PLANETIZATION and the Human Union

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Ramadan Reflections

Truth is our Trench

Two Plus Two Make Four
http://mujca.com/masterplan.htm

Barrett over Hannity in TKO (in case you missed it)
http://www.911blogger.com/2006/07/kevin-barrett-on-hannity-and-colmes.html

http://www.voiceofarizona.com/


AUDIO: 9/11 INSIDE JOB EXPLAINED....Dr. Kevin Barrett
http://www.apfn.net/pogo/A005I060715A.MP3


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Kevin Barrett Explains 9/11 to Ben Merens of Wisconsin Public Radio
Friday, July 14, 2006  at  5:00 PM

UW-Madison lecturer Kevin Barrett re-joins Ben Merens to give a full airing of his version of who he believes is really responsible for the 9/11 attacks and the role he says the U.S. government played in the attack. Guest: Kevin Barrett, lecturer, UW-Madison; co-founder, Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth. Member, Scholars for 9/11 Truth.

http://www.wpr.org/merens/index.cfm?strDirection=Prev&dteShowDate=2006-07-17 16%3A00%3A00


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In defense of the conspiratorial world view
by Jay Esbe     
July 13, 2006 at 05:46:15
  
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_jay_esbe_060713_in_defense_of_the_co.htm

A lot of effort goes into "debunking" conspiracy theories, and certainly there are many which are absurd, and poorly defended. But the tendency to find conspiracies to explain events, is anything but rooted in ignorance...

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US intelligence ties to Mumbai 7/11
By Larry Chin
Online Journal Associate Editor

Jul 13, 2006, 00:45

On July 11, eight bombs exploded aboard commuter trains in Mumbai, killing 190 people. No group has come forward claiming responsibility. But according to mainstream coverage, such as the yesterday's report in the San Francisco Chronicle by Anna Badkhen, the prime suspects are “militant Islamic groups with ties to Pakistan."

What the mainstream press fails to report is the direct connection between the terrorist groups they name, and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) -- a virtual branch of the American CIA. This in turn leads back to the same (alleged “al-Qaeda”) apparatus also responsible for the Bush administration’s 9/11 and other post-9/11 terror events.

Saeed Omar Shiekh and the ISI

The San Francisco Chronicle report, perhaps unwittingly, provides a damning trail directly back to possible covert Anglo-American involvement.

It quotes the Times of India, which cites Indian intelligence sources saying that two radical Muslim groups are behind the attacks, “one of them based in Pakistan, which has fought two wars with India over Kashmir. That group, the newspaper reported is the Pakistan-based militant group Lashkar-e-Toiba, or Army of the Pure . . . The other group . . . is the Students Islamic Movement of India, which has been in a loose alliance with Lashkar-e-Toiba.”

The Chronicle report also offers this: “In Washington, a US official who spoke to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity pointed to another group, Jaish-e-Mohammed, or Army of Mohammed, which is also affiliated with al-Qaeda, according to the Bush administration. Targeting trains at rush hour traffic is a tactic Jaish-e-Mohammed favors, the official said.

“The US government has designated Jaish-e-Mohammed a terrorist organization. One of its members, Shiekh Omar Sayed, has been sentenced to death for the murder of US journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002.”

Michel Chossudovsky has exposed this network, including the two groups named. Through the ISI, a branch of the CIA, US-allied Pakistan has promoted secessionist movements in India for decades. The ISI has been instrumental in the creation and ongoing guidance of the militant Islamic groups, including ‘al-Qaeda’ terror cells.

From Chossudovsky's groundbreaking book, America's "War on Terrorism":

“The December 2001 terrorist attacks on the Indian parliament -- which contributed to pushing India and Pakistan to the brink of war -- were conducted by two Pakistan-based rebel groups, Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Pure) and Jaish-e-Muhammad (Army of Mohammed), both of which are covertly supported by Pakistan’s ISI. The timely attack on the Indian parliament, followed by the ethnic riots in Gujarat in early 2002, were the culmination of a process initiated in the 1980s, financed by drug money and abetted by Pakistan’s military intelligence.

"Needless to say, these ISI-supported terrorist attacks serve the geopolitical interests of the US. They not only contribute to weakening and fracturing the Indian Union, they also create conditions which favor the outbreak of a regional war between Pakistan and India.”

Attributing the incident to a Saeed Omar Shiekh-affiliated group also brings us full circle to the original 9/11 “al-Qaeda” network, which, in turn has been exposed as a US military intelligence apparatus.

Here is Michael C. Ruppert, from his book Crossing the Rubicon, on Omar Saeed Shiekh [my emphasis in italics-LC]:

“He is variously known also by the names of Ahmad Umar Shiek, Ahmad Omar Saeed Shiekh, and Umar Shiekh. He was raised and educated in London, and by whatever name he is known, it has been acknowledged that he was an ISI agent. When the Times of India revealed that by examining his cell phone records (obtained through Indian intelligence services) they could prove that he was the leg man who had wired $100,000 to Mohammed Atta in Florida just days before the [9/11] attacks, they did not know that he was going to be arrested and convicted for the murder of [Daniel] Pearl. It was the cell phone records, among other things, that tied Shiekh directly to the ISI. And before this link to the ISI Chief General Mahmoud Ahmad became known and corroborated by major US papers, the American press had been setting him up as the number one al-Qaeda bag man.

“The ISI connection changed all that and became a liability for the US government.”

Finally, as Ruppert noted, “with so much damning evidence stacking up to suggest that the CIA had actually helped to finance the 9/11 attacks, there was nothing left for the mainstream press to do but engage in a game of confusion.”

This game of confusion was analyzed by Chaim Kupferberg’s in “9/11 and the Smoking Gun that Turned on its Tracker” (Part One and Part Two), another analysis that leaves no doubt about US/Bush administration involvement behind 9/11, and CIA connections to “al-Qaeda."

Bottom line: if the Mumbai attacks can be attributed to the ISI, a branch of the CIA, and the same “al-Qaeda” terror groups tied to US military intelligence groups working (either knowingly or guided) by the Bush administration’s intelligence agencies, what purpose did it serve US interests?

How does the US benefit from a destabilization of India?

A breakout of war between Pakistan and India favors US geostrategy in a number of ways. The possibilities will undoubtedly be analyzed, in coming weeks and months.

Broadly, the collapse of the Indio-Pak peace process opens the political doors for new US military interventions on the Eurasian subcontinent, and a restrengthening of the US presence on the Eurasian corridor, (which has, in recent months, been weakened by perceived failure of the Bush administration’s Iraq operation).

The other geopolitical “games” that benefit from violence in India include the setup towards any military action in Iran, revived operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the continuing superpower chess games with China and Russia. The overriding long-term imperative for all nations, of course, is energy.

As Ruppert notes in Crossing the Rubicon:

“If energy demand in China, India and Indonesia is allowed to grow as much as analysts say it will, then these three countries may well crowd the rest of the world out of the energy market . . . It is plain that growing energy demands will bring China, India and Indonesia into conflict with the developed world. The United States in particular, as the top world consumer of oil, will likely either have to curb consumption to make room for other countries or will have to find some way to curb demands of the emerging energy consumers. Moreover, competition for diminishing oil resources could threaten the US dollar hegemony over world oil transactions.”

According to Ruppert, the US attitude on India and energy is mixed. “Being so energy-poor, India may have no choice but to take what they can get," from Pakistan (which, prior to recent violence, was on course to provide India with access to a proposed Central Asian gas pipeline). At the same time, “it is foreseeable that India . . . may be left to starve, with much of the third world. Or it is possible that a nuclear exchange and/or a bloody war could be spurred on between India and Pakistan strictly for the purpose of population reduction. Such designs are despicable, but not out of the range of possibilities for starving nations.”

Finally, there is also the perennial propaganda imperative on the part of the Bush administration, and its many “allies in the war on terrorism." All perceived dips in mass public perception of the “war on terrorism” have triggered real as well as manufactured-for-media terror events. The Indian government, not surprisingly, is “vowing to battle terrorism," and issuing statements that repeat time-honored anti-terrorist rhetoric. And another shell-shocked populace is “reeling."

A final sickening reality is that Anglo-American-Israeli “war on terror” aggression has (by design as well as unintentionally) fomented and unleashed real terrorism and “blowback” that can no longer be controlled.
In the end, as was the case with 9/11, London 7/7, Bali, and every other post-9/11 “terror” calamity, we are left with another horrific tragedy. But we have also been handed a damning new evidence trail that leads to suspects in high places with means, motive, opportunity -- and geostrategy.

Copyright © 1998-2006 Online Journal
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July 16, 2006
New York Times Editorial

The Real Agenda

[for an unbowdlerized, non-dumbed-down view of "the real agenda", see:
Two Plus Two Make Four
http://mujca.com/masterplan.htm

It is only now, nearly five years after Sept. 11, that the full picture of the Bush administration’s response to the terror attacks is becoming clear. Much of it, we can see now, had far less to do with fighting Osama bin Laden than with expanding presidential power.

Over and over again, the same pattern emerges: Given a choice between following the rules or carving out some unprecedented executive power, the White House always shrugged off the legal constraints. Even when the only challenge was to get required approval from an ever-cooperative Congress, the president and his staff preferred to go it alone. While no one questions the determination of the White House to fight terrorism, the methods this administration has used to do it have been shaped by another, perverse determination: never to consult, never to ask and always to fight against any constraint on the executive branch.

One result has been a frayed democratic fabric in a country founded on a constitutional system of checks and balances. Another has been a less effective war on terror.

The Guantánamo Bay Prison

This whole sorry story has been on vivid display since the Supreme Court ruled that the Geneva Conventions and United States law both applied to the Guantánamo Bay detention camp. For one brief, shining moment, it appeared that the administration realized it had met a check that it could not simply ignore. The White House sent out signals that the president was ready to work with Congress in creating a proper procedure for trying the hundreds of men who have spent years now locked up as suspected terrorists without any hope of due process.

But by week’s end it was clear that the president’s idea of cooperation was purely cosmetic. At hearings last week, the administration made it clear that it merely wanted Congress to legalize President Bush’s illegal actions — to amend the law to negate the court’s ruling instead of creating a system of justice within the law. As for the Geneva Conventions, administration witnesses and some of their more ideologically blinkered supporters in Congress want to scrap the international consensus that no prisoner may be robbed of basic human dignity.

The hearings were a bizarre spectacle in which the top military lawyers — who had been elbowed aside when the procedures at Guantánamo were established — endorsed the idea that the prisoners were covered by the Geneva Convention protections. Meanwhile, administration officials and obedient Republican lawmakers offered a lot of silly talk about not coddling the masterminds of terror.

The divide made it clear how little this all has to do with fighting terrorism. Undoing the Geneva Conventions would further endanger the life of every member of the American military who might ever be taken captive in the future. And if the prisoners scooped up in Afghanistan and sent to Guantánamo had been properly processed first — as military lawyers wanted to do — many would never have been kept in custody, a continuing reproach to the country that is holding them. Others would actually have been able to be tried under a fair system that would give the world a less perverse vision of American justice. The recent disbanding of the C.I.A. unit charged with finding Osama bin Laden is a reminder that the American people may never see anyone brought to trial for the terrible crimes of 9/11.

The hearings were supposed to produce a hopeful vision of a newly humbled and cooperative administration working with Congress to undo the mess it had created in stashing away hundreds of people, many with limited connections to terrorism at the most, without any plan for what to do with them over the long run. Instead, we saw an administration whose political core was still intent on hunkering down. The most embarrassing moment came when Bush loyalists argued that the United States could not follow the Geneva Conventions because Common Article Three, which has governed the treatment of wartime prisoners for more than half a century, was too vague. Which part of “civilized peoples,” “judicial guarantees” or “humiliating and degrading treatment” do they find confusing?

Eavesdropping on Americans

The administration’s intent to use the war on terror to buttress presidential power was never clearer than in the case of its wiretapping program. The president had legal means of listening in on the phone calls of suspected terrorists and checking their e-mail messages. A special court was established through a 1978 law to give the executive branch warrants for just this purpose, efficiently and in secrecy. And Republicans in Congress were all but begging for a chance to change the process in any way the president requested. Instead, of course, the administration did what it wanted without asking anyone. When the program became public, the administration ignored calls for it to comply with the rules. As usual, the president’s most loyal supporters simply urged that Congress pass a law allowing him to go on doing whatever he wanted to do.

Senator Arlen Specter, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, announced on Thursday that he had obtained a concession from Mr. Bush on how to handle this problem. Once again, the early perception that the president was going to bend to the rules turned out to be premature.

The bill the president has agreed to accept would allow him to go on ignoring the eavesdropping law. It does not require the president to obtain warrants for the one domestic spying program we know about — or for any other program — from the special intelligence surveillance court. It makes that an option and sets the precedent of giving blanket approval to programs, rather than insisting on the individual warrants required by the Constitution. Once again, the president has refused to acknowledge that there are rules he is required to follow.

And while the bill would establish new rules that Mr. Bush could voluntarily follow, it strips the federal courts of the right to hear legal challenges to the president’s wiretapping authority. The Supreme Court made it clear in the Guantánamo Bay case that this sort of meddling is unconstitutional.

If Congress accepts this deal, Mr. Specter said, the president will promise to ask the surveillance court to assess the constitutionality of the domestic spying program he has acknowledged. Even if Mr. Bush had a record of keeping such bargains, that is not the right court to make the determination. In addition, Mr. Bush could appeal if the court ruled against him, but the measure provides no avenue of appeal if the surveillance court decides the spying program is constitutional.

The Cost of Executive Arrogance

The president’s constant efforts to assert his power to act without consent or consultation has warped the war on terror. The unity and sense of national purpose that followed 9/11 is gone, replaced by suspicion and divisiveness that never needed to emerge. The president had no need to go it alone — everyone wanted to go with him. Both parties in Congress were eager to show they were tough on terrorism. But the obsession with presidential prerogatives created fights where no fights needed to occur and made huge messes out of programs that could have functioned more efficiently within the rules.

Jane Mayer provided a close look at this effort to undermine the constitutional separation of powers in a chilling article in the July 3 issue of The New Yorker. She showed how it grew out of Vice President Dick Cheney’s long and deeply held conviction that the real lesson of Watergate and the later Iran-contra debacle was that the president needed more power and that Congress and the courts should get out of the way.

To a disturbing degree, the horror of 9/11 became an excuse to take up this cause behind the shield of Americans’ deep insecurity. The results have been devastating. Americans’ civil liberties have been trampled. The nation’s image as a champion of human rights has been gravely harmed. Prisoners have been abused, tortured and even killed at the prisons we know about, while other prisons operate in secret. American agents “disappear” people, some entirely innocent, and send them off to torture chambers in distant lands. Hundreds of innocent men have been jailed at Guantánamo Bay without charges or rudimentary rights. And Congress has shirked its duty to correct this out of fear of being painted as pro-terrorist at election time.

• We still hope Congress will respond to the Supreme Court’s powerful and unequivocal ruling on Guantánamo Bay and also hold Mr. Bush to account for ignoring the law on wiretapping. Certainly, the president has made it clear that he is not giving an inch of ground.

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What, me worry?

by Irv Shrago
Resident MUJCA Philosopher
Oskaloosa, Iowa, US

If I were a cynic, I'd see Israel's bizarre escalations as part of a rather desperate longer-term, coordinated strategy.
 
I'd surmise the Israeli government feels the Bush Administration is in danger of losing at least one branch of Congress in the November elections, which could end with impeachment. Hence, Israel is in a rush to expand the Gaza and Lebanon conflicts until Iran is openly drawn into the hostilities. This would give the Bush Administration the opportunity to "support" its main unoiled ally in the Middle East, destroy Iran's nuclear facilities, declare a total state of emergency in the U.S. and suspend elections, and coincidentally drive oil prices far into triple digits.
 
Luckily, I'm too stupid, naive and happily brainwashed to be cynical about our Glorious, Dear, Fearless Leader here in the recently and chafingly diplomatic United States of The Matrix.