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US backing al Qaeda again

Before al Qaeda called themselves al Qaeda they were the "freedom fighters" battling the Russians in Afghanistan. They called themselves the Mujahideen.  Now they're freedom fighters again, in Syria. Gotta get them a new name, though.

In an astounding admission, the New York Times confirms that the so-called “Syrian opposition” is entirely run by Al Qaeda and literally states: 

Nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of.

From the beginning, it was clear to geopolitical analysts that the conflict in Syria was not “pro-democracy” protesters rising up, but rather the fruition of a well-documented conspiracy between the US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia to arm and direct sectarian extremists affiliated with Al Qaeda against the Syrian government.

This was documented as early as 2007 – a full 4 years before the 2011 “Arab Spring” would begin – by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh in his New Yorker article titled, “”The Redirection: Is the Administration’s new policy benefiting our enemies in the war on terrorism?” which stated specifically (emphasis added):

To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

For the past two years the US, UK, France, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, and Turkey have sent billions of dollars and thousands of tons of weapons into Syria along side known-terrorists from Libya, Chechnya, neighboring Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq. In the Telegraph’s article titled, “US and Europe in ‘major airlift of arms to Syrian rebels through Zagreb’,” it is reported:

It claimed 3,000 tons of weapons dating back to the former Yugoslavia have been sent in 75 planeloads from Zagreb airport to the rebels, largely via Jordan since November. 

The story confirmed the origins of ex-Yugoslav weapons seen in growing numbers in rebel hands in online videos, as described last month by The Daily Telegraph and other newspapers, but suggests far bigger quantities than previously suspected.

The shipments were allegedly paid for by Saudi Arabia at the bidding of the United States, with assistance on supplying the weapons organised through Turkey and Jordan, Syria’s neighbours. But the report added that as well as from Croatia, weapons came “from several other European countries including Britain”, without specifying if they were British-supplied or British-procured arms.

British military advisers however are known to be operating in countries bordering Syria alongside French and Americans, offering training to rebel leaders and former Syrian army officers. The Americans are also believed to be providing training on securing chemical weapons sites inside Syria.

Additionally, The New York Times in its article, “Arms Airlift to Syria Rebels Expands, With C.I.A. Aid,” admits that:

With help from the C.I.A., Arab governments and Turkey have sharply increased their military aid to Syria’s opposition fighters in recent months, expanding a secret airlift of arms and equipment for the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad, according to air traffic data, interviews with officials in several countries and the accounts of rebel commanders.

The airlift, which began on a small scale in early 2012 and continued intermittently through last fall, expanded into a steady and much heavier flow late last year, the data shows. It has grown to include more than 160 military cargo flights by Jordanian, Saudi and Qatari military-style cargo planes landing at Esenboga Airport near Ankara, and, to a lesser degree, at other Turkish and Jordanian airports.

And more recently the US State Department had announced hundreds of millions of dollars more in aid, equipment and even armored vehicles to militants operating in Syria, along with demands of its allies to “match” the funding to reach a goal of over a billion dollars. The NYT would report in their article, “Kerry Says U.S. Will Double Aid to Rebels in Syria,” that:

With the pledge of fresh aid, the total amount of nonlethal assistance from the United States to the coalition and civic groups inside the country is $250 million. During the meeting here, Mr. Kerry urged other nations to step up their assistance, with the objective of providing $1 billion in international aid.

And as this astronomical torrent of cash, weapons, and equipment was overtly sent by the West into Syria, the US State Department since the very beginning of the violence has known that the most prominent fighting group operating inside Syria was Al Qaeda, more specifically, the al Nusra front. The US State Department’s official press statement titled, “Terrorist Designations of the al-Nusrah Front as an Alias for al-Qa’ida in Iraq,” stated explicitly that:

Since November 2011, al-Nusrah Front has claimed nearly 600 attacks – ranging from more than 40 suicide attacks to small arms and improvised explosive device operations – in major city centers including Damascus, Aleppo, Hamah, Dara, Homs, Idlib, and Dayr al-Zawr. During these attacks numerous innocent Syrians have been killed.

The State Department admits that from the very beginning, Al Qaeda has been carrying out hundreds of attacks in every major city in Syria. Clearly for those who read the 2007 Hersh piece in the New Yorker, and then witnessed the rise of Al Qaeda in Syria, the explanation is quite simple – the West intentionally and systematically funded and armed Al Qaeda to gain a foothold in Syria, then overthrow the Syrian government in an unprecedented sectarian bloodbath and subsequent humanitarian catastrophe, just as was planned years ago.

However, now, according to Western leaders, the public is expected to believe that despite the US, UK, France, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, and Turkey flooding Syria with billion in cash, and thousands of tons of weapons, all sent exclusively to “secular moderates,” somehow, Al Qaeda has still managed to gain preeminence amongst the “opposition.”

How can this be? If a 7-nation axis is arraying the summation of its resources in the region behind “secular moderates,” who then is arraying even more resources behind Al Qaeda? The answer is simple. There never were any “secular moderates,” a fact the New York Times has now fully admitted.

In its article titled, “Islamist Rebels Create Dilemma on Syria Policy,” the New York Times admits:

Across Syria, rebel-held areas are dotted with Islamic courts staffed by lawyers and clerics, and by fighting brigades led by extremists. Even the Supreme Military Council, the umbrella rebel organization whose formation the West had hoped would sideline radical groups, is stocked with commanders who want to infuse Islamic law into a future Syrian government.

Nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of.

However, in an explanation that defies reason, the article states:

The Islamist character of the opposition reflects the main constituency of the rebellion, which has been led since its start by Syria’s Sunni Muslim majority, mostly in conservative, marginalized areas. The descent into brutal civil war has hardened sectarian differences, and the failure of more mainstream rebel groups to secure regular arms supplies has allowed Islamists to fill the void and win supporters.

To “secure regular arms supplies” from whom? According to the West, they have been supplying “mainstream rebel groups” with billions in cash, and thousands of tons of weaponry – and now according to the BBC, training as well.Where if not intentionally and directly into the hands of al-Nusra, did all of this cash, these weapons, and training go?

The NYT also admits (emphasis added):

Of most concern to the United States is the Nusra Front, whose leader recently confirmed that the group cooperated with Al Qaeda in Iraq and pledged fealty to Al Qaeda’s top leader, Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden’s longtime deputy. Nusra has claimed responsibility for a number of suicide bombings and is the group of choice for the foreign jihadis pouring into Syria. 

Not only is the Syrian government fighting now openly admitted Al Qaeda terrorists, but terrorists that are not even of Syrian origin.

More outrageous still, is that the New York Times fully admits that the very oil fields the European Union has lifted sanctions on and is now buying oil from in Syria (see BBC’s “EU eases Syria oil embargo to help opposition“), are completely controlled by Al Qaeda – meaning the European Union is now intentionally exchanging cash with known international terrorists guilty of horrific atrocities, in exchange for oil.  The NYT reports:

Elsewhere, they [al-Nusra] have seized government oil fields, put employees back to work and now profit from the crude they produce.

And:

In the oil-rich provinces of Deir al-Zour and Hasaka, Nusra fighters have seized government oil fields, putting some under the control of tribal militias and running others themselves.

The Times continues by admitting (emphasis added):

Nusra’s hand is felt most strongly in Aleppo, where the group has set up camp in a former children’s hospital and has worked with other rebel groups to establish a Shariah Commission in the eye hospital next door to govern the city’s rebel-held neighborhoods. The commission runs a police force and an Islamic court that hands down sentences that have included lashings, though not amputations or executions as some Shariah courts in other countries have done.

Nusra fighters also control the power plant anddistribute flour to keep the city’s bakeries running.

This last point, “and distribute flour to keep the city’s bakeries running,” is of extreme importance, because that “flour” they are “distributing” comes admittedly, directly from the United State of America.

In the Washington Post’s article, “U.S. feeds Syrians, but secretly,” it is claimed that:

In the heart of rebel-held territory in Syria’s northern province of Aleppo, a small group of intrepid Westerners is undertaking a mission of great stealth. Living anonymously in a small rural community, they travel daily in unmarked cars, braving airstrikes, shelling and the threat of kidnapping to deliver food and other aid to needy Syrians — all of it paid for by the U.S. government.

The Washington Post then claims that most Syrians credit Al Qaeda’s al-Nusra with providing the aid:

“America has done nothing for us. Nothing at all,” said Mohammed Fouad Waisi, 50, spitting out the words for emphasis in his small Aleppo grocery store, which adjoins a bakery where he buys bread every day. The bakery is fully supplied with flour paid for by the United States. But Waisi credited Jabhat al-Nusra — a rebel group the United States has designated a terrorist organization because of its ties to al-Qaeda — with providing flour to the region, though he admitted he wasn’t sure where it comes from.

Clearly, the puzzle is now complete. Indeed Mr. Mohammed Fouad Waisi was correct, Jabhat al-Nusra, a listed terrorist organization by the US State Department, is supplying the people with flour, flour it receives by the ton directly and intentionally from the United States in direct contradiction to its own anti-terror laws, international laws, and the US State Department’s own frequent denials that it is bolstering terrorists inside of Syria.

Clearly the US and its allies are propping up terrorism, and more alarming is that the “aid” they have been providing the Syrian people, appears to have been used as a political weapon by Al Qaeda, allowing them to take, hold, and permanently subjugate territory inside Syria. It should be noted again, that the New York Times itself admits that the ranks of al-Nusra are filled with foreign, not Syrian, fighters.

Revealed is a conspiracy so insidious, so outrageous, and a web of lies so tangled, that Western governments perhaps count on their populations to disbelieve their tax money is being used to intentionally fund and arm savage terrorism while purposefully fueling a sectarian bloodbath whose death toll is sounded daily by the very people driving it up to astronomical heights. The cards are down – the US has been exposed as openly funding, arming, and supplying Al Qaeda in Syria for two years and in turn, is directly responsible for the death, atrocities, and humanitarian disasters within and along Syria’s borders that have resulted.

While the US attempts to sell military intervention on behalf of Al Qaeda in Syria, using the flimsy, yet familiar pretext of “chemical weapons,” it appears that before even one American boot officially touches Syrian soil, an already horrific crime against humanity of historic proportions has been committed by the US and its allies against the Syrian people.

 

FBI links a government to 9/11 conspiracy

No, not Bush and Cheney, but the Saudi government. Not that this necessarily lets anyone off the hook, considering how our government behaved after the fact. From the Miami Herald, and yes, they're looking into some of the characters in Sarasota, Florida.

Contrary to the official narrative, 9/11 was state-sponsored terror.  The only question is which state sponsored it.

A 9/11 Commissioner and Co-Chair of the Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 say in sworn declarations that the Saudi government is linked to the 9/11 attacks.

This week, the Miami Herald provided more evidence of a Saudi link:

A Saudi family who “fled” their Sarasota area home weeks before 9/11 had “many connections” to “individuals associated with the terrorist attacks on 9/11/2001,” according to newly released FBI records.

 One partially declassified document, marked “secret,” lists three of those individuals and ties them to the Venice, Fla., flight school where suicide hijackers Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi trained. Accomplice Ziad Jarrah took flying lessons at another school a block away.

 Atta and al-Shehhi were at the controls of the jetliners that slammed into the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center, killing nearly 3,000 people. Jarrah was the hijacker-pilot of United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in a field in rural Pennsylvania.

 The names, addresses and dates of birth of the three individuals tied to the flight school were blanked out before the records were released to BrowardBulldog.org amid ongoing Freedom of Information Act litigation.

 The information in the documents runs counter to previous FBI statements. It also adds to concerns raised by official investigations but never fully explored, that the full truth about Saudi Arabia and the 9/11 attacks has not yet been told.

 ***

 The documents are the first released by the FBI about its once-secret probe in Sarasota. Information contained in the documents flatly contradicts prior statements by FBI agents in Miami and Tampa who have said the investigation found no evidence connecting the al-Hijjis to the hijackers or the 9/11 plot.

 Concerned residents in the gated community of Prestancia tipped the FBI, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, to the al-Hijjis’ sudden departure in late August 2001. The family left behind three cars, clothes, furniture, diapers, toys, food and other items.

 [A] counterterrorism officer and Prestancia’s former administrator, Larry Berberich, both said an analysis of gatehouse security records — log books and snapshots of license tags — had determined that vehicles either driven by or carrying several of the future hijackers had visited the al-Hijji home.

 Phone records revealed similar, though indirect, ties to the hijackers, said the counterterrorism officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

 ***

 An April 16, 2002, FBI report says “repeated citizen calls” led to an inspection of the home by agents of the Southwest Florida Domestic Security Task Force.

 ***

 That person and a second individual were said to be flight students at Huffman Aviation — the flight school at the Venice Municipal Airport attended by hijackers Atta and al-Shehhi.

 The third person on the list “lived with flight students at Huffman Aviation” and was “arrested numerous times by the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office,” the report says.

 ***

 A notice on the document indicates the censored information regarding the three individuals associated with the terrorist attacks is scheduled to remain classified for another 25 years — until March 14, 2038.

 ***

 Al-Hijji, who following 9/11 worked for the Saudi oil company Aramco in England, could not be reached by phone or email last week. Aramco staff said there was no longer anyone by that name in the London office.

 ***

 The FBI documents also disclose that Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., queried Attorney General Eric Holder and FBI Director Robert Mueller about the Sarasota investigation six days after its existence was disclosed in Broward Bulldog/Miami Herald story.

 ***

 Similarly, Weich denied an assertion by then Sen. Bob Graham of Florida that the FBI had not turned over its Sarasota records to Congress. The bureau, he stated, made all of its records available and suggested they may have been overlooked by investigators.

 The documents the FBI has released do not mention other known aspects of the Sarasota investigation, including information provided to the FBI by al-Hijji’s former friend, Wissam Hammoud.

 Hammoud, 47, is a federal prisoner classified by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons as an “International Terrorist Associate.” He is serving a 21-year sentence for weapons violations and attempting to kill a federal agent and a witness in a previous case against him.

 [S]hortly after his 2004 arrest, Hammoud told agents that al-Hijji considered Osama bin Laden a “hero,” may have known some of the hijackers, and once introduced Hammoud to fugitive al-Qaeda leader and ex-Miramar resident Adnan Shukrijumah.

 When reached last year, al-Hijji acknowledged having known Hammoud well. He did not, however, respond to a question about Hammoud’s allegations and said Shukrijumah’s name did not “ring a bell.”

 ***

 Other FBI documents about Sarasota are known to exist, but were not released, including a report Graham says he read last year but can’t discuss because it is classified.

 The [Broward] Bulldog’s FOIA lawsuit asks U.S. District Judge William Zloch to order the FBI to produce all records of its Sarasota investigation, including the records seen by Graham.

The Daily Beast reported last year:

The FBI-led investigation in Sarasota reportedly focused on Saudi millionaire Abdulaziz al-Hijji and his wife, Anoud. Their upscale home was owned by Anoud al-Hijji’s father, Esam Ghazzawi, an adviser to Prince Fahd bin Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, the nephew of King Fahd.

An FBI informant hosted and rented a room to two hijackers in 2000. Specifically, investigators for the Congressional Joint Inquiry discovered that an FBI informant had hosted and even rented a room to two hijackers in 2000 and that, when the Inquiry sought to interview the informant, the FBI refused outright, and then hid him in an unknown location, and that a high-level FBI official stated these blocking maneuvers were undertaken under orders from the White House. As the New York Times notes:

Senator Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who is a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, accused the White House on Tuesday of covering up evidence ….The accusation stems from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s refusal to allow investigators for a Congressional inquiry and the independent Sept. 11 commission to interview an informant, Abdussattar Shaikh, who had been the landlord in San Diego of two Sept. 11 hijackers.

The 2 hijackers were Saudis. Indeed, 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudis.

The Daily Beast reported last year:

In San Diego, allegations of links between the Saudi government and the 9/11 hijackers revolve around two enigmatic Saudi men: Omar al-Bayoumi and Osama Basnan, both of whom have long since left the United States.

 Al-Bayoumi had previously worked for the Saudi government in civil aviation (a part of the Saudi defense department), and was alleged by many San Diego Muslims to be an agent for the Saudi governmentwho reported on the activities of Saudi-born students living in Southern California.

 In early 2000, al-Bayoumi invited two of the hijackers, Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, to San Diego from Los Angeles. He told authorities he met the two men by chance when he sat next to them at a restaurant.

 As Newsweek reported in 2002, al-Bayoumi’s invitation was extended on the same day that he visited the Saudi Consulate in Los Angeles for a private meeting.

Al-Bayoumi arranged for the two future hijackers to live in an apartment near the San Diego Islamic Center mosque and paid $1,500 to cover their first two months of rent.

When asked not long after the 9/11 attacks about al-Bayoumi’s possible involvement, San Diego County Sheriff Bill Gore, then the San Diego head of the FBI, told this reporter that there was no evidence al-Bayoumi played a role.

But a former top FBI official later told Newsweek, “We firmly believed that [al-Bayoumi] had knowledge [of the 9/11 plot].”

After 9/11, al-Bayoumi was detained by New Scotland Yard while living in the U.K. Gore said the FBI sent agents to London to interview him, but he was released a week later and allowed to return to Saudi Arabia.

 Newsweek reported that classified sections of the congressional 9/11 inquiry indicated that the Saudi Embassy in London pushed for al-Bayoumi’s release.

 Where is al-Bayoumi now? “I can’t say too much, but what I can tell you is that he is still alive and living in Saudi Arabia,” says Graham.

 As for Basnan, whom Graham calls “Bayoumi’s successor,” Newsweek reported that he received monthly checks for several years totaling as much as $73,000 from the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar, and his wife, Princess Haifa Faisal.

The checks were sent because Basnan’s wife, Majeda Dweikat, needed thyroid surgery, Newsweek and other media outlets reported. But Dweikat inexplicably signed many of the checks over to al-Bayoumi’s wife, Manal Bajadr. This money allegedly made its way into the hands of hijackers Almihdhar and Alhazmi, according to the congressional report.

At a post-9/11 gathering in San Diego, Basnan allegedly called the attack “a wonderful, glorious day” and celebrated the hijackers’ “heroism,” a law-enforcement official told Newsweek.

Despite all this, he was ultimately allowed to return to Saudi Arabia ….

Another man who might have helped investigators get to the bottom of this mystery is Abdussattar Shaikh, a longtime FBI asset in San Diego who was friends with al-Bayoumi and invited two of the San Diego-based hijackers to live in his home.

However, Shaikh was not allowed by the FBI or the Bush administration to testify before the 9/11 Commission or the JICI.

“For me, that was the low point of the [JICI] investigation,” says Graham. “Bayoumi introduced the hijackers to Shaikh, who clearly knew a lot, but the FBI, who had Shaikh in protective custody, seemed to care more about protecting their asset than allowing us to find out what he knew about 9/11.”

During roughly the same period after the 9/11 attacks, San Diego FBI agent Steven Butler alerted his superiors about a flow of money from Saudi government officials that had made its way into the hands of two of the San Diego-based hijackers, according to U.S. News & World Report. But the warning was ignored.

 “Butler is claiming that people [in the FBI] didn’t follow up,” a congressional source told U.S. News & World Report. Another congressional source told U.S. News: “Butler saw a pattern, a trail, and he told his supervisors, but it ended there.”

The investigation into the Saudi government’s alleged connections to the hijackers seemed to end there. Arguably the greatest crime mystery of our time has become a cold case.

 ***

[The Co-Chair of the Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 and former Head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Bob Graham] believes the Bush administration protected the Saudis during the 9/11 inquiry [and] wonders why the Obama administration hasn’t reopened the investigation and sought answers.

 “Perhaps they feel that we can’t afford to irritate the Saudis, especially with oil prices going up now,” he says. “I don’t know. Someday, I do believe we will get to the bottom of 9/11 and the Saudi government connections.”

Goodbye, Cruel World

Sometimes it seems like it's just an excuse to say goodbye, cruel world.

Authorities in Ohio say they aren’t sure what motivated a 42-year-old man to jump out of his car during a traffic stop in March and suddenly fire 37 rounds at two police officers. What seems clear, however, is the case is yet another example of the danger posed to unsuspecting officers who confront individuals steeped in extremist antigovernment ideas.

James L. Gilkerson had a library of antigovernment, homemade munitions and firearms books in his vehicle — along with an AK-47 assault rifle, five loaded 40-round magazines for the weapon, knives, five pounds of gunpowder and a black mask and gloves, authorities say. He was unemployed, spent his time caring for his ill mother, and apparently had no history of mental illness.

One of his books, Resistance to Tyranny, espouses a lone-wolf  “underground movement of secret freedom fighters, each acting individually and independently to ignore, evade, resist and thwart the increasingly heavy hand of government power.”

When his car was stopped after running a stop sign on March 10 — a quiet Sunday in Middlefield, Ohio — Gilkerson exited through his driver’s side door and began firing his assault rifle before officers could even get out of their police cruiser.

Gilkerson fired 37 shots at officers Erin Thomas and Brandon Savage, who both returned fire, shooting 54 rounds at Gilkerson as he shouted, “Kill me.” He died at the scene. The unnerving gunfight, captured on a dash cam in the officers’ bullet-riddled patrol car, is now a high-hit posting on YouTube.

“He was a scumbag, and a terrorist, and he’s dead,” Middlefield Police Chief Arnold Stanko said at a news conference last week, according to The [Cleveland] Plain Dealer.

“I don’t know what he had planned or where he was going,” the chief said. “I just know he got out of his car intending to kill my officers. The AK-47 rounds he was firing would go right through a policeman’s bulletproof vest.”

Both officers were wounded. Thomas lost the index finger of her left hand, and has not returned to duty. Savage had minor injuries to his left thigh and has returned to patrol work, the chief said.

After an investigation involving the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation and the Geauga County Sheriff’s Office, the officers’ actions were found to be justified.

“When you see what he had, how much ammunition he had, these officers may have prevented a tragedy down the road,” Geauga County Prosecutor James Flaiz told Cleveland television stationWKYC-TV.

The investigation showed that Gilkerson, who authorities described as a “loner,” had no known connections with extremist or antigovernment groups and had no criminal record. But he apparently did have an appetite for reading, particularly books about bombs, firearms and antigovernment activism.

It's a small world after all

One problem with conspiracy theories is that when there really is a conspiracy the people who are conspiring don't want the general public to know. And if it's an organization that has its tendrils into the media, it will do its best to discourage pursuit of the truth, sometimes by floating other conspiracy theories.

The whole idea of our government doing something as dreadful as somehow being behind the Boston Marathon massacre is pretty hard to swallow. I realize that when politics is involved people on different sides of the fences are willing to believe the worst about the characters on the other side. And that's encouraged by the principals.

As long as people spend their days hating on Obama, or (as I have) the Bushes, you never see the big picture, and the big picture is much different than what people generally see.

 So let's scroll back to right back after the brothers were identified. There was the mother who doesn't believe her sons would do such a thing, although it turns out that she's got an indictment for shoplifting hanging over her head. Then there's the uncle who seems to be the only sane one in the family. 

I mention this because sometimes the most obvious stories that float around immediately after a crime like this bombing is that the story that we got may just be what we were intended to get. After 9/11 there were all sorts of conspiracy theories. There was one that suggested that the Israelis did it, which is very believable for anti-Semites. There was also plenty of evidence pointing to Saudi Arabia. 

What "the tell" about 9/11 was for me was Huffman Aviation. While Mohammed Atta and a friend there were matriculating in how to fly airliners into buildings one of Huffman's jets, the size a businessman would fly, was busted in Orlando with 43 pounds of heroin. But no one was prosecuted. Not the pilot, not the owner. No one. 

Who can get caught moving 43 pounds of heroin into the US and not even get a lousy indictment over it? Well, if you've lived in the US through the last half century and you can't point your finger towards Langley, Virginia, then you aren't trying. So if the drug smugglers have friends in high places, what were the two terrorists doing there?

The tell for the Boston Marathon bombing is Uncle Ruslan, you know, the only good one in that Chechen family. Ruslan, who so vehemently called his nephews losers, I think the term was, is apparently a winner in this game. 

Must be a long fuse

I am intrigued how many Republicans are ready to junk constitutional rights when it comes to the surviving Boston bomber.

First, it is true that there's a legal exception to giving Miranda Rights, if there is imminent danger to the public. The guy's been in the hospital for a couple of days now, so if he planted another bomb it would have to have a very long fuse. 

As far as treating him as a military combatant, he's not. He's a U.S. citizen killing people on American soil. If you want the death penalty you probably can charge him in federal court for the bombing murders. Massachusetts doesn't have the death penalty so the murder of the MIT campus cop is a life-without-parole deal. 

I worry about politicians who are ready to deform and erode the Constitution at any chance they get. I'll particularly point out Lindsey Graham, who should know better, having been a JAG officer for years. Granted, Graham's homosexuality is the worst-kept secret in Congress and he's likely to be primaried out next year by a religious zealot, but playing a tough guy won't rescue his sorry ass. 

This is the time to find out what made these two brothers decide to do this. I suspect that the older brother was abused as a child. People who try to make their way through the world by hitting other people (he was a boxer and he reportedly hit his wife when he got angry) tend to have grown up being hit. Unfortunately, that may be the underlying cause of all this. 

More than a fool. He's a tool.

Back in 2005, after Bob Woodward revealed who "Deep Throat" was (supposedly), I wrote the following essay on him. Last week Woodward was back in the news, pretending that he was being threatened by a member of the Obama Administration who told him he would regret acting like a fool. But Woodward is more than a fool. He's a tool.

Here is that essay, in full:

Spy vs. Spy vs. Spy vs. Deep Throat

Mystery solved...not!

The problem with the world of secrecy (that is, the spy world) is that all is never what it is supposed to be, that all is never all, that you can never be quite sure what someone's motive might be. What is leaked may or may not be truth. Backgrounds of individuals help you to categorize a person and identify what "camp" he or she may be in. When an intelligence scandal breaks, though, there is more to an individual than just the few sentences in a news story. In fact, you can't ever trust the news source reporting the story to give you all of the story.

Political researcher Dave Emory has suggested another dimension to the difficulties of analyzing the movements of intelligence players. It was his theory of "agents, assets and assholes." That is, there are some people out there who are agents. That is, they work for an intelligence agency and draw a check. Then there is a murkier category, the asset. During the Cold War, for example, any American who went behind the Iron Curtain (with the peculiar exception of Lee Harvey Oswald) would be debriefed when he or she returned to the U.S. An oil executive (like, say, George H. W. Bush early in his career) who was negotiating a contract with the government of Yugoslavia would undoubtedly be called in upon his return to the U.S. to tell an agent what he saw. Students who went abroad, like Bill Clinton or Gloria Steinem (who in a 1967 news story actually admitted her CIA connections), would be important sources of intelligence about dissident student groups overseas, especially during the Vietnam War. Then there are the assholes, who may not have any connection to any intelligence agency but travel the same roads. And these categories overlap. An asshole may become as asset, an asset an agent. Sometimes an individual on assignment may be officially discharged from an intelligence unit but still working for it, albeit under cover of private employment.

Then there are the rivalries within the intelligence community. One hears about turf wars between the CIA and the FBI. But what about the Army Security Agency, the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Secret Service, or any other number of intelligence units in the U.S.? What about private intelligence companies that may or may not connect with official government intelligence units? Private intelligence agencies with political agendas have been around at least since Henry Ford's love affair with the Nazis and his desire to crush unions in the 1920s and 30s, and these have multiplied over the years with the greater ability to store information on individuals. Now multiply this multiplicity by the number of countries around the world. And intelligence agencies love to put their own people into other intelligence agencies in order to know what other intelligence agencies are doing. There are spies who double on their own agencies.

Most of this is funded with your tax dollar, by the way.

So here is the story we are now told to believe: A senior figure in the FBI leaked information to Bob Woodward, a young ace reporter for the Washington Post, and this information brought down the Nixon White House, which was an evil cabal of corrupt political figures who were overstepping their bounds.

Already there are problems. John Dean, the White House lawyer who "turned" and spilled the beans on Nixon's shenanigans, says that Mark Felt could not have known about some of the things for which he was attributed leaking to Woodward.

So who is Woodward?

Well, lo these many years later he is an established journalist with many books to his credit. He has never written anything quite so "investigative" as what he wrote about Watergate, but most books seem to have a smattering of little behind-the-scene discoveries that helps push publicity and sales.

Bob Woodward's history should have been of interest to anyone who was trying to find out who Deep Throat was. Where did he work prior to his job at the Post? Who might he have known who could have given him this information? But the media has for the most part stayed away from Woodward's life before Watergate.

An exception was Deborah Davis, who wrote KATHARINE THE GREAT, an unauthorized biography of Katharine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post. To understand Woodward, one needs to understand the Washington Post. There is a history of intelligence surrounding the Post that routinely escapes notice from the rest of the media. Graham's husband Phillip, during WWII, had been involved with "cable interception, code-breaking, [and] enemy disinformation." Chalmers Roberts, Mrs. Graham's first national affairs editor, "had been a communications specialist in the Pentagon." Joseph Alsop, there at the Post when Katharine Graham took the reins, had a military history with General Claire Chennault's "Flying Tigers" in the Asian Theater during the war. He was an extreme anti-Communist with connections to the reactionary milieu that gave birth to the various incarnations of what would become the World Anti-Communist League, itself a connection of reactionary and outright fascist intelligence officers from around the globe.

There are many, many more connections between the Washington Post and the U.S. intelligence community, but let's focus on one: Ben Bradlee, editor of the Post at the time of Watergate, had worked with codes during WWII (intelligence), and then after the war worked in Europe for the anti-Communist propaganda agency, the U.S. Office of Information and Educational Exchange. He spent much energy in that capacity denouncing the Rosenbergs and justifying their executions in American propaganda distributed throughout Europe in newspapers, pamphlets, etc. Through FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) disclosures it was learned that Bradlee was ordered by "the head of the CIA in Paris" to go to New York and meet with the prosecutors of the Rosenberg case [Davis]. So Bradlee, who assigned Woodward to the Watergate break-in story, was no stranger to the world of intelligence, or of the uses of leaks to promote the agenda of a clandestine agency.

And the perception of the Washington Post as part of a "liberal" establishment is at best an incomplete picture, at worst the wrong picture altogether. Nothing is ever as simple as it seems.

In short, from the publisher down, people at the Washington Post had numerous connections to intelligence agencies, to government propaganda operations and similar ventures, either through former employment or through "networking." [Emory has derided the term "conspiracy theory" for the bias connected with it. Instead, he prefers the term "networking." After all, in the end it is all a business.]

So what was Woodward's past? After he had graduated from Yale (a prime recruiting ground for the intelligence services after WWII) he enlisted and became a communications officer in the Navy, handling "coded cables on a guided-missile ship," a duty under the auspices of the Office of Naval Intelligence. Transferring to duty at the Pentagon, "he became, he conceded to a TIME magazine reporter, a member of an ultra-secret intelligence unit that was involved in highly sensitive issues at the White House [Davis]." Upon discharge he went to work as a reporter for the Washington Post.

You didn't see that in the movie "All The President's Men," did you?

There's plenty more, and if you're the curious sort, you may want to try to find a copy of Davis' book. Katharine Graham certainly used all the forces she could muster to quash the publication and distribution of that book. But you may be able to search out a copy.

The bigger question than "Who is Deep Throat" is why our free press didn't seem particularly curious about the background of all those connected to Bob Woodward and the Post? If Deep Throat was such a great mystery and given to so much speculation over the last thirty years, how come no one noticed that Woodward had an intelligence history through the Office of Naval Intelligence? Why didn't anyone consider Bradlee's work as a government propagandist when speculating on the motives of whoever was leaking this information that would eventually sink the Nixon Administration and force an exit from the disastrous war in Vietnam?

Maybe Watergate wasn't the greatest moment of American investigative journalism after all. Maybe it was just a part of the intelligence community showing Nixon who was boss. 

Jun 2, 2005 12:04:00 AM

The government's secret war on its citizens

Before drones there was J. Edgar.

It was most surprising to come across the following entry at the website for the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses for Terrorism (known by the acronym START), which is run by the Department of Homeland Security out of the University of Maryland.According to DHS, START is one of their “centers of excellence,” an academic center sponsored by the DHS’s Science and Technology Directorate.

The webpage concerns the “Terrorist Organization Profile” for the Secret Army Organization, a right-wing terrorist group in the early 1970s, a group START writes was “possibly funded by the FBI.”

According to START, “The Secret Army Organization (SAO), a right-wing militant group based in San Diego, was active from 1969 to 1972. They targeted individuals and groups who spoke out against the Vietnam War, especially those who organized public demonstrations and distributed anti-war literature.”

Indeed, if we could turn the clock back to June 1975, we would read an article in the New York Times, “A.C.L.U. Says F.B.I. Funded ‘Army’ to Terrorize Antiwar Protesters.”

According to the Times, the ACLU compiled a 5,000 page report on the SAO, a group of former Minutemen and other right-wingers and violent home-grown fascists, for the benefit of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, “alleging the Federal Bureau of Intelligence recruited a band of right-wing terrorists and supplied them with money and weapons to attack young antiwar demonstrators.”

But that’s not all, the SAO engaged in bombing and attempted assassination, and guess whose house the weapons turned up in? But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s let the DHS’s “Center of Excellence” inform us of this important episode in our history, which came, by the way, after the FBI claimed they had stopped their Cointelpro program of disruption of the Left.

Assassination Attempt, FBI Agent Hides the Weapon

From START’s SAO webpage:

The report also stated that the SAO planned to kidnap and murder protestors of the 1972 Republican National Convention, which was to be held in San Diego before being relocated to Miami Beach. An assassination attempt of Dr. Peter Bohmer, professor at San Diego State University, and Paula Tharp, reporter for the San Diego Street Journal, brought about the arrests of several SAO members who later acknowledge an FBI connection. During the investigation, the gun used in the assassination attempt was found in the home of FBI agent Steven Christiansen, who was subsequently identified as a SAO contact. In 1973, Godfrey, testifying as an FBI informant, claimed he received up to $20,000 in weapons and a $250 per month income from the FBI to recruit new SAO members and provide information to agents. He also testified to the criminal acts of several SAO operatives, including fellow leader Jerry Lynn Davis. Official statements from the FBI claimed no involvement with the SAO, and no agents were prosecuted.

The story of the SAO is a forgotten piece of contemporary history that is directly relevant to a number of current issues, including the prosecution of the bogus “war on terror,” and the FBI’s role in it; the debates about government participation in and legalization of assassination of its own citizens; and government surveillance of and attacks upon dissent in this country.

It also could be considered a prime example of the historical amnesia that plagues our times, an amnesia hastened by disinterest by the major media, cheered on by government agencies none too interested in accountability for government overreach or even criminality.

Links to the President

According to the Ann Arbor Sun at the time, the ACLU tagged the SAO as “an interagency apparatus organized ‘at the direction of Richard M. Nixon.’”

Reportedly the link to Nixon came via Watergate burglar Donald Segretti, who affidavits claimed had given funds and military hardware to SAO to disrupt the 1972 GOP convention in San Diego. (The convention was subsequently moved to Miami Beach.)

But it was the FBI who seems to have been operationally in charge.

From the Sun: “SAO operative Jerry Lynn Davis, who once participated in the CIA’s Bay of Pigs invasion, revealed that [admitted FBI informant Howard Barry] Godfrey had regularly supplied the SAO with money and weapons on behalf of the FBI.”

A newspaper office was attacked. A car firebombed. Informants infiltrated, while meetings were monitored. There were plans to poison the punch at antiwar meetings. A theater was bombed. Bulletins were published on how bulletins on “how to make booby traps, how to use ammonium nitrate in high explosives,” And then, there was the assassination plot, or rather plots, as the SAO bungled one assassination attempt after another to kill a left-wing professor at San Diego State.

How It Went Down, and the Cover-up

 

A 1973 article by Richard Popkin at Ramparts described the threats and the attack, when an SAO hitman with a FBI-paid driver tried to kill an American college professor on January 6, 1972, solely because of his political views and activism.

But first, we should realize this was not the first of the assassination plans. An Associated Press articleat the time described another failed plot that had yet another FBI informant, Gilbert Romero, and a San Diego undercover cop kidnapping Peter Bohmer and taking him to Tijuana, and setting him up to be killed by Mexican police. The New York Times wrote that the ACLU report included testimony from a FBI informant, John Raspberry, who said in the winter of 1971-72, the FBI approached him to kill Bohmer. For some reason, the attack never took place.

According to Popkin, Godfrey “was assigned to [FBI] agent Steve Christianson, to whom he reported verbally every day, Godfrey was to work on the militant right wing, and was paid two hundred fifty dollars per month by the FBI.”

Popkin continued, “Apparently, Godfrey himself was among the more dangerous elements in the SAO, and [FBI] agent Christianson among the more dangerous eminences grises of the operation…. Godfrey admitted that he had driven the car from which another SAO member, George Hoover, had fired into Bohmer’s house, wounding Paula Tharp. Subsequently, he had taken the weapon to Christianson, who had hidden it for six months. (This was evidently insufficient grounds for the FBI to take disciplinary action against agent Christianson. He continued as Godfrey’s contact until the bombing of the Guild Theatre, at which point he was removed by L. Patrick Gray himself…)”

The START page on SAO commented dryly on the aftermath of the botched assassination. “The SAO became inactive after the assassination case drew much public attention to the group’s operations,” DHS’s Center for Excellence reports. “The testimony of Godfrey against SAO members resulted in prison terms for a significant portion of the San Diego group. Of course, if the SAO was actually FBI-run, the notoriety drawn to the case would have been the impetus to dissolve the group.”

No kidding?

Bohmer’s Story

I think it’s appropriate to give the last words here to Peter Bohmer himself, who survived the attack and while he lost his job at San Diego State, the victim of a witchhunt, went on to join the faculty at Evergreen at Evergreen State College in Washington.

A few words about CoIntelpro before I come back to my story. It is short for counterintelligence program. Cointlepro was/is a program coordinated by the FBI to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize” individuals and groups…. Although Cointelpro officially ended in 1971, it has continued although in a somewhat less extreme form without the name up to September 11th 2001. Since then we are going backwards towards more police powers, infiltration and framing of activists….

Although no group I worked in San Diego planned or carried out any violent actions, and many groups were purely educational; 20 people I knew in these groups turned out to be police or FBI agents or informers, many worked for both. They worked hard to cause divisions among individuals and groups. Some but not all were provocateurs…. the FBI visited my employer, SDSU to get me fired, they visited landlords where I lived to get us evicted. They opened my mail, and monitored my checking accounts. We got anonymous phone calls about people being agents who I am sure weren’t….

FBI sponsored groups did firebombings, slashed tires of my cars, continual death threats, put out a wanted poster on me distributed in San Diego in 1971. The Secret Army Organization or (SAO) a group financed from FBI funds and led by an FBI informant, shot into a collective I lived in with the bullet permanently injuring a member of the collective, Paula Tharp in January 1972.

Howard Barry Godfrey, a well-paid FBI informant and head of the Secret Army Organization (SAO) admitted almost a year later in court to driving the car the night of the shooting but claimed another SAO member did the actual shooting. After the shooting into my house, other FBI agents in San Diego covered up the crime and hid the evidence such as the gun used in the shooting. The head of the FBI in LA, working with SD FBI, at this time was Richard W. Held who has been involved in the cases against many activists and political prisoners such as Judi Bari, Leonard Peltier and Geronimo Pratt.

After the shooting, threats and harassment continued. After the Secret Army Organization began threatening liberals as well as radicals and bombed a pornography theater where some police were present, the San Diego police demanded that the FBI reveal their informants in the SAO and the SAO were arrested in the summer of 1972 on numerous charges. Government lawyers hired by the FBI claimed various privileges such as not having to reveal much of the behavior because of security concerns. The full FBI involvement in this attempted murder didn’t come out although one FBI agent was forced to resign. Godfrey, the FBI informant and provocateur in the Secret Army Organization (SAO) didn’t go to prison although two other members of the SAO did.

Anyone remember the Symbionese Liberation Army? You may have missed this story on their connection to the CIA.

More information on Rudi Dekkers

If you recall, I linked to a story awhile back about Rudi Dekkers, the guy who ran, Huffman Aviation, the flight school in Sarasota, Florida where Mo Atta and another 9/11 hijacker learned to fly planes. He was busted in Texas for drug-smuggling. 

You may also recall that during the time when the hijackers metriculated there one of Huffman's planes was busted in Orlando, Florida with 43 pounds of heroin.

Why, you may wonder, didn't the media touch the story about the 43 pounds of heroin? And why haven't they touched on Mr. Dekkers' current legal problems? You may wonder.

In the days and weeks after the 9/11 attack Rudi Dekkers was everywhere. He did more than 2000 interviews. It was Rudi Dekkers who told the world  who the hijackers were, what they were doing, and what they were like.  He did almost all of the heavy lifting providing the narrative about what the hijackers had been doing in the U.S.

Rudi Dekkers was on television more often than Larry King. Then, and for the next ten years, the mainstream media bought his patter hook line and sinker.

There were a few reporters who expressed skepticism. But they were local, with no national readership. One worked for an alternative weekly newspaper in Sarasota, and arrived on scene at Huffman Aviation on September 12, on the first day of the media frenzy.

In the Sept. 29, 2001 Sarasota Weekly Planet, reporter Rochelle Renford noted how often Dekkers’ story was changing.

“Wouldn’t it be reasonable to expect Rudi Dekkers to give the same information to every news outlet?” she asked. “Perhaps. But that was not the case. When Dekkers first appeared before the press on the day after the attack, this is what he said:

“He didn’t know the suspects. He wasn’t the one who took their money so he was unsure how they had paid for their training.

“He didn’t see their passports so he wasn’t sure where they were from. He denied having had many interactions with them at all.  

“On Wednesday (the day after the attack) he told some reporters, including me, that his interaction with the two suspects came from a couple of brief conversations when he passed them in the halls,” Renford wrote. “He said his employees had dealt with their enrollment.”

“But by Sunday’s reports, Dekkers was serving up anecdotes about the two men, “ she continued. “He told one reporter: ‘He sat right there last year when he came to talk to me about taking lessons here.’”

"On the day after the attack a reporter from the New York Times asked Dekkers about reports that the two men (Atta and Al-Shehhi) were from Germany,"  Renford wrote. “Didn’t it strike you as odd that they were from Germany? They didn’t look German, did they?”

“Don’t tell me what people tell you,” Dekkers barked in response. “I have never heard that they’re from Germany. I have never heard that they speak German.”

“But Dekkers gave a different answer on Larry King Live. Now he did know where they were from… Dekkers now recalled that Atta told him he had come from Germany, he said. But when Dekkers, a Dutch native, began speaking to Atta in German, the Middle Eastern man just got up and walked out of his office. Dekkers said he found it odd."

“Whereas on Wednesday he’d blasted a reporter for asking about a German connection,” wrote Renford, “on Thursday he told me an anecdote about one of the suspects saying he was German.

“Dekkers wasn’t  just remembering new details,” Renford concluded. “He was learning how to tell a story.”

The whole article is interesting. You might want to read it.

Boom!

On the positive side...

...if they're shooting up newspaper offices they won't be doing mass shootings at the local grammar school. I think there must be something in the Second Amendment about threatening to kill reporters too.

Mr. Doig pointed out that the recent publication of gun information by other papers has made access to this public information more difficult because legislators started blocking the data immediately. “The backlash, very typically from this, is for legislators to try to close up the access to this type of data.”

Mr. Worley said he had received mainly taunting phone calls sprinkled in with callers who said “you should die.” He found broken glass outside of his home and would not say how much time he was spending there right now. But he said he had largely been supported by the newsroom.

The Journal News’s features editor, Mary Dolan, said that while she was not involved with the publication of the article, her home address and phone numbers were published online in retaliation. She has had to disconnect her phone and has “taken my social media presence and just put it on the shelf for a while.” She has also received angry phone calls from former neighbors in Westchester whose gun information was published.

She said she was especially concerned about the part-time staff members who write up wedding anniversary and church potluck announcements who have been harassed. But she supports the paper for its decision.

“It sparked a conversation that needed to occur in this country, and it revealed tactics that will be employed when gun owners feel their rights are threatened,” she said.

Putnam County has refused to release similar data, but Ms. Hasson said she would continue to press for it. She would not say whether the paper had lost any of its advertisers. According to the Alliance for Audited Media, The Journal News, like many newspapers nationwide, has had sharp declines in circulation. Its total circulation from Monday through Friday fell from 111,536 in September 2007 to 68,850 in September 2012.

At the same time, Ms. Hasson has been trying to calm the nerves of her family after photographs of the home she is renting and references to her adult children were put online.

“They are concerned about my safety,” she said about her children. “But they are very supportive.”