“Abu Omar al-Baghdadi was arrested today in Baghdad,” Baghdad security spokesman Major General Qasim Atta told AFP.
“It was Iraqi forces who arrested him based on an intelligence tipoff from someone,” he added.
Also known as Abu Hamza al-Baghdadi and Abu Abdullah al-Rashid al-Baghdadi, many questions have surrounded the so called leader of al Qaeda’s political front organization the “Islamic State of Iraq”.
He was thought to have been one of the figures to succeed the equally shadowy Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as a leader of insurgent forces in Iraq in 2006, after al Zarqawi, who was also previously reported captured and killed on several occasions, was laid to rest for good by the PR arm of the Pentagon.
The announcement of al-Baghdadi’s capture today jars with multiple previous reports from up to two years ago, detailing his arrest, his death and even questioning his existence altogether.
In March 2007, the Interior Ministry of Iraq claimed that al-Baghdadi had been captured in Baghdad. This was reported by AP and picked up by the likes of CNN, whose report stated that another insurgent had positively confirmed al-Baghdadi’s identity.
The U.S. military denied that al-Baghdadi was in their custody, however, and one day later Iraqi officials retracted their statements regarding his arrest.
Indeed this back and forth announcement of capture and later retraction occurred three times in the space of one week.
Then one month later, on May 3, 2007, the Iraqi Interior Ministry announced that al-Baghdadi had been killed by American and Iraqi forces north of Baghdad.
However, in July 2007, the U.S. military reported that al-Baghdadi had never actually existed and was, for all intents and purposes, a myth.
A reportedly high ranking “Al Qaeda in Iraq” detainee identified as Khaled al-Mashhadani, then claimed that al-Baghdadi was a fictional character created to give an Iraqi face to a foreign-run terror group, and that the “Islamic State of Iraq” was a “virtual organisation in cyberspace” created by al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Ayub al Masri.
The person claiming to be Baghdadi continued to release video and audiotapes attacking U.S. occupation of Iraq, but refused to show his face.
The U.S. military’s claim that Baghdadi is a fictitious character was then challenged in May 2008 after a police chief in Haditha said Baghdadi’s real identity is Hamed Dawood Mohammed Khalil al Zawi. “He was an officer in the security services and was dismissed from the army because of his extremism,” the police chief told al Arabiya television.
Now Baghdadi has been reported captured again!
This saga is another example of how a manufactured smoke and mirrors propaganda veils reality. The “war on terror” mantra continues to be propagated as justification to wage permanent occupation and control over the middle east by the global elite.
Al Qaeda in Iraq, al Zarqawi, al Baghdadi and the legions of other al qaeda operatives who have been reportedly captured and killed over and over are used as interchangeable PR tools.
Are or were any of them ever real? Possibly. However that matters little now.
Once again 99% of the corporate media will no doubt enthusiastically champion this latest arrest as a key victory in the continuing war on terror, and the majority of Americans who even notice will not take a second glance at the ludicrous back story.
- Infowars -
perjantai 24. huhtikuuta 2009
torstai 23. huhtikuuta 2009
9/11 truth, again
NOTE: click on the pics to open them in new window for real size and high quality
Why is noone covering this? I'm sure you're aware of the paper called "Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe", published by The Open Chemical Physics Journal made by Niels H. Harrit, Jeffrey Farrer, Steven E. Jones, Kevin R. Ryan, Frank M. Legge, Daniel Farnsworth, Gregg Roberts, James R. Gourley, Bradley R. Larsen. If you are not, here's the link for it. That's huge! That's something we've suspected for many years now, but there's finally a confirmation. Now here's where it REALLY gets hot!
911blogger reports:
"Turner Construction, who supervised the 2000 demolition of the Seattle Kingdome, participated in the post-9/11 Ground Zero clean-up and performed extensive renovations within the World Trade Center towers just prior to 9/11, was in fact performing unspecified renovation work throughout the WTC complex until the very morning of September 11, 2001. The Port Authority of NY/NJ now claims that records describing such work or other projects were destroyed on September 11, 2001. A December 2000 WTC property assessment described required renovation work to be completed within one year, upon steel columns within elevator shafts of both WTC towers that was immediately pending or already underway.
Terror devastates A/E/C firms
12 employees of Turner Construction were located in an office in the third subbasement of Tower 1, the north tower. Turner had been performing renovation work in various parts of the center and had occupied various office spaces. http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-79439506.html
In 1997 Turner Construction also constructed the new headquarters for the Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA). The Indian Head Naval Surface Warfare Center, a laboratory managed by NAVSEA was described during the 1990s as the "National Center for Energetics", the "Pentagon's jargon to broadly describe explosive materials, propellants and pyrotechnics" and as the "only reliable source of aluminum nanopowders in the United States".
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-574412.html
Turner Corporation 1997 10-K Report
During 1997, the company completed work on ... the Naval Sea Systems Command Headquarters (NAVSEA) for the Navy in Washington, DC.
http://www.buck.com/10k?tenkyear=97&idx=T&co=!TURNERC&nam=DEMO2&pw=DEMO2
Naval Sea Systems Command
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Sea_Systems_Command
The Top Ten Connections Between NIST and Nano-Thermites
http://www.journalof911studies.com/volume/2008/Ryan_NIST_and_Nano-1.pdf
Previous work performed by Turner Construction at the WTC included fireproofing of the only floors that were struck by United and American airlines flights on September 11, 2001 and that later burned and "failed".
http://www.911blogger.com/node/13272
A December 2000 WTC property assessment recommended immediate renovation work upon steel columns contained within elevator shafts of both WTC towers:
The Port Authority of NY/NJ claims that contracts with Turner Construction - including those that might describe the renovation work being performed by Turner Construction until the very morning of September 11, 2001 - were destroyed on September 11, 2001.
However, Port Authority records detailing other work performed by Turner Construction and requested by NIST during its investigation of the WTC building collapses, were not destroyed on September 11, 2001.
http://www.911podcasts.com/files/documents/NIST-Fireproofing.zip
Turner Construction Company occupied the 38th floor of WTC 1.
List of Tenants in One World Trade Center
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tenants_in_One_World_Trade_Center
Turner Construction particpated in the collection and disposal of the steel wreckage of the WTC towers following September 11, 2001.
Australia's Lend Lease has secured the contract to manage the clean-up operation at New York's World Trade Center site ... will also be in charge of AMEC Construction Management, Turner Construction and Tully Construction, which have been contracted to work on the site.
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-81303508.html
The CEO for Turner Construction Company appointed in 1999, was Tom Leppert, who joined the board of Turner in 1998, is currently the mayor of Dallas, Texas and who has ties with former president George W. Bush and Carlos M. Gutierrez, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Commerce. The National Institute of Standards and Technology, a bureau of the Department of Commerce, was assigned to investigate the collapses of the WTC 1,2 and 7.
Thomas C. Leppert Named To Succeed E.T. Gravette, Jr. As Chairman Of The Turner Corporation
http://www.turnerconstruction.com/corporate/content.asp?d=1222&p=1153
PRESIDENTIAL APPOINTMENT FOR MAYOR LEPPERT
President George W. Bush appointed Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert to the President’s Commission on White House Fellows.
http://www.tomleppert.com/PR/docs/fellows_commission.pdf
Mayor Leppert meets with Bush
Dallas Business Journal
Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert, along with a group of 11 other mayors, met with President George W. Bush and Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez Wednesday at the White House to discuss a free trade agreement with the South American countries of Peru and Colombia.
http://www.bizjournals.com/dallas/stories/2008/01/21/daily26.html?jst=m_ln_hl&surround=lfn
Carlos M. Gutierrez
http://www.commerce.gov/bios/Gutierrez_bio.htm
NIST and the World Trade Center
http://wtc.nist.gov/
***
Now add that with all the other evidence including drills, patsies, government lies, insider trading, confessions and foreknowledge and you get a pretty huge story! Why isn't the media hyping this like crazy?!?
Why is noone covering this? I'm sure you're aware of the paper called "Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe", published by The Open Chemical Physics Journal made by Niels H. Harrit, Jeffrey Farrer, Steven E. Jones, Kevin R. Ryan, Frank M. Legge, Daniel Farnsworth, Gregg Roberts, James R. Gourley, Bradley R. Larsen. If you are not, here's the link for it. That's huge! That's something we've suspected for many years now, but there's finally a confirmation. Now here's where it REALLY gets hot!
911blogger reports:
"Turner Construction, who supervised the 2000 demolition of the Seattle Kingdome, participated in the post-9/11 Ground Zero clean-up and performed extensive renovations within the World Trade Center towers just prior to 9/11, was in fact performing unspecified renovation work throughout the WTC complex until the very morning of September 11, 2001. The Port Authority of NY/NJ now claims that records describing such work or other projects were destroyed on September 11, 2001. A December 2000 WTC property assessment described required renovation work to be completed within one year, upon steel columns within elevator shafts of both WTC towers that was immediately pending or already underway.
Terror devastates A/E/C firms
12 employees of Turner Construction were located in an office in the third subbasement of Tower 1, the north tower. Turner had been performing renovation work in various parts of the center and had occupied various office spaces. http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-79439506.html
In 1997 Turner Construction also constructed the new headquarters for the Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA). The Indian Head Naval Surface Warfare Center, a laboratory managed by NAVSEA was described during the 1990s as the "National Center for Energetics", the "Pentagon's jargon to broadly describe explosive materials, propellants and pyrotechnics" and as the "only reliable source of aluminum nanopowders in the United States".
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-574412.html
Turner Corporation 1997 10-K Report
During 1997, the company completed work on ... the Naval Sea Systems Command Headquarters (NAVSEA) for the Navy in Washington, DC.
http://www.buck.com/10k?tenkyear=97&idx=T&co=!TURNERC&nam=DEMO2&pw=DEMO2
Naval Sea Systems Command
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Sea_Systems_Command
The Top Ten Connections Between NIST and Nano-Thermites
http://www.journalof911studies.com/volume/2008/Ryan_NIST_and_Nano-1.pdf
Previous work performed by Turner Construction at the WTC included fireproofing of the only floors that were struck by United and American airlines flights on September 11, 2001 and that later burned and "failed".
http://www.911blogger.com/node/13272
A December 2000 WTC property assessment recommended immediate renovation work upon steel columns contained within elevator shafts of both WTC towers:
The Port Authority of NY/NJ claims that contracts with Turner Construction - including those that might describe the renovation work being performed by Turner Construction until the very morning of September 11, 2001 - were destroyed on September 11, 2001.
However, Port Authority records detailing other work performed by Turner Construction and requested by NIST during its investigation of the WTC building collapses, were not destroyed on September 11, 2001.
http://www.911podcasts.com/files/documents/NIST-Fireproofing.zip
Turner Construction Company occupied the 38th floor of WTC 1.
List of Tenants in One World Trade Center
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tenants_in_One_World_Trade_Center
Turner Construction particpated in the collection and disposal of the steel wreckage of the WTC towers following September 11, 2001.
Australia's Lend Lease has secured the contract to manage the clean-up operation at New York's World Trade Center site ... will also be in charge of AMEC Construction Management, Turner Construction and Tully Construction, which have been contracted to work on the site.
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-81303508.html
The CEO for Turner Construction Company appointed in 1999, was Tom Leppert, who joined the board of Turner in 1998, is currently the mayor of Dallas, Texas and who has ties with former president George W. Bush and Carlos M. Gutierrez, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Commerce. The National Institute of Standards and Technology, a bureau of the Department of Commerce, was assigned to investigate the collapses of the WTC 1,2 and 7.
Thomas C. Leppert Named To Succeed E.T. Gravette, Jr. As Chairman Of The Turner Corporation
http://www.turnerconstruction.com/corporate/content.asp?d=1222&p=1153
PRESIDENTIAL APPOINTMENT FOR MAYOR LEPPERT
President George W. Bush appointed Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert to the President’s Commission on White House Fellows.
http://www.tomleppert.com/PR/docs/fellows_commission.pdf
Mayor Leppert meets with Bush
Dallas Business Journal
Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert, along with a group of 11 other mayors, met with President George W. Bush and Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez Wednesday at the White House to discuss a free trade agreement with the South American countries of Peru and Colombia.
http://www.bizjournals.com/dallas/stories/2008/01/21/daily26.html?jst=m_ln_hl&surround=lfn
Carlos M. Gutierrez
http://www.commerce.gov/bios/Gutierrez_bio.htm
NIST and the World Trade Center
http://wtc.nist.gov/
***
Now add that with all the other evidence including drills, patsies, government lies, insider trading, confessions and foreknowledge and you get a pretty huge story! Why isn't the media hyping this like crazy?!?
perjantai 10. huhtikuuta 2009
Al-CIA-duh
Today's headlines inspired me to write this. I'm going to post mainstream news which totally discredit and debunk the war on terror and Al-qaeda blunders that's going on in the media. Here's The News:
"LAHORE: Of the 60 cross-border predator strikes carried out by the Afghanistan-based American drones in Pakistan between January 14, 2006 and April 8, 2009, only 10 were able to hit their actual targets, killing 14 wanted al-Qaeda leaders, besides perishing 687 innocent Pakistani civilians. The success percentage of the US predator strikes thus comes to not more than six per cent." ...and it goes on to point out what a failure the whole operation is.
Here's Daily Times:
"Pakistan has not received any credible intelligence report about the presence of Al Qaeda leadership inside its borders, Foreign Office (FO) spokesman Abdul Basit said on Thursday.
“We have not come across any authentic intelligence which would indicate that Al Qaeda leadership is in Pakistan, and we do not attach importance to speculations,” Basit said in a weekly briefing.
He said the United States drone attacks might have achieved certain tactical gains but they were largely counterproductive and in violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty. “We cannot condone these attacks,” he said."
Now all the stuff I'm hearing on the news is that the US bombs the living daylights out of Pakistan is because of Al-qaeda. Now, we all know that US funded and created Al-qaeda in the 70s, so we don't have to go over that again. Let's look at some interesting headlines from the past:
Meet Kamal Jalil Uthman: "Another Al Qaeda In Iraq Leader Killed Twice by U.S": "The U.S. military command in Iraq was forced to retract showpiece statements made this week that they had killed a high profile Al Qaeda leader due to the fact that they had already announced the killing one year ago."
Meet Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the supposed former leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, was apparently killed no less than five times by coalition forces. 5!
"He was first killed in the Sulaimaniyah mountains of northern Iraq, then he was killed in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, followed by a death during Operation Matador near the town of Qaim on the Syrian border, then he was killed, along with his mentor, Osama bin Laden, in the besieged city of Fallujah, and finally met his fifth demise in a U.S. air raid north of Baghdad in the town of Hibhib near Baquba."
Now, whereas the CIA is an adept toying with these patsies and psyops, British intelligence can do it as well. Here's Times Online with a headline:
"Al-Qaeda cleric exposed as an MI5 double agent"....
And then there was the case of "...SAS soldiers, dressed as Arabs, were spotted by plain clothes Iraqi policemen...The soldiers engaged in a gun battle before being captured and taken to Jamiat police station in the southern Iraqi city." ...by Telegraph. After killing dozens of Iraqis they were arrested and a few days later the British army in Iraq destroyed the prison they were in and freed the provocateurs.
Mossad likes to play Al-qaeda roleplaying games as well. Larouchepub comes with an article that states as an opening chapter: "The United States government has been provided with concrete evidence that the Israeli Mossad and other Israeli intelligence services have been involved in a 13-month effort to "recruit" an Israeli-run, phony "al-Qaeda cell" among Palestinians, so that Israel could achieve a frontline position in the U.S. war against terrorism and get a green light for a worldwide "revenge without borders" policy."
There's tons of other stuff likes the fake passports and almost all the so called Al-qaeda terrorists working as intelligence assets in Kosovo, Bosnia, Philippines, Somalia, Sudan...you name it. The point is, Al-qaeda is fake boogeyman. So when Bush used to say that "terrorists attacked the US (which they didn't) because they hate our freedom".. I'd think that if they were any credible terror threats that wouldn't operated by the intelligence agencies, they would hate you because you bomb their countries for selfish interests like oil and other natural resources.
"LAHORE: Of the 60 cross-border predator strikes carried out by the Afghanistan-based American drones in Pakistan between January 14, 2006 and April 8, 2009, only 10 were able to hit their actual targets, killing 14 wanted al-Qaeda leaders, besides perishing 687 innocent Pakistani civilians. The success percentage of the US predator strikes thus comes to not more than six per cent." ...and it goes on to point out what a failure the whole operation is.
Here's Daily Times:
"Pakistan has not received any credible intelligence report about the presence of Al Qaeda leadership inside its borders, Foreign Office (FO) spokesman Abdul Basit said on Thursday.
“We have not come across any authentic intelligence which would indicate that Al Qaeda leadership is in Pakistan, and we do not attach importance to speculations,” Basit said in a weekly briefing.
He said the United States drone attacks might have achieved certain tactical gains but they were largely counterproductive and in violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty. “We cannot condone these attacks,” he said."
Now all the stuff I'm hearing on the news is that the US bombs the living daylights out of Pakistan is because of Al-qaeda. Now, we all know that US funded and created Al-qaeda in the 70s, so we don't have to go over that again. Let's look at some interesting headlines from the past:
Meet Kamal Jalil Uthman: "Another Al Qaeda In Iraq Leader Killed Twice by U.S": "The U.S. military command in Iraq was forced to retract showpiece statements made this week that they had killed a high profile Al Qaeda leader due to the fact that they had already announced the killing one year ago."
Meet Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the supposed former leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, was apparently killed no less than five times by coalition forces. 5!
"He was first killed in the Sulaimaniyah mountains of northern Iraq, then he was killed in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, followed by a death during Operation Matador near the town of Qaim on the Syrian border, then he was killed, along with his mentor, Osama bin Laden, in the besieged city of Fallujah, and finally met his fifth demise in a U.S. air raid north of Baghdad in the town of Hibhib near Baquba."
Now, whereas the CIA is an adept toying with these patsies and psyops, British intelligence can do it as well. Here's Times Online with a headline:
"Al-Qaeda cleric exposed as an MI5 double agent"....
And then there was the case of "...SAS soldiers, dressed as Arabs, were spotted by plain clothes Iraqi policemen...The soldiers engaged in a gun battle before being captured and taken to Jamiat police station in the southern Iraqi city." ...by Telegraph. After killing dozens of Iraqis they were arrested and a few days later the British army in Iraq destroyed the prison they were in and freed the provocateurs.
Mossad likes to play Al-qaeda roleplaying games as well. Larouchepub comes with an article that states as an opening chapter: "The United States government has been provided with concrete evidence that the Israeli Mossad and other Israeli intelligence services have been involved in a 13-month effort to "recruit" an Israeli-run, phony "al-Qaeda cell" among Palestinians, so that Israel could achieve a frontline position in the U.S. war against terrorism and get a green light for a worldwide "revenge without borders" policy."
There's tons of other stuff likes the fake passports and almost all the so called Al-qaeda terrorists working as intelligence assets in Kosovo, Bosnia, Philippines, Somalia, Sudan...you name it. The point is, Al-qaeda is fake boogeyman. So when Bush used to say that "terrorists attacked the US (which they didn't) because they hate our freedom".. I'd think that if they were any credible terror threats that wouldn't operated by the intelligence agencies, they would hate you because you bomb their countries for selfish interests like oil and other natural resources.
maanantai 6. huhtikuuta 2009
Reality check
Alrighty then. Here's the Concise Encylopedia of Economics: "Where socialism sought totalitarian control of a society’s economic processes through direct state operation of the means of production, fascism sought that control indirectly, through domination of nominally private owners. Where socialism nationalized property explicitly, fascism did so implicitly, by requiring owners to use their property in the “national interest”—that is, as the autocratic authority conceived it."
Here's Wall Street Journal:
"Some $340 million in TARP cash flowed back this week from four small banks in Louisiana, New York, Indiana and California. This isn't much when we routinely talk in trillions, but clearly that money has not been wasted or otherwise sunk down Wall Street's black hole. So why no cheering as the cash comes back?
My answer: The government wants to control the banks, just as it now controls GM and Chrysler, and will surely control the health industry in the not-too-distant future. Keeping them TARP-stuffed is the key to control. And for this intensely political president, mere influence is not enough. The White House wants to tell 'em what to do. Control. Direct. Command."
What's associated with fascism? Concentration camps, goon squads, busting trade unions, pseudo-science (race-science & the likes), a messianic leader and glorifying propaganda poster art.
Concentration camps:
"The United States Federal Emergency Management Agency has numerous detainment camps throughout the United States. Some camps have been recently constructed and / or renovated and are fully staffed. The existence of the camps coupled with Presidential Executive Orders giving the President and Department of Homeland Security (of which FEMA is now part) control over ‘national essential functions’ in the event of ‘catastrophic emergency’ have resulted in concerns that the camps will be used to forcefully detain American citizens for unconstitutional purposes.
Readiness Exercise 1984 (REX-84) is an emergency response program involving the implementation of martial law, the movement of civilian populations and the arrest and detainment of segments of the population. A rehearsal of the program was carried out April 5-13, 1984. It was led by FEMA and the Department of Defense and involved the coordination of 34 other Federal departments and agencies. REX-84 was mentioned during the Iran-Contra hearings and publicly exposed by the Miami Herald on Sunday July 5th, 1987.
Operation Garden Plot is a United States Army and National Guard program under control of the US Northern Command (NORTHCOM) to provide Federal military support during domestic civil disturbances. One example of the program’s implementation was during the 1992 Los Angeles riots when US Army and Marine forces were used in conjunction with the California National Guard. In Los Angeles an Executive Order was made to permit the use of the Federal army to uphold domestic laws pursuant to the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which places restrictions on the domestic use of the military for law enforcement purposes.
Recently, however, Section 1076 Public Law 109-364, or the "John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007" (H.R.5122) has amended Posse Comitatus and The Insurrection Act (which also places limits on domestic military deployment) to allow the Federal government to unilaterally take control of state National Guards and position Federal troops anywhere in the country during a ‘public emergency’.
Goon squads:
1) The US Senate voted yesterday to procedurally clear the way for President Obama’s National Service Corps. The bi-partisan vote approved a $6 billion scheme to increase the number of “community service” jobs in America from 75,000 to well over 250,000. Presumably under the direction of this cadre, the plan is designed to enlarge the number of Americans engaged in “community organizing” to about 7 million.
2) Defense Department Establishes Civilian Expeditionary Workforce:
"The Defense Department is forming a civilian expeditionary workforce that will be trained and equipped to deploy overseas in support of military missions worldwide, according to department officials.
The directive emphasizes, however, that volunteers be sought first for any expeditionary requirements, before requiring anyone to serve involuntarily or on short notice. Overseas duty tours shall not exceed two years."
3) This was years ago, but still worth a mention:
"Political analyst Al Martin, who has in the past proven accurate in getting ahead of the news curve, is reporting that Homeland Security have hired former Stasi head, the 'Silver Fox' Markus Wolf.
Martin states,
"Wolf is the man that effectively built the East German state intelligence operation’s internal directorate," Martin continues. "He turned half the population into informants. That is his specialty, is taking a population, constructing the various state divisions, mechanisms of control, in order to organize informants within the population. That is his real specialty. And that is precisely, as Primakov has intimated, why Wolf is being brought in. The regime knows that once all of Patriot II is in law and they begin working on Patriot III, they will then begin to establish the internal mechanism to coordinate, as an official function of state, a system of informants. Wolf’s speciality was to turn East Germany into the greatest and most efficient informant state ever created."
Busting trade-unions:
"Senator Obama is saying decisively that he does not support private school vouchers, while sticking with his support for incentive pay for teachers based on their students' performance. Mr. Obama also raised concerns when he endorsed the idea of "merit pay" at a convention last year for the other national teachers union, the National Education Association.
In his address to the NEA this year, he acknowledged that the idea "wasn't necessarily the most popular part of my speech last year," but vowed to stand by it, eliciting some boos. Those at the AFT convention said that no boos followed the remarks, though some union members later said they were concerned by them.
Pseudo-science:
1) President-elect Barack Obama met this afternoon in Chicago with former vice president Al Gore to discuss climate change, declaring after the meeting, "The time for denial is over."
"We all believe what the scientists have been telling us for years now," Obama said, "that this is a matter of urgency and national security, and it has to be dealt with in a serious way. That is what I intend my administration to do."
2) Even Drayson is outbid, however, by the groupies in The Guardian, who now suggest that people like Christopher Booker should no longer be compared to “Holocaust deniers” but consigned to even more outer darkness by branding them as climate “Creationists”, the dirtiest word they know. Meanwhile at the University of the West of England in Bristol this weekend, a conference of “eco-psychologists”, led by a professor, are solemnly exploring the notion that “climate change denial” should be classified as a form of “mental disorder”.
Messianic Leader:
1)Cnn: President Barack Obama is "President of the World"
2) Farrakhan: "A black man with a white mother became a savior to us," he told the crowd of mostly followers dressed in Nation of Islam attire including long white suits and matching head scarfs for women and navy-colored uniforms with caps for men. "A black man with a white mother could turn out to be one who can lift America from her fall."
Propaganda poster art:
Washington Post telling about the poster artist Shepard Fairey:
"Fairey's artwork follows the style of his predecessors. His Obama posters (and lots of his commercial and fine art work) are reworkings of the techniques of revolutionary propagandists -- the bright colors, bold lettering, geometric simplicity, heroic poses -- the "art with a purpose" created by constructivists in the early Soviet Union, like Alexander Rodchenko and the Stenberg brothers, and by America's own Depression-era Works Projects Administration."
Amazon.com sells a book called Barack Obama: Son of Promise, Child of Hope. The description says:
"Ever since Barack Obama was young, Hope has lived inside him. From the beaches of Hawaii to the streets of Chicago, from the jungles of Indonesia to the plains of Kenya, he has held on to Hope. Even as a boy, Barack knew he wasn't quite like anybody else, but through his journeys he found the ability to listen to Hope and become what he was meant to be: a bridge to bring people together."
Amazon.com also sells Pocket Obama - a little blue book, which contains speeches by mr. Obama.
************************************************
You also have army brigades on the streets, a huge genocidal depression with a derivatives bubble, preachers trained to sedate their flocks for gun confiscation and FEMA camps and a fumbling dollar that's about to collapse. If I were an American, I'd leave the country. Not that I'd have anywhere to hide, since this mess is becoming global under yet-to-come tyrannical world government, but I think the US is going to collapse first.
Here's Wall Street Journal:
"Some $340 million in TARP cash flowed back this week from four small banks in Louisiana, New York, Indiana and California. This isn't much when we routinely talk in trillions, but clearly that money has not been wasted or otherwise sunk down Wall Street's black hole. So why no cheering as the cash comes back?
My answer: The government wants to control the banks, just as it now controls GM and Chrysler, and will surely control the health industry in the not-too-distant future. Keeping them TARP-stuffed is the key to control. And for this intensely political president, mere influence is not enough. The White House wants to tell 'em what to do. Control. Direct. Command."
What's associated with fascism? Concentration camps, goon squads, busting trade unions, pseudo-science (race-science & the likes), a messianic leader and glorifying propaganda poster art.
Concentration camps:
"The United States Federal Emergency Management Agency has numerous detainment camps throughout the United States. Some camps have been recently constructed and / or renovated and are fully staffed. The existence of the camps coupled with Presidential Executive Orders giving the President and Department of Homeland Security (of which FEMA is now part) control over ‘national essential functions’ in the event of ‘catastrophic emergency’ have resulted in concerns that the camps will be used to forcefully detain American citizens for unconstitutional purposes.
Readiness Exercise 1984 (REX-84) is an emergency response program involving the implementation of martial law, the movement of civilian populations and the arrest and detainment of segments of the population. A rehearsal of the program was carried out April 5-13, 1984. It was led by FEMA and the Department of Defense and involved the coordination of 34 other Federal departments and agencies. REX-84 was mentioned during the Iran-Contra hearings and publicly exposed by the Miami Herald on Sunday July 5th, 1987.
Operation Garden Plot is a United States Army and National Guard program under control of the US Northern Command (NORTHCOM) to provide Federal military support during domestic civil disturbances. One example of the program’s implementation was during the 1992 Los Angeles riots when US Army and Marine forces were used in conjunction with the California National Guard. In Los Angeles an Executive Order was made to permit the use of the Federal army to uphold domestic laws pursuant to the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which places restrictions on the domestic use of the military for law enforcement purposes.
Recently, however, Section 1076 Public Law 109-364, or the "John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007" (H.R.5122) has amended Posse Comitatus and The Insurrection Act (which also places limits on domestic military deployment) to allow the Federal government to unilaterally take control of state National Guards and position Federal troops anywhere in the country during a ‘public emergency’.
Goon squads:
1) The US Senate voted yesterday to procedurally clear the way for President Obama’s National Service Corps. The bi-partisan vote approved a $6 billion scheme to increase the number of “community service” jobs in America from 75,000 to well over 250,000. Presumably under the direction of this cadre, the plan is designed to enlarge the number of Americans engaged in “community organizing” to about 7 million.
2) Defense Department Establishes Civilian Expeditionary Workforce:
"The Defense Department is forming a civilian expeditionary workforce that will be trained and equipped to deploy overseas in support of military missions worldwide, according to department officials.
The directive emphasizes, however, that volunteers be sought first for any expeditionary requirements, before requiring anyone to serve involuntarily or on short notice. Overseas duty tours shall not exceed two years."
3) This was years ago, but still worth a mention:
"Political analyst Al Martin, who has in the past proven accurate in getting ahead of the news curve, is reporting that Homeland Security have hired former Stasi head, the 'Silver Fox' Markus Wolf.
Martin states,
"Wolf is the man that effectively built the East German state intelligence operation’s internal directorate," Martin continues. "He turned half the population into informants. That is his specialty, is taking a population, constructing the various state divisions, mechanisms of control, in order to organize informants within the population. That is his real specialty. And that is precisely, as Primakov has intimated, why Wolf is being brought in. The regime knows that once all of Patriot II is in law and they begin working on Patriot III, they will then begin to establish the internal mechanism to coordinate, as an official function of state, a system of informants. Wolf’s speciality was to turn East Germany into the greatest and most efficient informant state ever created."
Busting trade-unions:
"Senator Obama is saying decisively that he does not support private school vouchers, while sticking with his support for incentive pay for teachers based on their students' performance. Mr. Obama also raised concerns when he endorsed the idea of "merit pay" at a convention last year for the other national teachers union, the National Education Association.
In his address to the NEA this year, he acknowledged that the idea "wasn't necessarily the most popular part of my speech last year," but vowed to stand by it, eliciting some boos. Those at the AFT convention said that no boos followed the remarks, though some union members later said they were concerned by them.
Pseudo-science:
1) President-elect Barack Obama met this afternoon in Chicago with former vice president Al Gore to discuss climate change, declaring after the meeting, "The time for denial is over."
"We all believe what the scientists have been telling us for years now," Obama said, "that this is a matter of urgency and national security, and it has to be dealt with in a serious way. That is what I intend my administration to do."
2) Even Drayson is outbid, however, by the groupies in The Guardian, who now suggest that people like Christopher Booker should no longer be compared to “Holocaust deniers” but consigned to even more outer darkness by branding them as climate “Creationists”, the dirtiest word they know. Meanwhile at the University of the West of England in Bristol this weekend, a conference of “eco-psychologists”, led by a professor, are solemnly exploring the notion that “climate change denial” should be classified as a form of “mental disorder”.
Messianic Leader:
1)Cnn: President Barack Obama is "President of the World"
2) Farrakhan: "A black man with a white mother became a savior to us," he told the crowd of mostly followers dressed in Nation of Islam attire including long white suits and matching head scarfs for women and navy-colored uniforms with caps for men. "A black man with a white mother could turn out to be one who can lift America from her fall."
Propaganda poster art:
Washington Post telling about the poster artist Shepard Fairey:
"Fairey's artwork follows the style of his predecessors. His Obama posters (and lots of his commercial and fine art work) are reworkings of the techniques of revolutionary propagandists -- the bright colors, bold lettering, geometric simplicity, heroic poses -- the "art with a purpose" created by constructivists in the early Soviet Union, like Alexander Rodchenko and the Stenberg brothers, and by America's own Depression-era Works Projects Administration."
Amazon.com sells a book called Barack Obama: Son of Promise, Child of Hope. The description says:
"Ever since Barack Obama was young, Hope has lived inside him. From the beaches of Hawaii to the streets of Chicago, from the jungles of Indonesia to the plains of Kenya, he has held on to Hope. Even as a boy, Barack knew he wasn't quite like anybody else, but through his journeys he found the ability to listen to Hope and become what he was meant to be: a bridge to bring people together."
Amazon.com also sells Pocket Obama - a little blue book, which contains speeches by mr. Obama.
************************************************
You also have army brigades on the streets, a huge genocidal depression with a derivatives bubble, preachers trained to sedate their flocks for gun confiscation and FEMA camps and a fumbling dollar that's about to collapse. If I were an American, I'd leave the country. Not that I'd have anywhere to hide, since this mess is becoming global under yet-to-come tyrannical world government, but I think the US is going to collapse first.
lauantai 4. huhtikuuta 2009
Let's ban guns and invade Pakistan
"(Reuters) - A man armed with two handguns killed 13 people at an immigration services center before apparently turning the gun on himself, authorities in Binghamton, New York, said on Friday.
Police Chief Joseph Zikuski told a news conference the gunman blocked the back entrance of the building with a car, walked in the front door and shot two receptionists, one of whom died, before entering a classroom and killing 12 more people and then apparently committing suicide.
He said that four other people were critically wounded in the latest U.S. shooting incident with multiple casualties.
One of the receptionists survived, pretending to be dead before crawling under a desk where she managed to call police, Zikuski said. She was in critical condition in a hospital.
"We have no idea what the motive is," Zikuski said, adding that the man was no stranger to the center."
***
" A Pakistani Taliban militant leader has claimed responsibility for the attack on a U.S. immigration center in New York state in which 13 people were killed, Reuters reported.
"I accept responsibility. They were my men. I gave them orders in reaction to U.S. drone attacks," Baituallah Mehsud told Reuters by telephone from an undisclosed location on Saturday. U.S. officials were not immediately available for comment about Mehsud's claim, Reuters reported, and one Pakistani security analyst dismissed the claim as a publicity stunt.
Representative Maurice Hinchey, whose district includes Binghamton, told the New York Times that indications are the gunman was an immigrant from Vietnam.
Mehsud's claim comes as a suspected U.S. drone fired two missiles at an alleged militant hide-out Saturday in northwestern Pakistan, killing 13 people."
**
Oh yeah, it's a stunt alright. An excerpt from Sky News article:
He is in his mid-thirties and was named by Time magazine as one of the top 100 most influential figures in the world. He’s been called more dangerous than Osama Bin Laden by Newsweek - and Musharraf and the America CIA said he was the mastermind behind Bhutto’s death.
The journalists who met him in South Waziristan, in Pakistan’s tribal belt, describe him as courteous, slightly plump, short and earnest.
According to a news report he died of renal failure.
**
I guess when you join the CIA as a puppet terrorist, you must sacrifice your kidneys for the cause. Winter Patriot breaks it down:
"Pakistan's most feared terrorist communicates with encryption so strong the Pakistani intelligence services cannot crack it. He gets information on Pakistani troop movements from an unidentified foreign government. He's said to be responsible for the vast majority of terrorist attacks in Pakistan (including the assassination of Benazir Bhutto), but the Americans -- who don't mind bombing "Islamic militants" in Pakistan every now and then -- have refused to attack him despite having solid information as to his whereabouts. And on, and on, and on...
All this and more is highlighted in a excellent piece from "State of Pakistan", which I have reproduced in full below, with just a bit of editing and a few comments.
Baithullah Mehsud could be a CIA ‘intelligence asset’ in this double game
A report published by the News on August 5, 2008 includes the following (apparently based on information given by the ISI officials):
”The top US military commander and the CIA official were also asked why the CIA-run predator[s ] and the US military did not swing into action when they were provided the exact location of Baitullah Mehsud [photo], Pakistan’s enemy number one and the mastermind of almost every suicide operation against the Pakistan Army and the ISI since June 2006. One such precise piece of information was made available to the CIA on May 24 when Baitullah Mehsud drove to a remote South Waziristan mountain post in his Toyota Land Cruiser to address the press and returned back to his safe abode. The United States military has the capacity to direct a missile to a precise location at very short notice as it has done close to 20 times in the last few years to hit al-Qaeda targets inside Pakistan. Pakistani official[s ] have long been intrigued by the presence of highly encrypted communications gear with Baitullah Mehsud. This communication gear enables him to collect real-time information on Pakistani troop movement from an unidentified foreign source without being intercepted by Pakistani intelligence.”
Both the CIA and the ISI have been playing a double game. Fighting and nurturing terrorists and warlords at the same time! Why?
If this is a serious question then perhaps I can answer it.
Now please carefully read the following published and circulated by the State of Pakistan on January 31, 2008.
Nicholas Schmidle, who was expelled from Pakistan in January 2008 for writing a detailed report in the NY Times on the tribal areas and the NWFP, later wrote in the Washington Post,
“foreign journalists are barred from almost half the country; in most cases, their visas are restricted to three cities — Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi. In Baluchistan province, which covers 44 percent of Pakistan and where ethnic nationalists are fighting a low-level insurgency, the government requires prior notification and approval if you want to travel anywhere outside the capital of Quetta. Such permission is rarely given. And the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), where the pro-Taliban militants are strong, are completely off-limits. Musharraf’s government says that journalists are kept out for their own security. But meanwhile, two conflicts go unreported in one of the world’s most vital — and misunderstood — countries.”
What does the government want to hide?
I could probably answer that, too.
Most governments make every effort to expose terrorists. Authorities pursue them relentlessly including placing advertisements about purported crimes, requesting people to come forward and give information. When arrested they prosecute the alleged terrorists vigorously and publicize convictions. But no such pattern in Pakistan. The website of Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency lists only two, yes only TWO terrorists from the federally administered tribal areas (FATA) as wanted. The star of ‘Jaish-e-Muhammed’ Masood Azhar was allowed to escape. The other star, Omar Saeed Sheikh, is still alive (ostensibly because his case is under appeal) although he was sentenced to death in July 2002. The alleged ‘master mind’ of the plan to blow up trans-atlantic flights, Rashid Rauf, has mysteriously escaped and the government does not even want to hear about it. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the master mind of 9/11, has been kept in Guantanamo since 2004 and has not been tried. Abdullah Mehsud (Baitullah’s relative) was released by the U.S. from Guantanamo and allowed to return? Why? So that they can issue threats to blow up the White House (interview to Al-Jazeera on Jan. 29, 2008) and provide justification for the so-called ‘War on Terror’ which has not seen a single terrorist attack on the U.S. soil since 9/11?
YES! Exactly!
Let’s now talk about Baitullah Mehsud who became a big militant leader soon after Abdullah’s release by the U.S. government from Guantanamo Bay in March 2004. Until the end of 2004, Baitullah Mehsud (former FATA secretary Brig. Mahmood Shah says he is in 40s) lived in the shadow of his daring and charismatic fellow tribesman, Abdullah Mehsud, who, with his long black hair, was considered a terrorist rock star. Abdullah fought with the Taliban in Afghanistan against the Northern Alliance and in 1996 lost a leg when he stepped on a land mine. He was taken captive by warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum who turned him over to American forces. Abdullah Mehsud was sent to Camp Delta at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba and held for two years, insisting the whole time that he was just an innocent tribesman. He was released in March 2004 for reasons which remain unclear and returned to Waziristan. Soon after his return, he orchestrated the kidnapping of two Chinese engineers working on a dam in his region, proclaiming that Beijing was guilty of killing Muslims. He also ordered an attack on Pakistan’s Interior Minister in which 31 people perished. The government came under tremendous pressure from the Chinese to hunt Abdullah after the killings of their engineers.
The Afghan Taliban, who were in the process of organizing themselves to fight in Afghanistan and were desperately trying to avoid a head-on confrontation with Pakistani forces in the tribal regions, were not pleased with the killing of the Chinese engineers. Abdullah was made a deputy of Baitullah Mehsud and a shura or tribal council was set up which further undermined his authority. It was said at the time that the Taliban preferred a cool-headed Baitullah over the temperamental Abdullah. Dejected, Abdullah left for Afghanistan to fight in Musa Qilla in the southern Afghan province of Helmand and was killed by security agencies in the Zhob area of the south-western province of Baluchistan while returning home to Pakistan.
Mehsud’s first battlefield experience was in Afghanistan in the late 1980s against Soviet invaders. His mentor at the time was Jalaluddin Haqqani, a powerful commander in eastern Afghanistan backed by the United States against the Soviets. Now Haqqani is wanted as a terrorist by the U.S. and NATO but the CIA has also been trying to get his support according to the Wall Street Journal. The ISI once considered him a ‘moderate’ Taliban.
For almost three years now, Baitullah Mehsud has been the leading face of militant resistance whose influence, security officials acknowledge, transcends the borders of South Waziristan, according to the sources in the governments of Pakistan and the United States. But there is little independent reporting on the tribal areas. Most of the so-called experts writing for the think tanks have never visited these areas. Mostly they cite each other in their papers or quote US or Pakistani officials.
[The] government [...] acknowledged Baitullah Mehsud as the new chief of militants in the Mehsud part of South Waziristan [...] in February, 2005, when it entered into an agreement with him in Sara Rogha following violent clashes and ambushes. He was reportedly paid [20 million rupees] as part of this deal though it remains unclear who picked [up] the tab, Pakistani or the U.S. government? But read the following report of Jan. 30, 2005 published by the Daily Times, Karachi:
“Baitullah Mehsud gets ready to surrender, Sets aside demand for amnesty to Abdullah Mehsud
By Iqbal Khattak
PESHAWAR: A key local Taliban militant expressed his willingness to surrender to the government after holding talks with tribal elders and clerics at an undisclosed location in South Waziristan Agency, said one of the negotiators on Saturday.
Baitullah Mehsud, a key tribal Taliban commander in the troubled South Waziristan tribal region bordering Afghanistan, expressed readiness to surrender, Brig (r) Qayyum Sher, a member of the peace committee that met the militant, told Daily Times from Tank.
“He (Baitullah) is ready to settle the matter with the government,” said the tribal negotiator. “We met him today and he said he is ready to resolve the matter.” The tribal negotiator said Baitullah did not press his old demand that his comrade Abdullah Mehsud should also be pardoned if he surrenders. “He (Baitullah) will surrender alone,” said Brig Qayyum.
However, the peace committee will discuss modalities for Baitullah’s surrender with the government. “The modalities will now be sorted out with the government. How, when and where he will surrender will be discussed with the military and the political administration,” said Brig Qayyum.
A military source told Daily Times that Baitullah’s surrender would prove a serious setback to Abdullah Mehsud. “That is what we want. But we have to wait for the moment when he (Baitullah) surrenders,” the source said on condition of anonymity. Lt Gen Safdar Hussain exempted Abdullah Mehsud from amnesty after his alleged involvement in two Chinese engineers’ kidnapping in October last year.
Brig Qayyum said Baitullah, who unlike Abdullah Mehsud and Nek Muhammad was not in the media limelight, set no conditions for his surrender and the Peshawar corps commander had already declared amnesty for him if he laid down arms.
Gen Safdar set a January 26 deadline for the two militants to surrender or “face military onslaught” and hoped sanity would prevail upon Baituallah to live peacefully. However, Gen Safdar had refused to pardon Abdullah Mehsud.
He pledged to cease attacks on security forces and government installations in return for a commitment by the government to withdraw forces from the Mehsud territory and not to take any punitive action against him and his associates. This followed a brief lull in fighting, prompting the then Pakistani army corps commander, Peshawar, Lt-Gen Safdar, to declare Baitullah Mehsud a “soldier of peace” after a meeting with him at Jandola in August, 2005.
The meeting followed accusations by Baitullah Mehsud that the government was not honouring its commitments, was refusing to withdraw its forces and was continuing to attack his mujahideen. Violence erupted again in the restive tribal region and a time came when the government’s writ was restricted to the compounds of the political administration.”
Why was not Baitullah captured when he was ready to surrender? Instead, he was given money and allowed to grow his militia from a few hundred to nearly 20,000? Why? Who made the decision?
Who else?
Baitullah Mehsud addressed his tribe after the Sararogha pact and clearly swore allegiance to Mullah Umar of the Taliban. His power over the two agencies is owed to his wealth and his ability to wage war. He goes around in a bullet-proof car and is followed around by 30 armed guards. Like Nek Muhammad, he too has two wives and has three castle-like houses in North and South Waziristan. Although he is not a tribal leader by lineage or by election, he is more respected as a warlord by the people of the two agencies than any other person. Although he denies that he received [20 million rupees] from the secret funds of the government without signing a receipt, corps commander Peshawar General Safdar Hussain is on record as saying that the money was indeed set aside for him.
Government officials now claim that Baitullah has been running a number of training camps for militants and suicide bombers. And in January 2007, helicopter gunships targeted what the government claimed was a militant compound, killing 20 people. Baitullah responded angrily and threatened revenge which he said “would be such that it would pain their heart”. It was followed by a string of suicide attacks in Peshawar, Dera Ismail Khan and Islamabad. By this time, government officials had begun pointing the accusing finger at Baitullah Mehsud. A UN report released in September 2007 blamed Baitullah for almost eighty percent of suicide bombings in Afghanistan. Now since when has the UN become so well informed as to be able to account for the exact percentage of the perpetrators of suicide bombings as to their source? Who is feeding this information (or disinformation).
In an address to the nation on January 2, 2008, Mr. Pervez Musharraf said that he believed Maulana Fazlullah and Baitullah Mehsud were prime suspects in the assassination of Bhutto.In its January 18, 2008 edition, The Washington Post reported that the CIA has concluded that Mehsud was behind the Bhutto assassination. “Offering the most definitive public assessment by a U.S. intelligence official, [Michael V.] Hayden said Bhutto was killed by fighters allied with Mehsud, a tribal leader in northwestern Pakistan, with support from al-Qaeda’s terrorist network.”
The CIA is really well informed! It could not trace Mullah Omar (who reportedly lived in Quetta) or Osama (who escaped helped by the cease fire ordered by Dick Cheney at Musharraf’s request in 2001) in more than six years but it can “conclude’ within three weeks of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto that Mehsud was behind it. Meanwhile Talibans in Afghanistan want to distance themselves from him?
According to a DAWN report (Jan. 28, 2008), the Taliban in Afghanistan have distanced themselves from Pakistani militants led by Baitullah Mehsud, saying they don’t support any militant activity in Pakistan. “We do not support any militant activity and operation in Pakistan,” Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told Dawn on telephone from an undisclosed location on Monday. The spokesman denied media reports that the Taliban had expelled Baitullah Mehsud, the head of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan. “Baitullah is a Pakistani and we as the Afghan Taliban have nothing to do with his appointment or his expulsion. We did not appoint him and we have not expelled him,” he said.
Now a $10 billion question: What is the end-game of the U.S. if Baitullah Mehsud is indeed an ‘intelligence asset’ of the CIA?
That's simple: Either they continue to protect him and hide the truth (about him, about themselves, about 9/11, and about the entire bogus "War On Terror"), or they all go straight to the guillotines.
Is the aim is to create a theatre of the ‘War on Terror’ in Pakistan to create the justification for the landing of the U.S. troops so that the republican administration can continue to tell American people that it is fighting terrorism while spending billions to enrich the military-industrial complex, win the next elections in Nov. 2008 and tighten its control over Pakistan to pursue its anti-China and anti-Iran foreign policy goals?
For those Pakistanis who may think this is far-fetched, here is a quote from “Devil’s Game” by Robert Dreyfuss (pp. 336-337, published 2005). Citing the infamous policy memo written by leading neocons in 1995, entitled, “A Clean Break” to then Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel to ‘contain, destablize, and roll back’ various states in the region, Dreyfuss concludes:
“Neoconservatives want to control the Middle East, not reform it, even it means tearing countries apart and replacing them with rump mini-states along ethnic and sectrian lines. The Islamic right, in this context, is just one more tool for dismantling existing regimes, if that is what it takes.”
It's not far-fetched at all; it's happening in many countries simultaneously.
And "dismantling existing regimes" is indeed "what it takes".
Furthermore, it will continue until and unless a few "existing regimes" -- in Washington, Islamabad and a few other places -- are "dismantled". That is to say: indefinitely."
**
This is by far one of the most retarded CIA black op's I have ever seen.
Police Chief Joseph Zikuski told a news conference the gunman blocked the back entrance of the building with a car, walked in the front door and shot two receptionists, one of whom died, before entering a classroom and killing 12 more people and then apparently committing suicide.
He said that four other people were critically wounded in the latest U.S. shooting incident with multiple casualties.
One of the receptionists survived, pretending to be dead before crawling under a desk where she managed to call police, Zikuski said. She was in critical condition in a hospital.
"We have no idea what the motive is," Zikuski said, adding that the man was no stranger to the center."
***
" A Pakistani Taliban militant leader has claimed responsibility for the attack on a U.S. immigration center in New York state in which 13 people were killed, Reuters reported.
"I accept responsibility. They were my men. I gave them orders in reaction to U.S. drone attacks," Baituallah Mehsud told Reuters by telephone from an undisclosed location on Saturday. U.S. officials were not immediately available for comment about Mehsud's claim, Reuters reported, and one Pakistani security analyst dismissed the claim as a publicity stunt.
Representative Maurice Hinchey, whose district includes Binghamton, told the New York Times that indications are the gunman was an immigrant from Vietnam.
Mehsud's claim comes as a suspected U.S. drone fired two missiles at an alleged militant hide-out Saturday in northwestern Pakistan, killing 13 people."
**
Oh yeah, it's a stunt alright. An excerpt from Sky News article:
He is in his mid-thirties and was named by Time magazine as one of the top 100 most influential figures in the world. He’s been called more dangerous than Osama Bin Laden by Newsweek - and Musharraf and the America CIA said he was the mastermind behind Bhutto’s death.
The journalists who met him in South Waziristan, in Pakistan’s tribal belt, describe him as courteous, slightly plump, short and earnest.
According to a news report he died of renal failure.
**
I guess when you join the CIA as a puppet terrorist, you must sacrifice your kidneys for the cause. Winter Patriot breaks it down:
"Pakistan's most feared terrorist communicates with encryption so strong the Pakistani intelligence services cannot crack it. He gets information on Pakistani troop movements from an unidentified foreign government. He's said to be responsible for the vast majority of terrorist attacks in Pakistan (including the assassination of Benazir Bhutto), but the Americans -- who don't mind bombing "Islamic militants" in Pakistan every now and then -- have refused to attack him despite having solid information as to his whereabouts. And on, and on, and on...
All this and more is highlighted in a excellent piece from "State of Pakistan", which I have reproduced in full below, with just a bit of editing and a few comments.
Baithullah Mehsud could be a CIA ‘intelligence asset’ in this double game
A report published by the News on August 5, 2008 includes the following (apparently based on information given by the ISI officials):
”The top US military commander and the CIA official were also asked why the CIA-run predator[s ] and the US military did not swing into action when they were provided the exact location of Baitullah Mehsud [photo], Pakistan’s enemy number one and the mastermind of almost every suicide operation against the Pakistan Army and the ISI since June 2006. One such precise piece of information was made available to the CIA on May 24 when Baitullah Mehsud drove to a remote South Waziristan mountain post in his Toyota Land Cruiser to address the press and returned back to his safe abode. The United States military has the capacity to direct a missile to a precise location at very short notice as it has done close to 20 times in the last few years to hit al-Qaeda targets inside Pakistan. Pakistani official[s ] have long been intrigued by the presence of highly encrypted communications gear with Baitullah Mehsud. This communication gear enables him to collect real-time information on Pakistani troop movement from an unidentified foreign source without being intercepted by Pakistani intelligence.”
Both the CIA and the ISI have been playing a double game. Fighting and nurturing terrorists and warlords at the same time! Why?
If this is a serious question then perhaps I can answer it.
Now please carefully read the following published and circulated by the State of Pakistan on January 31, 2008.
Nicholas Schmidle, who was expelled from Pakistan in January 2008 for writing a detailed report in the NY Times on the tribal areas and the NWFP, later wrote in the Washington Post,
“foreign journalists are barred from almost half the country; in most cases, their visas are restricted to three cities — Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi. In Baluchistan province, which covers 44 percent of Pakistan and where ethnic nationalists are fighting a low-level insurgency, the government requires prior notification and approval if you want to travel anywhere outside the capital of Quetta. Such permission is rarely given. And the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), where the pro-Taliban militants are strong, are completely off-limits. Musharraf’s government says that journalists are kept out for their own security. But meanwhile, two conflicts go unreported in one of the world’s most vital — and misunderstood — countries.”
What does the government want to hide?
I could probably answer that, too.
Most governments make every effort to expose terrorists. Authorities pursue them relentlessly including placing advertisements about purported crimes, requesting people to come forward and give information. When arrested they prosecute the alleged terrorists vigorously and publicize convictions. But no such pattern in Pakistan. The website of Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency lists only two, yes only TWO terrorists from the federally administered tribal areas (FATA) as wanted. The star of ‘Jaish-e-Muhammed’ Masood Azhar was allowed to escape. The other star, Omar Saeed Sheikh, is still alive (ostensibly because his case is under appeal) although he was sentenced to death in July 2002. The alleged ‘master mind’ of the plan to blow up trans-atlantic flights, Rashid Rauf, has mysteriously escaped and the government does not even want to hear about it. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the master mind of 9/11, has been kept in Guantanamo since 2004 and has not been tried. Abdullah Mehsud (Baitullah’s relative) was released by the U.S. from Guantanamo and allowed to return? Why? So that they can issue threats to blow up the White House (interview to Al-Jazeera on Jan. 29, 2008) and provide justification for the so-called ‘War on Terror’ which has not seen a single terrorist attack on the U.S. soil since 9/11?
YES! Exactly!
Let’s now talk about Baitullah Mehsud who became a big militant leader soon after Abdullah’s release by the U.S. government from Guantanamo Bay in March 2004. Until the end of 2004, Baitullah Mehsud (former FATA secretary Brig. Mahmood Shah says he is in 40s) lived in the shadow of his daring and charismatic fellow tribesman, Abdullah Mehsud, who, with his long black hair, was considered a terrorist rock star. Abdullah fought with the Taliban in Afghanistan against the Northern Alliance and in 1996 lost a leg when he stepped on a land mine. He was taken captive by warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum who turned him over to American forces. Abdullah Mehsud was sent to Camp Delta at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba and held for two years, insisting the whole time that he was just an innocent tribesman. He was released in March 2004 for reasons which remain unclear and returned to Waziristan. Soon after his return, he orchestrated the kidnapping of two Chinese engineers working on a dam in his region, proclaiming that Beijing was guilty of killing Muslims. He also ordered an attack on Pakistan’s Interior Minister in which 31 people perished. The government came under tremendous pressure from the Chinese to hunt Abdullah after the killings of their engineers.
The Afghan Taliban, who were in the process of organizing themselves to fight in Afghanistan and were desperately trying to avoid a head-on confrontation with Pakistani forces in the tribal regions, were not pleased with the killing of the Chinese engineers. Abdullah was made a deputy of Baitullah Mehsud and a shura or tribal council was set up which further undermined his authority. It was said at the time that the Taliban preferred a cool-headed Baitullah over the temperamental Abdullah. Dejected, Abdullah left for Afghanistan to fight in Musa Qilla in the southern Afghan province of Helmand and was killed by security agencies in the Zhob area of the south-western province of Baluchistan while returning home to Pakistan.
Mehsud’s first battlefield experience was in Afghanistan in the late 1980s against Soviet invaders. His mentor at the time was Jalaluddin Haqqani, a powerful commander in eastern Afghanistan backed by the United States against the Soviets. Now Haqqani is wanted as a terrorist by the U.S. and NATO but the CIA has also been trying to get his support according to the Wall Street Journal. The ISI once considered him a ‘moderate’ Taliban.
For almost three years now, Baitullah Mehsud has been the leading face of militant resistance whose influence, security officials acknowledge, transcends the borders of South Waziristan, according to the sources in the governments of Pakistan and the United States. But there is little independent reporting on the tribal areas. Most of the so-called experts writing for the think tanks have never visited these areas. Mostly they cite each other in their papers or quote US or Pakistani officials.
[The] government [...] acknowledged Baitullah Mehsud as the new chief of militants in the Mehsud part of South Waziristan [...] in February, 2005, when it entered into an agreement with him in Sara Rogha following violent clashes and ambushes. He was reportedly paid [20 million rupees] as part of this deal though it remains unclear who picked [up] the tab, Pakistani or the U.S. government? But read the following report of Jan. 30, 2005 published by the Daily Times, Karachi:
“Baitullah Mehsud gets ready to surrender, Sets aside demand for amnesty to Abdullah Mehsud
By Iqbal Khattak
PESHAWAR: A key local Taliban militant expressed his willingness to surrender to the government after holding talks with tribal elders and clerics at an undisclosed location in South Waziristan Agency, said one of the negotiators on Saturday.
Baitullah Mehsud, a key tribal Taliban commander in the troubled South Waziristan tribal region bordering Afghanistan, expressed readiness to surrender, Brig (r) Qayyum Sher, a member of the peace committee that met the militant, told Daily Times from Tank.
“He (Baitullah) is ready to settle the matter with the government,” said the tribal negotiator. “We met him today and he said he is ready to resolve the matter.” The tribal negotiator said Baitullah did not press his old demand that his comrade Abdullah Mehsud should also be pardoned if he surrenders. “He (Baitullah) will surrender alone,” said Brig Qayyum.
However, the peace committee will discuss modalities for Baitullah’s surrender with the government. “The modalities will now be sorted out with the government. How, when and where he will surrender will be discussed with the military and the political administration,” said Brig Qayyum.
A military source told Daily Times that Baitullah’s surrender would prove a serious setback to Abdullah Mehsud. “That is what we want. But we have to wait for the moment when he (Baitullah) surrenders,” the source said on condition of anonymity. Lt Gen Safdar Hussain exempted Abdullah Mehsud from amnesty after his alleged involvement in two Chinese engineers’ kidnapping in October last year.
Brig Qayyum said Baitullah, who unlike Abdullah Mehsud and Nek Muhammad was not in the media limelight, set no conditions for his surrender and the Peshawar corps commander had already declared amnesty for him if he laid down arms.
Gen Safdar set a January 26 deadline for the two militants to surrender or “face military onslaught” and hoped sanity would prevail upon Baituallah to live peacefully. However, Gen Safdar had refused to pardon Abdullah Mehsud.
He pledged to cease attacks on security forces and government installations in return for a commitment by the government to withdraw forces from the Mehsud territory and not to take any punitive action against him and his associates. This followed a brief lull in fighting, prompting the then Pakistani army corps commander, Peshawar, Lt-Gen Safdar, to declare Baitullah Mehsud a “soldier of peace” after a meeting with him at Jandola in August, 2005.
The meeting followed accusations by Baitullah Mehsud that the government was not honouring its commitments, was refusing to withdraw its forces and was continuing to attack his mujahideen. Violence erupted again in the restive tribal region and a time came when the government’s writ was restricted to the compounds of the political administration.”
Why was not Baitullah captured when he was ready to surrender? Instead, he was given money and allowed to grow his militia from a few hundred to nearly 20,000? Why? Who made the decision?
Who else?
Baitullah Mehsud addressed his tribe after the Sararogha pact and clearly swore allegiance to Mullah Umar of the Taliban. His power over the two agencies is owed to his wealth and his ability to wage war. He goes around in a bullet-proof car and is followed around by 30 armed guards. Like Nek Muhammad, he too has two wives and has three castle-like houses in North and South Waziristan. Although he is not a tribal leader by lineage or by election, he is more respected as a warlord by the people of the two agencies than any other person. Although he denies that he received [20 million rupees] from the secret funds of the government without signing a receipt, corps commander Peshawar General Safdar Hussain is on record as saying that the money was indeed set aside for him.
Government officials now claim that Baitullah has been running a number of training camps for militants and suicide bombers. And in January 2007, helicopter gunships targeted what the government claimed was a militant compound, killing 20 people. Baitullah responded angrily and threatened revenge which he said “would be such that it would pain their heart”. It was followed by a string of suicide attacks in Peshawar, Dera Ismail Khan and Islamabad. By this time, government officials had begun pointing the accusing finger at Baitullah Mehsud. A UN report released in September 2007 blamed Baitullah for almost eighty percent of suicide bombings in Afghanistan. Now since when has the UN become so well informed as to be able to account for the exact percentage of the perpetrators of suicide bombings as to their source? Who is feeding this information (or disinformation).
In an address to the nation on January 2, 2008, Mr. Pervez Musharraf said that he believed Maulana Fazlullah and Baitullah Mehsud were prime suspects in the assassination of Bhutto.In its January 18, 2008 edition, The Washington Post reported that the CIA has concluded that Mehsud was behind the Bhutto assassination. “Offering the most definitive public assessment by a U.S. intelligence official, [Michael V.] Hayden said Bhutto was killed by fighters allied with Mehsud, a tribal leader in northwestern Pakistan, with support from al-Qaeda’s terrorist network.”
The CIA is really well informed! It could not trace Mullah Omar (who reportedly lived in Quetta) or Osama (who escaped helped by the cease fire ordered by Dick Cheney at Musharraf’s request in 2001) in more than six years but it can “conclude’ within three weeks of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto that Mehsud was behind it. Meanwhile Talibans in Afghanistan want to distance themselves from him?
According to a DAWN report (Jan. 28, 2008), the Taliban in Afghanistan have distanced themselves from Pakistani militants led by Baitullah Mehsud, saying they don’t support any militant activity in Pakistan. “We do not support any militant activity and operation in Pakistan,” Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told Dawn on telephone from an undisclosed location on Monday. The spokesman denied media reports that the Taliban had expelled Baitullah Mehsud, the head of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan. “Baitullah is a Pakistani and we as the Afghan Taliban have nothing to do with his appointment or his expulsion. We did not appoint him and we have not expelled him,” he said.
Now a $10 billion question: What is the end-game of the U.S. if Baitullah Mehsud is indeed an ‘intelligence asset’ of the CIA?
That's simple: Either they continue to protect him and hide the truth (about him, about themselves, about 9/11, and about the entire bogus "War On Terror"), or they all go straight to the guillotines.
Is the aim is to create a theatre of the ‘War on Terror’ in Pakistan to create the justification for the landing of the U.S. troops so that the republican administration can continue to tell American people that it is fighting terrorism while spending billions to enrich the military-industrial complex, win the next elections in Nov. 2008 and tighten its control over Pakistan to pursue its anti-China and anti-Iran foreign policy goals?
For those Pakistanis who may think this is far-fetched, here is a quote from “Devil’s Game” by Robert Dreyfuss (pp. 336-337, published 2005). Citing the infamous policy memo written by leading neocons in 1995, entitled, “A Clean Break” to then Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel to ‘contain, destablize, and roll back’ various states in the region, Dreyfuss concludes:
“Neoconservatives want to control the Middle East, not reform it, even it means tearing countries apart and replacing them with rump mini-states along ethnic and sectrian lines. The Islamic right, in this context, is just one more tool for dismantling existing regimes, if that is what it takes.”
It's not far-fetched at all; it's happening in many countries simultaneously.
And "dismantling existing regimes" is indeed "what it takes".
Furthermore, it will continue until and unless a few "existing regimes" -- in Washington, Islamabad and a few other places -- are "dismantled". That is to say: indefinitely."
**
This is by far one of the most retarded CIA black op's I have ever seen.
torstai 2. huhtikuuta 2009
G20 & IMF
Trillion for IMF and World Bank? The G20 must be incompetent, insane or just plain devilish. Greg Palast interviewed Joseph Stiglitz, former WB head, and a Nobel prize winning economist. It's common knowledge that it was Stiglitz who leaked the documents describing the actions of these two entities. Here's why, along with the idiocy of the plan of throwing money to halt derivatives losses ($1-1,5 quadrillion in total), I'm not a fan of IMF:
"OE STIGLITZ: TODAY'S WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN ECONOMICS
by Greg Palast
The World Bank's former Chief Economist's accusations are eye-popping - including how the IMF and US Treasury fixed the Russian elections
"It has condemned people to death," the former apparatchik told me. This was like a scene out of Le Carre. The brilliant old agent comes in from the cold, crosses to our side, and in hours of debriefing, empties his memory of horrors committed in the name of a political ideology he now realizes has gone rotten.
And here before me was a far bigger catch than some used Cold War spy. Joseph Stiglitz was Chief Economist of the World Bank. To a great extent, the new world economic order was his theory come to life.
I "debriefed" Stigltiz over several days, at Cambridge University, in a London hotel and finally in Washington in April 2001 during the big confab of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. But instead of chairing the meetings of ministers and central bankers, Stiglitz was kept exiled safely behind the blue police cordons, the same as the nuns carrying a large wooden cross, the Bolivian union leaders, the parents of AIDS victims and the other 'anti-globalization' protesters. The ultimate insider was now on the outside.
In 1999 the World Bank fired Stiglitz. He was not allowed quiet retirement; US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, I'm told, demanded a public excommunication for Stiglitz' having expressed his first mild dissent from globalization World Bank style.
Here in Washington we completed the last of several hours of exclusive interviews for The Observer and BBC TV's Newsnight about the real, often hidden, workings of the IMF, World Bank, and the bank's 51% owner, the US Treasury.
And here, from sources unnamable (not Stiglitz), we obtained a cache of documents marked, "confidential," "restricted," and "not otherwise (to be) disclosed without World Bank authorization."
Stiglitz helped translate one from bureaucratise, a "Country Assistance Strategy." There's an Assistance Strategy for every poorer nation, designed, says the World Bank, after careful in-country investigation. But according to insider Stiglitz, the Bank's staff 'investigation' consists of close inspection of a nation's 5-star hotels. It concludes with the Bank staff meeting some begging, busted finance minister who is handed a 'restructuring agreement' pre-drafted for his 'voluntary' signature (I have a selection of these).
Each nation's economy is individually analyzed, then, says Stiglitz, the Bank hands every minister the same exact four-step program.
Step One is Privatization - which Stiglitz said could more accurately be called, 'Briberization.' Rather than object to the sell-offs of state industries, he said national leaders - using the World Bank's demands to silence local critics - happily flogged their electricity and water companies. "You could see their eyes widen" at the prospect of 10% commissions paid to Swiss bank accounts for simply shaving a few billion off the sale price of national assets.
And the US government knew it, charges Stiglitz, at least in the case of the biggest 'briberization' of all, the 1995 Russian sell-off. "The US Treasury view was this was great as we wanted Yeltsin re-elected. We don't care if it's a corrupt election. We want the money to go to Yeltzin" via kick-backs for his campaign.
Stiglitz is no conspiracy nutter ranting about Black Helicopters. The man was inside the game, a member of Bill Clinton's cabinet as Chairman of the President's council of economic advisors.
Most ill-making for Stiglitz is that the US-backed oligarchs stripped Russia's industrial assets, with the effect that the corruption scheme cut national output nearly in half causing depression and starvation.
After briberization, Step Two of the IMF/World Bank one-size-fits-all rescue-your-economy plan is 'Capital Market Liberalization.' In theory, capital market deregulation allows investment capital to flow in and out. Unfortunately, as in Indonesia and Brazil, the money simply flowed out and out. Stiglitz calls this the "Hot Money" cycle. Cash comes in for speculation in real estate and currency, then flees at the first whiff of trouble. A nation's reserves can drain in days, hours. And when that happens, to seduce speculators into returning a nation's own capital funds, the IMF demands these nations raise interest rates to 30%, 50% and 80%.
"The result was predictable," said Stiglitz of the Hot Money tidal waves in Asia and Latin America. Higher interest rates demolished property values, savaged industrial production and drained national treasuries.
At this point, the IMF drags the gasping nation to Step Three: Market-Based Pricing, a fancy term for raising prices on food, water and cooking gas. This leads, predictably, to Step-Three-and-a-Half: what Stiglitz calls, "The IMF riot."
The IMF riot is painfully predictable. When a nation is, "down and out, [the IMF] takes advantage and squeezes the last pound of blood out of them. They turn up the heat until, finally, the whole cauldron blows up," as when the IMF eliminated food and fuel subsidies for the poor in Indonesia in 1998. Indonesia exploded into riots, but there are other examples - the Bolivian riots over water prices last year and this February, the riots in Ecuador over the rise in cooking gas prices imposed by the World Bank. You'd almost get the impression that the riot is written into the plan.
And it is. What Stiglitz did not know is that, while in the States, BBC and The Observer obtained several documents from inside the World Bank, stamped over with those pesky warnings, "confidential," "restricted," "not to be disclosed." Let's get back to one: the "Interim Country Assistance Strategy" for Ecuador, in it the Bank several times states - with cold accuracy - that they expected their plans to spark, "social unrest," to use their bureaucratic term for a nation in flames.
That's not surprising. The secret report notes that the plan to make the US dollar Ecuador's currency has pushed 51% of the population below the poverty line. The World Bank "Assistance" plan simply calls for facing down civil strife and suffering with, "political resolve" - and still higher prices.
The IMF riots (and by riots I mean peaceful demonstrations dispersed by bullets, tanks and teargas) cause new panicked flights of capital and government bankruptcies. This economic arson has it's bright side - for foreign corporations, who can then pick off remaining assets, such as the odd mining concession or port, at fire sale prices.
Stiglitz notes that the IMF and World Bank are not heartless adherents to market economics. At the same time the IMF stopped Indonesia 'subsidizing' food purchases, "when the banks need a bail-out, intervention (in the market) is welcome." The IMF scrounged up tens of billions of dollars to save Indonesia's financiers and, by extension, the US and European banks from which they had borrowed.
A pattern emerges. There are lots of losers in this system but one clear winner: the Western banks and US Treasury, making the big bucks off this crazy new international capital churn. Stiglitz told me about his unhappy meeting, early in his World Bank tenure, with Ethopia's new president in the nation's first democratic election. The World Bank and IMF had ordered Ethiopia to divert aid money to its reserve account at the US Treasury, which pays a pitiful 4% return, while the nation borrowed US dollars at 12% to feed its population. The new president begged Stiglitz to let him use the aid money to rebuild the nation. But no, the loot went straight off to the US Treasury's vault in Washington.
Now we arrive at Step Four of what the IMF and World Bank call their "poverty reduction strategy": Free Trade. This is free trade by the rules of the World Trade Organization and World Bank, Stiglitz the insider likens free trade WTO-style to the Opium Wars. "That too was about opening markets," he said. As in the 19th century, Europeans and Americans today are kicking down the barriers to sales in Asia, Latin American and Africa, while barricading our own markets against Third World agriculture.
In the Opium Wars, the West used military blockades to force open markets for their unbalanced trade. Today, the World Bank can order a financial blockade just as effective - and sometimes just as deadly.
Stiglitz is particularly emotional over the WTO's intellectual property rights treaty (it goes by the acronym TRIPS, more on that in the next chapters). It is here, says the economist, that the new global order has "condemned people to death" by imposing impossible tariffs and tributes to pay to pharmaceutical companies for branded medicines. "They don't care," said the professor of the corporations and bank loans he worked with, "if people live or die."
By the way, don't be confused by the mix in this discussion of the IMF, World Bank and WTO. They are interchangeable masks of a single governance system. They have locked themselves together by what are unpleasantly called, "triggers." Taking a World Bank loan for a school 'triggers' a requirement to accept every 'conditionality' - they average 111 per nation - laid down by both the World Bank and IMF. In fact, said Stiglitz the IMF requires nations to accept trade policies more punitive than the official WTO rules.
Stiglitz greatest concern is that World Bank plans, devised in secrecy and driven by an absolutist ideology, are never open for discourse or dissent. Despite the West's push for elections throughout the developing world, the so-called Poverty Reduction Programs "undermine democracy."
And they don't work. Black Africa's productivity under the guiding hand of IMF structural "assistance" has gone to hell in a handbag. Did any nation avoid this fate? Yes, said Stiglitz, identifying Botswana. Their trick? "They told the IMF to go packing."
So then I turned on Stiglitz. OK, Mr Smart-Guy Professor, how would you help developing nations? Stiglitz proposed radical land reform, an attack at the heart of "landlordism," on the usurious rents charged by the propertied oligarchies worldwide, typically 50% of a tenant's crops. So I had to ask the professor: as you were top economist at the World Bank, why didn't the Bank follow your advice?
"If you challenge [land ownership], that would be a change in the power of the elites. That's not high on their agenda." Apparently not.
Ultimately, what drove him to put his job on the line was the failure of the banks and US Treasury to change course when confronted with the crises - failures and suffering perpetrated by their four-step monetarist mambo. Every time their free market solutions failed, the IMF simply demanded more free market policies.
"It's a little like the Middle Ages," the insider told me, "When the patient died they would say, "well, he stopped the bloodletting too soon, he still had a little blood in him."
I took away from my talks with the professor that the solution to world poverty and crisis is simple: remove the bloodsuckers.
******
A version of this was first published as "The IMF's Four Steps to Damnation" in The Observer (London) in April and another version in The Big Issue - that's the magazine that the homeless flog on platforms in the London Underground. Big Issue offered equal space to the IMF, whose "deputy chief media officer" wrote:
"... I find it impossible to respond given the depth and breadth of hearsay and misinformation in [Palast's] report."
Of course it was difficult for the Deputy Chief to respond. The information (and documents) came from the unhappy lot inside his agency and the World Bank.
Award-winning reporter Palast writes Inside Corporate America for the London Observer. To read other Palast reports, to contact the author or to subscribe to his column, go to GregPalast.Com"
Oh yeah.. IMF also wants to print global super currency, but I suppose you already knew that so it's no big deal. ;)
"OE STIGLITZ: TODAY'S WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN ECONOMICS
by Greg Palast
The World Bank's former Chief Economist's accusations are eye-popping - including how the IMF and US Treasury fixed the Russian elections
"It has condemned people to death," the former apparatchik told me. This was like a scene out of Le Carre. The brilliant old agent comes in from the cold, crosses to our side, and in hours of debriefing, empties his memory of horrors committed in the name of a political ideology he now realizes has gone rotten.
And here before me was a far bigger catch than some used Cold War spy. Joseph Stiglitz was Chief Economist of the World Bank. To a great extent, the new world economic order was his theory come to life.
I "debriefed" Stigltiz over several days, at Cambridge University, in a London hotel and finally in Washington in April 2001 during the big confab of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. But instead of chairing the meetings of ministers and central bankers, Stiglitz was kept exiled safely behind the blue police cordons, the same as the nuns carrying a large wooden cross, the Bolivian union leaders, the parents of AIDS victims and the other 'anti-globalization' protesters. The ultimate insider was now on the outside.
In 1999 the World Bank fired Stiglitz. He was not allowed quiet retirement; US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, I'm told, demanded a public excommunication for Stiglitz' having expressed his first mild dissent from globalization World Bank style.
Here in Washington we completed the last of several hours of exclusive interviews for The Observer and BBC TV's Newsnight about the real, often hidden, workings of the IMF, World Bank, and the bank's 51% owner, the US Treasury.
And here, from sources unnamable (not Stiglitz), we obtained a cache of documents marked, "confidential," "restricted," and "not otherwise (to be) disclosed without World Bank authorization."
Stiglitz helped translate one from bureaucratise, a "Country Assistance Strategy." There's an Assistance Strategy for every poorer nation, designed, says the World Bank, after careful in-country investigation. But according to insider Stiglitz, the Bank's staff 'investigation' consists of close inspection of a nation's 5-star hotels. It concludes with the Bank staff meeting some begging, busted finance minister who is handed a 'restructuring agreement' pre-drafted for his 'voluntary' signature (I have a selection of these).
Each nation's economy is individually analyzed, then, says Stiglitz, the Bank hands every minister the same exact four-step program.
Step One is Privatization - which Stiglitz said could more accurately be called, 'Briberization.' Rather than object to the sell-offs of state industries, he said national leaders - using the World Bank's demands to silence local critics - happily flogged their electricity and water companies. "You could see their eyes widen" at the prospect of 10% commissions paid to Swiss bank accounts for simply shaving a few billion off the sale price of national assets.
And the US government knew it, charges Stiglitz, at least in the case of the biggest 'briberization' of all, the 1995 Russian sell-off. "The US Treasury view was this was great as we wanted Yeltsin re-elected. We don't care if it's a corrupt election. We want the money to go to Yeltzin" via kick-backs for his campaign.
Stiglitz is no conspiracy nutter ranting about Black Helicopters. The man was inside the game, a member of Bill Clinton's cabinet as Chairman of the President's council of economic advisors.
Most ill-making for Stiglitz is that the US-backed oligarchs stripped Russia's industrial assets, with the effect that the corruption scheme cut national output nearly in half causing depression and starvation.
After briberization, Step Two of the IMF/World Bank one-size-fits-all rescue-your-economy plan is 'Capital Market Liberalization.' In theory, capital market deregulation allows investment capital to flow in and out. Unfortunately, as in Indonesia and Brazil, the money simply flowed out and out. Stiglitz calls this the "Hot Money" cycle. Cash comes in for speculation in real estate and currency, then flees at the first whiff of trouble. A nation's reserves can drain in days, hours. And when that happens, to seduce speculators into returning a nation's own capital funds, the IMF demands these nations raise interest rates to 30%, 50% and 80%.
"The result was predictable," said Stiglitz of the Hot Money tidal waves in Asia and Latin America. Higher interest rates demolished property values, savaged industrial production and drained national treasuries.
At this point, the IMF drags the gasping nation to Step Three: Market-Based Pricing, a fancy term for raising prices on food, water and cooking gas. This leads, predictably, to Step-Three-and-a-Half: what Stiglitz calls, "The IMF riot."
The IMF riot is painfully predictable. When a nation is, "down and out, [the IMF] takes advantage and squeezes the last pound of blood out of them. They turn up the heat until, finally, the whole cauldron blows up," as when the IMF eliminated food and fuel subsidies for the poor in Indonesia in 1998. Indonesia exploded into riots, but there are other examples - the Bolivian riots over water prices last year and this February, the riots in Ecuador over the rise in cooking gas prices imposed by the World Bank. You'd almost get the impression that the riot is written into the plan.
And it is. What Stiglitz did not know is that, while in the States, BBC and The Observer obtained several documents from inside the World Bank, stamped over with those pesky warnings, "confidential," "restricted," "not to be disclosed." Let's get back to one: the "Interim Country Assistance Strategy" for Ecuador, in it the Bank several times states - with cold accuracy - that they expected their plans to spark, "social unrest," to use their bureaucratic term for a nation in flames.
That's not surprising. The secret report notes that the plan to make the US dollar Ecuador's currency has pushed 51% of the population below the poverty line. The World Bank "Assistance" plan simply calls for facing down civil strife and suffering with, "political resolve" - and still higher prices.
The IMF riots (and by riots I mean peaceful demonstrations dispersed by bullets, tanks and teargas) cause new panicked flights of capital and government bankruptcies. This economic arson has it's bright side - for foreign corporations, who can then pick off remaining assets, such as the odd mining concession or port, at fire sale prices.
Stiglitz notes that the IMF and World Bank are not heartless adherents to market economics. At the same time the IMF stopped Indonesia 'subsidizing' food purchases, "when the banks need a bail-out, intervention (in the market) is welcome." The IMF scrounged up tens of billions of dollars to save Indonesia's financiers and, by extension, the US and European banks from which they had borrowed.
A pattern emerges. There are lots of losers in this system but one clear winner: the Western banks and US Treasury, making the big bucks off this crazy new international capital churn. Stiglitz told me about his unhappy meeting, early in his World Bank tenure, with Ethopia's new president in the nation's first democratic election. The World Bank and IMF had ordered Ethiopia to divert aid money to its reserve account at the US Treasury, which pays a pitiful 4% return, while the nation borrowed US dollars at 12% to feed its population. The new president begged Stiglitz to let him use the aid money to rebuild the nation. But no, the loot went straight off to the US Treasury's vault in Washington.
Now we arrive at Step Four of what the IMF and World Bank call their "poverty reduction strategy": Free Trade. This is free trade by the rules of the World Trade Organization and World Bank, Stiglitz the insider likens free trade WTO-style to the Opium Wars. "That too was about opening markets," he said. As in the 19th century, Europeans and Americans today are kicking down the barriers to sales in Asia, Latin American and Africa, while barricading our own markets against Third World agriculture.
In the Opium Wars, the West used military blockades to force open markets for their unbalanced trade. Today, the World Bank can order a financial blockade just as effective - and sometimes just as deadly.
Stiglitz is particularly emotional over the WTO's intellectual property rights treaty (it goes by the acronym TRIPS, more on that in the next chapters). It is here, says the economist, that the new global order has "condemned people to death" by imposing impossible tariffs and tributes to pay to pharmaceutical companies for branded medicines. "They don't care," said the professor of the corporations and bank loans he worked with, "if people live or die."
By the way, don't be confused by the mix in this discussion of the IMF, World Bank and WTO. They are interchangeable masks of a single governance system. They have locked themselves together by what are unpleasantly called, "triggers." Taking a World Bank loan for a school 'triggers' a requirement to accept every 'conditionality' - they average 111 per nation - laid down by both the World Bank and IMF. In fact, said Stiglitz the IMF requires nations to accept trade policies more punitive than the official WTO rules.
Stiglitz greatest concern is that World Bank plans, devised in secrecy and driven by an absolutist ideology, are never open for discourse or dissent. Despite the West's push for elections throughout the developing world, the so-called Poverty Reduction Programs "undermine democracy."
And they don't work. Black Africa's productivity under the guiding hand of IMF structural "assistance" has gone to hell in a handbag. Did any nation avoid this fate? Yes, said Stiglitz, identifying Botswana. Their trick? "They told the IMF to go packing."
So then I turned on Stiglitz. OK, Mr Smart-Guy Professor, how would you help developing nations? Stiglitz proposed radical land reform, an attack at the heart of "landlordism," on the usurious rents charged by the propertied oligarchies worldwide, typically 50% of a tenant's crops. So I had to ask the professor: as you were top economist at the World Bank, why didn't the Bank follow your advice?
"If you challenge [land ownership], that would be a change in the power of the elites. That's not high on their agenda." Apparently not.
Ultimately, what drove him to put his job on the line was the failure of the banks and US Treasury to change course when confronted with the crises - failures and suffering perpetrated by their four-step monetarist mambo. Every time their free market solutions failed, the IMF simply demanded more free market policies.
"It's a little like the Middle Ages," the insider told me, "When the patient died they would say, "well, he stopped the bloodletting too soon, he still had a little blood in him."
I took away from my talks with the professor that the solution to world poverty and crisis is simple: remove the bloodsuckers.
******
A version of this was first published as "The IMF's Four Steps to Damnation" in The Observer (London) in April and another version in The Big Issue - that's the magazine that the homeless flog on platforms in the London Underground. Big Issue offered equal space to the IMF, whose "deputy chief media officer" wrote:
"... I find it impossible to respond given the depth and breadth of hearsay and misinformation in [Palast's] report."
Of course it was difficult for the Deputy Chief to respond. The information (and documents) came from the unhappy lot inside his agency and the World Bank.
Award-winning reporter Palast writes Inside Corporate America for the London Observer. To read other Palast reports, to contact the author or to subscribe to his column, go to GregPalast.Com"
Oh yeah.. IMF also wants to print global super currency, but I suppose you already knew that so it's no big deal. ;)
keskiviikko 1. huhtikuuta 2009
Booga-Wooga
In case you've seen the media hype on the missile test by North Korea set to come any day now, you need to know something. They say they're launching a satellite and that may very well be the case but the media propaganda never connects the dots. Here goes:
"Donald Rumsfeld, the US secretary of defense, was on the board of technology giant Asea Brown Bovery (ABB) when it won a deal to supply North Korea with two nuclear power plants.
Weapons experts say waste material from the two reactors could be used for so-called 'dirty bombs'.
The Swiss-based ABB on Friday told swissinfo that Rumsfeld was involved with the company in early 2000, when it netted a $200 million (SFr270million) contract with Pyongyang.
The ABB contract was to deliver equipment and services for two nuclear power stations at Kumho, on North Koreaís east coast.
Rumsfeld - who is one of the Bush administration's most strident 'hardliners' on North Korea - was a member of ABB's board between 1990 and February 2001, when he left to take up his current post.
Wolfram Eberhardt, a spokesman for ABB, told swissinfo that Rumsfeld ìwas at nearly all the board meetings during his decade-long involvement with the company.
The ABB contract was a consequence of a 1994 deal between the US and Pyongyang to allow construction of two reactors in exchange for a freeze on the North's nuclear weapons programme.
North Korea revealed last year that it had secretly continued its nuclear weapons programme, despite its obligations under the deal with Washington.
The Bush government has repeatedly used the agreement to criticise the former Clinton administration for being too soft on North Korea. Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, has been among the most vocal critics of the 1994 weapons accord.
Weapons experts have also speculated that waste material from the two reactors could be used for so-called 'dirty bombs'.
Rumsfeld's position at ABB could prove embarrassing for the Bush administration since while he was a director he was also active on issues of weapons proliferation, chairing the 1998 congressional Ballistic Missile Threat commission.
The commission suggested the Clinton-era deal with Pyongyang gave too much away because "North Korea maintains an active weapons of mass destruction programme, including a nuclear weapons programme."
***
It's extremely hard to read mainstream papers without a frustration that'll explode your brains. So yeah, it's all bonkers, once again.
"Donald Rumsfeld, the US secretary of defense, was on the board of technology giant Asea Brown Bovery (ABB) when it won a deal to supply North Korea with two nuclear power plants.
Weapons experts say waste material from the two reactors could be used for so-called 'dirty bombs'.
The Swiss-based ABB on Friday told swissinfo that Rumsfeld was involved with the company in early 2000, when it netted a $200 million (SFr270million) contract with Pyongyang.
The ABB contract was to deliver equipment and services for two nuclear power stations at Kumho, on North Koreaís east coast.
Rumsfeld - who is one of the Bush administration's most strident 'hardliners' on North Korea - was a member of ABB's board between 1990 and February 2001, when he left to take up his current post.
Wolfram Eberhardt, a spokesman for ABB, told swissinfo that Rumsfeld ìwas at nearly all the board meetings during his decade-long involvement with the company.
The ABB contract was a consequence of a 1994 deal between the US and Pyongyang to allow construction of two reactors in exchange for a freeze on the North's nuclear weapons programme.
North Korea revealed last year that it had secretly continued its nuclear weapons programme, despite its obligations under the deal with Washington.
The Bush government has repeatedly used the agreement to criticise the former Clinton administration for being too soft on North Korea. Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, has been among the most vocal critics of the 1994 weapons accord.
Weapons experts have also speculated that waste material from the two reactors could be used for so-called 'dirty bombs'.
Rumsfeld's position at ABB could prove embarrassing for the Bush administration since while he was a director he was also active on issues of weapons proliferation, chairing the 1998 congressional Ballistic Missile Threat commission.
The commission suggested the Clinton-era deal with Pyongyang gave too much away because "North Korea maintains an active weapons of mass destruction programme, including a nuclear weapons programme."
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It's extremely hard to read mainstream papers without a frustration that'll explode your brains. So yeah, it's all bonkers, once again.
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