Mon May 27, 2013
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/05/27/305627/death-of-fbi-agents-creates-controversy/
Two well-trained Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents who were involved in the killing of a Boston bombing suspect have suspiciously died.
The FBI said in a statement that 41-year-old Christopher Lorek and 40-year-old Stephen Shaw were killed on May 17 as they fell out of a helicopter into water during a training mission off the coast of Virginia Beach.
US officials have blamed bad weather for the tragedy but some have questioned the credibility of the official account, considering it a cover-up.
They say the agents’ death adds to the suspicious death of a friend of the Boston bombing suspect, Ibragim Todashev, who was killed in his own apartment by an FBI agent.
Lorek and Shaw were part of the bureau's Critical Incident Response Group and were both members of the team investigating the Boston Marathon bombings in mid-April.
“You could always take it as one of an endless group of coincidences. We have so many [of them], when you look at the Boston investigation that these two individuals were involved in, everything had the stamp of CIA and FBI on it, from the first steps,” Gordon Duff, senior editor of Veterans Today, told Press TV.
“What we have in the US is that we don’t report, we don’t have the least free press here. There are powerful dissident elements within our military, intelligence services and government that are under the control of... I’ll call them organized crime on a worldwide basis. If you refer to hundreds of billions of dollars worth of narcotics and trillions of dollars worth of financial crimes, it is simply organized crime, it is the understatement of all time,” he added.
The incident has reminded many of the dramatic death of top US commandos in Afghanistan, who lost their lives three months after their involvement in the alleged killing of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in 2011.
On August 6, 2011, the helicopter of the Navy SEAL Team VI was shot down in Afghanistan.
The families of Navy SEAL members have blamed the government for the tragedy, saying the shooting down of the helicopter and the subsequent cover-up was planned by the government.
They said that US President Barack Obama turned the SEALs group into a Taliban target after the administration revealed they had conducted the bin Laden raid.
The families also claimed Taliban militants had received leaked information from the US government regarding the landing site of the commandos’ helicopter.
Moreover, the SEAL Team VI members were reportedly flown to the landing site with a Vietnam-era Chinook helicopter rather than with their customary Special Forces choppers.
“There is absolutely nothing that is credible about that; this is not a mission they would have been on, this is not a helicopter they would have been on,” Duff pointed out.
Showing posts with label Osama bin Laden. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Osama bin Laden. Show all posts
Friday, May 31, 2013
Monday, March 4, 2013
CIA Emails Reveal Winners and Losers
CIA Emails Reveal Winners and Losers of National Security Access
Full Article:
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2012/08/cia-emails-reveal-winners-and-losers-national-security-access/56297/
Excerpt:
For everyone who didn't get special access to information about the Osama bin Laden raid, today was a little bit discouraging as new e-mails revealed CIA officials gushing over Hollywood filmakers at the expense of trained reporters and documentarians.
The filmmakers given top notch access have been known for months: Director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal, the team behind the Oscar-winning film The Hurt Locker and the upcoming film on the mission to kill bin Laden Zero Dark Thirty. But we never got to see who was vying with them for access to details on the bin Laden raid, a group that includes former New York Times reporter Howard Blum, the History Channel and The BBC. Typically, details about deliberations over who wins and who loses in the competitive game of CIA access remains a secret, but thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request by the conservative legal group Judicial Watch, those conversations became public today.
From the outset, CIA, White House, and Pentagon officials began discussing the various Osama bin Laden projects with a slight degree of favoritism toward Bigelow and Boal's film. But pretty quickly the Oscar-winning pair blew away the competition and a highly-cordial subject-filmmaker relationship ensued.
Naomi Wolf Notes:
The Mark Boal/Kathryn Bigelow post is a propos. Am I the only one who is noticing that, if the Senate investigation finds that Boal and Bigelow were given classified info -- and I can tell you from my own interviews with the detainees' lawyers, the torture methods of detainees are CLASSIFIED -- then they are potentially guilty of exactly what Assange and Manning are accused of? In other words, if Assange is unable to leave the Ecuadorean embassy -- because he disclosed classified information -- and Manning is in solitary, stripped naked and denied his glasses -- because he released classified information -- then why are Bigelow and Boal -- if they disclosed classified information -- not facing the same threats of prosecution? Conversely, if we are being consistent (and of course best to NOT prosecute people for this 'crime', which was not prosecuted for decades before Obama went crazy with prosecutions) we keep Bigelow and Boal -- and Assange and Manning -- out of jail/away from threats of prosecution.
If classified info turns out to have been involved, then there is no real legal difference between Zero Dark Thirty and Wikileaks -- especially if the filmmakers keep insisting on 'authenticity' and 'true events'.
Unless the only difference between who is in prison in solitary, and who gets to go in nice clothes to film screenings, is whether the classified info exposes the US government to criticism, or else flatters its narrative.
Monday, December 24, 2012
Will "Zero Dark Thirty" Rehabilitate Torture?
Will the New Osama bin Laden Film "Zero Dark Thirty" Rehabilitate Torture?
Adam Serwer| Mon Dec. 10, 2012
http://www.motherjones.com/mixed-media/2012/12/zero-dark-thirty-osama-bin-laden-torture
Director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal want their cinematic portrayal of the hunt for Osama bin Laden, Zero Dark Thirty, to be seen as more than just a movie. "What we were attempting is almost a journalistic approach to film," Bigelow told The New Yorker's Dexter Filkins. The film is a "hybrid of the filmic and the journalistic," writer Mark Boal told New York. Speaking to Matt Lauer on NBC's Today, Bigelow said, "I think the film doesn't have an agenda. I think it just shows the story as, you know, the story of the greatest manhunt in history. And that's part of that history." But the film, according to those who have seen it, shows torture as central to the discovery of bin Laden's location, and this departs from what is publicly known about the raid on Abbottabad. So is Bigelow rehabilitating torture?
According to the New York Daily News, the film, which opens next month, "includes graphic torture scenes, including depictions of waterboarding and sexual humiliation, used to obtain information from detainees which ultimately help pinpoint bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan." Bigelow is no fan of torture, but she says she had to stick with the facts: "I wish that it wasn't a part of history, but it is and was." Not accurate history.
Filkins' fawning piece on Bigelow — he writes that "she feels a little like what she imagines the men and women who chased bin Laden must feel: elated" — points out that the Senate intelligence committee chair Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) explained that the original information that led to bin Laden didn't come from a CIA detainee. Feinstein's letter was unequivocal: "The suggestion that the operation was carried out based on information gained through the harsh treatment of CIA detainees is not only inaccurate, it trivializes the work of individuals across multiple U.S. agencies that led to UBL and the eventual operation." Nor was Feinstein the only one to say so; a letter from the then-CIA director Leon Panetta sent to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) echoed the same findings.
Defenders of Bush-era enhanced interrogation waged a fierce public relations campaign to rehabilitate torture in the aftermath of the bin Laden killing, in part to award Bush credit for the raid. But the facts kept getting in the way. Jose Rodriguez, the former CIA official responsible for the destruction of videos recording the (ineffectual) torture of detainee Abu Zubayda, went on 60 Minutes and was unable to rebut the fact that alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed lied when questioned about bin Laden's courier, despite being tortured. The CIA inspector general found that "you could not in good conscience reach a definitive conclusion about whether any specific technique was especially effective, or [whether] the enhanced techniques in the aggregate really worked." Republicans are currently attempting to block a Senate intelligence committee investigation of the efficacy of so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques."
Someone attempting to make a "journalistic" feature film on the hunt for Osama bin Laden could be expected to be aware of all this. When Filkins asked Boal about the portrayal of torture departing from the known facts, he replied, "It's a movie, not a documentary." Bigelow and Boal want their film to be seen as a contribution to the historical record, not as mere entertainment. So far they are winning over influential film critics. If you're thinking of giving them an award, Zero Dark Thirty is "history"; if you're a journalist asking a question about a factual error in the film, it's just a movie.
The critical acclaim Zero Dark Thirty is already receiving suggests that it may do what Karl Rove could not have done with all the money in the world: embed in the popular imagination the efficacy, even the necessity, of torture, despite available evidence to the contrary. Whatever the artistic merits of the film, that will be its moral legacy. That's quite an accomplishment, but not a journalistic one.
Sunday, August 21, 2011
Who–and What–Are Behind the “Official History” of the Bin Laden Raid?
Russ Baker
WhoWhatWhy.com
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/08/17-1
The establishment media just keep getting worse. They’re further and further from good, tough investigative journalism, and more prone to be pawns in complicated games that affect the public interest in untold ways. A significant recent example is The New Yorker’s vaunted August 8 exclusive on the vanquishing of Osama bin Laden.
The piece, trumpeted as the most detailed account to date of the May 1 raid in Abbottabad Pakistan, was an instant hit. “Got the chills half dozen times reading @NewYorker killing bin Laden tick tock…exquisite journalism,” tweeted the digital director of the PBS show Frontline. The author, freelancer Nicholas Schmidle, was quickly featured on the Charlie Rose show, an influential determiner of “chattering class” opinion. Other news outlets rushed to praise the story as “exhaustive,” “utterly compelling,” and on and on.
To be sure, it is the kind of granular, heroic story that the public loves, that generates follow-up bestsellers and movie options. The takedown even has a Hollywood-esque code name: “Operation Neptune’s Spear”.
Here’s the introduction to the mission commander, full of minute details that help give it a ring of authenticity and the most intimate reportorial access:
James, a broad-chested man in his late thirties, does not have the lithe swimmer’s frame that one might expect of a SEAL—he is built more like a discus thrower. That night, he wore a shirt and trousers in Desert Digital Camouflage, and carried a silenced Sig Sauer P226 pistol, along with extra ammunition; a CamelBak, for hydration; and gel shots, for endurance. He held a short-barrel, silenced M4 rifle. (Others SEALs had chosen the Heckler & Koch MP7.) A “blowout kit,” for treating field trauma, was tucked into the small of James’s back. Stuffed into one of his pockets was a laminated gridded map of the compound. In another pocket was a booklet with photographs and physical descriptions of the people suspected of being inside. He wore a noise-cancelling headset, which blocked out nearly everything besides his heartbeat.
On and on went the “tick-tock.” Yet as Paul Farhi, a Washington Post reporter, noted, that narrative was misleading in the extreme, because the New Yorker reporter never actually spoke to James—nor to a single one of James’s fellow SEALs (who have never been identified or photographed–even from behind–to protect their identity.) Instead, every word of Schmidle’s narrative was provided to him by people who were not present at the raid. Complains Farhi:
…a casual reader of the article wouldn’t know that; neither the article nor an editor’s note describes the sourcing for parts of the story. Schmidle, in fact, piles up so many details about some of the men, such as their thoughts at various times, that the article leaves a strong impression that he spoke with them directly.
That didn’t trouble New Yorker editor David Remnick, according to Farhi:
Remnick says he’s satisfied with the accuracy of the account. “The sources spoke to our fact-checkers,” he said. “I know who they are.”
But we don’t.
On a story of this gravity, should we automatically join in with the huzzahs because it has the imprimatur of America’s most respected magazine? Or would we be wise to approach it with caution?
*
Most of us are not the trusting naïfs we once were. And with good reason.
The list of consequential events packaged for us by media and Hollywood in unsatisfactory ways continues to grow. It starts, certainly, with the official version of the JFK assassination, widely discredited yet still carried forward by most major media organizations. More and more people realize that the heroic Woodward & Bernstein story of Nixon’s demise is deeply problematical. (I’ve written extensively on both of these in my book Family of Secrets.)
And untold millions don’t think we’ve heard the real (or at least complete) story of the phenomenal, complex success of those 19 hijackers on Sept. 11, 2001. Skeptics now include former White House counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke, who recently speculated that the hijackers may have been able to enter the US and move freely precisely because American intelligence hoped to recruit them as double agents—and that an ongoing cover-up is designed to
Hoax: The heroic rescue of Jessica Lynch in Iraq hide this. And then, of course, there are the Pentagon’s account of the heroic rescue of Jessica Lynch in Iraq, which turned out to be a hoax, and the Pentagon’s fabricated account of the heroic battle death of former NFL player Pat Tillman in Afghanistan, who turned out to be a victim of friendly fire. These are just a few from scores of examples of deceit perpetrated upon the American people. Hardly the kind of track record to inspire confidence in official explanations with the imprimatur of the military and the CIA.
Whatever one thinks of these other matters, we’re certainly now at a point where we ought to be prudent in embracing authorized accounts of the latest seismic event: the dramatic end to one of America’s most reviled and storied nemeses.
The bin Laden raid presents us with every reason to be cautious. The government’s initial claims about what transpired at that house in Abbottabad have changed, then changed again, with no proper explanation of the discrepancies. Even making allowances for human error in such shifting accounts, almost every aspect of what we were told requires a willing suspension of disbelief—from the manner of Osama’s death and burial to the purported pornography found at the site.
Clarke’s theory will seem less outrageous later, as we explore Saudi intelligence’s crucial, and bizarre, role at the end of bin Laden’s life—working directly with the man who now holds Clarke’s job.
Add to all of this the discovery that the reporter providing this newest account wasn’t even allowed to talk to any raid participants—and the magazine’s lack of candor on this point—and you’ve got an almost unassailable case for treating the New Yorker story with extreme caution.
*
We might begin by asking the question: Who provided The New Yorker with its exclusive, and what was their agenda in doing so? To try and sort out Schmidle’s sources, I read through the piece carefully several times.
One person who spoke to the reporter, and who is identified by name is John O. Brennan, Obama’s counterterrorism adviser. Brennan is quoted directly, briefly, near the top, describing to Schmidle pre-raid debate over whether such an operation would be a success or failure:
John Brennan, Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, told me that the President’s advisers began an “interrogation of the data, to see if, by that interrogation, you’re going to disprove the theory that bin Laden was there.”
The mere fact of Schmidle’s reliance on Brennan at all should send up a flare for the cautious reader. After all, that’s the very same Brennan who was the principal source of incorrect details in the hours and days after the raid. These included the claim that the SEALs encountered substantial armed resistance, not least from bin Laden himself; that it took them an astounding 40 minutes to get to bin Laden, and that the White House got to hear the soldiers’ conversations in real time.
Here’s a Washington Post account from Brennan published on May 3, less than 48 hours after the raid:
Half an hour had passed on the ground, but the American commandos raiding Osama bin Laden’s Pakistani hideaway had yet to find their long-sought target.
…The commandos swept methodically through the compound’s main building, clearing one room and then another as they made their way to the upper floors where they expected to find bin Laden. As they did so, Obama administration officials in the White House Situation Room listened to the SEAL team’s conversations over secure lines.
“The minutes passed like days,” said John O. Brennan, the administration’s chief counterterrorism adviser. “It was probably one of the most anxiety-filled periods of time, I think, in the lives of the people who were assembled.”
Finally, shortly before 2 a.m. in Pakistan, the commandos burst into an upstairs room.Inside, an armed bin Laden took cover behind a woman, Brennan said. With a burst of gunfire, one of the longest and costliest manhunts in modern history was over.
.. The commandos moved inside, and finally reached bin Laden’s upstairs living quarters after nearly 40 minutes on the ground.
Osama bin Ladens compound in Abbottabad Pakistan where he was killed in a raiding operation by US Navy-SEALS. Almost all that turns out to be hogwash—according to the new account produced by The New Yorker three months later. An account that, again, it seems, comes courtesy of Brennan. The minutes did not pass like days. Bin Laden was not armed, and did not take cover behind a woman. And the commandoes most certainly were not on the ground for 40 minutes. Some of them were up the stairs to the higher floors almost in a flash, and it didn’t take long for them to run into and kill bin Laden.
For another take, consider this account from NBC News’ Pentagon correspondent—also reported the week after the raid— two days after Brennan told the Washington Post a completely different story. This one appears to be based on a briefing from military officials who would have been likely to have good knowledge of the operational details:
According to the officials’ account, as the first SEAL team moved into the compound, they took small-arms fire from the guest house in the compound. The SEALs returned fire, killing bin Laden’s courier and the courier’s wife, who died in the crossfire. It was the only time the SEALs were shot at.
The second SEAL team entered the first floor of the main residence and could see a man standing in the dark with one hand behind his back. Fearing he was hiding a weapon, the SEALs shot and killed the lone man, who turned out to be unarmed.
As the U.S. commandos moved through the house, they found several stashes of weapons and barricades, as if the residents were prepared for a violent and lengthy standoff — which never materialized.
The SEALs then made their way up a staircase, where they ran into one of bin Laden’s sons. The Americans immediately shot and killed the 19-year-old son, who was also unarmed, according to the officials.
Hearing the shots, bin Laden peered over the railing from the floor above. The SEALs fired but missed bin Laden, who ducked back into his bedroom. As the SEALs stormed up the stairs, two young girls ran from the room.
One SEAL scooped them up and carried them out of harm’s way. The other two commandos stormed into bin Laden’s bedroom. One of bin Laden’s wives rushed toward the Navy SEAL, who shot her in the leg.
Then, without hesitation, the same commando turned his gun on bin Laden, standing in what appeared to be pajamas, and fired two quick shots, one to the chest and one to the head. Although there were weapons in that bedroom, bin Laden was also unarmed when he was shot.
Instead of a chaotic firefight, the U.S. officials said, the American commando assault was a precision operation, with SEALs moving carefully through the compound, room to room, floor to floor.
In fact, most of the operation was spent in what the military calls “exploiting the site,” gathering up the computers, hard drives, cellphones and files that could provide valuable intelligence on al-Qaida operatives and potential operations worldwide.
The U.S. officials describing the operation said the SEALs carefully gathered up 22 women and children to ensure they were not harmed. Some of the women were put in “flexi-cuffs” the plastic straps used to bind someone’s hands at the wrists, and left them for Pakistani security forces to discover.
*
Given that Brennan’s initial version of the raid was strikingly erroneous, his later account to The New Yorker is suspect as well. So who else besides Brennan might have been Schmidle’s sources? At one point in his piece, he cites an unnamed counterterrorism official:
A senior counterterrorism official who visited the JSOC redoubt described it as an enclave of unusual secrecy and discretion. “Everything they were working on was closely held,” the official said.
Later, that same unnamed counterterrorism official is again cited, this time seeming to continue Brennan’s narrative of the meeting before the raid, in which participants disagreed on the likely success of such a mission:
That day in Washington, Panetta convened more than a dozen senior C.I.A. officials and analysts for a final preparatory meeting. Panetta asked the participants, one by one, to declare how confident they were that bin Laden was inside the Abbottabad compound. The counterterrorism official told me that the percentages “ranged from forty per cent to ninety or ninety-five per cent,” and added, “This was a circumstantial case.”
From the story’s construction, one could reasonably conclude that the unnamed counterterrorism official is indeed still just Brennan. If not, who could it be? How many different white House counterterrorism officials would have debriefed the SEALs, if indeed that is even their role? How many would have been privy to that planning meeting? And how many different officials would have gotten authorization to sum up the events of that important day for this New Yorker writer? Also, it’s an old journalistic trick to quote the same source, on and off the record— thereby giving the source extra cover when discussing particularly delicate matters.
So, we don’t know whether the article was based on anything more than Brennan, under marching orders to clean up the conflicting accounts he originally put out.
UNEXPLAINED DISPUTES
It’s curious that the source chooses to emphasize the fundamental disagreement over whether the raid was a good idea. Presumably, there was a purpose in emphasizing this, but the New Yorker’s “tick-tock”, which is very light on analysis or context, doesn’t tell us what it was. It may have been intended to show Obama as brave, inclined toward big risks (thereby running counter to his reputation)—we can only guess.
This internal discord will get the attention of anyone who remembers all the assertions from intelligence officials over the years that bin Laden was almost certainly already dead—either of natural causes or killed at some previous time.
Here’s a bit more from The New Yorker on officials’ doubts going into the raid:
Several analysts from the National Counterterrorism Center were invited to critique the C.I.A.’s analysis; their confidence in the intelligence ranged between forty and sixty per cent. The center’s director, Michael Leiter, said that it would be preferable to wait for stronger confirmation of bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad.
Those doubts are particularly interesting for several reasons: the CIA has had a long history of disputes between its covert action wing, which tends to advocate activity, and its analysis section, historically prone to caution. The action wing also has a history of publicizing its being right—when it could purport to be right—and covering up its failures. So when an insider chooses to make public these disagreements, we should be willing to consider motives.
This dispute can also be seen as an intriguing prologue to the rush to dump Bin Laden’s body and not provide proof to the public that it was indeed bin Laden. What if it wasn’t bin Laden that they killed? Would the government announce that after such a high-stakes operation? (“While we thought he’d be there, we accidentally killed someone else instead”? Seems unlikely.)
*
Now, let us go to the next antechamber of this warren of shadowy entities and unstated agendas.
Who exactly wanted bin Laden shot rather than taken alive and interrogated—and why? There’s been much discussion about the purported reasons for terminating him on sight, but the fact remains that he would have been a source of tremendous intelligence of real value to the safety of Americans and others.
Yet, early in the piece, Schmidle writes:
If all went according to plan, the SEALs would drop from the helicopters into the compound, overpower bin Laden’s guards, shoot and kill him at close range, and then take the corpse back to Afghanistan.
That was the plan? Whose plan? We’ve never been explicitly told by the White House that such a decision had been made. In fact, we’d previously been informed that the president was glad to have the master plotter taken alive if he was unarmed and did not resist. So, that’s a huge and problematical discrepancy that is only heightened by Schmidle’s misleadingly matter-of-fact treatment of the matter.
GET ME RIYADH
If the justification for killing Osama presented in The New Yorker warrants concern, the account of how—and why—they disposed of his body ought to send alarm bells clanging.
At the time of the raid, the decision to hastily dump Osama’s body in the ocean rather than make it available for authoritative forensic examination was a highly controversial one—that only led to more speculation that the White House was hiding something. The justifications, including not wanting to bury him on land for fear of creating a shrine, were almost laughable.
So what do we learn about this from The New Yorker? It’s truly bizarre: the SEALS themselves made the decision. That’s strange enough. But then we learn that Brennan took it upon himself to verify that was the right decision. How did he do this? Not by speaking with the president or top military, diplomatic or legal brass. No, he called some foreigners—get ready–the Saudis, who told him that dumping at sea sounded like a good plan.
Here’s Schmidle’s account:
All along, the SEALs had planned to dump bin Laden’s corpse into the sea—a blunt way of ending the bin Laden myth. They had successfully pulled off a similar scheme before. During a DEVGRU helicopter raid inside Somalia in September, 2009, SEALs had killed Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, one of East Africa’s top Al Qaeda leaders; Nabhan’s corpse was then flown to a ship in the Indian Ocean, given proper Muslim rites, and thrown overboard. Before taking that step for bin Laden, however, John Brennan made a call. Brennan, who had been a C.I.A. station chief in Riyadh, phoned a former counterpart in Saudi intelligence. Brennan told the man what had occurred in Abbottabad and informed him of the plan to deposit bin Laden’s remains at sea. As Brennan knew, bin Laden’s relatives were still a prominent family in the Kingdom, and Osama had once been a Saudi citizen. Did the Saudi government have any interest in taking the body? “Your plan sounds like a good one,” the Saudi replied.
Let’s consider this. The most wanted man in the world; substantive professional doubts about whether the man in the Abbottabad house is him; tremendous public doubts about whether it could even be him; the most important operation of the Obama presidency; yet the decision about what to do with the body is left to low-level operatives. Keep in mind SEALs are trained to follow orders given by others. They’re expected to apply what they know to unexpected scenarios that come up, but the key strategic decisions— arrived at in advance—are not theirs to make.
Even more strange that Brennan would discuss this with a foreign power. And not just any foreign power, but the regime that is inextricably linked with the domestically-influential family of bin Laden—and home to many of the hijackers who worked for him.
Is it just me, or does this sound preposterous? Obama’s Homeland Security and Counterterrorism adviser is just winging it with key aspects of one of America’s most important, complex and risky operations? And the Saudi government is the one deciding to discard the remains of a man from one of Saudi Arabia’s most powerful families, before the public could receive proper proof of the identity of the body? A regime with a great deal at stake and perhaps plenty to hide.
Also please consider this important caveat: As we noted in a previous article, the claim that the body had already been positively identified via DNA has been disputed by a DNA expert who said that insufficient time had elapsed before the sea burial to complete such tests.
King Abdullah meets John Brennan, assistant to the US President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism The line about Brennan himself having been a former CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia is just sort of dropped in there. No recognition of what it means that a person of that background was put into that position after 9/11, no recognition that a person of that background and those fraught personal connections is controlling this narrative. He’s not just a “counterterrorism expert”—he is a longtime member of an agency whose mandate includes the frequent use of disinformation. And one who has his own historic direct links to the Saudi regime, a key and problematical player in the larger chess game playing out.
It’s relevant to note that Brennan is not only a career CIA officer (they say no one ever really leaves the Agency, no matter their new title) but one with a lot of baggage. He was deputy director of the CIA at the time of the 9/11 attacks. He was an adviser to Obama’s presidential campaign, after which Obama initially planned to name him CIA director. That appointment was pulled, in part due to criticism from human rights advocates over statements he had made in support of sending terrorism suspects to countries where they might be tortured.
Of course, there could have been other sources besides Brennan. In addition to the unnamed “counterterrorism official” previously cited, the New Yorker mentions a “special operations officer,” as in:
…according to a special-operations officer who is deeply familiar with the bin Laden raid.
Subsequent quotes from him indicate that this had to be a supervisory special ops officer. His comments are surprising:
“This wasn’t a hard op,” the special-operations officer told me. “It would be like hitting a target in McLean”—the upscale Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C.
President Barack Obama listening to John Brennans report.
Whoops! Here’s a Special Ops guy saying the Special Ops raid was actually no big deal! Shouldn’t that, if a valid assessment, get more attention? Especially given the endless praise and frequent statements of how difficult the operation was. I mean, the toughness and diciness of the Abbottabad mission is the prime reason we want to read the New Yorker’s account in the first place!
To further underline the point, consider that this fellow is not alone in his assessment:
In the months after the raid, the media have frequently suggested that the Abbottabad operation was as challenging as Operation Eagle Claw and the “Black Hawk Down” incident, but the senior Defense Department official told me that “this was not one of three missions.”…. He likened the routine of evening raids to “mowing the lawn.”
Why would a person overseeing an operation like this deflate the bubble of adoration? It doesn’t seem helpful to the interests of Special Operations – and it doesn’t seem credible, either. So there’s presumably a reason that this person is—again speaking to The New Yorker after this important exclusive has been carefully considered and strategized. We just don’t know what it is, and the magazine doesn’t even bother to wonder.
*
Most of the other sources seem to play bit roles. One is “a senior adviser to the President” whose only comment is that Obama decided not to trust the Pakistanis with advance notice of the raid—which we already knew. Another— named—source is Ben Rhodes, a deputy national-security adviser, who does not evince any intimate knowledge of the raid itself.
The New Yorker also includes a few other officials who brief Schmidle on general background, like a “senior defense department official” explaining the overall relationship between Special Operations and CIA personnel, and a named former CIA counsel explaining that the Abottabad raid amounted to “a complete incorporation of JSOC [Joint Special Operations Command] into a C.I.A. operation.”
That’s only slipped into the article, but it is perhaps one of the most important aspects of the piece, along with a brief mention of the way in which former Iraq/Afghan commander General David Petraeus has gone to CIA while CIA director Panetta has been made Defense Secretary. (For more on these important but confusing games of high-level musical chairs, which were not deeply scrutinized in the conventional media, see our WhoWhatWhy pieces here and here.)
This may sound too technical for your taste, but the takeaway point is that fundamental realignments are afoot in that vast, massively-funded, powerful and secretive part of the US government that is treated by the corporate press almost as if it does not exist. The tales of internal intrigue that we do not hear would begin to provide us with the real narratives that are not ours to have.
In the New Yorker piece, we do learn lots of things we did not know before—for example, that Special Ops considered tunneling in or coming in by foot rather than helicopter. We learn that CIA director Robert Gates wanted to drop massive bombs on the house. General James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, shared that view—Cartwright is one of the few who is directly identified as a source for Schmidle. That’s important stuff, and worth more than brief mention. And, once again, we need more effort to try and understand why we are being told these things.
“WE REALLY DIDN’T KNOW…WHAT WAS GOING ON”
About two-thirds of the article is a sort of scene-setter, a prologue to on-the-ground story we’ve all been waiting for. But when the big moment arrives, The New Yorker’s Schmidle instead punts:
Meanwhile, James, the squadron commander, had breached one wall, crossed a section of the yard covered with trellises, breached a second wall, and joined up with the SEALs from helo one, who were entering the ground floor of the house. What happened next is not precisely clear. “I can tell you that there was a time period of almost twenty to twenty-five minutes where we really didn’t know just exactly what was going on,” Panetta said later, on “PBS NewsHour.”
Until this moment, the operation had been monitored by dozens of defense, intelligence, and Administration officials watching the drone’s video feed. The SEALs were not wearing helmet cams, contrary to a widely cited report by CBS. None of them had any previous knowledge of the house’s floor plan, and they were further jostled by the awareness that they were possibly minutes away from ending the costliest manhunt in American history; as a result, some of their recollections—on which this account is based—may be imprecise and, thus, subject to dispute.
Schmidle claims that the SEALs’ “recollections—on which this account is based”—are subject to dispute. But as I’ve noted, the article is NOT based on their recollections, but on what some source claims to Schmidle were their recollections. Why the summary may be imprecise and thus subject to dispute after it has been filtered by a person controlling the scenario, must be asked. Perhaps this is why The New Yorker is not permitted to speak directly to the SEALs—because of what they could tell the magazine.
Now, killing the men who lived in the compound: First, the SEALs shot and killed the courier, who they say was armed, and his wife, who they say was not, when they emerged from the guesthouse. Then they killed the courier’s brother inside the main house, who they say was armed. Then they moved up the stairs:
...three SEALs marched up the stairs. Midway up, they saw bin Laden’s twenty-three-year-old son, Khalid, craning his neck around the corner. He then appeared at the top of the staircase with an AK-47. Khalid, who wore a white T-shirt with an overstretched neckline and had short hair and a clipped beard, fired down at the Americans. (The counterterrorism official claims that Khalid was unarmed, though still a threat worth taking seriously. “You have an adult male, late at night, in the dark, coming down the stairs at you in an Al Qaeda house—your assumption is that you’re encountering a hostile.”) At least two of the SEALs shot back and killed Khalid.
Ok, that’s pretty strange. First, Schmidle asserts that Khalid bin Laden was armed and fired with an AK-47. Then he quotes the “counterterrorism official” saying that Khalid was unarmed. Why does The New Yorker first run the “Khalid was armed” claim as a fact, and then include Brennan’s disclaimer? What’s really going on here, even from the New Yorker’s editorial standpoint?
Here’s another such instance: a dispute over where Osama was when they first saw him:
Three SEALs shuttled past Khalid’s body and blew open another metal cage, which obstructed the staircase leading to the third floor. Bounding up the unlit stairs, they scanned the railed landing. On the top stair, the lead SEAL swivelled right; with his night-vision goggles, he discerned that a tall, rangy man with a fist-length beard was peeking out from behind a bedroom door, ten feet away. The SEAL instantly sensed that it was Crankshaft [codename for Osama]. (The counterterrorism official asserts that the SEAL first saw bin Laden on the landing, and fired but missed.)
What’s the purpose of all this? How good is intelligence work when they can’t reconstruct whether the singular focus of the operation was first spotted peeking out from a doorway, or standing on the landing above them?
And then one of the most interesting passages, about the kill:
A second SEAL stepped into the room and trained the infrared laser of his M4 on bin Laden’s chest. The Al Qaeda chief, who was wearing a tan shalwar kameez and a prayer cap on his head, froze; he was unarmed. “There was never any question of detaining or capturing him—it wasn’t a split-second decision. No one wanted detainees,” the special-operations officer told me. (The Administration maintains that had bin Laden immediately surrendered he could have been taken alive.)
Uh-oh. So who is this Special Operations officer? He is directly disputing the administration’s claim on what surely matters greatly—what were President Obama’s intentions here? And did they always plan to just ignore them? That The New Yorker just drops this in with no further analysis or context is, simply put, shocking.
It seems almost as if Panetta, Obama, and the people in the story who most closely approximate actual representatives of the public in a functioning democracy, were basically cut off from observing what went down that day—or from influencing what transpired.
Consider this statement from Panetta, not included in the New Yorker piece:
“Once those teams went into the compound I can tell you that there was a time period of almost 20 or 25 minutes where we really didn’t know just exactly what was going on. And there were some very tense moments as we were waiting for information.
“We had some observation of the approach there, but we did not have direct flow of information as to the actual conduct of the operation itself as they were going through the compound.”
Panetta’s “lost 25 minutes” needs to be seen in the context of a man with civilian roots, notwithstanding two mid-60s years as a Lt. in military intel: Former Congressman, Clinton White House budget chief and Chief of Staff, credentials with civil rights and environment movements—a fellow with real distance from the true spook/military mojo.
Taken together, here’s what we have: President Obama did not know exactly what was going on. He did not decide that bin Laden should be shot. And he did not decide to dump his body in the ocean. The CIA and its Special Ops allies made all the decisions.
Then Brennan, the CIA’s man, put out the version that CIA wanted. (Keep in mind that, as noted earlier, CIA was really running the operation—with Special Ops under its direction).
What we’re looking at, folks, is the reality of democracy in America: A permanent entrenched covert establishment that marches to its own drummer or to drummers unknown. It’s exactly the kind of thing that never gets reported. Too scary. Too real. Better to dismiss this line of inquiry as too “conspiracy theory.”
If that sounds like hyperbole, let me add this rather significant consideration. It is the background of Nicholas Schmidle, the freelancer who wrote the New Yorker piece. It may give us insight into how he landed this extraordinary exclusive on this extraordinarily sensitive matter—information again, significantly, not shared by The New Yorker with its readers:
Marine Lt. General Robert E. “Rooster” Schmidle Jr. Schmidle’s father is Marine Lt. General Robert E. “Rooster” Schmidle Jr. General Schmidle served as Commanding Officer of Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force (Experimental)—that’s essentially Special Operations akin to Navy SEALs. In recent years, he was “assistant deputy commandant for Programs and Resources (Programs)”—where, among other things, he oversaw “irregular warfare.” (See various, including contract specs here on “Special Operations,” and picture caption here) In 2010, he moved into another piece of this, when Obama appointed him deputy commander, U.S. Cyber Command. Cumulatively, this makes the author’s father a very important man in precisely the sort of circles who care how the raid is publicly portrayed—and who would be quite intimate with some of the folks hunkering down with Obama in the Situation Room on the big day.
You can see a photo of Gen. Schmidle on a 2010 panel about “Warring Futures.” Event co-sponsors include Slate magazine and the New America Foundation, both of which, according to Nicholas Schmidle’s website, have also provided Schmidle’s son with an ongoing perch (with Slate giving him a platform for numerous articles from war zones and the foundation employing him as a Fellow.) These parallel relationships grow more disturbing with contemplation.
*
So let’s get back to the question, Who is driving this Ship of State?
First, consider this passage:
Obama returned to the White House at two o’clock, after playing nine holes of golf at Andrews Air Force Base. The Black Hawks departed from Jalalabad thirty minutes later. Just before four o’clock, Panetta announced to the group in the Situation Room that the helicopters were approaching Abbottabad.
John Brennan and ObamaTo be really useful reporting here, rather than just meaningless “color”, we’d need some context. Was the golf game’s purpose to blow off steam at an especially tense time? Did Obama not think it important enough for him to be constantly present in the hours leading up to the raid? Is this typical of his schedule when huge things are happening? We desperately need a more realistic sense of what presidents do, how much they’re really in charge, or, instead, figureheads for unnamed individuals who make most of the critical decisions.
Here’s something just as strange: we are told the President took a commanding role in determining key operational tactics, but then didn’t seem interested in important details, after the fact.
Forty-five minutes after the Black Hawks departed, four MH-47 Chinooks launched from the same runway in Jalalabad. Two of them flew to the border, staying on the Afghan side; the other two proceeded into Pakistan. Deploying four Chinooks was a last-minute decision made after President Barack Obama said he wanted to feel assured that the Americans could “fight their way out of Pakistan.”
Now, consider the following climactic New Yorker account of Obama meeting with the squadron commander after it’s all over, with bin Laden dead and the troops home and safe. Schmidle decides to call the commander “James…the names of all the covert operators mentioned in this story have been changed.” The anecdote will feature a canine, one who, in true furry dog story fashion, had already been introduced early in the New Yorker piece, as “Cairo” (it’s not clear whether the dog’s name, too, was changed):
As James talked about the raid, he mentioned Cairo’s role. “There was a dog?” Obama interrupted. James nodded and said that Cairo was in an adjoining room, muzzled, at the request of the Secret Service.
“I want to meet that dog,” Obama said.
“If you want to meet the dog, Mr. President, I advise you to bring treats,” James joked. Obama went over to pet Cairo, but the dog’s muzzle was left on.
Here’s the ending:
Before the President returned to Washington, he posed for photographs with each team member and spoke with many of them, but he left one thing unsaid. He never asked who fired the kill shot, and the SEALs never volunteered to tell him.
Why did the president not want to ask for specifics on the most important parts of the operation—but seemed so interested in a dog that participated? While it is certainly plausible that this happened, we should be wary of one of the oldest p.r. tricks around—get people cooing over an animal, while the real action is elsewhere.
Certainly, Obama’s reaction differs dramatically from that of other previous presidents who always demanded detailed briefings and would have stayed on top of it all throughout—including fellow Democrats JFK, Carter and Clinton. At minimum, it shows a degree of caution or ceremony based upon a desire not to know too much—or an understanding that he may not ask. Does anyone doubt that Bill Clinton would have been on watch 24/7 during this operation, parsing legal, political and operational details throughout, and would have demanded to know who felled America’s most wanted?
Nicholas Schmidle
Summing up about the reliability of this account, which is now likely to become required reading for every student in America, long into the future:
•It is based on reporting by a man who fails to disclose that he never spoke to the people who conducted the raid, or that his father has a long background himself running such operations (this even suggests the possibility that Nicholas Schmidle’s own father could have been one of those “unnamed sources.”)
•It seems to have depended heavily on trusting second-hand accounts by people with a poor track record for accurate summations, and an incentive to spin.
•The alleged decisions on killing bin Laden and disposing of his body lack credibility.
•The DNA evidence that the SEALs actually got their man is questionable.
•Though certain members of Congress say they have seen photos of the body (or, to be precise, a body), the rest of us have not seen anything.
•Promised photos of the ceremonial dumping of the body at sea have not materialized.
•The eyewitnesses from the house—including the surviving wives—have disappeared without comment.
We weren’t allowed to hear from the raid participants. And on August 6, seventeen Navy SEALs died when their helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan. We’re told that fifteen of them came, amazingly, from the same SEAL Team 6 that carried out the Abbottabad raid—but that none of the dead were present for the raid. We do get to hear the stories of those men, and their names.
Of course, if any of those men had been in the Abbottabad raid—or knew anything about it of broad public interest, we’d be none the wiser—because, the only “reliable sources” still available (and featured by the New Yorker) are military and intelligence professionals, coming out of a long tradition of cover-ups and fabrications.
Meanwhile, we have this president, this one who according to the magazine article didn’t ask about the core issues—why this man was killed, who killed him, under whose orders, what would be done with the body.
Well, he may not want answers. But we ought to want them. Otherwise, it’s all just a game.
WhoWhatWhy.com
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/08/17-1
The establishment media just keep getting worse. They’re further and further from good, tough investigative journalism, and more prone to be pawns in complicated games that affect the public interest in untold ways. A significant recent example is The New Yorker’s vaunted August 8 exclusive on the vanquishing of Osama bin Laden.
The piece, trumpeted as the most detailed account to date of the May 1 raid in Abbottabad Pakistan, was an instant hit. “Got the chills half dozen times reading @NewYorker killing bin Laden tick tock…exquisite journalism,” tweeted the digital director of the PBS show Frontline. The author, freelancer Nicholas Schmidle, was quickly featured on the Charlie Rose show, an influential determiner of “chattering class” opinion. Other news outlets rushed to praise the story as “exhaustive,” “utterly compelling,” and on and on.
To be sure, it is the kind of granular, heroic story that the public loves, that generates follow-up bestsellers and movie options. The takedown even has a Hollywood-esque code name: “Operation Neptune’s Spear”.
Here’s the introduction to the mission commander, full of minute details that help give it a ring of authenticity and the most intimate reportorial access:
James, a broad-chested man in his late thirties, does not have the lithe swimmer’s frame that one might expect of a SEAL—he is built more like a discus thrower. That night, he wore a shirt and trousers in Desert Digital Camouflage, and carried a silenced Sig Sauer P226 pistol, along with extra ammunition; a CamelBak, for hydration; and gel shots, for endurance. He held a short-barrel, silenced M4 rifle. (Others SEALs had chosen the Heckler & Koch MP7.) A “blowout kit,” for treating field trauma, was tucked into the small of James’s back. Stuffed into one of his pockets was a laminated gridded map of the compound. In another pocket was a booklet with photographs and physical descriptions of the people suspected of being inside. He wore a noise-cancelling headset, which blocked out nearly everything besides his heartbeat.
On and on went the “tick-tock.” Yet as Paul Farhi, a Washington Post reporter, noted, that narrative was misleading in the extreme, because the New Yorker reporter never actually spoke to James—nor to a single one of James’s fellow SEALs (who have never been identified or photographed–even from behind–to protect their identity.) Instead, every word of Schmidle’s narrative was provided to him by people who were not present at the raid. Complains Farhi:
…a casual reader of the article wouldn’t know that; neither the article nor an editor’s note describes the sourcing for parts of the story. Schmidle, in fact, piles up so many details about some of the men, such as their thoughts at various times, that the article leaves a strong impression that he spoke with them directly.
That didn’t trouble New Yorker editor David Remnick, according to Farhi:
Remnick says he’s satisfied with the accuracy of the account. “The sources spoke to our fact-checkers,” he said. “I know who they are.”
But we don’t.
On a story of this gravity, should we automatically join in with the huzzahs because it has the imprimatur of America’s most respected magazine? Or would we be wise to approach it with caution?
*
Most of us are not the trusting naïfs we once were. And with good reason.
The list of consequential events packaged for us by media and Hollywood in unsatisfactory ways continues to grow. It starts, certainly, with the official version of the JFK assassination, widely discredited yet still carried forward by most major media organizations. More and more people realize that the heroic Woodward & Bernstein story of Nixon’s demise is deeply problematical. (I’ve written extensively on both of these in my book Family of Secrets.)
And untold millions don’t think we’ve heard the real (or at least complete) story of the phenomenal, complex success of those 19 hijackers on Sept. 11, 2001. Skeptics now include former White House counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke, who recently speculated that the hijackers may have been able to enter the US and move freely precisely because American intelligence hoped to recruit them as double agents—and that an ongoing cover-up is designed to
Hoax: The heroic rescue of Jessica Lynch in Iraq hide this. And then, of course, there are the Pentagon’s account of the heroic rescue of Jessica Lynch in Iraq, which turned out to be a hoax, and the Pentagon’s fabricated account of the heroic battle death of former NFL player Pat Tillman in Afghanistan, who turned out to be a victim of friendly fire. These are just a few from scores of examples of deceit perpetrated upon the American people. Hardly the kind of track record to inspire confidence in official explanations with the imprimatur of the military and the CIA.
Whatever one thinks of these other matters, we’re certainly now at a point where we ought to be prudent in embracing authorized accounts of the latest seismic event: the dramatic end to one of America’s most reviled and storied nemeses.
The bin Laden raid presents us with every reason to be cautious. The government’s initial claims about what transpired at that house in Abbottabad have changed, then changed again, with no proper explanation of the discrepancies. Even making allowances for human error in such shifting accounts, almost every aspect of what we were told requires a willing suspension of disbelief—from the manner of Osama’s death and burial to the purported pornography found at the site.
Clarke’s theory will seem less outrageous later, as we explore Saudi intelligence’s crucial, and bizarre, role at the end of bin Laden’s life—working directly with the man who now holds Clarke’s job.
Add to all of this the discovery that the reporter providing this newest account wasn’t even allowed to talk to any raid participants—and the magazine’s lack of candor on this point—and you’ve got an almost unassailable case for treating the New Yorker story with extreme caution.
*
We might begin by asking the question: Who provided The New Yorker with its exclusive, and what was their agenda in doing so? To try and sort out Schmidle’s sources, I read through the piece carefully several times.
One person who spoke to the reporter, and who is identified by name is John O. Brennan, Obama’s counterterrorism adviser. Brennan is quoted directly, briefly, near the top, describing to Schmidle pre-raid debate over whether such an operation would be a success or failure:
John Brennan, Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, told me that the President’s advisers began an “interrogation of the data, to see if, by that interrogation, you’re going to disprove the theory that bin Laden was there.”
The mere fact of Schmidle’s reliance on Brennan at all should send up a flare for the cautious reader. After all, that’s the very same Brennan who was the principal source of incorrect details in the hours and days after the raid. These included the claim that the SEALs encountered substantial armed resistance, not least from bin Laden himself; that it took them an astounding 40 minutes to get to bin Laden, and that the White House got to hear the soldiers’ conversations in real time.
Here’s a Washington Post account from Brennan published on May 3, less than 48 hours after the raid:
Half an hour had passed on the ground, but the American commandos raiding Osama bin Laden’s Pakistani hideaway had yet to find their long-sought target.
…The commandos swept methodically through the compound’s main building, clearing one room and then another as they made their way to the upper floors where they expected to find bin Laden. As they did so, Obama administration officials in the White House Situation Room listened to the SEAL team’s conversations over secure lines.
“The minutes passed like days,” said John O. Brennan, the administration’s chief counterterrorism adviser. “It was probably one of the most anxiety-filled periods of time, I think, in the lives of the people who were assembled.”
Finally, shortly before 2 a.m. in Pakistan, the commandos burst into an upstairs room.Inside, an armed bin Laden took cover behind a woman, Brennan said. With a burst of gunfire, one of the longest and costliest manhunts in modern history was over.
.. The commandos moved inside, and finally reached bin Laden’s upstairs living quarters after nearly 40 minutes on the ground.
Osama bin Ladens compound in Abbottabad Pakistan where he was killed in a raiding operation by US Navy-SEALS. Almost all that turns out to be hogwash—according to the new account produced by The New Yorker three months later. An account that, again, it seems, comes courtesy of Brennan. The minutes did not pass like days. Bin Laden was not armed, and did not take cover behind a woman. And the commandoes most certainly were not on the ground for 40 minutes. Some of them were up the stairs to the higher floors almost in a flash, and it didn’t take long for them to run into and kill bin Laden.
For another take, consider this account from NBC News’ Pentagon correspondent—also reported the week after the raid— two days after Brennan told the Washington Post a completely different story. This one appears to be based on a briefing from military officials who would have been likely to have good knowledge of the operational details:
According to the officials’ account, as the first SEAL team moved into the compound, they took small-arms fire from the guest house in the compound. The SEALs returned fire, killing bin Laden’s courier and the courier’s wife, who died in the crossfire. It was the only time the SEALs were shot at.
The second SEAL team entered the first floor of the main residence and could see a man standing in the dark with one hand behind his back. Fearing he was hiding a weapon, the SEALs shot and killed the lone man, who turned out to be unarmed.
As the U.S. commandos moved through the house, they found several stashes of weapons and barricades, as if the residents were prepared for a violent and lengthy standoff — which never materialized.
The SEALs then made their way up a staircase, where they ran into one of bin Laden’s sons. The Americans immediately shot and killed the 19-year-old son, who was also unarmed, according to the officials.
Hearing the shots, bin Laden peered over the railing from the floor above. The SEALs fired but missed bin Laden, who ducked back into his bedroom. As the SEALs stormed up the stairs, two young girls ran from the room.
One SEAL scooped them up and carried them out of harm’s way. The other two commandos stormed into bin Laden’s bedroom. One of bin Laden’s wives rushed toward the Navy SEAL, who shot her in the leg.
Then, without hesitation, the same commando turned his gun on bin Laden, standing in what appeared to be pajamas, and fired two quick shots, one to the chest and one to the head. Although there were weapons in that bedroom, bin Laden was also unarmed when he was shot.
Instead of a chaotic firefight, the U.S. officials said, the American commando assault was a precision operation, with SEALs moving carefully through the compound, room to room, floor to floor.
In fact, most of the operation was spent in what the military calls “exploiting the site,” gathering up the computers, hard drives, cellphones and files that could provide valuable intelligence on al-Qaida operatives and potential operations worldwide.
The U.S. officials describing the operation said the SEALs carefully gathered up 22 women and children to ensure they were not harmed. Some of the women were put in “flexi-cuffs” the plastic straps used to bind someone’s hands at the wrists, and left them for Pakistani security forces to discover.
*
Given that Brennan’s initial version of the raid was strikingly erroneous, his later account to The New Yorker is suspect as well. So who else besides Brennan might have been Schmidle’s sources? At one point in his piece, he cites an unnamed counterterrorism official:
A senior counterterrorism official who visited the JSOC redoubt described it as an enclave of unusual secrecy and discretion. “Everything they were working on was closely held,” the official said.
Later, that same unnamed counterterrorism official is again cited, this time seeming to continue Brennan’s narrative of the meeting before the raid, in which participants disagreed on the likely success of such a mission:
That day in Washington, Panetta convened more than a dozen senior C.I.A. officials and analysts for a final preparatory meeting. Panetta asked the participants, one by one, to declare how confident they were that bin Laden was inside the Abbottabad compound. The counterterrorism official told me that the percentages “ranged from forty per cent to ninety or ninety-five per cent,” and added, “This was a circumstantial case.”
From the story’s construction, one could reasonably conclude that the unnamed counterterrorism official is indeed still just Brennan. If not, who could it be? How many different white House counterterrorism officials would have debriefed the SEALs, if indeed that is even their role? How many would have been privy to that planning meeting? And how many different officials would have gotten authorization to sum up the events of that important day for this New Yorker writer? Also, it’s an old journalistic trick to quote the same source, on and off the record— thereby giving the source extra cover when discussing particularly delicate matters.
So, we don’t know whether the article was based on anything more than Brennan, under marching orders to clean up the conflicting accounts he originally put out.
UNEXPLAINED DISPUTES
It’s curious that the source chooses to emphasize the fundamental disagreement over whether the raid was a good idea. Presumably, there was a purpose in emphasizing this, but the New Yorker’s “tick-tock”, which is very light on analysis or context, doesn’t tell us what it was. It may have been intended to show Obama as brave, inclined toward big risks (thereby running counter to his reputation)—we can only guess.
This internal discord will get the attention of anyone who remembers all the assertions from intelligence officials over the years that bin Laden was almost certainly already dead—either of natural causes or killed at some previous time.
Here’s a bit more from The New Yorker on officials’ doubts going into the raid:
Several analysts from the National Counterterrorism Center were invited to critique the C.I.A.’s analysis; their confidence in the intelligence ranged between forty and sixty per cent. The center’s director, Michael Leiter, said that it would be preferable to wait for stronger confirmation of bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad.
Those doubts are particularly interesting for several reasons: the CIA has had a long history of disputes between its covert action wing, which tends to advocate activity, and its analysis section, historically prone to caution. The action wing also has a history of publicizing its being right—when it could purport to be right—and covering up its failures. So when an insider chooses to make public these disagreements, we should be willing to consider motives.
This dispute can also be seen as an intriguing prologue to the rush to dump Bin Laden’s body and not provide proof to the public that it was indeed bin Laden. What if it wasn’t bin Laden that they killed? Would the government announce that after such a high-stakes operation? (“While we thought he’d be there, we accidentally killed someone else instead”? Seems unlikely.)
*
Now, let us go to the next antechamber of this warren of shadowy entities and unstated agendas.
Who exactly wanted bin Laden shot rather than taken alive and interrogated—and why? There’s been much discussion about the purported reasons for terminating him on sight, but the fact remains that he would have been a source of tremendous intelligence of real value to the safety of Americans and others.
Yet, early in the piece, Schmidle writes:
If all went according to plan, the SEALs would drop from the helicopters into the compound, overpower bin Laden’s guards, shoot and kill him at close range, and then take the corpse back to Afghanistan.
That was the plan? Whose plan? We’ve never been explicitly told by the White House that such a decision had been made. In fact, we’d previously been informed that the president was glad to have the master plotter taken alive if he was unarmed and did not resist. So, that’s a huge and problematical discrepancy that is only heightened by Schmidle’s misleadingly matter-of-fact treatment of the matter.
GET ME RIYADH
If the justification for killing Osama presented in The New Yorker warrants concern, the account of how—and why—they disposed of his body ought to send alarm bells clanging.
At the time of the raid, the decision to hastily dump Osama’s body in the ocean rather than make it available for authoritative forensic examination was a highly controversial one—that only led to more speculation that the White House was hiding something. The justifications, including not wanting to bury him on land for fear of creating a shrine, were almost laughable.
So what do we learn about this from The New Yorker? It’s truly bizarre: the SEALS themselves made the decision. That’s strange enough. But then we learn that Brennan took it upon himself to verify that was the right decision. How did he do this? Not by speaking with the president or top military, diplomatic or legal brass. No, he called some foreigners—get ready–the Saudis, who told him that dumping at sea sounded like a good plan.
Here’s Schmidle’s account:
All along, the SEALs had planned to dump bin Laden’s corpse into the sea—a blunt way of ending the bin Laden myth. They had successfully pulled off a similar scheme before. During a DEVGRU helicopter raid inside Somalia in September, 2009, SEALs had killed Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, one of East Africa’s top Al Qaeda leaders; Nabhan’s corpse was then flown to a ship in the Indian Ocean, given proper Muslim rites, and thrown overboard. Before taking that step for bin Laden, however, John Brennan made a call. Brennan, who had been a C.I.A. station chief in Riyadh, phoned a former counterpart in Saudi intelligence. Brennan told the man what had occurred in Abbottabad and informed him of the plan to deposit bin Laden’s remains at sea. As Brennan knew, bin Laden’s relatives were still a prominent family in the Kingdom, and Osama had once been a Saudi citizen. Did the Saudi government have any interest in taking the body? “Your plan sounds like a good one,” the Saudi replied.
Let’s consider this. The most wanted man in the world; substantive professional doubts about whether the man in the Abbottabad house is him; tremendous public doubts about whether it could even be him; the most important operation of the Obama presidency; yet the decision about what to do with the body is left to low-level operatives. Keep in mind SEALs are trained to follow orders given by others. They’re expected to apply what they know to unexpected scenarios that come up, but the key strategic decisions— arrived at in advance—are not theirs to make.
Even more strange that Brennan would discuss this with a foreign power. And not just any foreign power, but the regime that is inextricably linked with the domestically-influential family of bin Laden—and home to many of the hijackers who worked for him.
Is it just me, or does this sound preposterous? Obama’s Homeland Security and Counterterrorism adviser is just winging it with key aspects of one of America’s most important, complex and risky operations? And the Saudi government is the one deciding to discard the remains of a man from one of Saudi Arabia’s most powerful families, before the public could receive proper proof of the identity of the body? A regime with a great deal at stake and perhaps plenty to hide.
Also please consider this important caveat: As we noted in a previous article, the claim that the body had already been positively identified via DNA has been disputed by a DNA expert who said that insufficient time had elapsed before the sea burial to complete such tests.
King Abdullah meets John Brennan, assistant to the US President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism The line about Brennan himself having been a former CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia is just sort of dropped in there. No recognition of what it means that a person of that background was put into that position after 9/11, no recognition that a person of that background and those fraught personal connections is controlling this narrative. He’s not just a “counterterrorism expert”—he is a longtime member of an agency whose mandate includes the frequent use of disinformation. And one who has his own historic direct links to the Saudi regime, a key and problematical player in the larger chess game playing out.
It’s relevant to note that Brennan is not only a career CIA officer (they say no one ever really leaves the Agency, no matter their new title) but one with a lot of baggage. He was deputy director of the CIA at the time of the 9/11 attacks. He was an adviser to Obama’s presidential campaign, after which Obama initially planned to name him CIA director. That appointment was pulled, in part due to criticism from human rights advocates over statements he had made in support of sending terrorism suspects to countries where they might be tortured.
Of course, there could have been other sources besides Brennan. In addition to the unnamed “counterterrorism official” previously cited, the New Yorker mentions a “special operations officer,” as in:
…according to a special-operations officer who is deeply familiar with the bin Laden raid.
Subsequent quotes from him indicate that this had to be a supervisory special ops officer. His comments are surprising:
“This wasn’t a hard op,” the special-operations officer told me. “It would be like hitting a target in McLean”—the upscale Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C.
President Barack Obama listening to John Brennans report.
Whoops! Here’s a Special Ops guy saying the Special Ops raid was actually no big deal! Shouldn’t that, if a valid assessment, get more attention? Especially given the endless praise and frequent statements of how difficult the operation was. I mean, the toughness and diciness of the Abbottabad mission is the prime reason we want to read the New Yorker’s account in the first place!
To further underline the point, consider that this fellow is not alone in his assessment:
In the months after the raid, the media have frequently suggested that the Abbottabad operation was as challenging as Operation Eagle Claw and the “Black Hawk Down” incident, but the senior Defense Department official told me that “this was not one of three missions.”…. He likened the routine of evening raids to “mowing the lawn.”
Why would a person overseeing an operation like this deflate the bubble of adoration? It doesn’t seem helpful to the interests of Special Operations – and it doesn’t seem credible, either. So there’s presumably a reason that this person is—again speaking to The New Yorker after this important exclusive has been carefully considered and strategized. We just don’t know what it is, and the magazine doesn’t even bother to wonder.
*
Most of the other sources seem to play bit roles. One is “a senior adviser to the President” whose only comment is that Obama decided not to trust the Pakistanis with advance notice of the raid—which we already knew. Another— named—source is Ben Rhodes, a deputy national-security adviser, who does not evince any intimate knowledge of the raid itself.
The New Yorker also includes a few other officials who brief Schmidle on general background, like a “senior defense department official” explaining the overall relationship between Special Operations and CIA personnel, and a named former CIA counsel explaining that the Abottabad raid amounted to “a complete incorporation of JSOC [Joint Special Operations Command] into a C.I.A. operation.”
That’s only slipped into the article, but it is perhaps one of the most important aspects of the piece, along with a brief mention of the way in which former Iraq/Afghan commander General David Petraeus has gone to CIA while CIA director Panetta has been made Defense Secretary. (For more on these important but confusing games of high-level musical chairs, which were not deeply scrutinized in the conventional media, see our WhoWhatWhy pieces here and here.)
This may sound too technical for your taste, but the takeaway point is that fundamental realignments are afoot in that vast, massively-funded, powerful and secretive part of the US government that is treated by the corporate press almost as if it does not exist. The tales of internal intrigue that we do not hear would begin to provide us with the real narratives that are not ours to have.
In the New Yorker piece, we do learn lots of things we did not know before—for example, that Special Ops considered tunneling in or coming in by foot rather than helicopter. We learn that CIA director Robert Gates wanted to drop massive bombs on the house. General James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, shared that view—Cartwright is one of the few who is directly identified as a source for Schmidle. That’s important stuff, and worth more than brief mention. And, once again, we need more effort to try and understand why we are being told these things.
“WE REALLY DIDN’T KNOW…WHAT WAS GOING ON”
About two-thirds of the article is a sort of scene-setter, a prologue to on-the-ground story we’ve all been waiting for. But when the big moment arrives, The New Yorker’s Schmidle instead punts:
Meanwhile, James, the squadron commander, had breached one wall, crossed a section of the yard covered with trellises, breached a second wall, and joined up with the SEALs from helo one, who were entering the ground floor of the house. What happened next is not precisely clear. “I can tell you that there was a time period of almost twenty to twenty-five minutes where we really didn’t know just exactly what was going on,” Panetta said later, on “PBS NewsHour.”
Until this moment, the operation had been monitored by dozens of defense, intelligence, and Administration officials watching the drone’s video feed. The SEALs were not wearing helmet cams, contrary to a widely cited report by CBS. None of them had any previous knowledge of the house’s floor plan, and they were further jostled by the awareness that they were possibly minutes away from ending the costliest manhunt in American history; as a result, some of their recollections—on which this account is based—may be imprecise and, thus, subject to dispute.
Schmidle claims that the SEALs’ “recollections—on which this account is based”—are subject to dispute. But as I’ve noted, the article is NOT based on their recollections, but on what some source claims to Schmidle were their recollections. Why the summary may be imprecise and thus subject to dispute after it has been filtered by a person controlling the scenario, must be asked. Perhaps this is why The New Yorker is not permitted to speak directly to the SEALs—because of what they could tell the magazine.
Now, killing the men who lived in the compound: First, the SEALs shot and killed the courier, who they say was armed, and his wife, who they say was not, when they emerged from the guesthouse. Then they killed the courier’s brother inside the main house, who they say was armed. Then they moved up the stairs:
...three SEALs marched up the stairs. Midway up, they saw bin Laden’s twenty-three-year-old son, Khalid, craning his neck around the corner. He then appeared at the top of the staircase with an AK-47. Khalid, who wore a white T-shirt with an overstretched neckline and had short hair and a clipped beard, fired down at the Americans. (The counterterrorism official claims that Khalid was unarmed, though still a threat worth taking seriously. “You have an adult male, late at night, in the dark, coming down the stairs at you in an Al Qaeda house—your assumption is that you’re encountering a hostile.”) At least two of the SEALs shot back and killed Khalid.
Ok, that’s pretty strange. First, Schmidle asserts that Khalid bin Laden was armed and fired with an AK-47. Then he quotes the “counterterrorism official” saying that Khalid was unarmed. Why does The New Yorker first run the “Khalid was armed” claim as a fact, and then include Brennan’s disclaimer? What’s really going on here, even from the New Yorker’s editorial standpoint?
Here’s another such instance: a dispute over where Osama was when they first saw him:
Three SEALs shuttled past Khalid’s body and blew open another metal cage, which obstructed the staircase leading to the third floor. Bounding up the unlit stairs, they scanned the railed landing. On the top stair, the lead SEAL swivelled right; with his night-vision goggles, he discerned that a tall, rangy man with a fist-length beard was peeking out from behind a bedroom door, ten feet away. The SEAL instantly sensed that it was Crankshaft [codename for Osama]. (The counterterrorism official asserts that the SEAL first saw bin Laden on the landing, and fired but missed.)
What’s the purpose of all this? How good is intelligence work when they can’t reconstruct whether the singular focus of the operation was first spotted peeking out from a doorway, or standing on the landing above them?
And then one of the most interesting passages, about the kill:
A second SEAL stepped into the room and trained the infrared laser of his M4 on bin Laden’s chest. The Al Qaeda chief, who was wearing a tan shalwar kameez and a prayer cap on his head, froze; he was unarmed. “There was never any question of detaining or capturing him—it wasn’t a split-second decision. No one wanted detainees,” the special-operations officer told me. (The Administration maintains that had bin Laden immediately surrendered he could have been taken alive.)
Uh-oh. So who is this Special Operations officer? He is directly disputing the administration’s claim on what surely matters greatly—what were President Obama’s intentions here? And did they always plan to just ignore them? That The New Yorker just drops this in with no further analysis or context is, simply put, shocking.
It seems almost as if Panetta, Obama, and the people in the story who most closely approximate actual representatives of the public in a functioning democracy, were basically cut off from observing what went down that day—or from influencing what transpired.
Consider this statement from Panetta, not included in the New Yorker piece:
“Once those teams went into the compound I can tell you that there was a time period of almost 20 or 25 minutes where we really didn’t know just exactly what was going on. And there were some very tense moments as we were waiting for information.
“We had some observation of the approach there, but we did not have direct flow of information as to the actual conduct of the operation itself as they were going through the compound.”
Panetta’s “lost 25 minutes” needs to be seen in the context of a man with civilian roots, notwithstanding two mid-60s years as a Lt. in military intel: Former Congressman, Clinton White House budget chief and Chief of Staff, credentials with civil rights and environment movements—a fellow with real distance from the true spook/military mojo.
Taken together, here’s what we have: President Obama did not know exactly what was going on. He did not decide that bin Laden should be shot. And he did not decide to dump his body in the ocean. The CIA and its Special Ops allies made all the decisions.
Then Brennan, the CIA’s man, put out the version that CIA wanted. (Keep in mind that, as noted earlier, CIA was really running the operation—with Special Ops under its direction).
What we’re looking at, folks, is the reality of democracy in America: A permanent entrenched covert establishment that marches to its own drummer or to drummers unknown. It’s exactly the kind of thing that never gets reported. Too scary. Too real. Better to dismiss this line of inquiry as too “conspiracy theory.”
If that sounds like hyperbole, let me add this rather significant consideration. It is the background of Nicholas Schmidle, the freelancer who wrote the New Yorker piece. It may give us insight into how he landed this extraordinary exclusive on this extraordinarily sensitive matter—information again, significantly, not shared by The New Yorker with its readers:
Marine Lt. General Robert E. “Rooster” Schmidle Jr. Schmidle’s father is Marine Lt. General Robert E. “Rooster” Schmidle Jr. General Schmidle served as Commanding Officer of Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force (Experimental)—that’s essentially Special Operations akin to Navy SEALs. In recent years, he was “assistant deputy commandant for Programs and Resources (Programs)”—where, among other things, he oversaw “irregular warfare.” (See various, including contract specs here on “Special Operations,” and picture caption here) In 2010, he moved into another piece of this, when Obama appointed him deputy commander, U.S. Cyber Command. Cumulatively, this makes the author’s father a very important man in precisely the sort of circles who care how the raid is publicly portrayed—and who would be quite intimate with some of the folks hunkering down with Obama in the Situation Room on the big day.
You can see a photo of Gen. Schmidle on a 2010 panel about “Warring Futures.” Event co-sponsors include Slate magazine and the New America Foundation, both of which, according to Nicholas Schmidle’s website, have also provided Schmidle’s son with an ongoing perch (with Slate giving him a platform for numerous articles from war zones and the foundation employing him as a Fellow.) These parallel relationships grow more disturbing with contemplation.
*
So let’s get back to the question, Who is driving this Ship of State?
First, consider this passage:
Obama returned to the White House at two o’clock, after playing nine holes of golf at Andrews Air Force Base. The Black Hawks departed from Jalalabad thirty minutes later. Just before four o’clock, Panetta announced to the group in the Situation Room that the helicopters were approaching Abbottabad.
John Brennan and ObamaTo be really useful reporting here, rather than just meaningless “color”, we’d need some context. Was the golf game’s purpose to blow off steam at an especially tense time? Did Obama not think it important enough for him to be constantly present in the hours leading up to the raid? Is this typical of his schedule when huge things are happening? We desperately need a more realistic sense of what presidents do, how much they’re really in charge, or, instead, figureheads for unnamed individuals who make most of the critical decisions.
Here’s something just as strange: we are told the President took a commanding role in determining key operational tactics, but then didn’t seem interested in important details, after the fact.
Forty-five minutes after the Black Hawks departed, four MH-47 Chinooks launched from the same runway in Jalalabad. Two of them flew to the border, staying on the Afghan side; the other two proceeded into Pakistan. Deploying four Chinooks was a last-minute decision made after President Barack Obama said he wanted to feel assured that the Americans could “fight their way out of Pakistan.”
Now, consider the following climactic New Yorker account of Obama meeting with the squadron commander after it’s all over, with bin Laden dead and the troops home and safe. Schmidle decides to call the commander “James…the names of all the covert operators mentioned in this story have been changed.” The anecdote will feature a canine, one who, in true furry dog story fashion, had already been introduced early in the New Yorker piece, as “Cairo” (it’s not clear whether the dog’s name, too, was changed):
As James talked about the raid, he mentioned Cairo’s role. “There was a dog?” Obama interrupted. James nodded and said that Cairo was in an adjoining room, muzzled, at the request of the Secret Service.
“I want to meet that dog,” Obama said.
“If you want to meet the dog, Mr. President, I advise you to bring treats,” James joked. Obama went over to pet Cairo, but the dog’s muzzle was left on.
Here’s the ending:
Before the President returned to Washington, he posed for photographs with each team member and spoke with many of them, but he left one thing unsaid. He never asked who fired the kill shot, and the SEALs never volunteered to tell him.
Why did the president not want to ask for specifics on the most important parts of the operation—but seemed so interested in a dog that participated? While it is certainly plausible that this happened, we should be wary of one of the oldest p.r. tricks around—get people cooing over an animal, while the real action is elsewhere.
Certainly, Obama’s reaction differs dramatically from that of other previous presidents who always demanded detailed briefings and would have stayed on top of it all throughout—including fellow Democrats JFK, Carter and Clinton. At minimum, it shows a degree of caution or ceremony based upon a desire not to know too much—or an understanding that he may not ask. Does anyone doubt that Bill Clinton would have been on watch 24/7 during this operation, parsing legal, political and operational details throughout, and would have demanded to know who felled America’s most wanted?
Nicholas Schmidle
Summing up about the reliability of this account, which is now likely to become required reading for every student in America, long into the future:
•It is based on reporting by a man who fails to disclose that he never spoke to the people who conducted the raid, or that his father has a long background himself running such operations (this even suggests the possibility that Nicholas Schmidle’s own father could have been one of those “unnamed sources.”)
•It seems to have depended heavily on trusting second-hand accounts by people with a poor track record for accurate summations, and an incentive to spin.
•The alleged decisions on killing bin Laden and disposing of his body lack credibility.
•The DNA evidence that the SEALs actually got their man is questionable.
•Though certain members of Congress say they have seen photos of the body (or, to be precise, a body), the rest of us have not seen anything.
•Promised photos of the ceremonial dumping of the body at sea have not materialized.
•The eyewitnesses from the house—including the surviving wives—have disappeared without comment.
We weren’t allowed to hear from the raid participants. And on August 6, seventeen Navy SEALs died when their helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan. We’re told that fifteen of them came, amazingly, from the same SEAL Team 6 that carried out the Abbottabad raid—but that none of the dead were present for the raid. We do get to hear the stories of those men, and their names.
Of course, if any of those men had been in the Abbottabad raid—or knew anything about it of broad public interest, we’d be none the wiser—because, the only “reliable sources” still available (and featured by the New Yorker) are military and intelligence professionals, coming out of a long tradition of cover-ups and fabrications.
Meanwhile, we have this president, this one who according to the magazine article didn’t ask about the core issues—why this man was killed, who killed him, under whose orders, what would be done with the body.
Well, he may not want answers. But we ought to want them. Otherwise, it’s all just a game.
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Dead Men Don’t Talk
US Navy Seals Destroyed to Cover Up Washington’s Bin Laden Execution Hoax?
Finian Cunningham
Global Research, August 7, 2011
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25923
The wiping out of 30 US special forces in the Chinook helicopter crash in Afghanistan comes at a time when Washington’s official version of how it carried out the assassination of Osama bin Laden was falling apart from incredulity.
Among the 38 dead in the helicopter disaster – the biggest single loss of American lives in the 10-year Afghanistan war of occupation – are believed to have been 17 US Navy Seals. The dead also include other members of US special forces and Afghan commandos.
Early Western news media reports indicated that the Chinook may have been involved in a significant military operation against Afghan militants when it went down in Wardak Province, not far west from the capital, Kabul, early Saturday.
Taliban sources are reported to have claimed that its militants shot down the Chinook with rocket fire.
US military officials say they are investigating the cause of the crash.
However, significantly, unnamed US sources have told media outlets that they believe the helicopter was shot down. This unofficial US briefing seems a bit odd. Why would US military sources want to hand enemy combatants a stunning propaganda coup?
Perhaps, it serves US interests to divert from the real motive and cause of the helicopter crash, whether it was it hit by a rocket or not.
US officials have admitted that the dead Navy Seals were part of the Team Six unit that allegedly carried out the assassination in May of the supposed 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden.
From the outset, Washington’s account of how its special forces murdered Bin Laden in his residential compound in Abbottabad, northern Pakistan, has been riven with contradictions. Why was the liquidated Bin Laden buried hurriedly at sea? How could the world’s “No 1 Terrorist” have resided inconspicuously only miles from the Pakistani military headquarters in Rawalpindi?
Most glaringly, several informed sources are convinced that Bin Laden died from natural causes years ago. Author Ralph Schoenman dismissed the alleged Navy Seal execution as “a big lie”. Schoenman cited evidence on this subject from former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, among others, for their confirmation that Bin Laden had died from kidney failure years earlier.
More recently, as Paul Craig Roberts reports, Pakistani locals have claimed that the Navy Seal operation in Abbottabad ended in disaster, with one of three US helicopters exploding as it took off from the ground near the compound. The other two choppers had not landed and, according to witnesses, they flew from the scene immediately after the explosion. As Roberts points out, that means there was no Bin Laden corpse to dispose of at sea, as Washington maintains.
The key people who would know the truth about Washington’s incredible Bin Laden assassination are now unavailable for comment. Case sealed.
Finian Cunningham is a Global Research Correspondent based in Belfast, Ireland.
Finian Cunningham
Global Research, August 7, 2011
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25923
The wiping out of 30 US special forces in the Chinook helicopter crash in Afghanistan comes at a time when Washington’s official version of how it carried out the assassination of Osama bin Laden was falling apart from incredulity.
Among the 38 dead in the helicopter disaster – the biggest single loss of American lives in the 10-year Afghanistan war of occupation – are believed to have been 17 US Navy Seals. The dead also include other members of US special forces and Afghan commandos.
Early Western news media reports indicated that the Chinook may have been involved in a significant military operation against Afghan militants when it went down in Wardak Province, not far west from the capital, Kabul, early Saturday.
Taliban sources are reported to have claimed that its militants shot down the Chinook with rocket fire.
US military officials say they are investigating the cause of the crash.
However, significantly, unnamed US sources have told media outlets that they believe the helicopter was shot down. This unofficial US briefing seems a bit odd. Why would US military sources want to hand enemy combatants a stunning propaganda coup?
Perhaps, it serves US interests to divert from the real motive and cause of the helicopter crash, whether it was it hit by a rocket or not.
US officials have admitted that the dead Navy Seals were part of the Team Six unit that allegedly carried out the assassination in May of the supposed 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden.
From the outset, Washington’s account of how its special forces murdered Bin Laden in his residential compound in Abbottabad, northern Pakistan, has been riven with contradictions. Why was the liquidated Bin Laden buried hurriedly at sea? How could the world’s “No 1 Terrorist” have resided inconspicuously only miles from the Pakistani military headquarters in Rawalpindi?
Most glaringly, several informed sources are convinced that Bin Laden died from natural causes years ago. Author Ralph Schoenman dismissed the alleged Navy Seal execution as “a big lie”. Schoenman cited evidence on this subject from former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, among others, for their confirmation that Bin Laden had died from kidney failure years earlier.
More recently, as Paul Craig Roberts reports, Pakistani locals have claimed that the Navy Seal operation in Abbottabad ended in disaster, with one of three US helicopters exploding as it took off from the ground near the compound. The other two choppers had not landed and, according to witnesses, they flew from the scene immediately after the explosion. As Roberts points out, that means there was no Bin Laden corpse to dispose of at sea, as Washington maintains.
The key people who would know the truth about Washington’s incredible Bin Laden assassination are now unavailable for comment. Case sealed.
Finian Cunningham is a Global Research Correspondent based in Belfast, Ireland.
The Mysterious Death of Osama bin Laden
Creating Evidence Where There Is None
Paul Craig Roberts
The New Yorker has published a story planted on Nicholas Schmidle by unidentified sources who claim to be familiar with the alleged operation that murdered Osama bin Laden.
There is no useful information in the story. Its purpose seems simply to explain away or cover up holes in the original story, principally why did the Seals murder an unarmed, unresisting Osama bin Laden whose capture would have resulted in a goldmine of terrorist information and whose show trial would have rescued the government’s crumbling 9/11 story?
The gullible Schmidle tells us: “‘There was never any question of detaining or capturing him–it wasn’t a split-second decision. No one wanted detainees,’ the special-operations officer told me.” In other words, the SEALs murdered bin Laden, because the US government did not want detainees, not because trigger-happy stupid SEALs destroyed a font of terrorist information.
Why did the SEALS dump bin Laden’s body in the ocean instead of producing the evidence to a skeptical world?
No real explanation, just that SEALS had done the same thing to other victims. Schmidle writes: “All along, the SEALs had planned to dump bin Laden’s corpse into the sea–a blunt way of ending the bin Laden myth.” But before they did so, the US checked with an unidentified Saudi intelligence operative, who allegedly replied, “Your plan sounds like a good one.”
I mean, really.
After all of Sy Hersh’s New Yorker revelations of US government lies and plots, one can understand the pressure that might have been applied to the New Yorker to publish this fairy tale. But what is extraordinary is that there was a real story that Schmidle and the New Yorker could have investigated.
In the immediate aftermath of bin Laden’s alleged murder by the SEALs, Pakistani TV interviewed the next door neighbor to bin Laden’s alleged compound. Someone supplied the video with an English translation running at the bottom of the video. According to the translation, the next door neighbor, Mr. Bashir, said that he watched the entire operation from the roof of his house. There were 3 helicopters. Only 1 landed. About a dozen men got out and entered the house. They shortly returned and boarded the helicopter. When the helicopter lifted off it exploded, killing all aboard. Mr. Bashir reports seeing bodies and pieces of bodies all over.
The US government acknowledges that it lost a helicopter, but claims no one was hurt. Obviously, as there were no further landings, if everyone was killed as Mr. Bashir reports, there was no body to be dumped into the ocean.
A real investigation would begin with Mr. Bashir’s interview. Was he actually saying what the English translation reported? I have not been able to find the interview with the English translation, but I believe this is the interview that I saw.:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0vo-L3VACs
Surely there is a qualified interpreter who can tell us what Mr. Bashir is saying. If the English translation that I saw is not a hoax, then we are presented with a story totally different from the one the government told us and repeated again through Mr. Schmidle.
If the English translation of Mr. Bashir’s interview is correct, one would think that there would be some interest on the part of US news organizations and on the part of the intelligence committees in Congress to question Mr. Bashir and his neighbors, many of whom are also interviewed on Pakistani TV saying that they have lived in Abbottabad all their lives and are absolutely certain that Osama bin Laden was not among them.
Mr. Schmidle goes to lengths to describe the SEALs’ weapons, although his story makes it clear that no weapons were needed as bin Laden is described as “unarmed” and undefended. The “startled” bin Laden didn’t even hear the helicopters or all the SEALs coming up the stairs. In addition to all his fatal illnesses which most experts believe killed him a decade ago, bin Laden must have been deaf as neighbors report that the sound of the helicopters was “intense.”
When Pakistanis on the scene in Abbottabad report a totally different story from the one that reaches us second and third hand from unidentified operatives speaking to reporters in the US who have never been to Abbottabad, shouldn’t someone qualified look into the story?
Paul Craig Roberts, a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, has been reporting shocking cases of prosecutorial abuse for two decades. A new edition of his book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, a documented account of how Americans lost the protection of law, has been released by Random House
Paul Craig Roberts
The New Yorker has published a story planted on Nicholas Schmidle by unidentified sources who claim to be familiar with the alleged operation that murdered Osama bin Laden.
There is no useful information in the story. Its purpose seems simply to explain away or cover up holes in the original story, principally why did the Seals murder an unarmed, unresisting Osama bin Laden whose capture would have resulted in a goldmine of terrorist information and whose show trial would have rescued the government’s crumbling 9/11 story?
The gullible Schmidle tells us: “‘There was never any question of detaining or capturing him–it wasn’t a split-second decision. No one wanted detainees,’ the special-operations officer told me.” In other words, the SEALs murdered bin Laden, because the US government did not want detainees, not because trigger-happy stupid SEALs destroyed a font of terrorist information.
Why did the SEALS dump bin Laden’s body in the ocean instead of producing the evidence to a skeptical world?
No real explanation, just that SEALS had done the same thing to other victims. Schmidle writes: “All along, the SEALs had planned to dump bin Laden’s corpse into the sea–a blunt way of ending the bin Laden myth.” But before they did so, the US checked with an unidentified Saudi intelligence operative, who allegedly replied, “Your plan sounds like a good one.”
I mean, really.
After all of Sy Hersh’s New Yorker revelations of US government lies and plots, one can understand the pressure that might have been applied to the New Yorker to publish this fairy tale. But what is extraordinary is that there was a real story that Schmidle and the New Yorker could have investigated.
In the immediate aftermath of bin Laden’s alleged murder by the SEALs, Pakistani TV interviewed the next door neighbor to bin Laden’s alleged compound. Someone supplied the video with an English translation running at the bottom of the video. According to the translation, the next door neighbor, Mr. Bashir, said that he watched the entire operation from the roof of his house. There were 3 helicopters. Only 1 landed. About a dozen men got out and entered the house. They shortly returned and boarded the helicopter. When the helicopter lifted off it exploded, killing all aboard. Mr. Bashir reports seeing bodies and pieces of bodies all over.
The US government acknowledges that it lost a helicopter, but claims no one was hurt. Obviously, as there were no further landings, if everyone was killed as Mr. Bashir reports, there was no body to be dumped into the ocean.
A real investigation would begin with Mr. Bashir’s interview. Was he actually saying what the English translation reported? I have not been able to find the interview with the English translation, but I believe this is the interview that I saw.:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0vo-L3VACs
Surely there is a qualified interpreter who can tell us what Mr. Bashir is saying. If the English translation that I saw is not a hoax, then we are presented with a story totally different from the one the government told us and repeated again through Mr. Schmidle.
If the English translation of Mr. Bashir’s interview is correct, one would think that there would be some interest on the part of US news organizations and on the part of the intelligence committees in Congress to question Mr. Bashir and his neighbors, many of whom are also interviewed on Pakistani TV saying that they have lived in Abbottabad all their lives and are absolutely certain that Osama bin Laden was not among them.
Mr. Schmidle goes to lengths to describe the SEALs’ weapons, although his story makes it clear that no weapons were needed as bin Laden is described as “unarmed” and undefended. The “startled” bin Laden didn’t even hear the helicopters or all the SEALs coming up the stairs. In addition to all his fatal illnesses which most experts believe killed him a decade ago, bin Laden must have been deaf as neighbors report that the sound of the helicopters was “intense.”
When Pakistanis on the scene in Abbottabad report a totally different story from the one that reaches us second and third hand from unidentified operatives speaking to reporters in the US who have never been to Abbottabad, shouldn’t someone qualified look into the story?
Paul Craig Roberts, a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, has been reporting shocking cases of prosecutorial abuse for two decades. A new edition of his book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, a documented account of how Americans lost the protection of law, has been released by Random House
Saturday, May 28, 2011
SEAL Team Six in Modern Warfare 3
Does the Navy SEAL team that took out Osama bin Laden on May 2 appear in the upcoming Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 video game from Activision Blizzard?
That's the contention of gaming site Kotaku, which reported Saturday that "[a] brief audio clip that we believe is a piece of the upcoming Modern Warfare 3 refers to SEAL Team Six, the unit widely assumed to have killed Osama Bin Laden in a raid in Pakistan earlier this month."
Kotaku said the audio clip was part of "a larger leak of presumed Modern Warfare 3 images, story details and sound clips" that the site received last week.
In addition to the reported appearance of SEAL Team Six, there are spoilers aplenty in Kotaku's series of reports on the upcoming first-person shooter, the eighth installment in the Call of Duty series.
Modern Warfare 3 reportedly kicks off with a Russian invasion of Brooklyn (picking up from where Modern Warfare 2 left off) and takes players to more than a dozen more locations around the world for special-ops missions and out-and-out battles...
Navy SEALs Who Got Bin Laden in Modern Warfare 3?
Damon Poeter
May 14, 2011
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2385402,00.asp
That's the contention of gaming site Kotaku, which reported Saturday that "[a] brief audio clip that we believe is a piece of the upcoming Modern Warfare 3 refers to SEAL Team Six, the unit widely assumed to have killed Osama Bin Laden in a raid in Pakistan earlier this month."
Kotaku said the audio clip was part of "a larger leak of presumed Modern Warfare 3 images, story details and sound clips" that the site received last week.
In addition to the reported appearance of SEAL Team Six, there are spoilers aplenty in Kotaku's series of reports on the upcoming first-person shooter, the eighth installment in the Call of Duty series.
Modern Warfare 3 reportedly kicks off with a Russian invasion of Brooklyn (picking up from where Modern Warfare 2 left off) and takes players to more than a dozen more locations around the world for special-ops missions and out-and-out battles...
Navy SEALs Who Got Bin Laden in Modern Warfare 3?
Damon Poeter
May 14, 2011
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2385402,00.asp
Orwell Wrote The Script
China: The New Bin Laden
Paul Craig Roberts
May 11, 2011
George Orwell, the pen name by which Eric Blair is known, had the gift of prophecy, or else blind luck. In 1949 in his novel, 1984, he described the Amerika of today and, I fear, also his native Great Britain, which is no longer great and follows Washington, licking the jackboot and submitting to Washington’s hegemony over England and Europe and exhausting itself financially and morally in order to support Amerikan hegemony over the rest of the world.
In Orwell’s prophecy, Big Brother’s government rules over unquestioning people, incapable of independent thought, who are constantly spied upon. In 1949 there was no Internet, Facebook, twitter, GPS, etc. Big Brother’s spying was done through cameras and microphones in public areas, as in England today, and through television equipped with surveillance devices in homes. As everyone thought what the government intended for them to think, it was easy to identify the few who had suspicions.
Fear and war were used to keep everyone in line, but not even Orwell anticipated Homeland Security feeling up the genitals of air travelers and shopping center customers. Every day in people’s lives, there came over the TV the Two Minutes of Hate. An image of Emmanuel Goldstein, a propaganda creation of the Ministry of Truth, who is designated as Oceania’s Number One Enemy, appeared on the screen. Goldstein was the non-existent "enemy of the state" whose non-existent organization, "The Brotherhood," was Oceania’s terrorist enemy. The Goldstein Threat justified the "Homeland Security" that violated all known Rights of Englishmen and kept Oceania’s subjects "safe."
Since 9/11, with some diversions into Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Mohamed Atta, the two rivals to bin Laden as the "Mastermind of 9/11," Osama bin Laden has played the 21st century roleof Emmanuel Goldstein. Now that the Obama Regime has announced the murder of the modern-day Goldstein, a new demon must be constructed before Oceania’s wars run out of justifications.
Hillary Clinton, the low-grade moron who is US Secretary of State, is busy at work making China the new enemy of Oceania. China is Amerika’s largest creditor, but this did not inhibit the idiot Hilary from, this week in front of high Chinese officials, denouncing China for "human rights violations" and for the absence of democracy.
While Hilary was enjoying her rant and displaying unspeakable Amerikan hypocrisy, Homeland Security thugs had organized local police and sheriffs in a small town that is the home of Western Illinois University and set upon peaceful students who were enjoying their annual street party. There was no rioting, no property damage, but the riot police or Homeland Security SWAT teams showed up with sound cannons, gassed the students and beat them.
Indeed, if anyone pays any attention to what is happening in Amerika today, a militarized police and Homeland Security are destroying constitutional rights of peaceful assembly, protest, and free speech.
For practical purposes, the U.S. Constitution no longer exists. The police can beat, taser, abuse, and falsely arrest American citizens and experience no adverse consequences.
The executive branch of the federal government, to whom we used to look to protect us from abuses at the state and local level, acquired the right under the Bush regime to ignore both US and international law, along with the US Constitution and the constitutional powers of Congress and the judiciary. As long as there is a "state of war," such as the open-ended "war on terror," the executive branch is higher than the law and is unaccountable to law. Amerika is not a democracy, but a country ruled by an executive branch Caesar.
Hillary, of course, like the rest of the U.S. Government, is scared by the recent International Monetary Fund (IMF) report that China will be the most powerful economy in five years.
Just as the military/security complex pressured President John F. Kennedy to start a war with the Soviet Union over the Cuban missile crisis while the US still had the nuclear advantage, Hillary is now moving China into the role of Emmanuel Goldstein.
Hate has to be mobilized, before Washington can move the ignorant patriotic masses to war.
How can Oceania continue if the declared enemy, Osama bin Laden, is dead. Big Brother must immediately invent another "enemy of the people."
But Hillary, being a total idiot, has chosen a country that has other than military weapons. While the Amerikans support "dissidents" in China, who are sufficiently stupid to believe that democracy exists in Amerika, the insulted Chinese government sits on $2 trillion in US dollar-denominated assets that can be dumped, thus destroying the US dollar’s exchange value and the dollar as reserve currency, the main source of US power.
Hillary, in an unprecedented act of hypocrisy, denounced China for "human rights violations." This from a country that has violated the human rights of millions of victims in our own time in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, secret CIA prisons dotted all over the planet, in US courts of law, and in the arrests and seizure of documents of American war protestors. There is no worst violator of human rights on the planet than the US government, and the world knows it.
The hubris and arrogance of US policymakers, and the lies that they inculcate in the American public, have exposed Washington to war with the most populous country on earth, a country that has a military alliance with Russia, which has sufficient nuclear weapons to wipe out all life on earth. The scared idiots in Washington are desperate to set up China as the new Osama bin Laden, the figure of two minutes of hate every news hour, so that the World’s Only Superpower can take out the Chinese before they surpass the US as the Number One Power.
No country on earth has a less responsible government and a less accountable government than the Americans. However, Americans will defend their own oppression, and that of the world, to the bitter end.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by French President Francois Mitterrand. He is the author of Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider's Account of Policymaking in Washington; Alienation and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice.
Paul Craig Roberts
May 11, 2011
George Orwell, the pen name by which Eric Blair is known, had the gift of prophecy, or else blind luck. In 1949 in his novel, 1984, he described the Amerika of today and, I fear, also his native Great Britain, which is no longer great and follows Washington, licking the jackboot and submitting to Washington’s hegemony over England and Europe and exhausting itself financially and morally in order to support Amerikan hegemony over the rest of the world.
In Orwell’s prophecy, Big Brother’s government rules over unquestioning people, incapable of independent thought, who are constantly spied upon. In 1949 there was no Internet, Facebook, twitter, GPS, etc. Big Brother’s spying was done through cameras and microphones in public areas, as in England today, and through television equipped with surveillance devices in homes. As everyone thought what the government intended for them to think, it was easy to identify the few who had suspicions.
Fear and war were used to keep everyone in line, but not even Orwell anticipated Homeland Security feeling up the genitals of air travelers and shopping center customers. Every day in people’s lives, there came over the TV the Two Minutes of Hate. An image of Emmanuel Goldstein, a propaganda creation of the Ministry of Truth, who is designated as Oceania’s Number One Enemy, appeared on the screen. Goldstein was the non-existent "enemy of the state" whose non-existent organization, "The Brotherhood," was Oceania’s terrorist enemy. The Goldstein Threat justified the "Homeland Security" that violated all known Rights of Englishmen and kept Oceania’s subjects "safe."
Since 9/11, with some diversions into Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Mohamed Atta, the two rivals to bin Laden as the "Mastermind of 9/11," Osama bin Laden has played the 21st century roleof Emmanuel Goldstein. Now that the Obama Regime has announced the murder of the modern-day Goldstein, a new demon must be constructed before Oceania’s wars run out of justifications.
Hillary Clinton, the low-grade moron who is US Secretary of State, is busy at work making China the new enemy of Oceania. China is Amerika’s largest creditor, but this did not inhibit the idiot Hilary from, this week in front of high Chinese officials, denouncing China for "human rights violations" and for the absence of democracy.
While Hilary was enjoying her rant and displaying unspeakable Amerikan hypocrisy, Homeland Security thugs had organized local police and sheriffs in a small town that is the home of Western Illinois University and set upon peaceful students who were enjoying their annual street party. There was no rioting, no property damage, but the riot police or Homeland Security SWAT teams showed up with sound cannons, gassed the students and beat them.
Indeed, if anyone pays any attention to what is happening in Amerika today, a militarized police and Homeland Security are destroying constitutional rights of peaceful assembly, protest, and free speech.
For practical purposes, the U.S. Constitution no longer exists. The police can beat, taser, abuse, and falsely arrest American citizens and experience no adverse consequences.
The executive branch of the federal government, to whom we used to look to protect us from abuses at the state and local level, acquired the right under the Bush regime to ignore both US and international law, along with the US Constitution and the constitutional powers of Congress and the judiciary. As long as there is a "state of war," such as the open-ended "war on terror," the executive branch is higher than the law and is unaccountable to law. Amerika is not a democracy, but a country ruled by an executive branch Caesar.
Hillary, of course, like the rest of the U.S. Government, is scared by the recent International Monetary Fund (IMF) report that China will be the most powerful economy in five years.
Just as the military/security complex pressured President John F. Kennedy to start a war with the Soviet Union over the Cuban missile crisis while the US still had the nuclear advantage, Hillary is now moving China into the role of Emmanuel Goldstein.
Hate has to be mobilized, before Washington can move the ignorant patriotic masses to war.
How can Oceania continue if the declared enemy, Osama bin Laden, is dead. Big Brother must immediately invent another "enemy of the people."
But Hillary, being a total idiot, has chosen a country that has other than military weapons. While the Amerikans support "dissidents" in China, who are sufficiently stupid to believe that democracy exists in Amerika, the insulted Chinese government sits on $2 trillion in US dollar-denominated assets that can be dumped, thus destroying the US dollar’s exchange value and the dollar as reserve currency, the main source of US power.
Hillary, in an unprecedented act of hypocrisy, denounced China for "human rights violations." This from a country that has violated the human rights of millions of victims in our own time in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, secret CIA prisons dotted all over the planet, in US courts of law, and in the arrests and seizure of documents of American war protestors. There is no worst violator of human rights on the planet than the US government, and the world knows it.
The hubris and arrogance of US policymakers, and the lies that they inculcate in the American public, have exposed Washington to war with the most populous country on earth, a country that has a military alliance with Russia, which has sufficient nuclear weapons to wipe out all life on earth. The scared idiots in Washington are desperate to set up China as the new Osama bin Laden, the figure of two minutes of hate every news hour, so that the World’s Only Superpower can take out the Chinese before they surpass the US as the Number One Power.
No country on earth has a less responsible government and a less accountable government than the Americans. However, Americans will defend their own oppression, and that of the world, to the bitter end.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by French President Francois Mitterrand. He is the author of Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider's Account of Policymaking in Washington; Alienation and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice.
Porn found inside bin Laden's compound
Douglas Stanglin, USA TODAY
May 13, 2011
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/ondeadline/post/2011/05/reuters-porn-found-inside-bin-ladens-compound/1
U.S. commandos who raided Osama bin Laden's compound also recovered a "fairly extensive" stash of pornography, including videos, Reuters reports.
The news agency quotes unidentified current and former U.S. officials as saying it is unclear where in the sprawling compound the material was found nor is it clear who had been viewing it.
The officials specifically say they do not know if bin Laden himself had acquired or viewed the materials, Reuters reports.
Recently released home videos showed bin Laden viewing pictures of himself on a TV screen, indicating that the compound did have equipment for playing videos.
Will the Real Osama Please Stand Up?
Photos were originally with this excellent article on the two Osamas:
Exclusive: Osama bin Laden's Nose and Left Ear
Joe Quinn
Sun, 08 May 2011
http://www.sott.net/articles/show/228230-Exclusive-Osama-bin-Laden-s-Nose-and-Left-Ear
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
On The Death of Osama bin Laden
John Tully
Broadcatching
http://broadcatching.wordpress.com/
Now I lay me down to sleep while people cheer in the streets like creeps
Of course I love and respect our troops but wonder why they get treated like poop
Having to buy body armor - on their fifth deployment, while people fetishize them - a video game for their enjoyment
All those dead Americans - Iraqis and Afghans too, will the War on Terror ever be through
Ten years gone by - trillions of dollars spent, while ordinary Americans can’t even pay their rent
All this vengeance and all this hate, what have we accomplished, what is our fate?
Don’t feel any safer, we worry more than ever, while the politicians posture and try to be clever
The rest of the World wonders just what to say and thinks to themselves how our country lost it’s way
But I’m a true Patriot and so I ask questions, our Founders would demand this, that we learn our lessons
Broadcatching
http://broadcatching.wordpress.com/
Now I lay me down to sleep while people cheer in the streets like creeps
Of course I love and respect our troops but wonder why they get treated like poop
Having to buy body armor - on their fifth deployment, while people fetishize them - a video game for their enjoyment
All those dead Americans - Iraqis and Afghans too, will the War on Terror ever be through
Ten years gone by - trillions of dollars spent, while ordinary Americans can’t even pay their rent
All this vengeance and all this hate, what have we accomplished, what is our fate?
Don’t feel any safer, we worry more than ever, while the politicians posture and try to be clever
The rest of the World wonders just what to say and thinks to themselves how our country lost it’s way
But I’m a true Patriot and so I ask questions, our Founders would demand this, that we learn our lessons
Hoax: White House Claims 4-Year-Old Bin Laden Video Is New Footage
Dubious Bin Laden “Home Movies” Identical To Tapes Released 4 Years Ago By Pentagon Front Group
Paul Joseph Watson
PrisonPlanet.com
Saturday, May 7, 2011
http://www.prisonplanet.com/hoax-white-house-claims-4-year-old-bin-laden-tapes-are-new-footage.html
In a desperate effort to bolster its crumbling official narrative, the White House today released a set of dubious Bin Laden “home movies” purportedly seized from his compound during the raid on Sunday night that it claims show Bin Laden on camera in 2010, but the tapes are almost identical to footage released almost four years ago by a notorious Pentagon front group that acts as a conduit for US intelligence by regularly releasing fake Al-Qaeda videos.
Before we even look at the new tapes, recall that the Washington Post reported last year on how CIA officials recruited “darker-skinned employees” to create fake Bin Laden tapes. The fact that the CIA created fake Bin Laden tapes is an admitted fact, not a conspiracy theory.
“Extraordinary home videos taken from Osama bin Laden’s hideout show the terrorist leader watching news coverage of himself on television,” reports the Daily Mail.
“The videos were seized by Navy SEALs after Bin Laden was killed. They were shown to reporters this afternoon by intelligence officials.”
One of the videos purports to show Bin Laden watching television news reports about himself. The footage is filmed from almost behind his head and only shows a small portion of his face. The TV shows footage of Bin Laden as well as still images and footage of Barack Obama. Interestingly, the only moment in which the cameraman zooms in on the TV so that you can clearly see the picture is when it either shows Bin Laden, Obama, or both of them in a still shot together.
Contrary to the footage of Bin Laden allegedly flicking through television channels, in which his beard is gray, in the other tapes, which the White House claims were recorded between October and November 2010, Bin Laden appears with his beard dyed black. The man watching TV appears to be much older than the Bin Laden seen in the other tapes.
MSNBC ran the video under the headline New Video Shows Bin Laden In Gold Robe. However, these tapes are almost identical to footage first released by the Pentagon front group SITE in September 2007. In that footage, Bin Laden also appears with a dyed beard and is wearing exactly the same clothes. The only thing that differs is the color of the background, but in other tapes the background is the same brown color as the 2007 tape. As computer expert Neal Krawetz’s analysis revealed, fake backgrounds are often used on purported “Al-Qaeda” tapes, where a blue screen is used to superimpose the figure of the speaker over a pre-selected backdrop.
The footage in these tapes purports to show Bin Laden making recordings in late 2010, and yet he looks identical to how he appeared in tapes first released in 2007.
The establishment media has completely failed to even mention the fact that much of the footage, which the White House claims was filmed in 2010, is almost identical to that first released in 2007 by the Pentagon front group SITE. Why would Bin Laden make a video in October 2010 and not release it? Unless this is merely outtakes from the footage already released four years ago.
It would not be the first time that tapes of Bin Laden have been passed off as new material when in fact they are years old.
In July 2007, the mainstream media heralded the arrival of a tape of Bin Laden giving a speech as new footage. In fact it was almost six years old, having been filmed in October 2001 and later released by IntelCenter, SITE’s sister organization, in October 2003. At the time we did an image comparison proving that the footage dubbed “new” in 2007 was in fact filmed in 2001 and released first by the Al-Ansaar Islamic news agency in 2002.
As we documented yesterday, the organization that released the original 2007 tape which is virtually identical to the tapes released by the White House today is nothing more than a conduit for Pentagon propaganda run the daughter of a former Israeli spy.
The SITE organization is virtually a contractor for the U.S. government, receiving some $500,000 a year annually from Uncle Sam, and has been caught releasing fake Al-Qaeda tapes on numerous occasions. SITE’s website domain is hosted by servers located in Washington DC, which are stationed between the Department of Homeland Security and the Israeli Embassy.
As in the 2007 tape, the As-Sahab logo appears in the “new” tapes released by the White House. A 2007 investigation by Neal Krawetz featured in Wired Magazine found that the As-Sahab logo was added at the same as the IntelCenter logo, another US military-industrial complex front, meaning the so-called “Al-Qaeda” tapes were in fact coming straight out of US intelligence circles. Although Krawetz asserted that this was the case in a taped interview, after the story began to receive attention he mysteriously backed away from the claim despite Wired’s Kim Zetter receiving approval from Krawetz that all the information contained in the original report was valid.
These “new” tapes which are actually identical to footage first released in 2007 will do little to firm up the White House’s crumbling Bin Laden narrative, which has been under suspicion after it was reported that Osama’s body was hastily dumped into the sea and President Obama refused to release an image of the dead Bin Laden.
The narrative of last Sunday’s raid has flip-flopped constantly and even mainstream journalists are starting to become wary, particularly after it emerged that Obama and Hillary could not have watched the raid unfold live as they had claimed because the live feed was cut before the Navy SEALS entered the compound, meaning that the “situation room” photos that purported to show Obama and Hillary watching Bin Laden’s assassination live were in fact completely staged.
Paul Joseph Watson
PrisonPlanet.com
Saturday, May 7, 2011
http://www.prisonplanet.com/hoax-white-house-claims-4-year-old-bin-laden-tapes-are-new-footage.html
In a desperate effort to bolster its crumbling official narrative, the White House today released a set of dubious Bin Laden “home movies” purportedly seized from his compound during the raid on Sunday night that it claims show Bin Laden on camera in 2010, but the tapes are almost identical to footage released almost four years ago by a notorious Pentagon front group that acts as a conduit for US intelligence by regularly releasing fake Al-Qaeda videos.
Before we even look at the new tapes, recall that the Washington Post reported last year on how CIA officials recruited “darker-skinned employees” to create fake Bin Laden tapes. The fact that the CIA created fake Bin Laden tapes is an admitted fact, not a conspiracy theory.
“Extraordinary home videos taken from Osama bin Laden’s hideout show the terrorist leader watching news coverage of himself on television,” reports the Daily Mail.
“The videos were seized by Navy SEALs after Bin Laden was killed. They were shown to reporters this afternoon by intelligence officials.”
One of the videos purports to show Bin Laden watching television news reports about himself. The footage is filmed from almost behind his head and only shows a small portion of his face. The TV shows footage of Bin Laden as well as still images and footage of Barack Obama. Interestingly, the only moment in which the cameraman zooms in on the TV so that you can clearly see the picture is when it either shows Bin Laden, Obama, or both of them in a still shot together.
Contrary to the footage of Bin Laden allegedly flicking through television channels, in which his beard is gray, in the other tapes, which the White House claims were recorded between October and November 2010, Bin Laden appears with his beard dyed black. The man watching TV appears to be much older than the Bin Laden seen in the other tapes.
MSNBC ran the video under the headline New Video Shows Bin Laden In Gold Robe. However, these tapes are almost identical to footage first released by the Pentagon front group SITE in September 2007. In that footage, Bin Laden also appears with a dyed beard and is wearing exactly the same clothes. The only thing that differs is the color of the background, but in other tapes the background is the same brown color as the 2007 tape. As computer expert Neal Krawetz’s analysis revealed, fake backgrounds are often used on purported “Al-Qaeda” tapes, where a blue screen is used to superimpose the figure of the speaker over a pre-selected backdrop.
The footage in these tapes purports to show Bin Laden making recordings in late 2010, and yet he looks identical to how he appeared in tapes first released in 2007.
The establishment media has completely failed to even mention the fact that much of the footage, which the White House claims was filmed in 2010, is almost identical to that first released in 2007 by the Pentagon front group SITE. Why would Bin Laden make a video in October 2010 and not release it? Unless this is merely outtakes from the footage already released four years ago.
It would not be the first time that tapes of Bin Laden have been passed off as new material when in fact they are years old.
In July 2007, the mainstream media heralded the arrival of a tape of Bin Laden giving a speech as new footage. In fact it was almost six years old, having been filmed in October 2001 and later released by IntelCenter, SITE’s sister organization, in October 2003. At the time we did an image comparison proving that the footage dubbed “new” in 2007 was in fact filmed in 2001 and released first by the Al-Ansaar Islamic news agency in 2002.
As we documented yesterday, the organization that released the original 2007 tape which is virtually identical to the tapes released by the White House today is nothing more than a conduit for Pentagon propaganda run the daughter of a former Israeli spy.
The SITE organization is virtually a contractor for the U.S. government, receiving some $500,000 a year annually from Uncle Sam, and has been caught releasing fake Al-Qaeda tapes on numerous occasions. SITE’s website domain is hosted by servers located in Washington DC, which are stationed between the Department of Homeland Security and the Israeli Embassy.
As in the 2007 tape, the As-Sahab logo appears in the “new” tapes released by the White House. A 2007 investigation by Neal Krawetz featured in Wired Magazine found that the As-Sahab logo was added at the same as the IntelCenter logo, another US military-industrial complex front, meaning the so-called “Al-Qaeda” tapes were in fact coming straight out of US intelligence circles. Although Krawetz asserted that this was the case in a taped interview, after the story began to receive attention he mysteriously backed away from the claim despite Wired’s Kim Zetter receiving approval from Krawetz that all the information contained in the original report was valid.
These “new” tapes which are actually identical to footage first released in 2007 will do little to firm up the White House’s crumbling Bin Laden narrative, which has been under suspicion after it was reported that Osama’s body was hastily dumped into the sea and President Obama refused to release an image of the dead Bin Laden.
The narrative of last Sunday’s raid has flip-flopped constantly and even mainstream journalists are starting to become wary, particularly after it emerged that Obama and Hillary could not have watched the raid unfold live as they had claimed because the live feed was cut before the Navy SEALS entered the compound, meaning that the “situation room” photos that purported to show Obama and Hillary watching Bin Laden’s assassination live were in fact completely staged.
Jesse Ventura Questions Obama’s Narrative Of Bin Laden Raid
“Maybe they had some guy there that looked like Bin Laden and did him in,” former Governor tells Alex Jones Show
Paul Joseph Watson
PrisonPlanet.com
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
http://www.prisonplanet.com/jesse-ventura-questions-obamas-narrative-of-bin-laden-raid.html
Former Navy SEAL and Governor of Minnesota Jesse Ventura has questioned Barack Obama’s official narrative regarding the raid on Osama Bin Laden, telling the Alex Jones Show of his suspicions that Osama died years ago, and expressing disbelief that the man seen flicking between TV channels in the video released by the White House Saturday was actually Bin Laden.
“I’ve been lied to so much I question everything the government tells me,” Ventura said, adding that the Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman cover-ups made him suspect the official version of last Sunday’s events.
“I don’t know what to believe, that’s the disturbing thing about being a United States citizen,” said Ventura, noting how the media has for the most part simply regurgitated everything the White House claimed about the raid.
Ventura echoed the sentiments of a number of intelligence professionals and heads of state who publicly expressed their contention that Bin Laden had been dead for many years before Obama’s announcement of his death in a live speech on national television.
“This guy was supposedly on a dialysis machine way back 10 years ago, how does he survive that long if he was on a dialysis machine?” asked Ventura.
Referring to the footage released Saturday by the White House which claims to show Bin Laden flicking through television channels, Ventura said that he laughed when he saw the clip as there was no way of knowing if it actually was Osama. Residents of Abbottabad share Ventura’s doubts, with one telling a BBC reporter this week that the man in the video was actually his neighbor and the owner of the compound, a man called Akhbar Han.
Indeed, President Obama himself told 60 Minutes on Sunday that before the raid the White House was only 55/45 sure that the man inside the compound was Osama Bin Laden, fearing he could just have been a “prince from Dubai” instead.
“What they really did was shoot an old man sitting in his bed,” Ventura speculated, although being a former Navy SEAL himself, Ventura was keen to emphasize that the SEALS involved in the operation would have been told that the man they killed was Bin Laden and were not in on any kind of scam.
The former Governor also questioned why Bin Laden was not captured and interrogated even after it emerged that he had been unarmed.
Noting how Bin Laden would have been a treasure trove of information regarding Al-Qaeda, Ventura stated, “I certainly would capture him, why wouldn’t you attempt to capture this guy….it seems stupid to just have executed him without trying to capture him.”
Ventura also questioned the manner in which Bin Laden’s body was hastily dumped into the sea, noting that this was not in accordance with Islamic burial practices as the White House had claimed.
As we have documented, there are a myriad of inconsistencies surrounding the alleged raid on the Bin Laden compound, and the Obama administration’s constant flip-flopping of the official narrative has only increased suspicion surrounding the political motivations behind the whole episode.
Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show.
Paul Joseph Watson
PrisonPlanet.com
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
http://www.prisonplanet.com/jesse-ventura-questions-obamas-narrative-of-bin-laden-raid.html
Former Navy SEAL and Governor of Minnesota Jesse Ventura has questioned Barack Obama’s official narrative regarding the raid on Osama Bin Laden, telling the Alex Jones Show of his suspicions that Osama died years ago, and expressing disbelief that the man seen flicking between TV channels in the video released by the White House Saturday was actually Bin Laden.
“I’ve been lied to so much I question everything the government tells me,” Ventura said, adding that the Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman cover-ups made him suspect the official version of last Sunday’s events.
“I don’t know what to believe, that’s the disturbing thing about being a United States citizen,” said Ventura, noting how the media has for the most part simply regurgitated everything the White House claimed about the raid.
Ventura echoed the sentiments of a number of intelligence professionals and heads of state who publicly expressed their contention that Bin Laden had been dead for many years before Obama’s announcement of his death in a live speech on national television.
“This guy was supposedly on a dialysis machine way back 10 years ago, how does he survive that long if he was on a dialysis machine?” asked Ventura.
Referring to the footage released Saturday by the White House which claims to show Bin Laden flicking through television channels, Ventura said that he laughed when he saw the clip as there was no way of knowing if it actually was Osama. Residents of Abbottabad share Ventura’s doubts, with one telling a BBC reporter this week that the man in the video was actually his neighbor and the owner of the compound, a man called Akhbar Han.
Indeed, President Obama himself told 60 Minutes on Sunday that before the raid the White House was only 55/45 sure that the man inside the compound was Osama Bin Laden, fearing he could just have been a “prince from Dubai” instead.
“What they really did was shoot an old man sitting in his bed,” Ventura speculated, although being a former Navy SEAL himself, Ventura was keen to emphasize that the SEALS involved in the operation would have been told that the man they killed was Bin Laden and were not in on any kind of scam.
The former Governor also questioned why Bin Laden was not captured and interrogated even after it emerged that he had been unarmed.
Noting how Bin Laden would have been a treasure trove of information regarding Al-Qaeda, Ventura stated, “I certainly would capture him, why wouldn’t you attempt to capture this guy….it seems stupid to just have executed him without trying to capture him.”
Ventura also questioned the manner in which Bin Laden’s body was hastily dumped into the sea, noting that this was not in accordance with Islamic burial practices as the White House had claimed.
As we have documented, there are a myriad of inconsistencies surrounding the alleged raid on the Bin Laden compound, and the Obama administration’s constant flip-flopping of the official narrative has only increased suspicion surrounding the political motivations behind the whole episode.
Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show.
Friday, May 6, 2011
Waterboarding 'Worked'?
Media push pro-torture message
Media Advisory
Fair.org
5/4/11
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=4281
To hear some tell it, the intelligence clues that ultimately led to Osama bin Laden's hideout in Pakistan were generated by the use of torture. But the evidence available so far does not bear this out.
Torture advocates on the right are claiming vindication. On Fox News Channel's O'Reilly Factor (5/2/11), Rep. Peter King (R.-N.Y.) announced that:
we obtained information several years ago, vital information about the courier for Obama [sic]. We obtained that information through waterboarding. And so for those who say that waterboarding doesn't work, to say that it should be stopped and never used again-- we got vital information which directly led to us bin Laden.
This led O'Reilly to proclaim: "You're not going to hear that on the other networks. I guarantee you."
Actually, talk about how water torture may have revealed the identity of bin Laden's trusted courier could be heard widely. On the CBS Evening News (5/2/11), reporter David Martin said, "Some of the leads to that courier came out of the CIA's secret prison where those Al-Qaeda captives were waterboarded."
And ABC World News reporter Jonathan Karl tapped Dick Cheney for expertise (5/2/11):
KARL: One key, Cheney suggests: the CIA's enhanced interrogation program that Obama stopped because he said it included torture. An early tip leading to bin Laden's courier came from some of those interrogations.
CHENEY: All I know is what I've seen in the newspaper at this point, but it wouldn't be surprising if, in fact, that program produced results that ultimately contributed to the success of this venture.
The Los Angeles Times (5/2/11) reported:
Crucial information about the trusted courier who owned the compound came years ago from CIA interrogations of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohamed, the official said. This is significant, because the Al-Qaeda mastermind was subject to waterboarding and other brutal interrogation methods.
Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank noted (5/3/11) that Obama killed bin Laden "with an apparent assist from the Bush administration's interrogation program." And on NBC's Today show (5/3/11), Jim Miklasziewski reported:
U.S. officials tell NBC News that 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, while in CIA custody, provided key information regarding a courier close to bin Laden. Intelligence sometimes obtained through aggressive interrogation techniques like waterboarding.
But the details that are known so far do not support the argument that torture produced any of the key intelligence. As New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer wrote (NewYorker.com, 5/2/11):
You would think that if the CIA's interrogation of high-value detainees was all it took, the U.S. government would have succeeded in locating bin Laden before 2006, which is when the CIA's custody of so-called "high-value detainees" ended.... This timeline doesn’t seem to provide a lot of support for the pro-torture narrative.
The blog Think Progress (5/3/11) noted that administration officials disputed the idea that critical information came from torture sessions:
This morning on MSNBC's Morning Joe [5/3/11], Obama's counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan confirmed that the information acquired over nine years did not come from waterboarding but was pieced together from multiple sources.
The New York Times (5/4/11), interviewing an array of intelligence sources, reported that "a closer look at prisoner interrogations suggests that the harsh techniques played a small role at most in identifying Bin Laden's trusted courier and exposing his hide-out."
Most importantly, the Times noted that "two prisoners who underwent some of the harshest treatment--including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times--repeatedly misled their interrogators about the courier’s identity. "
An Associated Press dispatch (5/2/11) reported that:
Mohammed did not reveal the names while being subjected to the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding, former officials said. He identified them many months later under standard interrogation, they said, leaving it once again up for debate as to whether the harsh technique was a valuable tool or an unnecessarily violent tactic.
This "up for debate" conclusion is strange, given that evidence would suggest that the pro-torture side of the "debate" has little to support their case. And such discussions serve to reaffirm a media narrative that tries to normalize torture by making it a debate that prioritizes outcomes--i.e, Does it work?--over legality and morality. (See Extra!, 1-2/02.)
Along those lines, CNN's Kiran Chetry (5/3/11) posed this question to former Bush national security adviser Condoleezza Rice:
Things like enhanced interrogation have fallen out of favor. This administration has said they were ending some of those controversial practices like waterboarding that were acceptable under the Bush administration. The other big thing is the so-called black sites, these CIA interrogation sites around the world. All of this met with huge criticism. As more trickles out about whether or not any of these strategies played a key role in eventually killing Osama bin Laden, do they have to rethink this administration?
Along with rethinking the Bush administration, there are many media voices suggesting we should be reevaluating the question of whether torture should be an accepted practice for the U.S. government. One can only hope the media treat the subject more carefully than they have in the past.
Media Advisory
Fair.org
5/4/11
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=4281
To hear some tell it, the intelligence clues that ultimately led to Osama bin Laden's hideout in Pakistan were generated by the use of torture. But the evidence available so far does not bear this out.
Torture advocates on the right are claiming vindication. On Fox News Channel's O'Reilly Factor (5/2/11), Rep. Peter King (R.-N.Y.) announced that:
we obtained information several years ago, vital information about the courier for Obama [sic]. We obtained that information through waterboarding. And so for those who say that waterboarding doesn't work, to say that it should be stopped and never used again-- we got vital information which directly led to us bin Laden.
This led O'Reilly to proclaim: "You're not going to hear that on the other networks. I guarantee you."
Actually, talk about how water torture may have revealed the identity of bin Laden's trusted courier could be heard widely. On the CBS Evening News (5/2/11), reporter David Martin said, "Some of the leads to that courier came out of the CIA's secret prison where those Al-Qaeda captives were waterboarded."
And ABC World News reporter Jonathan Karl tapped Dick Cheney for expertise (5/2/11):
KARL: One key, Cheney suggests: the CIA's enhanced interrogation program that Obama stopped because he said it included torture. An early tip leading to bin Laden's courier came from some of those interrogations.
CHENEY: All I know is what I've seen in the newspaper at this point, but it wouldn't be surprising if, in fact, that program produced results that ultimately contributed to the success of this venture.
The Los Angeles Times (5/2/11) reported:
Crucial information about the trusted courier who owned the compound came years ago from CIA interrogations of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohamed, the official said. This is significant, because the Al-Qaeda mastermind was subject to waterboarding and other brutal interrogation methods.
Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank noted (5/3/11) that Obama killed bin Laden "with an apparent assist from the Bush administration's interrogation program." And on NBC's Today show (5/3/11), Jim Miklasziewski reported:
U.S. officials tell NBC News that 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, while in CIA custody, provided key information regarding a courier close to bin Laden. Intelligence sometimes obtained through aggressive interrogation techniques like waterboarding.
But the details that are known so far do not support the argument that torture produced any of the key intelligence. As New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer wrote (NewYorker.com, 5/2/11):
You would think that if the CIA's interrogation of high-value detainees was all it took, the U.S. government would have succeeded in locating bin Laden before 2006, which is when the CIA's custody of so-called "high-value detainees" ended.... This timeline doesn’t seem to provide a lot of support for the pro-torture narrative.
The blog Think Progress (5/3/11) noted that administration officials disputed the idea that critical information came from torture sessions:
This morning on MSNBC's Morning Joe [5/3/11], Obama's counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan confirmed that the information acquired over nine years did not come from waterboarding but was pieced together from multiple sources.
The New York Times (5/4/11), interviewing an array of intelligence sources, reported that "a closer look at prisoner interrogations suggests that the harsh techniques played a small role at most in identifying Bin Laden's trusted courier and exposing his hide-out."
Most importantly, the Times noted that "two prisoners who underwent some of the harshest treatment--including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times--repeatedly misled their interrogators about the courier’s identity. "
An Associated Press dispatch (5/2/11) reported that:
Mohammed did not reveal the names while being subjected to the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding, former officials said. He identified them many months later under standard interrogation, they said, leaving it once again up for debate as to whether the harsh technique was a valuable tool or an unnecessarily violent tactic.
This "up for debate" conclusion is strange, given that evidence would suggest that the pro-torture side of the "debate" has little to support their case. And such discussions serve to reaffirm a media narrative that tries to normalize torture by making it a debate that prioritizes outcomes--i.e, Does it work?--over legality and morality. (See Extra!, 1-2/02.)
Along those lines, CNN's Kiran Chetry (5/3/11) posed this question to former Bush national security adviser Condoleezza Rice:
Things like enhanced interrogation have fallen out of favor. This administration has said they were ending some of those controversial practices like waterboarding that were acceptable under the Bush administration. The other big thing is the so-called black sites, these CIA interrogation sites around the world. All of this met with huge criticism. As more trickles out about whether or not any of these strategies played a key role in eventually killing Osama bin Laden, do they have to rethink this administration?
Along with rethinking the Bush administration, there are many media voices suggesting we should be reevaluating the question of whether torture should be an accepted practice for the U.S. government. One can only hope the media treat the subject more carefully than they have in the past.
The illogic of the torture debate
Glenn Greenwald
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/05/04/torture/index.html
The killing of Osama bin Laden has, as The New York Times notes, reignited the debate over "brutal interrogations" -- by which it's meant that Republicans are now attempting to exploit the emotions generated by the killing to retroactively justify the torture regime they implemented. The factual assertions on which this attempt is based -- that waterboarding and other "harsh interrogation methods" produced evidence crucial to locating bin Laden -- are dubious in the extreme, for reasons Andrew Sullivan and Marcy Wheeler document. So fictitious are these claims that even Donald Rumsfeld has repudiated them.
But even if it were the case that valuable information were obtained during or after the use of torture, what would it prove? Nobody has ever argued that brutality will never produce truthful answers. It is sometimes the case that if you torture someone long and mercilessly enough, they will tell you something you want to know. Nobody has ever denied that. In terms of the tactical aspect of the torture debate, the point has always been -- as a consensus of interrogations professionals has repeatedly said -- that there are far more effective ways to extract the truth from someone than by torturing it out of them. The fact that one can point to an instance where torture produced the desired answer proves nothing about whether there were more effective ways of obtaining it.
This highlights what has long been a glaring fallacy in many debates over War on Terror policies: that Information X was obtained after using Policy A does not prove that Policy A was necessary or effective. That's just basic logic. This fallacy asserted itself constantly in the debate over warrantless surveillance. Proponents of the Bush NSA program would point to some piece of intelligence allegedly obtained during warrantless eavesdropping as proof that the illegal program was necessary and effective; obviously, though, that fact said nothing about whether the same information would also have been discovered through legal eavesdropping, i.e., eavesdropping approved in advance by the FISA court (and indeed, legal eavesdropping [like legal interrogation tactics] is typically more effective than the illegal version because, by necessity, it is far more focused on actual suspected Terrorism plots; warrantless eavesdropping entails the unconstrained power to listen in on any communications the Government wants without having to establish its connection to Terrorism). But in all cases, the fact that some piece of intelligence was obtained by some lawless Bush/Cheney War on Terror policy (whether it be torture or warrantless eavesdropping) proves nothing about whether that policy was effective or necessary.
And those causal issues are, of course, entirely independent of the legal and moral questions shunted to the side by this reignited "debate." There are many actions that the U.S. could take that would advance its interests that are nonetheless obviously wrong on moral and legal grounds. When Donald Trump recently suggested that we should simply take Libya's oil and that of any other country which we successfully invade and occupy, that suggestion prompted widespread mockery. That was the reaction despite the fact that stealing other countries' oil would in fact produce substantial benefits for the U.S. and advance our interests: it would help to lower gas prices, reduce our dependence on hostile oil-producing nations, and avoid having to degrade our own environment in order to drill domestically. Trump's proposal is morally reprehensible and flagrantly lawless despite how many benefits it would produce; therefore, no person of even minimal decency would embrace it no matter how many benefits it produces.
Exactly the same is true for the torture techniques used by the Bush administration and once again being heralded by its followers (and implicitly glorified by media stars who keep suggesting that they enabled bin Laden's detection). It makes no difference whether it extracted usable intelligence. Criminal, morally depraved acts don't become retroactively justified by pointing to the bounty they produced.
*
It was striking to note in yesterday's New York Times the obituary of Moshe Landau, the Israeli judge who presided over the 1961 war crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann. It's a reminder that when even the most heinous Nazi war criminals were hunted down by the Israelis, they weren't shot in the head and then dumped into the ocean, but rather were apprehended, tried in a court of law, confronted with the evidence against them for all the world to see, and then punished in accordance with due process. The same was done to leading Nazis found by Allied powers and tried at Nuremberg. It's true that those trials took place after the war was over, but whether Al Qaeda should be treated as active warriors or mere criminals was once one of the few ostensible differences between the two parties on the question of Terrorism.
Speaking of which: I know that very few people have even a slight interest in the unexciting, party-pooping question of whether our glorious killing comported with legal principles, but for those who do, both The Guardian and Der Spiegel have good discussions of that issue.
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/05/04/torture/index.html
The killing of Osama bin Laden has, as The New York Times notes, reignited the debate over "brutal interrogations" -- by which it's meant that Republicans are now attempting to exploit the emotions generated by the killing to retroactively justify the torture regime they implemented. The factual assertions on which this attempt is based -- that waterboarding and other "harsh interrogation methods" produced evidence crucial to locating bin Laden -- are dubious in the extreme, for reasons Andrew Sullivan and Marcy Wheeler document. So fictitious are these claims that even Donald Rumsfeld has repudiated them.
But even if it were the case that valuable information were obtained during or after the use of torture, what would it prove? Nobody has ever argued that brutality will never produce truthful answers. It is sometimes the case that if you torture someone long and mercilessly enough, they will tell you something you want to know. Nobody has ever denied that. In terms of the tactical aspect of the torture debate, the point has always been -- as a consensus of interrogations professionals has repeatedly said -- that there are far more effective ways to extract the truth from someone than by torturing it out of them. The fact that one can point to an instance where torture produced the desired answer proves nothing about whether there were more effective ways of obtaining it.
This highlights what has long been a glaring fallacy in many debates over War on Terror policies: that Information X was obtained after using Policy A does not prove that Policy A was necessary or effective. That's just basic logic. This fallacy asserted itself constantly in the debate over warrantless surveillance. Proponents of the Bush NSA program would point to some piece of intelligence allegedly obtained during warrantless eavesdropping as proof that the illegal program was necessary and effective; obviously, though, that fact said nothing about whether the same information would also have been discovered through legal eavesdropping, i.e., eavesdropping approved in advance by the FISA court (and indeed, legal eavesdropping [like legal interrogation tactics] is typically more effective than the illegal version because, by necessity, it is far more focused on actual suspected Terrorism plots; warrantless eavesdropping entails the unconstrained power to listen in on any communications the Government wants without having to establish its connection to Terrorism). But in all cases, the fact that some piece of intelligence was obtained by some lawless Bush/Cheney War on Terror policy (whether it be torture or warrantless eavesdropping) proves nothing about whether that policy was effective or necessary.
And those causal issues are, of course, entirely independent of the legal and moral questions shunted to the side by this reignited "debate." There are many actions that the U.S. could take that would advance its interests that are nonetheless obviously wrong on moral and legal grounds. When Donald Trump recently suggested that we should simply take Libya's oil and that of any other country which we successfully invade and occupy, that suggestion prompted widespread mockery. That was the reaction despite the fact that stealing other countries' oil would in fact produce substantial benefits for the U.S. and advance our interests: it would help to lower gas prices, reduce our dependence on hostile oil-producing nations, and avoid having to degrade our own environment in order to drill domestically. Trump's proposal is morally reprehensible and flagrantly lawless despite how many benefits it would produce; therefore, no person of even minimal decency would embrace it no matter how many benefits it produces.
Exactly the same is true for the torture techniques used by the Bush administration and once again being heralded by its followers (and implicitly glorified by media stars who keep suggesting that they enabled bin Laden's detection). It makes no difference whether it extracted usable intelligence. Criminal, morally depraved acts don't become retroactively justified by pointing to the bounty they produced.
*
It was striking to note in yesterday's New York Times the obituary of Moshe Landau, the Israeli judge who presided over the 1961 war crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann. It's a reminder that when even the most heinous Nazi war criminals were hunted down by the Israelis, they weren't shot in the head and then dumped into the ocean, but rather were apprehended, tried in a court of law, confronted with the evidence against them for all the world to see, and then punished in accordance with due process. The same was done to leading Nazis found by Allied powers and tried at Nuremberg. It's true that those trials took place after the war was over, but whether Al Qaeda should be treated as active warriors or mere criminals was once one of the few ostensible differences between the two parties on the question of Terrorism.
Speaking of which: I know that very few people have even a slight interest in the unexciting, party-pooping question of whether our glorious killing comported with legal principles, but for those who do, both The Guardian and Der Spiegel have good discussions of that issue.
Bin Laden's Magic Carpet
Kenn Thomas
Steamshovel Press
SteamshovelPress.com
If they want to withhold those photos then they shouldn’t complain about conspiracy theories. The left-behind stealth helicopter is much more of a security breach than any photos of Bin laden would be.
But there's another secret tech issue: it was once rumored that the FBI turncoat Robert Hanssen indirectly sold bin Laden the PROMIS software, which of course figures prominently in The Octopus book. Why PROMIS failed him in this instance is a question. If it ever happened, if there ever was such a one.
The story is in the second edition of Octopus, but here's an old Mike Ruppert report about it:
Promis Software - Bin Laden's Magic Carpet
From Mike Ruppert
mruppert@copvcia.com
12-7-1
http://www.rense.com/general17/maf.htm
An October 16 FOX News report by correspondent Carl Cameron indicating that convicted spy, former FBI Agent Robert Hanssen, had provided a highly secret computer software program called Promis to Russian organized crime figures - who in turn reportedly sold it to Osama bin Laden - may signal a potential intelligence disaster for the United States. Admissions by the FBI and Justice in the FOX story that they have discontinued use of the software are most certainly a legal disaster for a government that has been engaged in a 16-year battle with the software's creator, William Hamilton, CEO of the Inslaw Corporation. Over those 16 years, in response to lawsuits filed by Hamilton charging that the government had stolen the software from Inslaw, the FBI, the CIA and the Department of Justice have denied, in court and under oath, ever using the software.
Bin Laden's reported possession of Promis software was clearly reported in a June 15, 2001 story by Washington Times reporter Jerry Seper. That story went unnoticed by the major media. In it Seper wrote, "The software delivered to the Russian handlers and later sent to bin Laden, according to sources, is believed to be an upgraded version of a program known as Promis - developed in the 1980s by a Washington firm, Inslaw, Inc., to give attorneys the ability to keep tabs on their caseloads. It would give bin Laden the ability to monitor U.S. efforts to track him down, federal law-enforcement officials say. It also gives him access to databases on specific targets of his choosing and the ability to monitor electronic-banking transactions, easing money-laundering operations for himself or others, according to sources."
In a series of excellent stories by The Times, and as confirmed by parts of the FOX broadcast, it appears that Hanssen, who was arrested in February, in order to escape the death penalty this summer, agreed to provide the FBI and other intelligence agencies with a full accounting of his sale of Promis overseas. Reports state that almost until the moment of his capture, Hanssen was charged with "repairing" and upgrading versions of the software used by Britain and Germany.
On October 17, two different spokespersons at the FBI's Office of Public Affairs told FTW, "The FBI has discontinued use of the Promis software." The spokespersons declined to give their names.
On October 24, Department of Justice spokesperson Loren Pfeifle declined to answer any questions about where, when or how Promis had been used and would say only, "I can only confirm that the DoJ has discontinued use of the program."
Inslaw had two limited contracts to provide Promis to Justice in 1982 and 1983. Neither application had anything to do with tracking terrorist activities. Hamilton's suits charged that Reagan Administration officials, including Edwin Meese, pirated the software, modified it for intelligence and financial uses and made millions by selling it to the governments of Israel, Canada, Great Britain, Germany and other friendly nations. After the installation of a CIA-created "back door" into the program, Israel, using its lifelong Mossad agent Robert Maxwell, reportedly sold the software to "unfriendly" nations and then secretly retrieved priceless intelligence data.
The statements of FBI and Justice sources in the FOX story on October 16 have made Hamilton's case. They also give but the barest hint of the security breaches that may now be helping the most wanted man in the world. Bin Laden's reported possession of Promis may also explain the alleged threatening messages that were received by President Bush while aboard Air Force One on September 11th.
A mild uproar erupted in the days after the WTC attacks when Presidential aide Carl Rove indicated that threatening calls had been placed to Air Force One just hours after the attacks while President Bush was onboard. Some journalists excoriated Rove for suggested that bin Laden might have a mole in the White House who could have given bin Laden the secure codes to reach the aircraft in flight.
Bin Laden's possession of Promis would provide a possible explanation. According to Hamilton, under the right circumstances, Promis could have enabled the threatening calls to be made. "I have no way of knowing whether any Promis-related base has dial-up access to Air Force One. But if that happens, and if you have Promis, it's a straightforward thing to do. But one would still need to have access to the targeting computer.
"There is a central locator system to track members of the National Command Authority 24/7. If that is a database created with Promis and if anyone had access you could do it."
Such a penetration using Promis might also explain why Vice President Dick Cheney was hurriedly whisked out of sight and reportedly taken to a secure underground facility, where he reportedly works to this day. Cheney's prolonged absences from the public eye would also be explained by such a breach of security.
Numerous news stories, books and investigative reports, including a September 2000 story in FTW (Vol. III, No.7), spanning nearly two decades, have established that Promis holds unique abilities to track terrorists. The software has also, according to numerous sources including Hamilton, been modified with artificial intelligence and developed in parallel for the world's banking systems to track money movements, stock trades and other financial dealings. Systematics - since purchased by Alltel - an Arkansas financial and technical firm headed by billionaire Jackson Stephens, has often been reported as the primary developer of Promis for financial intelligence use. Systematics through its various evolutions had been a primary supplier of software used in inter-bank and international money transfers for many years. Attorneys who have been connected to Systematics and Promis include Webster Hubbell, Hillary Clinton and the late Vince Foster.
If true, and if claims by the FBI and the Department of Justice that they have "recently" discontinued the use of Promis are accurate, the likelihood than bin Laden may have compromised the systems the U.S. government and its allies use to track him is high. Additional information in the FOX broadcast indicating that Britain stopped using the software just three months ago and that Germany stopped using the software just weeks ago are equally disturbing. These are mission-critical systems requiring years of development. What has replaced them? And even if the U.S. government has replaced the software given to its allies with newer programs - several of which FTW knows to be in existence - the FOX report clearly implies that bin Laden and Associates have had ample time to get highly secret intelligence data from both Britain and Germany. Those systems might, in turn, have compromised U.S. systems. The WTC attacks had - by all reckoning - been in the works for years, and bin Laden would certainly have known that the U.S. would be looking for him afterwards.
What is Promis and what does it do?
Promis stands for Prosecutor's Management Information System.
In the late 1970s the legal system of the United States Department of Justice (DoJ) was comprised of more than thirty semi-autonomous regional U.S. Attorneys (USA) offices. Each had a computer system to track case management for prosecutions, investigations, and civil litigations. The problem was that they used as many as seven different programming languages. This made the transmission and sharing of information between offices virtually impossible. The computers in the USA's office in San Francisco could not read files sent from the USA in New York.
The genius of Hamilton and Inslaw was to create a software program that could access files in any number of databases and programming languages and translate and then unify them into one consistent file. Promis was the Rosetta stone of computer languages.
Inslaw won a $10 million, three-year contract in March 1982 to install a 16-bit architecture version of Promis, which the government had the right to use but not the right to modify without paying license fees to Inslaw, on government computers in the 22 largest U.S. Attorneys' Offices. In April 1983, the second year of the three-year contract, the government modified Inslaw's contract in order to obtain delivery of a 32-bit architecture version of Promis, which the government could not even use without paying license fees. In modifying the contract, the government promised to pay license fees if it decided to substitute the 32-bit version for the 16-bit version. In May 1983, the month following Inslaw's delivery of the 32-bit version of Promis, the government reneged on its contractual agreement to pay license fees and simultaneously began to find fault with Inslaw's implementation services as justification for withholding services payments.
The Justice Department thereafter withheld $1.77 million in services payments forcing Inslaw to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in February 1985.
In January 1988, following several weeks of trial in 1987, the U.S. Bankruptcy Court issued fully litigated findings of fact that the Justice Department "took, converted, stole" the 32-bit version of Promis "through trickery, fraud and deceit," implemented the 32-bit version of Promis in the 44 largest U.S. Attorneys Offices, and then tried to force INSLAW out of business in order to incapacitate INSLAW from litigating the Justice Department's theft of Promis. The Bankruptcy Court imposed a compulsory license on the 44 largest U.S. Attorneys Offices for the perpetual use of the 32-bit version of Promis and issued a permanent injunction against any further dissemination of Promis by the government except under license from Inslaw.
Subsequent appeals by the government saw the original rulings overturned on legal, not factual, grounds. Legal actions in the case continue to this day. Hamilton told FTW that none of the uses described above had anything to do with any licensing agreements for the software's use to track terrorists, intelligence matters or worldwide financial transactions.
The paper tracking of the refinements in Promis after the legal dispute erupted between INSLAW and the Reagan administration, verifies that at least one version of Promis was given to Martin Marietta, now Lockheed-Martin, which is now the nation's second largest defense contractor. Until late 2000, Lynne Cheney, the wife of Vice President Dick Cheney sat on Lockheed's board of directors. Research conducted by many investigative journalists has indicated that Promis has spread widely throughout the defense contractor network. FTW has received multiple reports of Promis use by companies and institutions like DynCorp, Raytheon, Boeing, SAIC and the Harvard Endowment as well as by government agencies such as the Financial Criminal Enforcement Network (FINCEN) and the U.S. Treasury.
Here's how powerful the software is.
Approximately two weeks after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the History Channel aired a documentary entitled "The History of Terrorism." In that documentary, a law enforcement officer described some of the methods used to track terrorist movements. He stated that "computers" were able to track such things as credit card purchases, entry and exits visas, telephone and utility usage etc. It was implied that these diverse data base files could be integrated into one unified table. He gave an example that through the use of such a system it would be possible to determine that if a suspected terrorist entered the country and was going to hide out, that by monitoring the water and electrical consumption of all possible suspects in a given cell, it would be possible to determine where the terrorist was hiding out by seeing whose utility use increased.
Conversely, it would be possible to determine if a terrorist was on the move if his utility consumption declined or his local shopping patterns were interrupted. Aren't those "club" cards from your supermarket handy?
This is but the barest glimpse of what Promis can do. Mated with artificial intelligence it is capable of analyzing not only an individual's, but also a community's entire life, in real time. It is also capable of issuing warnings when irregularities appear and of predicting future movements based upon past behavior.
In the financial arena Promis is even more formidable. Not only is it capable of predicting movements in financial markets and tracking trades in real time. It has been reported, on a number of occasions, to have been used, via the "back door" to enter secret bank accounts, including accounts in Switzerland and then remove the money in those accounts without being traced. Court documents filed in the various INSLAW trials include documentation of this ability as well as affidavits and declarations from Israeli intelligence officers and assets.
The one essential weakness of Promis is that it must be physically installed on a targeted computer for it to be effective. Hence, if Osama bin Laden is able to penetrate a U.S. Government system it must mean that Promis is there.
FTW has previously reported that the CIA uses Promis to track stock trades in real time. Thus, as described in FTW stories on insider trading directly connected to the September 11 attacks, the Agency had the ability to determine that immediate impending attacks were planned against both American and United Air Lines. The Israeli Herzliyya Institute for Counterterrorism was able to publish a detailed accounting of the trades within days of the attacks and their report underscores the connection between counterterrorist efforts and the monitoring of financial markets. [See FTW Vol. IV, No 7 - Oct. 15, 2001] Suspicions of CIA advance knowledge of the attacks were heightened when FTW disclosed that the current Executive Director of the CIA, A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard was, until 1998, the CEO of A.B. Brown, the company which handled many of the suspicious trades.
All of these abilities were a given when this writer met with members of the RCMP National Security Investigation Section in the summer of 2000. Our meetings were reported in the Toronto Star and are described in the previously referenced issue of FTW. A key question that lingered after the meetings with the RCMP was how many versions of the software had the CIA and the U.S. government given out and might they not have been also using a back door against "friendly" nations for economic motives to give advantage to U.S. companies. It was not a question that the RCMP dismissed as unlikely.
FOX news reported that Osama bin Laden once boasted that his youth "knew the wrinkles of the world's financial markets like the back of their hands and that his money would never be frozen." He may be right. And an administration so lost in covering up criminal conduct - no less than the conduct of the ones which preceded it -- while trying to fight a war at the same time -- might find itself doubly wounded by the software of Bill Hamilton and Inslaw.
Steamshovel Press
SteamshovelPress.com
If they want to withhold those photos then they shouldn’t complain about conspiracy theories. The left-behind stealth helicopter is much more of a security breach than any photos of Bin laden would be.
But there's another secret tech issue: it was once rumored that the FBI turncoat Robert Hanssen indirectly sold bin Laden the PROMIS software, which of course figures prominently in The Octopus book. Why PROMIS failed him in this instance is a question. If it ever happened, if there ever was such a one.
The story is in the second edition of Octopus, but here's an old Mike Ruppert report about it:
Promis Software - Bin Laden's Magic Carpet
From Mike Ruppert
mruppert@copvcia.com
12-7-1
http://www.rense.com/general17/maf.htm
An October 16 FOX News report by correspondent Carl Cameron indicating that convicted spy, former FBI Agent Robert Hanssen, had provided a highly secret computer software program called Promis to Russian organized crime figures - who in turn reportedly sold it to Osama bin Laden - may signal a potential intelligence disaster for the United States. Admissions by the FBI and Justice in the FOX story that they have discontinued use of the software are most certainly a legal disaster for a government that has been engaged in a 16-year battle with the software's creator, William Hamilton, CEO of the Inslaw Corporation. Over those 16 years, in response to lawsuits filed by Hamilton charging that the government had stolen the software from Inslaw, the FBI, the CIA and the Department of Justice have denied, in court and under oath, ever using the software.
Bin Laden's reported possession of Promis software was clearly reported in a June 15, 2001 story by Washington Times reporter Jerry Seper. That story went unnoticed by the major media. In it Seper wrote, "The software delivered to the Russian handlers and later sent to bin Laden, according to sources, is believed to be an upgraded version of a program known as Promis - developed in the 1980s by a Washington firm, Inslaw, Inc., to give attorneys the ability to keep tabs on their caseloads. It would give bin Laden the ability to monitor U.S. efforts to track him down, federal law-enforcement officials say. It also gives him access to databases on specific targets of his choosing and the ability to monitor electronic-banking transactions, easing money-laundering operations for himself or others, according to sources."
In a series of excellent stories by The Times, and as confirmed by parts of the FOX broadcast, it appears that Hanssen, who was arrested in February, in order to escape the death penalty this summer, agreed to provide the FBI and other intelligence agencies with a full accounting of his sale of Promis overseas. Reports state that almost until the moment of his capture, Hanssen was charged with "repairing" and upgrading versions of the software used by Britain and Germany.
On October 17, two different spokespersons at the FBI's Office of Public Affairs told FTW, "The FBI has discontinued use of the Promis software." The spokespersons declined to give their names.
On October 24, Department of Justice spokesperson Loren Pfeifle declined to answer any questions about where, when or how Promis had been used and would say only, "I can only confirm that the DoJ has discontinued use of the program."
Inslaw had two limited contracts to provide Promis to Justice in 1982 and 1983. Neither application had anything to do with tracking terrorist activities. Hamilton's suits charged that Reagan Administration officials, including Edwin Meese, pirated the software, modified it for intelligence and financial uses and made millions by selling it to the governments of Israel, Canada, Great Britain, Germany and other friendly nations. After the installation of a CIA-created "back door" into the program, Israel, using its lifelong Mossad agent Robert Maxwell, reportedly sold the software to "unfriendly" nations and then secretly retrieved priceless intelligence data.
The statements of FBI and Justice sources in the FOX story on October 16 have made Hamilton's case. They also give but the barest hint of the security breaches that may now be helping the most wanted man in the world. Bin Laden's reported possession of Promis may also explain the alleged threatening messages that were received by President Bush while aboard Air Force One on September 11th.
A mild uproar erupted in the days after the WTC attacks when Presidential aide Carl Rove indicated that threatening calls had been placed to Air Force One just hours after the attacks while President Bush was onboard. Some journalists excoriated Rove for suggested that bin Laden might have a mole in the White House who could have given bin Laden the secure codes to reach the aircraft in flight.
Bin Laden's possession of Promis would provide a possible explanation. According to Hamilton, under the right circumstances, Promis could have enabled the threatening calls to be made. "I have no way of knowing whether any Promis-related base has dial-up access to Air Force One. But if that happens, and if you have Promis, it's a straightforward thing to do. But one would still need to have access to the targeting computer.
"There is a central locator system to track members of the National Command Authority 24/7. If that is a database created with Promis and if anyone had access you could do it."
Such a penetration using Promis might also explain why Vice President Dick Cheney was hurriedly whisked out of sight and reportedly taken to a secure underground facility, where he reportedly works to this day. Cheney's prolonged absences from the public eye would also be explained by such a breach of security.
Numerous news stories, books and investigative reports, including a September 2000 story in FTW (Vol. III, No.7), spanning nearly two decades, have established that Promis holds unique abilities to track terrorists. The software has also, according to numerous sources including Hamilton, been modified with artificial intelligence and developed in parallel for the world's banking systems to track money movements, stock trades and other financial dealings. Systematics - since purchased by Alltel - an Arkansas financial and technical firm headed by billionaire Jackson Stephens, has often been reported as the primary developer of Promis for financial intelligence use. Systematics through its various evolutions had been a primary supplier of software used in inter-bank and international money transfers for many years. Attorneys who have been connected to Systematics and Promis include Webster Hubbell, Hillary Clinton and the late Vince Foster.
If true, and if claims by the FBI and the Department of Justice that they have "recently" discontinued the use of Promis are accurate, the likelihood than bin Laden may have compromised the systems the U.S. government and its allies use to track him is high. Additional information in the FOX broadcast indicating that Britain stopped using the software just three months ago and that Germany stopped using the software just weeks ago are equally disturbing. These are mission-critical systems requiring years of development. What has replaced them? And even if the U.S. government has replaced the software given to its allies with newer programs - several of which FTW knows to be in existence - the FOX report clearly implies that bin Laden and Associates have had ample time to get highly secret intelligence data from both Britain and Germany. Those systems might, in turn, have compromised U.S. systems. The WTC attacks had - by all reckoning - been in the works for years, and bin Laden would certainly have known that the U.S. would be looking for him afterwards.
What is Promis and what does it do?
Promis stands for Prosecutor's Management Information System.
In the late 1970s the legal system of the United States Department of Justice (DoJ) was comprised of more than thirty semi-autonomous regional U.S. Attorneys (USA) offices. Each had a computer system to track case management for prosecutions, investigations, and civil litigations. The problem was that they used as many as seven different programming languages. This made the transmission and sharing of information between offices virtually impossible. The computers in the USA's office in San Francisco could not read files sent from the USA in New York.
The genius of Hamilton and Inslaw was to create a software program that could access files in any number of databases and programming languages and translate and then unify them into one consistent file. Promis was the Rosetta stone of computer languages.
Inslaw won a $10 million, three-year contract in March 1982 to install a 16-bit architecture version of Promis, which the government had the right to use but not the right to modify without paying license fees to Inslaw, on government computers in the 22 largest U.S. Attorneys' Offices. In April 1983, the second year of the three-year contract, the government modified Inslaw's contract in order to obtain delivery of a 32-bit architecture version of Promis, which the government could not even use without paying license fees. In modifying the contract, the government promised to pay license fees if it decided to substitute the 32-bit version for the 16-bit version. In May 1983, the month following Inslaw's delivery of the 32-bit version of Promis, the government reneged on its contractual agreement to pay license fees and simultaneously began to find fault with Inslaw's implementation services as justification for withholding services payments.
The Justice Department thereafter withheld $1.77 million in services payments forcing Inslaw to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in February 1985.
In January 1988, following several weeks of trial in 1987, the U.S. Bankruptcy Court issued fully litigated findings of fact that the Justice Department "took, converted, stole" the 32-bit version of Promis "through trickery, fraud and deceit," implemented the 32-bit version of Promis in the 44 largest U.S. Attorneys Offices, and then tried to force INSLAW out of business in order to incapacitate INSLAW from litigating the Justice Department's theft of Promis. The Bankruptcy Court imposed a compulsory license on the 44 largest U.S. Attorneys Offices for the perpetual use of the 32-bit version of Promis and issued a permanent injunction against any further dissemination of Promis by the government except under license from Inslaw.
Subsequent appeals by the government saw the original rulings overturned on legal, not factual, grounds. Legal actions in the case continue to this day. Hamilton told FTW that none of the uses described above had anything to do with any licensing agreements for the software's use to track terrorists, intelligence matters or worldwide financial transactions.
The paper tracking of the refinements in Promis after the legal dispute erupted between INSLAW and the Reagan administration, verifies that at least one version of Promis was given to Martin Marietta, now Lockheed-Martin, which is now the nation's second largest defense contractor. Until late 2000, Lynne Cheney, the wife of Vice President Dick Cheney sat on Lockheed's board of directors. Research conducted by many investigative journalists has indicated that Promis has spread widely throughout the defense contractor network. FTW has received multiple reports of Promis use by companies and institutions like DynCorp, Raytheon, Boeing, SAIC and the Harvard Endowment as well as by government agencies such as the Financial Criminal Enforcement Network (FINCEN) and the U.S. Treasury.
Here's how powerful the software is.
Approximately two weeks after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the History Channel aired a documentary entitled "The History of Terrorism." In that documentary, a law enforcement officer described some of the methods used to track terrorist movements. He stated that "computers" were able to track such things as credit card purchases, entry and exits visas, telephone and utility usage etc. It was implied that these diverse data base files could be integrated into one unified table. He gave an example that through the use of such a system it would be possible to determine that if a suspected terrorist entered the country and was going to hide out, that by monitoring the water and electrical consumption of all possible suspects in a given cell, it would be possible to determine where the terrorist was hiding out by seeing whose utility use increased.
Conversely, it would be possible to determine if a terrorist was on the move if his utility consumption declined or his local shopping patterns were interrupted. Aren't those "club" cards from your supermarket handy?
This is but the barest glimpse of what Promis can do. Mated with artificial intelligence it is capable of analyzing not only an individual's, but also a community's entire life, in real time. It is also capable of issuing warnings when irregularities appear and of predicting future movements based upon past behavior.
In the financial arena Promis is even more formidable. Not only is it capable of predicting movements in financial markets and tracking trades in real time. It has been reported, on a number of occasions, to have been used, via the "back door" to enter secret bank accounts, including accounts in Switzerland and then remove the money in those accounts without being traced. Court documents filed in the various INSLAW trials include documentation of this ability as well as affidavits and declarations from Israeli intelligence officers and assets.
The one essential weakness of Promis is that it must be physically installed on a targeted computer for it to be effective. Hence, if Osama bin Laden is able to penetrate a U.S. Government system it must mean that Promis is there.
FTW has previously reported that the CIA uses Promis to track stock trades in real time. Thus, as described in FTW stories on insider trading directly connected to the September 11 attacks, the Agency had the ability to determine that immediate impending attacks were planned against both American and United Air Lines. The Israeli Herzliyya Institute for Counterterrorism was able to publish a detailed accounting of the trades within days of the attacks and their report underscores the connection between counterterrorist efforts and the monitoring of financial markets. [See FTW Vol. IV, No 7 - Oct. 15, 2001] Suspicions of CIA advance knowledge of the attacks were heightened when FTW disclosed that the current Executive Director of the CIA, A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard was, until 1998, the CEO of A.B. Brown, the company which handled many of the suspicious trades.
All of these abilities were a given when this writer met with members of the RCMP National Security Investigation Section in the summer of 2000. Our meetings were reported in the Toronto Star and are described in the previously referenced issue of FTW. A key question that lingered after the meetings with the RCMP was how many versions of the software had the CIA and the U.S. government given out and might they not have been also using a back door against "friendly" nations for economic motives to give advantage to U.S. companies. It was not a question that the RCMP dismissed as unlikely.
FOX news reported that Osama bin Laden once boasted that his youth "knew the wrinkles of the world's financial markets like the back of their hands and that his money would never be frozen." He may be right. And an administration so lost in covering up criminal conduct - no less than the conduct of the ones which preceded it -- while trying to fight a war at the same time -- might find itself doubly wounded by the software of Bill Hamilton and Inslaw.
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