INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY SETS PRECEDENT FOR EXTERMINATING U.S. CITIZENS

SkyWatch Canada
February 8, 2010

In the spring of 2009 the Department of Homeland Security published their Domestic Extremism Lexicon. This document expanded the scope of the DHS mission from hunting islamic suicide bombers an mass murderers to targeting American Anti-Abortionists, Tax Protesters, Constitutionalists and any other enemy of the state. This in itself was shocking enough but when combined with DHS’s  Project Endgame is clear that the policy of the Department of Homeland Security is to round up illegal immigrants and “potential terrorists” / domestic extremists and lock them up in detention camps built by Halliburton subsidiary KBR.

On February 4th Washington Times posted an article entitled ‘Permission’ Needed to Kill U.S. Terrorists. The article paints a picture of how inconvenient it is to get permission to kill overseas Al Qaeda members as it is just inevitable that they will be many casualties as a result of the war on terror, and how stupid it is to give Al CIA-Duh members constitutional rights. But looking beyond the most obvious implications of this article there are a few big question readers should also be asking. The first and most obvious is why National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair did not want to discuss the criteria for killing a ‘terrorist’ ? The second is why any US citizen would be denied the right of due process especially while facing a death sentence ? In the specific States in America in which the death penalty is permitted by law, capital punishment only doled out after a thorough investigation and TRIAL. But to overrule the justice system meant to protect Americans and to grant permission for an execution is a type of policy that would of put in place in Nazi Germany. When a government is given permission to exterminate its opponents without a real trial and real evidence a new precedent is set.

It now seems that labeling anti-abortionist extremists as enemies of the state and locking them up in detention camps is not audacious enough. In addition to indefinite detention of American citizens, the US government is now allowed to exterminate them with by merely asking (as the article put it) ‘permission’.

It’s expected that most would read this article and tell themselves “The Government wouldn’t exterminate an average American for opposing abortion”. Just remember policy is about what the Government is allowed to do not what it should do.

It’s time to wake up citizens, you are living in Nazi Germany. You better support your government otherwise they might just send you to Auschwitz.
 

MAIC Report Supporter and Missouri Gov. Nixon to Sit On Obama’s Council of Governors 

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
February 5, 2010

WRAL in North Carolina and the Associated Press are reporting that Obama has selected Missouri governor Jay Nixon to sit on his newly minted Council of Governors. On January 12, 2010, Infowars.com reported on Obama’s executive order establishing the Council or Governors.
 
Obama’s order states: “The Council shall meet at the call of the Secretary of Defense or the Co-Chairs of the Council to exchange views, information, or advice with the Secretary of Defense; the Secretary of Homeland Security; the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism; the Assistant to the President for Intergovernmental Affairs and Public Engagement; the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Americas’ Security Affairs; the Commander, United States Northern Command; the Chief, National Guard Bureau; the Commandant of the Coast Guard; and other appropriate officials of the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense, and appropriate officials of other executive departments or agencies as may be designated by the Secretary of Defense or the Secretary of Homeland Security.”

In other words, with the stroke of a pen Obama significantly increased the ongoing effort to federalize the states and take control of the National Guard in violation of the now more or less moribund Posse Comitatus Act. Posse Comitatus was effectively annulled by the  2006 John Warner National Defense Authorization Act. The act provides the president with power to declare martial law under revisions to the Insurrection Act and take charge of United States National Guard troops without state governor authorization. Parts of the act were repealed in 2008.

“Actually, this EO is simply the latest in a series of events going back to the Bush and Clinton years, in which the federal government has taken steps to lay the foundation for extensive military police action within the United States,” writes Chuck Baldwin.

In march of 2009, Missouri governor Jay Nixon supported and defended the now infamous MIAC Report. “Getting information, especially public information, out of our fusion center out to local law enforcement agencies is we do every day and we’re going to continue to do,” said Nixon. “Any way they take that information and can analyze what the threat levels are is important to make sure the public stays safe.”

The MIAC report was leaked to Alex Jones in early March by two Missouri police officers who were concerned by its content. The report went viral on the internet and was eventually covered by the corporate media.

The report “lists Ron Paul supporters, libertarians, people who display bumper stickers, people who own gold, or even people who fly a U.S. flag and equates them with radical race hate groups and terrorists. This is merely the latest example in an alarming trend which confirms that law enforcement across the country is being trained that American citizens are a dangerous enemy,” Paul Joseph Watson, Kurt Nimmo and Alex Jones reported on March 13.

The report was vetted by Captain Hull at the Missouri State Highway Patrol who told Infowars.com that the MIAC Strategic Report was part of “normal operation for officers” and was used to train police officers. Lt. John Hotz also told Alex Jones the document was legitimate.

In response to the story, three former presidential candidates — Chuck Baldwin, Ron Paul, and Bob Barr — sent a letter to Missouri officials protesting the MIAC Report. Appearing on The Alex Jones Show on March 19, Baldwin said that he and his fellow letter signatories were considering legal action if the letter did not result in a repudiation of the MIAC report and its inflammatory allegations.

On March 26, in response to media coverage of the report and public outrage over the document, Missouri Highway Patrol Superintendent James Keathley engaged in damage control and pulled the MIAC report. “The head of the Missouri State Highway Patrol has shut down a controversial report linking right-wing groups with the modern militia movement,” the Associated Press reported. In response to the public fallout, Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder called on the director of the Public Safety Department to be placed on administrative leave pending an investigation.

Governor Nixon also did an about face. “I was not governor when the MIAC was formed,” Nixon said. “I was not governor, I did not hire any of the people there and nobody in my administration — the director of public safety — saw this stuff before it went out,” reported Prime Buzz. “Under a previous system, MIAC would prepare and distribute these reports to law enforcement agencies without review or approval from the colonel of the Highway Patrol or the director of Public Safety,” Nixon said. “That’s simply not acceptable.”

The fact Nixon will now sit on Obama’s unconstitutional Council of Governors should be of concern. It must be remembered that Nixon enthusiastically supported MIAC before it became politically unpopular to do so. He is also an advocate of fusion centers surveilling the American people.

Mr. Nixon will soon be discussing national security and terrorist threats with the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of Homeland Security, the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Americas’ Security Affairs, and most ominously the commander of NORTHCOM.

Nixon’s initial support for the MIAC Report reveals that he agrees with its conclusion that libertarians and supporters of Ron Paul are domestic terrorists. It is significant that he will be sitting on a council along with members of the Department of Homeland Security.

In April, following the release of the MIAC Report and a similar report issued the Virginia Terrorism Threat Assessment, a DHS document entitled “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment” surfaced. The DHS document characterized returning veterans, gun owners, and opponents of Obama and big government as domestic terrorists. It also listed those opposed to abortion or immigration as potential extremists and cited groups that reject federal authority in favor of state or local authority as potential sources of hate crime.

In August, after a whirlwind of negative coverage, a freedom of information act request revealed that the report was not based on any reliable supporting evidence. “According to the DHS, the report was compiled based purely on around 50 internet articles, the credibility of which is severely questionable,” Steve Watson wrote at the time.

According to research conducted by Americans for Legal Immigration, the MIAC report was in essence crafted by the Southern Poverty Law Center and Anti Defamation League.

An FOIA request filed by Americans for Limited Government attempted to find out where the Department of Homeland Security received the information for its report. “Our worst fears about what went into this memo have been confirmed. The government department that was supposed to be tasked with identifying domestic terrorist threats is apparently using news stories, kooky websites, and conjecture instead of actual hard intelligence reporting and analysis… This is a disgrace, and calls into question what it is that the so-called ‘Extremism and Radicalizaton Branch of the Homeland Environment Threat Analysis Division’ actually does,” wrote the organization’s president.

These questionable sources include the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti Defamation League.
 

SENATE BURGLARY: CIA DOMESTIC BLACK-OP TEAM ARRESTED 

Rogue Government
 02-04-2010   

U.S. AGREES TO TIMETABLE FOR U.N. GUN BAN

Clinton-United Nations “Small Arms Treaty” Update

National Gun Rights Blog
 February 2, 2010

READ ALSO: Sec. Hillary Clinton — U.S. Support for the Arms Trade Treaty (Oct. 09)

The United Nations and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are moving forward with their plan to confiscate your guns.

The United States joined 152 other countries in support of the Arms Trade Treaty Resolution, which establishes the dates for the 2012 UN conference intended to attack American sovereignty by stripping Americans of the right to keep and bear arms.

Working groups of anti-gun countries will begin scripting language for the conference this year, creating a blueprint for other countries when they meet at the full conference.

The stakes couldn’t be higher.

Former United Nation’s ambassador John Bolton has cautioned gun owners about the Arms Trade Treaty and says the UN “is trying to act as though this is really just a treaty about international arms trade between nation states, but there’s no doubt that the real agenda here is domestic firearms control.”

Establishing the dates for the Arms Trade Treaty Conference is just the first step toward their plans for total gun confiscation.

The worldwide gun control mob will ensure the passage of an egregious, anti-gun treaty…

. . .and that’s where Secretary of State Hillary Clinton steps in.

Once the UN Gun Ban is passed by the General Assembly of the United Nations it must be ratified by each nation, including the United States.

As an arch enemy of gun owners, Clinton has pledged to push the U.S. Senate to ratify the treaty. She will push for passage of this outrageous treaty designed to register, ban and CONFISCATE firearms owned by private citizens like YOU.

That’s why it’s vital you sign the special petition I’ve made up for your signature that DEMANDS your U.S. Senators vote AGAINST ratification of the UN’s “Small Arms Treaty.”

So far, the gun-grabbers have successfully kept the exact wording of their new scheme under wraps.

But looking at previous versions of the UN “Small Arms Treaty,” you and I can get a good idea of what’s likely in the works.

Don’t let any of the “experts” lull you to sleep by saying “Oh, we have it handled” or “Until you know exactly what’s in the treaty you can’t fight against it.”

Judging by Ambassador Bolton’s comments — who certainly knows what to expect from the American-freedom-hating international crowd that infests the U.N. — we are certain the treaty’s going to address the private ownership of firearms.

If passed by the UN and ratified by the U.S. Senate (which is where we must ultimately make our stand), the UN “Small Arms Treaty” would almost certainly FORCE national governments to:

*** Enact tougher licensing requirements, making law-abiding citizens cut through even more bureaucratic red tape just to own a firearm legally;

*** CONFISCATE and DESTROY ALL “unauthorized” civilian firearms (all firearms owned by the government are excluded, of course);

*** BAN the trade, sale and private ownership of ALL semi-automatic weapons;

*** Create an INTERNATIONAL gun registry, setting the stage for full-scale gun CONFISCATION. So please click here to sign the petition to your U.S. Senators before it’s too late!

You see, this is NOT a fight we can afford to lose
 

DOES SECRET CIA-MOSSAD MEETING SIGNAL PREPARATION FOR IRAN ATTACK?

Press TV
February 1, 2010

A secret meeting between the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Leon Panetta and Israeli officials has reportedly centered on Iran’s nuclear program.

In a secret flying visit to Israel on Thursday, the head of the CIA reportedly discussed Iran’s nuclear issue in a sit-down with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Mossad Chief Meir Dagan.

The trip, which was originally scheduled to take place in May, follows a recent wave of developments in the Middle East that strongly imply preparations for a possible new military conflict in the region.

Israel has allegedly increased the scope of its undercover operations in the region, particularly against Lebanon, Iran, Syria and the Palestinian resistance movement, Hamas.

The extent of this could be seen in recent remarks by Israeli cabinet minister Yossi Peled, in which the former army general explicitly said that another confrontation with Lebanon’s resistance movement Hezbollah was almost inevitable.

Lebanon’s Prime Minister Saad Hariri responded to the claims on Thursday, saying that Israel’s threats against Hezbollah are perceived as threats against Lebanon.

“We consider the Israeli threats on Lebanon to be a threat to the Lebanese government as a whole, rather than to one particular person,” said Hariri during a joint news conference with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Cairo, Reuters reported.

Meanwhile, Hamas officials say they have concrete evidence that the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, staged the recent assassination of a senior Hamas commander, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, in Dubai on January 20.

Their claims have been somewhat supported by Dubai Police Chief Dhahi Khalfan.

“It could be Mossad,” AFP quoted police Chief Dhahi Khalfan as saying on Sunday.

{openx:49}To add to the controversy, sources in Turkey’s ruling party told Russia’s Mignews on Saturday that Israeli spy agents ran an advanced electronic monitoring station from the Ankara military headquarters to keep tabs on communication networks in Iran and Syria.

According to the sources who were speaking on condition of anonymity, the Signals Intelligence station was solely managed by Israeli intelligence personnel and had become off-limits for members of the Turkish government.

For years Israeli politicians have masterminded a wave of undercover operations and terror plots in numerous countries, including Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Switzerland, and the US.

However, much of Israel’s espionage operations have lately been focused on the Tehran government, largely because of Iran’s uranium enrichment activities, which Tel Aviv has been seeking to portray as a mortal threat.

Tel Aviv, which is reported to have an arsenal of 200 nuclear warheads itself, accuses Iran of developing nuclear weapons and routinely threatens to reduce the country’s enrichment sites to rubble.

This is while Iran, unlike Israel, is a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and has opened its enrichment facilities to UN inspection.

On Saturday, US presidential aid James Jones rejected prospects of an Israeli attack against Iran.

Although US officials normally deny having any plans to stage new war in the region, there have recently been strong hints to the contrary.

The New York Times reported Saturday that Washington will further increase its military presence in the Persian Gulf — allegedly to soup up its defense against possible Iranian missile attacks.

Meanwhile, US President Barack Obama has approved the deployment of new combat equipments, including advanced missile systems and special warships, to the region.
 

The Sharp Dressed Man Who Aided Mutallab Onto Flight 253 Was U.S. Government Agent 

Kurt Haskell
Infowars.com
January 30, 2010

Please note that in the article that follows, I am not claiming that the U.S. Government knew Mutallab had a bomb or intended to hurt anyone on Flight 253 when the U.S. Government let him board.

Since our flight landed on Christmas Day, Lori and I have been doing everything in our power to uncover the truth about why we were almost blown up in the air over Detroit. The truth is now finally out after the publication of the following Detroit News article:

http://detnews.com/article/20100127/NATION/1270405/Terror-suspect-kept-visa-to-avoid-tipping-off-larger-investigation

Let me quote from the article:

“Patrick F. Kennedy, an undersecretary for management at the State Department, said Abdulmutallab’s visa wasn’t taken away because intelligence officials asked his agency not to deny a visa to the suspected terrorist over concerns that a denial would’ve foiled a larger investigation into al-Qaida threats against the United States.

“Revocation action would’ve disclosed what they were doing,” Kennedy said in testimony before the House Committee on Homeland Security. Allowing Adbulmutallab to keep the visa increased chances federal investigators would be able to get closer to apprehending the terror network he is accused of working with, “rather than simply knocking out one solider in that effort.”‘

Now it all becomes apparent. Let me detail everything we know about the “Sharp Dressed Man” (SDM).

1. While being held in Customs on Christmas Day, I first told the story of the SDM.

2. My story has never changed.

3. The FBI visited my office on December 29, 2009, and showed me a series of approximately 10 photographs. None were of the SDM. I asked the FBI if they brought the Amsterdam security video to help me identify the SDM, but they acted as though my request was ridiculous. The FBI asked me what accent the SDM spoke in and I indicated that he had an American accent similar to my own. I further indicated that he wore a tan suit without a tie, was Indian looking, around age 50, 6′0″ tall and 250-260 lbs. I further indicated that I did not believe that he was an airline employee and that he was not on our flight.

4. During the first week of January, 2010, Dutch Military Police and the FBI indicated that over “200 Hours” of Amsterdam airport security video had been reviewed and it “Shows Nothing”.

5. The mainstream media picked up the “Shows nothing” story, which slanders my story. After visiting my office twice for a flight 253 special, Dateline NBC and Chris Hanson indicated that my story was “Unsubstantiated rumor dispelled as myth” and our story did not air during the tv special.

6. On January 2, 2010, I receive a call from a flight 253 passenger who indicated to me that it may be in my best interest to stop talking publicly about the SDM because he believes I am “wrong” in what I saw. He did not make any claim that he saw the SDM boarding gate incident at all. This call was made out of the blue after he made a “revelation” of this event on January 1, 2010. I later discover that this caller has ties to the U.S. Government.

7. On January 20, 2009, current Director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), Michael E. Leiter, made a startling admission. Leiter indicated that: “I will tell you, that when people come to the country and they are on the watch list, it is because we have generally made the choice that we want them here in the country for some reason or another.”

8. On January 22, 2010, CongressDaily reported that intelligence officials “have acknowledged the government knowingly allows foreigners whose names are on terrorist watch lists to enter the country in order to track their movement and activities.”

CongressDaily also reported, citing an unnamed “intelligence official” that Michael E. Leiter’s statement on January 20, 2010, reflected government policy and told the publication, “in certain situations it’s to our advantage to be able to track individuals who might be on a terrorist watch list because you can learn something from their activities and their contacts.”

9. On Janury 22, 2009, ABC News published an article that shoed a change of position in the government’s official story. Please see the following blog post for more information:

http://haskellfamily.blogspot.com/2010/01/initially-discounted.html

The U.S. government provided no explanation for the reason my story was initially discounted.

10. The SDM could not be from Al Qaeda. When speaking at the counter in Amsterdam, the SDM said the following “He is from Sudan, we do this all the time”. Who is “we”? If it is Al Qaeda, you surely don’t make such a statement to an airposrt security official.

11. The SDM could not be from airport security. The SDM did not dress in any secuirty uniform and did not appear to have any security badge. The SDM did not speak with a Dutch accent. The SDM dressed in a suit coat and pants. If the SDM was a higher up security official, he would not have to convince the ticket agent to let Mutallab on the plane without a valid passport. Instead, he would just order her to do it.

12. Could the SDM have been a U.S. Government official? He dressed in a suit and not a security uniform. Check. He indicated we do this all the time. Could “we” be the U.S. Government? Check. He spoke Enlish with an American accent. Check. Would he need to convice the ticket agent that this was a normal procedure to allow boarding without a passport? Check. Would he have the ability to obtain such clearance? Check. Could he enter this security area even though he wasn’t a passenger? Check. Would the ticket agent likely refer this request to a manager? Check. Would the U.S. Government not want this information public and try to hide it? Check.

13. The Amsterdam security video has not been released. A much more minor airport security violation occurred at the Newark New Jersay airport several days after the flight 253 incident. That video was released shortly thereafter.

14. Senators Levin and Stabenow, as well as Congressman Dingle, all refuse to discuss the matter with me.

With the information we already knew and the admission from the above referenced Detroit News article, we have evidence and claims made by government officials that the U.S. Government wanted Mutallab to proceed into the U.S. in order to obtain information on other terrorists involved with him. Once we take this statement and add it to my eyewitness account of a “Sharp Dressed Man” escorting Mutallab through the boarding process and allowing him to baord without a valid passport we can make the connection that the “Sharp Dressed Man” was a U.S. Government offical/agent.

The reasoning behind the following events now becomes very clear:

1. The reason Mutallab got through security despite the numerous warnings for months before our flight.

2. The reason why there have been so many lies from the U.S. Governemnt attempting to discredit my eyewitness account.

3. The reason why the Amsterdam airport security video is being hidden from the public.

4. The reason why the government is proposing a “Failed to Connect the Dots” account of the failure. The truth is too damning.

5. The reason why Mr. Wolf of the Obama administration indicated on the Keith Olberman Show that the White House was investigating a possible “intentional act” from within the U.S. Government as the reason for the Christmas Day attack.

6. The explanation for the cameraman and why he hasn’t been identified (Obviously, he was another U.S. Government agent) whose job was to film Mutallab for some governmental purpose.

7. The reason for the lax security after landing, which can be attributed to foreknowledge of the possible suspects involved.

8. The reason for the failure to search or secure the plane and passengers after landing, which can also be attributed to foreknowledge of the possible suspects involved.

9. The corporate media’s attempt to bury my eyewitness account.

10. Carl Levin’s, Debbie Stabenow’s and John Dingle’s intentional avoidance of my story and failure to return my calls/emails.

11. Janet Naploitano’s statement that “The System Worked”. From her point of view it probably did as this WAS PART OF THE SYSTEM!
 

SECRET BANKING CABAL EMERGES FROM AIG SHADOWS

Rogue Government
01-29-2010 
Source: Bloomberg

The idea of secret banking cabals that control the country and global economy are a given among conspiracy theorists who stockpile ammo, bottled water and peanut butter. After this week’s congressional hearing into the bailout of American International Group Inc., you have to wonder if those folks are crazy after all. 

Wednesday’s hearing described a secretive group deploying billions of dollars to favored banks, operating with little oversight by the public or elected officials. 

We’re talking about the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, whose role as the most influential part of the federal-reserve system -- apart from the matter of AIG’s bailout -- deserves further congressional scrutiny. 

The New York Fed is in the hot seat for its decision in November 2008 to buy out, for about $30 billion, insurance contracts AIG sold on toxic debt securities to banks, including Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Merrill Lynch & Co., Societe Generale and Deutsche Bank AG, among others. That decision, critics say, amounted to a back-door bailout for the banks, which received 100 cents on the dollar for contracts that would have been worth far less had AIG been allowed to fail. 

That move came a few weeks after the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department propped up AIG in the wake of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.’s own mid-September bankruptcy filing. 

Saving the System 

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was head of the New York Fed at the time of the AIG moves. He maintained during Wednesday’s hearing that the New York bank had to buy the insurance contracts, known as credit default swaps, to keep AIG from failing, which would have threatened the financial system. 

The hearing before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform also focused on what many in Congress believe was the New York Fed’s subsequent attempt to cover up buyout details and who benefited. 

By pursuing this line of inquiry, the hearing revealed some of the inner workings of the New York Fed and the outsized role it plays in banking. This insight is especially valuable given that the New York Fed is a quasi-governmental institution that isn’t subject to citizen intrusions such as freedom of information requests, unlike the Federal Reserve. 

This impenetrability comes in handy since the bank is the preferred vehicle for many of the Fed’s bailout programs. It’s as though the New York Fed was a black-ops outfit for the nation’s central bank. 

Geithner’s Bosses 

The New York Fed is one of 12 Federal Reserve Banks that operate under the supervision of the Federal Reserve’s board of governors, chaired by Ben Bernanke. Member-bank presidents are appointed by nine-member boards, who themselves are appointed largely by other bankers. 

As Representative Marcy Kaptur told Geithner at the hearing: “A lot of people think that the president of the New York Fed works for the U.S. government. But in fact you work for the private banks that elected you.” 

And yet the New York Fed played an integral role in the government’s bailout of banks, often receiving surprisingly free rein to act as it saw fit. 

Consider AIG. Let’s take Geithner at his word that a failure to resolve the insurer’s default swaps would have led to financial Armageddon. Given the stakes, you might think Geithner would have coordinated actions with then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. Yet Paulson testified that he wasn’t in the loop. 

“I had no involvement at all, in the payment to the counterparties, no involvement whatsoever,” Paulson said. 

Bernanke’s Denials 

Fed Chairman Bernanke also wasn’t involved. In a written response to questions from Representative Darrell Issa, Bernanke said he “was not directly involved in the negotiations” with AIG’s counterparty banks. 

You have to wonder then who really was in charge of our nation’s financial future if AIG posed as grave a threat as Geithner claimed. 

Questions about the New York Fed’s accountability grew after Geithner on Nov. 24, 2008, was named by then-President- elect Barack Obama to be Treasury Secretary. Geither said he recused himself from the bank’s day-to-day activities, even though he never actually signed a formal letter of recusal. 

That left issues related to disclosures about the deal in the hands of the bank’s lawyers and staff, rather than a top executive. Those staffers didn’t want details of the swaps purchase to become public. 

New York Fed staff and outside lawyers from Davis Polk & Wardell edited AIG communications to investors and intervened with the Securities and Exchange Commission to shield details about the buyout transactions, according to a report by Issa. 

That the New York Fed, a quasi-governmental body, was able to push around the SEC, an executive-branch agency, deserves a congressional hearing all by itself. 

Later, when it became clear information would be disclosed, New York Fed legal group staffer James Bergin e-mailed colleagues saying: “I have to think this train is probably going to leave the station soon and we need to focus our efforts on explaining the story as best we can. There were too many people involved in the deals -- too many counterparties, too many lawyers and advisors, too many people from AIG -- to keep a determined Congress from the information.” 

Think of the enormity of that statement. A staffer at a body with little public accountability and that exists to serve bankers is lamenting the inability to keep Congress in the dark. 

This belies the culture of secrecy obviously pervasive within the New York Fed. Committee Chairman Edolphus Towns noted during the hearing that the bank initially refused to disclose even the names of other banks that benefited from its actions, arguing this information would somehow harm AIG. 

‘Penchant for Secrecy’ 

“In fact, when the information was finally released, under pressure from Congress, nothing happened,” Towns said. “It had absolutely no effect on AIG’s business or financial condition. But it did have an effect on the credibility of the Federal Reserve, and it called into question the Fed’s penchant for secrecy.” 

Now, I’m not saying Congress should be meddling in interest-rate decisions, or micro-managing bank regulation. Nor do I think we should all don tin-foil hats and start ranting about the Trilateral Commission. 

Yet when unelected and unaccountable agencies pick banking winners while trying to end-run Congress, even as taxpayers are forced to lend, spend and guarantee about $8 trillion to prop up the financial system, our collective blood should boil.
 

MOSSAD ORCHESTRATED CHRISTMAS DAY BOMB PLOT

Press TV
January 28, 2010

The Nigerian terrorist suspect accused of attempting to blow up a US airliner on Christmas Day had been arranged by the Israeli-owned ‘International Consultants on Targeted Security’ to perform a “walk around” without a passport in Amsterdam.

Despite tighter screening processes since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Northwest Airlines Flight 253 experienced no delays in takeoff. According to the Mathaba News Agency “It is evident that clearing the terrorist with higher-ups took a matter of a minute or so and the Indian man, who had arranged the boarding, obviously had a high-level security pass.

Then, during the flight, onlookers noted that another passenger spent a great deal of time filming the 23-year-old Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab with his camcorder. Even stranger, once the suspect tried to ignite his “crotch bomb,” throughout the incident, the man continued filming the terrorist, calmly and without interruption.

Next, after the plane landed, another Indian man was led away in handcuffs after the bomb-sniffing dogs detected explosives in his luggage. Officials, however, have refused to release the Schiphol CCTV airport footage from Amsterdam, the air-bound “video passenger” film, or the identity of the man arrested in Detroit.

The Indian link doesn’t seem surprising since Israel and India are very close business partners, especially via their military contracts. Also, the Indian intelligence agency works hand-in-hand with Israel.

Abdulmutallab’s home country, Nigeria, is also clandestinely controlled by the Israeli army and Mossad.

Mossad’s reach extends even further, directly into Yemen. On Oct. 7, 2008, Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh said that security forces had arrested a group of militants linked to the Israeli intelligence agency.

Abdulmutallab has at times denied any association with the militant al-Qaeda group and claimed that he was trained in Yemen. Washington, however, accuses him of being instructed in the Arab country, which US authorities claim is infested with al-Qaeda militants.

According to military analyst and counterinsurgency specialist Gordon Duff, “There is no al-Qaeda in Yemen. George Bush released a couple of phony operatives from Guantanamo, and after traveling to the Middle East, they hooked up with the Mossad. The only reason Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez released them is because they’re assets.”

Abdulmutallab’s story is intended to keep ratcheting up Orwellian-style trauma and project Yemen, as well as the African continent, are the brand-new focus of the American so-called ‘war on terror.’
 

WHAT'S REALLY GOING ON IN HAITI?

Chuck Baldwin
January 26, 2010

People of goodwill everywhere are rightly sympathetic to the plight of hundreds of thousands of innocent Haitians in the aftermath of the terrible earthquake that rocked the island country. Private donations and volunteer efforts are pouring into Haiti from all over the globe–especially from the United States. This is a good thing, right? So, why am I troubled?

Simply put, I cannot remember such an all-out “relief effort” by our nation’s military and government forces following a natural disaster anywhere–ever! Not even New Orleans, Louisiana, and surrounding Gulf Coast communities here in the homeland received the kind of attention from Washington, D.C., that Haiti is receiving.

According to Agence France-Press (AFP), “The US military is ramping up its mission in quake-hit Haiti, with 20,000 US troops expected to operate on ground and offshore by Sunday [January 24], the US commander overseeing the region said.”

No doubt, this would include ships and personnel from the USS Carl Vinson carrier group. Cost to US taxpayers to send an entire carrier group–along with more than 20,000 (so far) military personnel–to Haiti already numbers in the multiplied millions of dollars. It is also almost certain that there will be no quick exit from the island nation. There never is. In other words, our military presence (dare I say occupation?) in Haiti will doubtless last for years. At least, that’s the way Latin American and European countries see it. And they are probably right.

Suffice it to say that the United States military is now completely in charge in Haiti.

At this point, it would be very enlightening for everyone to read Walter Williams’ column dated January 20, 2010, entitled “Haiti’s Avoidable Death Toll.”

See Walter’s column at:

http://tinyurl.com/haiti-avoidable-death

In short, Williams notes that the high death toll in Haiti is directly related to the inferior political/economic philosophies of the Haitian government. There is no economic liberty, which has relegated it to being one of the world’s poorest nations, with no opportunity to build the kind of homes and businesses that can withstand natural disasters. Williams is right when he says, “President Barack Obama called the quake ‘especially cruel and incomprehensible.’ He would be closer to the truth if he had said that the Haitian political and economic climate that make Haitians helpless in the face of natural disasters are ‘especially cruel and incomprehensible.’”

Williams also observes, “Corruption is rampant” in Haiti. Crime is, likewise, ubiquitous in Haiti, with little real law enforcement. Private property rights are nonexistent. Like many (if not most) third world countries, people live in tyranny and bondage to insensitive, power-mad strongmen who use up the country’s resources for their own selfish purposes. Tyranny always impoverishes people; freedom enriches them.

Williams rightly concludes, “Haiti’s disaster demands immediate Western assistance but it’s only the Haitian people who can relieve themselves of the deeper tragedy of self-inflicted poverty.” Amen.

All of that said, however, there are still several things bugging me about the Haiti story.

For one thing, why was an earthquake of this magnitude not felt beyond Port-au-Prince? (The only reports saying tremors were felt out of Haiti belong to US-controlled sources.) All of the testimonies that I have read from people living in the adjoining country of the Dominican Republic (which shares the same island with Haiti) that were quoted by French, British, or Spanish outlets universally say they felt nothing. If the foreign press is reporting the story accurately, the devastation was almost exclusively contained in and around Port-au-Prince. That is very strange to me. Even most of the roads reportedly remained open after the quake.

Another oddity is the fact that this earthquake did not produce a tsunami. It is being called “miraculous” that an earthquake measuring 7.0 on the Richter Scale did not produce a colossal tsunami, which would have affected everyone in the region.

Furthermore, does the French government know something that we don’t–but should? According to a report of the Global Analysis International Intelligence (GAII), “Not coincidentally, Agence France-Press (AFP), which of course is closely affiliated with French intelligence, filed a report on 14th January which contained the following concluding sentence:

“‘On Wednesday, Obama ordered a “swift, coordinated and aggressive effort to save lives” in Haiti following the murderous quake, as a massive US aid mission swung into action, using troops, naval forces, aircraft and rescue teams.’

“FACT: An ‘act of God,’ or natural calamity, is NOT a ‘murderous quake.’

“The use of the word MURDEROUS here implies that someone is doing the MURDERING.”

GAII further speculates that the earthquake may have been the work of US Black Ops, which “flattened the French embassy and many of its officials, imploded the United Nations’ own establishments in the Haitian capital, and no doubt obliterated evidence of US Government and rogue official drug-running complicity . . . channeled through the Haitian capital for many years.”

See the intelligence report at: http://tinyurl.com/gaii-haiti

Intelligence reports are also circulating about the possible disruption of liens and seizures of trillions of dollars by the international community relative to past crimes committed by former Presidents George Bush I and II, and Bill Clinton, which were being channeled through Haiti’s Central Bank.

If any of this is even remotely true, it is certainly more than convenient that the Haitian capital was destroyed.

This particular part of the story is a real sore spot with me. And I know if I broach this topic, many readers (especially my Christian brethren who live under the delusion that the Bush family can do no wrong) will refuse to believe anything I report and will even take their anger and umbrage out on me. So be it.

I am personally convinced that certain members of the Bush and Clinton families have been involved in the international smuggling of illicit drugs for decades. I have spoken in confidence with those who were in positions to know, and they have emphatically told me that both then-Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton and then-President George H.W. Bush were complicit in CIA-assisted drug running out of Mena, Arkansas. (You don’t think I would say this if I did not have absolute confidence in the integrity and credibility of these sources, do you? Plus, why would they tell me this at potential great harm to themselves, if it were not true? And, no, I cannot divulge their names, for obvious reasons.) And there is absolutely no reason to believe that similar operations are not ongoing. In my opinion, it would be utterly naïve to think otherwise.

After all, it has been often reported that the CIA used Army Special Forces troops to facilitate the smuggling of drugs out of Indochina during the Vietnam War, has it not? Yes, it has. That rogue elements within the US government would use war–or even earthquakes–as cover and facilitation for illegal drug smuggling or money laundering would not surprise me one bit.

I realize it is extremely difficult for many Americans to contemplate that members of their own federal government could be evil enough to be involved in anything such as is implied above. According to the thinking of many Americans, evil people only live in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, or North Korea. And, of course, that is exactly what government propagandists want us to believe.

Thomas Jefferson said virtually the same thing when he said, “In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”

This is why Jefferson and the rest of America’s founders insisted that we should be diligent to hold our civil magistrates accountable to the limits and protections of the US Constitution. They well understood the sentiments so wisely expressed by Lord Acton, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.” Christians, of all people, should understand this.

So, why are so many of us so quick to believe everything our government and their toadies in the national media are telling us? Are we so naïve as to believe that unregenerate politicians in Washington, D.C., are incapable of the same evil acts of barbarity and savagery that might be found in other parts of the world? Are sinners less sinful because they happened to receive their fallen nature from American bloodlines?

Am I saying that Black Ops personnel manufactured the earthquake in Haiti–and killed tens of thousands of people in the process–for the purpose of hiding or facilitating illegal activity? No, I am not. How in the world would I know it, even if it were true?

What I am saying is that, once again, for me, there are many things that do not add up regarding what is going on in Haiti. The way the earthquake behaved; the lack of related seismic and tsunamic activity usually associated with earthquakes of this magnitude; the unprecedented involvement of US military forces being used for “relief efforts” even as commanders are desperate to fill combat theaters in Iraq and Afghanistan; the occupation of another independent nation, which occurred at lightning speed; the vast sums of US taxpayer dollars being expended; the devastation done to key Haitian governmental and banking institutions–which were known to be conduits for international financial disbursements–with virtually no devastation experienced anywhere else; and intelligence reports of surreptitious activity circulating all over Europe and Latin America all add up to one big question, What’s really going on in Haiti?
 

TORTURE NEVER STOPPED UNDER OBAMA

by Shamus Cooke
Global Research
 January 26, 2010
 
“A year on, the [Obama] administration continues to look the other way when it comes to full disclosure of and remedy for human rights violations perpetrated by the U.S.A. in the name of countering terrorism.” – Amnesty International  

What is Torture?  It can be physical or physchological,  quick or unhurried.  It implies lasting trauma unbefitting a human.  The U.N. defines torture as:

“ ...any act by which severe pain or suffering, physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him, or a third person, information or a confession…” (U.N. Convention Against Torture). 

By this definition the U.S. continues to practice torture. Yes, Obama outlawed some especially shocking forms of torture — water boarding, for example — but other types of torture were not labeled “torture” and thus continue.

Surprisingly, this fact was recently discussed at length in The New York Times, under an Op-Ed piece appropriately entitled Torture’s Loopholes.  In it, an ex-interrogator explains some of the more glaring examples of how the U.S. currently tortures and argues for the practices to end.  In reference to Obama’s vow to end the systematic, obscene torture under Bush, the article states:

“…the changes were not as drastic as most Americans think, and elements of our interrogation policy continue to be both inhumane and counterproductive.”

The author says bluntly, “If I were to return to one of the war zones today… I would still be allowed to abuse [torture] prisoners.”

The article also explains how the U.S. “legally” continues a practice that thousands of people in the U.S. prison system already know to be psychological torture: 

“…extended solitary confinement is torture, as confirmed by many scientific studies. Even the initial 30 days of isolation could be considered abuse [torture].”

Other forms of torture commonly practiced — since they are part of the Military’s updated Field Manual — are “…stress positions [shackling prisoners in painful positions for extended periods of time], putting detainees into close confinement or environmental manipulation [hot or frigid rooms]…”

Also mentioned as torture is sleep deprivation, a tactic used in combination with 20-hour interrogation sessions. The author concludes that these practices do “not meet the minimum standard of humane treatment, either in terms of American law or simple human decency.”  (January 20, 2010).

Unmentioned by the article are other forms of torture institutionalized under the Obama administration.  One is “sensory deprivation,” a deeply traumatizing psychological torture described in detail in Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine.  The new Army Field Manual says that the tactic — though not called “sensory deprivation” — should be used to “prolong the shock of capture,” and should include “goggles or blindfolds and earmuffs” that completely disconnects the senses from the outside world, where the captive is able to experience only the thoughts in their head.    

Yet another blatant form of torture that Obama refused to stop practicing is “extraordinary rendition,” or what critics call “outsourcing torture.”  This is the practice of flying a prisoner to a country where torture is routinely practiced, so that the prisoner can be interrogated.  As reported by The New York Times: 

“The Obama administration will continue the Bush administration’s practice of sending terrorism suspects to third countries for detention and interrogation, but pledges to closely monitor their treatment to ensure that they are not tortured, administration officials said Monday.” (August 24, 2009).  

Human rights groups instantly called Obama’s bluff:  why transport terrorism suspects to other countries at all? If not for the fact that torture and other “harsh interrogation methods” are routinely practiced there? No justifiable answer has been given to these questions. 

Another common way the U.S. continues to outsource torture is performed in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.  There, the U.S. military often arrests suspects and hands over the interrogation duties to Iraqi or Afghan security forces, knowing full well that they regularly torture (this was also the strategy in the Vietnam war).  Unfortunately, handing over someone to be tortured means you are also guilty of the crime.  

A less obvious form of torture is the concept of “indefinite detention” — holding someone in prison indefinitely without a trial.  The terrible experience of hopelessness that a victim of this crime experiences, over years, is a profound form of psychological torture.  This is one of the reasons why the American Constitution guarantees due process, a legal detail that the Obama administration continues to ignore.

In connection, The Washington Post recently announced that the Obama administration will detain 50 Guantanamo inmates “indefinitely,” without any legal charges or chance of a trial.  This act is consistent with earlier statements made by Obama, when he stated that “some detainees are too dangerous, to be released.”  Of course, there does not exist any evidence to prove that these detainees are dangerous, otherwise they would be prosecuted in a legal court.  The article reports that these detainees are “un-prosecutable because officials fear trials…could challenge evidence obtained through coercion [torture].” (January 22, 2010). 

The Washington Post article also reports that 35 additional Guantanamo inmates will be tried in Federal or Military courts.  In the latter court, far less evidence — if any — is needed, and the military jury can be handpicked to deliver the preferred outcome. 

Obama, like Bush, has sought to undermine the legal rights of those detained and the victims of torture who seek accountability.  Obama continues to refuse to release pictures (evidence) of detainee abuse, preventing Americans from really understanding what their government is guilty of.  Obama has also refused detainees in so-called “black sites” (U.S. Bagram Air Base, for example) access to attorneys or courts. Finally, by not prosecuting anyone for torture crimes in the Bush administration, Obama is guaranteeing that the worst forms of torture will continue, since institutionalized behavior rarely stops unless rewards or punishments are implemented. 

In the end, the act of torture is impossible to separate from war in general.  The “rules of war” are always ignored by both sides, who implement the most barbaric acts to terrorize their opponents into submission. 

 Obama’s wars, like Bush’s, are wars of conquest. U.S. corporations want the oil and other raw materials in the region.  They also want to privatize the conquered state-owned companies, and to sell U.S. products in the new markets the war has opened them.  Many corporations benefit from the act of war itself (arms manufacturers and corporate-employed mercenaries), or from the reconstruction opportunities the destruction creates. 

 Working people have no interest in this type of war.  The hundreds of billions of dollars that Obama is using for destruction should be used to create jobs instead, or for health care, public education, social services, etc.   It is up to all working people to organize themselves — through their unions and community organizations — to broadcast this demand and make it a reality. 
 

Dead Osama Warns of Imminent Attack in Latest IntelCenter Fabrication

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
January 25, 2010

In a patently absurd follow-up to the made-over Osama by the Justice Department (using the face of an Italian communist), the CIA and Defense Department linked propaganda unit IntelCenter has released yet another Osama audio tape. IntelCenter was caught adding its logo and that of As-Sahab to the same layer of a purported al-Qaeda video, according to Neal Krawetz, a researcher and computer security consultant. The As-Sahab Foundation for Islamic Media Publication is said to be al-Qaeda’s media production house.

“Osama bin Laden’s word choice in the latest audio message attributed to him is seen as a ‘possible indicator’ of an upcoming attack by his Al-Qaeda network, a US monitoring group warned Sunday,” reports AFP.

The phrase “Peace be upon those who follow guidance,” appears at the beginning and end of messages “released in advance of attacks that are designed to provide warning to Al-Qaeda’s enemies that they need to change their ways or they will be attacked,” said IntelCenter.

Audio releases were Osama bin Laden’s normal vehicle for statements, with video statements having been very rare since September 11, 2001, according to IntelCenter.

In 2002, scientists in Switzerland indicated that an audio tape attributed to Osama bin Laden was a fake. Researchers at the Dalle Molle Institute for Perceptual Artificial Intelligence, in Lausanne, said the message was recorded by an impostor. The CIA and Pentagon stopped using video to propagate the al-Qaeda myth after the Fat Bin Laden video and the Grecian Formula video were widely criticized and easily debunked. Recent video tapes show images of Bin Laden before he died in late 2001.

The IntelCenter is painfully aware that anybody who pays attention understands Osama is dead. “Consequently, audio messages are the rule, not the exception, and thus speculation as to health or anything else merely because the message is in audio form and not video does not hold up to analytical scrutiny,” the propaganda front explained.

The SITE Intelligence Group, a sister organization staffed with ardent Zionists, quoted the dead CIA asset on September 25. In that fabrication, Osama supposedly told European countries to withdraw their forces from Afghanistan. The warning came prior to Obama’s announcement to increase the number of troops in the country in early December.

Earlier this month, the FBI was caught with its pants down when it used the image of a Spanish communist leader as a template for a new image of the dead al-Qaeda frontman. The westernized Osama in the sloppily constructed montage was designed for audiences in the United States and Europe
 

HAARP, HATI, BRZEZINSKI AND THE NWO

By Jerry Mazza
Online Journal Associate Editor

Jan 22, 2010, 00:30

On October 25, 2005, I wrote an article for Online Journal, headlined Is it the weather or government terror, detailing government manipulation of weather, including earthquakes, for terror and destruction, mentioning that “your local weatherman was surely not up to pointing this out,” and adding “let me help with the forecast, past, present and long-range. Well, déjà vu all over again seems to have struck in Haiti on January 12.

When I wrote that article, I was disturbed over the effects of Katrina, on August 25, 2005, not to mention the Indonesian tsunami preceding it on December 26, 2004. It seemed to me it would take a helluva lot more than the weatherman to explain such cosmic events within a year, four months and a day. Today, I ask you to read my first article to familiarize yourself with HAARP, the acronym for the government’s High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, which is about more than weather, but rather US Weapons of Meteorological Mass Destruction.

As I write that, I can hear the sirens of “conspiracy theory” going off on the airwaves as if a thief had broken into the dark hole of the Pentagon and was filling his pockets with all the secrets of these darker ops. Well, perhaps.

HAARP, as you will read in more detail, can shock the upper atmosphere with both a focused and navigable electromagnetic bolt. The ionosphere is the electrically charged sphere that surrounds the earth’s upper atmosphere, about 40 to 60 miles above the earth’s surface. Take a look also at the excellent Haiti Earthquake Raises HAARP Controversy at the phoenixaquua.blogspot, so you don’t think it’s just me thinking this. In fact, you can see filmed examples of how HAARP works, and how it has worked on Haiti.

You will particularly enjoy this article’s film clip of Pat Robertson’s analysis of the Haitian earthquake. Pat believes it’s due to the victory of the Haitians in their rebellion over Napoleon and the French in 1801. Their victory, he claims, was due to a pact the Haitians made with the Devil. And this pact, Pat iterates, haunts them to this day. This is a man who ran for president of the US, is the owner of a chain of TV and radio stations, and a leader of the Machiavellian Dominionists sect of Conservative Christianity. But I digress and I’m dizzy from this one.

HAARP has always been referred to by the US government as a tool for researching weather, but in fact has been developed and used by the military for Department of Defense purposes. This dark side of HAARP has been played down for obvious reasons, but Dr. Nick Begich and Jeane Manning have done an excellent expose of this “Military Pandora’s Box” in their book, Angel’s Don’t Play This Harp. There as an excellent summary of the book at this site. It debunks the notion that HAARP is no different than other ionospheric heaters operating safely through the world in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, Tromso, Norway, and the former Soviet Union.

Yet a 1990 government document claims that the radio frequency (RF) power bolt can drive the ionosphere to “unnatural” activities. Quoting the authors . . .”at the highest HF powers available in the West, the instabilities commonly studied are approaching their maximum RF energy dissipative capability, beyond which the plasma process will ‘runaway’ until the next limiting factor is reached.” The program operates out the University of Alaska Fairbanks (in Sarah Palin-land), providing a ground-based “Star Wars” technology, offering a relatively inexpensive defense shield.

But the University also boasts about the most mind-boggling geophysical manipulations since nuclear bombs of which HAARP is capable. It’s based on the work of electrical genius Nicholas Tesla and the work and patents of Texas’ physicist Bernard Eastlund. The military has deliberately underestimated the deadly possibilities of this uber technology, most pointedly in this case to create earthquakes with the generation of bolts of electrical power aimed at specific targets.

In fact, HAARP’s potential for havoc drew the attention of none other than Zbigniew Brzezinski, former NSA adviser to Jimmy Carter, science advisor to President Johnson, and political advisor to President Obama.

More than 25 years ago, when Brzezinski was a professor at Columbia University, he wrote, “Political strategists are tempted to exploit research on the brain and human behavior [another strange purpose HAARP can be put to]. Geophysicist Gordon J.F. MacDonald, a specialist in problems of warfare, says accurately-timed, artificially-excited electronic strokes could lead to a pattern of oscillations that produce relatively high power levels over certain legions of the earth . . . in this way one could develop a system that would seriously impair the brain performance of very large populations in selected regions over an extended period.”

He capped this statement with “no matter how deeply disturbing the thought of using the environment to manipulate behavior for national advantages, to some, the technology permitting such use will very probably develop within the next few decades.” Let me tell you, dear readers, it’s here.

As of 1970, Brzezinski predicted HAARP could be used for “a more controlled and directed society” linked to technology. This society would be dominated by an elite group which impresses voters by allegedly superior scientific know-how.” Furthermore, Dr. Strangelove states, “Unhindered by the restrains of traditional liberal values, this elite [the New World Order of today] would not hesitate to achieve its political ends by using the latest modern techniques for influencing public behavior and keeping society under close surveillance and control. Technical and scientific momentum would then feed on the situation it exploits.”

And thus spake Brzezinski, who also predicted that it would take an inciting incident like Pearl Harbor (i.e., 9/11) to engage the normally peaceful American population to go to war on a march for world hegemony (i.e., The War on Terror). And he was spot on.

Zbig is not afraid, in fact, is lauded for thinking down avenues that would make most of us shiver with disgust. Regrettably, his forecasts tend to prove accurate, because they inspire the worst people to do the worst things. And so, these “tools for the elite” and their temptation to use them increases incredibly. The policies to use them are in place. As to the “stepping stones” that could be used to reach this highly controlled techno-society, Brezinski expected them to be “persisting social crisis” and the use of mass media to gain the public’s confidence. Again, he’s spot on.

Way back in 1966, Professor Gordon J.F. MacDonald, then associate director of the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at UC, Los Angeles, was a member of President Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee and later a member of the President’s Council on Environmental Quality. He actually wrote a chapter called “How to Wreck the Environment” in his book, Unless Peace Comes. Of course, this came at the height of the Vietnam brutality. Given the aura of violence similar to today’s, Gordon described in his chapter, among other things, “polar ice cap melting or destabilization, ozone depletion techniques, earthquake engineering [italics mine], ocean wave control and brain wave manipulation using the planet’s energy fields.”

The outstanding peculiarity of the Haitian earthquake is that it devastated Haiti, which is the western part of the larger island of Hispaniola, while the eastern two-thirds of Hispaniola, the Dominican Republic, suffered some aftershocks but remained relatively unscathed, hotels operating, business booming, flights coming in and out. If this isn’t pinpoint targeting of an earthquake, it is a very strange, yet to be explained phenomena.

For the “official” statistics of the event, see the Tectonics of the Haitian earthquake by Chris Rowan at scienceblogs.com. Despite the fact that Rowan sees this as a “strike-slip in the Caribbean Plate with the crust on each side of the fault moving horizontally relative to the other side,” and so on, I still feel that the pinpointing of Haiti is not just another predictable earthquake. But read Chris’s full explanation. A bolt of HAARP energy could have caused that “strike-slip.”

What is far more interesting to note is an article from nextgov.com (Technology And The Business of Government), Defense launches online system to coordinate Haiti relief efforts, which was published last Friday but refers to a disaster relief drill that took place on Monday, January 11, a day before the earthquake. I quote, “As personnel representing hundreds of government and nongovernment agencies from around the world rush to the aid of earthquake-devastated Haiti, the Defense Information Systems Agency has launched a Web portal with multiple social networking tools to aid in coordinating their efforts.

“On Monday, [January 11, before the earthquake] Jean Demay, DISA’s technical manager for the agency’s Transnational Information Sharing Cooperation project, happened to be at the headquarters of the U.S. Southern Command in Miami preparing for a test of the system in a scenario that involved providing relief to Haiti in the wake of a hurricane. After the earthquake hit on Tuesday, Demay said SOUTHCOM decided to go live with the system [itlaics mine]. On Wednesday [the day after the earthquake], DISA opened up its All Partners Access Network, supported by the Transnational Information Sharing Cooperation project, to any organization supporting Haiti relief efforts.

“The information sharing project, developed with backing from both SOUTHCOM and the Defense Department’s European Command, has been in development for three years. It is designed to facilitate multilateral collaboration between federal and nongovernmental agencies . . .”

You’ll pardon my paranoia, but this is identical to drills being set up the day before 9/11/01 by FEMA in NYC on 9/10/01 and NORAD.

The political truth is that Haiti has historically been a thorn in the side of those from the US and Europe, who would exploit its natural resources and dare to genocide its people. See Wiki’s History of Haiti, which opens by with the tale of Christopher Columbus, colonizer extraordinaire, naming the entire island, Hispaniola.

From the very beginning, Wiki notes, “Following the arrival of Europeans, Haiti’s indigenous population suffered near-extinction, in possibly the worst case of depopulation in the Americas. A commonly accepted hypothesis attributes the high mortality of this colony in part to Old World diseases to which the natives had no immunity. The colonists also killed a considerable number of the natives both directly and indirectly by enslavement and murder.” And so the die was cast.

And, as Wayne Madsen reports, U.S. troops in Haiti to prevent Aristide’s return, “President Obama, in keeping with his CIA lineage, has permitted the Pentagon under Robert Gates to take charge of the humanitarian relief efforts in Haiti.

“As Cuban and Venezuelan field hospitals were already rendering first aid and trauma care to Haitians injured in the mega-quake, Obama was gathered at a White House photo op with Vice President Joe Biden and other Cabinet officers to state that U.S. military reconnaissance aircraft would fly over Haiti to assess the situation from the air. A U.S. P-3 Orion spy plane from Comalapa air base in El Salvador was dispatched to conduct the surveillance operation, an act that was already being accomplished by earth satellites, the images of which were available on Google Maps.

“As Obama was garnering praise from such sycophantic White House outlets as the largely-discredited Washington Post, a 37-person Icelandic search-and-rescue team was pulling trapped earthquake victims from the rubble of collapsed buildings in Port-au-Prince. Iceland, a nation bankrupted by Obama’s banker pals on Wall Street and in the City of London, was able to react in a way that the slumbering and oafish dying super-power, the United States, could not -- with action aimed at providing immediate assistance to the Haitian people . . .” Read the full article for all the details.

Madsen was not the only one to comment that in the middle of this havoc the US seems more set on occupying Haiti with its Army than delivering relief aid. Press TV reports that Nicaraguan President Ortega warns of US deployment in Haiti. He stated, “What is happening in Haiti seriously concerns me as US troops have already taken control of the airport,” Ortega said on Saturday ”The Pentagon says it has deployed more than 10,000 soldiers in Haiti to help victims of Tuesday’s earthquake.

”This is while US paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division took control of the main airport in the capital Port-au-Prince on Friday three days after a 7.0 magnitude earthquake brought death and misery to the impoverished nation.”

Said Press TV, ”The leftist Nicaraguan president denounced Washington’s move in deploying military forces in Haiti, saying ‘It seems that the bases (on Latin America) are not sufficient.’ 

”’There is no logic that US troops landed in Haiti. Haiti seeks humanitarian aid, not troops. It would be madness if we all began to send troops to Haiti,’ said Ortega.”

Given Nicaragua’s horrific experiences with the US and the Contras, his doubts, as Madsen’s, are to be seriously considered. Back then, we had Reagan and Bush I pulling the strings, which eventually exploded into the Iran-Contra debacle, which attempted to continue New World Order advancement from Central America to the Middle East. So what has changed?

Bottom line, am I asking you to blame anyone slipping on a banana peel to be the result of HAARP’s cataclysmic power? No, I’m not. But I am asking you to pursue the given links and seriously consider the possibility of HAARP’s ability to produce this highly targeted mega-earthquake. It is one more weapon in the US arsenal. And the more you know, the better to discern the big picture. All you have you to lose are your political chains and the specter of Zbigniew Brzezinski and his clones.
 

LATIN AMERICAN LEADERS SAY U.S. OCCUPYING HAITI

Press TV
January 22, 2010

Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua say the US is using the international relief operation in Haiti as a cover-up for a military takeover.

Bolivian President Evo Morales said that he will request an emergency UN meeting to reject what he calls the US military occupation of Haiti.

“It’s not right that the United States should use this natural disaster to invade and militarily occupy Haiti,” Morales told a press conference on Wednesday.

“If you have all these problems with the injured and the dead from the earthquake, you have to go there to save lives, and you don’t do that from a military standpoint,” he added.

An outspoken critic of US policies, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez also had accused Washington of occupying Haiti “under the guise of the natural disaster.”

Nicaragua also has taken a similar stance toward US with respect to the situation in Haiti.

The United States is deploying up to 20,000 troops to Haiti. US servicemen have taken control of the country’s international airport.

The Pentagon has sent one of its biggest aircraft carriers to Haiti, along with other navy and coast guard vessels.

On Friday, Arturo Valenzuela, the US assistant secretary of state for Western hemisphere affairs rejected that the US was occupying Haiti.

“Haiti is a sovereign country, everybody respects Haiti’s sovereign country, the United States respects Haiti’s sovereignty,” said Arturo Valenzuela.
 

RON PAUL WARNS OF COMING "SOCIAL AND POLITICAS CHAOS"

Congressman delivers timely State Of The Republic address
  
Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Friday, Jan 22, 2010

Texas Congressman Ron Paul has delivered a riveting "State of The Republic" address on his Campaign for Liberty website, orating his thoughts on where the U.S. stands as a nation and what the future holds. 

Paul warns that if the country continues along the course it is on, we will witness a three stage slide into social and political chaos, beginning with the current financial crisis, a coming dollar crisis, and culminating in mass unrest. 

"Reality is setting in," the Congressman urges, adding that the only way to prevent social breakdown is to embrace liberty and self reliance and reject the nanny state and government dependency. 

"We are rapidly moving toward a dangerous time in our history. Society as we know it is vulnerable to political and social unrest. This impending crisis comes as a consequence of our flawed foreign and domestic economic policies, a silly notion of money, ignorance about central banking, ignoring the onerous power and mischief of out of control intelligence agencies, our unsustainable welfare state and a willingness to sacrifice privacy and civil liberties in an attempt to achieve safety and security from an inept government." 

"Dangerous times indeed." The Congressman states, stressing that a street fight to restore liberty is not a good option. 

"The only way that we can prevent blood from running in the streets is to offer a better idea of the proper role of government in a society that desires, first and foremost, liberty." 

"The social unrest will illicit cries for the government to exert unusual force to head off a complete breakdown of law and order. The ultimate trap will be set for a system of government claiming to protect a free society." Paul states. 

"If more power and police authority are not given to the Federal government, it will be argued that only anarchy will result. If more government policing power is given, it will mean a lethal threat to civil liberties." 

The Congressman also warns that it is naive to assume that the American people will not be the eventual target of draconian laws and restrictions already introduced in the wake of 9/11. 

"Our civil leaders will not be hesitant to use these powers to maintain order, tragically, the people may even demand it." he says 

The Congressman elegantly lays out the intricacies of the financial crisis and its history, specifically pointing the finger of blame at the Fed and in particular Ben Bernanke, referring to the crisis as Bernanke's "very risky experiment with the health of our country and the wealth of our economy." 

"The worldwide financial system built on a foundation of paper has received the shockwaves of an impending collapse. The wild speculation in the derivatives market, the stock market bubble, the insurmountable debt, public and private, and the massive malinvestments have been shattered." 

Paul points out that doubling the money supply can hardly be a solution to a problem stemming from the creation of excess credit. 

"It wouldn't make much sense for a doctor taking care of a very sick patient from severe infection, to deliberately give the patient another infection - yet that is what the PhD doctors are doing to our very sick economy." 

"The only solution so far offered has been to print more money faster, keep interest rates low, at practically 0%, and remove all stops for controlling deficits. These are the very policies that caused the disequalibrium, and doing more of the same, but only faster, can hardly help our economy." Paul comments. 

"When it is revealed that the insider friends of the Fed and Congress get billions of dollars in bailout at the expense of the middle class, it's no wonder the people are taking to the streets and directing their hostilities towards both Republicans and Democrats in Washington."
 

H1N1 SWINE FLU HOAX FALLS APART AT THE SEAMS

Mike Adams
Natural News
Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

The great swine flu hoax of 2009 is now falling apart at the seams as one country after another unloads hundreds of millions of doses of unused swine flu vaccines. No informed person wants the injection anymore, and the entire fear-based campaign to promote the vaccines has now been exposed as outright quackery and propaganda.

Even doctors are now calling the pandemic a complete hoax. As reported on FoxNews, Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, a leading health authority in Europe, says that drug companies “organized a ‘campaign of panic’ to put pressure on the World Health Organization (WHO) to declare a pandemic. He believes it is ‘one of the greatest medicine scandals of the century,’ and he has called for an inquiry.” (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933…)

H1N1 swine flu was never dangerous, and it never should have been escalated to a level-six pandemic in the first place. It was all a big marketing scam whose purpose was to simply sell vaccines. (And the CDC and WHO were in on it…)

And it worked! Big Pharma made out with billions of dollars in profits for a useless vaccine that’s now being dumped by the truck load. These vaccines were, of course, paid for with taxpayer dollars, making the Great Swine Flu Hoax of 2009 nothing more than an elaborate financial scam whose goal was to transfer wealth from the People to the shareholders of Big Pharma.

In just the fourth quarter of 2009, GlaxoSmithKline shipped $1.4 billion worth of vaccines. (http://www.reuters.com/article/idUS…)

That’s $1.4 billion worth of taxpayer dollars, by the way. Dollars that could have been spent on nutrition or real health education. $1.4 billion worth of free vitamin D supplements would have done far more to protect public health than vaccines could ever hope to accomplish.

A bailout for Big Pharma

Wall Street hucksters have nothing on Big Pharma, the CDC and the WHO, all of which conspired to mislead the public and generate irrational fear in order to make money selling people vaccine shots they never needed in the first place.

The drug companies raked in billions of dollars in revenues while providing a product that offered absolutely no net reduction in mortality. In fact, as the long-term side effects of the vaccines remain unknown, it could turn out that the vaccines actually result in a net increase in mortality.

Meanwhile, countless people were harmed by the swine flu vaccine frenzy (it’s “countless” because nobody’s counting). In addition to those who were nearly paralyzed after receiving the vaccine shots, grade school students in Massachusetts who lined up to receive swine flu vaccine shots were instead injected with insulin. (Insulin injections can put you into a coma.) (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy…)

The school sent a letter home to students blaming the mishap on the school nurse. But if they weren’t injecting these kids with a useless vaccine for a non-pandemic, none of this would have happened in the first place.

Total swine flu deaths for 2009 were far lower than the number of deaths from regular seasonal flu. And yet it turns out that thousands of Americans who died from the swine flu had been previously injected with the vaccines (http://www.naturalnews.com/027956_H…). In fact, according to calculations derived from official CDC estimates, thousands of vaccinated Americans died from swine flu anyway. The vaccines, it seems, don’t really work after all. You’re just as safe doing nothing.

Actually, getting the vaccine may harm your health. Outspoken Dr. Wodarg even says that the full extent of the damage from the insufficiently-tested vaccines may not be known for years. “The vaccine developed by Novartis was produced in a bioreactor from cancerous cells, a technique that had never been used until now,” he says.

Just what we need, huh? Cancer cells being injected into the population as part of a vaccine campaign.

Cancelling vaccine orders

The Swine Flu hoax has fizzled out, and countries like Greece, France and the UK have cancelled orders for vaccines that they now realize won’t be needed (http://www.reuters.com/article/idUS…) (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8…). But even the fizzling of this hoax doesn’t mean it was a failure from the point of view of Big Pharma.

The swine flu hoax was a huge success not only for drug company profits, but also for certain influential individuals including Dr Julie Gerberding, former head of the CDC who has now accepted a high-paying job
as the president of Merck’s global vaccine operations. (http://www.naturalnews.com/027789_D…)

One minute you’re running the CDC, warning the country about a pandemic while urging everybody to get vaccinated, and the next minute you’re running the for-profit vaccine division of the world’s largest drug company. Amazing how that works, huh?
 

IS THE U.S. ECONOMY BEING TANKED BY MISTAKE OR BY INTENT?

by Bill Sardi

Recently by Bill Sardi: Who Is Left Holding the Bag on US Debt?

The government wants Americans to believe the greatest economic collapse in history was the result of ineptness and mistakes yet still have confidence in their financial institutions.

Should American bankers be let off the hook because they self-declare, before an investigational panel, that the failure of their newly invented risk swaps and other highly leveraged investment schemes was simply due to "mistakes"? Not malfeasance – just every-day mistakes? Bankers just fell asleep at the helm at a critical juncture in American history. Is that what we are being led to believe? 

Oh well, it’s just 18 million American homes that now lay empty in the wake of unprecedented foreclosures, and the bankers have collected obscene bonuses for reckless lending of their depositors’ money. It’s like the captain and crew of a ship saying, not to worry, twenty-percent of the passengers were lost overboard, but this was due to unavoidable mistakes, and then being rewarded with bonuses when they reach port.

Are Americans to believe that the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates to create a false bubble in the economy, at the same time the Securities Exchange Commission allowed investment banks risky reserve ratios and exerted lax control over investment tycoons like Bernie Madoff, and in lock step, the credit rating agencies (Fitch, Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s) handed out sterling A+ credit ratings on risky mortgage-backed securities, while the US Treasury Department stood by and did nothing? 

Shall Americans conclude the world’s largest economy is beyond the management skills and regulation of virtually every financial arm of government and the private sector? If so, widespread incompetence would suggest Americans had better come up with some institution or instrument of their own invention to protect their money.

Whatever or whomever did bring down the American economy, it appears to be an orchestrated effort. If one arm of the financial industry had objected or performed their job responsibly, the whole economic collapse could have been averted. The credit rating agencies alone could have put an abrupt halt to what amounts to a financial collapse of western civilization. 

Lenses into the future: a planned default?

Americans cannot see the economy as the elites do. The elites have lenses into the future. They have access to information that foretells the future of our economy. They can see a better picture of when mounting debt will rise beyond the ability to repay. 

They certainly can see pension funds, private and public, are under-funded and there is no way, with Baby Boomers now entering their retirement years, these obligations can be met. Medicare expenses are totally out of control with enrollees able to rack up bills in the tens of thousands of dollars beyond what they ever paid into the system.

At some point, seeing no way out, maybe a decision was made to default on our debts. There are rumblings that the world economy is being intentionally brought to its knees in order to usher in a one-world currency. 

There are other hints that the US is intentionally tanking its economy. 

Normally the US Patent & Trademark Office could be seen as a pathway to jump-start the economy. Some 6300 patent examiners hold the future fate of the American economy in their hands. But the patent office is backlogged. It embarrassingly has 6 years of patent applications, what amounts to over 1 million filings, waiting to be evaluated. Over $700 million of fees have been siphoned off by Congress to pay for other extraneous government projects, slowing the patent approval process to an agonizingly pace. About 7 of every 10 applicants were granted a patent in the past. But today, less than half are approved. 

In the past decade there also appeared to be an effort to drive States into debt. Colorado, a State that had a mandated spending limit, was belittled for stifling its economy. Lies were told that Colorado was so bogged down with this limitation that it repealed its spending limit bill. That was far from the truth. 

Another business stifling practice has been to limit the amount of large funds actually available to the economy in what is called M3 money supply. M1 is the amount of currency and traveler’s checks in circulation outside banks, along with demand deposits and other checkable deposits. M2 is M1 plus savings deposits, such as money market accounts. M3 is M2 plus large time-restricted deposits, institutional money-market funds and other large liquid assets. M3 is the best official measure of the total supply of money.
As of March 23, 2006, the M3 money supply is no longer published by the US central bank. So Americans can’t get a full view of what government is doing with the total money supply. The M3 is now estimated by two websites – ShadowStats.com and NowAndTheFuture.com. A severe contraction in the M3 money supply began to be reported in August of 2008. It appears there has been a sudden downturn in M3 funds, which could choke the economy at a critical time. 

By plan or mistake?

It would be difficult for the American public to even contemplate the idea that their government may be intentionally tanking the economy. So we are left with the commonly-heard claim that people in government are just incompetent, there is no conspiracy of any kind. Regardless, heads should roll, and we still have the same derelict captains (Bernanke, Geithner) at the helm.

Whatever is planned for the future US economy, there certainly must be contingency plans in place to devalue the dollar, issue new currency, declare banking holidays, reappraise the value of real estate to true market value (~ 30% drop), sell off government-held real estate assets to hedge funds, confiscate guns, invoke marshal law, etc. If these events occur, they won’t be without forethought. Call it conspiracy if you will.

On November 21, 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt stated, "The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the United States since the days of Andrew Jackson."

Few Americans recognize the merger of state and corporate powers, with the news media also subservient to those in power. How gullible the public has been over recent decades to not see how government and business have conspired to raise the price of goods.

The oil embargo of the 1970s

I can recall the gasoline crisis/OPEC oil embargo of the 1970s. I was traveling around the US on business at the time and I noticed that shortages of gasoline were not nationwide but were actually being staged in different regions. In Seattle there was no shortage of gasoline, but there were long lines at gas stations in Los Angeles. There was no scarcity of gasoline in Atlanta, but later there were long lines at gas pumps throughout Georgia. TV screens around the nation made it falsely appear the shortage was nationwide. 

The 1970s gasoline crisis was a concerted effort between government, oil producers and the news media to fool Americans into thinking there was a pervasive shortage of gasoline despite the fact OPEC, the oil-producing cartel, was founded because of an over-abundance of oil. 

I recall reading an article in Fortune Magazine in 1963 how oil companies longed to find a way to raise the price of gasoline to European levels. Pre-OPEC, oil was sold at competing prices. That couldn’t be tolerated. A spot-price had to be introduced. Then one country couldn’t undersell another and prices would "stabilize." The OPEC cartel eliminated competition, except for Hugo Chavez in Venezuela in recent times. Of course, Chavez is demonized. We do not have free markets, we have controlled markets based upon contrived events.

Tax cut or payoff to oil companies?

Another example of complicity between government and industry is the most recent run up in gasoline prices which began early in the past decade. The news media failed to note that when GW Bush passed his first tax cut in 2001, early in his first term in office, it was rapidly followed by an increase in gasoline prices at the pump. Had President Bush cut taxes in order to put money into consumers’ hands so they could then pay ghastly high gasoline bills? The tax cut appears to have been a hand-in-hand arrangement between oil producers and the federal government. Gasoline prices rose till the public began curtailing their driving. The oil companies had now determined the top price they could get for their refined oil without collapsing demand. 

There is nothing wrong with companies determining the top price consumers will pay for their goods, but there is something wrong when government secretly schemes with oil companies to create false market value, as they have also done in real estate.

Looking back in recent American history, there were also shortages of coffee and bananas in the 1970s and 80s, all staged events blamed on storms in South America that ruined crops. In those days, Americans didn’t have easy access to weather maps and information via the internet. These shortages were prolonged and prices rose until usage declined. Then the barons who ruled the coffee and banana industries had found the top price they could sell their products at without dampening demand. Suddenly, the shortages disappeared. The public never imagined these shortages were all artificially created.

Just as the price of oil, bananas and coffee were covertly engineered by a hidden alliance between government, industry and news outlets, is currency being gamed in the same fashion today? If so, current economic events are not by mistake.

Since President Roosevelt banned citizens from owning gold in 1933, the people were left holding increasingly worthless pieces of paper. 

Americans can’t imagine how monetary policy has eroded their purchasing power. The US was officially taken off the gold standard in 1971. Issuance of silver certificates ceased in 1964. Had the US dollar continued to be backed by gold, the rise in the value of gold would have offset recent increases in gasoline prices at the pump, a fact Ron Paul has brought to the public’s attention. 

For example, a portion of the rise in oil prices in recent years is due to erosion in the value of the dollar. Had the dollar remained strong the relative price of a barrel of oil would only have been around $65 in 2007-2008. If you compare the spot price of oil to gold, there has been almost no increase. Imagine what a gold-backed currency would do for America? Again, government (the Federal Reserve) has now admitted that it has arranged gold swaps with foreign banks in a prearranged way to suppress the value of gold. 

Is inflation inevitable? Or is it planned? Will the American public ever imagine the value of their money has long been manipulated just as the price of coffee, bananas, gasoline and gold have been engineered in an unholy alliance between government and bankers and corporate enterprise? Will the American public ever realize their government is working against them, plunder their wealth, in a growing fascist alliance with American corporations? The enemy is not the underpants airplane bomber as we are falsely being led to believe. The enemy is not a towelhead in Afghanistan. The enemy is not China. As Pogo once said, "we have met the enemy, and he is us."
 

GOLDMAN SACHS WANTS YOU TO PAY-BY-THE-MILE TO DRIVE ON U.S. ROADWAYS
 
By Mark Anderson

According to an independent British newspaper editor, in the not-so-distant future, English drivers will be charged based upon the number of miles they drive, as is being done step-by-step in America.

On January 12, AFP interviewed Mike Robinson, the editor of the UK Column, a liberty-minded newspaper not unlike AMERICAN FREE PRESS.

“Road charging,” as it is called in England, is widespread, he told AFP, as fiber optic cable has been laid along most English roads to help track vehicle travel by the mile so drivers can be charged.

“It has been on the European Union agenda for quite a long time,” he added.

His comments came amid recent news of a radical plan to raise $200 billion by privatizing “the motorway network,” as Brits call it. The plan was presented to the three main political parties by NM Rothschild, the influential investment bank, British news sources say.

The Rothschild bank, called “an architect of several privatizations,” reportedly made its pitch in the weeks running up to the summer recess back on July 21, 2009. Bankers told leading politicians that the sale of the roads overseen by the [public] Highways Agency—all motorways and most “big trunk roads”—could help revive battered public finances. This is the same story Americans have been told.

True to form, toll-road companies and “infrastructure funds” would compete to operate and maintain stretches of the British toll network.

In one version of this scheme, the British government would pay for upkeep through a system of “shadow” tolls. A more radical and less politically acceptable option would be for private companies to charge motorists directly through privately owned toll booths or electronic card readers.

And how did U.S. politicians get the idea that privatizing roads was an acceptable future? Two words: Goldman Sachs, according to noted Texas columnist Ed Wallace.

“Yes, large Wall Street investment banks, led by Goldman, started advising states across the nation on how to raise fast money by diverting the most necessary publicly owned assets—roads—into private ownership,” wrote Wallace. “You have to admit, it’s brilliant, because it’s a forced and guaranteed market: Americans can’t get out of driving.”

And as Daniel Schulman and James Ridgeway wrote in a scathing article, “The Highwaymen,” in January 2007, “Many similar deals are now on the horizon, and MIG and Cintra are often part of them. So is Goldman Sachs, the huge Wall Street firm that has played a remarkable role advising states on how to structure privatization deals—even while positioning itself to invest in the toll road market.”
 

THE MILITARIZATION OF EMERGENCY AID TO HAITI: IS IT A HUMANITARIAN OPERATION OR AN INVASION?

Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research
January 17, 2010

Haiti has a longstanding history of US military intervention and occupation going back to the beginning of the 20th Century. US interventionism has contributed to the destruction of Haiti’s national economy and the impoverishment of its population. 

The devastating earthquake is presented to World public opinion as the sole cause of the country’s predicament. 

A country has been destroyed, its infrastructure demolished. Its people precipitated into abysmal poverty and despair.

Haiti’s history, its colonial past have been erased. 

The US military has come to the rescue of an impoverished Nation. What is its Mandate?

Is it a Humanitarian Operation or an Invasion? 

The main actors in America’s “humanitarian operation” are the Department of Defense, the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). (See USAID Speeches: On-The-Record Briefing on the Situation in Haiti, 01/13/10). USAID has also been entrusted in channelling food aid to Haiti, which is distributed by the World Food Program. (See USAID Press Release: USAID to Provide Emergency Food Aid for Haiti Earthquake Victims, January 13, 2010)

The military component of the US mission, however, tends to overshadow the civilian functions of rescuing a desperate and impoverished population. The overall humanitarian operation is not being led by civilian governmental agencies such as FEMA or USAID, but by the Pentagon.

The dominant decision making role has been entrusted to US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM).

A massive deployment of military hardware personnel is contemplated. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen has confirmed that the US will be sending nine to ten thousand troops to Haiti, including 2000 marines. (American Forces Press Service, January 14, 2010)

Aircraft carrier, USS Carl Vinson and its complement of supporting ships has already arrived in Port au Prince. (January 15, 2010).  The  2,000-member Marine Amphibious Unit as well as and soldiers from the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne division “are trained in a wide variety of missions including security and riot-control in addition to humanitarian tasks.”

In contrast to rescue and relief teams dispatched by various civilian teams and organizations, the humanitarian mandate of the US military is not clearly defined:

“Marines are definitely warriors first, and that is what the world knows the Marines for,… [but] we’re equally as compassionate when we need to be, and this is a role that we’d like to show — that compassionate warrior, reaching out with a helping hand for those who need it. We are very excited about this.” (Marines’ Spokesman, Marines Embark on Haiti Response Mission, Army Forces Press Services, January 14, 2010)

While presidents Obama and Préval spoke on the phone, there were no reports of negotiations between the two governments regarding the entry and deployment of US troops on Haitian soil. The decision was taken and imposed unilaterally by Washington. The total lack of a functioning government in Haiti was used to legitimize, on humanitarian grounds, the sending in of a powerful military force, which has de facto taken over several governmental functions.

TABLE 1

US Military Assets  to be Sent to Haiti. (according to official announcements) 

The amphibious assault ship USS Bataan (LHD 5) and amphibious dock landing ships USS Fort McHenry (LSD 43) and USS Carter Hall (LSD 50).

A 2,000-member Marine Amphibious Unit from the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit and soldiers from the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne division. 900 soldiers are slated to arrive in Haiti by January 15th.

Aircraft carrier, USS Carl Vinson and its complement of supporting ships. (arrived in Port au Prince on January 15, 2010):  USS Carl Vinson CVN 70

The hospital ship USNS Comfort 

Several U.S. Coast Guard vessels and helicopters

The three amphibious ships will join aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson, guided-missile cruiser  USS Normandy and guided-missile frigate USS Underwood. —–

Leading Role of US Southern Command 

US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) with headquarters in Miami is the “lead agency” in Haiti. Its mandate as a regional military command is to carry out modern warfare. Its stated mission in Latin America and the Caribbean is  “to conduct military operations and promote security cooperation to achieve U.S. strategic objectives.” (Our Mission – U.S. Southern Command (USSOUTHCOM) The commanding officers  are trained to oversee theater operations, military policing as well “counterinsurgency” in Latin America and the Caribbean, including the recent establishment of new US military bases in Colombia, within proximity of the Venezuelan border.

General Douglas Fraser, commander of U.S. Southern Command has defined the Haiti emergency operation as a Command, Control, Communications operation (C3). US Southern Command is to oversee a massive deployment of military hardware, including several warships, an aircraft carrier, airborne combat divisions, etc:

“So we’re focused on getting command and control and communications there so that we can really get a better understanding of what’s going on. MINUSTAH [United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti], as their headquarters partially collapsed, lost a lot of their communication, and so we’re looking to robust that communication, also.

We’re also sending in assessment teams in conjunction with USAID, supporting their efforts, as well as putting in some of our own to support their efforts.

We’re moving various ships that we had in the region — they’re small ships, Coast Guard cutters, destroyers — in that direction, to provide whatever immediate assistance that we can on the ground.

We also have a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier, the USS Carl Vinson, moving in that direction. It was at sea off of Norfolk, and so it’s going to take a couple of days for it to get there. We need to also just resupply it and give it the provisions it needs to support the effort as we look at Haiti. And then we’re looking across the international agencies to figure out how we support their efforts as well as our efforts.

We also are looking at a large-deck amphibious ship with an embarked Marine Expeditionary Unit on it that will be a couple of days behind the USS Vinson.

And that gives us a broader range of capability to move supplies around, to have lift capability to help support the effort there also.

So bottom line to it is, we don’t have a clear assessment right now of what the situation on the ground is, what the needs within Port-au-Prince are, how extensive the situation is.

We also, finally, have a team that’s headed in to the airport. From my understanding — because my deputy commander just happened to be in Haiti when this situation happened, on a previously scheduled visit. He has been to the airport. He says the runway is functional but the tower doesn’t have communications capability. The passenger terminal — has structural damage to it, so we don’t know what the status of it is.

So we have a group going in to make sure we can gain and secure the airfield and operate from it, because that’s one of those locations we think we’re going to have a lot of the immediate effort from an international basis going into.

And then we’re out conducting all the other assessments that you would consider appropriate as we go in and work this effort.

We’re also coordinating on the ground with MINUSTAH, with the folks who are there. The commander for MINUSTAH happened to be in Miami when this situation happened, so he’s right now traveling back through and should be arriving in Port-au-Prince any time now. So that will help us coordinate our efforts there also, because again, obviously the United Nations suffered a significant loss there with the collapse — at least partial collapse of their headquarters.

So that’s — those are the initial efforts that we have ongoing And as we get the assessments of what’s coming next, then we’ll adjust as required.

The secretary of Defense, the president, have all stipulated that this is a significant effort, and we’re corralling all the resources within the Department of Defense to support this effort.” (Defense.gov News Transcript: DOD News Briefing with Gen. Fraser from the Pentagon, January 13, 2010)

A Heritage Foundation report summarizes the substance of America’s mission in Haiti: “The earthquake has both humanitarian and U.S. national security implications [requiring] a rapid response that is not only bold but decisive, mobilizing U.S. military, governmental, and civilian capabilities for both a short-term rescue and relief effort and a longer-term recovery and reform program in Haiti.” (James M. Roberts and Ray Walser, American Leadership Necessary to Assist Haiti After Devastating Earthquake, Heritage Foundation, January 14, 2010).

At the outset, the military mission will be involved in first aid and emergency as well as public security and police activities.

US Air Force Controls the Airport

The US Air Force has taken over air traffic control functions as well as the management of Port au Prince airport. In other words, the US military regulates the flow of emergency aid and relief supplies which are being brought into the country in civilian planes. The US Air Force is not working under the instructions of Haitian Airport officials. These officials have been displaced. The airport is run by the US Military (Interview with Haitian Ambassador to the US R. Joseph, PBS News, January 15, 2010)

“The FAA’s team is working with DOD combat controllers to improve the flow of air traffic moving in and out of the airport. The US Air Force reopened the airport on 14 January, and on 15 January its contingency response group was granted senior airfield authority … Senior airfield authority enables the Air Force to prioritise, schedule and control the airspace at the airport, …” (flightglobal.com, January 16, 2010, emphasis added)

The 1,000-bed U.S. Navy hospital ship, USNS Comfort, which includes more than 1,000 medical and support personnel has been sent to Haiti under the jurisdiction of Southern Command. (See  Navy hospital ship with 1,000 beds readies for Haiti quake relief, Digital Journal, January 14, 2010). There were, at the time of the Earthquake, some 7100 military personnel and over 2000 police, namely a foreign force of over 9000. In contrast, the international civilian personnel of MINUSTAH is less than 500. MINUSTAH Facts and Figures – United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti

TABLE 2 

United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH)

Current strength (30 November 2009)

9,065 total uniformed personnel

7,031 troops

2,034 police 488 international civilian personnel

1,212 local civilian staff

214 United Nations Volunteers

MINUSTAH Facts and Figures – United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti

Estimated combined SOUTHCOM and MINUSTAH forces; 19,095*

*Excluding commitments by France (unconfirmed) and Canada (confirmed 800 troops). The US, France and Canada were “partners” in the February 29, 2004 Coup d’État.

Haiti has been under foreign military occupation since the US instigated February 2004 Coup d’Etat. The contingent of US forces under SOUTHCOM combined with those of MINUSTAH brings foreign military presence in Haiti to close to 20,000 in a country of 9 million people. In  comparison in Afghanistan, prior to Obama’s military surge, combined US and NATO forces were of the order of 70,000 for a population of 28 million. In other words, on a per capita basis there will be more troops in Haiti than in Afghanistan.

Recent US Military Interventions in Haiti

There have been several US sponsored military interventions in recent history. In 1994, following three years of military rule, a force of  20,000 occupation troops and “peace-keepers” was sent to Haiti. The 1994 US military intervention “was not intended to restore democracy. Quite the contrary: it was carried out to prevent a popular insurrection against the military Junta and its neoliberal cohorts.” (Michel Chossudovsky, The Destabilization of Haiti, Global Research, February 28, 2004)

US and allied troops remained in the country until 1999. The Haitian armed forces were disbanded and the US State Department hired a mercenary company DynCorp to provide “technical advice” in restructuring the Haitian National Police (HNP). (Ibid).

The February 2004 Coup d’État

In the months leading up to the 2004 Coup d’Etat, US special forces and the CIA were training death squadrons composed of the former tonton macoute of the Duvalier era. The Rebel paramilitary army crossed the border from the Dominican Republic in early February 2004. “It was a well armed, trained and equipped paramilitary unit integrated by former members of Le Front pour l’avancement et le progrès d’Haiti (FRAPH), the “plain clothes” death squadrons, involved in mass killings of civilians and political assassinations during the CIA sponsored 1991 military coup, which led to the overthrow of the democratically elected government of President Jean Bertrand Aristide.” (see Michel Chossudovsky,  The Destabilization of Haiti: Global Research. February 28, 2004)

Foreign troops were sent into Haiti. MINUSTAH was set up in the wake of the US sponsored coup d’Etat in February 2004 and the kidnapping and deportation of the democratically elected president Jean Bertrand Aristide. The coup was instigated by the US with the support of  France and Canada.

The FRAPH units subsequently integrated the country’s police force, which was under the supervision of MINUSTAH. In the political and social disarray triggered by the earthquake, the former armed militia and Ton Ton macoute will be playing a new role.

Hidden Agenda

The unspoken mission of US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) with headquarters in Miami and US military installations throughout Latin America is to ensure the maintenance of subservient national regimes, namely US proxy governments, committed to the Washington Consensus and the neoliberal policy agenda. While US military personnel will at the outset be actively involved in emergency and disaster relief, this renewed US military presence in Haiti will be used  to establish a foothold in the country as well pursue America’s strategic and geopolitical objectives in the Caribbean basin, which are largely directed against Cuba and Venezuela.

The objective is not to work towards the rehabilitation of the national government, the presidency, the parliament, all of which has been decimated by the earthquake. Since the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship, America’s design has been to gradually dismantle the Haitian State, restore colonial patterns and obstruct the functioning of a democratic government. In the present context, the objective is not only to do away with the government but also to revamp the mandate of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), of which the headquarters have been destroyed.

“The role of heading the relief effort and managing the crisis quickly fell to the United States, for lack — in the short term, at least — of any other capable entity.” ( US Takes Charge in Haiti _ With Troops, Rescue Aid – NYTimes.com, January 14, 2009)

Prior to the earthquake, there were, according to US military sources, some 60 US military personnel in Haiti. From one day to the next, an outright military surge has occurred: 10,000 troops, marines, special forces, intelligence operatives, etc., not to mention private mercenary forces on contract to the Pentagon.

In all likelihood the humanitarian operation will be used as a pretext and justification to establish a more permanent US military presence in Haiti.

We are dealing with a massive deployment, a “surge” of military personnel assigned to emergency relief.

The first mission of SOUTHCOM will be to take control of what remains of the country’s communications, transport and energy infrastructure. Already, the airport is under de facto US control. In all likelihood, the activities of MINUSTAH which from the outset in 2004 have served US foreign policy interests, will be coordinated with those of SOUTHCOM, namely the UN mission will be put under de facto control of the US military.

The Militarization of Civil Society Relief Organizations

The US military in Haiti seeks to oversee the activities of approved humanitarian organizations. It also purports to encroach upon the humanitarian activities of Venezuela and Cuba:

“The government under President René Préval is weak and literally now in shambles. Cuba and Venezuela, already intent on minimizing U.S. influence in the region, are likely to seize this opportunity to raise their profile and influence…” (James M. Roberts and Ray Walser, American Leadership Necessary to Assist Haiti After Devastating Earthquake, Heritage Foundation, January 14, 2010).

In the US, the militarization of emergency relief operations was instigated during the Katrina crisis, when the US military was called in to play a lead role.

The model of emergency intervention for SOUTHCOM is patterned on the role of NORTHCOM, which was granted a mandate as “the lead agency” in US domestic emergency procedures.

During Hurricane Rita in 2005, the detailed groundwork for the “militarization of emergency relief” involving a leading role for NORTHCOM was established. In this regard, Bush had hinted to the central role of the military in emergency relief: “Is there a natural disaster–of a certain size–that would then enable the Defense Department to become the lead agency in coordinating and leading the response effort? That’s going to be a very important consideration for Congress to think about.” (Statement of President Bush at a press conference, Bush Urges Shift in Relief Responsibilities – washingtonpost.com, September 26, 2005).

“The response to the national disaster is not being coordinated by the civilian government out of Texas, but from a remote location and in accordance with military criteria. US Northern Command Headquarters will directly control the movement of military personnel and hardware in the Gulf of Mexico. As in the case of Katrina, it will override the actions of civilian bodies. Yet in this case, the entire operation is under the jurisdiction of the military rather than under that of FEMA.” (Michel Chossudovsky, US Northern Command and Hurricane Rita, Global Research, September 24, 2005)

Concluding Remarks

Haiti is a country under military occupation since the US instigated Coup d’Etat of February 2004.

The entry of ten thousand heavily armed US troops, coupled with the activities of local militia could potentially precipitate the country into social chaos.

These foreign forces have entered the country to reinforce MINUSTAH “peacekeepers” and Haitian police forces (integrated by former Tonton Macoute), which since 2004, have been responsible for war crimes directed against the Haitian people, including the indiscriminate killing of civilians.

These troups reinforce the existing occupation forces under UN mandate.

Twenty thousand foreign troops under SOUTHCOM and MINUSTAH commands will be present in the country. In all likelihood, there will be an integration or coordination of the command structures of SOUTHCOM and MINUSTAH.

The Haitian people have exhibited a high degree of solidarity, courage and social commitment.

Helping one another and acting with consciousness: under very difficult conditions, in the immediate wake of the disaster, citizens rescue teams were set up spontaneously.

The militarization of relief operations will weaken the organizational capabilities of Haitians to rebuild and reinstate the institutions of civilian government which have been destroyed. It will also encroach upon the efforts of the international medical teams and civilian relief organisations.

It is absolutely essential that the Haitian people continue to forcefully oppose the presence of foreign troops in their country, particularly in public security operations.

It is essential that Americans across the land forcefully oppose the decision of the Obama adminstration to send US combat troops to Haiti.

There can be no real reconstruction or development under foreign military occupation
 

ROTHSCHILDS & ROCKEFELLERS: TRILLIONAIRES OF THE WORLD

Prisonplanet.com
Sat 16th Jan, 2010

“Money is Power”, or shall we say, “The Monopoly to Create Credit Money and charge interest is Absolute Power”. (Alex James)

Amsel (Amschel) Bauer Mayer Rothschild, 1838:

“Let me issue and control a Nation’s money and I care not who makes its laws”.

Letter written from London by the Rothschilds to their New York agents introducing their banking method into America: “The few who can understand the system will be either so interested in its profits, or so dependent on its favours, that there will be no opposition from that class, while, on the other hand, that great body of people, mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that Capital derives from the system, will bear its burden without complaint and, perhaps, without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests.”

Nathan Rothschild said to the Commons Secret Committee on the question early in 1819: “In what line of business are you? – Mostly in the foreign banking line. “Have the goodness to state to the Committee in detail, what you conceive would be the consequence of an obligation imposed upon the Bank [of England, which he owned] to resume cash payments at the expiration of a year from the present time? – I do not think it can be done without very great distress to this country; it would do a great deal of mischief; we may not actually know ourselves what mischief it might cause. “Have the goodness to explain the nature of the mischief, and in what way it would be produced? – Money will be so very scarce, every article in this country will fall to such an enormous extent, that many persons will be ruined.”

The director of the Prussian Treasury wrote on a visit to London that Nathan Rothschild had as early as 1817: “.., incredible influence upon all financial affairs here in London. It is widely stated.., that he entirely regulates the rate of exchange in the City. His power as a banker is enormous”.

Austrian Prince Mettemich’s secretary wrote of the Rothschilds, as early as 1818, that: “… they are the richest people in Europe.”

Referring to James Rothschild, the poet Heinrich Heine said: “Money is the god of our times, and Rothschild is his prophet.”

James Rothschild built his fabulous mansion, called Ferrilres, 19 miles north-east of Paris. Wilhelm I, on first seeing it, exclaimed: “Kings couldn’t afford this. It could only belong to a Rothschild!”

Author Frederic Morton wrote that the Rothschilds had: “conquered the World more thoroughly, more cunningly, and much more lastingly than all the Caesars before…”

As Napoleon pointed out: “Terrorism, War & Bankruptcy are caused by the privatization of money, issued as a debt and compounded by interest “- he cancelled debt and interest in France – hence the Battle of Waterloo.

Some writers have claimed that Nathan Rothschild “warned that the United States would find itself involved in a most disastrous war if the bank’s charter were not renewed.” (do you see the similarities here? If you don’t play the game an economic disaster will fall on you and you will be destroyed.)

“There is but one power in Europe and that is Rothschild.” 19th century French commentator.

Lord Rothschild (Rockefellers and Rothschilds’ relatives) in his book The Shadow of a Great Man quotes a letter sent from Davidson on June 24, 1814 to Nathan Rothschild, “As long as a house is like yours, and as long as you work together with your brothers, not a house in the world will be able to compete with you, to cause you harm or to take advantage of you, for together you can undertake and perform more than any house in the world.” The closeness of the Rothschild brothers is seen in a letter from Soloman (Salmon) Rothschild to his brother Nathan on Feb. 28, 1815, “We are like the mechanism of a watch: each part is essential.” (2) This closeness is further seen in that of the 18 marriages made by Mayer Amschel Rothschild’s grandchildren – 16 were contracted between first cousins.

“Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.” The Communist Manifesto. In the case of the Bolshevik revolution, Rothschilds/ Rockefellers’ Chase Bank owned the state. In the US, the FED owners “own” the state.

Rothschilds’ favorite saying who along with the Rockefellers are the major Illuminati Banking Dynasties: “Who controls the issuance of money controls the government!”

Nathan Rothschild said (1777-1836): “I care not what puppet is placed on the throne of England to rule the Empire. The man who controls Britain’s money supply controls the British Empire and I control the British money supply.”

Rockefeller is reported to have said: “Competition is a sin”. “Own nothing. Control everything”. Because he wants to centralize control of everything and enslave us all, i.e. the modern Nimrod or Pharaoh.

The Rothschild were behind the colonization and occupations of India and the Rothschild owned British Petroleum was granted unlimited rights to all offshore Indian oil, which is still valid till this day.

“Give me the control of the credit of a nation, and I care not who makes the laws.” The famous boastful statement of Nathaniel Meyer Rothschild, speaking to a group of international bankers, 1912: “The few who could understand the system (cheque, money, credits) will either be so interested in its profits, or so dependent on its favours, that there will be no opposition from that class, while on the other hand, the great body of people, mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that capital derives from the system, will bear its burdens without complaint, and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests.” The boastful statement by Rothschild Bros. of London.

These people are the top masterminds and conspired for the creation of illegal FEDERAL RESERVE BANK in 1913: Theodore Roosevelt, Paul Warburg – Representative Of Rothschild, Woodrow Wilson – U.S. President Signed FED Into Act, Nelson W. Aldrich – Representative Of Rockefeller, Benjamin Strong – Representative Of Rockefeller, Frank A. Vanderlip – Representative Of Rockefeller, John D. Rockefeller – Rockefeller Himself, Henry Davison – Representative Of J. P. Morgan, Charles Norton – Representative Of J. P. Morgan.

In the last century, members of the British Fabian Society dynastic banking families in the City of London financed the Communist takeover of Russia. Trotsky in his biography refers to some of the loans from these British financiers going back as far as 1907. By 1917 the major subsidies and funding for the Bolshevik Revolution were co-ordinated and arranged by Sir George Buchanan and Lord Alfred Milner. [no doubt using money from Cecil Rhodes' South African gold and diamond legacy - Ed] The Communist system in Russia was a “British experiment” designed ultimately to become the Fabian Socialist model for the British takeover of the World through the UN and EU. The British plan to takeover the World and bring in a “New World Order” began with the teachings of John Ruskin and Cecil Rhodes at Oxford University. Rhodes in one of his wills in 1877 left his vast fortune to Lord Nathan Rothschild as trustee to set up the Rhodes Scholarship Program at Oxford to indoctrinate promising young graduates for the purpose, and also establish a secret society [Royal Institute of International Affairs RIIA, which branched into the Round Table, the Bilderbergers, the CFR, the Trilateral, etc -- Ed] for leading business and banking leaders around the World who would work for the City to bring in their Socialist World government.

Rothschild appointed Lord Alfred Milner to implement the plan.

Benjamin Freedman (Friedman) said this in 1961, Washington (he was a millionaire insider in international Zionist organizations, friend to 4 US presidents, and was also part of the 117-man strong Zionist delegation at the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 where Germany was forced into bankruptcy to the Zionist BankLords and social chaos): “Two years into WW1, Germany, which was then winning the war, offered Britain and France a negotiated peace deal, but German Zionist groups seeing the opportunity made a deal with Britain to get the United States into the war if Britain promised to give the Zionists Palestine.”

In other words, they made this deal: “We will get the United States into this war as your ally. The price you must pay us is Palestine after you have won the war and defeated Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey.” They made that promise, in October of 1916. And shortly after that — I don’t know how many here remember it — the United States, which was almost totally pro-German because the newspapers and mass communications media here were controlled by the Zionist bankers who owned the major commercial banks and the 12 Federal Reserve Banks (the original Stockholders of the Federal Reserve Banks in 1913 were the Rockefeller’ s, JP Morgan, Rothschild’s, Lazard Freres, Schoellkopf, Kuhn-Loeb, Warburgs, Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs, all with roots in Germany’s Zionists like the British Royal family, J.P. Morgan, Carnegie, Bush, Rumsfeld, Clintons, the Nazis that were brought into the CIA, etc. http://land.netonecom.net/tlp/ref/federal_reserve.shtml ) and they were pro-German because they wanted to use Germany to destroy the Czar of Russia and let the Communists whom they funded take over. The German Zionist bankers — Rothschilds, Rockefeller, Kuhn Loeb and the other big banking firms in the United States refused to finance France or England to the extent of one dollar. They stood aside and they said: “As long as France and England are tied up with Russia, not one cent!” They poured money into Germany, fighting with Germany against Russia, to lick the Czarist regime. The newspapers had been all pro-German, where they’d been telling the people of the difficulties that Germany was having fighting Great Britain commercially and in other respects, then after making the deal with the British for Palestine, all of a sudden the Germans were no good. They were villains. They were Huns. They were shooting Red Cross nurses. They were cutting off babies’ hands. And they were no good. The Zionists in London sent cables to the US, to Justice Brandeis: “Go to work on President Wilson. We’re getting from England what we want. Now you go to work, and you go to work on President Wilson and get the US into the war.” And that did happen. Shortly after President Woodrow Wilson declared war on Germany.

The power of the Rothschild family was evidenced on 24 Sept 2002 when a helicopter touched down on the lawn of Waddedson Manor, their ancestral home in Buckinghamshire, England. Out of the helicopter strode Warren Buffet, – touted as the second richest man in the World but really a lower ranking player- and Arnold Schwarzenegger (the gropinator), at that time a candidate for the Governorship of California. Also in attendance at this two day meeting of the World’s most powerful businessmen and financiers hosted by Jacob Rothschild were James Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank and Nicky Oppenheimer, chairman of De Beers. Arnold went on to secure the governorship of one of the biggest economies on the planet a year later. That he was initiated into the ruling class in the Rothschilds’ English country manor suggests that the centre of gravity of the three hundred trillion dollar cartel is in the U.K. and Europe not the U.S.

A recent article in the London Financial Times indicates why it is impossible to gain an accurate estimate of the wealth of the trillionaire bankers. Discussing the sale of Evelyn Rothschild’s stake in Rothschild Continuation Holdings, it states: …[this] requires agreement on the valuation of privately held assets whose value has never been tested in a public market. Most of these assets are held in a complex network of tax-efficient structures around the World.

Queen Elizabeth II’s shareholdings remain hidden behind Bank of England Nominee accounts. The Guardian newspaper reported in May 2002 … “the reason for the wild variations in valuations of her private wealth can be pinned on the secrecy over her portfolio of share investments. This is because her subjects have no way of knowing through a public register of interests where she, as their head of state, chooses to invest her money. Unlike the members of the Commons and now the Lords, the Queen does not have to annually declare her interests and as a result her subjects cannot question her or know about potential conflicts of interests…” In fact, the Queen even has an extra mechanism to ensure that her investments remain secret – a nominee company called the Bank of England Nominees. It has been available for decades to the entire World’s current heads of state to allow them anonymity when buying shares. Therefore, when a company publishes a share register and the Bank of England Nominees is listed, it is not possible to gauge whether the Queen, President Bush or even Saddam Hussein is the true shareholder.

By this method, the trillionaire masters of the universe remain hidden whilst Forbes magazine poses lower ranking billionaires like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett as the richest men in the World. Retired management consultant Gaylon Ross Sr, author of Who’s Who of the Global Elite, has been tipped from a private source that the combined wealth of the Rockefeller family in 1998 was approx (US) $11 trillion and the Rothschilds (U.S.) $100 trillion. However something of an insider’s knowledge of the hidden wealth of the elite is contained in the article, “Will the Dollar and America Fall Down on August 19?..” on page 1 of the 12th July 2001 issue of Russian newspaper Pravda. The newspaper interviewed Tatyana Koryagina, a senior research fellow in the Institute of Macroeconomic Researches subordinated to the Russian Ministry of Economic Development (Minekonom) on the subject of a recent conference concerning the fate of the U.S. economy:

Koryagina: The known history of civilization is merely the visible part of the iceberg. There is a shadow economy, shadow politics and also a shadow history, known to conspirologists. There are [unseen] forces acting in the World, unstoppable for [most powerful] countries and even continents.

Ashley Mote (EU): “Mr President, I wish to draw your attention to the Global Security Fund, set up in the early 1990s under the auspices of Jacob Rothschild. This is a Brussels-based fund and it is no ordinary fund: it does not trade, it is not listed and it has a totally different purpose. It is being used for geopolitical engineering purposes, apparently under the guidance of the intelligence services.” “I have previously asked about the alleged involvement of the European Union’s own intelligence resources in the management of slush funds in offshore accounts, and I still await a reply. To that question I now add another: what are the European Union’s connections to the Global Security Fund and what relationship does it have with European Union institutions? “Recently, Ashley Mote of the European Union (EU) asked this volatile question in a public EU meeting, a question never answered, as Mr. Mote, merely by asking this question, was immediately scratched from the White House Christmas card list and placed on its top ten hit list. The Illuminati’s cash cow, grazing freely on the World wide pasture of greenbacks, isn’t called “Elsie” but instead is called the Global Security Fund, a name actually meaning in the secret cult’s language Global Terrorist Fund. In simple terms, it’s a gigantic illegal trust fund, estimated by undercover overseas financial investigators at 65 trillion dollars, set-up for “Illuminati rainy days” and established when it is desperately needed in a pinch for bribery, assassinations and sponsoring World wide terrorist activities to divert attention from their banking mafia. Although the fund is cloaked in secrecy and made possible by the Western civilization’ s Federal Reserve banking system, investigators trying to pry into the Illuminati’s secret treasure trove have uncovered some interesting facts.
 

OBAMA STAFFER WANTS "COGNITIVE INFILTRATION" OF 9/11 CONSPIRACY GROUPS

By Daniel Tencer
Wednesday,
 January 13th, 2010

In a 2008 academic paper, President Barack Obama's appointee to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs advocated "cognitive infiltration" of groups that advocate "conspiracy theories" like the ones surrounding 9/11.

Cass Sunstein, a Harvard law professor, co-wrote an academic article entitled "Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures," in which he argued that the government should stealthily infiltrate groups that pose alternative theories on historical events via "chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine" those groups.

As head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Sunstein is in charge of "overseeing policies relating to privacy, information quality, and statistical programs," according to the White House Web site.

Sunstein's article, published in the Journal of Political Philosphy in 2008 and recently uncovered by blogger Marc Estrin, states that "our primary claim is that conspiracy theories typically stem not from irrationality or mental illness of any kind but from a 'crippled epistemology,' in the form of a sharply limited number of (relevant) informational sources."

By "crippled epistemology" Sunstein means that people who believe in conspiracy theories have a limited number of sources of information that they trust. Therefore, Sunstein argued in the article, it would not work to simply refute the conspiracy theories in public -- the very sources that conspiracy theorists believe would have to be infiltrated.

Sunstein, whose article focuses largely on the 9/11 conspiracy theories, suggests that the government "enlist nongovernmental officials in the effort to rebut the theories. It might ensure that credible independent experts offer the rebuttal, rather than government officials themselves. There is a tradeoff between credibility and control, however. The price of credibility is that government cannot be seen to control the independent experts."

Sunstein argued that "government might undertake (legal) tactics for breaking up the tight cognitive clusters of extremist theories." He suggested that "government agents (and their allies) might enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories by raising doubts about their factual premises, causal logic or implications for political action."

"We expect such tactics from undercover cops, or FBI," Estrin writes at the Rag Blog, expressing surprise that "a high-level presidential advisor" would support such a strategy.

Estrin notes that Sunstein advocates in his article for the infiltration of "extremist" groups so that it undermines the groups' confidence to the extent that "new recruits will be suspect and participants in the group’s virtual networks will doubt each other’s bona fides."

Sunstein has been the target of numerous "conspiracy theories" himself, mostly from the right wing political echo chamber, with conservative talking heads claiming he favors enacting "a second Bill of Rights" that would do away with the Second Amendment. Sunstein's recent book, On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done, was criticized by some on the right as "a blueprint for online censorship."

Sunstein "wants to hold blogs and web hosting services accountable for the remarks of commenters on websites while altering libel laws to make it easier to sue for spreading 'rumors,'" wrote Ed Lasky at American Thinker.
 

GEORGE W. OBAMA

After his first year, Obama shows his true face

By Nat Hentoff
January 12th 2010
Pat Benic/Newscom
 
What a disappointment a year makes.Before President Obama, it was grimly accurate to write, as I often did in the Voice, that George W. Bush came into the presidency with no discernible background in constitutional civil liberties or any acquaintance with the Constitution itself. Accordingly, he turned the "war on terror" over to Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld—ardent believers that the Constitution presents grave obstacles in a time of global jihad.

But now, Bush's successor—who actually taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago—is continuing much of the Bush-Cheney parallel government and, in some cases, is going much further in disregarding our laws and the international treaties we've signed.

On January 22, 2009, the apostle of "change we can believe in" proclaimed: "Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of my presidency." But four months into his first year in command, Obama instructed his attorney general, Eric Holder, to present in a case, Jewel v. National Security Agency, a claim of presidential "sovereign immunity" that not even Dick Cheney had the arrant chutzpah to propose.

Five customers of AT&T had tried to go to court and charge that the government's omnipresent spy, the NSA, had been given by AT&T private information from their phone bills and e-mails. In a first, the Obama administration countered—says Kevin Bankston of Electronic Frontier Foundation, representing these citizens stripped of their privacy—that "the U.S. can never be sued for spying that violated federal surveillance statutes, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or the Wiretap Act."

It is one thing, as the Bush regime did, to spy on us without going to court for a warrant, but to maintain that the executive branch can never even be charged with wholly disregarding our rule of law is, as a number of lawyers said, "breathtaking."

On the other hand, to his credit, Obama's very first executive orders in January included the ending of the CIA "renditions"—kidnapping terrorism suspects off the streets in Europe and elsewhere and sending them for interrogation to countries known to torture prisoners. However, in August, the administration admitted that the CIA would continue to send such manacled suspects to third countries for detention and interrogation.

Why send them to a foreign prison if they're not going to be tortured to extract information for the CIA? Oh, the U.S. would get "guarantees" from these nations that the prisoners would not be tortured. That's the same old cozening song that Condoleezza Rice and George W. Bush used to sing robotically.

President Obama also solemnly pledged to have "the most open administration in American history." Nonetheless, his Justice Department lawyers have already invoked "state secrets" to prevent cases brought by victims of the CIA renditions from being heard.

In February, in a lawsuit brought by five graduates of CIA "black sites" before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, one of the judges, visibly surprised at hearing the new "change" president invoking "state secrets," asked the government lawyer, Douglas Letter, "The change in administration has no bearing on this?"

The answer: "No, your honor." This demand for closing this case before it can be heard had, he said, been "thoroughly vetted with the appropriate officials within the new administration, [and] these are authorized positions."

Said the torture graduates' ACLU lawyer, Ben Wizner: "Much is at stake in this case. If the CIA's overboard secrecy claims prevail, torture victims will be denied their say in court solely on the basis of an affidavit submitted by their torturers."

Barack Obama a torturer? Not exactly. In this particular case, the torture policy had been set by George W. Bush. President Obama is just agreeing with his predecessor. Does that make Obama complicit in these acts of torture? You decide.

What is clear, beyond a doubt—and not only in "rendition" cases, but in other Obama validations of what Dick Cheney called the necessary "dark side" of the previous administration—has been stated by Jameel Jaffer. Head of the ACLU's National Security Project, he is the co-author of the definitive evidence of the Bush-Cheney war crimes that Obama is shielding, Administration of Torture (Columbia University Press).

After the obedient Holder rang the "state secrets" closing bell in the San Francisco case, Jaffer described the link between the Bush and Obama presidencies: "The Bush administration constructed a legal framework for torture, but the Obama administration is constructing a legal framework for impunity."

It's become an Obama trademark: reversing a vigorous position he had previously taken, as when he signed into law the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) Amendments Act that, as a senator, he had vowed to filibuster as a protest against their destruction of the Fourth Amendment. And now he's done it again. His government is free to spy on us at will.

For another example of the many Obamas, the shifting president had supported the release of photographs of Bush-era soldier abuses of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. (The Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York had approved the publication of these "intensive interrogations.") But Obama changed his mind, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates flat-out censored the photos. Not surprisingly, the Roberts Supreme Court agreed with Gates and Obama and overruled the Second Circuit.
 

NET NEUTRALITY COMMENT DEADLINE JANUARY 14

Blog for Iowa
January 13, 2010

Will the Internet remain in the hands of users? Or will a few phone and cable companies decide which Web sites you can and can’t see?  Urge the FCC to protect Net Neutrality once and for all.

Do you like the Internet as it is — open to everyone to create and find content? Do you like writing blogs, reading alternative media, posting videos, engaging with your communities, connecting with your friends and family? Do you want to see how the Internet keep developing applications and online experiences we’ve never imagined?

Then you have to tell the FCC. The agency is on the on the cusp of creating a final rule that, if done right, will protect Net Neutrality, the principle that safeguards the Internet from corporate control — and allows us to use it like we do.

The FCC is facing intense pressure from giant phone and cable companies that want to strip away our right to an open Internet. They have already flooded the FCC with comments calling for an end to Net Neutrality so that they can control the Internet and block our access to Web sites and information.

It’s time the FCC heard the voices of people like you who rely on the open Internet every day.

We’ve created an easy-to-use tool to file your comments. By acting today, you can make sure that no FCC commissioner can in good conscience side with the phone and cable cartel against an open Internet.

It’s time for the FCC to stand up for Net Neutrality. If you’ve never done it before, now is the time to take action.
 

OBAMA EXECUTIVE ORDER STOKES MARTIAL LAW FEARS

Some warn expansion of military involvement in domestic security could lead to “end of United States as a Republic”

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Tuesday, January 12, 2010

An Obama executive order that creates a council of state governors who will work with the feds to expand military involvement in domestic security has stoked fears that the administration is stepping up preparations for martial law.

The order, which is entitled Establishment of the Council of Governors (PDF), creates a body of ten state governors directly appointed by Obama who will work with the federal government to help advance the “synchronization and integration of State and Federal military activities in the United States”.

The governors will liaise with officials from Northcom, Homeland Security, the National Guard as well as DoD officials from the Pentagon “in order to strengthen further the partnership between the Federal Government and State governments,” according to the executive order.

In October 2008, Northcom, a Unified Combatant Command of the United States military based out of Peterson AFB, Colorado Springs, was assigned the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team returning from Iraq. An alarming September 8 Army Times report which was later denied after it sparked controversy stated that the troops would be used by Northcom to deal with “civil unrest and crowd control” in the aftermath of a national emergency.

The Obama executive order states that governors will help advise the feds on National Guard, homeland defense, and civil support activities.

The fact that the order further blurs the lines between state and federal power, as well as greasing the skids for more military involvement in domestic affairs has stoked fears that Obama may be laying the groundwork for his promised “national civilian security force”.

Conservatives and libertarians responded to the announcement by expressing their suspicion that Obama is preparing to give governors their marching orders in targeting “anti-government” types that have long been characterized as a terrorist threat by the feds in numerous reports stretching back over a decade.

“There is a definite purpose to this,” wrote one commenter on the popular Free Republic website, “The initial steps toward a domestic “Civilian Security Force” in each state, as called for by the fascisti during the campaign. It will be coordinated at the state level, under the authority of DHS and DoD and assorted agencies. The provision will be made for it to be “federalized” in an emergency, as is the National Guard.”

“This is a concrete step toward eliminating the independent authority and dissolving the sovereignty of the several States. It lays the groundwork for the end of the United States as a Republic,” she adds.

Others warn that Obama could be preparing to cancel elections under the justification of a national emergency, a fear that was often expressed when Bush was in office but one that never materialized.

However, the executive order clearly represents another assault on Posse Comitatus, the 1878 law that bars the military from exercising domestic police powers, which was temporarily annulled by the 2006 John Warner National Defense Authorization Act before parts of it were later repealed.
 

MOSSAD TIED TO "UNDERWEAR BOMBER"

By Victor Thorn

“His explosives couldn’t have blown up his own seat. Even if full power, it wouldn’t have worked.” These were the words relayed to me during a Jan. 2 interview with military analyst and counterinsurgen....cy specialist Gordon Duff in regard to the attempt of Christmas Day underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab [sometimes referred to as Abdulmutallab] to ignite 80 grams of the explosive PETN on a flight destined for America. He also explained how the patsy’s country of origin, Nigeria, is clandestinely controlled by the Israeli army and Mossad.

These entities train the military, sell weapons, run the airports, and wield power over DICON (Defense Industries Corporation). 

Furthermore, Mutallab’s father is a Mossad partner and Israel’s No. 1 contact in Nigeria. As the former CEO of his country’s most influential bank and the man who ran their national arms industry, Mr. Mutallab also harbors extremely close relationships with the U.S. ambassador and CIA chief in Nigeria.

On Nov. 19, 2009, Mutallab supposedly felt so alarmed about his errant son’s behavior that he met with the CIA’s station chief in Nigeria. 

Duff describes the father in a Dec. 31 article for Veterans Today as “one of the richest people in the world, head of a major bank, head of the national armaments industry, and close associate of the U.S. ambassador,” as well as being a Mossad asset. Yet we’re to believe that nobody prevented his Yemeni-....influenced “terrorist” son from boarding a plane ultimately bound for Detroit?

Another significant detail is being neglected by mainstream media sources. The firm in charge of security at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport is the Israeli-owned International Consultants on Targeted Security (ICTS). 

They’re also the same outfit responsible for all three airports used by “Muslim hijackers” on 9-11. ICTS also handled security for London’s bus system during their 7-7 “Muslim bombing,” while doing the same at Charles de Gaulle Airport when “shoe bomber” Richard Reid boarded a plane in Paris on Dec. 22, 2001.

When a Michigan passenger, attorney Kurt Haskell, reported that a “well-dressed” Indian man arranged for Umar Mutallab to perform a “walkaround” without a passport in Amsterdam, ICTS was one of only a few entities that could have permitted this security breach to take place.

Despite tighter screening processes since 9-11, Northwest Airlines Flight 253 experienced no delays in takeoff. 

According to the Mathaba News Agency on Jan. 2, “It is evident that clearing the terrorist with higher-ups took a matter of a minute or so—the ‘Indian’ obviously had a high-level pass (CIA, Mossad or high-level security clout).”

Then, during the flight, onlookers noted that another passenger spent a great deal of time filming 23-year-old Mutallab with his camcorder. Even stranger, once the suspect tried to ignite his “crotch bomb,” Mathaba reported, “Throughout the incident, the man continued recording the terrorist, calmly and without interruption.”

Next, after the plane landed, another Indian man was led away in handcuffs after bomb-sniffing dogs smelled explosives in his luggage. Now, more than a week later, officials have refused to release Schiphol CCTV airport footage from Amsterdam, the air-bound “video passenger” film, or identify the man arrested in Detroit.

This Indian link doesn’t surprise Duff. “Israel and India are very close business partners, especially via their military contracts. Also, the Indian intelligence agency (Research and Analysis Wing) works hand-in-hand with Israel. Essentially, the two governments are one.”

But the Mossad’s reach extends even further, directly into the country where Mutallab purportedly trained. On Oct. 7, 2008, BBC News reported, “Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh has said that security forces have arrested a group of alleged Islamist militants linked to Israeli intelligence.”

The ties go even deeper, straight to Mutallab’s home country. In a Sept. 5, 2008 article by Tashikalmah Hallah and Francis Okeke entitled “Nigeria: Lawmakers Divided Over Mossad,” Sen. Nuhu Aliyu voiced his support for their pact with Israel. “They (Mossad) are professionals, and they are here to help train our own intelligence agents. I don’t see any way by which their presence in the country poses a threat to our national security.”

One final element of the equation needs to be addressed; specifically, the “terrorist cell” that ostensibly trained Mutallab prior to his Christmas Day terror attempt.

However, Duff paints an entirely different picture. “There is no al-Qaeda in Yemen. George Bush released a couple of phony operatives from Guantanamo, and after traveling to the Middle East, they hooked up with the Mossad. The only reason Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez released
them is because they’re assets.”

Of course, the American public is being misled again into believing that this “lone nut” terrorist sneaked through the system (no-fly lists, airport scrutiny etc) due to mere incompetence, similar to what occurred on 9-11.

Yet Israeli intelligence provided security at the Amsterdam Airport, where Mutallab boarded a plane with no passport; the NSA is equipped to electronically eavesdrop anywhere around the world; the Mossad is tied to Yemen, Nigeria and India; while the suspect’s father opened up banking and arms contacts in the Middle East while harboring an extremely close relationship with American and Israeli intelligence.

What we’re being fed is another propagandized cover story that is intended to keep ratcheting up Orwellian-....style trauma and fear, all the while further spreading our global “terror war” to Yemen and the African continent.

Victor Thorn is a hard-hitting researcher, journalist and the author of many books on 9-11 and the New World Order. These include 9-11 Evil: The Israeli Role in 9-11 and Phantom Flight 93.
 

DOMESTIC ESPIONAGE ALERT: SPY DRONE DISCOVERED

News Junkie
January 10, 2010

KPRC news in Houston recently filmed a secret experiment by law enforcement agencies including the Dept. of Homeland Security of a drone intended to spy on Americans.

The drone uncovered during this investigation are not like the large, expensive models used by the military for targeted strikes on militants half a world away.  These are manufactured by Insitu out of Bingen, Washington (corporate offices located in Australia), only weigh about 40 pounds (18.1 kg) before monitoring equipment is installed. This model has the capacity to stay airborne for up to a day.

The Houston Police Department responded with the following statement, “Potential public safety applications include mobility, evacuations, homeland security, search and rescue, as well as tactical.” 

Such benign excuses were also used during the passage of draconian bills such as FISA and the Patriot Act before it was revealed the much more insidious and rampant applications of those tools.

Houston is within the coastal and border zone of America, where two-thirds of the population lives and where constitutional rights are routinely disregarded according to the ACLU, yet this poses the question about whether this is pilot program and the usage of unmanned drones might become a regular policy of law enforcement agencies in surveillance operations.
 

THE AIRPLANE BOMB PLOT: OBAMA CONTINUES COVER-UP

By Patrick Martin
8 January 2010

The statement made by President Barack Obama Thursday about the Christmas Day attempted bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight over Detroit is a continuation of a government-wide cover-up, aided and abetted by the media, of the actions of US intelligence and security agencies in the period leading up to the failed terrorist attack.

Obama repeated the meaningless phrase that has become the mantra of such cover-ups since the attacks of September 11, 2001—“failure to connect the dots”—and gave explicit assurances that no officer of any intelligence agency will suffer any consequences for what is arguably the greatest security failure since 9/11.

The president’s remarks continue the pattern established since the young Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, tried and failed to ignite a plastic explosive sown into his underwear as Northwest Flight 253 was in its final descent towards Detroit.

In the two weeks since the incident, there has been no coherent or credible explanation of how it was possible for Abdulmutallab to board the US-bound plane despite the mass of information available to US security agencies, including the visit by his father to the US embassy in Nigeria more than a month before the flight.

Obama admitted that US intelligence agencies had sufficient information to identify Abdulmutallab as a likely threat and place him on the no-fly list. He reiterated that there was not a failure to collect information, but rather a failure to connect disparate pieces, with the result that “a known terrorist” was allowed to board the plane in Amsterdam.

This was followed by the declaration that “no one individual and no single agency was at fault,” a claim that amounts to a blanket assertion of immunity for all those involved. It is also deliberately deceptive, since it suggests that inter-agency coordination was the problem in preventing action from being taken.

The executive summary of the administration review of the incident, released in a declassified form at the time of Obama’s statement, contradicts this implication, however. The summary reveals that both the CIA and the National Counter-Terrorism Center, separately and independently of each other, had all the information necessary to identify Abdulmutallab.

According to the summary, key “dots” to be connected were (1) plans by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to attack the United States, (2) its recruitment of a Nigerian for that purpose, and (3) Abdulmutallab’s departure to Yemen to join an extremist organization. The document declares: “all of that information was available to all-source analysts at the CIA and the NCTC prior to the attempted attack…”

Taken at its face value, this would suggest that the security failure on December 25, 2009 was even greater than that on September 11, 2001. The official explanation of the failure to stop the 9/11 attacks is that the CIA, the FBI and other security agencies each possessed part of the information needed to detect and forestall the terrorist hijackings, but that bureaucratic power struggles and refusal to share information across the “wall” prevented timely identification and coordinated action.

The World Socialist Web Site has written extensively against this official cover story for 9/11, but it is more plausible than the explanation now given for the failure to prevent the Christmas bomber from boarding the Northwest flight. By Obama’s own report, two separate government agencies, the CIA and the NCTC, had all the information needed to identify the bomber, but both agencies, each acting on their own, somehow failed to do so. And this simultaneous double failure took place even though the NCTC was established after 9/11 for the ostensible purpose of serving as the central “dot-connector” for the entire US intelligence apparatus.

Moreover, as we have previously explained, the “connecting the dots” metaphor suggests a mass of information in which each piece of data, taken separately, is not incriminating, and that only someone in possession of all the information can detect a sinister pattern embedded in it. In the case of the Christmas Day bombing attempt, however, each major piece of data was an alarm bell. To ignore these alarms, as both the CIA and the NCTC did, suggests conscious, willful inaction, not mere incompetence.

There is one other aspect of Obama’s statement worth noting. He has a well-practiced habit of adopting whatever persona seems politically necessary—in this case, striking the pose of purposeful determination appropriate to the “commander in chief.” He spoke in short, declarative sentences, punctuated with clichés like “The buck stops here.” He took no questions, and left the media to be briefed by two top security officials, White House terrorism adviser John Brennan and Janet Napolitano, secretary of homeland security.

Their press conference was brief—under 14 minutes—and there was no serious challenge to the official cover story, even though Brennan began with a description of what US security agencies knew before Abdulmutallab boarded the plane in Amsterdam which begged questioning.

Brennan declared: “In the weeks and months leading up to the Christmas attack, various components of our intelligence community had fragments of information about the strategic threat posed by Al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and the specific plot of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. It was known that AQAP not only sought to strike US targets in Yemen, as they had when they attacked our embassy in Sana’a in 2008, but that it also sought to strike the US homeland. Indeed, there was a stream of intelligence on this threat. It was known, thanks to the warnings of his father in November, that Abdulmutallab had developed extremist views, and that his father feared that he had joined unidentified extremists.”

Brennan went on to say, without offering any explanation, that somehow the vast US intelligence and security apparatus failed to put together the threat from Al Qaeda in Yemen and Abdulmutallab’s extremist affiliations and sojourn in that country.

Napolitano was asked about the report in the Los Angeles Times that customs officers in Detroit had seen Abdulmutallab’s name on the TIDE list—a larger database than the no-fly list—when they were checking the passenger manifest while Northwest Flight 253 was in the air. She confirmed that Customs intended to question him after the plane landed, but offered no explanation on why the plane’s crew was not notified so that protective measures could have been taken.

It is not yet possible to provide an answer as to how and why the events of December 25 unfolded as they did. One thing is certain: the official story does not hold water. The Obama administration and the US intelligence agencies are not telling the American people the truth.

One possibility is that Abdulmutallab had been identified as an Al Qaeda sympathizer, but was viewed, especially given his family connections, as a potential candidate for recruitment as an American agent, on the pattern of the operation that produced last week’s disaster for the CIA in Afghanistan. (In that case, the supposed recruit became a suicide bomber and killed seven CIA agents. If the bomb had detonated on board Flight 253, the death toll would have been nearly 300).

There are other possibilities, including an effort from within the intelligence apparatus to destabilize and undermine the Obama administration, or provide a means of pushing it to even more aggressive military actions in the Middle East and Central Asia.

In this context, one must consider the remarkable fact that Obama felt compelled to issue and make public an executive order requiring the US “counterterrorism community” to “enhance the rigor and raise the standard of tradecraft of intelligence analysis, especially analysis designed to uncover and prevent terrorist plots.”

It is extraordinary that more than eight years after 9/11, a US president must issue such a directive. But the White House executive summary notes, in a concluding paragraph:

“There was not a comprehensive or functioning process for tracking terrorist threat reporting and actions taken such that departments and agencies are held accountable for running down all leads associated with high visibility and high priority plotting efforts undertaken by al Qa’ida and its allies, in particular against the US Homeland.”

The syntax is convoluted and the language vague, but the only serious conclusion that can be drawn is that the entire “war on terror” is bogus. It is a pretext for the intensification of US military aggression abroad and attacks on the democratic rights of the American people at home.
 

AGENDA 21 ALERT: OBAMA'S $250 MILLION PLAN TO BRAINWASH YOUR CHILDREN

Cassandra Anderson
Infowars.com
January 7, 2010

On January 6, 2010, Obama proudly unveiled his “Innovative Agenda”. Financed by Public- Private Partnerships, the goal is to train over 100,000 elementary school math and science teachers. The Intel Foundation has committed to spending $200 million dollars to this venture, with 4 other companies providing another $50 million dollars.

The mainstream media’s spin on this story was that this is a gift to increase American children’s test scores. And most people believe this is a wonderful investment in the future and don’t understand the real intention behind the “gift”, with strings attached.

Do you think that depopulation of the planet is wonderful?

Do you think that the destruction of individual rights and the Constitution is wonderful?

Do you think that clearing humans from 50% of America’s landscape is wonderful?

Anytime you here the phrase “Public- Private Partnership”, you can be sure that a corporation or foundation is benefiting, as PPP’s are the tool of fascism. The “Private” component of the PPP is the money partner and is always interested in profit and power. When they couple with the government (the Public component of the PPP), the benefit is enforcement of policies, tax breaks, fees, etc. Please find out more by watching Joan Veon’s videos featured on InfoWars December 3rd.(http://www.infowars.com/agenda-21-alert-public-private-partnerships/).

After doing a little research on Intel’s website and its affiliation with the EPA and the United Nations, the implications are clear: Intel is preoccupied with the global warming hoax and intends to institute Agenda 21 Sustainable Development by indoctrinating children through education.

Lori Wigle, Intel’s Eco- Technology General Manager and “Green Queen” went to the Copenhagen convention and wrote in her blog that technology could provide a structure for people to telecommute from home so that “ultimately we may need fewer roads”. Remember that the collectivists’ agenda is to concentrate people in cities and remove them from the land. If there are no roads, the land becomes ‘off-limits’.

Further, Intel’s Corporate Responsibility Director, Michael Jacobson, glorifies the alliance between Intel and the United Nations in his blog regarding the United Nations Global Compact.

The United Nations Global Compact is based on the Rio Declaration of Environment and Development from 1992, and IS Agenda 21 Sustainable Development. Soft language is used, but the underlying message is that an international governing body should regulate all things concerning human interaction with the environment. The man made global warming hoax is one of the biggest weapons of propaganda and legal action that the collectivists use.

Lastly, education is a tool that the globalists use to promote their programs, and is clearly documented in their own materials. For example, California’s Assembly Bill 32 (Cap & Trade), the final report states, “ARB will also rely on partners throughout the state to develop and display options for curricula that will enhance the K-12, community college, trade technical training programs, and programs at four-year colleges.”

The Good News:

Being forewarned is being forearmed. You can teach your children about “Climategate” and get other parents involved. You can educate the educators and become more involved in what your child learns. 

OBAMA FLUBS HIS FIRST BAY OF PIGS MOMENT AS TERROR MOLES ESCAPE PURGE

Webster G. Tarpley
January 6, 2010

Obama’s speech this afternoon was an incongruous performance. On the one hand, he angrily detailed a catastrophic breakdown in US intelligence procedures leading to the near-massacre of hundreds of airline passengers in the skies over Detroit on Christmas Day. On the other hand, there was no purge of the corrupt, complicit, and incompetent officials who had made this incident possible. No firings were announced. No heads rolled. The rogue network or invisible government of treasonous and subversive moles inside the US government which is behind the Detroit incident, and so many other incidents, remained untouched once again.

Wolffe on MSNBC: “Cock-Up Or Conspiracy?”

The expectation that Obama might actually do something to combat the rogue network across US government institutions which inflicts terrorism on the American people and the world had been raised the night before in an interview by Washington journalist Richard Wolffe on Keith Olbermann’s MSNBC Countdown program. Wolffe, citing high-level White House officials, had reported that there was an investigation into whether the security lapses leading to the Detroit Christmas incident had been intentional and deliberate, and thus the products of conscious sabotage. Wolffe had stated: “It seems that the president is leaning very much towards thinking this was a systemic failure by individuals who maybe had an alternative agenda.The question there is again, cock up or conspiracy. Was there a reason these agencies were at war with each other that prevented that intelligence from being shared?” (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/#34694889) The goal, summarized Olbermann, was either a “turf war” or else the desire “to make somebody [Obama] look bad.” In reality, the goals involve a domestic police state and foreign geopolitical adventures. 

Wolffe’s report had suggested that at least some firings were in the offing for officials responsible for the failure to stop Umar Farouk Mutallab from boarding his flight from Amsterdam to Detroit , despite the cascade of red flags associated with this particular patsy. But in his speech, Obama did not lay a glove on the invisible government forces which stage false flag terror incidents to manipulate public opinion and politics in the direction of increased totalitarianism at home and aggression abroad. Obama talked about what he would not tolerate, and about accountability in the abstract, but did not provide any concrete retribution to make moles think twice about future actions. Even David Gergen, the former White House official who faithfully represents the oligarchical point of view, told Wolf Blitzer on CNN that he considered it virtually inconceivable for Obama to make such a speech without firing some failed officials.

The Bay Of Pigs, 1961 – A Distant Mirror For Obama

Obama’s situation offers certain parallels to the experience of John F. Kennedy in the Bay of Pigs invasion of April 1961. Upon entering office, Kennedy had been convinced by Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell of the CIA to support an invasion of Cuba , which the CIA promised would lead immediately to an insurrection throughout the island and thus to the overthrow of Fidel Castro. Instead, the invasion was a catastrophic failure and humiliation for the United States and for Kennedy personally. When Kennedy came into office, he had been inclined to work closely with operatives like Allen Dulles and Bissell, who personified the rogue network in its then-current form. Helped along — according to some accounts — by General Douglas MacArthur, Kennedy realized that the geopolitical forces behind and above the presidency which were seeking to use him for their own ends were also more than willing to ruin him politically and to cast him aside as an expendable puppet at the first opportunity. Over time, this led to Kennedy’s deep and abiding mistrust of the rogue elements dominating the Pentagon, the CIA, the FBI, and other elements of the US government — a mistrust which allowed Kennedy to resist the lunatic proposals for general war advanced by the rogue elements during the Cuban missile crisis. In the short run, Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs experience impelled him to fire Allen Dulles, Richard Bissell, and CIA deputy director Charles Cabell within less than a year after the failed invasion. Obama needs to imitate Kennedy’s response, on the fast track.

Today, the breakdown crisis of the Anglo-American world system is far more acute than anything Kennedy had to face. Obama needs to muster something more than mere impotent rage about what is happening to himself. If Obama wants to avoid the disastrous outcomes for himself and the country which are now clearly delineated, he will need to mount an ambitious purge of subversive and treasonous moles inside the federal bureaucracy, along with the incompetents, time servers, and bunglers who are happy to play along with the rogues.

Who Obama Should Fire

Almost any of the twenty-odd officials who attended Obama’s special meeting in the White House today could be candidates for ouster for reasons of incompetence or worse. One obvious choice would be Michael E. Leiter, the head of the National Counter-Terrorism Center , which has the responsibility of integrating all the information from 16 agencies which was so obviously not integrated in the Mutallab case. Another might be Leiter’s boss Dennis C. Blair, the Director of National Intelligence or intelligence czar created after 9/11. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is widely discredited, and has lost the confidence of the American people through her interviews if nothing else. Napolitano is also the keeper of the no-fly list, on which Mutallab needed to be listed, but was not. Hillary Clinton’s State Department failed to revoke Mutallab’s US entry visa after the Nigerian’s father warned the US Embassy in Nigeria about his son’s visit to Yemen — an outrageous lapse, or a deliberate sabotage. Leon Panetta’s CIA also had that information, and failed to make sure it was acted on. Gen. James Jones, the head of the National Security Council, is responsible for the overall coordination of the government, which in this case was substandard. FBI Director Robert Muller’s agents are up to their usual tricks of suppressing evidence in regard to the well-dressed Indian and the man in orange on the Detroit flight reported by an eyewitness, the Detroit attorney Kurt Haskell. If Obama continues to punt on real accountability, the rogue network will conclude that he is indeed the weakling and pushover which French President Sarkozy and others have suspected him to be. In that case, the handwriting will be on the wall for new world catastrophes
 

THE NEXT FALSE FLAG: AN ATTACK ON THE U.S. EMBASSY IN YEMEN

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
January 4, 2010

Earlier today, the Daily Telegraph reported that a truck of explosives and weapons managed to slip past a surveillance operation in Sana’a, Yemen.

“The revelations came as western diplomatic missions in Sana’a went into lockdown following threats from al-Qaeda’s Yemeni affiliate, which has taken responsibility for a failed attempt to blow up an airliner over Detroit on Christmas Day,” the newspaper reported. “The identity of those who smuggled the weapons contingent into Sana’a has not been disclosed, and it is unclear if its disappearance is linked to al-Qaeda’s increasingly powerful Yemeni branch, al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula.”

“Diplomats dismissed speculation that the vanishing convoy could presage an imminent attack on Western interests in the city.”

An attack on “Western interests” or an embassy or two would play right into the hands of the U.S. and Britain.

Gordon Brown has said he will convene a summit of world leaders on the Yemen problem at the end of this month.

In the United States the corporate media continues to beat the war drums and spread absurd hysteria about a supposed al-Qaeda faction in Yemen. We are expected to believe a rag-tag gang of terrorists in one of the world’s poorest countries pose a threat to freedom-loving Americans the same way a sanctions-ravaged Iraq posed a threat after Saddam ganged up with Osama and al-Qaeda — one of the more colorful lies spun by the warmongering and Muslim-hating neocons.

Last October authorities in Yemen busted a terrorist cell accused of attacking the U.S. embassy the previous month. According to a reported filed with the state-run Saba news agency, the group had links to Israeli intelligence. “The report, quoting an unnamed source, said investigations and data retrieved from a computer seized from the cell, showed there was correspondence between the Islamic Jihad group’s deputy leader Bassam Abdullah Fadhel Al-Haidari and an Israeli intelligence agency,” the Indo-Asian News Service said.

The Islamic Jihad, reported to have links with the Al Qaeda, had claimed responsibility for the attack on the US embassy in Sana’a Sep 17, which had claimed 18 lives, including that of an Indian woman.

Saba quoted the source as saying that the correspondence between the two sides included a request from the Israeli side to implement terrorist attacks inside Yemen.

“An Israeli foreign ministry spokesman said the Yemeni president’s statement was without foundation,” the BBC reported. “To believe that Israel would create Islamist cells in Yemen is really far-fetched. This is yet another victory for the proponents of conspiracy theories,” said Igal Palmor.

In fact, Israel has a long and sordid history of false flag attacks.

In 1950, a series of deadly attacks in Iraq were attributed to Israeli intelligence.

Four years later, Israeli false flag operatives exploded bombs in the British and American cultural centers and libraries in Cairo and blamed it on the Muslim Brotherhood.

Following the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel supported and encouraged Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Hamas in order to counter the influence of a secular PLO. “Israel started Hamas. It was a project of Shin Bet, which had a feeling that they could use it to hem in the PLO,” said Charles Freeman, a former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia. A former senior CIA official speaking to UPI described Israel’s support for Hamas as “a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious alternative.”

During the Six Day War, Israel attacked the USS Liberty and attempted to blame it on Egypt.

In the early 1970s, Israel teamed up with Jordan to support Muslim Brotherhood terrorism against Syria.

In the 1980s, Israel conducted a bombing campaign in Europe to counter A. Q. Khan’s nuclear proliferation network, which helped Pakistan build a nuclear weapon.

Oded Yinon’s paper, “A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties,” published in the winter of 1982 issue of Kivunim, suggested Arab States should be destroyed from within by exploiting their internal religious and ethnic tensions.

In September of 2000, India’s largest news weekly reported that a Mossad attempt to infiltrate al-Qaeda failed when undercover agents were stopped on their way to Bangladesh by Indian customs officials.

A year later, the Army School of Advanced Military Studies in the United States said the following about Israeli intelligence: “Wildcard. Ruthless and cunning. Has capability to target US forces and make it look like a Palestinian/Arab act.”

In 2005, US Intelligence officers reported that insurgents in Iraq used Beretta 02 pistols minus serial numbers. “Analysts suggest the lack of serial numbers indicates that the weapons were intended for intelligence operations or terrorist cells with substantial government backing. Analysts speculate that these guns are probably from either Mossad or the CIA. Analysts speculate that agent provocateurs may be using the untraceable weapons even as US authorities use insurgent attacks against civilians as evidence of the illegitimacy of the resistance,” the UPI reported.

In 2002, officials from the Palestinian Authority accused Mossad of setting up a fake al-Qaeda terrorist cell in Gaza. Then Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat said that Israel had set up the mock cell in order to justify attacks in Palestinian areas, according to the BBC.

“Not one big success of the Mossad has ever been made public,” Ephraim Halevy, head of the Mossad from 1998 to 2002, told 60 Minutes in 2003.

The U.S. also has a record of using and planning false flag attacks, most notably Operation Northwoods.

Andreas von Bülow, former German Minister for Research and Technology and a long-time member of German parliament, said in 2002 the attacks on September 11, 2001, were a false flag attack. “Whoever wants to understand the CIA’s methods, has to deal with its main task of covert operations: Below the level of war, and outside international law, foreign states are to be influenced by inciting insurrections or terrorist attacks, usually combined with drugs and weapons trade, and money laundering,” he told Tagesspiegal.

In addition to its long history of covertly overthrowing governments around the world, the CIA plotted false flag attacks in Europe to drive a wedge between Syria and Iran (according to CIA agent Robert Baer).

CIA operatives and patsies are legendary, as Webster Tarpley documents in his book,  9/11 Synthetic Terrorism: Made in USA. (Tarpley told Russia Today that the failed attack on a US passenger jet traveling from Amsterdam to Detroit was a set-up provocation controlled by US intelligence.)

If an embassy or other Western interests are bombed in the next few days in Yemen, a finger should be pointed at the CIA, Mossad, or both, not the rag-tag supposed al-Qaeda franchise operating in the country.

Embassies closed in Yemen due to supposed al-Qaeda threats.

On January 3, the Yemeni Foreign Ministry declared the threat posed by al-Qaeda is “exaggerated” by the U.S.

Finally, it should be noted that al-Qaeda was established by the CIA in Yemen, as CIA contractor Billy Waugh admitted in his autobiography. “I worked right there with these al-Qaeda operatives,” Waugh wrote in Hunting the Jackal with Tim Keown.
 

OBAMA AND  AFGHANISTAN: AMERICA'S DRUG-CORUPTED WAR

Peter Dale Scott
Global Research
January 3, 2009

The presidential electoral campaign of Barack Obama in 2008, it was thought, “changed the political debate in a party and a country that desperately needed to take a new direction.” Like most preceding presidential winners dating back at least to John F. Kennedy, what moved voters of all descriptions to back Obama was the hope he offered of significant change. Yet within a year Obama has taken decisive steps, not just to continue America’s engagement in Bush’s Afghan War, but significantly to enlarge it into Pakistan. If this was change of a sort, it was a change that few voters desired.

Those of us convinced that a war machine prevails in Washington were not surprised. The situation was similar to the disappointment experienced with Jimmy Carter: Carter was elected in 1976 with a promise to cut the defense budget. Instead, he initiated both an expansion of the defense budget and also an expansion of U.S. influence into the Indian Ocean.

As I wrote in The Road to 9/11, after Carter’s election:

It appeared on the surface that with the blessing of David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission, the traditional U.S. search for unilateral domination would be abandoned. But… the 1970s were a period in which a major “intellectual counterrevolution” was mustered, to mobilize conservative opinion with the aid of vast amounts of money… By the time SALT II was signed in 1979, Carter had consented to significant new weapons programs and arms budget increases (reversing his campaign pledge).

I noted further that the complex strategy for reversing Carter’s promises was revived for a new mobilization in the 1990s during the Clinton presidency, in which a commission headed by Donald Rumsfeld was prominent.

The Vietnam War as a Template for Afghanistan

It is as if Washington had emerged with only one objective from America’s failure in Vietnam: the urge to do it again and get it right. But the principal obstacle to victory in Afghanistan is the same as in Vietnam: the lack of a viable government to defend. The importance of this similarity has been stressed by Thomas H. Johnson, coordinator of anthropological research studies at the Naval Postgraduate School, and his co-author Chris Mason. In their memorable phrase, “the Vietnam War is less a metaphor for the conflict in Afghanistan than it is a template:”

It is an oft-cited maxim that in all the conflicts of the past century, the United States has refought its last war. A number of analysts and journalists have mentioned the war in Vietnam recently in connection with Afghanistan. Perhaps fearful of taking this analogy too far, most have backed away from it. They should not—the Vietnam War is less a metaphor for the conflict in Afghanistan than it is a template. For eight years, the United States has engaged in an almost exact political and military reenactment of the Vietnam War, and the lack of self-awareness of the repetition of events 50 years ago is deeply disturbing.

Many of the common features of an unpopular corrupted government have been well summarized by Johnson and Mason. In their words, quoting Jeffrey Record, “the fundamental political obstacle to an enduring American success in Vietnam [was] a politically illegitimate, militarily feckless, and thoroughly corrupted South Vietnamese client regime.” Substitute the word “Afghanistan” for the words “South Vietnam” in these quotations and the descriptions apply precisely to today’s government in Kabul. Like Afghanistan, South Vietnam at the national level was a massively corrupt collection of self-interested warlords, many of them deeply implicated in the profitable opium trade, with almost nonexistent legitimacy outside the capital city. The purely military gains achieved at such terrible cost in our nation’s blood and treasure in Vietnam never came close to exhausting the enemy’s manpower pool or his will to fight, and simply could not be sustained politically by a venal and incompetent set of dysfunctional state institutions where self-interest was the order of the day.

If Johnson had written a little later, he might have added that a major CIA asset in Afghanistan was Ahmed Wali Karzai, brother of President Hamid Karzai; and that Ahmed Wali Karzai was a major drug trafficker who used his private force to help arrange a flagrantly falsified election result. This is a fairly exact description of Ngo dinh Nhu in Vietnam, President Ngo dinh Diem’s brother, an organizer of the Vietnamese drug traffic whose dreaded Can Lao secret police helped, among other things, to organize a falsified election result there.

This pattern of a corrupt near relative, often involved in drugs, is a recurring feature of regimes installed or supported by U.S. influence. There were similar allegations about Chiang Kai-shek’s brother-in-law T.V. Soong, Mexican President Echevarría’s brother-in-law Rubén Zuno Arce, and the Shah of Iran’s sister. In the case of Ngo dinh Nhu, it was the absence of a popular base for his externally installed presidential brother that led to drug involvement, “to provide the necessary funding” for political repression. This analogy to the Karzais is pertinent.

An additional similarity, not noted by Johnson, is that America initially engaged in Vietnam in support of an embattled and unpopular minority, the Roman Catholics who had thrived under the French. America has twice made the same mistake in Afghanistan. Initially, after the Russian invasion of 1980, the bulk of American aid went to Gulbeddin Hekmatyar, a leader both insignificant in and unpopular with the mujahedin resistance; the CIA is said to have supported Hekmatyar, who became a drug trafficker to compensate for his lack of a popular base, because he was the preferred client of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which distributed American and Saudi aid.

When America re-engaged in 2001, it was to support the Northern Alliance, a drug-trafficking Tajik-Uzbek minority coalition hateful to the Pashtun majority south of the Hindu Kush. Just as America’s initial commitment to the Catholic Diem family fatally alienated the Vietnamese countryside, so the American presence in Afghanistan is weakened by its initial dependence on the Tajiks of the minority Northern Alliance. (The Roman Catholic minority in Vietnam at least shared a language with the Buddhists in the countryside. The Tajiks speak Dari, a version of Persian unintelligible to the Pashtun majority.)

According to an important article by Gareth Porter,

Contrary to the official portrayal of the Afghan National Army (ANA) as ethnically balanced, the latest data from U.S. sources reveal that the Tajik minority now accounts for far more of its troops than the Pashtuns, the country’s largest ethnic group… Tajik domination of the ANA feeds Pashtun resentment over the control of the country’s security institutions by their ethnic rivals, while Tajiks increasingly regard the Pashtun population as aligned with the Taliban.

The leadership of the army has been primarily Tajik since the ANA was organised in 2002, and Tajiks have been overrepresented in the officer corps from the beginning. But the original troop composition of the ANA was relatively well-balanced ethnically. The latest report of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, issued Oct. 30, shows that Tajiks, which represent 25 percent of the population, now account for 41 percent of all ANA troops who have been trained, and that only 30 percent of the ANA trainees are now Pashtuns. A key reason for the predominance of Tajik troops is that the ANA began to have serious problems recruiting troops in the rural areas of Kandahar and Helmand provinces by mid-2007.

This problem derives from a major strategic error committed by the U.S. first in Vietnam and now repeated: the effort to impose central state authority on a country that had always been socially and culturally diverse. Johnson and Mason illustrate Diem’s lack of legitimacy with a quote from Eric Bergerud:

The Government of Vietnam (GVN) lacked legitimacy with the rural peasantry, the largest segment of the population… The peasantry perceived the GVN to be aloof, corrupt, and inefficient… South Vietnam’s urban elite possessed the outward manifestations of a foreign culture… more importantly, this small group held most of the wealth and power in a poor nation, and the attitude of the ruling elite toward the rural population was, at best, paternalistic and, at worst, predatory.

Thomas Johnson rightly deplores the U.S. effort to impose Kabul’s will on an even more diverse Afghanistan. As he has written elsewhere,

The characterization of Afghanistan by the 19th Century British diplomat Sir Henry Rawlinson as ‘consist[ing] of a mere collection of tribes, of unequal power and divergent habits, which are held together more or less closely, according to the personal character of the chief who rules them. The feeling of patriotism, as it is known in Europe, cannot exist among Afghans, for there is no common country’ is still true today and suggests critical nuances for any realistic Afghanistan reconstruction and future political agenda.”

According to Thomas Johnson, the first eight years of the U.S. in Afghanistan have also seen the Army repeating the strategy of targeting the enemy that failed in Vietnam:

Since 2002, the prosecution of the war in Afghanistan—at all levels—has been based on an implied strategy of attrition via clearing operations virtually identical to those pursued in Vietnam. In Vietnam, they were dubbed “search and destroy missions;” in Afghanistan they are called “clearing operations” and “compound searches,” but the purpose is the same—to find easily replaced weapons or clear a tiny, arbitrarily chosen patch of worthless ground for a short period, and then turn it over to indigenous security forces who can’t hold it, and then go do it again somewhere else… General McChrystal is the first American commander since the war began to understand that protecting the people, not chasing illiterate teenage boys with guns around the countryside, is the basic principle of counterinsurgency. Yet four months into his command, little seems to have changed, except for an eight-year overdue order to stop answering the enemy’s prayers by blowing up compounds with air strikes to martyr more of the teenage boys

Johnson and Mason’s depiction of the Vietnam template underlying Afghanistan is important. But there is a glaring omission in their description of power in the Afghan countryside:

When it is in equilibrium, rural Afghan society is a triangle of power formed by the tribal elders, the mullahs, and the government… In times of peace and stability, the longest side of the triangle is that of the tribal elders, constituted through the jirga system. The next longest, but much shorter side is that of the mullahs. Traditionally and historically, the government side is a microscopic short segment. However, after 30 years of blowback from the Islamization of the Pashtun begun by General Zia in Pakistan and accelerated by the Soviet-Afghan War, the religious side of the triangle has become the longest side of jihad has grown stronger and more virulent.

This remains true, but is dated by its omission of drug-trafficking, and the militias supported by drug-trafficking, which since 1980 have become a more and more important element in the power-balance. Sometimes the drug-traffic adds to the power of tribal elders like Jalaluddin Haqqani or Haji Bashir Noorzai, with tribal drug networks often passed from father to son. But today one of the most important power-holders is the drug-trafficker Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a Ghilzai Pashtun from the north without a significant tribal base. Hekmatyar is much like General Dan Van Quang during the Vietnam War, in that his power continues to depend in part on his sophisticated heroin trafficking network in Afghanistan’s Kunar and Nuristan provinces.

The more we recognize that today drugs are a major factor in both the economy and the power structure of Afghanistan, the more we must recognize that an even better template for the Afghan war is not the Vietnam war, where drugs were important but not central, but the CIA’s drug-funded undeclared war in Laos, 1959-75.

Afghanistan and the Laos Template

I have quoted at great length from Johnson’s pessimistic essay in Military Review, partly because I believe it deserves to be read by a non-military audience, but also because I believe that his excellent analogies to Vietnam are even more pertinent if we recall the CIA’s hopeless fiasco in Laos.

Vietnam, for all its problems with Catholic and Montagnard minorities, was essentially a state with a single language and a single, French-imposed system of law. Laos, in contrast, was little more than an arbitrary collection of about 100 tribes with different languages, in which the dominant Tai-speaking Lao Loum tribes compromised, in the 1960s, little more than half of the total population. Faced with an intractable mountainous terrain, the French wisely devoted little energy to establishing a central power in Laos, which then had one capital for the north and another for the south  Like Afghanistan and in contrast to Nepal, Laos remained and remains one of the world’s last countries without a railroad.

To supplement their own minimal presence in Laos, the French relied on two minorities with two completely different non-Tai languages, the Vietnamese and the Méo or Hmong. The protracted French war in Indochina produced two combating armies in Laos, the pro-French Royal Laotian Army, in uneasy alliance with Hmong guerrillas, and the pro-Vietnamese Pathet Lao.

Thus Laos, when it became nominally independent in 1954, was a quasi-state with two armies, a collection of tribes with different languages and customs, and tribe-dividing borders defined arbitrarily to suit western convenience. All this might have remained relatively stable, had not Americans arrived with naïve notions of “nation-building.” Misguided efforts to establish a strong central government rapidly produced two dominating consequences: massive corruption (even worse than Vietnam’s), and civil war.

It would appear that the CIA in Laos, reflecting the opposition of the Dulles brothers to any form of neutralism, intended to divide the country and make it an anti-Communist battlefield, rather than let it slumber quietly under the guidance of its first post-French prime minister, the neutralist Souvanna Phouma (nephew of the king). A CIA officer told Time magazine in 1961 that the CIA’s aim “was to ‘polarize’ the communist and anti-communist factions in Laos.” If this was truly the aim, the CIA succeeded, creating a conflict in which the U.S. dropped more than two million tons of bombs on one part of Laos, more than in both Europe and the Pacific during World War Two.

Despite this absurd and criminal U.S. over-commitment, the end result was to turn Laos, a profoundly Buddhist nation with an anti-Vietnamese bias, into what is nominally one of the last remaining Communist countries in the world. And our principal ally, a Hmong faction allied earlier with the French, suffered devastating, almost genocidal casualties. (The London Guardian charged in 1971 that Hmong villages who “try to find their own way out of the war – even if it is simply by staying neutral and refusing to send their 13-year-olds to fight in the CIA army – are immediately denied American rice and transport, and ultimately bombed by the U.S. Air Force.”)

No one has ever claimed that in Laos, as opposed to Vietnam, “the system worked,  or that the U.S. might have prevailed had it not been for faulty decision-making at the civilian level. From a humanitarian standpoint, America’s campaign in Laos, was from the outset a disaster if not indeed a major war crime. Only one faction profited from that war, international drug traffickers – whether Corsican, Nationalist Chinese, or American.

With the beginning of CIA support for him in 1959, the CIA’s client Phoumi Nosavan, for the first time, directly involved his army in the opium traffic, “as an alternative source of income for his [Laotian] army and government… This decision ultimately led to the growth of northwest Laos as one of the largest heroin-producing centers in the world” in the late 1960s. (The CIA not only supported General Ouan Rattikone (Phoumi’s successor) and his drug-funded army, it even supplied airplanes to senior Laotian generals which soon “ran opium for them” without interference.) Conversely, when the US withdrew from Laos in the 1970s, opium production plummeted, from an estimated 200 tons in 1975 to 30 tons in 1984.

America’s Addiction to Drug-Assisted War: Afghanistan the 1980s

It is hard to demonstrate the CIA, when unilaterally initiating a military conflict in Laos in 1959, foresaw the resulting huge increase in Laotian opium production. But two decades later this experience did not deter Brzezinski, Carter’s national security adviser, from unilaterally initiating contact with drug-trafficking Afghans in 1978 and 1979.

It is clear that this time the Carter White House foresaw the drug consequences. In 1980 White House drug advisor David Musto told the White House Strategy Council on Drug Abuse that “we were going into Afghanistan to support the opium growers… Shouldn’t we try to avoid what we had done in Laos?  Denied access by the CIA to data to which he was legally entitled, Musto took his concerns public in May 1980, noting in a New York Times Op Ed that Golden Crescent heroin was already (and for the first time) causing a medical crisis in New York. And he warned, presciently, that “this crisis is bound to worsen.”

The CIA, in conjunction with its creation the Iranian intelligence agency SAVAK, was initially trying to move to the right the regime of Afghan president Mohammed Daoud Khan, whose objectionable policy (like that of Souvanna Phouma before him) was to maintain good relations with both the Soviet Union and the west. In 1978 SAVAK- and CIA-supported Islamist agents soon arrived from Iran “with bulging bankrolls,” trying to mobilize a purge of left-wing officers in the army and a clamp-down on their party the PDPA. The result of this provocative polarization was the same as in Laos: a confrontation in which the left, and not the right, soon prevailed. In a coup that was at least partly defensive, left-wing officers overthrew and killed Daoud; they installed in his place a left-wing regime so extreme and unpopular that by 1980 the USSR (as Brzezinski had predicted) intervened to install a more moderate faction.

By May 1979 the CIA was in touch with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the mujahedin warlord with perhaps the smallest following inside Afghanistan, and also the leading mujahedin drug-trafficker. Hekmatyar, famous for throwing acid in the faces of women not wearing burkas, was not the choice of the Afghan resistance, but of the Pakistani intelligence service (ISI), perhaps because he was the only Afghan leader willing to accept the British-drawn Durand Line as the Afghan-Pakistan boundary. As an Afghan leader in 1994 told Tim Weiner of the New York Times:

“We didn’t choose these leaders. The United States made Hekmatyar by giving him his weapons. Now we want the United States to shake these leaders and make them stop the killing, to save us from them.”

Robert D. Kaplan reported his personal experience that Hekmatyar was “loathed by all the other party leaders, fundamentalist and moderate alike.”

This decision by ISI and CIA belies the usual American rhetoric that the US was assisting an Afghan liberation movement. In the next decade of anti-Soviet resistance, more than half of America’s aid went to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who soon became “one of Afghanistan’s leading drug lords.” Brzezinski was also soon in contact with Pakistan’s emissary Fazle ul-Haq, a man who by 1982 would be listed by Interpol as an international narcotics trafficker.

The consequences were swiftly felt in America, where heroin from the Golden Crescent, negligible before 1979, amounted in 1980 to 60 percent of the U.S. market  And by 1986, for the first time, the region supplied 70 percent of the high-grade heroin in the world, and supplied a new army of 650,000 addicts in Pakistan itself. Witnesses confirmed that the drug was shipped out of the area on the same Pakistan Army trucks which shipped in “covert” US military aid. Yet before 1986 the only high-level heroin bust in Pakistan was made at the insistence of a single Norwegian prosecutor; none were instigated by the seventeen narcotics officers in the U.S. Embassy. Eight tons of Afghan-Pakistani morphine base from a single Pakistani source supplied the Sicilian mafia “Pizza Connection” in New York, said by the FBI supervisor on the case to have been responsible for 80% of the heroin reaching the United States between 1978 and 1984.

Meanwhile, CIA Director William Casey appears to have promoted a plan suggested to him in 1980 by the former French intelligence chief Alexandre de Marenches, that the CIA supply drugs on the sly to Soviet troops. Although de Marenches subsequently denied that the plan, Operation Mosquito, went forward, there are reports that heroin, hashish, and even cocaine from Latin America soon reached Soviet troops; and that along with the CIA-ISI-linked bank BCCI, “a few American intelligence operatives were deeply enmeshed in the drug trade” before the war was over. Maureen Orth heard from Mathea Falco, head of International Narcotics Control for the State Department under Jimmy Carter, that the CIA and ISI together encouraged the mujahedin to addict the Soviet troops.

America’s Return in 2001, Again With the Support of Drug-Traffickers

The social costs of this drug-assisted war are still with us: there are said, for example, to be now five million heroin addicts in Pakistan alone. And yet America in 2001 decided to do it again: to try, with the assistance of drug traffickers, to impose nation-building on a quasi-state with at least a dozen major ethnic groups speaking unrelated languages. In a close analogy to the use of the Hmong in Laos, America initiated its Afghan campaign in 2001 in concert with a distinct minority, the Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance. In a closer analogy still, the CIA in 2000 (in the last weeks of Clinton’s presidency) chose as its principal ally Ahmad Shah Massoud of the Northern Alliance, despite the objection of other national security advisers that “Massoud was a drug trafficker; if the CIA established a permanent base [with him] in the Panjshir, it risked entanglement with the heroin trade.”

There was no ambiguity about the U.S. intention to use drug traffickers to initiate its ground position in Afghanistan. The CIA mounted its coalition against the Taliban in 2001 by recruiting and even importing drug traffickers, usually old assets from the 1980s. An example was Haji Zaman who had retired to Dijon in France, whom “British and American officials… met with and persuaded… to return to Afghanistan.”

In Afghanistan in 2001 as in 1980, and as in Laos in 1959, the U.S. intervention has since been a bonanza for the international drug syndicates. With the increase of chaos in the countryside, and number of aircraft flying in and out of the country, opium production more than doubled, from 3276 metric tonnes in 2000 (and 185 in 2001, the year of a Taliban ban on opium) to 8,200 metric tonnes in 2007.

Why does the U.S. intervene repeatedly on the same side as the most powerful local drug traffickers? Some years ago I summarized the conventional wisdom on this matter:

Partly this has been from realpolitik – in recognition of the local power realities represented by the drug traffic. Partly it has been from the need to escape domestic political restraints: the traffickers have supplied additional financial resources needed because of US budgetary limitations, and they have also provided assets not bound (as the U.S. is) by the rules of war… These facts… have led to enduring intelligence networks involving both oil and drugs, or more specifically both petrodollars and narcodollars. These networks, particularly in the Middle East, have become so important that they affect, not just the conduct of US foreign policy, but the health and behavior of the US government, US banks and corporations, and indeed the whole of US society.

Persuaded in part by the analysis of authors like Michel Chossudovsky and James Petras, I would now stress more heavily that American banks, as well as oil majors, benefit significantly from drug trafficking. A Senate staff report has estimated “that $500 billion to $1 trillion in criminal proceeds are laundered through banks worldwide each year, with about half of that amount moved through United States banks. The London Independent reported in 2004 that drug trafficking constitutes “the third biggest global commodity in cash terms after oil and the arms trade.”

Petras concludes that the U.S. economy has become a narco-capitalist one, dependent on the hot or dirty money, much of it from the drug traffic.

As Senator Levin summarizes the record: “Estimates are that $500 billion to $1 trillion of international criminal proceeds are moved internationally and deposited into bank accounts annually. It is estimated half of that money comes to the United States”…

Washington and the mass media have portrayed the U.S. in the forefront of the struggle against narco trafficking, drug laundering and political corruption: the image is of clean white hands fighting dirty money from the Third world (or the ex-Communist countries). The truth is exactly the opposite. U.S. banks have developed a highly elaborate set of policies for transferring illicit funds to the U.S., investing those funds in legitimate businesses or U.S. government bonds and legitimating them. The U.S. Congress has held numerous hearings, provided detailed exposés of the illicit practices of the banks, passed several laws and called for stiffer enforcement by any number of public regulators and private bankers. Yet the biggest banks continue their practices, the sums of dirty money grows exponentially, because both the State and the banks have neither the will nor the interest to put an end to the practices that provide high profits and buttress an otherwise fragile empire.

In the wake of the 2008 economic crisis, this analysis found support from the claim of Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, that “Drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis.” According to the London Observer, Costa said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were “the only liquid investment capital” available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result… Costa said evidence that illegal money was being absorbed into the financial system was first drawn to his attention by intelligence agencies and prosecutors around 18 months ago. “In many instances, the money from drugs was the only liquid investment capital. In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system’s main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor,” he said.

Why This Drug-Corrupted War Will Continue

Thus the war machine that co-opted Obama into his incipient escalations of an unwinnable war is not just a bureaucratic cabal inside Washington. It is solidly grounded in and supported by a wide coalition of forces in our society. For this reason the war machine will not be dissuaded by sensible advice from within the establishment, such as the recommendation for Afghan counterterrorism from the RAND Corporation:

Minimize the use of U.S. military force. In most operations against al Qa’ida, local military forces frequently have more legitimacy to operate and a better understanding of the operating environment than U.S. forces have. This means a light U.S. military footprint or none at all.

It will not be dissuaded by the conclusion of a recent study for the Carnegie Endowment that “the presence of foreign troops is the most important element driving the resurgence of the Taliban.” To justify its global strategic posture of what it calls “full-spectrum dominance,” the Pentagon badly needs the “war against terror” in Afghanistan, just as a decade ago it needed the counter-productive “war against drugs” in Colombia.

Full-spectrum dominance is of course not just an end in itself, it is also lobbied for by far-flung American corporations overseas, especially oil companies like Exxon Mobil with huge investments in Kazakhstan and elsewhere in Central Asia. As Michael Klare noted in his book Resource Wars, a secondary objective of the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan was “to consolidate U.S. power in the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea area, and to ensure continued flow of oil.”

The global drug traffic itself will continue to benefit from the protracted conflict generated by “full-spectrum dominance” in Afghanistan, and some of the beneficiaries may have been secretly lobbying for it. And I fear that all the client intelligence assets organized about the movement of Afghan heroin through Central Asia and beyond will, without a clear change in policy, continue as before to be protected by the CIA. And America’s superbanks like Citibank – the banks allegedly “too big to fail” – are now since the downturn even more dependant than before on the hundreds of billions of illicit profits which they launder each year.

In both Afghanistan and Laos (as opposed to Vietnam) heroin has been by far the principal export, and so important that simply to curtail the production of opium has risked impoverishing those in the areas where opium was grown. This was the reason given for not disrupting heroin flows in the severe winter of 2001-02, the first year of the American invasion of Afghanistan. The economy was so devastated that, without income from opium, large numbers of Afghans might have starved.

According to Australian journalist Michael Ware, Time Magazine’s correspondent in Kandahar, opium is still the main support of the Afghan economy, as well the main support for both the Karzai government and the Taliban opposition:

You take away the opium and you suck the oxygen out of this economy and you’ll be treading on the toes of significant players who have built empires around the opium trade, and that includes political and military figures as well as criminal and business figures here in Kandahar.

A consistent bias of U.S. news reporting on opium and heroin in Afghanistan has been to blame the Taliban for their production, and not also the government. For example, the New York Times reported on November 27, 2008 that

“Afghanistan has produced so much opium in recent years that the Taliban are cutting poppy cultivation and stockpiling raw opium in an effort to support prices and preserve a major source of financing for the insurgency, Antonio Maria Costa, the executive director of the United Nations drug office [UNODC], says.”

But as Jeremy Hammond responds,

In commentary attached to the UNODC report, Mr. Costa asks, “Who collects this money? Local strong men. In other words, by year end, war-lords, drug-lords and insurgents will have extracted almost half a billion dollars of tax revenue from drug farming, production and trafficking.” Notably, Mr. Costa does not answer his question with “the Taliban”, but includes a much broader range of participants who profit from the trade that includes, but is in no way limited to, the Taliban.

Citing the statistics in the UNODC’s annual reports, Hammond estimates that the reported Taliban revenues from opium ($75-100 million) are only about 3 percent of the total earned income in Afghanistan ($3.4 billion), which in turn is only about five percent of the UNODC estimate of what that crop is worth in the world market ($64 billion).

It is because of the larger share of drug profits going to supporters of the Kabul government that U.S. strategies to attack the Afghan drug trade are explicitly limited to attacking drug traffickers supporting the Taliban.Such strategies have the indirect effect of increasing the opium market share of the past and present CIA assets in the Karzai regime (headed by Hamid Karzai, a former CIA asset)  such as the president’s brother Ahmed Wali Karzai, an active CIA asset, and Abdul Rashid Dostum, a former CIA asset.

As I have observed elsewhere about the U.S. campaign against the FARC and cocaine in Colombia, the aim of all U.S. anti drug campaigns abroad has never been the hopeless ideal of eradication. The aim of all such campaigns has been to alter market share: to target specific enemies and thus ensure that the drug traffic remains under the control of those traffickers who are allies of the state security apparatus and/or the CIA. This was notably true of Laos in the 1960s, when the CIA intervened militarily with air support to assist Ouan Rattikone’s army, in a battle over a contested opium caravan in Laos.

Consequences for America of a Drug-Corrupted War

But this toleration of the traffic has led to another similarity with Vietnam and Laos in the 1960s: the increasing addiction of GIs to heroin, Afghanistan’s principal export. Despite the denial one has come to expect from high places, it is (according to Salon’s Shaun McCanna),

not difficult to find a soldier who has returned from Afghanistan with an addiction. Nearly every veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom I have spoken with was familiar with heroin’s availability on base, and most knew at least one soldier who used while deployed.

And the reported easy availability of heroin outside Afghanistan’s Bagram air base, like that four decades ago outside Vietnam’s American base at Long Binh, points to another alarming similarity. Just as at the height of the Vietnam war, heroin was shipped to the United States in body bags containing cadavers, so now we hear from Heneral Mahmut Gareev, a former Soviet commander in Afghanistan that

Americans themselves admit that drugs are often transported out of Afghanistan on American planes. Drug trafficking in Afghanistan brings them about 50 billion dollars a year – which fully covers the expenses tied to keeping their troops there. Essentially, they are not going to interfere and stop the production of drugs.

Gareev’s charge has been repeated in one form or another by a number of other sources, including Pakistani General Hamid Gul, a former ISI commander:

“Abdul Wali Karzai is the biggest drug baron of Afghanistan,” he stated bluntly. He added that the drug lords are also involved in arms trafficking, which is “a flourishing trade” in Afghanistan. “But what is most disturbing from my point of view is that the military aircraft, American military aircraft are also being used. You said very rightly that the drug routes are northward through the Central Asia republics and through some of the Russian territory, and then into Europe and beyond. But some of it is going directly. That is by the military aircraft. I have so many times in my interviews said, ‘Please listen to this information, because I am an aware person.’ We have Afghans still in Pakistan, and they sometimes contact and pass on the stories to me. And some of them are very authentic. I can judge that. So they are saying that the American military aircraft are being used for this purpose. So, if that is true, it is very, very disturbing indeed.”

Another slightly different testimony is from General Khodaidad Khodaidad, the current Afghan minister of counter narcotics:

The Afghan minister of counter narcotics says foreign troops are earning money from drug production in Afghanistan. General Khodaidad Khodaidad said the majority of drugs are stockpiled in two provinces controlled by troops from the US, the UK, and Canada, IRNA reported on Saturday. He went on to say that NATO forces are taxing the production of opium in the regions under their control.
I do not accept these charges as proven, despite the number of additional sources for them. None of the sources quoted here can be considered an objective source with no axe to grind, and worse charges still are easy to find in wilds of the Internet.

However the charges are plausible, because of history. Just as in Vietnam and Laos, the United States made its initial alliances in Afghanistan with drug traffickers, both in 1980 and again in 2001; and this is a major factor explaining the endemic corruption of the U.S.-sponsored Karzai regime today. There should be an official Congressional investigation whether the United States did not intend for its Afghan assets, just as earlier in Burma, Laos, and Thailand, to supplement their CIA subsidies with income from drug trafficking.

In short, the impasse the U.S. faces in Afghanistan, in its efforts to support an unpopular and corrupt regime, must be understood in the light of its past relations to the drug traffic there – a situation which resembles the past U.S. involvement in Laos even more than in Vietnam. It is this sustained pattern of intervention in support of drug economies, and with the support of drug traffickers, that so depresses observers who had hoped desperately that, in this respect, Obama would bring a change.

The question remains: how many Americans, Afghans, and Pakistanis will have to die, before we can put an end to this drug-corrupted and drug-corrupting war?

OBAMA ORDERS U.S. GOVERNMENT TO BEGIN PREPARING FOR BIOLOGICAL ATTACK

The European Union Times
January 2, 2010

The US Post Office could play a key role in distributing medical aid in the event of a biological attack, according to an executive order released by the White House.

The order signed by President Barack Obama directs government agencies, local law enforcement and the US Post Office to work on a model for distribution of medical countermeasures in the wake of a biological attack.

“This policy would seek to: (1) mitigate illness and prevent death; (2) sustain critical infrastructure; and (3) complement and supplement State, local, territorial, and tribal government medical countermeasure distribution capacity,” the order said.

“The US Postal Service has the capacity for rapid residential delivery of medical countermeasures for self administration across all communities in the United States,” the order added.

The US Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano were instructed to work with the post office to develop a “dispensing model for US cities to respond to a large-scale biological attack, with anthrax as the primary threat consideration.”

The order calls for the model to be drawn up within 180 days, but gives no details as to whether the idea of using the US postal system to assist Americans in the wake of a biological attack is a new one.

The United States has sought to bolster its capacity to respond to biological attacks since 2001, when anthrax-laced letters mailed to people across the United States led to five deaths.

The order came amid heightened security concerns here following an attempt to bring down a US-bound jetliner on Christmas Day. A 23-year-old Nigerian has been charged in the case.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Obviously when reading an article such as this one, you must first come to the realization that the only country insane enough to attack America is America. What they are preparing for is martial law, plain and simple. How to use a false flag operation to enslave the people.

-Col.South
 

FALSE FLAG EVENT IN DETROIT A PRETEXT TO INVADE YEMEN

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
January 1, 2009

The UK PM Gordon Brown called for an “emergency summit of world leaders last night to stop Yemen becoming a new terror center,” reports The Sun. Brown declares the poverty-stricken country — increasingly described as a “failed state” by government officials and the corporate media (the same way Afghanistan and Iraq were deemed failed states before they were invaded) — represents an “evolving threat” threat and an “incubator” for terrorism.

“Yemen, as a potential safe haven for terrorism, presents a regional and global threat,” said Brown and added that Britain and the United States are “building our support for Yemen’s efforts to tackle” the supposed terrorist threat.

In other words, the governments of Britain and the United States are preparing to invade Yemen. Gordon Brown’s planned “emergency summit of world leaders” later this month should be considered a red flag indicating the elite plan to expand the GWOT into Yemen and Africa.

“The United States will more than double its security assistance to Yemen, officials said Friday, and Britain will host an international meeting this month to seek ways to prevent the poorest Arab nation from becoming an al-Qaeda stronghold,” reports The Washington Post. “The announcements highlight mounting Western concern over Yemen after a failed attempt to bomb a U.S. airliner on Christmas; the suspect is a Nigerian man who reportedly told authorities that he received training and equipment in the country, which borders Saudi Arabia.”

On Friday, Saudi warplanes carried out several airstrikes on northern Yemen villages and the oil kingdom sent troops into the country, according to Houthi fighters who oppose the government of the Arab country. Houthis accuse the Yemeni government of violating their civil rights and attempting to politically, economically, and religiously marginalize them.

The Yemeni government claims to have destroyed what it calls a “terrorist den” in the northern Sa’ada region on Thursday, according to a report filed by Reuters. Since the so-called underwear bomber’s failed attack, the United States has called for the government of Yemen to attack what it describes as an expansion of an al-Qaeda presence in the country.

Also on Friday, senior leaders of the Shabab rebels in Somalia promised to send their fighters beyond Somalia to Yemen and wherever jihad beckons, according to The New York Times. Sheik Muktar Robow, a senior rebel official, said that the fighters had been trained to fight the African Union peacekeeping force and the transitional federal government in Somalia but that Yemen was just across the Gulf of Aden and that “our brothers must be ready for our welcome.”

“The Shabab have increased their ties with Al Qaeda, which has recently been fighting the American-backed military in Yemen,” claims The New York Times.

“A group calling itself al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula has claimed responsibility for the failed bombing of an Amsterdam-to-Detroit aircraft on Christmas Day. Nigerian suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab told investigators he had trained with al-Qaida operatives in Yemen. An increasing number of terrorism experts suggest that the turmoil in Yemen provides an ideal training ground for terrorists,” reports The Voice of America.

“Obama has formulated his new version of the Axis of Evil, composed of Afghanistan-Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen,” writes historian and author Webster Griffin Tarpley.

In Yemen, a civil war pits the Saudi-backed central government against the Iranian-backed Shiite Houthi rebels, whom the US has bombed at least twice this month. The goal here is to play Iran against Saudi Arabia so as to weaken both the pro-Moscow Achmadinejad government in Iran, and also those Saudi forces that are fed up with their status as a US protectorate. The US is openly now sponsoring a regroupment of “al Qaeda” (the CIA Moslem legion) in Yemen , including by sending fighters direct from Guantanamo . The new CIA-promoted entity synthetic entity is “Al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula or AQAP, a gaggle of US patsies, dupes, and fanatics which is claiming credit for the Umar Farouk incident. The US hopes to further dominate the exit from the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, while also easing pressure on the battered US dollar by jacking up the price of oil in an atmosphere of tension on the Arabian peninsula.

It should be obvious now that the Umar Farouk incident was a false flag event designed precisely to cobble together a pretext for an invasion of the “failed state” Yemen where al-Qaeda has magically and conveniently taken up residence. Gordon Brown’s summit later this month will serve as a planning session on formulating the invasion.

As noted on the Haskell Family Blog today, the FBI has stumbled through no less than four versions of what happened in Amsterdam and Detroit. Confronted with the eye witness account of the event as told by Michigan lawyer Kurt Haksell, who related his story on the Alex Jones Show earlier in the week, the government is attempting to sow confusion and disinformation by spinning various distorted accounts and manufacturing outright lies about what happened. In many ways this a repeat of what the government — with the eager participation of the corporate media — did in the days and weeks following the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Finally, it should be noted that al-Qaeda presence in Yemen is not a new development. As CIA contractor Billy Waug wrote in his autobiography, he was part of a concerted effort to train al-Qaeda operatives in the country beginning in 1994