Tuesday, December 16, 2008

10 false flags operations that shaped our world


http://www.conspiracy-times.com/images/articles_images/falseflag_00.jpgFrom Nero to 9/11, via Pearl Harbour and the Gulf of Tonkin incident... Joe Crubaugh provides an "all time greatest hits" of false flag operations, whereby one scenario is repeated... as the world keeps falling for the same lie.

The most commonly known false flag operations consist of a government agency staging a terror attack, whereby an uninvolved entity gets blamed for the carnage. As at least two millennia have proven, false flag operations, with healthy doses of propaganda and ignorance, provided a great recipe for endless war.
In "War is a Racket", Two-time Medal of Honor recipient Major General Smedley Butler wrote: "I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested."
You may not have heard of these operations, but perhaps you have heard of these?

1. Nero, Christians, and the Great Fire of Rome

NeroRome, the night of July 19, 64 AD. The Great Fire burst through the rooftops of shops near the mass entertainment and chariot racing venue called Circus Maximus. The flames, whipped by a strong wind, rapidly engulfed densely populated areas of the city. After burning uncontrolled for five days, four of the 14 Roman districts were burned to the ground, and seven more were severely damaged.
It was no secret that Nero wanted to build a series of palaces which he planned to name "Neropolis". But, the planned location was in the city and in order to build Neropolis, a third of Rome would have to be torn down. The Senate rejected the idea. Then, coincidentally, the fire cleared the very real estate Neropolis required.

Despite the obvious benefit, there's still a good probability that Nero did not start the fire. Up to a hundred small fires regularly broke out in Rome each day. On top of that, the fire destroyed Nero's own palace and it appears that Nero did everything he could to stop the fire. Accounts of the day say that when Nero heard about the fire, he rushed back from Antium to organize a relief effort, using his own money. He opened his palaces to let in the homeless and had food supplies delivered to the survivors.
Nero also devised a new urban development plan that would make Rome less vulnerable to fire. But, although he put in place rules to insure a safer reconstruction, he also gave himself a huge tract of city property with the intention of building his new palace there.
People knew of Nero's plans for Neropolis, and all his efforts to help the city could not counteract the rampant rumours that he'd help start the fire. As his poll numbers dropped, Nero's administration realised the need to employ False Flag 101: When something - anything - bad happens to you, even if it's accidental, point the finger at your enemy.
Luckily, there was a new cult of religious nuts at hand. The cult was unpopular because its followers refused to worship the emperor, denounced possessions, held secret meetings and they were always talking about the destruction of Rome and the end of the world. Even more luckily for Nero, two of the cult's biggest leaders, Peter and Paul, were currently in town. Nero spread word that the Christians had started the Great Fire. The citizens of Rome bought his lie hook, line and sinker. Peter was crucified and Paul beheaded. Hundreds of others in the young cult were fed to the lions or smeared with tar and set on fire to become human street lamps.

2. Remember the Maine, to Hell with Spain

Remember the MaineThe Spanish Empire was the first truly global empire, reaching its territorial height in the late 1700s. By 1898, Spain was losing territories regularly. Cuba too was becoming increasingly hard to control and a minor revolution had broken out. This wasn't welcome news to people in the United States who owned Cuban sugar, tobacco and iron industry properties valued at over $50 million (worth ca. $1.2 billion today).
The main stream media, then dominated by newspaper magnates Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, exaggerated - and outright fabricated - stories of horrible conditions under Spanish rule. Following the age-old maxim, "If it bleeds, it leads", the newspapers published stories about Spanish death camps, Spanish cannibalism and inhumane torture. The newspapers sent reporters to Cuba. However, when they got there, they found a different story. Artist and correspondent Frederick Remington wrote back to Hearst: "There is no war. Request to be recalled." Hearst's famous reply: "Please remain. You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war." And he did. His newspaper, continually screaming how Spanish Cuba was going to hell in a hand basket, convinced big business interests in the US to put pressure on anti-war President William McKinley to protect their Cuban investments. McKinley, in response, sent the USS Maine battleship to Havana Harbour as a calming show of force.

Three weeks after arriving, on the night of February 15, 1898, the USS Maine exploded, killing 266 men. There are two theories for the explosion: some believe the explosion was caused by an external mine that detonated the ship's ammunition magazines. Others say it was caused by a spontaneous coal bunker fire that reached the ammunition magazines. Currently, the evidence seems to favour the external mine theory.
Without waiting on an investigation, America's mainstream media blamed the tragedy on Spain and beat the drums for war. By April, McKinley yielded to public pressure and signed a congressional resolution declaring war on Spain. To help pay for the Spanish-American War, congress enacted a "temporary" tax of 3 percent on long-distance telephone bills. This was essentially a tax on the rich, as only about 1,300 Americans owned phones in 1898. Although the Spanish-American War ended in 1898, the temporary tax was only abolished in... 2005. Over its lifetime, the 107-year-old tax generated almost $94 billion - more than 230 times the cost of the Spanish-American War.

The Spanish-American War put a large nail in the coffin of Spain's global empire. And by the end of 1898, the United States, which was founded in opposition to imperialism, found itself in control not only of Cuba, but of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Hawaiian Islands as well.

3. The Manchurian Incident

Manchurian incidentThe economic slump following 1929's thorough and convincing near-obliteration of Wall Street hit Japan especially hard: exports fell, unemployment rose. Japan, not being rich in natural resources, needed oil and coal to make power to run machines to produce goods to sell to other countries to make money to buy food to have enough energy. Manchuria, a province of China, had its fair share of oil and coal.
After Japan decided it needed to invade Manchuria, they needed a pretext to justify the invasion. They chose to create a false flag attack on a railway close to Liutiao Lake... a big flat area that had no military value to either the Japanese or the Chinese. The main reason the spot was chosen was for its proximity (about 800 meters distant) to Chinese troops stationed at Beidaying. The Japanese press labelled the no-name site of the blast Liutiaogou, which was Japanese for "Liutiao Bridge." There was no bridge there, but the name helped convince some that the sabotage was a strategic Chinese attack.
Colonel Itagaki Seishiro and Lieutenant Colonel Kanji Ishiwara ordered officers of the Shimamoto Regiment to place a bomb beneath the tracks. The original bomb failed to detonate and a replacement had to be found. Then, at 10.20pm, September 18, 1931, the tracks were blown. Surprisingly, the explosion was minor. Only one side of the rail was damaged, and the damage was so light that a train headed for Shenyang passed by only a few minutes later. But it was a good enough excuse to invade...

The Japanese immediately charged the Chinese soldiers with the destruction, then invaded Manchuria. A puppet government known as Manchukuo was installed. The League of Nations investigated and in a 1932 report denied that the invasion was an act of defence, as Japan had advertised. But rather than vacate Manchuria, Japan decided to vacate the League of Nations, the precursor to the United Nations.

4. Secrets of the Reichstag Fire

Adolf HitlerIn 1933, just a week before general elections that might place enough Nazis in office to make Hitler defacto dictator, the Reichstag, which housed the parliament of the German Empire, was set on fire. Adolf Hitler assured everyone that communist terrorists started the fire. Hitler's party member Hermann Göring stated that he had secret evidence that would soon be made public; evidence that proved communists did it. These proclamations came on top of weeks of Nazi-organized street violence designed to whip the public into a pathological fear of communists.
The next day, the Nazis convinced a senile President von Hindenburg to sign the Reichstag Decree. The decree, using defence against terrorism as an excuse, suspended just about every major civil liberty set forth in the Weimar Constitution: habeus corpus (the right to know why you're being put in jail)? Gone. Freedom of opinion? Gone. Freedom of the press? Not any more. Freedom to organise and assemble? Deported. The Reichstag decree even allowed the government to spy on its own citizens' personal mail and telephone conversations without a warrant... something most Americans today could hardly begin to fathom... a precursor to President George W. Bush secret order in 2002 ordering the National Security Agency to do just exactly the same thing.
So what about the fire? The only thing historians seem to agree on is that Marinus van der Lubbe, a former Dutch Communist and mentally disturbed arsonist hungry for fame, was found inside the building. Despite the Nazi attempt to blame the fire on a group of communists, the communists were later acquitted by the Nazi government itself. After years of extensive investigation, most historians believe the Hitlerites themselves set fire to the Reichstag using van der Lubbe as their patsy: they knew a nut was going to try to burn down the building and not only did they let him do it, but they may have befriended him, encouraged him and even helped the blaze spread by scattering gasoline and incendiaries.
Most Germans, feeling safe from terrorism again, didn't mind that their freedom and liberty had been stolen, or that so much of their life and work had become so strictly controlled. On the contrary, they felt very enthusiastic and patriotic about the new government because they ignorantly believed the new government cared about them. And as long as the average citizen worked hard, kept his mouth shut and let his kids take part in the Hitler Youth organization, he stayed out of the detention camps.

5. The Fake Invasion at Gleiwitz

NaujocksIn the late evening of Thursday, August 31, 1939, German covert operatives pretending to be Polish terrorists seized the Gleiwitz radio station in the German/Poland border region of Silesia. The station's music program came to an abrupt halt, followed by frantic German voices announcing that Polish formations were marching toward town. Germany was being invaded by Poland! Then, like a bad imitation of the previous year's infamous War of the Worlds broadcast, the transmission went dead for a moment of dramatic silence. Soon, the airwaves popped and crackled to life again, and this time Polish voices called for all Poles in the broadcast area to take up arms and attack Germany.
In no time, radio stations across greater Europe picked up the story. The BBC broadcast this statement: "There have been reports of an attack on a radio station in Gleiwitz, which is just across the Polish border in Silesia. The German News Agency reports that the attack came at about 8.00pm this evening when the Poles forced their way into the studio and began broadcasting a statement in Polish. Within quarter of an hour, says reports, the Poles were overpowered by German police, who opened fire on them. Several of the Poles were reported killed, but the numbers are not yet known." And thus, Hitler invented an excuse to invade Poland, which he did the next day: September 1, 1939. World War II began.

What really happened? Alfred Helmut Naujocks received the orders from Heinrich Müller, chief of the Gestapo, to put the staged terrorist attack together at the Gleiwitz station. At Naujock's disposal were what the Germans had codenamed "canned goods," which were dissenters and criminals kept alive in detention camps until the Gestapo needed a warm dead body. To add cogency to the Gleiwitz attack, Naujocks brought along one such canned good: Franciszek Honiok. Honiok, a German from the Silesian region, was a known Polish sympathizer. Before arriving at the station, the Gestapo gave him a lethal injection. Then, they dressed him up like a Polish terrorist and brought him to the front of the radio station. Naujocks later testified that the man was unconscious, but not dead yet, when he was shot full of pistol rounds. When the police and press found Honiok's body, they assumed he'd been one of the fictional Polish terrorists that attacked the station.
In all, there were 21 fake terror actions along the border that same night, many of them using "canned goods" from German prisons so there would be plenty of bodies in the morning: evidence of Polish attackers that had been shot in self defence. The next day, after a long night filled with fake terror, Hitler gave a speech to the German Army, complete with synthetic anger: "The Polish State has refused the peaceful settlement of relations which I desired, and has appealed to arms. Germans in Poland are persecuted with bloody terror and driven from their houses. A series of violations of the frontier, intolerable to a great Power, prove that Poland is no longer willing to respect the frontier of the Reich. In order to put an end to this lunacy, I have no other choice than to meet force with force from now on. The German Army will fight the battle for the honour and the vital rights of reborn Germany with hard determination. I expect that every soldier, mindful of the great traditions of eternal German soldiery, will ever remain conscious that he is a representative of the National-Socialist Greater Germany. Long live our people and our Reich!"
Had it not been for the Nuremberg trials in 1945, the real story behind the Gleiwitz attack might never have been uncovered. It was there that the operation's leader, Alfred Naujocks, spilled the beans in a written affidavit.

6. The Myth of Pearl Harbour

Pearl Harbour posterOn Sunday morning, December 7, 1941, the Japanese launched a sneak attack at Pearl Harbor that decimated the US Pacific Fleet and forced the United States to enter WWII. That's what most of us were taught as school children... But, except for the date, everything you just read is a myth. In reality, there was no sneak attack. The Pacific Fleet was far from destroyed. And, furthermore, the United States took great pains to bring about the assault.
On January 27, 1941, Joseph C. Grew, the U.S. ambassador to Japan, wired Washington that he'd learned of the surprise attack Japan was preparing for Pearl Harbour. On September 24, a dispatch from Japanese naval intelligence to Japan's consul general in Honolulu was deciphered. The transmission was a request for a grid of exact locations of ships in Pearl Harbour. Surprisingly, Washington chose not to share this information with the officers at Pearl Harbour. Then, on November 26, the main body of the Japanese strike force (consisting of six aircraft carriers, two battleships, three cruisers, nine destroyers, eight tankers, 23 fleet submarines, and five midget submarines) departed Japan for Hawaii.
Despite the myth that the strike force maintained strict radio silence, US Naval intelligence intercepted and translated many dispatches. And, there was no shortage of dispatches: Tokyo sent over 1000 transmissions to the attack fleet before it reached Hawaii. Some of these dispatches, in particular this message from Admiral Yamamoto, left no doubt that Pearl Harbour was the target of a Japanese attack: "The task force, keeping its movement strictly secret and maintaining close guard against submarines and aircraft, shall advance into Hawaiian waters, and upon the very opening of hostilities shall attack the main force of the United States fleet and deal it a mortal blow. The first air raid is planned for the dawn of x-day. Exact date to be given by later order."
Even on the night before the attack, US intelligence decoded a message pointing to Sunday morning as a deadline for some kind of Japanese action. The message was delivered to the Washington high command more than four hours before the attack on Pearl Harbour. But, as many messages before, it was withheld from the Pearl Harbour commanders.Although many ships were damaged at Pearl Harbour, they were all old and slow. The main targets of the Japanese attack fleet were the Pacific Fleet's aircraft carriers, but Roosevelt made sure these were safe from the attack: in November, at about the same time as the Japanese attack fleet left Japan, Roosevelt sent the Lexington and Enterprise out to sea. Meanwhile, the Saratoga was in San Diego.
Why did Pearl Harbour happen? Roosevelt wanted a piece of the war pie. Having failed to bait Hitler by giving $50.1 billion in war supplies to Britain, the Soviet Union, France and China as part of the Lend Lease program, Roosevelt switched focus to Japan. Because Japan had signed a mutual defence pact with Germany and Italy, Roosevelt knew war with Japan was a legitimate back door to joining the war in Europe. On October 7, 1940, one of Roosevelt's military advisors, Lieutenant Commander Arthur McCollum, wrote a memo detailing an 8-step plan that would provoke Japan into attacking the United States. Over the next year, Roosevelt implemented all eight of the recommended actions. In the summer of 1941, the US joined England in an oil embargo against Japan. Japan needed oil for its war with China, and had no remaining option but to invade the East Indies and Southeast Asia to get new resources. And that required getting rid of the US Pacific Fleet first.
Although Roosevelt may have got more than he bargained for, he clearly let the attack on Pearl Harbour happen, and even helped Japan by making sure their attack was a surprise. He did this by withholding information from Pearl Harbour's commanders and even by ensuring the attack force wasn't accidentally discovered by commercial shipping traffic. As Rear Admiral Richmond K. Turner stated in 1941: "We were prepared to divert traffic when we believed war was imminent. We sent the traffic down via the Torres Strait, so that the track of the Japanese task force would be clear of any traffic."

7. Israeli Terrorist Cell Uncovered in Egypt

President NasserIn July, 1954, an Israeli terrorist cell was activated inside Egypt. The ensuing attacks, cleverly designed to look like the work of Arabs, blasted and torched American and British targets. First, the Israeli terrorists firebombed the Alexandria Post Office. Then, they firebombed the US Information Agency libraries: one in Alexandria, and one in Cairo. Then, they firebombed a British-owned Metro-Goldwyn Mayer theatre, a railway terminal, the central post office, and a couple more theatres...
To smuggle their bombs inside the buildings, the terrorists used devices shaped like books, hiding them inside book covers. Once inside, bags filled with acid were placed on top of the nitroglycerin bombs. After several hours, the acid ate through the bags and ignited the nitroglycerin, causing explosions and blazing infernos.

In the early 1950s, the United States was making fast friends with Egypt, taking advantage of the new pan-Arab Egyptian government of Gamal Abdel Nasser. The warming relationship between the US and Egypt caused a very insecure Israel to feel threatened. Nassar also had plans to nationalize the Suez Canal, which had been controlled by the British for decades. Egypt had been known to blockade Israeli shipping through the canal and Israel feared Nassar would make a blockade permanent.
After US President Eisenhower began encouraging the British to leave the Suez Canal Zone, Israel started looking for a way to make the British stay, and a way to remain best buddies with America. And what better way to treat your best friend than to stab them in the back and tell them one of your other friends did it?

David Ben Gurion, Israel's founding prime minister, thought that Egyptian terrorist attacks against Americans would be a perfect way to cool the growing US/Egypt relationship. Since there were no Egyptians planning attacks against Americans, Ben Gurion's protégés did the next best thing: they recruited Israeli agents to pretend to be Egyptian terrorists.
The top-secret Israeli terrorist cell, Unit 131, had existed since 1948. In 1950, Israel's Directorate of Military Intelligence Aman was created and Israel sent an undercover agent, Colonel Avraham Dar (alias: John Darling, British citizen of the island of Gibraltar), to recruit more members to Unit 131. He also trained them in how to build bombs and terrify Americans and British civilians working and living in Egypt.
Before the terrorist cell was activated, another Israeli agent named Avraham (Avraham Seidenberg) was sent to take control from Avraham Dar. Seidenberg first went to Germany to establish an alias: he assumed the identy of Paul Frank, a former SS officer, complete with underground Nazi connections. By 1954, his new identity was in place and he went to Egypt to take command of Unit 131. Everything was going well for the Israeli terrorists it seemed. But, there was one thing the members of Unit 131 didn't know: their terrorist sleeper cell had itself been infiltrated by the Egyptian intelligence service. The new Unit 131 leader, Seidenberg, had betrayed them to the Egyptians. So, when Unit 131 member Philip Nathanson made his way to bomb the British-owned Rio theatre in Alexandria, not only was he being followed, the Egyptian intelligence service had a fire engine waiting to put out the flames. As Nathanson stood in the ticket line, his bad luck turned worse when one of the bombs in his pocket ignited and then exploded. Nathanson was burned but not killed. As nearby pedestrians shouted warnings and wondered if he was a suicide bomber, Egyptian policemen stepped in, calmed the crowd, and identified Nathanson as one of the terrorists who had been blowing up American and British buildings.
Nathanson was interrogated by Egypt's military intelligence and confessed the whole plot, which led to more arrests. When the Israeli spies were given a public trail, all the details of their terrorist training in Israel came to light.
Former Israeli Prime Minister Ben Gurion and Israel's Aman chief, Binyamin Gibli, tried to frame their own Defense Minister Pinhas Lavon. They even offered forged documents as proof. The frame-up worked for a while, so much so that the entire incident is still popularly known as the Lavon Affair. Lavon resigned and Ben Gurion came out of political retirement to replace him as Israel's Defense Minister. However, the truth did finally emerge. In 1960, a review of the inquiry discovered the fake documents, as well as perjury by Seidenberg. A committee of seven Cabinet members cleared Lavon. Although Ben Gurion never admitted fault, he did resign his post as Defense Minister.

8. Operation Northwoods

Robert & John KennedyIn 1962, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously proposed state-sponsored acts of terrorism on American soil, against American citizens. The head of every branch of the US armed forces gave written approval to sink US ships, shoot down hijacked American planes, and gun down and bomb civilians on the streets of Washington, D.C., and Miami. The idea was to blame the self-inflicted terrorism on Cuba's leader, Fidel Castro, so the American public would beg and scream for the Marines to storm Havana.
The public learned about Operation Northwoods 35 years later, when the Top Secret document was declassified by the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board. Among other things, Operation Northwoods proposed:
- Faking the crash of an American passenger plane. The disaster was to be accomplished by faking a commercial flight from the US to Jamaica, and having the plane boarded at a public airport by CIA agents disguised as college students going on vacation. An empty remote-controlled plane would follow the commercial flight as it left Florida. The commercial flight's pilots would radio for help, mention that they had been attacked by a Cuban fighter, then land in secret at Eglin AFB. The empty remote-controlled plane would then be blown out of the sky and the public would be told all the poor college students aboard were killed.
- Using a possible NASA disaster (astronaut John Glenn's death) as a pretext to launch the war. The plan called for "manufacturing various pieces of evidence which would prove electronic interference on the part of the Cubans" if something went wrong with NASA's third manned space launch.
- Blowing up buildings in Washington and Miami. Cuban agents (undercover CIA agents) would be arrested, and they would confess to the bombings. In addition, false documents proving Castro's involvement in the attacks would be "found" and given to the press.
- Attacking an American military base in Guantanamo with CIA recruits posing as Cuban mercenaries. This involved blowing up the ammunition depot and would obviously result in material damages and many dead American troops. As a last resort, the plan even mentioned bribing one of Castro's commanders to initiate the Guantanamo attack. That deserves repeating: the Pentagon considered using our tax dollars to bribe another country's military to attack our own troops in order to instigate a full-scale war.

Operation Northwoods was only one of several plans under the umbrella of Operation Mongoose. Shortly after the Joint Chiefs signed and presented the plan in March, 1962, President Kennedy, still smarting from the Bay of Pigs fiasco, declared that he would never authorize a military invasion of Cuba. In September, Kennedy denied the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Lyman Lemnitzer, a second term as the nation's highest ranking military officer. And by the winter of 1963, Kennedy was dead... killed, apparently, by a Cuban sympathiser in the streets of an American city.

9. Phantoms in the Gulf of Tonkin

Lyndon B. JohnsonOn August 2, 1964, three North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked a US destroyer, the USS Maddox. The boats reportedly fired torpedoes at the US ship in international waters in the Gulf of Tonkin, about thirty miles off the Vietnam coast. On August 4, the US Navy reported another unprovoked attack on the USS Maddox and the USS Turner Joy.
Within hours, President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered a retaliatory strike. As the bases for North Vietnamese torpedo boats were bombed, Johnson went on TV and told America: "Repeated acts of violence against the armed forces of the United States must be met not only with alert defense, but with a positive reply. That reply is being given as I speak tonight." The next day, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara assured Capital Hill that the Maddox had only been "carrying out a routine mission of the type we carry out all over the world at all times." McNamara said the two boats were in no way involved with recent South Vietnamese boat raids against North Vietnamese targets.
At Johnson's request, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. The resolution pre-approved any military actions Johnson would take. It gave Johnson a free ticket to wage war in Vietnam as large as the President wanted. And, true to his large Texas roots, Johnson got a big war: by 1969, over half a million US troops were fighting in Indochina. Despite McNamara's testimony to the contrary, the USS Maddox had been providing intelligence support to South Vietnamese boats carrying out raids against North Vietnam. McNamara had also testified that there was "unequivocable proof" of an "unprovoked" second attack against the USS Maddox. In fact, the second attack never occurred at all.
At the time of the second incident, the two US destroyers misinterpreted radar and radio signals as attacks by the North Vietnamese navy. It's now known that no North Vietnamese boats were in the area. So, for two hours, the two US destroyers blasted away at nonexistent radar targets and vigorously manoeuvred to avoid phantom North Vietnamese ships. Even though the second "attack" only involved two US ships defending themselves against a nonexistent enemy, the President and Secretary of Defense used it to coerce Congress and the American people to start a war they neither wanted nor needed.
After the Vietnam War turned into a quagmire, Congress decided to put limits on the President's authority to unilaterally wage war. Thus, on November 7, 1973, Congress overturned President Nixon's veto and passed the War Powers Resolution. The resolution requires the President to consult with Congress before making any decisions that engage the US military in hostilities. It is still in effect to this day.

10. The September 11, 2001 Attacks

9/11Like many buildings built in the 1970s, the twin towers were constructed with vast quantities of cancer-causing asbestos. The cost of removing the Twin Tower asbestos? A year's worth of revenues at a minimum; possibly as much as the value of the buildings themselves. The cost to disassemble the Twin Towers floor by floor would have run into the double-digit billions. In addition, the Port Authority was prohibited from demolishing the towers because the resulting asbestos dust would cover the entire city, which it did when they collapsed, resulting in many cancers with a confirmed link to the WTC dust.
Despite its questionable status, in January of 2001, Larry Silverstein made a $3.2 billion bid for the World Trade Center. On July 24, the Port Authority accepted the offer. Silverstein then took out an insurance policy that, understandably, covered terrorist attacks, which happened seven weeks later. To date, Silverstein has been awarded almost $5 billion from nine different insurance companies. What was an asbestos nightmare turned into a $1.8 billion profit within seven weeks.

Donald Rumsfeld said about the Pentagon on the morning of September 10, 2001: "According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions." That bombshell was pretty much forgotten by the next morning. So, as a reward for losing $8,000 for every man, woman, and child in America, taxpayers patriotically forked over another $370 billion and counting to invade Iraq. True to form, the Pentagon promptly lost $9 billion of that money, too.

Eight days after the attacks, the 342-page Patriot Act was given to Congress. That same week, letters armed with anthrax from a US military lab entered the mail. Subsequently, while Congressional offices were evacuated, examined, cleaned and nasal cavities swabbed, the Patriot Act remained largely unread. Then, with little debate, the Patriot Act became law, giving the Bush administration unprecedented power to access people's medical records, tax records, information about the books they bought or borrowed and the power to conduct secret residential searches without notifying owners that their homes had been searched.

In early 2001, executives from Shell, BP, and Exxon met with Dick Cheney's Energy Task Force while it was developing its new national energy policy. Later, the companies freely admitted interest in profiting from Iraq's oil fields, even before the US invaded Iraq. And now? A new Iraq hydrocarbon law expected to pass in March 2007 will open the door for international investors, led by BP, Exxon and Shell, to siphon off 75 percent of Iraq oil wealth for the next thirty years.

According to statements by Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, a Bronze Star recipient with 22 years of experience in intelligence operations, a classified intelligence program codenamed Able Danger had uncovered two of the three 9/11 terrorist cells a year before the attacks and had identified four of the hijackers. Shaffer alerted the FBI in September of 2000, but the meetings he tried to set up with bureau officials were repeatedly blocked by military lawyers. Four credible witnesses have come forward to verify Shaffer's claims.
In August 2001, a Pan Am International Flight Academy instructor warned the FBI that a student (Zacarias Moussaoui) might use a commercial plane loaded with fuel as a weapon. The instructor asked "Do you realize that a 747 loaded with fuel can be used as a bomb?" Moussaoui was then arrested on immigration charges, but despite the repeated urging of the school and local agents, FBI headquarters refused a deeper investigation. The US also received dozens of detailed warnings (names, locations, dates) from the intelligence agencies of Indonesia, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, Egypt, Jordan, India, Argentina, Morocco, Russia, Israel, France and even the Taliban. It would seem that the entire world was onto the bungling Saudi hijackers and somewhat perplexed that the US wasn't taking preventative actions. But in each case the US, as if by design, chose not to investigate. Instead. Condoleezza Rice, on May 16, 2002, stated: "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon."
We also know that on the morning of 9/11, multiple Air Force war games and drills were in progress. The hijackers would have never made it to their targets without these war games: Operation Northern Vigilance ensured that many jet fighters that would have normally been patrolling the east coast were flying over Alaska and northern Canada in a drill that simulated a Russian air attack, complete with false radar blips.
Remarkably, operation Vigilant Guardian simulated hijacked planes in the north eastern sector, while real hijackers were in the same airspace. This drill had NORAD and the Air Force reacting to false blips on FAA radar screens. Some of these blips corresponded to real military aircraft in the air posing as hijacked aircraft. That's why when NORAD's airborne control officer, Lt. Col. Dawne Deskins, heard Boston claim it had a hijacked airliner, her first words were, "It must be part of the exercise."

Changing colours

If you follow the money, you can see that the people with the most to gain occupied the key military and civilian positions to help 9/11 happen, as well as to cover up the crime. Such is the hallmark of false flag operations throughout history. But the incredible scale of the 9/11 sham, and the sheer number of people who still refuse to see the mountain of truth in front of their eyes...that's what makes the September 11, 2001 attacks the greatest false flag operation of all time.
Hermann Göring stated: "Naturally the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or 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 to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."
Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf, a book still forbidden in some countries (such as France), wrote: "In the size of the lie there is always contained a certain factor of credibility, since the great masses of the people...will more easily fall victim to a great lie than to a small one."

Joe Crubaugh is a freelance writer, artist, and software consultant. Visit his website.

Source: http://www.conspiracy-times.com/content/view/30/2/

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

TWENTY-SIX THINGS WE NOW KNOW SEVEN YEARS AFTER 9/11

http://www.crisispa pers.org/ essays8w/ 26things. htm
<http://www.crisispa pers.org/ essays8w/ 26things. htm>

Has it been so long? - WVNS

Each year around the anniversary of 9/11, I summarize what we ordinary
citizens have learned since that awful day in 2001. This is the seventh
annual look backwards, a 2008 update that contains new information and
surmisings about those horrific events and what followed.

1. One 9/11
Size Fits All. What we now more fully understand is how the CheneyBush
Administration utilized the murderous terrorism of 9/11 as the linchpin
justification for their unfolding domestic and foreign agenda, much of
it illegal, immoral and impeachable. By and large, one can sum up that
overall agenda as: Amass and control power in the U.S. and much of the
world ("full-spectrum dominance"), and, in cahoots with their corporate
supporters such as Halliburton and Blackwater, loot the federal
treasury. All this was to be carried out secretly, with no
accountability.

2. Iraq War Planning Began Before 9/11. We also know more about the
nature of the lies (including forged documents) used by the
Administration to sell the Iraq War, which attack already was in the
planning stages well before 9/11. The first faked document, by CIA
forgers at the behest of White House officials, was a 2005 letter
(back-dated 2001) supposedly coming from the then-Iraqi intelligence
chief to his boss Saddam Hussein mentioning alleged "facts" that
established a tie-in between 9/11, Al-Qaida and Iraq and about Saddam's
supposed purchase of uranium. The official, Tahir Jalil Habbush
al-Tikriti, who had been an informant for the U.S. during the run-up to
the war, actually had written his CIA handlers at the time, reported
author Ron Suskind, that there were no WMD, no 9/11 or Al-Qaida
connections; that letter was deep-sixed by the CIA and the official was
taken into protective custody, hidden away in Jordan and given $5million
for services rendered (which later included his signature on the phony
letter).

The second fake document, which was used by the Brits and Americans in
the run-up to the war, supposedly was from the African nation of Niger.
It was an amateurish botch job (incorrect letterhead, signature of a
minister of state who no longer was in that office, etc.) that came from
the Italian Secret Service, but the idea for it might have originated
elsewhere, perhaps from a clandestine American service. It was designed
to bolster the fiction that Iraq was purchasing uranium "yellowcake"
from Niger. Since the yellowcake theory was of great value to the
CheneyBush plans to bomb Iraq -- as Ambassador Joe Wilson had made plain
in his various articles --the tendency worldwide was to believe that the
U.S. might well have been involved in having the phony letter written.

3. Domestic Spying Started Before 9/11. Similary, we know more about the
illegal and widespread domestic spying ordered by CheneyBush seven
months BEFORE 9/11. We still don't fully understand the reasons for this
top-secret, massive data-mining, to be carried out without proper legal
warrants. But the point is that the CheneyBush Administration, for its
own reasons, and long before 9/11, asked the giant communications
companies to furnish them with the private records of its customers,
which then were passed on to the relevant governmental security
departments. All this new information has made fringe theorists about
9/11 all the more numerous: If CheneyBush did all those illegal things
to fool the population -- the forgeries, the lies, the coverups, the
deceptions, the police-state tactics BEFORE 9/11 -- how far, they ask,
might they have gone to order or carry out or be in some complicit
relationship with the 9/11 attacks?

4. McCain and 9/11/Iraq. We also know that one of the two major
contenders for the presidency in the 2008 elections swallowed the
CheneyBush line about 9/11 and propagandized for the Iraq War and
Occupation because, he said, Iraq was tied to the events of 9/11 and to
Al-Qaida and to WMD stockpiles. None of those was true, but even though
John McCain had problems with how Rumsfeld was managing the war, the
Arizona senator placed himself right in the neo-con corner about the
necessity for the war. He continues to this day to justify the U.S.
Occupation as necessary for a U.S. "victory," whatever that term may
mean -- even, he says, if it it takes another hundred years and
trillions of dollars more. (His opponent, Barack Obama, is more
dedicated to drawing down troops in Iraq, "re-deploying" some of them to
the anti-Taliban war in Afghanistan, and sending the rest home.) So,
with that introduction, let's take a look at the rest of the list. Some
of what follows has appeared in my previous articles, and some is new or
expanded:
9/11 and "the War on Terror"

5. 9/11/Anthrax and Iraq. Let's remember the chronology of how we got
here: The Administration' s far-right domestic agenda was bogged down in
2001 after Jim Jeffords left the Republican caucus and joined the
now-majority Democratic one in the Senate. The murderous terrorism of
9/11 occurred several months later. As did the mysterious anthrax
attacks aimed at Congress and the media, which seven years later was
blamed conveniently on a single scientist at the Army's Fort Detrick
biological weapons lab), who committed suicide a few months ago. Both
the anthrax attack and the 9/11 terror attacks had the effect of
providing the CheneyBush Administration pretty much a free ride in
putting police-state tactics in place. Those tactics were embodied in
the so-called "Patriot Act," which superseded Constitutional
protections, and which succeeded in greasing the wheels for all sorts of
questionable domestic legislation that otherwise might have been bottled
up forever. The planning for an attack on Iraq, as Treasury Secretary
Paul O'Neill later told us, already had begun at the first cabinet
meetings after Inauguration Day in early 2001. After 9/11, those plans
proceeded apace, even when the intelligence indicated that it was not an
Iraq operation but an al-Qaida terrorist attack, out of Afghanistan.

It appeared that the U.S. military over time would capture or kill Osama
bin Laden in Afghanistan and effectively wipe out most of al-Qaida,
which had attacked America on 9/11. But CheneyBush abruptly pulled the
U.S. forces from Afghanistan and sent them to Iraq, a country that was
no real danger to the U.S. and its allies. (Addendum: By Fall of 2008,
the Taliban regrouped and began mounting more and and more attacks on
U.S. and Western coalition forces in Afghanistan and now once again
control a good share of the country. If the U.S. troops had not been
precipitously pulled out and dispatched to Iraq, instead of taking care
of business in Afghanistan, today's reality there might well have been
significantly different.)

6. Unanswered 9/11 Questions. There still are numerous unanswered
questions about the horrific events of September 11, 2001, mainly
centered around: A. Why Bush sat there in the Florida school for seven
minutes reading the "Pet Goat" book after he'd been informed by his
chief of staff, after the second plane struck the World Trade Center,
that "America is under attack," and why the Secret Service, as they are
trained to do when the President is believed to be in danger, didn't
surround him and get him the hell out of that classroom. The clear
implication is that a delay-operation was in progress. B. Why NORAD
didn't scramble its fighters in time to do anything. (Same implication) .
C. Whether World Trade Center Towers 1, 2 and 7 collapsed into their
footprints as a result of fire/structural damage or from pre-set
demolition charges (there are reputable scientists on both sides of that
one). D. How to explain all the "put" options on American Airlines and
United Airlines stocks just prior to the attacks, clearly suggesting
someone knew which airlines were going to be hijacked and was trying to
profit from the pending attacks?

But regardless of whether CheneyBush were complicit in the deaths and
destruction that day -- and there is no conclusive proof that they were
-- what we do know is that in the months, weeks and days prior to 9/11,
red-hot warnings about a planned terrorist attack, using planes as
weapons aimed at buildings in New York and Washington, were coming into
the White House from a wide variety of other countries. At the very
least then, CheneyBush and a few other key insiders knew that a
"spectacular" attack was coming and did absolutely nothing. Bush was
presented by the CIA on August 6 with a Presidential Daily Briefing
entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the U.S.", which talked
about preparations for plane hijackings, suspected terrorists
surveilling federal buildings in New York, teams of terrorists being
inside the U.S. with explosives. But, even following these dire
warnings, there was no heightening of awareness in the Bush
Administration, no alerting airlines, no sending out photos of al-Qaida
suspects to be on the lookout for, no calling an urgent meeting of
counter-terrorism experts inside the White House to coordinate either a
way of minimizing the damage or dealing with a post-attack response.
Nothing.

One is left with two reasonable alternative explanations:

A: These CheneyBush guys in charge were (and remain) totally over their
heads in terms of governance. They simply didn't have a clue what was
about to happen and what to do about it. Administration actions during
the past seven and a half years supply more than enough evidence that
Bush and his crew are total fuck-ups. It's a reverse-Midas syndrome:
everything they touch turns to excrement. Total bumblers, screwups,
incompetent dolts. B: They knew something major was about to go down
(although 3000 deaths may have been way beyond what they imagined), and
did nothing in order to use those attacks as a rallying point to amass
power and push their agenda through a Congress that otherwise was
antagonistic to them.

7. The Facts of 9/11. We know that the Bush
Administration didn't want the public to learn much, if anything, about
the events of that day. Bush&Co. had to be dragged kicking and screaming
into agreeing to the appointment of the official 9/11 Commission, and
they named as the executive director one of their made men, Philip
Zelikow, who later would be named a high-ranking Administration
official.

As it turned out, the Administration stonewalled many of the
Commission's requests for documents. Moreover, Bush would not testify
under oath and would deign to appear only with Cheney by his side,
(here's my imagined transcript of that testimony.) We later learned that
the commission was so angered by the constantly-shifting stories told by
the Pentagon/NORAD that they were ready to urge that legal charges be
filed against those who testified from those two governmental bodies. In
short, the 9/11 Commission's probe was not exhaustive, leaving many
areas of investigation unplumbed, and the documentation provided by the
Administration was insufficient and often late in arriving. Conclusion:
Even today, many questions remain unsatisfactorily unanswered.

8. PNAC & the Neo-Cons. We know that a FarRight segment of the
conservative movement, by and large former Reagan Administration
officials in exile from power during the Clinton presidency, was
dedicated to using America's sole superpower status to move aggressively
in the world while, they believed, no other country or international
force could put up much resistance. The key neo-con leaders who were
placed in charge of U.S. foreign/military policy after the 2000 election
(Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Bolton, Perle, Khalilzad, et al.) were
founders of, and affiliated with, The Project for The New American
Century (PNAC), a group that urged the U.S. to use its sole-superpower
muscle in creating Pax Americana "hegemony" over key regions of the
world.

The Bush neo-cons realized that presidents enjoy enormous patriotic
support during wartime, but when the war ends, those leaders lose their
compelling luster, as was the case with President Bush#1. Ergo, Bush#2
would become a PERMANENT wartime president, and those who opposed him
could then be tarred forever with the smear of "unpatriotic" and "hating
America," thus marginalizing their political impact. And it worked: the
Democrats cowered and gave Bush virtually everything he wanted, up until
relatively recently, when occasionally they remembered that they have
spines and stood up and fought as an opposition party should. As they
did more of that, and promised to end the war and reign in CheneyBush
lawlessness, the public swept them into majority control of the House
and Senate in the 2006 elections. (Note: After the election, however,
the Democrats continued funding the war, approved the Administration' s
illegal domestic-surveillan ce, and took "off the table" the possibility
of impeaching Bush and Cheney for their gross abuse of power and of the
Constitution. )

We know that Bush&Co. saw, in Condi Rice's apt term at the time, the
"opportunity" offered by the 9/11 attacks to move quickly and forcefully
with the Administration' s foreign and domestic agenda. PNAC talked about
its Pax Americana plan for global "benevolent hegemony" using a retooled
military. This military transformation would take forever to implement,
a PNAC report said, unless a "new Pearl Harbor" changed the equation in
the public mind. 9/11 came along and was used as that "new Pearl
Harbor." (See "How We Got Into This Imperial Pickle: A PNAC Primer").

We know that after 9/11, Bush seemed to bring the entire country along
with him when he launched an attack on al-Qaida and its
Taliban-government supporters in their Afghanistan homebase. But there's
no oil in that destitute country, and, as Rumsfeld reminded us, not much
worth bombing. Thus, no lessons could be drawn by Middle East leaders
from the U.S. attack. But, as Cheney's secret energy panel was aware,
there was another country in the region that did have oil, and lots of
it, and which could be taken easily by U.S. forces. Thus Iraq became the
object-lesson to other autocratic leaders in the Middle East, especially
in Syria and Iran. If you do not do our bidding, prepare to accept a
massive dose of "shock&awe." You will be removed and replaced by
democratic-looking governments as arranged by the U.S. Control of Iraq's
oil has been at the forefront of U.S. occupation policies in Iraq, and
remains so there and elsewhere as oil and gas become even more
sought-after energy sources.

These neo-con members of PNAC and similar organizations, such as the
American Enterprise Institute and Foundation for the Defense of
Democracies, had urged Clinton to depose Saddam Hussein in 1998. But he
demurred, seeing a mostly contained dictator there, whereas Osama bin
Laden in Afghanistan, and those terrorists like him, actually were
successfully attacking U.S. assets inside the country and abroad. But
the PNAC crowd had larger ambitions than simply toppling a brutal Iraqi
dictator. They were after effective control of energy sources around the
globe. To get to that hegemonic point, they developed a philosophy that
included: "pre-emptively" attacking countries that were of no imminent
danger to the U.S., abrogating treaties when they conflicted with U.S.
goals, making sure no other nation or organization (such as the United
Nations) could ever achieve power-parity with the U.S., installing
U.S.-friendly governments to do America's will, expressing a willingness
to use tactical nuclear weapons, and so on. All of these extreme PNAC
suggestions, once regarded as lunatic, were enshrined in 2002 as
official U.S. policy in the National Security Strategy of the United
States of America.

The Iraq Invasion and Occupation

9. Sexing Up the Intel. Given the extreme nature of the neo-con agenda
in fomenting support for an invasion and occupation of Iraq, Bush&Co.
had their work cut out for them. Therefore, among the first moves by
Rumsfeld following 9/11 was to somehow try to connect Saddam to the
terror attacks. When the various intelligence agencies reported to
Rumsfeld that there was no Iraq connection to 9/11, and since the CIA
and the other intelligence agencies would not, or could not, supply the
intelligence needed to justify a war on Iraq, Rumsfeld set up his own
rump "intelligence" agency, the Office of Special Plans, stocked it with
political appointees of the PNAC persuasion and soon was stovepiping
cherry-picked raw intel, much of it untrue, from self-interested Iraqi
exiles, straight to Cheney and others in the White House. Shortly
thereafter, the White House Iraq Group -- the in-house marketing cabal
for the war, with such major players as Libby, Rove, Card, Rice, Hadley,
Hughes, Matalin, et al. -- went big-time with the WMD and mushroom-cloud
scares and the suspect melding of Saddam Hussein with the events of
9/11.

Based on this sexed-up and phony intelligence, Cheney, Bush, Rice,
Rumsfeld and the others began warning about mushroom clouds over the
U.S., drone planes dropping biological agents over the East Coast (with
phony photos shown to members of Congress), huge stockpiles of chemical
weapons in Iraq, etc. Secretary of State Colin Powell, regarded as the
most believable of the bunch, was dispatched to the United Nations to
make the case, which he did, reluctantly, by presenting an
embarrassingly weak litany of surmise and concocted allegations. While
the U.S. corporate media was unanimous in its opinion that Powell had
cinched the case, the world didn't buy it. (Powell, who resigned in
2004, has since lamented his role in this charade.) The opposition to
the impending U.S. war on Iraq was palpable and huge: 10 million
citizens throughout the world hit the streets to protest, and former
allies publicly criticized Bush. Only Tony Blair in England eagerly
hitched his wagon to the Bush war-plan, dispatching large numbers of
troops, as it turned out over the objections of many of his closest
aides and advisers.

10. The Big Lie & the Downing Street Revelations. We know that those
advisers warned Blair that he was about to involve the U.K. in an
illegal, immoral and probably unwinnable war that would put U.K. and
U.S. troops in great danger from potential insurgent forces. How do we
know about these inner workings of the Blair government? Because someone
from inside that body leaked the top-secret minutes from those
war-Cabinet meetings, the so-called Downing Street Memos. We also
learned from those minutes that Bush & Blair agreed to make war on Iraq
as early as the Spring of 2002. The intelligence, they decided, would be
"fixed around the policy" to go to war, despite their telling their
legislative bodies, the mass media, and their citizens that no decisions
had been made. In fact, the Bush Administration had let it be known
privately that it had decided to attack Iraq a year before the invasion.
"Fuck Saddam," Bush told three U.S. Senators in March of 2002. "We're
taking him out."

We know that many of Blair's most senior advisors thought the WMD
argument rested on shaky ground, and that without specific authorization
from the United Nations Security Council, the legality of the war was
doubtful. The U.N. inspectors on the ground in Iraq were not finding any
WMD stockpiles, but the Bush Administration rushed to war anyway. The
haste to begin the war meant that there was little or no proper planning
to secure the peace and reconstruct the country after the major
fighting. Some weeks later, Bush prematurely declared, under a "Mission
Accomplished" banner, that the U.S. had "prevailed" in the Iraq war. The
Iraqi "insurgency" was about to blow up in their faces.

The Downing Street Memos make clear that both the U.S. and U.K. were
well aware that Iraq was a paper tiger, with no significant WMD
stockpiles or link to Al-Qaida and the 9/11 attacks. Nevertheless, the
major thrust of Bush&Co.'s justification for going to war was based on
these non-existent weapons and 9/11 links. The Big Lie Technique,
repeating the same falsehoods over and over and over, drummed those
falsehoods into Americans' heads day after day, month after month, with
little if any skeptical analysis by the corporate mainstream media,
which marched mostly in lockstep with Bush policy and thinking.
Wolfowitz admitted later that they chose WMD as the primary reason for
making war because they couldn't agree on anything else the public might
accept. But frightening people with talk of nuclear weapons, mushroom
clouds, toxins delivered to the East Coast of the U.S. by Iraqi drone
airplanes and the like would work like a charm in convincing Americans
to go to war.

11. Iran Is Beneficiary of U.S. Policy. We know that the real reasons
for invading Iraq had precious little to do with WMD, with Islamist
terrorists inside that country, with installing democracy, and the like.
There were no WMD to speak of, and Saddam, an especially vicious
dictator, did not tolerate religious or political zealots of any stripe.
No, the reasons had more to do with American geopolitical goals in the
region involving oil, control, support for its ally Israel, hardened
military bases and keeping Iran from having free rein in the region.
However, as it turned out, the invasion and brutal occupation of Iraq
removed the one major buffer against the expansion of Iran's political
and military power in the region. In addition, because the U.S.
Occupation was so incompetently carried out, it pushed Iraq and Iran
into a far closer religious and political alliance than would have been
the case if Saddam had been permitted to remain in power. CheneyBush may
have sacrificed thousands of American dead, tens of thousands of
American wounded, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis as "collateral
damage," and now the Administration, which has constantly downsized its
definition of "victory," seems quietly willing to accept a stable
Islamic government that may well turn out to be more attuned to Teheran
than to Washington.

12. Iraq As a Disaster Zone. We know that Bush's war has been a thorough
disaster, built on a foundation of lies, and bungled from the start. The
2007 "surge" of U.S. troops has eased the violence in a military sense,
but the political reconciliation that could bring peace still has not
been made by the warring sects and clans and politicians. In short,
peace has not come, and billions of dollars have been (and continue to
be) wasted or lost in the corrupt system of organized corporate looting
that ostensibly is designed to speed up Iraq's "reconstruction. " Indeed,
so much has Bush's war been botched that the "realists" in the
Administration know the U.S. must get out as quickly as possible if they
are to have any hope of exercising their considerable muscle elsewhere
in the Middle East. But, so far, the neo-con strategy still rules, and
"stay-the-course" remains the operating principle, at least until the
new American President is installed.

13. The Stretched-Thin Military. We know that Bush's Greater Middle East
agenda also is suffering because the U.S. military is spread way thin in
Afghanistan and Iraq, the desertion and suicide rates are high, morale
(especially among Reserve and National Guard troops) is way down as a
result of the never-ending multiple tours of duty, soldiers are not
re-enlisting at the usual clip, recruitment isn't working and deceptive
scams are being used to lure youngsters (many of them gang-members,
felons, psychologically damaged) into signing up. In short, there are no
forces to spare on the ground. There is way too much reliance on air
power or from missiles, which merely deliver a message about U.S.
superiority in the air but with no successful follow-up possible on the
ground. The air attacks result in making the civilian citizens of those
countries even angrier at America, and with little likelihood of success
in forging U.S.-friendly "democratic" governments in Iran, Syria, et
al., since bombed populations tend to support their existing
governments. In short, America's failure in Iraq and Israel's failure in
Lebanon demonstrate the limits of muscle-bound, high-tech armies in the
modern, nationalist- guerrillas world.

14. Hiding Facts from the Public. We know that Bush&Co. made sure that
there would be no full-scale, independent probes of their role in using
and abusing the intelligence that led to war on Iraq. This is the most
secretive Administration in American history, and they want no
investigations of any of their mistakes or corruptions of the democratic
process. The Senate Intelligence Committee, then led by Republican Pat
Roberts, held hearings on the failures lower down the chain, namely at
the CIA and FBI level, and promised there would be followup hearings on
any White House manipulation of intelligence. But, following the 2004
election, Roberts said no purpose would be served in launching such an
investigation. Likewise, the 9/11 Commission did not delve deeply into
how the Bush Administration misused its pre-9/11 knowledge. In short,
this secretive administration made sure that everything was done to head
off at the pass any investigations whatsoever.

After the 2006 elections, many years too late, the now-majority
Democrats eventually began their probe into the Administration' s use of
intelligence to promote the Iraq War. The committee concluded that the
Administration "repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in
reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent. As a
result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from
Iraq was much greater than actually existed." Chairman Jay Rockefeller
added: "There is no question we all relied on flawed intelligence. But,
there is a fundamental difference between relying on incorrect
intelligence and deliberately painting a picture to the American people
that you know is not fully accurate."

The Turn to Tyranny at Home

15. Perilously Close to Dictatorship. We know that Bush has no great
love for democratic processes, certainly not inside the United States.
(On at least three occasions, he has "jokingly" expressed his preference
for dictatorship, as long, he said, as he can be the dictator.) He much
prefers to rule as an oligarch, but to do that, he had to invent legal
justifications that would grant him the requisite power. So he had
longtime lawyer-toady Alberto Gonzales, and Cheney's now-chief-of- staff
David Addington, devise a legal philosophy that would permit Bush to do
pretty much what he wants -- ignore laws on the books, disappear U.S.
citizens into military prisons, authorize torture, spy on citizens'
phone calls and emails, declare martial law and rule by decree, etc. --
whenever Bush says he's acting as "commander-in- chief" during "wartime."

And, since "wartime" is the amorphous "war on terror," a war against a
tactic, there is no end and Bush is home free. There always will be
terrorists trying to do anti-U.S. damage somewhere around the globe, or
inside America, and the "commander-in- chief" will need to respond. Ergo,
goes this logic, Bush (and any successor) is above the law, untouchable,
in perpetuity. Bush&Co. also made sure that U.S. officials and military
troops would not be subject to indictment by any international court or
war-crimes tribunal. However, even with ultra-conservative Bush
appointees John Roberts and Samuel Alito on the bench, the U.S. Supreme
Court has ruled several times that the Administration has gone beyond
constitutional limits with regard to its treatment of suspected
terrorist "detainees." But somehow Bush&Co. always manage to postpone
and delay implementation or find ways around the court rulings.

16. Torture As Official U.S. Policy. We know that Gonzales, Addington
and Pentagon and DoJ lawyers beholden to Rumsfeld devised legal
rationales that make torture of suspects official state policy. These
Bush-loyalist lawyers also greatly widened the definition of what is
acceptable interrogation practice -- basically anything this side of
death or terminally abusing internal organs. They also authorized the
"rendering" of key suspects to countries specializing in extreme
torture. After all this, Bush and Rumsfeld professed shock, shock! that
those under their command would wind up torturing, abusing and
humiliating prisoners in U.S. care. But the Administration made sure to
stop all inquiries into higher-up responsibility for the endemic
torture. The buck never stops on CheneyBush's desk. If something goes
wrong (and they never will admit to mistakes), it's always someone
else's fault. If and when Iraq "falls," the names of scapegoats are
being prepared: al-Maliki, Democrats, the "liberal media" and bloggers,
Bill Clinton, et al. Never Cheney, never Bush.

17. The Bill of Rights Goes "Quaint." We know that the Bush
Administration has been able to obtain whatever legislation it needs in
its self-proclaimed "war on terror" by utilizing, and hyping, the
understandable fright of the American people. John Ashcroft and Tom
Ridge emerged periodically to manipulate the public's fright by
announcing yet another "terror" threat, based on "credible but
unverified" evidence. As he departed from his directorate of the
Homeland Security Department, Ridge admitted that he was required to
issue many of those "terror" warnings when there was no justifiable
reason for doing so. It has been demonstrated and Ridge seemed to be
suggesting that those warnings were activated usually when the
Administration was facing an election or when they were having an
especially bad-news day. Meanwhile, Congress (shame on you, Democrats!)
made most of the Patriot Act laws permanent. Unless those can be
repealed, and the juridical tradition of habeas corpus (where a court
has to rule on the legality of a suspect's arrest) re-introduced into
American jurisprudence, that vote will be a nail into the coffin housing
the remains of the Bill of Rights.

18. Outing CIA Agents for Political Reasons. The Bush Administration,
for its own crass political reasons, compromised American national
security by revealing the identity of two key intelligence operatives.
The first was CIA agent Valerie Plame, who had important contacts in the
shadowy world of weapons of mass destruction, especially in dealing with
Iran's nuclear capabilities. Whoever else also was responsible for the
agent's outing, it is clear that Cheney (through Libby) and Rove
disclosed Plame's covert identity in an attempt to punish her husband
for exposing Bush's lie to the nation that Saddam was seeking supplies
of uranium from central Africa. Revealing the identity of a covert CIA
agent is a felony. The other outing of a CIA operative, by Condi Rice,
apparently to show off how successful the Administration was in its
anti-terrorism hunt, was that of a high-ranking mole close to bin
Laden's inner circle. This operative could have kept the U.S. informed
as to ongoing and future plans of al-Qaida. That's Bush's
"war-on-terrorism" at work.

And, no surprise, after Libby was convicted of obstruction of justice
and perjury, Bush commuted his sentence just before Libby was to head
for prison. As usual, there is no accountability for illegal behavior in
the Bush Administration, and miscreants know that if they keep their
mouths shut or tell lies to the police and get caught, they have a
guaranteed Get-Out-of-Jail- Free card.

19. Do You Know If Your Vote IsCounted?
We know that America's vote-counting system is corrupted.
Sophisticated statistical analysis along with wide-scale exit-polling,
suggests strongly that the 2000 and 2004 presidential election results
were fiddled with by the private companies that tally the votes. These
companies are owned by far-right Republican supporters, but the same
objection would be lodged if Democrats owned the companies. It has been
demonstrated publicly that those who control the software or who hack
into the easily-penetrated system can manipulate the vote totals without
anybody being the wiser.

There are no good reasons to "outsource" vote-counting to private
corporations. These are the same companies who make and program the
voting machines, who refuse to permit inspection of their software, and
whose technicians have behaved suspiciously on election nights in 2000
in Florida, in 2002 in Georgia, and in Ohio and Florida in 2004.

And we haven't even mentioned Rove's dirty-tricks department whose
function has been, by hook or by crook, to lower the number of potential
Democrat voters, especially minority voters; a favorite tactic is to
purge hundreds of thousands of likely Democratic voters from the voting
rolls in advance in key states such as Florida and Ohio. (As I write
this, the GOP in Ohio is lobbying for 600,000 voters to undergo
electoral scrutiny, most of them probably leaning Democratic, with many,
perhaps several hundred thousand, to be stricken from the voting rolls.)
Various states were concerned enough about touch-screen computer-voting
to order significant changes in equipment. But because the same
companies control the secret counting of the votes, unless the
vote-tabulating system can be changed soon, the integrity of our
elections will be suspect into the far future. Even if all the other
reforms were implemented for November's federal election, they would
mean nothing without the guarantee of honest tabulation.

20. No Privacy Anymore. We also now know that even before 9/11,
CheneyBush authorized massive data-mining of Americans' phone calls and
emails, along with other domestic spying operations, many of them in
clear violation of the FISA law establishing a separate, secret court to
rule on requests for eavesdropping warrants. There was a flurry of
outrage about citizens' privacy being breached in such an obviously
illegal manner, but a few months ago Democrats joined Republicans in
giving retroactive cover for such domestic-spying and even gave
post-facto immunity to the giant communications corporations who joined
in breaking the law.

21. Purging the Body Politic. We now know that CheneyBush, angered by
the unwillingness of the intelligence analysts at the CIA and State
Department to cook the intel books for political reasons, conducted
purges of recalcitrant analysts at CIA and State.

There also were purges in the Justice Department -- including the use of
illegal partisan criteria in an attempt to keep independent- minded
jobseekers from being hired -- so that only "loyal Bushies" (their term)
would be in place, those who would do the bidding of the White House
without opposition or questioning. And so the DOJ, under Bush toady
Alberto Gonzales, fired at least nine U.S. Attorneys around the country
and replaced them with their own guys. They tried to pretend that the
firings were the result of poor performance ratings, but that wasn't the
case. It was simply partisan, to help guarantee GOP control of the
election and indicting process through which the Democratic Party and it
supporters could be legally hassled in court or likely Democratic voters
kept from the polls. A side-effect of Bush&Co. putting their own U.S.
Attorneys in power would be protection for themselves and their
supporters from criminal charges. The resulting public furor got
Gonzales canned, but his replacement, Michael Mukasey, continues in the
same tradition of representing Bush and Cheney as presidential counsel,
rather than representing the Constitution and the American people's
interests. In short, not much has changed at the DoJ.

22.There Is No Real Economic Plan. We know that the Bush Administration
paid off its backers (and itself) by giving humongous tax breaks, for 10
years, to the already wealthy and to large corporations. In addition,
corporate tax-evasion was made easier via offshore listings and by
laying off thousands of IRS auditors of high-end returns. All this was
done at a time when the U.S. economy was in a sorry state and when the
treasury deficit from those tax-breaks was growing even larger from the
Iraq/Afghanistan/ "war-on-terror" costs. (Those war costs are now closing
in on a TRILLION dollars! and Congress continues to grant Bush's
requests for several hundred billion more). So far as we know, the Bush
Administration has no plans for how to retire that debt and no real plan
(other than the discredited "trickle-down" theory) for restarting the
economy and creating well-paying jobs for long-time employees, many of
whom have had their positions outsourced to foreign lands. The economy
is in such desperate shape in late-2008 that the Administration' s and
McCain's lack of a plan to turn things around is at the heart of the
upcoming election, and the issue could decide the race.

23. Drowning Government In a Bathtub. We know that the HardRight
conservatives who control Bush policy don't really care what kind of
debt and deficits their policies cause; in some ways, the more the
better since, as GOP honcho Grover Norquist has admitted, they want to
shrink government "down to the size where we can drown it in the
bathtub." They want to decimate and starve popular social programs from
the New Deal/Great Society eras, including, most visibly, Head Start,
Social Security, Medicare (and real drug coverage for seniors), student
loans, welfare assistance, public education, etc. Bush's plan to
privatize a huge chunk of the Social Security System is still out there
as a goal -- McCain is on board -- though Republicans are keeping quiet
about it.

24. Privatizing Government Functions. We know that in addition to trying
to privatize Social Security and other government programs, CheneyBush
have begun privatizing the military, partially through its all-volunteer
army and by employing mercenaries ("independent contractors" ) to carry
out numerous national-security functions, such as
intelligence- gathering. (It's estimated that about 130,000 such
mercenaries are on the ground in Iraq, close to the same number as
official U.S. military forces.) The corporate army known as Blackwater
is used not only in Iraq but was used domestically as well, to police
New Orleans after the Katrina disaster. Private corporations built and
presumably will run internment centers around the U.S. in the event of a
natural or terrorist disaster. Under the ambiguous provisions of
martial-law, it is possible that those who too actively oppose
government policy could be classified as aiding and comforting
"terrorists" and be housed in those camps.

25. Who Cares What You Drink or Breathe? We know that Bush environmental
policy (dealing with air and water pollution, mineral extraction,
national parks, and so on) is an unmitigated disaster, giving pretty
much free rein to corporations whose bottom lines do better when they
don't have to pay attention to the public interest. It's the worst sort
of grab-the-money- and-run scenario. Perhaps the best worst example of
the Administration' s attitude toward protecting the public's health can
be seen in the EPA giving the green light for residents and workers to
safely return to their homes and jobs in Lower Manhattan shortly after
the WTC Towers fell seven years ago, even though EPA scientists had
determined that the air was grossly polluted and dangerous.

26. It's Faith Over Science, Myth Over Reality. We know that this "my
mind is made up, don't bother me with the facts" attitude shows up most
openly in how science is disregarded by the Bush Administration in favor
of faith-based reasoning. A good example would be the issue of global
warming. Some of this non-curiosity about reality may be based in
fundamentalist religious, even Apocalyptic, beliefs. Much of Bush's
bashing of science is designed as payback to his fundamentalist base,
but the scary part is that a good share of the time he actually seems to
believe what he's saying, about evolution vs. creationism, stem-cell
research, abstinence education, censoring the rewriting of government
scientific reports that differ from the Bush party line, cutbacks in R&D
grants for the National Science Foundation, etc., ad nauseum. This
closed-mind attitude helps explain, on a deeper level, why things aren't
working out in Iraq, or anywhere else for that matter. Reality, to them,
is an annoyance that is best ignored.

AMERICA OR GERMANY IN THE '30S?

In sum, we know that permanent-war policy abroad and police-state
tactics at home are taking us further into a kind of American fascism
domestically and an imperial foreign policy overseas. All aspects of the
American polity are infected with the militarist Know-Nothingism
emanating from the top, with governmental and vigilante-type crackdowns
on protesters, dissent, free speech, freedom of assembly happening
regularly on both the local and federal levels. (You need look no
further than the martial-law behavior of federal, state and local
agencies in pre-emptively arresting and disciplining would-be protesters
at both the Democratic and Republican conventions in 2008.) More and
more, America is resembling Germany in the early 1930s, with group
pitted against group while the central government amasses more and more
power and control of its put-upon citizens, and criticizing The Leader's
policies is denounced as unpatriotic or even treasonous.

The good news is that after suffering through seven-plus years of the
CheneyBush presidency, and despite the Bush-compliant corporate
mass-media that often disgraces the journalistic profession, the
public's blinders are falling off. The Republicans can rely on no more
than 35% of the voting population for "base" support. The 2006 defeat of
the Republicans in the House and Senate and Tom DeLay's fall from power
are good symbols of this, and the true nature of these men and their
regime is finally starting to hit home. Cheney is widely acknowledged as
the true power behind the throne, and Bush is seen for what he is: an
insecure, uncurious, arrogant, dangerous, dry-drunk bully who is
endangering U.S. national interests abroad with his reckless and
incompetently- managed wars, his wrecking of the U.S. economy at home,
and with his over-reaching in all areas. It goes without saying that had
a Democratic president and vice president behaved similarly to Bush and
Cheney, they'd have been in the impeachment dock in a minute. Given all
these scandals and more, and the loss of public support for the Iraq war
and Republican policies in general, it would seem that the Democrats are
in an enviable position to take back the White House in 2008.

DEMS DOING "BUSINESS AS USUAL"

But the Democrats, who were given the majority in Congress by voters
anxious and desperate for major change, seem content to fritter away
their political advantage by nibbling around the edges of CheneyBush
policy but rarely attacking them frontally, especially on the continuing
war in Iraq and a possible attack on Iran coming down the pike, and on
impeachment. It's more or less business as usual in the nation's
capitol.
It's possible that this inaction of Democratic leadership is a result of
their own complicity in many of the worst decisions of the past eight
years. Or perhaps they believe that because the war is so unpopular and
the scandal-ridden GOP is self-destructing from within, the Dems should
just keep their heads down and coast to a victory in 2008. In Barack
Obama, they have a charismatic candidate who mobilizes millions with his
promise of hope and change.

But a lot can happen between now and November that could prove
disastrous or wonderful for Democratic chances. It's possible that the
positive GOP momentum with Sarah Palin could lead the Republican ticket
to victory. Or the never-ending series of scandals in Sarah Palin's
political life could help sink John McCain's chances. Or Bush could make
some sort of "peace" agreement with Iran. Or he could bomb Iran. Or
announce the capture or death of Osama bin Laden. Or Biden or Obama
could self-destruct in some embarrassing way. Anything is possible in
American politics. The Democrats are not politically pure, to be sure.
Too many (including, to a certain extent, Obama) are beholden to the
same interests that have corrupted the Republicans during the CheneyBush
years. However, in enough instances that matter -- moving away from the
Iraq War, naming less ideological judges to the Supreme Court, paying
attention to Constitutional protections of citizens' rights, acting on
global warming, beefing up governmental regulation to protect the
environment, etc. -- the Democrats would be different enough to start to
turn the ship of state away from its reckless, dangerous extremism and
back more toward the center and maybe even, on some issues, in the
direction of progressive liberalism.

Bernard Weiner, Ph.D. in government & international relations, has
taught at universities in California and Washington, worked as a
writer/editor with the San Francisco Chronicle for two decades, and
currently serves as co-editor of The Crisis Papers
(www.crisispapers. org). To comment: crisispapers@ hotmail.com .

Sunday, November 9, 2008

Two stories worth reading!

(Both true stories)

Story One

Many years ago, Al Capone virtually owned Chicago. Capone wasn't famous for anything heroic. He was notorious for enmeshing the windy city in everything from bootlegged booze and prostitution to murder.

Capone had a lawyer nicknamed "Easy Eddie". He was his lawyer for a good reason - Eddie was very good! In fact, Eddie's skill at legal manoeuvring kept Big Al out of jail for a long time.

To show his appreciation, Capone paid him very well. Not only was the money big, but also, Eddie got special dividends. For instance, he and his family occupied a fenced-in mansion with live-in help and all of the conveniences of the day. The estate was so large that it filled an entire Chicago City block.

Eddie lived the high life of the Chicago mob and gave little consideration to the atrocity that went on around him. Eddie did have one soft spot, however. He had a son that he loved dearly.

Eddie saw to it that his young son had clothes, cars, and a good education. Nothing was withheld. Price was no object. And, despite his involvement with organized crime, Eddie even tried to teach him right from wrong. Eddie wanted his son to be a better man than he was.

Yet, with all his wealth and influence, there were two things he couldn't give his son - he couldn't pass on a good name or a good example.

One day, Easy Eddie reached a difficult decision. Easy Eddie wanted to rectify wrongs he had done. He decided he would go to the authorities and tell the truth about Al "Scarface" Capone, clean up his tarnished name, and offer his son some semblance of integrity.

To do this, he would have to testify against The Mob, and he knew that the cost would be great.

So... he testified.

Within the year Easy Eddie's life ended in a blaze of gunfire on a lonely Chicago Street. But, in his eyes, he had given his son the greatest gift he had to offer, at the greatest price he could ever pay.

Police removed from his pockets a rosary, crucifix, religious medallion and a poem clipped from a magazine. The poem read:

The clock of life is wound but once,
And no man has the power
To tell just when the hands will stop
At late or early hour.
Now is the only time you own.
Live, love, toil with a will.
Place no faith in time.
For the clock may soon be still.

Story Two

World War II produced many heroes. One such man was Lieutenant Commander Butch O'Hare. He was a fighter pilot assigned to the aircraft carrier Lexington in the South Pacific.

Wikipedia tells of the early life of Edward O'Hare.

Butch became the Navy's first Ace of WWII, and the first Naval Aviator to win the Congressional Medal of Honor.

A year later Butch was killed in aerial combat at the age of 29.

His home town would not allow the memory of this WW II hero to fade, and today, O'Hare Airport in Chicago is named in tribute to the courage of this great man.

So, the next time you find yourself at O'Hare International give some thought to visiting Butch's memorial displaying his statue and his Medal of Honor. It's located between Terminals 1 and 2.

What do these two stories have to do with each other?

Butch O'Hare was Easy Eddie's son.

Monday, August 25, 2008

Leave No Comrade Behind



Leaving no one behind is a time-honored tradition, from the battle fields of Gettysburg, Hamburger Hill, Pearl Harbor, Battle of the Bulge, Wake Island, etc, etc, etc. This is not a tradition of the United States but of all countries that find themselves in wars and conflicts, whether on the ground, in the skies or on the seven seas.

On the battle fields of this once-great nation called the United States they would bury the dead with honor so as not to forget their service in fighting for their country. Whether it was the North or South, in Europe, Asia or wherever Americans have fought and died they have been honored for the ultimate sacrifice for their country.

Many brave men in all wars have risked their own lives so they may save the life of another, and as Jesus Himself said, ‘no greater love exists than that a man lay down his life for another’. You can’t teach this type of dedication in any school nor can you order anyone to put himself in harm’s way to save another and guarantee that that order is followed.

The type of men who put themselves in harm’s way to save another is in the soul of that person. With no hesitation you react–there is no time for thinking, it just happens and it is a gift that comes from God. In most wars, even the enemy has the dignity to treat and care for the captured or killed, just as they would want there own treated. I am not suggesting this is always the case, as indeed some are tortured or abused in many different manners. Unfortunately this happens in war. When it does happen however, normally the abusers are tried in a court and hung until dead or in prison as they very well should be.

I was in a situation during the six day war between Israel and the Arab states,

being on a ship called the USS Liberty. What a wonderful name, to be put on a ship which stands for what is so great about America–our freedoms, our respect for one another, the constitution, bill of rights, all meant to protect the citizens of America.

All of that pride for my country and for what it stands all flew out the window at two o’clock in the afternoon on June 8, 1967, a bright sunny day when our beautiful flag with her beautiful stars and stripes were flying in the warm breeze coming over our deck. In just seconds our flag was in tatters, holes in her and shot down. The men on deck where screaming in agony from shrapnel wounds peppering there flesh and leaving huge wounds that bled profusely. I saw the greatness in mankind that day, the greatness of the American fighting men aboard Liberty as other sailors put their lives on the line to save their helpless comrades, braving rockets, canons, amour-piercing fifty-caliber machine gun fire as the Jewish state and its assassins shot at our fire-fighters and stretcher bearers. I saw men put their lives on the line to retrieve the dead on the exposed weather decks, I saw men fighting fires on the bridge bravely from the napalm Israel dropped on our ship that engulfed it in flames. Men below the water line bravely stood their ground with five torpedoes on their way to sink our ship, the Liberty. In the communication spaces the men stayed, awaiting certain death in the engine room and the same in the fire room as these brave American sailors would not abandon their general quarters stations and all for the greater good of the crew and our ship.

One of the torpedo’s struck our ship on the starboard side in the communication spaces, resulting in the deaths of twenty five sailors and Marines who were blown to bits. The blast was so powerful it picked our ship up out of the water and dropped her back onto the sea with a thunderous rumble.

The word was passed to abandon ship. All of our life rafts had been destroyed except for three. We put them over the side to put our most seriously wounded in them. Two of rafts were shot out of the water and a third was taken aboard one of the three attacking Israeli torpedo boats, a blatant war crime to say the very least. Troop-carrying helicopters sent to our ship hovered overhead with armed commandoes ready to board us and kill the rest of us. They were so close you could see the hate in their bloodthirsty eyes and to call it frightening is the understatement of the century. They stayed for awhile and left, but we did not find out until much later why the did not board our ship and murder the rest of the crew. To add insult to injury we had been identified by Israel as American and friendly many hours before the attack but they attacked the only ‘friend’ they have nevertheless.

When all was said and done the attack lasted about as long as the attack on Pearl Harbor and left behind two thirds of the crew either dead or wounded. Over eight hundred rocket and cannon holes in her skin, napalm burning us up, and a hole in the side of our ship you could fit a house in it. We were listing badly to the starboard side and praying our ship would not roll over on us.

The Liberty crew is one of the most decorated ships in Naval history. Our ship was so heavily damaged it is second to none including if it can be believed during WWII. Only the hand of God kept our good ship Liberty afloat and all the experts say we should have gone down and gone down fast.

Now the most shameful part of American history is not that our ship was attacked by an enemy of the United States but rather by our so called ‘ally’– Israel. They used unmarked jet aircraft to attack our virtually unarmed ship to mask the true identity of our attackers. We got a message out to the sixth fleet that we were under attack to the USS Saratoga battle group and the USS America battle group within fifteen minutes of the start of the attack. Rescue aircraft were sent to our aid only to be recalled by John McCain JR. Admiral Commander in Chief United States Naval Forces, it is none other that his own son, Senator John McCain son who is in the Presidential race. Can you imagine the gaul it took to recall rescue air craft when an American ship is under attack by an unknown government? Our ship was in international waters doing what we were ordered to do and had every right to be there.

We had no idea who was attacking us until the torpedo boats came after us, then we could see the boats markings and the Star of David on their flags. We almost fell over in shock, as we thought it was an Arab state doing the murdering, not Israel. Help never did come to our aid, unbelievable as it may sound, until eighteen hours after the attack, disgraceful indeed.

On Sunday Admiral Isaac Kidd came aboard our ship and put the fear of God in all of us, ordering us never to speak of the attack to anyone–family members, friends, not even to God Himself–NO ONE. It was made clear to us that if we broke those orders he would make sure we ended up in prison or worse and worse meant DEAD and thus made us part of the cover up.

At Arlington National Cemetery there is a mass grave with six men buried, only body parts, never to be identified. On the very large head stone there is no mention of who killed these Americans. The only reason for that is to protect Israel and to keep the 41-year old cover-up in place.

Israel gets a pass on cold-blooded murder and our government is their biggest fans. They will not tell the truth about what really happened to the finest ship that ever was commissioned into the United Sates Navy fleet.

Bringing it full-circle, ‘Leave no comrade behind’ does not pertain, does not mean a thing when it comes to Israel. Our government left the United States behind. Israel not only attacked our ship and got by with it, ISRAEL ATTACKED YOU, MY FELLOW AMERICANS, AND GOT BY WITH IT.

And as bad as this is, it gets worse my friends, for history will repeat itself if ‘we the people’ don’t react to this brutal crime, get the truth out and let America know what Israel did to all of us and continues to do so with the help of our very own government since June 8 1967. No one should get by with cold-blooded murder of America’s sons and the United States of America should not get by with leaving their comrades behind to be slaughtered. This is a crime in itself.

Phillip F Tourney

Survivor USS Liberty

June 8 1967

tonktime5@yahoo.com