Why Putin Despises Edward Snowden

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By Michael Bohm



When Edward Snowden, with the assistance of his curators in the Russian government, held his makeshift news conference last Friday in Sheremetyevo Airport's transit zone, it was no surprise that pro-Kremlin opinion makers dominated the short, invitation-only list of attendees. Among them were prominent lawyer and Public Chamber member Anatoly Kucherena, political analyst and State Duma Deputy Vyacheslav Nikonov and human rights ombudsmen Vladimir Lukin. Basking in the spotlight amid Snowden's sudden reappearance after nearly a month of being incognito in the airport's transit zone, they took full advantage of this PR opportunity, explaining to several hundred journalists on hand that Russia should offer Snowden political asylum because he is a refugee of U.S. repression.

"Snowden is not a criminal," Lukin said, "and deserves asylum status."

"He deserves protection," Kucherena said. "We need to defend him. I consider him a hero. … [The U.S. government] is persecuting him."

This kind of demagoguery is expected from Kremlin loyalists. But what was surprising and disheartening was that the Moscow-based directors of two respected global rights organizations, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, joined the chorus of support for Snowden's quest to receive political asylum. It was unsettling to see these organizations in full solidarity with Kremlin spin doctors. Indeed, the two groups make strange bedfellows, particularly considering that these NGOs have been victims of government harassment and a state-­sponsored smear campaign that depicts them as U.S.-paid agents.

Vladimir Putin: I will not let Edward Snowden harm Russia's relations with US

 

These ardent Snowden supporters fail to understand a fundamental principle in asylum jurisprudence: Political asylum should be granted in cases of persecution, not prosecution. To qualify for asylum, Snowden must produce evidence that he is being persecuted based on his political opinion, race, religion, nationality or membership in a particular social group. These are United Nations and internationally recognized categories to determine the legitimacy of a person's asylum request. Asylum should not be granted to suspected criminals like Snowden who are simply trying to avoid a jail sentence in their home country.

A good example of a legitimate asylum seeker would be Leonid Razvozzhayev, an opposition leader who fled to Ukraine in October to escape political persecution in Russia. When Razvozzhayev tried to seek political asylum in the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Kiev, he was seized by masked men believed to be Russian intelligence agents, handcuffed and dragged back to Moscow, where he is still being held in pretrial detention on trumped-up charges of "plotting riots." In this case, both Amnesty International and ­Human Rights Watch were correct in protesting Razvozzhayev's kidnapping, detention and prosecution.

Most Snowden supporters in Russia agree that Snowden broke the law by leaking classified information but say there is a higher law — a moral law — that justifies his decision to expose massive surveillance by the National Security Agency that Americans and the entire world had a right to know about. His actions, the argument goes, amounted to civil disobedience in the spirit of U.S. civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

But these Snowden advocates are missing two key differences: King, a Noble Peace Prize laureate, did not flee the U.S., and he worked within the democratic system to push for human rights legislation that addressed the immorality of existing segregation laws. Snowden, too, should have also worked within the U.S. legal system to declassify the NSA programs, thus subjecting them to larger public scrutiny, instead of engaging in criminal cyber-vigilantism.

Snowden claims to be a whistleblower, but he is far from one. Unlike real whistleblowers — such as Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971 — Snowden did not reveal anything illegal in the NSA surveillance programs and thus cannot be protected under U.S. whistleblower laws. His sole position was that he was against the NSA surveillance programs and thought they should be declassified.

But Snowden's personal dislike of the NSA programs is not sufficient grounds to leak classified information. This is precisely why he is a criminal, not a whistleblower. According to Snowden's logic, a pedophile who doesn't like anti-pedophile laws would have the same self-anointed right to violate the law on the grounds that it also contradicts his or her personal values.

While pro-Kremlin spin doctors are having a heyday with Snowden's extended stay in Moscow and are enthusiastic about the opportunity to give him asylum, President Vladimir Putin remains highly unenthusiastic, to say the least, about Snowden's presence in the country for two main reasons.

First, Putin has a strong dislike for human rights activists as a class, especially those working in Russia. They hardly mix well with his vertical power structure. Putin may like activists more when they reveal rights abuses in the U.S., but having someone like Snowden living in Russia and becoming cozy with Russian-based rights groups, who have their own long laundry lists of abuses committed by Putin's regime, probably makes Putin a bit uneasy.

Last week, pro-Kremlin defense analyst Igor Korotchenko said in an interview with state-­controlled Rossia 24 television that if Snowden receives asylum in Russia, "he will have a fabulous opportunity to continue his human rights activities, including battling against the state's interference in private lives."

The problem, though, is that if Snowden were to turn his attention toward Russia's poor record on human rights, government transparency and privacy protection, Russia could easily get more than it bargained for with Snowden. After all, Putin's condition for giving Snowden political asylum was that he refrain from inflicting more damage on the United States. Putin said nothing about Russia.

This situation is complicated by the fact that Russian authorities are keen on expanding surveillance of Russians who use Google, YouTube, Skype and Facebook, the preferred site for organizing protests. These foreign companies, unlike Russian ones such as Yandex, are largely out of the reach of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, since their servers are located in the U.S. Thus, the Kremlin is trying to force these U.S.-based companies to give the FSB direct, unlimited access to their servers as a condition for them being able to operate in the country. Snowden, whose main mission was to fight the "U.S. surveillance state," would likely have trouble swallowing this exponentially larger surveillance state in Russia.

Given Snowden's apparent obsession with privacy rights and government transparency, Putin doesn't trust him. There is no guarantee that Snowden would remain silent about the FSB's widespread spying abuses, which make even the NSA's worst abuses look like child's play. (For example, the e-mails and telephone conversations of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who was sentenced to five years in prison on Thursday, were regularly hacked, even before charges were filed against him.) And once Snowden received asylum status, even Putin would have trouble taking it away if Snowden got out of hand.

The second reason Putin, a former KGB agent, is wary about Snowden is because Putin remains religiously faithful to the lifetime oath he took: Never give away state secrets. Whatever initial gratification he might have experienced when Snowden revealed U.S. government abuses was quickly replaced by a sense of disdain for Snowden, who betrayed his nation. For this reason alone, Putin clearly considers Snowden a traitor, not a hero.

Putin put it best in 2010, when he spoke of a Russian informant who gave away 10 sleeper agents in the U.S.: "Traitors are swine. … The lives of traitors always end badly." And this is precisely why Putin said that the sooner Snowden leaves Russia, the better.

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/opinion/article/why-putin-despises-snowden/483368.html

On Crimes Against Western Muslims

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[Special Focus]: Matthew Harwood’s Must Read Article On US Laws & American-Muslims


Source: Le Monde Diplomatique


For a British-focus report see the post below on the rise of ‘domestic terror’ attacks against Muslims [by white-extremists] in persons (check for more posts by typing ‘Woolwich’ on our blog search space) and places of gatherings (mosques, community centres etc: the first bomb attack was also in the West Midalnds).
The study ‘Mapping Muslims’ (see the article below for the link to the study in full is a must read for all Muslims).

The article is truly a must-read for all Muslims.

Political violence and privilege

Why violent right-wing extremism doesn’t scare Americans

by Matthew Harwood

The evangelical Christians of Greenville County, South Carolina, are afraid.

There has been talk of informants and undercover agents luring young, conservative evangelicals across the South into sham terrorist plots. The feds and the area’s police want to eliminate a particularly extreme strain of evangelical Christianity opposed to abortion, homosexuality, and secularism, whose adherents sometimes use violent imagery and speech. They fear such extreme talk could convince lone wolves or small groups of Christian extremists to target abortion clinics, gay bars, or shopping malls for attack. As a result, law enforcement has flooded these communities with informants meant to provide an early warning system for any signs of such “radicalization.”

Converts, so important to the evangelical movement, are now looked upon with suspicion — the more fervent, the more suspicious. In local barbecue joints, diners, and watering holes, the proprietors are careful not to let FOX News linger onscreen too long, fearing political discussions that could be misconstrued. After all, you can never be too sure who’s listening.

Come Sunday, the ministers who once railed against abortion, gay marriage, and Hollywood as sure signs that the U.S. is descending into godlessness will mute their messages. They will peer out at their congregations and fear that some faces aren’t interested in the Gospel, or maybe are a little too interested in every word. The once vibrant political clubs at Bob Jones University have become lifeless as students whisper about informants and fear a few misplaced words could leave them in a government database or worse.

Naturally, none of this is actually happening to evangelical Christians in South Carolina, across the South, or anywhere else. It would never be tolerated. Yet the equivalents of everything cited above did happen in and around the New York metropolitan area — just not to white, conservative, Christian Americans. But replace them with American Muslims in the New York area and you have a perfect fit, as documented by the recent report Mapping Muslims. And New York is hardly alone.

Since 9/11, American law enforcement has taken a disproportionate interest in American Muslims across the country, seeing a whole community as a national security threat, particularly in California and New York City. But here’s the thing: the facts that have been piling up ever since that date don’t support such suspicion. Not at all.

The numbers couldn’t be clearer: right-wing extremists have committed far more acts of political violence since 1990 than American Muslims. That law enforcement across the country hasn’t felt similarly compelled to infiltrate and watch over conservative Christian communities in the hopes of disrupting violent right-wing extremism confirms what American Muslims know in their bones: to be different is to be suspect.

Conducting suspicionless surveillance

In the aftermath of 9/11, law enforcement has infiltrated Muslim American communities and spied on them in ways that would have outraged Americans, had such tactics been used against Christian communities after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, or after any of the other hate crimes or anti-abortion-based acts of violence committed since then by right-wing extremists.

Documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests by the American Civil Liberties Union make clear that FBI agents in California used community outreach programs to gather intelligence at mosques and other local events, recording the opinions and associations of people not suspected of any crime. In 2008, the FBI loosened its internal guidelines further, allowing agents to collect demographic information on ethnically concentrated communities and map them for intelligence and investigative purposes.
There is no question that the most extreme example of such blanket, suspicion-less surveillance has been conducted by the New York City Police Department (NYPD). As revealed by the Associated Press, the NYPD’s Intelligence Division carried out a secret surveillance program on the city’s varied Muslim communities based on the erroneous belief that their religion makes them more susceptible to violent radicalization.

The program, which continues today, looks something like this, according to Mapping Muslims: “rakers,” or undercover officers, are sent into neighborhoods to identify “hot spots” — mosques, schools, restaurants, cafes, halal meat shops, hookah bars — and told to chat up people to “gauge sentiment,” while setting up “listening posts.” “Crawlers,” or informants, are then recruited and sent to infiltrate mosques and religious events. They are ordered to record what imams and congregants say and take note of who attended services and meetings.

These crawlers are encouraged to initiate “create and capture” conversations with their targets, bringing up terrorism or some other controversial topic, recording the response, and then sharing it with the NYPD. The intelligence unit also went mobile, checking out and infiltrating American-Muslim student groups from Connecticut to New Jersey and even as far away as Pennsylvania.

When news of the NYPD’s spying program broke, it shattered trust within the city’s Muslim communities, giving rise to general suspicion and fraying community ties of all sorts. This naturally raises the question: How many terrorism plots were identified and disrupted thanks to this widespread and suspicionless surveillance program? The answer: none.

Worse, the chief of the NYPD Intelligence Division admitted in sworn testimony last summer that the Muslim surveillance program did not even generate a single criminal lead. The incredibly invasive, rights-eroding program was a complete bust, a total waste of the resources of the New York City Police Department.
And that’s without even considering what is surely its most harmful aspect: the likelihood that, at least in the short term, it has caused irreparable damage to the Muslim community’s trust in the police. Surveillance, concludes the Mapping Muslims report, “has stifled constitutionally protected activity and destroyed trust between American Muslim communities and the agencies charged with protecting them.”

When people fear the police, tips dry up, potentially making the community less safe. This is important, especially given that the Muslim-American community has helped prevent, depending on whose figures you use, from 21%-40% of all terrorism plots associated with Muslims since 9/11. That’s grounds for cooperation, not alienation: a lesson that would have been learned by a police department with strong ties to and trust in the community.

Numbers may not lie, but they sure can be ignored

The idea that American law enforcement’s mass surveillance of Muslim communities is a necessary, if unfortunate, counterterrorism tool rests with the empirically false notion that American Muslims are more prone to political violence than other Americans.

This is simply not true.

According to the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), right-wing terrorists perpetrated 145 “ideologically motivated homicide incidents” between 1990 and 2010. In that same period, notes START, “al Qaeda affiliates, al Qaeda-inspired extremists, and secular Arab Nationalists committed 27 homicide incidents in the United States involving 16 perpetrators or groups of perpetrators.”

Last November, West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center published a report on America’s violent far-right extremists. Its numbers were even more startling than START’s. “The consolidated dataset,” writes report author Arie Perliger, “includes information on 4,420 violent incidents that occurred between 1990 and 2012 within U.S. borders, and which caused 670 fatalities and injured 3,053 people.” Perliger also found that the number of far-right attacks had jumped 400% in the first 11 years of the 21st century.

It’s highly probable that the FBI drastically undercounts instances of terrorism perpetrated by right-wing extremists because of cultural double standards. As the New America Foundation’s Peter Bergen has noted, attacks associated with anti-abortion or white supremacist ideologies are rarely, if ever, counted as terrorist attacks. A typical example: the massacre of worshippers at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, in August 2012 by a white supremacist.

Simply put, there is an unhealthy obsession among American law enforcement agencies (and American society at large) with stopping violence perpetrated by American Muslims, one that is wholly out of line with the numbers. There is no doubt that the events of 9/11 play into this — never mind that not one hijacker was American — but there is something much darker at work here as well. It’s the fear of a people, a culture, and a religion that most Americans do not understand and therefore see as alien and dangerous.
The fear of the “other” has wiggled its way into the core of another American generation.

“While vile, all of this speech is protected by the first amendment”

Widespread surveillance and suspicion aren’t the only things American Muslims have to worry about, feel frustrated by, or fear. They can also point to the way fellow American Muslims are treated in the larger criminal justice system.

Since 9/11, the FBI has used tactics that clearly raise the issue of entrapment in arresting hundreds of Muslims inside the U.S. on terrorism-related charges. Investigative journalist Trevor Aaronson, author of The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism, did the hard work of compiling and analyzing all of these cases between September 11, 2001, and August 2011. What he found was alarming.
“Of the 508 defendants, 243 had been targeted through an FBI informant, 158 had been caught in an FBI terrorism sting, and 49 had encountered an agent provocateur. Most of the people who didn’t face off against an informant weren’t directly involved with terrorism at all, but were instead Category II offenders, small-time criminals with distant links to terrorists overseas. Seventy-two of these Category II offenders had been charged with making false statements, while 121 had been prosecuted for immigration violations. Of the 508 cases, I could count on one hand the number of actual terrorists… who posed a direct and immediate threat to the United States.”

Those numbers, however damning, still don’t fully reflect the inequity American Muslims face within the U.S. criminal justice system when it comes to terrorism allegations. An analysis of two separate but similar cases offers a clear sense of how terrorism allegations targeting the American right and American Muslims in the criminal justice system can end with very different results. The common question running through two federal terrorism prosecutions — one against a group of seven anti-government right-wing Christian paranoids, better known as the Hutaree Militia, and the other against a Massachusetts pharmacist and Islamic radical — is what kind of speech is protected by the First Amendment and just who can rest safely under its shield?
In late March 2010, FBI raids led to the arrest of members of the Hutaree Militia across the Midwest. A Christian Patriot militia, Hutaree members believed that the end of the world was near and local, state, and federal law enforcement officers were actually “foot soldiers” in the “New World Order.” According to thefederal indictment, Hutaree leader David Brian Stone, Sr., planned the murder of a local police officer. But that was just to be the bait. When law enforcement from across the nation attended his burial, the Hutaree would attack the funeral procession with improvised explosive devices and other homemade bombs, sparking a revolt against the government.

Seven Hutaree members were charged with at least four felonies, including seditious conspiracy and conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction. Like many post-9/11 counterterrorism investigations, the case was built via an undercover FBI agent, primarily by using the violent, antigovernment statements some of the accused made as proof that a terrorist conspiracy existed. The defendants all filed motions for a judgment of acquittal, arguing that the government didn’t have enough evidence to sustain a conviction.
In March 2012, Judge Victoria Roberts agreed with the motions of the defendants, acquitting all seven on the most serious charges. (David Stone, Sr., and his son were convicted of weapons-related offenses and were sentenced to time served.) Read Roberts’s decision and it’s hard to disagree with her ruling, which concludes that the plot was all talk among paranoid people.

Referring to Stone Sr.’s anti-government statements, Roberts writes, “While vile, all of this speech is protected by the First Amendment.” Ultimately, Roberts concluded, the government’s case was far too flimsy. “The plethora of inferences the Government asks this Court to make are in excess of what the law allows,” she wrote. “But the Government crosses the line from inference to pure speculation a number of times in this case. Charges built on speculation cannot be sustained.”

Can anyone doubt, however, that if David Stone, Sr., had an Islamic-sounding name, he, his two sons, and the four other codefendants would likely be spending the rest of their lives in a federal penitentiary?

Does the first amendment have a blind spot for Muslims?

Consider the case of 29-year-old Tarek Mehanna. In April 2012, he was convicted of conspiracy to provide material support to al-Qaeda, providing material support to terrorists, conspiracy to commit murder in a foreign country, and lesser charges like lying to the FBI.

According to the federal government’s case, Mehanna and two associates went to a terrorist training camp in Yemen in 2004 with the intention of later making their way to Iraq to resist the U.S. occupation of that country. Mehanna countered that he went to Yemen to study Islam and learn Arabic. Whatever Mehanna intended, we know that, in fact, he never made it to any terrorist training camp.

That, however, wasn’t the alleged “crime” the FBI was most interested in. On his return from Yemen, Mehanna began translating into English and posting jihadist videos and documents on the Internet advocating that Muslims defend their lands against American imperialism. One video was particularly gruesome. It showed the mutilation of the remains of U.S. personnel in Iraq after the reported rape of an Iraqi girl by an American service member. After watching it, an associate asked Mehanna whether there was a way to try the U.S. serviceman suspected of the crime. Mehanna replied, “Who cares? Texas BBQ is the way to go.”
However grotesque or cruel Mehanna’s Internet activity or talk may have been, it all constituted First-Amendment protected activity. The government, however, argued that Mehanna’s online activities materially supported al-Qaeda, even though Mehanna was known to have rejected al-Qaeda’s worldview. He did not, among other things, believe civilians should be targeted in response to the actions of their government abroad. His belief was clear enough: “Those who fight Muslims may be fought, not those who have the same nationality as those who fight.”

The distinction didn’t matter. Mehanna is currently serving a 171/2-year sentence in a federal supermax prison. His thought crime: engaging in the same kind of violent but constitutionally-protected online advocacy regularly engaged in by white supremacists and anti-government militias on the radical Right.
That, to say the least, is the benefit of the doubt American Muslims cannot take for granted in the United States more than a decade after 9/11. White Christians rarely have to worry that an informant or undercover agent has infiltrated their churches, their neighborhoods, or their student groups. They never have to fear someone watching them and taking notes. They never have to question whether the new person who seems so friendly may be just a little too friendly, just a little too provocative. They don’t have to think twice before they say or post online something political, controversial, or even violently angry. None of this is their responsibility, their burden in life, just because some random person within their community lashes out in the name of God. And that’s how it should be, for everyone.

http://highfieldsoffice.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/on-crimes-against-western-muslims-special-focus-matthew-harwoods-must-read-article-on-us-laws-american-muslims-source-le-monde-diplomatique/

9/11 could be insurance fraud as “trial” of conspiring duo begins in NY today

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By Dr. Kevin Barrett

Is this the world's worst case of insurance fraud...ever?

That's what many are saying, as the world's biggest real-estate swindler and the world's most corrupt judge meet in a Manhattan courtroom on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. At issue: billions of dollars in loot from the demolition of the World Trade Center complex on September 11th, 2001.

World Trade Center owner Larry Silverstein - who confessed on national television to “pulling” World Trade Center Building 7 - will appear in the courtroom of Judge Alvin Hellerstein at 500 Pearl St. in New York City. The non-jury trial, which is expected to last three days, will decide whether Silverstein is entitled to recover $3.5 billion from airlines and airport-related companies, in addition to the $4.9 billion he has already received for his “losses” on September 11th.

The question on everyone's mind is: Why is Silverstein claiming that airliners destroyed his buildings, when he has already confessed to demolishing at least one of them himself? In the 2002 PBS documentary “America Rebuilds,” Silverstein admitted to complicity in the controlled demolition of WTC-7, a 47-story skyscraper that dropped into its own footprint in 6.5 seconds.

The mysterious destruction of Building 7 has become the Rosetta Stone of 9/11. Virtually all independent experts who have studied the case, including thousands of architects and engineers, agree that the government's explanation - that a few small office fires somehow destroyed WTC-7 - is a non-starter. Building 7, these experts say, was obviously taken down in a controlled demolition, as Silverstein himself admitted. (A nationwide ad campaign called “Re-Think 9/11” will remind millions of Americans about Building 7 this September.)

Despite his confession to demolishing his own building, Silverstein has already received $861 million from insurers for Building 7 alone, as well as over $4 billion for the rest of the Trade Center complex. That $861 million for WTC-7 was paid on the basis of Silverstein's claim that airplanes were somehow responsible for making Building 7, which was not hit by any plane, disappear at free-fall acceleration.

    The insurance companies are not openly accusing Silverstein of insurance fraud, presumably because doing so would threaten to demolish the 9/11 cover-up and bring down the US and Israeli governments at free-fall speed. But they have gone so far as to call Silverstein's demand for more money “absurd,” a considerable understatement.



The insurance companies claim that Silverstein's demands amount to “double recovery.” They say that Silverstein was already paid $4.9 billion - vastly more than the paltry $115 million or so that he and his backers paid for the complex just weeks before it was demolished - so why is he asking for another $3.5 billion? Silverstein's answer: He needs the money.

And does he ever. He was originally demanding an extra $11 billion, before Hellerstein capped it at $3.5 billion.

The insurers have not mentioned the fact that the World Trade Center Towers were condemned for asbestos in early 2001, just months before Silverstein bought them in July, six weeks prior to their demolition. They have not mentioned that Silverstein doubled the insurance coverage when he purchased the Trade Center. They have not mentioned that Silverstein hardballed his insurers to change the coverage to “cash payout.” They have not mentioned that Silverstein engineered his purchase of the Trade Center through fellow Zionist billionaire Lewis Eisenberg, Chair of the Republican National Committee and head of the New York Port Authority.

As Christopher Bollyn wrote in 2002:

“Silverstein and Eisenberg have both held leadership positions with the United Jewish Appeal (UJA), a billion dollar Zionist 'charity' organization. Silverstein is a former chairman of the United Jewish Appeal-Federation of Jewish Philanthropies of New York, Inc. This is an umbrella organization which raises hundreds of millions of dollars every year for its network of hundreds of member Zionist agencies in the United States and Israel.”

According to Ha'aretz, Silverstein is a close friend of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. They speak on the phone every weekend.

The insurance companies have likewise neglected to mention that after doubling his insurance coverage immediately before 9/11, Silverstein re-doubled his winnings after 9/11 by claiming double indemnity. According to Silverstein's spokesman, “the two hijacked airliners that struck the 110-story twin towers Sept. 11 were separate 'occurrences' for insurance purposes, entitling him to collect twice on $3.6 billion of policies.” The bizarre double-indemnity claim was approved in 2004.

Additionally, the insurers have failed to mention that on the morning of 9/11, Silverstein and his daughter both failed to show up for their daily breakfast at Windows on the World restaurant atop the North Tower. Both offered flimsy pretexts - Silverstein claiming that he had suddenly remembered a dermatologist's appointment.

How has Silverstein managed to get away with murder, in the most obvious case of insurance fraud ever?

Thanks to his partner in crime, Judge Alvin Hellerstein.

Hellerstein's courtroom is Ground Zero in the cover-up of the crimes of 9/11. Virtually all 9/11 litigation has been funneled through his courtroom, including Ellen Mariani's recent lawsuit against Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and others.

Like Silverstein and Eisenberg, Hellerstein is a rabid Zionist with close ties to Israel. The judge's son and sister both emigrated from the US to orthodox Zionist settlements in the Occupied Territories.

Investigative journalist Christopher Bollyn writes: “Hellerstein's son is an Israeli lawyer who emigrated to Israel in 2001 and whose law firm works for and with the Rothschild-funded Mossad company responsible for the 9-11 terror attacks.”

Bollyn notes that Hellerstein's son, an Israeli lawyer, represents “the Mossad-controlled airport security firm named International Consultants on Targeted Security (ICTS) N.V., which is the owner of Huntleigh U.S.A., the passenger screening company that checked the passengers that boarded the aircraft at the key airports on 9-11.”

Additionally, Bollyn writes, “Both Alvin Hellerstein and his son Joseph worked for the well-known Jewish law firm of Stroock, Stroock & Lavan before moving to the positions they now hold...Stroock, Stroock & Lavan played a key role in the setting up of 9-11...Stroock has a long history of representing the Rothschilds and other high-level Zionists.”

Will New York City 9/11 skeptics protest the Silverstein-Hellerstein trial this Monday through Wednesday?

Will truth and justice ever triumph?

In order to triumph, truth and justice will have to defeat the world's wealthiest and most powerful criminal network.




Dr. Kevin Barrett, a Ph.D. Arabist-Islamologist, is one of America's best-known critics of the War on Terror. Dr. Barrett has appeared many times on Fox, CNN, PBS and other broadcast outlets, and has inspired feature stories and op-eds in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Chicago Tribune, and other leading publications. Dr. Barrett has taught at colleges and universities in San Francisco, Paris, and Wisconsin, where he ran for Congress in 2008. He is the co-founder of the Muslim-Christian-Jewish Alliance, and author of the books Truth Jihad: My Epic Struggle Against the 9/11 Big Lie (2007) and Questioning the War on Terror: A Primer for Obama Voters (2009). His website is www.truthjihad.com.

http://presstv.com/detail/2013/07/15/313839/911-incident-insurance-fraud/

Der Spiegel Encrypted E-mails Interview with whistleblower Edward Snowden

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Part 1: The NSA and Its Willing Helpers

Part 2: 'US Multinationals Should Not Be Trusted' (See below)

- The NSA and Its Willing Helpers
 
In an interview conducted using encrypted e-mails, whistleblower Edward Snowden discusses the power of the NSA, how it is "in bed together with the Germans" and the vast scope of Internet spying conducted by the United States and Britain.

 Shortly before he became a household name around the world as a whistleblower, Edward Snowden answered a comprehensive list of questions. They originated from Jacob Appelbaum, 30, a developer of encryption and security software. Appelbaum provides training to international human rights groups and journalists on how to use the Internet anonymously.

Appelbaum first became more broadly known to the public after he spoke on behalf of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at a hacker conference in New York in 2010. Together with Assange and other co-authors, Appelbaum recently released a compilation of interviews in book form under the title "Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet."

Appelbaum wound up on the radar of American authorities in the course of their investigation into the WikiLeaks revelations. They have since served legal orders to Twitter, Google and Sonic to hand over information about his accounts. But Appelbaum describes his relationship with WikiLeaks as being "ambiguous," and explains here how he was able to pose questions to Snowden.

"In mid-May, documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras contacted me," Appelbaum said. "She told me she was in contact with a possible anonymous National Security Agency (NSA) source who had agreed to be interviewed by her."

"She was in the process of putting questions together and thought that asking some specific technical questions was an important part of the source verification process. One of the goals was to determine whether we were really dealing with an NSA whistleblower. I had deep concerns of COINTELPRO-style entrapment. We sent our securely encrypted questions to our source. I had no knowledge of Edward Snowden's identity before he was revealed to the world in Hong Kong. He also didn't know who I was. I expected that when the anonymity was removed, we would find a man in his sixties."

"The following questions are excerpted from a larger interview that covered numerous topics, many of which are highly technical in nature. Some of the questions have been reordered to provide the required context. The questions focus almost entirely on the NSA's capabilities and activities. It is critical to understand that these questions were not asked in a context that is reactive to this week's or even this month's events. They were asked in a relatively quiet period, when Snowden was likely enjoying his last moments in a Hawaiian paradise -- a paradise he abandoned so that every person on the planet might come to understand the current situation as he does."

"At a later point, I also had direct contact with Edward Snowden in which I revealed my own identity. At that time, he expressed his willingness to have his feelings and observations on these topics published when I thought the time was right."

---

Editor's note: The following excerpts are taken from the original English-language version of the interview. Potential differences in language between the German and English versions can be explained by the fact that we have largely preserved the technical terms used by Snowden in this transcript. Explanations for some of the terminology used by Snowden as well as editor's notes are provided in the form of footnotes.
 
Interviewer: What is the mission of America's National Security Agency (NSA) -- and how is the job it does compatible with the rule of law?

Snowden: They're tasked to know everything of importance that happens outside of the United States. That's a significant challenge. When it is made to appear as though not knowing everything about everyone is an existential crisis, then you feel that bending the rules is okay. Once people hate you for bending those rules, breaking them becomes a matter of survival.

Interviewer: Are German authorities or German politicians involved in the NSA surveillance system?

Snowden: Yes, of course. We're ¹ in bed together with the Germans the same as with most other Western countries. For example, we ² tip them off when someone we want is flying through their airports (that we for example, have learned from the cell phone of a suspected hacker's girlfriend in a totally unrelated third country -- and they hand them over to us. They ³ don't ask to justify how we know something, and vice versa, to insulate their political leaders from the backlash of knowing how grievously they're violating global privacy.

Interviewer: But if details about this system are now exposed, who will be charged?

Snowden: In front of US courts? I'm not sure if you're serious. An investigation found the specific people who authorized the warrantless wiretapping of millions and millions of communications, which per count would have resulted in the longest sentences in world history, and our highest official simply demanded the investigation be halted. Who "can" be brought up on charges is immaterial when the rule of law is not respected. Laws are meant for you, not for them.

Interviewer: Does the NSA partner with other nations, like Israel?

Snowden: Yes. All the time. The NSA has a massive body responsible for this: FAD, the Foreign Affairs Directorate.

Interviewer: Did the NSA help to create Stuxnet? (Stuxnet is the computer worm that was deployed against the Iranian nuclear program.)

Snowden: NSA and Israel co-wrote it.

Interviewer: What are some of the big surveillance programs that are active today and how do international partners aid the NSA?

Snowden: In some cases, the so-called Five Eye Partners ⁴ go beyond what NSA itself does. For instance, the UK's General Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has a system called TEMPORA. TEMPORA is the signals intelligence community's first "full-take" Internet buffer that doesn't care about content type and pays only marginal attention to the Human Rights Act. It snarfs everything, in a rolling buffer to allow retroactive investigation without missing a single bit. Right now the buffer can hold three days of traffic, but that's being improved. Three days may not sound like much, but remember that that's not metadata. "Full-take" means it doesn't miss anything, and ingests the entirety of each circuit's capacity. If you send a single ICMP packet ⁵ and it routes through the UK, we get it. If you download something and the CDN (Content Delivery Network) happens to serve from the UK, we get it. If your sick daughter's medical records get processed at a London call center … well, you get the idea.

Interviewer: Is there a way of circumventing that?

Snowden: As a general rule, so long as you have any choice at all, you should never route through or peer with the UK under any circumstances. Their fibers are radioactive, and even the Queen's selfies to the pool boy get logged.

Interviewer: Do the NSA and its partners across the globe do full dragnet data collection for telephone calls, text and data?

Snowden: Yes, but how much they get depends on the capabilities of the individual collection sites -- i.e., some circuits have fat pipes but tiny collection systems, so they have to be selective. This is more of a problem for overseas collection sites than domestic ⁶ ones, which is what makes domestic collection so terrifying. NSA isn't limited by power, space and cooling PSC constraints.


Part 2: 'US Multinationals Should Not Be Trusted'

Interviewer: The NSA is building a massive new data center in Utah. What is its purpose?

Snowden: The massive data repositories.

Interviewer: How long is the collected data being stored for?

Snowden: As of right now, full-take collection ages off quickly ( a few days) due to its size unless an analyst has "tasked" ⁷ a target or communication, in which the tasked communications get stored "forever and ever," regardless of policy, because you can always get a waiver. The metadata ⁸ also ages off, though less quickly. The NSA wants to be at the point where at least all of the metadata is permanently stored. In most cases, content isn't as valuable as metadata because you can either re-fetch content based on the metadata or, if not, simply task all future communications of interest for permanent collection since the metadata tells you what out of their data stream you actually want.

Interviewer: Do private companies help the NSA?

Snowden: Yes. Definitive proof of this is the hard part because the NSA considers the identities of telecom collaborators to be the jewels in their crown of omniscience. As a general rule, US-based multinationals should not be trusted until they prove otherwise. This is sad, because they have the capability to provide the best and most trusted services in the world if they actually desire to do so. To facilitate this, civil liberties organizations should use this disclosure to push them to update their contracts to include enforceable clauses indicating they aren't spying on you, and they need to implement technical changes. If they can get even one company to play ball, it will change the security of global communications forever. If they won't, consider starting that company.

Interviewer: Are there companies that refuse to cooperate with the NSA?

Snowden: Also yes, but I'm not aware of any list. This category will get a lot larger if the collaborators are punished by consumers in the market, which should be considered Priority One for anyone who believes in freedom of thought.

Interviewer: What websites should a person avoid if they don't want to get targeted by the NSA?
Snowden: Normally you'd be specifically selected for targeting based on, for example, your Facebook or webmail content. The only one I personally know of that might get you hit untargeted are jihadi forums.
Interviewer: What happens after the NSA targets a user?

Snowden: They're just owned. An analyst will get a daily (or scheduled based on exfiltration summary) report on what changed on the system, PCAPS ⁹ of leftover data that wasn't understood by the automated dissectors, and so forth. It's up to the analyst to do whatever they want at that point -- the target's machine doesn't belong to them anymore, it belongs to the US government.


Footnotes:
¹ "We're" refers to the NSA.
² "We" refers to the US intelligence service apparatus
³ "They" refers to the other authorities.
⁴ The "Five Eye Partners" is a reference to the intelligence services of United States, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
⁵ "ICMP" is a reference to Internet Control Message Protocol. The answer provided here by Snowden was highly technical, but it was clear that he was referring to all data packets sent to or from Britain.
⁶ "Domestic" is a reference to the United States.
⁷ In this context, "tasked" refers to the full collection and storage of metadata and content for any matched identifiers by the NSA or its partners.
⁸ "Metadata" can include telephone numbers, IP addresses and connection times, among other things. Wired Magazine offers a solid primer on metadata.
9 "PCAPS" is an abbreviation of the term "packet capture".

Interview conducted by Jacob Appelbaum and Laura Poitras

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/interview-with-whistleblower-edward-snowden-on-global-spying-a-910006.html

The Israeli Vigilante Movement Spewing Hate In Occupied Palestine

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Translated by Charlotte Fichou

Cases of violent vandalism are multiplying against Arab villages and places of worship. 

Standing in front of his house in this Arab-Israeli village west of Jerusalem, Ibrahim Hatem stares in disbelief: “I don’t understand. I am Israeli. I like this country. On my street, my neighbors are all Jewish.”
On June 18, Ibrahim Hatem became yet another victim of the “price tag” movement, which has been gaining momentum lately and performing acts of vandalism all over the country. In Abu Gosh, about 30 cars had their tires slashed during the night. Graffiti reading “Arabs out,” and “racism or assimilation” was spray-painted on the walls.

And yet, of all Arab villages, Abu Gosh is perhaps the most loyal to Israel – it was the only Palestinian village to side with Israel in 1948. “If those who committed these crimes want to make the country implode, they chose just the right place to do it,” worries Hatem.

This attack on a symbol of Arab-Israeli coexistence puts the government in an increasingly uncomfortable situation. On June 16, Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu refused to classify the authors of this racist vandalism as “terrorists,” against the wishes of Justice Minister Tzipi Livni who had been advocating for the classification of the attacks as “acts of terror.”

In the past month, attacks have been multiplying in Israel and in the West Bank. They have been attributed to Jewish radicals from the Hilltop Youth movement, a group of second-generation settlers, proponents of a “Greater Israel” – from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River. The modus operandi is usually the same: slashed tires, burnt cars and “price tag” graffiti, which often mention Eviatar Borovsky, a father of five from the West Bank settlement of Yitzhak who was stabbed by a Palestinian while waiting for a bus on April 30.
Acts of revenge between Palestinians and West Bank settlers are nothing new – the expression “price tag” first appeared in 2008. Their objective is to respond eye for eye to every attack against Israeli settlements. They justify their actions by saying they are “exacting a price” after acts perpetrated by the Palestinians against them or after moves by the Israeli security forces to dismantle illegal settlement outposts.

The concept was theorized in a 2009 book called Torat Hamelech (“The King’s Torah”), written by extremist rabbis who argued that killing non-Jews is acceptable as part of a religious war. Coincidence? After this inflammatory book was published, the number of attacks against Palestinians went up 144% between 2009 and 2011.

Targeting places of worship

In addition to these assaults, what is most striking is how fast the “price tag” concept has been spreading. “It has now largely overtaken its initial concept of taking back the West Bank, and even the issue of settlements. It has become a way to express the hatred of minorities,” explains Barak Weiss, coordinator of the Tag Me’ir group, which fights against this growing phenomenon. Since September 2011, he says, 25 “price tag” attacks have been perpetrated inside Israel’s Green Line, particularly in Arab-Israeli towns.
Since the beginning of 2012, more and more of these attacks have been targeting places of worship, including Christian churches. On May 31, 2013, the phrase “Christians are monkeys” was spray-painted on the walls of the Benedictine Dormition Abbey on Mount Zion in Jerusalem. On June 13 in Tel Aviv, tombstones were vandalized in the Christian Orthodox cemetery, in the historic district of Jaffa.

"Arabs out" price tag in Abu Gosh - Photo: reshettv

Christian authorities are starting to worry about this new development: “Anti-Christian acts have always existed. What is new is that they are happening within a political protest movement. But what do West Bank settlements have to do with churches?” asks Father David Neuhaus, a patriarchal vicar in Jerusalem.
On the other hand, we are also witnessing a shift in the way the “price tag” activists are acting out. At first, it was mostly impulsive acts of vengeance, but now we are seeing a spate of well thought-out and planned attacks. “There hasn’t been any particular event recently against West Bank settlements,” Weiss points out.

This development has not escaped Prime Minister Netanyahu. On June 2, he condemned the “Racism against Israeli Arabs and acts of hooliganism against Palestinians, without any provocation or justification.”
Aside from these official condemnations, Israel has not done much to put an end to the movement. The Israeli police, who has been accused of doing nothing, tried show its good faith by announcing that in the past 18 months, it had opened 788 investigations, arrested 276 people and indicted 154 of them.
Israeli NGOs however remain skeptical about these numbers. According to B’Tselem, over the past ten years, only a dozen of people have been charged for these attacks. So far, none of them have yet been brought to trial.

 http://www.lemonde.fr/

America Needs an Enemy in the Arctic

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By James R. Holmes


On these hot days is the mad blood stirring, and beckoning the Naval Diplomat's attention to … the frosty Arctic!

Last May the Obama administration released the nation's first National Strategy for the Arctic Region. It's worth your time. For me, perusing the document confirms that the U.S. Coast Guard is the logical executor of U.S. strategy. The functions delineated in the document conform ideally to the coast guard's "para-naval" — political scientist Ken Booth's term — character as a sea service.

The strategy's framers sketch three main "lines of effort" in polar climes. They direct U.S. agencies to bolster the nation's security interests, developing the strategic wherewithal to monitor events throughout the region, upholding freedom of the seas, and providing for energy security. The document commits Washington to exercise stewardship over the region, conserving its resources, protecting the environment, and conducting scientific research. And it calls for international cooperation through forums such as the Arctic Council and the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. These are coast-guard functions par excellence, well suited to a force that exists mainly to manage events off American shores.

Is the National Strategy for the Arctic Region really a strategy, though? Sure, in a generic sense. Admiral Wylie defines strategy as a "plan of action designed in order to achieve some end; a purpose together with a system of measures for its accomplishment." The Arctic strategy is light on specific ways and means for accomplishing its goals, but it gets over Wylie's bar with perhaps a micron to spare.

It's not a strategy in the traditional sense, though. It makes little mention of the potential for international competition in the Arctic basin. It seemingly assumes away the prospect of interaction between competitors determined to get their way. Clausewitz, of course, depicts strategy as a collision of living forces, as a duel on a grand scale, or as two wrestlers constantly striving to throw each other.

Assuming the ocean will remain tranquil also deprives the strategy of a focal point. Whether strategy demands an adversary is a long-running debate in my field. The drift of opinion seems to be: yes. That's certainly your gentle scribe's view. Even Wylie, having advanced his rather anodyne definition, spends the bulk of his book Military Strategy probing the ins and outs of martial strife.

Washington, then, should refuse to let the non-military challenges lurking in the Arctic theater obscure the likelihood of competition driven by the Thucydidean motives of fear, honor, and interest. Maybe the powers fronting on the polar sea can resolve their conflicts of interest amicably, factoring in the interests of stakeholders to the south. Maybe a navigable Arctic will remain free of the elemental passions that have impelled human actions throughout history. But let's not succumb to wishful thinking.

 http://thediplomat.com/the-naval-diplomat/2013/07/12/america-needs-an-enemy-in-the-arctic/

The Snowden Asylum Saga

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by NORMAN POLLACK

The NYT reports on the wholly expected: US application of pressure to prevent Latin American nations from granting asylum to Edward Snowden.  Why not?  First in the techniques of rendition, waterboarding, habeas-corpus suspension, data-mining, overall contempt for civil liberties, and presided over by the  “Assassination” President who authorizes aerial murder at his Tuesday evening soirees with a stellar cast of national-security advisers, all with a supine, bankrupt Left looking idly on.  With a national resume like that, the only surprise is not ordering a Special Ops mission to Moscow to kidnap Snowden.

How dare Snowden spill the beans!  Every hegemon worth its salt declares itself a National-Security State, rests comfortably with its biggest elephant in the room, its nuclear stockpile (Israel, are you also listening?), turns paramilitary operations, regime change, and economic blackmail into the fun-and-games entertainment of its Joint Chiefs, Political Honchoes, and CIA-JSOC debonair warriors, and, ear to the ground, moves in unison with the needs, ambitions, and desires of its upper capitalist stratum, itself an integral—if not paramount—part of the National-Security State.  Shame on you, Snowden: stripping away the political-legal cover for war crimes.  Twicefold shame, Snowden, for stripping away the ideological cover of counterterrorism, not only as America’s biggest growth industry, not only as the surest way of terrorizing the American public and keeping them docile, but also, as the presently most effective way of pursuing the now age-old means for achieving global counterrevolution, counterrevolution enlarged in concept and practice to include more than taking out Left movements and governments, or even Third World efforts at realizing autonomous modernization, for the biggest challenge perceived by US policy makers appears to be China (Obama’s notorious “pivot,” the Pacific-first geostrategic framework to gain predominance in Asia and hem-in Chinese development to prevent its global political-economic influence).  Snowden’s Revelations (deserving capital “R,” as a way of inaugurating a new Bill of Rights for Americans, if we only cared to listen) leaves the Administration with its pants down (cynically mooning a compliant—aka, complicit—populace), exposing the pretentiousness of Exceptionalism and Moral Rectitude by which the US knows itself (talk of false consciousness!!) in seeking exclusive direction, guidance, leadership of a world community safe for the expansion of American capitalism.

Snowden’s documents thus far released already demonstrate that the US has a finger in every pie, making it only a matter of time before that selfsame world community, especially the euphonious-sounding “friends and allies,” awakens to the recognition that all are being had, whether as “partners” in military alliances, which liberally finance the military’s status and power in each of the countries, participants in American-led international financial organizations (IMF, World Bank) which have determined domestic austerity policies compatible with US commercial and banking interests, or simply, as carrot-and-stick induced ideological soul mates, cemented in the spiritual bond of market fundamentalism, in which outsourcing clothing manufacturing to the semi-enslaved workers in poor Asian countries is deemed a crowning achievement.  We mustn’t underestimate the significance of the Revelations, which is why the USG will leave no stone unturned in seeking retribution and, more immediately, silencing the messenger.  This will also serve notice on future whistleblowers, your services are not wanted; indeed, you are really domestic al Qadea, and fair game for Obama’s Tuesday soirees off the Situation Room; you, too, may find yourself on the baseball cards dealt around the table.  Feel honored that your Leader cares enough about you to enlist the full apparatus of the National-Security State to squelch your activities, with the full help of AG Holder and DCIA Brennan, Rice leading the cheering section of “humanitarian interventionists.”  My New York Times Comment (July 12) follows, on the article about US full-court pressure applied to Latin American nations concerning asylum for Snowden:

    If I could give my home extraterritoriality I would be honored to take in Edward Snowden as my guest. But of course even then USG would find a way to render him to a third country for torture–or simply shoot him on sight. In the eyes of the world America by its treatment of Snowden–as here blackmailing Latin American countries with sinister threats–stands out as the global terrorist, bully, war criminal.

The more we get tough the more isolated we become, a world pariah. That is the main thing, not the specific revelations about domestic and foreign surveillance, but the larger revelation: that the US believes it can dominate Latin America and the world at large. Thank you, Obama, for revealing your true despotic dimensions–while your fellow liberals and/or progressives look the other way, showing their contempt for civil liberties and privacy (true tests of a democracy). The Left in the US is morally bankrupt, worshiping at the feet of a Democratic Party distinguished only by its interventionist propensities and incipiently fascist opportunism. By all means, Biden, man the phones. You are a laughing stock.


Norman Pollack is the author of “The Populist Response to Industrial America” (Harvard) and “The Just Polity” (Illinois), Guggenheim Fellow, and professor of history emeritus, Michigan State University. His new book, Eichmann on the Potomac, will be published by CounterPunch/AK Press in the fall of 2013.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/07/12/the-snowden-asylum-saga/

New studies: ‘Conspiracy theorists’ sane; government dupes crazy, hostile

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Dr. Kevin Barrett

Recent studies by psychologists and social scientists in the US and UK suggest that contrary to mainstream media stereotypes, those labeled “conspiracy theorists” appear to be saner than those who accept the official versions of contested events.

The most recent study was published on July 8th by psychologists Michael J. Wood and Karen M. Douglas of the University of Kent (UK). Entitled “What about Building 7? A social psychological study of online discussion of 9/11 conspiracy theories,” the study compared “conspiracist” (pro-conspiracy theory) and “conventionalist” (anti-conspiracy) comments at news websites.

The authors were surprised to discover that it is now more conventional to leave so-called conspiracist comments than conventionalist ones: “Of the 2174 comments collected, 1459 were coded as conspiracist and 715 as conventionalist.” In other words, among people who comment on news articles, those who disbelieve government accounts of such events as 9/11 and the JFK assassination outnumber believers by more than two to one. That means it is the pro-conspiracy commenters who are expressing what is now the conventional wisdom, while the anti-conspiracy commenters are becoming a small, beleaguered minority.

Perhaps because their supposedly mainstream views no longer represent the majority, the anti-conspiracy commenters often displayed anger and hostility: “The research… showed that people who favoured the official account of 9/11 were generally more hostile when trying to persuade their rivals.”

Additionally, it turned out that the anti-conspiracy people were not only hostile, but fanatically attached to their own conspiracy theories as well. According to them, their own theory of 9/11 - a conspiracy theory holding that 19 Arabs, none of whom could fly planes with any proficiency, pulled off the crime of the century under the direction of a guy on dialysis in a cave in Afghanistan - was indisputably true. The so-called conspiracists, on the other hand, did not pretend to have a theory that completely explained the events of 9/11: “For people who think 9/11 was a government conspiracy, the focus is not on promoting a specific rival theory, but in trying to debunk the official account.”

In short, the new study by Wood and Douglas suggests that the negative stereotype of the conspiracy theorist - a hostile fanatic wedded to the truth of his own fringe theory - accurately describes the people who defend the official account of 9/11, not those who dispute it.

Additionally, the study found that so-called conspiracists discuss historical context (such as viewing the JFK assassination as a precedent for 9/11) more than anti-conspiracists. It also found that the so-called conspiracists to not like to be called “conspiracists” or “conspiracy theorists.”

Both of these findings are amplified in the new book Conspiracy Theory in America by political scientist Lance deHaven-Smith, published earlier this year by the University of Texas Press. Professor deHaven-Smith explains why people don’t like being called “conspiracy theorists”: The term was invented and put into wide circulation by the CIA to smear and defame people questioning the JFK assassination! “The CIA’s campaign to popularize the term ‘conspiracy theory’ and make conspiracy belief a target of ridicule and hostility must be credited, unfortunately, with being one of the most successful propaganda initiatives of all time.”

In other words, people who use the terms “conspiracy theory” and “conspiracy theorist” as an insult are doing so as the result of a well-documented, undisputed, historically-real conspiracy by the CIA to cover up the JFK assassination. That campaign, by the way, was completely illegal, and the CIA officers involved were criminals; the CIA is barred from all domestic activities, yet routinely breaks the law to conduct domestic operations ranging from propaganda to assassinations.

DeHaven-Smith also explains why those who doubt official explanations of high crimes are eager to discuss historical context. He points out that a very large number of conspiracy claims have turned out to be true, and that there appear to be strong relationships between many as-yet-unsolved “state crimes against democracy.” An obvious example is the link between the JFK and RFK assassinations, which both paved the way for presidencies that continued the Vietnam War. According to DeHaven-Smith, we should always discuss the “Kennedy assassinations” in the plural, because the two killings appear to have been aspects of the same larger crime.

Psychologist Laurie Manwell of the University of Guelph agrees that the CIA-designed “conspiracy theory” label impedes cognitive function. She points out, in an article published in American Behavioral Scientist (2010), that anti-conspiracy people are unable to think clearly about such apparent state crimes against democracy as 9/11 due to their inability to process information that conflicts with pre-existing belief.

In the same issue of ABS, University of Buffalo professor Steven Hoffman adds that anti-conspiracy people are typically prey to strong “confirmation bias” - that is, they seek out information that confirms their pre-existing beliefs, while using irrational mechanisms (such as the “conspiracy theory” label) to avoid conflicting information.

The extreme irrationality of those who attack “conspiracy theories” has been ably exposed by Communications professors Ginna Husting and Martin Orr of Boise State University. In a 2007 peer-reviewed article entitled “Dangerous Machinery: ‘Conspiracy Theorist’ as a Transpersonal Strategy of Exclusion,” they wrote:

“If I call you a conspiracy theorist, it matters little whether you have actually claimed that a conspiracy exists or whether you have simply raised an issue that I would rather avoid… By labeling you, I strategically exclude you from the sphere where public speech, debate, and conflict occur.”

But now, thanks to the internet, people who doubt official stories are no longer excluded from public conversation; the CIA’s 44-year-old campaign to stifle debate using the “conspiracy theory” smear is nearly worn-out. In academic studies, as in comments on news articles, pro-conspiracy voices are now more numerous - and more rational - than anti-conspiracy ones.

No wonder the anti-conspiracy people are sounding more and more like a bunch of hostile, paranoid cranks.


Dr. Kevin Barrett, a Ph.D. Arabist-Islamologist, is one of America's best-known critics of the War on Terror. Dr. Barrett has appeared many times on Fox, CNN, PBS and other broadcast outlets, and has inspired feature stories and op-eds in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Chicago Tribune, and other leading publications. Dr. Barrett has taught at colleges and universities in San Francisco, Paris, and Wisconsin, where he ran for Congress in 2008. He is the co-founder of the Muslim-Christian-Jewish Alliance, and author of the books Truth Jihad: My Epic Struggle Against the 9/11 Big Lie (2007) and Questioning the War on Terror: A Primer for Obama Voters (2009). His website is 
www.truthjihad.com
.http://presstv.com/detail/2013/07/12/313399/conspiracy-theorists-vs-govt-dupes/

Snowden a Hero to Americans

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by Justin Raimondo

 In spite of a hate campaign by the "mainstream" media

He’s been portrayed in the mainstream media as a "narcissist," a scheming "traitor," an agent of Russia, a Chinese spy, a clueless high school drop out, an anti-government "extremist," and I’m quite sure I must’ve missed a few of the more exotic epithets. I’m talking about Edward Snowden, of course, the former CIA employee and NSA contractor whose leaking to the Guardian has exposed a vast global spying apparatus secretly constructed by Washington. The weeks-long Hate aimed at Snowden reached its apogee when prominent "journalists" started going after the reporters who broke the Snowden story, principally Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, inferring that it was Greenwald and the Guardian who put Snowden up to penetrating the NSA. These aren’t just wingnut bloggers we’re dealing with here, but two prominent legacy-media reporters: David "Meet the Press" Gregory and Walter Pincus, of the Washington Post. When Gregory demanded to know why Greenwald shouldn’t be prosecuted alongside Snowden, that was the Establishment baring its teeth.

One should never assume their bark is worse than their bite, but clearly this display of anger is born of sheer frustration. Snowden, after all, has thrown our rulers and their court jesters in the media on the defensive. Not since David bopped Goliath on the noggin has a single individual landed such a decisive blow on a giant, unwieldy bully. Washington is reeling from the impact of the Snowden revelations, not just on the international plane but on the home front as well. In spite of battalions of politicians of both parties dutifully denouncing the NSA leaker as a modern day Benedict Arnold, and weeks of media hysteria over the alleged "damage" he has done to our national security, the American people aren’t buying the Official Narrative: a recent Quinnipiac poll reports:

"American voters say 55 – 34 percent that Edward Snowden is a whistle-blower, rather than a traitor, according to a Quinnipiac University national poll released today. In a massive shift in attitudes, voters say 45 – 40 percent the government’s anti-terrorism efforts go too far restricting civil liberties, a reversal from a January 14, 2010, survey by the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University when voters said 63 – 25 percent that such activities didn’t go far enough to adequately protect the country. Almost every party, gender, income, education, age and income group regards Snowden as a whistle-blower rather than a traitor."

This poll tracks several interesting trends, the most arresting of which is the utter unanimity with which the American people are rejecting the Official Narrative on Snowden – that Snowden is a traitor who committed espionage and deserves to be punished for his "crime." Weeks and weeks of relentless smearing, accusing him of collusion with America’s enemies, and worse, have simply had no effect – other than, perhaps, to increase his approval ratings!

As was the case in the former Soviet Union, where people took the truth to be the opposite of whatever appeared in the newspapers, the American people are simply tuning out the "mainstream" media. In the upside down Bizarro World they find themselves living in, Americans have resorted to the only reliable method of determining truth from falsehood: by simply inverting whatever the Establishment media is "reporting." They’re telling us Snowden’s a "traitor": ergo, he’s a heroic whistle-blower. A crude but very effective methodology, one that – if applied consistently – can have some pretty interesting implications down the road.

The great shift in voter attitudes toward civil liberties is worth going into specifics: the partisan breakdown is particularly interesting. While 49 percent of Republicans support the NSA’s phone dragnet program, the number rises to 58 percent when we’re talking about Democrats. Opposition is centered in Independents, Republicans, and males. 56 percent of Republicans say the dragnet is too much of an intrusion into privacy, while only 40 percent of Democrats agree.

The evolution of American liberalism from a pro-civil liberties stance to one that effectively disappears the Fourth Amendment because Government Is Our Friend is here charted and measured. Yes, you’re right that they might not be telling the pollsters this if a Republican was in the White House, but I would argue this shift was bound to happen anyway. After all, haven’t "progressives" been telling us for years that conservative-libertarian fears of Big Government are just paranoid alarmism? Aren’t Democrats the "Mommy" party, which sees government as the Great Protector – and doesn’t the demographic breakdown, which shows women much more conducive to the Surveillance State than men, tell us where Democratic strategists are placing their bets? Indeed, one is hard put to come up with a reason for liberals to stand with Snowden in an age when "We’re from the government, and we’re here to help" is the leitmotif and motto of American "progressivism."

Old-fashioned American liberals never believed in any such claptrap. The Midwestern "progressives" of yesteryear didn’t cotton to centralization, and saw government regulation as the instrument of corporate control as much as a shield against it. They didn’t trust Washington bureaucrats, and although they initially supported the New Deal they turned against FDR when he started accruing more power in the alphabet soup of government agencies set up during the Depression. They stood up during the McCarthy era, when the threat to our civil liberties was almost as great as it is today, and they fought government repression tooth and nail. Today, that noble tradition persists in the ACLU, and a few other organizations, mostly legal defense groups, but politically the old-fashioned liberals are in decline, as the Quinnipiac poll suggests, with the center of opposition to the Surveillance State shifting to the libertarian-conservative side of the spectrum.

In the short term, this is good news for libertarians, such as myself, who have been campaigning for years to convert conservatives to the cause of constitutional government and a non-interventionist foreign policy. The latter is involved, at least tangentially, because the rationalization for universal surveillance hinges on the need to protect us from the consequences of our dangerously wrong-headed policy of perpetual war. To those of us who lived – and suffered – through the Bush years, that significantly more Republicans than Democrats see Snowden as a whistleblower rather than a "traitor" is an astonishing fact.

On the other hand, this is very bad news for the country in the long term. A healthy American liberalism – that is, a movement dedicated to the preservation of our civil liberties against a government ever-eager to infringe on them – is absolutely necessary if the Constitution is to be successfully defended. In the absence of such a movement, it becomes politically impossible to fight off attempts by both the Obama cult and the neocons to impose a universal surveillance regime in the US. Unless old-fashioned liberalism undergoes a revival on account of the Snowden revelations, civil liberties in this country are doomed. Neither the left nor the right alone can save the Constitution: a united effort is needed if we are going to defeat the new authoritarians.

 http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2013/07/11/snowden-a-hero-to-americans/

Where Orwell got it wrong

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by John O'Farrell

War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.

In his novel 1984, George Orwell forecasted a dystopian society 36 years in the future, in which an all-powerful state uses advanced technology to exert totalitarian control over the thoughts, words and actions of its citizens. Ubiquitous two-way “telescreens” watch the individual’s every move and emit an endless stream of sinister propaganda. Big Brother is watching you. The Ministry of Truth is the only source of information. The Thought Police control what you think. As citizen Winston Smith learns to his cost, resistance is futile.

The allegations that the NSA has apparently been collecting the cellphone and Internet records of everyone in the United States (if not the world) has catalyzed fears that Orwell’s terrifying future may finally be materializing twenty-nine years late. Sales of 1984 are up 9,500%. Was Orwell right? Is technology in the hands of the state enabling our subjugation as he predicted?

In one key aspect, Orwell was absolutely right. Like Orwell’s telescreens, security cameras increasingly monitor us from every street-corner, but we also carry smartphones that log our every physical movement, and meanwhile a host of tracking technologies record our virtual movements across the Web. As a recent WSJ OpEd by Sen. Rand Paul proclaims, “Big Brother Really Is Watching Us” – and he’s using technologies far more powerful than Orwell could have imagined back in 1948. The implications of this surveillance are profoundly disturbing. While we may trust the current administration’s assertions that they’re only watching us in order to protect us, who can be confident that future administrations or less benign overseas governments will not use these tools to track and persecute whomever they deem to be an enemy of the state?

In another fundamental aspect, however, Orwell was dead wrong. In a paradox worthy of 1984 itself, the same technologies that enable Big Brother to watch us are rendering it ever more impossible for him to control what we know and think. Far from ending up in control of all knowledge through the Ministry of Truth, today’s governments have effectively lost the ability to control our access to information. In Orwell’s time, the state only needed to censor a few newspapers and a handful of broadcasters to effect total information control. Today, we carry access to hundreds of global news sources and tens of thousands of bloggers around in our pockets, most of them beyond our national government’s reach. If the New York Times won’t publish it due to a secret FISA court order, the Guardian will. If we don’t trust the Turkish government’s account of events in the streets of Istanbul, we can turn for the truth to thousands of cellphone videos or tweets from the people themselves. SMS, Twitter and Facebook have become the means for citizens to organize resistance to abusive government power, and for the rest of the world to witness it. No wonder Prime Minister Erdogan recently declared Twitter and its ilk “the worst menace to society.”

Moreover, technology is exposing the state itself to scrutiny in ways that Orwell never foresaw. Even in China, these days it only seems to take a flurry of critical comments on Sina Weibo for the government to change its policy on luxury cars for officials or to give in to villagers demanding the removal of a corrupt mayor. In what’s become a recurring nightmare for Western governments, leaks spread instantly and uncontrollably in the world of smartphones and Twitter. Whether you agree or disagree with their tactics, it only takes one “whistleblower” to shine the blinding spotlight of the global Internet on controversial top-secret government programs. And just as our personal use of technology lays a trail the government can follow, so too does government’s use of technology create a record that can be used to scrutinize the actions of the officials involved and hold them to account. If there is a “smoking gun” associated with the IRS Tea Party affair, it’s likely to be found somewhere in a trove of internal email. Like Nixon with his tapes, the day will inevitably come when a national government is brought down by its emails.

So, Orwell was partly right. The state uses ever more advanced surveillance technology to watch us, and our own ever-greater use of personal technology makes it possible. On the other hand, technology has fundamentally destroyed the state’s ability to control our access to information, and exposed its bureaucracy to unprecedented scrutiny. This may be the death of privacy, but perhaps it’s also the death of secrecy and impunity. In that respect, fortunately, Orwell was wrong. Thanks to technology, Big Brother may be watching us, but we’re watching him too.

https://medium.com/surveillance-state/a3f8a99880d6

September 11: Inside Job or Mossad Job?

by Laurent Guyénot

 

Israel’s role in the events of September 11, 2001—that shape the 21st century—is the subject of bitter controversy, or rather a real taboo even within the 9/11 Truth Movement, causing the ostracism of the man who dared to broach the subject, Thierry Meyssan. Most advocacy groups, mobilized behind the slogan "9/11 was an Inside Job," remain discreet regarding the evidence involving the secret services of the Jewish state. Laurent Guyénot focuses on certain compelling—though grossly under reported—facts and analyzes the mechanisms of denial.

While Israel’s role in the destabilization of the world post-September 11 is becoming increasingly clear, the idea that a faction of Likudniks, aided by their allies embedded in the U.S. State apparatus, are responsible for the false flag operation of September 11 is becoming more difficult to suppress, and some individuals have the courage to state so publicly. Francesco Cossiga, President of Italy between 1985 and 1992, declared on 30 November 2007 to the daily Corriere della Sera: “From areas around the Palazzo Chigi, nerve centre of direction of Italian intelligence, it is noted that the non-authenticity of the video is supported by the fact that Osama bin Laden in it ’confessed’ that Al Qaeda was responsible for the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers in New York. However, all of the democratic areas of America and of Europe, with the Italian center-left in the forefront, now know full well that the disastrous attack was planned and executed by the American CIA and Mossad with the help of the Zionist world to falsely incriminate Arabic countries and to persuade the Western Powers to intervene in Iraq and Afghanistan [1]." Alan Sabrosky, former professor at the U.S. Army War College and the U.S. Military Academy, did not hesitate to proclaim his belief that September 11 is a "classical operation orchestrated by Mossad" carried out with accomplices within the United States government, and his voice has been forcefully echoed by some U.S. Army veterans sites who are disgusted by the vile war that they were forced to wage on behalf of the September 11 lie or that of the weapons of mass destruction of Saddam Hussein [2].

The arguments in favor of the Mossad hypothesis are not only related to the reputation of the world’s most powerful secret service, which a report by the U.S. Army School for Advanced Military Studies (quoted by the Washington Times on the eve of September 11th), described as "wildcat, ruthless and cunning. Able to carry out an attack on U.S. forces and disguise it as an act committed by Palestinians/Arabs [3]." The Mossad involvement, together with other Israeli elite units, is made evident by a number of little known facts.

The dancing Israelis

The eBook by Hicham Hamza, "Israel and September 11: The Great Taboo" (2013) brings together the case against Israel, with impeccable precision and all easily accessible sources.

How many of us know, for example, that the only people arrested on the same day in connection with the terrorist attacks of September 11 are Israelis [4]? This information was reported the very next day by journalist Paulo Lima in The Record, the newspaper of Bergen County in New Jersey, according to police sources. Immediately after the first impact on the North Tower, three individuals were seen by several witnesses on the roof of a van parked at Liberty State Park in Jersey City, "celebrating” and “jumping up and down,” and photographing themselves with the twin towers in the background. They then moved their van to another parking spot in Jersey City, where other witnesses saw them display the same ostentatious celebrations. The police immediately issued a BOLO alert (be-on-the-look-out): "Vehicle possibly related to the terrorist attack in New York. 2000 white Chevrolet van with New Jersey plates and an ’Urban Moving Systems’ sign at the back, was seen at Liberty State Park, Jersey City, NJ, at the time of first impact of jetliner into the World Trade Center. Three individuals with the van were seen celebrating after the initial impact and the explosion that followed [5]." The van was stopped by police a few hours later, with five young Israelis aboard: Sivan and Paul Kurzberg, Yaron Shmuel, Oded Ellner and Omer Marmari. Physically forced out of the vehicle and pinned to the ground, the driver, Sivan Kurzberg, launched this strange sentence: "We are Israelis. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem [6].” Police sources who informed Paulo Lima were convinced of the involvement of the Israelis in the morning’s attacks: "There were maps of the city in the van with some of the points highlighted. It looked like they knew [...] they knew what would happen when they were at Liberty State Park [7]. Passports of various nationalities, nearly 6000 dollars in cash and open airline tickets to travel abroad were also found on them. The Kurzberg brothers were formally identified as Mossad agents. The five Israelis worked officially for a moving company named Urban Moving Systems, whose employees were mostly Israelis. "I was in tears. These guys were joking and that bothered me [8]," stated one of the few non-Israeli workers to The Record. On September14, after receiving a visit from the police, the business owner, Dominik Otto Suter, left the country for Tel Aviv.

The information disclosed by The Record, confirmed by the police report, was taken on by investigative sites such as the Wayne Madsen Report (September 14, 2005) and Counterpunch (February 7, 2007). It was also reported in some main media as well but in a way that minimized its scope: the New York Times (November 21, 2001) failed to mention the nationality of the individuals, just like Fox News and the Associated Press. The Washington Post (November 23, 2001) said they were Israelis, but passed over in silence their apparent foreknowledge of the event. However, The Forward (March 15, 2002), a magazine of the New York Jewish community, revealed that, according to an anonymous U.S. intelligence source, Urban Moving Systems was a Mossad undercover unit (which did not prevent it from receiving a federal loan of 498,750 dollars, as shown by the tax records)] [9].

The FBI conducted an investigation contained in a 579 page report, partially declassified in 2005 (it will be completely declassified in 2035). Freelance journalist Hisham Hamza analyzed this in detail in his book Israel and September 11: The Great Taboo. It shows a number of damning elements. First, the photos taken by these young Israelis actually show them in attitudes of celebration before the North Tower on fire: "They smiled, they hugged and they gave each other high fives." To explain this, stakeholders said they were simply delighted "that the United States should now take steps to stop terrorism in the world" (although, at this point, a majority of people thought the crashes were an accident rather than an actd of terrorism). Moreover, at least one witness saw them positioned at 8:00, before an aircraft struck the first tower, while others certify that they were already taking pictures five minutes later, which is confirmed by their photos. A former employee confirmed to the FBI, the fanatically pro-Israeli and anti-American atmosphere that reigned in the company, even attributing to its director, Dominik Otto Suter, these words: "Give us twenty years and we will seize and destroy your media and your country." The five arrested Israelis were in contact with another moving company called Classic International Movers, four employees of which were interviewed separately for their links with the nineteen suspected hijackers. One of them had called "an individual in South America with genuine links to Islamic militants in the Middle East." Finally, "a sniffer dog gave a positive result for the presence of traces of explosives in the vehicle [10]."

As Hamza notes, the report’s conclusion is thought provoking: the FBI informs the local police detaining the suspects that, "the FBI has no further interest in investigating the prisoners and ’appropriate immigration procedures should be initiated [11]." A letter from the federal Immigration and Naturalization Service in fact shows that the FBI management recommended the termination of the investigation on September 24, 2001. However, the five Israelis spent 71 days in prison in Brooklyn, during which they refused, then failed several lie detector tests. They were subsequently repatriated under the simple charges of visa violations.

Omer Marmari, Oded Ellner and Yaron Shmuel, three of the five "dancing Israelis" are invited to report in an Israeli TV programe upon their return in November 2001. Denying being members of Mossad, one of them said candidly: "Our goal was to record the event."

We must finally mention an important detail of this affair, which may provide an additional explanation for the exuberant behavior of these young Israelis: some witnesses specify in their calls to the police, that people rejoicing on the roof of their van seemed to be "Arabs" or "Palestinians". In particular, shortly after the collapse of the towers, an anonymous call to police in Jersey City, reported on the same day by NBC News, described "a white van with two or three guys on the inside, they look like Palestinians and they are circling around a building", one of them "is mixing things and he has a ’sheikh’s outfit on. [...] He is dressed like an Arab [12]." All indications are that these individuals were precisely the five Israelis arrested later. Two hypotheses come to mind: either our false movers are actually engaged in a staged action to appear as Arabs/Palestinians, or the witness or witnesses who described them as such were accomplices. As in the other case, it is clear that their goal was to initiate media rumors that Muslims had been spotted rejoicing not only for the attacks, but also for having foreknowledge. The information was actually broadcast on some radio stations at noon, and on NBC News in the afternoon. I personally lean toward the second hypothesis (informants as accomplices rather than true Arabs in disguise) because the police report makes no mention of any exotic clothing found in the van, but especially because the informant cited above, who emphasized the clothing details, seems to have wanted to mislead the police about the exact location of the van; the latter was intercepted only because the police, instead of being satisfied with just this location, blocked all bridges and underground tunnels between New Jersey and New York. But the important thing is this: If the Israelis had not been arraigned in the late afternoon, the story probably would have made headlines with the title: The Dancing Arabs. Instead, it was completely suppressed and was circulated only confidentially under the title The dancing Dancing Israelis, or The Highfivers.

Ehud Barak, former head of Israeli military intelligence (Sayeret Matkal), was Prime Minister from July 1999 to March 2001. Replaced by Ariel Sharon, he moved to the United States as a consultant for Electronic Data Systems and SCP Partners, a Mossad screen company specializing in security issues which, with its partners Metallurg Holdings and Advanced Metallurgical, had the ability to produce nano-thermite. SCP Partners had an office within ten kilometers of Urban Moving Systems. An hour after the disintegration of the towers, Ehud Barak is on the set of BBC World to describe bin Laden as the prime suspect (Bollyn, Solving 9-11, p. 278-280).

200 explosives expert spies

Few people, even among the 9/11 Truthers, know the story of "the dancing Israelis" (we are still waiting, for example, for the Reopen 9/11 Association to talk about it on its Francophone site, though they are very sharp on all other aspects of the case). Also, few people know that at the time of the attacks, the U.S. federal police were busy dismantling the largest Israeli spy network ever identified on US soil. In March 2001, the National Counterintelligence Center (NACIC) posted this message on its website: "During the past six weeks, employees of federal offices located throughout the United States have reported suspicious activities related to individuals posing as foreign students selling or delivering artwork." The NACIC specifies that these individuals, citizens of Israel, "also went to private homes of federal officials under the guise of selling art objects [13]."

Then in the summer, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), after being targeted by a large number of such incidents, compiled a report which was revealed to the public by the Washington Post on November 23, 2001, and in The World on March 14, 2002, before being made fully accessible by the French magazine Intelligence Online. This report lists 140 Israelis arrested since March 2001. Aged between 20 and 30 years and organized into teams of 4 to 8 members, they visited at least "36 sensitive sites in the Department of Defense." Many of them were identified as members of the Mossad and Aman (Israeli military intelligence), and six were in possession of phones paid for by a former Israeli vice consul. Sixty arrests occurred after September 11, bringing to 200 the number of Israeli spies arrested. All were eventually released.

Michael Chertoff, an Israeli citizen, the son of an Orthodox rabbi and a pioneer of the Mossad, headed the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice in 2001, and as such was responsible for the retention and destruction of all evidence regarding the 11th of September – from Pentagon cameras to World Trade Center beams. It is to him also that the "dancing Israelis" owe their discreet repatriation. In 2003, he was appointed to head the new Department of Homeland Security in charge of counter-terrorism on U.S. territory, which allows him to control dissent while continuing to restrict access to the file of Sept. 11 through the law of Sensitive Security Information.

The DEA report concluded that "the nature of the behavior of these individuals [...] leads us to believe that the incidents are perhaps intelligence gathering [14]." But the nature of the information collected remains unknown. It may be that in fact espionage was just a secondary cover—an undergarment—of these Israeli art students, considering the military training received by some as demolition explosive ordnance expert, combat engineer, bomb disposal expert, electronic signal intercept operator, according to the DEA. One of the arrested agents, Peer Segalovitz, "acknowledged that he was capable of making buildings, bridges and cars explode, and anything he wanted [15]." Why would these Israeli agents have diverted attention from their real mission in a campaign of espionage as ostentatious as unproductive curiously focusing on the Drug Enforcement Agency? The answer to this question is suggested by a disturbing geographical link between this network and the attacks of September 11.

According to the DEA report, "The Hollywood community in Florida seems to have been the focal point of these individuals [16]." In fact, more than thirty of the fake Israeli student spies arrested shortly before September 11 lived in or near the city of Hollywood, Florida, precisely where 15 of the 19 alleged Islamist hijackers had regrouped (9 in Hollywood proper and 6 others nearby). One of them, Hanan Serfaty, through whom at least one hundred thousand dollars transited in three months, had rented two Hollywood apartments close to the apartment and post office box rented by Mohamed Atta, who was presented to us as the leader of the gang of hijackers. What was the relationship between the "Israeli spies" and the "Islamic terrorists?" According to the embarrassed explanation by the aligned media, the former were just monitoring the latter. Listen for example to David Pujadas introducing the Intelligence Online article televised March 5, 2002 on France 2: "More about Israel, but specifically concerning Afghanistan now, this espionage affaire is troubling: an Israeli network was dismantled in the United States, particularly in Florida: one of its missions was to track the men of Al-Qaeda (this was before September 11). Some sources go even further: they indicate that the Mossad may not have shared all the information in its possession." This euphemistic explanation is an example of damage control. Israel appears barely tainted, since we can not reasonably blame a spy service for not shariong information. At worst, Israel can be accused of having "let it happen", which guarantees impunity. This explains, in my opinion, the sub-secondary cover of the spies-as-fake-Israeli-students, actually experts at false flag attacks. In fact, the students’ deliberately frail cover was made to draw attention to their secondary cover, that of spies, which would serve as an alibi for their proximity to the alleged pirates.

Why does Pujadas (propelled to France 2 television news just a week before September 11) mention Afghanistan, which has nothing to do with the information being introduced? The slip can only be deliberate and illustrates "the great taboo" which Hicham Hamza alludes to: never mention September 11 and Israel in the same sentence.

The truth is that they were probably not spying on the pirates, but that they manipulated them, financed them, and probably likely eliminated them shortly before September 11. An article in the New York Times of February 18, 2009 established that Ali al-Jarrah, cousin of a suspected Flight 93 pirate, Ziad al-Jarrah, had been a spy for the Mossad for 25 years, infiltrating the Palestinian resistance and Hezbollah in 1983. He is currently in prison in Lebanon. Let’s also recall that the Mohamed Atta in Florida was a fake. The real Mohamed Atta, who called his father after the attacks (as last confirmed by the German magazine Bild am Sonntag in late 2002), is described by his family as reserved, pious, avoiding women and having a fear of planes. He had his passport stolen in 1999 while studying architecture in Hamburg. The false Mohamed Atta in Florida was living with a stripper, ate pork, loved fast cars, casinos and cocaine. As reported by the South Florida Sun-Sentinel on September 16, "The suspects’ actions do not add up." As also reported by many national newspapers, this Atta got drunk, drugged and paid for the services of several prostitutes in the weeks and days before the September 11 attacks, and four other suicide bombers had similar behavior incompatible with Islamists preparing for death [17].

The New York Network

According to the renegade agent, Victor Ostrovsky (By Way of Deception, 1990), the Mossad draws its effectiveness from its international network of sayanim ("collaborators"), the Hebrew term designating Jews living outside Israel and ready to perform illegal actions on demand, without necessarily knowing their ultimate purpose. They number in the thousands in the United States, particularly in New York, where the U.S. Jewish community is concentrated. Larry Silverstein, the leaseholder of the Twin Towers as of April 2001, appears as the archetype of a September 11 sayan. He is a leading member of the United Jewish Appeal/Federation of Jewish Philanthropies of New York, the largest U.S. fund raiser for Israel (after the U.S. government, which pays annually three billion in aid to Israel). Silverstein was also at the time of the attacks, the intimate friend of Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu, with whom he was in conversation every Sunday, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. Silverstein’s partner for the mall basement in the lease of the WTC was Frank Lowy, another Zionist "philanthropist" close to Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert, former member of the Haganah. The head of the New York Port Authority, which privatized the WTC, granting the lease to Silverstein and Lowy was Lewis Eisenberg, also a member of the United Jewish Appeal Federation and former vice president of AIPAC. Silverstein, Lowy and Eisenberg were undoubtedly three key men in the planning of the attacks against the Twin Towers.

Lucky Larry! Every morning, without exception, Larry Silverstein took his breakfast at Windows on the World atop the north tower of the WTC. Until the morning of September 11, when he had an appointment with a dermatologist.

Other members of the New York-based network can be identified. According to the NIST report, the Boeing that crashed into the North Tower "cut a gash that was over half the width of the building and extended from the 93rd floor to the 99th floor. All but the lowest of these floors were occupied by Marsh & McLennan, a worldwide insurance company, which also occupied the 100th floor [18]." The CEO of Marsh & McLennan was then Jeffrey Greenberg, a member of a wealthy Jewish family that contributed heavily to the campaign of George W. Bush. Greenberg was also the insurer of the twin towers and on July 24, 2001, they had taken the precaution of reinsuring their contracts with competitors who had to indemnify Silverstein and Lowy. And as the world of the neocons is small, in November 2000, the Board of Directors of Marsh & McLennan welcomed Paul Bremer, President of the National Commission on Terrorism at the time of the attacks, and appointed as the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in 2003.

Paul Bremer appeared on September 11, 2001 on the set of NBC, calm and relaxed, while 400 employees of his company are missing (in the end, 295 employees and more than 60 of the group’s associates were to be officially counted among the victims).

Complicity must also be sought in airports and airlines involved in the attacks. Both airports from which flights AA11, UA175 and UA93 took off (Logan Airport in Boston and Newark Airport near New York) subcontracted their security to International Consultants on Targeted Security (ICTS), a firm financed through Israel and headed by Menachem Atzmon, a treasurer of the Likud. A thorough investigation would certainly lead to other accomplices. Such an investigation should, for example, focus on Zim Israel Navigational, a giant maritime shipping outfit 48% held by the Jewish state (known to occasionally be used as a cover for the Israeli secret service), the US head of which left his offices at WTC with his 200 employees Sept. 4, 2001, one week before the attacks - "Like an act of God [19] - commented the CEO Shaul Cohen-Mintz.

It’s the oil, stupid!

All these facts give a new meaning to the words of Bob Graham, a member of the September 11 Commission, who, in an interview with PBS in December 2002, cited "evidence that foreign governments contributed to facilitating the activities of at least some of the terrorists in the United States [20]." Graham, of course, was referring to Saudi Arabia. Why would the Saud family have helped Osama bin Laden, after having deprived him of his Saudi nationality and put a price on his head for his attacks on their soil? Graham’s response, made in July 2011, is "the threat of civil unrest led by Al-Qaeda against the monarchy [21]." The Saudis supposedly helped Bin Laden under his threat of fomenting a revolution. This ridiculous theory (that Graham, short on arguments, developed into a novel) [22]. has only one goal: to divert suspicion away from the only "foreign government" whose links with the alleged terrorists are demonstrated, Israel, towards its enemy, Saudi Arabia. We smile similarly when reading the summary of the book The War After (2003) by the anti-Saudi Laurent Murawiec that "The royal power [Saudi] has succeeded over the years to infiltrate agents of influence at the highest levels of the U.S. administration and to organize an effective intellectual lobby that now controls several universities among the country’s most prestigious [23]. "

In asserting further that the Saudi track was stifled because of the friendship between the Bush and Saudi families, Graham and his friends use neoconservative George W. Bush as a fuse or lightning rod. The strategy paid off since the 9/11 Truth movement as a whole barks against him and balks at pronouncing the name of Israel. One can recognize the art of Machiavelli: have the dirty work done by another, and then lead the mob against him.

As I have shown elsewhere, a more appropriate term for the "neo-conservatives" would be "machiavelo-Zionists." Michael Ledeen gives proof of this in an article in the Jewish World Review (June 7, 1999) where he defends the thesis that Machiavelli was "secretly Jewish" as at the time were thousands of families nominally converted to Catholicism under threat of expulsion (mainly Marranos from the Iberian Peninsula). "Listen to his political philosophy and you will hear Jewish music ". By definition, Machiavellianism advances masked by virtuous speech (ie the human-rightist), but a growing number of Zionists overtly espouse it: Another example is the book by Obadiah Shoher, "Samson Blinded: A Machiavellian Perspective on the Middle East Conflict."

The day when, under pressure from public opinion, the mainstream media will be forced to abandon the official theory, the protest movement will have been thoroughly infiltrated and the "9/11 is an inside job" slogan will have prepared public sentiment for an outburst against Bush, Cheney and others, while neoconservatives remain immune from justice. And if, by misfortune, the day of the great unravelling, media zionists fail to keep Israel beyond the reach of justice, the Jewish state can always play the Chomsky card: America made me do it. Noam Chomsky [24], who camps on the far left since the Trotskyist Irving Kristol veered to the extreme right to form the neoconservative movement, continues in effect to relentlessly push the hackneyed argument that Israel is merely carrying out the will of the United States, as its de facto 51st state and the policeman in the Middle East.

According to Chomsky and hyped radical U.S. left personalities such as Michael Moore, the destabilization of the Middle East is Washington’s strategy prior to being that of Tel Aviv. The Iraq war? For oil of course: "Of course it was Iraq’s energy resources. It’s not even a question [25]." Sign of the times, here Chomsky has Alan Greenspan, head of the Federal Reserve, joining in the chorus. In his book, The age of turbulence (2007) Greenspan pretends to concede "what everyone knows: one of the major factors in the war in Iraq was oil in the region."

"I personally believe that there is a deep connection between the events of September 11 and peak oil, but it’s not something I can prove," states Richard Heinberg, expert on energy depletion, in the documentary “Oil, Smoke and Mirrors”. Might as well say that the thesis arises from irrational faith.

To this we must respond in unison with James Petras (Zionism, Militarism and the Decline of U.S. Power), Stephen Sniegoski (The Transparent Cabal) and Jonathan Cook (Israel and the Clash of Civilizations): "Not only did Big Oil not encourage the invasion, it did not even manage to control a single oil well, despite the presence of 160,000 U.S. troops, 127,000 mercenaries paid by the Pentagon and the State

Department, and a corrupt puppet government [26]." No, the oil does not explain the war in Iraq, nor does it explain the war in Afghanistan, nor does it explain the assault on Syria by surrogate mercenaries, no more than it explains the planned war against Iran. And it is certainly not the oil lobby that has the power to impose the "great taboo" over the entire media sphere (from Marianne to Echoes, in the case of France).

The Israeli culture of false flag terror

A reminder is needed here to better situate September 11 in history. Americans have a long history of manufacturing false pretenses for war. We could go back to 1845 with the expansionist war against Mexico, triggered by U.S. provocations on the disputed area on the border with Texas (the Nueces River in Mexico, the Rio Grande for Texans) until clashes offered President James Polk (a Texan) the opportunity to declare that the Mexicans “spilled American blood on American soil." After the war, a member by the name of Abraham Lincoln had Congress admit the falsity of the casus belli. Thereafter, all the wars waged by the United States have been under false pretenses: the explosion of the USS Maine for the war against Spain in Cuba, the sinking of the Lusitania for entry into the First World War World, Pearl Harbor for the second, and the Gulf of Tonkin for the burning down of North Vietnam. However, only the explosion of the USS Maine, which caused few deaths, falls into the category of a false flag ploy; although it is still not completely clear.

The transatlantic liner RMS Lusitania was torpedoed May 7, 1915 by the Germans, while operating in a war zone. Remember the Lusitania is the slogan that President Woodrow Wilson used in mobilizing public opinion in favor of U.S. entry into the war. The fact that only one torpedo was enough to sink the ship in fifteen minutes raises questions. In his paper, Mendel Edward House, Wilson’s adviser, reports a conversation he had shortly before with the British Foreign Minister Edward Grey (later in 1919 ambassador to the United States). "What would the Americans do if the Germans sank a transatlantic liner with American passengers on board?" Grey asked. House replied: "I think a fire of indignation would sweep the United States and that would be enough to get us into war."

However, it is a fact that Israel has a heavy past and great expertise in false flag attacks. A world history of this strategy would probably have to devote half of its pages to Israel, though it is the youngest of modern nations. The mould was cast even before the creation of Israel, with the bombing of King David Hotel, the headquarters of the British authorities in Jerusalem. On the morning of July 22, 1946, six terrorists of Irgun (the terrorist militia commanded by Menachem Begin, the future Prime Minister) dressed as Arabs entered and deposited 225 kg of TNT hidden in milk cans around the central pillar of the building, while others planted explosives along the access roads to the hotel to prevent the arrival of first responders. When a British officer became suspicious, a gunfight broke out in the hotel and members of the commando fled after detonating the devices. The explosion killed 91 people, mostly British, but also 15 Jews.

The strategem was repeated in Egypt during the summer of 1954, with Operation Susannah, whose aim was to thwart the British withdrawal from the Suez Canal required by Gamal Abdul Nasser with support from President Eisenhower. This also went stale and is known as the "Lavon Affair", named after the Israeli prime minister who was held responsible. The most famous and most calamitous of the Israeli false flag attacks was that on the American NSA ship USS Liberty, June 8, 1967 off the coast of Egypt, two days before the end of the Six Day War; we see already a deep collaboration between Israel and the U.S. The Johnson administration had covered up and perhaps even encouraged this crime against its own engineers and soldiers. I evoked these two cases in a previous article and will not go over them again here [27]

In 1986, the Mossad tried to make believe that a series of terrorist orders were transmitted from Libya to various Libyan embassies around the world. According to former agent Victor Ostrovsky (By Way of Deception, 1990), the Mossad used a special communication system, labeled "Trojan Horse," established by commandos inside enemy territory. The system acts as a relay station for false transmissions sent from an Israeli ship and immediately reissued on a frequency used by the Libyan state. As the Mossad had hoped, the NSA caught and deciphered the transmissions, which were interpreted as evidence that the Libyans supported terrorism, reports that Mossad came opportunely to confirm. Israel relied on Reagan’s promise of retaliation against any country caught in the act of supporting terrorism. The Americans fell into the trap and dragged with them the British and the Germans: April 14, 1986, one hundred and sixty U.S. aircraft dropped over sixty tons of bombs on Libya, targeting mainly airports and military bases. Among the civilian casualties on the Libyan side was Gaddafi’s adopted daughter, aged four. The strike torpedoed a deal for the release of US hostages held in Lebanon, allowing Hezbollah to continue as public enemy number one in the eyes of the West.

Isser Harel, founder of the Israeli secret service, would have predicted to the Christian Zionist Michael Evans in 1980 that Islamic terrorism would eventually hit the USA. "In Islamic theology, the phallic symbol is very important. Your biggest phallic symbol is New York City and its tallest building will be the phallic symbol they will hit. "In reporting this exchange in a 2004 interview, Evans, author of "The American Prophecies, Terrorism and Mid-East Conflict Reveal a Nation’s Destiny", hopes to elevate Harel to prophet. Rational minds will see the indication rather that September 11 matured for 30 years in the deep state of Israel.

The manipulating capacity of the Mossad at the time can be further illustrated by two stories analyzed by Thomas Gordon. On April 17, 1986 a young Irish woman named Ann-Marie Murphy unknowingly carried 1.5 pounds of Semtex on board a flight from London to Tel Aviv. Her fiancé, a Pakistani named Nezar Hindawi, was arrested while trying to flee to the Syrian Embassy. Both were actually manipulated by the Mossad, which achieved the desired result: the Thatcher government broke off diplomatic relations with Syria. But the manipulation was exposed in high places (as Jacques Chirac later told the Washington Times) [28]

In January 1987, the Palestinian Ismail Sowan, a Mossad mole who infiltrated the PLO in London, is given two suitcases packed with weapons and explosives by an unknown person supposedly sent by his PLO chief. Ismail reveals this to his Mossad contacts, who send him on a trip to Tel Aviv, then denounce him to Scotland Yard as a suspect in an Islamist attack in London. Ismail is picked up on his return to Heathrow Airport and charged on the basis of weapons found at his home. Result: the Mossad gains the favors of the Thatcher government [29]. After the February 26, 1993, attack against the WTC, the FBI arrested the Palestinian Ahmed Ajaj and identified him as a terrorist linked to Hamas, but the Israeli newspaper Kol Ha’ir showed that qu’Ajaj had never been involved with Hamas or the PLO. According to journalist Robert Friedman, author of an article in The Village Voice, August 3, 1993, Ajaj was actually a petty crook arrested in 1988 for forging dollars, sentenced to two and a half years in prison and released after a year following a deal with the Mossad, for whom he had infiltrated Palestinian groups. Upon his release, Ajaj undergoes a classic sheep-dipping by being briefly imprisoned again, this time for trying to smuggle weapons for Fatah in the West Bank. We have therefore, with the bombing of the WTC in 1993 a prototype for September 11, in which are demonstrated Israel’s responsibility for terrorism and its willingness to have Palestinians accused.

The attack against the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992, which caused 29 dead and 242 wounded, was instantly blamed on Hezbollah suicide bombers who used a truck bomb. But the judge in charge of the investigation revealed pressures from the US and Israeli delegates and manipulation of evidence and false testimony to lean the investigation toward the theory of a truck bomb, while facts indicated that the explosion came from inside the building. When the Argentine Supreme Court upheld this argument, the spokesman of the Israeli embassy accused the judges of anti-Semitism.

It is interesting to recall what was written by Philip Zelikow with John Deutch in December 1998 in an article in Foreign Affairs entitled "Catastrophic Terrorism," positing that the bomb used in the 1993 attack was nuclear, and already evoking a new Pearl Harbor: "An act of catastrophic terrorism that killed thousands or tens of thousands of people and/or disrupted the necessities of life for hundreds of thousands, or even millions, would be a watershed event in America’s history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented for peacetime and undermine Americans’ fundamental sense of security within their own borders in a manner akin to the 1949 Soviet atomic bomb test, or perhaps even worse. […] Like Pearl Harbor, the event would divide our past and future into a before and after. The United States might respond with draconian measures scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects and use of deadly force [30]."

On 12 January 12, 2000, according to the Indian newspaper The Week, Indian intelligence officers arrested eleven Islamist preachers who were preparing to board a flight to Bangladesh at Calcutta airport. They were suspected of belonging to Al-Qaeda and wanting to hijack the plane. They presented themselves as Afghans who had stayed in Iran before spending two months in India to preach Islam. But it was found that they all had Israeli passports. The Indian intelligence officer told The Week that Tel Aviv "exerted considerable pressure" on Delhi to secure their release.

On 12 October 12, 2000, in the final weeks of Clinton’s term of office, the USS Cole, en route to the Persian Gulf, was ordered by its homeport of Norfolk to refuel in the port of Aden in Yemen, an unusual procedure since these destroyers are generally supplied by a Navy tanker at sea. The captain of the ship expressed his surprise and concern: the USS Cole had recently filled up at the entrance of the Suez Canal, and Yemen is a hostile area. The USS Cole was executing docking maneuvers when she was approached by a dinghy apparently for the removal of garbage, which exploded against the hull, killing 17 sailors and wounding 50. The two "suicide bombers" driving the boat also perished in this "suicide". The attack was immediately attributed to Al-Qaeda, although bin Laden denied responsibility and the Taliban denied that their "host" could have been involved. The accusation gave the United States a pretext to force the Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh to cooperate in the fight against anti-imperialist Islamism, closing for starters three paramilitary camps on its territory. On top of that, a few weeks before the elections, the attack was the October Surprise that brought Bush to power.

John O’Neill was in charge of the investigation. A twenty year veteran of the FBI, and experienced specialist in counter-terrorism, he had investigated the bombing at the WTC in 1993. His team came to suspect that Israel had fired a missile from a submarine: the hole was indeed indicative of a penetrating charge and inexplicable by the explosion of one dinghy. The suspicions were shared by President Saleh, who spoke in an interview with Newsweek, of the possibility that the attack was due to Israel, "trying to spoil the US-Yemeni relationship [31]." O’Neill and his team suffered the hostility of U.S. Ambassador Barbara Bodine. They were kept from diving in order to inspect the damage. Finally, taking advantage of their return to New York for Thanksgiving, Bodine refused them re-entry to Yemen. The crew of the Cole were put under a gag order forbidding then to talk about the attack to anyone other than the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS). In July 2001, O’Neill resigned from the FBI. He was soon after offered a position as head of security at the WTC starting on September 11, 2001. His body was found in the rubble of the WTC after he had disappeared for two days. As for Barbara Bodine, in 2003 she joined the corrupt team of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Baghdad.

Where does the list of Zionist-designed fake Islamic terrorism end? The "New York Times" and other newspapers reported that on September 19, 2005, two agents of the British Special Forces (SAS) were arrested after forcing a road block in a car filled with weapons, ammunition, explosives and detonators which they drove disguised as Arabs. It is suspected that they were planning to commit violent attacks in the center of Basra during a religious event, to stir up conflict between Shiites and Sunnis. The same evening, a SAS unit freed the two agents by destroying the prison with a dozen tanks assisted by helicopters. Captain Masters, charged with the investigation of this embarrassing affair, died in Basra on October 15.

Laurent Guyénot

Translation
Roger Lagassé

[1] Original article in Italian: "Demystifying 9/11: Israel and the Tactics of Mistake — Alan Sabrosky."
[2] “Wildcard. Ruthless and cunning. Has capability to target U.S. forces and make it look like a Palestinian/Arab act” (Rowan Scarborough, "U.S. troops would enforce peace Under Army study," The Washington Times, 10 September 2001.)
[3] In addition to the book by Hicham Hamza and Christopher Bollyn, more on this issue from: Justin Raimondo, The Terror Enigma: 9/11 and the Israeli Connection, iUniversal, 2003 as well as an article by Christopher Ketcham, "What Did Israel Know in Advance of the 9/11 Attacks?", CounterPunch, 2007, vol. 14, p. 1-10).
[4] "Vehicle possibly related to New York terrorist attack. White, 2000 Chevrolet van with New Jersey registration with ’Urban Moving Systems’ sign on back seen at Liberty State Park, Jersey City, NJ, at the time of first impact of jetliner into World Trade Center. Three individuals with van were seen celebrating after initial impact and subsequent explosion" (Raimondo, The Terror Enigma, p. xi).
[5] "We are Israelis. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are your problem." (Hicham Hamza, Le Grand Tabou, ch. 2).
[6] "There are maps of the city in the car with certain places highlighted. It looked like they’re hooked in with this. It looked like they knew what was going to happen when they were at Liberty State Park" (Raimondo, The Terror Enigma, p. xi).
[7] "I was in tears. These guys were joking and that bothered me"(Raimondo, The Terror Enigma, p. 19 ); Hamza, Le Grand Tabou, ch. 2.
[8] "They smiled, they hugged each other and they appeared to ‘high five’ one another"; "the United States will take steps to stop terrorism in the world"; "Give us twenty years and we’ll take over your media and destroy your country"; "an individual in South America with authentic ties to Islamic militants in the middle east"; "The vehicule was also searched by a trained bomb-sniffing dog which yielded a positive result for the presence of explosive traces" (Hamza, Le Grand Tabou, ch. 2).
[9] "... that the FBI no longer has any investigative interests in the detainees and they should proceed with the appropriate immigration proceedings" (Hamza, Le Grand Tabou, ch. 2).
[10] See Youtube “Dancing Israelis, our purpose was to document the event.”
[11] "Yes, we have a white van, 2 or 3 guys in there, they look like Palestinians and going around a building. […] I see the guy by Newark Airport mixing some junk and he has those sheikh uniforms. […] He’s dressed like an Arab" (Bollyn, Solving 9-11, p. 278-80).
[12] "Yes, we have a white van, 2 or 3 guys in there, they look like Palestinians and going around a building. […] I see the guy by Newark Airport mixing some junk and he has those sheikh uniforms. […] He’s dressed like an Arab" (Bollyn, Solving 9-11, p. 278-80).
[13] "In the past six weeks, employees in federal office buildings located throughout the United States have reported suspicious activities connected with individuals representing themselves as foreign students selling or delivering artwork.” “These individuals have also gone to the private residences of senior federal officials under the guise of selling art." Drug Enforcement Administration Report.
[14] “The nature of the individuals’ conducts […] leads us to believe the incidents may well be an organized intelligence gathering activity” (Raimondo, The Terror Enigma, p. x).
[15] “acknowledged he could blow up buildings, bridges, cars, and anything else that he needed to” (Bollyn, Solving 9/11, p. 159).
[16] "The Hollywood, Florida, area seems to be a central point for these individuals” (Raimondo, The Terror Enigma, p. 3).
[17] David Ray Griffin, 9/11 Contradictions, Arris Books, 2008, p. 142-156, citing the Daily Mail, the Boston Herald, the San Francisco Chronicle and The Wall Street Journal.
[18] "The aircraft cut a gash that was over half the width of the building and extended from the 93rd floor to the 99th floor. All but the lowest of these floors were occupied by Marsh & McLennan, a worldwide insurance company, which also occupied the 100th floor." (p. 20). These elements have been analyzed by Lalo Vespera in La parenthèse enchantée, ch. 10
[19] "Like an act of God, we moved," (USA Today, 17 septembre 2001).
[20] “Evidence that there were foreign governments involved in facilitating the activities of at least some of the terrorists in the United States” (Raimondo, The Terror Enigma, p. 64).
[21] "The threat of civil unrest against the monarchy, led by al Qaeda" ("Saudi Arabia : Friend or Foe?," The Daily Beast, 11 July 2011).
[22] The Keys to the Kingdom, Vanguard Press, 2011
[23] Summary from Amazon.ca
[24] “Contrary to Chomsky’s theories, the United States has no interest to support Israel”, by Jeffrey Blankfort, Voltaire Network, 28 September 2006.
[25] “Of course it was Iraq’s energy resources. It’s not even a question”(Stephen Sniegoski, The Transparent Cabal : The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel, Enigma Edition, 2008, p. 333).
[26] "‘Big Oil’ not only did not promote the invasion, but has failed to secure a single oil field, despite the presence of 160,000 US troops, 127,000 Pentagon/State Department paid mercenaries and a corrupt puppet régime" (James Petras, Zionism, Militarism and the Decline of US Power, Clarity Press, 2008, p. 18).
[27] “Kennedy, the Lobby and the Bomb”, by Laurent Guyénot, Translation Gaia Edwards, Voltaire Network, 2 May 2013.
[28] Gordon Thomas, Gideon’s Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad, Griffin; New Ed edition (23 Feb 2007).
[29] Gordon Thomas, op.cit.
[30] “An act of catastrophic terrorism that killed thousands or tens of thousands of people and/or disrupted the necessities of life for hundreds of thousands, or even millions, would be a watershed event in America’s history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented for peacetime and undermine Americans’ fundamental sense of security within their own borders in a manner akin to the 1949 Soviet atomic bomb test, or perhaps even worse. […] Like Pearl Harbor, the event would divide our past and future into a before and after. The United States might respond with draconian measures scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects and use of deadly force” (Griffin, 9/11 Contradictions, p. 295-6).
[31] "We Are Still Searching" (The Daily Beast, December 17, 2007.

Laurent Guyénot

Engineer (National School of Advanced Technology, 1982) and medievalist (PhD in Medieval Studies at Paris IV-Sorbonne, 2009). He has authored numerous books on the subject. He has dedicated the past three years to studying the behind-the-scenes history of the United States, where he lived for five years.

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