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The Pentagon’s “Operation Jade Helm 15″: The Floodgate towards Martial Law and World War III?

2015-04-23T03:50:00.004+03:00

The Pentagon’s “Operation Jade Helm 15″: The Floodgate towards Martial Law and World War III?

By Joachim Hagopian

First we learned that Operation Jade Helm 15 is coming this summer from mid-July through mid-September to a Southwest neighborhood near you stretching from Texas to California. Per government sources and their mainstream media outlets like the Washington Post, it’s nothing more than a benign massive military drill designed to test how effectively US Special Operations forces can covertly and as seamlessly as possible embed themselves into the civilian populace as a mere security training exercise to keep us all safe in the future. The Washington Post March 31st headline - “Why Operation Jade Helm 15 is Freaking out the Internet and Why it Shouldn’t Be” - then goes on to list several alternative news sites like InfoWars making the claim that martial law in America is coming soon.

According to last August’s CNN poll, an all-time high of 87% of Americans simply do not trust their own government nor mainstream media as truthful or credible. More and more Americans are turning to alternative news sources in an attempt to find out what’s really going on in their world.

But the rash of “sky is falling” headlines from the internet news sources have created a media firestorm. Millions of Americans could hardly be consoled by the Washington Post article encouraging them not to worry that our government once again is up to no good. Instead those distrusting MSM believe Jade Helm 15 is a training exercise that will pave the way for US martial law similar to how the Boston Marathon false flag was a litmus test for martial law imposed on a major US metropolitan city. Except this time Jade Helm’s unprecedented size and scope covers a large expansive area taking up the southwestern quadrant of the United States.

The US military has designated certain states like Texas, Utah and part of Southern California during this operation as “hostile,” adding that “New Mexico isn’t much friendlier.” That the one time reputable DC newspaper that broke Watergate in the 70’s describes the Jade Helm operation in terms as if it were some kind of board game like Risk or Monopoly doesn’t help its already dubious credibility. Millions of Americans have realized their own oligarchic government has betrayed them and their interests and simply can no longer be trusted. So in the eyes of the feds, that would automatically make them “hostile.” The Post article also list several past covert military operations where states have been labeled as hostile territory for purposes of the training exercises. And of course that they went by unnoticed should give us solace the Jade’s outcome will be no different.

Now that the fascist totalitarian oligarchy posing as our federal government has been busily expanding its military wars from the Middle East to American soil against its own law abiding citizens, the Post tells us we shouldn’t worry. George W Bush once infamously proclaimed “you’re either with us or against us.”

The fact that police in America armed with the same heavy weaponry look identical to US combat troops fighting foreign wars are now murdering unarmed US citizens at an unprecedented rate, we shouldn’t worry? The number of Americans civilians since 9/11 killed by militant police is closing in on the number of American soldiers killed in action fighting in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars (as of a year ago 6802). Though no actual records are conveniently kept of police killing Americans, a year and a half ago it was reported that estimates of over 5000 Americans were killed by police since 9/11. Tack on the mounting numbers of police killings that have increased exponentially in the last year and a half and it could well exceed the KIA’s from foreign wars by now. That tells us the same counterinsurgency wars the US has been brutally waging on foreign soil is now being fought against us in the streets of America. As such, we stand to lose our life 55 times greater from our own police than any actual terrorists. And if you happen to be an African American male, that likelihood skyrockets.

As of the 2012 NDAA, military forces can enter our homes without warrants or charges and lock us up indefinitely without trial or legal representation. And according to that Washington Post article, apparently we should have no concerns about Special Forces showing up at our doorstep or roaming through our neighborhoods for several months over the summer. Our friendly state propagandist Washington Post says that when the elite wing of Big Brother’s killing machine invades our local communities, we should actually feel safer. Military spokesman Army Lt. Col. Mark Lastoria’s e-mail stated, “Training exercise Jade Helm is going to assist our Special Operations Soldiers and leadership in refining the skills needed against an ever changing foreign threat.” And we should all believe this because the military has such a great track record of always telling us the truth.

From the Boston Marathon bombings to Sandy Hook, the government has been executing false flags for purposes of imposing absolute NWO control over its citizens. Ever since the neocons’ inside 9/11 job the feds have used their “national security” card ad nauseam as their flimsy excuse to willfully betray our Constitution that they all swore oaths to uphold. And in its place treasonous governments in the West have systematically enacted draconian Orwellian laws of tyranny and oppression to conveniently vilify citizens bold enough to demand their civil liberties and privacy rights back. We dissidents who do not approve of our government’s obliteration of our constitutional rights have become the feds’ targeted enemy and deemed potential homegrown terrorists. Even homecoming veterans from US foreign wars are perceived as threats.

The international criminal cabal beholding to the Western oligarchs has infiltrated and hijacked the governments of Israel and the United States as well as Europe, Canada, Australia and Japan. We have a crime syndicate that has protected the international banksters who’ve been laundering drug money for multiple decades in its international drug trade. There’s nothing new here as the Bush crime family has been running drugs from South and Central America since the 1970’s. For years the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the State Department, the CIA, the FBI, the US military and their paramilitary private contractors have been flooding America and especially its inner cities with drugs – crack cocaine from Latin America and heroin from Afghanistan. High levels of the US government have partnered with drug cartels from Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Central America, and Dominican Republic to maintain their criminal activities. At the same time, ever since the late 1970’s high levels within these same US rogue crime agencies have also been partnering with al Qaeda/ISIS to create their invented “war on terror.”

And now if you believe many of the independent media sources, as of this summer all these sinister elements appear to be converging to soon cause catastrophic upheaval in the US Southwest, likely to change America forever. According to Judicial Watch earlier this week, the independent federal watchdog organization revealed that the US government is complicit with both the Mexican government and the Sinaloa drug cartel to be involved in joint training camp operations with ISIS a few miles from El Paso, Texas across the border in Mexico. Judicial Watch claims a Mexican military field grade officer and a Mexican Federal Police Inspector are among its sources. The camp is said to be located just eight miles from the US border. Despite the US intelligence community being well aware of this claim that terrorists might be currently training a few miles from our border and apparently planning an alleged invasion of the United States, President Obama as commander-in-chief apparently is laying low with only the already announced plans of Jade Helm operations that neither include a false flag war involving ISIS nor World War III as much of the internet media is all abuzz.

Between the US State Department’s Fast and Furious gun smuggling operation that was caught “inadvertently” arming drug cartels several years ago, and the feds’ funding and secret backing of ISIS as their proxy mercenary allies, several independent media sites maintain that a covert operation involving ISIS’ hybrid terrorists have been “slipping” across the border into the United States as provocateur forces designed to kill American citizens. Jade Helm and this latest ISIS piece converging on the states bordering Mexico are said to be the Obama excuse he’s been planning to implement martial law, illegally arresting American dissidents after a false flag event where Americans are murdered by the feds’ terrorist stooges.

Even more alarming is The Common Sense Show’s Dave Hodges most recent post including photos of surface to air missiles at a US Air Force base that literally appeared overnight near Lubbock, Texas. In the designated hostile state of Texas, Hodges believes more than just martial law will be initiated but an actual US invasion and World War III is planned.

These days it is becoming increasingly more difficult to ferret out the truth, be it mainstream or independent media sources. A major strategy the federal government commonly uses to discredit alternative media is planting disinformation within its ranks. Government moles have infiltrated the so called independent online media, intentionally muddying the waters so murky as to obscure the facts. When alternative sites cry out that the sky is falling and then it doesn’t, it conditions consumers of independent media to no longer believe them either, thus rendering all independent news outlets “whacked out conspiracy theorists.” Through various PSYOPS the US intelligence community has targeted both social media as well as alternative news media as viably effective outlets to spread further disinformation and propaganda lies. Of course this malicious agenda of the US government purposely keeping Americans uninformed in the dark, too dumbed down and confused, not knowing who or what to believe or trust as the actual truth, is exactly where the feds want us.

After checking with their inside sources, Veterans Today editors Gordon Duff and Jim W. Dean have drawn the conclusion that the neocon feds have purposely used Jade Helm 15 to deceive and discredit independent news sources that are running with the ISIS invasion story.

This writer is uncertain of the coming events this summer. I’m unwilling to completely rule out the dire forecast of “an ISIS invasion” while simultaneously I’m unwilling to trust what the feds, the military or the Washington Post claim Jade Helm will bring as well. It bears in mind today to be skeptical in a healthy way toward any and all news outlets. Unfortunately it requires some vigilance and a willingness to do homework cross-checking sources to arrive at a more informed and accurate assessment of what may actually be transpiring in the world. By design the sub-standard educational system fails miserably in teaching discriminative, critical thinking amongst our population. Many people of course don’t have the luxury of time to invest in seeking out multiple sources to arrive at the truth in their fast paced, muddled, upside down world. Too many hidden agendas from both the right and the left carry misinformation and deception, whether intended or not. Ultimately the rule of thumb should minimally be to check the sources of whatever news information you utilize in order to draw your own conclusions.

Source: http://empireexposed.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/the-jade-helm-plot-thickens-with-latest.html

Shock: Fracking Used to Inject Nuclear Waste Underground for Decades

2015-03-14T04:23:00.001+03:00

Shock: Fracking Used to Inject Nuclear Waste Underground for Decades

Aaron Dykes and Melissa Melton

Unearthed articles from the 1960s detail how nuclear waste was buried beneath the Earth’s surface by Halliburton & Co. for decades as a means of disposing the by-products of post-World War II atomic energy production.

Fracking is already a controversial practice on its face; allowing U.S. industries to inject slurries of toxic, potentially carcinogenic compounds deep beneath the planet’s surface — as a means of “see no evil” waste disposal — already sounds ridiculous, dangerous, and stupid anyway without even going into further detail.

Alleged fracking links to the contamination of the public water supply and critical aquifers, as well as ties to earthquake upticks near drilling locations that are otherwise not prone to seismic activity have created uproar in the years since the 2005 “Cheney loophole,” which allowed the industry to circumvent the Safe Drinking Water Act by exempting fracking fluids, thus fast tracking shale fracking as a source of cheap natural gas.

Now, it is apparent that the fracking industry is also privy to many secrets of the nuclear energy industry and, specifically, where the bodies are buried, err… dangerous nuclear waste is buried, rather — waste that atomic researchers have otherwise found so difficult to eliminate.

TruthstreamMedia.com uncovered several published newspaper accounts from the Spring of 1964 concerning a then-newly disclosed plan to dump nuclear waste produced by the atomic energy industry into hydraulic fracturing (fracking) wells using a cement slurry technique developed by Halliburton & Co. The top two fracking companies in the nation at the time were Halliburton and Dowell, a subsidiary of Dow Chemical.

And here we thought fracking was a relatively new industrial phenomenon growing in popularity over just the last couple of decades. Boy were we wrong. Revealed within these articles is Halliburton’s long-standing relationship with the secret government and deep ties between the oil and nuclear industries.

Teaming up with the U.S. Government and Union Carbide Corp., who operate nuclear materials divisions at the Oak Ridge National Laboratories in Tennessee, Halliburton was then credited with “solving” the radioactive waste problem faced by America’s secretive nuclear industry. Dumping waste via fracking had apparently been going on since 1960, according to the reports, but was only made public here in 1964.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

Each of the articles Truthstream found carries the same account under different headlines, with four of them using identical copy; and the fifth, published in the San Antonio Express, slightly rewritten based upon the same source information. The photo captions of each story also add some useful tidbits:

May 3, 1964 edition of the San Antonio Express News

These ran in the:

April 19, 1964 edition of the Great Bend Tribune,

the April 22, 1964 edition of the Warren Times-Mirror,

the April 26, 1964 edition of the Lubbock Avalanche Journal,

the May 3, 1964 edition of the San Antonio Express News (original)

and the June 15, 1964 edition of the Denton Record Chronicle.

The story read, in part:

Two techniques originated by the petroleum industry for its own uses are expected to solve a major problem in the development of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. The problem is the disposal of dangerous, sometimes deadly, radioactive waste by-products.

Researchers at Halliburton Co’s. Technical Center here working with Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists, have combined the oil well cementing technique with the hydraulic fracturing production stimulation technique to entomb radioactive wastes in an impermeable shale formation a thousand feet underground.

The method used at Oak Ridge begins by mixing the waste with a cement slurry, pumping the mixture down a hole drilled into the Conasuaga shale and then fracturing the shale to create a horizontal crack. The crack fills with the mixture to form a thin, horizontal sheet several hundred feet across. The mix sets to permanently hold the radioactive waste in the formation.

Union Carbide Corp., which operates facilities at Oak Ridge for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, and Halliburton, which provides specialized oil field services such as cementing fracturing worldwide, have collaborated on the project since 1960.

The mix remained liquid for 48 hours before it was supposed to permanently set and remain there, entombed, forever.

The articles make clear that the Atomic Energy Commission was preparing to use fracking as a means of disposing of nuclear wastes at additional facilities, with Oak Ridge being simply one of the largest, and the first to publicly disclose these out-of-sight disposal procedures:

Oak Ridge has a radioactive waste disposal problem typical of the nation’s nuclear sites. Each year about four million gallons of waste, including such fission products as strontium 90, cesium 137 and ruthenium 103, are generated at Oak Ridge.

Among the disposal methods already tried have been dumping concrete-encased barrels of waste in the ocean or burying the waste in lead-lined containers. These are considered either too dangerous or too expensive or both.

Unfortunately, the ocean has been used as a giant trashcan not only by the nuclear industry, but municipal garbage and landfill companies and many other entities as well, without any real concern about its significant effects on the food supply and larger ecosystem of the planet.

If this process is successful for disposal of Oak Ridge National Laboratory intermediate-level wastes, it has potential application at other atomic energy sites where suitable geological conditions exist,” the Atomic Energy Commission says.

The slightly different version in the San Antonio Express News added these details:

A couple of techniques used by oilmen when they have hopes of production may soon be used by the Atomic Energy Commission for – of all things – radioactive garbage disposal.

Final tests are now under way at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, in trying a combination of oil well cementing plus hydraulic fracturing to entomb radioactive wastes in an impermeable shale formation a thousand feet underground.

Meanwhile, the Great Bend Tribune added information about the Halliburton executives involved in the plan in their caption for a photo which shows businessmen looking at a diagram explaining how nuclear waste like strontium 90 is mixed with cement and injected into shale formations:

Halliburton engineer Mack Stogner, left, reviews the project with Harry P. Conroy, senior vice president and general manager of the oil field service firm, and W.D. Owsley, senior vice president.

The process includes remote controlled operation of the hydraulic fracturing drill in order to shield workers from the “medium level” radioactive substances being dumped into the Earth’s crust, as the Warren Times Mirror in Pennsylvania notes in the caption:

Disposing of Waste – Working behind shielding and wearing film badges, Halliburton Company personnel use demounted oil field service units to dispose of radioactive waste generated at the Oak Ridge, Tenn. nuclear site.

How often this procedure has been used at other facilities since then is not entirely clear, though we know from reports discussed below that the practice continued and there is no indication that it ever stopped.

Five years later, the October 22, 1969 edition of the San Bernardino County Sun carried a report titled, “3 Ways to Manage Radioactive Waste.”

It discussed the ongoing and growing problems with nuclear waste, naming three principle strategies for managing the toxic stuff, summed up as “(1) delay and decay, (2) concentrate and confine and (3) dilute and disperse,” discussing how materials with lower half lives can supposedly be safely sequestered and later dumped, while other materials can be simply diluted and poured into existing groundwater supplies and systems.

The UPI story originating out of Oak Ridge states, in part,

Since the start of the atomic era in the 1940s, nuclear reactors around the nation have produced 75 million gallons of hazardous high level radioactive waste materials.

And scientists here and elsewhere around the nation still are wrestling with the problems of what to do with this material, which promises to become even more plentiful as more and more commercial nuclear reactors go into power production.

Oak Ridge proclaims that it found a solution to dealing with high level nuclear wastes, which has thus far been to keep it,

…buried a few feet underground in storage tanks – tanks which must be periodically replaced because of the natural deterioration of the steel and other materials of which they are fabricated.

It is in this area of confining the high level wastes, whose radioactive half life ranges up to 30 to 50 years, that the Atomic Energy Commission is pushing dramatic new concepts.

One disposal system, involving materials in the medium range of radioactivity, is the hydraulic fracturing procedures. This system is now being used at Oak Ridge and involves mixing the liquid radioactive waste with concrete to form a grout which is pumped into shale formations 500 to 800 feet underground.

Note, this article cites a shallower depth, at levels as shallow as 500 feet, after the 1964 articles claimed a further removed depth of 1,000 feet to 5,000. The even “higher level wastes” were disposed of in abandoned salt mines, according to Oak Ridge.

Nuclear Waste ‘Safely Flushed Away’ into the Water Supply

The 1969 article states that “low level waste” is “material which can safely be flushed away into rivers and lakes or released into the atmosphere because the level of radioactivity is so low that is presents no hazard when diluted and flushed into man’s natural environment. The more difficult problem is involved in the high level, liquid and solid wastes which are produced in the reprocessing of used fuel elements from nuclear reactor cores.”

The idea that the waste dumped into water supplies was so “low level” as to be completely harmless is likely dubious and hopeful at best. Fluoride, a by-product of the nuclear power industry, was one of those constituents, and was transformed from being known as a rat poison to being known as a dental benefit by the original spin doctor and propagandist, Edward Bernays.

In his book The Fluoride Deception, author Christopher Bryson revealed how the nuclear industry also used fluoridation of the public water supply as a means of secretly dumping industrial waste after fluoride was a major by-product in the uranium enrichment process for building the atomic bomb. Bryson told Democracy Now:

The Manhattan Project needed fluoride to enrich uranium. That’s how they did it. The biggest industrial building in the world, for a time, was the fluoride gaseous diffusion plant in Tennessee the Manhattan Project and Dr. Hodge as the senior toxicologist for the Manhattan Project, were scared stiff less that workers would realize that the fluoride they were going to be breathing inside these plants was going to injury them and that the Manhattan Project, the key — the key of U.S. Strategic power in the Cold War Era, would be jeopardized because the Manhattan Project and the industrial contractors making the atomic bomb would be facing all these lawsuits from workers, all these lawsuits from farmers living around these industrial plants and so Harold Hodge assures us that fluoride is safe and good for children.

More recently, an Associated Press investigation found in 2011 that 48 of 65 nuclear sites in the United States were leaking tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen, into groundwater supplies via corroded pipes and tunnels. AP found at least 37 locations were in direct violation of federal drinking water standards for tritium, in some cases hundreds of times over.

Fracking Nuclear Waste ‘Safe for Millions of Years’… Unless It Leaks

Some 30 trillion gallons of toxic waste has been kept out of sight, out of mind by U.S. industries that have injected it hundreds and thousands of feet underground into wells since the 1960s.

Scientists who work for these corporations have used computer modeling to assure the Environmental Protection Agency that this waste poses no threat to our aquifers and that layers of rock deep within the Earth would safely store this stuff like Tupperware for millennia.

Already, several incidents have proven that scientific computer models are no match for reality.

It is clear from a December 21, 1973 article that disposal of nuclear waste via fracking continued, along with promises that it would be safe for millions of years to come.

The Dixon Evening Telegraph wrote in “Geologists look at energy crunch”:

The U.S. Government is disposing of approximately 250,000 gallons of intermediate-level wastes each year using a technique called hydraulic fracturing. Liquids are pumped into impervious shales 1,000 to 5,000 feet below the surface. High pressure is applied causing the rocks to fracture and the liquid moves out laterally. Because the rock and radioactive wastes it contains will not be exposed to the biosphere for millions of years, this method should be safe unless leakage into an overlying aquifer occurs.

That is, as the article points out, unless there are leaks.

As we found in research, leakage is exactly what has happened time and again throughout the years, including at disposal sites for Oak Ridge National Laboratories, according to reports in the following cases. Via ProPublica:

In April, 1967 pesticide waste injected by a chemical plant at Denver’s Rocky Mountain Arsenal destabilized a seismic fault, causing a magnitude 5.0 earthquake — strong enough to shatter windows and close schools — and jolting scientists with newfound risks of injection, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

A year later, a corroded hazardous waste well for pulping liquor at the Hammermill Paper Co., in Erie, Pa., ruptured. Five miles away, according to an EPA report, “a noxious black liquid seeped from an abandoned gas well” in Presque Isle State Park.

In 1975 in Beaumont, Texas, dioxin and a highly acidic herbicide injected underground by the Velsicol Chemical Corp. burned a hole through its well casing, sending as much as five million gallons of the waste into a nearby drinking water aquifer.

And these are hardly the only examples… in fact, it is just scratching the surface of an issue that is almost as incomprehensible as it is unfathomable.

Then in August 1984 in Oak Ridge, Tenn., radioactive waste was turned up by water monitoring near a deep injection well at a government nuclear facility.

Bingo…

There it is. The infallible, permanent, and “impermeable” deep injection wells that Halliburton and the Atomic Energy Commission considered as a solution to nuclear waste for eons to come were found turning up radioactive nuclear waste at the very Oak Ridge site where these 1960s disposal projects were taking place.

Subterranean Waste Disposal a ‘Cornerstone of the Nation’s Economy’

Those cemented wells, filled with injected disposal substances may be safely secured for a few years or even decades, but that is no guarantee for the years down the road and its certainly not the millennia as promised by Halliburton and others in the industry. In fact, many of the wells have been forgotten, abandoned, and are lost to the record books.

As ProPublica reports:

There are upwards of 2 million abandoned and plugged oil and gas wells in the U.S., more than 100,000 of which may not appear in regulators’ records. Sometimes they are just broken off tubes of steel, buried or sticking out of the ground. Many are supposed to be sealed shut with cement, but studies show that cement breaks down over time, allowing seepage up the well structure.

And many of these are injection wells, where all kinds of unwanted, toxic substances are dumped in order to be forgotten… though not necessarily gone.

Not only are these practices taking place, they are widespread… and widely defended, even with the known failures and safety issues.

Many scientists and regulators say the alternatives to the injection process — burning waste, treating wastewater, recycling, or disposing of waste on the surface — are far more expensive or bring additional environmental risks.

Subterranean waste disposal, they point out, is a cornerstone of the nation’s economy, relied on by the pharmaceutical, agricultural and chemical industries. It’s also critical to a future less dependent on foreign oil: Hydraulic fracturing, “clean coal” technologies, nuclear fuel production and carbon storage (the keystone of the strategy to address climate change) all count on pushing waste into rock formations below the earth’s surface. (source)

Sure, maybe it’s better than dumping it directly into the waterways, but still. This isn’t just playing with fire, this is playing with the lives of everyone in the nation for generations to come.

Please read ProPublica’s full series of reports on this, starting here. Things have to change.

These people should not have started messing with something they did not know how to fully and safely manage.

How long can this madness continue until it winds up tainting every drinking glass in America?

Engineer Mario Salazar, who worked as a technical expert for 25 years with the EPA’s underground injection program in Washington, told ProPublica’s Abrahm Lustgarten something that should give us all pause about how radioactive nuclear waste and industrial pollutants in general are being handled, and where they may ultimately end up:

In 10 to 100 years we are going to find out that most of our groundwater is polluted. A lot of people are going to get sick, and a lot of people may die.

Source: http://www.activistpost.com/2015/03/shock-fracking-used-to-inject-nuclear.html

Human Rights Watch FAIL: Uses Photo of American Bombing Destruction To Condemn Assad

2015-03-13T02:24:00.000+03:00

Human Rights Watch FAIL: Uses Photo of American Bombing Destruction To Condemn Assad

Brandon Turbeville
Activist Post

Putting its hypocritical and biased nature on full display once again, the alleged human rights organization, Human Rights Watch, was recently caught in an attempt to fabricate “evidence” of Assad’s use of barrel bombs in civilian areas for the purposes of further demonizing the secular Syrian government.

On February 25, HRW posted a photo of a devastated civilian area in Syria with the tagline “Syria dropped barrel bombs despite ban.” The “ban” HRW is referring to is the ban on bombing civilian areas that applies to both sides in Aleppo after the United Nations stepped in to save the Western-backed terroristsfrom annihilation. Assad’s forces had surrounded the city and had cut off a major supply route for the death squads from Turkey thus making the ultimate elimination of the jihadist forces a virtual inevitability.

As Somini Sengupta wrote for the New York Times on February 24,

Human Rights Watch said Tuesday that the Syrian government had dropped so-called barrel bombs on hundreds of sites in rebel-held towns and cities in the past year, flouting a United Nations Security Council measure.

In a report released Tuesday, the group said it relied on satellite images, photos, videos and witness statements to conclude that the Syrian government had bombarded at least 450 sites in and around the southern town of Daraa and at least 1,000 sites in Aleppo in the north.

The report focused on the period since Feb. 22, 2014, when the Security Council specifically condemned the use of barrel bombs, which are large containers filled with explosives and projectiles that can indiscriminately hurt civilians and are prohibited under international law.

There was only one problem with HRW’s tweet – the photograph the organization provided was not Aleppo.

In fact, the damage that had been wrought upon the civilian area in the photograph was not committed by the Syrian military but by the United States.

The photo was actually a picture of Kobane (Ayn al-Arab), the city which has been the site of heavy US aerial bombardment over the last several months as the US engages in its program of death squad herding and geographical reformation of sovereign Syrian and Iraqi territory.

But, while HRW was content to use the destruction of the city as a reason to condemn the Assad government and continue to promote the cause for US military action in Syria, the “human rights organization” was apparently much less interested in the exact same destruction wrought by US forces.

In other words, if Assad’s forces bomb a civilian area into the stone age, it is an atrocity, a war crime, and justification for international military involvement. If the United States bombs a civilian area into the stone age, it’s no biggie.

Partially funded by George Soros, Human Rights Watch has repeatedly shilled for NATO and America’s imperialist aims, particularly in Syria.

For instance, when Western media propaganda had reached a crescendo regarding the outright lie that Assad had used chemical weapons against his own people, HRW stood right beside Barack Obama and John Kerry in their effort to prove Assad’s guilt. HRW even went so far as to repeat the lie that the UN report suggested that Assad was the offending party, driving the final nail into the coffin of any credibility HRW may have had.

When a last-minute chemical weapons deal was secured by Russia in an effort to avoid yet another US/NATO invasion of Syria, HRW did not rejoice for the opportunity of peaceful destruction of chemical weapons and a chance to avoid war, it attacked the deal by claiming that it “failed to ensure justice.” Of course, the deal did fail to ensure justice. There were no provisions demanding punishment of the death squads who actually used the weapons or the US/NATO apparatus that initiated and controlled the jihadist invasion to begin with.

Regardless, when Mother Agnes Mariam of the Cross released her report that refuted what the US/NATO was asserting in regards to chemical weapons in Syria, HRW embarked upon acampaign of attack against her and her work.

Even as far back as 2009, however, HRW was showing its true colors when it apparently signed off on and supported renditions – the process of kidnapping individuals off the street without any due process and “rendering” them to jails and prisons in other countries where they are often tortured – in secret talks with the Obama administration.

If HRW ever had any credibility in terms of the question of actual human rights, then all of that credibility has assuredly been lost. HRW is nothing more than a pro-US, pro-NATO NGO that acts as a smokescreen for the continuation of the violation of human rights across the world – that is, unless those violations are committed by America’s enemies.

Source: http://www.activistpost.com/2015/03/human-rights-watch-fail-uses-photo-of.html

Global Terrorism and Saudi Arabia: Bandar’s Terror Network

2014-01-11T20:57:00.000+03:00

Global Terrorism and Saudi Arabia: Bandar’s Terror Network

By: Prof. James Petras, January 11, 2013

Saudi Arabia has all the vices and none of the virtues of an oil rich state like Venezuela. The country is governed by a family dictatorship which tolerates no opposition and severely punishes human rights advocates and political dissidents. Hundreds of billions in oil revenues are controlled by the royal despotism and fuel speculative investments the world over. The ruling elite relies on the purchase of Western arms and US military bases for protection. The wealth of productive nations is syphoned to enrich the conspicuous consumption of the Saudi ruling family. The ruling elite finances the most fanatical, retrograde, misogynist version of Islam, “Wahhabi” a sect of Sunni Islam.

Faced with internal dissent from repressed subjects and religious minorities, the Saudi dictatorship perceives threats and dangers from all sides: overseas, secular, nationalists and Shia ruling governments; internally, moderate Sunni nationalists, democrats and feminists; within the royalist cliques, traditionalists and modernizers. In response it has turned toward financing, training and arming an international network of Islamic terrorists who are directed toward attacking, invading and destroying regimes opposed to the Saudi clerical-dictatorial regime.

The mastermind of the Saudi terror network is Bandar bin Sultan, who has longstanding and deep ties to high level US political, military and intelligence officials. Bandar was trained and indoctrinated at Maxwell Air Force Base and Johns Hopkins University and served as Saudi Ambassador to the US for over two decades (1983 – 2005). Between 2005 – 2011 he was Secretary of the National Security Council and in 2012 he was appointed as Director General of the Saudi Intelligence Agency. Early on Bandar became deeply immersed in clandestine terror operations working

in liaison with the CIA. Among his numerous “dirty operations” with the CIA during the 1980s, Bandar channeled $32 million dollars to the Nicaragua Contra’s engaged in a terror campaign to overthrow the revolutionary Sandinista government in Nicaragua. During his tenure as ambassador he was actively engaged in protecting Saudi royalty with ties to the 9/11/01 bombing of the Triple Towers and the Pentagon. Suspicion that Bandar and his allies in the Royal family had prior knowledge of the bombings by Saudi terrorists (11 of the 19), is suggested by the sudden flight of Saudi Royalty following the terrorist act. US intelligence documents regarding the Saudi-Bandar connection are under Congressional review.

With a wealth of experience and training in running clandestine terrorist operations, derived from his two decades of collaboration with the US intelligence agencies, Bandar was in a position to organize his own global terror network in defense of the isolated retrograde and vulnerable Saudi despotic monarchy.

Bandar’s Terror Network

Bandar bin Sultan has transformed Saudi Arabia from an inward-looking, tribal based regime totally dependent on US military power for its survival, to a major regional center of a vast terror network, an active financial backer of rightwing military dictatorships (Egypt) and client regimes (Yemen) and military interventor in the Gulf region (Bahrain). Bandar has financed and armed a vast array of clandestine terror operations, utilizing Islamic affiliates of Al Qaeda, the Saudi controlled Wahhabi sect as well as numerous other Sunni armed groups. Bandar is a “pragmatic” terrorist operator: repressing Al Qaeda adversaries in Saudi Arabia and financing Al Qaeda terrorists in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and elsewhere., While Bandar was a long-term asset of the US intelligence services, he has, more recently, taken an ‘independent course’ where the regional interests of the despotic state diverge from those of the US. In the same vein, while Saudi Arabia has a longstanding enmity toward Israel, Bandar has developed a “covert understanding” and working relation with the Netanyahu regime, around their common enmity toward Iran and more specifically in opposition to the interim agreement between the Obama-Rohani regime.

Bandar has intervened directly or via proxies in reshaping political alignments, destabilizing adversaries and bolstering and expanding the political reach of the Saudi dictatorship from North Africa to South Asia, from the Russian Caucuses to the Horn of Africa, sometimes in concert with Western imperialism, other times projecting Saudi hegemonic aspirations.

North Africa: Tunisia, Morocco, Libya and Egypt

Bandar has poured billions of dollars to bolster the rightwing pro-Islamic regimes in Tunisia and Morocco, ensuring that the mass pro-democracy movements would be repressed, marginalized and demobilized.. Islamic extremists receiving Saudi financial support are encouraged to back the “moderate” Islamists in government by assassinating secular democratic leaders and socialist trade union leaders in opposition. Bandar’s policies largely coincide with those of the US and France in Tunisia and Morocco; but not in Libya and Egypt.

Saudi financial backing for Islamist terrorists and Al Qaeda affiliates against Libyan President Gadhafi were in-line with the NATO air war. However divergences emerged in the aftermath: the NATO backed client regime made up of neo-liberal ex-pat’s faced off against Saudi backed Al Qaeda and Islamist terror gangs and assorted tribal gunmen and marauders. Bandar funded Islamic extremists in Libya were bankrolled to extend their military operations to Syria, where the Saudi regime was organizing a vast military operation to overthrow the Assad regime. The internecine conflict between NATO and Saudi armed groups in Libya, spilled over and led to the Islamist murder of the US Ambassador and CIA operatives in Benghazi. Having overthrown Gadhafi, Bandar virtually abandoned interest in the ensuing blood bath and chaos provoked by his armed assets. They in turn, became self-financing – robbing banks, pilfering oil and emptying local treasuries – relatively “independent” of Bandar’s control.

In Egypt, Bandar developed, in coordination with Israel (but for different reasons), a strategy of undermining the relatively independent, democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood regime of Mohammed Morsi. Bandar and the Saudi dictatorship financially backed the military coup and dictatorship of General Sisi. The US strategy of a power-sharing agreement between the Moslem Brotherhood and the military regime, combining popular electoral legitimacy and the pro-Israel-pro NATO military was sabotaged. With a $15 billion aid package and promises of more to come, Bandar provided the Egyptian military a financial lifeline and economic immunity from any international financial reprisals. None were taken of any consequences. The military crushed the Brotherhood, jailed and threatened to execute its elected leaders. It outlawed sectors of the liberal-left opposition which it had used as cannon fodder to justify its seizure of power. In backing the military coup, Bandar eliminated a rival, democratically elected Islamic regime which stood in contrast to the Saudi despotism. He secured a like-minded dictatorial regime in a key Arab country, even though the military rulers are more secular, pro-Western, pro-Israel and less anti-Assad than the Brotherhood regime. Bandar’s success in greasing the wheels for the Egyptian coup secured a political ally but faces an uncertain future.

The revival of a new anti-dictatorial mass movement would also target the Saudi connection. Moreover Bandar undercut and weakened Gulf State unity: Qatar had financed the Morsi regime and was out $5 billion dollars it had extended to the previous regime.

Bandar’s terror network is most evident in his long-term large scale financing, arming, training and transport of tens of thousands of Islamic terrorist “volunteers” from the US, Europe, the Middle East, the Caucuses, North Africa and elsewhere.. Al Qaeda terrorists in Saudi Arabia became “martyrs of Islam” in Syria. Dozens of Islamic armed gangs in Syria competed for Saudi arms and funds. Training bases with US and European instructors and Saudi financing were established in Jordan, Pakistan and Turkey. Bandar financed the major ‘rebel’ Islamic terrorist armed group, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, for cross border operations.

With Hezbollah supporting Assad, Bandar directed money and arms to the Abdullah Azzam Brigades in Lebanon to bomb South Beirut, the Iranian embassy and Tripoli. Bandar directed $3 billion to the Lebanese military with the idea of fomenting a new civil war between it and Hezbollah. In co-ordination with France and the US, but with far greater funding and greater latitude to recruit Islamic terrorist, Bandar assumed the leading role and became the principle director of a three front military and diplomatic offensive against Syria, Hezbollah and Iran. For Bandar, an Islamic takeover in Syria would lead to an Islamic Syrian invasion in support of Al Qaeda in Lebanon to defeat Hezbollah in hopes of isolating Iran. Teheran would then become the target of a Saudi-Israeli-US offensive. Bandar’s strategy is more fantasy then reality.

Bandar Diverges from Washington: the Offensive in Iraq and Iran

Saudi Arabia has been an extremely useful but sometimes out of control client of Washington. This is especially the case since Bandar has taken over as Intelligence chief: a long-time asset of the CIA he has also, at times, taken the liberty to extract “favors” for his services, especially when those “favors” enhance his upward advance within the Saudi power structure. Hence, for example, his ability to secure AWACs despite AIPAC opposition earned him merit points. As did Bandar’s ability to secure the departure of several hundred Saudi ‘royalty’ with ties to the 9/11 bombers, despite a high level national security lockdown in the aftermath of the bombing.

While there were episodic transgressions in the past, Bandar moved on to more serious divergences from US policy. He went ahead, building his own terror network, directed toward maximizing Saudi hegemony – even where it conflicted with US proxies, clients and clandestine operatives.

While the US is committed to backing the rightwing Malicki regime in Iraq, Bandar is providing political, military and financial backing to the Sunni terrorist “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria”. When the US negotiated the “interim agreement” with Iran Bandar voiced his opposition and “bought” support. Saudi signed off on a billion dollar arms agreement during French President Hollande’s visit, in exchange for greater sanctions on Iran. Bandar also expressed support for Israel’s use of the Zionist power configuration to influence the Congress, to sabotage US negotiations with Iran.

Bandar has moved beyond his original submission to US intelligence handlers. His close ties with past and present US and EU presidents and political influentials have encouraged him to engage in “Big Power adventures”. He met with Russian President Putin to convince him to drop his support for Syria, offering a carrot or a stick: a multi-billion dollar arms sale for compliance and a threat to unleash Chechnyian terrorists to undermine the Sochi Olympics. He has turned Erdogan from a NATO ally supporting ‘moderate’ armed opponents to Bashar Assad, into embracing the Saudi backed ‘Islamic State of Iraq and Syria”, a terrorist Al Qaeda affiliate. Bandar has “overlooked” Erdogan’s “opportunist” efforts to sign off oil deals with Iran and Iraq, his continuing military arrangements with NATO and his past backing of the defunct Morsi regime in Egypt, in order to secure Erdogan’s support for the easy transit of large numbers of Saudi trained terrorists to Syria and probably Lebanon.

Bandar has strengthened ties with the armed Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, arming and financing their armed resistance against the US, as well as offering the US a site for a ‘negotiated departure’.

Bandar is probably supporting and arming Uighur Muslim terrorists in western China, and Chechens and Caucasian Islamic terrorists in Russia, even as the Saudi’s expand their oil agreements with China and cooperate with Russia’s Gazprom.

The only region where the Saudi’s have exercised direct military intervention is in the Gulf min-state of Bahrain, where Saudi troops crushed the pro-democracy movement challenging the local despot.

Bandar: Global Terror on Dubious Domestic Foundations

Bandar has embarked on an extraordinary transformation of Saudi foreign policy and enhanced its global influence. All to the worst. Like Israel, when a reactionary ruler comes to power and overturns the democratic order, Saudi arrives on the scene with bags of dollars to buttress the regime. Whenever an Islamic terror network emerges to subvert a nationalist, secular or Shia regime, it can count on Saudi funds and arms. What some Western scribes euphemistically describe as “tenuous effort to liberalize and modernize” the retrograde Saudi regime, is really a military upgrade of its overseas terrorist activity. Bandar uses modern techniques of terror to impose the Saudi model of reactionary rule on neighboring and distant regimes with Muslim populations.

The problem is that Bandar’s “adventurous” large scale overseas operations conflict with some of the ruling Royal family’s “introspective” style of rulership. They want to be left alone to accrue hundreds of billions collecting petrol rents, to invest in high-end properties around the world, and to quietly patronize high end call girls in Washington, London and Beirut –while posing as pious guardians of Medina, Mecca and the Holy sites. So far Bandar has not been challenged, because he has been careful to pay his respects to the ruling monarch and his inner circle. He has bought and brought Western and Eastern prime ministers, presidents and other respectable notable to Riyadh to sign deals and pay compliments to the delight of the reigning despot. Yet his solicitous behavior to overseas Al Qaeda operations, his encouraging Saudi extremists to go overseas and engage in terrorist wars, disturbs monarchical circles. They worry that Saudis trained, armed and knowledgeable terrorists – dubbed as “holy warriors” – may return from Syria, Russia and Iraq and bomb the Kings palaces. Moreover, oversea regimes targeted by Bandar’s terror network may retaliate: Russia or Iran, Syrians, Egyptians, Pakistanis, Iraqis may just sponsor their own instruments of retaliation. Despite the hundreds of billions spent on arms purchases, the Saudi regime is very vulnerable on all levels. Apart from tribal legions, the billionaire elite have little popular support and even less legitimacy. It depends on overseas migrant labor, foreign “experts” and US military forces. The Saudi elite is also despised by the most religious of the Wahhabi clergy for allowing “infidels” on sacred terrain. While Bandar extends Saudi power abroad, the domestic foundations of rule are narrowing. While he defies US policymakers in Syria, Iran and Afghanistan, the regime depends on the US Air Force and Seventh Fleet to protect it from a growing array of adversarial regimes.

Bandar, with his inflated ego, may believe that he is a “Saladin” building a new Islamic empire, but in reality, by waving one finger his patron monarch can lead to his rapid dismissal. One too many provocative civilian bombings by his Islamic terrorist beneficiaries can lead to an international crises leading to Saudi Arabia becoming the target of world opprobrium.

In reality, Bandar bin Sultan is the protégé and successor of Bin Laden; he has deepened and systematized global terrorism. Bandar’s terror network has murdered far more innocent victims than Bin Laden. That, of course, is to be expected; after all he has billions of dollars from the Saudi treasury, training from the CIA and the handshake of Netanyahu!

Dollar Hegemony,“Monetary Geopolitics” and the IMF: The Symbiosis between Global Finance and Power Politics

2013-12-25T23:35:00.000+03:00

Dollar Hegemony,“Monetary Geopolitics” and the IMF: The Symbiosis between Global Finance and Power Politics

By José Miguel Alonso Trabanco

Global Research, December 21, 2013

The following article is part II of a longer text pertaining to Hegemonic Currencies and Monetary Geopolitics.

Part I of this text is Honey Traps”: The Strauss-Kahn Affair, A Stealthy Coup d’état at the IMF?

«Money brings honor, friends, conquests and realms» –John Milton

This study is incomprehensible unless one acknowledges that “the management of money is always and everywhere political [and that…] even in the esoteric realm of money, international relations still reflect, to some extent, the interests of powerful states” (Kirshner, 2003).

Along these lines, since Classical Antiquity, there has always been a strong connection between wealth and military power and therefore, in the most simple and direct way, between economics and national security. Not surprisingly, modern times are not so different. (Friedberg, 1991).

Therefore, the trends that rule the behavior of currencies are strikingly similar to those that govern the conduct of national states. They both seek dominance in highly hierarchical and dynamic systems where competition, conflict and confrontation are commonplace. They both gain and lose power and prestige at the expense of one another in zero-sum games (Cohen, 2003). Therefore, “the realpolitik balancing instinct would apply to currency politics as well as geopolitics” (Drezner, 2010).

The evident overlapping parallel implies that, paraphrasing Robert Mundell (1993), powerful States have powerful currencies. In fact, history provides many examples that demonstrate that “currency can enhance the power of the state that issues it” (Cohen, 2009). Thus, it would be mistaken to disregard that “Money Rules – now more than ever – but those rules serve political masters [so] students of money in general and political scientists most particularly must return to that basic starting point – money is politics”. (Kirshner, 2003).Indeed, “World history demonstrates that there is a close relationship between monetary systems and war and peace”(Lips, 2004).

Furthermore, since the dawn of human civilization, the issuance of currency has invariably carried heavy political connotations related to territorial considerations: “governments have been assumed to enjoy a natural right of monopoly control over the issue and management of money within their borders [and following a model akin to a]Westphalian model of monetary geography […whereby] each state was expected to maintain its own exclusive territorial currency” (Cohen, 2008).

Consequently, not unlike nations, currencies rise and fall too. “An examination of the long history of reserve currencies shows the tendency for one currency to dominate, with any change in status often reflecting a shift or rebalancing of economic and political power” (Lee, 2010). Accordingly, “currency internationalization does indeed impact directly on the power position of issuing states” (Cohen, 2009).

Hence, there seems to be a persistent symbiotic link between geopolitics and finance that represents an element which is considered by statesmen in order to properly assess national power. Indeed, it is known that nowadays Central Bankers and political leaders actively collect intelligence information on the behavior of currencies and periodically test their relative strength, in order to “adjust their strategies accordingly” (Stroupe, 2005).

However, hegemonies, both geopolitical and monetary, are not perpetual: “historical experience demonstrates the speed and pervasiveness of changes in national economic power; since hegemony is transitory, so must be any international monetary system that takes hegemony as its basis” (Eichengreen, 2003), which indicates that “the international monetary system has always rested and depended upon political foundations” (Kirshner, 2003).

The following graph, based on data from a study on the evolution of monetary hegemony (Dwyer & Lothian, 2002), shows the historic succession of dominant international currencies from the 5th century B.C. onwards. Not surprisingly, as can be clearly seen, currencies occupy a dominant position when the nation that mints them becomes a great power.

However, “since states are no longer able to exercise supreme control over the circulation and use of money within their own frontiers, they must instead do what they can to preserve or promote market share. As a result, the population of the monetary universe is becoming ever more stratified, assuming the appearance of a vast Currency Pyramid — narrow at the top, where the strongest monies dominate; and increasingly broad below, reflecting varying degrees of competitive inferiority” (Cohen, 2003).

At this point, it is important to emphasize that ‘reserve currency’ status is the highest position a currency can attain because it is “something which evolves over time through combination of international economic and political power and convenience to the greatest number of users rather than abruptly as the result of conscious decisions by a single country”(Eslake, 2009). Moreover, there are other evident advantages provided that “the issuers of currencies that are widely used by others as reserve assets […] can finance deficits simply by printing more of their own money” (Cohen, 2008). Therefore, there is a “link between the distribution of economic power and the allocation of reserve currencies” (Drezner, 2010). Hence, “the great bulk of reserves is held in the form of highly liquid assets denominated in one of the small handful of moneys at the peak of the Currency Pyramid” (Cohen, 2009).
A reserve currency is thus defined by three essential attributes:

a) It provides a store of value, i.e. “confidence that the currency will retain its value, so making it a safe place in which to invest official reserves or denominate contracts” (Dobbs, 2009). Confidence is critical because “economies operate on trust as a foundation” (Stroupe, 2006). Thus, “reserve assets serve as a store of value that can be used directly for intervention purposes or else can be more or less quickly converted into a usable intervention medium” (Cohen, 2009).

b) It is employed as a “medium of exchange that offers the ability to transact globally in the currency in an easy and low-cost way” (Dobbs, 2009). As such, “a reserve currency facilitates trade and finance by decreasing the number of bilateral exchange markets that need to be created, thus reducing transaction costs” (Carbaugh&Hendrik, 2009). Therefore, it provides a reference to set the bilateral exchange rate quotations (Oxford Analytica, 2008).

c) As a unit of account, it is “a widely held and recognized currency that can be used to denominate international contracts […and] to invoice contracts” (Dobbs, 2009) and it is the currency in which many commodities –including fossil fuels, strategic raw materials, precious metals– and financial instruments available in capital markets are priced and traded (Oxford Analytica, 2008).

The latter is particularly important because there is a strong link between finance and hydrocarbons market, due to the fact that

“black gold has other pseudo-monetary characteristics as an indispensable commodity that practically begs to be controlled. In an increasingly industrialized world, this fungible primary energy source is everywhere in demand [and, as result…] the spectrum of thought on national security and foreign policy [is taken] into the realm of high finance, capital flows and the trump asset of energy resources (Roby, 2010).

Hence, this research paper must be understood in the context of the United States dollar’s decades-long role as the ‘first among equals’ in the international monetary system. The following graph, based on data from a paper written by a prominent scholar of International Political Economy (Cohen, 2009) illustrates the current hierarchical pyramid of currencies, classified as “top currency”, “patrician currencies” and “elite currencies”.

In geopolitical terms, during the Cold War period, the Dollar hegemony “held the American alliance system and the world economy together… [because] America’s major allies and economic partners were willing to hold dollars for political as well as for economic reasons” (Engdahl, 2006). Therefore, the privileged position of the dollar has been “a key contributor to US global hegemony” (Oxford Analytica, 2008) for it provides advantages derived from the Federal Reserve’s absolute monopoly of the printing of a currency needed by countless national economies to survive (Engdahl, 2003).

Thus, thanks to of its wealth, “America has been able to irresistibly influence all the other players on the geopolitical chessboard because it has led the global economy, and historically it could therefore greatly reward or severely punish in ways and to an extent no one else could” (Stroupe, 2006), attaining both political and diplomatic power, as well as formidable power projection capabilities.

For this reason, “America’s dominant position as the sole superpower ultimately rests upon two pillars: its overwhelming military superiority and its control of the global economic system by the unique role of the dollar as the World Reserve Currency” (Clark, 2005). According to this reasoning,

“it might be considered an elemental interest of the United States to maintain the system which also includes intense diplomatic and limited military operations in order to preserve its abundant financing for as long as possible. After all, there seems to be a strong interdependence among nations. The US is dependent on cheap financing from abroad and is even willing to apply some military power to protect these interests” (Schulz, 2009).

Moreover, it cannot be denied that “the dollar’s leading role in foreign exchange transactions also is reinforced by this currency’s widespread use in the invoicing of international trade” (Goldberg, 2011). That is especially true about oil markets, given that “since oil trade was and still is noted, as well as traded in US Dollars, every nation has to purchase huge amounts of this currency for its national reserves in order to maintain its ability to purchase the required energy” (Schulz, 2009). Consequently, monetary dependence of others on the issuing country confers the latter significant geopolitical power(Cohen, 2003).

The unavoidable reasoning that arises is that “a full challenge to the domination of the US dollar as the world central-bank reserve currency entails a de facto declaration of war [on American power]” and, as a result, the United States is willing to fight wars to defend its national currency (Engdahl, 2006) because “an end to the dollar’s reserve currency status would impose material constraints on the United States to finance its deficits, and lead to a major loss of prestige and power projection capabilities” (Drezner, 2010). A possibility is that “widespread oil pricing in alternative currencies or perhaps the bartering of oil would then threaten U.S. hegemony by crimping the relative global demand for dollars” (Roby, 2010).

Nevertheless, perpetual hierarchic supremacy of the dollar cannot be taken for granted:

“Sooner or later, confidence in the dollar is bound to be undermined by America’s chronic payments deficits, which add persistently to the country’s looming foreign debt […] The exorbitant privilege obviously cannot endure forever; America’s spending cannot indefinitely exceed its income. In the absence of significant policy reforms to reverse the deficits, the world’s trust in the dollar is bound […] to be eroded. Dollar accumulations will eventually dry up and could even turn into massive sales” (Cohen, 2008).

The feasibility of said scenario has been enhanced by recent events. Indeed, “the [2008 and 2009] financial crisis and its aftermath have triggered uncertainty about the future of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency” (Drezner, 2010) because it “revealed the inherent weaknesses of the current international monetary system that contributed to global financial instability and a weak global economy and [said crisis has also] hampered the long-term prospects of both the US dollar and the euro as reserve currencies. The crisis has compromised both currencies as safe-haven stores of value” (Lee, 2010).

The following chart, based on official IMF data (International Monetary Fund, 2013) reflects the composition of foreign exchange reserves held on a global basis by early 2013. As can be seen, nowadays the US dollar still occupies a predominant position which is unmatched by other inhabitants of the world’s current monetary universe.

At first, “it appears that the current system of dollar dominance will persist provided that geopolitical tensions do not become too important for policymakers – or not important enough” (Drezner, 2010), yet appearances can deceiving and potential challengers might become increasingly assertive:

“several states around the world today are thought to harbor ambitions to amplify their monetary power – including, most prominently, the four BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and above all China). One way to do this is to promote internationalization of their currency” (Cohen, 2009) by “trying to establish their own financial regimes as the international payment vehicle” (Schulz, 2009).

It is telling that, back in 2008, Vice Admiral J. Michael McConnell, then Director of National Intelligence voiced before the United States Congress Intelligence Committee his “concerns about the financial capabilities of Russia, China, and OPEC countries and the potential use of their market access to exert financial leverage to achieve political ends” (McConnell, 2008). The senior American official’s threat assessment is not mistaken: “influence might be increased directly through the use of newly acquired reserve stockpiles to threaten manipulation of the value or stability of a key currency such as the dollar” (Cohen, 2008).

The Vice Admiral’s statement, which –needless to say– goes “beyond the conventional world of spycraft” (Shelton, 2008), implies that the US intelligence Nomenklatura has already acknowledged the threat posed by the geopolitical manipulation of financial forces by foreign powers hostile to American interests. It might be interpreted as the confirmation that “the United States may be expected to resist any compromise of the greenback’s historical dominance…” (Cohen, 2008).

Indeed, McConnell’s concern is not unsubstantiated at all, taking into account that “[the] US increasingly came to rely on the governments of countries that were neither democracies nor US allies for financing […and since such States] with large quantities of reserves have more strategic freedom of action; they are less likely to be deterred from taking geostrategic risks by the possibility that their actions could precipitate a financial crisis (Setser, 2009).

Actually, the unleashing of financial warfare seeks the infliction of economic damage as it “involves malicious acts in markets for stocks, bonds, currencies, commodities and derivatives” (Rickards, 2012). The same author points out that, unlike conventional warfare, it can be waged stealthily enough so as to obscure the identities of the attackers as well as their channels. Thus, it requires a remarkably high degree of sophistication.

The aforementioned has engendered, paralleling Cold War terminology, a system akin to a “balance of financial terror” (Summers, 2004) whereby America’s overall stability could potentially be threatened due to the fact that “America’s partners in NATO are no longer the dominant holders of US dollars in reserve as they were during the cold war. The connection between dollar holders and security partners has been severed [and, as a result,] the dollar depends on the kindness of strangers” (Drezner, 2010). At this point, it is vital to underscore that “[regarding monetary concerns] politics will mater greatly [because] States do not typically (accumulate claims on) countries that are, or may be, their geopolitical competitors –if they can help it, that is, or if there is any credible alternative” (Jaeger, 2010).

In the light of the above, based on data from the CIA World Factbook (Central Intelligence Agency, 2012) and the World Gold Council (2011), the following chart reveals the largest proprietors of financial assets, including foreign currency reserves, gold and holdings of SDR. The list includes industrial economies, emerging powers, world-class financial centers and oil exporters. Not many of them are staunch US allies, some might eventually reconsider their Foreign Policy vis-à-vis America and only one of them, namely Germany, is a NATO member, for the time being.

It must be borne in mind that “for historical reasons gold is still included in the reserve stockpiles of many countries, despite the fact that it is no longer directly employable as a means of exchange. So too are SDRs [and that both of them] must be exchanged for a more utilizable instrument when the need for financing arises” (Cohen, 2009). Indeed, given the fact that the aurous metal “has been used as money to a greater or lesser extent for much of the history of civilization” (Michaud, et al., 2006), it “fulfills the unique function of a global store of value” (Faugère& Van Erlach, 2005). Incidentally, even though the US is not among the top ten holders of financial assets, most the US currency reserves are not denominated in dollars (!) but in gold: Its 8,133.5 tons represent 76.6% of its national currency reserves (World Gold Council, 2011).

Even though this paper does not focus on the yellow metal, its significance in terms of monetary politics is deservedly acknowledged because “from the beginning of recorded history some 6,000 years ago, gold made a profound and lasting impression. Gold was, and still is, the ultimate symbol of wealth, power, beauty and prestige. It has been deeply rooted in the consciousness of man ever since” (Lips, 2001) and, as a result, “gold is a political metal” (Lips, 2004). As such, it is “highly susceptible to geopolitical factors [because…] during periods of fiscal or monetary mismanagement, crises of various kinds or fundamental changes in the dominant currency, gold may be a very useful asset for hedging risk” (Michaud, et al., 2006).

In other respects, dollar hegemony went unchallenged during six decades because no competitive rival emerged, yet “ample evidence exists to suggest that the distribution of power in international monetary affairs is changing” (Cohen, 2008). Especially, the rise of the People’s Republic of China as an economic superpower has enhanced the possibility that the ‘Middle Kingdom’ could become, in the long run, a financial superpower (Makin, 2011). Naturally, “many PRC scholars and policy makers […] aspire for a world economic and financial order less dominated by the US and in which the PRC can play a more influential role” (Lee, 2010).

Accordingly, by proposing alternatives to the US dollar as reserve currency –like Special Drawing Rights–, “China desires to decrease the financial and political power of the United States” (Carbaugh & Hendrik, 2009) and, it has to be taken into account that “If any nation is in a position to use its newly acquired influence in this manner, it is China. At any time, Beijing could undermine America’s money by dumping greenbacks on the world’s currency exchanges or even simply by declining to add dollars to China’s reserves in the future” (Cohen, 2008).

Both options are not mutually exclusive and they can be advanced simultaneously. Indeed, the People’s Bank of China could covertly and progressively diversify its massive currency reserves by ceasing to buy American dollars and, simultaneously, stockpiling growing reserves denominated in other currencies and even in precious metals. This deceptive strategy is meant to preserve wealth without precipitating a sudden dollar collapse, along with some political consequences such move would recklessly unleash. Therefore, it is not surprising that the composition of its foreign currency reserves is one of the highest state secrets of the People Republic of China (Stroupe, 2006).

Even if “China’s tactics suggest that it is not prepared to challenge the dollar’s hegemonic status at any point in the near future” (Drezner, 2010), it actually looks like, in the long term, Beijing is interested in forging a new monetary system in which the US dollar is no longer the only reserve currency available and overreliance on the American currency is not a necessary evil anymore. Chinese statesmen can accomplish such an ambitious objective through the application of two strategies: a) contributing to the strengthening of Special Drawing Rights (DSR)[1], in order to establish a multilateral reserve currency under which financial power will be, more or less, evenly distributed and b) unilaterally promoting the internationalization of the Renminbi as a growingly solid currency (Chin & Wang, 2010).

Interestingly, the international monetary diversification away from the dollar is enthusiastically welcomed by Russia (Drezner, 2010), an utmost resourceful challenger of American geopolitical interests which, as such, would be more than glad to witness the accelerated decline of the US as the international’s system top power.

If the economic rise of China is uninterrupted during the next few decades, there will be profound financial and, above all, geopolitical consequences: “If the yuan emerges as a reserve currency potentially rivaling the dollar, China will become more powerful and the US less powerful in international and financial affairs… [In that sense,] the emergence of the yuan as a major reserve currency will reflect the underlying shift in economic and financial power, even if it does, independently, provide tangible benefits to China [but] this is likely to have ramifications for Washington’s political position in the world” (Jaeger, 2010).

Reportedly, while discussing if accumulating mammoth currency reserves denominated in American currency benefits China’s national interests, Beijing’s ruling elite has questioned the long-term strength of the US dollar a solid store of value and, in order to encourage the introduction of a new international monetary system under a new global reserve currency and, thus, senior Chinese government officials have implemented. “measures to promote the internationalization of the renminbi [also known as ‘people’s currency’ or yuan]” (Drezner, 2010).
Nowadays, it appears likely that

“the yuan is set to become a major reserve currency, but it is not a foregone conclusion that it will emerge as the dominant reserve currency 20, 30 or even 40 years from now. For, despite heated theoretical debate, it is possible for two or even three major reserve currencies to co-exist” (Jaeger, 2010).

Even if it is still unclear who will inherit the dollar’s position as hegemonic currency due to a lack of credible alternative successors, the assumption that an eventual monetary transition, far from being unfeasible, is a real possibility, considering that “several currencies can share reserve currency status, as they not infrequently have. Changes in financial technologies and market structures […] make it even more likely that this will be true in the future than the past” (Eichengreen, 2005). Likewise, “a multi-currency reserve system provides alternatives for countries to diversify their foreign exchange currency holdings. If dollar liabilities increase and confidence declines, for example, central banks can switch to the other reserve currencies” (Lee, 2010).

Accordingly, it is way too early to accurately forecast what the international monetary system will look like during the next few decades. It is also unknown if the much-anticipated shift will be accomplished through peaceful or violent means. In the absence of consolidated challengers, it appears likely that some sort of ‘multipolar balance of monetary power’ will emerge, i.e. “[a] fragmented currency system, with no dominant leader… [akin to the] interregnum of the period between the two World Wars, when Britain’s pound sterling was in decline and the dollar on the rise, but neither was dominant” (Cohen, 2008).

Whatever the ultimate result, it must always be kept in mind that a power vacuum is not meant to last neither in geopolitics nor in finance. Along these lines, some analysts foresee that “the dollar’s global dominance is more likely to be lost incrementally to a number of other currencies as those currencies continue to rise in international importance, that is, as they come to be used more frequently in international transactions” (Stroupe, 2006).

If the US dollar does lose its royal crown, it will not be immediately grabbed by another national currency. There are alternative possibilities that deserve special attention, such as Special Drawing Rights (SDR), which were “created by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 1969 to support the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates. The IMF’s objective was to introduce into the payments mechanism a new type of international money, in addition to the dollar and gold, that could be transferred among participating nations in settlement of payments deficits Although the SDR was designed as a reserve currency, it never took off. SDRs today add up to less than 1 percent of total reserves. The SDR has only limited use as a reserve asset, and its main purpose is to serve as the unit of account of the IMF and some other international organizations. Rather than being an international currency, the SDR is a potential claim on the freely usable currencies of IMF members” (Carbaugh&Hendrik, 2009).

Nonetheless, it must be pointed out that “The SDR is not a hard currency but rather a derivative as its value is determined based on the value of other assets […] more importantly, the SDR is tied to all the world’s economies unlike existing currencies which are components of either a single country’s economy or a pool of countries like the euro” (Rosensweig, 2009). In other words, SDR is regarded as the “Esperanto of currency options” (Drezner, 2010).

The aforementioned plurality is due to the fact that “the value of the SDR is defined as a basket of currencies which include the U.S. dollar, Japanese yen, UK pound, and the euro. The SDR’s basket composition is reviewed every five years to ensure that it reflects the relative importance of currencies in the world’s trading and financial systems. the economic welfare of the world would not depend on the behavior of a single currency, namely the dollar. Currency risk would be diversified through a basket reserve unit. It would take years to develop SDR money markets that are liquid enough to serve as a reserve asset. Although the IMF approved the first issuance of SDR-denominated bonds on July 1, 2009, as it attempts to increase its resources, the bonds can be purchased and sold only by central banks, not private investors” (Carbaugh & Hendrik, 2009).

On the other hand, it is outstanding that, only until relatively recent times, have military strategists acknowledged the full destructive potential of financial warfare as a geopolitical weapon of the highest caliber, yet if offers the advantage of avoiding much bloodshed, unlike the use of conventional armament or Weapons of Mass Destruction –WMD–. Indeed, according to Chinese military experts, wars can be waged through the manipulation of financial instruments to demolish countries’ national economies. In that sense, the consequences of financial attacks are usually devastating because they precipitate “a near collapse of the social and political order.

“The casualties resulting from the constant chaos are no less than those resulting from a regional war, and the injury done to the living social organism even exceeds the injury inflicted by a regional war [and an additional advantage is that]… financial war […] allows for concealed actions…” (Quiao & Wang, 1999).

In that sense, it has been argued that dollar hegemony was somehow involved with the Anglo-American decision to invade Iraq back in 2003, not long after the Middle Eastern country had switched to the euro in its oil exports. Once Saddam Hussein’s regime was overthrown, the occupation forces “quickly reconverted Iraq’s oil transaction currency to the dollar” (Clark, 2005). That would explain the staunch Franco-German reluctance to participate in and back Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Libya offers another intriguing case worth looking into. Libyan satrap Muammar Gaddafi was reportedly planning to sponsor the introduction of a gold currency shared by African and Arab nations (Scott, 2011). Revealingly, French President Sarkozy even declared that, “Libya has begun to change their views towards financial security of mankind” (Gold Investment, 2011). Furthermore, during an ensuing bloody insurrection, Western-backed rebels fighting to unseat Gaddafi established their own central bank even before the Libyan dictator was finally deposed and a new government could be created, which illustrates that “there were some pretty sophisticated influences [involved and that it also shows] how extraordinarily powerful central bankers have become in our era” (Brown, 2011).

Finally, “the absence of geopolitical tensions could boost the chances of coordinated shift in currency reserves” (Drezner, 2010), but it definitely cannot be discarded that “the outcome could be heightened struggle for leadership over the longer term and a rising tension in international currency affairs” (Chin & Wang, 2010). Indeed, it seems that the first shots of this very unconventional war may have even been fired already, indicating that, apparently, “a battle of currencies [far from being peaceful] could get nasty” (Cohen, 2008).

Indeed, “there are many other historic examples of the US stepping in to halt a movement away from the petrodollar system, often in covert ways” (Katusha, 2012) and the case of Dominique Strauss-Kahn may offer one of such examples. The author of this paper shares said perception and believes that, as will be explained below, DSK apparently may have been one of its (political) casualties.

Intergovernmental Institutions as Battleground Arenas

«Money is a good soldier, sir…» –William Shakespeare

It is mistaken to disassociate international institutions from the contextual balance of power that prevails at any given time. Far from being autonomous players, they “are created by the more powerful states, and [they] survive in their original form as long as they serve the major interests of their creators, or are thought to do so [and] institutions remain close to the underlying distribution of national capabilities or [else] they court failure” (Waltz, 2000).

From the moment of their inception, intergovernmental institutions are inescapably permeated by national interests due to the fact that “States sometimes operate through institutions. The most powerful in the system create and shape institutions so that they can maintain their share of world power, or even increase it” (Mearsheimer, 1994). As a result, institutions are not politically neutral. Instead, they “reflect state calculations of self-interest based primarily on concerns about relative power” (Mearsheimer, 1995). So, it is not surprising at all that powerful States struggle to control, either directly or indirectly, those same institutions.

For instance, the Organization of American States (OAS) is clearly dominated by the USA as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) is undeniably dominated by both the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation. Likewise, “since the founding of the Bretton Woods institutions in 1945, the World Bank has been headed by an American whereas the FMI has been under the helm of a (Western) European” (Chossudovsky, 2011). Such control indicates that, when both institutions were created, the US and Western Europe wanted to forge a comprehensive transatlantic alliance which could encompass economic and financial affairs. There was also, of course, a military counterpart: The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

The following lists, based on official data published by both the International Monetary Fund (2012) and the World Bank (2012), illustrate that the former has always been ran by a European whereas the latter has invariably presided over by an American.

In that sense, international financial institutions –like the IMF– are certainly no exception because “the most basic choices about money – what money is used where, the behaviour of international financial institutions, and efforts at cooperation – can only be understood as the outcome of a political contest between states with motivations other than the pursuit of global economic efficiency” (Kirshner, 2003).

History has shown that, from the very beginning, “the evolution of the IMF has reflected the geopolitics of the international economy. [Beyond the fact that its] headquarters […] have always been in Washington D.C. […it] has undoubtedly played a role which has been useful for the general national interest of the United States” (Bordo& James, 2000).

In fact, it has been acknowledged that “one key channel of U.S. global influence in the modern economic system has been its influence on the institutions, such as the IMF and World Bank, that undergird the current international economic and financial order” (Goldberg, 2011). Moreover,“the United States also exercises a substantial amount of informal power at the IMF” (Weiss, 2012).

It must not be forgotten that the

“the IMF is owned by the governments of its member countries, represented through a Board of Governors. The Governor for each member country is usually the Minister of Finance or sometimes the Central Bank Governor. Voting is in accordance with the size of a country’s share-holding in the Fund (or ‘quota’), and many important decisions require special majorities (85% of the vote). Periodically, quotas are recalculated to reflect changing economic size”. (Bordo & James, 2000).

Consequently, it is deeply mistaken to assume that IMF activities cannot be interpreted as foreign to power politics and “many analysts contend that the IMF is a highly politicized institution, reflecting the wide power differential between a few advanced economies and the remaining membership” (Weiss, 2012). Moreover, “diverting the IMF, for geopolitical purposes, from its principles to serve particular interest is possible since decisions to lend are taken by the Executive Board […which] is responsible for conducting the day-to-day business of the IMF. It is composed of 24 Directors, who are appointed or elected by member countries or by groups of countries, and the Managing Director, who serves as its Chairman” (Reynaud & Vauday, 2007).

Indeed, power is not evenly distributed among the IMF’s 188 member States. That multilateral organization (International Monetary Fund, 2012) explains that “Each member country of the IMF is assigned a quota, based broadly on its relative position in the world economy. A member country’s quota determines its maximum financial commitment to the IMF, its voting power, and has a bearing on its access to IMF financing”. The logical result is that “members with very large voting weight can possess a disproportionately greater voting power” (Leech, 2002). In a nutshell, “the quota system is the basis of asymmetric power relations among member states in the IMF” (Blomberg & Broz, 2006).

The following charts, based respectively on data from the IMF (2012) and the CIA (2012) reflects a comparison between the most influential IMF members, measured in terms of the share of their voting power, and the largest economies, in terms of their 2011 Gross Domestic Product (nominal). The correspondence is somewhat accurate but, in the IMF system, the US, Japan, Germany, France, the UK and Canada and are overrated, whereas China, India and Brazil are underrated. Please note that, as of June 2012, the US represents 16.75 % of the vote and, as a result, has the power to veto IMF decisions it does not accept or agree with.

Conversely, it has to be taken into account that

“[even though] looking after national interests is the responsibility of national governments… History gives us many examples of states choosing policies supposedly in the national interest, but which in fact were chosen to serve the interests of social, political or economic elites… History has many examples of national policies serving special interests” (Strange, 1998). Moreover, “finance is no longer dominated [only] by a few national governments at the apex of the global order” (Cohen, 2008).

By extension, the same applies to intergovernmental organizations, including the IMF.

Along these lines, the International Monetary Fund is hardly an independent entity or indifferent to pervasive financial and banking interests, for it “is run by its governors and executive directors, of whom the overwhelmingly dominant authorities are the US treasury department, which includes heavy representation from [investment bank] GoldmanSachs, and, secondarily, the European powers” (Weisbrot, 2011). Indeed,

“while the IMF is in theory an intergovernmental organization, it has historically been controlled by Wall Street and the US Treasury [… and its] role is to implement and enforce those economic policies on behalf of dominant economic interests” (Chossudovsky, 2011).

It is not far-fetched to assert that “the IMF also responds to pressure from private banks, as evidenced by the fact that IMF programs include conditions that support their interests” (Dreher, et al., 2007). In fact, even insiders admit this. For example, former Senior Vice President of the World Bank Joseph Stiglitz (2002) points out that the IMF is controlled by the wealthiest countries and also by their financial interests, which provide the prism employed by the Fund’s staff to observe events and developments. Stiglitz adds that, therefore, it makes sense to presume that the IMF’s policies are designed taking said interests into consideration.

The power of banking clans currently reaches considerable heights and must not be dismissed outright only because they are non state actors. According to an article published by the New Scientist magazine, a compact group of corporations, “mainly banks, [exert] a disproportionate power over the global economy” (Coghland & MacKenzie, 2011). The study, produced by complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Zurich, revealed that, through entangled corporate ownership networks, financial juggernauts stand out among the top “superconected companies”: Barclays pls, JP Morgan Chase & Co, Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse Group, Goldman Sachs Group Inc, Morgan Stanley, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc, Bank of America Corporation, Lloyds TSB Group plc, ING Groep NV, among others.

A Geopolitical Interpretation of Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s Downfall as Managing Director of the IMF

«And I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies…»–Thomas Jefferson

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is not commonly thought of as a likely candidate for regime change. Whenever one hears such term, one thinks of strategically important States whose geopolitical patronage is being fought over by great powers: Belarus, Cuba, Iran, Libya, Myanmar, Syria, Ukraine, Venezuela and so on and so forth.

In fact, the IMF was established by the Western victors of World War Two, who reached an unwritten agreement whereby the World Bank would be run by an American whereas the IMF would be lead by a European, as explained above. Therefore, according to conventional wisdom, it is hardly conceivable that the most important intergovernmental financial organism worldwide could even hypothetically become the target for a regime change operation.

There might several member states interested in changing IMF policies or maybe even its overall direction, but it has to be acknowledged that only very few governments have the political willingness, the necessary contacts, the inside influence, the global reach or the technical capabilities to bring about such an outcome without serious consequences or at least without being visibly detected.

In that sense, back in 2007 even the Russian Federation failed to substantially promote its handpicked nominee, then Governor of the of the Czech National Bank Josef Tošovský. Instead, Dominique Gaston André Strauss-Kahn (DSK), a French politician associated with the Socialist Party, became Managing Director of the IMF as the candidate backed by the European Union, replacing Spaniard Rodrigo Rato.

DSK was even supported by right-wing French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who was allegedly trying to send away one the most prominent heavyweights of the Socialist Party (Reuters, 2007) and, it must be borne in mind, a potential challenger for Sarkozy’s UMP Party -Union pour un MouvementPopulaire- in the coming French presidential election that was to be held in 2012.

Moreover, what could possibly motivate a soft coup d’état against DSK?

There is an intriguing possibility. According to the UK-based newspaper The Guardian, in February 2011, Strauss-Kahn proposed the introduction of a new world currency that would challenge the supremacy of the US dollar and help ensure a greater financial stability prevails. The then managing director of the IMF specified that “using the Special Drawing Rightsto price global trade and denominate financial assets would provide a buffer from exchange rate volatility”, while “issuing SDR-denominated bonds could create a potentially new class of reserve assets“ (Stewart, 2011).

Said proposal, far from being far-fetched, is theoretically feasible because “even though there is no currency currently poised to dethrone the dollar, that does not mean that the euro, the yuan, or a basket of currencies such as the SDR could not eventually join the dollar as a reserve currency” (Carbaugh & Hendrik, 2009).

One must bear in mind that, during DSK’s tenure as Managing Director, the IMF published a study which examined the implications of enhancing the role of SRD in the context of the debate concerning international monetary reform, especially as a unit of account “which could be used to price internationally traded assets (e.g., sovereign bonds) and goods (e.g., commodities), to peg currencies, and to report balance of payments data” (International Monetary Fund, 2011).

Such solutions, according to the same IMF working paper, need to be taken into consideration in order to correct problems like persistent global imbalances, large and volatile capital flows, exchange rate fluctuations disconnected from fundamentals and insufficient supply of safe global assets, among others. Interestingly, the paper’s authors warn that political hurdles and constraints would need to be overcome (!).

It is important to consider that some specialists specify that an attack on the dollar’s position as the world’s top reserve currency amounts to an attack against the Achilles’ heel of American power. In fact,

“The second pillar of American dominance in the world [the first one being superior state-of-the-art military technology] is the role played by the US dollar as the international World Reserve Currency…Maintaining this is a strategic imperative if America seeks global dominance. It should be noted that dollar hegemony is in many respects more important than US military superiority. Indeed, removing the dollar pillar will naturally result in the diminishment of the military pillar” (Clark, 2005).

Hence, it is logical to believe that Washington is not willing to lose, at least not without a fight, the considerable economic and political advantages derived from the role of the US dollar as the only truly global reserve currency, which is used as a medium of exchange, unit of account and store of value all over the world, taking into consideration that “[from the American viewpoint,] war and insidious interventions of this sort may be costly, but the costs of not protecting the petrodollar system would be far higher” (Katusha, 2012).

The consequences would include “the loss of the exorbitant privilege of easy financing of large US deficits, both government and national. The political influence that American policy makers have internationally, including in international institutions, could also be diminished. If the euro were to overtake the dollar in a few decades, it would be a once-in-a-century event… [however, if] it happened to the pound in the last century, so who is to say it could not happen to the dollar in this?”(Frenkel& Chin, 2008).

Additionally, in a speech delivered by DSK back in late 2009, he stressed that even though he acknowledged that the US dollar was expected to remain the chief reserve currency for some (sic) time, “there have already been a number of valuable proposals for how to address concerns related to reserve currencies, including from prominent figures here in China. Some call for the creation of a new world reserve currency, possibly based on the Special Drawing Right (or SDR)—the composite currency issued by the IMF. Another possibility is for a multi-reserve currency system to emerge, with the euro, the yen, and the renminbi perhaps serving as co-equal anchors. These are useful ideas that will influence the future discussion of this issue”.

On that occasion, the then IMF Managing Director went ever farther when he explored the potential implications of the “unprecedented shift in relative wealth and economic power” –as the US intelligence community terms it (National Intelligence Council, 2008)– away from the West to the Eastern hemisphere. He explained that, given that the economic balance of power is being reconfigured,

“for China and for Asia as a whole, a growing voice on the international stage means tremendous opportunities to contribute to the reshaping of the post-crisis global economy… China, no doubt, will play a leadership role in making the changes needed to embark on a new growth path that secures long-term economic success for all nations… [adding that] China’s role in the international policy debate has been rising in tandem with its growing economy. As a key member of the G-20, China is helping to elaborate the global policy priorities for the future, and devise solutions to global problems. And at the IMF, China is supporting our efforts to adapt and serve the needs of our member countries even more effectively”.(Strauss-Kahn, 2009).

Remarkably, in April 2011 –shortly before the abrupt end of DSK’s tenure as its Managing Director–, the IMF forecasted that, by 2016, China’s GDP, measured in terms of power purchasing parity, will have overtaken the United States as the largest economy on Earth. It is not news devoid of deeper ramifications because “It is the first time the IMF has put a time frame on the communist country’s inevitable march, and the forecast has profound implications for the balance of global power […moreover, said prediction casted] a deepening cloud over the future of the dollar as the world’s dominant currency as well as Washington’s attempts to close the budget gap and rein in the nation’s ballooning debt”. (Gardner, 2011).

IMF special studies and estimations go beyond the realm of intellectual or academic interests alone because “the most useful function that the IMF contributed to the debate about policy coordination was through the provision of data and forecasts” (Bordo& James, 2000). The importance of which is highlighted due to the fact that “[said intergovernmental organization’s] board usually meets several times a week and carries out its work largely on the basis of papers prepared by IMF staff” (Reynaud &Vauday, 2007). Incidentally, said forecasts “are not purely based on economic considerations” (Dreher, et al., 2007).

The ultimate (geo)political significance of the aforementioned did not go unnoticed by political analysts. The IMF’s projection was certainly unwelcomed in Washington since “whether deserved or not, the IMF has a lot of credibility.

By placing China as the number one economic power by the end of the next US presidential term, the IMF thrust a dagger through the heart of American hegemony. Washington’s power is based on America’s economic supremacy. The IMF report said that this supremacy was at its end. This kind of announcement tells the political world that, as the headline read, ‘the age of America is over’” (Roberts, 2011). So, Strauss-Kahn possibly constituted a much formidable and dangerous challenge due to his “perfect position to shape policy and to persuade foreign heads of state that replacing the dollar is in their best interests” (Whitney, 2011).

Even if DSK’s provocative statements were not monitored by the mainstream media, they could not have gone unnoticed by neither the US intelligence community nor by financial players interested in maintaining the dollar hegemony. Needless to say, it is clear that said reckless pronouncements were not received warmly.

Strauss-Kahn is (was?) a member of the Western elite as a representative of Old Europe’s Franco-German establishment –in contrast to the evident pro-Atlantist position held by President Sarkozy–. Regardless, DSK was presumably framed by law enforcement authorities closely linked to New York politician and Wall Street businessman Michael Bloomberg (Chossudovsky, 2011). In the cases of both Eliot Spitzer and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, some analysts suspect that “behind the curtain might be found investment bankers and international financiers” (Bucci, 2011).

Furthermore, it was reported that French politician Michelle Sabban stated that she

“[was] convinced it is an international conspiracy [because] it’s the IMF they wanted to decapitate, not so much the Socialist primary candidate […adding that] it’s not like him. Everyone knows that his weakness is seduction, women. That’s how they got him” (Allen, 2011).

In the light of the above, It must not be overlooked that Russian President Vladimir Putin stated he disbelieved the official version of the DSK sex scandal because the “real political underlying reasons… [were] hard to evaluate” (Osborn, 2011). Taking into account his professional background as a KGB spook, Mr. Putin is clearly not unfamiliar with dirty tricks such as ‘honey traps’ and ‘character assassination’ and, more importantly, his opinion openly endorses the view that there were political factors involved (!).

There are other additional circumstances worth taken into consideration. Then under the helm of DSK, “on November 11-12, 2010, IMF member states agreed on a package of reforms, the core of which is a doubling of overall IMF quota to about $755 billion. In addition, there would be a significant shift of voting power to dynamic emerging market economies. If the reforms are implemented, the ten largest members of the IMF will consist of the United States, Japan, the four largest European economies (France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom) and Brazil, China, India, and Russia” (Weiss, 2012).

Said proposed redistribution, needless to say, was not enthusiastically received in some circles whereas because it favors emerging powers. Meanwhile, “China is urging the IMF to […] accelerate its own internal governance reforms [i.e.] changes in voting shares to reflect changes in the international balance of economic power” (Chin & Wang, 2010).

Conversely, some pundits speculated that

“Strauss-Kahn could just as easily been set up by rivals inside the IMF, as well as by rivals within the French political establishment… [due to the fact that] Wall Street and the US government also had strong reasons to eliminate him” (Roberts, 2011).

Other commentators wondered if DSK’s actions –specially his promotion of SDR as alternative to the US Dollar– could have unleashed the ire of “some very powerful and well-connected people” (Whitney, 2011).

The apparent participation of operatives close to French President Nicolas Sarkozy, a staunch supporter of US foreign policy, suggests another factor worth scrutinizing beyond the undeclared goal of triggering ‘regime change’ at the IMF, namely, the possibility that DSK might have competed in the then incoming France’s presidential, successfully challenging then incumbent President Sarkozy: To be precise,

“a Strauss-Kahn presidency and a ‘Socialist’ government would have been a serious setback for Washington, contributing to a major shift in Franco-American relations. It would have contributed to weakening Washington’s role on the European political chessboard, leading to a shift in the balance of power between America and ‘Old Europe’ (namely the Franco-German alliance)” (Chossudovsky, 2011).

Both possibilities, it has to be borne in mind, are not mutually exclusive. Far from it: They reinforce one another.

Conclusions

«…and wine maketh merry, but money answereth all things» –Ecclesiastes 10:19

There is way too much at stake regarding the evolution of monetary hegemony. As has been discussed throughout this paper, the indisputable symbiosis of geopolitics and finance is a concern of the highest political order for top decision makers and, as a result, there are powerful States and groups involved. Moreover, the IMF is a most critical multilateral organization whose proclivity is ultimately decisive. Thus, resourceful players want to ensure that such intergovernmental institution, far from being neutral, favors their interests at the expense of potential challengers, real or imagined.

In practical terms, the aforementioned implies that, as the issuer of the world’s top reserve currency, the US simply cannot afford to be a passive observer while the IMF promotes an alternative, however hypothetical, to the monetary system of dollar hegemony. The United States is likely to perceive any such attempt as a ‘deviation’ that needs to be corrected one way or another whereas financially capable competitors politically willing to undermine the dollar’s supremacy certainly consider the American currency’s reign as factor that somehow will need to be deconstructed in order to irrevocably dismantle one of the major elements of US power, contributing to catalyze its geopolitical decadence.

Thus, the monetary system is doomed to become an increasingly confrontational arena. At this point, the battle’s final results are, at best, unclear and cannot be precisely foreseen with an ample degree of accuracy. Yet only one thing is certain: Conflict is and will be inevitable, both among great powers as well as among currencies. Monetary war shall be waged through both conventional and unconventional means. Consequently, intensifying attacks and backlashes are to be expected either within the institutional framework of the IMF or, more importantly, outside of it. In other words, the future of monetary hegemony will not be defined peacefully and, of course, there will be havoc, losses and casualties.

In the light of the above, although it cannot be authoritatively confirmed that there was a clandestine conspiracy organized by a powerful cabal of financial and political forces at the highest levels to unseat Dominique Strauss-Kahn as the IMF Managing Director, the circumstantial evidence analytically hereby scrutinized leads to the reasonable conclusion that the ultimate goal of such plot involving the judicialization of monetary geopolitics was to prevent the IMF from becoming a solid platform for launching any initiative considered as a credible alternative to the dollar hegemony, thus impeding any meaningful reform of the international monetary system’s current distribution of power any time soon. Geopolitically speaking, this hypothetical interpretation does make sense.
On the other hand, the determination to eliminate a competitive adversary who was acquiring enough political capital and momentum to defy President Sarkozy’s bid for reelection in 2012 represented no more than a secondary concern.

Source: http://www.globalresearch.ca/dollar-hegemony-and-monetary-geopolitics-the-symbiosis-between-global-finance-and-power-politics-2/5362357

Elites’ strange plot to take over the world

2013-10-27T22:54:00.000+03:00

Elites’ strange plot to take over the world

FRIDAY, SEP 20, 2013

BY MATT STOLLER

The idea of a country seems pretty simple. I live in America, and I’m an American. She lives in France, and she is French. The Americans have a president who is their leader, the British have a prime minister, the French have their own president, and so forth.

But the way political decision-making around security issues ricochets around the world, from Western capital to Western capital, is making a mockery of commonly held conceptions of national sovereignty. In recent weeks, a British parliament vote on Syria forced the U.S. president to seek authorization from Congress, while leaked documents detailed extensive cooperation between the intelligence services of the U.S. and other nations. The president of Bolivia was forced to down his plane by Italy and France, just because he joked about having Edwards Snowden on board. And so on, and so forth.

This all demands the question: Why do we hold the conception that we live in separate nation-states? Well, it turns out that this question was actually asked after World War II, and the answer American leaders came up with was … we shouldn’t.

In fact, Western elites in America and Western Europe after World War II made a serious effort to get rid of nations altogether, and combine all “freedom-loving peoples” into one giant “Atlantic Union,” a federal state built on top of the NATO military alliance.

As odd as it sounds, the documentary evidence is clear. This movement did manage to create a “European Union,” which came from the same ideological wellspring as the “Atlantic Union.” Once we recognize that the Cold War saw the construction of a powerful international regime that explicitly sought to get rid of sovereign nations, these broad security architectures revealed by the Syria situation and the NSA spying revelations make a lot more sense.

The strange story of Atlantica

The effort to unite Europe and the U.S. started in 1939, with the publication of a book by an influential journalist, Clarence Streit. This influential book was called ”Union Now,” and had a galvanizing effect on the anti-fascist youth of the time, a sort of cross between Thomas Friedman’s “The World Is Flat” and Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine.” Streit served in World War I in an intelligence unit, and saw up close the negotiations for the Treaty of Versailles. He then became a New York Times journalist assigned to cover the League of Nations, which led him to the conclusion that the only way to prevent American isolationism and European fascism was for political and economic integration of the major “freedom-loving” peoples, which he described as America, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa and most of Western Europe. The Five Eyes surveillance architecture was created just a few years later, as was the international monetary regime concocted at Bretton Woods.

When Streit wrote “Union Now,” in 1939, the German threat was obvious, World War II was beginning, and fascism and communism had linked arms through the pact between the Nazis and the Soviets. Streit’s argument, that the West needed to combine its strength to fight totalitarianism everywhere, was a powerful draw. The youth of the 1930s — those who read Streit’s book — became the political and diplomatic leaders of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, and many of them went on to craft the multilateral institutions and international policies of the Cold War.

Indeed, the congressional record is peppered with resolutions and hearings from the late 1940s to the 1970s pushing for Atlantic Union. For example, in 1971, the Foreign Affairs Committee in the House of Representatives convened a hearing to discuss the prospect of combining the United States of America and Western Europe into one country. This “Atlantic Union” would be a federal union, very similar to the the one described in United States Constitution. Existing countries would become states under a federalist system, with the larger federal system having its own currency, military, interstate commerce regulation and foreign relations apparatus.

That day in 1971, the committee was discussing a specific piece of legislation, a resolution — House Concurrent Resolution 163 — to create an “Atlantic Union Delegation,” a committee of 18 “eminent citizens” to join with other NATO country delegations and negotiate a plan to unite. The subcommittee chairman presiding over the hearing, congressman Donald Fraser of Minnesota, described the specific goal of the legislation as convening an “international convention to explore the possibility of agreement on a declaration to transform the present Atlantic alliance into a federal union, set a timetable for transition to this goal and to prescribe democratic institutions under which the goal would be achieved.” It was to be a Constitutional Convention.

Similar legislation, he noted, “was considered by the full House Committee on Foreign Affairs in 1960, 1966, and 1968, with favorable reports in 1960 and 1968.” Congress even passed the resolution in 1960, and spent money to send a delegation to Paris for such a convention (though John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson ignored the delegation’s recommendations).

This proposal had a great deal of elite support. Nearly every presidential candidate from the 1950s to the 1970s supported it, as did hundreds of legislators in the U.S. and Western Europe. The context of first World War II, and then the Cold War, made such a proposal sound reasonable, even inevitable. 1971 was the tail end of the post-World War II era, during which there had been a frenzy of international institutional creation work designed to avoid a repeat of the Great Depression and the two world wars. A large multilateral military force formed of allied governments and millions of soldiers of all nationalities had recently defeated the fascist powers on three continents. Millions had an experience of international comity in the defeat of the Axis Powers — so the concept of political union was not so far-fetched.

Moreover, the specter of the failed diplomatic and monetary initiatives of the 1930s haunted postwar leaders, and caused them to think deeply and act decisively to weave together a system whose core was the economic, military and political interdependence of sovereign allies. The Depression was seen as a phenomenon borne of a failed international system based on short-sited nationalist objectives. Streit, the president of the International Movement for Atlantic Union, breathlessly advocated for a union lest history be repeated. A lack of a union would lead to a monetary crash, and then crushing poverty. As circumstances changed, Streit’s testimonials to Congress changed. Just after World War II, he noted that Hitler’s appeal came from fascists arguing for political totalitarianism under the slogan “you can’t eat freedom.” He argued, consistent with the anti-communism of the time, that such a union was the only way to beat the Soviet threat. Later, he pointed out that union was important because with nuclear weapons at hand, the world could not afford a repeat of pre-World War II foreign policy mistakes. Then, as Bretton Woods began breaking down in the 1960s, he argued that a 1930s-style financial crash was inevitable without union.

Streit and his fellow Atlanticists were pragmatic; they sought to build the Atlantic Union on top of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, the Atlantic military alliance. And there was momentum on the side of the Atlanticists; the post-WWII international institution-building was impressive. In 1944, officials from the U.S. and U.K. — primarily John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White — worked at Bretton Woods to create what would become the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. These institutions were designed to avert a monetary crisis such as the one that had occurred in the 1930s. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, or GATT, was created in 1947, similarly, to avert a trade war. The United Nations was constructed to do what the League of Nations had not, to serve as a legitimate forum for nations of the world to continuously deliberate. NATO could apply the united military strength of the West. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, or the OECD, served originally as a forum whereby the United States could funnel aid to Europe to create the European Union. And this is to say nothing of the collaborative Cold War spying apparatus.

Faced with a Soviet threat, it seemed only natural to think that the next step after all of this institution-building was an Atlantic Union. Richard Nixon in 1966 supported the “Atlantic Union resolution” as a “forward-looking proposal which acknowledges the depth and breadth of incredible change which is going on in the world around us.” President Dwight Eisenhower, upon leaving office, thought such a trans-Atlantic union was inevitable, and argued it could cut massive Cold War defense costs by half. Eugene McCarthy, just before entering the presidential primary race against Lyndon Johnson (who did not support the measure), cosponsored the resolution in the Senate. Bobby Kennedy, George McGovern and Estes Kefauver were ardent believers. Even Barry Goldwater supported it; Ronald Reagan was the only major national figure in the Republican Party who opposed it, and Lyndon Johnson was a significant opponent in the Democratic Party.

The far right hated this idea. Gunthler Klincke of the Liberty Lobby called it a scheme for a socialist world government, and Myra Hacker of a group called the “American Coalition of Patriotic Societies,” said proponents of this plan “distrust and despise the American citizen” and that it was a plan for “national suicide.” Though the proposal for Atlantic Union has been written out of liberal historical memory, there are echoes of this episode in right-wing rhetoric about One World Government. The irony of this is that, as liberals gently chuckle at right-wing paranoia about what they perceive as an imagined plot to create a world government, it is the conservatives who have a more accurate read on history. There was a serious plan to get rid of American sovereignty in favor of a globalist movement, and the various institutions the right wing hates — the IMF, the World Bank, the U.N. — were seen as stepping stones to it. Where the right wing was wrong is in thinking that this plot for a global government was also a communist plot; it wasn’t, it was motivated by anti-communism. The proponents of the Atlantic Union in fact thought that this was the only way to defeat the USSR.

Streit explained that uniting the countries of Western Europe and the United States would “give their union a hand strong enough to win for peace peacefully, a land that no combination of dictatorships could challenge — all four aces and the joker. By this I meant: The ace of spades or productive power; the ace of diamonds or raw material power; the ace of clubs, or armed power; the ace of hearts, or moral power; and the joker — their growing power, their ability to admit to this nuclear union of the free other nations that desired to enter it, and were willing and able to uphold its standards of liberty. These few freedom practicing peoples needed only unite federally to” achieve it.

The question of Atlantic Union, proposed in 1939, percolated as a catch-all answer to Western foreign policy problems, until the 1970s. There were two basic arguments for Atlantic Union. The architects of NATO and the OECD believed that closer interdependence of nations in the non-Soviet “free world” would isolate the USSR. And this same group recognized that the Bretton Woods system, whereby the United States held most of the world’s gold and operated its reserve currency, was breaking down as Western European nations rebuilt their economies and as U.S. banks sought to escape regulation domestically by parking dollars abroad in those newly prosperous economies. Combining Western Europe and the U.S. into one federal union with one currency and regulatory harmonization of “interstate commerce” could avoid this “Eurodollar” problem.

A formal Atlantic Union was not a realistic proposal, though it was not as unimaginable as one might think — American support for the now-existing European Union came from the same intellectual and political tradition. The State Department, and politicians in power like Lyndon Johnson, opposed global federalism. And as the years crept on, it became less and less realistic. The World War II generation had idolized “Union Now” in their youth, but they had to confront the failures of the war in Vietnam and the global colonial project that Streit ignored (or worse, embraced). The new political generation drew their inspiration not from hoary pre-WWII tomes of global utopianism, with the implications of a global rich white man’s club. As one New Left-influenced witness in the 1971 hearing put it, “The 1960′s revolution of political consciousness within the United States means the rejection of Atlantic Union ideas or alliance structures such as NATO in the seventies.”

But Atlantic Union was an important part of the debate of how the postwar era would be structured. Think about the debate as follows. On the right, you have the Liberty League and the right-wing patriots, represented by politicians like then governor of California Ronald Reagan. These people wanted a return to an isolationist or hyper-nationalist model of foreign relations. Then you had the mainstream State Department liberal internationalists, the JFKs and LBJs, who built entangling institutions like the IMF, the World Bank, the U.N. and so forth. Even further on the globalist spectrum, you had the Atlantic Unionists. All three strands echo, today. Consider Larry Summers, who in 2000 as treasury secretary argued for allowing cheap Chinese goods into the U.S. as a way of establishing “a fifth column for openness” in that country. Failure to integrate China in the global system with trade concessions, he said, would not only cut the average American’s paycheck, but would “make it more likely his son will be in a war in Asia.” This Thomas Friedman-esque “The World Is Flat” argument owes an intellectual debt to Streit. Integrate, the case goes, or perish.

The formal concept of Atlantica cracked under the weight of Vietnam and the coming neoliberal revolution in finance. The United States didn’t maintain its monopoly on stores of gold, as Nixon repudiated Bretton Woods in the face of high inflation and monetary instability. But as first Jimmy Carter, and then Ronald Reagan, deregulated the banking industry, global capital flows once again became a reality. Only, global capital flows just weren’t run by nation-states, as the Atlantic Unionists and liberal internationalists imagined, they were run by institutions like Citigroup and politically captured regulatory entities such as the Federal Reserve.

Did the plan succeed?

The institutional framework of a world government composed of Western European and American states remains far more potent than we like to imagine, even beyond the security apparatus revealed by Snowden’s documents. For example, in every major free trade agreement since NAFTA, U.S. courts have been subordinated to international tribunals, which operate according to rules laid out either by the World Trade Organization, a division of the World Bank, or by a division of the United Nations known as UNCITRAL (the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law). These tribunals rule on consumer, labor, and environmental questions – not just trade. And they are trans-national, much as the supply chains of Apple, Ford, Toyota, or any other multi-national corporation are, or the technology that Google, Microsoft, or IBM promote all over the world.

There are other deep links. The Basil banking accords seek international harmonization of capital standards. Why? It’s not clear what the benefits are of having global standards for what banks should do. But the global elites push onward, regardless, towards a one world solution. And lest one think this is just theoretical, the Federal Reserve supported the European Central Bank with unlimited swap lines during the financial crisis, lending as much as $500B to the ECB in 2008 and 2009. European and other foreign banks drew liberally from the New York Federal Reserve’s discount window. The Fed became the central banker to the world.

Questions of sovereignty still exists – as just one of many examples, the U.S. still refuses to sign the Law of the Sea Treaty, which is a nod to the Liberty League. But the history and reflexive embrace of globalism is far more complicated than we want to admit. And it’s time to begin grappling with the international architecture that we have. This means recognizing that the Cold War involved constructing a “deep state” to partially subordinate national sovereignty, and therefore, voting populations, to transnational elites.

As the spying scandal, a truly global scandal, continues, activists, citizens and journalists are recognizing the powerful remnants of this Cold War-era global deep state. The players in the scandal hop from country to country, some safe zones and some not. The Guardian is a British newspaper, and is now partnering with the New York Times, to keep the global intelligence services at bay. Cyberspace is a new and strange transnational front combining elements of war, trade, journalism, finance, activism, surveillance and applied government power. The Syrian situation too is a global security problem, with the French and the British tied to the American political order. The American executive is finding himself buffeted by British debates that should be irrelevant in a sovereign state acting solely in its vital national security interests.

Streit never achieved his goal of having a formal “Atlantic Union.” But with an international “intelligence community,” globalized supply chains, increasingly global free trade agreements that subordinate national court systems, and globalized private and central banks, all couched under the rubric of promoting “freedom,” he has as much claim to being the true animating force behind what we’re facing today as anyone else.

Source: http://www.salon.com/2013/09/20/elites_strange_plot_to_take_over_the_world/

New Report Reveals 30 Million People Enslaved Worldwide

2013-10-19T22:36:00.001+03:00

New Report Reveals 30 Million People Enslaved Worldwide

This is the first edition of the Global Slavery Index. It is the first Index of its kind – providing an estimate, country by country, of the number of people living in modern slavery today.

The Global Slavery Index 2013 measures the size of the modern slavery problem, country by country. The Index provides a quantitative ranking of 162 countries around the world according to the estimated prevalence of slavery, that is, the estimated percentage of enslaved people in the national population at a point in time. The Global Slavery Index also examines the risk factors and outlines the strength of the government responses in the fight against modern slavery.

Download the full report, explore findings by navigating the interactive map, or browse regional and country-level research and statistics.

Source: http://www.globalslaveryindex.org/report/#view-online

US must release data on civilian drone casualties, says UN report

2013-10-19T22:11:00.000+03:00

US must release data on civilian drone casualties, says UN report

October 18, 2013 by Alice K Ross
A report by a UN expert urges the US to ‘release its own data on the level of civilian casualties’ caused by drone strikes and attacks the lack of transparency surrounding CIA and US special forces drone operations.

Ben Emmerson, a British barrister and UN special rapporteur on counter-terrorism, has released the second of two major UN reports in a week to examine the use of drones both in conflict zones and in covert settings.

In the earlier report, Christof Heyns also called for increased transparency around the use of drones. In thenew report Emmerson emphasises that this is a vital step to ensuring accountability and redress for the civilian victims of drone strikes.

‘The Special Rapporteur does not accept that considerations of national security justify withholding statistical and basic methodological data’
- Ben Emmerson

Emmerson says: ‘The single greatest obstacle to an evaluation of the civilian impact of drone strikes is lack of transparency, which makes it extremely difficult to assess claims of precision targeting objectively.’

Related story – UN expert calls for increased transparency over armed drones

The report says the involvement of the CIA in drone operations has created an ‘almost insurmountable obstacle to transparency’, and he is also critical of the ‘almost invariably classified’ nature of special forces drone operations in Yemen and Somalia. ‘The Special Rapporteur does not accept that considerations of national security justify withholding statistical and basic methodological data.’

Drones currently operate in an ‘accountability vacuum’, Emmerson says, adding that there is a legal obligation on states to launch a full investigation into claims from ‘any plausible source’ of civilian casualties – including those made by non-governmental organisations. The results of such investigations should be made public, ‘subject to redactions on grounds of national security’, he adds.

He notes that the current director of the CIA John Brennan has called for the release of data relating to civilian casualties. The US government is in the process of moving its drone operations from the CIA to the Department of Defense to improve transparency, he says, adding that he understands this is due to be completed ‘by the end of 2014′.

The report highlights ‘differences of view’ over who should be considered a civilian in situations where non-uniformed fighters live and operate among the civilian population. He points to ‘considerable uncertainty’ over the criteria used to identify individuals as legitimate targets and calls for further clarification.

Emmerson examines US, British and Israeli drone operations in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, Libya and Gaza.

‘Only in the most exceptional of circumstances would it be permissible under international human rights law for killing to be the sole or primary objective of an operation’- Ben Emmerson

The Pakistani government released data to Emmerson showing at least 400 civilian casualties – a number close to the Bureau’s lower-end estimate – and a further 200 were ‘regarded as probable non-combatants’. Emmerson wrote ‘those figures were likely to be an underestimate’ according to local officials. He told MSNBC there is no reason ‘on the face of it’ to question this data as it echoed independent estimates.

For Yemen drone operations, the report cites the Bureau’s estimate of 21-58 civilian casualties as the highest such figures. But the report does not provide estimates for drone operations in Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, Somalia or Gaza, pointing to a lack of official figures specifically covering civilians killed in drone strikes.

Kat Craig, Legal Director of the human rights charity Reprieve, which represents civilian victims of drone strikes, said: ‘This report highlights the US’ failure to reveal any information whatsoever about their shadowy, covert drone programme. Hiding the reality of civilian deaths is not only morally abhorrent but an affront to the sort of transparency that should be the hallmark of any democratic government. Some basic accountability is the very least people in Pakistan and Yemen should expect from the CIA as it rains down Hellfire missiles on their homes and villages.’

Related story – Pakistan government says ‘at least 400′ civilians killed in drone strikes

Emmerson also addresses the legality of drone strikes outside of military conflict areas, saying that where no official conflict exists lethal action will ‘rarely be lawful… because only in the most exceptional of circumstances would it be permissible under international human rights law for killing to be the sole or primary objective of an operation’.

The US claims it can legally carry out such lethal operations – but Emmerson says this ‘gives rise to a number of issues on which there is either no clear international consensus, or United States policy appears to challenge established norms’. The US has claimed that it carries out drone strikes in countries including Pakistan and Yemen in legitimate self-defence against imminent threats and that it is in a state of continuing war against al Qaeda and associated groups.

The report recommends that a clear international legal consensus is reached and Emmerson is currently consulting states with a view to ‘clarifying their position on these questions’.

He writes that he has identified 33 strikes that appear to have led to civilian casualties and ‘undoubtedly raise issues of accountability and transparency’. The full findings on these strikes will be published at a later stage.

A White House spokeswoman, Laura Magnuson, said: ‘We are aware that this report has been released and are reviewing it carefully.’

The reports by Heyns and Emmerson will be presented to the UN General Assembly in New York next week. Also next week on October 22 Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch will publish reports on drone operations in Pakistan and Yemen respectively.

Source: http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2013/10/18/us-must-release-data-on-civilian-drone-casualties-says-un-report/

Tokyo Olympics Bid was Fixed by the International Olympic Committee’s Nuclear Lobby

2013-09-17T23:04:00.005+03:00

Tokyo Olympics Bid was Fixed by the International Olympic Committee’s Nuclear Lobby

By Yoichi Shimatsu

September 16, 2013

The lame acquiescence of International Olympic Committee to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s blatant lies about Fukushima radiation leaks being under control” is an act of reckless negligence on the health risk to young athletes aiming for a spot at the 2020 Olympics.

The Olympic hosting rights was stolen from safer and better-off candidate cities Istanbul and Madrid by an well-financed lobbying effort from Japan’s national committee and the Education and Sports Ministry, which provides murky donations for sports programs in developing countries.

The hidden factor behind Tokyo’s campaign of radiation denial was the quiet support from the global nuclear industry acting through the IOC’s corporate sponsorship program. The political influence and corruption behind this campaign was so obvious that even the semi-governmental NHK television news has raised questions about bribery in the bidding process.

The Nuclear Grip

Many of the big multinationals that finance the IOC are not readily associated with the Olympic goals of good health much less amateur sports. Anyone who believes in the healthy fun meal hype from McDonalds does not comprehend the hazards of obesity and clogged arteries. Besides household names like toothpaste giant P&G and smartphone maker Samsung, some brands on the sponsor list such as Atos are virtually unknown.

Every corporation on the IOC global sponsor list is, in fact, connected with the nuclear industry, and some directly with the melted-down of the Fukushima plant. Here’s a look at the list:

GE (General Electric): builder of Fukushima Mark 1 reactors Nos. 1,2 and 6; and designer of MOX (mixed oxide of uranium and plutonium) shroud for reactors Nos.3 and 4. The tritium-enhanced explosion at Reactor 3 massively contaminated the Kanto region, including Tokyo’s watershed.

Panasonic: Besides televisions and home appliances, this Japanese electronics giant is a manufacturer of radiation measuring equipment used by TEPCO and other atomic energy players, including Iran’s nuclear program.

Atos: A French IT company that provides command-and-control systems for 70 nuclear power plants around the world, and which is also involved in the upgrade of British nuclear power plants recently acquired by Hitachi-GE.

Dow: Along with partner company Graver, the chemical giant produces resins, polishing compounds, cleansers and filters for the worldwide nuclear industry.

Samsung, Builder of nuclear power plants in South Korea and for export, including the Middle East, in partnership with Toshiba, which built reactor No.5 at Fukushima.

P&G: Proctor & Gamble directors Alan G. Laffley is a board member of GE and James McNerney Jr. is a retired top-ranking GE executive.

Omega: The Swiss watchmaker uses its precision timing technology for monitoring instruments used inside nuclear power plants.

McDonalds: Board member Enrique Hernandez is CEO of Inter-Con Security, which provides armed guards for Southern California Edison’s San Onofre reactors and other nuclear plants.

Coca Cola: the soft drink maker’s board of directors includes Jacob Wallenberg, a director of ABB along with Donald Rumsfeld when it sold 2 nuclear reactors to North Korea (under investigation, ABB sold its nuclear division to BNFL in the UK, which has since been taken over by Hitachi and GE); Alexis Hernadez, a lawyer for and board member of Entergy, the U.S. power company with several radiation-leaking plants; and retired senator Sam Nunn, former Secretary of Defense and board member of GE.

It’s no wonder then that Tokyo won the 2020 Olympics, when the voting was actually a litmus test for “nuclear safety”. Radiation denial is key to the expansion of the nuclear industry, as Hitachi, Toshiba and GE are now pushing in Vietnam, Turkey, the UAE, the UK, India and many other countries.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Put on Your Blinders

As if wearing blinders, IOC delegates at Buenos Aires ignored media questions about the thousands of tons of radiation-contaminated water leaking from the Fukushima nuclear plant. Arguably worse is the ash from Tokyo’s incinerators that burned Fukushima combustible waste for two years. The highly radioactive cinders were dumped into landfills in Tokyo Bay, which will be the site of the Olympic Village and most of the sports venues.

The Arakawa River, which flows into Tokyo Bay, is also contaminated in its upper reaches by clouds drifting in from the Pacific. The forests around Tokyo’s watershed in Oku-Tama, which provides drinking water to the capital, are dangerously drenched by radioactive rainfall, and the national food supply is so irradiated that regulators have had to raise the food safety level.

The risk of more clouds of radioactive fallout sweeping toward Tokyo is not hypothetical but an inevitable consequence of uncontrollable meltdowns of hundreds of tons of nuclear fuel at Fukushima. The danger is amplified by recurrent earthquakes along Japan’s major fault lines and consequent volcanic eruptions, which pose a constant threat to the nearby nuclear plants at Hamaoka on the seaside below Mount Fuji, Tokai in neighboring Ibaraki, and the twin plants in Fukushima. Another explosion at any of these nuclear sites would force the evacuation of 50 million residents, or one-third of the population.

A major quake or volcanic eruption, long-overdue in the nearby Nankai Trough and Mount Fuji, and even under Tokyo itself, would close the capital’s airports, forcing thousands of Olympic athletes and spectators along with millions of residents to flee in the opposite direction, directly into Fukushima Prefecture. Tokyo is a killing field waiting to happen.

Influence Peddling

The Japanese host-city team was led by JOC chief Tsunekazu Takeda, who is the successor to his father Prince Takeda, a cavalry officer in Manchuria who supervised the Unit 703 bioweapons program. An equestrian contestant at the Berlin Olympics, Prince Tsuneyoshi organized the military looting of East Asia and also personally authorized plague-and-virus attacks against Chinese cities and lethal experiments on prisoners. The aristocratic war veteran evaded prosecution for war crimes because the U.S. Army recruited UNIT 731 scientists and was then appointed by Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, founder of Japan’s nuclear weapons program and Abe’s grandfather, to head the bidding for the 1964 Olympics.

The counterpart for the private sector is Masato Mizuno, former chief of Mizuno Sports and CEO of the Tokyo bidding team, who led the outreach to the IOC corporate sponsors.

The bid was originally launched by then Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara, whose resignation as alleged in local media reports was due to the diversion of Olympics donations for his provocative visits and attempt to purchase the disputed Senkaku-Diaoyu islands. These connections are worthy of an Interpol investigation since the IOC is incapable of policing itself.

Backlash Against the Heist

The French cartoon that provoked an angry protest by “chimpira”, slang for punks or yakuza wannabees, is only the start of a worldwide backlash against the Tokyo heist.

The usually timid Japanese media are raising questions about Abe’s lack of credibility on the radiation issue and Japan’s economic health. In contrast to the hype in Buenos Aires about Tokyo’s prosperity, the national debt stands at 10 trillion U.S. dollars, making the Japanese by far the most indebted people on the planet. Even TEPCO officials, including its vice president in charge of Fukushima operations, Zengo Aizawa, have scoffed at Abe’s nonsense and countered that the radioactive water leaks are out of control, despite his team’s best efforts.

Abe is a shameless liar and buffoon, while his pro-nuclear allies among IOC sponsors are only kidding themselves in a black comedy destined to careen into further disaster. The Tokyo bid is a hard act to follow, and the only thing that could equal this bad joke is if Ukraine places a bid to host the 2024 Chernobyl Olympics.

Source: http://rinf.com/alt-news/breaking-news/tokyo-olympics-bid-was-fixed-by-the-international-olympic-committees-nuclear-lobby/69923/

U.S. Military and Intelligence Officials to Obama: “Assad NOT Responsible for Chemical Attack”

2013-09-08T23:04:00.001+03:00

Obama Warned on Syrian Intel

September 6, 2013

Exclusive: Despite the Obama administration’s supposedly “high confidence” regarding Syrian government guilt over the Aug. 21 chemical attack near Damascus, a dozen former U.S. military and intelligence officials are telling President Obama that they are picking up information that undercuts the Official Story.

MEMORANDUM FOR: The President
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
SUBJECT: Is Syria a Trap?
Precedence: IMMEDIATE
We regret to inform you that some of our former co-workers are telling us, categorically, that contrary to the claims of your administration, the most reliable intelligence shows that Bashar al-Assad was NOT responsible for the chemical incident that killed and injured Syrian civilians on August 21, and that British intelligence officials also know this. In writing this brief report, we choose to assume that you have not been fully informed because your advisers decided to afford you the opportunity for what is commonly known as “plausible denial.”
We have been down this road before – with President George W. Bush, to whom we addressed our first VIPS memorandumimmediately after Colin Powell’s Feb. 5, 2003 U.N. speech, in which he peddled fraudulent “intelligence” to support attacking Iraq. Then, also, we chose to give President Bush the benefit of the doubt, thinking he was being misled – or, at the least, very poorly advised.

Secretary of State John Kerry departs for a Sept. 6 trip to Europe where he plans to meet with officials to discuss the Syrian crisis and other issues. (State Department photo)

The fraudulent nature of Powell’s speech was a no-brainer. And so, that very afternoon we strongly urged your predecessor to “widen the discussion beyond … the circle of those advisers clearly bent on a war for which we see no compelling reason and from which we believe the unintended consequences are likely to be catastrophic.” We offer you the same advice today.
Our sources confirm that a chemical incident of some sort did cause fatalities and injuries on August 21 in a suburb of Damascus. They insist, however, that the incident was not the result of an attack by the Syrian Army using military-grade chemical weapons from its arsenal. That is the most salient fact, according to CIA officers working on the Syria issue. They tell us that CIA Director John Brennan is perpetrating a pre-Iraq-War-type fraud on members of Congress, the media, the public – and perhaps even you.
We have observed John Brennan closely over recent years and, sadly, we find what our former colleagues are now telling us easy to believe. Sadder still, this goes in spades for those of us who have worked with him personally; we give him zero credence. And that goes, as well, for his titular boss, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who has admitted he gave “clearly erroneous” sworn testimony to Congress denying NSA eavesdropping on Americans.
Intelligence Summary or Political Ploy?
That Secretary of State John Kerry would invoke Clapper’s name this week in Congressional testimony, in an apparent attempt to enhance the credibility of the four-page “Government Assessment” strikes us as odd. The more so, since it was, for some unexplained reason, not Clapper but the White House that released the “assessment.”
This is not a fine point. We know how these things are done. Although the “Government Assessment” is being sold to the media as an “intelligence summary,” it is a political, not an intelligence document. The drafters, massagers, and fixers avoided presenting essential detail. Moreover, they conceded upfront that, though they pinned “high confidence” on the assessment, it still fell “short of confirmation.”
Déjà Fraud: This brings a flashback to the famous Downing Street Minutes of July 23, 2002, on Iraq, The minutes record the Richard Dearlove, then head of British intelligence, reporting to Prime Minister Tony Blair and other senior officials that President Bush had decided to remove Saddam Hussein through military action that would be “justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD.” Dearlove had gotten the word from then-CIA Director George Tenet whom he visited at CIA headquarters on July 20.
The discussion that followed centered on the ephemeral nature of the evidence, prompting Dearlove to explain: “But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” We are concerned that this is precisely what has happened with the “intelligence” on Syria.
The Intelligence
There is a growing body of evidence from numerous sources in the Middle East — mostly affiliated with the Syrian opposition and its supporters — providing a strong circumstantial case that the August 21 chemical incident was a pre-planned provocation by the Syrian opposition and its Saudi and Turkish supporters. The aim is reported to have been to create the kind of incident that would bring the United States into the war.
According to some reports, canisters containing chemical agent were brought into a suburb of Damascus, where they were then opened. Some people in the immediate vicinity died; others were injured.
We are unaware of any reliable evidence that a Syrian military rocket capable of carrying a chemical agent was fired into the area. In fact, we are aware of no reliable physical evidence to support the claim that this was a result of a strike by a Syrian military unit with expertise in chemical weapons.
In addition, we have learned that on August 13-14, 2013, Western-sponsored opposition forces in Turkey started advance preparations for a major, irregular military surge. Initial meetings between senior opposition military commanders and Qatari, Turkish and U.S. intelligence officials took place at the converted Turkish military garrison in Antakya, Hatay Province, now used as the command center and headquarters of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and their foreign sponsors.
Senior opposition commanders who came from Istanbul pre-briefed the regional commanders on an imminent escalation in the fighting due to “a war-changing development,” which, in turn, would lead to a U.S.-led bombing of Syria.
At operations coordinating meetings at Antakya, attended by senior Turkish, Qatari and U.S. intelligence officials as well as senior commanders of the Syrian opposition, the Syrians were told that the bombing would start in a few days. Opposition leaders were ordered to prepare their forces quickly to exploit the U.S. bombing, march into Damascus, and remove the Bashar al-Assad government
The Qatari and Turkish intelligence officials assured the Syrian regional commanders that they would be provided with plenty of weapons for the coming offensive. And they were. A weapons distribution operation unprecedented in scope began in all opposition camps on August 21-23. The weapons were distributed from storehouses controlled by Qatari and Turkish intelligence under the tight supervision of U.S. intelligence officers.
Cui bono?
That the various groups trying to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad have ample incentive to get the U.S. more deeply involved in support of that effort is clear. Until now, it has not been quite as clear that the Netanyahu government in Israel has equally powerful incentive to get Washington more deeply engaged in yet another war in the area. But with outspoken urging coming from Israel and those Americans who lobby for Israeli interests, this priority Israeli objective is becoming crystal clear.
Reporter Judi Rudoren, writing from Jerusalem in an important article in Friday’s New York Times addresses Israeli motivation in an uncommonly candid way. Her article, titled “Israel Backs Limited Strike Against Syria,” notes that the Israelis have argued, quietly, that the best outcome for Syria’s two-and-a-half-year-old civil war, at least for the moment, is no outcome. Rudoren continues:
“For Jerusalem, the status quo, horrific as it may be from a humanitarian perspective, seems preferable to either a victory by Mr. Assad’s government and his Iranian backers or a strengthening of rebel groups, increasingly dominated by Sunni jihadis.
“‘This is a playoff situation in which you need both teams to lose, but at least you don’t want one to win — we’ll settle for a tie,’ said Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli consul general in New York. ‘Let them both bleed, hemorrhage to death: that’s the strategic thinking here. As long as this lingers, there’s no real threat from Syria.’”
We think this is the way Israel’s current leaders look at the situation in Syria, and that deeper U.S. involvement – albeit, initially, by “limited” military strikes – is likely to ensure that there is no early resolution of the conflict in Syria. The longer Sunni and Shia are at each other’s throats in Syria and in the wider region, the safer Israel calculates that it is.
That Syria’s main ally is Iran, with whom it has a mutual defense treaty, also plays a role in Israeli calculations. Iran’s leaders are not likely to be able to have much military impact in Syria, and Israel can highlight that as an embarrassment for Tehran.
Iran’s Role
Iran can readily be blamed by association and charged with all manner of provocation, real and imagined. Some have seen Israel’s hand in the provenance of the most damaging charges against Assad regarding chemical weapons and our experience suggests to us that such is supremely possible.
Possible also is a false-flag attack by an interested party resulting in the sinking or damaging, say, of one of the five U.S. destroyers now on patrol just west of Syria. Our mainstream media could be counted on to milk that for all it’s worth, and you would find yourself under still more pressure to widen U.S. military involvement in Syria – and perhaps beyond, against Iran.
Iran has joined those who blame the Syrian rebels for the August 21 chemical incident, and has been quick to warn the U.S. not to get more deeply involved. According to the Iranian English-channel Press TV, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javid Zarif has claimed: “The Syria crisis is a trap set by Zionist pressure groups for [the United States].”
Actually, he may be not far off the mark. But we think your advisers may be chary of entertaining this notion. Thus, we see as our continuing responsibility to try to get word to you so as to ensure that you and other decision makers are given the full picture.
Inevitable Retaliation
We hope your advisers have warned you that retaliation for attacks on Syrian are not a matter of IF, but rather WHERE and WHEN. Retaliation is inevitable. For example, terrorist strikes on U.S. embassies and other installations are likely to make what happened to the U.S. “Mission” in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012, look like a minor dust-up by comparison. One of us addressed this key consideration directly a week ago in an article titled “Possible Consequences of a U.S. Military Attack on Syria – Remembering the U.S. Marine Barracks Destruction in Beirut, 1983.”
For the Steering Group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
Thomas Drake, Senior Executive, NSA (former)
Philip Giraldi, CIA, Operations Officer (ret.)
Matthew Hoh, former Capt., USMC, Iraq & Foreign Service Officer, Afghanistan
Larry Johnson, CIA & State Department (ret.)
W. Patrick Lang, Senior Executive and Defense Intelligence Officer, DIA (ret.)
David MacMichael, National Intelligence Council (ret.)
Ray McGovern, former US Army infantry/intelligence officer & CIA analyst (ret.)
Elizabeth Murray, Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Middle East (ret.)
Todd Pierce, US Army Judge Advocate General (ret.)
Sam Provance, former Sgt., US Army, Iraq
Coleen Rowley, Division Council & Special Agent, FBI (ret.)
Ann Wright, Col., US Army (ret); Foreign Service Officer (ret.)

Source: http://consortiumnews.com/2013/09/06/obama-warned-on-syrian-intel/

John Kerry: Arab Countries Have Offered to Pay the “Full Cost” of America’s War on Syria

2013-09-08T22:43:00.000+03:00

John Kerry: Arab Countries Have Offered to Pay the “Full Cost” of America’s War on Syria

By Matthias Chang

Friday, 06 September 2013 09:52

The US military by the admission of Secretary of State John Kerry is for sale and can do the bidding of any state willing to pay the cost for any military adventure even if such military action constitutes war crimes.

“The US regime” is nothing but a war criminal regime.

This shameless government accuses others of committing crimes, but the US is the first country to use nuclear weapons, raining death and destruction on innocent lives in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In Vietnam, the deployment of Agent Orange killed hundreds of thousands of innocent lives and created an environmental disaster for which Vietnam is still suffering.

Then there is the use of depleted uranium weapons in Iraq.

Where will it end?

The US, supposedly a “democracy” is a renegade country. It commits genocide with impunity.

American citizens cannot deny their collective responsibility because throughout the above mentioned wars, they have through their elected representatives in Congress and in the Senate approved and condoned the wanton slaughter of the innocent.

Secretary of State John Kerry said Arab countries have offered to pay for a full invasion of Syria to oust President Bashar Assad.

“With respect to Arab countries offering to bear costs and to assess, the answer is profoundly yes,” Kerry told the House Foreign Relations Committee during a hearing Wednesday, according to The Washington Post. “They have. That offer is on the table.”

Kerry told Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) that Arab countries are willing to put up the full cost.

“In fact, some of them have said that if the United States is prepared to go do the whole thing the way we’ve done it previously in other places, they’ll carry that cost,” Kerry said.

“That’s how dedicated they are at this. That’s not in the cards, and nobody’s talking about it, but they’re talking in serious ways about getting this done.”

“We’ve done it previously”. Where: Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq. That is the model of US intervention.

Source: http://futurefastforward.com/component/content/article/8772

One in seven hungry in US as Obama preps for more war

2013-09-08T22:03:00.000+03:00

One in seven hungry in US as Obama preps for more war

08 Sept, 2013

By Rady Ananda

The number of starving US citizens during Obama’s terms in office is a whopping one in seven, worse than the global average of one in eight. As he continues to pour several hundred billion dollars into the Middle East war theater that will likely soon include Syria, Congress wants to cut $40 billion in food aid to its constituents.

A recent USDA report reveals that nearly 18 million families, or 49 million people, lacked “food security” which is defined as “consistent, dependable access to enough food for active, healthy living.” Food insecurity is a polite term for starvation.

Since 1995, the percent starving in the US hovered at or below 12%. That changed in 2008 when it jumped to 14.6%, and has stayed above 14% since then. In 2012, the percentage was 14.5%, or one in seven people.

Only 59% of those counted as “food insecure” used any of the three major federal food assistance programs, researchers found. They looked at Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps); Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC); and the National School Lunch Program.

Though food stamps provide an average of $1.33 per meal for its recipients, Republicrats plan to cut $40 billion over ten years from this essential social service,Think Progress reports. People get nasty when hungry; and many sociologists and historians point to widespread hunger as the cause of most, if not all, major revolutions in world history. Even recent ones. The Romans understood this, ergo the saying, panem et circenses (give the masses ‘bread and circuses’ to appease them and thus retain control).

Despite that one out of seven US citizens goes hungry, Obama, like his predecessors, continues to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into the war machine. At last count, the US spent $684 billion in 2012, or 39% of the total global defense spending, reportsGlobal Issues.

US military spending is down from 2008, when it spent $711 billion, if sources are accurate.

Even so, notes Jobs Not Wars, “If the U.S. cut its military spending in half, it would still outspend China, Russia and Britain together.”

Obama’s Food ‘Security’ Program

Obama’s military spending is ironic given his Global Food Security Initiative announcedjust months into his presidency, at the April 2009 G20 Summit held in London. As part of a global development strategy, Obama stated his plan to:

“Increase our investments and engagement in development-focused innovation by seeking and scaling up potential game-changing development technologies such as vaccines for neglected diseases, weather-resistant seed varieties, and clean energy technologies.”

The World Food Programme of the United Nations estimates the global hunger rate at one in eight. Under these circumstances, no US president has any business worrying about hunger over there. But that he is, at least superficially.

The food security initiative includes a “Feed the Future” program that established “the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program (GAFSP) – a multilateral trust fund, based at the World Bank and launched by the United States in collaboration with other donors, including private philanthropy — designed to help poor farmers grow, market and earn more.”

In reality, “Feed the Future” is merely a scheme to blanket the planet in genetically modified food and toxic chemicals.

Obama’s concern about homegrown poverty, as we see from bankster bailouts and never-ending war, is nonexistent. He certainly hasn’t bucked long-time federal policy of legalizing slavery under the name minimum wage. No adult can support herself on minimum wage. Hunger is guaranteed under minimum wage.

The War on Farms

Obama’s FDA, run by former Monsanto executives, has a peculiar interest in destroying small farming operations in this nation. Nutritious food, grown organically and raised humanely, has been the target of several federally directed raids, supported by local sheriffs and police. No one has been sickened by food sold by these farms, or in the private buying clubs (like Rawsome Foods) that distribute it. But that’s not the point. Instead, the federal government clearly seeks to eliminate giant agribiz competition.

The current war on small US farmers is detailed in David Gumpert’s two books, The Raw Milk Revolution: Behind America’s Emerging Battle Over Food Rights (2009), and Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Food Rights (2013).

We also see the feds’ real motives in the “Food Safety Modernization Act” (formerly S 510), and the bandaid fix known as the Tester Amendment which was adopted to protect small farms from onerous food safety regulations that would put them out of business. Even former supporters now recognize that the FSMA will devastate small farm operations. The Cornucopia Institute now admits:

“Instead, the regulations would ensnare the country’s safest family farmers in burdensome regulations in a misdirected attempt to rein in abuses that are mostly emanating from industrial-scale factory farms and giant agribusiness food processing facilities.” [emphasis in original]

On the state level, we continue to find news items where children’s lemonade andraspberry stands are being shut down, for failure to acquire a permit. At the city level, feeding the homeless, a time-honored act of charity, has been criminalized across the US. Even fundraising bake sales have been criminalized.

Ron Finley, a self-admitted “gangsta gardener” faced a $400 fine for growing free-for-the-taking vegetables on his tree lawn.

The War on Herbs

The federal government, in line with globalists, also seeks complete control over medicinal and nutritional herbs. By and far, the best advocate protecting our right to natural herbs with which humans evolved is the National Health Federation, the only populist representative on the Codex Alimentarius Commission, a forum ostensibly created to facilitate global trade in foods. Unfortunately, we learn from NHF:

“This will be used to exclude high-potency American supplements and move towards harmonization of the more-liberal U.S. food regulatory regime with the harsh European regulatory model that only allows ridiculously low-potency and expensive supplements to be marketed.”

The “more-liberal U.S. food regulatory regime” is being overturned as we speak, with the introduction of several bills to force natural herbs into a testing protocol more strict, and more expensive, than what pharmaceuticals endure. In opposing hyper-regulation of supplements (as spearheaded by Senator Dick Durbin and others), Dr. Mercola explains:

“Data from the U.S. National Poison Data System’s annual report, which tracked data from 57 U.S. poison centers, showed vitamin and mineral supplements caused zero deaths in 2010, whereas pharmaceuticals caused more than 1,100 of the total 1,366 reported fatalities. FDA-approved drugs cause 80 percent of poison control fatalities each year. Poison control centers report 100,000 calls, 56,000 emergency room visits, 2,600 hospitalizations and nearly 500 deaths each yearfrom acetaminophen (Tylenol) alone.

“Data from the European Union indicate that pharmaceutical drugs are 62,000 times as likely to kill you as dietary supplements. You’re actually more likely to be struck dead by lightning or drown in your bathtub than have a lethal reaction to a dietary supplement. These figures make it quite clear where the danger lies. If Senator Durbin really cared about your health, his efforts would be centered on doing something to make drugs safer, as they obviously pose a FAR greater risk to your health.”

The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA), among other laws, already controls supplements. Instead of enabling enhanced nutrition of its citizens, the feds concern themselves with increasing pharmaceutical profits.

The same can be said for other nations. In 2011, legislation introduced in Australia sought to ban thousands of plants, including its national flower, because they contain DMT, a naturally-occurring hallucinogen that even the human brain produces.

The War on Weed

Though rarely considered in food criminalization discussions, not only does marijuana have medicinal and recreational benefits, but its “seeds contain essential fatty acids and amino acids, which can be baked into foods to boost their nutritional value, in seed oil when sauteing foods, or taken as a supplement,” report Fox, Armentano and Tvert in Marijuana Is Safer So Why Are We Driving People to Drink?

Marijuana Is Safer details numerous medical benefits including anti-carcinogenic properties, preventing epileptic seizures, reducing peripheral neuropathy pain along with other types of pain, and thus reduces opiate dosage needs. It increases craving for food, a boon for those on appetite-suppressing chemotherapy, and it promotes sleepiness.

Not only does marijuana treat the symptoms of disease, Marijuana Is Safer reports, but:

“In some cases, it appears that marijuana can effectively treat disease itself. For instance, marijuana possesses strong antioxidant properties that can protect the brain during trauma and potentially ward off the onset of certain neurological diseases such as Alzheimers.

“In fact, in one of the great political ironies, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services holds a patent – it’s patent no. 6630507 – on the use of cannabinoids as antioxidants and neuroprotectants. That’s right, the same government that classifies cannabis as a Schedule I illicit drug (which under federal law is defined as possessing ‘no currently accepted medical use in treatment’) owns the intellectual property rights to several of the plant’s naturally occurring, therapeutic chemicals.”

That patent was filed back in 1999, deep amid the war on drugs.

Genetically modified marijuana research has been ongoing for over two decades, detailed by numerous freelance researchers. Several insist that a former agent for the Drug Enforcement Agency, Sam Selezny (aka David Watson aka Skunkman) developed his strains of GM weed in Holland with funding from the DEA. His company, Hortapharm, stands to make billions when pot is fully legalized in the States.

Just as natural, unmodified fresh milk is a market threat to drug-laden, industrial milk; natural, privately grown marijuana is a threat to the GM weed market. And so we see legal marijuana suffering under Obama.

Raids on legal cannabis farming and sales has cost nearly $300 million in the past four years, reports Americans for Safe Access:

Last month, however, we saw some key changes in federal policy. Attorney General Eric Holder announced a “compassionate release” program to let medical marijuana users out of prison. Next, the Dept. of Justice reversed itself by agreeing to allow banks to work with medical marijuana clinics, and agreed to abide by voter decision in Washington and Colorado which allows for recreational use.

The DoJ’s policy reversals follow a unanimous resolution adopted by US mayors at their annual conference in June, supporting the notion of “states setting their own marijuana policies without federal interference.”

Food as Trade Commodities

Finally, we cannot discuss starvation without mentioning food commodities. The dissolution of trade barriers and deregulation of the banking sector has led to price manipulation, increasing food insecurity and causing widespread starvation.

F. William Engdahl explains that for over 4,000 years, grains were safely stored for up to seven years to protect against war, drought and famine. That all changed in 1993 with the passage of GATT – the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade – when:

“[T]he European Union finally agreed in 1993 to the GATT Uruguay Round, requiring a major reduction of national agriculture protection. Central to the Uruguay Round deal was agreement on one major change: national grain reserves as a government responsibility were to be ended….

“The elimination of national grain reserves in the USA and EU and other major OECD industrial countries set the stage for the next step in the process—elimination of agricultural commodity derivatives regulation, allowing unbridled unchecked speculative manipulations.

“Under the Clinton Treasury (1999 – 2000) the elimination of grain reserves was formalized by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC)—the government body charged with supervising derivatives trade in exchanges such as the Chicago Board of Trade or NYMEX— and in legislation drafted by Tim Geithner and Larry Summers at Treasury. It was no accident that Wall Street pushed Geithner, former President of the NY Federal Reserve, to become Obama’s Treasury Secretary in 2008, amid the worst financial debacle in history. Something to do with having foxes guard henhouses.”

The Fox scored big in the henhouse:

“When Henry Kissinger was Secretary of State in 1972-1973, acting in league with the Department of Agriculture and major US grain trading companies, he orchestrated an unprecedented 200% jump in the price of grain. The price hike was triggered at that time by the US signing a three-year contract with the Soviet Union that had just gone through a disastrous harvest failure.

“The US-Soviet deal hit amid global drought and severely reduced harvests worldwide, hardly a prudent time to sell the entire US grain cupboard to an ostensible Cold War opponent. The sale took place amid a major world grain harvest shortfall leading to the explosive price rise. Critical voices in US press at the time appropriately dubbed it the Great Grain Robbery. Kissinger had even arranged for much of the cost of shipping US grain to the Soviets to be paid by US taxpayers. Cargill and company laughed all the way to the bank.”

Next, writes Engdahl, came the Commodity Futures Modernization Act in 2000:

“The two key architects of Clinton’s new law were a former Goldman Sachs consultant and Clinton’s Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, and his Assistant at Treasury Tim Geithner, friend of Wall Street and today Obama’s Treasury Secretary. Secretary Summers was also a key player in preventing efforts to regulate financial derivatives in commodities and financial products….”

“At the time, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) proposed also to deregulate trading in derivatives between major banks or financial institutions, including derivatives of grain and other agricultural commodities.

“The historic and unprecedented deregulation opened a massive hole in Government supervision of derivatives trading, a gaping hole that ultimately facilitated the derivatives games leading to the 2007 financial collapse. It also formed the deregulation free-for-all that is behind much of the recent explosion in grain prices.”

The Emerging Local Food Movement

There’s still hope.

Despite the FDA’s war on private food and herb sources, private buying clubs and direct farm to consumer sales are spreading as fast as Monsanto-resistant weeds, and are a boon to local farm economies. The following chart shows the growth in direct sales from 1997 thru 2007, segregated by region:

Urban agriculture is taking off in blighted areas in Detroit, Los Angeles, and other cities.Rooftop and bus top gardens represent innovations beyond the ken of Obama and his agribuddies. They profit urbanites by providing local, healthy produce in food deserts, where fresh, nutritious food is lacking. They also provide a food cushion, should disaster strike and the local store’s 3-day food supply runs out.

While peace activists the world over vocally oppose more MidEast wars, agtivists continue to battle the biotech giants whose products are genetically contaminating natural crops and destroying our pollinators and soils with their requisite toxic chemicals. A fortnight of actions for Seed and Food Freedom is planned for Oct. 2-16 around the planet.

As “generals gather in their masses,” we can expect little positive aid from the feds. We can and should get local regulators on our side, so that our kids can have lemonade stands, our churches can have bake sales, and our private buying clubs or food co-ops can provide the food we want, that is much healthier for us, and that works with nature instead of against it.

“The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.” ~Ayn Rand

The real trick to reducing hunger is to decentralize the food system, to grow our own, and to buy local. This is food democracy in action, and we don’t need permission to do it.

It’s coming to America first,
the cradle of the best and of the worst.
It’s here they got the range
and the machinery for change
and it’s here they got the spiritual thirst.
It’s here the family’s broken
and it’s here the lonely say
that the heart has got to open
in a fundamental way:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
~ Leonard Cohen

Source: http://foodfreedomgroup.com/2013/09/08/one-in-seven-hungry-in-us-as-obama-preps-for-more-war/

Saudi Arabia’s 'Chemical Bandar' behind the Syrian chemical attacks?

2013-09-08T21:25:00.001+03:00

Saudi Arabia’s 'Chemical Bandar' behind the Syrian chemical attacks?
time: September 05, 2013 02:08

The Obama Administration’s intelligence report on Syria was a rehash of Iraq. “There are lots of things that aren’t spelled out” in the four-page document, according to Richard Guthrie, the former project head of the Chemical and Biological Warfare Project of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. One piece of evidence is the alleged interception of Syrian government communications, but no transcripts were provided.Nothing the US claims about what happened in Syria adds up. We are being asked to believe an illogical story, when it is much more likely that it was Israel and Saudi Arabia who enabled the Obama Administration to threaten Syria with war.
An Israeli-Saudi-US conspiracy?So it seems that the Saudis enabled the chemical attack while the Israelis provided them cover to ignite a full-scale war, or at the very least enable a bombing campaign against Damascus. Israel and Saudi Arabia have empowered the Obama Administration to threaten war on Syria.
Obama wants to change the balance of power in Syria

Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya is a sociologist, award-winning author and geopolitical analyst.

U.N. chemical weapons experts visit a hospital where wounded people affected by an apparent gas attack are being treated, in the southwestern Damascus suburb of Mouadamiya, August 26, 2013 (Reuters / Abo Alnour Alhaji)

Just as with the Obama Administration’s speeches which all fall short of conclusively confirming what happened, nothing was categorically confirmed in the intelligence report. Actually it comes across more as a superficial college or university student’s paper put together by wordsmiths instead of genuine experts on the subject.

Going in a circle, the report even depends on “unnamed” social media and accounts as sources of evidence or data. Lacking transparency, it states that “there are accounts from international and Syrian medical personnel, videos, witness accounts, thousands of social media reports from at least 12 different locations in the Damascus area, journalist accounts and reports from highly credible non-governmental organizations.”

Chances are that these unnamed sources are actually foreign-funded insurgents, Israeli media, Saudi media, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights - which includes fighters in the ranks of the insurgency and salutes Saudi Arabia as a model democracy - or the NGO Doctors Without Borders. These are the same sources that have been supporting the insurgency and pushing for regime change and military intervention in Syria.

Moreover, one of the main sources of the intelligence and communication interceptions that are supposed to be a smoking gun is none other than Israel, which is notorious for doctoring and falsifying evidence.

The US intelligence report also claims to have advanced knowledge about the plans to launch a chemical weapons attack several days before it happened. A leading expert on chemical weapons, Jean Pascal Zanders, who until recently was a senior research fellow at the European Union’s Institute for Security Studies, asks why the US government did not tell the world about it and issue warnings about a chemical attack at that time.

The US-supported anti-government forces fighting inside Syria are the ones that have a track record of using chemical weapons. Yet, Obama and company have said nothing.

Reuters / Loubna Mrie

Despite the anti-government forces accusations that the Syrian military launched a chemical weapon attack on Homs at Christmas in December 2012, CNN reported that the US military was training anti-government fighters with the securing and handling of chemical weapons. Under the name of theDestructive Wind Chemical Battalion, the insurgents themselves even threatened to use nerve gas and released a video where they killed rabbits as a demonstration of what they planned on doing in Syria.

According to the French newspaper Le Figaro, two brigades of anti-government fighters that were trained by the CIA, Israelis, Saudis, and Jordanians crossed from the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordon into Syria to launch an assault, respectively on August 17 and 19, 2013. The US must have invested quite a lot in training both anti-government brigades. If true, some may argue that their defeat prompted the chemical weapons attack in Damascus as a contingency plan to fall back on.

However, how they came by chemical weapons is another issue, but many trails lead to Saudi Arabia. According to the British Independent, it was Saudi Prince Bandar “that first alerted Western allies to the alleged use of sarin gas by the Syrian regime in February 2013.” Turkey would apprehend Syrian militants in its territory with sarin gas, which these terrorists planned on using inside Syria. On July 22 the insurgents would also overrun Al-Assal and kill all the witnesses as part of a cover-up.

A report by Yahya Ababneh, which was contributed to by Dale Gavlak, has collected the testimonies of witnesses who say that “certain rebels received chemical weapons via the Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, and were responsible for carrying out the gas attack.”

The Mint Press News report adds an important dimension to the story, totally contradicting the claims of the US government. It quotes a female insurgent fighter who says things that make a link to Saudi Arabia clear. She says that those who provided them with weapons ‘didn’t tell them what these arms were or how to use them” and that they “didn’t know they were chemical weapons.” “When Saudi Prince Bandar gives such weapons to people, he must give them to those who know how to handle and use them,” she is quoted.

There is also another Saudi link in the report: “Abdel-Moneim said his son and 12 other rebels were killed inside a tunnel used to store weapons provided by a Saudi militant, known as Abu Ayesha, who was leading a fighting battalion. The father described the weapons as having a ‘tube-like structure’ while others were like a ‘huge gas bottle.’”

The moralistic language coming out of Washington is despicable posturing. The hypocrisy of the US government knows no bounds. It condemns the Syrian military for using cluster bombs while the United States sells them en mass to Saudi Arabia.

US President Barack Obama (AFP Photo / Scanpix Sweden / Jessica Gow)

The UN inspectors entered Syria in the first place on the invitation of the government in Damascus. The Syrian government warned the UN for weeks that the anti-government militias were trying to use chemical weapons after they gained control of a chlorine factory east of Aleppo. As a precaution, the Syrian military consolidated all its chemical weapons into a handful of heavily guarded compounds to prevent anti-government forces reaching them. Yet, the insurgents launched a chemical weapon attack against the Syrian government’s forces in Khan Al-Assal on March 19, 2013. Turning the truth on its head, the insurgents and their foreign backers, including the US government, would try to blame the Syrian government for the chemical attack, but the UN’s investigator Carla Del Ponte would refute their claimsas false in May after extensive work.

Concerning the alleged August attack the Obama Administration has been lying and contradicting itself for days. They say that traces of chemical weapons cannot be eliminated, but that the Syrian government destroyed that same evidence that cannot be eradicated. They want an investigation, but say they already have all the answers.

The claims that the Syrian government used chemical weapons in the suburb of Ghouta defy logic. Why would the Syrian government unnecessarily use chemical weapons in an area that it controls and shoot itself in the foot by presenting the US and its allies with a pretext to intervene? And of all the days it could unnecessarily use chemical weapons, the Obama administration wants us to believe that the Syrian government picked the day when United Nation inspectors arrived in Damascus.

Even the biased and misleading state-run British Broadcasting Corporation admitted that there was something strange about the event. The BBC’s own “Middle East Editor Jeremy Bowen says many will ask why the [Syrian] government would want to use such weapons at a time when [United Nations] inspectors are in the country and the military has been doing well militarily in the area around Damascus.”

The US is deliberately pointing the finger for the use of chemical weapons at the Syrian government.

American officials have a track record of lying to start wars against other countries. This has been the consistent modus operandi of the US from Vietnam to Yugoslavia, and from Iraq to Libya.

It is not Syria that is going against the international community, but the warmongers in Washington, which include the Obama Administration.

Washington is threatening to attack Syria as a means of prolonging the fighting inside Syria. The US government also wants to have a stronger hand in the country’s future negotiations by restoring the balance of power between the Syrian government and America’s anti-government insurgent allies, thus weakening the Syrian military and ending its winning momentum against the insurgency. If not softening Damascus up for the insurgents, America wants to level the equation and undermine the Syrian government before a final negotiation takes place.

Now is the time for the “responsibility to prevent war”—the real R2P—to come into play.

Source: http://rt.com/op-edge/saudi-chemical-behind-syrian-attack-421/

American Jews Push Obama to War

2013-09-02T23:56:00.002+03:00

American Jews Push Obama to War

Andrey MELEKHOV | 01.09.2013 | 00:00

Life is a strange thing! Especially if you are a rich American Jew. On the one hand you want to become richer. That’s what the United States needs short-tern victorious military campaigns for - to remind everyone who is the boss in this world. At that, the Jewish capital never allows over-production. Like the production of extra quantities of weapons, for instance. It is expedient to get rid of redundant arms along with muscle flexing in the regions, which are rich in oil, gas and other minerals. They are precious enough to throw bombs and even costly Tomahawks at the heads of aborigines once they are too dumb to realize what the United States interests are.

At the same time the call of blood is always alive in the soul of a Jew and it urges him to come to the aid and defend Israel if need be. Because somehow it has happened so that the aborigines, who live in the lands of oil and gas, don’t like the Jewish state for whatever the reason it may be. As soon as the American Jews, who control the US finances and industry, start a new war in the Middle East, a thought comes to the head of an Arab – what about striking Israel once the promised land is so dear to the heart of an American Jew?

There is a paradox: Israelis rely on the United States, whatever they do, but each and every time they become victims of the greed and ambitions of their American co-nationals who consider the United States only as an instrument of global financial management. The events in Syria prove the point.

The war in the neighboring country has been raging for already two years but it has not directly threatened the Israel’s security. But as soon as Washington made public its intent to use military force and do it (just think about it!) on the side of Israel’s foes – the Islamists, then the citizens of this country, who have sad experience of previous American adventures, started to acquire gas masks and prepare places in bomb shelters, caulk windows and check the alarm systems in case of chemical attack.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) says «The Jewish state is our only ally-and the only country in the world-whose citizens are currently being distributed gas masks en mass». So, all stand up and fight for Israel! Can’t you see AIPAC is full of anxiety! But an Israeli Jew will not have to enjoy the odor of Asian spices through a gas mask if the American Jews don’t poke their noses everywhere and use their Tomahawk missiles to meddle into other people’s affairs pretending the intent is to manage the conflicts they have provoked themselves. The most striking paradox under the circumstances is that Israelis can become victims in case chemical weapons are used by US allies – the Islamists (one can hardly imagine the Syrian leaders willing to face an international tribunal accused of crimes against humanity).

The situation could not be better for the Islamic radicals rushing to Syria upon the US call to come and defend «democracy». Having launched a couple of poisonous sarin-tipped munitions against Israel, they will provide the West with an opportunity to substantiate the need for toppling the legal Syrian government using military force. On the other hand, they’ll have great pleasure to watch TV and see the Jews they hate so much in the throes of death…

Do they understand it in Israel? You bet! The leading experts of the Institute for National Security Studies (Israel) Amos Yadlin, and Avner Golov wrote in their piece called US Military Intervention in Syria: The Broad Strategic Purpose, Beyond Punitive Action ((INSS Insight No. 459, August 29, 2013),«The main fear is that American action in Syria could have «unexpected consequences» that would expand the scope and duration of a military operation. For example, a military operation against Assad could strengthenthe jihadi organizations».

Just think about it! The American military have been regularly warned about it during the last two years. Including the warnings coming from the countries considered to be the main obstacles on the way of implementing the US Middle East policy – Russia and China. But all to no avail.

There is an impression that those who rule «the only global power» are carried away by what they plan to do and there is no way to stop them. At least not with conventional weapons. Only nuclear arms can deter the American hawks from aggression. That’s why the Iran’s nuclear program gets Washington exasperated so much. Somehow AIPAC is actively pushing Washington into the armed conflict direction.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee calls on the White House,«The use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime highlights the danger of allowing the world's most dangerous regimes to possess weapons of mass destruction. As Israel prepares its citizens for the possible ramifications of a chemical attack from Syria, the United States must consider potentially catastrophic ramifications if Iran, who is actively backing Assad, acquires a nuclear weapons capability».

Perhaps this is the core goal pursued by the rich American Jews when it comes to Syria? To instigate a US attack against Iran whose riches never leave them in peace?

Then one understands better the proposition put forward by American Israel Public Affairs Committee which calls for immediate strike against Syria without any delay till Iran has not gone nuclear. It would serve as a lesson for Persians: an attempt to deter the United States has ended up the very same way – a military intervention. Like if the United States would leave Iran alone in case it possessed no nuclear weapons. The example of Iraq tells quite a different story.

The world is plunging into chaos. The reason is helter-skelter in the minds of those who belong to the American ruling elite, their heads going ‘round while they pursuit the goal of global domination.

One day they foster Islamists to defeat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and then they expressly shed tears over the ruins of twin towers destroyed by jihadists in New York. One day they bring Muslim Brotherhood to power in Egypt, and then they topple them with the help of military coup. Now Washington provokes Islamists into attacks against Syria and it does not know itself what to do if the «allies» get hold of weaponized sarin to poison Israelis, Europeans and the Americans themselves.

Do they realize in Washington that it is the imperial policy of the United States that makes other nations seek possible options to defend themselves, including weapons of mass destruction?

Do they realize that it’s the US policy that doomed the reset policy with Russia or that the contradictions between China and the United States are exacerbated because of American attempts to transform normal economic competition into military and political dimension?

The United States makes other nations spur arms race and join efforts to keep the insane America at the distance. How long will it last? What if one day Washington crosses the line when diplomatic opportunities are exhausted?

It has not happened so far. Having it all in mind, it is itching to tell Americans: come on, stop this «Nobel Prize Peace Winner» of yours at last! Don’t you have enough domestic problems to worry the elected President more than the fate of «democracy» in the Middle East? Especially once he tries to do it with the help of Al Qaeda, Muslim brothers and other warriors of jihad, grown and supported at the expense of US taxpayers. If you don’t try to get hold of Iran’s riches, then will matter it if Iran is nuclear or not? Why bother about Israel, nobody threatens its security, nobody encroaches on it but the very same Islamists that your own President is feeding today at the expense of US state budget?

Wake up, America! It’s not late yet!

Source: http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2013/09/01/american-jews-push-obama-to-war.html

Encircling Empire: Report #23—Obama’s Scramble for Africa

2013-08-15T21:26:00.001+03:00

Encircling Empire: Report #23—Obama’s Scramble for Africa

Posted on 10 August 2013 by Maximilian Forte

On a beach in Ghana, a discarded wrapper for “Obama Biscuits,” produced in Ghana to mark Obama’s visit in 2009.

Special thanks for leads and commentary that were useful for this report goes to Crossed Crocodiles, a website devoted to Africa and U.S.-African relations.

This report–the last Encircling Empire Report for 2013–is fairly long given that it provides detail on a relatively comprehensive pattern of recent events which, taken together, paint a portrait of what the new scramble for Africa means for the U.S. It is sometimes a very disturbing portrait, at other times comical for the excessive insincerity of the speakers, and in some instances quite underwhelming when the true structural weaknesses of U.S. empire come into view. Once again the U.S. finds itself in over its head, with much in the way of promises but little to offer, and a great many threats and impositions put in place. The ideal objective for the U.S. is to get African nations to administer themselves for U.S. capital, and to rework systems of governance so that they may block access to Chinese, Brazilian, Russian and other influences. In doing so, the U.S. will look for anything that can drive a wedge between African leaders and powers competing against the U.S., and any lever to undermine African leaders who do not comply with U.S. wishes.

As the U.S. exhausts itself, and nears the end of its hegemonic cycle, it seems to be reencountering an earlier, older version of itself when it was still ascending. Here we see a very similar pattern of intervention, investment, and political reengineering that marked the early phase of U.S. expansion in the Caribbean, Central America, and the Pacific in the last decades of the 19th-century, when the U.S. became the “new empire,” as historian Walter LaFeber explained in his book. This time, however, the old “new empire” is met by a shadow, another “new imperialism” that became prominent in characterizing late British empire this time, the rise of a hollow British imperial “humanitarianism,” and the first scramble for Africa. It is not a question of mere repetition, however: as a cycle, some elements appear to be repeated, but the conditions and context under which that superficially apparent repetition occurs are radically different.

This report effectively consists of several articles bundled into one, most dealing with Obama’s Africa tour in late June-early July, and others ranging from the drone war and U.S. military installations across Africa, to AFRICOM military exercises, to gay rights, the recent elections in Zimbabwe, the CIA’s conversion of Libya into a site for arming rebels in Syria, and the continuum between Bush and Obama in Africa. The sections/articles within also range from agriculture, to privatization, trade, governance, human rights, and militarization.

Contents:–U.S. Militarization of Africa–Obama Scrambles Africa–Neoliberal Restructuring: Getting Out of Our Way–General Electric’s Salesman of the Year Award Goes to Barack Obama–Food Security (for Transnational Capitalism)–Obama’s Gay Rights Crusade in Senegal: “No we can’t”–NObama in South Africa–U.S. AFRICOM Military Exercise in South Africa–The CIA: Converting Libya into a Covert Military Asset–Zimbabwe: U.S. Rails against a Predicted Electoral Victory–The Bush-Obama Africa Continuum–References

This report is for the period from June 26, 2013 to August 10, 2013.
This and previous issues have been archived on a dedicated site—please see:ENCIRCLING EMPIRE.For frequent updates, please “like” our Facebook page.

“The countries that cooperate with us get at least a free pass,” acknowledged a senior U.S. official who specializes in Africa but spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid retribution. “Whereas other countries that don’t cooperate, we ream them as best we can.” The official said the administration of former president George W. Bush took the same approach in Africa. Many U.S. diplomats and human-rights groups had hoped Obama would shift his emphasis in Africa from security to democracy, but that has not happened, the official added. “There’s pretty much been no change at all,” the official said. “In the end, it was an almost seamless transition from Bush to Obama.” (Whitlock, 2013/4/13)

U.S. Militarization of Africa

Reflecting on this synthesizing statement of U.S. Africa policy–“The countries that cooperate with us get at least a free pass. Whereas other countries that don’t cooperate, we ream them as best we can”–Crossed Crocodiles (CC) sees this as the essence of U.S. foreign policy, one which has “escalated over time, particularly in the 1980s under Reagan, and with the proliferation of pointless wars this century begun by Bush and expanded under Obama. I say pointless, because although there may have been objectives, they were not related to the means used to achieve them, or to the eventual outcomes, in any coherent way. The US has tried to solve political problems with the brute force of military power….US policy in Africa continues this pattern. The destruction of Libya is the most aggressive recent example.” Giving a graphic example of the pervasive nature of the militarization of U.S. policy toward Africa, CC provides a link to the following interactive map showing what is known of the current U.S. military presence in Africa:

View Larger Map

In addition CC points to a report in Public Intelligence with a breakdown, accompanied by aerial photos, of each of the drone bases in Africa (down at the time of writing, thus an archived copy is presented instead).

Thus when it comes to the U.S.’ much vaunted policies aimed at “democracy promotion,” which translates into violent regime change when enforced against target nations, the U.S. is content to give a “free pass” to those who aid it in its “reaming”:

“In Djibouti, on the Horn of Africa, President Ismail Omar Guelleh has ruled unchallenged over his tiny country since 1999 by marginalizing political opponents and confining journalists. Still, the U.S. government has embraced Guelleh as a friend because he has allowed the Pentagon to build a major counter-terrorism base on his territory. In Uganda, where Yoweri Museveni has served as president for 27 years, U.S. officials have objected to the persecution of gay men and lesbians and other human-rights abuses. But Washington has kept up a generous flow of foreign aid. It also pays Uganda to send troops to war-torn Somalia and lead a regional hunt for Joseph Kony, the brutal leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army. In Kenya, U.S. diplomats warned there would be unspecified “consequences” if the country elected a fugitive from the International Criminal Court as its new president. Kenyans did so anyway, and the Obama administration has hesitated to downgrade relations because it needs help on counter-terrorism. Human-rights groups have also accused the U.S. government of holding its tongue about political repression in Ethiopia, another key security partner in East Africa.”

Obama Scrambles Africa

On Wednesday, June 26, 2013, Obama began a tour of Africa lasting almost six days, going from Senegal to South Africa and then Tanzania. As is to be expected, the corporate media contactors that followed Obama, such as the aptly named Associated Press, minimized the fact that the tour was meant, first of all, to promote the business interests of select corporations, some of whom are also leading defence contractors–thus it is only at the end of its article that the AP briefly mentions that top “U.S. business leaders were traveling with Obama.” The AP also gave dimensions to the prize in Obama’s eyes: a continent which had six of the world’s ten fastest-growing economies in 2012, and where China’s trade with Africa ($200 billion per year) more than doubles U.S. trade with Africa ($95 billion per year). Meanwhile others noted that the U.S. accounts for only 10% of foreign investment in Africa. Add to that the growing presence of Brazil in Africa: “In the past decade, Africa-Brazil trade has soared by 500 per cent to reach US$9 billion….With 37 embassies in 54 African countries, Brazil has the fifth largest number of embassies in Africa after the United States, China, France and Russia”. Yet, by overthrowing Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi in a bloody intervention, thus eliminating one key competitor for influence, Obama clearly hoped to reap the rewards.

Obama went to Africa to especially open markets to the U.S.: “Washington is also looking to extend the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) when it expires in 2015. The deal, signed into law by former President Bill Clinton in 2000, slashes customs duties for African countries building free markets.” On his trip, Obama made it quite clear that AGOA has been great for U.S. corporations: “Our exports to Africa have tripled — with Caterpillar, for example, from my home state of Illinois, selling mining trucks to Mozambique. Boeing is selling airplanes to Kenya — Kenya Airways. American-made solar-powered water treatment systems sold in Senegal and Cameroon, they’re supporting jobs back in Pennsylvania.” (Some may wish to recall that Caterpillar, from Obama’s home state, was locked out of investments in Libya under Gaddafi.)

In terms of Obama’s Africa mission, under the White House’s listed priority of “increasing U.S. trade and investment,” a spokesperson wrote: “We are redoubling our efforts to create an environment that enables greater trade, and investment, through encouraging regional integration, legal reforms that break down barriers to the free flow of goods, and services, greater transparency, and anti-corruption measures”. The second listed priority, “investment in strong democratic institutions,” makes the same points, if one is lucid enough to not indulge belief in fairy-tales of what democracy means, in this context: governments “open” to U.S. capitalist interests, and “accountable” to the U.S. and its allies. The “freedom” is about free trade, not anti-oppression. To carry through its plans, the U.S. is trying to build a cadre of new African leaders via its Young African Leaders Initiative (YALI), which is designed to build and maintain connections between them and the U.S. Put simply, this is a U.S. engineered plan for the governance of Africa, as administered by the U.S.’ African allies in favour of U.S. interests. This is not so dissimilar from late 19th-century U.S. expansionism in the Caribbean, and particularly in Cuba in the latter decades of the 19th and first decades of the 20th century. In Africa, the U.S. may “find” its new Cuba–and that is something that can cut both ways.

Neoliberal Restructuring: Getting Out of Our Way

At a meeting with business leaders in Tanzania on July 1, Obama made it clear that any obstacles in the way of foreign investment would need to be either torn down or restructured to facilitate foreign investors. His words were straightforward enough:

We know that it has to become easier to do business in Africa. This is something that we had extensive conversations about, and all of you know this better than anyone — you’ve figured out how to work around the constraints, but we need to tear down these constraints. It still takes way too long — too many documents, too much bureaucracy — just to start a business, to build a new facility, to start exporting. And one of the useful comments that came during our discussion is, if we’re going to, for example, build a lot of power around Africa, we can’t have a seven-year timeframe for building a power plant. We’ve got to move. Things have to go faster. And government can have an impact on that — for good or for ill.

So as part of our partnership for growth, we’re working with countries like Tanzania and Ghana to make sure rules and regulations are encouraging investment, not scaring it away. And, by the way, if we can synchronize regionally between countries so that there is some standardization of how business gets done, that’s helpful too, because then people don’t have to try to figure out and unlock a different bureaucracy and a different system, different paperwork for even the most routine tasks.

We know that strengthening good governance is good business as well — and this is something that I’ve been emphasizing throughout my tour with leaders and with citizens in Senegal and South Africa, and now in Tanzania. No one should have to pay a bribe to start a business or ship their goods. You should have to hire somebody’s cousin who doesn’t come to work just to get your job — get your business done. You shouldn’t have to do that. (Applause.)

So as part of our global effort against corruption, we’re working with countries across Africa to improve governance, enhance open government, uphold the rule of law. Because trade will flow where rules are predictable and investment is protected.

This is, in effect, a litany of U.S. capitalists’ complaints about getting into African markets. From my research, they strongly echo U.S. complaints about the cost of doing business in Libya, and the result being that U.S. firms often found themselves barred from entry, and the U.S. Embassy growing increasingly angry. That these obstacles matter to Obama, Obama himself makes very clear.

General Electric’s Salesman of the Year Award Goes to Barack Obama

This brings us to “Power Africa”. Speaking about the generation of electricity, Obama declared: “it’s the connection needed to plug Africa into the grid of the global economy. You’ve got to have power”. Elsewhere Obama exclaimed: “It’s a win for the United States because the investments made here, including in cleaner energy, means more exports for the U.S. and more jobs in the U.S.”

As Forbes noted, “providing that power could be a real boon to American (and global) companies focused on power generation and energy management”–as Obama stated frankly, “my own nation will benefit enormously if you reach full potential”. Traveling with Obama to Africa was the CEO of General Electric, Jeffrey Immelt, “who until early this year chaired the president’s Council on Jobs and Effectiveness”.

In addition to Immelt, and Bill Gates, other investors in “Power Africa” listed by the White Houseinclude:

“Heirs Holdings, the investment vehicle of Nigerian tycoon Tony Elumelu, which has pledged $2.5 billion. Aldwych International, a Dutch-backed company, plans a 400 mw wind power project in Kenya. And then there’s Symbion Power, which is run by Lord Richard Westbury, a former officer with the British special forces, and which counts former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson (husband of outed CIA agent Valerie Plame) as a director. Symbion has done a handful of power projects in Iraq, and recently completed a 55 mw diesel-powered electricity project in Tanzania”.

Obama’s promotion of his “Power Africa” plan, whose major beneficiary will in fact be General Electric (GE), along with several other corporations following, has some ambiguities. The funding for the program is not as impressive as one might think, nor a “sure thing”. While the private sector will supposedly invest $9 billion, Obama’s pledge is $7 billion in U.S. government funding, even though it would cost at least $300 billion to bring electricity to “Sub-Saharan” Africa–and even though out of that mere $7 billion the U.S. government is only sure that it can provide just about $300 million. The rest of the funds do not seem to be especially rewarding for Africans themselves: “the US Export-Import Bank [is] to provide $5 billion, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation to give $1.5 billion, and the Millennium Development Corporation to offer $1 billion. Yet these are mostly likely loan guarantees where, say, if Tanzania wishes to purchase turbines worth $50 million, the US-based funds guarantee the loan”. The majority of Obama’s plan thus consists of loan guarantees and the assumption of credit risks, to back GE and others.

In other words, U.S. companies and banks will reap the rewards, while Africans will reap debt. Moreover, with more electric power, African markets made “free” are then turned into dependent and open outlets for U.S. goods. As Obama himself said: “We also then have somebody to trade with and sell iPods to, and airplanes, and all kinds of good stuff”.

How does Obama’s “Power Africa” plan compare to what China is doing in Africa? China has already been investing tens of billions of dollars in the African energy sector, with over $4 billion spent just in Ethiopia alone.

Food Security (for Transnational Capitalism)

One part of Obama’s African tour involved further spearheading the controversial agricultural plan known as the “New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition”. In Senegal, a roundtable of the New Alliance was held, including members of Obama’s delegation such as the head of USAID, the director of the Peace Corps, a senior member of the National Security Council, the U.S. ambassador to Senegal and the CEO of the Millennium Challenge Corporation. During the roundtable, one of the participants wrote, “we spoke with high-level African officials from West African countries and regional institutions, as well as with key investors to discuss opportunities for further investment. We also highlighted U.S. food security initiatives across the continent and urged continued progress on reforms that would boost sustainable private investment in agriculture”.

To understand more about the New Alliance, see the following articles (extracts included below):

Monbiot, George. (2013/6/10). “Africa, let us help – just like in 1884: From the Conference of Berlin to today’s G8, ‘helping’ Africans looks suspiciously like grabbing their resources.” The Guardian, June 10:

Neoliberalism, land grabs, and seed monopolies, all in the name of humanitarian salvation:

“One of the stated purposes of the Conference of Berlin in 1884 was to save Africans from the slave trade. To discharge this grave responsibility, Europe’s powers discovered, to their undoubted distress, that they would have to extend their control and ownership of large parts of Africa….One of the stated purposes of the G8 conference, hosted by David Cameron next week, is to save the people of Africa from starvation. To discharge this grave responsibility, the global powers have discovered, to their undoubted distress, that their corporations must extend their control and ownership of large parts of Africa. As a result, they will find themselves in astonished possession of Africa’s land, seed and markets.”

Chandrasekaran, Kirtana, & Bassey, Nnimmo. (2013/6/7). “G8′s new alliance for food security and nutrition is a flawed project: The UK government claims to be commited to ending hunger yet supports a scheme that, billed as good for Africa, is anything but.” The Guardian, June 7.

….So it’s good news, right? Sadly, no. The new alliance prioritises unprecedented access for multinational companies to resources in Africa. To access cash under the initiative, African governments have to make far-reaching changes to their land, seed and farming policies.

Statement by Civil Society in Africa (2013). Modernising African Agriculture: Who Benefits? May 15.

Opening markets and creating space for multinationals to secure profits lie at the heart of the G8 ["New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition in Africa"] and AGRA [Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa] interventions. Both initiatives are built on the basis of public-private partnerships (PPPs) with the large multinational seed, fertiliser and agrochemical companies setting the agenda, and states and institutions (like the G8, World Bank and others) and philanthropic institutions (like AGRA and others) establishing the institutional and infrastructural mechanisms to realise this agenda. Multinational corporations like Yara, Monsanto, Syngenta, Cargill and many others want secure markets for their products in Africa. In the first place, security means protection of their private ownership of knowledge in the form of intellectual property (IP) protection. Across Africa, so-called ‘harmonisation’ of laws and policies are underway to align African laws and systems with the interests of these multinationals.

Obama’s Gay Rights Crusade in Senegal: “No we can’t”

Obama as Indiana Jones, while touring the Sphinx in Egypt in 2009.

That colonial attitudes walk alongside the U.S. media and the president, is a fact that was also on exhibit during this tour. Outlets such as the Christian Science Monitor were not shy about revealing a certain patronizing condescension towards the African continent as a whole. As congratulations for “progress,” the continent “deserves a slap on the back.” One rarely finds such belittling and superior attitudes when U.S. “journalists” write about white settler nations. Later, the CSM would go further–too far–with an atrocious and abusively ignorant headline that likened social justice and indigenous ownership of indigenous resources to “apartheid”: “Is Zimbabwe preparing its own version of apartheid?“

Perhaps more abominable was Obama’s strident condescension in bordering on a proclamation of himself as the good shepherd of South Africa’s future and its young people: “There’s no question, Africa’s on the move, but it’s not moving fast enough. We’ve got more work to do because Africans must not be left behind. That’s where you come in, young people.”

Little was as condescending and ill-considered as Obama’s unsolicited lecture on gay rights in Senegal, which largely backfired. This, supposedly, was meant to show how–unlike China–the U.S. is concerned about more than just business, but also human rights. That this means propagating moral absolutes without regard to local social processes does not bother Obama, now posing as humanitarian, now posing as if he commanded the moral high ground on gay rights when the U.S. is itself by no means a leader in gay rights, especially not in the West, and not even in North America itself for that matter. Human rights, and in this case the gay variant, is the lever that the U.S. has chosen to somehow try to muscle China out of African markets. This episode was not some quirky detour to flash gay rights when the U.S. Supreme Court issued a limited new ruling on gay marriages, rather it is a matter of U.S. foreign policy: “In a December 2011 memorandum, Obama instructed federal agencies to promote gay rights overseas.”

Senegalese President Macky Sall denied that gays were persecuted by the state. Far from being impressed by Obama’s instructions on governance, the likes of which would not be offered by Chinese diplomats and leaders, Sall “said it was important for other countries to refrain from imposing their values beyond their borders”–and he added: “We don’t ask the Europeans to be polygamists, We like polygamy in our country, but we can’t impose it in yours. Because the people won’t understand it, they won’t accept it. It’s the same thing.” Sall explained that Senegalese tend to be very quiet and not very violent–this could be interpreted to mean that in everyday life Senegalese have achieved a modus vivendi, whereby homosexuality happens as a public secret, while the state feels that it is its socially-approved moral duty to enact official laws against homosexuality. Sall also seems to have made the reasonable suggestion that Senegalese society, unlike an amusement park that rushes to acquire the latest ride, will need to cover its own ground in its own time: “I don’t know what will happen in 10 years, because the world changes. It depends on each culture or each civilization. We have to take time. Because people need time to absorb. It’s not something you can have in one day.” (Full comment, in French.)

Here are Sall’s comments in full, at the press conference with Obama, where he also reminded everyone that, unlike in the U.S. for example, Senegal has no death penalty:

Now, on the issue of homosexuality, Mr. President, you did make a long development on this issue. But you said something very important — general principles which all nations could share, and that is the respect for the human being and non-discrimination. But these issues are all societal issues basically, and we cannot have a standard model which is applicable to all nations, all countries — you said it, we all have different cultures. We have different religions. We have different traditions. And even in countries where this has been decriminalized and homosexual marriage is allowed, people don’t share the same views.

Senegal, as far as it is concerned, is a very tolerant country which does not discriminate in terms of inalienable rights of the human being. We don’t tell anybody that he will not be recruited because he is gay or he will not access a job because his sexual orientation is different. But we are still not ready to decriminalize homosexuality. I’ve already said it in the past, in our Cabinet meeting it is Senegal’s option, at least for the time being, while we have respect for the rights of homosexuals — but for the time being, we are still not ready to change the law.

But of course this does not mean that we are all homophobic. But the society has to absolve these issues. It has to take time to digest them, bringing pressure to bear upon them, on such issues. It is just like the capital punishment. In our country, we have abolished it for many years. In other countries, it is still the order of the day, because the situation in the country requires it. And we do respect the choice of each country. But please be assured that Senegal is a country of freedom and homosexuals are not being prosecuted, persecuted. But we must also show respect for the values and choices of the other Senegalese people.

Sall was the anthropologist here in what Le Monde called a “clash of cultures,” and Obama, son of an anthropologist, came across as a blundering interventionist. Sall was in fact praised for his stance by the press: “the front pages of local newspapers on Friday were dominated by talk of the exchange on homosexuality. The newspaper Liberation, for example, praised Sall for his ‘courageous’ stance and, alongside a photo of Obama and Sall, ran a banner headline that played on Obama’s famous campaign slogan: ‘No, we can’t’.” The New York Times documented a small sample of the ways Obama’s message backfired locally.

NObama in South Africa

Protests against Obama in South Africa started even before he arrived in the country. Western media reported “hundreds” of protesters went to the U.S. Embassy in one event, seemingly underreporting the number (another source said “thousands“), and another group protested against Obama’s visit in front of the Parliament in Cape Town where “Obama’s record on human rights and trade relations in Africa were questioned.” Most of the protesters were trade unionists from COSATU, members of the South African Communist Party, and local Muslim activists, among others. The drone war was not far from protesters’ minds either. One was quoted as criticizing Obama’s attempts to glue himself to Mandela’s legacy: “Mandela valued human life… Mandela would condemn drone attacks and civilian deaths, Mandela cannot be his hero, he cannot be on that list.”

A statement by the Young Communist League of South Africa/the South African Communist Party, indicated the range of groups protesting against Obama, forming the “NObama Coalition“:

We as South Africans in the form of the South African Communist Party (SACP), the Young Communist League of South Africa (YCL), the South African Students Congress (SASCO), the Muslim Students Association (MSA), the National Education, Health and Allied Workers Union (NEHAWU), the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), Friend of Cuba Society (FOCUS), Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel in South Africa (BDS South African), and the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), declare our utmost rejection of visit of the United States of America President, Barak Obama to our country.

And they added:

Our rejection is based the USA’s arrogant, selfish and oppressive foreign policies, treatment of workers and international trade relations that are rooted in war mongering, neo-liberal super-exploitation, colonial racism and the disregard and destruction of the environment, thus making the realisation of a just and peaceful world impossible.

Among the issues the protesters aimed to highlight, were these six:

The championing and maintenance, by the USA, in the militarisation of international relations and co-operation. It is a well-known fact that the USA approaches conflicts in the world through inciting, encouraging as well and championing war, primarily driven by its business interests often masqueraded in the language of defence of human rights. The militarisation of international relations is in the main exemplified by institutions like Africom, NATO, and the continuing double standards around nuclear disarmament that the USA preaches when it comes to countries in the South, whilst continuing to collaborate with on nuclear weapons with Israel.

The continued greed in the guzzling of world resources by the USA epitomised by its encouragement and support of its multinational companies that have no regard for the environment, human rights, progressive labour laws etc.

The USA`s active support and defence of colonial and oppressive regimes. This is the one aspect of USA foreign policy that most exposes its hypocritical character where regimes that support its interest are never opposed; instead they are not only supported but maintained through amongst other things, the USA war machinery. Chief amongst these is Israel, which continues to serve as the USA`s frontline state in the Middle-East whilst suppressing and maintaining its racist apartheid policies on Palestinian people. Another example, is the USA`s support to Morocco, that is oppressing and colonialally [sic] occupying Western Sahara, and increasingly the support of oppressive regimes like the one in Colombia.

The USA`s role maintaining the underdevelopment of the African continent and its imperialistic trade relations with African countries.

The unjustifiable blockade on Cuba and unfair imprisonment of the Cuban 5.

The United States of America is the single largest contributor to global warming which is condemning the world into catastrophic environmental disasters.

The Muslim Lawyers Association of South Africa also called on the government to arrest Obama on “war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.”

Absent in all of this is any mention of the U.S. war against Libya, though it is (at best) implied in point #1. Here was an actual war on the African continent, fought by the U.S. and Western allies, an actual imperialist aggression, led by someone who would be on their soil, in their home, and these South African communists cannot even mention Libya’s name. It’s as if Libya was buried in a secret, unmarked, mass grave. Surely one of the most fundamental weapons in the fight against empire ought to at least be memory, a critical historical consciousness without mystery closets and forgotten basements.

In the photo of this protester, widely reproduced across the international news media (click on photo to enlarge), one can see some examples of the above in the written sign. Again, no mention of either Libya or Syria. Even stranger, the juxtaposition of contradictory messages, from one that appears to denounce WikiLeaks, to another that praises Julian Assange, from support for Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood to condemnation of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Gulf state financial backers, such as Qatar. The message is all over the place, and seemingly nowhere. Moreover, at least some protesters seemed to fixate on Obama’s skin colour, denouncing him as an “Uncle Tom” and “kitchen boy,” which really seems to miss recognizing him as the product of white American society to begin with.

Even so, at least according to some, these protesters represented a radical difference from the bulk of South Africa’s public opinion. That’s bad news, not least of all for South Africa itself. The “mother of all protests,” in the end proved to be an overstatement of what actually materialized.

Having said that, it is interesting to note that the University of Johannesburg felt the need to defend its granting of an honorary doctorate to Obama, a gesture that also came with the transformation of the campus into a restricted, militarized zone for the sake of Obama’s visit:

…the university’s management insists its honorary doctorate for Obama is a recognition of personal merit rather than an expression of support for United States policies….

UJ deputy vice-chancellor Tinyiko Maluleke said that members of the council and senate, who resoundingly voted in favour of honouring Obama, drew a line between his achievements as president and as an individual. “UJ is giving Obama an honorary doctorate. It is not honouring the policies of the US,” said Maluleke. “He’s failed in some instances [as president]. We can debate that issue. But let’s not say he can’t be honoured.” Obama’s academic achievements alone were enough to honour him, Maluleke said, pointing out that Obama graduated with a law doctorate degree magna cum laude in 1991….

It’s not even our event,” he said. Obama’s address to young leaders on the campus was organised by the US embassy in Pretoria.

U.S. AFRICOM Military Exercise in South Africa

Just about three weeks after Obama departed South Africa, his military paid a visit to the countrystarting on July 24: Exercise Shared Accord 2013 involved roughly 700 U.S. and 3,000 South African Defense Force troops. It was the second such exercise between the two. “This particular exercise is aimed at specifically providing collective training for the United States and the South African National Defense Force while building interoperability and mutual understanding between the two armed forces,” in the words of South African Major General Ephraim Phako. For his part, Brigadier General Peter L. Corey, deputy commander of U.S. Army Africa, said: “We are here also to learn how [South Africans] conduct their day-to-day operations, airborne operations and peacekeeping operations and in turn show them how we conduct those same operations. We will improve our own skills by training with them in a different environment.” The exercise involved “a live-fire operation, airborne and dismounted infantry tactics, a maritime amphibious assault, peacekeeping operations and disaster response. In addition, a humanitarian civic assistance project is scheduled which will provide primary medical, veterinary and optometry assistance to the local population”.

The CIA: Converting Libya into a Covert Military Asset

More details, and further confirmation, emerged over the last few weeks about the U.S.’ use of its Benghazi post in Libya as part of a CIA operation to illegally send heavy weapons to rebels in Syria. This means that while the Obama administration had claimed it was not arming the rebels, it actually was, in what is in effect an undeclared war that has received no Congressional approval or oversight. This is many months before Obama finally declared, two months ago, the U.S. would “now” arm Syrian insurgents, and that even that would not include “heavy weapons”. The pronouncement was superfluous and misleading at best.

In an attempt to further hide information from the public, the Obama administration is now going to unprecedented extremes in trying to clamp down on any potential disclosures from the CIA,CNN reported. Repeated polygraph tests of CIA employees are designed to ensure that no one is speaking to the media, or Congress. What we now know is that Benghazi post was not so much a “diplomatic” mission as it was a CIA hub: of the 35 U.S. employees there on the night that Ambassador Chris Stevens was killed, 21 of them were CIA agents, including two that were killed with Stevens. The State Department merely provided a façade for a covert mission, conducted without the knowledge or approval of Congress. None have mentioned how similar this is to the essence of Reagan’s “Iran-Contra” scandal, which at least was investigated and publicly discussed. The shadow government has come a long way, in becoming ever more shadowy.

For more, see this compelling report:

Zimbabwe: U.S. Rails against a Predicted Electoral Victory

In one of the outstanding ironies of Obama’s trip to Africa, he took time out to issue declarations on Zimbabwe’s elections, yet to take place at the time. His concern was for “free and fair elections,” and Obama’s narrative seemed to be at least ten years out of date in describing Zimbabwe as some sort of economic basket case. This was ironic given what was about to take place elsewhere on the African continent, mere days after Obama’s “democracy promotion” tour: the military coup in Egypt, which the U.S. tacitly if not directly backed and approved, refusing to issue any criticisms whatsoever. When it comes to mixed signals, Obama is a master of confusion.

In none of the narratives that dominate Western media is there any conceptualization of how Zimbabwe’s elections were already pre-rigged by the intervention for foreign powers such as the U.S. and UK in backing Morgan Tsvangirai. No election can be deemed free or fair once one side in an electoral contest is going beyond the rules of the game by courting favour with imperial powers. Once again, imperialism and democracy are fundamentally incompatible, anywhere; states in the periphery, with limited resources, who seek to fight against imperialism sometimes do so also at the expense of the sorts of liberties that liberal idealists imagine should be universal, regardless of context.

One has to wonder how some Western commentators had come to believe that victory was either possible or likely for a scandal-plagued Morgan Tsvangirai, trailed by accounts of corruption, widely seen as losing touch with his base, and up against a ruling ZANU-PF at the helm of popular land reform and indigenization programs. It’s not just the New York Times, CNN, and the BBC that have suddenly aired these criticisms of the failures and betrayals by Tsvangirai, it is also former members of the MDC who, while remaining staunchly critical of Robert Mugabe, see good reason in the landslide victory of the ZANU-PF–and not because of vote rigging. It was Tsvangirai himself, after all, who went on an international your not long ago, to praise the successes of Zimbabwe and call for an end to sanctions.

Morgan Tsvangirai had denounced the elections from before the first general votes were ever cast, and yet chose to participate nonetheless. Why? (It’s not among the questions the BBC chose to raise.) Indeed, as even critics of Mugabe themselves noted:

It becomes difficult to sustain rigging as the main reason when the pro-opposition Western-funded local elections monitoring body, the Zimbabwe Elections Support Network (ZESN), that had 7000 observers nation wide, tells us that: “in 98% of polling stations there were no incidents of intimidation… at 98% of polling stations, no one attempted to intimidate or influence election officials during counting nor did anyone attempt to disrupt the counting process …and MDC-T agents signed the V-11 results form at 97% stations at which they were present”, which were subsequently posted outside polling stations.

If there was blatant rigging why sign?

So has there been an upsurge of support for the ruling ZANU-PF? That there indeed was a surge in popular support was registered before the elections in polls conducted by outside groups, none of which have any love for Mugabe. One poll, conducted by the U.S.’ Freedom House in conjunction with the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, found that “support for the Movement for Democratic Change, or M.D.C., the main opposition party, has fallen from 38 percent in 2010 to 20 percent this year among voters who declared a preference….Over the same period, by contrast, support for ZANU-PF grew to 31 percent from 17 percent, the survey found”. One of the anti-Mugabe organizations, Zimbabwe Vigil, also said that “the MDC-T would likely lose the next elections”. Not even the friendliest survey, by Afrobarometer, as reported by the Voice of America, could conclude that Tsvangirai had good chances of an electoral victory. While Western media usually report that urban areas, such as the capital Harare, are strongholds of support for the MDC, that too is outdated: “in Harare, MDC-T support declined from 50 percent in 2010 to 17 percent, while that for Zanu-PF rose from eight percent to 22 percent”. When it came to the referendum for a new constitution that would govern the elections, it was the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, who declared that the March 16, 2013, vote was “peaceful, successful and credible,” and which saw nearly 95% of voters approving the new constitution–”the referendum passed without incident and turnout was high”.

One of the organizations making most of the claims of vote rigging, and most often quoted by Western media, has been the Zimbabwe Election Support Network (ZESN), formed in 2000. At first glance, the credentials of this umbrella body could seem impeccable. However, as keen as it is about “transparency,” one might find it curious that the ZESN is somewhat muted and evasiveabout its own sources of funding: “The organisation is 100 % donor funded by both local and international funding partners”. It does not name those “international funding partners,” but there are other ways to find out. U.S. Embassy cables provide some answers. Here is what we know:

the Zimbabwe Electoral Support Network (ZESN) received funding via the U.S.’ Economic Support Fund, in part to support the ZESN’s media activities.
the U.S. also listed the ZESN as a partner of USAID‘s Democracy & Governance program (also here).
there is past evidence that the ZESN coordinated its election monitoring with the U.S. Embassy.

While these facts do not necessarily mean that the ZESN simply fabricated its allegations, they do call into question its neutrality and independence, and thus ultimately its credibility.

According to the investigations made by a Zimbabwean newspaper, both the U.S., EU and UK have continued to fund the opposition even until recently:

The US State Department made two separate deposits into a Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition local account on January 23, 2013 (US$264 684) and June 24 2013 (US$187 978,04) to finance the so-called Feya Feya campaign which is designed to lure voters to the MDC-T under the guise of a campaign for peaceful, free and fair elections.

The EU, on the other hand, through non-governmental organisations, Humanist Institute for Co-operation (Hivos) and International Media Support (IMS) has also availed $ 736 530.00 to ZESN to carry out a quasi-election monitoring exercise whose intended purpose is to “authenticate” the Western stance that the elections are not free and fair if the MDC-T loses.

The money was paid in four tranches on April 17 2013 (US$168 258 and US$199 993-00), July 10, 2013 (US$168 258) and 11 July 2013 (US$199 993).

The British Embassy also joined the fray and availed US$156 000 on January 30, 2013 and US$161 000 (February 13, 2013) to Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition for the MDC-T campaign.

But the question remains: why was there such a resounding victory for Mugabe and the ZANU-PF? Here some of Mugabe’s own critics on the left provide a plausible account:

…Mugabe strategically brilliantly re-positioned his party leftward, around land, indigenisation [majority Zimbabwe ownership of companies], economic empowerment and African nationalism. Such re-orientation had also saved him from the 1990s revolts. Mugabe and his ministers, using diamond money and proceeds from indigenisation, dished out seeds, fertiliser, food to rural farmers, recognised informal miners, the informal sector, gave out urban housing stands and projects for youths and women. They vigorously courted the independent African churches and ran an anti-West anti-sanctions campaign. On the eve of elections minister Chombo announced a hugely popular cancellation of council debts which was denounced by MDC. As agriculture recovered driven by 80,000 new tobacco farmers who in 2013 produced 164 million kilograms worth over $600 million, ZANU-PF’s rural base soared nation-wide but especially the agriculturally rich Mashonaland belt, just as that of Tsvangirai and MDC massively shrunk. It is therefore not surprising that the defining character of these elections was that the rural voters, across the country rejected and abandoned Tsvangirai and the MDCs. ZANU-PF’s 40%-strong showing in the towns shows that many urban poor are following. As in Kenya and Zambia, where rising African nationalism triumphed, and the anti-neoliberal revolts across the world, the rural poor rejected MDC as the party most closely identified with austerity and Western puppetry.

Understanding the roots of its victory, the ruling party declared a renewed drive towards further indigenization of the economy and thus,

“ZANU-PF ran full-page advertisements in newspapers saying its crushing election win was an endorsement of ‘black economic empowerment’ plans that target foreign-owned companies including banks and mines. ‘The people of Zimbabwe have given President Robert Mugabe and ZANU-PF a clear mandate to transform the economy through indeginisation and economic empowerment,’ the party said. ‘Over the next five years, Zimbabwe is going to witness a unique wealth transfer model that will see ordinary people take charge of the economy.’ ZANU-PF has set its eyes on 1,100 foreign-owned firms. It also pledged to leverage mineral reserves ranging from gold to diamonds to platinum to raise money to prop up an economy still emerging from a decade-long recession”.

As I argued at the outset of this section, this election would be a misunderstood one if we restricted our analysis so that the contest appears as one merely between two local adversaries. An analytical framework that instead sees this as a contest between imperialism and indigenization, in an effort to push the kind of neoliberal agenda that dominated Obama’s Africa tour, is more credible and is attested to by the key actors’ statements themselves. For example, apparently anticipating his defeat, Tsvangirai was quick to call on his foreign backers, or more accurately, to complain that they are not acting visibly to overturn the election:

Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai said Friday that he felt betrayed by his erstwhile backers in the West who seem to have resigned given up [sic] on actively seeking to topple President Robert Mugabe and are even prepared to accept his victory in next week’s elections….“For some years, there has been a movement towards democratic precondition. But people get tired of the Zimbabwean issue so what do they do? They resign and they say stability is better than democracy and any form of accommodation of bringing ‘our relations with Zimbabwe by whatever means, we will do it’.”

For his part, in his first public comments after the election Mugabe stressed against which forces this was a huge victory:

“We are very happy that we have dealt the enemy a blow, and the enemy is not (opposition leader Morgan) Tsvangirai. Tsvangirai is a mere part of the enemy. The enemy is he who is behind Tsvangirai. Who is behind the MDC? The British and their allies. Those are the ones who were the real enemies.”

As in Zimbabwe, when it comes to Kenya Glen Ford says: “The United States is angry because Washington wanted the Kenyan people to elect a different president, one more acceptable to U.S. policymakers. The Americans expected the whole of Kenyan civil society to bend to Washington’s will, and reject the candidacy of Uhuru Kenyatta, simply to please the superpower. When that didn’t happen, it was decided that Kenya must be shunned, despite its past services to U.S. imperialism. [Obama] Skipping Kenya [during his tour] was a warning that more serious repercussions may lurk in the future.”

For past articles of relevance on Zimbabwe, please see:

The Bush-Obama Africa Continuum

One of the odd coincidences of Obama’s tour is that it coincided with that of former president George W. Bush. Almost to the end, Obama’s handlers seemed to downplay the fact that both Bush and Obama would be in Tanzania at the same time. Eventually, the two camps joined together, with some telling statements and symbolically useful photo ops.

“George, stay a little behind me there, or they’ll think you’re still the President.” Obama and Bush walk to a terrorist attack memorial in Tanzania in July 2013.

“Hey Mich, if you keep this up soon you’re gonna start looking like me too!” The “first ladies” have a get together in Tanzania in July 2013.

As one reporter recounted about the spouses of Bush and Obama:

“their wives were putting on a public display of mutual affection in a discussion moderated by American journalist Cokie Roberts. Mrs. Obama said she wanted to appear with Laura Bush because “I like this woman” and it’s therapeutic to share the challenges of their roles.

“It’s sort of a club, a sorority, I guess,” Mrs. Bush responded.

The two presidents meanwhile joined together for–unsurprisingly–a commemoration of a terrorist attack.

Going back to the opening quote of this report, at least one writer spoke explicitly of the “Africa continuum” in U.S. foreign policy:

There are also a dizzying number of counterterrorism wars on this continent, all either launched or intensified on Obama’s watch: against Boko Haram in Nigeria; al-Shabaab in Somalia; the Lord’s Resistance Army (Joseph Kony) in the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the U.S.-midwifed state of South Sudan; and the Signatories in Blood in Algeria. And this doesn’t count the U.S. efforts to reverse a coup in Mali staged by Amadou Haya Sarog, a commander who received extensive military training in the U.S.

America now has 4,000 to 5,000 troops, mostly in Djibouti and drone bases there and Niger. Questions about the U.S. “militarization” of Africa were raised before and throughout Obama’s three-nation tour.

They rippled through the comments of retired Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu in Cape Town on Sunday. Looking squarely at Obama, Tutu said, “Your failure, whether you like it or not, is our failure. We pray that you will be known as having brought peace in all of these places where there is strife …and no more need for Guantanamo Bay Detention Center.”

Obama. Lectured by Tutu. About Gitmo. In Africa. Could there be a better, more prickly example, of how deeply Obama and Bush have become entwined?

References

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———- . (2013/6/28). “Sweet Potatoes and Ending Hunger in Africa.” The White House Blog, June 28.

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US Government “Protection” of Al-Qaeda Terrorists and the US-Saudi “Black Hole”

2013-08-07T23:08:00.000+03:00

US Government “Protection” of Al-Qaeda Terrorists and the US-Saudi “Black Hole”

For almost two centuries American government, though always imperfect, was also a model for the world of limited government, having evolved a system of restraints on executive power through its constitutional arrangement of checks and balances.

Since 9/11 however, constitutional American government has been overshadowed by a series of emergency measures to fight terrorism. The latter have mushroomed in size and budget, while traditional government has been shrunk.

As a result we have today what the journalist Dana Priest has called

two governments: the one its citizens were familiar with, operated more or less in the open: the other a parallel top secret government whose parts had mushroomed in less than a decade into a gigantic, sprawling universe of its own, visible to only a carefully vetted cadre – and its entirety…visible only to God.[1]

More and more, it is becoming common to say that America, like Turkey before it, now has what Marc Ambinder and John Tirman have called a deep state behind the public one.[2] And this parallel government is guided in surveillance matters by its own Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court, which according to the New York Times “has quietly become almost a parallel Supreme Court.”[3] Thanks largely to Edward Snowden, it is now clear that the FISA Court has permitted this deep state to expand surveillance beyond the tiny number of known and suspected Islamic terrorists, to any incipient protest movement that might challenge the policies of the American war machine.

Americans have by and large not questioned this parallel government, accepting that sacrifices of traditional rights and traditional transparency are necessary to keep us safe from al Qaeda attacks. However secret power is unchecked power, and experience of the last century has only reinforced the truth of Lord Acton’s famous dictum that unchecked power always corrupts. It is time to consider the extent to which American secret agencies have developed a symbiotic relationship with the forces they are supposed to be fighting – and have even on occasion intervened to let al-Qaeda terrorists proceed with their plots.

“Intervened to let al-Qaeda terrorists proceed with their plots”? These words as I write them make me wonder yet again, as I so often do, if I am not losing my marbles, and proving myself to be no more than a zany “conspiracy theorist.” Yet I have to remind myself that my claim is not one coming from theory, but from certain undisputed facts, about incidents that are true even though they have been systematically suppressed or under-reported in the American mainstream media.

Worse, I am describing a phenomenon that occurred not just once, but consistently, almost predictably. We shall see that, among the al-Qaeda terrorists who were first protected and then continued their activities were

1) Ali Mohamed, identified in the 9/11 Commission Report (p. 68) as the leader of the 1998 Nairobi Embassy bombing;

2) Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, Osama bin Laden’s close friend and financier while in the Philippines of Ramzi Yousef (principle architect of the first WTC attack) and his uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (next)

3) Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, identified in the 9/11 Commission Report (p. 145) as “the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks.”

4) Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. two of the alleged 9/11 hijackers, whose presence in the United States was concealed from the FBI by CIA officers for months before 9/11.[4]

It might sound from these three citations that the 9/11 Commission marked a new stage in the U.S. treatment of these terrorists, and that the Report now exposed those terrorists who in the past had been protected. On the contrary, a principal purpose of my essay is to show that

1) one purpose of protecting these individuals had been to protect a valued intelligence connection (the “Al-Qaeda connection” if you will);

2) one major intention in the 9/11 Commission Report was to continue protecting this connection;

3) those on the 9/11 Commission staff who were charged with this protection included at least one commission member (Jamie Gorelick), one staff member (Dietrich Snell) and one important witness (Patrick Fitzgerald) who earlier had figured among the terrorists’ protectors.

In the course of writing this essay, I came to another disturbing conclusion I had not anticipated. This is that a central feature of the protection has been to defend the 9/11 Commission’s false picture of al-Qaeda as an example of non-state terrorism, at odds with not just the CIA but also the royal families of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. In reality, as I shall show, royal family protection from Qatar and Saudi Arabia (concealed by the 9/11 Commission) was repeatedly given to key figures like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged “principal architect of the 9/11 attacks.”

This finding totally undermines the claim that the wars fought by America in Asia since 9/11 have been part of a global “war on terror.” On the contrary, the result of the wars has been to establish a permanent U.S. military presence in the oil- and gas-rich regions of Central Asia, in alliance with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Pakistan – the principal backers of the jihadi terrorist networks the U.S. been supposedly fighting. Meanwhile the most authentic opponents in the region of these Sunni jihadi terrorists – the governments of Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Iran – have found themselves overthrown (in the case of Iraq and Libya) subverted with U.S. support (in the case of Syria), or sanctioned and threatened as part of an “axis of evil” (in the case of Iran). We should not forget that, just one day after 9/11, “Rumsfeld was talking about broadening the objectives of our response and ‘getting Iraq.’”[5]

The protection to terrorists described in this essay, in other words, has been sustained partly in order to support the false ideology that has underlain U.S. Asian wars for more than a decade. And the blame cannot be assigned all to the Saudis. Two months before 9/11, FBI counter-terrorism expert John O’Neill described to the French journalist Jean-Charles Brisard America’s “impotence” in getting help from Saudi Arabia concerning terrorist networks. The reason? In Brisard’s paraphrase, “Just one: the petroleum interests.”[6] Former CIA officer Robert Baer voiced a similar complaint in complained about the lobbying influence of “the Foreign Oil Companies Group, a cover for a cartel of major petroleum companies doing business in the Caspian. . . . The deeper I got, the more Caspian oil money I found sloshing around Washington.”[7]

The decade of protection for terrorists demonstrates the power of this extra dimension to the American deep state: the dark forces in our society responsible for protecting terrorists, over and above the parallel government institutionalized on and after 9/11.[8] Although I cannot securely define these dark forces, I hope to demonstrate that they are related to the black hole at the heart of the complex U.S-Saudi connection, a complex that involves the oil majors like Exxon, the military domination of oil and gas movements from the Persian Gulf and Central Asia, offsetting arms sales, Saudi investments in major U.S. corporations like Citibank and the Carlyle Group, and above all the ultimate United States dependency on Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and OPEC, for the defense of the petrodollar.[9]

This deeper dimension of the deep state, behind its institutional manifestation in our parallel government, is a far greater threat than foreign terrorism to the preservation of U.S. democracy.

The FBI’s Intervention with the RCMP to Release Ali Mohamed, 1993

Let me begin this essay with the FBI’s instruction in 1993 to the Canadian RCMP to release the al-Qaeda organizer Mohamed Ali, who then proceeded to Nairobi in the same year to begin planning the U.S. Embassy bombing of 1998.

In early 1993 a wanted Egyptian terrorist named Essam Hafez Marzouk, a close ally of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, arrived at Canada’s Vancouver Airport and was promptly detained by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). A second terrorist named Mohamed Ali, “the primary U.S. intelligence agent for Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden,” came from California to the airport to meet him; and, not finding him, made the mistake of asking about his friend at the Vancouver airport customs office. As a result the RCMP interrogated Mohamed Ali for two days, but finally released him, even though Ali had clearly come in order to smugle a wanted terrorist into the United States.[10]

If the RCMP had detained Mohamed Ali, who was much bigger game than the first terrorist, hundreds of lives might have been saved. After being released, Ali went on to Nairobi, Kenya. There in December 1993 he and his team photographed the U.S. Embassy, and then delivered the photos to Osama bin Laden in Khartoum, leading to the Embassy bombing of 1998.[11] Ali later told an FBI agent that at some point he also trained al Qaeda terrorists in how to hijack airplanes using box cutters.[12]

The RCMP release of Ali Mohamed was unjustified, clearly had historic consequences, and may have contributed to 9/11. Yet the release was done for a bureaucratic reason: Ali Mohamed gave the RCMP the phone number of an FBI agent, John Zent, in the San Francisco FBI office, and told them, “If they called that number, the agent on the other end of the line would vouch for him.” As Ali had predicted, Zent ordered his release.[13]

Ali Mohamed was an important double agent, of major interest to more important U.S. authorities than Zent. Although Mohamed was at last arrested in September 1998 for his role in the Nairobi Embassy bombing, the USG still had not sentenced him in 2006; and he may still not have gone to jail.[14]

The story of his release in Vancouver and its consequences is another example of the dangers of working with double agents. One can never be sure if the agent is working for his movement, for his agency, or – perhaps most likely – for increasing his own power along with that of both his movement and his agency, by increasing violence in the world.[15]

Ali Mohamed’s Release as a Deep Event Ignored by the U.S. Media

Mohamed’s release in Vancouver was a deep event, by which I mean an event predictably suppressed in the media and still not fully understandable. A whole chapter in my book The Road to 9/11 was not enough to describe Mohamed’s intricate relationships at various times with the CIA, U.S. Special Forces at Fort Bragg, the murder of Jewish extremist Meir Kahane, and finally the cover-up of 9/11 perpetrated by the 9/11 Commission and their witness, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald (Mohamed’s former prosecutor).[16]

The deep event is also an example of deep politics, a mixture of intrigue and suppression involving not just a part of the U.S. Government, but also the governing media. To this day (according to a 2013 search of Lexis Nexis) the Vancouver release incident, well covered in Canada’s leading newspaper The Toronto Globe and Mail (December 22, 2001), has never been mentioned in any major American newspaper.

More disturbingly, it is not hinted at the otherwise well-informed books and articles about Ali Mohamed by Steven Emerson, Peter Bergen, and Lawrence Wright.[17] Nor is there any surviving mention of it in the best insider’s book about the FBI and Ali Mohamed, The Black Banners, by former FBI agent Ali Soufan (a book that was itself heavily and inexcusably censored by the CIA, after being cleared for publication by the FBI).[18] Since first publishing this paragraph, I have noticed that former CIA office Michael Scheuer also faults both Steve Coll and Lawrence Wright for their “whole-hog acceptance of the Saudi narrative” that minimizes U.S.-Saudi differences.[19]

There is no doubt of the FBI’s responsibility for Mohamed’s release, It (along with other FBI anomalies in handling Mohamed) is frankly acknowledged in a Pentagon Internet article on Mohamed:

In early 1993, Mohamed was detained by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) at the Vancouver, Canada, airport. He had come to the airport to meet an Egyptian who had arrived from Damascus but was found to be carrying two forged Saudi passports. When Mohamed was about to be arrested as well, he told the RCMP he was collaborating with the FBI and gave them a name and phone number to call to confirm this. The RCMP made the call and Mohamed was released immediately at the request of the FBI. When the FBI subsequently questioned Mohamed about this incident, he offered information about a ring in California that was selling counterfeit documents to smugglers of illegal aliens. This is the earliest hard evidence that is publicly available of Mohamed being an FBI informant.[20]

Contrast this official candor about the FBI responsibility for Mohamed’s release with the suppression of it in a much longer account of Mohamed (3200 words) by Benjamin Weiner and James Risen in the New York Times:

[In 1993] he was stopped by the border authorities in Canada, while traveling in the company of a suspected associate of Mr. bin Laden’s who was trying to enter the United States using false documents.

Soon after, Mr. Mohamed was questioned by the F.B.I., which had learned of his ties to Mr. bin Laden. Apparently in an attempt to fend off the investigators, Mr. Mohamed offered information about a ring in California that was selling counterfeit documents to smugglers of illegal aliens.[21]

A long Wall Street Journal account massages the facts even more evasively:

At about the same time [1993], the elusive Mr. Mohamed popped up again on the FBI radar screen with information that underscored the emerging bin Laden threat. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police questioned Mr. Mohamed in the spring of 1993 after his identification was discovered on another Arab man trying to enter the U.S. from Vancouver — a man Mr. Mohamed identified as someone who had helped him move Mr. bin Laden to Sudan. The FBI located Mr. Mohamed near San Francisco in 1993, where he volunteered the earliest insider description of al Qaeda that is publicly known.[22]

In 1998, after the Embassy bombings, Mohamed was finally arrested. In the ensuing trial an FBI Agent, Daniel Coleman, entered a court affidavit (approved by prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald) which summarized the Vancouver incident as follows:

In 1993, MOHAMED advised the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (“RCMP”) that he had provided intelligence and counter-intelligence training in Afghanistan to a particular individual…. MOHAMED admitted that he had travelled to Vancouver, Canada, in the spring of 1993 to facilitate the entry of that individual into the United States…. MOHAMED further admitted that he and the individual had transported Osama bin Laden from Afghanistan to the Sudan in 1991…. MOHAMED told the RCMP that he was in the process of applying for a job as an FBI interpreter and did not want this incident to jeopardize the application. (In fact, MOHAMED then had such an application pending though he was never hired as a translator.)[23]

Like the American media, this FBI affidavit suppressed the fact that Mohamed, an admitted ally of Osama bin Laden caught red-handed with another known terrorist, was released on orders from the FBI.

The Two Levels of American History: Official History and Deep History

The whole episode illustrates what has become all too common in recent American history, the way in which secret bureaucratic policies can take priority over the public interest, even to the point of leading to mass murder (since it contributed at a minimum to the 1998 Embassy bombings, if not also 9/11). It is also an example of what I mean by the two levels of history in America, We can refer to them as those historical facts officially acknowledged, and those facts officially suppressed; or alternatively as those facts fit to be mentioned in the governing media, and those suppressed by the same media. This leads in turn to two levels of historical narrative: official or archival history, which ignores or marginalizes deep events, and a second level – called deep history by its practitioners or “conspiracy theory” by its critics – which incorporates them. The method of deep political research is to recover deep events from this second level.

This activity sets deep political research at odds with the governing media, but not, I believe with the national interest. Speaking personally as an ex-diplomat, I should state clearly that the national interest does occasionally require secrets, at least for a time. Kissinger’s trip to China, for example, which led to a normalization of U.S.-Chinese relations, probably required secrecy (at least at the time) in order to succeed.

When insiders and the governing media collaborate in the keeping of a secret, as in the case of the FBI-ordered release of Mohamed, they probably persuade themselves that they are protecting, not just the FBI, but national security. However national security in this case was conspicuously not served by the subsequent embassy bombings, let alone by 9/11.

In the glaring gap between these two levels of history is a third level — that of the privileged books about Mohamed – privileged in the sense that they have access to sources denied to others — that give important but selective parts of the truth. This selectivity is not necessarily culpable; it may for example be due to pressure from lawyers representing Saudi millionaires (a pressure I have yielded to myself).[24] But cumulatively it is misleading.

I owe a considerable debt in particular to Lawrence Wright’s book, The Looming Tower, which helped expose many problems and limitations in the official account of 9/11. But I see now in retrospect that I, like many others, have been delayed by its selectivity on many matters (including for example Mohamed’s RCMP release) from developing a less warped understanding of the truth.

The Longer History of FBI and USG Protection for Ali Mohamed

Why did John Zent vouchsafe for Mohamed in 1993, so that the RCMP released him. The explanation of Peter Lance, the best chronicler of the FBI’s culpability in both the first and second WTC attacks, is that Zent did so because Mohamed was already working as his personal informant, “feeding Zent ‘intelligence’ on Mexican smugglers who were moving illegal immigrants into the United States from the South.”[25] (FBI agent Cloonan confirms that Mohamed had been working as a local FBI informant since 1992.[26]) Elsewhere Lance describes Zent as “trusting and distracted,” so that he failed to realize Mohamed’s importance.[27]

But the FBI’s protection of Ali Mohamed did not begin with Zent. It dated back at least to 1989, when (according to the Pentagon Security bio)

While serving in the Army at Fort Bragg, he traveled on weekends to Jersey City, NJ, and to Connecticut to train other Islamic fundamentalists in surveillance, weapons and explosives. … Telephone records show that while at Fort Bragg and later, Mohamed maintained a very close and active relationship with the Office of Services [Makhtab-al-Khidimat] of the Mujihadeen, in Brooklyn, which at that time was recruiting volunteers and soliciting funds for the jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan. This was the main recruitment center for the network that, after the Soviets left Afghanistan, became known as al-Qaida….

The FBI observed and photographed Mohamed giving weapons training to a group of New York area residents during four successive weekends in July 1989. They drove from the Farouq Mosque in Brooklyn to a shooting range in Calverton, Long Island, and they fired AK-47 assault rifles, semiautomatic handguns and revolvers during what appeared to be training sessions. For reasons that are unknown, the FBI then ceased its surveillance of the group.[28]

(Similarly in 1993 an FBI supervisor would again abruptly close down surveillance of another group from the al-Kifah Center at a militant training camp in Pennsylvania.)[29]

In the subsequent trial of Mohamed’s trainees and others for bombing the World Trade Center, the defense attorney, Roger Stavis, established that Mohamed was giving the al-Kifah trainees “courses on how to make bombs, how to use guns, how to make Molotov cocktails.” He showed the court that a training manual seized in Nosair’s apartment “showed how to make explosives and some kind of improvised weapons and explosives.”[30]

So why would the FBI, having discovered terrorist training, then cease its surveillance? Here the Wall Street Journal has what I am sure is the right answer: the FBI ceased surveillance because they somehow determined that the men were training “to help the mujahedeen fighting the Soviet puppet government in Afghanistan.”[31] (Note that the mujahedeen were no longer fighting the Soviet army itself, which had been withdrawn from Afghanistan as of March 1989.)

Al-Kifah, Ali Mohamed, the Flow of Arabs to Afghanistan

Afghanistan is indeed the obvious explanation for the FBI’s terminating its videotaping of jihadists from the Brooklyn Al-Kifah Refugee Center. Incorporated officially in 1987 as “Afghan Refugee Services, Inc.,” the Al-Kifah Center “was the recruitment hub for U.S.-based Muslims seeking to fight the Soviets. As many as two hundred fighters were funneled through the center to Afghanistan.”[32]More importantly, it was

a branch of the Office of Services [Makhtab-al-Khidimat]. the Pakistan-based organization that Osama bin Laden helped finance and lead and would later become al Qaeda. In fact, it was Mustafa Shalabi, an Egyptian who founded and ran the center, whom bin Laden called in 1991 when he needed help moving to Sudan.[33]

As we shall see, the Makhtab, created in 1984 to organize Saudi financial support to the foreign “Arab Afghans” in the jihad, was part of a project that had the fullest support of the Saudi, Egyptian, and U.S. Governments. And Ali Mohamed, although he remained in the US Army Reserves until August 1994, was clearly an important trainer in that project, both in Afghanistan and in America.

A privileged account of Mohamed’s career by Peter Bergen, in Holy Wars, Inc., claims that

Ali Mohamed…was an indispensable player in al-Qaeda…. At some point in the early eighties he proffered his services as an informant to the CIA, the first of his several attempts to work for the U.S. government. The Agency was in contact with him for a few weeks but broke off relations after determining he was “unreliable.” That would turn out to be a masterful understatement, as Mohamed was already a member of Egypt’s terrorist Jihad group. After being discharged from the Egyptian Army in 1984, Mohamed [took] a job in the counterterrorism department of Egyptair. The following year he moved to the United States,[34]

Bergen’s most serious omission here is that Mohamed, though he was on the State Department’s visa watch list, had been admitted to the U.S. in 1984 “on a visa-waiver program that was sponsored by the agency [i.e. CIA] itself, one designed to shield valuable assets or those who have performed valuable services for the country.”[35] This should be enough to question the CIA’s account that it found Mohamed “unreliable.” (Later, one of Mohamed’s officers at Fort Bragg was also convinced that Mohamed was “sponsored” by a U.S. intelligence service, “I assumed the CIA.”)[36] In addition Bergen omits that, before Mohamed’s brief stint as a formal CIA agent, he had been selected out of the Egyptian army in 1981 for a leadership training at Fort Bragg – an important point to which we shall return.[37]

The FBI’s Cover-Up of Ali Mohamed in the Kahane Murder

The CIA may have wanted to think that the Al-Kifah training was only for Afghanistan. But the blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the mentor of the Center whom the CIA brought to America in 1990, was preaching for the killing of Jews and also for the destruction of the West.[38] His preachings guided Mohamed’s Makhtab trainees: as a first step, in November 1990, three of them conspired to kill Meir Kahane, the founder of the Jewish Defense League.

Kahane’s actual killer, El Sayyid Nosair, was detained by accident almost immediately, and by luck the police soon found his two coconspirators, Mahmoud Abouhalima and Mohammed Salameh, waiting at Nosair’s house. Also at the house, according to John Miller,

were training manuals from the Army Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg [where Ali Mohamed at the time was a training officer]. There were copies of teletypes that had been routed to the Secretary of the Army and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.[39]

And the Pentagon bio, with yet another gentle dig at the FBI, identifies the documents as Mohamed’s:

In a search of Nosair’s home, the police found U.S. Army training manuals, videotaped talks that Mohamed delivered at the JFK Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, operational plans for joint coalition exercises conducted in Egypt, and other materials marked Classified or Top Secret. These documents belonged to Mohamed, who often stayed in New Jersey with Nosair. The documents did not surface during Nosair’s 1991 trial for the Kahane murder. It is not known if the FBI investigated Mohamed in connection with these documents.

Yet only hours after the killing, Joseph Borelli, the chief of NYPD detectives, pronounced Nosair a “lone deranged gunman.”[40]A more extended account of his remarks in the New York Times actually alluded to Mohamed, though not by name, and minimized the significance of the links to terrorism in a detailed account of the Nosair home cache:

The files contained articles about firearms and explosives apparently culled from magazines, like Soldier of Fortune, appealing to would-be mercenaries. But the police said the handwritten papers, translated by an Arabic-speaking officer, appeared to be minor correspondence and did not mention terrorism or outline any plan to kill the militant Jewish leader who had called for the removal of all Arabs from Israel.

“There was nothing [at Nosair’s house] that would stir your imagination,” Chief Borelli said…. A joint anti-terrorist task force of New York City police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been set up to look into any possible international links to the slaying, the official said, but so far has not turned up anything.

“Nothing has transpired that changes our opinion that he acted alone,” Chief Borrelli told a news conference yesterday afternoon.[41]

Later an FBI spokesman said the FBI also believed “that Mr. Nosair had acted alone in shooting Rabbi Kahane.” “The bottom line is that we can’t connect anyone else to the Kahane shooting,” an FBI agent said.[42]

Blaming the New York County District Attorney, Robert Morgenthau, the FBI later claimed that the evidence retrieved from Nosair’s home was not processed for two or three years.[43] But Robert Friedman suggests that the FBI were not just lying to the public, but also to Morgenthau (who had just helped expose and bring down the CIA-favored Muslim bank BCCI).

According to other sources familiar with the case, the FBI told District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau that Nosair was a lone gunman, not part of a broader conspiracy; the prosecution took this position at trial and lost, only convicting Nosair of gun charges. Morgenthau speculated the CIA may have encouraged the FBI not to pursue any other leads, these sources say. ‘The FBI lied to me,’ Morgenthau has told colleagues. ‘They’re supposed to untangle terrorist connections, but they can’t be trusted to do the job.’[44]

Using evidence from the Nosair trial transcript, Peter Lance confirms the tension between Morgenthau’s office, which wanted to pursue Nosair’s international terrorist connections, and the FBI, which insisted on trying Nosair alone.[45]

The FBI’s Protection of Ali Mohamed in the 1993 WTC Bombing

In thus limiting the case, the police and the FBI were in effect protecting, not just Ali Mohamed, but also Nosair’s two Arab coconspirators, Mahmoud Abouhalima and Mohammed Salameh, in the murder of a U.S. citizen. The two were thus left free to kill again on February 26, 1993, one month after the FBI secured Mohamed’s release in Vancouver. Both Abouhalima and Salameh were ultimately convicted in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, along with another Mohamed trainee, Nidal Ayyad.

To quote the Pentagon bio yet again,

In February 1993, the terrorist cell that Mohamed had trained exploded a truck bomb under the World Trade Center that killed six and injured about 1,000 persons. The perpetrators of this bombing included people Mohamed had trained, and Mohamed had been in close contact with the cell during the period leading up to the bombing [i.e. including January 1993, the month of Mohamed’s detention and release in Vancouver]. Mohamed’s name appeared on a list of 118 potential un-indicted co-conspirators that was prepared by federal prosecutors.

Ali Mohamed was again listed as one of 172 unindicted co-conspirators in the follow-up “Landmarks” case, which convicted Sheikh Rahman and others of plotting to blow up the United Nations, the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, and the George Washington Bridge.[46] The two cases were closely related, as much of the evidence for the Landmarks case came from an informant, Emad Salem, whom the FBI had first planted among the WTC plotters. But the prosecutors’ awareness of Ali Mohamed’s involvement must be contrasted with the intelligence failure at the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center: according to Steve Coll, the CTC “immediately established a seven-day, twenty-four hour task force to collect intelligence about the World Trade Center bombing…but nothing of substance came in.”[47]

In the WTC bombing case, the FBI moved swiftly to bring the Al-Kifah plotters to trial one month later, in March. Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, a DIA officer, later said that

we [i.e. DIA] were surprised how quickly they’d [i.e. FBI] made the arrests after the first World Trade Center bombing. Only later did we find out that the FBI had been watching some of these people for months prior to both incidents [i.e. both the 1993 WTC bombing and 9/11].[48]

Shaffer’s claim that the FBI had been watching some of the plotters is abundantly corroborated, e.g. by Steve Coll in Ghost Wars.[49]

The U.S., Egyptian, and Saudi Backing for the Makhtab Network

What was being protected here by the FBI? One obvious answer is an extension of Lance’s explanation for Zent’s behavior: that Mohamed had already been a domestic FBI informant since 1992. However I entirely agree with New York County District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, who suspected that a much larger asset was being protected, the Saudi-sponsored network which we now know was the Makhtab-i-Khidimat, by this time already evolving into Al-Qaeda.

On the day the FBI arrested four Arabs for the World Trade Centre bombing, saying it had all of the suspects, Morgenthau’s ears pricked up. He didn’t believe the four were ‘self-starters,’ and speculated that there was probably a larger network as well as a foreign sponsor. He also had a hunch that the suspects would lead back to Sheikh Abdel Rahman. But he worried [correctly] that the dots might not be connected because the U.S. government was protecting the sheikh for his help in Afghanistan.[50]

This “larger network” of the Makhtab, although created in 1984, consolidated an assistance program that had been launched by the U.S. Government much earlier, at almost the beginning of the Afghan war itself.

In January 1980, Brzezinski visited Egypt to mobilize support for the jihad. Within weeks of his visit, Sadat authorized Egypt’s full participation, giving permission for the U.S. Air Force to use Egypt as a base…and recruiting, training, and arming Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood activists for battle…. Not only were they packaged and shipped to Afghanistan, but [by the end of 1980] they received expert training from U.S. Special Forces.[51]

U.S. military trainers had in fact already been in Egypt since at least 1978 (the year of the Israel-Egypt Camp David peace accords), training Sadat’s elite praetorian guard, of which Mohamed Ali was at the time a member. At first the training was handled by a “private” firm, J.J. Cappucci and Associates, owned by former CIA officers Ed Wilson and Theodore Shackley. But after Brzezinski’s visit in 1980, the contract was taken over by the CIA.[52]

In 1981 Ali Mohamed was selected out of the U.S.-trained praetorian guard for four months of Special Forces training at Fort Bragg: “Working alongside Green Berets, he learned unconventional warfare, counterinsurgency operations, and how to command elite soldiers on difficult missions.”[53]The leadership aspect of this training almost certainly means that Mohamed was part of the Pentagon’s Professional military education (PME) program for future leaders; and that he was being trained to transmit to Egypt the kind of Afghanistan-related skills that he later provided to Al-Kifah on Long Island in 1989.

Mohamed was thus in America when some of his fellow guard members, responding to a fatwa or religious order from Muslim Brotherhood member Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, assassinated Sadat in October 1981. The assassination only accelerated the export to Afghanistan of Muslim Brotherhood members accused of the murder. These included two of Mohamed’s eventual close associates, Sheikh Abdel Rahman and Rahman’s then friend Ayman al-Zawahiri, to whom Mohamed swore a bayat or oath of allegiance in 1984, after his return to Egypt.[54]

The Al-Kifah Target in 1993: Not Afghanistan but Bosnia

Morgenthau’s suspicions about Afghanistan in 1993 were very pertinent, but also somewhat anachronistic; by 1993, under its new director James Woolsey, the CIA had lost interest in Afghanistan. The new interim president of Afghanistan, Mojaddedi, under pressure from Washington, announced that the Arab Afghans should leave. Pakistan followed suit, closed the offices of all mujahedin in its country, and ordered the deportation of all Arab Afghans.[55]

But the Al-Kifah support network had new targets in mind elsewhere.

After 1991 the Brooklyn center was focused chiefly on training people for jihad in Bosnia, and at least two sources allege that Ali Mohamed himself visited Bosnia in 1992 (when he also returned to Afghanistan).[56]

Al-Kifah’s English-language newsletter Al-Hussam (The Sword) also began publishing regular updates on jihad action in Bosnia….Under the control of the minions of Shaykh Omar Abdel Rahman, the newsletter aggressively incited sympathetic Muslims to join the jihad in Bosnia and Afghanistan themselves….The Al-Kifah Bosnian branch office in Zagreb, Croatia, housed in a modern, two-story building, was evidently in close communication with the organizational headquarters in New York. The deputy director of the Zagreb office, Hassan Hakim, admitted to receiving all orders and funding directly from the main United States office of Al-Kifah on Atlantic Avenue controlled by Shaykh Omar Abdel Rahman.[57]

One of Ali Mohamed’s trainees at al-Kifah, Rodney Hampton-El, assisted in this support program, recruiting warriors from U.S. Army bases like Fort Belvoir, and also training them to be fighters in New Jersey.[58] In 1995 Hampton-El was tried and convicted for his role (along with al-Kifah leader Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman) in the plot to blow up New York landmarks. At the trial Hampton-El testified how he was personally given thousands of dollars for this project by Saudi Prince Faisal in the Washington Saudi Embassy.[59] (In addition, “Saudi intelligence has contributed to Sheikh Rahman’s legal-defence fund, according to Mohammed al-Khilewi, the former first secretary to the Saudi mission at the U.N.)”[60]

Al-Kifah, Al-Qaeda, Tajikistan, and Drugs

Meanwhile the ISI had not lost interest in bin Laden’s Arabs, but began to recruit them with bin Laden’s support for battle in new areas, notably Kashmir.[61] Bin Laden in the same period began to dispatch his jihadis into areas of the former Soviet Union, notably to the infant Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) in Tajikistan.

The outbreak of Islamist violence in Tajikistan…moved bin Laden to send a limited number of Al-Qaeda cadre to support Tajik Islamist forces, among them his close associate Wali Khan Amin Shah [an Uzbek later working in the Philippines with Ramzi Yousuf and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] and the soon-to-be-famous mujahid, Ibn Khattab. In addition, bin Laden, even after his 1991 move to Sudan, continued to run training camps in Afghanistan, where he welcomed the chance to train Tajiks, Uzbeks, Uighurs, and Chechens.[62]

In an al-Qaeda document captured in Iraq, bin Laden wrote

with the grace of Allah, we were successful in cooperating with our brothers in Tajikistan in various fields including training. We were able train a good number of them, arm them and deliver them to Tajikistan. Moreover, Allah facilitated to us delivering weapons and ammunition to them; we pray that Allah grants us all victory[63]

Many other accounts report that the delivery of arms and ammunition was facilitated by the involvement of the IMU and bin Laden in the massive flow of heroin from Afghanistan into the former Soviet Union. According to Ahmed Rashid,

Much of the I.M.U.’s financing came from the lucrative opium trade through Afghanistan. Ralf Mutschke, the assistant director of Interpol’s Criminal Intelligence Directorate, estimated that sixty per cent of Afghan opium exports were moving through Central Asia and that the “I.M.U. may be responsible for seventy per cent of the total amount of heroin and opium transiting through the area.”[64]

Among the experts confirming the IMU-al-Qaeda-drug connection is Gretchen Peters,

The opium trade… supported the global ambitions of Osama bin Laden…. There was … evidence that bin Laden served as middleman between the Taliban and Arab drug smugglers…. With Mullah Omar’s approval, bin Laden hijacked the state-run Ariana Airlines, turning it into a narco-terror charter service… according to former U.S. and Afghan officials…. One U.S. intelligence report seen by the author described a smuggling route snaking up through Afghanistan’s northwest provinces if Baghdis, Faryab, and Jowzan into Turkmenistan. It was being used as of mid-2004 by “extremists associated with the Taliban, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and al-Qaeda,” the report said. Traffickers would move “both heroin and terrorists” along the route and “then onwards into other countries in Central Asia,” the CIA document said.[65]

It has been widely reported that in the early 1990s, as US financial support dwindled and bin Laden’s finances were being rapidly exhausted in Sudan, his new involvement with the IMU and later the Taliban involved al-Qaeda also in the growing Afghan heroin traffic. Peters saw a CIA document confirming this.[66] Yet the 9/11 Report, in contorted language, denied this, as did a Staff Report:

No persuasive evidence exists that al Qaeda relied on the drug trade as an important source of revenue, had any substantial involvement with conflict diamonds, or was financially sponsored by any foreign government.[67]

This surprising claim was at odds with the views of many U.S. intelligence operatives. It also contradicted the official position of the British government, which told its Parliament in 2001,

Usama Bin Laden and Al Qaida have been based in Afghanistan since 1996, but have a network of operations throughout the world. The network includes training camps, warehouses, communication facilities and commercial operations able to raise significant sums of money to support its activity. That activity includes substantial exploitation of the illegal drugs trade from Afghanistan.[68]

And there were allegations that the Brooklyn Al-Kifah Center, as well as bin Laden, was involved in drug trafficking.Back in 1993, the New York Times reported that, according to investigators, “Some of the 11 men charged in the [Day of Terror] plot to bomb New York City targets are also suspected of trafficking in drugs.”[69] Mujahid Abdulqaadir Menepta, a Muslim suspect in both the 9/11 case and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, was linked by telephone numbers on his cell phones to ongoing criminal investigations, involving “organized crime, drugs, and money laundering.”[70] And Raed Hijazi, an al Qaeda terrorist arrested in Jordan in 1999, had previously become an FBI informant in order to avoid drug charges.[71]

Was the U.S. Protection of the Al-Kifah Center Intended to Help Export Jihadis?

There is also no treatment in the 9/11 Report, and almost none elsewhere, of the allegations from Steven Emerson that by 1987, the Al-Kifah Center Al-Farooq Mosque in Brooklyn “had become a center for counterfeiting tens of thousands of dollars.”[72] Similarly there has been no government follow-up of the allegation by Yossef Bodansky, citing FBI informant Emad Salem, that one of the Al-Kifah cell leaders (Siddiq Ibrahim Siddig Ali)

had offered to sell a million dollars [of counterfeit currency] for $150,000, well below market value. … Quantities of counterfeit $100 bills were later found at the apartment of Sheikh Umar Abdel-Rahman.[73]

J.M. Berger goes further, reporting from court testimony: “In order to support Al Kifah’s operations,” Mustafa Shalabi, the head of the Al-Kifah Center until his murder in 1991, “employed a number of for-profit criminal enterprises, including gunrunning, arson for hire, and a counterfeiting ring set up in the basement of the jihad office.”[74] Yet the 9/11 Report is silent about these serious charges, which U.S. prosecutors at the time did not pursue.

Why this official reticence? The answer may lie in the fact that by 1996 bin Laden was “supporting Islamists in Lebanon, Bosnia, Kashmir, Tajikistan, and Chechnya.”[75] And in step with bin Laden, the al-Kifah Center was also supporting jihad after 1992 “in Afghanistan, Bosnia, the Philippines, Egypt, Algeria, Kashmir, Palestine, and elsewhere.”[76]

But bin Laden and Al-Kifah were not acting on their own, they were supporting projects, especially in Tajikistan (1993-95) and then Chechnya (after 1995), where their principal ally, Ibn al-Khattab (Thamir Saleh Abdullah Al-Suwailem) also enjoyed high-level support in Saudi Arabia.[77]

Khattab enjoyed a certain amount of logistical and financial support from Saudi Arabia. Saudi sheikhs declared the Chechen resistance a legitimate jihad, and private Saudi donors sent money to Khattab and his Chechen colleagues. As late as 1996, mujahidin wounded in Chechnya were sent to Saudi Arabia for medical treatment, a practice paid for by charities and tolerated by the state.[78]

Ali Soufan adds that America also supported this jihad: by 1996, “the United States had been on the side of Muslims in Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Chechnya.”[79]

By protecting the Al-Kifah Center and its associates (including Mohamed) and not prosecuting them for their crimes (including murder), the U.S. Government was in effect keeping open a channel whereby those in America who wished to wage jihad were helped to wage jihad in other countries, not here. (After the arrest of Sheikh Rahman in 1993 the Al Kifah closed itself down. But we shall see that an allied institution, Sphinx Trading, continued to be protected, even after the FBI knew it had helped one of the alleged 9/11 hijackers prepare for 9/11.)

Was all this protection intended to keep just such a channel open? It was certainly an intentional result of the protection and support for the Makhtab al-Khidimat in Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Supportfor the Makhtab, and Later for Al Qaeda

The Saudis, like the Egyptians, had domestic reasons for wishing to export as many Muslim Brotherhood members to possible death in Afghanistan, Bosnia, or anywhere else. Until 1979 Saudi Arabia had provided a home to Brotherhood members fleeing persecution in countries like Syria and Egypt, where some of them had tried to assassinate the Saudis’ political enemy Gamel Abdel Nasser. But in 1979 radical Wahhabis, condemning the ruling Saudi family as corrupt infidels, seized the Grand Mosque at Mecca and defended it for weeks.[80] Profoundly shaken, the Saudi family used its foundations, like the World Muslim League (WML), to subsidize the emigration of political Islamists, above all to the new jihad in Afghanistan which opened one month later against the Soviet Union.[81]

In Afghanistan both Rahman and al-Zawahiri worked with the Makhtab al Khidamat that had been created in 1984 by two other members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Palestinian Abdullah Azzam and the Saudi Osama bin Laden.[82] All that the 9/11 Commission Report has to say about the Makhtab’s financing is that “Bin Laden and his comrades had their own sources of support and training, and they received little or no assistance from the United States” (p. 56). But the Pakistani author Ahmed Rashid makes clear the support coming from the Saudi royal family, including Prince Turki (the head of Saudi intelligence), and also royal creations like the World Muslim League:

Bin Laden, although not a royal, was close enough to the royals and certainly wealthy enough to lead the Saudi contingent. Bin Laden, Prince Turki and General [Hameed] Gul [the head of the Pakistani ISI] were to become firm friends and allies in a common cause. The center for the Arab-Afghans was the offices of the World Muslim League and the Muslim Brotherhood in Peshawar which was run by Abdullah Azam. Saudi funds flowed to Azam and the Makhtab al Khidamat or Services Center which he created in 1984 to service the new recruits and receive donations from Islamic charities. Donations from Saudi Intelligence, the Saudi Red Crescent, the World Muslim League and private donations from Saudi princes and mosques were channeled through the Makhtab. A decade later the Makhtab would emerge at the center of a web of radical organizations that helped carry out the World Trade Center bombing [in 1993] and the bombings of US Embassies in Africa in 1998.[83]

Former Ambassador Peter Tomsen has described how the evolution of the Makhtab into al-Qaeda was accomplished with support from the offices of royally ordained organizations like the World Muslim League (WML) and the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY):

Bin Laden’s brother-in-law, Mohammad Jamal Khalifa, headed the Muslim World League office in Peshawar during the mid-1980s. In 1988, he moved to Manila and opened a branch office of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth. He made the charity a front for bin Laden’s terrorist operations in the Philippines and Asia. Al Qaeda operatives, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, and his nephew Ramzi Yusuf [master bomb-maker of the 1993 WTC bombing], traveled to Manila in the early 1990s to help Khalifa strengthen al-Qaeda networks in Southeast Asia and plan terrorist attacks in the region.[84]

There are many other examples of WML and WAMY connections to Al-Qaeda. For example Maulana Fazlur Rehman Khalil, a signatory of Osama bin Laden’s 1998 fatwa to kill Jews and Americans, was invited in 1996 to the 34th WML Congress in Mecca and also spoke there to WAMY.[85] Yet there are only minimal references to Maulana Fazlur Rehman in the western (as opposed to the Asian) media, and none (according to a Lexis Nexis search in July 2013) linking him to the WML or WAMY.

The FBI’s hands-off attitude towards WAMY in America may help explain its protection of Ali Mohamed. According to former federal prosecutor John Loftus and others, there was a block in force in the 1980s against antiterrorism actions that might embarrass the Saudis.[86] This block explains for example the protection enjoyed by the chair of WAMY in Virginia, Osama bin Laden’s nephew Abdullah bin Laden. The FBI opened an investigation of Abdullah bin Laden in February 1996, calling WAMY “a suspected terrorist organization,” but the investigation was closed down six months later.[87]

How and Why Did a Passportless Osama Leave Saudi Arabia?

None of the official or privileged sources on Ali Mohamed has linked him to Saudi intelligence activities. But there is at least one such link, his trip, as described in the Coleman FBI affidavit, when he “travelled to Afghanistan to escort Usama bin Laden from Afghanistan to the Sudan.”[88] The FBI affidavit presents this, without explanation, as an act in furtherance of an al-Qaeda “murder conspiracy.” But Osama’s move to Sudan was synchronized with a simultaneous investment in Sudan by his bin Laden brothers, including an airport construction project that was largely subsidized by the Saudi royal family.[89]

A great deal of confusion surrounds the circumstances of bin Laden’s displacement in 1991-92, from Saudi Arabia via Pakistan and perhaps Afghanistan) to the Sudan. But in these conflicted accounts one fact is not contested: bin Laden’s trip was initially arranged by someone in the royal family.[90] Steven Coll in Ghost Wars reports that this person was Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki, who blamed it on pressure from the U.S:

Peter Tomsen and other emissaries from Washington discussed the rising Islamist threat with [Saudi intelligence chief] Prince Turki in the summer of 1991…. At some of the meetings between Turki and the CIA, Osama bin Laden’s name came up explicitly. The CIA continued to pick up reporting that he was funding radicals such as Hekmatyar in Afghanistan…. “His family has disowned him,” Turki assured the Americans about bin Laden. Every effort had been made to persuade bin Laden to stop protesting against the Saudi royal family. These efforts had failed, Turki conceded, and the kingdom was now prepared to take sterner measures…. Bin Laden learned of this when Saudi police arrived at his cushion-strewn, modestly furnished compound in Jeddah to announce that he would have to leave the kingdom. According to an account later provided to the CIA by a source in Saudi intelligence, the officer assigned to carry out the expulsion assured bin Laden that this was being done for his own good. The officer blamed the Americans. The U.S. government was planning to kill him, he told bin Laden, by this account, so the royal family would get him out of the kingdom for his own protection. The escort put bin Laden on a plane out of Saudi Arabia.[91]

Coll’s magistral but privileged book appeared in February 2004. Six months later the 9/11 Commission Report published a quite different account, implying that by 1991 the Saudi government was estranged from bin Laden:

The Saudi government… undertook to silence Bin Laden by, among other things, taking away his passport. With help from a dissident member of the royal family, he managed to get out of the country under the pretext of attending an Islamic gathering in Pakistan in April 1991.[92]

Lawrence Wright claims that the prince returning Osama’s passport was Interior Minister Prince Naif, after bin Laden persuaded him he was needed in Peshawar “in order to help mediate the civil war among the mujahideen.”[93] Prince Naif, the most anti-American of the senior Saudi royals, gave back bin Laden’s passport on one condition, that he “sign a pledge that he would not interfere with the politics of South Arabia or any Arab country.”[94]

The “Islamic gathering” is almost certainly a reference to the on-going negotiations in Peshawar which eventually produced the Saudi-backed Peshawar Accord (finalized in April 1992) to end the Afghan Civil War. By several well-informed accounts, Bin Laden did play an important part in these negotiations, in furtherance (I would argue) of Prince Tuki’s own policies. Like Sheikh Rahman before him in 1990, bin Laden tried, vainly, to negotiate a truce between the warring mujahideen leaders, Massoud and Hekmatyar. In these negotiations (according to Peter Tomsen, who was there), Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda were all united in seeking the same objective: a united Sunni army that (in opposition to American appeals for Shia representation) that could retake Kabul by force.[95]

Thus I believe it is quite clear that bin Laden, in his mediation attempts to bring Hekmatyar into the Peshawar consensus, was acting in line with official Saudi and Pakistani interests. Others disagree. Without documentation, the author of the Frontline biography of bin Laden asserts,

Contrary to what is always reiterated bin Laden has never had official relations with the Saudi regime or the royal family. All his contacts would happen through his brothers.[96] …. Specifically he had no relation with Turki al-Faisal head of Saudi intelligence. He used to be very suspicious of his role in Afghanistan and once had open confrontation with him in 1991 and accused him of being the reason of the fight between Afghan factions.[97]

Michael Scheuer, once head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, endorsed this claim, and reinforced it with the testimony of Sa’ad al-Faqih (a critic of the Saudi royal family who has been accused by the U.S. Treasury of being affiliated with al-Qaeda) that, “after the Soviets withdrew ‘Saudi intelligence [officers] were actually increasing the gap between Afghani factions to keep them fighting.’”[98]

But this claim if true must have beenafter Kabul fell to the jihadis in 1992, when Massoud, backed by the favored Saudi client Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, began to fight Hekmatyar, the favored client of Pakistan’s ISI. Before this time the U.S. State Department’s Afghan policy was to promote a broad-based opposition to the rump Communist government in Kabul, while “side-lining the extremists,” including both Hekmatyar and Sayyaf.[99]

Pakistan’s ISI in the same period clearly wanted a strong rebel alliance united behind Hekmatyar, and both the CIA and the Saudis continued to support them. As Barnett Rubin reports, “During this period, political ‘unity’ of some sort among the mujahidin groups was a major goal of U.S.-Pakistani-Saudi policy.”[100]And in 1990-91, as Washington cut its allocation for the CIA’s covert Afghan program by 60 percent, Prince Turki more than made up for the shortfall by increased contributions from Saudi Arabia.[101]

I conclude that bin Laden’s mediation efforts in Peshawar in 1991 were in accordance with Prince Turki’s preferences, just as did Ali Mohamed, in organizing bin Laden’s subsequent move from Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Sudan. As Steve Coll reports, the break between bin Laden and the Saudi royal family did not become serious until 1993, after the involvement of bin Laden’s ally Sheikh Rahman in the first WTC bombing.[102]

Meanwhile Saudi royal support for this web of radical organizations, in which Ali Mohamed was a central organizer and trainer, continued until at least 1995, well after the WTC bombing of 1993. Anthony Summers reports that Turki may have personally renewed a deal with bin Laden as late as 1998:

In sworn statements after 9/11, former Taliban intelligence chief Mohammed Khaksar said that in 1998 the prince sealed a deal under which bin Laden undertook not to attack Saudi targets. In return, Saudi Arabia would provide funds and material assistance to the Taliban…. Saudi businesses, meanwhile, would ensure that money also flowed directly to bin Laden. Turki would deny after 9/11 that any such deal was done with bin Laden. One account has it, however, that he himself met with bin Laden – his old protégé from the days of the anti-Soviet jihad – during the exchanges that led to the deal.[103]

In 1991 the Soviet troops had been out of Kabul for two years; and, as former US Ambassador Tomsen has reported, the CIA’s objective of a Pakistan-backed military overthrow in Kabul was at odds with the official U.S. policy of support for “a political settlement restoring Afghanistan’s independence.”[104] Ambassador Tomsen himself told the CIA Station Chief in Islamabad (Bill) that, by endorsing Pakistan’s military attack on Kabul,

he was violating fundamental U.S. policy precepts agreed to in Washington by his own agency. American policy was to cut Hekmatyar off, not build him up. Bill looked at me impassively as I spoke. I assumed his superiors in Langley had approved the offensive. The U.S. government was conducting two diametrically opposed Afghan policies.[105]

Steve Coll agrees that “By early 1991, the Afghan policies pursued by the State Department and the CIA were in open competition with each other…. The CIA…continued to collaborate with Pakistani military intelligence on a separate military track that mainly promoted Hekmatyar and other Islamist commanders.”[106]

This conflict between the State Department and CIA was far from unprecedented. In particular it recalled the CIA-State conflict in Laos in 1959-60, which led to a tragic war in Laos, and eventually Vietnam.[107] Just as oil companies had a stake in that conflict, so too in 1990-92 the CIA was thinking not just of Afghanistan but of the oil resources of Central Asia, where some of the al-Kifah-trained “Arab Afghans” were about to focus their attention.

The State Department in Afghanistan represented the will of the National Security Council and the public state. The CIA, on the other hand, was not “rogue” (as has sometimes been suggested), it was pursuing the goals of oil companies and their financial backers – or what I have called the deep state — in preparing for a launch into the former Soviet republics of central Asia.

In 1991 the leaders of Central Asia “began to hold talks with Western oil companies, on the back of ongoing negotiations between Kazakhstan and the US company Chevron.”[108] The first Bush Administration actively supported the plans of U.S. oil companies to contract for exploiting the resources of the Caspian region, and also for a pipeline not controlled by Moscow that could bring the oil and gas production out to the west.

In the same year 1991, Richard Secord, Heinie Aderholt, and Ed Dearborn, three veterans of U.S. operations in Laos, and later of Oliver North’s operations with the Contras, turned up in Baku under the cover of an oil company, MEGA Oil.[109] This was at a time when the first Bush administration had expressed its support for an oil pipeline stretching from Azerbaijan across the Caucasus to Turkey.[110] MEGA never did find oil, but did contribute materially to the removal of Azerbaijan from the sphere of post-Soviet Russian influence.

As MEGA operatives in Azerbaijan, Secord, Aderholt, Dearborn, and their men engaged in military training, passed “brown bags filled with cash” to members of the government, and above all set up an airline on the model of Air America which soon was picking up hundreds of mujahedin mercenaries in Afghanistan.[111] (Secord and Aderholt claim to have left Azerbaijan before the mujahedin arrived.)

Meanwhile, Hekmatyar, who at the time was still allied with bin Laden, was “observed recruiting Afghan mercenaries [i.e. Arab Afghans] to fight in Azerbaijan against Armenia and its Russian allies.”[112]Hekmatyar was a notorious drug trafficker; and, at this time, heroin flooded from Afghanistan through Baku into Chechnya, Russia, and even North America.[113]

Bin Laden, Ali Mohamed, and the Saudi Royal Family

By attempting to negotiate Hekmatyar’s reconciliation with the other Peshawar commanders, bin Laden in 1991 was clearly an important part of this CIA effort. So, a year earlier, had been the blind Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman:

In 1990, after the assassination of Abdullah Azzam, Abd al-Rahman was invited to Peshawar, where his host was Khalid al-Islambouli, brother of one of the assassins of Sadat…. On this trip, reportedly paid for by the CIA, Abd al-Rahman preached to the Afghans about the necessity of unity to overthrow the Kabul regime.[114]

This presumably was shortly before Sheikh Abdul Rahman, even though he was on a State Department terrorist watch list after being imprisoned for the murder of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, was issued a multiple-entry U.S. visa in 1990 “by a CIA officer working undercover in the consular section of the American embassy in Sudan.”[115] This was the same CIA-sponsored program that six years earlier had admitted Ali Mohamed, “a visa-waiver program that was … designed to shield valuable assets or those who have performed valuable services for the country.”[116]

And Ali Mohamed himself was, according to the New York Times, part of the CIA’s plan for a military solution: “In the fall of 1992, Mr. Mohamed returned to fight in Afghanistan, training rebel commanders in military tactics, United States officials said.”[117] Before this, Mohamed had been charged with the major task of moving bin Laden, his four wives, and his seventeen children from Afghanistan to Sudan. The task was a major one, for Osama moved with his assistants, “a stable of Arabian horses, and bulldozers.”[118]

The Turki-bin Laden connection, which was cemented by Turki’s chief of staff and bin Laden’s teacher Ahmed Badeeb, may have been renewed as late as 1998:

In sworn statements after 9/11, former Taliban intelligence chief Mohammed Khaksar said that in 1998 the prince sealed a deal under which bin Laden undertook not to attack Saudi targets. In return, Saudi Arabia would provide funds and material assistance to the Taliban…. Saudi businesses, meanwhile, would ensure that money also flowed directly to bin Laden. Turki would deny after 0/11 that any such deal was done with bin Laden. One account has it, however, that he himself met with bin Laden – his old protégé from the days of the anti-Soviet jihad – during the exchanges that led to the deal.[119]

Bin Laden’s move to the Sudan in 1991-92, the move organized by Ali Mohamed, appears to have been done in collaboration with his family. There is hotly contested evidence that Osama participated with his brothers in the construction of the Port Sudan airport, a project underwritten with funds from the Saudi royal family.[120] According to Lawrence Wright, “the Saudi Bnladen Group got the contract to build an airport in Port Sudan, which brought Osama frequently into the country to oversee the construction. He finally moved to Khartoum in 1992….”[121]

Not contested, but largely overlooked, is the evidence of how bin Laden financed his move, through investing $50 million in the Sudanese al-Shama Islamic bank – a bank that also had support from both the bin Laden family and also the Saudi royal family. As the Chicago Tribune reported in November 2001,

According to a 1996 State Department report on bin Laden’s finances, bin Laden co-founded the Al Shamal bank with a group of wealthy Sudanese and capitalized it with $50 million of his inherited fortune…..[122]

According to public records, among the investors in the Al Shamal Islamic Bank is a Geneva-based financial services conglomerate headed by Prince Mohamed al-Faisal al-Saud, [brother of Prince Turki], son of the late King [Faisal al-]Saud and a cousin [i.e. nephew] of the current Saudi monarch, King Fahd.

The Al Shamal bank, which opened for business in 1990, admits that Osama bin Laden held three accounts there between 1992 and 1997, when he used Sudan as his base of operations before fleeing to Afghanistan. But the bank insists in a written statement that bin Laden “was never a founder or a shareholder of Al Shamal Islamic Bank.”

Told of the bank’s statement, the State Department official replied that “we stand by” the assertion that bin Laden put $50 million into the bank.

The Al Shamal bank does acknowledge that among its five “main founders” and principal shareholders is another Khartoum bank, the Faisal Islamic Bank of Sudan. According to public records, 19 percent of the Faisal Islamic Bank is owned by the Dar Al-Maal Al-Islami Trust, headed by Saudi Prince [Mohammed al-Faisal] al-Saud.

(The Dar Al-Mal Al-Islami or DMI Trust, “based in the Bahamas and with its operations center in Geneva,” was one of a spate of banks, mostly dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, that were set up with western guidance and assistance – in DMI’s case the assistance came from Price Waterhouse and eventually Harvard University.[123] DMI was one of the two main banks which, according to Jane’s Intelligence Review, had been funding the Makhtab and also the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO), of which more below.)[124]

The $3.5 billion DMI Trust, whose slogan is “Allah is the purveyor of success,” was founded 20 years ago to foster the spread of Islamic banking across the Muslim world. Its 12-member board of directors includes Haydar Mohamed Binladen, according to a DMI spokesman, a half-brother of Osama bin Laden…..

Though small, the Al Shamal Islamic Bank enabled bin Laden to move money quickly from one country to another through its correspondent relationships with some of the world’s major banks, several of which have been suspended since Sept. 11.

The Al Shamal bank was identified as one of bin Laden’s principal financial entities during the trial earlier this year of four Al Qaeda operatives convicted in the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa.[125]

One might have expected this early and revealing insight into bin Laden’s finances to have been developed in the spate of privileged bin Laden and al Qaeda books that appeared in the years after 2001. In fact I have located only one brief inconsequential reference, in Steve Coll’s The Bin Ladens: “Osama had reorganized his personal banking at the Al-Shamal Bank in Khartoum, but his accounts gradually dried up.”[126]

There is of course no mention of the al-Shamal Bank in the 9/11 Commission Report.

Federal Protection for Osama bin Laden’s Brother-in-Law, Mohammed Jamal Khalifa

It seems clear that the 1980s official USG block against antiterrorism actions that might embarrass the Saudis was still in force in America in 1995. We see this in the extraordinary federal protection extended to Mohamed Jamal Khalifa, Osama bin Laden’s best friend and brother-in-law.

On December 16, 1994, the San Francisco FBI arrested Khalifa in Morgan Hills (not far from Ali Mohamed’s home). Khalifa’s business card had been discovered in a search one year earlier of Sheikh Rahman’s residence, after which he had been named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Landmarks case. Soon afterwards, a State Department cable described him as

a known financier of terrorist operations and an officer of an Islamic NGO in the Philippines that is a known Hamas front. He is under indictment in Jordan in connection with a series of cinema bombings earlier this year.[127]

Khalifa, in other words, was like Ali Mohamed involved in terrorist operations on an international level. He was an important source of information and talked freely to the FBI agents who arrested him. In his possession they found “documents that connected Islamic terrorist manuals to the International Islamic Relief Organization, the group that he had headed in the Philippines.”[128] And in his notebook they found evidence linking him directly to Ramzi Yousef, who at the time was the FBI’s most-wanted terrorist for his role in the 1993 WTC bombing.

But as Peter Lance narrates, “The Feds never got a chance to question him.” Instead, in January 1995, a decision was made by Secretary of State Warren Christopher and supported by Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick to whisk Khalifa from the United States to Jordan for trial, where he was soon “acquitted of terrorism charges and allowed to move to Saudi Arabia.”[129]There “Saudi officials greeted him at the airport.”[130]

“I remember people at CIA who were ripshit at the time” over the decision, says Jacob L. Boesen, an Energy Department analyst then working at the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. “Not even speaking in retrospect, but contemporaneous with what the intelligence community knew about bin Laden, Khalifa’s deportation was unreal.”[131]

Even more unreal was the decision of a court in a civil case to return to Khalifa before his deportation the contents of his luggage, including his notebook and other computer files.[132]

I believe that Peter Lance, after all his meticulous scholarship, failed to identify who was really being protected by this evasive measure. He writes that Khalifa, from 1983 to 1991, “had been trusted by al Qaeda with running the Philippines branch of the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO), one of their key NGOs.”[133]

But the IIRO was in the hands of a far greater power than al Qaeda, which in any case did not exist in 1983. It was a charitable organization that had been authorized in 1979 by Saudi royal decree, as an affiliate of another key institution of the royal family, the Muslim World League (MWL).[134]According to former CIA officer Robert Baer, the IIRO has been run “with an iron hand” by Prince Salman ibn Abdul-Aziz al Saud (the brother of Saudi King Abdullah), who “personally approved all important appointments and spending.”[135]

The creation date of 1979 reflects the important shift in that year of the Saudi royal family’s attitude towards the political Islamism of the Muslim Brotherhood or Ikhwan (of which Mohammed Jamal Khalifa was a senior member). As already noted, 1979 was the year radical Wahhabis, seized the Grand Mosque at Mecca. In response, the Saudi family foundations like the IIRO, to subsidize the emigration of the Muslim Brotherhood.[136]

Thus Khalifa’s status in the IIRO was not anomalous. Besides the bombings in Jordan, the IIRO has also been linked to support of terrorists in the Philippines,[137] India,[138] Indonesia,[139] Canada,[140]Albania, Chechnya, Kenya,[141] and other countries, notably Bosnia.[142] In particular Khalifa personally has been accused of financing the Philippine terrorist group Abu Sayyaf (which in 1993 had kidnapped an American Bible translator).[143] Yet “The U.S. government has not designated Khalifa as a financial supporter of terrorism.”[144]

Federal Protection for Al-Qaeda Plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

The Saudi royal protection for Jamal Khalifa was more than matched by the Qatari royal protection of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), Ramzi Yousuf’s uncle and co-conspirator in the Philippines. The 9/11 Commission, who judged KSM to be “the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks,” made a muted acknowledgment of this Qatari protection of him:

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — Yousef’s uncle, then located in Qatar — was a fellow plotter of Yousef’s in the Manila air plot and had also wired him some money prior to the Trade Center bombing. The U.S. Attorney obtained an indictment against KSM in January 1996, but an official in the government of Qatar probably warned him about it. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed evaded capture (and stayed at large to play a central part in the 9/11 attacks).[145]

From other sources, notably Robert Baer who was then a CIA officer in Qatar, we learn that the “official” was Sheikh Abdallah bin Khalid bin Hamad al-Thani, the Qatari minister of the Interior and the brother of then Qatari Emir Sheik Hamad bin Khalid al-Thani.[146] According to ABC News,

Mohammed is believed to have fled Qatar with a passport provided by that country’s government. He is also believed to have been given a home in Qatar as well as a job at the Department of Public Water Works. Officials also said bin Laden himself visited Abdallah bin Khalid al-Thani in Qatar between the years of 1996 and 2000.[147]

In Triple Cross, Peter Lance, who does not mention KSM’s escape from Qatar, focuses instead on the way that, later in the same year, federal prosecutors kept his name out of the trial of Ramzi Yousuf in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing:

Assistant U.S. Attorneys Mike Garcia and Dietrich Snell presented a riveting, evidence case… and characterized the material retrieved from Ramzi’s Toshiba laptop as ‘the most devastating evidence of all.”…. While Yousuf’s Toshiba laptop… contained the full details of the plot later executed on 9/11, not a word of that scenario was mentioned during trial. …. Most surprising, during the entire summer-long trial, the name of the fourth Bojinka conspirator, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed…was mentioned by name only once, in reference to a letter found in [Yousuf’s apartment].[148]

Lance repeatedly suggests that U.S. prosecutors in New York, and particularly Dietrich Snell, were responsible for minimizing the role of Khalid Sheikh Mohamed and other shortcomings, because they were seeking “to hide the full truth behind the Justice Department’s failures.”[149] But the matter of KSM’s escape in 1996, like the release of Jamal Khalifa, was sensitive at a much higher level than that of prosecutors. It was a was a matter that reached back into the black hole that is represented by the ultimate United States dependency on Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and OPEC, for the defense of the petrodollar.

In other words, the suppression of KSM’s name was not surprising at all. On the contrary, it was totally consistent with one of the most sensitive and controversial features of the 9/11 story: the much-discussed fact that before CIA two counterterrorist officers protected two of the alleged hijackers from detection and surveillance by the FBI.

Federal Protection for Alleged 9/11 Hijackers

Morgenthau’s hypothesis that the CIA was protecting Saudi criminal assets received further corroboration in the wake of 9/11. There is now evidence, much of it systematically suppressed by the 9/11 Commission, that before 9/11 CIA officers Richard Blee and Tom Wilshire inside the CIA’s Bin Laden Unit, along with FBI agents Dina Corsi et al., were protecting from investigation and arrest two of the eventual alleged hijackers on 9/11, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi — much as the FBI had protected Ali Mohamed from arrest in 1993.

There are also indications that al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, like Hampton-El before them, may have been receiving funds indirectly from the Saudi Embassy in Washington:

“[B]etween 1998 and 2002, up to US$73,000 in cashier cheques was funneled by [Saudi Ambassador Prince] Bandar’s wife Haifa – who once described the elder Bushes as like “my mother and father” – to two Californian families known to have bankrolled al-Midhar and al-Hazmi. … Princess Haifa sent regular monthly payments of between $2,000 and $3,500 to Majeda Dweikat, wife of Osama Basnan, believed by various investigators to be a spy for the Saudi government. Many of the cheques were signed over to Manal Bajadr, wife of Omar al-Bayoumi, himself suspected of covertly working for the kingdom. The Basnans, the al-Bayoumis and the two 9/11 hijackers once shared the same apartment block in San Diego. It was al-Bayoumi who greeted the killers when they first arrived in America, and provided them, among other assistance, with an apartment and social security cards. He even helped the men enroll at flight schools in Florida.”[150]

The Report of the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 (pp. 173-77), though very heavily redacted at this point, supplies corroborating information, including a report that Basnan had once hosted a party for the “Blind Sheikh” Omar Abdul Rahman. In other words, the Congressional investigation found indications that the same protection extended to those protected in the crimes of 1993, were protected again in 9/11.

The 9/11 Commission Report, overruling FBI reports, simplydenied that Saudi embassy money had supported the two hijackers.[151] It recognized that there had been an intelligence failure with respect to the al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, but treated it as an accident that might not have occurred “if more resources had been applied.”[152] This explanation, however, has since been rejected by 9/11 Commission Chairman Tom Kean. Asked if the failure to deal appropriately with al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi could have been a simple mistake, Kean replied:

Oh, it wasn’t careless oversight. It was purposeful. No question about that .… The conclusion that we came to was that in the DNA of these organizations was secrecy. And secrecy to the point of ya don’t share it with anybody.[153]

In 2011 an important book by Kevin Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, demonstrated conclusively that the withholding was purposive, and sustained over a period of eighteen months.[154] This interference and manipulation became particularly blatant and controversial in the days before 9/11; it led one FBI agent, Steve Bongardt, to predict accurately on August 29, less than two weeks before 9/11, that “someday someone will die.”\[155]

Before reading Fenton’s book, I was satisfied with Lawrence Wright’s speculations that the CIA may have wanted to recruit the two Saudis; and that “The CIA may also have been protecting an overseas operation [possibly in conjunction with Saudi Arabia] and was afraid that the F.B.I. would expose it.”[156] However I am now persuaded that Lawrence Wright’s explanation, that the CIA was protecting a covert operation, may explain the beginnings of the withholding in January 2000, but cannot explain its renewal in the days just before 9/11.

Fenton analyzes a list of thirty-five different occasions where the two alleged hijackers were protected in this fashion, from January 2000 to about September 5, 2001, less than a week before the hijackings.[157] In his analysis, the incidents fall into two main groups. In the earlier incidents he sees an intention “to cover a CIA operation that was already in progress.”[158] However after “the system was blinking red” in the summer of 2001, and the CIA expected an imminent attack, Fenton can see no other explanation than that “the purpose of withholding the information had become to allow the attacks to go forward.”[159]

In support of Fenton’s conclusion, there is evidence (not mentioned by him) indicating that in mid-2001 the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center (CTC), who were the chief suppliers of the CIA protection, believed an al Qaeda attack was imminent, and that al-Mihdhar was important to it. On August 15, CIA Counterterrorism Chief Cofer Black told a secret Pentagon conference, “We’re going to be struck soon…. Many Americans are going to die, and it could be in the U.S.”[160] Three weeks earlier, CTC Deputy Chief Tom Wilshire had written that ““When the next big op is carried out…Khallad [bin Attash] will be at or near the top ….Khalid Midhar should be very high interest.”[161] Yet Wilshire (like his superior, Richard Blee), instead of expediting to the FBI the transmission of his knowledge about al-Mihdhar, did the opposite: he

not only failed to tell anyone else involved in the hunt [for Al-Mihdhar] that Almihdhar would likely soon be a participant in a major al-Qaeda attack inside the US, but also supported a dubious procedure which meant that the FBI was only able to focus a fraction of the resources it had on the hunt.[162]

Fenton’s serious allegation has to be considered in the light of the earlier instances of protection we have surveyed:

1) the protection given to Salameh and Abouhalima in the 1990 Kahane murder, leaving them free to participate in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing;

2) the failure for two or three years to process Ali Mohamed’s documents seized in 1990, which could have prevented the 1993 World Trade Center bombing;

3) the release of Ali Mohamed from RCMP detention in 1993, leaving him free to participate in the 1998 Nairobi Embassy bombing;

4) the treatment of Ali Mohamed as an “unindicted coconspirator” in the 1993 WTC bombing case and Landmarks case, leaving him free to participate in the 1998 Nairobi Embassy bombing.

There are other indicators that these events were part of a single long-term cover-up, one that is still ongoing. One of the connectors is Sheikh Abdul Rahman’s Al–Salaam Mosque in Jersey City, visited by Ali Mohamed and his trainees in 1989, and allegedly frequented by two of the alleged 9/11 hijackers (Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi) in 2000-01.[163]

Next door to the Mosque in Jersey City was the Sphinx Trading Company, whose incorporator and director, Waleed Abouel Nour, was like Ali Mohamed listed as an unindicted coconspirator in the 1995 Landmarks conspiracy case. (The New York Times later reported that the FBI had identified Nour as a terrorist.)[164]

At minimum, two Ali Mohamed-trained members of the New York cell — El Sayyid Nosair and Siddig Ali Siddig — are confirmed to have kept mailboxes at Sphinx Trading during the 1990s, as did the blind Sheikh himself.

A decade later, the mailboxes were still being used by al Qaeda-linked terrorists.

Testifying in a sealed proceeding in 2002, a New Jersey policeman said the FBI told him that “several of the hijackers involved in the September 11th event also had mailboxes at that location.”

Police searched the office of a New Jersey businessman [Mohamed el-Atriss] whose name appeared on the Sphinx Trading Co. incorporation papers and found the names and phone numbers of several hijackers among his papers. The businessman eventually admitted having sold fake identification cards to two of the hijackers.[165] [One of the fake IDs was given to Khalid Al-Mihdhar.][166]

This important inquiry into the infrastructure of the Ali Mohamed connection was quickly shut down by the FBI:

The police officer testified in 2002 that the FBI had shut down the New Jersey police investigation of these connections, without explanation but amid unconfirmed rumors (reported by the New York Times) that the businessman was himself an FBI informant. All terrorism charges against the businessman were eventually dropped.[167]

The Saudi-American Petroleum Complex and the Defense of the Petrodollar

This on-going cover-up of a terrorist infrastructure spanning a decade is mirrored by the censorship of the Joint Inquiry findings about Osama Basnan, involved in the pass-through of Saudi Embassy funds to al-Mihdhar, and earlier the host of a party for Sheikh Abdul Rahman. One factor enabling the cover-up is the over-arching and little-understood U.S.-Saudi relationship, to understand which we must also consider the context of petrodollars, OPEC and the major oil companies.

The export of Saudi oil, paid for by all customers in U.S. dollars, and in the U.S. case largely offset by the export of U.S. arms to Saudi Arabia, is a major underpinning of America’s petrodollar economy. As I have documented elsewhere, its current strength is supported by OPEC’s requirement (secured by a secret agreement in the 1970s between the US and Saudi Arabia) that all OPEC oil sales be denominated in dollars.[168] $600 billion of the Saudi dollar earnings have been reinvested abroad, most of it in U.S. corporations like Citibank (where the two largest shareholders are members of the Saudi Royal family).[169]

This fusion of U.S. and Saudi governing interests is as much political as economic. The first oil price hike of 1972-73, arranged by Nixon with the King of Saudi Arabia and the Shah of Iran, helped pay to arm Iran and Saudi Arabia as U.S. proxies in the region, following the withdrawal of British troops from the region in 1971.[170] The oil price hikes of 1979-80, on the other hand, were assuredly not the intention of President Carter, a political victim of the increases. They have however been credibly attributed to the work of oil majors like BP, possibly acting in collusion with Republicans; and had the result of helping to elect Ronald Reagan (as well as Margaret Thatcher in England).[171]

I am suggesting that there is a high-level fusion of interests between the U.S. and Saudi governments, oil companies and banks (not to mention facilitating alliances like the Carlyle Group) which the CIA tends to represent continuously, and not just ad hoc for the sake of any one particular goal. The on-going protection given through the years to criminals like Salameh, Ali Mohamed, al-Mihdhar, and al-Hazmi should be seen as symptoms of this high-level fusion of interests. Needless to add, the 99 percent of ordinary American people, having as a result now suffered a series of recurring attacks (the first World Trade Center bombing, the 1998 Embassy bombings, possibly even 9/11 itself) have been losers from this arrangement.

I am confident that the mystery of USG protection to terrorists can be traced in part to this “roof” of inscrutable governmental, financial, and corporate relationships between the United States and Saudi Arabia. There is a “black hole” at the center of this roof in which the interests of governments, petrodollar banks, and multinational oil companies, are all inscrutably mixed.

Notes

[1]Dana Priest and William Arkin, Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State (New York: Little Brown, 2011), 52.

[2] E.g. Marc Ambinder and D.G. Grady, Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry (New York: Wiley, 2013); John Tirman, “The Quiet Coup: No, Not Egypt. Here,” HuffingtonPost, July 9, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-tirman/nsa-deep-state_b_3569316.html.

[3] Erich Lichtblau, “In Secret, Court Vastly Broadens Powers of N.S.A.,” New York Times, July 6, 2013.

[4] In addition there are unproven allegations that the United States granted a green card to Ayman al Zawahiri, identified in the 9/11 Commission Report (p. 57) as “the most important Egyptian in bin Laden’s circle” (p. 57), and since 2011 the leader of al-Qaeda (Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, The War On Truth: 9/11, Disinformation And The Anatomy Of Terrorism [Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2005], 46). It is not contested that “Foreign trial transcripts and U.S. court records confirmed that Zawahiri had previously flown to America, once in the early 1990s, and again in 1994…. Ali Mohamed, bin-Laden’s American-trained military adviser, served as Zawahiri’s host during the 1994 American fundraising campaign” (Jayna Davis, The third terrorist: the Middle East connection to the Oklahoma City bombing [Nashville, TN: WND Books, 2004], 318-19).

[5] Richard Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror(New York: Free Press, 2004), 30.

[6] Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquié, Ben Laden: la vérité interdite(Paris: Denoël, 2001), 14.

[7] Robert Baer, See No Evil: the true story of a ground soldier in the CIA’s war on terrorism (New York : Crown Publishers, 2002), 243-44; discussion in Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, oil, and war: the United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). 28-31; The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 170-72.

[8] Cf. my enlargement of the concept of an American deep state beyond parallel government in Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 20-23; Peter Dale Scott, “The ‘Deep State’ behind U.S. democracy,” VoltaireNet, April 6, 2011, http://www.voltairenet.org/article169316.html; etc.

[9] All of America’s military engagements since 1950 have involved defense of the petrodollar system. See Peter Dale Scott, “The Libyan War, American Power and the Decline of the Petrodollar System,” Asian-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, April 27, 2011, http://japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3522.

[10] Peter Lance, Triple Cross: How bin Laden’s Master Spy Penetrated the CIA, the Green Berets, and the FBI — and Why Patrick Fitzgerald Failed to Stop Him(New York: Regan/ HarperCollins, 2006), 120-25. Cf. Toronto Globe and Mail, November 22, 2001; Tim Weiner, Enemies: a history of the FBI (New York: Random House, 2012), 397.

[11]Ali H. Soufan, The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda (New York: Norton, 2011), 75-77.

[12] Lance, Triple Cross, 373. Cf. J.M. Berger, “Paving the Road to 9/11,” Intelwire,http://intelwire.egoplex.com/unlocking911-1-ali-mohamed-911.html: “Ali Mohamed was the utility player who created al Qaeda’s terrorist infrastructure in the United States — a series of connections, ideas, techniques and specific tools used by the [9/11] plot’s hijackers and masterminds…. Mohamed described teaching al Qaeda terrorists how to smuggle box cutters onto airplanes.”

[13] Lance, Triple Cross, 123-24.

[14]Soufan, The Black Banners, 561. The testimony of former FBI agents like Ali Soufan that Mohamed was not incarcerated has been challenged in a curious book by Special Forces veteran Pete Blaber, The Mission, The Men, and Me: Lessons from a Former Delta Force Commander (New York: Berkley Trade, 2010). Blaber claims to have interviewed Mohamed in a prison cell, after reading Mohamed’s perceptive document on how to track down Osama bin Laden. Blaber argues strenuously that Mohamed was not a double agent, but fails to deal with any of the countervailing evidence (such as the RCMP release).

[15]“D.E.A. Deployed Mumbai Plotter Despite Warning,” New York Times, November 8, 2009; cf. Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 246-47. Cf. The Globe and Mail(Canada), May 26, 2011: “FBI thought Mumbai massacre plotter worked for them, court told.”Another much simpler domestic example of this puzzle is Richard Aoki, the FBI informant who in the 1960s supplied the Black Panthers in Oakland with arms (Seth Rosenfeld, Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power [New York: Macmillan, 2012], 418-24, etc.).

[16] Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 151-60. For a summary, see Peter Dale Scott, “Bosnia, Kosovo, and Now Libya: The Human Costs of Washington’s On-Going Collusion with Terrorists,” Asian-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, July 29, 2011, http://japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3578.

[17] Steven Emerson, American jihad: the terrorists living among us (New York: Free Press, 2002), 57-58; Peter L. Bergen, Holy war, Inc.: inside the secret world of Osama bin Laden(New York: Free Press, 2001), 135;Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Knopf, 2006), 181-82. Wright gives a detailed summary of John Zent’s ensuing interview with Mohamed in May 1993, but says not a word about Zent’s intervention with the RCMP. To my knowledge the only privileged book to do so is Tim Weiner,Enemies: a history of the FBI(New York: Random House, 2012), 397: “He explained that he was working for the FBI and he offered the telephone number of his Bureau contact in San Francisco. The Canadians released Mohamed after the agent vouched for him.” Weiner’s relative candor came in 2012, long after this FBI scandal had already been publicized by Lance and other authors, including myself.

[18] Cf. Washington Post, June 1, 2012: “Soufan’s case was unusual because he never worked for the CIA. The PRB’s [Publications Review Board’s] authority [i.e. legal authority] is grounded in the secrecy agreements signed by agency employees that require them to submit any material prepared for public disclosure ‘either during my employment . . . or at anytime thereafter.’” In other words, the CIA’s PRB had no legal right to censor Soufan’s book, but did so anyway – an example of the blurring of past bureaucratic distinctions in today’s shadow state.

[19] Michael Scheuer, Osama bin Laden (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 218n.

[20] “Ali Mohamed Case,” Defense Human Resources Activity (DHRA), Department of Defense,http://www.dhra.mil/perserec/adr/counterterrorism/mohamed.htm; citing the Toronto Globe and Mail.

[21] Benjamin Weiner and James Risen, “The Masking of a Militant: A special report; A Soldier’s Shadowy Trail In U.S. and in the Mideast,” New York Times, December 1, 1998. This embarrassing exercise in damage control cannot be found on Lexis Nexis.

[22] Peter Waldman, Gerald F. Seib, Jerry Markon, Christopher Cooper, “Sergeant Served U.S. Army and bin Laden, Showing Failings in FBI’s Terror Policing,” Wall Street Journal, November 26, 2001.

[23]Daniel Coleman, Affidavit, Sealed Complaint, United States of America v Ali Abdelseoud Mohamed, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, September 1998 (obtained by INTELWIRE.com), p.7,http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fintelfiles.egoplex.com%2Fali-mohamed-coleman-affidavit.pdf&h=UAQFrJ-ys. In fact Mohamed had been an FBI informant since at least 1992 (see below).

[24] I had no choice but to remove certain relevant material from The Road to 9/11. As British and American lawyers pointed out to me, my sources had already retracted their statements before me.

[25] Lance, Triple Cross, 125. Cf. Steven Emerson, “Osama bin Laden’s Special Operations Man,” Journal of Counterterrorism and Security International,

September 1, 1998, http://www.investigativeproject.org/187/osama-bin-ladens-special-operations-man: “In a seemingly bizarre twist, while in California, Mohammed volunteered to provide information to the FBI on a smuggling operations involving Mexicans and other aliens not connected to terrorist groups. Within time, officials say, the relationship allowed Mohammed to divert the FBI’s attention away from looking at his real role in terrorism into examining the information he gave them about other smuggling.” But it could not have diverted the FBI’s attention for very long. By May 1993, five months later, Mohamed had described to Zent in some detail his activities with Obama and al-Qaeda (Wright, Looming Tower, 181-82; Berger, Ali Mohamed, 31-32).

[26] Lance, Triple Cross, 95. Cf. Tim Weiner, Enemies, 397.

[27] Lance, Triple Cross, 99. Similarly Tim Weiner writes that the FBI agents handling Mohamed “did not comprehend him” (Weiner, Enemies: a history of the FBI, 397).

[28] “Ali Mohamed Case,” Defense Human Resources Activity (DHRA), Department of Defense,http://www.dhra.mil/perserec/adr/counterterrorism/mohamed.htm, emphasis added.

[29] John Miller, Michael Stone, Chris Mitchell, The Cell: Inside the 9/11 Plot, and Why the FBI and CIA Failed to Stop It (New York: Hyperion, 2002), 90-91.

[30] U.S. vs. Omar Abdel Rahman et al., September 11, 1995; quoted in Berger, Ali Mohamed, 210; cf. Lance, Triple Cross, 48.

[31] “Sergeant Served U.S. Army and bin Laden,” Wall Street Journal, November 26, 2001: “At the time, the FBI wrote them off as harmless zealots, fired up to help the mujahedeen fighting the Soviet puppet government in Afghanistan.”

[32] Bergen, Holy War, Inc., 134. The al-Kifah Center (al-Kifah means “the struggle”) was “known informally as ‘the jihad office.’… There was no problem finding volunteers, who might stay in Afghanistan up to three months at a time…. The volunteers joined the forces of the Hezb-I-Islami (Party of Islam), led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar” (Stephen Franklin, “Slain Muslim Had Link To Radical Cleric,”Chicago Tribune, July 11, 1993, http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1993-07-11/news/9307110208_1_world-trade-center-bombing-sheik-omar-abdel-rahman-mustafa-shalabi.)

[33] Mitchell D. Silber, The Al Qaeda Factor: Plots Against the West (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 169-70.

[34] Peter Bergen, Holy Wars, Inc., 130-31.

[35]Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Knopf, 2006), 180; citing Boston Globe, February 3, 1995; cf. Robert Friedman, “The CIA’s Jihad,” New Yorker, March 17, 1995;Paul L. Williams, Al Qaeda: brotherhood of terror ([Parsippany, NJ?]: Alpha, 2002), 117.

[36]Lance Williams and Erik McCormick, “Al Qaeda terrorist worked with FBI,”San Francisco Chronicle, November 4, 2001.

[37] “Ali Mohamed Case,” Pentagon, http://www.dhra.mil/perserec/adr/counterterrorism/mohamed.htm, Cf.Emerson, “Osama bin Laden’s Special Operations Man:” “He had been in the United States earlier that decade, having graduated as a captain from a Special Forces Officers School at Fort Bragg in 1981 in a program for visiting military officials from foreign countries.”

[38] Robert Friedman, “The CIA and the Sheik,” Village Voice, March 30, 1993; Evan Kohlmann, Al-Qaida’s Jihad in Europe (New York: Berg, 2004), 26.

[39] John Miller, Michael Stone, Chris Mitchell, The Cell: Inside the 9/11 Plot, and Why the FBI and CIA Failed to Stop It (New York: Hyperion, 2002), 44. Cf. J.M. Berger, Jihad Joe: Americans who go to war in the name of Islam, (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2011), 44: “The stash included military training manuals and documents given to Nosair by Sergeant Ali Mohamed, the jihadist mole at Fort Bragg.”

[40]Newsday, November 8, 1990.

[41]New York Times, November 8, 1990.

[42]New York Times, December 16, 1990. As before, it is instructive to compare the Pentagon’s version of the training given by Mohamed (“surveillance, weapons and explosives”) with that in the long article about Mohamed in the New York Times: “Mr. Mohamed met the local Muslims at an apartment in Jersey City, and taught them survival techniques, map reading and how to recognize tanks and other Soviet weapons, according to testimony by one of his students at Mr. Nosair’s 1995 Federal trial” (Weiner and Risen, “The Masking of a Militant: A special report,” New York Times, December 01, 1998; cf. Berger, Ali Mohamed, ).

[43]TV journalist John Miller, a former New York deputy police commissioner who would later become the FBI’s Assistant Director for Public Affairs, reported in The Cell (44) that the disputed evidence from Nosair’s home was withheld from NYPD officer Edward Morris, who prepared the NYPD case against Nosair: “On the third say after the shooting, while Norris was out to lunch, the FBI removed Nosair’s 16 boxes of files from Norris’s squad room. Unfortunately the evidence was about to enter a black hole. The FBI now says it turned the files the evidence was about to enter a black hole. The FBI now says it turned the files over to the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, after it was decided, following a series of meetings and phone calls, that the local prosecutor and the NYPD would have exclusive jurisdiction over the murder case. The Manhattan DA’s office won’t comment on what was done with the files before Nosair’s trail, though Norris was never informed they were available. But this much is certain: The bulk of the material remained untranslated and unread for nearly three years.” [This last sentence is hard to reconcile with the detailed description given at the time by Borelli.]

[44] Friedman, “The CIA’s Jihad.”

[45] Lance, Triple Cross, 58-62.

[46] For the list, see Lance, Triple Cross, 574-75.

[47] Steve Coll, Ghost wars: the secret history of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 251.

[48] Quoted in Peter Lance, Triple Cross, 383.

[49] Steve Coll, Ghost Wars, 255; “Since 1989 the FBI had been running paid informants inside circles of Islamic radicals in New York and New Jersey. In 1990, the FBI carted away forty-seven boxes of documents and training manuals from the home of El Sayyid Nosair.” Cf. Lance, Triple Cross, 73-75, etc.

[50] Robert Friedman, “The CIA’s Jihad,” New Yorker, March 17, 1995.

[51] Robert Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game: how the United States helped unleash fundamentalist Islam (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003), 274-75; quoting Jiohn Cooley, Unholy Wars (London: Pluto Press, 1999), 31-32: “By the end of 1980, U.S. military trainers were sent to Egypt to impart the skills of the U.S. Special Forces to those Egyptians who would, in turn, pass on the training to the Egyptian volunteers flying to the aid of the mujahideen in Afghanistan.”

[52] Joseph J. Trento, Prelude to terror: the rogue CIA and the legacy of America’s private intelligence network (New York: Carrol and Graf, 2005), 150, 247.

[53] “Ali Mohamed Case,” http://www.dhra.mil/perserec/adr/counterterrorism/mohamed.htm.

[54] Lance, Triple Cross, 194 (oath).

[55] Scott, Road to 9/11, 161-62; citing Guardian (London), January 7, 1993; Evan F. Kohlmann, Al-Qaida’s Jihad in Europe: The Afghan-Bosnian Network (Oxford and New York: Berg Publishers, 2004), 16.

[56] Ferrukh Mir, Half Truth (iUniverse.com, 2011), 163-64: “In 1992, Ali Mohamed, a double agent and ex-US Special Forces office with close ties to Al-Kifah, led a group of US militants who were all ex-US soldiers to train and fight in Bosnia. Abu Obadiah Yahiya, an ex-US Marine and security chief at the Brooklyn branch, lead [sic] a second group of US militants to fight in Bosnia.” Cf. Mark Huband, Trading Secrets: spies and intelligence in an age of terror(New York: I.B. Tauris, 2013), 112; “Mohamed – using the nom-de-guerre Abu ‘Abdallah – travelled to Bosnia as part of a team which trained and armed Muslim fighters there until June 1993, when he travelled on to Khartoum and was asked by bin Laden to set up the al-Qaeda cell in Nairobi, Kenya.”

[57] Evan Kohlmann, Al-Qaida’s Jihad in Europe (New York: Berg, 2004), 39-41; citing Steve Coll and Steve LeVine, “Global Network Provides Money, Haven,” Washington Post, August 3, 1993. Bin Laden also gave money to the Third World Relief Agency to buy weapons for Bosnian fighters (Anonymous [Michael Scheuer], Through our enemies’ eyes: Osama bin Laden, radical Islam, and the future of America [Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, Inc., 2006], 151).

[58]Scott, Road to 9/11, 149-50; Kohlmann, Al-Qaida’s Jihad in Europe, 45, 73-75.

[59]Scott, Road to 9/11, 149; Kohlmann, Al-Qaida’s Jihad in Europe, 73. I have been unable to identify this Prince Faisal securely. He is perhaps Prince Faisal bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, who frequently visited the United States in connection with his horsebreeding interests in Kentucky. In 2003 Gerald Posner claimed that Faisal’s older brother and business partner Ahmed bin Salman had had ties to al-Qaeda and advance knowledge of 9/11 (Gerald Posner, Why America slept: the failure to prevent 9/11 [New York: Random House, 2003]), 202. Cf. Anthony Summers and Robbyn Day, The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Bin Laden (New York: Ballantine Books, 2011), 405-07, 419, 563-64.

[60] Friedman, “The CIA’s Jihad.” About this time, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in 2013 the leader of al Qaeda, came without difficulty to America to raise funds in Silicon Valley, where he was hosted by Ali Mohamed (Lawrence Wright, New Yorker: “Zawahiri decided to look for money in the world center of venture capitalism-Silicon Valley. He had been to America once before, in 1989, when he paid a recruiting visit to the mujahideen’s Services Bureau branch office in Brooklyn. According to the F.B.I., he returned in the spring of 1993, this time to Santa Clara, California, where he was greeted by Ali Mohamed, the double agent.”)

[61] Bruce O. Riedel, The Search for Al Qaeda: Its Leadership, Ideology, and Future (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2008), 43: “Osama also worked with ISI in the creation of a key Kashmiri jihadist group in the late 1980s, the Lashkar-e-Tayyiba.” Cf. Yossef Bodansky, Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America (Rocklin, CA: Forum, 2001), 320.

[62] Michael Scheuer, “Central Asia in Al-Qaeda’s Vision of the Anti-American Jihad, 1979-2006,” China and Eurasia Forum Quarterly (2006), 3.

[63] The Black Vault, www.theblackvault.com/documents/capturediraq/mullah.pdf‎

[64] Ahmed Rashid, “They’re Only Sleeping: Why militant Islamicists in Central Asia aren’t going to go away,” New Yorker, January 14, 2002, http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2002/01/14/020114fa_FACT; cf. Ahmed Rashid, Jihad(New Haven:Yale UP, 2002), 165; Svante Cornell, “Narcotics, Radicalism and Security in Central Asia: The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan,” Uppsala University, December 2004, 19: “Bolot Januzakov, Head of the Kyrgyz Security Council, asserted in 2000 that the IMU controlled the majority, perhaps up to 70%, of the heroin entering Kyrgyzstan.”

[65] Gretchen Peters, Seeds of Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and Al Qaeda (New York: Macmillan, 2009), 69, 87, 89, 132-33.

[66] Peters, Seeds of Terror, 132-33.

[67] 9/11 Commission, “Monograph on Terrorist Financing: Staff Report to the Commission,” 7. Cf. 9/11 Commission Report, 171: “Al Qaeda has been alleged to have used a variety of illegitimate means, particularly drug trafficking and conflict diamonds, to finance itself…. While the drug trade was a source of income for the Taliban, it did not serve the same purpose for al Qaeda.” Yhe footnote to this sentence (p. 499) adds: “No evidence indicates any such involvement in drug trafficking, and none of the detained al Qaeda operatives has indicated that this was a method of fund-raising.”

[68]“Evidence Presented to the British Parliament, 4th October 2001,” Los Angeles Times, October 4, 2001. Cf. New York Times, October 4, 2001. For further documentation, see Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 32, 36.

[69]New York Times, 7/20/93. Cf. J. R. de Szigethy, “Crime Scene — World Trade Center,” AmericanMafia.com, September 2004: “The murders [from the 1993 WTC bombing] were the result of a plot by members of an organized crime syndicate involved in drug trafficking.”

[70]Jayna Davis, The Third Terrorist: The Middle East Connection to the Oklahoma City Bombing (Nashville: WND Books/Thomas Nelson, 2004), 303.

[71]Boston Herald, 10/17/01; cf. 9/11 Report, 175.

[72] Steven Emerson, American jihad: the terrorists living among us (New York: Free Press, 2002), 28.

[73] Yossef Bodansky, Terror! The Inside Story of the Terrorist Conspiracy in America (New York: S.P.I. Books, 1994), 166. Similarly Gerald Posner notes “rumors that [Mustafa] Shalabi [the head of the al-Kifah Center until he was murdered in February 1991] … might be involved in counterfeiting” (Posner, Why America slept, 8).

[74] Berger, Jihad Joe, 37; citing USA v. Rahman, S5 93 Cr. 181, court transcript, April 3, 1995.

[75] Scheuer, Through Our Enemies’ Eyes, 151.

[76] Emerson, American jihad, 28.

[77] Bin Laden’s and al-Qaeda’s proximity to Khattab is both asserted and disputed at high levels. See Robert W. Schaefer, The insurgency in Chechnya and the North Caucasus: from gazavat to jihad (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger Security International, 2011), 165-66.

[78]Thomas Hegghammer.Jihad in Saudi Arabia : violence and pan-Islamism since 1979 (Cambridge, UK ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2010), 56.

[79] Soufan, Black Banners, 62. Jeremy Scahill also writes of Special Operations veterans in Blackwater with previous “experience in Chechnya” (Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield [New York: Nation Books, 2013], 408.).

[80] Yaroslav Trofimov, The Siege of Mecca: The 1979 Uprising at Islam’s Holiest Shrine (New York: Anchor, 2008).

[81] Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan, 179-82, 195-99.

[82] Steve Coll, Ghost wars: the secret history of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 155. For Azzam’s and OBL’s Muslim Brotherhood memberships, see Steve Coll, The Bin Ladens: an Arabian family in the American century (New York: Penguin Press, 2008), 148, 253.

[83] Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven: Yale UP, 2001), 131. Cf. Steven A. Yetiv, The Petroleum Triangle: Oil, Globalization, and Terror (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 65.

[84] Peter Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan: messianic terrorism, tribal conflicts, and the failures of great powers (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011), 198.

[85] Scott, Road to 9/11, 171; citing Rajeev Sharma, Pak Proxy War (New Delhi: Kaveri Books, 2002), 145-46.

[86] Cf. John J. Loftus , “What Congress Does Not Know about Enron and 9/11,” May 2003,http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4219.htm: “The … block order, in force since the 1980’s, was against any investigation that would embarrass the Saudi Royal family. Originally, it was designed to conceal Saudi support for Muslim extremists fighting against the Soviets in Afghanistan and Chechnya, but it went too far. Oliver North noted in his autobiography, that every time he tried to do something about terrorism links in the Middle East, he was told to stop because it might embarrass the Saudis. This block remains in place.”

[87] Scott, Road to 9/11, 172; citing Greg Palast and David Pallister, “Intelligence: FBI Claims Bin Laden InquiryWas Frustrated,” Guardian, November 7, 2001, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/nov/07/afghanistan.september11.

[88] Coleman affidavit, 2; in Berger, Ali Mohamed, 26.

[89] Coll, The Bin Ladens, 399-401.

[90] For a summary of some of the conflicting accounts, see Anthony Summers and Robbyn Day, The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Bin Laden (New York: Ballantine Books, 2011), 215-16.

[91] Coll, Ghost Wars, 231. In 2001 Peter Bergen had claimed that bin Laden “used his family connections with King Fahd to convince the [Saudi] government that he needed to leave the country to sort out some business matters in Pakistan. Arriving there in April 1991, he then sent a letter to his family telling them that he would not be able to return home. After some months in Afghanistan he arrived in Sudan” (Bergen, Holy Wars, Inc., 81-82).

[92]9/11 Commission Report, 57. In the December 2004 paperback edition of Ghost Wars (231-32), Coll adjusted his account to reconcile with the 9/11 Report. He replaced his sentence, “The escort put bin Laden on a plane out of Saudi Arabia,” with two new ones: “Two associates of bin Laden later offered a different version while under interrogation. They said a dissident member of the royal family helped him leave the country by arranging for bin Laden to attend an Islamic conference in Pakistan during the spring of 1991.” The “Islamic conference” is almost certainly a reference to the negotiations in Peshawar which produced the Saudi-backed Peshawar Accord (finalized in April 1992) to end the Afghan Civil War. Bin Laden did play a part in these negotiations. Like Sheikh Rahman before him, he tried, vainly, to negotiate a truce between the warring mujahideen leaders, Massoud and Hekmatyar (Wright, Looming Tower, 161; Roy Gutman. How We Missed the Story: Osama Bin Laden, the Taliban and the Hijacking of Afghanistan [Washington DC., Endowment of the United States Institute of Peace,2008], 34).

[93] Steve Coll also suggests that the “interior ministry” (headed by Prince) supplied bin Laden with “a one-time exit visa to travel to Pakistan to liquidate investments there” (Coll, The Bin Ladens, 381). Both motives may have been present in bin Laden’s mind, but his capacity to serve as a mediator may have been more influential in persuading the Saudis to arrange for his departure.

[94] Wright, Looming Tower, 161. For Naif (or Nayef) as anti-American, see Coll, Ghost Wars, 399; Coll, The Bin Ladens, 437, 626n.

[95] Tomsen, Wars of Afghanistan, 485: “Al-Qaeda, Muslim Brotherhood extremists, and Prince Turki’s General Intelligence Directorate supported the ISI’s extremist-centered Afghan strategy.”

[96] Against this odd claim cf. e.g. Wright, Looming Tower, 154: “The minister of the interior, Prince Naif, … summoned bin Laden to his office…. Bin Laden had reported to Naif…many times during the Afghan jihad.” As noted above, Ahmed Rashid claims that bin Laden and Prince Turki became “firm friends and allies” in the same cause (Taliban, 131).

[97] “A Biography of Osama bin Laden,” Frontline, PBS, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/binladen/who/bio2.html.

[98] Anonymous [Michael Scheuer], Through our enemies’ eyes: Osama bin Laden, radical Islam, and the future of America (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, Inc., 2006), 131.

[99] Coll, Ghost Wars, 207.

[100] Barnett R. Rubin, Afghanistan in the Post-Cold war Era (New York: Oxford UP, 2013), 86.

[101] Coll, Ghost Wars, 215-16.

[102] Coll, The Bin Ladens, 403-05.

[103] Summers, The Eleventh Day, 393: “Citing a U.S. intelligence source, the author Simon Reeve reported as much in 1999 – well before it became an issue after 9/11.” It is not contested that when bin Laden exited Sudan in 1996, his plane stopped in Qatar. “At the airport in Doha, Qatar’s capital, government officials boarded the plane and greeted bin Laden warmly” (Coll, Ghost Wars, 325).

[104] Peter Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan: messianic terrorism, tribal conflicts, and the failures of great powers (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011), 337.

[105] Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan, 406-07.

[106] Steve Coll, Ghost wars: the secret history of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 225.

[107] Scott, American War Machine, 94-105; Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War (Ipswich MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2008), 98-103.

[108]Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven: Yale UP, 2001), 145.

[109]Thomas Goltz, Azerbaijan Diary: A Rogue Reporter’s Adventures in an Oil-Rich, War-Torn, Post-Soviet Republic (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), 272-75. Cf. Mark Irkali, Tengiz Kodrarian and Cali Ruchala, “God Save the Shah,” Sobaka Magazine, May 22, 2003, http://www.diacritica.com/sobaka/2003/shah2.html . A fourth operative in MEGA Oil, Gary Best, was also a veteran of North’s Contra support effort. For more on General Secord’s and Major Aderholt’s role as part of Ted Shackley’s team of off-loaded CIA assets and capabilities, see Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott, and Jane Hunter, The Iran-Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Era (Boston: South End Press, 1987), 26-30, 36-42, 197-98.

[110]It was also a time when Congress, under pressure from Armenian voters, had banned all military aid to Azerbaijan (under Section 907 of the Freedom Support Act). This ban, reminiscent of the Congressional ban on aid to the Contras in the 1980s, ended after 9/11. “In the interest of national security, and to help in `enhancing global energy security’ during this War on Terror, Congress granted President Bush the right to waive Section 907 in the aftermath of September 11th. It was necessary, Secretary of State Colin Powell told Congress, to `enable Azerbaijan to counter terrorist organizations’” (Irkali, Kodrarian and Ruchala, “God Save the Shah,” Sobaka Magazine, May 22, 2003).

[111]Goltz, Azerbaijan Diary, 272-75; Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 7. As part of the airline operation, Azeri pilots were trained in Texas. Dearborn had previously helped Secord advise and train the fledgling Contra air force (Marshall, Scott, and Hunter, The Iran-Contra Connection, 197). These important developments were barely noticed in the U.S. press, but a Washington Post article did belatedly note that a group of American men who wore “big cowboy hats and big cowboy boots” had arrived in Azerbaijan as military trainers for its army, followed in 1993 by “more than 1,000 guerrilla fighters from Afghanistan’s radical prime minister, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.” (Washington Post, 4/21/94) Richard Secord was allegedly attempting also to sell Israeli arms, with the assistance of Israeli agent David Kimche, another associate of Oliver North. See Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 7, 8, 20. Whether the Americans were aware of it or not, the al Qaeda presence in Baku soon expanded to include assistance for moving jihadis onwards into Dagestan and Chechnya.

[112]Cooley, Unholy Wars, 180; Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 7. These important developments were barely noticed in the U.S. press, but a Washington Post article did belatedly note that a group of American men who wore “big cowboy hats and big cowboy boots” had arrived in Azerbaijan as military trainers for its army, followed in 1993 by “more than 1,000 guerrilla fighters from Afghanistan’s radical prime minister, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.” (Washington Post, April 21, 1994). The Azeri “Afghan Brigade” was formally dissolved in 1994, after which it focused more on sabotage and terrorism (Cooley, Unholy Wars, 181),

[113]As the 9/11Commission Report notes (58), the bin Laden organization established an NGO in Baku, which became a base for terrorism elsewhere. It also became a transshipment point for Afghan heroin to the Chechen mafia, whose branches “extended not only to the London arms market, but also throughout continental Europe and North America (Cooley, Unholy Wars, 176).

[114] Rubin, Afghanistan from the Cold War, 86.

[115] Peter L. Bergen, Holy War, Inc.: inside the secret world of Osama bin Laden (New York: Free Press, 2001), 67. Cf. Ali Soufan, Black Banners, 565 (murder of Anwar Sadat, watch list); Berger, Jihad Joe, 24 (watch list).

[116]Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Knopf, 2006), 180; cf.Paul L. Williams, Al Qaeda: brotherhood of terror ([Parsippany, NJ?]: Alpha, 2002), 117.

[117] “A Soldier’s Shadowy Trail In U.S. and in the Mideast,” New York Times, December 1, 1998, http://www.nytimes.com/1998/12/01/international/120198LADEN_SHADOW.html?pagewanted=4.

[118] Phil Karber, Fear and faith in paradise: exploring conflict and religion in the Middle East (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), ZZ; cf. Wright, Looming Tower, 164-65.

[119] Summers, The Eleventh Day, 393: “Citing a U.S. intelligence source, the author Simon Reeve reported as much in 1999 – well before it became an issue after 9/11.”

[120] Coll, The Bin Ladens, 399-401. Cf. Geoffrey Wawro, Quicksand: America’s pursuit of power in the Middle East (New York: Penguin Press, 2010), ZZ: “Osama mixed business and religion. He committed to build an airport at Port Sudan;” Karber, Fear and faith in paradise, ZZ: “Bin Laden promised the people of Sudan an airport at Port Sudan.”

[121] Wright, Looming Tower, 165.

[122] The text of the State Department paper of August 14, 1996, “State Department Issues Factsheet on Bin Ladin,” is reproduced in Brisard and Dasquié, Ben Laden: la vérité interdite, 257-58.

[123] Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game, 180-81.

[124]Jane’s Intelligence Review, August 1, 2001; quoted in Scott, Road to 9/11, 356.

[125]John Crewdson, “Swiss Officials Freeze Bank Accounts Linked to Supporters of Terrorist Groups.” Chicago Tribune, November 3, 2001, http://www.sudanreeves.org/2004/12/22/us-state-departments–growing-expediency-in-dealing-with-khartoums-terrorist-connections-november-5-2001/. Cf. Ahmed, War on Truth, 98; Financial Times, November 29 2001, http://specials.ft.com/attackonterrorism/FT3RNR3XMUC.html : “A US State Department report in 1996 and a French investigation into the bank separately concur that bin Laden invested $50m in the bank on his arrival in Sudan in 1991, an allegation Mr Ismail [of the bank] denies.” Cf. also Brisard, Ben Laden: La Verité Interdite, 119-21, 308-10, etc.

[126] Coll, The Bin Ladens, 413. There is a brief reference to the State Department White Paper in Bergen, Holy Wars, Inc. (2001), 83: “Bin Laden…sank $50 million of his own money into the Al-Shamal Islamic Bank in Khartoum” (cf. 264n). The controversial author Yossef Bodansky links both the Faisal Islamic Bank and the Al-Shamal Bank to significant jihad activities, as well as possible drug trafficking (Yossef Bodansky, Bin Laden: the man who declared war on America (Rocklin, CA: Forum, 2001), 42-43.

[127] Lance, Triple Cross, 157-59, citing State Department Cable 1994STATE335575.

[128] Steve A. Yetiv, The petroleum triangle: oil, globalization, and terror (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2011), 114-15.

[129] Zachary Abuza, Militant Islam in Southeast Asia: Crucible of Terror (Boulder, CO:Lynne Rienner, 2003), 108. At ease in Saudi Arabia, Khalifa became a misleading source, rather than a topic of inquiry, in privileged bin Laden books like Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower (112-13, 450).

[130] Anonymous [Michael Scheuer], Through our enemies’ eyes, 151.

[131] Lance, Triple Cross, 161, citing personal interview.

[132] Lance, Triple Cross, 162.

[133] Lance, Triple Cross, 157-58.

[134] Khalifa also “headed the Muslim World League office in Peshawar in the 1980s. In 1988, he moved to Manila and opened a branch office of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth [an allied royal creation]” (Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan, 198).

[135] Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil (New York: Crown, 2003), 167, 140.

[136] Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan, 179-82, 195-99.

[137] Abuza, Militant Islam in Southeast Asia, 93.

[138] Baer, Sleeping with the Devil, 69; Aaron Mannes, Profiles In Terror: The Guide To Middle East Terrorist Organizations(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 41.

[139] Kumar Ramakrishna (ed.), After Bali: The Threat of Terrorism in Southeast Asia (Singapore: Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies, 2003), 139.

[140] Wesley J. L. Anderson, Disrupting Threat Finances: Utilization of Financial Information to Disrupt Terrorist Organizations in the Twenty-First Century (S.l.: BiblioScholar, 2012), 14.

[141] Girma Yohannes Iyassu Menelik, Europe: The future Battleground of Islamic Terrorism, 95.

[142] Kohlmann, Al-Qaida’s Jihad in Europe, 41-42. Before being captured in Pakistan, Ramzi Yousuf was being sheltered by his maternal uncle Zahid al-Shaikh, a principal with Mercy International (Lance, 1000 Years for Revenge, 189). Mercy International was another Islamic NGO involved in recruiting “international volunteers” for the war in Bosnia (Richard Labévière, Dollars For Terror: The United States and Islam (New York: Algora, 2000), 151.

[143] Larry Niksch, Abu Sayyaf: Target of Philippine-U. S. Anti-Terrorism Cooperation (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, 2007), CRS-4.

[144] Peter L. Bergen, The Osama Bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of Al Qaeda’s Leader (New York: Free Press, 2006), 444.

[145] 9/11 Commission Report, 73; citing Joint Inquiry Report (classified version), 324-28. Cf. pp. 146, 148: “In 1992, KSM… moved his family to Qatar at the suggestion of the former minister of Islamic affairs of Qatar, Sheikh Abdallah…, In January 1996, well aware that U.S. authorities were chasing him, he left Qatar for good.”

[146] Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil, 18-19, 194-96. Baer heard from another member of the al-Thani family, former police chief Hamad bin Jasim bin Hamad al-Thani, that when KSM came from the Philippines, Abdallah bin Khalid gave him 20 blank Qatari passports. Later, “As soon as the FBI showed up in Doha” in 1996, the emir ordered Abdallah to move KSM out of his apartment to his beach estate, and eventually out of the country (pp. 195-96).

[147] Brian Ross and David Scott, “Al Qaeda Ally? Member of Qatari Royal Family Helped Senior Al Qaeda Official Get Away,” ABCNEWS.com, February 7, 2003, http://web.archive.org/web/20030209235027/http://abcnews.go.com/sections/wnt/DailyNews/qatar_alqaeda030207.html.

[148] Lance, Triple Cross, 253; emphasis in original. Lance does discuss the role of Qatar’s Sheikh Abdullah in helping KSM to escape the FBI (Cover up: what the government is still hiding about the war on terror [New York: Regan Books, 2004], 168-69).

[149] Lance, Triple Cross, 342.

[150] Anthony Summers and Robbyn Day, The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Bin Laden (New York: Ballantine Books, 2011), 410-15, 559-62; Former Senator Bob Graham, Keys to the Kingdom, 131-32; cf. David B Ottaway, The king’s messenger:Prince Bandar bin Sultan and America’s tangled relationship with Saudi Arabia (New York: Walker & Company, 2008), 198-99.

[151] 9/11 Commission, ”Appendix A: The Financing of the 9/11 Plot, Staff Report, Terrorist Financing, 1.“Despite persistent public speculation, there is no evidence that the hijackers who initially settled in San Diego, Mihdhar and Hazmi, received funding from Saudi citizens Omar al Bayoumi and Osama Bassnan, or that Saudi Princess Haifa al Faisal provided any funds to the hijackers either directly or indirectly. A number of internal FBI documents state without reservation that Bayoumi paid rent on behalf of Mihdhar and Hazmi, a claim reflecting the initial view of some FBI agents. More thorough investigation, however, has determined that Bayoumi did not pay rent or provide any funding to the hijackers.”

[152]9/11 Commission Report, 266-72 (272).

[153]Rory O’Connor and Ray Nowosielski, “Who Is Rich Blee?” 911Truth.org, September 21, 2111, http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20110921153919600; Rory O’Connor and Ray Nowosielski, “Insiders voice doubts about CIA’s 9/11 story,” Salon, October 14, 2111, http://www.salon.com/writer/rory_oconnor_and_ray_nowosielski/. O’Connor and Nowosielski add corroboration from former Counterterrorism Chief Richard Clarke. “Clarke said he assumed that ‘there was a high-level decision in the CIA ordering people not to share that information.’ When asked who might have issued such an order, he replied, ‘I would think it would have been made by the director,” referring to Tenet — although he added that Tenet and others would never admit to the truth today “even if you waterboarded them.’

[154]Kevin Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots (Walterville, OR: TrineDay, 2011); cf. Peter Dale Scott, ZZ, in James R Gourley, ed., The 9/11 Toronto Report: International Hearings on the Events of September 11, 2001 (Seattle, WA: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2012). According to Fenton (pp. 72-79), the post-9/11 cover-up of Wilshire’s behavior was principally the work of one person, Barbara Grewe, who worked first on the Justice Department Inspector General’s investigation of Wilshire’s behavior, then was transferred to two successive positions with the 9/11 Commission’s staff.

[155]9/11 Commission Report, 259, 271; Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11(New York: Knopf, 2006), 352–54; Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 203.

[156]Lawrence Wright, “The Agent,” New Yorker, July 10 and 17, 2006, 68; cf. Wright, Looming Tower, 339-44; discussion in Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War (Ipswich MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2008), 355, 388-89.

[157]Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 383-86.

[158]Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 48. Cf. Lawrence Wright, “The Agent,” New Yorker, July 10 and 17, 2006, 68; quoted approvingly in Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine, 399.

[159]Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 371, cf. 95.

[160] Quoted in Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars, 21.

[161] Tom Wilshire, July 23, 2001, in “United States v. Zacarias Moussaoui (No. 01-455), Substitution for the Testimony of ‘John.’” U.S. Court for the District of Alexandria, July 31, 2006; quoted in Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 274, 401.

[162]Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 276.

[163] Berger, Ali Mohamed, 17; citing Wayne Parry, “Mysterious pair in custody perplexes federal investigators,” Associated Press, November 11, 2001; Falasten M. Abdeljabbar, “Neighborhood tired of suspicions and fear,” The Jersey Journal, December 18, 2001.

[164]Robert Hanley and Jonathan Miller, “4 Transcripts Are Released In Case Tied to 9/11 Hijackers,” New York Times, June 25, 2003.

[165] Berger, Ali Mohamed, 18; citing John Kifner, “Kahane Suspect Is a Muslim With a Series of Addresses,” New York Times, November 7, 1990; Transcript, Sealed Bail Hearing, US v. El-Atriss, November 19, 2002. The transcripts were unsealed after a lawsuit by several organizations including the New York Times and the Washington Post.

[166]Wayne Parry, “September 11 Fake ID Suspect Flees U.S.,” Associated Press, July 31, 2003, http://911review.org/Wiki/Mohamed-El-Atriss.html.

[167] Berger, Ali Mohamed, 18; citing Robert Hanley and Jonathan Miller, “4 Transcripts Are Released In Case Tied to 9/11 Hijackers,” New York Times, June 25, 2003; Wayne Parry, “Judge releases transcripts in Sept. 11 fake IDs case,” Associated Press, June 24, 2003. The New York Times story is worth quoting further: “*Mr. Atriss was a co-founder of a Jersey City check-cashing company, Sphinx Trading Company, that had bank accounts with millions of dollars and had as a co-owner Waleed Abouel Nour, whom the F.B.I. had identified as a terrorist.That business was at the same location, on Kennedy Boulevard, used as a mailing address by several of the hijackers and earlier by Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, whose followers were convicted of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.”

[168] Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 53. Cf. David E. Spiro, The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony: Petrodollar Recycling and International Markets (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999), x: “In 1974 [Treasury Secretary William] Simon negotiated a secret deal so the Saudi central bank could buy U.S. Treasury securities outside of the normal auction. A few years later, Treasury Secretary Michael Blumenthal cut a secret deal with the Saudis so that OPEC would continue to price oil in dollars. These deals were secret because the United States had promised other industrialized democracies that it would not pursue such unilateral policies.

[169] See e.g. Michael Quint, “Saudi Prince Becomes Citicorp’s Top Stockholder.” New York Times, February 22, 1991.

[170] Andrew Scott Cooper, The Oil Kings: How the U.S., Iran, and Saudi Arabia Changed the Balance of Power in the Middle East (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 275, etc.; Scott, Road to 9/11, 33-34.

[171]F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (London: Pluto Press, 2004), 173; Andrew Gavin Marshall, “The Imperial Anatomy of Al-Qaeda. The CIA’s Drug-Running Terrorists and the ‘Arc of Crisis.’” Global Research, September 4, 2010, http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-imperial-anatomy-of-al-qaeda-the-cia-s-drug-running-terrorists-and-the-arc-of-crisis/20907. Cf. Scott, Road to 9/11, 86-89.

Source: globalresearch.ca

Believe it or not: HAARP: Secret Weapon Used For Weather Modification, Electromagnetic Warfare

2013-07-28T23:15:00.000+03:00

Believe it or not: HAARP: Secret Weapon Used For Weather Modification, Electromagnetic Warfare

This article was first published August 2, 2010

“It isn’t just conspiracy theorists who are concerned about HAARP. The European Union called the project a global concern and passed a resolution calling for more information on its health and environmental risks. Despite those concerns, officials at HAARP insist the project is nothing more sinister than a radio science research facility.”
– Quote from a TV documentary on HAARP by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC).

HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program) is a little-known, yet critically important U.S. military defense program which has generated quite a bit of controversy over the years in certain circles. Though denied by HAARP officials, some respected researchers allege that secret electromagnetic warfare capabilities of HAARP are designed to forward the US military’s stated goalof achieving full-spectrum dominance by the year 2020. Others go so far as to claim that HAARP can and has been used for weather modification, to cause earthquakes and tsunamis, to disrupt global communications systems, and more.

Major aspects of the program are kept secret for alleged reasons of “national security.” Yet there is no doubt that HAARP and electromagnetic weapons capable of being used in warfare do exist. According to the official HAARP website, “HAARP is a scientific endeavor aimed at studying the properties and behavior of the ionosphere, with particular emphasis on being able to understand and use it to enhance communications and surveillance systems for both civilian and defense purposes.” The ionosphere is the delicate upper layer of our atmosphere which ranges from about 30 miles (50 km) to 600 miles (1,000 km) above the surface of the Earth.

The HAARP website acknowledges that experiments are conducted which use electromagnetic frequencies to fire pulsed, directed energy beams in order to “temporarily excite a limited area of theionosphere.” Some scientists state that purposefully disturbing this sensitive layer could have major and even disastrous consequences. Concerned HAARP researchers like Dr. Michel Chossudovskyof the University of Ottawa and Alaska’s Dr. Nick Begich (son of a US Congressman) present evidence suggesting that these disturbances can even cause tsunamis and earthquakes.

Two key major media documentaries, one by Canada’s public broadcasting network CBC and the other by the History Channel, reveal the inner workings of HAARP in a most powerful way. The very well researched CBC documentary includes this key quote:

“It isn’t just conspiracy theorists who are concerned about HAARP. In January of 1999, the European Union called the project a global concern and passed a resolution calling for more information on its health and environmental risks. Despite those concerns, officials at HAARP insist the project is nothing more sinister than a radio science research facility.”

To view the European Union (EU) document which brings HAARP and similar electromagnetic weapons into question, click here. The actual wording at bullet point 24 in this telling document states that the EU “considers HAARP by virtue of its far-reaching impact on the environment to be a global concern and calls for its legal, ecological and ethical implications to be examined by an international independent body before any further research and testing.” This reveling document further states that the EU regrets the repeated refusal of the U.S. government to send anyone to give evidence on HAARP.

To watch this engaging 15-minute CBC documentary online, click here. For an even more detailed and revealing 45-minute History Channel documentary on HAARP and other secret weapons used for electromagnetic warfare, click here. Below are two quotes from the History Channel documentary:

“Electromagnetic weapons … pack an invisible wallop hundreds of times more powerful than the electrical current in a lightning bolt. One can blast enemy missiles out of the sky, another could be used to blind soldiers on the battlefield, still another to control an unruly crowd by burning the surface of their skin. If detonated over a large city, an electromagnetic weapon could destroy all electronics in seconds. They all use directed energy to create a powerful electromagnetic pulse.”

“Directed energy is such a powerful technology it could be used to heat the ionosphere to turn weather into a weapon of war. Imagine using a flood to destroy a city or tornadoes to decimate an approaching army in the desert. The military has spent a huge amount of time on weather modification as a concept for battle environments. If an electromagnetic pulse went off over a city, basically all the electronic things in your home would wink and go out, and they would be permanently destroyed.”

For those who still doubt that such devastating secret weapons have been developed, here is an intriguing quote from an article in New Zealand’s leading newspaper, the New Zealand Herald:

“Top-secret wartime experiments were conducted off the coast of Auckland to perfect a tidal wave bomb, declassified files reveal. United States defence chiefs said that if the project had been completed before the end of the war, it could have played a role as effective as that of the atom bomb. Details of the tsunami bomb, known as Project Seal, are contained in 53-year-old documents released by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade.”

If the military secretly developed a weapon which could cause a tsunami over half a century ago, what kind of advanced deadly weapons might be available now? And why is it that the general public still doesn’t know about secret weapons developed over 50 years ago? To understand why the media isn’t covering these highly critical issues, click here. Clearly the military has the capability to cause a tsunami and likely to cause earthquakes and hurricanes, as well. It’s time for us to take action to spread the word on this vital topic.

Having interpreted to for top generals in my work as a language interpreter with the US Department of State, I learned that military planners are always interested in developing the most devastating weapons possible. Yet these weapons are kept secret as long as possible, allegedly for reasons of national security. The many layers of intense secrecy both in the military and government result in very few people being aware of the gruesome capabilities for death and destruction that have been developed over the years. There are many examples of major defense projects kept successfully out of the public’s eyes for years and even decades.

The massive Manhattan Project (development of the first atomic bomb) is one such example. The building of an entire city to support the project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee was successfully kept secret even from the state’s governor. The stealth bomber was kept top secret for many years, and the public still has no way of knowing it’s full capabilities. It is through the use of the highly organized military and intelligence services that the power elite of our world, working in cooperation with key allies in government and corporate ownership of the media, are able to carry out major cover-ups and secret operations like those involved with HAARP.

Some researchers have raised questions about the possible involvement of HAARP in major disasters like the earthquake in Haiti, Indonesian tsunami, and hurricane Katrina. Could these have been HAARP experiments gone awry? Might they even have been caused by rogue elements which gained control of this devastating technology. Of course disasters like this happen regularly on a natural basis, yet if you begin to research, there is some high strangeness around some of these disasters. The evidence is inconclusive, yet with the known and unknown major destructive capabilities of this weapon, serious questions remain.

Jesse Ventura, the former Navy Seal who turned pro wrestler only to then become governor of Minnesota, has also done a special on HAARP that is a bit sensationalized, yet contains useful information. You can watch this special on YouTube at this link.

Source: wanttoknow.info

ANN Intl Feature: Swimming in a sea of Frequencies: Electromagnetic Fields and us

2013-05-22T14:05:00.000+03:00

ANN Intl Feature: Swimming in a sea of Frequencies:

Electromagnetic Fields and us

By Alex Quinn

Particularly now that wireless communications are so closely integrated into our daily lives, electromagnetic fields (EMFs) are all around us. Our cities, especially the larger ones, are perpetually shrouded in an invisible electrosmog, a ‘sea’ of EMFs through which we swim every day. But does this momentous development in civilisation come with health effects – and if so, can we do anything to reduce them?

What is ELF-EMF and what are its sources?

It’s important to realise that there are two main forms of EMF: radiofrequency (RF)-EMF and extremely low-frequency (ELF)-EMFs. The frequency range of ELF-EMF is 1–300 Hz, and the Earth’s natural geomagnetic field strength varies from around 60 μT (microtesla) at the magnetic poles to around 30 μT at the equator.

Many man-made sources of ELF-EMF exist. Prime among these artificial sources are power lines and electronic appliances, with vacuum cleaners, electric can-openers, microwave ovens, shavers and hair dryers among the most powerful. These appliances emit ELF-EMF at field intensities ranging from 17.44 to 164.75 μT, measured from 5 cm away. Since the intensity of magnetic fields decreases dramatically with increased distance from the source, the corresponding range of magnetic field intensities at 50 cm is 0.12–1.66 μT.

Table 1. ELF-EMFs produced by domestic appliances. Taken from IARC Monograph Volume 80 (2002).

The International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (INCIRP) has set limits of 1 mT (millitesla) for occupational exposure to ELF-EMF, and 200 μT for general public exposure. While these limits are not breached by individual man-made sources, additive effects must also be considered, as we shall see.

What is RF-EMF and what are its sources?

The frequencies of RF-EMFs are considerably higher than ELF-EMFs, ranging from 100 kHz to 300 GHz. As its name suggests, the main uses of RF-EMF are in broadcasting information. In today’s data-driven world, this means that RF-EMF is constantly around us: it is produced by things such as mobile phone base stations, cordless phones, utility ‘smart’ meters, remote control toys, wireless networks, radar and baby monitors. In addition, there are various natural sources of RF-EMF, including the Earth, the Sun and other black body radiators.

Here’s a shocking statistic: did you know that having a cordless phone base station in your housecan expose you to the same level of RF-EMFs as having a mobile phone mast in your back garden?

Do EMFs pose health problems?

The mainstream view is that the only potential danger from EMFs stems from their heating effects on tissue, in the case of RF-EMF, or of electrical currents induced in the body for ELF-EMF. However, there is strong evidence to suggest that the athermal effects of ELF- and RF-EMFs also contribute to various health problems.

Childhood leukaemia

According to the BioInitiative report, evidence indicates that risk of childhood leukaemia in young boys doubles when they are exposed to ELF-EMF levels of 1.4 mG (milligauss), while other studies indicate that leukaemia risks begin at 2, 3 and 4 mG. This occurs in the context of an ICNIRP limit of 1000 mG.

The BioInitiative report also found that ELF-EMFs interfered with recovery from childhood leukaemia: if a child was exposed to levels of ≥2 mG during recovery, their risk of death increased by 300%, while at levels of ≥4 mG that risk increased to 450%.

Alzheimer’s disease

ELF-EMF has also been found to increase the risk of Alzheimer’s disease by increasing levels of a protein called amyloid beta, a leading risk factor for Alzheimer’s.

Melatonin

EMFs have also been found to decrease the levels of melatonin in the body. Melatonin is produced in the pineal gland of the brain, which produces melatonin when it directly or indirectly detects low light levels. EMFs may interfere with this mechanism because the brain confuses them with light waves, thus suppressing the pineal gland’s melatonin production. Melatonin is an absolutely vital hormone. It acts as a powerful antioxidant, and has been found to aid in the prevention of Alzheimer’s, depression, cardiovascular diseases, insomnia, mood disorders, tinnitus and various cancers.

Brain and auditory nerve cancers

RF-EMFs have been given a 2B classification – possibly carcinogenic – by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC). They have been found to be possible causes of acoustic neuromas and brain tumours called gliomas. Studies have shown that using cordless phones, which produce RF-EMFs, can increase the risk of brain tumours by up to 470% after ≥10 years of use when habitually used on one side of the head. Mobile phones, in the same scenario, can increase the risk by up to 200%. Both mobiles and cordless phones can trigger reactions in people who suffer from electrohypersensitivity.

What about interactions between EMFs and other factors?

Of course, EMFs don’t affect us in isolation: everyone living in a city, for example, is bombarded by numerous chemical toxins and other environmental pollutants, and many of them take multiple pharmaceutical drugs – in addition to constant EMF exposure. We are at an early stage of investigating and defining these complex interactions, but existing research indicates that these combinations can have both beneficial and adverse effects. For example, in vitro DNA damage was caused by a 7 mT magnetic field in combination with ferrous chloride, but not with either agent alone. Other combinations of EMFs and agents enhanced analgesia and neural performance.

Call to action: Reduce your EMF exposure!

Thus, you should take as many steps as possible to reduce your exposure to EMFs. Suggested strategies include:

Using fibre-optic cables for your broadband
Using wired connections whenever possible
Keeping mobile and cordless phones away from your body
Using wired baby monitors: children are more effected by EMFs than adults
Keeping wireless routers or cordless phones out of regularly used bedrooms or children’s bedrooms
Reducing time spent in calls when using mobile or cordless phones
Reducing children’s exposure to wireless devices as much as possible
Avoiding using microwave oven
Avoiding placing wireless computers on your lap
Avoiding allowing your children to use remote-control toys for long periods of time, if at all

ANH Europe Homepage
ANH EMR campaign page

Updated: 15 May 2013

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Tue, 21/05/2013 - 08:56.

Quinn states that we should use fiber-optic cables. But they invite Big Brother into our house and will in the future be used also for "Smart Meters" and various kinds of surveillance through recording activities, with hidden cameras and microphones, and to control certain activities with various kinds of equipment.

Submitted by Tina (not verified) on Wed, 15/05/2013 - 22:23.

Thank you Alex for your research, I think you have done a great job. Two years ago we decided to move from UK to Nicaragua, one of the reasons being how ill I was feeling in our house in UK. At night I could pick up 15 wi-fi signals from neighbours in our bedroom - we also lived very close to the police station and I think they were using the tetra net. In the end I could hardly sleep for the pain in my head and then by the morning the pain was so bad I couldn't get going and was surviving on painkillers. Every time we were away from the house the pain was not in my head, once we realised that we decided we needed to move. I hope your article alerts others to the dangers of EMF exposure, for many the symptoms won't be as obvious as mine. Keep up the good work Alex. Best wishes, Tina.

Source: http://anh-europe.org

Nice Song. Kinsi Haji Adan

2012-11-08T23:43:00.000+03:00

Brain-Speared Florida Teen Making 'Miraculous Recovery'

2012-06-20T03:15:00.000+03:00

Brain-Speared Florida Teen Making 'Miraculous Recovery'

The first images of the Florida teen who survived a spear shot into his head show the key factors that likely saved the teen's life, his doctors said.
Yasser Lopez, 16, was fishing with a friend at a Miami lake nearly two weeks ago when the spear gun they were using accidentally deployed and hit Lopez in the head, according to Miami-Dade police.
Click HERE to see the X-rays of the spear in Lopez's head.
Lopez was rushed by paramedics to the University of Miami-Jackson Memorial Hospital where he arrived conscious but with 3 feet of the spear protruding from his forehead.
"The tip, it didn't penetrate the skin but you could feel underneath the skin on the back of his head so we knew that it went all the way through," said Dr. George Garcia, an assistant professor of surgery at the Army Trauma Training Center who treated Lopez.
Doctors credited the paramedics who treated Lopez with saving his life by not immediately pulling the spear out of the teen's head.
"The temptation if you don't have experience with these things is, 'Oh well, pull it out,'" said Dr. Ross Bullock, a neurosurgeon at Jackson Memorial. "If you do that, most of the time it's uniformly fatal."
Paramedics used a re-bar tool and pliers to stabilize the spear and a hydraulic cutter to clip the steel spear so the teen's head could fit inside a CT scanner.
The X-rays of Lopez's head showed the spear went all the way through his head at an angle and exited the other side but just missed his eye and dodged all major blood vessels in Lopez's brain. It also traveled through the right hemisphere of his brain, less than one inch above the central brain that controls the senses, heart rate and breathing.
"All of these are structures that, if this had happened to affect those, he would not have been likely to have survived to even get to the hospital," Bullock said. "If you had to have a spear go through there [the head], then this spear chose the right path to go with the least damage."
Doctors used the X-rays to plan the complex three-hour surgery in which they removed the spear from Lopez's head.
Lopez was moved out of the hospital's Intensive Care Unit Monday. Doctors say he is now sitting up and speaking a few words and that brain scans since his surgery show the spear caused relatively little damage to his brain.
The teen may have some lingering trouble with movement on the left side of his body, doctors say, but he is expected to make an otherwise full recovery.
"He's making pretty much a miraculous recovery," Bullock said.

Dead woman climbs out of coffin

2012-04-22T04:27:00.002+03:00

Dead' woman climbs out of coffin

A 95-year-old grandmother terrified her neighbours in China - by climbing out of her coffin six days after she 'died'.

Li Xiufeng was found motionless and not breathing in bed by her neighbour more than a fortnight after tripping and suffering a head injury.
When he failed to wake her up, Chen Qingwang assumed the frail grandmother had passed away in her sleep, in the village of Liulou, in Beiliu, Guangxi Province.
Recounting his daily visit to bring the elderly lady breakfast, Mr Qingwang, 60, said: ""She didn't get up, so I came up to wake her up.
"No matter how hard I pushed her and called her name, she had no reactions. I felt something was wrong, so I tried her breath, and she has gone, but her body is still not cold."
According to tradition, the 'dead' woman was laid in her coffin ahead of the funeral for friends and relatives to pay their respects.
But the day before the funeral, Mr Qingwang arrived at his neighbour's house to find the coffin empty and the corpse gone.
"We were so terrified, and immediately asked the neighbours to come for help," he said.
After searching for the missing body, the villagers were stunned to find Mrs Xiufeng sitting on a stool in her kitchen cooking.
She reportedly told villagers: "I slept for a long time. After waking up, I felt so hungry, and wanted to cook something to eat. I pushed the lid for a long time to climb out."
A county hospital reportedly believes Mrs Xiufeng suffered an artificial death, during which the person has no breath, but the body remains warm.

SOMALIA: FAMINE FOR PROFIT AND THE EAST AFRICAN FOOD CRISIS

2012-04-22T03:42:00.000+03:00

SOMALIA: FAMINE FOR PROFIT AND THE EAST AFRICAN FOOD CRISIS

by Nile Bowie

Photographs, James Nachtwey

Few parts of the world aptly fit the description of hell better than Somalia’s crumbling capital city, Mogadishu; a nation ravaged by imperialism, domestic instability and economic sabotage from foreign forces. Parades of malnourished Africans queuing up to receive rations are trumpeted in thirty second news pieces on most mainstream media outlets, of which offer embarrassingly insubstantial examples of journalism with little explanation for such images of unparalleled inequality, past the effects of droughts, while never missing the opportunity to highlight the threat of al-Qaeda. While it cannot be denied that the current droughts in East Africa, which have been reported to be the most dire in sixty years, have been negatively exacerbating the climate of food availability in Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia; the mammoth aid conglomerates which ‘shake their coin cup’ for incoming donations from the predominately cash-strapped civilian populations of the ‘developed’ world and the reporting mainstream media outlets consistently fail to maturely scrutinize the basis for such economic dysfunction in East Africa, responsible for the starvation of thousands of people. In Somalia’s case (a nation once self sufficient in it’s food production), the ‘economic medicine’ of the International Monetary Fund and the behest of colossal oil robber-barrens have contributed far more devastation than droughts towards producing the images of deprived and inebriated bodies you see on television.

While a percentage of people around the world enjoy the supersized culture of fast food Globalization in our age of 3D HDTV, quadruple-decker cheese burgers and senseless commodity overproduction, three billion people or nearly half the world’s population individually sustain themselves on less than two USD per day amidst an annual surge in the global price of food, which has increased by thirty seven percent since last year. The loathsomely bias individuals which comprise the International Community, of whom are capable of feeding the entire African content with the loose change in their couch cushions, use today’s reports of legitimate or fabricated human rights abuses in Africa and all over the world as a pretext for exercising avenues of modern imperial conquest in the morally bankrupt pursuit of private geopolitical, economic and militarily strategic gain; this should lend serious credence to the motivations of East African aid supplied by Western Political & Financial Institutions, which have contributed to the very economic genocide responsible for requiring such aid to begin with. The area designated as modern day Somalia is a region believed to have produced the first Homo sapiens, who were responsible for crafting vast anthropological treasures and archeological artifacts, evidence of a highly sophisticated ancient civilization. The region once thrived as a bustling hub of commerce and lucrative international trade, Somali merchants of the time were chieftains of commercial exchange between Asia, Persia and Africa during the time of the Ming Dynasty and were even responsible for influencing Chinese linguistics during the period. Today, the people of Somalia are regarded as little more than ants at a picnic for the Intelligence Agencies and Corporate Interests that seek to occupy this strategically located area. The weapon of choice against them is man made famine.

Somalians belong to a single homogenous ethnic group comprised predominately of nomadic tribesmen who place great importance on poetry and other oral traditions, they are historically characterized by fiercely striving for independence against foreign forces during the Scramble for Africa, most notably from the imposing agents of the British Empire in league with Christian Ethiopians and Italian Fascists in the late 19^th century in their pursuit to control Somalia’s trading ports and strategic coastline. The religious cleric turned patriotic leader of the day, Sayid Mohamed Abdulle Hassan led several successful military ventures using guerilla armies of ethnically Somali fighters from across the Horn of Africa, which overpowered British imperial forces on several occasions. While its surrounding peers had been colonized or utilized as proxy forces, as such in Ethiopia, Hassan fathered the Dervish State in modern day Somalia built on the pillars of homogenous, linguistic and religious unity and national self sufficiency, which had remained the only independent Muslim State on the entire African continent. Like today, any governance that resists the command of Imperialists (now called ‘Globalists’) are dispensed militarily; the British launched the first modern airstrike in Africa against Dervish military bases in Somalia, effectively crushing the resistance of the rightful indigenous inhabitants for their own private objectives of which have continued to the present day in more sophisticated ways.

Somalia was once a progressive developing nation built on homogenous unity and agricultural self-sufficiency, which encouraged gender equality, the emerging roles of women in military and production, and the banning female circumcision.

With total disregard for anthropological requirements and ethnic distinctions of the people within the areas of foreign territory they carved up, the British invaders ceded regions populated by ethnic Somalis such as Haud and Ogaden over to their ally, the Ethiopian Emperor Menelik in 1948; later, crippling regional conflict would ensue in regaining these stolen territories. The geographical borders of the first Somali Republic, which achieved independence in 1960, were literally drawn by British and Italian forces. Mohamed Siad Barre declared Somalia a Socialist state after a military coup in ’69 and attempted to build a nation in Hassan’s vision of state unity and self-sufficiency through cooperative farming and nationalization programs of industry and mass production. While life in the times of Socialist Somalia was far from glamorous, it was absolutely blissful compared to the current state of affairs within the Horn of Africa. At the time Somalia was agriculturally stable and actively implementing sweeping public works programs and working to dramatically increase the nations literacy rate through urban and rural programs, while introducing the first Latin-based orthography of the Somalian dialect as the national language of education. The Islamic government exercised very progressive views towards improving the influence of women in society by offering unisex education and creating laws forbidding female circumcision, woman were actively recruited in the military and female employment in factory production was encouraged. Barre supported the model of Greater Somalia, which sought to regain ethnic Somali territories handed out by the preceding colonial administrations that would encompass Somalia, Djibouti, Ogaden (Ethiopia) and the North Eastern Province (Kenya); these aspirations led to the Ogaden War with Ethiopia, the superpowers of the time aided and funded this conflict in exchange for constructing military bases, thus effectively reducing the Horn of Africa to pliant client states and of the Cold War.

The Soviet Union was closely allied with Barre’s government and supplied vast military and economic aid, allowing Somalia to build up the largest armory on the continent before switching strategies and backing Ethiopia, which was synonymous for being an American proxy state prior to a military takeover which led to the rise of Ethiopian Marxist leader, Mengistu Haile Mariam. Somalia turned to the United States for aid and the resulting conflicts killed thousands of Africans and severely weakened Ethiopia and Somalia, as their lands were used as the inconsequential frontlines of foreign forces. Following the Somalia’s military withdrawal in the Ogaden War, the economy was crippled due to disproportionate military spending and looming foreign debt. In the face of increasing public discontent with Barre’s government and the loss of aid from the Soviet Union, Somalia called to the West; unfortunately for the Somali people, The International Monetary Fund answered. As part of the IMF’s loan protocol, the borrower country must accept the conditions stipulated within structural adjustment policies, thus requiring the suspension of public work programs, investments in education and nearly any outlet which gives priority towards improving people’s conditions and standards of living. Structural adjustment programs are designed to pry countries open to predatory capital, often purging the authority of national companies over the management of the resources in their own lands; these schemes of the IMF and other financial institutions are designed to secure the indebtedness the borrower country to total dependency on further loans and foreign aid; directly attacking national sovereignty and practices of self sufficiency which the Somalis gave their lives to protect.

Following the IMF-imposed austerity measures, Somalia began to grovel and churn by facing food shortages, record inflation and currency devaluation, to a point where a simple meal at a restaurant required paying with bundles of currency notes. Barre’s increasingly irrelevant leadership settled further loan agreements with the Paris Club and International Development Association, which required the Government to sell off vital public systems, such as the countries’ electricity generators, which cast Mogadishu into a nightly darkness. As the situation in Somalia became increasingly unstable, Ethiopians armed and funded various militia clans such as the Somali Salvation Democratic Front and the Somali National Movement, which ousted President Barre after twenty-two years of military rule. Warring foreign funded clans sought to legitimize themselves as Barre’s successor, leading to a Civil War in ‘91, which plunged the nation into anarchy. James Bishop, the former United States ambassador to Somalia stated, “There is competition for water, pasturage, and cattle. It is a competition that used to be fought out with arrows and sabers, now it is fought out with AK-47’s”. Since that time, the nation of Somalia has been largely without a stable Government, after decades of intervention from foreign forces, the Somali people have been brought to their knees. In the present day, Somalia is trumpeted as an emerging front in the ever expanding and oxymoronic War on Terror. Much of the country is under the control of Al Qaeda linked militia group, ‘Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen’, simply known as Al-Shabaab. Under further examination of the International Communities’ engagements in Somalia, the goal of cleansing the land of its indigenous inhabitants becomes glaringly obvious in its brazen criminality.

THE ARCHITECTURE OF MAN-MADE FAMINE & THE CARTELIZATION OF FOOD

“The present vast overpopulation, now far beyond the world carrying capacity, cannot be answered by future reductions in the birth rate due to contraception, sterilization and abortion, but must be met in the present by the reduction of numbers presently existing. This must be done by whatever means necessary.”  - Initiative for the United Nations ECO-92 EARTH CHARTER

The key policy makers, in which the International Community is comprised of, are among the worst examples of human beings our globalized civilization has to offer; through the lenses of their own superiority complex, these individuals view the Third World as a place designated for their personal plunder, populated with third-rate individuals and useless eaters who are unworthy to consume the nourishments produced on their own indigenous lands. Presently, Somalia is weathering consecutively severe droughts, which prevail in the regions of southern Bakool and Lower Shabelle, partially controlled by jihadist militia group, Al-Shabaab. Traditionally, due to its harsh geographical climate, Somalia has always been a pastoral and rural economy of barter between nomadic herdsmen and resident agriculturalists. Despite persistent droughts, Somalia maintained agricultural self-sufficiency throughout the 1970’s and implemented programs, which led to sizeable commercial pastoral development. The IMF-World Bank intervened in the 80’s and set the stage for an agricultural crisis through economic reforms, which diluted the delicate exchange relationship between pastoralists and small farmers, in their relative nomadic and sedentary economies.

In order to service debt owed to the Paris Club and other Washington-based financial institutions, harsh austerity measures were imposed on the former Somali Government, which reinforced national dependency on imported grain, further contributing to bankruptcy and the need for additional loan supplements. Food aid increased by fifteen times between the mid seventies to mid eighties and continued to rise by thirty-one percent per annum. Sedentary agricultural producers were ruined by the IMF stipulated increase of commercial imports, traditionally consumed locally grown crops such as maize and sorghum were replaced with cheap foreign wheat and subsidized US grain in an effort to increase Somalia’s dependency - not its sovereignty. Prices of fuel, fertilizer and farm inputs rose exorbitantly following periodic IMF imposed devaluations of the Somali Shilling, which crushed the nations purchasing power and severely impacted domestic agricultural producers and irrigated farming. The real causes of impoverishment in Somali farming communities were caused by deregulation of the grain market, currency warfare and the influx of foreign food aid, such donations were made with the expectation that Somalia’s best-irrigated farmlands would be used to harvest fruits, vegetables, oilseeds and cotton, not for domestic consumption, but for export into lucrative grocery market shelves in the First World. Donors were able to take control of the entire budgetary process by providing food aid because its domestic sale became the principal source of revenue for the state.

“Depopulation should be the highest priority of foreign policy towards the Third World, because the US economy will require large and increasing amounts of minerals from abroad, especially from less developed countries.”- Henry Kissinger, Nobel Peace Prize recipient & former US Secretary of State

In a country where fifty percent of the population is comprised of nomadic pastoralists, the role of camels and other livestock is integral to survival and wealth procurement; prior to the IMF’s involvement in Somalia, livestock contributed to eighty percent of export earnings. Ultimately, creating dependency is profitable and securing such relationships is the ultimate goal of a lending institution, loans are distributed attached to structural adjustment polices for that reason. The World Bank encouraged the privatization of livestock veterinary services, a private market for veterinary drugs, and administered the commercialization of water during times of drought, while effectively dissolving the functions performed by the government’s own Ministry of Livestock; thus forcing a traditional exchange economy onto a privatized for-profit system, not catered towards the needs of nomadic herders in remote pastoral areas, which yielded devastating results by wiping out herds and any semblance of the pastoralist economy. Bretton Woods’ institutions oversaw the restructuring of government budgeting and expenditure, which prevented the government from independently utilizing the available domestic resources, leading to an eighty five percent decline in agricultural expenditures from levels in the mid seventies.

The economic restructuring programs implemented by the IMF-World Bank have devastated the practices of nomadic pastoralists and driven them to impoverished austerity. The traditional exchange economy was undone; grain producers who bartered their grain for livestock were ruined as grazing herds faded from starvation, which contributed to dwindling foreign exchange earnings from international beef exports. It is no surprise that the governments once reasonably sound economic and social programs began to deteriorate. According to research published by Michael Chossudovsky, government expenditure on health in ’89 had declined by seventy eight percent in comparison with their relative mid seventies levels and the levels of recurrent annual expenditure on education was only four USD per student, when previously the budget in ’82 allowed for eighty two USD to be allocated per student, amidst a forty one percent decrease in school enrollment, resulting in the relative collapse of the education system. The average public sector wage was reduced to three USD per month and Somalia’s debt-servicing obligations represented a bleak 194.6 percent of export earnings, the situation became hopeless.The World Bank had permitted a structural adjustment loan for seventy million USD in ‘89, but was later frozen due to hemorrhaging economic performance; even if the country were to take new loans in an attempt to repay their debts, Somalia has been taken hostage by predatory capital, debt servicing and structural adjustment. Traditional economies in hundreds of different countries are under attack from the IMF; famines in the present day are not an outcome of a food shortage but the result of economic restructuring, unaffordability and global oversupply.

“A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.” - Ted Turner, CNN founder and donor to the United Nations

The work of the IMF, World Bank and other Bretton Woods financial institutions is to secure the handcuffed dependency of the borrower country to world markets and the destruction of food security; environmental conditions and drought foster additional vulnerability towards food insecurity, as seen presently unfolding in the Horn. Somalia was cast further into economic dysfunction due to the subsidization of duty-free beef and dairy products, imported from the European Union; pastoral farmers are prevented from traditionally procuring wealth from their herds because low quality meat products imported from the EU sell for half the price of domestically produced product. Food aid to sub-Saharan Africa has increased more than seven times since 1974 and commercial grain imports have flooded local markets and more than doubled in availability in countries known to be agriculturally self-sufficient, such as Zimbabwe, where the population was subjected consuming tree bark during a food crisis in 1992, while their fertile lands were used for cultivating tobacco exports to service foreign debt. Financial institutions apply debilitating restructuring to the economies of borrower countries to effectively turn them into breadbaskets for cash crops and other money harvests, using the highest quality farmlands available to cultivate tobacco crops for export, while simultaneously flooding the local market with subsidized foreign grain and meat products; creating a deliberate express route to creating poverty and unraveling local economies. In addition to implementing crippling initiatives of austerity in the rural development, public works and agricultural infrastructure projects of African countries, their shameless pursuit of turning a profit has led the World Bank to trumpet the commoditization of water, which does nothing but actively contribute to food insecurity and famine in arid climates.

IMF-World Bank imposed structural adjustment is the ultimate attack on sovereignty and any local system of exchange that bypasses the global market. The ensuing economic dysfunctions are not a terrible coincidence or a result of mismanagement; they are designed to create dependency through Malthusian policies, market sabotage and contrived famines, resulting in intentionally culling the population of the developing world, out of fear that their indigenous resources and sovereign economies may potentially yield a bountiful amount of wealth and independent development. According to research conducted by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the global price of food has skyrocketed more than two hundred and forty percent since 2004; the unwarranted upward mobility of such necessities must not be naively dismissed as market fluctuations, the price of food is directly manipulated by key constituents of the Anglo-Dutch-Swiss food cartel, comprised of a dozen pivotal companies, assisted by another three dozen, which literally hold a monopoly over the world's food supply under the nauseating influence of the inbreeding feudalists within the Royal British House of Windsor. Never before in history have such powerful oligarchs been so blatant in expressing their advocacy for depopulation. Their control of the food supply is enough to loose sleep over.

“To really reduce population, quickly, you have to pull all the males into the fighting and you have to kill significant numbers of fertile age females The quickest way to reduce population is through famine, like in Africa, or through disease, like the Black Death.”  - Thomas Ferguson, US State Department Office of Population Affairs

The work of the Windsor-led food cartel directly serves to influence the deaths of millions of people annually, by means of starvation through man-made famines. The cartel is comprised of six leading private grain producing companies: Cargill, Continental, Louis Dreyfus, Bunge and Born, André, and Archer Daniels Midland, which control the majority of the world’s grain, wheat, corn, oats, rye, sorghum, barley, meats, dairy, oils, fruits, vegetables, sugars and spices. In an effort to dominate the world’s natural resources, the institution of the House of Windsor has worked to centrally focus control over energy distribution, management of mineral/resources and the cultivation of food. Extensive research published by Richard Freeman in the Executive Intelligence Review thoroughly illustrate the central control of the food cartel, of whom have established four main export blocks used to fuel the global food economy. The regional breakdown of market control includes the United States, the European Union, the Commonwealth Nations such as Australia, South Africa, Canada, New Zealand and Latin America (Argentina & Brazil); Although these regions account for much less than a quarter of the world population by today’s estimates, they are used to grow produce and other food products, which cheaply pour into the markets of the other 80% of the world.

While it is common for countries producing bountiful and nutritious food to become active in the export market, the four focus regions of the cartel were given unbridled priority as world distributors, effectively instilling forced dependency in the restructuring Third World, which fell into the trap of accepting adjustment loans from the very foreign forces which plundered them in colonization; the countries outside the four export regions could either import from the global market, or starve. War was waged against the independent farm economies of the four export regions, sparring nothing outside of corporate central control. In 1976, Russia was sold 12.4 million tons of grain produced in North America by Cargill and Continental, creating a grain shortage in America and Canada at time. Just because the food is grown in the four export regions, does not entitle those countries to guaranteed food security, or mean the ruling governments of those countries have any authority over the destination or prices of the products, because they are harvested and distributed by totally private entities who make their decisions based on profit, not merit or moral supremacy. In studies conducted by the Trade Analysis Branch of the US Department of Agriculture in 1994, the export regions account for eighty eight percent of the world’s wheat exports, when it comprised only thirty nine percent of the world’s wheat production of 522.4 million tons in ’94 – ’95; although these regions came nowhere close to producing the largest quantities of product, their preeminence is forced by the food cartel through flooding any semblance of a ‘free market’.

“AIDS and other diseases will be the COVER STORY for the decimation. The real causes will be starvation, contaminated water (which has existed for a long time), toxic vaccines given to people who are already immune-suppressed, wars, and of course, stolen farmland.“ - John Rappoport, author of Depopulation and HIV

The direct control apparatus of the Anglo-Dutch-Swiss food cartel are to blame for these tragic fluctuations within this intentionally Malthusian food system. Research published in the Executive Intelligence Review by Joseph Brewda highlight a memorandum authored by the openly eugenic Henry Kissinger, vainly discussing the “Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests”. Kissinger, who was the former US Secretary of State during the Nixon and Ford administrations, channels the racial pseudo science of the 1940’s by proposing the implementation of a covert plan to reduce population growth in selected developing countries through targeted birth control, war and famine due to the threat of population growth in the former colonial sector, which was subsequently adopted as official policy by President Gerald Ford in 1975, former National Security Advisor and then-CIA Director George Bush senior would be commissioned to implement the policy. Kissinger gloats, "Capital investments for irrigation and infrastructure and the organization requirements for continuous improvements in agricultural yields may be beyond the financial and administrative capacity of many least developed countries. For some of the areas under heaviest population pressure, there is little or no prospect for foreign exchange earnings to cover constantly increasingly imports of food. It is questionable, whether aid donor countries will be prepared to provide the sort of massive food aid called for by the import projections on a long-term continuing basis" before subsequently warning of a "large-scale famine of a kind not experienced for several decades, a kind the world thought had been permanently banished”.

Mr. Kissinger is well aware that these anomalies are not products of backwards peoples, unable to feed themselves in their own countries, but orchestrated by deliberate financial policies designed to ‘stabilize’ populate levels in potentially competitive and more resource-rich countries. The sheer human suffering being experienced in the Horn of Africa right now is solely a product of decades of Malthusian policies, which harbor food as a weapon. Ironically, the authors of genocidal policies and Malthus advocates never volunteer themselves to starvation; perhaps Mr. Kissinger should experience the receiving end of his population stabilization, although one assumes he wouldn’t fair too well without two thousand-dollar bottles of champagne, foie gras and gourmet truffles. Most people assume the United Nations, with it’s World Food Program and ‘peacekeeping soldiers are on a bold mission to make the world a better place, however these agencies are at the forefront of implementing policies of central control by trumpeting genetically modified organisms, vaccination and sterilization programs in the developing world under the guise of sustainable development, orchestrated by people who can only be described as eco-extremists.

U.N. ENFORCING MASS POPULATION REDUCTION THROUGH VACCINES & GMO

“Perhaps those agencies, combined with UNEP and the United Nations population agencies, might eventually be developed into a Planetary Regime—sort of an international superagency for population, resources, and environment. Such a comprehensive Planetary Regime could control the development, administration, conservation, and distribution of all natural resources, renewable or nonrenewable, at least insofar as international implications exist.”

- Page 942 of ‘ECOSCIENCE’, authored by current US Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology, John P. Holdren

Creating a solution to the current problems within the Horn of Africa is not an issue of unwillingness in utilizing the bountiful available resources of the unimaginably wealthy cabal of bankers, corporate profiteers, monarchs and the general ruling class, all of whom who can contribute such insignificant amounts of their relative fortunes to drastically offset this maltreatment. This is an issue of intentional depopulation, brought you to by the agencies administering the framework for a sounder ecological and sustainable world, which can only be administered through population reduction, primarily in the Third World. Over the past several years millions of dollars have been invested into slick corporate public relations campaigns attempting to subtly condition the public to what appears to be at first, a more reasoned consumer consciousness relating to the environmental impacts of human consumption and unwavering capitalism. While it may be reasonable to conserve water and adopt more ecological forms of waste disposal and packaging, the unwarranted flow of green propaganda is designed to centralize control of nations through a monogovernmental system, in addition to further transferring wealth between the public and the ruling class, by delicately molding public opinion into accepting new forms of taxation, such as a carbon tax.

The world being brought in by the International Community is one where total control is implemented under the guise of environmentalism, where human beings are viewed as liabilities and inadequate pollutants of carbon, of whom, must be culled through policies of enforced genocide and population reduction. The United Nations Population Division released a policy brief in 2009, which literally begins with the phrase, “What would it take to accelerate fertility decline in the least developed countries?”. Another mention by the United Nations Population Fund in it’s 2009 State of the World Population Report entitled, “Facing a Changing World: Women, Population and Climate“ goes on to say “Each birth results not only in the emissions attributable to that person in his or her lifetime, but also the emissions of all his or her descendants. Hence, the emissions savings from intended or planned births multiply with time” and also “Strong family planning programmes are in the interests of all countries for greenhouse-gas concerns as well as for broader welfare concerns”. These eco-extremists attempt to rationalize reducing population levels through declaring carbon as a pollutant, effectively accusing human beings or carbon-based forms of life as ‘unsustainable’.

“In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill, but in designating them as the enemy, we fall into the trap of mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.”

- Page 104 of ‘The First Global Revolution’, authored by The Club of Rome, a prominent global think tank consisting of current and former Heads of State, UN bureaucrats, high-level politicians and government officials, diplomats, scientists, economists, and business leaders from around the globe

These accusations of the International Community spiriting a genocidal consensus are not speculation and cannot be immaturely dismissed as ridiculous conspiracy theories, although the proponents of such policies are quite vocal of their intentions, one only has to observe the dire inequalities of the human condition around the world to aptly reach the conclusion that the architecture of our governing institutions are not designed to benefit the common man. Currently, there is a food war being raged against the people of the Horn of Africa and Somalia; the United States is currently working to block international food assistance to areas controlled by Al-Shabaab resistance forces. There is an internationally recognized Somalian Transitional Government, heavily influenced by the United States; the Americans have proposed limiting the distribution of incoming international aid strictly to areas in control of their own Somali proxy leaders, which effectively means starvation for about three million people, since only a few neighborhoods in Mogadishu would receive supplies, amidst an annually dwindling aid program; U.S. food relief to the UN’s Somali operations has been steeply declining since 2009.

The UN’ bankrolled World Food Program is happy to

take your money to assist you in ‘saving lives’, the organization

has syphoned $160 million dollars of aid money to UN

employees, delivered 12% of food aid to intended poverty

stricken areas of Ethiopia, used foreign aid donations to

purchase arms and inflated shipping and

trucking fees up to 300% over the actual cost.

The current Somali Transitional Government can aptly be described as American puppets, which have exhibited incapabilities in garnering public support, defending themselves without the aid of foreign forces and have essentially failed to maintain the infrastructure of a functioning government. The actions of the US Government in the Horn have been a total failure and have only contributed to further civil chaos and domestic instability. Partnered with agencies such as the United Nations World Food Program (WFP), the Somali people are being starved in submission, while the West is refusing to authorize the release of grain piled high in Kenyan warehouses because American forces have failed to install a handpicked ruler can who adequately defend against resistance forces. While they have no problem exploiting the genuine morality and concern of ordinary individuals by fishing for donations to help save lives, the WFP has been accused of syphoning one hundred and sixty million dollars of aid money to UN employees and into arms trading deals with Islamic militants and hired defense contractors by the United Nation’s own Monitoring Group. Elsewhere in Georgia, the WFP proved to be totally incompetent by failing to provide a daily minimum diet to prevent malnutrition and starvation, after food rations were not adjusted during a harsh winter in ’09, in addition to providing terrible quality flour, which produced inedible hardened bread.

"I don't claim to have any special interest in natural history,  but as a boy I was made aware of the annual fluctuations in  the number of game animals and the need to adjust  the cull to the size of the surplus population."  - Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh,  patron of the World Wildlife Fund

The racial pseudo science of the 20^th century resulted in the extermination of millions of people, motivated by the elimination of undesirable elements within the population. Eugenics is coined as the study of the hereditary improvement of the human race by controlled selective breeding; these maniacal ideas have stealthily transitioned into the 21^st century, where extraordinarily influential bodies such as the United Nations and other prominent think tanks lined with bureaucrats, government officials, scientists and global business leaders have explicitly called for reducing the world population, strictly cordoning areas of human habitat into designated population zones and the transition of environmentalism into the faith of the future. The vapid performance of the United Nations and its subsidiary organizations to adequately contribute to alleviating food-related disasters and their efforts to influence a reasoned system for food pricing and distribution only gives credence to the fact that although their organizations may market themselves on morally superior concepts such as global harmony and sustainability, individuals within these institutions themselves envision a single sterilization state, within a world absent of the majority of humans.

One may find it curious why bodies such as USAID, the UN’s World Food Program and many other NGO’s concerned with ‘reproductive rights’ still provide food relief to crisis zones if their true intent was the eventual depopulation of the regional occupants; In the Somalian context, creating dependency has been reached through the commoditization of food aid from the outside world, like the situation in Somalia, entire nations can be brought to grovel in impoverishment through economic restructuring and the bounties of ‘free trade’ brought to you by the World Trade Organization (WTO). In addition to reports of the WFP delivering only 12% of food aid to intended poverty stricken areas of Ethiopia, using foreign aid donations to purchase arms and of inflating shipping and trucking fees up to 300% over the actual cost (reflecting the total corruption of private organizations which hold billion dollar contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan), the organization, backed up tirades of UN collectivists actively attempt to coerce governments to adopt transgenic genetically modified organisms and mass vaccination schemes as the only contributable aid or face being cut off and to receive nothing, after all, beggars can’t be choosers. In 1998, the mammoth American pesticide and GM-producing corporation, Monsanto authored an appeal entitled ‘Let The Harvest Begin', which proposed the only hope in alleviating the plight of the world's poor is through force-feeding GMO seeds without prior subjection to independent safety testing, onto African crops and distributed the document to the various African Heads of State, amidst staunch debate and objections from American and European consumers, healthcare experts, environmentalists and food retailers.

"The FDA has placed the interest of a handful of biotechnology companies ahead of their responsibility to protect public health. By failing to require testing and labeling of genetically engineered foods, the agency has made consumers unknowing guinea pigs for potentially harmful, unregulated food substances.” - Andrew Kimbrell, Executive Director of the International Center for Technology Assessment (CTA)

In response to Monsanto’s appeal, representatives from every African nation except South Africa issued a collective response, stating “We strongly object that the image of the poor and hungry from our countries is being used by giant multinational corporations to push a technology that is neither safe, environmentally friendly, nor economically beneficial to us. We think it will destroy the diversity, the local knowledge and the sustainable agricultural systems that our farmers have developed for millennia, and that it will thus undermine our capacity to feed ourselves". Elsewhere, such as in Hungary, nearly one thousand acres of maize found to have been grown with genetically modified seeds have been destroyed in an effort to rid the country of Monsanto’s GMO products; Peru has also recently issued a decade-long ban on GMO production. Monsanto has been systematically blocking researchers from using its patented gene modified GMO seeds to conduct independent research into the potentially debilitating health effects of consuming such products, the company is also the forerunner in attempting to privatize the world seed supply in an attempt to create a world where 100% of all commercial seeds are genetically modified and patented, the company already owns 90% of the world’s patents for GMO seeds including cotton, soybeans, corn, sugar beets and canola.

Monsanto has literally taken organic seeds from farmers to create genetically engineered copycat versions, promising higher yields and effectively committing bio-piracy by retaining all intellectual property rights of the seed; the company invested eighteen million USD to develop technologies to monopolize nature, which directly attack food sovereignty by creating seeds which only yield a single harvest and die before the second generation in an effort to force farmers in developing countries to abide by their agreements to continually purchase the junk seeds, resulting in the accumulation of enormous debt; in India, accounts of over two hundred thousand indebted farmer suicides have been reported. Ironically enough, a large amount of those farmers take their own lives by drinking Round Up Ready, a toxic herbicide produced by Monsanto. In their unwaveringly ethical pursuit of profit, Monsanto has actually filed patent infringement claims against conventional and organic farmers in both Canada and the US whose crops suffer with trace contamination from neighboring GMO crops, and often times, Monsanto is the victor, leaving local farmers with outrageous legal bills and fines, which forces them to shut down, allowing Monsanto to buy up the land. Representatives from Monsanto, The WPF and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are annual guests of secret Bilderberg Group meetings, both prominent bodies enforcing sterilization and mass genocide.

"Whatever the price of the Chinese Revolution, it has obviously succeeded not only in producing a more efficient and dedicated administration, but also in fostering high morale and community of purpose. The social experiment in China under Chairman Mao’s leadership is one of the most important and successful in human history.”

- David Rockefeller, banker, honorary director of Council on Foreign Relations, honorary chairman of Bilderberg Group & founder of Trilateral Commission, praising Chairman Mao, whose policies resulted in the extermination at least 35 million people

Monsanto was one of the corporate sponsors of HR 875, a bill in the United States that would grant the US Federal Department Of Agriculture central authority to dictate strict laws over organic farming, which include the mandatory spraying of toxic herbicides such as Round Up Ready and control over livestock diets and veterinary services; these new stipulations backed the establishment intentionally mirror loan-restructuring protocol required by indebted countries such as Somalia. The enormously wealthy and influential Rockefeller Foundation, chaired by the robber-barren-Mao-praising David Rockefeller, has long influenced the movement towards sustainability by encouraging the widespread use of transgenic GM seeds, particularly in Africa. On behalf of the Rockefeller Foundation, Representative Akinwumi Adesina stated the following before the Congressional Black Caucus Legislative Conference in 2007: ‘”Regarding genetic engineering, by and large, African countries do not currently have in place regulatory frameworks that allow their use for food production. Many challenges face the introduction and cultivation of GM crops in Africa, including fear of GE crops. Assisting Africa to meet its food needs has other advantages for climate change. Increasing population pressure and reliance on extensive agricultural practices will likely lead to further deforestations and carbon dioxide emissions and contributions to climate change”.

While Adesina parrots the tired talking points and green pseudoscience of the International Community by trying to argue that traditional agricultural methods, which have been practiced on the African continent since the early days of human existence will lead to deforestation and that GMO seeds produced by transnational corporations such as Monsanto, backed by maniacal environmental extremists are good, documents released by the Rockefeller Foundation shed light on their strategic motives: “Major organizations such as the Population Council and the National and International Planned Parenthood Federations have been supported by the Foundation in a variety of ways. These and other existing organizations, as well as others that may come into being, represent exceedingly important instrumentalities for the extension of family planning information and contraceptive methods. Future initiatives of the foundation are described: ‘It will explore potentialities of training programs, seminars, public forums, symposia, and other devices for conveying information about the impact of population growth on economic and social development to government officials from ministries of health, planning commissions, and other appropriate agencies, in the interest of motivating greater action on population policy and population control programs.”

“The eugenics of Hitler were financed to a major extent by the same Rockefeller Foundation which today is building a doomsday seed vault to preserve samples of every seed on our planet, in reality, as it years later emerged, the Green Revolution was a brilliant Rockefeller family scheme to develop a globalized agribusiness which they then could monopolize just as they had done in the world oil industry beginning a half century before. As Henry Kissinger declared in the 1970’s, ‘If you control the oil you control the country; if you control food, you control the population’. Agribusiness and the Rockefeller Green Revolution went hand-in-hand.” - F. William Engdahl, author and researcher

Large swaths of land in Africa around the world are being converted into crops used for growing biofuels, such as corn-based ethanol, an increasingly popular additive used in diesel-fueled vehicles and commercial trucks because it is popularly considered to be environmentally friendly due to it’s renewability. Surprisingly enough, recent studies issued by the European Union reveal that biofuels, or fuel made from living, renewable sources, produces 400 percent more CO2 than conventional fossil fuels do; take into consideration that many arguments used to promote transgenic seeds highlight their sustainability to the environment and their potential to reduce carbon emissions. We are told to believe traditional agricultural methods can contribute to famine, deforestation and environmental degradation, while the International Community is authoring authoritarian new green policing policies and claiming the environment is really a priority, when lush rainforests, up to twenty million acres of American farm land in states such as Iowa and the best lands in the Third World, which are traditionally used to grow food for the local communities, are taken over by corporations to grow corn-based ethanol thus, working to exacerbate the phony issue of carbon emissions in the first place.

The green dialogue we are being fed is phony, self contradictory and completely criminal. Biofuels have helped to fuel man-made famines by reducing the amount of local crops allowed to be grown, thus globally increasing the price of food, that includes the subsidized foreign foods used to flood developing markets. This is a sick and twisted scheme to use food as a weapon to achieve the desired culls of the surplus population. The sheer fact that a “marketplace” for life-sustaining goods exists let alone, the fact that such precious resources are subject to maniacal manipulations enforced by a speculative club of super-rich perverts who commoditize everything of value to humanity, leaves little wonder why people around the world are showing their discontent on the streets. Directionless people, totally disenfranchised by leading substance-less lives revolving around neglect and consumerism, the kind of people currently attempting to create chaos on the streets of London are a strong signification that something is really wrong with every foundation of our society, our culture of commodities and our mutual alienation of compassion for human life. Our civilization is looking very bleak at the moment; people loot liquor stores and steal iPads in the developed world, while people in the undeveloped world are viewed as liabilities and denied their sustenance because the International Community tell us, we cannot accommodate their carbon pollution.

"The world today has 6.8 billion people. That's heading up to about nine billion. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent." - Bill Gates, founder of The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Microsoft

The threat of death, autism and other debilitating neurological disorders associated with pandemic vaccinations is a subject rarely, if ever, brought up by the mainstream media. An episode of 60 Minutes aired once in 1979 and later banned from being rebroadcasted attempted to touch on the subject of devastating vaccination side effects following a US Government sponsored Swine Flu hype, which resulted in the vaccination of 48 million people in 1976. The host interviews a middle-aged schoolteacher named Judy Roberts, who obediently took a vaccination after being influence by Swine Flu propaganda produced by the US Center for Disease Control (CDC) and subsequently began suffering from paralysis. She was later diagnosed with Guillain–Barré syndrome (GBS), a fatal disease affecting the peripheral nervous system, causing Roberts to become a quadriplegic. When the director of the vaccination program, Dr. David Sensor was interviewed, he uncomfortably admitted that the pro-vaccination hype generated CDC was unwarranted, because no confirmed cases of the Swine Flu existed. The CDC was responsible for authoring a consent sheet, which stated that scientists performed several safety checks on the vaccine, however the vaccination that was actually distributed, X53A, was another concoction entirely and was subject to no testing.

An interview was also conducted with Dr. Michael Hatwick, the Director of the Vaccination Surveillance team at the time who claimed the agency was fully aware of the health risks attributed to the X53A vaccination. In a blatant lie, Director David Sensor awkwardly claims to never have been aware of such health risks. The CDC was also responsible for creating a vaccination awareness campaign; the agency also used the names of celebrities and pop culture icons of the day without their consent to garner support for their program. It’s hard to distinguish which is more disturbing, the content of the story itself or the fact that the episode had been banned from air. There has been a longstanding demonization of medical doctors who face their careers and credentials being challenged by the establishment if they are viewed as vocal opponents of pandemic vaccinations. Ghislaine Lanctôt, a Canadian author and medical doctor investigated the ineffectiveness and dangers of vaccination and concluded that vaccinations are intentionally being used as a eugenics weapon for a massive and targeted reduction of the world population. Lanctôt writes, “Because of my professional status, my words weighed significantly in the public eye. The Medical Board’s reaction was immediate and strong. Its leaders demanded that I resign as a physician. I answered that I would do so as long as they could prove that what I had written was false. The Medical Board replied with a call for my expulsion. As I witnessed the disproportionate reaction of the Medical Board, I discovered that, despite official claims, vaccines have nothing to do with public health. Underneath the governmental stamp of approval, there are deep military, political and industrial interests.”

“Scientific evidence links vaccinations to chronic fatigue, autoimmune disorders, aids, learning disabilities, and other health problems. Viera Scheibner notes that the annual death rate in Europe prior to 1940 from diphtheria was negligible (less than 300 deaths per million). After this date, when mass vaccinations against the disease were begun, "unprecedented" diphtheria epidemics followed in fully vaccinated subjects.”- Ron Garner, researcher and author of ‘Conscious Health’

Scientists and other prominent professionals who have bravely questioned the inconclusive official account of the September 11^th attacks have similarly been blacklisted and subject to career suicide, equating any intellectual deviation from the Corporate media’s version of effects enough to warrant being burnt at the stake. Recently in Australia, the nation’s most prominent anti-vaccination group, The Australian Vaccination Network, which provides anti-vaccination information through its website, magazines and seminars, has been stripped of it’s charitable status by the government of New South Wales and can no longer appeal for public fundraising. The countries seasonal flu vaccine (which is pushed with priority towards loathed Australian Aboriginals and pregnant women), Fluvax, reportedly caused convulsions in ninety-nine children. The rate of seizures in 2010 were fifty times higher than would ordinarily be expected with a vaccine; similarly in Ghaziabad, India, two nine-month-old twins in died within fifteen minutes of receiving a measles vaccination, research published by Archie Kalokerinos, M.D. states that in some Aboriginal communities of Australia every second child given a vaccination died of crib death, but when fed high doses of vitamin C before and after vaccinations, not a single child died; according to the Australian Government, permitting any awareness toward these legitimate concerns is unacceptable.

In 2009, The World Health Organization declared the first flu pandemic of the 21st century during a propagated Swine Flu scare, which like in 1976, never came into fruition. However, the virus created to combat the much-hyped H1N1, which millions of people willfully accepted, contained some very alarming substances. One of the noted components was Thimerosal, a noted mercury derivative, a substance banned in Russia, Denmark, Austria, Japan, Great Britain and Scandinavian countries.

According to a Russian study conducted in 1977, adults exposed to ethylmercury, which is the form of mercury found in thimerosal, suffered brain damage and nervous system injury, which in many cases resulted in coma and death. The vaccine also contained Squalene, an experimental anthrax vaccine component given to returning Gulf War veterans who were used as guinea pigs and subsequently suffered from eveloped arthritis, non-healing skin lesions, aphthous ulcers, neuropsychiatric problems, anti-thyroid effects, anemia, systemic lupus erythematosus, chronic diarrhea and multiple sclerosis, to name a few. Author of the book “Vaccine-A” and journalist Gary Matsumoto commented, “Squalene adjuvants are a key ingredient in a whole new generation of vaccines intended for mass immunization around the globe. Eating and digesting Squalene isn’t a problem. But, injecting it galvanizes the immune system into attacking it, which can produce self-destructive cross reactions against the same molecule in the places where it occurs naturally in the body and where it is critical to the health of the nervous system” and has also stated “Squalene is a kind of trigger for a real biological weapon.” Numerous scientists and medical professionals have refused to take the vaccine.

“Despite the refusal of the conventional health establishment to investigate the long-term effects of childhood vaccinations, independent research reports have increasingly been made public. These link vaccination rates to the epidemic of childhood asthma, as well as to crib death, shaken baby syndrome, hyperactivity, attention deficit disorder, autism, and juvenile diabetes. Since the 1990s, there has been a tenfold or 1000-percent increase in autism, an increase which has been linked by some researchers to the organic mercury preservative commonly found in baby vaccines.” – Walter Last, author of ‘The Natural Way to Heal’

Despite the findings of medical professionals and numerous researchers, the establishment media and the International Community still find no problem with promoting the supposed ‘beneficial qualities’ of mass vaccination. Bill Gates, who has previously attended closed Bilderberg meetings lined with individuals attempting to influence global society with eugenics and strict breeding policies, has contributed 27.6 million USD on five hundred thousand shares of Monsanto stock between April and June 2010 and unsurprisingly, is an outspoken proponent of global vaccinations and touts goals of vaccinating every single child on the planet, claiming that vaccines are “one of the most effective health interventions ever developed.” Chillingly, Gates, when speaking at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, pledged ten billion USD to developing new vaccines for the world’s poorest countries and while declaring “the decade of vaccines” and their huge impact.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have also contributed over 12.5 million USD since 1998 to the organization, Planned Parenthood. Founded by Margaret Sanger in 1921, a prominent eugenicist famous for quotes such as "We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population", "Birth control must lead ultimately to a cleaner race", "The most merciful thing that a family does to one of its infant members is to kill it" and "Eugenics is… the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political and social problems." In 1939, Sanger launched The Negro Project, with aim of steadily reducing the African American population. Sanger managed to cleverly recruit prominent and well-educated African American ministers into supporting her scheme by portraying birth control as a means to attain economic empowerment, elevate the race and garner the respect of whites; abortion clinics were opened en masse in African American inner city neighborhoods. In 1942, the organization achieved federal status and today has 820 clinic locations in the US, with a total budget of approximately one billion USD. To date, according to studies by the CDC, over thirteen million African American fetuses have been aborted and 78% of their clinics are in minority communities. African Americans make up 12% of the US population and 35% of the domestic abortions, effectively making them the only minority in American with a declining population. Annually, the US Government contributes about three hundred and sixty million USD to Planned Parenthood. Jill Stannic, an Illinois hospital employee has testified before the US House Committee about her experiences with Induced Labor Abortions, where medicines inserted into the vaginal cavity produce a premature live birth, the child is the brought by nursing staff into a room where soiled linens are kept until the child dies. Unlike an abortion, the child receives a birth and death certificate.

"I have studied with great interest, the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock." - Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

Under the regime of Barack Obama, who has personally voted no against the Born Alive Infant Protection Act, which aims to protect the rights of children who survive abortion procedures, has unanimously passed four times, having been backed by every Democratic candidate include Hilary Clinton and John Kerry. Barack Obama and the American establishment effectively support infanticide and the continued rates of abortion within African American communities. The President himself has personally advocated Planned Parenthood, an organization founded on the pillars of racial purity and eugenics: "There will always be people, many of goodwill, who do not share my view on the issue of choice. On this fundamental issue, I will not yield and Planned Parenthood will not yield.” The work of federally funded Planned Parenthood is not the leisurely use of contraceptives, a woman’s right to choose and advocating practices of safe sex; it is about culling racial undesirables and creating a cleaner white race. Unfortunately for Somalians and the people of the African continent, the aims of the Negro Project have not been confined to American borders.

Earlier this year, the United Nation’s news service reports a UN-backed campaign in rural areas of Somalia to vaccinate more than 1.8 million young children against polio, four years after Somalia was declared to be polio-free. The campaign is supported by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and touts goals of reaching every eligible child in the country, despite the fact that the last recorded case of polio in Somalia was in March 2007. Despite numerous studies within the scientific community which indicate that autism may be the result of adverse reactions to childhood vaccinations, research published by environmental physician, Dr. Alan Cohen, stipulates that high levels of autism and attention deficit disorder (ADD) did not occur until the mandatory use of childhood vaccinations, which are still being trumpeted in Africa by the maniacal Neo-Malthusian International Community; officials in Somalia have stated that they hope to reach an estimated 800,000 children in the country's south-central region, UNICEF’s representative in Somalia has called for the necessity of vaccination teams able to access every community, every household and every child aged under five. In reality these vaccinations offer little protection against yearly flu virus strains and are heavily promoted by the CDC, US Public Health Department and most physicians despite the fact that these substances have resulted in thousands of deaths and paralyzing illnesses. There is enough evidence from the medical community available to confirm that the development of the immune system after contracting the usual childhood diseases matures and renders it capable to fight future infections.

The use of multiple vaccines prevents natural immunity and promotes the development of detrimental side effects. Disturbingly, many hospitals have made flu vaccinations of the elderly a part of routine admission orders and studies have disclosed that 23% of vaccinated children develop asthma compared to zero in unvaccinated children. The vaccination of the Somalian masses was allowed to continue; despite reports from the Associated Press stating the accounts of Nigerian health officials claiming the paralyzation of 124 Nigerian children had been caused by a cheap oral polio vaccine used to fight the paralyzing disease, which was made from a live poliovirus and carries a risk of causing polio, even the vaccines used in the United States and other Western nations are administered in shots, which use a killed virus that cannot cause polio. Numerous members of the scientific and medical communities have published their studies against the detrimental effects of pandemic and immunizational vaccination and have bravely questioned disturbing movements designed to reach vast numbers of the population during stages of infancy. It is documented that immune systems are impaired by vaccinations because even though they may claim to protect the body from one strain of infectious disease, they weaken the immune system against future strains in people who have received vaccinations at a young age, who in the future may seek additional vaccinations to offset their weak immunities caused by infantile vaccination in the first place.

International studies have shown that immunization vaccination contributes to around ten thousand cases of SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) annually and other studies have determined at least three thousand children die annually from vaccines within the United States. Because of the dire climate of food instability currently unfolding in Somalia, it difficult to track the adverse effects of vaccinations because most casualties may sooner perish from starvation or at least, that is what the mainstream media outlets will report. As a further indication of the true conditions of concern for the people of Somalia, one must investigate the origins of the heavily reported Somalian piracy and the reports of nuclear waste dumped in the Gulf of Aden off the coasts of Somalia. Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia claims, “Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. European companies found it to be very cheap to get rid of the waste, costing as little as $2.50 a tonne, where waste disposal costs in Europe are something like $1000 a tonne. And the waste is many different kinds. There is uranium radioactive waste. There is lead, and heavy metals like cadmium and mercury. There is also industrial waste, and there are hospital wastes, chemical wastes – you name it. Since the containers came ashore, hundreds of residents have fallen ill, suffering from mouth and abdominal bleeding, skin infections and other ailments."

Much of the materials reported in the Somalian seas, which are contributing to new cases of radiation sickness, strange rashes, nausea, malformed babies and death, can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, that have apparently been passed to the Italian mafia to conduct it’s cheap disposal. During a tsunami in 2005, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore, Ould-Abdallah has claimed European governments were offering, “Nothing. There has been no cleanup, no compensation and no prevention.” Reports within certain circles of Somalian pirates who take over large cargo ships in exchange for millions in ransom money are commonplace, but the media rarely mentions that some pirates have pledged the money going towards cleaning up the radioactive material on their shores. Januna Ali Jama, a spokesperson representing groups of Somalian pirates has claimed that ransom demand is a means of "reacting to the toxic waste that has been continually dumped on the shores of our country for nearly 20 years. The Somali coastline has been destroyed, and we believe this money is nothing compared to the devastation that we have seen on the seas.” Additionally, other European ships have been illegally fishing in Somalia’s seas and harvesting seafood, their greatest resource. Vast trawlers illegally sailing into Somalia’s unprotected seas are stealing more than three hundred million USD worth of tuna, shrimp, lobster and other sea life every year. Consider the fact that not only are millions of dollars worth of seafood illegally harvested annually, but also it is harvested off the coast of regions synonymous for recent food instability in waters where nuclear waste is being dumped; those fish are then sold at exorbitant prices in grocery stores all over Europe and elsewhere; the total negligence for human health and well being is astonishing.

Although holding hostages may not be justifiable or the best way to go about addressing solutions to the issues and surely several less-enlightened people take part in piracy to fuel their own personal gain, these are characteristics of people who have lost their livelihoods and have nothing else to loose; the mainstream media has totally neglected this perspective on the issue and only focuses on championing the dispatchment of UN paramilitary forces into Somalian waters, which is an excuse for furthering additional geopolitical objectives of the US. The local fishermen have suddenly lost their livelihoods and the nation is starving. Mohammed Hussein, a local fisherman in the town of Marka told reporters, “If nothing is done, there soon won’t be much fish left in our coastal waters.” A group, who originally referred to them selves as the Volunteer Coast Guard of Somalia, was comprised of ordinary Somalian fishermen who were first to take out speedboats to try to dissuade foreign dumpers and trawlers and establish a fishing tax.

CONCLUSION

The evidence laid out in this article to support the complex array of sabotage being tragically committed against Somalians, residents with the Horn of Africa and the world is enough to leave one overwhelmed and with a very bleak world view. As if things couldn’t get worse for the Somali people, the Washington Post, New York Times and other major American newspapers have recently reported that the US has extended it’s illegal and oxymoronic War on Terror by beginning to launch drone missile attacks over Somalia, while the Pentagon has roughly three thousand troops from all four major branches of the military assigned to the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa stationed in Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, Somalia's neighboring country to the north. Under the guise of fighting Islamic extremists (the funding of which, will be subject to a separate in-depth article) and degenerate pirates, The US military is preparing to implement an East African military geo-strategy to control the maritime waterways and the movement of international shipping through the Gulf of Aden, as well as the prospects of descending looming multinational corporations to harvest the potential yields of the East African energy basin. Somalia’s lands can very well be subjected to predatory capital and resource-robbers, due to it’s untapped and unexplored potential, and the possibility of American oil giants such as Conoco, Amoco, Chevron and Phillips, who have been sitting quietly since nearly two-thirds of Somalia land was allocated to them in the final years before President Mohamed Siad Barre was overthrown and thrown into disarray, to reap prospective fortune in exclusive concessions to explore millions of acres of the Somali countryside for potential petroleum deposits, once the Somalian people have been democratized and liberated by the United States, of course.

John P. Holdren

Concerned people, disenfranchised with what is taking place in the Horn need to drastically reexamine the claims of this article and adjust their vocalization of this issue away from “a failure of the International Community to make sure people have food to eat” to “a deliberate effort of the International Community to enforce austerity and use food as a weapon to enforce population reduction.” Perhaps there is no better example of the Neo-Malthusian philosophy and it’s role in influencing the future, than the genocidal material authored by John P. Holdren, the Obama administration’s US Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology, Paul Ralph Ehrlich, biologist and founder of the Zero Population Growth group and his wife, Anne Howland Ehrlich. The lengthy book they published together is called ‘Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment’ and it provides incredible clarity into the intended directions of the Obama Administration and the United Nations policies on the future management of the world’s resources and society. The document encourages the creation of a Global State run by a Planetary Regime, which enforces mass sterilization, compulsory abortions and the rule of law through an International Police force that has control over the intimate and trivial details of our lives. Dr. Webster Tarpley has been critical in offering his insight into the document and the impacts it may have on the future direction of policy.

Holdren, who proudly boasts himself as a Neo-Malthusianist, views human life has a cancerous outgrowth and ridicules ‘Cornucopians’ or people who believe in the bounties of nature in relation to growth and production, contending that harsh limits must be taken to avoid production and innovation by living within the confines of whichever amount of growth he deems suitable, while actively enforcing deindustrialization. The authors of Ecoscience suggest triaging nations deemed too populous such as India and Bangladesh, withholding them from receiving any international food or monetary aid or any kind and the creation of a Science Court charged with the issuance and controls of innovative new sciences and technology. Holdren argues that the world’s population must be adjusted to ‘carrying capacity’ to be in harmony with nature and advocates reducing the population to one billion people by means of sterilization. Excerpts from the genocidal document suggest the following on page 786: “A program of sterilizing women after their second or third child, despite the relatively greater difficulty of the operation than vasectomy, might be easier to implement than trying to sterilize men. The development of a long-term sterilizing capsule that could be implanted under the skin and removed when pregnancy is desired opens additional possibilities for coercive fertility control. The capsule could be implanted at puberty and might be removable, with official permission, for a limited number of births.” On page 942: “The Planetary Regime might be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world and for each region and for arbitrating various countries' shares within their regional limits. Control of population size might remain the responsibility of each government, but the Regime would have some power to enforce the agreed limits.

On page 837, Holdren advocates compulsory abortion, “Indeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society” and the right of the Government to take away children born in single parent households on page 786, “One way to carry out this disapproval might be to insist that all illegitimate babies be put up for adoption—especially those born to minors, who generally are not capable of caring properly for a child alone. If a single mother really wished to keep her baby, she might be obliged to go through adoption proceedings and demonstrate her ability to support and care for it. Adoption proceedings probably should remain more difficult for single people than for married couples, in recognition of the relative difficulty of raising children alone. It would even be possible to require pregnant single women to marry or have abortions, perhaps as an alternative to placement for adoption, depending on the society.” Certainly, we have come to a time of great transition in the human story and the prospects our leaders are advocating appear to be intentionally deceptive and contribute to enthusiastically killing any hope of offsetting the abuses described in this article. The eloquence of Mr. Kissinger may help to shed light on why all central authority is mounting towards the continuation of destroying the human condition.

Source: nilebowie.blogspot.com

OBAMA'S BIRTH CERTIFICATE: Obama’s Forgery and Fraud Have Become a Thorn in the Side of the Union

2012-04-01T01:52:00.000+03:00

OBAMA'S BIRTH CERTIFICATE: Obama’s Forgery and Fraud Have Become a Thorn in the Side of the Union by Patrick Henningsen

March 30, 2012



Who is Barack Obama? Where was he born, in the United States, or in Kenya? Where is the hard copy of his birth certificate? Did he hold an Indonesian passport? Does he qualify as a Natural Born Citizen? Does he qualify to hold the office of President of the United States? Since 2007, these questions have remained largely unanswered, not least because the White House’s legal team has gone to great lengths and costs to seal all documents related to the President’s identity. The result of this – is a nation gradually tearing apart at the seams. Arizona is currently leading a multi-state, head-on charge towards this issue with a bill requiring the president to prove he qualifies for office. Arizona’s Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office has mounted the only official law enforcement effort to date that has dared to investigate the President’s presented credentials –asking the burning question: has there been forgery or fraud committed by, or on behalf of the President? In a famous passage from Aesop’s Fables, it tells a story of a slave named Androcles who was wandering through the forest when he came upon a Lion lying down moaning and in pain. At first he turned to flee, but finding that the Lion did not pursue him, he turned back and went up to him. As he came near, the Lion put out his paw, which was swollen and bleeding. Androcles found a huge thorn, causing all the pain. He pulled out the thorn and bound up the paw of the Lion, who was soon able to rise and lick the hand of Androcles like a dog. From a consensus reality perspective, the prevailing mainstream media interpretation of this fable might portray President Obama and his Federal government in the role of the Lion, and the Arizona state legislature along with Sheriff Joe Arpaio – as the thorn in the White House’s paw. The part of Androcles would be played by the mainstream media itself, dutifully rescuing the lion from an annoying state effort to inflict pain on the White House. From a Constitutional perspective however, the roles represented would look more like this: the Lion represents the 50 States of the Union, and the thorn in its paw is Obama’s inability to clear his name in the face of a damning investigation into his eligibility to hold the office of US President. This thorn is buried deep into the fabric of the Union and it also includes the ruling establishment’s own clandestine effort to conceal the truth. And, what of the slave Androcles? Androcles should be played by the press, the fabled Fourth Estate or ‘watchdog’, supposedly meant to be a dutiful servant of the people of the United States. Sadly, here in 2012, those romantic tales of the mainstream corporate press fighting corruption and bringing criminal activity in government to book are all but ancient history. So far, media coverage of Arizona’s “Candidate Certification Bill” HB2480 has been dismissive, ignoring the contents of the Bill. The Establishment’s lapdog corporate media have only seen fit to delve into its own pre-laid surface covering the issue, with its own adolescent level analysis dismissing Arizona’s efforts as a mere “Birther Bill”, and attacking Arizona ad hominem as “the Birther state”. For an event as unprecedented as this, the ensuing intentional media blackout which has descended on Obama’s missing birth certificate story is disturbing – but not surprising. Media coverage of law enforcement efforts to this point has been reduced to personally attacking Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his Cold Case Posse – rather than asking critical questions about the actual evidence they have discovered. So who is left to play Androcles? In this story, it’s rightly being played by elected representatives in Arizona who drafted state Bill HB2480 and Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s Cold Case Posse of volunteer investigators. They are neither heroic, nor extraordinary. They are merely doing the job which has been laid out by the Constitution of the state and country respectively, that is, rightly serving the interests of their constituents – the people of the United States. And so it should be. The Founders of this nation designed their country whereby the government should be servants of the electorate – and not the other way around. George Washington once described the ideal relationship between the government and the electorate stating: “Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.” More than anything, the controversy surrounding the President’s lack of authentic identification is an opportunity to test the system and voracity of the laws which are meant to govern how we work and interact in a free Constitutional Republic. Unfortunately, this is not how the story is being framed in the mainstream media. Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s Cold Case investigation into the forgery and fraud evidence surrounding President Obama’s PDF birth certificate, Selective Service registration card and the missing INS microfilms – is ongoing and will likely unearth many more discoveries that will further cast a shadow on his Presidency. The fate of Arizona’s Obama eligibility bill is less certain. If the law is killed in committee or later vetoed by Arizona’s governor, it will only go to prove that persons in positions of power do not have to observe even the basic vetting or requirements of proving their identity – as the average American citizen has to on a daily basis. Although many would prefer not to face up to it, the whole issue of Obama’s records has become a thorn in the paw of the Union. If employees of the Federal government are not held to the same standards as their state counterparts, or even individuals – then we are staring at nothing less than a modern tyranny. If we are to learn anything from all this, we should stop to consider who ‘s the Lion in own contemporary political story. Source: Infowars.com

Baby born with two heads in Brazil (VIDEO)

2012-01-03T03:55:00.001+03:00

Baby born with two heads in Brazil

Conjoined twins been born in Brazil with two heads but only one body.

The twins, named Jesus and Emanuel, have two functioning brains and two backbones - but a single heart.
The rare condition is thought to have occurred when one of the pair failed to fully develop in the womb.
Dr Neila Dahas, who is treating the newborns, said surgery was not being considered at the moment.
But she said separating the boys would be impossible because the twins had a single set of organs - and both brains were functioning well.
"What we know statistically is that the children who undergo surgery and survive are the children who have less organs in common," she added.
"What we've got to think about at this moment is to maintain the children in good condition and see how they will develop."
The condition, known as dicephalic parapagus, is rare.

Horn of Africa: US Proxy War in Somalia Veers Towards Regional Conflict

2012-01-03T03:11:00.000+03:00

Horn of Africa: US Proxy War in Somalia Veers Towards Regional Conflict

Ethiopia’s anticipated invasion marks scramble for territory with Kenyan rival

by Finian Cunningham

The conflict in Somalia has been raised to dramatically higher stakes at the weekend after Ethiopian troops occupied a central town, routing Al Shabab militants in fighting that claimed dozens of lives.

The Ethiopian military entered the town of Beledweyne near its border on Saturday morning along with Somali troops belonging to the Western-backed Transitional Federal Government. The latter has been battling with Al Shabab Islamic militants for the past two years, but has only managed to maintain tenuous control of the capital, Mogadishu. Large areas of the country, especially to the south, have been under the command of the militants.

Earlier reports of Ethiopian troops having invaded Somalia with heavy armour were denied by the government in Addis Ababa. But the weekend offensive now confirms Ethiopia’s involvement in its neighbour to the east.

Almost every country in the Horn of Africa has a military presence in war-torn Somalia. In mid-October Kenyan forces mounted a large-scale invasion of Somalia with thousands of troops backed up with tanks and fighter jets. Nearly three months on, Kenyan forces are still battling with Al Shabab militants mainly in the territory south of Mogadishu on Kenya’s north-eastern border.

Last month, a contingent of troops from Djibouti arrived in Mogadishu, officially welcomed by the Somali government to join forces from Burundi and Uganda, which have been present in Somalia for the past two years as part of an African Union (AU) “peacekeeping mission” to combat the militants.

In addition to these contingencies is the involvement of the United States and France. Washington and Paris have given military support to the Kenyan and AU forces. American aerial attack drones and French naval firepower have coordinated with the Kenyan ground assault.

A week before Djibouti troops were dispatched to Somalia, US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta visited Djibouti where he warned about “key terror nodes in Yemen and Somalia”.

Ethiopia is also a close Washington ally. The government in Addis Ababa was given the green light by then President Bush to invade Somalia in 2006 in a bid to oust the Islamic Courts Union that was in power then.

The latest intervention by Ethiopia is unlikely to have been sanctioned without Washington’s clearance.

Superficially, it would appear that Washington is orchestrating a multi-prong offensive against the Somali militants. The US agenda has little to do with fighting terrorism and is motivated by geopolitical concern to assert control over the strategically important East African country. The country has been wracked by conflict for the past two decades ever since the US-backed Siad Barre dictatorship was overthrown in 1991.

With its coastline overlooking the key oil routes of the Gulf of Yemen and Red Sea, the US has been vexed by Somalia’s relentless instability – instability that has been largely engendered by Washington’s proxy warmongering in the region. The US-backed government in Mogadishu, which is accused of corruption and misrule, has proven incapable of decisively controlling the country. Even with generous aid from Washington and military support from neighbouring US-backed states, including the presence of US mercenaries, the government in Mogadishu can only but cling on to its central seat of power.

The entry of forces from Kenya, Ethiopia and Djibouti could be seen as Washington trying to ratchet up the military pressure on Al Shabab.

But of deeper concern is that US proxy war-making in East Africa could be stoking up nationalist rivalries that may backfire in a regional war between the various players who so far appear to be on the same side, that is, in doing Washington’s dirty work against Al Shabab.

In recent years Ethiopia’s regional leadership has been challenged by the rise of Kenya. Both countries share borders with Somalia and, historically preceding colonial demarcations, both lay claim to adjacent Somali territories. When Kenyan forces invaded Somalia in October, there was a marked diplomatic silence from Ethiopia. Ethiopia had suffered a humiliating defeat when it carried out its US-backed military gambit in Somalia in 2006. With the US latterly turning to Kenya as its favoured proxy there seemed to be a certain chagrin felt in Addis Ababa.

While appearing to do Washington’s bidding against Al Shabab, political sources in Kenya have told Global Research that Nairobi’s agenda is to annex a large swathe of Somalia’s southern Jubbaland territory, historically known as Azania. There have also been reports of Kenyan politicians surreptitiously striking oil deals with French company Total in this part of Somalia. Another crucial natural resource for Kenya in that territory is the acquisition of freshwater, which Kenya is in short supply of.

With Somalia’s territorial integrity at risk from 20 years of internecine violence and lawlessness – despite Washington’s efforts to shore up the federal government – it can be seen as only a matter of time before Ethiopia would join in a scramble for neighbouring land. It is significant that the latest invasion by Ethiopia has targeted the central part of Somalia, the south already being assailed by Kenyan forces.

So far, Washington’s orchestration of conflict in Somalia may appear as a smart bid for neocolonial control. But the real danger is when the deep-seated regional rivalries of Washington’s proxies start to clash at close quarters. And given the desperate need for natural resources in this famine-prone region, the stakes of any resultant all-out conflict take on even greater urgency and mordancy.