SOTT Focus:

Connecting the Dots: Whistling Past The Graveyard

Sott Editors
Sott.net
Sat, 14 Aug 2010 17:34 UTC

July 2010 saw extreme weather and the further apparent collapse of our planet's eco-system come front and center. Despite these dire warning signs, the psychopaths in power continue to do their best to obfuscate the facts and embroil as many normal human beings as possible in conflict, strife, suffering and death.

On July 15th, three months after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded and sank to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, BP announced it had successfully capped the gushing oil well. Its vice president Kent Wells was so relieved that he said, "I am very excited that there's no oil in the Gulf of Mexico." It's hard to know what to make of such a comment after his company leaked 5,000,000 barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Perhaps he thought that with the oil flow halted, BP was suddenly off the hook and free to carry on as normal? Apparently so, as the company announced several days later it will soon begin drilling to even greater depths off the coast of Libya. So did this latest effort to cap the well actually work? We can't know for certain because we have to take BP's word for it. Remember that it was in BP's interest to underestimate the oil flow rate; the lower the oil flow rate, the less they have to pay the US government and the local Gulf population in fines and compensation. The true cost to the whole planet may be higher than anyone could have imagined.

Read on for the web's best comprehensive summation of the current state of our planet...

Toxic Gulf

Successfully capping the well should have produced tremendous pressure under the cap, but when that didn't manifest it became obvious that oil was leaking from elsewhere. Distrusting BP's assessment, the US government sent its own monitors to the site on July 18th and immediately noticed that oil and methane was coming up from under the sea floor. By the time this news was leaked to the press, unnamed government officials confirmed that oil was "seeping a distance from the well," possibly alluding to what oil industry insider Matt Simmons was referring to when he berated the absurdity of focusing on the capped well when there is another massive hole leaking oil "miles" from the Deepwater site. Once again, BP was caught lying through its teeth as CBS News also reported that oil and methane were detected surfacing three kilometers from the well head. Typical of the constant obfuscation we've been treated to since April, the Miami Herald reassured us that "detection devices have sensed naturally occurring seeps, which are a common phenomenon in the Gulf." It's ok, see, we've capped the leak at the well; all those other leaks are Mother Nature's fault. Matt Simmons, incidentally, is now dead. He "drowned in his home" or "died of a heart attack", depending on which report you believe.

Operation 'static kill' saw the well pumped full of heavy drill mud that will soon be joined by cement to, in theory, plug the well for good. This was attempted in May but failed as the pressure was too strong to insert anything into the well. The fact that it worked this time around reinforces the reports of leaks occurring in multiple locations around the well. The well itself was most probably damaged during the initial methane explosion on April 20th. This would explain the lower than expected pressure behind the recent cap. Oil and methane is breaching the well casing and finding its way through fractures in the seabed. Considering BP's outright lies about the well head being sealed, what are we to make of the preposterous announcement on August 4th that not only had the well been permanently sealed, but most of the oil in the Gulf was now gone! Just like that! The White House claimed that "most of the oil was taken care of by Mother Nature - either consumed by deep-water bacteria or simply evaporating."

Lies, lies and damned lies. Most of the oil is "gone" because BP has been bribing many scientists, the media are not allowed to film it and the toxic Corexit has dispersed it deeper into the water column. Psychopaths simply declaring reality to be the way they wish us to believe it to be does not make it so. Just think of how BP was caught 'photoshopping' images of the disaster not once, but on several occasions. Just as the media were barred from access to damaged sites, BP has now moved to control academic research into its mess. It emerged last month that the company has been on a spending spree to buy scientists' silence and control all scientific research on the environmental and health implications of the disaster. BP brazenly attempted to hire the entire marine sciences department at one Alabama university as it prepares to fend off lawsuits, while scientists from Louisiana State University, Mississippi State University and Texas A&M have signed contracts with BP to determine how much ecological damage the Gulf of Mexico region has suffered. The contract "prohibits the scientists from publishing their research, sharing it with other scientists or speaking about the data that they collect for at least the next three years."

It is just more of the same wishful thinking that epitomises psychopathy to believe the public's perception of what is really happening in the Gulf region can be contained. The intensive use of Corexit to mask the visibility of oil means that the "75%" remains dispersed throughout the sea. The full extent of the problem remains hidden from view. But it's only a matter of time before people know the truth as the toxic fallout impacts every aspect of their lives. Methane concentrations over 100,000 times the Gulf water's normal limit have already altered the complex food web that forms the foundation of the Gulf's ecosystem. A 'dead zone' caused by low oxygen levels now stretches over an area the size of Massachusetts from Louisiana west along the Texas shoreline. Public authorities reassure us that the water is safe yet test after test of oil and water samples reveal dangerous levels of toxicity. We should remember that the Bush government also told the American public that the air around 'ground zero' at the WTC was safe. Thousands of rescue workers still suffering from respiratory illnesses today are a testament to that particular flagrant and callous government lie.

Surveys conducted to assess the human impact have found that nearly half of working class people in the Gulf are reporting skin irritations and respiratory problems, to say nothing of the damage to their psychological and economic well-being during what should be peak tourist season. A Center for Disease Control study found that 10% of the population of Key West, Florida was infected with the dengue fever virus, a critter carried by mosquitoes which produces symptoms in humans eerily similar to the effects of exposure to Corexit and crude oil:

Dengue Fever Outbreak in Florida Compounds Risks from Gulf Oil and Corexit Toxicity

H.P. Albarelli Jr. & Zoe Martell
Truthout.org
Wednesday, 21 July, 2010

The timing of this outbreak of dengue fever presents two additional problems; the symptoms of dengue fever are very similar to that of exposures to chemicals such as those contained in crude oil and the dispersants currently being used in the contaminated areas of the Gulf of Mexico, potentially making it difficult to diagnose the source of a sufferer's symptoms. Worse yet, there looms the possibility that Corexit and other toxins present in the Gulf area may weaken the immune system, thus, setting the stage for more severe forms of the disease in people who are, or have previously been, exposed to the virus.

In a bizarre twist, the department of Homeland Security Administration then issued a "terror alert" concerning the findings, although it was never made clear why. Is it really 'dengue fever' that people in Florida are coming down with? Gulf residents are furious with BP and its cover-up of the magnitude of the ecocide, but we wonder how they might feel if they learned that dengue fever was deliberately introduced into Florida by the CIA in the 1950s as part of Project Artichoke:

Several CIA documents, as well as the findings of a 1975 Congressional committee, reveal that three sites in Florida, Key West, Panama City and Avon Park, as well as two other locations in central Florida, were used for experiments with mosquito-borne dengue fever and other biological substances. [...]

The experiments in Avon Park, about 170 miles from Miami, were covertly conducted in a low-income African-American neighborhood that contained several newly constructed public housing projects. CIA documents related to its top-secret Project MK/NAOMI clearly indicate that the mosquitoes used in Avon Park were the Aedes aegypti type. Specially equipped aircraft, in one of the larger experiments, released 600,000 mosquitoes over the area. In one of the Avon Park experiments, about 150,000 mosquitoes were dropped in paper bags designed to open upon impact with the ground. Each bag held about 1,000 insects. Besides dengue, some of the mosquitoes were also carrying yellow fever.

When tens of thousands of dead bloated Menhaden fish were spotted floating in shallow Mississippi waters in early August, the Department of Environmental Quality sought to pull the wool over our eyes with reassurances that the dead fish had escaped through the torn net of a fishing trawler. Try telling that to the dead turtles or the dead dolphins washing ashore. In any event, just days later another huge fish kill was reported in Gulfport, Mississippi. "Unprecedented" fish kills were already being reported in June. As we go to press, yet another massive Menhaden fish kill was reported way up the US coast off Massachusetts, although here the blame is being attributed to unusually warm water. Residents say they've never seen anything like it. Tens of thousands more dead Menhaden fish washed ashore at Delaware Bay in southern New Jersey on August 11th.

Citing "incomplete forms," BP announced July 12th that it would be drastically reducing its payments on oil spill claims to some 40,000 Gulf residents directly affected by the catastrophe. In tandem with the US government, BP went even further the following week:

BP's Scheme to Swindle the "Small People"

Dahr Jamail
Truthout.org
Wednesday, 21 July, 2010

© Unknown
Gulf Coast fishermen and others with lost income claims against BP are outraged by a recent announcement that the $20 billion government-administered claim fund will subtract money they earn by working on the cleanup effort from any future damage claims against BP. [...]

Kenneth Feinberg, who was appointed by President Obama as the independent administrator of the Gulf Claims Facility for the $20 billion BP Deepwater Horizon oil disaster compensation fund, said yesterday that the wages earned by people working on BP's cleanup will be deducted from their claims against the company.

This is what corporate entities do of course; cut costs and maximise profits. Why pay people to clean up your mess when you can conscript slaves from America's vast prison population? With the highest rate of incarceration in the country, Louisiana's inmates offer BP a great way to save money and write off the meager hiring costs against their (already low) corporate tax in the process. Those clean-up workers that were hired through regular channels are not faring much better. They are paid pittance, morale is low and when they fall sick, they are simply told, "We'll call you", which means that they have been fired for daring to become ill and thereby contradict the official line that chemical dispersants are safe. Others were simply fired for talking to the media. How long before stories like this become a regular event?

Package bomb goes off at Houston oil executive's home

Stephen C. Webster
Raw Story
Sunday, 11 July

Pipe bomb disguised as chocolates sends woman to hospital

A seemingly anonymous gift left on the front porch of a Houston home owned by an oil company executive has the city's affluent population of oil profiteers on edge this weekend, after that package exploded and seriously injured a 62-year-old woman.

Neighbors of the victim told an ABC News affiliate in Houston that the bomb was disguised as a box of chocolates in a gift bag, left on the home's doorstep around Thursday.

Instead, it contained what authorities described as a pipe bomb carrying a load of thumb tacks and nails. When she opened the package on Friday evening, standing on her back porch around 6:30, it resulted in shrapnel embedded across the woman's face -- injuries police said were not life-threatening.

We naturally wonder if BP is behind a joint lawsuit on behalf of fishermen, residents and oil workers that seeks to blame the rescue fireboats for causing the oil spill, on the basis that their hosing of the burning rig caused it to sink and then snap the pipe connected to the well head. Of course, they left out the part where the greedy dwarves at BP insisted that the rig's employees ignore the warning signs and continue to drill until they died in a ball of flame. Next we learned that the lazy employees had "inhibited" the rig's alarm system in order to get a good night's sleep. That might have meant the difference in terms of saving more lives on the rig, but a few more seconds' warning would have done nothing to prevent the explosion and the subsequent gusher.

What can a corporation do when it becomes a target for the anger of an entire country? Change brands! Yes, BP is considering renaming its US gas stations, possibly reverting back to American Amoco, as protests, vandalism and plummeting sales hit its distributors' forecourts. It will take more than superficial changes to save the company from potential bankruptcy. A lawsuit has just been announced against BP claiming $10 billion in damages relating to an entirely separate incident at a Texas City refinery in May. BP CEO Tony - "I'd like my life back" - Hayward was finally forced out by the company on July 26th, sent on his merry way with a package worth over $18 million. Hayward may have taken the flack for BP's gross negligence but he has been replaced by BP's US executive Bob Dudley, who was actually charged with managing the oil spill response operation. One of the new CEO's first assignments was to make good with his former Russian partners-in-crime, from whom he fled in 2008 over a soured BP-Russian oil deal. His other important duty is to speed up the sale of some $20 billion in assets, ostensibly to fund the Gulf mess, but it's noteworthy that the company's American assets are first in line to be removed from the books. With former Amoco chief Bob Dudley back in the driver's seat and a name change in the cards, is BP preparing to abandon American shores?

We speculated back in May and June that BP was preventing the full picture from coming into public view because it sought to profit from the crisis itself. The US Securities and Exchange Commission confirmed our suspicions last week when it emerged that the financial regulator was "investigating whether employees at BP illegally profited from information not made available to the public in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill." The US government is apparently livid with BP after the company claimed a $10 billion tax credit supposedly incurred throughout the duration of the spill. What did it expect after creating such a lax regulatory environment that practically invites robber barons to pillage the country's resources at will? Elsewhere the greedy dwarves at Halliburton saw their 2nd quarter profits jump 83%, thanks largely to horizontal drilling on US land that is gradually poisoning the water table. The biggest cheer in the oil industry goes to Royal Dutch Shell, which announced a 34% hike in 2nd quarter profits to $4.2 billion after it "saved costs" by slashing 7,000 jobs. Don't worry, we rather suspect that Halliburton and Shell will get their comeuppance some day soon. We can only concur with Hiram Lee writing for the World Socialist Web Site when he says that these parasites are "in for a rude shock. The blatant criminality exposed by the BP oil spill, combined with the thoroughly corrupt and cynical response of the government, has only added to mounting public outrage in the US; outrage that will find political expression, sooner rather than later. When it does so, it must be based on the realization that there can be no serious response to disasters like the Gulf oil spill - and no serious effort to prevent the next disaster - that does not address the problem at its source: the capitalist system."Once people understand that the greedy dwarves driving the capitalist machine are psychopaths, the lights will go out for them...

The deadly combination of corporate malfeasance and cosmic climate change saw other significant oil spills hit the headlines last month. A 20-foot high gusher spewed oil and gas into the air just yards from the Louisiana marshes after a wellhead was hit by a tug boat that was part of the Deepwater cleanup. In mid-July disaster struck in Michigan as a broken underground pipeline connecting the US to Canada pumped over 1 million gallons of oil into the Kalamazoo River which flows into Lake Michigan:

Oil spill in Michigan's Kalamazoo River has echoes of Gulf of Mexico disaster

Kari Lydersen & David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post
Friday, August 6, 2010

"The pattern that we see here is a pattern of inadequate oversight and supervision [in government] and an industry that appears to cut corners," said the National Wildlife Federation's Tim Warman, who helped write a report documenting hundreds of accidents in the oil and gas industry in the past decade. [...]

"The pattern suggests that we're going to see more of them," Warman said.

© AP Photo/Jiang He, GreenpeaceA firefighter rushes to aid his colleague who ran into trouble amid thick oil cover as they attempted to fix an underwater pump in Dalian, China on Tuesday, July 20, 2010.

Within days the Michigan spill was dwarfed by a spectacular port incident in the northern Chinese city of Dalian on July 16th. A massive explosion and fire ruptured a pipe linking a berthed oil tanker to an onshore storage facility. When the fire threatened to spread to storage tanks containing crude and a highly flammable chemical called dimethylbenzene, PetroChina ordered the release of the nearest full tank before it could explode and wreak carnage on the city's 6 million residents. The fire raged for 15 hours and apparently burned off large amounts of the oil. Some 350,000 barrels of thick crude oil flowed downhill into the sea, making it a larger spill than the Exxon Valdez. That disaster spoiled 1,200 miles of Alaskan coastline, yet astonishingly the Chinese authorities claim that the combination of 23 tons of oil-eating bacteria, an army of 8,000 workers and 800 fishing boats using straw mats and stockings filled with human hair returned Dalian and the surrounding waters to its pre-spill state within 9 days. Volunteers were given a helping incentive to expose themselves to the toxic sludge by being paid $44 for every barrel of oil they collected, resulting in a clean-up frenzy. As we go to press two massive transport tankers have collided off the Indian coast, resulting in one of them leaking its cargo of oil products and threatening to sink altogether.

Did BP just bring on Climate Change?

There is a whole other aspect to the Gulf ecocide to consider. In mid-May satellite observation noticed that the oil slick was being pulled into the Loop current of the Gulf of Mexico. The Loop current is like the engine room of the global ocean Conveyor Belt, otherwise known as the Gulf Stream or the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation. Warm water enters the Gulf from the Caribbean and generates a looping current that takes it back down the Floridian Gulf coast and slingshots it around the sunshine state and out into the North Atlantic, where it effectively protects Europe from sheets of ice three miles thick. On the 18th of May, a long tendril of oil was observed stretching down into the Loop Current. That same day, the Loop Current began to break up! Specifically, it began disconnecting from the water current exiting the Gulf on its way to the Atlantic Ocean, leaving behind a clockwise eddy in the Gulf that became completely disconnected by mid-June. The significant findings were published by the National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Italy, and the paper's authors stated in the abstract that the "BP Oil Spill may cause an irreparable damage to the Gulf Stream global climate thermoregulation activity."

Risk of Global Climate Change by BP Oil Spill

Gianluigi Zangari
Frascati National Laboratories (LNF) - National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN)
Frascati 00044, Via E. Fermi, 40, ITALY

Correspondence to: Gianluigi Zangari Email: gianluigi.zangari@lnf.infn.it

Abstract: BP Oil Spill may cause an irreparable damage to the Gulf Stream global climate thermoregulation activity.

The Gulf Stream importance in the global climate thermoregulation processes
is well assessed. The latest real time satellite (Jason, Topex/Poseidon, Geosat
Follow-On, ERS-2, Envisat) data maps of May-June 2010 processed by CCAR^1,2

(Colorado Center for Astrodynamics Research), checked at Frascati Laboratories by the means of the SHT congruent calculus³ and compared with past years data, show for the first time a direct evidence of the rapid breaking of the Loop Current, a warm ocean current, crucial part of the Gulf Stream. As displayed both by the sea surface velocity maps and the sea surface height maps, the Loop Current broke down for the first time around May 18th and generated a clock wise eddy, which is still active (see Fig. 1).

Figure 1| Real time satellites data maps. Real time sea surface height maps (above) and sea surface velocity maps (below) starting from april 22nd until June 9th processed by CCAR1,2 and checked at LNF (Frascati) by SHT calculus³. The star indicates the site of BP platform Deepwater Horizon. The yellow arrow indicates the breaking of the Loop Stream.

As of today the situation has deteriorated up to the point in which the eddy has detached itself completely from the main stream therefore destroying completely the Loop Current, as in figure 2 below, dated June 12th 2010.

Figure 2: Real time satellites data maps updated. Real time sea surface height map (left) and sea surface velocity maps (right) updated on June 12th processed by CCAR^1,2 and checked at LNF (Frascati) by SHT calculus3. The star indicates the site of BP platform Deepwater Horizon. The yellow arrow indicates the breaking of the Loop Stream.

Since comparative analysis with past satellite data until may 2010 didn't show relevant anomalies, it might be therefore plausible to correlate the breaking of the Loop Current with the biochemical and physical action of the BP Oil Spill on the Gulf Stream. It is reasonable to foresee the threat that the breaking of a crucial warm stream as the Loop Current may generate a chain reaction of unpredictable critical phenomena and instabilities due to strong non linearities which may have serious consequences on the dynamics of the Gulf Stream thermoregulation activity of the Global Climate.

References

CCAR web page;

Leben, R. R., G. H. Born, B. R. Engebreth, 2002, Operational altimeter
data processing for mesoscale monitoring. Marine Geodesy, 25, 3-18;

G. Zangari patent SIAE-OLAF n. 9903198/1999

In other words, the Gulf Stream may no longer reach Europe and we will enter the next Ice Age. SOTT.net has been suggesting for years the likelihood of this scenario taking place, but we had not considered that the deviants within human society could be a significant factor in shifting the climate. What we have here is an interesting situation where, in the midst of climate change, a psychopathic corporation does what psychopaths do: screws things up out of greed, then gets the blame for the extreme cold next winter. Never mind that next winter was already going to be a doozy!

It's really not a good time to be a psychopath.

The last time we noticed the Gulf Stream break up for a week in mid December 2006, wild weather and freak natural events broke out across the northern hemisphere over a two week period, peaking around three weeks afterwards in January 2007. This time the "chain reaction" has taken us one step further into unchartered waters: the Jet Stream has split in two, a phenomenon that has produced a cascade of extreme weather this past month like we have never seen before. That in itself is not unusual, but observers are alarmed because they have never before seen the southern part of the split Jet stream move as far south as it has. The $64,000 question we need to ask is: Did BP's greed cause the Deepwater rig to explode; causing the gusher to turn the Gulf of Mexico black; causing the Loop Current to separate from the Gulf Stream; causing the Gulf Stream to break up; causing the Jet Stream to split in two; causing the recent extreme weather in Pakistan, Russia and China? The media have attributed the heatwave in Russia, the flooding in Pakistan and the landslides in China to the split Jet Stream. But note again what the scientists wrote above: "a chain reaction of unpredictable critical phenomena and instabilities due to strong non linearities." What this means is that at this stage in the show, cause and effect become harder, if not impossible, to disentangle. All bets are now off. Artificially tampering with ocean currents will produce non linear effects on regions that are not apparently connected in terms of established weather patterns. Besides, there are other factors at play here which have contributed to the extreme weather phenomena happening all over the globe, which we will turn to further on.

There was a noticeable increase in the number of strong earthquakes reported last month. Have a look at this list of quakes. Note the two highlighted clusters:

July 7th - Southern California, US: Magnitude 5.4, Nearly 1,000 Aftershocks Until July 14th
July 14th - Bio-Bio, Chile: Magnitude 6.5
July 16th - Washington, DC, US: Magnitude 3.6
July 18th - Fox Islands, Aleutian Islands, Alaska, US: Magnitude 6.7
July 18th - New Britain Region, Papua New Guinea: Magnitude 6.9
July 18th - New Britain Region, Papua New Guinea (2): Magnitude 7.3
July 20th - New Britain Region, Papua New Guinea: Magnitude 6.3
July 21st - North of Halmahera, Indonesia: Magnitude 6.1
July 22nd - Vanuatu: Magnitude 6.2
July 23rd - St. Lawrence Valley Region, Quebec, Canada: Magnitude 4.1
July 23rd - Moro Gulf, Mindanao, Philippines: Magnitude 7.3
July 23rd - Moro Gulf, Mindanao, Philippines (2): Magnitude 7.6
July 23rd - Moro Gulf, Mindanao, Philippines (3): Magnitude 7.4
July 23rd - Moro Gulf, Mindanao, Philippines (4): Magnitude 6.5
July 24th - Tonga: Magnitude 6.0
July 28th - Off Coast of Oregon, US: Magnitude 5.3
July 29th - Moro Gulf, Mindanao, Philippines: Magnitude 6.6
July 30th - Off East Coast of Kamchatka, Russia: Magnitude 6.2
August 3rd - Molucca Sea, Indonesia: Magnitude 6.3
August 4th - Papua New Guinea: Magnitude 6.4
August 4th - South of Fiji Islands, Fiji: Magnitude 6.0
August 4th - Andreanof Islands, Aleutian Islands, Alaska: Magnitude 6.4
August 4th - Utah, US: Magnitude 5.3
August 4th - New Britain Region, Papua New Guinea: Magnitude 7.0
August 4th - East of Kuril Islands, Russia: Magnitude 6.0
August 4th - Wyoming, US: Magnitude 4.8
August 10th - Vanuatu: Magnitude 7.5

Jim Holden, chief scientist for a US-Indonesia deep-sea expedition, reported that the 4 strong quakes recorded in the Gulf of Moro off the south Philippines on July 23rd were actually seismic readings of a significant underwater volcanic eruption. Kawio Barat, an enormous underwater volcano which rises 10,000 feet up from the sea floor level of minus 18,000 feet between Indonesia and the south Philippines, was only discovered two weeks before it erupted. We might wonder about other clusters of quakes in the region and whether they are purely tectonic in origin or are actually underwater eruptions of volcanoes unknown. One thing is certain: each new expedition that scans the underworld returns surprised at the greater than expected levels of volcanic activity taking place.

This, of course, is heating the oceans. Great stretches of coral reef are being turned white this year from the "high water temperatures." Scientists recently noticed huge areas of "previously pristine reef being turned into barren white undersea landscapes off the coast of Thailand and Indonesia," while monitoring teams have reported the mass bleaching of coral reefs off the coast of Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, the Maldives, the Caribbean, Sri Lanka, Australia and east Africa. The water temperature has risen by three degrees off the coast of Cambodia where 100% of the coral has bleached. A vast blue-green algae bloom the size of Germany has formed in the Baltic Sea after the prolonged heatwave in eastern Europe. Worse still, the types of algae are "toxic to humans and can cause skin inflammation." It happens every summer, but this year it has carpeted about 90% of the semi-enclosed sea. Elsewhere last month, residents of Orange County were freaked out by the appearance of a "neon green slime" along the Californian coast. Most alarming of all is the finding from a study published in Nature that worldwide phytoplankton levels are down 40% since the 1950s. The global warmists have tried to bend this data to fit their models, but this is another strong sign that the only warming taking place is coming from below and not from human activity on land.

The death toll has steadily been climbing in Pakistan where it has rained and rained for almost a month now. Some 4 million people's homes were washed away in a veritable tsunami of water. In fact, the scale of this catastrophe is so large that the UN has described it as the worst humanitarian disaster it has ever had to deal with - even larger in scale than the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. As we go to press, the Pakistani government has updated its estimate of the number of people left homeless to 20 million, saying that it was the worst crisis the country has seen since partition from India in 1947. Perhaps all those NATO military resources in the region can be put to good use clearing and rebuilding the enormous infrastructural damage caused by landslides and swollen rivers? We're not holding our breath though. The Pakistani government says this is beyond its capacity to deal with. Flash flooding extended into Kashmir and northern India where mud buried homes and killed hundreds more people.

A downpour "of biblical proportions" hit Mombasa, Kenya in mid-July. The freak event turned the streets into canals as parked cars floated away. The first typhoon of the year left at least 80 dead in the Philippines as its size and ferocity took the country by surprise. Although downgraded to a tropical storm by the time it hit Vietnam, Typhoon Conson was followed by Typhoon Chanthu just one week later and this time Vietnam suffered flooding and landslides.

During this time China was hit from both sides by the monsoon rains that devastated Pakistan and the typhoons from the east. Multiple landslides and widespread flooding across southwest China from the two typhoons left over 2,000 people dead and almost 1.5 million homes destroyed in the wettest rainy season the country has seen since 1998. Just three months ago southwestern China was experiencing its worst drought in 50 years. Now 25 rivers are at their highest ever levels and over 100 cities are flooded. Meanwhile in the northwest, Zhouqu in the Gansu province was inundated by a spectacular mudslide that carried away 6-storey buildings.

While south Asia is drowning, Russia is baking in the hottest continuous heatwave for at least 1,000 years, according to the head of the Russian Meteorological Center. The record-breaking heat has seen the thermometer climb to 45 C° in parts of European Russia. In Moscow alone at least 700 people are dying each day as the morgues overflow with dead bodies. Thousands of raging forest fires have also scorched vast tracts of arable land, destroying crops and producing a dense cloud of smoke that became a toxic smog when it combined with industrial pollution. By late July a third of Russian cereal crops had already been destroyed, prompting prime minister Putin to impose a ban on the export of all grains. As we go to press the estimate has risen to 40% of Russia's grain crops destroyed and winter sowing is at serious risk. By July 15th, 1,000 people, desperately seeking any water source in which to cool down, had drowned because they were unable to swim and got into difficulty. The numbers of dead are keeping pace with the rising mercury and we estimate that when the damage is surveyed after this passes, many more thousands will have suffocated to death from the heat and many more thousands of hectares of crops will have perished. The oven-like conditions are expected to last throughout August. As we go to press reports are surfacing that some countries are evacuating their embassies in Moscow.

© Associated PressValentina Kotikova, whose mother died from a stroke as their house burned to the ground, stands at the site of a fire in the village of Peredeltsy in Russia's Ryazan region on Thursday, August 5, 2010.

Now the mainstream media is loudly broadcasting that all this extreme weather in the northern hemisphere has a single cause. Yes indeed, the erratic behaviour of the high-altitude Jet Stream air current which has "split in two" and caused "all of these meteorological blocking events" (resulting in large anti-cyclones like the one over western Russia) is all due to...you guessed it, man-made climate change of course!

Frozen jet stream links Pakistan floods, Russian fires

Michael Marshall
New Scientist
Tuesday 10 August, 2010

According to meteorologists monitoring the atmosphere above the northern hemisphere, unusual holding patterns in the jet stream are to blame. As a result, weather systems sat still. Temperatures rocketed and rainfall reached extremes.

Renowned for its influence on European and Asian weather, the jet stream flows between 7 and 12 kilometres above ground. In its basic form it is a current of fast-moving air that bobs north and south as it rushes around the globe from west to east. Its wave-like shape is caused by Rossby waves - powerful spinning wind currents that push the jet stream alternately north and south like a giant game of pinball.

In recent weeks, meteorologists have noticed a change in the jet stream's normal pattern. Its waves normally shift east, dragging weather systems along with it. But in mid-July they ground to a halt, says Mike Blackburn of the University of Reading, UK (see diagram). There was a similar pattern over the US in late June.

© New Scientist[Click to enlarge]
So what is the root cause of all of this? Meteorologists are unsure. Climate change models predict that rising greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere will drive up the number of extreme heat events. Whether this is because greenhouse gas concentrations are linked to blocking events or because of some other mechanism entirely is impossible to say.

Now let's stop for a moment and think about what was just said. The author claims that climate change models predict that rising greenhouse gas concentrations will lead to an increased number of extreme heat events, BUT it is impossible to say what the mechanism of that will be.

This is, to use the vernacular, complete BS. Computers are not magical oracle machines that give accurate answers to any question posed. They are machines that are programmed to analyze data and give answers based on the input data. In other words, if we want a computer to tell me the value of 2 + 2, we must first program the computer with the rules of addition. If our program is well written, the computer will give us the correct answer of 4. If our program is faulty we will get some other answer.

Of course, we could easily impress people with the claim that a computer model has revealed that 2 + 2 = 5, but the fact of the matter will be that our computer model is simply wrong.

We will have two choices in how to build our computer model. One will be based on known absolutes, such as number theory (for the addition example) or the laws of physics. The other will be based on statistical analysis.

If, for instance, we wish to know where a feather will land on the ground when dropped from the roof, we could build a model based on the laws of physics and aerodynamics that will attempt to calculate the entire flight of the feather from the roof to the ground. This sort of calculation would require knowing the air temperature to calculate air density, prevailing wind, size and shape of the feather, etc.

The statistical model would, instead, be a guess based on a series of previous measurements. It might take into account the time of year and the air temperature, then correlate those with the previous measurements of where the feather had fallen at various times of the year. On still summer days, the feather would likely fall fairly straight down, while on winter days it would tend to drift off due to wind.

Note that in the statistical model it is impossible to tell exactly why the feather drifted or in which direction it would drift, while in the rule based model, that question could be answered absolutely. Also note that the statistical model is based on ignorance of the laws that govern the motion of the feather, and so are highly prone to error and invalid assumptions.

This is the case with the climate models referenced in this article. They are statistical, based on prior measurements, but can not (as they freely admit here) answer the question of why the particular results are produced. In other words, they are nothing but a high-tech guessing game.

As most people on the planet learned last winter, man-made climate change is a crock. We rather suspect that someone doth protest too much with the wide dissemination of the news about the jet stream. It's not like the PTB to make it easy for people to 'connect the dots' (can't have the masses thinking outside of the box, now can we?). So what gives here?

Pakistan just happens to be in the crosshairs of the PTB at the moment. We know that the PTB consider Asia to be the ultimate prize to megalomaniacal aspirations of world domination, and that US strategy is focused on "containing" Russia and China. We know the government within the US government has researched, tested and launched weather modification technology. Check out the following article written by political scientist Dr. Andrey Areshev and published in the International Affairs journal. This publication is an official organ of the Russian Ministry for Foreign Affairs and is chaired by the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov. Areshev's article was subsequently picked up by the Russian mainstream media:

Climate Weapons: More Than Just a Conspiracy Theory?

Dr. Andrey Areshev
International Affaris
Tuesday, 27 July 2010

[T]he incidence of the current anomalously high temperatures exclusively in Russia and some adjacent territories invites alternative explanations.

Back in the 1970s, Zbigniew Brzezinski invoked in his Between Two Ages the theme of weather control, which he regarded as a form of broader social regulation. No doubt, the heavyweight of the US geopolitical thinking had to take interest not only in the immediate social but also in the potential geopolitical implications of influencing the climate. He was not the only author to probe into the issue but, due to obvious regards, information on the progress in the sphere of climate weaponry is unlikely to spill over secrecy barriers in the foreseeable future.

Comment: The author then talks about HAARP as a potential source of weather manipulation, but as SOTT.net has pointed out on numerous occasions, its functional purpose actually concerns mass behavioural modification.

Far-reaching hypotheses arise naturally in the situation. Venezuelan leader H. Chavez was ridiculed for attributing the Haiti earthquake to the impact of HAARP but, for example, similar suspicions crept in following the 2008 earthquake in China's Sichuan province. Moreover, there is evidence that the US climate influence program not only spans a number of countries and regions but is also partially based in space. For instance, the X-37B unmanned vehicle orbited on April 22, 2010 reportedly carries new types of laser weaponry. According to New York Times, the Pentagon rejects any connection between X-37B and whatever combat weapons but recognizes that its purpose is to support ground operations and to handle a number of auxiliary tasks⁷. The vehicle was built 11 years ago as a part of a NASA program which was taken over by the US Air Force 6 years ago and completely classified⁸.

Demands to unveil details of the experimental program put into practice in Alaska are voiced both in the US and in several other countries. Russia never joined the chorus, but the impression is that efforts aimed at deliberate climate change are not a myth, and that in the nearest future Russia - together with the rest of the world - will face a new generation of threats. At the moment the climate weapons may be reaching their target capacity and used to provoke droughts, to erase crops, and to induce various anomalous phenomena in certain countries.

References

In Connecting the Dots February ('Haiti: Murder Inc.') we suggested the following scenario: that the earthquake in Haiti was a premeditated act of murder by the United states government to reimpose regional hegemony and to herald the arrival to its competitors of a new means of enforcing the planet through space-based toys like the above mentioned X-37B. Is the Russian government letting on that space-based weapons are behind the meltdown in Russia? We know that in the past Putin and company have been alarmed by their implications:

Russia issues warning on space-based weapons

New York Times
Thursday, September 27, 2007

Moscow - The chief of Russia's space forces said Thursday that the nation would have to retaliate if others deployed weapons in space - a stern warning to the United States.

While Colonel General Vladimir Popovkin did not name any specific country, he was clearly referring to U.S. plans for space-based weapons, which the Kremlin has vociferously opposed.

"We don't want to wage a war in space, we don't want to gain dominance in space, but we won't allow any other nation to dominate space," Popovkin said in televised remarks. "If any country deploys weapons in space then the laws of warfare are such that retaliatory weapons are certain to appear."

President Vladimir Putin has criticized U.S. plans for space-based weapons, saying they could trigger a new arms race. [...]

Russia and China have strongly pushed for an international agreement banning space weapons, but their proposals have been stymied by the United States. [...]

President George W. Bush signed an order in October 2006 tacitly asserting the right of the United States to space weapons and opposing the development of treaties or other measures restricting them.

We must bear in mind that any such activity is taking place within the context of global climate change. Extreme weather events are happening all over the planet. Do the PTB wish us to believe that they can influence the climate to the extent that it can target select countries? Is this just more slick perception management to reassure people that someone or some group is in control of things here on the BBM, thereby implying that events have not gotten out of control? As people wake up to what is going on, the last thing the psychopaths in power want to see happen is for people to make any cognitive connection between the advent of the Ice Age and the psychopaths' role in both blocking awareness of it and, as we've seen with the Loop Current in the Gulf of Mexico, in actually initiating the "chain reaction."

Nowhere was the contrast of extreme weather more prominent recently than in Canada, where Alberta was walloped with heavy snowfalls in mid-July and British Colombia was scorched with over 400 wildfires and a melting glacier caused a massive avalanche on Capricorn Mountain just two weeks later! 'Warmists' were excited about the news that a chunk of ice the size of Manhattan broke off from Greenland in early August but they seemed to forget - or were blissfully unaware - the likelihood that a significant factor in the onset of previous Ice Ages was the North Atlantic branch of the thermohaline "conveyor belt" circulation - the Gulf Stream - shutting down because of melting ice sheets. You will certainly never hear them mention the Berlingske Glacier in Greenland which has steadily grown 5 kms longer over the past century. In any event, the Antarctic ice sheet is becoming thicker and the extent of sea ice there is growing.

People are reporting larger and larger hailstones accompanying storms. There was a time when golf ball-sized hailstones were novel, like these ones that pummeled Calgary, Canada in early July, but when ice footballs ten inches in diameter and weighing over one pound start falling, like they did in South Dakota on July 30th, you know it's time to run for the hills.

There has also been widespread flooding in Europe recently. July was the wettest on record for the UK and Ireland, where there was a report of a tornado sighting. Flash floods killed 10 people in Poland and central Europe as the wet trend continues since April. The Russian heatwave initially extended across western Europe in early July. Another rare tornado, this time off the German coast, injured 8 people on the small island of Duene. Have a look at this monster as it rolled over Helsinki, FInland, on August 9th:

Shades of Independence Day!

Speaking of which, Hurricane Season is upon the US and it's expected to produce "6 to 8 major hurricanes." Much of the US also baked throughout July as temperatures regularly hit 100 F° along the southeast coast. The Midwest saw tremendous storms like the one in Chicago late July which produced 7.5 inches, normally about two months' summer rainfall, over just two days. Other locations in Iowa reported 9 inches of rain, causing the Lake Delhi Dam to burst. Two more sinkholes were reported in the US last month; one in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on July , which opened up during record-breaking rainfall for the city; but the other one, in Tampa, Florida, happened during fine weather. Both sinkholes suddenly collapsed, and both swallowed cars! They were just the latest in a string of sinkholes appearing all over the world since April.

As we go to press a third sinkhole has been reported in the US in the past month, this time in Cheektowaga, New York. A family was swimming outside when all the water suddenly drained out into a sinkhole that opened up beneath their backyard pool!

Temperatures of -25 C° in Peru have killed hundreds of people, forcing the government to declare a state of emergency. Over the past four years, Peruvian winters have become colder and reached ever lower altitudes, killing ever greater numbers of alpaca and people who do not have the infrastructure to survive the new climate. Parts of sub-tropical northern Argentina were dusted with rare snowfalls in mid-July as Latin America clocked up its longest cold streak in 17 years. Several inches of snow blanketed Cordoba, while Buenos Aires experienced its coolest day in a decade on July 16th. By the time the deep freeze extended to Chile, Brazil, Bolivia, Uruguay and Paraguay, thousands of cattle and hundreds of people died in sub-tropical regions where the temperature rarely falls below 20 C°. The shock was too much for river creatures in Bolivia where a reported 6 million (and counting) fish, alligators, turtles and dolphins died within days at the height of the freeze. The subfreezing temperatures in the Amazon jungle where the thermometer normally hovers around 35 C° coincided with hundreds of dead penguins washing up on the beaches of Sao Paulo.

Between Russia's decimated food supply, drenched crops in Europe and the frigid weather in Latin America, expect food prices to increase rapidly in the coming months. Farmers in South Africa are also asking where global warming went to as temperatures plunged last month and widespread frosts destroyed crops.

Notice above that the most notable recent earthquake data was the spike in the number of quakes on August 4th. What happened on August 4th? Well the one thing that stands out is a "complex eruption" on the Sun which sent a coronal mass ejection our way on August 1st and which reached Earth over the course of the 3rd and 4th:

Solar Tsunami Revealed in Stunning New Photo

Space.com
Friday, August 6th, 2010

© NASA/SDO/AIANASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory snapped this multi-wavelength extreme ultraviolet image of the sun, showing the Aug. 1 solar eruption that blasted charged particles toward Earth. The Class C3 solar flare triggered stunning aurora displays and geomagnetic storms on Earth that lasted about 12 hours.
The solar storm, which NASA called a "solar tsunami" in a Friday statement, occurred Aug. 1. It was a Class C3 solar flare in which almost the entire Earth-facing side of the sun erupted in a wave of tumultuous activity.

The solar particles began striking Earth's magnetic field Tuesday and sparked a powerful 12-hour geomagnetic storm and spectacular aurora displays.

Spaceweather.com reported that the impact sparked a G2-class geomagnetic storm that lasted nearly 12 hours, time enough for auroras to spread all the way from Europe to North America. This display is from a view over Lake Superior, Michigan:

After an eerie and protracted silence that extended well beyond solar minimum, the Sun has come alive recently and dazzled observers with multiple displays of sunspots and flares so large they are visible to the naked eye.

A high speed solar wind stream buffeted Earth's magnetic field in late July, causing geomagnetic activity around the poles. Zoltan Kenwell of Edmonton, Alberta, witnessed this display on July 27th:

On August 7th another solar flare, this time an even stronger M1-class flare, hurled another coronal mass ejection our way and produced more spectacular auroras:

Could the geomagnetic storm on August 3rd and 4th be related to the cluster of earthquakes on August 4th? Or is the same cause affecting both Sun and Earth? Our planet's magnetic field is connected to the Sun's by way of FTE, or "flux transfer event":

Magnetic Portals Connect Earth to the Sun

Tony Phillips
NASA
Thursday, 30 October 2008

Approximately every eight minutes, the two fields briefly merge or "reconnect," forming a portal through which particles can flow. The portal takes the form of a magnetic cylinder about as wide as Earth.

The sun's activity is not the only factor behind climate change. It's known that the upper atmosphere is cooling and recently it was discovered that solar minimum is not the primary reason for this. The biggest layer of the atmosphere, the thermosphere, expands and contracts with solar activity, but its last contraction during solar minimum 2008-2009 saw it collapse to a record low altitude for which the sun's inactivity alone could not account. Sun halos like this one have become a frequent sight, possibly as a result of an increase in the density of ice crystals in the upper atmosphere:

Whatever is changing the composition of the atmosphere is making its presence known in subtle ways. There were many sightings of fireballs last month. By "fireballs" we don't mean "shooting stars" where small streaks of light flash overhead during meteor showers, like the Perseid comet trail Earth has just passed through. We're more interested in the chunks of meteors and comets that burn up so hard in the atmosphere that they either reach the ground or explode overhead or produce spectacular light displays. Here's one falling over Chile; a giant one seen from Cape Town, South Africa; one that "turned night into day" over New Mexico, US; another from Arizona three days later; a "broad streak of brilliant green light" seen from the English countryside; another caught on camera over Russia the night of August 5th; and a similar view from Italy on August 8th. This one filmed from Lima, Peru initially seemed like the reflection from an airplane's contrail at sunset. But when the camera zooms in to the "airplane", well, there is no airplane there! There are reports that go way back about some of these cosmic visitors moving very slowly through the atmosphere - almost supernaturally slow.

Speaking of supernatural bolides, perhaps our strangest report of the month comes from Bosnia, where meteorites have recently hit the same house for the sixth time!

'Alien' meteorites hit Bosnian man's house six times

Monday July 19th, 2010
UK Telegraph

Radivoke Lajic, 50, said that his house being hit by rocks from space was the result of an extraterrestrial grudge.

"I am obviously being targeted by extraterrestrials," he said.

© CENRadivoje Lajic and meteorites that hit his house
"I don't know what I have done to annoy them but there is no other explanation that makes sense.

"The chance of being hit by a meteorite is so small that getting hit six times has to be deliberate."

Mr Lajic, who lives in the village of Gornji Lajici in northern Bosnia, near Prijedor, said that the meteorite strikes always happen when it is raining.

The first meteorite struck his house in November 2007.

Scientists at Belgrade University have confirmed that the rocks are all meteorites.

"I have no doubt I am being targeted by aliens," he said.

"They are playing games with me. I don't know why they are doing this. When it rains I can't sleep for worrying about another strike."

Mr Lajic has reinforced his roof with steel for fear that a meteor may hit his house. [...]

Mr Lajic first hit the headlines two years ago, when the fifth meteorite struck his house.

Scientists are now studying magnetic fields around the property to try and explain the frequency of the strikes.

Another meteorite hit a man in the chest as he watched a cricket match in England last month. Jan Marszel and Richard Haynes were amazed to see the small rock hit the ground in front of them, split in two then bounce up in their direction. On August 8th another man in Ohio, US heard a whistling noise before being grazed on one shoulder by a meteorite which then landed in his pool. It was still warm when he retrieved it.

What Leaks?

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been all over the airwaves giving interviews to explain his organisation's position as a neutral depository of information to which whistleblowers from anywhere in the world can send documents and files that authorities would rather never see the light of day. The release of thousands of US military files to the media last month came with such fanfare and hype that it seemed pretty obvious that somebody wanted people to pay attention to WikiLeaks' revelations and bring pressure to bear against the US government's war crimes in Afghanistan. The documents are raw data of US military encounters with everything from alleged 'Taliban' to Afghan goats, the intelligence for which was largely provided by Afghan spies and paid informants. The fact is that the documents tell us nothing that we did not already know about the illegal US military occupation of Afghanistan.

Chris Hedges summed it up well when he wrote:

the overall effect of the multi-part coverage of the documents is to paint a portrait of plucky, put-upon Americans trying their darnedest to get the job done despite the dastardly dealings and gooberish bumblings of the ungrateful little brown wretches we are trying to save from themselves.

Wikileaks checks most of the boxes of either a Pentagon operation or the project of a well-meaning but largely deluded Julian Assange who simply does not understand the gravity of the current global nightmare in which we find ourselves. By falling into the arms of the mainstream media, he has ensured that, if Wikileaks ever had a chance of making a difference, that chance is now gone.

For a would-be whistle-blower, Assange seems strangely averse to accepting the biggest conspiracy of them all. He recently stated:

"I'm constantly annoyed that people are distracted by false conspiracies such as 9/11, when all around we provide evidence of real conspiracies, for war or mass financial fraud."

The problem however is that government conspiracies to justify war are a matter of historical record. Perhaps Assange missed the recent official recognition of the Gulf of Tonkin incident as a false flag operation carried out by the US government?

Wikileaks' credentials grew steadily since its foundation in 2006, picking up awards and plaudits for shining a light on corporate and government misdeeds. It won the Economist's censorship award in 2008 and the Amnesty International media award in 2009. It published internal documents from Trafigura which led to the multinational shipping company being found guilty of dumping toxic waste in the Ivory Coast. But its first "leak" was from an Al Shabbab "insider" in Somalia. Al Shabbab is the Somali resistance group that the NeoCons in the Pentagon have sought to link to the fictional "al Qaeda," but which is actually the legitimate opposition to the US-backed "Transitional Federal Government of Somalia". Watch Assange describe how WikiLeaks played a key role in Kenya's national elections in 2007. Left out entirely is the fact that the US government's National Endowment for Democracy was inciting riots on behalf of the CIA at the same time. Curiouser and curiouser. With each leak posted on its website, WikiLeaks - which Assange describes as "an intelligence agency of the people" - has drawn ever larger audiences. The Collateral Murder video of a US Apache helicopter gunship mowing down innocent Iraqis was released in April and rapidly went viral, even though it was nothing out of the ordinary for US military behaviour in Iraq. WikiLeaks preaches "total transparency" yet it's considering "setting up a subscription service, where high-paying members would have early access to leaks." It has previously tried to auction off 7,000 internal e-mails from the account of a former speechwriter for Hugo Chavez. Hmmm... Assange is portrayed as a crusader of the Left, yet he sides with the US establishment by going after Chavez?

As Wayne Madsen put it, the steady build-up of its credentials helped "boost the website's bona fides as part of a cyber-psychological warfare campaign." He points out that

on Wikileaks' advisory board is Ben Laurie, a one-time programmer and Internet security expert for Google, which recently signed a cooperative agreement with the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and has been charged by China with being part of a U.S. cyber-espionage campaign against China. Other Wikileaks advisory members are leading Chinese dissidents, including Wan Dan, who won the 1998 National Endowment for Democracy (NED) Democracy Award; Wang Youcai, founder of the Chinese Democracy Party; Xiao Qiang, the director of the China Internet Project at the University of California at Berkeley, member of the advisory board of the International Campaign for Tibet, and commentator on the George Soros-affiliated Radio Free Asia; and Tibetan exile and activist Tashi Namgyal Khamsitsang.

Curiously, Wikileaks refrained from publishing a chunk of the files made available to them which covered US Special Forces operations in Afghanistan. If there is real gold to be found in these files then surely it is buried there? The New York Times and the Guardian have already told us the gory details about rounding up and executing schoolchildren. What the world needs to know about before the slaughter of Afghans can be stopped is the truth of what US counter-insurgency actually entails: setting off bombs in crowded places then blaming the insurgents; airlifting "Taliban" around Afghanistan to make it look like the opposing side is a credible enough force to justify US occupation of the country for the next decade; the CIA running up massive profits in the manufacture and sale of high-grade heroin. We want to see the receipts that prove that this is not a war but a death industry from which the same few people are getting exceedingly rich (again).

But instead all we have are these "War Logs" that effectively gifted the US and its allies multiple propaganda coups, all piled up on one plate, by portraying Pakistan as the bogeyman behind the carnage. Not only that, Osama bin Laden got a mention too: an August 2006 report placed him at a meeting in Quetta, Pakistan, where he was plotting and scheming with Mullah Omar to carry out suicide attacks in Afghanistan. No mention yet about the ISI official who wired Mohammed Atta $100,000 shortly before 9/11. Or the fact that any handling of Islamic militants the ISI does in Afghanistan is being done at the behest of the CIA. Another "leaked" report claimed that North Korea has been interfering with America's "democratization" of Afghanistan! Iran too, of course!

Historical comparisons were immediately being drawn with the release of the Pentagon Papers at the height of the Vietnam War. They are entirely appropriate, but not for the reasons laid out in the mainstream media. Fletcher Prouty explains in The Secret Team how the Pentagon Papers were stacked in the elite's favour by someone who wanted Pentagon employee Daniel Ellsberg to blow the whistle on just how atrocious the war had become. This justified the escalation of bombing campaigns as the US government made out like it was doing "everything in its power" to end the war, whereas in reality it was doing everything it could to justify massive military budget expenditure. The promotion WikiLeaks has received in the mainstream media is a major red flag. Look at this front page layout of the Guardian two days after the big scoop:

Faces of Afghanistan's Army - Meet the future of the fight against terrorism

July 29th, 2010

© Guardian/Kevin Frayer The Guardian's caption reads:

"Afghan soldiers, Combat Outpost Ware, southern Afghanistan

Images of 10 of almost 40 soldiers from the Afghan national army, who patrol from a US outpost in the Arghandab valley, near Kandahar. The army is largely made up of northerners, who fought the Pashtun-dominated Taliban from the south of the country."
Afghan soldiers, Combat Oupost Ware, southern Afghanistan

Images of 10 of almost 40 soldiers from the Afghan national army, who patrol from a US outpost in the Arghandab valley, near Kandahar. The army is largely made up of northerners, who fought the Pashtun-dominated Taliban from the south of the country. Portraits by Kevin Frayer

The Guardian could run glossy bios on Afghan mercenaries yet it missed a report on the £6 billion of military equipment that has "gone missing", according to a UK government audit. And what about 9/11? Is this war not based on the pretext of 9/11? Surely someone has leaked something to help fill in the gaping holes in the official conspiracy theory? Said Assange: "I'm constantly annoyed that people are distracted by false conspiracies such as 9/11, when all around we provide evidence of real conspiracies, for war or mass financial fraud."

The Pakistani media is rightly wondering how WikiLeaks came upon this heavily spun material at a time when the US is leaning heavily on Pakistan to support the Obama-Petraeus "surge". The new US commander in Afghanistan is the same general who led the slaughter of Fallujah. General Mattis freely admitted that "it's fun to kill in Afghanistan." With casualty rates soaring to record levels and no end in sight, Joe Quinn suggests that Operation WikiLeaks has served an altogether different purpose than revealing the "truth about the War in Afghanistan":

Beware Julian Assange and Wikileaks - Darlings Of The Mainstream Media

Every now and then, the people who make it their priority to keep their fingers on the pulse of public sentiment vis a vis the increasingly flagrant crimes of public officials, deem it necessary to introduce a faux people's hero. Someone who, apparently, has the balls and the gall to 'stick it to the man' and be the voice of the silent majority. The goal, and the effect, is to provide a vessel to suck up all that latent and growing public anger and outrage that is presumed to exist and disperse it in much the same way that Corexit was used to disperse the oil industry's mess in the Gulf of Mexico. I submit that Assange is just such a 'vessel', and I have to admit to wondering if this pallid and laconic man was chosen deliberately to represent the voice of the people - is that a true estimation by the powers that be of the potency of the potential threat from an irate population, or is that simply what they would like us believe...?

Today the US government demonises what it calls "the Taliban". But less than 30 years ago, the very same people were lauded as Freedom Fighters:

"To watch the courageous Afghan freedom fighters battle modern arsenals with simple hand-held weapons is an inspiration to those who love freedom. Their courage teaches us that there are things in this world worth defending. To the Afghan people, I say on behalf of all Americans that we admire your heroism, your devotion to freedom, and your relentless struggle against your oppressors."

~ Ronald Reagan, 1983

And if you prefer something more recent, here is current US Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, explaining how the US created "the Taliban".

The salient point here being that times do not change, but interests do. Meanwhile, here is a list of articles that highlight what is really going on in Afghanistan, and we didn't need to get hold of thousands of 'secret' documents to bring you this information:

July 11th: British Sangin pull-out evidences deepening crisis of US Afghan intervention
July 13th: Afghan Soldier Kills 3 British Soldiers
July 17th: Twin bomb explosions rock Lahore, Pakistan: No group claims responsibility
July 17th: Two US and six British troops killed in Afghanistan
July 17th: 'Pro-Taliban militants' kill 16 civilians in Pakistan
July 19th: Afghanistan Suicide Bombing Kills At Least 3, Injures Dozens
July 19th: Pakistan: Forty-two "militants" killed in Orakzai, Kurram
July 19th: 22 Taliban militants killed in western Afghanistan
July 19th: Afghanistan: Two US troops killed in separate bombings
July 24th: US drone attack kills 16 people in Pakistan
July 26th: Afghanistan: Karzai Says 52 Afghan Civilians Killed in NATO Strike
July 27th: Israel Trains German Pilots to Fly Drones in Afghanistan
August 13th: US airstrike kills 8 Afghan civilians

Last Days of the Empire

Six months on since Haiti was flattened in what we strongly suspect to have been an act of eco-terrorism that murdered some 250,000 people and left another 1.5 million homeless, the billions of dollars in humanitarian relief donated by the international community has still not reached the desperate survivors. Most people have no access to safe shelter, clean drinking water, electricity or basic healthcare. The next hurricane that passes through will bring more devastation to the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. The Western media has been echoing the prescribed talking points, painting the reconstruction effort as "stalled" because of infighting and disorganisation among donors, and blames a "lack of leadership" on the part of the Haitian government, which has been "paralysed by inertia".

It is disingenuous in the extreme to lay the blame at Haiti's door. One aid agency reported that the very opposite scenario is actually playing out. The reconstruction has been next to non-existent because the US government (through Bill Clinton and the incomparable 'Dubya') put itself in charge of building projects that are specified according to "the wishes of donor countries - mainly the US and the EU - rather than the needs of Haitians themselves." We saw this coming as soon as the vulture capitalists began circling overhead back in January. The bulk of the 12,000 US troops stationed in Haiti were pulled out by June 1st, having successfully prevented an uprising against what Patrick Martin rightly describes as Haiti's "stooge president, René Préval, and the tiny elite of Haitian multimillionaires":

American Imperialism and the Haitian Catastrophe Six Months After Earthquake

Patrick Martin
World Socialist Web Site
Tuesday, 13 July 2010

With the possible exceptions of Iraq and Afghanistan, no country in the world has been so despoiled by Washington's aggression, subversion and economic domination as Haiti.

This relationship continues in the so-called rebuilding effort sponsored by the United Nations. The commission established in March to oversee use of the $5.3 billion pledged to Haitian reconstruction is co-chaired by Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive, but real power lies in the hands of the American co-chair, former president Bill Clinton, and the Obama administration.

It is Washington that calls the shots on the use of the aid money, despite the fig leaf of Haitian participation. The commission did not even meet officially until June 17, more than five months after the earthquake, and then only because the onset of hurricane season made it necessary to approve a mere $31 million in projects to build hurricane shelters for a small fraction of the population.

Former president Clinton has repeatedly declared that his main goal is to encourage private investment in Haiti, and toward that end he has systematically promoted policies to ensure the profits of the banks and corporations of the United States and other imperialist powers.

Young Haitians chose the day after the six-month mark to protest in Port-au-Prince and demand that President Rene Préval resign as US viceroy. He will be gone by November 28th anyway when Haitians pay homage to the Democracy God and take part in a voting ritual reduced to mockery by 100 years of constant US intervention. This election will be no different as the US candidate is Wyclef Jean, a hip-hop musician from New York. How's that for "catapulting the propaganda"? Observers have questioned his suitability at a time when Haitians need strong leadership, but what they really need is to be galvanised by the historical truth of the US' pillage and murder of their country.

The sudden replacement of Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd with his deputy Julia Gillard on June 23rd had all the hallmarks of an outright political coup in which Australians had no say whatsoever. This skillfully executed coup took place in under 15 hours as the various movers and shakers within the Labor Party stepped in on behalf of the elite to protect its profits. Apparently Kevin Rudd's proposed 40 percent "resource super-profits tax" (RSPT) didn't go down well with the mining magnates that dominate Australia's political economy. John Pilger writes that all this tax amounted to was a modest tax on the profits of mining giants like BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto to help pay off the national debt: "The response was a vicious advertising campaign against the government and a threat to shut down mines." Tom Albanese, chief executive of the corporate mining behemoth Rio Tinto, berated Rudd's "resource nationalism" during a dinner speech he gave not long after the coup. To the applause of 500 mining executives, he said, "Policy makers around the world can learn a lesson when considering a new tax to plug a revenue gap, or play to local politics." In other words, don't anyone else dare to emulate the Australian example of taxing the corporations or you'll be sacked like Rudd, or worse. In the midst of demonstrating her authoritarian credentials to the elite, Gillard announced a snap election to be held later this month, clearly confident that their support will cement her coup.

Mining executive's speech points to key role in Australian coup

Nick Beams
World Socialist Web Site
Thursday, 15 July 2010

Under conditions where wide sections of the population are deeply disturbed about the axeing of Rudd, and the more politically conscious layers are becoming alerted to the real forces operating behind the façade of parliamentary democracy, the media is playing a critical role: to prevent any probing of the coup and the forces that organised it. [...]

The media's cover-up will intensify throughout the upcoming election campaign, as it works to ensure that any discussion of the political implications of the coup is suppressed.

But it is a different story within the corporate board rooms and upper echelons of the financial elite, where an intense discussion is underway of the Australian events and their relationship to the deepening global economic turbulence.

The coup against Rudd was a foretaste of the political shocks to come. It demonstrated that the dominant sections of the global financial and corporate elites will increasingly dispense with the trappings of parliamentary democracy and employ dictatorial methods to enforce their interests.

Rudd's resources super-tax proposal was immediately shelved by Gillard, the country's newly selected prime minister, who further heralded the government's shift to the right when she pledged that Australia would seek to build an offshore "refugee processing center" on East Timor and wrote an editorial for The Age and Sydney Morning Herald in which she played the War on Terror™ card and reassured Washington of Australia's commitment to the Empire by reversing a decision made by Rudd's defence minister only hours before the coup to withdraw Australian troops from Afghanistan.

The East Timorese were naturally livid at the idea of becoming Australia's Gitmo. Many of these refugees travel all the way from Afghanistan, a country Australia helped devastate. But the compliant media helpfully spun her idea as the foreign policy "gaffe" of a naïve newbie (East Timor's hard won freedom came despite Australia backing Indonesia's butchery in the tiny island state). Last year Gillard travelled to Israel (all-expenses-paid by Jewish Australian property tycoon Albert Dadon, now the employer of her husband) where she pledged her commitment to Zionism and was thanked by the Israeli government for championing "Israel's right to self-defence" during Operation Cast Lead. Is it just a coincidence that her June 24th coup took place exactly one year to the day that she arrived in Israel?

© Reuters/Jo Jung-Ho/YonhapThe U.S. nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS George Washington and the South Korean Navy's Landing Platform Helicopter ship Dokdo set sail to antagonise China and North Korea, July 25, 2010. Named after a man who freed the 13 colonies from England's imperial yoke, what would Washington think of the US today?

Connecting the Dots in May examined the 'rogue torpedo' incident that sunk a South Korean military vessel, the Cheonan. As far as the US government is concerned, North Korea was responsible for sinking the ship despite all the evidence to the contrary. The Obama administration used the incident for maximum leverage against both North Korea and China. When North Korea plays war games in the Sea of Japan or the Yellow Sea, it is accused of belligerence; but when the US combines its military hardware with South Korea's for a week of military exercises, as it did in mid-July and again in early August, it justifies it under that tired old 60-year Cold War pretext that North Korea is a danger to its Asian garrison. The Chinese and Russian governments do not believe North Korea was responsible for the Cheonan and perceive the US-South Korean exercises as an aggressive war dance in their backyard.

The only belligerence on display in the Asia-Pacific region is American. North Korea threatened a "physical response" which in turn prompted Hilary Clinton to announce fresh sanctions against a country already suffering from extreme isolation and untold poverty. Like her predecessor Condoleeza Rice, Clinton's warmongering efforts on behalf of the empire saw her sit in on an ASEAN security summit that met in Vietnam in late July where it was clear from the outset what her brief was: to side with Vietnam in a territorial dispute with China over a string of islands in the South China Sea. The US has some nerve pretending to "stand up for the little guy" after what it did to Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. History is repeating itself here (again) as the US becomes belligerent with another small Asian nation on the basis of a contrived naval incident. The New York Times covered the release of more than 1,100 pages of previously classified Vietnam-era transcripts on July 16th that make clear that then US president Lyndon B Johnson was fully aware that the Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which the USS Maddox was allegedly fired upon by the North Vietnamese navy, was in fact a non-event, a work of fiction undoubtedly spun by the Secret Team, the rogue element that links the world's intelligence networks.

How many wars can the US undertake at once? Things are heating up in the Latin American "war theater" too. When the Organisation of American States (OAS) met in Washington last month, the Colombia government accused Venezuela of harboring "terrorists" and presented videos, maps and photos to back up its claims that Colombian FARC and ELN rebels have bases in Venezuela, before giving the Chavez government a "30-day ultimatum" to allow for international intervention. Bernardo Álvarez, Venezuela's ambassador to the US, describes Colombia's Colin Powell moment:

Colombia Kicks Over the Negotiating Table

Venezuelanalysis.com
August 6th, 2010

At its face value, Colombia's supposed "evidence" was laughable, just as it has been on previous occasions when similar accusations have been made. [Colombian ambassador to the OAS, Luis Alfonso] Hoyos showed pictures of FARC insurgents, claiming that they were in camps deep in Venezuelan territory. The proof? A stray Venezuelan flag and a bottle of Venezuelan beer -- hardly incontrovertible geographic evidence. He then showed Google map locations of alleged FARC encampments on Venezuela's side of the border. But again, Hoyos failed to show that FARC or ELN insurgents were actually there, or that they had ever been there. Most importantly, he had no concrete evidence that their supposed presence was met with the approval of the highest reaches of the Venezuelan government.

Hugo Chavez furiously denounced the "evidence" as forgeries and insisted that any FARC presence in Venezuela's jungles is nothing to do with him. He announced on Venezuelan TV that Colombia had left his government no choice but to sever ties and explained that outgoing Colombian President Alvaro Uribe "is even capable of setting up a fake camp in one of the jungles on the Venezuelan side to attack it, bomb it and bring about a war between Colombia and Venezuela." That sounds exactly like the modus operandi of US Special Ops. The Obama administration denies interfering in Venezuela yet the US State Department was exposed in June with paying millions of dollars to "independent journalists" throughout Latin America, but particularly in Venezuela. Investigative journalist Eva Golinger, who brought to light the CIA's involvement in funding the US propaganda war against the Venezuelan government, reported July 26th that Chavez had come into possession of a memo sent to him by a source inside the US warning that US military intervention in Venezuela was a dead certainty. If this was Secret Team manipulation to prime Chavez to react, then it seems to have worked because within days Chavez sent troops to Venezuela's Colombian border. Although he was invited to attend the swearing-in ceremony of new Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, it's probably just as well Chavez didn't attend as a car bomb exploded in Bogota days later, injuring 9 people. Perhaps this was a reminder from the Secret Team, just to show him who's boss.

The violence in Mexico continued to escalate last month as a car bomb went off July 15th in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, killing police officers, journalists and medical personnel who were on the scene reporting and tending to the wounded from a gunfight that took place only minutes earlier. One of the bloodiest incidents in Mexico's drug war took place in the city of Torreon the following night. 17 people killed when gunmen burst into a party and fired over 100 rounds "at anything that moved." But the worst news emerged late July as over 50 bodies were found dumped in a mass grave outside Monterrey, discovered after an informant tipped off local police. Since Mexican President Felipe Calderon launched his military campaign against the Mexican drug cartels in 2007, some 25,000 people have been murdered, often in the most horrific circumstances imaginable.

© Warrick Page/Getty ImagesA terrified Iraqi boy watches an Iraqi Emergency Response Brigade member (trained by US Special Forces) ransack his family home after an arrest warrant was issued for his father.

Ever since Emperor Bush the Younger tried to wash his hands of Iraqi blood with that 'Mission Accomplished' stunt, the world has been treated to a marvel of Western propaganda that would convince us that the rivers of blood unleashed in Iraq is the result of a civil war that the foreign invaders must stick around to pacify. Arguably the substantial reason why Barack Obama was swept into power in 2008 was because he was committed to pulling US troops out of Iraq once and for all. Two years later we learn that they are not only staying put, but their numbers are set to increase:

Iraq Withdrawal? Obama and Clinton Expanding US Paramilitary Force in Iraq

Jeremy Scahill
The Nation
Thursday, 22 July, 2010

As a candidate for president, Senator Hillary Clinton vowed to ban the use of private security contractors, which she referred to as mercenaries. "These private security contractors have been reckless and have compromised our mission in Iraq," Clinton said in February 2008. "The time to show these contractors the door is long past due." Clinton was one of only two senators to sponsor legislation to ban these companies. Fast forward to the present and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is presiding over what is shaping up to be a radical expansion of a private, US-funded paramilitary force that will operate in Iraq for the foreseeable future--the very type of force Clinton once claimed she opposed.

Iraq is being left with no room to grieve as fresh waves of bombings and attacks terrorise the country anew. The US believes this justifies the continuation of its (now) proxy war in a country it has been bombing, besieging, looting, violating and terrorising in one form or another for almost 30 years. The question we always ask is; who is really behind the bombings of innocent civilians? Why would someone in the Iraqi resistance blow up his neighbour in an attempt to oust the foreign occupier? The answer of course is that they are not blowing themselves up; this too is the work of foreign intervention. Just think of the Israeli firms training Kurdish paramilitary groups in northern Iraq during the height of the carnage before the Bush "surge", while the Mossad had interrogators working night shifts at Abu Ghraib. Or the British SAS units disguised as locals shooting up police checkpoints from cars laden with explosives.

Who is bombing in Iraq?

Christopher King
Voltairenet.org
Sunday, 18 July, 2010

This latest series of attacks on top of a long series of lesser but still deadly attacks is not the work of a small group. It's a large, well disciplined, well financed group with substantial support.

© AP Photo/Alaa al-MarjaniA woman kisses the shrouded body of her four-year-old niece, Zainab, who was killed in a Baghdad bombing on June 21, 2010. The child was killed along with her entire family - mother, father, and sister - on Sunday, when "suicide bombers" attacked a crowded Baghdad commercial district.
The usual unnamed officials of unspecified nationality say that Al-Qaeda is doing the attacks. Well they would, wouldn't they? Am I mistaken in recalling that General David Petraeus's great success in Iraq was the elimination of Al-Qaeda? Or was that only while he was paying the Awakening Councils to go after them - if indeed Al-Qaeda was ever in Iraq at all. Since the Iraq invasion itself was based on a pack of lies there is no reason to believe anything that we are subsequently told about what is happening there or anywhere else where the US is involved.

Actually, even people on the ground in Iraq often don't know who is doing what and allegiances are constantly changing. It's suggested that Al-Qaeda doesn't want the Americans to leave because the cost of the occupation is damaging America. [...] I don't buy Al-Qaeda. That's the standard US scare story and it's worn out, like the dozens of accusations that Iran was behind the Iraqi resistance and supplying arms and bomb technology without a scrap of evidence. All propaganda and rubbish - like Saddam's nuclear programme, his weapons of mass destruction, his collaboration with Al-Qaeda, his mobile chemical laboratories. All now officially certified lies.

This is certain: the US invasion caused extraordinary devastation in Iraq and its continued presence is the problem for Iraqis. It's most likely that because they have no intention of leaving, it's the US itself that is behind the attacks. Or maybe the Israelis on their behalf, using locally organized groups. [...]

The Israelis, CIA, US and UK military all regularly assassinate suspected militants along with innocent men, women and children. They consider no-one to be innocent.

An audit of the US Defense Department recently found that over 95% of the $9.1 billion in Iraqi oil money it was supposed to set aside for rebuilding the hospitals, schools, roads, factories, utilities etc that the US destroyed... went missing. Over 95%. Missing. Only the day before it was revealed that British auditors refused on Monday to sign off the Ministry of Defence's accounts for the fourth consecutive year in a row after £6 billion of military equipment "went missing" in Afghanistan. But the British government had other things to deal with on July 26th: the British media got wind of news that the British Attorney General was looking into a report compiled by a former KGB officer who learned from an MI5 officer that "the competing firm", namely MI6, had "exterminated" Dr. David Kelly for his "reckless behaviour." SOTT.net readers won't be surprised to hear this, but what stands out is that the British press carried the story at all, perhaps signaling a struggle within the British establishment? The Lib-Lab coalition government was certainly in a truthful mood all week. First defence secretary Liam Fox admitted that British forces used tons of depleted uranium (which is considered illegal under international law to be a weapon of mass destruction) during their genocide against the Iraqi civilian population. This was followed up by new deputy prime minister Nick Clegg reminding parliament of what it 'temporarily forgot' that fateful day when Blair spellbound them into believing that Saddam's nukes were only 45 minutes away: that the invasion of Iraq had also been illegal under international law. Did you catch that, International Criminal Court? Prosecute Tony Blair now!

Insane Israel

What a surprise to learn that the Israeli military investigation into its own assault of the Freedom Flotilla that sailed for Gaza at the end of May was "plagued by errors of planning, intelligence and coordination", but was nonetheless fully "justified." The day after the report's release, the Israeli navy committed another act of piracy when it intercepted a Libyan aid ship and forced it to divert to the port of Al-Arish in Egypt. The British government's hot streak of truthfulness continued when prime minister David Cameron described Gaza as a prison camp, prompting Israeli president Shimon Peres to say that England was "deeply pro-Arab and anti-Israeli" and that the British establishment "always worked against us," a ridiculous assertion given that Israel would never have come into existence without the Balfour Declaration. The Egyptian government prevented a Jordanian aid convoy bound for the Gaza Strip from crossing the Red Sea on July 19th, but as we go to press, another humanitarian mission has set sail for Gaza City's port, this time with an all-female crew from Lebanon, another vessel shrewdly named Audacity of Hope (so named after one of Nobel peace laureate Obama's books) plans to sail from the US to the beleaguered territory soon, and the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, comprising veterans of the humanitarian mission in May, intends to send another flotilla of volunteers later in the year. This vanguard of action will likely be met with more Israeli brutality but their bravery has inspired dockworkers the world overto refuse to handle Israeli trade. Power to the People!

Israel's litany of crimes this past month was nothing out of the ordinary. In a propaganda war against Truth, psychopaths know that they must target journalists in order to minimise exposure, as evidenced by IDF assaults against Associated Press journalists covering Palestinian protests in the West Bank. In a country where 18 families control 60% of the equity value of all companies, it's little wonder that there is nothing to distinguish one political party from the next. With such a clannish concentration of power, a society's culture gradually loses any semblance of normal humanity. Whereas teenagers in normal countries go on summer camps to learn or participate in something constructive, in Israel some 70,000 teens are enlisted as police volunteers and are quietly conscripted into the state's military apparatus. "Summer camp" in this context means helping to remove the belongings of Palestinians before bulldozers and riot police move in to destroy people's homes. An entire village was destroyed in this way in late July. Is it any wonder that 1 in 8 Israeli teenagers have mental disorders? (Although we suspect this figure is much higher for Israeli males). Meanwhile Palestinian children are routinely detained in Israeli prisons and the government is set to expel hundreds of children of 'illegal immigrants' (in their own land) on the basis that they represent "a tangible threat to the Jewish and democratic character of the state of Israel," according to prime minister Netanyahu.

Palestinian Sabbar Kashur was sentenced to 18 months in prison last month for committing "rape by deception", a crime unique to Israel apparently, after he was turned in by a woman with whom he had had consensual sex, but failed to disclose to her that he was non-Jewish.

Judge Zvi Segal conceded that it was not "a classical rape by force"

Harriet Sherwood
The Observer
Sunday, 25 July 2010

"I am paying the price for a mistake that she made," Kushour, 30, told the Observer. "I was shocked at the sentence - it shows a very vivid and clear racism." The message from the judge, he says, was that "because you are an Arab and you didn't make that clear, we are going to punish you".

© Said Khatib / AFP/Getty ImagesA Palestinian child weeps during the funeral for a 22-year-old man who was killed in an Israeli airstrike in the southern Gaza Strip town of Khan Yunis on August 4th, 2010.

Such staggering mendacity is competing with the following story in which the Jerusalem Municipality authorised the destruction of a 12th-century Muslim cemetery by bulldozers on the basis that it was "built illegally" in order to take over the plot" of disputed land. Apparently its new owners, the Israeli Land Administration (ILA), wanted to "restore it to its prior condition."

Israel says ancient Muslim gravestones 'built illegally'

Soraya Bauwens-Nuseibeh
Ma'an News Agency
Friday, 6th August 2010

Dating back 1,000 years, the Ma'man Allah cemetery was an active burial ground until 1948, when West Jerusalem became part of the newly declared State of Israel. According to Muslim tradition, it is the burial site of the Prophet Mohammad's companions, Salah Ad-Din's warriors, Sufi saints, as well as judges, scholars, and Palestinian dignitaries.

By "prior condition", the ILA was apparently referring to pre-1000 A.D.! All use of this land in the intervening 1,000 years is therefore retrospectively declared illegal under Israeli law! But should we expect any different from a country that disinterred over 1,500 graves in 2009 to make way for a "Museum of Tolerance"? The real reason for the desecration of these tombstones is likely related to the list of spiritual dignitaries listed above. Israel has no spiritual history of its own so it cannot bear to tolerate remnants of the land's real spiritual and cultural roots.

© Israeli armyAn Israeli soldier operates "Spot and Shoot," a system that allows her to fire a remotely controlled machine-gun to execute Palestinians who approach the fence around Gaza by pressing a button on her joystick. Israel is at the forefront of developing such "remote killing" technology.

Witnesses in Gaza have described the recent Israeli attacks there as the fiercest since Operation Cast Lead. Israeli war planes launched an airstrike against Gaza's survival network of tunnels on July 26th, followed by multiple airstrikes on July 31st which killed a field commander of the Al-Qassam Brigades and wounded 10 other people who were made refugees by Cast Lead. Artillery fire from Israel's remote-controlled gun-towers wounded another 3 people at the Erez Crossing in north Gaza on the same day. It was all justified, of course, because Hamas fired a "rocket" into the Israeli town of Ashkelon earlier in the day. Except that they didn't, as confirmed by an IDF official who told Ynet he did not believe Hamas had fired the Grad rocket, which failed to explode because like all of these glorified fireworks, it contained no explosives. Five more of these Grad rockets were launched towards the Israeli seaside resort of Eilat on August 2nd, but they overshot the city and one landed in the Jordanian city of Aqaba, killing a taxi driver. Somewhat ludicrously, Egypt and Israel claimed that these were fired by Hamas from across the Gulf of Aqaba in the Sinai Peninsula, although no explanation was offered as to how Hamas managed to pull off such a feat when its members can't even patrol Gazan waters without being blown out of the water by Israeli military hawks. Hamas instead suggested the more likely scenario: Israel carried out the attack in order to justify escalating the "cycle of violence" once again.

Subverting Lebanon

Up to a hundred people have now been arrested in Lebanon, accused of spying for Israeli Mossad and subverting the country by exploiting its mixed ethnic and religious population. Some are described in the Lebanese press as "high-ranking state employees." Some are known to be officers in the Lebanese Armed Forces and the list may include some members of parliament. The issue is clearly threatening the political order in Lebanon as prime minister Hariri has ordered that the investigation's details be classified. Now that Syria has been exonerated from involvement in the assassination of Hariri's father, the UN's Special Tribunal For Lebanon (STL) has set its sights on Hezbollah, some of whose members may face charges in September. It's clear that Israel and the US have this tribunal by the scruff of the neck:

The Hariri Assassination: Israel's Fingerprints Surface

Rannie Amiri
Counterpunch.org
Sunday, 25 July, 2010

© UnknownThe aftermath of the Hariri bombing.
In a July 16 televised speech, Hezbollah Secretary-General Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah speculated the STL would use information gleaned from Israeli-compromised communications to falsely implicate the group in the prime minister's murder:

"Some are counting in their analysis of the (STL) indictment on witnesses, some of whom turned out to be fake, and on the telecommunications networks which were infiltrated by spies who can change and manipulate data.

"Before the (2006) war, these spies gave important information to the Israeli enemy and based on this information, Israel bombed buildings, homes, factories and institutions. Many martyrs died and many others were wounded. These spies are partners in the killings, the crimes, the threats and the displacement."

Nasrallah called the STL's manipulation an "Israeli project" meant to "create an uproar in Lebanon."

Indeed this Israeli manipulation caused major uproar in Lebanon, where Syrian and Iranian-backed Hezbollah are part of Saad Hariri's national unity government. Saad Hariri, you may have guessed, is the son of the assassinated Rafik Hariri. The Syrian and Saudi leaders came to Lebanon on July 30th for an emergency summit aimed at defusing tensions over the possible Hezbollah indictment. This was Syrian president Assad's first visit to Lebanon since the assassination and the first time he and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia had met since Sunni and Shia Muslims fought running battles in the streets of Beirut two years ago. We don't know what was agreed at the summit but Assad emerged from the tripartite discussions with a thumbs-up and said it was "an excellent summit." Next came the mysterious rocket attacks on the borders of Jordan, Israel and Egypt on August 2nd. This was followed by a spark that could have spiraled into open warfare between Israel and Lebanon: five people were killed in a border shootout between the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) and the IDF on August 4th. Both sides naturally dispute the sequence of events. LAF commanders say they fired warning shots in the air after Israeli troops reached over the border fence to uproot a tree on the Lebanese side which was apparently blocking the view of one of its security cameras. Israel says those shots directly targeted another IDF unit some 200 yards back inside Israeli territory, killing a colonel. Its measured "response", if it was indeed that, involved an Apache helicopter, rockets and heavy artillery fire against an armoured patrol vehicle in a nearby Lebanese village, killing three Lebanese soldiers and an Al-Ahkbar journalist on the scene. The Lebanese forces say one of their snipers shot and killed the Israeli colonel at this point. UNIFIL may have played a role in brokering a ceasefire after which the LAF forces retreated away from the border, remembering, perhaps, that Israel needs only the smallest incident to justify its lust for vengeance.

Note that this was an altercation between the Lebanese army and the IDF. Hezbollah's secretary general Hassan Nasrallah says he offered the Lebanese resistance movement's services to the Lebanese government during the crisis but otherwise stayed out of the picture. If this incident was an Israeli provocation to sow chaos inside Lebanon, then it has backfired. The whole Lebanese establishment is united behind its army. By design or by chance Nasrallah gave a speech on the same day in which he openly accused Israel of the murder of Rafik Hariri. And then on August 9th Hezbollah published surveillance footage intercepted from Israeli unmanned aerial drones (UAVs) going back to 1997. In what appears to be a spectacular surveillance coup (considering the relatively small size of Hezbollah's resources compared with Israel's - and the fact that other entities rarely breach Israeli intelligence), Hezbollah broadcast through its affiliated al-Manar TV station a speech by Nasrallah in which he narrated a concise timeline of events peripheral to the bombing which killed Hariri and 22 bystanders. Interspersed throughout was footage from the UAVs which Hezbollah got ahold of by somehow intercepting the surveillance data as it was sent from the drones to an Israeli operations center. Nasrallah was able to show that Israeli drones were monitoring the location where Hariri's car was blown up, as well as the route his convoy took from his home through Beirut, in the days running up to that fateful Valentine's Day in 2005. While he admits that this alone is not conclusive proof that Israel was behind the assassination, Nasrallah further said, "We have evidence that Ghassan al-Jedd, an alleged Israeli spy who hosted Israeli operations teams, was present at the Rafik Hariri crime scene." Combined with the steady stream of Israeli collaborators unearthed in Lebanon since the current Hariri came to power, the tables might just have turned on Israel's manipulation of Lebanese politics.

Targeting Iran

The lengths that Israel and the US will go to in order to convince us that Iran is a threat to the free peoples of the world were displayed for all to see last month as Shahram Amiri, a scientist who had worked on Iran's civilian nuclear program, returned home to Iran with a very different version of events that led to his disappearance last year. The official story up to this point had been that he defected of his own free will. It turns out that he was abducted by US and Saudi agents during a pilgrimage to Medina in Saudi Arabia and was put under "intensive psychological pressure" (read, tortured) to "reveal some false information about Iran's nuclear work." He was also offered $50 million to remain a guest of the CIA, agree to say that he was in the US seeking political asylum and become their media spokesman on the wickedness of Iran's ways. Even more disturbingly, Amiri revealed that "Israeli agents were present at some of my interrogation sessions and I was threatened to be handed over to Israel if I refused to cooperate with Americans." Echoing the Russian spy swap in June, it also emerged that the US offered to exchange Amiri for the three American "hikers" caught and detained by Iran last year after they crossed over from Iraq, thereby acknowledging that the "hikers" were in fact spies and not, as US media propaganda broadcast at the time, 'innocent tourists' who had simply taken a wrong turn.

As Amiri flew into the Imam Khomeini Airport in Tehran, a massive bomb ripped though a crowd of Shiite worshippers outside a mosque in Zahedan, Sistan-Baluchistan, near Iran's border with Pakistan. 27 people were killed and many more wounded. Several similar terrorist attacks in the region have taken place in recent years and have been carried out by Jundullah, a separatist group that is being funded by the CIA. With the "Iranian nuke scientist" story dead in the water, the warmongers came back with a soft blow. The Iranian government was forced to deny Israeli claims that it had sentenced a woman to death by stoning, allegedly for committing adultery. Just like Neda Soltani's face was flashed across the world after she was murdered under mysterious circumstances during the orchestrated riots that followed Iran's presidential election last summer, a photo of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani accompanied feature articles about her that were carried by mainstream media outlets the world over. SOTT.net has found that this story was first leaked by Radio Farda, the Iranian branch of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a CIA propaganda mill, in conjuction with The Media Line, a Zionist propaganda mill. This Jerusalem Post article broached the story of the non-stoning to the mainstream media on June 30. The British media reported that Ahmadinejad had narrowly escaped assassination on August 4th when someone threw a "homemade" hand-grenade at his motorcade in the city of Hamadan, but an Iranian spokesman insisted it was merely a firecracker thrown by an "excited fan." Ahmadinejad reminded the world during a televised speech several days later why he is Zionism's number one target:

"What was the story behind September 11? In the space of five to six days, and with the aid of the media, they swayed public opinion to the point of considering an attack on Afghanistan and Iraq permissible and a right [for themselves]."

The EU decided that last month's UN Security Council sanctions against Iran weren't sufficient and unilaterally imposed more sanctions on Iranian trade, energy and banking. "This is the most substantive and far-reaching set of sanctions the EU has agreed to on Iran or indeed on any country," said one obsequious EU diplomat, clearly proud of his new country's contribution to international relations in the 21st century. The following day the US House of Representatives introduced Resolution 1553, which provides explicit support for military strikes against Iran, stating that Congress backs Israel's use of "all means necessary" against Iran, "including the use of military force." In effect, what the NeoCons behind this bill are gunning for is carte blanche for Israel to attack Iran and for the US to then step in and shield it from the Iranian counter-attack.

The Real Aim of Israel's Bomb Iran Campaign

Gareth Porter
CommonDreams.org
Friday, 30 July, 2010

That has long been the Israeli strategy for Iran, because Israel cannot fight a war with Iran without full U.S. involvement. Israel needs to know that the United States will finish the war that Israel wants to start. [...]

Gerecht suggests that the same logic would apply to any Iranian "terrorism against the United States after an Israeli strike," by which we really means any attack on a U.S. target in the Middle East. Gerecht writes that Obama might be "obliged" to threaten major retaliation "immediately after an Israeli surprise attack."

That's the key sentence in this very long Gerecht argument. Obama is not going to be "obliged" to join Israeli aggression against Iran unless he feels that domestic political pressures to do so are too strong to resist. That's why the Israelis are determined to line up a strong majority in Congress and public opinion for war to foreclose Obama's options. [...]

Gerecht first revealed this Israeli-neocon fantasy as early as 2000, before the Iranian nuclear program was even taken seriously, in an essay written for a book published by the Project for a New American Century. Gerecht argued that, if Iran could be caught in a "terrorist act," the U.S. Navy should "retaliate with fury". [...]

Comment: This is the definition of false-flag terrorism; pinning the blame for a terrorist act on your mark, or intended victim. This Israeli-neocon fantasy predates the "Iranian nuclear threat" because the latter is a scripted pretext to justify the US intervening to "secure the realm" on Israel's behalf.

And lest anyone fail to understand what he meant by that, Gerecht was more explicit: "That is, no cruise missiles at midnight to minimize the body count. The clerics will almost certainly strike back unless Washington uses overwhelming, paralyzing force."

[...] polling data for 2010 show that a majority of Americans have already been manipulated into supporting war against Iran - in large part because more than two-thirds of those polled have gotten the impression that Iran already has nuclear weapons. The Israelis are apparently hoping to exploit that advantage. "If the Israelis bomb now, American public opinion will probably be with them," writes Gerecht. "Perhaps decisively so." Netanyahu must be feeling good about the prospects for pressuring Barack Obama to join an Israeli war of aggression against Iran. It was Netanyahu, after all, who declared in 2001, "I know what America is. America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction. They won't get in the way."

Bibi knows what he's talking about: the US has just agreed to grant Israel its largest ever military handout - $2.775 billion in "security assistance funding specifically for Israel". And that just covers 2010. Oh, and Israel will get a discount price on a new anti-missile system as well as F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jets thrown into the deal. A candidate for the false-flag attack that justifies attacking Iran presented itself in late July when a Japanese oil tanker was "subject to a terrorist act" for which "a militant group linked to al Qaeda" was blamed. The jihadists claimed that a suicide bomber had thrown himself up against the side of the M Star, but from the size of the dent investigators overruled the mystery terrorists and said it was more likely that explosives were sailed up to the ship in the same manner that the USS Cole was said to have been attacked. Funny how terrorists can forget their lines!

After its surprising agreement to dole out sanctions on Iran in June, the Russian government last month got fully behind the hype as president Medvedev warned that, "Iran is moving closer to possessing the potential which in principle could be used for the creation of nuclear weapons," which is diplomatic-speak for, "Yeah right, whatever, we'll play along, but leave you guessing our real motives." So has Russia really thrown Iran to the wolves? It doesn't seem so, as by early August the Iranians announced they had received the first installment of those S-300 missiles that the US was supposed to have talked Russia out of delivering. We are not sure what to make of Russia's sudden and surprising collaboration in the occupation of Afghanistan either. After nine years and 110,000 dead, the US military campaign in Afghanistan was all but finished until WikiLeaks and Russia stepped in last month to lend a hand. Are Putin and Medvedev giving the US some rope with which to hang itself? Or have they figured that if Afghanistan implodes it will create a black hole from which Russian interests won't escape unscathed?

Let them eat chocolate

A recent endeavour of the elite suggests that something is in the offing:

US billionaires club together - to give away half their fortunes to good causes

Andrew Clark
UK Guardian
August 4th, 2010

America's ultra-rich are queuing to join in a grand gesture of generosity. Forty US billionaires have signed up to pledge at least half of their fortunes to charity under a philanthropic campaign kicked off by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates.

In an unprecedented mass commitment, top figures including New York's mayor Michael Bloomberg, the hotel heir Barron Hilton, CNN media mogul Ted Turner, and the Star Wars director George Lucas have lent their names to the "giving pledge", an initiative founded six weeks ago to encourage America's richest families to commit money to society's most pressing problems.

© UnknownBill Gates and Warren Buffett share a good chuckle about the unfairness of it all
The pledge is not a legally binding contract but is described as a moral commitment. Inspired by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which pumps billions into fighting disease in developing countries, it does not prescribe any particular charitable causes but is a statement of principle. [...]

On the face of it, the sums involved are enormous. Among those committing to give away money are the Oracle business software tycoon Larry Ellison, whose fortune is estimated by Forbes magazine at $28bn, the banker David Rockefeller ($2.2bn), oilman Boone Pickens ($1.1bn) and private equity tycoon Pete Peterson ($2bn).

Also on the list are the media entrepreneur Barry Diller and fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg, his wife. A former Citigroup banking boss, Sandy Weill, has signed up, as have fellow Wall Street names including David Rubenstein, co-founder of the Carlyle private equity group. [...]

Some are sceptical of the way Gates and Buffett are creating a highly public philanthropic elite.

Pablo Eisenberg, a senior fellow at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute, at Georgetown University, Washington DC, said ultra-wealthy donors tend to give money to higher education, arts and established healthcare causes, with relatively little going to poverty reduction, disability causes or to disadvantaged ethnic minority communities. Billionaires generally gave away funds through tax advantageous foundations.

"These mega-foundations, which are effectively family enterprises with no accountability, are going to dictate public policy priorities for this country," said Eisenberg. "I'm not sure that tax receipts haven't done a better job, over time, of meeting the needs of our neediest people, than philanthropists."

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation invests money in Big Pharma projects that produce vaccines and drugs, and in oil companies (like BP) that are destroying the countries that they are claiming to help. When people come down with illnesses that result from their crimes, Gates and company will be there with the vaccines and medicines to push them over the edge.

Of course, it's not just vaccines and "aids drugs" for the poor of this world that the mega-corrupt are interested in; they are also using their ill-gotten gains to sponsor "nano-vaccines" for the rest of us. One hare-brained scheme is "sweat-triggered vaccine delivery", a program based on nanoparticles penetrating human skin. The technology is described as a way to "...develop nanoparticles that penetrate the skin through hair follicles and burst upon contact with human sweat to release vaccines."

That would be the kind of stuff that can be sprayed in places like airports, malls, security checkpoints, hospitals, etc, so that you get the "vaccine" whether you like it, or know about it, or not.

Then there's the money they spend on what sounds a lot like "population reduction". One of the programs recently funded by the Bill's foundation is a sterilization program that uses sharp blasts of ultrasound directed against a man's scrotum to render him infertile for six months (or so they say, anyone want to step up and test it?) It might more accurately be called "surgery-free castration technology."

Having helped them plunder our world, we are now deemed expendable and surplus to requirement. Can't you just feel the philanthropic benevolence of it all?

And now for a short bedtime story...

Once upon a time a sub-species known as psychopaths tricked the planet's other inhabitants into believing that the poles would melt, the seas rise and the world's cities would disappear under the waves if they did not agree to hand over lots of money to the psychopaths who would then use it to corral the humans and feed off them.

To convince them to go along with this scheme, the psychopaths told the humans that a gas which was previously thought to be essential to life on Earth was actually responsible for overheating the planet. Humans were told that they produced too much of this gas, so it would be best for all if some of them just disappeared. So the humans began pushing the poorest among them off the boat, so to speak, and agreed, under false pretenses, to build a prison for themselves, believing all the while that this would save the planet. But the affluent humans did not understand that soon they too would be pushed off the boat because the psychopaths were ruthless parasites which had been engorging themselves while humanity willingly embraced poverty.

The psychopaths were fiendishly clever. They had some idea of the real nature of the change that was coming but they didn't want the humans to know. So they prepared hideaways for themselves and planned to blame humans for changing the climate once the storm began! In the meantime the psychopaths set about terrorising and distracting the humans by causing wars amongst them, then diligently prepared for the time soon to come when they believed they would inherit the planet all to themselves (and perhaps a small group of human slaves that survived the great changes).

For the plan to work, the humans could not at any cost be allowed to discover the scheme. But they did. They began to understand that the psychopaths were not good leaders at all, and in fact were dangerous creatures. Then they shared their newfound awareness with others. The psychopaths became desperate as they sensed that the humans were slipping from their grasp. To keep their human slaves from turning against them, the psychopaths decided to buy up the world's supply of chocolate because they knew that chocolate makes humans happy. But they had became so reckless in their deeds that the humans could no longer fail to see them for what they really were: evil parasites upon themselves and their home planet.

© UnknownChocolate, opiate of the masses

Well we don't know how the story will end, but we see much in the chaos that gives us hope. It's important to remember that, like the bedtime stories we grew up with, the above is a story, a representation that helps people digest new concepts that seem very threatening at first and which will temporarily turn their lives upside down. But when this passes, the listener can arrive at a life-enriching, objective, and more balanced view of the universe and understand their place in it.

The truth is that there is no grand plan being executed by any one group of people. There are many psychopaths who conspire with one another against humans, but their very nature means that they are also conspiring against each other! They simply lack the foresight and intelligence to envision, much less direct, complex chains of events on the grand stage. Individually and - to a limited extent - in groups, they may have temporary successes in hoodwinking people, but they are not magicians. Oh sure, they believe they are! And they want you to believe they are! And perhaps we want to believe they are; that someone at least is in control down here. But this is wishful thinking. The engine is running but no one's driving this thing!

The opportunity exists, therefore, that even a small number of well-intentioned and forthright individuals can use their creative energies to fashion order out of the growing chaos. Fear not, you are not alone!.

Reader Comments

Woodsman · 2010-08-14T19:02:22Z

Thanks for the amazing article.

This episode of Dots had me glued.

I've been involved in a bunch of demanding life things all week, and I'd missed a ton of news events from all over the world. Reading about them in connection with all the research of events from the past weeks was jaw-dropping, scary, and also amazing. I don't want to miss a moment of it!

The last three paragraphs especially are sound advice and encouragement. Thank-you!

Jiménez · 2010-08-14T20:42:01Z

Amazing and a lot more...

...But too bright were our heavens, too far away,
Too frail their ethereal stuff;
Too splendid and sudden our light could not stay;
The roots were not deep enough.

He who would bring the heavens here
Must descend himself into clay
And the burden of earthly nature bear
And tread the dolorous way.

Sri Aurobindo (A GOD'S LABOUR)

Strenght and Honor. Thank-you!

Bright Hope · 2010-08-15T06:06:58Z

Wow, jaw-dropping

Thanks for this breath-taking article. I've never read anything like it. The sheer quantity of information is overwhelming, and details of the weather events around the world in particular left me wanting to pray for the incredible suffering these will bring to millions.

The birth pangs of the bright new world are occurring and will soon be known as just that. We won't let go of something we think is wonderful and delicious - we will when we recognise it as garbage though!

Iconoclast · 2010-08-15T08:32:54Z

connect the dots

is IMHO the highest quality summary of global events that can be found anywhere on the internet.

thank you.

way2wyrd · 2010-08-15T18:50:47Z

Thank You SOTT Team

For helping us stay abreast of the everchanging game we find ourselves in.

redrock12 · 2010-08-16T23:08:20Z

Keep 'em Coming Sott!

Humanity needs your in-your-face reporting of the TRUTH!
We certainly can't rely on the gutless minions of the msm.

Laura · 2010-08-17T17:04:27Z

Well...

... not everybody likes it when we get in their face and tell the truth! It can get really ugly, especially when we expose people who claim to be "alternative" but are really just part of some psy-ops program - Duncan Roads and Nexus come to mind.

Aeneas · 2010-08-25T01:45:54Z

Thanks

Great summary!

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