My Two Cents: Is this a pick the biggest neocon douchenugget competition? End Two Cents.

Philip Zelikow, top adviser to Condoleezza Rice, talks to the Guardian about his top secret 2006 memo on interrogation

A senior Bush administration official and former head of the 9/11 Commission has described CIA interrogation techniques used on alleged terrorists as torture and said he warned in a secret memo at the height of the “war on terror” that they breached the US’s own war crimes laws.

Philip Zelikow, who was the US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice’s most senior official, told the Guardian that he now regards what officials euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation”, such as sleep deprivation and waterboarding, as torture – although he did not use that word at the time and is reluctant to use it now.

Zelikow, whose official position was counsellor to Rice, said he had her support on the issue. As the state department’s representative on the National Security Council committee considering legal issues around violent interrogations, he expressed his concerns at the time in a top secret 2006 memorandum.

The memo, to other members of the committee who represented the justice and defence departments and intelligence services, warned that the CIA’s use of waterboarding and other abuses were almost certainly in breach of US and international law. But the memo so alarmed the administration that it was immediately rejected and all copies were ordered destroyed.

A draft version of the memo, found at the state department, wasreleased this week following a freedom of information request by the National Security Archive in Washington.

Zelikow told the Guardian in an email exchange that while he did not use the word torture in the memo, he believes that is what the CIA was using. “I do regard the interrogation practices and conditions of confinement, taken together, as torture – in the ordinary layman’s use of this term. But … ‘torture’ is also a term with a carefully worded legal meaning and definition. So I tend to avoid talking about ‘torture’ because it would appear I’m accusing officials of criminal activity, which I’m not sure was the case,” he said.

“I have sometimes just referred to ‘physical torment’ instead, which seems expressive and is accurate.”

Zelikow said he is uncertain whether individuals in the CIA or other services are guilty of war crimes or have other criminal liability over the use of torture because they were told by the office of legal counsel, which provides legal advice to the president, that techniques such waterboarding, which causes the sensation of drowning, sleep deprivation and stress positions, were legal.

“For better or worse, but mainly better, to be a crime one must violate the law. To be an intentional crime … So the attorney general’s legal position telling officials their conduct is legal really did matter,” he said. “Had I been in the attorney general’s or OLC’s position in 2002, I would not have interpreted either the war crimes statute (as written then) or the torture statute in the way those officials interpreted them. But they made their choices and had the authority to make them.”

But he said he has little doubt that the methods were unacceptable. “I think what they did was wrong,” he said.

CONTINUEd at The Guardian.

*Taken from TPM. More photos at link.

The first images to come from the Libyan rebels’ ransacking of deposed leader Muammar Qaddafi’s compound in Tripoli were fun but fairly benign: fighters brandishing their spoils including his cherished cap, gold chain and a golf cart.

And in a 2007 interview with al-Jazeera,according to MSNBC, Qaddafi said of Rice: “I support my darling black African woman. I admire and am very proud of the way she leans back and gives orders to the Arab leaders … Leezza, Leezza, Leezza. … I love her very much. I admire her and I’m proud of her because she’s a black woman of African origin.”

CONTINUED..

*Taken from CNBC.

As Fourth of July celebrations get under way across the United States, London will hold its own tribute to America’s 40th President, Ronald Reagan, with the unveiling of a bronze statue outside the American embassy in Grosvenor Square.

Former president Reagan will stand alongside other celebrated US heads of state such as Franklin D. Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower and was considered important enough for Westminster City Council to break its rule specifying that ten years must pass after a subject’s death before they can be immortalized in statue form.

Former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will be in London for the unveiling of the memorial, along with British Foreign Secretary William Hague. Baroness Thatcher, Reagan’s closest foreign ally and one half of the ‘Special Relationship’ which came to epitomize the 1980s and contribute to the demise of the Cold War will probably be too frail to attend the ceremony celebrating the man she referred to as “the second most important man in my life.”

CONTINUED..

When people think about Homeland Security, they immediately think about 9/11, Al-Qaeda, the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, the terrorist attacks on American soil and George W. Bush. I think about tyranny, the police state and all the other bullshit people seem to adore more than freedom. The reality of the situation is that, although Bush and 9/11 were major factors in Homeland Security becoming a reality, this idea was not born from the Bush … Read More

via TheSwash.com

My Two Cents: I’ve been thinking this for a few weeks now and it certainly makes some damn sense. End Two Cents.

*Taken from VoltaireNet. Written by F. William Engdahl.

The story on the surface makes for a script for a new Oliver Stone Hollywood thriller. A 39-year old Australian hacker holds the President of the United States and his State Department hostage to a gigantic cyber “leak,” unless the President leaves Julian Assange and his Wikileaks free to release hundreds of thousands of pages of sensitive US Government memos. A closer look at the details, so far carefully leaked by the most ultra-establishment of international media such as the New York Times, reveals a clear agenda. That agenda coincidentally serves to buttress the agenda of US geopolitics around the world from Iran to Russia to North Korea. The Wikileaks is a big and dangerous US intelligence Con Job which will likely be used to police the Internet.

It is almost too perfectly-scripted to be true. A discontented 22-year old US Army soldier on duty in Baghdad, Bradley Manning, a low-grade US Army intelligence analyst, described as a loner, a gay in the military, a disgruntled “computer geek,” sifts through classified information at Forward Operating Base Hammer. He decides to secretly download US State Department email communications from the entire world over a period of eight months for hours a day, onto his blank CDs while pretending to be listening to Lady Gaga. In addition to diplomatic cables, Manning is believed to have provided WikiLeaks with helicopter gun camera video of an errant US attack in Baghdad on unarmed journalists, and with war logs from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Manning then is supposed to have tracked down a notorious former US computer hacker to get his 250,000 pages of classified US State Department cables out in the Internet for the whole world to see. He allegedly told the US hacker that the documents he had contained “incredible, awful things that belonged in the public domain and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington, DC.” The hacker turned him in to US authorities so the story goes. Manning is now incommunicado since months in US military confinement so we cannot ask him, conveniently. The Pentagon routinely hires the best hackers to design their security systems.

Then the plot thickens. The 250,000 pages end up at the desk of Julian Assange, the 39-year-old Australian founder of a supposedly anti-establishment website with the cute name Wikileaks. Assange decides to selectively choose several of the world’s most ultra-establishment news media to exclusively handle the leaking job for him as he seems to be on the run from Interpol, not for leaking classified information, but for allegedly having consensual sex with two Swedish women who later decided it was rape.

He selects as exclusive newspapers to decide what is to be leaked the New York Times which did such service in promoting faked propaganda against Saddam that led to the Iraqi war, the London Guardianand Der Spiegel. Assange claims he had no time to sift through so many pages so handed them to the trusted editors of the establishment media for them to decide what should be released. Very “anti-establishment” that. The New York Times even assigned one of its top people, David E. Sanger, to control the release of the Wikileaks material. Sanger is no establishment outsider. He sits as a member of the elite Council on Foreign Relations as well as the Aspen Institute Strategy Group together with the likes of Condi Rice, former Defense Secretary William Perry, former CIA head John Deutch, former State Department Deputy Secretary and now World Bank head Robert Zoellick among others.

Indeed a strange choice of media for a person who claims to be anti-establishment. But then Assange also says he believes the US Government version of 9/11 and calls the Bilderberg Group a normal meeting of people, a very establishment view.

Not so secret cables…

The latest sensational Wikileaks documents allegedly from the US State Department embassies around the world to Washington are definitely not as Hillary Clinton claimed “an attack on America’s foreign policy interests that have endangered innocent people.” And they do not amount to what the Italian foreign minister, called the “September 11 of world diplomacy.” The British government calls them a threat to national security and an aide to Canada’s Prime Minister calls on the CIA to assassinate Assange, as does kooky would-be US Presidential hopeful Sarah Palin.

Most important, the 250,000 cables are not “top secret” as we might have thought. Between two and three million US Government employees are cleared to see this level of “secret” document,[1] and some 500,000 people around the world have access to the Secret Internet Protocol Network (SIPRnet) where the cables were stored. Siprnet is not recommended for distribution of top-secret information. Only 6% or 15,000 pages of the documents have been classified as even secret, a level below top-secret. Another 40% were the lowest level, “confidential”, while the rest were unclassified. In brief, it was not all that secret.[2]

Most of the revelations so far have been unspectacular. In Germany the revelations led to the removal of a prominent young FDP politician close to Guido Westerwelle who apparently liked to talk too much to his counterpart at the US Embassy. The revelations about Russian politics, that a US Embassy official refers to Putin and Medvedev as “Batman and Robin,” tells more about the cultural level of current US State Department personnel than it does about internal Russian politics.

But for anyone who has studied the craft of intelligence and of disinformation, a clear pattern emerges in the Wikileaks drama. The focus is put on select US geopolitical targets, appearing as Hillary Clinton put it “to justify US sanctions against Iran.” They claim North Korea with China’s granting of free passage to Korean ships despite US State Department pleas, send dangerous missiles to Iran. Saudi Arabia’s ailing King Abdullah reportedly called Iran’s President a Hitler.

Excuse to police the Internet?

What is emerging from all the sound and Wikileaks fury in Washington is that the entire scandal is serving to advance a long-standing Obama and Bush agenda of policing the until-now free Internet. Already the US Government has shut the Wikileaks server in the United States though no identifiable US law has been broken.

The process of policing the Web was well underway before the current leaks scandal. In 2009 Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller and Republican Olympia Snowe introduced the Cybersecurity Act of 2009 (S.773). It would give the President unlimited power to disconnect private-sector computers from the internet. The bill “would allow the president to ‘declare a cyber-security emergency’ relating to ‘non-governmental’ computer networks and do what’s necessary to respond to the threat.” We can expect that now this controversial piece of legislation will get top priority when a new Republican House and the Senate convene in January.

The US Department of Homeland Security, an agency created in the political hysteria following 9/11 2001 that has been compared to the Gestapo, has already begun policing the Internet. They are quietly seizing and shutting down internet websites (web domains) without due process or a proper trial. DHS simply seizes web domains that it wants to and posts an ominous “Department of Justice” logo on the web site. See an example at http://torrent-finder.com. Over 75 websites were seized and shut in a recent week. Right now, their focus is websites that they claim “violate copyrights,” yet the torrent-finder.com website that was seized by DHS contained no copyrighted content whatsoever. It was merely a search engine website that linked to destinations where people could access copyrighted content. Step by careful step freedom of speech can be taken away. Then what?

My Two Cents: I found this interesting. End Two Cents.

*Taken from The Excavator. Written by Saman Mohammadi

The United States government has repeatedly stated that the treat from Al-Qaeda against America is very real, and that all action is being taken to eliminate that threat. Nobody in their right mind would question such a serious assessment about a sensitive national security matter from the world’s leading democracy. But the truth is that over the past fifty years America’s democratic institutions like the press have been weakened, and an elitist National Security State has risen, and taken control over all aspects of government.

Since World War II U.S. leaders have consistently lied to the American people about foreign threats in order to feed the military machine’s appetite for war. All of these wars are unjust and unwarranted but that does not stop the self-interested criminals who control U.S. foreign policy. A recent example of a lie they told was their assertion that Saddam Hussein was in possession of weapons of mass destruction. That episode revealed to many people the true nature of the American government. Simply put, it does not care about the truth, or the American people, or the members of the military. U.S. leaders like former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and current Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, to name but a few, tell lies at will. Dishonesty means nothing to them. They deceive the American people, the American military, and the world about their motives and methods – and they lie to themselves about their own powers and abilities.

Next to the hundreds of thousands of innocent people who were slaughtered by the American war machine in its numerous criminal wars, U.S. soldiers have suffered the most – way more than the rest of the population in America. It can’t be said enough that the U.S. government’s treatment of its soldiers is scandalous and shameful. It is so out of whack that in America today dogs are treated better than military vets. Some dogs are even treated to luxurious spas while military vets are denied the proper health care that they deserve. Instead, they’re left to rot, and commit suicide. And for what? To defend America? To defeat Al-Qaeda? Or to keep the war machine and its benefactors rich and powerful? As you will see by the end of this post, it is the latter.

I. Setting The Historical Scene: The United States Government And The American Mainstream Media Are Anti-Democracy, Anti-Freedom, Anti-Peace

“All governments lie.” said American journalist I. F. Stone. You can add to that great quote “and all newspapers lie, too.”

By joining forces together, the CIA and American newspapers sold two criminal wars to the people – a manufactured and destructive “War on Terror,” and the Iraq war. Most journalists were not consciously part of the propaganda campaign, they just bought the hype, but, without a doubt, a lot of journalists who work for the CIA knowingly injected false information into their columns and helped spread nationalist fever across America to boost public support for the wars.

Government spies posing as independent journalists is one of the CIA’s least kept secrets. Former CIA director William Colby famously said “The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media.” Carl Bernstein revealed the relationship between the CIA and the media in his 1977 Rolling Stone article “The CIA and the Media.” An excerpt:

“Some of these journalists’ relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit. There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services — from simple intelligence gathering to serving as go-betweens with spies in Communist countries. Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters who considered themselves ambassadors-without-portfolio for their country. Most were less exalted: foreign correspondents who found that their association with the Agency helped their work; stringers and freelancers who were as interested it the derring-do of the spy business as in filing articles, and, the smallest category, full-time CIA employees masquerading as journalists abroad. In many instances, CIA documents show, journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements America’s leading news organizations.”

The media’s relationship with the CIA began well before the Vietnam war, but it was after that disastrous war ended when the Pentagon and the CIA took their clandestine media operations to another level. They wanted to completely gut the free press in America, which contributed to the anti-war sentiment in the late 60s and early 70s. Government officials secretly established deep ties to journalists to make sure that the American people would be less informed about America’s foreign policy, and future conflicts, and hence, less combative against the government and less anti-war.

The Pentagon has been interested in information warfare for many decades, and the fruits of their studies are applied to the American people, and to foreign enemies. “PSYOP,” shorthand for “Psychological Operations,” is a propaganda and disinformation Pentagon program that is used in the foreign battlefield to break the will of enemy forces, and make the ensuing battle a little less bloody. It worked wonderfully in the Gulf war. Retired Col. Jim Noll said that PSYOPs was a life-saving military technique. From a 2001 article called “Persian Gulf War 10 years later: Winning the war by convincing the enemy to go home” by Al Zdon:

“The psychological warfare in the end saved many lives, on both sides. “I know many American lives were saved because so many Iraqis had deserted or chose not to fight when we arrived. Many of them were holding up our leaflets to surrender with.”

The leaflets were based on the intelligence the Psyops battalion had gained from prisoners. Some showed large bombers dropping their payloads. Others showed tank units how to surrender. Others showed Americans landing from the sea (a military ploy to divert Iraqi defenses. The U.S. never did land from the sea.) Others were printed on fake Iraqi money so the soldiers could conceal them in their wallets.”

Wired magazine reported in June that the Pentagon may change the name PSYOP to Military Information Support and/to Operations (MISO). I wrote an article about the proposed name change back in July called “MISO: Making Intelligence Sound Obscure.”

The threat by PSYOPS to democracy, and freedom in America cannot be overstated. It is a fact that the Pentagon and the CIA routinely use PSYOPS against the American people to make them support illegal and unnecessary wars. Indeed, it is not a stretch to say that today the United States is a PSYOPS state, not a democratic state.

It should concern all Americans, and all citizens around the world that the CIA and Pentagon are using psychological military techniques inside the United States against the American people. The CIA was created to keep tabs on foreign enemies, not the American people. Former Governor Jesse Ventura has confirmed that the CIA is working within America’s borders a number of times in his many television interviews. He says that a cadre of CIA officials questioned him shortly after he won the election in Minnesota as an independent candidate about how he won. Ventura guesses that the CIA questioned him because they were surprised that a political maverick like him succeeded and wanted to know his political strategy in order to prevent a similar candidate from advancing to such a high political position in the future.

Former President Harry Truman criticized the CIA for intervening in domestic affairs in a Washington Post op-ed in 1963: “For some time I have been disturbed by the way the CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the government…. I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations.”

Philip Agee, who served in the CIA from 1957 to 1968, left the Agency because it failed to uphold the beliefs and values of the American people. He remained a leading critic of CIA policies until his death on January 7, 2008. In his 1975 book “Inside the Company: CIA Diary,” Agee warned that the murderous methods used by the CIA and the American empire in foreign lands would be used against the American people. “The killings at Kent State and Jackson State,” he wrote, “show clearly enough that sooner or later our counter-insurgency methods would be applied at home.” The rise of FEMA, TSA, and the overall police state proves that Agee’s prediction was accurate. In fact, the threat of martial law is so severe that it can be declared by the White House in the very near future.

II. Flashback: The Threat From Iraq Was Not Real

Knowing the truth matters in a democracy because without the truth citizens can’t make informed decisions about government policies that impact their lives. It is not possible to consciously answer fundamental societal questions like “should we go to war?” without a firm grasp of all the facts at hand. When independent journalists fail to provide the simple and straightforward facts to the public, they become complicit in government murder and fraud, and deserve even more ridicule than dishonest government officials and government-owned journalists.

Had the truth emerged that Saddam Hussein was not in possession of weapons of mass destruction before America invaded Iraq in March of 2003, there would not have been any public support for the war. True, hundreds of thousands of people around the world protested the invasion of Iraq before it was launched, but many people didn’t because they believed the lie that Saddam was a dangerous threat and would use WMDs against America if he wasn’t taken out. Leaders in the Bush administration used the oldest trick in the book of war to get the people to support a war that was not in their interest: they created a justification. Basically, they lied.

Since a government’s justification for war, whether real or contrived, carries weight with a significant amount of people because they accept the word of authority over science and critical thinking, it is crucial to know, especially in societies based on the consent of the people, if a justification given by the government for war is true, or false. In the case of Iraq, as we now know, it was false.

It is a tragedy that the world did not learn the fact that Saddam did not have weapons of mass destruction a lot sooner. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people died in Iraq who could have lived a long and fulfilling life, and the country itself was destroyed in a deliberate and systematic fashion. Dirk Adriaensens, a member of the Executive Committee of the BRussells Tribunal, which is a group that was part of the World Tribunal on Iraq, describes exactly how Iraq was demolished by the sick and murderous U.S. and U.K. governments in his article “Iraq: The Age of Darkness.”

Leaders in the Bush administration knew all along that Saddam did not have WMDs and was not a threat, but they wanted to go to war so bad that they made stuff up and presented it as the truth to the whole world. Ellen Knickmeyer, a former Washington Post bureau chief in Baghdad and Cairo, said this much and more in an article she wrote in October after WikiLeaks published hundreds of thousands of Iraq war logs. ”Recent revelations by WikiLeaks,” Knickmeyer said, “show how top American leaders lied, knowingly, to the American public, to American troops, and to the world.”

Some defenders of the Iraq war insist that it was noble and good because a tyrant was removed from power. This is a poisonous and dangerous half-truth. Indeed, it is true that Saddam was a vicious tyrant, and a godforsaken man, but his removal from power didn’t require a huge ground invasion and subsequent military occupation since he had no real support from his people and military. But that’s beside the point because removing tyrants from power is not an objective of U.S. foreign policy. And it should not be. Tyrants are always removed from below, never from above.

If American leaders truly cared about the rule of law and democracy in Iraq they would have presented their case to the United Nations that Saddam was a war criminal for gassing the Kurds, which would have been met with agreement, and from there a variety of peaceful and legal means would have been recommended by the international community to bring Saddam to justice. If he then resisted international arrest, there would be a legal justification for using force to capture him and bring him to trial. But that course was not taken by American leaders because justice was only on their lips, not on their minds. American leaders and the CIA, unfortunately, are destroyers – not defenders – of democracy and the rule of a law. The same is true for Israeli leaders and Mossad. They are counterfeiters and war criminals who deserve to be hanged, not defended and praised.

Noam Chomsky said on Democracy Now last week that the political leadership in both the United States and Israel share a “profound hatred for democracy.” This statement gets at the truth of the current political reality in Washington and Tel Aviv, but U.S. and Israeli don’t just hate democracy, they also hate the American people, humanity, truth, honor, peace, and all that is good and righteous in the world.

Just as Iraq was destroyed by design by U.S. leaders, America is being destroyed by design by U.S. leaders. The American people are coming to this realization reluctantly, but they’re coming to it at last. They are beginning to discover that their country is in ruins not by accident but from other causes, namely, that their top leaders are traitors who desire the destruction of America and the advancement of a new world order in which their illegally acquired power and wealth grows evermore.

Both Herodotus and Socrates said “The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance.” Knowledge of the cause for war brings good into the world, ignorance of the causes of war brings evil into the world. Despite what we have been taught, war is not natural. War exists when ruling before the Second World War began, and when it ended, after millions of people died, historian Howard Zinn learned the same truth the hard way and then taught it to people for decades, up to the start of the Iraq war. In 2006 he wrote, “war itself is the enemy of the human race.”

To defeat war, humanity’s collective enemy, we must learn the truth for why there is war in our time. When asked why America is at war American leaders always point to the attacks on September 11, 2001, but the official account of what happened on that day is not true. New scientific evidence gathered by a collection of physicists, scientists, architects, and engineers, among them Steven E. Jones, Niels Harrit, and Richard Gage, proves unequivocally that the towers, including the rarely mentioned building 7, collapsed due to controlled demolition using explosives.

American leaders told one of the greatest lies in human history when they said that Al-Qaeda was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. That lie spawned an immediate and criminal invasion of Afghanistan, and a much larger, and more consequential global war on terrorism that is still being waged in numerous countries more than nine years after the attacks. Former President George W. Bush also used the 9/11 lie to paint Saddam Hussein as a supporter of terrorism. In his State of the Union Address on January 28, 2003, Bush said: “Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications and statements by people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of Al Qaida.” This statement later was proven to be a complete lie. Saddam had no connections to Al-Qaeda.

President Barack Obama has frequently relied on the 9/11 lie to support his administration’s war in Afghanistan. After the Christmas Day airliner bombing attempt last December, which also remains a dubious eventbecause the bomber was boarded onto the plane with help from an unmentioned person who is presumed to be an intelligence official, Obamasaid: “We are at war against al Qaeda, a far-reaching network of violence and hatred that attacked us on 9/11, that killed nearly 3,000 innocent people and that is plotting to strike us again. And we will do whatever it takes to defeat them.”

Obama was blatantly lying when he said that Al-Qaeda is a “far-reaching network of violence and hatred.” Once you research the origins of Al-Qaeda, which in Arabic simply means “the base,” you can’t help but view American leaders like Bush and Obama as devilish tricksters who are trying to pull the wool over our eyes.

III. 11 Reasons Why The Threat From Al-Qaeda is Not Real

Al-Qaeda is either one of these things, or it is a combination of them: a) a completely fake threat; the organization does not exist, b) an organization that exists in small numbers but was created by the CIA to serve a corrupt U.S. foreign policy, and remains a U.S. intelligence asset in the manufactured global war on terrorism, or c) a small organization that exists independently of the U.S. government but its strength and influence in the Middle East is exaggerated by radical policymakers and officials in Washington. Out of all three statements the first and second deserve the most serious attention because they are supported by the evidence listed below.

#1. Radical American cleric Anwar Al-Awlaki, who was ordered to beassassinated by President Obama, met with top military officials at the Pentagon months after the 9/11 attacks. Were Pentagon officials sincerely interested in reaching out to members of the Muslim community, or were they recruiting radical Muslim clerics to spread the message of radical Islam in order to validate and sustain the Bush administration’s war on terror? It is not outrageous or crazy to raise the question if the U.S. government aims to inflame radical Islam, even by funding and supporting undercover intelligence agents that front as terrorists, in order to make the American people perceive that they are in danger of violent Islamic extremism, and cause them to give up their liberties for permanent security.

An alarming piece of news is that follows an undeniable pattern of government-induced terrorist activity is of an FBI informant, Craig Monteilh, who infiltrated a Mosque in California, and shouted violent rhetoric with the intention to entrap potential terrorists, and then sell it to the public that “Hey, the FBI arrested someone at a Mosque who wanted to blow a building up,” without mentioning the fact that the FBI agent was the one who got the ball rolling in the first place. In this case, however, the government’s plan to attract and create terrorists didn’t work. The Washington Post reported: “In the Irvine case, Monteilh’s mission as an informant backfired. Muslims were so alarmed by his talk of violent jihad that they obtained a restraining order against him.”

#2. CIA Director Leon Panetta revealed in June 2010 on ABC’s This Week that there are less than 100 Al-Qaeda members in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. “I think the estimate on the number of Al Qaeda,” said Panetta, “is actually relatively small. At most, we’re looking at 50 to 100, maybe less. It’s in that vicinity.” By contrast, there are more than 100,000 American soldiers and military contractors in the region. You can’t call it a fair fight. You can’t even say “it’s not a fair fight,” because, in reality, it is not a fight at all. It is not a fight. 50,000 Al-Qaeda members would make it a fight. It still wouldn’t be a fair fight, but it would be a fight.

#3. The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), one of the world’s leading security think tanks, published a report this year which said that the threat of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban is exaggerated by Western policymakers. The report warned that the war in Afghanistan will become a “long, drawn-out disaster” if troops are not withdrawn. Nigel Inkster, a former deputy chief of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service who is a member of the think tank, also said that the threat from Al-Qaeda in Pakistan is minimal, and almost absent in Yemen, and Somalia.

Commenting on the report by the IISS, journalist and author Eric Margolissaid:

“The IISS’s findings are a direct challenge to Obama, Britain’s new prime minister, David Cameron, and other US allies with troops in Afghanistan. This report undermines their rational used to sustain the increasingly unpopular conflict. It will certainly convince sceptics that the real reason for occupation of Afghanistan has to do with oil, excluding China from the region, and keeping watch on nuclear-armed Pakistan.”

#4. Former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in an interview to the Los Angeles Times’s Patt Morrison in October 2010 that Al-Qaeda doesn’t exist. “The organization that did 9/11 — that Al Qaeda — I don’t think really exists,” said Rice. The statement is shocking, to say the least, and contradicts the official 9/11 story which is built on the premise that Al-Qaeda, regarded as an Islamic terrorist group by the United States, England, Canada, Israel,Saudi Arabia and many other governments, was large and sophisticated enough to plan and execute the biggest terrorist attack in the United States. Apparently, Rice doesn’t agree with President Obama that Al-Qaeda is a “far-reaching network of violence.”

#5. The U.S. government created, and funded Islamic fundamentalism in the 1980s to be used to draw the Soviet Union into Afghanistan, and bleed it to death in a costly and unwinnable war. This was no doubt a smart move when you have a strategic hat on, when you are sitting comfortably on the seat of power, but when you are confronting issues of peace and war, life and death, coexistence and annihilation, on a very small planet, it was a very cynical and dangerous error. Zbigniew Brzezinski, who is considered a realist in foreign policy circles and a critic of Israel, was one of the leaders behind the operation as President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor. In an interview he gave to a weekly French magazine called “Le Nouvel Observateur” in January 1998 he discussed how and why the U.S. funded Muslim terrorists (or freedom fighters, depending on your outlook). Excerpt from the interview:

Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn’t believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don’t regret anything today?

Brzezinski: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the break-up of the Soviet empire.

The fact that America trained and funded a terrorist network in Central Asia less than two decades before the September 11, 2001 attacks is a relevant historical fact. It raises the strong possibility that after the Soviet Union collapsed the CIA used their terrorist network to promote U.S. foreign policy by covert means, including in the United States on September 11, 2001.

#6. Robin Cook, who served as a British MP for 22 years and as Foreign Secretary from 1997 to 2001, wrote an article for the Guardian in July 2005, a month before his death, called “The struggle against terrorism cannot be won by military means.” Throughout the article Cook makes many devastating critiques of the West’s war on terror, but here is a quote that requires our greatest attention:

“Bin Laden was, though, a product of a monumental miscalculation by western security agencies. Throughout the 80s he was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. Al-Qaida, literally “the database”, was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians.”

Cook’s analysis is dead on in certain respects, but, like others, including author Chalmers Johnson (RIP), he made the mistake of contextualizing terrorism against the West as the result of a blowback against American foreign policy that is orchestrated chiefly by a mad and independent Osama Bin Laden and his hardcore followers. In reality, the problem of terrorism originates directly from within Western governments, mainly the United States, England, and Israel – governments that are not democratic, but authoritarian, and rely on secrecy, misinformation, and deception to promote policies that enrich a few well-connected individuals who are powerful and immoral enough to negatively influence government legislation and government policy.

#7. A BBC article from July 2004 called “Al-Qaeda’s origins and links” reveals that Osama Bin Laden was a CIA agent in the 1980s. The article states: “During the anti-Soviet jihad Bin Laden and his fighters received American and Saudi funding. Some analysts believe Bin Laden himself had security training from the CIA.” It is highly possible that Osama Bin Laden was still an agent of the CIA on September 11, 2001. As they say of the CIA, once a member, always a member.

#8. J. Michael Springmann, a 20 year foreign service official, and a former Consulate officer in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, has publicly stated for many years that the CIA brought over Muslim radicals to the United States for secret terrorist training. Most of these radicals were brought through Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where Springman was stationed from 1987 to 1989 before he was let go by the State Department because he raised questions about the weakly enforced VISA qualification process.

In an interview with Alex Jones in May 2002 Springmann pointed out that 15 of the 19 hijackers in the 9/11 attacks entered the United States after CIA officials in Jeddah approved their visas. “According to the Los Angeles Times,” said Springmann, “fifteen of the nineteen people, the Saudis who were allegedly responsible for flying planes into the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon, they got their visas from the Consulate at Jeddah.”

In an article written in February of 2003 called “Policing the Borders: Old Fears, New Realities” Springmann wrote about how U.S. foreign policy works, and to what ends:

“What very few Americans understand is the pathological Cold War mindset of those who have shaped U.S. foreign policy since the middle of the last century. It is a worldview with little interest in “security” per se. For those who exercise ultimate power, success is measured by the bottom lines on certain corporate quarterly reports. These numbers represent transcendent ends which have justified and continue to justify any and every means imaginable, from rubber-stamping illegitimate visa applications to full scale massacre.”

Click here to read the transcript of Alex Jones’s interview with Springmann in May 2002; click here to listen to Alex Jones’s interview with Springmann in February 2010. Both interviews are very revealing, and should be required listening/reading for everyone.

#9. Germany’s Der Spiegel’s published an article by Siegesmund von Ilsemann called “Arming the Middle East: The Checkered History of American Weapons Deals” in June 2007. The article backed up the reporting done by the BBC, and elsewhere that the United States government “supplied Afghan freedom fighters in the 1980s with money and arms for their struggle against occupying Soviet troops. One of the best customers for the CIA back then was Saudi millionaire Osama Bin Laden.” This account is only half-true. The CIA funded and trained a network of Muslim fighters not to liberate Afghanistan from corrupt Soviet influence, but to create havoc and instigate a Soviet invasion so that it would drain itself of blood and treasure. Once the objective of bringing down the Soviet Union was achieved, the stage was set for the United States and the West to invade Afghanistan and take advantage of the country’s vast resources, from oil to heroin.

#10. Selig Harrison, a current member of the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars, a former senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and an expert on South Asia, said in March 2001 at a conference called “Terrorism and Regional Security: Managing the Challenges in Asia,” that the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI helped create the backward and tyrannical Taliban. “The CIA made a historic mistake in encouraging Islamic groups from all over the world to come to Afghanistan,” said Harrison, a quote that appears in an article in the Times of India from March 2001. According to Harrison, without the CIA and ISI’s funds and guns, the Taliban wouldn’t exist as a political and religious force in Afghanistan. An excerpt from the Times of India article:

The old associations between the intelligence agencies continue, Harrison said. “The CIA still has close links with the ISI (Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence).”

Today that money and those weapons have helped build up the Taliban, Harrison said. “The Taliban are not just recruits from ‘madrassas’ (Muslim theological schools) but are on the payroll of the ISI (Inter Services Intelligence, the intelligence wing of the Pakistani government).” The Taliban are now “making a living out of terrorism.”

Harrison said the UN Security Council resolution number 1333 calls for an embargo on arms to the Taliban. “But it is a resolution without teeth because it does not provide sanctions for non-compliance,” he said. “The US is not backing the Russians who want to give more teeth to the resolution.”

Now it is Pakistan that “holds the key to the future of Afghanistan,” Harrison said. The creation of the Taliban was central to Pakistan’s “pan-Islamic vision,” Harrison said.

It came after “the CIA made the historic mistake of encouraging Islamic groups from all over the world to come to Afghanistan,” he said. The creation of the Taliban had been “actively encouraged by the ISI and the CIA,” he said. “Pakistan has been building up Afghan collaborators who will sustain Pakistan,” he said.

#11. The September 11, 2001 attacks, which serve as the basis for America’s wars in the Middle East, were committed by the United States government with assistance from the government of Israel. This is an indisputable fact. Here is a list of three points that proves without a shadow of a doubt that the official 9/11 story is false, and indefensible:

* American physicist Steven E. Jones, Danish chemist Niels Harrit, and others wrote a peer-reviewed paper in 2009 called “Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe,” that was published in The Open Chemical Physics Journal. The authors discovered nano-thermite in samples of the WTC dust, a highly advanced explosive that is made by a small number of companies. Theywrote:

“As measured using DSC, the material ignites and reacts vigorously at a temperature of approximately 430 °C, with a rather narrow exotherm, matching fairly closely an independent observation on a known super-thermite sample. The low temperature of ignition and the presence of iron oxide grains less than 120 nm show that the material is not conventional thermite (which ignites at temperatures above 900 °C) but very likely a form of super-thermite.”

* The vertical collapse of Building Se7en, a building that was not struck by a plane. Steel buildings have never collapsed before because of fire alone. Common sense suggests that explosives were used to bring the building down, which rules out involvement by radical Muslims because officer workers would have noticed their activity in the building prior to 9/11.

* Firefighters said they witnessed and heard loud back-to-back explosions coming from the Towers. In this video clip, a couple of firefighters recount what they saw. One of them says, “It was as if they had detonated. . . as if they were planning to take down a building: boom boom boom boom boom.”

There are so many more points, and so many more smoking guns, but it does not get any more obvious, any more in-your-face than hearing firefighters say that they heard bombs going off. All honest individuals must rethink their position on the 9/11 attacks after taking a look at the collapse of building 7, and watching firefighters say that they heard explosions. You don’t have to be an expert to see the obvious. You don’t even have to be smart. You just have to be honest and unafraid.

IV. Ending The Perpetual War on Terror And The Not So Great Game

Now that we know the threat from Al-Qaeda is not real, we must pressure our Western governments to end the global war on terrorism, and bring home all the troops from Afghanistan, Iraq, and everywhere else in the Middle East. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are unjust, unnecessary, and destructive to global peace, global harmony, and global stability. The U.S. and UK governments are not waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan to establish free and open democracies but to fulfill criminal goals, and emerge victorious in the 21st century’s “Great Game.”

The West’s war on terror is all about the Great Game, not defeating “Al-Qaeda” or Islamic extremists. A small proof that this is true comes fromPrince Andrew’s own words. In one of the diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks, Andrew says:

Addressing the Ambassador directly, Prince Andrew then turned to regional politics. He stated baldly that “the United Kingdom, Western Europe (and by extension you Americans too”) were now back in the thick of playing the Great Game. More animated than ever, he stated cockily: “And this time we aim to win!”

Such arrogance reflects anti-human and anti-freedom beliefs, which are shared by many members of the elite in the United States, England, and Europe, who desire war and conflict over peace and brotherhood. Members of the Western political elite have the hearts of monsters. They are more interested in winning a geopolitical game that causes death and mass destruction than in uplifting humanity, and making the world a better place for all people.

U.S. and U.K. policymakers cynically fund and assist radical Muslims, and sometimes stage terrorist attacks that are blamed on radical Muslims, to maintain the public perception in the Western world that there are thousands of nasty terrorists who wish them harm. But this is not true. And it is a dangerous perception that must be erased. As Professor Michel Chossudovsky writes in his 2008 article “Al Qaeda and the “War on Terrorism”:

“U.S. foreign policy is not geared towards curbing the tide of Islamic fundamentalism. In fact, it is quite the opposite. The significant development of “radical Islam”, in the wake of the Cold War in the former Soviet Union and the Middle East is consistent with Washington’s hidden agenda. The latter consists in sustaining rather than combating international terrorism, with a view to destabilizing national societies and preventing the articulation of genuine secular social movements directed against the American Empire.

Washington continues to support — through CIA covert operations — the development of Islamic fundamentalism, throughout the Middle East, in the former Soviet Union as well in China and India.

Throughout the developing world, the growth of sectarian, fundamentalist and other such organizations tends to serve U.S. interests. These various organizations and armed insurgents have been developed, particularly in countries where state institutions have collapsed under the brunt of the IMF-sponsored economic reforms.

These fundamentalist organizations contribute by destroying and displacing secular institutions.

Islamic fundamentalism creates social and ethnic divisions. It undermines the capacity of people to organize against the American Empire. These organizations or movements, such as the Taliban, often foment “opposition to Uncle Sam” in a way which does not constitute any real threat to America’s broader geopolitical and economic interests.”

We must speak the full truth about the origins of the war on terror if we want to end it. Journalists need to publicize the historical facts about U.S. support for terrorism, and report the truth about the September 11, 2001 attacks. We can’t let the truth about government-staged terrorism be trapped in the black hole of history. There will be change once we speak the full truth passionately and demand justice. The old tyrants will vanish under a new sun.

A different world is possible. A world with universal and permanent peace on Earth is not a Utopian dream. There are no reasons for conflict in the world today. The threat of “terrorism” is a manufactured threat. Al-Qaeda doesn’t exist. And 9/11 is a big lie. In sum, the War on Terror is totally illegitimate and criminal. The governments of United States, England, Canada, Australia, and Israel represent the only obstacle to peace in the Middle East. Their leaders have committed crimes against humanity, and must be brought to justice.

“A war on world poverty may well do more for the security of the west than a war on terror,” said U.K. MP Robin Cook in 2005. He was right, and then some. But it is not enough to be right. We must win. We must put an end to the War on Terror and the Great Game. We must restart the global anti-war movement, and this time we must expose the lie about 9/11 because victory against the war criminals is impossible without a firm foothold on the ground of truth.

When people think about Homeland Security, they immediately think about 9/11, Al-Qaeda, the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, the terrorist attacks on American soil and George W. Bush. I think about tyranny, the police state and all the other bullshit people seem to adore more than freedom. The reality of the situation is that, although Bush and 9/11 were major factors in Homeland Security becoming a reality, this idea was not born from the Bush Administration. In fact, the Bush Administration opposed the idea of Homeland Security, until the events of September 11th, 2001 forced them to reanalyze their stance. The truth is, the idea for Homeland Security came from the Clinton Administration and Senator Joe Lieberman in 1998. Being born out of the Clinton era is what caused 2 Bush 2 Furious to blow off the whole damn idea. I wish Dubya would’ve stuck to that stance but then again he was a pro big government liberal-conservative and the epitome of the left-right paradigm.

This all “officially” started in 1998 with a report created by the United States Commission on National Security/21st Century simply called “Road Map for National Security: Imperative for Change”. Change you say? The report called for the implementation of a “homeland security force”. After 9/11 and several times thereafter, the Bush Administration added and modified the Commission to fit what they deemed necessary for “national security” purposes. The Commission was significantly influenced by the Council on Foreign Relations: a semi-secret private organization of which Bush II: Bush Harder’s father was a prominent member. With strict membership standards, the Council on Foreign Relations, or CFR,  was created in 1921 and was known at that time as the Rockefeller Council on Foreign Relations. Stick that in your conspiracy pipe and smoke it. My favorite flavor of pipe tobacco is the Bilderberg Burly Balkan blend.

According to the CFR themselves about themselves:

“If the Council as a body has stood for anything these 75 years, it has been for American internationalism based on American interests. If the Council has had influence during this period, it has derived from individual members taking the varied and often conflicting fare of Council meetings and publications to a wider American audience. From Foreign Affairs articles by W.E.B. DuBois and George F. Kennan to books by Henry A. Kissinger and Stanley Hoffmann, the Council’s role has been to find the best minds and leaders, bring them together with other Council members, and provide forum and stage.”

Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, William Colby, George Bush Sr., William Webster, James Woolsey, John Deutsch, and William Casey have all been prominent members of the Council on Foreign Relations and all were also Directors of the CIA. Some of these names should raise a few eyebrows and actually, the CFR itself has often times been the focus of scrutiny and conspiracy theorists’ wet dreams. Now I don’t want to jump onto that all-to-easy conspiracy bandwagon but when delving deeper into the truth, disproving the basis of their claims becomes nearly impossible. In fact, there is more to support a conspiracy than to prove that it is just crazy talk.

Hell, Henry Kissinger is a prominent member of the Bilderberg Group, as are the Rockefellers (who founded the CFR). Kissinger, publicly and completely out in the open, has been calling for a “new world order” for years. Kissinger’s foreign policy focused on protecting and advancing U.S. interests abroad. His stance seems noble and logical, however he pushed those interests forward even if it meant supporting repressive governments which rejected American political and civil values. Throughout his political career, he has often times been accused of committing war crimes, which have been supported by compelling evidence. Kissinger, a Jew who escaped Nazi Germany, should probably not want to associate with an organization that has ties to the Nazis but as you will see, the CFR has such ties.

Allen Dulles, former CIA director and big wig for the Council on Foreign Relations was a friend to the Nazi regime during and after World War II. In fact, he hired a large number of Nazis into the CIA before he was that organization’s director. The fact that he was made the director of the CIA after helping the enemy, the worst enemy the world has ever faced, is pretty fucking sickening. That’s not even the tip of the iceberg though. Dulles’s involvement with the Nazis is a puzzle, to say the least. His web of evil bullshit is a tough one to untangle and really merits its own blog or series of blogs. To keep it concise, I’ll simply state that his most atrocious act would have to be that he helped prominent Nazi leaders escape Germany and sent them to Argentina, where he hired them into the CIA to be informants against the socialist and nationalist groups in South America. This fucksack should have been tried for treason and not have been handed the CIA on a silver blood-splattered platter.

Now back to the Bush Family. Grandfather Prescott also had ties to the Nazis, father Geroge, Sr. was incredibly influential in the CFR and also CIA director for a period of time, son George, Jr. made Homeland Security a reality and his cabinet was full of CFR members. Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, George Shultz, Robert Blackwill, Stephen Hadley, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Dov Zakheim, Lewis Libby, Robert Zoellick and many others held prominent positions in the CFR and in Bush’s cabinet as well as helping orchestrate what would become known as the Homeland Security Act on November 25th, 2002.

When the Homeland Security Act was first brought forth to be considered, it was a 32 page document. Once Bush II: The Secret of the Ooze and his cronies got a hold of the thing, it swelled to over 500 pages. This massive document (albeit not as big as Obamacare) called for the creation of the largest federal agency in history. Needing 170,000 employees, the agency’s budget was proposed to be roughly $38 billion just in 2003 alone. Now I am not sure what the final budget was but knowing government, I am sure it went well over the proposal and in the years since, I am sure that it has multiplied exponentially like mogwais at a night time beach party.

Now, I shouldn’t have to give the millions of reasons why the Homeland Security Act is tyrannical and an enemy of liberty. Any American with his wits about him should be able to put two and two together and frankly, any conspiracy theorist whether a true freedom fighter or a nutjob should be able to see the seeds planted for the rise of a real police state. Retrospectively, it is important to see where this whole thing came from and the roots of its tyranny, deceit and control, which have given us this faux safety net in exchange for our freedom.

“He who gives up freedom for safety deserves neither.” – Benjamin Franklin