With the US war in Iraq supposedly having reached a good conclusion (or halfway decent … or better than nothing … or let’s get the hell out of here while some of us are still in one piece and there are some Iraqis we haven’t yet killed), the best and the brightest in our government and media turn their thoughts to what to do about Afghanistan. It appears that no one seems to remember, if they ever knew, that Afghanistan was not really about 9-11 or fighting terrorists (except the many the US has created by its invasion and occupation), but was about pipelines.

President Obama declared in August 2009: “But we must never forget this is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans.”

Never mind that out of the tens of thousands of people the United States and its NATO front have killed in Afghanistan not one has been identified as having had anything to do with the events of September 11, 2001.

Never mind that the “plotting to attack America” in 2001 was devised in Germany and Spain and the United States more than in Afghanistan. Why hasn’t the United States bombed those countries?

Indeed, what actually was needed to plot to buy airline tickets and take flying lessons in the United States? A room with some chairs? What does “an even larger safe haven” mean? A larger room with more chairs? Perhaps a blackboard? Terrorists intent upon attacking the United States can meet almost anywhere, with Afghanistan probably being one of the worst places for them, given the American occupation.

The only “necessity” that drew the United States to Afghanistan was the desire to establish a military presence in this land that is next door to the Caspian Sea region of Central Asia — which reportedly contains the second largest proven reserves of petroleum and natural gas in the world — and build oil and gas pipelines from that region running through Afghanistan.

Afghanistan is well situated for oil and gas pipelines to serve much of south Asia, pipelines that can bypass those not-yet Washington clients, Iran and Russia. If only the Taliban would not attack the lines. Here’s Richard Boucher, US Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs, in 2007: “One of our goals is to stabilize Afghanistan, so it can become a conduit and a hub between South and Central Asia so that energy can flow to the south.”

Since the 1980s all kinds of pipelines have been planned for the area, only to be delayed or canceled by one military, financial or political problem or another. For example, the so-called TAPI pipeline (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) had strong support from Washington, which was eager to block a competing pipeline that would bring gas to Pakistan and India from Iran. TAPI goes back to the late 1990s, when the Taliban government held talks with the California-based oil company Unocal Corporation. These talks were conducted with the full knowledge of the Clinton administration, and were undeterred by the extreme repression of Taliban society. Taliban officials even made trips to the United States for discussions. ¹¹ Testifying before the House Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific on February 12, 1998, Unocal representative John Maresca discussed the importance of the pipeline project and the increasing difficulties in dealing with the Taliban:

The region’s total oil reserves may well reach more than 60 billion barrels of oil. Some estimates are as high as 200 billion barrels … From the outset, we have made it clear that construction of the pipeline we have proposed across Afghanistan could not begin until a recognized government is in place that has the confidence of governments, leaders, and our company.

When those talks stalled in July, 2001 the Bush administration threatened the Taliban with military reprisals if the government did not go along with American demands. The talks finally broke down for good the following month, a month before 9-11.

The United States has been serious indeed about the Caspian Sea and Persian Gulf oil and gas areas. Through one war or another beginning with the Gulf War of 1990-1, the US has managed to establish military bases in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan.

The war against the Taliban can’t be “won” short of killing everyone in Afghanistan. The United States may well try again to negotiate some form of pipeline security with the Taliban, then get out, and declare “victory”. Barack Obama can surely deliver an eloquent victory speech from his teleprompter. It might even include the words “freedom” and “democracy”, but certainly not “pipeline”.

William Blum is an American, historian and critic of United States foreign policy. He is the author of Killing Hope: U.S. Military & CIA Interventions Since World War II. He has described his life’s mission as: “If not ending, at least slowing down the American Empire. At least injuring the beast. It’s causing so much suffering around the world.“Mr. Blum can be reached through his website http://killinghope.org .

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As we all know only too well, the United States and Israel would hate to see Iran possessing nuclear weapons. Being “the only nuclear power in the Middle East” is a great card for Israel to have in its hand. But — in the real, non-propaganda world — is USrael actually fearful of an attack from a nuclear-armed Iran? In case you’ve forgotten…

In 2007, in a closed discussion, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said that in her opinion “Iranian nuclear weapons do not pose an existential threat to Israel.” She “also criticized the exaggerated use that [Israeli] Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is making of the issue of the Iranian bomb, claiming that he is attempting to rally the public around him by playing on its most basic fears.” ¹

2009: “A senior Israeli official in Washington” asserted that “Iran would be unlikely to use its missiles in an attack [against Israel] because of the certainty of retaliation.” ²

In 2010 the Sunday Times of London (January 10) reported that Brigadier-General Uzi Eilam, war hero, pillar of the Israeli defense establishment, and former director-general of Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission, “believes it will probably take Iran seven years to make nuclear weapons.”

Early last month, US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told a television audience: “Are they [Iran] trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No, but we know that they’re trying to develop a nuclear capability.” ³

A week later we could read in the New York Times (January 15) that “three leading Israeli security experts — the Mossad chief, Tamir Pardo, a former Mossad chief, Efraim Halevy, and a former military chief of staff, Dan Halutz — all recently declared that a nuclear Iran would not pose an existential threat to Israel.”

Then, a few days afterward, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, in an interview with Israeli Army Radio (January 18), had this exchange:

Question: Is it Israel’s judgment that Iran has not yet decided to turn its nuclear potential into weapons of mass destruction?

Barak: People ask whether Iran is determined to break out from the control [inspection] regime right now … in an attempt to obtain nuclear weapons or an operable installation as quickly as possible. Apparently that is not the case.

Lastly, we have the US Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, in a report to Congress: “We do not know, however, if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons. … There are “certain things [the Iranians] have not done” that would be necessary to build a warhead. ⁴

Admissions like the above — and there are others — are never put into headlines by the American mass media; indeed, only very lightly reported at all; and sometimes distorted — On the Public Broadcasting System (PBS News Hour, January 9), the non-commercial network much beloved by American liberals, the Panetta quote above was reported as: “But we know that they’re trying to develop a nuclear capability, and that’s what concerns us.” Flagrantly omitted were the preceding words: “Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No …” ⁵

One of Israel’s leading military historians, Martin van Creveld, was interviewed by Playboy magazine in June 2007:

Playboy: Can the World live with a nuclear Iran?

Van Creveld: The U.S. has lived with a nuclear Soviet Union and a nuclear China, so why not a nuclear Iran? I’ve researched how the U.S. opposed nuclear proliferation in the past, and each time a country was about to proliferate, the U.S. expressed its opposition in terms of why this other country was very dangerous and didn’t deserve to have nuclear weapons. Americans believe they’re the only people who deserve to have nuclear weapons, because they are good and democratic and they like Mother and apple pie and the flag. But Americans are the only ones who have used them. … We are in no danger at all of having an Iranian nuclear weapon dropped on us. We cannot say so too openly, however, because we have a history of using any threat in order to get weapons … thanks to the Iranian threat, we are getting weapons from the U.S. and Germany.”

And throughout these years, regularly, Israeli and American officials have been assuring us that Iran is World Nuclear Threat Number One, that we can’t relax our guard against them, that there should be no limit to the ultra-tough sanctions we impose upon the Iranian people and their government. Repeated murder and attempted murder of Iraqi nuclear scientists, sabotage of Iranian nuclear equipment with computer viruses, the sale of faulty parts and raw materials, unexplained plane crashes, explosions at Iranian facilities … Who can be behind this but USrael? How do we know? It’s called “plain common sense”. Or do you think it was Costa Rica? Or perhaps South Africa? Or maybe Thailand?

Defense Secretary Panetta recently commented on one of the assassinations of an Iranian scientist. He put it succinctly: “That’s not what the United States does.” ⁶

Does anyone know Leon Panetta’s email address? I’d like to send him my list of United States assassination plots. More than 50 foreign leaders were targeted over the years, many successfully. ⁷

Not long ago, Iraq and Iran were regarded by USrael as the most significant threats to Israeli Middle-East hegemony. Thus was born the myth of Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction, and the United States proceeded to turn Iraq into a basket case. That left Iran, and thus was born the myth of the Iranian Nuclear Threat. As it began to sink in that Iran was not really that much of a nuclear threat, or that this “threat” was becoming too difficult to sell to the rest of the world, USrael decided that, at a minimum, it wanted regime change. The next step may be to block Iran’s lifeline — oil sales using the Strait of Hormuz. Ergo, the recent US and EU naval buildup near the Persian Gulf, an act of war trying to goad Iran into firing the first shot. If Iran tries to counter this blockade it could be the signal for another US Basket Case, the fourth in a decade, with the devastated people of Libya and Afghanistan, along with Iraq, currently enjoying America’s unique gift of freedom and democracy.

On January 11, the Washington Post reported: “In addition to influencing Iranian leaders directly, [a US intelligence official] says another option here is that [sanctions] will create hate and discontent at the street level so that the Iranian leaders realize that they need to change their ways.”

How utterly charming, these tactics and goals for the 21st century by the leader of “The Free World”. (Is that expression still used?)

The neo-conservative thinking (and Barack Obama can be regarded as often being a fellow traveler of such) is even more charming than that. Listen to Danielle Pletka, vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at America’s most prominent neo-con think tank, American Enterprise Institute:

The biggest problem for the United States is not Iran getting a nuclear weapon and testing it, it’s Iran getting a nuclear weapon and not using it. Because the second that they have one and they don’t do anything bad, all of the naysayers are going to come back and say, “See, we told you Iran is a responsible power. We told you Iran wasn’t getting nuclear weapons in order to use them immediately.” … And they will eventually define Iran with nuclear weapons as not a problem. ⁸

What are we to make of that and all the other quotations above? I think it gets back to my opening statement: Being “the only nuclear power in the Middle East” is a great card for Israel to have in its hand. Is USrael willing to go to war to hold on to that card?

William Blum is an American, historian and critic of United States foreign policy. He is the author of Killing Hope: U.S. Military & CIA Interventions Since World War II. He has described his life’s mission as: “If not ending, at least slowing down the American Empire. At least injuring the beast. It’s causing so much suffering around the world.“Mr. Blum can be reached through his website http://killinghope.org .

 Notes

1. 1.     Haaretz.com (Israel), October 25, 2007; print edition October 26 ^↩
2. 2.     Washington Post, March 5, 2009^↩
3. 3.     “Face the Nation”, CBS, January 8, 2012; see video^↩
4. 4.     The Guardian (London), January 31, 2012″ ^↩
5. 5.     “PBS’s Dishonest Iran Edit”, FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), January 10, 2012^↩
6. 6.     Reuters, January 12, 2012 ^↩
7. 7.     http://killinghope.org/bblum6/assass.htm^↩
8. 8.     Video of Pletka making these remarks^↩

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Last week Boiling Frogs Post broke the newly brewing story-line in the war propaganda against Iran involving an alleged Iranian terror plot in Azerbaijan. Yesterday we had a follow up on the emerging ‘alleged’ details in the ‘alleged’ plot claiming Israeli diplomats and religious figures were the intended targets of the alleged Iranian assassination plot [All Emphasis Mine]:

Three Azerbaijani citizens who were arrested by security forces last week planned to attack Jewish targets, including Israeli ambassador to Baku Michael Lotem, a local media outlet reported Tuesday. Israeli sources also speculated that the terror cell members plotted to attack the embassy in Baku and the ambassador… The men are suspected of plotting to kill a rabbi and a teacher at the Ohr Avner Chabad Jewish Day School in Baku as revenge for the recent killing of a nuclear scientist in Tehran…Two of the suspects were identified as Rasim Aliyev and Ali Huseynov. According to reports, they received instructions from Balagardash Dadashov, who was in contact with Iranian intelligence and received a sniper rifle, pistols and explosive devices to attack Chabad emissaries operating in Baku.

…

As with many stories, especially those involving ‘alleged’ terrorism operations conducted by the nations on the list of our to-be invaded-occupied nations it is important to pay specific attention to the context, and other ancillary and related details and facts. Before we do that let’s note the most important fact in the case of Iran: which actor in the current global imperial pursuits has been the primary and most active force against Iran and for its invasion? I believe everyone would unanimously and very easily answer this question. Israel.

While the pressure and the venues of attacks on Iran have been growing and escalating- think nuclear arms development accusations, meddling in Iraq accusations, alleged assassination attempt against Saudi Diplomat in the US accusations …, we suddenly get a brand new allegation accusing Iran of plotting a terror act in Azerbaijan. Not only that, the targets of this alleged terror plot happen to be none other than Israel. If that doesn’t give you pause, make it a long pause, followed by firm skepticism, well, your mental faculties may be in need of a serious check-up followed by a thorough tune-up.

Now, let’s review the latest details providing needed context in the new allegations pointed directly at Iran by Israel and Azerbaijan.

Four days after we brought the readers’ attention to this significant developing story, four days late, the mainstream media began its coverage, of course with their own version. Here is a report by Reuters:

Authorities in Azerbaijan, a former Soviet republic bordering Iran, have arrested two men suspected of plotting to attack prominent foreigners including Israel’s ambassador and a local rabbi, officials and media reported on Wednesday.

The National Security Ministry said the men were connected to an Iranian citizen who had links with Iran’s intelligence.

…

Here is an excerpt clarifying Azerbaijan’s position and its intimate ties to Israel and the US, but fails to mention its status as ‘To-Be-NATO Member’ soon:

Azerbaijan, a secular Muslim country, is home to more than 9,000 Jews and has friendly ties with Israel and the United States. A major energy producer, it exports oil to Israel and imports weapons and military hardware.

And here is the US setting the stage for the next wave of conspiracy in setting up Iran:

The U.S. embassy issued a warning to its citizens saying “the possibility remains for actions against U.S. or other high-profile foreign interests in Azerbaijan”.

…

Diplomatic ties between Azerbaijan and Iran are cool, but Iranian companies operate and have stakes in oil contracts in the Caspian Sea state, which exports around 1 million barrels of crude a day (bpd) westward through a pipeline operated by a consortium led by BP.

…

Also yesterday, Israeli President Shimon Peres personally saluted Azerbaijan for allegedly foiling the alleged terror plot:

Peres, attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, told Ilham Aliyev that Israel saluted his country for “saving lives on your land from a murderous terrorist attack.” Azerbaijan’s National Security Ministry revealed last week that it uncovered a cell planning terrorist attacks. Two Azerbaijanis and an Iranian citizen living in Iran were implicated in the plot. The two Azerbaijanis were arrested.

…

Here is what Aliyev emphasized:

Aliyev, according to Peres’s office, said the plot showed “to what degree we are in a difficult and dangerous neighborhood…Aliyev said Azerbaijan would continue to cooperate with Israel, especially on homeland security issues.

…

Speaking of relations getting more intimate between Azerbaijan and Israel:

During the signing ceremony SCC head noted that the State Customs Committee is interested in expanding cooperation with the Israeli Customs Directorate, “The agreement signed between the Azerbaijani and Israeli governments gives an impetus to bilateral relationships, and will accelerate the process of cooperation and integration of the parties.”

Azerbaijan has become an important trading partner with Israel on security and foreign affairs. Economic cooperation between Israel and Azerbaijan has grown significantly. In 2011, the trade between the two countries totaled more than $2.5 billion.

…

Remember those ‘conflicting’ reports on the ‘alleged’ Iranian assassination plot against the Saudi Diplomat in the US? You can refresh your memory here.  Well, this ‘alleged’ plot is also filled with ‘conflicting’ reports and details, already:

Conflicting reports have emerged about the terror plot. While local media said an Iranian-backed terror cell had planned to kill Jewish teachers at the Or Avner Jewish schooll just outside the capital Baku, other reports in the media claimed the men were offered $150,000 by Iran to assassinate Israel’s Ambassador Michael Lotem.

A spokesman for the Or Avner network of Jewish schools, however, denied on Tuesday night any knowledge of a planned attack. “The Jews of Baku and the administrators of the school have no information on what was reported in Azeri media last Thursday,” said the spokesman. “The community’s routine has not changed.”

…

Here is a video clip on this new alleged Iranian Terror Plot:

In the UK, the Telegraph also reported on the ‘alleged’ story, and of course, it added the usual UK twist and spice:

If true, the plot will be seen as the latest evidence of Iran’s intentions to strike at its enemies abroad. Last October, the US justice ministry said it had uncovered an Iranian conspiracy to use members of a Mexican drug cartel to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to Washington.

…

Speaking of Britain, the following data is also noteworthy:

The volume of investments made by BP and its partners in Azerbaijan amounted to $ 35 billion during its activity in the country, BP Azerbaijan company head Rashid Javanshir said during a ceremony of signing the agreement on the support with the National Olympic and National Paralympic Committees… BP will continue its activity to develop the economy as a whole and oil and gas industry in particular in subsequent years, he said.

…

We were the first US site to break and cover this still-brewing story. We will continue our coverage and rely on you to disseminate this new scheme in our nation’s desperate attempt to invade-occupy yet another nation.  Please stay tuned.

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Last week we broke the newly brewing story-line in the war propaganda against Iran here at Boiling Frogs Post. The new scenario was originated, disseminated and promoted by a known member of the loyal propaganda machine of our global imperial pursuits, Radio Free Europe. According to the new story-line, our soon-to-be-NATO member intimate ally regime in Central Asia, Azerbaijan, claims it has allegedly exposed an Iranian assassination plot and Iranian terror cell in its capital city-Baku [All Emphasis Mine]:

Azerbaijan’s National Security Ministry (MNS) says it has uncovered a terror group that was plotting to assassinate public figures, RFE/RL’s Azerbaijani Service reports. The ministry said on January 19 that the group was planning terrorist acts and had illegally acquired firearms, military supplies, and explosives. The APA news agency quoted the MNS as saying that Azerbaijani citizens Rasim Aliyev, Ali Huseynov, and Balaqardash Dadashov — the latter of whom is living in Iran — coordinated efforts to acquire firearms and explosives.It said those materials were brought illegally to Azerbaijan from Iran.

The MSN said Dadashov was in contact with Iranian special service bodies and ordered the assassination of prominent foreigners living in Baku. It claims that Dadashov promised Aliyev — his brother-in-law — $150,000 for his work.The MSN said Dadashov had told his accomplices that he would discuss their plans with Iranian secret services.

…

Today, brewing in the background are new allegations and  further thickening of this new plot directed against Iran, providing further unsubstantiated details.  According to the unsubstantiated new claims those arrested by Azeri security forces last week planned to attack Jewish targets, including Israeli ambassador to Baku, Michael Lotem:

Three Azerbaijani citizens who were arrested by security forces last week planned to attack Jewish targets, including Israeli ambassador to Baku Michael Lotem, a local media outlet reported Tuesday. Israeli sources also speculated that the terror cell members plotted to attack the embassy in Baku and the ambassador.

…

The men are suspected of plotting to kill a rabbi and a teacher at the Ohr Avner Chabad Jewish Day School in Baku as revenge for the recent killing of a nuclear scientist in Tehran. The Iranian regime claimed Israel was behind the assassination. Two of the suspects were identified as Rasim Aliyev and Ali Huseynov. According to reports, they received instructions from Balagardash Dadashov, who was in contact with Iranian intelligence and received a sniper rifle, pistols and explosive devices to attack Chabad emissaries operating in Baku.

…

Azeri politicians are accusing Iran of creating provocations following the uncovering of an alleged terror plot to allegedly assassinate Israel’s ambassador to Baku.

“On one hand, Iran talks of Shiite Muslim brotherhood, but on the other it cooperates with and supports terrorists of Christian-Armenian,” said chairman of the country’s Civil Solidarity Party Sabir Rustamkhanly…

…

For the last few months the empire’s nuclear weapons allegations against Iran have produced very little results; they haven’t really stuck. Most likely the Saudi Prince-Ambassador Assassination Plot-Scenario was outsourced to a not very competent or bright Hollywood producer-director; it failed big time and it certainly was embarrassing to all secondary actors such as the FBI. The empire still hasn’t invaded Iran. The Caspian Sea is waiting, and so many are drooling. It must be time for a new scenario. A new script. A brand new actor. Welcome Azerbaijan, a thickening new assassination plot, an alleged scary terror cell in Baku, and alleged Israeli targets. The powers up there seem desperate, and desperation can do stupid things with irreversible damage.

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The imperial establishment’s desperation to militarily go after and take over the last ‘real’ domino – Iran, has truly reached a peak, and with that desperation comes a new farfetched and fantastical scenario. Last time the script of their scenario was written based on a Saudi Diplomat actor. It was only three months ago when the puppet mainstream media jumped in with a made-up, dubious, far-reaching, murkily and vaguely-sourced story of the thwarted Iranian plot to kill the Saudi Ambassador in US. Here are a few excerpts from CNN’s fabulous-ized headline story that played around the clock for days, beating the war drums for its masters:  

U.S. agents disrupted an Iranian assassination-for-hire scheme targeting Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States, U.S. officials said Tuesday…The Saudi ambassador was not the only intended target, U.S. officials said. The suspects also discussed attacking Israeli and Saudi embassies in Washington and possibly Buenos Aires, Argentina, a senior U.S. official said.

…

Of course CNN was not the lone wolf in the intense broadcasting and dissemination of this Washington script. The rest of the MSM puppets followed the same trend: Washington Post, New York Times, FOX … Not only that, the pseudo-alternative con outlets did exactly the same thing. Just check out the verbatim dissemination by Huffington Post and other ‘popular’ so-called alternatives. Thankfully we had enough facts, critical thinkers, and independent news fronts to expose all the holes in that concocted story:

A close analysis of the FBI deposition reveals, however, that independent evidence for the charge that Arbabsiar was sent by the Qods Force on a mission to arrange for the assassination of Jubeir is lacking. The FBI account is full of holes and contradictions, moreover. The document gives good reason to doubt that Arbabsiar and his confederates in Iran had the intention of assassinating Jubeir, and to believe instead that the FBI hatched the plot as part of a sting operation.

…

So that scenario script kinda failed. Of course the other long-cooking concoction on Iran’s nuclear weapons development has not gotten the establishment hawks far either. Even the mainstream has been grudgingly admitting the holes-filled allegations on dangerous nuclear weapons armed Iran!

You’d think all the debunked allegations and failed attempts would give the imperial hawks a bit of a pause to come up with a better concoction. At least go away for a while and rethink their strategy; no? Obviously not. Desperation can do amazingly stupid things to greed-driven, wild-eyed and blood-thirsty bullies in pursuit of expanded turf.  They just came out with a new concocted scenario and allegations. This time their lead actor happens to be Azerbaijan.

Our soon-to-be-NATO member intimate ally regime in Central Asia, Azerbaijan, claims it has allegedly exposed an Iranian assassination plot and Iranian terror cell in its capital city-Baku [All Emphasis Mine]:

Azerbaijan’s National Security Ministry (MNS) says it has uncovered a terror group that was plotting to assassinate public figures, RFE/RL’s Azerbaijani Service reports. The ministry said on January 19 that the group was planning terrorist acts and had illegally acquired firearms, military supplies, and explosives.

The APA news agency quoted the MNS as saying that Azerbaijani citizens Rasim Aliyev, Ali Huseynov, and Balaqardash Dadashov — the latter of whom is living in Iran — coordinated efforts to acquire firearms and explosives.It said those materials were brought illegally to Azerbaijan from Iran.

The MSN said Dadashov was in contact with Iranian special service bodies and ordered the assassination of prominent foreigners living in Baku. It claims that Dadashov promised Aliyev — his brother-in-law — $150,000 for his work.The MSN said Dadashov had told his accomplices that he would discuss their plans with Iranian secret services.

…

Now, interestingly the first place/source to start to disseminate our script writers’ new concocted scenario involving another ‘Iranian Plot’ was no other than … yes, you guessed it: Radio Free Europe. Check out this news’ origination by this long-propaganda machine of our global imperial pursuits here. The second source to pick up on it was no other than a Soros-Funded site on Central Asia here. Guaranteed: the other MSM outlets will be having a field day with this new propaganda. In fact, they’ve been hot on another related side story with the same actor written by the same writers. I kid you not; here it is: Azerbaijan claims that the recent cyber attacks that destroyed its government and news websites originated in … Iran! Let’s check out the headline on this today at …Business Week:

Jan. 21 (Bloomberg) — Cyber attacks that destroyed government and news websites in Azerbaijan this week mostly originated in Iran, government minister Ali Abbasov said. An investigation by Abbasov’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology found that of 25 attacks, 24 came from Iran and one from the Netherlands, Abbasov told reporters in the Azeri capital, Baku, today.

…

For the last few months the empire’s nuclear weapons allegations against Iran have produced very little results; they haven’t really stuck. Most likely the Saudi Prince-Ambassador Assassination Plot-Scenario was outsourced to a not very competent or bright Hollywood producer-director; it failed big time and it certainly was embarrassing to all secondary actors such as the FBI. The empire still hasn’t invaded Iran. The Caspian Sea is waiting, and so many are drooling. It must be time for a new scenario. A new script. A brand new actor. Welcome Azerbaijan, a thickening new assassination plot, a scary terror cell in Baku, and savvy Iranian cyber-terrorists obsessed with this dingy little country’s dingier-littler government and news websites.

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Have you noticed how it’s been all quiet on the Western MSM War Propaganda front? As more and more alternative news outlets are increasing their reporting on the real situation in Syria, as even the puppet Arab League is issuing observations contradicting previously reported ‘un-sourced and undocumented’ atrocities and a made-up huge death-toll caused by Assad’s regime, the mainstream media and corporate-funded NGO news fronts have been decreasing their Syria coverage. It is almost as if they’ve gotten ‘a black-eye’ and gone in hiding. Rest assured, there won’t be any retraction on previously publicized, that is, intensely, un-sourced, un-confirmed, un-documented, fictional death toll numbers and imaginary scenarios.

Let’s take a look at a few recent reports starting with an excellent piece at Asia Times today [All Emphasis Mine]:

Mistaken Case for Syrian Regime Change

What we are seeing in Syria is a deliberate and calculated campaign to bring down the Assad government so as to replace it with a regime “more compatible” with US interests in the region. The blueprint for this project is essentially a report produced by the neo-conservative Brookings Institute for regime change in Iran in 2009. The report – “Which Path to Persia?” [3] – continues to be the generic strategic approach for US-led regime change in the region.

A rereading of it, together with the more recent “Towards a Post-Assad Syria” [4] (which adopts the same language and perspective, but focuses on Syria, and was recently produced by two US neo-conservative think-tanks) illustrates how developments in Syria have been shaped according to the step-by-step approach detailed in the “Paths to Persia” report with the same key objective: regime change.

…

Arguably, the most important component in this struggle for the “strategic prize” has been the deliberate construction of a largely false narrative that pits unarmed democracy demonstrators being killed in their hundreds and thousands as they protest peacefully against an oppressive, violent regime, a “killing machine” [7] led by the “monster” [8] Assad.

Whereas in Libya, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) claimed it had “no confirmed reports of civilian casualties” because, as the New York Times wrote recently, “the alliance had created its own definition for ‘confirmed’: only a death that NATO itself investigated and corroborated could be called confirmed”. “But because the alliance declined to investigate allegations,” the Times wrote, “its casualty tally by definition could not budge – from zero”. [9]

In Syria, we see the exact opposite: the majority of Western mainstream media outlets, along with the media of the US’s allies in the region, particularly al-Jazeera and the Saudi-owned al-Arabiya TV channels, are effectively collaborating with the “regime change” narrative and agenda with a near-complete lack of questioning or investigation of statistics and information put out by organizations and media outlets that are either funded or owned by the US/European/Gulf alliance – the very same countries instigating the regime change project in the first place.

Then, the article sets about analyzing and exposing dubious MSM and Western-Funded dirty NGOs (You may want to see my previous report on how for months ‘AntiWar.Com,’ despite all appeals, disseminated and marketed the misinformation and propaganda by these exact same dirty sources here):

Claims of “massacres”, “campaigns of rape targeting women and girls in predominantly Sunni towns” [10] “torture” and even “child-rape” [11] are reported by the international press based largely on two sources – the British-based Syrian Observatory of Human Rights and the Local Co-ordination Committees (LCCs) – with minimal additional checking or verification.

Hiding behind the rubric – “we are not able to verify these statistics” – the lack of integrity in reporting by the Western mainstream media has been starkly apparent since the onset of events in Syria. A decade after the Iraq war, it would seem that no lessons from 2003 – from the demonization of Saddam Hussein and his purported weapons of mass destruction – have been learnt.

Of the three main sources for all data on numbers of protesters killed and numbers of people attending demonstrations – the pillars of the narrative – all are part of the “regime change” alliance. The Syrian Observatory of Human Rights, in particular, is reportedly funded through a Dubai-based fund with pooled (and therefore deniable) Western-Gulf money (Saudi Arabia alone has, according to Elliot Abrams [12] allocated US$130 billion to “palliate the masses” of the Arab Spring).

…

Please go read this stellar analysis by Aisling Byrne here at Asia Times. Bravo.

Russia Today has been reporting both sides and doing so with a fair balance. Here is the latest from RT:

Syrians Being Killed by Gangs & defectors

As Syrian forces reportedly continue to kill civilian protesters, armed rebels have threatened to step up their own attacks. Middle East expert Dr. Jeremy Salt says there is tunnel vision when it comes to deciding just who is doing the killing.

“In its report, the Human Rights Council said 4,000 [people have been killed in Syria to date]…but there was no information about where they got that figure from,” he said. “A few days later, Navi Pillay, who is the UN Human Rights Commissioner, stood up in the Security Council and said 5,000 – and the figure echoes around the world,” he told RT.
“I think it lodges in the popular imagination as 5,000 people being killed by the Syrian government – by the security forces, by the military – whatever. Whereas in fact, I don’t think there’s any doubt at all that a large number of military, of civilians have been killed by armed gangs and by defectors,” Salt explained.

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Look, even the filthy-owned, puppet in disguise, Al Jazeera, who has been beating the War on Syria drums loudly for months, has begun backpedaling:

The case against military intervention in Syria

In this, the SNC repeated earlier appeals by the Free Syrian Army for a no-fly zone, as well as a few scattered calls in the street. The plight suffered by civilian protesters has indeed reached an unbearable level. This raises questions about how to achieve lasting change in Syria.

Foreign intervention paves the way for a dangerous strategic choice that opposition movements within and outside Syria should carefully weigh. It will be argued here that the struggle for change needs to be fought from within and transition to democracy peacefully implemented. This implies that foreign military intervention should, under all circumstances, be ruled out; domestically, resistance to the regime should also remain unarmed.

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Ordinarily I wouldn’t ask our readers to waste their time and read this Arab branch of our MSM propaganda machine, but I am going to invite you to go and read the above piece and compare it to all their previous reporting on Syria in the last few months; including ‘filming a border city at 5:00 a.m. in order to claim town desertion by protesters!.’

I mean, come on people, even our puppets couldn’t find atrocity and genocidal acts to report back and appease their Western masters! And yet, the black-eyed MSM and corporate-funded and government-backed quasi alternatives are shameless enough to not retract their months-long BS reporting, statistics, and all that heavily promoted fiction.

Now, there are way too many solid and reliable real alternative news outlets to credit with excellent and critical reporting. I won’t be able to list them all, and I am sure many of you already know who they are. So I am going to list less than a handful and congratulate them on their relentless and vigilant reporting and editorials:

Asia Times (Especially Pepe Escobar)

Center for Research on Globalization

Tony Cartalucci’s Land Destroyer

Russia Today

Again, there are many others and they all deserve credit for fair and balanced, and most importantly, independent reporting on Syria. Thank you all!

Hmmmm. For the hall of shame, if I were to list all, I’d take several long web pages. I don’t believe you need that long list of reminders. Think NY Times, Washington Post, Fox News, MSNBC, NBC, CBS, Al Jazeera, News Week, Times …and keep going, and going, and going

On the other hand, I am going to list one major hall of shame member, my one major disappointment:

Antiwar.com

With the exception of Raimondo, Giraldi and a couple of other stellar writers there, their new additions, Ditz & Keaton, have been filling up their front page with all the culprit MSM headlines beating the war drums on Syria, and have been doing so for months. As I’ve said before, a few independent journalists and authors will be writing a series and providing astonishing statistics on AntiWar.Com’s recent troubling changes. Meanwhile I want to go on record and reveal that the new management has been refusing to publish any articles submitted to them on all documented contradictory, factual, reports on Syria. In fact, I have been banned and censored from even posting comments on their site (several respectful but critical comments were taken out, deleted and censored by their new managers).

You see, what really gets my blood boiling on AntiWar.Com is their name, title: Anti War, for Pete’s sake! And what these dubious new additions have been doing lately is the exact opposite. So I hope the good guys there would either kick out these infiltrators, or, just change their name to ProWar.Com. They made it to the top of our list of hall of shame contenders on Syria, Libya and beyond.

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“Most people don’t understand what they have been part of here,” said Command Sgt. Major Ron Kelley as he and other American troops prepared to leave Iraq in mid-December. “We have done a great thing as a nation. We freed a people and gave their country back to them.”

“It is pretty exciting,” said another young American soldier in Iraq. “We are going down in the history books, you might say.” (Washington Post, December 18, 2011)

Ah yes, the history books, the multi-volume leather-bound set of “The Greatest Destructions of One Country by Another.” The newest volume can relate, with numerous graphic photos, how the modern, educated, advanced nation of Iraq was reduced to a quasi failed state; how the Americans, beginning in 1991, bombed for 12 years, with one dubious excuse or another; then invaded, then occupied, overthrew the government, tortured without inhibition, killed wantonly, … how the people of that unhappy land lost everything — their homes, their schools, their electricity, their clean water, their environment, their neighborhoods, their mosques, their archaeology, their jobs, their careers, their professionals, their state-run enterprises, their physical health, their mental health, their health care, their welfare state, their women’s rights, their religious tolerance, their safety, their security, their children, their parents, their past, their present, their future, their lives … More than half the population either dead, wounded, traumatized, in prison, internally displaced, or in foreign exile … The air, soil, water, blood, and genes drenched with depleted uranium … the most awful birth defects … unexploded cluster bombs lying anywhere in wait for children to pick them up … a river of blood running alongside the Euphrates and Tigris … through a country that may never be put back together again.

“It is a common refrain among war-weary Iraqis that things were better before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003,” reported the Washington Post on May 5, 2007.

No matter … drum roll, please … Stand tall American GI hero! And don’t even think of ever apologizing or paying any reparations. Iraq is forced by Washington to continue paying reparations to Kuwait for Iraq’s invasion in 1990 (an invasion instigated in no small measure by the United States). And — deep breath here! — Vietnam has been compensating the United States. Since 1997 Hanoi has been paying off about $145 million in debts left by the defeated South Vietnamese government for American food and infrastructure aid. Thus, Hanoi is reimbursing the United States for part of the cost of the war waged against it. (William Blum, Rogue State, p.304) How much will the United States pay the people of Iraq?

On December 14, at the Fort Bragg, North Carolina military base, Barack Obama stood before an audience of soldiers to speak about the Iraq war. It was a moment in which the president of the United States found it within his heart and soul — as well as within his oft-praised (supposed) intellect — to proclaim:

This is an extraordinary achievement, nearly nine years in the making. And today, we remember everything that you did to make it possible. … Years from now, your legacy will endure. In the names of your fallen comrades etched on headstones at Arlington, and the quiet memorials across our country. In the whispered words of admiration as you march in parades, and in the freedom of our children and grandchildren. … So God bless you all, God bless your families, and God bless the United States of America. … You have earned your place in history because you sacrificed so much for people you have never met.

Does Mr. Obama, the Peace Laureate, believe the words that come out of his mouth?

Barack H. Obama believes only in being the President of the United States. It is the only strong belief the man holds.

William Blum is an American, historian, and critic of United States foreign policy.He is the author of Killing Hope: U.S. Military & CIA Interventions Since World War II. He has described his life’s mission as: “If not ending, at least slowing down the American Empire. At least injuring the beast. It’s causing so much suffering around the world.“Mr. Blum can be reached through his website http://killinghope.org .

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A question asked by many shocked observers today both inside and outside of the United States is “what has become of the America I knew and loved?”

Beginning in the late 1930s as an overt propaganda campaign against fascist Germany and Imperial Japan, the world was treated to a Hollywood version of America as a democratic society that despite its flaws managed to maintain the egalitarian principles of its founding fathers and continued to press forward as a beacon of liberty, individualism and human rights.

As a romanticized ideal, the narrative of that America was of a “great melting pot” for all races where upward mobility, modernism and economic and religious freedom promised a better life for all those willing to make it work. And for millions it once did.

With a manufacturing and farm economy the envy of the world, a burgeoning middle-class and a huge military establishment garrisoning the world, the ideal was temporarily sustainable. But as the years wore on, the economy and political system constricted and the Pentagon grew to gargantuan proportions, the yawing schism between the real America and the illusory bygone America of Hollywood’s imagination began to take on a frightening dimension.

We have illustrated in our two multi-part series, 9/11, Psychological Warfare and the American Narrative and House of Mirrors that whatever America once appeared to be, at least since World War II and the beginning of the Cold War up to 9/11, it never was the country we thought it to be.  

Although still theoretically governed by rules, democratic laws and financial regulations, the real America of today has come to be controlled by the private and personal agendas of a handful of people and the vast majority of the American public disapproves of it. Over the years, organizations such as the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg group and the Club of Rome are known to have exerted a decisive role over government policies and mass media. We have been warned of the Rockefellers, Carnegies and Rothschilds and their desires for political control of the world through financial manipulation. Yet, despite their monopolistic and anti-democratic efforts their power and their money continue to fuel popular allure. We have written of secret intelligence organizations such as Le Cercle, the Safari Club and the 61 which at the behest of international business cartels both legal and illegal have secretly undermined democratic elections, overthrown governments and generally subverted the will of the people for the benefit of a chosen few.

But who are these few, and what are their plans for our country and the world? Where are we headed and most of all, what principles are guiding what increasingly resembles an international governmental, financial and geopolitical shipwreck brought on by years of Laissez-faire fiscal abuse, corporate greed and political delusion?

Our personal understanding of the present dilemma starts with another shipwreck, this one off the coast of Ireland in the year 1577. That was the year a notorious English pirate and slave trader named Martin Frobisher smashed a schooner filled with what was thought to be gold bullion onto the isolated, rocky, western coast of Ireland at a place known as Smerwick. According to one account, Frobisher’s mission was intended to find the fabled Northwest Passage to China as part of a “Protestant adventure that would rival the Catholic quest as well as enrich the queen’s [Elizabeth I] treasury.” The “gold”—which was soon revealed to be nothing more than iron pyrites (fools gold)—spilled from the broken ship’s hull, littering the base of the cliffs.

An Irish rebel-captain by the name of James Fitzmaurice raised a fort at the summit of the cliffs and named it Fort Del Oro, (Fort of Gold) to mock Queen Elizabeth’s greed and her vain quest to challenge Rome for wealth and power. Fitzmaurice’s family, the Fitzgeralds had been in conflict with London over land and authority since initiating the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland in the twelfth century at the behest of their lord, Richard de Clare, otherwise known as Strongbow, the Earl of Pembroke.

Chafing under the rule of King Henry II of England, Strongbow pictured himself as the King of Ireland and his marriage to the daughter of Irish King Dermot MacMurrough was intended to seal the agreement. But fate and the driving ambitions of Henry II soon scuttled the plan and upon Strongbow’s death a short time later, the equally ambitious Fitzgeralds assumed his mission.  

Known for their loyalty to a Catholic Rome, their embrace of Ireland’s Celtic culture and their fierce desire to establish their control over Ireland, the next four hundred years found the family drawn deeply into English as well as European politics with numerous Geraldines (the family name) interned in the Tower of London. The coming of the Reformation to England in the 16^th century turned four hundred years of border disputes and jurisdictional feuding into holy war. And in 1580, the Holy See in Rome sent an army of Italians and Spaniards to help the Geraldines under the authority drafted by the “Just War Doctrine,”to help in the fight against Queen Elizabeth’s Protestant forces.

Dubbed by author Richard Berleth as the “Twilight Lords” for their role as the last doomed, feudal barons of Ireland, the Fitzgeralds and their struggle to fight off the Elizabethans and the Renaissance Neoplatonism of men such as Edmund Spencer and Walter Raleigh offers a glimpse into more than just another stale moment in history. It offers a revelation into a secret esoteric struggle between the spiritual forces of London, Rome, Moscow, Washington and Berlin that exploded openly into war numerous times during the 20^th century and whose ominous final confrontation looms over today’s geopolitical arena like a sword of Damocles.

Allegorized by the Elizabethans as evil and representative of the darkness in Spencer’s Faerie Queene, the Fitzgeralds came to embody the “Other” in the English propaganda of the day, while Elizabeth as both the Faerie Queene and Britomart and her knights embodied only the most chaste and blessed in the tradition of the Arthurian Round Table.

Far from being only a war over ecclesiastical principles, this “holy war” fought between the Catholic Geraldines and their Protestant others was also a war against economic domination and colonization from London. From London’s perspective, the war was a just war because it was a struggle to the death against the Papal forces of the Counter Reformation, which were encircling it militarily and economically and rolling back Protestant reforms. In the end, the war depopulated the Irish countryside, shifted the balance of power from local landowners to mercantilists in London and instilled a lasting fear and anger between Protestants and Catholics. As an experiment in colonization, Ireland set the standards of behavior that marked the beginnings of Britain’s empire that live on as much today in the neighborhoods of Kabul, Kandahar and Peshawar as they do in Derry and Belfast. But it also marked a turning point in the Holy Roman Empire’s ability to control events through military force and a shift from the ecclesiastically sanctioned violence of “just war” to the secular/state sanctioned violence of “just war.”

When in 1980 Colin Gray and Keith Payne attempted to stretch that concept of just war to justify nuclear war-fighting by transforming immorality into morality, it came as a cruel awakening to us that despite the gulf of four hundred years little had changed in the need to bend reality to justify war.

But in the thirty years since, the savage carnival of endless war with its attendant think tanks and lobbyists has only made the darkness blacker. In fact, the spiritual inspiration that propels today’s Washington/London/Berlin/Paris alliance and its so called humanitarian interventions could be considered nothing less than diabolic in which – as stated in the opening chapter to this series – America has turned from the light into its very opposite as it seeks to emulate “the dark matter… the force that orders the universe but can’t be seen.”

In battling the Elizabethans, the Fitzgeralds exhausted the very idea of Just War by plunging themselves and their hopeless cause into darkness. We can only hope as the U.S. continues to wander through the many facets of darkness contained within this House of Mirrors that someday soon, it will heed the lessons of history and find its way back to the clarity and sanity of the light.

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Turkish claims earlier this year that three Chechen militants who were gunned down in Istanbul were in fact killed by Russian agents hardly made a ripple in the mainstream western media. Seen as a minor footnote to the ongoing Russian edition of the so-called Global War on Terrorism, it seemed like an interesting but isolated incident. Far from being unusual, however, what this incident points to is only the latest data point on a graph that demonstrates protection of Chechen terrorists from the capital of Turkey right into the heart of Europe.

What this case and many others points to is the fundamental hypocrisy underlying the US-led, NATO-enforced, Western-backed “war on terror” paradigm; just as the self-same Afghan mujahedeen could be called “freedom fighters” by one American president and “evildoers” by another, so, too, authorities can use the “freedom fighter” excuse to justify looking the other way when Islamic extremists from the Northern Caucasus set up bases in Europe. Upon closer examination, however, the West has not been involved in merely tacit support of the terrorists in the Caucasus, but in active funding, training and protection of these terrorists.

This is our EyeOpener Report by James Corbett presenting the West’s continuous support and funding of terrorists in the Caucasus, Moscow’s evident conviction that the Chechen terror organizations are being protected and supported by the West, and exploring the likely reasons behind the puzzling relative silence from the Kremlin on these still-hidden realities and facts behind the terror in the Caucasus.

Watch the Preview Here:

Watch the Full Video Report Here:

*The Transcript for this video is available at Corbett Report: Click Here

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Authors and investigative journalists Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald join us to discuss their ground-breaking exclusive series ‘House of Mirrors’ on how America’s full blown surge into personal and private holy war caused the U.S. to slip into a crisis of identity. They explore the little-analyzed facts and mystical covert agendas that the United States continues to press on with into the 21st century, what those agendas may mean to America’s new role as the dark force that orders the universe, the prevailing motives that drive American national security policy today, and its de-evolution of rational defense policy and its immersion into the mystical. Gould-Fitzgerald talk about the top secret military operation known as the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) which views itself as a ‘dark force,’ Mystical Imperialism traced to both Britain and Russia’s 19th century efforts to establish dominion through a mix of imperialism and Christian zeal, and more!

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, a husband and wife team, began their experience in Afghanistan when they were the first American journalists to acquire permission to enter behind Soviet lines in 1981 for CBS News and produced a documentary, Afghanistan Between Three Worlds, for PBS. In 1983 they returned to Kabul with Harvard Negotiation project director Roger Fisher for ABC Nightline and contributed to the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour. They continued to research, write and lecture about the long-term run-up that led to the US invasion of Afghanistan. They are the authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story , Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire and The Voice. Visit their website here.

Listen to the preview Here

Here are our guest Elizabeth Gould & Paul Fitzgerald unplugged!

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More than one policy pundit has scratched their head at the strange, increasingly irrational nature of what guides American and European foreign policy. In November of 2010, commentator William Pfaff resorted to the term “medieval mysticism” to describe the “the cloud of unknowing” surrounding the run up to the all important NATO summit in Lisbon. He marveled that only by invoking the mystical past could one contemplate what was in store as the West pondered a dark future.

As odd as it may seem to modern audiences, medieval mysticism and its attendant priesthoods are not as far beneath the surface of present day policy as one might think. In fact following the crisis brought about by the failure of advanced technology to defeat Communism in Vietnam, America’s premier defense intellectuals were quick to fall back on the Middle Ages for answers to what seemed eternal and imponderable questions. 

One vivid example came from future Reagan administration officials Colin S. Gray and Keith Payne in the summer 1980 edition of Foreign Policy magazine who declared in an article titled “Victory is Possible” that: “Nuclear War is possible. But unlike Armageddon, the apocalyptic war prophesied to end history, nuclear war can have a wide range of options… If American nuclear power is to support U.S. foreign policy objectives, the United States must possess the ability to wage nuclear war rationally.”

Having come of age at a time when the U.S. enjoyed an overwhelming nuclear advantage and unquestioned technological superiority, America’s plunge into military defeat in Vietnam and a rough nuclear parity with the USSR was cause for a deep philosophical reassessment. The “new right” embodied in groups like Team B, the Committee on the Present Danger and the American Security Council needed to undo the debilitating effects caused by their own failures and discrediting the strategic doctrine implemented by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara known as Mutual Assured Destruction or (MAD) topped a long list.

These former government insiders and harsh critics of détente believed that the constraints on nuclear war fighting posed by the 1972 Anti-Ballistic-Missile Treaty (ABM) and the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks I and II (SALT), were predicated on a false assumption that nuclear weapons were too horrible to ever be used again. Neoconservative defense intellectuals viewed this restraint as a form of suicide and vowed to break free of it utilizing some pre-enlightenment thinking that challenged the very nature of modern reality.

The ideological cold war against Communism had never relied on facts. No one on the left or right could predict with any certainty where or when a nuclear war would stop if one ever broke out. Regardless of the kind or size of nuclear weapons used, with the enemy leadership decapitated and communications destroyed, there’d be no one left who could stop it. That’s what made nuclear war irrational. Anti-Communism was a matter of faith in which the political right and the political left shared the same goals but differed only in tactics. But the political right’s accommodation of the political left was never more than an elaborate game of deception played in a house of mirrors. In fact, according to the CIA’s own documents, “the theoretical foundation of the Agency’s political operations against Communism” for the first twenty years of the Cold War relied completely on the manipulation and control of the so called progressive, liberal, non-Communist left.

Blamed by the neoconservative right for the failure in Vietnam and the relative decline in America’s nuclear posture, this faux left’s legitimacy as a valid political factor in American politics began to crumble. With the left’s policy of nuclear restraint now dismissed as irrational what possible justification could be found to wage a nuclear war in which tens of millions of innocent Russians and Americans as well as millions of others would be killed? 

By the late 1970s, those obscure strategic analysts who had formulated America’s nuclear policies had attained the status of religious figures. With their wisdom “worshipped as gospel truth,” and their insight raised to “an almost mystical level and accepted as dogma” the high priests of the new right stood ready to displace not only the left but traditional conservatives as well. By the summer of 1980 (6 months after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan)  two of those high priests were willing to take the dogma one step further by reinterpreting the Just War Doctrine of the Catholic Church to justify what reality, reason and common sense had forbad the U.S. from doing since the final days of World War II. 

“Ironically, it is commonplace to assert that war-survival theories affront the crucial test of political and moral acceptability” wrote Colin S. Gray and Keith Payne that summer. “Surely no one can be comfortable with the claim that a strategy that would kill tens of millions of U.S. citizens would be politically and morally acceptable. However it is worth recalling the six guidelines for the use of force provided by the “just war” doctrine of the Catholic Church…”

Carefully sidestepping the principle that war can only be “just” when used as a last resort and that targeting innocents is strictly forbidden, Gray and Payne would go on to claim that based on the most ancient rules of the game, not only did U.S. policy of nuclear deterrence toward the Soviet Union (MAD) fail to qualify for “just war,” but that in failing to plan to actually fight a nuclear war, “U.S. nuclear strategy is immoral.”

In other words, since neoconservative hawks could not use a rational scientific process to achieve victory through nuclear weapons or to find hard evidence to support their claims that the Soviets assumed they could achieve victory through theirs, they devised a new process that simply viewed the empirical evidence as a lie and whatever they could imagine as truth, based on precepts evolved by medieval monks.

The idea of justly killing one’s fellow humans had presented a moral dilemma since the origins of Christianity. St Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE) originated the Just War theory which was later refined and expanded by St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274). But murdering in the name of Christ was tricky business and subject to self-serving and often conflicting interpretations. Far from the romantic notions of chivalry presented by today’s popular mythology, medieval knights were viewed by the Catholic Church at the time as lawless thugs engaged in an illicit business whose behavior was clearly “unjust.” The idea that a monk would engage in the plunder and murder of innocents, much less warfare that would bring about widespread death and destruction was anathema to church teaching.

The powerful Cistercian abbot, Bernard of Clairvaux weighed in with a different opinion in his famous twelfth-century treatise De Laude Novae Militiae (In Praise of the new Knighthood) by redefining the very nature of murder itself in support of his friend Hugues de Payens, Grand Master of the warrior monks known as the Knights Templar.

 “The soldier of Christ kills safely and dies the more safely… He is the instrument of God for the punishment of malefactors and for the defense of the just. Indeed, when he kills a malefactor this is not homicide but malicide, and he is accounted Christ’s legal executioner against evildoers.”

Like Colin S. Gray and Keith Payne’s “Victory is Possible,” Clairvaux’s treatise was propaganda intended to bend the rules for the uses of acceptable violence. It opened the floodgates of recruits for the Crusades, established the legal authority of powerful, wealthy Catholic military orders and put the power of the feudal machine under Church control, at least temporarily. 

Following the publication of Gray and Payne’s 1980 treatise we became drawn to the history of just war. After three years working as the host of a public affairs program for an affiliate of Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network in Boston (remember the Fairness Doctrine?) we bore witness to an aggressive underground rightwing/Christian political movement merging into the American mainstream. Some basic assumptions about America’s secular democracy and defense policy were being challenged on the basis of faith, not facts. But the idea that some medieval religious precepts could or would be called upon to justify a nuclear war-fighting doctrine was staggering.

What we didn’t know at the time was that the Just War Doctrine of the Catholic Church had been invoked by the Papal Nuncio for the Fitzgerald family in Ireland during the 1570s. As a Fitzgerald I knew something of my family’s history. A terrible war, brought on the Fitzgeralds by the English had destroyed much of the family’s power and depopulated the Irish countryside.

Because of the Just War Doctrine, history had suddenly become personal and as it led us into the past we began to see behind the cover story into a hidden history of events ranging from the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy to the events of 9/11.

Join us as we explore the journey that took us from the emerging Christian Reconstructionism of the 1970s back in time to the 12^th century Norman invasion of Ireland and what it means to the upcoming Presidential elections of 2012 in our next installment titled The Twilight Lords. 

House of Mirrors Part I

House of Mirrors Part II

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are the authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story  ,  Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire and The Voice. Visit their website here.

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The US media may be many awful things, but no one could ever accuse them of not being consistent- at least when it comes to certain subject areas; US-NATO-Chechen joint terrorism operations being one. The censorship of this topic goes to such extremes where even modified-sanitized-pasteurized versions of related events and facts are nowhere to be found in the US media. Let me list a few globally known and reported facts, then add a few twos and twos and twos together, and see whether you can find any traces of that in the US mainstream media:

Assassinations of Chechen Terrorist Leaders in Turkey

The following was reported by British paper Telegraph in September this year:

Kremlin hit squad ‘assassinate Chechen Islamist in Istanbul’

The triple murder was carried out by a lone gunman in less than thirty seconds using a 9mm pistol fitted with a silencer. It brought the number of Chechens assassinated in the Turkish city in the last four years to at least six. The gunman pumped eleven bullets into the three men in a busy Istanbul street before speeding off in a black getaway car.

One of the murdered men, 33-year-old Berg-Haj Musayev, was said to be close to Doku Umarov, an Islamist terrorist leader who is Russia’s most wanted man. The other two were said to be his bodyguards.

It was Umarov who claimed responsibility for the January suicide bombing of Moscow’s busy Domodedovo airport, an atrocity that left 37 people dead. Musayev’s widow Sehida said she was sure the Russian secret service was behind her husband’s murder, a view echoed by Murat Ozer, head of a Chechen Diaspora group in Istanbul.

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I am going to provide you with several cases like this, and go back several years, but for now keep this article in mind, and ask yourself: How did these notorious Chechen terrorist masterminds and leaders end up in Turkey? Why did all these high-level terrorists choose Turkey? How could they be allowed by the Turkish government to operate and carry out their terror operations from Turkey as their HQ-base?

Keep those questions in mind as you proceed to the next case and facts. Now, a bit more on these assassinations from Spiegel:

Russia Hunts Down Chechen Terrorists Abroad

Russian intelligence agents appear to be systematically working off a hit list. When he came into power, Putin, who was president at the time, apparently decided to expand the death zone. “We will pursue the terrorists wherever they go. If we find them in the toilet, we’ll kill them in the outhouse,” the president vowed, and set his agents loose on Chechen rebels and terrorists abroad.

In February 2004, Russian agents with diplomatic passports blew up an SUV carrying Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, a Chechen rebel commander, in Qatar, where he had been a guest of that country’s emir…

…

The attacks were carried out in Arab countries, Azerbaidjan in the southern Caucasus and, in particular, Turkey. In September 2008, the Chechen militant Gaji Edilsultanov was murdered in Istanbul in broad daylight. Three months later, his fellow militant Islam Zhanibekov was killed in an execution-style shooting in front of his wife and children. Russian special-forces units had targeted the Chechen because of his involvement in several terrorist attacks.

…

Late last week, there was speculation on Chechen underground websites, as well as in the Russian and Turkish media, that a so-called “Berlin group” may have been involved in the killings. Russian undercover operations have allegedly been directed from the German capital, of all places.

Officially, German authorities have no solid evidence that this is the case. However, they did not fail to notice that more than 1,200 Chechen exiles and Russian intelligence agents are now stalking each other in Berlin. The Germans have also noticed that Umarov’s following is growing. They report dubious flows of cash — including from young men who are leaving Germany to join the holy war in the Caucasus.

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What I want you to specifically take with you from this second article is that: 1- The largest concentrations of these active Chechen terrorists are in (in order): Turkey- A NATO member, Azerbaijan (Almost a NATO Member), Germany (a NATO Member), followed by Dubai- one of the closest US Allies in the Arab States, and Qatar-another very close US ally and partner in the Arab states. 2- Amazingly these notorious ‘Islamist’ terrorists are not present in ‘Islamist’ nations designated as terrorist nations by the United States: Iran, Syria. Of course there are no Chechens terrorist groups in North Korea Please keep this ‘2’ together with the previous one, and we’ll move to the next area.

Chechen Terrorists Linked Closely with Turkey

Do you remember the Moscow Theater hostage Crisis in 2002? If not, you can quickly check it out here. The following report came out after the investigations and follow up:

Chechen terrorists linked with Turkey: Russia

There were earlier reports that Chechen terrorists had made telephone calls to Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates during the hostage drama.

According to reports carried by the Itar-Tass on Tuesday, Russian security intelligence said that they had had indisputable proof that the Chechens had received support and encouragement from these three countries.

…

The head of Russia’s International Military Co-operation Department, General Anatoli Mazurkeviç, is to meet with a European Parliamentarian Council delegation later on Tuesday and complain of what Russia sees as a double standard in west on combating terrorism.

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I am sure you have picked up on the commonality shared by the mentioned nations. The time frame: 2002, and the terrorist and terrorist supporting nations happen to be those outside our nation’s designated axis of evil. No Iraq, Iran or Syria. No Gaddafi-led Libya.

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Let’s pause for a second and check out the Chechens’ American friends and advocates, and after that we’ll come back here. The following article appeared in the Guardian UK in 2004 [All emphasis mine]:

The Chechens American Friends

In the US, the leading group which pleads the Chechen cause is the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya (ACPC). The list of the self-styled “distinguished Americans” who are its members is a roll call of the most prominent neoconservatives who so enthusiastically support the “war on terror”.

They include Richard Perle, the notorious Pentagon adviser; Elliott Abrams of Iran-Contra fame; Kenneth Adelman, the former US ambassador to the UN who egged on the invasion of Iraq by predicting it would be “a cakewalk”; Midge Decter, biographer of Donald Rumsfeld and a director of the rightwing Heritage Foundation; Frank Gaffney of the militarist Centre for Security Policy; Bruce Jackson, former US military intelligence officer and one-time vice-president of Lockheed Martin, now president of the US Committee on NATO; Michael Ladeen of the American Enterprise Institute, a former admirer of Italian fascism and now a leading proponent of regime change in Iran; and R James Woolsey, the former CIA director who is one of the leading cheerleaders behind George Bush’s plans to re-model the Muslim world along pro-US lines.

…

… In August, the ACPC welcomed the award of political asylum in the US, and a US-government funded grant, to Ilyas Akhmadov, foreign minister in the opposition Chechen government, and a man Moscow describes as a terrorist. Coming from both political parties, the ACPC members represent the backbone of the US foreign policy establishment, and their views are indeed those of the US administration.

…

Okay. You should have several twos by now to add together later: Main Chechen terror base and HQ in NATO Member and one of the closest US allies in the Middle East Turkey + Network Extension in Germany (NATO), Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (Two closest US Arab Allies and Pawns) + All the major PNAC –Neoconservative & the New World Order players and operators + the CIA.

Now, let’s head back where we left off with the Russia-Turkey angle, and take a look at a more specific player. Here is an article from 2008:

Turkish Building Company Denied Funding Chechen Militants

Moscow, April 23 (RIA Novosti) – Turkish building company ENKA Wednesday rejected claims, made in a documentary program broadcast Tuesday on Russia’s Channel One TV, that it had provided financing in the 1990s to Chechen militants.

“We state that all information regarding our company broadcast April 22 in the Plan Caucasus TV program on Channel One is totally groundless and untrue,” ENKA said. “We deny all such accusations.”

ENKA is one of Turkey’s largest construction companies working in Russia.

The claims were made against ENKA in the TV program by Sultan Kekhursayev, now living in Istanbul. He said he had been “[now dead Chechen separatist leader Dzhokhar] Dudayev’s army brigadier general.”

Kekhursayev said large Turkish companies working in Russia, including ENKA, funded the seizure of Chechnya’s capital Grozny in the summer 1996, adding that they “had done much” to assist militants.

…

ENKA was in fact involved in funding Chechen terrorist groups and even more. However, the funding was channeled via ENKA; not sourced to it. ENKA was (and probably still is) one of many Turkish companies used by the US government, specifically the CIA and the State Department, catering to objectives set by American actors mentioned in this article.

How do I know this? Well, let’s say it is one of the main State Secrets that received a particular privilege with my case. No matter. I have enough public documents and information to make you privy to this State’s Secret.

ENKA, one of the largest building-construction companies in Turkey (also internationally) is one of the top players, top operatives, and top members of a gigantic Turkish-American Lobby organization called the American Turkish Council (ATC). You can check its top status here at the ATC site: Click here.

To get a real picture of ATC I encourage you to read the entries here. And the following are a few excerpts from the Vanity Fair article in 2005:

Sibel also recalled hearing wiretaps indicating that Turkish Embassy targets frequently spoke to staff members at the A.T.C… the wiretaps suggested to her that the Washington office of the A.T.C. was being used as a front for criminal activity.

            …

Please check the date mentioned above in the article on ENKA’s involvement and financing of Chechen terrorism dating back to the 1990s. And here is an excerpt from the VF article provided to the reporter by another FBI-DOJ source:

One counter-intelligence official familiar with Edmonds’s case has told Vanity Fair that the F.B.I. opened an investigation into covert activities by Turkish nationals in the late 1990’s…Toward the end of 2001, Edmonds was asked to translate some of the thousands of calls that had been recorded by this operation, some dating back to 1997. 

I believe it would be needless to ask you to add more twos here: FBI wiretaps targeting ATC, ENKA- a major operative and player of ATC, the dates of these files going back to the mid 1990s, our major American neoconservative/NWO players (movers-shakers) supporting Chechen terrorism against Russia, and their support (financing, masterminding, training, etc.) being implemented, in addition to the CIA, by operatives and players in Turkey and NATO. I could talk about various ways of money funneling through middle-men to the hands of the terrorists. Instead of talking and writing about it for hours, I’ll provide you with one example involving companies like ENKA:

Did you know that the US Government has been paying ENKA hundreds of millions of dollars for building US Embassies?  You can check it out here at ENKA’s website: US Embassy in Guinea, in Cameroon, in Mali, in Bosnia, in Sarajevo …Now ask yourself: why in the world would our government hire a Turkish company to build embassies for it around the world? My short tenure with the FBI was a real eye-opener with operations like this. This is one way to add to our black budget for our CIA’s black operations. You see, they (the CIA, aka State Department) get middlemen companies such as ENKA (believe me ATC is full of such companies) to quote a price ten or a hundred times more than the actual price. Then, they don’t let any ‘real company’ bid. Then, they get it easily approved (State Department, Congress). A company like ENKA would take a nice profit out of that, and the rest would go to finance our illegal/black operations in, let’s say Central Asia or the Caucasus.

I can assure you, every single main player in our media has known all about this-with documents, credible witnesses, for Pete’s sake through other nations’ news reports! Yet, for all these years, they have played as they’ve told by their masters-those powers ruling from behind our visible government: they’ve been consistent in censoring and blacking out the facts in ‘Islamist Terrorism Made in the USA.’ Be my guest. Take this well-documented and sourced information, and comb through our mainstream media’s archives. See what you end up with…other than ‘zilch.’

We Americans, bogged down in a perpetual so-called ‘war on terror,’ waging illegal and unjustified wars globally in the name of that ‘war on terror’ and so-called ‘Islamist terrorists,’ happen to be the world’s biggest mastermind, creator, financier, and supporter of ‘Islamist Terror.’ We used this as our number one method, modus operandi, during the Cold War throughout the Middle East, Northern Africa and the rest of the Muslim world. We made and trained and employed Bin Laden. No, it should be plural. We trained and employed and supported many Bin Ladens around the world. Then, after the Cold War, we continued the trend throughout Central Asia, the Balkans, Caucasus, and Xinjiang. Today we still remain the world’s number one terrorist nation. Either through illegal and unjustified wars of aggression or those blamed on some ‘Islamist Extremists’ which happen to be directly masterminded, instigated, financed and supported by us.

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Last weekend at the farmers Market I bumped in to an author, activist and a fairly popular blog-ist friend. I asked what he had been up to lately, and he said he was working with a group on bringing more pressure on Bush-Rumsfeld-Cheney from the international community, and possibly getting them banned from entering certain countries. I asked him about his plans for our current president, his undeclared wars and black operations, and his still-in-the-making trail of civilian casualties-the babies and grandmothers and all…He sincerely answered my question without any hesitation, ‘Oh, no plans for that yet. Not yet… Maybe after we are done with Bush… Obama certainly deserves being banned, but right now we are busy with our current project targeting Bush and his evil entourage.’

It seems like every time I look around I see these activists/writers/blog-ists who are extremely busy with chasing that long-gone evil president, or maybe his ghost. The guy had eight years in the White House when he was engaged in planning and executing orders for atrocious practices, and neither Congress nor the media lifted a finger to do anything about it. Even though they could; in theory, that is. Despite all our activism and whistleblowing the man came out of it without a scratch; really.

Look, I am not saying the pursuit of George W. Bush is totally futile and a waste of time. I certainly don’t disagree with those who believe the previous administration should be held accountable. After all, what do people think when they hear the name Sibel Edmonds? The FBI linguist who was retaliated against and fired by Bush’s FBI, silenced and gagged by Bush’s Justice Department, and basically, slammed and quashed and attacked nonstop by the Bush Administration (while the US Congress and the media watched detachedly without a blink). So, no, I have justifiably more reasons than many to despise the Bush Administration and seek accountability and justice.

Then, what is it I am disagreeing with here? Or more accurately, what is bugging me about the few sample examples of many more examples I cited above? Allow me to provide you with a fictional example to illustrate the point of this commentary:

Once upon a time there was a man who lived happily with his wife. Then, one day, while on the way home from work, his wife was raped. Despite all attempts by the local police and all the evidence they were able to gather, the perpetuator was never caught. After a while the police quit and declared the case ‘cold.’ However, the husband who adored his wife would not give up. He set up his own little office down in the basement where he worked on the case, the evidence, possible leads…He could not let that horrible criminal, that rapist, just get away, and roam the streets free, and very possibly commit even more rapes. He would not.

The man made this his mission, and he took this mission very seriously. He was going to do all it took to find that rapist and deliver what he believed was justice. When he worked downstairs, those late night hours after work, neither his wife nor his son would dare to distract or bother him. He worked as if in a trance, intensely and with passion. Sometimes he’d imagine holding down that rapist and make him beg for his life…Months went by, then one late evening, while he was in the basement working intensely on his ‘catch that rapist and make him pay’ project, a masked man broke into his house. As his wife screamed ‘rape, rapist, help me…,’ as she was beaten, brutalized, and raped repeatedly, the man worked downstairs…despite hearing the bangs and screams…He was determined. He was going to catch that rapist who had raped his wife three years back…

I don’t think I need to spell out my point here. Do I really? We had a horrible president who did truly horrible things…for eight years. Then, he was replaced…three years ago. In the last three years we have been getting raped every single day: being raped in airports, being raped on the phone and in e-mails, being raped of our hard-earned dollars given to crooks …Every Single Day. As I am typing this commentary, as you are reading this piece, we are being raped. Right now. Right at this moment.

Thousands of people outside our country have been getting, and are getting, raped too: raped of life in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Yemen…every single say. Right now. Thousands have been, and are being, injured-handicapped and raped of living normal lives. Tens of thousands have been, and are being, raped of having parent(s)-family. Right now, as I am typing, as you are reading, our government is killing, injuring, and creating orphans. Right now.

This is now. Right now we are all being raped as a nation. And right now there are people in other parts of the world who are getting raped by our nation. Right now. Right at this moment. Our current President, our current Commander in Chief, our current administration in power, our current government, is raping us and others in the world. Do you want to chase the ghost of the previous rapist? Or, should you be doing something to stop this current, this ongoing rape? The one happening right now-right at this moment…

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13 articles. Thirteen hard-hitting well-written, thoroughly investigated, and unabashedly presented articles. Thirteen articles on abuses involving war(s), military, ‘generals’ games, prison and torture … You want to check it for yourself:Here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here.

Then, I searched for Hersh’s article written during the current administration:

3 articles. Three articles. Only three articles since Mr. Obama’s presidential victory. That’s it. None of them on the scandals, issues and abuses of the Obama administration. None of them on Obama’s drone-mania. None of them on bombing and killing civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan. None of them on the dubious brief assault in Yemen. None of them on Bagram torture-abuse-secret imprisonment. None of them on Libya. None of them on jailing Manning-DOD whistleblower or bringing criminal charges against other government whistleblowers. Instead of listing the long list of ‘Nones,’ I’ll give you the only three articles written by Hersh at the New Yorker:

Syria Calling: The Obama Administration’s Chance to Engage in a Middle East Peace- Published in April 2009.

Defending the Arsenal: In an Unstable Pakistan, can Nuclear Warheads be Kept Safe? – Published in November 2009.

The Online Threat: Should we be Worry about a Cyber War? - Published in November 2010.

You’d think the Obama administration’s incredible expansion of US covert wars would be right up Hersh’s alley, no?  How about the current covert war in Yemen with the silent mainstream? Do I need to mention the latest reports on US Drone-Bombing of Somalia?! Or maybe our latest shenanigans and inside-out/outside-in Pakistan relations and our nonstop drone attacks over there? I am sure you can come up with dozens of macro cases and scandals involving the current administration, the Pentagon and the CIA that ordinarily would be Hersh’s reporting territory. No?

Well, my article on Hersh’s troubling absence from the scene of the even more troubling American investigative journalism arena received a lot of attention; some good, and some very antagonistic. The ones who attacked me did so not on the merit of my report or the rationale and logic behind it, but for my daring to question Seymour Hersh the great, and this despite all the deserved credit I made sure I attributed to Mr. Hersh’s work in my commentary. Here is a quote from an e-mail I received immediately after the article’s publication:

Who the fu.. do you think you are to question and criticize Hersh? You are not even a journalist! The man has so gotten so many awards and is the best investigative journalist this country’s got. Shame on you…

In my commentary I neither claimed nor pretended to be a journalist nor had I in any way tried to look down upon anyone’s journalistic capability. I was being a very humble no-body who pointed to some hard data and facts and asked the obvious and logical questions. I was taught to question the questionable in life- not necessarily as an award-winning journalist or a decorated academic, but as a rational human being who uses her brain’s critical thinking function rather than following the trend of the majority and turning off that function.

Recently I came across a comment by one of our readers-Xicha at Boiling Frogs Post:

Sibel, do you still talk to Seymour? Is he still out to lunch?

Just a few weeks before that I received an e-mail inquiry from one of our readers asking me whether I knew anything about Hersh’s status. She ended her e-mail with the following comment and questions:

We need him so badly. What would it take to get Sy Hersh to investigate and expose these criminals, their wars and abuses? What can we do to get him to write again?!

At the time my immediate response was, ‘how should I know?!’ However, a couple of weeks later, the answer suddenly occurred to me! Bam, out of the blue! I got the answer, and I’m pretty confident of it. Not only that, I also have the solution to the problem. Here is my answer:

In order for Seymour Hersh to investigate and pour out those fabulously long and telling reports in pages after pages, nonstop, back-to-back, unrelenting and hard-hitting, a Republican president must occupy the White House. A Democrat won’t do; no matter how much of a Neocon he is, no matter how abusive and hawkish his practices, and no matter how aggressively he assaults people domestically and internationally.

As for the how can ‘one’ make this happen question:

I guess those people must do their share; go vote Republican and pray one gets the majority vote and gets into the White House. Once that happens they’ll get the good ole Hersh Feast in the New Yorker.

Now I will humbly seek your opinion and answer, and pass the microphone to you: what do ‘you’ think it would take to end Hersh’s hibernation cycle, get him to investigate, write and report again?

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From ten years on, everything about 9/11 feels otherworldly and irrational, the reasons for it, the apparent helplessness in the face of it, the curious identities of the people involved and the American government’s response to it. It defied logic then and it still does. The World Trade Towers were proud symbols of who we were as early 21^st century Americans, at least who we thought we were. After all, wasn’t the spiritual motto of the original 1939 Flushing, NY World’s Fair “World trade center” pavilion dedicated to “world peace through trade?”  

There would be no peace after 9/11. The destruction loosed a demon that had been struggling for America’s soul since the creation of the Cold War in 1947. The U.S. would now be freed to pursue “evil” wherever it could be found and there would be no turning back. The creation of the World Trade Towers by Rockefeller brothers Nelson and David had been steeped in psychological symbolism from their start in the early 1960s. As the most well known scions of American business, the Rockefeller family brought more than just money to their endeavors, they brought a vision for the future of the planet and a philosophy to guide it.

Begun as a massive undertaking to revitalize lower Manhattan, Chase Manhattan Bank Chairman David and New York Governor Nelson pushed hard for the project and each tower stood as a symbol of their respective power. As metaphor, the towers were more than just two of the tallest buildings in the world. It might be said they were as important as the two pillars Joachim and Boaz which stood at the entrance to Solomon’s Temple; mystical gates to a Cathedral of wisdom in which all could worship under one religion; the religion of business, Capitalism.

The Rockefellers were no strangers to the power of psychological warfare and its impact on American opinion. During World War II Nelson had headed the U.S. government’s intelligence agency for Latin America, the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (CIAA). CIAA’s film division guided the 1942 production of Walt Disney’s Saludos Amigos to promote pro-American sentiment in South America. In 1954 Nelson was appointed as President Eisenhower’s White House special assistant on Cold War tactics and psychological warfare. Nelson Rockefeller played a central role in formulating domestic propaganda programs throughout the 1950s as chairman of the Planning Coordination Group which, in addition to its propaganda work, oversaw all CIA covert operations. His 1956 Special Studies Project directed by Rockefeller protégé Henry Kissinger produced many of the domestic policy recommendations that came to be known as President Kennedy’s New Frontier. His family’s philanthropic support of the arts had been carefully coordinated with the CIA and was both overtly and covertly propagandistic.

As a committed Anglophile, Rockefeller had aided British intelligence during World War II when he rented space in New York’s Rockefeller Center at a steep discount to a number of British propaganda agencies including their secret intelligence service for the Americas, the British Security Coordination (BSC). The BSC’s chief, Sir William Stephenson (Intrepid) set up shop in New York City with the help of some of New York’s wealthiest families with one main objective in mind: Get the United States into the war in Europe on Britain’s behalf.

One key agent in the psychological war for American public opinion was young RAF pilot Roald Dahl who along with James Bond creator Ian Fleming, playwright Noel Coward and Gallup pollster David Ogilvy were given free rein to commit sabotage, political subversion and propagandize “the natives” (Americans) through whatever means possible.

Dahl’s creative fiction earned him praise from the New York Times and publishing contracts from Random House as well as entrée to Hollywood where he would collaborate with Walt and Roy Disney in their studio’s transformation into an arsenal of animation while inspiring numerous imitators.  Dahl would go on to marry a movie star and become a Hollywood icon with perennial successes, most notably “Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.” The cult of intelligence would ultimately become so seamlessly blended into every aspect of publishing, television and film, the CIA would jokingly be referred to as “the Chocolate Factory.” Along with Fleming, Ogilvy and Coward, Dahl would help to get the United States into the war with Germany and craft an enduring Anglo-centric cultural narrative in the public’s mind whose main objective was the promotion of a British agenda for the United States. That agenda would quickly shift from anti-fascist to aggressive Cold War anti-communist (read anti-Russian) as World War II ended, with Britain playing a seminal role in the creation of America’s national security state.

President Harry Truman’s March 12, 1947 proclamation laying out the rationale for the Cold War (Truman Doctrine), fundamentally altered America’s identity by embedding a permanent psychology of fear. But a hidden aspect of this conflict was the slow, grinding corruption that its unreality fostered in America’s leadership. That unreality was finally revealed in the catastrophe of Vietnam.

In a remarkably self-effacing (especially by today’s standards) January 8, 1972 New Yorker article tracing the origins of the devastation caused by Vietnam titled “Reflections: In Thrall To Fear,” Senator J. William Fulbright bemoaned the mental corruption caused by the Truman Doctrine during the 1940s, 50s and 60s, whereby “Our leaders became liberated from the normal rules of evidence and inference when it came to dealing with Communism… The effect of the anti-Communist ideology was to spare us the task of taking cognizance of the specific facts of specific situations. Our ‘faith’ liberated us, like the believers of old, from the requirements of empirical thinking… Like medieval theologians, we had a philosophy that explained everything to us in advance, and everything that did not fit could be readily identified as a fraud or a lie or an illusion.”

What Fulbright’s brilliant but tragic reflections fail to include is that America’s assumptions about the Cold War were never empirical. In fact the assumptions weren’t even necessarily American but had been crafted by America’s Anglo-centric intelligence bureaucracy and rooted in messianic 19^th century British designs for control of the Eurasian landmass. A recent release of classified documents reveals that Britain’s wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill was so obsessed with Eurasian conquest, he’d envisioned rearming Germany and attacking the Soviet Union right up to the end of World War II in a plan named Operation Unthinkable. Faced with the absurdity of confronting an overwhelmingly superior Soviet force and starting World War III, Churchill’s operation was shelved, but his famous Iron Curtain speech of 1946 would animate the idea while establishing the ideological narrative by which all future U.S./Soviet relations would be defined.   

The inspiration for Churchill’s speech and its warning of the growing Communist threat to “Christian civilization” was the American child of British immigrants, James Burnham. As the godfather of neoconservatism, Burnham would work his way from Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky in the 1930s, to authoring a book that would forge the foundations of a new kind of planned, centralized society, to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II. His much critiqued landmark 1940 The Managerial Revolution would be read and admired by Hitler’s general staff and viewed as the blueprint for George Orwell’s 1984 in which a new class of business executives, technicians, bureaucrats and soldiers would destroy the old capitalist order, crush the working class and seize all of society’s wealth for themselves.

In a 1945 Partisan Review article titled “Lenin’s Heir” Burnham, while still at the OSS, infused his apocalyptic political views with mystical allusions to the Eurasian heartland as “the magnetic core” of Soviet power, comparing it to the mystical “reality of the One of Neo-Platonism,” whose inexorable and unstoppable “emanative progression… descends through the stages of Mind, Soul, and Matter” towards its ultimate destination beyond the Eurasian boundaries and through “Appeasement and Infiltration (England, the United States).”  Burnham was a keen advocate of dirty tricks. He would play an important role in the overthrow of Iran’s Mohammed Mosaddeq and the installation of the Shah. His book The Machiavellians would become a handbook for CIA planners. 

As an “anti-Communist ideology” Burnham’s apocalyptic warnings about the inevitability of Soviet expansion from Eurasia’s magnetic core ring like a medieval theologian’s incantation throughout Churchill’s  “Iron Curtain” speech. George Orwell even makes clear in his 1946 “Second Thoughts on James Burnham” that Burnham’s words read like a mystical invocation and were most likely intended to hypnotize.  

Twenty six years later, Senator Fulbright would realize that only because of the disastrous outcome of Vietnam was there any willingness at all to reexamine the basic assumptions of American postwar policy toward the Soviet Union and what had brought the United States to such a sorry state. The 1972 Strategic Arms Limitation Talks SALT would spring from this realization, as would the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty ABM and eventually SALT II, until in January of 1980 President Jimmy Carter would ask the Senate to delay consideration of the Treaty on the Senate floor because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. That treaty would never be passed.

Our involvement in the Afghanistan story began in the summer of 1979 when we began production of a documentary titled Arms Race and the Economy: A Delicate Balance. During the next months numerous experts including economist John Kenneth Galbraith lent their experience to our understanding of the unseen damage that a massive new diversion of tax dollars and investment capital would represent to the civilian economy. Galbraith insisted that accelerated defense spending and renewing the Cold War – as the neoconservative right was demanding at that critical moment – would ultimately destroy the civilian economy. He was convinced that the Cold War had already made America more and more like the Soviet Union, ruled by a military-industrial-academic establishment suspended from reality.

But by the time our program aired that winter, the argument was no longer whether our government should call a halt to the nuclear arms race and reinvest in the civilian economy. The December 27, 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had rolled back the narrative to 1947, the Truman Doctrine, to Churchill and Burnham’s mystical, medieval enchantment and the psychological warfare campaign necessary to bring it back to life was about to begin.

J. William Fulbright’s 1972 “Reflections: In Thrall To Fear” represented an awakening from the deep hypnotic trance imposed upon Americans by Cold War ideology. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan brought about its re-emersion, but this time to a deeper and totally detached level of unreality.

With the election of Ronald Reagan in the fall of 1980, the United States not only rejected Fulbright’s concerns for the intellectual dishonesty represented by the continuation of the Cold War, but willfully embraced the fraud, the lie and the illusion as its own and was willing to take it one step further.   

The U.S. had silently, almost imperceptibly crossed through a mirror in 1947 with the creation of a second and covert national-security-government. But few in Washington understood at the time, the Faustian bargain they were signing onto. Now that secret government would take the U.S. on a fairytale journey into a mirrored image of itself from the 1940s, interweaving its own delusion with a remanufactured, two dimensional Hollywood invention named Ronald Reagan as the host. America would never be the same.

As an actor, Reagan had been implanted into America’s subconscious as a hero during the 1940s and his militaristic campaign of Peace through Strength  was sold to Americans as the Reagan revolution. It was in fact a counter-revolution engineered by a reactionary gang of consummate insiders headed by former Research Industry of America employee, OSS veteran and Wall Street lawyer William J. Casey with the intention of restoring America’s militarist Cold War thinking.

As Reagan’s intelligence chief, Casey had key access to the concentric circles of international power necessary to carry off the tectonic shift of wealth from Main Street to Wall Street that would transfer power to an already wealthy globalist elite. As one of OSS chief Wild Bill Donovan’s Knights Templar during World War II, Casey took his “Crusade for Freedom” and a one world religion of Capitalism as creed, and as Director of Central Intelligence was perfectly positioned to put James Burnham’s dirty tricks and Machiavellian philosophy to work in the heartland of Eurasia.

Casey’s passion for the Afghan jihad was messianic. An ultra-conservative Catholic, Casey saw little difference in the antimodernist beliefs of the Wahhabist House of Saud and the anti-enlightenment views of the newly installed Polish Pope, John Paul II. Disguised as a war to liberate Afghanistan from Soviet aggression, Casey’s campaign was intended to infiltrate covert teams beyond Afghanistan into the Soviet Union’s Muslim provinces and provoke an insurrection. Backed by neoconservatives, the Saudis and secretive organizations like the Safari Club, Le Cercle, the Bilderberg Group and the 6I, it would play out in propaganda from Rambo to Charlie Wilson’s War as the greatest American victory of the Cold War.

In reality, Casey’s team would so tear down the wall between fact and fiction, legal and illegal, truth and the lie, it would make 9/11 inevitable.

But if anyone deserves the prize for the culture of triumphalist self-deception which lives on today in the endless war on terror and the Homeland Security State-culture-of-fear, it is James Burnham.  On February 23, 1983 James Burnham was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Ronald Reagan culminating his fifty years of service as one of the “guiding lights in mankind’s quest for truth.” Burnham’s 1940 prediction that Nazi Germany would win the war had actually been wrong as was his prediction that the Soviet Union would lose. His subsequent revised prediction that the Soviets would win and expand beyond the Eurasian heartland followed only after a Soviet victory appeared obvious in 1944.

In George Orwell’s 1946, “Second Thoughts on James Burnham,” Orwell clinically diagnosed Burnham’s convenient powers of revisionist prophecy as the product of a “mental disease” whose “roots lie partly in cowardice and partly in the worship of power, which is not fully separable from cowardice.”

Ten years after the events of September 11, 2001, thirty two years after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and sixty four years after the creation of the Cold War, James Burnham lives on as an icon to a deeply corrupted Homeland Security-culture “In Thrall to Fear.” We have no one to blame but ourselves for allowing that culture’s acolytes, their lies and their fabrications to continue to hypnotize us.

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are the authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story and Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire Visit their website here.

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The root cause of what the United States suffers from today, both politically and economically stems from the psychological warfare campaign triggered by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.  At that time, Americans responded dutifully if not robotically to the threat as a barrage of propaganda poured from a hoard of foreign policy “experts” claiming vindication for Vietnam while bemoaning America’s military weakness. Zbigniew Brzezinski himself claimed that the Soviet invasion was a vindication of his prediction that the Soviets would be emboldened by a lack of U.S. resolve elsewhere. The shaken president, Jimmy Carter announced a U.S. boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, the creation of a rapid deployment force to the Middle East and a new get tough posture toward the Soviet Union.

On January 2, 1980 the MacNeil Lehrer News Hour presented former U.S. Ambassador Theodore Eliot and Harvard Professor Richard Pipes to speculate on the implications of the invasion. As an unabashed neoconservative ideologue, Pipes should have been considered a controversial choice sitting alongside the thoroughly Eastern establishment Eliot. But on this evening Pipes had been carefully chosen to play the very special role of delegitimizing détente with the Soviet Union while moving the discussion permanently and irretrievably to the neoconservative right.  Paired with Eliot, the dean of American diplomacy and soon to be Secretary General for the United States of a gathering of international elites calling itself, the Bilderberg group, the two were there to send the signal that the ideology of neoconservatism, globalism and the institutions of the American government were now one and the same.

It was a moment that would change the United States in ways that few Americans would immediately understand and many continue to find baffling. Years earlier, Pipes had been chosen to chair a highly controversial operation known as the Team B experiment in competitive analysis.

The decade of the 1970s had presented a series of strategic shocks to the United States. The Watergate scandal and the Arab oil embargo, campus protests, combined with the American military failure in Vietnam had shaken Washington’s own belief in the American narrative. Vietnam had removed the veil from America’s Cold War defense-intellectual elite, revealing their elaborate plans and complex mathematical formulas to be useless as a guide to action. But even before the end of that war in 1975, pressure had been building from a powerful collection of right-wing ideologues to ignore their own complete intellectual failure, wind back the clock and return to an openly militarized Cold War approach to the Soviet Union.

Backed by Gerald Ford’s CIA director George W. Bush, the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) vice chairman, Leo Cherne, and the father of Cold War thinking, Paul Nitze, Team B’s goal was to turn the CIA’s thinking about the Soviet Union on its head.

“The intensity and scope of the current Soviet military effort in peacetime is without parallel in twentieth century history,” they claimed in their top secret 1976 report. The Soviets were preparing for a “third world war” and were comparable only to “Nazi remilitarization of the 1930s.” Given military superiority and the will to use it, they reasoned, at some point in the near future the Soviets would make a strategic move that the United States would be militarily unable to stop.

But it was in their claim that the Soviets would first “intimidate smaller powers . . . adjacent to the USSR . . . where pro-Soviet forces have an opportunity to seize power but are unable to do so without military help,” that the Team B assessment attained a level of prophecy.

If anything could be described as a psychological warfare operation come unhinged, it was the Team B experiment. Team B effectively exposed the government’s own process of rational analysis to an irrational exercise in personalized, politicized, ethnic and faith-based psychological warfare. And it succeeded.

By 1979, the Team B and its acolytes Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Zalmay Khalilzad had so managed to overlay their alternate reality onto the mind of government that when the invasion of Afghanistan took place in 1979 their fantasy appeared to be as real and foreordained as it was intended to be.

Richard Pipes made clear in that January 2, 1980 broadcast that Afghanistan was “a superb springboard from which to launch offensives both into the Indian subcontinent and into Iran and the Iranian Gulf….” And then invoked the magic of World War II by stating that never before had the Soviets “felt bold enough… to engage in a direct blitzkrieg. So if they get away with it in Afghanistan, there’ll not only be great danger for our whole Middle eastern position but we will have encouraged them to engage in actions of this sort in other parts of the world, including, for example, Southeastern Europe or possibly even Western Europe.”

A “direct blitzkrieg” aimed at the Middle East, India, Southeastern and even Western Europe? Just like the phantom threat posed by Saddam Hussein in 2003 and brought forward by the very same people, the idea that the Soviets might cut off a vital oil supply was all that was needed to capture public opinion. That spring CBS News anchor Dan Rather followed up with a coast to coast broadcast reinforcing the company line: the American people were asleep to Soviet designs and had better start supporting the Mujahideen “freedom fighters” before it was too late. 

The major media had been priming the pump for months prior to the invasion citing Brzezinski and the importance of the “arc of crisis,” and predicting that the Soviet Union would be driven toward the Persian Gulf within the decade due to intelligence reports that it was “running short of the oil it needs to fuel an expanding economy.” Never mind that the Soviet economy was actually contracting at that point and the CIA’s secret 14-page memo titled “The Impending Soviet Oil Crisis,” was pure hokum.

Brzezinski and his Team B allies wanted the Soviets in Afghanistan as part of a long standing plan for the conquest of Eurasia and the psychological warfare campaign to convince Americans of the Soviets’ malevolent desires for world domination was already gearing up to make it reality.

International Rescue Committee Chairman Leo Cherne was well practiced in the arts of such deception. As of 1978, the year of the Marxist coup in Afghanistan the IRC was already at work stating in their Annual Report that they were actively engaged in bringing Afghan refugees to Europe and the United States following “The takeover of Afghanistan by dictatorial forces sympathetic to the Soviet Union…” The IRC’s Annual Report that year featured a photograph of Cherne’s old protégé at the Research Institute of America, board member William J. Casey while conducting a tour of Southeast Asia. Casey would serve as Chairman of the Executive Committee the next year before running Ronald Reagan’s 1980 election campaign and shortly thereafter becoming his CIA director.

The IRC in cooperation with the CIA had virtually created the elaborate psychological warfare mechanism that sold the U.S. military buildup in Vietnam to the American public. By 1975 their campaign of black lies had been exposed as a dangerous fraud. But in faraway Afghanistan, those mistakes would be forgotten with the help of the Europeans and a covert globalist agenda. 

It was obvious to us in 1980 that the Soviet invasion was not what it seemed and even more obvious that the Western response to it was not what it should have been. 1979 was a critical moment in American history. Vietnam had created huge problems for the post World War II infrastructure and economy. Huge debt and a military resurgence was the last thing the U.S. needed. But when Theodore Eliot showed up at a preview of our first-person 1981 Afghan documentary on life behind Soviet lines and demanded to know who in the U.S. government had “authorized” our project, we realized we had penetrated a psychological warfare campaign that was steeped in the irrational.  

Like clockwork, the 1979 Soviet invasion would open a back door for a small band of globalists to bleed, loot and ultimately disassemble the Soviet Union, just the way the very same people would use 9/11 to go through the front door to bleed, loot and disassemble the United States.

Join us next for Willie Wonka and the National Security State as the U.S. resumes a holy war begun in the 19^th century through a syncretistic cult-like British foreign policy known as Mystical Imperialism.

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are the authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story and Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire Visit their website here.

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

The state’s use of psychological warfare to bend the population to war is as old, if not older than the existence of states themselves. But it was perhaps Nazi Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering whose statement while on trial at Nuremberg best summed up the cynical simplicity of the logic.

“Of course people don’t want war. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders, that is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to greater danger.”

Psychological warfare in the form of propaganda comes in all shapes and sizes as well as shades of black, grey or white.  America’s coordinated use of psychological warfare began in earnest during World War II and ever since has grown and expanded into public relations, advertising, cinema, radio and television, electronic video games and now social media. Its pro-war boosterism extends over sports, religion, education, news and entertainment (and of course the military) to form a seamless electronic cocoon-like web. It is employed on an ever growing list of those deemed as enemies of America as well as on a confused and agitated American public – whose corporate news networks frame and manage an increasingly shallow narrative while engaging in a kind of Orwellian Kabuki Theatre of fairness and balance.

Americans were heavily propagandized to support a U.S. entry into World War II and again heavily propagandized to accept the morality of deploying the atomic bomb to end it, despite dissent from within the scientific community. Even Mickey Mouse was conscripted for America’s total war effort along with the minds of America’s youth. Following the war Americans were heavily propagandized to accept the Cold War, the need for maintaining a permanent army, navy and air force as well as the buildup of a nuclear weapons arsenal.

 Since 9/11 Americans have been bathed in psychological warfare on Islamic terrorism despite the fact that only a handful of incidents in the West can be attributed to radical Islamists. What is generally not appreciated by America’s leadership about this kind of prolonged use of propaganda on the American public is that it exposes the rationale for the longest war in American history in Afghanistan as flimsy and unconvincing and completely sidesteps the outright lies and deceptions used to justify the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq.

The origins of Washington’s war in Afghanistan have always been strategic, long term and particularly black, obscured throughout the Cold War by a narrative adapted from Britain’s 19^th century colonial expansion.

Given little priority during the U.S.’s long involvement in Vietnam in the 1950s and 60s, America’s psychological warfare campaign shifted its attention to Central Asia in 1973 when Afghanistan’s king was overthrown by his brother in law and cousin Mohammed Daoud with the help of the Parcham faction of the Marxist/Leninist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA). The role of the Communist party meant so little to the U.S. media at the time it remained invisible in both Time and Newsweek’s published reports of the coup. But to U.S. ambassador Robert G. Neumann, the presence of the PDPA meant that a “limited Great Game” with the Soviet Union was now back in play.

A coordinated campaign of pressure from U.S.-backed Pakistan and Iran soon ousted Daoud’s Marxist partner while the Shah’s dreaded spy agency SAVAK moved in to help Daoud clean house of leftists. The Shah even readied a military force to invade should Daoud waver in his newfound anti-Communist zeal. But by 1978 a new day for Iran and Afghanistan was about to dawn.  

Enter Hafizullah Amin. Before, during and after World War II the U.S. had created a number of psychological warfare organizations designed to compete with the political propaganda of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.  Integrated closely into the CIA’s intelligence and psychological warfare units after the war, organizations like Leo Cherne’s International Rescue Committee (IRC) and according to the CIA’s own website, the Congress for Cultural Freedom “helped to solidify CIA’s emerging strategy of promoting the non-Communist left–the strategy that would soon become the theoretical foundation of the Agency’s political operations against Communism over the next two decades.”

In constant competition with the KGB, the CIA was also known to target foreign students destined to hold high rank in their home countries.  Handpicked by U.S. administrators to participate in a UNESCO/Columbia University program, Amin was sent to New York in 1957. He later completed a master’s degree at Columbia—coincidentally at a time when future National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski was gaining prominence as a professor there.

Amin claimed to have become radicalized at the University of Wisconsin in 1958. He also claimed to have become a Marxist that summer but would conceal his emergence as a leader in the Kalq faction of the PDPA until much later. Despite being a Marxist, Amin was again chosen in 1962 by the Americans to attend Columbia, this time as a doctoral candidate and rose quickly to become the president of the Afghan Student Association. A disclosure in Ramparts magazine in 1967 would reveal the CIA’s sponsorship of that same Afghan Student Association during that time. Following his return Amin rose rapidly in Afghan politics and by 1978 was positioned to play a pivotal role in another Palace coup, this time of Prince Mohammed Daoud himself.

1978 was a pivotal year in the foreign policy of the United States as President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski made steady inroads into Secretary of State Cyrus Vance’s power. By that year he had persuaded Carter to transfer jurisdiction over the CIA from the Inter-Agency Policy Review Committee, (headed by the secretary of state) to the National Security Council’s Special Coordinating Committee which he chaired. This shift gave Brzezinski control over covert operations in Afghanistan. It also gave him control of the psychological warfare campaign necessary to make those operations work both at home and abroad.

Hafizullah Amin played the perfect foil to Brzezinski’s propaganda war which, regardless of the lack of evidence, painted the PDPA takeover in Kabul as a clear example of the growing dangers of Soviet expansionism and their pursuit of dominance in the Persian Gulf. Throughout 1978 and into 1979 Amin’s actions dovetailed perfectly into the expanding psychological warfare campaign with Brzezinski blaming Amin’s February 1979 assassination of American Ambassador Adolph Dubs, on the Soviets.

Transcripts from Politburo meetings in Moscow from March 1979 show a Soviet leadership confounded as the events unfolded, referring to conversations with Amin as looking “like a detective novel.” Had the operation been scripted in advance by the CIA to confuse Moscow, it was working brilliantly.

The subsequent, December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan ended détente, renewed the Cold War and opened a U.S. relationship with Communist China that could not have been imagined at the time. It established a new narrative of an expanding Evil Empire threatening America’s vital interests in the Persian Gulf and would redefine U.S. objectives along neoconservative lines. These lines were laid out within days of the Soviet invasion by former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Theodore Eliot and Harvard Professor Richard Pipes in a MacNeil Lehrer broadcast on January 2, 1980.

But it wasn’t until we probed this new narrative by going to Afghanistan ourselves in 1981 and were challenged personally in a public forum for doing so by Ambassador Eliot, that we realized there was much more to Ambassador Eliot and his narrative than met the eye.

*Join us next as we look at the strange team behind the psychological warfare campaign that brought the United States into Afghanistan and kept it there and how that campaign has come home to haunt America in a post 9/11 world.

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are the authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story and Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire Visit their website here.

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

On the other hand, by this very same definition, a criminal ‘hot case’ that has not gone through a proper investigation by real investigators remains a ‘hot case.’ Whether that hot case is shoved into a cold case file or not does not make it technically a ‘cold case.’ The never-investigated mass murder on September 11, 2001, a case never assigned to real and independent investigators, with many witnesses never-interviewed, with many suspects never-pursued, with many questions left unanswered, and with many leads never-followed, remains a ‘hot case.’ The self-serving classifications and redactions, the many cover ups, and the burial of the case and related files in government-created massive igloos, do not make 9/11 a cold case.

Let’s take a few minutes and by comparison examine a smaller scale murder investigation involving a murdered wealthy middle-aged man in an office building that was set on fire. While the forensic teams go over the body and through the charred building and debris to search for clues and evidence, the trained detectives begin interviewing witnesses, checking out the victim’s history, following any leads and forming their list of suspects.

In creating their list of suspects, the investigators look at all persons with direct or indirect motive(s): A young trophy wife with a multi-million dollar life insurance policy; a business adversary with much to gain from the elimination of the murder victim; former business partners and associates with grudges; a man who had actually threatened the murder victim; another who had shared his intense desire to see the victim dead; the owner of the handsomely insured burned down office building who had been unsuccessfully trying to sell the building and liquidate his assets …so on and so forth.

Whether through accounts of eye-witnesses or relatives, coworkers and friends, whether through documented evidence such as letters or e-mails, the investigators fill the list with possible suspects with motive(s) to see the victim dead, and maybe some with the established intent to kill him. Once the investigators create their list of suspects, and once the forensic and other evidence and witness statements have been gathered and analyzed, then they set about winnowing down the list. Using exhaustive interrogation techniques, investigative channels, and forensic evidence, the investigators begin eliminating unlikely suspects from the initial list one-by-one.

Sometimes the list is simultaneously narrowed down and expanded. While some initial suspects can be eliminated, others related to the initial suspects may be added as accessories to the crime. For example, the murder victim’s business adversary hired a professional hit organization that turned around and contracted the killing to three of its contract hit men. Or the victim’s wife’s lover plotted with her and engaged two hit men to execute the plot.

In the end, the investigators turn over their final suspect-accessory list and all the evidence that they believe will stand up in court to a prosecutor who then decides (on the evidence)  whether to bring charges against one or more suspects, and then argues the case in court. The suspect(s), motive, means and opportunity, all supported by evidence and witnesses, are presented in court for the jury to judge the case and decide guilt beyond reasonable doubt.

Of course we then have those cases that never make it to court. The lack of sufficient evidence, witnesses, or even a lack of possible suspects, moves the case from the investigation phase directly into the cold case file cabinet.

Then, we have cases that never make it even to the real investigation phase. Period. Without going through the usual investigative process- evidence-gathering, witness interviews, seeking motives and means, looking for intent, establishing a list of suspects …Without turning over any suspect with ‘all’ associated evidence and witnesses to any prosecutor…These case are evasively declared closed or a cold case.

The investigation of the 9/11 mass murder was first assigned to a highly-influenced and dependent Congress. We are not talking seasoned detectives and investigative agents here. Then, it was given to a group of sleazy pocketed politicians called a commission. Again, we are not talking about experienced detectives and savvy and independent prosecutors. No; just a handful of masterful and deceitful politicians and their puppet administrative staff.

There never was a thorough initial list of suspects. A few hours after the mass murder a bearded man in some dark cave in Afghanistan was announced as the mastermind and less than a couple dozen dead hit-men were declared the executioners of that mass murder. As for motive and intent, there was a round or two of circular discussions in the media, but absent any real investigation and thus any need for real prosecution, establishing motive and intent were deemed irrelevant and unnecessary. Same for any accessory suspects; a few hundred were rounded up around the globe and were taken into black holes, black sites, and black prisons. Some were later released, some were tortured and killed, and some still remain in those holes. We don’t know, and it looks like we’ll never know.

In a real-life mass murder investigation by real investigators a document like this, explicitly stating the desire for a mass murder like this would immediately make its way into the evidence bag, and signatories such as these people with a real motive and unlimited means would be automatically added to the top of the investigators’ initial list of suspects. They would remain there until further investigated, eliminated, or possibly prosecuted. Of course this was not a real investigation, and with no real investigators, and there never was a real list of suspects.

In a real-life investigation highly suspicious suspects like this would not easily disappear into thin air just like that.

In a real-life investigation any suspect accessory like this would be investigated, interrogated, and accordingly cleared or apprehended. And other highly suspicious persons or possible witnesses like this would be questioned and examined very thoroughly, rather than being directly assisted in fleeing the country.

In a real-life investigation key witnesses and investigative experts like these would be held with the highest regard, and their knowledge, first-hand information, and documented evidence would be considered of great value. They certainly wouldn’t be censored, classified and officially gagged.

In a real-life investigation if the highest-level criminal investigative body declares the capriciously designated perpetrator only a ‘suspect’ with no real hard evidence ever linking him to the crime in question, the case would be categorized as ‘never-solved & so very much open.’

And the list goes on and on. When we get down to it, I mean really get down to it, what do we really have in the investigation of the biggest mass murder in the history of our nation? I’ll tell you what we have. We have a still ‘Hot Case’ that has been shoved inside a massive establishment-built igloo; so far, successfully.

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

 I am not going to get into the ‘some’ reasons for this post; although, I have plenty to say on the subject. Instead, for the purpose of this piece, and for those audiences, I am going to answer the ‘whys.’ Why ‘some’ still question and seek answer(s) and accountability on 9/11.

Why 9/11? Because ‘they’ claim that’s what gives them the right to override our Constitution and all other laws guaranteeing our liberties and privacy.

Why 9/11? Because that’s what ‘they’ claim as justification for every one of our many wars.

Why 9/11? Because that’s what ‘they’ say is the reason for us having to be violated, humiliated, groped and fondled for the ‘privilege’ of travel.

Why 9/11? Because that’s when ‘they’ began the illegal eavesdropping of all our communications.

Why 9/11? Because that’s how ‘they’ legitimize excessive secrecy.

Why 9/11? Because that’s the excuse ‘they’ use to implement torture and severe human right violations and escape all liabilities.

Why 9/11? Because that’s the rationalization ‘they’ use to expand ‘their’ size and power.

Why 9/11? Because ‘they’ have successfully made it a means to justify many unjustifiable ends.

Why 9/11? Because that holds answers to many questions ‘they’ don’t want you to ask.

Why 9/11? Because that’s the question ‘they’ don’t want ever answered.

Why 9/11? Because maybe that is what ‘they’ really wanted.

Why 9/11? Because ‘they’ should not get away with it.

With all due respect to those who are still not satisfied with my answers to their ‘why’ question, we’ll be publishing articles, podcast interviews and investigative videos on 9/11 and related topics for the next few weeks…or maybe longer.  We hope to have those friends as an open-minded and critical thinking audience during our 9/11 coverage here at Boiling Frogs Post.

Sibel Edmonds

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

By Elizabeth Gould & Paul Fitzgerald

 9/11. The number still rings in the mind as if chosen to act as a Pavlovian trigger: Outrage, anger, paranoia, retribution. A shadowy band of religious zealots fly not one, but two commercial airliners into the heart of America’s financial community while others deal a deadly blow to the Pentagon. It was a Hollywood movie, an act of war rivaling Pearl Harbor. Why did it happen? Who would do this to Americans, to America? How could a band of ragged terrorists plotting from a cave in faraway Afghanistan have accomplished such a complex task given the size and pervasiveness of the largest and most expensive military/intelligence apparatus in the history of the world? And even more curiously, why would Islamic radicals give the ideology-driven neoconservative administration of George W. Bush exactly the pretext they needed to launch a bloody invasion and further occupation of the Middle East?

According to the official narrative, 9/11 was an attack on everything American and in so doing changed everything about America. Like Kafkaesque characters who’d suddenly found themselves on the other side of a Cold War “Iron Curtain” mirror, Americans would now have to “watch what they say and watch what they do,” open up to questioning or face jail when prodded by squinty-eyed border guards and forsake any hope of privacy or dignity in a new world of electronic spies and full body scans. Former National Security Advisor, Admiral John Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness program would be enacted and a preexisting “Patriot Act” would be signed into law to clamp down on dissent and real or imagined domestic terrorism.

Some careful observers like Anthony Lewis of the New York Times had already noticed the bizarre coup-like changes coming over Washington in the months leading up to the attack as the George W. Bush administration inaugurated radical shifts in domestic and foreign policy that seemed un-American and alien to anything that had gone before. But those concerns would soon be forgotten in the race for revenge. 

9/11 would ultimately give President George W. Bush and his neoconservative advisors all the public approval they needed to transform America and invade Afghanistan and Iraq to cleanse the world of evil in an endless “war on terror.” In the end it would turn America’s reputation for racial and religious tolerance, military invincibility and economic dominance on its head.

Looking back on the carnage of the last ten years it’s easy to see how the psychology of 9/11 changed America. What’s not easy to see is how a long standing campaign of covert psychological warfare built up since the early days of World War II had made the slow destruction of American democracy and the ascension of rule by secrecy inevitable, long before the planes ever left the runway on 9/11. 

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” -Dr. Joseph Goebbels

As chief propagandist for the Nazi Party, Joseph Goebbels system of black propaganda not only helped Hitler’s rise to power but kept him there by utilizing near-hypnotic powers over the German people even after the consequences of his disastrous failures had become obvious.

To counter Goebbels’ propaganda theatre emanating from Nazi party headquarters at Munich’s Braunes Haus (Brown House), an organization named Freedom House was founded in New York City in 1941. Fronted by American celebrities and public luminaries such as Eleanor Roosevelt, the brains behind the outfit was Leo Cherne, the psychological warfare specialist/co-founder of the Research Institute of America (RIA), which would much later be labeled the “CIA for businessmen.”    

If anyone was a match for Goebbels mastery of the black arts of psychological warfare it was Cherne. In 1938 Cherne had published a guide to industrial mobilization in Adjusting Your Business to War, prophetically forecasting the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939 and on September 1^st of that year completed a 3000-page report titled, Industrial Mobilization Plans for World War II, the very day that German troops crossed into Poland.

That same year Cherne asked a young protégé named William J. Casey, the future director of the CIA, “How do you take a country like ours, stuck in depression, and convert it into an arsenal?” Their combined answer was the loose-leaf book called The War Coordinator. Cherne and Casey’s psychological warfare campaign would establish a narrative that didn’t just embrace freedom as its major theme, in their minds their ideas would actually become Freedom and through the use of propaganda would grow and harden over the decades into an impenetrable shield-like narrative of American triumphalism.

Cherne’s prophecies on war and business attained a near mystical quality and over the decades following World War II he would attract the most powerful and influential figures in American business and politics to his causes. A listing of Freedom House trustees on its 50^th anniversary in 1991 includes people as diverse as Kenneth L. Adelman, Andrew Young, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, Albert Shanker, Donald Rumsfeld and James Woolsey. It has since become an exclusive neoconservative bastion.

Freedom House’s narrative is no less than the narrative of the American century where, “It has fought on the side of freedom and against aggressors in struggles that can be evoked by simple words and phrases: the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine, NATO, Hungarian Freedom Fighters, the Berlin Wall, the Prague Spring…” and of course Afghanistan.

We experienced Freedom House’s simple words and phrases and their dark influence on the major media in the spring of 1983 in a televised Nightline program following a trip to Afghanistan with Harvard Negotiation Project Director, Roger Fisher. We had brought Fisher to Afghanistan to explore the possibilities of a Soviet withdrawal of forces and discovered the Soviets were desperate to get out. But instead of expanding on Fisher’s efforts to get the Soviets out of Afghanistan, host Ted Koppel undermined the very premise of the discussion by introducing a political officer of the Jamaat-i Islami, which Koppel described as “an anti-communist resistance group based in Pakistan. He is here in the United States under the auspices of two American organizations, concerned with democracy in Afghanistan, the Afghan Relief Committee and Freedom House.”

Had Koppel and Freedom House really been concerned about democracy in Afghanistan, their choice of the Jamaat-i Islami could not be viewed as anything but the darkest of black propaganda, an outright lie.

Originally founded by the Pakistani theologian Abul Ala Maudidi in 1941, the goal of the Jamaat-i Islami was more than just that of gaining political representation for radical Islamists. The Jamaat was to be an all-embracing, extremist Islamic Society, crafted through the strictest interpretation of Islamic law, as a replacement for a modern western-style democracy.

Through the help of the mainstream media during the 1980s the psychological war promoted by Freedom House and Ronald Reagan’s C.I.A. director William J. Casey held the Soviets in Afghanistan for an additional six years, destabilized Central Asia, encouraged the growth of the largest heroin operation in history and enabled the rise of the very Islamic extremists that allegedly planned and carried off the attacks on 9/11.

Ten years after 9/11 Afghanistan remains the center of a growing Islamic insurgency and the longest war in American history. The success of America’s seventy year old psychological warfare campaign, where the lie became the truth and the truth became the enemy of the state, has now so disorientated America’s institutional thinking that we have reached the moment when the state can no longer shield the American people from the consequences of that lie.

Follow us as we go deeper into the creation of the Afghan narrative and the broader implications of the side effects of psychological warfare on the American people in our next piece, Building the Afghan Narrative with Black Propaganda, The Process is Revealed.

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are the authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story  and   Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire Visit their website here.

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

For almost 10 years we have been engaged in a massive and many-fronted war advertised as a war on terror-war on Al Qaeda. Recent reports put the total cost to America of this war on terror at around $3 trillion. This is not counting un-countable covert operations with secret budgets, and it does not include the war in Libya or covert wars elsewhere.

For the last 10 years of the Cold War, the period of our heightened expenditures against a war marketed as a war against communism, we reportedly spent slightly under $3 trillion.

For a moment let’s forget about the exaggerated and sometimes dubious Soviet threats that were being sold to our nation during the Cold-War, and assume all of them legitimate and warranted. Okay?

We had the Soviet military with over 5 million men. We were dealing with Long-Range Ballistic Missile capabilities.  We had an empire with a declared arsenal of 39,967 tons of chemical weapons. We were faced with massive nuclear arsenals and warheads, sophisticated fighter aircraft, tanks… All that, and of course the added fear propaganda and jazzed up other threats to go with it. My point here is not how scary an adversary the USSR was to the United States. Here is what I want you to do:

Take into perspective and compare the size, budget, militaristic and technological capabilities, and the vast power of our former adversary, the USSR, to the current alleged terrorist adversary, Al Qaeda, whom we have supposedly been fighting for ten years.

Let’s first begin by engaging in a rational process of elimination, and take out the wars and targets that are not related to the 9/11 terrorists, the supposed Al-Qaeda. That will take out Iraq and Saddam Hussein, and also Libya and Gaddafi.

Next, we should take out Afghanistan as a terrorist nation state. Afghanistan has been under our occupation for almost ten years, and we have our puppet government installed there, and when it comes down to it, the Taliban does not equate to Al-Qaeda, it never did. The Taliban did not exercise terrorism in the United States or its Global territories.

We must also remove Pakistan as a terrorist country, thus a nation state target. If you remember, neither the quasi 9/11 Congressional Inquiry nor the quasi 9/11 Commission Report ever declared the Pakistani government/nation as terrorists or an Al-Qaeda member. Let us go with their official judgment. After all, haven’t we been giving Pakistan billions of dollars in US aid since 9/11 and continuing to date? Wouldn’t it be ridiculous to on one hand categorize our drone war there as war against Pakistan as a member of the Al-Qaeda terrorist network, and on the other hand support and finance them? Exactly; that eliminates Pakistan as an Al-Qaeda nation-government. Are you with me so far? What does this leave us with?

Our war on Al-Qaeda terror does not include a single nation state or organized state military. No military infrastructure or headquarters. No trained army-navy-air force. No tanks, warplanes, nuclear warheads, drones. No intelligence institutions or landmarks. No communication satellites. No technology. No borders. No GDP…

The supposed Al Qaeda’s top leadership was declared by our government to be Osama Bin Laden, aka Al Qaeda Commander in Chief; a sickly old man who was hooked to a dialysis machine; who supposedly lived and hid in caves, and later, in a mud house located in a remote third world village with chickens and goats. A man who sustained himself and his family by periodically selling his wives jewelry or bartering milk from his goats for occasional lamb chops. All this according to our own government; coming out in bits and pieces, and of course, sometimes in a totally contradictory fashion.

The supposed Al-Qaeda network’s communication and intelligence sharing infrastructure, according to our government, was kept very simple to evade our trillion-dollar intelligence institutions. The Al-Qaeda commander-in-Chief wrote down notes and instructions. He then waited for the courier to come and pick it up. The old man courier would hop on a donkey and travel from a bigger town to the Commander-in-Chief’s mud house in a third world village. This sometimes took several days. He’d take the note, then hop on his donkey, and go back to the town where he’d meet another intermediary courier. The intermediary courier would take the note to a nondescript little house, climb up to the roof where he kept trained courier pigeons and hawks, and based on the importance of the communication given to him, he’d either choose a hawk or pigeon to send the intelligence to the next courier. The next one used couriers who traveled to the remote deserts by camels, and so on and so forth.

How about the sophistication of weapons-methods used by our target terrorists, the ominous Al Qaeda? We are talking about a dozen or so pocket knives priced at approximately $4 a piece (probably made in China), and of course if bought in bulk, for a total under $40. That for the supposed execution of the massive terror plot over here, in the world’s super power nation. As for other worldwide terror incidents that have been placed under the  ‘Al Qaeda Track Record,’  we are talking about rudimentary bomb-making ability paired up with ultra simple bombs created by ingredients such as fertilizer; we are talking a few loads of cow dung here; literally, that is.

What about the size of the manpower these terrorists, Al-Qaeda, possess? Interestingly no one in our government has ever touched upon any scientific or even commonsensical estimate as to the number of active-combative Al-Qaeda terrorists. Instead, our government, through their stenographers in the media and their marketing arm in the Hollywood filmmaking industry, has succeeded in forming this public perception of a massive number of boogieman-Al Qaeda-terrorists out there who are actively and constantly planning and executing terror plots against the West.  Thus, to get a certain level of rational perception we must look at some factual indicators:

We have had this $3 trillion ‘War on Al Qaeda Terror’ for the last 10 years with nearly a quarter million military members, thousands and thousands of intelligence operatives and analysts, highly sophisticated and gigantic intelligence gathering tools (Think NSA, satellite technologies, wiretaps, spooks and snitches), mega rewards for turning in Al-Qaeda members …You’d think in ten years of these constant war and intelligence gathering operations we’d have tens of thousands of captured Al-Qaeda terrorists in our jails here and abroad. No?

Interestingly ‘No.’ Let’s take a look at the mother of all our captive top Al Qaeda terrorists detention center; Guantanamo Bay:

Since October 7, 2001, when began the war in Afghanistan, 775 detainees have been brought to Guantanamo. Of these, most have been released without charge or transferred to facilities in their home countries. The Department of Defense often referred to these prisoners as the “worst of the worst”, but a 2003 memo by then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld says, “We need to stop populating Guantanamo Bay (GTMO) with low-level enemy combatants … GTMO needs to serve as an [redacted] not a prison for Afghanistan.”

Currently we have less than 200 detainees at Guantanamo most of whom have not been proven guilty of being ‘Al Qaeda terrorists.’ Let’s be even more generous and count in those detained in other US military prisons like Bagram. Again, we are looking at 500 or so prisoners none of whom having ever been charged; none of whom legally found to be an Al Qaeda terrorist.

Now please put all these facts in perspective: Ten long years of continuous wars, trillions of dollars, 250,000 military personnel, trillions of dollars worth of intelligence gathering institutions and capabilities, millions of dollars set in rewards for Al Qaeda terrorists, and a supposed network with supposed  Al Qaeda active terrorist members in very large numbers. Yet we have less than 1000 detained who have been accused of being Al Qaeda terrorists, and none ever proven to be an active Al Qaeda terrorist member.

Does this make sense to you? Does it make sense as far as the trillions of dollars you have been made to pay for this? What are we talking about here? A massive never-ending war against a fantastical network of technologically and militaristically dwarfed terrorists whose proven guilty members we haven’t been able to catch or kill.

Everyone is busy arguing whether we should cut or add a few billion dollars to the several trillion dollars war on Al Qaeda. People keep talking about which country we should be getting out of, or, how many more countries we should get into to fight against terrorist Al Qaeda. No one is asking what Al Qaeda is or who really these supposed Al Qaeda terrorists are. The question that never seems to come up is exactly how big is this Al Qaeda we are spending trillions of dollars and thousands of lives fighting against. I mean no one.

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DailyKos has acted to ban commenters from linking to Mondoweiss, charging me with anti-Semitism. It is a disgraceful smear and hides DailyKos’s real anxiety: it cannot deal with the issue of Palestinian human rights, any more than the Democratic Party can, and so Israel supporters are striking at me.

            …

And this from another writer over there at Mondoweiss:

…Several times over the last few months I’ve been alerted by friends regarding ‘diaries’ by members of ‘Team Shalom’ at Daily Kos highly critical of Mondoweiss. Why does this matter? For our site, I don’t think it does. It’s clear some of our biggest detractors read this site avidly, including the comments that ultimately drive traffic.  Team Shalom has run a campaign to have this site banned from Daily Kos (even tho I am not aware posters there link to this site with any regularity, perhaps I am wrong) and yesterday one of my friends who posts there wrote to inform me they have achieved this goal.

…

You can read more on other recent censorship incidents by these Israeli Lobby parasites here.

Does this incident, this exposé, come as a surprise to me? Of course not. After Obama’s election any discussion threads about me or my case were also banned from this Parasitic-Zionist-Neoconistic mega establishment mini mouthpiece. I didn’t bother writing about it. With the reasons so obvious, with the pattern so very clear, and with the involved participants’ agenda extremely translucent, why waste time to dwell upon it?

It took one article to get on this extension of partisan status quo’s black-list. While foaming at the mouth they yelled ‘How dare she criticize Obama?! She should just focus on Bush-Cheney FBI and DOJ, and leave the rest of the politics to our experts….’

Any real criticism and exposure of Obama-Cons made it to the top of their ‘no-no’ list.

Same goes for other ‘dangerous’ topics. Even though, initially, this forum started off on the back of rational and legitimate 9/11 critics, despite milking the attention on 9/11 related topics at the time, it very quickly changed course and started banning and censoring any and all topics related to 9/11.

The real establishment is nonpartisan. It seeks power, control, and of course mega dollars. For them real independent and rational ‘ideas’ are dangerous. For them the ‘free exchange of ideas’ is extremely dangerous. For them the possibility of the exchange of independent rational ideas leading to ‘real action’ is detrimental. So be realistic and ask yourself what are they to do? Shouldn’t they rein in any forums and channels with any potential of becoming a place for any rational independent ideas that may lead to any real action? Right. Then, welcome the phony alternative news; welcome the little parasitic puppet forums; welcome the existence of sites such as the Daily Kos. Need I say more?

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It has been over two weeks since the orchestrated ever-changing Bin Laden Death. The question of what happened remains the same except it doesn’t seem to matter any longer. The US media is done after making their initial splash, and the majority is left with one conclusion: the SOB is dead, and who gives a da… how it happened. Whether Osama held an AK-47 while using some damsel in distress as a shield, whether there was a real fight or not, whether it was really Osama’s body in an organic edible shell we fed to the endangered sharks, whether the full credit goes to the CIA or the White House or the Pentagon …no longer seems to matter. Dizzy-fying confusion induced by dozens and dozens of lies and discrepancies and denials has given way to post-adrenaline-rush exhaustion. The question of what happened has been classified as moot and irrelevant. Right or wrong I’ll leave that question behind, at least for now, and instead, go back to focus on the more important question- the question of ‘why and why now.’

As I stated during the first few days of covering the Bin Laden Death Script, when it comes to DC dirty politics, when it comes to the new world order machine, and when it comes to US presidents, timing is everything and there are no such things as coincidences:

Considering the mainstream media’s sensationalism and propaganda tactics and their cemented role as an extension of the establishment, one must step back and take in the entire landscape, the context, connections, and of course the timing. Only after that, after putting the pieces together instead of dumbly staring at the images spread before us by the media, we have a chance to get a grasp of the reality-facts; or at least a chance to come up with real questions.

In the past two weeks, after talking with many experts and sources, both nationally and internationally, Pakistan has been surfacing as the common thread holding the most rational explanation of ‘why and why now.’ Interestingly, I came across the following statement by Rep. Ron Paul during his interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe:

“The helicopters that landed in Abbottabad won’t be the last to put American troops on the ground in Pakistan, I see the whole thing as a mess, and I think that we are going to be in Pakistan. I think that’s the next occupation and I fear it. I think it’s ridiculous, and I think our foreign policy is such that we don’t need to be doing this.”

I was planning to write a comprehensive piece based on information and analyses I have gathered from my solid intelligence and Pentagon sources. However, after watching the interview with Ron Paul (And he has his credible sources), I decided to go ahead and write a fairly quick commentary on why the question of ‘why and why now’ keeps pointing to Pakistan as the next probable occupation target for our never-dying neocon objective-makers. Actually the following is more of significant developments and a timeline than a subjective interpretation or commentary. I am going to put them together and have us look at the pattern and where these points point to, and that’s exactly what I meant by “one must step back and take in the entire landscape, the context, connections, and of course the timing.”

Let’s start with Project for the New American Century (PNAC) which was launched in 1997 and became known for leading the public campaign to oust Saddam Hussein both before and after the September 11 attacks. As many of my highly aware readers know, those neocons, their objectives and activities, never go away. They may change names or change a few front faces, but like a leech they always hold on to the system; the system they help put in place in the first place:

The blandly-named Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) – the brainchild of Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, neo-conservative foreign policy guru Robert Kagan, and former Bush administration official Dan Senor – has thus far kept a low profile; its only activity to this point has been to sponsor a conference pushing for a U.S. “surge” in Afghanistan.But some see FPI as a likely successor to Kristol’s and Kagan’s previous organisation, the now-defunct Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which they launched in 1997 and which became best known for leading the public campaign to oust former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein both before and after the Sep. 11 attacks.

…

So what’s their mission statement, and what have these neocons been cooking up with the new face, their new president, Obama? The following is from an article by Jim Lobe in 2009:

The mission statement opens by listing a familiar litany of threats to the U.S., including “rogue states,” “failed states,” “autocracies” and “terrorism”, but gives pride of place to the “challenges” posed by “rising and resurgent powers,” of which only China and Russia are named.

…FPI intends to make confrontation with China and Russia the centrepiece of its foreign policy stance. If this is the case, it would mark a return to the early days of the Bush administration, before 9/11, when Kristol’s Weekly Standard took the lead in attacking Washington for its alleged “appeasement” of Beijing… FPI has chosen to push for escalating the U.S. military effort in Afghanistan. The organisation’s first event, to be held here Mar. 31, will be a conference entitled “Afghanistan: Planning for Success”.

…

For now, this is what I want you to take from the above on Obama’s Neoconistic objectives: fiercely counter China-Russia when it comes to establishing US hegemony, especially in Central and South Asia, with emphasis on Afghanistan. Next, let’s look at the strategic importance of the same region for China [All emphasis mine]:

In order for China to sustain its status as the emerging economic superpower, it must take all the necessary steps required in order to have sufficient energy resources for the near future. According to Pakistani think tank, BrassTacks, Chinese interests in the Indian Ocean became visible in 2002, when they invested heavily and began work on the Gwadar Port, located in Baluchestan, a province of Pakistan.

The Gwadar Port has its benefits for both Pakistan and China. According to Abdus Sattar Ghazali, executive editor for American Muslim Perspective, “The cost benefits to China of using Gwadar as the port for western China’s imports and exports are as evident as the long-term economic benefits to Pakistan of Gwadar becoming a port for Chinese goods.” Not only does Gwadar enable China to fulfill its energy needs, but it will also provide a strategic military footprint in the Arabian Sea, which has the United States worried.

…

Okay, now you have Obama’s Neoconistic objectives with China as its main target and competitor, and you have China competing for the same strategic area, Pakistan, to fulfill its energy needs and establish a strategic footprint in the Arabian Sea, and in the middle of it, the point where US-China strategic objectives intersect: Pakistan.

In order to halt this, the globalists need to block China’s access to the Arabian Sea by way of Gwadar. According to BrassTacks, to do this, “there needs to be a ‘new Pakistan’ as indicated in Operation Enduring Turmoil.” Operation Enduring Turmoil is PNAC’s plan to disassemble Pakistan into three parts. According to a “game plan” drawn out by Lt. Col. Ralph Peters, in a 2006 article of the Armed Forces Journal, “Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier tribes would be reunited with their Afghan brethren [and] would also lose its Baluch territory to Free Baluchistan. The remaining ‘natural’ Pakistan would lie entirely east of the Indus, except for a westward spur near Karachi.” With this done, what was once the NWFP, a province of Pakistan, is now part of Afghanistan, and what was once Baluchistan, a province of Pakistan, is now its own state, Free Baluchistan. This would force China to impossibly go through Afghanistan and Free Baluchistan in order to reach the Arabian Sea. Such an arrangement would cut China’s route to the Arabian Sea.

…

Now, please focus on our three main actors- China, US and in the middle, the strategically important Pakistan. Let’s use our common sense minus logic-clouding details, and consider what happens when the strategically crucial actor in the middle starts straying away from one main actor and moving toward the other.

This is from November, 2009:

China has sent out an interesting signal ahead of US president Barack Obama’s scheduled visit to Beijing by offering a set of advanced fighter jets to Pakistan. It has agreed to sell $1.4 billion worth of jets to Islamabad days ahead of the planned visit of the US president Barack Obama to Shanghai and Beijing on November 15-18.

The move is expected to jolt the US administration as it works on notes and talking points for Obama’s meetings with Chinese leaders. He is expected to discuss Beijing’s relationship with India and its role in internal conflicts in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Beijing is keen to reduce US influence on Pakistan, which will make it easier for it to deal with India, sources said. Washington’s recent decision to extend massive financial assistance to Islamabad is seen in some quarters as a policy setback for China.

…

A year later, in October 2010, the following interesting perspective on how things were heating up between the US and Pakistan is published by Margolis:

The neoconservative far right in Washington and its media allies again claim Pakistan is a grave threat to US interests and to Israel. Pakistan must be declawed and dismembered, insist the neocons. Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is reportedly being targeted for seizure or elimination by US Special Forces. There is also talk in Washington of dividing Afghanistan into Pashtun, Tajik and Uzbek mini-states, as the US has done in Iraq, and perhaps Pakistan, as well. Little states are easier to rule or intimidate than big ones. Many Pakistanis believe the United States is bent on dismembering their nation. Some polls show Pakistanis now regard the United States as a greater enemy than India.

…

It is important to remember how Obama passed AIPAC neocons’ test on Pakistan during his presidential campaign in 2007. Obama said if elected in November 2008 he would be willing to attack inside Pakistan with or without approval from the Pakistani government,”If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will,” Obama said.

Now, let’s fast-forward to early April 2011:

Pakistan’s ambassador to China used a recent celebration of his country’s Republic Day to give a rhetoric-filled talk about Beijing-Islamabad relations. If March 23, 1940, was the day the Muslim League decided to establish Pakistan, then the anniversary would be a time to declare that relations with China will define the way forward. ‘We shall take our bilateral relations to new heights,’ Masood Khan proclaimed. [...] Pakistan has been moving into China’s sphere of influence for decades and the countries routinely refer to each other as ‘all-weather’ partners.

This year will mark the 60th anniversary of diplomatic relations. ‘Even when I was there in 1981, ’82, I could see Chinese military factories going up,’ says Stephen Cohen, a Pakistan expert at the Brookings Institution. Now, Pakistan represents a major market for China’s nuclear and military technology. According to SIPRI, a Swedish think tank, over 40 per cent of Chinese arms exports go to Pakistan—the largest share of any country China sells to.”

Obviously Obama’s day in day out bombing of Pakistan, his ‘let’s drone the hell out of them’ policy, had backfired, producing the opposite effect for his Neoconistic global hegemony objectives. Now, things begin to really heat up; this is from April 17, 2011:

President Obama’s rhetoric in Delhi had no substance except to rile the Pakistanis. The Delhi card didn’t quite work. The Chinese Premier visited Islamabad and pledged $20 billion in investment in Pakistan during the next five years. How about them apples? The Pakistani retort is what it has always been we need “Friends Not Masters”.

Britain as a colonial power practiced “Divide and rule” pitting religious and ethnic differences in the Middle East to rule continents. Bhutto famously theorized that the post-colonial powers were working on a “unite and rule” strategy forcing Pakistan to work with India against China.

“The idea of becoming subservient to India is abhorrent and that of cooperation with India, with the object of promoting tension with China, equally repugnant.” Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto.

…

Most Pakistanis don’t want closer relations with Washington–they want to build closer relations with Beijing, and work on creating the Muslim Union (similar to the European Union) in Central Asia. Links with Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey are key to the future of Pakistan.

Islamabad is moving ever closer to China, both militarily and economically– and that’s a fact Jack.

…

By mid April things start going downhill; very fast.

The transactional relationship between Washington and Islamabad is coming to an end. While US-Pakistani transactional relations are fraying at both ends, the opposite is true of Sino-Pakistani relations.

Pakistan supported China when she was recognized only by Albania, and built the bridge to the USA. This fact cannot be forgotten by the Chinese who mention it in every summit and mentioned it in this summit also

…

There is renewed energy to pace up the development of Gwadar Port to provide China a shorter route and easy excess to world markets to dispatch its goods to Europe and America.

“The Gwadar port project will transform Pakistan’s Navy into a force that can rival regional navies. The government of Pakistan has designated the port area as a “sensitive defense zone.” The Gwadar port will rank among the world’s largest deep-sea ports. The port provides China a strategic foothold in the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean.

Located at the entrance of the Persian Gulf and about 460 kms from Karachi, Gwadar has had immense Geostrategic significance on many accounts. The continued unstable regional environment in the Persian Gulf in particular as a result of the Iran/Iraq war, the Gulf war and the emergence of the new Central Asian States has added to this importance. Considering the Geo-economic imperative of the regional changes, the ADB’s Ports Master Plan studies considered an alternate to the Persian Gulf Ports to capture the transit trade of the Central Asian Republic (CAR) as well as the trans-shipment trade of the region.

…

And finally, on April 27, according to my sources, the following catalyst prompts the Obama team to execute the Kill Osama Bin Laden Script. This is the pivotal point in the Bin Laden Death Operation Script as a catalyst for the soon to come Pakistan Occupation:

Pakistan is lobbying Afghan President Hamid Karzai against building a long-term strategic partnership with the United States, and urging him instead to look to Pakistan and its ally, China, for help in striking a peace deal with the Taliban and rebuilding the economy, according to Afghan officials.

…

Washington”s relations with Pakistan have reached their lowest point in years following a series of missteps on both sides, and Pakistani officials say that they no longer have an incentive to follow the American lead in their own backyard, the report added.

“Pakistan is sole guarantor of its own interest,” said a senior Pakistani official, adding: “We”re not looking for anyone else to protect us, especially the US. If they”re leaving, they”re leaving and they should go.”

…

The next day, on April 28, , a senior Pakistani government official said that the Export-Import Bank of China will loan Pakistan $1.7 billion to develop a city-wide train system in the eastern city of Lahore.

Since the holes-filled and never-explained ‘kill or capture’ operation, the presidential PR machine, the US media and their extension guised under ‘alternative’ have been beating the war drums. After all, as with any wars of ours, public opinion must be shaped, and public backing must be garnered. This is one of the latest reflecting just that: 

After the killing of Usama bin Laden in Pakistan, few American voters believe that country is an ally of the United States in the war against terrorism. Moreover, most doubt Pakistan is worthy of continued U.S. foreign aid.

That’s according to a Fox News poll released Wednesday.

Nearly three out of four voters — 73 percent — say the United States should stop sending foreign aid until Pakistan demonstrates a deeper commitment to the war against terrorism. Some 19 percent would continue to provide funding.

…

With the discovery that bin Laden apparently had been living in Pakistan for years, the consensus is Pakistan is not a friend (74 percent). A small 16 percent minority of voters views Pakistan as a strong U.S. ally in the war against terrorism.

…

You must be thinking: Pakistan must have tons in their own dossier to expose US government duplicities, lies, and nefarious activities. So why have they been relatively silent in all this? Why don’t they open the flood gate on ‘facts’ surrounding Bin Laden, his supposed role in 9/11, his supposed journey since 9/11, and his supposed death recently? And I have an answer for that: neither party has played all their cards yet. Just take a look at how Gates has been playing both sides carefully while measuring the outcome of various factors in play:

Gates reiterated the accusation that elements within the Pakistani government knew about the location of Osama bin Laden and were keeping that information from the United States. Bin Laden was killed in a US raid earlier this month.

At the same time, Gates echoed comments by other officials, conceding that the US has absolutely no evidence to that effect and that it is “pure supposition on our part.” The repeated accusations, despite being based on “pure supposition” have done major damage to US-Pakistan ties, and have spawned calls from Congress to suspend all aid to Pakistan to punish them.

Gates, who attended the conference with Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Michael Mullen, also said that the US raid that killed bin Laden had “humiliated” the Pakistani government, and that they had “paid a price” for bin Laden’s presence. Mullen added that the US ability to attack Pakistan with impunity was “a humbling experience” for the Pakistani military.

…

The White House neocons are in the midst of age-old diplomatic games, bluffing, and hedging their bets. They have the ‘foreign & military aid’ card. They have the ‘ISI dirt files’ card. They have the ‘ultimate China leaning’ card. And of course, they have the ‘mighty power of preemptive occupation war’ card which is always blessed and supported by NATO and overlooked by their butlers in the UN.

China has its own set of cards; whether it is their biggest market for dumping goods, or carrying the US debt, or who knows what else. For now they are using the ‘talk’ card with no real strings attached:

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao assured his Pakistani counterpart Yusuf Raza Gilani of China’s “all-weather friendship” on Wednesday, during a visit that sharply contrasted with anger between Washington and Islamabad.

“I wish to stress here that no matter what changes might take place in the international landscape, China and Pakistan will remain forever good neighbours, good friends, good partners and good brothers,” Wen told Gilani at the start of a meeting in central Beijing’s Great Hall of the People.

Suffice it to say that not all cards have been placed on the table. As the famous Kenny Rogers’ Gambler lyrics go:

You got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em,
Know when to walk away and know when to run.
You never count your money when you’re sittin’ at the table.
There’ll be time enough for countin’ when the dealin’s done.

As for us the people, we’ll be sitting and waiting for the three parties to conclude this stage of their global hegemony game. We’ll be reading and watching and listening to their PR machine in the media give us one concocted fantasy after another. As in all other wars of ours we will have zero to say, zilch to gain, and plenty to lose. They have the cards, and we are the piled up tokens on the table.

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The Controversial Muslim preacher has now extended his tentacles into schools in the United States, where he controls and operates more than 100 charter schools within a calculatively set up maze of dubious NGOs. Fethullah Gulen, whose organizations’ net worth is estimated to be somewhere between $22 billion and $50 billion, owns and operates over three hundred Madrasas around the world, including Pakistan, Central Asia, and the Caucasus. While Gulen’s suspicious and secretive Madrasas have been shut down and or restrained in countries such as Russia, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, based on these governments’ justified suspicions that his schools had more than just education on their agendas, his rapidly and secretively expanding charter school empire here in the US has gone quite unnoticed and unacknowledged.

In less than a decade Gulen’s Islamic network in the US has established over 100 publicly funded charter schools in 25 states. What makes this eyebrow raising phenomenon a very disturbing case is the fact that despite official documents and publicly available data Fethullah Gulen is going out of his way to deny his connections to these schools. The question is why? Here are a few excerpts from a USA Today article in August 2010:

The schools educate as many as 35,000 students — taken together they’d make up the largest charter school network in the USA — and have imported thousands of Turkish educators over the past decade.But the success of the schools at times has been clouded by nagging questions about what ties the schools may have to a reclusive Muslim leader in his late 60s living in exile in rural Pennsylvania.

…

Top administrators say they have no official ties to Gülen. And Gülen himself denies any connection to the schools. Still, documents available at various foundation websites and in federal forms required of non-profit groups show that virtually all of the schools have opened or operate with the aid of Gülen-inspired “dialogue” groups, local non-profits that promote Turkish culture. In one case, the Ohio-based Horizon Science Academy of Springfield in 2005 signed a five-year building lease with the parent organization of Chicago’s Niagara Foundation, which promotes Gülen’s philosophy of “peace, mutual respect, the culture of coexistence.” Gülen is the foundation’s honorary president. In many cases, charter school board members also serve as dialogue group leaders.

…

…lawmakers, researchers and parents are beginning to put the schools under the microscope for hiring practices — they import hundreds of teachers from Turkey each year — and for steps they take to keep their academic profile high.

The schools’ unacknowledged ties to Gülen, they say, mock public schools’ spirit of transparency.
…

My regular visitors are familiar with my on and off coverage of Fethullah Gulen and his movement. Others who have not read our previous commentaries and updates on this topic can check them out here, here, and here . I can sit and write volumes on Gulen’s history and his ‘real’ operations, but I am going to limit the length of this piece and provide you with a list of significant facts and background relevant to this particular post without going into other details:

-In 1999 Gulen defected to the US shortly before his scandalous speech, where he is heard calling on his supporters to “work patiently and to creep silently into the institutions in order to seize power in the state”, became public. Turkish prosecutors demanded a ten-year sentence for Gülen for having “founded an organization that sought to destroy the secular apparatus of state and establish a theocratic state”. Mr. Gulen has not left the United States since.

-The Netherlands has taken major steps to cut funding to all Gülen associated organizations and is investigating his operations. The Turkish Fethullah Gülen movement is really an Islamic fundamentalist group, claims Rotterdam council member Anita Fähmel (Leefbaar Rotterdam) on the basis of her own study of the Turkish movement.

-The Russian government has banned all Gülen schools and the activities of the Nur sect in Russia. Over 20 Turkish followers of Gulen were deported from Russia in 2002-2004.

-In 1999 Uzbekistan closed all Gulen’s Madrasas and shortly afterward arrested eight journalists who were graduates of Gulen schools, and found them guilty of setting up an illegal religious group and of involvement in an extremist organization.

-In Turkmenistan, government authorities have placed Gulen’s schools under close scrutiny and have ordered them to scrap the history of religion from curriculums.

Okay, let’s recap and pay attention to the absurdity:
 
Here is a Turkish Muslim preacher who fled Turkey after his alleged intentions to replace the secular government with one based on Sharia laws were exposed. He comes to the US, settles here, and starts taking advantage of our vastly and overly used nonprofit laws to build his network of dubious NGOs. Meanwhile he continues to expand his network of Madrasas and related businesses overseas-Central Asia, Caucasus, Balkans, etc.

 After years of investigating him the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, due to his guardian angels in the State Department and the CIA, are prevented from bringing an indictment against him, so they try to kick him out of the US. But once again Gulen’s CIA angels step in and portray Gulen as a scholar, despite the fact that Fethullah Gulen doesn’t even have a high-school diploma and never went beyond the  5^th grade. Among his angels who vouched for him were Graham Fuller, George Fidas, and Morton Abramowitz.

With his proven immunity Gulen accelerates his operations in the US, and now with a minimum $20 billion worth of operations and front organization he is the largest US charter school operator. Not only that, while American teachers are finding it much harder to obtain jobs, Gulen’s network, thanks to their closeted State Department ties, have been securing US work visas for Turkish and Turkic Republic citizens over there to come and teach at their charter schools here in the US. Some very interesting documented data on Gulen-based work visas provided to the Turkic individuals overseas here.

And here comes the most important question: Why is Gulen trying so very hard to deny his intimate ties to his organizations’ US charter school empire?

Interestingly, Gulen and his entourage have been gloating about these US charter schools as their territory and a major accomplishment, but not here; not in the US.  There are dozens of articles in the Turkish media such as this and this one.

Several dozen American teachers from Gulen’s charter schools have formed a coalition to expose the organizations’ documented ties to Gulen and other nefarious activities. A few groups have set up websites to provide information and exposés on this issue, since the mainstream media hasn’t been giving it deserved coverage. Examples can be found here and here.

I’ve been in touch with several teachers, some of whom have resigned from their positions to pursue and expose these long-censored operations. These teachers were willing to give up their income and go through incredible economic hardship during these hard times in order to warn the American public, and those who have so far gullibly entrusted their children to Gulen’s agenda that is being systematically implemented through his new charter schools empire. I am sure they will add their input to this article in our ‘comments’ section, and I am thankful to them for all the documents and sources they’ve been providing me.  We’ll continue our coverage of this case, so stay tuned.

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According to news reports, the Obama administration is once again reevaluating how to deal with Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai out of fear that it may now be holding him to unrealistic standards of U.S. law enforcement. This comes after a summer of news that Karzai continues to find new ways of resisting Washington’s efforts to rein in rampant corruption in his government.  Now we hear from legendary Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward that the U.S. has intelligence showing Hamid Karzai is under medication for manic depression and that Obama’s national security team doubts that “his strategy in Afghanistan” (whatever that may be at the moment) can work. The tug of war between Kabul and Washington has become so desperate, former CIA Near East, South Asia Chief Dr. Charles Cogan recently opined that the situation was fast approaching a “Diem Moment.” Cogan even suggested that while Diem’s removal had been “horribly botched,” “a removal of Mr. Karzai might turn out to be more straightforward.” Given the similarities to America’s quagmire in Vietnam, invoking Diem raises more than a few dark memories. Yet despite vast differences in the two wars another even more deeply unsettling similarity is emerging. Hamid Karzai is in a political fight for his life like South Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem. But (strange as it might seem) his contradictory behavior and the chaos and corruption surrounding it may be no accident. In fact it could be exactly the consequence that his main neoconservative backer, former RAND director, U.S. Ambassador and Special Presidential Envoy to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad, had long intended.

According to Thomas Ruttig, a United Nations official present at the mid-2002 Kabul Loya Jirga that installed Karzai, “Khalilzad was the driving force behind THE mistake committed in the post-Taleban period that basically and fundamentally undermined the – possible! – emergence of a stable Afghanistan by bringing in the warlords again and allowing them unrestricted access to the new institutions…  Re-empowered militarily and politically, the warlords expanded the realms of their power into the economy. With their [U.S. Special Forces] Alpha Team seed capital they took over that part of the economy that matters in Afghanistan, the poppy and heroin business. With the profits from this they expanded into what remains of the licit economy: import of luxury goods, cars, spare parts, fuel and cooking gas [and] real estate often by occupying government-owned land…”

When asked in the spring of 2010 whether Khalilzad should be invited back to assist the Obama administration, former Special Assistant to President Reagan, Reagan-Doctrine Architect and honorary Afghan “Freedom Fighter,” California Congressman Dana Rohrabacher told Huffpost interviewer Michael Hughes, “He [Khalilzad] oversaw the establishment of a government that was unable to function in Afghan society. And on top of that he browbeat people into accepting Karzai. He even browbeat the ex-King of Afghanistan Zahir Shah into accepting him. Khalilzad was not in the anti-Taliban camp in the 1990’s, so why the hell would we bring him in now? By forcing Karzai into office, Khalilzad snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory because the Taliban were beaten at that point.”

To both Ruttig and Rohrabacher, Khalilzad’s ultimate crime – like the U.S. manipulation of the Ngo Dinh Diem regime in Vietnam – was that his corruption of the Karzai regime had created so much internal chaos that no amount of outside effort could undo it. Yet the idea that chaos, as a form of extreme social engineering, may have actually been the plan cannot be ignored.

If anyone embodies the Cold War neoconservative philosophy that came to dominate American foreign and military policy from Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush, it is Zalmay Khalilzad. Khalilzad first came to the United States as a high school exchange student.

He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from American University in Beirut and his doctorate degree from the University of Chicago where he met and studied along with Paul Wolfowitz under the RAND nuclear warfare theorist, former Trotskyite and father of neoconservatism, Albert J. Wohlstetter.  It was Wohlstetter’s early 1970s series of articles in the Wall Street Journal and Strategic Review that prompted the politicized CIA analysis known as the Team B experiment. It was the Team B’s adherents both inside and outside the Carter administration who set the stage for undermining détente and luring the Soviets into the Afghan trap and holding them there while Afghanistan disintegrated. And it was the same Team B brain-trust of Wohlstetter acolytes including Khalilzad that went on to provide the philosophical template for the politicized intelligence process that led to the strategic military disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan. 

In her 1972 book about Vietnam, Fire in the Lake, author Frances FitzGerald wrote of the perverse illogic of another of Wohlstetter’s onetime RAND protégés, Herman Kahn.

“Just before his departure for a two-week tour of Vietnam in 1967, the defense analyst, Herman Kahn, listened to an American businessman give a detailed account of the economic situation in South Vietnam. At the end of the talk – an argument for reducing the war – Kahn said, ‘I see what you mean. We have corrupted the cities. Now, perhaps we can corrupt the countryside as well.’ It was not a joke. Kahn was thinking in terms of a counterinsurgency program: the United States would win the war by making all Vietnamese economically dependent upon it. In 1967 his program was already becoming a reality, for the corruption reached even to the lowest levels of Vietnamese society.”

In a country as poor as Afghanistan after three decades of war it took little time and less effort to corrupt every level of Afghan society, but in Afghanistan, official corruption, both American and Afghan was built in. Overseen by Khalilzad, a bizarre marriage of America’s pro-business, neoconservative Washington and Afghanistan’s pro-business and often pro-Taliban right wing took root to direct and guide Afghanistan’s reconstruction.

A 2007 report by Canadian journalist Arthur Kent described the DNA that coursed through the bloodstream of the Bush administration’s Afghan agenda. Kent writes, “Within Khalilzad’s makeshift provisional authority in Kabul, he championed a creation called the Afghanistan Reconstruction Group. ARG, achieved two cherished goals for the administration: putting a select group of loyal American and Afghan-American business hawks in charge of US-funded development projects; and doing so while completely bypassing the State Department.”

Outside the boundaries of normal oversight procedures while under the auspices of Donald Rumsfeld’s office at the Pentagon, ARG became a watering hole of high priced contracts for well-placed friends of the Bush administration. In 2005, when Khalilzad’s successor, career diplomat Ronald Neuman tried to break up ARG and return contracting to the State Department, Khalilzad arranged for a “political audit.” The result was Neuman’s replacement by the White House.

In a U.S. Congressional report published in June 2010 titled  Warlord, Inc.,  Representative John F. Tierney’s Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs painted a sordid picture of the chaos, deception and corruption in Afghanistan that now stands as the legacy of America’s neoconservative brain trust. But given the history of America’s covert and overt involvement in Afghanistan, none of this should have come as a surprise. The U.S. fostered destabilization of Afghanistan’s governments in the 1970s, backed Pakistan’s ISI and their Islamist protégés, lured the Soviets to defeat and watched as the country descended into anarchy. It then hatched a Frankenstein movement called the Taliban together with the ISI – all the while pretending it was indigenous to Afghanistan. After 2001 it then allowed the movement to regroup and grow stronger as they slaughtered moderate Pashtuns and claimed the mantle of Pashtun nationalism for themselves. Whatever the future holds for Hamid Karzai, President Obama’s AfPak war was built upon a chaos, designed and programmed from its inception by the highest intellectual circles in the United States. As his administration approaches another winter trying to resolve it, it might as well face up to the fact that whether it likes it or not, it is getting exactly the chaos that it asked for.

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, a husband and wife team, began their experience in Afghanistan when they were the first American journalists to acquire permission to enter behind Soviet lines in 1981 for CBS News and produced a documentary, Afghanistan Between Three Worlds, for PBS. In 1983 they returned to Kabul with Harvard Negotiation project director Roger Fisher for ABC Nightline and contributed to the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour. They continued to research, write and lecture about the long-term run-up that led to the US invasion of Afghanistan. They are featured in an award winning documentary by Samira Goetschel. Titled, Our own Private Bin Laden which traces the creation of the Osama bin Laden mythology in Afghanistan and how that mythology has been used to maintain the “war on terror” approach of the Bush administration. Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story published by City Lights, January 2009 chronicles their three-decade-focus on Afghanistan and the media. Their next book Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire will be published February, 2011.

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President Obama appears to have run out of Non-Neocon candidates to appoint for crucial positions. After one year with no ambassador to fill the position in Azerbaijan, the President reached out to and appointed a young neocon with a tangled web of conflicts. I am talking about a neocon and his wife, a duo who for the last decade and a half have been attached to figures such as Michael Rubin, Barry Rubin, Daniel Pipes, Richard Perle, Robert Novak…We have here a fairly young to-be-ambassador neocon, whose lavish wedding in Turkey could not have been possible without the generosity of those involved in the Baku-Ceyhan Pipeline projects, and corrupt figureheads in Azerbaijan politics…This is about a shady neocon figure with a shadier role in the almost-forgotten Georgia-Russia incident a couple of years ago…We are talking about neocon Matt Bryza and his more-of-a-neocon think-tank damsel Zeyno Baran; President Obama’s choice for  the ambassadorship in Azerbaijan.

Last Thursday Mr. Bryza was on the defensive when he appeared before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. While the general MSM coverage placed its main focus on Bryza’s questionable actions, actually lack of actions, on the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflicts and incidents involving the desecration of ancient Armenian gravesites in the town of Julfa in the Azerbaijani exclave of Naxcivan, very little coverage was given to his even greater baggage and background.  Here is one of those cursory coverages I’m talking about:

Bryza also pledged to not let his personal life affect his work. His wife, Zeyno Baran, is of Turkish origin, which some Armenian critics say leads to an anti-Armenian bias. Baran, who was present at the hearing, has also been cited as a source of potential conflict of interest for Bryza in terms of energy politics. She works for the Hudson Institute, a Washington-based think-tank which receives funding from ExxonMobile and other energy companies. Azerbaijan is a key “southern corridor” country for planned increases in gas shipment from the Caspian region to Europe.

…

Bryza’s neocon damsel’s past and present, and her various business and close associations are only the tip of a gigantic iceberg. But rest assured, our media and Congress will not go ‘there’, of course, without being forced to do so, that is.

So who is this quietly conceived hatched Neocon Larva, Matt Bryza?

As before I am going to start with the common pedigree chosen by our shallow MSM journalist friends and the like; the type that doesn’t raise many (if any) flags, at first glance:

Matthew J. Bryza is a diplomat who became Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs in June 2005. Two months ago President Obama appointed him as the US Ambassador to Azerbaijan. Here is a canned description of his job as a ‘diplomat’:

In this capacity, he is responsible for policy oversight and management of U.S. relations with countries in the Caucasus and Southern Europe. He also leads U.S. efforts to advance peaceful settlements of the separatist conflicts of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia, and works with the Special Negotiator for Eurasian Conflicts to advance a settlement to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Additionally, Bryza coordinates U.S. energy policy in the regions surrounding the Black and Caspian Seas. He also works with European countries on issues of tolerance, social integration, and Islam.

In April 2001, Bryza joined the National Security Council as Director for Europe and Eurasia, with responsibility for coordinating U.S. policy on Turkey, Greece, Cyprus, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Caspian energy.

Bryza served as the deputy to the Special Advisor to the President and Secretary of State on Caspian Basin Energy Diplomacy from July 1998 to March 2001. In this capacity, Bryza coordinated the U.S. Government’s inter-agency effort to develop a network of oil and gas pipelines in the Caspian region.During 1997-1998, Bryza was special advisor to Ambassador Richard Morningstar, coordinating U.S. Government assistance programs on economic reform in the Caucasus and Central Asia.

Bryza served at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow during 1995-1997, first as special assistant to Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering, then as a political officer covering the Russian Duma, the Communist Party, and the Republic of Dagestan in the North Caucasus.

He worked on European and Russian affairs at the State Department during 1991-1995.Bryza served in Poland in 1989-1991 at the U.S. Consulate in Poznań and the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw, where he covered the Solidarity movement, reform of Poland’s security services, and regional politics.

At first glance the above description is about a good ole boring tie-wearing State Department bureaucrat who was docile and boring enough to last through four administrations: Bush Sr., Clinton, Bush Jr., and now, Obama; that and the fact that the guy has been climbing the ladder steadily and rather quickly. Taking a closer look, if we have enough interest and if we are paying attention, our man’s operational file stands out a bit:

Caucasus, Central Asia, Eurasia, Caspian Sea, Turkey, Russia, Dagestan, Georgia…

Look just a little bit closer and you’ll notice even more important key works associated with key operations falling within the real interest of the key people:

Caspian Basin, Caspian Energy, Energy Diplomacy, Islam, Oil & Gas Pipelines…

You and I know that ‘they’ don’t put just any good ole boring bureaucrat in positions dealing with the above key regions and dealing with the above key operations and issues. Right? Right. So back to the real question: who is this Matt Bryza? How did he get his start? Whose protégé was he to make it this far this fast? Who are his buddies? The answers to some of these questions take time and real effort to discover, since you won’t find them by browsing through MSM news archives or biographical synapses posted here and there…

Let’s start with the key person leading to Bryza’s acceptance and entry as a larva into the nest of the major neocon players, and his speedy ascent thereafter:

Richard Morningstar & His Closeted Neocon Status

From Morningstar’s commonly cited pedigree sheet we know that he and Bryza collected degrees from Stanford University, which later led to their mentor-protégé relationship. In 1997 Bryza  became special advisor to Ambassador Richard Morningstar, coordinating U.S. Government assistance programs on economic reform in the Caucasus and Central Asia during 1997-1998. Digging a little bit more:

In 1998 Bryza was Morningstar‘s chief lieutenant in managing U.S. Caspian Sea energy interests as Deputy to the Special Advisor to the President and Secretary of State on Caspian Basin Energy Diplomacy, where he remained until March of 2001, and he worked on developing what are now U.S. and Western plans to circumvent Russia and Iran and achieve dominance over the delivery of energy supplies to Europe.

Interestingly, last year, one year before Obama appointed Bryza as an Ambassador to Azerbaijan, on April 20, 2009, Morningstar was appointed to the role of supporting U.S. energy goals in the Eurasian region. Morningstar was special advisor to the Clinton administration on Caspian energy; time to reunite the old mentor and his protégé for the next attempt on the Baku-Ceyhan Pipeline.

Morningstar’s status as one of the power player neocons has been long closeted.. During the 90s he was working with and serving one of the main agendas of Neocon players such as Elliott Abrams, Dick Cheney, Frank Gaffney, Paul Wolfowitz …People tend to pay attention only to the top 25 signatories and contributors of Project for the New American Century-PNAC. Yes, that infamous list also includes the Neocons shining star for Central Asia & the Caucasus, Mr. Richard L. Morningstar.

Conn Halinan’s counterpunch article in 2004 aptly highlights an important fact when it comes to the Haliburtons, Perles and Wumsers and their Project for the New American Century (PNAC) as it relates to Central Asia:

The recent move of oil companies and the U.S. military into Central Asia is a case in point. It was President Bill Clinton, not George W. Bush, who crafted that strategy. It was not the Republicans who brought Halliburton and Cheney into the Caspian region, but Clinton advisor Richard Morningstar, now a John Kerry point man.

Halinan is right on target: Clinton appointee Morningstar paved the way for Dick Cheney’s Halliburton’s positioning in Central Asia, and did darn many other good deeds for the main signatories of the Neocon Wet Dream in that region.

Morningstar is also known as one of those who take their allegiances to Israel above anything else. You may remember the questions surrounding Douglas Feith’s and Rahm Emanuel’s Israel citizenship status. I haven’t seen anyone questioning Mr. Morningstar’s status in Israel; at least not on the record, but Morningstar and his family are known as staunch supporters of Israel with close ties over there. Morningstar’s mother’s, the late Jane Morningstar, obituary in the Boston Globe provides only a little initial glimpse; others with far deeper knowledge of Morningstar’s real Israel connections would currently rather whisper…Time may raise the volume on these closeted facts, or may not.

The latest articles regarding Matt Bryza’s connection to the Neocons are limited to his connection through his wife, Zeyno Baran. Either intentional censorship or ignorance glosses over his close neocon ties which started long before his marriage, going back to his early years under his mentor Morningstar, and accelerating steadily, assisting his speedy career ascent.  Just check out his event calendar to see how his name pairs up with tneocon brand names when it comes to functions, speeches, think-tank gatherings…

Matt Bryza & His Neocon Damsel

In 2007 Matt Bryza married Zeyno Baran, a Turkish-American neocon who’s been working for the Hudson Institute and before that for the Nixon Center. Here are a few of her titles and areas of expertise highly valued and marketed by her current neocon mentors and bosses such as Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Conrad Black, Abram Shulsky…: Director of the Center for Eurasian Policy, Director of International Security and Energy Programs, Director of the Caucasus Project.

Baran and her colleagues and mentors are closely associated with the Turkish Ultra-Nationalist (Ulusalcis) movement and figures, including the military figures involved in the Ergenekon scandal:

The think tanks actively engaging the Turkish Ulusalcıs are AEI, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and the Hudson Institute. The institutional relations between the American neo-cons and the Turkish Ulusalcıs are run by the office of Dick Cheney, Richard Perle of AEI and Zeyno Baran of the Hudson Institute on the American side and, on the other side, by Mustafa Süzer, former owner of Kentbank and a close associate of Perle, and İlhan Selçuk, “big brother” of Cumhuriyet. Süzer’s meetings with Dick Cheney were disclosed in the Turkish press and never denied by either side. Selçuk is also reported to have spoken with Cheney’s advisors and established a back-channel with the US vice president’s office through Elçin Poyrazlar, the Washington representative for Cumhuriyet. Writing in the Yeni Şafak daily, Taha Kıvanç claimed that this back-channel had already been established before the American occupation of Iraq and that Selçuk had promised the Americans Turkey’s support in return for American neo-con support for the Turkish Ulusalcıs to come to power in Ankara.

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It was also claimed that State Department diplomat Matthew Bryza, long-time boyfriend and, more recently, husband of Zeyno Baran, was the person who wrote the declaration read by Fried that gave the Turkish military the “green light” by saying that the Americans were not on any side of the discussion. The extent to which Bryza was influenced by his wife is not known, but the similarities in their rhetoric against the AK Party are striking. Baran, who was already a controversial figure due to her involvement in the infamous Hudson Institute meeting, her article in Newsweek that predicted a military coup in 2007 and her involvement with the colored revolutions in Kyrgyzstan, Georgia and Ukraine…

…

Despite her deranged mother,  who has been calling Turkish reporters, harassing and asking them to write about her daughter’s IQ level (her claim on that went from ‘over 100’ to ‘120,’ and during the Bryza-Baran wedding to ‘158’ IQ points!!), the overly ambitious Zeyno Baran’s idiotic move to preempt Ergenekon by publicly ‘predicting’ the attempted coup backfired, and cast doubt on this Nuevo Neocon’s intelligence and tactfulness. What she wanted: to grab attention and score points among her neocon mentors and colleagues. What happened: she exposed the mutually dependent relationship between her bosses and the ultra-nationalist rogue Turkish generals, and brought into the light the active role played by US neocons in the coup plot in Turkey. This major booboo alone was enough to take 15 points off her average IQ. Later in this article we’ll go over another major Baran booboo on the financial sources of her lavish wedding, leaving her very few remaining IQ points…

The Lavish Wedding, the Wedding Financiers, and the Mafia

In 2007, after several years of a personal and close work relationship, Matt Bryza and Zeyno Baran were married in Turkey. The ultra lavish wedding and its highly interesting list of 400 plus guests made the front-page of many Turkish newspapers and magazines, but that publicity was nothing compared to the subsequent media coverage, and of course, the cost to two brave Azerbaijani journalists who exposed the ‘real financiers’ of Bryza-Baran’s lavish wedding and it’s true implications. Let’s start with the ‘highly costly’ wedding, the ‘special guests,’ the exposed financiers, and those who tried to expose them. Here is a snapshot of the costly wedding:

The location:  In one of the most expensive club houses in Istanbul. To rent the space Bryza-Baran were given a ‘special’ discount by a ‘very special’ Turkish mafia connected friend (the infamous owner of the Galatasaray Soccer Team); Instead of $80K the rent was reduced to around $35K.

Number of Guests: around 450; many power-players from the Caspian energy field, including political figureheads from Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkey, Georgia, and of course the USA.

Wedding Security: 250 policemen were hired and put in place for protection; several K-9 police dogs were brought in for search purposes. In addition to all this Bryza-Baran hired 20 additional private bodyguards.

The Groom’s Best Men & Witnesses: One of the three best men and witnesses for Matt Bryza was none other than Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov.

The Designer Gown & Suit: The couple purchased their gown & tuxedo from the famous designer Vakko; the total cost for this is said to be over $10K

The famous quote of the wedding: This couplehood was formed by the Baku-Ceyhan Pipeline Project- – - Turkish Energy Minister, Hilmi Guler.

This is just a snapshot of the ultra lavish wedding, which nearly 300 state and private security personnel were hired to serve. The estimated cost for Mr. Bryza’s lavish story-book wedding in Turkey ranges from $150,000 to $250,000. Customarily this amount would have been paid by the bride’s parents. However, neither Mrs. Baran-Bryza’s mother, father, or step-father could or would dish out this amount. Of course, a bill in this amount paid by Matt Bryza would have raised way too many eyebrows here in the US. So what happened? Who did finance this wedding extravaganza?

Be careful. Be very careful. Because when two journalists tried to answer these same questions they ended up being attacked, beaten up, stabbed,  arrested, tortured…and one of them  had to escape the country. That’s right. In Turkey, between Bryza-Baran’s rouge powerful general friends and of even more powerful mafia babas, they made sure no journalist dared venture into these questions. Here in the United States no real bodily force or threat was necessary, since the State Department’s stenographers in the MSM censored the entire episode. However, in Azerbaijan two brave journalists dared, and this is what happened to them:

Did a high-level Azeri official pay for Matthew Bryza’s 2007 wedding to Turkish author Zayna Baran? A swift crackdown on two journalists who reported at the time that the wedding ceremony for President Obama’s current nominee for the US ambassadorship to Baku was funded by Azerbaijan’s Economic Development minister suggests some misconduct.

In 2007, the editor of opposition newspaper Azatliq, Genimet Zahid and correspondent Adil Khalil were sued over an article entitled “Azerbaijanis Paid for Matthew Bryza’s Wedding.” The article alleges that Azeri Economic Development minister Haydar Babayev paid for a significant portion of Bryza’s wedding, which took place in Istanbul the same year. At the time, Bryza was the US co-chairman of the OSCE Minsk Group, the body tasked with mediating a peace deal for the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

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During the appellate process, both of which were ruled in favor of the minister, Khalil was severely beaten and stabbed. Reportedly he fled to France. Meanwhile, Zahid was sentenced to four years in jail on a separate charge of “hooliganism.”Zahid’s lawyers last fall appealed to the International Court of Human Rights, arguing that charges against their client was a violation of Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which protects freedom of expression. The appeal to the court also charges that the journalists were not granted a fair trial.

The swift action by Minister Babayev signals that the Azadliq article had merit. The editor’s unwillingness to retract, coupled with the swift court rulings and the subsequent attacks on the journalists, suggest that there was more to Bryza’s Istanbul nuptials than a mere wedding ceremony.

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Think about it for a second. The exposé written by the Azerbaijani journalist duo was most damaging to whom? In a country ruled by despots, father Aliyev and now Aliyev the son, riddled by corruption and atrocities, this piece of information does nothing in terms of touching, even coming close to touching, those in power; has no effect – one scandal among thousands. But how about Bryza-Baran? A neocon operator ready to be appointed as Ambassador to Azerbaijan; not wanting anything to interfere with his confirmation. A mini neocon woman working under a powerful group of Neocons whose eyes have been set on the region; getting ready to make their pipeline dreams come true-fruits of which will be collected by their upper echelon bosses.  How did it go? Did Bryza call his wedding financiers, his best man, his government official guests of honor in Azerbaijan, and ask them to shut these journalists up before the ‘facts’ reach here and get distributed? Or was it Bryza’s mentors and colleagues making the request?

Don’t wait for any new developments to reach here from Azerbaijan: With one of the journalists sitting in jail, the other one hiding in fear somewhere in France (where Turkish ultra-nationalist operators have quite a reach), and of course, the rest of the journalist community getting the message loud and clear, thus not willing to touch upon the scandal…well, it won’t happen. How about here in the US? Not a single reporter is going to follow up on this massive scandal and it’s far reaching implications. When it comes to State Department operatives: ‘can’t touch this.’

Matt Bryza: Highly Criticized Role in Russia-Georgia Conflict

Let me first provide a little bit of background on Bryza’s role in the region, especially in Georgia and Azerbaijan:

During his four-year stint as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs he has focused on the South Caucasus, and during that period Georgia’s war budget has ballooned from $30 million a year when U.S.-educated Mikheil Saakashvili took power after the nation’s “Rose Revolution” in 2004 to $1 billion last year, a more than thirty fold increase. In the same year, 2008, Azerbaijan’s military spending had grown from $163 million the preceding year to $1,850,000,000, more than a 1000% increase. Much of the money expended for both unprecedented build-ups came from revenues derived from oil sales and transit fees connected with the BTC pipeline Bryza was instrumental in setting up.

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Regarding neighboring Georgia, a German press report on the second day of last August’s war between that nation and Russia stated that “US Special Forces troops, and later US Marines replacing them, have for the last half decade been systematically training selected Georgian units to NATO standards” and “First-line Georgian soldiers wear NATO uniforms, kevlar helmets and body armour matching US issue, and carry the US-manufactured M-16 automatic rifle….” On the first day of the war the Chairman of the Russia’s State Duma Security Committee, Vladimir Vasilyev, denounced the fact that the Georgian President Saakashvili “undertook consistent steps to increase [Georgia's] military budget from $US 30 million to $US 1 billion – Georgia was preparing for a military action.”

And here is how Turkey ties into this:

An Armenian news source the same day detailed that “Most of Georgia’s officers were trained in the U.S. or Turkey. The country’s military expenses increased by 30 times during past four years, making up 9-10 per cent of the GDP. The defense budget has reached $1 billion.”U.S. military grants to Georgia total $40.6 million. NATO member states, including Turkey and Bulgaria, supplied Georgia with 175 tanks, 126 armored carriers, 67 artillery pieces, 4 warplanes, 12 helicopters, 8 ships and boats. 100 armored carriers, 14 jets (including 4 Mirazh-2000) fighters, 15 Black Hawk helicopters and 10 various ships are expected to be conveyed soon.”

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Bryza‘s assistance to the Saakashvili government has also extended to backing it in its armed conflicts with Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which in the second case escalated into all-out war a year ago.

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The following appeared in the Wall Street Journal in August 2008, albeit with an attempt to portray Bryza’s role more positively:

When Russian tanks rolled out of South Ossetia and into Georgia proper Monday, triggering fears of a full-scale invasion, a man began furiously shoving U.S. diplomat Matthew J. Bryza around the lobby of the Marriott Tbilisi, the capital’s fanciest hotel. “It’s your fault too,” shouted Georgy Khaindrava, a former Georgian minister for conflict resolution. “If you hadn’t propped up Misha Magariya [Misha the strong], we wouldn’t have tanks here now,” he said, referring to Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili.

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The affable Mr. Bryza has developed a reputation as a hard-liner on Russia’s actions towards the former states of the Soviet Union and a staunch defender of both Georgia and the 40-year-old Mr. Saakashvili, with whom he has a close personal relationship.Critics say that has complicated the U.S.-Georgian relationship, possibly diluting State Department warnings to Tbilisi against engaging in a military confrontation with Russia. Some say there were signs for months that Russia was laying a trap for Mr. Saakashvili.

…

Do you remember the short-lived justified frenzy over Randy Scheunemann, John McCain’s top foreign policy advisor, and his role involving Georgia? Guess who was one of Scheunemann’s points of ‘frequent’ contact at the State Department?

So let’s take a look at what Scheuneman was actually doing in that role — which helped earn his firm nearly $900,000 since 2004. Lobbying for a foreign government is a vaguely defined task that involves cultivating contacts, trying to shape perception and influence key decisions. For Georgia, the goal was clear — to get on track for NATO membership and secure western backing against Russian influence and aggression. Schuenemann’s dual role of paid foreign agent (as recently as March) and key adviser to a presidential candidate is unusual, especially since McCain has not indicated that Scheunemann will recuse himself from Georgia issues.

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As a paid foreign agent, Scheunemann and his lobbying firm, Orion Strategies, filed disclosure reports with the Department of Justice, which offer some insight into the process of exercising influence in Washington. Scheunemann spent a lot of time working the phones, talking to key Bush Administration officials about Georgia’s efforts to join NATO. He often spoke to Ambassador John Tefft who heads the U.S. embassy in Georgia, as well as Dan Fried and Matt Bryza at the State Department…

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Now let’s hear from the people on the ground on Bryza; the people of Georgia and what they think of Matthew Bryza:

People filed into the Boris Paichadze National Stadium from all over Tbilisi. Unlike the sour grapes that had been standing on Rustavli Avenue for the past month, these people were smiling and light-hearted, at first. One man in his 50s walked by and gave me the wooden eye treatment, stopped, deliberated for a moment, came back and let me have it.

“Where are you from?”

“America.”

“Bandits,” he said. “A nation of criminals. Bryza has support of only two percent, two percent of the people. He’s a faggot and a liar. And Saakashvili, the faggot; he’s got to go.”

It was the first time I had heard Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Matthew Bryza’s name mentioned on the streets of Tbilisi and had no idea what 2 % the gentleman was talking about.

…

Back in 2005, Shalva said Bryza’s biased reporting on Georgia and support of the Saakashvili administration undermined both the promotion of democracy in the region and ties between the U.S. and Georgia. He called on the US State dept. to sack him. When he failed to get a visa to Great Britian in February this year, he said UK Ambassador Denis Keefe had conspired against him with Saakashvili, and also demanded Keefe’s dismissal.

…

Bryza’s Car Accident, His Victim in a Coma & Never-Answered Questions

In August 1997 Matthew Bryza caused yet another major scandal for the US government when he hit and seriously injured a pedestrian while driving under highly questionable circumstances:

The U.S. State Department on 20 August announced plans to recall Matthew Bryza, a second secretary of the U.S. embassy in Moscow, who two days earlier had been driving a car that hit and critically injured a Moscow pedestrian. Nesterushkin said the criminal case against Bryza will remain open as police continue investigating the accident. Bryza cannot be prosecuted unless the U.S. lifts his immunity. In February, Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze lifted the immunity of a Georgian diplomat who caused a car accident in Washington that killed one woman. That diplomat is currently in pre-trial detention in the U.S.

…

A U.S. diplomat has seriously injured a woman in a car accident in Moscow, the City Law Enforcement Department told Interfax Tuesday. The car, an Isuzu Trooper driven by Second Secretary of the U.S. Embassy Matthew Bryza, 33, hit an unidentified woman near house 13 Ul. Panferova, the Southwestern precinct, at 10:00 p.m. Moscow time Monday, police have reported. The woman, about 30 years old, was taken to hospital with a serious head injury. She is in a coma.

…

Now, interestingly and mysteriously, the reports and results of the criminal investigations into this accident never came to light, and later quietly disappeared. By the way, the United States government never lifted Bryza’s immunity! Based on the buzz circulating at the time ‘they didn’t want anything out there regarding Bryza’s alcohol & narcotics status…’ The rumors included dependency on cocaine and alcohol, but again, a tight lid was put on any media follow-up on this in the US. Considering the grave consequences:

On Thursday, Matthew Bryza will face a Senate panel to begin the confirmation process for his nomination as US Ambassador to Azerbaijan. Will senators question Bryza for his role in a 1997 car accident, which left a woman in a coma? Or, will Bryza avoid responsibility?

The Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and other press sources at the time reported that on August 18, 1997, Bryza hit a woman, who was taken to the hospital with serious head injuries. The US response to this incident was to recall Bryza back to the States and express “regret” for the victim. James Rubin, the official spokesman for the State Department at the time said that the decision to recall Bryza from Moscow was made in connection with the fact that the diplomat “is no longer able to work efficiently in Moscow because of this incident.”

…

Again, you’d think with the location being set in Russia in the mid 90s, the fairly high-level government status of the perpetrator, the serious injuries of the victim who was put in a coma, the efforts to keep the name of the victim out of the press, the buzz regarding drug and alcohol…all that would make front-page news here in the US; no? Well, it didn’t. And, here is how Bryza was promoted later, after his scandalous recall from his position:

At the time of the incident, none other than Richard Hoagland, a press spokesman for the US Embassy in Moscow at the time had this to say about Bryza: “I also want to say something about Matt Bryza who comes across in the press reports about this incident as all but a monster. Matt was one of the brightest, most polite, most promising young diplomats at the American Embassy in Moscow. While we have to have compassion for the woman who was injured in this accident, I think it’s important we have compassion for Matt, too, who has suffered the double trauma of having been involved in a traffic accident and of having had his diplomatic career in Moscow abruptly yanked out from under him.”

Hoagland was President George W. Bush’s nominee for the US ambassadorial post in Armenia. His nomination was blocked by Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey, due to Hoagland’s continued insistence to deny the Armenian Genocide. Bush subsequently pulled Hoagland’s nomination.

Bryza was then appointed to be the US co-chairman of the OSCE Minsk Group and developed close ties with Azeri elite in Baku. News of a high-ranking Azeri minister allegedly paying for Bryza’s wedding to Turkish scholar Zeyno Baran was reported by the Azeri press, after which the editor and reporter of the newspaper were jailed and attacked.

…

Here is another good question: What did we give the Russians to not raise a diplomatic incident; to make them make ‘it’ go away?!

We all know what close ties Bryza developed with the corrupt ruling elites, including the Aliyev clan! So is there any wonder how those two brave journalists who exposed the ‘real financing’ of Bryza’s wedding ended up beaten up by elite hired guns, and later tortured and jailed? Hmmmm.

I could triple this article’s length to cover the Father & Son Aliyevs, the Kingdom we’ve groomed and planted in Azerbaijan, the nation we’ve helped turn into one of the top 30 corrupt countries in the world, the embezzlement and corruption cases we’ve helped create there… and, I will; it  will be another lengthy piece similar to those on Kyrgyzstan’s Bakiyev Clan, Pakistan’s Bhutto-Zardari Duo, and Turkey’s Ciller. Needless to say, the cozy ties between Bryza and corrupt Azeri officials, the ‘contributions’ he’s been receiving from them – including making his lavish wedding dreams come true, his ‘pure luck’ in getting the Azeri journalists…certainly come together nicely, forming a picture that makes complete sense!
………………………………………………………………………………

Bryza testified before  the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on July 22. His grilling, while not comprehensive and tough enough, rattled him enough to come across as unconvincing:

Citing Congressional Research Service (CRS), Sen. Boxer also asked why U.S. aid programs in Karabakh were limited to an average of $2 million a year, even though Congress allocated about $8 million annually.Bryza confirmed lower than allocated spending but did not explain it. Instead he said that he supported disbursal of all allocated funds, noting that they have gone for de-mining, housing, schools and water supply projects. In response to the senator’s request, Bryza promised a detailed report on the aid program.

…

So the guy doesn’t know what happened to the remaining $6,000,000! Interesting! Is this related to being out of touch with the areas falling under his direct responsibility? Is it related to ‘whatever’ influences he was under in 1997 when he hit a woman and put her in coma? Maybe we’ll find out more later, that is if the media here follows up on this.

Speaking in references to his comments on territorial integrity, Bryza claimed that he was only following the policy language used by Vice President Richard Cheney in September 2008. (In fact, Bryza first made similar comments in August, shortly after the Georgia war and before Cheney.)

There he goes again; this time blaming it on his old boss, yet forgetting his on-the-record record! Is he treating the members of this particular committee as morons? Maybe. Or is this again related to his ‘conditions’ which were never followed-up on by the press?

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), who chaired the hearing, referred to The Washington Times report that cited close ties between Bryza and senior Azerbaijani officials and allegations of potential conflict of interest. She also raised the issue of Azerbaijani regime’s crackdown on its opponents.Bryza responded that his finances have been thoroughly investigated as part of the nomination process and no improprieties were found. He also denied an Azerbaijani media report that claimed that his wedding expenses were covered by Azerbaijani officials. (Azerbaijani journalist who originally made the claim was subsequently violently assaulted and has since fled abroad.)

Can you believe how unconvincing a supposed savvy diplomat can be! Who investigated his finances? What was submitted? How about his wife’s long-list of assets in Turkey where they will be protected due to her Turkish citizenship status and mafia backing? The financing of his wedding is a slam-dunk obvious, the question is who in the US media will dare to investigate, or at least translate those reports produced by other nations’ gutsy reporters! And, how about his role in insuring the ultimate punishment for journalists in Azerbaijan who happened to ‘expose’ him and his neocon damsel?!

We have another month or so before Bryza appears before the Congress again, and hopefully much more will come to light between now and then. By this I mean mainly the ‘foreign press’;-) But the real issue here is this newly hatched Neocon’s nomination by the current President in the first place. Is President Obama that keen and committed to keeping and or bringing back known neocons? Is it that this President is unable to find any clean non-Neocon candidates for strategically very important positions like this? Is this President (and his advisors) simply too  ignorant to disregard tons of alarming,  improper, eye-brow raising, embarrassing …background and current facts about the candidate he nominated for this ambassadorship?!

Well, you be the judge, but please do more than that. You may want to call or write your representative and make sure that he or she gets all these facts on Mr. Matthew Bryza and his infamous spouse Zeyno Baran. You never know; with enough people talking, writing, and calling, some right decision may find its way into this upcoming confirmation.
# # # #

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In 1999 Richard Armitage joined an “advisory team” put together by Condoleezza Rice for the George W. Bush presidential campaign. Other members of this “advisory team” included Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Zoellick, and Donald Rumsfeld all of whom, along with Armitage, were signatories to the 1998 PNAC letter to President Clinton that advocated regime change in Iraq through the bogus “Weapons of Mass Destruction” argument. It should have been no surprise, therefore, to see where these “advisors” were to lead as soon as they were appointed to key positions in the Bush administration in early 2001.

Armitage was appointed as the number 2 man at the State Department but not without protest from a certain former Republican congressman:

“General Colin Powell has named Richard Armitage to the key position as his deputy secretary of state.

“Mr. Armitage served in the Pentagon back in the 1980s and, in the process, caused so many problems that by 1989 he twice had to withdraw his name from consideration for high-ranking positions in the first Bush administration.

“Simply stated, the U.S. Senate would not confirm him for any job.

“The FBI agent in charge of compiling the ‘file’ on Armitage said at the time, ‘The Armitage file is the thickest file ever for any nominee for any position.’”

“Now, 12 years later, the new Bush administration is again trying to ram Armitage through the confirmation process. Powell wants him because ‘Rich Armitage is my best friend in the world.’”

Both Armitage and Powell had served in Vietnam and it’s worth remembering that prior to his performance at the UN National Security Council in early 2003, Colin Powell was best known for helping to cover up the My Lai Massacre.

Armitage was confirmed by the Senate as the Deputy Secretary of State in late March, 2001, in plenty of time to implement the plan for regime change in Iraq that he had supported in 1998 and which PNAC had argued for in September, 2000:

“Further, the process of [US military] transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.”

The “new Pearl Harbor” that was so desired by Armitage and the rest of the PNAC crowd occured on 11 September, 2001. Immediately after 11 September, Armitage threatened to “bomb Pakistan back to the Stone Age”:

“During last week’s US media blitz to promote his new book, Musharraf claimed soon after 9/11, US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage warned Lt. Gen. Mahmud Ahmed, head of ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence service, the US would ‘bomb Pakistan back to the Stone Age’ if it did not immediately turn against its Afghan ally, Taliban, and allow the US to use military bases in Pakistan to invade Afghanistan.

[ . . . ]

“I’ve heard various versions of Armitage’s exact words. But I know whatever he said put the fear of god into Pakistan’s military leadership.

“ISI sources say the Bush Administration threatened to bomb faithful old ally Pakistan, cut off its oil, collapse its banking system, and call in its loans. More frightening, Washington also threatened to ‘unleash’ India against Pakistan, either allowing India to conquer the Pakistani-held portion of disputed Kashmir, or give Delhi a green light to invade all of Pakistan, possibly with American assistance.”

Such language by Armitage would be consistent with other ultimatums issued by the US government, such as this gem by a Bush administration State Department negotiator to the Taliban in August, 2001, more than a month before the “new Pearl Harbor”:

“At the final meeting with the Taliban, on Aug. 2, 2001, State Department negotiator Christine Rocca, clarified the options: ‘Either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold [for 'secure access to the Caspian Basin for American companies'], or we bury you under a carpet of bombs.’ With the futility of negotiations apparent, “President Bush promptly informed Pakistan and India the U.S. would launch a military mission into Afghanistan before the end of October.”

“This was five weeks before the events of 9/11.”

Almost a year later, Armitage was sent by the Bush administration to deliver, perhaps, the same message to the Pakistanis:

“Bush has stopped short of publicly admonishing Pakistan, Washington’s key ally in the war on terror, but he’s dispatching burly Undersecretary of State Richard Armitage to Islamabad next week, and his mission will be to deliver a heavy, private bruising. ‘If anyone can threaten to crack Musharraf in half, it’s Armitage,’ says one State Department source.”

“Bomb Pakistan back to the Stone Age”? “Crack Musharraf in half”? It should be no surprise that Armitage was tasked with delivering these messages. He was sent by the Reagan administration to deliver a similar message to Manuel Noriega a year before the US invasion of Panama:

“The Reagan Administration sent a high-ranking Pentagon official on a secret mission to Panama last week to press its strongman, Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega, to step down and allow free elections in the country, State Department and congressional sources said Thursday.

“The emissary, Richard L. Armitage, assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, held what one U.S. official called ‘a lengthy session’ with Noriega early last week to urge him to withdraw from politics.

“Armitage was picked to deliver the Administration’s strongest direct message to date to Noriega because the Panamanian strongman is a ‘military man’ and Washington wanted “the most effective interlocutor possible,” the official said.”

Having arrived in the US a week before 11 September “on a regular visit of consultations”, the ISI’s General Mahmoud Ahmed met with State Department officials, including Armitage, on 12 and 13 September:

“The press reports confirm that Lt. General Mahmoud Ahmad had two meetings with Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, respectively on the 12th and 13th. After September 11, he also met Senator Joseph Biden, chairman of the powerful Committee on Foreign Relations of the Senate.

“Confirmed by several press reports, however, he also had ‘a regular visit of consultations’ with US officials during the week prior to September 11, –i.e. meetings with his US counterparts at the CIA and the Pentagon.

“What was the nature of these routine ‘consultations’? Were they in any way related to the subsequent ‘post-September 11 consultations’ pertaining to Pakistan’s decision to cooperate with Washington, held behind closed doors at the State Department on September 12 and 13? Was the planning of war being discussed between Pakistani and US officials?”

The article continues:

“The meeting behind closed doors at the State Department on September 13 between Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and Lt. General Mahmoud Ahmad was shrouded in secrecy. Remember President Bush was not even involved in these crucial negotiations:

“‘Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage handed over [to ISI chief Mahmoud Ahmad] a list of specific steps Washington wanted Pakistan to take’. ‘After a telephone conversation between [Secretary of State Colin] Powell and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Pakistan had promised to cooperate.’ President George W. Bush later confirmed (also on the morning of September 13th) that the Pakistan government had accepted “to cooperate and to participate as we hunt down those people who committed this unbelievable, despicable act on America’.

[ . . . ]

“Armitage was one of the main architects behind US covert support to the Mujahedin and the ‘militant Islamic base’, both during the Afghan-Soviet war as well as in its aftermath. US covert support was financed by the Golden Crescent drug trade.”

We know that Armitage was no stranger to the Golden Crescent drug trade.

General Mahmoud Ahmed met with someone else in those days immediately following 11 September, and that “someone else” worked directly under Richard Armitage. That “someone else” was none other than Marc Grossman:

“ISI Chief Lt-Gen Mahmood’s week-long presence in Washington has triggered speculation about the agenda of his mysterious meetings at the Pentagon and National Security Council. [ . . . ] But the most important meeting was with Mark Grossman, US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. US sources would not furnish any details beyond saying that the two discussed ‘matters of mutual interests.’”

Or, as Sibel Edmonds stated back in 2005:

“Although Grossman ‘has not been as high profile in the press’ FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds cryptically told me the other day, ‘don’t overlook him – he is very important.’”

Chris Deliso elaborates further:

“Marc Grossman has served in a number of interesting countries and positions over the past 29 years. From 1976-1983, at a pivotal point in the Cold War, he was employed at the U.S. embassy in Pakistan – America’s key regional ally, through which millions of dollars in weapons and other “aid” were delivered by Pakistan’s ISI intelligence service to the mujahedin following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.

[ . . . ]

“Grossman’s professional ties with Pakistan apparently long outlived his nine-year tenure there. The Guardian, among others, mentioned the fact that in the days immediately preceding Sept. 11, 2001, Pakistani ISI chief Gen. Mahmoud Ahmed – financier of 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta – paid a visit to senior administration officials, including Grossman, then undersecretary of state for political affairs.”

As The Times reported in January, 2008 (although not mentioning Grossman by name), Grossman was so deeply involved in the sale of nuclear secrets to Pakistan that he was under FBI surveillance. Since Grossman was directly responsible to Armitage, what did Armitage know about Grossman’s dirty dealings?

That question does not stretch the imagination because Armitage became involved in another event that Grossman was also involved with–Plamegate and the exposure of CIA front company Brewster Jennings, and those events will be included in our next post.

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

Dr. Nafeez Ahmed provides us with an overview of the role played by US military and intelligence practices in the creation of terrorism, particularly Al-Qaeda. He tells us about the status of investigations into the Blair government’s complicity with the Bush administration in supporting the invasion of Iraq. He discusses possible factors behind Americans’ long-held denial and dismissal of dark US foreign policy practices as conspiracies. Mr. Nafeez talks about the Obama administration, the ongoing posture of US corporate interests and the desire to dominate world energy supplies, the so-called liquid bombing plot and how it was mythologized in the US, and more.

Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is a bestselling author and political analyst. He is the Executive Director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development, and has taught courses in contemporary history and international relations theory at the University of Sussex. His Doctoral thesis investigated the radicalization processes and dynamics of violent conflict in the context of hierarchical social systems in the modern world. Dr. Ahmed has also published extensively on international security issues, including The London Bombings; The War on Truth; Behind the War on Terror; and The War on Freedom. He has been an expert commentator for BBC News 24, BBC World Today, Al-Jazeera English, among others. He is currently advising the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst on engaging British Muslim communities. Visit Dr. Nafeez’ website.

Here is our guest Nafeez Ahmed unplugged!

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Spectre of Serial War

Security agencies are now focusing their sights on a whole set of countries deemed to be at-risk. According to a leaked confidential memo, people from these countries will be profiled and targeted for “additional screening” at airports. In the words of one US commentator for the Philadelphia Inquirer:

“… most frightening to me was that while the leaked document deemed that holders of passports from Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Libya, Syria, Sudan, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq, Yemen, and Algeria should be subjected to additional screening, no such special attention was given to holders of passports from Saudi Arabia – the home of 15 of the 9/11 hijackers. And now it’s worth noting that the list doesn’t include Pakistan or Nigeria – Umar Farouk’s home – either.”

The decision to widen the “screening” of travellers to encompass this vast array of countries deemed to be countries of particular threat to the West fits well within the original logic of the pre-9/11 geostrategy that has now become the ‘War on Terror’.

Hints of this geostrategy surfaced from disparate sources, such as former NATO Commander General Wesley Clarke, who wrote in his book Winning Modern Wars:

“As I went back through the Pentagon in November 2001, one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan.”

Clarke didn’t mention Yemen. But Yemen was explicitly mentioned in an address by the infamous Richard Perle – then Chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense policy Board and former Assistant Secretary of Defence in the Reagan administration – in the same month, at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Washington DC:

“Those who think Iraq should not be next may want to think about Syria or Iran or Sudan or Yemen or Somalia or North Korea or Lebanon or the Palestinian Authority.”

Obama’s Neocons: Kissinger and Brzezinski

The escalation of US military activity in Yemen, therefore, is by no means simply a response to events of recent years, but merely the continuing extension of a wider bipartisan geostrategy that was formulated not only by people largely associated with Republican neocons, but also by arch-Democrats, such as former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and former National Security Adviser to President Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski. During the 1970s Middle East oil crisis, Kissinger secretly advocated that the US military might have to intervene to directly and permanently occupy the oil-producing Gulf States to prevent future volatility in US energy security. Four years before 9/11, in his study published by the Council on Foreign Relations, Brzezinski outlined in unnerving detail the contours of what the Bush, and now the Obama, administration, have pursued in the context of the ‘War on Terror’: a plan to dominate “Eurasia” – the landmass comprising the continents of Europe and Asia, at the juncture of which lies the Middle East:

“… how America ‘manages’ Eurasia is critical… A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world’s three most advanced and economically productive regions. A mere glance at the map also suggests that control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail Africa’s subordination, rendering the Western Hemisphere and Oceania geopolitically peripheral to the world’s central continent. About 75 per cent of the world’s people live in Eurasia, and most of the world’s physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for 60 per cent of the world’s GNP and about three-fourths of the world’s known energy resources.”

“Two basic steps are thus required: first, to identify the geostrategically dynamic Eurasian states that have the power to cause a potentially important shift in the international distribution of power and to decipher the central external goals of their respective political elites and the likely consequences of their seeking to attain them;… second, to formulate specific U.S. policies to offset, co-opt, and/or control the above…”

Democratic neocons Kissinger and Brzezinski continue to play a key role in Obama’s foreign and security policies, particularly in… (drum roll)… Eurasia! (Eureka? – no, way too easy) In December 2008 before Obama’s foreign policy team was even fully formed, the incoming President dispatched  Kissinger to Moscow to meet Putin and president Medvedev. Kissinger re-visited Russia in March 2009,  this time joined by a whole cohort of former senior US administration officials, just two weeks before the Medvedev-Obama summit in London. Although the White House insisted this was a purely private affair, it was obvious that his visit was part of normal ‘Track Two’ diplomacy. Brzezinski is also playing a behind-the-scenes advisory role to Obama, on Russia and NATO, as well as on issues in the Middle East including Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Just how key their role is, is a matter for debate. While Brzezinski has acted as Obama’s senior foreign policy advisor, Kissinger purportedly has no ‘official’ position. Or has he? “As the most recent National Security Advisor of the United States,” declared Obama’s National Security Advisor General Jim Jones at the 45^th Munich Conference, “I take my daily orders from Dr. Kissinger, filtered down through Generaal [sic] Brent Scowcroft and Sandy Berger, who is also here. We have a chain of command in the National Security Council that exists today.”

Say what??

“I think my role today is a little bit different than you might expect”, he added.

No kidding.
 

Profiling

US and UK governments are also exploring the prospect of profiling passengers on the basis of race, age and gender. While that is not to endorse profiling of any kind as a meaningful and viable security procedure, the Philadelphia Inquirer’s observation is worth noting – if profiling is going ahead, why is it avoiding US client states like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, among others?

Curiously enough, Wesley Clarke put the case very well seven years ago:

“And what about the real sources of terrorists – U.S. allies in the region like Egypt, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia? Wasn’t it the repressive policies of the first, and the corruption and poverty of the second, that were generating many of the angry young men who became terrorists? And what of the radical ideology and direct funding spewing from Saudi Arabia? Wasn’t that what was holding the radical Islamic movement together?”

It is more complicated than Clarke makes out, but he makes a valid point. Why are known state-sponsors of Islamist terrorism being ignored? The question, of course, brings up the wider issue – what exactly is Yemen’s relation to the pre-9/11 bipartisan geostrategy that is currently playing out at the hands of the Obama administration?

Militarization of Geopolitical Energy Choke-Points

A glimpse of the answer to this question actually arrived one day before the foiled attack from Associated Press:

“The Pentagon recently confirmed it has poured nearly $70 million in military aid into Yemen this year–compared with none in 2008. The U.S. military has boosted its counterterrorism training for Yemeni forces and is providing more intelligence, according to U.S. officials and analysts. The result appears to be a sharp escalation in Yemen’s campaign against al-Qaida, which previously amounted to scattered raids against militants, mixed with tolerance of some fighters who made vague promises they would avoid terrorist activity….

“Yemen’s government, which has little control outside the capital, has been distracted by other internal problems. It is fighting a fierce war against Shiite rebels who rose up near the Saudi border, and Saudi forces have gotten involved, battling rebels who have crossed into its territory. The government is also struggling with a secessionist movement in the once-independent south and trying to deal with rampant poverty…

“The central government’s lack of control of areas outside Yemen’s capital – places where many angry tribes are willing to take in al-Qaeda militants – have raised U.S. fears that the beleaguered nation could collapse into chaos. Yemen not only lies next to Saudi Arabia and near the oil-rich nations of the Persian Gulf, it overlooks vital sea routes in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.”

Couple of key points become obvious from this. The last year, 2009, has seen a sudden massive, unprecedented escalation in US military intelligence activity in Yemen. The Abdulmutallab incident has only intensified and legitimized this activity. The US and Britain are moving to operate a joint “counter-terrorism police unit in Yemen along with more support for the Yemeni coastguard”, while also “pushing for more UN intervention to tackle the emerging terrorist threat in Somalia.” So there is a question of chronology – why now? Then the geopolitics – the US-UK presence in Yemen puts their military forces right on the cusp of the Horn of Africa, poised for intensified force projection in Africa, with a focus on fighting off Somali piracy. The region between Yemen and Somalia is where we find the Bab el-Mandab, the closure of which according to the US Energy Information Administration:

“… could keep tankers from the Persian Gulf from reaching the Suez Canal/Sumed pipeline complex, diverting them around the southern tip of Africa. The Strait of Bab el-Mandab is a chokepoint between the horn of Africa and the Middle East, and a strategic link between the Mediterranean Sea and Indian Ocean. It is located between Yemen, Djibouti, and Eritrea, and connects the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea. Exports from the Persian Gulf must pass through Bab el-Mandab before entering the Suez Canal. In 2006, an estimated 3.3 million bbl/d flowed through this waterway toward Europe, the United States, and Asia. The majority of traffic, around 2.1 million bbl/d, flows northbound through the Bab el-Mandab to the Suez/Sumed complex.”

Energy Crisis – US Corporate Loss

There are various problems. Yemeni oil production has peaked, declining from 450,000 barrels per day in 2003 to 280,000 in early 2009. This has led to drastic decline in Yemen’s oil exports by around half – expected to decline to zero in about 10 years. During this period, the Yemen government has attempted increasingly to gain control over domestic oil production projects. As of 2005, a dispute broke out between two major US oil companies, Hunt Oil and ExxonMobil, and the Yemen government, over production of “Block 18”. “Natural gas reserves from Marib Block 18 and other fields located in the vicinity have been dedicated to the project, which will require approximately 1 billion cubic feet of gas per day to produce 6.7 million tonnes of LNG per annum”, reads Hunt Oil’s website on its Yemen projects. The existing gas production facilities in Marib Block 18 currently have a capacity of 3.2 billion cubic feet per day… The LNG will be shipped to markets in the U.S. and Korea.”

Through the Yemen Exploration and Production Company (YEPC), Hunt and Exxon have produced oil in Block 18 for 20 years since 1982. They say that this period was extended for five years in an agreement signed by the Yemen government and YEPC in January 2004, and beginning in November 2005. But Yemen would have none of it, reports Gulf Oil & Gas:

“Since November 15, 2005, the Government of Yemen has taken numerous actions to prevent YEPC from exercising its duties as operator of Block 18 in breach of the various legally executed and binding agreements signed in 2004. This is without precedent in Yemen. Further, Yemen has attempted to replace YEPC in the Marib Block with a government-owned company, Safer Exploration and Production Operations Company (‘SEPOC’)”

Hunt and Exxon responded by filing for arbitration with the International Chamber of Commerce in Paris. The outcome of this was announced in late November 2008 – and it didn’t look good for Big Oil. “… the outcome has ensured that the Yemeni state retains earnings from a disputed production block from 2005 to date”, reported Arabian Oil & Gas, “a ruling worth billions of dollars to the oil-revenue dependent state.” Clearly, Yemen’s insistence on maximising its control over gas revenues is partly a response to its rapidly plummeting revenues from oil exports.

The following year, 2009, saw an escalating deterioration of conditions inside Yemen, with intensifying and proliferating clashes between Yemeni security forces, al-Qaeda insurgents and Shi’ite rebels. Thus Yemen’s own oil and gas energy resources, its geostrategic position in relation to Gulf energy and North African energy supplies, and its escalating domestic energy crisis, have played a critical role in the deepening of US military involvement in Yemen under Obama from early 2009 – now escalating in the aftermath of the crotch-bombing incident.

Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is a bestselling author and political analyst. He is the Executive Director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development, and has taught courses in contemporary history and international relations theory at the University of Sussex. His Doctoral thesis investigated the radicalization processes and dynamics of violent conflict in the context of hierarchical social systems in the modern world. Dr. Ahmed has also published extensively on international security issues, including The London Bombings; The War on Truth; Behind the War on Terror; and The War on Freedom. He has been an expert commentator for BBC News 24, BBC World Today, Al-Jazeera English, among others. He is currently advising the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst on engaging British Muslim communities. Visit Dr. Nafeez’ website.

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.