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German Minister's Interview Rips 911 Case Open
Mistranslated Osama bin Laden Video - the German Press Investigates
GUILTY FOR 9-11, SECTION 3: BUSH IN THE OPEN
by Illarion Bykov and Jared Israel
2 Big Mind Jobs On The World - 911's Money Trails To Bonesmen
MAJOR holes in Feds' Tampa mind-controlled hijacker story
General Adbul Rashid Dostum, Northern Alliance Warlord
Bush's Colder War And The New 'Red Scare' By John Pilger The Mirror - London
A White Knight Talking Backwards SPY CASE IN CANADIAN COURTS SUGGESTS US NAVAL OFFICER HAD FOREKNOWLEDGE OF 9-11 by Michael C. Ruppert
Vreeland Letter Written Before 9-11
German Minister's Interview Rips 911 Case Open Rumor Mill News Reading Room Forum
Posted By: Rosalinda 1-16-2
(DRAFT) [Source: Tagesspiegel, Jan. 13] PARTIAL TRANSLATION
The following interview with Von Buelow appeared in the German daily 'Tagesspiegel,' on Jan. 13.
Q: You seem so angry, really upset.
Von Buelow: I can explain what's bothering me: I see that after the horrifying attacks of Sept. 11, all political public opinion is being forced into a direction that I consider wrong.
Q: What do you mean by that?
Von Buelow: I wonder why many questions are not asked. Normally, with such a terrible thing, various leads and tracks appear that are then commented on, by the investigators, the media, the government: Is there something here or not? Are the explanations plausible? This time, this is not the case at all. It already began just hours after the attacks in New York and Washington and--
Q: In those hours, there was horror, and grief.
Von Buelow: Right, but actually it was astounding: There are 26 intelligence services in the U.S.A. with a budget of $30 billion--
Q: More than the German defense budget.
Von Buelow: --which were not able to prevent the attacks. In fact, they didn't even have an inkling they would happen. For 60 decisive minutes, the military and intelligence agencies let the fighter planes stay on the ground, 48 hours later, however, the FBI presented a list of suicide attackers. Within ten days, it emerged that seven of them were still alive.
Q: What, please?
Von Buelow: Yes, yes. And why did the FBI chief take no position regarding contradictions? Where the list came from, why it was false? If I were the chief investigator (state attorney) in such a case, I would regularly go to the public, and give information on which leads are valid and which not.
Q: The U.S. government talked about an emergency situation after the attacks: They said they were in a war. Is it not understandable that one does not tell the enemy everything one knows about him?
Von Buelow: Naturally. But a government which goes to war, must first establish who the attacker, the enemy, is. It has a duty to provide evidence. According to its own admission, it has not been able to present any evidence that would hold up in court.
Q: Some information on the perpetrators has been proven with documents. The suspected leader, Mohammad Atta, left Portland for Boston on the morning of Sept. 11, in order to board the plane that later hit the World Trade Center
Von Buelow: If this Atta was the decisive man in the operation, it's really strange that he took such a risk of taking a plane that would reach Boston such a short time before the connecting flight. Had his flight been a few minutes late, he would not have been in the plane that was hijacked. Why should a sophisticated terrorist do this? One can, by the way, read on CNN (Internet) that none of these names were on the official passenger lists. None of them had gone through the check-in procedures. And why did none of the threatened pilots give the agreed-upon code 7700 over the [Steuerknueppel: STEERING NOB?] to the ground station? In addition: The black boxes which are fire and shock proof, as well as the voice recordings, contain no valuable data--
Q: That sounds like--
Von Buelow: --like assailants who, in their preparations, leave tracks behind them like a herd of stampeding elephants? They made payments with credit cards with their own names; they reported to their flight instructors with their own names. They left behind rented cars with flight manuals in Arabic for jumbo jets. They took with them, on their suicide trip, wills and farewell letters, which fall into the hands of the FBI, because they were stored in the wrong place and wrongly addressed. Clues were left like behind like in a child's game of hide-and-seek, which were to be followed!
There is also the theory of one British flight engineer:
According to this, the steering of the planes was perhaps taken out of the pilots' hands, from outside.
The Americans had developed a method in the 1970s, whereby they could rescue hijacked planes by intervening into the computer piloting [automatic pilot system]. This theory says, this technique was abused in this case. That's a theory....
Q: Which sounds really adventurous, and was never considered.
Von Buelow: You see! I do not accept this theory, but I find it worth considering. And what about the obscure stock transactions? In the week prior to the attacks, the amount of transactions in stocks in American Airlines, United Airlines, and insurance companies, increased 1,200%. It was for a value of $15 billion. Some people must have known something. Who?
Q: Why don't you speculate on who it might have been.
Von Buelow: With the help of the horrifying attacks, the Western mass democracies were subjected to brainwashing. The enemy image of anti-communism doesn't work any more; it is to be replaced by peoples of Islamic belief. They are accused of having given birth to suicidal terrorism.
Q: Brainwashing? That's a tough term.
Von Buelow: Yes? But the idea of the enemy image doesn't come from me. It comes from Zbigniew Brzezinski and Samuel Huntington, two policy-makers of American intelligence and foreign policy. Already in the middle of he 1990s, Huntingon believed, people in Europe and the U.S. needed someone they could hate-- this would strengthen their identification with their own society. And Brzezinski, the mad dog, as adviser to President Jimmy Carter, campaigned for the exclusive right of the U.S. to seize all the raw materials of the world, especially oil and gas.
Q: You mean, the events of Sept. 11--
Von Buelow: --fit perfectly in the concept of the armaments industry, the intelligence agencies, the whole military-industrial-academic complex. This is in fact conspicuous. The huge raw materials reserves of the former Soviet Union are now at their disposal, also the pipeline routes and--
Q: Erich Follach described that at length in {Spiegel}: ``It's a matter of military bases, drugs, oil and gas reserves.''
Von Buelow: I can state: the planning of the attacks was technically and organizationally a master achievement. To hijack four huge airplanes within a few minutes and within one hour, to drive them into their targets, with complicated flight maneuvers! This is unthinkable, without years-long support from secretapparatuses of the state and industry.
Q: You are a conspiracy theorist!
Von Buelow: Yeah, yeah. That's the ridicule heaped [on those raising these questions] by those who would prefer to follow the official, politically correct line. Even investigative journalists are fed propaganda and disinformation. Anyone who doubts that, doesn't have all his marbles! That is your accusation.
Q: Your career actually speaks against the idea that you are not in your right mind. You were already in the 1970s, state secretary in the Defense Ministry; in 1993 you were the SPD [Social Democratic Party] speaker in the Schalk-Golodkowski investigation committee--
Von Buelow: And it all began there! Until that time, I did not have any great knowledge of the work of intelligence agencies. And now we had to take note of a great discrepancy: We shed light on the dealings of the Stasi and other East bloc intelligence agencies in the field of economic criminality, but as soon as we wanted to know something about the activities of the BND [German intelligence] or the CIA, it was mercilessly blocked. No information, no cooperation, nothing! That's when I was first taken aback.
Q: Schalck-Golodkowski mediated, among other things, various business deals abroad. When you looked at his case more closely--
Von Buelow: We found, for example, a clue in Rostock, where Schalck organized his weapons depot. Well, then we happened upon an affiliation of Schalck in Panama, and then we happened upon Manuel Noriega, who was for many years President, drug dealer, and money launderer, all in one, right? And this Noriega was also on the payroll of the CIA, for $200,000 a year. These were things that really made me curious.
Q: You wrote a book on the dealings of the CIA and Co. In the meantime, you have become an expert regarding the strange things related to intelligence services' work.
Von Buelow: ``Strange things'' is the wrong term. What has gone on, and goes on, in the name of intelligence services, are true crimes.
Q: What would you say determines the work of intelligence services?
Von Buelow: So that we don't have any misunderstandings: I find that it makes sense to have intelligence services....
Q: You don't think much of the earlier proposals by the Greens, who wanted to dismantle these agencies?
Von Buelow: No. It is right to take a look behind the scenes. Getting intelligence about the intentions of an enemy, makes sense. It is important when one tries to put oneself into the mind of the enemy. Whoever wants to understand the CIA's methods, has to deal with its main tasks, {covert operations}: below the level of war, and outside international law, foreign states are to be influenced, by organizing insurrections, terrorist attacks, usually combined with drugs and weapons trade, and money laundering. This is essentially very simple: One arms violent people with weapons. Since, however, it must not under any circumstances come out, that there is an intelligence agency behind it, all traces are erased, with tremendous deployment of resources.
I have the impression that this kind of intelligence agency spends 90% of its time this way: creating false leads. So that, if anyone suspects the collaboration of the agencies, he is accused of the sickness of conspiracy madness. The truth often comes out only years later. CIA chief Allen Dulles once said: In case of doubt, I would even lie to the Congress!
Q: The American journalist Seymour M. Hersh, wrote in the {New Yorker,} that even some people in the CIA and government assumed, that certain leads had been laid in order to confuse the investigators. Who, Herr von Buelow, would have done this?
Von Buelow: I don't know that either. How should I? I simply use my common sense, and-- See: The terrorists behaved in such a way to attract attention. And as practicing Muslims, they were in a strip-tease bar, and, drunken, stuck dollar bills into the panty of the dancer.
Q: Things like that also happen.
Von Buelow: It may be. As a lone fighter, I cannot prove anything, that's beyond my capabilities. I have real difficulties, however, to imagine that all this all sprung out ofthe mind of an evil man in his cave.
Q: Mr. von Buelow, you yourself say that you are alone in your criticism. Formerly, you were part of the political establishment, now you are an outsider.
Von Buelow: That is a problem sometimes, but one gets used to it. By the way, I know a lot of people, including very influential ones, who agree with me, but only in whispers, never publicly.
Q: Do you still have contact with old SPD companions, such as Egon Bahr and former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt?
Von Buelow: There are no close contacts any more. I wantedto go to the last SPD party congress, but I was sick.
Q: Can it be, Mr. von Buelow, that you are a mouthpiece for typical anti-Americanism?
Von Buelow: Nonsense, this has absolutely nothing to do with anti-Americanism. I am a great admirer of this great, open, free society, and always have been. I studied in the U.S.
Q: How did you get the idea that there could be a link between the attacks and the American intelligence agencies?
Von Buelow: Do you remember the first attack on the WorldTrade Center in 1993?
Q: Six people were killed and over a thousand wounded, by a bomb explosion.
Von Buelow: In the middle was the bombmaker, a former Egyptian officer. He had pulled together some Muslims for the attack. They were snuck into the country by the CIA, despite a State Department ban on their entry. At the same time, the leader of the band was an FBI informant.
And he made a deal with the authorities: At the last minute, the dangerous explosive material would be replaced by a harmless powder.
The FBI did not stick to the deal. The bomb exploded, so to speak, with the knowledge of the FBI. The official story of the crime was quickly found: The criminals were evil Muslims.
Q: At the time Soviet soldiers marched into Afghanistan, you were in the cabinet of Helmut Schmidt. What was it like?
Von Buelow: The Americans pushed for trade sanctions, they demanded the boycott of the Olympic games in Moscow....
Q.... which the German government followed...
Von Buelow: And today we know: It was the strategy of the American security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, to destabilize the Soviet Union from neighboring Muslim countries They lured the Russians into Afghanistan, and then prepared for them a hell on earth, their Vietnam. With decisive support of the U.S. intelligence agencies, at least 30,000 Muslim fighters were trained in Afghanistan and Pakistan, a bunch of good-for-nothings and fanatics who were, and still are today, ready for anything.
And one of them is Osama bin Laden. I wrote years ago: ` `It was out of this brood, that the Taliban grew up in Afghanistan, who had been brought up in the Koran schools financed by American and Saudi funds, the Taliban who are now terrorizing the country and destroying it
Q: Even though you say, for the U.S. it was a matter of raw materials in the region, the starting point for the U.S. aggression, was the terrorist attack which cost thousands of human lives.
Von Buelow: Completely true. One must always keep this gruesome act in mind. Nonetheless, in the analysis of political processes, I am allowed to look and see who has advantages and disadvantages, and what is coincidental. When in doubt, it is always worthwhile to take a look at a map, where are raw materials resources, and the routes to them? Then lay a map of civil wars and conflicts on top of that --they coincide. The same is the case with the third map: nodal points of the drug trade.
Where this all comes together, the American intelligence services are not far away. By the way, the Bush family is linked to oil, gas, and weapons trade, through the bin Laden family.
Q: What do you think of the Bin Laden films?
Von Buelow: When one is dealing with intelligence services, one can imagine manipulations of the highest quality. Hollywood could provide these techniques. I consider the videos inappropriate as evidence.
Q: You believe the CIA is capable of anything, [wouldn't stop at anything].
Von Buelow: The CIA, in the state interests of the U.S., does not have to abide by any law in interventions abroad, is not bound by international law; only the President gives orders.
And when funds are cut, peace is on the horizon, then a bomb explodes somewhere. Thus it is proven, that you can't do without the intelligence services; and that the critics are {nuts,} as Father Bush called them, Bush who was once CIA head and President.
You have to see that the U.S. spends $30 billion on intelligence services, and $13 billion on anti-drug work. And what comes out of it?
The chief of a special unit of the strategic anti-drug work declared, in despair, after 30 years of service, that in every big, important drug case, the CIA came in and took it out of my hands. (Rosalinda: Michael Levin)
Q: Do you criticize the German government for its reaction after Sept. 11?
Von Buelow: No. To assume that the government were independent in these questions, would be naive.
Q: Herr von Buelow, what will you do now?
Von Buelow: Nothing. My task is concluded by saying, it could not have been that way [according to the official story] Search for the truth!
http://www.rumormillnews.net/cgi-bin/config.pl?read=16890
By Joe Vialls 1-17-2
In his interview with the German daily "Tagesspiegel" on January 13th, former German Secretary of Defence Andreas Von Buelow made the following statement:-
"There is also the theory of one British flight engineer: according to this, the steering of the planes was perhaps taken out of the pilots' hands, from outside. The Americans had developed a method in the 1970s, whereby they could rescue hijacked planes by intervening into the computer piloting [automatic pilot system]. This theory says, this technique was abused in this case..."
Not quite so much a theory as might first appear. When I released the above report about "Home Run" remote control in October 2001, I mentioned that one European flag carrier was aware of the technology, though at that precise point in time I thought it prudent not to name the actual airline:-
"As long ago as the early nineties, a major European flag carrier acquired the information and was seriously alarmed that one of its own aircraft might be "rescued" by the Americans without its authority. Accordingly, this flag carrier completely stripped the American flight control computers out of its entire fleet, and replaced them with a home grown version. These aircraft are now effectively impregnable to penetration by Home Run, but that is more than can be said for the American aircraft fleet..."
The European flag carrier which completely stripped the American flight computers out of its aircraft was Lufthansa, the German national airline. Bearing in mind his former posts as Secretary of Defence and Minister of Science and Technology, Herr Von Buelow would have known all about this mammoth but secretive task.
How very clever (and discreet) of Von Buelow to sort of "drop the information" into the middle of an interview about the 9/11 attacks!
Reproduced gratefully from Rense Reports
http://www.rense.com
2 Big Mind Jobs On The World - 911's
Money Trails To Bonesmen
By Roy Sawyer c2news@hushmail.com 1-10-2
As this U.S. investigator and a small number of independent research journalist retrace the financial trails connecting the (911) attack and the other acts of bio terrorism; with evidence that the anthrax was made in this country, the overwhelming evidences points to the White House using some members inside the CIA, FBI, NSA, Justice and Treasury departments.
Those involved that would have profited financially are President Bush's German (Skull and Bones) AKA Bonesmen and the German-based global banking conglomerate Deutsche bank-Alex Brown.
The combined firm is the single largest bank in Europe.
This Bank played several key roles in the events connected to the September 11 attacks.
Those responsible for the (911) and Bio attacks have used this mind control act of distraction before.
Mind Job #1
In 1933, shortly after Hitler's appointment as Chancellor of Germany, the German Parliament was set on fire by the Nazis, but the Communists were blamed for this act of terrorism against the German people.
Following the Nazi-inspired arson, Hitler exploited the outrage of the German citizens to arrogate to himself dictatorial powers, which he promised would be used to rid Germany of Communists.
The next day, Chancellor Hitler demanded from the German cabinet an emergency decree which would enable him to deal decisively with the domestic crisis. President von Hindenburg signed the decree "for the Protection of the people and the State."
The grandfather of President George W. Bush (Skull & Bones, AKA Bonesmen in the year 1968) was Prescott Bush (Skull & Bones of 1917), and his great grand father was George Herbert Walker.
Prescott Bush and George Herbert (Bert) Walker were directors of the London-affiliated New York banking house of Brown Brothers-Harriman and its various fronts, which funded and directed the military-industrial complex behind Hitler and the Nazi revolution. In 1919, George Herbert Walker had organized W.A. Harriman & Co which merged with the British Brown Brothers in 1931.
In 1924, Averell Harriman (Skull & Bones, 1913) and Fritz Thyssen, the German industrialist who began funding Hitler in 1923, set up the Union Banking Corp. in New York to handle funds supplied to it through Thyssen's Dutch bank for American investment.
Prescott Bush, who had been an officer of the W.A. Harriman bank since 1926, was a director of the Union Banking Corp from 1934 through 1943.
According to government documents, "all of the shares of the Union Banking Corp., were held for the benefit of members of the Thyssen family."
In 1942, the U.S. government investigative report that surfaced during 1945 Senate hearings found that the Union Bank, with Prescott Bush on the board, was an "interlocking concern" with the German Steel Trust that had produced:
50% of Nazi Germany's pig iron 41% of Nazi Germany's universal plate 36% of Nazi Germany's heavy plate 38% of Nazi Germany's galvanized sheet 45% of Nazi Germany's pipes and tubes 22% of Nazi Germany's wire 35% of Nazi Germany's explosives
Mind Job # 2
A major French publication (Le Figaro) was the first to report that Bin Laden meets with a CIA agent in a Dubai Hospital.
It is reported that during the month of July Bin Laden's was visited by the local CIA representative in United Arab Emirates who was seen going into Bin Laden's room and later reported leaving the country after July 14 going back to Washington, after some many information meetings.
Dubai, is one of the seven emirates of the Federation of the, North-East of Abi-Dhabi.
This city, population 350,000, was the backdrop of a secret meeting between Osama bin Laden and the local CIA agent.
A partner of the administration of the Hospital in Dubai claims that Bin Laden stayed at this hospital between the 4th and 14th of July.
He was admitted to this American Hospital with four bodyguards, as well as a male Algerian nurse.
The American funded Hospital is a glass and marble building situated between the Al-Garhoud and Al-Maktoum bridges.
Each floor of the hospital has two "VIP" suites and fifteen rooms.
The Saudi billionaire Osama bin Laden was treated at this well-respected Urology department run by Dr. Terry Callaway, gallstone and infertility specialist.
Communication between the CIA and Bin Laden began in early 1979 when, as a representative of his family's business, bin Laden began recruiting volunteers for the Afghan resistance against the Russian Army.
FBI investigators examining the embassy bombing sites in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam discovered that evidence led to military explosives from the US Army, and that these explosives had been delivered three years earlier to Afghan Arab rebels, currently known as the Taliban.
The infamous international volunteer brigades involved side by side with Bin Laden's Al Qaida during the Afghan war against the Russian Army.
The Deutsche Bank Alex Brown
A.B. 'Buzzy' Krongard - The current Executive Director of the (CIA) Central Intelligence Agency was the former Chairman of the investment bank Deutsche Bank Alex Brown as well as the former Vice Chairman of the Board of Bankers Trust.
Krongard rejoined the CIA in 1998 as counsel to a CIA Director George Tenet.
He has now been promoted to CIA Executive Director in 2001 by President Bush in March.
(911) was used as a cattalos for the bonesmen and the German Deutsche Bank to profit off the blood and terror of people in the summer 2001 as well as aidding the agenda to push the world into a New World Order.
A September 21, 2001 story by the Israeli Herzliyya an international policy institute for counter- terrorism, entitled ,
Black Tuesday: "The World's Largest Insider Trading Scam"
Documents the following trades connected to the September 11 attacks:
Between September 6 and 7, the Chicago Board Options Exchange saw purchases of 4,744 put options on United Airlines, but only 396 call options.
Some 4,500 of these options were bought by people with advance knowledge of the imminent attacks, these 'insiders' would have profited by more than $5 million. On September 10, 4,516 put options on American Airlines were bought on the Chicago exchange, compared to only 748 calls.
There was no public news before (911) that would point to a justifiable reason for this trading activity.
Some 4,000 of these options trades for the 'insiders' would gain more than $4 million.
The levels of put options purchased above were more than six times higher than normal.
No similar trading on airlines stocks occurred on the Chicago exchange in the days immediately preceding Black Tuesday after the reopening.
Morgan Stanley Dean Whittier & Co., which occupied 22 floors of the World Trade Center, saw 2,157 of its October $45 put options bought in the three trading days before Black Tuesday; this compares to an average of 27 contracts per day before September 6.
Morgan Stanley's share price fell from $48.90 to $42.50 in the aftermath of the attacks. 2,000 of these options contracts were bought based upon knowledge of the approaching attacks, their purchasers profited by at least $1.2 million.
Merrill Lynch & Co., with headquarters near the World Trade Center, saw 12,215 October $45 put options bought in the four trading days before the attacks; the previous average volume in those shares had been 252 contracts per day; a 1200% increase!
When trading resumed, Merrill's shares fell from $46.88 to $41.50; assuming that 11,000 option contracts were bought by 'insiders' their profits would have been some $5.5 million. European regulators are examining trades in Germany's Munich Re, Switzerland's Swiss Re, and AXA of France, all major reinsurers with exposure to the Black Tuesday disaster.
"FTW Note: AXA also owns more than 25% of American Airlines stock making the attacks a double whammy for them."
On September 29, 2001 - A cover-up story that has gone unnoticed by the major media - the San Francisco Chronicle reported: "Investors have yet to collect more than $2.5 million in profits they made trading options in the stock of United Airlines before the Sept. 11, terrorist attacks, according to a source familiar with the trades and market data.
The uncollected money raises suspicions that the investors - whose identities and nationalities have not been made public - had advance knowledge of the strikes.
The suspension of trading for four days after the attacks made it impossible for some not to cash-out quickly and claim their profits before investigators began looking at unusual stock trading.
October series options for UAL Corp. were purchased in highly unusual volumes three trading days before the terrorist attacks for a total outlay of $2,070; investors bought the option contracts, each representing 100 shares, for 90 cents each; total represents 230,000 shares.
Those options are now selling at more than $12 each. There are still 2,313 so-called 'put' options outstanding valued at $2.77 million and representing 231,300 shares according to the Options Clearinghouse Corp."
The source familiar with the United trades identified Deutsche Bank Alex Brown, the American investment banking arm of German giant Deutsche Bank, as the investment bank used to purchase some of these options. This operation was managed by Deutsche Bank Alex linked to the current Executive Director of the (CIA) AB Krongard.
As reported in other news stories, Deutsche Bank was also the hub of insider trading activity connected to the German Munich Re, Switzerland's Swiss Re, and AXA of France; just before the attacks.
The current crisis in America extends far beyond Osama bin Laden's terrorist network to the larger terrorist network of elite Anglo-Americans the AKA Bonesmen -- who financed the Nazi terrorist machine now and in the past; whose objective remains the extermination of all individuals deemed unworthy of survival in the New World Order.
This story is for the people's freedom and all information sources are verifiable.
We all need more than one God in this horrifying time in history; let all the Gods, Goddess, Ladies and Lords; the followers of Islam, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism and Judaism; all faiths need to unite and stop this evil New World Order.
By Roy Sawyer c2news@hushmail.com CEO, Editor And Chief Reporter Con2versial News and Media Network Inc.
Reproduced gratefully from from the excellent conspiracy site: Rense Reports
MainPage http://www.rense.com
From: TOP_VIEW <top_viewer@y...> Date: Tue Jan 8, 2002 10:59 am Subject: To:
x ** TOP_VIEW ** x The Bigger Picture
MAJOR holes in Feds' Tampa mind-controlled hijacker story
MORE excellent research and analysis on the WHOLE story about what REALLY happened in Tampa/St. Pete on Saturday, when 15-year-old Charles Bishop -- a well-liked, friendly STRAIGHT-A honor-student KNOWN to be HEAVILY patriotic; who avowed he'd join the USAF after 911 as he sported a US AIR FORCE T-shirt -- stole a small plane from Clearwater airport in front of his FLIGHT INSTRUCTOR, MOTHER AND GRANDMOTHER, and ended up crashing it into Tampa's B of A building, causing his own death.
The spook divisions of the Air Force are KNOWN to be HEAVILY involved in major mind-control activities, using a wide variety of devastatingly effective techniques to mold, condition, brainwash, manipulate and otherwise CONTROL minds -- especially of highly-impressionable children and young teenagers, as was Charles Bishop.
All day Saturday, Feds couldn't tell us often enough that the incident had NOTHING to do with any "terrorism".
By SUNDAY, Fed spin-meisters were claiming to have found a note in the unfortunate mind-controlled hijacker's pocket, which SUPPOSEDLY stated he SUPPORTED bin Laden.
(Who WROTE this alleged note, of course, is VERY MUCH in question.)
By MONDAY, it was claimed the INDESTRUCTIBLE piece of paper was found in the burnt wreckage of the Cessna. And the Feds couldn't tell us often enough that this was an incident of "domestic terrorism", and that there are sure to be many more.
And if you believe THAT, these guys have two 110-story buildings in lower Manhattan they'd love to sell you, too. http://www.nomorefakenews.com/ No More Fake News by Jon Rappoport
TUESDAY, JANUARY 8. As one astute observer said, "If a completely normal person commits a crime, people enter into a confusion. They think that ANYONE could commit a crime, and in these times, they also think they should report all 'suspicious' behavior..."
ADD: The more (or less) we learn about Charles Bishop, the 15-year old who stole a small pane and crashed it into the B of A building in Tampa, the higher the paradoxes pile up.
ADD: At his former school, he was a straight-A student. He carried the American flag in daily processions. He sang patriotic songs with passion, noted his teachers.
ADD: He entered patriotic essays in contests sponsored by groups like Daughters of the American Revolution.
ADD: After 9/11, he wore a US Air Force T-shirt to school and said he would become a fighter pilot.
ADD: His flight instructor wrote a letter of recommendation to get Bishop into an honors student travel program to Australia. Bishop had just been accepted.
ADD: The boy wanted to learn to fly so much that he washed planes at the training school to earn $$ credits for his lessons.
ADD: This is hardly the story of a boy who decides to kill himself in a plane, who writes a suicide note saying he supports bin Laden.
ADD: This is a set-up.
ADD: Now we are told that MacDill AFB, command central for the whole US-Afghan war, does not have any fighter planes. In fact, it has few security defenses at all. Some machine guns and the like. That's why fighter jets had to be scrambled out of Homestead, 200 miles away.
ADD: This whole story smells to high heaven.
ADD: But one result is, the public becomes more suspicious of "possible terrorist activity" by Americans, even the most "normal" Americans. Which adds to the climate of fear. Which seems to justify surrendering even more freedoms in return for tighter protection.
******
Interview with Aaron McGruder, creator of "The Boondocks" - who calls Bush a moron
THIS IS OUTRAGEOUSLY GOOD!
From: http://www.salon.com/people/feature/2001/12/07/mcgruder/index_np.html
Aaron McGruder, creator of "The Boondocks"
The controversial cartoonist calls Bush a moron, says Americans shouldn't worry about bin Laden and says he might leave the country.
By Stephen Lemons
Dec. 7, 2001
Long before the war in Afghanistan becomes just a twinkle in the eye of an old general, Aaron McGruder may well be living in exile in Canada. The 27-year-old creator of the daily hip-hop comic "The Boondocks," which features the escapades of a group of young African-American kids growing up in the almost-all-white suburbs, has wrenched the torch of scathing satire from the Boomer King of Cartoon Controversy, Garry Trudeau, and set off on an Olympic-style sprint for infamy. Since Sept. 11, McGruder has been setting fire to the funny pages with incendiary panels of political humor mocking everything from Attorney General Ashcroft's anti-terrorist dragnet and the public's fear of anthrax to FBI wiretaps and the nation's ongoing orgy of patriotism.
McGruder's 4-year-old strip does garner laughs, but not without an accompanying sting. The point man in the strip is the pint-size Black Panther-in-spirit Huey Freeman, who recently has been as busy as an anarchist at a WTO meeting. Among his many subversive acts, Freeman has called the FBI tip line to report Ronald Reagan as aiding and abetting terrorism, suggested that the terrorists may be making their bucks these days manufacturing flags and has pointed out the parallels between George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden during a Thanksgiving meal prayer. About the only thing Huey hasn't done yet is strap on a Kalashnikov and set off for Kandahar. But now that John Walker's bearded mug is on the front page of dailies worldwide, anything's possible.
A number of the 250 publications that carry "The Boondocks" have taken exception to the sardonic sedition of McGruder's characters. The New York Daily News dropped the strip for about a month and a half, Newsday in Long Island chose not to run Sept. 11-inspired strips the first week they started coming out and the Dallas Morning News has moved the strip to a separate section altogether from other comics. None of this fazed McGruder. In response, he temporarily "replaced" the strip with "The Adventures of Flagee and Ribbon," where the two symbols sing the National Anthem and talk tough about the U.S. kicking tail.
Angry letter writers have suggested McGruder emigrate, and McGruder admits that he's so disgusted with his native land he may eventually do just that. Recently, he tore himself away from ranting at the tube in his Los Angeles digs long enough to rant to Salon about the state of the nation.
Your strips post-9/11 have touched a raw nerve with some folks. Did you anticipate all the attention you've gotten because of them?
It's become a story because of timing. You know, the New York Daily News temporarily pulls the strip, and in the middle of this wartime situation, it became a story about freedom of speech and all that. The reality is I get pulled all the time from various newspapers for different reasons. And it's been that way since the strip started.
CLIP
Why did you decide to target the post-Sept. 11 displays of patriotism in the strip, and essentially mock them with those two characters Flagee and Ribbon?
Because it wasn't genuine. I thought it was very faddish, and there was no real weight behind it. You know, we just came off an election that was a mess. We still don't know if the president won the election. We do know that he got less votes nationwide. There's no question about that. And he may not even have won, legitimately, the electoral contest. There were reports of the massive disenfranchisement of African-Americans in Florida, which went totally unreported in this country, but was covered widely by the foreign press. There were black people in Florida yelling and screaming, trying to get somebody to pay attention to them. They were saying that they had their rights taken away from them, and they were not allowed to vote. And nobody in this country cared. Where was the flag then?
Where was this embracing of American ideals when people had their rights ripped from them so unjustly? We have a president who was appointed by the Supreme Court, and there was none of this talk about freedom and love of country at that time. So I feel like the deaths of 4,000 people had really nothing to do with love of country or not. This country made giant mistakes and failed to protect its people. We don't need to be rallying around the government and supporting it, we need to be holding it accountable and being very critical so this type of thing doesn't happen again. So there are a number of reasons why I was uncomfortable with the whole flag thing.
A lot of folks would argue that no matter what our disagreements are internally, if we're attacked from the outside, we have to come together and support the current administration even if we have problems with it. How do you respond to that argument?
I don't think that's true. Look, they're telling us these people are bad because they hate us, and they hate our way of life. And they hate our way of life because they hate freedom, and they hate the fact that we have freely elected officials. This is what the president said. Well, he wasn't elected! We really have to think about that. Considering that people around the world, other people, people "over there," "bad" people will always try to do bad things, that's kind of outside of your control. The only thing you can be responsible for is what goes on here. The American people have no control over what the military does. We have no say in American foreign policy. None. The only thing we can exercise some will on is what happens here domestically. So I think the focus is wrong.
I don't think the American people should be worried at all about Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein or anybody, because our government is going to do what it wants to do to them regardless of what we want them to do or not. All we can control is what happens here. And what happened here is what allowed those attacks to take place. The intelligence community failed. Security failed. The military failed. Everybody failed at the same time. I can be really nice to them and say, "You guys really messed up and need to check yourself." Or I could be not nice and say, "You know, I don't think it's really probable that all the systems can fail at the same time, which means something far more insidious took place." People are really afraid to get into that.
Are you suggesting some collusion on the part of our government in the Sept. 11 attacks?
I'm not suggesting that. I'm saying I'm not going there. I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they're idiots, and not that they had something far more nefarious in mind. However, history does teach us that the government has done things like that before, particularly with Pearl Harbor, where there's an overwhelming amount of evidence that [FDR] was aware of it and lured the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor. He literally left it undefended. There's some new evidence that has just come out about the CIA planning terrorist attacks on U.S. soil in the '60s and how they were going to set up Castro for it in order to get America behind a war in Cuba. That's not even a conspiracy theory. The CIA drew up the plans, even though it never happened. So if I were to go that route, I wouldn't be crazy. But I'm not going to go that route. I'm just going to say that the American people need to be concerned about what happens here. Forget what happens overseas. That's out of your control. Be concerned with what happens here. Because honestly, if our game is tight here, we can't be attacked. If our intelligence community and airports and military are doing what they're supposed to do, then we should be relatively OK.
This reminds me of the strip where Huey calls the FBI terrorist hotline, tells them he's got a tip on someone who helped the terrorists, and it's Ronald Reagan. Do you think there's been enough coverage of the support our leaders have given the mujahedin in the past?
The media have reported on it. But it's not so much [that] they said it or not, it's the way they've said it. When the news wants to tell you something is important, they put dramatic theme music behind it. They scare you into watching the story. Like, anthrax -- very, very important. Pay attention, it's scary. When they report on the U.S. creation of these people, these terrorists, it's all very matter of fact. Like, oh yeah, we gave them a whole bunch of money, and now on to sports. So a lot of it is not necessarily an issue of it being covered up. In fact, it can't be covered up -- it's well known. But to me, it's not given the right emphasis. The question is to what extent is the government culpable for creating the people who have done this? And to what extent should they be held responsible for the actions of terrorists that they have supported in the past? That's what this is all about. I'm talking about Ronald Reagan, George Bush Sr., their whole crew, up until the crew that's in there today. After the embassy attacks in Africa, they were well aware of Osama bin Laden. They were well aware of his location in Afghanistan, his protection by the Taliban, and this Bush administration gave them $43 million this year! And nobody talks about it, and nobody holds them accountable, and that's wrong.
To be fair, though, I believe even the Clinton administration supported the Taliban in the beginning because they were viewed as a stabilizing force.
Well, to hell with Clinton, too. I'm not a Democrat. I don't give a damnabout Clinton. Hold these people responsible! You know, Democratic and Republican administrations alike have supported individuals and regimes that have slaughtered millions across the globe. And they need to be held accountable for that.
Your depiction of the news media in your strip makes it out to be almost a cheerleader for the government. Is that a fair assessment of your opinion?
They've absolutely been playing cheerleader for the government, to the extent that even they've had to admit it. I watch news shows, and they're like, "Yeah, we're treating Bush differently now." I don't want the news to be patriotic. I don't want to see flags on the lapels of the anchors. I don't want any of that. I want the news delivered unbiased. I thought that was the whole point with journalism. They've thrown that out the window. And because they've all thrown it out the window at the same time, it's supposedly acceptable. No! It's ridiculous. I don't need to see that.
This is war. It's serious. People are dying on both sides. How dare the media just give in when the government says don't air any of Osama bin Laden's video messages! What is this? He's going to rub his nose and something is going to blow up over here? Like terrorists don't have satellite television, and they can't watch foreign news and get the same messages. That's insane. It's totally and thoroughly irresponsible behavior by the entire institution of the media.
Don't hold back, Aaron.
I won't. I was talking to some television journalists about this who gave me some interesting insight. Right now, they're scared to be critical of the government. Everything is about access. Reporters are afraid that the administration will cut them off. Decades ago, the mark of a good reporter was how much dirt you could dig up. Like the Watergate scandal. They were actively trying to find out what was going on and report the truth to people. Now it's the exact opposite. Nobody wants to say anything that makes the government mad, and that's ridiculous. Also, after the attacks, now people think it's unpatriotic to say anything critical of the government.
Come on, Bush is a moron. There is no doubt about it. And they really didn't have a problem going there before. But now, nobody wants to call him on it. People get excited because he can speak well. What world is this? When we're happy that the president can articulate well. That's something they only used to say about black men. "Oh, you speak so well." That's nuts. You don't say that about the president. We're supposed to have higher standards. The media are a big part of shaping the perception of the country, and right now, they're not asking the tough questions. They're not exploring, for example, the Bush administration's financial ties with Afghanistan. The fact that George Bush Sr. has financial investments in the area, and those investments become much more valuable when the Taliban government is removed. I'm not talking about getting into a whole bunch of conspiracies. Report what's actually happening, and challenge the government to explain itself. Why didn't they ask more questions? Like, how did this happen? How did four planes get hijacked in one day? And who got fired? That's the question I want to know the answer to, because a whole bunch of people should have gotten fired for what happened on Sept. 11. Report on the fact that G. W. Bush is sealing presidential papers. Indefinitely. His, his father's, Reagan's. It's totally unconstitutional. Why don't they talk about that?
On the topic of George W's I.Q., I think that idea is pretty threatening to people right now, because like it or not, we're stuck with him.
Yes, but living in denial doesn't help the situation. We have to confront the very scary fact that the president is a moron. He's really dumb. He's got some really smart people around him, and people weren't afraid to say that before. They said it in a nice way, but they said it. It was like, he's dumb, but he's got Cheney and he's got Powell, so we'll probably be OK. But now they act like he's done something great. You know, he's called [the terrorists] "evil." That's really some childish stuff. They're bad, we're good. That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. That's so incredibly stupid. What do you think they do? They call us "evil." I just see so many parallels between both sides in this war, and it's really uncomfortable. You know, they kill civilians, we kill civilians. They say they're justified, we say the same thing. This is gang warfare on an international level. That's all it is. And when gang warfare happens in American cities, we say it's wrong. When somebody loads a gun, goes 20 blocks and kills the guy who killed his brother, it's not justifiable homicide or self-defense, it's murder and we put people in jail for it. Why is it acceptable that we do it now?
Do you support the war at all?
I don't support the killing of innocent people, and that's what's happening. What's worse is that we're killing innocent people out of retribution for the killing of innocent people. It's wrong. It's really wrong.
But assuming that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida are responsible, we have to go in and get them. How do we go in and get them without taking over that country?
I don't know. But I would ask, how many bombs can we drop to bring these people back? We can't drop enough bombs to bring 4,000 people back, and we can't drop enough bombs to ensure that it never happens again. Is it really about Osama bin Laden, or are we narrowing this? The people that hijacked the planes and crashed them are dead. If there's a terrorist network or a man responsible, yes, we should get them, but when you construct it like a police action or an investigation, and not like a war, then you're forced to respect the lives of innocents, even if it's a pain in the ass. I say it's not worth innocent people dying, even if it takes years and you have to keep sending SEAL teams or whatever in there. What the hell? That's what they're trained to do. That's why they exist. Drop them in there to get one guy. F-18s exist to wipe out towns. It may take longer the other way, but that's too bad.
But I'm sure you've seen pictures of Germany after World War II, and that country was flattened. Japan too. There were countless innocent lives lost.
World War II was 60 years ago. I mean, just in terms of technology, we're not fighting wars the same way. They had special ops, but it was the beginnings of special ops. They didn't have satellites that could listen to a conversation from space or pinpoint and read a newspaper headline from miles in the air. We didn't have that. You went to war, carpet-bombed and a whole lot of civilians died. And you know what? World War II was fucked up. How many millions of people died good and bad? Could World War II have been fought differently? I don't know.
There are few wars where innocent people don't die.
I don't know why this had to become a war. A war on whom? This feels like the war on drugs. When does it end? When you declare war on Japan or Germany, you know you can stop when those countries are flattened. When you declare war against the word "terrorism," when is that over? What does that mean? Stopping terrorism is like stopping rape or burglary, it's an individual action. Anyone with a gun can go out and commit an act of terrorism, even without a political affiliation. It never ends. So it's like the war on drugs, and what has that accomplished? Not a goddamn thing but a whole lot of black men in jail for nonviolent crimes, millions of dollars spent and nothing else. And that's what the war on terrorism is going to do -- we're going to lose countless amounts of money, people are going to die and get locked up, but that's it. There's going to be no good coming out of it. We're going to lose our civil rights, and they're going to be gone forever.
You don't buy the argument that the curtailing of certain civil liberties is temporary, that it's been necessary in previous wars, and that eventually those rights will be restored?
It's not temporary. Once you give up rights, they're not going to give them back. This is a war that will never end. When are they going to say they've defeated terrorism? No one is stupid enough to say that. Because then when something blows up, they look like dickheads. They can never again come out and say America is safe. They'd be idiots if they did. So given that they've set the situation up as a war they can't win, they're never giving the rights back. Literally, someone will have to be elected who doesn't agree with this shit and gives us our rights back. Someone, I don't know who, will have to get into power and say, "You know, this was all bullshit, and we're changing the laws."
What do you think we'll have to go through for that to happen?
America will really have to understand how corrupt its system is, and they'll have to get so fed up that they're ready to make change. And I don't think that'll happen because the media are so in line with the government and so invested in the status quo. We have, essentially, a worthless democracy. I hate to sound so extreme, but things are that bad. There's nothing we have to share with the rest of the world. We don't even have one man, one vote. And we have so much legal corruption in our political system that no one even thinks about it anymore.
You say that, but would you want to live anywhere else?
I tell you what, I visited Canada, and I liked it. I liked it a lot. This idea that there's no better place in the world to live, I don't buy that.
CLIP
Beast of the Month - December 2001
General Adbul Rashid Dostum, Northern Alliance Warlord
"I yam an anti-Christ..." John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) of The Sex Pistols, "Anarchy in the UK"
"A carpet of gold or you'll get a carpet of bombs." What Taliban representatives were reportedly told in August 2001 by US negotiators over a Caspian Sea oil pipeline, according to Bin Laden: The Forbidden Truth, by French authors Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie
November 2001 was a month of Thanksgivings in the USA, where things slowly got back to normal. Temptation Island was on television. Sports fans stopped feeling sorry for New Yorkers and rooted for those Damn Yankees to lose. And the US military mercilessly pounded to rubble another Third World country that got uppity to its edicts.
To believe the war on Afghanistan is a "war against evil" and not one of mammon requires one to ignore eagerness of the Bush Team (in both government and the oil industry) to do business with the Taliban - eager, that is, until the Taliban made it clear that they weren't going to let them swindle Afghanistan's resources. When that message was understood, the US planned an early October attack on Afghanistan, according to the BBC's George Arney (whose source was former Pakistani Foreign Secretary Niaz Naik, who claims he was told of the plans by US officials) and the UK Guardian. Oddly, though this war was being prepared for, no mass propaganda campaign against Afghanistan was waged before 911, which made the September 11 attacks very convenient. Despite the popular refrain of "Everything has changed," it appears that US foreign policy didn't change in the least thanks to 911: the Afghanistan campaign began in early October, exactly as planned during the summer.
In any case, the Taliban and their military forces quickly retreated on November 10 - in a timing that suspiciously coincided with China's acceptance in the WTO. This was a major victory for the United States and Northern Alliance forces, and an even bigger defeat for the Taliban. Whether it was a victory for the Afghani people, however, remains to be seen.
The repressive nature of the Taliban leadership has long been condemned in The Konformist, and their brand of twisted morality (from their treatment of women and non-Muslims to their destruction of ancient Buddha statues) will not be defended here. However, the Northern Alliance - while having some noble leaders, including the late Ahmad Shah Masood - are loaded with brutal thugs that have no moral superiority to Mullah Mohammad Omar and his gang.
The Northern Alliance conquests began with the takeover of Mazar-i- Sharif by forces led by General Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Uzbekian warlord and The Konformist Beast of the Month. He, more than perhaps anyone else, represents the dubious ethical choice that the US has made in siding with the Northern Alliance. As Robert Fisk noted in The UK Independent:
General Rashid Dostum, our hero now that he has recaptured Mazar-i- Sharif, is in the habit of punishing his soldiers by tying them to tank tracks and then driving the tanks around his barracks' square to turn them into mincemeat. You wouldn't have thought this, would you, when you heard the jubilant reports of General Dostum's victory on Monday night?
No, you wouldn't. You also wouldn't hear much about the deeds by other NA forces. India's IANS reported of eyewitness accounts that Northern Alliance forces killed around 300 Pakistani and Arab fighters in Kabul, besides hundreds of Taliban supporters who had surrendered. (If anything, these numbers appear to be conservative estimates.) "They were slaughtering people," one eyewitness named Ebad-ur-Rehman reported. "I could have been among the deceased, but I saved myself by getting my long beard shaved." (Men found with long beards were regularly killed, as they were suspected Taliban sympathizers.) He added:
"Whoever could not speak Pushtu or Persian was killed on the spot. Whoever they found to be Arab or Pakistani they sprayed with bullets... There was a hue and cry in the streets. The jubilant alliance troops entered any house they wanted. They raped and dishonoured Afghan women and even minor girls... "I don't know much about other areas, but there was no law in Kabul. The alliance troops were looting even personal belongings like jackets and boots... They were beating and spitting on the bodies of Taliban soldiers. I personally saw that the Northern Alliance forces brought foreign media cameramen and forced men to get their beards shaved and women to remove burqas so the cameramen could record the scenes."
Of course, the actual number of casualties isn't known. Part of the reason is that the Kabul office of Al Jazeera (the Arab satellite news service that had been publicly attacked by the Bush Team for its independent coverage of the Afghan War) was conveniently destroyed by an American missile attack just as the NA invasion began. The Pentagon claims the attack on Al Jazeera was an unfortunate accident.
Those with any sense of history shouldn't be surprised by the widespread massacres in Kabul. As Fisk put it, "from 1992 to 1996, the Northern Alliance was a symbol of massacre, systematic rape, and pillage. Which is why we - and I include the US State Department - welcomed the Taliban when they arrived in Kabul. The Northern Alliance left the city in 1996 with 50,000 dead behind it. Now its members are our foot soldiers."
But the massacre of Kabul pales to what happened in November at Mazar- i-Sharif under the nose of General Dostum. The stage was set as his forces invaded the city on November 9 (curiously, the mirror image of 9-11 in date.) The International Committee of the Red Cross reported it had found 400 to 600 bodies, apparent victims of summary execution following the attack.
This was only the beginning. The real slaughter began on November 25, and lasted until the end of the month, when US, British, and Dostum's Northern Alliance forces joined together to slaughter 400 to 800 Taliban POWs in the Qala-i-Janghi prison fortress outside the city, with less than one hundred surviving the slayings. What made this gross violation of the Geneva Convention so notable wasn't the number of deaths (which are still 400 to 800 too many) or the savagery of the slayings (though the slayings were quite ruthless) but the shamelessness in openly flaunting international law by the forces feigning to represent them.
This is the real scandal: there was hardly anything covert about the massacre at Qala-i-Janghi. Despite calls from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights for an investigation, the korporate media paid no interest to the blatant butchery. Instead, the focus fell solely on Johnny Spann, the CIA agent killed during the prisoner revolt.
There is some irony here: it appears that the "prisoner revolt" was in fact inspired by Spann and his unnamed CIA compadre, who were both CIA "interrogators" (a rather nice way of saying "torturer".) The two CIA agents reportedly began shouting and shooting at unarmed prisoners, killing at least five. The Times of London also noted the "rebellion may have also been sparked by efforts to tie up the Taliban prisoners, many of whom apparently believed they were about to be killed. About 250 prisoners had been bound by their guards, according to one report, before the rest rebelled."
Whatever inspired the "revolt" (and if they had legitimate concern that they were to be slaughtered, they certainly had every moral right to rebel) it is clear that the mass butchery by the US, UK and NA which followed was inexcusable. Here is some of the more noted evidence, much of it courtesy of the World Socialist Web Site, one of the few media organizations to note the massacre for what it was:
* As the WSWS put it, "news footage of American and Northern Alliance troops firing down on the POWs from the heights of the fortress walls, and fields littered with the corpses of dead and mutilated prisoners, provided clear evidence of a massacre."
* British press reports said Northern Alliance forces executed all Taliban prisoners who managed (or even tried) to escape from the fort. Taliban corpses lied in a gateway, each killed by a single bullet to the head.
* On November 27, NA forces went room-by-room, killing anyone left alive, including the wounded, and even firing bullets and rockets into corpses.
* An AP photographer said he saw up to fifty bodies of Taliban with bound hands laid out in a field inside the fortress. How prisoners with bound hands were deemed a threat remains a mystery. Alliance soldiers were busy untying the hands of the corpses.
* Most of the deaths occurred due to US air strikes on the compound. At least 30 bombing attacks were carried out by US warplanes and helicopter gunships.
* US Special Forces reportedly instructed Northern Alliance troops to pour diesel fuel into a basement where prisoners were hiding and set it on fire.
All of this shouldn't be a surprise as well. Again from Fisk:
The massacres committed by malicious fighting in the name of outside powers have regularly brought shame upon their more powerful allies. The Contras in Nicaragua and the Phalangist militiamen in Lebanon contaminated their respective American and Israeli masters - the latter in the notorious Palestinian camp massacres of Sabra and Chatila in 1982.
General Dostum may issue unconvincing denials about his culpability over what has transpired at Mazar-i-Sharif (and one wonders what's happening in Sheberghan, where another 6,000 Taliban prisoners are held) but The Konformist suspect it won't matter. The Taliban are now officially sanctioned demons, and so therefore the slaughter of anyone associated with their cause is now deemed acceptable. Instead, the outrage and demands for punishment fall on scapegoats such as John Walker Lindh, the 20-year-old American Taliban member found among the few remaining survivors at the prison fortress. While gross atrocities remain uninvestigated, those foaming at the mouth shout calls for Walker's head over dubious charges of treason.
Of course, who really is to blame for the massacre at Mazar-i- Sharif? While much of it deservedly should go on General Dostum, Time journalist Alex Perry's account states on no uncertain terms that American Special Forces and British SAS operatives were "running the show." This would make US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld a defendant of war crimes charges. Even the Washington Post, a top cheerleader for the entire Afghanistan campaign, reported of concern in the Middle Eastern press that Rumsfeld's comments before the slaughter amounted to "a 'green light' from the United States to kill so-called Afghan Arabs."
But the blame should be pointed even higher, at both George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair. After all, for all the demonization of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, his indictment by the International Criminal Tribunal lists the total deaths of 346 Kosovo Albanians carried out by Serb military and paramilitary forces over a four-month period, a number less than the carnage at Mazar-i-Sharif. Milosevic isn't charged with personally ordering a single death, but creating an atmosphere with his office and populist brand of demagogue rhetoric that inspired the slaughters that followed. He certainly has a lot of company in that department.
Whoever is to be held accountable, the evidence of guilt is there. No actual proof has yet to be provided linking Osama Bin Laden (or any of the Taliban leadership, for that matter) to the 911 attacks, but based on the cruel bloody treatment of anyone even suspected of being an enemy by US, British and Northern Alliance forces, it is clear that (if Osama was behind the 911 tragedy) he has some partners in twisted justifications for ruthless mass killings.
In any case, we salute General Adbul Rashid Dostum as Beast of the Month. Congratulations, and keep up the great work, Rashid!!!
Sources:
Bin Laden: The Forbidden Truth, Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie
US-Backed Northern Alliance's Bloody Reputation Robert Fisk, The Independent (UK) 13 November 2001
What Will the Northern Alliance Do in Our Name Now? Robert Fisk, The Independent (UK) 14 November 2001
Various Articles World Socialist Web Site ( http://www.wsws.org )
The Konformist http://www.konformist.com Robert Sterling Post Office Box 24825 Los Angeles, California 90024-0825 Robalini@aol.com
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GUILTY FOR 9-11, SECTION 3: BUSH IN THE OPEN
by Illarion Bykov and Jared Israel
[Posted 18 January 2002]
We have demonstrated that normal air safety and air defense measures were not employed on September 11th. This is extraordinary because 9-11 was the only day that four airplanes were hijacked in the U.S., not to mention the only day that three planes crashed into key buildings in New York City and Washington, DC. (1)
We have argued that this stand-down of the air protection systems could not have occurred absent the involvement of top officials. We have named George Walker Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and General Richard B. Myers.
Why these three men?
Authority in the U.S. military stems from a person's position in the military chain-of-command. The President and the Secretary of Defense are the two top positions in the military chain-of-command. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is part of the communications chain and can be given specific responsibilities by the President and/or Secretary of Defense. (1a) On 11 September, George Bush was President. Donald Rumsfeld was Secretary of Defense. And General Richard B. Myers was Acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
These three men had critical responsibilities for the protection of New York and Washington, DC that day. According to the information which is publicly available, they shirked their duties.
Their behavior, as described in the media, presents the appearance of bewilderment, naiveté and lack of preparedness. But we shall prove this appearance was contrived.
Let us begin at the top of the chain-of-command.
GEORGE WALKER BUSH.
On 9-11 President Bush was in Sarasota, Florida on the second day of a two-day tour. Bush's plans for that day were publicly known in advance. (2)
Many people are confused concerning what President Bush knew and when he knew it that morning.
The reason for this confusion is that, later on, Ari Fleischer, Bush's press secretary, Richard Cheney, his Vice President and President Bush himself issued contradictory accounts of what Bush did that morning.
Fortunately, newspaper and TV people were with President Bush in Florida on September 11. Their eyewitness reports paint a clear picture.
In this section of the Summary of Evidence, we will:
* a) establish what Bush and his staff knew prior to his entering the classroom at the Booker School and
* b) consider some implications.
In future sections we will examine Bush's actual visit to the Booker School and his departure from Sarasota-Bradenton International Airport in Florida later that morning. We will also examine the cover stories floated, later on, by Fleischer, Cheney and by President Bush himself.
BUSH KNEW ABOUT THE FIRST CRASH BEFORE ENTERING BOOKER SCHOOL
Associated Press reporter Sonya Ross was one of the journalists covering Bush's trip to Florida on the morning of 9-11. Ms. Ross was either on her way to the Booker School or already there when she learned of the first WTC crash:
"My cell phone rang as President Bush's motorcade coursed toward Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Fla. A colleague reported that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center in New York. No further information.
"I called the AP desk in Washington, seeking details. Same scant information. But I knew it had to be grim. I searched for a White House official to question, but none was on hand until 9:05 a.m. " AP 12 September (3)
Ms. Ross 'searched for a White House official' because she knew Bush's people would be better informed than the Associated Press.
BUSH TRAVELS WITH A POWERFUL STAFF
President Bush is not an ordinary person. He travels with an entire staff. They are responsible for receiving, filtering and conveying administrative and military information. Chief of Staff Andrew Card organizes and coordinates these staff members and communicates with the President. In addition, Bush has the Secret Service, which is responsible for his safety.
The members of this support team have the best communications equipment in the world. They maintain contact with, or can easily reach, Bush's cabinet, the National Military Command Center (NMCC) in the Pentagon, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and Secret Service agents who have stayed behind at the White House, etc.
Since Ms. Ross heard about the first WTC crash while the Bush motorcade was speeding to the Booker School, common sense dictates that Mr. Bush knew earlier and knew more.
ABC journalist John Cochran was traveling with the President. He reported on this very matter on ABC TV on Tuesday morning:
"Peter, as you know, the president's down in Florida talking about education. He got out of his hotel suite this morning, was about to leave, reporters saw the White House chief of staff, Andy Card, whisper into his ear. The reporter said to the president, 'Do you know what's going on in New York?' He said he did, and he said he will have something about it later. His first event is about half an hour at an elementary school in Sarasota, Florida." 'ABC News' Special Report (4)
So Bush knew about the first WTC incident before leaving his hotel.
What else did he know?
1) John Cochran reports that President Bush did not respond to Andrew Card. It is inconceivable that a living person could be told that a plane had just ploughed into the biggest building in New York and have no response. So Bush must have known before Card whispered in his ear.
2) This is confirmed by the fact that shortly after Card spoke to him, Bush told a reporter that he would make a statement later. Bush would not have said that without discussing the situation with his Chief of Staff and others.
DID BUSH KNOW THE WTC CRASH
WAS A TERRORIST ATTACK?
This question is answered by something Vice President Richard Cheney revealed, probably unwittingly, on MEET THE PRESS, Sunday, September 16th.
Even without John Cochran's report on ABC, Cheney's comments constitute evidence that before President Bush went to the Booker School he knew a plane had been hijacked and then crashed into the WTC.
Cheney was talking with MEET THE PRESS journalist Tim Russert about the flight path of American Flight 77, which struck the Pentagon. Here's the exchange:
"VICE PRES. CHENEY: ...As best we can tell, they [American Flight 77] came initially at the White House and...
"MR. RUSSERT: The plane actually circled the White House?
"VICE PRES. CHENEY: Didn't circle it, but was headed on a track into it. The Secret Service has an arrangement with the F.A.A. They had open lines after the World Trade Center was... "
"MR. RUSSERT: Tracking it by radar.
"VICE PRES. CHENEY: And when it entered the danger zone and looked like it was headed for the White House was when they grabbed me and evacuated me to the basement... (Etc.)" MEET THE PRESS Transcript (5)
It appears that Cheney may have blurted out the crucial fact that the Secret Service had an open line to the FAA, then realized he was talking too much and stopped before completing his sentence. But if he did indeed talk too much, he also stopped talking too late. It is obvious that the sentence should have ended with the word 'hit' or something similar. Thus:
"The Secret Service has an arrangement with the F.A.A. They had open lines after the World Trade Center was hit."
The Secret Service had a special connection with the FAA so that it could rapidly access information relevant to the President's safety. After the first WTC attack, the connection between the FAA and the Secret Service was elevated to the level of open lines.
(In a similar fashion, orders issued by the FAA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff require heightened contact between the FAA and the National Military Command Center (NMCC) during hijackings. See 'Guilty for 9-11, Section 2: Cheney's Cover Story ') (6)
Therefore, by the time American Flight 11 crashed into the World Trade Center, around 8:46, and most likely before that happened, the Secret Service knew what the FAA knew.
So, what did the FAA know?
The FAA admits that at 8:20 it 'suspected' that American Flight 11 had been hijacked. (7) And according to the official story released Sept. 14th:
"8:40 [the] FAA notifie[s] NEADS (the Northeast Air Defense Sector) of NORAD, the military's civil defense system, about Flight 11, [i.e., that it had been hijacked.]" Newsday 23 September 2001 (7)
Therefore, based on the official story, the Secret Service knew by 8:40 or before that Flight 11 had been hijacked. And since the FAA was tracking Flight 11, as was the National Military Command Center, which is notified of hijackings and has access to radar from all over the country, (8) it is definite that at 8:46 the Secret Service knew a hijacked plane had crashed into the World Trade Center.
So according to the official story, before the President entered the Booker School, indeed, apparently before he left his hotel, the Secret Service knew that, for the first time in US history, the country had been attacked by terrorists from the air.
The job of the Secret Service is to protect the President and Vice President. Here's how Richard Cheney described the response of Secret Service agents when they thought he might be in danger:
"...under these circumstances, they just move. They don't say "sir" or ask politely. They came in and said, "Sir, we have to leave immediately," and grabbed me and...
"MR. RUSSERT: Literally grabbed you and moved you?
"VICE PRES. CHENEY: Yeah. And, you know, your feet touch the floor periodically. But they're bigger than I am, and they hoisted me up and moved me very rapidly down the hallway, down some stairs, through some doors and down some more stairs into an underground facility under the White House, and, as a matter of fact, it's a corridor, locked at both ends..."
NBC MEET THE PRESS 16 September 2001 (9)
Here is what we can state with certainty:
1) Before President Bush left his hotel, the Secret Service knew a hijacked plane had ploughed into the World Trade Center, a building that symbolized US power.
2) The President is the most obvious individual target for a terrorist attack.
3) The President was scheduled to visit the Booker School that morning. The visit was of no importance - that is, he could easily cancel it. His schedule was publicly known, down to the time he would give a talk at the school - 9:30. (10)
4) Assuming the official story was entirely true, there was every reason to believe that a terrorist had flown a plane into the WTC. Therefore, of course, a terrorist might fly a plane into the Booker School to kill Bush - arguably a bigger victory than ramming the WTC. And if the WTC attack signaled the start of a broader terrorist attack, it was certainly possible that heavily armed terrorists would attack the Booker School on the ground.
HERE IS THE BURNING QUESTION:
Given the Secret Service's obligation to protect the President;
Given the Secret Service's open line to the FAA and therefore its knowledge that a plane had been hijacked and subsequently ploughed into the World Trade Center;
Given the potentially deadly threat to President Bush if he proceeded to a public place, on schedule, as announced the day before and known to everyone in the region;
There is only one explanation for the Secret Service allowing President Bush to take the deadly risk of going to the Booker School on the morning of September 11th.
George Walker Bush knew the plans for 9-11. And because he knew those plans, he knew that nobody was going to attack the Booker School.
***
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FOOTNOTES:
1) The stand-down of U.S. forces on 9-11 was first documented in Section 1: 'Guilty for 9-11: Bush, Rumsfeld, Myers, Section 1: Why Were None of the Hijacked Planes Intercepted?' [Posted 14 November 2001] It can be read at http://emperors-clothes.com/indict/indict-1.htm
For links to many Emperor's Clothes articles on 9-11, please go to: http://emperors-clothes.com/indict/911page.htm Alternative address is http://emperor.vwh.net/indict/911page.htm
1a) See 'CHAIN OF COMMAND of the U.S. MILITARY' which can be read at http://emperors-clothes.com/9-11backups/chainof.htm
2) Regarding public knowledge of Bush's plans for 9-11, See Sarasota Herald-Tribune, September 11, 2001 Tuesday All Editions - Pg. A10 [HEADLINE:] 'Lessons for the president; In visit to Sarasota school, he should look beyond the photo-op' can be read at http://emperors-clothes.com/ 9-11backups/sarasota.htm#a
3) The Associated Press Wednesday 12 September 2001 "Flying with President Bush on a day terrorists hit hard" by Sonya Ross. For link to exact quote, in context, go to: http://emperors-clothes.com/9-11backups/ap912.htm#quote )
4) ABC News Special Report 'Planes crash into World Trade Center' (8:53 AM ET) Tuesday 11 September 2001 For link to exact quote, in context, go to http://emperors-clothes.com/9-11backups/abc911.htm#mybust
5) For link to exact quote, in context, go to 'NBC, Meet the Press' (10:00 AM ET) Sunday 16 September 2001. http://emperors-clothes.com/9-11backups/nbcmp.htm#openlines Original transcript of MEET THE PRESS can be read at: http://stacks.msnbc.com/news/629714.asp?cp1=1 )
6) To go direct to reference to FAA, NORAD NMCC communications during hijackings, see 'Guilty for 9-11, Section 2: Mr. Cheney's Cover Story'' [Posted 20 November 2001] http://emperors-clothes.com/indict/indict-2.htm#a
7) Newsday 23 September 2001, 'Air Attack on Pentagon Indicates Weaknesses' by Sylvia Adcock, Brian Donovan and Craig Gordon For link to references go to http://emperors-clothes.com/9-11backups/nd923.htm#faa840norad Original at: http://www.newsday.com/ny-uspent232380681sep23.story
8) Regarding the NMCC's access to radar all over the U.S., see 'Guilty for 9-11, Section 2: Mr. Cheney's Cover Story'' [Posted 20 November 2001] http://emperors-clothes.com/indict/indict-2.htm#b
(9) For link to exact excerpt, in context, go to http://emperors-clothes.com/9-11backups/nbcmp.htm#grabdick original at: http://stacks.msnbc.com/news/629714.asp?cp1=1 )
(10) FEDERAL NEWS SERVICE ADVANCE SCHEDULE FOR TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 For FNS report that it will be taping President Bush at 9:30 at the Booker School, go to http://emperors-clothes.com/9-11backups/fns930.htm
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http://dc.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=16389&group=webcast
Mistranslated Osama bin Laden Video - the German Press Investigates
by Craig Morris
7:16am Sun Dec 23 '01 (Modified on 5:58pm Sun Dec 23 '01)
A German TV show found that the White House's translation of the "confession" video was not only inaccurate, but even "manipulative". Mistranslated OBL video - Germany’s Channel One investigates
On 20 December 2001, German TV channel “Das Erste” broadcast its analysis of the White House’s translation of the OBL video that George Bush has called a “confession of guilt”. On the show “Monitor”, two independent translators and an expert on oriental studies found the White House’s translation not only to be inaccurate, but “manipulative”.
Arabist Dr. Abdel El M. Husseini, one of the translators, states, “I have carefully examined the Pentagon’s translation. This translation is very problematic. At the most important places where it is held to prove the guilt of Bin Laden, it is not identical with the Arabic.”
Whereas the White House would have us believe that OBL admits that “We calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy…”, translator Dr. Murad Alami finds that: “‘In advance’ is not said. The translation is wrong. At least when we look at the original Arabic, and there are no misunderstandings to allow us to read it into the original.”
At another point, the White House translation reads: “We had notification since the previous Thursday that the event would take place that day.” Dr. Murad Alami: “‘Previous’ is never said. The subsequent statement that this event would take place on that day cannot be heard in the original Arabic version.”
The White House’s version also included the sentence “we asked each of them to go to America”, but Alami says the original formulation is in the passive along the lines of “they were required to go”. He also say that the sentence afterwards - “they didn’t know anything about the operation” - cannot be understood.
Prof. Gernot Rotter, professor of Islamic and Arabic Studies at the Asia-Africa Institute at the University of Hamburg sums it up: “The American translators who listened to the tapes and transcribed them apparently wrote a lot of things in that they wanted to hear but that cannot be heard on the tape no matter how many times you listen to it.”
Meanwhile the US press has not picked up on this story at all, reporting instead that a new translation has revealed that OBL even mentions the names of some of those involved. But the item is all over the German press, from Germany’s Channel One (“Das Erste” - the ones who broke the story, equivalent to NBC or the BBC) to ZDF (Channel Two) to Der Spiegel (the equivalent of TIME or the Economist - visit http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,174025,00.html if you can read German). More surprisingly, as I write the following site appears on Lycos in German: http://www.netzeitung.de/servlets/page?section=1109&item=172422 - but nothing under lycos.com in English.
Instead, we read in the Washington Post of Friday, December 21, 2001 (the day after the German TV show was broadcast) that a new translation done in the US “also indicates bin Laden had even more knowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon than was apparent in the original Defense Department translation.... Although the expanded version does not change the substance of what was released, it provides added details and color to what has been disclosed.”
I’ll say. Aren’t there any reporters in the US who speak German (or Arabic, for that matter)? An article in USA Today of 20 December 2001 sheds some light on why the original translation might not be accurate: “the first translation was rushed in 12 hours, in a room in the Pentagon”. So why didn’t the new US translation find the same discrepancies as the German translators did? Read the article in USA Today against the grain: “Michael, who is originally Lebanese, translated the tape with Kassem Wahba, an Egyptian. Both men had difficulties with the Saudi dialect bin Laden and his guest use in the tape, Michael said.” Why can a Saudi translator not be found in a multicultural country like the US, especially with the close business relations between the US and Saudi Arabia? Bush Sr. probably knows any number of them himself.
Of course, if we ever hear about the German analysis in the US press, the reactions will be that some will never believe that OBL is behind the attacks no matter what you tell them. But actually, Americans are just as stubborn in refusing to face facts. One moderator on Fox News complained to his interviewee that the European media were focusing too much on civilian casualties in Afghanistan. (I wondered which European languages this moderator could speak; a few weeks later, he happened to say on his show that he had had “three years of German”. This, he claimed, would allow him to “do the show in German.”) His interviewee responded that, yes, the Taliban were very savvy manipulators of the media. So there we have it: Europeans get their information straight from the Taliban Ministry of Propaganda.
Craig Morris is a translator living in Europe. He can be reached at cmorris@t-online.de . The original broadcast of the German show can be viewed in German at http://www.wdr.de/tv/monitor/real.phtml?id=379 .
Bush's Colder War And The New 'Red Scare'
By John Pilger The Mirror - London
1-30-2
Last week, the US government announced that it was building the biggest-ever war machine. Military spending will rise to $379billion, of which $50billion will pay for its "war on terrorism". There will be special funding for new, refined weapons of mass slaughter and for "military operations" - invasions of other countries.
Of all the extraordinary news since September 11, this is the most alarming. It is time to break our silence.
That is to say, it is time for other governments to break their silence, especially the Blair government, whose complicity in the American rampage in Afghanistan has not denied its understanding of the Bush administration's true plans and ambitions.
The recent statements of British Ministers about the "vindication" of the "outstanding success" in Afghanistan would be comical if the price of their "success" had not been paid with the lives of more than 5,000 innocent Afghani civilians and the failure to catch Osama bin Laden and anyone else of importance in the al-Qaeda network.
The Pentagon's release of deliberately provocative pictures of prisoners at Camp X-Ray on Cuba was meant to conceal this failure from the American public, who are being conditioned, along with the rest of us, to accept a permanent war footing similar to the paranoia that sustained and prolonged the Cold War.
The threat of "terrorism", some of it real, most of it invented, is the new Red Scare.
The parallels are striking.
IN AMERICA in the 1950s, the Red Scare was used to justify the growth of war industries, the suspension of democratic rights and the silencing of dissenters.
That is happening now.
Above all, the American industrial-complex has a new enemy with which to justify its gargantuan appetite for public resources - the new military budget is enough to end all primary causes of poverty in the world.
Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, says he has told the Pentagon to "think the unthinkable".
Vice President Dick Cheney, the voice of Bush, has said the US is considering military or other action against "40 to 50 countries" and warns that the new war may last 50 years or more.
A Bush adviser, Richard Perle, explained. "(There will be) no stages," he said.
"This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there ... If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy but just wage a total war, our children will sing great songs about us years from now."
Their words evoke George Orwell's great prophetic work, Nineteen Eighty-Four.
In the novel, three slogans dominate society: war is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength.
Today's slogan, war on terrorism, also reverses meaning. The war is terrorism.
The next American attack is likely to be against Somalia, a deeply impoverished country in the Horn of Africa.
Washington claims there are al-Qaeda terrorist cells there.
This is almost certainly a fiction spread by Somalia's overbearing neighbour, Ethiopia, in order to ingratiate itself with Washington. Certainly, there are vast oil fields off the coast of Somalia.
For the Americans, there is the added attraction of "settling a score".
In 1993, in the last days of George Bush Senior's presidency, 18 American soldiers were killed in Somalia after the US Marines had invaded to "restore hope", as they put it.
A current Hollywood movie, Black Hawk Down, glamorises and lies about this episode.
It leaves out the fact that the invading Americans left behind between 7,000 and 10,000 Somalis killed.
Like the victims of American bombing in Afghanistan, and Iraq, and Cambodia, and Vietnam and many other stricken countries, the Somalis are unpeople, whose deaths have no political and media value in the West.
WHEN Bush Junior's heroic marines return in their Black Hawk gunships, loaded with technology, looking for "terrorists", their victims will once again be nameless. We can then expect the release of Black Hawk Down II.
Breaking our silence means not allowing the history of our lifetimes to be written this way, with lies and the blood of innocent people. To understand the lie of what Blair/Straw/Hoon call the "outstanding success" in Afghanistan, read the work of the original author of "Total War", a man called Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was President Carter's National Security Adviser and is still a powerful force in Washington.
Brzezinski not long ago revealed that on July 3, 1979, unknown to the American public and Congress, President Jimmy Carter secretly authorised $500million to create an international terrorist movement that would spread Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia and "destabilise" the Soviet Union.
The CIA called this Operation Cyclone and in the following years poured $4billion into setting up Islamic training schools in Pakistan (Taliban means "student").
Young zealots were sent to the CIA's spy training camp in Virginia, where future members of al-Qaeda were taught "sabotage skills" - terrorism.
Others were recruited at an Islamic school in Brooklyn, New York, within sight of the fated Twin Towers.
In Pakistan, they were directed by British MI6 officers and trained by the SAS.
The result, quipped Brzezinski, was "a few stirred up Muslims" - meaning the Taliban.
At that time, the late 1970s, the American goal was to overthrow Afghanistan's first progressive, secular government, which had granted equal rights to women, established health care and literacy programmes and set out to break feudalism.
When the Taliban seized power in 1996, they hanged the former president from a lamp-post in Kabul.
His body was still a public spectacle when Clinton administration officials and oil company executives were entertaining Taliban leaders in Washington and Houston, Texas.
The Wall Street Journal declared: "The Taliban are the players most capable of achieving peace. Moreover, they were crucial to secure the country as a prime trans-shipment route for the export of Central Asia's vast oil, gas and other natural resources."
NO AMERICAN newspaper dares suggest that the prisoners in Camp X-Ray are the product of this policy, nor that it was one of the factors that led to the attacks of September 11.
Nor do they ask: who were the real winners of September 11?
The day the Wall Street stockmarket opened after the destruction of the Twin Towers, the few companies showing increased value were the giant military contractors Alliant Tech Systems, Northrop Gruman, Raytheon (a contributor to New Labour) and Lockheed Martin.
As the US military's biggest supplier, Lockheed Martin's share value rose by a staggering 30 per cent.
Within six weeks of September 11, the company (with its main plant in Texas, George Bush's home state) had secured the biggest military order in history: a $200billion contract to develop a new fighter aircraft. The greatest taboo of all, which Orwell would surely recognise, is the record of the United States as a terrorist state and haven for terrorists.
This truth is virtually unknown by the American public and makes a mockery of Bush's (and Blair's) statements about "tracking down terrorists wherever they are".
They don't have to look far.
Florida, currently governed by the President's brother, Jeb Bush, has given refuge to terrorists who, like the September 11 gang, have hi-jacked aircraft and boats with guns and knives.
Most have never had criminal charges brought against them.
Why? All of them are anti-Castro Cubans. Former Guatemalan Defence Minister Gramajo Morales, who was accused of "devising and directing an indiscriminate campaign of terror against civilians", including the torture of an American nun and the massacre of eight people from one family, studied at Harvard University on a US government scholarship.
During the 1980s, thousands of people were murdered by death squads connected to the army of El Salvador, whose former chief now lives comfortably in Florida.
The former Haitian dictator, General Prosper Avril, liked to display the bloodied victims of his torture on television.
When he was overthrown, he was flown to Florida by the US government, and granted political asylum.
A leading member of the Chilean military during the reign of General Pinochet, whose special responsibility was executions and torture, lives in Miami.
THE Iranian general who ran Iran's notorious prisons, is a wealthy exile in the US.
One of Pol Pot's senior henchmen, who enticed Cambodian exiles back to their certain death, lives in Mount Vernon, New York.
What all these people have in common, apart from their history of terrorism, is that they either worked directly for the US government or carried out the dirty work of US policies.
The al-Qaeda training camps are kindergartens compared with the world's leading university of terrorism at Fort Benning in Georgia. Known until recently as the School of the Americas, its graduates include almost half the cabinet ministers of the genocidal regimes in Guatemala, two thirds of the El Salvadorean army officers who committed, according to the United Nations, the worst atrocities of that country's civil war, and the head of Pinochet's secret police, who ran Chile's concentration camps.
There is terrible irony at work here. The humane response of people all over the world to the terrorism of September 11 has long been hijacked by those running a rapacious great power with a history of terrorism second to none. Global supremacy, not the defeat of terrorism, is the goal; only the politically blind believe otherwise.
The "widening gap between the world's "haves" and "have nots"', says a remarkably candid document of the US Space Command, presents "new challenges" to the world's superpower and which can only be met by "Full Spectrum Dominance" - dominance of land, sea, air and space.
http://multimedia.carlton.com/images/pilger/mainnav2/02
Reproduced gratefully from: Rense.com
A White Knight Talking Backwards SPY CASE IN CANADIAN COURTS SUGGESTS US NAVAL OFFICER HAD FOREKNOWLEDGE OF 9-11
by
Michael C. Ruppert
[Copyright 2002, Michael C. Ruppert and From The Wilderness Publications, http://www.copvcia.com/, all rights reserved. May be reposted, reprinted or distributed for non-profit purposes only when this statement appears with the text.]
TORONTO, [Filed January 25, 2002, and Revised January 28, 2002] – EDITORIAL NOTE: In our original story we indicated that the note written by Delmart “Mike” Vreeland had been sealed in court records. We based this on a misreading of Canadian press stories. In fact, the warning of the World Trade Center attacks, written by Vreeland on either August 11th or 12th has been introduced into open evidence in Vreeland’s case in Toronto. Using court records in our possession, FTW has scanned the document and it is available for viewing in this story. We apologize for the error. Following is a revised story which we feel is the best way to present this important information in context.]
----------
Delmart Edward “Mike” Vreeland, an American citizen whose claims to being a US Naval Lieutenant assigned to the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) are being increasingly corroborated in open court, has been in a Canadian jail since December 6, 2000. On August 11 or 12 of 2001, the date is uncertain, after trying to verbally alert his Canadian jailers to the coming World Trade Center attacks, he wrote down key information and sealed it in an envelope which he then had placed in jailers’ custody. This event is not disputed by Canadian authorities. The letter specifically listed a number of targets including The Sears Towers, The World Trade Center, The White House, The Pentagon, The World Bank, The Canadian parliament building in Ottawa and the Royal Bank in Toronto.
A chilling sentence follows the list of targets, “Let one happen. Stop the rest!!!”
When the envelope was opened on September 14th it set off alarms in the US and Canada.
The US wants Vreeland back in the States on a Michigan warrant for credit card fraud – using his own credit card. Vreeland, convinced that a return to the US means certain death, wants to stay in Canada in a witness protection program. His lawyers Rocco Galati and Paul Slansky, two former Canadian prosecutors, agree with Vreeland’s assessment. They should. Both have been the victims of harassment and threats including dead cats hung on porches and car windows smashed out in car burglaries.
The position of the United States government, as represented by Crown Solicitors in Toronto, is that all of this is nonsense. Vreeland, says the Navy, was discharged as a Seaman after a few months of service for unsatisfactory performance in 1986. He has never had anything to do with intelligence according to 1200 pages of Navy records filed in Toronto Superior Court.
“How is it,” says Galati, “that the Navy says that he was only in the service a few months and then send us a 1200 page personnel file? Some of the entries are obvious forgeries or alterations and the sanitizing of his records was done so hurriedly that some dates of medical exams in the 1990s were left intact.”
In a January 10, 2002 tactic worthy of Perry Mason, with the greatest possible risk to his client if it failed, attorney Slansky got the judge to agree to let him call the Pentagon from open court. Using a speaker phone, in front of at least six witnesses, Slansky first dialed directory information and got a number for the Pentagon switchboard. Then, calling that number he asked the Department of Defense operator to locate the office of Lt. Delmart Vreeland. Within moments the operator had confirmed Vreeland’s posting, his rank as a Lieutenant O-3, his room number and given Slansky his direct-dial number.
All of this is a part of the court record.
On January 17, as this writer sat in the courtroom, another mind-numbing event occurred.
As Vreeland sat shackled in a corner, closely flanked by two guards, the Crown Solicitor sought to debunk Vreeland’s assertions that he had been assigned to travel to Moscow to review and retrieve highly technical and classified documents pertaining to Russian and Chinese efforts to counter the proposed US “Star Wars” missile defense system. [Ed note: FTW believes this to be a cover story.] “Why,” said the Crown Solicitor, “would the US choose, in a case involving some of the most highly technical intelligence, a random seaman with training in the tool and die field.” The point that someone discharged in 1986 with no special training and rank would be sent to review technical documents sounded reasonable – assuming that Vreeland’s background was as the Solicitor argued.
The reasonableness vanished a few moments later as the Crown Solicitor argued that Vreeland, who has been in jail and without access to a computer for thirteen months, had somehow cracked the Pentagon’s personnel records and inserted his name, an office number, and telephone extension into the Pentagon database.
No one except for Vreeland and attorney Galati seemed to notice the contradiction.
The Crown Solicitor ventured further through the looking glass by then arguing that Vreeland, having certain papers in his possession at the time of his arrest, had memorized Russian and Albanian documents and then had translated them from memory. Vreeland doesn’t speak Russian or Albanian. The judge, noticing this stretch of credibility, asked the Solicitor to restate the point. The argument then became that Vreeland had an unnamed colleague go to an unspecified web site, print Russian and Albanian documents for him, and then used foreign language dictionaries to translate them.
Vreeland’s extradition process could take years and his time in jail has not been easy. There have been threats, illnesses and his every move is watched. Galati and Slansky wonder how long his psyche will hold up. The history of jailhouse deaths of key witnesses leans heavily in favor of Vreeland’s belief that he could be killed at any moment. His apparent strategy is to not reveal any accurate Top Secret material to either his lawyers or the press, hoping that his silence will provide him with some support from US clandestine services. This a standard approach taken in dozens of similar cases researched by FTW in the past They include the cases – well known in research circles – of William Tyree and Michael Riconosciuto. Tyree has been jailed on a questionable murder conviction since 1979 and Riconosciuto on a variety or drug-related charges since the early 1990s. Both men have been directly connected to CIA and other intelligence operations by official documents.
“We don’t need to know and we don’t want to know the secret details, “says Galati. “They’re not necessary for us to do the job of keeping our client alive and in Canada. He faces a special danger in the US because he has also been an informant against an organized crime family in Michigan where the criminal charges originate. The most he is facing there is two years but we believe he might not live for two days in that system.”
Additional press reports indicate that Vreeland’s intelligence work was connected to drug smuggling – a much more likely reason for his trip to Moscow. And the history of the relations between Naval Intelligence and the mafia is documented as far back as the Second World War when ONI officers made deals with convicted mafia don Lucky Luciano and his lieutenant Vito Genovese to protect New York docks and assist with the subsequent Allied invasion and occupation of Italy.
Mike Vreeland is one man who, in a rational world, could totally expose the complicity of the US government in the attacks of September 11th. No one has disputed what he wrote and stuffed into that envelope. In a rational world that would be the most pressing and public inquiry of all. The two questions remaining are whether Vreeland will live and whether or not he will ever tell what he knows. That may be a mutually exclusive proposition.
FTW has retained the services of freelance journalist Greta Knutsen in Toronto to report on developments in this critical case for our subscribers. Important updates will be posted and sent out via subscriber bulletin to our readers as they become available.
[The Warning Written by Mike Vreeland Before 9-11]
Vreeland Letter Written Before 9-11
<http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/nat-gen/2002/feb/13/021303439.html >
February 13, 2002
SAN FRANCISCO- In the latest
tussle between local and federal officials
over medical marijuana, the head of the Drug Enforcement Agency was jeered
by city leaders hours after his agents raided a club that provides pot to
the infirm.
DEA Administrator Asa Hutchinson was denounced Tuesday while delivering a
speech outside the Commonwealth Club of California. Demonstrators blew
kazoos and chanted "Go away D-E-A" while the smell of marijuana wafted
through the air.
Earlier in the day, federal agents seized more than 600 pot plants from the
Harm Reduction Center and arrested the group's executive director. Three
other men also were arrested.
The raid coincided with President Bush's announcement of a stepped-up war
on drugs, with a goal of cutting drug abuse by 25 percent in five years, in
part through improved law enforcement.
California, Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Maine, Oregon and
Washington allow the infirm to receive, possess, grow or smoke marijuana
for medical purposes without fear of state prosecution.
However, the U.S. Supreme Court said last year that it is illegal to
distribute marijuana for medical reasons - setting the stage for conflict
with local officials.
During the raid on the Harm Reduction Center, the group's executive
director, Richard Watts, was arrested and two other men were charged with
growing more than 100 pot plants. In a separate case, a fourth man was
charged with growing more than 1,000 marijuana plants.
"They all are connected with marijuana smuggling," said DEA spokesman
Richard Meyer. "We've said all along the cultivation and distribution of
marijuana is illegal regardless of state or local law."
The center serves about 200 patients a day, all with doctors'
recommendations to get the drug. Many suffer chronic pain from AIDS and
cancer, said David Witty, the marijuana club's chief of security.
San Francisco District Attorney Terence Hallinan has been outspoken in his
support of such clubs, and Police Chief Fred Lau has said his officers
wouldn't take part in any raids. City leaders declared San Francisco a
sanctuary for medical cannabis use last year.
"This is a decision to be made by the voters of California and the people
of the city and county of San Francisco," Hallinan said through a bullhorn
at the site of Hutchinson's speech.
Board of Supervisors President Tom Ammiano went one step further, calling
the DEA an "obnoxious, grandstanding" agency. "I don't want
somebody in my
house that's not invited!" Ammiano shouted.
In his speech, Hutchinson said "science has told us so far there is no
medical benefit for smoking marijuana." He also defended the arrests,
saying "We have to enforce the law."
Tuesday's raid is just one in a series of recent federal crackdowns in
California. Agents shut down a West Hollywood cannabis club in October.
Other federal actions include raiding a Ventura County garden operated by
patients, and seizure of medical records from a Northern California doctor
who is a prominent medical marijuana proponent.
------------
On the Net:
Marijuana Policy Project: http://www.mpp.org
Drug Enforcement Administration: http://www.usdoj.gov/dea/
Robert Fisk: Fear and learning in America April 17 2002 at 9:50 AM Robert Fisk: Fear and learning in America (no login)
Independent Robert Fisk: Fear and learning in America
As an outspoken critic of US policy in the Middle East, Fisk expected a hostile reception when he paid his first visit to the American Midwest since 11 September. He couldn't have been more mistaken 17 April 2002 http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=285777
Osama bin Laden once told me that Americans did not understand the Middle East. Last week, in a little shuttle bus shouldering its way through curtains of rain across the Iowa prairies, I opened my copy of the Des Moines Register and realised that he might be right. "BIG HOG LOTS CALLED GREATER THREAT THAN BIN LADEN," announced the headline. Iowa's 15 million massive pigs, it seems, produce so much manure that the state waterways are polluted. "Large-scale hog producers are a greater threat to the United States and US democracy than Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network, says Robert F Kennedy Junior, president of... a New York environment group... 'We've watched communities and American values shattered by these bullies,' Kennedy said..." I took out my pocket calculator and did a little maths. Cedar Rapids, I reckoned, was 7,000 miles from Afghanistan. Another planet, more like.
I've been travelling to the United States for years, lecturing at Princeton or Harvard or Brown University, Rhode Island, or San Francisco, or Madison, Wisconsin. God knows why. I refuse all payment and take just a business-class round trip from Beirut because I can't take 14 hours of screaming babies in each direction. American college students are tough as nails and bored as cabbages, and in some cities - Washington is top of the list - I might as well talk in Amharic. If you don't use phrases like "peace process", "back on track" or "Israel under siege", there's a kind of computerised blackout on the faces of the audience. Total Disk Failure. Why should my latest bout of Americana have been any different?
Sure, there were the usual oddballs. There was the old black guy whose first "question" on the Middle East in a Chicago University lecture theatre was a long and proud announcement that he hadn't paid taxes to the IRS since 1948 - a claim so wonderful that I forbore the usual threat to close down on him. There were the World Trade Centre conspiracists who insisted that the US government had planted explosives in the twin towers. There was the silver-haired lady who wanted to know why God couldn't be made to resolve the hatred between Israelis and Palestinians. And a Native American Indian in Los Angeles who ranted on about a Jewish plot to deprive his people of their land. A bespectacled man with long white hair in a ponytail shut him up before declaring that the Israeli-Palestinian war was identical to the American-Mexican war that deprived his own people of... well, of Los Angeles. I began to calculate the distance between LA and Jenin. A galaxy perhaps.
And there were the little tell-tale stories that showed just how biased and gutless the American press has become in the face of America's Israeli lobby groups. "I wrote a report for a major paper about the Palestinian exodus of 1948," a Jewish woman told me as we drove through the smog of downtown LA. "And of course, I mentioned the massacre of Palestinians at Deir Yassin by the Stern Gang and other Jewish groups - the massacre that prompted 750,000 Arabs to flee their homes. Then I look for my story in the paper and what do I find? The word 'alleged' has been inserted before the word 'massacre'. I called the paper's ombudsman and told him the massacre at Deir Yassin was a historical fact. Can you guess his reply? He said that the editor had written the word 'alleged' before 'massacre' because that way he thought he'd avoid lots of critical letters."
By chance, this was the theme of my talks and lectures: the cowardly, idle, spineless way in which American journalists are lobotomising their stories from the Middle East, how the "occupied territories" have become "disputed territories" in their reports, how Jewish "settlements" have been transformed into Jewish "neighbourhoods", how Arab militants are "terrorists" but Israeli militants only "fanatics" or "extremists", how Ariel Sharon - the man held "personally responsible" by Israel's own commissioner's inquiry for the 1982 Sabra and Chatila massacre of 1,700 Palestinians - could be described in a report in The New York Times as having the instincts of "a warrior". How the execution of surviving Palestinian fighters was so often called "mopping up". How civilians killed by Israeli soldiers were always "caught in the crossfire". I demanded to know of my audiences - and I expected the usual American indignation when I did - how US citizens could accept the infantile "dead or alive", "with us or against us", axis-of-evil policies of their President.
And for the first time in more than a decade of lecturing in the United States, I was shocked. Not by the passivity of Americans - the all-accepting, patriotic notion that the President knows best - nor by the dangerous self-absorption of the United States since 11 September and the constant, all-consuming fear of criticising Israel. What shocked me was the extraordinary new American refusal to go along with the official line, the growing, angry awareness among Americans that they were being lied to and deceived. At some of my talks, 60 per cent of the audiences were over 40. In some cases, perhaps 80 per cent were Americans with no ethnic or religious roots in the Middle East - "American Americans", as I cruelly referred to them on one occasion, "white Americans", as a Palestinian student called them more truculently. For the first time, it wasn't my lectures they objected to, but the lectures they received from their President and the lectures they read in their press about Israel's "war on terror" and the need always, uncritically, to support everything that America's little Middle Eastern ally says and does.
There was, for example, the crinkly-faced, ex-naval officer who approached me after a talk at a United Methodist church in the San Diego suburb of Encinitas. "Sir, I was an officer on the aircraft carrier John F Kennedy during the 1973 Middle East war," he began. (I checked him out later and he was, as my host remarked, "for real".) "We were stationed off Gibraltar and our job was to refuel the fighter jets we were sending to Israel after their air force was shot to bits by the Arabs. Our planes would land with their USAF and Marine markings partly stripped off and the Star of David already painted on the side. Does anyone know why we gave all those planes to the Israelis just like that? When I see on television our planes and our tanks used to attack Palestinians, I can understand why people hate Americans."
In the United States, I'm used to lecturing in half-empty lecture halls. Three years ago, I managed to fill a Washington auditorium seating 600 with just 32 Americans. But in Chicago and Iowa and Los Angeles this month, they came in their hundreds - almost 900 at one venue at the University of Southern California - and they sat in the aisles and corridors and outside the doors. It wasn't because Lord Fisk was in town. Maybe the title of my talk - "September 11: ask who did it, but for heaven's sake don't ask why" - was provocative. But for the most part they came, as the question-and-answer sessions quickly revealed, because they were tired of being suckered by the television news networks and the right-wing punditocracy.
Never before have I been asked by Americans: "How can we make our press report the Middle East fairly?" or - much more disturbingly - "How can we make our government reflect our views?" The questions are a trap, of course. Brits have been shoving advice at the United States ever since we lost the War of Independence, and I wasn't going to join their number. But the fact that these questions could be asked - usually by middle-aged Americans with no family origins in the Middle East - suggested a profound change in a hitherto docile population.
Towards the end of each talk, I apologised for the remarks I was about to make. I told audiences that the world did not change on 11 September, that the Lebanese and Palestinians had lost 17,500 dead during Israel's 1982 invasion - more than five times the death toll of the international crimes against humanity of 11 September - but the world did not change 20 yearsago. There were no candles lit then, no memorial services. And each time I said this, there was a nodding of heads - grey-haired and balding as well as young - across the room. The smallest irreverent joke about President Bush was often met with hoots of laughter. I asked one of my hosts why this happened, why the audience accepted this from a Briton. "Because we don't think Bush won the election," she replied.
Of course, it's easy to be fooled. The first local radio shows illustrated all too well how the Middle East discourse is handled in America. When Gayane Torosyan opened WSUI/KSUI for questions in Iowa City, a caller named "Michael" - a leader of the local Jewish community, I later learnt, though he did not say this on air - insisted that after the Camp David talks in 2000, Yasser Arafat had turned to "terrorism" despite being offered a Palestinian state with a capital in Jerusalem and 96 per cent of the West Bank and Gaza. Slowly and deliberately, I had to deconstruct this nonsense. Jerusalem was to have remained the "eternal and unified capital of Israel", according to Camp David. Arafat would only have got what Madeleine Albright called "a sort of sovereignty" over the Haram al-Sharif mosque area and some Arab streets, while the Palestinian parliament would have been below the city's eastern walls at Abu Dis. With the vastly extended and illegal Jerusalem municipality boundaries deep into the West Bank, Jewish settlements like Maale Adumim were not up for negotiation; nor were several other settlements. Nor was the 10-mile Israeli military buffer zone around the West Bank, nor the settlers' roads, which would razor through the Palestinian "state". Arafat was offered about 46 per cent of the 22 per cent of Palestine that was left. I could imagine the audience of WSUI/KSUI falling slowly from their seats in boredom.
Yet back at my folksy, wooden-walled hotel, the proprietor and his wife - P Force volunteers in the Kennedy era - had listened to every word. "We know what is going on," he said. "I was a naval officer in the Gulf back in the Sixties and we only had few ships there then. In those days, the Shah of Iran was our policeman. Now we've got all those ships in there and our soldiers in the Arab countries and we seem to dominate the place." Osama bin Laden, I said to myself, couldn't put it better.
How odd, I reflected, that American newspapers can scarcely say even this. The Daily Iowan - there are no fewer than four dailies in Iowa City, press freedom being represented by the number of newspapers rather than their depth of coverage - had none of my hotel landlord's forthrightness. "The situation in the Middle East is one that many Americans do not adequately understand," it miserably lamented, "nor can they be reasonably articulate about it." This rubbish - that Americans were too dumb to comprehend the Middle East bloodbath and should therefore keep their mouths shut - was a pervasive theme in editorials. Even more instructive were the reports of my own lectures.
The headline, "Fisk: Who really are the terrorists?" in the Daily Iowan last week at least caught the gist of my message, and included my own examples of American press bias in the Middle East, although it failed on the facts, wrongly reporting that it was the United Nations (rather than the far more persuasive Israeli Kahan Commission) which concluded that Sharon was "personally responsible" for the Sabra and Chatila massacre. The Des Moines Register's account of one of my talks was intriguing. It concentrated on my interviews with Osama bin Laden - which I had indeed mentioned in my lecture - and then referred to my account of how an Afghan crowd beat me up last December. I had told the American audience that the Afghans were outraged by US bombing raids that had just killed their relatives around Kandahar and how important it had been to include this fact in my own report of the fray - to give context and reason to the Afghan attack on me. The Register used my words to describe the attack but then itself made no mention of the reasons. Long live, I thought, the Iowa City Press-Citizen, whose own headline - "Middle East reporter slams media" - got the point.
It's not that Iowans have any excuse to be unaware of the Middle East. In the small town of Davenport, Israelis have been trained in the systems of the Apache AH-64 attack helicopters used to assassinate Palestinians on Israel's wanted list. According to one local journalist, several Iowa companies, including the regional office of Rockwell, have been involved in military contracts worth millions of dollars with Israel. CemenTech of Indianola supplies equipment to the Israeli air force. The day I arrived in Iowa City, John Ashcroft, the US Attorney General, was telling Iowans that a hundred foreign nationals "from countries known as home to terrorists" had been interrogated in the state. Another hundred were likely to be "interviewed" soon. There was no editorial comment on this.
So Iowa University classes were absorbing. One young woman began by announcing that she knew the American media were biased. When I asked why, she said that "it has to do with America's support for Israel..." and then, red-faced, she dried up. Not so the student in Rex Honey's global studies class. After I had outlined the military trap into which the Americans had been lured in Afghanistan - the supposed "victory" followed by further engagements with al-Qa'ida and then, inevitably, daily battles with Afghan warlords and sniping attacks on Western troops - he put his hand up. "So how do we beat them?" he asked. There was a gentle ripple of laughter through the room. "Why do you want to 'beat' the Afghans," I asked? "Why not help them build a new land?" The student came up to me afterwards, hand outstretched. "I want to thank you, sir, for all you told us," he said. I had a suspicion he was a military man. Are you planning to join the army, I asked? "No, sir," he replied. "I'm going to join the Marines."
I advised him to stay clear of Afghanistan. In its own way, the American national press was doing the same. Two days later, the Los Angeles Times, in a remarkable dispatch from its correspondent David Zucchino, reported on the bitterness and anger among Afghans whose families had been killed in United States B-52 bomber raids. The recent American battle in Gardez, the report said, had left "bitterness in its wake".
If only the same bluntness was applied to the Palestinian-Israeli war. Alas, no. On the freeway past Long Beach on Friday, I opened the LA Times to be told that Israel "mops up [sic] in the West Bank", while the syndicated columnist Mona Charen was telling readers in other papers that "98 per cent of Palestinians have not been living under occupation since Israel pulled out under the Oslo accords" and that the Israeli Prime Minister at the time, Ehud Barak, had offered Arafat "97 per cent of the West Bank and Gaza". This was 1 per cent higher even than the statistic from "Michael" on WSUI/KSUI radio. Arafat - "this murderer with the deaths of thousands of Jews and Arabs on his hands" - was to blame. The issue between Israel and her neighbours, Charen contended, "is not occupation, it is not settlements and it certainly is not Israeli brutality and aggression. It is the Arabs' inability to live peacefully with others".
Maybe California is organically different from the rest of the United States, but its journalists as well as its students seemed a tad smarter than the Midwest of America. The Orange County Register, a traditionally conservative newspaper in an area that is now 50 per cent Latino, has been trying to tell the truth about the Middle East and was carrying a tough feature by Holger Jensen, which warned that if President Bush didn't rein in Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister "will succeed where Osama bin Laden failed: forcing us into a war of civilisations against 1.2 billion Muslims". When I lunched with senior editorial staff, they invited three members of the Orange County Muslim community to join them.
Cocktails with friends of the Methodist church revealed a sane grasp of the Middle East - one of them was deeply disturbed by a recent remark by Israel's Internal Security Minister, Uzi Landau, who had said that "we're not facing human beings, but rather beasts". A black guest commended the UN secretary general Kofi Annan's criticism of Israel. Yet when I flipped on Fox News, there was Benjamin Netanyahu out-Sharoning Sharon, declaring that Palestinian suicide bombers would soon be prowling America's streets, meeting Congressmen to enlist their help in Israel's "war on terror", even while the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, was in Israel.
"Why Israel's Mission Must Continue," the New York Times's comment page shouted on Friday. A long and tedious article on Israel's crusade against "terror" by an Israeli army colonel, Nitsan Alon, included several of my favourite cop-out phrases, including the stock reference to "a large number of civilians" who were - yes - "caught in the crossfire".
By the time I was addressing the more bohemian denizens of an art club in Los Angeles, the newspapers I was attacking were beginning to turn up. Mark Kellner arrived to report for The Washington Times. "He's going to stitch up everything you say," a friend remarked. "The Washington Times is to the right of the Republican Party." We shall see.
But if my audiences had been largely made up of Americans without any Middle East roots, the same could not be said of Sunday's cocktails at the home of Stanley Sheinbaum, the philanthropist, art collector and libertarian - we shall forget the period in which he helped to run the Los Angeles Police Department - where my little speech was to set off some verbal hand-grenades. Sheinbaum it was who met Syria's President Hafez el-Assad at President Jimmy Carter's request, arranging Assad's extraordinary summit with Carter in Geneva. "Tell me something good about yourself," he said to me. Have you heard nothing good from anyone else, I enquired? "Nope," he said.
But I liked Sheinbaum, a crusty, humorous man in his eighties who encourages every liberal Jewish American to have his say about the Middle East. As the lunchtime fog embraced the rose gardens and villas and swimming pools and hills of Brentwood, up stepped Rabbi Haim dov Beliak to explain how he intends to close down the bingo and gambling operations of one of America's greatest Jewish settlement builders. "Call me when you get back to Beirut - by all means write about it." As we scoffed Stanley Sheinbaum's strawberries and sipped his fine Californian red wine, another rabbi approached. "You're gonna have some hostile people in your audience," he said. "Just let 'em hear the truth."
So I did. I talked about the cowardice of Secretary Powell, who dawdled his way around the Mediterranean to give Sharon time to finish destroying the Jenin refugee camp. I talked about the rotting bodies of Jenin and the growing evidence that back in 1982 Sharon's troops handed the survivors of the Sabra and Chatila massacre back to their Phalangist tormentors to be killed. I said that Arafat was never offered 96 per cent of the West Bank at Camp David. I advised the 100 or so people in the room to read the Israeli journalist Amira Haas' courageous reports in Haaretz. I talked about the squalor of the Palestinian camp. I talked of suicide bombings as "evil" but suggested that Israel would never have security until it abided by UN Security Council Resolution 252; that Israel would never have peace until it abandoned all of the West Bank, Gaza, Golan and East Jerusalem.
"I find it very difficult to ask you a question, because what you said made me so angry," a woman began afterwards. Why did I not realise that the Palestinians wanted to destroy all of Israel, that the right-of-return would destroy the state? For an hour I explained the reality I saw in the Middle East; an all-powerful Israel fighting an old-time colonial war. I talked about the 1954-62 Algerian war, its brutality and cruelty, the French army's torture and killings, the Algerians' slaughter of civilians, the frightening parallels with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. I talked about the Palestinians who wanted, at the least, an admission of the injustice their people had suffered in 1948, adding that there were Palestinians aplenty who realised that financial compensation would have to suffice for most of those refugees whose homes were in what is now Israel. I talked about Sharon and his bloody record in Lebanon. And about the pressures of the Israeli lobby in America, the fear of being labelled an anti-Semite, and the feeble reporting of the Middle East.
A rabbi was the first to tell me afterwards that the Palestinians were victims, that they should be given a real state. An old lady asked me for the name of the best book on the Algerian war. I gave it to her; Alastair Horne's A Savage War of Peace . A card was pushed into my hand. "Insightful talk!" the owner had written at the bottom and - hate though I do the word "insightful" - I couldn't help noticing that the name on the card was Yigal Arens, the son of one of Israel's most ruthless right-wing ministers, who had once informed me - in Beirut, back in 1982 - that Israel would "fight forever" against Palestinian terror.
On the freeway to LAX afterwards, the terminals and control tower looming through the Californian haze, I looked over Saturday's LA Times. A report on page 12 revealed that the BBC's award-winning film on Sharon's involvement in the Sabra and Chatila massacres had been dropped from a Canadian film festival after protests from Jewish groups. The organisers had explained that The Accused "could invite unwanted attention from interest groups" - whatever that means. But a paragraph at the end of the report caught my attention. "Sharon, who was the Israeli defence minister at the time, allegedly facilitated the assault on the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps..." There it was again. Allegedly? How many angry letters was that little lie supposed to avoid? Allegedly indeed.
But on reflection, I didn't think the Americans I met would be fooled by this. I didn't think my hotel proprietor would accept "allegedly". Nor the old naval officer from the John F Kennedy. Nor the listeners to KSUI. Nor even Stanley Sheinbaum. Yes, Osama bin Laden told me he thought Americans didn't understand the Middle East. Maybe he was right then. But not any more.
© 2001 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd