SOTT Focus:

Connecting the Dots: 2009 - The Year in Review

SOTT Editors
Sott.net
Fri, 08 Jan 2010 13:57 UTC

Warm winter blessings to our readers this New Year! And midsummer's greetings to our readers in the southern hemisphere! We thought we'd begin this month's Connecting the Dots by welcoming in the new year with some reflection upon the old: 2009 was a truly smashing year in more ways than one.

Climategate broke out just as Connecting the Dots went to print last month. As we felt might happen, the Copenhagen Summit took a mighty hit from the 'truth vibrations' and despite frantic efforts, no binding international treaty came to pass. For now.

The mother of all cosmic ironies was not lost on us as the temperatures plummeted and negotiations at the 'Global Warming' summit froze! But the question remains: is the freezing weather in the northern hemisphere simply explained by regular variations in weather patterns? Or is climate change, in the sense of a fundamental change in the planet's climate, really happening, only not in the way we're being told?

As the solstice is a time for festive fun, we have a special treat for you this month, a pantomime, complete with odd characters in funny costumes and underwear that sparkles! Even Silvio Berlusconi makes a cameo appearance, until his mask nearly breaks in two. Sadly, not everyone saw the funny side, so we'll be looking at some of the darker implications of such episodes. We'll also be assessing the likely impacts upon our lives as a result of the latest phony act of terror.

Venture with us now into the shadow world of espionage and subterfuge, where the heroes refuse to bow before the Evil Empire and the villains do their Zionist master's bidding on the grand stage of power politics. Who are the real terrorists in this Faustian drama? Are they connected to those who claim ownership of the planet's resources for themselves at the expense of humanity? Would they really have us pay for the air we breathe and the water we drink? Is it possible that 'evil' is a real phenomenon?

2009: Lest We Forget

2009 had a bloody beginning, courtesy of the murderous army of Yahweh-inspired Zionism which launched Operation Cast Lead under the paltry justification that it was an appropriate response to homemade rockets fired from Gaza - rockets that were largely ineffective and amounted to a gesture of defiance and a vent for frustration in the face of Israel's inhuman siege of Gaza. That's assuming those rockets were actually fired by Palestinian militants, as it is common practice for the Mossad to play the false flag "who, me?" game, which explains the recurrent appearance of groups "using an uncommon name not previously linked with the ruling Hamas Islamist movement". Indeed, even Hamas had previously blamed the rockets fired into Israel on 'Israeli collaborators'. Also suppressed from the public domain was the fact that Israel broke a five-month-long ceasefire with Hamas on November 4th, 2008 by assassinating six Hamas officials in Gaza, and that the attack on Gaza was planned six months in advance, as reported by Haaretz.

More than 1,300 Palestinians were killed, including 400 women and children, at least 5,300 were wounded and tens of thousands were left homeless. Only 95 of those killed were actual resistance fighters, while only 13 Israelis died in the conflict - ten of them due to 'friendly fire'. The crimes committed in those 22 shameful days are too many to enumerate in this limited space, but for a memory refresher, let us point out the following:

Gazan civilians and Gazan infrastructure were systematically and intentionally targeted.
Israeli troops kidnapped around 300 Palestinian civilians, executing some by gunfire or with tank shells, among them women and children - a number of which were used as human shields.
In at least one documented case, Israeli soldiers forced a Palestinian mother to choose five of her ten children to be killed.

Israeli forces attacked the UN Relief and Works Agency headquarters in Gaza with white phosphorus shells - a burning chemical agent that was exploded liberally over civilian.
Three hospitals sheltering 500 people were also attacked with white phosphorus, while the Red Cross and the Red Crescent were prevented from reaching the wounded and their ambulances deliberately targeted.
Palestinian victims had wounds indicating that Yahweh's stormtroopers had used Dense Inert Metal Explosives and munitions fitted with depleted uranium.

This hell would have probably gone on indefinitely were it not for Israel's 'gesture' towards its new servant in the White House who required an unproblematic inauguration ceremony, and who returned the favour by acquiescing with these war crimes, steadfastly refusing to condemn Israel's slaughter and instead sending his Middle East envoy to parrot "Israel's right to defend itself". Indeed, this would prove to be the first heartbreak of many that Barack Obama would inflict upon his hopeful supporters around the world, who had to bear the sight of this 'hero' adopting the rhetoric, terror policies and imperial ambitions of his predecessor. 'Af-Pak' became Obama's trademark war, as he supported the international banking class over the will and well being of the people.

The Afghan-Pakistani scenario went from bad to worse as the year wore on. The crimes and dirty tricks of grotesque proportion that we witnessed in the Iraq war have extended to the Af-Pak theater. What else could we expect, given that the man chosen to lead US and NATO troops and expand Obama's war, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, has a history of war crime atrocities from when he was director of the Pentagon's death squads, run by the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). McChrystal's role in Iraq from 2003 to 2008 was to create terrorism. Obama empowered this psycho by injecting billions into his operations and sending more troops, which now amount to 100,000 (with yet more on their way). As a result the Afghan and Pakistani populations have had to endure, among other things:

Displacement as hundreds of thousands flee the fighting.
Ongoing "precision" strikes known for killing several dozens of civilians, including children. The assassinations are often perpetrated by drones controlled remotely - from US territory itself - but massacres come in more conventional forms too, as with the case of US/NATO jets bombing two fuel tankers surrounded by hundreds of civilians, with predictably horrific consequences.

Military assaults and 'suicide bombs' on hospitals, schools and funerals. In one month in Pakistan alone, 300 people died as a result of waves of bombings in major cities.
Death squads, disappearances and torture.
US and Israeli funding of Taliban militias, such as war chief Baitullah Mehsud, who is routinely blamed for all sorts of terrorist attacks in the region, in spite of reports of his being either dead or dying, like that ghost of al Qaeda past, Osama Bin Laden. Now we know how Mehsud's 25,000 men are not only highly trained, but also have state-of-the-art weapons at their disposal; and why occupation forces have been providing air transportation to "Taliban fighters."
The construction of gargantuan US military bases.
The presence of CIA spies, analysts and paramilitary operatives - 'Af-Pak' has given rise to one of the largest CIA stations in the agency's history.
The reemergence of the CIA created Afghan drug trade; Afghanistan now produces 90% or more of the world's heroin supply, which is estimated to amount to double the world's demand for the stuff.
The presence of mercenaries from over 50 countries under NATO-US command.

The American people, as usual, have picked up the tab, with record high numbers of troops being sent home in body bags, while those that return alive are psychologically and physically broken.

But it would be a mistake to think that the war is 'over there' in Afghanistan, as opposed to 'all over', since imperial ambitions deem it convenient to wage covert wars on people and their way of life in many different countries. L. Fletcher Prouty tells us that the boys from the CIA and the 'Secret Team' call these dirty tricks "Fun and Games". In 2009 such tricks involved stimulating anti-government protests in Iran through hysterically biased coverage from western media and distributing $400 million through the CIA's USAID program to "grassroots" groups inside Iran to provoke a revolution; the encirclement of Venezuela by deploying US soldiers inside Colombia; a coup d'etat in Honduras tacitly supported by the US government; renewing its influence on Africa as evidenced by war games sponsored by the Pentagon, along with placing one of the key architects of the Pentagon's policy for Africa into position as Obama's national security adviser; the presence of Blackwater military contractors still at large in Iraq, a country which after almost seven years of trauma still experiences regular bombings on its streets randomly killing civilians.

It's obvious that the 'Secret Team' and the Zionists of Israel are hell-bent on toppling the Iranian government, whether through indirect pressure or old fashioned 'shock & awe'. This is why the US and Israeli governments have gone to great lengths to court Russian support for Iranian 'regime change'; this is also why the western media and leaders will do their utmost to convince us, without any evidence, that Iran's civilian nuclear program is an existential threat to the world.

2009 was also the year in which the global population had to dance to the tune of the economic crisis - a situation which has been bad enough in its own right, but which was aggravated by dire suggestions that it would lead to riots and violence, thus blaming the victims and transforming people who raised their voices into legitimate targets of repression. And repress they did, most notably during the G20 summits in London and Pittsburgh, which featured such niceties as undercover policemen, openly provocative tactics, riot police caught on camera hitting civilians, sonic cannons, National Guard troops playing the role of police, and of course the now standard agent provocateurs.

Behind the charade of group photographs and empty rhetoric, the summits' outcomes were a staggering exercise in hubris. The London summit stamped out any hope that the crisis might produce the changes needed to prevent such a system shock in the future. The Group of 20 leaders instead reaffirmed their commitment to corporate capitalism by spending trillions to bail out big banks, the very entities responsible for the crisis in the first place. The Pittsburgh summit saw the G20 simply declare that their solutions at the London summit had worked! The crisis was over, case closed. Meanwhile the common people were too worried trying to make ends meet to notice. Hidden amidst the G20 rhetoric is a series of structural measures that have the look and feel of what is often referred to as the New World Order. The door was flung open for the IMF to don a more significant role, one that makes it look more and more like the bank of the world government, complete with the ability to print its own money and inject liquidity into global markets. In short, to control the global economy. In the same spirit, the G20 members modestly agreed "to make themselves the lead group for tackling international economic issues in the future", replacing the G8. The net result is yet more power concentrated into the hands of the elite few.

One of the biggest stories of 2009 was the very real threat to our health and lives posed, not by "swine flu", but by the attempted mass inoculation of the population with dubious vaccines which, by the way, represent a very profitable business for the pharmaceutical industry. It all started with a few almost unnoticed cases in the US, swiftly followed by hundreds more reported in Mexico, a country which reacted in disproportionate alarm and panic, considering the actual rate of mortality. Mexico City, one of the largest on the globe, saw all school activity and non-essential work suspended for a few days, as well as all public events canceled. It was the same hysterical atmosphere that compelled people to wear surgical masks on the streets that we witnessed a few months later in Ukraine, where the government of Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko ordered quarantines, school closures and hurried deliveries of the antiviral drug Tamiflu, all the while parading 'reassuring' Ukrainians by appearing in front of the cameras with a surgical mask. This was all, in fact, a clever political maneuver to boost her presidential campaign, as revealed by a senior campaign advisor for Tymoshenko's BYuT bloc. No surprise there, as it does not take an insider to realize that this was the same principle of 'manipulation through fear' at work around the world.

In 300 days over 8 million people died from communicable diseases and almost 30 million died from non-communicable diseases; while mortal cases, many of them presumed to have resulted from "swine flu", amounted to 5,000. Are we to assume then that local governments are taking advantage of the situation for specific purposes of their own? Of course, but there is much more to it than that. You see, the World Health Organization has done a splendid job of scaring us into accepting poison shots (i.e. vaccines). How sneaky of the WHO to change its own guidelines for defining a pandemic in time to declare this current round of mild flu a "pandemic," only to then incrementally raise its risk assessment. Without such a move, its declaration of a "pandemic" and everything that follows would have not been possible.

The result? A number of cases of deaths, injuries and nasty side effects linked to the vaccine. That hasn't prevented the shareholders of companies such as GlaxoSmithKline Plc, Sanofi-Aventis SA, AstraZeneca Plc and Baxter International Inc from laughing all the way to the bank.

The skies of planet Earth were also super-active these past twelve months. Sightings of fireballs (some caught on video) were too numerous to do them any justice here. We recommend interested readers visit our Fireballs & Meteors sister-site for up-to-date data on our cosmic weather. In June, while many were scratching their heads at the mysterious disappearance of Air France Flight 447, some of us were left wondering where we could duck ours. No doubt the "authorities" with a handle on the real cause of the sudden demise of Flight 447 were content to file the matter away as 'mysterious'. But the Spanish pilot of an Air Comet plane flying in the vicinity at the time of the doomed Air France flight gave those readers familiar with Sott.net's research into cosmic hazards a clue to the perplexing mystery:

"Suddenly we saw in the distance a bright intense flash of white light that fell straight down and disappeared in six seconds."

It seems reasonable to suggest that an aircraft would not produce a bright and intense white light for six seconds as it fell from the sky. We cannot help but wonder if the likely cause was an overhead cometary explosion, not unlike the Tunguska explosion of 1908.

We could hardly catch our breath, or rather, move into Cheyenne Mountain , when a mysterious dark spot appeared in Jupiter's southern hemisphere. Like a scene out of 2010: The Year We Make Contact, the mysterious spot grew then dissipated and was found to be the site of a comet or asteroid impact, coincidentally impacting Jupiter on the 15th anniversary of Comet Schumaker-Levy's impact there in 1994. And just a few days later another spot, bright this time, appeared in Venus' southern hemisphere.

Take note that as all this occurred, the Pentagon suddenly decided to withold scientists' access to data gleaned from its satellites tasked with observing space debris entering the Earth's atmosphere, prompting 'coincidence theorists' to go into overdrive!

So that was the year that was 2009. Now lets connect some dots in December, the latest chapter in our history.

Nopenhagen

If you live in the northern hemisphere, you have probably been wearing mittens outside and using an extra duvet in bed, while you know in your bones that the Universe in all its divine wisdom is playing a joke on the preachers of global warming. Or rather, they have been playing a joke on us all along, as the Climategate affair revealed in November. They can "hide the decline" only for so long, but they cannot fool reality. Is it not an extraordinary wake-up call - as well as a superb irony - that the United Nations Climate Change Copenhagen Conference, which was meant to address global warming, opened on the eve of one of the coldest winters in decades?

An early sign that the conference would not turn out quite as expected was warmist crusader Al Gore abruptly cancelling a December 16th appearance to promote his new book, Our Choice. Although no specific reason was offered, the group coordinating ticket sales ($1,209 per VIP ticket, by the way) and publicity for the event hinted that "great annoyance" was a factor in the cancellation - an obvious reference to what Gore must have felt upon learning about Climategate. Equally curious were the comments of another warmist evangelist, James Hansen, head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, who wished that the summit would end in collapse because "the whole approach is so fundamentally wrong that it is better to reassess the situation. If it is going to be the Kyoto-type thing then [people] will spend years trying to determine exactly what that means." Did he say so because he was aware that the global warming camp needed regrouping after a lost battle? Or were both Gore and Hansen simply told to turn their backs on Copenhagen?

Another blow was provided by the Conservative opposition in the Australian Senate, which rejected the Labor government's plan to implement a carbon emissions trading scheme. Even the Australian Green party opposed it, and quite rightly, as it would have rewarded big polluting industries $AUS30bn in compensation while the government could have met its carbon emissions target by simply purchasing 'permits to pollute' from overseas, doing nothing good for the environment. Four weeks later France would follow this example when the French Constitutional Council ruled the new French carbon tax unconstitutional - just two days before taking effect. These are not so much obstacles in the way of the noble goal of cleaning the planet as hindrances to profiteering from 'carbon trading'. You see, the geniuses behind disaster capitalism figured they could make a billion or two with the excuse of saving the planet by inventing carbon emissions trading, which basically means that companies which 'overpollute' must buy 'credits' from those that 'underpollute' - so that they can keep on polluting. Rather than being an incentive for environmentally friendly industrial technologies, this has created an extremely lucrative market in 'carbon trading' that is projected to grow to $3 trillion a year - twice that of oil trading - in the next decade.

No wonder then that the public was upset and 100,000 protested the corporate agenda behind environmentalism, under banners such as "Our Climate - Not Your Business" - the name of a group that was particularly targeted by the police. The Danish authorities' response was on a par with the dehumanization tactics paraded by police forces at both G20 summits. Around 1,000 people were arrested, rounded up, their hands bound behind their backs, then made to sit in the freezing cold for hours, while journalists were restricted from reporting at the site of the arrests.

© ScanpixNext they were lined up in rows, with legs apart, then cordoned off the from surrounding streets by a ring of state 'enforcers'. For hours at a time, people subject to these "stress positions" no longer had rights: they were considered sub-human.

© Thibault Camus/Associated PressPleas for assistance were ignored and many had to resort to urinating where they sat. Their 'arrests' were completely unprovoked, and it's clear from these images that the police were tasked beforehand to execute this highly organised operation regardless of protestors' behaviour.

The usual suspects were present: a group of 300 'anarchists', bearing all the hallmarks of agent provocateurs, hijacked peaceful demonstrations. Judge for yourselves.

To make mass arrests more palatable, the police prepared the public in advance by declaring they had seized a cache of paint bombs, shields and other gear to be used, presumably, by "unruly demonstrators". A police spokesman even said: "we know from experience that some destructive elements will infiltrate the demonstration." 'Infiltrate' is the key word here, as unruly people dressed in black, with faces covered and a hunger for violence, are quite alien to your average environmentally concerned protester, but nevertheless give the police just cause for cracking heads.

As for the summit itself... well, you guessed correctly when you heard about Climategate: it collapsed. Delegations of developing nations got wind of a leaked draft agreement written in secret by rich nations with the intention of springing it upon the rest. It would give them further power, sideline the UN's negotiating role and abandon the Kyoto protocol. The document known as the 'Danish text' was worked on by a group known as the "circle of commitment" - which included the usual suspects, the UK and the US, with the addition of host nation Denmark - and would relocate funds originally destined to third world nations through the administration of the UN, to the IMF and the World Bank, no less!

The IMF and the World Bank, as you probably know, are the bane of the developing world. While these institutions are meant in principle to assist developing nations, in practice they have done precisely the opposite by conditioning their financial aid to the fulfillment of domestic economic policies that have nothing to do with improving the quality of life of the local populations and everything to do with facilitating profit for foreign investors and richer countries. As outlined in our summary of 2009 above, the IMF has lately been empowered by the global elite and is fast becoming the banking arm of the 'World Government'.

Furthermore, the infamous Danish text would not allow poor countries to emit more than 1.44 tonnes of carbon per person by 2050, while allowing rich countries to emit 2.67 tonnes. This exercise in injustice was proposed despite the fact that industrialized nations do most of the polluting, with 55% of the volume of emissions correspond to the US, and that reducing the emissions of developing nations would further cripple their economies, pushing millions more to the brink of starvation. (By the way, did you realize that the single largest institutional polluter in the world is the Pentagon? It is, of course, exempt from all international climate agreements, which is unsurprising, given that it disregards all areas of international law governing nation-states. But of course to ask for the Pentagon to be environmentally friendly would be like asking a serial killer to wipe off his shoes every time he breaks into his next victim's house.)

Faced with such an arrogant neo-colonial conspiracy, African countries supported by the G77 group of developing nations walked out of the summit in disgust. In the end, the delegates of the 192 participating nations only managed to salvage a non-binding accord which "recognizes" the "scientific case" for limiting temperature rises to no more than 2C, but contains no commitments to emissions reductions. The media have tried to put a positive spin on the Copenhagen accord; however, if you have been following the real scientific debate, you will probably agree with us that it is effectively worthless. (Just avoid mentioning this inconvenient truth in UN summits or you might find yourself being ejected by security personnel.)

It is interesting that in the aftermath of the conference, and in spite of the failed coup by the "circle of commitment", the western media was instructed to place the blame of the Copenhagen failure... on China. Well, of course, someone had to be the bad guy here, and it wasn't going to be the Prince of Peace Obama, now was it?

China, apparently, stonewalled the efforts to reach a legally binding treaty on climate change. Assuming that such a treaty would have been based on the Danish text, we cannot fault China for resisting. The Chinese were simply defending the interests of their industries and showed little concern for fair deals or cleaner planets. This begs the question, is China aware that global warming is a scam? Furthermore, are all states aware but they play the game anyway? One frightening, but very possible conclusion of the relentless push to classify CO2 as a pollutant and reduce its levels, is that the Pathocrats (psychopaths in power) are fully aware that we have entered a period of a rapid temperature decreases (arising entirely from natural cyclical causes) and their strategy is to capitalize on this natural development and penalize people for heating and eating, thus increasing the numbers that die from cold and malnutrition in the years ahead, thereby retaining as many resources for themselves as possible.

Ice Age Cometh?

The Elements gave us their opinion of the Climate Change Conference as Copenhagen turned white from a blizzard as the warmists began to preach their sermons. This was just one of many cities around the world that have been experiencing the coldest winter in years; pretty much the entire northern hemisphere, in fact. Bear in mind that winter begins with the solstice at the end of December, so we might expect things to get worse for three months before they get any better.

In order to get an idea of what is going on around the northern hemisphere, here is a chronological review of the highlights:

As early as the first days of December, the US had already been hit by a windy storm that made the temperature feel like -25C in several states.
Around the 13th of December, Edmonton became the coldest place in Canada, and possibly the coldest city on the planet, at -49C, smashing its previous record for that day of -33C (1968).
On the 17th, northern Japan witnessed record accumulations of snow and record-low temperatures for December.
By the 23rd of December, Europe had already reported around a hundred cold-related deaths. Weather conditions forced cancellations and delays in airports while train lines were forced to close - a situation which continues to date.

China's Christmas gift was a two-day strong cold front that sent the thermometer down to -30C in some places.
By Boxing Day, more than half of US territory was covered in snow. Dallas, which had not experienced a storm of blizzard proportions in 80 years, saw record snowfall. In fact, no blizzard warning had ever been issued for an area of Texas as far south as Interstate 20. At least 23 deaths were attributed to the storm in the central US.
The Chinese transport system has also been affected as the country suffers its lowest temperatures in 50 years.
As the UK goes through one of its worst winters in 100 years, the British are being threatened with gas shortages quite early in the season and, as a result, the wholesale cost of gas has soared by 70 per cent. Apparently, the problems are being caused by gas transmission overload rather than the potential shortage of supplies.
157 people had died by January 6 in northern India as a result of the cold wave.

The freezing weather of early January in the US midwest triggered a -52C windchill in North Dakota.
Central Sweden is experiencing its coldest weather since the mid 1980s (with temperatures as low as -40C).

As shocking as these events are, they would not be surprising had we not been bombarded by a propaganda campaign that convinced us of exactly the opposite of what was true and was apparently known since at least 1974. It was in that year that Time Magazine published an article revealing that the atmosphere had been cooling for three decades, raising the prospect of an ice age. A recent report states that the upper atmosphere is indeed cooling as a result of the inactivity of the sun (as evidenced by the lack of sunspots). The report, however, argues that this does not contradict the man-made global warming theory because the lower atmosphere is still warming. Judging by the current weather forecast, we doubt that somehow. In fact, it has been pretty funny to read some of the comments in the media from scientists bent on following the party line, as they try to reason that just because we are freezing doesn't mean we aren't warming!

Fortunately, not all scientists have lost the ability to think critically. You may want to take some time to listen to this brilliant interview with Dr. Timothy Ball, Joseph D'Aleo and Robert W. Felix, some of the researchers who reckon that an Ice Age is where we are headed. And it could happen any time now. We learn from them, among other things, that two thirds of the temperature data gleaned from stations on the ground were located in the middle of cities, which are always warmer than surrounding environments.

For ninety percent of the last million years, the normal state of the planet's climate was frozen in ice. The northern hemisphere has gone through a regular cycle of ice ages: 90,000 years with ice: 10,000 years without. It turns out that the last ice age ended 10,000 years ago, so an ice age is overdue. It must also be said that the 'rebound' into an ice age is a far more catastrophic scenario than the alleged global warming. Ironically, it also appears that attempts to combat global warming by reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere may in fact hasten the advent of an ice age. We are left to wonder if the pathocracy did not come up with "CO2 is an evil pollutant that must be reduced" for precisely that purpose. To make matters more interesting, there is evidence that the cold period that started 12,800 years ago, known as the Younger Dryas, may have begun very suddenly, not gradually. That is, within a few months or one or two years at most. Sudden changes are more dangerous because living creatures have less time to adapt - and that includes human beings and the infrastructure that protects them.

Secret Team Productions present: the Al Qaeda® Christmas Special

There have been many absurd "terrorist plots" down through the years, but the al Qaeda® 2009 Christmas Special is probably the Secret Team's most farcical performance to date. We recommend that you first read Joe Quinn's The Underwear Bomber - Crushing Freedom With Phony Arab Terrorism. His article covers the glaring inconsistencies of the ridiculous Christmas tale of Farouk Abdulmutallab and his combustible underwear. It would all be hilarious if it didn't have such alarming consequences for normal people the world over.

Enter ugly Israelis

Alhaji Abdulmutallab: a Muslim Nigerian in name, a financier of the Global Pathocracy in nature

It's obvious that young Farouk was put up to it by agents of western intelligence. The connections begin with his fabulously rich Nigerian banking father, so let's start with him. Gordon Duff of Veterans Today caught our attention with this revelation:

We do know a couple of things. Dad, back in Nigeria, ran the national arms industry (DICON) in partnership with Israel, in particular, the Mossad. He was in daily contact with them. They run everything in Nigeria, from arms production to counter-terrorism. Though Islamic, Muttalab was a close associate of Israel. He has been misrepresented. His "banking" is a cover.

In September 2008 Nigeria's leaders were considering Mossad's offer to train the country's security forces. Whether through sheer ignorance of the Mossad's history in training and profiting from both sides in every civil war it provokes and prolongs, or simply from a meeting of like minds, Senator Nuhu Aliyu, Chairman of Nigeria's Senate Committee on National Security and Intelligence, reassured his compatriots that, "They (Mossad) are professionals and they are here to help train our own intelligence agents. I don't see any way by which their presence in the country poses any threat to our National Security."

Well, if he was paying attention to events in Yemen the following month, he might have reconsidered his position:

Yemen seizes 'Israel-linked' cell

Tuesday, 7 October 2008
BBC News

Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh has said the security forces have arrested a group of alleged Islamist militants linked to Israeli intelligence.

Mr Saleh did not say what evidence had been found to show the group's links with Israel, a regional enemy of Yemen.

The arrests were connected with an attack on the US embassy in Sanaa last month which killed at least 18 people, official sources were quoted saying.

Israel's foreign ministry has rejected the accusation as "totally ridiculous".

"A terrorist cell was arrested and will be referred to the judicial authorities for its links with the Israeli intelligence services," Mr Saleh told a gathering at al-Mukalla University in Hadramawt province.

Fast-forward one year and Nigeria has become one of the largest recipients of Israeli weapons and 'security training', along with the governments of two other countries in the geo-strategic Horn of Africa region, Ethiopia and Kenya. These countries' governments were the chief beneficiaries of a tour undertaken by Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman in September 2009. With an entourage that included Israeli industrialists, arms magnates, financiers and 'security staff', Lieberman and company were guests of honour at the ECOWAS conference in Nigeria, where billions of dollars worth in weapons sales and 'security contracts' between Israeli firms and African regimes were negotiated. Even the Israeli press has been frank about Israel's nefarious business on the continent:

Of particular importance to Israel's geo-strategic posture were the countries of the Horn of Africa - Ethiopia, Kenya and Sudan - which control the shipping lanes to Eilat and are close to Egypt, Yemen and Saudi Arabia. This also gave Mossad agents and Israel Defense Forces officers an excuse to be involved in the internal affairs of African regimes. According to various publications, Israelis were involved in coups d'etat in Uganda and Zanzibar, or at least had prior knowledge of them.

It is a sad truth that with the exception of a few civilian enterprises in agriculture, communications, infrastructure and diamonds, almost all Israeli activity on the African continent is related to weapons exports.

"The ugly Israeli" in the guise of the arms dealer (mostly former intelligence and military officials), who promotes weapons sales on behalf of Israeli military industries, with the backing of the defense establishment, have given Israel a bad name world-wide. Israelis have been involved in civil wars (in Angola, Liberia, Sierra Leone and the Ivory Coast) and in aiding dictatorial regimes such as in Equatorial Guinea and the two Congo republics.

A case in point is the deal concluded recently between Israel Shipyards and the Nigerian defense ministry, for the manufacture and delivery of two Shaldag patrol boats. According to the Nigerian navy's budget book, the deal is worth $25 million (even if, for various reasons, this may be an inflated price). One boat has already been delivered. Nigerian crews have been trained in Israel, and Israeli instructors will provide further training in Nigeria.

These deals have put Israel in the position of interfering in an internal Nigerian dispute that could lead to civil war. The boats and intelligence equipment are intended for the use of Nigerian forces against rebels in the Niger River Delta region.

© Pius Utomi Ekpei/AFP/Getty ImagesMovement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND). Just where does the Nigerian government think rebel groups like this get such weapons from, if not through the US and Israeli military-intelligence network?

Judging by the escalating tension and pipeline bombings in the Niger River Delta region throughout 2009, it looks like the Mossad have made themselves at home. But by no means has it exclusive exploitation rights for Africa in general, or for Nigeria in particular. The Pentagon military-industrial complex has a large presence throughout the continent. It is highly probable that the huge fortress in Djibouti, across the Red Sea from Yemen, plays a significant role in the CIA and Green Berets' fun and games on the Arabian peninsula. Nigerian media reported about Unified Quest, a global war game scenario devised by the Pentagon in 2008:

[I]t was the first time war games included African scenarios as part of the Pentagon's plan to create a new military command for the continent: the Africa Command or AFRICOM.

[...]

In addition to U.S. military officers and intelligence officers, "Unified Quest 2008" brought together participants from the State Department and other U.S. government agencies, academics, journalists, and foreign military officers (including military representatives from several NATO countries, Australia, and Israel), along with the private military contractors who helped run the war games: the Rand Corporation and Booz-Allen.

[...]

[One game] was a test of how AFRICOM could respond to a crisis in Nigeria in which the Nigerian government is near collapse, and rival factions and rebels are fighting for control of the oil fields of the Niger Delta and vying for power in the country which is the sixth largest supplier of America's oil imports.

[...]

Among scenarios examined during the game were the possibility of direct American military intervention involving some 20,000 U.S. troops in order to "secure the oil," and the question of how to handle possible splits between factions within the Nigerian government. The game ended without military intervention because one of the rival factions executed a successful coup and formed a new government that sought stability.

[...]

[I]n a presentation by Vice Admiral Moeller at an AFRICOM conference held at Fort McNair on February 18, 2008 and subsequently posted on the web by the Pentagon, he declared that protecting "the free flow of natural resources from Africa to the global market" was one of AFRICOM's "guiding principles" and specifically cited "oil disruption," "terrorism," and the "growing influence" of China as major "challenges" to U.S. interests in Africa.

Son of a banker

Though we haven't found any direct evidence placing the patsy's father at the meetings with Lieberman and the Israeli merchants of death in September, it's not unreasonable to presume that as one of the richest and most powerful men in Africa, particularly as Chief Financial Officer of the Nigerian arms industry, he was probably involved in some way. One thing is clear: he moved in some high circles. Very high circles.

Alhaji Abdulmutallab was no ordinary banker. He was in fact the top money man, the go-to man in Nigeria for the international banking elite. His CV, which you could find here, before the page was taken down, listed him as Chairman of Nigeria's First Bank until his retirement (just two weeks before Christmas, incidentally).

Here are some choice highlights from his CV:

Veteran Chairman of the Board of First Bank Plc, Alhaji Umaru Abdul Mutallab formally retired from the position on December 13, 2009 after serving on the Board for thirteen years.
He also served as Chief Accountant/Acting General Manager, Defence Industries Corporation of Nigeria (DICON) in Kaduna. He was also the Financial Controller of the company.
He holds the Nigeria National Honour of the Commander of the Order of the Niger (CON) and the Italian National Honour of Commander of the Order of Merit.
Mutallab also served on the boards of several companies such as Arewa Textiles Limited, NEPA, NACB, NCC, Nigeria Agip Oil, and the Cement Company of Northern Nigeria [CCNN].
He is currently Chairman of several companies, including Impresit Bakolori Plc, Incar Nigeria Plc and Spring Waters Nigeria Limited (SWAN).

The Italian award apparently entitled his son to an Italian passport. We know this because he flew under this passport for the Lagos-Amsterdam leg of his journey. Alhaji AbdulMutallab has a Yemeni wife; she is the mother of the Underwear Bomber. Until IntelCenter or SITE cook up some phony internet communications linking the lonely son of an elite Nigerian banker to the CIA's new-look revamped "al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula", the only thing linking Farouk to Yemen is that he spent some time there in the run-up to Christmas. Probably with his mum.

But there is a far more interesting connection linking this elite Nigerian-Yemeni family to Yemen: Alhaji is also chairman of another bank that appears to be instrumental in delivering control of Yemen's natural resources to the IMF and international oil magnates like Ray L. Hunt, a friend of Bush II's and with deep CIA ties. Joe Quinn begin_of_the_skype_highlighting end_of_the_skype_highlighting highlights this curious 'insider trading' in the period from the beginning of the joint US-Saudi-Yemeni counter-insurgency Operation Scorched Earth in August to overt US intervention in December:

Yemen has international debt totaling almost $6 billion, much of it owed to the IFC (basically the World Bank) and the Paris Club (same thing). What is most interesting however is that almost ALL of this $6 billion appeared on Yemen's books in the last 6 months of 2009.

In short, the Yemeni government sold its soul, or more specifically, the lives of many Yemeni civilians, to the World Bank. What it got in return is open to debate. When this type of thing happens (which it has, often, especially in the last 10 years) I like to think that the leaders of the lucky country in question received first class seats on the "rapture train", but I could be wrong.

More details about the bomber's father's banking interests have also appeared. Part of Yemen's debt is financed by the Islamic Development Bank (IDB) which just happens to be the bank that financed the opening of Nigeria's first Islamic Bank, Jaiz Bank, in 2007. The bomber's father is chairman of the Board of Directors of Jaiz bank.

With a money trail like this, it's little wonder the western media were reporting soon after the plane landed safely at Detroit airport that Farouk had "cut all contact with his family."

Besides daily contact with the Mossad, Alhaji Abdulmutallab was in regular contact with the local CIA station in Nigeria in the weeks and months before Christmas. He also met with the US ambassador to Nigeria, apparently to warn the US security services of his son's jihadist tendencies. The ludicrous manner in which his son was shepherded aboard Flight 253 to Detroit at Schipol Airport, and that he was "in a trance" for the duration of his ordeal, suggests that young Farouk was effectively kidnapped and brain-washed for the role. Was he forfeit for some aspect of dealings between Nigeria, the US and Israel that went wrong? A pawn on the chessboard for hegemony over the Horn of Africa and the Middle East?

Accepting for a moment that Farouk really did have "jihadist sympathies" and made them known through internet postings (which can never be trusted because private intelligence contractors scour the internet seeking to entrap aggrieved Muslims into wishing ill upon western collaborators with Zionist Israel), we cannot discount the strong possibility that he was nevertheless purposely groomed for the role, oblivious that his handlers were in fact agents of western intelligence.

Obama's global jihad

© SITEThe ghost of al Qaeda past: Said Ali Shari, released from Guantanamo Bay in November 2007, is now one of the leaders of "Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula". Note the 'SITE' logo on this photo. Along with IntelCenter, this company is fed "exclusive leaks" from intelligence agencies which are then distributed to the media.

In our November installment of Connecting the Dots, we highlighted the escalating bombing of northern Yemen from Saudi forces, their use of white phosphorous and high-level CIA meetings that now look to have been paving the way for open US involvement in the war for control of Somalia and Yemen across the Gulf of Aden. The Saudis significantly increased bombing raids throughout December and just one week before the Christmas Special, Obama ordered multiple cruise missile attacks on sites across the small coastal nation, killing at least 120 people, while the Saudis conducted at least 70 air raids on the same day.

The White House initially denied any involvement. Then it admitted carrying out bombing raids "to protect US assets." Protect US assets? Was this a reference to the money masters' recent $6 billion investment in the country? An acknowledgement, perhaps, that their investment had to be "protected" from the insurgency, which is threatening to end their puppet Saleh's brutal dictatorship? In any event, Team Obama backtracked and changed its story as reports of dead civilians poured out of Yemen and thousands of people took to the streets in outrage. Now the party line was that the US was sending Yemen's impoverished people early Christmas presents in the form of cruise missiles because they were targeting US-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. As Scott Creighton points out, slaughtering women and children under the pretext of assassinating a Muslim cleric who "had communications with" the framed patsy in the triple-shooter Fort Hood psy-op doesn't look good for your image when you've recently been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

How convenient then that a revivified al Qaeda should once again come to the rescue of the US government's barbaric counter-insurgency warfare throughout the Muslim world. And how interesting that two of the founding members of "al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula" were released from Guantanamo Bay three years ago, retrained and reprogrammed for their next undercover mission as Warriors of Allah against the Infidels, while the innocent taxi drivers and teachers kidnapped from the streets of Kabul and Kandahar continue to rot in America's global gulags.

With curious timing, Somali "pirates" seized yet another ship in the Indian Ocean on November 29th. The Greek-owned Maran Centaurus was about 1,300km offshore and is a 'super-tanker' that was en voyage to the US with a cargo full of oil. We would love to know just how gangs of marauding pirates in single-engine makeshift speedboats are capable of pulling off such feats hundreds of miles from shore, with the largest concentration of navy warships and patrol vessels from multiple countries amassed in the area and US unmanned drones scouring overhead for suspect vessels? Surely they must at the very least be getting reconnaissance assistance to accurately navigate the hazards involved? Well, according to this report in the Guardian earlier in the year, they are:

The Somali pirates attacking shipping in the Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean are directed to their targets by a "consultant" team in London, according to a European military intelligence document obtained by a Spanish radio station.

The document, obtained by Cadena SER radio, says the team and the pirates remain in contact by satellite telephone.

© AP/BundeswehrNot all hijackings are successful, but a lot of them are. These men were seized by a German frigate on March 5. This photo was taken by the Bundeswehr shortly before the Somalis were captured.
It says that pirate groups have "well-placed informers" in London who are in regular contact with control centres in Somalia where decisions on which vessels to attack are made. These London-based "consultants" help the pirates select targets, providing information on the ships' cargoes and courses.

[...]

The pirates' information network extends to Yemen, Dubai and the Suez canal.

[...]

"The information that merchant ships sailing through the area volunteer to various international organisations is ending up in the pirates' hands," Cadena SER reported the report as saying.

This enables the more organised pirate groups to study their targets in advance, even spending several days training teams for specific hijacks. Senior pirates then join the vessel once it has been sailed close to Somalia.

Captains of attacked ships have found that pirates know everything from the layout of the vessel to its ports of call.

[...]

In each case, says the document, the pirates had full knowledge of the cargo, nationality and course of the vessel.

The national flag of a ship is also taken into account when choosing a target, with British vessels being increasingly avoided, according to the report.

Well now, that is interesting. We can add "Somali pirates" to the mix of the Secret Team's 'fun and games' to justify the heavy military build-up in the region. Yemen is the target for now, but direct intervention in Somalia is also looming on the horizon.

If you thought the brazen Bush regime was bad, listen to US Senator Claire McCaskill, a Democrat, rallying her colleagues towards the new righteous party line for the new decade:

"President Obama said very clearly and very forcefully that there is a war against terror and violence that is a vast network. And we have been taking it to that network through the intelligence community, through additional resources in Somalia and Yemen. Unlike a myopic focus on Iraq, this administration is going worldwide in this war and is focused on it."

The War on Terror™ has been rewarding to the Yemeni regime. It has been able to extend its hold on power thanks to American military hardware and CIA 'special advisors'. But now that the US and UK will intervene directly, their war-cries are making President Saleh and his enforcers nervous: they want assurances that it will retain power when the bombs are raining down hard. If Blair was Bush's poodle, what does that make Gordon Brown? Obama's bulldog? If a fresh war and surge in patriotism can bring relief to Obama's flagging popularity, then it could possibly revive Brown's deadweight government. What does it say for these two countries that their primary contribution to the world is warfare? That all the creativity their political class can muster to resolve its bloody mess is to start another one? In a sense, they have no other choice. Their economies are heavily in debt and built around military conquest: unemployment and superior technology provide them with all the canon fodder and drones they need to quell resistance to the dictates of the international moneyed elite.

The Underwear Bomber's mission didn't need to be "successful" to succeed. In fact, given the in-flight irregularities, it's probable the "firecrackers" were never intended to down the plane. It's well understood by the psychopathic practitioners of the shock doctrine that low-voltage, low-intensity terror, when carefully timed, can reap exponentially effective results. Obama was dealt a hero card by the Secret Team. He's cashed it in with a shift in focus from the fantasy 'Axis of Evil' scripted by the NeoCons for Bush II (Iraq, Iran, North Korea) to the NeoLiberal fantasy Axis of Af-Pak, Yemen and Somalia. One year on the job; two more wars... "Yes we can!"

Leonard Lewin's Report from Iron Mountain comes to mind each time we cringe at America's ever-widening war path:

"The organizing principle of any society is for war. The basic authority of a modern state over its people resides in its war powers."

Similarly, George Orwell once wrote:

"Victory is not possible. The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. Hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. This new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed. In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia, but to keep the very structure of society intact."

On the home front, the al Qaeda Christmas Special heralded a sharp spike in airport hysteria, an opportunity that was immediately seized upon by the military-security complex which is ready and willing to profit from the rapid expansion of full-body "naked" scanners at airports. One notable winner is Michael Chertoff, former Homeland Security Secretary, whose shameless promotion of these 'dehumanization' machines will see him net a tidy profit through his security consultancy firm. Gordon Brown immediately ordered UK airports to introduce full body scanners, despite the fact that Europe has declared these devices to be in breach of human rights. Soon we can all look forward to the introduction of similarly abrasive devices like the taser-wrist-band the Pathocrats hope will eventually replace boarding cards for getting through airport security.

Perhaps it's hoped that by making flying such an unpleasant experience, people will become less willing to travel. Judging by some of the comments we've noticed, that is exactly what many will do; limit their air travel. Airports make useful testing centers for herd control, for reconditioning the human race to passively accept total domination. There is a silver lining to this affair however: this latest scenario cooked up by the Secret Team to remind people at large of the 'reality' of the threat posed by "Muslim terrorists" was so ridiculously contrived that it offered many more people the opportunity to question the propaganda and see through the lies used to justify the Global War on Terror™.

Survivors: Iran and Venezuela will not submit

The US-UK-Israel trifecta, with other western governments in tow, are pushing for crippling the Iranian economy with "sanctions", which, by the way, is a euphemism for implementing economic siege on a country by gradually sealing off its access to essential goods from abroad. But the true Axis of Evil knows it can't get peoples' support for another large scale war in the Middle East without at the very least delivering the appearance of a just cause for obliterating Iran as they have Iraq.

So far, the Iranian regime hasn't flinched. We reported last month that its response to the UN Security Council's contrived new International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) resolution calling on Iran to unconditionally halt all its nuclear operations was to announce the construction of ten new nuclear reactors to enrich uranium for civil purposes (for nuclear power plants and medical facilities). We say "contrived" because Russia and China only supported the resolution after Obama warned the Chinese that if they failed to get behind the Axis' agenda to shut down Iran's legitimate quest for nuclear energy, the US would be 'powerless' to stop Israel unilaterally bombing Iran. Within days of this 'united front' against Iran, Putin highlighted its weakness by stressing there was no evidence Iran wants nuclear weapons. The Obama administration is now prepared to impose unilateral sanctions should the UN not go along with it. Remember the prelude to Shock and Awe in Iraq in 2003? The UN rejected the British and American grounds for a "pre-emptive" invasion of Iraq, so they went ahead and did it anyway. With "sanctions" now "on the table", Iran has again met the raised bar by announcing that it would now in fact be needing twenty new nuclear reactors for its growing energy needs!

It's worth noting that there is some debate within the Iranian government about the pros and cons of enriching its own uranium versus importing it from abroad. But this is besides the point. Every country is entitled to make such decisions for itself, and Iran has always done everything by the book. The tremendous pressure exerted by the Axis powers to portray Iran's intentions as a dangerous threat to the world serves to distract from the reality that the Axis possesses the bulk of the planet's nuclear weapons, which it uses as leaverage towards imposing Israeli regional hegemony on the Middle East and beyond.

There were several instances of allegedly top secret documents "leaked" in December, supposedly revealing Iran's duplicitous intentions. Guess what? They were all faked then circulated to intelligence agencies and media outlets. Investigative historian and journalist Gareth Porter has been investigating and keeping track of these documents and is fairly certain that either UK or Israeli intelligence is the source of these fake documents and that MI6 and the Mossad are conducting a comprehensive propaganda campaign to convince western powers of Iran's non-existent "secret nuclear weapons program." The Times of London hyped up yet another document linking Iran to nukes in the middle of the month, but a former CIA official, with a history of neutralising Secret Team disinformation, revealed on behalf of US intelligence that they saw through the ruse right away, calling it a forgery:

The Times of London story published Dec. 14 did not identify the source of the document. But it quoted "an Asian intelligence source" - a term some news media have used for Israeli intelligence officials [...]

"The Rupert Murdoch chain has been used extensively to publish false intelligence from the Israelis and occasionally from the British government," Giraldi said.

[...]

In 2005, Giraldi identified Michael Ledeen, the extreme right-wing former consultant to the National Security Council and the Pentagon, as an author of the fabricated letter purporting to show Iraqi interest in purchasing uranium from Niger. That letter was used by the George W. Bush administration to bolster its false case that Saddam Hussein had an active nuclear weapons program.

Giraldi also identified officials in the "Office of Special Plans" who worked under Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith as having forged a letter purportedly written by Hussein's intelligence director, Tahir Jalail Habbush al-Tikriti, to Hussein himself, referring to an Iraqi intelligence operation to arrange for an unidentified shipment from Niger.

Unfazed, The Times then published a second document which it claimed was a photocopy of an Iranian original. When irregularities were pointed out, the Times reporter admitted it was not even a photocopy - it was "a retyped version of the relevant parts of that original document"! If at first you don't succeed, try, try and try again. Evidently they hope that at least some of the mud they're throwing at Iran will stick, by which time they'll have their smoking gun that Iran is making nukes.

So fake documents aren't working. What else can they try? Oh yes! How about this:

Osama bin Laden's family missing since 9/11 attacks found living in secret compound in Iran

Bin Laden + Iran = 9/11. You see? Iran was behind 9/11! It's really that simple folks! Sarcasm aside, it wouldn't surprise us to see Iran linked into a fictional chain of causality linking its regime to involvement in 9/11, as was done with Saddam Hussein as the US and UK became desperate to sell the invasion of Iraq. Of more immediate concern for the Iranian government is how to deal with the CIA-backed groups fomenting unrest within the country. In a re-run of the premeditated violence that followed Ahmadinejad's landslide election victory in June, demonstrators were killed by persons unknown at protests held towards the end of December. Their timing couldn't have been more insulting to Iran's predominantly Shia Muslim population. Ashura is a widely celebrated solemn religious anniversary commemorating the 7th century death of Prophet Muhammad's grandson, Imam Hussein. The security forces insist they killed no one: police on the streets were unarmed.

Western powers seized this opportunity to berate Iran's subsequent crackdown on the revivified "Twitter Revolution" and the sacking of Mirhossein Mousavi from his government position. Given the western media's manipulation of the summer's protests and Iranian suspicions that Neda Soltani's murder and subsequent martyrdom was a psy-op orchestrated by foreign agents, it's unsurprising that the Iranian government blamed "foreign interference" (the US-UK-Israeli Axis) for the recent disturbances. In fact, Ahmadinejad came right out and said the US and Israel staged the protests:

Describing the deadly events on Ashura as a "nauseating play," President Ahmadinejad said, "Americans and Zionists are the sole audience of a play they have commissioned and sold out."

We couldn't have said it better.

Another man with a penchant for calling a duck a duck is Hugo Chavez. Dealing with thieving bankers in a way most world leaders wish they could, but are too afraid to do so, his government had several big bankers arrested for defrauding the Venezuelan people and shut down complicit banks before they could do any more damage. Said Hugo:

"These bankers should be shown for what they really are to the public: vulgar robbers, thieves in ties, pickpockets and obstinate kleptomaniacs."

The US remains Venezuela's largest oil customer, but Chavez is moving to transplant that relationship to China, with whom he signed another round of mega-trade deals in December. It's "socialist" behaviour like this that aggravates the US government and banking elite. The US military build up in Colombia is ominous. Calling Colombia the "Israel of South America", Chavez is certain that Colombia is preparing to attack, under the guise of a strike against FARC guerillas ("narco-terrorists" in US government parlance) that are supposedly hiding in the jungles bordering the two countries. Venezuela is buying large quantities of military hardware from Russia in a race to meet US-Colombian preparations for war. As the tension mounts the Secret Team knows that all it could take is a little. . . push:

Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez said Sunday a U.S. unmanned spy plane violated Venezuela's airspace and he had ordered the military to shoot down similar aircraft in the future.

Isra-hell: Just like Nazi Germany

In a world so dominated by psychopathology it's often difficult to distinguish deviance against the background of 'norms' humanity has come to acccept. However, we once again have Israel to thank for dramatically illustrating the spread of macrosocial evil. There was a trickle of reports over recent years, but 2009 revealed the scale and gruesome depravity of Israel's organ harvesting network like never before. The dam broke in the summer when a racket involving New Jersey politicians and rabbis brought to light that US hospitals were participating in the illegal trade in body parts, encouraged by Israeli insurance companies and subsidised by the Israeli government. Then a Swedish newspaper made it known that Israeli forces steal organs from murdered Palestinians, a widespread practice going on since the early 1990s and centered around Israel's State Pathologist. Despite Israel's fierce reaction to this "blood libel", the cat was out of the bag and we soon discovered an international network of Israelis paying desperate people the world over, their consent often questionable or non-existent, for body parts to supply Israeli demand. This network has reared its ugly head in the US, Moldova, Romania, Algeria, China, Brazil and Turkey.

December saw Ukraine added to the growing list. With each revelation, it's becoming apparent that "illegal trade" in body parts is not the appropriate term to use here. We are looking at an international conspiracy that involves kidnapping children from poor backgrounds, then taking them to Israel where they are (presumeably killed) then used for spare body parts. Shortly before Christmas an Israeli Knesset member, Ahmad Tibi, leader of the Arab Nationalist Party, told reporters that "a medical institution in Israel [probably the notorious Abu Kabir Forensic Institute in Tel Aviv, at which Jehuda Hiss was Israel's chief pathologist] harvested appendages from the bodies of dead Palestinians in the 1990's." Damage control came in the form of a documentary broadcast on Israeli television on December 20th. Jehuda Hiss admitted that this practice had been going on since the early 1980s and justified it by saying, "We did it for the sake of research and medical progress." The details are gruesome, but the evidence clear: Israel has no conscience:

[T]o return to what was exposed in the TV film, the skin off the back was taken from the dead as well the cornea, as a treatment for wounded Israel soldiers.

According to Avi Itrg, "We were taking the skin off the back of the deceased and this was not discovered by their families because they were not turning the body during the burial, and they did not know that we got the skin from the back of their dead relatives."

In 1986, Israel set up the skin bank. The bank suffered from a lack of the skin, but the Abu Kabir Institute provided the bank with the skin for wounded Israeli soldiers and citizens who suffered burns.

According to the videotape, Arieh Eldad, a squatter in Kfar Adumim, who is a medical doctor specializing in plastic surgery and was the chief medical officer of the IDF from 1997-2000, and who is a member of the Knesset for the National Union, said "We had orders not to take the consent of the families while taking the organs of the dead".

Famous last words from Nuremburg: "We were only following orders from above."

Rabid squatters

Perhaps consuming Palestinians' bodyparts shouldn't surprise us, given the larger context of Israel's steady consumption of the emaciated lands of Palestine. Between the psychotic settlers and the Israeli government, 14,000 olive trees were uprooted in the West Bank alone last year. What pockets remain populated with Palestinians in East Jerusalem and the West Bank are now effectively imprisoned on all sides by 15-meter high reinforced concrete walls and monstrous hilltop garrisons manned by heavily armed, fanatical, fundamentalist Jews. Protected by the Israeli military and funded with Americans' money, the settlers - "squatters" is a more appropriate term - are terrorising the local inhabitants from their homes, then expanding settlements before they can return. It's a pattern explained away by the Israeli government as a consequence of "natural growth", but it has the organised military odour of 'clear and hold', or indeed, paramilitary death squads cloaked in religious garb. It's been happening piecemeal for decades, but the frantic land grab since psychopaths Netanyahu and Lieberman teamed up has finally shown even Israel's most ardent supporters in the US and Europe, that Israel has no intention whatsoever of halting the expansion of settlement building. Quite the reverse in fact; this fascist regime is mouthing platitudes towards its sponsors in order to buy the time it needs to complete the acquisition of the West Bank, ending forever the natives' hope for peaceful coexistence. Every good Israeli agrees: it's time to go Bibical with the Arabs.

In 2008 'apartheid' became the buzz word to describe the situation in the West Bank. But after successive visitors from South Africa came away saying that Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is "worse, much worse", and as a result of Israel's display of pornographic brutality before, during and after Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli regime is more frequently and openly being compared with the Nazi regime. We could even go further and say that the Zionists are worse then the Nazis. They may not have (yet) murdered in the same quantities, but the quality of the totalitarian system they have built in the West Bank, thanks largely to ultra-sophisticated technologies procured from the military-industrial complex, is arguably unrivaled in modern history. People in developed countries invariably find it difficult to fathom that such barbarity remains ever-present. They would need to physically experience the atmosphere of terror for themselves to perceive and thus acknowledge its reality. Rather than acknowledge that psychopaths carry the 'Nazi-spirit' through the social organism, those who speak out to warn humanity are attacked for 'imagining' such horrible notions.

Devouring Gaza

The slaughter of Gaza last year was cruel enough. But to then seal the dead and wounded off from civilisation and maintain a siege preventing the survivors from access to food, medical supplies and building materials, further suggests a level of cruelty beyond the imagination of the normal human mind. One year on, not one home has been rebuilt. One year on, 20,000 Gazans are still living in make-shift shacks. In early December, going into the coldest winter for decades, Israel shut down the sole oil and gas terminal supplying the Gazan population, "for security reasons." The Guardian reported that those few patients who are granted leave for medical treatment in Israel are invariably held without charge at the border 'processing centers' and told they will not be let through unless they agree to become Israeli collaborators.

For a while it looked like Israel would commemorate last year's carnage with another round of sacrificial slaughter. On December 23rd, Israeli planes dropped thousands of leaflets warning Gazans not to cooperate with Hamas and threatening a new attack on the anniversary of the opening bombings of Cast Lead. This proved to be a sick joke, but for a few days the people of Gaza held their breath. On Christmas Day all border crossings were closed and Gaza really was sealed shut. Then Israel announced a return to open assassinations with the murder of 6 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Although the anniversary itself passed uneventfully, Israeli tanks and jets briefly strafed the Strip on New Year's Day. Children were aparently terrified, fearing last year's hell was about to begin all over. Attacks have continued into the first week of 2010. It's just a matter of time before Cast Lead 2.

1,500 international activists were en-route to Gaza for the December 27th anniversary, along with another Viva Palestina convoy of some 250 trucks and ambulances delivering medical supplies and other essential aid donated from ordinary people throughout Europe and the Middle East. But the Egyptian authorities were clearly under orders to prevent George Galloway and friends from getting anywhere near Gaza's tiny border with Egypt. The aid convoy was denied entry into the country from Jordan via the Gulf of Aqaba. So they drove the whole way around Israel to sail from the port of Latakia in Syria and arrived several days later in the Egyptian port of Al-Arish on the Mediterranean coast. When they arrived, the Turkish government intervened to mediate when Galloway announced he was going on hunger-strike until the Egyptians let the convoy through. In fact, all 400 members of Viva Palestina began a hunger-strike, among them was an 85-year-old Jewish survivor of Hitler's concentration camps. The Egyptian security goons weren't expecting such resistance from this determined group of people and stalled them in the only way they know.

Meanwhile the stranded activists in Cairo accepted that they would not make it to Gaza, so they spent the New Year fending off attacks from the police as they held continuous demonstrations and vigils outside various embassies and Egyptian government buildings. The Egyptian dictatorship eventually tired of this nuisance and opened the Rafah border crossing into Gaza on January 6th. The whole episode again emphasised that Israel is not the sole warden of this open-air prison. Egypt is equally culpabale in this genocide and is installing a US-made steel-reinforced wall underground to prevent desperate Gazans from tunneling under the border to bring in supplies:

War Criminals

We've heard lots of talk but seen little action when it comes to prosecuting the ministers and generals responsible for Cast Lead. Nevertheless, at least there are some gestures being made to restrain this out-of-control monster. In December a British court issued an arrest warrant for Tzipni Livni, to which Israel's vice prime minister responded with customary chutzpah:

"We are all Tzipi Livni," he said. "The time has come for us to move from the defensive to the offensive. We must use real diplomacy here, to tell Britain, Spain and all those other states that we will not stand for this anymore."

Britain's Jewish foreign secretary David Miliband was "shocked" and promised his Israeli kin that no such arrest would take place under his watch. Furthermore, the law concerning prosecution of foreign heads of state for war crimes would be "reformed and renewed." It's not difficult to see why the British government is on the defensive here. "War crime" was mentioned one too many times for its liking by the British press throughout December as the Chilcot Iraq War Enquiry finally established that the invasion of Iraq was planned before 9/11 and that there was no intention whatsoever to "rebuild post-war Iraq."

For all our hope of a rift developing between the US and Israel that becomes sufficient to halt the relentless destruction of the Axis of Zionists, Obama has again outdone his predecessor, feeding Israel's insatiable appetite another $2.775 billion in "security aid" to match a similar figure he dished out in July. More daunting still is the news that Israel has secured "aid" totalling $30 billion for the coming decade.

Bashful Berlusconi

The antics of Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi never fail to amuse, but there was a noticeable deterioration in his behaviour throughout 2009. Sex scandals and corruption are the norm for 'high-class' stage performers like him, but his addiction to the limelight will ultimately reap his downfall. A huge demonstration rallied in Rome for his resignation at the beginning of December. People's collective frustration found an outlet in the form of a flying cathedral that knocked out his front teeth, hurled by a "mentally unstable" man after Berlusconi had delivered a speech to supporters that was apparently reminiscent of Il Duce himself. Well, he had it coming! There was nothing funny about Berlusconi's reaction, but it offers us invaluable insight into how psychopathology infects and transforms social consciousness when carriers of the disease acquire the means to impress their inverted worldview onto society at large:

The government is now pushing for a bill that would restrict internet freedom by making it compulsory, even for blogs, to get a government permission before posting political comment on the web.

© UnknownA pathocrat scorned
From his bed in the hospital, Berlusconi's first reaction to the violent attack on him was sincere shock: "Why do people hate me? I love everybody, I am the president of every Italian."

As an early political opponent to Berlusconi (and former editor of one of his newspapers) used to say, the problem with Berlusconi is that he believes his own fantasies. He's always said that everybody should love him, and now we see that he really meant that. The newly-released documentary Videocracy shows that after 10 years of Berlusconi as a PM, thanks to the impressive media power at his disposal, Italians are now living in his imagined world. It's a world without respect for woman, legality or financial accountability; which values only individual success, money. It sees the image as more important than the word.

When one man has such a complete control over his country, those who have different political views are given little space to express them through the media. As long as that leader feels loved by his citizens he will fight opposition by democratic means, but we should not forget that it is when a man is scared and feels reviled he is capable of resorting to the use of an undemocratic arsenal. What seems to be good news for Berlusconi's opponents could easily turn bad.

Paranoia about plots against his rule is unhinging Silvio further, so we can expect to see this spread through Italian society. All of a sudden 'Superman' has vowed to destroy the Mafia within three years. But of course, in Silvio's latest fantasy, he's neglected to include the fact that he is Mafioso!

Welcoming in The New Year With a Glass of 'Blue Gold'

"Mankind ... Intoxicated with a sense of his own power, ... seems to be going farther and farther into more experiments for the destruction of himself and his world. For this unhappy trend there is no single remedy - no panacea"

Rachel Carson April, 1952.

The privatization of the world's water supply does not require the capital needed that other forms of population extinction do. No bombs, no white phosphorous, no poison vaccines. Privatization of water proceeds quietly, one bankrupt country at a time, one deal at a time between its government, the World Bank and the IMF, stealthily installing prepaid meters around the nation until before you know it, those who can't afford to pay find their luck's run out and the tap is turned off.

To paraphrase Carson's quote:

"The Psychopaths... intoxicated with a sense of their own power ... seem to be going farther and farther into more experiments for the destruction of humanity and this world. For this unhappy trend there is no single remedy - no panacea."

If a country is in debt, if it needs a loan from the World Bank or the IMF, it will more likely than not be asked to guarantee its loan by transferring the management of its natural resources from the public sector to a private corporation. This process gives enormous power to small groups of individuals who, by denying resources to those who can not afford to pay, gain over them the power of granting life or death. This is especially true in the case of water.

Although all natural resources are precious, water is the most precious of all as - "an investment opportunity". To corporations whose sole aim is to make a profit, water is therefore 'blue gold'.

The similarities between psychopaths and corporations are explored in the 2002 documentary The Corporation in which the tactics used by these "legal persons" to achieve their aims are measured against a Checklist of Mental Disorders compiled by Dr. Robert Hare, whose groundbreaking studies on this subject have done much to publicize the phenomenon of psychopathy:

Personality Disorder Checklist
World Health Organization ICD-10
Manual of Mental Disorders DSM-IV

Callous unconcern for the feelings of others.
Incapacity to maintain enduring relationships.
Reckless disregard for the safety of others
Deceitfulness: repeated lying and conning others for profit.
Incapacity to experience guilt.
Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors.

Jean Luc-Tuly, a former accountant with 30 years of experience with Vivendi/Violia Corporation provides a window into the tactics of the CEOs of water corporations in the documentary Flow

The (water) companies have been in existence for 150 years and were founded by bankers; this is what you need to know.

These multinational corporations are by no means philanthropic organizations so the progressive language of these multinationals is truly scandalous because they say 'We are the ones who will end poverty with regards to access of water.

But how could Vivendi shareholders wait 10 to 15 years to bring water to people who can't pay for it? They are not interested at all.

The first decade of the 21st Century has been marked by popular uprisings against the privatization of water in such countries as Nicaragua, India, South Africa, Ghana and Bolivia, to name just a few. To get a sense of the scope of the hardships imposed on local populations by the privatization of water, watch this.

The connection between the role of bankers and water companies present limitless opportunities for the privatization of municipal water supplies as municipalities are strapped for money to pay for the maintenance needed to insure the purity of their water supply. Once this happens, it's inevitable that the price for water will go up, and that those who can't pay the increase will have to make do with dirty water as the price for the shareholders' profit.

According to a 2003 study done by the Center for Public Integrity:

The explosive growth of private water utility companies in the last 10 years raises fears that mankind may be losing control of its most vital resource to a handful of monopolistic corporations. In Europe and North America, analysts predict that within the next 15 years these companies will control 65 percent to 75 percent of what are now public waterworks
.
Water corporations have worked closely with the World Bank and other International financial institutions to gain a foothold on every continent. They aggressively lobby for legislation and trade laws to force cities to privatize their water and set the agenda for debate on solutions to the world's increasing water scarcity.

The companies argue they are more efficient and cheaper than public utilities. Critics say they are predatory capitalists that ultimately plan to control the world's water resources and drive up prices even as the gap between rich and poor widens. The fear is that accountability will vanish, and the world will lose control of its source of life.

Yet one poor country's tragedy is a multinational corporation's - investment opportunity:

There's huge growth potential.... "There will be world wars fought over water in the future. It's a limited, precious resource, so the growth market is always going to be there." _Peter Spillett, a senior executive with Thames Water

"Water as a business is very effective when you look at the needs... We purify water and bring this water to your home. We provide a service, it has a cost, and somebody has to pay for it."

- Gerard Payen who directed the overseas expansion of Suez S.A.

And if you are poor and can't pay the cost of the pre-pay meter, you either head to the creek and fill your container with polluted water that you hope does not harbor cholera, or other water-borne diseases, or you fight back.

Below are some reports from the front lines of the water wars that transpired in 2009. Some cover violent outbreaks due to scarcity. Others concern pollutants in the water - a condition which acts as bait for municipalities who turn to water corporations who will offer to clean up - for a fee:

Underused Drilling Practices Could Reduce Pollution, But Energy Companies Shy Away From Using Them

Do El Salvador and the other countries in Central America have the right to enforce their own environmental laws, or do transnational corporations get to rule?

The Real Story on Arsenic in Your Water

That Tap Water Is Legal but May Be Unhealthy and Deadly

Study Finds Hundreds of Pollutants in Nation's Tap Water

Drugs in Drinking Water a Growing Problem

China: 100,000 Face Drinking Water Shortages in Xiangtan City

Bailed-Out AIG Forcing Poor to Choose Between Running Water and Food

Nuclear Scars: Tainted water runs beneath Nevada desert

Palestinian farmers denied access to water in disputed West Bank

Ethnic cleansing: Israel denying Palestinians access to clean water

Is Chicago Mayor Daley Looking To Lease Water System?

Toxic Waters Regulatory Absence Allows Chemical Coal and Farm Industries to Pollute US Water Supplies

California's coastal waters: a dump for fishing gear

Study Reveals Privatized Water Systems Result in Job Losses

With natural gas boom Pennsylvania faces an onslaught of wastewater

Water demand puts Canadian rivers at risk

School Drinking Water Contains Toxins

Water wars loom in a nation of parched fields

Toxic Waters Clean Water Laws Are Neglected at a Cost in Suffering

Gaza 10,000 without access to water and sanitation

Mexico water shortage becomes crisis amid drought

Unscrewing a mystery

There were no reports of Santa Claus in the sky this Christmas, but the skies were full of high strangeness nonetheless!

We counted 136 sightings of UFOs this month. This may be down to good observation on our part! They were especially concentrated over the UK and North America, with 58 sightings in the US and Canada, and 62 sightings in the UK. There was a spike in sightings on Christmas Day and New Year's Eve. Even one of our own editors saw a red-orange orb zip across the sky as he observed the lunar eclipse on the Blue Moon New Year's Eve!

Now, what was this?

Mystery as spiral blue light display hovers above Norway

Forum members have thought through the clues related to this awesome display in the sky. Given the available data, it seems likely that the object was indeed a missile spinning - the explanation provided to the media. How a spinning object could produce such a beautiful spiral is best explained in this simulation. You can compare and contrast other videos of similar incidents with comparable features on Youtube, in particular this video report from China. However, neither the media nor the simulation explain why we had never seen missiles create something so aesthetically spectacular before. This suggests that something was indeed extraordinary about the phenomenon - not the missile itself, but perhaps the atmosphere? If the air is denser than usual or charged with unusual particles, the reflection of light would also be different. Remember this article from 2008?

"The incidence of noctilucent clouds [night-shining clouds] seems to be increasing, perhaps because of global warming," says Paul M. Bellan, a professor of applied physics at Caltech.

© Mark Humpage/ swns.com'Noctilucent' or 'night-shining' clouds form at the outer limits of the upper atmosphere and reflect the sun's light long after it has gone down over the horizon.
Twenty-five years ago, researchers at Poker Flat, Alaska, discovered that the clouds were highly reflective to radar. This unusual property has long puzzled scientists. Bellan, reporting in the August issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres, now has an explanation: the ice grains in noctilucent clouds are coated with a thin film of metal, made of sodium and iron. The metal film causes radar waves to reflect off ripples in the cloud in a manner analogous to how X-rays reflect from a crystal lattice.

Sodium and iron atoms collect in the upper atmosphere after being blasted off incoming micrometeors. These metal atoms settle into a thin layer of vapor that sits just above the altitude at which noctilucent clouds occur. Astronomers recently have been using the sodium layer to create laser-illuminated artificial guide stars for adaptive optics telescopes that remove the distorting affects of atmospheric turbulence to produce clearer celestial images.

In other words, the reason there are more night-shining clouds of late is that the atmosphere is being bombarded by micrometeors. This is tremendously significant because with micrometeors will come macrometeors. Indeed, we have been keeping track of fireballs for a few years now, and although we lack the statistical data to make definitive conclusions, we cannot help but notice the increase in reported sightings in world media. Here are the reports from December:

US: Mysterious booms questioned

Maryland, US: Strange Fiery Object Found On Beach

Bluish-green fireball sighted over northern Germany

Hawaii: Colored 'fireballs' light up evening sky

Huge fireball and blue/green skies seen from Minnesota to Wisconsin

Fireball: Curious Events In Nebraska

Earthquakes in Nebraska are rare, so what are the odds of one happening within minutes of a meteoritic fireball blazing a trail?

Magnitude 3.5 earthquake follows Nebraska fireball

China: Fireball in Beijing

UK: Daylight fireball reported

Flame-Shooting UFO (Meteor?) Spotted Near A47 in England

US: "Electric" Blue Streak (Meteor?) Seen in Eastern Sky

Canada: Apparent Meteor Zips Through Sky

Alleged Meteorite Fall Causes Alarm in Santiago, Chile

US: Sonic boom-like noise heard by many last night

Green meteor lights up night sky over Mojave Desert

We leave you this month with this thought for the New Year: Who are the real terrorists?

US war veteran: We were told we were fighting terrorists, but the real terrorist was me and the real terrorism is this occupation

Reader Comments

Aeneas · 2010-01-09T15:34:36Z

Thank you!

Great work as usual from the SOTT team. Thank you for the monthly Connecting the Dots during all of 2009 and look forward to them again this year.

PRao · 2010-01-11T17:46:51Z

Amazing

This is amazing beyond any proportions. Hopenosis picture tells the complete tale

Niall · 2010-01-13T08:23:16Z

Fossil relic of a dead civilization

Very interesting, thanks Manuel. Douglas Reed is another writer who saw Israel for what it is. His "Controversy of Zion" is a must-read [Link]. It charts the development of this anti-human 'ideology'. Sott factors in Political Ponerology to help us understand what imperial conquest and its surface ideologies really represent. History doesn't leave its primitive roots behind; they 'resurface' in cyclical fashion. The chorus after WWII was "never again", but here we are today and the 'Nazi-spirit' has not only survived, but re-emerged stronger than ever.

apeguia · 2010-01-15T01:05:45Z

C of Z

Hard copies of the Controversy of Zion can also be purchased here:

[Link]

Niall · 2010-01-23T22:01:51Z

Ooh!

I did not know that! It'd be great to have a hard copy for cross-referencing. Thanks Red Pill Press Canada!

Amerikagulag · 2010-01-14T13:06:08Z

Year in review

Absolutely brilliant. Thank you so much for this in depth article.

The greed and hubris of our western leaders is going to kill our economies, which have been in recession since 2008. When the shit finally hits...

Peter Jennings

There is a theory that the Voyager 1 & 2 were sent out into space to find and track Planet X. A very recent report says they may well have...

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SBCTry transcendental meditation or Raja yoga (yoga of wisdom). Either will teach you how to understand the inner conciousness. The role of the...

Awordinyourear

Almost all the private wealth of the UK is held by the Grannies and Grandads ,representing the lifetime savings to keep them secure and to pass on...

Awordinyourear

Considering the level of rationality displayed on Western / EU side lately, I think they will do it anyway. Which only hastens their demise.

codis

SOTT Focus:

Connecting the Dots: 2009 - The Year in Review

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