al Qaeda (or else an Al Qaeda front), then Al Qaeda must have greatly increased its financial resources from the 9/11 attacks. If, on the other hand, it was, let’s say, the Republican Party, then the beneficiaries would have been Al Qaeda’s American allies — not much different.
Two other such comprehensive reports suggesting possible Bush complicity in the 9/11 attacks include, first of note, from Kate Clark in Britain’s Independent, on 7 September 2002, “The Taliban minister, the US envoy and the warning of September 11 that was ignored”; and second of note, from truthout.com’s Wm. Rivers Pitt, on 20 June 2002, “All Along the Watchtower.” The piece by Pitt was especially incriminating, because it discussed the $7 billion class-action lawsuit on behalf of 14 victim families and 400 other plaintiffs of the 9-11 attacks, filed by Republican attorney, Stanley Hilton, on 3 June 2002, in San Francisco U.S. District Court, alleging that Bush “let it happen on purpose,” and that “the Bush administration got the pipeline it wanted.” Pitt added that, “Even the most hardened political observer must admit the dismal truth — September 11th was the greatest thing ever to happen to the Bush administration.” Osama bin Laden did far more for Bush than even Enron corporation’s Ken Lay did, though not quite as much as did the 2000 Green Party U.S. Presidential candidate Ralph Nader. (Nader’s nearly 2% of the Florida vote placed G.W. Bush into the White House, by draining from Democrat Al Gore far more than the mere one-hundredth of one percent of Florida’s votes that separated Gore from Bush. Nader also tipped New Hampshire to Bush. If either state had gone to Gore, there wouldn’t have been able to be any Supreme Court resolution of the election and Gore would straightforwardly have become President.) Osama bin Laden’s 9-11 terror attack did more than anything else to retain Bush in the White House. A community of interests certainly existed between bin Laden and Bush, perhaps even stronger than that which had existed between Ken Lay of Enron, and Mr. Bush.
Furthermore, Bush blocked progress on the fight against Al Qaeda, until 9/11 hit. On 5 August 2002, TIME’s Michael Elliott bannered “They Had a Plan: Long before 9/11, the White House debated taking the fight to al-Qaeda”, and Elliott reported, for example, that “John O’Neill led the FBI’s National Security Division, commanding more than 100 experienced agents. … O’Neill’s boss, Assistant FBI Director Barry Mawn, spent part of his time pleading with Washington for more agents, more linguists, more clerical help. He got nowhere.” O’Neill’s office was in the World Trade Center, and had responsibility for the investigation of the attack on the U.S.S. Cole, the ship which Al Qaeda had struck during the closing days of the Clinton Administration. “Heeding the pleas from the FBI’s New York City office, where Mawn and O’Neill were desperate for new linguists and analysts, acting FBI Director [Thomas] Pickard [the temporary FBI chief, between Freeh and Mueller] asked the Justice Department [including, until 10 May 2001, Deputy Attorney General Mueller] for some $50 million for the bureau’s counterterrorism program. He was turned down. In August, a bureau source says, he appealed to Attorney General Ashcroft. The reply was a flat no.”
Mueller also was active in the cover-up of Bush’s lies about Iraq.
On 11 February 2003 — shortly before we invaded and destroyed Iraq — FBI Director Mueller testified, to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, that: “Secretary Powell presented evidence last week that Baghdad has failed to disarm its weapons of mass destruction, willfully attempting to evade and deceive the international community. Our particular concern is that Saddam may supply al-Qaeda with biological, chemical, or radiological material.” He just reiterated the President’s lies, and his concern wasn’t to raise any question about them, but to reinforce them.
That was the actual counter-terrorism performance of the George W. Bush Administration: an American bulls-eye waiting passively for whatever Al Qaeda would fire at it. And all of this occurred after Berger had told Rice, “I believe that the Bush Administration will spend more time on terrorism generally, and on al-Qaeda specifically, than any other subject.” Berger had simply assumed that the people replacing the Clinton Administration would care about the welfare of the American people, just as Bill Clinton’s people did (at least somewhat). This assumption turned out to be false.
— Part Six
As for the devout Bush Administration’s “services” to the direct victims of the 9/11 attacks, there was a little-noticed major news story from Newsweek reporters Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball, on 16 April 2003, which, for some mysterious reason, appeared only on that magazine’s website, at http://stacks.msnbc.com/news/901320.asp. Inconspicuously headlined there as, “A Legal Counterattack,” it reported that the law firm defending Saudi Arabia (or, more appropriately, defending the Saudi royal family), against a $1 trillion lawsuit on behalf of the victims of 9/11, was Baker Botts, headed by Bush confidant and former Secretary of State, the WASP gang’s leading consiglieri, James Baker, who had also masterminded G.W. Bush’s legal campaign to stop the 2000 Florida vote-recount, and co-headed the White House’s official ‘investigation’ and account of 9/11. This report mentioned that the Saudis had approached many other high-priced law firms, but were turned down by several, because, as one of these lawyers said, “I kept asking myself, ‘do I want to be representing the Saudis against the 9-11 families — especially after all the trouble we had getting cooperation from the Saudis on terrorism’,” and, “I finally just said no.”
Salon.com’s Eric Boehlert headlined, on 18 June 2003, “Bush’s 9/11 Coverup?” reporting that, “Family advocates … wanted to know why the government — and specifically the Bush administration” (including Bush’s FBI-coverup Director, Robert Mueller) was “so reluctant to find answers to any of the obvious questions about what went wrong that day, why so little has been fixed, and why virtually nobody has accepted any responsibility for the glaring failures.” But what were failures from the victims’ standpoint, were Mr. Bush’s (and his sponsors’) greatest triumph, from his (and their) political (and financial) standpoint. And then President Bush returned Al Qaeda’s favor, by invading Iraq, thus pumping up Islamic hatred of Americans, and recruitments by Al Qaeda — and weapons-sales by Lockheed Martin etc.
Back again to Newsweek’s Isikoff and Hosenball (only three weeks after their notable “A Legal Counterattack”), and buried again only on the magazine’s website, at http://stacks.msnbc.com/news/910676.asp, were more ugly details of Bush’s dogged efforts to sabotage the investigation by the 9/11 commission whose very creation he had opposed. This 7 May 2003 article was titled, “September 11 Showdown.” Among the barriers the White House was putting up: “Commission members argue that they can’t possibly do their job to write the authoritative history of 9-11 if they can’t discover what the federal government has learned from al Qaeda operatives” whom the Government had in custody.
An AP story on 24 June 2003 by Ted Bridis and John Solomon was headlined, “Officials: U.S. Slow on Bin Laden Drones,” and reported that, “When President Bush took office in January 2001, the White House was told that Predator drones had recently spotted Osama bin Laden as many as three times and officials were urged to arm the unmanned planes with missiles to kill the al-Quaida leader. But the administration failed to get drones back into the Afghan skies until after the Sept. 11 attacks later that year.” Bush wanted to protect bin Laden at least until he hit.
On 15 August 2005, Michael Hirsh of Newsweek headlined “CIA Commander,” subheaded that the U.S. “Let bin Laden Slip Away,” and reported: “In a forthcoming book, the CIA field commander for the agency’s Jawbreaker team at Tora Bora, Gary Berntsen, says he and other U.S. commanders did know that bin Laden was among the hundreds of fleeing Qaeda and Taliban members. Berntsen says he had definitive intelligence that bin Laden was holed up at Tora Bora — intelligence operatives had tracked him — and could have been caught. ‘He was there,’ Berntsen tells NEWSWEEK.” Berntsen’s book, Jawbreaker, was published later in 2005, providing extensive details on this operation, despite the Pentagon’s continued denials that anyone knew whether bin Laden was among the Al Qaeda forces fleeing Tora Bora.
During the President’s press conference on 13 March 2002, just shortly after his initial failure to have captured/killed bin Laden, he was asked, “Mr. President, in your speeches now you rarely talk or mention Osama bin Laden. Why is that?” In his response, Bush said, “You know, I just don’t spend that much time on him, Kelly, to be honest with you.” The reporter, obviously shocked, followed up with, “But don’t you believe that the threat that bin Laden posed won’t truly be eliminated until he is found either dead or alive?” Bush replied: “I’ll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him.” He never had been; he had refused to be — especially prior to 9/11. Does this suggest he wanted the 9/11 attacks in order to have a “justification” to invade Iraq? Was President Bush a traitor, or only a fool? Either way, thousands of Americans died on 9/11 due to bin Laden — and Bush’s approval ratings from voters shot up by 40% as a result of bin Laden’s attack, and stayed high through the 2002 mid-term congressional elections, and even till the 2004 Presidential election. America has a history of re-electing wartime Presidents. (The only exception was Lyndon Johnson, who quit because his own Party didn’t support his Vietnam war; Republican presidents never face that kind of problem, because conservatives support conquest in principle.) Bush followed this long tradition, even though he failed miserably as Commander-in-Chief and didn’t even really care about the public, at all.
Fairly late in the Bush II regime, on 10 September 2006, the Washington Post headlined “Bin Laden Trail ‘Stone Cold’: U.S. Steps Up Efforts, But Good Intelligence On Ground Is Lacking.” Dana Priest and Ann Scott Tyson blew the lid off the Republicans’ claims to be strong against terrorism. They reported that bin Laden was initially concerned about his danger of being captured. “That was December 2001. Only two months later, Bush decided to pull out most of the special operations troops and their CIA counterparts … that were leading the hunt for bin Laden in Afghanistan.” These Special Forces were pulled out “to prepare for war in Iraq.” Even in March 2002, Bush was so obsessed with Saddam Hussein, that resources were drawn off from the bin Laden hunt. “‘I was appalled when I learned about it,’ said [Flynnt L.] Leverett,” who was “then an expert on the Middle East at the National Security Council. … ‘It’s very likely that bin Laden would be dead or in American custody if we hadn’t done that.’ … White House spokeswoman Michele Davis said she would not comment.” (We’ll have occasion to come back to that report again later, because the rest of it deals with how the Administration wasn’t even primarily concerned with success in the war against terrorists. He didn’t have his eye on that ball.)
CNN’s “Inside Politics” with Judy Woodruff, reported, on 30 April 2001 — in other words prior to 9/11 (and this “prior” is shocking in the given context) — “The State Department officially released its annual terrorism report just a little more than an hour ago, but unlike last year [under President Clinton], there’s no extensive mention of alleged terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden. A senior State Department official tells CNN the U.S. government made a mistake in focusing so much energy on bin Laden and ‘personalizing terrorism.’” Bush downplayed bin Laden as soon as Bush entered the White House. Instead, he refocused against Saddam Hussein, right away.
As Afghanistan was falling back under increasing Taliban control during 2006, President Bush’s friend and head of the Senate, Bill Frist was quoted in an AP article on October 3rd, from Afghanistan, “Frist Says Afghan War Can’t Be Won”: “U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) said Monday that the war against Taliban guerrillas in Afghanistan could never be won militarily, and he urged support for efforts to bring ‘people who call themselves Taliban’ into the government.” Did the Democrats, and Presidents FDR and Truman, say to Germany, “Let’s bring ‘people who call themselves Nazis’ into the German Government”?
The only war that Republicans were really determined to win was the one which Bush had in mind from even before he entered the White House: the war in Iraq. Forget about 9/11, was the Republicans’ real attitude. Bush had brought on the 9/11 attacks only so that he could have a pretext for “regime change” in Iraq. Once that objective in Iraq was achieved, the Republicans didn’t much care about what happened in Afghanistan (no oil there) — let the Taliban and Islamic Law come back in that country, and all those Afghan girls be kicked out of school again. What was really important now was keeping our military bases in Iraq. Forget about the bloodshed and the futility of it all, the never-ending war and death. What’s important is that military contractors were making billions, and were kicking back millions of it into Republican campaign war chests (and into the campaigns of Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and other neoconservative Democrats) — for the Republicans’ real domestic war, against the (non-neocon) Democrats. Thus, “Frist said … the only way to win [in Afghanistan] was to ‘assimilate people who call themselves Taliban into a larger, more representative government.’” (So: goodbye, Hamid Karzai; you’ve served your purpose.)
The 9-11 Commission, which the President and his Republican Congress reluctantly set up to investigate the attacks, was, at its start, strongly inclined to shift blame away from the Bush Administration. And yet a Bush-incriminating story from this commission appeared in the New York Times as early as 23 November 2002, under the headline “9/11 Report Says Saudi Arabia Links Went Unexamined.” Then, another, and even more incriminating, report appeared in the pro-Bush Chicago Tribune as early as 24 May 2003. Bryan A. Keogh wrote from Washington, under the headline, “9/11 Panel Told of Cover-Ups Before Attacks,” and subheaded, “Witnesses: U.S. suppressed warnings.” This story said: “The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were made possible by gaping holes in airline security, government cover-ups that prevented problems from being fixed and a failure to respond to a growing threat that terrorists might use airliners as weapons, witnesses told an independent commission this week. ‘The notion that these hijackings and terrorism were an unforeseen and unforeseeable risk is an airline and FAA public-relations management myth’ said Mary Schiavo, a former inspector general at the Department of Transportation, in testimony Friday [May 23].” Remarkably, “Despite often-conflicting testimony at the hearings, commission chairman Thomas Kean, a former New Jersey [Republican] governor, said the panel gained considerable insight into how the attacks occurred. ‘We’ve certainly learned about the failures of the system on 9/11,’ he said.” The Guardian reported on 10 July 2003 that Mr. Kean had said the day before, “I think the commission feels unanimously that it’s some intimidation” the Administration was applying against all government employees who wished to cooperate with their investigation. Even Republicans had to admit that President Bush, whose sole supposed argument for re-election was that he was good at protecting the American people from terrorism, had no real argument at all to continue in office, other than his possessing the largest campaign kitty in history.
That money shared common interests with the Saudi royal family. Catherine Arnie headlined “The Secret Saudi Flight on 9-13 Could Be the Key to the Bush-Saudi-Al Qaeda Connection” at www.democrats.com/view.cfm?id=14289, arguing credibly that President Bush was on the side of the people who financed the 9-11 attacks, namely the Saudi royal family, and not on the side of the United States. This would also explain a report from Jeff Gerth in the New York Times on 15 May 2003, headlined, “C.I.A. Chief Won’t Name Officials Who Failed to Add Hijackers to Watch List.” It opened: “Seven months after telling Congress he would do so, George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, has yet to provide the names of agency officials responsible for one of the most glaring intelligence mistakes leading up to the attacks of Sept. 11, according to Congressional and agency officials. Soon after the attacks, the mistake emerged, showing that the Central Intelligence Agency had waited 20 months before placing on a federal watch list two suspected terrorists who wound up as hijackers. Had the information about the two hijackers been promptly relayed to other agencies, the government might have been able to disrupt, limit or possibly even prevent the terrorist attacks, intelligence officials and Congressional investigators said.” The report went on to note that, though Mr. Tenet would not name the C.I.A. officials who had failed, he did, in fact, promote two of them. So, he, himself, was responsible for this. The same day’s edition of the Times led with a story headlined, “Ambassador Says Saudis Didn’t Heed Security Request,” reporting that though the car bombing of the American compound in Riyadh that had occurred on 12 May 2003 had been anticipated and the U.S. had requested the Saudi royal family to increase its security protection of Americans in their country, this request had gone unheeded. On 28 May, the Times headlined, “A Saudi Editor Who Offended Clerics Is Ousted From His post.” It reported that the Saudi royal family had fired an editor for his criticizing Muslim clerics who were preaching support for terrorism against the West. This same Saudi royal family are present and past business partners of the Bush family. 15 of the 19 9-11 hijackers were Saudis. Immediately after 9-11, when all U.S. flights were grounded, the only non-military planes in the U.S. skies were the Bush Administration’s whisking out of the United States members of both the Saudi royal family and the bin Laden family. Rumors of this were confirmed by Bill Andrews writing in Scotland’s Edinburgh Evening News, on 3 September 2003, under the heading “Bin Laden Family’s US Exit ‘Approved’.” His report opened: “The United States allowed members of Osama bin Laden’s family to jet out of the US in the immediate aftermath of September 11, even as American airspace was closed. Former White House counter-terrorism tsar Richard Clarke said the Bush administration sanctioned the repatriation of about 140 high-ranking Saudi Arabians, including relatives of the al-Qaeda chief.” Apparently, the order came through the State Department; it would have to have originated from President Bush himself. On 11 April 2004 writing in the Boston Globe, Craig Unger said, “The White House told me that it is ‘absolutely confident’ the Sept. 13 flight from Tampa did not take place.”
Then, on 9 June 2004, Jean Heller of the St. Petersburg [Florida] Times, reported, “For nearly three years, White House, aviation and law enforcement officials have insisted the flight never took place and have denied published reports. … But now, at the request of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks, TIA [Tampa International Airport] officials have confirmed that the flight did take place.” On 22 July 2004, Dana Milbank headlined in the Washington Post, “Plane Carried 13 Bin Ladens,” and reported: “At least 13 relatives of Osama bin Laden, accompanied by bodyguards and associates, were allowed to leave the United States on a chartered flight eight days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to a passenger manifest released yesterday. … The passenger list was made public by Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), who obtained the manifest from officials at Boston’s Logan International Airport.” Bush had been lying during almost three years. As Gerald Posner pointed out in an op-ed in the New York Times on 27 July 2004, the final report of the 9/11 Commission “fails to mine any of the widely available reporting and research that establishes” Saudi royal financing of the attacks. Furthermore, “The report fails … to note that when the flights occurred, air-space was open only to a limited number of commercial — not private — planes,” and these jets were all private. The Times headlined on 17 October 2002, “Report Says Saudis Fail to Crack Down on Charities That Finance Terrorists,” and reported: “Al Qaeda’s terror network derives most of its financing from charities and individuals in Saudi Arabia, but the kingdom has ‘turned a blind eye to this problem,’ according to a new report … by a committee sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations. … The council’s report goes further by concluding for the first time that Saudi Arabia is the single largest source of terrorist financing. … In one of its starkest conclusions, the report said, ‘It is worth stating clearly and unambiguously, if only because official U.S. government spokespersons have not: for years, individuals and charities based in Saudi Arabia have been the most important source of funds for Al Qaeda, and for years Saudi officials have turned a blind eye to this problem.”
On 10 September 2006, the Washington Post, in that blockbuster story mentioned earlier, “Bin Laden Trail ‘Stone Cold’: U.S. Steps Up Efforts, But Good Intelligence On Ground Is Lacking,” reported that: “Bureaucratic battles slowed down the hunt for bin Laden for the first two or three years, according to officials in several agencies. … In early November 2002, … a CIA drone armed with a Hellfire missile killed a top al-Qaeda leader,” and Donald Rumsfeld got angry at this, because the NSA had given the intelligence to the CIA for this job. “‘Why aren’t you giving it to us?’ Rumsfeld wanted to know. [Michael] Hayden [the NSA chief] … told Rumsfeld that the [NSA’s] information-sharing mechanism with the CIA was working well.” It’s not yet clear whether Rumsfeld was an insider on the 9/11 operation. How could he not have been, given the facts which Michael Kane brought together on 27 March 2004, at Global Research, under the headline “Elephants in the Barracks”? But the indications are even stronger that Bush, Cheney, Rice, Hayden, Mueller, and Comey were. (Comey, as the Deputy Attorney General in 2005, endorsed a memorandum that approved the use of 13 enhanced interrogation techniques including waterboarding and sleep deprivation for up to 180 hours, which methods were used by the CIA when interrogating suspects. However, he famously objected to further torture-methods. He knew that all of the proposed torture-methods were illegal, and he endorsed only the ones he considered necessary in order to be able to extract from detainees ‘evidence’ that Saddam was involved in 9/11.)
— Part Seven
As was documented in 2003 at “Investigate and Impeach Bush for Failing to Act on 911 Warnings – And then Lying About It”, the Bush Administration prevented FBI terrorism experts from investigating Saudi Arabian ties to al-Qaeda before 9/11, leading to the resignation of FBI Deputy Director John O’Neill in disgust only two weeks before 9/11. O’Neill allegedly asserted that, “The main obstacles to investigate Islamic terrorism were US oil interests, and the role played by Saudi Arabia.” Bush on 6 August 2001 personally ignored a warning in a top-secret briefing memo headlined, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” That briefing even stated that there was a report “in 1998 saying that Bin Ladin wanted to hijack a US aircraft. … FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings.” This memo was clearly warning of a likelihood in the present time that Al Qaeda would finally do that; yet Bush did nothing to prevent it. There clearly was virtual certainty that crashing an airliner into key U.S. building(s) was now imminent. The Administration received these dire warnings; only the American public did not. Then, despite repeated warnings from CIA Director George Tenet not to do so, President Bush actually ordered counterterrorism agencies to “stand down” from the existing highest level of alert, which had pertained before August. Bush’s reaction to the warnings was to reduce the level of threat-preparedness; not to raise it. This reduction in alertness also ignored urgent warnings from an FBI agent in Phoenix, from Jordanian intelligence, from Israeli intelligence, from Russian intelligence, and from Moroccan intelligence. Also, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said that he warned “the Americans” on 31 August that “something would happen.” Yet, still, President Bush held to the newly reduced alertness status. Right before the planes struck, the U.S. stock market was flooded with “put” orders to dump the whole range of stocks that ended up being directly crumpled by 9/11. Only the U.S. public was being kept in the dark.
Subsequently, both Rice and Bush lied to Congress saying that all of these warnings were purely of a “historical” nature and concerned nothing at all after 1998. However, this intelligence was, in fact, all fresh — that’s the reason why Clarke, Tenet, and others, were so alarmed, frantic even — and it was now pouring in, and rising to a crescendo, during the summer of 2001, right up until 9/11. And yet the President’s response to it was to have the agencies “stand down.”
This was especially stunning after Bob Woodward’s 2006 State of Denial, which reported that on 10 July 2001, as the New York Times confirmed on 2 October 2006, “Records Show Tenet Briefed Rice on Al Qaeda Threat.” The reporters said: “A review of White House records has determined that George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, did brief Condoleezza Rice and other top officials on July 10, 2001, about the looming threat from Al Qaeda. … The account … came hours after Ms. Rice, the secretary of state, told reporters aboard her airplane that she did not recall” the meeting. Also on 2 October 2006, McClatchy newspapers reported, “Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and former Attorney General John Ashcroft received the same CIA briefing about an imminent al-Qaida strike on an American target. … One official who helped to prepare the briefing, which included a PowerPoint presentation, described it as a ‘10 on a scale of 1 to 10.’” And yet, “Many officials [including Rice] have claimed they never received or don’t remember” it. Of course, when faced with irrefutable facts, which contradict what one is saying and what one has repeated numerous times, the standard response of a liar is to claim “they never received or don’t remember.”
A lot of the intelligence that the President had received prior to 9/11 became public afterwards; and good summaries of it appeared at CBS and at the Britannica site. It’s not merely about events that ‘concerned nothing at all after 1998’, but entailed enormous detail about the trendline and the intentions of Al Qaeda during the buildup toward 9/11.
On 26 February 2013, CBS headlined “The 1993 World Trade Center bombers: Where are they now?”, and reported that “By 1997, seven men had been convicted for the attack: [Kuwaiti Ramzi] Yousef, [Jordanian Eyad] Ismoil, Egyptian Mahmud Abouhalima, Palestinian Mohammad Salameh, Kuwaiti Nidal A. Ayyad, Iraqi Abdul Rahman Yasin and Palestinian Ahmad Ajaj. Only six of them, however [all but Yassin], had been caught.” In addition, there was their inspirerer, “Omar Abdel Rahman, a blind sheik” who also was caught, and “Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who also was caught, and who is not only Yousef’s uncle, but also later claimed to be the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks which ultimately brought the Twin Towers down. Mohammed gave Yousef advice, tips, and cash in the run up to the 1993 bombing.”
Furthermore, the Britannica article on “Khalid Sheikh Mohammed” indicates that “Although he later claimed responsibility for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Mohammed first came to international attention for his participation in the so-called Bojinka Plot, a deadly and wildly ambitious plan concocted by Mohammed’s nephew, Ramzi Yousef.” That article continues:
One proposed aspect of the Bojinka Plot involved hijacking an aircraft and using it as a missile to attack the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Mohammed took this plan to Osama bin Laden in 1996, with the suggestion that it be used to attack symbolic targets in the United States. It is believed that bin Laden approved the plan at some point in late 1998 or early 1999, and Mohammed began his formal affiliation with al-Qaeda. Mohammed, along with bin Laden and Muhammad Atef, began assembling the hijacker teams. In early December 1999 Mohammed held an instructional meeting with three al-Qaeda operatives who would carry out the September 11 attacks.
After those attacks, Mohammed’s cachet within al-Qaeda skyrocketed. He was involved in other plots against the United States, including the attempted “shoe-bombing” of an American Airlines jet by Richard Reid that was foiled by passengers on December 22, 2001. Mohammed also claimed to have beheaded The Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002, a claim that was later verified by independent sources. In early 2003 Mohammed was planning an attack on London’s Heathrow Airport, but the plot was disrupted by the United States and its allies. Soon after, on March 1, 2003, he was captured by U.S. and Pakistani officers in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.
During his interrogation by the CIA, Mohammed was subjected to waterboarding more than 180 times. After spending several years in classified CIA “black site” prisons in central Europe, he was transferred to Guantánamo Bay detention camp in 2006.
With all of that background, how could George W. Bush not have known, in advance, that something like 9/11 was about to occur? Only if he was an idiot. And, although he tried to play that role, not much intelligence is required in order to recognize that his “aw, shucks” act was only an act. He was no genius, but he also was no one’s fool. He was, in fact, quite cunning, and very effective at what he was trying to do.
Other important details of the Bush Administration’s failings to prevent the 9/11 attack were made public by a joint congressional report (not the official 9/11 report but the far less Presidentially controlled congressional one) on 18 September 2002. Here are some of the highlights: In May 2001, the CIA learned that seven of bin Laden’s operatives were on their way to the U.S. via Canada and Britain and “were disappearing while others were preparing for martyrdom,” because they “were planning attacks in the United States.” Furthermore, a July 2001 briefing for senior government officials had stated: “Based on a review of all-source reporting over the last five months, we believe that UBL [Usama bin Laden] will launch a significant terrorist attack against U.S. and/or Israeli interests in the coming weeks. The attack will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties against U.S. facilities or interests. Attack preparations have been made. Attack will occur with little or no warning.” President Bush ignored this stunning warning: he didn’t place the government on high alert, much less make preparations to strike immediately against bin Laden and Al Qaeda, both in the U.S. and in Afghanistan, so as to avert the planned attack.
Senator Richard Shelby, Republican of Alabama, admitted, “We know now that our inability to detect and prevent the Sept. 11 attacks was an intelligence failure of unprecedented magnitude. [This was a lie; the failure was in the White House, not the CIA.] … Some people who couldn’t seem to utter the words ‘intelligence failure’ are now convinced of it.” Since he was a Republican Senator, covering up for the Republican President, his comment shifted to the CIA — to the messenger which had brought to the Administration the bad news or warning of the “imminent” attack — the blame that actually belonged instead directly in the Oval Office, which did nothing to prevent that attack. Shelby’s conclusion blaming the intelligence services was reiterated by the final 9/11 Commission report, because President Bush appointed its members, and the Commission agreed in advance not to find blame with the President himself. The intelligence services therefore took the fall for the President, just as they did when Saddam’s alleged weapons of mass destruction that President Bush alleged to have been the reason for invading Iraq turned out not to exist. However, on 14 September 2004 the New York Times headlined “Review at C.I.A. and Justice Brings No 9/11 Punishment,” and reported that all of the studies and reviews of these intelligence failures “have not resulted in any disciplinary actions” against any of the intelligence personnel either. The reason for this is that the President was, in fact, warned by the CIA. So, Bush made sure that no one would be blamed.
The voters considered this to be acceptable; there was no accountability and Bush was even re-elected. To the contrary of accountability, President Bush was viewed by the voters as overwhelmingly superior to any Democrat for protecting the U.S. against terrorism. This proven failure was greatly preferred by the public, against all alternative candidates. In the 2004 Presidential contest, the results, like in 2000, were so close that a ‘win’ turned out to be stealable. What should have been a clear win for the Democratic Party’s candidate, turned out to be instead just another nail-biter.
Confirming this cover-up for the President was www.truthout.org/docs_03/062603B.shtml, “Interview: 27-Year CIA Veteran” by Ray McGovern, 26 June 2003, in which McGovern said, “My analysis is that George Bush had no option but to keep George Tenet on as Director, because George Tenet had warned Bush repeatedly, for months and months before September 11, that something very bad was about to happen. … Bush was well briefed before he went off to Texas to chop wood for a month.” Subsequently, of course, Tenet retired from the CIA.
— Part Eight
On 16 June 2003, Laura Blumenfeld of the Washington Post reported, under the headline, “Former Aide Takes Aim at War on Terror.” A national security aide to the President, Rand Beers, who was a man that had replaced the neo-fascist Oliver North in the Reagan White House, and that had then served under the senior Bush, and then under Clinton, and now the junior Bush, resigned from George W. Bush’s Administration, because “They’re making us less secure, not more secure. … As an insider, I saw the things that weren’t being done. And the longer I sat and watched, the more concerned I became, until I got up and walked out.” He committed himself to ousting George W. Bush from office. His wife commented, “This is an administration that determines what it thinks and then sets about to prove it. There’s almost a religious kind of certainty. There’s no curiosity about opposing points of view. It’s very scary. There’s kind of a ghost agenda.” Bush shared the public’s religious values, so Americans felt confident with him protecting them. They had faith.
By the time of 8 July 2003, even the pro-Bush Wall Street Journal was leading off with, “White House Hurdles Delay 9/11 Investigation,” and reported that, “so far the probers have made little progress. The commission is embroiled in tense negotiations over the level of access it will have to White House documents and the federal personnel it wants to interview.” Consequently, “the commission may not be able to complete an exhaustive investigation before its deadline next May” (which it did not). Republican Senator John McCain was quoted as saying, “Excessive administration secrecy on issues related to the Sept. 11 attacks feeds conspiracy theories.” Long Island Newsday headlined a month later, 7 August, “U.S. Clamps Secrecy on Warnings Before 9/11,” saying that it wasn’t only Saudi royal involvement in 9/11 that the Bush Administration was hiding, but that “a deeper, darker problem is our own government’s refusal to fill in the blanks about itself,” regarding what the President knew, and when he knew it. In December 2003, one of the ten members of the 9/11 Commission quietly quitted, after months of very publicly decrying Bush’s uncooperativeness. Max Cleland said he refused to be part of the White House’s “cover-up.” www.newsofinterest.tv/911.htmlposted “A Summary of Issues About the 9/11 Attacks”, and on one of its pages, titled “Military, Intelligence, and Government Officials Questioning 9/11,” are quoted Louis Freeh, Curt Weldon, Mark Dayton, Max Cleland, and others, all saying that the work of the 9/11 Commission was so compromised by the President, that the only thing which was really clear is that he must have had lots to hide, because he was certainly hiding things he had no right to be hiding from that commission. Furthermore, the entire Administration was uncooperative. On 2 August 2006, Dan Eggen headlined in the Washington Post, “9/11 Panel Suspected Deception by Pentagon,” and even the very highly partisan Republican Chairman of the Commission, Thomas Kean, was quoted, “We to this day don’t know why NORAD [the North American Aerospace Command] told us what they told us. … It was just so far from the truth.”
On 20 June 2018, the Washington Examiner bannered “OPINION Robert Mueller was the biggest obstacle for Sept. 11 families who wanted to sue Saudi Arabia” and opened: “A lawyer representing the families of 9/11 victims says Robert Mueller engaged in a cover-up of evidence that the Saudi government aided the attackers.” That’s the “opinion” which had been expressed to the newspaper’s reporter, Ryan Gidursky. He wrote: “New York-based lawyer Jim Kreindler, representing the families of the Sept. 11 victims, said in an interview with me that Mueller and his successor, James Comey, engaged in a systematic cover-up of evidence that the Saudi government aided the terrorists who committed the Sept. 11 attacks.”
That report went on to say that:
Several people formerly associated with the investigation stated that Saudi Arabia was financially involved with the Sept. 11 attacks, including John Lehman, a Republican member of the 9/11 Commission, and former Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., who chaired the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence at the time. Graham’s testimony during an appearance on “60 Minutes” was especially damning: “the hijackers received active support and guidance from rich Saudis, Saudi charities, and top members of the Saudi government.”
Stephen K. Moore, the retired FBI agent who led the Sept. 11 probe in Los Angeles, also confirmed in an affidavit back in December 2017 that the Saudis played a significant role.
Despite mounting evidence and testimony from key players in the investigation as well as former politicians, Kreindler told me that he ran into significant roadblocks from the FBI and former directors Mueller and Comey.
“We’ve really been stymied over the last 17 years from getting information from the FBI, State Department, and Department of Defense,” Kreindler said in an interview. “From day one, instead of focusing on the evidence, there was an effort to not look at the Saudis and [instead to] get their help in launching the Iraq War.”
Kreindler said that retired FBI agents had told him that they also believe Mueller lied in 2002 before the joint congressional inquiry that he was unaware of Saudi government involvement.
On 11 August 2017, The Hill headlined “Former Mueller deputy on Trump: ‘Government is going to kill this guy’”, and Joe Concha reported that his source
said Trump’s defense of Russian President Vladimir Putin has compelled federal employees “at Langley, Foggy Bottom, CIA and State” to try to take Trump down.
“Let me give you one bottom line as a former government official. Government is going to kill this guy,” Mudd, a staunch critic of Trump, said on “The Lead.”
“He defends Vladimir Putin. There are State Department and CIA officers coming home, and at Langley and Foggy Bottom, CIA and State, they’re saying, ‘This is how you defend us?’”
Those Government officials were outraged against the President. Though they worked under his Administration, they worked for the Deep State, against him — their nominal boss. Trump’s constant defenses of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman al-Saud are acceptable to those retinues of America’s billionaires, but for Trump to say anything favorable regarding Putin is totally unacceptable to them. It’s like “Russia, enemy; Saudi Arabia, friend.” That’s the Deep State’s position. And any nation that is at all favorable toward Russia — such as Saddam’s Iraq, Qaddafi’s Libya, Assad’s Syria, and Khomeini’s Iran — is also no “ally” but instead only a target for the weaponry that’s manufactured by America’s top 100 ‘defense’ contractors. And that will mean more sales-volume for those firms. Mueller protects the Sauds, who buy more U.S.-made weaponry than any other country except the U.S. Government itself. And he’s the ideal person to work against Russia. The billionaires who control Lockheed Martin (and other such companies) want their biggest foreignbuyer protected, and want the main target of the weapons they sell to continue to be their target, because that nation is the target of their costliest weapons, the nuclear forces; and those billionaires define which nations the U.S. Government calls ‘allies’ (meaning markets for those manufacturers). So, ‘Saudi Arabia is an ally of America’. Iran, Russia, and China don’t buy their products at all, but are instead their biggest and ultimate targets to invade and conquer, or else to overthrow via a coup and take over as the ultimate prizes to add to the U.S. empire; so, those countries are ‘America’s enemies’. This has nothing whatsoever to do with protecting the American public, and everything to do with boosting the profits to the owners of those companies. Doing that is the bipartisan goal of today’s U.S. Government.
And, of course, as was pointed out and documented earlier in this series, James Comey became one of the three highest-paid executives at America’s largest weapons-manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, and then became General Counsel and Member of the Executive Committee at one of the three largest Hedge funds, which happened to be the second-biggest stockholder in Lockheed Martin.
And, as was also documented at the start of this series, Louis Freeh retired to become the chief personal attorney representing the Saud family in the United States — and that family are Lockheed Martin’s second-largest customer.
On Tuesday, 22 January 2019, at the time of the longest stalemate and shut-down of the U.S. Government ever, Reuters headlined “House approves bill warning against U.S. NATO pullout” and reported that:
In a warning to President Donald Trump not to try to withdraw the United States from the NATO military alliance, the U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday approved legislation aimed at preventing such a move.
The Democratic-led House approved the measure by a bipartisan 357-22 vote, with the only “no” votes coming from Republicans. It now goes to the Republican-majority Senate, where its future is unclear, although a similar measure has been introduced there.
At a news conference before the vote, Democratic lawmakers said they were alarmed by reports of the Republican president’s low regard for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a 70-year-old military alliance that joins the United States and Canada with allies in Europe.
The New York Times said last week that several times over the course of 2018, Trump privately told his advisers he wanted to withdraw from NATO. …
NATO, of course, is the anti-Russia military alliance that had been started after World War II, against the communist Soviet Union, which nation and ideology ended in 1991 while that sales-organization for American-made weaponry against it continued. Though the Congress was extremely split on everything else, they were virtually 100% united against the U.S. President who is the first ever that wants to terminate this sales-promotion organization for U.S. weapons-firms. The U.S. Deep State is even more united on that against Russia than on its support for the Saud family. And Robert Mueller has been a key person at both ends of that Deep State agenda: against Russia, and for the Sauds.
Now, if you really want to get to know Robert Mueller, here’s the low-down on him: https://caucus99percent.com/content/what-mueller-wont-find
He (like Obama) was born into the retinues of the Deep State, and he (like Obama) throughout his life has continued loyally to serve the Deep State — America’s billionaires and a few centi-millionaires, the individuals who own and control America’s international corporations. That’e the Deep State, and people such as Mueller and Comey and Freeh are important servants to it.
And that’s the reality about today’s international Deep State. It controls America’s foreign policies. It controls the empire.
The way the Deep State shows itself in domestic national (as opposed to international) U.S. policies is reported with remarkable honesty and effectiveness in Michael Moore’s 2018 documentary film, Fahrenheit 11/9 (which is not to be confused with his 2004 documentary Fahrenheit 9/11), the best film he has yet made. An excellent example of how the Deep State misrepresents and criticizes that masterful documentary film was the review published in Britain’s Guardian, which was headlined “Fahrenheit 11/9 review: Michael Moore v Donald Trump = stalemate”. That review was skillfully written so as to discourage the public from seeing this film and learning the reality, both about today’s America and about the film itself. The Guardian nowadays represents the interests of liberal billionaires who backed the Clintons, Obama, and Tony Blair, none of whom come across in this film as being anything other than political prostitutes of those billionaires. But the documentary is just as devastating about the the politicians representing the opposing side of the aristocracy, politicians such as George W. Bush and Donald Trump. It’s hardly the sort of movie that hero-worshippers on either side of today’s U.S. politics would want to see. But it’s a film that everyone around the world ought to see, because it is true, deeply true, about the aristocracy, and about the way they deal with the public, as objects to be used and callously disposed of (as is documented in that film). And that side, the domestic side, is the side of the U.S. aristocracy’s operation Robert Mueller doesn’t much get involved with. He specializes mostly in carrying out the U.S. aristocracy’s international dirty-works. That’s what he’s mainly there for. This is why Mueller is going after Trump, because Trump isn’t sufficiently against Russia and sufficiently supportive of NATO.
Maybe Trump had thought that his rabid hostility toward Iran, and his deregulation of America’s companies, and his lowering of their taxes, would be enough to keep those hyenas away. But, clearly, that’s not the case. They want lots more from a U.S. president than Trump is delivering. And Mueller was the man they had hired to lead the pack to replace him with Mike Pence. But all that they ended up with was a shoddily ‘documented’ case that ‘Russia interfered in the 2016 election’. At least they increased American fools’ fear of ‘those scheming Russians’, who, unquestionably, interfere in foreign domestic politics far less than the U.S. Government itself does. Russia is the chief punching-bag for America’s billionaires. They got what they want: an ‘indictment’ of Russia.
* * *
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
- India Shoots Down Satellite, Joining Elite Club Of "Space Powers"
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is truly pulling out all of the stops to ensure victory in the “biggest election in human history”, which begins in two weeks when Indians take to the polls to elect their government.
In an announcement that took the world by surprise, Modi announced on Wednesday that India had successfully shot down a satellite during a missile test. If accurate (his claims have yet to be verified), this would mean that India has joined an elite group of nations, including Russia, China and the US, that have the ability to shoot down enemies’ communication satellites. It also raises questions about the weaponization of space just as India’s regional rivalry with China, which it is struggling against for regional supremacy, is heating up.
Millions of Indians stopped what they were doing to watch Modi’s speech, according to the New York Times.
During a speech announcing the test, Modi hailed India’s arrival as a “space power,” and heralded the country’s “unprecedented achievement.” According to the PM, the satellite, which was in low-Earth orbit, was shot down from 300 kilometers away in space.
“Our scientists shot down a live satellite 300 kilometers away in space, in low-Earth orbit,” Modi said in a television broadcast.
“India has made an unprecedented achievement today,” he added, speaking in Hindi. “India registered its name as a space power.”
And in a series of tweets extolling the successful test, Modi claimed that the “indigenous” effort (it was accomplished solely by Indians), would send a message to India’s adversaries and anyone threatening the country’s “peace and harmony.”
#MissionShakti is special for 2 reasons:
(1) India is only the 4th country to acquire such a specialised & modern capability.
(2) Entire effort is indigenous.
India stands tall as a space power!
It will make India stronger, even more secure and will further peace and harmony.— Chowkidar Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) March 27, 2019
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Indeed, a proud moment for the whole nation.
Just like you smash the bad deliveries out of the park, our scientists have given India the capability to smash those forces who threaten our peace and harmony. #MissionShakti https://t.co/U4mpQiH9Fn
— Chowkidar Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) March 27, 2019
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India has been building its space program since its first satellite launch in 1975. It joined a manned space mission with Russia in 1984 and launched a Mars orbiter in 2013. India launched its heaviest communication satellite so far into space in December. The satellite weighed nearly 5,000 pounds, into space.
Analysts warned that the test would ratchet up tensions between India and China, while others said they were surprised by Modi’s willingness to do whatever it takes to prevail in the elections next month. Though his poll numbers had been sagging before the skirmish with Pakistan last month, he has been riding a crest of popular support in recent weeks.
- The World Is Increasingly Wary Of US Power, Says Pew Survey on Global Threats
Authored by Grace Dobush via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
Terrorism is still a major concern around the world, but global warming is the bigger worry, and fear of cyberattacks is on the rise, according to a new Pew Research Center survey on threats.
Following similar studies in 2013 and 2017, Pew researchers asked people in 23 countries whether they considered the following a “major threat to our country”:
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Global climate change
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The Islamic militant group known as ISIS
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Cyberattacks from other countries
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North Korea’s nuclear program
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The condition of the global economy
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U.S. power and influence
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Russia’s power and influence
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China’s power and influence
Pew found that global climate change has risen from being a concern for 53% of respondents in 2013 to 63% in 2017 and now 67% in the most recent survey.
Here are four major takeaways from the study, which was conducted among 27,612 respondents in 26 countries from May to August 2018:
1. Perception of U.S. power as a threat is closely tied to views on Trump.
Overall, only 25% of respondents were worried about U.S. power and influence in 2013, when Barack Obama was president. That rose to 38% in 2017 and now sits at 45%.
In specific countries, the perception of the U.S. as a threat rose by increases of 30 percentage points in Germany, 29 points in France and 26 points in Brazil and Mexico. In 17 countries surveyed, people who had little or no confidence in Donald Trump were more likely to name U.S. power and influence as a top threat. This difference is most acute among America’s allies, including Canada, the U.K. and Australia, where views of the U.S. and its president have plummeted in recent years.
2. Russia is the least bothered about any threats.
Compared to the other countries, Russians are among the least concerned about any of the threats tested in the survey. Russians are relatively untroubled by foreign cyberattacks (36% said it’s a major threat), North Korean nuclear power (30%), and the world economy (40%). Russians are most concerned about ISIS, with 62% of respondents saying it’s a major threat, followed by global climate change and U.S. power and influence, each at 43%. Only one country ranked Russian power and influence as its No. 1 threat: Poland.
3. Latin America is more concerned about U.S. influence.
In the three Latin American countries surveyed — Mexico, Argentina and Brazil — global climate change remains the top concern.
But worries about U.S. power and influence on average were higher there — above 50% in each — than in other regions. U.S. power was the No. 2 concern for Mexico.
4. The U.S. is most concerned about cyberattacks.
Nearly three-quarters of Americans surveyed said their biggest concern is about cyberattacks from other countries.
The only countries with even higher responses were South Korea and Japan, each with 81%; those two countries were also among the most concerned about Chinese power. Cyberattacks also topped the rankings of concerns for the Netherlands and South Africa. Overall, 61% of global respondents are concerned about cyberattacks, up 7 points from 2017.
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- Low Rates Have Buried Canadians Under A Mountain Of Debt
Household debt in Canada is now bordering on excessive, catalyzed by low rates setting off a boom of borrowing over the last decade. Canadians now collectively owe C$2.16 trillion, which as a share of GDP is the highest debt load in G-7 economies. At the same time, the housing market is starting to cool in the country and people are “freaking out”, even with rates not far above historical lows, according to Bloomberg.
The article profiled one citizen, Kieran Maxwell, a 43 year old single mom who is about C$100,000 in debt primarily from student loans and credit cards. In 2017, she realized she couldn’t even keep up with the minimum payments on her credit cards after using them to take care of her 14 year old son, who has learning disabilities. She flinches when her phone rings with an 800 number, fearing debt collectors.
She said:
“You go to bed thinking about it. You wake up thinking about it. I wouldn’t even want to answer the phone because I didn’t want to know who was asking for what.”
Due to low rates, the once financially sound country has found itself on a recent borrowing binge. The country’s ratio of debt to disposable income rose to a record 174% in the fourth quarter, from 148% a decade earlier.
Now, everyone is waiting to see what will happen next. The Bank of Canada has raised rates 5 times since 2017, resulting in current rates of 1.75%. Federal rules put into place have curbed speculation in the housing market. Home values are falling for the first time in three decades. In other words, the chickens could soon be coming home to roost.
Individual households are also feeling the pain. For instance, the debt service ratio, which measures how much disposable income goes to principal and interest payments, was up to 14.9 in the forth quarter, nearly matching the 2007 record high.
Delinquencies in auto loans hit 0.97 in the last quarter of 2018, which is the highest number since the aftermath of the 2008 recession. Data is also showing a “pronounced shift” to leasing, as higher rates make it less economical to offer cheap longer term loans. Leases made up 36% of the C$7.85 billion in new auto loans in the fourth quarter, the largest share since before the financial crisis.
These loan delinquencies could mean that further trouble for housing is on the way.
Jodi Letkiewicz, an associate professor at York University said:
“The last thing to go is the mortgage. Before then, people stop making car payments or they begin making smaller credit card payments. By then, they’re already in a lot of trouble.”
In Canada, borrowing from home equity lines of credit, or Helocs, is also growing “faster than residential mortgages”. In other words, more people are tapping the equity on their already existing homes than are taking on new mortgages. Helocs totaled C$243 billion in October, or 11.3 percent of total household debt. Heloc balances, per capita, in Canada were $4,849 in October, more than quadruple the $1,080 in the U.S., according to Bloomberg.
The article also notes that a total of 31,900 Canadians filed for insolvency in the three months through December, the most since 2010.
We have been watching Canadian bankruptcies closely. Earlier this month we reported about how soaring insolvencies were crippling local banks. This news came just weeks after we reported that insolvency filings had skyrocketed in almost all Canadian provinces.
Toronto-Dominion Bank and Canadian Imperial Bank of Canada both posted ugly first quarter results that included higher provisions for loan losses as a key contributor to missing analyst expectations. TD Bank saw its provision for loan losses move to C$850 million, which was up 23% from the year prior. It also marked the highest level for such provisions in at least two years, mainly split between the bank’s U.S. and Canadian retail divisions (36% each), followed by the bank’s corporate division.
CIBC also saw its provisions rise – more than doubling across the bank to C$338 million, which also marked the highest level in at least two years.
- The Making Of A Monster: We're All Lab Rats In The Government's Secret Experiments
Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
“But these weren’t the kind of monsters that had tentacles and rotting skin, the kind a seven-year-old might be able to wrap his mind around—they were monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, marching in lockstep, so banal you don’t recognize them for what they are until it’s too late.”
– Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children
The U.S. government, in its pursuit of so-called monsters, has itself become a monster.
This is not a new development, nor is it a revelation.
This is a government that has in recent decades unleashed untold horrors upon the world—including its own citizenry—in the name of global conquest, the acquisition of greater wealth, scientific experimentation, and technological advances, all packaged in the guise of the greater good.
Mind you, there is no greater good when the government is involved. There is only greater greed for money and power.
Unfortunately, the public has become so easily distracted by the political spectacle coming out of Washington, DC, that they are altogether oblivious to the grisly experiments, barbaric behavior and inhumane conditions that have become synonymous with the U.S. government.
These horrors are being meted out against humans and animals alike.
It’s heartbreaking enough when you hear about police shooting family dogs that pose no threat—beloved pets that are “guilty” of little more than barking, or wagging a tag, or racing towards them in greeting—at an alarming rate somewhere in the vicinity of 500 dogs a day.
What I’m about to share goes beyond heartbreaking to horrifying.
For instance, did you know that the U.S. government has been buying hundreds of dogs and cats from “Asian meat markets” as part of a gruesome experiment into food-borne illnesses? The cannibalistic experiments involve killing cats and dogs purchased from Colombia, Brazil, Vietnam, China and Ethiopia, and then feeding the dead remains to laboratory kittens, bred in government laboratories for the express purpose of being infected with a disease and then killed.
It gets more gruesome.
The Department of Veterans Affairs has been removing parts of dogs’ brains to see how it affects their breathing; applying electrodes to dogs’ spinal cords (before and after severing them) to see how it impacts their cough reflexes; and implanting pacemakers in dogs’ hearts and then inducing them to have heart attacks (before draining their blood). All of the laboratory dogs are killed during the course of these experiments.
It’s not just animals that are being treated like lab rats by government agencies.
“We the people” have also become the police state’s guinea pigs: to be caged, branded, experimented upon without our knowledge or consent, and then conveniently discarded and left to suffer from the after-effects.
Back in 2017, FEMA “inadvertently” exposed nearly 10,000 firefighters, paramedics and other responders to a deadly form of ricin during simulated bioterrorism response sessions. In 2015, it was discovered that an Army lab had been “mistakenly” shipping deadly anthrax to labs and defense contractors for a decade.
While these particular incidents have been dismissed as “accidents,” you don’t have to dig very deep or go very back in the nation’s history to uncover numerous cases in which the government deliberately conducted secret experiments on an unsuspecting populace—citizens and noncitizens alike—making healthy people sick by spraying them with chemicals, injecting them with infectious diseases and exposing them to airborne toxins.
At the time, the government reasoned that it was legitimate to experiment on people who did not have full rights in society such as prisoners, mental patients, and poor blacks.
In Alabama, for example, 600 black men with syphilis were allowed to suffer without proper medical treatment in order to study the natural progression of untreated syphilis. In California, older prisoners had testicles from livestock and from recently executed convicts implanted in them to test their virility. In Connecticut, mental patients were injected with hepatitis.
In Maryland, sleeping prisoners had a pandemic flu virus sprayed up their noses. In Georgia, two dozen “volunteering” prison inmates had gonorrhea bacteria pumped directly into their urinary tracts through the penis. In Michigan, male patients at an insane asylum were exposed to the flu after first being injected with an experimental flu vaccine. In Minnesota, 11 public service employee “volunteers” were injected with malaria, then starved for five days.
In New York, dying patients had cancer cells introduced into their systems. In Ohio, over 100 inmates were injected with live cancer cells. Also in New York, prisoners at a reformatory prison were also split into two groups to determine how a deadly stomach virus was spread: the first group was made to swallow an unfiltered stool suspension, while the second group merely breathed in germs sprayed into the air. And in Staten Island, children with mental retardation were given hepatitis orally and by injection to see if they could then be cured.
As the Associated Press reports, “The late 1940s and 1950s saw huge growth in the U.S. pharmaceutical and health care industries, accompanied by a boom in prisoner experiments funded by both the government and corporations. By the 1960s, at least half the states allowed prisoners to be used as medical guinea pigs … because they were cheaper than chimpanzees.”
Moreover, “Some of these studies, mostly from the 1940s to the ’60s, apparently were never covered by news media. Others were reported at the time, but the focus was on the promise of enduring new cures, while glossing over how test subjects were treated.”
Media blackouts, propaganda, spin. Sound familiar?
How many government incursions into our freedoms have been blacked out, buried under “entertainment” news headlines, or spun in such a way as to suggest that anyone voicing a word of caution is paranoid or conspiratorial?
Unfortunately, these incidents are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the atrocities the government has inflicted on an unsuspecting populace in the name of secret experimentation.
For instance, there was the U.S. military’s secret race-based testing of mustard gas on more than 60,000 enlisted men. As NPR reports, “All of the World War II experiments with mustard gas were done in secret and weren’t recorded on the subjects’ official military records. Most do not have proof of what they went through. They received no follow-up health care or monitoring of any kind. And they were sworn to secrecy about the tests under threat of dishonorable discharge and military prison time, leaving some unable to receive adequate medical treatment for their injuries, because they couldn’t tell doctors what happened to them.”
And then there was the CIA’s MKULTRA program in which hundreds of unsuspecting American civilians and military personnel were dosed with LSD, some having the hallucinogenic drug slipped into their drinks at the beach, in city bars, at restaurants. As Time reports, “before the documentation and other facts of the program were made public, those who talked of it were frequently dismissed as being psychotic.”
Now one might argue that this is all ancient history and that the government today is different from the government of yesteryear, but has the U.S. government really changed?
Has the government become any more humane, any more respectful of the rights of the citizenry?
Has it become any more transparent or willing to abide by the rule of law? Has it become any more truthful about its activities? Has it become any more cognizant of its appointed role as a guardian of our rights?
Or has the government simply hunkered down and hidden its nefarious acts and dastardly experiments under layers of secrecy, legalism and obfuscations? Has it not become wilier, more slippery, more difficult to pin down?
Having mastered the Orwellian art of Doublespeak and followed the Huxleyan blueprint for distraction and diversion, are we not dealing with a government that is simply craftier and more conniving that it used to be?
Consider this: after revelations about the government’s experiments spanning the 20th century spawned outrage, the government began looking for human guinea pigs in other countries, where “clinical trials could be done more cheaply and with fewer rules.”
In Guatemala, prisoners and patients at a mental hospital were infected with syphilis, “apparently to test whether penicillin could prevent some sexually transmitted disease.” In Uganda, U.S.-funded doctors “failed to give the AIDS drug AZT to all the HIV-infected pregnant women in a study… even though it would have protected their newborns.” Meanwhile, in Nigeria, children with meningitis were used to test an antibiotic named Trovan. Eleven children died and many others were left disabled.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Case in point: back in 2016, it was announced that scientists working for the Department of Homeland Security would begin releasing various gases and particles on crowded subway platforms as part of an experiment aimed at testing bioterror airflow in New York subways.
The government insisted that the gases released into the subways by the DHS were nontoxic and did not pose a health risk. It’s in our best interests, they said, to understand how quickly a chemical or biological terrorist attack might spread. And look how cool the technology is—said the government cheerleaders—that scientists can use something called DNATrax to track the movement of microscopic substances in air and food. (Imagine the kinds of surveillance that could be carried out by the government using trackable airborne microscopic substances you breathe in or ingest.)
Mind you, this is the same government that in 1949 sprayed bacteria into the Pentagon’s air handling system, then the world’s largest office building. In 1950, special ops forces sprayed bacteria from Navy ships off the coast of Norfolk and San Francisco, in the latter case exposing all of the city’s 800,000 residents.
In 1953, government operatives staged “mock” anthrax attacks on St. Louis, Minneapolis, and Winnipegusing generators placed on top of cars. Local governments were reportedly told that “‘invisible smokescreen[s]’ were being deployed to mask the city on enemy radar.” Later experiments covered territory as wide-ranging as Ohio to Texas and Michigan to Kansas.
In 1965, the government’s experiments in bioterror took aim at Washington’s National Airport, followed by a 1966 experiment in which army scientists exposed a million subway NYC passengers to airborne bacteria that causes food poisoning.
And this is the same government that has taken every bit of technology sold to us as being in our best interests—GPS devices, surveillance, nonlethal weapons, etc.—and used it against us, to track, control and trap us.
So, no, I don’t think the government’s ethics have changed much over the years. It’s just taken its nefarious programs undercover.
The question remains: why is the government doing this? The answer is always the same: money, power and total domination.
It’s the same answer no matter which totalitarian regime is in power.
The mindset driving these programs has, appropriately, been likened to that of Nazi doctors experimenting on Jews. As the Holocaust Museum recounts, Nazi physicians “conducted painful and often deadly experiments on thousands of concentration camp prisoners without their consent.”
The Nazi’s unethical experiments ran the gamut from freezing experiments using prisoners to find an effective treatment for hypothermia, tests to determine the maximum altitude for parachuting out of a plane, injecting prisoners with malaria, typhus, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, yellow fever, and infectious hepatitis, exposing prisoners to phosgene and mustard gas, and mass sterilization experiments.
The horrors being meted out against the American people can be traced back, in a direct line, to the horrors meted out in Nazi laboratories. In fact, following the second World War, the U.S. government recruited many of Hitler’s employees, adopted his protocols, embraced his mindset about law and order and experimentation, and implemented his tactics in incremental steps.
Sounds far-fetched, you say? Read on. It’s all documented.
As historian Robert Gellately recounts, the Nazi police state was initially so admired for its efficiency and order by the world powers of the day that Herbert Hoover, then-head of the FBI, actually sent one of his right-hand men, Edmund Patrick Coffey, to Berlin in January 1938 at the invitation of Germany’s secret police, the Gestapo.
The FBI was so impressed with the Nazi regime that, according to the New York Times, in the decades after World War II, the FBI, along with other government agencies, aggressively recruited at least a thousand Nazis, including some of Hitler’s highest henchmen.
All told, thousands of Nazi collaborators—including the head of a Nazi concentration camp, among others—were given secret visas and brought to America by way of Project Paperclip. Subsequently, they were hired on as spies, informants and scientific advisers, and then camouflaged to ensure that their true identities and ties to Hitler’s holocaust machine would remain unknown. All the while, thousands of Jewish refugees were refused entry visas to the U.S. on the grounds that it could threaten national security.
Adding further insult to injury, American taxpayers have been paying to keep these ex-Nazis on the U.S. government’s payroll ever since. And in true Gestapo fashion, anyone who has dared to blow the whistle on the FBI’s illicit Nazi ties has found himself spied upon, intimidated, harassed and labeled a threat to national security.
As if the government’s covert, taxpayer-funded employment of Nazis after World War II wasn’t bad enough, U.S. government agencies—the FBI, CIA and the military—have since fully embraced many of the Nazi’s well-honed policing tactics, and have used them repeatedly against American citizens.
It’s certainly easy to denounce the full-frontal horrors carried out by the scientific and medical community within a despotic regime such as Nazi Germany, but what do you do when it’s your own government that claims to be a champion of human rights all the while allowing its agents to engage in the foulest, bases and most despicable acts of torture, abuse and experimentation?
When all is said and done, this is not a government that has our best interests at heart.
This is not a government that values us.
Perhaps the answer lies in The Third Man, Carol Reed’s influential 1949 film starring Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles. In the film, set in a post-WW II Vienna, rogue war profiteer Harry Lime has come to view human carnage with a callous indifference, unconcerned that the diluted penicillin he’s been trafficking underground has resulted in the tortured deaths of young children.
Challenged by his old friend Holly Martins to consider the consequences of his actions, Lime responds, “In these days, old man, nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don’t, so why should we?”
“Have you ever seen any of your victims?” asks Martins.
“Victims?” responds Limes, as he looks down from the top of a Ferris wheel onto a populace reduced to mere dots on the ground. “Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax — the only way you can save money nowadays.”
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, this is how the U.S. government sees us, too, when it looks down upon us from its lofty perch.
To the powers-that-be, the rest of us are insignificant specks, faceless dots on the ground.
To the architects of the American police state, we are not worthy or vested with inherent rights. This is how the government can justify treating us like economic units to be bought and sold and traded, or caged rats to be experimented upon and discarded when we’ve outgrown our usefulness.
To those who call the shots in the halls of government, “we the people” are merely the means to an end.
“We the people”—who think, who reason, who take a stand, who resist, who demand to be treated with dignity and care, who believe in freedom and justice for all—have become obsolete, undervalued citizens of a totalitarian state that, in the words of Rod Serling, “has patterned itself after every dictator who has ever planted the ripping imprint of a boot on the pages of history since the beginning of time. It has refinements, technological advances, and a more sophisticated approach to the destruction of human freedom.”
In this sense, we are all Romney Wordsworth, the condemned man in Serling’s Twilight Zone episode “The Obsolete Man.”
“The Obsolete Man” speaks to the dangers of a government that views people as expendable once they have outgrown their usefulness to the State. Yet—and here’s the kicker—this is where the government through its monstrous inhumanity also becomes obsolete. As Serling noted in his original script for “The Obsolete Man,” “Any state, any entity, any ideology which fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of Man…that state is obsolete.”
How do you defeat a monster? You start by recognizing the monster for what it is.
- Twitter Suspends Tesla Critic's Account After User Posts Spreadsheet Of Tesla-Related Deaths
The controversy over silencing short sellers and skeptics of Tesla has now spilled over to Twitter, as one of the company’s most vocal critics, Twitter user @ElonBachman, has been suspended, possibly for sharing statistics on Autopilot and Tesla related deaths.
In response to a recent tweet by Elon Musk about Tesla’s Autopilot feature, @ElonBachman replied with a link to a public Google spreadsheet that appears to have a running tally of deaths associated with Tesla vehicles.
A link to that spreadsheet is here and a copy of the table included within it looks like this:
Shortly thereafter, @ElonBachman’s account was listed as suspended for violation of Twitter’s rules.
The outrage among the user’s followers, combined with the Tesla short selling/critic community, was immediate:
ATTENTION
TSLAQ hero @Elonbachman’s account is now suspended.
This is after @Elonbachman responded to Musk and posted his own research and devastating spreadsheet that tracks the tremendous number of Tesla-related deaths.https://t.co/VACYPviX9z
— skabooshka (@elonbachman lives!) (@skabooshka) March 27, 2019
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FREE @Elonbachman !! https://t.co/QhEWMRraFD
— Fizz2 (@The_Fizz2) March 27, 2019
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One of the smartest $TSLAQ‘ers around. @ElonBachman has been suspended. Unreal. Twitter is a battleground, but that soldier will be back!!!!!!! https://t.co/6xX9BRGHAr
— Suspected Saboteur (@ShortingIsFun) March 27, 2019
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$TSLA $TSLAQ@ElonBachman suspended for tweeting out spreadsheet of Tesla deaths.
Here is the document. Tweet it out.
Tesla deaths.xlsx https://t.co/RTnDBVZR5X
— Menelaus (@TheAdaptedMind) March 27, 2019
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Everybody make sure to RT the document in @skabooshka‘s tweet detailing how deadly driving a $TSLA vehicle can be https://t.co/vzwYOkHX5i
— tim nutt (@twnutt) March 27, 2019
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— Enron Musk (@Enron_Musk_Fake) March 28, 2019
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Tonight’s BaggyBlitz™️ has been canceled. Don’t feel like generating ad revenue for @jack at the moment. https://t.co/2XDU9UUdGJ
— Bag Holder (@BagholderQuotes) March 28, 2019
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This seems like a good time to remind everyone (who hasn’t already) to catch this Joe Rogan podcast with Jack and @Timcast about Twitter censorship. People speaking out against Tesla are being silenced with no reason given. This is not the first time.https://t.co/hq20g4rGVa
— ben k (@Benshooter) March 28, 2019
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When $TSLA goes BK and all of Elon’s frauds are exposed, remember that @jack and 90% of the MSM were complicit. They willfully traded their integrity for a few clicks from know-nothing, hero-worshiping sheep. @elonbachman stands for truth and should be celebrated, not suspended. https://t.co/AOKqPhg2LZ
— NetflixAndLamp (@NetflixAndLamp) March 28, 2019
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This is an outrage!
Free @ElonBachman !!!
Calling all $TSLAQ. Please retweet widely.
cc @jack @twittersecurity https://t.co/Awzo91aibD— TeslaCharts (@TeslaCharts) March 27, 2019
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Nice work @elonmusk. Are you some kind of vampire? Why does sunlight bother you so? That was the one thing that stood out when reading the Vance biography. The lengths you went to cover up all bad news. Try being honest about anything. Just once. You might like it. https://t.co/hYOVUBBLcZ
— CrowPointPartners (@cppinvest) March 28, 2019
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk is guilty of unethically using the #FirstAmendment as BOTH a sword and a shield.
Musk cowardly hides behind #1A in SEC contempt case & inconsistently $TSLAQ @ElonBachman‘s account is suspended for exposing $TSLA deaths. #FraudFormula $TWTR #WhiteKnighting pic.twitter.com/3yakwg6Tpf— KillingMyCareer (@MelaynaLokosky) March 28, 2019
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This suspension comes about nine months after Tesla’s attack on, and the doxxing of, one of the company’s most well known short-sellers and skeptics, Montana Skeptic. The company’s pushback on Montana Skeptic, inclusive of Elon Musk even going so far as to reportedly call his boss, instantly catapulted the Skeptic to legendary status among the Tesla short seller community.
Perhaps this Twitter suspension will also have the opposite of its desired effect and divert attention to the Tesla related deaths that were brought to light in the above linked spreadsheet.
Twitter, it’s your move.
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