Friday, June 25 2010   -   9/11 Precedents

By Robert Parry (A Special Report)
June 24, 2010
ConsortiumNews.com

As the Official Story of the 1980 October Surprise case crumbles -- with new revelations that key evidence was hidden from investigators of a congressional task force and that internal doubts were suppressed -- history must finally confront the troubling impression that remains: that disgruntled elements of the CIA and Israel's Likud hardliners teamed up to remove a U.S. president from office.

Indeed, it is this disturbing conclusion -- perhaps even more than the idea of a Republican dirty trick -- that may explain the longstanding and determined cover-up of this political scandal.

Too many powerful interests do not want the American people to accept even the possibility that U.S. intelligence operatives and a longtime ally could intervene to oust a president who had impinged on what those two groups considered their vital interests.

To accept that scenario would mean that two of the great fears of American democracy had come true -- George Washington's warning against the dangers of "entangling alliances" and Harry Truman's concern that the clandestine operations of the CIA had the makings of an "American Gestapo."

It is far easier to assure the American people that no such thing could occur, that Israel's Likud -- whatever its differences with Washington over Middle East peace policies -- would never seek to subvert a U.S. president, and that CIA dissidents -- no matter how frustrated by political constraints -- would never sabotage their own government.

But the evidence points in that direction, and there are some points that are not in dispute. For instance, there is no doubt that CIA Old Boys and Likudniks had strong motives for seeking President Jimmy Carter's defeat in 1980.

Inside the CIA, Carter and his CIA Director Stansfield Turner were blamed for firing many of the free-wheeling covert operatives from the Vietnam era, for ousting legendary spymaster Ted Shackley, and for failing to protect longtime U.S. allies (and friends of the CIA), such as Iran's Shah and Nicaragua's dictator Anastasio Somoza.

As for Israel, Likud Prime Minister Menachem Begin was furious over Carter's high-handed actions at Camp David in 1978 forcing Israel to trade the occupied Sinai to Egypt for a peace deal. Begin feared that Carter would use his second term to bully Israel into accepting a Palestinian state on West Bank lands that Likud considered part of Israel's divinely granted territory.

 

Friday, June 4 2010   -   9/11 Precedents

June 1, 2010
by Dahr Jamail
t r u t h o u t | Report

The Israeli military has attacked a flotilla of international peace activists, killing as many as 19 innocent civilians while they were carrying ten tons of aid to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza. This is not the first time the Israeli military has attacked a nonthreatening entity in international waters.

On June 8, 1967, while sailing in international waters, the US Navy intelligence ship USS Liberty was attacked by air and naval forces of the state of Israel. Of the Liberty's crew of 294, more than half were killed or wounded. More than 40 years later, survivors are still seeking justice.

The Israeli forces attacked with full knowledge that the Liberty was an American ship, yet survivors have been forbidden to tell their story under oath to the American public.

Joe Meadors was on the Liberty during the attack.

"I watched some jets pass us then turn left after they passed our ship, then they started strafing [attacking repeatedly with bombs or machine-gun fire from low-flying aircraft] us," Meadors told Truthout.

 

Tuesday, May 4 2010   -   9/11 Precedents

Probe Beneath the Surface of the Obama Era at the “Understanding Deep Politics” Conference in Santa Cruz, May 14-16

By Byron Belitsos
May 4, 2010

Some say it began with the invasion of Iraq. Others, with the inauguration of George W. Bush for his second term. Many point to the day of 9/11. But those in the know—including ten distinguished speakers headlining the “Understanding Deep Politics” Conference in Santa Cruz this May 14-16—trace the era of deep politics further back: Some to JFK’s assassination; others, to the aftermath of World War II. And a few speakers in Santa Cruz will stretch us back to Hitler, Lenin, Weishaupt, or Machiavelli, from there to ancient secret societies, and even back to the dawn of human governance itself—in the belief that conscious political deception is an inescapable feature of human nature. But all agree on the general definition of deep politics: It refers to government in which two dimensions of action always coexist: Overt and covert, or benign and utterly ruthless.

We can trace it forward too; by now we know that the ways of deceptive government did not end with the ascent of Obama. As with the Bush era, the overt side of American politics still refers to government actions thinly covered in the mainstream press; on this level of action, we know that Obama signed the largest military budget in history, expanded the war in Afganistan, bailed out banks, and “reformed” health care; but on the covert side of the equation, most don’t realize—given how the corporate media and Obama’s benign rhetoric is busy distracting us—that the new president has carried forward virtually all of the discredited Bush-era War or Terror policies. Worse, Obama and his gallery of advisors steeped in the ways of postmodern corruption have shocked Americans by their eagerness to uphold the Bush administration’s ornate machinery of quasi-constitutional and sometimes criminalized covert action. At a minimum, these include: claims of “state secrets,” NSA (National Security Agency) domestic surveillance, emergency powers linked with the de facto repeal of Posse Comitatus (which enable martial law), summary assassination, illegal detention, and counter-insurgency warfare techniques that defy international law. In addition, Obama countenanced trillions in secret bailout money issued by the Federal Reserve; and, he handed back-room deals to Big Pharma and the health insurance cartel that locks their super-profits into “Obamacare.”

The speakers in Santa Cruz will help you trace these steps by the new administration, measures that further America’s (and the world’s) descent into what might be called the postmodern reign of deep politics. The unprecedented Santa Cruz event also offers us the hope of seeing through the charade.

 

Tuesday, April 6 2010   -   9/11 Precedents

PRESS CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENT
[FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – MONDAY – APRIL 4, 2010]

LOCATION: The Oklahoma State Capitol Building
SECOND FLOOR, WEST WING
STATE SUPREME COURT CORRIDOR.

DATE: Thursday – April 15, 2010, 1:30 pm CST

SUBJECT: THE OKLAHOMA CITY BOMBING – STILL SEEKING THE TRUTH; FIFTEEN YEARS LATER

Oklahoma City, OK - Oklahoma City bombing victim’s family members and survivors along with investigative journalists, law enforcement officers, private investigators, documentary film producers and attorneys impacted by the Oklahoma City bombing; will hold a press conference to review the unanswered questions and latest revelations pertaining to this very important part of U.S. History.

 

Tuesday, March 30 2010   -   9/11 Precedents

by Anthony L. Kimery
Tuesday, 30 March 2010
HSToday.us

‘Secret’ CIA documents withheld in FOIA suit raise more questions than they answer

Questions about foreign complicity in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in downtown Oklahoma City for which Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were convicted, were disclosed Friday in a ruling by US District court judge Clark Waddoups on a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the CIA for the CIA's refusal to completely declassify records it has acknowledged it possesses that pertain to the case.

It is the first indication that the CIA and the Department of Justice (DOJ) worked together in the bombing investigations and prosecutions.

The classified materials also were never made available to McVeigh's defense team, led by attorney Stephen Jones, who has publicly expressed his concern that the federal government knows more about the bombing than it has admitted.

 

Tuesday, November 10 2009   -   9/11 Precedents

by Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed
October, 2009
New Internationalist.org

Islamic fundamentalist militants are the enemies of Israel and Western governments, right? Think again. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed reports.

Once upon a time, the CIA trained, financed and supported Osama bin Laden and his mujahidin networks in Afghanistan to repel the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. After the end of the Cold War, bin Laden turned against the West and we no longer had any use for him. His persistent terrorist attacks against us for more than a decade, culminating in 9/11, provoked our own response, in the form of the ‘War on Terror’. This is the official narrative. And it’s false. Not only did Western intelligence services continue to foster Islamist extremist and terrorist groups connected to al-Qaeda after the Cold War; they continued to do so even after 9/11.

The CIA’s jihad

The story begins in the summer of 1979, six months before the Soviet invasion, when the CIA had already begun financing elements of an emerging Islamist mujahidin force inside Afghanistan. The idea, according to former US National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and former CIA Director Robert Gates, was to increase the probability of a Soviet invasion, and entrap ‘the Soviets into a Vietnamese quagmire’.¹

Osama bin Laden arrived in the country later that year, sent by then-Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki bin Faisal, where he set up the Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK) which helped finance, recruit and train mujahidin fighters.² Bin Laden, the MAK, and the Afghan mujahidin in total received about half a billion dollars a year from the CIA, and roughly the same from the Saudis, funnelled through Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI).³

By around 1988, as Jane’s Defence Weekly reports, ‘with US knowledge, Bin Laden created al-Qaeda (The Base): a conglomerate of quasi-independent Islamic terrorist cells spread across at least 26 countries’.⁴ US and Western intelligence agencies facilitated this process, seeing rightwing Islamist movements as a counterweight to Communist, leftwing and nationalist political trends. They supported the Saudis and other Gulf states, as well as Pakistan, Turkey and Azerbaijan among others, in proliferating Islamist extremist institutions in far-flung countries such as Algeria, Yemen, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Funding for these activities was intertwined with the establishment of organized criminal financial centres in Malaysia, Madagascar, South Africa, Nigeria, Latin America, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Turkestan, and elsewhere.⁵

 

Saturday, October 3 2009   -   9/11 Precedents

by Steven J. DuBord
October 1, 2009
TheNewAmerican.com

The Federal Bureau of Investigation claims that surveillance tapes of the Oklahoma City bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995 have not been edited, despite the fact that all of the more than two dozen tapes released fail mysteriously to show the moments just before the truck bomb exploded.

Salt Lake City attorney Jesse Trentadue obtained the tapes through a Freedom of Information Act request as part of his investigation of the bombing. All of the tapes feature blanks just before the bomb went off at 9:02 a.m., but "the interesting thing is they spring back on after 9:02," Trentadue said. "The absence of footage from these crucial time intervals is evidence that there is something there that the FBI doesn't want anybody to see."

The Associated Press reported on September 30 that FBI spokesman Paul Bresson told them in an e-mail the Bureau didn't edit the tapes before releasing them. Bresson said the FBI responded to Trentadue's request by turning over 26 videos taken from surveillance cameras in 11 different locations. The agency did not report finding any tapes from the Murrah Building itself.

 

Sunday, August 30 2009   -   9/11 Precedents

Megrahi is to point the finger

August 23,2009
By Ben Borland
Sunday Express

AN AMERICAN citizen is to be named by the Lockerbie bomber as the man who really carried out the terrorist attack on Pan Am Flight 103.

Megrahi's early release from prison on compassionate grounds.

Lawyers for the bomber were to argue that an "elusive" terrorist codenamed Abu Elias planted the bomb in December 1988, causing the deaths of 270 innocent people.

Megrahi is now expected to identify the man behind this alias.

The Scottish Sunday Express tracked this man down to his home in the US, and he strongly denied having anything to do with the atrocity.

However, we can reveal that he has connections to at least two international terrorists and a Palestinian terror group, as well as links to the US intelligence services.

The man, who works as a schools engineer for the US government, was to become the central figure in Megrahi's aborted appeal.

 

Monday, August 24 2009   -   9/11 Precedents

by Lisa Pease
August 21, 2009
Consortium News

In any kind of major transnational event, there is the historical truth, what actually happened, and the political truth, what must have happened for the nations involved to continue on as before.

Sometimes, these accounts match; other times, these "truths" are wildly divergent, which appears to be the case with the Lockerbie bombing.

On Thursday, Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the former Libyan intelligence officer convicted of planting a bomb aboard Pan Am Flight 103 which exploded over the hills over Lockerbie, Scotland, on Dec. 21, 1988, was released. The Scottish authorities said they were letting al-Megrahi go free on "compassionate grounds" because he was terminally ill from cancer.

This decision caused an uproar in the United States. Obama administration officials lodged angry protests; family members of the victims decried the move, and TV pundits joined in the lamentations. But what do they really know about the Lockerbie bombing, beyond what they've read in the last few days?

The truth about what happened at Lockerbie appears quite a bit more complex than the cookie-cutter version presented by the mainstream media. Several longtime observers of the al-Megrahi case have concluded that it has always been weak, at best.

 

Thursday, July 9 2009   -   9/11 Precedents

By Gareth Porter
July 8, 2009
RawStory.com

Official government documents reveal new side of defense secretary’s legacy

Robert S. McNamara, Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1967, took many secrets with him when he died Monday at 93. But probably no secret was more sensitive politically than the one that would have changed fundamentally the public perception of his role in Vietnam policy had it been become widely known.

The secret was his deliberate deceit of President Lyndon B. Johnson on Aug. 4, 1964 regarding the alleged attack on US warships in the Gulf of Tonkin.

Documents which have been available for decades in the LBJ Library show clearly that McNamara failed to inform Johnson that the U.S. naval task group commander in the Tonkin Gulf, Captain John J. Herrick, had changed his mind about the alleged North Vietnamese torpedo attack on U.S. warships he had reported earlier that day.

By early afternoon Washington time, Herrick had reported to the Commander in Chief Pacific in Honolulu that “freak weather effects” on the ship’s radar had made such an attack questionable. In fact, Herrick was now saying, in a message sent at 1:27 pm Washington time, that no North Vietnamese patrol boats had actually been sighted. Herrick now proposed a “complete evaluation before any further action taken.”

 

Tuesday, June 2 2009   -   9/11 Precedents

By Ray McGovern
June 1, 2009
Consortiumnews.com

What’s the difference between murder and massacre?

The answer is Terry Halbardier, whose bravery and ingenuity as a 23-year-old Navy seaman spelled the difference between the murder of 34 of the USS Liberty crew and the intended massacre of all 294.

The date was June 8, 1967; and for the families of the 34 murdered and for the Liberty's survivors and their families, it is a "date which will live in infamy" -- like the date of an earlier surprise attack on the U.S. Navy.

The infamy is two-fold: (1) the Liberty, a virtually defenseless intelligence collection platform prominently flying an American flag in international waters, came under deliberate attack by Israeli aircraft and three 60-ton Israeli torpedo boats off the coast of the Sinai on a cloudless June afternoon during the six-day Israeli-Arab war; and (2) President Lyndon Johnson called back carrier aircraft dispatched to defend the Liberty lest Israel be embarrassed -- the start of an unconscionable cover-up, including top Navy brass, that persists to this day.

Given all they have been through, the Liberty survivors and other veterans – who joined Halbardier to celebrate his belated receipt of the Silver Star – can be forgiven for having doubted that this day would ever come.