Press reports and comments by top intelligence officials suggest that Mohamed Merah, the alleged gunman who killed seven people including three Jewish schoolchildren in a nine-day shooting spree in Toulouse, was a French intelligence asset.

These revelations raise questions about French intelligence's failure to stop Merah, and whether this failure was dictated by political considerations. The investigation of Merah was led by the Central Directorate of Internal Intelligence (DCRI), run by Bernard Squarcini - a close associate of incumbent President Nicolas Sarkozy. Sarkozy, previously running far behind Socialist Party (PS) candidate François Hollande in next month's presidential elections, has benefited from massive media coverage after the attacks and now is catching up to Hollande in polls.

In a March 23 Le Monde interview, Squarcini had confirmed that Merah had traveled extensively in the Middle East, even though his legal earnings were roughly at the minimum wage: "He spent time with his brother in Cairo after having traveled in the Near East: Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and even Israel. ... Then he went to Afghanistan via Tajikistan. He took unusual routes and did not appear on our radars, nor those of French, American, or local foreign intelligence services."

Squarcini apparently aimed to bolster the official explanation for Merah's ability to escape police: he was an undetectable "self-radicalized lone wolf." This story is being shattered by revelations that French intelligence agencies were apparently in close contact with Merah, trying to develop him as an informant inside Islamist networks.

With few exceptions the news that will shape public discourse is subject to a de facto censorial process of powerful government and corporate elites beyond accountability to the public. It is here that Sigmund Freud's notion of repression is especially helpful for assessing the decrepit state of media and public discourse in the United States. In Freud's view, one's collective life experiences are registered in the subconscious, with those particularly disturbing or socially impermissible experiences being involuntarily suppressed, only later to emerge as neuroses. Whereas suppression is conscious and voluntary, repression takes place apart from individual volition.

With opinion polls indicating at least half of the public distrusting the official account of September 11th, the foremost basis for the "war on terror", no public event has been more repressed in public consciousness via the mass media than 9/11. The enduring usefulness of Freud's theory is suggested in repeated manifestations of the repressed episode to haunt the public mind for which a surrogate reality has been crafted.

"From 1950 to 1962, the C.I.A. ran a massive research project, a veritable Manhattan Project of the mind, spending over $1 billion a year to crack the code of human consciousness, from both mass persuasion and the use of coercion in individual interrogation." - Professor Alfred McCoy, author of A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror. This quote is from Prof. McCoy's interview with Democracy Now on February 17, 2006.

"Our brain is domineering when it comes to coping with reality. We sometimes see things not as they really are, sometimes invent categories that do not exist and sometimes fail to see things that are really there. There are people who have never seen or heard of an aircraft and will not be able to imagine it and a real airplane overhead will be distorted in their minds, creating alternative realities.

To recognize that what we call reality is only a consensus reality (only what we have agreed to call reality) is to recognize that we can perceive only what we can conceive. Captain Cook's ship was invisible to the Tahitians because they could not conceive of such a vessel. Joseph Pearce explains this best: "Man's mind mirrors a universe that mirrors man's mind."" - Bharati Sarkar, "Consciousness - Our third eye."

"Remember: those who are at the top of the heap will always take whatever steps are necessary to maintain the status quo. It is obvious that they cannot completely control the propagation of the information. So, how do they "keep secrets?" They don't. Everything is right out there in the public domain. Anybody who wants to can do the research we have done and come to the realizations we have in this process. BUT, not everyone is able to withstand the OTHER weapon of Mass Control: the fear of being labeled a "suspected or potential supporter" in a world where the Grand Inquisitor has total control over life and death." - Laura Knight-Jadczyk, "Mass Mind Control?"

Before the CIA and NSA decided it was a good idea to invade your home without your knowledge to spy on you with advanced appliances, smart phones, computers, and other electronics, they invaded your mind to manipulate your understanding of reality and history, especially of epochal events like the JFK assassination and the 9/11 attacks.

It is disturbing to know that the CIA has been inside the public mind for half a century, and is now using its unthinkable technological capabilities to invade private homes to document and categorize each individual's behavioural patterns, lifestyle choices, information preferences, and daily habits.

Of course, state surveillance spooks cannot track and data-mine every space of information in this vast social ocean that we call the virtual world. But, that problem can be managed because the sharks of the state don't need to be aware of the entire environment to strike fear in the fishes and other creatures. Just the fact that sharks are buzzing around is enough to make any thinking fish freeze and adapt his thoughts, views, opinions, and patterns in order to placate the sharks' appetite for domination and total control.

Michel Collon, investigative reporter, in Libya shows what "collateral damage". really means...

The French president has caused an outcry after dozens of infant school children were forced to chant 'Long Live Sarkozy!' when he visited their school.

Parents complained about the youngsters being used as 'propaganda tools' after they were made to treat Nicolas Sarkozy as a hero, waving Tricolour flags and constantly shouting his name.

Some were even kissed by Mr Sarkozy, who is hugely unpopular and widely expected to lose the presidential election being held in France in the Spring.

One should judge Nicolas Sarkozy according to his actions, and not according to his personality. Yet when his doings surprise even his own constituents, it is legitimate to take a detailed look at his biography and question the bonds that brought him to power. Thierry Meyssan has decided to write the truth about the French Republic's president background. All the information included in this article is provable, except for two assertions signalled by the author who alone takes full responsibility.

Tired of the overextended presidencies of François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac, the French elected Nicolas Sarkozy counting on his energy to revitalize their country. They were hoping for a break with years of no-change and ideologies of the past. What they got instead was a break with the very principles which founded the French nation, and have been shocked by this "hyper-president", seizing every day a new dossier, attracting towards him the right and the left wing, and tearing apart all points of reference to the point of creating total confusion.

Like children who have just made a boo-boo, the French are too busy trying to find excuses for themselves to admit the magnitude of the damages and of their naiveté, and they refuse all the more to see who Nicolas Sarkozy really is, that they realize they should have known since a long time who he was.

In the wake of a horrific rampage, in which Mohamed Merah (now dead after a 32-hour standoff with police) reportedly murdered three French soldiers, three young Jewish schoolchildren, and a rabbi, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France has begun calling for criminal penalties for citizens who visit web sites that advocate for terror or hate. "From now on, any person who habitually consults Web sites that advocate terrorism or that call for hatred and violence will be criminally punished," Sarkozy was reported as saying.

Apart from the obvious flaws in Sarkozy's plan--users, can, of course, use anonymizing tools to view the material or simply access it from a variety of locations to avoid appearing as "habitual" viewers--there are numerous other reasons to be concerned about criminalizing access to information.

First, there's no guarantee that criminalizing access to hate speech or terrorist content will end the very real problems of hate crime and terrorism. Extremist violence didn't start with the Internet and it won't end with it, either.

Second, who defines "hate speech"? In France, that definition includes Holocaust denial, which in the past resulted in Yahoo! discontinuing auctions of Nazi memoribilia (the collectors of which are not, by any stretch, all sympathizers). And negative comments about France's Muslim community have also resulted in criminal penalties, most notably in the case of actress Brigitte Bardot, who has been convicted five times for "inciting racial hatred." While Holocaust denial and comments about Muslims such as those made by Bardot may be deplorable, they should not be criminal.

Finally, while Sarkozy is not--yet--calling for websites to be blocked, it wouldn't be a stretch; after all, France already offers mechanisms for blocking child pornography and "incitement to terrorism and racial hatred." If Sarkozy were to decide censorship is the answer, one major risk would be overblocking: there's nary a country in the world that censors the Internet without collateral damage (in Australia, for example, testing on a would-be censorship regime found the site of a dentist blocked, among others).

EFF has serious concerns about the implications of Sarkozy's comments. When a democratic country such as France decides to censor or criminalize speech, it is not just the French that suffer, but the world, as authoritarian regimes are given easy justification for their own censorship. We urge French authorities to judge crime on action, not expression.

The following are important facts that may help you understand the background to the recent shocking events in South Western France.

Three servicemen have died and in another attack on a Jewish school, a teacher, two of his own children and a third child were tragically gunned down by a masked man riding a motor scooter.

Important fact number one: the first round of the French presidential election is scheduled for April 22nd. A final encounter between the two front runners is scheduled for May 6th, should no clear winner emerge from the first round.

And number two: the incumbent Nicholas Sarkozy is fighting for his political life. He has trailed his socialist opponent Francoise Holland for months now. He has not led in the polls against any socialist contender since November 2009.

To sum up, Sarkozy is one of the consistently least popular presidents in the history of the Fifth Republic. He looked every inch the loser engaged in a race to the bottom. His populist lunges at the over-bearing EU, playing the anti-Turkish card over the Armenian genocide issue, barely registered more than a temporary flicker on the political Geiger counter.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has spoken out strongly against extremism, but urged his countrymen not to stigmatize Muslims, after a 32-hour siege that resulted in the death of a radical Islamist gunman who confessed to killing seven people.

Sarkozy has proposed a raft of new anti-terrorist measures.

Speaking in a press conference straight after the end of the siege in Toulouse, the French president said anyone regularly visiting websites "justifying terrorism" or "preaching hatred and violence" would be prosecuted.


Sarkozy also called for punishments to those who travel to radical Islamic camps, even if they commit no crimes on French soil.


It is suspected that the Mohamed Merah, the gunman who numbered three Jewish children among his victims, visited Afghanistan and Pakistan on several occasions, fighting alongside the Taliban. Merah claimed links with Al-Qaeda during the siege.

Another day, another false-flag terror event in another advanced Western democracy. This time, the people of France are the target of Western state-sponsored terrorism and the strategy of tension. The patsy's name is Mohammed Merah. The names of the people who were murdered by the French state are Jonathan (Yonatan) Sandler, plus two of his young children named Aryeh and Gabriel, and another child named Myriam Monsonego.

This is an ordinary state-run terrorist operation to increase tension, fear, and hatred in Western society. This is what the fascist State does when it is free to write history on the spot and blow stuff up. It kills innocent children to make the submerged public gasp for air, hate the scapegoat, and demand security and steel nerve from the leaders of the State.

Vincenzo Vinciguerra, an Italian neo-fascist and terrorist, described in 1984 the existence of a shadow network of military officials and political leaders in Italy who frequently organized terror attacks to keep the country within the sphere of right-wing politics. This network was part of a larger structure known as Gladio that included government fascists in Europe, America, and NATO. Vinciguerra, who was a mercenary of this secret state-terror network until the day he raised awareness of its existence, said in the famous documentary, Operation Gladio:

You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple: to force the public to turn to the state to ask for greater security.