Wednesday, November 30, 2005
C-SPAN TV - "Crazy? Caller" and 9/11
On the c-span Washington Journal today around 8:51 EST, a caller had the floor and went on for possibly 45 seconds. The words, which I did not follow, and can't recall in detail, had content about "energy without words", and talked about the 9/11 hijackers having supernatural powers to get into the cockpits.
This, of course, has the effect of disinfo and discredit for 9/11 Truth.
Tags: 9/11 cspan
This, of course, has the effect of disinfo and discredit for 9/11 Truth.
Tags: 9/11 cspan
Issue 11: Tales From the Grassy Knoll by Eva Sion
Issue 11: Tales From the Grassy Knoll by Eva Sion
"GELLI was on top of his game; in fact, he was a guest of honor at Ronald Reagan's 1981 inauguration..."
"GELLI was on top of his game; in fact, he was a guest of honor at Ronald Reagan's 1981 inauguration..."
John McCain: Torture Worked on Me
John McCain: Torture Worked on Me
Blogger Thoughts: It's a two-fer: smear McCain and justify torture! Newsmax, you are the greatest!
Blogger Thoughts: It's a two-fer: smear McCain and justify torture! Newsmax, you are the greatest!
UNDERNEWS: FEDS GOING TO GREAT LENGTHS TO RIG MOUSSAOUI JURY
UNDERNEWS: FEDS GOING TO GREAT LENGTHS TO RIG MOUSSAOUI JURY
[The jury questionnaire includes unconstitutional inquiries concerning support of death penalty and social contacts with Arabs. Can you imagine a potential juror being asked, "Do you socialize with black people?" The death penalty question is unconstitutional because one is allowed a juror of one's peers and, as the ABC News story below indicates, that means a juror split between death penalty supporters and those opposed]JERRY MARKON WASHINGTON POST - The Justice Department's proposed questionnaire for potential jurors, filed yesterday in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, contains . . . 89 questions, ranging from requests for highly specific biographical data to queries about whether the candidate ever worked in an airport or socializes "with any people of Arab descent." . . ."This is like the normal jury selection process on steroids. It's awfully extensive," said Andrew G. McBride, a former federal prosecutor in Alexandria who has closely followed the case. McBride said the government is trying to "ferret out" potential jurors who oppose the death penalty or those who may tell the judge they could vote to impose death but "when the moment comes, they are not able to do so." . . .Among the 89 questions on the form are requests for biographical data, including the jurors' names, ages and marital status; the educational level and occupation of each of their children; their religion and how often they worship; and whether they belong to groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Rifle Association and the Rotary Club.[Other questions include: Are you, or any relatives, of Arab descent? Do/have you worked with any people of Arab descent? ]ABC NEWS MAY 2004 - The pending execution of Timothy McVeigh comes at a time of deep and growing ambivalence about the death penalty, to the point that bare majorities of Americans favor a moratorium on executions รข€” or even a law replacing them with mandatory life in prison.Most people, 63 percent, support the death penalty when no other option is presented. But that's down from a high of 80 percent seven years ago, and it's weakly held: Support for executions drops to 46 percent when life without parole is offered as an alternative. . . This ABC News -Washington Post poll finds broad agreement with two other arguments against the death penalty: That it's applied unfairly across jurisdictions, and that innocent people are sometimes executed. And the strongest argument in favor - that it prevents killers from killing again - is also achieved by life in prison without parole. Given these views, 51 percent of Americans say they'd support a law replacing the death penalty with mandatory life; 46 percent would oppose such legislation. . . Fifty-one percent also say they'd support a nationwide moratorium on the death penalty while a commission studies whether it's been administered fairly.
[The jury questionnaire includes unconstitutional inquiries concerning support of death penalty and social contacts with Arabs. Can you imagine a potential juror being asked, "Do you socialize with black people?" The death penalty question is unconstitutional because one is allowed a juror of one's peers and, as the ABC News story below indicates, that means a juror split between death penalty supporters and those opposed]JERRY MARKON WASHINGTON POST - The Justice Department's proposed questionnaire for potential jurors, filed yesterday in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, contains . . . 89 questions, ranging from requests for highly specific biographical data to queries about whether the candidate ever worked in an airport or socializes "with any people of Arab descent." . . ."This is like the normal jury selection process on steroids. It's awfully extensive," said Andrew G. McBride, a former federal prosecutor in Alexandria who has closely followed the case. McBride said the government is trying to "ferret out" potential jurors who oppose the death penalty or those who may tell the judge they could vote to impose death but "when the moment comes, they are not able to do so." . . .Among the 89 questions on the form are requests for biographical data, including the jurors' names, ages and marital status; the educational level and occupation of each of their children; their religion and how often they worship; and whether they belong to groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Rifle Association and the Rotary Club.[Other questions include: Are you, or any relatives, of Arab descent? Do/have you worked with any people of Arab descent? ]ABC NEWS MAY 2004 - The pending execution of Timothy McVeigh comes at a time of deep and growing ambivalence about the death penalty, to the point that bare majorities of Americans favor a moratorium on executions รข€” or even a law replacing them with mandatory life in prison.Most people, 63 percent, support the death penalty when no other option is presented. But that's down from a high of 80 percent seven years ago, and it's weakly held: Support for executions drops to 46 percent when life without parole is offered as an alternative. . . This ABC News -Washington Post poll finds broad agreement with two other arguments against the death penalty: That it's applied unfairly across jurisdictions, and that innocent people are sometimes executed. And the strongest argument in favor - that it prevents killers from killing again - is also achieved by life in prison without parole. Given these views, 51 percent of Americans say they'd support a law replacing the death penalty with mandatory life; 46 percent would oppose such legislation. . . Fifty-one percent also say they'd support a nationwide moratorium on the death penalty while a commission studies whether it's been administered fairly.
My 'hood, 8.00am this morning
The roads were pretty (scary). First snow of the winter, but they're predicting more.
Sunset Breeze
The Evening breeze gently fans the sunset fire. We sit and watch in awe at natures evening gown.
Bravo Nature..
Bravo Nature..
ABC News: CIA Director Says Agency Working to Infiltrate Terrorist Strongholds
ABC News: CIA Director Says Agency Working to Infiltrate Terrorist Strongholds: "'We know a great deal more about bin Laden, Zarqawi and [bin Laden aide Ayman] Zawahiri then we're able to say publicly,'"
Former high-ranking FBI official calls for new OKC bombing probe
McCurtain Daily Gazette
รฟรพFormer high-ranking FBI official calls for new OKC bombing probe
11/28/2005J.D. Cash
Danny Coulson
A former deputy assistant director of the FBI with extensive experience in domestic terrorism cases is calling for additional investigation into the 1995 bombing of the A.P. Murrah Federal Building. Danny Coulson – a man who played a central role in the early stages of the original OKBOMB case – took time from his vacation with his wife in McCurtain County last weekend to review teletypes issued by former FBI director Louis Freeh after Coulson left the investigation. The legendary agent who created the FBI’s fabled Hostage Rescue Team (HRT) and solved some of the nation’s toughest cases, Coulson says he now suspects some of Timothy McVeigh’s cohorts were not charged in the horrendous crime. New evidenceCentral to his call for additional investigation are FBI teletypes that were heavily redacted by the agency before their release some weeks ago. Although some sentences and many names are redacted, there was enough information contained in those documents to impress the former OKBOMB commander that more persons were involved in the attack. Referring to a January 4, 1996 teletype from former director Freeh to a select group of FBI offices, Coulson said that he believes a man he has long suspected should have been more thoroughly investigated in the crime, German National Andreas Strassmeir, is one of the names the bureau has blacked out of those documents. Coulson said he suspects Strassmeir may have been more involved with McVeigh than the agency has publicly admitted. After reviewing the teletypes at a cabin north of Pickens on Sunday, Coulson says he now wants to see a much more thorough investigation done of Strassmeir and the bank bandits the German lived with at Elohim City. “I have had significant experience conducting major investigations and in my view this case is not over,” Coulson said.“For many years, I’ve believed Elohim City was important to this case, and I think we now know Tim McVeigh had contacts there. That is the key to understanding this complicated case. Any future investigation should focus strictly on McVeigh’s associates within that group.” Source of new documentsThe plaintiff in a Freedom of Information Act case against the FBI – and making use of the teletypes – is Salt Lake City attorney Jesse Trentadue. He believes the FBI is hiding evidence that his brother was tortured and murdered in August 1995 during an interrogation at the Oklahoma City Federal Transfer Center. For years, the FBI has said Kenneth Trentadue hanged himself, but his older brother believes FBI agents killed his ex-convict brother while seeking information about a group of bank bandits associated with McVeigh, Strassmeir and the bombing. Before McVeigh was executed, Trentadue says he was contacted by an intermediary at the prison where McVeigh was incarcerated and told that McVeigh believed the FBI mistakenly thought Kenneth Trentadue was a man associated with a bank robbery gang linked to the bombing conspiracy. Close to the bank robbery gang, Strassmeir is a former German military officer with extensive intelligence training. His name came to light after the bombing when this newspaper began interviewing people at Elohim City with ties to McVeigh. McVeigh’s phone records, discovered by the FBI after the bombing, indicate a call was placed to Elohim City on April 5, 1995 – just seconds after a call was made with the same calling card to a Ryder Truck establishment. People the FBI interviewed at the compound said McVeigh was seeking Strassmeir. A judge in the Salt Lake City federal court has ordered the FBI to turn over to Trentadue documents showing there were informants at Elohim City at the time of the bombing that worked for a private charity – the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). According to those teletypes, SPLC informants were present at Elohim City on April 17 when McVeigh contacted the compound, looking for additional help in the bomb plot.According to then-director Freeh, McVeigh was looking for extra help with his plans when he called the compound. However, the FBI blacked out much of the person’s name with whom Freeh said McVeigh was closely associated. In the past, the FBI has vehemently denied McVeigh had any close associates at the camp. Strassmeir was the compound’s paramilitary instructor from 1993 until August of 1995. And since the bombing, over a half-dozen of Strassmeir’s associates at Elohim City have gone to prison for bank robbery, conspiracy to overthrow the government and murder. None, however, were ever charged in the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City.Inexplicably, Strassmeir was allowed to the leave this country in early 1996. In one of the teletypes issued by Freeh, the director appears to know where Strassmeir is staying in the U.S. and of plans Strassmeir is making to return to Germany through Mexico. Days after Freeh’s memo was issued, Strassmeir did indeed cross the Mexican border and make his way to Berlin with the assistance of former CIA pilot Dave Holloway. Neither Dave Holloway nor his associate, attorney Kirk Lyons of North Carolina – who paid for the pair’s trip – were ever charged with aiding Strassmeir’s flight. At the time of Strassmeir’s escape, he was listed as an illegal overstay by the INS and wanted by the ATF for illegally carrying a firearm in the U.S. Believing him to be “armed and dangerous” at the time, the OKBOMB task force even contacted the INS and asked that Strassmeir be stopped at the border and held for questioning in the bombing case. Incredibly, this is the same week that Freeh told several offices that Strassmeir was staying in North Carolina with Lyons. Safely back in Germany for many weeks, it’s only after Strassmeir’s name was linked to McVeigh by this newspaper and others that two Justice Department lawyers in Denver called Strassmeir in Berlin, twice, to ask about any contacts he may have had with McVeigh and the bombing. During those brief interviews, Strassmeir admitted over the phone that he may have met McVeigh at a gun show in Tulsa once, but he also assured prosecutors he did not help with the bomb plot. In the wake of the tragedy, the FBI had available several well-qualified commanders with extensive experience in major case investigations to lead and complete the investigation. However, a man with much less investigative experience, Danny Defenbaugh, replaced the original five experienced FBI commanders’ initially assigned to head the case.With the original five commanders off the OKBOMB case, considerable criticism has since been leveled at the job Defenbaugh did while heading up the FBI’s most expensive investigation in U.S. history. In spite of two dozen eyewitnesses that placed McVeigh with others in downtown Oklahoma City that day and $85 million that was spent putting together a case that sent two men to jail and one to the death chamber, only McVeigh and army buddy Terry Nichols were charged. Also imprisoned, Michael Fortier admitted his involvement in the conspiracy and agreed to cooperate with the FBI in return for a lighter sentence. Jurors in both cases in Denver, plus a grand jury in Oklahoma City, said they doubted the FBI had gotten all those involved.In 2001, over 4,000 pages of FBI interviews and other evidence never shown the defense teams for McVeigh or Nichols were discovered on the eve of McVeigh’s execution. The discovery caused McVeigh’s execution to be put on hold and the fiasco quickly led to the sudden resignation of Defenbaugh. Coulson believes the magnitude of the tragic attack that left 168 dead and 500 injured warrants the appointment of an experienced federal prosecutor to look into all of the evidence and the use of a federal grand jury to facilitate the investigation.“Based upon my investigation following the bombing of the Murrah building on April 19, 1995, and these new documents from the FBI turned up in the Utah case, it’s clear to me further investigation is required,” he said.Referring to the documents uncovered during the FOIA lawsuit and the large number of witnesses the FBI interviewed after the bombing that placed McVeigh in the company of others at key points in the conspiracy, Coulson observed, “The totality of this information very strongly indicates there are others involved and not charged who were involved at least in conspiratorial acts. “Families of victims and the American people deserve answers to many unanswered questions,” he said.“It is my opinion that a new investigation would only be successful if conducted through the auspices of a federal grand jury. It would be necessary to subpoena documents and some people would need to be given immunity to obtain the cooperation necessary to expose those guilty. This was the most heinous crime ever committed in the country at that time and we must be confident we did everything to find those responsible,” he added.
รฟรพFormer high-ranking FBI official calls for new OKC bombing probe
11/28/2005J.D. Cash
Danny Coulson
A former deputy assistant director of the FBI with extensive experience in domestic terrorism cases is calling for additional investigation into the 1995 bombing of the A.P. Murrah Federal Building. Danny Coulson – a man who played a central role in the early stages of the original OKBOMB case – took time from his vacation with his wife in McCurtain County last weekend to review teletypes issued by former FBI director Louis Freeh after Coulson left the investigation. The legendary agent who created the FBI’s fabled Hostage Rescue Team (HRT) and solved some of the nation’s toughest cases, Coulson says he now suspects some of Timothy McVeigh’s cohorts were not charged in the horrendous crime. New evidenceCentral to his call for additional investigation are FBI teletypes that were heavily redacted by the agency before their release some weeks ago. Although some sentences and many names are redacted, there was enough information contained in those documents to impress the former OKBOMB commander that more persons were involved in the attack. Referring to a January 4, 1996 teletype from former director Freeh to a select group of FBI offices, Coulson said that he believes a man he has long suspected should have been more thoroughly investigated in the crime, German National Andreas Strassmeir, is one of the names the bureau has blacked out of those documents. Coulson said he suspects Strassmeir may have been more involved with McVeigh than the agency has publicly admitted. After reviewing the teletypes at a cabin north of Pickens on Sunday, Coulson says he now wants to see a much more thorough investigation done of Strassmeir and the bank bandits the German lived with at Elohim City. “I have had significant experience conducting major investigations and in my view this case is not over,” Coulson said.“For many years, I’ve believed Elohim City was important to this case, and I think we now know Tim McVeigh had contacts there. That is the key to understanding this complicated case. Any future investigation should focus strictly on McVeigh’s associates within that group.” Source of new documentsThe plaintiff in a Freedom of Information Act case against the FBI – and making use of the teletypes – is Salt Lake City attorney Jesse Trentadue. He believes the FBI is hiding evidence that his brother was tortured and murdered in August 1995 during an interrogation at the Oklahoma City Federal Transfer Center. For years, the FBI has said Kenneth Trentadue hanged himself, but his older brother believes FBI agents killed his ex-convict brother while seeking information about a group of bank bandits associated with McVeigh, Strassmeir and the bombing. Before McVeigh was executed, Trentadue says he was contacted by an intermediary at the prison where McVeigh was incarcerated and told that McVeigh believed the FBI mistakenly thought Kenneth Trentadue was a man associated with a bank robbery gang linked to the bombing conspiracy. Close to the bank robbery gang, Strassmeir is a former German military officer with extensive intelligence training. His name came to light after the bombing when this newspaper began interviewing people at Elohim City with ties to McVeigh. McVeigh’s phone records, discovered by the FBI after the bombing, indicate a call was placed to Elohim City on April 5, 1995 – just seconds after a call was made with the same calling card to a Ryder Truck establishment. People the FBI interviewed at the compound said McVeigh was seeking Strassmeir. A judge in the Salt Lake City federal court has ordered the FBI to turn over to Trentadue documents showing there were informants at Elohim City at the time of the bombing that worked for a private charity – the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). According to those teletypes, SPLC informants were present at Elohim City on April 17 when McVeigh contacted the compound, looking for additional help in the bomb plot.According to then-director Freeh, McVeigh was looking for extra help with his plans when he called the compound. However, the FBI blacked out much of the person’s name with whom Freeh said McVeigh was closely associated. In the past, the FBI has vehemently denied McVeigh had any close associates at the camp. Strassmeir was the compound’s paramilitary instructor from 1993 until August of 1995. And since the bombing, over a half-dozen of Strassmeir’s associates at Elohim City have gone to prison for bank robbery, conspiracy to overthrow the government and murder. None, however, were ever charged in the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City.Inexplicably, Strassmeir was allowed to the leave this country in early 1996. In one of the teletypes issued by Freeh, the director appears to know where Strassmeir is staying in the U.S. and of plans Strassmeir is making to return to Germany through Mexico. Days after Freeh’s memo was issued, Strassmeir did indeed cross the Mexican border and make his way to Berlin with the assistance of former CIA pilot Dave Holloway. Neither Dave Holloway nor his associate, attorney Kirk Lyons of North Carolina – who paid for the pair’s trip – were ever charged with aiding Strassmeir’s flight. At the time of Strassmeir’s escape, he was listed as an illegal overstay by the INS and wanted by the ATF for illegally carrying a firearm in the U.S. Believing him to be “armed and dangerous” at the time, the OKBOMB task force even contacted the INS and asked that Strassmeir be stopped at the border and held for questioning in the bombing case. Incredibly, this is the same week that Freeh told several offices that Strassmeir was staying in North Carolina with Lyons. Safely back in Germany for many weeks, it’s only after Strassmeir’s name was linked to McVeigh by this newspaper and others that two Justice Department lawyers in Denver called Strassmeir in Berlin, twice, to ask about any contacts he may have had with McVeigh and the bombing. During those brief interviews, Strassmeir admitted over the phone that he may have met McVeigh at a gun show in Tulsa once, but he also assured prosecutors he did not help with the bomb plot. In the wake of the tragedy, the FBI had available several well-qualified commanders with extensive experience in major case investigations to lead and complete the investigation. However, a man with much less investigative experience, Danny Defenbaugh, replaced the original five experienced FBI commanders’ initially assigned to head the case.With the original five commanders off the OKBOMB case, considerable criticism has since been leveled at the job Defenbaugh did while heading up the FBI’s most expensive investigation in U.S. history. In spite of two dozen eyewitnesses that placed McVeigh with others in downtown Oklahoma City that day and $85 million that was spent putting together a case that sent two men to jail and one to the death chamber, only McVeigh and army buddy Terry Nichols were charged. Also imprisoned, Michael Fortier admitted his involvement in the conspiracy and agreed to cooperate with the FBI in return for a lighter sentence. Jurors in both cases in Denver, plus a grand jury in Oklahoma City, said they doubted the FBI had gotten all those involved.In 2001, over 4,000 pages of FBI interviews and other evidence never shown the defense teams for McVeigh or Nichols were discovered on the eve of McVeigh’s execution. The discovery caused McVeigh’s execution to be put on hold and the fiasco quickly led to the sudden resignation of Defenbaugh. Coulson believes the magnitude of the tragic attack that left 168 dead and 500 injured warrants the appointment of an experienced federal prosecutor to look into all of the evidence and the use of a federal grand jury to facilitate the investigation.“Based upon my investigation following the bombing of the Murrah building on April 19, 1995, and these new documents from the FBI turned up in the Utah case, it’s clear to me further investigation is required,” he said.Referring to the documents uncovered during the FOIA lawsuit and the large number of witnesses the FBI interviewed after the bombing that placed McVeigh in the company of others at key points in the conspiracy, Coulson observed, “The totality of this information very strongly indicates there are others involved and not charged who were involved at least in conspiratorial acts. “Families of victims and the American people deserve answers to many unanswered questions,” he said.“It is my opinion that a new investigation would only be successful if conducted through the auspices of a federal grand jury. It would be necessary to subpoena documents and some people would need to be given immunity to obtain the cooperation necessary to expose those guilty. This was the most heinous crime ever committed in the country at that time and we must be confident we did everything to find those responsible,” he added.
MSM: An Odd Mix of Opinion and Deceit
EU Rota
Blogger Thoughts: This post goes with previous post for reference.
Admittedly, it would be good if NYT would find the resources to do some investigative reporting rather than offer so much speculation.
Blogger Thoughts: This post goes with previous post for reference.
Admittedly, it would be good if NYT would find the resources to do some investigative reporting rather than offer so much speculation.
NOW WHAT? WHITE PHOSPHOROUS...
The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid: " But as usual, it's all lies. "
Blogger Thoughts: I've found this blog interesting to reference. In this case, they are part of the apparent cover up by offering an unfounded denial.
Blogger Thoughts: I've found this blog interesting to reference. In this case, they are part of the apparent cover up by offering an unfounded denial.
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
Thomas Sowell: Corrective Action Needed?
Thomas Sowell
Blogger Thought: Social Commentary such as this wouldn't be so offensive if those behind it didn't support the idea that the current corrupt fascish US govt. (self labeled compassionate conservatives) has provided or will provide if re-elected the needed remedies.
Blogger Thought: Social Commentary such as this wouldn't be so offensive if those behind it didn't support the idea that the current corrupt fascish US govt. (self labeled compassionate conservatives) has provided or will provide if re-elected the needed remedies.
Immigration Policy and Action: What is Needed in the US
Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.
Blogger Thoughts: I was surprised by how much I agreed with this. Perhaps the stickiest is point #9. Are we really going to refuse emergency room care? This is currently mandated if I'm not mistaken. Wouldn't a treat and report policy be rational?
Blogger Thoughts: I was surprised by how much I agreed with this. Perhaps the stickiest is point #9. Are we really going to refuse emergency room care? This is currently mandated if I'm not mistaken. Wouldn't a treat and report policy be rational?
The Anchoress � The bravest woman blogging�
The Anchoress � The bravest woman blogging�
Blogger Thoughts: Why can't I rub the sleep out of my eyes and enjoy the reality that these people are just the stuff of nightmares? Is that so much to ask?
Blogger Thoughts: Why can't I rub the sleep out of my eyes and enjoy the reality that these people are just the stuff of nightmares? Is that so much to ask?
UNDERNEWS: INSIDE A BUSH GULAG ON THE MISSISSIPPI
UNDERNEWS: INSIDE A BUSH GULAG ON THE MISSISSIPPI
ABDULRAHMAN ZEITOUN - I am the owner of Zeitoun A. Painting Contractors LLC, and Zeitoun Rentals LLC. I have been in business in New Orleans for almost 12 years. I have a very good reputation through out the City of New Orleans, and I am listed with the Better Business Bureau. I am originally from Syria, and I came to the United States in 1973. I started my life from scratch, and worked my way up to where I am now. I am married to Kathryn M. Richmond, I have 3 daughters and a son with her. My wife and kids evacuated from New Orleans due to hurricane Katrina and headed to Baton Rouge. I decided to stay behind to try and minimize any damage that may happen to my property. . .[Zeitoun describes in detail the days that follow. And then. . . ]I went back to my house on Claiborne. As I walked up the stairs, I heard the phone ring. It was my wife. She was worried about me. It was unusual for me to go this long in the day without calling her. I told her about my clients house, and about the bodies I saw. She asked me if it was anyone we knew. I told her I didn't have the heart to look. After I spoke to my wife, I spoke to my brother in Spain. When I was finished, I tried the water to see if it was working. To my surprise, it was. I quickly took a shower. It felt so good to be clean. When I was finished, I told my friend that he should take a shower before the water runs out.When I entered the area where the phone was, I saw a strange man there. I asked my tenant who he was, and what he was doing here. My tenant said that he was with the search and rescue team, and he needed to use the phone. I told him, "Oh, ok." We heard people outside. My tenant went to talk to them. It was the military. They asked him if we needed water. We told him no thank you, we have some. Then they jumped out the boat, went inside the house with their machine guns, and they were yelling at us to get in the boat. One of the military persons searched the house, for what? Only God knows. They treated us like hard criminals. They asked to see our ID cards, we showed it to them, they didn't even look at it. They only returned it to us. I told them I own this house, and my tenant was trying to prove to them that he lived there. They didn't care. They forced us out by gunpoint.We asked them where they were taking us. They said, "talk to my boss." We were taken to St. Charles Ave and Napoleon Ave. As soon as we got out of the boat, the military personnel jumped on us in a very rough manner, and handcuffed us. We were treated very, very badly. Then they put us in a white van. We asked the military who were they and why are they doing this to us. They said they were from Indiana, and they were only following orders, and doing their job. . .After processing us, they put us in a make shift chicken cage. Actually, it was the bus terminals that they turned into prison cells. It looked like a giant chicken cage. It was filthy dirty. They left us there for 3 days on this stinky, oily, filthy dirty floor. With no blankets or pillows. I swear, had we been in a prison in Afghanistan or Iraq, we would have been treated better. Somehow, I got a splinter the size of a tooth pick in my foot. It was the size of a tooth pick in width, and about half the length. It was getting infected, and caused me quite a bit of pain. I asked them if I could see a doctor. They refused me. Every day, I asked for a doctor. the splinter was lodged in my foot. I couldn't get it out. I saw a doctor helping other prisoners. I called out to him for help. He yelled at me in a very rude voice, that he was not a doctor. But he was a liar. He was a doctor. He was wearing green clothes, and he had a stethoscope. No one would help me.On the third day I was in this hell hole, they fed us an MRE that came with a small glass bottle of Tabasco. I broke that bottle on that nasty floor, picked up a shard of glass, then cut my foot open where the splinter was. The skin had grown over the splinter. My foot was infected. So much puss came out. Very painfully, I managed to get the splinter out. I squeezed out as much pus as I could, and hoped for the best. We would ask the soldiers why we were here. One would say because of looting, another would say because of terrorism, and another would say something else. They were trying to stick us with whatever they could.Later that afternoon, they moved us to Hunt Correctional Center in St. Gabrielle. They so called "processed" us again. They filled out a paper on each of us. . . They brought us to a maximum security section of the prison. I asked if I could use a phone to call my wife. They refused me. Flat-out told me no. They treated us like we were hardened criminals. They put 3 of us in a cell the size of my bathroom. The cell was only 8'x8'. They had on open toilet in the room. So, everyone would see me use the bathroom. There was no privacy on the toilet. . .Since a doctor wouldn't come, I asked for a Tylenol. They said I need to see a doctor to get any medication. But I couldn't see a doctor cause not one of them would come to me. Another week went bye. Still no doctor. Within the first week, an individual from homeland security came to us and interviewed us. He asked me a lot of questions. Then he said, I was clean, and he had no interest in me, and never has had any interest in me, nor my friend. I kept asking for the phone. After about 2 weeks they said we could finally use the phone.There were 50 people trying to use the phone. Each one of them was allowed 3-5 minutes only, and we were only able to use the phone in the late ours of the night. Bye the time it was my turn, I had fallen asleep. I must have dozed off waiting. They did not wake us. They simply went to the next cell. In the morning, I asked for my turn to use the phone. They said I missed it. I was really upset. I knew my wife was worried. I needed to find a way to contact her and let her know where I was. But everyone I begged/pleaded to call my wife, just told me no. I had to talk to her. Oh, my God I was in so much pain. Still no doctor came. The guard told me it takes up to 3 days after the doctor gets your form before he will see you.It has been over two weeks. Two weeks and we weren't even allowed to leave our cells. We ate, slept, and crapped in one room. We didn't see the light of day. Also, every meal they served us, had pork on it. I was unable to eat. I was very lucky when they didn't put pork on the grits. Otherwise, I starved. They served pork just about 2-3 times a day. They knew I couldn't eat this. So many days, I did starve.The next night I stayed awake the whole night waiting to use the phone. By the time it was my turn, they cancelled the phone service to us. I did not know that. The guard came to me when he saw me awake in the late night/early morning and asked me why I was still awake. I told him I was waiting to use the phone. He said the time was finished. I asked him to please let me use the phone. He spoke with another guard, and they agreed to let me use the phone. I tried to call my wife, but cell phones do not accept collect calls from prison. I felt I lost all hope.The first court date I had, the public defender told me not to say a word. Just listen. The judge came out and set the bail to $75,000. he said I was being charged with looting, and possessions of stolen goods. I couldn't believe they were charging me with that. I didn't have anything on my possession except my wallet. Which they took. They were just trying to stick us with anything they could. Since the terrorist accusations didn't work, they were going to pin us as looters. This was a bunch of bull.Also, $75,000. for a bond. They knew that no one could come up with that kind of money. No banks were open in New Orleans, and the city was upside down. I needed to get in touch with my wife so she could get the papers and prove that this was my house. The Judge told me, that he was not here to hear me. Only to set a bond. Even if we did have the money, there was no place to pay the bond. There was not one in existence at that time. There was no bond system for New Orleans prisoners at that time. I felt I was really being screwed.The next court date, my real lawyer was there. Someone must have called my wife. She had my lawyer there. However, there was no court system set up, so not much could be done for me at that time. I was very disappointed again. He said he could try to get the bond lowered, and the only way to get out was to pay the bond, or put up property. Still, there was no place to pay any bond at that time.Finally, on the third week I was there, they decided to improve our living conditions. They moved us to a minimum security level of the prison, and we were now allowed to go outside for a couple of hours a day. Still, no doctor looked at my side. Which left me moaning through out the night, and sometimes I could deal with the pain. Other times, I couldn't. I can't believe it. I constantly asked for medical treatment. They didn't give me any. What did I do to deserve this treatment? Why were they treating me like this? I truly feel in my heart that I was discriminated against. Why else would they arrest me?Finally, my wife was able to come to New Orleans. She dug through a collapsed building to get the property documents to help get me out. On Thursday she signed over our the warehouse as collateral for my bond. I still wasn't released that day. They made me wait till Friday. They made me stay a total of 23 days in that place. I feel sorry for my friends that are still in there under bogus charges.While I was being released, I asked for my wallet. The Hunt Correctional Center said they didn't have it. they said it was in New Orleans.All I had on me for ID was a prison ID. I couldn't travel with this. When my cousin, and wife came to pick me up, they took me to his apartment, where my Aunt, Uncle, and cousin's wife were waiting for me with delicious food. After I showered, I ate, then I was taken to Our Lady Of the Lake Hospital. I lost 15 pounds while I was in prison due to the food they were trying to serve me.They did blood work, and X-rays on me. It was documented that I have a torn muscle. I still suffer from this till now. I have been seen by three real doctors and I am on medication. I suffer so much from this. I think it would not have gotten so bad had they let me see a doctor at least one of the 23 days they kept me in there.On that following Monday, My wife and I went to the bus station where they kept me. I asked for my wallet. At first, they said they couldn't find it. Then they said they need it for evidence. My wife did not except this. They told her she needed to speak with the District Attorney. She saw Mr. Eddie Jordan there and asked him for the wallet. he refused to give it to her. So she went in and fussed a little. She told them that I couldn't travel with a prison ID. She said I was Arab, and they might think I was a terrorist. Finally someone went and got my ID, green card, social security card, and drivers license. They stole my wallet, and all of my credit cards. They either kept, stole, or lost, my wallet, visa card, master card, Lowe's, and home Depot cards, and a lot of business cards. Well, at least I got my green card back, and my driver's license. . .The tenants apartment had been looted after we were arrested. All of her Jewelry had been stolen, along with the downstairs tenants laptop computer and a few other items. All the trouble he went thru to save what little bit of stuff he did have, was all in vain. He saved it from the flood, but had it stolen by the looters after we were arrested. . .My wife asked me if I was read the Miranda Rights. You know, they didn't even do that. I guess that is why they didn't give me any rights. If they didn't read me my rights, then, I guess, that means I didn't have any.
5:27 PM 3 comments links to this post
3 Comments:
At 6:10 PM, Dredd Scott said...
Welcome to the real America that hides behind the mask.
At 9:26 PM, Anonymous said...
that's right-- we don't have any rights-- it takes some of us a while to figure it out-- a strange incident at a demo or a run in with the law on a dark road-- we may be lucky to survive--other folks just die with their illusions.
At 12:41 AM, Anonymous said...
we have rights. a complacent generation doesn't have the balls to speak up to defend and maintain them.defeatism and despair are Karl Rove's trump cards.
ABDULRAHMAN ZEITOUN - I am the owner of Zeitoun A. Painting Contractors LLC, and Zeitoun Rentals LLC. I have been in business in New Orleans for almost 12 years. I have a very good reputation through out the City of New Orleans, and I am listed with the Better Business Bureau. I am originally from Syria, and I came to the United States in 1973. I started my life from scratch, and worked my way up to where I am now. I am married to Kathryn M. Richmond, I have 3 daughters and a son with her. My wife and kids evacuated from New Orleans due to hurricane Katrina and headed to Baton Rouge. I decided to stay behind to try and minimize any damage that may happen to my property. . .[Zeitoun describes in detail the days that follow. And then. . . ]I went back to my house on Claiborne. As I walked up the stairs, I heard the phone ring. It was my wife. She was worried about me. It was unusual for me to go this long in the day without calling her. I told her about my clients house, and about the bodies I saw. She asked me if it was anyone we knew. I told her I didn't have the heart to look. After I spoke to my wife, I spoke to my brother in Spain. When I was finished, I tried the water to see if it was working. To my surprise, it was. I quickly took a shower. It felt so good to be clean. When I was finished, I told my friend that he should take a shower before the water runs out.When I entered the area where the phone was, I saw a strange man there. I asked my tenant who he was, and what he was doing here. My tenant said that he was with the search and rescue team, and he needed to use the phone. I told him, "Oh, ok." We heard people outside. My tenant went to talk to them. It was the military. They asked him if we needed water. We told him no thank you, we have some. Then they jumped out the boat, went inside the house with their machine guns, and they were yelling at us to get in the boat. One of the military persons searched the house, for what? Only God knows. They treated us like hard criminals. They asked to see our ID cards, we showed it to them, they didn't even look at it. They only returned it to us. I told them I own this house, and my tenant was trying to prove to them that he lived there. They didn't care. They forced us out by gunpoint.We asked them where they were taking us. They said, "talk to my boss." We were taken to St. Charles Ave and Napoleon Ave. As soon as we got out of the boat, the military personnel jumped on us in a very rough manner, and handcuffed us. We were treated very, very badly. Then they put us in a white van. We asked the military who were they and why are they doing this to us. They said they were from Indiana, and they were only following orders, and doing their job. . .After processing us, they put us in a make shift chicken cage. Actually, it was the bus terminals that they turned into prison cells. It looked like a giant chicken cage. It was filthy dirty. They left us there for 3 days on this stinky, oily, filthy dirty floor. With no blankets or pillows. I swear, had we been in a prison in Afghanistan or Iraq, we would have been treated better. Somehow, I got a splinter the size of a tooth pick in my foot. It was the size of a tooth pick in width, and about half the length. It was getting infected, and caused me quite a bit of pain. I asked them if I could see a doctor. They refused me. Every day, I asked for a doctor. the splinter was lodged in my foot. I couldn't get it out. I saw a doctor helping other prisoners. I called out to him for help. He yelled at me in a very rude voice, that he was not a doctor. But he was a liar. He was a doctor. He was wearing green clothes, and he had a stethoscope. No one would help me.On the third day I was in this hell hole, they fed us an MRE that came with a small glass bottle of Tabasco. I broke that bottle on that nasty floor, picked up a shard of glass, then cut my foot open where the splinter was. The skin had grown over the splinter. My foot was infected. So much puss came out. Very painfully, I managed to get the splinter out. I squeezed out as much pus as I could, and hoped for the best. We would ask the soldiers why we were here. One would say because of looting, another would say because of terrorism, and another would say something else. They were trying to stick us with whatever they could.Later that afternoon, they moved us to Hunt Correctional Center in St. Gabrielle. They so called "processed" us again. They filled out a paper on each of us. . . They brought us to a maximum security section of the prison. I asked if I could use a phone to call my wife. They refused me. Flat-out told me no. They treated us like we were hardened criminals. They put 3 of us in a cell the size of my bathroom. The cell was only 8'x8'. They had on open toilet in the room. So, everyone would see me use the bathroom. There was no privacy on the toilet. . .Since a doctor wouldn't come, I asked for a Tylenol. They said I need to see a doctor to get any medication. But I couldn't see a doctor cause not one of them would come to me. Another week went bye. Still no doctor. Within the first week, an individual from homeland security came to us and interviewed us. He asked me a lot of questions. Then he said, I was clean, and he had no interest in me, and never has had any interest in me, nor my friend. I kept asking for the phone. After about 2 weeks they said we could finally use the phone.There were 50 people trying to use the phone. Each one of them was allowed 3-5 minutes only, and we were only able to use the phone in the late ours of the night. Bye the time it was my turn, I had fallen asleep. I must have dozed off waiting. They did not wake us. They simply went to the next cell. In the morning, I asked for my turn to use the phone. They said I missed it. I was really upset. I knew my wife was worried. I needed to find a way to contact her and let her know where I was. But everyone I begged/pleaded to call my wife, just told me no. I had to talk to her. Oh, my God I was in so much pain. Still no doctor came. The guard told me it takes up to 3 days after the doctor gets your form before he will see you.It has been over two weeks. Two weeks and we weren't even allowed to leave our cells. We ate, slept, and crapped in one room. We didn't see the light of day. Also, every meal they served us, had pork on it. I was unable to eat. I was very lucky when they didn't put pork on the grits. Otherwise, I starved. They served pork just about 2-3 times a day. They knew I couldn't eat this. So many days, I did starve.The next night I stayed awake the whole night waiting to use the phone. By the time it was my turn, they cancelled the phone service to us. I did not know that. The guard came to me when he saw me awake in the late night/early morning and asked me why I was still awake. I told him I was waiting to use the phone. He said the time was finished. I asked him to please let me use the phone. He spoke with another guard, and they agreed to let me use the phone. I tried to call my wife, but cell phones do not accept collect calls from prison. I felt I lost all hope.The first court date I had, the public defender told me not to say a word. Just listen. The judge came out and set the bail to $75,000. he said I was being charged with looting, and possessions of stolen goods. I couldn't believe they were charging me with that. I didn't have anything on my possession except my wallet. Which they took. They were just trying to stick us with anything they could. Since the terrorist accusations didn't work, they were going to pin us as looters. This was a bunch of bull.Also, $75,000. for a bond. They knew that no one could come up with that kind of money. No banks were open in New Orleans, and the city was upside down. I needed to get in touch with my wife so she could get the papers and prove that this was my house. The Judge told me, that he was not here to hear me. Only to set a bond. Even if we did have the money, there was no place to pay the bond. There was not one in existence at that time. There was no bond system for New Orleans prisoners at that time. I felt I was really being screwed.The next court date, my real lawyer was there. Someone must have called my wife. She had my lawyer there. However, there was no court system set up, so not much could be done for me at that time. I was very disappointed again. He said he could try to get the bond lowered, and the only way to get out was to pay the bond, or put up property. Still, there was no place to pay any bond at that time.Finally, on the third week I was there, they decided to improve our living conditions. They moved us to a minimum security level of the prison, and we were now allowed to go outside for a couple of hours a day. Still, no doctor looked at my side. Which left me moaning through out the night, and sometimes I could deal with the pain. Other times, I couldn't. I can't believe it. I constantly asked for medical treatment. They didn't give me any. What did I do to deserve this treatment? Why were they treating me like this? I truly feel in my heart that I was discriminated against. Why else would they arrest me?Finally, my wife was able to come to New Orleans. She dug through a collapsed building to get the property documents to help get me out. On Thursday she signed over our the warehouse as collateral for my bond. I still wasn't released that day. They made me wait till Friday. They made me stay a total of 23 days in that place. I feel sorry for my friends that are still in there under bogus charges.While I was being released, I asked for my wallet. The Hunt Correctional Center said they didn't have it. they said it was in New Orleans.All I had on me for ID was a prison ID. I couldn't travel with this. When my cousin, and wife came to pick me up, they took me to his apartment, where my Aunt, Uncle, and cousin's wife were waiting for me with delicious food. After I showered, I ate, then I was taken to Our Lady Of the Lake Hospital. I lost 15 pounds while I was in prison due to the food they were trying to serve me.They did blood work, and X-rays on me. It was documented that I have a torn muscle. I still suffer from this till now. I have been seen by three real doctors and I am on medication. I suffer so much from this. I think it would not have gotten so bad had they let me see a doctor at least one of the 23 days they kept me in there.On that following Monday, My wife and I went to the bus station where they kept me. I asked for my wallet. At first, they said they couldn't find it. Then they said they need it for evidence. My wife did not except this. They told her she needed to speak with the District Attorney. She saw Mr. Eddie Jordan there and asked him for the wallet. he refused to give it to her. So she went in and fussed a little. She told them that I couldn't travel with a prison ID. She said I was Arab, and they might think I was a terrorist. Finally someone went and got my ID, green card, social security card, and drivers license. They stole my wallet, and all of my credit cards. They either kept, stole, or lost, my wallet, visa card, master card, Lowe's, and home Depot cards, and a lot of business cards. Well, at least I got my green card back, and my driver's license. . .The tenants apartment had been looted after we were arrested. All of her Jewelry had been stolen, along with the downstairs tenants laptop computer and a few other items. All the trouble he went thru to save what little bit of stuff he did have, was all in vain. He saved it from the flood, but had it stolen by the looters after we were arrested. . .My wife asked me if I was read the Miranda Rights. You know, they didn't even do that. I guess that is why they didn't give me any rights. If they didn't read me my rights, then, I guess, that means I didn't have any.
5:27 PM 3 comments links to this post
3 Comments:
At 6:10 PM, Dredd Scott said...
Welcome to the real America that hides behind the mask.
At 9:26 PM, Anonymous said...
that's right-- we don't have any rights-- it takes some of us a while to figure it out-- a strange incident at a demo or a run in with the law on a dark road-- we may be lucky to survive--other folks just die with their illusions.
At 12:41 AM, Anonymous said...
we have rights. a complacent generation doesn't have the balls to speak up to defend and maintain them.defeatism and despair are Karl Rove's trump cards.
How our governments use terrorism to control us
How our governments use terrorism to control us
Special Reports
How our governments use terrorism to control usBy Tim HowellsOnline Journal Contributing WriterNov 28, 2005, 13:55
The sponsorship of terrorism by western governments, targeting their own populations, has been a taboo subject. Although major scandals have received cursory coverage in the media, the subject has been allowed to immediately disappear without discussion or investigation. Therefore the appearance this year of two major studies of this subject is a welcome breakthrough, and provides essential reading for anyone struggling to understand the events of September 11, 2001 and the post September 11 world.
The studies are complementary. NATO's Secret Armies, Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe by Daniele Ganser concerns terrorism sponsored by American and British intelligence in Western Europe and Turkey between the end of World War II and 1985. The War on Truth, 9/11, Disinformation, and the Anatomy of Terrorism by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed chronicles the cultivation and sponsorship of militant Islamic terrorism by the intelligence services of the United States, Britain and Russia from 1979 to the present. Both studies are models of scholarship -- meticulously documented and carefully reasoned -- but the world they reveal will boggle the mind of the most wild-eyed conspiracy theorist.
Creating "Communist" Terrorism to Fuel the Cold War
NATO's Secret Armies describes how following World War II the US and Britain, fearing a Soviet invasion of Europe, established "stay-behind" paramilitary units throughout Western Europe and in Turkey. Had the anticipated Soviet invasion occurred these units would have constituted ready made resistance groups, trained and armed, with secure communications with each other and with their allies in Britain and the US. In some counties, for example Norway and Sweden, these stay-behind units were true to their original charters, remaining inactive until they disbanded at the end of the Cold War. In other countries, however, the paramilitary units were activated by their handlers in the United States as part of a hellish "Strategy of Tension" designed to convince left-leaning populations in Italy, Germany, Belgium, Greece, Turkey and other countries that their very lives were at risk from communist terrorists. The arms and bombs originally intended for the Soviets were turned instead on their own compatriots with the aim of placing the blame for the waves of terrorist attacks on communists.
In Italy the stay-behind operation was referred to as Gladio (Latin for "Sword"). The Piazza Fontana bombings that killed 16 and wounded 80 shortly before Christmas in 1969 initiated a wave of terrorist bombings in Italy by Gladio operatives that continued throughout the 1970s. The worst single bombing occurred in the Bologna train station in 1980, killing 85 and wounding 200. Another Gladio bombing in Brescia in 1974 killed eight and wounded 102, and the same year a train was bombed in Rome, killing 12 and wounding 48. The case that led to the discovery of the Gladio plots by the Italian courts was a 1972 bombing that killed three policemen.
The Gladio operations in Italy are relatively well known and well understood because of several high level judicial investigations that received coverage in the European press and have been the subject of a few books. One contribution of Ganser's book is to bring this material together in a concise and well organised format. Further, Ganser extends his study beyond Italy to examine the effects of stay-behind operations throughout Western Europe and in Turkey.
I was quite surprised to learn that by far the most extensive and destructive stay-behind operations were those carried out in Turkey under the code name Counter-Guerrilla. Among other crimes, a long series of bombings, random killings and assassinations, covertly perpetrated by CIA-controlled Counter-Guerrilla operatives in the late 1970s, were used as a pretext for the military coup in 1980 that led to the installation of a pro-American and pro-Israeli government there. I was also shocked to learn that stay-behind operatives were responsible for a series of horrific terrorist attacks in Belgium as late in the Cold War as 1985, although this is still the subject of unconvincing official denials.
One limitation of Ganser's study, which he frequently laments, is the unavailability of official documentation because all materials relating to the stay-behind operations remain highly classified. All Freedom of Information Act requests to date have been denied by American authorities. One might have hoped that at least with the end of the Cold War such atrocious strategies would be renounced, and that the implicated governments would make every effort to come clean and ensure that this history would not be repeated. Unfortunately, as The War on Truth by Nafeez Ahmed makes clear, the Strategy of Tension has proved to be so useful a tool both in terms of global and domestic politics that, far from being abandoned, these despicable operations have become increasingly accepted and commonplace.
Creating "Islamic" Terrorism for the Post-Cold War Era
Ahmed's study centres on the attacks of September 11, 2001, but the story begins in Afghanistan prior to the Soviet invasion in 1979. Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security advisor to President Jimmy Carter at the time, has described in an interview how, even prior to the invasion, the US had taken steps to fund the Mujahedeen warlords and to inflame militant Islam in the region. The aim was to destabilise the region and to force the Soviets to invade -- to draw them into their own Vietnam-style quagmire.
According to Brzezinski, "We did not push the Russians into invading, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would. That secret operation was an excellent idea. The effect was to draw the Russians into the Afghan trap."
After the Soviets' inglorious retreat from Afghanistan, and even more so after the collapse of the Soviet Union several years later, the policy of inflaming and exploiting militant Islam was credited by many in the US national security establishment for these historic developments. Ahmed has compiled irrefutable evidence that the United States did not abandon the militant Islamists after the end of the Cold War. In fact, American leadership at the very highest levels has continued to covertly protect, assist and guide militant Islam in general and al-Qaeda in particular in geopolitically important areas around the world, including Central Asia, North Africa, the Balkans, and the Philippines.
It is impossible to do justice to Ahmed's densely packed 390-page presentation here, but I will give some representative examples.
Sergeant Ali Mohamed Joins al-Qaeda
Ali Mohamed, an Egyptian intelligence officer, was fired in 1984 because of his religious extremism. In spite of this and in spite of the fact that his name was on the State Department's terrorist watch list, he was granted a visa to enter the US and became a US citizen. By 1986 he was a sergeant in the US Army and an instructor at the elite Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg. While in this position Mohamed travelled to Afghanistan to meet with bin Laden, and he assisted with the training of al-Qaeda operatives both in Afghanistan and in the US. His immediate supervisors at Fort Bragg were duly alarmed by these illegal activities, and reported them up the chain of command. When their reports failed to produce any action, not even an official debriefing of Mohamed upon his return from Afghanistan, at least one of his supervisors, Lt. Col. Robert Anderson, concluded that Mohamed had been acting as part of an operation sanctioned by an American intelligence agency, "probably the CIA."
Mohamed's activities in support of al-Qaeda throughout the 1990s were of the highest significance to that organisation. In 1991, he handled security for bin Laden's move from Saudi Arabia to the Sudan. In 1993, Mohamed accompanied bin Laden's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, on a fund raising tour of the United States, again handling security arrangements. The funds raised helped support Zawahiri in a Pentagon supported mission in the Balkans, which will be discussed in the next section.
The al-Qaeda members trained by Mohamed in the United States included several who were later convicted in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Top secret US Army training manuals supplied by Mohamed to the defendants were produced as evidence at their trial.
Mohamed himself did the initial surveillance for the al-Qaeda bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. At the time Mohamed was on active reserve with the Special Forces and was a paid FBI informant. Mohamed was at long last charged with crimes in connection with the 1998 embassy bombings. In October 2000, he was convicted of five counts of conspiracy to murder nationals of the United States. However, the nature of Mohamed's plea agreement, the sentence handed down, if any, and Mohamed's present whereabouts remain secret.
The Pentagon Brings al-Qaeda to the Balkans
The US national security establishment did not miss a beat in seeking to replicate the triumph in Afghanistan in other geopolitically critical areas. The Soviet puppet regime fell in Afghanistan in February 1992. That same year, the Pentagon started importing Afghan jihadists organised by bin Laden into Bosnia to wreak chaos and fuel the civil wars between Muslims and Serbs that devastated the former Yugoslavia in the following years. Bin Laden's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, served as commander of the Mujahedeen forces in the Balkans.
The role of the Pentagon in airlifting the Mujahedeen terrorists into Bosnia and Kosovo between 1992 to 1995 has been well documented and widely reported in the European and Canadian media, but almost completely ignored in the United States. However, the geopolitical advantages of breaking the former sovereign nation of Yugoslavia into a patchwork of NATO protectorates, under the firm control of the United States, did not go unnoted. New Republic editors Jacob Heilbrunn and Michael Lind celebrated the event in a New York Times article titled "The Third American Empire" published on January 2, 1996:
"Instead of seeing Bosnia as the eastern frontier of NATO, we should view the Balkans as the western frontier of America's rapidly expanding sphere of influence in the Middle East . . . The regions once ruled by the Ottoman Turks show signs of becoming the heart of a third American empire . . . The main purpose of NATO countries, for the foreseeable future, will be to serve as staging areas for American wars in the Balkans, the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf."
The CIA Brings al-Qaeda to the Philippines
In 1991, with the Afghan War winding down, the Abu Sayyaf terrorist group was formed in the Philippines around a core of radical Afghan veterans. They conducted their first kidnapping operation in 1992, and were responsible for a series of bombings and kidnappings throughout the 1990s that were highly destabilising for the Philippine government. Several high level al-Qaeda operatives, including Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed were involved. Funding was provided by one of bin Laden's brothers in law, Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, an important figure in the funding of al-Qaeda operations worldwide.
Ahmed cites many authoritative sources, including Philippine intelligence officer Rene Jarque, Lt. Col. Ricardo Morales, and Senator Aquilino Q. Pimentel, to show that the Abu-Sayyaf group has received special assistance and protection both from the Philippine military and from the United States. Pimentel in a speech before the Philippine Senate in July of 2000 accused the CIA of creating the terrorist organisation with the help of their contacts in the Philippine military and intelligence communities.
Two incidents in particular have exposed the connivance of the United States in the Abu Sayyaf reign of terror beyond a reasonable doubt. In December of 1994, Khalifa was arrested during a visit to San Francisco on immigration violations. The FBI was aware of his ties to the Abu Sayyaf group and to al-Qaeda, and began a criminal investigation. Khalifa's lawyers tried to stall the investigation and manoeuvre for extradition to Jordan. Incredibly, help came to Khalifa from on high. Secretary of State Warren Christopher personally wrote a three-page letter to Attorney General Janet Reno asking that the request for extradition be granted. Accordingly, the FBI investigation was cancelled and Khalifa was sent to Jordan per his own request, where he was soon a free man.
The second incident is even more extraordinary and revealing. Michael Meiring, an American citizen, arrived in the Philippines in 1992 and promptly formed close working relationships both with high government officials and with rebel leaders in the Abu Sayyaf group. In 2002, in the midst of a wave of Abu Sayyaf bombings, Meiring accidentally detonated a bomb in his own hotel room in Mindao causing grave injury to himself, requiring emergency hospitalisation. US authorities immediately intervened. FBI agents and "agents of the National Security Council" swept him away from his hospital room, first to a hospital in Manila where Meiring was kept incommunicado and was treated by a doctor hand-picked by the US embassy. Then Meiring was rushed back to the United States. Like Ali Mohamed, his fate and current whereabouts are unknown. Numerous attempts to have him extradited back to the Philippines for prosecution have been stonewalled by US authorities.
The motivations for American support of terrorism in the Philippines are not hard to guess. In 1991, the same year that Abu Sayyaf was formed, the Philippines Senate had voted to close all US military bases in their country, an action with profound implications for the military posture of the United States in South Asia. In 2002, due to the destabilising effects of the Abu Sayyaf operations, the US military were invited back into the country to participate in operation Balikatan ("shoulder to shoulder"), a joint US/Philippine military exercise purportedly aimed at eliminating terrorism. These operations required special exemptions from the Philippine Constitution, which forbids foreign armies from operating on Philippine soil. Once again, al-Qaeda, with the help of their American friends, had acted to advance the geostrategic interests of the United States.
The Grand Design
The above examples are by no means isolated anomalies. The bulk of Ahmed's fine book is devoted to recording a pattern of evidence that is finally overwhelming. As he says in conclusion, "not only does the strategy employed in the new 'War on Terror' seem to provoke terrorism, but an integral dimension of the strategy is the protection of key actors culpable in the financial, logistical, and military-intelligence support of international terrorism."
And Then There Is September 11 Itself . . .
But what about the September 11 attacks themselves? Were they "blowback," i.e., unintended domestic consequences of foreign covert operations, or were they an integral part of the Strategy of Tension? Based in part on an analysis of intelligence warnings of the attacks, and on the absence of any air defence response, Ahmed strongly endorses the latter view. He reviews the dozens of very specific foreign and domestic intelligence warnings of terrorist attacks in the United States using airliners that came in the months leading up to the attacks. These in turn led to warnings issued by American intelligence to Pentagon officials, and to others, including author Salman Rushdie and San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, to cancel all flight plans on the day of September 11, 2001. Meanwhile, no action whatsoever was taken to warn or to protect the American public.
Ahmed points out that the responsible authorities at the Pentagon and the Federal Aviation Administration have produced several profoundly contradictory accounts of their own actions on that day -- each subsequent story seemingly an attempt to remedy the shortcomings of a previous one. And still no remotely satisfactory account of the failure to intercept even one of the four hijacked airliners has been produced. Under ordinary circumstances, interception of wayward aircraft by military fighters would have been absolutely routine; such interceptions occurred at least 56 times in the calendar year prior to September 11, 2001. Ahmed points out that the attacks were allowed to proceed "entirely unhindered for over one and one half hours in the most restricted airspace in the world." He finds the idea that this was due to negligence beyond belief. Instead he argues that there must have been a deliberate stand-down of the air defence system managed by senior national security officials including the vice president and the secretary of defense.
The Future of the Strategy of Tension
The books reviewed herein document a continuous history over the last 40 years of the United States and other governments fostering and manipulating terrorism for their own ends. Terrorist organisations have been used to destabilise inconvenient regimes around the world, and to sow chaos, which can then serve as a pretext for military intervention.
Even more importantly, terrorism is used to create a crisis atmosphere at home under cover of which the crimes and corruption of government officials go unpunished, civil liberties are easily abandoned, and major wars can be launched under false pretences. Although at present there appears to be no reason for the terror-masters in Washington to consider changing their tactics, the publication this year of these two illuminating books raises the hope that the Strategy of Tension, which can only thrive in darkness and confusion, will ultimately have to be abandoned.
# # # # #
Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, The War on Truth, 9/11, Disinformation, and the Anatomy of Terrorism, Olive Branch Press, An imprint of Interlink Publishing, 2005, Northampton, MADaniele Ganser, NATO's Secret Armies, Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe, Frank Cass, 2005, London and New York Copyright © 1998-2005 Online JournalEmail Online Journal Editor
Special Reports
How our governments use terrorism to control usBy Tim HowellsOnline Journal Contributing WriterNov 28, 2005, 13:55
The sponsorship of terrorism by western governments, targeting their own populations, has been a taboo subject. Although major scandals have received cursory coverage in the media, the subject has been allowed to immediately disappear without discussion or investigation. Therefore the appearance this year of two major studies of this subject is a welcome breakthrough, and provides essential reading for anyone struggling to understand the events of September 11, 2001 and the post September 11 world.
The studies are complementary. NATO's Secret Armies, Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe by Daniele Ganser concerns terrorism sponsored by American and British intelligence in Western Europe and Turkey between the end of World War II and 1985. The War on Truth, 9/11, Disinformation, and the Anatomy of Terrorism by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed chronicles the cultivation and sponsorship of militant Islamic terrorism by the intelligence services of the United States, Britain and Russia from 1979 to the present. Both studies are models of scholarship -- meticulously documented and carefully reasoned -- but the world they reveal will boggle the mind of the most wild-eyed conspiracy theorist.
Creating "Communist" Terrorism to Fuel the Cold War
NATO's Secret Armies describes how following World War II the US and Britain, fearing a Soviet invasion of Europe, established "stay-behind" paramilitary units throughout Western Europe and in Turkey. Had the anticipated Soviet invasion occurred these units would have constituted ready made resistance groups, trained and armed, with secure communications with each other and with their allies in Britain and the US. In some counties, for example Norway and Sweden, these stay-behind units were true to their original charters, remaining inactive until they disbanded at the end of the Cold War. In other countries, however, the paramilitary units were activated by their handlers in the United States as part of a hellish "Strategy of Tension" designed to convince left-leaning populations in Italy, Germany, Belgium, Greece, Turkey and other countries that their very lives were at risk from communist terrorists. The arms and bombs originally intended for the Soviets were turned instead on their own compatriots with the aim of placing the blame for the waves of terrorist attacks on communists.
In Italy the stay-behind operation was referred to as Gladio (Latin for "Sword"). The Piazza Fontana bombings that killed 16 and wounded 80 shortly before Christmas in 1969 initiated a wave of terrorist bombings in Italy by Gladio operatives that continued throughout the 1970s. The worst single bombing occurred in the Bologna train station in 1980, killing 85 and wounding 200. Another Gladio bombing in Brescia in 1974 killed eight and wounded 102, and the same year a train was bombed in Rome, killing 12 and wounding 48. The case that led to the discovery of the Gladio plots by the Italian courts was a 1972 bombing that killed three policemen.
The Gladio operations in Italy are relatively well known and well understood because of several high level judicial investigations that received coverage in the European press and have been the subject of a few books. One contribution of Ganser's book is to bring this material together in a concise and well organised format. Further, Ganser extends his study beyond Italy to examine the effects of stay-behind operations throughout Western Europe and in Turkey.
I was quite surprised to learn that by far the most extensive and destructive stay-behind operations were those carried out in Turkey under the code name Counter-Guerrilla. Among other crimes, a long series of bombings, random killings and assassinations, covertly perpetrated by CIA-controlled Counter-Guerrilla operatives in the late 1970s, were used as a pretext for the military coup in 1980 that led to the installation of a pro-American and pro-Israeli government there. I was also shocked to learn that stay-behind operatives were responsible for a series of horrific terrorist attacks in Belgium as late in the Cold War as 1985, although this is still the subject of unconvincing official denials.
One limitation of Ganser's study, which he frequently laments, is the unavailability of official documentation because all materials relating to the stay-behind operations remain highly classified. All Freedom of Information Act requests to date have been denied by American authorities. One might have hoped that at least with the end of the Cold War such atrocious strategies would be renounced, and that the implicated governments would make every effort to come clean and ensure that this history would not be repeated. Unfortunately, as The War on Truth by Nafeez Ahmed makes clear, the Strategy of Tension has proved to be so useful a tool both in terms of global and domestic politics that, far from being abandoned, these despicable operations have become increasingly accepted and commonplace.
Creating "Islamic" Terrorism for the Post-Cold War Era
Ahmed's study centres on the attacks of September 11, 2001, but the story begins in Afghanistan prior to the Soviet invasion in 1979. Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security advisor to President Jimmy Carter at the time, has described in an interview how, even prior to the invasion, the US had taken steps to fund the Mujahedeen warlords and to inflame militant Islam in the region. The aim was to destabilise the region and to force the Soviets to invade -- to draw them into their own Vietnam-style quagmire.
According to Brzezinski, "We did not push the Russians into invading, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would. That secret operation was an excellent idea. The effect was to draw the Russians into the Afghan trap."
After the Soviets' inglorious retreat from Afghanistan, and even more so after the collapse of the Soviet Union several years later, the policy of inflaming and exploiting militant Islam was credited by many in the US national security establishment for these historic developments. Ahmed has compiled irrefutable evidence that the United States did not abandon the militant Islamists after the end of the Cold War. In fact, American leadership at the very highest levels has continued to covertly protect, assist and guide militant Islam in general and al-Qaeda in particular in geopolitically important areas around the world, including Central Asia, North Africa, the Balkans, and the Philippines.
It is impossible to do justice to Ahmed's densely packed 390-page presentation here, but I will give some representative examples.
Sergeant Ali Mohamed Joins al-Qaeda
Ali Mohamed, an Egyptian intelligence officer, was fired in 1984 because of his religious extremism. In spite of this and in spite of the fact that his name was on the State Department's terrorist watch list, he was granted a visa to enter the US and became a US citizen. By 1986 he was a sergeant in the US Army and an instructor at the elite Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg. While in this position Mohamed travelled to Afghanistan to meet with bin Laden, and he assisted with the training of al-Qaeda operatives both in Afghanistan and in the US. His immediate supervisors at Fort Bragg were duly alarmed by these illegal activities, and reported them up the chain of command. When their reports failed to produce any action, not even an official debriefing of Mohamed upon his return from Afghanistan, at least one of his supervisors, Lt. Col. Robert Anderson, concluded that Mohamed had been acting as part of an operation sanctioned by an American intelligence agency, "probably the CIA."
Mohamed's activities in support of al-Qaeda throughout the 1990s were of the highest significance to that organisation. In 1991, he handled security for bin Laden's move from Saudi Arabia to the Sudan. In 1993, Mohamed accompanied bin Laden's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, on a fund raising tour of the United States, again handling security arrangements. The funds raised helped support Zawahiri in a Pentagon supported mission in the Balkans, which will be discussed in the next section.
The al-Qaeda members trained by Mohamed in the United States included several who were later convicted in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Top secret US Army training manuals supplied by Mohamed to the defendants were produced as evidence at their trial.
Mohamed himself did the initial surveillance for the al-Qaeda bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. At the time Mohamed was on active reserve with the Special Forces and was a paid FBI informant. Mohamed was at long last charged with crimes in connection with the 1998 embassy bombings. In October 2000, he was convicted of five counts of conspiracy to murder nationals of the United States. However, the nature of Mohamed's plea agreement, the sentence handed down, if any, and Mohamed's present whereabouts remain secret.
The Pentagon Brings al-Qaeda to the Balkans
The US national security establishment did not miss a beat in seeking to replicate the triumph in Afghanistan in other geopolitically critical areas. The Soviet puppet regime fell in Afghanistan in February 1992. That same year, the Pentagon started importing Afghan jihadists organised by bin Laden into Bosnia to wreak chaos and fuel the civil wars between Muslims and Serbs that devastated the former Yugoslavia in the following years. Bin Laden's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, served as commander of the Mujahedeen forces in the Balkans.
The role of the Pentagon in airlifting the Mujahedeen terrorists into Bosnia and Kosovo between 1992 to 1995 has been well documented and widely reported in the European and Canadian media, but almost completely ignored in the United States. However, the geopolitical advantages of breaking the former sovereign nation of Yugoslavia into a patchwork of NATO protectorates, under the firm control of the United States, did not go unnoted. New Republic editors Jacob Heilbrunn and Michael Lind celebrated the event in a New York Times article titled "The Third American Empire" published on January 2, 1996:
"Instead of seeing Bosnia as the eastern frontier of NATO, we should view the Balkans as the western frontier of America's rapidly expanding sphere of influence in the Middle East . . . The regions once ruled by the Ottoman Turks show signs of becoming the heart of a third American empire . . . The main purpose of NATO countries, for the foreseeable future, will be to serve as staging areas for American wars in the Balkans, the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf."
The CIA Brings al-Qaeda to the Philippines
In 1991, with the Afghan War winding down, the Abu Sayyaf terrorist group was formed in the Philippines around a core of radical Afghan veterans. They conducted their first kidnapping operation in 1992, and were responsible for a series of bombings and kidnappings throughout the 1990s that were highly destabilising for the Philippine government. Several high level al-Qaeda operatives, including Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed were involved. Funding was provided by one of bin Laden's brothers in law, Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, an important figure in the funding of al-Qaeda operations worldwide.
Ahmed cites many authoritative sources, including Philippine intelligence officer Rene Jarque, Lt. Col. Ricardo Morales, and Senator Aquilino Q. Pimentel, to show that the Abu-Sayyaf group has received special assistance and protection both from the Philippine military and from the United States. Pimentel in a speech before the Philippine Senate in July of 2000 accused the CIA of creating the terrorist organisation with the help of their contacts in the Philippine military and intelligence communities.
Two incidents in particular have exposed the connivance of the United States in the Abu Sayyaf reign of terror beyond a reasonable doubt. In December of 1994, Khalifa was arrested during a visit to San Francisco on immigration violations. The FBI was aware of his ties to the Abu Sayyaf group and to al-Qaeda, and began a criminal investigation. Khalifa's lawyers tried to stall the investigation and manoeuvre for extradition to Jordan. Incredibly, help came to Khalifa from on high. Secretary of State Warren Christopher personally wrote a three-page letter to Attorney General Janet Reno asking that the request for extradition be granted. Accordingly, the FBI investigation was cancelled and Khalifa was sent to Jordan per his own request, where he was soon a free man.
The second incident is even more extraordinary and revealing. Michael Meiring, an American citizen, arrived in the Philippines in 1992 and promptly formed close working relationships both with high government officials and with rebel leaders in the Abu Sayyaf group. In 2002, in the midst of a wave of Abu Sayyaf bombings, Meiring accidentally detonated a bomb in his own hotel room in Mindao causing grave injury to himself, requiring emergency hospitalisation. US authorities immediately intervened. FBI agents and "agents of the National Security Council" swept him away from his hospital room, first to a hospital in Manila where Meiring was kept incommunicado and was treated by a doctor hand-picked by the US embassy. Then Meiring was rushed back to the United States. Like Ali Mohamed, his fate and current whereabouts are unknown. Numerous attempts to have him extradited back to the Philippines for prosecution have been stonewalled by US authorities.
The motivations for American support of terrorism in the Philippines are not hard to guess. In 1991, the same year that Abu Sayyaf was formed, the Philippines Senate had voted to close all US military bases in their country, an action with profound implications for the military posture of the United States in South Asia. In 2002, due to the destabilising effects of the Abu Sayyaf operations, the US military were invited back into the country to participate in operation Balikatan ("shoulder to shoulder"), a joint US/Philippine military exercise purportedly aimed at eliminating terrorism. These operations required special exemptions from the Philippine Constitution, which forbids foreign armies from operating on Philippine soil. Once again, al-Qaeda, with the help of their American friends, had acted to advance the geostrategic interests of the United States.
The Grand Design
The above examples are by no means isolated anomalies. The bulk of Ahmed's fine book is devoted to recording a pattern of evidence that is finally overwhelming. As he says in conclusion, "not only does the strategy employed in the new 'War on Terror' seem to provoke terrorism, but an integral dimension of the strategy is the protection of key actors culpable in the financial, logistical, and military-intelligence support of international terrorism."
And Then There Is September 11 Itself . . .
But what about the September 11 attacks themselves? Were they "blowback," i.e., unintended domestic consequences of foreign covert operations, or were they an integral part of the Strategy of Tension? Based in part on an analysis of intelligence warnings of the attacks, and on the absence of any air defence response, Ahmed strongly endorses the latter view. He reviews the dozens of very specific foreign and domestic intelligence warnings of terrorist attacks in the United States using airliners that came in the months leading up to the attacks. These in turn led to warnings issued by American intelligence to Pentagon officials, and to others, including author Salman Rushdie and San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, to cancel all flight plans on the day of September 11, 2001. Meanwhile, no action whatsoever was taken to warn or to protect the American public.
Ahmed points out that the responsible authorities at the Pentagon and the Federal Aviation Administration have produced several profoundly contradictory accounts of their own actions on that day -- each subsequent story seemingly an attempt to remedy the shortcomings of a previous one. And still no remotely satisfactory account of the failure to intercept even one of the four hijacked airliners has been produced. Under ordinary circumstances, interception of wayward aircraft by military fighters would have been absolutely routine; such interceptions occurred at least 56 times in the calendar year prior to September 11, 2001. Ahmed points out that the attacks were allowed to proceed "entirely unhindered for over one and one half hours in the most restricted airspace in the world." He finds the idea that this was due to negligence beyond belief. Instead he argues that there must have been a deliberate stand-down of the air defence system managed by senior national security officials including the vice president and the secretary of defense.
The Future of the Strategy of Tension
The books reviewed herein document a continuous history over the last 40 years of the United States and other governments fostering and manipulating terrorism for their own ends. Terrorist organisations have been used to destabilise inconvenient regimes around the world, and to sow chaos, which can then serve as a pretext for military intervention.
Even more importantly, terrorism is used to create a crisis atmosphere at home under cover of which the crimes and corruption of government officials go unpunished, civil liberties are easily abandoned, and major wars can be launched under false pretences. Although at present there appears to be no reason for the terror-masters in Washington to consider changing their tactics, the publication this year of these two illuminating books raises the hope that the Strategy of Tension, which can only thrive in darkness and confusion, will ultimately have to be abandoned.
# # # # #
Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, The War on Truth, 9/11, Disinformation, and the Anatomy of Terrorism, Olive Branch Press, An imprint of Interlink Publishing, 2005, Northampton, MADaniele Ganser, NATO's Secret Armies, Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe, Frank Cass, 2005, London and New York Copyright © 1998-2005 Online JournalEmail Online Journal Editor
Cytations: reform is happening: "To Work Closely with Jordan to Destabilize"
Cytations: reform is happening: "To Work Closely with Jordan to Destabilize"
How Zarqawi and Other TerroristWild Goose Chases Were CreatedBy CyteIsrael's declared policy is to "work closely with Jordan to destabilize" the Middle East. Jordan is an old ally of Israel. The bombs in the hotel ceiling may have been part of this continued clandestine collaboration. But there is more.In the late 1970's, Jordanian intelligence helped Israel execute the most deceptive psychological operation of all times. The operation was headquartered in the town of Zarqa near Amman, Jordan. "Zarqawi" means "the man from Zarqa," and this Israeli-Jordanian cooperation created many mythical Zarqawis.Over beer in downtown Amman, Mossad agents discussed the details with their Jordanian counterparts.Leaflets were printed under the slogans "save your Muslim sisters from rape by infidels in Afghanistan" and "come train for jihad."Psychedelic Islamic choir chants were created, probably with professional help from Zionist musicians. The chants put listeners in some kind of a trance and moved them to sign up for training in Jordan.For those young Arabs to think they could train in Jordan to fight the Russians in Afghanistan is like Northern Irish Catholic boys believing that they could train with British cops in the London subway.Israel's old ally, Jordan, is a small police state and an enemy of Muslim causes. The king of Jordan ordered his troops to shoot at Arabs in 1947 to protect invading Israelis. Religious activists are tortured to death.But the leaflets told of Russians raping Muslim women while they are crying for help. It made Muslim men feel an extreme sense of duty and guilt. And the chants placed the young listeners on an imaginary mission in the middle of a war and it made them feel invincible.The poetry challenged mountains to come crumbling down and used similar fantastic exaggerations typical of Arabic poetry. Verses of the Koran were intermingled to give authority to the fantasy.These unique songs had very powerful psychological effects, especially on a young listener. Arabs had never heard anything like them.Men with beards from Jordanian intelligence played the roles of imams and martial arts trainers. Mossad agents who spoke Arabic gave lectures on the Islamic virtues of suicide bombings (there are none).Hundreds of Arabs from different countries flocked to the "training camps" in Zarqa.The young men were trained in martial arts, they ate hummus together, they listened to lectures and psychedelic chants for three months, and then, it was round-up time.The purpose of the operation was only to create an illusion of global Islamic suicide terrorism, not real terrorists.The operation was wrapped up because the illusion was already created, with real people and real records of "jihad training." Jordanian intelligence kept records that would convince foreign prosecutors.One of the remnants of this myth is Zarqawi, the man from Zarqa.Many trainees perished under torture in Jordanian prisons or were shipped to other Arab countries or to Afghanistan. Few escaped and rejoined normal life.To this day, the 25 year old, powerful psychedelic chants remain unmatched in Arabic music. Those caught listening to them are arrested for subversion.So how did these chants end up on the Baghdad sniper's video? [Video Missing from WWW 12/28/2005] The middle song on this tape is a recruitment song from 25 years ago. It is the one that calls on mountains to come crumbling down.I watched the high-quality video. It does not look like something prepared by a man on the run. A man who lists statistics bragging about killing hundreds of American troops, including several snipers.One of the targets is performing a Christian prayer, just before being shot dead.No, this is not a documentary of the work of one Iraqi resistance sniper named Juba.I believe that a team of non-Iraqi snipers are involved. I believe that this video is a psy-op meant to inflame Americans, an attempt to fuel the dying war between Christians and Muslims, a war that was started for the sake of Israel.P.S. Many Arabs have friends and relatives whose kids were lured to Jordan by this recruitment ploy. Just ask an Arab friend who is old enough to know. This is not fiction.
How Zarqawi and Other TerroristWild Goose Chases Were CreatedBy CyteIsrael's declared policy is to "work closely with Jordan to destabilize" the Middle East. Jordan is an old ally of Israel. The bombs in the hotel ceiling may have been part of this continued clandestine collaboration. But there is more.In the late 1970's, Jordanian intelligence helped Israel execute the most deceptive psychological operation of all times. The operation was headquartered in the town of Zarqa near Amman, Jordan. "Zarqawi" means "the man from Zarqa," and this Israeli-Jordanian cooperation created many mythical Zarqawis.Over beer in downtown Amman, Mossad agents discussed the details with their Jordanian counterparts.Leaflets were printed under the slogans "save your Muslim sisters from rape by infidels in Afghanistan" and "come train for jihad."Psychedelic Islamic choir chants were created, probably with professional help from Zionist musicians. The chants put listeners in some kind of a trance and moved them to sign up for training in Jordan.For those young Arabs to think they could train in Jordan to fight the Russians in Afghanistan is like Northern Irish Catholic boys believing that they could train with British cops in the London subway.Israel's old ally, Jordan, is a small police state and an enemy of Muslim causes. The king of Jordan ordered his troops to shoot at Arabs in 1947 to protect invading Israelis. Religious activists are tortured to death.But the leaflets told of Russians raping Muslim women while they are crying for help. It made Muslim men feel an extreme sense of duty and guilt. And the chants placed the young listeners on an imaginary mission in the middle of a war and it made them feel invincible.The poetry challenged mountains to come crumbling down and used similar fantastic exaggerations typical of Arabic poetry. Verses of the Koran were intermingled to give authority to the fantasy.These unique songs had very powerful psychological effects, especially on a young listener. Arabs had never heard anything like them.Men with beards from Jordanian intelligence played the roles of imams and martial arts trainers. Mossad agents who spoke Arabic gave lectures on the Islamic virtues of suicide bombings (there are none).Hundreds of Arabs from different countries flocked to the "training camps" in Zarqa.The young men were trained in martial arts, they ate hummus together, they listened to lectures and psychedelic chants for three months, and then, it was round-up time.The purpose of the operation was only to create an illusion of global Islamic suicide terrorism, not real terrorists.The operation was wrapped up because the illusion was already created, with real people and real records of "jihad training." Jordanian intelligence kept records that would convince foreign prosecutors.One of the remnants of this myth is Zarqawi, the man from Zarqa.Many trainees perished under torture in Jordanian prisons or were shipped to other Arab countries or to Afghanistan. Few escaped and rejoined normal life.To this day, the 25 year old, powerful psychedelic chants remain unmatched in Arabic music. Those caught listening to them are arrested for subversion.So how did these chants end up on the Baghdad sniper's video? [Video Missing from WWW 12/28/2005] The middle song on this tape is a recruitment song from 25 years ago. It is the one that calls on mountains to come crumbling down.I watched the high-quality video. It does not look like something prepared by a man on the run. A man who lists statistics bragging about killing hundreds of American troops, including several snipers.One of the targets is performing a Christian prayer, just before being shot dead.No, this is not a documentary of the work of one Iraqi resistance sniper named Juba.I believe that a team of non-Iraqi snipers are involved. I believe that this video is a psy-op meant to inflame Americans, an attempt to fuel the dying war between Christians and Muslims, a war that was started for the sake of Israel.P.S. Many Arabs have friends and relatives whose kids were lured to Jordan by this recruitment ploy. Just ask an Arab friend who is old enough to know. This is not fiction.
Al Franken Overrules Antonin Scalia
Al Franken Overrules Antonin Scalia
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is, supposedly, a very smart man. Indeed, he is frequently referred to as the intellectual giant on the current high court.
Yet, when Scalia was confronted by comedian and social commentator Al Franken with a basic question of legal ethics, it was the funny man, not the "serious" jurist, who proved to be the most knowledgeable.
The confrontation took place last week in New York City, where Scalia was the guest of Conversations on the Circle, a prestigious series of one-on-one interviews with Norman Pearlstine, the outgoing Time Inc. editor-in-chief.
After Pearlstine tossed a predictable set of softball questions to the justice, the session was opened to questions from the audience. Up popped Franken, the best-selling author and host of Air America's The Al Franken Show.
According to a scathing article that appeared in the Scalia-friendly New York Post, "Franken stood up in the back row and started talking about ‘judicial demeanor' and asking ‘hypothetically' about whether a judge should recuse himself if he had gone duck-hunting or flown in a private jet with a party in a case before his court."
Franken's reference was to Scalia's refusal to recuse himself from deliberations involving a lawsuit brought by public-interest groups that said Vice President Dick Cheney engaged in improper contacts with energy-industry executives and lobbyists while heading the Bush administration task force on energy policy. A federal court ordered Cheney to release documents related to his work with the task force, at which point the Bush administration appealed to the Supreme Court.
After the administration filed its appeal but before the court took the case, Cheney and Scalia were seen dining together in November, 2003, at an out-of-the-way restaurant on Maryland's eastern shore.
After the court agreed to take the case, Cheney and Scalia spent several days in January, 2004, hunting ducks at a remote camp in Louisiana.
Watchdog groups called for Scalia to recuse himself -- Charles Lewis, director of the Center for Public Integrity, argued that fraternization involving a justice and a litigant with a case before the court "gives the appearance of a tainted process where decisions are not made on the merits" -- but the justice responded by announcing that, "I do not think my impartiality could reasonably be questioned."
Several months later, Scalia and the other justices remanded the case back to the appellate court for further consideration -- a decision that effectively made the issue go away during the 2004 presidential contest.
Scalia, a friend of Cheney's since the days when they worked together in the administration of former President Gerald Ford, had participated in a decision that was of tremendous benefit to the vice president in an election year.
Yet, when Franken raised the issue at the Conversation on the Circle event, according to the Post, Scalia "chided Franken as if he were a delinquent schoolboy." And Time Warner chairman Dick Parsons said of author: "Al was not quite ready for prime time."
In fact, it was Scalia, not Franken, who was caught with his ethics down.
Scalia took issue with the comic's use of the word demeanor. "Demeanor is the wrong word. You mean ethics," the justice claimed, before adding that, "Ethics is governed by tradition. It has never been the case where you recuse because of friendship."
Actually, Scalia was wrong on all accounts. Because U.S. Supreme Court justices decide when to recuse themselves for ethical reasons, they operate under looser standards and softer scrutiny than other jurists. Thus, the term "demeanor" was precisely correct. Legal dictionaries define "demeanor" as one's "outward manner" and "way of conducting oneself." By any measure, with his refusal to recuse himself from a case involving his friend Cheney, Scalia chose to conduct himself in an unethical manner.
How do we know that?
The American Bar Association's Model Code of Judicial Conduct, certainly a reasonable measure for such decisions, is blunt with regards to these questions, stating that:
1.) "(A judge) shall act at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary."
2.) "A judge shall conduct all of the judge's extra-judicial activities so they do not cast reasonable doubt on the judge's capacity to act impartially as a judge."
3.) "A judge shall not allow family, social, political or other relationships to influence the judge's judicial conduct or judgment."
4.) "(A judge shall not) convey or permit others to convey the impression that they are in a special position to influence the judge."
Unfortunately, the ABA's model code does not apply -- in any official sense -- to high court justices.
But there is still no question that Scalia should have recused himself. The standard for U.S. Supreme Court Justices was set by the court itself in a majority opinion in the 1994 resolution of the case of Liteky v. United States. According to that opinion, recusal is required where "impartiality might reasonably be questioned." The opinion set a high standard, declaring that what matters "is not the reality of bias or prejudice, but its appearance."
Who was the stickler for ethics who wrote those words?
Justice Antonin Scalia.
An expanded paperback edition of John Nichols' biography of Vice President Dick Cheney, The Rise and Rise of Richard B. Cheney: Unlocking the Mysteries of the Most Powerful Vice President in American History (The New Press: 2005), is available nationwide at independent bookstores and at www.amazon.com. The book features an exclusive interview with Joe Wilson and a chapter on the vice president's use and misuse of intelligence. Publisher's Weekly describes the book as "a Fahrenheit 9/11 for Cheney" and Esquire magazine says it "reveals the inner Cheney."
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is, supposedly, a very smart man. Indeed, he is frequently referred to as the intellectual giant on the current high court.
Yet, when Scalia was confronted by comedian and social commentator Al Franken with a basic question of legal ethics, it was the funny man, not the "serious" jurist, who proved to be the most knowledgeable.
The confrontation took place last week in New York City, where Scalia was the guest of Conversations on the Circle, a prestigious series of one-on-one interviews with Norman Pearlstine, the outgoing Time Inc. editor-in-chief.
After Pearlstine tossed a predictable set of softball questions to the justice, the session was opened to questions from the audience. Up popped Franken, the best-selling author and host of Air America's The Al Franken Show.
According to a scathing article that appeared in the Scalia-friendly New York Post, "Franken stood up in the back row and started talking about ‘judicial demeanor' and asking ‘hypothetically' about whether a judge should recuse himself if he had gone duck-hunting or flown in a private jet with a party in a case before his court."
Franken's reference was to Scalia's refusal to recuse himself from deliberations involving a lawsuit brought by public-interest groups that said Vice President Dick Cheney engaged in improper contacts with energy-industry executives and lobbyists while heading the Bush administration task force on energy policy. A federal court ordered Cheney to release documents related to his work with the task force, at which point the Bush administration appealed to the Supreme Court.
After the administration filed its appeal but before the court took the case, Cheney and Scalia were seen dining together in November, 2003, at an out-of-the-way restaurant on Maryland's eastern shore.
After the court agreed to take the case, Cheney and Scalia spent several days in January, 2004, hunting ducks at a remote camp in Louisiana.
Watchdog groups called for Scalia to recuse himself -- Charles Lewis, director of the Center for Public Integrity, argued that fraternization involving a justice and a litigant with a case before the court "gives the appearance of a tainted process where decisions are not made on the merits" -- but the justice responded by announcing that, "I do not think my impartiality could reasonably be questioned."
Several months later, Scalia and the other justices remanded the case back to the appellate court for further consideration -- a decision that effectively made the issue go away during the 2004 presidential contest.
Scalia, a friend of Cheney's since the days when they worked together in the administration of former President Gerald Ford, had participated in a decision that was of tremendous benefit to the vice president in an election year.
Yet, when Franken raised the issue at the Conversation on the Circle event, according to the Post, Scalia "chided Franken as if he were a delinquent schoolboy." And Time Warner chairman Dick Parsons said of author: "Al was not quite ready for prime time."
In fact, it was Scalia, not Franken, who was caught with his ethics down.
Scalia took issue with the comic's use of the word demeanor. "Demeanor is the wrong word. You mean ethics," the justice claimed, before adding that, "Ethics is governed by tradition. It has never been the case where you recuse because of friendship."
Actually, Scalia was wrong on all accounts. Because U.S. Supreme Court justices decide when to recuse themselves for ethical reasons, they operate under looser standards and softer scrutiny than other jurists. Thus, the term "demeanor" was precisely correct. Legal dictionaries define "demeanor" as one's "outward manner" and "way of conducting oneself." By any measure, with his refusal to recuse himself from a case involving his friend Cheney, Scalia chose to conduct himself in an unethical manner.
How do we know that?
The American Bar Association's Model Code of Judicial Conduct, certainly a reasonable measure for such decisions, is blunt with regards to these questions, stating that:
1.) "(A judge) shall act at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary."
2.) "A judge shall conduct all of the judge's extra-judicial activities so they do not cast reasonable doubt on the judge's capacity to act impartially as a judge."
3.) "A judge shall not allow family, social, political or other relationships to influence the judge's judicial conduct or judgment."
4.) "(A judge shall not) convey or permit others to convey the impression that they are in a special position to influence the judge."
Unfortunately, the ABA's model code does not apply -- in any official sense -- to high court justices.
But there is still no question that Scalia should have recused himself. The standard for U.S. Supreme Court Justices was set by the court itself in a majority opinion in the 1994 resolution of the case of Liteky v. United States. According to that opinion, recusal is required where "impartiality might reasonably be questioned." The opinion set a high standard, declaring that what matters "is not the reality of bias or prejudice, but its appearance."
Who was the stickler for ethics who wrote those words?
Justice Antonin Scalia.
An expanded paperback edition of John Nichols' biography of Vice President Dick Cheney, The Rise and Rise of Richard B. Cheney: Unlocking the Mysteries of the Most Powerful Vice President in American History (The New Press: 2005), is available nationwide at independent bookstores and at www.amazon.com. The book features an exclusive interview with Joe Wilson and a chapter on the vice president's use and misuse of intelligence. Publisher's Weekly describes the book as "a Fahrenheit 9/11 for Cheney" and Esquire magazine says it "reveals the inner Cheney."
Monday, November 28, 2005
Not Closed - Newsweek National News - MSNBC.com
Case Not Closed - Newsweek National News - MSNBC.com: ...Bush administration junta has indicated it may still hold the accused “enemy combatant” indefinitely...
Tags: Padilla corruption illegal detention
Tags: Padilla corruption illegal detention
Sunday, November 27, 2005
A Journey That Ended in Anguish - Los Angeles Times
A Journey That Ended in Anguish - Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-colonel27nov27,0,6096413,full.story?coll=la-home-headlines
THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ
A Journey That Ended in Anguish
Col. Ted Westhusing, a military ethicist who volunteered to go to Iraq, was upset by what he saw. His apparent suicide raises questions.By T. Christian MillerTimes Staff WriterNovember 27, 2005"War is the hardest place to make moral judgments." Col. Ted Westhusing, Journal of Military Ethics*WASHINGTON — One hot, dusty day in June, Col. Ted Westhusing was found dead in a trailer at a military base near the Baghdad airport, a single gunshot wound to the head.The Army would conclude that he committed suicide with his service pistol. At the time, he was the highest-ranking officer to die in Iraq.The Army closed its case. But the questions surrounding Westhusing's death continue.Westhusing, 44, was no ordinary officer. He was one of the Army's leading scholars of military ethics, a full professor at West Point who volunteered to serve in Iraq to be able to better teach his students. He had a doctorate in philosophy; his dissertation was an extended meditation on the meaning of honor.So it was only natural that Westhusing acted when he learned of possible corruption by U.S. contractors in Iraq. A few weeks before he died, Westhusing received an anonymous complaint that a private security company he oversaw had cheated the U.S. government and committed human rights violations. Westhusing confronted the contractor and reported the concerns to superiors, who launched an investigation.In e-mails to his family, Westhusing seemed especially upset by one conclusion he had reached: that traditional military values such as duty, honor and country had been replaced by profit motives in Iraq, where the U.S. had come to rely heavily on contractors for jobs once done by the military.His death stunned all who knew him. Colleagues and commanders wondered whether they had missed signs of depression. He had been losing weight and not sleeping well. But only a day before his death, Westhusing won praise from a senior officer for his progress in training Iraqi police.His friends and family struggle with the idea that Westhusing could have killed himself. He was a loving father and husband and a devout Catholic. He was an extraordinary intellect and had mastered ancient Greek and Italian. He had less than a month before his return home. It seemed impossible that anything could crush the spirit of a man with such a powerful sense of right and wrong.On the Internet and in conversations with one another, Westhusing's family and friends have questioned the military investigation.A note found in his trailer seemed to offer clues. Written in what the Army determined was his handwriting, the colonel appeared to be struggling with a final question.How is honor possible in a war like the one in Iraq?Even at Jenks High School in suburban Tulsa, one of the biggest in Oklahoma, Westhusing stood out. He was starting point guard for the Trojans, a team that made a strong run for the state basketball championship his senior year. He was a National Merit Scholarship finalist. He was an officer in a fellowship of Christian athletes.Joe Holladay, who coached Westhusing before going on to become assistant coach of the University of North Carolina Tarheels, recalled Westhusing showing up at the gym at 7 a.m. to get in 100 extra practice shots."There was never a question of how hard he played or how much effort he put into something," Holladay said. "Whatever he did, he did well. He was the cream of the crop."When Westhusing entered West Point in 1979, the tradition-bound institution was just emerging from a cheating scandal that had shamed the Army. Restoring honor to the nation's preeminent incubator for Army leadership was the focus of the day.Cadets are taught to value duty, honor and country, and are drilled in West Point's strict moral code: A cadet will not lie, cheat or steal — or tolerate those who do.Westhusing embraced it. He was selected as honor captain for the entire academy his senior year. Col. Tim Trainor, a classmate and currently a West Point professor, said Westhusing was strict but sympathetic to cadets' problems. He remembered him as "introspective."Westhusing graduated third in his class in 1983 and became an infantry platoon leader. He received special forces training, served in Italy, South Korea and Honduras, and eventually became division operations officer for the 82nd Airborne, based at Ft. Bragg, N.C.He loved commanding soldiers. But he remained drawn to intellectual pursuits.In 2000, Westhusing enrolled in Emory University's doctoral philosophy program. The idea was to return to West Point to teach future leaders.He immediately stood out on the leafy Atlanta campus. Married with children, he was surrounded by young, single students. He was a deeply faithful Christian in a graduate program of professional skeptics.Plunged into academia, Westhusing held fast to his military ties. Students and professors recalled him jogging up steep hills in combat boots and camouflage, his rucksack full, to stay in shape. He wrote a paper challenging an essay that questioned the morality of patriotism."He was as straight an arrow as you would possibly find," said Aaron Fichtelberg, a fellow student and now a professor at the University of Delaware. "He seemed unshakable."In his 352-page dissertation, Westhusing discussed the ethics of war, focusing on examples of military honor from Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee to the Israeli army. It is a dense, searching and sometimes personal effort to define what, exactly, constitutes virtuous conduct in the context of the modern U.S. military."Born to be a warrior, I desire these answers not just for philosophical reasons, but for self-knowledge," he wrote in the opening pages.As planned, Westhusing returned to teach philosophy and English at West Point as a full professor with a guaranteed lifetime assignment. He settled into life on campus with his wife, Michelle, and their three young children.But amid the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, he told friends that he felt experience in Iraq would help him in teaching cadets. In the fall of 2004, he volunteered for duty."He wanted to serve, he wanted to use his skills, maybe he wanted some glory," recalled Nick Fotion, his advisor at Emory. "He wanted to go."In January, Westhusing began work on what the Pentagon considered the most important mission in Iraq: training Iraqi forces to take over security duties from U.S. troops.Westhusing's task was to oversee a private security company, Virginia-based USIS, which had contracts worth $79 million to train a corps of Iraqi police to conduct special operations.In March, Gen. David Petraeus, commanding officer of the Iraqi training mission, praised Westhusing's performance, saying he had exceeded "lofty expectations.""Thanks much, sir, but we can do much better and will," Westhusing wrote back, according to a copy of the Army investigation of his death that was obtained by The Times.In April, his mood seemed to have darkened. He worried over delays in training one of the police battalions.Then, in May, Westhusing received an anonymous four-page letter that contained detailed allegations of wrongdoing by USIS.The writer accused USIS of deliberately shorting the government on the number of trainers to increase its profit margin. More seriously, the writer detailed two incidents in which USIS contractors allegedly had witnessed or participated in the killing of Iraqis.A USIS contractor accompanied Iraqi police trainees during the assault on Fallouja last November and later boasted about the number of insurgents he had killed, the letter says. Private security contractors are not allowed to conduct offensive operations.In a second incident, the letter says, a USIS employee saw Iraqi police trainees kill two innocent Iraqi civilians, then covered it up. A USIS manager "did not want it reported because he thought it would put his contract at risk."Westhusing reported the allegations to his superiors but told one of them, Gen. Joseph Fil, that he believed USIS was complying with the terms of its contract.U.S. officials investigated and found "no contractual violations," an Army spokesman said. Bill Winter, a USIS spokesman, said the investigation "found these allegations to be unfounded." However, several U.S. officials said inquiries on USIS were ongoing. One U.S. military official, who, like others, requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case, said the inquiries had turned up problems, but nothing to support the more serious charges of human rights violations."As is typical, there may be a wisp of truth in each of the allegations," the official said.The letter shook Westhusing, who felt personally implicated by accusations that he was too friendly with USIS management, according to an e-mail in the report."This is a mess … dunno what I will do with this," he wrote home to his family May 18.The colonel began to complain to colleagues about "his dislike of the contractors," who, he said, "were paid too much money by the government," according to one captain."The meetings [with contractors] were never easy and always contentious. The contracts were in dispute and always under discussion," an Army Corps of Engineers official told investigators.By June, some of Westhusing's colleagues had begun to worry about his health. They later told investigators that he had lost weight and begun fidgeting, sometimes staring off into space. He seemed withdrawn, they said.His family was also becoming worried. He described feeling alone and abandoned. He sent home brief, cryptic e-mails, including one that said, "[I] didn't think I'd make it last night." He talked of resigning his command.Westhusing brushed aside entreaties for details, writing that he would say more when he returned home. The family responded with an outpouring of e-mails expressing love and support.His wife recalled a phone conversation that chilled her two weeks before his death."I heard something in his voice," she told investigators, according to a transcript of the interview. "In Ted's voice, there was fear. He did not like the nighttime and being alone."Westhusing's father, Keith, said the family did not want to comment for this article.On June 4, Westhusing left his office in the U.S.-controlled Green Zone of Baghdad to view a demonstration of Iraqi police preparedness at Camp Dublin, the USIS headquarters at the airport. He gave a briefing that impressed Petraeus and a visiting scholar. He stayed overnight at the USIS camp.That night in his office, a USIS secretary would later tell investigators, she watched Westhusing take out his 9-millimeter pistol and "play" with it, repeatedly unholstering the weapon.At a meeting the next morning to discuss construction delays, he seemed agitated. He stewed over demands for tighter vetting of police candidates, worried that it would slow the mission. He seemed upset over funding shortfalls.Uncharacteristically, he lashed out at the contractors in attendance, according to the Army Corps official. In three months, the official had never seen Westhusing upset."He was sick of money-grubbing contractors," the official recounted. Westhusing said that "he had not come over to Iraq for this."The meeting broke up shortly before lunch. About 1 p.m., a USIS manager went looking for Westhusing because he was scheduled for a ride back to the Green Zone. After getting no answer, the manager returned about 15 minutes later. Another USIS employee peeked through a window. He saw Westhusing lying on the floor in a pool of blood.The manager rushed into the trailer and tried to revive Westhusing. The manager told investigators that he picked up the pistol at Westhusing's feet and tossed it onto the bed."I knew people would show up," that manager said later in attempting to explain why he had handled the weapon. "With 30 years from military and law enforcement training, I did not want the weapon to get bumped and go off."After a three-month inquiry, investigators declared Westhusing's death a suicide. A test showed gunpowder residue on his hands. A shell casing in the room bore markings indicating it had been fired from his service revolver.Then there was the note.Investigators found it lying on Westhusing's bed. The handwriting matched his.The first part of the four-page letter lashes out at Petraeus and Fil. Both men later told investigators that they had not criticized Westhusing or heard negative comments from him. An Army review undertaken after Westhusing's death was complimentary of the command climate under the two men, a U.S. military official said.Most of the letter is a wrenching account of a struggle for honor in a strange land."I cannot support a msn [mission] that leads to corruption, human rights abuse and liars. I am sullied," it says. "I came to serve honorably and feel dishonored."Death before being dishonored any more."A psychologist reviewed Westhusing's e-mails and interviewed colleagues. She concluded that the anonymous letter had been the "most difficult and probably most painful stressor."She said that Westhusing had placed too much pressure on himself to succeed and that he was unusually rigid in his thinking. Westhusing struggled with the idea that monetary values could outweigh moral ones in war. This, she said, was a flaw."Despite his intelligence, his ability to grasp the idea that profit is an important goal for people working in the private sector was surprisingly limited," wrote Lt. Col. Lisa Breitenbach. "He could not shift his mind-set from the military notion of completing a mission irrespective of cost, nor could he change his belief that doing the right thing because it was the right thing to do should be the sole motivator for businesses."One military officer said he felt Westhusing had trouble reconciling his ideals with Iraq's reality. Iraq "isn't a black-and-white place," the officer said. "There's a lot of gray."Fil and Petraeus, Westhusing's commanding officers, declined to comment on the investigation, but they praised him. He was "an extremely bright, highly competent, completely professional and exceedingly hard-working officer. His death was truly tragic and was a tremendous blow," Petraeus said.Westhusing's family and friends are troubled that he died at Camp Dublin, where he was without a bodyguard, surrounded by the same contractors he suspected of wrongdoing. They wonder why the manager who discovered Westhusing's body and picked up his weapon was not tested for gunpowder residue.Mostly, they wonder how Col. Ted Westhusing — father, husband, son and expert on doing right — could have found himself in a place so dark that he saw no light."He's the last person who would commit suicide," said Fichtelberg, his graduate school colleague. "He couldn't have done it. He's just too damn stubborn."Westhusing's body was flown back to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. Waiting to receive it were his family and a close friend from West Point, a lieutenant colonel.In the military report, the unidentified colonel told investigators that he had turned to Michelle, Westhusing's wife, and asked what happened. She answered: "Iraq."
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-colonel27nov27,0,6096413,full.story?coll=la-home-headlines
THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ
A Journey That Ended in Anguish
Col. Ted Westhusing, a military ethicist who volunteered to go to Iraq, was upset by what he saw. His apparent suicide raises questions.By T. Christian MillerTimes Staff WriterNovember 27, 2005"War is the hardest place to make moral judgments." Col. Ted Westhusing, Journal of Military Ethics*WASHINGTON — One hot, dusty day in June, Col. Ted Westhusing was found dead in a trailer at a military base near the Baghdad airport, a single gunshot wound to the head.The Army would conclude that he committed suicide with his service pistol. At the time, he was the highest-ranking officer to die in Iraq.The Army closed its case. But the questions surrounding Westhusing's death continue.Westhusing, 44, was no ordinary officer. He was one of the Army's leading scholars of military ethics, a full professor at West Point who volunteered to serve in Iraq to be able to better teach his students. He had a doctorate in philosophy; his dissertation was an extended meditation on the meaning of honor.So it was only natural that Westhusing acted when he learned of possible corruption by U.S. contractors in Iraq. A few weeks before he died, Westhusing received an anonymous complaint that a private security company he oversaw had cheated the U.S. government and committed human rights violations. Westhusing confronted the contractor and reported the concerns to superiors, who launched an investigation.In e-mails to his family, Westhusing seemed especially upset by one conclusion he had reached: that traditional military values such as duty, honor and country had been replaced by profit motives in Iraq, where the U.S. had come to rely heavily on contractors for jobs once done by the military.His death stunned all who knew him. Colleagues and commanders wondered whether they had missed signs of depression. He had been losing weight and not sleeping well. But only a day before his death, Westhusing won praise from a senior officer for his progress in training Iraqi police.His friends and family struggle with the idea that Westhusing could have killed himself. He was a loving father and husband and a devout Catholic. He was an extraordinary intellect and had mastered ancient Greek and Italian. He had less than a month before his return home. It seemed impossible that anything could crush the spirit of a man with such a powerful sense of right and wrong.On the Internet and in conversations with one another, Westhusing's family and friends have questioned the military investigation.A note found in his trailer seemed to offer clues. Written in what the Army determined was his handwriting, the colonel appeared to be struggling with a final question.How is honor possible in a war like the one in Iraq?Even at Jenks High School in suburban Tulsa, one of the biggest in Oklahoma, Westhusing stood out. He was starting point guard for the Trojans, a team that made a strong run for the state basketball championship his senior year. He was a National Merit Scholarship finalist. He was an officer in a fellowship of Christian athletes.Joe Holladay, who coached Westhusing before going on to become assistant coach of the University of North Carolina Tarheels, recalled Westhusing showing up at the gym at 7 a.m. to get in 100 extra practice shots."There was never a question of how hard he played or how much effort he put into something," Holladay said. "Whatever he did, he did well. He was the cream of the crop."When Westhusing entered West Point in 1979, the tradition-bound institution was just emerging from a cheating scandal that had shamed the Army. Restoring honor to the nation's preeminent incubator for Army leadership was the focus of the day.Cadets are taught to value duty, honor and country, and are drilled in West Point's strict moral code: A cadet will not lie, cheat or steal — or tolerate those who do.Westhusing embraced it. He was selected as honor captain for the entire academy his senior year. Col. Tim Trainor, a classmate and currently a West Point professor, said Westhusing was strict but sympathetic to cadets' problems. He remembered him as "introspective."Westhusing graduated third in his class in 1983 and became an infantry platoon leader. He received special forces training, served in Italy, South Korea and Honduras, and eventually became division operations officer for the 82nd Airborne, based at Ft. Bragg, N.C.He loved commanding soldiers. But he remained drawn to intellectual pursuits.In 2000, Westhusing enrolled in Emory University's doctoral philosophy program. The idea was to return to West Point to teach future leaders.He immediately stood out on the leafy Atlanta campus. Married with children, he was surrounded by young, single students. He was a deeply faithful Christian in a graduate program of professional skeptics.Plunged into academia, Westhusing held fast to his military ties. Students and professors recalled him jogging up steep hills in combat boots and camouflage, his rucksack full, to stay in shape. He wrote a paper challenging an essay that questioned the morality of patriotism."He was as straight an arrow as you would possibly find," said Aaron Fichtelberg, a fellow student and now a professor at the University of Delaware. "He seemed unshakable."In his 352-page dissertation, Westhusing discussed the ethics of war, focusing on examples of military honor from Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee to the Israeli army. It is a dense, searching and sometimes personal effort to define what, exactly, constitutes virtuous conduct in the context of the modern U.S. military."Born to be a warrior, I desire these answers not just for philosophical reasons, but for self-knowledge," he wrote in the opening pages.As planned, Westhusing returned to teach philosophy and English at West Point as a full professor with a guaranteed lifetime assignment. He settled into life on campus with his wife, Michelle, and their three young children.But amid the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, he told friends that he felt experience in Iraq would help him in teaching cadets. In the fall of 2004, he volunteered for duty."He wanted to serve, he wanted to use his skills, maybe he wanted some glory," recalled Nick Fotion, his advisor at Emory. "He wanted to go."In January, Westhusing began work on what the Pentagon considered the most important mission in Iraq: training Iraqi forces to take over security duties from U.S. troops.Westhusing's task was to oversee a private security company, Virginia-based USIS, which had contracts worth $79 million to train a corps of Iraqi police to conduct special operations.In March, Gen. David Petraeus, commanding officer of the Iraqi training mission, praised Westhusing's performance, saying he had exceeded "lofty expectations.""Thanks much, sir, but we can do much better and will," Westhusing wrote back, according to a copy of the Army investigation of his death that was obtained by The Times.In April, his mood seemed to have darkened. He worried over delays in training one of the police battalions.Then, in May, Westhusing received an anonymous four-page letter that contained detailed allegations of wrongdoing by USIS.The writer accused USIS of deliberately shorting the government on the number of trainers to increase its profit margin. More seriously, the writer detailed two incidents in which USIS contractors allegedly had witnessed or participated in the killing of Iraqis.A USIS contractor accompanied Iraqi police trainees during the assault on Fallouja last November and later boasted about the number of insurgents he had killed, the letter says. Private security contractors are not allowed to conduct offensive operations.In a second incident, the letter says, a USIS employee saw Iraqi police trainees kill two innocent Iraqi civilians, then covered it up. A USIS manager "did not want it reported because he thought it would put his contract at risk."Westhusing reported the allegations to his superiors but told one of them, Gen. Joseph Fil, that he believed USIS was complying with the terms of its contract.U.S. officials investigated and found "no contractual violations," an Army spokesman said. Bill Winter, a USIS spokesman, said the investigation "found these allegations to be unfounded." However, several U.S. officials said inquiries on USIS were ongoing. One U.S. military official, who, like others, requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case, said the inquiries had turned up problems, but nothing to support the more serious charges of human rights violations."As is typical, there may be a wisp of truth in each of the allegations," the official said.The letter shook Westhusing, who felt personally implicated by accusations that he was too friendly with USIS management, according to an e-mail in the report."This is a mess … dunno what I will do with this," he wrote home to his family May 18.The colonel began to complain to colleagues about "his dislike of the contractors," who, he said, "were paid too much money by the government," according to one captain."The meetings [with contractors] were never easy and always contentious. The contracts were in dispute and always under discussion," an Army Corps of Engineers official told investigators.By June, some of Westhusing's colleagues had begun to worry about his health. They later told investigators that he had lost weight and begun fidgeting, sometimes staring off into space. He seemed withdrawn, they said.His family was also becoming worried. He described feeling alone and abandoned. He sent home brief, cryptic e-mails, including one that said, "[I] didn't think I'd make it last night." He talked of resigning his command.Westhusing brushed aside entreaties for details, writing that he would say more when he returned home. The family responded with an outpouring of e-mails expressing love and support.His wife recalled a phone conversation that chilled her two weeks before his death."I heard something in his voice," she told investigators, according to a transcript of the interview. "In Ted's voice, there was fear. He did not like the nighttime and being alone."Westhusing's father, Keith, said the family did not want to comment for this article.On June 4, Westhusing left his office in the U.S.-controlled Green Zone of Baghdad to view a demonstration of Iraqi police preparedness at Camp Dublin, the USIS headquarters at the airport. He gave a briefing that impressed Petraeus and a visiting scholar. He stayed overnight at the USIS camp.That night in his office, a USIS secretary would later tell investigators, she watched Westhusing take out his 9-millimeter pistol and "play" with it, repeatedly unholstering the weapon.At a meeting the next morning to discuss construction delays, he seemed agitated. He stewed over demands for tighter vetting of police candidates, worried that it would slow the mission. He seemed upset over funding shortfalls.Uncharacteristically, he lashed out at the contractors in attendance, according to the Army Corps official. In three months, the official had never seen Westhusing upset."He was sick of money-grubbing contractors," the official recounted. Westhusing said that "he had not come over to Iraq for this."The meeting broke up shortly before lunch. About 1 p.m., a USIS manager went looking for Westhusing because he was scheduled for a ride back to the Green Zone. After getting no answer, the manager returned about 15 minutes later. Another USIS employee peeked through a window. He saw Westhusing lying on the floor in a pool of blood.The manager rushed into the trailer and tried to revive Westhusing. The manager told investigators that he picked up the pistol at Westhusing's feet and tossed it onto the bed."I knew people would show up," that manager said later in attempting to explain why he had handled the weapon. "With 30 years from military and law enforcement training, I did not want the weapon to get bumped and go off."After a three-month inquiry, investigators declared Westhusing's death a suicide. A test showed gunpowder residue on his hands. A shell casing in the room bore markings indicating it had been fired from his service revolver.Then there was the note.Investigators found it lying on Westhusing's bed. The handwriting matched his.The first part of the four-page letter lashes out at Petraeus and Fil. Both men later told investigators that they had not criticized Westhusing or heard negative comments from him. An Army review undertaken after Westhusing's death was complimentary of the command climate under the two men, a U.S. military official said.Most of the letter is a wrenching account of a struggle for honor in a strange land."I cannot support a msn [mission] that leads to corruption, human rights abuse and liars. I am sullied," it says. "I came to serve honorably and feel dishonored."Death before being dishonored any more."A psychologist reviewed Westhusing's e-mails and interviewed colleagues. She concluded that the anonymous letter had been the "most difficult and probably most painful stressor."She said that Westhusing had placed too much pressure on himself to succeed and that he was unusually rigid in his thinking. Westhusing struggled with the idea that monetary values could outweigh moral ones in war. This, she said, was a flaw."Despite his intelligence, his ability to grasp the idea that profit is an important goal for people working in the private sector was surprisingly limited," wrote Lt. Col. Lisa Breitenbach. "He could not shift his mind-set from the military notion of completing a mission irrespective of cost, nor could he change his belief that doing the right thing because it was the right thing to do should be the sole motivator for businesses."One military officer said he felt Westhusing had trouble reconciling his ideals with Iraq's reality. Iraq "isn't a black-and-white place," the officer said. "There's a lot of gray."Fil and Petraeus, Westhusing's commanding officers, declined to comment on the investigation, but they praised him. He was "an extremely bright, highly competent, completely professional and exceedingly hard-working officer. His death was truly tragic and was a tremendous blow," Petraeus said.Westhusing's family and friends are troubled that he died at Camp Dublin, where he was without a bodyguard, surrounded by the same contractors he suspected of wrongdoing. They wonder why the manager who discovered Westhusing's body and picked up his weapon was not tested for gunpowder residue.Mostly, they wonder how Col. Ted Westhusing — father, husband, son and expert on doing right — could have found himself in a place so dark that he saw no light."He's the last person who would commit suicide," said Fichtelberg, his graduate school colleague. "He couldn't have done it. He's just too damn stubborn."Westhusing's body was flown back to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. Waiting to receive it were his family and a close friend from West Point, a lieutenant colonel.In the military report, the unidentified colonel told investigators that he had turned to Michelle, Westhusing's wife, and asked what happened. She answered: "Iraq."
The Loft � Blog Archive � Being Thankful for Strong Republicans
The Loft � Blog Archive � Being Thankful for Strong Republicans
Blogger Thoughts: Catapulting the Propaganda!
Blogger Thoughts: Catapulting the Propaganda!
Law news and Law Reports from The Times - Times Online
Law news and Law Reports from The Times - Times Online
The Times
November 22, 2005Milton was right. Truth is stronger than factionBy David Pannick, QC
“IT IS a fair summary of history,” as Mr Justice Frankfurter observed in the United States Supreme Court in 1950, “that the safeguards of liberty have frequently been forged in controversies involving not very nice people”. The Government’s proposals, in the Terrorism Bill, to make it a criminal offence to encourage terrorism and to glorify terrorism undoubtedly address the conduct of some very unpleasant people who sympathise with the July 7 London bombings. But the proposals are unprincipled, unjustified, and unlikely to make any significant contribution to the battle against terrorism.
Clause 1 of the Terrorism Bill will make it a criminal offence, punishable by imprisonment for up to seven years, for a person to make a statement “that is likely to be understood” as “a direct or indirect encouragement or other inducement” to commit, prepare or instigate acts of terrorism. Defendants are guilty of this offence if they intend their statements to be so understood, or are reckless as to whether they are likely to be so understood. The Bill adds that indirect encouragement of terrorism covers any statement that “glorifies the commission or preparation (whether in the past, in the future or generally)” of any terrorist acts, so as to suggest emulation of such conduct to members of the public.
“Terrorism” is very broadly defined by the Terrorism Act 2000 to cover not just suicide bombings but any action involving serious violence against a person or serious damage to property, so long as the conduct is designed to influence the Government or to intimidate the public and is done in order to advance a political, religious or ideological cause. There are three main problems with this legislative proposal.
The first is that the Government has failed to identify how existing law is deficient. It has long been a crime to incite another to commit murder, or any other serious offence. Incitement may be general in nature. In 1881, in R v Most, Lord Chief Justice Coleridge and four other judges upheld the conviction of a man who had published a newspaper article praising the recent murder of the tsar and commending it to revolutionaries throughout the world. If prosecutions are not being brought today against Islamic militants who encourage their followers to kill infidels, that is not because of a gap in the law, but because of the absence of evidence or because of a (debatable) judgment by prosecuting authorities as to the wisdom of giving a platform to such defendants.
The second problem is the breadth of the proposed new offence and the consequent inhibitions it places on political debate. I could be guilty of unlawful “encouragement” by “glorification” if I write an article assessing Islamic fundamentalism or animal liberation or “fathers for justice”, drawing attention to previous examples of violent action to secure political goals, praising (for example) the conduct of the ANC during the apartheid years in South Africa, or those who plotted to assassinate Hitler in Germany during the Second World War. Because the new offence would apply to the encouragement of terrorism here or abroad, I could not suggest in public that the Burmese or the Zimbabwean people might be justified in damaging government property in their country in an attempt to overthrow their oppressive regimes.
There is a very heavy onus on the Government to justify preventing people from stating their opinion on political issues. One of the most valuable features of the society we are defending against terrorist attack is that we have the right to express uncensored opinions, however controversial, about government. Vigorous debate promotes the adoption of wise and effective policies. The right to say what we think is an important safety valve, the removal of which makes violence more likely.
Perhaps none of this would matter if Clause 1 made a real contribution to preventing another July 7 bombing. The third problem with the proposal is that it is unrealistic to think that it will alter the views of those irrational and inhuman enough to believe that it is appropriate to set off a bomb on a bus or a train in supposed support of the policies (whatever they are) of Islamic fundamentalism.
In our society, any statements purporting to defend such indefensible conduct rightly attract widespread revulsion. To make it a criminal offence to express sympathy with such behaviour would drive the warped message underground and prevent the proponent from being exposed, answered, condemned and (if a foreign citizen) deported. I prefer to know which people, representing which groups, seek to justify what happened on July 7. Some of us still hold to the unfashionable principle stated by John Milton in Areopagitica (1644): “. . . who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?”
The author is a practising barrister at Blackstone Chambers in the Temple and a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford
The Times
November 22, 2005Milton was right. Truth is stronger than factionBy David Pannick, QC
“IT IS a fair summary of history,” as Mr Justice Frankfurter observed in the United States Supreme Court in 1950, “that the safeguards of liberty have frequently been forged in controversies involving not very nice people”. The Government’s proposals, in the Terrorism Bill, to make it a criminal offence to encourage terrorism and to glorify terrorism undoubtedly address the conduct of some very unpleasant people who sympathise with the July 7 London bombings. But the proposals are unprincipled, unjustified, and unlikely to make any significant contribution to the battle against terrorism.
Clause 1 of the Terrorism Bill will make it a criminal offence, punishable by imprisonment for up to seven years, for a person to make a statement “that is likely to be understood” as “a direct or indirect encouragement or other inducement” to commit, prepare or instigate acts of terrorism. Defendants are guilty of this offence if they intend their statements to be so understood, or are reckless as to whether they are likely to be so understood. The Bill adds that indirect encouragement of terrorism covers any statement that “glorifies the commission or preparation (whether in the past, in the future or generally)” of any terrorist acts, so as to suggest emulation of such conduct to members of the public.
“Terrorism” is very broadly defined by the Terrorism Act 2000 to cover not just suicide bombings but any action involving serious violence against a person or serious damage to property, so long as the conduct is designed to influence the Government or to intimidate the public and is done in order to advance a political, religious or ideological cause. There are three main problems with this legislative proposal.
The first is that the Government has failed to identify how existing law is deficient. It has long been a crime to incite another to commit murder, or any other serious offence. Incitement may be general in nature. In 1881, in R v Most, Lord Chief Justice Coleridge and four other judges upheld the conviction of a man who had published a newspaper article praising the recent murder of the tsar and commending it to revolutionaries throughout the world. If prosecutions are not being brought today against Islamic militants who encourage their followers to kill infidels, that is not because of a gap in the law, but because of the absence of evidence or because of a (debatable) judgment by prosecuting authorities as to the wisdom of giving a platform to such defendants.
The second problem is the breadth of the proposed new offence and the consequent inhibitions it places on political debate. I could be guilty of unlawful “encouragement” by “glorification” if I write an article assessing Islamic fundamentalism or animal liberation or “fathers for justice”, drawing attention to previous examples of violent action to secure political goals, praising (for example) the conduct of the ANC during the apartheid years in South Africa, or those who plotted to assassinate Hitler in Germany during the Second World War. Because the new offence would apply to the encouragement of terrorism here or abroad, I could not suggest in public that the Burmese or the Zimbabwean people might be justified in damaging government property in their country in an attempt to overthrow their oppressive regimes.
There is a very heavy onus on the Government to justify preventing people from stating their opinion on political issues. One of the most valuable features of the society we are defending against terrorist attack is that we have the right to express uncensored opinions, however controversial, about government. Vigorous debate promotes the adoption of wise and effective policies. The right to say what we think is an important safety valve, the removal of which makes violence more likely.
Perhaps none of this would matter if Clause 1 made a real contribution to preventing another July 7 bombing. The third problem with the proposal is that it is unrealistic to think that it will alter the views of those irrational and inhuman enough to believe that it is appropriate to set off a bomb on a bus or a train in supposed support of the policies (whatever they are) of Islamic fundamentalism.
In our society, any statements purporting to defend such indefensible conduct rightly attract widespread revulsion. To make it a criminal offence to express sympathy with such behaviour would drive the warped message underground and prevent the proponent from being exposed, answered, condemned and (if a foreign citizen) deported. I prefer to know which people, representing which groups, seek to justify what happened on July 7. Some of us still hold to the unfashionable principle stated by John Milton in Areopagitica (1644): “. . . who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?”
The author is a practising barrister at Blackstone Chambers in the Temple and a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford
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