Friday, December 24, 2010

Osama bin Dead awhile

by Keith Johnson

The next time the CIA comes up with another Osama bin Laden videotape, you might want to compare their images of the alleged al-Qaeda leader to the photograph I’ve provided here. If he looks any healthier than that, then you’re probably looking at an imposter.


Yeah, Osama has definitely seen better days. But give the guy a break, huh? You wouldn’t look much better if you’d been dead for nine years.

Oh, by the way, in case you’ve just joined us? Osama bin Laden is dead.

He died in the Tora Bora Mountains of Afghanistan on December 13, 2001. He was buried in an unmarked grave within 24 hours of his death. Case closed.

But don’t just take my word for it. Top terror experts, intelligence analysts, academics, government officials, and even major political figures around the globe tend to agree that, “All the evidence suggests Elvis Presley is more alive today than Osama Bin Laden.”

I know this is old news to most of you, but I think it’s important to reiterate this fact. Why? Because Christmas season is upon us, and you know what that means: Terrorism!

That’s right! “Tis the season to be frightened,” and what 21st century Christmas would be complete without a holiday greeting from the man often credited with masterminding the attacks behind 9/11?

But wait—it’s already Christmas Eve (at least it was at the time of this writing)—and although our government has been hyping the threat al-Qaeda poses to the American people, one central figure has been conspicuously absent from their conspiracy theories.

Could it be that our government has finally given up on trying to convince the American people that Osama bin Laden is still alive and kicking? There sure is plenty to suggest that their efforts have thus far failed to inspire the kind of fear they need to justify these unpopular wars abroad, and the even more unpopular war on the civil liberties of American citizens here at home.

A CNN poll conducted in September of this year reveals that 67% of Americans believe it is unlikely the U.S. will ever capture or kill Osama bin Laden. That’s a dramatic increase since 2001, when only 20% believed that it would be unlikely that the government would catch him. One thing this poll does not address is why the American people believe it is unlikely that the U.S. will capture or kill Osama bin Laden. But you and I know the answer to that question, right? Right—because he’s dead!

By the time this poll was conducted, the American people had already grown tired of the ad nauseam attempts by our government to breathe life into this long dead villain. Each new audio and videotape purporting to be that of Osama bin Laden failed to stand up to scrutiny. One of the more prominent critics of these tapes is Former U.S. foreign intelligence officer Angelo M. Codevilla, who is now a professor of international relations at Boston University. In March of 2009, Codevilla wrote a damning critique of the countless recordings in an article for American Spectator Magazine.

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Jewish Extremism and Its Media Cover Up

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Is Wikileaks Endgame Internet Censorship?

By F. William Engdahl
12-21-10


"A closer look at the details of what has so far been carefully leaked by the most ultra-establishment of international media such as the New York Times reveals a clear agenda. That agenda coincidentally serves to buttress the agenda of US geopolitics around the world from Iran to North Korea. It is almost too perfectly scripted to be true. A discontented 22-year old US Army soldier on duty in Baghdad, Bradley Manning, a low-grade US Army intelligence analyst, described as a loner, a gay in the military, a disgruntled "computer geek," sifts through classified information at Forward Operating Base Hammer. He decides to secretly download US State Department email communications from the entire world over a period of eight months for hours a day, onto his blank CDs while pretending to be listening to Lady Gaga.

In addition to diplomatic cables, Manning is believed to have provided WikiLeaks with helicopter gun camera video of an errant US attack in Baghdad on unarmed journalists, and with war logs from Iraq and Afghanistan. It is almost too perfectly scripted to be true. A discontented 22-year old US Army soldier on duty in Baghdad, Bradley Manning, a low-grade US Army intelligence analyst, described as a loner, a gay in the military, a disgruntled "computer geek," sifts through classified information at Forward Operating Base Hammer. He decides to secretly download US State Department email communications from the entire world over a period of eight months for hours a day, onto his blank CDs while pretending to be listening to Lady Gaga. In addition to diplomatic cables, Manning is believed to have provided WikiLeaks with helicopter gun camera video of an errant US attack in Baghdad on unarmed journalists, and with war logs from Iraq and Afghanistan."

"Manning then is supposed to have tracked down a notorious former US computer hacker to get his 250,000 pages of classified US State Department cables out in the Internet for the whole world to see. He allegedly told the US hacker that the documents he had contained "incredible, awful things that belonged in the public domain and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington, DC." The hacker turned him in to US authorities so the story goes. Manning is now incommunicado since months in US military confinement so we cannot ask him, conveniently. The Pentagon routinely hires the best hackers to design their security systems. [Assange] selects as exclusive newspapers to decide what is to be leaked the New York Times which did such service in promoting faked propaganda against Saddam that led to the Iraqi war, the London Guardian and Der Spiegel. Assange claims he had no time to sift through so many pages so handed them to the trusted editors of the establishment media for them to decide what should be released. Very "anti-establishment" that.

The New York Times even assigned one of its top people, David E. Sanger, to control the release of the Wikileaks material. Sanger is no establishment outsider. He sits as a member of the elite Council on Foreign Relations as well as the Aspen Institute Strategy Group together with the likes of Condi Rice, former Defense Secretary William Perry, former CIA head John Deutch, former State Department Deputy Secretary and now World Bank head Robert Zoellick among others. Indeed a strange choice of media for a person who claims to be anti-establishment. But then Assange also says he believes the US Government version of 9/11 and calls the Bilderberg Group a normal meeting of people, a very establishment view. Most important, the 250,000 cables are not "top secret" as we might have thought.

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Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Monday, December 20, 2010

North Korea 'will not hit back' over Yeonpyeong drills

North Korea says it will not retaliate despite "reckless provocations" from the South, which held live-fire drills on the flashpoint island of Yeonpyeong.

The North shelled the island last month after similar drills and had threatened more retaliation this time.

But state media quoted the army as saying it was "not worth reacting".

Meanwhile US politician Bill Richardson, on a visit to the North, says it has agreed to allow UN inspectors back into the country.

The New Mexico governor, who is in Pyongyang in an unofficial capacity, said he had been told during meetings that members of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) would be allowed renewed access to a uranium enrichment facility.

There has been no official comment from the North, and it is unclear which facility Mr Richardson was referring to.

Inspectors, who had been monitoring the Yongbyon nuclear plant, were expelled from the country in April 2009.

UN Security Council talks on North Korea ended without a deal at the weekend, reportedly after China refused to agree to a statement critical of its ally.

The South's government has been under huge domestic pressure to take a tough stance towards Pyongyang, in the wake of the 23 November shelling of Yeonpyeong, which killed four people.
'Make dialogue, not war'

The South ordered residents of Yeonpyeong and several other islands to take cover in air-raid shelters early on Monday.

Witnesses said the ground shook from the force of the artillery barrages during 90 minutes of firing.

South Koreans feared a military response from the North, but state news agency KCNA reported that the military was not planning any retaliation.

"The revolutionary armed forces of the DPRK [North Korea] did not feel any need to retaliate against every despicable military provocation," KCNA quoted the the army's Supreme Command as saying.

"The world should properly know who is the true champion of peace and who is the real provocateur of a war."

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Historical Revisionism Needs To Focus On The Truth

By Karl Schwarz
12-20-10


In what might first appear a brave act of Historical Revisionism, Germany has endeavored to get the truth on the record regarding the saturation fire-bombing of Dresden Germany.

Or, did they?

They appointed a Historical Commission that purportedly had free license to dig into the matter as deep as they wished. As often happens when 'historical accounts' are looked into the 'Dresden matter' produced a much lower number of casualties and seems to have accomplished nothing but expand the debate.

Although reports have varied wildly about the number killed being anywhere from 35,000, to 100,000 and some statements as high as 500,000, it seems the math was wrong according to the (victimized) Germans that were involved in the Historical Commission investigation. Or, this could just as easily be zionist 'revisionist history' at work again.

The following is a quote from the October 2, 2008 issue of 'Der Spiegel':

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,581992,00.html

"Dresden Commission of Historians for the Ascertainment of the Number of Victims of the Air Raids on the City of Dresden on 13/14 February 1945" has provisionally estimated the likely death-toll at around 18,000 and definitely no more than 25,000."

Now, this revelation brings up several interesting points.

First, what is the true casualty / death-toll of the fire-bombing of Dresden during World War II? It seems the true number is still an unknown and hotly contested figure, no pun intended.

Second, most people accept that the saturation incendiary bombing of a civilian population in the manner that was done was blatantly wrong. The war was almost over and snuffing out those lives was merely a show of air power, not a military necessity. The US and UK were putting on a 'shock and awe' demonstration for the advancing Russian army.

Yes, they killed a lot of innocent civilians to demonstrate to the Russians that their advancement to the west needed to halt. This Historical Commission says 18,000 to 25,000 and many other accounts state in the 100,000 to 250,000 to 500,000 range. Regardless of the actual figure, it was a war crime and should have never happened.

Third, not enough has been reported about the 1 to 1.5 million German POW soldiers that were literally starved to death or froze to death in the POW camps run by the US after the war ended. It happened but getting at the truth of the matter is difficult to do when so many wish to hide from the issue and the Truth.

There has been some written on that subject, up to and including how appalled the British were at US actions after the war. It seems the British were a little more caring and concerned about proper Hague and Geneva Convention conduct in post-war Germany. Just because an enemy has been defeated and surrendered, it is not a just cause to keep on killing them in inhumane ways as the US forces did to the German POW's after World War II ended. I have even read articles that the Russians were more compassionate in feeding and clothing the German POW's, than were the Americans.

I recently had breakfast with a German who was born in Dresden and survived the fire-bombing. He related to me the horrors of those two days but confessed that no one knows what the actual number of dead was from the fire-bombing of Dresden. It may be that only God knows the real number of dead, and the numbers still vary wildly from the 18,000 to 25,000 up to the much higher 250,000 to 500,000. He was there and thinks the figure was around 40,000 to 50,000 dead.

Which is the truth? That is still hard to ascertain.

The Dresden resident that survived the bombing continued to tell me a story that is not in the history books and was just as interesting to me. The Russian army reached Dresden before the Americans arrived. He reported that there were no problems whatsoever as the Russian army moved towards Berlin and to establish their western front. There was no battle or resistance from the German people.

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'I didn't think of Iraqis as humans,' says U.S. soldier who raped 14-year-old girl before killing her and her family

An Iraq War veteran serving five life terms for raping and killing a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and killing her parents and sister says he didn't think of Iraqi civilians as humans after being exposed to extreme warzone violence.

Steven Green, a former 101st Airborne soldier, in his first interview since the 2006 killings, claimed that his crimes were fuelled in part by experiences in Iraq's violent 'Triangle of Death' where two of his sergeants were gunned down.

He also cited a lack of leadership and help from the Army.

'I was crazy,' Green said in the exclusive telephone interview from federal prison in Tucson, Arizona. 'I was just all the way out there. I didn't think I was going to live.'

Green talked about what led up to the March 12, 2006, attack on a family near Mahmoudiya, Iraq, that left him serving five consecutive life sentences.

The former soldier, who apologised at sentencing for his crimes, said he wasn't seeking sympathy nor trying to justify his actions - killings prosecutors described at trial in 2009 as one of the worst crimes of the Iraq war.

But Green said people should know his actions were a consequence of his circumstances in a war zone.

'If I hadn't ever been in Iraq, I wouldn't be in the kind of trouble I'm in now,' Green said. 'I'm not happy about that.'

Green was discharged with a 'personality disorder' before federal charges were brought against him.

Prosecutors sought a death sentence, but a federal jury in Paducah, Kentucky, opted for five life sentences on charges including the rape and murder of 14-year-old Abeer Qassim Al-Janabi and the shooting deaths of her mother, father and younger sister.

Four other soldiers were convicted in military court for various roles in the attack. Three remain in military prison.

Green is challenging the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, which allows the federal government to charge an American in civilian court for alleged crimes committed overseas. He was the first former soldier convicted under the statute. The U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals has scheduled arguments for January 21.

Green is challenging the constitutionality of that law, saying it gives the executive branch too much leeway over whom to prosecute. Prosecutors say the law should be upheld.

'I've got some hope, but I'm not delusional about it,' said Green, now 25. 'I hope it works. But, whenever they give you multiple life sentences, they're not planning on letting you out.'

Green didn't testify at trial. During sentencing, he apologized and said he expects to face 'God's justice' when he dies.

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