Why ‘some’ Still Question, Seek Answer(s) & Accountability
For ‘some’ reason I have been receiving more than a few ‘eye-rolling’ responses when I mention our theme for the month leading up to September 11- the tenth year. You and I know where the conscious but mostly subconscious eye-rolling and in some cases eye-aversion reactions come from. A very few bold ones are courageous enough to actually put this reaction into words. They ask ‘why can’t some people just let it go?’ They comment, ‘enough already with this 9/11 subject!’ Many of these same people are actually very outspoken and active in combating civil liberties related issues and abuses such as NSA Illegal Domestic Wiretapping, Rendition and Torture, FBI National Security Letters, TSA’s outrageous abuses …and the long list goes on. However, for ‘some’ reason they see ‘this 9/11 thing’ as a pointless nuisance, and wonder why some people don’t give up and keep bringing ‘it’ up. After all, the majority of these people consider 9/11 as ‘case closed,’ and a few regard it as a ‘cold case.’
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.Read more
Investigative journalist and NATO expert Rick Rozoff joins us to discuss the largest-ever one-time expansion of NATO membership, NATO’s invitation to the Persian Gulf kingdom to join NATO’s partnership program in the region, and its consideration of Saudi Arabia as a key player in the region. With the threat of Western military action against Syria and Iran mounting, Rozoff explores NATO’s intention to recruit Saudi Arabia for the Persian Gulf partnership, and how the U.S. and its Western counterparts are promoting in the Arab world from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf is a lethal mixture of militarism, monarchism and theocracy. He also talks about the Syria situation and how the Gulf monarchies are supplying the funds as well as many of the arms and recruiting foreign religious extremists as fighters, while the U.S. and its NATO allies are preparing to arm anti-government forces with more advanced weaponry and train and advise them with Western Special Forces personnel.
Rick Rozoff is an investigative journalist based in Chicago and has been an active opponent of war, militarism and intervention for over 40 years. He manages the Stop NATO e-mail list , and is the editor of Stop NATO, a website on the threat of international militarization, especially on the globalization of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Mr. Rozoff has a graduate degree in European literature.
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Brzezinski Geopolitical Notion Remains US Foreign Policy Today
By William Engdahl
The prospect of an unparalleled Eurasian economic boom lasting into the next Century and beyond is at hand. The first steps binding the vast economic space are being constructed with a number of little-publicized rail links connecting China, Russia, Kazakhstan and parts of Western Europe. It is becoming clear to more people in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Eurasia including China and Russia that their natural tendency to build these markets faces only one major obstacle: NATO and the US Pentagon’s Full Spectrum Dominance obsession. Rail infrastructure is a major key to building vast new economic markets across Eurasia.
China and Turkey are in discussions to build a new high-speed railway link across Turkey. If completed it would be the country’s largest railway project ever, even including the pre-World War I Berlin-Baghdad Railway link. The project was perhaps the most important agenda item, far more so than Syria during talks in Beijing between Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the Chinese leadership in early April. The proposed rail link would run from Kars on the easternmost border with Armenia, through the Turkish interior on to Istanbul where it would connect to the Marmaray rail tunnel now under construction that runs under the Bosphorus strait. Then it would continue to Edirne near the border to Greece and Bulgaria in the European Union. It will cost an estimated $35 billion. The realization of the Turkish link would complete a Chinese Trans-Eurasian Rail Bridge project that would bring freight from China to Spain and England.[1]Read more
Playing with Dynamite & Nuclear War in the Balkans
By William Engdahl
In one of the more bizarre foreign policy announcements of a bizarre Obama Administration, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has announced that Washington will “help” Kosovo to join NATO as well as the European Union. She made the pledge after a recent Washington meeting with Kosovan Prime Minister Hashim Thaci in Washington where she praised the progress of the Thaci government in its progress in “European integration and economic development.”[1]
Her announcement no doubt caused serious gas pains among government and military officials in the various capitals of European NATO. Few people appreciate just how mad Clinton’s plan to push Kosovo into NATO and the EU is. Read more
A Major AFRICOM & US State Department Campaign to Undermine Chinese Influence in Central Africa
By William Engdahl
According to their website, the American NGO, Invisible Children, claims now to have had over 80 million viewers to their YouTube video, “Kony2012,” since its release on YouTube a few weeks ago. For anyone with the patience to sit through the entire YouTube of Kony2012, it is questionable how truthful the figure of 80 million viewers is. Eighty million is unprecedented in YouTube history by all accounts.
The video features such prominent Hollywood personalities as Angelina Jolie, George Clooney, Lady GaGa, Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs and other notables. It’s a slick, sentimental story directed by Jason Russell, a 33-year-old now-hospitalized American filmmaker who apparently just underwent a bizarre mental disconnect on the streets of San Diego.[1] The YouTube video depicts a young Ugandan, Jacob Acaye, whom Russell claims he befriended some ten years earlier after Acaye escaped conscription into Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) as an 11-year-old killer. The film portrays Kony as the world’s worst beast and terrorist, in effect, Africa’s Osama bin Laden. [2]
The Invisible Children NGO is itself opaque. It reportedly rakes in millions from sales of such things as buttons, Invisible Children T-shirts, bracelets and posters priced from $30-$250, but it ranks low on transparency regarding other donors. The group, which employs around 100 people, is expected to raise millions of dollars from their “Kony2012” video, but so far it refuses to say how much has been donated or how it will spend the money. The founders of the group, who advocate direct US military intervention in response to the LRA, had been previously criticized for posing with guns alongside members of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) in 2008, an organization widely accused of rape and looting. The group issued a statement in response: “We thought it would be funny to bring back to our friends and family a joke photo. You know, ‘Haha – they have bazookas in their hands but they’re actually fighting for peace’.” [3] HaHa…Read more
‘The Key Oil Derivatives Insiders are Laughing All the Way to the Bank’
By William Engdahl
Since around October last year, the price of crude oil on world futures markets has exploded. Different people have different explanations. The most common one is the belief in financial markets that a war between either Israel and Iran or the USA and Iran or all three is imminent. Another camp argues that the price is rising unavoidably because the world has passed what they call “Peak Oil”—the point on an imaginary Gaussian Bell Curve at which half of all world known oil reserves have been depleted and the remaining oil will decline in quantity at an accelerating pace with rising price.
Both the war danger and peak oil explanations are off base. As in the astronomic price run-up in the Summer of 2008 when oil in futures markets briefly hit $147 a barrel, oil today is rising because of the speculative pressure on oil futures markets from hedge funds and major banks such as Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase and most notably, Goldman Sachs, the bank always present when there are big bucks to be won for little effort betting on a sure thing. They’re getting a generous assist from the US Government agency entrusted with regulating financial derivatives, the Commodity Futures Trading Corporation (CFTC).Read more
Late last year, hackers with the anonymous hacking group LulzSec raided the servers of Strategic Forecasting, Inc., or Stratfor, a private intelligence company in Austin, Texas, coming away with some 5 million emails. Last month, Wikileaks began publishing the emails as “The Global Intelligence Files” to much fanfare. All of the claims that continue to emerge on a daily basis from this email archive are just that: claims. Regardless of the truth of this or that particular claim, perhaps the most significant thing to emerge from the emails is the fact that companies like Stratfor exist at all. That private companies are in possession of vast intelligence networks and vast sums of data on private individuals is a trend that few are comfortable with, but few are aware of until situations like the Stratfor leak bring it to the public’s attention.
This is our EyeOpener Report by James Corbett, presenting the disturbing trend of outsourcing intelligence work to private companies, the unhealthy relationship between intelligence agencies and the private sector, the culpability for misconduct and shielding the government from being held accountable for crimes committed on its behalf, and the creation of a revolving door that allows the private companies enormous leeway in bending and breaking laws by offering incentives to the agencies that are supposedly keeping an eye on them.
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Another weapon in the arsenal of the Western powers to destabilize “uncooperative” governments around the world
As anyone who has logged on to the internet in the last five years is all too aware, social media websites have exploded in popularity to the point where they are virtually impossible to avoid. Facebook is expected to hit one billion users later this year. Twitter handles almost 300 million tweets per day. Every second, one hour of video footage is uploaded to YouTube.
With this rise in popularity of social media has come an attendant rise in another trend: the dinosaur media’s attempts to portray these websites as revolutionary tools for freedom loving people around the world.
This is our EyeOpener Report by James Corbett presenting the entire myth of the social media revolution carefully constructed by US State Department-linked NGOs as another weapon in the arsenal of the Western powers who have been caught time and again destabilizing uncooperative governments around the world for decades.
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Rising Energy Tensions in the Aegean—Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, Syria
By William Engdahl
The discovery in late 2010 of the huge natural gas bonanza off Israel’s Mediterranean shores triggered other neighboring countries to look more closely at their own waters. The results revealed that the entire eastern Mediterranean is swimming in huge untapped oil and gas reserves. That discovery is having enormous political, geopolitical as well as economic consequences. It well may have potential military consequences too.
Preliminary exploration has confirmed similarly impressive reserves of gas and oil in the waters off Greece, Turkey, Cyprus and potentially, Syria.
Greek ‘energy Sirtaki’
Not surprisingly, amid its disastrous financial crisis the Greek government began serious exploration for oil and gas. Since then the country has been in a curious kind of a dance with the IMF and EU governments, a kind of “energy Sirtaki” over who will control and ultimately benefit from the huge resource discoveries there.
In December 2010, as it seemed the Greek crisis might still be resolved without the by-now huge bailouts or privatizations, Greece’s Energy Ministry formed a special group of experts to research the prospects for oil and gas in Greek waters. Greece’s Energean Oil & Gas began increased investment into drilling in the offshore waters after a successful smaller oil discovery in 2009. Major geological surveys were made. Preliminary estimates now are that total offshore oil in Greek waters exceeds 22 billion barrels in the Ionian Sea off western Greece and some 4 billion barrels in the northern Aegean Sea.[1]Read more
Taking a look at the historical realities of Western imperialism in the Middle East and North Africa following World War II allows us to place current conflicts in a wider context and understanding. Briefly looking at the coup in Iran in 1953, the Egyptian Suez Crisis in 1956, the Syrian Crisis in 1957, and the independence struggles in North Africa against the French during the same period, we are able to see a recurring focus on the same major states as to this very day being strategically important for Western interests in a region of vast import for the United States. As one key U.S. adviser in the State Department acknowledged in 1945, Middle Eastern oil is “a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history.”
With research drawing from declassified State Department, Pentagon, CIA, National Security Council and White House documents from the era, the American Empire following World War II sought to define for itself a more pragmatic strategy aimed at domination, which simultaneously sought to separate itself from the formal colonial empires of France and Britain, while still serving their interests, and in supporting “moderate” and pro-Western Arab nationalists in the region in order to undermine the “extremist nationalists” like Nasser in Egypt, acknowledging that national liberation was a force of history through which the United States would have to navigate if it had any hope of maintaining itself as an imperial power.
For ‘some’ reason I have been receiving more than a few ‘eye-rolling’ responses when I mention our theme for the month leading up to September 11- the tenth year. You and I know where the conscious but mostly subconscious eye-rolling and in some cases eye-aversion reactions come from. A very few bold ones are courageous enough to actually put this reaction into words. They ask ‘why can’t some people just let it go?’ They comment, ‘enough already with this 9/11 subject!’ Many of these same people are actually very outspoken and active in combating civil liberties related issues and abuses such as NSA Illegal Domestic Wiretapping, Rendition and Torture, FBI National Security Letters, TSA’s outrageous abuses …and the long list goes on. However, for ‘some’ reason they see ‘this 9/11 thing’ as a pointless nuisance, and wonder why some people don’t give up and keep bringing ‘it’ up. After all, the majority of these people consider 9/11 as ‘case closed,’ and a few regard it as a ‘cold case.’
The prospect of an unparalleled Eurasian economic boom lasting into the next Century and beyond is at hand. The first steps binding the vast economic space are being constructed with a number of little-publicized rail links connecting China, Russia, Kazakhstan and parts of Western Europe. It is becoming clear to more people in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Eurasia including China and Russia that their natural tendency to build these markets faces only one major obstacle: NATO and the US Pentagon’s Full Spectrum Dominance obsession. Rail infrastructure is a major key to building vast new economic markets across Eurasia.
The discovery in late 2010 of the huge natural gas bonanza off Israel’s Mediterranean shores triggered other neighboring countries to look more closely at their own waters. The results revealed that the entire eastern Mediterranean is swimming in huge untapped oil and gas reserves. That discovery is having enormous political, geopolitical as well as economic consequences. It well may have potential military consequences too.
In December 2010, as it seemed the Greek crisis might still be resolved without the by-now huge bailouts or privatizations, Greece’s Energy Ministry formed a special group of experts to research the prospects for oil and gas in Greek waters. Greece’s Energean Oil & Gas began increased investment into drilling in the offshore waters after a successful smaller oil discovery in 2009. Major geological surveys were made. Preliminary estimates now are that total offshore oil in Greek waters exceeds 22 billion barrels in the Ionian Sea off western Greece and some 4 billion barrels in the northern Aegean Sea.
Taking a look at the historical realities of Western imperialism in the Middle East and North Africa following World War II allows us to place current conflicts in a wider context and understanding. Briefly looking at the coup in Iran in 1953, the Egyptian Suez Crisis in 1956, the Syrian Crisis in 1957, and the independence struggles in North Africa against the French during the same period, we are able to see a recurring focus on the same major states as to this very day being strategically important for Western interests in a region of vast import for the United States. As one key U.S. adviser in the State Department acknowledged in 1945, Middle Eastern oil is “a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history.” 
