Tag Archives: 9/11

The Billionaires Who Helped Destroy Democracy

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The Mayfair Set: Four Stories About the Rise of Business and the Decline of Political Power

Directed by Adam Curtis (1999)

Film Review

The Mayfair Set is a four part documentary series profiling the right wing financiers responsible for the financialization of the British-American economy in the seventies and eighties. It also explores the simultaneous transfer of real power away from elected representatives to banks and financial markets. “Mayfair Set” refers to a private London gambling club – the Clermont Club – where many of these future billionaires were members.

Part 1 – concerns British aristocrat Colonel David Sterling, founder of the British SAS (Special Air Service). In the sixties and seventies, Sterling created a series of private mercenary armies to fight independence movements in Africa and elsewhere. In addition to secretly fighting Egypt’s invasion of Yemen in 1962, he also set up numerous arms deals for Saudi Arabia,* with the assistance of notorious Saudi arms dealer, Adnan Khashoggi.** He also created the Saudi air force.

Part 2 – concerns two right wing Clermont Club members John Slater and Tiny Rollin. Slater was a corporate raider who almost singlehandedly wiped out Britain’s manufacturing sector in the seventies and eighties. He did so by targeting specific companies for hostile takeover, stripping their assets, sacking thousands of workers, and investing the proceeds in the share market. Rollin was responsible for bilking newly independent African nations of their mines, factories and plantations.

Part 3 – concerns Slater’s fellow corporate raider, Michael Goldsmith, who emigrated to the US in 1980 and paired up with junk bond guru Michael Milken to destroy America’s manufacturing base by initiating dozens of hostile takeovers of US companies. In 1990 Milken was sentenced to 3 ½ years prison on 94 counts of fraud, racketeering and insider trading.

Part 4 – concerns the rise to power of Clermont Club darling Margaret Thatcher and her (controversial) embrace of Egyptian businessman Mohamed Al-Fayed. Al-Fayed saved her government when currency speculator George Soros led a vicious attack on the British pound in 1992. Al-Fayed would subsequently blow the whistle to the Guardian on all the British MPs who accepted bribes from him. Al-Fayed was father to Dodi, the boyfriend killed in the car crash with Princess Diana.

*British arms sales to Saudi Arabia, which continue to the present day, have become extremely controversial owing to the Saudis’ carpet bombing of Yemen and the resulting humanitarian crisis.  See Shelve UK arms sales to Saudis over Yemen, say two MPs’ committees

**Khashoggi first came to public attention for his role in the Iran-Contra scandal, in which George Herbert Walker Bush and other members of the Reagan administration illegally sold weapons to Iran to finance their illegal war against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. Khashoggi also had direct links with the alleged 9-11 terrorists (see Spike the News) and was the uncle of Dodi Al Fayed, the boyfriend killed in the car crash with Princess Diana.

 

Untold History of the US – Bush and Obama Age of Terror

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Part 10 of Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States covers the Bush II and Obama presidency.

The Bush II Presidency

Stone begins this section by reminding viewers that Al Gore won the 2000 election by 540,000 votes. He asserts Gore would also have won the electoral college if the Supreme Court hadn’t intervened and stopped the recount in Florida.

Under the heavy influence of Vice President Dick Cheney and other Project for a New American Century (PNAC) members, Bush immediately withdrew from the International Criminal Court treaty (which Clinton supported), the Nuclear Test Ban Treat, the Kyoto Accord and the Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty. He also suspended US-led talks for Korean unification and for peace in Israel-Palestine.

Following 9-11 (which Stone refers to as the new Pearl Harbor PNAC called for), Bush launched illegal wars of aggression against Afghanistan and Iraq. In addition to authorizing the illegal indefinite detention of “enemy combatants” at Guantanamo, he also authorized the use torture and significantly expanded the US of “extraordinary rendition”* by the CIA, a program started by Clinton.

During his two terms as president, Bush doubled the defense budget, forcing massive cuts in domestic spending – which Stone maintains destroyed the US economy.

Meanwhile he pushed the Patriot Act through Congress to suppress domestic dissent against these policies.

The Obama Presidency

Stone begins this segment by reminding us that Obama rejected public campaign financing in 2008. His opponent John McCain, in contrast, accept public financing. As a result, Obama received all the major donations from Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street banks. This enabled him to significantly outspend McCain.

Stone blasts Obama for campaigning as the anti-war, change candidate. Who immediately on receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, massively increased troop numbers in Afghanistan, as well as expanding the war on terror to Libya, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Somalia and the Philippines.

In addition to continuing NATO expansion to increase the likelihood of war with Russia, Obama significantly expanded the southern military command (SouthCom) to target democratic populism in South America (eg Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil and Argentina). In 2008 he created AfriCom a sixth military command aimed at countering Chinese investment in Africa.

Obama has also significantly increased the likelihood of war with China by encircling them with new troop deployment and sophisticated nuclear weapons systems.

*Extraordinary rendition is the term used when the CIA kidnaps criminal or terrorist suspects in a foreign country and secretly (and illegal) transports them to a country known to engage in torture.

The Impermanence of Empire

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nemesis

Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic

By Chalmers Johnson

Henry Holt (2007)

Book Review

Available free as a mobi file (download Kindle for PCs free from Amazon) at libcom.org

The third and final volume in a trilogy, Nemesis is a study of the impermanence of empire. Johnson draws on detailed studies of the Roman and British Empire to make specific predictions about the ultimate fate of the US.

After taking inventory of some of the British Empire’s worst atrocities (the deliberate destruction of thriving civilizations in India and China, the extermination of the Tasmanians in Australia, the systemic genocide against the Kikuyu in Kenya*, the slaughter of 10,000 Sudanese and the genocidal Malaysian Emergency), the late Chalmers Johnson asserts that Britain surrendered their empire after World War II due to flagging domestic support for their administrative massacres in India.

Rome, in contrast, continued its imperial conquests and atrocities by imposing a brutal dictatorship at home. Citing the systematic revocation of civil liberties, Johnson theorizes that the US has opted to follow Rome’s example. He makes the uncanny prediction (in 2007) that there will be no change in US foreign policy, even after getting rid of Bush and Cheney.

As the average lifespan of a full fledged empire is 100 years, Johnson predicts the US empire will have collapsed by the 22nd century. He believes it will maintain the facade of democracy until bankruptcy overwhelms it.

According to Johnson, the loss of the US manufacturing base has forced the country into spending exorbitant sums on totally useless technology (his chapters on Star Wars SDI weapons are particularly illuminating) just to keep the economy afloat.

Aside from the secret budget devoted to covert CIA operations, which he enumerates in detail**, 40% of the Pentagon budget is secret – even from Congress.

The US government finally came out of the closet after 9-11 about being an empire. However they continue to be extremely secretive about the total number of countries they occupy. As of 2007, the official count was 737 bases in 130. However Johnson lists at least a dozen secret bases that are kept off the official list for political reasons.

*The so-called Mau Mau uprising.

**A partial listing of the democracies overthrown by the CIA and replaced with dictatorships:

  • Italy 1947-48
  • Iran 1953
  • Guatemala 1954
  • Indonesia 1957-58
  • Brazil 1961-64
  • Greece 1964-74
  • South Korea 1961-1987
  • Philippines continuously
  • Chile 1973

The Psychological Trauma Inflicted by Predatory Capitalism

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The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

Directed by Michael Winterbottom (2009)

Film Review

Based on Naomi Klein’s best-selling book by the same name, this documentary explores predatory capitalism’s use of psychological trauma to crush human rights and forcibly transfer vast sums of money  from the poor to the rich.

Like the book, the documentary begins with Dr Ewan Cameron’s CIA-funded research at McGill University into the long term  effects of shock therapy, sleep deprivation and other deliberately inflicted trauma. The Agency would incorporate Cameron’s findings in their Kubark counterintelligence interrogation (ie torture) manual. They went on to use Kubark to train fascist South American military officers at the School of the Americas and to interrogate random prisoners (the vast majority were never charged) at Guantanamo and Iraqi prisons.

The film also explores the “economic shock therapy” developed by the late University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman. Friedman was a master at exploiting natural and contrived disasters to impose the kind of extreme free market reforms that crush unions and wages, shut down or privatize public services and create massive unemployment – while simultaneously transferring obscene amounts of wealth from the working and middle classes to the rich.

Friedman and his cronies seized the opportunity to put their predatory theories into practice when the CIA helped overthrow democratically elected governments in Chile, Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina; during the neoconservative regimes of Thatcher and Reagan; in Russia after the Berlin Wall collapsed; in New Orleans after Katrina; in Sri Lanka after the 2004 tsunami; and in Iraq after 9/11.

French Activists Real Target of State of Emergency

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Paris State of Emergency

Medialien (2016)

Film Review

Paris State of Emergency is a short documentary revealing how French police are using the state of emergency declared in November 2015 to target social justice activists rather than Islamic terrorists.

This has resulted in numerous warrantless house searches by armed SWAT teams, as well as arbitrary arrest and heavy police violence against squatters and peaceful protesters.

French activists find themselves in a similar position as US activists after 9-11 and the passage of the Patriot Act. The latter has targeted vastly more activists than terrorists for surveillance, home invasion and arrest.

The French activists interviewed also complain of heavy infiltration of their organizations by police informants – which explains how French authorities could immediately target key organizers once they declared the state of emergency.

Inside the Brutal Reality of Saudi Arabia

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Inside the Dark Kingdom: Butchery, Slavery and History of Revolt

Abby Martin (2015)

Film Review

Inside the Dark Kingdom is a documentary celebrating the irony of Saudi Arabia’s selection to head the UN Panel of Human Rights. The blatant hypocrisy of the (successful) US campaign for this tyrannical kingdom to champion global human rights is obvious from the simple statement of facts. As is the duplicity of trying to depose the so-called “bloody dictator” of Syria while openly supporting the Saudi reign of terror.

The film investigates Saudi Arabia’s brutal and arbitrary criminal justice system, their brutal oppression of women, their virtual enslavement of migrant workers, their recent invasion of Yemen, their role in 9-11 and their reliance on US military assistance to suppress human rights organizing.

Saudi trials take place in secret, often without legal representation for the accused. Saudi subjects can be beheaded, stoned or crucified for crimes such as adultery, blasphemy, homosexuality and drug use and imprisoned and lashed for human rights advocacy or being victimized by sexual assault (typically rape victims receive more lashes than the men who rape them). Forty-five percent of Saudi executions are for non-violent drug crimes.

Saudi Uprisings

You rarely hear about Saudi Arabia’s long history of popular uprisings (and their brutal suppression) in the corporate media. The US first began collaborating with the Saudi royal family to suppress human rights in 1953, when Aramco (Arabian Oil Company workers) went on strike demanding a union. The US responded by establishing the US Training Mission in Saudi Arabia, which assisted the Saudi government in torturing and assassinating union leaders.

Saudi Arabia had their first failed revolution in 1962, when a Shia-led uprising demanded that oil profits be used to address poverty rather than to increase the wealth of American oil companies and the Saudi royal family.

Inspired by the 1979 revolution in Iran, rebels in the eastern Shia region of Saudi people launched massive street protests. These were crushed when the government tortured and assassinated key leaders and destroyed (via bombing) of dissident civilian enclaves.

The Saudi Arab Spring

Following the Arab Spring rebellions that blossomed in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011, there were Arab Spring rebellions in three major Saudi cities. The royal family responded by declaring martial law and banning any mainstream or social media favorable to the Arab Spring or unfavorable to the royal family. After arresting, torturing and/or assassinating of key organizers (and their families), the government immediately quadrupled their arms imports from the US.

The primary purpose of all this military hardware is to suppress dissent, not only in Saudi Arabia, but in Bahrain (the Saudi Army invaded Bahrain to suppress their Arab Spring uprising) and Yemen. Since April, 150,000 Saudi troops have invaded Yemen and killed 4,000 Yemenis – more than half of them civilians.

The 1945 Oil Protection Agreement

Martin also traces the history of the unique US-Saudi relationship, which started in 1945 with the signing of an official Oil Protection Agreement and the installation of a US naval base.

Dating back to 1988 the last four US presidents have had close business and personal relationships with the Saudi royal family. At present the Saudi princes are major donors to the Clinton Foundation.

Going Off the Grid

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off the grid

Off the Grid: Inside the Movement for more Space, Less Government, and True Independence in Modern America

by Nick Rosen

Penguin Books (2010)

Book Review

Off the Grid is an exploration of the diverse permutations of the US off-the-grid movement. According to British journalist and documentary filmmaker Nick Rosen, living “off the grid” can have a variety of meanings. For some it means living self-sufficiently without the higher cost and carbon emissions of electric, gas, water and sewage connections. For others, it means living incommunicado without the daily intrusion of cellphones or email. In a few cases, involving political dissidents or those with criminal records, it means escaping the prying eyes of the surveillance society.

The movement includes liberal-leaning environmentalists, who Rosen describes as the “foot soldiers of the eco-revolution,” right wing civil libertarians and survivalists, the homeless and urban homesteaders who capture rainwater and produce their own electricity despite living within city limits.

In 2007, there were 300,000 off the grid households in the US. By 2010, the number had reached 520,000 and was growing by 10-15% annually.

Obama’s Smart Grid

Rosen is clearly a strong supporter – and part time practitioner – of off the grid living. He also strongly opposes Obama’s push to build a multibillion dollar “Smart Grid.”  With the latter, power companies use Smart Meters to continuously monitor users’ electricity consumption. Power companies (and Obama) are bending the truth when they claim a government subsidized smart grid is essential to respond to big growth in future electricity demand. Electricity demand is decreasing, due to the economic downturn and big improvements in efficiency.

The real reason power companies want Obama to build them a Smart Grid is to facilitate long distance trading in wholesale electricity. This is where they make their big money (Anyone remember Enron?).

The History of the Grid

The most interesting section of the book explores the historical development of the electrical grid. According to Rosen, it part of a deliberate scheme by Edison and GE (the company he founded) to increase electricity consumption. Both GE and Westinghouse launched massive propaganda campaigns to get people to sign up for the grid and purchase more electrical appliances to increase their consumption.

Although far less profitable for power companies, there’s no question that smaller, decentralized energy supply networks would have been more efficient* and cheaper for consumers.

Intentional Community

The bulk of the book focuses on groups and individuals who have created off-the-grid communities to recapture the social engagement that has disappeared from modern society. People who join them make an intentional decision to rely on one another, rather than technology, to meet their needs.

One prominent example includes the Earthship community architect Mike Reynolds started in New Mexico.  An Earthship is an ecologically sustainable home built out of used tires filled with earth or sand and other recycled items. Dennis Weaver’s documentary Garbage Warrior, celebrates Reynold’s creation of the Earthship concept. Another highlight is Rosen’s fascinating visit to an Amish old order Mennonite community in Kentucky.

Belittling 911 Truthers

One part of the book that really irritated me was the chapter belittling civil libertarians who decided to live off-the-grid after discovering the 9-11 attacks were an “inside job.” Rosen makes it appear as if people who reject the Bush administration version of the Twin Tower attacks (as I do) are mentally ill and deluded.

Support for the 9-11 truth movement is in no way limited to paranoid right wing libertarians, as Rosen suggests. Globally the movement has millions of adherents and they represent the entire political spectrum.

*Our current electrical power system loses approximately 8-15% of the electricity it creates between the power plant and the consumer.

The Elite Cabal Behind the JFK Assassination

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JFK to 911: Everything is a Rich Man’s Trick

Francis Richard Connolly (2014)

Film Review

This lengthy documentary explores how a handful of super rich American, British and Dutch fascists used their consolidated wealth and power to secretly manipulate the course of modern history. Connolly presents a coherent, well-documented examination of the American robber baron families who financed the rise of Nazi Germany and secretly plotted and financed the JFK assassination. His reconstruction of November 1963 Dealey Plaza events is based on the collected work of reputable assassination researchers, which he lists in the credits.

Introducing the Robber Barons

The film begins with the rise of key monopoly capitalists in the early 20th century: E H Harriman, who borrowed money from the Rothschild banks to create his railroad monopoly; John Rockefeller, who Harriman assisted in creating an oil monopoly; and J P Morgan who borrowed from the Rothschilds to create a banking monopoly. After World War I, these elite families would be joined by the Colgate family, the Birdseye family, the Dupont family and members of the British and Dutch royal families to create a fascist government in Germany as a bulwark against Soviet Bolshevism. Connolly carefully traces how these elite families, using Allen and John Foster Dulles and George Herbert Walker and Prescott Bush as their political henchman, assisted Germany in paying their war reparations and acquiring a dazzling arsenal of tanks, bombers and advanced weapons that would eventually be used against American GIs.

Immediately following World War II, the same families used CIA Director Allen Dulles and Congressman Richard Nixon to enable Nazi spies and scientists they had brought to power to secretly emigrate to the US to join the CIA and the US aerospace program.

Fifteen years later, these families, along with key Dallas oilmen and defense contractors and Mafia bosses the FBI and CIA enlisted during World War II, conspired to assassinate President John F Kennedy. Among the politicians who assisted them were Richard Nixon, George Herbert Walker Bush, J Edgar Hoover and Lyndon Johnson.

Follow the Money

In describing the motivation behind the JFK assassination, Connally begins with the gathering of high level co-conspirators at the home of Dallas oil mogul Clint Murchison on November 21, 1963 (the night before the assassination). We know who attended thanks to LBJ’s former mistress Madeline Duncan Brown. The corporate bigwigs were there because Kennedy threatened the fascist CIA-Wall Street empire they had built and because they stood to incur major financial losses from two Kennedy policy directives: to withdraw US military advisors from Vietnam and to end the oil depletion allowance.

The politicians were there because of historic ties with the fascist CIA-Wall Street nexus and because two risked losing their careers if Kennedy remained in office. LBJ was on the verge of going to prison for aiding and abetting the criminal activities of Billie Sol Estes.* Former FBI Director Hoover was on the verge of being forced out because the Kennedys had photos of him engaged in homosexual activities with his lover Clyde Tolson.

Mafia boss Carlos Marcello was there because he felt Kennedy had betrayed a promise his father Joe Kennedy had made to protect the Mob.

The Ambush in Dealey Plaza

Connolly’s dramatic reenactment of the ambush in Dealey Plaza (starts at 1:38) is the most exciting section of the film. Based on eye witness testimony, he identifies each of eight snipers by name and US intelligence role. Altogether sixteen shots were fired in four stages.

He also offers the first plausible explanation I’ve seen for the assassination of Dallas police officer J D Tippett, a well-known JFK look-alike. Connolly also identifies the CIA mortician who did post-mortem surgery on Tippett to make his wounds consistent with the official version of the assassination, the two coffins that flew to Washington DC on Air Force Two and the switch that occurred at Bethesda Naval Hospital.

*Billie Sol Estes was an American financier best known for his friendship with Senator (and future president) Lyndon Johnson and the business scandal that sent him to jail for fraud multiple times

Sticking It to Chomsky

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languageLanguage: the Cultural Tool

by Daniel Everett

Profile Books Ltd (2012)

Book Review

The purpose of this book is to outline a dispute in the linguistic community between those who believe that language is acquired – that human beings develop language as a cultural tool – and “nativists” who believe that people develop language because of their genetic programming.

Noam Chomsky, who is better known as an activist and dissident, is also considered the founder of modern linguistics. Nativists like Chomsky argue that language development is genetic mainly because all human beings acquire language, regardless of their intelligence, all languages have a similar core grammar, including Creole languages invented by children (actually they don’t, as Everett demonstrates) and all children follow the same developmental stages in learning language.

By examining linguistic research into the structure and function of language, as well as the biological requirements necessary to create it, Everett essentially demolishes all of Chomsky’s arguments – but in a nice way. As a former Wycliffe bible translator, Everett lived for many years in the Amazon and has researched over a dozen indigenous languages of Brazil. He has special interest in the language and culture of the Piraha tribe.

Everett takes the side of Aristotle, who first proposed that language is a tool 2300 years ago. Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934) was the first to articulate this view in the modern area. He believed human language was developed and shaped by the needs of social interaction.

I’ve always been troubled the unquestioning adulation Chomsky receives from the activist community, especially in view of his dismissive attitude towards an extensive body of research pointing to a government role in 9-11 and the John F Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations. Thus I was intrigued to learn of similar concerns in the linguistic community about the unquestioning embrace of his linguistic theories.

The Art and Science of State Terrorism

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state terrorism

Part 4 of Counter-intelligence: Shining a Light on Black Operations

“Necrophilous” is Part 4 of a five part documentary by Scott Noble called Counter-Intelligence: Shining a Light on Black Operations.

In Part 4, filmmaker Scott Noble examines the sadistic fixation of the National Security State with death, pain and permanent injury of individuals and groups whose democratic yearnings conflict with the financial interests of US corporations. He likens this fixation to the psychopathology that motivates serial killers.

Necophilous is defined as having an abnormal fascination with death and the dead. Part 4 begins by examining the decision, in 1945, to drop two atomic bombs on Japan.

A nuclear bomb deliberately targets civilians, a war crime under the Geneva Convention. Truman’s claim that nuking Japan spared GIs the bloodshed of a land invasions turns out to be completely bogus.

He already knew the Japanese were on the verge of surrendering. In fact Secretary of War Henry Stimson was afraid the Japanese would surrender before the US got the chance to deploy atomic weapons – which were mainly intended to terrorize the Soviet Union.

The School of the Americas

Exhibit two is the School of the Americas (SOA), founded in 1946 at Fort Benning Georgia. More than 60,000 soldiers and police from US client states have trained in counter-insurgency techniques (aka state terrorism) at SOA. The use of deaths squads who disappear and assassinate pesky intellectuals, educators, labor leaders and human rights advocates figures prominently in the SOA curriculum.

The CIA-installed Guatemalan dictatorship first used it in the 1950s. After the CIA itself used it during Operation Phoenix in Vietnam, it would be replicated by US-backed regimes of terror throughout Latin America. The same “men in black” reappeared in Bush’s campaign to terrorize Afghans and Iraqis who resisted US occupation.

Aided by Kubark, the official CIA torture manual, the instructors at SOA are also the world’s leading experts in torture. The only purpose of torture is to induce fear and compliance in a hostile population. Despite its role in inducing false confessions, it never produces meaningful intelligence. This is confirmed by decades of research.

Total War and the War on Terror

A final form of American state terrorism is “Total War,” in which civilians are deliberately targeted for extermination.

US dedication to Total War predates the Geneva Convention that declared it a war crime. It dates back to the near total extermination of the Native Americans, followed by the mass slaughter of the Philippine population during US occupation (1898-1946), Vietnamese civilians during the Vietnam War, Clinton’s deliberate bombing of essential Iraqi infrastructure in 1991 and the use of white phosphorus and depleted uranium against civilians during the second invasion of Iraq in 2003.

In fact the War on Terror is really a War OF Terror, aimed at expanding the US empire to include seven Middle East and North African (MENA) countries: Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Syria, Lebanon and Iran.*

As Noble ably documents, plans for the American conquest of the above seven countries first crystallized in 1979 under Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. A fundamental aspect of this campaign has been covert US support for Islamic fundamentalism – the self-same “terrorists” we are fighting in the so-called War on Terror – in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Palestine, Afghanistan, Syria and elsewhere.

“Necrophilous” concludes by examining evidence that 9-11 was most likely an engineered false flag operation to justify the decades-long war that would be required to establish a permanent military presence in the Middle East and North Africa. The military build-up for the invasion of Afghanistan began months before the so-called “attack” on the Twin Towers.

*Retired General Wesley Clark first revealed the existence of this campaign to conquer the Middle East and North Africa during a Democracy Now interview in 2007

photo credit: Kurt and Sybilla via photopin cc

Counter-intelligence: Shining a Light on Black Operations
Scott Noble
Metanoia Films (2013)

Also posted on Veterans Today