9/11: The Ultimate Triumph of the Strategy of Tension

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Part I: 9/11: Unanswered Questions


by Wayne Madsen

President Bush's chief counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke has revealed that the CIA under George Tenet attempted to recruit some of the 9/11 "Al Qaeda" terrorists prior to the attack of September 11, 2001, but that after the attempt failed, Tenet and his senior CIA staff covered up the botched recruitment effort.

The revelation is yet one more nail in the coffin of what has become the most discredited U.S. government report since the infamous Warren Report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. In fact, the Warren Report received another blow after it was revealed that First Lady Jacqueline revealed in 1964 to historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. that she believed that Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was behind the assassination of her husband in Dallas. The revelations by Mrs. Kennedy and Clarke show that the United States government cannot be trusted to investigate misdeeds carried out with the full knowledge and support of senior officials of the CIA and the White House. The 9/11 attack represents one such high-level government cover-up.

Clarke's recent revelations about CIA knowledge of Al Qaeda 9/11 cells prior to the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington merely takes one to the shallowest of depths of the rabbit hole of the intelligence world, highly-compartmented cells of which carefully planned the attacks and how the mass media would cover the unfolding events.

The one individual who stands tall among those intelligence and law enforcement officers who was aggressively pursuing the criminal network that would carry out 9/11 was FBI counter-terrorism top man John O’Neill. Ever since the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, O’Neill’s pursuit of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda had been dogged. After further terrorist attacks at the Khobar Towers barracks in Dharan, Saudi Arabia; the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania; and the USS Cole in Aden harbor, O’Neill’s biggest problem was not Al Qaeda, it was resistance from top officials inside the U.S. government.

The biggest conspiracy theory of them all, the official 9/11 Commission Reportthat concluded that nineteen, mostly Saudi, hijackers, armed with box cutters, were able to defeat a multi-trillion dollar U.S. defense and intelligence system in a matter if mere hours one Tuesday morning in September 2001, has even been partly debunked by the two co-chairman of the 9/11 Commission, former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean and former Indiana Democratic Representative Lee Hamilton. Both have said that their committee was lied to by government officials and that important information was covered up and not released to committee investigators…

Kean's and Hamilton's ire would be best suited at being vented against Philip Zelikow, the one-time aide to Bush National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, who stated under oath that no one ever expected that passenger planes would be used as weapons. Zelikow was appointed as the executive director of the 9/11 Commission and he had the task of avoiding any investigations that would look at the roles of the CIA, Mossad, the Saudis, and Wall Street interests in crafting the ingredients that permitted the 9/11 attacks to be be carried out without a hitch. Zelikow has a storied career at debunking any theory that does not comport with government doctrine, including his many years of attacking anyone who disbelieves the Warren Commission's myths about the assassination of President Kennedy.

Unfortunately, the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center was not the first time the U.S. government engaged in a massive cover-up of an attack on the buildings. According to U.S. intelligence sources, the FBI and Justice Department sat on volumes of translations of Arabic telephone intercepts gathered before the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center from U.S.- and Sudan-based Muslim militants who once worked for U.S. intelligence in the mujaheddin war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The critical intelligence, which demonstrated a link between the CIA and "Afghan Arab" muhajeddin forces, including those loyal to Osama bin Laden, was never introduced into the trial of the Brooklyn- and Jersey City-based cell that included the blind Egyptian cleric Shaikh Omar Abdul Rahman, Ramzi Yousef, and Eyad Ismail. The New York and New Jersey cell also included Ali Mohammed, a graduate of the U.S. Army's Special Forces School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, who, while an active duty member of the Special Forces, secretly traveled to Afghanistan to train Bin Laden's forces and provided him with special intelligence on U.S. "soft targets" for terrorist attacks, and Wadih el-Hage, Osama bin Laden's personal secretary, who was also a resident of the United States.

Ironically, the two men responsible for the failure to present the surveillance intelligence on the 1993 World Trade Center bombers to the juries and grand juries hearing the charges -- the main federal prosecutors for New York City and New Jersey in the bombing case -- were Patrick J. Fitzgerald and Michael Chertoff, respectively. Fitzgerald went on to become the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois and cut his teeth indicting and having convicted two successive Illinois governors for corruption, Republican George Ryan and Democrat Rod Blagojevich. Both cases were politically-tainted show trials.

Adding to the outrages committed by the U.S. government was the fact that, according to an FBI source, the chief FBI investigator against Al Qaeda in the 1990s, the late John O'Neill, was upset that the much of the telephone surveillance of the 1993 bombers was never introduced as evidence and remained un-translated and classified.

Other CIA connections to Bin Laden and Al Qaeda that are too numerous to describe. However, one jumps out because it involves a key player in the Donald Rumsfeld Pentagon during the 9/11 attacks. A CIA source involved with the Bosnia Defense Fund, used to collect donations from Arab and Muslim countries for the Bosnian war against Serbia and Croatia, revealed that the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FINCEN) was concerned that money transferred by Riggs Bank to the Bosnian Defense Fund's account at the Central Bank in Sarajevo, was "bleeding" to terrorist elements believed to be linked to Osama bin Laden and "Al Qaeda." Riggs was the major bank serving Saudi ambassador to the U.S. Prince Bandar and his wife Princess Haifa and it was a bank with family ties to George H.W. and George W. Bush.

When the CIA source complained about Bosnia Defense Fund cash falling into the hands of Islamic terrorists, including people linked to bin Laden, he was told by one of the major Bosnia Defense Fund principals to "just make it f*****g happen!"

The Bosnia link to "Al Qaeda" was important. In fact, bin Laden had reportedly not only visited Bosnia, but carried at least one Bosnian diplomatic passport and had interfaced with Bosnian diplomats in Vienna, Austria.

And Mossad's link to 9/11 cannot be ignored. Two internal U.S. government documents revealed that among the 120 Israeli “art students” who attempted to penetrate the security of dozens of Federal office buildings and who visited the homes of scores of U.S. law enforcement personnel during 2000 and 2001 were some who used addresses and mail drops in southern Florida and Texas near those used by a number of the 9/11 hijackers. The information came from a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Report drafted in June 2001 on the activities of the art students and a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) list of the hijackers and other terrorist suspects, including a known Mossad agent, Dominick Suter, who ran an Israeli moving company in Weehawken, New Jersey. The FBI list was accidentally released in early October 2001 on a Finnish government web site.

Five Israelis working for Suter's Urban Moving Systems were arrested by police and FBI agents during the later afternoon of 9/11, driving a suspicious van near Giant Stadium in Secaucus, New Jersey. The five Israelis were the only suspects arrested on September 11, 2001 on suspicion of involvement in the 9/11 attacks. All five were deported to Israel without ever having been formally charged. The DEA memo specifically stated that the Israelis casing federal offices and employees' homes may have had ties to an “Islamic fundamentalist group.”

Even ten years later, the U.S. government and the governments of New York and New York City are dismissing those 9/11 attack veterans who, unlike O'Neill, were fortunate enough to survive the catastrophic attack. Survivors or the World Trade Center collapse and first responders with the New York Police Department, New York-New Jersey Port Authority Police, New York Fire Department, and others were not invited to the tenth anniversary ceremonies at "Ground Zero" on September 11, 2011.

For ten years, the 9/11 attacks, along with those in London, Madrid, Bali, and other locations, have been used by the corporate media to hype government-directed campaigns against civil liberties, human rights, privacy protection, wars of liberation by aspirant ethnic groups and political parties, freedom of expression, and freedom of information. Americans of all ages and backgrounds are now subjected to intrusive body searches at airports that would have been seen as outrageous abuses of government authority fifteen years ago.

As we now reflect back on 9/11, we are told that Bin Laden was killed in a Special Operations assault in Abbotabad, Pakistan. There was little forensic evidence to prove Bin Laden was killed. In any case, most of the members of US Navy SEAL Team 6, which carried out the attack on Bin Laden, were killed recently in an attack on their helicopter in Afghanistan.

As with the assassination of President Kennedy and the Iran-Contra scandal twenty years later, 9/11 will be relegated to the history books as an event shrouded in mystery and short on actual evidence, most of it destroyed or remaining highly-classified, to identify the actual perpetrators.


Part II: 9/11 The Ultimate Triumph of the Strategy of Tension


After years of employing the fascistic “strategy of tension” in Western Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, the neo-conservatives who dominated the Bush administration on the eve of September 11, 2001, were confident that the ultimate act of destroying the World Trade Center in New York and bombing the Pentagon, in addition to destroying a yet unknown target by United flight 93 – shot down by U.S. Air Force fighter-interceptors over Pennsylvania – would bring about the sea change foreseen by the neo-conservatives.

What the neo-conservative cabal, through their propaganda outlets like Fox News and The Washington Post, brought forth after their long-awaited “New Pearl Harbor,” was their reference to America’s “new normal,” the de facto imposition of a crypto-fascist dictatorship that overturned the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law, and onset of the “clash of civilizations,” the final showdown between Islam and Judeo-Christianity. The geo-social-political “Armageddon” hoped for by such neo-fascist philosophers as Professors Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis would be a final battle that would see the downfall of Islamic governments and regimes from Morocco to Indonesia and the triumph of “western civilization.” In fact, “western civilization” is code for the twin pillars of capitalist-backed militarism and Zionism.

The “strategy of tension” employed by NATO stay-behind networks in Europe from the 1960s to the present day is defined by Swiss professor of contemporary history Daniele Glaser as the method by which “world powers divide, manipulate, and control public opinion using fear, propaganda, disinformation, psychological warfare, agents provocateurs, and false flag terrorist actions” to achieve their ultimate goals. The September 11, 2001, false flag attacks in New York and Virginia succeeded in laying the groundwork for a concerted disinformation, psychological warfare, and propaganda campaign that, ten years following 9/11, are being cited by the corporate media as having” changed the world.” Even the date, 9/11, was chosen as a psychological warfare tool, 911 being the emergency phone number used by Americans to call for assistance from law enforcement and other emergency responders.

George Orwell’s “tele-screen,” the means by which Big Brother largely maintained control over public opinion by hyping non-existent threats to public safety, became real in the minutes following the 9/11 attacks when the corporate new channels, all seemingly pre-programmed for the terror event, began instilling fear in the minds of Americans and people around the world. In the months after 9/11, anyone who questioned the official version of events was painted as a disloyal “conspiracy theorist.” However, there were thousands of more facts presented by those who contradicted the official version of 9/11 than any dubious explanations presented in the official 9/11 Commission report and other government documents, including those from the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

The corporate news channels, led by Fox News, concocted unbelievable threats following 9/11, including exploding bombs being placed inside cows, terrorist frogmen coming ashore on America’s beaches, Al Qaeda attacking shopping malls in the United States, and Arab terrorists infiltrating Latin American human smuggling routes from Mexico. All of the fear stories were rank nonsense and not based on any facts.

After the anthrax postal system attacks on Congress and the media, which ensured the quick passage by Congress of the unconstitutional USA-PARIOT Act, the failed attempt by a shoe bomber to bring down a plane flying from Paris to Miami, and a later attempt by a Nigerian flying from Amsterdam to Detroit to set off explosive material in his underpants, the public was conditioned to accept anything as a potential threat to security and safety. Nothing was mentioned about Israel’s role in the anthrax attacks and the two failed airplane bombings. The only individuals arrested on 9/11 for suspicion that they were involved in the 9/11 attacks were five employees of Weehawken, New Jersey-based Urban Moving Systems. FBI agents who visited the firm’s warehouse in Weehawken not only found bomb-making materials but traces of anthrax. The owner of the firm, Dominick Suter, was later discovered in a joint CIA-FBI counter-intelligence database to be a Mossad agent. Some of the Israeli “movers” arrested were also found to be in the database.

The five Israeli “movers” were witnessed celebrating and videotaping the aerial attacks on the World Trade Center, minutes after the first plane struck, from their vantage point at Liberty State Park, across the Hudson River from lower Manhattan. It was an Israeli aviation security company, ICTS International, replete with ex-Mossad and ex-Shin Bet officers in its management, that handled airport security at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport and Amsterdam’s Schipol International Airport, where Richard Reid, the “shoe bomber” and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the “underwear bomber,” attempted their amateurish bombing attempts on American Airlines flight 63 and Northwest Airlines flight 253, respectively. ICTS also shared security responsibilities at Boston’s Logan Airport on September 11, 2001, the airport where American Airlines flight 11 was allegedly hijacked by Mohammed Atta and flown into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

In pushing the neo-conservative notion of the “clash of civilizations,” there was no mention made by the Israeli-influenced corporate media about the numerous connections of Israel to the 9/11 attacks. Nineteen Arab hijackers, 16 of whom hailed from Saudi Arabia, was the official story and there would be no deviation from the official line. Even statements by Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak on American television that 9/11 was beneficial to Israel were ignored by the media. Those who were brave enough to point out Israeli connections to 9/11 were intimidated by the old canard that they were “anti-Semitic.”

Some corporate news stations that reported on suspicious Israeli intelligence activities in the months prior to 9/11 saw their stories “tombstoned” on the Internet. A four-part series on the Israeli activity aired by Fox News quickly disappeared from its website. Similar stories, such as the following, also quickly evaporated into the ether:

“10/02/2001 - Fifteen People Arrested in March in Dallas, Suspected of Casing Federal Buildings. 11 News reported how people claiming to be ‘Israeli art students’ might be trying to sneak into federal buildings and defense sites, and even doing surveillance. In Dallas, the so-called students hit early this year at the city’s FBI building, the Drug Enforcement Administration and at the Earle Cabell Federal building, where guards found one student wandering the halls with a floor plan of the building.”

Osama bin Laden, the accused mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, was a character directly out of Hollywood central casting. Bin Laden initially denied he had anything to do with the attacks. In an interview carried by the September 28, 2001 edition of the Pakistani newspaper Ummat Karachi Bin Laden stated, "I have already said that I am not involved in the September 11 attacks in the United States. As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie. I had no knowledge of these attacks, nor do I consider the killing of innocent women, children and other humans as an appreciable act." Even FBI director Robert Mueller stated, the “FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11.”

Few media outlets reported on Bin Laden’s longstanding ties to the U.S. intelligence community, links that were maintained after the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. According to classified documents from French intelligence, Al Qaeda and Bin Laden had still been under the operational control of U.S. and British “security services” until 1995, fully two years after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. As of 1996, the U.S. State Department continued to refuse to list Al Qaeda as a terrorist organization. Bin Laden’s past ties to the CIA may have sealed his fate. Just as with others who worked for the CIA and were then discarded like garbage, including Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein, and Muammar Qaddafi, Osama Bin Laden may have been used as a convenient decoy by the actual perpetrators of 9/11, those who wanted to blame Arabs and Muslims as part of their grand schemes” the Project for the New American Century that hoped for a “new Pearl Harbor,” those who wanted a “clash of civilizations” between Judeo-Christianity and Islam, and those who saw a continued strategy of tensions to bring about their agenda. The strategy of tension would not end with 9/11 and would be repeated in the following years in Madrid, London, Bali, Beslan, Jakarta, Istanbul, Casablanca, Mumbai, and Oslo…

The real architects of 9/11 are still at-large and continue their strategy of tension campaign. On September 11, 2011, many of the key perpetrators will gather at the “Ground Zero” site in New York to publicly honor those who were killed in the attacks, but privately celebrate their accomplishments over the last ten years. The corporate media will continue to propagate the myth of 9/11 and the public, they hope, will continue to accept the official version of the events.

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150 Smoking Guns (From Main Stream Media)

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9/11: The Luckiest Man Alive!

Stunning new video about Lucky Larry Silverstein on Sept.11

This video provides a chronology of World Trade Center owner, Larry Silverstein's day on September 11th, 2001. The only question that remains unanswered about Larry's day, is why he was so lucky. Firstly, he managed to avoid being killed in the attacks due to a fortunate appointment with a dermatologist. The events of 9/11 also provided an easy solution to the costly and cumbersome problem of how to deal with the illegal asbestos that covered every steel beam in the twin towers. 9/11 also solved Silverstein's problem of finding new tenants to occupy the trade center buildings. And on top of that, Silverstein gained a multi-billion dollar payout from an insurance policy he took out just 6 weeks before 9/11. Considering all of these fortunate coincidences, it is strange that Silverstein has not even been questioned by the police.


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CIA's 9/11 Major Mistakes

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by CIA John Rizzo

John Rizzo is the CIA's chief legal officer from 2001-2009. He reflects on what we did wrong—and on the lessons we've learned.

I was the CIA’s chief legal officer for six-and-a-half of the first eight years following the 9/11 attacks. I am writing this on the cusp of the tenth anniversary of those attacks, now retired from the Agency for nearly two years after a total of 34 years of service as a CIA lawyer. In the decade that has passed since that ghastly sunny September morning, our country—and the CIA—has become a much different place. Having reflected on all the counterterrorist operations that the Agency has conducted in those years, and on all the controversies and frequent opprobrium it has weathered for some of those actions, I believe there are a number of lessons that we in CIA learned in the course of that unprecedented period of our history.

Regrettably, the lessons are mostly painful, as valuable lessons usually are. Certainly, some are personally painful to me, since they were mistakes and misjudgments CIA made in which I played a role. Nonetheless, I summarize a few of them here in a necessarily brief (and incomplete) list to offer an assessment of what the post-9/11 years taught at least one grizzled Agency lifer.

ONE: KEEP CONGRESS INFORMED. EIGHT WAS NOT ENOUGH.

A few days after the attacks, President Bush signed a top-secret directive to CIA authorizing an unprecedented array of covert actions against Al Qaeda and its leadership. Like almost every such authorization issued by presidents over the previous quarter-century, this one was provided to the intelligence committees of the House and Senate as well as the defense subcommittees of the House and Senate appropriations committees. However, the White House directed that details about the most ambitious, sensitive and potentially explosive new program authorized by the President—the capture, incommunicado detention and aggressive interrogation of senior Al Qaeda operatives—could only be shared with the leaders of the House and Senate, plus the chair and ranking member of the two intelligence committees.

As always, CIA dutifully followed White House orders, so for the next five years we only told those select members—euphemistically dubbed the "Gang of 8"—about the program as it developed and expanded. Only they were briefed on CIA’s secret detention facilities overseas and the employment of so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" (EITs), including the waterboarding of high-value detainees like Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheik Mohammad.

While used only rarely in the past, the "Gang of 8" notification process is explicitly authorized in the congressional oversight provisions of the National Security Act for covert actions of "extraordinary" sensitivity. It was an entirely lawful way to proceed to notify Congress about the EIT program. Yet I am convinced it proved to have disastrous consequences for CIA.

These lessons are personally painful to me. There were mistakes and misjudgments CIA made in which I played a role.

For one thing, such notifications are only really suitable for surgical, discrete, "one-off" actions; the May 2011 raid on Osama Bin Laden’s compound is a perfect example. The detention and interrogation program, by contrast, was complex, costly, and open-ended in duration, evolving into an ever more treacherous legal and political terrain for the Agency to navigate. From its beginning, what CIA needed above all from Congress was stalwart, bipartisan cover—for their understanding and acquiescence that the continuing Al Qaeda threat required unprecedented measures. We needed it for the time down the road from 9/11 when, absent a second catastrophic attack, the political winds inevitably would change once the initial shock, horror, and outrage about what happened that day abated.

We were naïve in believing that the "Gang of 8" would play that role. There is no way to expect that from a handful of politicians being made to listen some very dicey and chilling information in sporadic, off-the-record sessions. Sure enough, as time went by and controversy over leaked details about the program grew, the only cover they provided was for themselves. In the earliest days of his Administration, President Obama rescinded and publicly repudiated the Agency’s detention and interrogation program, and for good measure declassified virtually every detail of the program.

Shortly thereafter, almost seven years after CIA first informed her about its employment of waterboarding and the other EITs, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, stood before the cameras and claimed that all CIA ever told her was that waterboarding was being "considered" as an interrogation tactic, not that it would be ever employed. Confronted with evidence to the contrary, the Speaker subsequently conceded that she had been informed about EITs from the outset but insisted she was always opposed to them but powerless to do anything to stop them. None of which was true, but in hindsight the Speaker’s moonwalk was hardly unforeseeable.

Meanwhile, other than the chair and ranking member, the two intelligence committees would be kept in the dark for the first five years of the program, as was every other member of Congress. In effect, they were given a pass on any oversight and responsibility for the program, as the attacks about what the Agency was doing escalated in the media. And to what end, all this extraordinary secrecy? Over those five years, many of the details about the program were leaking out, drip by drip, from elsewhere in the Government.

Things falling through the cracks: something I saw happen far too often in my long Agency career.

Restricting Congress’ knowledge about the detention and interrogation program was foolish and feckless. It was a White House decision, but we in the senior ranks of the Agency—the ones who bore the brunt of that decision—should have pushed back earlier and harder than we did. We should have insisted from the outset that, as a minimum, all the members of the intelligence committees (and senior staffers too) be apprised of all the details all along the way, on the record and with a transcriber present. To allow the committees—compel them, really—to take a stand on the merits to either endorse the program or stop it in its tracks.

Instead, we let Congress off the hook.

TWO: WHEN A SENSITIVE OPERATION GOES AWRY, CONFESS ERROR RIGHT AWAY. BETTER TO BE ACCUSED OF A SCREW-UP THAN A COVER-UP

In 2002, CIA videotaped the interrogation of the first captured Al Qaeda terrorist to be water-boarded. It was lawfully conducted, but the tapes were graphic and hard to watch. Almost immediately, those in CIA who made the tapes wanted to destroy them, fearing the faces of the interrogators on the tapes would put them in danger if and when they were ever made public. I, and two successive CIA directors, rejected the idea for three years until November 2005, when the head of CIA’s clandestine service, defying orders, went behind my back and destroyed them. That was bad enough, but what the Agency failed to do next made things infinitely worse.

While we had informed the intelligence committee leadership in early 2003 of the tapes’ existence, we did not tell them on a timely basis about their unauthorized destruction. It was not our intent to hide that fact; it was simply a communications breakdown inside CIA in which then-Director Porter Goss neglected to inform the leadership as we agreed he would do the day he and I learned about the destruction. To this day I am convinced it was an unintentional oversight on his part, and I blame myself for not following up to make sure he had informed the Hill. The whole thing had just fallen through the cracks, something I saw happen far too often in my long Agency career.

Flash forward two years later, to December 2007. Nothing stays secret in CIA forever, and certainly nothing so explosive as the unauthorized destruction of videotapes of CIA waterboarding somebody. The New York Times unearthed the entire mess and ran a series of breathless page 1 stories. The intelligence committees predictably went ballistic, as they always do when they first find out about an intelligence fiasco via the media. In the ensuing pandemonium, I was hauled before Congress for a four-hour grilling. Far worse, a three-year Federal criminal investigation was launched, sapping CIA resources and morale.

Confessing to error may sting, but being accused of hiding your mistakes is far more painful and damaging.

Ultimately, the various investigations would find no evidence of a cover-up, but rather that the whole thing was one monumental screw-up. But the damage to the Agency was done, and it was all self-inflicted. We should have made damn sure that the intelligence committees’ leadership—if not the full committees—were told about the destruction as soon as it happened. To take whatever lumps we deserved (and we clearly deserved some) then and there. We should have done the same thing with judges presiding over then-pending court cases potentially implicating the tapes, even if we weren’t obligated to do so as a technical legal matter. In short, we should have told everyone in all three branches in the Government who had even an arguable need to know.

In the intelligence world, confessing to error may sting, but being accused of hiding your mistakes is far more painful and lasting.

THREE: CIA PLACED TOO MUCH EMPHASIS ON THE ENHANCED INTERROGATION PROGRAM

On its face, this lesson would appear counterintuitive. The EITs, with their introduction of the term "waterboarding" into the national lexicon, furnished much of the oxygen firing the controversies of the post 9/11 years. And yet, to the extent that CIA personnel were involved in unsanctioned treatment of prisoners in those years—and those cases were few and far between—almost none of them involved prisoners who were subjected to EITs. Looking back, I have concluded that was because we devoted so much attention to that program and were so scrupulous about using our most highly trained and experienced officers in that effort. What’s more, there were always medical personnel, and frequently CIA lawyers, on the scene monitoring the EITs to ensure they stayed within carefully prescribed standards approved in writing by the Justice Department.

But at the same time, and particularly in the first few years after 9/11, CIA officers took part in numerous other interrogations of Al Qaeda captives, none significant enough to meet the criteria for EITs. These relatively low-level captures tended to be ad hoc, unforeseen and generally under the radar of those of us in CIA headquarters. Our officers in the field, many of whom were newly arrived on the scene and thrust into the breach with little counterterrorist experience, were frequently left to their own devices in dealing with their captives. Under tremendous stress and in often isolated, dangerous areas, most performed professionally and valiantly.

But every once in a while, there were apparent excesses in their treatment of their prisoners. Back at Langley, consumed by our focus on capturing the biggest Al Qaeda quarry and on overseeing the EIT program, our attentions were largely turned elsewhere. That, I have come to believe, was a mistake. An understandable, inevitable mistake perhaps, but a mistake nonetheless.

We should have recognized that all CIA counterterrorist prisoners carry risks, as well as rewards, and approached all of them accordingly.

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As I indicated at the beginning of this piece, my list here is necessarily truncated. There are plenty of other lessons I learned, and with more space I could talk about them. For instance, stalking and killing a big-name terrorist evidently is less legally risky, and is viewed in many quarters as far less morally objectionable than capturing and aggressively interrogating one. Or that trying to create from scratch a new framework of military tribunals to prosecute accused terrorists has proven to be a well-intentioned but utterly failed exercise. It is a travesty and disgrace that, 10 years after 9/11, there has yet to be a trial, much less a conviction, of any Al Qaeda figure in custody with 9/11 blood on his hands.

But I will end on a different note. A decade after 9/11, there has not been another successful Al Qaeda attack on the homeland. And Osama Bin Laden has met his just desserts. All in all, not a bad bottom-line for CIA and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community.

John Rizzo was a lawyer at the Central Intelligence Agency from 1976 through 2009. He was its chief legal officer from 2001 through 2002 and 2004 through 2009. Currently he is a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a Senior Counsel at the Steptoe & Johnson law firm. He is also writing a memoir of his CIA career.


Source: http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/91992


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Osama bin Laden : The real story?

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NB: The editor of this website does not believe in 'HearSay stories' from any source. The following obviously applies to this rule and is presented here for "new revelations" that may add to the understanding or just add more confusion to the already saturated myth of Osama, the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of L'Arabia of modern times. What is certain is that this new Osama Recipe from the Jewish- American mythmakers Cookbook, has brought destruction to many nations and millions of people unconnected to this myth and also made some crooked cooks and their evil employers immensely rich and powerful.

By Sic Semper Tyrannis
(A Committee of Correspondence)

The killing of bin Laden in a US Special Forces raid on a house in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad unleashed a torrent of stories about the event. The accounts by various US officials (given in bits and pieces immediately after the raid) gave little information on the details of the operation, and none on the ‘back story’. This left the field open to a lot of speculative accounts about how the raid took place and the events leading up to it. A rash of conspiracy theories also sprang up, many of which flatly denied bin Laden was even present in the house, while others put forward various versions of the Pakistani role in these events.

Recently, two accounts have been published that claim to be based on information from sources ‘in the know’ or ones who actually participated in the planning (though perhaps not the execution) of the raid. The first was a detailed account by Nicholas Schmidle in The New Yorker, based on interviews with and information provided by senior White House staff and some of the planners of the raid. This was obviously the “official” version, what the US administration would like people to believe.

The second is a post on her blog by RJ Hillhouse, in which she quotes her intelligence sources on certain aspects of the raid, especially the events leading up to it.

By studying these two accounts, separating the grain from the chaff, and judiciously filling in some of the blanks, it is possible to come up with what is likely to be fairly close to the real story.

It begins with the CIA station chief in one of the Gulf states receiving an unexpected visitor with a fascinating tale. He was a recently retired senior officer of Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI, and he wanted to talk about Osama bin Laden. Some years ago, he said, the Saudi intelligence chief approached the ISI with the request to provide sanctuary to bin Laden within Pakistan. The Saudis said that bin Laden was prepared to come down from the hills where he was hiding, provided sufficient assurances were available about his security. In return, he would ensure that al Qaeda would not target Pakistan, and he would also limit his own involvement in its operations.

The Saudi motive behind this request presumably had to do with their internal imperatives. The bin Ladens are a very rich and influential family in Saudi Arabia. Osama and al Qaeda, and their goals, are supported by a large number of religious Saudis (even though the royal family considers them enemies). If bin Laden were to be hunted down and killed by the Americans in the tribal badlands of Pakistan, it would give the regime a black eye in the view of many of its people as well as being a serious blow to the bin Laden clan. It made sense to the Saudis to get Osama bin Laden into a safe hideout while at the same time neutralizing him as a functioning jihadi.

Whatever the Saudi motivation, their request placed the Pakistanis in a severe dilemma. The Saudis were their helpers and supporters, in fact the kingdom was their backer of last resort; they could not afford to alienate them. On the other side, bin Laden was the principal enemy and target of their current backer and ally, the United States; they could not take the risk of being caught harbouring him. The matter went right up to President Musharraf, and was the subject of much anxious debate. Finally, it was decided that the affair would be handled through one of the client jihadi outfits of the ISI, with no official involvement, thus ensuring plausible deniability in case something went wrong.

This, said the former ISI official, was how bin Laden was moved into Pakistan some years ago, and was safely harboured there. He was prepared to divulge his current location to the CIA provided he was given the reward on offer, and he and his family (accompanying him on this holiday) were securely relocated to the USA. The CIA station chief set up another meeting with the informant, and promptly relayed the information to Washington. The background check on the ISI officer having proved satisfactory, at this second meeting the station chief accepted his offer on the condition that the reward would only be paid if his information proved accurate.

When the location of bin Laden reached Langley, the CIA commenced a sophisticated, but secret, operation to verify that bin Laden did indeed live in the house in Abbottabad that their ISI informant had betrayed to them. Even before the results of this activity became available, the top security officials in the US administration began to consider actions that could be taken if his presence there was confirmed. This process quickly narrowed down the options to essentially two: a drone strike on the house, or a Special Forces raid (of the type being regularly carried out in Afghanistan against suspected insurgent leaders). When the CIA established that there was a high probability that Osama bin Laden did indeed live in the Abbottabad house, detailed planning began for both options. Their pros and cons differed so radically, however, that choosing between them was not easy.

A drone strike would involve no risk to US personnel while also reducing the loss of face for the Pakistanis and, hence, their reaction after the event. An SF raid, on the other hand, would be a risky affair. Apart from the danger of various mishaps there was a possibility of Pakistani interference, both in the air and on the ground, which would endanger not only the success of the operation but also the US personnel involved. Such an intrusion of American ‘boots on the ground’ would likely cause serious problems in relations between the two countries. The biggest difference, however, lay in the degree to which the success of the operation could be established by the administration, and generally accepted by the world when announced. A successful drone strike would show that the house was destroyed, but not whether bin Laden had been killed (the Pakistanis would never admit that he had even been there). A successful SF raid, on the other hand, would provide definitive proof.

The two options were presented to President Obama for a decision. His military advisers generally favoured the drone option, though the JSOC command was quite happy to do the raid. The ‘political’ advisers did not want to pass up this great opportunity to claim a notable success for the administration, but that would only be possible with an SF raid. Obama mulled over the choice for a few days and decided to carry out the raid ─ but with its risks minimized by getting the Pakistan military to cooperate. This set off another hectic debate among the advisers; it was finally decided that a very hard line be taken with the Pakistanis, giving them, in effect, neither the option to refuse nor any wiggle room in compliance. Leon Panetta was chosen to deliver the ultimatum: in essence, to do another ‘Armitage’ on them.

Panetta enjoyed playing the heavy with the Pakistanis (especially after their successful false emissary caper and their exploitation of the Raymond Davis affair). He told the ISI chief how the US had found out, and then confirmed, that bin Laden was being sheltered by them. The US was going to take him out; Pakistan could either help, or it would be considered an enemy of the US and treated accordingly. Backed into a corner, with their ‘plausible deniability’ in shreds, the Pakistani generals folded: they were prepared to help, but they needed a good cover story, especially for the Saudis. The US agreed to work with them on this, but demanded that knowledge of the raid be confined to a very few people at the top of the command chain, no more than necessary to ensure that any attempt by someone in the security forces to interfere with the operation would be immediately detected and quashed.

The cover story finally agreed upon was that the US had carried out a drone strike on the house (though none would in fact take place). This would account for the night-time explosions at the house, and, more importantly, provide an explanation to give to the Saudis for bin Laden’s sudden and unfortunate demise (his body having been almost obliterated by the bombs!). The US’s agreement was simply a ruse, however, in order to keep the Pakistanis cooperating; having rejected the drone option because it did not allow a definitive claim of the operation’s success, the US administration had no intention of going through with this cover story. Instead, it intended to announce the carrying out of the raid, and its momentous result, as soon as it was completed, though it is likely they planned to shift its venue to some undefined place under insurgent control so as to allow the Pakistani military some face-saving, and thus limit their adverse reaction. In the event, the helicopter crash put paid to this.

With the Pakistani military on board, the raid was launched on May 1^st. Two Black Hawk helicopters with the Navy SEALs team on board took off from Jalalabad late evening and landed at the Ghazi airbase, Tarbela. This base is used by Pakistani SF (the Special Services Group), and has a US SF helicopter-training contingent stationed there. Helicopter flights into the US base area from Afghanistan are routine, and the flight of these two helicopters was cleared on the same basis. The attack on the Abbottabad target was launched from here later that night. The flying distance from Ghazi to the target is approximately 60 km (40 miles).

Even though the Pakistan army chief had agreed to allow the raid to go through without any interference, the US was not taking any chances. Schmidle describes a backup force of four Chinook helicopters, two with a backup SEALs team (which remained on the Afghan side of the border), and two as helicopter backups for the assault Black Hawks. He says that these latter two “landed at a predetermined point on a dry riverbed in a wide, unpopulated valley”. This is probably correct since, in case of a Pakistani double-cross, they would be grounded if they were to wait at the Ghazi airbase instead. One of these Chinooks was later used as the replacement for the Black Hawk that crashed at the Abbottabad house.

Schmidle’s account (and critiques of it published afterwards) dwell mostly on the details of the action inside the bin Laden compound. It doesn’t really matter how that action unfolded, though controversy over it does shift attention away from those aspects of the operation that are being kept concealed by both the US and Pakistan. The important point of these actions is that they resulted in Osama bin Laden being killed. Many conspiracy theorists refuse to accept this, but al Qaeda does, and so do the Pakistanis, who have in their custody bin Laden’s wives who witnessed the event. It may be worth commenting on a couple of the items of controversy. It doesn’t matter whether bin Laden had a weapon or not; the orders were for him to be killed. The reason why Amal al-Fatah, bin Laden’s wife who tried to protect him, was shot in the leg (DEVGRU normally just kills) was probably because the plan was to bring the wives and surviving sons back as prisoners (the loss of one of the Black Hawks forced a change there).

As for the fallout from the operation, it was, as expected, mainly on US-Pakistan relations. If the US had the intention of making it easier for the Pakistanis by fudging the site of the raid, the crashed helicopter’s tail sticking up from bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound ended that option. This stark evidence of the US incursion left the US with no option but to (in Hillhouse’s apt phrase) throw the Pakistanis under the bus. Panetta couldn’t let the opportunity pass without adding an extra kick of his own (“ they were either complicit or incompetent”). The Pakistan military lost a lot of ‘face’ internally, but had a tolerable alibi for the Saudis. Most importantly, the raid and its aftermath ended all chances of them working as allies with the US in the future; the relationship became once again purely transactional, with no trust on either side.

The United States certainly got their man but, in the process, lost Pakistan. Time will tell whether that was a good deal.

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It's a TOTAL war, monsieur

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By Pepe Escobar, atimes


The winners of that "kinetic" thing in northern Africa (the Barack Obama administration swears it's not a war) - collectively described as Friends of Libya (FOL) - were all in a jolly mood as they gathered in Paris on Thursday, with no air-conditioning but potent odors of runny Brie and Roquefort, to gloat about their United Nations-sanctioned, North Atlantic Treaty Organization-implemented "operation" for regime change in Libya.

Call it the FOL war; the R2P war (as in "responsibility to protect" Western plunder); the Air France war; the Total war; anyway, the FOL had a blast spinning their win.

The Great Arab Liberator, neo-Napoleonic President Nicolas Sarkozy, gloated, "We have aligned with the Arab people in their aspiration for freedom." Bahrainis, Saudis, Yemenis, not to mention Tunisians and Egyptians, have every right to be puzzled.

Sarko added, "Dozens of thousands of lives were spared thanks to the intervention." Even the "rebels" are spinning there are at least 50,000 dead, with NATO still hooked on a wild bombing spree.

The emir of Qatar at least admitted that on-the-run Muammar Gaddafi could not have been toppled without NATO. But he added that the Arab League could have done more; in fact it did - by providing a bogus vote that opened the way for the Anglo-French-American redacted UN Resolution 1973.

Transitional National Council (TNC) interim prime minister Mahmoud Jibril asserted, "The world bet on the Libyans and the Libyans showed their courage and made their dream real." "World" now means NATO and a bunch of regressive Persian Gulf monarchies. As for the rest, shut up.

Yet the most sinister, true to character, must have been NATO secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen; "We have no plans whatsoever to intervene in conflicts in the region." Then came the inevitable "but". Rasmussen added, "But more generally speaking, I think this could set a template. We have demonstrated an ability to act in support of the United Nations and we have demonstrated an ability to include partners outside NATO in such operations".

Africa and the Middle East, not to mention most of the global South, you have been warned; Humanitarian imperialism, under the cloak of R2P, is the new law of the land.

Securing the loot

Hours before the Paris bash, French daily Liberation published on its website a letter written only 17 days after UN Resolution 1973. In the letter, the TNC ratifies an agreement ceding no less than 35% of Libya's total crude oil production to France in exchange of Sarko's "humanitarian" support.

The letter is addressed to the office of the emir of Qatar (the go-between for the TNC and France from the beginning) - with a copy to then-Arab League secretary general, Amr Moussa. The letterhead is supplied by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Libya.

The promise totally matches what an official from an oil company in Cyrenaica said last week - that the "winners" in the oil bonanza would be the nations that supported the TNC from the start.

As expected, denials piled up. The Quai d'Orsay - the French Foreign Ministry - said it had never heard of such a document. Same for Mansur Said al-Nasr, a TNC special envoy to the Paris conference. The TNC's man in Britain, Guma al-Gamaty, added that all future oil contracts would be awarded "on the basis of merit". And even energy giant Total had to muscle in; its chief executive officer, Christophe de Margerie, swore he had never discussed oil deals with the TNC.

As if Sarko and Total were altruistic, Rousseau-style humanitarians who would never spare a thought for 44 billion barrels of oil. Total was in Benghazi discussing business with the TNC already last June. A bitter intra-European "oil war" between Total and Italy's ENI is already in effect.

ENI - active in Libya since 1959 - has already signed an agreement with the TNC to be back in business and immediately supply fuel to Libya - in exchange for future payment in oil. Total's push is to secure a much larger piece of the Libya energy pie than it already had - as in future contracts.

Slouching towards Arabia

It's quasi-official. Libya is not in Africa anymore. It has been relocated (upgraded?) to Arabia. Maybe Saudi King Abdullah ordered it by decree and no one noticed. The FOL do not include Africans. The African Union (AU) has refused to recognize the TNC; it will only do so when a legitimate government is in place.

While NATO went the Air France way - liberation from above, in business class - the AU from the start pleaded for a ceasefire and negotiations. The FOL imperially ignored it.

Perhaps Africans have noticed that NATO's mission "to protect civilians" now includes bombing Sirte - where smart projectiles carefully target only "evil" Gaddafi supporters disguised as civilians, while the good guys escape unharmed.

Perhaps Africans have been the only ones to listen to the Vietnam-era threat by TNC member Ali Tarhouni - very cozy with Qatar - who said, about the few towns and regions still loyal to Gaddafi, "Sometimes to avoid bloodshed you must shed blood - and the faster we do this the less blood will be shed."

Perhaps Africans were the only ones to notice the sustained and increasingly reported (not by corporate media) ethnic cleansing perpetrated by the "rebels"; as if no one knew that people in Cyrenaica have historically been extremely prejudiced against sub-Saharan Africans.

Or perhaps Africans see right through the FOL's agenda; the new Libyan status as a barely disguised Western colony; and the neo-Orwellian fable of humanitarian imperialism.

***

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

LESSONS FROM NATO'S ATTACK ON LIBYA

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by Imran Nazar Hosein

وَلَقَدْ ذَرَأْنَا لِجَهَنَّمَ كَثِيرًا مِنَ الْجِنِّ وَالْإِنْسِ ۖ لَهُمْ قُلُوبٌ لَا يَفْقَهُونَ بِهَا وَلَهُمْ أَعْيُنٌ لَا يُبْصِرُونَ بِهَا وَلَهُمْ آذَانٌ لَا يَسْمَعُونَ بِهَا ۚ أُولَٰئِكَ كَالْأَنْعَامِ بَلْ هُمْ أَضَلُّ ۚ أُولَٰئِكَ هُمُ الْغَافِلُونَ

". . . . they have hearts and yet do not understand, they have eyes and yet do not see, they have ears and yet do not hear; Such people are just like cattle.

Those who see with two eyes, the internal as well as the external, would recognize 'Zionism' and 'Zionist Imperialism' written all over the well-armed and long-planned insurrection which toppled the Libyan government. This was no spontaneous popular uprising of a people against their dictatorial ruler as the Zionist-controlled news media around the world would have us believe. Nor was the regime toppled because the people responded with rage to the regime's alleged slaughter of innocent protestors. That is the brain-washing that passes for news and is swallowed by cattle as Truth.

It is quite easy to recognize Zionist intimidation and control of news media when mainstream newspapers radio and television around the world (including Al-Jazeerah) adamantly refuse to question the blatantly false official explanation of the 9/11 terrorist attack on America.

The bitter truth is that there are many Libyan Muslims who will now be mercilessly killed unless they submit and embrace the new blood-stained dictatorship which has been imposed upon them at the point of a Zionist sword.

Using a barbarian strategy which came from the 'beast of the earth', the forces of insurrection struck their final Satanic blow at dusk in the month of Ramadan when believers were breaking their day-long fast. They embarked on an indiscriminate killing-spree intended to instill panic in the Libyan capital city of Tripoli and to thus destabilize its military defense. More than a thousand innocent Libyan Muslims became shuhada - having just completed a day of fasting - as they were mercilessly mowed down with weapons supplied by the Zionist Kuffar. Only a brain-washed people would accept that satanic warfare as a spontaneous popular uprising.

I suspect there are some in Egypt who would have sleepless nights if a substantial reward were to be offered for credible information of how so many weapons - capable of outmatching a standing army - reached the insurrectionists in Libya, - perhaps from across the Egyptian border? With all their weapons however, the insurrectionists could never have succeeded without the active and visible assistance and support of Zionism's military arm, i.e., the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO); nor can the new government survive without NATO protection. In this sense therefore, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Libya's new government all belong to the same group of countries whose tortured birth and continued survival cannot be explained without reference to Zionism.

NATO is already firmly established in Afghanistan and in Iraq and will never withdraw from those countries until Israel rules the world for 'a day like a week' and Dajjal declares himself to be the promised Messiah (see my book entitled 'Jerusalem in the Qur'an' for an explanation of this subject). The one-eyed do not realize that NATO is in Libya in order to protect and promote Israel's imperial interests. Israel is about to launch big wars against the Arabs in particular, and this writer warns that the world could then face at least another 25 years of continuous war until return of the son of Mary (Allah's blessings be upon them both - virgin mother and Messiah son). Those who see with one eye perhaps still do not realize that NATO will now seek to remain in Libya for the next 25 years.

The first implication of the above that we wish to share with our readers is that those Muslims who refuse to submit to Dajjal's Zionist State of Israel must now part company, for their own safety, from the one-eyed active participants and vocal supporters of the Libyan insurrection. No matter how loudly they may yell and scream in response to this essay, the fact is that - unless they repent - such people are not of us and we are not of them:

يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا لَا تَتَّخِذُوا الْيَهُودَ وَالنَّصَارَىٰ أَوْلِيَاءَ ۘ بَعْضُهُمْ أَوْلِيَاءُ بَعْضٍ ۚ وَمَنْ يَتَوَلَّهُمْ مِنْكُمْ فَإِنَّهُ مِنْهُمْ ۗ إِنَّ اللَّهَ لَا يَهْدِي الْقَوْمَ الظَّالِمِينَ

"O you who have faith (in Allah) do not take (such) Jews and (such) Christians as your friends and allies who themselves are friends and allies of each other. And whoever from amongst you turns to them (for friendship and alliance) now belong to them (and not to us). Surely Allah does not guide a wicked people."

(Qur'an, al-Maida, 5:51)

[Note: The Qur'an does not here refer to individual friendship between a Jew and a Christian. Rather the verse anticipates the emergence of the Judeo-Christian Zionist alliance which is now waging unjust war on Islam and Muslims on Israel's behalf.]

Pakistani and Egyptian Muslims in particular must sever all ties with those within Pakistan and Egypt who dance with NATO. When the NATO attacks on Pakistan and Egypt are inevitably unleashed, such people will be used to play the same role in Pakistan and Egypt as they have just played in Libya.

I have no doubt that large numbers of Egyptians are now waking up to the dangerous implication of NATO's success in Libya, i.e., that the noose is tightening around Egypt's neck. This brief essay helps to explain that subject.

Israel has to expand her territorial frontiers to encompass the (false) Biblical frontiers of the Holy Land (al-Ard al-Muqaddasah). The Bible (i.e. the Torah) declares that the Holy Land extends "from the river of Egypt to the river Euphrates". Whoever rewrote the Bible to insert this falsehood almost certainly did so because the Jews lived in the fertile Eastern Delta of Egypt for 400 years and they were also enslaved in Iraq (Babylon) for a long period of time.

No Jew will accept Dajjal's claim to be the Messiah when he does make that claim from Jerusalem in another 20-30 years from now, unless he rules over an Israel that encompasses the Biblical frontiers of the Holy Land.

And so it is inevitable that Israel will have to attack Egypt in order to physically occupy Egypt's Eastern Delta. The implication of NATO's success in Libya is that Egypt would now be attacked from both East and West; and as in the case of Pakistan, so too in the case of Egypt, the strategy would be to break up both Pakistan and Egypt into small states that can easily be controlled by India and Israel. (See my essays entitled 'Explaining Israel's Mysterious Imperial Agenda' and 'Obama's Afghan Surge, Pakistan's Moment of Truth and Death of the US Dollar' on my website.)

Despite his faults and eccentricities, this much we can say with confidence about Moammar Gadhafi that so long as he ruled over Libya he would never have permitted a NATO military presence in that country. It follows that so long as he ruled over Libya NATO could never launch an attack on Egypt with ground troops pouring into Egypt from across the Libyan border.

Thanks to the cattle, such an attack on Egypt is now possible. It is time therefore for every Egyptian to be armed - as every Venezuelan is armed - in preparation for what can now be clearly seen in the horizon.

We may also note that there were economic and monetary reasons as well for the shameless NATO attack on tiny Libya. The Zionists now have not only Iraqi but also Libyan oil in their control, and it seems only a matter of time before they assume direct control over Saudi oil as well. Zionist control over oil would eventually translate into Israeli oil blackmail for a world now dependent on oil for economic survival.

Finally it is reported that Libya had no foreign debts. As a consequence the Zionist-controlled international banking system could not bring this errant state under its influence and control. But the Zionists never give up. When the banking system failed to deliver this country to their control they then resorted to NATO.

There remains one part of this puzzle which defies explanation. Why did Russia and China support the UN Security Council resolution which permitted NATO military intervention in Libya? Were these two States really that dumb that they could not foresee the consequences of their support for the resolution? Or is there more to this than meets the eye?

***

Imran on The Aljezeera Deception

Prediction of The Arab Awakening ( in 2003 ) and the Role of Aljazeera and israel

Nuclear 911

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Since 1950, there have been 32 nuclear weapon accidents, known as "Broken Arrows."

A Broken Arrow is defined as an unexpected event involving nuclear weapons that result in the accidental launching, firing, detonating, theft or loss of the weapon. To date, six nuclear weapons have been lost and never recovered. Recently declassified documents reveal the history and secrecy surrounding the events known as "Broken Arrows".

Six of these nuclear weapons have been lost and never recovered. What does this say about our defense system? What does this mean to our threatened environment? What do we do to rectify these monumental "mistakes"?

Using spectacular special effects, newly uncovered and recently declassified footage, filmmaker Peter Kuran explores the accidents, incidents and exercises in the secret world of nuclear weapons.




PART 2




PART 3




PART 4




PART 5




PART 6

10 painful lessons of 9/11

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by Ralph Nader


The commemorative ceremonies that are planned for the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 massacre are those of pathos for the victims and their families, of praise for both the pursuit of the supporters of the attackers and the performance of first responders and our soldiers abroad.

Flags and martial music will punctuate the combined atmosphere of sorrow and aggressive defiance to those terrorists who would threaten us. These events will be moments of respectful silence and some expressions of rage and ferocity.

But many Americans might also want to pause to recognize - or unlearn - those reactions and overreactions to 9/11 that have harmed our country. How, in this forward-looking manner, can we respect the day of 9/11?

Here are some suggestions:

1. Do not exaggerate our adversaries' strength in order to produce a climate of hysteria that results in repression of civil liberties, embodied in the overwrought USA Patriot Act, and immense long-term damage to our economy. Consider the massive diversion of trillions of dollars from domestic civilian needs because of the huge expansion and misspending in military and security budgets.

2. Do not allow our leaders to lie and exaggerate as when they told us there were funded, suicidal and hateful al-Qaeda cells all over our country. They were never here. Actually, the wholesale invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan became recruiting grounds for more al-Qaeda branches there and in other countries - a fact acknowledged by both then-Army Chief of Staff George Casey and then-CIA Director Porter Goss.

3. Do not create a climate of fear or monopolize a partisan definition of patriotism in order to silence dissent from other political parties, the citizenry or the unfairly arrested or harassed.

4. Do not tolerate presidents who violate our Constitution and start wars without congressional deliberation and a declaration of war (article 1, section 8, clause 11). Do not let them disobey federal statutes and international treaties in pursuing unlawful, misdirected quicksand wars, as in Iraq, that produce deaths, destruction and debts that undermine our country's national interests.

5. Do not have Congress write a blank check, outside the normal Appropriations Committee hearing process, for the huge budgetary demands from the executive branch for funding of the Iraq, Afghan-Pakistan and other undeclared wars.

6. Do not allow the executive branch to engage in unconstitutional and illegal recurrent practices such as wiretapping and other methods of surveillance of Americans without judicial approval, in addition to arrests without charges, indefinite imprisonment, torture and denial of habeas corpus and other due process rights established by our Founding Fathers. Congress has passed no reforms to check the continuing exercise of unchecked dictatorial presidential power.

7. Do not let the government hide the horrors of war from the people by prohibiting photographs of U.S. casualties; operating cruel, secret prisons; harassing reporters; and refusing to count civilian casualties in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. There is too much intimidation of returning soldiers - so many harmed for life - from telling the people what they experienced and think about these wars and their heavy outsourcing to profiteering corporations.

8. Do not allow leaders to violate American principles with torture or other war crimes prohibited by the Geneva Conventions. Nor should top military brass or members of the executive branch be above our laws and escape accountability.

9. Do not allow your Congress to abdicate or transfer its own constitutional authorities to the president. We the people have not exercised our civic duties enough to make our representatives in Congress fulfill their obligations under the Constitution to decide whether we go to war and act as a watchdog of the president's conduct. The Libyan war was decided and funded by President Obama without congressional approval.

10. Call out those in the news media who become a mouthpiece of the president and his departments involved in these hostilities. What more is the military really doing in Libya, Somali and Yemen as compared with the official line? Under what legal authority?

In addition, demand that news media outlets seek the inconvenient facts, wherever they might lead, unlike the pre-Iraq invasion period.

The celebrated American theologian-philosopher Reinhold Niebuhr aptly wrote decades ago that "to the end of history, social orders will probably destroy themselves in the effort to prove that they are indestructible."

All empires eventually eat away at their own and devour themselves.


Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer and author of Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us. He is encouraging people around the country to gather in their own towns or cities on Sept. 10 to discuss ways to avoid overreactions to threats.