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| ©Unknown
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| Prof. Peter Dale Scott
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The Deep State and 9/11
The unthinkable - that elements inside the state would conspire with criminals to kill innocent civilians - has become not only thinkable but commonplace in the last century. A seminal example was in French Algeria, where dissident elements of the French armed forces, resisting General de Gaulle's plans for Algerian independence, organized as the Secret Army Organization and bombed civilians indiscriminately, with targets including hospitals and schools. Critics like Alexander Litvinenko, who was subsequently murdered in London in November 2006, have charged that the 1999 bombings of apartment buildings around Moscow, attributed to Chechen separatists, were in fact the work of the Russian secret service (FSB).
SOTT Focus
SOTT.netSat, 31 May 2008 18:05 UTC
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| ©worldproutassembly
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| Evidence that Chavez is planning a world communist revolution and corrupting the minds of the youth in Venezuela.
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Not content with their preparations for war against Iran, a war that is worryingly looking like it will involve the use of a nuclear weapon by Israel and the US while blaming the detonation on Iran, it seems that Venezuela and particularly Hugo Chavez are in the cross-hairs of the imperial war machine.
The most recent chapter of the story starts with a Columbian air raid against a camp in Ecuador on March 1st. The camp was the location of a group from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) who were negotiating the release of some 700 prisoners. The raid killed FARC's second in command and top negotiator, Raul Reyes, and 23 other people, including 5 Mexican students. The air raid, followed up by a raid by special forces, was an armed incursion into Ecuador's sovereign territory and therefore an act of war against Ecuador (consider how the US would react if such an act were carried out by Iran into Iraq, let alone by Canada into the US) but this has conveniently been forgotten in the excitement that eight perfectly intact pieces of computer hardware were found at the scene of devastation.
Beyond the sound and fury of its conquest of Iraq and campaign against Iran, the world's dominant power is waging a largely unreported war on another continent - Latin America. Using proxies, Washington aims to restore and reinforce the political control of a privileged group calling itself middle-class, to shift the responsibility for massacres and drug trafficking away from the psychotic regime in Colombia and its mafiosi, and to extinguish hopes raised among Latin America's impoverished majority by the reform governments of Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia.
The head of the United Nation's atomic watchdog again hit out at Israel's willingness to take unilateral action against countries such as Syria, in comments published in a magazine interview Monday.
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| ©Unknown
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Andrew Sullivan, writing about McClellan's new book is most taken with the fact that McClellan claims that Bush intentionally ignored the WMD evidence, saying "if the president intentionally ignored data refuting the existence of Saddam's WMDs, he should be impeached."
Frankly, the fact that Bush did this is
old news; and impeachment is the least of the appropriate responses -- a war crimes trial would be called for. (I sort of thought Sullivan was farther along than this, actually.)
The truth is out there
When Cynthia McKinney speaks the words of Martin Luther King Jr, they resound through the church with some of King's cadence. "A time comes," declares the former US congresswoman from Georgia, "when silence is betrayal." The congregation answers with whoops and calls of "That's right!" King was talking about America's war in Vietnam. More than 40 years later, before the packed pews of the Immanuel Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles, McKinney is speaking of the American government's war on its own people. The shock and awe phase of this conflict, we had been told earlier, began on September 11 2001, when the Bush administration launched attacks on New York and Washington, or at least waved them through.
According to a show of hands that February afternoon, several hundred people in the immaculate church believe this to be true. Some came in T-shirts bearing the words "9/11 was an inside job". One wore a badge demanding that you "Examine your assumptions". Quite a few bought the DVDs on sale in the foyer, most of which bore photographs of the Twin Towers spewing smoke. They had all come to hear the message of Architects, Engineers & Scientists for 9/11 Truth, one of the dozens of groups across the US which campaign to persuade us that everything we think we know about 9/11 is wrong.
Comment: The fact is that the events of 11th of September, 2001, were full of anomalies in many senses - including physical anomalies. There were enough to reasonably conclude that it was an inside job of which neocons and Zionists benefited the most. While the details of what exactly happened and how it happened may be open to debate, the fact remains that these anomalies scandalously contradict the ridiculous official story.
It is this official story that is challenged, and focusing on the debates and contradictions among the different factions of 'truthers' in order to discredit them is missing the essential point that we were lied to as never before, and that these lies have led the world into two wars and soon to a third, which may well turn out to be catastrophic.
And again, who benefits if the essential point is missed?
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Saturday blamed the United States for the global financial downturn and said Russia had the energy and food resources to come to the world's help.
"It is precisely the gap between the United States' formal role in the world economy and its real capabilities that was one of the key reasons for the current crisis," Medvedev told a business forum in Saint Petersburg.
"Russia is a global player and understands its responsibility for the fate of the world," he said.
"We want to participate in setting out the new rules of the game, not out of imperial ambitions... but because of our energy resources."
Arrest of 47 people over alleged coup plot sparks fears of hidden ultra-right network.
It has the elements of a thriller: a shadowy group of right-wing former soldiers, a mafia don, extremist lawyers and politicians; hand-grenades in a rucksack; plots to kill the Prime Minister and a Nobel-prize winning writer; allegedly planted evidence and falsified wire taps.
Even the name of the villains - the Ergenekon network - has an airport paperback flavour, and the stakes involved are high: the stability of one of the world's most strategically important countries. This highly charged political reality is splitting Turkey.
In the coming days the Ergenekon investigation will reach its climax. According to newspaper reports, a long-awaited indictment will be issued by the state prosecutor. After successive waves of arrests, 47 people are in custody. They include senior figures in the ultra-right-wing Workers' Party, a dozen retired senior army officers, journalists and a lawyer accused of launching legal attacks that drove Nobel award-winning writer Orhan Pamuk from his homeland.
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| ©Carsten Koall/AFP/Getty Images
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| Supporters wave flags for Devlet Bahceli in Istanbul, Turkey.
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SOTT Focus
SOTT.netThu, 05 Jun 2008 16:52 UTC
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| ©Nate Sullivan
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The recent network related attack on SOTT.net known as ARP poisoning which redirected traffic to sites hosting malicious software comes at a curious time. While presidential candidates are pledging allegiance to Israel at AIPAC meetings, the Israeli Prime Minister is ordering Bush to
prepare for strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities.
His warning also comes on the heels of former German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, warning of an impending
Israeli strike against Iran:
As a result of misguided American policy, the threat of another military confrontation hangs like a dark cloud over the Middle East. The United States' enemies have been strengthened, and Iran - despite being branded as a member of the so-called "axis of evil" - has been catapulted into regional hegemony. Iran could never have achieved this on its own, certainly not in such a short time.
A hitherto latent rivalry between Iran and Israel thus has been transformed into an open struggle for dominance in the Middle East. The result has been the emergence of some surprising, if not bizarre, alliances: Iran, Syria, Hizbullah, Hamas and the American-backed, Shiite-dominated Iraq are facing Israel, Saudi Arabia, and most of the other Sunni Arab states, all of which feel existentially threatened by Iran's ascendance.
The danger of a major confrontation has been heightened further by a series of factors: persistently high oil prices, which have created new financial and political opportunities for Iran; the possible defeat of the West and its regional allies in proxy wars in Gaza and Lebanon; and the United Nations Security Council's failure to induce Iran to accept even a temporary freeze of its nuclear program.
Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni served as a Paris agent for the Mossad overseas intelligence agency in the 1980s during a series of missions it ran to kill Palestinian terrorists across Europe, according to the Sunday Times.
The report cites Livni's former colleagues as saying the Kadima frontrunner was on active duty in 1983, when senior Palestine Liberation Organization official Mamoun Meraish was shot dead by two Mossad agents in Athens.
Comment: For additional context to the ongoing vilification of Chavez, see the following:
James Petras' Venezuela: Democracy, Socialism and Imperialism and Venezuela: A Dictionary of Euphemisms of the Liberal Opposition
John Pilger's Latin America: the attack on democracy
Nikolas Kozloff's Controversy Over Guajira -- U.S. Military Bases in South America
Naomi Klein's Venezuela's Media Coup
Eva Golinger's Chronology of the 4th Generation War Against Venezuela
Troy Turner's Propaganda alert : A portrait of Hugo Chavez and his influence on American lives