Brilliant — both Skousen and Roberts!
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World Affairs Brief, September 14, 2012 Commentary and Insights on a Troubled World. Copyright Joel Skousen. Partial quotations with attribution permitted. Cite source as Joel Skousen’s World Affairs Brief (http://www.worldaffairsbrief.com)
THIS WEEK’S ANALYSIS:
Anniversary of a Government Terror
German Supreme Court Upholds EU Bailout Fund
Fed Supporting Obama’s Reelection
Netanyahu Losing it over Iran
Nowhere to Hide from Satellite Surveillance
Collusion Between NY Times and CIA confirmed
Obama Administration Protects CIA Torturers
ANNIVERSARY OF A GOVERNMENT TERROR
It isn’t just a coincidence that a major wave of anti-US backlash has been unleashed in Libya, Egypt and Yemen, three nations in which the US is continuing to intervene in their civil wars and aftermath. This is the kind of blowback Ron Paul warned about and its NOT about the so-called anti-Islamic film, and it’s not necessarily al Qaeda—that convenient label the US pins on anyone they want to target in the Middle East. The film may have given Muslim fanatics the excuse, but it’s the continued presence of US drones in these countries and the civilian casualties they cause that fuels this hatred.
As Spencer Ackerman wrote, “The drones never left Libya. The skies over Libya were clogged with U.S. Predator drones during last year’s war. But just because the war officially ended in October didn’t mean the drones went home. A Defense Department official tells [wired.com] Danger Room that the U.S. has kept drone flights flying over Libya, despite the conflict that initially brought them to Libyan airspace ending nearly a year ago.”
Michael Snyder of endoftheamericandream.com put it thus: “Radical Islamic militants stormed the U.S. embassy in Cairo, Egypt and replaced the American flag with the al-Qaeda flag. In Benghazi, Libya the U.S. consulate was attacked by a crowd equipped with guns, homemade bombs and rocket-propelled grenades. They torched the consulate, looted it, and killed the U.S. ambassador and three other U.S. officials. [And, Wednesday, anti-US protestors attacked the Embassy in Yemen] Apparently they are not as grateful for our help in ‘liberating’ their homelands as the Obama administration thought they would be. Unfortunately, our politicians fundamentally misunderstand what is going on in the Middle East, and this is going to continue to lead to more policy errors.
“For years, our politicians told us that ‘al-Qaeda’ was the big enemy in the ‘War on Terror’. But then during the ‘Arab Spring’ the U.S. government was openly working with ‘al-Qaeda’ and a bunch of other similar organizations all over the Middle East to overthrow established governments. To say that our approach to the Middle East has been ‘inconsistent’ would be a massive understatement.”
My take is a little different, and perhaps more complete. After studying how the US government pulled off the attack on the World Trade Center my frank opinion is that official al-Qaeda is an outright false flag terrorist outfit run by the CIA for the purposes of creating conflict at home and abroad. These terror events, falsely blamed on Muslim extremists (though they do exist, the ones who attacked the WTC were not religious extremists) provide the impetus for military intervention and the diminution of civil rights at home—both of which are intermediate goals in driving nations toward a New World Order.
According to various defectors, and disaffected intelligence agents over the years, it appears that the dark side of the US government uses both the Saudis and the Pakistani ISI to provide funding and mission direction to al Qaeda, which was a US creation during the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. The US would have us believe that they simply lost control of al Qaeda prior to 9/11, but this is simply false.
ABC News reported that “at least 12 Saudi businessmen were financing al Qaeda through accounts in Cyprus, Switzerland and Malaysia, among other countries. U.S. officials told ABC News that a full investigation into the allegations was under way and that there may be criminal charges filed before the end of the year.” Guess what year that was? –2007. The Saudis do the arms length funding for the US, and the US provides protection against prosecution. Immunity is one of the key components to understanding how the world works.
Bin Laden always was the US and Saudi’s man right up until he died several years ago. As I pointed out in a recent WAB, The killing of bin Laden in Abbattabad was a charade, killing instead one of the CIA’s two Osama look-a-likes. They were using these clones to make threatening videos for the decade after 9/11 in order to continue fomenting the phony war on terror.
Paul Craig Roberts agrees: “Osama bin Laden was too useful a bogeyman, and Washington and the presstitute media kept him alive for another decade until Obama needed to kill the dead man in order to boost his sinking standings in the polls so that Democrats would not back a challenger for the Democratic presidential nomination. Numerous bin Laden videos, every one pronounced a fake by experts, were released whenever it was convenient for Washington. No one in the Western media or in the US Congress or European or UK parliaments was sufficiently intelligent to recognize that a bin Laden video always showed up on cue when Washington needed it. ‘Why would the ‘mastermind’ be so accommodating for Washington?’ was the question that went through my mind every time one of the fake videos was released.”
Because of US drone strikes in Pakistan, the US has become an increasingly unwelcome ally in Pakistan, and the ISI (Pakistani Intelligence) has come under increasing pressure within Pakistani military and political circles to end its covert support of US al Qaeda terrorism. For this reason, the US is probably shifting control of their al Qaeda operations to Saudi Arabia. It is even possible that both the Saudis and Pakistanis have their own al-Qaeda operations to run, and they are not connected now, as they were in prior decades.
There are indications that there exist several different al Qaeda cells around the world, and they probably are not funded by the CIA’s usually bagmen, the Saudis or the Pakistanis, at least not directly. The Saudis have long been the deep pockets for US covert support of radical movements. The US probably has found willing front men in other countries to run terror cells, but on a smaller scale than what the Saudis are capable of funding.
What do the Saudis get in return from the US? Protection from internal overthrow and external attack. The US media also covers for the Saudis to keep out of the newspapers the egregious sexual escapades of various members of the Saudi Royal family, including the kidnapping of sex slaves.
Of course, there are plenty of disgruntled Muslim fanatics to do the suicide bombing and fighting as long as someone pays and trains them. Probably none of the actual terrorists on the ground (except those involved in 9/11) know who is calling the shots at the top. So, there is real terror in the world and real terrorists, but most of those organizations, at the top, are run by the CIA or one of its many subordinate or allied spook entities.
Just as the US has spawned and protected its own drug cartels around the world—and reaped the whirlwind of violence from competing cartels—so there are plenty of smaller terror groups emerging all the time competing with US sponsored al Qaeda variety. All of that is backlash against US involvement in their own countries.
I do not think this week’s attacks on the consulate and embassies in Libya, Cairo and Yemen were done by US sponsored terror, but the anti-Muslim film produced crudely in America may well be a black operation to incite these attacks.
The AP reported on Thursday, “A federal law enforcement official said Thursday that Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, 55, was the man behind ‘Innocence of Muslims,’ a film denigrating Islam and the Prophet Muhammad that sparked protests earlier in the week in Egypt and Libya and now in Yemen. The official… said Nakoula was connected to the persona of Sam Bacile, a figure who initially claimed to be the writer and director of the film. But Bacile quickly turned out to a false identity and the Associated Press traced a cellphone number used by Bacile to a southern California house where Nakoula was found.”
Nakoula denied he was Bacile, but investigators discovered he has a scam background and has used variations on that last name before. It looks to me that the feds caught him and gave him a choice of going to jail or helping the government produce a second rate amateur video of provocation. Some of the actors have reported that the director dubbed in different words than they spoke on camera. This was a hatchet job, once again to build up the war on terror.
The 11th Anniversary of 9/11 is always used by the media to promote the establishment version of events that day even as they are coming under increasing scrutiny. For the first time ever, Colorado Public Radio hosted a showing of a video produced by Architects and Engineers for 9/11 truth (see it at www.ae911truth.org). Their video presentation on the evidence for explosive demolition in the towers is one of the best, and a credible way of introducing friends to the powerful evidence the towers were taken down by internal explosives—which no ring of terrorists could have accomplished. It had to be an inside job.
Paul Craig Roberts had probably one of the best overviews of the anniversary and the contradictions in the official version. Here are excerpts [with my comments in brackets]: “In order to understand the improbability of the government’s explanation of 9/11, it is not necessary to know anything about what force or forces brought down the three World Trade Center buildings, what hit the Pentagon or caused the explosion, the flying skills or lack thereof of the alleged hijackers, whether the airliner crashed in Pennsylvania or was shot down, whether cell phone calls made at the altitudes could be received, or any other debated aspect of the controversy [although those are important anomalies and contradictions to the official story].
“You only have to know two things [extreme anomalies]: One is that according to the official story, a handful of Arabs, mainly Saudi Arabians, operating independently of any government and competent intelligence service, men without James Bond and V for Vendetta capabilities, outwitted not only the CIA, FBI, and National Security Agency, but all 16 US intelligence agencies, along with all security agencies of America’s NATO allies and Israel’s Mossad. Not only did the entire intelligence forces of the Western world fail, but on the morning of the attack the entire apparatus of the National Security State simultaneously failed. Airport security failed four times in one hour.
“NORAD failed. Air Traffic Control failed. The US Air Force failed. The National Security Council failed. Dick Cheney failed [actually, he didn’t fail. He sat in the White House situation room and made sure a young Air Force officer DID NOT make the call to intercept the aircraft as it headed for the Pentagon]. Absolutely nothing worked [because they forced it into standown]. The world’s only superpower was helpless at the humiliating mercy of a few undistinguished Arabs.
“It is hard to image a more far-fetched story–except for the second thing you need to know: The humiliating failure of US National Security did not result in immediate demands from the President of the United States, from Congress, from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and from the media for an investigation of how such improbable total failure could have occurred. No one was held accountable for the greatest failure of national security in world history. Instead, the White House dragged its feet for a year resisting any investigation until the persistent demands from 9/11 families for accountability forced President George W. Bush to appoint a political commission, devoid of any experts, to hold a pretend investigation.
“On 9/11 Doubts Were Immediate: The towers—the three-fourths or four-fifths of the buildings beneath the plane strikes–were standing, apparently largely undamaged. There were no signs of fire except in the vicinity of where the airliners had hit. Suddenly, one of the towers blew up, disintegrated, and disappeared in fine dust. Before one could make any sense of this, the same thing happened to the second tower, and it too disappeared into fine dust.
“The TV news anchors compared the disintegration of the towers to controlled demolition. There were numerous reports of explosions throughout the towers from the base or sub-basements to the top [and the ones in the basement happened BEFORE the aircraft struck. That’s what blew out all the windows in the lobby]. (Once the government put out the story of terrorist attack, references to controlled demolition and explosions disappeared from the print and TV media.) This made sense to me. Someone had blown up the buildings. It was completely obvious that the towers had not fallen down from asymmetrical structural damage. They had [been] blown up [that means there are probably 25-50 explosives riggers involved that were sworn to secrecy or had their lives threatened to silence them].
“I don’t remember the time line, but it wasn’t long before the story was in place that Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda gang had attacked the US. A passport had been found in the rubble… When I heard these reports, I wondered. How could a tiny undamaged passport be found in the rubble of two skyscrapers, each more than 100 stories tall, when bodies, office furniture and computers could not be found [it was planted]? How could airport security fail so totally that four airliners could be hijacked within the same hour? How could authorities know so conclusively and almost immediately the names of the perpetrators who pulled off such a successful attack on the world’s only superpower, when the authorities had no idea that such an attack was planned or even possible [and why did supposed trained terrorists leave behind such an easy to find trail of evidence: credit card use, flight manuals, tape records]?
“The more the story of 9/11 was presented in the media, the more wondrous it became. It is not credible that not only the CIA and FBI failed to detect the plot, but also all 16 US intelligence agencies, including the National Security Agency, which spies on everyone on the planet, and the Defense Intelligence Agency, Israel’s Mossad, and the intelligence agencies of Washington’s NATO allies. There are simply too many watchmen and too much infiltration of terrorist groups for such a complex attack to be prepared undetected and carried out undeterred. Washington’s explanation of the attack implied a security failure too massive to be credible.
“NORAD failed. The US Air Force could not get jet fighters in the air. Air Traffic Control lost sight of the hijacked airliners [One controller at McGuire AFB told me that he had been told to stand down and not let any of the fighters take off]. Yet, instead of launching an investigation, the White House resisted for one year the demands of the 9/11 families for an investigation. Neither the public, the media, nor Congress seemed to think an investigation was necessary.
“The focus was on revenge [because attacking Afghanistan and Iraq were part of the reason for this false flag attack], which the Bush neocon regime said meant invading Afghanistan which was alleged to be sheltering the perpetrator, Osama bin Laden.”
Why did no one brag about pulling off 9/11? “Normally, terrorists are proud of their success and announce their responsibility. It is a way to build a movement… It makes no sense that the ‘mastermind’ of the most humiliating blow in world history ever to have been delivered against a superpower would not claim credit for his accomplishment. By September 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden knew that he was deathly ill. According to news reports he underwent kidney dialysis the following month [at the American hospital in Dubai, and was visited by the CIA station chief]. The most reliable reports that we have are that he died in December 2001. It is simply not credible that bin Laden denied responsibility because he feared Washington.
“The 9/11 ‘investigation’ that finally took place was a political one run from the White House. One member of the commission resigned, declaring the investigation to be a farce, and both co-chairman and the legal counsel of the 9/11 Commission distanced themselves from their report with statements that the 9/11 Commission was ‘set up to fail,’ that resources were withheld from the commission, that representatives of the US military lied to the commission and that the commission considered referring the false testimony for criminal prosecution. One would think that these revelations would cause a sensation, but the news media, Congress, the White House, and the public were silent.
“All of this bothered me a great deal. The US had invaded two Muslim countries based on unsubstantiated allegations linking the two countries to 9/11, which itself remained uninvestigated. The neoconservatives who staffed the George W. Bush regime were advocating more invasions of more Muslim countries. Paul O’Neill, President Bush’s first Treasury Secretary, stated publicly that the Bush regime was planning to invade Iraq prior to 9/11. O’Neill said that no one at a National Security Council meeting even asked the question, why invade Iraq? ‘It was all about finding a way to do it.’
“The leaked top secret Downing Street Memo written by the head of British intelligence (MI6) confirms Paul O’Neill’s testimony. The memo, known as the ‘smoking gun memo’ whose authenticity has been confirmed, states that ‘President George W. Bush wants to remove Saddam Hussein, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.’ In other words, the US invasion of Iraq was based on nothing but a made up lie.
“As an engineering student I had witnessed a controlled demolition. When films of the collapse of WTC building 7 emerged, it was obvious that building 7 had been brought down by controlled demolition. When physics instructor David Chandler measured the descent of the building and established that it took place at free fall acceleration, the case was closed. Buildings cannot enter free fall unless controlled demolition has removed all resistance to the collapsing floors. If airliners brought down two skyscrapers, why was controlled demolition used to bring down a third building?
“I assumed that structural architects, structural engineers, and physicists would blow the whistle on the obviously false story [yes, but principled people weren’t hired by NIST to do the report. There are whores in any profession that will do anything for money—especially if they are told it’s a matter of National Security]. If I could see that something was amiss, certainly more highly trained people would.
“The first physicist to make an effective and compelling argument was Steven Jones at BYU. Jones said that explosives brought down the twin towers. He made a good case. For his efforts, he was pressured to resign his tenured position. I wondered whether the federal government had threatened BYU’s research grants or whether patriotic trustees and alumni were the driving force behind Jones’ expulsion. Regardless, the message was clear to other university based experts: ‘Shut up or we’ll get you [Jones is a personal friend of mine. There were no direct threats from government. There may have been some pressure on the church university’s leaders intimating that Jones’ conclusion that only government could have done this was embarrassing the LDS Church. I happen to know that many leaders of the LDS church share that mainstream bias against conspiracy in government, even though many of the Mormon faithful believe in conspiracy].
“Steven Jones was vindicated when chemist Niels Harrit of the University of Copenhagen In Denmark reported unequivocally that the scientific team in which he participated found nano-thermite in the residue of the twin towers. This sensational finding was not mentioned in the US print and TV media to my knowledge.
“Several years after 9/11 architect Richard Gage formed Architects and Engineers for 9/11 truth, an organization that has grown to include 1,700 experts. The plans of the towers have been studied. They were formidable structures. They were constructed to withstand airliner hits and fires. There is no credible explanation of their failure except intentional demolition.
“I also found disturbing the gullibility of the public, media, and Congress in the unquestioning acceptance of the official stories of the shoe-bomber, shampoo and bottled water bomber, and underwear bomber plots to blow up airliners in transit. These schemes are farcical. How can we believe that al Qaeda, capable of pulling off the most fantastic terrorist attack in history and capable of devising improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that kill and maim US troops and destroy US military vehicles would rely on something that had to be lighted with a match [Roberts apparently is aware that you cannot initiate an explosion of plastic explosives with a match. It is precisely that fact that proves this was a plot not intended to cause anything but an excuse to give TSA more power to inspect liquids and install body scanners. Any trained terrorist would have known that you must have a blasting cap—not a match to set this off]. And, the liquid bomb would not have required extended time in a lavatory to be mixed (all to no effect, according to experts).
“The circumstantial evidence is that these were orchestrated events designed to keep fear alive, to create new intrusive powers for a new over-arching federal policy agency, to accustom US citizens to intrusive searches and a police force to conducting them, and to sell expensive porno-scanners and now more advanced devices to the Transportation Safety Administration. Apparently, this expensive collection of high-tech gadgetry is insufficient to protect us from terrorists, and in August 2012 the Department of Homeland Security put in an order for 750 million rounds of ammunition, enough to shoot every person in the US 2.5 times.
“Naive and gullible Americans claim that if some part of the US government had been involved in 9/11, “someone would have talked by now.” A comforting thought, perhaps, but nothing more [Eventually, someone might (on their death bed), as the additional shooters did in the JFK assassination]. Consider, for example, the cover-up by the US government of the 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty that killed or wounded most of the crew but failed to sink the ship. As the survivors have testified, they were ordered in a threatening way not to speak about the event. It was twelve years later before one of the USS Liberty’s officers, James Ennes, told the story of the attack in his book, Assault on the Liberty. I continue to wonder how the professionals at the National Institute of Standards and Technology feel about being maneuvered by the federal government into the unscientific position NIST took concerning the destruction of the WTC towers [Or how long the explosives workers who set the charges can live with themselves].
“What will be the outcome of the doubts about the official story raised by experts? I worry that most Americans are too mentally and emotionally weak to be able to come to grips with the truth [a very good point]. They are far more comfortable with the story that enemies attacked America successfully despite the massive national security state in place [that old knee-jerk patriotism at work that infects a lot of conservatives. The longer it persists, the harder it is for Americans to believe the truth when it comes to them—which includes the searing truth that they were part of the majority that was deceived]. The American public has proved itself to be so cowardly that it willingly, without a peep, sacrificed its civil liberty and the protections of law guaranteed by the Constitution in order to be ‘safe.’
“Congress is not about to expose itself for having squandered trillions of dollars on pointless wars based on an orchestrated ‘new Pearl Harbor.’ When the neoconservatives said that a ‘new Pearl Harbor’ was a requirement for their wars for American/Israeli hegemony, they set the stage for the 21st century wars that Washington has launched. If Syria falls, there is only Iran, and then Washington stands in direct confrontation with Russia and China.
“Unless Russia and China can be overthrown with ‘color revolutions,’ [won’t happen] these two nuclear powers are unlikely to submit to Washington’s hegemony. The world as we know it might be drawing to a close [I think Roberts is finally getting the big picture. What he doesn’t know is that the dark side of government is trying to cover for that future war. He only sees them as antagonizing Russia or China, but may not understand this is part of the next and biggest “New Pearl Harbor.”].”
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Related:
[Landmark Video!] POWERFUL 9/11 Documentary on Airs on PBS Across Colorado!!!!!!!