Killing America's Kids and Driving Them Insane

[Harconen]

The Yemen Hidden Agenda: Behind the Al-Qaeda Scenarios, A Strategic Oil Transit Chokepoint

by F. William Engdahl
Global Research, January 5, 2010
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16786

On December 25 US authorities arrested a Nigerian named Abdulmutallab aboard a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on charges of having tried to blow up the plane with smuggled explosives. Since then reports have been broadcast from CNN, the New York Times and other sources that he was “suspected” of having been trained in Yemen for his terror mission. What the world has been subjected to since is the emergence of a new target for the US ‘War on Terror,’ namely a desolate state on the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen. A closer look at the background suggests the Pentagon and US intelligence have a hidden agenda in Yemen.

 

For some months the world has seen a steady escalation of US military involvement in Yemen, a dismally poor land adjacent to Saudi Arabia on its north, the Red Sea on its west, the Gulf of Aden on its south, opening to the Arabian Sea, overlooking another desolate land that has been in the headlines of late, Somalia. The evidence suggests that the Pentagon and US intelligence are moving to militarize a strategic chokepoint for the world’s oil flows, Bab el-Mandab, and using the Somalia piracy incident, together with claims of a new Al Qaeda threat arising from Yemen, to militarize one of the world’s most important oil transport routes. In addition, undeveloped petroleum reserves in the territory between Yemen and Saudi Arabia are reportedly among the world’s largest.

 

The 23-year-old Nigerian man charged with the failed bomb attempt, Abdulmutallab, reportedly has been talking, claiming he was sent on his mission by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), based in Yemen. This has conveniently turned the world’s attention on Yemen as a new center of the alleged Al Qaeda terror organization.

Notably, Bruce Riedel, a 30-year CIA veteran who advised President Obama on the policy leading to the Afghan troop surge, wrote in his blog of the alleged ties of the Detroit bomber to Yemen, “The attempt to destroy Northwest Airlines Flight 253 en route from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day underscores the growing ambition of Al Qaeda's Yemen franchise, which has grown from a largely Yemeni agenda to become a player in the global Islamic jihad in the last year…The weak Yemeni government of President Ali Abdallah Salih, which has never fully controlled the country and now faces a host of growing problems, will need significant American support to defeat AQAP.”[1].

Some basic Yemen geopolitics

 

Before we can say much about the latest incident, it is useful to look more closely at the Yemen situation. Here several things stand out as peculiar when stacked against Washington’s claims about a resurgent Al Qaeda organization in the Arabian Peninsula.

In early 2009 the chess pieces on the Yemeni board began to move. Tariq al-Fadhli, a former jihadist leader originally from South Yemen, broke a 15 year alliance with the Yemeni government of President Ali Abdullah Saleh and announced he was joining the broad-based opposition coalition known as the Southern Movement (SM). Al-Fadhli had been a member of the Mujahideen movement in Afghanistan in the late 1980’s. His break with the government was reported in Arab and Yemeni media in April 2009. Al-Fadhli’s break with the Yemen dictatorship gave new power to the Southern Movement (SM). He has since become a leading figure in the alliance.

Yemen itself is a synthetic amalgam created after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, when the southern Peoples’ Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY) lost its main foreign sponsor. Unification of the northern Yemen Arab Republic and the southern PDRY state led to a short-lived optimism that ended in a brief civil war in 1994, as southern army factions organized a revolt against what they saw as the corrupt crony state rule of northern President Ali Abdullah Saleh. President Saleh has held a one-man rule since 1978, first as President of North Yemen  (the Yemen Arab Republic) and since 1990 as President of the unified new Yemen. The southern army revolt failed as Saleh enlisted al-Fadhli and other Yemeni Salafists, followers of a conservative interpretation of Islam, and jihadists to fight the formerly Marxist forces of the Yemen Socialist Party in the south.

Before 1990, Washington and the Saudi Kingdom backed and supported Saleh and his policy of Islamization as a bid to contain the communist south.[2] Since then Saleh has relied on a strong Salafist-jihadi movement to retain a one-man dictatorial rule. The break with Saleh by al-Fadhli and his joining the southern opposition group with his former socialist foes marked a major setback for Saleh.

Soon after al-Fadhli joined the Southern Movement coalition, on April 28, 2009 protests in the southern Yemeni provinces of Lahj, Dalea and Hadramout intensified. There were demonstrations by tens of thousands of dismissed military personnel and civil servants demanding better pay and benefits, demonstrations that had been taking place in growing numbers since 2006. The April demonstrations included for the first time a public appearance by al-Fadhli. His appearance served to change a long moribund southern socialist movement into a broader nationalist campaign. It also galvanized President Saleh, who then called on Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Cooperation Council states for help, warning that the entire Arabian Peninsula would suffer the consequences.

Complicating the picture in what some call a failed state, in the north Saleh faces an al-Houthi Zaydi Shi’ite rebellion. On September 11, 2009, in an Al-Jazeera TV interview, Saleh accused Iraq’s Shi’ite opposition leader, Muqtada al-Sadr, and also Iran, of backing the north Yemen Shi’ite Houthist rebels in an Al-Jazeera TV interview. Yemen’s Saleh declared, “We cannot accuse the Iranian official side, but the Iranians are contacting us, saying that they are prepared for a mediation. This means that the Iranians have contacts with them [the Houthists], given that they want to mediate between the Yemeni government and them. Also, Muqtada al-Sadr in al-Najaf in Iraq is asking that he be accepted as a mediator. This means they have a link.”[3]

Yemen authorities claim they have seized caches of weapons made in Iran, while the Houthists claim to have captured Yemeni equipment with Saudi Arabian markings, accusing Sana’a  (the capital of Yemen and site of the US Embassy) of acting as a Saudi proxy. Iran has rejected claims that Iranian weapons were found in north Yemen, calling claims of support to the rebels as baseless. [4]

What about Al Qaeda?

The picture that emerges is one of a desperate US-backed dictator, Yemen’s President Saleh, increasingly losing control after two decades as despotic ruler of the unified Yemen. Economic conditions in the country took a drastic downward slide in 2008 when world oil prices collapsed. Some 70% of the state revenues derive from Yemen’s oil sales. The central government of Saleh sits in former North Yemen in Sana’a, while the oil is in former South Yemen. Yet Saleh controls the oil revenue flows. Lack of oil revenue has made Saleh’s usual option of buying off opposition groups all but impossible. 

Into this chaotic domestic picture comes the January 2009 announcement, prominently featured in select Internet websites, that Al Qaeda, the alleged global terrorist organization created by the late CIA-trained Saudi, Osama bin Laden, has opened a major new branch in Yemen for both Yemen and Saudi operations.   

Al Qaeda in Yemen released a statement through online jihadist forums Jan. 20, 2009 from the group’s leader Nasir al-Wahayshi, announcing formation of a single al Qaeda group for the Arabian Peninsula under his command. According to al-Wahayshi, the new group, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, would consist of his former Al Qaeda in Yemen, as well as members of the defunct Saudi Al Qaeda group. The press release claimed, interestingly enough, that a Saudi national, a former Guantanamo detainee (Number 372), Abu-Sayyaf al-Shihri, would serve as al-Wahayshi’s deputy.

Days later an online video from al-Wahayshi appeared under the alarming title, “We Start from Here and We Will Meet at al-Aqsa.” Al-Aqsa refers to the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem that Jews know as Temple Mount, the site of the destroyed Temple of Solomon, which Muslims call Al Haram Al Sharif. The video threatens Muslim leaders -- including Yemeni’s President Saleh, the Saudi royal family, and Egyptian President Mubarak -- and promises to take the jihad from Yemen to Israel to “liberate” Muslim holy sites and Gaza, something that would likely detonate World War III if anyone were mad enough to do it.

Also in that video, in addition to former Guantanamo inmate al-Shihri, is a statement from Abu-al-Harith Muhammad al-Awfi, identified as a field commander in the video, and allegedly former Guantanamo detainee 333. As it is well-established that torture methods are worthless to obtain truthful confessions, some have speculated that the real goal of CIA and Pentagon interrogators at Guantanamo prison since September 2001, has been to use brutal techniques to train or recruit sleeper terrorists who can be activated on command by US intelligence, a charge difficult to prove or disprove. The presence of two such high-ranking Guantanamo graduates in the new Yemen-based Al Qaeda is certainly ground for questioning.

Al Qaeda in Yemen is apparently anathema to al-Fadhli and the enlarged mass-based Southern Movement. In an interview, al-Fadhli declared, “I have strong relations with all of the jihadists in the north and the south and everywhere, but not with al-Qaeda.”[5] That has not hindered Saleh from claiming the Southern Movement and al Qaeda are one and the same, a convenient way to insure backing from Washington.

According to US intelligence reports, there are a grand total of perhaps 200 Al Qaeda members in southern Yemen. [6]

Al-Fadhli gave an interview distancing himself from al Qaeda in May 2009, declaring, “We [in South Yemen] have been invaded 15 years ago and we are under a vicious occupation. So we are busy with our cause and we do not look at any other cause in the world. We want our independence and to put an end to this occupation.”[7] Conveniently, the same day, Al Qaeda made a large profile declaring its support for southern Yemen’s cause.

On May 14, in an audiotape released on the internet, al-Wahayshi, leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, expressed sympathy with the people of the southern provinces and their attempt to defend themselves against their “oppression,” declaring, “What is happening in Lahaj, Dhali, Abyan and Hadramaut and the other southern provinces cannot be approved. We have to support and help [the southerners].” He promised retaliation: “The oppression against you will not pass without punishment… the killing of Muslims in the streets is an unjustified major crime.” [8]

The curious emergence of a tiny but well-publicized al Qaeda in southern Yemen amid what observers call a broad-based popular-based Southern Movement front that eschews the radical global agenda of al Qaeda, serves to give the Pentagon a kind of casus belli to escalate US military operations in the strategic region.

Indeed, after declaring that the Yemen internal strife was Yemen’s own affair, President Obama ordered air strikes in Yemen. The Pentagon claimed its attacks on December 17 and 24 killed three key al Qaeda leaders but no evidence has yet proven this. Now the Christmas Day Detroit bomber drama gives new life to Washington’s “War on Terror” campaign in Yemen. Obama has now offered military assistance to the Saleh Yemen government.

Somali Pirates escalate as if on cue

As if on cue, at the same time CNN headlines broadcast new terror threats from Yemen, the long-running Somalia pirate attacks on commercial shipping in the same Gulf of Aden and Arabian Sea across from southern Yemen escalated dramatically after having been reduced by multinational ship patrols.

On December 29, Moscow’s RAI Novosti reported that Somali pirates seized a Greek cargo vessel in the Gulf of Aden off Somalia's coast. Earlier the same day a British-flagged chemical tanker and its 26 crew were also seized in the Gulf of Aden. In a sign of sophisticated skills in using western media, pirate commander Mohamed Shakir told the British newspaper The Times by phone, "We have hijacked a ship with [a] British flag in the Gulf of Aden late yesterday." The US intelligence brief, Stratfor, reports that The Times, owned by neo-conservative financial backer, Rupert Murdoch, is sometimes used by Israeli intelligence to plant useful stories.

The two latest events brought a record number of attacks and hijackings for 2009. As of December 22, attacks by Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden and the east coast of Somalia numbered 174, with 35 vessels hijacked and 587 crew taken hostage so far in 2009, almost all successful pirate activity, according to the International Maritime Bureau's Piracy Reporting Center. The open question is, who is providing the Somali “pirates” with arms and logistics sufficient to elude international patrols from numerous nations?

Notably, on January 3, President Saleh got a phone call from Somali president Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed in which he briefed president Saleh on latest developments in Somalia. Sheikh Sharif, whose own base in Mogadishu is so weak he is sometimes referred to as President of Mogadishu Airport, told Saleh he would share information with Saleh about any terror activities that might be launched from Somali territories targeting stability and security of Yemen and the region.

The Oil chokepoint and other oily affairs

The strategic significance of the region between Yemen and Somalia becomes the point of geopolitical interest. It is the site of Bab el-Mandab, one of what the US Government lists as seven strategic world oil shipping chokepoints. The US Government Energy Information Agency states that “closure of the Bab el-Mandab could keep tankers from the Persian Gulf from reaching the Suez Canal/Sumed pipeline complex, diverting them around the southern tip of Africa. The Strait of Bab el-Mandab is a chokepoint between the horn of Africa and the Middle East, and a strategic link between the Mediterranean Sea and Indian Ocean.” [9]

 

Bab el-Mandab, between Yemen, Djibouti, and Eritrea connects the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea. Oil and other exports from the Persian Gulf must pass through Bab el-Mandab before entering the Suez Canal. In 2006, the Energy Department in Washington reported that an estimated 3.3 million barrels a day of oil flowed through this narrow waterway to Europe, the United States, and Asia. Most oil, or some 2.1 million barrels a day, goes north through the Bab el-Mandab to the Suez/Sumed complex into the Mediterranean.

 

An excuse for a US or NATO militarization of the waters around Bab el-Mandab would give Washington another major link in its pursuit of control of the seven most critical oil chokepoints around the world, a major part of any future US strategy aimed at denying  oil flows to China, the EU or any region or country that opposes US policy. Given that significant flows of Saudi oil pass through Bab el-Mandab, a US military control there would serve to deter the Saudi Kingdom from becoming serious about transacting future oil sales with China or others no longer in dollars, as was recently reported by UK Independent journalist Robert Fisk.

 

It would also be in a position to threaten China’s oil transport from Port Sudan on the Red Sea just north of Bab el-Mandab, a major lifeline in China’s national energy needs.

 

In addition to its geopolitical position as a major global oil transit chokepoint, Yemen is reported to hold some of the world’s greatest untapped oil reserves. Yemen’s Masila Basin and Shabwa Basin are reported by international oil companies to contain “world class discoveries.”[10] France’s Total and several smaller international oil companies are engaged in developing Yemen’s oil production. Some fifteen years ago I was told in a private meeting with a well-informed Washington insider that Yemen contained “enough undeveloped oil to fill the oil demand of the entire world for the next fifty years.” Perhaps there is more to Washington’s recent Yemen concern than a rag-tag al Qaeda whose very existence as a global terror organization has been doubted by seasoned Islamic experts.

 

F. William Engdahl is the author of Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order



Notes
 
1. Bruce Riedel, The Menace of Yemen, December 31, 2009, accessed in http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-12-31/the-menace-of-yemen/?cid=tag:all1.

2.  Stratfor, Yemen: Intensifying Problems for the Government, May 7, 2009.
3. Cited in Terrorism Monitor, Yemen President Accuses Iraq’s Sadrists of Backing the Houthi Insurgency, Jamestown Foundation, Volume: 7 Issue: 28, September 17, 2009.

4.  NewsYemen, September 8, 2009; Yemen Observer, September 10, 2009.

5. Albaidanew.com, May 14, 2009, cited in Jamestown Foundation, op.cit.

6. Abigail Hauslohner, Despite U.S. Aid, Yemen Faces Growing al-Qaeda Threat, Time, December 22, 2009, accessed in www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1949324,00.html#ixzz0be0NL7Cv.

7. Tariq al Fadhli, in Al-Sharq al-Awsat, May 14, 2009, cited in Jamestown Foundation, op. cit.

8. al-Wahayshi interview, al Jazeera, May 14, 2009.

9. US Government, Department of Energy, Energy Information Administration, Bab el-Mandab, accessed in http://www.eia.doe.gov/cabs/World_Oil_Transit_Chokepoints/Full.html.

10 Adelphi Energy, Yemen Exploration Blocks 7 & 74, accessed in http://www.adelphienergy.com.au/projects/Proj_Yemen.php.

 

F. William Engdahl is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

[Harconen]

Telling the Truth

Telling the truth might be an act of courage but it is also a powerful entity, which can open doors, shame governments and mobilise people to fight for what is right and what is just.

by Yvonne Ridley
Global Research, January 6, 2010
Middle East Monitor - 2010-01-02
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16772

Telling the truth can be a complicated business. This was one of the first lessons I learned at a very tender age. Still unable to grasp the importance of the school timetable in my first week, I rolled up for class 20 minutes late having been diverted by a rather splendid game of marbles. Four black jack chews and a sherbet dip were at stake. By the time I walked in the teacher was so fraught that lying seemed to be the best option. Five minutes later I was before the headmistress because my colourful story about helping a blind man find his way home after his old, crippled guide dog had dropped dead outside the playground gates was – surprisingly ‑ not believed.

At the end of the day when my mother came to collect me she was hauled in to the head's office where I was forced to recount my rather elaborate story before being made to apologise to the grown-ups and promise always to tell the truth. Just as we were about to leave she reminded my mother that the school day actually finished at 3.30pm and noted that she had arrived five minutes after the bell. My mother was really annoyed; angry with me for telling lies and irritated by the head's observation on the importance of time-keeping.

On seeing me the next day the headmistress asked me what my mother had to say about the previous day’s events. "Oh," I responded brimming with determination to only tell the truth, "she thinks you are an interfering, old busybody."

That evening when the school bell sounded both my mum and I were back in the head’s office. To my utter amazement my mother lied and when we got home that night I was punished for telling the truth! I was four years old and I realised there and then that telling the truth can sometimes be painful.

Why am I recounting this childhood story for you? I am in Egypt now, following the Free Gaza Movement of 1400 peace activists who gathered in Cairo from more than 40 different countries. Their week-long efforts to get to Gaza to give humanitarian aid and messages of goodwill and solidarity to the Palestinians have been thwarted with the utmost vigour and enthusiasm by the Egyptian Government.

This prompted me to write a series of articles exposing the shameful behaviour of the Egyptian Government. I described the Cairo Government as “Obama's rent boy” in the Middle East clearly influenced by the $2 billion of aid it receives from the USA. Thanks to some heroic camerawork from British film-maker Warren Biggs and American journalist Jehan Hafiz, I was able to back up my words about the violence of the Mukhabarat – the secret police ‑ with some shocking images.

Telling the truth in Cairo, as I have now discovered, can be a rather precarious thing to do and certainly does not endear you to people in power or authority. I have been told that I will never be allowed to enter Egypt again although, as usual, the implied threats are never put down, officially, in writing. I would be devastated if this ban is indeed official because despite the flotsam and jetsam in power, I have a deep respect for ordinary Egyptian people and their country.

Threats are something local journalists have experienced over many years, and there are those who have ended up in Cairo's darkest dungeons for telling the truth, so I salute my fellow scribes for their heroic determination to make sure the facts surface.

Sadly, not all journalists subscribe to that ethos and they opt for something worse than telling the truth ‑ silence. I will not name and shame those journalists in this article; they know who they are and they are working in positions of great influence where their words and pictures could easily tell the world about what is really happening on the ground in Cairo. What I would say to them is that if they are too afraid to tell the truth, or even cover the most basic stories in an open way, then they are in the wrong profession and doing a great disservice to journalism.

Ours is a noble profession and hundreds of our colleagues have paid the ultimate price for trying to get the truth out in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan; in fact, in war and conflict zones across the globe as well as within the most sinister of police states.

But those who chose to ignore the arrival in Cairo of 1400 peace activists from around the world, and the efforts they have made to get to Gaza, cannot call themselves journalists. They have become an extension of a government apparatus which uses fear and intimidation to stop the truth getting out.

At the end of the day the truth is there. The Cairo government might attack it, ignorant individuals may choose to ridicule it, but it will not go away and the truth will out.

To all those Egyptian journalists who continue to defend the truth, I salute you; and to those miserable individuals who remained silent or twisted the facts, there is a chance to redeem yourselves ‑ over the next 72 hours the Viva Palestina convoy will enter Egypt. Please report exactly how the members of the convoy are treated and how the Egyptian Government receives them.

Telling the truth might be an act of courage but it is also a powerful entity, which can open doors, shame governments and mobilise people to fight for what is right and what is just.

Everyone is entitled to their opinions but ‑ to paraphrase the late C.P. Scott, editor of the Guardian newspaper from 1872 until 1929 – the truth is sacred.

Yvonne Ridley is a British journalist, one of the founders of Viva Palestina, as well as a member of the RESPECT Party, and presenter for Rattansi & Ridley and the Agenda shows on Press TV. She is making a documentary with Indy film-maker Warren Biggs about the Gaza Freedom March for First Witness Productions - www.1stwitness.com

[Harconen]

New Revelations Tear Holes in Nuclear Trigger Story - Times of London Reporter Admits Fabrication

Gareth Porter
Inter Press Services
Wed, 06 Jan 2010 07:45 EST
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=49889

New revelations about two documents leaked to The Times of London to show that Iran is working on a "nuclear trigger" mechanism have further undermined the credibility of the document the newspaper had presented as evidence of a continuing Iranian nuclear weapons programme.

A columnist for the Times has acknowledged that the two-page Persian language document published by The Times last month was not a photocopy of the original document but an expurgated and retyped version of the original.

A translation of a second Persian language document also published by The Times, moreover, contradicts the claim by The Times that it shows the "nuclear trigger" document was written within an organisation run by an Iranian military scientist.

Former Central Intelligence Agency official Philip Giraldi has said U.S. intelligence judges the "nuclear trigger" document to be a forgery, as IPS reported last week. The IPS story also pointed out that the document lacked both security markings and identification of either the issuing organisation or the recipient.

The new revelations point to additional reasons why intelligence analysts would have been suspicious of the "nuclear trigger" document.

On Dec. 14, The Times published what it explicitly represented as a photocopy of a complete Persian language document showing Iranian plans for testing a neutron initiator, a triggering device for a nuclear weapon, along with an English language translation.

But in response to a reader who noted the absence of crucial information from the document, including security markings, Oliver Kamm, an online columnist for The Times, admitted Jan. 3 that the Persian language document published by The Times was "a retyped version of the relevant parts of that original document".

Kamm wrote that the original document had "contained a lot of classified information" and was not published "because of the danger that it would alert Iranian authorities to the source of the leak".

In offering the explanation of the intelligence agency that leaked the document to The Times, Kamm was also damaging the credibility of the document. A document that had been both edited and retyped could obviously have been doctored by adding material on a neutron initiator.

The reason for such editing could not have been to excise "classified information", because, if the document were genuine, the Iranian government would already have the information.

Furthermore there would have been ways of avoiding disclosure of the source of the leak that would not have required the release of an expurgated version of the document. The number of the copy of the document could have been blacked out, for example.

The Times claimed in a separate story that the "nuclear trigger" document was written within the military technology development organisation run by Iranian scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.

A second document, also published in Persian language by The Times, shows Fakhrizadeh's signature under the title, "Chief, Department of Development and Deployment of Advanced Technology", and includes a list of 12 "recipients" within that organisation, and is dated the Persian equivalent of Dec. 29, 2005 on the Western calendar, according to an English translation obtained by IPS.

The Times reporter, Catherine Philp, wrote that the neutron initiator document "was drawn up within the Centre for Preparedness at the Institute of Applied Physics", which she identifies as "one of the organization's 12 departments".

But the reference to a "Centre for Preparedness at the Institute of Applied Physics" is an obvious misreading of a chart given to The Times by the intelligence agency but not published by The Times.

The chart, which can be found on the website of the Institute for Science and International Security, shows what are clearly two separate organisations relating to neutronics - a "Center for Preparedness" and an "Institute of Applied Physics" - under what the intelligence agency translated as the "Field for Expansion of Advance Technologies' Deployment".

But George Maschke, a Persian language expert and former U.S. military intelligence officer, provided IPS with a translation of the list of the 12 recipients on the cover page document showing that it includes a "Centre for Preparedness and New Defense Technology" but not an "Institute of Applied Physics".

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reports have referred to the Institute of Applied Physics as a stand-alone institution rather than part of Fakhrizadeh's organisation.

The English translation of the document shows that none of the other five Centres and groups on the list of recipients is a plausible candidate to run a neutron-related experimentation programme, either.

They include the chiefs of the Centre for Explosives and Impact Technology, the Centre for Manufacturing and Industrial Research, the Chemical and Metallurgical Groups of the Centre for Advanced Materials Research and Technology, and the Centre for New Aerospace Research and Design.

Contrary to The Times story, moreover, the other five recipients on the list of 12 are not heads of "departments" but deputies to the director for various cross-cutting themes: finance and budget, plans and programmes, science, administration and human resources and audits and legal affairs.

The absence of any organisation with an obvious expertise in atomic energy indicates Fakhrizadeh's Department of Development and Deployment of Advanced Technology is not the locus of a clandestine nuclear weapons programme.

The nuclear weapons programmes of Israel, India and Pakistan prior to testing of an atomic bomb were all located within their respective atomic energy commissions. That organisational pattern reflects the fact that scientific expertise in nuclear physics and the different stages through which uranium must pass before being converted into a weapon is located overwhelmingly in the national atomic commissions.

The Times story claimed a consensus among "Western intelligence agencies" that Fakhrizadeh's "Advanced Technology Development and Deployment Department" has inherited the same components as were present in the "Physics Research Centre" of the 1990s. It also asserts that the same components were present in the alleged nuclear weapons research programme that the mysterious cache of intelligence documents now called the "alleged studies" documents portrayed as being under Fakhrizadeh's control.

Those claims were taken from the chart given to The Times by the unidentified intelligence agency.

But the idea that Fakhrizadeh has been in charge of a covert nuclear weapons project can be traced directly to the fact that he helped procure or sought to procure dual-use items when he was head of the Physics Resource Center in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The items included vacuum equipment, magnets, a balancing machine, and a mass spectrometer, all of which might be used either in a nuclear programme or for non-nuclear and non-military purposes.

The IAEA suggested in reports beginning in 2004 that Fakhrizadeh's interest in these dual-use items indicated a possible role in Iran's nuclear programme.

That same year someone concocted a collection of documents - later dubbed "the alleged studies" documents - showing a purported Iranian nuclear weapons project, based on the premise that Fakhrizadeh was its chief.

Iran insisted, however, that Fakhrizadeh had procured the technologies in question for non-military uses by various components of the Imam Hussein University, where he was a lecturer.

And after reviewing documentation submitted by Iran and verifying some of its assertions by inspection on the spot, the IAEA concluded in its Feb. 22, 2008 report that Iran's explanation for Fakhrizadeh's role in obtaining the items had been truthful after all.

But instead of questioning the authenticity of the "alleged studies" documents, IAEA Deputy Director for Safeguards Olli Heinonen highlighted Fakhrizadeh's role in Iran's alleged nuclear weapons work in a briefing for member states just three days after the publication of that correction.

*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006

[Harconen]

Flashback:  Private Jihad: How Rita Katz got into the business of inventing Muslim terrorists and hystericizing America 

Benjamin Wallace-Wells
The New Yorker
Mon, 29 May 2006 21:52 EDT
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/05/29/060529fa_fact?currentPage=all

Rita Katz, Executive Director of the SITE Intelligence Group. Rita's paranoid hobbies include hyping Islamofascism, making people hysterical, manipulating data and pretending to be Muslim so she can frame innocent Muslims for crimes that never took place.

Rita Katz is tiny and dark, with volatile brown eyes, and when she is nervous or excited she can't sit still. She speaks in torrents, ten minutes at a stretch. Everybody who works in intelligence calls her Rita, even people who don't know her well. She sometimes telephones people she hasn't met - important people in the government - to tell them things that she thinks they ought to know. She keeps copies of letters from officials whose investigations into terrorism she has assisted. "You and your staff . . . were invaluable additions to the investigative team," the special agent in charge of the F.B.I.'s Salt Lake City Division wrote; the Assistant U.S. Attorney in Boise said, "You are a rare and extraordinary gem that has appeared too infrequently throughout the course of history." The letters come in handy, she told me, when she meets with skepticism or lack of interest; they are her establishment bona fides.

Katz, who was born in Iraq and speaks fluent Arabic, spends hours each day monitoring the password-protected online chat rooms in which Islamic terrorists discuss politics and trade tips: how to disperse botulinum toxin or transfer funds, which suicide vests work best. Occasionally, a chat-room member will announce that he is turning in his user name and password and going to Iraq to become a martyr, a shaheed. Several weeks later, his friends will post a report of the young man blowing himself up. Katz usually logs on at six in the morning. When she has guests for dinner, she leaves a laptop open on the kitchen counter, so she can check for updates. "It is completely addicting," she says. "You wake up thinking, I've been offline for seven hours, but the terrorists have been making plans."

Comment: Interestingly, this is exactly what happened with the so-called "triple agent Jordanian asset" who allegedly blew himself up killing 8 CIA staff in Afghanistan on December 30: http://www.sott.net/articles/show/200454-CIA-Afghan-base-bomber-was-triple-agent-says-SITE

Suicide Bomber on CIA Base was Jihadist Forum Member https://www.siteintelgroup.com/_layouts/SiteIntel/login.aspx?ReturnUrl=%2f_layouts%2fAuthenticate.aspx%3fSource%3d%252FPages%252FDefault%252Easpx&Source=%2FPages%2FDefault%2Easpx

You would need to register with SITE to view this page, but we don't recommend that, as it may incriminate you for 'visiting a jihadist website'.

raditionally, intelligence has been filtered through government agencies, such as the C.I.A. and the N.S.A., which gather raw data and analyze it, and the government decides who sees the product of their work and when. Katz, who is the head of an organization called the Search for International Terrorist Entities, or SITE Institute, has made it her business to upset that monopoly. She and her researchers mine online sources for intelligence, which her staff translates and sends out by e-mail to a list of about a hundred subscribers.

Katz's client list includes people in the government who are presumably frustrated by how long it takes to get information through official channels; it also includes people in corporate security and in the media, who rarely get much useful material from the C.I.A. She has worked with prosecutors on more than a dozen terrorism investigations, and many American officers in Iraq rely on Katz's e-mails to, for example, brief their troops on the designs for explosives that are passed around terrorist Web sites. "You're thrown into Baghdad, and there are a million different groups out there you've never heard of claiming responsibility for attacks," Robert Worth, a Times reporter who used Katz's service during the eighteen months he spent in Iraq, told me. "Rita really knows what she's talking about - who's responsible for attacks, what's a legitimate terrorist organization and what's not." Because many reporters rebroadcast her information, it can reach the public before people in the government have had a chance to evaluate it; her organization's work is cited in the Times and the Washington Post about twice a month.

Katz has many critics, who believe that she is giving terrorists a bigger platform than they would otherwise have, and that the certainty and obsession that make her a dedicated archivist also make her too eager to find plots where they don't exist; she publicized a manual for using botulinum in terror attacks, for example, which experts later concluded was not linked to any serious threat. It's possible that her immersion in the world of terrorism has removed whatever skepticism or doubts she may have had. "Much as Al Jazeera underplays terrorist threats, the SITE Institute at times overhypes them," Michael Scheuer, the former head of the C.I.A.'s bin Laden unit, said.

More fundamentally, some people involved in counterterrorism do not think that a private group with limited resources can do as good or as prudent a job as government agencies can. "Intelligence analysis is a set of skills that you learn, not just something that anyone can walk in off the street and pick up," Steven Aftergood, who monitors the intelligence community for the Federation of American Scientists, told me. Katz, however, pointed out that, for example, the professionals consistently missed signals about Al Qaeda before September 11, 2001, and said that she was simply filling a gap. (A 2004 audit showed that the F.B.I. alone had thousands of hours of untranslated intercepts.) Indeed, Katz has received outsourcing contracts from the government.

Before the September 11, 2001, attacks, the official counterterrorism agencies paid relatively little attention to the jihadis' online presence. But in the past few years that has changed, in large measure because of changes in the way terror networks operate. "Nearly everything about Al Qaeda that matters is happening online right now," Peter Bergen, a journalist and terrorism expert, said. Some analysts believe that Al Qaeda today is a model of what is called "leaderless resistance": self-appointed cells operating with help and inspiration from materials that they find online. Traffic rose dramatically after Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of Al Qaeda in Iraq, posted a video of the beheading of the American contractor Nicholas Berg.

"It's not as if Al Qaeda were inventing this," Jessica Stern, a terrorism specialist who served on the National Security Council under President Clinton, said. What's unique about Islamic terror and the Internet is that there is up-to-the-minute access to what terrorists are thinking. Rita Katz is, in a sense, the natural complement, the engineer of a leaderless counter-resistance to the terrorist groups. "Some people think that she's a zealot," Stern said when I asked her about Katz, "but only a zealot would provide this kind of service." 

In March, I visited Katz at her office, on the seventh floor of an old building in a Northeastern city that she refuses to allow reporters to identify in print. She told me to take a train to the city's main terminal, and then call the office for further directions. By the time I got to SITE's locked door, which has a black security camera and a plaque bearing the name of a nonexistent business, I half expected to walk into a center full of high-tech equipment, with flashing maps and screens.

The SITE Institute's office looked like a college newspaper's. There were three rooms: Katz's office, dominated by a large conference table; a small room for two translators (more work part time, from home); and what's called the pit, where several researchers and interns, all in their twenties, sat under a long, eye-level row of mug shots of wanted terrorists - mostly bearded Arab men, with grim, unsmiling glares. There was an air of intense isolation, with everyone focussed on his own projects. It was hard to ignore the office's youth; Katz told me of a new service she had added that scanned French-language terrorist sites, and that depended on an undergraduate intern who spoke fluent French (Katz has since hired another French-speaker for the service).

Each day, Katz finds about a half-dozen items on the Arabic message boards that are worth distributing. Her researchers, who monitor English-language jihadist Web sites, often find a few more. Some are propaganda: videos taking responsibility for attacks, statements of intent to attack, announcements of allegiances or splits. Others involve tactics and weapons. "You don't need to go to Afghanistan for training anymore," Katz said as we paged through a list of credit-card information that seemed to have been stolen from Houston suburbanites. "You just get it on the Internet." SITE tries to have the items translated and sent to subscribers within an hour and a half of their first appearance online; when the material could be a big news story - for instance, a new audiotape released by Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's closest associate - SITE's translation may go on television a few minutes later. The full transcript of the video of the American reporter Jill Carroll, made by her kidnappers, was posted within twenty-five minutes.

Katz has a testy relationship with the government, sometimes acting as a consultant and sometimes as an antagonist. About a year ago, a SITE staffer, under an alias, managed to join an exclusive jihadist message board that, among other things, served as a debarkation point for many would-be suicide bombers. For months, the staffer pretended to be one of the jihadis, joining in chats and watching as other members posted the chilling messages known as "wills," the final sign-offs before martyrdom. The staffer also passed along technical advice on how to keep the message board going. Eventually, he won the confidence of the site's Webmasters, who were impressed with his computer skills, and he gained access to the true e-mail addresses of the members and other information about them. After monitoring the site for several more days, the staffer told Katz that one of the site's members, a young Muslim man in a European country, had just posted a will. "It was obvious that he was planning to become a martyr very soon," Katz said.

Katz called officials in Washington, and was met with institutional resistance: "They said, 'Oh, Rita, I'm not sure you should even be communicating with them - you might be providing material support!' And they wanted to get approval from the Department of Justice to look at the e-mails. I said, 'Look, we have to do something.' " Katz then called an American counterterrorism official stationed in the young man's country, and he, in turn, sent the jihadi's e-mails to local investigators. Within twenty-four hours, they had him under surveillance, and a week later they arrested him. "In my opinion, they probably wouldn't have had a clue if it hadn't been for Rita," the official told me. This, Katz said, is what she always hopes to achieve: "It's one case where everything just worked so well."

At the SITE office, Katz showed me some suicide-bombing videos from Iraq. They are often five or ten minutes long, overlaid with religious chanting. In one video, a middle-aged Iraqi doctor straps on a suicide vest. "In Israel, they always told you that the profile of a suicide bomber was someone young, without family, from the lowest economic level, but what we see here over and over is just the opposite," Katz said.

We watched the last day in the life of Abu Mouwayia al-Shimali, a chubby, bespectacled Saudi. Shimali discusses a letter purportedly written by a female prisoner at Abu Ghraib named Fatima, describing nightly public rapes of female prisoners by American guards. The letter is apocryphal, but it has circulated widely online, and has become a rallying point for the Iraqi insurgency. Shimali does not sound unhinged or bloodthirsty; he sounds humble.

Shimali is shown waving as he walks to a car. Then he is in the driver's seat, with a rifle in his lap, patting a clunky metal apparatus next to him. His smile is warm, and he is speaking in a measured tone. "He is saying, 'This is my bomb,' " Katz translated. The car pulls up to a dusty checkpoint manned by American and Iraqi soldiers, and then explodes. SITE distributed the video two days after it was posted. As you watch, it feels not like an advertisement for homicide but like an advertisement for belief. Katz told me that even she, watching such videos, could imagine wanting to become a suicide bomber.

Katz believes that America has so far understood the terrorist threat only in bastardized and insufficient terms. She believes that it is wrong to assert, as President Bush does, that terrorists are motivated by hatred for our freedoms rather than by our policies in the Middle East or those of their own governments. Though she herself is circumspect about the issue of Iraq, some members of her staff believe that the war is a distraction from the fight with radical Islamic terrorism. But Katz also believes that terrorists are more sophisticated and resilient than most Americans realize, that the war against radical Islam is likely to last for decades, and that the outcome is far from clear. Her project is, in large measure, to convince Americans of the seriousness of the threat by building a direct conduit to the terrorist mind.

"What makes Rita unique is her background," Peter Probst, a terrorism consultant and retired C.I.A. officer who works with Katz, told me. "Because of what she'd been through, she understood the threat earlier and better than most of us."

Katz was born in Basra, Iraq, in 1963, one of four children of a wealthy Jewish businessman. In 1968, in the wake of the Six-Day War, the Baath government, with Saddam Hussein as its head of security, encouraged attacks against Iraqi Jews. Some Jews from prominent families were arrested and charged with spying for Israel, among them Katz's father. After he was imprisoned, his wife and children were transported to Baghdad and kept under house arrest in a stone hut. Katz's father was convicted in a military tribunal and executed, in 1969, with eight other Jews and five non-Jews, in a public hanging in Baghdad's central square. Hundreds of thousands of cheering Iraqis attended; the government offered free transportation to people from the provinces, and belly dancers performed for the crowd. Katz was six years old.

After the family had been living in the hut for months, Katz's mother drugged the guards and escaped with the children. By pretending to be the wife of a well-known Iraqi general, a woman she faintly resembled, she got the family first to the Iranian border and then to Israel. They settled in a small seaside town called Bat-Yam. Katz did her military service in the Israel Defense Forces after high school, and studied politics and history at Tel Aviv University. She married a medical student, and went into business with her mother, manufacturing clothes; Katz handled sales. In 1997, Katz's husband won a fellowship to do research in endocrinology at the National Institutes of Health, and they moved to Washington with their three children. (They later had a fourth.)

The particulars of her biography - her father's execution, her escape from Iraq, and her education in Israel - give Katz, in the eyes of some in the counterterrorism community, a kind of bionic character, as if she had been designed to hunt down terrorists. Her friends and allies are awed by her background; her critics find in it reason to be suspicious of her motives. Katz claims to attach no special meaning to it. "I would have to think about that," she said, when I asked her if her early life had made her particularly sensitive to the terrorist threat. Later, she told me, "I know that the people who killed my father aren't the same as the jihadis, but obviously I would never have got interested in the politics of this part of the world if it weren't for his execution." (She also said, "When you grow up in a place like Iraq, you understand maybe a little bit about how Arabs think, and also what they are capable of.")

Katz's first nine months in the United States were lonely - "I cried on the phone to my mama every day" - and she abruptly quit the one job she held, as an assistant in a suburban gift shop. (She didn't get along with her boss.) She saw an ad for an Arabic-speaking research assistant, applied for the job, and got it. Her employer was the Investigative Project, run by Steven Emerson, a former reporter with an interest in terror networks. Emerson became widely known in the aftermath of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, when, appearing as an expert on CBS News, he theorized that the attack was the work of Islamic extremists. It turned out that Timothy McVeigh was responsible.

The Investigative Project was an exciting place to be. By the mid-nineties, the Internet had begun to change intelligence gathering profoundly, allowing groups like Emerson's to emerge - self-styled spies who relied on the floods of "open source" information available online - tax records, credit reports, Internet newsletters written by people in Belgrade or Indonesia. Senior counterterrorism officials had been slow to take open-source information seriously. "It was seen as irrelevant, and they much preferred working with spies and satellites," Timothy Naftali, of the University of Virginia, who wrote a history of American counterterrorism for the 9/11 Commission, said. Katz would start with the name of an organization, or an individual, and pore over records to find out who was associated with whom, whether they were sending money overseas, what they were writing. She was amazed at what she could discover. She began joining message boards related to a particular group or mosque and chatting with her subjects online, pretending to be a Muslim man.

[luckee1]

Occasionally, a chat-room member will announce that he is turning in his user name and password and going to Iraq to become a martyr, a shaheed. Several weeks later, his friends will post a report of the young man blowing himself up.  Katz usually logs on at six in the morning. When she has guests for dinner, she leaves a laptop open on the kitchen counter, so she can check for updates. "It is completely addicting," she says. "You wake up thinking, I've been offline for seven hours, but the terrorists have been making plans."

Can anyone else here see the utter BS?

What real terrorist or operative would announce such a thing?  When taking real anti-terrorist training (1980s), we learned that there is no open communication of who is doing what, until after the event, when an announcement was made!

Rita Katz, Executive Director of the SITE Intelligence Group. Rita's paranoid hobbies include hyping Islamofascism, making people hysterical, manipulating data and pretending to be Muslim so she can frame innocent Muslims for crimes that never took place.

Is this the same woman who has been terrorizing

http://wakeupfromyourslumber.com/node/5344

BTW, Rita dear, it looks like everyone's fav war monger and war criminal at large, GW Bush, is having a little trouble pushing thru his latest "Endless War for Peace" bill thru the US Congress.
Guess it's time to dig up--figuratively and literally--Bin Laden and produce one of your videos in which the dead guy threatens us infidels.

Pssst. Here's a hint: This time, don't use an actor faking the
dead BL that has recently dyed his beard. Devout Muslim men DON'T use hair dyes.
Gotta keep this "War on Terror" narrative on script, dear, so this time, be a bit more discreet in choosing actors from MOSSAD's central casting.

And the next time you just happen to "discover" the latest AQ/BL tape, try and be a bit more discreet in announcing the release of the tape.
After all, when you best out the world's intelligence agencies on a regular basis in "finding" these tapes, people tend to be a bit suspicious.

P.S. One more suggestion: It might make your latest incarnation of SITE more believable if the IP address wasn't the same as another MOSSAD asset, MEMRI. See, you both have the same 67.19.162.130 IP address.

[Harconen]

The Investigative Project also did undercover work at Islamic fund-raisers and rallies. "Our families all thought we were nuts," Evan Kohlmann, who worked with Katz and Emerson, said. (Kohlmann now runs his own Web-based consultancy, globalterroralert.com.) The I.P. sometimes sent Katz to events where non-Muslims would stand out; she pretended to be the wife of a radical Iraqi-American businessman. She taped crowds outside the Israeli Embassy screaming in Arabic, "Jew, Jew, Muhammad is coming to get you." At particularly radical fund-raisers and conferences, she wore a burka, spoke a deferential Iraqi-accented Arabic, and sat apart from the men, averting her eyes. By volunteering to send cash to the families of suicide bombers, she said, she figured out which organizations were funnelling money to them. She openly videotaped events, as true believers do, and, she said, "sometimes when I had trouble holding the video camera, they would be very polite and hold it for me." She became so consumed by this work - telephoning her house from other cities at odd hours and telling her family that she'd be back in a day or two but couldn't say why - that her husband suspected her of having an affair.

On December 14, 1999, an Algerian named Ahmed Ressam was arrested as he tried to cross the border from Canada with a trunk full of materials for an explosive device that he intended to detonate at Los Angeles International Airport. Richard A. Clarke, who was then President Clinton's counterterrorism adviser, called Emerson from the White House and asked the Investigative Project for a report on militant Islamic cells in North America. The worry was that Ressam was part of a larger plot planned for the millennium. Each day for the next two weeks, Kohlmann, Katz, Emerson, and two other analysts stayed at the office until well past midnight, looking through public records and other sources. Katz became convinced that she was looking at a single global network of terror. "We began to realize how big it was, and how little anyone knew about it," she said, "and it just began to swallow me up."

On September 11, 2001, Kohlmann, then in law school, raced out of class and called Katz. "She said, 'Time to get to work.' " But by the following June Katz and Emerson, both combative personalities, had parted ways. Taking two staff members from the Investigative Project, Katz set up her own office. She got by on small government contracts. Some of that work, done for the Treasury Department, involved identifying Islamic groups that might be sending money to terrorist organizations. She also had a contract with the Swiss government and with a group of relatives of 9/11 victims who were suing Saudi Arabian officials, businesses, and charities. Still, during the first two years, Katz said, she couldn't always pay salaries.

But Katz's organization had embedded itself in the Internet, and when a part-time P.R. consultant whom Katz brought in suggested that she start a subscription service, Katz sent out an e-mail to people and groups she had worked with. In a few weeks, SITE had a few dozen subscribers, each paying twenty-five hundred dollars annually. (SITE is a nonprofit organization, and also raises money from private donors.)

The world of private, open-source counterterrorism operations is tiny - a few dozen people, if you're counting liberally - and it tends to have the same characteristics as other self-appointed, at-the-barricades élites, like the neoconservatives, or the old American left, or, for that matter, an underground terrorist organization. There are the same personal allegiances and petty feuds, the same mixture of importance and self-importance. Kohlmann and Josh Devon, who left the Investigative Project with Katz and helped set up SITE, have been friends since middle school. They finished college in 2001. Kohlmann has long hair and a beard and is aided in his work, he said, "by looking like the kind of grad-school, hippie American that Islamic terrorists think they can recruit"; Devon has curly hair and always looks slightly surprised. When I asked Devon whether they had given much thought to the implications of selling intelligence by subscription, he said, "We were just trying to survive."

In May, 2003, Katz published, anonymously, a memoir about her work, called "Terrorist Hunter." (She was exposed as its author soon afterward.) The book is as psychologically blunt as she is, and the tone, at times, verges on smugness; the F.B.I., she writes, didn't "possess one-thousandth of my knowledge on the relevant issues." It is also an account, in almost religious terms, of her revelation about the threat and reach of global Islamic terrorism. Not that Katz goes through any real conversion in the course of the book; the only change is the slow, mechanical development of naïveté into experience, of suspicion into conviction, like water into steam.

That month, Katz went on "60 Minutes" to promote "Terrorist Hunter," and to talk about her investigation into terrorist financing. Wearing a wig, five hours' worth of makeup, and a large fake nose to conceal her identity, Katz also suggested that Mar-Jac Poultry, a Georgia chicken farm, was sending money to terrorists. She speculated that the company had hidden the transfers by selling chickens that it had recorded in its books as dead. Mar-Jac sued Katz and CBS. (The suit is still pending.) "This woman knows nothing about money laundering, and she sure as hell knows nothing about poultry," Mar-Jac's lawyer, Wilmer Parker, told me.

Katz said that her information was sound, but the publicity from the suit was not good. And there were other setbacks. In 2004, after she spent months helping the Department of Justice prepare a case against a young University of Idaho computer scientist named Sami Omar al-Hussayen for giving material support to terrorists, a jury acquitted him.

The invasion of Iraq opened up new opportunities for small, private groups like SITE, and as the war went on, and the insurgency continued to grow, SITE provided instantaneous bits of information to keep up with the news cycle. "It's like when CNN came on the scene in the Gulf War, with twenty-four-hour news - it forever changed the field," Bruce Hoffman, a counterterrorism expert at RAND told me. "SITE sends out six, seven e-mails a day, and the stuff is good, and it forces everyone else to play catch-up."

Comment: Hoffman is now a 'Senior Adviser' to SITE.  https://www.siteintelgroup.com/_layouts/SiteIntel/aboutsite.aspx?setnav=About%20SITE&startchar=a&endchar=f


SITE's detractors have also questioned the quality, or, rather, the possible slant, of SITE's translations - an especially troubling issue given the shortage of alternatives. "An Arabic word can have four or five different meanings in translation," Michael Scheuer, the former C.I.A. analyst, said. SITE, in his view, always picks the "most warlike translation."

"Our translations are as close as we can get to the original language," Katz told me. "We have native speakers who do them, and I definitely don't tell the native speakers what word to use - I am too busy to do that."

Last December, Katz was reading a jihadist message board called Al Safanat when she discovered a manual describing how to attack the Alaska pipeline. She was struck by the level of detail: the manual recommended that an élite cell of four or five men equipped with armor-piercing bullets or explosives sneak across the border into Alaska from Canada. "They spilled our brothers' blood and they stole our oil resources," it said. "This is our time to teach them a lesson." SITE sent the manual to its subscribers that day.

Soon afterward, the Anchorage Daily News published an article on the threat, crediting SITE for the information. "That's when everything went crazy," Katz said. Other reports followed, and soon Katz's phone was ringing so frequently that she was overwhelmed. Things were even more overwhelming for workers on the pipeline. "We were already in communication with local, state, and federal officials," Mike Heatwole, a spokesman for the company that manages the pipeline, said. When the media reports of the manual came out, Heatwole's company sent internal memos reassuring its employees and their spouses that there was no credible threat. "The situation we don't want to be in is to have CNN on in our facilities and someone on TV saying, 'This just in - terrorist threat to the pipeline,' and all our workers and their families saying, 'Oh, no!' "

Katz conceded that her group doesn't check the scientific accuracy of each manual, or the legitimacy of every threat - although she tries to make sure that the Web site that a particular item appears on has produced credible threats in the past, and that the threat seems serious. And, she said, vetting isn't her role. "I'm telling people what terrorists are thinking," Katz says. "Wouldn't you rather know that they're thinking about the Alaska pipeline, even if this manual wouldn't work?"

There are hundreds of extremist Web sites, but there is also a hierarchy: sites on which terrorist groups release statements and videos have the most devoted audiences. As soon as something appears, users post it on dozens of message boards, chat rooms, and blogs. For much of the past two years, activity centered on a board called Ansar; once it was shut down, with its British-based Webmaster imprisoned for his part in a bomb plot, users shifted to a board called Al Hesbah. "There was absolutely no disruption," Katz said.

Al Hesbah has several thousand regular users, and most log on from Europe and the Middle East. The tone of the conversation is respectful - "brother" is the universal term of greeting - and dissent is not tolerated. Once in a while, someone will ask whether it is justifiable to kill Muslims or women in the course of jihad in Iraq, but in the past year, according to Rebecca Givner-Forbes, an analyst with the Terrorism Research Center, "that has pretty much stopped."

One afternoon early last fall, Katz came across a new thread. It was about her. A jihadi had posted a link to the SITE Institute's Web site. "The SITE is lurking," he wrote. Its people were on the boards, using false names and acting as spies. He urged his brothers to ferret them out and expel them.

But another poster responded that SITE might be providing a valuable service. He wrote, "They translate the statements into English on our behalf, and they do not analyze them. Why do we not grab the opportunity?" Eventually, a moderator on the site weighed in: "All right, men, do not argue. We will carry out an election, and then we will see if we should keep them or expel them - what do you think? I am a democratic operative, don't you think?" He ended with a smiley-face emoticon. By the time attention shifted to a new thread, opinion was running fifty-fifty as to whether SITE was, on balance, good for jihad.

Terrorism is, in part, theatre and psychological warfare, and many of the statements that Katz translates are propaganda intended to raise the profile of obscure groups. Katz sees her audience mainly as professionals - people whose job it is to stop terrorism or uncover it. But, by creating a shortcut around government agencies, she may also be contributing to the tendency that the media (and at times the government) has displayed since 9/11 to dramatize even the flimsiest threat. In recent months, Katz has noticed Algerian radicals and Afghan terrorists releasing videos that mirror Zarqawi's in substance and tone and that are also designed to impress young militants in the West. Katz believes that the terrorists have been underestimated, and that more people should have direct access to what they are thinking and saying. The terrorists, of course, think so, too.

Katz has a very specific vision of the counterterrorism problem, which she shares with most of the other contractors and consultants who do what she does. They believe that the government has failed to appreciate the threat of Islamic extremism, and that its feel for counterterrorism is all wrong. As they see it, the best way to fight terrorists is to go at it not like G-men, with two-year assignments and query letters to the staff attorneys, but the way the terrorists do, with fury and the conviction that history will turn on the decisions you make - as an obsession and as a life style. Worrying about overestimating the threat is beside the point, because underestimating the threat is so much worse.

"The problem isn't Rita Katz - the problem is our political conversation about terrorism," Timothy Naftali says. "Now, after September 11th, there's no incentive for anyone in politics or the media to say the Alaska pipeline's fine, and nobody's cows are going to be poisoned by the terrorists. And so you have these little eruptions of anxiety. But, for me, look, the world is wired now: either you take the risks that come with giving people - not just the government - this kind of access to information or you leave them. I take them."

[Harconen]

Who Would Benefit Politically from a Terrorist Incident on American Soil? The Strange Case of Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab

by Tom Burghardt
Global Research, January 4, 2010
Antifascist Calling...
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16780

Despite some $40 billion dollars spent by the American people on airline security since 2001, allegedly to thwart attacks on the Heimat, the botched attempt by Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab to bring down Northwest Airlines Flight 253 over Detroit on Christmas Day was foiled, not by a bloated counterterrorist bureaucracy, but by the passengers themselves.

Talk about validating that old Wobbly slogan: Direct action gets the goods!

And yet, the closer one looks at the available evidence surrounding the strange case of Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab, the more sinister alleged "intelligence failures" become. As this story unfolds it is becoming abundantly clear that U.S. security officials had far more information on the would-be lap bomber than we've been told.

The Observer revealed January 3 that the British secret state had Abdulmutallab on their radar for several years and that he had become "politically involved" with "extremist networks" while a student at University College London, where he served as president of the Islamic Society.

Examining "e-mail and text traffic," security officers claim to have belatedly discovered that "he has been in contact with jihadists from across the world since 2007."

Indeed, The Sunday Times disclosed that the 23-year-old terrorism suspect was "'reaching out' to extremists whom MI5 had under surveillance." The officials said that Abdulmutallab was "'starting out on a journey' in Britain" that culminated with last week's attempt to destroy Flight 253.

It is claimed by unnamed "British officials" that "none of this information was passed" to their American counterparts; on the face of it, this appears to be a rank mendacity.

The Sunday Times further reported that security officials have "now passed a file" to American counterterrorism officers that show "his repeated contacts with MI5 targets who were subject to phone taps, email intercepts and other forms of surveillance."

None of this should surprise anyone, however. In light of multiple prior warnings which preceded past terrorist atrocities, the selective leaking of information to the British media in its own way, buttresses the official story that the near-tragedy aboard Flight 253 was simply the result of ubiquitous "intelligence failures."

But as we have seen with Mohamed Atta, Richard Reid and Mohammad Sidique Khan, Abdul Mutallab's "journey" was one undertaken by many before, often with a wink-and-a-nod by British and American security officials when it served the geostrategic ambitions of their political masters.

As security researcher and analyst Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed wrote in the New Internationalist (October 2009): "Islamist terrorism cannot be understood without acknowledging the extent to which its networks are being used by Western military intelligence services, both to control strategic energy resources and to counter their geopolitical rivals. Even now, nearly a decade after 9/11, covert sponsorship of al-Qaeda networks continues."

Ahmed's findings track closely with those of Michel Chossudovsky, Peter Dale Scott and Richard Labévière, who have painstakingly documented that the complex of jihadi groups known as al-Qaeda have enjoyed the closest ties with Western intelligence agencies stretching back decades.

That intelligence officers, including those at the highest levels of the secret state's security apparat, did nothing to hamper an alleged al-Qaeda operative from getting on that plane--in a chilling echo of the 9/11 attacks--calls into question the thin tissue of lies outlined in the official narrative.

An Intelligence "Failure," or a Wild "Success" for Security Corporations?

Charged December 26 with attempting to blow up a U.S. airliner, according to The Washington Post Abdulmutallab "was listed in a U.S. terrorism database."

The Post reported that the suspect's name "was added in November to the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE." It is further described as a "catch-all list" which "contains about 550,000 individuals" and is maintained by "the Office of the Director of National Intelligence at the National Counterterrorism Center."

However, The New York Times revealed December 31 that the "National Security Agency four months ago intercepted conversations among leaders of Al Qaeda in Yemen discussing a plot to use a Nigerian man for a coming terrorist attack."

Times' reporters Mark Mazzetti and Eric Lipton, citing unnamed "government officials," disclosed that "the electronic intercepts were translated and disseminated across classified computer networks" months before Abdulmutallab boarded Flight 253 in Amsterdam.

But when the NSA intercepts landed at the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), overseen by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), analysts there "did not synthesize the eavesdropping intelligence with information gathered in November" when Abdulmutallab's father provided the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria crucial information on his son's involvement with the Afghan-Arab database of disposable Western intelligence assets, also known as al-Qaeda.

Seeking comment from NCTC proved to be a daunting task. As the Times delicately put it, "officials at the counterterrorist center ... maintained a stoic silence on Wednesday, noting that the review ordered by President Obama was still under way."

Despite revelations in the British press, the White House maintains that U.S. intelligence agencies "did not miss a 'smoking gun'" that could have prevented the botched attack, the Associated Press reported January 3.

White House aide John Brennan, citing "lapses" and "errors" in sharing intelligence said, "There was no single piece of intelligence that said, 'this guy is going to get on a plane.'"

As we will soon see, Mr. Brennan has every reason to hide behind such mendacities.

Investigative journalist Tim Shorrock, the author of the essential book Spies For Hire, reported in CorpWatch, that NCTC is an outsourced counterterrorist agency chock-a-block with security contractors in the heavily-leveraged homeland security market.

Indeed, The Analysis Corporation (TAC), a wholly-owned subsidiary of defense and intelligence contractor Global Strategies Group/North America, "specializes in providing counterterrorism analysis and watchlists to U.S. government agencies."

"It is best known" according to Shorrock, "for its connection to John O. Brennan, its former CEO, a 35-year veteran of the CIA and currently President Obama's chief counterterrorism adviser. Brennan, the first director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), retired from government in November 2005 and immediately joined TAC."

Shorrock reports that "much of TAC's business is with the NCTC itself. In fact, the NCTC is one of the company's largest customers, and TAC provides counterterrorism (CT) support to 'most of the agencies within the intelligence community,' according to a company press release. One of its biggest customers is the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which manages the NCTC."

"During the 1990s" Shorrock relates, "TAC developed the U.S. government's first terrorist database, 'Tipoff,' on behalf of the State Department."

Shorrock chronicles how "the database was initially conceived as a tool to help U.S. consular officials and customs inspectors determine if foreigners trying to enter the United States were known or suspected terrorists."

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks and subsequent reorganization of the U.S. security bureaucracy, the investigative journalist tells us that "in 2003, management of the database--which received information collected by a large number of agencies including the CIA, NSA, and FBI--was transferred to the CIA's Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC) and, later, to the National Counterterrorism Center."

"In 2005" Shorrock discloses, "Tipoff was expanded and renamed the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE, and fingerprint and facial recognition software was added to help identify suspects as they crossed U.S. borders."

Despite the utter worthlessness of a bloated database containing more than 1.3 million names according to the American Civil Liberties Union, and not the grossly undercounted figure of 550,000 cited by corporate media, TIDE has been a boon for TAC.

    "In the five years after 9/11" Shorrock reveals, "its income quintupled, from less than $5 million in 2001 to $24 million in 2006. In 2006, TAC increased its visibility in the intelligence community by creating a 'senior advisory board' that included three heavy hitters from the CIA: former Director George J. Tenet, former Chief Information Officer Alan Wade, and former senior analyst John P. Young."

And what have the American people gained from inflating the corporatist bottom line? In light of the Christmas Day bombing attempt, not much.

As investigative journalists Susan and Joseph Trento revealed in their overlooked but highly-disturbing 2006 book, Unsafe At Any Altitude, most of the 9/11 hijackers, including Mohamed Atta, Hani Hanjour, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Majed Moqed "were flagged by CAPPS (Computer-Assisted Passenger Prescreening System)."

But because of CIA and FBI monkey-business that rendered watch-list information useless to stop suspected terrorists from boarding an airliner, "the only thing that was done as a result was that the baggage of several members of the Al Qaeda team was held on the ground until the cabin crew confirmed they had boarded as passengers."

And when you consider that Abdulmutallab didn't even have any baggage to check, alleged security "lapses" are even more glaring.

According to the Trentos, "the FBI, CIA, NSA, and Department of Homeland Security refuse to give the airlines an accurate no fly list, thereby allowing the most threatening terrorists to continue to fly." Is there a pattern here? You bet there is!

An unnamed "counterterrorist official" told The Wall Street Journal December 31: "'If you look back to these audit reports, there are significant issues raised with the accuracy and omissions to the watchlisting process that haven't been fixed, clearly,' as of Dec. 25. 'Essentially you're screening blindly, and that's not effective'."

However, we can be sure there will be very little in the way of a hard-hitting investigation into this alleged security breach. The New York Times reported that TAC's former CEO John O. Brennan, has been "granted a special ethics waiver ... to conduct a review of the intelligence and screening breakdown that preceded the failed Christmas Day bombing attempt on an American passenger plane over Detroit."

Enter the CIA, Stage (Far) Right

What "other government agency" may have suppressed intelligence on the would-be bomber?

The CBS Evening News revealed December 29 that "as early as August of 2009," tracking closely with the time-frame of NSA intercepts, "the Central Intelligence Agency was picking up information on a person of interest dubbed 'The Nigerian,' suspected of meeting with 'terrorist elements' in Yemen."

Unnamed "intelligence sources" told CBS, "'The Nigerian' has now turned out to be Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab." But that connection "was not made when Abdulmutallab's father went to the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria three months later, on November 19, 2009. It was then he expressed deep concerns to a CIA officer about his son's ties to extremists in Yemen, a hotbed of al Qaeda activity." CBS claims "this information was not connected until after the attempted Christmas Day bombing."

Earlier reports have alleged that Umar's father, a wealthy Nigerian banker and former high state official, Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, had only provided Embassy officials with a vague concern that his son's estrangement "may have" something to do with his growing "religious fervor." This too, turns out to be a lie.

The Times reported that a "family cousin quoted the father as warning officials from the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency in Nigeria: 'Look at the texts he's sending. He's a security threat'."

Nothing vague in this disclosure, but rather more concrete evidence in the form of "texts" which we now know were shortstopped by British security and included "phone taps, email intercepts and other forms of surveillance" by MI5 that led an anguished father to express well-placed fears about his son to U.S officials.

But as the Times were told by their source, "They promised to look into it. They didn't take him seriously."

And here's where things take a decidedly malevolent turn. According to the Times, "C.I.A. officials in Nigeria also prepared a separate report compiling biographical information about Mr. Abdulmutallab, including his educational background and the fact that he was considering pursuing academic studies in Islamic law in Yemen."

"That cable was sent to C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va.," Mark Mazzetti and Eric Lipton disclosed, "but not disseminated to other intelligence agencies, government officials said on Wednesday."

Then again, perhaps they knew all-too-well of Abdulmutallab's glide path and chose instead to turn a blind eye. Coming on the heels of disclosures in the British media, the evidence suggests that CIA intelligence provided by NSA intercepts, their own on-the-ground operatives in Yemen and MI5 surveillance reports were scrupulously ignored by factions within the secret state who sat on critical information that withheld, would disarm and paralyze normal security procedures in the face of an attack they knew was imminent.

We were told by corporate media, infamously serving as an echo chamber for grifting politicians, Bushist officials and the 9/11 Commission's 2004 whitewash, that the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks resulted from "a failure of imagination" by counterterrorism officials to "connect the dots."

Seems there were plenty of "dots" in Abdulmutallab's case and yet, inexplicably, if you buy the official story, and sinisterly, if you don't, not a single one was "connected" prior to the time he took his seat on Flight 253.

Despite the fact that Abdulmutallab was denied re-entry into Britain, paid $2,800 in cash for his "ticket to Paradise," and had no luggage that normally would accompany a person holding a 2-year entry visa into the U.S., the erstwhile lap bomber scored a goal each time and eluded every intrusive "profile" presumably in place to keep us "safe." Talk about a hat trick!

Available evidence suggests that Abdulmutallab should have landed on TSA's hush-hush "Selectee list" for additional screening, or the agency's "No-fly list." And given NSA intercepts and a CIA biographical report on the suspect, this alone should have barred him from entering the country if "normal" security procedures were followed. They weren't.

As The Independent on Sunday reported last week, "the revelation of Abdulmutallab's background has confounded terror experts." One such "expert," Dr Magnus Ranstorp of the Center for Asymmetric Threat Studies at the Swedish National Defence College, told IoS that "the attempted bombing 'didn't square'."

"On the one hand" Ranstorp said, "it seems he's been on the terror watch list but not on the no-fly list."

"That doesn't square" Ranstorp elaborated, "because the American Department for Homeland Security has pretty stringent data-mining capability. I don't understand how he had a valid visa if he was known on the terror watch list."

Good question, Dr. Ranstorp. Perhaps because someone wanted him on that plane. The question is, who?

One would have thought, given the "special treatment" afforded antiwar activists by TSA at airports, that a warning about Abdul  Mutallab's possible involvement with terrorists, by his own father no less, a former top official in a government friendly to Washington, numerous NSA intercepts, a CIA dossier and MI5 reports would have raised at least one red flag!

In the suspect's case, there were so many red flags flying you'd have thought the Red Army was parading through Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport!

Then again, perhaps Abdul Mutallab was on that plane because, as journalist Daniel Hopsicker was told by a former aviation executive during his investigation of the 9/11 attacks: "Sometimes when things don't make business sense ... its because they do make sense...just in some other way."

As the World Socialist Web Site points out:

    The general outlines of the Northwest bombing attempt and the 9/11 attacks are startlingly similar. One might even say that what is involved is a modus operandi. In both cases, those alleged to have carried out the actions had been the subject of US intelligence investigations and surveillance and had been allowed to enter the country and board flights under conditions that would normally have set off multiple security alarms.

    Both then and now, the government and the media expect the public to accept that all that was involved was mistakes. But why should anyone assume that the failure to act on the extensive intelligence leading to Abdulmutallab involved merely "innocent" mistakes--and not something far more sinister? (Bill Van Auken, "The Northwest Flight 253 intelligence failure: Negligence or conspiracy?," World Socialist Web Site, December 31, 2009)

And so dear readers with are left to ponder the question, cui bono?

Who would benefit politically from a major terrorist incident on American soil, ready, willing and able to step into the breach and exploit the catastrophic loss of human life that would follow in its wake?

Who indeed.

Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly and Global Research, , his articles can be read on Dissident Voice, The Intelligence Daily, Pacific Free Press, Uncommon Thought Journal, and the whistleblowing website Wikileaks. He is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military "Civil Disturbance" Planning, distributed by AK Press.

[Harconen]

Pakistan Judge describes intelligence agencies 'Gestapo-like reign of terror'

Nasir Iqbal
Dawn
Thu, 07 Jan 2010 18:46 EST
http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/pakistan/04-military-role-missing-persons-case-qs-03

Incidents involving hundreds of missing persons have been reported in the past four years.

* * *

The Supreme Court declared on Wednesday the term of "missing persons" applied to all people picked up by intelligence agencies.

"Missing persons are only those who have been picked up by intelligence agencies as we cannot include every case of ransom, abduction or enmity into the category of missing persons," observed Justice Javed Iqbal, head of a three-judge bench hearing the missing person cases on petitions filed by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, Muttahida Qaumi Movement, Defence of Human Rights and the Human Rights Network.

The bench, which includes Justice Raja Fayyaz and Justice Mohammad Sair Ali, summoned the Inspector General of Frontier Constabulary and Major Ibrahim next week to explain how Mustafa Azam, an accused in the Hayatabad (Peshawar) bombing, went missing after he had been arrested his [alleged] involvement in the blast but released within an hour.

The Supreme Court also wanted to know why names of brigadiers or majors always surfaced whenever cases of missing persons were taken up for hearing. Who had given them the right, it asked, to pick up individuals at will?

"There is a reign of terror like Gestapo and anyone can just barge into someone's house to pick anyone," Justice Raja Fayyaz said.

The court would be satisfied even if one person was recovered and the anxiety of one family was addressed, Justice Iqbal observed.

Mr Azam, father of Mustafa Azam who has been missing since 2006 from Sindh, informed the court that Major Ibrahim of the FC admitted that his son had been picked up for his [alleged] involvement in the Hayatabad blast, but released after an hour.

Since then, he added, he had gone to several prisons and met many people, but had not been able to trace his son.

The working of the FC had no semblance of the law, the court said, adding that the FC had no right to arrest or detain any person.

The court asked the FC to carry out what assigned to it under the law and said that its interference in civilian matters should not exceed the directives given to it.

"What kind of democracy is this where there is no respect for human rights," Justice Iqbal said, adding that the entire system was on the verge of collapse, but there was always a hue and cry whenever there was an intervention by the court.

HRCP chairperson Asma Jehangir told the court that 31 people, including a Norwegian, Ehsanullah Arjumandi, had been picked up from Balochistan after the installation of the PPP government.

Justice Iqbal said he had seen the record of Mr Arjumandi who in fact belonged to Iran and even his relatives had claimed that he used to travel on counterfeit Pakistani identity card.

"From where you have derived the authenticity that he was picked up by security agencies," the court asked and deplored that in dozens of cases intelligence agencies had denied that the person in question was in their custody.

"We have written statement of the driver of the bus from which Mr Arjumandi was picked and even the Norwegian embassy had acknowledged that the accused was a Norwegian national of Irani origin," Ms Jehangir said.

She demanded the setting up of a commission to look into the issue of missing persons in Balochistan and to proceed against those responsible. She also called for payment of compensation to the victims.

[Harconen]

Bomb Plot with a Yemeni Connection: A Christmas Gift for US War Plans

by Finian Cunningham
Global Research, January 6, 2010
Gulf Daily News
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16822

Washington's blame game over the lapse of security that enabled a young Nigerian man to nearly set off explosives as an aircraft prepared to land in Detroit raises suspicions over how and why the incident happened.

 

President Obama and his aides have blasted the Pentagon and the CIA for a "catastrophic" failure in security measures. Yet - and this is telling - a miffed CIA has subsequently let it be known that it passed on information about the alleged bomber as early as November to the homeland security office, which works closely with the White House.

 

The official bluster in Washington suggests that elements within the US executive are looking for a scapegoat to blame in order to give an otherwise incredible bomb plot a semblance of credibility. A plot which would have us believe that a Nigerian militant with links to Al Qaeda in Yemen was able to evade global US security and surveillance in an attempt to kill some 300 air passengers on Christmas Day.

 

Now, there are calls for ramping up the "war on terror" against the will of the majority of US public who have become increasingly critical of Washington's wasteful and destructive interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as its infringements of privacy and civil rights.

 

In particular, the ratcheting up of American public fear and anger is intended to permit the US government to open up a new front, with military involvement in Yemen.

 

Could the US government or shadowy elements within it have such a heinous game plan to sacrifice the lives of its own citizens in order to further geopolitical designs?

 

The historical evidence would confirm this. There is a tried and trusted formula used by the US (and other governments) in which alleged breaches of security become pretexts for a "just war".

 

Some of the classic US pretexts for war include the "mysterious" sinking of the USS Maine off Cuba in 1898, which outraged the American public and precipitated the Spanish-American War. Victory elevated the US to imperial power status, giving it hegemony over South America in place of the Spanish.

 

The air attack on Pearl Harbour by Japan in 1941 also falls into this pattern. The death of more than 2,000 US personnel again infuriated American public opinion and prompted US entry into the Second World War.

 

Declassified documents, however, show that Washington was well aware of the impending "secret" Japanese attack, but allowed it to happen in order to rally a mood for war among the American public who had hitherto shown indifference. The US would emerge from the war as the undisputed Western economic and military power.

 

The Gulf of Tonkin Incident in 1964 is another classic pretext for war. The alleged clash with the North Vietnamese navy - since shown to be a non-event by Washington declassified papers - permitted President Lyndon Johnson to escalate the Vietnam War.

 

To the list of deception may be added the terror attacks of 9/11. In this case, known Al Qaeda suspects were allowed to enter the US, train as pilots and execute their plan to crash jumbo jets into New York's Twin Towers and the Pentagon. The official US probe into how such a daring plot could have happened has been widely criticised as a "white wash", leaving numerous questions unanswered by the authorities and security services.

 

But what is undeniable is the strategic US advantages that have resulted: the launching of wars in a region of the world that is vital for future energy supplies - interventions that would never have been accepted by American or world public opinion or allowed under international law.

 

So, just when the US public is growing increasingly weary of these trillion-dollar wars that are killing young Americans and innocent villagers with no end in sight and for no credible purpose, and just when Washington wants to expand its regional war into Yemen - we conveniently have the "Christmas Day bomb plot" with a Yemeni connection. Now, that is a gift for US war aims.

[Harconen]

Two Missile Strikes in Pakistan Kill 10

Global Research, January 6, 2010
Kuwait News Agency
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16813

ISLAMABAD, Jan 6 (KUNA) - At least ten people were killed and eight others were injured in two missile strikes in Pakistani tribal agency of North Waziristan on Wednesday, said officials.

 

The two strikes hit a suspected militant compound within one hour of each other. According to security officials, a pilotless US aircraft fired two missiles at a suspected militant compound in Datakhel area of the agency. They told KUNA that the first strike killed five militants and wounded about five others.

In the second strike, the officialS said further, a missile hit a house of a local tribesman, known for his links with Taliban militants, in the same area. The officials said that the second strike also killed about five people and wounded three others. The strikes took place amid hostility against America is increasing in Pakistan owing to unabated drone attacks. Foreign Minister Shah Mehmoud Qureshi on Tuesday taking notice of such hostility said that the government was pursuing pro-Pakistan policy and that national interests will be safeguarded.

[Harconen]

Afghanistan: Gold Mine for Security Companies

Global Research, January 6, 2010
Russia Today
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16812

Private military companies are being criticized for profiteering from the conflict in Afghanistan while the number of deadly attacks keeps rising and the local population remains in an insecure environment.


General Khatool Mohammadzai from the Afghan National Army notes,“This is war. President Karzai says it will take fifteen years for our army to be able to stand on its own. When the President talks, I know he has considered everything, so he must be right.”


But does this mean for the next 15 years the country will be unstable until the government gets it right? That is the reason foreign security companies give to explain why they are in the country. At least 17 of them are operating in Afghanistan, including the infamous Blackwater, which was accused in 2007 of killing civilians in Iraq.

Regardless, not even foreign contractors are still unable to prevent bomb explosions, so the feeling of fear and panic is everywhere. Yama Saifi, former owner of Shield Security Company, says that sentiment wasn’t around when it was his job to provide security for the cabinet.

That was before the Taliban came to power and people then were not afraid of random suicide bombings like they are today.

“I really don’t believe most foreign security companies are actually here to provide security. It is very clear they come here to make money. I am sure Afghan security companies can provide better security than them. And anyway, they use our people; it’s just that all the directors are from abroad,” thinks Yama Saifi.


There are big bucks to be made in Afghanistan. Each of the hundreds of non-governmental organizations working in the country put aside between thirty and forty percent of their budget for security. Even the US army and foreign militaries use private security companies.

“The longevity of instability is good business for security companies. So, security companies working for profit, this brings a lot of questions,” Daoud Sultanzoy, chairman of Economic Committee of the Afghan parliament believes.


No stranger to Afghanistan, former CIA officer Jack Rice believes NATO troops and security services don't know what the country's people really need.

“Afghani people themselves are interested in such things as schools, clean water and hospitals.” Saying that the problem is that the authorities do not pay attention to what people want, he added: “It makes the US military and NATO troops essentially blind and that is a disaster.”


Dr Tajuddin Millatmal from the Afghan Doctors’ Society divides his time between America and Afghanistan. He is a citizen of both countries – and as an American he does not want his tax payer money spent on security he says is not needed; as an Afghan he complains the situation is getting worse.

He thinks that “It is very interesting when you see one man traveling from one place to another how much security arrangements they make for it, for which it does nothing. If bomb goes off there is nothing they can do about it, but they are the things they are charging for.”


American security companies continue to keep silent, so the questions remain unanswered.

[Harconen]

Reagan’s Ghost: Starwars Stops START
Hopes fading that the historical treaty between the US and the Soviet Union will be renewed

by Eric Walberg
Global Research, January 6, 2010
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16810

Russian confidence that US President Barack Obama might represent a fundamental change in the direction of US foreign policy is fast eroding. Even pro-Western analyst Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Centre reflects, “The people who see Russia as a problem are still at the Pentagon,” and he predicts that even if Obama lasts another seven years, the Russians are coming to the conclusion that “he may not be able to withstand the pressures on him.”

 

The hope, as recently s a month ago was that a new version of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (SALT) might be successfully negotiated. But Obama’s two other surges — NATO’s expansion inEastern Europe and the rush to implement the US missile defence system around the world — follow so closely the hawkish policies of his predecessors, that whatever “Atlantists” there might be in the Kremlin have been put on the defensive, so to speak.

 

To blame Russia for tripping up the START talks, given the facts on the ground, is nonsense. The writing for the present impasse was on the wall even before SALT I was signed. Anyone old enough can remember Reagan in the 1980s with schoolboy enthusiasm showing the media his Disneyesque coloured charts with US satellites zapping UFOs and unnamed enemy rockets.

 

This was the beginning of the Starwars project which effectively ended the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treatybetween the US and the Soviet Union sign in 1972 to refrain from developing blanket missile defence systems, the logic being to discourage any thought of launching the unthinkable.

 

It was only Gorbachev’s willingness to throw in the towel and ignore Reagan’s duplicity, desperate to show some quick results of his perestroika, that allowed SALT 1 to be signed in the first place. The finishing touch came shortly after 911, when Bush II gave notice that the US was formally withdrawing from what is perhaps the most important disarmament treaty in history. Now that Russia is on its feet again, the ghost of Reagan has come back to haunt us.

 

Asked by a journalist just before the new year what the biggest problem was in replacing the old START treaty, Russian Prime Minister Putin said: “What is the problem? The problem is that our American partners are building an anti-missile shield and we are not building one.” “The problems of missile defence and offensive arms are very closely linked. By building such an umbrella over themselves our partners,” Putin said, with his trademark sarcasm, referring to the US, “could feel themselves fully secure and will do whatever they want, which upsets the balance.” Stating the obvious, he added,  “Aggressiveness immediately increases in real politics and economics.”

 

Rumour has it that Russian President Dmitri Medvedev and Putin disagreed over the new START treaty, with Medvedev and foreign policy advisor Sergei Prihodko inclined to ignore Starwars and sign the treaty as soon as possible to score a major foreign policy success for Medvedev. Putin and Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov, it is said, opposed rushing the deal, reminding Medvedev of Gorbachev’s hasty agreement with Reagan-Bush in the late 1980s and early 1990s which upset the hard-won balance-of-power policies of Stalin through Brezhnev.

 

But that is unlikely, as almost any Russian will tell you in unprintable language just what he thinks of Gorbachev’s follies. Medvedev would hardly want to be seen as following in these ill-starred footsteps. As his recent statements make clear, Putin is the force to reckon with on such weighty matters, and few Russians would take issue with this, as his enduring popularity shows.

 

So instead of a “surge” in dismantling nuclear weapons, the Russian government is reluctantly calling for more money to be spent on developing new ICBMs that cannot be disabled by US anti-missile defences. The world can only be thankful that there is some force preventing the militaristic hegemone from launching nuclear war at will.

 

This is not what Obama had in mind last summer when he scrapped the Bush plan to set up bases inPoland and the Czech Republic, a decision Putin called “correct and brave” at the time. But in early December, the US and Poland signed an infamous “status of forces” agreement, allowing the US to station troops in Poland for the first time, as well as, yes, an agreement to build an anti-missile defence system there, now “mobile”.

 

What are the Russians supposed to make of this? Just what country are these troops and missiles to protect Poland from? This move can only be taken as an insult to Russia, and is a foolish and provocative step by Poland. And just role does Obama play in this duplicity? Is he a closet peacenik who is being forced against his will to follow the policy begun by Reagan almost three decades ago?

 

The missiles are scheduled to arrive in Poland in a few months’ time. And yet US Russian-watchers feign dismay at Putin’s warning. “It would be a huge obstacle in the talks if Putin now says we need limits on missile defence as part of this treaty,” frets Steven Pifer of the Brookings Institution. “It would be a huge setback, and it would make the treaty very hard, if not impossible, to conclude,” he moans.

 

Vladimir Belaeff at the Global Society Institute in San Francisco notes the obliviousness in Washington to its credibility gap with Russia regarding armaments, citing “NATO’s expansion eastward, non-compliance with signed treaties to control conventional armaments in Europe, assurances that American weapons delivered to Georgia would not be used offensively, and the persistence in deploying American weapons in Poland.”

 

With Obama’s diving popularity (60 per cent of Americans disapproved of his Nobel Prize) and an increasingly ornery Senate, the probability of US ratification of any treaty is not much above zero, so the Russians have nothing to lose by staking out their position to defend the Motherland and waiting for things military to further unravel in the US empire.

 

What the Russians are up to is well known among Western defence experts. They hailed the failed 13th test of the Bulava submarine-launched ICBM Bulava on 9 December. They were chagrined a week later when an RS-20V ICBM missile was successfully test-fired. The latter is a new version of a Soviet-era missile known in the West as the SS-18 Satan, one of the Soviet Union’s most effective nuclear weapons. The Russian military grimly argue that extending the life of its Soviet-era missiles is a “cost-effective” way to preserve nuclear parity with the US.

 

US official response has been unimpressive, from the bizarre suggestion that Russia join NATO to the demand that Russia cut its defence and nuclear ties with Iran in exchange for more information about US Starwars plans. Putin brushed such prattle aside by challenging Obama: “Let the Americans hand over all their information on missile defence and we are ready to hand over all the information on offensive weapons systems,” making no reference to any longing to join NATO or to shaft Iran.

 

Sadly, the present scenario is the classic arms race one: vast sums will be spent by both sides uselessly as their respective economies crumble.

 

But, maybe all this is a tempest in a teapot, or as the Arab saying has it, salt, which disappears in a drop of water. Andrei Liakhov of Withers Worldwide, London, argues that since the 1960s, “the destructive force of nuclear weapons made them the best deterrent against another global war.” That the proliferation of nuclear states since then merely reinforces this MAD (mutual assured destruction) logic. That rather than a grandiose plan targetting only US-Russian nuclear weapons, strengthening the non-proliferation treaty — which would of necessity include Israel — is the way to go.


 

Eric Walberg writes for Al-Ahram Weekly http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/ You can reach him athttp://ericwalberg.com/

[Harconen]

International Declaration: War is Illegal

Global Research, January 5, 2010
War-is-illegal.org
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16794

Against a background of escalating ecological crises, and the fact that large parts of the world´s population are being exposed to extreme poverty, inhuman working conditions and increasing social tensions, the annual global military expenditure has risen to more than 1000 billion dollars.

The military-industrial complex of just a few G8 countries is responsible for the overwhelming part of this spending, causing incalcuable social and ecological consequences.

Unequal distribution of global resources, increasingly controlled by large multinational companies, global debt policy and unfair international trading practices ultimately could not be maintained without military security. In many countries the military is used to repress critical opposition.

The terror attacks of September 11, 2001 are increasingly used to justify systematic surveillance and the dismantling of constitutional rights. Even European countries have helped to establish Guantanamo-like secret prisons, where torture in all probability takes place.

Iraq was attacked based on falsified evidence causing the death of hundreds of thousands of people, widespread destruction, destabilization and contamination with cancer-causing depleted uranium munitions.
Now plans to attack Iran and the possibility of a new World War have been made public, meeting resistance even from moderate elements within the military due to the unforeseeable consequences.

Faced with the choice between a war, that according to some western leaders, will last for many years or a possible peaceful transformation we support the following demands:

1) [Impeachment proceedings against US President Bush and US Vice President Cheney before the 2008 election, a demand raised in solidarity with large parts of the US public and some members of US Congress.]
Furthermore prosecution by the International Court of Justice of G. W. Bush, R. Cheney and other officials from various countries for waging wars of aggression contrary to international law and committing crimes against humanity.

2) International investigation of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. They are used as the central justification for the "War on Terror", but well documented evidence shows that the official explanation of 9/11 cannot be correct. International personalities in science, politics, and culture, including high-ranking military veterans, have called for a new investigation.

3) Immediate military withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq, and no attack against Iran. International prohibition of war as a means of conflict resolution. Military intervention and export of weapons should be criminalized.
In a civilized society torture must be prohibited in any form.

4) Conversion of military industries to civilian purposes and the development of ecological and sustainable energy resources. According to the UN environmental agency, a fraction of the annual global defence expenditure could ensure that all humans have access to clean water and a basic supply of food and healthcare.

This statement is based on a commitment to non-violence and tolerance of all ethnic groups and religions. Two devastating World Wars and historical catastrophes like the Nazi Holocaust must always remind us of the worst consequences of nationalism, racism and incitement to war.

Sign this statement, pass it on, whatever we can do. It is up to us.


(After US-President Obama took office the demand for impeachment in #1 has been placed in parentheses. The text of the declaration remains unchanged.)

to sign please use the form at the top right of this page or send e-mail to:support@war-is-illegal.org
or warisillegal@fastmail.fm

More than 3000 signatures since November 2007, and more than 150 new signatures in December 2009

To see the list go http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16794

[Harconen]

Truth Crime: UK soldier who told the truth about the war jailed

Mark Steel
The Independent
Wed, 06 Jan 2010 17:49 EST
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/mark-steel/mark-steel-heres-one-soldier-who-told-the-truth-about-this-war-1858857.html

Politicians and newspapers love to revere a war hero from Afghanistan, so it's strange that they haven't got round to Lance-Corporal Joe Glenton. When Joe went out there he must have been warned he could end up being held in captivity, but he can't have expected that would mean getting locked away by the British Army.

His crime was to conclude that the war was making matters worse, and it was immoral to carry on fighting, and to say this publicly. So they put him in a military jail, presumably to stop him doing it again. Leave this dangerous felon at liberty and he might refuse to fight in the Congo, in Kashmir, in a re-enactment of the Battle of Bosworth; who knows what danger he'd be to the public.

As a soldier, this must leave you in a state of confusion, as I doubt whether the initial briefing includes a section that goes, "Now then, men, during your tour of duty with the British Army, I implore you to remain vigilant and wary at all times of the wily foes known as the British Army."

Joe Glenton might have escaped arrest if he'd been prepared to keep his opposition to the war quiet, rather than speak about his experience openly. Because, as a soldier, he's not supposed to air an opinion about the war. But every week there are reports in which soldiers tell us we're slowly winning, and none of them get court-martialled. So the real crime wasn't to voice an opinion but to voice the wrong opinion.

In any case Army leaders make statements about every aspect of the war, to the extent that Richard Dannatt, head of the whole force, criticised the Government just before announcing his allegiance to the Tories. Maybe there's a formula that goes, "Officers of the rank of Captain or above shall he be entitled to thoughts. (However, ranks down to Sergeant-Major may be permitted certain impulses, at the rate of up to three per calendar month)."

It must be hard for a soldier not to hold an opinion on the war, when they can see they're often arming one set of warlords against another, to the extent we call the ones we like the "Moderate Taliban". Presumably these are the ones who say "One tower was fine, but we shouldn't have done the two".

There must be signs all round the barracks saying "You are ordered not to notice that the honest government you're risking your lives to defend fiddled the election so blatantly the UN ordered it to be re-run - or that the heroin production you were told you'd be eliminating has gone up - or that many of the civilians you're here to protect want you to leave. You must also be careful not to remember that one of the reasons given for the war was to capture Bin Laden, which we never did. Therefore anyone who sees him must not notice him, as this will serve to dampen morale."

This might be why Joe described his time in the barracks since his imprisonment by saying "The response was fantastic. Soldiers shook my hand and patted me on the back. One guy said, 'You're saying what everyone else is thinking'. Talking to soldiers in other units, you get the impression that people are questioning why we're in Afghanistan."

This questioning has spread through every layer of society, to the extent that the audience for a recent Question Time in Wootton Bassett, the town that lines the streets for each returning dead soldier, warmed to the arguments of anti-war campaigner Salma Yaqoob. So the politicians and supporters of the war must be thankful to Anjem Choudary, who's planned a march through Wootton Bassett for his group called Islam4UK.

To give him credit, no one could accuse Islam4UK of pandering to Middle England. If one of his supporters suggested "Maybe we should call ourselves Islam4UK, except for Surrey", he'd probably say "If you're going soft you can sod off and join the Liberal Democrats". Next week, you assume, he'll announce a parade demanding the ritual slaughter of all kittens live on Blue Peter.

The march allows supporters of the war to define the situation as sensible Britain versus militant Islam. But sensible Britain is turning against this war.

Joe Glenton has recently been released on bail, and his court martial takes place in three weeks, around the time another participant in war will be giving his evidence. So the rules seem to be that if you tell a lie to start a war, you're called up seven years later for a polite inquiry. And if you tell the truth to stop a war you're likely to get banged up. To someone somewhere I presume this all makes sense.

[Harconen]

Blackwater staff among CIA-base attack victims: reports

http://rawstory.com/news/afp/Blackwater_staff_among_CIA_base_att_01062010.html

A suicide attack on a CIA base in Afghanistan a week ago killed two contractors with XE, the controversial private security firm once known as Blackwater, US media reported.

The two apprently were among seven CIA operative and a Jordanian intelligence officer killed in the December 30 attack, reportedly by a Jordanian double agent who blew himself up inside Forward Operating Base Chapman.

Their deaths were reported by local newspapers in Washington state and Virginia.

The News Tribune, from the Pacific state of Washington, said 46-year-old local man Dane Clak Paresi, a Xe contractor and retired soldier, was killed in the blast.

His wife, MindyLou Paresi, told the paper she was informed her husband was nearest to the bomber when he detonated his device.

"All of the agents are national heroes because they were there to do a job, a very large job. What it was I do not know exactly, but they were heroes fighting the war against terror," she said.

The Virginia-Pilot, a newspaper near Xe's base in North Carolina, said Jeremy Wise, also a contractor and a former Navy SEAL, was killed as well.

The reports point to a continued close relationship between the CIA and Blackwater.

The firm is believed to have participated in programs to kill top Al-Qaeda terrorists in 2004, and CIA "snatch and grab" missions to capture or kill insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But the CIA had appeared to distance itself from the firm in recent years, particularly after five Blackwater employees were charged with killing 14 unarmed Iraqi civilians and wounding 18 others during an unprovoked attack at a busy Baghdad roundabout using guns and grenades in 2007.

A US judge recently dismissed criminal charges against five, but not before the firm lost its contract to provide security for US embassy diplomats in Baghdad and was reportedly stripped of other CIA contracts.

Erik Prince, the former US Navy Seal who founded Blackwater, told Vanity Fair magazine earlier this month he felt betrayed that his role in working with the CIA had become public.

"I put myself and my company at the CIA's disposal for some very risky missions," said Prince, who eschewed a role in his family's billion-dollar auto-parts firm to join the military.

"But when it became politically expedient to do so, someone threw me under the bus."

Prince's role in the CIA program was widely reported after Panetta briefed US lawmakers on its existence.

[VulpesVafrae]

They got blackwater AND the cia?! I'll take that any day over our regulars.

[Harconen]

Suicide Claims More US Military Lives Than Afghan War

by James Cogan
Global Research, January 7, 2010
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16814

American military personnel are continuing to take their own lives in unprecedented numbers, as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq wars drag on. By late November, at least 334 members of the armed forces had committed suicide in 2009, more than the 319 who were killed in Afghanistan or the 150 who died in Iraq. While a final figure is not available, the toll of military suicides last year was the worst since records began to be kept in 1980.

 

The Army, National Guard and Army Reserve lost at least 211 personnel to suicide. More than half of those who took their lives had served in either Iraq or Afghanistan. The Army suicide rate of 20.2 per 100,000 personnel is higher than that registered among males aged 19 to 29, the gender age bracket with the highest rate among the general population. Before 2001, the Army rarely suffered 10 suicides per 100,000 soldiers.

 

The Navy lost at least 47 active duty personnel in 2009, the Air Force 34 and the Marine Corp, which has been flung into some of the bloodiest fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, 42. The Marine suicide rate has soared since 2001 from 12 to at least 19.5 per 100,000.

 

For every death, at least five members of the armed forces were hospitalised for attempting to take their life. According to the Navy Times, 2 percent of Army; 2.3 percent of Marines and 3 percent of Navy respondents to the military’s own survey of 28,536 members from all branches reported they had attempted suicide at some point. The “Defense Survey of Health-Related Behaviors” also found “dangerous levels” of alcohol abuse and the illicit use of drugs such as pain killers by 12 percent of personnel.

 

The trigger for a suicide attempt varied from case to case: relationship breakdowns, financial problems, substance abuse, tensions with other members of their unit, a traumatic event. What is clear, however, is that military service has seriously impacted on the physical and mental health of the victims.

 

The suicide figures for serving personnel are only one indication. The most alarming statistics are those on mental illness related to the hundreds of thousands of veterans of the two wars who have left the military and sought to reintegrate into civilian life.

 

While there is no exact figure, studies estimate that as many as 20 to 30 percent of veterans suffer some degree of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), hindering their ability to hold down jobs, maintain relationships, overcome substance abuse and, in some cases, maintain their will to live. The worsening economic conditions facing working people in the US are aggravating the difficulties.

 

A survey last year found that at least 15 percent of former soldiers in the 20 to 24 age bracket were unemployed. An article by the Florida Today site on January 3 reported that 450 of the 800 homeless in Brevard County were Iraq or Afghanistan veterans. Shelters in California are reporting twice as many requests for assistance from new veterans compared with 2007. At the current rate, they will eventually outnumber the more than 100,000 homeless Vietnam vets.

 

A study of veterans with PTSD published last August by the Journal of Traumatic Stress found that 47 percent had had suicidal thoughts before seeking treatment and 3 percent had attempted to kill themselves. The US Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) has been compelled to substantially upgrade its services. Since its 24-hour, seven-days a week suicide hotline was belatedly established in July 2007, it has counselled over 185,000 veterans or their families and claims to have prevented at least 5,000 suicides. It now has 400 counselors dedicated to suicide prevention though even the Pentagon admits far more are needed.

 

People who served in either Iraq or Afghanistan make up a growing proportion of the 6,400 veterans that VA estimates take their own lives each year. A 2007 CBS study put the rate among male veterans aged 20 to 24 at four times the national average—more than 40 per 100,000 per year.

 

The suicide estimates do not include the hundreds of young veterans who die each year in auto accidents, many of which are linked with excessive speed or driving under the influence and kill or injure others as well. In 2008, veterans who served in Iraq or Afghanistan were 75 percent more likely to die in an auto accident than non-veterans and 148 percent more likely to die in a motorcycle crash. Suicide statistics also do not count deaths that are classified as accidental drug-related overdoses.

 

American society will continue to pay for the harm caused by the Iraq and Afghan wars for decades to come. There is a growing medical consensus that a significant factor in PTSD is actual physical damage to the brain. Developments in vehicle and body armour, combined with advances in medical treatment, have enabled thousands of soldiers to survive bomb blasts that might have taken their lives in earlier conflicts. They survive with trauma to their brain however.

 

The Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury estimated in early 2009 that between 45,000 to 90,000 veterans of the two wars had been left with “severe and lasting symptoms” of brain injury. Overall, the Defense Department estimates that as many as 20 percent of veterans had suffered some degree of brain injury due to bomb blasts while in Iraq or Afghanistan—a staggering 360,000 men and women.

[Harconen]

Never Mind the Facts, Let’s Have a War…

by Finian Cunningham
Global Research, January 8, 2010
Gulf Daily News - 2009-12-23
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16834

A missile test-fired by Iran last week was reported on the BBC World Service as being “capable of striking Israel”.
 
The choice of words was not unusual. On previous occasions when Iran has test-fired a long-range rocket, the BBC and other western news media dutifully inform us that the said device is “capable of striking Israel”. The well-worn phrase is so reliably heard in these news bulletins that its use betrays a coded script. The not-too subliminal implications are that Iran is: a) a hostile state; b) doing something illegal in test-firing a long-range missile; and c) gearing up to deliver on its alleged threat to wipe out the state of Israel.
 
Within hours of these reports last week, the US government weighed in with the pious accusation that the test-firing “undermines Iran’s claims of peaceful intentions”.
 
This is a propaganda system at work: the choice of words and framework of logic designed to condition people into accepting certain options. In this case, the pre-determined option is a unilateral military strike on Iran either by the US or Israel. In that event, it will of course be reported by the BBC and other western media as a “pre-emptive” military measure to “prevent” Iran from attacking western interests in the region. Reported too, no doubt, will be the “collateral damage” of civilian casualties – unfortunate victims in an otherwise “just cause” to bring a “hardline regime” to abide by “international norms”. This is classic thought engineering that British political essayist George Orwell exposed so brilliantly – the official use of sanitised words to cover the sordid truth.
 
So let’s rewind and play back the news with some pertinent facts and context that are routinely omitted in western media reporting.
 
Iran has test-fired a long-range missile – within its sovereign borders. The US and its western allies carry out such weapons testing all the time, as is their sovereign right. One of the US’ allies, Israel, has a stockpile of nuclear weapons in contravention of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. This same ally has previously committed acts of aggression (war crimes) by launching air attacks on neighbouring countries. Israel, with overt approval from Washington, has repeatedly said that it is prepared to militarily strike Iran “soon”, The US itself has warned several times that it reserves the right to use a military option in its relations with Iran. The US is waging illegal wars in three of Iran’s neighbours: Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. A dynamic of fear and distrust between Gulf countries is fuelling a regional arms race. This dynamic is being pushed by the US with, what should be, obvious self-serving interests (massive arms sales, geopolitical influence) that are instead disguised by its bogeyman illusion of Iran, which, unfortunately, Gulf states appear to buy into. All told, these facts actually do “undermine US claims of peaceful intentions”.
 
Here are some other facts that the western media curiously underplay. Iran is not at war with any country, although it is routinely accused in the western media, without supporting evidence, of covert subversion across the region. Iran is conducting a nuclear energy programme, which it has repeatedly said is for civilian power supply. After a decade of close monitoring by UN inspectors, which would never be permitted in its territory by the US or its western allies, the inspectors have reiterated that there is no evidence of Iran building a nuclear weapon. Nevertheless, this conclusion does not restrain Washington and London in their dogged assertion that Tehran is building nuclear weapons (cue more arms sales).
 
Given these facts, the test-firing by Iran of a long-range missile is far from being a quasi-criminal act laden with hostile intentions. It is the action of a country that needs to show it can defend itself amid relentless provocations from proven and much more greatly armed aggressors, whose arsenal also includes a propaganda system that Nazi spinmeister Joseph Goebbels would have marvelled at.   

[Harconen]

Cancer - The Deadly Legacy of the Invasion of Iraq

Jalal Ghazi
New America Media
Wed, 06 Jan 2010 19:47 EST
http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=80e260b3839daf2084fdeb0965ad31ab

Forget about oil, occupation, terrorism or even Al Qaeda. The real hazard for Iraqis these days is cancer. Cancer is spreading like wildfire in Iraq. Thousands of infants are being born with deformities. Doctors say they are struggling to cope with the rise of cancer and birth defects, especially in cities subjected to heavy American and British bombardment.

Here are a few examples. In Falluja, which was heavily bombarded by the US in 2004, as many as 25% of new- born infants have serious abnormalities, including congenital anomalies, brain tumors, and neural tube defects in the spinal cord.

The cancer rate in the province of Babil, south of Baghdad has risen from 500 diagnosed cases in 2004 to 9,082 in 2009 according to Al Jazeera English.

In Basra there were 1885 diagnosed cases of cancer in 2005. According to Dr. Jawad al Ali, director of the Oncology Center, the number increased to 2,302 in 2006 and 3,071 in 2007. Dr. Ali told Al Jazeera English that about 1,250-1,500 patients visit the Oncology Center every month now.

Not everyone is ready to draw a direct correlation between allied bombing of these areas and tumors, and the Pentagon has been skeptical of any attempts to link the two. But Iraqi doctors and some Western scholars say the massive quantities of depleted uranium used in U.S. and British bombs, and the sharp increase in cancer rates are not unconnected.

Dr Ahmad Hardan, who served as a special scientific adviser to the World Health Organization, the United Nations and the Iraqi Ministry of Health, says that there is scientific evidence linking depleted uranium to cancer and birth defects. He told Al Jazeera English, "Children with congenital anomalies are subjected to karyotyping and chromosomal studies with complete genetic back-grounding and clinical assessment. Family and obstetrical histories are taken too. These international studies have produced ample evidence to show that depleted uranium has disastrous consequences."

Iraqi doctors say cancer cases increased after both the 1991 war and the 2003 invasion.

Abdulhaq Al-Ani, author of "Uranium in Iraq" told Al Jazeera English that the incubation period for depleted uranium is five to six years, which is consistent with the spike in cancer rates in 1996-1997 and 2008-2009.

There are also similar patterns of birth defects among Iraqi and Afghan infants who were also born in areas that were subjected to depleted uranium bombardment.

Dr. Daud Miraki, director of the Afghan Depleted Uranium and Recovery Fund, told Al Jazeera English he found evidence of the effect of depleted uranium in infants in eastern and south- eastern Afghanistan. "Many children are born with no eyes, no limbs, or tumors protruding from their mouths and eyes," said Dr. Miraki.

It's not just Iraqis and Afghans. Babies born to American soldiers deployed in Iraq during the 1991 war are also showing similar defects. In 2000, Iraqi biologist Huda saleh Mahadi pointed out that the hands of deformed American infants were directly linked to their shoulders, a deformity seen in Iraqi infants.

Many US soldiers are now referring to Gulf War Syndrome #2 and alleging they have developed cancer because of exposure to depleted uranium in Iraq.

But soldiers can end their exposure to depleted uranium when their service in Iraq ends. Iraqi civilians have nowhere else to go. The water, soil and air in large areas of Iraq, including Baghdad, are contaminated with depleted uranium that has a radioactive half-life of 4.5 billion years.

Dr. Doug Rokke, former director of the U.S. Army's Depleted Uranium Project during the first Gulf War, was in charge of a project of decontaminating American tanks. He told Al Jazeera English that "it took the U.S. Department of Defense in a multi-million dollar facility with trained physicists and engineers, three years to decontaminate the 24 tanks that I sent back to the U.S."

And he added, "What can the average Iraqi do with thousands and thousands of trash and destroyed vehicles spread across the desert and other areas?"

According to Al Jazeera, the Pentagon used more than 300 tons of depleted uranium in 1991. In 2003, the United States used more than 1,000 tons.

[Harconen]

Four US and one French soldier killed in Afghanistan

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8458219.stm

Attacks by militants in Afghanistan have left four US and one French soldier dead, with the US death toll for 2010 now 14.

Nato said that one American had died in fighting in the east while another succumbed to wounds suffered in a roadside bombing in the south.

Little information was given about a bomb which killed two more US soldiers.

A roadside bomb attack to the north-east of the capital, Kabul, killed one French soldier.

Six international soldiers were killed in Afghanistan as a result of attacks on Monday, the deadliest day for foreign troops there in two months.

They were identified as three Americans, a Briton and two French soldiers. One of the French soldiers was mortally wounded, and died on Tuesday.

'France undeterred'

At least 100,000 foreign military personnel are deployed in Afghanistan under Nato and US command.

Of these, at least 74,000 are American and 3,300 are French.

The French soldier killed on Wednesday had been travelling in a convoy in the Mahmud Raqi region, between the Nijrab and Bagram military bases, the French presidency said.

Two other French soldiers were wounded in the same attack.

President Nicolas Sarkozy offered his condolences to the dead soldier's family, adding: "Today's attack does not dampen France's desire to pursue its mission in Afghanistan."

A count by the French news agency AFP puts the total number of French soldiers killed in Afghanistan since the war began in 2001 at 39.

[Harconen]

Suicide bomber kills 16 people in Afghanistan

Associated Press
2010-01-14 05:14 PM
http://www.etaiwannews.com/etn/news_content.php?id=1155586&lang=eng_news&cate_img=1037.jpg&cate_rss=General

Provincial officials say a suicide bomber has killed at least 16 people in a market district in central Afghanistan.

The provincial governor says the attacker blew himself up Thursday in an area crowded with shoppers and vendors in the main town of Uruzgan province, Dihrawud.

Gov. Juma Gul Himat says 16 people have been killed and 13 wounded in the blast, which occurred during the town's weekly market day.

[Harconen]

God, will this ever end? When we will learn to love, and to respect human life, as we love and respect our?

[Harconen]

Seven killed by suicide truck bomber in western Iraq

BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8457237.stm

Seven people have died as a suicide bomber blew up a truck near a police station in western Iraq, security officials say.

At least two police officers were among the dead, while another six people were injured in the blast in Saqlawiya in Anbar province, officials said.

The bombing comes a week after attacks targeting police killed eight people in the town of Hit in the same province.

The area has in the past been a stronghold of Sunni insurgents.

The bomber blew up a water tanker near the gates of the police station, Mohammad Jassim, a police spokesman, told Reuters news agency.

Militants targeted

A young girl was among the injured, AFP news agency reported.

It is the latest in a series of attacks on officials active in the drive to expel militant groups from Anbar province.

Last Thursday, seven people died in four explosions, which appeared to have been caused by bombs planted at the houses of prominent policemen.

One of the main targets seems to have been Maj Walid Suleiman, a senior figure in the drive against insurgent groups in the area.

Pre-election violence

A week before that, twin suicide blasts in the provincial capital Ramadi killed 25 people and severely injured regional governor Qassim Mohammed.

Violence has been rising as Iraq prepares for a March general election.

Until two years ago, the Sunni insurgency was strong in Anbar province.

But local Sunni tribes and their followers then turned against the militants, and began co-operating with the Iraqi government and US forces against them.

After a period of relative calm, the province is against suffering from mounting violence.

[Harconen]

"Serbia will Never Join NATO"
200 intellectuals want referendum on NATO

Global Research, January 12, 2010
Beta - 2010-01-11
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16912

BELGRADE -- A group of 200 intellectuals have asked the Serbian parliament to call a referendum on the country’s possible future NATO membership.


“Serbia has many times, from the world’s most important podiums, said it will ‘never recognize an independent state of Kosovo’, and that means that Serbia will never join NATO.”

“The ‘independent Kosovo’ is NATO’s doing, it created this phony state and gave itself supreme and unchallenged powers [there],” the group said in its request, read during a news conference in Belgrade this Monday by author and member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANU) Matija Bećković.

The letter adds that a “militarily neutral Serbia, true to herself and her own traditions, is no exception”.

“Serbia also has another reason [not to join], that no other country has, and that is the criminal NATO bombing and destruction of Serbia and her people, while trampling on sacrosanct norms of international law. That reason has not been produced from times immemorial, nor is some other NATO, rather than this one, responsible for that crime,“ the intellectuals wrote, in reference to the 1999 attacks the Western military alliance staged against then Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SRJ).

This is a reason that the Serb people cannot ignore, without ignoring their own memory and their own dignity, the intellectuals further said.

Bećković said that while Serbia’s NATO membership is “discussed in every family in the country”, there is fear that this could be done behind citizens’ backs and behind closed doors.

“If that is not the case, all the better, but, once bitten, twice shy. It would not be a first for some institution to solve an issue of common importance. This question is such that no one party, government, or even parliament can solve. No nation would hand an issue of this kind over to someone else,” he said.

Association of Journalists of Serbia (UNS) President Ljiljana Smajlović, who signed the document on her own behalf, said there is a general national consensus about Serbia’s NATO membership, and that is not visible because of otherwise deep political divisions.

“That consensus does not favor Serbia’s NATO membership, and we are asking that the citizens be given an opportunity to express this consensus in a referendum.”

She reminded that NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen was quoted as saying that “Serbia needs a debate” on joining the alliance.

“Defense Minister Dragan Šutanovac says that the best answer about Serbia’s NATO membership would be provided by the business and security people and that the real issue is whether it’s best to have real estate worth more or less. High real estate prices are favorable to those who have lots of real estate. There is this manner of the people in power in Serbia to start off from whatever suits those who have a lot,” Smajlović said.

She pointed out that “whether real estate prices will go up or down” is not Serbia’s major issue.

Member of the Council of the Broadcasting Agency Svetozar Stojanović, who signed the document as a private citizen, also took part in the news conference today and reminded that Serbian citizens’ will regarding the country’s military neutrality was expressed only indirectly through parliament, which adopted a declaration to that end.

“It’s surprising that people in power are making statements which are contrary to the parliamentary declaration,” Stojanović commented, and added that he believed Serbians would say no to NATO membership if given a chance in a referendum.

The document was, among others, signed by former PM Vojislav Koštunica, film director Emir Kustrica, SPC Metropolitan Amfilohije, Bishop Atanasije, and former Interior Minister Dušan Mihajlović.

[Harconen]

Multiple bombs rock Iraqi city of Najaf

BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8459805.stm

Three bombs have exploded in the Iraqi city of Najaf, killing at least 15 people and wounding dozens of others, security sources say.


Initial reports suggested that the bombs were detonated near a market in the city centre, filled with shoppers in the early evening.

The mainly Shia city, some 90 miles (150km) south of Baghdad, attracts thousands of pilgrims each year.

It is home to the mausoleum of Imam Ali, cousin of the Prophet Mohammed.

"Three bombs exploded at the same time close to a large market at Jumla, targeting the innocent, passers-by and traders," a local government official said, according to the AFP news agency.

Locator map showing Najaf

He said those injured in the triple blasts were being taken to hospital for treatment.

A police source in Baghdad said the blasts had occurred less than a kilometre from the Imam Ali shrine, Reuters reports.

Iraqi security forces sealed many of the main roads into the city following the attack, AFP reports.

Although attacks are common in the capital, Baghdad, as well as in the northern cities of Mosul and Kirkuk, violence in Najaf has become rare.

The last major attack in the city dates back to February 2007 when a suicide car bomber struck an Iraqi police checkpoint, killing 13 people and wounding dozens more.

[luckee1]

Psychiatric disorders spiral among US troops
Fri, 22 Jan 2010 08:35:31 GMT


http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=116768&sectionid=3510203

A new study indicates US troops who were withdrawn from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars for medical reasons were increasingly evacuated for psychiatric reasons.

Psychiatric disorders rose from 2004 to 2007, despite an increased focus on treating mental health problems, the research study revealed on Friday.

Only 14 percent of troops taken out of combat operations on medical grounds during the four-year period were because of a combat injury, AFP reported.

The biggest single cause for a pullout was 'musculo-skeletal' and joint problems, which accounted for 24 percent of medical evacuations.

In contrast, psychiatric grounds accounted for five percent of evacuations in Iraq and six percent in Afghanistan in 2004; these figures rose to 14 and 11 percent respectively in 2007.

Researchers also said that repeat missions and declining public support for the Iraq war may partly account for the rise.

The study drew on data from more than 34,000 US personnel who had been evacuated to the main US military receiving hospital in Landstuhl, Germany.

Steven Cohen of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore led the research team.

AGB/MTM/DT

[LightCaster]

Collateral Murder: WikiLeaks video from US helicopter gunship reveals glimpse of slaughterfest in Iraq

Daniel Tencer
Raw Story
Mon, 05 Apr 2010 18:00 EDT

VIDEO

McChrystal: 'We've shot an amazing number of people ... none has proven to have been a real threat to the force'

US military personnel apparently mistook the cameras slung over the backs of two Reuters journalists for weapons when they opened fire on them and a group of people in a Baghdad suburb in 2007, recently released video footage purportedly shows.

The whistleblower Web site Wikileaks on Monday released a 17-minute video of footage from an Apache helicopter that was reportedly one of two helicopters involved in a fight against insurgents in the neighborhood of New Baghdad on July 12, 2007.

The video purportedly shows the deaths of Reuters journalists Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22 and Saeed Chmagh, 40, along with six other people on a street corner. It also shows US forces firing on a minivan in which two injured children were found.

"The military did not reveal how the Reuters staff were killed, and stated that they did not know how the children were injured," Wikileaks states.

The two reporters arrived in the area after reports of skirmishes between US forces and insurgents. According to media news site The Baron, "there was no fighting on the streets in which Noor-Eldeen and Chmagh were moving about."

The video seems to substantiate that report, as it shows Noor-Eldeen and Chmagh (identified on the tape by arrows) walking around in a group of people who don't appear to be engaged in fighting. "Although some of the men appear to have been armed, the behavior of nearly everyone was relaxed," Wikileaks notes, suggesting that the men weren't involved in the fighting reportedly taking place in the area.

The video shows the Apache helicopter's camera focusing in on Noor-Eldeen with a camera slung over his back.

"That's a weapon," a voice can be heard saying on the video. Moments later, the US service member announces he has "five to six individuals with AK-47s. Request permission to engage."

"Roger that," comes the response.

The video then shows a massive volley of gunfire from the helicopter at the group of people including the two reporters. "We just engaged eight individuals," the US service member is heard saying.

The camera then shows a person, identified by Wikileaks as Chmagh, running frantically away from the gunfire. The camera follows the reporter down a city block, and Chmagh can be seen falling in a hail of gunfire.

A shortened, 17-minute version of the video can be viewed above. For the full-length video, click here.

In its press release on the incident, the US military announced it had killed nine insurgents during a firefight. "Two civilians were killed during the firefight," the statement added. "The two civilians were reported as employees for the Reuters news service."

But Wikileaks offers the video as evidence there was no firefight in the location where US forces launched the attack. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, witnesses said there were no gunfights in the area at the time of the attack.

Following the shooting, the Reuters news agency demanded an investigation. According to Wikileaks, the US military determined that the shooting was carried out in accordance with the rules of engagement.

Reuters reportedly obtained the video of the incident under a Freedom of Information request in August, 2007.

Allegations that the US carelessly killed civilians in its Iraq and Afghanistan war have been around for years, but they appeared to be corroborated last month by no less an authority than Gen. Stanley McChrystal, head of US troops in Afghanistan.

During a virtual town hall discussion of the problems involved with "escalation of force" situations, where troops escalate a situation towards violence usually due to non-compliance by civilians, McChrystal said: "We've shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force."

McChrystal added: "To my knowledge, in the nine-plus months I've been here, not a single case where we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it and, in many cases, had families in it."

Since its release earlier Monday, the Wikileaks video has made waves online. As of Monday afternoon, it occupied all four of the top spots on the social news site Reddit.com.

This video is from WikiLeaks, uploaded to YouTube April 3, 2010.

[LightCaster]

Afghan and Iraqi Civilian Killings Nothing New

Siun
Firedoglake
Tue, 06 Apr 2010 20:32 EDT

VIDEO:60 Afghan Civilians Killed As War Intensifies

There are times when I feel that all of the posts I write for FDL are just variations on one story: US forces kill civilians in occupied country. US spinmeisters claim civilians were really "insurgents." Witnesses speak up or neighbors go to local government to complain. US military quietly backtrack on original story and some officer makes a visit to the scene of the killing, pockets full of condolence cash. Officer pledges that from now on, things will change, more care will be taken - and of course we deeply regret ...

And then it happens all over again.

It's very good to see new attention being paid to civilian casualties as the horrific murders of three Afghan women, two pregnant, comes to light - and the new Wikileaks videos are documenting incidents that passed virtually unnoticed at the time. But these incidents are not unique, not surprising, not news to the people of the countries we occupy. And neither are the "regrets" and promises of more careful behavior to come.

They have seen it all before:

Take the murders of 90 Afghan civilians in one airstrike - in September 2008. While local villagers reported the killings, the US military told the western press that only insurgents were killed - and assured everyone that they were certain of these "facts" because a journalist had been on the scene. It was only later, and not in the US press that we learned that that journalist was none other than Oliver North - and it was only after video taken by a doctor on the scene and a UN investigation that the US military admitted responsibility.

Or look at the 2005 Haditha massacre in Iraq: "A Naval Criminal Investigative Service report found that the Marines then killed five unarmed civilians whom they ordered out of a car - one Marine alleged that another got down on one knee and shot them one by one - before storming several houses and killing women and children, some of them still in their pajamas and lying in bed...

A report by Maj. Gen. Eldon A. Bargewell on Haditha, leaked to the Washington Post noted:
"All levels of command tended to view civilian casualties, even in significant numbers, as routine and as the natural and intended result of insurgent tactics ... Statements made by the chain of command during interviews for this investigation, taken as a whole, suggest that Iraqi civilian lives are not as important as U.S. lives, their deaths are just the cost of doing business, and that the Marines need to get 'the job done' no matter what it takes."

And the Post's Josh White reported that Bargewell's analysis shows that the chain of command consistently misrepresented or refused to investigate the massacre: Then, no one asked any further questions, Bargewell wrote, despite gruesome photographs circulating among junior Marines that showed that women and children had been killed in their beds.

The attitudes towards civilians which lead to such easy killing have been well known to our military leaders. In 2007, the Pentagon studied the mental health of US troops in

Iraq and found:

Only 47 percent of the soldiers and 38 percent of Marines said noncombatants should be treated with dignity and respect.

About a third of troops said they had insulted or cursed at civilians in their presence.

About 10 percent of soldiers and Marines reported mistreating civilians or damaging property when it was not necessary. Mistreatment includes hitting or kicking a civilian.

This report led Gen. James T. Conway, the Marine Corps commandant to say:

"I was a little bit disturbed by what I saw because, one, Marines were more likely to do those things than were soldiers," he said. "I want to get after that because, again, those things are things that either incite the population or, conversely, help to win the fight if you do them right." and then said that an Army commander in Afghanistan was wrong when he issued a public apology for an incident in March where Marines "killed and wounded innocent Afghan people."
19 Afghans were killed and 50 injured in the incident the commandant referenced.

Then there's this, from 10/19/2008:

On 1PM on Thursday General David McKiernan's senior staff officers "were briefing reporters and Western aid groups in Kabul on the new measures McKiernan had ordered for the purpose of "protecting the civilian population" during combat operations."

At the same time, a NATO air strike was killing "25 to 30 civilians" in the village of Nad Ali in the south of Afghanistan.

Local officials and residents of Nad Ali said Thursday that a bomb had hit three houses in a village in the Loy Bagh District where seven families were seeking refuge from fighting elsewhere. Mahboob Khan, the district chief, said in a telephone interview that 18 bodies had been retrieved, and that as many as 12 other bodies remained in the rubble.

Followed by this in November 2008:

People near Kandahar in Afghanistan were also celebrating last week, celebrating a wedding - and once again, US air strikes brought death and despair rather than joy to these innocents. 37 died, 35 more were wounded. Nine "insurgents" were also killed...

The U.S. military said Thursday that civilians attempted to leave during the battle in Shah Wali Kott, "but the insurgents forced them to remain as they continued to fire on the ANSF (Afghan National Security Forces) and Coalition forces along the highway."

The Kandahar attack was followed on Thursday by another:

The latest incident happened Thursday morning in northwestern Afghanistan and left up to 30 civilians dead, according to officials in Badghis province.

There is one hopeful sign however:

"I've given direct guidance, and so has my boss to me, that if there's any doubt at all that the enemy is firing from a house or building where there might be women and children, that we'll just back off," Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Schloesser, the commanding general of the 101st Airborne Division, told CNN's Barbara Starr.

"That potentially is something that we did not do before, but now because of this increased emphasis, we are doing," he said...

Yet, a month later:

They came in the night and shot Saeed Alam in his bed. His three-year-old son was crying at his feet and his mother had leapt on top of him to try to block the bullets. Both of them were hurled out of the way and an American soldier opened fire...

Saeed Alam was shot four times in the chest in the raid last Saturday. His son landed in a fire pit, used for cooking. His mother died of shock the next day. The American soldiers left, taking 10 other Afghans with them. "We are not Taliban. We do not support al-Qa'ida but if these searches continue we will definitely join the anti-government elements," said Mr. Janan, a senior member of the Gardeserai shura, or council...

"What laws allow them to kill him without an investigation?" Mr. Janan said. "There are no courts, there is no justice. We are Muslims. Maybe they are from another religion but there are international laws and customs. Who will tell me that killing this person was legal?"

[LightCaster]

Two months later:

Three recent U.S. Special Forces operations killed 50 people - the vast majority civilians...

Afghan officials say an overnight raid Jan. 7 in the village of Masmoot in Laghman killed 19 civilians. A raid in Kapisa on Jan. 19 killed 15 people, mostly civilians. And a second Laghman raid Jan. 23, in Guloch village, killed 16, they say.

In addition to the 50 listed above, three more civilians were killed by US forces Saturday, including two children in Helmand and a tribal elder in Paktia.

After each such incident, American military officials promise that more care will be taken - yet we still read accounts like these from Laghman:

An angry Afghan man with a thick black beard ranted wildly at the U.S. officials, shouting about how their overnight raid had killed 16 civilians in his village. An Afghan elder cried out in grief that his son and four grandsons were among the dead.

"One young boy said his whole family was killed, and now he wants to become a suicide bomber. This is a very negative message," Mashal said. "

These deaths occurred during nighttime raids by US Special Forces.

So many of these raids are tied to US Special Forces. Take the example of one SOF unit - the Fox Company of the Marine Special Operations Forces - "who have been responsible for all three of the largest civilian casualty events, two of which occurred after MSOC was removed from Afghanistan for acting like cowboys the first time around [but] the DOD is not worried: (h/t Cernig for link via email)"

The spokesman for US forces in Afghanistan, Colonel Greg Julian, denied reports that commanders had lost confidence in Marsoc and insisted the group was operating under the same rules as everyone else.

"They have the same rules of engagement that everyone has and there's a tactical directive for all international forces," he said. "Marsoc was involved in these incidents, but it's not all the same guys. They get the lessons learned passed on from all of the rotations and experiences. Yet they are human."

As Jerome Starkey reported a year ago about the same unit:

Troops from the US Marine Corps' recently formed Special Operations Command, or Marsoc, were responsible for calling in air strikes in Bala Baluk, in Farah, last week which officials say left up to 147 people dead. The Red Cross confirmed that women and children - more than 90 - according to Afghan investigators, were among those killed.

In August last year a 20-man Marsoc unit, fighting alongside about 20 Afghan commandos, directed fire from unmanned drones, attack helicopters and a cannon-armed Spectre C-130 gunship into compounds in Azizabad, in Shindand district in Herat, leaving more than 90 dead - many of them children.

And in March 2007 a Marsoc convoy fired on civilians near Jalalabad, in eastern Afghanistan, as they sped away from a suicide bomb attack close to the Pakistan border. Eyewitnesses said the marines fired indiscriminately at pedestrians and civilian cars, killing at least 19 people and injuring more than 50.

Their tour was cut short and they were flown out of Afghanistan on 3 April, but they were later spared criminal charges by marine General Samuel Helland, after a three-week "court of inquiry" in the United States.
It is worth remembering that Stanley McChrystal was commander of JSOC at the time of their 2007 removal.

This is just a sampling. These are the big events with many civilians killed but there are untold numbers of little events. Back in 2007, the ACLU released details they uncovered using FOIA of incidents in which civilians were killed by US forces. These accounts represented only those civilians killed in "non-combat" situations. And these are only the ones for which the military accepted some level of responsibility - or rather agreed to pay a condolence fee without accepting responsibility. At the time the New York Times reported that "the military has paid more than $32 million to Iraqi and Afghan civilians for noncombat-related killings, injuries and property damage, an Army spokeswoman said. That figure does not include condolence payments made at a unit commander's discretion." And given that the average payment for a dead adult civilian was $3,000, you begin to get some sense of the scale of devastation we have brought to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan.

It is good that we are taking notice - and that once again an attempted cover-up of a horrific crime has been revealed. Someday we may also face up to what these incidents say about our military and their "leadership," and someday we may actually demand a stop to these war crimes.

[LightCaster]

U.S. Admits Role in February Killing of Afghan Women

Richard A. Oppel Jr.
NY Times
Mon, 05 Apr 2010 18:17 EDT

After initially denying involvement or any cover-up in the deaths of three Afghan women during a badly bungled American Special Operations assault in February, the American-led military command in Kabul admitted late on Sunday that its forces had, in fact, killed the women during the nighttime raid.

The admission immediately raised questions about what really happened during the Feb. 12 operation - and what falsehoods followed - including a new report that Special Operations forces dug bullets out of the bodies of the women to hide the true nature of their deaths.

A NATO official also said Sunday in an interview that an Afghan-led team of investigators had found signs of evidence tampering at the scene, including the removal of bullets from walls near where the women were killed. A senior NATO official later denied on Monday that any evidence tampering occurred.

The disclosure could not come at a worse moment for the American military: NATO officials are struggling to contain fallout from a series of tirades against the foreign military presence by the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, who has also railed against the killing of civilians by Western forces.

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the American and NATO commander in Afghanistan, has tried hard, and with some success, to reduce civilian casualties through new rules that include restricting night raids and also bringing Special Operations forces under tighter control. But botched Special Operations attacks - which are blamed for a large proportion of the civilian deaths caused by NATO forces - continue to infuriate Afghans and create support for the Taliban.

NATO military officials had already admitted killing two innocent civilians - a district prosecutor and local police chief - during the raid, on a home near Gardez in southeastern Afghanistan. The two men were shot to death when they came out of their home, armed with Kalashnikov rifles, to investigate.

Three women also died that night at the same home: One was a pregnant mother of 10 and another was a pregnant mother of six. NATO military officials had suggested that the women were actually stabbed to death - or had died by some other means - hours before the raid, an explanation that implied that family members or others at the home might have killed them.

Survivors of the raid called that explanation a cover-up and insisted that American forces killed the women. Relatives and family friends said the bloody raid followed a party in honor of the birth of a grandson of the owner of the house.

On Sunday night the American-led military command in Kabul issued a statement admitting that "international forces" were responsible for the deaths of the women. Officials have previously stated that American Special Operations forces and Afghan forces conducted the operation.

The statement said that "investigators could not conclusively determine how or when the women died, due to lack of forensic evidence" but that they had nonetheless "concluded that the women were accidentally killed as a result of the joint force firing at the men."

"We deeply regret the outcome of this operation, accept responsibility for our actions that night, and know that this loss will be felt forever by the families," said Brig. Gen. Eric Tremblay, a spokesman for the NATO command in Kabul.

The admission was an abrupt about-face. In a statement soon after the raid, NATO had claimed that its raiding party had stumbled upon the "bodies of three women who had been tied up, gagged and killed" and hidden in a room in the house. Military officials had also said later that the bodies showed signs of puncture and slashing wounds from a knife, and that the women appeared to have been killed several hours before the raid.

And in what would be a scandalous turn to the investigation, The Times of London reported Sunday night that Afghan investigators also determined that American forces not only killed the women but had also "dug bullets out of their victims' bodies in the bloody aftermath" and then "washed the wounds with alcohol before lying to their superiors about what happened."

A spokesman for the Afghan Interior Ministry, Zemary Bashary, said that he did not have any information about the Afghan investigation, which he said remained unfinished.

In an interview, a NATO official said the Afghan-led investigation team alerted American and NATO commanders that the inquiry had found signs of evidence tampering. A briefing was given by investigators to General McChrystal and other military officials in late March.

"There was evidence of tampering at the scene, walls being washed, bullets dug out of holes in the wall," the NATO official said, adding that investigators "couldn't find bullets from the wounds in the body."

The investigators, the official said, "alluded to the fact that bullets were missing but did not discuss anything specific to that. Nothing pointed conclusively to the fact that our guys were the ones who tampered with the scene."

On Monday, a senior NATO official denied that there was any effort to tamper with evidence.

"We have discovered no evidence in our investigation that any of our forces did anything to manipulate the evidence at the scene or the bodies," said the deputy chief of staff for communications for General McChrystal, Rear Adm. Gregory J. Smith.

Several bullets that were fired but had not struck either of the two men were removed from the walls, Admiral Smith said. But he said that was done "to make sure what kinds of rounds they were."

NATO officials have also rejected allegations that the killings were covered up. But it was not immediately clear on Sunday night how troops who shot the women and later examined their bodies would not have recognized that it was their bullets that killed them.

[LightCaster]

This is what Alex have to say about this.

Download the MP3 Audio

Thank you Alex. You have understanding of the real situation there, and compassion for victims.

[LightCaster]

[LightCaster]

Calls for inquiry into Apache attack on Iraqi civilians

Damien McElroy
The Telegraph
Tue, 06 Apr 2010 23:58 EDT

A video grab taken from a video shot from a US army Apache helicopter
gun-sight shows the scene in the streets of the New Baghdad district just after a group
of men were fired upon by the helicopter

The US military is facing demands for an inquiry after the leak of a video showing an American helicopter attack on innocent Iraqi civilians.

The footage of the assault on a Baghdad square in 2007 was published on the website WikiLeaks in defiance of Pentagon attempts to keep the recording secret.

from a US army Apache helicopter gun-sight shows the scene in the streets of the New Baghdad district just after a group of men were fired upon by the helicopter
The US military is facing demands for an inquiry after the leak of a video showing an American helicopter attack on innocent Iraqi civilians.

The footage of the assault on a Baghdad square in 2007 was published on the website WikiLeaks in defiance of Pentagon attempts to keep the recording secret.

Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh, two cameramen for the Reuters news agency, were among 15 people killed in the attacks which also included a group of men who attempted to rescue the injured at the scene. Two Apache helicopter gunships targeted and then opened fire on the group in the belief that they were carrying heavy weapons.

The video published by the website Wikileaks included a transcript of the crews of circulating helicopters seeking permission to open fire and then assessing the effects of the shooting.

Members of the crew are heard to say "Come on, let us fire'' followed by exhortations such as "light 'em up!" and "keep shooting, keep shooting".

A crewman goes on to say "Ha, ha, ha - I hit 'em," followed by a second who said "Look at those dead bastards."

In one sequence two children can be seen at the window of a van that was later attacked. An American patrol that arrived in the aftermath of the attack is seen carrying the injured children to an Iraqi police checkpoint after permission was refused to airlift the children to an American military base. The pilots were unapologetic: "Well, it's their fault for bring their kids into a battle," said one. "Too right," said a colleague.

In one sequence two children can be seen at the window of a van that was later attacked. An American patrol that arrived in the aftermath of the attack is seen carrying the injured children to an Iraqi police checkpoint after permission was refused to airlift the children to an American military base. The pilots were unapologetic: "Well, it's their fault for bring their kids into a battle," said one. "Too right," said a colleague.

The video was obtained by the website Wikileaks which has been investigated by the Pentagon for endangering national security. The organisation has secured the assistance of Icelandic television after the island state vowed to protect people involved in leaking official information.

The Pentagon acknowledged the authenticity of the video but a spokesman insisted the video did not contradict the official finding that the helicopters' crew acted within the rules of engagement.

"Since 2007, we acknowledged everything that's in the video," the official said. "We acknowledged that the strike took place and that there were two Reuters employees. We know that two kids were injured."

The spokesman said that the inquiry backed the assessment that the group of men was carrying a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG).

The American military has rejected calls to discipline the crew for the deaths of the Reuters journalist because the men could not be distinguished from suspected insurgents.

"The RPG in the video is real," he said. "We had insurgents and reporters in an area where US forces were about to be ambushed. At the time we weren't able to discern whether (Reuters employees) were carrying cameras or weapons."

Mr Noor-Eldeen's father said that the footage vindicated the family's calls for those involved to face charges.

"At last the truth has been revealed and I'm satisfied that God has revealed the truth," said Noor Eldeen. "If such an attack took place in America, even if an animal were killed like this, what would they do?"

Nabeel Noor-Eldeen, the dead man's brother, was sceptical that how the military could make such a basic error. "My question is how could those highly skilled American pilots with all their hi-tech information not distinguish between a camera and a rocket launcher."

The Iraqi Journalists' Union yesterday called for an investigation into the shooting claiming the footage was evidence of a crime and should be investigated.

__________________________________________________________________________

Comment: Here's the video showing live the murder of the Iraqi civilians, from WikiLeaks:

VIDEO

TRANSCRIPT

[LightCaster]

Iraq War Vet: "We Were Told to Just Shoot People, and the Officers Would Take Care of Us"

by Dahr Jamail
Global Research, April 8, 2010
Truthout - 2010-04-07

On Monday, April 5, Wikileaks.org posted video footage from Iraq, taken from a US military Apache helicopter in July 2007 as soldiers aboard it killed 12 people and wounded two children. The dead included two employees of the Reuters news agency: photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen and driver Saeed Chmagh.

The US military confirmed the authenticity of the video.

The footage clearly shows an unprovoked slaughter, and is shocking to watch whilst listening to the casual conversation of the soldiers in the background.

As disturbing as the video is, this type of behavior by US soldiers in Iraq is not uncommon.

Truthout has spoken with several soldiers who shared equally horrific stories of the slaughtering of innocent Iraqis by US occupation forces.

"I remember one woman walking by," said Jason Washburn, a corporal in the US Marines who served three tours in Iraq. He told the audience at the Winter Soldier hearings that took place March 13-16, 2008, in Silver Spring, Maryland, "She was carrying a huge bag, and she looked like she was heading toward us, so we lit her up with the Mark 19, which is an automatic grenade launcher, and when the dust settled, we realized that the bag was full of groceries. She had been trying to bring us food and we blew her to pieces."

The hearings provided a platform for veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan to share the reality of their occupation experiences with the media in the US.

Washburn testified on a panel that discussed the rules of engagement (ROE) in Iraq, and how lax they were, to the point of being virtually nonexistent.

"During the course of my three tours, the rules of engagement changed a lot," Washburn's testimony continued, "The higher the threat the more viciously we were permitted and expected to respond. Something else we were encouraged to do, almost with a wink and nudge, was to carry 'drop weapons', or by my third tour, 'drop shovels'. We would carry these weapons or shovels with us because if we accidentally shot a civilian, we could just toss the weapon on the body, and make them look like an insurgent."

Hart Viges, a member of the 82nd Airborne Division of the Army who served one year in Iraq, told of taking orders over the radio.

    "One time they said to ?re on all taxicabs because the enemy was using them for transportation.... One of the snipers replied back, 'Excuse me? Did I hear that right? Fire on all taxicabs?' The lieutenant colonel responded, 'You heard me, trooper, ?re on all taxicabs.' After that, the town lit up, with all the units ?ring on cars. This was my ?rst experience with war, and that kind of set the tone for the rest of the deployment."

Vincent Emanuele, a Marine rifleman who spent a year in the al-Qaim area of Iraq near the Syrian border, told of emptying magazines of bullets into the city without identifying targets, running over corpses with Humvees and stopping to take "trophy" photos of bodies.

"An act that took place quite often in Iraq was taking pot shots at cars that drove by," he said, "This was not an isolated incident, and it took place for most of our eight-month deployment."

Kelly Dougherty - then executive director of Iraq Veterans Against the War - blamed the behavior of soldiers in Iraq on policies of the US government.

"The abuses committed in the occupations, far from being the result of a 'few bad apples' misbehaving, are the result of our government's Middle East policy, which is crafted in the highest spheres of US power," she said.

Michael Leduc, a corporal in the Marines who was part of the US attack on Fallujah in November 2004, said orders he received from his battalion JAG officer before entering the city were as follows: "You see an individual with a white ?ag and he does anything but approach you slowly and obey commands, assume it's a trick and kill him."

Brian Casler, a corporal in the Marines, spoke of witnessing the prevalent dehumanizing outlook soldiers took toward Iraqis during the invasion of Iraq.

"... on these convoys, I saw Marines defecate into MRE bags or urinate in bottles and throw them at children on the side of the road," he stated.

Scott Ewing, who served in Iraq from 2005-2006, admitted on one panel that units intentionally gave candy to Iraqi children for reasons other than "winning hearts and minds.

"There was also another motive," Ewing said. "If the kids were around our vehicles, the bad guys wouldn't attack. We used the kids as human shields."

In response to the WikiLeaks video, the Pentagon, while not officially commenting on the video, announced that two Pentagon investigations cleared the air crew of any wrongdoing.

A statement from the two probes said the air crew had acted appropriately and followed the ROE.

Adam Kokesh served in Fallujah beginning in February 2004 for roughly one year.

Speaking on a panel at the aforementioned hearings about the ROE, he held up the ROE card soldiers are issued in Iraq and said, "This card says, 'Nothing on this card prevents you from using deadly force to defend yourself'."

Kokesh pointed out that "reasonable certainty" was the condition for using deadly force under the ROE, and this led to rampant civilian deaths. He discussed taking part in the April 2004 siege of Fallujah. During that attack, doctors at Fallujah General Hospital told Truthout there were 736 deaths, over 60 percent of which were civilians.

"We changed the ROE more often than we changed our underwear," Kokesh said, "At one point, we imposed a curfew on the city, and were told to fire at anything that moved in the dark."

Kokesh also testified that during two cease-fires in the midst of the siege, the military decided to let out as many women and children from the embattled city as possible, but this did not include most men.

"For males, they had to be under 14 years of age," he said, "So I had to go over there and turn men back, who had just been separated from their women and children. We thought we were being gracious."

Steve Casey served in Iraq for over a year starting in mid-2003.

"We were scheduled to go home in April 2004, but due to rising violence we stayed in with Operation Blackjack," Casey said, "I watched soldiers firing into the radiators and windows of oncoming vehicles. Those who didn't turn around were unfortunately neutralized one way or another - well over 20 times I personally witnessed this. There was a lot of collateral damage."

Jason Hurd served in central Baghdad from November 2004 until November 2005. He told of how, after his unit took "stray rounds" from a nearby firefight, a machine gunner responded by firing over 200 rounds into a nearby building.

"We fired indiscriminately at this building," he said. "Things like that happened every day in Iraq. We reacted out of fear for our lives, and we reacted with total destruction."

Hurd said the situation deteriorated rapidly while he was in Iraq. "Over time, as the absurdity of war set in, individuals from my unit indiscriminately opened fire at vehicles driving down the wrong side of the road. People in my unit would later brag about it. I remember thinking how appalled I was that we were laughing at this, but that was the reality."

Other soldiers Truthout has interviewed have often laughed when asked about their ROE in Iraq.

Garret Reppenhagen served in Iraq from February 2004-2005 in the city of Baquba, 40 kilometers (about 25 miles) northeast of Baghdad. He said his first experience in Iraq was being on a patrol that killed two Iraqi farmers as they worked in their field at night.

"I was told they were out in the fields farming because their pumps only operated with electricity, which meant they had to go out in the dark when there was electricity," he explained, "I asked the sergeant, if he knew this, why did he fire on the men. He told me because the men were out after curfew. I was never given another ROE during my time in Iraq."

Emmanuel added: "We took fire while trying to blow up a bridge. Many of the attackers were part of the general population. This led to our squad shooting at everything and anything in order to push through the town. I remember myself emptying magazines into the town, never identifying a target."

Emmanuel spoke of abusing prisoners he knew were innocent, adding, "We took it upon ourselves to harass them, and took them to the desert to throw them out of our Humvees, while kicking and punching them when we threw them out."

Jason Wayne Lemue is a Marine who served three tours in Iraq.

"My commander told me, 'Kill those who need to be killed, and save those who need to be saved'; that was our mission on our first tour," he said of his first deployment during the invasion.

    "After that the ROE changed, and carrying a shovel, or standing on a rooftop talking on a cell phone, or being out after curfew [meant those people] were to be killed. I can't tell you how many people died because of this. By my third tour, we were told to just shoot people, and the officers would take care of us."

When this Truthout reporter was in Baghdad in November 2004, my Iraqi interpreter was in the Abu Hanifa mosque that was raided by US and Iraqi soldiers during Friday prayers.

"Everyone was there for Friday prayers, when five Humvees and several trucks carrying [US soldiers and] Iraqi National Guards entered," Abu Talat told Truthout on the phone from within the mosque while the raid was in progress. "Everyone starting yelling 'Allahu Akbar' (God is the greatest) because they were frightened. Then the soldiers started shooting the people praying!"

"They have just shot and killed at least four of the people praying," he said in a panicked voice, "At least 10 other people are wounded now. We are on our bellies and in a very bad situation."

Iraqi Red Crescent later confirmed to Truthout that at least four people were killed, and nine wounded. Truthout later witnessed pieces of brain splattered on one of the walls inside the mosque while large blood stains covered carpets at several places.

This type of indiscriminate killing has been typical from the initial invasion of Iraq.

Truthout spoke with Iraq war veteran and former National Guard and Army Reserve member Jason Moon, who was there for the invasion.

    "While on our initial convoy into Iraq in early June 2003, we were given a direct order that if any children or civilians got in front of the vehicles in our convoy, we were not to stop, we were not to slow down, we were to keep driving. In the event an insurgent attacked us from behind human shields, we were supposed to count. If there were thirty or less civilians we were allowed to fire into the area. If there were over thirty, we were supposed to take fire and send it up the chain of command. These were the rules of engagement. I don't know about you, but if you are getting shot at from a crowd of people, how fast are you going to count, and how accurately?"

Moon brought back a video that shows his sergeant declaring, "The difference between an insurgent and an Iraqi civilian is whether they are dead or alive."

Moon explains the thinking: "If you kill a civilian he becomes an insurgent because you retroactively make that person a threat."

According to the Pentagon probes of the killings shown in the WikiLeaks video, the air crew had "reason to believe" the people seen in the video were fighters before opening fire.

Article 48 of the Geneva Conventions speaks to the "basic rule" regarding the protection of civilians:

    "In order to ensure respect for and protection of the civilian population and civilian objects, the Parties to the conflict shall at all times distinguish between the civilian population and combatants and between civilian objects and military objectives and accordingly shall direct their operations only against military objectives."

What is happening in Iraq seems to reflect what psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton calls "atrocity-producing situations." He used this term first in his book "The Nazi Doctors." In 2004, he wrote an article for The Nation, applying his insights to the Iraq War and occupation.

"Atrocity-producing situations," Lifton wrote, occur when a power structure sets up an environment where "ordinary people, men or women no better or worse than you or I, can regularly commit atrocities.... This kind of atrocity-producing situation ... surely occurs to some degrees in all wars, including World War II, our last 'good war.' But a counterinsurgency war in a hostile setting, especially when driven by profound ideological distortions, is particularly prone to sustained atrocity - all the more so when it becomes an occupation."

Cliff Hicks served in Iraq from October 2003 to August 2004.

"There was a tall apartment complex, the only spot from where people could see over our perimeter," Hicks told Truthout, "There would be laundry hanging off the balconies, and people hanging out on the roof for fresh air. The place was full of kids and families. On rare occasions, a fighter would get atop the building and shoot at our passing vehicles. They never really hit anybody. We just knew to be careful when we were over by that part of the wall, and nobody did sh*t about it until one day a lieutenant colonel was driving down and they shot at his vehicle and he got scared. So he jumped through a bunch of hoops and cut through some red tape and got a C-130 to come out the next night and all but leveled the place. Earlier that evening when I was returning from a patrol the apartment had been packed full of people.".

[LightCaster]

Killings of Civilians in Afghanistan: US Special Forces Covered Up Massacre

Preparations advance for assault on Kandahar

by Tom Eley
Global Research,
April 8, 2010

A NATO military statement issued Sunday admitted that US Special Forces commandos carried out the execution-style killings of three women and two men in a February 12 night raid in southeastern Afghanistan. Among the dead women were two pregnant mothers, with 16 children between them. The third was a teenage girl. For weeks the US-led NATO officials had denied killing the women.

After the killings US Special Forces dug their bullets out of the dead women’s bodies and treated the holes with alcohol to erase forensic evidence, an Afghanistan government investigation has reportedly determined. A United Nations official confirmed that the Afghan investigation found evidence US soldiers had tampered with the crime scene. These reports are substantiated by family members and local authorities, who say US soldiers blocked access for seven hours to the home in Gardez, the regional capital of eastern Paktia province, while they attempted to cover up the crime.

The US-led coalition, while admitting for the first time that its forces killed the women, now contends that it did not attempt a cover-up. “All regrettable,” said Rear Adm. Greg Smith, the top military spokesman in Kabul, of the deaths. “That said, there is absolutely no evidence that the forces covered anything up.” This is a bald lie. In fact, all the available evidence shows there was a cover-up, and a crude one at that.

Soon after the raid, NATO acknowledged that US Special Forces had gunned down two brothers, described as the local police chief and the district prosecutor, in their home. NATO conceded the men were civilians, but claimed, without providing evidence, that they were carrying Kalashnikov rifles.

NATO however denied that US Special Forces had killed the three women, claiming instead, fantastically, that they had been bound, gagged, and stabbed to death more than half a day earlier. Yet only a few hours before the killings the family had concluded a celebration for the birth of a new child, with 25 guests and musicians present in the home.

“In what culture in the world do you invite … people for a party and meanwhile kill three women?” a senior Afghan official asked the Times of London. “The dead bodies were just eight metres from where they were preparing the food. The Americans, they told us the women were dead for 14 hours.”

The NATO statement released Sunday abandoned this earlier statement, concluding “that the women were accidentally killed as a result of the joint force firing at the men.” It did not bother to explain why the earlier false story had been planted and now retracted.

Separately, the German government of Angela Merkel apologized for the killing of six Afghan policemen on April 2. The German military, which operates in Afghanistan’s increasingly violent north, claims that the car carrying the men was obliterated by a German tank after it failed to stop on command. Three German soldiers had died earlier in the day in a gunfight with insurgents.

The episodes reveal the real nature of the occupation of Afghanistan, which has nothing to do with “defending” the local population or the US people against the Taliban or Al Qaeda. Its purpose is to assert US and NATO control over the strategically-crucial nation, the better to pursue Washington’s interests throughout resource-rich Central Asia and block rivals such as China and Russia. This imperialist agenda inevitably requires the terrorization of the population.

The spate of civilian killings offers a glimpse of the bloody violence President Barack Obama has unleashed on the suffering country through his “surge.” This will only intensify as the US makes preparations for a major military offensive against Afghanistan’s second most populous city, Kandahar, which Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, has called “the center of gravity” for anti-insurgent operations. The attack is slated for June.

Kandahar’s local government is ostensibly loyal to the Kabul regime of Hamid Karzai. The head of its council is Karzai’s brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, who reputedly profits from the region’s major industry, the narcotics trade. But vast sections of the city and its suburbs are under the de facto control of the Taliban.

Unlike the recent attack on the rural area of Marjah, operations in Kandahar will take place in an urban area of some 2 million people. The scale of the forthcoming violence is indicated by the recent decisions by UN and relief organizations to abandon the city for the safety of their personnel.

Prior to the full-scale military assault, efforts are being made to cajole, threaten, and bribe the local elite. The US is ordering a series of “shura” councils, at which elders from Kandahar’s various districts and neighborhoods are being told that if they fail to eject the Taliban, they will face the American military.

These efforts are following a similar pattern as the Bush administration “surge” in Iraq. The alternative to cooperating with the Americans is assassination. In preparation for the invasion, US Special Forces have reportedly carried out extra-judicial killings of close to 70 locals accused of links to the Taliban, and have arrested a similar number.

This self-styled “political” campaign faces several glaring contradictions, most notably the fact that the local Pashtun political elite are closely tied to both Karzais. Like Ahmed Karzai, their wealth and influence rests largely on the narcotics trade. Moreover, both Hamid and Ahmed Karzai owe their positions to the US invasion and the phony democracy established in its wake. It is this final contradiction that Washington finds most galling.

In a demonstration of their contempt for their own charade of democracy in Afghanistan, US officials are openly contemplating the assassination of Ahmed Karzai, who was elected to his position in a US gun-barrel vote, as a recent Washington Post news article reports. Hamid Karzai reportedly defied an ultimatum from Obama to sideline his brother by providing him with an international post.

A senior US military official told the Post of a recent conversation with Ahmed Karzai in Kandahar. “I told him, ‘I’m going to be watching every step you take,’” the official said. “If I catch you meeting an insurgent, I’m going to put you on the JPEL. That means that I can capture or kill you.” JPEL stands for Joint Prioritized Engagement List. Those whose names appear on it have been slated for execution by the US.

The Post article expressed frustration, however, that such a fate appears unlikely for Ahmed Karzai, at least in the short term. “As an elected official, Karzai cannot simply be removed from office,” the Post concluded.

The physical removal of Hamid Karzai, whose pro forma denunciations of US military violence have aggravated the Obama administration, is also under consideration.

Over the past two days, Karzai has once again become the target of a full-scale US media campaign. In the wake of the killings in Gardez, Karzai has reported to have asked US and coalition forces to cease house searches and said that he would consider joining the Taliban if western heavy-handedness continued. All of the major US newspapers quickly responded with articles Monday focusing on growing “frustration” in the Obama administration with Karzai.

This is the second media campaign against Karzai in half a year. In the recent disputed and fraud-ridden elections of last year, it was frequently hinted that Karzai might have to be eliminated. This possibility is now being openly articulated, Karzai’s main offense this time his hollow criticism of US brutality.

“To some it may seem as if President Hamid Karzai has a death wish,” a Monday comment in Time magazine notes. “The Afghan leader has lately begun sticking it to the U.S. and its Western allies—the only force protecting him from a surging Taliban, which hanged the last foreign-backed President when it reached Kabul in 1996.”

Yet Karzai must also contend with the overwhelming hatred of the US and NATO presence. “The wily President knows that the presence of foreign forces in his country is deeply unpopular, particularly when civilians are killed in the course of NATO military operations,” according to Time. “Karzai, moreover, is humiliated and shown to be powerless when his protestations over such operations are ignored by his Western patrons.”

Time points out that Karzai’s career as president has depended on the US and its calculations for the country. “It’s worth remembering that Karzai was essentially parachuted into the country in the course of the U.S. invasion, tapped to lead a new post-Taliban government” backed largely by warlords and “all manner of unsavory characters” funded by the CIA, which transported “hundreds of millions of dollars in suitcases” to Kabul.

The opposition to the US occupation is ultimately rooted in its predatory character, which has done nothing to improve the living conditions for masses of Afghan workers and peasants. This basic reality was highlighted by last week’s UN release of startling new data on social conditions in the country.

According to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), fully 36 percent of Afghanistan’s population live in “absolute poverty,” and another 37 percent live only slightly above the official poverty threshold. Only a quarter of the population have access to safe drinking water.

“Poverty is neither accidental, nor inevitable; it is both a cause and a consequence of a massive human rights deficit,” OHCHR head Norah Niland said in Kabul on March 31.

The devastating effects of Obama’s surge are also reflected in a sharp increase in US and coalition casualties. At this time last year approximately 45 U.S. soldiers and 35 other NATO troops had been killed. So far in 2010, some 90 U.S. soldiers and 57 additional coalition deaths have been reported, almost twice the rate for 2009, the bloodiest year since the 2001 invasion.

The looming attack on Kandahar is being carried out in conjunction with stepped up drone attacks on the border provinces of North and South Waziristan in Pakistan. According to a report in the New York Times, 90 people have been killed in the attacks since January 1. The drones hover constantly overhead in the border regions and their CIA operators have become far less concerned over killing civilians close to alleged militants, striking fear into the entire civilian population, the Times boasts. These attacks, and Washington’s free admission that they kill civilians, constitute war crimes and are a violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty.

The drone attacks have only stirred bitter anger in the tribal regions and beyond, increasingly destabilizing the Pakistani government which consents to the killings. On Monday a series of apparently coordinated attacks killed at least 30 people in Northwest Pakistan. The most audacious was a sustained attack on the US consulate in Peshawar, during which six people were killed.

[LightCaster]

"Collateral Damage" - Spinning Away Murder in Iraq

Gordon Duff
Veterans Today
Wed, 07 Apr 2010 16:21 EDT

Excuses, explanations or conspiracy and misprision of a felony

Time for the "spin masters" to "pay the fiddler"

“MSNBC Panel discusses Wikileaks.org's "Collateral Murder" Video - Part 1”

http://www.youtube.com/verify_age?next_url=/watch%3Fv%3D5d3SHumK2UY%26feature%3Dplayer_embedded


MSNBC, in an excellent video, has put out both sides of the story on the 2007 "video game murder" in Iraq. The most telling aspect of this story isn't just that we now know our own Army leaked the video or that many others like it exist, it is the lengths we go to using "surrogates" to spin away murder. Years of lies droning on, filling the American airwaves have made senseless and fantasy based explanations for daily issues, be they war, health care or the presidents birth certificate subject to "conspiracy theory." What so many Americans have awakened to is that our real conspiracies are all formulated "at the top" where money and power seek to control public opinion thru disinformation. Now we are being told black is white on a video we can actually see. 

RPG 29, weapon said
to be inside camera bag

I wish to thank WikiLeaks and the people of the United States military who leaked this film along with those who support realistic reforms that this film demands. Taking a moment to put some reality into the spin, misinformation and attempts at a cover-up, we can get a few facts out.

1. This film was made during the height of the surge. The area filmed is called a "hot zone." This explanation, through omission, is a lie. The primary activity of the surge was not combat but rather the realignment of the armed militias in the region being filmed through cash payments. If the two armed security people with the Reuters group were militia members, they were most likely employees of the United States government receiving a $300 a month stipend. Journalists are in far more danger in these areas than any other group, including American troops. The number of journalists kidnapped and murdered is astounding. These journalists would have had security personnel with them in that neighborhood.

Thousands of armed militia, real militia with heavy weapons and uniforms, in this area of Baghdad were working for the US at this time. Assuming that these two lightly armed people with the unarmed group were not either security personnel, protecting the others from criminal gangs or paid militia working for the US is not based on the reality of the period and the location, is unrealistic. No permission to fire could have been made against this group, largely unarmed, and not a threat to anyone. Lying to interfere with an investigation or to hide a crime, whether done by a reporter or member of the military is a felony.

2. Statements that the Apache helicopter was subject to attack by this group are untrue. We have failed to reveal that the helicopter was, based on the optics and pattern of fire, nearly 1 mile away. The M789 ammunition which should have been used has an effective range, capable of piercing tank armor, of 4000 meters, approximately 3 miles. The rationale given for the attack, that the Apache Longbow helicopters that were out of visual range, using their extremely sophisticated optics were about to be attacked by advanced weaponry that of a size and type that only exists in science fiction, indicates a pattern of systematic deception between pilots and their controllers, deception meant to provide authorization for indiscriminate criminal activity.

American optics can read a car license plate from earth orbit. We can certainly tell a child in a car or a movie camera the size of a woman's purse from an RPG that is 6 feet long. Hitting a helicopter with a non-existent RPG hidden inside a camera bag, from a mile away, is utterly impossible. Also, hitting any target at long range with an AK-47, a weapon with a short range 7.62/39 cartridge is also impossible.

Namir Noor-Eldeen,
murdered journalist said to have
6 foot long RPG... nope, looks
like a camera to us

Future Weapons: Apache Longbow
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rw7V2pvwHZs&feature=player_embedded

3. Assuming that a group of men on the streets of a neighborhood filled with criminal gangs, gangs living on bribe money paid by Americans, gangs who make a living by kidnapping journalists and local citizens, who have an armed escort are "insurgents" is simply crazy. Iraqis living there are in far more danger than Americans and die by the dozens, sometimes hundreds, each week. It is still going on at even higher levels than then with no Americans operating in the areas at all. The same people walk the same streets with the same guns today, in exactly the same way. It is how they stay alive. In America, we would call it our 2nd Amendment right.

30mm canon shells used on reporters and van

4. The military and its "surrogates" have suggested the Apache was defending a nearby convoy from attacks from RPG 29s that they spotted inside the camera bags of the Reuters reporters. Above you can see a photograph of an RPG 29.

5. The military has released a number of unsupported claims, one being that a convoy was in the area. Imagine a maze of small streets, an almost infinite maze. Not only were there no troops anywhere near the site of the incident but, in fact, directing them to find the area took some time. The "convoy" was not only not going there, they didn't even know how to find "there" even with the help of an Apache Longbow helicopter with advanced geo-navigation systems.

6. Iraq is an Islamic Republic and subject to Islamic law. Islamic law requires all citizens to assist any sick or wounded person. Every American knows this and, frankly, many Americans have benefited from this. Any Muslim that stops to help another is performing a religious duty, an act of similar importance to prayer itself. Attacking a Muslim for aiding the sick or injured is a criminal act in any Islamic country and, frankly, should be everywhere. The Americans who directed the murderous attack on the unarmed people who stopped to help the single severely wounded man were attacked, not only in direct violation of American rules of engagement but Islamic law.

Reports from the military indicate that false reports of a firefight involving ground forces was part of the action. In such cases, commendations and medals are often awarded. What will a search of the military records of all involved reveal? Were any medals or commendations awarded based on inventing an incident to obscure criminal activity? What does this do to every American veteran and every decorated combat veteran if we find commendations were awarded for these "acts?"

8. As no statements on the "load-out" of the Apache Longbow helicopters involved has been made, is it possible that Depleted Uranium ammunition, now being cited by the Department of Veterans Affairs as cause for numerous illnesses suffered by Gulf War veterans, being used in this engagement?

Patterns of subterfuge and deception

The internet is flooded with hundreds of videos, perhaps even thousands, demonstrating the prowess of advanced weaponry being used in an urban environment or against "insurgent" targets. Systems such as the Apache Longbow, designed for use against massed enemy armoured divisions with massive cannons designed to obliterate enemy tanks and highly fortified positions, when used against sporadically armed irregular forces or unarmed civilians seems a misapplication of resources at minimum and, frankly, insanity when looked at carefully.

Typical fragmentation pattern
of Apache 30mm "anti-personnel" round
 (use of such weapons banned by the
Geneva Convention)

General Stanley McChrystal, recognizing that it was cheaper to hire insurgents at $300 per month than to use $5000 dollars worth of ammunition to kill one showed, not only amazing judgment but an appreciation for human life seldom seen in military leaders. Were the two armed personnel insurgents planning to attack an American convoy of Bradley fighting vehicles, using only two rifles and no extra ammunition or were these two security guards watching out for Reuters newsmen interviewing local leaders? Were the two armed men who were killed actually employed by the United States, as were others of their ilk in that neighborhood?

What of the unarmed people with them? Do insurgent groups typically only arm some and not all? Are weapons hard to get in Iraq? We all know better than this. What of the totally unarmed group? Were they actually killed for trying to help wounded, as the tape says? Do Americans pay millions to Boeing to build the Apache helicopter or thousands to General Dynamics to manufacture the ammunition, for such senselessness?

Do we spend millions training pilots for this kind of mission? Is there anything we could have done, spending so much money, misusing so many resources, to do as much damage to the reputation of the United States, the honor of her military forces and veterans and the security of our country?

[Xill]

Killings of Civilians in Afghanistan: US Special Forces Covered Up Massacre

Preparations advance for assault on Kandahar

by Tom Eley
Global Research,
April 8, 2010

A NATO military statement issued Sunday admitted that US Special Forces commandos carried out the execution-style killings of three women and two men in a February 12 night raid in southeastern Afghanistan. Among the dead women were two pregnant mothers, with 16 children between them. The third was a teenage girl. For weeks the US-led NATO officials had denied killing the women.

After the killings US Special Forces dug their bullets out of the dead women’s bodies and treated the holes with alcohol to erase forensic evidence, an Afghanistan government investigation has reportedly determined. A United Nations official confirmed that the Afghan investigation found evidence US soldiers had tampered with the crime scene. These reports are substantiated by family members and local authorities, who say US soldiers blocked access for seven hours to the home in Gardez, the regional capital of eastern Paktia province, while they attempted to cover up the crime.

The US-led coalition, while admitting for the first time that its forces killed the women, now contends that it did not attempt a cover-up. “All regrettable,” said Rear Adm. Greg Smith, the top military spokesman in Kabul, of the deaths. “That said, there is absolutely no evidence that the forces covered anything up.” This is a bald lie. In fact, all the available evidence shows there was a cover-up, and a crude one at that.

Soon after the raid, NATO acknowledged that US Special Forces had gunned down two brothers, described as the local police chief and the district prosecutor, in their home. NATO conceded the men were civilians, but claimed, without providing evidence, that they were carrying Kalashnikov rifles.

NATO however denied that US Special Forces had killed the three women, claiming instead, fantastically, that they had been bound, gagged, and stabbed to death more than half a day earlier. Yet only a few hours before the killings the family had concluded a celebration for the birth of a new child, with 25 guests and musicians present in the home.

“In what culture in the world do you invite … people for a party and meanwhile kill three women?” a senior Afghan official asked the Times of London. “The dead bodies were just eight metres from where they were preparing the food. The Americans, they told us the women were dead for 14 hours.”

The NATO statement released Sunday abandoned this earlier statement, concluding “that the women were accidentally killed as a result of the joint force firing at the men.” It did not bother to explain why the earlier false story had been planted and now retracted.

Separately, the German government of Angela Merkel apologized for the killing of six Afghan policemen on April 2. The German military, which operates in Afghanistan’s increasingly violent north, claims that the car carrying the men was obliterated by a German tank after it failed to stop on command. Three German soldiers had died earlier in the day in a gunfight with insurgents.

The episodes reveal the real nature of the occupation of Afghanistan, which has nothing to do with “defending” the local population or the US people against the Taliban or Al Qaeda. Its purpose is to assert US and NATO control over the strategically-crucial nation, the better to pursue Washington’s interests throughout resource-rich Central Asia and block rivals such as China and Russia. This imperialist agenda inevitably requires the terrorization of the population.

The spate of civilian killings offers a glimpse of the bloody violence President Barack Obama has unleashed on the suffering country through his “surge.” This will only intensify as the US makes preparations for a major military offensive against Afghanistan’s second most populous city, Kandahar, which Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, has called “the center of gravity” for anti-insurgent operations. The attack is slated for June.

Kandahar’s local government is ostensibly loyal to the Kabul regime of Hamid Karzai. The head of its council is Karzai’s brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, who reputedly profits from the region’s major industry, the narcotics trade. But vast sections of the city and its suburbs are under the de facto control of the Taliban.

Unlike the recent attack on the rural area of Marjah, operations in Kandahar will take place in an urban area of some 2 million people. The scale of the forthcoming violence is indicated by the recent decisions by UN and relief organizations to abandon the city for the safety of their personnel.

Prior to the full-scale military assault, efforts are being made to cajole, threaten, and bribe the local elite. The US is ordering a series of “shura” councils, at which elders from Kandahar’s various districts and neighborhoods are being told that if they fail to eject the Taliban, they will face the American military.

These efforts are following a similar pattern as the Bush administration “surge” in Iraq. The alternative to cooperating with the Americans is assassination. In preparation for the invasion, US Special Forces have reportedly carried out extra-judicial killings of close to 70 locals accused of links to the Taliban, and have arrested a similar number.

This self-styled “political” campaign faces several glaring contradictions, most notably the fact that the local Pashtun political elite are closely tied to both Karzais. Like Ahmed Karzai, their wealth and influence rests largely on the narcotics trade. Moreover, both Hamid and Ahmed Karzai owe their positions to the US invasion and the phony democracy established in its wake. It is this final contradiction that Washington finds most galling.

In a demonstration of their contempt for their own charade of democracy in Afghanistan, US officials are openly contemplating the assassination of Ahmed Karzai, who was elected to his position in a US gun-barrel vote, as a recent Washington Post news article reports. Hamid Karzai reportedly defied an ultimatum from Obama to sideline his brother by providing him with an international post.

A senior US military official told the Post of a recent conversation with Ahmed Karzai in Kandahar. “I told him, ‘I’m going to be watching every step you take,’” the official said. “If I catch you meeting an insurgent, I’m going to put you on the JPEL. That means that I can capture or kill you.” JPEL stands for Joint Prioritized Engagement List. Those whose names appear on it have been slated for execution by the US.

The Post article expressed frustration, however, that such a fate appears unlikely for Ahmed Karzai, at least in the short term. “As an elected official, Karzai cannot simply be removed from office,” the Post concluded.

The physical removal of Hamid Karzai, whose pro forma denunciations of US military violence have aggravated the Obama administration, is also under consideration.

Over the past two days, Karzai has once again become the target of a full-scale US media campaign. In the wake of the killings in Gardez, Karzai has reported to have asked US and coalition forces to cease house searches and said that he would consider joining the Taliban if western heavy-handedness continued. All of the major US newspapers quickly responded with articles Monday focusing on growing “frustration” in the Obama administration with Karzai.

This is the second media campaign against Karzai in half a year. In the recent disputed and fraud-ridden elections of last year, it was frequently hinted that Karzai might have to be eliminated. This possibility is now being openly articulated, Karzai’s main offense this time his hollow criticism of US brutality.

“To some it may seem as if President Hamid Karzai has a death wish,” a Monday comment in Time magazine notes. “The Afghan leader has lately begun sticking it to the U.S. and its Western allies—the only force protecting him from a surging Taliban, which hanged the last foreign-backed President when it reached Kabul in 1996.”

Yet Karzai must also contend with the overwhelming hatred of the US and NATO presence. “The wily President knows that the presence of foreign forces in his country is deeply unpopular, particularly when civilians are killed in the course of NATO military operations,” according to Time. “Karzai, moreover, is humiliated and shown to be powerless when his protestations over such operations are ignored by his Western patrons.”

Time points out that Karzai’s career as president has depended on the US and its calculations for the country. “It’s worth remembering that Karzai was essentially parachuted into the country in the course of the U.S. invasion, tapped to lead a new post-Taliban government” backed largely by warlords and “all manner of unsavory characters” funded by the CIA, which transported “hundreds of millions of dollars in suitcases” to Kabul.

The opposition to the US occupation is ultimately rooted in its predatory character, which has done nothing to improve the living conditions for masses of Afghan workers and peasants. This basic reality was highlighted by last week’s UN release of startling new data on social conditions in the country.

According to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), fully 36 percent of Afghanistan’s population live in “absolute poverty,” and another 37 percent live only slightly above the official poverty threshold. Only a quarter of the population have access to safe drinking water.

“Poverty is neither accidental, nor inevitable; it is both a cause and a consequence of a massive human rights deficit,” OHCHR head Norah Niland said in Kabul on March 31.

The devastating effects of Obama’s surge are also reflected in a sharp increase in US and coalition casualties. At this time last year approximately 45 U.S. soldiers and 35 other NATO troops had been killed. So far in 2010, some 90 U.S. soldiers and 57 additional coalition deaths have been reported, almost twice the rate for 2009, the bloodiest year since the 2001 invasion.

The looming attack on Kandahar is being carried out in conjunction with stepped up drone attacks on the border provinces of North and South Waziristan in Pakistan. According to a report in the New York Times, 90 people have been killed in the attacks since January 1. The drones hover constantly overhead in the border regions and their CIA operators have become far less concerned over killing civilians close to alleged militants, striking fear into the entire civilian population, the Times boasts. These attacks, and Washington’s free admission that they kill civilians, constitute war crimes and are a violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty.

The drone attacks have only stirred bitter anger in the tribal regions and beyond, increasingly destabilizing the Pakistani government which consents to the killings. On Monday a series of apparently coordinated attacks killed at least 30 people in Northwest Pakistan. The most audacious was a sustained attack on the US consulate in Peshawar, during which six people were killed.

Well, I think I'll have nightmares tonight.

[LightCaster]

Well, I think I'll have nightmares tonight.

Nightmares and vomiting, casual symptoms when you face the truth about every day horrors in occupied Iraq and Afghanistan. Over 1.300.000 victims in Iraq and over 100.000 in Afghanistan. And how about war veterans, and what they are bringing to home from there? That is a reality of that genocide/atrocities conducted over those "brown" people there. Like it was that one in Europe during WWII, remember? Nobody protected Jews until it was over. When will US stop with that ongoing crime against humanity? After 2 mil? 3 mil? 6 mil? And what we will do about it?

Thing that bothers me the most is that people in western culture doesn't want to be educated or informed, they wish to be entertained. They just don't care.

We Like War

Cause of this crimes done by those soldiers is spiritual sickness. Spiritual sickness can be described as an "material spirituality" or "money is a God". That kind of spirituality is pimping up the Ego, vanity, and brings decadence as an result. Moral, empathy, care for others, even love is distorted or completely erased from the mind of the material spiritualists. That kind of the state of the mind can be seen as shizoidal and pathological compulsive-impulsive need to ensure material security no matter what. That brings a feeling of "Power over the others", that imagined power can be transformed in an animal impulse that destroys anything that oppose to that power. In one moment that becomes a need for aggression and hunger for blood, as an pasion and perverted sexual satisfaction. It as an road or a path on the dark side. A material spirituality is completely opposite to any religion of the human kind and can be described, for example, as a Satanism, in the Christian way of understanding an spiritual opposition. Degradation of a human mind into a mind of the beast can be seen on some tapes, presented by Alex in his show, where you can see that soldiers are creating animal sound during a torture of the kids. It is a clear example of the devastation of the human mind caused by material spirituality, as it is described above.

Only God can stop this. And He will. American people doesn't have excuse for this. 90% of U.S. citysens are in compliance with wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and they are calmly watching this atrocities, holocaust, call it as you like. Next target of NWO-U.S.-Nazi monsters is Iran, and people will not react on that next crime against humanity. 90% will comply again. So, anything that God puts on U.S. as a punishment will be very well deserved. Americans have no right to complain to  God for it. They don't deserve that right any more.

[bigron]

LIGHTCASTER  !!

Great stuff...........Keep em coming !!

Thanks

[LightCaster]

LIGHTCASTER  !!

Great stuff...........Keep em coming !!

Thanks

Thank you bigron. You work here is amazing! I am reading your posts for over a year. I am proud to have you as a friend and combatant in this war. Truth must be told, we all need to spread it, until that truth like shining star overcome darkness around us.