© voltairenet.orgThe Baker-Hamilton Commission takes stock of the Rumsfeld/Cebrowski strategy in Iraq.
The Baker/Hamilton Commission
In Iraq, things are going from bad to worse. The Provisional Government that succeeded the Provisional Authority is failing to stabilize the country. Once the "shock and amazement" of the Allied bombings has dissipated, the population is waking up and becoming aware of the looting and destruction carried out by the Provisional Authority. From the very beginning, the United States burned the archives and the national library. They first looted those national museums whose treasures had not been hidden in time. They methodically privatized the country's socialist economy for their own benefit, with the help of "their" specialists like former Bulgarian President Petar Stoyanov and former Russian Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar.
Everywhere, soldiers demobilized by the US occupier are reorganizing and rebelling against it. To overcome the anger of the Iraqis, the US ambassador, John Negroponte, decides to break their unity and provoke them into fighting each other. With the support of his old friend Elliot Abrams and Liz Cheney in Washington, he creates a Sunni group tasked with attacking the Shiites and a Shiite group tasked with massacring the Sunnis. Negroponte had already become the Director of National Intelligence of the United States when the civil war began. The descent into hell began with the gigantic attack against the Al-Askari Shiite mosque in Samarra on February 22, 2006, which left more than a thousand dead. Although not claimed, it is generally attributed to the Islamic Emirate of Iraq, the future Daesh. Despite calls for calm from Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani and Moqtada Al-Sadr, this was followed by numerous attacks and lynchings, resulting in the deaths of 3,000 Sunnis.
In concrete terms, the outcome of this war can be summed up as follows: President Saddam Hussein was overthrown under false pretenses; the country was methodically pillaged by the men responsible for the September 11 coup; and despite the presence of 170,000 GIs and several trillion dollars invested, the country is in the grip of a civil war as atrocious as it is artificial.
The ruling class in Washington is divided over whether it benefited from a piece of the pie or was forced to pay for the operation. Ultimately, Congress decides to create a bipartisan commission tasked with finding a solution to the Iraqi adventure. It is co-chaired by two figures deemed neutral by both groups: Republican James Baker and Democrat Lee Hamilton. The former was Secretary of State and then an advisor to the Carlyle Group investment fund, which managed the assets of the Bush and Bin Laden families; the latter was the rapporteur on Middle Eastern oil reserves and then vice-chairman of the presidential commission of inquiry into 9/11.
For almost a year, the Baker/Hamilton Commission examined not only Iraq, but the entire Middle Eastern policy of the United States, particularly Lebanon, Syria and Iran. On December 6, 2006, it reached the conclusion that it was necessary to abandon the plan for successive wars against all the states in the region (the Rumsfeld/Czebrowski doctrine), and instead, negotiate a return to peace with Syria and Iran [ 1 ] .
During the Commission's work, Cheney and Rumsfeld pressured the military to hasten war against Iran and its Shiite allies. They attempted to launch it on several occasions before the report was submitted. Several senior officers, breaking their imposed reserve, accused Rumsfeld of not being the right man for the job and publicly called for his resignation. The military encountered clear support from public opinion, aware of the disastrous situation in Iraq. Ultimately, following his electoral defeat in the midterm elections, President George Bush Jr. decided to dismiss the eternal Rumsfeld (74 years old) and replace him with a member of the Baker/Hamilton Commission. Baker, wishing to maintain his status as a "neutral sage," chose Republican Robert Gates, former director of the CIA.
Throughout 2007, the men of 9/11 attempted dirty tricks. Discreetly, the Spanish, French and Italian contingents of the UN Interposition Force between Israel and Lebanon were placed under NATO command. After the assassination of Rafic Hariri and the Israeli war, we were heading towards a third round in Beirut. Simultaneously, six atomic bombs were illegally moved from the Minot base to that of Barksdale, and were prepared to be sent to the Middle East [ 2 ] . At the last moment, the operation was cancelled. A spy satellite that was monitoring the Middle East self-destructed. Its debris fell in Peru.
Finally, the Director of National Intelligence, Vice Admiral John Michael McConnell, released a classified document stating that Iran had halted its civilian nuclear program several years ago, at least four years ago. In this way, he prevented Dick Cheney from repeating the weapons of mass destruction stunt that had allowed him to justify the attack on Iraq. The generals rebelled against the Bush administration and made this known.
© UnknownThen US President George W. Bush and Admiral WIlliam Fallon who resigns after negotiating peace with Iran, but Bush administration absolutely did not want it.
The head of Central Command — supervisor of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — Admiral William Fallon, a Vietnam veteran, is well aware that his troops are exhausted and will not be able to wage both counter-guerrilla warfare against the Iraqi Resistance and a war against Iran. Using the connections he has built up over the course of his career, he contacts Iranian figures and negotiates with the Islamic Republic in the presence of Russian and Chinese representatives. On March 2, 2008, he secretly meets with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Baghdad. The two men manage to find common ground. Iran is prepared to withdraw its commandos from sensitive areas of the broader Middle East (Afghanistan and Iraq, Bahrain and Lebanon, etc.) if the United States does the same.
Furious, Dick Cheney disavows the admiral. Betrayed by his own people, Fallon resigns. Tehran responds by massively supplying arms to the Iraqi, Lebanese, and Palestinian resistance movements.
The commander of US forces in Iraq, General David Petraeus, is jubilant. He replaces Admiral Fallon as head of CentCom and floods the press with his version of events in Iraq. He assures anyone who will listen that his surge has allowed him to control the Resistance and that things are about to return to normal.
The reality is quite different. John Negroponte's mercenaries have indeed succeeded in pitting Shiites against Sunnis and vice versa, but while armed groups are fighting each other, the population is not really participating in this civil war. Little by little, people are realizing that they are victims of manipulation. Tens of thousands of unemployed young people are in turn joining the resistance against the Occupier.
General Petraeus, advised by Australian expert David Kilcullen, decides to return and pay 80,000 of them ($10 a day). The vast majority of anti-US operations thus cease, although it is obvious that once the payment ceases, the 80,000 "collaborators" of the occupation forces will turn against them, and this time with the weapons that the Pentagon has just delivered to them. No matter, Petraeus just wants to buy time; time to sign onerous contracts for the exploitation of the oil fields and to obtain legal immunity for his troops and the ad aeternam maintenance of his military bases.
Petraeus is presented today as one of the world's leading counterterrorism experts, which is misleading, to say the least. He's an armchair general who made a career serving as a liaison between the Pentagon and Congress, not on the battlefield. Moreover, he spent his time in Iraq mostly abusing little girls rather than solving anything.
In any case, Defense Secretary Robert Gates is calling for a one-year truce between the two groups dividing the Pentagon, and from there, for a suspension of US interventions in the world.
The men of 9/11 tolerate, but do not give up. Since they cannot use the US military as a weapon, they turn to the British and the Israelis. The latter are ready to take revenge on Hezbollah and Syria on the one hand and, on the other, to carry out a raid on Iran as they did in 1981 on an Iraqi nuclear reactor.
However, their bombers lacked sufficient range. London then offered to provide them with closer airfields in Georgia. President Mikheil Saakashvili agreed to lease two military bases to Israel. The British installed one of their own nationals in his government, while the Israelis appointed one of their own, David Kezerashvili, as Minister of Defense.
© voltairenet.orgHezbollah, not the national army, is the main force protecting Lebanon
Hassan Nasrallah, the Secretary General of Hezbollah, asked the Prime Minister to withdraw these instructions, which he described as a "declaration of war." The Prime Minister maintained them, while a new war against Lebanon, Syria, and Iran was prepared. On May 7, 2008, Hezbollah invaded government buildings and the private homes of officials. Within hours, the state security services were disarmed, and Hezbollah triumphed. More discreetly, elite troops from the Party of God attacked a bunker located beneath the former headquarters of Future Television (owned by the Hariri family). It housed the operational center of the British, American, Israeli, and Jordanian forces. The foreign officers managed to escape through an underground passage and reach the beach. Inflatable boats took them out to sea, where they were picked up by a US ship. Having preserved the Resistance, Hezbollah withdrew.
This lightning victory led to the Doha Agreement. The March 14 Coalition, united around the Hariri family, negotiated its continued presence in government, while Hezbollah ignored it and demanded full freedom to defend the country.
While the annihilation of Hezbollah will have to wait, that of Iran is underway.
© voltairenet.orgPrime Minister Mikheil Saakashvili (in shirt) and his Defense minister, the Georgian-Israeli Davit Kezerashvili (here looking at his watch), leased two airports to Israel so it could bomb Iran.
In the Caucasus, convinced that the system he had conceded to the West protected him, President Saakashvili took the initiative to attack South Ossetia and Abkhazia. These two states, joined with Georgia during the Soviet era, declared themselves independent upon the dissolution of the USSR, without being recognized by the international community. Knowing that most Ossetians and Abkhazians held dual Russian nationality, President Dmitry Medvedev authorized his troops to intervene. His Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin, took charge of the operations. To everyone's surprise, he began by bombing the two military bases leased to Israel, grounding their planes, and then attacked the Georgian army.
Western media ignore the presence of Israel and the Iranian issue. They insist that the Russian army is completely obsolete. According to them, it was only able to win because Georgia itself was underequipped. Maybe. Maybe not. Russia, which everyone believed to be devastated since the dissolution of the USSR and the pillaging of the Yeltsin era, is recovering.
With neither US camp having any interest in revealing what happened, Washington is asking its French agent, Nicolas Sarkozy, to "negotiate" peace. In reality, there is nothing to negotiate: Georgia was wrong and lost. Israel is unable to explain its presence.
Sarkozy flies to Moscow to meet President Medvedev. On his way from the airport, he sees a huge poster campaign for Profile magazine . Since his portrait is on the cover, he asks his ambassador about its contents. It is a study I had written based on the President's family ties with one of the three founders of the CIA [ 3 ] . Arriving at the Kremlin, Sarkozy is received by his counterpart. But no sooner are the two men seated than the door opens again and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin enters. When Sarkozy tries to set his conditions, Putin, without a word, places a copy of the magazine on the table in front of him, turning the cover towards the Frenchman, as he will later recount. In the end, it is Sarkozy who accepts the Russian conditions, provoking the anger of his Central European partners.
© voltairenet.orgAt Guantanamo Bay, the US Navy tortures without hiding
During his two terms in office, George W. Bush terrified the Muslim world. Not only did he support the redrawing of the borders of the wider Middle East so that no state with more than 10 million inhabitants would remain, not only did he attack Afghanistan and Iraq, killing at least 3 million innocent people, but he also subjected at least 80,000 Muslims to torture.
Unlike television series and Hollywood movies, torture has never been effective in gathering reliable intelligence. However, it is an age-old form of government. It is a deterrent.
During Antiquity and the Middle Ages, this barbaric practice was not used to claim intelligence, but to force convicts to sign prepared confessions. During the Second World War, the Nazis resorted extensively to torture. They only incidentally obtained intelligence in this way. Their real interrogators, in accordance with Hanns Scharff's instructions, practiced no violence and, on the other hand, obtained all sorts of reliable information. Their torturers terrorized the population, ensuring their power, but in doing so, arousing the Resistance that defeated them.
Vice President Dick Cheney held a dozen meetings at the White House to decide what techniques would be used against Muslims. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Attorney General John Aschcroft, and CIA Director George Tenet participated and made their decisions based on the experiments conducted before their eyes.
Very few dictators have stooped to such practices, not even Chancellor Hitler. So John Ascroft eventually refused to attend these meetings, declaring: "History will not forgive us for what we have done."
While Western public opinion has heard of the Guantanamo Bay base, Abu Ghraib in Iraq, and the CIA's secret prisons, it has not been informed of the Navy's prisons in the holds of warships cruising in international waters. Seventeen of these floating prisons have been identified: USS Bataan, USS Peleliu, USS Ashland, USNS Stockham, USNS Watson, USNS Watkins, USNS Sister, USNS Charlton, USNS Pomeroy, USNS Red Cloud, USNS Soderman, USNS Dahl, MV PFC William B. Baugh, MV Alex Bonnyman, MV Franklin J. Phillips, MV Louis J. Huage Jr., MV James Anderson Jr. According to the British association Reprieve, more than 80,000 people kidnapped in the wider Middle East were tortured there before being released and returned to their countries.
It is no surprise that some of the relatives of these victims should show hatred of the West and unthinkingly join any group that claims to rebel against it.
Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's chief of staff, testified in written testimony at a trial at Guantanamo Bay that the administration knew full well that most of the individuals held there had no connection to terrorism.
While they were at it, the six aforementioned "democratic" leaders decided to test Professor Martin Seligman's theories about the possibility, not of obtaining intelligence, but of inculcating behavior [ 4 ] .
Leaning on
- on the study of Chinese torture during the Korean War by Professor Albert D. Biderman of the Rand Corporation,
- on CIA practices during the Cold War at the Political Warfare Cadres Academy (Taiwan) and the School of Americas (Panama) - set out in the Kubark manual -,
- on the CIA's Project MK-Ultra mind control experiments,
- and on the study of the "Arab mind" by Professor Raphael Patai, the former president of the American Psychological Association, Martin Seligman, devised a method aimed at breaking the personality of individuals (theory of "learned helplessness") and creating a new one for them.
© voltairenet.orgProfessor Martin Seligman, CIA advisor
In passing, Diane Feinstein establishes that, apart from the screams of the tortured, the United States has never received a confession linking the attacks of September 11 to Al-Qaeda [ 5 ] . She also implicated two of Seligman's students, who had shown rare sadism during the supervision of the "enhanced interrogations", Bruce Jensen and the Mormon bishop James Mitchell.
The Obama Presidency
© The Washington Post
The United States absolutely must drastically reduce its standard of living and make massive budget cuts. Wars will have to wait.
This is when George W. Bush's two terms ended and the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama, was elected. While the international press considered President Bush too stupid to govern and that his Vice President was working behind the scenes, it did not admit that Dick Cheney was not only this Vice President but also one of the members of the "continuity government" that organized the coup d'état of September 11. So it pretended to believe that power resided in the White House and that Obama would be a real President.
The American mentality readily accommodates "wiping the slate clean." Thus, when an entrepreneur goes bankrupt, they simply file for bankruptcy without paying their creditors. While in Europe, they are tried and generally banned from exercising management, in the United States they can immediately create another company and continue their activity. Similarly, in every presidential election — up to and including Donald Trump's — the new President does not present himself as accountable for the crimes committed by his predecessors. Barack Obama excels in this regard. He unabashedly pledges to unilaterally reduce nuclear arsenals and lead to world peace, drawing thunderous applause and receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in advance. In the same vein, Atlanticist propaganda celebrates the color of his skin as a sign of the end of racism and the triumph of equality. In fact, under his tenure, white supremacist organizations will flourish and police officers will become accustomed to murdering Black people without prosecution.
It turns out that, in all likelihood, Barack Obama was not born a U.S. citizen in Hawaii, but a subject of the British Crown in Kenya, which should have barred him from being elected President under the Constitution. In any case, his grandmother testified that she was present at his birth in Africa, but perhaps she was confusing him with another of her grandchildren. Hawaii's records did not preserve the declaration of his birth, but they were probably poorly filed. The Secretary of State awarded him a scholarship as a foreign student, but perhaps he had cheated to receive it. Subsequently, the White House press office would release a copy of his birth certificate, but it turned out to be faked.
A fringe movement is developing to challenge its legitimacy.
It is funded by New York entrepreneur Donald Trump.
It is funded by New York entrepreneur Donald Trump.
References:
[ 1 ] The Iraq Study Group Report , James Baker III & Lee H. Hamilton, Lawrence S. Eagleburger, Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., Edwin Meese III, Sandra Day O'Connor, Leon E. Panetta, William J. Perry, Charles S. Rob, Alan K. Simpson, Vintage Books (2008).
[ 2 ] " The US deployment of nuclear bombs against Iran? ", by Larry Johnson, Voltaire Network , September 17, 2007.
[ 3 ] " Operation Sarkozy: how the CIA placed one of its agents in the presidency of the French Republic ", by Thierry Meyssan, profile (Russian Federation), Voltaire Network , July 19, 2008.
[ 4 ] " The Secret of Guantanamo ," by Thierry Meyssan, Odnako (Russia), Voltaire Network , October 28, 2009.
[ 5 ] "Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and Interrogation Program", Senate Select Committee on Intelligence , December 9, 2014.
[ 6 ] " The Hidden Biography of the Obamas ," by Wayne Madsen, Translation Nathalie Krieg, Voltaire Network , August 30, 2010.
[ 7 ] " Barack Obama's African political experience ", by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network, March 9, 2013.
Also, " On September 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers collapsed despite annual revenues of $46.7 billion. The repercussions affected the entire global financial system. In truth, this and subsequent failures had little connection to real economic activity, but they disrupted the entire banking sector. They provided the Bush and Obama administrations with an opportunity to drain the national treasury and bail out their donors."
Americans need to remember that they paid for the corruption of Obama and Bush.