Dan Feidt's log on Minnesota, Information Operations, spinstorms and latent contradictions.
Over here at Hongpong.com, I've tried to keep tabs on the Sibel Edmonds case. I won't get into the details right now, but basically... um, one of those neo-conservatives, Marc Grossman, more or less committed espionage/treason by exposing Valerie Plame's Brewster Jennings group as a CIA front to the Pakistani ISI and Turkish spies (involved in major drug trafficking networks) way before the Novak thing. When Sibel Edmonds worked at the FBI as a translator, she stumbled into the Turkish spy angle of the case, and efforts at the top of the FBI to cover up this massive spy scandal.
AIPAC and its sister organization JINSA, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, are implicated as allies of the American Turkish Council.....
goto waynemadsenreport.com for the latest on this case. gotta run.....
"Colonels and Lieutenant Colonels asking the Lieutenant Colonel in charge of the air force 'why isn't NORAD scrambling jets? and he said 'we received an order to stand down''. And that just perplexed everybody."
-- Sgt. Lauro Chavez
There are various competing conspiracy theories offered about 9/11. One of the more widely offered ones is the claim that military war game exercises on September 11 were used as a way to conceal The Conspiracy (as told, usually orchestrated by Cheney). There is evidence the wargames occurred, but they got very scant mention in the official story and the 9/11 Commission's report. Vigilant Guardian is one of these 'wargames', and now a member of the military is openly claiming that Vigilant Guardian was planned as a Top Secret exercise on the morning of 9/11. (graphic from oilempire.us)
Lauro Chavez also claims that he knows how 'blips' can be inserted by the military onto civilian air traffic control systems, to mark planes that are involved with simulated exercises. According to some 'conspiracy theorists'/'truth movementarians'/etc , such as Michael Ruppert, technology such as PROMIS or other systems allowed Cheney and his buddies to hide the real hijacked planes among false signals.
More evidence has been released recently of control tower recordings during September 11 that indicate something at least sort of big was going on. "Is this real world or exercise?" as one guy asked. See the Alex Jones explanation of this and reaction to more recent NORAD releases. This should help put his argument here into better context.
On the other hand, there is a whiff of something too good to be true about all of this. The guy's name is Chavez, he's telling something just before October (surprise!) that meshes like a jigsaw with The Theory Out There So Far. Could Mr. Chavez be a Karl Rove-style plant, a grifter with a tale tailor-made by the RNC to sucker in the skeptics – and then suddenly expose Chavez as a liar? This would discredit the rest of the increasing dissent around the offical explanation of September 11 right at the election? Or perhaps insulate the White House from damaging, authentic revelations from the Democrats and whistleblowers? The Sibel Edmonds story, too, promises a big punch, but it could really be a sucker punch. (this is called 'poisoning the well' by planting silly stories and crazy witnesses to discredit investigations, like Garrison in the JFK case... something silly about a poison dart gun in the umbrella...)
Beware of things that sound too good to be true in an election season. Sweep up all things, related and not...
CENTCOM Sergeant Details Traitorous Stand Down Orders On 9/11
Military whistleblower comes forward with key information
Steve Watson / Infowars | September 26 2006
Alex Jones was joined on air yesterday by a former Sergeant in the United States Army named Lauro "LJ" Chavez. Chavez was stationed at MacDill AFB where he claims he witnessed unusual preparations for a potential airplane hitting the base on the morning of 9/11 and distinctly heard officers talking about a stand down. This has led him to go public in questioning the NORAD stand down and the demolition of the twin towers.
In a letter that first appeared on the 9/11 Veterans For Truth Website, Sergeant Lauro "LJ" Chavez responds to a Cincinnati Post hit piece article by outlining his own doubts about the official version of 9/11 and his personal experiences of the strange prelude to the events of that morning.
Despite early (and healthy) reactions claiming this may be a hoax designed to poison the well of the 9/11 truth movement, Sergeant Chavez has now provided us with evidence of his credentials, his honorable discharge documents showing the military installations he was located inside. The last station he held was inside United States Central Command in Tampa - the pdf can be viewed here.
Mr Chavez was quick to point out that he does not have all the answers, but does have what he feels is vital information regarding the events of 9/11:
''I'm in no way in a position to tell people that 'this is the official story so believe me', no, I want to give people the information so they can go away and look for themselves and formulate a logical decision with all the evidence." Chavez said.
Mr Chavez worked within CENTCOM, one of the five American regional unified commands consisting of Marines, Navy and air force officers. CENTCOM's area of jurisdiction is in the Middle East, East Africa and Central Asia. CENTCOM has been the main American presence in many military operations, including the Persian Gulf War, the United States war in Afghanistan, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Chavez was stationed at CENTCOM's headquarters at MacDill AFB, in Tampa, Florida. His commanding officer was Four Star General Tommy Franks.
Chavez worked in the J6 department that was in charge of all the computer systems, the network backbone of CENTCOM. Chavez ran a team of six soldiers on the helpdesk network side. He was personally responsible for the maintenance of commanding officers computers, including those of General Tommy Franks. He has letters of recommendation from Franks and even went to Franks' house to work on his computers.
Chavez described how the military has a ring of computer networks according to different security clearance levels. Chavez worked only with systems classified as top secret or higher.
On the morning before 9/11 Chavez was in the Secure Compartmented Information Facility, the secure bunker at the base of CENTCOM HQ which is populated by high ranking military intelligence personnel. This is a facility that requires a top secret gamma clearance. Inside are systems that can monitor weather systems and flight paths of all aircraft within the country.
That day he was involved with supporting computer equipment being used in the Vigilant Guardian exercise and another exercise based in Egypt. On this day Chavez got to see information that he wasn't supposed to see.
"I was working on psyops commander's computer and next to his PC was a top secret document that was open, his neglect was my ally, I was sitting there working on his computer and was waiting for some passes to download and I look over and I'm reading the document, and it's the off order for the exercise that they are participating in."
This raises major questions because normally wargames or exercises are not classified as top secret as it is a requirement to let some information be public, especially if the exercise is taking place in a populated area.
Chavez continued:
"So I'm reading this document and it's giving proposed situations for scenarios for this wargame the scenarios include a hijacked plane, most of them were hijacked planes, I saw one that was like a car bomb trying to blow up something, but one of them was a hijacked plane crashing into a nuclear power plant in California, the Sears Tower, the World Trade Center, The Pentagon obviously, the White House, our building was one of the targets as well."
Chavez went on to describe how CENTCOM HQ was being heavily fortified the day before 9/11 and access to the base was restricted to top secret personnel only. This ties in with a declaration of Martial Law by Jeb Bush two days previously throughout the entirety of Florida.
Chavez also described how during the exercises the aerospace grid with "enemy" blips on it has to be piped in to the air traffic controllers of all the airports in the affected area so they know there is a military exercise going on. This ties in with the released NORAD/NEADS and FAA tapes and accounts that are riddled with references to the drills and exercises taking place on 9/11.
Chavez described the plot as "genius" and stated:
"If you want to crash planes into a building, and you've got the aerospace grid at your beckoning call, so you put a bunch of blips on it so no one knows which ones are real and which ones are fake... All you have to do is have someone in charge of the computer systems to put the blips on the screen and then you can do whatever you want."
Chavez proceeded to detail the key discussions that he heard inside the bunker on the day of 9/11:
"I didn't get to see tower one hit, I was in there talking with individuals and i was tired, I'd been there since four in the morning. Then all of a sudden everybody started hustling and bustling. it was like NASA when Apollo 13 was about to crash, everybody running around, and then they put it on the big screen, CNN with the tower on fire.
Then we see the other plane come in and hit it and at that point everybody is standing up. The air force had commanders in contact with NORAD. The plane, or whatever, hit the Pentagon and then we were like 'Why aren't they scrambling jets?' We were asking, there was eight or nine people... Colonels and Lieutenant Colonels asking the Lieutenant Colonel in charge of the air force 'why isn't NORAD scrambling jets? and he said 'we received an order to stand down''. And that just perplexed everybody."
Mr Chavez did not know the Lieutenant Colonel and so does not know his name, yet if he can be identified, then we have uncovered a direct link to the stand down order. If that man or any others who were present at CENTCOM on 9/11 can be identified and made to testify under oath, then the whole cover operation could be blown. A real independent investigation would have secured this.
The entire riveting interview is freely available online at Prisonplanet.tv now. Please spread this information far and wide.
Mr Chavez has since been informed that the computer company he now works for, as information security manager, has been receiving threatening phone calls demanding his dismissal. Mr Chavez is another example of someone who is bravely putting his career, reputation and life on the line to get the truth out about the 9/11 cover up.
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INFOWARS: BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
"When I ran into the drugs I was told that if I mentioned the money to the drugs around 9/11 that would be the end of me."
--Indira Singh
The 9/11 terror plot itself, intersected with the activities of a drug trafficking network of international scope, in ways that form a "crystal clear" picture of what was going on -- to quote Sibel Edmonds.
Fintan Dunne, Editor BreakForNews.com (at this link, Daniel Ellsberg's support of Edmonds is noted - Ellsberg was cool on Colbert Report this week)
SIBEL: Essentially, there is only one investigation – a very big one, an all-inclusive one. Completely by chance, I, a lowly translator, stumbled over one piece of it. But I can tell you there are a lot of people involved, a lot of ranking officials, and a lot of illegal activities that include multi-billion-dollar drug-smuggling operations, black-market nuclear sales to terrorists and unsavory regimes, you name it. And of course a lot of people from abroad are involved. It's massive. So to do this investigation, to really do it, they will have to look into everything.
CD: But you can start from anywhere –
SIBEL: That's the beauty of it. You can start from the AIPAC angle. You can start from the Plame case. You can start from my case. They all end up going to the same place, and they revolve around the same nucleus of people. There may be a lot of them, but it is one group. And they are very dangerous for all of us.
Now THIS is what I call a map. This comes directly from the National Drug Intelligence Center in the Department of Justice, National Drug Threat Assessment 2006, January 2006. Today I'm going to post a lot of stuff that I certainly don't consider the Gospel Truth. It's purely for your careful consideration with barrels of salt. So let's kick things off with the DOJ:
And this is just funny. I suspect the purple patches are notorious 'rebel zones' in the War on Drugs, where the federal and state government policies have split apart entirely. But they forgot eastern Tennessee... and of course everywhere else.
We will be returning to the one about the Russian-Israeli crime organizations. Florida drug money is connected to some of the loose ends around 9/11. The 9/11 drug money connection has many potential angles, but first note here that the DEA marks Miami as a key heroin and cocaine distribution area.
Now we're going into stuff that seems hard to believe, and beyond here, I don't claim that any of these people are telling the truth.
This is just a small slice of the material on the internet about how the rich & powerful skim huge amounts of cash out of the addicted masses of America through the profitable geopolitics of illicit drugs. Some people claim there is a strong connection between drug trafficking and 9/11 financing. Certainly all the players in Afghanistan since 1979 have been up to their ears in it, including the CIA and its favored contractors (who make up around half the CIA personnel these days).
This is certainly part of a trend towards the criminalization of war, which corresponds to the increasing privatization of war. We will have more on this angle in the coming days. Even if there are no operational links to the real September 11 conspiracy itself, the drug-militarization angle really needs to be investigated seriously, perhaps by a Democratic Congress with subpoena and immunity powers. Even snooping at possible loose 9/11 connections immediately reveals a world awash in drug money, with Bush and the Establishment generating vast cash flows from conflict zones - and enforcing loyalties among players from Afghanistan to South America by aligning these cash flows with military force. Sometimes privatized paramilitary forces. Why not?
"Kill the Messenger:" Sibel Edmonds is on the radar a bit more than usual, as they have apparently whipped up a documentary to expose more of her surreal role in the weird world of intelligence after 9/11, named appropriately enough, Kill the Messenger. (perhaps she shouldn't be trusted, one guy suggests) A blog supporting Edmonds' film, sibeledmonds.blogspot.com is operated by Lukery at wotisitgood4.blogspot.com, who has covered her case in detail. To recap what I have posted before, Edmonds worked as a translator at the FBI, where she discovered a conspiracy within her unit to cover up a Turkish espionage ring in the United States. One of her co-translators was spoofing the wiretaps for FBI agents, and when Edmonds tried to bring this to her superiors, they suppressed the whole thing. Also Dennis Hastert was taking big bribes from the Turks, and there is some kind of global nuclear parts trafficking conspiracy connected to the AQ Khan network and some Israeli mobster types - probably Marc Rich type guys. The guys running the secret nuclear trafficking network were enemies of the CIA's Brewster-Jennings counter-proliferation operations and Valerie Plame, adding yet another twisted concourse to that scandal. And the AIPAC stuff and Chalabi are laterally related, since so much of it revolves around the same neo-con cats in DC and their foreign allies.
Lukery summarized:
Sibel makes 2 specific related claims: a) Sibel claims that she has information which proves that senior officials knew that there were plans to attack America months before 9/11.
Specifically: "There was general information about the time-frame, about methods to be used but not specifically about how they would be used and about people being in place and who was ordering these sorts of terror attacks. There were other cities that were mentioned. Major cities with skyscrapers." and "President Bush said they had no specific information about 11 September and that is accurate but only because he said 11 September," she said. There was, however, general information about the use of airplanes and that an attack was just months away."
b) Sibel claims that she has evidence of a global multi-billion dollar smuggling/dealing network of weapons and drug which is hidden in plain view. Of course, there is also the requisite money-laundering infrastructure. She claims that the network comprises senior american government officials, terrorists, and 'unsavoury regimes.'
and they merge, giving us: "drug trafficking, money laundering, foreign names and American names directly involved in the financing of the 9-11 attacks on WTC (World Trade Center) and the Pentagon."
After a mere 3 months in the FBI, Edmonds publicly claims that all this stuff was going on, covered up at numerous levels in the federal government – though Ashcroft-era gag orders prevent her from sharing many aspects of the story. A virtual hailstorm of individual criminal conspiracies, involving top neo-cons, drug trafficking, all kinds of crazy shit. She has mentioned Coleen Rowley as an ally in the whistleblower field.
There is another potential side to this: Edmonds is herself possibly a red herring, a player or a dupe in the conspiracy, posing as an opponent. Conspiracy gurus suggest she might be a "limited hangout," or a channel to expose parts of the story, and fill other parts with disinformation. Edmonds comes from a prominent family in Turkey, so perhaps she has a bit of Turkish partisanship against some groups back home. One blogger named xymphora suggested she speaks the conspiracy-ese a bit too well:
"Edmonds sometimes makes me a bit nervous as she seems overly adept with the terms and arguments of conspiracy theory for someone who is supposed to have been a lowly FBI translator (it's like she's been reading Peter Dale Scott!). Is she part of the battle in Washington between the Bush Administration enablers involved in the drugs/arms business who don't mind directly or indirectly supporting al Qaeda if it is good for business, and those old-fashioned types who still consider that dealing with American enemies is treason?"
And she gives interviews with patently crazy people like Tom Flocco. Here is a fragment tying some of the neo-cons to some nasty shit:
Although Grossman "has not been as high profile in the press" FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds cryptically told me the other day, "don't overlook him – he is very important." She was not speaking about the Plame affair, though Grossman did indeed have a key role there, as we will see.
According to her, Grossman was one of three officials – the other two, she says, are Richard Perle and Douglas Feith – who had been watched by both Valerie Plame's Brewster Jennings & Associates CIA team, and by the major FBI investigation of organized crime and governmental corruption on which she herself was working until being terminated in April 2002.
Marc Grossman has served in a number of interesting countries and positions over the past 29 years. From 1976-1983, at a pivotal point in the Cold War, he was employed at the U.S. embassy in Pakistan – America's key regional ally, through which millions of dollars in weapons and other "aid" were delivered by Pakistan's ISI intelligence service to the mujahedin following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
Grossman is definitely part of the Valerie Plame scandal, no doubt.
Well, it all still makes her story worth adding to the mixture. Here is the documentary trailer. Please let's take some bets if this will be aired in the United States.
Florida drug money angles (and there are many!) There was this funny story about one of the flight school proprietors in Florida who trained the 9/11 hijackers. The flight school owner was caught with 43 pounds of heroin just after the 9/11 hijackers got to his school, and somehow this story never got fully explored. See MadCowProd.com for a lot of amusing tales of south Floridian drug trafficking. It's worth considering what the site's proprietor Daniel Hopsicker says, "THE 9.11 HEROIN CONNECTION" is "The Biggest Censored Story of the 21st Century." He cites Thomas Pynchon: "If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers."
More recently, and quite funny, is the "SkyWay Aircraft" case, where Tom DeLay's buddy + Homeland Security defense contractor accidentally getting busted with 5.5 tons of cocaine on a DC9 connected with the Titan defense contractor. Naturally, the DEA ducking and covering from obvious political pressure ensued. Good times. And perhaps this link is connected to Zacharias Moussaoui and 9/11 financing. (Bonus: MadCowProd says Adnan Kashoggi finances the 9/11 Truth Movement? Now that's what I call a conspiracy!)
Ruppert on Hawalas, PTECH, PROMIS, 9/11 and some heroin networks, BCCI-style. From Mike Ruppert's FromTheWilderness.com last year, "PTECH, 9/11, and USA-SAUDI TERROR: PART II" which offers some evidence that PROMIS software connected to 9/11, and possible narcotics / heroin money connections to 9/11. Ruppert himself offers a theory that advanced software like PROMIS was capable of manipulating computers throughout the financial sphere and the federal government. Ruppert's book Crossing the Rubicon suggests that Dick Cheney could have executed 9/11 himself by using PROMIS and other whizbang technologies to, for example, insert extra radar blips in air traffic control towers across America. It seems kind of like a Deus Ex Machina conspiracy argument to me, but it is still an interesting, if far-fetched hypothetical argument that raises serious questions about how PROMIS and the rest of the fed's information technology really is run. At a dense 675 pages, crossing the Rubicon is one hell of a book, summarized thusly:
"In my book I make several key points:
1. I name Vice President Richard Cheney as the prime suspect in the mass murders of 9/11 and will establish that, not only was he a planner in the attacks, but also that on the day of the attacks he was running a completely separate Command, Control and Communications system which was superceding any orders being issued by the FAA, the Pentagon, or the White House Situation Room;
2. I establish conclusively that in May of 2001, by presidential order, Richard Cheney was put in direct command and control of all wargame and field exercise training and scheduling through several agencies, especially FEMA. This also extended to all of the conflicting and overlapping NORAD drills -- some involving hijack simulations -- taking place on that day.
3. I demonstrate that the TRIPOD II exercise being set up on Sept. 10th in Manhattan was directly connected to Cheney's role in the above.
4. I also prove conclusively that a number of public officials, at the national and New York City levels, including then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, were aware that flight 175 was en route to lower Manhattan for 20 minutes and did nothing to order the evacuation of, or warn the occupants of the South Tower. One military officer was forced to leave his post in the middle of the attacks and place a private call to his brother - who worked at the WTC - warning him to get out. That was because no other part of the system was taking action.
5. I also show that the Israeli and British governments acted as partners with the highest levels of the American government to help in the preparation and, very possibly, the actual execution of the attacks."
"There is more reason to be afraid of not facing the evidence in this book than of facing what is in it."
Approach #2: Peter Dale Scott's "The Global Drug Meta-Group: Drugs, Managed Violence, and the Russian 9/11". haven't looked through all of it, but it seems an interesting source to begin looking at how the gears really turn in Central Asia and thereabouts.
it also seems possible that the U.S. government might contemplate using Hizb ut-Tahrir and the meta-group for political changes in Russia itself, even while combating the Islamism of al-Qaeda elsewhere. This would be far from the first time that the U.S. Government had used drug-trafficking proxies as assets, and would do a lot to explain the role of the U.S. in 2001 in restoring major drug traffickers to power in Afghanistan. Dubious figures like Nukhaev, Khodorkovskii, and Khashoggi have already shown their interest in such initiatives; and western business interests have shown their eagerness to work with these allies of the meta-group.
It is fitting to think of most U.S. intelligence assets as chess pieces, moved at the whim of their controllers. That is however not an apt metaphor for the meta-group, which clearly has the resources to negotiate and to exert its own influence interactively upon the governments it works with.
Since first hearing about the meta-group's role in the Russian 9/11, I have pondered the question whether it could have played a similar role in the American 9/11 as well. At this point I have to say that I have found no persuasive evidence that would prove its involvement. The fact remains that two informed and credible witnesses, Sibell Edmonds and Indira Singh, have spoken independently of the importance of international drug trafficking in the background of 9/11.
The Bush Administration has paid Sibell Edmonds the tribute of silencing her on the grounds of national interest. She has nonetheless made it clear that what she would talk about concerns that part of the world where the meta-group has influence:
SE [Sibel Edmonds]: It's interesting, in one of my interviews, they say "Turkish countries," but I believe they meant Turkic countries – that is, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and all the 'Stans, including Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, and [non-Turkic countries like] Afghanistan and Pakistan. All of these countries play a big part in the sort of things I have been talking about.
CD [Chris Deliso]: What, you mean drug-smuggling?
SE: Among other things. Yes, that is a major part of it. It's amazing that in this whole "war on terror" thing, no one ever talks about these issues.[120]
Indira Singh, who lost her high-tech job at J.P. Morgan after telling the FBI about Ptech and 9/11, was even more dramatic in her public testimony at a Canadian event:
I did a number of things in my research and when I ran into the drugs I was told that if I mentioned the money to the drugs around 9/11 that would be the end of me.[121]
The False Dilemmas of 9/11 Theories
I said earlier that by suppressing awareness of the role of drug-trafficking in our society, we give drug traffickers a de facto franchise to exert political influence without criticism or opposition. An example of this is the discussion of 9/11 in America, which usually fails to consider the meta-group among the list of possible suspects.
I have tried to suggest in this paper that in fact the meta-group had both motive – to restore the Afghan opium harvest and increase instability and chaos along the trade routes through Central Asia – and opportunity – to utilize its contacts with both al-Zawahiri in al Qaeda and the CIA in Washington. It is furthermore the best candidate to explain one of the more difficult anomalies (or indeed paradoxes) of the clues surrounding 9/11: that many of the clues lead in the direction of Saudi Arabia, but some lead also in a very different direction, towards Israel.[122]
Here it is worth quoting again the well-informed remark of a Washington insider about the meta-group's predecessor, BCCI: "Who else could wire something together to Saudi Arabia, China, Israel, and the U.S.?"[123] The current meta-group fills the same bill, for it unites supporters of Muslim Salafism (Saidov) with at least one Israeli citizen (Kosman).
The meta-group's involvement in the Russian 9/11 of course does nothing to prove its involvement in the American one. However awareness of its presence – as an unrecognized Force X operating in the world – makes previous discussions of 9/11 seem curiously limited. Again and again questions of responsibility have been unthinkingly limited to false dilemmas in which the possible involvement of this or any other Force X is excluded.
An early example is Michael Moore's naïve question to President Bush in Dude, Where's My Country: "Who attacked the United States on September 11 – a guy on dialysis from a cave in Afghanistan, or your friends, Saudi Arabia?"[124] A far more widespread dilemma is that articulated by David Ray Griffin in his searching critique of the 9/11 Commission Report:
There are two basic theories about 9/11. Each of these theories is a "conspiracy theory." One of these is the official conspiracy theory, according to which the attacks of 9/11 were planned and executed solely by al-Qaeda terrorists under the guidance of Osama bin Laden....Opposing this official theory is the [sic] alternative conspiracy theory, which holds that the attacks of 9/11 were able to succeed only because they were facilitated by the Bush administration and its agencies.[125]
Griffin of course is not consciously excluding a third possible theory – that a Force X was responsible. But his failure to acknowledge this possibility is an example of the almost universal cultural denial I referred to earlier. In America few are likely to conceive of the possibility that a force in contact with the U.S. government could be not just an asset, but a force exerting influence on that government.
My personal suggestion to 9/11 researchers is that they focus on the connections of the meta-group's firm Far West, Ltd. – in particular those which lead to Khashoggi, Berezovskii, Halliburton and Dick Cheney, and Diligence, Joe Allbaugh, and Neil Bush.
As a grain of salt, we should remember that Florida is so thoroughly laden with drug money that it is quite likely people would catch false leads to September 11 among the huge forest of shady people getting rich from the Business. The loose end about how the DEA was tracking Israelis who lived virtually around the corner from the 9/11 hijackers is an interesting one, but perhaps the density of shady business in Hollywood, Florida is just that high, one block of criminal enterprises after another. This IS Florida we're talking about.
The Israeli 9/11 angles are still worth checking out – the supposed Mossad front company Urban Moving Systems and the rest. From one of America's most respected Jewish periodicals, Forward:
Spy Rumors Fly on Gusts of Truth: Americans Probing Reports of Israeli Espionage
MARCH 15, 2002
By MARC PERELMAN, FORWARD STAFF
"Despite angry denials by Israel and its American supporters, reports that Israel was conducting spying activities in the United States may have a grain of truth, the Forward has learned.
However, far from pointing to Israeli spying against U.S. government and military facilities, as reported in Europe last week, the incidents in question appear to represent a case of Israelis in the United States spying on a common enemy, radical Islamic networks suspected of links to Middle East terrorism.
In particular, a group of five Israelis arrested in New Jersey shortly after the September 11 attacks and held for more than two months was subjected to an unusual number of polygraph tests and interrogated by a series of government agencies including the FBI's counterintelligence division, which by some reports remains convinced that Israel was conducting an intelligence operation. The five Israelis worked for a moving company with few discernable assets that closed up shop immediately afterward and whose owner fled to Israel.
Other allegations involved Israelis claiming to be art students who had backgrounds in signal interception and ordnance. (See related story, Page 8.)
Sources emphasized that the release of all the Israelis under investigation indicates that they were cleared of any suspicion that they had prior knowledge of the September 11 attacks, as some anti-Israel media outlets have suggested.
The resulting tensions between Washington and Jerusalem, sources told the Forward, arose not because of the operations' targets but because Israel reportedly violated a secret gentlemen's agreement between the two countries under which espionage on each other's soil is to be coordinated in advance.
Most experts and former officials interviewed for this article said that such so-called unilateral or uncoordinated Israeli monitoring of radical Muslims in America would not be surprising. In fact, they said, Israeli intelligence played a key role in helping the Bush administration to crack down on Islamic charities suspected of funneling money to terrorist groups, most notably the Richardson, Texas-based Holy Land Foundation last December.
"I have no doubt Israel has an interest in spying on those groups," said Peter Unsinger, an intelligence expert who teaches justice administration at San Jose University. "The Israelis give us good stuff, like on the Hamas charities." According to one former high-ranking American intelligence official, who asked not to be named, the FBI came to the conclusion at the end of its investigation that the five Israelis arrested in New Jersey last September were conducting a Mossad surveillance mission and that their employer, Urban Moving Systems of Weehawken, N.J., served as a front.
After their arrest, the men were held in detention for two-and-a-half months and were deported at the end of November, officially for visa violations. However, a counterintelligence investigation by the FBI concluded that at least two of them were in fact Mossad operatives, according to the former American official, who said he was regularly briefed on the investigation by two separate law enforcement officials.
"The assessment was that Urban Moving Systems was a front for the Mossad and operatives employed by it," he said. "The conclusion of the FBI was that they were spying on local Arabs but that they could leave because they did not know anything about 9/11."
However, he added, the bureau was "very irritated because it was a case of so-called unilateral espionage, meaning they didn't know about it."
Spokesmen for the FBI, the Justice Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service refused to discuss the case. Israeli officials flatly dismissed the allegations as untrue. However, the former American official said that after American authorities confronted Jerusalem on the issue at the end of last year, the Israeli government acknowledged the operation and apologized for not coordinating it with Washington.
The five men — Sivan and Paul Kurzberg, Oded Ellner, Omer Marmari and Yaron Shmuel — were arrested eight hours after the attacks by the Bergen County, N.J., police while driving in an Urban Moving Systems van. The police acted on an FBI alert after the men allegedly were seen acting strangely while watching the events from the roof of their warehouse and the roof of their van............
A retired corporate lawyer, Gerald Shea, put together all the government reports on Israeli DEA groups he could find, and corroborated the locations of Israeli groups the DEA monitored and where in Florida the 9/11 hijackers lived when they were training. The results had interesting geographic distribution (which correlates with the Russian-Israeli organizations in Florida admittedly monitored by the Department of Justice as I noted above). These maps are from the Shea's PDF file:
All righty then. That's a lot of heady stuff to consider. I'll note again that I am not a true believer in anything in today's post. I just want to offer some of the interesting things out there on the internet today. I strongly believe that the Republican establishment in America today is very complicit in international drug trafficking – especially since we've got a lot of the same guys who ran cocaine angles in Central America during the Iran-Contra affair. Past behavior is a guide towards future actions, if not ironclad proof.
Arbitrage is power: the buying and selling of goods across geographic space supports the global "shadow economy" that makes up a huge proportion of economic activity. Whoever controls the space, controls the money. Half of Afghanistan's economy is heroin production, for example. Follow the cash: it's one heck of a loose end of September 11, and the war on terror.
This video shows what Real Democrats ought to sound these days. I appreciate the reference to the college students... Good stuff. Rep. Ryan on the House floor recently.
My perspective on Thailand is filtered by my dad's experience in Chile, when he was hitchiking after college in the summer of 1973. There were CIA guys hanging around Santiago bars, and he recalled US Navy ships stationed offshore. The evidence is pretty clear that Nixon and Kissinger were supportive of the plot. My dad, sensing trouble, cleared out of there around Sept. 3 or so, a week before the Pinochet's coup.
My point here is to wonder about the links between the Thai coup leaders today and the U.S. unified combat command of the region, AKA USPACOM. What messages went between PACOM and Thailand this week as the Prime Minister was in New York? It wouldn't be the first time that a PM was at some American-related function as gears suddenly spun to get rid of him.
As the relative influence of the State Department and ambassadors has waned, the relationship between PACOM, CENTCOM, the other COMs and various local militaries has deepened. The link between our generals and the elite generals of other nations might be seen in the neocon worldview to be the ultimate safe power link, not subject to those pesky "election" thingies. The "New World Order" could be a tier of global generals tacitly allowed to overthrow democracies, with PACOM et al. handling the details and perhaps planting pretexts and back-stories, the information operations required to slot it into American discourse.
I recall an disturbing episode of "E-Ring" that featured a South American republic overthrown by a glorified general with Swift Return to Elections Promised Right Away, leaving Dennis Hopper as a proud American who preserved our all-important bauxite concession.
I don't know much (anything) about Thai politics, so I don't know if this coup was carried out by factions with tacit American support, like Rummy's recent attempt in Venezuela. However, I suspect a major element of global securitization trend, i.e. the political-military structures set up for "the war on terror", is to create security arrangements that supercede democratic structures. A tonic of temporary military fascisms and martial laws, normalized by "war on terror" ideology. (not that they would dare try it here.... ...)
Robert Kaplan is one of the President's favorite geopolitical writers, and his piece called "Supremacy by Stealth" (Atl. Monthly, July/Aug. 2003) suggests a secretive network of self-sustaining military leadership cells in nations around the world that can intervene when local democracy makes problems for the United States. Sort of a decentralized shadow military dictatorship kinda thing. I don't know if that's Thailand now, but when they claim a "good coup," this I suspect is the implementation of the theory. Of course, the private military corporations - mercenary corporations like DynCorp and MPRI, full of retired American officers - are an ideal organizational glue for this whole approach.
Kaplan: (prolly should read all of it!)
Precisely because they foment dynamic change, liberal empires-like those of Venice, Great Britain, and the United States-create the conditions for their own demise. Thus they must be especially devious. The very spread of the democracy for which we struggle weakens our grip on many heretofore docile governments: behold the stubborn refusal by Turkey and Mexico to go along with U.S. policy on Iraq. Consequently, if we are to get our way, and at the same time to promote our democratic principles, we will have to operate nimbly, in the shadows and behind closed doors, using means far less obvious than the august array of power displayed in the air and ground war against Iraq. "Don't bluster, don't threaten, but quietly and severely punish bad behavior," says Eliot Cohen, a military historian at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, in Washington. "It's the way the Romans acted." Not just the Romans, of course: "Speak softly and carry a big stick" was Theodore Roosevelt's way of putting it.
..........
The United States has set up military missions throughout the formerly communist world, creating situations in which U.S. majors, lieutenant colonels, and full colonels are often advising foreign generals and chiefs of staff. Make no mistake: these officers are policymakers by another name. A Romanian-speaking expert on the Balkans, Army Lieutenant Colonel Charles van Bebber, has become well known in top military circles in Bucharest for helping to start the reform process that led to Romania's integration with NATO. Such small-scale but vital relationships give America an edge there over its Western European allies. One of the reasons that countries like Romania and Bulgaria supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq is that they now see their primary military relationship as being with America rather than with NATO as such.
..........
Rule No. 4
Use the Military to Promote Democracy
In an age of expanding democracy, military and intelligence contacts are more important than ever. Civilian politicians in weak and fledgling parliamentary systems come and go. But leading military and security men remain as behind-the-scenes props, sometimes even getting themselves elected to high office-as has happened in Nigeria, Venezuela, and Russia. "Whoever the President of Kenya is, the same group of guys run their special forces and the President's bodyguards," one Army Special Operations officer told me. "We've trained them. That translates into diplomatic leverage."
The U.S. military's bilateral relationships with foreign armies and their officer corps play a substantial role in safeguarding democratic transitions. Militaries have been the pillars of so many Third World societies for so long that the advent of elections can scarcely make them politically irrelevant, especially in Africa and Latin America. In some places, such as Turkey and Pakistan, the military and security services have at times actually enjoyed a reputation for greater liberalism than the civilian authorities. In Colombia in the mid-1990s the civilian government was tainted by drug money; the military police, who were seen to be less corrupt, helped to save our bilateral relationship.
......
Our strategy in Colombia and Yemen is unspoken but simple: establish not a totally reformed military but a self-sustaining structure of a few specialized units.That's the best we will be able to do, and it will not require a heavy American military presence.
.......
Rule No. 6
Bring Back the Old Rules
Refer to the pre-Vietnam War rules by which small groups of quiet professionals would be used to help stabilize or destabilize a regime, depending on the circumstances and our needs. Covert means are more discreet and cheaper than declared war and large-scale mobilization, and in an age when an industrial economy is no longer necessary for the production of weapons of mass destruction, the American public, burdened with large government deficits, will demand an extraordinary degree of protection for as few tax dollars as possible. Impending technologies, such as bullets that can be directed at specific targets the way larger warheads are today, and satellites that can track the neurobiological signatures of individuals, will make assassinations far more feasible, enabling the United States to kill rulers like Saddam Hussein without having to harm their subject populations through conventional combat.
.......
As shocking as some of the above may sound, much of what I advocate is already taking place. The old rules, with their accent on discretion, were on the way back even before 9/11. Witness the increasing use of security-consulting firms and defense contractors that employ-in places as diverse as South America, the Caucasus, and West Africa-retired members of the U.S. military to conduct aerial surveillance, to train local armies, and to help struggling friendly regimes. Consider Military Professional Resources, Inc. (MPRI), of northern Virginia, which during the mid-1990s restructured and modernized the Croatian military. Shortly afterward Croatian battlefield success against the Serbs forced Belgrade to the peace table.
Encouraging an overall moral outcome to the Yugoslav conflict involved methods that were not always defensible in narrowly moral terms; the Croats, too, were murderers. And moral ambiguity is even greater in protracted wars, such as the Cold War and the war on terrorism, in which deals will always have to be struck with bad people and bad regimes for the sake of a larger good. The war on terrorism will not be successful if every aspect of its execution must be disclosed and justified-in terms of universal principles-to the satisfaction of the world media and world public opinion. The old rules are good rules because, as the ancient Chinese philosophers well knew, deception and occasional dirty work are morally preferable to launching a war.
*****
Wikipedia quotes:
* "It is firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup. It would be much preferable to have this transpire prior to 24 October but efforts in this regard will continue vigorously beyond this date. We are to continue to generate maximum pressure toward this end, utilizing every appropriate resource. It is imperative that these actions be implemented clandestinely and securely so that the USG and American hand be well hidden..." — A communique to the CIA base in Chile, issued on October 16, 1970
* "[Military rule aims] to make Chile not a nation of proletarians, but a nation of entrepreneurs." — Augusto Pinochet
* "We didn't do it. I mean we helped them. [Garbled] created the conditions as great as possible. — Henry Kissinger conversing with President Nixon about the coup.
Rumors that the King overthrew the civilian government on CNN. Military seizes control of the capital while the Prime Minister is in New York to speak at the United Nations. Too much shit going on at UN headquarters today!
I liked this story because it's focused right on the money, which, as in most things, is the real interesting dimension to follow....
Bloomberg: Thai Baht Falls Most Since 2002 as Premier Declares Emergency By Aaron PanSept. 19 (Bloomberg) -- The Thai baht fell the most in four years after the military seized control of Bangkok and Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra declared a state of emergency.
The currency dropped as tanks rolled into the capital and Thaksin fired the head of the army in a broadcast on state television that he made from New York where he is attending meetings at the United Nations. Thai bonds and a New York-traded fund of the nation's stocks declined.
``The baht will come under more pressure,'' said Marios Maratheftis, a currency strategist at Standard Chartered Plc in London.
The baht fell 1.3 percent to 37.79 per dollar at 2 p.m. in New York, from 37.29 late yesterday, the biggest decline since July 2002. Before the announcement the baht had been trading at its highest since 2000.
Shares of mutual funds that invest in Thailand dropped in U.S. trading. Thai Fund Inc. fell 3.8 percent to $8.35 as of 1:45 p.m. in New York after tumbling as much as 7.1 percent earlier. Thai Capital Fund Inc. lost 4.3 percent to $9.71.
The risk of owning Thai government bonds jumped to a two- year high, according to traders betting on the creditworthiness of countries in the credit-default swaps market.
The price of the contracts rose to more than $47,000 from $33,000 today, according to HSBC Holdings Plc. The contracts, which pay investors $10 million in exchange for the bonds should the government default in the next five years.
Yield premiums on Thailand's 7.75 percent bond due in April 2007 compared with benchmark Treasuries rose 2 basis points to 60 basis points, the highest in a month, HSBC prices show.
Tanks in the Streets
Thailand's military announced the coup after deploying tanks and troop carriers in downtown Bangkok. Two tanks blocked the main entrance to Government House, where Thaksin's offices are located and three more parked outside the United Nations building.
Coup leaders said they revoked the constitution, imposed martial law and appointed a new prime minister.
Army Chief Sondhi Boonyarataklin had earlier dismissed speculation of a possible coup and a defense spokesman said Thai military leaders had pledged not to interfere in politics, the Bangkok Post reported on Sept. 14.
Investors said the coup was unlikely to trigger declines in emerging market securities as Thailand's devaluation did in 1997. That event prompted bonds, stocks and currencies from South Korea to Indonesia to tumble.
``For now I don't see the risk of contagion or anything like that,'' said Luis Costa, an emerging markets strategist at ING Bank NV in London. ``This doesn't affect the fundamentals in emerging market debt.''
Currency Gains
The baht is still up 8.6 percent against the dollar so far this year, beating the Indonesian rupiah for the biggest advance among Asian currencies as record exports spurred a trade surplus.
``We don't have financial contagion of the irrational type anymore,'' said Jerome Booth, who helps manage $23 billion in emerging-market debt at Ashmore Investment Management in London. ``Emerging markets are dominated now by long institutional investors like pension funds and there is no massive short squeezing where problems occur.''
Thailand reported a $309 million current account surplus in July, following an excess of $65 million in the previous month, the central bank reported Aug. 31. Exports climbed to a record. For the full year, the country may post a current-account excess of $3.6 billion, or 1.8 percent of gross domestic product, according to Credit Suisse forecasts.
``It's going to be quite localized,'' said James Barrineau, an asset manager at Alliance Bernstein in New York who helps manage $9 billion in emerging-market bonds.
Just the other day I tossed in a somewhat old link about FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, who despite a gag order has offered a lot of strange hints about money laundering, Turkish spies connected to Douglas Feith and Richard Perle, WMD proliferation networks and other strange things. It is quite possible all this stuff is more red herrings, but it's all a very tantalyzing angle into how the Bush adminstration really rolls.
The reason I mention Edmonds is that she has hinted around the edges at a related complex of scandal and intrigue: namely the Riggs Bank account Feith and Perle angle - this bank account allegedly having been used to finance Islamic fundamentalists in Bosnia and perhaps operate clandestine WMD networks.
This story also introduces what Madsen calls the "Russian-Ukranian-Israeli Mafia" or RUIM, which consists of organized crime operators, drug traffickers and the mythical arms trafficker Viktor Bout, who Nicholas Cage's character in "Lord of War" was loosely based on. Perhaps a stereotypical eastern-European image, the RUIM, in Madsen's story, are the guys profiting from, and carrying out, aspects of the Cheney administrations geo-political trickery around Asia and the Middle East.
So I always take what Mr. Madsen says with many grains of salt. The content of this story forces one to consider the Big Picture of the War On Terror, and it also suggests that American intelligence services under the new President Clinton failed to stop the 1993 World Trade Center bombings in shady circumstances. Who covered that up for the Grand Jury? According to Madsen, Patrick Fitzgerald and Michael Chertoff. Now that's a hell of a story.
Oh, one other thing: why did Karl Rove et. al. bring down Valerie Plame and expose the Brewster-Jennings CIA front company? Was it simply "Joe Wilson's yellowcake thing pisses us off!" Or was it a much deeper kind of secret intel war type thing, an inside-the-Beltway knives-out intelligence community fight - with the Bushistas burning Brewster-Jennings to protect very dark dealings?
In the view of this story (and to some extent, Edmonds) Brewster-Jennings got burned by the White House because the CIA was getting too close to RUIM/Marc Rich WMD proliferation networks connected with A.Q. Khan and that gang. Perhaps, even, Brewster Jennings managed to block WMDs from being planted by these RUIM cats in Iran - which would have generated the fake pretext for a war in Iran.
It's heady stuff. (and the story implies the Israelis are tapping wireless communication on Capitol Hill. So that's how AIPAC's gots everyone's nuts?) I would hope that when Democrats snag a bit more power in DC they're willing to wander down these trails with the power of subpoena, then we'll know if this is all hot air or not. For now, consider it just another possibility in the wasteland of mirrors.
Wayne Madsen Report, Sept. 17-18:
SPECIAL REPORT. On Jul. 14 and Aug. 8, WMR reported on convicted Ohio Rep. Bob Ney's longtime intelligence role for the CIA. More details are emerging about that role. The following is what WMR reported last month on the Ohio Republican:"WMR has learned that covert Iranian backchannels employed by a current member of the U.S. House of Representatives in support of [Valerie] Plame's Brewster Jennings & Associates network were thoroughly compromised by the White House leak. The member of Congress, who, like Plame, had been an earlier CIA "non-official cover (NOC) energy consultant" in the Middle East during the late 1970s and early 80s, and who was familiar with the early weapons of mass destruction proliferation involving the A. Q. Khan network of Pakistan, Libya, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, was compromised and he and his connections to the Brewster Jennings & Associates intelligence network and Iranian government contacts were made known to adversarial intelligence agencies. The staff of the member whose covert Iranian contact network was compromised was targeted and tainted with Jack Abramoff money, putting the U.S. Representative in extreme political jeopardy.
WMR can now report that according to congressional sources in Washington and well-placed sources in Columbus, Ohio, including high-level Democratic sources, the congressman in question is Republican Rep. Bob Ney, who yesterday announced that he was dropping out of his race for re-election. Because neo-con elements opposed to any negotiations between the United States and Iran discovered Ney's involvement in CIA backchannels to Tehran they decided to use Abramoff's illegal political money and favors conduit to steer money and non-monetary gifts to Ney's staff and eventually to Ney himself. With Ney's departure from Congress, his role as an intermediary between Washington and Tehran is severely diminished.
After Ney's stint as a CIA "NOC" in the Middle East, he returned to Ohio to run against former US Representative and then-Ohio state representative Wayne Hays . . . In May, Ney's former chief of staff Neil Volz pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy involving his role in getting Ney to support several Abramoff initiatives that benefited Abramoff's Indian casino, Israeli-connected wireless company, Northern Marianas clothing manufacturer, and other clients.
According to a Democratic Party official in Ohio, it was always well known that Ney had "special protection" stemming from his CIA past. A House of Representatives source revealed that Abramoff's interest in Ney was accentuated by Ney's involvement as a CIA Counter-proliferation Division (CPD) backchannel to Tehran. However, under General Michael Hayden's iron fist, the CIA continues to purge and put into the cold those involved with Brewster Jennings, the CPD, and questioning fanciful Bush administration weapons of mass destruction claims."
The Department of Justice, in its charges against Ney, failed to mention the name of the Syrian-born arms trader from whom Ney pleaded guilty to accepting casino chip bribes in return for getting him a U.S. visa and a sanctions waiver on the sale of U.S. aircraft parts from his front company in Larnaca, Cyprus for later sale to Iran. The reasons for the mystery surrounding Ney's Middle East interlocutors are that they point to high-level corruption within the Bush Justice Department -- corruption that is tied to covering up the role of U.S. and Russian Mafia state and non-state players in assisting the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction throughout the Middle East and South Asia. The Syrian, Fouad al Zayat, whose Larnaca-based company, FN Aviation (later changed to FAZ Aviation), is based in Russian-Israeli mobbed-up Cyprus and has an office in London, is known as a high-rolling gambler called "The Fat Man" in London gambling parlors. The London gambling dens are known to act as major money laundering enterprises for arms smugglers and other mob activities. FN Aviation's British director, Nigel Winfield, a thrice-convicted felon, paid for Ney to take a three-day trip to London in February 2003, a month before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. According to well-placed congressional sources, Ney was using the dodgy London arms network to determine whether neocon-supplied intelligence reports that Saddam Hussein possessed WMDs had any merit. However, Ney had also stumbled across incriminating evidence tying top Bush administration officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, to the WMD proliferation network -- the same intelligence discovered by covert CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson and her Brewster Jennings & Associates (BJ&A) network in their investigation of arms smuggling routes through Cyprus, South Africa, Turkey, and former Soviet Central Asian states. Zayat's money laundering reportedly coincided with BJ&A's investigation of WMD money laundering and sanctions-busting activities in Switzerland, Cyprus, and the Isle of Man. Ney's links to the Middle East arms bazaar also provided the CIA with an important backchannel into Tehran, Damascus, and Baghdad -- a backchannel not wanted by the neocons who were anxious to bomb all three capital cities.
Ney is said to have agreed to cooperate with Justice prosecutors in return for a sentence of 27 months in prison and a $500,000 fine. In reality, Gonzales' prosecutors are more interested in how much Ney discovered about links between top GOP and White House officials and the arms smuggling business involving Iran, Iraq, and the Zayat, Abdul Qadeer (AQ) Khan, and other shady networks connected to neocon and Russian-Israeli Mafia activities. By finding out what Ney knows, Cheney and his neocon provocateurs will be able to neutralize any embarrassing information on their proliferation activities prior to the November 7 election. In fact, during the DOJ investigation of Ney, the congressman, aware that wireless communications in the House was in the hands of Israeli-owned MobileAccess Communications (formerly Foxcom Wireless), studiously avoided communicating with sensitive sources through any member of his staff.
FN Aviation's chief lobbyists in the United States, people whose activities were of interest to Ney (and Brewster Jennings and the CIA) were Roy Coffee and David DiStefano, both of whom work for failed Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers' old law firm, Locke Liddell & Sapp. According to the Jan. 24, 2006, Dallas Morning News Coffee, who was a one time deputy campaign manager for then-Texas Governor George W. Bush, and DiStefano, pressured Ney to lobby the State Department to grant an export license for the sale of U.S. spare aircraft parts by FN Aviation to Iran. Coffee has been called Bush's "eyes and ears on K Street," a reference to the lobbyist district of Washington, DC. WMR has been told that Ney was passing the information he was getting on FN Aviation's activities, as well as other intelligence, to BJ&A. After BJ&A's cover was blown by Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and Richard Armitage (who was worried that the CIA would discover his own involvement in shady deals in Azerbaijan), Ney's intermediary activities also became known to the White House and the Special Prosecutor named to investigate the leak of the classified CIA information to the media -- Patrick Fitzgerald.
Fitzgerald's decision not to prosecute Karl Rove and to seek the lesser charges of perjury and obstruction of justice against Cheney's former Chief of Staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby stems from Fitzgerald's own conflicts-of-interest in the CIA case. Ney and BJ&A were uncovering past and embarrassing links between the Russian-Israeli mob and key players in the Bush administration. Zayat's myriad aircraft firms in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan are based in the same locations as those of Russian Mafia arms smuggler (and favored Pentagon contractor) Viktor Bout. Bout's Kyrgyzstan companies -- Phoenix Aviation and Inter Transavia, both connected to U.S. private military contractors operating in Iraq and Africa -- and Zayat's Kyrgyz-based aviation company, Aqua Transit, share the same airfield in the Kyrgyz capital of Bishkek. Zayat's Samaya Investments Ltd. comfortably resides in Tashkent, Uzbekistan along with firms controlled by the Uzbek-speaking Bout. Bout and Zayat share more than central Asian airports and capitals in common -- they both have high level contacts in the Bush administration, contacts that reach right into the Oval Office.
When she was National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice interceded with Sharjah authorities not to arrest Bout. She informed U.S. intelligence to "look but don't touch" with regard to Bout. And Alberto Gonzales' Justice Department, while convicting Ney, has yet to go after Zayat's lobbyist, Coffee, George W. Bush's former deputy campaign manager and "eyes and ears" on K Street. And there is continued Department of Homeland Security disinterest in the activities of Bout's Syrian associate Monzer al Qasser, who has been involved with his brother Ghassem in arms and drug smuggling and counterfeiting of $100 U.S. notes. Interpol has long been interested in the al Qassers' weapons smuggling and counterfeiting activities but the official U.S. Secret Service replies have echoed Rice's "look but don't touch" orders. Monzer Al Qasser's weapons smuggling activities, selling former East Bloc arms and using secret bank accounts in Luxembourg and Switzerland, cross the path of Viktor Bout's supply of weapons to the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and pro-Al Qaeda Islamist elements in the Balkans. The supply of arms from Mafia smugglers to Muslim guerrillas in Bosnia and Kosovo also involve the financial networks employed by the Bosnia Defense Fund, a 1990s weapons-purchasing slush fund set up at Riggs Bank in Washington, DC and the Central Bank of Bosnia in Sarajevo by Richard Perle and Douglas Feith. WMR has learned of a significant Washington, DC-based lobbying and smuggling operation involving Al Qasser and Bout. This operation appears to be sanctioned by high-level Bush administration officials. [Dan adds: TEH SWEET]
And there is even more to this story. Bout was a supplier of logistics and arms to both the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan. As WMR has reported, a classified French intelligence report obtained by WMR shows that Bin Laden remained under the operational control of the CIA and Britain's MI-6 until 1995. According to U.S. intelligence sources, Fitzgerald, working for then-US Attorney for Southern New York James Comey, failed to translate from Arabic and Farsi and present to the grand jury and jury in the trials of 1993 World Trade Center bombers several important telecommunications intercepts. The intercepts proved that Bin Laden, who was based in Sudan at the time and living on the largesse of the Saudi-backed Sudanese government, was directly involved in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Suspiciously, the attack took place only a few weeks after Bill Clinton was sworn in an President. Sudanese and Bin Laden involvement in the bombing was proven by NSA-decrypted messages sent between the Sudanese Mission to the UN and the Sudanese Foreign Ministry in Khartoum. According to a former Sudanese government officials, the NSA possessed a backdoor into the encryption equipment Sudan's Foreign Ministry purchased from a Hamburg, Germany firm named PK Electronics. Fitzgerald also covered up key evidence that a US Army Special Forces non-commissioned officer, Ali Mohammed, was in direct contact with Bin Laden in Afghanistan while still on active duty and reporting to the U.S. Special Forces command in Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
It is believed by many legal and intelligence observers that the Washington, DC U.S. District Court grand jury's decision to indict Karl Rove last May was derailed after Attorney General Alberto Gonzales confronted Fitzgerald with his past prosecutorial misconduct in the 1993 World Trade Center trials. Therefore, an unusual "SEALED vs. SEALED" indictment of the grand jury against Rove remains sealed to this day and Rove attorney Robert Luskin maintains a veil of secrecy around a 10-page letter, dated June 12, 2006, that stated that Fitzgerald did not intend to charge Rove in the leak of Valerie Plame Wilson's name and identity to a number of journalists. Nor did Fitzgerald charge either Rove or Libby with the underlying crime of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act -- an act cited by federal appellate Judge David Tatel in a February 2005 as having "serious" national security implications. In fact, Tatel wrote that Valerie Plame Wilson "worked for the CIA in some unusual capacity relating to counterproliferation." In fact, Mrs. Wilson and her CIA network were targeting the very same smuggling and money laundering networks that were aided and abetted by Cheney and his neocon influence network.
[this is one sweet graf, I gotta say --Dan] It is now clear that Fitzgerald has been playing what the French call a "double jeu" -- a "double game." Eager to protect his and then-New Jersey federal prosecutor Michael Chertoff's own cover-up of the U.S. intelligence links to the 1993 World Trade Center bombers, Fitzgerald folded when confronted with the threat of exposure from Gonzales, who was acting on behalf of Cheney, Rove, and Bush. Cheney's and Libby's ties to Russian-Israeli mobsters like Marc Rich, a major global smuggler in his own right, and their involvement in the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction to form the conditions to promote a casus belli for neocon war goals were the real reasons behind the Cheney's operation to expose Mrs. Wilson and her BJ&A network and Abramoff's and Gonzales' entrapment of CIA asset Ney in a double cross sting operation.
We are not posting much until the new drupal site is rolled out. There has been a setback in the last couple days, as the image uploader mysteriously stopped working. Frustrating to have feature collapse!
Neoconservative intelligence spoofing alert (via wotisitgood4.blogspot.com):
Laura Rozen:
"Interesting Warren Strobel/John Wolcott piece on an eerie echo of phony pre-war Iraq intelligence from discredited exile groups and figures being injected into the system via unconventional US government offices, this time on Iran
[......]
And they nod to a piece I reported in the LAT a couple months back -- that a new "Iranian directorate" has been set up inside the same Pentagon policy shop that oversaw the Office of Special Plans.
[....]
It's hard to imagine that this office would wittingly use Ghorbanifar directly for Iran intelligence; but you don't have to go far to find the model that is more likely to being employed. Check out how Ghorbanifar worked with Congressman Curt Weldon -- using a cut-out, "Ali," Ghorbanifar's longtime business partner. And read the Chalabi section of the new Senate Intel committee Phase II report to see the pattern writ large -- the system by which almost a dozen fabricators were pushed forward by the INC to ply their wares on the US government, echoing and providing "confirmation" for the fabrications put forward by an earlier one; some of them have now totally disappeared. Some were pushed forward by the likes of Jim Woolsey through the DOD. I would think that responsible parties in the US government, say at the National Security Council where Stephen Hadley should by now know about Ghorbanifar because he approved the origial Pentagon meetings with him in 2001, would want to be very careful with what they're getting this time on Iran from places like DIA and DoD, and be pressing back hard to question the validity and chain of custody of the original sources."
So they are fabricating another war in the usual ways. Fuck it.
Chavez pledges to support Iran in invasion: Sep. 14, 2006. 09:20 PM
ASSOCIATED PRESS
HAVANA — Venezuela's president pledged Thursday his country would support Iran if it was invaded as a result of its nuclear standoff with the UN Security Council.
The UN has demanded Iran suspend uranium enrichment amid concerns by some nations that it could be used for nuclear weapons. Iran insists the enrichment is aimed solely at producing electricity.
"Iran is under threat; there are plans to invade Iran, hopefully it won't happen, but we are with you," Hugo Chavez told Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at a meeting of the Group of 15 developing nations on the sidelines of a Nonaligned Movement summit in Cuba.
Anti-U.S. states try to cement accord Sat Sep 16, 2006 5:00 PM By Anthony Boadle
HAVANA (Reuters) - Iran, North Korea, Venezuela and Cuba moved to cement an anti-U.S. alliance and support Tehran's right to nuclear technology at a summit of Non-Aligned nations on Saturday.
More than 40 heads of state and leaders from over 100 developing countries were debating a document supporting Iran's right to nuclear technology for peaceful ends and another sharply critical of Israel's recent war in Lebanon. But governments with friendly ties to Washington, among them India, Pakistan, Chile, Peru and Colombia, sought to steer the summit way from confrontation and finger-pointing at the United States.
North Korea blasted the United States for unilateral actions against individual countries and called for a revitalised NAM to raise a united voice. "The United States is attempting to deprive other countries of even their legitimate right to peaceful nuclear activities," North Korea's second-ranking leader, Kim Yong-nam, said.
A batch of info mostly from JuanCole.com, the indispensable guide to all things Middle Eastern. For example, dissecting a Republican report on Iran packed with disinformation (more here). Cole's recap of 9/11 myths is a good one. Also Steve Clemons' TheWashingtonNote.com is doing good things, such as predicting ahead of time that John Bolton's recent re-nomination was sunk.
Indian guys observe that some World Trade Center scrap found its way to India, since of course there was no reason to keep evidence around.
Valerie Plame scandal flips upside down? CNN.com - Outed CIA agent Plame adds Armitage to lawsuit. The Armitage thing is a strange angle since Armitage was definitely not part of the neo-con camp in the run-up to the war - he was more of a Powell loyalist. It seems like in reality he was burned by his co-Deputy at State at the time, Marc Grossman, who is a shady neoconservative connected with drug trafficking since the good old days of Pakistan in the 1980s. According to some sources, Grossman sent Armitage a memo with Plame's name that did not flag her status as a covert agent.
In a tiny tidbit, Sibel Edmonds has noted that on the morning of September 11, Marc Grossman was meeting with then-Rep. Porter Goss, Senator Bob Graham, and Mahmoud Ahmed, the director of Pakistan's ISI intelligence agency, the guys that created the Taliban! Ahmed apparently wired $100,000 to Mohammed Atta before September 11. If you want some mind-blowingly weird shit about Sibel Edmonds, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, financing around 9/11 and other intrigues, check this post, this and this one on wotisitgood4.blogspot.com. Nice.
In the recently released Bin Laden tape, there were odd discrepancies in how global media like chinese Xinhua and Al Jazeera described the hijackers. Either media errors or Vast Conspiracy, I guess.
BAE profit rises 28% on US orders for Iraq:
Thursday, September 14, 2006
LONDON, SEPT 13: BAE Systems Plc, Europe’s biggest weapons maker, said first-half profit rose 28%, more than analysts estimated, on US orders for Bradley fighting vehicles used in Iraq.
Net income increased to 405 million pounds ($759 million), or 12.4 pence a share, from 317 million pounds a year earlier, BAE said on Wednesday in a statement. Profit beat the 354 million-pound estimate of six analysts surveyed by Bloomberg. BAE purchased United Defense Industries Inc, the maker of the Bradley, in June 2005 to become the Pentagon’s seventh-biggest contractor. London-based BAE on September 6 recommended shareholders approve the sale of its 20% stake in Airbus SAS to concentrate on US defence acquisitions.
The sale ‘‘will allow BAE to focus on the defense sector and not be distracted by some serious problems that Airbus is facing,’’ David Hart, an analyst at Fat Prophets in London, said in an interview. ‘‘Refitting Bradleys will be a strong market for them for years to come.’’
The spooky new pope, in his infinite wisdom, decided to quote some fossilized Byzantine emperor named Manuel II Palaiologos, who hated Muslims and was therefore worth quoting.
The U.S. military is starting to fray in a lot of ways, with gang members and white supremacists now getting recruited.
Sen. Tom Harkin down in Iowa talking about the situation. John Bolton's gonna fuck everything up. Great Britain's role in the war in Lebanon - many details of nitty gritty that Blair is going to pay for. Your Iraq statistic reference.
A little humor: Top ten dumbest secret identities. Bert Blyleven drops the F-BOMB twice during a Twins game broadcast!! Awesome. Five great comedians that have totally lost it. Excellent.
Colbert scores a Hungarian bridge, or does he? Watch the video!
Most middle eastern leaders tell Kofi the war has been a disaster for them. Al Qaeda in Iraq - or not: check out the reasonable overview from a UPI analysis of the Iraq Sunni fundie situation:
Eye on Iraq: The al-Qaida myth, By MARTIN SIEFF UPI Senior News Analyst
Why did the tactical U.S. successes against al-Qaida within Iraq fail to have any positive impact on quelling the insurgency? Part of the answer is that al-Qaida and its allies had already succeeded in pulverizing the credibility of Iraq's three democratically elected governments by the time U.S. forces could make real inroads against them.
Also, U.S. planners failed disastrously to bring in enough American troops right after the fall of Saddam Hussein in April 2003 to ensure stability and the rapid restoration of basic government services in Iraq.
The U.S. obsession with ambitious, cumbersome constitutional processes distracted American planners and military from being able to focus on the primary issues of restoring power, running water and having enough reliable U.S. and allied troops to ensure law and order in Iraq's cities and towns. As a result, every one of the three civilian governments Iraq has so far had no grassroots credibility or been able to deliver basic protection or reliable services to a significant element of the population by itself.
Even in supposedly peaceful Shiite majority provinces across southern Iraq, the government forces only operate in alliance with, or at the sufferance of, a patch-quilt of Shiite militias that they do not control.
However, the real reason is that al-Qaida was never the only, or even the main, part of the Sunni resistance against U.S. forces in Iraq. By the time Zarqawi was killed, he was only the first among equals in a shifting coalition of anti-American Sunni militia groups. And when Zarqawi succeeded in provoking an overwhelming Shiite violent reaction after the Al-Askariya bombing, he achieved his ultimate strategic goal of making Iraq ungovernable through the U.S.-guided democratic political process that had been set up.
U.S. grand strategy in Iraq, in its obsession with Zarqawi and al-Qaida, never confronted the messy religious and ethnic political and paramilitary realities of the country. President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld remained convinced through June that once Zarqawi was hunted down and killed and al-Qaida's operational command structure was smashed, then the Sunni insurgency would evaporate and peaceful, democratic political processes would at last triumph in Iraq.
But it has not happened that way and there is no real sign that it will. The condition we have described in these columns as "Belfast rules" or "Beirut rules" -- the condition of ongoing, many-sided sectarian war between different militias after a central governing authority has collapsed -- continues to be the case in Iraq. Conditions in that unhappy country will only start to improve when U.S. policymakers finally confront this unpleasant fact.
Doomed Palestinians trapped in Iraq: Talk about double jeopardy: Palestinians that resettled after the Nakba (catastrophe of Israel's creation) in Iraq are now pretty much screwed, in particular since Shiites don't like them. This is yet another material reason that West Bank settlements are extremely bad for the world, Arabs and the United States.
Reuters: IRAQ: Palestinian refugees targeted by militants receive no help
13 Sep 2006 13:29:12 GMT
BAGHDAD, 13 September (IRIN) - The deteriorating conditions of Palestinians in Iraq have been highlighted in a report by US-based NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW).
The report, released on 10 September, said that Palestinian refugees living in Iraq are being targeted by mostly Shi'ite militant groups and are also being harassed by the government.
"Since the fall of [former president] Saddam Hussein's government, Palestinian refugees in Iraq have increasingly become targets of violence and persecution," said Sarah Leah Whitson, HRW's Middle East director.
"Shi'ite militant groups have murdered dozens of Palestinian refugees, and the Iraqi government has made it difficult for these refugees to stay legally in Iraq by imposing onerous registration requirements," she added.
Since we are posting Prof. Juan Cole-derived goodies today, I'm going to have to pilfer his post on 9/11 and Al Qaeda because it makes 1000% more sense than any other bullshit in the media in the last week. I hope he understands!
September 11, 2006: The War with al-Qaeda
The war with al-Qaeda has many dimensions. There is the war with the organization itself. There is the struggle against its offshoots and copycats. There is cooperation with Muslim governments and communities in derailing the threat. There is the question of the strength of Sunni fundamentalist parties that might support al-Qaeda. And there is winning hearts and minds in the Muslim world.
The war with the organization itself largely succeeded by 2003 and no further progress seems to have been made since that time. Some 600 al-Qaeda operatives were captured in Pakistan, many of them through a sting arranged inside the Karachi Western Union office, according to Ron Susskind. The original al-Qaeda has been badly disrupted as to command and control.
It is not, however, dead. Every evidence is that the London subway bombings of a little over a year ago had a strong connection to Ayman al-Zawahiri. He appears to have worked with a Pakistani terrorist group such as Jaish-i Muhammad or Lashkar-i Tayyibah or whatever they are calling themselves these days to recruit the young Britons that carried out the attack. Al-Zawahiri had in his possession their suicide tapes, and broadcast them on Aljazeera. It is urgent that Usamah Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri be captured. Declan Walsh explains why this is is difficult.
It may well be that the Egyptian Islamic Jihad offshoot operating in the Sinai, which conducted the Sharm El Shaikh and Taba bombings of tourist hotels, has a link to Zawahiri.
Al-Qaeda's popularity is declining in some quarters. A Pew poll in 2005 found that significantly fewer numbers of Moroccans, Turks and Indonesians were confident in Bin Laden that year than the two previous years. On the other hand, a majority of Jordanians and Pakistanis continued to have a high regard for his competency.
The Madrid train bombings show the severe challenge posed by local copycat groups that do not have a direct connection to al-Qaeda, but take up one of its calls to action and learn techniques from the internet. If a group has at least some email connections to a known terror group or individual already under surveillance, at least there is a chance of cracking the plot. If they are all "newskins," that makes them invisible.
US cooperation with Middle Eastern governments is at a high level, from all accounts. The operation against Abu Musab al-Zarqawi appears to have been very significantly a Jordanian operation. Egypt and the US conduct joint military exercises. I have a sense that the relationship with Morocco has deepened. Algeria's government fought a decade-long civil war against Islamist political forces, some of them very violent, and has reason to cooperate.
On the negative side, the Sunni Arabs of Iraq appear ever increasingly to be organized by radical Muslim fundamentalist forces of various sorts. This population of some 5 million had been among the bulwarks of secular Arab nationalism in the past, but those days are long gone.
The Islamic Action Council in Pakistan, some members of which sympathize with al-Qaeda and the Taliban, continues to rule the Northwest Frontier Province. The central government, however, which is more secular, has stopped it from implementing Islamic law and hisbah (measures that give anyone standing in enforcing morality on others). Parliament has even moved to rewrite Pakistan's flawed rape law, which is based on Gen. Zia ul-Haq's Islamization measures and is so poorly framed that it often ends up allowing the victims to be punished!
Four MPs from the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan went to mourn Zarqawi's death with his family, triggering sanctions against them. The incident raised questions about how much distance there is between the Salafi Jihadis, the violent revivalists, and the conservative religious parties that seem to eschew violence and pursue ordinary politics.
The US pressured Egypt to open up its parliamentary elections last fall, and the Mubarak regime took revenge by letting 88 Muslim Brother delegates be seated in a chanber with a little over 400 members. These supported Hizbullah in the recent Israel-Lebanon War and have demanded that the Camp David Accords be revoked.
Hamas won the elections in the Palestine Authority. The Israelis have taken many of the elected Hamas representatives and officials into custody, however, and have repeatedly bombed the Interior Ministry in Gaza. These developments have added to the popularity of Hamas and radical fundamentalism while making a mockery of the Bush administration's stated commitment to democratization.
Hizbullah itself achieved enormous popularity, and enhanced the prestige of radical Muslim fundamentalism, by its ability to make a stand before the Israeli military machine. This development will ripple through the region, to the disadvantage of more secular, moderate forces.
The evidence with regard to hearts and minds is mixed. The Pew Global Attitudes Project reports on Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim country, with a population of 224 mn. In 2000, 70 percent of Indonesians viewed the United States favorably. (Such numbers were typical for US Muslim allies in areas not consumed by the Arab-Israeli conflict). In 2002 as a result of the Afghanistan war, the number fell to 60 percent. Then in 2003 after Bush invaded Iraq, it fell to 15 percent. After Bush sent the US Navy to help Indonesia in the aftermath of the tsunami, the numbers rebounded in 2005 to 38 percent. In 2006 they have fallen again, down to 30 percent.
So since 2000, we have fallen from 70 percent approval in Indonesia to only 30 percent, and at some points we were way down. This story contains a caution and also some encouraging news. The caution is that we are losing the Indonesia public because of this Iraq occupation. It is true in Turkey, as well, and lots of other places. The good news is that it is not irreversible. Do some nice things for someone, and the numbers go up. (The numbers also went up in Pakistan after we diverted some military helicopters to help the victims of the Kashmir earthquake). If we ended our Iraq presence, there is a chance we could repair these relationships with some munificent gestures.
In Turkey, the favorability rating of the US in 2002 was 52 percent. It is now 15 percent. That is a scary plummet! I suspect it is all about Iraq, and particularly the feeling that the US is letting the Iraqi Kurds harbor the PKK terrorists, who are blowing things up in Turkey.
The only really good news in the Pew findings is that the US has grown in popularity in Morocco, to nearly 50%, and is especially popular with youth and women. Moroccans have said they are worried about terrorism and about too much influence of religion in politics. I don't entirely understand what is driving the Morocco numbers, since they were pretty upset about Iraq, but the change should be studied for what it can tell us about doing things right. One thing that helps is that Morocco is a long way from the Arab-Israeli conflict, and, in fact, has good behind the scenes relations with Israel.
The Arab world mostly just dislikes US policy, mainly because of kneejerk support for Israeli depredations against Palestinians. The dislike doesn't change that much, though we reached a nadir in 2003-2004. In 2002 76 percent of the Egyptian public disapproved of us. In 2004 that rose to 98 percent. It has fallen down to 86 percent in 2006. Very few Egyptians approve of US foreign policy. They don't even like US intervention to open up the Egyptian political system.
To the extent that small terrorist groups benefit in their recruitment and in motivating recruits from deeply negative attitudes to the United States, these polling numbers are extremely disturbing. The main things driving a polarization between Muslim publics and the US are not al-Qaeda or terrorism, however. They are Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon. It is the policy. The policy can provoke anger and engender threat, and that is why it had better be a damn good policy. It can also make for friendships, which is what we should be aiming at.
It wouldn't take much now to settle the Israel-Palestine thing, and the time is ripe to have Israel give back the Golan to Syria and the Shebaa Farms to Lebanon in return for a genuine peace process. The Israelis are not made more secure by crowding into the West Bank or bombing Gaza daily. South Lebanon has demonstrated the dangers of ever more sophisticated microwars over rugged territory. It is time for Israel, and for the United States, to do the right thing and rescue the Palestinians from the curse of statelessness, the slavery of the 21st century. Ending this debilitating struggle would also be the very best thing for the Israelis themselves. In one fell swoop, the US would have solved 80 percent of its problems with the Muslim world and vastly reduced the threat of terrorism.
But of all the things this administration has done badly, it has been worst of all at making friends in the region. That could end up hurting us most of all, and playing into Bin Laden's increasingly ghostly hands.
Well that does it for now. Have a nice weekend.
Knesset Member Effi Eitam (National Religious Party): 'It is impossible with all of these Arabs.' (BauBau/Archive)
Last update - 15:53 11/09/2006 Haaretz: Leftist MKs blast Eitam's statements on Arabs, urge AG to investigate
By Jack Khoury, Haaretz Correspondent, and Haaretz Service
Left-wing lawmakers reacted furiously Monday to statements made by rightist Knesset Member Effi Eitam against Israeli Arab politicians and Palestinians in the West Bank, and called for attorney general Menachem Mazuz to open an investigation into Eitam's comments on grounds of incitement to racism.
Eitam, a member of the right-wing National Union-National Religious Party sparked a political firestorm Monday when he said that the great majority of Palestinians in the West Bank should be expelled, and that Arabs should be ousted from Israeli politics as a fifth column and "a league of traitors."
The remarks, broadcast Monday on Army Radio, were made during a Sunday speech at a memorial service for a soldier killed in Lebanon during the recent war.
It was the first time that Eitam, who heads the Religious Zionism faction within the National Union, has publicly supported deportation of Palestinians, a concept espoused by assassinated National Union founder Rehavam Ze'evi as "transfer."
"We will have to expel the great majority of the Arabs of Judea and Samaria," Eitam urged, referring to the whole of the West Bank.
According to Eitam, experience showed that Israel cannot give up the area of the West Bank. "It is impossible with all of these Arabs, and it is impossible to give up the territory. We've already seen what they're doing there."
Turning to the subject of Israeli Arabs, Eitam said, "We will have to take another decision, and that is to sweep the Israeli Arabs from the political system. Here, too, the issues are clear and simple.
"We've raised a fifth column, a league of traitors of the first rank. Therefore, we cannot continue to enable so large and so hostile a presense within the political system of Israel."
Beilin: Bring Eitam to trial
Yossi Beilin, the leader of the left-wing Meretz party, urged Attorney General Menachem Mazuz Monday to bring Eitam to trial on charges of incitement to racism.
Beilin's call was based on an amendment to the law which grants lawmakers immunity from prosecution. The amendment lifts the immunity from legislators who incite to racism or ethnic prejudice. Earlier in the day, Meretz MK Avshalom Vilan called on Mazuz to open an investigation against Eitam, on suspicion of incitement and sedition.
Arab MK Ahmed Tibi (Ra'am-Ta'al) said Monday that "Eitam's remarks would have been more authentic, had they been delivered in German."
"These are irresponsible statements," Tibi told the radio, "directed at the lowest level of the racism surging within Israeli society."
"A long time ago the racists and fascists moved from the Israeli street to the Israeli government and the halls of power" added Tibi.
Peace Now leader Yariv Oppenheimer said that the words of Eitam "show that the dogma of [slain extreme right-wing Rabbi Meir] Kahane is alive and well. In a moment of candor, the mask was removed from Eitam's face, exposing him as a leader of fantasy and racism."
Arab MK Mohammed Barakeh said that the attack on the representatives of Arab citizens of Israel was an attempt to "delegitimize the Arab population entirely and to negate their right to voice their opinions and participate in the political process."
According to Barakeh, the measures proposed by Eitam are already being implemented, as the Palestinians, "are witness to many steps to push them aside and expel them from their homeland, among them the security fence in Jerusalem and the West Bank. The policies of siege, starvation, and negation of the basic right of human dignity are a means of extremely dangerous ethnic expulsion.
"You don't need trucks to transfer Palestinians."
Primaries are going on in Minnesota today and you should roll over to that.
The Star Tribune has a nice feature on their site called MyVote that tells you where to go and what the choices are.
Turnout is usually pretty low so your vote makes a bigger difference than the general, and for matters like the DFL 5th district (of which I am not a part), it's way more important than the November election. Best of luck to all the candidates, especially, here, Judge Ostby, who threw out my charges after I got arrested because the police tampered with evidence!!
I am minimizing entries to the old site while we get the new one up and running. Thanks to the folks who are testing it and running into inexplicable errors. Meanwhile the world keeps turning. I found this a pretty striking contribution on MSNBC, just minutes before Bush addressed the nation with more of the same. For some bizarre reason, Keith Olbermann has a lot of guts. If he's not implying Rumsfeld is a 'fascist' himself, he's throwing in 'impeachable offenses.' The field has shifted....
This hole in the groundHalf a lifetime ago, I worked in this now-empty space. And for 40 days after the attacks, I worked here again, trying to make sense of what happened, and was yet to happen, as a reporter.
All the time, I knew that the very air I breathed contained the remains of thousands of people, including four of my friends, two in the planes and -- as I discovered from those "missing posters" seared still into my soul -- two more in the Towers.
And I knew too, that this was the pyre for hundreds of New York policemen and firemen, of whom my family can claim half a dozen or more, as our ancestors.
I belabor this to emphasize that, for me this was, and is, and always shall be, personal.
And anyone who claims that I and others like me are "soft,"or have "forgotten" the lessons of what happened here is at best a grasping, opportunistic, dilettante and at worst, an idiot whether he is a commentator, or a Vice President, or a President.
However, of all the things those of us who were here five years ago could have forecast -- of all the nightmares that unfolded before our eyes, and the others that unfolded only in our minds -- none of us could have predicted this.
Five years later this space is still empty.
Five years later there is no memorial to the dead.
Five years later there is no building rising to show with proud defiance that we would not have our America wrung from us, by cowards and criminals.
Five years later this country's wound is still open.
Five years later this country's mass grave is still unmarked.
Five years later this is still just a background for a photo-op.
It is beyond shameful.
At the dedication of the Gettysburg Memorial -- barely four months after the last soldier staggered from another Pennsylvania field -- Mr. Lincoln said, "we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract."
Lincoln used those words to immortalize their sacrifice.
Today our leaders could use those same words to rationalize their reprehensible inaction. "We cannot dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground." So we won't.
Instead they bicker and buck pass. They thwart private efforts, and jostle to claim credit for initiatives that go nowhere. They spend the money on irrelevant wars, and elaborate self-congratulations, and buying off columnists to write how good a job they're doing instead of doing any job at all.
Five years later, Mr. Bush, we are still fighting the terrorists on these streets. And look carefully, sir, on these 16 empty acres. The terrorists are clearly, still winning.
And, in a crime against every victim here and every patriotic sentiment you mouthed but did not enact, you have done nothing about it.
And there is something worse still than this vast gaping hole in this city, and in the fabric of our nation. There is its symbolism of the promise unfulfilled, the urgent oath, reduced to lazy execution.
The only positive on 9/11 and the days and weeks that so slowly and painfully followed it was the unanimous humanity, here, and throughout the country. The government, the President in particular, was given every possible measure of support.
Those who did not belong to his party -- tabled that.
Those who doubted the mechanics of his election -- ignored that.
Those who wondered of his qualifications -- forgot that.
History teaches us that nearly unanimous support of a government cannot be taken away from that government by its critics. It can only be squandered by those who use it not to heal a nation's wounds, but to take political advantage.
Terrorists did not come and steal our newly-regained sense of being American first, and political, fiftieth. Nor did the Democrats. Nor did the media. Nor did the people.
The President -- and those around him -- did that.
They promised bi-partisanship, and then showed that to them, "bi-partisanship" meant that their party would rule and the rest would have to follow, or be branded, with ever-escalating hysteria, as morally or intellectually confused, as appeasers, as those who, in the Vice President's words yesterday, "validate the strategy of the terrorists."
They promised protection, and then showed that to them "protection" meant going to war against a despot whose hand they had once shaken, a despot who we now learn from our own Senate Intelligence Committee, hated al-Qaida as much as we did.
The polite phrase for how so many of us were duped into supporting a war, on the false premise that it had 'something to do' with 9/11 is "lying by implication."
The impolite phrase is "impeachable offense."
Not once in now five years has this President ever offered to assume responsibility for the failures that led to this empty space, and to this, the current, curdled, version of our beloved country.
Still, there is a last snapping flame from a final candle of respect and fairness: even his most virulent critics have never suggested he alone bears the full brunt of the blame for 9/11.
Half the time, in fact, this President has been so gently treated, that he has seemed not even to be the man most responsible for anything in his own administration.
Yet what is happening this very night?
A mini-series, created, influenced -- possibly financed by -- the most radical and cold of domestic political Machiavellis, continues to be televised into our homes.
The documented truths of the last fifteen years are replaced by bald-faced lies; the talking points of the current regime parroted; the whole sorry story blurred, by spin, to make the party out of office seem vacillating and impotent, and the party in office, seem like the only option.
How dare you, Mr. President, after taking cynical advantage of the unanimity and love, and transmuting it into fraudulent war and needless death, after monstrously transforming it into fear and suspicion and turning that fear into the campaign slogan of three elections? How dare you -- or those around you -- ever "spin" 9/11?
Just as the terrorists have succeeded -- are still succeeding -- as long as there is no memorial and no construction here at Ground Zero.
So, too, have they succeeded, and are still succeeding as long as this government uses 9/11 as a wedge to pit Americans against Americans.
This is an odd point to cite a television program, especially one from March of 1960. But as Disney's continuing sell-out of the truth (and this country) suggests, even television programs can be powerful things.
And long ago, a series called "The Twilight Zone" broadcast a riveting episode entitled "The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street."
In brief: a meteor sparks rumors of an invasion by extra-terrestrials disguised as humans. The electricity goes out. A neighbor pleads for calm. Suddenly his car -- and only his car -- starts. Someone suggests he must be the alien. Then another man's lights go on. As charges and suspicion and panic overtake the street, guns are inevitably produced. An "alien" is shot -- but he turns out to be just another neighbor, returning from going for help. The camera pulls back to a near-by hill, where two extra-terrestrials are seen manipulating a small device that can jam electricity. The veteran tells his novice that there's no need to actually attack, that you just turn off a few of the human machines and then, "they pick the most dangerous enemy they can find, and it's themselves."
And then, in perhaps his finest piece of writing, Rod Serling sums it up with words of remarkable prescience, given where we find ourselves tonight: "The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men.
"For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own -- for the children, and the children yet unborn."
When those who dissent are told time and time again -- as we will be, if not tonight by the President, then tomorrow by his portable public chorus -- that he is preserving our freedom, but that if we use any of it, we are somehow un-American...When we are scolded, that if we merely question, we have "forgotten the lessons of 9/11"... look into this empty space behind me and the bi-partisanship upon which this administration also did not build, and tell me:
Who has left this hole in the ground?
We have not forgotten, Mr. President.
You have.
May this country forgive you.
The new system, temporarily located here, is called Drupal and in it, basically all the content is called 'nodes'. There can be regular blog post nodes, image nodes, video nodes. They can be associated to other nodes, and have comments. There are a lot of RSS headline feed features around too, including an audio node + RSS feed = Podcast feature.
On the plus side, there is going to be podcasting support set up, image gallery handling, polls and more static content that is tied to dynamic content.
Overall the software seems to work pretty well. The addon modules might not work as expected, but I will basically turn stuff off and on until it works.
The site is going to replace the front page within this week. That's the damn goal!!!
There is also a page called the 'HongWire' which will have a lot of feeds from various sites. It needs to be cleaned up, but it works with new headlines every 30 minutes, and that'll give us something interesting every 30 minutes without any more work from me!!
'Nyarlahotep Chooses' is a block reserved for a random selection of David's artwork, when that gets put together after his new computer finally shows up.
There is going to be a box on the front page connected to the del.icio.us service that will allow folks to send links over from their browsers.
Basically most anything contributed by a registered user will be posted. I've got some individual blogs set up and they will always be marked at least on the sidebar and probably on the main page too.
These are the tricky things. So far the only major bug is that the auto-banner rotating feature is not compatible with caching. So it runs hella slow. So the fancy logo that changes every time will have to wait.
The "HongWire" news aggregator is probably going to have to be tweaked for it to work fast enough.
The other random image box is going to be random images from the library. Might not keep that.
Any creative contributions are appreciated and individual contributors keep their own copyright for their own work and if they ever want it taken down that's fine.
I'm probably going to have to put in ads to try to pay for the web hosting. If it breaks even that will be a shock.
Well, damn skippy!
All right, that took long enough. But yes, in fact, I was able to dump the entirety of HongPong.com into Drupal, by first going from MovableType to WordPress, and then using the fine and polished 'Wordpress to Drupal Migration Utility' module by Borek Bernard at borber.com.
Notably, my beloved lengthy headlines have been truncated a bit, but this is due to Drupal's maximum headline size, which is going to have to be hacked. This was not the fault of Wordpress or Borek. Also some HTML encodings, like for example ampersands, have become garbled. HTML encodings are the tricky monster of MySQL, so there are other messed up characters yet to be found.
I imported this onto a new test Drupal server at
http://drupal-test.hongpong.com .
This will probably be molded into the production server, and I will just copy over the customizations already at
drupal.hongpong.com .
Thanks for your patience with this process. The colossal technical hurdle that held things back (apart from my laziness) was overcome with a triple-bank shot. Thanks too to WordPress. Excellent software but not quite right for the task at hand.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING US OVER THE YEARS.
THANK YOU, C.I.A., DEPTS PENTAGON, STATE AND JUSTICE FOR VISITING AND AMUSING ME.
(you guys ain't seen nothing yet)
THANK YOU CONTRIBUTORS FOR ROCKIN.
THANK YOU SPAMMERS FOR BOOSTING OUR GOOGLE RANK!
MOVABLETYPE IS AT AN END.
HONGPONG.COM (VERSION 6?) IS ON THE WAY.
This is one of those annoying times for engineering this site. Currently running on MovableType 2.661, the last free version they offered, but on the new, faster and generally good web hosting I now get from PowWeb, it glitches out. I get out of memory errors when posting, and the Total Post Exporter function doesn't work completely.
I want to get the site into Drupal, and I've decided it's gonna 'go live' before I have perfected its design. Anything would be better than this situation, and I have a couple folks who want to contribute goodies when it's finally working. They have been very patient, but it's taken far too long to kick this process into action.
Unfortunately, the big stumbling block so far has been getting the data from MT into Drupal. There are a number of methods that people have devised, but each suffers from certain drawbacks: version incompatibilities, failing to import categories, and other toxic problems.
So I have been checkmated and unwilling to deal with muddling through this while programming all day at work. But just now, an obvious potential solution has popped into my head.
Last summer I experimented with yet another popular Open Source blog platform, WordPress, which is quite good and fairly mature now. I got most of the site put together, but there were some problems I didn't like in how it structured things. Drupal solves these problems - namely heirarchical categories/tags/taxonomies. All these billions of del.icio.us bookmarks I've been making in the last couple weeks are closely related to this scheme.
Most importantly, I was able to import all of Hongpong.com, including the comments, from Movable Type into WordPress. I did this at least twice, so I know it works.
So today I thought, if MovableType > Drupal is not working, why not try MovableType > WordPress > Drupal ?
So I just installed Wordpress again, simply to pull this off. It's so crazy, it just might work!! Please stand by............
Drupal.hongpong.com - i swear it'll happen!! (Currently it's just a few test posts) Eventually!!!!
There are some things that should set off the old alarm bells. As PrisonPlanet put it in their usual understated way, Military-Industrial Complex Kingpins Call For Genocide To Kick-Start World War Three. But that would appear to be the plan:
"There will be no peace. At any given moment for the rest of our lifetimes, there will be multiple conflicts in mutating forms around the globe. Violent conflict will dominate the headlines, but cultural and economic struggles will be steadier and ultimately more decisive. The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing."
This scheme published in a Pentagon periodical is one of the more wicked things imaginable:
The pathway to the apocalypse lies in grand plans...
Armed Forces Journal: Blood borders: How a better Middle East would look
By Ralph Peters
International borders are never completely just. But the degree of injustice they inflict upon those whom frontiers force together or separate makes an enormous difference — often the difference between freedom and oppression, tolerance and atrocity, the rule of law and terrorism, or even peace and war.
The most arbitrary and distorted borders in the world are in Africa and the Middle East. Drawn by self-interested Europeans (who have had sufficient trouble defining their own frontiers), Africa's borders continue to provoke the deaths of millions of local inhabitants. But the unjust borders in the Middle East — to borrow from Churchill — generate more trouble than can be consumed locally.
While the Middle East has far more problems than dysfunctional borders alone — from cultural stagnation through scandalous inequality to deadly religious extremism — the greatest taboo in striving to understand the region's comprehensive failure isn't Islam but the awful-but-sacrosanct international boundaries worshipped by our own diplomats.
........Oh, and one other dirty little secret from 5,000 years of history: Ethnic cleansing works.
Begin with the border issue most sensitive to American readers: For Israel to have any hope of living in reasonable peace with its neighbors, it will have to return to its pre-1967 borders — with essential local adjustments for legitimate security concerns. But the issue of the territories surrounding Jerusalem, a city stained with thousands of years of blood, may prove intractable beyond our lifetimes. Where all parties have turned their god into a real-estate tycoon, literal turf battles have a tenacity unrivaled by mere greed for oil wealth or ethnic squabbles. So let us set aside this single overstudied issue and turn to those that are studiously ignored.
Well, ducking the nuclear reactor of tension that is the West Bank settlement complex is one way to help yourself along to a greater ethnic cleansing project, especially one that would "work" so well.
From time to time, other people have developed maps to represent reorganizing the regions they deem to be inherently subordinate. Thanks to Wikipedia for noting Reichskommissariat Ostland: The Ostland was the "East Land" of Poland that the Nazis wanted to reshuffle - with ethnic Germans in the western sector, Poles in the center, and the Jews pushed off to the east, destination unresolved. The Jews were first detained into camps or executed at random by Einsatzgruppen SS units.
As time went on, methods became available for generating the correct ethnic balance. Some used railroads:
The result was rationalized annihilation:
"Ethnic cleansing works."
We need to listen very carefully to what they say. To which we can only reply:
NEVER AGAIN.
Not even in "free Baluchistan".
