"Liberty, Oh Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name."
--Madame Roland, French Revolution, on her way to the Guillotine

Much like Gandhi's Salt March in India in 1930 the "March of Life" in Yemen began in the besieged bombed southern city of Taiz with tens of thousands of men, women, and children, walking for five days to the northern capitol city of Sana to protest the illegal immunity given the blood and money thirsty tyrant, President Ali Abdullah Saleh by the U.S. – Saudi Plan.

The plan calls for a transfer of power from Saleh to his vice president while he remains in power for three months. Yemen's population wholeheartedly rejects this appeasing plan. Saleh is a chronic liar who has never lived up to any promise or agreement he's ever made or signed, much life all of Israel's prime ministers.

Upon arriving in Sana the peaceful March of Life became the "March of Death", when the exhausted protesters were met by the murderous Republican Guard led by Saleh's son, who opened fire on the protesters killing at least 13 and wounding scores of civilians.

In keeping with America's blind support of Arab dictators, the Jewish American Ambassador to Yemen, Gerald Felerstein, held a press conference at the U.S. Embassy (even prior to the arrival of the March to the capitol Sana) arrogantly and obnoxiously warning that this March "is aimed to cause chaos and violence...it seems to have the intention not to carry out a peaceful march...and will provoke a violent response by the security forces."

These shocking remarks earned the Ambassador and the U.S. the scorn and hatred of the Yemeni population who've always known that Saleh is an American mole and puppet.

Like Saleh, President Obama, the Sultan of Drone massacres in the Arab and Muslim world. has betrayed his every promise as well as having shred the American Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the civil liberties of the American people.

He has shown the world that he is a spineless leader who if opposed immediately caves in. A man apparently suffering from an inferiority complex to those in power whether in Corporate America, Congress, the extreme right wing of the Republican Party, special interests, the media; and most especially to Israel that slapped him back into kosher coherence and submissiveness more so than any previous American President.

From left: Ali Abdullah Saleh, Obama, Hillary Clinton and Gerald Feierstein

As a coddler of murderous Arab tyrants he's been late and conflicted to act courageously and forcefully to support the Arab Spring that seeks freedom from tyranny and free democratic governments.

In an inexplicable slap to American interests in Yemen, Obama has stupidly invited Saleh to come to the U.S. under the pretense of medical treatment; making the U.S. a state that harbors terrorists turning the Bush Doctrine of attacking States that harbor terrorists on its head.

What on earth would prompt Obama to harbor and coddle this terrorist and allow him entry into the United States?

The answer my friend is the alleged "war on terror" that has justified America's wars and total support of dictators. As long as these tyrants purportedly are fighting a real or imagined anti-American "terror" group, they are free to annihilate their people while keeping their rule and stolen treasures under American protection.

If you kill "them", you are a U.S. ally, thereby entitled to billions of tax dollars, weapons, international protection, and be hailed as a freedom fighter.

To America, Saleh's value lies in his alleged fight against "Al Qaeda."

Hilary Clinton became the first U.S. Secretary of State to visit Yemen in early January 2011, just two weeks prior to the uprising. She outlined the reason behind America's support for Saleh the murderer.

She said:

"We face a common threat posed by the terrorists and al-Qaeda... I want to be frank about the fact that there are terrorists operating from Yemen's territory today...stopping these threats would be a priority for any nation, and it is a priority for us."

Hence, the lives of billions of civilians on this planet are simply collateral damage to western imperialistic thirst and greed for natural resources found under the feet of the dark people, no more so than the oil beneath Arab feet.

America thinks with its guns; not its mind, and certainly not its heart.

Obama should retain some honor and dignity for himself and his country by refusing to allow Yemen's terrorist, President Ali Abdullah Saleh, to enter this nation.

Rather he should refer him to the International Criminal Court for prosecution of his war crimes. But that would mean America truly believes in the sanctity of life, human rights, and justice; virtues belied by its addiction to war and oil.

American can ill afford to lose the Arab and Muslim world due to its blind adoption of Israel's policies of constant war and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians as well as its support of Arab dictators.

Past and future American Presidents in their stupefying short term foreign policy in the Arab/Muslim world will make the prophecy of a "Clash of Civilizations" a reality; and such a conflict can only lead to the demise of the American-Israeli-European imperial hegemony.

President Obama, for the sake of your legacy, America's national interests, American values of freedom and justice, you must reject Saleh's entry into this country. He deserves prison not a suite in a New York City Hotel.

* Mohamed Khodr is a political activist who frequently writes on the plight of Palestinians living under the brutal occupation of Israel, U.S. Foreign Policy, Islam, and Arab politics.

Part I

On 12 December 2011 hundreds of Israeli settler fanatics besieged a West Bank IDF army base. They destroyed equipment, set fires, and even stoned the base soldiers. This was the second such attack in a month. The cause? Anger over the army's dismantlement of a small number of isolated, unauthorized settler outposts. The Chief of the Central Command of the Israel "Defense" Forces, Major General Avi Misrahi, is quoted as saying "I have not seen such hatred of Jews towards soldiers during my 30 years of service." He must not have been looking.

This was not an exceptional event. The subsequent indignation over the attack expressed by Prime Minister Netanyahu ("red lines have been crossed") was, as Alex Fishman writing in Yedioth Ahronoth put it, staged hypocrisy. The Prime Minister is certainly aware that for some time there has been on-going skirmishing between the settlers and government security forces. Right wing settlers regularly throw rocks and fire bombs at police and army vehicles and "physical altercations" between settlers and Israeli police and soldiers are "almost routine." This is so despite the fact that the government, both Prime Minister and Knesset, "either tacitly or openly" support the settlers. Then why the hatred and why the attacks?

At this stage the battle is over strategy. The Israeli government wants to gobble up all of Palestine in an orderly step by step fashion. In part, this is to avoid too much international criticism at any particular stage of the process. On the other hand, the settlers don't give a damn about international opinion – no more than does al-Qaeda, to which they have an unsavory resemblance. Led "by fundamentalist religious leaders who do not recognize the state of Israel and its laws," they are driven by religious fanaticism and have no respect for governments or their agents. It is their ideological conviction that all of Palestine (including, by the way, Jordan) must be Jewish as soon as possible. The authorities sometime get in the way of this goal and that has led the settlers to, as Fishman puts it, "terrorize not only the Palestinian population but also the police and the army."

Prime Minister Netanyahu, belatedly noticing an erosion of government authority, has begun to set rules against settler violence when it is directed toward the IDF and police (but not toward the Palestinians). The New York Times reports that from now on such "radical Israelis" attacking soldiers or policemen will be treated just like "Palestinian militants." That is they will be "detained for long periods without charge and tried in military courts."

Alas, this new toughness won't work. For years Israeli governments have looked the other way as thousands of armed religious fanatics organized themselves and got stronger and more self-assured. Now, as Adam Keller of Gush Shalom tells us, "the Golem has turned on its creator." These are the people who assassinated Yitzhak Rabin. What makes Netanyahu believe that Israel's present army, police and courts which, reminiscent of the Weimar Republic, regularly show sympathy and leniency toward these criminals, are going to change their attitude on his orders? When a military reporter asked a brigade commander if he was prepared to act toward settler hostility in the same manner as he would Palestinian hostility, he answered "you would not expect me to open fire on a Jew...I am certain you didn't mean that."

The reporter would have gotten a very different answer if she had asked the fanatic settlers about how far they were willing to go. Anshel Pfeffer writing in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz notes that "the only red line that has yet to be crossed is a scenario in which an Israeli citizen [belonging to] the extreme settler right would open fire on IDF soldiers. There are those in Israel's security forces who fear that day is not so distant."

Netanyahu's apparent change of heart comes too late. What we have here is incipient civil war. Any really serious effort to stop these fanatics will result in their turning their weapons on those who represent the government. What you sow is what you reap.

Part II

This climate of internecine hostility contaminates the Jewish diaspora as well. There is no rock throwing or armed men threatening violence, but the hatred is there. Jewish critics of Israeli behavior are categorized as "Israel-haters" or, alternatively, "self-hating Jews." This is often expressed with the same vehemence displayed by Israel's settler fanatics. And, indeed, those pointing fingers in the U.S. are often supporters of the extremists on the West Bank.

Last week Howard Gutman, the U.S. Ambassador to Belgium, addressed "a group of European Jewish lawyers gathered...to discuss anti-Semitism" Gutman told them that there was now two different kinds of anti-Semitism: a "classic" type that is "directed against Jews for being Jews" and "a newer form" that is a product of "the Israeli-Arab conflict and can therefore be mitigated by reducing Israeli-Palestinian tensions." This is actually a conclusion that was reached by Israel's Defense Ministry as early as 1994. No matter, when Gutman's statement became public "the long knives" came out "for another Jewish liberal who committed the sin of stating the uncomfortably obvious truth about a causal relation between Israeli policy and Muslim anti-Semitism."

The Republican Jewish Coalition's Executive Director Matthew Brooks called Gutman's revelation "outrageous" and one that "makes excuses for anti-Semitic hatred and bigotry." Senator Joe Lieberman called Gutman's remarks "inexcusable" and Representative Gary Ackerman of New York suggested that Gutman himself might be anti-Semitic.

Again, the charge of anti-Semitism can be and frequently is leveled against fellow Jews who are critical of Israel. The logic goes something like this: Judaism and Israel are one and the same. Ergo if you are critical of Israeli behavior you are critical of Jewish behavior and that makes you an anti-Semite. Very neat. Of course, the whole train of thought rests on the false assumption that Israel and Judaism are two sides of the same coin.

Despite the viral reaction, Jewish criticism of Israel is growing quickly and this creates a frustrating dilemma for the Zionists. The pro-Israeli blogger Steven Plaut describes this situation in catastrophic terms. "Jewish anti-Semitism is all around us, part of the political air we breathe, a modern disease. In the twenty-first century the world is experiencing an explosion of it, a virtual plague."

Part III

None of this Zionist extremism can be dismissed as a passing phenomenon. It has been with us too long. In fact it has been with us since 1917 and the Balfour Declaration. That is when a certain segment of European Jewry began its obsessive drive to create and maintain a state for one group only. It was then, and continues to be an inherently racist project. Ideologies, like Zionism, that support such projects usually reject all opposition. And opposition from erstwhile members of the in-group is the very worst because it exposes the false nature of claims of ethnic, religious or racial solidarity.

When and if Israeli society comes to its senses and decides to rid itself of the Occupied Territories the settler fanatics will resist "fanatically," and the civil war that is now incipient will release its full potential violence. When and if that happens there will be repercussions for U.S. and European Jews and they too may well entail violence. It would seem that the people chosen to be a "light unto the nations" have only managed to create another badly flawed nation state–one with a preference for apartheid policies. Zionism said "let modern Israel be" and, pop, the light went out.

* Lawrence Davidson is professor of history at West Chester University. He is the author of numerous books, including Islamic Fundamentalism and America's Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood.

The dynamic of democratic, nationalist and class struggles throughout the Muslim world has set in motion a new constellation of alliances between the imperial West (US and European Union) and Islamist parties, leaders and regimes, dubbed "moderate" by US officials, propagandists and academics.

This essay analyzes the changing contemporary context of imperial domination, especially the demise of longstanding client regimes. It then examines the previous significant ties between western imperial powers and Islamist movements and regimes and the basis of 'historical collaboration'.

The third part of the paper will outline the political circumstances in which the imperial powers embrace "moderate" Islamists in government and utilize "armed fundamentalists" in opposition to secular regimes. We will critically analyze how "moderate" Islam is defined by the Western imperialist powers. Is this a tactical or strategic alliance? What are the political "trade-offs"? What do imperialism's neo-liberal clients and their new 'moderate' Muslim allies have in common and how do they differ?

In conclusion we will evaluate the viability of this alliance and its capacity to contain and deflect the popular democratic movements and repress the burgeoning class and national struggles, especially in regard to the 'obstacles' posed by the Israel-US-Zionist ties and the continued IMF policies which promise to worsen the crises in the Muslim countries.

The Transition from Neo-Liberal Client Rulers to Power-Sharing with Moderate Islamists

The key motivation in Washington's and the European imperial troika's (England, France and Germany) embrace of what their press and officialdom hail as "moderate" Islamist parties has been the collapse or weakening of their long-term client rulers. Faced with the ouster of Mubarak, in Egypt, Ali in Tunisia and Saleh in Yemen, mass protests in Morocco and Algeria, the US-EU turned to conservative Muslim leaders who were willing to work within the existing state institutional framework (including the army and state police), uphold the capitalist order and align with the empire against anti-imperial movements and states. In Egypt, the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) (the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood), in Tunisia the Renaissance Party, in Morocco the Justice and Development Party have all indicated their willingness to serve as reliable partners in blocking the pro-democracy movements that challenge the socio-economic status quo and the long-standing military-imperial linkages.

The Islamist collaborators are called "moderate and respectable" because they agree to participate in elections within the boundaries of the established political and economic order; they have dropped any criticism of imperial and colonial treaties and trade agreements signed by the previous client regions - including ones which collaborate with Israel's colonization of Palestine.

Equally important "moderate" means supporting imperial wars against nationalist and secular Arab republics, such as Syria and Libya, and isolating and/or repressing class based trade unions and secular-left parties.

"Moderate" Islamists have become the Empire's 'contraceptive of choice' against any chance the massive Arab peoples' revolt might give birth to substantive egalitarian social changes and bring those brutal pro- western officials, responsible for so many crimes against humanity, to justice.

The West and their client officials in the military and police have agreed to a kind of "power-sharing' with the moderate/respectable (read 'reactionary') Islamist parties. The Islamists would be responsible for imposing orthodox economic policies and re-establishing 'order' (i.e. bolstering the existing one) in partnership with pro-multinational bank economists and pro US-EU generals and security officials. In exchange the Islamists could take certain ministries, appoint their members, finance electoral clientele among the poor and push their 'moderate' religious, social and cultural agenda. Basically, the elected Islamists would replace the old corrupt dictatorial regimes in running the state and signing off on more free trade agreements with the EU. Their role would keep the leftists, nationalists and populists out of power and from gaining mass support. Their job would substitute spiritual solace and "inner worth" via Islam in place of redistributing land, income and power from the elite, including the foreign multi-nationals to the peasants, workers, unemployed and exploited low-paid employees.

Why the Empire Arms Fundamentalist Anti-Secular Muslims

While the US and EU have backed respectable "moderate Islam" in heading off a popular upheaval of the young and unemployed, in other contexts they have enlisted violent, fundamentalist Islamic terrorists to overthrow secular independent anti-imperialists regimes - like Libya, Syria - just as they had done earlier in Afghanistan and Yugoslavia. The US, Qatar and the European troika financed and armed Libyan fundamentalist militias and then engaged in a murderous eight months air and sea assault to ensure their client's 'victory' over the secular Gaddafi regime. Fresh from NATO's success, the US, the European 'Troika' and Turkey, with the backing of the League of Arab collaborator princes and emirs, have financed a violent Muslim Brotherhood insurrection in Syria, intent on destroying the nationalist economy and modern secular state.

The US and EU have openly unleashed their fundamentalists allies in order to destroy independent adversaries in the name of "democracy" and 'humanitarian intervention', a laughable claim in light of decade long colonial wars of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan. All target regimes have one crime in common: Using their national resources to develop modern secular states - independent of imperial dictates.

NATO implements its campaigns through conservative 'moderate' or armed fundamentalist Islamist movements depending on the specific needs, circumstances and range of options in any given target nation. With the fall of pro-Empire 'secular dictatorships' in Egypt and Tunisia, pliable conservative Islamist leaders are the fall back "lesser evil". When the opportunity to overthrow an independent secular or nationalist regime arises, armed and violent fundamentalist mercenaries become the political vehicle of choice.

As with European empires in the past, the modern Western imperial countries have relied on retrograde religious parties and leaders to collaborate and serve their economic and military interests and to provide mercenaries for imperial armies to savage any anti-imperialist social revolutionaries. In that sense US and European rulers are neither 'pro nor anti' Islam, it all depends on their national and class position. Islamists who collaborate with Empire are "moderate" allies and if they attack an anti-imperialist regime, they become 'freedom fighters'. On the other hand, they become "terrorists" or "fundamentalists" when they oppose imperial occupation, pillage or colonial settlements.

Contemporary History of Islamist-Imperial Collaboration

The historical record of western imperial expansion reveals many instances of collaboration and cooptation as well as conflict with Islamist regimes, movements and parties. In the early 1960's the CIA backed a brutal military coup against the secular Indonesian nationalist regime of Sukarno, and encouraged their puppet dictator General Suharto to unleash Muslim militia in a veritable "holy war" exterminating nearly one million leftist trade unionists, school teachers, students, farmers, communists or suspected sympathizers and their family members. The horrific 'Jakarta Option' became a model for CIA operations elsewhere. In Yugoslavia the US and Europe promoted and financed fundamentalists Muslims in Bosnia, importing mujahedeen who would later form part of Al Qaida, and then backed the Kosovo Liberation Army, a known terrorist organization, in order to completely break-up and ethnically 'cleanse' a modern secular multi-national state - going so far as to have Americans and NATO bomb Belgrade for the first time since the Nazis in the Second World War.

During President Carter's administration, the CIA joined with Saudi Arabia's ruling royalty, providing billions of dollars in arms and military supplies to Afghan Muslim fundamentalists in their brutal but successful Jihad overthrowing a modern, secular nationalist regime backed by the USSR. The murderous fate of school teachers and educated women in the aftermath was quickly covered up.

Needless to say, wherever US imperialism faces leftists or secular, modernizing anti-imperialist regimes, Washington turns to retrograde Islamic leaders willing and able to destroy the progressive regime in return for imperialist support. Such coalitions are built mainly around fundamentalist and moderate Islamist opposition to secular, class- based politics allied with the Empire's hostility to any anti-imperialist challenge to its domination..

The same 'coalition' of Islamists and the Empire has been glaringly obvious during the NATO assault on Libya and continues against Syria: The Muslims provide the shock troops on the ground; NATO provides the aerial bombing, funds, arms, sanctions, embargoes and propaganda.

These Islamist-Imperialist coalitions are usually temporary, based on a common secular or nationalist enemy and not on any common strategic interest. After the defeat of a secular anti-imperialist regime, militant Muslims may find themselves attacked by the colonial neo-liberal regime most favored by the imperial west. This happened in Afghanistan and elsewhere after the overseas Islamist fighters (Afghan Arabs) returned to their own neo-colonized, collaborating home countries, like Saudi Arabia, Algeria and Egypt and elsewhere.

Contemporary History of Islamist-Imperial Conflict

The relation between Islamist regimes and imperialism is complex, changing and full of examples of bloody conflict.

The US backed the "modernizing" free market dictatorship of the Shah in Iran, overthrowing the nationalist Mosaddegh regime. They provided arms and intelligence for the Savak, the Shah's monstrous secret police as it hunted down and murdered tens of thousands of nationalist-Islamists and leftist resistance fighters and critics in Iran and abroad. The rise to power of the fundamentalist-anti-imperialist Khomeini regime fueled US armed attacks and provoked retaliatory moves: Iran backed and financed anti-colonial Islamist groups in Lebanon (Hezbollah), Palestine (Hamas) and Iraq (the Shia parties).

Subsequent to 9/11 the US invaded and overthrew the Islamist Taliban regime, re-colonized the country, establishing a puppet regime under US-European auspices. The Taliban and allied Islamist and nationalist resistance fighters organized and established a mass guerrilla army which has engaged in a decade long war with armed support from Pakistani Islamist forces responding to US military incursions.

In Palestine, Washington, under the overweening control of Israel's Zionist fifth column, has armed and financed Israel's war against the popularly elected Palestinian Islamist Hamas government in Gaza. Washington's total commitment to the Jewish state and its colonial expansion and usurpation of Palestinian (Muslim and Christian) lands and property in Jerusalem and elsewhere reflects the profound and pervasive influence of the Zionist power configuration throughout the US political system .They secure 90% votes in Congress, pledges of allegiance from the White House, and senior appointments in Treasury, State Department and the Pentagon.

What determines whether the US Empire will have a collaborative or conflict-ridden relation with Islam depends on the specific political context. The US allies with Islamists when faced with nationalist, leftist and secular democratic regimes and movements, especially where their optimal choice, a military-neo-liberal alternative is relatively weak. However, faced with a nationalist, anti-colonial Islamist regime (as is the case of the Islamic Republic of Iran), Washington will side with pro-western liberals, dissident Muslim clerics, pliable tribal chiefs, separatist ethnic minorities and pro-Western generals.

The key to US-Islamist relations from the White House perspective is based on the Islamists' attitude toward empire, class politics, NATO and the "free market" (private foreign investment).

Today's 'moderate' Islamist parties in Tunisia, Egypt, Turkey, Morocco (and elsewhere), which have offered their support to NATO and its wars against Libya and Syria, uphold 'private property' (i.e. foreign and imperialist client control of key industries) and repress independent working class and anti-imperialist parties: They are the Empire's "new partners" in the pillage of the resource-rich Middle East and North Africa.

The US-brokered counter-revolutionary alliance among moderate Islamists, the previous military rulers and Washington is fraught with tensions. The military demands total impunity and a continuation of its economic privileges; this includes a veto on any legislation addressing the previous regime's brutal crimes against its own people. On the other hand, the Islamist parties uphold their electoral victories and demand majority rule. Washington insists the alliance adhere to its policy toward Israel and abandon their support for the Palestinian national struggle. As these tensions and conflicts deepen, the alliance could collapse ushering in a new phase of conflict and instability.

Emblematic of "moderate Islamiist" collaboration with US-EU imperialism is the role of Qatar, home to the 'respectable' Arabic media giant, Al-Jazeera, and the demagogic Qatari "spiritual guide" Sheik Youssef al-Qaradawi. Sheik Youssef quotes the Koran and Islamic moral principles in defense of NATO's 8-month aerial bombing of Libya, which killed over 50,000 pro-regime Libyans (themselves Muslims). He calls for armed imperial intervention in Syria to overthrow the secular Assad regime, a position he shares comfortably with the state of Israel. He urges the "moderate Islamists" in Egypt and Tunisia to cease any criticism of the existing economic order, ( see "Spiritual guide steers Arabs to moderation", Financial Times, December 9, 2011 - p5). In a word, this respectable Muslim cleric is NATO's perfect Koran-quoting "moderate Islamist" partner - a dream come true.

The Strategic Utility of "Moderate" Islamist Parties

Islamist parties are approached by the Empire's policy elites only when they have a mass following and can therefore weaken any popular, nationalist insurgency. Mass-based Islamist parties serve the empire by providing "legitimacy", by winning elections and by giving a veneer of respectability to the pro-imperial military and police apparatus retained in place from the overthrown client state dictatorships.

The Islamist parties compete at the "grass roots" with the leftists. They build up a clientele of supporters among the poor in the countryside and urban slums through organized charity and basic social services administered at the mosques and humanitarian religious foundations. Because they reject class struggle and are intensely hostile to the left (with its secular, pro-feminist and working-class agenda), they have been 'half-tolerated' by the dictatorship, while the leftist activists are routinely murdered. Subsequently, with the overthrow of the dictatorship, the Islamists emerge intact with the strongest national organizational network as the country's 'natural leaders' from the religious-bazaar merchant political elite. Their leaders offer to serve the empire and its traditional native military collaborators in exchange for a 'slice of power', especially over morality, culture, religion and households (women), in other words, the "micro-society".

For their part, they offer to marginalize and undermine the left, anti-imperialist secular democrats in the streets. In the face of mass popular rebellion calling into question the imperial order, a 'moderate' Islamist-imperial partnership is a 'heavenly deal' praised in Washington, Paris or London (as well as Riyadh and Tel Aviv).

Conclusion: How Viable is the Imperial-Islamic Coalition?

Those who thought that the spontaneous pro-democracy movements spelled the end of the imperial order left out the role of organized "moderate" Islamist electoral parties as able collaborators of Empire. The brutally repressed mass mobilization of unemployed youth was no match for the well-funded grass roots community organization of the moderate Islamists. This is especially true when politics shifted from the street to the ballot box, a process that the Islamist parties facilitated. In the absence of a mass revolutionary party, seeking state power, the existing military-police state was able to work around the mass protesters and put together a power sharing agreement at least in the short-run.

In the November 2011 elections, the radical Egyptian Islamist party, Nour, gathered one-quarter of the vote in Cairo and Alexandria. Their showing was even higher among the urban poor districts, which promises even greater support among poor rural constituencies in the coming elections. Essentially a Salafist Islamist party, Nour, unlike the Muslim Brotherhood, combined denunciations of class abuses and elite corruption with mass appeals to a return to a mythic harmonious life. They used effective grass roots organizing around basic services in order to gain a greater proportion of the working class vote than all the leftist parties combined. Nour's message of "class retribution against the ...abuses of Egypt's elite fueled Nour's new found popularity", (Financial Times December 10, 2011 p6).

Despite the successes of the Islamist-Imperial partnership, the world economic crises and especially the growing unemployment and misery in the Arab countries will make it difficult for the 'respectable moderate' Islamists to stabilize their societies. They are inextricably constrained by their alliances to function within the confines of the 'orthodox neo-liberal framework' imposed by the Empire. For that reason, the "moderate" Islamists will try to co-opt some secular liberals, social democrats and even a few leftists as 'minority partners', so that they won't be held solely responsible for dashing the expectations of the poor in their countries.

The fact of the matter is that the pro-imperial Islamist parties have absolutely no answer to the current crises: Charities delivered from the mosque during the dictatorship won them mass support; now more austerity programs imposed from their ministerial posts will certainly alienate and infuriate their mass base. What will follow depends on who is best organized: Liberals are limited to media campaigns and tied to economic orthodoxy; the leftists have to advance from protest movements in the downtown squares to organized political units operating in popular neighborhoods, workplaces, markets, villages and slums. Otherwise radical fundamentalist, like the Salafists, will exploit the people's outrage with moderate Islamist betrayals and promote their own version of a closed clerical society, opposing the West while repressing the Left.

The US and EU may have 'temporarily' avoided revolution by accommodating electoral reforms and adapting to alliances with "moderate" Islamists, but their ongoing military interventions and their own growing economic crisis will simply postpone a more decisive conflict in the near future.

* James Petras is the author of more than 62 books published in 29 languages, and over 600 articles in professional journals. Petras' latest books, Global Depression and Regional Wars (Atlanta, Clarity Press, 2009) is the third in a series, including Zionism, Militarism and the Decline of US Power (Atlanta, Clarity Press 2008) and The Power of Israel in the United States (Atlanta, Clarity Press 2006), analyzing the influence of militarism and Zionism in American foreign policy.

By Noam Chomsky * | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

This is the 10th anniversary of the horrendous atrocities of Sept. 11, 2001, which, it is commonly held, changed the world.

The impact of the attacks is not in doubt. Just keeping to western and central Asia: Afghanistan is barely surviving, Iraq has been devastated and Pakistan is edging closer to a disaster that could be catastrophic.
On May 1, 2011, the presumed mastermind of the crime, Osama bin Laden, was assassinated in Pakistan. The most immediate significant consequences have also occurred in Pakistan. There has been much discussion of Washington’s anger that Pakistan didn’t turn over bin Laden. Less has been said about the fury among Pakistanis that the U.S. invaded their territory to carry out a political assassination. Anti-American fervor had already intensified in Pakistan, and these events have stoked it further.

One of the leading specialists on Pakistan, British military historian Anatol Lieven, wrote in The National Interest in February that the war in Afghanistan is “destabilizing and radicalizing Pakistan, risking a geopolitical catastrophe for the United States – and the world – which would dwarf anything that could possibly occur in Afghanistan.”

At every level of society, Lieven writes, Pakistanis overwhelmingly sympathize with the Afghan Taliban, not because they like them but because “the Taliban are seen as a legitimate force of resistance against an alien occupation of the country,” much as the Afghan mujahedeen were perceived when they resisted the Russian occupation in the 1980s.

These feelings are shared by Pakistan’s military leaders, who bitterly resent U.S. pressures to sacrifice themselves in Washington’s war against the Taliban. Further bitterness comes from the terror attacks (drone warfare) by the U.S. within Pakistan, the frequency of which was sharply accelerated by President Obama; and from U.S. demands that the Pakistani army carry Washington’s war into tribal areas of Pakistan that had been pretty much left on their own, even under British rule.

The military is the stable institution in Pakistan, holding the country together. U.S. actions might “provoke a mutiny of parts of the military,” Lieven writes, in which case “the Pakistani state would collapse very quickly indeed, with all the disasters that this would entail.”

The potential disasters are drastically heightened by Pakistan’s huge, rapidly growing nuclear weapons arsenal, and by the country’s substantial jihadi movement.

Both of these are legacies of the Reagan administration. Reagan officials pretended they did not know that Zia ul-Haq, the most vicious of Pakistan’s military dictators and a Washington favorite, was developing nuclear weapons and carrying out a program of radical Islamization of Pakistan with Saudi funding.

The catastrophe lurking in the background is that these two legacies might combine, with fissile materials leaking into the hands of jihadis. Thus we might see nuclear weapons, most likely “dirty bombs,” exploding in London and New York.

Lieven summarizes: “U.S. and British soldiers are in effect dying in Afghanistan in order to make the world more dangerous for American and British peoples.”

Surely Washington understands that U.S. operations in what has been christened “Afpak” – Afghanistan-Pakistan – might destabilize and radicalize Pakistan.

The most significant WikiLeaks documents to have been released so far are the cables from U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson in Islamabad, who supports U.S. actions in Afpak but warns that they “risk destabilizing the Pakistani state, alienating both the civilian government and military leadership, and provoking a broader governance crisis in Pakistan â(euro) .125.”

Patterson writes of the possibility that “someone working in (Pakistani government) facilities could gradually smuggle enough fissile material out to eventually make a weapon,” a danger enhanced by “the vulnerability of weapons in transit.”

A number of analysts have observed that bin Laden won some major successes in his war against the United States.

As Eric S. Margolis writes in The American Conservative in May, “(bin Laden) repeatedly asserted that the only way to drive the U.S. from the Muslim world and defeat its satraps was by drawing Americans into a series of small but expensive wars that would ultimately bankrupt them.”

That Washington seemed bent on fulfilling bin Laden’s wishes was evident immediately after the 9/11 attacks.

In his 2004 book “Imperial Hubris,” Michael Scheuer, a senior CIA analyst who had tracked Osama bin Laden since 1996, explains: “Bin Laden has been precise in telling America the reasons he is waging war on us. (He) is out to drastically alter U.S. and Western policies toward the Islamic world,” and largely achieved his goal.

He continues: “U.S. forces and policies are completing the radicalization of the Islamic world, something Osama bin Laden has been trying to do with substantial but incomplete success since the early 1990s. As a result, I think it is fair to conclude that the United States of America remains bin Laden’s only indispensable ally.” And arguably remains so, even after his death.

The succession of horrors across the past decade leads to the question: Was there an alternative to the West’s response to the 9/11 attacks?

The jihadi movement, much of it highly critical of bin Laden, could have been split and undermined after 9/11, if the “crime against humanity,” as the attacks were rightly called, had been approached as a crime, with an international operation to apprehend the suspects. That was recognized at the time, but no such idea was even considered in the rush to war. It is worth adding that bin Laden was condemned in much of the Arab world for his part in the attacks.

By the time of his death, bin Laden had long been a fading presence, and in the previous months was eclipsed by the Arab Spring. His significance in the Arab world is captured by the headline in a New York Times article by Middle East specialist Gilles Kepel: “Bin Laden Was Dead Already.”

That headline might have been dated far earlier, had the U.S. not mobilized the jihadi movement with retaliatory attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq.
Within the jihadi movement, bin Laden was doubtless a venerated symbol but apparently didn’t play much more of a role for al-Qaida, this “network of networks,” as analysts call it, which undertake mostly independent operations.

Even the most obvious and elementary facts about the decade lead to bleak reflections when we consider 9/11 and its consequences, and what they portend for the future.

* Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and pressor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Techonology. Chomsky is well known in the academic and scientific communities as one of the fathers of modern linguistics, and a major figure of analytic philosophy. Chomsky is the author of more than 150 books and has received worldwide attention for his views.

By Stephen Lendman * | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

Wikipedia defines false or black flags as "covert operations designed to deceive the public in such a way that the operations appear as though they are being carried out by other entities."

They're "big lies," defined by Merriam-Webster as "deliberate gross distortion(s) of the truth used especially as a propaganda tactic."

America's decade from September 11, 2001 to May 1, 2011 was punctuated by the (big) lie of our time and (big) lie of the moment.

Put another way, the official stories are falsified, myths, widely believed fantasies contrary to reality.

In his exhaustive research and writings, David Ray Griffin provided convincing evidence that 9/11 was an inside job and that bin Laden died of natural causes in mid-December 2001.

The former spawned a decade of overt and covert "war on terror" lawlessness at home and abroad. Policies and events following the second have yet to unfold, but expect little at best to be positive.

Past US false flags provided pretexts for militarism, wars, occupations, domestic repression, and national security state extremism, antithetical to democratically free and open societies. Allegedly removing America's "Enemy Number One," in fact, may intensify, not diminish, Washington's scheme for unchallengeable global dominance. More on him below.

With or without bin Laden, bogymen threats are plentiful. Since WW II alone, America's had numerous ones, including communists, Al Qaeda, WMDs, the Taliban, Gaddafi, and a host others yet unnamed, as well as numerous "foiled" domestic ones.

Among others, they include:

• a fake shoe bomber;
• fake underwear bomber;
• fake Times Square bomber;
• an earlier one there;
• fake shampoo bombers;
• fake Al Qaeda woman planning fake mass casualty attacks on New York landmarks;
• fake Oregon bomber;
• fake armed forces recruiting station bomber;
• fake synagogue bombers;
• fake Chicago Sears Tower bombers;
• fake FBI and other building bombers;
• fake National Guard, Fort Dix and Quantico marine base attackers;
• fake 9/11 bombers; and
• others to enlist public support for the fake war on terror and very real ones it spawned.

America, Pakistan, Bin Laden, Official Lies, and Misreporting

On May 5, New York Times writer Elisabeth Bumiller headlined, "Pentagon Breaks Silence on Pakistani Role," saying:

A "top Pentagon official said....Pakistan would have to work hard to rebuild relations with the United States Congress," including a commitment "to fighting terrorism...."

It suggests what some analysts suspect: namely, planned destabilization, confrontation, and balkanization for greater Eurasian control, as well as future terrorist false flags.

On May 5, Times writers Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane headlined, "Data Show Bin Laden Plots; CIA Hid Near Raided House," saying:

Alleged "computer files and documents seized at the compound where Osama bin Laden was killed," reveal "considered attacks on American railroads, (but) there was no evidence of a specific plot."

Perhaps no files and documents either. For sure, no bin Laden.

Nonetheless, "(s)ince Sunday night, counterterrorism officials have been alert to (possible) new attacks from Al Qaeda to avenge its leader's death," especially at airports, rail facilities, and other strategic locations. "American officials and terrorism experts have warned that this is not the end of Al Qaeda," not, of course, if they're blamed for planned false flags to intensify US imperial wars.

Another May 5 Bumiller Times report ran cover for shifting official accounts about what really happened on May 1 headlined, "Raid Account, Hastily Told, Proves Fluid," saying:

"(I)t was a classic collision of a White House desire to promote a stunning national security triumph - and feed a ravenous media - while collecting facts from a chaotic military operation on the other side of the world. At the same time, White House officials worked hard to use the facts of the raid to diminish Bin Laden's legacy."

She continued, quoting an unnamed Pentagon official claiming no "intent to deceive or dramatize," adding that "Everything we put out we really believed to be true at the time." She also quoted Victoria Clarke, Bush Pentagon spokeswoman, saying, "First reports are always wrong. It's a fundamental truth in military affairs."

In other words, it was OK first to claim a fierce firefight in which no US forces were killed or hurt, then 24 hours later call the battle one-sided, Navy Seals quickly dispatching bin Laden's guards and "Enemy Number One," shooting him unarmed in the head.

Notably, however, there's no body, no photos, no video, no evidence, and no truth, just the media regurgitated big lie.

In fact, more lies compounded it, including about:

• Pakistan's alleged knowledge of his presence;
• claimed evidence confirming it and assault specifics; and
• fabricated bad theater, explained in a slapdash, keystone cops manner.

High Level Skepticism

Appearing on CNN May 5, former Pakistani intelligence chief, Hamid Gul, told "In the Arena's" host Eliot Spitzer that bin Laden died years earlier, saying:

"Yes, I think he died - he perished some years ago, and I think this was a story which was created (because) nobody would want to believe this version....I (don't believe) the story which was given out by the American media and by the American administration."

Whoever was killed May 1 "was probably somebody else....(American authorities) must have known that he died some years ago....were keeping this story on the ice and they were looking for an appropriate moment" to announce it.

"(P)eople simply not in Pakistan alone but around the world....don't believe the stories that have been put out."

In other words, the entire account was fabricated, the event staged, Western media, including The New York Times, running cover for the big lie. Gul politely called it "a huge intelligence failure."

Notable American and Other False Flags

Discussed in earlier writing, numerous ones stand out, including:

• In 1898, Spain was falsely accused of blowing up the USS Maine in Havana, Cuba harbor. The Spanish-American war followed.
• On May 7, 1915, a German U-boat was accused of torpedoing the RMS Lusitania, killing 128 US citizens. It helped precipitate America's April 4, 1917 WW I entry, a war Woodrow Wilson wanted and got through a propaganda campaign, turning pacifist Americans into German haters. It was later learned that on board munitions, not a torpedo, exploded, sinking the ship.
• In 1933 Germany, a week before general elections, the strategically timed Reichstag fire (home of the German parliament) was blamed on communists. President Paul von Hindenburg's emergency decree followed. Civil liberties were suspended. Weimar Republic democracy ended, and Hitler assumed fascist powers after enough Nazis were elected to assure it.
• On August 31, 1939, Nazis impersonating Polish terrorists attacked the Gleiwitz radio station on the border between the two countries, starting WW II.
• On December 7, 1941, Roosevelt manipulated Japan to attack Pearl Harbor, giving him the war he wanted from the early 1930s, but had to convince a pacifist public of the threat. The fleet was also tracked across the Pacific, but Admiral HE Kimmel wasn't warned or given known intelligence to assure enough mass casualties for congressional and public support.
• Complicit with Washington, numerous 1949/1950 South Korean incursions north precipitated Pyongyang's retaliation in June 1950, giving Truman the war he wanted.
• In 1962, a US Joint Chiefs of Staff proposed false flag never happened because Kennedy rejected it. Called Operation Northwoods (a part of Operation Mongoose), it included sinking US ships, shooting down US commercial airliners, blowing up buildings in US cities, attacking America's Guantanamo base, other incidents, and blaming it on Cuba as a reason for war.
• The fake August 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident initiated full-scale retaliation against North Vietnam after Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, authorizing war without declaring it.
• In October 1983, after ousting Prime Minister Maurice Bishop, US forces invaded Grenada, allegedly to rescue American medical students threatened by nonbelligerent Cubans building infrastructure.
• In December 1989, manufactured incidents precipitated America's Panama invasion, deposing Manuel Noriega, one-time ally turned enemy because he forgot who's boss.
• in August 1990, Washington colluded with the al- Sabah monarchy, entrapping Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait. In January 1991, it launched the Gulf War, followed by over two decades of sanctions, more war occupation, and destruction of the "cradle of civilization."
• The September 11, 2001 false flag operation launched a decade of imperial wars against Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Palestine allied with Israel, perhaps others to come, as well as proxy wars in Somalia, Yemen, Bahrain, Central Africa, Haiti, Honduras, Colombia, and at home against Muslims, Latino immigrants, and working Americas.

On February 16, 2010, a Washington's blog web site (georgewashington2.blogspot.com) article titled, "Governments ADMIT That They Carry Out False Flag Terror" listed examples, including:

• The CIA admitted its 1950s role in toppling Iran's democratically government in 1953.
• Israel acknowledged a 1954 attack in Egypt, including planting bombs in US diplomatic facilities, leaving "evidence" of Arab involvement.
• Indonesia's former president, Abdurrahman Wahid, said the nation's police or military most likely were involved in the 2002 Bali bombing, killing over 200 people.
• A former Italian prime minister, judge, and military counterintelligence head, General Gianadelio Maletti, said America's CIA instigated and abetted right wing terrorist groups in the 1970s and earlier, including bombing a Milan bank in 1969 to rally popular anti-communist support in Italy and other European countries.
• Many others, including former Carter administration National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, telling a Senate committee that a false flag terror attack on US soil might occur to blame Iran and justify war.

In his 1997 book, "The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives," he said:

"Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly multicultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat," the kind 9/11 created - predicted, planned, orchestrated, and carried out to further new world order global dominance.

Other False Flag Examples

• The March 2004 Madrid train bombings occurred three days before Spain's general elections. With no supportive evidence, they were blamed on Al Qaeda, yet they stoked public fear of threats against other Western cities, including American ones.
• The July 7, 2005 London underground bombings (called 7/7) were a series of attacks on the city's public transport system during the morning rush hour for maximum disruption and casualties. At precisely the same time, an anti-terror drill occurred, simulating real attacks. It was no coincidence, others in America and Britain came on the same day.
• On 9/11 morning, the CIA ran a "pre-planned simulation to explore the emergency response issues that would be created if a plane were to strike a building." Held at the Agency's Chantilly, Virginia Reconnaissance Office, AP reported (on August 22, 2002) that it simulated "a small corporate jet (hitting) one of the four towers....after experiencing a mechanical failure."

  Unmentioned at the time was a later revealed (but unreported) Homeland Security conference announcement a year later to commemorate the 9/11 event. Held under the auspices of the National Law Enforcement and Security Institute, one of its speakers was John Fulton, CIA Chief of the Strategic War Gaming Division of the National Reconnaissance office in charge of the operation. Another coincidence, or was something more sinister afoot?

  In October 2000, the Pentagon simulated a commercial plane striking the Pentagon, coordinated by its Command Emergency Response Team and the Defense Protective Services Police. This and the 9/11 exercises are more than coincidental, given what's now known and the fallout.

• On June 30, 2007, a Jeep Cherokee with propane canisters crashed into Glasgow International Airport's glass doors, the BBC reporting that it "was in the middle of the doorway burning....The car didn't actually explode. There were a few pops and bangs which presumably was the petrol."

The usual suspects were falsely blamed, Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorists.

In Miami, on January 11, 2010 (one day before Haiti's earthquake), the Pentagon's US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) simulated a hurricane striking the island in preparation for subsequent measures to be implemented. A carefully prepared military operation, they included occupying, controlling, and plundering the island.

Also, Deputy SOUTHCOM head, General PK Keen, was in Haiti when the quake struck, ready to assume command when it did and use a communication tool called the Transnational Information Sharing Cooperation project (TISC), linking other nations and NGOs with the Pentagon and US government to facilitate measures to be implemented. None were to help Haitians.

A Final Comment

Exposed as bad theater, New York Times writer Elizabeth Harris further discredited the broadsheet, headlining:

"Al Qaeda Confirms Bin Laden's Death," citing an unconfirmed statement, warning of new attacks to come. It also said an audio recording days before his death will soon be released. In fact, past video and audio ones were exposed as fakes.

* Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon.

Illustration by Carlos Latuff

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts * | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

The US government's bin Laden story was so poorly crafted that it did not last 48 hours before being fundamentally altered. Indeed, the new story put out on Tuesday by White House press secretary Jay Carney bears little resemblance to the original Sunday evening story. The fierce firefight did not occur. Osama bin Laden did not hide behind a woman. Indeed, bin Laden, Carney said, "was not armed."

The firefight story was instantly suspicious as not a single SEAL got a scratch, despite being up against al Qaeda, described by former Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld as 'the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth."

Every original story detail has been changed. It wasn't bin Laden's wife who was murdered by the Navy SEALs , but the wife of an aide. It wasn't bin Laden's son, Khalid, who was murdered by the Navy SEALs, but son Hamza.

Carney blamed the changed story on "the fog of war." But there was no firefight, so where did the "fog of war" come from?

The White House has also had to abandon the story that President Obama and his national security team watched tensely as events unfolded in real time (despite the White House having released photos of the team watching tensely), with the operation conveyed into the White House by cameras on the SEALs helmets. If Obama was watching the event as it happened, he would have noticed, one would hope, that there was no firefight and, thus, would not have told the public that bin Laden was killed in a firefight. Another reason the story had to be abandoned is that if the event was captured on video, every news service in the world would be asking for the video, but if the event was orchestrated theater, there would be no video.

No explanation has been provided for why an unarmed bin Laden, in the absence of a firefight, was murdered by the SEALs with a shot to the head. For those who believe the government's story that "we got bin Laden," the operation can only appear as the most botched operation in history. What kind of incompetence does it require to senselessly and needlessly kill the most valuable intelligence asset on the planet?

According to the US government, the terrorist movements of the world operated through bin Laden, "the mastermind." Thanks to a trigger-happy stupid SEAL, a bullet destroyed the most valuable terrorist information on the planet. Perhaps the SEAL was thinking that he could put a notch on his gun and brag for the rest of his life about being the macho tough guy who killed Osama bin Laden, the most dangerous man on the planet, who outwitted the US and its European and Israeli allies and inflicted humiliation on the "world's only superpower" on 9/11.

When such a foundational story as the demise of bin Laden cannot last 48 hours without acknowledged "discrepancies" that require fundamental alternations to the story, there are grounds for suspicion in addition to the suspicions arising from the absence of a dead body, from the absence of any evidence that bin Laden was killed in the raid or that a raid even took place. The entire episode could just be another event like the August 4, 1964, Gulf of Tonkin event that never happened but succeeded in launching open warfare against North Vietnam at a huge cost to Americans and Vietnamese and enormous profits to the military/security complex.

There is no doubt that the US is sufficiently incompetent to have needlessly killed bin Laden instead of capturing him. But who can believe that the US would quickly dispose of the evidence that bin Laden had been terminated? The government's story is not believable that the government dumped the proof of its success into the ocean, but has some photos that might be released, someday.

As one reader put it in an email to me: "What is really alarming is the increasingly arrogant sloppiness of these lies, as though the government has become so profoundly confident of their ability to deceive people that they make virtually no effort to even appear credible."

Governments have known from the beginning of time that they can always deceive citizens and subjects by playing the patriot card. "Remember the Maine," the "Gulf of Tonkin," "weapons of mass destruction," "the Reichstag fire"--the staged events and bogus evidence are endless. If Americans knew any history, they would not be so gullible.

The real question before us is: What agenda or agendas is the "death of bin Laden" designed to further?

There are many answers to this question. Many have noticed that Obama was facing re-election with poor approval ratings. Is anyone surprised that the New York Times/CBS Poll finds a strong rise in Obama's poll numbers after the bin Laden raid? As the New York Times reported, "the glow of national pride" rose "above partisan politics, as support for the president rose significantly among both Republicans and independents. In all, 57 percent said they now approved of the president's job performance, up from 46 percent."

In Washington-think, a 24% rise in approval rating justifies a staged event.

Another possibility is that Obama realized that the the budget deficit and the dollar's rescue from collapse require the end of the expensive Afghan war and occupation and spillover war into Pakistan. As the purpose of the war was to get bin Laden, success in this objective allows the US to withdraw without loss of face, thus making it possible to reduce the US budget deficit by several hundred billion dollars annually--an easy way to have a major spending cut.

If this is the agenda, then more power to it. However, if this was Obama's agenda, the military/security complex has quickly moved against it. CIA director Leon Panetta opened the door to false flag attacks to keep the war going by declaring that al Qaeda would avenge bin Laden's killing. Secretary of State Clinton declared that success in killing bin Laden justified more war and more success. Homeland Security declared that the killing of bin Laden would motivate "homegrown violent extremists" into making terrorist attacks. "Homegrown violent extremists" is an undefined term, but this newly created bogyman seems to include environmentalists and war protesters. Like "suspect," the term will include anyone the government wants to pick up.

Various parts of the government quickly seized on the success in killing bin Laden to defend and advance their own agendas, such as torture. Americans were told that bin Laden was found as a result of information gleaned from torturing detainees held in Eastern European CIA secret prisons years ago.

This listing of possible agendas and add-on agendas is far from complete, but for those capable of skepticism and independent thought, it can serve as a starting point. The agendas behind the theater will reveal themselves as time goes on. All you have to do is to pay attention and to realize that most of what you hear from the mainstream media is designed to advance the agendas.

* Paul Craig Roberts was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. His latest book, How the Economy Was Lost: The War of the Worlds . He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

By Reuters

WARNING: GRAPHIC PHOTOGRAPHS OF DEATH AND INJURY BELOW

"Reuters" -- Photographs acquired by Reuters and taken about an hour after the U.S. assault on Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad in Pakistan show three dead men lying in pools of blood, but no weapons.

The photos, taken by a Pakistani security official who entered the compound after the early morning raid on Monday, show two men dressed in traditional Pakistani garb and one in a t-shirt, with blood streaming from their ears, noses and mouths.

The official, who wished to remain anonymous, sold the pictures to Reuters.

None of the men looked like bin Laden. President Barack Obama decided not to release photos of his body because it could have incited violence and used as an al Qaeda propaganda tool, the White House said on Wednesday.

Based on the time-stamps on the pictures, the earliest one was dated May 2, 2:30 a.m., approximately an hour after the completion of the raid in which bin Laden was killed.

Other photos, taken hours later at between 5:21 a.m. and 6:43 a.m. show the outside of the trash-strewn compound and the wreckage of the helicopter the United States abandoned. The tail assembly is unusual, and could indicate some kind of previously unknown stealth capability.

Reuters is confident of the authenticity of the purchased images because details in the photos appear to show a wrecked helicopter from the assault, matching details from photos taken independently on Monday.

U.S. forces lost a helicopter in the raid due to a mechanical problem and later destroyed it.

The pictures are also taken in sequence and are all the same size in pixels, indicating they have not been tampered with. The time and date in the photos as recorded in the digital file's metadata match lighting conditions for the area as well as the time and date imprinted on the image itself.

The close-cropped pictures do not show any weapons on the dead men, but the photos are taken in medium close-up and often crop out the men's hands and arms.

One photo shows a computer cable and what looks like a child's plastic green and orange water pistol lying under the right shoulder of one of the dead men. A large pool of blood has formed under his head.

A second shows another man with a streak of blood running from his nose across his right cheek and a large band of blood across his chest.

A third man, in a T-shirt, is on his back in a large pool of blood which appears to be from a head wound.

U.S. acknowledgment on Tuesday that bin Laden was unarmed when shot dead had raised accusations Washington had violated international law. The exact circumstances of his death remained unclear and could yet fuel controversy, especially in the Muslim world.

Pakistan faced national embarrassment, a leading Islamabad newspaper said, in explaining how the world's most-wanted man was able to live for years in the military garrison town of Abbottabad, just north of the capital.

Pakistan blamed worldwide intelligence lapses for a failure to detect bin Laden, while Washington worked to establish whether its ally had sheltered the al Qaeda leader, which Islamabad vehemently denies.

(Writing by Chris Allbritton; Editing by Jon Boyle)

The unidentified body of a man is seen after a raid by U.S. Navy SEAL commandos on the compound where al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad, May 2, 2011. Bin Laden was killed in the U.S. special forces assault on the Pakistani compound, then quickly buried at sea, in a dramatic end to the long manhunt for the al Qaeda leader who had been the guiding star of global terrorism. Picture taken May 2, 2011. REUTERS

The unidentified body of a man is seen after a raid by U.S. Navy SEAL commandos on the compound where al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad, May 2, 2011. Bin Laden was killed in the U.S. special forces assault on the Pakistani compound, then quickly buried at sea, in a dramatic end to the long manhunt for the al Qaeda leader who had been the guiding star of global terrorism. Picture taken May 2, 2011. REUTERS

The unidentified body of a man is seen after a raid by U.S. Navy SEAL commandos on the compound where al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad, May 2, 2011. Bin Laden was killed in the U.S. special forces assault on the Pakistani compound, then quickly buried at sea, in a dramatic end to the long manhunt for the al Qaeda leader who had been the guiding star of global terrorism. Picture taken May 2, 2011. REUTERS

The unidentified body of a man is seen after a raid by U.S. Navy SEAL commandos on the compound where al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad May 2, 2011. Bin Laden was killed in the U.S. special forces assault on the Pakistani compound, then quickly buried at sea, in a dramatic end to the long manhunt for the al Qaeda leader who had been the guiding star of global terrorism. Picture taken May 2, 2011. REUTERS

By Maria Rainier* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

Just one day after blaming Bin Ladin and al-Qaeda for arming Libyan youngsters and spurring them with drugs and alcohol to "destruction and sabotage," Col Moammar Gadhafi appeared at Green Square in Tripoli to announce that he would "open the arms depot so all Libyans and tribes become armed."

NPR says that Gadhafi's civilian supporters have already taken full advantage of their brawn. Many opened fire with automatic and anti-aircraft weapons from rooftops and on street level on Friday during demonstrations. Multiple deaths have been reported by witnesses who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Since Friday, NPR's Lourdes Garcia-Navarro says that "security forces, irregular troops allied to Gadhafi [have been] firing on demonstrators in many neighborhoods." Militias have allegedly been using ambulances for transportation. The wounded remain on the streets.

Seif al-Islam, Gadhafi's son, claims that the firefight was only "fireworks." Meanwhile, the capital is allegedly "calm ... everything is peaceful" with no casualties.

NPR further reports that later on Friday, forces backing Gadhafi went east to attack Misrata Air Base on Libya's coastline. The base had been taken by rebels, and much east of Sirte (a Gadhafi stronghold) is currently under opposition control. As of Saturday, February 26, they still held much of the base and had had captured two fighters, including a senior officer.

Gadhafi's Cheap Shot

Earlier, on February 24, Gadhafi took what BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner says is a cheap shot by blaming al-Qaeda for the recent uprisings in the Middle East.

"You should not listen to Bin Ladin and his followers," Gadhafi advised, addressing the residents of al-Zawiya, where heavy gunfire and a case of arson were recently reported. "It is obvious now that this issue is run by Al-Quaeda. Those armed youngsters, our children, are incited by people who are wanted by America and the Western world."

If this was an ego stroke for listening American officials, Obama didn't seem to be swayed when he signed the executive order to freeze Gadhafi's and his children's assets in the US. The sanctions also apply to the Libyan government. Obama added his signature hours after the last plane full of US citizens took off for Turkey on February 24^th after temporarily abandoning their embassy in Tripoli.

Economic Sanctions Not Likely to Sway Gadhafi

How Gadhafi will respond to the economic sanction is predictable, but not in the US's or UN's favor. NPR's Peter Kenyon reports from Cairo, "The Gadhafi family is quite used to being isolated and shunned and their defiant tone indicates that economic sanctions will have little effect."

Meanwhile, Gadhafi insists Libya's rebellion is different from Egypt's and Tunisia's, since the people of Libya had committees and therefore their paths in their own hands. It seems Gadhafi thought it only fair that he put guns in the hands of his supporters.

"This is your country and it is up to you how to deal with it," he said. "Those inciting are very few in numbers and we have to capture them. . . . [They are] trigger happy and they shoot especially when they are stoned with drugs."

Cheap shot, indeed. The jihadist movement within the Middle East has been pushed aside amidst recent popular uprisings. Religion, according to BBC, has hardly played a role. This is merely Gadhafi putting on a hero's cape while standing in a pool of blood.

The US and UN are currently pondering an international response.

* Maria Rainier is a freelance writer and blog junkie. She is currently a resident blogger at First in Education where she writes about education, online degrees, and what it takes to succeed as a student getting an online associates degree remotely from home. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gardening, swimming, and avoiding her laptop.

By Rob Lonaker | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

Dear Israel,

My son Jeff, a U.S. Army soldier, is sworn to defend Israel against all its enemies. At least that's how his commanding officers and the guys in his squad figure it, because America and Israel have exactly the same interests. Our countries are like one. Perfect allies!

Plus, like his mother and me, his whole platoon is Christian and proud of it. He has his Bible study every day, so he knows how important Israel and the Jewish people are to God. His platoon wants to fulfill God's plan, so they fight hard for you, Israel. They all love you. And to prove it, they're dying for you.

Lately something's been bothering Jeff, though. It seems a lot of Americans have found convincing evidence of explosives used to bring down the towers on 9/11. And it's direct evidence, as the lawyers say: video, eyewitness, and chemical evidence.

Problem is, no one in the media or government will look at the evidence, even though most of it has come to light only since 2009. That's weird, because 9/11 was a pretty important event. Jeff is constantly reminded by his captain that 9/11 is the main reason his squad is in Afghanistan, fighting and dying for you, Israel.

Here's the strange part: Not one prominent Jewish person is asking for an investigation of this evidence.

We all know how much influence the Jews and Israel have over our politicians and the media. Don't get me wrong – I mean, it's great! The Israel Lobby makes sure every congressman and senator is being sensitive to even the smallest issue that affects Israel. You guys do a good job pressuring every last member of Congress to vote to fund each holocaust memorial service – and it seems likes there's another one, somewhere, every couple weeks!

Best of all, you always make sure no one criticizes Israel. We all know that's hate speech by definition! And your mechanisms for punishing politicians who slip up, by defunding their campaigns and trashing them in the press, or throwing them in jail like Jim Traficant, is nothing short of genius. Your organizational skills are amazing.

So Jeff can't understand why Jewish leaders don't want anyone to investigate the explosives found in the dust around Manhattan on 9/11.

Why are you silent, Israel?

Shouldn't great Jewish men, like 9/11 Commission Director Philip Zelikow, former Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff, and NIST 9/11 Investigation Leader John Gross, want to look at this evidence? Why aren't they clamoring to find the truth? These guys were in positions of trust, so we Americans assumed they would never omit important evidence, much less refuse to talk about it now that they're out of office.

Shouldn't our Jewish neoconservative leaders be excited to investigate new and important evidence of explosives? After all, they helped us launch America's righteous wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, and they now urge us to plunge deeper toward national bankruptcy and troop suicide by invading Iran with nukes. Where are men like Eliot Cohen, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser, Abraham Shulsky, Elliott Abrams, David Schenker, Michael Ledeen, and Michael Rubin, who helped bake Iraqi WMD intelligence, when you need them? I just don't get it.

And what about the media? Come on, most mainstream media sources are heavily Jewish owned or influenced. Can't they put a little pressure on politicians and the Justice Department to get an investigation going?

We all know that al-Qaeda did 9/11, because the media, president, and congress say so. I know, no one's proved it yet, and the story is completely implausible, but – well, that's beside the point. Heck, the media told us within ten minutes of the second plane hit that Osama bin Laden did it. That just proves how smart they are: the story never needed changing, even after the 9/11 Commission "investigated" it!

So why won't Western media and governments now look into the explosives issue? I'm sure they'll find that somehow, al-Qaeda helped destroy the twin towers using the explosive agent nanothermite, which scientists later discovered in the tower dust. And someone will surely explain how al-Qaeda got access to this high-grade explosive, produced only in a few countries' classified military programs.

A few of Jeff's buddies in Afghanistan tell him there's only one logical explanation for why all the mainstream media and politicians won't look at the new explosives evidence:

You did 9/11.

Jeff thinks that no other explanation fits all the facts. But the reality of this crushes him and makes him want to despair.

But he always gets a grip on himself. He fights back tears and tries to put it out of his mind. He will stay brave.

If I may be so bold, Israel, Jeff and I would like to ask, why?

Forgive me for saying so, but I really don't think you needed to go that far. Jeff would still have fought and died for you, as I'm sure President Bush would have ordered him to, even without 9/11. I'll bet the fake WMD evidence the neocons ginned up would have been enough to garner public support for the wars you wanted. I guess what I'm saying is, our soldiers could have been mobilized into your service, Israel, with just a little false flag prevarication. You didn't need to go all the way and kill 3,000 of us. Jeff even has a friend whose mom died in the towers. Again pardon me for being brash enough to say this: that wasn't cool.

But hey, I'm sorry. Jeff and I will get over it. I talked it over with his mother, and I think maybe one day, she'll get past it, too. She's pretty emotional, though, so it may take a while.

Jeff's whole squad still supports you, Israel! They're Christians, after all, and they must remain faithful to God's Anointed People. If you had to kill some of us Americans to show us the way, then I suppose that God's ways, which are your ways, are perhaps just beyond our lowly human understanding.

Who knows? Maybe losing 3,000 innocent citizens was a small price for us to pay in your bigger scheme of things.

May God give Jeff the faith to keep fighting for you, Israel, and to be willing to lose life and limb for you, even though he may not comprehend everything. Like God smote Job to test his faith, I think that's what Israel must be doing to America. And like Abraham, I'm willing to sacrifice my son if you say it's God's will.

Jeff will go forward for you, no matter the cost you impose. Isn't that what blind faith is all about?

Sincerely,

Rob Lonaker

Source: Veterans Today

Al Qaeda Ink Cartridge Bomb

By Maidhc Ó Cathail * | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

While Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) may have claimed responsibility for the parcel bomb plot, it's worth considering how this latest Yemen-linked terror scare has been a gift to their avowed enemies.

A mere two weeks before the discovery of mail bombs addressed to "two places of Jewish worship in Chicago", Rupert Murdoch sounded prescient as he received an award from the Anti-Defamation League for his support of Israel. "The terrorists continue to target Jews across the world," declared the media mogul in his acceptance speech. "But they have not succeeded in bringing down the Israeli government - and they have not weakened Israeli resolve." Equating criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, the Fox News owner smeared the growing worldwide condemnation of Israel's rogue behaviour as an "ongoing war against the Jews".

Binyamin Netanyahu, a frequent London house guest of Murdoch and a likely recipient of his political contributions, was quick to make hay of the foiled plot. Briefing the cabinet on his impending address to the General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America, the Israeli prime minister told them that it would be "held against the background of reports about the attempt to attack the Jewish community in Chicago".

Linking the parcel bomb plot to some of the most iconic terrorist attacks of the post-9/11 era, Netanyahu said that "it does not matter if the target was a synagogue in Chicago or a railway station in Madrid, London, Mumbai or Bali". Deftly associating his increasingly isolated government with the victims of those attacks, the Israeli prime minister proclaimed: "We are facing a growing wave of terrorism by extremist Islam."

Netanyahu, never one prone to understatement, offered this analysis of the unsuccessful attempt to use desktop printers as terror weapons: "It is growing in the scope and brazen gall of its attacks, in the weapons with which it is arming itself, and in the sweeping objectives of the leaders of global terrorism."

He then assured his colleagues that "one of the main issues" he would be addressing in New Orleans with American Jewish leaders was "the steps that the civilized and free world must take in order to stop this wave that threatens us all."

Needless to say, those "steps" are unlikely to include an end to the 43-year occupation and colonization of the West Bank or a lifting of the four-year blockade of Gaza.

An American apologist for Israel's self-appointed guardian of "the civilized and free world" took a similar line. Joel Pollak, a Republican candidate in the mid-term elections, released a statement condemning the attempted terror attack, saying he would be spending the Jewish sabbath in West Rogers Park "in solidarity with the people of the ninth congressional district who were the direct targets of Al Qaeda terror". Sounding a lot like Netanyahu, Pollak attempted to rally his constituents by telling them, "We must not stop fighting to eradicate the twin evils of terror and hatred."

Again, we can take it as read that the "terror and hatred" Americans are being urged to combat only applies to Israel's enemies (PDF).

The Israeli news website DEBKA-Net-Weekly, which describes itself as "the leading geopolitical newsletter", has even attempted to implicate Israel's current enemy number one, Iran. The next issue, for subscribers only, promises to reveal "how the Al-Qaeda air package plot fit [sic] into the selective partnership between Tehran and Al-Qaeda and homes in on the areas where their schemes dovetail".

But how trustworthy is this "leading newsletter"?

"Debka is prepared mostly by former Mossad operatives. A reliable stream of information," Martin Peretz, the Islamophobic editor-in-chief of the staunchly pro-Israel New Republic assures us.

Ever since an Israeli firm let the Christmas Day crotch bomber "slip through" security at Schiphol Airport without a passport, a few influential voices with close ties to Israel have been instrumental in making Yemen "the new buzzword".

Appearing on Fox News two days later, the No. 1 pro-Israel advocate and leader in Congress, Senator Joe Lieberman, announced: "Iraq was yesterday's war. Afghanistan is today's war. If we don't act preemptively, Yemen will be tomorrow's war."

Within a week, Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Saban Center in the Brookings Institution, had an op-ed in the Daily Beast titled "The menace of Yemen". Touting the botched Christmas Day plot as evidence of "the growing ambition of Al-Qaeda's Yemen franchise," Riedel called for "significant American support to defeat AQAP".

Riedel's employer, the Saban Center, is named after Haim Saban, the Israeli-American media mogul, who in 2002 pledged 13 million dollars to found the Saban Center for Middle East Policy. Two years later, Saban admitted to the New York Times: "I'm a one-issue guy and my issue is Israel."

"The US may be walking into a bit of a trap," warns Gregory Johnsen, a Yemen expert and doctoral candidate at Princeton University's Department of Near Eastern Studies.

That "trap" has been best described by a former CIA officer. "America's misguided war on terror", Philip Giraldi pointed out in a recent article, "is in fact a complete adoption of Israeli security paradigms without any regard for the actual threats that confront the US, making Israel's many enemies also the foes of Washington".

Israel must be very grateful indeed for this latest terror scare. If Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula did not exist, they might have to invent it.

* Maidhc Ó Cathail is a widely published writer based in Japan.

AIPAC BRAGS, "UNPRECEDENTED CONTROL OVER AMERICAN POLITICS"

By Gordon Duff * | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

You Can't Make Stuff Like This Up!

"Step two, "shock and awe" for Iran followed by a full scale invasion that, according to military experts directly responsible for drawing up our war plans, requires the fall of Pakistan, its "Balkanization and the military occupation of Baluchistan as a staging area."

AIPAC, the Israel lobby used to, well, we don't exactly know what they are "used to" but every politician in America is terrified of it for some reason, claims to have total control over the new congress.

It isn't a "Jewish thing," AIPAC got rid of 6 Jews who were too "pro-American" for their tastes. The last thing it is about is the security of Israel, a regional bully, a small land of ICBMs, germ warfare labs and warehouses loaded with American munitions which they sell around the world.

Israel and its thuggish "American" lobby terrifies a lot of people, congress, journalists certainly and as Noam Chomsky continually points out, its own citizens.

There is a real threat against Israel, one they perceive but many Americans are unaware of yet. Israel is terrified of a new 9/11 investigation. Even Noam Chomsky, top critic of many Israeli policies, had always stopped short of debunking 9/11. He was their last line of defense, Chomsky and Jon Stewart, pseudo-progressive "hand puppet."

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzNhAo1zBD4

"The explicit and declared motive of the [Afghanistan] war was to compel the Taliban to turn over to the United States, the people who they accused of having been involved in World Trade Center and Pentagon terrorist acts. The Taliban...they requested evidence...and the Bush administration refused to provide any,"

"We later discovered one of the reasons why they did not bring evidence: they did not have any."

Chomsky doesn't come out and say "Israel did it." However, he does point out that the attack on Afghanistan was illegal and that there has never been a shred of proof that anyone in Afghanistan had ever been involved in 9/11 at any time, not Osama bin Laden, not the Taliban, nobody. In fact, when it came time for America to submit proof to justify attacking Afghanistan, America began a series of subterfuges that have left the United States branded an aggressor and criminal state.

When 9/11 moves away from Afghanistan, one of the two targets Israel gave us after 9/11, with the veritable flood of secret intelligence from the Mossad guiding Bush 100%, Israel is faced with real risks. When you look outside Afghanistan, you look at terrorist organizations long penetrated by Israeli intelligence, perhaps even under the control of Israel as with many of the groups now active in Yemen.

If this door is opened, if an honest investigation begins, Israel will quickly move from "trusted ally" to "rogue state" and "suspect number one." Iraq and Afghanistan have been found innocent. 9 years has found no massive underground complex such as the one the Mossad told America of in Afghanistan or the weapons labs and secret stolen nuclear weapons they "convinced" Bush and Rumsfeld to invade Iraq for.

"BIN LADENLAND" AT TORA BORA, AMERICA'S IMAGINATION GONE WILD

The other "job" the new congress was hired for is to destroy Iran. With America's military stretched to the limit, exhausted from 9 years of civil wars, occupation, and endless "wheel spinning" in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Neo-con boondoggles of all time, the new "wet behind the ears" Israeli controlled legislators are expected to fall into line, recognizing who owns them.

$1.2 billion dollars bought the new congress, laundered drug money from Afghanistan and Mexico, Federal "bail-out" tax dollars, "recycled" into buying even more bail outs but mostly money tied to Israel and tied to war. The one issue every Tea Party member was silent on, orders from the top, was war on Iran. This is the cost of their office, sending 400,000 troops that America doesn't have to fight a war against an enemy 3 times larger than Iraq, one whose military wasn't already 90% depleted as was Iraq in 2003?

Oh, they didn't tell you that, after Gulf War I, Iraq was never able to rearm and that America spent years fighting the leftovers of an enemy it had already defeated only a few years before? They didn't tell you that other part, where the new troops are to come from.

We call it a "draft."

Not only doesn't America have a large enough army to fight in Afghanistan and keep our other obligations around the world, we are shy 250,000 men, even with every national guard and reserve unit used, all troops from Korea and Europe deployed and maybe even police and fire departments nationalized and put under federal control.

This is the military and manpower capabilities of Iran, according to the Central Intelligence Agency (2008)

• Total Population: 65,875,224 [2008]
• Population Available: 39,851,026 [2008]
• Fit for Military Service: 34,344,352 [2008]
• Reaching Military Age Annually: 1,494,322 [2008]
• Active Military Personnel: 545,000 [2008]
• Active Military Reserve: 350,000 [2008]
• Active Paramilitary Units: 11,390,000 [2008]

THERE ARE ALMOST 13 MILLION ARMED IRANIANS!

Those 20 million "illegal aliens" living in the United States are likely to be much more popular if Israel get's their wish.

Notwithstanding that Iran has never attacked the United States nor every threatened to attack the United States and has proven repeatedly that it has no nuclear program, Israel is demanding of that its members of congress support a war against Iran, one that doesn't involve a single Israeli soldier, exactly as with Iraq and Afghanistan, the two other surrogate wars we are fighting for Israel.

Is Israel planning to pay the estimated $2 trillion dollars they are asking America to spend or compensate the families of the 40,000 troops we are expected to lose? Thus far, nearly 500,000 Americans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan are either being compensated for war related disability, military or veteran retirement and Social Security. Are we aiming to make it an even million?

MORE OF WHY ISRAEL IS TERRIFIED OF 9/11

Taking the clock back to September 2001, just after the 9/11 "incident," I use this term as far as we have proven, 9/11 may well have been some sort of mind control of mass hysteria. Actually, this seems to be an apt description of the governments position on 9/11 or so we thought. Now I am not so sure what the government really thinks. This is how Wired magazine reported it then:

When the terrorists who commandeered the four airplanes in the Sept. 11 attacks were identified, their faces appeared in news publications all over the world.

President Bush has said he has evidence that Osama bin Laden was behind the attacks, so it would seem obvious that the FBI would include him and other suspects on its 10 most wanted fugitives Web page.

Think again.

Bin Laden is listed, but only for the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. There is no mention of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing or the attacks on the USS Cole in October 2000, both of which he is widely believed to have orchestrated. And forget about Sept. 11.

The reason? Fugitives on the list must be formally charged with a crime, and bin Laden is still only a suspect in the recent attacks in New York City and Washington.

"There's going to be a considerable amount of time before anyone associated with the attacks is actually charged," said Rex Tomb, who is head of the FBI's chief fugitive publicity unit and helps decide which fugitives appear on the list. "To be charged with a crime, this means we have found evidence to confirm our suspicions, and a prosecutor has said we will pursue this case in court."

Larry C. Johnson, a former CIA officer who was deputy director of the U.S. State Department Office of Counterterrorism from 1989 to 1993, said in a Sept. 12 interview conducted by Frontline that there is no concrete proof that bin Laden is responsible for the USS Cole and the 1993 WTC attacks, but bin Laden celebrates those attacks and associates himself with people who are responsible for it.

President Bush promises to reveal evidence linking bin Laden to the suicide hijackers who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The Wall Street Journal's Washington Blog lays out a case for how far out of control the demand for a new 9/11 investigation has gone. With folks like Jon Stewart still referring to those who want the truth as "lunatics," even though, in a recent poll by the Herald Sun of Australia (10,000 responses) 77% of citizens there believe 9/11 was an "inside job." That's right, not a 200 phone call sampling, 10,000 responses and nearly 8 out of 10 in agreement.

Does Jon Stewart know what the 9/11 Commission members themselves said? Perhaps he should learn:

9/11 Commissioners:

• The 9/11 Commission's co-chairs said that the 9/11 Commissioners knew that military officials misrepresented the facts to the Commission, and the Commission considered recommending criminal charges for such false statements (free subscription required)
• 9/11 Commission co-chair Lee Hamilton says "I don't believe for a minute we got everything right", that the Commission was set up to fail, that people should keep asking questions about 9/11, and that the 9/11 debate should continue
• 9/11 Commissioner Timothy Roemer said "We were extremely frustrated with the false statements we were getting"
• 9/11 Commissioner Max Cleland resigned from the Commission, stating: "It is a national scandal"; "This investigation is now compromised"; and "One of these days we will have to get the full story because the 9-11 issue is so important to America. But this White House wants to cover it up"
• 9/11 Commissioner Bob Kerrey said that "There are ample reasons to suspect that there may be some alternative to what we outlined in our version . . . We didn't have access . . . ." He also said that the investigation depended too heavily on the accounts of Al Qaeda detainees who were physically coerced into talking
• And the Senior Counsel to the 9/11 Commission (John Farmer) – who led the 9/11 staff's inquiry – recently said "At some level of the government, at some point in time...there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened". He also said "I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described .... The tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years.... This is not spin. This is not true." And he said: "It's almost a culture of concealment, for lack of a better word. There were interviews made at the FAA's New York center the night of 9/11 and those tapes were destroyed. The CIA tapes of the interrogations were destroyed. The story of 9/11 itself, to put it mildly, was distorted and was completely different from the way things happened"

Additionally, the Washington Blog has a few members of congress that are, according to Stewart, "lunatics." Check the list carefully, it will be surprisingly bipartisan:

• According to the Co-Chair of the Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 and former Head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Bob Graham, an FBI informant had hosted and rented a room to two hijackers in 2000 and that, when the Inquiry sought to interview the informant, the FBI refused outright, and then hid him in an unknown location, and that a high-level FBI official stated these blocking maneuvers were undertaken under orders from the White House (confirmed here)
• Current Democratic U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy said "The two questions that the congress will not ask . . . is why did 9/11 happen on George Bush's watch when he had clear warnings that it was going to happen? Why did they allow it to happen?"
• Current Republican Congressman Ron Paul calls for a new 9/11 investigation and states that "we see the [9/11] investigations that have been done so far as more or less cover-up and no real explanation of what went on"
• Current Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich hints that we aren't being told the truth about 9/11
• Current Republican Congressman Jason Chafetz says that we need to be vigilant and continue to investigate 9/11
• Former Democratic Senator Mike Gravel states that he supports a new 9/11 investigation and that we don't know the truth about 9/11
• Former Republican Senator Lincoln Chaffee endorses a new 9/11 investigation
• Former U.S. Democratic Congressman Dan Hamburg doesn't believe the official version of events
• Former U.S. Republican Congressman and senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, and who served six years as the Chairman of the Military Research and Development Subcommittee Curt Weldon has shown that the U.S. tracked hijackers before 9/11, is open to hearing information about explosives in the Twin Towers, and is open to the possibility that 9/11 was an inside job

To this list, we can go on and on, top intelligence officials, top military leaders, diplomats, even former FBI director Louis Freeh called the 9/11 investigation a coverup:

"No wonder the 9/11 families were outraged by these revelations and called for a 'new' commission to investigate."

CONGRESS AS TERRORISTS, CONGRESS AS CONSPIRATORS, WILL THIS BE AMERICA'S MOST TREASONOUS CONGRESS?

Hundreds of thousands of Americans received emails last week claiming a "false flag" nuclear attack on the United States had been predicted on the network cartoon show, The Simpsons. Emails blaming the "Illuminati" and including links to a video viewed over 200,000 times in a few days, were included. Terrorism and nuclear holocaust had become humor but something more. Warnings of "false flag" attacks, orchestrated by Israel, to push the US into war with Iran had moved from "fringe" internet sites to corporate intelligence reports. Rumors began spreading not through chatrooms but through military and law enforcement circles.

This humorous depiction, released in a video that quickly went viral, released on all the "right" email lists, through the Tea Party, "Birther" and "Islamophobia" groups, had a purpose other than to inform and entertain. Real warnings about "false flag" attacks had gotten "too close to home" and needed to be discredited. Tying space aliens or the "Illuminati" to them is an attempt to poison the message, using "spin" to push the views of what is likely a majority of Americans into an area that can be contained, under the label of "fringe" or "conspiracy theory."

Clever people were trying to put the toothpaste back into the tube.

This is the job of the new congress also, to head off any investigation, financial crimes, espionage, illegal foreign influence and, especially, 9/11.

Step one, kill any possibility of a new investigation that will permanently damage the relationship between the United States and Israel.

"Step two, "shock and awe" for Iran followed by a full scale invasion that, according to military experts directly responsible for drawing up our war plans, requires the fall of Pakistan, its "Balkanization and the military occupation of Baluchistan as a staging area."

* Gordon Duff is senior editor of Veterans Today.

"Al Qaeda" Call For Attacks On America, Not Israel, Under Suspicion

By Gordon Duff * | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

TERROR HOAX?

The people of Yemen simply don't believe in Al Qaeda or Osama bin Laden, and for good reason. When Abdullah al-Faqih, professor of political science at Sana University told the New York Times, "We cannot differentiate between what is propaganda and what is real...Some of what looks like Al Qaeda is really terror as a business."

With early news stories being continually contradicted, bombs that weren't really bombs heading out on flights that never existed, carrying packages for companies that don't service Yemen, all heading for Chicago synagogues, part of the wildest "persecution complex" of all time, the whole "Al Qaeda/Yemen" thing has been little more than a "borscht belt" comedy act.

Can we blame President Obama if he got some political mileage out of it before it became so outlandish that a new "Al Qaeda cell" had to take responsibility. Funniest of all was the supposed "Al Qaeda" statement that is clearly part of the long debunked synagogue attack fantasy;

"God has exposed you and showed the world that you are nothing but treacherous agents to the Jews because these bomb packages were headed to Jewish-Zionist temples, and you had to intervene with your treacherous ways to protect them, so may God curse you for being the oppressors."

JDL (JEWISH DEFENSE LEAGUE) ORDERS JEWS TO GO TO ISRAEL OR BUY GUNS TO PROTECT THEMSELVES FROM "AMERICANS"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S87xQ8xhQok

Could manipulating threats against Jews in America serve Israeli interests?

Every scenario plays the same, as with this announcement, more calls for attacks on America and not a single word mentioned about Israel, the traditional target of all Islamic extremist groups. This announcement, like so many before it including Adam "Perlman" Gadahn's most recent, call for attacks on America. Though this one mentions Jews, its language, "so may G-d curse you for being the oppressors" calls for attacks on America only, not Israel. Could anything be more obvious?

"ELVIS BIN LADEN" GOES TO YEMEN

When Arnaud de Borchgrave of UPI and the Washington Times announced Osama bin Laden was "dead as Elvis," he knew there would be a reaction. The "bin Laden industry," making and selling bin Laden tapes to American buyers hungry for any excuse to bilk the public out of more money for the imaginary "war on terror" had run its course. When the real bin Laden died in 2001, the videos, short bin Laden's, fat bin Ladens, festooned like department store Santas, were debunked one by one, despite attempts by the US State Department and Homeland Security to exploit them.

Eventually, the CIA put a stop to this when Director Leon Panetta hinted at bin Laden's demise in 2001 stating that there had been "no known sightings" since that time.Phony intelligence reports had bin Laden driving around Afghanistan on a personal appearance tour the week before. Not long after, newspapers attacked Iran claiming bin Laden was living in luxury there while other rumors said he was being protected by the Iranian community in Los Angeles.

As phony bin Laden videos gave way to quickly debunked audio tapes, still flowing out of Israel on a near weekly basis, "Al Qaeda," the conveniently created terrorist organization meant to justify the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq magically relocated to Yemen. However, not everyone is buying that. A November 3, 2010 New York Times report stated:

As Yemen intensifies its military campaign against Al Qaeda's regional arm, it faces a serious obstacle: most Yemenis consider the group a myth, or a ploy by their president to squeeze the West for aid money and punish his domestic opponents. "What is Al Qaeda? The truth is there is no Al Qaeda," said Lutfi Muhammad, a weary-looking unemployed 50-year-old walking through this city's tumultuous Tahrir Square.

Instead, he said, the violence is "because of the regime and the lack of stability and the internal struggles."...The Yemeni government has used jihadists as proxy soldiers in the past, and sometimes conflates the Qaeda threat and the unrelated political insurgencies it has fought in northern and southern Yemen in recent years.

... many Yemenis seem doubtful that Al Qaeda was guilty in all or even most of those killings, which took place in the same southern parts of the country where a secessionist movement has been growing for the past three years.

"We cannot differentiate between what is propaganda and what is real," said Abdullah al-Faqih, a professor of political science at Sana University. "It's impossible to tell who is killing who; you have tribal feuds, Al Qaeda and the Southern Movement, and the state is doing a lot of manipulation."

"Some of what looks like Al Qaeda is really terror as a business," Mr. Faqih said.

With the government of Yemen fully invested in bin Laden tapes and the influx of cash tied to hunting down the mysterious and illusory "Al Qaeda," the convenient terror organization that can make the difference between asking money to fight a civil war or crush local political opponents or, the second you scream "Al Qaeda," Israel has their worldwide network of newspapers repeating your every word, American drone aircraft are suddenly overhead ready to kill of your pesky mother-in-law or the guy who stole your highschool sweetheart.

This is how it all started in Afghanistan and is still going strong to this day, the "Al Qaeda card" being played when "government approved" drug kingpins want to crush competition. It was also a totally fabricated Al Qaeda, a fact long proven, that put America into Iraq and 5000 American soldiers into an early grave.

In fact, the position the government of Yemen now holds is amazing considering they were of the opposite belief only two years ago. Is there a wonder the people of Yemen believe they are being scammed? From a BBC report on October 7, 2008:

Yemen seizes 'Israel-linked' cell

Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh has said the security forces have arrested a group of alleged Islamist militants linked to Israeli intelligence. Mr Saleh did not say what evidence had been found to show the group's links with Israel, a regional enemy of Yemen.

The arrests were connected with an attack on the US embassy in Sanaa last month which killed at least 18 people, official sources were quoted saying......

"A terrorist cell was arrested and will be referred to the judicial authorities for its links with the Israeli intelligence services," Mr Saleh told a gathering at al-Mukalla University in Hadramawt province."Details of the trial will be announced later. You will hear about what goes on in the proceedings," he added.

The 17 September attack was the second to target the US embassy since April. Militants detonated car bombs before firing rockets at the heavily fortified building.

Mr Saleh did not identify the suspects, but official sources were quoted saying it was same cell – led by a militant called Abu al-Ghaith al-Yamani – whose arrest was announced a week after the attack......

PHONY TERROR SCARE OBAMA'S HARMLESS VERSION OF "9/11″

The 2010 election in America is the most expensive in history, costing well over $1 billion. With the elimination of most controls on election spending, a massive influx of foreign capital, almost all untraceable even under United Nations money-laundering conventions, combined with millions from Israeli sources such as media mogul Rupert Murdoch, managed to take control of the US House of Representatives and almost took the US Senate. It is very possible that the phony terror scare may have been all that saved the last shred of President Obama's influence in American government.

Despite discussions of "smaller government" and "lowering taxes," many political experts in the United States saw the election, not as a referendum on approval or disapproval of any policy but rather a clear demonstration of the ability of foreign capital to flex its muscle in the American political arena using little more than cash, innuendo and broad coordination of controlled media resources, "spin" and suppression of positive news coverage of President Obama and his agenda and accomplishments.

UAE AND YEMEN DEBUNK CARGO STORY

A cursory examination of the UPS website shows that the company doesn't service Yemen. In addition, the Yemen Post reported the following confirmations;

Mohammed al-Shaibah, Air Cargo Director for Yemenia Airways said to Yemen Post, "No UPS cargo plane left Yemeni lands over the land 48 hours. These accusations are false and baseless."

He added, "No UPS or DHL cargo packages heading to Chicago through Yemen took place in the last 48 hours as well."

"All packages are checked very carefully in Yemen, and there is no evidence to prove that this package came through Yemen."

CNN reported the suspicious package, which contained a "manipulated" toner cartridge, tested negative for explosive material, the source said, but it led to heightened inspection of arriving cargo flights in Newark, New Jersey, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and a UPS truck in New York.

Additionally, Press TV, reporting from Dubai, carried a government denial that any packages from Yemen left the United Arab Emirates for the United States;

Fighter jets were scrambled on Friday to accompany an Emirates plane into New York's JFK airport after a security alert, US media reported. Emirati authorities, however, said flight 201 carried no 'suspicious' cargo from Yemen as claimed by US-Canadian military agency NORAD. UAE officials rejected the claim and said the plane was not a source of threat.

"The Emirates plane that arrived today in the United States from Dubai did not contain any packages from Yemen," the official Emirati WAM news agency quoted an unnamed source with the country's civil aviation body as saying.

North American military agency caused a media hype after it reported the suspicious flight.

PRE-ELECTION SKULLDUGGERY?

With American jets scrambled, Chicago synagogues terrorized and US backed troops heading into secessionist regions of Yemen searching for "Al Qaeda" terrorists in a thinly veiled ruse for a tribal crackdown, irresponsible and complicit news media working hand in hand with intelligence agencies, both American and "other," have managed to manufacture more of the subterfuge required to maintain a continual flow of unverifiable threats from Yemen. It has become clear that, with adequate incentives, the government of Yemen will be willing to repackage their internal divisions to appear as terrorism "on demand."

This will help keep America's focus on the region will post-election political maneuvering is likely to stress a more aggressive policy toward Iran, pre-staging an attack in the spring, a response to, well, we can only wait and see.

* Gordon Duff is senior editor of Veterans Today.

AL QAEDA SPOKESMAN ADAM GADAHN WORKS FOR THE ISRAELI GOVERNMENT, END OF STORY

By Gordon Duff * | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

"Israeli terrorist "clones" are responsible for most hard line rhetoric, threats and, if we investigated closely, have actually recruited terrorists and directly inspired, if not planned and executed, attacks on Americans...Gadahn is part of it, so is Wikileaks"

A call to arms, demanding Muslims in America and elsewhere begin a terror campaign, was spread around the world. The message, we are told, was found on a "secret website" by an Israeli company who put it in a press release.

There is no evidence any American Muslim has ever been on the website referred to, no American intelligence agency could find it, not the CIA or the FBI or Homeland Security. There was only one way the 300,000 Muslims of Detroit could hear call to terrorism, from an Israeli company that passes on such messages for profit.

Does it create them too? You be the judge.

Let's look at a possible analogy. If you were to capture a vicious rabid dog in the wilderness and turned it loose in a children's playground, would you be a terrorist?

This is essentially what is being admitted to.

What is in question, another analogy, is whether you purposefully infected the dog with rabies in the first place. Either way, you are a terrorist.

Adam Gadahn, the "American Taliban," the lisping, overweight bungler continually calling for the murder of Americans is really named Adam Perlman from a family highly influential in the Anti-Defamation League. The group distributing his threats, SITE Intelligence, contracted to the American government, is run by a former IDF member whose father was executed in Iraq as a Mossad terrorist. SITE Intelligence is the source of the Osama bin Laden tapes long proven to be, not only the wrong voice, but to resemble bin Laden so little as to have become a joke.

Gadahn came on the scene when tapes of Osama bin Laden claiming credit for 9/11 failed forensic examination. They were counterfeits. The CIA's own version had bin Laden denying any involvement. (See APPENDIX below for official CIA transcript)

This was late 2001 and Americans hadn't been told that the story about Tora Bora, the many stories about Tora Bora, warlords covering for bin Laden, American troops being pulled back at the last minute by presidential order or the Delta Force being betrayed, were all lies. Osama bin Laden, already dying from kidney failure, was murdered by one of his own men on December 14, 2001.

Pakistan's ISI had informants there, it was leaked to the newspapers and was widely reported. Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto even announced it in an interview with BBC's David Frost.

With a 9/11 denial "on the books" and bin Laden dead, there would be no invasion of Iraq, no new leader was "in place" to bring out for the American people, no new "boogeyman."

The very real conspiracy, covering up the sickening truth about 9/11, the treasonous intelligence doctoring leading to the disaster in Iraq and the upcoming years of building a drug empire in Afghanistan, stealing billions in oil from Iraq, the thinly disguised martial law decrees in America and the planned attack on Iran, was threatened unless, somehow, Osama bin Laden could be brought back to life.

Nearly a decade later, Pakistan's intelligence chief, General Pasha does everything but scream it from rooftops, when he carefully hints to a dull witted ABC interviewer that bin Laden is dead. Journalist Arnaud de Borchgrave of UPI and Washington Times fame, makes it as clear as possible when he says "Bin Laden is as dead as Elvis." Even CIA director Leon Panetta confirms there is no evidence of bin Laden since "late 2001."

With bin Laden dead, it all falls apart, Al Qaeda, 9/11, and the continual accusations made against Pakistan. Still, we hear it. Bin Laden touring Afghanistan or as with last weeks report, "living in luxury" in Iran.

Not only is bin Laden dead but when he was alive, the BBC confirmed that he had absolutely no terrorist organization of any kind, masterminded no plots, controlled no organizations and had no more involvement on the world stage other than, at one time, helping the CIA raise money to fund refugee organizations during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mztfFdpd1Rk

Contrary to what has been reported, bin Laden never raised money for weapons. That task was left to Gulbuddin Hikmatyar, the CIA paymaster who received $800,000,000 in US funds. Today we are told Hikmatyar may be in Iran. However, we have verified that he is actually in Pakistan, working directly with the CIA as "go between" with the Taliban, taking an active role in the current talks with the Karzai government. Few in Afghanistan trust Hikmatyar, long a favorite with CIA and Pakistan "hard liners."

If anything, the myth of Osama bin Laden is actually Hikmatyar. What is said bin Laden did in Afghanistan was always Hikmatyar, CIA "moneyman" and terrorist. Problem is, he is still a CIA moneyman and terrorist, flying on American planes, going on and off American bases but listed with the Department of Homeland Security as one of the most wanted terrorists in the world. The truth, Hikmatyar is seen by the US as their "dealmaker" in Afghanistan, something many in Afghanistan find both frightening and delusional.

Perhaps one of the most frightening issues of the 'war on terror' or, more appropriately, 'the phony war on terror' has been the use of 'terrorist clones' like Adam Perlman, the Israeli actor playing a Taliban leader on videos distributed by Israeli intelligence. The real insanity is that the videos aren't produced to just fool Americans into rebuilding the coalition of Islamophobics and paranoids typified by the subscribers of www.familysecuritymatters.org. Please, visit this website. See if everything on it doesn't just scream

"Look out, the boogeyman is coming, quick, hide under your bed!"

Things aren't that innocent. Much of the message is going to the Islamic community worldwide and is reaching people who are angry and looking for someone to blame. Those funding Adam Gadhan, those magically finding his mysterious broadcasts and those distributing them to the world are giving material support to terrorism. They are, in fact, terrorists.

The message they, our friends, you know exactly who I mean, are spreading is clear:

"Attack and kill Americans, not just in Iraq and Afghanistan, but anywhere you can find them in the world. They are the real enemy, not Israel."

Does anyone wonder why Gadahn never calls for attacks on Israel? In fact, Al Qaeda doesn't seem to know Israel exists. They never threaten Israel. They never attack Israel. They never even mention Israel, never. All those Osama bin Laden and Adam Perlman, sorry, "Adam Gadahn" tapes have one thing in common.

Israel doesn't exist. Get the picture? Here is what Perlman, lets be straight about it, his name is Perlman, his family is Jewish, Zionist, and very active in the ADL. This is what he or is it 'they" are advocating in this statement released yesterday:

"emigrant communities like those which live on the margins of society in the miserable suburbs of Paris, London and Detroit, or are from those arriving in America or Europe to study in its universities or seek their daily bread in the streets of its cities....you have an opportunity to strike the leaders of unbelief and retaliate against them on their own soil, as long as there is no covenant between you and them"

Clear and simple, we are hearing what Israel is telling the world, the Muslim world, is the voice of Al Qaeda. What is Israel, or rather "Al Qaeda" telling us?

Please attack Britain, France and the United States but leave Israel alone.

Detroit has Muslim population of 300,000 yet, the one terrorist attack there was done by a mentally incompetent Nigerian national. Do you remember the "crotch bomber?" Do you wonder why the story disappeared from the news so quickly? When two Detroit attorneys caught airport officials putting the terrorist on a plane, airport officials working for an Israeli company, things fell apart. When Veterans Today discovered from intelligence sources in both Nigeria and Ghana that the boy's family was not only tied directly to the CIA but the father was a business partner in an Israeli defense firm, it came apart further. When this came out, a news "blackout" fell and the story died.

When the government of Yemen found laptop computers belonging to "Al Qaeda" that showed a clear record of daily contacts with "handlers" in Israel, the story died totally.

The Detroit bombing told us two things:

1. The vast majority of American Muslims are Americans and have no loyalty to religious extremists or any other country. That is "those other guys." American Muslims are mostly, not only Republicans but politically active in the party and very conservative.
2. Terrorists can't move around the world without help, either visas, real or phony, passports, security"walk arounds" and more. If a grandmother with a knitting needle and an American passport could never, under any imaginable circumstances, get on a plane in Schipol Airport, how did a single male, Nigeria, Muslim, no passport at all...he wasn't carrying any identification of any kind and, this is the best part, a bomb strapped to his genitals get seated on a plane ahead of the rest of the passengers. Remember, you first have to get into a country with no passport, around immigration, then you have to go through airport security and prove you have proper immigration documents then you are checked again before boarding. Abdul Mohammed, without Mossad help, stood a better chance of winning the Irish Sweepstakes than getting on that plane.

Is that a bomb in your pants or are you just glad to see me?

THE PERLMAN/WIKILEAKS "NON-EVENT"

For years, Perlman, masquerading as a spokesman for Al Qaeda, has put out childish videos, all time to help certain political races, influence arms sales to Israel, or as with yesterday's treat, to reinforce the Wikileaks fiasco, another attempt to con America. Last time Wikileaks tried to get the US to cut all aid to Pakistan, an act which would have made the war in Afghanistan even worse than it is now, if that's possible. This one is time to a Wikileak "custom crafted" to blame the world's ills on Iran, target number one for Israel. As a "three fer," the New York Times and MSNBC went after Iran for "secretly" buying off President Karzai of Afghanistan.

We knew Karzai was aligned with India and Israel against Pakistan. Now he is "owned" by Iran? How many sides can one person be on?

When I was in Pakistan earlier in the year, Gadahn was said to be hiding in an apartment building in Karachi. The building was stormed, "Gadahn" was captured, a "Gadahn," not "the Gadahn." It seems that a "look alike" had been used to leave a false trail, the real Adam Perlman was safe and sound elsewhere, some place with video studios. The individual recruiting real terrorists to kill real Americans with real bombs is a real Israeli, no question about that, and not the first time.

It is also believed that the new "Al Qaeda" operations chief, Adnan Shukrijumah of Brooklyn, New York and Miami Beach is another Israeli creation, a phony terrorist, an actor, much like the phony "bin Ladens" of every shape and size used to scare small children after the death of the real bin Laden in December 2001.

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1uLdmct8_E

During comprehensive briefings with Pakistans ISPR, the group that briefs people like, well, Secretary Clinton, it was made clear to me that we were all on the same page, Osama bin Laden is dead. There was much discussion, some of it humorous, as how to let people know. After short discussions on this with ISPR DG General Athar Abbas I was summoned to a "mysterious" meeting.

This was General Ahmed Shurja Pasha, Director General of Pakistan's intelligence service known as the ISI. During a private lunch with the director, his top aide, Commodore Zafar Iqbal and author Jeff Gates, who was accompanying me on a lecture tour, one of the areas of discussion was dishonesty in journalism. An interview with a very prominent American journalist that General Pasha had held had been falsified. Statements regarding Pakistan and Mumbai were simply invented. This wasn't the first time I had run into this. A widely published interview between the editor of a Washington newspaper and former ISI Chief General Hamid Gul was similarly fabricated.

When I made reference to the Gul interview in an article, he phoned me. Gul, an editor at Veterans Today, a co-worker and good friend, pointed out that the interview never happened and was entirely made up. Another "famous journalist" with an agenda simply invented a story, had it published around the world, and the real truth would be lost forever. Between video editing, phony interviews and released audio and video tapes of dead or non-existent "terrorists," the media has ended up being as strong a force promoting extremism and conflict as the real issues, which, frankly, none of us are that sure about anymore.

People like Pakistan's Imran Khan, who talk about extremism in realistic terms are seldom listened to. How can I prove this? Do you know who Imran Khan is? There is your answer.

IF THESE PLOYS DON'T WORK, CAN WE EXPECT ANOTHER 9/11?

This week, something surprising happened in Australia. In a world where you can't tun on a television without hearing how crazy people are who question the 9/11 cover story, even though Fox News seems to have changed sides on this issue, what you don't see are public opinion polls on 9/11. If Bill Maher or Jon Stewart, the "liberal progressives" of American television, with their continual attacks on "the right" show us one thing it is that, no matter how much you may find government a pack of useless liars, the magic "boxcutter and pancaking building" story on 9/11 must be adhered to. Even though those the 9/11 Truth movement blame, the Americans anyway, are you most vile political enemies, when it comes to 9/11, you attack anyone who questions the Bush/Cheney doctrine like a rabid field mouse.

There is a reason for this. The ability to repeat 9/11, contain an investigation, keep press assets focused on a cover story few take seriously anymore, is vital. Without the ability to blow up an American city and blame Iran or an imaginary terrorist group, the "Masters of the Universe" will lose their ability to control the fate of the human race.

Thus, everything we have seen since 9/11 has been done to prepare us for the next 9/11. The last one finished Saddam, looted the American economy and imposed martial law on the United States. Iran and Pakistan still stand. With all the terror warnings, phony stories about imaginary nuclear programs, the threats, the sanctions and even Wikileaks, it all isn't going to be enough.

America is sick of war and not very likely to believe the media, not anymore. Big problem here, when you attack anyone's credibility, the Bush administration, Obama, Tony Blair, eventually people begin to question you too.

Watch Wikileaks dribble away into nothing. Watch the news try to pump air into this story and spin it against Iran.

When that fails, maybe it will be time to hide under your bed after all.

APPENDIX

CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY FOREIGN BROADCASTING INTERNATIONAL SERVICE:

FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY

[FBIS Report] Website of Doha Al-Jazirah Satellite Channel Television in Arabic, independent television station financed by the Qatari Government, which can be accessedat URL: http://www.aljazeera.net, carries at 2011 GMT on 24 September the text of the following letter by Usama Bin Ladin "to the Pakistani people."

• "We hope that these brothers would be the first martyrs in Islam's battle in this age against the new Jewish crusade that is being led by the biggest crusader, Bush, under the banner of the cross. This battle is one of Islam's immortal battles."
• "We beseech God to grant him victory against the forces of infidelity and arrogance, and to crush the new crusader-Jewish campaign on the land of Pakistan and Afghanistan."
• "I have already said that I am not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States."
• "Neither I had any knowledge of these attacks nor I consider the killing of innocent women, children, and other humans as an appreciable act. . Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent women, children, and other people. Such a practice is forbidden ever in the course of a battle."
• "All that is going on in Palestine for the last 11 months is sufficient to call the wrath of God upon the United States and Israel."
• "Whoever committed the act of 11 September are not the friends of the American people. I have already said that we are against the American system, not against its people, whereas in these attacks, the common American people have been killed. According to my information, the death toll is much higher than what the US Government has stated.
• "The United States should try to trace the perpetrators of these attacks within itself; the people who are a part of the US system, but are dissenting against it. Or those who are working for some other system; persons who want to make the present century as a century of conflict between Islam and Christianity so that their own civilization, nation, country, or ideology could survive."
• "They can be any one, from Russia to Israel and from India to Serbia."
• "Then you cannot forget the American Jews, who are annoyed with President Bush ever since the elections in Florida and want to avenge him."
• "Then there are intelligence agencies in the US, which require billions of dollars worth of funds from the Congress and the government every year. This [funding issue] was not a big problem till the existence of the former Soviet Union but after that the budget of these (FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY 180) agencies has been in danger. They needed an enemy. So, they first started propaganda against Usama and Taliban and then this incident happened."
• "Drug smugglers from all over the world are in contact with the US secret agencies. These agencies do not want to eradicate narcotics cultivation and trafficking because their importance will be diminished. The people in the US Drug Enforcement Department are encouraging drug trade so that they could show performance and get millions of dollars worth of budget. General Noriega was made a drug baron by the CIA and, in need, he was made a scapegoat."
• "President Bush or any other US President, they cannot bring Israel to justice for its human rights abuses or to hold it accountable for such crimes. What is this? Is it not that there exists a government within the government in the United Sates? That secret government must be asked as to who made the attacks."
• "Supporting the US act is the need of some Muslim countries and the compulsion of others. However, they should think as to what will remain of their religious and moral position if they support the attack of the Christians and the Jews on a Muslim country like Afghanistan."
• "I have already said that we are not hostile to the United States. We are against the system, which makes other nations slaves of the United States, or forces them to mortgage their political and economic freedom."
• "This system is totally in control of the American Jews, whose first priority is Israel, not the United States. It is simply that the American people are themselves the slaves of the Jews and are forced to live according to the principles and laws laid by them. So, the punishment should reach Israel."
• "The Western media is unleashing such a baseless propaganda, which make us surprise but it reflects on what is in their hearts and gradually they themselves become captive of this propaganda. They become afraid of it and begin to cause harm to themselves."
• "Terror is the most dreaded weapon in modern age and the Western media is mercilessly using it against its own people. It can add fear and helplessness in the psyche of the people of Europe and the United States. It means that what the enemies of the United States cannot do, its media is doing that. You can understand as to what will be the performance of the nation in a war, which suffers from fear and helplessness."

FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY END OF OFFICIAL TRANSCRIPT

* Gordon Duff is senior editor of Veterans Today.

By Maidhc Ó Cathail * | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

Philip Zelikow

In an interview on the Fox Business Network, a retired U.S. intelligence officer accused the official in charge of the 9/11 Commission of a cover-up of intelligence failures leading up to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

Appearing on the political talk show Freedom Watch, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, a former Defense Intelligence Agency officer and the author of Operation Dark Heart, a much-hyped new book on the war in Afghanistan, spoke about his mid-October 2003 encounter with Dr. Philip Zelikow, then executive director of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States.

During a fact-finding mission to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, Zelikow's team was briefed by Shaffer on Able Danger, a DIA data mining project that had allegedly identified Mohammed Atta as a threat to the U.S. a year before 9/11.

Parenthetically, the "Mohammed Atta" identified by Able Danger may have been an imposter operating under a stolen identity, as occurred in the assassination of a senior Hamas official in Dubai. In an interview with a German newspaper, reported by the Guardian, Mohammed Atta's father claimed that his son had nothing to do with the attacks and was still alive a year after 9/11.

Whichever Mohammed Atta was referred to by Shaffer in Bagram, Zelikow reportedly "fell silent with shock at the news."

According to Shaffer, Zelikow came to him at the end of the meeting, gave him his card, and said: "What you said today is critically important, very important. Please come see me when you return to Washington D.C."

On his return to Washington in January 2004, Shaffer immediately contacted Zelikow's office and was told to "stand by." After a week passed, Shaffer called again, and this time was told by Zelikow's staff: "We don't need you to come in. We have all the information on Able Danger we need. Thank you anyway."

None of the information provided by Shaffer appeared in the 9/11 Commission's 585-page report, however.

In September 2005, more than a year after the publication of the 9/11 report, Shaffer said he met with one of the 9/11 commissioners in Philadelphia. Over lunch, he told the commissioner what he had told Zelikow in Afghanistan. The commissioner said that "he had never heard any of this," adding that, "had he heard of it, it would have been something that was very much of interest to he [sic] and the commission."

"So there's a lot of things that never made it in that 9/11 report?" asked Judge Andrew Napolitano, the host of Freedom Watch.

"Things were either by negligence left out, or, and I believe, by purpose left out," Shaffer replied.

Another guest on the show, Michael Scheuer, who headed the CIA's bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999, spoke of a similarly frustrating experience with the 9/11 Commission staff director.

Describing the 9/11 Commission Report as "a whitewash, and a lie from top to bottom," Scheuer said he provided Zelikow with over 400 pages of official government documents detailing intelligence failures before 9/11.

"I never heard one word back from Zelikow," he said.

"They all seemed very interested in what you had to say," the former CIA officer added, referring to meetings he had with Zelikow and his staff, "but at the end of the day, it didn't make it into the report."

This is not the first time that questions have been raised about Zelikow's handling of the 9/11 Commission.

In his 2009 book, The Commission, Philip Shenon, an investigative reporter for the New York Times, wrote about "how tightly Zelikow was able to control the flow of information on the commission," and that "everything" was "run through" him.

While Zelikow's tight control of the commission excluded disturbing evidence from national security experts like Shaffer and Scheuer, a dubious scholar like Laurie Mylroie was afforded ample opportunity to promote the most spurious justification for the Iraq war. Mylroie, whose major booster in government was Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, argued that Iraq had been involved in every major terrorist attack against the United States since the early 1990s, including 9/11. During commission hearings on al-Qaeda, Zelikow, writes Shenon, "made sure that she had a prominent place at the witness table."

And why wouldn't he? After all, Zelikow had an important role in, as Shenon puts it, "developing the scholarly underpinnings for the Iraq war." It was Zelikow who had authored a thirty-one-page "preemptive war" doctrine which George W. Bush announced to the world in 2002 as "The National Security Strategy of the United States."

"Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us?" Zelikow asked an audience at the University of Virginia in September 2002. In a rare moment of candour, Zelikow proceeded to explain that the real reason for preemptive war against Iraq was "the threat against Israel."

Judge Napolitano asked Lt. Col. Shaffer if the commissioner in Philadelphia had said whether anyone on the 9/11 Commission "had an agenda, or was covering up for somebody, or was protecting somebody." The commissioner's reply was, according to Shaffer: "Everybody on the commission was covering for someone."

Given the fatal career implications of broaching such a taboo subject, not to mention Rupert Murdoch's well-known devotion to the State of Israel, it's hardly surprising that the Fox presenter didn't probe too deeply into who Philip Zelikow might have been covering for.

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nbak9KOINgo

* Maidhc Ó Cathail is a widely published writer based in Japan.

One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter

By Paul J. Balles* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

"Terrorist" is probably the dirtiest label of the last decade. It has also proven convenient for a number of uses:

1. instil fear in the populace
2. justify large military budgets
3. excuse extra-judicial assassinations
4. deflect attention from one's actions to another's

Following 9/11, the US and its "coalition of the willing" entered into a War on Terror. The so-called War on Terror conveniently served all of its uses.

As a means to instil fear, those who bandied about the terms terrorist and terrorism seldom took the time to make clear what the terms meant.

Is it terrorism if an enemy attacks a military organization, or does it apply only to attacks on civilians?

When the American military attacked the Iraq military, would that fit any definition of terrorism? Or would it apply only to the attacks on civilians?

Calling on the same logic, can the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon (military) be on a par with the attacks on the Trade Center (civilian)?

Can governments perform terrorist acts, or are they only performed by non-governmental groups? Can Israelis be considered terrorists when they attack Lebanon or Gaza or West Bank enclaves?

When these places are attacked, are the only terrorists non-governmental, like Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza or suicide bombers in the West Bank?

A woman whose son was killed said, "Israel took my home in Jaffa, now they come and kill us here, and they say WE are the terrorists."

During the Algerian War of the 1950s, the Arab nationalist guerrilla insurgency won the title of "anti-colonial freedom fighters" while the French government, military and settlers were branded "torturers" and "terrorists".

Do acts of terrorism apply only during peacetime? Or are they applicable during wartime? The activities in both Iraq and Afghanistan have both been referred to as wars.

Does it matter if an act called "terrorism" is done for a good cause? Does it matter if those performing the acts have been oppressed or prevented from enjoying their fundamental human rights?

Ironically, who are the "terrorists" and who are "freedom fighters" have yet to be determined in the US war on terror.

It's important to consider these questions very carefully before labelling anyone or members of any group, simply by virtue of their membership, as terrorists.

What some governments, particularly the United States and Israel, call terrorists, others have called resistance movements. Their members have also been called "freedom fighters".

According to Wikipedia, "a resistance movement is a group or collection of individual groups, dedicated to fighting an invader in an occupied country..."

During the Cold War the term freedom fighter was used by the United States and other Western Bloc countries to describe rebels in countries controlled by communist states or otherwise under the influence of the Soviet Union.

Rebels against the Soviet Union were never called terrorists.Clearly, the distinction between terrorist and freedom fighter is nothing more than political labelling.

According to John Farmer, writing for the New York Times this week, "several federal officials warned that "home-grown terrorists" represent the nation's greatest emerging threat."

Robert Mueller, FBI chief has said that Al Qaeda "has looked to recruit Americans or Westerners who are able to remain undetected by heightened security measures."

This has led Janet Napolitano, the secretary of Homeland Security, to conclude that "homeland security begins with hometown security." And hometown security begins with locally based observations of "suspicious" activity.

Can "home-grown terrorists" be "freedom fighters" as well? Welcome to Nineteen Eighty-Four.Big brother is watching you.

* Paul J. Balles is a retired American university professor and freelance writer who has lived in the Middle East for many years. For more information, see http://www.pballes.com.