A Note to New Readers of Signs of the Times

Dated 08/09/2004

As a result of the upsurge in readers brought to the Signs of the Times page by our Flash animation on the Pentagon crash, we became very aware that many first time readers are somewhat surprised by the contents of the Signs of the Times, as well the content of our other sites. Many may never have been to what has come to be known as an "alternative news site" or to a site quite like 'Signs of the Times.org'. We would therefore like to introduce ourselves and our goals to any new readers that happen to stumble upon our page. [For those interested in the Pentagon crash, please scroll down to that section of the page.]

First, what is an "alternative news site"?

Most people get their news from the mainstream media. These are the newspapers, radio networks, and television networks owned by large corporations. In the last few decades, the concentration of media has increased dramatically, so that programming is produced in a large center, such as New York, and is then fed out to the member stations. A certain amount of local news is still collected locally. However, national and international issues come from one source.

While there may be slight differences in the way the major media cover stories, by and large they are promoting the point of view of those who own them. These are wealthy people with connections with other wealthy people who own the large corporations that dominate the modern economic landscape. They are also tightly connected with the two major political parties in the US. In fact, they represent a very small stratum of the public: those who have stakes of ownership.

The news they report is coloured by their interests, and their interests are not the interests of the vast majority of their readers. And one of their principle interests is to keep the majority of their readers or viewers in ignorance over the true facts of US policy and the consequences of this policy on people overseas. There is minimal news reporting that deals with international affairs, and that reporting which is done is heavily biased from a simplistic "us and them" perspective. "Us" being the US and its allies, although the allies don't really count for much, and "them" is everyone else. "Them" used to be portrayed as in the sphere of influence of the Russians. Nowadays the French seem to be portrayed as the Bad Guys. Along, of course, with the entire Arab and Moslem world.

The mainstream news sites accept as a given the proclamations that come from the White House. In the period prior to the invasion of Iraq, the assertion's of the Bush Administration that Saddam was an immediate threat to the US, that he had stockpiled WMD that could be unleashed upon the US, was accepted without question by the mainstream news.

They are now admitting that this was not true and that they should have questioned these assertions.

That there were no WMD did not come as a surprise to those who read alternative news sites. The information was available, at least, there was enough data available prior to the invasion of Iraq to seriously put into question the "facts" given to us by Messieurs Bush, Cheney, Powell, and Rumsfeld. The data was out there, only the mainstream news did not report them.

Alternative news sites do the work the mainstream media refuse to do. They take risks by covering stories that do not get reported on CNN, Fox, or in the New York Times or the Washington Post. Coming upon a site such as this can be a shock if you have been in the protected environment of CNN or Fox. The reality they portray is far from the reality that exists. It can be difficult at first for new readers because they have never been confronted before with the world as it is. It is a powerful shock. Our leaders are lying to us -- consciously and deliberately. And they know they can get away with it because they know that most people will not take the time nor make the effort to go out and look for themselves at information from other sources. Or if they do, they will automatically discount any news that contradicts what they have been brought up to believe.

Alternative news sites exist to bring the facts and data to those who are willing to put into question their preconceived ideas, their assumptions about the nature of our society, about those that lead this society.

Different alternative news sites deliver the news from different points of view. Some are liberal, some are conservative, some are libertarian, and some are part of what is known as the Patriot movement. Each reflects the point of view of the writers of the site. Whereas the mainstream sites pretend to be "objective", reporting simply "the facts", alternative sites openly admit their affiliations and their points of view. They do not think that it is possible to be "objective". Everything is seen from a "point of view".

So what is the "point of view" of this site?

We are neither liberal nor conservative, neither left nor right. We strive to present the news from the point of view of the Soul. Our concern is how the events on the planet, not only those within the US, affect our spiritual evolution. Mankind, in a large part helped through the teachings of small-minded religions such as Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, has created a veritable Hell on Earth. No one takes the actual precepts of religion seriously: love thy neighbor; do unto others as you would have them do unto you, etc. Religion has become a means of dividing the world once more into "Us and Them". We think that religion is a control system used to keep people in their place. So when we talk of the evolution of the Soul, we are not referring to any specific religious teaching.

We also think that it is very difficult to be certain about much of what happens in the world. There is a certain amount of data that is available to us, and from this data we can build hypotheses which we can then test against new data. If new data contradicts the hypothesis, the hypothesis can be changed. Therefore, we look at the world in terms of probabilities.

This approach can also be unnerving to those who wish to see the world in the harsh terms of black and white. If they read that we criticise Bush, they immediately assume that we support Kerry. If we criticise the United States, they suggest we should go live in Russia. If we are against the invasion and occupation of Iraq, they assume we support Saddam.

In fact, we think that mankind in general is more or less mechanical in his actions. Most of us are doing everything on auto-pilot. We are programmed through our social conditioning, education, the media, and our interactions with our families and friends to live according to formulas. The struggle to survive imposes the need to work in conditions that emphasise the mechanical and uncreative aspects of our nature, to the detriment of the Creative spark we should be nourishing within.

It takes a conscious choice and much effort to lift oneself out of this environment. Both the capitalist and communist systems are based upon turning us into cogs in the machine, forcing us to conform to survive.

So what do we propose?

We think that there is an Ancient Tradition that has been passed down, sometimes coming out into the open, other times remaining hidden in the shadows, that teaches us how to master ourselves. Through this work, we can each "grow" a Soul. This work includes rooting out the programmes that have been instilled within us. It is aimed at reinforcing our Free Will so that we can see the manipulations of society for what they are and learn to avoid them. Many of the articles on this site and our related sites discuss this work in more detail.

What is fundamental is the work to see the world as it is, not caught within the assumptions, preconceptions, and prejudices of political parties or class structures, or any other dogmatisms, but rather, to see it in all its glory and horror.

Frankly, we have made a real mess of things, in spite of thousands of years of attempts by many others to improve the situation. Why has this happened?

As mentioned above, we work with probabilities. As new information becomes available, as our understanding changes, as our knowledge grows, we can reassess probabilities. Thus, nothing is ever set in stone.

We bring to this work a mixture of science and mysticism. If science is valid, then one day there may be answers to the questions that we now label "mystic". These answers will not necessarily reduce mystical or spiritual questions to materialist answers, such as the idea that our consciousness is nothing more than an epiphenomenon that emerges when matter achieves a certain degree of complexity. We think that consciousness is something real, a cause rather than an effect. But neither can it be reduced to the "God" of the monotheistic religions. It is something vaster, more wonderful and miraculous. A scientific explanation, rather than reducing God or consciousness to nothing, may well open up vistas to the marvelous that we can not yet comprehend. But for this to take place, science must also change and shed the hard-core materialist garb it has taken upon itself in the last century.

At least, this is our hypothesis.

We know that this approach will not satisfy everyone. Why should it? We are all different and unique individuals. However, those who do appreciate the possibilities in such an approach should certainly be free to undertake such investigations.

This notion of liberty of expression has taken a nose dive, unfortunately, among certain Americans who have written us recently. We even had one writer let us know that he thought our site should be "eliminated".

For those people who have written asking further questions about the Pentagon crash animation, we will do our best to answer them by way of the following articles and commentary.

Pentagate

The Signs Pentagon Crash animation has found its way across the Internet. It has been reposted at many other sites. The reaction to the animation has been split, with a large number agreeing with the point of the presentation: there are many unanswered questions and these questions point to an involvement of members of the US government in the organisation of the events of September 11, 2001.

Suggesting that members of the government, whether appointed or elected, were implicated in an attack upon American soil is not something that we do lightly. It is a horrible thing. But as we show below, the same types of operations have been carried out by the United States the world over for decades. No one is safe if he or she gets in the way of the US desire to impose its "democracy" on others. These operations are always portrayed in the compliant US media as necessary and unavoidable in the struggle to "free" people from oppressive regimes. Unfortunately, the US-backed regimes that are put into place are rarely free and democratic for those subjugated. Yes, US capital is then "free" to come in and invest and buy up the resources of said countries, but the lot of the people does not improve.

The recent (August 2004) US interference in Venezuela is an example. The coup against Salvador Allende, on the significant date of September 11, 1973, coordinated by Henry Kissinger, is one with a less pleasant outcome.

The assassination of President Kennedy shows that the people behind these covert activities have no compunction about killing American citizens. As we have seen in the period since 9/11, it is very easy to manipulate the public into seeing dissenters as "un-American" and therefore expendable.

Here we will provide the interested reader with some of the facts and some other sites where he or she can go to investigate these matters for themselves. We have no desire to impose our point of view upon anyone. What we hope is that after reading this, you will have enough questions raised to be willing to go and do further investigation yourselves. Do not believe us simply because you read something here. Make this knowledge your own by following the threads and coming to your own conclusions. We would also counsel you, however, to keep an open mind. If your mind is made up before beginning your investigation, you will see only what you wish to see.

A Little History...
Various Sources

While the arguments and criticisms expressed in the many emails to us from readers about our "P3nt4gon Str!ke" Flash Presentation were varied, it would appear that they all shared a singular, common motivating factor - emotion. Despite the accusations that were, and continue to be, levelled at us, our work is not deliberately designed to elicit an emotional response and thereby cloud judgment and the truth. Indeed, if some of the verifiable facts that we present, and the conclusions that such facts naturally lead to, provoke a negative emotional reaction in our readers, then it is more likely to be as a result of the encroachment of truth into the "bubble" of subjective reality that we all surround ourselves with, rather than any bias or divisiveness on our part. The truth is the truth after all, and, once presented, is eminently capable of standing up for itself.

In attempting then to address the vitriol and accusations which we have been receiving in great quantity recently about the truth or otherwise of our assertions about the nature and origin of the 9/11 attacks, let us look at some historical facts about the US government, its various agencies and allies (overt and covert) and their tendency to prefer deception over honesty, lies over truth and malevolence over benevolence as a way to control the population, which, in the final analysis, is their chief function.


Operation Northwoods

US Planned Fake Terror Attacks On Citizens To Create Support For Cuban War

From BODY OF SECRETS, James Bamford, Doubleday, 2001, p.82 and following
September 8, 2004

..In [Joint Chief's chair] Lemnitzer's view, the country would be far better off if the generals could take over. [JFK assassination legend has it some general presided over the fudgy JFK autopsy. --Mk]

For those military officers who were sitting on the fence, the Kennedy administration's botched Bay of Pigs invasion was the last straw. "The Bay of Pigs fiasco broke the dike," said one report at the time. "President Kennedy was pilloried by the super patriots as a 'no-win' chief . . . The Far Right became a fount of proposals born of frustration and put forward in the name of anti-Communism. . . Active-duty commanders played host to anti-Communist seminars on their bases and attended or addressed Right-wing meetings elsewhere."

Although no one in Congress could have known it at the time, Lemnitzer and the Joint Chiefs had quietly slipped over the edge.

According to secret and long-hidden documents obtained for Body of Secrets, the Joint Chiefs of Staff drew up and approved plans for what may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government. In the name of antiCommunism, they proposed launching a secret and bloody war of terrorism against their own country in order to trick the American public into supporting an ill-conceived war they intended to launch against Cuba.

Code named Operation Northwoods, the plan, which had the written approval of the Chairman and every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called for innocent people to be shot on American streets; for boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba to be sunk on the high seas; for a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, D.C., Miami, and elsewhere. People would be framed for bombings they did not commit; planes would be hijacked. Using phony evidence, all of it would be blamed on Castro, thus giving Lemnitzer and his cabal the excuse, as well as the public and international backing, they needed to launch their war.

The idea may actually have originated with President Eisenhower in the last days of his administration. With the Cold War hotter than ever and the recent U-2 scandal fresh in the public's memory, the old general wanted to go out with a win. He wanted desperately to invade Cuba in the weeks leading up to Kennedy's inauguration; indeed, on January 3 he told Lemnitzer and other aides in his Cabinet Room that he would move against Castro before the inauguration if only the Cubans gave him a really good excuse. Then, with time growing short, Eisenhower floated an idea. If Castro failed to provide that excuse, perhaps, he said, the United States "could think of manufacturing something that would be generally acceptable." What he was suggesting was a pretext a bombing, an attack, an act of sabotage carried out secretly against the United States by the United States. Its purpose would be to justify the launching of a war. It was a dangerous suggestion by a desperate president.

Although no such war took place, the idea was not lost on General Lemnitzer But he and his colleagues were frustrated by Kennedy's failure to authorize their plan, and angry that Castro had not provided an excuse to invade.

The final straw may have come during a White House meeting on February 26, 1962. Concerned that General Lansdale's various covert action plans under Operation Mongoose were simply becoming more outrageous and going nowhere, Robert Kennedy told him to drop all anti-Castro efforts. Instead, Lansdale was ordered to concentrate for the next three months strictly on gathering intelligence about Cuba. It was a humiliating defeat for Lansdale, a man more accustomed to praise than to scorn.

As the Kennedy brothers appeared to suddenly "go soft" on Castro, Lemnitzer could see his opportunity to invade Cuba quickly slipping away. The attempts to provoke the Cuban public to revolt seemed dead and Castro, unfortunately, appeared to have no inclination to launch any attacks against Americans or their property Lemnitzer and the other Chiefs knew there was only one option left that would ensure their war. They would have to trick the American public and world opinion into hating Cuba so much that they would not only go along, but would insist that he and his generals launch their war against Castro. "World opinion, and the United Nations forum," said a secret JCS document, "should be favorably affected by developing the international image of the Cuban government as rash and irresponsible, and as an alarming and unpredictable threat to the peace of the Western Hemisphere."

Operation Northwoods called for a war in which many patriotic Americans and innocent Cubans would die senseless deaths, all to satisfy the egos of twisted generals back in Washington, safe in their taxpayer financed homes and limousines.

One idea seriously considered involved the launch of John Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth. On February 20,1962, Glenn was to lift off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on his historic journey. The flight was to carry the banner of America's virtues of truth, freedom, and democracy into orbit high over the planet. But Lemnitzer and his Chiefs had a different idea. They proposed to Lansdale that, should the rocket explode and kill Glenn, "the objective is to provide irrevocable proof that . . . the fault lies with the Communists et al Cuba [sic.]"

This would be accomplished, Lemnitzer continued, "by manufacturing various pieces of evidence which would prove electronic interference on the part of the Cubans." Thus, as NASA prepared to send the first American into space, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were preparing to use John Glenn's possible death as a pretext to launch a war.

Glenn lifted into history without mishap, leaving Lemnitzer and the Chiefs to begin devising new plots which they suggested be carried out "within the time frame of the next few months."

Among the actions recommended was "a series of well coordinated incidents to take place in and around" the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. This included dressing "friendly" Cubans in Cuban military uniforms and then have them "start riots near the main gate of the base. Others would pretend to be saboteurs inside the base. Ammunition would be blown up, fires started, aircraft sabotaged, mortars fired at the base with damage to installations."

The suggested operations grew progressively more outrageous. Another called for an action similar to the infamous incident in February 1898 when an explosion aboard the battleship Maine in Havana harbor killed 266 U.S. sailors. Although the exact cause of the explosion remained undetermined, it sparked the Spanish-American War with Cuba. Incited by the deadly blast, more than one million men volunteered for duty. Lemnitzer and his generals came up with a similar plan. "We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba," they proposed; "casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation."

There seemed no limit to their fanaticism: "We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington," they wrote. "The terror campaign could be pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States.

We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated). . . . We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized."

Bombings were proposed, false arrests, hijackings:

*"Exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots, the arrest of Cuban agents and the release of prepared documents substantiating Cuban involvement also would be helpful in projecting the idea of an irresponsible government."

*"Advantage can be taken of the sensitivity of the Dominican [Republic] Air Force to intrusions within their national air space. 'Cuban' B-26 or C-46 type aircraft could make cane burning raids at night. Soviet Bloc incendiaries could be found. This could be coupled with 'Cuban' messages to the Communist underground in the Dominican Republic and 'Cuban' shipments of arms which would be found, or intercepted, on the beach. Use of MiG type aircraft by U.S. pilots could provide additional provocation."

*"Hijacking attempts against civil air and surface craft could appear to continue as harassing measures condoned by the Government of Cuba."

Among the most elaborate schemes was to "create an incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner en route from the United States to Jamaica, Guatemala, Panama or Venezuela. The destination would be chosen only to cause the flight plan route to cross Cuba. The passengers could be a group of college students off on a holiday or any grouping of persons with a common interest to support chartering a non-scheduled flight."

Lemnitzer and the Joint Chiefs worked out a complex deception:

An aircraft at Elgin AFB would be painted and numbered as an exact duplicate for a civil registered aircraft belonging to a CJA proprietary organization in the Miami area. At a designated time the duplicate would be substituted for the actual civil aircraft and would be loaded with the selected passengers, all boarded under carefully prepared aliases. The actual registered aircraft would be converted to a drone [a remotely controlled unmanned aircraft]. Take off times of the drone aircraft and the actual aircraft will be scheduled to allow a rendezvous south of Florida.

From the rendezvous point the passenger-carrying aircraft will descend to minimum altitude and go directly into an auxiliary field at Elgin AFB where arrangements will have been made to evacuate the passengers and return the aircraft to its original status. The drone aircraft meanwhile will continue to fly the filed flight plan. When over Cuba the drone will be transmitting on the international distress frequency a "May Day" message stating he is under attack by Cuban MiG aircraft. The transmission will be interrupted by destruction of the aircraft, which will be triggered by radio signal. This will allow ICAO [International Civil Aviation Organization radio stations in the Western Hemisphere to tell the U.S. what has happened to the aircraft instead of the U.S. trying to "sell" the incident.

Finally, there was a plan to "make it appear that Communist Cuban MiGs have destroyed a USAF aircraft over international waters in an unprovoked attack." It was a particularly believable operation given the decade of shoot downs that had just taken place.

In the final sentence of his letter to Secretary McNamara recommending the operations, Lemnitzer made a grab for even more power asking that the Joint Chiefs be placed in charge of carrying out Operation Northwoods and the invasion. "It is recommended," he wrote, "that this responsibility for both overt and covert military operations be assigned to the Joint Chiefs of Staff."

At 2:30 on the afternoon of Tuesday, March 13, 1962, Lemnitzer went over last-minute details of Operation Northwoods with his covert action chief, Brigadier General William H. Craig, and signed the document. He then went to a "special meeting" in McNamara's office. An hour later he met with Kennedy's military representative, General Maxwell Taylor. What happened during those meetings is unknown. But three days later, President Kennedy told Lemnitzer that there was virtually no possibility that the U.S. would ever use overt military force in Cuba.

Undeterred, Lemnitzer and the Chiefs persisted, virtually to the point of demanding that they be given authority to invade and take over Cuba. About a month after submitting Operation Northwoods, they met the "tank," as the JCS conference room was called, and agreed on the wording of a tough memorandum to McNamara. "The Joint Chiefs of Staff believe that the Cuban problem must be solved in the near future," they wrote. "Further, they see no prospect of early success in overthrowing the present communist regime either as a result of internal uprising or external political, economic or psychological pressures. Accordingly they believe that military intervention by the United States will be required to overthrow the present communist regime."

Because of the secrecy and illegality of Operation Northwoods, all details remained hidden for forty years. Lemnitzer may have thought that all copies of the relevant documents had been destroyed; he was not one to leave compromising material lying around. Following the Bay of Pigs debacle, for example, he ordered Brigadier General David W Gray, Craig's predecessor as chief of the Cuba project within the JCS, to destroy all his notes concerning Joint Chiefs actions and discussions during that period. Gray's meticulous notes were the only detailed official records of what happened within the JCS during that time. According to Gray, Lemnitzer feared a congressional investigation and therefore wanted any incriminating evidence destroyed.

With the evidence destroyed, Lemnitzer felt free to lie to Congress. When asked, during secret hearings before a Senate committee, if he knew of any Pentagon plans for a direct invasion of Cuba he said he did not. Yet detailed JCS invasion plans had been drawn up even before Kennedy was inaugurated. And additional plans had been developed since. The consummate planner and man of details also became evasive, suddenly encountering great difficulty in recalling key aspects of the operation, as if he had been out of the country during the period. It was a sorry spectacle. Senator Gore called for Lemnitzer to be fired. "We need a shake up of the Joint Chiefs of Staff" he said. "We direly need a new chairman, as well as new members." No one had any idea of Operation Northwoods.

Because so many documents were destroyed, it is difficult to determine how many senior officials were aware of Operation Northwoods. As has been described, the document was signed and fully approved by Lemnitzer and the rest of the Joint Chiefs and addressed to the Secretary of Defense for his signature. Whether it went beyond McNamara to the president and the attorney general is not known.

Even after Lemnitzer lost his job, the Joint Chiefs kept planning "pretext" operations at least into 1963. Among their proposals was a deliberately create a war between Cuba and any of a number of American neighbors. This would give the United States military an excuse to come in on the side of Cuba's adversary and get rid of "A contrived 'Cuban' attack on an OAS [Organization of Americas] member could be set up," said one proposal, "and the attacked state could be urged to 'take measures of self-defense and request ice from the U.S. and OAS; the U.S. could almost certainly obtain necessary two-thirds support among OAS members for collective action against Cuba."

Among the nations they suggested that the United States secretly were Jamaica and Trinidad-Tobago. Both were members of the Commonwealth; thus, by secretly attacking them and then blaming Cuba, the United States could lure England into the war Castro. The report noted, "Any of the contrived situations de above are inherently, extremely risky in our democratic system in which security can be maintained, after the fact, with very great difficulty. If the decision should be made to set up a contrived situation it be one in which participation by U.S. personnel is limited only to the most highly trusted covert personnel. This suggests the infeasibility of the use of military units for any aspect of the contrived situation."

The report even suggested secretly paying someone in the Castro government to attack the United States: "The only area remaining for ration then would be to bribe one of Castro's subordinate commanders to initiate an attack on [the U.S. naval base at] Guantanamo." The act suggested--bribing a foreign nation to launch a violent attack American military installation--was treason.

In May 1963, Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul H. Nitze sent a message to the White House proposing "a possible scenario whereby an attack on a United States reconnaissance aircraft could be exploited toward the end of effecting the removal of the Castro regime." In the event Cuba attacked a U-2, the plan proposed sending in additional American pilots, this time on dangerous, unnecessary low-level reconnaissance missions with the expectation that they would also be shot down, thus provoking a war "[T]he U.S. could undertake various measures designed to stimulate the Cubans to provoke a new incident," said the plan. Nitze, however, did not volunteer to be one of the pilots.

One idea involved sending fighters across the island on "harassing reconnaissance" and "show-off" missions "flaunting our freedom of action, hoping to stir the Cuban military to action." "Thus," said the plan, "depending above all on whether the Cubans were or could be made to be trigger-happy, the development of the initial downing of a reconnaissance plane could lead at best to the elimination of Castro, perhaps to the removal of Soviet troops and the installation of ground inspection in Cuba, or at the least to our demonstration of firmness on reconnaissance." About a month later, a low-level flight was made across Cuba, but unfortunately for the Pentagon, instead of bullets it produced only a protest.

Lemnitzer was a dangerous-perhaps even unbalanced-right-wing extremist in an extraordinarily sensitive position during a critical period. But Operation Northwoods also had the support of every single member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and even senior Pentagon official Paul Nitze argued in favor of provoking a phony war with Cuba. The fact that the most senior members of all the services and the Pentagon could be so out of touch with reality and the meaning of democracy would be hidden for four decades.

In retrospect, the documents offer new insight into the thinking of the military's star-studded leadership. Although they never succeeded in launching America into a phony war with Cuba, they may have done so with Vietnam. More than 50,000 Americans and more than 2 million Vietnamese were eventually killed in that war.

It has long been suspected that the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident-the spark that led to America's long war in Vietnam-was largely staged or provoked by U.S. officials in order to build up congressional and public support for American involvement. Over the years, serious questions have been raised about the alleged attack by North Vietnamese patrol boats on two American destroyers in the Gulf But defenders of the Pentagon have always denied such charges, arguing that senior officials would never engage in such deceit.

Now, however, in light of the Operation Northwoods documents, it at deceiving the public and trumping up wars for Americans to fight and die in was standard, approved policy at the highest levels of the Pentagon. In fact, the Gulf of Tonkin seems right out of the Operation Northwoods playbook: "We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba . . . casualty lists in U.S. newspapers cause a helpful wave of indignation." One need only replace "Guantanamo Bay" with "Tonkin Gulf," and "Cuba" with "North Vietnam" and the Gulf of Tonkin incident may or may not have been stage-managed, but the senior Pentagon leadership at the time was clearly capable of such deceit.

Comment: The similarities between Operation Northwoods and the 9/11 attacks and subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq are striking. Note particularly the plan to use duplicate aircraft and to replace the original aircraft and its occupants with a remote controlled "drone":

"An aircraft at Elgin AFB would be painted and numbered as an exact duplicate for a civil registered aircraft belonging to a CJA proprietary organization in the Miami area. At a designated time the duplicate would be substituted for the actual civil aircraft and would be loaded with the selected passengers, all boarded under carefully prepared aliases. The actual registered aircraft would be converted to a drone [a remotely controlled unmanned aircraft]. Take off times of the drone aircraft and the actual aircraft will be scheduled to allow a rendezvous south of Florida."

And this was back in 1962! If such a plan was feasible then, with today's "modern technology", including mass media communication and control, just imagine the relative ease with which a similar "false flag" operation could be carried out today. While "Operation Northwoods" was not actually implemented, it serves as an excellent insight into the thinking of a select group of our "leaders", and while today their names may have changed, their attitude towards this planet and the people on it have not.

Despite the lengths that certain members of government are prepared to go to deceive the masses, some members of the public still credit themselves with the ability to easily recognise a government cover up. Yet the glaring contradiction in such a stance is that many of these same members of the public are UNWILLING to allow for the possibility that their governments would even attempt to deceive them, regardless of the HISTORICAL evidence pointing to the fact that governments themselves understand that they must deceive the masses in order to remain in power. When a person precludes the possibility that their government would ever lie to them, no amount of evidence will ever convince them of the contrary. Governments understand this and they also understand that the size of the lie is an important factor in facilitating this type of public disbelief - as Adolf Hitler stated in "Mein Kampf".

"The size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed, because the vast masses of a nation are in the depths of their hearts more easily deceived than they are consciously and intentionally bad.

The primitive simplicity of their minds renders them more easy victims of a big lie than a small one, because they themselves often tell little lies but would be ashamed to tell big ones.

Such a form of lying would never enter their heads. They would never credit others with the possibility of such great impudence as the complete reversal of facts. Even explanations would long leave them in doubt and hesitation, and any trifling reason would dispose them to accept a thing as true.

Something therefore always remains and sticks from the most imprudent of lies, a fact which all bodies and individuals concerned in the art of lying in this world know only too well, and therefore they stop at nothing to achieve this end."

Operation Northwoods was merely a blueprint that set the tone for many other US government backed covert and "false flag" operations.


A Timeline of CIA Atrocities
By Steve Kangas
September 8, 2004

The following timeline describes just a few of the hundreds of atrocities and crimes committed by the CIA. [...]

1949

Radio Free Europe — The CIA creates its first major propaganda outlet, Radio Free Europe. Over the next several decades, its broadcasts are so blatantly false that for a time it is considered illegal to publish transcripts of them in the U.S.

Late 40s

Operation MOCKINGBIRD — The CIA begins recruiting American news organizations and journalists to become spies and disseminators of propaganda. The effort is headed by Frank Wisner, Allan Dulles, Richard Helms and Philip Graham. Graham is publisher of The Washington Post, which becomes a major CIA player. Eventually, the CIA’s media assets will include ABC, NBC, CBS, Time, Newsweek, Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Copley News Service and more. By the CIA’s own admission, at least 25 organizations and 400 journalists will become CIA assets.

1953

Iran – CIA overthrows the democratically elected Mohammed Mossadegh in a military coup, after he threatened to nationalize British oil. The CIA replaces him with a dictator, the Shah of Iran, whose secret police, SAVAK, is as brutal as the Gestapo.

Operation MK-ULTRA — Inspired by North Korea’s brainwashing program, the CIA begins experiments on mind control. The most notorious part of this project involves giving LSD and other drugs to American subjects without their knowledge or against their will, causing several to commit suicide. However, the operation involves far more than this. Funded in part by the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, research includes propaganda, brainwashing, public relations, advertising, hypnosis, and other forms of suggestion.

1954

Guatemala — CIA overthrows the democratically elected Jacob Arbenz in a military coup. Arbenz has threatened to nationalize the Rockefeller-owned United Fruit Company, in which CIA Director Allen Dulles also owns stock. Arbenz is replaced with a series of right-wing dictators whose bloodthirsty policies will kill over 100,000 Guatemalans in the next 40 years.

1954-1958

North Vietnam — CIA officer Edward Lansdale spends four years trying to overthrow the communist government of North Vietnam, using all the usual dirty tricks. The CIA also attempts to legitimize a tyrannical puppet regime in South Vietnam, headed by Ngo Dinh Diem. These efforts fail to win the hearts and minds of the South Vietnamese because the Diem government is opposed to true democracy, land reform and poverty reduction measures. The CIA’s continuing failure results in escalating American intervention, culminating in the Vietnam War.

1956

Hungary — Radio Free Europe incites Hungary to revolt by broadcasting Khruschev’s Secret Speech, in which he denounced Stalin. It also hints that American aid will help the Hungarians fight. This aid fails to materialize as Hungarians launch a doomed armed revolt, which only invites a major Soviet invasion. The conflict kills 7,000 Soviets and 30,000 Hungarians.

1957-1973

Laos — The CIA carries out approximately one coup per year trying to nullify Laos’ democratic elections. [...]

1959

Haiti — The U.S. military helps "Papa Doc" Duvalier become dictator of Haiti. He creates his own private police force, the "Tonton Macoutes," who terrorize the population with machetes. They will kill over 100,000 during the Duvalier family reign. The U.S. does not protest their dismal human rights record.

1961

The Bay of Pigs — The CIA sends 1,500 Cuban exiles to invade Castro’s Cuba.[...]

Dominican Republic — The CIA assassinates Rafael Trujillo, a murderous dictator Washington has supported since 1930. Trujillo’s business interests have grown so large (about 60 percent of the economy) that they have begun competing with American business interests.

Ecuador — The CIA-backed military forces the democratically elected President Jose Velasco to resign. Vice President Carlos Arosemana replaces him; the CIA fills the now vacant vice presidency with its own man.

Congo (Zaire) — The CIA assassinates the democratically elected Patrice Lumumba. However, public support for Lumumba’s politics runs so high that the CIA cannot clearly install his opponents in power. Four years of political turmoil follow.

1963

Dominican Republic — The CIA overthrows the democratically elected Juan Bosch in a military coup. The CIA installs a repressive, right-wing junta.

Ecuador — A CIA-backed military coup overthrows President Arosemana, whose independent (not socialist) policies have become unacceptable to Washington. A military junta assumes command, cancels the 1964 elections, and begins abusing human rights.

1964

Brazil — A CIA-backed military coup overthrows the democratically elected government of Joao Goulart. The junta that replaces it will, in the next two decades, become one of the most bloodthirsty in history.[...]

1965

Indonesia — The CIA overthrows the democratically elected Sukarno with a military coup. [...]

Dominican Republic — A popular rebellion breaks out, promising to reinstall Juan Bosch as the country’s elected leader. The revolution is crushed when U.S. Marines land to uphold the military regime by force. The CIA directs everything behind the scenes.

Greece — With the CIA’s backing, the king removes George Papandreous as prime minister. Papandreous has failed to vigorously support U.S. interests in Greece.

Congo (Zaire) — A CIA-backed military coup installs Mobutu Sese Seko as dictator. The hated and repressive Mobutu exploits his desperately poor country for billions.

1966

The Ramparts Affair — The radical magazine Ramparts begins a series of unprecedented anti-CIA articles. Among their scoops: the CIA has paid the University of Michigan $25 million dollars to hire "professors" to train South Vietnamese students in covert police methods. MIT and other universities have received similar payments. Ramparts also reveals that the National Students’ Association is a CIA front. Students are sometimes recruited through blackmail and bribery, including draft deferments.

1967

Greece — A CIA-backed military coup overthrows the government two days before the elections. The favorite to win was George Papandreous, the liberal candidate. During the next six years, the "reign of the colonels" — backed by the CIA — will usher in the widespread use of torture and murder against political opponents. When a Greek ambassador objects to President Johnson about U.S. plans for Cypress, Johnson tells him: "Fuck your parliament and your constitution."

Operation PHEONIX — The CIA helps South Vietnamese agents identify and then murder alleged Viet Cong leaders operating in South Vietnamese villages. According to a 1971 congressional report, this operation killed about 20,000 "Viet Cong."

1968

Operation CHAOSThe CIA has been illegally spying on American citizens since 1959, but with Operation CHAOS, President Johnson dramatically boosts the effort. CIA agents go undercover as student radicals to spy on and disrupt campus organizations protesting the Vietnam War. They are searching for Russian instigators, which they never find. CHAOS will eventually spy on 7,000 individuals and 1,000 organizations.

Bolivia — A CIA-organized military operation captures legendary guerilla Che Guevara. The CIA wants to keep him alive for interrogation, but the Bolivian government executes him to prevent worldwide calls for clemency.

1969

Uruguay — The notorious CIA torturer Dan Mitrione arrives in Uruguay, a country torn with political strife. [...]

1970

Cambodia — The CIA overthrows Prince Sahounek, who is highly popular among Cambodians for keeping them out of the Vietnam War. [...]

1971

Bolivia — After half a decade of CIA-inspired political turmoil, a CIA-backed military coup overthrows the leftist President Juan Torres. In the next two years, dictator Hugo Banzer will have over 2,000 political opponents arrested without trial, then tortured, raped and executed. [...]

1972

Cambodia — Congress votes to cut off CIA funds for its secret war in Cambodia.

Wagergate Break-in — President Nixon sends in a team of burglars to wiretap Democratic offices at Watergate. The team members have extensive CIA histories, including James McCord, E. Howard Hunt and five of the Cuban burglars. They work for the Committee to Reelect the President (CREEP), which does dirty work like disrupting Democratic campaigns and laundering Nixon’s illegal campaign contributions. CREEP’s activities are funded and organized by another CIA front, the Mullen Company.

1973

Chile — The CIA overthrows and assassinates Salvador Allende, Latin America’s first democratically elected socialist leader. The problems begin when Allende nationalizes American-owned firms in Chile. ITT offers the CIA $1 million for a coup (reportedly refused). The CIA replaces Allende with General Augusto Pinochet, who will torture and murder thousands of his own countrymen in a crackdown on labor leaders and the political left. [...]

1975

Australia — The CIA helps topple the democratically elected, left-leaning government of Prime Minister Edward Whitlam.[...]

Angola — Eager to demonstrate American military resolve after its defeat in Vietnam, Henry Kissinger launches a CIA-backed war in Angola. Contrary to Kissinger’s assertions, Angola is a country of little strategic importance and not seriously threatened by communism. The CIA backs the brutal leader of UNITAS, Jonas Savimbi. [...]

"The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence" — Victor Marchetti and John Marks publish this whistle-blowing history of CIA crimes and abuses. Marchetti has spent 14 years in the CIA, eventually becoming an executive assistant to the Deputy Director of Intelligence. Marks has spent five years as an intelligence official in the State Department.

"Inside the Company" — Philip Agee publishes a diary of his life inside the CIA. Agee has worked in covert operations in Latin America during the 60s, and details the crimes in which he took part. [...]

The Rockefeller Commission — In an attempt to reduce the damage done by the Church Committee, President Ford creates the "Rockefeller Commission" to whitewash CIA history and propose toothless reforms. The commission’s namesake, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, is himself a major CIA figure. Five of the commission’s eight members are also members of the Council on Foreign Relations, a CIA-dominated organization.

1979

Iran — The CIA fails to predict the fall of the Shah of Iran, a longtime CIA puppet, and the rise of Muslim fundamentalists who are furious at the CIA’s backing of SAVAK, the Shah’s bloodthirsty secret police. In revenge, the Muslims take 52 Americans hostage in the U.S. embassy in Tehran.

Afghanistan — The Soviets invade Afghanistan. The CIA immediately begins supplying arms to any faction willing to fight the occupying Soviets. Such indiscriminate arming means that when the Soviets leave Afghanistan, civil war will erupt. Also, fanatical Muslim extremists now possess state-of-the-art weaponry. One of these is Sheik Abdel Rahman, who will become involved in the World Trade Center bombing in New York.

El Salvador — An idealistic group of young military officers, repulsed by the massacre of the poor, overthrows the right-wing government. However, the U.S. compels the inexperienced officers to include many of the old guard in key positions in their new government. Soon, things are back to "normal" — the military government is repressing and killing poor civilian protesters. Many of the young military and civilian reformers, finding themselves powerless, resign in disgust.

Nicaragua — Anastasios Samoza II, the CIA-backed dictator, falls. The Marxist Sandinistas take over government, and they are initially popular because of their commitment to land and anti-poverty reform. Samoza had a murderous and hated personal army called the National Guard. Remnants of the Guard will become the Contras, who fight a CIA-backed guerilla war against the Sandinista government throughout the 1980s.

1980

El Salvador — The Archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Romero, pleads with President Carter "Christian to Christian" to stop aiding the military government slaughtering his people. Carter refuses.[...]

1981

Iran/Contra Begins — The CIA begins selling arms to Iran at high prices, using the profits to arm the Contras fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. [...]

1983

Honduras — The CIA gives Honduran military officers the Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual – 1983, which teaches how to torture people. [...]

1984

The Boland Amendment — The last of a series of Boland Amendments is passed. These amendments have reduced CIA aid to the Contras; the last one cuts it off completely. However, CIA Director William Casey is already prepared to "hand off" the operation to Colonel Oliver North, who illegally continues supplying the Contras through the CIA’s informal, secret, and self-financing network. This includes "humanitarian aid" donated by Adolph Coors and William Simon, and military aid funded by Iranian arms sales.

1986

[...] Iran/Contra Scandal — Although the details have long been known, the Iran/Contra scandal finally captures the media’s attention in 1986. Congress holds hearings, and several key figures (like Oliver North) lie under oath to protect the intelligence community. CIA Director William Casey dies of brain cancer before Congress can question him. All reforms enacted by Congress after the scandal are purely cosmetic.

Haiti — [...] The CIA then rigs the upcoming elections in favor of another right-wing military strongman. However, violence keeps the country in political turmoil for another four years. The CIA tries to strengthen the military by creating the National Intelligence Service (SIN), which suppresses popular revolt through torture and assassination.

1989

Panama — The U.S. invades Panama to overthrow a dictator of its own making, General Manuel Noriega. Noriega has been on the CIA’s payroll since 1966, and has been transporting drugs with the CIA’s knowledge since 1972. By the late 80s, Noriega’s growing independence and intransigence have angered Washington… so out he goes.

1990

Haiti — Competing against 10 comparatively wealthy candidates, leftist priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide captures 68 percent of the vote. After only eight months in power, however, the CIA-backed military deposes him. More military dictators brutalize the country, as thousands of Haitian refugees escape the turmoil in barely seaworthy boats. As popular opinion calls for Aristide’s return, the CIA begins a disinformation campaign painting the courageous priest as mentally unstable.

1991

The Gulf War — The U.S. liberates Kuwait from Iraq. But Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein, is another creature of the CIA. With U.S. encouragement, Hussein invaded Iran in 1980. During this costly eight-year war, the CIA built up Hussein’s forces with sophisticated arms, intelligence, training and financial backing. This cemented Hussein’s power at home, allowing him to crush the many internal rebellions that erupted from time to time, sometimes with poison gas. It also gave him all the military might he needed to conduct further adventurism — in Kuwait, for example.

The Fall of the Soviet Union —[...] Curiously, the intelligence community’s budget is not significantly reduced after the demise of communism. [...]

1992

Economic Espionage — In the years following the end of the Cold War, the CIA is increasingly used for economic espionage. This involves stealing the technological secrets of competing foreign companies and giving them to American ones. Given the CIA’s clear preference for dirty tricks over mere information gathering, the possibility of serious criminal behavior is very great indeed.

1993

Haiti — The chaos in Haiti grows so bad that President Clinton has no choice but to remove the Haitian military dictator, Raoul Cedras, on threat of U.S. invasion. The U.S. occupiers do not arrest Haiti’s military leaders for crimes against humanity, but instead ensure their safety and rich retirements. Aristide is returned to power only after being forced to accept an agenda favorable to the country’s ruling class.

EPILOGUE

In a speech before the CIA celebrating its 50th anniversary, President Clinton said: "By necessity, the American people will never know the full story of your courage."

Clinton’s is a common defense of the CIA: namely, the American people should stop criticizing the CIA because they don’t know what it really does. This, of course, is the heart of the problem in the first place. An agency that is above criticism is also above moral behavior and reform. Its secrecy and lack of accountability allows its corruption to grow unchecked.

Furthermore, Clinton’s statement is simply untrue. The history of the agency is growing painfully clear, especially with the declassification of historical CIA documents. We may not know the details of specific operations, but we do know, quite well, the general behavior of the CIA. These facts began emerging nearly two decades ago at an ever-quickening pace. Today we have a remarkably accurate and consistent picture, repeated in country after country, and verified from countless different directions.

The CIA’s response to this growing knowledge and criticism follows a typical historical pattern. (Indeed, there are remarkable parallels to the Medieval Church’s fight against the Scientific Revolution.) The first journalists and writers to reveal the CIA’s criminal behavior were harassed and censored if they were American writers, and tortured and murdered if they were foreigners. (See Philip Agee’s On the Run for an example of early harassment.) However, over the last two decades the tide of evidence has become overwhelming, and the CIA has found that it does not have enough fingers to plug every hole in the dike. This is especially true in the age of the Internet, where information flows freely among millions of people. Since censorship is impossible, the Agency must now defend itself with apologetics. Clinton’s "Americans will never know" defense is a prime example.

Another common apologetic is that "the world is filled with unsavory characters, and we must deal with them if we are to protect American interests at all." There are two things wrong with this. First, it ignores the fact that the CIA has regularly spurned alliances with defenders of democracy, free speech and human rights, preferring the company of military dictators and tyrants. The CIA had moral options available to them, but did not take them.

Second, this argument begs several questions. The first is: "Which American interests?" The CIA has courted right wing dictators because they allow wealthy Americans to exploit the country’s cheap labor and resources. But poor and middle-class Americans pay the price whenever they fight the wars that stem from CIA actions, from Vietnam to the Gulf War to Panama. The second begged question is: "Why should American interests come at the expense of other peoples’ human rights?"

"The major function of secrecy in Washington is to keep the U.S. people ... from knowing what the nation's leaders are doing." John Stockwell

Comment: We find it rather incredible that there are still people out there who, having been exposed to the above information, still refuse to believe that their government and its covert agencies are not capable of deceiving them.

Moving forward in time, with a little investigation we notice that, as in Operation Northwoods when the plan was to falsely characterise the Cubans as "terrorists" to the American public in order to generate support for war, US governments over the past few decades have been carefully cultivating the "Arab terrorist" threat to wage a new type of war for a new century - a holy war without end where the enemy is, in reality, the free thinkers of this world. The chief bogeymen/CIA puppet in this new "crusade" is Osama Bin Laden, but like all other useful idiots, Osama too is simply a means to achieve the central goals of government - the subjugation through fear of the world's population.


Flashback: How the CIA created Osama bin Laden
NORM DIXON
Greenleft.org

Made in the USA

According to Ahmed Rashid, a correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review, in 1986 CIA chief William Casey committed CIA support to a long-standing ISI proposal to recruit from around the world to join the Afghan jihad. At least 100,000 Islamic militants flocked to Pakistan between 1982 and 1992 (some 60,000 attended fundamentalist schools in Pakistan without necessarily taking part in the fighting).

John Cooley, a former journalist with the US ABC television network and author of Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism, has revealed that Muslims recruited in the US for the mujaheddin were sent to Camp Peary, the CIA's spy training camp in Virginia, where young Afghans, Arabs from Egypt and Jordan, and even some African-American “black Muslims” were taught “sabotage skills”.

The November 1, 1998, British Independent reported that one of those charged with the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Ali Mohammed, had trained “bin Laden's operatives” in 1989.

These “operatives” were recruited at the al Kifah Refugee Centre in Brooklyn, New York, given paramilitary training in the New York area and then sent to Afghanistan with US assistance to join Hekmatyar's forces. Mohammed was a member of the US army's elite Green Berets.

The program, reported the Independent, was part of a Washington-approved plan called “Operation Cyclone”.

In Pakistan, recruits, money and equipment were distributed to the mujaheddin factions by an organisation known as Maktab al Khidamar (Office of Services — MAK).

MAK was a front for Pakistan's CIA, the Inter-Service Intelligence Directorate. The ISI was the first recipient of the vast bulk of CIA and Saudi Arabian covert assistance for the Afghan contras. Bin Laden was one of three people who ran MAK. In 1989, he took overall charge of MAK.

Among those trained by Mohammed were El Sayyid Nosair, who was jailed in 1995 for killing Israeli rightist Rabbi Meir Kahane and plotting with others to bomb New York landmarks, including the World Trade Center in 1993.

The Independent also suggested that Shiekh Omar Abdel-Rahman, an Egyptian religious leader also jailed for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, was also part of Operation Cyclone. He entered the US in 1990 with the CIA's approval. A confidential CIA report concluded that the agency was “partly culpable” for the 1993 World Trade Center blast, the Independent reported.

Bin Laden

Osama bin Laden, one of 20 sons of a billionaire construction magnate, arrived in Afghanistan to join the jihad in 1980. An austere religious fanatic and business tycoon, bin Laden specialised in recruiting, financing and training the estimated 35,000 non-Afghan mercenaries who joined the mujaheddin.

The bin Laden family is a prominent pillar of the Saudi Arabian ruling class, with close personal, financial and political ties to that country's pro-US royal family.

Bin Laden senior was appointed Saudi Arabia's minister of public works as a favour by King Faisal. The new minister awarded his own construction companies lucrative contracts to rebuild Islam's holiest mosques in Mecca and Medina. In the process, the bin Laden family company in 1966 became the world's largest private construction company.

Osama bin Laden's father died in 1968. Until 1994, he had access to the dividends from this ill-gotten business empire.

(Bin Laden junior's oft-quoted personal fortune of US$200-300 million has been arrived at by the US State Department by dividing today's value of the bin Laden family net worth — estimated to be US$5 billion — by the number of bin Laden senior's sons. A fact rarely mentioned is that in 1994 the bin Laden family disowned Osama and took control of his share.)

Osama's military and business adventures in Afghanistan had the blessing of the bin Laden dynasty and the reactionary Saudi Arabian regime. His close working relationship with MAK also meant that the CIA was fully aware of his activities.

Milt Bearden, the CIA's station chief in Pakistan from 1986 to 1989, admitted to the January 24, 2000, New Yorker that while he never personally met bin Laden, “Did I know that he was out there? Yes, I did ... [Guys like] bin Laden were bringing $20-$25 million a month from other Saudis and Gulf Arabs to underwrite the war. And that is a lot of money. It's an extra $200-$300 million a year. And this is what bin Laden did.”

In 1986, bin Laden brought heavy construction equipment from Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan. Using his extensive knowledge of construction techniques (he has a degree in civil engineering), he built “training camps”, some dug deep into the sides of mountains, and built roads to reach them.

These camps, now dubbed “terrorist universities” by Washington, were built in collaboration with the ISI and the CIA. The Afghan contra fighters, including the tens of thousands of mercenaries recruited and paid for by bin Laden, were armed by the CIA. Pakistan, the US and Britain provided military trainers.

Tom Carew, a former British SAS soldier who secretly fought for the mujaheddin told the August 13, 2000, British Observer, “The Americans were keen to teach the Afghans the techniques of urban terrorism — car bombing and so on — so that they could strike at the Russians in major towns ... Many of them are now using their knowledge and expertise to wage war on everything they hate.”

Al Qaeda (the Base), bin Laden's organisation, was established in 1987-88 to run the camps and other business enterprises. It is a tightly-run capitalist holding company — albeit one that integrates the operations of a mercenary force and related logistical services with “legitimate” business operations.

Bin Laden has simply continued to do the job he was asked to do in Afghanistan during the 1980s — fund, feed and train mercenaries. All that has changed is his primary customer. Then it was the ISI and, behind the scenes, the CIA. Today, his services are utilised primarily by the reactionary Taliban regime.

Bin Laden only became a “terrorist” in US eyes when he fell out with the Saudi royal family over its decision to allow more than 540,000 US troops to be stationed on Saudi soil following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.

When thousands of US troops remained in Saudi Arabia after the end of the Gulf War, bin Laden's anger turned to outright opposition. He declared that Saudi Arabia and other regimes — such as Egypt — in the Middle East were puppets of the US, just as the PDPA government of Afghanistan had been a puppet of the Soviet Union.

He called for the overthrow of these client regimes and declared it the duty of all Muslims to drive the US out of the Gulf states. In 1994, he was stripped of his Saudi citizenship and forced to leave the country. His assets there were frozen.

After a period in Sudan, he returned to Afghanistan in May 1996. He refurbished the camps he had helped build during the Afghan war and offered the facilities and services — and thousands of his mercenaries — to the Taliban, which took power that September.

Today, bin Laden's private army of non-Afghan religious fanatics is a key prop of the Taliban regime.

Prior to the devastating September 11 attack on the twin towers of World Trade Center, US ruling-class figures remained unrepentant about the consequences of their dirty deals with the likes of bin Laden, Hekmatyar and the Taliban. Since the awful attack, they have been downright hypocritical.

In an August 28, 1998, report posted on MSNBC, Michael Moran quotes Senator Orrin Hatch, who was a senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee which approved US dealings with the mujaheddin, as saying he would make “the same call again”, even knowing what bin Laden would become.

“It was worth it. Those were very important, pivotal matters that played an important role in the downfall of the Soviet Union.”

Hatch today is one of the most gung-ho voices demanding military retaliation.

Another face that has appeared repeatedly on television screens since the attack has been Vincent Cannistrano, described as a former CIA chief of “counter-terrorism operations”.

Cannistrano is certainly an expert on terrorists like bin Laden, because he directed their “work”. He was in charge of the CIA-backed Nicaraguan contras during the early 1980s. In 1984, he became the supervisor of covert aid to the Afghan mujaheddin for the US National Security Council.

Comment: While the US government clearly has much to gain from promoting the phony "Arab terrorist" threat, we should realise that there is also a country in the Middle East that stands to gain enormously from the declaration of open season on Arabs of every nationality that the 9/11 attacks heralded, and, as such, is very likely to be involved in deliberately perpetuating the "war on terror".

Flashback: Mossad Exposed in Phony ' Palestinian Al-Qaeda' Caper
Executive Intelligence Review
Michele Steinberg and Hussein Askary
December 20, 2002
The United States government has been provided with concrete evidence that the Israeli Mossad and other Israeli intelligence services have been involved in a 13-month effort to "recruit" an Israeli-run, phony "al-Qaeda cell" among Palestinians, so that Israel could achieve a frontline position in the U.S. war against terrorism and get a green light for a worldwide "revenge without borders" policy. The question: Does the United States have the moral fiber to investigate?

Evidence of the Israeli dirty tricks burst onto the public scene on Dec. 6, when Col. Rashid Abu Shbak, head of the Palestinian Preventive Security Services in the Gaza Strip, held a press conference revealing the details of the alleged plot, as his agency had put the pieces together. The revelations undermine the "big lie" that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has used to justify new brutal attacks on Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip and other occupied areas. Sharon claimed on Dec. 4 that Israeli intelligence had "hard evidence" of al-Qaeda operations in the Gaza Strip. Now, the top Palestinian leadership has shown the United States and other nations how Israeli intelligence entities were creating that al-Qaeda link!

American leader Lyndon LaRouche, a Democratic Presidential pre-candidate in 2004, commented that these revelations, if confirmed, could be "of strategic importance" in stopping the American, British, and Israeli warhawks pushing for a Middle East war, beginning with an invasion of Iraq. A war would justify the Sharon government's plan to annihilate the very idea of a Palestinian state. LaRouche warned that if institutions of the American Presidency and the international community successfully block an American pre-emptive war on Iraq, the biggest danger would be that a "mega-terror" attack, blamed on Palestinians, or an "Iraqi-linked" al-Qaeda, would be staged by Israel's ruling Jabotinskyite fanatics, to put the war back on the agenda.

News about the Mossad-run attempt to create an al-Qaeda cell came when well-informed intelligence sources based in Washington had already told EIR that there are many doubts about the Mossad's hasty declaration that "al-Qaeda" had been responsible for the Nov. 28 attack on a hotel in Mombasa, Kenya, where three Israelis were killed, and the failed rocket attack on an Israeli chartered jet that was departing from Mombasa airport. There was no identification of the bombers within the first five days of the incident, the sources pointed out, yet Sharon's government ministers went on an immediate propaganda rampage announcing worldwide revenge. Authorities in Kenya also denied the al-Qaeda link. But the usefulness of blaming al-Qaeda, for the Israeli right, was palpable, when Foreign Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the Kenya attacks "a golden opportunity" to prove to the United States that Bush's war on terrorism, and Israel's war with the Palestinians is the same thing. Netanyahu's faction has violently rejected the Palestinian Authority's revelations, and so far, the American and European press have followed suit, despite the dramatic nature of these charges, and the documents that the Palestinians have provided to the international press.
Chronology of the Revelations

On Dec. 7, the British news service, Reuters, the Israeli daily Ha'aretz, and Qatar-based Al-Jazeera TV network, all reported that the Palestinian Authority had accused the Mossad of creating a phony al-Qaeda cell in the Gaza Strip. Ha'aretz reported, "the head of Palestinian Preventive Security" in the Gaza Strip, Col. Rashid Abu Shbak, said on Dec. 6, "that his forces had identified a number of Palestinian collaborators who had been ordered by Israeli security agencies to 'work in the Gaza Strip under the name of al-Qaeda.' He said the investigation was ongoing and evidence would be presented soon." Al-Jazeera TV added that the Palestinian authorities had arrested a group of Palestinian "collaborators with Israeli occupation" in Gaza, involved in the operation.

Reuters' reporter Diala Saadeh, under the headline, "Palestinians: Israel Faked Gaza al-Qaeda Presence," quoted a number of Palestinian Authority (P.A.) senior officials, including President Yasser Arafat, who told reporters at his West Bank Ramallah headquarters, that Sharon's claims of al-Qaeda operations in Palestinian territories "is a big, big, big lie to cover [Sharon's] attacks and his crimes against our people everywhere." P.A. Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo detailed the case: "There are certain elements who were instructed by the Mossad to form a cell under the name of al-Qaeda in the Gaza Strip in order to justify the assault and the military campaigns of the Israeli occupation army against Gaza."

Palestinian officials promised to provide detailed evidence, and did so on Dec. 8, in a press conference addressed by Colonel Shbak, and by Palestinian Minister for Planning and International Cooperation Nabil Shaath. Shbak told the international representatives that, "Over the past nine months, we've been investigating eight cases in which Israeli intelligence posing as al-Qaeda operatives recruited Palestinians in the Gaza Strip." Colonel Shbak said that 3 men were under arrest, and 11 had been released. He explained that those released had voluntarily provided information going back to May 2002, about the contacts that had been made asking them to operate as an "al-Qaeda" group. The alleged al-Qaeda recruiters were traced to Israeli intelligence, said Colonel Shbak. He detailed incidents, some of which were described in official documents, of cell phone calls and e-mails, where Palestinians were asked to "join al-Qaeda." Shbak said, "We investigated the origin of those calls, which used [wireless phone] roaming, and messages, and found out they all came from Israel," reported the publication, IslamOnline. He said that the potential "recruits," had been given money and weapons, "although most of these weapons did not even work." He also noted that the money for these targetted Palestinians "was transferred from bank accounts in Jerusalem or Israel."

Minister Shaath announced at the press conference that the P.A. had "handed ambassadors and consuls of the Arab and foreign countries, documents revealing the involvement of the Israeli intelligence in recruiting citizens from Gaza Strip in a fake organization carrying the name of Qaeda." He said the ploy was intended "to create a new excuse to escalate the aggression on Gaza Strip."

The international community was jolted again on Dec. 10, when Colonel Shbak held another press conference and the Preventive Security Agency presented the Mossad's potential recruiter himself to the international media. According to reports in the Arabic press in Dubai, London and Ramallah, the man appeared in disguise (for security reasons,) and was identified only as "Ibrahim," but explained in great detail that he was one of the "key recruiters" for the potential cell. He said the story started in October 2001, when, after he sent his photo and mobile phone number to a "contact page" in a Jerusalem magazine, he was contacted by a person calling himself "Youssef," and nicknamed "Abu Othman." After building up a personal relationship with "Ibrahim," and telling him how much he resembled his own son, who had been killed, Youssef sent him $2,000, and began encouraging the Gaza man—who appeared to be in his early 20s—to become a more observant and practicing Muslim.

In May 2002, five months after the initial contact, said Ibrahim, Youssef "told me frankly, 'you are a good candidate to work for us in the company of Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda group.' " This Youssef also claimed to have already created an al-Qaeda cell inside Israel. Ibrahim said that he then approached the Palestinian security services and told them about the transactions with Youssef, and that the security services asked him to continue the communications, which they would monitor. He said that the specific instructions were that Ibrahim was to announce through a communiqué—directly from Gaza—that al-Qaeda claimed credit for a bombing attack, or attacks, that Youssef indicated his network was about to carry out in Israel. Ibrahim stressed that the man also said that he (the Mossad officer) "had the capability to carry out major bombing operations inside Israel, but that the al-Qaeda group in Gaza should claim responsibility for the attack and no other group." In an interview with the London-based Arabic daily Al-Hayat, after the press conference, Ibrahim stated, that "the man told him that mega military operations will be conducted inside Israel, and that these operations would be announced through Ibrahim." This would mean that as soon as he gets the signal after a major terrorist act against Israeli civilian targets, Ibrahim and his group would send a communiqué to the press or a videotape, similar to the ones sent by bin Laden to Al-Jazeera, claiming responsibility for the attack.

Ibrahim was also asked to gather specific information for Youssef about a number of persons in Gaza, some of them known to be members of Hamas. When asked why he wanted this information, Youssef said, "I want them to join al-Qaeda." At that point, Palestinian security services cut off the "Ibrahim-Youssef" contact, because it was becoming too dangerous.

At the same press conference, Colonel Shbak said direct money payments "transferred from Israel," had been received by five out of the eight Palestinians who have been giving information to the Preventive Security Agency about this operation. Shbak also explained that his agency traced and obtained a number of telephone numbers, registrations, and bank receipts for money transferred to some of those persons.

Now, said Shbak, the United States and a number of international intelligence and security organs had been supplied with documents and evidence refuting the Israeli allegations about Palestinian connections to al-Qaeda. "These documents prove without any doubt that the ones who are behind this alleged al-Qaeda group are the various Israeli intelligence organizations," Shbak added. He told Al-Hayat Al-Jadidah daily that the "Americans have not responded yet to the documents ... as provided by the Palestinian Preventive Security agency."

The 9/11 Cover Story

The question is whether the U.S. government and other governments will take up the evidence given to them. It is well established that several top Cabinet officials in the current Sharon caretaker government, including Sharon himself, have a long, jaded history of staging precisely these kinds of "countergang" operations, using Israeli covert operatives and Arabs tortured and brainwashed in Israeli jails and recruited as false-flag terrorists. Sharon, Mossad chief Moshe Dagan, and Gen. Effie Eitam are proponents of such dirty-war tactics. As EIR reported in several extensive articles on the Hamas organization, that terrorist capability was actually created by Ariel Sharon and the Israeli right wing, for the purpose of supplanting Yasser Arafat and the organizations of the Palestine Liberation Organization (see EIR, Dec. 6).

Even more to the point, the Osama bin Laden authorship of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks has been a cover story from the first moments the media began reporting it as fact. Interviewed on the morning of Sept. 11 as the attacks were unfolding, LaRouche made clear that the breadth and sophistication of these attacks showed that it was "an inside job," involving U.S. military and intelligence operatives capable of defeating or neutralizing all existing and backup security systems. Bin Laden was named as the culprit, explains LaRouche, because his name provided entry into the policy of a Clash of Civilizations against Islam, which right-wing neo-conservatives in the Bush Administration have as their goal. LaRouche has also pointedly asked when Osama bin Laden stopped being an American agent—a reality that the "Islamic card" networks of Zbigniew Brzezinski and the Iran-Contra financiers of the Afghansi mujahideen, want to bury. It must also be asked, when did al-Qaeda stop working for British intelligence? EIR has documented that British foreign intelligence, MI6, worked closely with so-called Islamist terrorist groups safe-housed in Britain, to destabilize Arab and Muslim nations, in the geopolitical service of Her Majesty's government, and an Anglo-American imperial faction.

As recently as November, this coverup of British/U.S. covert support for terrorism continued, with the case of David Shayler, a former MI5 agent who was sentenced to six months in jail for disclosing "government secret information." Shayler told London Guardian reporter Martin Bright that MI6 hired one of Osama bin Laden's closest collaborators—Anas al-Liby, who remains on the U.S. government's Most Wanted List, with a reward of $25 million for his capture—to assassinate Libya's Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi in 1996. Bright, who could not publish the article in the Guardian, but did so in the Pakistani daily, The Dawn, on Oct. 30, received a gag order from the British Attorney General, threatening him with prison, if he publishes any more information from Shayler.

With this background in mind, the public revelations about the Mossad attempts to set up al-Qaeda cells, could have strategic consequences for the discredited Sharon government—and even more broadly for the Clash of Civilizations zealots covering up the truth about Sept. 11. The Palestinian revelations could become the "straw that broke the camel's back," in this dirty war.

Comment: The above report is but the tip of the iceberg of the evidence which implicates Israel and its intelligence agency in the events of September 11th 2001 and everything that has happened since. Much more information implicating the Mossad in the 9/11 attacks is available on this site and other alternative and mainstream news sources.

At this point we would like to directly address those readers who claim that there is nothing amiss about the "plane" that hit the Pentagon. While there are many pieces of evidence that support our suggestion that it was not in fact AA flight 77 that made that 7 feet diameter hole in the facade, leaving little or no trace of wreckage, we feel that an objective analysis of the most basic facts will suffice to make our case.

Firstly, consider this picture below:

The image was taken from a security camera on the Pentaon grounds and shows the alleged plane (or rather a small smoke trail) appoaching the front facade of the building. The "plane" struck approximately half way along the length of the front of the Pentagon wall. The wall is a total of 971 feet in length. If we include the approximate distance from the camera to a point parallel with the beginning of the facade on the left - about 100 feet - and then add half of the entire wall length, we get a total of 585 feet or about 180 meters.

Now we have a question: Have you ever been on an airplane as it sat on a run way? Do you recall seeing other planes parked at their gates some considerable distance away? Perhaps you were looking at boeing 757s. Do you remember how they looked? In particular, do you remember how big they looked, even from a distance of a couple of hundred yards? There certainly was no missing or mistaking them. Now look at the picture above again.

Where is the plane?

Where is the 125 feet wingspan?

Where IS that 20 feet tall 60 ton chunk of Boeing 757?

Ok, let's put that little detail on the shelf for the moment and assume that a 757 really did hit the Pentagon that morning. Much of the "conspiracy theorists'" arguments involve questions about the lack of debris from the crash. To this, concerted skeptics assert that the plane "vaporised" on impact. Well, lets look at another photo.

The arrow points to the little hole made by the "plane" before, or maybe after, it was "vaporised" - we can't tell. Yet here again there is another glaring problem. Just below the arrow lie the remains of a car, about 5 or 6 feet from the front wall and perhaps 5 -10 feet from the point of impact. The question, obviously, is: If the impact was forceful enough to obliterate 60 tons of Boeing 757, why is the car still recognisable as a car, even with a rubber wheel more or less intact? Furthermore, if the plane "vaporised" on impact, what was it that puched a whole through three tiers of the structurally reinforced Pentagon walls? It really is amazing to see the lengths that some people will go to ignore certain facts that do not fit with what they sincerely want to believe.

In short, dear readers, you cannot blame us for the fact that there exists overwhelming circumstantial evidence that your government is lying to you about one of the most important events in recent global history. Our job (at least here on the Signs page) is to simply present the facts as they stand, what you DO with those facts is for you to decide. You are free to kick, scream, flee into denial and even condemn us, but that will not change the FACTS. Do not forget that, we too had to face this information for the first time, and it was very difficult to accept, but ultimately we understood that we had to know more, that we want, indeed, that we feel we DESERVE to know the full truth, whatever it turns out to be.

Yet in attempting to come to a conclusion about the nature of government, our leaders, and those that sit atop the pile here on the "big blue marble", we would not dream of asking you to rely on our word alone. Consider the following quotes from various men who were most certainly in a position to know more about the topic than us...

"The real menace of our Republic is the invisible government which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy legs over our cities states and nation. At the head is a small group of banking houses generally referred to as 'international bankers.' This little coterie... run our government for their own selfish ends. It operates under cover of a self-created screen...[and] seizes...our executive officers... legislative bodies... schools... courts...newspapers and every agency created for the public protection. - John F Hylan - Mayor of New York 1918-1925

"We are grateful to the Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries." David Rockefeller... Baden-Baden, Germany 1991

The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes. Benjamin Disraeli - First British prime Minister 1844

The governments of the present day have to deal not merely with other governments, with emperors, kings and ministers, but also with the secret societies which have everywhere their unscrupulous agents, and can at the last moment upset all the governments' plans. Benjamin Disraeli - British prime Minister 1876

We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the world - no longer a Government of free opinion no longer a Government by conviction and vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of small groups of dominant men." Woodrow Wilson

Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men's views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the U.S., in the field of commerce and manufacturing, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it." Woodrow Wilson - In "The New Freedom" (1913)

The real rulers in Washington are invisible and exercise power from behind the scenes - Felix Frankfurter US Supreme Court Justice 1952

The case for government by elites is irrefutable - William Fulbright 1963

Fifty men have run America and that's a high figure - Joseph Kennedy Father of JFK and RFK

We shall have world government, whether or not you like it...by conquest or consent - James Warburg - Rothschild banking agent 1950

"Today, Americans would be outraged if U.N. troops entered Los Angeles to restore order. Tomorrow they will be grateful. This is especially true if they were told that there were an outside threat from beyond, whether real or promulgated, that threatened their very existence. It is then that all peoples of the world will plead to deliver them from this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well-being granted to them by the World Government. - Henry Kissinger Bilderberger Conference Evian, France 1991.


The Pentagon Crash
Various Sources

A number of people have written in to say that we offer no proof or references for the information given in the Flash animation. We will look into the evidence in more detail below. First, we would like to point out that an animation of several minutes is not the place to offer proof for an event this complex. There is no way to go into the detail necessary to show the inconsistencies in the government's explanation, nor the various changes in their version of the story.

However, it appears that people are so habituated in getting their news from the television in 30 second clips that they consider this format to be all that is necessary.

Having said that, let's look at the evidence at some of the questions raised. At the end of this section you will find a list of websites where you can go to deepen your research.

The plane exploded and melted after the crash. That is why there were no pieces.

The official story is that American Airlines flight 77 exploded and melted in the heat of the crash. This reason was given for there being no pieces of the plane found on the site. This is from the official DoD transcript of a press conference on September 12, 2001. The question is asked to Ed Plaugher, fire chief of Arlington County, who directed the fire operations:

Q: Is there anything left of the aircraft at all?

Plaugher: First all, the question about the aircraft, there are some small pieces of aircraft visible from the interior during this fire-fighting operation I'm talking about, but not large sections. In other words, there's no fuselage sections and that sort of thing.

Further along, there is mention of small debris found nearby:

Q: Chief, there are small pieces of the plane virtually all over, out over the highway, tiny pieces. Would you say the plane exploded, virtually exploded on impact due to the fuel or --

Plaugher: You know, I'd rather not comment on that.

We have a lot of eyewitnesses that can give you better information about what actually happened with the aircraft as it approached. So we don't know. I don't know.

In the days following the crash, the spokesmen for the Defense Department explained there were no large pieces of the plane found because of the intense heat of the explosion and subsequent fire. They suggested this was due to the extreme heat that had not only melted by had vaporised the plane.

At 600 degrees celsius, aluminium melts. At 3000°, it evaporates.

One could argue that this is what the photos of the crash site show. There is no major wreckage. There are no melted lumps of the metal either. The plane simply vanished.

But how does that reconcile with reports that victims were identified by their finger prints. [Libération, 30 March 2002, cited by Meyssan, Pentagate, p. 15] Surely a fire powerful enough to melt and then vaporise aluminium would reduce the human body to ash. Were did they find the fingers?

Perhaps in the same place they finally found the missing plane.

During the winter of 2002, the story of the "missing plane" broke, due to the book The Big Lie, written by French journalist Thierry Meyssan. In his follow-up book, Pentagate, recounting how the official media had done their best to ignore the facts, Meyssan notes that the official story had changed six months after the crash.

In April 2002, the FBI contradicted the original story and said that they had recuperated almost the entire plane and had been able to reassemble them in a hangar!

"The pieces of the plane are stored in a hangar and they are marked with the serial numbers of flight 77." [Quoted in Liberation, March 30, 2003.]

So said the FBI in April 2002.

How was the FBI able to conjure up pieces of the plane that had vaporised six months earlier?

Moreover, Ed Plaugher had changed his story. He told a reporter from Digipresse, Valérie Labrousse, that he had seen "pieces of the fuselage, the wings, the landing gear, pieces of the motor, seats. I can affirm to you, there was a plane... a commercial jet." [Translated from the French by SOTT]

So not only did the FBI have the plane, the Fire Chief suddenly remembered having seen all those pieces he hadn't seen on September 12, 2001.

Doesn't this smell of a cover-up, people changing their stories to suit the needs of the moment?

The mysterious disappearance and subsequent reappearance of the plane, as crazy as it might sound, does fit with the plane/missile swapping scenario. If it was not flight 77 that hit the Pentagon, then the plane was somewhere else. It could have been crashed, the pieces collected together, and then placed in the FBI's hangar.

Do we have proof of this? No. The best we can do is make a hypothesis from all the available data. Whoever organised the attack of 9/11 went to great lengths. The goal was of enormous importance. It was essentially a coup d'état, a holding the US hostage to their plans to repeal Americans' civil rights and liberties, a manipulation of the emotions of the American people, knowing that they would fall under the sway of Bush under the shock of the attack. Bush and his colleagues, added by an obedient press, have capitalised upon this desire for revenge, bringing about radical transformations in the United States. Americans can now be arrested an held without rights if they are classified as "terrorists".

What happened to the people on Flight 77?

After Flight 77 was hijacked, the transponder was cut off at 8:56. The transponder is what identifies the aircraft to the civil authorities. After turning southwest, it disappears from the screen for 8 minutes. It is only picked up by what is called "primary radar", available to the military. The military claim that the flight never disappeared from their radar, but if they were involved in the cover-up, this would have been the moment to "exchange" planes. From that moment on, even though the first WTC had been hit, and until it got to Washington, no military jets were scrambled in blatant contradiction to standing regulations that insist that with if an airplane is not identified within two minutes, then NORAD must be called to intercept it. This did not happen until 9:24. The cynical might suggest that this was intentional.

By 9:38, something hits the Pentagon. If it was not flight 77, then where did it go?

The people who organised the attack have shown they care nothing of human life. What likely happened was that the plane was diverted elsewhere and the plane/missile that hit the Pentagon took over its flight path. Flight 77 was then landed at an undisclosed location and the people were killed. Their bodies, or parts of them, might then have been used for the DNA tests that were said to have been carried out on the remains found in the Pentagon.

No, this is not a pretty picture. But neither is the war in Iraq, the war on Afghanistan, the war on the Palestinians, not to mention the various coups organised by the US over the years, the torturing of people opposed to US policies in their countries, etc. Remember as well this famous comment from Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in the Clinton Administration:

LESLEY STAHL: "...We have heard that a half a million children have died. I mean that's more children than died when-wh-in- in Hiroshima. And- and, you know, is the price worth it?"

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price--we think the price is worth it... It is a moral question. but the moral question is even a larger one. Don't we owe to the American people and to the American military and to the other countries in the region that this man not be a threat?"

STAHL: "Even with the starvation and the lack..."

ALBRIGHT: "I think, Lesley--it is hard for me to say this because I am a humane person, but my first responsibility is to make sure that United States forces do not have to go and refight the Gulf War."

For Albright, this is a "moral question". The lives of 500,000 Iraqi children are worth less than American lives. Saddam was a "threat", according to Albright. We now know that this was not true. There were no biological weapons. There were no nuclear weapons. There were no chemical weapons.

The threat comes from the US using the well-known ploy of "an external threat", that is, blaming their aggression on the need to defend against another.

So why is it so hard to believe that they would take out a few Americans to get their way?

So, did flight 77 hit the Pentagon, or was it some sort of missile disguised to look like an airliner?

We will leave the last word to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

Secretary Rumsfeld Interview with Parade Magazine

News Transcript
US Department of Defense
Friday, Oct. 12, 2001

[...] Q: This is a question that's been asked by many Americans, but especially by the widows of September 11th. How were we so asleep at the switch? How did a war targeting civilians arrive on our homeland with seemingly no warning?

Rumsfeld: There were lots of warnings. The intelligence information that we get, it sometimes runs into the hundreds of alerts or pieces of intelligence a week. One looks at the worldwide, it's thousands. And the task is to sort through it and see what you can find. And as you find things, the law enforcement officials who have the responsibility to deal with that type of thing -- the FBI at the federal level, and although it is not, it's an investigative service as opposed to a police force, it's not a federal police force, as you know. But the state and local law enforcement officials have the responsibility for dealing with those kinds of issues.

They [find a lot] and any number of terrorist efforts have been dissuaded, deterred or stopped by good intelligence gathering and good preventive work. It is a truth that a terrorist can attack any time, any place, using any technique and it's physically impossible to defend at every time and every place against every conceivable technique. Here we're talking about plastic knives and using an American Airlines flight filed with our citizens, and the missile to damage this building and similar (inaudible) that damaged the World Trade Center. The only way to deal with this problem is by taking the battle to the terrorists, wherever they are, and dealing with them.

There are many sites that have data and analyses of what happened on September 11. The events of the Pentagon must be seen in the larger context. To understand that context and to gather the data, we suggest you check these links out for yourselves:

Did Flight 77 Really Crash into the Pentagon?

Global Research

The Center for Cooperative Research

Physics 911

911 Skeptics

911 Truth

911 Research

Flight 77 - the untold story

Mad Cow Morning News - excellent investigative work on the links between the supposed hijackers and the CIA.

John Kaminski


Bush Lies
Flashbacks from Signs of the Times

The next section looks at the lies that Bush has told and continues to tell, collected from the Signs of the Times archives.

It is a truism to say that politicians lie, however, we think, and we are not alone, that Bush has taken this to a whole new level. It is a matter of course for Bush to lie. He sometimes blames it on "faulty intelligence", but he never admits that he was wrong. He never admits that he lied.

Some people think this can be explained away. They say that he knows more than we do, and for reasons of national security, we must be kept in the dark. To accept this argument is to give up your freedom. A real democracy must be based upon an informed public, with a space wherein ideas, policy, and programmes can be discussed and debated. But to do so knowledgeably, one must have the facts. A public that accepts whatever a politician says, a public that doesn't care if their elected representatives lie, will get the government they deserve.

The Bush Administration and the Clinton Administration are two examples of what that means.


"Bush Lied, My Son Died"
SOTT Editorial

These words were on a banner carried by a protester during the recent protests during the Republican National Convention in New York City. Here at Signs of the Times, we often question the truth behind the words of America's current president, George W. Bush. To those reading our page for the first time, it may seem that we are attempting to align ourselves with the American Democratic party.

In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Nevertheless, many people have written to us stating that they are certain that this must be what drives us. We are "liberals", "lefties", Democrats, or just about any other label that people can think of to project onto us. Forget further research, forget data, forget facts - these essential tools of the truthseeker are irrelevant. Intense emotional reactions are triggered by simple words that are not in agreement with the readers programming, and the automatic responses light up the individual's brain. Emotion rules, and the intellect fades into blackness. It is clear that it is painfully easy to erroneously project onto others that which we have been programmed to see - or that which we wish to see. This is an example of what we call wishful thinking.

It is generally believed that a divided people cannot stand. It seems most Americans have been divided from other countries, and even from themselves. If the powers that be can convince us to live in an illusion, and we accept that illusion, then their work becomes all too easy. Subsequent generations will do the work for their masters. Anyone who dares to question the mainstream views and ideas - anyone who steps out of line - will quickly be attacked by the very people they may wish to help. And so it is with the Signs page.

Note that the Signs page has a disclaimer at the bottom. We realize that many people will not bother to read the fine print - which generally consists of strictly legal disclaimers on most web sites - so we decided to discuss our disclaimer a bit more directly today. It reads:

The owners and publishers of these pages wish to state that the material presented here that is the product of our research and experimentation in Superluminal Communication is offered with the caveat that the reader ought always to research on their own.

We invite the reader to share in our seeking of Truth by reading with an Open, but skeptical mind. We do not encourage "devotee-ism" nor "True Belief." We DO encourage the seeking of Knowledge and Awareness in all fields of endeavor as the best way to be able to discern lies from truth.

We constantly seek to validate and/or refine what we understand to be either possible or probable or both. We do this in the sincere hope that all of mankind will benefit, if not now, then at some point in one of our probable futures.

One of the most important things we think is that it is critically important to verify alleged facts for oneself. If our research has shown us anything, it is that this world is jam-packed full of lies of every shape and color. History, the sciences, wars, societies - all seem to be based upon falsehoods or half-truths.

We began with a recollection of the protestor at the Republican National Convention carrying a sign that read, "Bush Lied, My Son Died". We would like to clarify again that we support neither George Bush nor John Kerry. Regardless of who is "elected" in November, our research leads us to strongly suspect that nothing will change in terms of the war on terror, the clampdown on civil liberties, and the mountains of lies that have become the primary sustenance of the "Greatest Country on Earth". Yes, the same thing is happening in other countries, but not yet to the extent that it has happened in the US. Furthermore, as the world's sole military superpower, everyone in every country should be deeply concerned about the state of America and its actions around the globe. We also have to wonder why so many people now believe we are "siding with the Democrats"... We have been researching the actions and lies of Bush for quite some time now. Nothing has changed - except that the upcoming election appears to have polarized and emotionally charged most Americans.

There is one simple reason why we frequently focus on Bush and his antics: he happens to be the president of the US, and there is substantial evidence to indicate that he led America down its current path by lying and manipulating the public. If Kerry is elected and continues in the same manner as Bush, we will examine Kerry with the same vigor.

The point of including so much information about Bush on the Signs page is to hopefully help ourselves and our readers to see the truth - to see the man behind the mask of sanity. He certainly isn't alone in his endeavors - but what is the point of highlighting the misdeeds of past leaders when the current leader is the one having an immediate effect on the American - and indeed the world's - people?

We do this not in the hope that we can change anything, but rather in the hope that those who are seeking to observe reality more objectively may benefit from a tool that some of us didn't have. If we can each begin to see what is occurring on the planet around us, perhaps we can enable ourselves to make a personal choice of alignment with something greater than the lie.

We also produce the page on a daily basis in the hopes that our readers will share any information they have with us. In this way, we develop a sort of worldwide network with nodes in numerous countries. As always, we question everything and dig for facts. Nevertheless, we do reserve the right to change our minds if new data becomes available. Sometimes we deal with more concrete data; other times we must search far and wide for whatever evidence we can find on a certain topic and see if it fits together. Sometimes we solve the puzzle, sometimes we don't - in either case, we like to publish what we have for others to read and discuss.

The attentive reader will note that we often use phrases such as, "It appears that" and "It seems that". As our disclaimer indicates, we constantly seek to validate and/or refine what we understand to be either possible or probable or both. If we appear to state something with a high degree of certainty, it is because we have been searching and compiling data on that subject for quite some time. Sometimes the reader will have to do some digging of their own to find the trail, but we try to provide flashbacks to highlight certain important threads.

It is in this light that we provide the following review of Bush's war on terror.

Click here to comment on this article


Flashback: Fabricating a War Without End
SOTT
September 11, 2003

The Problem:

"There is a chance for the President of the United States to use this disaster to carry out what his father....a phrase his father used .. I think only once.. and hasn't been used since.. and that is a New World Order" - Gary Hart Co-Chair of the CFR, Former Senator of Colorado at the CFR meeting on CSpan after September 11th.

"The process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor" - Project for a New American Century

"… But in the meantime, it is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges, capable of dominating Eurasia and thus of also challenging America. The formulation of a comprehensive and integrated Eurasian geostrategy is therefore the purpose of this book...The attitude of the American public toward the external projection of American power has been much more ambivalent. The public supported America's engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor." - 'The Grand Chessboard ­ American Primacy And It's Geostrategic Imperatives' - Zbigniew Brzezinski, Basic Books, 1997.

The Precedent:

"On the evening of December 6, 1941, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the president of the United States, received a message intercepted by the U.S. Navy. Sent from Tokyo to the Japanese embassy in Washington.

It was imperative that the president see the message right away because it revealed that the Japanese, under the heavy pressure of Western economic sanctions, were terminating relations with the United States. Roosevelt read the thirteen-part transmission, looked up and announced, "This means war."

He then did a very strange thing for a president in his situation. Nothing."

"We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba…casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation. We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington...create an exact duplicate for a civil registered aircraft…At a designated time the duplicate would be…loaded with…selected passengers, all boarded under carefully prepared aliases. The actual registered aircraft would be converted to a drone [a remotely controlled unmanned aircraft]…the destruction of (that) aircraft will be triggered by radio signal." - Admiral Lyman Lemnitzer head of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. Operation Northwoods, 1962

The Solution

"The attack will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties against U.S. facilities or interests. Attack preparations have been made. Attack will occur with little or no warning." - CIA Intelligence Report for President Bush, July, 2001 (60 Days Prior to 9/11)

"Americans will become increasingly vulnerable to hostile attack on our homeland, and our military superiority will not entirely protect us. Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers.' This was the first conclusion of our Commission after almost one year of investigation of what we called the 'New World Coming', which we described in our first public report. That conclusion was delivered on September 15, 1999, almost exactly two years to the day before our prediction came true." - Gary Hart, co-chair, U.S. Commission on National Security/21st CenturyUnited States Senate, testimony before the Committee on Government Affairs United States Capitol Washington, D. C. September 21,2001

The Evidence

WTC attack known by 1998

Sydney Morning Herald
September 20 2002

The United States intelligence community was told in 1998 that Arab terrorists were planning to fly a bomb-laden aircraft into the World Trade Centre, but the FBI and the Federal Aviation Administration did not take the threat seriously, a congressional investigation into the September 11 attacks has found. [...]

"For 60 decisive minutes, the military and intelligence agencies let the fighter planes stay on the ground, 48 hours later, however, the FBI presented a list of suicide attackers. Within ten days, it emerged that seven of them were still alive. And why did the FBI chief take no position regarding contradictions? Where the list came from, why it was false? If I were the chief investigator (state attorney) in such a case, I would regularly go to the public, and give information on which leads are valid and which not. But a government which goes to war, must first establish who the attacker, the enemy, is. It has a duty to provide evidence. According to its own admission, it has not been able to present any evidence that would hold up in court." - Andreas Von Buelow, former German Defense Minister, interview in the German daily 'Tagesspiegel,' on Jan. 13, 2002

"Whoever wants to understand the CIA's methods, has to deal with its main tasks, [covert operations]: below the level of war, and outside international law, foreign states are to be influenced, by organizing insurrections, terrorist attacks, usually combined with drugs and weapons trade, and money laundering. This is essentially very simple: One arms violent people with weapons. Since, however, it must not under any circumstances come out, that there is an intelligence agency behind it, all traces are erased, with tremendous deployment of resources. I have the impression that this kind of intelligence agency spends 90% of its time this way: creating false leads. So that, if anyone suspects the collaboration of the agencies, he is accused of the sickness of conspiracy madness. The truth often comes out only years later. CIA chief Allen Dulles once said: In case of doubt, I would even lie to the Congress!" - Andreas Von Buelow, former German Defense Minister Jan, 2002

Flash Presentation - Bush Knew - An American Requiem

"[H]aving just been told the country was under attack the commander in chief appeared uninterested in further details. He never asked if there had been any additional threats, where the attacks were coming from, how to best protect the country from further attacks, or what the current status of NORAD or the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Nor did he call for an immediate return to Washington.

Instead, in the middle of a modern-day Pearl Harbor, he simply turned back to the matter at hand; the day's photo op. Precious minutes were ticking by, and many more lives were at risk. 'Really good readers, whew!' he told the class as the electronic flashes once again began to blink and the video cameras rolled. 'These must be sixth graders." - From James Bamford's "Body of Secrets"

Autopsy: No Arabs on Flight 77

By Thomas R. Olmsted, M.D
03/07/02

A list of names on a piece of paper is not evidence, but an autopsy by a pathologist, is. I undertook by FOIA request, to obtain that autopsy list and you are invited to view it below. Guess what? Still no Arabs on the list. It is my opinion that the monsters who planned this crime made a mistake by not including Arabic names on the original list to make the ruse seem more believable.[...]

On September 27th, the FBI published photos of the "hijackers" of Flight 77:

No Arabs wound up on the morgue slab; however, three ADDITIONAL people not listed by American Airline sneaked in. I have seen no explanation for these extras.

"We were the first ones in the second tower after the plane struck. I was taking firefighters up in the elevator to the 24th floor to get in position to evacuate workers. On the last trip up a bomb went off. We think there was bombs set in the building. I had just asked another firefighter to stay with me, which was a good thing because we were trapped inside the elevator and he had the tools to get out." - Louie Cacchioli, 51, is a firefighter assigned to Engine 47 in Harlem

Air Force Officer Delivers Blistering Excoriation Of Bush

Says Bush is Responsible for September 11th Attacks

A US Air Force officer in California recently accused President Bush of deliberately allowing the September 11 terror attacks to take place. The officer has been relieved of his command and faces further discipline. The controversy surrounding Lt. Col. Steve Butler's letter to the editor, in which he affirmed that Bush did nothing to warn the American people because he "needed this war on terrorism," received scant coverage in the media.

Universally ignored by the press, however, was that the officer was not merely expressing a personal opinion. He was in a position to have direct knowledge of contacts between the US military and some of the hijackers in the period before the terrorist attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon.

The Aftermath

"The most important thing is for us to find Osama bin Laden. It is our Number one priority and we will not rest until we find him!" - GW Bush, September 13, 2001

"I don't know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and I really don't care. It's not that important. It's not our priority." - GW Bush, March 13, 2002

Thousands of civilians die in US attack on Afghanistan

Extortion, corruption and poverty everywhere in 'liberated' Afghanistan.

Afghanistan opium production leaps with overthrow of Taleban

Up to 10,000 civilians die in Iraq Invasion

Fury Rises In Baghdad- Saddam's Gone, Heroin Is Back

Blue Movies Proliferate in Post-Saddam Iraq

Iraqi women 'forced to veil' - significant increase in rape

Click here to comment on this article


Flashback: Bring 'Em On!

The Bush Administration's Top 40 Lies About War and Terrorism

By STEVE PERRY
July 30, 2003

Editors' note: In the interest of relative brevity we've stinted on citing and quoting sources in some of the items below. You can find links to news stories that elaborate on each of these items at Perry's online Bush Wars column.

1) The administration was not bent on war with Iraq from 9/11 onward.

Throughout the year leading up to war, the White House publicly maintained that the U.S. took weapons inspections seriously, that diplomacy would get its chance, that Saddam had the opportunity to prevent a U.S. invasion. The most pungent and concise evidence to the contrary comes from the president's own mouth. According to Time's March 31 road-to-war story, Bush popped in on national security adviser Condi Rice one day in March 2002, interrupting a meeting on UN sanctions against Iraq. Getting a whiff of the subject matter, W peremptorily waved his hand and told her, "Fuck Saddam. We're taking him out." Clare Short, Tony Blair's former secretary for international development, recently lent further credence to the anecdote. She told the London Guardian that Bush and Blair made a secret pact a few months afterward, in the summer of 2002, to invade Iraq in either February or March of this year.

Last fall CBS News obtained meeting notes taken by a Rumsfeld aide at 2:40 on the afternoon of September 11, 2001. The notes indicate that Rumsfeld wanted the "best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time. Not only UBL [Usama bin Laden].... Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not."

Rumsfeld's deputy Paul Wolfowitz, the Bushmen's leading intellectual light, has long been rabid on the subject of Iraq. He reportedly told Vanity Fair writer Sam Tanenhaus off the record that he believes Saddam was connected not only to bin Laden and 9/11, but the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

The Bush administration's foreign policy plan was not based on September 11, or terrorism; those events only brought to the forefront a radical plan for U.S. control of the post-Cold War world that had been taking shape since the closing days of the first Bush presidency. Back then a small claque of planners, led by Wolfowitz, generated a draft document known as Defense Planning Guidance, which envisioned a U.S. that took advantage of its lone-superpower status to consolidate American control of the world both militarily and economically, to the point where no other nation could ever reasonably hope to challenge the U.S. Toward that end it envisioned what we now call "preemptive" wars waged to reset the geopolitical table.

After a copy of DPG was leaked to the New York Times, subsequent drafts were rendered a little less frank, but the basic idea never changed. In 1997 Wolfowitz and his true believers--Richard Perle, William Kristol, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld--formed an organization called Project for the New American Century to carry their cause forward. And though they all flocked around the Bush administration from the start, W never really embraced their plan until the events of September 11 left him casting around for a foreign policy plan.

2) The invasion of Iraq was based on a reasonable belief that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction that posed a threat to the U.S., a belief supported by available intelligence evidence.

Paul Wolfowitz admitted to Vanity Fair that weapons of mass destruction were not really the main reason for invading Iraq: "The decision to highlight weapons of mass destruction as the main justification for going to war in Iraq was taken for bureaucratic reasons.... [T]here were many other important factors as well." Right. But they did not come under the heading of self-defense.

We now know how the Bushmen gathered their prewar intelligence: They set out to patch together their case for invading Iraq and ignored everything that contradicted it. In the end, this required that Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al. set aside the findings of analysts from the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency (the Pentagon's own spy bureau) and stake their claim largely on the basis of isolated, anecdotal testimony from handpicked Iraqi defectors. (See #5, Ahmed Chalabi.) But the administration did not just listen to the defectors; it promoted their claims in the press as a means of enlisting public opinion. The only reason so many Americans thought there was a connection between Saddam and al Qaeda in the first place was that the Bushmen trotted out Iraqi defectors making these sorts of claims to every major media outlet that would listen.

Here is the verdict of Gregory Thielman, the recently retired head of the State Department's intelligence office: "I believe the Bush administration did not provide an accurate picture to the American people of the military threat posed by Iraq. This administration has had a faith-based intelligence attitude--we know the answers, give us the intelligence to support those answers." Elsewhere he has been quoted as saying, "The principal reasons that Americans did not understand the nature of the Iraqi threat in my view was the failure of senior administration officials to speak honestly about what the intelligence showed."

3) Saddam tried to buy uranium in Niger.

Lies and distortions tend to beget more lies and distortions, and here is W's most notorious case in point: Once the administration decided to issue a damage-controlling (they hoped) mea culpa in the matter of African uranium, they were obliged to couch it in another, more perilous lie: that the administration, and quite likely Bush himself, thought the uranium claim was true when he made it. But former acting ambassador to Iraq Joseph Wilson wrote an op-ed in the New York Times on July 6 that exploded the claim. Wilson, who traveled to Niger in 2002 to investigate the uranium claims at the behest of the CIA and Dick Cheney's office and found them to be groundless, describes what followed this way: "Although I did not file a written report, there should be at least four documents in U.S. government archives confirming my mission. The documents should include the ambassador's report of my debriefing in Niamey, a separate report written by the embassy staff, a CIA report summing up my trip, and a specific answer from the agency to the office of the vice president (this may have been delivered orally). While I have not seen any of these reports, I have spent enough time in government to know that this is standard operating procedure."

4) The aluminum tubes were proof of a nuclear program.

The very next sentence of Bush's State of the Union address was just as egregious a lie as the uranium claim, though a bit cagier in its formulation. "Our intelligence sources tell us that [Saddam] has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production." This is altogether false in its implication (that this is the likeliest use for these materials) and may be untrue in its literal sense as well. As the London Independent summed it up recently, "The U.S. persistently alleged that Baghdad tried to buy high-strength aluminum tubes whose only use could be in gas centrifuges, needed to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. Equally persistently, the International Atomic Energy Agency said the tubes were being used for artillery rockets. The head of the IAEA, Mohamed El Baradei, told the UN Security Council in January that the tubes were not even suitable for centrifuges."

5) Iraq's WMDs were sent to Syria for hiding.

Or Iran, or.... "They shipped them out!" was a rallying cry for the administration in the first few nervous weeks of finding no WMDs, but not a bit of supporting evidence has emerged.

6) The CIA was primarily responsible for any prewar intelligence errors or distortions regarding Iraq.

Don't be misled by the news that CIA director George Tenet has taken the fall for Bush's falsehoods in the State of the Uranium address. As the journalist Robert Dreyfuss wrote shortly before the war, "Even as it prepares for war against Iraq, the Pentagon is already engaged on a second front: its war against the Central Intelligence Agency. The Pentagon is bringing relentless pressure to bear on the agency to produce intelligence reports more supportive of war with Iraq. ... Morale inside the U.S. national-security apparatus is said to be low, with career staffers feeling intimidated and pressured to justify the push for war."

In short, Tenet fell on his sword when he vetted Bush's State of the Union yarns. And now he has had to get up and fall on it again.

7) An International Atomic Energy Agency report indicated that Iraq could be as little as six months from making nuclear weapons.

Alas: The claim had to be retracted when the IAEA pointed out that no such report existed.

8) Saddam was involved with bin Laden and al Qaeda in the plotting of 9/11.

One of the most audacious and well-traveled of the Bushmen's fibs, this one hangs by two of the slenderest evidentiary threads imaginable: first, anecdotal testimony by isolated, handpicked Iraqi defectors that there was an al Qaeda training camp in Iraq, a claim CIA analysts did not corroborate and that postwar U.S. military inspectors conceded did not exist; and second, old intelligence accounts of a 1991 meeting in Baghdad between a bin Laden emissary and officers from Saddam's intelligence service, which did not lead to any subsequent contact that U.S. or UK spies have ever managed to turn up. According to former State Department intelligence chief Gregory Thielman, the consensus of U.S. intelligence agencies well in advance of the war was that "there was no significant pattern of cooperation between Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist operation."

9) The U.S. wants democracy in Iraq and the Middle East.

Democracy is the last thing the U.S. can afford in Iraq, as anyone who has paid attention to the state of Arab popular sentiment already realizes. Representative government in Iraq would mean the rapid expulsion of U.S. interests. Rather, the U.S. wants westernized, secular leadership regimes that will stay in pocket and work to neutralize the politically ambitious anti-Western religious sects popping up everywhere. If a little brutality and graft are required to do the job, it has never troubled the U.S. in the past. Ironically, these standards describe someone more or less like Saddam Hussein. Judging from the state of civil affairs in Iraq now, the Bush administration will no doubt be looking for a strongman again, if and when they are finally compelled to install anyone at all.

10) Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress are a homegrown Iraqi political force, not a U.S.-sponsored front.

Chalabi is a more important bit player in the Iraq war than most people realize, and not because he was the U.S.'s failed choice to lead a post-Saddam government. It was Chalabi and his INC that funneled compliant defectors to the Bush administration, where they attested to everything the Bushmen wanted to believe about Saddam and Iraq (meaning, mainly, al Qaeda connections and WMD programs). The administration proceeded to take their dubious word over that of the combined intelligence of the CIA and DIA, which indicated that Saddam was not in the business of sponsoring foreign terrorism and posed no imminent threat to anyone.

Naturally Chalabi is despised nowadays round the halls of Langley, but it wasn't always so. The CIA built the Iraqi National Congress and installed Chalabi at the helm back in the days following Gulf War I, when the thought was to topple Saddam by whipping up and sponsoring an internal opposition. It didn't work; from the start Iraqis have disliked and distrusted Chalabi. Moreover, his erratic and duplicitous ways have alienated practically everyone in the U.S. foreign policy establishment as well--except for Rumsfeld's Department of Defense, and therefore the White House.

Click here to read about the other 30 Bush lies on this list, with further links.

Comment: One of the most popular arguments we have heard in defense of GWB is that none of the lies mentioned in this article are actually Bush's fault. It is always the CIA's fault, or the Pentagon's fault, or the "few bad apples" that tortured the Iraqis at Abu Ghraib.

This is a rather disturbing argument, as it implies that those who express it don't believe that Bush is in control of the presidency. In fact, the argument would mean that the president has very little - if any - control over any arm of the US government. Apparently that idea doesn't bother such Americans.


Flashback: Iraq's 'special relationship'

BBC Online
Sunday, 26 January, 2003, 06:33 GMT

[...] The coup that brought the Ba'ath Party to power in 1963 was celebrated by the United States.

The CIA had a hand in it. They had funded the Ba'ath Party - of which Saddam Hussein was a young member - when it was in opposition.

US diplomat James Akins served in the Baghdad Embassy at the time.

"I knew all the Ba'ath Party leaders and I liked them," he told me.

"The CIA were definitely involved in that coup. We saw the rise of the Ba'athists as a way of replacing a pro-Soviet government with a pro-American one and you don't get that chance very often.

"Sure, some people were rounded up and shot but these were mostly communists so that didn't bother us".

This happy co-existence lasted right through the 1980s.

When the Ayatollah Khomeini seized power in Iran in 1979, America set about turning Saddam Hussein into Our Man in the Gulf Region.

Washington gave Baghdad intelligence support.

President Reagan sent a special presidential envoy to Baghdad to talk to Saddam in person.

The envoy's name was Donald Rumsfeld.

Everyone knew that Saddam was using chemical weapons against Iranian conscripts.

When 5,000 Kurds were gassed at Halabja in 1988, Kurdish leaders turned to America for help. Mahmoud Osman was one of them.

Halabja, when Saddam used weapons of mass destruction: "I couldn't get any of my friends in the State Department to return my calls," he said. [...]

Comment: So, as the reader can see, America is certain that Saddam had chemical weapons. They just ignored the fact that they helped set Saddam up in Iraq in the first place, and that international inspectors destroyed all of the weapons long before Iraq Invasion II.

Also see How the west helped Saddam gain power and decimate the Iraqi elite.

As the reader will see from the following articles, Bush's America has not just affected Afghanis and Iraqis...


When George Bush comes to town, the Constitution leaves town. It's Orwellian 2004.
By Regis T. Sabol

Erie, PA - George Bush's smoke-and-mirrors bus tour breezed into Erie for about an hour Saturday, just long enough to chase the Bill of Rights out of town.

Since Bush doesn't like to see those who disagree with his policies, he has ordered the Secret Service to create "Free Speech Zones." A Free Speech Zone is a pen, enclosure, or blocked off street far from King George's presence. Here his opponents may express their First Amendment rights where they will not be seen or heard and where they will have no effect. In this case, a Free Speech Zone is a moronic oxymoron.

I must admit that the Bush campaign team is getting smarter when it comes to dodging protest demonstrations. In Erie, Bush wasn't scheduled to arrive until 3:30 p.m. His bus showed up an hour ahead of schedule.

What makes this significant is that the local Kerry campaign had organized a counter rally in the city square, 20 blocks north of the stadium. That rally, which attracted about 300 Kerry supporters and Bush haters of all stripes, got started at about 1:30. The plan was for those attending the rally to walk the 20 blocks up State Street after the speeches had ended to give Bush the welcome he deserved. As it turned out, Bush was already in the stadium by the time the demonstrators arrived at the "Free Speech Zone."

Being a block away from the stadium, we couldn't hear a word Bush said, which, when you think of it, isn't that great a loss. The local newspaper said it was exactly the same speech he'd given several hours before in a small Ohio town.

All we could hear was the roar of the adoring crowd over and over and over as if they hadn't heard it all before over and over and over. They didn't care. They acted like Jesus reincarnated was speaking from the mountain top. From what I've read, Bush himself thinks he has a direct line to Jesus. I somehow doubt that Jesus would pick up the phone.

The swelling cheers, jeers, and applause did remind me of another well known historical figure who knew how to whip up a crowd into a mindless frenzy. It's not likely that the guy I'm thinking of could favorably be compared to Jesus.

As I said, these Bushies know what they're doing. They don't miss a trick. The Bush campaign committee managed to fill the 18,000 seat stadium to beyond its capacity by busing supporters in from anywhere their tentacles could reach. For example, while Kerry is habitually notoriously late for campaign appearances, as was Bill Clinton, the Bushies make it a point to be right on time. This time they made it a point to get to the stadium well before those nasty, unpatriotic protesters could get within range. Pretty clever, I must admit.

The Republican-orchestrated rally at Veterans Stadium set a dubious standard for Orwellian double-speak. Erie County GOP Chairman John Mizner had announced that Bush's campaign appearance was open to the public but those attending needed to get tickets from Republican campaign headquarters in order to gain admission.

However, the good folks at Republican headquarters reserved the right to deny tickets to those they considered unacceptable--unacceptable being anyone who did not indicate undying fealty to the Republican Party or who might be considered a troublemaker, a troublemaker being one who might, perhaps, disagree with Bush's policies. So much for the Bush rally being open to the public.

Since anyone entering Veterans Stadium had to have a ticket, Erie Police Chief Charles Bowers ruled that the police had an obligation to keep protesters at least a block away from the stadium because Bush's campaign appearance was, to use his words, "a private event by invitation only." Did someone forget to tell the police chief that Veterans Stadium is owned by the taxpayers of the city and that the public has a right to attend an event billed as "open to the public"? Or, at the very least, all citizens should enjoy the same access to public sidewalks--the sidewalk across the street from the stadium would do--as those attending the private party. Why did the Secret Service or Chief Bowers deem it necessary to cordon off the streets--from anyone who did not have a magic ticket--with a phalanx of armed police officers backed up by a contingent of police mounted on horses?

Actually, every street within two blocks of the stadium was shut down. Residents living inside the security zone were ordered to remain indoors. Otherwise, they would be considered potential terrorists. Ah, the joys of living in the land of the free.

For some inexplicable reason, the "invitation only" rule remained in effect long after the Bush bus headed to the airport. As the GOP faithful streamed out of the stadium and walked up West 26th Street or down State Street, demonstrators were still denied access to the public streets and sidewalks. Thus we had the spectacle of smug Republicans jauntily walking along the sidewalks while protesters were forbidden to use the very same sidewalks.

Why? The "invitation only" event "open to the public" was over; Bush was long gone. Shouldn't the barriers have gone down after Elvis left the building?

The upshot of it all is that Bush's private party that drew Republicans from near and far, many of them bused in from points unknown, cost the taxpayers of the City of Erie more than $100,000 in overtime pay to law enforcement officers and in providing other security measures. In other words, Bush's visit was a financial nightmare for the city.

Shouldn't the Bush Campaign get a bill for services rendered?

Then there were all those people who discovered they were temporarily living in a cordoned-off ghetto. And, of course, the entire spectacle made a mockery of the United States Constitution, which, as I recall, the president swore to uphold and defend.

But why quibble about such minor inconveniences? The President came to town! The President came to town! Hurray!

Regis T. Sabol is a contributing editor to Intervention Magazine. He is also editor of A New Deal: an online magazine of political, social, and cultural thought. You can email him at Regis@interventionmag.com


Flashback: Ashcroft: Tougher Patriot Act needed

WorldNetDaily.com
June 30, 2004

Saying the Patriot Act has helped prevent further terrorist attacks on America, Attorney General John Ashcroft yesterday called for even tougher law-enforcement tools.

In Tampa, Fla., Ashcroft reissued a warning that terrorists intend to attack the U.S. and that the upcoming Fourth of July holiday and political conventions should be considered prime targets.

"We are a nation at war," Ashcroft said. "There are times when 9-11 may seem like a distant memory, but it is not. Al-Qaida wants to hit us and hit us hard."

Ashcroft said the nation is entering a "season of symbolic events" that might become terrorist targets. While not wanting the public to be fearful and not enjoy the upcoming holiday, he urged people to be vigilant.

His warnings, similar to ones issued in late May, followed a visit in Tampa to an anti-terrorism group meeting at the Port of Tampa, considered by many law-enforcement officials to be one of Florida's prime targets for a possible attack.

The attorney general's visit to the Tampa Anti-Terrorism Advisory Council, a group of local and federal law-enforcement officials, was part pep talk and part lobbying effort for additional anti-terror tools.

He said the changes made by the Patriot Act in the years since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks gave government agencies the ability to share information, but investigators still need additional powers.

Civil-liberties groups have criticized the Patriot Act, saying it weakens judicial review and other checks to law enforcement's surveillance and investigative powers.

Ashcroft argued that law enforcement needs more powers, not fewer.

Among those he called for are the power for investigators to subpoena business records in terrorism investigations on their own rather than through a grand jury and a federal death penalty for some terrorism attacks in which people are killed.

Ashcroft is also asking Congress to allow judges to impose the death penalty for those convicted of terrorist activities that do not now have death penalty specifications.

Comment: But these draconian laws that have been passed by the Bush administration are designed to protect good wholesome Americans, right? See next article...

Flashback: Security Official Apologizes to Kennedy
By LOLITA C. BALDOR
Associated Press Writer
Friday August 20, 2004 5:01 PM

WASHINGTON (AP) - A top Homeland Security official has apologized to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy who was stopped at airports because a name similar to his appeared on the government's no-fly list of terror suspects.

"If they have that kind of difficulty with a member of Congress, how in the world are average Americans, who are getting caught up in this thing, how are they going to be treated fairly and not have their rights abused?" Kennedy asked Homeland Security undersecretary Asa Hutchinson.

Comment: Average Americans are not going to be treated fairly - isn't that the whole point?

The Massachusetts Democrat said he'd been misidentified on the watch list when he tried to board airliners between Washington and Boston. Kennedy said he was stopped five times as he tried to board US Airways shuttles because a name similar to his appeared on a list or his name popped up for additional screening.

Hutchinson, who apologized for "any inconvenience" to the senator, testified Thursday before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the need for the federal government to take over the watch lists, which are currently administered by the airlines.

Another prominent Democratic member of Congress, Rep. John Lewis of Georgia, said Friday the same thing has happened to him for months. Lewis said he can't get an electronic ticket, must show extra identification and has his luggage combed through by hand.

"I said, 'I'm the most nonviolent person to get on this plane and the most peaceful person to get on this plane,'" said Lewis, a pioneer of the civil rights movement.

Lewis said one airline representative in Atlanta told him, "Once you're on the list, there's no way to get off it." Lewis said he filed a complaint with the Department of Homeland Security and even considered a lawsuit.

This week, Lewis got a call from another John Lewis - a faculty member at the University of Houston - who told him he also was on a no-fly list.

"It's weird," he said. "But I like being classed with Ted Kennedy and the congressman. It makes me feel more important."

Kennedy said he was stopped at airports in Washington, D.C., and Boston three times in March. Airline agents told him he would not be sold a ticket because his name was on a list.

When he asked the agent why, he was told, "We can't tell you."

Each time, a supervisor recognized Kennedy and got him on the flight. But after the third incident, Kennedy's staff called the Transportation Security Administration and asked to clear up the confusion.

The TSA said a name similar to Kennedy's was on the watch list, and that he was later flagged to go through additional screening. TSA also said that the airlines didn't handle the matter properly.

But twice after contacting TSA, Kennedy was stopped again at the airline counter.

The American Civil Liberties Union has filed lawsuits in San Francisco and Seattle over this issue, demanding that the government explain how wrongly flagged travelers can get off the lists.

Hutchinson said that people who experience problems can call the TSA ombudsman to clear things up.

Comment: Well, it seems we at Signs of the Times have been overreacting a bit. You see, this whole clampdown on civil liberties really isn't so bad after all. Obviously, losing your right to fly somewhere unmolested by security officers - for reasons which are classified - is easily compensated for by the fact that you get to feel like you rank right up there with stars like Ted Kennedy...

And if you don't want the hassle of airport security, just sign up for "The Platinum Flyers Club"...


Flashback: Fast-Tracking Flyers
By SALLY B. DONNELLY
Time.com
Sunday, Jun. 13, 2004

After paying a fee and submitting to an extensive background check, airline passengers may be entitled to special security treatment

As the number of airline passengers starts to soar with the temperature, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is finally taking a significant step toward speeding the security process for at least some flyers. Aviation sources tell Time that this week the TSA will announce the launch of a three-month trial of its Registered Traveler program, which will start at five airports, beginning in Minneapolis—St. Paul and then in other cities, including Los Angeles and Houston.

A sort of fast track for frequent flyers, the program aims to let approved passengers use less crowded lanes to the security checkpoints and possibly avoid such routine security measures as removing their shoes and coats. To gain that privilege, passengers must submit to an extensive background check, including searches of commercial and government databases. After being approved and paying a small annual fee (yet to be determined), they would be issued a card—containing a biometric identifier (a fingerprint, for example) and personal data—that shows they're entitled to the special security treatment.

The initiative comes not a moment too soon. Almost 200 million people are expected to fly this summer, a 12% increase from last year, yet the cash-strapped TSA has had to lay off thousands of screeners. Up to 15% of passengers are still being singled out for extra screening because of outdated parameters like buying a one-way ticket or paying in cash. The TSA has fumbled efforts to improve the screening procedures and carry out a new color-coded system that verifies the identity and assesses the risk of every passenger.

Critics of the pilot program doubt it will make the security process much easier for prescreened travelers. But airport officials are supportive. "We love the idea," says Tim Anderson, an executive director of the Minneapolis—St. Paul International Airport. "It helps move us away from treating everyone the same and searching for the needle in the haystack."

Comment: One way to ensure that the masses love being controlled by Big Brother is to make them feel special or privileged. To become a member of the exclusive Registered Traveler program, all you have to do is give up your right to privacy. Then you will receive a futuristic biometric ID card that will serve as a symbol of your increased social status. Heck, why not just get an RFID tag implanted instead?

And to top it all off, people will actually have to pay for this "privilege". Fake a terror attack, lock down the country, and then make people pay you to regain a bit of their former freedom. If that's not a racket, we're not sure what is...


Last Thoughts

We have looked at a number of different issues that are important for understanding the events of 9/11 and after. Does this information provide proof of exactly what happened before, during, and after that tragic day? No. Much of what occurred was necessarily hidden from public view. However, we think that the data paint a disturbing picture. We give our highest probability that 9/11 was organised by elements in the US government, with elements from Israeli intelligence, in order to implicate Arabs and fundamentalist Moslems in the attack in order to justify the genocide of the Palestinians by the Israelis and the imposition of tyranny in the United States. It also justified the invasion of two countries, Iraq and Afghanistan, with several others now under the gun.

We have shown how Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda may well be US and Israeli intelligence assets used to promote this plan. To what extent individuals in al Qaeda are aware of how they are being used is open to question. Certainly, US and Israeli policy inflames the Arab world and provides an excuse for acts of terror against those who they see as infidels. This in turn further inflames the Middle East and justifies further repressive measures and war.

If we ask what possible benefits the "Islamic fundamentalists" have attained, it is hard to judge anything positive. US troops occupy Iraq. There is civil war and violence throughout the country. Afghanistan is in the hands of the war lords. The Israeli slaughter of the Palestinians continues. When you look at the hard facts, only Israel and the US, and here we are speaking of the most reactionary members of these two governments, not the entire people, have benefited.

The President of the US is a liar. He uses his God to justify a religious war, having created the perfect foil for this crusade in Osama bin Laden. Bush's bosom buddy, Ariel Sharon, is also benefiting, continuing the relentless war of attrition against the Palestinians.

If this information is new to you, it is a lot to take in at once. You may want to reject it.

Fine.

But some of you way find that this description of our reality and the hypotheses we propose makes sense. If so, continue your research on your own. Put the pieces together yourself. Begin to think and act based upon this new knowledge and for your destiny.

Bush and his like have the right to be, to continue their plans. Our world belongs to people like this. It is the job of those of us who feel alienated from this world to work our way out. That is what we mean when we speak of the evolution of the Soul.

Knowledge protects.

Knowledge about psychopaths and those without any empathy helps us to protect ourselves from their plans. Knowledge of history helps us to see that things have ever been so, and it is more than likely that they will ever be this way. The rabbit hole goes even deeper than we have begun to discuss on this page.

However, by understanding how the world really works, we can begin to bring a small glimmer of truth into a fallen world, and that small flash of light may one day become the seed of something new and better.

If you wish the truth to have a home in this world, you must light the torch yourself.

Click here to comment on this article

 



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