30 April, 2009

private industry and state secrets

in the US of Angst.. the intermingling between Wall Street financial crimes and Military crimes against humanity and technological fascism ...
IS NOT A PROBLEM. There is no awareness that this is exactly what caused German elites to hire themselves a Hitler...

NISC Appoints Dr. Donald Kerr to its Board of Directors

By: Business Wire Apr. 29, 2009 01:34 PM

National Interest Security Company, LLC (NISC), a company controlled by DC Capital Partners, LLC, announced today that Dr. Donald Kerr, former Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, has been named to the NISC Board of Directors. He joins other distinguished independent Directors, including former Director of the CIA, General Michael Hayden; former Senator Chuck Hagel; General Tony Zinni (USMC, ret.); General Michael Hagee (USMC, ret.); Ambassador Henry Crumpton; VADM Stephen Loftus (USN, ret.); Rob Hytner; and Kara Bue. In addition to serving on the Board, Dr. Kerr will be assisting NISC with the development of technology solutions and strategies for its clients.

Thomas J. Campbell, President of DC Capital Partners and Chairman of NISC, said, .Don.s 40-plus years of experience and leadership in the Intelligence Community, Federal law enforcement, and the Department of Energy will be invaluable as we navigate the path to becoming a leading provider of innovative information management and technology solutions. We are privileged to have Dr. Kerr join our team..

Dr. Kerr has had a notable career in the Intelligence Community. In 2007, he was confirmed by the Senate as Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence. Prior to his position at ODNI, Kerr was the Director of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). In 2005, he was appointed Assistant to the Secretary of the Air Force, Intelligence Space Technology. Before that, he was Deputy Director of Science and Technology at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), where he received the CIA Distinguished Intelligence Medal in September 2005.

.We are honored to have Don Kerr join our Board of Directors,. added Andrew B. Maner, NISC CEO. .He has served our nation with excellence and has played an important role in designing solutions and strategies for effective and efficient government. He brings a tremendous breadth of expertise and history to assist NISC in serving its customers and their mission in the Intelligence, Defense, Energy, and Homeland Security communities..

Dr. Kerr has also held prominent positions in Federal law enforcement and the Energy sector, including Assistant Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, where he was responsible for the Laboratory Division; and service with the Department of Energy, where he received the DOE Outstanding Service Award in 1979. Dr. Kerr was Director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1979 to 1985.

About National Interest Security Company, LLC:

Headquartered in Fairfax, Virginia, NISC is a leading provider of innovative information technology, information management, and management and technology consulting solutions in support of national interest and security initiatives for the Intelligence Community and the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Energy, as well as other key Federal Civilian and Federal Health agencies. NISC's expertise includes software and systems engineering, cyber security, biometrics, document and media exploitation, decision support and portfolio analysis, enterprise architecture, strategic management systems, intelligence operations and analysis support, and network and critical infrastructure protection. Representative missions currently include, but are not limited to, providing analytically-based portfolio and capability prototyping to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence; conversion, hosting, petascale data management, and multi-lingual data exploitation for the Intelligence Community; application development and systems support to the U.S. Cyber Security effort; critical program management support to the National Cyber Security Division of the Department of Homeland Security; and strategy, assessment, policy, planning, and execution for the Department of Energy. NISC has more than 1,000 employees and represents the successful integration of mission-oriented companies into an industry-leading enterprise that offers a full continuum of capabilities. Additional information on NISC can be found at www.nisc-llc.com.

About DC Capital Partners, LLC:

DC Capital Partners, LLC, is a private equity firm with offices in Washington, DC, and Alexandria, VA, focused on investing primarily in the defense and government sectors. Additional information on DC Capital Partners can be found at www.dccapitalpartners.com.

Published Apr. 29, 2009

Bookmark and Share
posted by u2r2h at Thursday, April 30, 2009 0 comments

29 April, 2009

"errant" drones -- Oh! We didn't know!!

Like Nazis did not know where the V2 rockets would hit in London..

Errant Drone Attacks Spur Militants in Pakistan
By Gareth Porter*

WASHINGTON, Apr 15 (IPS) - The U.S. programme of drone aircraft strikes against higher-ranking officials of al Qaeda and allied militant organisations, which has been touted by proponents as having eliminated nine of the 20 top al Qaeda leaders, is actually weakening Pakistan.s defence against the insurgency of the Islamic militants there by killing large numbers of civilians based on faulty intelligence and discrediting the Pakistani military, according to data from the Pakistani government and interviews with senior analysts.

Some evidence indicates, moreover, that the top officials in the Barack Obama administration now see the programme more as an incentive for the Pakistani military to take a more aggressive posture toward the militants rather than as an effective tool against the insurgents.

Although the strikes have been sold to the U.S. public as a way to weaken and disrupt al Qaeda, which is an explicitly counter-terrorist objective, al Qaeda is not actually the main threat to U.S. security emanating from Pakistan, according to some analysts. The real threat comes from the broader, rapidly growing insurgency of Islamic militants against the shaky Pakistani government and military, they observe, and the drone strikes are a strategically inappropriate approach to that problem.

"Al Qaeda has very little to do with the militancy in the tribal areas of Pakistan," said Marvin Weinbaum, former Afghanistan and Pakistan analyst at the Bureau of Intelligence Research at the U.S. Department of State and now scholar-in-residence at the Middle East Institute.

John McCreary, a senior intelligence analyst for the Defence Intelligence Agency until his retirement in 2006, agrees with Weinbaum.s assessment. "The drone programme is supposed to be all about al Qaeda," he told IPS in an interview, but in fact, "the threat is much larger."

McCreary observes that the targets in recent months "have been expanded to include Pakistani Pashtun militants." The administration apparently had dealt with that contradiction by effectively broadening the definition of al Qaeda, according to McCreary

Ambassador James Dobbins, the director of National Security Studies at the Rand Corporation, who maintains contacts with a range of administration national security officials, told IPS in an interview that the drone strikes in Pakistan are aimed "in the short and medium term" at the counter-terrorism objective of preventing attacks on Washington and other capitals.

But as they have shifted to Pakistani Taliban targets, Dobbins said, "To degree the targets are insurgents and are Pakistanis not Arabs it would be correct to assess that they are part of an insurgency." That raises the question, he said, whether the drone programme "is feeding the insurgency and popular support for it."

The drone program cannot even be expected to be a decisive factor in al Qaeda.s ability to operate, according to McCreary. "All you can do with drones is decapitate leadership," McCreary told IPS in a recent interview. "Even in relation to al Qaeda.s organisational dynamics, it has only limited, temporary impact."

McCreary warned that the drone strikes will cause much more serious problems when they increase and expand into new parts of Pakistan as the administration is now seriously considering, according to a New York Times article Apr. 7. "Now al Qaeda is fleeing to other cities, "said McCreary. "The programme is escalating and having ripple effects that are incalculable."

McCreary said one of the longer-term consequences of the attacks is "the public humiliation of the Pakistan Army as a defender of the national patrimony". That effect of striking Pakistani targets with U.S. aircraft is "the least understood dimension of the attacks, the most discounted and most dangerous". McCreary said the attacks. "ensure that successive generations of Pakistani military officers will be viscerally anti-American."

Administration officials have defended the drone strikes programme as necessary to weaken and disrupt al Qaeda to prevent terrorist attacks, and officials have leaked to the media in recent weeks the fact that the programme has killed nine of 20 top al Qaeda leaders.

But the Pakistani government leaked data last week to The News in Lahore showing that only 10 drone attacks out of 60 carried out from Jan. 29, 2009 to Apr. 8, 2009 actually hit al Qaeda leaders, while 50 other strikes were based on faulty intelligence and killed a total of 537 civilians but no al Qaeda leaders.

The drone strikes have been even less accurate in their targeting in 2009 than they had been from 2006 through 2008, according to the detailed data from Pakistani authorities. Of 14 drone strikes carried out in those 99 days, only one was successful, killing a senior al Qaeda commander in North Waziristan and its external operations chief. The other 13 strikes had killed 152 people without netting a single al Qaeda leader.

Dobbins, speaking to IPS before the Pakistani data on drone strikes was released, said it was difficult for an outsider to evaluate the benefits of the programme but that "we can assess that there is a significant price that is being paid" in terms of the impact on Pakistani opinion toward U.S. efforts to stem the tide of the insurgency.

Dobbins said one of the reasons for the continuing drone attacks, despite the high political price, is that "it is an incentive aimed prodding the Pakistani government." He said he believes the United States would be happy to trade off the strikes in return for a more effective counterinsurgency campaign by the Pakistani government.

Further bolstering that interpretation of the objective of continued drone strikes is a report, in the same story in The News, that the most recent strike took place only hours after U.S. officials had reportedly received a rejection by Pakistani authorities Apr. 8 of a proposal for joint military operations against militant organisations in the tribal areas from U.S. South Asia envoy Richard Holbrooke and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen, who were visiting Islamabad.

Other analysts suggest that the programme has acquired bureaucratic and political momentum because it a politically important symbol that the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan are against al Qaeda and because the United States has no other policy instrument to demonstrate that it is doing something about the growth of Islamic groups that share al Qaeda.s extremist Islamic militancy.

McCreary believes that the programme is related to the fear of the Obama administration that it would be unable to get support for operations in Afghanistan if it didn.t focus on al Qaeda. "I think it was a way to link Afghanistan operations to al Qaeda," he said.

"That suggests to me that the tactic for motivating domestic support is influencing the policy," said McCreary. The former senior DIA analyst added that the drone strike programme "has acquired its own momentum, which is now having immense consequences."

Weinbaum told IPS in an interview that the drone attacks are being continued, "primarily because we.re enormously frustrated, and they represent the only thing we really have."

*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=46511

Bookmark and Share
posted by u2r2h at Wednesday, April 29, 2009 0 comments

27 April, 2009

Suicide Bombs - remote control

NOTE: Not all suicide bombs are intetional suicide.
Mossad CIA DIA ONI and related murderous "Agencies" are
activly formenting terror to cause unrest and assassinate..

Remember Sergio DeMello de mello BALI bomb MADRID bombings etc


March 31, 2009

CHILDREN OF DARKNESS - KILLING .THEM. - PARTS 1 & 2

Al-Qaeda - Who Else?

On March 23, BBC online reported another bloody day in Iraq:

.It was the second bomb attack in Iraq on Monday, with an earlier explosion near the capital. Baghdad, killing at least eight people.

.The BBC's Hugh Sykes, in Baghdad, says al-Qaeda have launched several attacks in Diyala since losing support in other parts of Iraq..
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7959918.stm)

The foe, naturally, was the global bad guy, .al-Qaeda.. Thirty years ago the BBC would have declared them .Communists. or .Marxists.. We wrote to the BBC.s .man in Baghdad. the same day:

Dear Hugh

Hope you're well. A BBC online report today says:

"The BBC's Hugh Sykes, in Baghdad, says al-Qaeda have launched several attacks in Diyala since losing support in other parts of Iraq."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7959918.stm

What is the evidence that al-Qaeda, rather than some other insurgent group, were behind the attacks, please?

Best wishes

David Edwards

Sykes replied the following day:

Hello David

No proof, but circumstantial evidence and reasonable presumption of AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq] involvement - very much their modus operandum. Suicide attacks are their signature method, and this was a dramatic detonation suggesting a lot of explosive - again, very AQI.

And...who else would do this?

So, process of elimination, history of AQI attacks in Diyala etc.

And the logic of it Sunni Arab vs Iraqi Kurds. As a man in Jalawla told Reuters:

"Al-Qaida is targeting the Kurds because it believes that
we are involved in the political process and collaborating
with the Americans."

Best wishes

Hugh

This was a speedy and amicable reply from Sykes. But we hesitate to call it serious journalism. .As a man in Jalawla told Reuters.! How to describe this level of evidence in response to a serious question on a matter of such importance?

Sykes wrote: "No proof, but circumstantial evidence and reasonable presumption of AQI involvement."

And yet when we asked why the BBC had failed to report the use of banned weapons by US forces in their November 2004 assault on Falljuah, the BBC.s director of news, Helen Boaden, told us:

.We are committed to evidence-based journalism. We have not been able to establish that the US used banned chemical weapons and committed other atrocities against civilians in Falluja last November [2004]. Inquiries on the ground at the time and subsequently indicate that their use is unlikely to have occurred.. (Email forwarded by numerous Media Lens readers, July 13 onwards, 2005)

The BBC later accepted that such evidence did indeed exist.

Sykes also asked: "And...who else would do this?"

There is no proof, just circumstantial evidence, presumption... and we can.t think of anyone else, so: "al-Qaeda have launched several attacks".

Sykes.s indifference to evidence is understandable. In a sense it is beside the point - enemies of the West are killing people, and enemies of the West are currently labelled .al-Qaeda.. It was ever thus. As Piero Gleijeses, professor of American foreign policy at Johns Hopkins University, said of Guatemala in 1988:

"Just as the Indian was branded a savage beast to justify his exploitation, so those who sought social reform were branded communists to justify their persecution." (Gleijeses, Politics and Culture in Guatemala, Michigan, 1988, p.392)

Sykes was simply stating a propaganda fact - the identity is defined by the action, not by the agent. Thirty second soundbites require Manichean propaganda: .We good, they bad..

Venturing into the real world, we can speculate about, even investigate, the actual identities and motives of the suicide bombers.

On September 23, 2005, the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington released a report that accused the US of .feeding the myth. of foreign fighters (i.e. al-Qaeda) in Iraq, who accounted for less than 10 per cent of a resistance then estimated at 30,000. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/sep/23/iraq.ewenmacaskill)

In May 2007, the renowned investigative reporter Seymour Hersh told Democracy Now!:

.I do know that within the last month, maybe four, four-and-a-half weeks ago, they [the Bush administration] made a decision that because of the totally dwindling support for the war in Iraq, we go back to the al-Qaeda card, and we start talking about al-Qaeda. And the next thing you know, right after that, Bush went to the Southern Command . this was a month ago . and talked, mentioned al-Qaeda twenty-seven times in his speech...

.All of a sudden, the poor Iraqi Sunnis, I mean, they can.t do anything without al-Qaeda. It.s only al-Qaeda that.s dropping the bombs and causing mayhem. It.s not the Sunni and Shia insurgents or militias. And this policy just gets picked up [by the media], although there.s absolutely no empirical basis. Most of the pros will tell you the foreign fighters are a couple percent, and then they.re sort of leaderless in the sense that there.s no overall direction of the various foreign fighters. You could call them al-Qaeda. You can also call them jihadists and Salafists that want to die fighting the Americans or the occupiers in Iraq and they come across the border... there.s no attempt to suggest there.s any significant coordination of these groups by bin Laden or anybody else, and the press just goes gaga... It.s just amazing to me, you guys.. (http://www.democracynow.org/2007/5/24/ seymour_hersh_u_s_indirectly_backed)

Robert Pape, author of the book, Dying to Win: Why Suicide Terrorists Do It, wrote in 2006:

"Researching my book, which covered all 462 suicide bombings around the globe, I had colleagues scour Lebanese sources to collect martyr videos, pictures and testimonials and biographies of the Hizbollah bombers. Of the 41, we identified the names, birth places and other personal data for 38. We were shocked to find that only eight were Islamic fundamentalists; 27 were from leftist political groups such as the Lebanese Communist Party and the Arab Socialist Union; three were Christians, including a female secondary school teacher with a college degree. All were born in Lebanon.

"What these suicide attackers - and their heirs today - shared was not a religious or political ideology but simply a commitment to resisting a foreign occupation." (Pape, 'What we still don't understand about Hizbollah,' The Observer, August 6, 2006; http://www.guardian.co.uk /commentisfree/2006/aug/06/israel.syria)

And so the answer to Sykes.s question: .And...who else would do this?.? Any number of people committed to .resisting a foreign occupation. for any number of political and religious reasons. How ugly, how obviously convenient, to lump all opposition together under the name of the West.s great bete noire, .al-Qaeda..
That.s What Makes Us Different To Them

As we have noted before, journalists are highly evolved intellectual herd animals. They possess sophisticated sense organs capable of detecting minute changes in the propaganda environment. Commentators are currently well aware, for example, that the United States has declared a willingness to negotiate with the Taliban in Afghanistan - the standard last resort when the costs of violence become so high that rational solutions are deemed preferable. No surprise, then, that the Guardian's Madeleine Bunting is able to perceive a level of complexity in that ruined country that so rarely features in reporting from Iraq:

.To add to the confusion we don't even know who is our enemy and who is our ally. Taliban is a crude catch-all term which is of little help in Afghanistan's immensely complex, fragmented politics of tribe, clan and region. These groupings judge how best to secure their position and shift their allegiances accordingly.. (Bunting, 'Leaders have not shown the courage to explain what the war really means,' The Guardian, March 23, 2009; http://www.guardian.co.uk/ commentisfree/2009/mar/23/afghanistan-military-terrorism)

Talking to the Taliban does not mean recognising their humanity, however. The BBC reported last month:

"The hospital at Camp Bastion, the UK's main military base in Helmand, occasionally treats enemy forces that have been wounded.

.Ms Gibbons said treating them was no different to treating any other patient but added that medics needed to be more alert.

".At the end of the day he could have been a normal person,. she said.

".The Geneva Convention requires us to give the same level of medical treatment as our forces.

".We probably wouldn't get the same back but that's what makes us different to them.." (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/ scotland/south_of_scotland/7912675.stm)

The BBC saw fit to publish this classic propaganda view of the enemy (no inverted commas required - they are the enemy of the state +and+ the BBC). Who would guess that Auntie Beeb is not Big Brother, but is ostensibly independent of state control?

The racist contempt is as deeply embedded as the reporting. Former BBC (now Al-Jazeera) reporter, Rageh Omaar, describes the BBC as .a white man's club.. But there is much more to it than that, as Omaar explained to the Guardian in 2007:

.It's the mentality. I'm in some ways guilty of this - I went to public school, I went to Oxford. I speak at a lot of schools with Somali kids and they say, .How do I become a journalist? We may be from the same community, but I don't have your accent.. So it's a class thing rather than about being white necessarily. It's much more subtle.. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/ media/2007/feb/15/broadcasting.bbc)


Part 2

To be fair to the BBC, Rageh Omaar.s observation generalises: the whole of British journalism is a .white man.s club. dominated by the .class thing..

In March, media magnate Rupert Murdoch received the American Jewish Committee.s National Human Relations Award. The plaudits heaped on Murdoch recalled the words of the 4th century Buddhist poet, Aryasura:

.When virtue is given as a name to one devoid of virtue, it has a harsh and grating sound, as if it were contempt instead of praise.. (Aryasura, The Marvelous Companion, Dharma Publishing, 1983, p.127)

The man with so much influence over what the world knows and thinks gave an idea of his contribution to .human relations.:

.Hamas has been raining down rockets on Israeli civilians. Like all terrorist attacks, the aim is to spread fear within free societies, and to paralyze its leaders. This Israel cannot afford. I do not need to tell anyone in this room that no sovereign nation can sit by while its civilian population is attacked.. (http://www.ajc.org/site/c.ijITI2PHKoG/b.5018279/ k.7184/AJC_Honors_Rupert_Murdoch.htm)

David Bromwich, professor of literature at Yale university, puts the argument in perspective:

"We are offered an analogy: what would Americans do if rockets were fired from Canada or Cuba?... [But] the rockets are assumed to come suddenly without cause. The choking of the Gaza Strip by land, sea, and air, the rejection by the US of the Palestinian Unity Government, the coup launched by Fatah and bankrolled by the US, which ended in the seizure of power by Hamas . all of this happened before the rockets fell from the sky. It is as if it belonged to a pre-historic time." (http://www.zmag.org/zmag /viewArticle/20746)

The idea that Israel.s massacre of 1,400 Palestinians was intended to stop rocket attacks is hard to reconcile with the fact that Israel deliberately provoked those attacks when it broke the ceasefire with its November 4, 2008 attack killing six people in Gaza. As we have discussed (http://www.medialens.org/alerts/ 09/090204_the_bbc_impartiality.php), darker motives are hidden beneath the declared need to act in self-defence.

The Los Angeles Times reported last week:

.The winter assault on the Gaza Strip was officially portrayed in Israel as an attempt to quell rocket fire by militants of Hamas. But some soldiers say they also were lectured about a more ambitious aim: to banish non-Jews from the biblical land of Israel.

".This rabbi comes to us and says the fight is between the children of light and the children of darkness,. a reserve sergeant said, recalling a training camp encounter. .His message was clear: .This is a war against an entire people, not against specific terrorists.. The whole thing was turned into something very religious and messianic.." (Richard Boudreaux, .Israeli army rabbis criticized for stance on Gaza assault - Some Israeli soldiers say military rabbis cast the offensive against Hamas rockets as a fight to expel non-Jews,. Los Angeles Times, March 24, 2009; http://www.latimes.com/news/la-fg-israel-holywar25- 2009mar25,0,3336606.story?track=ntothtml)

The LA Times added:

.In testimony reported by Israeli news media and in interviews with The Times, Gaza veterans said rabbis advised army units to show the enemy no mercy and called for resettlement of the Palestinian enclave by Jews.

".The rabbis were all over, in every unit,. said Yehuda Shaul, a retired army officer whose human rights group, Breaking the Silence, has taken testimony from dozens of Gaza veterans. .It was quite well organized.."

Little or none of this exists for the .white man.s club,. Murdoch included. He warned, instead, against the notion that Israel was in any way in the ascendancy:

.It.s true that Israel.s conventional superiority means it could flatten Gaza if it wanted. But the Israeli Defense Forces . unlike Hamas . are accountable to a democratically chosen government.

.No matter which party is in the majority, every Israeli government knows it will be held accountable by its people and by the world for the lives that are lost because of its decisions..

And yet .the world., notably the United States, allowed Israel to continue its massacre with impunity. He continued:

.Hamas knows that in some ways, dead Palestinians serve their purposes even better than dead Israelis. In the West we look at this and say, .It makes no sense.. But it does make sense.

.If you are committed to Israel.s destruction, and if you believe that dead Palestinians help you score a propaganda victory, you do things like launch rockets from a Palestinian schoolyard. This ensures that when the Israelis do respond, it will likely lead to the death of an innocent Palestinian . no matter how many precautions Israeli soldiers take..

As discussed in Part 1, .that's what makes us different to them..

The Financial Times provided a reality check for Murdoch.s commentary, citing a .string of damning reports. published last week in Israeli newspapers of soldiers. testimonies, including evidence that troops shot at unarmed civilians. Some reported that they had been issued with .lax rules of engagement that placed little value on the safety of Gazan civilians..

The FT reported:

.Among the incidents which the Israeli army said it would investigate were the shootings of a mother and her two children, who were ordered to leave their house but, misunderstanding the soldiers. instructions, strayed into a .no-go. zone where they were killed by sniper fire. A separate shooting of another Gaza woman was described by one soldier as .cold-blooded murder..

.On Monday, a report by a UN human rights panel made fresh allegations, including the claim that Israeli soldiers used Palestinian civilians as human shields during the fighting. .Violations were committed on a daily basis, too numerous to list,. said one of the report.s authors.. (Tobias Buck, .Israel dismissive as fury mounts,. Financial Times, March 24, 2009)

This was reported in the same week that Israel.s Haaretz newspaper published details of the images Israeli soldiers are having printed on the shirts they order to mark the end of training, or of duty in the field:

.A T-shirt for infantry snipers bears the inscription .Better use Durex,. next to a picture of a dead Palestinian baby, with his weeping mother and a teddy bear beside him. A sharpshooter's T-shirt from the Givati Brigade's Shaked battalion shows a pregnant Palestinian woman with a bull's-eye superimposed on her belly, with the slogan, in English, .1 shot, 2 kills.. A .graduation. shirt for those who have completed another snipers course depicts a Palestinian baby, who grows into a combative boy and then an armed adult, with the inscription, .No matter how it begins, we'll put an end to it.." (http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1072466.html)

Sociologist Dr. Orna Sasson-Levy, of Bar-Ilan University, commented:

"This tendency is most strikingly evident among soldiers who encounter various situations in the territories on a daily basis. There is less meticulousness than in the past, and increasing callousness. There is a perception that the Palestinian is not a person, a human being entitled to basic rights, and therefore anything may be done to him." (Ibid)

Readers may feel it is unfair to focus on Murdoch. He is of the hard-right and, after all, there is a spectrum. As Murdoch.s employee, Rod Liddle, commented in the Times:

.Proper western liberal democracy is about accommodating all forms of fabulous stupidity, even the sort of stuff which comes from people who, if we.re honest, might feel more at home hunkering down in a cave somewhere in the Afghan-Pakistani borderlands. They hate us, implacably. It is a visceral loathing.... (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/ columnists/rod_liddle/article5908258.ece)

Again, .that's what makes us different to them..

We can easily take the Spectrum Test by turning once more to the Guardian.s Madeleine Bunting, who comments from the more fragrant end of .proper western liberal democracy.. What is her take on the beasts in human form that are the Taliban?

"What is clear is that this is an easy war for the Taliban. They may lack military technology but they don't need it; all they need is patience, men and weapons, and they have plenty of all three. They have none of the constraints imposed by European electorates on body counts; careless of their own men's lives, they can use the deaths of opponents and civilians to their advantage." (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/ 2009/mar/23/afghanistan-military-terrorism)

The Murdoch view, in other words. This has been the one saving grace for all Third World opponents of high-tech Western firepower through the ages - they do not value life as highly as we do. We might think they are not having an .easy war. - we are blowing many thousands of them to kingdom come, after all - but this is merely to project our own human sensitivities onto the .children of darkness.. In truth, their indifference to the fate of their own people is probably beyond our powers of conception. In 2006, novelist Martin Amis described how Iran, .our natural enemy,. would be willing to accept a nuclear attack in order to realise its dark dreams:

"They feel they can absorb this hit and destroy Israel." (Amis, This Week, October 12, 2006)

After all, what would a few million incinerated men, women and children mean to an .enemy. so .careless of their men.s lives.? They have no feeling for the people we currently slaughter in the thousands and hundreds of thousands - they would be unmoved by the addition of a few zeros.

One does not need to be a highly paid therapist to perceive the actual projection: .They. could not care less for the lives of the people +we+ slaughter so casually. And so .they., rather than we, are to blame. Corporal Matthew 'Des' Desmond of the UK.s 2nd Parachute Regiment described how he shot a Taliban fighter from two metres:

.There is no emotional attachment, you'd feel more anguish shooting a bunny rabbit.. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008 /oct/26/military-afghanistan)

The comment was made, the Guardian noted, with a rueful smile.

How ironic - utterly unlike our .natural enemy., we are united by a common indifference to their destruction.

Of course, .at the end of the day. he .could have been a normal person.. The British soldier, that is.
Iraq Epidemiologist Body Count

If there is a democratic constraint, it is on our body counts. Honest attempts to count the bodies of the .different. ones, the .children of darkness., are perceived as threats to be attacked, smeared, denigrated and dismissed by .proper western liberal democracy.. Thus, some of the world.s greatest experts in the field of epidemiology find their careers joining a casualty count of hardball propaganda.

A BBC whistleblower wrote to us (asking to remain anonymous) quoting from one of our media alerts:

Dear Davids,

"Have journalists learnt nothing from recent history?"

The answer, I fear, is nothing.

I work at BBC World Service and this email was recently sent as a group to everyone.

.Chris Booth, Baghdad bureau chief, tells me the following two websites are a good point of reference for casualty figures in Iraq (classified by time period, nationality etc). Useful for graphics and cues (with attribution):

.www.icasualties.org for military casualties (also deals with Afghanistan)

.www.iraqbodycount.org for civilian casualties (NB this is not a definitive count, but a trusted estimate, so needs to be qualified)."

It was from a producer. Unsurprising, unfortunately, that there is no mention of the ORB survey. Even given the recent update of the survey.

Anyway, I thought you'd find it interesting, depressing and perhaps useful.

Appreciate if you don't mention my name.

best wishes

Name Withheld (Email to Media Lens, March 20, 2009)

No mention of the Opinion Research Business [ORB] survey reporting 1,033,000 deaths (January 2008, http://www.opinion.co.uk/ Newsroom_details.aspx?NewsId=88), nor of the 2004 and 2006 Lancet studies. That the BBC.s Baghdad Bureau Chief can believe that Iraq Body Count offers an .estimate. of the death toll in Iraq is staggering. In fact, it offers a figure based on media reports of violent civilian deaths in a country where journalists, who have been targeted and killed in large numbers, have been unable to function during the awesome violence that has accompanied the occupation (data from morgues and government records have been added in recent years).

The IBC website team - which is as qualified to act as a primary source on the Iraqi death toll as we are - is .trusted. by the mainstream media because it offers an extremely low number, has a superficial veneer of academic rigour, and has not been subjected to the unrelenting attacks mounted on studies offering higher numbers.

Stephen Soldz, Director of the Center for Research, Evaluation, and Program Development at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis, notes:

.We have recently learned that Gilbert Burnham, the lead author of second Lancet study, has been sanctioned by Johns Hopkins for deviating from the approved IRB protocol and collecting the names of many survey respondents, a fact that was implicitly denied in numerous public pronouncements.. (http://www.zcommunications.org/ znet/viewArticle/20890)

This collecting of names potentially placed lives at risk, although it is thought that no one was in fact harmed. But Soldz argues that Burnham.s lapse means Lancet II.s estimate can no longer be trusted:

.If one major methodological detail was distorted, we simply cannot know whether other aspects of the study were carried out as stated..

It is a bold leap of doubt to take on such an important issue. After all, a key finding of Johns Hopkins. internal investigation, unmentioned by Soldz, took a different view:

.Inclusion of identifiers did not affect the results of the study.. (http://www.jhsph.edu/publichealthnews/ press_releases/2009/iraq_review.html)

We asked John Tirman, Executive Director of MIT's Center for International Studies, for his opinion on March 18:

Hi John

Hope you're well. We exchanged some emails last year. I wonder if you agree with Stephen Soldz's comments on the findings of the internal investigation by Johns Hopkins into the 2006 Lancet study on mortality in Iraq:

"This error, and its possible coverup in subsequent public statements means that, in my opinion, we can no longer rely upon the Lancet II mortality estimates. If one major methodological detail was distorted, we simply cannot know whether other aspects of the study were carried out as stated.

.Until and unless there is far greater detail on these methods, I do not feel that their estimate of 650,000 post-invasion surplus deaths can be trusted." (http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/20890)

Isn't that an irrational response, unless the misbehaviour affected the results? There's no indication that it did. Gilbert Burnham was censured personally. The study wasn't impugned.

What are your views (for quoting please)?

Best wishes

David

Tirman replied on March 19:

David,

Yes, I agree with you, and the Hopkins statement makes clear that the confusion about identifiers (in Arabic) has nothing to do with the integrity of the methods and their implementation. In fact, the Hopkins review verified that the data was collected and entered properly, something several critics have harped on for 30 months. It's now clear that the data and the analysis are solid. Of course, there could have been a sampling error, but that is always a risk; I don.t believe we can see one, and the main-street-bias folks are simply off kilter on this, as I've explained before.

It is interesting how this small cadre of harpies persists the argue [sic] on diminishing grounds, when the IBC and DoD numbers, and the MoH/WHO survey, goes without critical comment. This tells us what they're up to.

My own estimate, for what it's worth, of the current figures, using the earlier surveys and the IBC trend line, is between 800,000 and 1.3 million dead as of January. The numbers of displaced, widows, etc., is supporting evidence.

Thanks for keeping up with this.

Best,

John

As Noam Chomsky has often noted, the propaganda system will embrace any level of idiocy and error, if it is in the best interests of power. Describe all attacks in Iraq as the result of .al-Qaeda., for example, and no-one even notices. On the other hand, contributions that harm powerful interests trigger the most exhausting and exacting standards of scrutiny.

The two Lancet studies have been faced with exactly that, endlessly, and still their results and basic methodology have not been found wanting. We wonder how many similar studies, if subjected to a similar level of hostility and examination, would emerge spotless. The effect is powerful, particularly in the academic world, where any hint of political controversy is damaging. Perhaps because such conflagrations are quite rare, there is a tendency to assume that there must surely be +some+ fire amidst all that smoke. But that is often not the case in politics, where propaganda may well be unrelieved, cynical deceit.

The reality of the US-UK catastrophe in Iraq is, or could be, a major catastrophe for US-UK propaganda - for the lie of benevolence that gives policy free rein. And so an absolute torrent of mud has been directed at the Lancet studies. A clear cut victory has never been sought - the goal is simply increased confusion, additional doubt. The technical term: mud sticks!

This is the power of flak, and one result, at least, is very clear - the courageous, compassionate, sincere and highly qualified lead authors of the Lancet reports have been, for the moment at least, silenced.
SUGGESTED ACTION

The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect for others. If you do write to journalists, we strongly urge you to maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone.

Write to Hugh Sykes at the BBC
Email: hugh.sykes@bbc.co.uk

Write to Steve Herrmann, BBC online editor
Email: steve.herrmann@bbc.co.uk

Write to Madeleine Bunting at the Guardian
Email: m.bunting@guardian.co.uk

Write to Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian
Email: alan.rusbridger@guardian.co.uk

Please send a copy of your emails to us


www.medialens.org/alerts/09/090330_children_of_darkness.php

Bookmark and Share
posted by u2r2h at Monday, April 27, 2009 0 comments

22 April, 2009

US population like Pakistanis ... deep state false flag gladio

East meets west. By K. Kalame

People of Pakistan and people of the US operate in such different contexts that it is hard to imagine that their fates are somehow linked.

The people of Pakistan standing up to restore their chief justice was a history changing event. This reference point for people power, publicized properly, has the potential to snow ball. Remember the restoration of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela by the people. It bloodied the nose of the elite and superpower alike.

The people of the US may rise up against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with force, like they did against Vietnam . If they do it can have a profound impact on the people of Pakistan .

But why would they do such a thing ?

They may do this out of plain self interest. According to the Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz in the Washington Post, the war in Iraq alone will end up costing the American tax payer about US$3 trillion dollars.

To get to the end point, they may have to go back to the starting point, i.e., the event that created the excuse for America to go to war.

Like the Pakistani people got their victory by sticking to the truth of the accusations levelled on Nov 3, the American people can have theirs by revisiting 911.

911 is the basis for the 2nd largest military offensive the US has ever embarked upon, supposedly to punish the culprits responsible for those events. This offensive resulted in killing of 1.3 million Iraqis, Afghanis and Pakistanis. Therefore, who is actually responsible for 911 is a matter of some significance.

When a country with the most advanced military in the world gets ready to wipe out a million beings of human origin, or in other words their next of kin, it had better make sure that this does not turn out to be a holocaust of mistaken identity.

However, such precautions were not taken. Only US$15 million were spent to investigate 911 and put together the 911 commission report. In comparison about US$65 million were spent to investigate president Clinton about possibly inaccurate statements involving the creative use of a cigar and some real estate deals.

Eight years later, after the murder of 1.3 million human beings, the question remains as relevant as it was on Sept 12 2001, if not more.

Who ?

There has been a disturbing amount of evidence pointing towards a massive cover up relating to 911. Even more disturbing is the strengthening suspicion that the bald eagle is holding the smoking gun.

Professor Naom Chomsky believes it is entirely irrelevent as to who is responsible for 911. Furthermore, according to him, "Even if it [i.e., the US government is responsible for 911 and not foreigh terrorists], were true which is extremely unlikely, who cares ! " His view about who is responsible for JFK assasination is "who knows" and furthemore "who cares".

I agree with his statement to the extent that 1.3 million people would still be dead whether the US government was responsible for 911 or Al Qaeda.

In that context "who" is not the relevent question. That the US public is fine with declaring war on countries in response to perceived attacks by a non state player of diffuse origin, is puzzling.

The alternate explanation is that American public never agreed with it. They just never objected strongly enough. Who would have thought, there would be such a dear price to pay for not objecting strongly enough. US$3 trillion dollars for them, 1.3 million lives for the Iraqis.

I further agree with Naom Chomsky's statement relating to JFK to the extent that JFK would still be dead whether it was a deranged man who killed him or the US government.

However, a reasonable and objective person would admit the possibility that had JFK escaped assasination, he may not have allowed an invasion of Vietnam , which Lyndon Johnson actively precipitated. Also, the US invading Afghanistan or Iraq without blaming them both for 911 may not have been sellable at home and an invasion may never had taken place.

In short, history of the world would have been different. I believe most people care who was responsible for 911 and most people would like to know who killed JFK, if it changes history.

Should the truth relating to 911 come out in the open, the current US adventure in Afghanistan and Iraq may have to end abrubtly due to mass protests at home, and withdrawal of international support. This is good reason to care, not just for US people but also of Pakistan , Iraq , Afghanistan and the world at large.

That the people of the US can take a cue from the people of Pakistan in getting the will of the people recognized is ironic. But it is reality. When a sleeping nation awakens such ironies become fact.

Now that the US is raising its military presence in Afghanistan by 50% and even contemplating carpet bombing of Balochistan, the interests of the people of Pakistan and US are more aligned than ever. Both peoples can avoid bankruptcy in the financial and moral sense by exposing the facts relating to 911, a day that shall live in infamy in the annals of history.

As for the lawlessness in Pakistan 's backyard, no one should be naïve enough to think that American departure will make it all go away overnight. However, strict law enforcement with justice and development is the answer not military operation.

To that extent, the Pakistani people and the American people want the same thing.
www.pakistanchristianpost.com/viewarticles.php?editorialid=725

Bookmark and Share
posted by u2r2h at Wednesday, April 22, 2009 0 comments

15 April, 2009

Pinocchio’s Nose - nice Ace Baker Wiki


Pinocchio’s Nose

From 911composites


fig.  20   Chopper 5 – Pinocchio’s Nose

fig. 20 Chopper 5 – Pinocchio’s Nose

In Chopper 5, some object appears to come out of the back (north) side of the tower (fig. 20).

Nose Out Multiple Choice

fig.  21 - Nose-Out Multiple Choice

fig. 21 - Nose-Out Multiple Choice

This object looks remarkably similar to the nose of the Boeing 767 airplane that appears to fly into the building. In fact, the object is indistinguishable from the nose. In fig. 21 below are 8 enlargements. Some are noses, some are the exiting object. Which are which?

Under the video compositing hypothesis, Pinocchio’s Nose is simply the nose of the airplane image, escaping the back side of the luma key layer mask, as I’ve demonstrated.

Under the hologramme hypothesis the image is still being projected onto the vapor carried by the remnants of the missile. The conjugated mirror then disintegrates and the spray mechanism becomes visible as the "Venus Plane Trap".

It Slows Down

The aeroplane would never enter the whole tower, there are massive steel columns in the centre of the WTC and the tail section would crumple and break off. But 911 conspiracy researchers are a little manic.. they think of everything... bar the most logical, hologrammes. Logical because the perpetrators could NEVER allow a film sequence that showed the same crash face side of the building without a jet without a jet aircraft HOWEVER IMPERFECT. Without = not possible.
You see, photos are less of a problem. If they show an explosion in the early stages, the (phantasy-) plane has "already gone in", and if it shows the face of the WTC without explosion and without a wide-body jet... well, it was taken "too early".

The perps must have rehearsed very carefully what a real crash WOULD look like and how to approximate it visually (with a hologram and explosives).

Real plane supporter Dave Rogers has pointed out that the airplane image appears to slow down considerably while “inside” the tower. He suggests this is proof of a real plane, evidently assuming that a composite airplane image would have to fly a constant speed.

Steve Wright made the same claim on the Hardfire program. He tracked the motion of the airplane, continuing the motion of an outline through the building at a constant speed. The outline emerged well before Pinocchio’s Nose.

But this doesn’t prove a real airplane. An animated image can be made to change speeds any which way, of course. Steve Wright’s own educational video, in the very first lesson, demonstrates compositing by overlaying, of all things, a jet airplane. He applies a “velocity curve”, the jet enters the screen fast, then slows down in the middle of the picture.

Knowing the approximate visual location of the towers in the shot, there is a very good reason why the 9/11 airplane animations would be pre-made to slow down in the middle of the picture: It would give the operator more time to turn off the airplane layer before it pops out the back side of the mask.

Official Stories

fig.  22Gamma Press – Nose Out
fig. 22Gamma Press – Nose Out
fig.  23Gamma Press – Nose out, with added model 767 to scale

fig. 23Gamma Press – Nose out, with added model 767 to scale

Under the real plane hypothesis, the exiting “nose-out” object would be something real. Various explanations have emerged:

  • The object really is the nose of the airplane
  • The object is an engine
  • The object is a landing gear
  • The object is a dust explosion

[edit] Airplane Nose ?

fig.  24Gamma Press – Venus Plane Trap

fig. 24Gamma Press – Venus Plane Trap

The nose of an airplane is ruled out. A Boeing 767 nose is hollow, it is plastic, it is not meant to withstand any sort of collision. The mere thought of it surviving intact through a dense grid of steel box columns, twice, is just absurd. Kai Simonsen, who was the camera operator aboard Chopper 5, and who is also happens to be a video compositing expert, agreed that it looked just like the nose of the airplane. He asked interviewer Jeff Hill, “Why do you say it’s impossible?”[#_ftn5 [5]]

[edit] Engine or Landing Gear ?

fig.  25Gamma Press – Venus Plane Trap, darkened, color balance shifted

fig. 25Gamma Press – Venus Plane Trap, darkened, color balance shifted

To explore whether Pinocchio’s Nose could be a real event, we’ll next consider the 2nd generation of videos, which emerged in the hours after the event.

Despite being a poor quality copy, the Gamma Press video clearly shows a gray, metallic, cylindrical object emerging. The engine and landing gear are both heavy, solid objects made of strong metals such as steel and titanium. We might imagine that one of these objects could penetrate two sets of perimeter steel box columns.

I’ve overlaid a model 767 to scale, and added motion blur (fig. 23). We can see that the emerging object is much too large to be an engine or a landing gear. The size and shape of the Gamma Press nose-out is consistent with a fuselage, which is consistent with Chopper 5.

In Gamma Press, after the Pinocchio’s Nose event,a strange, very bright, 2D looking flame gobbles up the object, it disappears, and is never seen again. StillDiggin named this the "Venus Plane Trap”

In fig. 25 above I’ve darkened and shifted the color balance of the Gamma Press image. The entire image was processed equally. Notice how the Venus Plane Trap sticks out and looks so distinct from the other flame. It is much brighter than the rest of the fireball explosion. This is consistent with adding a fake flame into a real shot with a real explosion. In compositing, color-matching can be tricky.

In Gamma Press, we have additional video data that seem to support the idea that the Chopper 5 nose-out is some solid object. But there are four terrible problems with the idea that Pinocchio’s Nose was a solid object:

  • The nose-out object is far too big to be either an engine or a landing gear.
  • According to the Gamma Press video, a flame completely destroyed the object in a fraction of a second. Fire can’t do that to steel or titanium.
  • Other, later videos, such as Naudet, show a dust explosion (see fig. 27 below).
  • There are no broken columns where the solid object would have exited (see fig. 26 below).

Dust Explosion ?

fig.  26The North face of WTC2, showing the area where a solid object would have exited

fig. 26The North face of WTC2, showing the area where a solid object would have exited

Next, I consider the third generation videos, those that emerged days or weeks after the event.They show a dust explosion, not a metallic cylinder.The clearest example of this is Naudet (see fig. 27 below).

The Naudet footage shows a dust explosion for Pinocchio’s Nose, and it looks nothing at all like the fuselage of a plane, or an engine, or any solid object. This dust explosion would be moving at more than 300 mph. It seems impossible that any sort of dust explosion could maintain its shape in the face of a 300 mph headwind. It’s dust.

How would a dust explosion (or anything else for that matter) form itself into a size, color, and shape indistinguishable from the nose of a Boeing 767?

Also, we have the Venus Plane Trap flame event from the Gamma Press video. While we might imagine a solid object could explode into flame, how could a dust explosion, which by definition has already exploded, itself explode into flame?

The frames of Naudet that would show the Venus Plane Trap have been edited out. This editing is highly suspicious, especially considering it corresponds with the fade to black in Chopper 5. The Naudet Brothers are called upon to release unedited, original quality footage so that we may examine the sequence that was edited out. And if you have not yet signed the petition requesting broadcast-quality video from the networks, why not do so now?

http://www.petitiononline.com/Video911/petition.html

Conclusion

fig.  27Naudet (L) , Chopper 5 (R) – The two images are synchronized in time.

fig. 27Naudet (L) , Chopper 5 (R) – The two images are synchronized in time.

Thus, the totality of the video evidence is completely inconsistent with Pinocchio’s Nose being any real event.The solid objects are ruled out because there is no exit wound, because steel/titanium objects can’t burn up, and because the apparent object is too big. The dust explosion is ruled out because it cannot maintain its shape in the face of a 300 mph headwind, nor can it explode. Both are ruled out because the various videos are completely inconsistent with one other, some showing a metallic object, others showing dust.

As impossible as it is to reconcile Pinocchio’s Nose with a real event, it is quite easily understood under the video compositing hypothesis. The nose of the airplane image was accidentally allowed to come out from the back side of the luma key layer mask in Chopper 5, the other videos are subsequent attempts to explain it away.

The composite works by placing video images on layers, in this case a total of three layers. The tower shot is duplicated and placed on two of the layers. The top copy of the tower shot has had the sky made transparent with an effect called “Luminance Keying” or “Luma Key”. When these two layers are combined, it looks identical to the original shot.

fig.  28Top layer, sky removed (left). Bottom layer, unchanged (center). Put together, it appears identical to the original shot (right).

fig. 28Top layer, sky removed (left). Bottom layer, unchanged (center). Put together, it appears identical to the original shot (right).

Sandwiched in between the two tower layers is the airplane layer. It is an airplane image on an otherwise transparent layer. Below I’ve inserted a model 767 at way too large a scale, to demonstrate the presence of layers.

fig.  29Manipulating video in layers. With the luma key in place, objects can now be inserted that appear behind the towers, and in front of the sky.

fig. 29Manipulating video in layers. With the luma key in place, objects can now be inserted that appear behind the towers, and in front of the sky.
fig.  30Added airplane model crosses under the layer mask, appearing to pass behind the tower

fig. 30Added airplane model crosses under the layer mask, appearing to pass behind the tower

If the flying airplane image is not made to stop at the correct time, having it appear to pop out the back side of the tower is precisely what will hapen. Evidently, it did happen, despite the precaution of having the pre-made airplane image slow down once “inside”. I have given a detailed explanation of how the live 9/11 composites must have been created, and inserted a 2nd flying airplane image into the Chopper 5 video.

Under the compositing hypothesis, the Venus Plane Trap flame event was added to videos to attempt to explain the fate of Pinocchio’s Nose. The mismatching flame color is consistent with compositing.

Therefore Pinocchio’s Nose is perfectly consistent with the hologramme and the compositing hypothesis, and impossible under the real plane hypothesis.


see

u2r2h's Variable Visibility Hologramme Theory VVHT

Tangible Information: September Clues -- 9/11 was a snuff movie
Bookmark and Share
posted by u2r2h at Wednesday, April 15, 2009 0 comments

11 April, 2009

HYPNOTIZED ASSASSIN

The Real Manchurian Candidate
Nearly four decades after the death of Bobby Kennedy, questions remain about the guilt of his killer, Pasadena.s Sirhan Sirhan

By Carl Kozlowski 11/16/2006

On the surface, Munir Sirhan would appear to be just another quiet, middle-aged, tax-paying citizen. He emigrated from Palestine to Pasadena when he was just 8 and grew up as a quiet kid amid a large family that took pride in assimilating into their new culture. He.s also the brother of one of America.s most notorious figures: Sirhan Sirhan, the man convicted of killing one of the nation.s most iconic politicians, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.

The death of RFK has haunted the life of Munir Sirhan and the rest of his family for nearly 40 years, despite an array of evidence that would make the killing seem like a slam-dunk to solve.

But as the horrific assassination of Bobby Kennedy returns to the public onsciousness this weekend with the release of the film .Bobby,. which blends historic footage of his 1968 presidential campaign with the intertwined fictional stories of 22 ordinary citizens at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles that fateful day, the mysteries surrounding the shooting also cry out for investigation.

.It was horrifying to go through this. It was unbelievable. He had never said anything about Kennedy either way,. recalls Munir Sirhan, hiding his pain behind dark shades while sitting at a table inside a Pasadena Starbucks. .From the start, I doubted the charges because Sirhan couldn.t hurt a fly. He wasn.t capable of it, running at someone and shooting them. Now he.s spent nearly his entire life in prison, and he.s the only family I have left. But I still have hope the truth will come out, and I know he prays for that..
MKULTRA::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

The story of Sirhan Sirhan begins in a central Pasadena neighborhood in 1957. That was when his mother, a schoolteacher, moved to America with her six kids and husband, who had been a municipal employee back in his native Palestine. Despite being Eastern Orthodox, their move had been sponsored by a Nazarene church, and his dad only lasted six months in his new homeland before he had to return to Palestine to care for his sick mother.

Munir recalls that Sirhan, who was five years older, attempted to be a typical American teenager by studying hard at John Muir High School and maintaining a paper route before attending Pasadena City College. He says Sirhan used to study languages a lot because he harbored a dream of becoming a United Nations interpreter, hoping to bring peace to the world at a time when Israeli-Arab tensions were at full boil amid the era of the Six-Day War.

Perhaps more tellingly, Sirhan Sirhan also harbored a fascination with the occult, particularly the practice of hypnosis and mind control. It is that interest that Munir and many others believe forms the key to the mystery of how his ostensibly peace-loving brother wound up convicted of killing Robert Kennedy.

The official story of what happened in the early morning hours of June 6, 1968, is that Robert Kennedy had just finished his victory speech at the now-demolished Ambassador Hotel after winning the Democratic presidential primary in California. The victory had come during a year in which turmoil around the world and within America.s borders was reaching almost unprecedented levels: The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the My Lai Massacre, Tet Offensive and Siege of Khe Sahn, and riots in Paris as well as a crushing invasion by Soviets to counter newfound freedoms in Czechoslovakia were just some of the lowlights that year.

Amid all this, RFK.s campaign . which followed an incredibly successful career as America.s attorney general under his brother John and JFK.s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, in which he battled organized crime and oversaw a staggering 800 percent drop in crime nationwide . was seen as a sign of true hope that the .little man. in America was getting his voice heard. Bobby Kennedy had led media caravans through the poorest black urban centers and the most economically ravaged pockets of white rural poverty, shining a light on how far America had to go in order to truly fulfill its promises of hope for all of its citizens.

Such stands, however, brought him plenty of enemies as well, ranging from the suddenly beleaguered mob to the most powerful big-business forces in the nation, who wanted to maintain the status quo of leaving behind anyone who got in the way of making profits. So he shocked the party by effectively chasing LBJ out of his re-election campaign and surpassing Hubert Humphrey in California to take the lead for his party.s nomination.

And then, within moments of ending his speech and heading out of the Ambassador through its kitchen area, it is said that Sirhan Sirhan pulled out a .22-caliber revolver and shot Bobby Kennedy dead in addition to injuring six others.

But that official story has been so rife with contradictions and errors from the start that even when Sirhan confessed he had killed Kennedy .with 20 years of malice aforethought,. the judge wouldn.t accept it. After all, that patently ridiculous taunt would have meant he.d been planning to kill Bobby since he was 4 years old, and years before Kennedy had risen to any level of notoriety.

Even more strangely, Sirhan has always maintained, even under repeated attempts at intensive hypnosis, that he has no memory of the crime.

.Even when the family spoke to him, we tried to find out how, why and where because he couldn.t remember, and that was a concern. Coincidentally, there.s no actual photograph of the shooting itself, even with all the press there that day. Nearly 3,000 photos were destroyed by the LAPD from the moments around the shooting, and there were contradictions about things like the amount of bullets,. says Munir Sirhan.

.An FBI agent pointed out a discrepancy in the number of bullets from what police said, and I don.t think any eyewitness placed him closer than one to five feet away from Kennedy. There were extra bullet holes in the framework of the doors and ceiling, and numerous people recalled his facial expression when it happened, thinking he was under some sort of hypnotic suggestion. There are just so many questions ..

He pauses, thinking back across 40 years, wondering whether to discuss the most controversial aspect of the whole mess again. .And then you hear about MKULTRA..
.The polka dot lady.::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

While it might sound like something out of the wildly fictitious world of James Bond movies . or at least the world of .Get Smart. . MKULTRA was in fact a real-life, top-secret program that ran throughout much of the 1950s and .60s in which the CIA attempted to master brainwashing techniques and hypnotize ordinary people into doing its dirty work. The question is not whether the program existed, but whether it was ever taken beyond the experimental phase and into directing its hypnotized subjects into committing assassinations and other such activities.

Those who believe that Sirhan Sirhan was an unwilling and unwitting accomplice to the program believe that government agents spotted him while they attended live hypnotist shows to look for MKULTRA subjects and saw that Sirhan was a particularly easy person to put under a spell.

.They were spending millions going to universities around the country looking for subjects. In December .63, the CIA was thinking about getting rid of it, but their deputy director Richard Helms issued a memo asking to keep it alive. It.s believed he had just used the program to get away with the murder of JFK,. explains Michael Calder, the author of the investigative book .JFK vs. CIA,. who developed that book from his master.s thesis at UC Berkeley. .They found new drugs that in combination with hypnotism are able to create amnesia for events prior to and during killing. I thought that sounds like Sirhan, and I.ve been reading LAPD documents for the past year trying to draw all the connections together..

The reason that Calder is able to pore over countless LAPD documents and recordings in search of the truth behind Bobby Kennedy.s murder is that in 1988 a judge ordered the department to release all its RFK-related materials without redactions. As a result, every piece of evidence the men in blue ever collected for the investigation is stored in two places: state archives in Sacramento and the archives of the central branch of the Los Angeles Public Library.

Every piece of evidence, that is, except for the more than 2,900 photos taken that night, which the LAPD conveniently managed to lose or destroy by 1988. But there.s still plenty left for a self-trained investigator like Calder to dig through, and he thinks he.s approaching a comprehensive answer to what actually happened on that fateful night.

.There.s trial testimony available both in transcripts and the original audiotapes of Vincent Di Piero, a part-time waiter and full-time college student whose father said to come down and meet Kennedy that night,. says Calder. .Vincent walked into the pantry with Kennedy after the speech, when he saw a guy standing about 20 feet away with a beautiful girl on his arm and they.re smiling at each other. She says something to him, and suddenly he turns and stares at Kennedy, walks toward him, takes the gun out of his pants and shoots. The girl had brown hair down to her shoulders and wore a white dress with black polka dots, and she was moving right away..

Indeed, Calder has found testimony that shows the woman was seen by at least four people that night, mostly as she was moving quickly out of the building next to a tall man who wasn.t Sirhan as most people were running in to see the commotion, and smiling as most others that night were understandably shocked. At least one woman testified and told TV news reporters that she heard .the polka dot lady. say, .We shot Kennedy.. Yet the lady was never found, and it is believed that a valid search was never conducted for her.

.I think she was the one who said something to Sirhan that sent him into deep amnesia as Helms planned,. says Calder.

Sirhan.s claim of not remembering what happened that night has withstood numerous intensive levels of hypnosis by prosecution and defense experts intending to draw such memories out of him.
A second gun::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

That.s just the tip of the iceberg concerning the inconsistencies that riddle the official account of that night. Sirhan allegedly fired eight shots from a gun that could only hold five bullets. He didn.t have time to reload before being tackled by famed NFL player Rosie Grier. Those eight bullets supposedly managed to hit RFK three times and graze him a fourth while also managing to injure six other people that night.

The so-called .Magic Bullet. that Lee Harvey Oswald used to kill Kennedy.s older brother five years earlier had nothing on Sirhan Sirhan.s acrobatic ammo.

Add in 28 other bullet holes found in the pantry after the shooting, which were never fully investigated, and, even more importantly, the fact that RFK.s own autopsy said he was killed by a bullet to the back of the head that was fired at such close range that he had powder burns in his flesh. This would mean that the shooter would have to have been behind RFK basically jamming the gun into his head and the two places that were shot in his back before firing.

Yet every eyewitness describing Sirhan Sirhan.s actions said he shot at RFK from the front and from at least one to five feet away.

Aside from this evidence, Sirhan.s legal team later enlisted the help of America.s leading expert on hypnosis, Dr. Herbert Spiegel, in failed attempts to win him a new trial during the 1990s. Spiegel, who practices psychiatry in New York City in addition to teaching hypnosis at the Columbia University medical school, said in an exclusive phone interview that he has no doubt Sirhan Sirhan was subjected to MKULTRA or a program akin to it.

.[Sirhan.s post-conviction lawyer] Lawrence Teeter tried to get the court to allow a new trial because in his first trial, Sirhan.s defense did not mention he was hypnotizable and said he was psychotic and schizophrenic, which the jury just didn.t buy,. says Spiegel. .In the first trial, the defense also did not introduce the fact that there had to be a second gun. I read the records and found out that the court-appointed psychiatrist who examined him for the trial found that he was highly hypnotizable. About 80 percent of the population is hypnotizable to one degree or another, and Sirhan was found to be in the top 10 percent, but the judge refused to let me examine him to back this up..

Spiegel believes in the story of the woman in the polka dot dress, saying that witness Di Piero.s description of a smiling Sirhan turning blank-faced and homicidal with the slip of a word seems like a perfect example of a programmed person.

.He was supposed to follow her command to kill Kennedy, but his arm was pushed and none of his bullets hit Kennedy, just witnesses. The judge did not allow the autopsy findings in the trial, which had shown RFK had been hit by four bullets directly from behind and to the right, while Sirhan was at least three feet away and from the front,. says Spiegel.

.The police said he killed Kennedy, and like a hypnotizable person, Sirhan confessed by simply telling them back what they wanted him to say..
.He acted alone.:::::::::::::::::::::::::

On the other hand, investigative reporter Dan Moldea, author of the 1995 book .The Killing of Robert F. Kennedy,. believes that any connection between Sirhan Sirhan and MKULTRA .was complete bullshit. and that Sirhan acted on his own accord out of a desire for fame and anger over Kennedy.s support for Israel against Palestine.

He says that until Teeter came aboard to represent Sirhan, years after his initial trial, Sirhan never mentioned MKULTRA and .just claimed he was drunk and couldn.t remember that night..

.Now he.s saying he didn.t do it, but he was heavily influenced by Teeter, who believed that the CIA was responsible for anything that went wrong in society and was a real conspiracy buff,. claims Moldea. .Sirhan was a kid, an average guy who was 24 and the same age as Lee Harvey Oswald. He was checking out girls that day at PCC, and before that was even practicing firing his weapon at a firing range. He went to the Ambassador because there were three different election-night parties there, had several Tom Collinses when he got there, and it was hot and he got drunk..

But perhaps his most closely held view is that no witnesses were focusing on Sirhan Sirhan.s actions once shots were fired because they instinctively dove for safety, leaving him free to pin Bobby down and force the close-range shots that others claimed no one witnessed.

.Sirhan Sirhan shot Bobby Kennedy and he acted alone. When a civilian investigator is looking for a conspiracy in a highly publicized case like this, he.s probably gonna find it, but you have to run through the gauntlet of re-examining the evidence and in this case, all of the large questions that would indicate a second gunman at the crime scene go by the wayside,. says Moldea.

.Sirhan and I are the same religion, Eastern Orthodox, and he.s a very nice guy now. He.s not the same person he was then, when he was young and full of anger. He claims he can.t remember but he has a very good recollection of that night except when it goes to motive, means or opportunity. But I don.t think Sirhan ever said anything he didn.t want to say, under hypnosis or not..
Terrorist threat?::::::::::::::::::::::

Even amid these clouds of controversy, however, there remains one perhaps even stranger chapter in the tale of Sirhan Sirhan, one which has been unfolding since the week after Sept. 11.

Incredible as the following sounds, Munir Sirhan and his current legal representative Summer Reese, who is helping the Sirhans find a new attorney in the wake of Lawrence Teeter.s death last fall, provided the legal briefs that support their claims.

.I haven.t seen my brother in five years, since Sept. 11,. says Munir Sirhan with sadness in his voice. .Since the last time I saw him, since then his mother.s passed away and our other two brothers have passed. He.s gotten bigger over the years, but he.s still hopeful that something will come through to vindicate him. He.s not a Muslim; [he.s] always been a Christian, a devout Christian. But I.ve heard the California authorities have listed him as second on their list of terrorists, next to Osama bin Laden, even though he.s not a Muslim..

What Munir Sirhan is referring to is a shockingly odd series of misunderstandings that occurred shortly after the World Trade Center disaster. Sirhan Sirhan had never been a TV buff and had never bothered to keep a television in his cell over the years. But a couple of days before Sept. 11, an inmate friend of his was being released and offered Sirhan his TV, telling him he could pass it along if he still lacked interest in watching it.

So Sirhan had a TV set in his cell for what appeared to be the first time ever, and one day that week, he also found himself colder than usual after taking a shower in the California State Prison-Corcoran, where he is confined. He decided to wrap a towel around his head to keep it warm, and was watching the round-the-clock post-disaster coverage when a passing guard noticed the towel and the TV and made the incredible assumption that not only was Sirhan Sirhan suddenly a Muslim, but that his interest in the news coverage meant he must have had a hand in plotting the Sept. 11 attacks . even though he.d been sitting in prison since the early .70s.

.He was thrown into solitary confinement for the next year until we were finally able to prove he was innocent of their claims and get him out. But now the guards have poisoned the thoughts of other prisoners against him, and they still think he is a Muslim and he.s afraid they.ll try to kill him,. says Munir Sirhan. .He.s afraid to leave for anything except a shower twice a week because he believes the guards either won.t protect him or will be out for him themselves for filing complaints about this situation. He wants to transfer to another prison but they won.t let him..

Munir Sirhan also claims that during that year in isolation, all of his brother.s attorney-client conversations, which are legally supposed to be private, were thoroughly monitored. According to Sabrina Johnson, public information officer for the Corcoran prison, Munir.s claims about Sirhan.s solitary confinement are accurate to a point.

.We took the Sept. 11 issue seriously based on documentation we received and based on his safety and that of the institution. He was eventually not deemed a threat, but he was disciplined for some things,. says Johnson. .He.s housed around other infamous inmates so we had him in solitary at the time for his safety too. But he.s allowed to be out of his cell six hours a day, and if he chooses to lock himself inside instead we are not obligated to force him out..

So the Sirhan brothers wait, hoping that Sirhan Sirhan will get another miraculous chance at a trial that will this time enable his defense to provide all its evidence. They are prospecting for good attorneys who want to give them a fair shake, but for now, they simply wait and pray, living with the realization that under a governor who.s married to a Kennedy relation, that chance may be another four years away.

.As you look at these things, as I get older, you look at all of these so-called theories and you give credence to them. There was no one to defend Sirhan Sirhan well the first time, and with his last parole hearing, Teeter had just died,. says Munir Sirhan. .He had three days notice only, when you.re supposed to get a week, and he had no attorney to help him. So he let it go. But I.m very optimistic that something will come through. And he.s optimistic and he prays for it..


www.pasadenaweekly.com/cms/story/detail/?id=4046&IssueNum=46

4.25.8

"Manchurian Candidates," Mind Control Experiments and Assassinations

In this edition of Richard's Room 101, we are going discuss one of the strangest conspiracy theories that I have ever heard of, but still think is somewhat credible and at least half believable. The conspiracy theory is that the CIA have used (and are maybe still using) brainwashing techniques to create "Manchurian candidates."

The term "Manchurian candidate" originates from the 1959 novel of the same name by Richard Condon. The best seller was later adapted into two popular films: the 1962 original version starring Frank Sinatra and Laurence Harvey and the 2004 remake starring Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep. The classic novel is about the creation of a programmed assassin by communist Chinese brainwashers in Manchuria during the Korean War. The brainwashed assassin, an American POW, returns to America unknowingly programmed to kill the President of the United States.

In the real world the Chinese did use public confessions extracted from American POWs for propaganda purposes during the Korean War, more than half of American POWs were said to have confessed to war crimes and, strangely, some former POWs continued to stick to their confessions long after they had been returned back home to the United States. This led some Americans to speculate that the Chinese were not only using traditional torture to extract forced confessions, but that they were also using more exotic techniques such as drugs and even hypnosis to brainwash their prisoners.

Such wild speculation in the paranoid atmosphere of the early Cold War would lead to the CIA MK-ULTRA programme, the most infamous of all the American mind control programmes. Experiments were carried out on people without their knowledge or consent, subjects were hypnotised and given dangerous drugs, very sadly some experiments were even fatal.

Many conspiracy theorists allege that the CIA did not only want to develop the ultimate interrogation technique, but that they were also eager to develop the perfect CIA agent, what could be called a "sleeper agent," that, once activated, would carry out their mission and block any memory of what they had done afterwards. After being programmed these "Manchurian candidates" could be activated at anytime and could be used for spying or perhaps even assassinations.

MK-ULTRA and similar mind control programmes like Operation ARTICHOKE are documented history, but whether such programmes were ultimately successful in any such quest to create a "Manchurian candidate" or whether such agents were ever used is much less certain. However, there have been a number of very suspicious assassinations of prominent people in America since the 1960s, from JFK to John Lennon. Is it possible that at least some of these deaths could be the work of a "Manchurian candidate" ?

Perhaps the strangest was the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy on June 5th, 1968, in Los Angeles, only 63 days after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis and less then five years after his older brother, President John F. Kennedy, was killed in Dallas.

I recently watched a new documentary film about the Robert F. Kennedy assassination called "RFK Must Die" by Shane O'Sullivan. I first heard about this documentary on the BBC's very high profile Newsnight programme, Newsnight showed a report by O'Sullivan made up of extracts from his film and interviewed him afterwards. In the report O'Sullivan showed new footage that he believed proved that three CIA agents were present on the night RFK was assassinated, suggesting these men were connected with the assassination in some way. In the film O'Sullivan suggests these CIA agents were perhaps handlers for Sirhan Sirhan, the alleged shooter, who may have been hypnotised to kill RFK or just cause a distraction while someone else shoots him.

Certainly if the CIA or anyone else were looking for someone to hypnotize, they could not have picked a better subject. In the documentary, O'Sullivan covers how Sirhan's defence team discovered that Sirhan was extremely hypnotizable. Amazingly, Defence Psychiatrist Dr. Bernhard Diamond hypnotised Sirhan into climbing his cell bars like a monkey. The unusual idea of Sirhan's defence hypnotizing him arose in the first place because Sirhan claimed he could not remember shooting Kennedy. To this day, Sirhan maintains he cannot remember what happened that night and has only been able to recall what happened under hypnosis.

There are also other signs that Sirhan was hypnotized the night of the assassination. Witnesses who saw Sirhan before the assassination that night said that he looked like he was in a trance and later after the assassination when police shined a torch in Sirhan's eyes his pupils were dilated as if Sirhan had been drugged.

As far as I can see there are three main possibilities. One, Sirhan killed RFK exactly the way the mainstream history books said he did and he is lying about not remembering. Two, Sirhan hypnotized himself into killing RFK, or three, Sirhan was hypnotized to kill RFK by someone else, perhaps the CIA. Personally, I find it hard to believe that Sirhan has been lying about not remembering for 40 years. If he had said he remembered and showed some remorse, he could have been out of prison by now. That leaves us with possibilities two and three, of which I slightly favour three because of O'Sullivan's film evidence that three CIA agents or at least three very strangely behaving people were present the night of the assassination.

Anyone interested in the case should watch Shane O'Sullivan's film "RFK Must Die" and decide for themselves what they think happened. However, whatever the truth, I think Sirhan deserves a new trial where all the evidence is brought to the jury and to let them have the last say on this strange and very sad page in history.

Richard Thomas, BoA UK Correspondent and Columnist.

www.binnallofamerica.com/rr4.25.8.html

Bookmark and Share
posted by u2r2h at Saturday, April 11, 2009 1 comments

NEW RULES - FINANCE RULES

OPINION
Mark-to-Mike: Reassessing myself

By Michael Silverstein

Last week, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), which determines how we measure value in the material world, made a major rule change. Prodded by that noted statesman and keen economic thinker Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the board changed the so-called mark-to-market rule in a way that will dramatically improve the look of bank balance sheets.

Mark-to-market is a simple concept: You value the assets on your books at their current market value. The new rule, however, would allow banks far more leeway in this regard. They could opine that some of their assets are really worth more than the market says they are. They could thereby increase their reserves, which in turn would allow them to lend more to businesses and consumers, at least theoretically.

This change bothered me at first. I was reminded of how strongly Adam Smith emphasized the importance of consistency when it comes to valuing assets, noting the inherent dangers in changing measuring standards to accommodate near-term challenges. FASB, I thought, had ushered in mark-to-made-up, or maybe even mark-to-Madoff.

But then I realized how a bit of inconsistency in valuing assets could better my own life.

Certain difficulties - too painful to enumerate here - have caused a sharp devaluation of my credit score. By simply applying FASB thinking to this score, however, I would qualify for additional borrowing.

This would turn me into the shop-till-I-drop consumer I used to be, advancing the Obama administration goal of reanimating the market with additional spending. If other consumers also did a bit of credit-score revaluation, the economy would be bubbling again in no time.

There's also the business of my house. Who says it has depreciated just because the surrounding properties are boarded up and regularly visited after dark by people who like to party? The market? What does the market know?

I say the value of this house has actually gone up - because I think it has gone up. So enough with the foreclosure notices. Give me a third mortgage on the place, based on my own higher estimation of its worth.

Lots of taxes are based on someone else's asset valuations. So are alimony payments. But what do tax collectors know? And who says some judge knows my real worth better than I do? Just give me a pocket calculator and watch me FASB my way to solvency.

Look my way, Barney Frank. Do for me what you did for the banks. I don't want a government handout; that's socialism. Just give me the right to reassess everything I own or owe, and I'll consider myself fully bailed.

====

America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between. Oscar Wilde

Bookmark and Share
posted by u2r2h at Saturday, April 11, 2009 0 comments

Locations of visitors to this page Politics Blogs - Blog Top Sites