Why was British ISIS member ‘Jihadi George’ tried in a US court?

February 02 2023

Photo Credit: The Cradle

The decision to try one of the so-called “Beatles” ISIS members in the US was to conceal his previous links to British intelligence and his role in their regime-change efforts in Syria.

ByWilliam Van Wagenen

In January 2023, reports emerged that Alexanda Kotey, known as “Jihadi George” and one of the four British ISIS members collectively known as the “Beatles,” had disappeared from the custody of the US Bureau of Prisons (BOP).

In 2022, Kotey was convicted in a US court and sentenced to life in prison for the abduction and detention of multiple western hostages in Syria between 2012 and 2015, including journalists James Foley, John Cantlie, and Steven Sotloff, and aid workers Kayla Jean Mueller, Peter Kassig, David Haines, and Alan Henning, most of whom were later executed by ISIS.

A BOP spokesperson refused to provide details of Kotey’s whereabouts or why he had been moved, stating only that only that there are “several reasons” why an inmate may be referred to as “not in BOP custody,” including for “court hearings, medical treatment or for other reasons. We do not provide specific information on the status of inmates who are not in the custody of the BOP for safety, security, or privacy reasons.”

Kotey’s links with British intelligence

The refusal of BOP officials to provide details of Kotey’s whereabouts raises fears that Kotey may be able to escape facing justice for his crimes. This is due to Kotey’s previous links to British intelligence, which sought to use UK-based Islamist extremists such as Kotey as proxies in the 2011 US-led regime-change war against the Syrian government.

Kotey’s links to British intelligence are evidenced by the convoluted effort to prosecute him after his 2018 detention by the US-backed and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

Although Kotey held UK citizenship like three of his alleged victims, Haines, Henning, and Cantlie, British officials insisted that Kotey and fellow Beatle Elshafee Elsheikh be tried in US rather than UK courts.

A review of events surrounding Kotey’s case reveals that prosecuting the West Londoner in the US was necessary to avoid revealing his and fellow Beatles’ links to British intelligence.

Laying the foundations for ISIS

Kotey traveled to Syria in August 2012 with fellow Beatle Muhammad Emzawi, known as “Jihadi John,” as part of a “terror-funnel” established by British intelligence. Upon arrival in Syria, Kotey and Emzawi immediately joined an armed group fighting against the Syrian government known as Katibat al-Muhajireen.

In November 2012, Emzawi participated in the abduction of American journalist James Foley and British journalist John Cantlie near the town of Binnish in northwestern Syria.

Kotey, Emzawi, and Elsheikh then served as prison guards for Foley, Cantlie, and other western hostages. Many members of Katibat al-Muhajireen – including the trio – then helped lay the foundation for the rise of ISIS by joining the terror group when it was established in April 2013.

Foley was brutally murdered by Emzawi in August 2014. In a video recording of the murder, a black-clad and masked Emzawi beheaded Foley, who was kneeling in the desert sand in an orange Guantanamo-style prisoner’s jumpsuit. Sotloff, Haines, Hennig, and Kassig were murdered subsequently, while Cantlie’s whereabouts are still unknown.

Terrorism researcher Raffaello Pantucci reports that Kotey and Elsheikh, “were longstanding figures of concern to the security services. Involved in a West London network that has long fed young British men to jihadi battlefields and created terrorist cells back in the UK.”

The Times reports that according to court papers filed in Kotey’s case, he first tried to travel to Syria with three other Britons via the Channel tunnel in February 2012 but was denied entry at the Turkish border and deported.

A month later, Kotey tried again but failed to reach Syria by flying from Barcelona. He returned to London through St Pancras station, where police arrested him for carrying a “lock-blade knife.”

The Times reported further that, “In August 2012 Kotey tried for a third time to make it to Syria by travelling overland across Europe with Emwazi. He has disclosed that the pair were detained at least twice during the two-month journey, although it is unclear in which countries. Each time, it seems, they were allowed to continue on their way.”

A spokesman for the SDF claimed that Kotey entered Turkey in 2012 “even though the Turkish intelligence had his jihadi record. He gained two months’ residence in Turkey and then he was allowed to go to Syria and he entered Syrian soil through the border crossing at Bab al Hawa.”

After years of fighting for Katibat al-Muhajireen and then ISIS, Kotey and Elsheikh were detained by the SDF in 2018 as the Caliphate faced defeat by the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and its allies on the one hand, and US and SDF forces on the other, during the race to control Syria’s northeastern oil and grain producing regions. Emzawi had already been killed in a US airstrike in 2015.

Trial in the US instead of UK

By the time of Kotey’s detention in 2018, British police had long been collecting evidence of Kotey’s terrorist activities. As a result, the Guardian reported that the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) had charged Kotey with five counts of murder and eight counts of hostage-taking in February 2016, and issued warrants for his arrest.

However, once Kotey was in SDF custody, British officials took extraordinary legal measures to ensure he would not be brought back to the UK for trial, insisting instead that Kotey be tried in a US court.

The British Home Office then revoked Kotey’s British citizenship, making it more difficult to prosecute him in the UK. According to Ken Macdonald, a former UK director of public prosecutions, stripping Kotey of his citizenship appeared to be an attempt by the government “to duck responsibility for bringing this Briton to justice.”

The Guardian reports that UK Security Minister Ben Wallace claimed to parliament in July 2018 that the UK did not have enough evidence to try Kotey and a US trial was the only option. However, a legal source with knowledge of the case claimed that the “British families of those murdered by ‘the Beatles’ were misled by UK government officials” and told that “if these men are not sent to the US, we won’t be able to prosecute them.”

The Telegraph reported in 2018 that according to a leaked letter from British Home Secretary Sajid Javid, the Metropolitan Police and FBI had been investigating Kotey’s activities in Syria for the past four years, “collecting more than 600 witness statements in a criminal inquiry involving 14 other countries,” and that there was “intelligence” implicating Kotey in the “kidnap and murder” of two Britons and three Americans.

Britain’s support of terrorists in Syria

UK officials were correct, however, in saying to the victims’ families that if Kotey and Elsheikh were not sent to the US, they could not be prosecuted. This was because British intelligence had been directly supporting Katibat al-Muhajireen, the armed group Kotey, Elsheikh, and Emzawi initially fought for during the time they participated in the abduction and captivity of numerous western hostages.

Two previous efforts to convict British citizens on terrorism charges for their involvement with Katibat al-Muhajireen had fallen apart for this specific reason, illustrating British intelligence support for the armed group.

The first was the 2015 terror trial of Swedish citizen Bherlin Gildo, who according to the Daily Mail fought for Katibat al-Muhajireen and later for the official al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, the Nusra Front.

The Guardian reports that after Gildo abandoned the conflict, he was detained while transiting through Heathrow Airport. He was accused by British authorities of attending a terrorist training camp and receiving weapons training between 31 August, 2012, and 1 March, 2013, as well as possessing information likely to be useful to a terrorist.

However, the terror trial collapsed “after fears of deep embarrassment” to the British security services. This was because, as Gildo’s lawyer explained, “British intelligence agencies were supporting the same Syrian opposition groups as he [Gildo] was.”

Another example is former Guantanamo detainee Moazzam Begg, who was also tried on terror charges for assisting Katibat al-Muhajireen. Begg traveled to Syria several times in 2012 and provided physical training to foreign fighters from the group in Aleppo, as reported by Foreign Policy. Begg made his latest trip to Syria in December 2012.

As a result, Begg was detained by UK authorities in 2014 and accused of attending a terrorist training camp. The Guardian reported, however, that Begg was freed after British intelligence officials from MI5, “belatedly gave police and prosecutors a series of documents that detailed the agency’s extensive contacts with him before and after his trips to Syria,” and which showed that MI5 told Begg he could continue his work for the so-called opposition in Syria “unhindered.”

It was therefore clear that any terror trial of Kotey and Elsheikh in the UK would collapse for the same reasons as the previous cases, leaving UK officials no choice but to have them tried in the US instead.

In the letter leaked to the Telegraph, former Home Secretary Sajid Javid explained that “the UK does not currently intend to request, nor actively encourage, the transfer of Kotey and El-sheikh to the UK to support future UK-based prosecution.” Showing that he was under pressure as a result of this decision, Javid wrote further to the letter’s addressee, “I do understand your frustration on this subject.”

The Telegraph notes further that, “despite repeated ministerial assurances that British jihadists traveling to Syria would be held to account in British courts, the Home Secretary’s letter discloses concerns that laws in this country may not be robust enough to ensure successful prosecution. He believes American terrorism laws are more effective.”

In other words, British law was not robust enough to convict someone on terrorism charges for fighting with a terrorist group the UK intelligence services themselves supported.

The capital punishment loophole

Despite claims that there was insufficient evidence to prosecute Kotey in the UK, any successful conviction in the US would have relied on evidence collected by UK prosecutors, which would have to be shared with their US counterparts.

This was problematic, however, because US officials had not provided assurances that Kotey would not face the death penalty if convicted. Because the death penalty is banned in the UK, it was contrary to long standing UK policy to provide evidence that could contribute to a death sentence.

Home Secretary Javid nevertheless approved providing evidence against Kotey and Elsheikh to US prosecutors after the pair were transferred from SDF to US custody.

House of Lords member Alex Carlile, a former reviewer of terrorism legislation, described Javid’s willingness to approve this as “a dramatic change of policy by a minister, secretly, without any discussion in parliament,” and that “Britain has always said that it will pass information and intelligence, in appropriate cases, provided there is no death penalty. That is a decades-old policy and it is not for the home secretary to change that policy.”

This led Elsheikh’s mother to sue the British government, fearing that if her son and Kotey were convicted in a US court, they would be executed. The case eventually went to the British Supreme Court, which according to the New York Times, “unanimously ruled that the British home secretary’s decision to transfer personal data to law enforcement authorities abroad for use in capital criminal proceedings without any safeguards violated a data protection law passed in 2018.”

As a result, US Attorney General William Barr belatedly gave the assurance in August 2020 that Kotey and Elsheikh would not face the death penalty, allowing the sharing of evidence and the prosecution to move forward.

A testimony of the west’s support of ISIS

In 2022, Kotey and Elsheikh were finally convicted and sentenced to life in prison. At the time, the Washington Post explained that the successful prosecution of Elsheikh and Kotey had been unlikely, given that at time of their capture, it was “unclear whether an American trial would happen at all. A federal prosecution was met with opposition at the highest levels of government on two continents.”

While the reason for Kotey’s recent disappearance from US Bureau of Prisons custody is unclear, the insistence of UK officials to have him and fellow Beatle Elsheikh prosecuted in a US rather than UK court, and the reluctance of both governments to try the two ISIS militants at all, indicates that British planners wished to hide their previous support for extremists who helped lay the foundation for ISIS.

While ISIS is widely understood to have emerged in Iraq, evidence continues to emerge showing that officials in London and Washington played the crucial role in the rise of the notorious terror group as part of a broader effort to topple the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad.

The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.

Cuba’s hero, American spy: Ana Belen Montes

13 Jan 2023

Source: Al Mayadeen English

By Rachel Hamdoun 

The recently freed Puerto Rican-American will be remembered as Castro’s “exceptional person” and Cuba’s “respect and admiration” for infiltrating the Pentagon to prevent the US from destroying Cuba.

Puerto Rican-American spy Ana Belen Montes

The US calls her the “Queen of Cuba,” but the intention to brand her as a notorious figure of evil nature is something Western-entrenched to be avoided in this article. To say her name, Ana Belen Montes, is for her to be remembered for saving Cuba and its people so many times that so many innocent deaths of Cubans were avoided.

She is not a queen, nor a terrorist as the Americans describe her. She is a hero who singlehandedly saved lives by giving Cuba information about possible attacks by the US at a time when the US was carrying out a colonial campaign against Central America, due to fear of communist presence in the region.

Sibling rivalries at the FBI

Ana Belen Montes was born in Nuremberg in what was then West Germany on February 28, 1957, on a US Army base where her father was stationed. After moving to the US, she received a Bachelor’s from the University of Virginia in International Affairs and was hired by the Defense Intelligence Agency in 1985 before acquiring a Master’s degree in the same specialty from Johns Hopkins in 1988. 
 
With her intelligence and hard work, she excelled and constantly got promoted until she was finally hired by the Pentagon in 1992 as an analyst specializing in Cuban matters. That was the door for her to gain access to files and documents related to Cuba by the CIA, FBI, and the National Security Agency (NSA). Of her three siblings, two were employed with the FBI: her brother Tito served as an FBI special agent and her sister, Lucy, also worked as a Spanish-language FBI agent who would later do the exact opposite of what Ana set out to do. 
 
During her position, Montes traveled to Cuba in 1993 on a “fact-finding” mission to study the Cuban military for intelligence study paid for by the CIA. She would later go on to have many more of these trips. She planned to achieve her goal during the time of Fidel Castro as Cuba’s leader and revolutionary hero, alongside Ernesto “Che” Guevara, and during Bill Clinton’s time as US President. 

Communication between Montes and Cuban officials was done via numeric messages transmitted over shortwave radio with the use of codes, and with Montes’ access to files and sensitive information, she was able to memorize everything at work and type them out at home to facilitate communication.

The cheat sheet used by Montes for communication (FBI Archives)

On February 23, 1996, American Rear Admiral Eugene Carroll visited Cuba as part of an American campaign to gradually control the island. The Cuban Ministry of Defense warned the US not to allow the “Brothers to the Rescue” planes to fly over Cuba as planned. The “Brothers to the Rescue” refers to the group formed by five Cuban exiles who were an anti-Castro opposition established in 1991 and protected by the US due to common interests naturally.

However, the US decided to continue poking the bear and let two of the planes fly over Havana the next day, which were then shot down. It was found that Montes was the one who arranged Admiral Carroll’s travel to Cuba and when asked about it, she stated that she chose that specific date because it was a free date available on the Admiral’s schedule – with the help of the Wasp Network, known as La Red Avispa in Spanish.  
 
The “Brothers to the Rescue” was infiltrated by the Wasp Network, and five of the activists pertaining to the Network were caught by the US in 1998 and charged with conspiracy to commit espionage. They were caught with the help and treachery of Montes’ sister, Lucy, who was responsible for translating the wiretapped conversations. 

Snitch with a ‘gut feeling’ 

As a result of suspicion by a colleague in her department, she was subjected to two polygraphy tests, informally known as lie detector tests that check a suspect’s heart rate and respiration to determine if they committed a crime or not through lying. She passed both tests. Her colleague and DIA employee, Scott Carmichael, became a pest for the FBI after he built a whole file on Montes due to his ‘gut feeling’ and finally came through to lead agent Steve McCoy who opened the investigation against her. According to the Washington Post, FBI agents waited for her to leave town with her boyfriend to break into her apartment and came across the infamous Toshiba laptop. The hard drives containing all the sensitive information were confiscated, and the laptop was left as it was. 
 
In 1999, the NSA caught and deflected a Cuban communication message which revealed a top official associated with the DIA’s SAFE software system – indicating that the official was most likely an employee of the DIA. Not only so, but the official was discovered to have traveled to Guantanamo Bay back in 1996 and used a Toshiba laptop – Montes matched all the above. Montes was arrested in September 2001 at Bolling Airbase in Washington, D.C., and was convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage.
 
The moment she was captured, FBI agents had a nurse, oxygen tanks, and a wheelchair prepared, because they expected her to collapse and “be a wreck,” retired FBI special agent Pete Lapp said, as he added, “And I think she could have just carried both of us out on her back. She walked out that calm — I won’t say ‘proud’ — but with that kind of composure.”

She was sentenced to 25 years at the Federal Medical Center, Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas. At Carswell, she was placed in a special unit meant for offenders with mental and psychiatric problems, but it was never clarified as to why. During her trial 21 years ago, she stated that the US government’s policies against Cuba are very harsh, speaking out that she behaved according to her conscience rather than the law. She added, “I felt morally obligated to help the island defend itself from our efforts to impose our values and our political system on it.”

She suffered inhumane imprisonment conditions in Carswell as she was not allowed to contact other inmates, receive external letters, read newspapers and magazines, or watch TV. Her basic and constitutional rights were violated at the prison.

Back home

In 2002, a year after her imprisonment, Fidel Castro was asked at the University of Informatic Sciences in Havana about her arrest by an American journalist. He responded by saying that a noble American who is against such an injustice and against a blockade of over 40 years, who was able to act in the manner that she did, is an exceptional person…. who “deserves respect and admiration.”

On January 7, a day before her release, Cuban-American Florida Senator, Marco Rubio, said, “[H]er treason against the US accomplished nothing for the Cuban people. On the contrary, by helping the criminal Castro regime, Montes strengthened the Cuban people’s worst enemy,” making it seem as if he is entitled to speak on behalf of the Cuban people who, according to him, prefer Cuba to remain silent while the US carries on its colonial endeavors. 
 
On January 8, Ana Belen Montes was released. Her lawyer, Linda Backiel, confirmed that she has reached her homeland Puerto Rico and relayed Montes’ letter to the public on her behalf.

“I am more than happy to touch Puerto Rican soil again. After two rather exhausting decades and faced with the need to earn a living again, I would like to dedicate myself to a quiet and private existence. Therefore, I will not participate in any media activities…. I encourage those who wish to focus on me to focus instead on important issues, such as the serious problems facing the Puerto Rican people or the US economic embargo against Cuba. February will mark the 61st anniversary of the economic embargo against Cuba, enacted by President John F. Kennedy and later tightened by the US Congress.” 

We contacted Ms. Backiel through email to find out more about Montes’ imprisonment conditions but have not received any comment yet. 

In a letter written by her sister Lucy and addressed to her in prison, she wrote, “You betrayed your family, you betrayed all your friends. Everyone who loves you was betrayed by you,” adding, “You betrayed your co-workers and your employer, and you betrayed your nation. You worked for an evil megalomaniac who shares or sells our secrets to our enemies.”

Her family has cut contact with her since her arrest and imprisonment over 20 years ago, given the fact that both her siblings and their spouses were all FBI agents. 

Ana Belen Montes should be a lesson to demonstrate how vulnerable and cowardly the US is, in the face of those who stand and fight against injustices toward innocent people through attacks, embargoes, and murders. Ana Belen Montes will be one for the books and a symbol of hope for the activist in everyone. 

Related Stories

• Confirmed: Ana Belen Montes released from US prison after 20 years
• Sick children of Cuba are the victims of US sanctions: MfA report
• Cuban FM: US ignored UN vote to lift embargo on Cuba 29 times

CALL OF DUTY IS A GOVERNMENT PSYOP: THESE DOCUMENTS PROVE IT

NOVEMBER 18TH, 2022

ALAN MACLEOD

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II has been available for less than three weeks, but it is already making waves. Breaking records, within ten days, the first-person military shooter video game earned more than $1 billion in revenue. Yet it has also been shrouded in controversy, not least because missions include assassinating an Iranian general clearly based on Qassem Soleimani, a statesman and military leader slain by the Trump administration in 2020, and a level where players must shoot “drug traffickers” attempting to cross the U.S./Mexico border.

The Call of Duty franchise is an entertainment juggernaut, having sold close to half a billion games since it was launched in 2003. Its publisher, Activision Blizzard, is a giant in the industry, behind titles games as the Guitar Hero, Warcraft, Starcraft, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, Crash Bandicoot and Candy Crush Saga series.

Yet a closer inspection of Activision Blizzard’s key staff and their connections to state power, as well as details gleaned from documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, reveal that Call of Duty is not a neutral first-person shooter, but a carefully constructed piece of military propaganda, designed to advance the interests of the U.S. national security state.

In the first five minutes the new Call of Duty has you pilot the missile that kills Soleimani lol

— sad because the female faceapp of me isnt fuckable (@websiteidi0t) October 20, 2022

MILITARY-ENTERTAINMENT COMPLEX

It has long been a matter of public record that American spies have targeted and penetrated Activision Blizzard games. Documents released by Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA, CIA, FBI and Department of Defense infiltrated the vast online realms such as World of Warcraft, creating make-believe characters to monitor potential illegal activity and recruit informers. Indeed, at one point, there were so many U.S. spies in one video game that they had to create a “deconfliction” group as they were wasting time unwittingly surveilling each other. Virtual games, the NSA wrote, were an “opportunity” and a “target-rich communication network”.

However, documents obtained legally under the Freedom of Information Act by journalist and researcher Tom Secker and shared with MintPress News show that the connections between the national security state and the video game industry go far beyond this, and into active collaboration.

In September 2018, for example, the United States Air Force flew a group of entertainment executives – including Call of Duty/Activision Blizzard producer Coco Francini – to their headquarters at Hurlburt Field, Florida. The explicit reason for doing so, they wrote, was to “showcase” their hardware and to make the entertainment industry more “credible advocates” for the U.S. war machine.

“We’ve got a bunch of people working on future blockbusters (think Marvel, Call of Duty, etc.) stoked about this trip!” wrote one Air Force officer. Another email notes that the point of the visit was to provide “heavy-hitter” producers with “AFSOC [Air Force Special Operations Command] immersion focused on Special Tactics Airmen and air-to-ground capabilities.”

“This is a great opportunity to educate this community and make them more credible advocates for us in the production of any future movies/television productions on the Air Force and our Special Tactics community,” wrote the AFSOC community relations chief.

Francini and others were shown CV-22 helicopters and AC-130 planes in action, both of which feature heavily in Call of Duty games.

Yet Call of Duty collaboration with the military goes back much further. The documents show that the United States Marine Corps (USMC) was involved in the production of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Call of Duty 5. The games’ producers approached the USMC at the 2010 E3 entertainment convention in Los Angeles, requesting access to hovercrafts (vehicles which later appeared in the game). Call of Duty 5 executives also asked for use of a hovercraft, a tank and a C-130 aircraft.

This collaboration continued in 2012 with the release of Modern Warfare 4, where producers requested access to all manner of air and ground vehicles.

Secker told MintPress that, by collaborating with the gaming industry, the military ensures a positive portrayal that can help it reach recruitment targets, stating that,

For certain demographics of gamers it’s a recruitment portal, some first-person shooters have embedded adverts within the games themselves…Even without this sort of explicit recruitment effort, games like Call of Duty make warfare seem fun, exciting, an escape from the drudgery of their normal lives.”

Secker’s documentary, “Theaters of War: How the Pentagon and CIA Took Hollywood” was released earlier this year.

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The military clearly held considerable influence over the direction of Call of Duty games. In 2010, its producers approached the Department of Defense (DoD) for help on a game set in 2075. However, the DoD liaison “expressed concern that [the] scenario being considered involves future war with China.” As a result, Activision Blizzard began “looking at other possible conflicts to design the game around.” In the end, due in part to military objections, the game was permanently abandoned.

FROM WAR ON TERROR TO FIRST-PERSON SHOOTERS

Not only does Activision Blizzard work with the U.S. military to shape its products, but its leadership board is also full of former high state officials. Chief amongst these is Frances Townsend, Activision Blizzard’s senior counsel, and, until September, its chief compliance officer and executive vice president for corporate affairs.

Prior to joining Activision Blizzard, Townsend spent her life working her way up the rungs of the national security state. Previously serving as head of intelligence for the Coast Guard and as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s counterterrorism deputy, in 2004, President Bush appointed her to his Intelligence Advisory Board.

As the White House’s most senior advisor on terrorism and homeland security, Townsend worked closely with Bush and Rice, and became one of the faces of the administration’s War on Terror. One of her principal achievements was to whip the American public into a constant state of fear about the supposed threat of more Al-Qaeda attacks (which never came).

Before she joined Activision Blizzard, Frances Townsend worked in Homeland Security and Counterterrorism for the Bush White House. Ron Edmonds | AP

As part of her job, Townsend helped popularize the term “enhanced interrogation techniques” – a Bush-era euphemism for torturing detainees. Worse still, Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, the officer in charge of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, alleged that Townsend put pressure on him to ramp up the torture program, reminding him “many, many times” that he needed to improve the intelligence output from the Iraqi jail.

Townsend has denied these allegations. She also later condemned the “handcuff[ing]” and “humiliation” surrounding Abu Ghraib. She was not referring to the prisoners, however. In an interview with CNN, she lamented that “these career professionals” – CIA torturers – had been subject to “humiliation and opprobrium” after details of their actions were made public, meaning that future administrations would be “handcuffed” by the fear of bad publicity, while the intelligence community would become more “risk-averse”.

During the Trump administration, Townsend was hotly tipped to become the Director of National Intelligence or the Secretary of Homeland Security. President Trump also approached her for the role of director of the FBI. Instead, however, Townsend took a seemingly incongruous career detour to become an executive at a video games company.

ENTER THE WAR PLANNERS

In addition to this role, Townsend is a director of the NATO offshoot, the Atlantic Council, a director at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a trustee of the hawkish think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a group MintPress News has previously covered in detail.

Funded by weapons companies, NATO and the U.S. government, the Atlantic Council serves as the military alliance’s brain trust, devising strategies on how best to manage the world. Also on its board of directors are high statespersons like Henry Kissinger and Conzoleezza Rice, virtually every retired U.S. general of note, and no fewer than seven former directors of the CIA. As such, the Atlantic Council represents the collective opinion of the national security state.

Two more key Call of Duty staff also work for the Atlantic Council. Chance Glasco, a co-founder of Infinity Ward developers who oversaw the game franchise’s rapid rise, is the council’s nonresident senior fellow, advising top generals and political leaders on the latest developments in tech.

A New US Air Force Video Game Lets You Drone Bomb Iraqis and Afghans

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Game designer and producer Dave Anthony, crucial to Call of Duty’s success, is also an Atlantic Council employee, joining the group in 2014. There, he advises them on what the future of warfare will look like, and devises strategies for NATO to fight in upcoming conflicts.

Anthony has made no secret that he collaborated with the U.S. national security state while making the Call of Duty franchise. “My greatest honor was to consult with Lieut. Col. Oliver North on the story of Black Ops 2,” he stated publicly, adding, There are so many small details we could never have known about if it wasn’t for his involvement.”

Oliver North is a high government official gained worldwide infamy after being convicted for his role in the Iran-Contra Affair, whereby his team secretly sold weapons to the government of Iran, using the money to arm and train fascist death squads in Central America – groups who attempted to overthrow the government of Nicaragua and carried out waves of massacres and ethnic cleansing in the process.

REPUBLICANS FOR HIRE

Another eyebrow-raising hire is Activision Blizzard’s chief administration officer, Brian Bulatao. A former Army captain and consultant for McKinsey & Company, until 2018, he was chief operating officer for the CIA, placing him third in command of the agency. When CIA Director Mike Pompeo moved over to the State Department, becoming Trump’s Secretary of State, Bulatao went with him, and was appointed Under Secretary of State for Management.

There, by some accounts, he served as Pompeo’s personal “attack dog,” with former colleagues describing him as a “bully” who brought a “cloud of intimidation” over the workplace, repeatedly pressing them to ignore potential illegalities happening at the department. Thus, it is unclear if Bulatao is the man to improve Activision Blizzard’s notoriously “toxic” workplace environment that caused dozens of employees to walk out en masse last summer.

After the Trump administration’s electoral defeat, Bulatao went straight from the State Department into the highest echelons of Activision Blizzard, despite no experience in the entertainment industry.

Trump stands with then-CIA Chief Operations Officer Brian Bulatao at CIA Headquarters, May 21, 2018, in Langley, Va. Evan Vucci | AP

The third senior Republican official Activision Blizzard has recruited to its upper ranks is Grant Dixton. Between 2003 and 2006, Dixton served as associate counsel to President Bush, advising him on many of his administration’s most controversial legal activities (such as torture and the rapid expansion of the surveillance state). A lawyer by trade, he later went on to work for weapons manufacturer Boeing, rising to become its senior vice president, general counsel and corporate secretary. In June 2021, he left Boeing to join Activision Blizzard as its chief legal officer.

Other Activision Blizzard executives with backgrounds in national security include senior vice president and chief information security officer Brett Wahlin, who was a U.S. Army counterintelligence agent, and chief of staff, Angela Alvarez, who, until 2016, was an Army chemical operations specialist.

That the same government that was infiltrating games 10-15 years ago now has so many former officials controlling the very game companies raises serious questions around privacy and state control over media, and mirrors the national security state penetration of social media that has occurred over the same timeframe.

WAR GAMES

These deep connections to the U.S. national security state can perhaps help partly explain why, for years, many have complained about the blatant pro-U.S. propaganda apparent throughout the games.

The latest installment, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, is no exception. In the game’s first mission, players must carry out a drone strike against a character named

The latest installment, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, is no exception. In the game’s first mission, players must carry out a drone strike against a character named General Ghorbrani. The mission is obviously a recreation of the Trump administration’s illegal 2020 drone strike against Iranian General Qassem Soleimani – the in game general even bears a striking resemblance to Soleimani.

The latest Call of Duty game has players assassinate a General Ghorbrani, a nebulous reference to Iranian General Qassem Solemani, pictured right

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II ludicrously presents the general as under Russia’s thumb and claims that Ghorbrani is “supplying terrorists” with aid. In reality, Soleimani was the key force in defeating ISIS terror across the Middle East – actions for which even Western media declared him a “hero”. U.S.-run polls found that Soleimani was perhaps the most popular leader in the Middle East, with over 80% of Iranians holding a positive opinion of him.

Straight after the assassination, Pompeo’s State Department floated the falsehood that the reason they killed Soleimani was that he was on the verge of carrying out a terror attack against Americans. In reality, Soleimani was in Baghdad, Iraq, for peace talks with Saudi Arabia.

These negotiations could have led to peace between the two nations, something that the U.S. government is dead against. Then-Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi revealed that he had personally asked President Trump for permission to invite Soleimani. Trump agreed, then used the opportunity to carry out the killing.

Therefore,, just as Activision Blizzard is recruiting top State Department officials to its upper ranks, its games are celebrating the same State Department’s most controversial assassinations.

This is far from the first time Call of Duty has instructed impressionable young gamers to kill foreign leaders, however. In Call of Duty Black Ops (2010), players must complete a mission to murder Cuban leader Fidel Castro. If they manage to shoot him in the head, they are rewarded with an extra gory slow motion scene and obtain a bronze “Death to Dictators” trophy. Thus, players are forced to carry out digitally what Washington failed to do on over 600 occasions.

A mission from “Call of Duty: Black Ops” has players assassinate a hostage-taking Fidel Castro

Likewise, Call of Duty: Ghosts is set in Venezuela, where players fight against General Almagro, a socialist military leader clearly modelled on former president Hugo Chavez. Like Chavez, Almagro wears a red beret and uses Venezuela’s oil wealth to forge an alliance of independent Latin American nations against the U.S. Washington attempted to overthrow Chavez and his successor, Nicolás Maduro, multiple times. During the sixth mission of the game, players must shoot and kill Almagro from close range.

The anti-Russian propaganda is also turned up to 11 in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019). One mission recreates the infamous Highway of Death incident. During the First Iraq War, U.S.-led forces trapped fleeing Iraqi troops on Highway 80. What followed was what then-Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell described as “wanton killing” and “slaughter for slaughter’s sake” as U.S. troops and their allies pummeled the Iraqi convoy for hours, killing hundreds and destroying thousands of vehicles. U.S. forces also reportedly shot hundreds of Iraqi civilians and surrendered soldiers in their care.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare recreates this scene for dramatic effect. However, in their version, it is not the U.S.-led forces doing the killing, but Russia, thereby whitewashing a war crime by pinning the blame on official enemies.

A mission in “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare” has players recreate the infamous highway of death

“Call of Duty, in particular, has been flagged up for recreating real events as game missions and manipulating them for geopolitical purposes,” Secker told MintPress, referring to the Highway of Death, adding,

In a culture where most people’s exposure to games (and films, TV shows and so on) is far greater than their knowledge of historical and current events, these manipulations help frame the gamers’ emotional, intellectual and political reactions. This helps them turn into more general advocates for militarism, even if they don’t sign up in any formal way.”

Secker’s latest book, “Superheroes, Movies and the State: How the U.S. Government Shapes Cinematic Universes,” was published earlier this year.

GAME OVER

In today’s digitized era, the worlds of war and video games increasingly resemble one another. Many have commented on the similarities between piloting drones in real life and in games such as Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Prince Harry, who was a helicopter gunner in Afghanistan, described his “joy” at firing missiles at enemies. “I’m one of those people who loves playing PlayStation and Xbox, so with my thumbs I like to think I’m probably quite useful,” he said. “If there’s people trying to do bad stuff to our guys, then we’ll take them out of the game,” he added, explicitly comparing the two activities. U.S. forces even control drones with Xbox controllers, blurring the lines between war games and war games even further.

The military has also directly produced video games as promotional and recruitment tools. One is a U.S. Air Force game called Airman Challenge. Featuring 16 missions to complete, interspersed with facts and recruitment information about how to become a drone operator yourself. In its latest attempts to market active service to young people, players move through missions escorting U.S. vehicles through countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, serving up death from above to all those designated “insurgents” by the game.

Players earn medals and achievements for most effectively destroying moving targets. All the while, there is a prominent “apply now” button on screen if players feel like enlisting and conducting real drone strikes on the Middle East.

U.S. Armed Forces use the popularity of video games to recruit heavily among young people, sponsoring gaming tournaments, fielding their own U.S. Army Esports team, and directly trying to recruit teens on streaming sites such as Twitch. The Amazon-owned platform eventually had to clamp down on the practice after the military used fake prize giveaways that lured impressionable young viewers onto recruitment websites.

Video games are a massive business and a huge center of soft power and ideology. The medium makes for particularly persuasive propaganda because children and adolescents consume them, often for weeks or months on end, and because they are light entertainment. Because of this, users do not have their guards up like if they were listening to a politician speaking. Their power is often overlooked by scholars and journalists because of the supposed frivolity of the medium. But it is the very notion that these are unimportant sources of fun that makes their message all the more potent.

The Call of Duty franchise is particularly egregious, not only in its messaging, but because who the messengers are. Increasingly, the games appear to be little more than American propaganda masquerading as fun first-person shooters. For gamers, the point is to enjoy its fast-paced entertainment. But for those involved in their production, the goal is not just making money; it is about serving the imperial war machine.

Feature photo | Illustration by MintPress News

Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common Dreams.

Mixed Bag June 22

June 22, 2022

Please visit Andrei’s website: https://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/
and support him here: https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u=60459185

Blinken claims US will “follow facts” on Shireen Abu Akleh murder

June 8 2022

Source: Agencies

By Al Mayadeen English 

The US Secretary of State claims the US is looking for an independent and credible investigation for the murder of Palestinian-US journalist Shireen Abu Akleh.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken claimed Tuesday that the US will pursue accountability over the murder of Palestinian-US journalist Shireen Abu Akleh wherever facts lead.

Appearing at a forum for student journalists on the sidelines of a Latin America summit in Los Angeles, Blinken was confronted by a question on why there have been “absolutely no repercussions” for the Israeli occupation.

“I’m sorry, with respect, they have not yet been established,” Blinken said of the facts behind the case.

“We are looking for an independent, credible investigation. When that investigation happens, we will follow the facts, wherever they lead. It’s as straightforward as that,” he claimed.

The US Secretary of State said, “I deplore the loss of Shireen. She was a remarkable journalist, an American citizen.”

It is noteworthy that Palestine’s Attorney General Akram Al-Khatib had announced that an Israeli soldier shot and hit Abu Akleh, clarifying that the bullet hit her directly in the head.

A CNN report, quoting witnesses, also said that the Palestinian-US journalist appeared to have been killed in a targeted attack by Israeli occupation forces.

In the same context, Yousef Jamal Al-Rantisi, a forensic expert and manager of the Gaza Center for Human Rights, released a forensic analysis of the evidence related to Abu Akleh’s murder, which concludes that she was deliberately shot and killed by Israeli occupation forces.

The Israeli occupation has angrily denied murdering Abu Akleh while asking the Palestinians to take part in a joint probe.

Dozens of lawmakers from Blinken’s Democratic Party have called on the FBI to lead an investigation to seek an impartial finding into the journalist’s murder.

Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs filed a report to the International Criminal Court regarding the brutal murder of Abu Akleh.

The American Spring by American Spies: Fake News II

29 Mar 2022

Osama Eltrabolsi 

Source: Al Mayadeen Net

With some reading, eventually, you will see how they utilize big tech algorithms, fake news, and US spies who are good at lying even to their own citizens. 

The American Spring by American Spies: Fake News II

It’s amazing how fast the news cycles are in the USA. It seems as though telling the journalistic truth these days has become akin to the days of the prophets. How ironic it is that the great USA whose thumbprint is power is filled with people who are clueless and unaware of their inner spies… I described this strangeness in my first article. And for credibility sake and journalistic standards, I hold myself to the high standards of always telling the truth. If you practice this, it means that eventually the patterns, cycles, and people emerge from the unknown war machine with names, faces, and religions across the spectrums but all have one common goal: Money and Power.

Writing about the Democrats’ fake Russian Reset, I highlighted how Michael Sussman was exposed by the Americans in a government-authorized investigation. The Durham Report, which is currently in process, proved that Hillary Clinton paid for tech information while accusing Trump of espionage.

Durham’s filing says university researchers mined internet data to establish “an inference” and a “narrative” tying Trump to Russia and that they “were seeking to please certain ‘VIPs’.” Durham identified these VIPs as individuals at Sussmann’s law firm called Perkins Coie, where Sussman was a partner. The Clinton campaign was on that VIP list. Durham’s filing alleged that Trump’s residences and the White House were spied on by a tech executive aligned with the Democratic Party…”

What this implies is that, according to the West itself, there is a wide range of political schemes happening even to the American people, and those schemes look like the Arab Spring. How big a claim but only through a steady dose of truth-filled journalism can one begin to see. As a lawyer and independent journalist, with some reading and following these articles, eventually, you will see how they utilize big tech algorithms, fake news, and American spies who are good at lying even to their citizens. 

WHY IT MATTERS TO US

It matters to us because a masterful strategic identity game is played in American politics, and like a torch in an Olympic game being handed over to a teammate, these American decision-makers hand over revolutions and wars. It is important to know about the American Spring and to understand their hostile powers, their military, and their intelligence capabilities, as well as what their latest scandal affords in the chess game of politics. Did Biden forfeit a massive war machine or did he hand it to the Taliban? These consistently destructive failures have devastating consequences and what we see with US mass media, now including social media, is in direct collusion with who they claim is a terrorist. 

It means the media is flagrantly and sinister in their deflection. But In order to understand, one has to first understand this is a network of closely linked individuals who share a common goal: personal power at the expense of the whole.

In an American Spring, one would see nothing less than the complete destruction of American culture and influence. This has long happened since the days of Obama whose shady Presidency succumbed to a future promising president Hillary Clinton or President Donald J. Trump. Trump won in 2020 as a result of this decaying American influence. It sounds shocking and unbelievable, but essentially Hillary, Obama, and their allies have been positioning themselves to be the Lenin and Stalin of our time. They adopted the principles of their former enemies and have years of contradictions to prove it. How do principles change with such flexibility? They don’t. News cycles change, not values. 

This American Spring is two-fold: the subversion of American culture and its replacement with socialist values, and soon we will be seeing a weaponization of Takfirists Islamic groups again to create instability, division, and ultimately regime changes. 

The Americans are either too unaware of the dirty politics or their media are too proud to admit this. You heard the name Sussman from my writing and later confirmed by the Durham Report. However, Durham is a Special Counsel assigned to investigate the truth about the Russian Democrat-led disinformation campaign which means he is an exception and the US intelligence is no longer credible. Who are they and how do they sleep at night?

To prove my point that the intelligence apparatus of the US has failed, I digress with a NY Post article that calls a list of 51 names of intelligence officers and media pundits spies who lie: 51 ‘intelligence’ experts refuse to apologize for discrediting true Hunter Biden story. These experts chose to cover for Hunter Biden, who lost a computer which has been dubbed as the laptop from hell in which he sold “introductions to his father for 10 million dollars.” The same current news cycle and its major components are happening as we speak but in multiple areas of criminal political activity. 

Let’s look at how this intelligence scandal of the 51 is no different from what we see around the world where the US invokes regime changes and how it relates to us specifically.

Front and Center Left, John Brennan 

Remember that US officials are rotated and cycled through various government institutions distancing them from suspicion or conflicts of interest. Brennan​ in 2010 stated, “And during a 25-year career in government, I was privileged to serve in positions across the Middle East — as a political officer with the State Department and as a CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia. In Saudi Arabia, I saw how our Saudi partners fulfilled their duty as custodians of the two holy mosques of Mecca and Medina. I marveled at the majesty of the Hajj and the devotion of those who fulfilled their duty as Muslims by making that privilege — that pilgrimage.” 

This tells us two things we need to know. As he claimed:

1) Brennan admits to being a ‘political officer’ with the State Dept while simultaneously the Jeddah Station chief. The second thing here to note is 

2) Brennan has an affection and admitted pro-Islamic bias. As a political officer for the Dept of State, Brennan would be granted authority to issue visas from his CIA station.

In the West, Brennan has always been questionable by his opponents even so far as rumors claiming that Brennan converted to Islam​. It’s similar to Lawrence of Arabia, but without the charm.

As a journalist, I know what it means for a laptop to be discredited by 51 lying spies and then proven to be true, which calls the spies’ integrity into question.

The American Spring continues under the strange leadership of Biden after a very long history of race-baiting and war-mongering. The laptop being denied isn’t the main story, rather it is what is on the laptop which is the true story, and here again, we see the same characters.

The same John Brennan who was located in Pakistan with Brezinsky, Obama’s university professor, and Carter’s CIA director, who would become a main face in the Arab Spring, is now again here before us. 

History is in fact repeating itself because, despite their promises to avoid history’s mistakes, they continue to commit them. 

Front and Center Right, James Clapper 

Remember that US officials are rotated and cycled through various government institutions distancing them from suspicion or conflicts of interest. The New York Post is asking Clapper to renounce the accusation that was undergirded by fake news and American Spies as they call them. 

President Bill Clinton created a task force to study the Khobar Towers bombing and assess all threats. The Assessment Task Force was led by General Downing, and a retired Air Force Lieutenant named General James Clapper served as the head of the intelligence assessment team. The task force was not asked to do a criminal investigation but only to report instances of malfeasance to the chain of command. 

Downing reported​ that the chain of command “did not provide adequate guidance and support to the commander” who “was ill-served by the intelligence arrangement within his command…” 

Not ironically, from 1999 to 2000, he was the Chief of Staff to then-CIA Director George Tenet. 

Could the whole Russian Hoax have been to protect these people from being exposed for all their ‘malfeasance’ through their appointed careers? With Trump promising to end endless wars, this could be the only path forward. All Biden had to do was win what Hillary lost: Power & Control. Yet, as Obama warned his Democratic accomplices, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to F*** things up.” 

If it’s an American Spring, Trump would now have to be seen as heroic as the Left made Zelenski, no different than how the Egyptians see Sisi.

This American Spring very well may be interrupted if the Americans realize they do have spies amongst them and Biden’s seat of power squeaks with rust as it is upheld by them. 

The Past

To understand the Middle East today, we must know some history. The intelligence scene is very much the fuel behind these conflicts, so consider another person of question. Louis Freeh

George H.W. Bush appointed him a judge for the US District Court for the Southern District of New York in 91. Two years later, he answered a call from President Bill Clinton, and he became the fifth director of the FBI in 93.

Freeh was the FBI Director during the Khobar Towers, the Unabomber, the Centennial Olympic bombing, Ruby Ridge, and Waco investigations. The Oklahoma City bombing happened under his watch.

He served from September 1993 to June 25, 2001, and was succeeded by Robert Mueller who reappears from the past to investigate Trump with the wasteful 3-year sham investigation which led to minimal prosecution compared to what was promised: Espionage. 

As it relates to the Russian Hoax, Freeh is connected to the Russian-owned money laundering firm ‘Prevazon’. Prevazon hired Louis Freeh to help settle a major money-laundering case with the US government for roughly $5.9 million. 

Prevazon is also represented by Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who met with top Trump campaign officials in June 2016 at Trump Tower to lobby for repealing the 2012 Magnitsky Act. This would be the meeting that was planned and orchestrated against Trump. 

Louis Freeh wasn’t used by the Democrats to ensnare Trump but is an intelligence officer with a past that Trump threatened to expose and end. 

With official charges and Trump being acquitted over and over, the loser is the American people because although no charges were brought, this infamous Trump Tower meeting “with Russians” solidified the fake narrative of unproven espionage. Did Freeh have anything to be concerned about? 

Leading us to another worthy note: Natalia Veselnitskaya was indicted for her connection to Kremlin- tied Prevazon, and American mainstream media still has no interest in correcting their false lies regarding the fake and obviously orchestrated Trump Tower meeting. Join me next week as we explore how these men have impacted the Middle East and our lives. And since the Western Media cannot expose it, I invite you to journey as we get to know who the American Spies are and how they have meticulously organized in a stealthy manner what will soon be known in the history books as the American Spring.

The opinions mentioned in this article do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Al mayadeen, but rather express the opinion of its writer exclusively.

Related

• Fake news & refugees: Democrats recruiting mercenaries
• Who’s fighting whom & who’s cheating?
• Russian Reset

Retired US generals have warned of the possibility of a coup during the 2024 election.

January 10, 2022

Source: Agencies

By Al Mayadeen net

Retired US generals have warned of the possibility of a coup during the 2024 election.

A three percenter patch is worn over a US military outfit (AFP)

Experts are concerned that the emergence of right-wing extremism in the US military would endanger democracy in the US. The Department of Defense is implementing new procedures to combat extremism inside its forces; however, experts are concerned that the measures will not go far enough, making the next election vulnerable to assault. Retired US generals have warned of the possibility of a coup during the 2024 election.

Paul Eaton, a retired US army major general and senior advisor to the non-profit VoteVets, said, “We’re behind the ball on what we know about domestic terrorists in the United States.”

In an interview, Eaton said the US military and law enforcement have a history of underestimating the threat posed from the far right. Referring to the 1995 Oklahoma city bombing perpetrated by Timothy McVeigh that killed 168 people and injured over 650, Eaton said, “It’s the Timothy McVeigh problem: what did we know about McVeigh and what were we doing about it?”

He adds that the cyber age and social media have helped to boost the threat of the far-right, considering that the “McVeighs of the world are still there, we had about 4,500 of them crawling all over the nation’s Capitol.”

Eaton warns that there is a recruiting effort ongoing and that extremism infiltrating the police force is a concern that needs to be monitored.

The FBI has accused over 700 Donald Trump supporters of taking part in the siege of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. 81 of them had ties to the military and 5 were on duty at the time.

Neo-Nazi attacks attempted

Last year, army private Ethan Phelan Melzer confessed to organizing an attack against his fellow troops with a neo-Nazi group to ensure the “deaths of as many of his fellow service members as possible.”

In 2018, after attacking people in the 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” demonstrations, marine lance corporal Vasillios Pistolis was found to be a member of the neo-Nazi group Aomwaffen.

354 people with military backgrounds have committed criminal acts motivated by political or religious goals, according to the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland.

From 1990-2010, the number of cases a year has tripled.

Stand down

Lloyd Austin, the Defense Secretary, authorized a 60-day “stand down” early last year to devise regulations to combat extremism throughout the military’s many branches. 

The Pentagon’s new guidelines, enacted last month, state that military officers are barred from engaging in extremist activities and may face disciplinary action even for “liking” terrorist information on social media.

Additionally, officers cannot be “indifferent” and must hold military personnel who engage in extremist activity accountable. 

An AP investigation found that the Pentagon’s efforts may fall short, as the new guidelines don’t prohibit membership in extremist organizations, as long as they are not “actively participating”.

Kristofer Goldsmith, an Iraq veteran and researcher, says white supremacist and fascist movements target veterans because they are an “economically efficient target for campaigns because if you get one, they often bring their immediate social circle with them.”

Goldsmith says, “we saw a violent insurrection, we did not experience a peaceful transfer of power. It was an attempted coup. Every failed coup is just practice for the next one.”

‘Media Bears a Responsibility’ – Protesters Demand Justice for Survivors amid Maxwell Trial

December 08th, 2021

By Dan Cohen

Source

Dozens of protesters gathered outside the Thurghood Marshall Courthouse in New York City, where Ghislaine Maxwell is on trial for her role in Jeffrey Epstein’s decades-long sex trafficking operation invovling numerous elite figures. Dan Cohen reports from the demonstration.

NEW YORK – On December 4, protesters and survivors of sex trafficking gathered outside the Thurghood Marshall Courthouse in New York City to demand justice for the victims of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, whose trial is ongoing.

“Epstein and Maxwell trafficked children for 25 years and Maxwell is only charged with one count of child trafficking,” investigative journalist Nick Bryant told the crowd.

“Testimonies indicate that Epstein demanded sexual acts from women and girls up to three times a day,” explained Taina Bien-Aimé, executive director of the Coalition Against Trafficking In Women, adding:

If true, that would be 1,032 acts of sexual violence a year. And with at least 3 decades of Epestin’s reported patterns of sexual abuse, that is over 32,000 instances of rape and sexual assault by Epstein alone. And 30, 40 years later, there are four survivors in that courtroom that are accusing Maxwell of pimping. Four!”

While the legal system has leveled a mere six charges against Maxwell, mass media from Google and Wikipedia to television networks uniformly describe her as a “socialite.”

Both Google and Wikipedia characterize Maxwell as a “socialite”

It’s a stark contrast to the media treatment of Alisha Owen – a survivor of a similar pedophilia ring involving powerful businessmen, political and intelligences figures – who spoke at the rally.

“I am no longer going to just be a survivor. I am going to be a warrior,” she told the cheering crowd. “On the front page of the Omaha World Herald, they called me short, fat and ugly. ‘This couldn’t possibly happen to her, she’s short, fat and ugly….’ It was so brutal. So I think the media bears a responsibility,” Owen remarked to MintPress News.

On top of being smeared by her local newspaper, Owen says she was pressured by the FBI to recant her testimony. “Between 50 and 100 times, the FBI was, ‘You’re gonna change. You know, you’re gonna recant. You’re gonna say you’re a liar…’ The FBI told me, ‘You’re gonna be an old woman.’ I was supposed to be in [for] 250 years.”

But no outlet has given such an explicit display of sympathy as Bloomberg News, which asked if Ghislaine Maxwell is a victim in the affair.

Ghislaine Maxwell’s sex-trafficking trial is set to be one of the biggest of the #MeToo era. But the jury may have to grapple with a unique question: is Maxwell herself a victim? https://t.co/vPRayRUB43

— Bloomberg (@business) November 29, 2021

It’s no surprise, given that the owner of the outlet, billionaire Michael Bloomberg, is tied to Maxwell and Epstein. Photos from 2013 show Bloomberg and Maxwell together:

Another photo of Ghislaine Maxwell with vertically challenged Democrat/Independent former Mayor of NYC Michael Bloomberg pic.twitter.com/wLJ0viEQHY

— Ghislaine Maxwell Trial Updates (@MaxwellTrial) November 27, 2021

And Epstein’s infamous Little Black Book contains five different phone numbers for Bloomberg.

Also curiously missing from most mainstream reporting on Epstein and Maxwell are questions about their ties to U.S. and Israeli intelligence.

Jeffrey Epstein was an FBI informant, and former Secretary of Labor Alex Acosta, who in 2008 was the U.S. attorney in Miami, cut a plea deal with Epstein after he was told Epstein “belonged to intelligence.” Ghislaine Maxwell’s late father, Robert Maxwell, is reported to have been a Mossad operative.

What became of the Epstein dirt?

With Epstein dead in what many suspect was a covered-up murder, and Maxwell facing only a handful of charges, the elite figures who visited Epstein’s mansions – from Bill Clinton and Donald Trump to Bill Gates and Ehud Barak – are not under investigation. As journalist Chris Hedges explained:

The videos that Epstein apparently collected of his guests engaged in sexual escapades with teenage and underage girls from the cameras he had installed in his opulent residences and his private island have mystersously disappeared, most probably into the crucial hole of the FBI along with other evidence.”

With the system that allowed Epstein and Maxwell to commit their crimes intact, the protesters vow to carry on their struggle for justice.

Another Look at 9/11: Ask Not ‘What Happened?’ but ‘Who Did It?’

Philip Giraldi

September 16, 202

The evidence of Israeli involvement is substantial, based on the level of the Jewish state’s espionage operations in the U.S., Phil Giraldi writes.

The twentieth anniversary of 9/11 last Saturday has raised many of the usual issues about what actually happened on that day. Were hijacked airliners actually crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon or was the damage in New York City attributable to explosives or even some kind of nuclear device? These are fundamental questions and the so-called “Truthers” who raise them have been inspired by their reading of the 585 page 9/11 Report, which is most charitably described as incomplete, though many would reasonably call it a government cover-up.

I have long believed that unless one actually sees or experiences something first hand the description of any event is no better than hearsay. The closest I came to “seeing” 9/11 was the panicked evacuation of a CIA office building, where I was working at the time. Another related bit of 9/11 narrative also came from two close friends who were driving into work at the Pentagon when they each independently observed what appeared to be a large plane passing over their cars and striking the building. I consider the sources credible but was it an airplane or a missile? And I was not there to see it with my own eyes, so I am reluctant to claim that my friends actually saw something that in retrospect might have been misconstrued.

Critics of the physical and engineering aspects of the accepted narrative certainly have a great deal of expert evidence that supports their case. The way the towers fell as well as the collapse of Building 7 nearby are suggestive of something other than the impact of an airliner near the top of the structure, but I am no expert in the science of the matter and have avoided expressing a view regarding it.

Apart from what happened, I have always been more intrigued by “Who done it?” I found the 9/11 Report to be conspicuously lacking in its failure to cover possible foreign involvement, to include the Saudis, Pakistanis and the Israelis. Indeed, President Joe Biden has taken steps that have resulted in the declassification and release of 16 pages of the notorious 28-page redaction of documents relating to any possible Saudi role. The document consists of interviews with Saudi student Omar al-Bayoumi, who reportedly helped support several hijackers.

The Saudis are being sued by 9/11 survivors, but it is unlikely that anything really sensitive will ever be exposed, as explained by investigative journalist Jim Bovard. Indeed, the documents released last Saturday did not demonstrate that the Saudi government itself played any direct role in 9/11, though it is clear that wealthy Saudis and even members of the Royal Family had been supporting and funding al-Qaeda. It is also known that that Saudi Embassy and Consulate employees in the U.S. had funded the alleged hijackers.

Friends who were in CIA’s Counterterrorism Center at the time of 9/11 tend to believe that the Saudis were indeed supporting their fellow citizens while in the U.S. but were likely not knowledgeable regarding any terrorist plot. They observed, however, that there was considerable evidence that Israel knew in advance about what was impending and may have even been instrumental in making sure that it succeeded.

The evidence of Israeli involvement is substantial, based on the level of the Jewish state’s espionage operations in the U.S. and also its track record on so-called covert actions simulating terrorist attacks designed to influence political decision making in foreign countries. But, of course, in reporting on the 9/11 tragedy no one in the mainstream media did pick up on the connection, inhibited no doubt by the understanding that there are some things that one just does not write about Israel if one hopes to remain employed. That is true in spite of the fact that the Israeli angle to 9/11 is without a doubt a good story, consigned to the alternative media, where it can be marginalized by critics as a conspiracy theory or the product of anti-Semitism.

In the year 2001 Israel was running a massive spying operation directed against Muslims either resident or traveling in the United States. The operation included the creation of a number of cover companies in New Jersey, Florida and also on the west coast that served as spying mechanisms for Mossad officers. The effort was supported by the Mossad Station in Washington DC and included a large number of volunteers, the so-called “art students” who traveled around the U.S. selling various products at malls and outdoor markets. The FBI was aware of the numerous Israeli students who were routinely overstaying their visas but they were regarded as a minor nuisance and were normally left to the tender mercies of the inspectors at the Bureau of Customs and Immigration.

The Israelis were also running more sophisticated intelligence operations inside the United States, many of which were focused on Washington’s military capabilities and intentions. Some specialized intelligence units concentrated on obtaining military and dual use technology. It was also known that Israeli spies had penetrated the phone systems of the U.S. government, to include those at the White House.

All of that came into focus on September 11, 2001, when a New Jersey housewife saw something from the window of her apartment building, which overlooked the World Trade Center. She watched as the buildings burned and crumbled but also noted something strange. Three young men were kneeling on the roof of a white transit van parked by the water’s edge, making a movie in which they featured themselves high fiving and laughing in front of the catastrophic scene unfolding behind them. The woman wrote down the license plate number of the van and called the police, who responded quickly and soon both the local force and the FBI began looking for the vehicle, which was subsequently seen by other witnesses in various locations along the New Jersey waterfront, its occupants “celebrating and filming.”

The license plate number revealed that the van belonged to a New Jersey registered company called Urban Moving Systems. The van was identified and pulled over. Five men between the ages of 22 and 27 years old emerged to be detained at gunpoint and handcuffed. They were all Israelis. One of them had $4,700 in cash hidden in his sock and another had two foreign passports. Bomb sniffing dogs reacted to the smell of explosives in the van.

According to the initial police report, the driver identified as Sivan Kurzberg, stated “We are Israeli. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem.” The five men were detained at the Bergen County jail in New Jersey before being transferred the FBI’s Foreign Counterintelligence Section, which handles allegations of spying.

After the arrest, the FBI obtained a warrant to search Urban Moving System’s Weehawken, NJ, offices. Papers and computers were seized. The company owner Dominick Suter, also an Israeli, answered FBI questions but when a follow-up interview was set up a few days later it was learned that he had fled the country for Israel, putting both his business and home up for sale. It was later learned that Suter has been associated with at least fourteen businesses in the United States, mostly in New Jersey and New York but also in Florida.

The five Israelis were held in Brooklyn, initially on charges relating to visa fraud. FBI interrogators questioned them for more than two months. Several were held in solitary confinement so they could not communicate with each other and two of them were given repeated polygraph exams, which they failed when claiming that they were nothing more than students working summer jobs. The two men that the FBI focused on most intensively were believed to be Mossad staff officers and the other three were volunteers helping with surveillance. Interestingly, photo evidence demonstrated that they had been seen “casing” the area where they were seen celebrating on the day before, indicating that they had prior knowledge of the attack.

The Israelis were not exactly cooperative, but the FBI concluded from documents obtained at their office in Weehawken that they had been targeting Arabs in New York and New Jersey. The FBI concluded that there was a distinct possibility that the Israelis had actually monitored the activities of at least two of the alleged 9/11 hijackers while the cover companies and intelligence personnel often intersected with locations frequented by the Saudis.

The dots were apparently never connected by investigators. Police records in New Jersey and New York where the men were held have disappeared and FBI interrogation reports are inaccessible. Media coverage of the case also died, though the five were referred to in the press as the “dancing Israelis” and by some, more disparagingly, as the “dancing Shlomos.”

Inevitably, the George W. Bush White House intervened. After 71 days in detention, the five Israelis were inexplicably released from prison, put on a plane, and deported. One should also recall that when the news of 9/11 reached Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was pleased, saying that “It’s very good. Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy.” It will “strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we’ve experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror.” And, of course, it was conveniently attributable to Israel’s enemies.

The possible role of Israel in 9/11 was first explored in book form in 2003 by Antiwar.com editorial director Justin Raimondo in his The Terror Enigma, a short book focusing on Israeli spying and inconsistencies in the narrative that bore the provocative subtitle “9/11 and the Israeli Connection.”

Currently, the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 has inspired some others to take another look at the possible Israeli role. Ron Unz has recently completed an exhaustive examination of the evidence. He observes that 9/11 and its aftermath have shaped “the last two decades, greatly changing the daily lives and liberties of most ordinary Americans.” He asks “What organized group would have been sufficiently powerful and daring to carry off an attack of such vast scale against the central heart of the world’s sole superpower? And how were they possibly able to orchestrate such a massively effective media and political cover-up, even enlisting the participation of the U.S. government itself?”

Ron Unz answers his question, concluding that there is “a strong, perhaps even overwhelming case that the Israeli Mossad together with its American collaborators played the central role” in the attack. His argument is based on the noted inconsistencies in the standard narrative, plus an examination of the history of Israeli false flag and mass terrorism attacks. It also includes new information gleaned from Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman’s recent book Rise and Kill First: the Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations.

To a certain extent, Unz relies on a detailed investigative article written by French journalist Laurent Guyenot in 2018 as well as on an argument made by an ex-Marine and former instructor at the U.S. Army War College Alan Sabrosky in an article where he records how “Many years ago I read a fascinating discussion of the ‘tactics of mistake.’ This essentially entailed using a target’s prejudices and preconceptions to mislead them as to the origin and intent of the attack, entrapping them in a tactical situation that later worked to the attacker’s strategic advantage. This is what unfolded in the 9/11 attacks that led us into the matrix of wars and conflicts, present (Afghanistan and Iraq), planned (Iran and Syria) and projected (Jordan and Egypt), that benefit Israel and no other country — although I concede that many private contractors and politicians are doing very well for themselves out of the death and misery of others. I am also absolutely certain as a strategic analyst that 9/11 itself, from which all else flows, was a classic Mossad-orchestrated operation. But Mossad did not do it alone. They needed local help within America (and perhaps elsewhere) and they had it, principally from some alumni of PNAC (the misnamed Project for a New American Century) and their affiliates within and outside of the U.S. Government (USG), who in the 9/11 attacks got the ‘catalytic event’ they needed and craved to take the U.S. to war on Israel’s behalf…”

Economist and author Paul Craig Roberts has also been motivated by the anniversary to review the evidence and concludes “Circumstantial evidence suggests that 9/11 was a scheme of George W. Bush regime neoconservative officials allied with vice president Dick Cheney and Israel to create a ‘new Pearl Harbor’ that would generate support on the part of the American people and Washington’s European allies for a Middle Eastern ‘war on terror’ whose real purpose was to destroy Israel’s enemies in the interest of Greater Israel… This is the most plausible explanation, but, if true, it is not one that the U.S. and Israeli governments would ever acknowledge. Consequently, we are stuck with an official explanation long championed by the presstitutes that no one believes.”

Yes, an implausible explanation that no one really believes for the greatest national security disaster in America’s twenty-first century. And Israel gets yet another pass.

Families of 9/11 Victims Expect Release of FBI Report on Saudi Role

September 10, 2021

By Staff, Agencies 

Families of the victims of the September 11 attacks who are suing the government of Saudi Arabia in a United States federal court in New York are expecting the US government to imminently release a key FBI report.

The 16-page report is an FBI summary and analysis of the agency’s long-running investigation into the activities of two of the September 11 hijackers, Saudi nationals, Khalid Al-Mihdhar and Nawaf Al-Hazmi.

In January 2000, the two Al-Qaeda operatives arrived in California where they were assisted by other Saudis. The FBI report, which may be redacted upon its public release, is expected to provide details of the FBI’s inquiry into who helped Al-Mihdhar and Al-Hazmi, according to a lawyer for the September 11 families.

“It’s unclear what other parts of the government may have known what was going on, but clearly, fairly high-level and mid-level Saudi officials working for the government were part of this conspiracy,” said Andrew ‘Duke’ Maloney, a lawyer with the law firm Kreindler LLP representing the September 11 families in the litigation against Saudi Arabia.

Now 20 years after the 2001 attacks that resulted in the deaths of nearly 3,000 people in New York City, Washington, DC, and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, the families’ lawsuit accusing the Saudi government of complicity is nearing a turning point. Either sufficient evidence to support the lawsuit will be presented to the court or it will fail to move forward.

The pending FBI report is an analysis by agents who looked into how Al-Mihdhar and Al-Hazmi, who spoke little English and had no independent resources when they arrived in the US, gained a foothold in Los Angeles and then in San Diego.

Lawyers for the September 11 families believe they can prove there was “a cabal” of Saudi government officials “who were conspiring with Al-Qaeda operatives.” The lawsuit’s goal is to win a financial settlement for the families of the victims of the attack.

Argued largely in private, behind closed doors and in secret filings, the factual underpinnings of the case could soon become public under an executive order by President Joe Biden.

After Biden was told by September 11 family members he would not be welcome at anniversary memorials usually attended by the president, Biden directed the Justice Department and other agencies to review and release still-secret FBI documents and evidence.

Biden’s order specifically directs the release of the 16-page report by the September 11, 2021 anniversary.

The report is likely to shed new light on what the FBI knows about several men connected to the hijackers, including Saudi nationals, Muslim leader Fahad Al-Thumairy and suspect Saudi spy Omar Al-Bayoumi, Maloney said.

A Saudi embassy official, Mussaed Ahmed Al-Jarrah, whose name had emerged previously as part of the legal proceedings, is believed to have provided assistance to the future hijackers, according to the families’ lawyers.

Of the 19 al-Qaeda hijackers, 15 were Saudis and from the beginning of multiple US inquiries in to the September 11 attacks, questions have swirled around the Saudi role.

The Taliban, 9/11, the Empire, MAGA eastern wet pampers

September 09, 2021

by Andrei for the Saker Blog

Most of you must have heard it: the Taliban will organize a major celebration on September 11th to mark the liberation of Afghanistan from the US occupation and the creation of the new Afghan government.  The Russians and the Chinese have been invited.  As are the Pakistanis.  Not sure about Iran (do you know?)?

The Afghan government could be called a “GITMO government” since 5 members are former GITMO hostages and one, the head of security/intel, is still on the FBI most wanted list.

Needless to say, the Taliban had nothing to do with 9/11.  As for Bin-Laden and al-Qaeda they were somewhat involved, but only as “patsies”.

But the US government declared that the Taliban guilty and invaded Afghanistan.

Twenty years later, the Taliban are in total control and the US has probably executed one of the dumbest, worst and generally immoral military operation in history.  And 20 years later, the US was totally defeated.  Not by Russia.  Not by China.  Not by Iran.  Not even by Venezuela.  By the Afghans, after 20 years of warfare and trillions spent.

I have to agree with a Russian analyst who recently declared that “no, this is not even a “regular/normal” imperial collapse, this is the worst and most shameful imperial collapse in history”.

I fully concur.

As for what the Taliban will do this Saturday, it can’t even be called “spitting in Uncle Shmuel’s face”.  It’s even more than that.  Maybe we could speak of “urinating into Uncle Shmuel’s face” or some other even ruder metaphor showing both the total and utter contempt in which the Taliban hold not only the USA but the entire AngloZionist Empire AND somehow express the magnitude of the humiliation inflicted upon the USA.

I lack the words to come up with a suitable metaphor.

Can somebody come up with something sufficiently powerful?

Also, and especially for the MAGA folks out there:

CNN has reported that the entire “Ukie plan” to kidnap Russian PMCs was organized by the CIA and botched by the Ukies.  The harcore Ukronazis are now accusing CNN of either being “duped by the FSB” or even for being used by Putin personally.  Or both.

Anyway, what this goes to prove that Trump approved a clear terrorist attack against Russia.  Either that, or he did not even know about it, which might be worse…

And you guys are seriously discussing his possible comeback?!?!

Get real!

I saw an interesting poll somewhere (sorry, don’t remember where exactly) which shows that 49% of US Americans feel safer than on 9/11 20 years ago and 41% feel less safe.

And that is the real outcome of this monumentally evil and stupid Neocon plan.

After 20 years of warfare, pompous self-aggrandizement, many thousands dead and maimed and trillions spent.

Nothing will ever wash off this shame from the awareness of folks in Zone B and even many in Zone A.

Finally, today the Ukronazis shelled the Donbass again, with howitzers and mortars.  They were aiming at a water pumping station, miss and wounded/killed a couple.  Either way, this is a warcrime.  The Russians have declared that they have the designation of the unit which fired and the name of the commander who gave the order.

Which is all very predictable, since 1) US officials just visited the Ukraine 2) the CNN story is a HUGE scandal in the Ukie Rada and 3) Zelenskii is desperate to show that he might still be useful to the USA.

As for the Poles, they are fearing Russian invasion, so they put bared wire (I kid you not!) along their eastern border.  Which remind me of a Russian joke: a man walks down the street minding his own business, when he sees a woman on a balcony screaming “help! he wants to rape me! help!!!” from the top of her lungs.  The man looks up and says, “ma’am, calm down, I have no interest in you whatsoever and you are on the balcony while I am in the street” to which the woman replies, “yeah, maybe, but I can come down!“.

The Russian military is engaged in some large and serious, not fake, military maneuvers: 200’000 soldiers in both Russia and Belarus.  Hence all the wet pampers in eastern Europe (especially in Poland – the “hyena of Europe” always was a cowardly animal).

The Poles have even predicted the date of the Russian invasion: tomorrow (not a joke)

I have terrible news for Poland, the Baltic statelets and the Ukraine: nobody in Russia has any need for you, or your land.  Nobody.  Oh, and, for your information: “defenses” like walls, barbed-wires or even trenches cannot stop a modern military, such crap would not even slow the Russians down.

Summary: both Biden and Zelenskii might get impeached or otherwise removed.  That’s won’t solve anything for the US or the Ukraine, but sheer magnitude of their incompetence and stupidity makes such an outcome quite possible.

Not even in my most wildest and craziest dreams could I ever have imagined such a quick and total collapse of the Empire and of the USA.  I have to pinch myself several times a day, each time I get the news 🙂

Cheers

Two 9/11 Saudi Hijackers Helped By US-Based Network – Ex-FBI Agent

September 6, 2021

By Staff, Agencies

A former Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI] agent involved in an investigation into the September 11, 2001 attacks said two of the hijackers received help from a US-based network of Saudis, including Omar al-Bayoumi who had ties to the Saudi government.

Danny Gonzalez, who worked on the still-classified FBI investigation ‘Operation Encore’ which focused on Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar who along with three other hijackers flew planes into the Pentagon, said he believes the pair were helped by a number of Saudi citizens including Bayoumi after they moved to San Diego in January 2001.

“19 hijackers cannot commit 3,000 mass murders by themselves,” Gonzalez told CBS News.

Bayoumi, who was working for the Riyadh government, helped al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar move to San Diego and assisted them in finding an apartment and opening a bank account after, Gonzalez said.

The 9/11 Commission report released in 2004 found that Bayoumi was an “unlikely candidate for clandestine involvement” with extremists. It said there was “no credible evidence that he believed in violent extremism or knowingly aided extremist groups.”

But Gonzalez said the public would learn “a lot” if documents from ‘Operation Encore’, which began two years after the Commission’s report, were released, adding that the records would change the public’s understanding of the attacks.

Gonzalez said he can’t reveal certain classified information about the investigation per orders from the FBI.

His statements came as US President Joe Biden on Friday directed the Department of Justice to declassify some documents related to the attacks and release them over the next six months amid pressure from families and survivors who are suing the kingdom for its alleged complicity in the attacks.

Some of the documents which are set to be released pertain to “Encore.”

Commenting on Biden’s order, Brett Eagleson who lost his father Bruce in the Twin Towers attacks and has been an advocate for the victims’ families, said they would stay skeptical until the documents were released. 

“We are cautiously optimistic that we will get the documents we need, however our guard is still up,” Eagleson told DailyMail.com.

Some 3,000 people were killed in the attacks that targeted several locations across the US.

Saudi Arabia’s name came to the fore in discussions concerning the attacks after their occurrence, with investigators quickly concluding that 15 of the 19 hijackers involved in the raids were of Saudi origin.

The Riyadh regime, however, has managed to avoid any liability amid what the families of the victims, survivors and their lawyers denounce as Washington’s attempts to shield the kingdom from any comeuppance.

Nasrallah suggests Lebanese politicians aiding militants in Syria behind nitrate stockpile at Beirut Port

August 10, 2021

“Poor” Hezbollah..”Poor” Syria

Original link: http://middleeastobserver.net/nasrallah-suggests-lebanese-politicians-aiding-militants-in-syria-behind-nitrate-shipment-to-beirut-port/

Hezbollah’s leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah comments on the political exploitation and investigation findings of the Port of Beirut Disaster that took place one year ago in Lebanon’s capital.Source: Spot Shot (YouTube)Date: August 8, 2021

(Please help MEO keep producing independent translations for you by contributing a sustainable monthly amount https://www.patreon.com/MiddleEastObserver?fan_landing=true)

Transcript:

Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s Secretary General:

And after a year has passed, they (i.e. Lebanese groups leading the anti-Hezbollah campaign in relation to the Beirut Port explosion) found no evidence, proof, or investigation that could lead to this conclusion. They got lost, they were lost for a while; what can they say (in this regard)? They were waiting for the investigations, and they know that the official investigation by the Lebanese Army, the investigation by (Lebanon’s) Information Branch, the French investigation and the FBI investigation, and all the sides that took part and contributed to this investigation, reached a clear conclusion, which is now openly available and documented as well: there were no missiles, no weapons, and no munitions in Warehouse 12, nor anywhere in the entire Port (of Beirut). Nothing. And there was no (military or sabotage) action (from an external state/party). I’m not rushing (to conclusions), the (official Lebanese investigators) are obliged to announce the findings (of their investigation), but they don’t wish to announce (the results), and I’ll get back to this point.

In this case, what could they possibly do, having nothing (in hand) that can lead to (the accusation) of the Resistance and Hezbollah? They came up with a new story regarding the (Ammonium) nitrate. Who brought the nitrate (to Lebanon)? Great! The (Lebanese) judiciary should reveal who brought the nitrate, the ship that brought the nitrate. There are reports that say that (the ship’s intended) destination wasn’t Beirut, but it had an accident and resorted to the Port of Beirut. Its destination wasn’t Beirut to begin with.

So, who brought in the nitrate? Who stored them? Who kept them in (the warehouse)? Who prevented the transportation of these materials and (prevented) their sale? The same story all over again: ‘the one who brought the nitrate is Hezbollah, and Hezbollah is the one who knows about it because they brought it (into Lebanon), Hezbollah stored it in Warehouse 12 and kept it there, and the one who prevented the transportation (of the nitrate) is Hezbollah as well’.

Okay, what evidence do you have dear? What’s the evidence for this vile and atrocious accusation (against Hezbollah)? None, there is nothing. However, they have television stations, newspapers, media outlets, and an electronic army, and they can say whatever they want, and they’re (indeed) trying to frame a (particular) scenario.

Now, I want to answer (this campaign of accusations) in way that is somehow sarcastic. Poor Hezbollah, how saddening! They don’t have tons of weapons, munitions, missiles, and explosives that are manufactured in the best military factories in the world, which meet the (required) standards, poor (Hezbollah), they have nothing. They must bring nitrate and smuggle them into Lebanon, nitrate that is used for agricultural purposes and can also be used for manufacturing explosives, how poor (Hezbollah) is, it has no other choice. Poor Hezbollah, they’ve got no warehouses to transport nitrate to, they’ve got warehouses that can accommodate tens of thousands of missiles, but they do not have warehouses where they can put about 2,000 tons of this nitrate for example, so they had to leave them in the warehouse in the Port (of Beirut). Poor Hezbollah, for six or seven years, they haven’t been able to secure places to transport the nitrate to. Poor Hezbollah, they haven’t got any transportation (means) or trucks, they need to rent trucks, taxis, chauffeurs, or drivers to transport (these materials) directly to the south of Lebanon. Poor Hezbollah…

Could there be anything more ridiculous than this? Anything sillier? Anything more horrible? I’ll leave the judgement to you. If someone wishes to make an accusation, they need to make it a bit logical and make some sense. This is all absurd talk. Yet, it is intended; they know it is ridiculous and absurd, but they follow the method of telling lies upon lies as there are people who are ready to believe them, and this is a part of the battle, part of the open war.

They then developed their claim, they said: no, Hezbollah is not in need, those (stockpiles of nitrate) were brought by Hezbollah and placed in the Port so that they can move them to Syria. (I’ll use the) the same (sarcastic) approach. The poor Syrian regime, it doesn’t have ports, it doesn’t have a port in Latakia, nor in Tartus, it doesn’t have any, so, it is forced to bring them into Beirut, and burden Hezbollah with the process of transportation from Beirut to Syria. Poor Syrian regime, it has got no allies that could provide it, through aircrafts and ships, with weapons, munitions, explosives, and so on…Come on! Could someone sane believe such a thing?

Well, anyway, whatever has been said from one year till this very moment, especially the past few days, is not based on any logic or sense, and it doesn’t have any aim other than distortion, accusation, extortion, insulting, and misleading (people from) the truth. We could’ve done the same, from the first day, while people were still searching for the (bodies of the) martyrs, I could’ve went up on TV and said: The ones who killed your children and led to this (massive) explosion in the country are the ones who support the armed groups in Syria. The ones who need nitrate to manufacture explosives are neither Hezbollah nor the Syrian (government) forces. Rather, the ones who need the nitrate to manufacture explosives are the militants on the outskirts of Arsal, Qalamoun, and Al-Qusayr, and the armed groups in Syria. Certain Lebanese groups supporting (the armed militant groups in Syria) are the ones who brought the nitrate (into Lebanon), and they are known by name, and (these personalities) are present within (various levels of the Lebanese) state and security apparatus.

We could have accused them (from that very day). You have a voice and we have ours, you have (your) television (stations) and we have (ours), you have (your) social media networks and we have ours, you have your outlets and we have ours; and the people of the country would have fought each other with each side accusing the other. However, we didn’t adopt this approach, and even today, I’m only mentioning it as an evidence, you know why? Because we are a people of logic and proof, and because we have honor. Because we have honor. Because we know what if feels like to (have) martyrs, we know what it feels like to be wounded, we know how it feels for people to have their homes demolished, we know how it feels like when people have their livelihoods destroyed, we’ve been aware of this matter for many years.

However, you who are sitting behind television screens, running seminars, you and some politicians, who live with golden spoons in your mouths, how could you possibly understand these emotions? We refused to (engage in trying to) manipulate people’s emotions, the emotions of the families of the martyrs and the wounded, and the people affected (by the port explosion), or to exploit anything whatsoever – no matter how small it be – in such a serious event of this magnitude that affected everyone. This is because we are concerned about the country, the peace of the country, and harmony within the country, we didn’t exploit anything for our political interests, nor have we attacked (others) through the media; even when we were accused, insulted, and (our reputation was) distorted, we didn’t defend ourselves with (counter)attacks; we rather defended ourselves by clarifying (the situation) and by resorting to (the matter to the course of) investigations. We (reasoned with public opinion and) said that there are (findings from the) investigations which are not being made public, (and we questioned) why they are not being made public. This is the difference between you and us.

أسئلة شديدة الملوحة حول تفجير مرفأ بيروت؟؟؟

 الأربعاء 4 آب 2021

 ناصر قنديل

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يدور النقاش اللبناني الداخلي وما يواكبه من نقاش خارجي حول من يجب ان يُلاحق بموجب التحقيق الجاري حول تفجير مرفأ بيروت، ولا يخفي نقاش الحصانات، سواء بدعوة رفعها عن الجميع، أو بالتحصّن خلفها من الجميع، أو بتمييز البعض عن البعض، وسواء ما يصدر عن القوى السياسية او عن المحقق العدلي او عن الهيئات الحقوقية الخارجية والداخلية، أن الأصل في النقاش هو السياسة، وفي هذا توظيف لدماء الشهداء ولشعاري الحقيقة والعدالة، لأن الأصل في تحرك من ينشد الحقيقة والعدالة ليس البحث عمّن يمكن تحميله المسؤولية وتقديمه على مذبح الحقيقة والعدالة، فالأصل هو البحث عن الحقيقة ثم إقامة العدالة، لأنّ البحث عن العدالة يعني البحث عن قصاص يعادل سقوط أرواح غالية ودمار وخراب لحقا بأملاك الناس وتشويه أصاب وجه المدينة الجميلة، والبحث عن قصاص يعادل الجريمة قد لا ينسجم مع السعي للحقيقة التي تبدأ من طرح الأسئلة الحقيقية، قبل الحديث عن المسؤولية، وتبحث عن توصيف الجرم قبل الحديث الجريمة والمجرمين.

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الأسئلة التي توصل الى الحقيقة لا يجب ان تعرف المجاملة، ولا السعي لتجنب الإحراج، ولا التوجيه السياسي، والأجوبة على هذه الأسئلة يجب ان توضع في تصرف الرأي العام ليُبنى عليها الإتهام، وفق التوصيف الجرمي الذي توفره الحقيقة وحدها، وما دامت الحقيقة غائبة أو مغيبة، يبقى كل اتهام وكل توصيف جرمي سياسة، ولو رافقته سياقات مدبجة قانونا، وتبقى كل حصانة سياسة أيضاً ولو رافقتها سياقات مدبّجة قانوناً، والصراع بينهما صراع سياسي بغلاف قانوني، لأنّ الفريقين الإتهامي والمتحصن، لا يقدمان أولوية البحث عن الحقيقة، بل يدخلان فوراً في النقاش الجرمي والإتهامي، مع إيهام الزعم ان في ذلك سعياً للعدالة.

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نحو الحقيقة يجب ان نعرف بداية، هل ان النقاش يدور على قاعدة التسليم بأن لا عمل جرمياً وراء جلب النترات، وأن لا عمل جرمياً وراء استبقائها، وأن لا عمل جرمياً وراء تفجيرها، وانّ كلّ المعنيين أبرياء من هذه الزاوية، والنقاش محصور بتوصيف جرم الإهمال وحدود المعرفة بالخطر الناتج عنه، وهذا هو معنى القتل بالقصد الاحتمالي قانوناً، فلماذا لا يقول لنا التحقيق أولاً إنّ الفرضيات الجرمية القائمة وراء جلب النترات واستبقائها وتفجيرها، ساقطة، وإنّ لديه سردية تقول إنّ كلّ شيء تمّ عفواً وبالصدفة، وسقط الشهداء وتخرّبت المدينة لأنّ المسؤولين لم يقوموا بما كان يمكنهم القيام به لتجنب الكارثة، تماماً كما هو التوصيف الرائج لسردية الانهيار المالي، القائمة على نفي وجود جريمة الاستدانة المفرطة، والفوائد المفرطة، والأرباح المصرفية المفرطة، والتحويلات المفرطة، والإنفاق العام المفرط، وانّ كلّ القضية انّ المسؤولين نسوا أن ينتبهوا لما يجب فعله لمنع الإنهيار!

–

الأسئلة نحو الحقيقة تبدأ من تقديم جواب مقنع ورسمي من اليونيفيل حول كيفية تعاملها مع ملف النترات، وهي الجهة الأمنية المزوّدة بأحدث التقنيات، والموجودة للتشدّد في مراقبة كلّ ما يقع تحت تصنيف عسكري او شبه عسكري في البحر ويحاول دخول المياه اللبنانية، من دون مزحة المانيفست، لأن الألمان والطليان والفرنسيين ليسوا موجودين لمنع تزوّد حزب الله بالسلاح من خلال مراقبة ما اذا كان يجلب السلاح مصرحاً عنه وفقاً للمانيفست، بل لتجاوز المانيفست ومعرفة المخفي والمخبّأ ووضع اليد عليه، فما هي معلومات البحرية الدولية عن النترات، وكيف تفسّر تسامحها مع دخولها ومع بقائها، وكيف تفسّر ما هو أخطر الحديث عن استعمالها، خصوصاً انّ الإتهامات الرائجة توجه نحو حزب الله الذي وُجدت هذه البحرية الدولية لمراقبة ما هو أقلّ ومنع وصوله، فهل يعقل ان اليونيفيل البحرية كانت علم خلال ست سنوات وتصمت على تخزين حزب الله للنترات واستجرارها نحو سورية او غيرها، وربما في وجهات أوروبية كما يقول خصوم حزب الله، فماذا تقول اليونيفيل عن كلّ ذلك، ولماذا لم يسألها مجلس الأمن الذي انتدبها لمهمة واضحة وحاسمة، عن تبريرها لهذا الانتهاك الخطير لمهمتها، وهل قام المحقق العدلي بمراسلة من تعاقبوا على قيادة هذه القوة البحرية واستدعاهم للتحقيق، لأنّ جوهر مهمتهم وفق القرار الأممي هو مساعدة البحرية اللبنانية على ضبط السواحل اللبنانية ومنع دخول أيّ مواد عسكرية وشبه عسكرية، لغير الجهات العسكرية الشرعية للدولة اللبنانية؟ وان لم يفعل فلماذا؟

–

الحلقة الثانية من الأسئلة تطال زيارات متعددة تمّت لبوارج حربية أميركية وبريطانية وفرنسية، الى مرفأ بيروت، آخرها كانت زيارات البارجة الأميركية يو اس اس راماج في شهر أيلول 2019، وبعدها حاملة الطائرات الفرنسية تولون في آب 2020، وقبلهما حاملة الطائرات البريطانية أوشن في شهر آذار 2017، وقبل هذه الزيارات زيارات أخرى، تمت لمرفأ بيروت، من سفن حربية غربية، ومعلوم عند أبسط الخبراء الأمنيين أنّ مسحاً أمنياً تفصيلياً يتمّ لمدى جغرافي لعدة كيلومترات، بواسطة معدات تقنية عالية الدقة، تهتمّ اصلاً بوجود المواد المتفجرة، في دائرة قريبة، وكلّ هذه الزيارات وما سبقها من مسح أمني جرت في فترة إقامة النترات في المرفأ، فماذا قال الخبراء وكيف صنفوا وجودها ودرجة خطورتها، ولماذا تغاضوا عنها، وكلّ الخبراء يقولون انه يستحيل الا تكون قد ظهرت على شاشات أجهزتهم، أو ان يكون قد فاتهم حجم خطورتها، وانّ التفسير الوحيد للتغاضي هنا هو وظيفة متفق عليها ومعلومة من المعنيين في الغرب وبعض نظرائهم في لبنان لمهمة النترات واقامتها، لأنّ القول بالعكس بالنسبة لعمليات التفتيش العسكرية كما بالنسبة لليونيفيل يعني ضمنا تبرئة المسؤولين اللبنانيين العسكريين والأمنيين، الذين لا يمكن اتهامهم حتى بالتقصير ان كان كبار خبراء الغرب العسكريين لم يعتبروا ان وجود النترات مصدر خطر، فكيف من هم أقلّ مسؤولية وخبرة من وزراء ومدراء لهم صفات ادارية!

–

الحلقة الثالثة من الأسئلة التي تقودنا للحقيقة، هي لبّ القضية، فهل تمّ استقدام هذه النترات لاستعمالها، والوجهة المنشودة كانت الحرب السورية، ولحساب من في سورية، وإذا ثبت سواء لجهة الاستقدام المتعمّد لهذه الغاية، او استثمار بقاء النترات وإطالة أمد بقائها عمداً، سيكون سهلاً معرفة الجهة اللبنانية الإدارية والسياسية والأمنية التي ارتكبت جرم التواطؤ من خلال معرفة جهة الإستخدام السورية، خصوصاً انّ التقرير المسرّب عن الـ «أف بي أي» يقول إنّ الكمية التي تفجرت هي أقلّ من ربع الكمية الموجودة نظريا وعلى الورق، وتبعه محامي القائد السابق للجيش اللبناني، المتهم بالتقصير في الملف، العماد جان قهوجي، يقول انّ حزب الله كان يهرّب هذه النترات الى سورية، ولأنّ الحقيقة هي الحقيقة، وجب على المحقق العدلي ان يسير بفرضية واحدة يمكن الحديث معها عن جرم عمد، هي جلب أو استبقاء النترات بهدف ارسالها الى سورية، وتتبّع هذه الفرضية لنفيها او تأكيدها، وإن تأكدت تحديد وجهة الإستخدام، ليسهل تتبّع جهة التسهيل اللبنانية، وبالمناسبة قد يفيد التذكير بأنّ سورية من الدول الأولى في العالم بإنتاج نترات الأمونيوم، وأنّ مصنعاً واحداً تملكه الدولة السورية قرب بحيرة قطينة بجوار حمص ينتج 250 ألف طن من النترات سنوياً وموجود منذ السبعينيات من القرن الماضي وكان يصدّر الفائض من إنتاجه للخارج، وبقي تحت سلطة الدولة السورية، وتمّ تخفيض إنتاجه خلال سنوات الحرب لتراجع الطلب داخلياً وصعوبة التصدير للخارج بسبب ظروف الحرب ومصاعب العلاقات الدولية الناتجة عنها ما ينفي حاجة الدولة السورية للنترات، لكن بكلّ حال على المحقق ان يتتبّع خيوطه ويطرح أسئلته ويبحث عن الأجوبة، حتى يجد ما يقنعه ويخرج به على اللبنانيين طالبا اقتناعهم؟

–

اذا كانت الخلاصة التي تختصر حقيقة التحقيق هي ما بُنيت عليه الاتهامات، فهي تقول ان لا جرم ولا جريمة، وان القضية هي انّ هناك من عرف بوجود النترات وخطرها ولم يفعل ما كان ينبغي فعله، وهؤلاء قصّروا ويجب ان يحاسبوا على تقصيرهم، وهذا معنى القتل بالقصد الاحتمالي، وان ثبت هذا فالاستنتاج صحيح، لكن قناعة المحقق بهذه الحقيقة يجب ان تقال بصراحة ووضوح، وله أن يمضي في توزيع المسؤوليات بعد ذلك، وفقاً لمعادلة درجة المسؤولية عن واجب المعرفة، ودرجة المسؤولية وفقاً لموجب القدرة على التحرك، ومن يجب ان يعرف ولم يعرف لا ينال البراءة، ومن ضمن صلاحياته التحرك ولم يتحرك لا يمنح صكّ البراءة لأنّ أحداً لم يراجعه، فوفقاً للصلاحيات ثمة من اطلع عرضاً وليس من مهمته المعرفة ولا من صلاحياته التحرك، وثمة من عليه ان يعلم وعليه ان يتحرك، وهؤلاء في مقدمة من يجب ان يتحمّل المسؤولية، ووفقاً للقوانين اللبنانية ثمة ثلاث جهات لبنانة يجب ان تعلم ويجب ان تتحرك، هي الجمارك، والنيابة العامة وقيادة الجيش، وقبلها جميعاً قيادة اليونيفيل البحرية!

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Bombshell book in Germany revives 9/11 as a business model

April 06, 2021

By Pepe Escobar – Book Review for The Saker Blog

Nearly 20 years after 9/11, Germany and the German-speaking world are being hit by a formidable one-two.

A ground-breaking study by gifted independent financial journalist Lars Schall, Denken wie der Feind – 20 Jahre Ausnahmezustand 9/11 und die Geopolitik des Terrors 

(“Thinking Like the Enemy – 20 Years State of Emergency, 9/11 and the Geopolitics of Terror”) is being published in Germany in two books.

The first one – Das Erdöl, der Dollar und die Drogen (“The Oil, The Dollar and The Drugs”) – is out this week. Volume II will be out next week.

Nomi Prins, formerly from Goldman Sachs, has described Schall’s “investigation of 9/11 insider trading” as “stunning”. Marshall Auerback, researcher at the Levy Institute in the U.S., noted how “most of the MSM still refuse to tackle the broader, more controversial aspects of the 9/11 tragedy”. Schall, he adds, “provides a healthy corrective”.

A sample of Schall’s work, already published by The Saker blog, is this interview on 9/11 terror trading.

I’ve had the pleasure to write the introduction for the German one-two. Here it is – hoping that such an extraordinary achievement may find its way in many other languages, especially across the Global South

9/11, or “The Owls Are Not What They Seem”

Until COVID-19 showed up on the scene in the Spring of 2020, nearly two decades after the fact, the world remained hostage to 9/11. This was the ultimate geopolitical game-changer that set the tone for the young 21st century. The book you have in your hands asks the ultimate question: why 9/11 matters.

Follow the money. It’s quite fitting that this meticulous investigation is conducted by a gifted, extremely serious financial journalist – and, in an unprecedented way, presents a mass of information previously unavailable in German.

I’ve known Lars Schall, virtually, for years – exchanging correspondence on politics and economics. When we met in person in Berlin in 2015, we finally had time, live, to also indulge in our number one pop culture mutual passion: David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. Lars may be a German incarnation of FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper. Or, better yet, the compassionate version of Albert Rosenfield, the sarcastic pathologist in Twin Peaks.

Take for instance this dialogue from Twin Peaks:

Albert Rosenfield: We sent a portrait of your long-haired man to every agency from NASA to DEA and came up empty. This cat is in nobody’s database. 

 Special Agent Dale Cooper: A man that four of us have seen here in Twin Peaks. 

 Albert Rosenfield: [smiling] Sure. Oh, by the way, you were shot with a Walther PPK. It’s James Bond’s gun, did you know that?

So what you have in your hands is 9/11 dissected by a thoroughly working pathologist, who had “a lot of cutting and pasting to do”. He was aware of myriad red lines from the start, as well as myriad vanishing acts and false non sequiturs. 9/11 may be the ultimate illustration of one of Twin Peaks’ legendary one-liners: “The owls are not what they seem”.

Our pathologist had in fact to disassemble a humongous matryoshka to break it down into smaller dolls. This process had some surprises in store: by following-the-money approach regarding 9/11, for instance, our pathologist was in the end confronted with the case of an anal prolapse at Guantanamo Bay. You don’t believe it? Just wait and read the research.

This journey will take you through hundreds of pages of text and myriads of endnotes, over 2,400 of them, quite a few dealing with many different sources, as well as selected sensitive documents treated by professional translators.

The double volume details the interconnected implications of extremely complex dossiers: the US national energy policy group chaired by former Vice-President Dick Cheney, in secrecy, only four days after the start of the Bush administration; the ramifications of Peak Oil; the interest by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) on Middle East oil, especially Iraq; the CIA’s major role in the drug trade business; the Saudi-U.S. alliance related to the protection of al-Qaeda; what happened with the U.S. air defense on 9/11; and last but not least, insider trading on 9/11, especially anomalies in the option and bond markets.

The nearly mythical computer software program PROMIS, created in the 1970s by former NSA analyst Bill Hamilton, plays a sort of Rosebud role in this narrative – complete with a trail of unexplained deaths and disappearing files that renders some of its avatars, especially those containing backdoor eavesdropping capabilities enhanced by artificial intelligence (AI) almost impervious to investigation.

As a matter of fact, Lars had been contacted by Bill Hamilton, who asked him if he could help in relation to the PROMIS affair. It was this request – which took place in the Spring of 2012 after Lars had just published a 9/11-Insider Trading article at Asia Times – that has been the spark which started the investigation you are about to read.

For the German reader, one of the firsts of this sprawling analysis is to take what is considered in the U.S. as a “conspiracy theory” – Mike Ruppert’s seminal 2004 book “Crossing the Rubicon” – and, in Lars’s words, “figure out how far it can be proven correct, more than 15 years after it was published.”

Lars shows in detail how 9/11 enabled a state of emergency, a permanent Continuity of Government (COG) in the U.S. and mass surveillance of U.S. citizens – connecting the dots all the way from missing trillions of dollars in the Pentagon to NSA data mining and leading U.S. neocons. The latter had been praying for a “Pearl Harbor” to reorient US foreign policy since 1997. Their prayers were answered beyond their wildest dreams.

The investigation eventually displays a startling road map: the war on terror as a business model. However, as Lars also shows, in the end, much to the despair of U.S. neocons, all the combined sound and fury of 9/11 and the Global War on Terror, in nearly two decades, ended up bringing about a Russia-China strategic partnership in Eurasia.

It’s fair to ask the author what did he learn as he juggled for years with this immense mass of information. Lars points to the familiarity he acquired with the work of Peter Dale Scott – author, among others of “The Road to 9/11”, and a specialist in the origins of the U.S. Deep State – which is diametrically opposed to the sanitized narrative privileged by the Beltway and U.S. corporate media. Lars presents information by Peter Dale Scott that had never been translated into German before.

Special Agent Lars Cooper / Lars Rosenfield had in effect to kiss goodbye to a career as a journalist, because “I’ll be forever scorned as a ‘conspiracy theorist’,” as he told me. So a stark choice was in play; fearlessness, or a comfortable career as a corporate hack. In the end, Lars chose fearlessness.

In Twin Peaks, Special Agent Dale Cooper has ultimately to confront himself. He knows he’s lost if he tries to run away from his dark self – who is “the dweller on the threshold.” Our Special Agent Lars Cooper definitely did not run away from the dweller on the threshold this time around. He dared to cross to the other side to stare at the abyss. And now he’s back to tell us in a book what it looks like.

Denken wie der Feind – 20 Jahre Ausnahmezustand 9/11 und die Geopolitik des Terrors 

(“Thinking Like the Enemy – 20 Years State of Emergency, 9/11 and the Geopolitics of Terror”), by Lars Schall

Book 1: Das Erdöl, der Dollar und die Drogen

(The Oil, The Dollar and The Drugs)

Via Books on Demand (BOD):

ISBN for the book: 9783753442938. For the e-Book: 9783753414737

Book 2:  Das “Pearl Harbor” des 21. Jahrhunderts (The “Pearl Harbor “ of the 21st Century)

Via Books on Demand (BOD):

ISBN for the book: 9783753460796. For the e-book:  9783753433882

Blockbuster: Epstein, Aided by Mossad, Local Cops, Raped, Threatened to ‘throw woman to alligators’ – New Lawsuit

By VT Editors -March 30, 2021

• …Epstein and Maxwell threatened and intimidated her by emphasizing Epstein’s influence over the FBI, the U.S. Office of Homeland Security’s Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Florida state and local law enforcement, according to the lawsuit….(through both Epstein’s and Maxwell’s Mossad connections)
• ...Epstein also promised to help find her husband a job with the FBI…
• …Epstein’s lawyers, including famed prosecutor turned defense lawyer Kenneth Starr, appealed to the Department of Justice in Washington, urging them to intervene in the South Florida case…

Ken Starr and George W Bush

Raw Story: In a new lawsuit, a woman identified as only “Jane Doe” claims that Jeffrey Epstein and his companion Ghislaine Maxwell repeatedly raped her in front of her 8-year-old son at a hotel in Naples, Florida, in early 2008, the Miami Herald reports.

The woman also claims the pair trafficked her to have sex with other men, including an unnamed local judge, and that Epstein forced her to undergo a vaginal medical procedure so he could market her as a virgin to one of his “high profile” clients.

The lawsuit says Doe was a real estate broker who met Epstein and Maxwell sometime in 2006 or 2007 and helped him find property to rent, for which he paid cash and instructed her not to identify him as a tenant or process his identification. He later offered her to work for him.

“About six months later, Doe, ‘persuaded by the persistent efforts of Maxwell,’ agreed to consider working for Epstein,” the Herald reports. “A trained hairdresser, Doe said she was hired to go to Epstein’s Palm Beach mansion in January 2008 to cut Epstein’s hair. When she arrived, Epstein was naked and, with Maxwell’s assistance, brutally raped her, according to the lawsuit.”

After he raped her, Epstein allegedly gave her $200.

When Doe threatened to call the police, Maxwell claimed that she had already called the police. Then, according to the lawsuit, two men who claimed to be police officers showed up and threatened to arrest Doe for prostitution, take away her son, and deport her.

“Epstein then ushered the plaintiff to the body of water and told her in explicit detail that — as had happened to other women in the past, according to the pair — she would end up in this body of water and be devoured should she ever reveal what Epstein had done to her,” the suit says.  From the Miami Herald:

The woman, who is identified only as “Jane Doe,” claims that Epstein and Maxwell repeatedly raped her in front of her 8-year-old son at a hotel in Naples, Florida, in early 2008; that they trafficked her to have sex with a number of other men, including an unnamed local judge; and that Epstein forced her to undergo vaginal surgery so that he could market her as a virgin to one of their “high-profile” clients.

The woman, who is identified only as “Jane Doe,” claims that Epstein and Maxwell repeatedly raped her in front of her 8-year-old son at a hotel in Naples, Florida, in early 2008; that they trafficked her to have sex with a number of other men, including an unnamed local judge; and that Epstein forced her to undergo vaginal surgery so that he could market her as a virgin to one of their “high-profile” clients.

Then Epstein and Maxwell ordered Doe to drive with them in Doe’s vehicle, picking up her son along the way. During the trip, they pulled off the side of the road to a waterway filled with alligators.

“Epstein then ushered the plaintiff to the body of water and told her in explicit detail that — as had happened to other women in the past, according to the pair — she would end up in this body of water and be devoured should she ever reveal what Epstein had done to her,’’ the suit says.

At a hotel in Naples, over a period of days, Doe was repeatedly raped by Epstein and Maxwell in the presence of her young son, she said.

---

…introduction by Jonas E. Alexis, VT Editor

JEA: It is well known that Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, Robert Maxwell, was a double agent for the Israeli Mossad. Robert was a staunch supporter of Israel during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. He actually made a deal with the Czech communists at the time, who provided Israel with guns and bullets in order to fight the Arabs.[1]

Maxwell, who was called “a ruthless bully” by the Daily Mail,[2] was a Jew from Czechoslovakia who eventually became a flamboyant British mogul through various publishing empires such as the New York Daily News and Mirror Group newspapers.[3] In 1991, his body was mysteriously found floating in the Atlantic Ocean. The Guardian later asked, “Was it murder? Suicide? Or just an accident?”[4] The newspaper moved on to say that there was “talk of suicide, or murder – perhaps by Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service.”[5]

Anyway, after his death, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, a terrorist in the strict sense of the word,[6] declared that Robert “has done more for Israel than can today be told.”[7] The question is simply this: Were Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein Israeli spies, blackmailing and titillating politicians and preying on other people’s weakness?

In Epstein: Dead Men Tell No Tales, Dylan Howard and co-authors Melissa Cronin and James Robertson produce enough evidence showing that Jeffrey Epstein was indeed an Israeli agent, acting covertly and using sex rings to trap politicians and powerful people. This is one reason why Epstein constantly bragged that he “had dirt on powerful people…. some of it potentially damaging or embarrassing, including details about their supposed sexual proclivities and recreational drug use.”[8]

James B. Stewart of the New York Times himself declared last year that “many prominent men and at least a few women must be breathing sighs of relief that whatever Mr. Epstein knew, he has taken it with him.”[9] In other words, those people had a vested interest in seeing Epstein dead.

We will discuss the full content of Epstein: Dead Men Tell No Tales next year. But what should be clear by everyone here is that there is more to the Jeffrey Epstein debacle than meets the eye and ear, and Philip Giraldi, a former intelligence officer for the CIA, is giving us an introduction of what this is all about.

The Maxwells: Mossad’s First Family of Spies

By Philip Giraldi, former CIA officer

The story of the deceased pedophile and presumed Israeli spy Jeffrey Epstein continues to enthrall because so little of the truth regarding it has been revealed in spite of claims by the government that a thorough follow-up investigation has been initiated. The case is reportedly still open and it is to be presumed that Justice Department investigators have been able to examine certain aspects of what occurred more intensively. A major part of the investigation has been a review of actions taken by the four government prosecutors who were most directly involved with the negotiations with Epstein and his lawyers in 2007-8. The 22 month-long review, carried out by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), finally produced a 350 page report which was released on November 12^th.

The DOJ has now picked out a scapegoat for what many now think was gross prosecutorial negligence, possibly including corruption of senior government officials. He is not surprisingly Alexander Acosta, who was the U.S. Attorney for Miami when the Epstein case came up. Relying substantially on internal government emails as well as communications between the prosecutors and Epstein’s team of high-profile lawyers to reach its conclusion, the OPR review concluded that Acosta exhibited “poor judgment” in his handling of the Epstein deal. He did not inform the victims or their attorneys of developments in the case, as required by law, and overruled the lead prosecutor and FBI agents who argued that Epstein should face serious jail time. He even cut a deal with Epstein before the investigation into his crimes was completed. The OPR investigators also determined that many emails that would have materially aided the plaintiffs were not made available to their attorneys, a shortcoming that the report attributed to a “technological error.”

The email gap covers the time span from May 2007, when the prosecutor’s office prepared a 53-page draft indictment of Epstein, to April 2008, shortly before Epstein’s guilty plea and slap-on-the-wrist sentence in state court ended the federal investigation. Epstein’s defense attorneys had during that time period been engaged in an aggressive lobbying campaign to persuade the federal prosecutors to rescind the indictment and shut down the federal case. Epstein’s “sweetheart deal” with the federal government negated a possible conviction of serious crimes against 19 alleged victims, most of whom were minors. Instead of a possible sentence of between 14 and 17 years in federal prison, Epstein was encouraged by federal prosecutors to plead guilty to two prostitution-related crimes in state court to resolve the case. He served 13 months of an 18-month sentence in a county jail on a liberal work release program, often sleeping in his own home, and the federal case was duly closed.

It is, of course, noticeable that neither Acosta, who has possibly now retired from public life, nor anyone else will be punished for what was clearly a gross miscarriage of justice. That is the way the government works these days. But there is also a much bigger problem with the report, which is that it essentially failed to follow up on an argument that Acosta made when the bungling of the Epstein case began to surface in the media last year.

There has, in fact, been a cover-up of a major element in the Epstein saga, namely his possible connection with Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad. Investigative reporter Whitney Webb has recently completed an exhaustive review of what we know about Epstein’s partner in crime, lover and accomplice Ghislaine Maxell, to include some consideration of the possible involvement of her sisters Isabel and Christine in activity initially directed by their father, known Mossad agent Robert Maxwell.

The evidence that Epstein was directly involved in intelligence work to include bribing or blackmailing prominent individuals to act on behalf of Israel, derives both from the statement made by Acosta in 2017 that “I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone,” a comment that the Justice Department and FBI have apparently never sought to investigate further. It also derives from other external evidence. Epstein was found to be making videos of his guests having sex with his young girls, which is a version of a classic intelligence entrapment technique employed by every major spy agency worldwide and in his Manhattan mansion he had a large supply of diamonds, cash and an Austrian passport on hand if he should have to make a quick escape.

That Epstein would be linked to Israel rather than to some other intelligence service is inevitably due to his relationship with Robert Maxwell, which eventually included his daughter Ghislaine. Robert, a Czech Jew who became a naturalized British citizen, was believed by C.I.A. and other intelligence services to be a long-time agent of Mossad. After he died under mysterious circumstances, he was given a state funeral in Israel that was attended by every current and former head of the Jewish state’s intelligence service as well as by the country’s prime minister Yitzhak Shamir who eulogized: “He has done more for Israel than can today be said.” Ghislaine reportedly became the principal procurer of Epstein’s young girl victims.

Also corroborating the tale of espionage even if it appears to be of no interest to the FBI and Justice Department, is a book Epstein: Dead Men Tell No Tales written by a former Israeli intelligence officer who actually ran the “Robert Maxwell” operation, describing inter alia how Epstein and Maxwell were blackmailing prominent politicians on behalf of Mossad. According to Ari Ben-Menashe, the two had been working directly for the Israeli government since the 1980’s and their operation, which was funded by Mossad and also by prominent American Jews, was a classic “honey-trap” which used underage girls as bait to attract well-known politicians from around the world, a list that included Prince Andrew and Bill Clinton. The politicians would be photographed and video recorded when they were in bed with the girls.

But in spite of the evidence, the role of Ghislaine, currently in custody in a maximum-security Brooklyn prison, is less well known and is possibly being deliberately concealed by the Trump Administration, which is prone to do favors for Israel. Even less known is the possible roles of her two sisters. Webb details how Maxwell and his Israeli Mossad handlers compromised the top-secret information system then in use by the U.S. government. She observes that “While Ghislaine’s own ties to intelligence have…come to light in relation to her critical role in facilitating the Jeffrey Epstein sexual blackmail operation,…little, if any attention, has been paid to her siblings, particularly Christine and her twin sister Isabel, despite them having held senior roles at the Israeli intelligence front company that facilitated their father’s greatest act of espionage on Israel’s behalf, the sale of the bugged PROMIS software to the U.S. national laboratories at the heart of the country’s nuclear weapons system… Ghislaine herself also became involved in these [blackmail] affairs, as did Jeffrey Epstein following his first arrest, as they began courting the biggest names in the U.S. tech scene, from Silicon Valley’s most powerful venture capital firms to its most well-known titans. This also dovetailed with Epstein’s investments in Israeli intelligence-linked tech firms and his claims of having troves of blackmail on prominent tech company CEOs during this same period.”

Upon Robert Maxwell’s mysterious death in 1991, his sons Kevin and Ian took control of many of the interlocking companies that their father had used both to conceal assets and to obtain access and information while Ghislaine remained in the New York area and two other daughters Isabel and Christine opted to exploit the internet as an intelligence resource to build upon their father’s “legacy.”

Isabel, in particular, moved aggressively and eventually became recognized as the self-styled liaison between Israel’s government and Silicon Valley. Whitney Webb recounts in considerable detail how she “mov[ed] in ‘the same circles as her father’ and vow[ed] to ‘work only on things involving Israel’ … [to become] a pivotal liaison for the entry of Israeli intelligence-linked tech firms into Silicon Valley with the help of Microsoft’s two co-founders, Paul Allen and Bill Gates.”

One has to suspect that a tale of Mossad running a major spy ring in the U.S. using a pedophile and young girls might just be too much for some folks in power to tolerate and they have made sure that the true story will never see the light of day. But the tale of how the prominent ostensibly British Maxwell family, acting for Mossad, may have systematically spied on the United States over a number of years, often pretty much out in the open, and the FBI and Justice Department saw fit to look the other way, is bigger still. That is the real story. Israel yet again spies and Washington denies.

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• [1] John Loftus, The Secret War Against the Jews (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), chapter 9. I don’t necessarily agree with Loftus’ assertions.
• [2] Jane Fryer, “Misery of the Maxwells: Bankruptcy, sudden death, huge fortunes made and lost – the shattering legacy of all the children in thrall to their monstrous father Robert Maxwell,” Daily Mail, August 15, 2019.
• [3] “The story of Robert Maxwell: Ghislaine’s disgraced media-mogul dad,” NY Post, July 3, 2020.
• [4] Caroline Davies, “The murky life and death of Robert Maxwell – and how it shaped his daughter Ghislaine,” Guardian, August 22, 2019.
• [5] Ibid.
• [6] I have documented Shamir’s terrorist activities in the book Zionism vs. the West.
• [7] Gordon Thomas, Gideon’s Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 23.
• [8] James B. Stewart, “The Day Jeffrey Epstein Told Me He Had Dirt on Powerful People,” NY Times, August 12, 2019.
• [9] Ibid.

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The Puppet Masters: Is There Really a Deep State?

The danger posed by the Deep State is that it wields immense power but is unelected and unaccountable, Phil Giraldi writes.

By Philip Giraldi

Global Research, March 19, 2021

Strategic Culture Foundation 18 March 2021

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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As a former intelligence officer, I find it amusing to read articles in the mainstream media that blithely report how the latest international outrages are undoubtedly the work of CIA and the rest of the U.S. government’s national security alphabet soup. The recurring claim that the CIA is somehow running the world by virtue of a vast conspiracy that includes the secret intelligence agencies of a number of countries, using blackmail and other inducements to corrupt vulnerable politicians and opinion makers, has entered into the DNA of journalists worldwide, frequently without any evidence that the current crop of spies is capable to doing anything more complicated than getting out of bed in the morning.

One problem with the theory about total global dominance through espionage is the sheer logistics of it all. Directing political and economic developments in two hundred nations simultaneously must require a lot of space and a large staff. Is there a huge office hidden in Langley? Or the Pentagon? Or in the White House West Wing itself? Or is it in one of the secure facilities that have been popping up like mushrooms just off of the Dulles Toll Road in Herndon Virginia?

To provide evidence that intelligence agencies extend their tentacles just about everywhere, the other claim that is nearly always made is that all former spooks are part of the conspiracy, as once you learn the secret handshake to join CIA, NSA or the FBI you never stop being “one of them.” Well, that might be true in some cases but the majority of former spooks are quite happy to be “former,” and one might also observe that many voices in the anti-war movement, such as it is, come from intelligence, law enforcement or military backgrounds. Of course, the conspiracy theorists will explain that away by claiming that it is a conspiracy within a conspiracy, making the dissidents little better than double agents or gatekeepers who are put in place to make sure that the opposition doesn’t become too effective.

Given the fact that how the so-called American “Deep State” actually gets together and plots is unknown, one would have to concede that it is an organization without much structure, unlike the original Turkish Deep State (Derin Devlet), which coined the phrase, that actually met and had centralized planning. I would suggest that the problem is one of definitions and it also helps to know how the national security state is structured and what its legitimate mission is. The CIA, for example, employs about 20,000 people, nearly all of whom work in various divisions that collect information (spying), analysis, technology and also are divided into staffs that work transnationally on issues like terrorism, narcotics, and nuclear proliferation. The overwhelming majority of those employees have political views and vote but there is a consensus that what their work entails is apolitical. The actual politics of how policy comes out the other end is confined to a very small group at the top, some of whom are themselves political appointees.

To be sure, one can and probably should oppose the policies of regime change that the Agency is engaged in worldwide but there is one important consideration that has to be understood. Those policies are set by the country’s civilian leadership (president, secretary of state and national security council) and they are imposed on CIA by its own political leadership. The Agency does not hold referenda among its employees to determine which foreign policy option is preferable any more than soldiers in the 101^st Airborne are consulted when they receive orders to deploy.Rethinking National Security: CIA and FBI Are Corrupt, but What About Congress?

Nearly all current and former intelligence officers that I know are, in fact, opposed to the politics of U.S. global dominance that have been pretty much in place since 9/11, most particularly as evidenced by the continued conflict with Russia, the ramping up of aggression with China, and the regime change policies relating to Syria, Iran and Venezuela. Those officers often consider the invasions and exercise of “maximum pressure” to have been failures. Those policies were supported by truculent language, sanctions and displays of military readiness by the Trump Administration but it now appears clear that they will all be continued in one form or another under President Joe Biden, likely to include even more aggression against Russia through proxies in Ukraine and Georgia.

The officers engaged in such operations also observe that regime change has basically come out of the closet since 2001. George W. Bush announced that there was a “new sheriff in town” and the gloves would be coming off. Things that the intelligence agencies used to do are now done right out in the open, using military resources against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria while the biggest change of all, in Ukraine in 2014, was largely engineered by Victoria Nuland at the State Department. The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was also active in Russia supporting opposition parties until the Kremlin forced them to leave the country.

So, it is fair to say that the Deep State is not a function of either the CIA or the FBI, but at the same time the involvement of John Brennan, James Clapper and James Comey in the plot to destroy Donald Trump is disturbing, as the three men headed the Agency, the Office of National Intelligence and Bureau. They appear to have played critical leadership roles in carrying out this conspiracy and they may not have operated on their own. Almost certainly what they may have done would have been either explicitly or implicitly authorized by the former President of the United States, Barack Obama, and others in his national security team.

It is now known that President Barack Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan created a secret interagency Trump Task Force in early 2016. Rather than working against genuine foreign threats, this Task Force played a critical role in creating and feeding the meme that Donald Trump was a tool of the Russians and a puppet of President Vladimir Putin, a claim that still surfaces regularly to this day. Working with Clapper, Brennan fabricated the narrative that “Russia had interfered in the 2016 election.” Brennan and Clapper promoted that tale even though they knew very well that Russia and the United States have carried out a broad array of covert actions against each other, including information operations, for the past seventy years, but they pretended that what happened in 2016 was qualitatively and substantively different even though the “evidence” produced to support that claim is weak to nonexistent.

I would, nevertheless, argue that their behavior, though it exploited intelligence resources, was not intrinsic to the organizations that they led, that the three of them were part and parcel of the real Deep State, which consists of a consensus view on running the country that is held by nearly all of the elements that together make up the American Establishment, with its political power focused in Washington and its financial center in New York City. It should come as no surprise that those government officials who are complicit in the process are often personally rewarded with highly paid sinecure jobs in financial services, which they know nothing about, when they “retire.”

The danger posed by the Deep State, or, if you choose, the Establishment, is that it wields immense power but is unelected and unaccountable. Even though it does not actually meet in secret, it does operate through relationships that are not transparent and as the media is part of it, there is little chance that its activity will be exposed. One notes that while the Deep State is mentioned frequently in the national media there has been little effort to identify its components and how it operates.

Viewed in that fashion, the argument that there exists a cohesive group of power brokers who really run the country and are even able to coopt those who are ostensibly dedicated to keeping the country safe becomes much more plausible without denigrating the many honest people who are employed by the national security agencies. The Deep State conspirators don’t have to meet to plot as they all understand very well what has to be done to maintain their supremacy. That is the real danger. The Biden Administration will surely demonstrate over the next several months that the Deep State is still with us and more powerful than ever as it operates both inside and outside the government itself. And the real danger comes from the Democrats now in charge, who are if anything more given to playing with consensus politics that involve phony threats than were the Republicans.

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Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.orgaddress is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org

He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Blockbuster/Exclusive: More Mossad Ties between ‘Bear Spray Killers’ , proof of Israel’s role in January 6

By VT Editors -March 16, 2021

January 6 was a last ditch attempt by Israel to save the Trump presidency and turn the US into a full-fledge colony of Israel.  How anti-Semitic does that sound?How true does it sound?VT Exclusive: We have been doing background on the January 6 killers of Officer Sicknick.  When Elie Khater was arrested getting off a plane from Israel and that was hidden, we knew there was something else.We then found this article from Newsweek, owned by former Congresswoman Jane Harmon, who was “busted” for trying to free Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, who gave America’s NOC List to the Russians. This is the real story and why every top US intel official for 28 years demand he “burn in hell.”Now we find young Israeli “American’ Elie Khater, the alleged murder, was, with his mother, evacuated from Lebanon to save them from Hezbollah, in 2006, by the US military.Dad is never mentioned nor is why they were there serving in an unnamed intelligence capacity.  Fake people, fake restaurants, no murder charges…it keeps getting better and better…

Onscene: Pain, Joy, After Leaving Lebanon

BY NEWSWEEK STAFF ON 7/20/06 AT 8:00 PM EDT

Sitting aboard the USS Trenton as it leaves Lebanon, Elie Khater is crying. But unlike most Americans aboard this amphibious assault ship, her tears are not those of joy over escaping a country tumbling into war. The 43-year-old mother of four is sobbing because the clashes between Israel and Hizbullah have forced her out of her adopted home in Kherbert Kanafar, a small village where her husband’s family has a fruit orchard and where the New Jersey native has lived since 1994.

The Khaters decided to leave Lebanon after Israeli airstrikes hit nearby villages and roads, cutting off most escape routes. Their harrowing drive to Beirut on a bomb-damaged road was terrifying; now the prospect of going back to America breaks her heart. “Lebanon has become my country and it’s is horrible beyond words to be leaving behind my extended family, my friends, my life,” she weeps.

The Khaters were among the thousands of foreigners trapped in Lebanon when fighting broke out 10 days ago. On Friday, an estimated 4,000 Americans were scheduled to leave for Cyprus in what Brig. Gen. Carl Jensen, the U.S. Marine Corps officer commanding the operation, calls a “voluntary withdrawal.” A similar number have already been evacuated over the last two days, with the United States chartering ferry boats and rerouting seven naval ships to help Americans trying get out. Helicopters were also deployed to fly out humanitarian cases like the elderly and disabled.

Why aren’t they charged as cop killers?  Could it be because of reasons only VT will publish?  Arrested in the airport while exiting a plane from Tel Aviv…shouldn’t that fact be gotten out?  We think so…and hiding it tells us volumes…

VT: Julian Elie Khater was picked up today as he got off a plane from Tel Aviv at the Newark Airport. Both Khater and George Tanios are childhood friends who grew up in New Brunswick, New Jersey’s Jewish community, just outside Philadelphia.

Khater fled to Israel after the killing of Officer Sicknick during the January 6 coup attempt by Donald Trump.  Autopsy results have been withheld, particularly toxicology, but VT sources say Officer Sicknick died from a reaction to being soaked with powerful “Bear Spray”, listed as a “dangerous weapon.” 

Video exists showing both Khater and Tanios deploying bear spray against Officer Sicknick, but it also shows that both were coordinating deployment of chemical weapons with highly trained teams that were searching for members of Congress, teams allegedly in communication with GOP House members.

This is a separate FBI investigation. A House investigation has published 2000 pages of tweets from members of the House and Senate that were used, it is alleged, “in real time” to hunt Vice President Pence and his family and Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

We also found, with little effort, that Tanios’ restaurant, if you can call it that, is fake as well.

VT’s sources say both Khater and Tanios are former IDF intelligence and are Israeli citizens. We also learn that Tanio’s “restaurant” is not so much either, one review at Tripadvisor:

and from Yelp:

Every decent Mossad agent is taught to keep their cover and make money at their side business.  Certainly the Mossad’s highly paid journalists are proof of this.  Look at Hannity and Carlson…

WaPo: Federal authorities have arrested and charged two men with assaulting U.S. Capitol Police officer Brian D. Sicknick with bear spray during the Jan. 6 Capitol riot but have not determined whether the exposure caused his death.

Julian Elie Khater, 32, of Pennsylvania and George Pierre Tanios, 39 of Morgantown, W.Va., were arrested Sunday and are expected to appear in federal court Monday.

“Give me that bear s—,” Khater allegedly said to Tanios on video recorded at the Lower West Terrace of the Capitol at 2:14 p.m., where Sicknick and other officers were standing guard behind metal bicycle racks, arrest papers say.

About nine minutes later, after Khater said he had been hit with bear spray, Khater is seen on video discharging a canister into the face of Sicknick and two other officers, arrest papers allege.

Khater and Tanios are charged with nine counts including assaulting three officers with a deadly weapon — Sicknick, another U.S. Capitol Police officer identified as C. Edwards, and a D.C. police officer identified as B. Chapman. They are also charged with civil disorder and obstruction of a congressional proceeding. The charges are punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

Prosecutors filed charges after tipsters contacted the FBI allegedly identifying Khater and Tanios from wanted images released by the bureau from surveillance video and officer-worn body camera footage, the complaint said. It said the men grew up together in New Jersey, and that Khater had worked in State College, Pa., and Tanios owns a business in Morgantown.

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Arrested at Newark Airport getting off a plane from Israel in an FBI sting, something censored by the Washington Post

Khater was arrested Sunday in Newark, N.J., according to an unsealed arrest warrant signed by a magistrate judge on March 6. Family for Khater could not be immediately reached.

Questions remain about whether anyone will be held criminally responsible in Sicknick’s death. Autopsy results for Sicknick were still pending as of Monday, according to a spokeswoman for the deputy mayor of public safety in D.C.

Without a cause of death, his case has not been established as a homicide, although charging papers allege that evidence of an assault on Sicknick is clear on video.

This is, officially, the longest autopsy ever.  It it isn’t a coincidental natural death, then it is a homicide.  Why the games.  Both impeachment docs and US Atty. Rosen stated Sicknick was murdered and did so many weeks ago.

An FBI agent alleged in charging papers that publicly available video showed that after Khater asked for the bear spray, Tanios replied, “Hold on, hold on, not yet, not yet … it’s still early.” The agent said the exchange showed that the two allegedly were “working in concert and had a plan to use the toxic spray against law enforcement.”

The agent asserted that the men “appeared to time the deployment of chemical substances to coincide with other rioters’ efforts to forcibly remove the bike rack barriers that were preventing the rioters from moving closer to the Capitol building,” using their hands, ropes and straps.

All three officers were temporarily blinded and incapacitated for more than 20 minutes, and Edwards sustained scarring beneath her eyes for several weeks, charging papers said.

Sicknick died at a hospital about 9:30 p.m. Jan. 7, one day after 139 police officers were reportedly assaulted by an angry mob of Trump supporters wielding sledge hammers, baseball bats, hockey sticks, crutches and flagpoles. At least 800 people entered the Capitol after a smaller number forced entry, police have testified, seeking to block Congress from confirming the November presidential election victory of Joe Biden.

FBI focuses on video of Capitol Police officer being sprayed with chemicals

Referring to Sicknick, a House-passed article of impeachment charged Trump with inciting insurrection, alleging that members of a crowd he addressed “injured and killed law enforcement personnel.” Trump was acquitted after 57 senators voted to convict him for inciting the attack, 10 short of the two-thirds majority needed.

Then-acting U.S. attorney general Jeffrey A. Rosen said in a statement shortly afterward that Sicknick died of “the injuries he suffered defending the U.S. Capitol,” echoing a statement by Capitol Police.

Investigators determined that he did not die of blunt force trauma, people familiar with the matter said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation. After more than two months, no autopsy or toxicology report has been made public.

This report, however, has been kept from the public.  Is it because every suspect arrested can be charged with full 1st Degree Murder, not simply trespass, as per well established legal precedent.

Officer Brian D. Sicknick recalled for his ‘shared humanity’The senator described Sicknick’s death as a “crime” that “demands the full attention of federal law enforcement.” He said “when white supremacists attacked our nation’s capital, they took the life of one of our officers. They spilled his blood, they took a son away from his parents. They took a sibling away from their brothers.”

Beaten, sprayed with mace and hit with stun guns: Police describe injuries to dozens of officers during assault on U.S. Capitol

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https://file411.substack.com/p/julian-elie-khater-and-george-pierre?r=2i5gr&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&utm_source=twitter

Julian Elie Khater and George Pierre Tanios – charged and arrested in the Death of US Capitol Police Officer Brian Siknick

Finally and yes it was captured on Body Worn Camera(s)

Both charged (these are incredibly serious charges);

18 U.S.C. §§ 111(a) and (b) – Assault on Federal Officer with Dangerous Weapon; 18 U.S.C. §§ 111(a) and (b) – Assault on Federal Officer with Dangerous Weapon; 18 U.S.C. §§ 111(a) and (b) – Assault on Federal Officer with Dangerous Weapon; 18 U.S.C. § 372 – Conspiracy to Injure an Officer; 18 U.S.C. § 231(a)(3) – Civil Disorder; 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)(2) – Obstructing or Impeding Any Official Proceeding; 18 U.S.C. § 1752(a)(1), (2), (4), (b)(1)(A) and (b)(1)(B) – Physical violence on restricted grounds, while carrying dangerous weapon, and resulting in significant bodily injury; 40 U.S.C. § 5104(e)(2)(f) – Violent entry and disorderly conduct, act of physical violence on Capitol Grounds; and 18 U.S.C. § 2 – Aiding and Abetting.

As the affidavit reads:

“Officers Sicknick, Edwards and Chapman, who are standing within a few feet of KHATER, all react, one by one, to something striking them in the face. The officers immediately retreat from the line, bring their hands to their faces and rush to find water to wash out their eyes…

….defendants, JULIAN ELIE KHATER and GEORGE PIERRE TANIOS, working together to assault law enforcement officers with an unknown chemical substance by spraying officers directly in the face and eyes….”

Again I’ll never understand why the “fire extinguisher” took root – I repeatedly tried to tell my readers that was disinformation that the death was likely caused by the excessive deployment of a chemical irritant;

“KHATER continues to talk animatedly with TANIOS. At approximately 2:20 p.m., KHATER walks through the crowd to within a few steps of the bike rack barrier. KHATER is standing directly across from a line of law enforcement officers to include U.S. Capitol Police (“USCP”) Officers B. Sicknick and C. Edwards, and Metropolitan Police Department (“MPD”) Officer D. Chapman, who was equipped with a functioning body worn camera (“BWC”) device.

Officer Chapman’s BWC shows that at 2:23 p.m., the rioters begin pulling on a bike rack to Chapman’s left, using ropes and their hands to pull the rack away. Seconds later, KHATER is observed with his right arm up high in the air, appearing to be holding a canister in his right hand and aiming it in the officers’ direction while moving his right arm from side to side. Officer Chapman’s BWC confirms that KHATER was standing only five to eight feet away from the officers.

“Officers Sicknick, Edwards and Chapman, who are standing within a few feet of KHATER, all react, one by one, to something striking them in the face. The officers immediately retreat from the line, bring their hands to their faces and rush to find water to wash out their eyes, as described in further detail…

“KHATER is again observed raising his arm and continues to spray in the direction of law enforcement officers. MPD Lt. Bagshaw notices these actions and approaches KHATER. At 2:23 p.m., Lt. Bagshaw then sprays KHATER, as observed on both surveillance footage and Lt. Bagshaw’s BWC….”

“All three officers were incapacitated and unable to perform their duties for at least 20 minutes or longer while they recovered from the spray. Officer Edwards reported lasting injuries underneath her eyes, including scabbing that remained on her face for weeks…”

“Defendant KHATER was listed as subject number 190. Defendant TANIOS was listed as subject number 254. A tipster to the FBI provided information that TANIOS and KHATER knew each other and grew up together in New Jersey…”

So investigators received several tips and subsequently reviewed the defendant’s LinkedIn account and other social media accounts

It came down to the “Sandwich University” sweatshirt and a keen eye by both a former coworker and the investigators …

“kingofthefatsandwich.” no really that’s in the affidavit …

Redacted Affiliation Found here. According to the DOJ-OPA:

“…arrested on Sunday in connection with a complaint filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., charging them with conspiring to injure officers and assaulting federal officers, among other charges, on Jan. 6.  Khater was arrested as he disembarked from an airplane at Newark Airport in New Jersey.  Tanios was arrested at his residence in West Virginia.

Motion for Detention filed by USA as to Defendant Tanios:

https://ecf.wvnd.uscourts.gov/doc1/19903090082

Or via my public drive https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xwceNNp-gLcaVKJte87Ds6ViR76Er1av/view?usp=drivesdk

Sorry more files incoming – paperless Minute Order WVDC- Defendant Tanios

United States v. 2012 White Jeep Grand Cherokee with West Virginia License Tag 53T507, VIN 1C4RJFAT2CC204303 (1:21-mj-00024) ECF

-and it is well worth reading the 65+page affidavit in support of the search warrant – I uploaded it to my public drive, found here. I literally have <27 minutes before I have to jump on a Teams Call – so I’m speedy racing through the Court Documents

United States v. 708 Beechurst Avenue, Morgantown, WV 26505 (1:21-mj-00025)

Seized)(mh) (copy USA, Agent) (Entered: 03/14/2021)

Document Number:1 Attachment Description Affidavit Agent – Attachment A – Property to be Searched and Attachment B – Description of Property to be Seized

United States v. 205 Blue Ridge Lane, Morgantown, WV 26508 (1:21-mj-00026) ECF

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US: One of Deadliest Shootouts in FBI History Leaves 2 Agents Dead

By Staff, Agencies

The FBI announced that two of its agents were fatally shot and three were wounded in a shootout as they executed a search warrant in Sunrise, Florida, on Tuesday morning.

The subject of the warrant is dead, the FBI said in a statement.

The shooting occurred at about 6 a.m. as a team of law enforcement officers executed the federal court-ordered search warrant as part of a violent crimes against children case, according to a statement from FBI Miami Special Agent Michael D. Leverock and spokesman Jim Marshall.

At an afternoon media briefing, Special Agent in Charge George Piro said the suspect opened fire.

Two agents with multiple gunshot wounds were taken to the hospital and are in stable condition, officials said. The third injured agent was treated at the scene.

FBI Director Christopher Wray identified the deceased agents as Special Agent Daniel Alfin and Special Agent Laura Schwartzenberger.

“Every day, FBI Special Agents put themselves in harm’s way to keep the American people safe. Special Agent Alfin and Special Agent Schwartzenberger exemplified heroism today in defense of their country,” he said in a statement. “The FBI will always honor their ultimate sacrifice and will be forever grateful for their bravery.”

The shooting took place at the Water Terrace apartment complex, an upscale gated community outside Fort Lauderdale, at 6:04 a.m., according to Sunrise Police spokeswoman Otishia Browning-Smith. The person who officers were looking for had barricaded himself, she said.

The shootout, one of the deadliest in FBI history, brought a major law enforcement response to the area.

The FBI said its Inspection Division is investigating the shooting.

“The review process is thorough and objective and is conducted as expeditiously as possible under the circumstances,” the FBI statement said.

Joe Biden-Administration may focus only on internal issues

January 26, 2021

by Zamir Awan for the Saker Blog

Congratulations! Joe Biden has been taken oath as the 46th U.S. president, terminating one of the most intense political transitions in modern American history. Due to various internal threats, heavy deployment of troops has turned Capital Washington into a military Garrison. The security measured taken never witnessed in the past. Donald Trump – who has not formally acknowledged the presidency to Mr. Joe Biden – ridiculed the inaugural ceremony, in a departure from longstanding precedent, Vice-President Mr. Pence handed over the Presidency to Mr. Joe Bidden. Mr. Trump has become the first president not to attend his successor’s inauguration since 1869. He left the White House early on Wednesday and flew to the nearby Andrews Air Force base.

President Joe Biden, 78, was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1942. At the young age of only 29, in 1972, he became one of the youngest persons ever elected to the U.S. Senate. He went on to serve as a six-term senator from Delaware. A well-versed, mature politician, having served under several US-administrations, having gained an in-depth understanding of state affairs, received greetings from all around the world and messages of good wishes. He is a ray of hope for many Americans and hopes for the rest of the world.

Trump-era was full of controversies, chaos, and unrest, especially during the last couple of months, he has created an enormous mess. The hate, turmoil, and internal drive he has left behind him, are an inheritance to President Joe Biden.

Many questions are arising in the minds of many Americans as well as around the globe. Like: Who is the real threat to the U.S. national security? It has been propagated often that the U.S. is facing external threats, especially from China and Russia. These are a phenomenon of the cold war era and vanished long ago. However, the chaotic Capitol riots on January 6 have set an alarming message to the world as a new food for thought. The internal clashes and civil unrest of the U.S. Capitol’s type have switched external military aggression as the primary source of threats to human lives and state stability. It directly affects the collapse of the internal system and the erosion of “democracy” and the typical capitalistic system. Failure of state rit and helplessness of state institutions means a destruction.

President Biden has frequently stressed the term “unity” in his opening address, precisely what’s needed in present China-US relations. Because over the past four years, a small number of anti-China politicians in the United States have misled and lied too much out of their political interests and prompted too much hatred and division, and the people of both countries have all been hurt because of it. Many people of vision from China, the United States, and the international community hope China-US-Russia relations will get back to the right path at an early date. All sides can work together to meet the significant persistent challenges facing the world today. The same is valid in the case of Russia-US relations. President Biden said in his opening address; democracy allows disagreement, and “Disagreement must not lead to disunion”. It is hoped this should also be revealed in his foreign policy. Countries with different political & social systems, cultural backgrounds, and ideologies should and are fully capable of coexisting in harmony, engaging in dialogue and collaboration, and collectively work for world peace, stability and prosperity. President Biden also mentioned that the United States “has too much to heal, much to restore.”

The world welcomes the United States’ return to the Paris Agreement and looking onward to its positive contributions to fighting climate change. The Paris Agreement is an outcome of multilateralism, which united together countries worldwide, reinforces the implementation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and is an essential legal instrument to guide post-2020 international collaboration on climate change.

U.S. withdrawal from WHO, it is well-known that WHO is a specialized organization in international health and plays a vital leading and coordinating role in international anti-epidemic collaboration. In particular, against the grim situation of the raging COVID-19 Pandemic, the International community welcome the United States’ return to WHO and wishing to strengthen cooperation with the United States and other countries.

The Capitol riots have exploded unprecedented U.S. political and social anarchy like a spark falling into an oil container. Especially while the U.S. claimed global superpower and claimed its leadership role for the whole world, such mishaps were never expected. It has irreversibly, irrecoverably, and unforgettable damaged the reputation and image of the U.S. internationally. Although the chaos dragged the country into its darkest moment was controlled temporarily, it might take decades to restore completely. The FBI is cautioning that it has received information of “armed protests” in all other states in the days to come. It is expected that the departed President Trump may not sit idly, but continue to create more hurdles for President Joe Biden, and ultimately bleeding America. The hate and divide, which he has made in American society, is not easy to mend.

The Capitol invasion, the anti-racism protests that brushed the U.S., and the rapid-growing and uncontrolled epidemic are sufficient to prove that the U.S. is decaying speedily and badly sick. The ailing economy has also impacted adversely and aggregated in the radicalization of the situation. The U.S., punctured with deep flaws, is now being plagued by ongoing internal crises. It’s rational to say the country’s internal division has touched the level where it’s hard to mend. The political and social divergence has produced hatred, high risks of violence, and unrest. Civil war could be ignited at any moment. A country is mostly known for its gun culture, the legislation over guns and ammunition is another factor to endanger the risk of the civil war-like situation.

Americans are known for planting sabotage, subversion, and conspiracies around the world. But due to the Pandemic, they could not travel abroad, and finally, they have to stage it on their soil. It is time for a typical American to feel the pain of such crimes committed in other countries. It is hoped that such things will not be repeated in any part of the world, and human rights must be respected irrespective of race, religion, or ethnicity.

Will American society be restored or continue to be torn apart? Will the U.S. see more turmoil or keep its stability? If the U.S. still can’t sort out the real threat to its national security and flops to diagnose that the biggest enemy of the U.S. is itself, the scenarios of the country will be even miserable. In fact, Americans are the victim of superiority complex and feel shame to acknowledge their weaknesses or flaws. They are reluctant to learn from others and have closed all options to improve their thinking or political system.

Why has the U.S. been stuck in such grave internal crises? One of the reasons is that, for a long time, Washington has spared little interest in addressing domestic problems but has been more excited about shaping ideological adversaries, engaging in geopolitical competition, and provoking major power confrontations. The 2017 U.S. National Security Strategy declared “inter-state strategic competition” as a significant national security concern. Over some time, the domestic problems kept on compiling, and finally, the volcano has to burst one day.

The U.S. sets itself as a “firm” protector of national security and interests by creating a hype about the “China threat” or “Russia threat.” For example, U.S. Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe in December 2020 branded China as “national security threat No.1,” blaming China for posing the greatest threat to America, as well as to democracy and freedom around the globe. U.S. president-elect Joe Biden termed Russia as Washington’s most severe global threat during his election campaign.

The U.S., since the Cold War, has been the single superpower in the world. No matter how hard it tries to expose alleged foreign foes, no external forces can cause such a big country to flop.

But can shaping alleged foreign adversaries bring American unity? Should the U.S. have dedicated more resources and energy to resolving its domestic flaws, getting liberated from ideological prejudice and a sense of supremacy over its political system, and converging more on major power collaboration rather than rivalry, it may have encountered a different domestic situation.

The only element that can cripple the country is its internal crunches. The domestic dilemma the U.S. is facing demonstrations the country’s biggest enemy is itself. The question is: Who dares to speak this out in the U.S.? It is hoped the scholars, intellectuals, politicians, and visionary individuals and professionals may think neutrally and realize their faults and formulate policies to rectify things in the best interest of humankind worldwide.

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Author: Prof. Engr. Zamir Ahmed Awan, Sinologist (ex-Diplomat), Editor, Analyst, Non-Resident Fellow of CCG (Center for China and Globalization), National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Islamabad, Pakistan. (E-mail: awanzamir@yahoo.com).

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