Page XVIII
WTC Attack - Some Serious Questions
WTC Attack - Some Serious Questions
Hypocrisy, Hatred And The War On Terror by Robert Fisk
The Fifth Freedom Gangster Pimping in the Culture of Terrorism - Noam Chomsky Interview
Michael Riconosciuto And 'Tim Osman' (Osama bin Laden) By J. Orlin Grabbe
What it really means to be for this war
WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE OBVIOUS by Barry Chamish
WTC Attack - Some Serious Questions
News
Analysis by J.J. Johnson 11.01.01
Sierra Times
http://www.sierratimes.com/archive/files/nov/06/arwc110601.htm
With all the
conspiracy theories floating around, a recent article has been published that
might make even the most sheepish sheeple begin to scratch their heads. There
clearly is more going on than someone is telling us. An article from the New
York Daily news is frightening -- once you begin to look at the evidence. Let's
go over this in detail, giving the government the complete benefit of the doubt.
If any one has more information on this, please let us know.
(Analysis in blue)
Cache of Gold Found at WTC Two truckloads
retrieved through a tunnel in rubble
By GREG GITTRICH, THOMAS
ZAMBITO and LEO STANDORA
Daily News Staff Writers URL
Link to Complete Story Here
Workers at Ground Zero unearthed last night a buried treasure of gold, hidden for weeks under the ruins of the World Trade Center.
As a small army of federal agents with shotguns and automatic rifles stood guard, city cops and firefighters packed two Brink's armored trucks with the lode, sources said.
This is not a shocker, as it was rumored that as much as $160 Billion in bullion was stored under the Trade Center. Let's read on.
The sources said the gold was found in a delivery tunnel under 5 World Trade Center.
Ok -- stop right here: Why would gold be in a tunnel? Maybe someone was trying to get it out on September 11. Completely explainable.
"They are taking gold out of there right now," one source said last night. "They've brought in extra cops."
It wasn't immediately clear how much gold was recovered last night - or exactly how much was buried under the complex after the Sept. 11 attacks.
We heard up to $160 Billion - so it's not a big secrect.
|
The Toronto-based Bank of Nova Scotia has said its vault under 4 World Trade Center alone held more than $200 million in gold and silver. Bank spokeswoman Pam Agnew didn't immediately know if any of that gold was found last night.
Other companies are believed to have lost untold gold and valuables in the disaster.
For the last couple of days, construction workers - directed by the feds - had been clearing a delivery tunnel that runs under the complex.
So the feds apparently knew exactly where it was. We can assume someone told them (?)
Officials finally got to the gold through that tunnel yesterday, after workers hauled out a 10-wheel truck, several crushed cars and mounds of debris.
No bodies were recovered during the operation.
Huh?? Let's get this straight so far: $200 Million in gold; found in a tunnel; there were NO bodies found near the gold and the Feds knew it was there. Like, there wasn't anyone guarding that gold? Or there was, but they bailed out before the second tower collapsed? On foot??
As workers inched closer to the gold yesterday, authorities began restricting access to the north side of Ground Zero and FBI and Secret Service agents joined cops and firefighters at the site.
Meaning, they knew EXACTLY where that gold was.
"If I tried to go down there, they would have shot me," said a construction worker shooed away from the tunnel.
A handful of heavy-machinery operators and other workers, under the watchful eyes of more than 100 armed officers, built and graded a ramp into the delivery tunnel.
A small bulldozer knocked down a wall inside the tunnel, and a Brink's armored truck drove in just before sunset.
It came out about 7 p.m. with the first load of gold, sources said. A second truck entered the tunnel a short time later and also was loaded with gold before leaving.
A handful of construction workers were held over from the day shift, which ends at 7 p.m., to help.
"They sent most of us on our merry way," said one worker.
 Click on Image for Full Size View |
Alright, take a look at Ground Zero. Notice where Building #5 is sitting. Also notice how close the federal building is to Building #5 (right across the street). According the report, the gold may have been moved from the Bank of Nova Scotia, whose vault was under Trade Center Building #4, adjacent to the first tower that collapsed. It was clearly being moved AWAY from the South Tower.
This leads to the question: did someone suspect building #4 would be so damaged (from a collapse) that it was imperative to move the gold immediately? Since the South Tower collapsed first and there were tons of debris in the tunnel, it is amazing NO bodies were found there guarding the gold. There clearly was more going on than a human rescue operation on September 11.
 Click on Image for Full Size View South Tower wreckage on lower left |
Reproduced gratefully from: Sierra Times
http://www.sierratimes.com/archive/files/nov/06/arwc110601.htm
Finally, an America Hater
by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
Bring up US foreign policy to a warhawk, point out that the terrorists have specifically named US policy in Muslim lands as the reason for their desire to kill, and the response is always the same: you are blaming the victim, which is America, and exonerating the guilty.
This is nonsense! To say that the wife killed the husband to get the insurance money isn’t to blame the husband for being insured. To say the robber held up a bank to get the money isn’t to say that it’s the bank’s fault for keeping money there. As Gene Callahan tirelessly points out, establishing a motive is essential to proving guilt. It doesn’t exonerate; it convicts.
So let’s talk motive. It’s a fact that the terrorist actions and continuing threats are a direct response to US troops in Saudi Arabia, trade sanctions against Iraq, and the perception that the US approves of the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Anyone who pays attention to the news, and understands anything about the region, knew that these policies spelled trouble even before bin Laden announced it.
To take the next step in the libertarian argument requires that we make judgments about whether the policies that inspired the attacks are justified. Even independently of the attacks, the US can and should change these policies because they are bad, period. If by our doing so, potential terrorists no longer feel inspired to poison people and hijack planes, that’s all to the good.
Hence, the neoconservative claim that we libertarians are just blaming America for the crimes of others doesn’t fly. Even in the case of most leftists who oppose this war, they are not "blaming America" but identifying US government policies as a motive force. It’s a simple matter of observing that folks don’t like it, for example, when 1 million people die as a result of sanctions you impose.
For weeks, I’ve looked in vain for someone to actually say the things that the neocons accuse us of saying: that America deserved the attacks, that this is the price we pay for being such a sinful country, that the American way of life needed to get a good wallop. We’ve all looked and looked for actual America haters among those who oppose the US war against Afghanistan.
Where are the people who are saying such things? Certainly no one on LRC. I’ve yet to see any major spokesman for peace promote such absurdities. Does anyone who thinks like that actually exist, apart from a few drugged-up antiglobalism protestors or professors in minority studies programs?
Much to my amazement, a person who actually does fit the neocon stereotype has at last shown his face. It is none other than our old friend Bill Clinton.
Speaking at Georgetown University, Clinton indulged in a flight of fancy about all the things America has done to call down these attacks on us. In particular he named the fact that "we were founded as a nation that practiced slavery, and slaves quite frequently were killed even though they were innocent."
If that isn’t bad enough: "this country once looked the other way when a significant number of native Americans were dispossessed and killed to get their land or their mineral rights or because they were thought of as less than fully human."
Finally the clincher: "And we are still paying a price today."
So there you have it: a blame America Firster, someone who actually believes that the attacks are the price we pay for our original sin, as well as events a century and a half old. When you hear this kind of drivel, it’s enough to get the old patriotic juices flowing. It tempts one to observe that this man, this former president of the United States, secretly hates this country. That sure would explain much about the Clinton regime.
Or perhaps it’s not a psychological state at all. It’s all the more gripping when you realize that the real reason for the attacks were the policies carried out under his administration. So he more than anyone else would have a good reason for wanting to distract people from events of the last 10 years to events of ancient history–events that no one can control now.
Clinton is pleased to promote the hatred of America, especially among college students, so long as it averts people’s eyes from the US government’s actions in the 1990s. So there we have the motive for the first genuine case of anti-Americanism I’ve seen. Wouldn’t you know that it comes from the mouth of the former president, whom historians will probably someday consider "near great" for his policies that got us into this war.
When Jerry Falwell said the attacks might be God’s judgment for Americans’ sins of abortion, the whole world came crashing down on him. That hasn’t happened and won’t happen to Clinton. The most the Wall Street Journal could muster was a pathetic: "wartime is hardly the time for an American politician to be harping on America's shortcomings."
The
problem isn’t the harping as such; it’s Clinton’s theory itself, that the
US was born in sin, and terror is the price we pay. I’m willing to bet that
the hijackers didn’t care a flip about slavery or Indian policies, and Clinton
doesn’t believe they did. His is a metaphysical argument, an anti-American
argument. We are paying the price for Bill Clinton and those like him.
November 9, 2001
Copyright © 2001 LewRockwell.com
Reproduced gratefully from: LewRockwell.com
ZNet Commentary
Hypocrisy, Hatred And The War On Terror by Robert Fisk
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2001-11/09fisk.cfm
"Air campaign"? "Coalition forces"? "War on terror"? How much longer must we go on enduring these lies? There is no "campaign" -- merely an air bombardment of the poorest and most broken country in the world by the world's richest and most sophisticated nation. No MIGs have taken to the skies to do battle with the American B-52s or F-18s. The only ammunition soaring into the air over Kabul comes from Russian anti-aircraft guns manufactured around 1943.
Coalition? Hands up who's seen the Luftwaffe in the skies over Kandahar, or the Italian air force or the French air force over Herat. Or even the Pakistani air force. The Americans are bombing Afghanistan with a few British missiles thrown in. "Coalition" indeed.
Then there's the "war on terror". When are we moving on to bomb the Jaffna peninsula? Or Chechnya -- which we have already left in Vladimir Putin's bloody hands?
I even seem to recall a massive terrorist car bomb that exploded in Beirut in 1985 -- targeting Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the spiritual inspiration to the Hezbollah, who now appears to be back on Washington's hit list -- and which missed Nasrallah but slaughtered 85 innocent Lebanese civilians. Years later, Carl Bernstein revealed in his book, Veil, that the CIA was behind the bomb after the Saudis agreed to fund the operation. So will the US President George Bush be hunting down the CIA murderers involved? The hell he will.
So why on earth are all my chums on CNN and Sky and the BBC rabbiting on about the "air campaign", "coalition forces" and the "war on terror"? Do they think their viewers believe this twaddle?
Certainly Muslims don't. In fact, you don't have to spend long in Pakistan to realize that the Pakistani press gives an infinitely more truthful and balanced account of the "war" -- publishing work by local intellectuals, historians and opposition writers along with Taliban comments and pro-government statements as well as syndicated Western analyses -- than The New York Times; and all this, remember, in a military dictatorship.
You only have to spend a few weeks in the Middle East and the subcontinent to realize why Tony Blair's interviews on al-Jazeera and Larry King Live don't amount to a hill of beans.
The Beirut daily As-Safir ran a widely-praised editorial asking why an Arab who wanted to express the anger and humiliation of millions of other Arabs was forced to do so from a cave in a non-Arab country. The implication, of course, was that this -- rather than the crimes against humanity on 11 September -- was the reason for America's determination to liquidate Osama bin Laden.
Far more persuasive has been a series of articles in the Pakistani press on the outrageous treatment of Muslims arrested in the United States in the aftermath of the September atrocities.
One such article should suffice. Headlined "Hate crime victim's diary", in The News of Lahore, it outlined the suffering of Hasnain Javed, who was arrested in Alabama on 19 September with an expired visa. In prison in Mississippi, he was beaten up by a prisoner who also broke his tooth.
Then, long after he had sounded the warden's alarm bell, more men beat him against a wall with the words: "Hey bin Laden, this is the first round. There are going to be 10 rounds like this." There are dozens of other such stories in the Pakistani press and most of them appear to be true.
Again, Muslims have been outraged by the hypocrisy of the West's supposed "respect" for Islam. We are not, so we have informed the world, going to suspend military operations in Afghanistan during the holy fasting month of Ramadan. After all, the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq conflict continued during Ramadan. So have Arab-Israeli conflicts. True enough.
But why, then, did we make such a show of suspending bombing on the first Friday of the bombardment last month out of our "respect" for Islam? Because we were more respectful then than now? Or because -- the Taliban remaining unbroken -- we've decided to forget about all that "respect"?
"I can see why you want to separate bin Laden from our religion," a Peshawar journalist said to me a few days ago. "Of course you want to tell us that this isn't a religious war, but Mr Robert, please, please stop telling us how much you respect Islam."
There is another disturbing argument I hear in Pakistan. If, as Mr Bush claims, the attacks on New York and Washington were an assault on "civilization", why shouldn't Muslims regard an attack on Afghanistan as a war on Islam?
The Pakistanis swiftly spotted the hypocrisy of the Australians. While itching to get into the fight against Mr bin Laden, the Australians have sent armed troops to force destitute Afghan refugees out of their territorial waters.
The Aussies want to bomb Afghanistan -- but they don't want to save the Afghans. Pakistan, it should be added, hosts 2.5 million Afghan refugees. Needless to say, this discrepancy doesn't get much of an airing on our satellite channels. Indeed, I have never heard so much fury directed at journalists as I have in Pakistan these past few weeks. Nor am I surprised.
What, after all, are we supposed to make of the so-called "liberal" American television journalist Geraldo Rivera who is just moving to Fox TV, a Murdoch channel? "I'm feeling more patriotic than at any time in my life, itching for justice, or maybe just revenge," he announced this week.
"And this catharsis I've gone through has caused me to reassess what I do for a living." This is truly chilling stuff. Here is an American journalist actually revealing that he's possibly "itching for revenge".
Infinitely more shameful -- and unethical -- were the disgraceful words of Walter Isaacson, the chairman of CNN, to his staff. Showing the misery of Afghanistan ran the risk of promoting enemy propaganda, he said.
"It seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan ... we must talk about how the Taliban are using civilian shields and how the Taliban have harbored the terrorists responsible for killing close up to 5,000 innocent people."
Mr Isaacson was an unimaginative boss of Time magazine but these latest words will do more to damage the supposed impartiality of CNN than anything on the air in recent years.
Perverse? Why perverse? Why are Afghan casualties so far down Mr Isaacson's compassion? Or is Mr Isaacson just following the lead set down for him a few days earlier by the White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, who portentously announced to the Washington press corps that in times like these "people have to watch what they say and watch what they do".
Needless to say, CNN has caved in to the US government's demand not to broadcast Mr bin Laden's words in toto lest they contain "coded messages". But the coded messages go out on television every hour. They are "air campaign", "coalition forces" and "war on terror".
[© 2001 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
Reproduced Gratefully from Znet
http://www.guerrillanews.com/counter_intelligence/206.html
The Fifth Freedom Gangster Pimping in the Culture of Terrorism - Noam Chomsky Interview
As Enduring Freedom lumbers toward its uncertain goal, advocates of the operation have consolidated their message into a solitary line of media-packaged simplicity. In justification of the on-going attacks on the Taliban controlled Afghan population, the Bush administration continually asserts the regime's links to international terrorism. But, as we know, one nation's terrorist is another nation's freedom fighter. And, as the once-feverish patriotism of the mainstream press cools into rational objectivity, some writers have begun to ask the difficult question: What role has the United States played in aiding, abetting and harboring terrorists in the name of achieving their own foreign policy objectives?
In this much-anticipated interview with GNN, Noam Chomsky leads us through his own critical analysis of the war. Tapping his expertise in linguistics, Professor Chomsky gives some startling interpretations of words like 'terrorist' and 'Enduring Freedom'. And, with unfaltering clarity, Chomsky explains how America's tendency toward historical revisionism may be one of the most dangerous policy initiatives ever undertaken.
Stephen Marshall: Hi Noam.
Noam Chomsky: Hello. What are we going to be talking about today?
Well. I’d like to begin with a brief discussion about your work in linguistics and how that developed into a major concentration on U.S. foreign policy. I’d like to then move on to the subject of the current conflict. Looking at it from the perspective that is presented in The Culture of Terrorism. And then I want to focus on stuff like the Fifth Freedom and your opinion about how the Bush Administration is handling the retaliations. Is that cool?
Sounds great.
Ok. Maybe we’ll just start with the fact that your original scholastic focus was in the field of linguistics. Some people might actually be surprised to hear that. I wanted to ask you if there is a connection between the study of language and that of political systems. How should we look at language in our political studies?
Well, my professional field happens to be linguistics and I’ve been in it since I was 17 years old. But it has basically nothing to do with my interests in international affairs and social and economic issues, which actually preceded it from childhood. Just parallel lives…
There are certainly questions about the use of language, that’s a very important question but you don’t have to be a professional linguist to say anything about those. Those are just common sense.
Take, say, a word like ‘terrorism,’ for example. Like most terms of political discourse it has two meanings: there’s a literal meaning and if you want to know what that is you can look up the official U.S. code or army manuals, they’ll tell you what terrorism is. And it’s what you would think, terrorism is "the calculated use of violence against civilians to intimidate, induce fear, often to kill, for some political, religious, or other end."
That’s terrorism, according to its official definition.
But that definition can’t be used. Because if that definition is used, you get all the wrong consequences. For one thing, that definition turns out to be almost the same as the definition of official U.S. policy. Except, when it’s U.S. policy, it’s called ‘counter-insurgency’ or ‘low-intensity conflict’ or some other name. But, in fact, if you look at the definition, it’s essentially terrorism. In fact, almost a paraphrase. Furthermore, if you apply the literal definition, you conclude that the U.S. is a leading terrorist state because it engages in these practices all the time. It’s the only state, in fact, which has been condemned by the World Court and the Security Council for terrorism, in this sense. And the same is true of its allies. So, right now, they’re putting together what they call a ‘coalition against terror’, for the ‘war on terror’, and if you run down the list, every one of them is a leading terrorist state.
So obviously you can’t use that definition.
So therefore, there’s a propagandistic definition which is the one actually used and in that definition terrorism is "terrorism which is directed against the United States or its allies and carried out by enemies." Well, that’s the propagandistic use and, if you read the newspapers and the scholarly literature, they’re always using that use. And that’s not just the U.S. Every country does that, even the worst killers, the worst mass murderers do it. Take the Nazis, they were combating an occupied Europe. They combated what they called terrorism, namely partisan resistance, which often was, in fact, terrorism in the technical sense.
Resistance usually is.
The American Revolution is a good example - plenty of terrorism. So, the Nazis were combating terrorism and they called what they were doing, which was extraordinarily brutal, ‘counter-terrorism’. And the U.S. basically agreed with them. The U.S. Army, after the war, made extensive use of Nazi training manuals… did studies which did careful analysis of them, thinking what was right, what was wrong - meaning did it work or didn’t it work - essentially accepting the same framework, and, furthermore, immediately started carrying out the same actions against, pretty much, the same enemies. The U.S. Army manuals, on what is called ‘counter-terrorism', drew from German manuals and even involved the high German officers—Wehrmacht officers – who were used as consultants. And, in every other state, it’s the same. The terrorism they don’t like is called ‘terrorism’ and the terrorism they do like, because they carry it out or their allies carry it out, is called ‘counter-terrorism’.
Well, this all has to do with the use of language. But you certainly don’t have to be a professional linguist to see this. This just requires having ordinary intelligence and looking at the facts. And the same is true throughout, I mean the terms that are used are twisted in ways to satisfy the needs of whoever’s using them, which turns out mostly to be concentrated power centers, state or private, and that’s true wherever you look.
And that’s a serious issue. So you can look at the use of language and propaganda and ideology and schools and so on, but it’s really just common sense.
In many of your writings, you have discussed the notion of state deception, especially when it comes to historical revision. Something happened one night during a news broadcast that made me question how immediate the revision is becoming. I was watching CNN after Bush’s address to Congress, and they were discussing Bush’s use of the word ‘crusade’. And there was an advisor or policy analyst who came on and said: "It’s unfortunate that Bush and his speechwriters didn’t understand the implications of a word like crusade." And I was shocked. I mean, do you believe that George Bush’s speechwriters would not understand the implications of a word like ‘crusade’ to the Islamic people and, on the converse, aren’t words like those used to incite or trigger responses?
Well, you’re right to emphasize George Bush’s speechwriter because he probably doesn’t even know what he’s saying. But the speechwriter’s picked the word ‘crusade’, and you can understand it. In English, the term ‘crusade’ is used quite generally. A crusade against something just means a struggle against it. But in the Islamic world it has a different meaning, it refers to the crusades, which were an extremely brutal and violent invasion of their land by Christian fundamentalist fanatics who left a horrendous trail of bloodshed.
And that’s part of their history.
It’s usually the victims who remember the history, not the perpetrators. So the use of the word ‘crusade’ in the Islamic world carries many strong memories and associations and Bush’s speechwriters hadn’t thought about it. So they withdrew the word crusade. That’s happened a couple of times already.
The first operation against Afghanistan was called ‘Infinite Justice’ and they withdrew that when it was pointed out to them that the only ‘infinite justice’ is God’s justice, and they were being interpreted as regarding themselves as divinity. And they didn’t want to do that for obvious reasons, so they changed it to some other phrase. The phrase they did pick is interesting. The campaign is now called ‘Enduring Freedom’. Well, a number of comments about that...
If you want to look at the kind of ‘freedom’ they have in mind, there’s an ample historical record of the kind of freedom they impose. The other point is, nobody seems to have noticed it but, the word ‘enduring’ is actually ambiguous. It can mean ‘lasting’ or it can mean ‘suffering from’. So, I’m enduring pain is another interpretation of ‘enduring’ and, in fact, if you think of the kind of freedom they impose and enduring freedom in the other sense, that is: ‘somehow living with the horrendous consequences of it,’ is not an inaccurate description.
Nobody’s pointed that out to them yet so they’re still using this phrase, but if someone does maybe they’ll make another one up.
Yeah, but I wondered if it wasn’t a bit of a ploy, if there isn’t a bit of incitement going on. Kind of subliminal psychological intimidation. I mean, these speechwriters are, I imagine, are some of the best in the country. They must implicitly understand the import and potential impact of every word -
No, I don’t think so. I think they’re just mistakes.
Fair enough. Now, sticking with this analysis of language and, specifically, the use of the word ‘freedom’. In The Culture of Terrorism, you discuss something called the ‘fifth freedom’. Can you please just define that for us and maybe describe how it has any relevance right now?
Well, there’s a famous concept called The Four Freedoms. In, I think it must have been 1944 approximately… President Roosevelt, towards the end of the war, announced that the allies were fighting for the ‘four freedoms.’ That’s freedom from want, freedom from fear, I forget the exact other words, but all good things. So those were the four freedoms we were fighting for.
We actually have a declassified record, a released internal record of the background… what they were afraid of at the time. Remember, that at the time the world was mostly colonies and the colonies, in fact, often welcomed, especially, the Japanese. They welcomed the Japanese because the Japanese were throwing out the colonial oppressors - they were throwing out the British, and the French, and the Dutch, and the Americans and so on.
And it was understood, internally, that it was necessary to make some appeal to the huge part of the world which was the colonial world - we now call the south or the Third World - which would make them believe that we were really fighting for good things. Not just to restore colonialism.
And out of that came the Four Freedoms. And by the ‘fifth’ freedom, I meant the one that they didn’t mention. But the crucial one. Namely the freedom to rob and exploit, that’s a freedom that we and our powerful countries, the imperial countries, insist on. And that was the real freedom that was being fought for.
And the colonial world, if they didn’t know it already, discovered that very fast after the Second World War. That’s a good part of the history of the last 50 years… is the record of how the great powers - primarily the United States, because it’s the most powerful - pursued their own freedom to rob and exploit and oppress and so on. That’s the real history. It may not be taught in school here but the real history of British imperialism wasn’t taught in British schools either. It’s known by the victims.
Historical revisionism. On that topic, you published an official reaction to the terrorist attacks and the proposed U.S. reaction on October 8th. There is a lot to that but I wanted to focus on one point you made, namely this concept of historical revisionism. In that text, you used the words "systemic falsification of the past" to describe the West’s approach to its history. I’d like to ask you to define that terminology for people who don’t understand it, and how it plays a role in current events in allowing them to sustain itself. Is it a mode of behavior that can have severe human consequences?
It’s very typical over history, over time, for the world to look very different depending on whether you’re holding the whip, or you’re under the whip.
It just looks different.
For a couple hundred years, Europe and its offshoots - we’re one of it offshoots - have been holding the whip. They’ve been carrying out massive atrocities against others, and that’s U.S. history. That’s the history of England, France, Belgium, Germany and others. They’ve always been attacking people outside and conquering the world; they didn’t conquer the world in a pretty fashion. And they have a picture which is about how they were bringing freedom and justice and… ‘maybe they made some mistakes, but it was all well intentioned’… and so on. From the other end of the guns, it looks very different.
Now, our systematic falsification of history… well, let’s just take where we’re talking right now:
Well, we’re here in New England because religious fanatics, extreme fanatic religious fundamentalists, very much like Islamic fundamentalists, landed here and mercilessly destroyed the indigenous population. So we’re here. That’s not the way it’s taught, but that’s the way it was. And the founding fathers were well aware of it. And they recognized it, sometimes with regret, sometimes not, and it continued until the national territory was conquered. There were, after all, maybe 7 or 8 million or maybe more inhabitants here, they weren’t around by the year 1900. And the U.S., for example, conquered half of Mexico. Well, the Mexicans know it; we don’t get taught it in school. When the U.S. took over the Philippines, they killed a couple hundred thousand people. Filipinos, they know it, we don’t talk about it.
And this falsification of history has consequences. In fact, we saw some of them on Sept 11th. Here, the commentary often… much of the commentary is: "Well, why do they hate us?" And a lot of the commentary, op eds, in The New York Times and so on, by big thinkers, was: "Well, they hate us because we stand for freedom and democracy and prosperity and therefore they hate us."
Well, that’s a nice, comforting point of view, but it’s totally false. And some of the press, to its credit, did begin to look at the history. So the Wall Street Journal very soon, within a few days, began running articles on actual attitudes of people in the Middle East towards the United States. They sampled the wealthy and the privileged - the people who they’re concerned about - not beggars and rural people, but bankers, and lawyers for international corporations, businessmen, and they did several good studies of their attitudes. And, it turns out, that they’re very bitter and angry and frustrated about the United States though they’re very pro-American and, in fact, all involved in the U.S. system.
And their anger is precisely the opposite of what the elite intellectuals are saying.
They don’t hate us for our democracy, they hate us because we repress democracy. They hate us because we’ve supported the oppressive and brutal and authoritarian regimes and undermined any attempt at democracy in the region, and because of their explicit policies. So the policy of the last ten years… the U.S. and Britain have devastated the civilian society of Iraq meanwhile, strengthening Saddam Hussein. And they know very well, even though we don’t like to say it, that the U.S. and Britain supported Hussein right through his worst atrocities. The ones that are now being brought up to show how terrible he is. Like the gassing of the Kurds. A horrible atrocity, and, yet, the U.S. and Britain supported him right through it, continued to support him afterwards. And they know that. They also know that the policies are destroying the civilian society and strengthening Saddam Hussein, and that stands alongside the U.S. policies towards Israel and Palestine.
I mean, they know, even if we pretend not to, that there has been a brutal military occupation, now going into its 35th year, which has relied crucially on U.S. support - diplomatic support, military support, economic support. When Israel builds settlements to break up the occupied territories illegally, the U.S. is paying for it. When it sends helicopters to carry out assassinations or attack civilian complexes, they are U.S. helicopters sent with a certain knowledge that that’s how they’re going to be used. On the diplomatic front, they know, even if we pretend not to, that for twenty-five years, the U.S. has been blocking a diplomatic settlement which has almost total - almost, the whole world has been in favor of it for 25 years, including the Arab states, Europe, former Soviet Union, everybody – [in favor of] some sort of two-state settlement. And the U.S. has been blocking it, and they’re still blocking it.
Well, they know all of this. And such policies towards say, Iraq and the consistent U.S. support for brutal and oppressive regimes. Even its own atrocities within the region, which are not slight… its opposition to democracy, those are the attitudes of the pro-American elements. The wealthy, privileged elements. If you get out on the streets, you hear the same things, it’s just much more bitter and they’re also furious about the fact that the wealth of the region, which is real - mostly oil wealth - is not being used for them, but it’s going to the West. It’s going to purchase U.S. Treasury securities, or U.S. arms, or pay off U.S. and British investment firms, well they know all that.
They’re living in misery and the wealth is going to the West.
These are the real attitudes. Now if we choose not to pay attention to those attitudes and to pretend that they’re angry because we’re so wonderful, well, we’re just guaranteeing that there will be more terrorist acts. If you don’t want to understand the reasons, you can be pretty sure that it will continue. And this is true of, take any crime you like - robbery in the streets or a major atrocity - whoever is committing it has reasons. I mean, maybe it’s just pathology, that could happen too, but usually they have reasons. And if you look at the reasons, there’s usually something behind them, even something legitimate behind them. So, when… take the Oklahoma city bombing, when it first happened, there were big headlines about "Let’s Bomb Beirut" or something like that. It was assumed that it had some Middle East connection and if it had some Middle East connection, the U.S. probably would have gone to war, like it’s doing now. Well, it turned out not to have a Middle East connection, but to be a domestic person with militia associations.
OK, what was the reaction?
Was the reaction to bomb Idaho and destroy Montana and bomb the Republic of Texas, which has declared independence of the oppressive government of Washington? No that wasn’t the reaction, that would have been crazy. The reaction was to find the person who was responsible, bring him to trial, follow legal procedures, and consider the grievances. I mean, the militia movements come out of something. And if you look at what they come out of, you find that there are some things that really ought be attended to. They’re important. And that’s typically the case. We can choose not to do that, but then we’re just guaranteeing that the cycle of violence will escalate, like tribal warfare - you hurt me, I’m going to hurt you more. That’s a way to go on, and we know the consequences.
OK. Further to that… how would you then characterize the foreign policy of the United States, which goes and empowers someone like Saddam Hussein while he is administrating over such brutal atrocities? Because, that is a direct policy. It is premeditated and conscious and one which, in my view, constantly creates a sort of strife. It’s almost like a sort of Machiavellian concept… maybe, perhaps, of divide and conquer. Can you sort of characterize that?
Well, the U.S. supported Saddam Hussein for, what they considered, sound policy reasons. For one thing, Saddam Hussein was anti-Communist and he’s a brutal monster and always was since the time he took power. But he was applying his atrocities to U.S. enemies, namely the domestic Communist parties. After that, the U.S. backed him, as did Britain, in his war against Iran; he invaded Iran, and Iran was a U.S. enemy by that time.
So Iraq invaded Iran.
The U.S. gave it pretty strong support, as did Britain and others. And, in fact, U.S. support ended up being decisive. The U.S. ended up actually shooting down an Iranian commercial airliner in Iranian airspace, killing 290 people. Here it’s not taken very seriously. In fact, the warship that did it came back and the commander got a hero’s welcome and the Legion or Merit of Honor. But the Iranians paid attention. It was one of many events which made them understand that the U.S. was going to go to the limit to make sure that Iraq won the war, and they effectively capitulated.
And the U.S. continued to back Saddam.
This was the period of the really huge atrocities, like the massacre of the Kurds, with gassing. These were Iraqi Kurds, the U.S. continued to support him. In fact, the first Bush administration was providing him with an enormous amount of agricultural aid, which he needed because the Kurdish regions that were destroyed were agricultural regions, supplying him with technology that could be used for weapons of mass destruction, as was recognized. Britain did too. Britain actually had a serious government inquiry into it later and revealed a lot of the facts, here it’s kind of ignored. And that continued almost up until Saddam Hussein made his first mistake, from the U.S. point of view. Namely, he disobeyed orders. His takeover of Kuwait… the U.S. was opposed to that; clients aren’t supposed to disobey orders. In comparison with his other crimes, it didn’t amount to much, but it was the one that counted, so then he became an enemy.
And there’s case after case like that.
Take say, just a few months before Iraq invaded Kuwait, the United States invaded Panama, and killed maybe a couple thousand people, destroyed residential neighborhoods and kidnapped someone they didn’t like. Namely Manuel Noriega. He was kidnapped, brought to trial in Florida and, if you look at the charges against him, I mean, they were surely accurate, but they were charges from the period when he was on the CIA payroll, almost entirely. He had been a client of the United States: he was a gangster and a killer. But he was a client, he was doing the things the U.S. wanted. He was participating in the U.S. war against Nicaragua, which was a major terrorist crime - that’s the one that the World Court condemned the United States for – and, as long as he was doing that, it didn’t matter much if he stole elections and tortured dozens and killed his opponents, it was okay.
But a couple of years later, he was getting too big for his britches. He was, sort of, acting on his own. He was not cooperating in the war and the U.S. decided "well, okay, he’s a criminal," which, of course, he was, and invaded the country brutally, and kidnapped him, which is totally illegal, of course, and brought him here. Well, here it’s considered a great triumph, but not in the rest of the world, especially not in the Third world, they’re too familiar with it. And that goes on constantly.
Take, right at this moment for example, the U.S. wants Afghanistan to turn over Osama bin laden. Now, the Taliban regime - which is a very cruel and oppressive regime (and that didn’t bother the United States before but now it does), they have said "give us some evidence." Well, that happens to be a very reasonable request. If a country approached the United States and said "hand over so and so, because we think he’s a criminal" and they didn’t provide any evidence, nobody would even bother laughing. Well, this Taliban request is considered ridiculous, you know, it just shows how awful they are: "look they’re asking for evidence, they’re not allowed to do that, we say we want him, hand him over."
Well, it happens that they’re right on this. You should provide convincing evidence, and the U.S. hasn’t provided it, probably because it doesn’t have it and, besides, they just treat them with contempt when they offer to negotiate.
You kick ‘em in the face.
Well, the world notices that. Certainly the Arab world. And many people may notice something else: the U.S. has criminals, internally… major criminals. Other countries are asking for their extradition, want them handed over, and the U.S. won’t do it, even though, in this case, the evidence is quite strong. So, right in the midst of all this focus of attention on the Taliban and Osama bin Laden, Haiti has repeated its request which it has been raising for a year that the United States turn over Emanuel Constant, who is not only indicted but was sentenced in absentia in Haiti for a leading role in the murder of four to five thousand people in the early 90’s, during the coup period.
Now, the U.S., the first Bush and the Clinton administrations were tacitly supporting the military junta and the rich elite, it’s not very hard to show. Constant, who was the head of the murderess paramilitary forces, had close ties to the U.S., to the CIA, and others, and probably that’s why the U.S. doesn’t want to hand him over. But here was a man who was a leading figure in the killing of four to five thousand people in a country right next door: they’ve had the evidence, they’ve brought him to trial, in fact, convicted him, and now they want him handed over. Not only the will the U.S. not do it but, in fact, it isn’t even discussed. We do what we want.
And there are other such cases.
I mean, Costa Rica, for example, which is the one long-time democratic state in Central America. For about fifteen years now they’ve been asking the U.S. to hand over a man named John Hull, who was a rancher in Costa Rica. They discovered that his land was being used by the Reagan administration as a base for major terrorist attacks against a neighboring country, namely Nicaragua. Well, in Costa Rica it’s a crime to have your land used for terrorist attacks against another country, and they’ve been asking the U.S. to hand him over. The U.S. won’t think about it. In fact, it punished them for making the request by economic sanctions of a kind, but here it’s never discussed. And we can go on. These are things that people, especially in the Third world, know quite well. We may choose to look in some other direction but they see it, and they’re aware of it and they suffer the consequences.
I know that we are getting short on time, so I want to jump into a different question entirely. It has to do with the way that 9-11 is being used to shape policy. If we look back in history, to the 1920’s when the Council on Foreign Relations was created, there was this whole concept of a New World Order and a world government that was trotted out. Obviously, the evolution of Communism as a dominant world power got in the way of that but by the end of the Reagan administration and the fall of the Berlin Wall the notion seemed to be in vogue again. In fact, George Bush reiterated publicly, during his address to Congress in 1991 when he spoke about the Iraqi conflict. My question is, has this recent attack in an ironic way, furthered that concept of creating a broad-lateral coalition of world government in the sense that our enemy is justifiably an enemy of the entire so-called free world; including, finally, Russia?
It’s the same, you know. The basic policies remain very stable. The policies are rooted in the domestic institutions. Like in any country, if you want to figure out what it’s policy is, you look at who runs it internally. Well, internally, the United States is formally democratic but power is overwhelmingly in the hands of a highly concentrated business sector, corporate sector, closely linked to government, closely linked to military, and so on. They have a very strong impact on how policy is formed, and they’re stable over very long periods of policy, stable over long periods of time. It adjusts, tactically adjusts… there are changes. Take this war on terrorism. It’s not a new war. The Reagan administration came into office 20 years ago, announcing very clearly that its major concern was the plague of international terrorism, which had to be destroyed. And they proceeded to combat the plague by creating the most extraordinary international terrorist network that ever existed, and using it to launch major terrorist wars in Central America, to support South African depredations against their neighboring countries which killed a million and a half people in the Reagan years alone.
This time, there’s supposed to be a coalition of countries against terrorism and, as I already mentioned, if you look at the coalition, it’s terrorist states. So the Russians are happy to join the coalition because they want U.S. support for their brutal and murderous war in Chechnya. And the Chinese are quite happy to join because they want U.S. support for their murderous activities against Muslim groups in western China. Turkey’s delighted to join because they want U.S. support, which has always been there, for the massive ethnic cleansing and atrocities that they’ve been carrying out inside Turkey in the late 90’s against their own Kurdish population. And we can run through the list; every one of them is happy to join because they want U.S. support for their terrorist activities. So yes, that’s a coalition of ‘the just’, if you like. But it’s just an adjustment of traditional policies to new circumstances.
OK. Last question: there is a critique of the anti-war Left, and you’ve heard it often, over and over again, "you guys want peace, you advocate detente, you want some sort of solution, but you don’t have any solutions. At least the Right has a solution." If you were president, what would be your policy goals toward -
Toward what?
U.S. policy subsequent to the Sept 11 attacks...
It’s very straightforward; it’s been stated over and over. The Left has plenty of concrete solutions. It’s just that power centers don’t want to pursue them. What happened on September 11 was a major atrocity, one of the worst terrorist attacks in history. Actually, unfortunately, it wasn’t unique in scale.
Let’s take an uncontroversial case. Uncontroversial because we have the judgement of the World Court and the Security Council, the highest international authorities - namely the war against Nicaragua. That war was much worse than even the World Trade Center bombing, they killed tens of thousands of people, practically destroyed the country. It may never recover. What did Nicaragua do? They didn’t set off bombs in Washington. They went to the World Court with their case, a strong case. In fact, they won it. Now, the Court accepted their case, ordered the United States to stop what they called "unlawful use of force," which means international terrorism, and to pay substantial reparations. The U.S. dismissed the Court judgement and immediately escalated the war.
And so Nicaragua went to the U.N. Security Council, which considered a resolution, calling on all states to observe international law. It didn’t mention anyone but everyone knew it meant the United States. The U.S. vetoed it. Nicaragua, then, went to the General Assembly where there’s no veto and they got essentially unanimous agreement for two years in a row, for essentially the same resolution. The U.S. and Israel were opposed, that’s all. Well, Nicaragua couldn’t do anything. It’s facing a violent superpower, can’t do anything. On the other hand, if the U.S. pursued the lawful course, using the precedent of law-abiding states, nobody would block it, everybody would applaud. And that’s exactly what the U.S. should have done in the beginning, and should still do.
Notice what they are doing.
What the U.S. is doing, is killing an enormous number, we don’t know how many, but plenty of innocent Afghans. Now, I’m not talking about the collateral damage from bombing - as they call it with collateral damage, meaning civilians who happen to be killed when a bomb hits a residential neighborhood - I mean, that’s a crime but it’s very small in comparison to the real crime. Now, the real crime is starving the population to death and that could be hundreds of thousands, it could turn out to be millions of people. The U.N., which has been trying to do something about the food problem for years, estimates that there may be 7 million Afghans just on the verge of starvation. They were being kept alive by food shipments from international agencies, primarily the U.N. World Food program, Oxfam, Save the Children, Christian Aid, and others. Those programs were all terminated when the U.S. threatened to bomb. The international agencies had to withdraw their international workers, and the food shipments stopped. And , of course, people were terrified by the bombing threats and began to flee, but they couldn’t go anywhere. Now, we don’t know how many people died in the first several weeks, but it must have been a lot. Well, finally the World Food program, the main one, did start in early October shipping some food back in. Well, then, the U.S. started bombing. Food shipment stopped, distribution stopped. By now, it has started again but at about half the rate that is estimated to be necessary to keep 7 million people alive. And it’s only going to go on for another few weeks then the winter comes.
Well, just do the arithmetic. I’ll do it for you… do the arithmetic and those are the assumptions of policy planners.
Well, I’m strongly opposed to policies that are aimed at killing, I don’t know how many, it could turn out to be millions of Afghans, who have nothing to do with the Taliban. They’re victims of the Taliban. If the Right thinks that’s the right thing to do, well, we know where to place them in history.
I don’t think so.
I don’t think we should be following such policies. I think we should be following the policies of lawful states, law-abiding states, that’s a very concrete proposal. And we can go on to consider more concrete proposals. To say that critics have no policy proposals, that’s just a lie. They have very explicit proposals on case after case after case, it’s just that power centers don’t want to consider them for their own reasons.
Thank you Noam.
You’re welcome.
Reproduced gratefully from:
Michael Riconosciuto And 'Tim Osman' (Osama bin Laden)
By J. Orlin Grabbe The Laissez Faire City Times Vol 5, No 46, November 12, 2001
http://www.orlingrabbe.com/binladin_timosman.htm
11-8-1
The two men headed to the Hilton Hotel in Sherman Oaks, California in the late Spring of 1986 were on their way to meet representatives of the mujahadeen, the Afghan fighters resisting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
One of the two, Ted Gunderson, had had a distinguished career in the FBI, serving as some sort of supervisor over Special Agents in the early 60s, as head of the Dallas field office from 1973-75, and as head of the Los Angeles field office from 1977-1979. He retired to become an investigator for, among others, well-known attorney F. Lee Bailey. And all along the way, Gunderson, whether or not actually a CIA contract agent, had been around to provide services to various CIA and National Security Council operations, as he was doing now.
In more recent years Gunderson was to become controversial for his investigations into child prostitution rings, after he became convinced of the innocence of an Army medical doctor named Jeffrey McDonald, who had been convicted of the murder of his wife and three young children in the 1970s. This has led to various attempts by the patrons and operators of the child prostitution industry to smear Gunderson's reputation.
Michael Riconosciuto was there to discuss assisting the mujahadeen with MANPADs,ÄîMan Portable Air Defense Systems. Stinger missiles were one possibility. If the U.S. would permit their export, Riconosciuto could modify the Stinger's electronics, so the guided missile would still be effective against Soviet aircraft, but would not be a threattto U.S. or NATO forces.
But Riconosciuto had another idea. Through his connections with the Chinese industrial and military group <http://www.norinco.com.cn/Norinco, he could obtain the basic components for the unassembled Chinese 107 MM rocket system. These could be reconfigured into a man-portable, shoulder-fired, anti- aircraft guided missile sytem, and produced in Pakistan at a facility called the Pakistan Ordinance Works. The mujahadeen would then have a lethal weapon against Soviet helicopter, observation, and transport aircraft.
Riconosciuto was more than just an expert on missile electronics; he was also an expert on electronic computers and associated subjects such as cryptology (see my "<http://orlingrabbe.com/ricono.htm Michael Riconosciuto on Encryption").
Riconosciuto was a prodigy who had grown up in the spook community. The Riconosciuto family had once run Hercules, California, as a company town. In the early days (1861) a company called California Powder Works had been established in Santa Cruz, CA. It later purchased land on San Pablo Bay, and in 1881 started producing dynamite, locating buildings in gullies and ravines for safety purposes. A particularly potent type of black powder was named "Hercules Powder", which gave the name to the town of Hercules, formally incorporated in 1900. In World War I, Hercules became the largest producer of TNT in the U.S. Hercules, however, had gotten out of the explosives business by 1940 when an anhydrous ammonia plant was constructed. In 1959 Hercules began a new manufacturing facility to produce methanol, formaldehyde, and urea formaldehyde. In 1966 the plant was sold to Valley Nitrogen Producers. Labor problems led to a plant closure in 1977. In 1979 the plant and site was purchased by a group of investors calling themselves Hercules Properties, Ltd.
However, Michael and his father Marshall Riconosciuto, a friend of Richard Nixon, continued to run the Hercules Research Corporation. In the early 1980s Michael also served as the Director of Research for a joint venture between the Wackenhut Corporation of Coral Gables, Florida, and the <http://orlingrabbe.com/part12.htm Cabazon Band of Indians in Indio, California.
Riconosciuto's talents were much in demand. He had created the a- neutronic bomb (or "Electro-Hydrodynamic Gaseous Fuel Device"), which sank the ground level of the Nevada test site by 30 feet when a prototype was tested. Samuel Cohen, the inventor of the neutron bomb, said of Riconosciuto: "I've spoken to Michael Riconosciuto (the inventor of the a-neutronic bomb) and he's an extraordinarily bright guy. I also have a hunch, which I can't prove, that they both (Riconosciuto and Lavos, his partner) indirectly work for the CIA."
Riconosciuto's bomb made suitcase nukes obsolete, because it achieved near-atomic explosive yields, but could be more easily minaturized. You could have a suitcase a-neutronic bomb, or a briefcase a- neutronic bomb, or simply a lady's purse a-neutronic bomb. Or just pull out your wallet for identification and... The Meridian Arms Corporation, as well as the Universities of California and Chicago owned a piece of the technology.
But there was more than explosives in the portfolios of the CIA agents who surrounded Riconosciuto like moths around a candle. Both Robert Booth Nichols, the shady head of Meridian Arms Corporation (with both CIA and organized crime conections), and Dr. John Phillip Nichols, the manager of the Cabazon reservation, were involved in bio- warfare work,Äîthe first in trying to sell bio-warfare products to the army through Wackenhut, the second in giving tribal permission for research to take place at Cabazon. According to Riconosciuto, the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was in charge of the classified contracts for biological warfare research. Riconosciuto would later testify under oath that <http://www.stormont- labs.com/ Stormont Laboratories was involved in the DARPA-Wackenhut- Cabazon project. Jonathan Littman, a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle would relate: "Cabazons and Wackenhut appeared to be acting as middlemen between the Pentagon's DARPA and Stormont Laboratories, a small facility in Woodland near Sacramento."
The Race Weapon
Riconosciuto would make additional claims about <http://www.bio- rad.com/Bio-Rad corporation, a medical supplier which had gradually taken over Hercules, California. They were also, Riconosciuto would say, covertly engaged in bio-warfare research - producing some of the deadliest toxins known to man. The focus of Bio-Rad's research was said to be bio-active elements that could be tailored to attack those with certain types of DNA. Weapons could thus be produced that were specifically designed to wipe out specific races or genetic classes of human beings. (Alternatively, particular DNA types could be immunized against a deadly biological agent; the agent could then be released, and everyone else would die.)
A couple of years later, Meridian International Logistics, the parent company of Meridian Arms, was to farm similar research out to the Japanese. This included (according to minutes of a corporate meeting dated Aug. 26, 1988) methods for "induction and activation of cytotoxic T-lymphocytes". Associated with Meridian's Robert Booth Nichols in a Middle Eastern operation called FIDCO, a company that ran arms into and heroin out of Lebanon's Beqaa (Bekaa) Valley, was Harold Okimoto, a high-ranking member of the Yakuza. Okimoto had long worked under Frank Carlucci (who served as Secretary of Defense and Deputy Director of the CIA before becoming Chairman of <http://www.thecarlylegroup.com/ The Carlyle Group). Okimoto owned food concessions in casinos around the world - Las Vega, Reno, Macao, and the Middle East. (Free drinks and anthrax while you play blackjack, anyone?)
Meeting Riconosciuto and Gunderson at the hotel were two representatives of the mujahadeen, waiting to discuss their armament needs. One of the two was named "Ralph Olberg." The other one was called Tim Osman (or Ossman).
"Ralph Olberg" was an American businesman who was leading the procurement of American weapons and technology on behalf of the Afghan rebels. He worked through the Afghan desk at the U.S. State Department, as well as through Senator Hubert Humphrey's office. Olberg looked after the Afghanis through a curious front called MSH - Management Sciences for Health.
The other man, dressed in Docker's clothing, was not a native Afghan any more than Olberg was. He was a 28-year-old Saudi. Tim Osman (Ossman) has recently become better known as Osama Bin Ladin. "Tim Osman" was the name assigned to him by the CIA for his tour of the U.S. and U.S. military bases, in search of political support and armaments.
Gunderson and Riconosciuto were not on an altruistic mission. They had some conditions for their help. And they had some bad news to deliver. The mujahadeen needed to be willing to test new weapons in the field and to return a research report, complete with photos.
The bad news was that some factions of the CIA didn't feel that Oldberg and Osman's group were the real representatives of the Afghans. Upon hearing this both Tim and Ralph were indignant. They wanted to mount a full-court press. Round up other members of their group and do a congressional and White House lobbying effort in Washington, D.C.
"Pleased to meet you. Hope you guess my name." -The Rolling Stones, Sympathy for the Devil
Did the lobbying effort take place? I don't know. There is some evidence that Tim Osman and Ralph Oldberg visited the While House. There is certainty that Tim Osman toured some U.S. military bases, even receiving special demonstrations of the latest equipment. Why hasn't this been reported in the major media?
One week after giving an affidavit to Inslaw regarding the PROMIS software in 1991, Riconosciuto was arrested on trumped-up drug charges. The Assistant U.S. Attorney prosecuting the case attempted to cover up Riconosciuto's intelligence background by claiming to the jury he was "delusional." A TV station came and pointed a camera out at the desert at Cabazon and said, "Riconosciuto says he modified the PROMIS software here." Of course Riconosciuto didn't modify the software out between the cacti and yucca. Sand isn't good for computers. He did the modifications in offices in nearby Indio, California. The AUSA [assistant U.S. attorney] told reporters Riconosciuto had been diagnosed with a mental condition, the implication being "he's making all this stuff up". Yes, there had been a mental evaluation of Riconosciuto. I have a copy of the report. The diagnosis? Here it is: NO MENTAL DISORDER. The Department of Justice consistently and maliciously lied to the jury, just as had been threatened by Justice Department official Peter Viednicks if Riconosciuto cooperated with the congressional investigation of PROMIS.
If the war against Osama Bin Ladin (Tim Osman) is not a total fraud, then what is Michael Riconosciuto doing in prison? Why doesn't he have an office next to Colin Powell so he can give realistic advice on Bin Ladin's thinking? And where is Ralph Olberg?
Thirty-four days before the East African embassy bombings of August 7, 1998, Riconosciuto notified the FBI in Miami that the bombings were going to take place. Two days prior to the bombings he requested of BOP (Bureau of Prisons) officials at the Federal Corrections Institution (FCI) in Coleman, FL., that he be allowed to call <http://www.iss.co.za/Pubs/Monographs/No44/ECOMOG.html ECOMOG security headquarters to warn African officials. The BOP denied the request. Riconosciuto was mystified at being ignored by the relevant government authorities. I'm not mystified. I suspect the reason Riconosciuto was ignored was that the relevant parties, including especially the Miami FBI office, knew all along the bombings would take place. And they wanted them to happen.
The same is true with respect to the recent plane bombings of the WTC. It wasn't an intelligence "failure". The terrorist acts were deliberately allowed to happen. The actors may have been foreign. But the stage directors appear to have been all along here in the U.S. Cui bono?
Isn't it time to let Michael Riconosciuto out of prison, and wipe the slate clean of the trumped-up drug charges, and let him be a national security advisor - at least with respect to the government's pursuit of Osama Bin Ladin? Isn't it time to quit pretending Osama Bin Ladin came out of nowhere?
This is not an academic argument. Sources say three dozen MANPADs have been imported into Quebec, Canada, from Colombia (where they arrived from Eastern Europe). The missile shipments followed the "northern" drug route - from Colombia into Canada. The missiles involved are <http://www.rusarm.ru/products/ad/igla.htm Russian Strellas and Iglas. These will serve just fine to take down commercial airline flights. Just like TWA 800. Which group of terrorists has the missiles? Meanwhile, how many biological warfare agents are in the hands of organized crime? Maybe you should ask Riconosciuto about all this. Michael Riconosciuto is now incarcerated at the FCI Allenwood, PA. You know where to find him.
J. Orlin Grabbe's homepage is located at http://orlingrabbe.com . http://www.orlingrabbe.com/binladin_timosman.htm
*****
Rumor Mill News Reading Room Forum MICHAEL J. RICONOSCIUTO IS IN THE HOLE!! Rayelan Wednesday, 7 November 2001
Michael Riconosciuto was pulled from his cell at 5AM this morning (Nov 6/01). He was not able to grab his records. He has been moved from Allenwood to a place he did not want to go. He is in the hole at Springfield, MO. Michael was revealing details of terrorist networks, now communications are severed and he has been taken to a place which is very dangerous for him. Michael J. Riconosciuto 21309-086 Box 4000 U.S. Medical Center Springfield, MO 65801-4000 He is in the hole because he would be attacked by other prisoners if he were in the regular facilities. They will need to move the main-threat person into the hole in order to get him time out of the hole - this won't do him a lot of good because other prisoners are also threats, and he could be beaten & killed. Michael was presented to the people at Springfield as someone who is mentally ill. Fortunately, he got someone to call Allenwood to verify the cancer problem. His new BOP councilors are Mr. Dunn and Mrs. Cunningham. CAPT Newton E. Kendig II., M.D., Medical Director and Phillip S. Wise, Assistant Director are two men who can make a real difference. Please call them and let them know how important it is that Michael be given every opportunity to survive this ordeal. The Federal Bureau of Prisons Central Office is located at 320 First St., NW., Washington, D.C. 20534. Office hours are 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., Eastern time, Monday through Friday. Phone 202-307-3055. Fax 202-307-0826. Another potential source for assistance would be Congressman Petersen's office. Phone: 814-827-3985. Calls to local representatives would also help. I have spoken with Michael on the phone as recently as Sunday. He told me he has all the information needed to totally expose the terrorist networks. We needed time to unravel them. Now communications with him are cut off. How long he can live in the hole when he is already ill, I don't know, but it is no way to treat a sick man, and no way to treat a person who is attempting to stop a disaster. Sincerely, Anita Langley
http://www.rumormillnews.net/cgi-bin/config.pl?read=14605
This fine editorial comes courtesy of Canadian Content. The original is at: http://www.track0.com/cc/features/110601gowans.html
Another editorial by the same author, "Selling liberties for security," can be found at: http://www.track0.com/cc/features/102601gowans.html
What it really means to be for this war
by Stephen Gowans In his 1939 antiwar classic, Johnny Got His Gun, Dalton Trumbo builds a story around an American casualty of W.W.I. Horribly mangled in combat, Trumbo's casualty has no arms, no legs, no eyes, no ears, no tongue. He can't talk or hear or speak or walk or touch. Confined to a glass case, lost in mute isolation, all he can do is breathe and eat and shit and piss...and think. "Take me wherever there are parliaments," he thinks, "and diets and chambers of statesmen. I want to hear when they talk about honor and justice and making the world safe...Let them debate...why should we take all this crap off Germany or whoever the next Germany is. Let them talk more munitions and airplanes and battleships and tanks and gases, why of course we've got to have them, we can't get along without them, how in the world could we protect the peace if we didn't have them? Let them form blocs and alliances and mutual assistance pacts...But before they vote on them, before they give the order for all the little guys to start killing each other, let the main guy rap his gavel of my case and point down at me and say, here gentlemen is the only issue before this house, and that is, are you for this thing here or are you against it?"
Weeks after the US and Britain began bombing Afghanistan, leveling Red Cross warehouses, destroying Red Crescent buildings, flattening hospitals, taking out mud huts, the true nature of the war has begun to sink in. As many as 1.5 million Afghans are on the move, according to the UN, fleeing the bombing. Up to 7.5 million face starvation, as bombing disrupts the humanitarian food relief efforts needed to alleviate the effects of decades of civil war and one of the worse droughts in the country's history. And there's carnage. If you don't turn away, it's there for you to see. The Afghan child, maybe two or three, with the red pulpy divot taken out of the right side of her skull, lying beside the still, lifeless body of her brother. Had a madman driven a golf tee into the child's head, and then swung at the ball resting atop the tee sunk into brain tissue? Did he swing too low, driving his three iron through the child's skull, with an explosion of blood and bits of pulpy tissue that splattered all over her mother's face and clothes? Or was it a young American pilot, a guy who plays golf when he's at home, who had dropped a bomb marked Made in the USA that accomplished what a three iron could accomplish just as readily? Did the pilot scrawl across the bomb, "To Osama bin Laden," the way World War Two flyers used to write To Adolph Hitler on their bombs? Or did he write, "To Mamoud, aged 2"? For that's what war is, isn't it? It isn't a pilot giving the thumbs up, as she waits to take off from an aircraft carrier, captured by an AP photographer, his handiwork splashed across the front pages of newspapers around the world to make the people back home feel good about this war of terror that's supposed to root out terrorism. She was taking off for another bombing run against, what? Taliban targets, or that little kid's house? Brains sprayed across the floor, mothers weeping over little kids who got in the way, amputated legs on the operating room floor, poor, starving, wretched people, with what few possessions they have, trudging up a muddy road, to get away from all the bombing, not knowing where they're going to live, not knowing how they're going to survive, not knowing whether the jets flying over their heads are going to make another of their infamous blunders and unleash the fires of Hell on them, just innocents, trying to get out, away from the devastation, and all the corpses.
Oh well, that's war, shrug the phony sages and corporate media executives and politicians back home. That's what this war is, isn't it? It isn't Osama bin Laden, on the run, hiding in a warren of caves high the Afghanistan mountains (or is it somewhere in Pakistan, or maybe Albania, by now?); it's 16-year old Assadullah, not a Taliban solider, but an ice-cream vendor, without a leg and two of his fingers gone, blasted away when an American missile slammed into an airport near his home. It's Trumbo's Johnny, no Mohammed, no legs, no arms, no eyes, no mouth, no ears, lying in his glass case. Are you for this? Or against it? Those who are for it -- the politicians and Generals and newspaper editors -- are afraid that more and more of us, aren't. In Britain support for the war is "wobbly," as the British press puts it. Tony Blair urges those whose support is faltering to think about how they felt when the Twin Towers collapsed. War feeds on emotion. War needs emotion. War demands emotion, to fog the brain, to keep people from thinking about the essential contradiction: We're killing innocent civilians to show that killing innocent civilians is wrong. In Canada, the Globe and Mail tries to put some steel into the spines of Canadians whose support for the war is flagging. It publishes the photographs of 19 Canadians killed in the Sept. 11 attacks, under the headline, Never to be heard from again. It won't publish the photographs of the hundreds of Afghans killed by US and UK bombs under the same headline.
On October 31 the newspaper gives over a full page to its religion and ethics reporter, Michael Valpy. Accompanying the article is a cartoon depicting God giving a thumbs up to American bombers. The headlines read: The Just War The right to smite If the US and its allies are to maintain the moral high ground, they must weigh the costs of their war against its benefits, (assuming off the bat there's a moral high ground to maintain.) And then Valpy writes: "Those theologians who are not pacifists have generally given the US and its allies the green light on the right to go to war." Buck up, Canadians. God is on our side. Were the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin alive, he may have thundered in retort: If God approves the war, then God, if he truly exists, must be abolished. Just a day before, Walter Isaascon, chairman of CNN, decided that his reporters were focussing "too much on the casualties and hardship in Afghanistan," and ordered CNN reporters "to make sure people understand that when they see civilian suffering there, it's in the context of a terrorist attack that caused enormous suffering in the United States." Rick Davis, CNN's head of standards and practices, tells anchors to put scenes of Afghans suffering "into context." He recommends anchors say: "The Pentagon has repeatedly stressed that it is trying to minimize civilian casualties in Afghanistan, even as the Taliban regime continues to harbor terrorists who are connected to the Sept. 11 attacks that claimed thousands of innocent lives in the US. We must keep in mind...that these US military actions are in response to a terrorist attack that killed close to 5,000 innocent people in the US." In other words, because innocent people were killed in the US, it's all right to kill innocent people in Afghanistan. Or as Foreign Affairs Minister John Manley said, when asked about civilian casualties, "Canada would feel that innocent people have already been hurt."
Kindergarten moral reasoning. Turn this around: Imagine Osama bin Laden remonstrating with his followers who are uncomfortable with the deaths of innocent Americans in the New York and Washington attacks. "The US government refuses to renounce its Middle East policies which have led to the deaths of 1.5 million Iraqis through sanctions and have allowed the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine to continue for over three decades, causing untold suffering for Palestinians. Washington refuses to apologize for atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and for the killing of millions of civilians in South East Asia. You have to understand that while you see civilian suffering there, it's in the context of American foreign policy that caused enormous suffering in the Middle East and throughout the world." Reasoning like this was vigorously disputed when some people -- Simon Fraser university professor Sunera Thobani, for example -- tried to explain the Sept. 11 attacks as blow back for what she called "blood- soaked" US foreign policy. Who was disputing the views of Thobani and others like her vigorously? The very same people who are telling you that the suffering of innocent Afghans has to be understood in the context of the Sept. 11 attacks. Johnny continued, "And if they are against this, why goddam let them stand up...and vote." And if you are for this, then stand up and say so, too. Don't hide behind God or the 6,000 killed in Washington and New York or John Manley's kindergarten moral reasoning or lame aphorisms about war being terrible (so too is terrorism -- does that excuse it?). Say you're for the killing of innocents, because that's what you're for. Say you're for millions starving, because that's what this war is about. And say you're for the smashed in skull of a three year old, and for her mother weeping over her. And remember whose support allowed it all to happen.
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This transcript comes courtesy of the BBC's Newsnight. The original is at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/events/newsnight/newsid_1645000/1645527.stm
This transcript is produced from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight. It has been checked against the programme as broadcast, however Newsnight can accept no responsibility for any factual inaccuracies. We will be happy to correct serious errors. Has someone been sitting on the FBI? 6/11/01 GREG PALAST: The CIA and Saudi Arabia, the Bushes and the Bin Ladens. Did their connections cause America to turn a blind eye to terrorism? UNNAMED MAN: There is a hidden agenda at the very highest levels of our government. JOE TRENTO, (AUTHOR, "SECRET HISTORY OF THE CIA"): The sad thing is that thousands of Americans had to die needlessly. PETER ELSNER: How can it be that the former President of the US and the current President of the US have business dealings with characters that need to be investigated? PALAST: In the eight weeks since the attacks, over 1,000 suspects and potential witnesses have been detained. Yet, just days after the hijackers took off from Boston aiming for the Twin Towers, a special charter flight out of the same airport whisked 11 members of Osama Bin Laden's family off to Saudi Arabia. That did not concern the White House. Their official line is that the Bin Ladens are above suspicion - apart from Osama, the black sheep, who they say hijacked the family name. That's fortunate for the Bush family and the Saudi royal household, whose links with the Bin Ladens could otherwise prove embarrassing. But Newsnight has obtained evidence that the FBI was on the trail of other members of the] Bin Laden family for links to terrorist organisations before and after September 11th. This document is marked "Secret". Case ID - 199-Eye WF 213 589. 199 is FBI code for case type. 9 would be murder. 65 would be espionage. 199 means national security. WF indicates Washington field office special agents were investigating ABL - because of it's relationship with the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, WAMY - a suspected terrorist organisation. ABL is Abdullah Bin Laden, president and treasurer of WAMY. This is the sleepy Washington suburb of Falls Church, Virginia where almost every home displays the Stars and Stripes. On this unremarkable street, at 3411 Silver Maple Place, we located the former home of Abdullah and another brother, Omar, also an FBI suspect. It's conveniently close to WAMY. The World Assembly of Muslim Youth is in this building, in a little room in the basement at 5613 Leesburg Pike. And here, just a couple blocks down the road at 5913 Leesburg, is where four of the hijackers that attacked New York and Washington are listed as having lived. The US Treasury has not frozen WAMY's assets, and when we talked to them, they insisted they are a charity. Yet, just weeks ago, Pakistan expelled WAMY operatives. And India claimed that WAMY was funding an organisation linked to bombings in Kashmir. And the Philippines military has accused WAMY of funding Muslim insurgency. The FBI did look into WAMY, but, for some reason, agents were pulled off the trail. TRENTO: The FBI wanted to investigate these guys. This is not something that they didn't want to do - they wanted to, they weren't permitted to. PALAST: The secret file fell into the hands of national security expert, Joe Trento. The Washington spook-tracker has been looking into the FBI's allegations about WAMY. TRENTO: They've had connections to Osama Bin Laden's people. They've had connections to Muslim cultural and financial aid groups that have terrorist connections. They fit the pattern of groups that the Saudi royal family and Saudi community of princes - the 20,000 princes - have funded who've engaged in terrorist activity. Now, do I know that WAMY has done anything that's illegal? No, I don't know that. Do I know that as far back as 1996 the FBI was very concerned about this organisation? I do. PALAST: Newsnight has uncovered a long history of shadowy connections between the State Department, the CIA and the Saudis. The former head of the American visa bureau in Jeddah is Michael Springman. MICHAEL SPRINGMAN: In Saudi Arabia I was repeatedly ordered by high level State Dept officials to issue visas to unqualified applicants. These were, essentially, people who had no ties either to Saudi Arabia or to their own country. I complained bitterly at the time there. I returned to the US, I complained to the State Dept here, to the General Accounting Office, to the Bureau of Diplomatic Security and to the Inspector General's office. I was met with silence. PALAST: By now, Bush Sr, once CIA director, was in the White House. Springman was shocked to find this wasn't visa fraud. Rather, State and CIA were playing "the Great Game". SPRINGMAN: What I was protesting was, in reality, an effort to bring recruits, rounded up by Osama Bin Laden, to the US for terrorist training by the CIA. They would then be returned to Afghanistan to fight against the then-Soviets. The attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 did not shake the State Department's faith in the Saudis, nor did the attack on American barracks at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia three years later, in which 19 Americans died. FBI agents began to feel their investigation was being obstructed. Would you be surprised to find out that FBI agents are a bit frustrated that they can't be looking into some Saudi connections? MICHAEL WILDES, ( LAWYER) I would never be surprised with that. They're cut off at the hip sometimes by supervisors or given shots that are being called from Washington at the highest levels. PALAST: I showed lawyer Michael Wildes our FBI documents. One of the Khobar Towers bombers was represented by Wildes, who thought he had useful intelligence for the US. He also represents a Saudi diplomat who defected to the USA with 14,000 documents which Wildes claims implicates Saudi citizens in financing terrorism and more. Wildes met with FBI men who told him they were not permitted to read all the documents. Nevertheless, he tried to give them to the agents. WILDES: "Take these with you. We're not going to charge for the copies. Keep them. Do something with them. Get some bad guys with them." They refused. PALAST: In the hall of mirrors that is the US intelligence community, Wildes, a former US federal attorney, said the FBI field agents wanted the documents, but they were told to "see no evil." WILDES: You see a difference between the rank-and-file counter-intelligence agents, who are regarded by some as the motor pool of the FBI, who drive following diplomats, and the people who are getting the shots called at the highest level of our government, who have a different agenda - it's unconscionable. PALAST: State wanted to keep the pro-American Saudi royal family in control of the world's biggest oil spigot, even at the price of turning a blind eye to any terrorist connection so long as America was safe. In recent years, CIA operatives had other reasons for not exposing Saudi- backed suspects. TRENTO: If you recruited somebody who is a member of a terrorist organisation, who happens to make his way here to the US, and even though you're not in touch with that person anymore but you have used him in the past, it would be unseemly if he were arrested by the FBI and word got back that he'd once been on the payroll of the CIA. What we're talking about is blow-back. What we're talking about is embarrassing, career-destroying blow-back for intelligence officials. PALAST: Does the Bush family also have to worry about political blow-back? The younger Bush made his first million 20 years ago with an oil company partly funded by Salem Bin Laden's chief US representative. Young George also received fees as director of a subsidiary of Carlyle Corporation, a little known private company which has, in just a few years of its founding, become one of Americas biggest defence contractors. His father, Bush Senior, is also a paid advisor. And what became embarrassing was the revelation that the Bin Ladens held a stake in Carlyle, sold just after September 11. ELSNER: You have a key relationship between the Saudis and the former President of the US who happens to be the father of the current President of the US. And you have all sorts of questions about where does policy begin and where does good business and good profits for the company, Carlyle, end? PALAST: I received a phone call from a high-placed member of a US intelligence agency. He tells me that while there's always been constraints on investigating Saudis, under George Bush it's gotten much worse. After the elections, the agencies were told to "back off" investigating the Bin Ladens and Saudi royals, and that angered agents. I'm told that since September 11th the policy has been reversed. FBI headquarters told us they could not comment on our findings. A spokesman said: "There are lots of things that only the intelligence community knows and that no-one else ought to know.
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WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE OBVIOUS
by Barry Chamish
That:
- Osama Bib Laden is a creation of American and British intelligence and wittingly or not, is doing their bidding.
- Two airplanes did not knock down the World Trade Centers by
themselves and the structures did not collapse because of melted steel. The
jet fuel had already nearly burned itself out when the demolition began.
- Five trillion dollars stolen from the American economy in the past
decade are now deliberately untraceable, the evidence buried in the rubble
of the WTC.
- Pilots trained on Cessnas at a Florida flight school could not
guide passenger jets into target buildings. Remote control guidance could.
- Bush and Bin Laden family business ties create a conflict of
interest so blatant that the current American president must be made to resign.
- If the American people want to exact justice for the crimes of
September 11, they should choose better targets than Afghanistan, like
Jesuit headquarters in Rome or Chatham House in Manhattan.
- The Taliban was one of numerous dictatorships funded and armed by
the hidden planetary rulers to justify a later war.
- The timing of the anthrax attacks was not coincidental but a part
of a wide terror campaign whose goal is the destruction of civil rights and
the initiation of a new world order run by the very folks spreading the
disease.
- Because of the nearly complete corruption of the courts and
mainstream media, no serious crime will ever be truthfully exposed, be it
the downing of Pan Am, TWA, Swissair or Egypt Air passenger jets or
political assassinations like JFK Jr. or Princess Diana. etc. etc. et al.
- At least in Israel, they're not going to get away with the Rabin
murder.
- Which does nothing to stop the lying whitewashes of such crimes as
the kidnapping of Yemenite infants or the assassination of Rehavam Zeevi.
- Nor will the truth of the Oslo Accord ever be told. But we know
that Israel was put on the front line of today's world war and that the
"peace" process was planned from the beginning to exacerbate Islamic
extremism and get the world used to suicide bombings before they were used
against them.
All that, we view as obvious.
I'm off on a speaking tour, so no updates for a few weeks.
Toronto Information: I will be manning a booth on Nov. 23, 24 and 25 (Whole Life Expo). Then, speaking on Nov. 27, 28, 29 - Bradgate Arms, Rosedale Room, 54 Foxbar Road (corner Avenue Rd. one block south of St. Clair W.) 6:30 - 10:30 Reservations: 416-259-2829 Fax: 416-259-2128 Out of town: 1-888-845-6838
For details call:
Loretta - 416-259-4954
New York area information:
Tuesday, Nov. 13 - Salon meeting at the home of Ray Antoky. He has kindly consented to accept my phone messages as well. Call 917 5541855
Wed. Nov 14th - Lisker Synagogue 163 E. 69th St between Lex and 3rd 8:00 asking $5 donation
Thurs Nov 15th in the Clark/Rahway area (New Jersey) for details call Charlie (cell) 908 217 1358
Sat. Nov 17th Young Israel of Passaic 200 Brook Ave (one block off Main St.) 8:30 for info call 973 471 7708
For further information: Contact Charlie chasjew@aol.com or cell 908 217 1358
My e-mail address while I'm in North America is bchamish@yahoo.com
Hope I'll be meeting you soon.
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