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From The Sunday Times September 16, 2007
Alan Greenspan claims Iraq war was really for oil Graham Paterson
AMERICA’s elder statesman of finance, Alan Greenspan, has shaken the White House by declaring that the prime motive for the war in Iraq was oil.
In his long-awaited memoir, to be published tomorrow, Greenspan, a Republican whose 18-year tenure as head of the US Federal Reserve was widely admired, will also deliver a stinging critique of President George W Bush’s economic policies.
However, it is his view on the motive for the 2003 Iraq invasion that is likely to provoke the most controversy.
“I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil,” he says.
Greenspan, 81, is understood to believe that Saddam Hussein posed a threat to the security of oil supplies in the Middle East.
Britain and America have always insisted the war had nothing to do with oil.
Bush said the aim was to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction and end Saddam’s support for terrorism.
In response to today’s ruling by the House of Lords, Des Browne, the Defence Secretary, welcomed the ruling which he said provided "helpful clarification of the precise legal framework under which UK forces operated overseas".
“As the Chief of General Staff has already said, Baha Musa died after being held in UK custody and was subject to an unlawful conditioning process," said Mr Browne.
"We have never argued that the treatment of Baha Musa was acceptable or that his death should not have been investigated.
"Credible allegations of serious wrong-doing have to be, and are, investigated. Where evidence is independently assessed as justifying a prosecution, the application of a robust, fair system of military justice must follow."
Mr Browne said that the Musa case was not closed. "As is normal in any case of this nature, the case is currently being reviewed by the Royal Military Police and Army Prosecuting Authority. They will determine whether any further criminal charges should be brought."
The Defence Secretary did not respond directly to the allegation that the "unlawful conditioning process" was UK military policy approved by the Government at the time.
He went on: “Since 2003 we have reviewed our practices in relation to detention, and where necessary made changes. This is a complex judgment, some 60 pages long, and needs careful consideration. However if further lessons or action needs to be taken on board as a result of this judgement we will do so.”
 © Copyright 2007 Times Newspapers Ltd |
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Saturday, 9 September 2006
Iraq war justifications laid bare
In a report issued on Friday, it also found that was little or no evidence to support a raft of claims made by the US intelligence community concerning Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
The 400-page report was three years in the making, and is probably the definitive public account of the intelligence used to justify the invasion of Iraq.
One starting point is this:
In a poll conducted this month by Opinion Research Corporation for CNN, a sample of American adults was asked: "Do you think Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 11 September terrorist attacks, or not?"
Forty-three percent of those polled answered yes, they believed Saddam was personally involved.
Even though it is well-established that Saddam Hussein was no ally of al-Qaeda, nor did he possess weapons of mass destruction, the original justifications for the invasion for Iraq linger on, often in ways that have strangely mutated on their journey through politics and media.
Cheney claims 'untrue'
In fact, the intelligence agencies had been extremely cautious in suggesting links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
It was Vice-President Dick Cheney who asserted most strongly in public that Saddam Hussein's regime and al-Qaeda had an operational relationship.
In a television interview in September 2003, he said there was "a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda that stretched back through most of the decade of the '90s... al-Qaeda sent personnel to Baghdad to get trained... the Iraqis providing bomb-making expertise and advice to the al-Qaeda organisation."
It was "clearly official policy" on the part of Iraq, he said.
Friday's report, issued by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, provides another definitive statement that that assertion is simply not true.
It says that debriefings conducted since the invasion of Iraq "indicate that Saddam issued a general order that Iraq should not deal with al-Qaeda. No post-war information suggests that the Iraqi regime attempted to facilitate a relationship with [Osama] Bin Laden.
"Saddam Hussein was distrustful of al-Qaeda... refusing all requests from al-Qaeda to provide material or operational support."
Administration confusion
The report supports the intelligence community's finding that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — the man who was al-Qaeda's chief operative in Iraq between the invasion and his death in June this year — was indeed in Baghdad in 2002.
Was this an Iraqi link to al-Qaeda?
No, says the report. Far from harbouring him, Saddam's regime was trying to find and capture him.
But the Bush administration has a way, still, of confusing this issue.
As recently as 21 August this year, President Bush said that Saddam "had relations with Zarqawi".
The Senate report is scathing of the intelligence community's product concerning Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
"Post-war findings", it reads, "do not support the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate judgement that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program."
Nor do "post-war findings" support the 2002 NIE's assertions that Iraq had chemical or biological weapons.
Political fallout
It remains to be seen if the Democrats can use the Senate report to damage the Republican Party in the run-up to Congressional elections in November by reminding the American public of the intelligence debacle that preceded the invasion of Iraq, and ascribing that failure to the leadership of the Bush administration.
It is far from clear they'll be able to do so.
The president has been extremely active in the last week, selling his successes in the "war on terror" in a series of speeches; demanding Congress give him greater powers to fight it; and announcing that the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks will be brought to trial.
The Democratic Party still seems unable to find a concerted critique of President Bush's handling of the "war on terrorism" and the conflict in Iraq, without themselves appearing defeatist.
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WASHINGTON — Saddam Hussein rejected Osama bin Laden's pleas for help and tried to capture terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi when he was in Iraq, a Senate Intelligence Committee report released yesterday found, casting further doubt on the Bush administration's rationale for invading Iraq.
President Bush and other administration officials repeatedly cited Saddam's alleged ties to Islamic terrorists as one reason to invade Iraq in March 2003.
The 150-page report said the administration's claims were untrue. "Postwar findings indicate that Saddam Hussein was distrustful of al Qaeda and viewed Islamic extremists as a threat to his regime, refusing all requests from al Qaeda to provide material or operational support," the report said.
The report was released along with a second one that said false information from the exile group Iraqi National Congress, led by Ahmad Chalabi, had been widely used to support intelligence assessments about Iraq's weapons and links to terrorism. Intelligence officials repeatedly warned that the INC was unreliable, but White House officials ignored the warnings.
The reports are part of a five-report study that the Senate Intelligence Committee has undertaken.
The study has left the committee badly divided. Three reports remain classified, including one comparing prewar statements by Bush administration officials to intelligence available at the time. Democrats have accused Republicans of delaying the reports until after the November congressional elections.
Yesterday, Democrats charged that the reports showed that the White House had manipulated intelligence to make the case for war to the American people.
"The administration ignored warnings prior to the war about the veracity of the intelligence it trumpeted publicly to support its case that Iraq was an imminent threat to the security of the United States," said Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va.
Republicans rejected that allegation, saying the reports added little to what was already known.
"The long-known fact is that the prewar intelligence was wrong," said committee chairman Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan. "That flawed intelligence was used by policymakers, both in the administration and in Congress, as one of numerous justifications to go to war in Iraq."
Meanwhile, the New York Times reported, violence rippled across parts of Iraq yesterday. In Baghdad, a bomb exploded near a police convoy, killing three civilians and wounding three policemen. And police in Baghdad found six bodies.
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Israel US War Crime
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The second reason for relief was far more specific and short-lived: the Atara checkpoint leading in and out of Ramallah has caused hours of delay everyday for all Palestinians who need to enter Ramallah, whether to work or study or stock-up on supplies that are sorely lacking in the villages.
This checkpoint has been constantly manned for the past 6 months and was unmanned for ten hours on the day that Hezbollah attacked the military outpost on the northern border of Israel.
By the time I passed through it at 9 pm on my way to a village for the weekend, it was manned again; and by very angry soldiers.
But it was impossible to ignore the relief in the village that evening when Atara was talked about; how services had passed straight through to Ramallah and how the younger men from the village did not have to get out and be searched and interrogated at will and maybe sent back home.
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Senate: Hussein Wasn't Allied With Al Qaeda
Iraq rebuffed Bin Laden and wanted to capture Zarqawi, the Intelligence Committee reports, contradicting Bush's argument for invasion.
By Greg Miller, Times Staff Writer
September 9, 2006 |
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WASHINGTON — The Senate Intelligence Committee on Friday said it had found no evidence that Saddam Hussein had ties to Al Qaeda or provided safe harbor to one of its most notorious operatives, Abu Musab Zarqawi — conclusions contradicting claims by the Bush administration before it invaded Iraq.
In a long-awaited report, the committee instead determined that the former Iraqi dictator was wary of Al Qaeda; repeatedly rebuffed requests from its leader, Osama bin Laden, for assistance; and sought to capture Zarqawi when the terrorist turned up in Baghdad.
The findings are the latest in a series of high-profile studies to dispute some of the Bush administration's key arguments for invading Iraq — mainly that the Hussein regime possessed stockpiles of banned weapons and had cultivated ties to terrorist networks. Presenting these since-discredited allegations as fact, President Bush and other high-ranking officials argued that Hussein's government posed an intolerable risk in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.
The 356-page report is certain to fuel the election-season debate over the administration's foreign policy at a time when Bush is seeking to shore up support for the war in Iraq through a series of speeches that cast the conflict as central to winning the larger war on terrorism.
Bush on Thursday again asserted that the battle in Iraq was inextricably linked to Al Qaeda, and disparaged those who considered it a "diversion" from the war on terrorism.
White House spokesman Tony Snow on Friday downplayed the significance of the report, describing it as "nothing new."
"It's … kind of relitigating things that happened three years ago," Snow said. "In 2002 and 2003, members of both parties got a good look at the intelligence we had, and they came to the very same conclusions about what was going on."
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In one of its main conclusions, the report said that "postwar findings indicate that Saddam Hussein was distrustful of Al Qaeda and viewed Islamic extremists as a threat to his regime, refusing all requests from Al Qaeda to provide material or operational support."
According to the report, Hussein has told U.S. interrogators that "if he wanted to cooperate with the enemies of the U.S., he would have allied with North Korea or China." His former deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, told U.S. interrogators that "Saddam only expressed negative sentiments about Bin Laden."
The report's disclosures include a classified assessment by the CIA last year that Hussein's regime "did not have a relationship, harbor or turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi and his associates."
The committee, made up of eight Republicans and seven Democrats, said U.S. intelligence agencies before Sept. 11 "accurately characterized" Bin Laden's intermittent interest in pursuing assistance from Iraq, but were largely wrong about Hussein's attitudes.
The Iraqi leader, according to the report, was so wary of the terrorist network that he "issued a general order that Iraq should not deal with Al Qaeda."
Democrats seized on the findings Friday to accuse the Bush administration of having distorted the threat Iraq posed.
In a speech on the Senate floor, Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, accused the White House of pursuing "a deceptive strategy of using intelligence reporting that the intelligence community had already warned was uncorroborated, unreliable and, in critical instances, fabricated."
The report released Friday is based largely on documents recovered from Iraqi facilities in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion in March 2003, as well as interrogations of Hussein and other Iraqi officials captured by coalition forces.
As a result, it represents the most thorough comparison to date of prewar suspicions with evidence subsequently collected. Much of the information was unavailable to U.S. intelligence agencies and policymakers before the war.
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The report's publication was marked by intense political wrangling within the Republican-controlled Intelligence Committee, with two GOP members — Sens. Olympia J. Snowe of Maine and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska — breaking ranks to vote in favor of conclusions drafted by Democrats.
In a statement, Snowe cited the "obligation of our government to learn from these horrific mistakes" and complained that the intelligence panel, "once noted for its bipartisanship, has become marred by partisan feuding." Hagel was not available for comment.
The dispute put Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), the committee's chairman, in the awkward position of touting the work of his panel while urging the public to ignore some of its conclusions.
"Overall, I am disappointed that some of my colleagues have twisted the facts to reach conclusions that support other agendas," Roberts said. "It is my view that the public should not focus on the conclusions in this report, but rather on the underlying facts."
Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times |
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www.counterpunch.org By KATHLEEN CHRISTISON former CIA analyst July 17, 2006
Atrocities in the Promised Land
The Brutality of the State of Israel
Words fail; ordinary terms are inadequate to describe the horrors Israel daily perpetrates, and has perpetrated for years, against the Palestinians.
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The tragedy of Gaza has been described a hundred times over, as have the tragedies of 1948, of Qibya, of Sabra and Shatila, of Jenin — 60 years of atrocity perpetrated in the name of Judaism.
But the horror generally falls on deaf ears in most of Israel, in the U.S. political arena, in the mainstream U.S. media.
Those who are horrified — and there are many — cannot penetrate the shield of impassivity that protects the political and media elite in Israel, even more so in the U.S., and increasingly now in Canada and Europe, from seeing, from caring.
But it needs to be said now, loudly: those who devise and carry out Israeli policies have made Israel into a monster, and it has come time for all of us — all Israelis, all Jews who allow Israel to speak for them, all Americans who do nothing to end U.S. support for Israel and its murderous policies — to recognize that we stain ourselves morally by continuing to sit by while Israel carries out its atrocities against the Palestinians.
A nation that mandates the primacy of one ethnicity or religion over all others will eventually become psychologically dysfunctional.
Narcissistically obsessed with its own image, it must strive to maintain its racial superiority at all costs and will inevitably come to view any resistance to this imagined superiority as an existential threat.
Indeed, any other people automatically becomes an existential threat simply by virtue of its own existence.
As it seeks to protect itself against phantom threats, the racist state becomes increasingly paranoid, its society closed and insular, intellectually limited.
Setbacks enrage it; humiliations madden it.
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The state lashes out in a crazed effort, lacking any sense of proportion, to reassure itself of its strength.
The pattern played out in Nazi Germany as it sought to maintain a mythical Aryan superiority. It is playing out now in Israel.
“This society no longer recognizes any boundaries, geographical or moral,” wrote Israeli intellectual and anti-Zionist activist Michel Warschawski in his 2004 book Towards an Open Tomb: The Crisis of Israeli Society.
Israel knows no limits and is lashing out as it finds that its attempt to beat the Palestinians into submission and swallow Palestine whole is being thwarted by a resilient, dignified Palestinian people who refuse to submit quietly and give up resisting Israel’s arrogance.
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Atrocities committed by Israel — graphic pictures What CNN never shows you |
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Senate: Hussein Wasn't Allied With Al Qaeda
Iraq rebuffed Bin Laden and wanted to capture Zarqawi, the Intelligence Committee reports, contradicting Bush's argument for invasion.
By Greg Miller, Times Staff Writer
September 9, 2006 |
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In particular, Roberts objected to findings that he said overstated the influence of the Iraqi National Congress — an exile group led by Ahmad Chalabi that had close ties to the Bush administration and has been accused of funneling prewar misinformation about Baghdad's weapons programs to U.S. intelligence agencies and news organizations.
The committee devoted 207 pages to an analysis of the INC, concluding that it had "attempted to influence U.S. policy on Iraq by providing false information through defectors."
Another section focused on the erroneous prewar estimates by the CIA and other agencies that Baghdad had stockpiles of chemical and biological munitions and was pursuing the development of nuclear arms.
But the most significant new information in the report focuses on Baghdad's alleged ties to Al Qaeda.
The CIA and other intelligence agencies were generally skeptical that Hussein had significant links to the terrorist group. But Vice President Dick Cheney and other senior administration officials have persistently highlighted isolated intelligence reports suggesting a relationship between Hussein and Bin Laden. The Senate report contradicts many of those assertions.
The report concludes, for instance, that it is true that Zarqawi was in Baghdad for about seven months in 2002. But Hussein was initially unaware of his presence in the country and later ordered his intelligence services to capture Zarqawi, according to the report.
The attempt was unsuccessful, and Zarqawi escaped to Iran. He also hid in areas of northern Iraq beyond Hussein's reach. After Hussein was overthrown, Zarqawi led the deadly insurgency against U.S. forces before he was killed by a U.S. airstrike in June.
Even as administration officials insisted on a Hussein-Al Qaeda link, they steered clear of alleging a direct role by the Iraqi strongman in the Sept. 11 attacks.
And at a news conference last month, Bush said flatly that Hussein had "nothing" to do with the assaults. Still, a CNN poll released this week found that 43% of U.S. residents said they believed Hussein was personally involved in the attacks; 52% said he was not.
The committee's report also dismisses a contention repeatedly cited by Cheney that an Iraqi intelligence agent met with Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta in Prague in April 2001. That claim has bolstered public perceptions that Iraq was somehow linked to the Sept. 11 attacks.
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But postwar evidence indicates no such meeting ever occurred, the committee found, citing Atta's travel and cellphone records obtained by the FBI, as well as information from the Iraqi agent alleged to have attended the meeting.
The report casts similar doubt on assertions that Iraq had provided chemical and biological weapons training to Al Qaeda operatives, or allowed terrorist organizations to practice for attacks on aircraft at a facility south of Baghdad known as Salman Pak.
Despite reports of repeated contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda, the committee said, U.S. intelligence has been able to assemble evidence of only a single meeting — a 1995 encounter in Sudan between Bin Laden and Iraqi intelligence officer Faruq Hijazi.
In postwar debriefings, Hijazi said that Hussein had instructed him to "only listen" and not negotiate or offer support to Bin Laden. He said that Bin Laden "requested an office in Iraq, military training for his followers, Chinese sea mines and the broadcast of speeches from an anti-Saudi cleric."
Hijazi said that he "immediately rejected" virtually all of the requests, offering only to consider broadcasting anti-Saudi speeches.
Overall, the document portrays Hussein and his underlings as alarmed by U.S. accusations linking him to Al Qaeda.
At one point, the report said, Hussein was warned by the director of Iraq's intelligence service "that U.S. intelligence was attempting to fabricate connections between the [Iraqi intelligence services] and Al Qaeda" to justify an invasion.
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The Senate report also offers new theories as to why Hussein's regime was unable to convince U.N. inspectors before the U.S. invasion that it no longer had stocks of illegal weapons.
A recent CIA analysis concluded that Hussein was stunned by the aggressiveness of weapons inspections after the 1991 Gulf War, and ordered the covert destruction of undeclared weapons and documents.
In the process, Hussein destroyed the very records U.N. inspectors sought a decade later when putting pressure on Iraq to account for its illicit weapons.
"The result was that Iraq was unable to provide proof when it tried at a later time to establish compliance," the report said, citing the CIA study.
Times staff writer Maura Reynolds contributed to this report.
Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times |
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Atrocities in the Promised Land
The Brutality of the State of Israel
We in the United States have become inured to tragedy inflicted by Israel, and we easily fall for the spin that automatically, by some trick of the imagination, converts Israeli atrocities to examples of how Israel is victimized.
But a military establishment that drops a 500-pound bomb on a residential apartment building in the middle of the night and kills 14 sleeping civilians, as happened in Gaza four years ago, is not a military that operates by civilized rules.
A military establishment that drops a 500-pound bomb on a house in the middle of the night and kills a man and his wife and seven of their children, as happened in Gaza four days ago, is not the military of a moral country.
A society that can brush off as unimportant an army officer’s brutal murder of a 13-year-old girl on the claim that she threatened soldiers at a military post — one of nearly 700 Palestinian children murdered by Israelis since the intifada began — is not a society with a conscience.
A government that imprisons a 15-year-old girl — one of several hundred children in Israeli detention — for the crime of pushing and running away from a male soldier trying to do a body search as she entered a mosque is not a government with any moral bearings.
(This story, not the kind that ever appears in the U.S. media, was reported in the London Sunday Times.
The girl was shot three times as she ran away and was convicted to 18 months in prison after she came out of a coma.)
Critics of Israel note increasingly that Israel is self-destructing, nearing a catastrophe of its own making.
Israeli journalist Gideon Levy talks of a society in “moral collapse.” |
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www.counterpunch.org By KATHLEEN CHRISTISON former CIA analyst July 17, 2006 Atrocities in the Promised Land The Brutality of the State of Israel US paid for Israeli bulldozers demolish a building in the West Bank city of Nablus July 20, 2006. Michel Warschawski writes of an “Israeli madness” and “insane brutality,” a “putrefaction” of civilized society, that have set Israel on a suicidal course. He foresees the end of the Zionist enterprise; Israel is a “gang of hoodlums,” he says, a state “that makes a mockery of legality and of civil morality. “A state run in contempt of justice loses the strength to survive.” As Warschawski notes bitterly, Israel no longer knows any moral boundaries — if it ever did. Those who continue to support Israel, who make excuses for it as it descends into corruption, have lost their moral compass. |
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Senate: Hussein Wasn't Allied With Al Qaeda
Iraq rebuffed Bin Laden and wanted to capture Zarqawi, the Intelligence Committee reports, contradicting Bush's argument for invasion.
By Greg Miller, Times Staff Writer
September 9, 2006 |
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Prewar claims versus report findings
A report by the Senate Intelligence Committee found no evidence connecting Iraq to weapons of mass destruction and Al Qaeda:
On connections between Iraq and terrorists
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Committee finding:
Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times |
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Israel US War Crime
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But then on thinking a little deeper it became clear that the closed shops and the empty streets were the only means by which the people of Ramallah could say they did not want to acknowledge the presence of the Secretary, or allow her in any way to participate in the life of the city.
It was their way of turning their backs on American policy in this region, too closely allied with Israel's.
The people of Ramallah have precious little except the vibrancy of their always lively streets, and in protest that vibrancy was put behind locked doors to preserve it from the woman of America who had come smiling to gloat over their poverty.
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| Fleeing Lebanese Speak of Indiscriminate Bombing ADDABBAOUSIYEH (northern Lebanese border) — People fleeing the bombing of Lebanon say the Israelis are targeting civilian neighbourhoods and vital infrastructure.
"Everything is being bombed," a teacher from the United States who was on vacation in Beirut told IPS. "It's terror. We've literally been terrorised."
Abud Aziz, a 31-year-old Lebanese pastry chef from Beirut crossed the border into Syria carrying his suitcase and looking for food and water. There had been no water or electricity in Beirut since Saturday, he said.
"Yesterday I saw two hospitals bombed," he told IPS. "Nobody who remains in Beirut can be safe. No way."
A 25-year-old construction worker named Hamed also said he saw warplanes bomb a hospital in Beirut.
"I saw them bomb a hospital yesterday," he told IPS. "I left just hours ago. They are bombing everything — houses, casinos, fuel stations and so many bridges."
"The warplanes bombed the Palestinian camps in Tripoli," a Danish woman who was vacationing in Tripoli in Lebanon said, "They are attacking up and down the coast, and the port in Tripoli was also attacked."
Her 14-year-old daughter Barihan al-Jassim said, "Somebody should stop this madness. How is it possible for a country to be bombed like this and nobody stops them from doing it?" Dahr Jamail, Inter Press Service, July 17, 2006 |
| June 5, 1967: Israel war paid for by US money using US weapons.
Resulting in the continuing enslavement of the Palestinian people.
Continuing occupation of Arab Lands, and the continuation of the policy to subjugate muslims The Day the 1967 Israeli War of Aggression Started.
The World on June 5, 1967 (right): Crying.
The World on June 5, 2006 (left): Doesn't Know How to Cry Anymore
All funded by the US taxpayer.
Inch by inch, kilometer by kilometre, what remains of Palestinian land continues to be taken.
US paid Israel troops shot dead a Palestinian belonging to President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah movement during an attack on Nablus.
The Israel military, including weapons: tanks, missiles, warplanes, artillery, shells, are all funded by the US taxpayer.
More than Fifteen million US dollars is given by US taxpayers to Israel each day for their military use.
Total funding is more than 4 billion US dollars per year. |
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Israel US War Crime
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A cartoon has started circulating again in Palestine.
A poignant and tragic reminder of how much these two countries have suffered in like at the hands of a U.S backed Israel.
It shows Hamoodi, that strange little symbol of Palestinian resistance offering a flower to a maiden who is gazing down at Hamoodi through a gaping hole in a wall, caused by an exploding shell.
“Good Morning Beirut,” little Hamoodi says to the maiden.
“Welcome to our struggle. We weep with you we, we suffer with you, we know how brutal your enemy can be.
We too are suffering.
Our sisters and brothers in Gaza are being buried every day.
Buried beneath the rubble of collapsing buildings, and beneath the sands blown by the desert winds in anger against the failure of the World leaders to act.
We have been waiting here for a long time.
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We greet you and offer you a flower. The ruins left by the inhuman military machine has devastated your people as it has ours. And now all we in Palestine have to offer you is a flower.
We have nothing else.
I have not faced the world for a long time, because the world does not want to know what I have to say. Nor could it bare to see the scars on my face. But you, sweet maiden, can see my face because you are suffering like us”
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www.counterpunch.org Najla Said July 22-23, 2006
Do People Know How Much We Hurt?
How do I even start this?
How do I write about my Beirut?
My heartbreak, my home, my safety, my loss. again.
I suppose I just start.
I have experienced true terror a handful of times.
The first was in 1983.
The first time I evacuated Beirut.
We had gone to visit my jiddo Emile, my teta Hilda, as we did every summer.
Just after we arrived,the airport was shut down, Israeli soldiers were everywhere, the mountains were filling with smoke.
We spent the next week in the staircase of our building as shells fell around us.
My brother Wadie was almost hit by shrapnel.
My father, Edward, was in Switzerland.
He knew we were in danger.
I had no idea he wasn’t with us because he was Palestinian.
I didn’t understand.
Although I was born in 1974, I never knew about the war until the summer of ’82 — the first summer we didn’t go.
The summer we spent in Illinois.
I did cartwheels in the living room trying to get Mommy and Daddy’s attention.
But all they did was watch the news and eat nuts and look worried.
I wish I’d known how my Mommy’s heart was breaking.
I know now.
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| “How will [Mr Bush] meet his god having slaughtered so many men and women? He has committed so many crimes.”
“I want to defend my home. If a stranger invades America and the people resist, does that mean they are terrorists?”
22-year-old Iraq Olympic football player Ahmed Manajid |
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www.counterpunch.org Najla Said July 22-23, 2006
Do People Know How Much We Hurt?
We got on the boat and fled to Cyprus leaving my family behind.
The boat was filled with pilgrims going to Mecca.
I didn’t know what they were.
I didn’t understand.
I didn’t know Muslim or Christian or Jew.
I didn’t know anything.
I knew fear and I knew confusion.
I knew the sound of bombs.
An inexplicable sound if you haven’t felt it before, for it is a sound you feel and not a sound you hear.
It is TERRIFYING.
Your body shakes.
You feel helpless and you cry, that’s what happens.
No sound effect can really replicate what it feels like when they’re real.
I never thought I’d hear that sound again.
I went into my Mommy’s bed the night before we left.
I was scared.
The balcony door was open because there was no A.C., no electricity.
As the curtains fluttered behind me I shivered and shook in my non-existent sleep.
I felt the breeze behind my back and knew for certain the bombs would get me as I lay there vulnerable.
But I was frozen in terror.
Shivering and shaking, teeth chattering.
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www.counterpunch.org Najla Said July 22-23, 2006
Do People Know How Much We Hurt?
I wanted to move to the other side, switch places with Mommy, have her wrap her arms around me and keep me safe — but then she would feel the bombs on her back, I reasoned, and she would die.
I can’t lose mommy, I thought. I’d rather die than lose Mommy. I’m so so so scared.
I wrote about that experience and it got me into Princeton. Wadie, my brother, did too. I didn’t see Beirut again till 1992. I was 18. It was awful, destroyed.
Where were the beaches, the fruits, the vegetables, the clean water, the fun, the bikinis, the people the joy?
I remember feeling like I had walked into a cobweb-ridden home, frozen in time. I cried.
Each year after, though, I went back.
It got better and better.
It became home again.
All the things I loved: the cucumbers and apricots and watermelon and sunshine and beaches and laughter and love and warmth and family and perseverance and resilience and strength and beauty and joy. They were there, and they continued to come back, along with the people who had fled, stronger than ever, year after year.
The most wonderful summer ever was twenty years after the scary escape.
In 2003: Mommy, Daddy, me, Wadie, his wife Jennifer, all of us were in Beirut laughing, playing fighting, eating, drinking, beaching — being a family.
Back home.
My parents originally fell in love in Beirut. In the late 60s/early 70's. In fact, Daddy who is so so so revered as a “great arab,” actually rediscovered the Middle East he had lost as a child through Lebanon, through Mommy, who is, as I love to say, 3000% Lebanese.
And so we buried Daddy there, 4 months later. In Brummana, in the mountains next to Jiddo’s home. In the Quaker family cemetery. That’s where he wanted to be.
It was terror that came back to me when Daddy died, and, oddly, beautifully, it was Lebanon that saved me from it.
It was the same quaking shaking shivering feeling I had had in the bed with mommy 20 years earlier.
When Jenn walked into my bedroom and said we were going “to go say goodbye” I fell to the ground with the same feeling I had then, in Beirut, in ‘83, convulsing shaking crying gasping.
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US rushing delivery of precision-guided bombs to Israel. Israel requested the expedited shipment last week after beginning its air campaign against Lebanon |
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www.counterpunch.org Najla Said July 22-23, 2006
Do People Know How Much We Hurt?
But the beauty was that when Daddy died, Lebanon became what I had. All I had.
My safety, security, my home, my family, my everything. My good times, my laughter, my healing, my wholeness, my fun. My roots. My security... That’s the only word I can write.
And now this summer. Evacuated again. Throwing up shaking fearing, hurting crying. Again.
And again the feeling I keep having is that terror.
That terror that I had twice before.
The feeling that it’s gone, it’s over.
You summon your courage, your optimism, your humor — the things that people love you for — you decide that tomorrow Beirut will be back, that you will see Daddy again.
(Oh how I kept turning my brain away from thoughts of him when he died — it was too difficult to fathom the reality)
The idea that you will never see something or someone you love again is unbelievably terrifying when you know really that it’s over, it’s gone and it’s getting worse every day.
And now I’m here in an internet cafe in Damascus.
And what now?
This is what I think of when I think of Arab terror.
My terror.
Our terror.
Do people know how much we hurt?
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Report Details Errors Before War
By Walter Pincus Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, September 9, 2006; Page A12 The long-awaited Senate Intelligence Committee report released yesterday sheds new light on why U.S. intelligence agencies provided inaccurate prewar information about Saddam Hussein and his weapons programs, including details on how Iraqi exiles who fabricated or exaggerated their stories were accepted as truthful because they passed Pentagon lie detector tests.
The two newly declassified chapters of the report fueled political accusations yesterday that the Bush administration lied to justify invading Iraq, but the documents' nearly 400 pages contain several examples of how bad information wound up accepted as truthful in intelligence assessments at the time.
A section includes the results of an evaluation by the CIA of its performance, which concludes that, despite repeated prewar assessments that the Iraqis were practicing deceit and deception to hide their weapons, there actually were no such efforts because there were no weapons.
The CIA concludes: "There comes a point where the absence of evidence does indeed become the evidence of absence." That statement is a play on a remark Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld made frequently in the months before the war — after U.N. inspectors in late 2002 and early 2003 could find no weapons — that "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."
One 208-page chapter from the Senate committee report covers the use of intelligence provided by the Iraqi National Congress and its leader, Ahmed Chalabi. The panel wrote that three Iraqi exiles gave the Pentagon inaccurate information about Hussein's alleged training of al-Qaeda terrorists, as well as about the existence of mobile biological weapons factories and an alleged meeting between the Iraqi leader and Osama bin Laden. All three exiles passed lie detector tests given by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), adding credibility to their stories.
In each case, the information proved to be questionable, if not inaccurate. But in the case of the mobile labs, the source's information was used to corroborate data in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq even after the informant had been tagged as a fabricator.
The report notes that a DIA official who knew that the source was unreliable sat in on two meetings in which the mobile labs information was incorporated into the speech Secretary of State Colin L. Powell delivered in February 2003 to the U.N. Security Council, but that the official did not realize the information was based solely on the word of the untrustworthy source.
According to the Senate panel's report, another Iraqi National Congress source, recommended to the DIA by Chalabi through a high-ranking Defense Department official, passed two lie detector tests after "claiming to have seen Saddam meeting with a man, who Uday Hussein [Saddam's son] identified as bin Laden." The source said Uday Hussein told him that bin Laden was there "to discuss training of some of his people in Iraq."
The DIA subsequently distributed the information but pointed out that the source was connected with the Iraqi opposition and that the information "may have been intended to influence as well as inform decision makers." The CIA later noted in its assessment of the information that the meeting between Hussein and bin Laden had "not been corroborated" and that "other sensitive reporting . . . provides no indication that Saddam and bin Laden have met each other."
Although the Senate report raises questions about the reliability of the information provided by Iraqi exiles, it notes that the information had little direct impact on the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq produced in October 2002. Many of the Iraqi National Congress claims, however, were passed on to the White House and the office of Vice President Cheney through reports by a separate intelligence analysis group established by then-Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith.
The Senate committee's inquiry into the Feith group's activities, another part of the prewar intelligence study, has been delayed by committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), who is awaiting the completion of a Pentagon inspector general inquiry into the same matter.
One surprising conclusion from the CIA retrospective is that the agency now believes that aggressive U.N. inspections in Iraq in 1991 after the Persian Gulf War led Hussein to what it describes as a "fateful decision." He covertly dismantled and destroyed the undeclared nuclear, chemical and biological facilities, materials and actual weapons he had put together in the preceding decade — along with "the records that could have verified that unilateral destruction."
As a result, there was no proof in 2002 and 2003 when the Iraqis claimed they had no weapons of mass destruction, and Hussein could not demonstrate he was in basic, if not complete, compliance with U.N. resolutions. Noncompliance with the Security Council's October resolution was the main U.S. public rationale for the invasion of Iraq.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company |
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http://angryarab.blogspot.com/ Saturday, July 15, 2006
Lies of the Times
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Saturday, July 15, 2006 BBC: where human life doesn't count if you are on the "wrong" side BBC RACISM Actress and columnist Maureen Lipman on BBC 1's This Week programme of 13 July, said: "Human life is not cheap to the Israelis, and human life on the other side is quite cheap actually..." Of the This Week team — Andrew Neil, Dianne Abbott and Michael Portillo — only Abbott responded, calling the comment "unfair", before Neil quickly moved the discussion along. www.arabmediawatch.com 14 July 2006 COMPLAIN TO THE BBC OVER RACIST REMARKS!!! Please complain about an outrageous, racist comment by actress and columnist Maureen Lipman on BBC 1's This Week programme of 13 July, in which she said: "Human life is not cheap to the Israelis, and human life on the other side is quite cheap actually..." Of the This Week team — Andrew Neil, Dianne Abbott and Michael Portillo — only Abbott responded, calling the comment "unfair", before Neil quickly moved the discussion along. Please let the BBC know that such racism is unacceptable, and that you demand an official statement from the corporation condemning Lipman's comment and apologising for the offence caused. You can listen again by clicking on "latest programme" at the top-right-hand side of the following page: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/this_week/5176894.stm You can call the BBC complaints department on 08700 100 222. You can write to BBC Complaints, PO BOX 1922, Glasgow G2 3WT. And you can complain online at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/make_complaint_step1.shtml The BBC complaints guide is at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/complaints_process.shtml You can also email thisweek@bbc.co.uk. |
http://uruknet.info/ July 15th, 2006
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July 7, 2006 By KEVIN GRAHAM, St. Petersburg Times Staff Sgt. Joseph Frederick Fuerst III called Chuck Paulk with a problem just days before his wedding. "I don't know how to dance," he told Paulk, 53, of Tampa. Paulk spent the three days before the ceremony teaching Fuerst and his soon-to-be-bride the two-step. "I kept telling him to look at my eyes and not my shoes," Paulk said. "It was hard for him to do with his arms around me." The newlyweds didn't miss a beat during their first dance, he said. Thursday morning it was the movement of soldiers' marching feet that captured Paulk's attention, as they carried Fuerst's casket at Christ the King Roman Catholic Church in South Tampa. The 26-year-old died June 24 of injuries from rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire in an attack on his Humvee in Afghanistan's Panjway District. He would have celebrated a birthday in two weeks. Fuerst's was the first of three funerals planned for Tampa soldiers who died within a week while fighting in Mideast wars. Army Cpl. Aaron Griner, who grew up in Brandon, died June 28 in the deserts of Afghanistan. He was 24. Army Sgt. Bryan Luckey, 25, of Tampa, died June 29 in Iraq. Fuerst and his wife Tara, 22, were both deployed to Afghanistan last summer as part of the Florida Guard's 53rd Infantry Brigade. They married in March 2005. She was in Afghanistan when news came of her husband's death. Hundreds of mourners filled the pews in the sunlit church Thursday, and a hush settled on the crowd as the soldier's family entered the foyer, accompanied by the flag-draped coffin and a uniformed escort. With military precision, the troops lifted and folded the American flag, and the family draped the coffin with a Catholic ceremonial funeral cloth. Tears began to fall as Father Desmond Daly sprinkled holy water on the casket. The mourners sang How Great Thou Art as a Boy Scout troop led the processional into the church. Sgt. Jorge Pozo served with Fuerst in Afghanistan. He broke his right leg in the same firefight that ended Fuerst's life, he said. He was carrying a fallen soldier out of a kill zone when he broke his leg, but kept running to get to safety, making the injury worse. He attended Fuerst's funeral on crutches. "He loved his wife, and he loved what he was doing," Pozo said. Fuerst joined the Army in 1998, after graduating from H.B. Plant High School. Paulk, the man who taught Fuerst to dance for his wedding, met him when Fuerst was a junior. Fuerst had gone to Paulk's home to cut his lawn. From that grew their friendship. They last spoke two months ago during an hourlong telephone conversation. Fuerst talked about the war, how frequently he saw his wife and joked about how Paulk could send him a bottle of Jack Daniel's whiskey without anyone noticing. "He was a pretty simple guy," Paulk said. "You could always count on him to show up and buy the next round of drinks. Just showing up is what it's all about. He would do just that." Fuerst and his wife had bought an acre of land in Brooksville where they planned to settle down and have children after he got out of the military in October, Paulk said. A police academy graduate, Fuerst had started applying for jobs as an officer. "I don't look at this as a loss," Paulk said. "The 26 years he was here, it was a gift." |
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http://uruknet.info/ July 15th, 2006
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Jul 14 By ROBERT WELLER, Associated Press Writer
An Air Force officer pleaded guilty Friday to defacing cars with bumper stickers supporting President Bush, and was given a two-year deferred sentence.
Lt. Col. Alexis Fecteau, a decorated officer who flew 500 combat hours in the Gulf War, Kosovo and Bosnia, pleaded guilty to felony mischief and must pay restitution to the owners of the damaged cars to clear his record.
Attorney Patrick Mulligan said his client, a 20-year veteran, has submitted his retirement papers. Negotiations are under way to determine at what rank and with what benefits he will be retired.
Fecteau originally faced 13 charges for defacing vehicles at the Denver airport from January to July 2005.
Fecteau admitted to investigators he had vandalized cars starting around the time of the November 2004 election, but pleaded guilty to a single charge of criminal mischief that named all 13 victims.
Fecteau blacked out pro-Bush bumper stickers and then spray-painted an expletive over them.
[Press reports at the time said what he wrote was “Fuck Bush.” — uruknet.info]
After the charges became public, Fecteau was removed as director of operations for reserve forces at the National Security Space Institute at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs. |
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| Safir Newspaper Beirut and Uruknet.info http://uruknet.info/ July 22, 2006 Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research US Israel crimes against humanity: Gruesome images of charred and mutilated bodies following Israeli air strikes While these gruesome images have been released by acredited news agencies including Reuters, Agence France Press and the Associated Press, they are casually dismissed, they are not considered as reliable evidence of war crimes. There is, in this regard, a deliberate media coverup of Israeli sponsored crimes and atrocities. Civilian casualties continue to be presented in media reports as "collateral damage". Laser guided missiles and "smart bombs" are very precise. They rarely miss their target. |
| Do you know what kind of weapons causes this damage? |
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Beirut July 21st, 2006 I left the office early last night; at midnight. There was only one devastating picture yesterday: that of two people who were killed in air strikes on Akkar, (the poorer area) in the north, late Wednesday night. Weird Both corps were black, both were dismembered, both were "weird". I don't think it matters anymore to try to prove that Israel is using unconventional, forbidden weapons ... that would only prove that it should have used "allowed" weapons. Who cares, people are dying anyway. And whatever weapons are being used, the pollution they're creating will kill the survivors from cancer later. The rest of the pictures were less devastating, conventional: demolished houses, wiped out villages and towns, more refugees, some of them starving, lovely babes on board of US marines ships and colored people from poor countries lining up in front of embassies hoping they will get them out of this hell.
"We're with you, like you: left alone, suffering and part of your cause, a great one."
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| Safir Newspaper Beirut and Uruknet.info http://uruknet.info/ July 22, 2006 Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research US Israel crimes against humanity: Gruesome images of charred and mutilated bodies following Israeli air strikes When residential buildings are targetted, this means civilians will be killed. These actions ordered by Israel's IDF are quite deliberate. The atrocities in these pictures are beyond description. Israel has being using, quite deliberately, deadly "weapons of mass destruction" in the real sense of the word against Lebanese civilians. Israel is involved in crimes against humanity and the so-called international community unreservedly supports Israel's right to "self defense". Moreover, in providing a green light to Israel to continue its criminal bombings for another week, the Bush adminstration is directly responsible for these atrocities. No compassion on the part of western leaders. "War is good for business". The killings are for profit and political gain. |
| Safir Newspaper Beirut and Uruknet.info http://uruknet.info/ July 22, 2006 Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research The entire Western meda is silent, focussing ad nauseam on the alleged terrorist actions of Hizbollah, its "links to Iran and Syria", the rescue of Western expatriates. But not a word on the destruction of an entire nation. What Israel is doing in a very concrete sense is "wiping Lebanon off the face of the map". By destroying its civilian infrastructure and killing its people, Israel "questions Lebanon's right to exist" as a sovereign nation. Is this what is called "the clash of civilisations"? We are dealing with the criminalisation of the Western media. If atrocities of this nature are not reported or acknowledged, what are the implications? The end of "civilised society"? |
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| Safir Newspaper Beirut and Uruknet.info http://uruknet.info/ July 22, 2006 Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research There can be no double standards. If G-8 leaders and the UN Secretary General do not speak out explicitly, not only in condemning but in taking concrete actions against Israel, they too are collectively responsible for crimes against humanity. It is time for the real war criminals be prosecuted. Extensive sanctions should be adopted against the Israeli government. Political leaders who endorse the Israeli sponsored killings must understand that they too can be prosecuted within their respective jurisdictions. |
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Beirut July 19, 2006 The attached pictures are hideously gruesome, but you have to look at them. Help me find out what kind of weapons cause this kind of dismemberment and mutation. What kind of weapons cause this kind of damage? Do you know? Could you find out? None of this is confirmed, or could be here and now. However, there are growing doubts that Israel might be using internationally forbidden weapons in its current aggression against Lebanon. News from "Southern Medical Center", a hospital in Saida( in South Lebanon) are not good. Dr. Bashir Sham, member of "French Association of Cardiovascular Surgeons", explains that the way the corps look when they reach the hospital, especially those of the air strikes in Doueir and Rmayleih, is very abnormal. One might think they were burnt, but their colour is dark, they're inflated, and they have a terrible smell. All this, and the hair is not burnt nor do the bodies bleed.
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| The director of the same medical center, Ali Mansour, says that due to the strong smell of the corps, he couldn't breath properly for at least 12 hours after the corps were handled. He explains that the center received eight bodies from Rmeileh last Monday, and none of them was bleeding. Mansour tells us the hospital wrote to both the commissioner of the European Union for Foreign Affaires Javier Solana, and the United Nations Secretary general Kofi Anan. He said that Dr Sham will communicate his doubts to the Doctors Order in Lebanon. CAN YOU HELP US, PLEASE! Hanady |
| Look at the eye |
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How Massacres Become the Norm
By Dahr Jamail t r u t h o u t | Perspective Tuesday 04 April 2006 [Images inserted by TheWE.biz]
US soldiers killing innocent civilians in Iraq is not news.
Just as it was not news that US soldiers slaughtered countless innocent civilians in Vietnam.
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However, when some rare reportage of this non news from Iraq does seep through the cracks of the corporate media, albeit briefly, the American public seems shocked.
Private and public statements of denial and dismissal immediately start to fill the air.
We hear, "American soldiers would never do such a thing," or "Who would make such a ridiculous claim?"
It amazes me that so many people in the US today somehow seriously believe that American soldiers would never kill civilians. Despite the fact that they are in a no-win guerrilla war in Iraq which, like any other guerrilla war, always generates more civilian casualties than combatant casualties on either side.
PTSD
Robert J. Lifton is a prominent American psychiatrist who lobbied for the inclusion of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders after his work with US veterans from Vietnam.
His studies on the behavior of those who have committed war crimes led him to believe it does not require an unusual level of mental illness or of personal evil to carry out such crimes.
Rather, these crimes are nearly guaranteed to occur in what Lifton refers to as "atrocity-producing situations."
Several of his books, like The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, examine how abnormal conditions work on normal minds, enabling them to commit the most horrendous crimes imaginable.
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Iraq today is most certainly an "atrocity-producing situation," as it has been from the very beginning of the occupation.
The latest reported war crime, a US military raid on the al-Mustafa Shia mosque in Baghdad on March 26th, which killed at least 16 people, is only one instance of the phenomena that Lifton has spoken of.
An AP video of the scene shows male bodies tangled together in a bloody mass on the floor of the Imams' living quarters — all of them with shotgun wounds and other bullet holes.
The tape also shows shell casings of the caliber used by the US military scattered about on the floor.
An official from the al-Sadr political bloc reported that American forces had surrounded the hospital where the wounded were taken for treatment after the massacre.
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The slaughter was followed by an instant and predictable disinformation blitz by the US military.
The second ranking US commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, told reporters "someone went in and made the scene look different from what it was."
On March 15th, 11 Iraqis, mostly women and children, were massacred by US troops in Balad. |
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Witnesses told reporters that US helicopters landed near a home, which was then stormed by US troops.
Everyone visible was rounded up and taken inside the house where they were killed.
The victims' ages ranged from six months to 75 years.
The US military acknowledged the raid, but claimed to have captured a resistance fighter and insisted that only four people had been killed.
Their claim would have held good but for the discrepancies that the available evidence presents.
For one, the photographs that the AP reporter took of the scene reveal a collapsed roof, three destroyed cars and two dead cows.
The other indictment comes from the detailed report of the incident prepared by Iraq Police.
It matches witness accounts and accuses the American troops of murdering Iraqi civilians.
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"The American forces gathered the family members in one room and executed 11 persons, including five children, four women and two men.
Then they bombed the house, burned three vehicles and killed the animals."
The report includes the observation of local medics that all of the bodies had bullet wounds in the head.
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Ahmed Khalaf, the nephew of one of the victims said:
"The killed family was not part of the resistance, they were women and children.
"The Americans have promised us a better life, but we get only death."
AP photos of the aftermath showed the bodies of five children, two men and four others covered in blankets being driven to a nearby hospital.
Reminiscent of Vietnam?
Another appalling example of the effect of an "atrocity-producing situation" was experienced last November 19th in Haditha.
American troops, in retaliation against a roadside bomb attack, stormed nearby homes and shot dead 15 members of two families, including a three-year-old girl.
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US military response?
All 15 civilians were killed by the blast of the roadside bomb.
In this case, reality refuted their claim when a student of journalism from Haditha showed up with a video tape of the dead, still in their nightclothes.
Killing Iraqis in their homes and while they are in bed is not news either, for during the aftermath of the November 2004 assault on Fallujah, scores of Iraqis were killed by US soldiers in this manner.
Neither is it news that the US military regularly targets ambulances and medical infrastructure.
Khaled Ahmed Rsayef, whose brother and six other relatives were killed by the troops, vividly described the blind frustration of the American soldiers and their impulsive revenge at losing one of their own.
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"American troops immediately cordoned off the area and raided two nearby houses, shooting at everyone inside."
"It was a massacre in every sense of the word," said Rasayef.
While he was not present at the scene, his 15-year-old niece was and her story was corroborated by other residents of the area who witnessed the carnage.
A quick scan of some Arab media reportage for last month exposes further atrocities carried out by US forces in Iraq which find no mention in the corporate media.
March 20, the Daily Dar Al-Salam reported: "US forces destroyed houses in Hasibah and displaced the inhabitants. Also, a source at Abu Ghurayb Secondary School said that US forces raided the school for the third time and arrested the guard."
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In December 2003, I personally witnessed US soldiers raid a secondary school in the al-Amiriyah district of Baghdad and detain 16 children.
March 19, Al-Arabia reported: "In another development, seven people, including a woman, were killed in a raid carried out by joint American-Iraqi forces in Al-Dulu'iyah at dawn today. The US Army has so far not confirmed this information."
March 9, Al Sharqiyah Television reported: "US troops opened fire at a civilian vehicle as it passed by Al-Hadba district in the western part of Mosul, northern Iraq. The three occupants of the vehicle were martyred in the incident."
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Throughout the three-year history of the US-led catastrophe that is the occupation of Iraq, we have had one instance after another of brutality meted out to innocent Iraqis, by way of direct executions or bombings from the air, or both.
During an attack on a wedding party in May 2004, US troops killed over 40 people, mostly women and children, in a desert village on the Syrian border of Iraq.
APTN footage showed fragments of musical instruments, blood stains, the headless body of a child, other dead children and clumps of women's hair in a destroyed house that was bombed by US warplanes.
Other photographs showed dead women and children, and an AP reporter identified at least 10 of the bodies as those of children.
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Relatives who gathered at a cemetery outside of Ramadi, where all the bodies were buried, told reporters that each of the 28 fresh graves contained between one and three bodies.
The few survivors of the massacre later recounted how in the middle of the night long after the wedding feast had ended, US jets began raining bombs on their tents and houses.
Mrs. Shihab, a 30-year-old woman who survived the massacre, told the Guardian:
"We went out of the house and the American soldiers started to shoot us.
"They were shooting low on the ground and targeting us one by one."
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She added that she ran with her two little boys before they were all shot, including herself in the leg.
"I left them because they were dead," she said of her two little boys, one of whom was decapitated by a shell.
"I fell into the mud and an American soldier came and kicked me.
"I pretended to be dead so he wouldn't kill me."
Thereafter, armored military vehicles entered the village, shooting at all the other houses and the people who were starting to assemble in the open.
Following these, two Chinook helicopters offloaded several dozen troops, some of who set explosives in one of the homes and a building next to it.
Both exploded into rubble as the helicopters lifted off.
Mr. Nawaf, one of the survivors, said:
"I saw something that nobody ever saw in this world.
There were children's bodies cut into pieces, women cut into pieces, men cut into pieces.
The Americans call these people foreign fighters.
It is a lie.
I just want one piece of evidence of what they are saying."
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Hamdi Noor al-Alusi, the manager of al-Qa'im general hospital, the nearest medical facility to the scene of the slaughter, said that of the 42 killed, 14 were children and 11 women.
"I want to know why the Americans targeted this small village," he said.
"These people are my patients. I know each one of them. What has caused this disaster?"
As usual, the US military ran a disinformation campaign saying the target was a "suspected safe-house" for foreign fighters and denied that any children were killed.
The ever pliant US Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt told reporters that the troops who reported back from the operation "told us they did not shoot women and children."
Topping his ridiculous claim was the statement of Maj. Gen. James Mattis, commander of the 1st Marine Division.
"How many people go to the middle of the desert ... to hold a wedding 80 miles (130km) from the nearest civilization?"
Perhaps someone should have informed him that these farmers and nomads often "go to the middle of the desert" because they happen to live there. |
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"These were more than two dozen military-age males.
Let's not be naïve," Mattis stated before being asked by a reporter to comment on the footage on Arabic television which showed a child's body being lowered into a grave.
His brilliant response was: "I have not seen the pictures but bad things happen in wars. I don't have to apologize for the conduct of my men."
If the US were a member of the International Criminal Court, Maj. Gen. Mattis may well have been in The Hague right now being tried for aiding and abetting war crimes. |
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How can someone holding an official position like Mattis publicly sanction atrocities? |
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It is about unnatural responses such as these that Dr. Lifton has written extensively.
In a piece he wrote for the New England Journal of Medicine in July 2004, Lifton addressed the issue of US doctors being complicit in torturing Iraqis in Abu Ghraib.
This article sheds much light on the situation in Iraq.
If we substitute "doctors" with "soldiers" it is easy to understand why American soldiers are regularly committing the excesses that we hear of.
It is about unnatural responses such as these that Dr. Lifton has written extensively.
In a piece he wrote for the New England Journal of Medicine in July 2004, Lifton addressed the issue of US doctors being complicit in torturing Iraqis in Abu Ghraib.
This article sheds much light on the situation in Iraq.
If we substitute "doctors" with "soldiers" it is easy to understand why American soldiers are regularly committing the excesses that we hear of. |
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Lifton writes, "American doctors at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere have undoubtedly been aware of their medical responsibility to document injuries and raise questions about their possible source in abuse.
But those doctors and other medical personnel were part of a command structure that permitted, encouraged, and sometimes orchestrated torture to a degree that it became the norm — with which they were expected to comply — in the immediate prison environment."
He continues:
The doctors thus brought a medical component to what I call an "atrocity-producing situation" — one so structured, psychologically and militarily, that ordinary people can readily engage in atrocities.
Even without directly participating in the abuse, doctors may have become socialized to an environment of torture and by virtue of their medical authority helped sustain it. |
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"In studying various forms of medical abuse, I have found that the participation of doctors can confer an aura of legitimacy.
And can even create an illusion of therapy and healing."
I have personally experienced this.
Standing with US soldiers at checkpoints and perimeters of operations in Iraq, I have seen them curse and kick Iraqis, heard them threatening to kill even women and children and then look at me as if they had merely said hello to them.
My status of journalist did not deter them because they saw no need for checks. |
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Having stood with soldiers anticipating that each moving car would turn into a bomb and each passerby into a suicide bomber, I have tasted the stress and fear these soldiers live with on a daily basis.
When one of their fellow soldiers is killed by a roadside bomb, the need for revenge may be directed at anything.
And repeated often enough, the process gets socialized. |
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It's about this attitude brought on by the normalization of the abnormal under "atrocity-producing situations" that Dr. Lifton speaks.
Unless of course we consider Mattis and others like him to be rare sociopaths who are able to participate in atrocities without suffering lasting emotional harm.
And it is this attitude that is responsible for the incessant replication of wanton slaughter and madness in Iraq today. |
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Back in November of 2004, I wrote about 12-year-old Fatima Harouz.
She lay dazed in a crowded room in Yarmouk Hospital in Bahgdad, feebly waving her bruised arm at flies.
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Her shins had been shattered by bullets from US soldiers when they fired through the front door of her home in Latifiya, a small city just south of Baghdad.
Small plastic drainage bags filled with red fluid sat upon her abdomen, where she took shrapnel from another bullet.
Her mother, who was standing with us, said, "They attacked our home and there weren't even any resistance fighters in our area."
Her brother had been shot and killed, and his wife was wounded as their home was ransacked by soldiers.
"Before they left, they killed all of our chickens," she added, her eyes a mixture of fear, shock and rage.
On hearing the story, a doctor looked at me sternly and asked: "This is the freedom ... in their Disney Land are there kids just like this?"
Another wounded young woman in a nearby hospital bed, Rana Obeidy, had been walking home with her brother.
She assumed the soldiers shot her and her brother because he was carrying a bottle of soda.
This happened in Baghdad.
She had a chest wound where a bullet had grazed her, unlike her little brother, whom the bullets had killed.
There exist many more such cases.
Amnesty International has documented scores of human rights violations committed by US troops in Iraq during the first six months of the occupation.
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To mention but a few:
US troops shot dead and injured scores of Iraqi demonstrators in several incidents. For example, seven people were reportedly shot dead and dozens injured in Mosul on 15 April.
At least 15 people, including children, were shot dead and more than 70 injured in Fallujah on 29 April.
Two demonstrators were shot dead outside the Republican Palace in Baghdad on 18 June.
On 14 May, two US armed vehicles broke through the perimeter wall of the home of Sa'adi Suleiman Ibrahim al-'Ubaydi in Ramadi. Soldiers beat him with rifle butts and then shot him dead as he tried to flee.
US forces shot 12-year-old Mohammad al-Kubaisi as they carried out search operations around his house in the Hay al-Jihad area in Baghdad on 26 June.
He was carrying the family bedding to the roof of his house when he was shot.
Neighbors tried to rush him to the nearby hospital by car, but US soldiers stopped them and ordered them to go back. By the time they returned to his home, Mohammad al-Kubaisi was dead.
On 17 September, a 14-year-old boy was killed and six people were injured when US troops opened fire at a wedding party in Fallujah.
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On 23 September, three farmers, 'Ali Khalaf, Sa'adi Faqri and Salem Khalil, were killed and three others injured when US troops opened a barrage of gunfire reportedly lasting for at least an hour in the village of al-Jisr near Fallujah.
A US military official stated that this happened when the troops came under attack but this was vehemently denied by relatives of the dead.
Later that day, US military officials reportedly went to the farmhouse, took photographs and apologized to the family. |
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After executing three men soldiers completely destroyed the home
This last incident ended in a way similar to the one I covered in Ramadi in November, 2003. On the 23rd of that month during Ramadan, US soldiers raided a home where a family was just sitting down together to break their fast.
Three men of the family had their hands tied behind them with plastic ties and were laid on the ground face down while the women and children were made to stand inside a nearby storage closet.
Khalil Ahmed, 30 years old, the brother of two of the victims and cousin with a third, wept when he described to me how after executing the three men the soldiers completely destroyed the home, using Humvees with machine guns, small tanks, and gunfire from the many troops on foot and helicopters.
"We don't know the reason why the soldiers came here. They didn't tell us the reason. We don't know why they killed our family members." Khalil seemed to demand an answer from me. "There are no weapons in this house, there are no resistance fighters. So why did these people have to die? Why?"
Khalil told me that the day after the executions took place, soldiers returned to apologize. They handed him a cake saying they were sorry that they had been given wrong information by someone that told them there were resistance fighters in their house.
This is only a very small sampling.
The only way to prevent any of this from being repeated ad infinitum is to remove US soldiers from their "atrocity-producing situation" in Iraq.
For it is clearer than ever that the longer the failed, illegal occupation persists, the larger will be the numbers of Iraqis slaughtered by the occupation forces.
Dahr Jamail is an independent journalist who spent over 8 months reporting from occupied Iraq.
He presented evidence of US war crimes in Iraq at the International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration in New York City in January 2006.
He writes regularly for TruthOut, Inter Press Service, Asia Times and TomDispatch, and maintains his own web site, dahrjamailiraq.com.
© : t r u t h o u t 2006 |
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Bush — he burns them to death with chemical weapons. By Chris Floyd
U.S. President George W. Bush often complains about the "media filter" that distorts the true picture of his administration's accomplishments in Iraq.
And he's right.
For regardless of where you stand on Bush's policies in the region, it's undeniable that the political and commercial biases of the American press have consistently misrepresented the reality of the situation.
U.S. media ignored announcement of U.S. use of chemical weapons.
Here's an excellent example.
Earlier this month, the American media completely ignored an important announcement from an official of the Iraqi government concerning the oft-maligned U.S. operation to clear insurgents from the city of Fallujah last November.
Although the press conference of Health Ministry investigator Dr. Khalid ash-Shaykhli was attended by representatives from The Washington Post, Knight-Ridder and more than 20 other international news outlets, nary a word of his team's thorough investigation into the truth about the battle made it through the filter's dense mesh.
Once again, the American public was denied the full story of one of President Bush's remarkable triumphs.
Dr. ash-Shaykhli's findings provided confirmation of earlier reports by many other Iraqis — reports that were also ignored by the arrogant filterers, who seem more interested in hearing from terrorists or anti-occupation extremists than ordinary Iraqis and those like Dr. ash-Shaykhli, who serve in the U.S.-backed interim government vetted and approved by President Bush.
But while the media elite turn up their noses at such riffraff, the testimony of these common folk and diligent public servants gives ample evidence of Bush's innovative method of liberating innocent Iraqis from tyranny:
He burns them to death with chemical weapons. Dr. ash-Shaykhli was sent by the pro-American Baghdad government to assess health conditions in Fallujah, a city of 300,000 that was razed to the ground by a U.S. assault on a few hundred insurgents, most of whom slipped away long before the attack. The ruin of the city was complete: Every single house was either destroyed (from 75 to 80 percent of the total) or heavily damaged. The city's entire infrastructure — water, electricity, food, transport, medicine — was obliterated. Indeed, the city's hospitals were among the first targets, in order to prevent medical workers from spreading "propaganda" about civilian casualties, U.S. officials said at the time. Burning chemicals Eyewitness accounts from the few survivors of the onslaught, which killed an estimated 1,200 noncombatants, have consistently reported the use of "burning chemicals" by American forces: horrible concoctions that roasted people alive with an unquenchable jellied fire, InterPress reported. They also tell of whole quadrants of the city in which nothing was left alive, not even dogs or goats — quadrants that were sealed off by the victorious Americans for mysterious scouring operations after the battle. Others told of widespread use of cluster bombs in civilian areas — a flagrant violation of the Geneva Conventions, but a standard practice throughout the war. The few fragments of this information that made it through the ever-vigilant filter were instantly dismissed as anti-American propaganda, although they often came from civilians who had opposed the heavy-handed insurgent presence in the town. Rejected as well were the innumerable horror stories of those who had seen their whole families — including women, children, the sick and the elderly — slaughtered in the "liberal rules of engagement" established by Bush's top brass. Most of the city was declared "weapons-free": military jargon meaning that soldiers could shoot "whatever they see — it's all considered hostile," The New York Times reported, in a story buried deep inside the paper. Yet the ash-Shaykhli team — again, appointed by the Bush-backed government — confirmed the use of "mustard gas, nerve gas and other burning chemicals" by U.S. forces during the battle. Dr. ash-Shaykhli said that survivors — still living in refugee camps, along with some 200,000 former Fallujah residents who fled before the assault — are now showing the medical effects of attack by chemical agents and the use of depleted uranium shells. (American officials have admitted raining more than 250,000 pounds of toxin-tipped DU ammunition on Iraqis since the war began.) The Pentagon has acknowledged using white phosphorus in Fallujah, but only for "illumination purposes." It denied using napalm in the attack — but, in the course of that denial, it admitted that its earlier denials of using napalm elsewhere in Iraq were in fact false. And individual Marines filing "After Action Reports" on the Internet for military enthusiasts back home have detailed the routine use of white phosphorus shells, propane bombs and "jellied gasoline" (also known as napalm) during direct tactical assaults in Fallujah. Dr. ash-Shaykhli's findings — coming from a pro-American government, buttressed by reams of eyewitness testimony from ordinary Iraqi civilians — appear to be substantial, credible and worthy of further investigation by the U.S. press.
Certainly, the findings are more credible than the pre-war lies and fantasies about Saddam's phantom WMD, which the "media filter" lapped up from the Bush regime and amplified across the nation, rousing support for an unnecessary, illegal and immoral war.
Yet these serious new atrocity charges have not even been mentioned, much less examined.
Degeneration of American society is taking place
Behind the filter — with its basic story template of "always moral U.S. policies occasionally marred by a few bad apples" — a relentless degeneration of American society is taking place.
Brutality and atrocity are becoming normalized, systemized and rewarded.
The noble American ideal of transcendence — overcoming the beast within, seeking to embrace an ever-broader, ever-deeper, ever-richer vision of universal communion and individual worth — is dying at the hands of the resurgent barbarity championed and cultivated by the Bush regime.
Old-fashioned citizens are being replaced by "Bush Americans": wilfully ignorant, bellicose zealots, cringingly servile toward the powerful, violently hostile to all "outsiders."
Despite Bush's artful complaints, the media filter has served his degenerate purposes very well.
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More war, more terror, more authoritarian rule: The fire next time is almost here.
Annotations
Napalm, Chemical Weapons Used at Fallujah: Iraqi Official
ILCA Online, March 7, 2005 Stories From Fallujah Iraq Dispatch, Feb. 8, 2005 Fallujah, Tent City, Awaits Compensation Informed Comment, March 13, 2005 Another Sad Day for Our Country The American Independent, March 7, 2005 Iraqi Health Ministry Confirms Use of Prohibited Weapons in Attacks on al-Fallujah Mafkarat al-Islam (Iraq), March 2, 2005 U.S. General From Abu Ghraib Scandal Promoted Stars and Stripes, March 15, 2005 Odd Happenings in Fallujah Electronic Iraq, Jan. 18, 2005 U.S. Denies Use of Napalm in Fallujah U.S, International Information Programs Jan. 27, 2005 The Eyewitnesses Must Be Crazy Antiwar.com, March 15, 2005 Life Under the Bombs in Iraq TomDispatch, Feb. 2, 2005 TV News Turns Myopic: Profits Come First Houston Chronicle, March 16, 2005 The Media Lobby CorpWatch, March 11, 2005 Journalism, Infotainment and the Bottom-Line Business of Broadcasting Buzzflash, March 17, 2005 Handmaiden of the State: The Role of Media in an Age of Empire Antiwar.com, March 16, 2005 Extreme Cinema Verite: Soldiers Make Music Videos of Death and Destruction Los Angeles Times, March 14, 2005 A War Crime in Real Time: Obliterating Fallujah CounterPunch, Nov. 15, 2004 Inside Fallujah: One Family's Diary of Terror Scotland Sunday Herald, Nov. 14, 2004 The Marine's Tale: 'I Felt We Were Committing Genocide The Independent, May 23, 2004 Smoke and Corpses BBC, Nov. 11, 2004 20 Doctors Killed in Strike on Clinic: Red Crescent UN Integrated Regional Information Network, Nov. 10, 2004 US Strikes Raze Fallujah Hospital BBC, Nov. 6, 2004 Ghost City Calls for Help BBC, Nov. 13, 2004 Let Them Drink Sand: War Crimes in Fallujah CounterPunch, Nov. 13, 2004 American Heroes Baghdad Burning, Nov. 16, 2004 Beyond Embattled City, Rebels Roam Free Los Angeles Times, Nov. 12, 2004 Administration Rejects Ruling on PR Videos Washington Post, March 14, 2005 $226 Million in Government Ads Helped Pave the Way to War Antiwar.com, May 28, 2004 © Copyright 2005, The Moscow Times. All Rights Reserved. |
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The secret story of Mossad and the World Trade Center attack The Odigo Warning: Israeli employees get e-mail warnings of 9-11 SEC Secret Probe Of Stock Dealings Before 9/11 |
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SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, very simply...this is over the winter...the government made...I think the article is called “The Redirection.”
There was a major change of policy by the United States government, essentially, which was that we were going to...the American government would join with the Brits and other Western allies and with what we call the moderate Sunni governments — that is, the governments of Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt — and join with them and with Israel to fight the Shia.
One of the major goals for America, of course, was the obsession the Bush White House has with Iran, and the other obsession they have is, of course...is in fear...is of Hezbollah.
Hezbollah the Shia Party of God that’s so dominant in southern Lebanon and whose leader Hassan Nasrallah wants to play a bigger political role and is doing quite a bit to get there and is in direct confrontation with Siniora.
Fouad Siniora, deputy or aide to Rafik Hariri, the slain leader of Lebanon
And so, you have a situation where the Sunni government, pretty much in control now, the American-supported Sunni government headed by Fouad Siniora, who was a deputy or an aide to Rafik Hariri, the slain leader of Lebanon, that government has....
We know, the 'International Crisis Group' reported a couple years ago that the son Saad Hariri, the son of Rafik Hariri, who’s now a major player in the parliament of Lebanon, he put up $40,000 bail to free four Sunni fundamentalists — Jihadist-Salafists who were tied directly to, you know, this word “al-Qaeda.”
It is sort of ridiculous, they were tied to jihadist groups, and God knows, al-Qaeda, in terms of Osama bin Laden.
Osama bin Laden doesn’t have much to do with what we’re talking about.
These are independently, more or less, you can call them, fanatical jihadists.
Given support covertly, the goal being they would be potential enemies of Hezbollah
So, the goal — part of the goal in Lebanon, part of the way this policy played out, was, with Saudi help, Prince Bandar.
We remember Prince Bandar, the Saudi prince, as a major player in Iran-Contra and also in the American effort two decades ago.
If you remember, we supported Osama bin Laden and other jihadists in Afghanistan against the Russians, and that didn’t work out so well.
Well, we run right back to the well again, and we began supporting some of these jihadist groups, and particularly — in the article, I did name Fatah al-Islam.
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The idea was to provide them with some arms and some money and some basic equipment.
These are small units, a couple hundred people.
There were three or four around the country given the same help covertly, the goal being they would be potential enemies of Hezbollah in case of warfare.
In case Nasrallah decided to do something physical, get kinetic, in Lebanon, the Sunni Siniora government would have some very tough guys on its side, period.
That’s the policy.
JUAN GONZALEZ:
Well, Sy Hersh, if that is true, then what has led to the current fighting now? If the Lebanese government had been backing the group, why is it now attacking it?
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, first of all, the Lebanese army is very distinct.
Let me begin by saying nobody really knows anything right now.
I mean one of the things about crises is you learn that you really get to play much later.
But based on common sense and what I’m reading, the Lebanese army has maintained an amazing sort of neutrality, which is surprising.
The army has not been a pawn of the Siniora government.
As you know, the American government — the American position right now — there’s a stand-off politically.
You cannot discuss what’s going on without discussing the overall politics.
There’s a stand-off politically right now, a very serious one, in Lebanon.
The government is polarized.
The government in power really has no legal basis to make any changes in cabinet positions, etc., because it’s not a constitutional government, because Hezbollah, which had five members of the parliament — five members of the cabinet and a dozen or so members in the parliament, Hezbollah pulled out months ago.
And there were street protests, protests against Siniora.
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And right now, you have Hezbollah in league with a Christian leader named Aoun, a former chief of staff for the army.
Aoun and Nasrallah are in an amazing partnership against the Siniora government.
And where this breaks down and who’s going to win this stand-off — it’s been going on since last December — isn’t clear.
America clearly supports Siniora.
But there’s a big brutal fight going.
And the Lebanese army stayed out of it and was pretty much, very much, independent, in the sense that when there were street demonstrations, they did not beat up on the Nasrallah people.
They were very impartial.
Palestinians — you know, rational people don’t like being mistreated
So I think the story that we have is that there was a crime, and they were chasing people into one of the Palestinian camps, which are always hotbeds.
God knows the Palestinians are the end of the stick, not only for the West, but also for the Arab world.
Nobody pays much attention to them and those places.
I’ve been to Tripoli and been into the camps, and they are seething, as they should be.
You know, rational people don’t like being mistreated.
So what seems to me we have is just a series — the word you could use is “unintended consequences.”
I don’t think anybody in the Siniora government anticipated that the people they were covertly supporting to some degree — I got an email the other day, and I have not checked this out, from somebody who was in the community, in the intelligence community and still consults with the community, he says:
“Why don’t we ask more about the American arms that the fighters of Fatah al-Islam are brandishing?”
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I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I did get that email.
And so, that could be true.
Both Saudi money and American money, not directly, but indirectly, was fed into these groups.
The White House is putting it out hot and heavy as part of the anti-Syria campaign, but it’s not flying
And what is the laugh riot and the reason I’m actually talking to you guys about this — I usually don’t like to do interviews unless I have a story in The New Yorker — the reason I’m talking about it is because the American government keeps on putting out this story that Syria is behind the Fatah group, which is just beyond belief.
There’s no way — it may be possible, but the chances of it are very slight, simply because Syria is a very big supporter, obviously, of Nasrallah.
Bashar al-Assad has told me that he’s in awe of Nasrallah, that he worships at his feet and has great respect for him.
The idea that the Syrians would be sponsoring Sunni jihadist groups whose sole mission are to kill the apostates — that is, anybody who doesn’t support their view, the Wahhabi or Salafist view of Sunni religion — that includes the Shia — anybody who doesn’t believe — support these guys’ religions are apostates and are killable, that’s basically one of the crazy aspects of all this, and it’s just inconceivable.
Nothing can be ruled out, but that doesn’t make much case, and I noticed that in the papers today there’s fewer and fewer references to this.
The newspapers in America are beginning to wise up, that this can’t be — this isn’t very logical.
The White House is putting it out hot and heavy as part of the anti-Syria campaign, but it’s not flying, because it doesn’t make sense.
So there we are.
It’s another mess.
Look, clearly this president is deeply involved in this, too, but what I hear from my people, of course, the players — it’s always Cheney, Cheney.
You might think that one of the reasons — I think I wrote about this in The New Yorker — one of the things that the Saudi Bandar had promised us was that we can control the jihadists.
We can control them, he assured us.
Don’t worry about getting in bed with these bad guys, because, as we remember, the same kind of assurances were given to us in the late 1980s, when we supported, as I said, bin Laden and others in the war against Russia, the Mujahideen war, and that, of course, bit us on the ass.
And this is, too.
So there we are.
AMY GOODMAN: Seymour Hersh, what about the role of Vice President Dick Cheney, the Deputy National Security Advisor Elliott Abrams?
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, any time you have violent anti-Iran policy and anti-Shia policy, you have to start looking there.
Look, clearly this president is deeply involved in this, too, but what I hear from my people, of course, the players — it’s always Cheney, Cheney.
Cheney meets with Bush at least once a week.
They have a lunch.
They usually have a scheduled lunch.
And out of that comes a lot of big decisions.
We don’t know what’s ever said at that meeting.
And this is — talk about being opaque, this is a government that is so hidden from us.
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So I can tell you that the thing that’s amazing about this government, the thing that’s really spectacular, is even now how they can get their way mostly with a lot of the American press.
They made a decision that because of the totally dwindling support for the war in Iraq, we go back to the al-Qaeda card, and we start talking about al-Qaeda
For example, I do know — and, you know, you have to take it on face value — if you’ve been reading me for a long time, you know a lot of the things I write are true or come out to be more or less true — I do know that within the last month, maybe four, four-and-a-half weeks ago, they made a decision that because of the totally dwindling support for the war in Iraq, we go back to the al-Qaeda card, and we start talking about al-Qaeda.
And the next thing you know, right after that, Bush went to the Southern Command — this was a month ago — and talked, mentioned al-Qaeda twenty-seven times in his speech.
He did so just the other day — al-Qaeda this, al-Qaeda that
He did so just the other day this week — al-Qaeda this, al-Qaeda that.
All of a sudden, the poor Iraqi Sunnis, I mean, they can’t do anything without al-Qaeda.
It’s only al-Qaeda that’s dropping the bombs and causing mayhem.
It’s not the Sunni and Shia insurgents or militias.
And this policy just gets picked up, although there’s absolutely no empirical basis.
Most of the pros will tell you the foreign fighters are a couple percent, and then they’re sort of leaderless in the sense that there’s no overall direction of the various foreign fighters.
You could call them al-Qaeda.
You can also call them jihadists and Salafists that want to die fighting the Americans or the occupiers in Iraq and they come across the border.
Whether this is — there’s no attempt to suggest there’s any significant coordination of these groups by bin Laden or anybody else, and the press just goes gaga.
And so, they went gaga a little bit over the Syrian connection to the activities in Tripoli.
It’s just amazing to me, you guys. |
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California Man Revealed as al Qaeda Leader
July 07, 2006
For the first time, a former Orange County, Calif. teenage rock music fan has revealed his role as a top al Qaeda leader.
Adam Gadahn, who disappeared from California seven years ago, appeared unmasked on an al Qaeda tape made public on the internet today.
As previously reported by ABC News, the FBI had concluded that the masked man was Gadahn based on voice analysis of previous al Qaeda tapes. On today's tape, Gadahn is bearded, wearing a turban.
He denounces U.S. soldiers in Iraq and their alleged murder and rapes of Iraqi citizens.
"Who are the real terrorists?" Gadahn asks.
When referring to the alleged atrocities committed by U.S. Marines in Iraq, Gadahn also says, "It's hard to imagine that any compassionate person could see pictures... and not want to go on a shooting spree at the Marines' housing facilities at Camp Pendleton."
Camp Pendleton is located just south of where Gadahn grew up in California.
There was no immediate response from Gadahn's family, which still lives in California.
They had previously denied he was the masked figure on al Qaeda tapes. 
Copyright © 2005 ABCNEWS Internet Ventures. |
Mossad Agent Pearlman Releases Phony "Al-Qaeda Tape"
While President Bush authorizes the CIA to bankroll and arm the real Al-Qaeda in Iran
Paul Joseph Watson/Prison Planet.com Wednesday, May 30, 2007 Adam Pearlman, the Jewish Mossad agent who once wrote stinging essays condemning Muslims as "bloodthirsty terrorists", has once again popped up as an "Al-Qaeda spokesman" to frighten the dwindling number of Americans who still believe Al-Qaeda exists outside of U.S. intelligence circles.
"An American member of al-Qaida warned President Bush on Tuesday to end U.S. involvement in all Muslim lands or face an attack worse than the Sept. 11 suicide assault, according to a new videotape."
"Wearing a white robe and a turban, Adam Yehiye Gadahn, who also goes by the name Azzam al-Amriki, said al-Qaida would not negotiate on its demands," reports the Associated Press.
Who is the mysterious Adam Yehiye Gadahn?
The FBI lists Gadahn's aliases as Abu Suhayb Al-Amriki, Abu Suhayb, Yihya Majadin Adams, Adam Pearlman, and Yayah.
Adam Pearlman is his real name and his grandfather is none other than the late Carl K. Pearlman; a prominent Jewish urologist in Orange County.
Carl was also a member of the board of directors of the Anti-Defamation League, which was caught spying on Americans for Israel in 1993.
WhatReallyHappened.com
Mike Rivero has the scoop at WhatReallyHappened.com .
Israel's Mossad intelligence agency was caught in 2002 creating a phony Al-Qaeda group to justify attacks on Palestinians.
Pearlman has a knack of releasing his tapes at the most politically opportune time for Bush, having first burst onto the scene shortly before the 2004 presidential election and then again right after Katrina when the President's approval rating was tanking fast.
Even more mainstream publications, like the Los Angeles City Beat, have dismissed Pearlman before as nothing more than "cartoonish propaganda."
Pearlman had a hippy upbringing, a brief but intense flirtation with death metal and before a sudden transformation, once referred to Muslims as “bloodthirsty, barbaric terrorists.”
Pearlman was a hardcore Jewish Zionist and wrote essays and screeds bashing the Muslim faith.
He even got into fights at mosques and beat up Muslim worshippers.
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Pearlman's personal history and the highly suspicious nature in which he suddenly professed his conversion to Islam in a single Internet posting and later appeared on the scene as a spokesman for "Al-Qaeda" are all the ingredients needed to draw the conclusion that Pearlman is working as a double agent and most likely for Mossad.
The Pearlman tape was once again obtained by the IntelCenter group, a U.S. government contractor, and it's head Ben Venzke has given the tape credence in media interviews concerning the story.
In our previous groundbreaking expose, we unveiled the ties between Intelcenter, a group that regularly 'obtains' Al-Qaeda tapes and the Pentagon.
Intelcenter is an offshoot of IDEFENSE, which was staffed by a senior military psy-op intelligence officer Jim Melnick, who has worked directly for Donald Rumsfeld.
Intelcenter were behind the October 2006 release of the "laughing hijackers" tape that showed Mohammad Atta and Ziad Jarrah allegedly attending a 2000 Al-Qaeda meeting and reading their last will and testament.
Segments of the video that were interspersed with footage of the "laughing hijackers," Jarrah and Atta, showing Bin Laden giving a speech to an audience in Afghanistan on January 8 2000, were culled from what terror experts described as surveillance footage taken by a "security agency."
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News reports at the time contained the admission that the U.S. government had been in possession of the footage since 2002, while others said it was found when the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001.
Yet it was still bizarrely reported that the tape, bearing all the hallmarks of having been filmed and edited by undercover US intelligence and having admittedly been in US possession for five years, was released over the weekend of September 31/October 1 by Al-Qaeda.
The video also contained segments that were first broadcast in a British documentary called The Road to Guantanamo, which was originally aired in March 2006.
The context of the corresponding scene in the dramatized documentary featured U.S. interrogators attempting to coerce Gitmo detainees into confessing Al-Qaeda membership by showing them fake videos where their likeness had been computer generated to appear as if they were in attendance during Bin Laden's January 8 2000 speech.
Monster in the closet
The monster in the closet is once again being waved in front of the American people's faces in order to quell bubbling national resentment about the ongoing carnage in Iraq and the fact that May was the deadliest month in terms of our boys returning home in flag-draped caskets.
Meanwhile, President Bush has authorized the CIA to bankroll and arm Jundullah, a Sunni Al-Qaeda organization, to attack Iran in order to destabilize Ahmadinejad's government.
While Bush grandstands in his Rose Garden speech about how Al-Qaeda wants to kill our children and as Mossad agent Pearlman rants on a video tape about a new 9/11, the only real Al-Qaeda are being equipped, funded and trained by our own government to kill innocent civilians in the Middle East in order to pave the way for the next chapter of Neo-Con blood-letting.
Crude propaganda tapes foisted on us at home in an effort to hoodwink us into supporting it all.
PRISON PLANET.com Copyright © 2002-2006 Alex Jones All rights reserved. |
| Palestine |
| Lebanon |
| Lebanon An 18-month-old Lebanese child lies dead 17 July on a hospital bed in Saida eight hours after being injured yesterday in an Israeli air attack in Tyre.
War crimes in Lebanon.
US Israel aircraft and missiles continued to attack south, east and northern Lebanon.
The Israel military, including weapons: tanks, missiles, warplanes, artillery, shells, are all funded by the US taxpayer.
Photo: http://uruknet.info/AFP |
Lebanon Lebanese man that was injured and burned by Israeli attacks on Tyre, lies in a hospital in south Lebanon July 15, 2006.
War crimes in Lebanon.
US Israel aircraft and missiles continued to attack south, east and northern Lebanon.
The Israel military, including weapons: tanks, missiles, warplanes, artillery, shells, are all funded by the US taxpayer.
Photo: http://uruknet.info/AFP |
Lebanon The corpse of a dead man lies admist the rubble from devastating Israeli air strikes in Tyre, south Lebanon, 16 July, 2006.
War crimes in Lebanon.
US Israel aircraft and missiles continued to attack south, east and northern Lebanon.
The Israel military, including weapons: tanks, missiles, warplanes, artillery, shells, are all funded by the US taxpayer.
Photo: http://uruknet.info/AFP |
Lebanon The corpse of a Lebanese civilian lies amidst the rubble following a devastating Israeli air strike in Tyre, south Lebanon, 16 July.
War crimes in Lebanon.
US Israel aircraft and missiles continued to attack south, east and northern Lebanon.
The Israel military, including weapons: tanks, missiles, warplanes, artillery, shells, are all funded by the US taxpayer.
Photo: http://uruknet.info/ |
Lebanon A civil defense member transports the corpse of a Lebanese civilian killed in an Israeli air raid that targeted the Rmeyleh bridge near Saida 17 July, 2006.
War crimes in Lebanon.
US Israel aircraft and missiles continued to attack south, east and northern Lebanon.
The Israel military, including weapons: tanks, missiles, warplanes, artillery, shells, are all funded by the US taxpayer.
Photo: http://uruknet.info/AFP |
Lebanon Civil defence rescuers carry the body of a woman away from a civilian car that was struck by an Israeli warplane missile — Rmayleih 17 July, 2006.
War crimes in Lebanon.
US Israel aircraft and missiles continued to attack south, east and northern Lebanon.
The Israel military, including weapons: tanks, missiles, warplanes, artillery, shells, are all funded by the US taxpayer.
Photo: http://uruknet.info/AFP |
Lebanon Look at his face — A 7-year-old Lebanese boy fights for his life on a hospital bed in Saida 17 July 2006 after being injured in an Israeli air raid.
War crimes in Lebanon.
US Israel aircraft and missiles continued to attack south, east and northern Lebanon.
The Israel military, including weapons: tanks, missiles, warplanes, artillery, shells, are all funded by the US taxpayer.
Photo: http://uruknet.info/AFP |
Lebanon — Marwahin A badly charred and mutilated body lies on the ground after an Israeli missile hit a van carrying passengers on a road in southern Lebanon, July 15, 2006.
War crimes in Lebanon.
US Israel aircraft and missiles continued to attack south, east and northern Lebanon.
The Israel military, including weapons: tanks, missiles, warplanes, artillery, shells, are all funded by the US taxpayer.
Photo: http://uruknet.info/Reuters |
Lebanon — Marwahin A body of a man from the southern village of Marwahin, who was killed along with 17 others near the village of Shamaa.
War crimes in Lebanon.
US Israel aircraft and missiles continued to attack south, east and northern Lebanon.
The Israel military, including weapons: tanks, missiles, warplanes, artillery, shells, are all funded by the US taxpayer.
Photo: http://uruknet.info/ |
Lebanon A young girl — Teir Hafra, July 15, 2006
War crimes in Lebanon.
US Israel aircraft and missiles continued to attack south, east and northern Lebanon.
The Israel military, including weapons: tanks, missiles, warplanes, artillery, shells, are all funded by the US taxpayer.
Photo: http://uruknet.info/ |
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| Airline stock puts
trenchant quote:
"Between August 26 and September 11, 2001, a group of speculators, identified by the American Securities and Exchange Commission as Israeli citizens, sold "short" a list of 38 stocks that could reasonably be expected to fall in value as a result of the pending attacks.
These speculators operated out of the Toronto, Canada and Frankfurt, Germany, stock exchanges and their profits were specifically stated to be "in the millions of dollars."
SEC SECRET PROBE OF STOCK DEALINGS BEFORE 9/11
Between August 26 and September 11, 2001, a group of speculators, identified by the American Securities and Exchange Commission as Israeli citizens, sold "short" a list of 38 stocks that could reasonably be expected to fall in value as a result of the pending attacks.
These speculators operated out of the Toronto, Canada and Frankfurt, Germany, stock exchanges and their profits were specifically stated to be "in the millions of dollars."
Short selling of stocks involves the opportunity to gain large profits by passing shares to a friendly third party, then buying them back when the price falls.
Historically, if this precedes a traumatic event, it is an indication of foreknowledge.
It is widely known that the CIA uses the Promis software to routinely monitor stock trades as a possible warning sign of a terrorist attack or suspicious economic behavior.
A week after the Sept.11 attacks, the London Times reported that the CIA had asked regulators for the Financial Services Authority in London to investigate the suspicious sales of millions of shares of stock just prior to the terrorist acts.
It was hoped the business paper trail might lead to the terrorists.
Investigators from numerous government agencies are part of a clandestine but official effort to resolve the market manipulations.
There has been a great deal of talk about insider trading of American stocks by certain Israeli groups both in Canada and Germany between August 26 and the Sept.11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Lynne Howard, a spokeswoman for the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE), stated that information about who made the trades was available immediately.
"We would have been aware of any unusual activity right away. It would have been triggered by any unusual volume. There is an automated system called 'blue sheeting,' or the CBOE Market Surveillance System, that everyone in the business knows about. It provides information on the trades - the name and even the Social Security number on an account - and these surveillance systems are set up specifically to look into insider trading. The system would look at the volume, and then a real person would take over and review it, going back in time and looking at other unusual activity."
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Howard continued, "The system is so smart that even if there is a news event that triggers a market event it can go back in time, and even the parameters can be changed depending on what is being looked at. It's a very clever system and it is instantaneous. Even with the system, though, we have very experienced and savvy staff in our market-regulations area who are always looking for things that might be unusual. They're trained to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Even if it's offshore, it might take a little longer, but all offshore accounts have to go through U.S. member firms - members of the CBOE - and it is easily and quickly identifiable who made the trades. The member firm who made the trades has to have identifiable information about the client under the 'Know Your Customer' regulations (and we share all information with the Securities and Exchange Commission.)"
Given all of this, at a minimum the CBOE and government regulators who are conducting the secret investigations have known for some time who made the options puts on a total of 38 stocks that might reasonably be anticipated to have a sharp drop in value because of an attack similar to the 9/11 episode.
The silence from the investigating camps could mean several things: Either terrorists are responsible for the puts on the listed stocks or others besides terrorists had foreknowledge of the attack and used this knowledge to reap a nice financial harvest from the tragedy.
Adam Hamilton of Zeal LLC, a North Dakota-based private consulting company that publishes research on markets worldwide, stated that "I heard that $22 million in profits was made on these put options..."
Federal investigators are continuing to be so closed-mouthed about these stock trades, and it is clear that a much wider net has been cast, apparently looking for bigger international fish involved in dubious financial activity relating to the 9/11 attacks on the world stock markets.
Just a month after the attacks the SEC sent out a list of stocks to various securities firms around the world looking for information.
The list includes stocks of American, United, Continental, Northwest, Southwest and US Airways airlines, as well as Martin, Boeing, Lockheed Martin Corp., AIG, American Express Corp, American International Group, AMR Corporation, Axa SA, Bank of America Corp, Bank of New York Corp, Bank One Corp, Cigna Group, CNA Financial, Carnival Corp, Chubb Group, John Hancock Financial Services, Hercules Inc, L-3 Communications Holdings, Inc., LTV Corporation, Marsh & McLennan Cos. Inc., MetLife, Progressive Corp., General Motors, Raytheon, W.R. Grace, Royal Caribbean Cruises, Ltd., Lone Star Technologies, American Express, the Citigroup Inc.,Royal & Sun Alliance, Lehman Brothers Holdings, Inc., Vornado Reality Trust, Morgan Stanley, Dean Witter & Co., XL Capital Ltd., and Bear Stearns.
The Times said market regulators in Germany, Japan and the US all had received information concerning the short selling of insurance, airlines and arms companies stock, all of which fell sharply in the wake of the attacks.
City of London broker and analyst Richard Crossley noted that someone sold shares in unusually large quantities beginning three weeks before the assault on the WTC and Pentagon.
He said he took this as evidence that someone had insider foreknowledge of the attacks.
"What is more awful than he should aim a stiletto blow at the heart of Western financial markets?" he added. "But to profit from it? Words fail me."
The US Government also admitted it was investigating short selling, which evinced a compellingly strong foreknowledge of the coming Arab attack.
There was unusually heavy trading in airline and insurance stocks several days before Sept.11, which essentially bet on a drop in the worth of the stocks.
It was reported by the Interdisciplinary Center, a counter-terrorism think tank involving former Israeli intelligence officers, that insiders made nearly $16 million profit by short selling shares in American and United Airlines, the two airlines that suffered hijacking, and the investment firm of Morgan Stanley, which occupied 22 floors of the WTC.
Apparently none of the suspicious transactions could be traced to bin Laden because this news item quietly dropped from sight, leaving many people wondering if it tracked back to American firms or intelligence agencies.
Most of these transactions were handled primarily by Deutsche Bank-A.B.Brown, a firm which until 1998 was chaired by A. B."Buzzy" Krongard, who later became executive director of the CIA.
More serious was an article in the Sept. 28, 2001 edition of the Washington Post stating that officials with the instant messaging firm of Odigo in New York confirmed that two employees in Israel received text messages warning of an attack on the WTC two hours before the planes crashed into the buildings!
The firm's vice president of sales and marketing, Alex Diamandis said it was possible that the warning was sent to other Odigo members, but they had not received any reports of such.
The day after, the Jerusalem Post claimed two Israelis died on the hijacked airplanes and that 4,000 were missing at the WTC.
A week later, a Beirut television station reported that 4,000 Israeli employees of the WTC were absent the day of the attack.
This information spread across the Internet but was quickly branded a hoax.
On Sept. 19, the Washington Post reported about 113 Israelis were missing at the WTC and the next day, President Bush noted more than 130 Israelis were victims.
Finally, on Sept. 22, the New York Times stated "There were, in fact, only three Israelis who had been confirmed as dead: two on the planes and another who had been visiting the towers on business and who was identified and buried."
Investigators from numerous government agencies are part of a clandestine but official effort to resolve the market manipulations There has been a great deal of talk about the insider trading of American stocks by certain Israeli groups both in Canada and Germany between August 26 and the Sept.11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Government investigators have maintained a diplomatic silence about a Department of Justice (DOJ) probe of possible profiteering by interested parties with advance knowledge of the attack.
On Sept. 6, 2001, the Thursday before the tragedy, 2,075 put options were made on United Airlines and on Sept. 10, the day before the attacks, 2,282 put options were recorded for American Airlines.
Given the prices at the time, this could have yielded speculators between $2 million and $4 million in profit.
The matter still is under investigation and none of the government investigating bodies - including the FBI, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and DOJ - are speaking to reporters about insider trading.
Even so, suspicion of insider trading to profit from the Sept. 11 attacks is not limited to U.S. regulators.
Investigations were initiated in a number of places including Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Luxembourg, Hong Kong, Switzerland and Spain.
As in the United States, all are treating these inquiries as if they were state secrets.
Mossad emblem attempting to co-opt Jewish heritage: "by way of deception"
Sharon's screaming match with Shimon Peres
On October 4, 2001, a report aired on Col Yisrael radio of a screaming match between Ariel Sharon and Foreign Minister (and former Prime Minister) Shimon Peres over the perceived decline of Israeli world status.
"Don't worry about American pressure on Israel," Sharon reportedly yelled at Peres. "We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it."
Peres wasn't sure how long that would prove to be true.
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There is no doubt that Mossad did have pretty detailed knowledge of a forthcoming attack on the US.
The London Telegraph reported on Sept. 17 that Mossad officials actually flew to Washington in August to try to personally plead with the CIA and FBI to deal with a cell of 200 terrorists planning a major operation — but both agencies refused to listen.
The Mossad officials specifically warned that "large-scale terrorist attacks on highly visible targets on the American mainland were imminent."
While offering no specific target information, they pointed to Iraq and Osama bin Laden.
A US official told the Telegraph that it was "quite credible" that the CIA did not heed the Mossad warning. "It has a history of being over-cautious about Israeli information." But he added that "if this is true, then the refusal to take it seriously will mean heads will roll."
But of course they didn't.
CIA "over-caution" stems from the Mossad too often crying wolf in order to get the US to do its dirty work for them.It would seem self-defeating for Mossad to tell the CIA in advance about such an attack if Mossad was itself involved, but Mossad could have been playing an extremely clever card, knowing its warning would be ignored, and thus covering its own butt by issuing the warning anyway.
Sometimes the best way to keep a secret is to "hide" it right out in the open, where no one would think to look.
There is always the possibility the CIA and Mossad may have even worked together to smooth the way for the New York attack, without having a direct hand in it.
After all, the CIA supplied the explosives used in the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993.
That is confirmed by sworn court testimony from the CIA itself; its agents "didn't really believe the terrorist cell it had infiltrated would actually use the explosives."
But they did, and so the CIA has to share the blame for 1,000 injuries and six deaths.
Jim Moore, from the book "Big Oil — Big War: The true story of September 11, 2001 and the 'War on Terror'
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ESTIMATED NUCLEAR WARHEADS, STRATEGIC AND TACTICAL The United States has conducted 1,127 nuclear and thermonuclear tests — 217 in the atmosphere.
The Soviet Union/ Russia conducted 969 tests — 219 in the atmosphere.
France, 210 tests, 50 in the atmosphere.
The United Kingdom, 45 tests — 21 in the atmosphere.
China, 45 tests — 23 in the atmosphere.
India and Pakistan — 13 tests underground.
Israel — possible 1 test atmosphere South Africa 1979.
North Korea — 1 test underground, October 2006.
“The United states had drawn up a battle plan for the potential use of nuclear weapons in Iraq and the United States has been involved in planning potential nuclear use scenarios for Iran.”“The United States is now involved in a massive program to overhaul its nuclear arsenal. In fact they're working to replace every nuclear warhead and all of the existing delivery systems in the arsenal to ensure prompt precision global strike capabilities.”Jackie Cabasso — Western States Legal Foundation |
Western Elite militarismWestern Elite Terror StatesWestern Elite War Crimes
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We are change 9/11 lies have sustained the ruling terrorism-threat paradigm The “why” is obvious: To justify an unjust war to serve corporate interests and greed |
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9.11 Truth New York City Decades long history of political disruption the US has been responsible for 9/11 is part of a long series of criminal, imperialist conquests Another major highlight was surprise appearance of Cynthia McKinney |
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Architects and Engineers for 9/11 truth A solid convincing case which architects & engineers will readily see: that the 3 WTC high-rise buildings were destroyed by both classic and novel forms of controlled demolition These buildings were professionally demolished with explosives |
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Danish scientist Niels Harrit on nano-thermite in the WTC dust
— Click Here
Niels Harrit and 8 other scientists found nano-thermite in the dust from the World Trade Center.
Niels Harrit, you and eight other researchers conclude in this article that it was nano-thermite that caused these buildings to collapse. |
ITALIAN SAYS 9-11 SOLVED
It’s common knowledge, he reveals
CIA — Mossad behind terror attacks By the Staff of American Free Press
Former Italian President Francesco Cossiga, who revealed the existence of Operation Gladio, has told Italy’s oldest and most widely read newspaper that the 9-11 terrorist attacks were run by the CIA and Mossad, and that this was common knowledge among global intelligence agencies.
In what translates awkwardly into English, Cossiga told the newspaper Corriere della Sera:
“All the [intelligence services] of America and Europe… know well that the disastrous attack has been planned and realized from the Mossad, with the aid of the Zionist world in order to put under accusation the Arabic countries and in order to induce the western powers to take part … in Iraq [and] Afghanistan.”
Cossiga was elected president of the Italian Senate in July 1983 before winning a landslide election to become president of the country in 1985, and he remained until 1992.
Cossiga’s tendency to be outspoken upset the Italian political establishment, and he was forced to resign after revealing the existence of, and his part in setting up, Operation Gladio.
This was a rogue intelligence network under NATO auspices that carried out bombings across Europe in the 1960s, 1970s and ’80s.
Gladio’s specialty was to carry out what they termed 'false flag' operations — terror attacks that were blamed on their domestic and geopolitical opposition.
In March 2001, Gladio agent Vincenzo Vinciguerra stated, in sworn testimony:
“You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game.
The reason was quite simple: to force … the public to turn to the state to ask for greater security.”
Cossiga first expressed his doubts about 9-11 in 2001, and is quoted by 9-11 researcher Webster Tarpley saying:
“The mastermind of the attack must have been a sophisticated mind, provided with ample means not only to recruit fanatic kamikazes, but also highly specialized personnel.
I add one thing: it could not be accomplished without infiltrations in the radar and flight security personnel.”
Coming from a widely respected former head of state, Cossiga’s assertion that the 9-11 attacks were an inside job and that this is common knowledge among global intelligence agencies is illuminating.
It is one more eye-opening confirmation that has not been mentioned by America’s propaganda machine in print or on TV.
Nevertheless, because of his experience and status in the world, Cossiga cannot be discounted as a crackpot.
Free to redistribute as long as credit given to American Free Press |
Photo: Bentham-Open.org |
Bentham-Open.org Download pdf — 10mg document including images — Right click Save As |
The secret story of Mossad and the World Trade Center attack The Odigo Warning: Israeli employees get e-mail warnings of 9-11 SEC Secret Probe Of Stock Dealings Before 9/11 |
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Truth Action LA Branch We are in the midst of a mass awakening 9/11 is the foundational myth upon which the entire agenda has been triggered for our generation |
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Scholars for 9/11 Truth & Justice High Velocity Bursts of Debris From Point-Like Sources in the WTC Towers Why Did the World’s Most Advanced Electronics Warfare Plane Circle Over The White House on 9/11? |
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Your life, your children's lives — Will you live or die?Decided by small group of elite.Pure evil It doesn't get any clearer than this
Published on Friday, March 2, 2007 by the Los Angeles Times
US to Develop New Hydrogen Bomb
by Ralph Vartabedian
The Energy Department will announce today a contract to develop the nation's first new hydrogen bomb in two decades, involving a collaboration between three national weapons laboratories, The Times has learned.
The new bomb will include design features from all three labs, though Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the Bay Area appears to have taken the lead position in the project. The Los Alamos and Sandia labs in New Mexico will also be part of the project.
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Hiroshima, Nagasaki — George Weller report |
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Why are the West's elites trying to start a nuclear war?
Because you pay for it |
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BBC — Thursday, 6 September 2007
UK jets 'chase Russian bombers'
The UK's Royal Air Force has launched fighter jets to intercept eight Russian military planes flying in airspace patrolled by Nato, UK officials say.
Four RAF F3 Tornado aircraft were scrambled in response to the Russian action, the UK's defence ministry said.
The Russian planes - said to be long-range bombers - had earlier been followed by Norwegian F16 jets.
Russia recently revived a Cold War-era practice of flying bombers on long-range patrols.
A Norwegian officer, Lt Col John Inge Oegland, told the BBC the Russian Tupolev Tu-95 Bear bombers flew in international airspace from the Barents Sea to the Atlantic, before turning back.
Two Norwegian F-16s shadowed them on Thursday morning and another two went up later, he said.
There have been several similar incidents in recent months, Lt-Col Oegland added.
"Norway is following the increased Russian activity in the far north with interest," he told the BBC News website.
He said the Russian flights were not causing alarm in Norway. "Our systems are adequate," he said, when asked whether Norway was bolstering its security in the area. |
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'Oh! You don't believe the 9-11 official version,' they say.
'You mean where they want you to accept the buildings were not blown up from below.
'Plane fuel! Substance never burns higher then a gas stove! That it caused the inner core steel to melt!
'Steel melting!
'Concrete vaporizing!
'
'No! I don't believe that conspiracy theory.
'Cheney! Bush! Rudy Giuliani! HA! HA!
'Tower 7 that never had a plane hit — just came tumbling down!
'You believe that, eh!
'Ever think it had to be blown up because the plane scheduled to fly into it was off getting shot down.
'Thermite in Tower 7's walls, you see — incriminating evidence — impossible to get out without people watching!
Had to be blown up!
'Next you'll be saying Obama is not a Wall Street Illuminati banker stooge?
'Take your pick: The partner in a comedy team who feeds lines to the other comedians.
'Him who allows himself to be used.
'Oh! I can't really blame you, Television it turns minds to pulp.
'Turn off the television. It's the only way.'
'Turn off the television?'
'Get rid of it really. I mean what else is there to do!'
'Get rid of the television?'
'Don't forget all radio garbage is propaganda, even the songs.
'Then those five minute propaganda hits they send you every hour!
'The ones they refer to as News
'Get rid of all the propaganda from your brain, the only way to do it.'
'Stop being hooked on those Hollywood movies — even those that make you think they are making you think'
'All paid performers to make your brain dead.
'You turn the brainwashing off, you'll begin to become yourself.
'It really is the only way!'
'Oh!'
Kewe — TheWE.biz
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9/11
By all accounts, the unprecedented events of September 11th, 2001 changed the way our country functions, and in turn, the world.
It is therefore critical that conscientious Americans, as well as people around the globe, understand these events in detail.
Unfortunately the official reports, including The 9/11 Commission Report and the NIST WTC Report, written by those working under the direction of the Bush Administration, have been proven to be elaborate cover-ups.
Film: 9/11 Revisited
September 11th Revisited is perhaps the most riveting film ever made about the destruction of the World Trade Center.
This is a powerful documentary which features eyewitness accounts and archived news footage that was shot on September 11, 2001 but never replayed on television.
Featuring interviews with eyewitnesses & firefighters, along with expert analysis by Professor Steven E. Jones, Professor David Ray Griffin, MIT Engineer Jeffrey King, and Professor James H. Fetzer.
This film provides stunning evidence that explosives were used in the complete demolition of the WTC Twin Towers and WTC Building 7.
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For Film: 9/11 Revisited
— Click Here
Film: 9/11 Press for Truth
An excellent documentary about the families of the victims of 9/11 and their fight to uncover and expose the truth about what happened that day.
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For Film: 9/11 Press for Truth
— Click Here
Film: 9/11 Mysteries
90 minutes of pure demolition evidence and analysis, laced with staggering witness testimonials.
Moving from “the myth” through “the analysis” and into “the players,” careful deconstruction of the official story set right alongside clean, clear science.
The 9/11 picture is not one of politics or nationalism or loyalty, but one of strict and simple physics. How do you get a 10-second 110-story pancake collapse?
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Image: Natasha Mayers |
| It's kind of a fun gameYou see the aim of those inner forces who guide the Elite —
For them the real agenda is depopulation
To kill off you your children your grandchildren It is to have fun watching our stupidity as we allow the destruction of our planet — but most haven't figured this out yet! If we stop them with the nuclear and biological weapons then it's the 400+ MPH, KPH wind the increase in UVB, UVC, UVA rays due to loss of stratospheric ozone. It's the climate! It's the reduction and elimination of food coming from all levels of cunning World Elite — tools and servants of Lucifer |
Gustave Doré's illustration for Paradise Lost by John Milton |
The Dark Side Initiates — Click here Dark path initiates depend on the denial The five-percent manipulator class is composed of those on the dark path |
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Agent Orange Dioxin — Vietnam Cleft palate, Canoe footed, Clawed fingers continue in births I didn't know what it was then, but it was white |
UVC in the 10 to 290 nanometer band UVB, 290 to 320 nanometers UVA, 320 to 400 nanometers |
Soot's effect on ice melt and glaciers Washington State's Glaciers are Melting |
Remnants of knowledge would be retained with those on higher ground. A few people here, a few there. Translations of discussions with The WE |
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Published on Monday, July 4, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
by Sheldon Drobny Justice O'Connor's decision in Bush v. Gore led to the current Bush administration's execution of war crimes and atrocities in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places in the Middle East that are as egregious as those committed by the Third Reich and other evil governments in human history.
The lesson is clear.
Those people who may be honorable and distinguished in their chosen profession should always make decisions based upon good rather than evil no matter where their nominal allegiances may rest.
Justice O'Connor was quoted to have said something to the affect that she abhorred the thought of Bush losing the 2000 election to Gore.
She was known to have wanted to retire after the 2000 election for same reason she is now retiring.
She wanted to spend more time with her sick husband.
Unfortunately, she tarnished her distinguished career with the deciding vote in Bush v. Gore by going along with the partisan majority of the Court to interfere with a democratic election that she and the majority feared would be lost in an honest recount.
She dishonored herself and the Supreme Court by succumbing to party allegiances and not The Constitution to which she swore to uphold.
And the constitutional argument she and the majority used to justify their decision was the Equal Protection Clause.
The Equal Protection Clause was the ultimate basis for the decision, but the majority essentially admitted (what was obvious in any event) that it was not basing its conclusion on any general view of what equal protection requires.
The decision in Bush v Gore was not dictated by the law in any sense—either the law found through research, or the law as reflected in the kind of intuitive sense that comes from immersion in the legal culture.
The Equal Protection clause is generally used in matters concerning civil rights.
The majority ignored their basic conservative views supporting federalism and states' rights in order to justify their decision.
History will haunt these justices down for their utter lack of justice and the hypocrisy associated with this decision.
Sheldon Drobny is Co-founder of Air America Radio.
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The Dark Side Initiates — Click here Dark path initiates depend on the denial The five-percent manipulator class is composed of those on the dark path |
Bush v. Gore Appointment of U.S. President by the U.S. Supreme Court — Raw political clout exercised by US Supreme Court |
Unspeakable grief and horror
...and the circus of deception killing continues...
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Nanci Pelosi — U.S. House Democratic leader — Congresswoman California, 8th District
Speaking at the AIPAC agenda May 26, 2005
There are those who contend that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is all about Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. This is absolute nonsense.
In truth, the history of the conflict is not over occupation, and never has been: it is over the fundamental right of Israel to exist.
The greatest threat to Israel's right to exist, with the prospect of devastating violence, now comes from Iran.
For too long, leaders of both political parties in the United States have not done nearly enough to confront the Russians and the Chinese, who have supplied Iran as it has plowed ahead with its nuclear and missile technology....
In the words of Isaiah, we will make ourselves to Israel 'as hiding places from the winds and shelters from the tempests; as rivers of water in dry places; as shadows of a great rock in a weary land.'
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The United States will stand with Israel now and forever.
Now and forever.
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The Dark Side Initiates — Click here Dark path initiates depend on the denial The five-percent manipulator class is composed of those on the dark path |
Ahmed and Asma, story of two children dying — Lest we forget |
Atrocities committed by Israel — graphic pictures What CNN never shows you |
Israel, chemical weapons and phosphorous bombs New and unknown deadly weapons used by Israeli forces Undetectable poison-needle gun for 'clean' assassinations |
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| Kewe Archives |  kewe archives | kewe archives  | TheWE.biz |
Saddam Hussein was distrustful of al-Qaeda and viewed Islamic extremists as a threat to his regime, refusing all requests from al-Qaeda to provide material or operational support
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