Raveena Hansa

A great deal of new evidence concerning the 26 November 2008 terrorist attacks in Bombay has emerged over the past year. This includes the book Who Killed Karkare: The Real Face of Terrorism in India by S.M.Mushrif, a former police officer with a distinguished record, who uses news reports during and just after the attacks to question the official story; the book To the Last Bullet by Vinita Kamte (the widow of Ashok Kamte) and Vinita Deshmukh; revelations concerning Hemant Karkare's bullet-proof jacket and post-mortem report; the David Coleman Headley trial; and the trial of Ajmal Kasab, Fahim Ansari and Sabauddin Shaikh. I do not include the Ram Pradhan Commission report on police responses to the attack, for reasons I will explain.

The Headley Affair

The Headley affair has, predictably, grabbed a great deal of publicity. The fact that the FBI had been investigating the involvement of this American in conducting reconnaisance for the 26/11 attacks seems to have come as a revelation to the Indian investigators, who had a chance to apprehend him but instead chose to detain two Indian Muslims, Fahim Ansari and Sabauddin Shaikh, for preparing maps of 26/11 targets.

It has been established that Headley was an agent of the US Drug Enforcement Administration, and his plea bargain leads us to conclude he was also a US intelligence agent: in other words, a spy. It is also known he was involved with the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), and supplied information to them about targets attacked on 26/11. There are three possible explanations that would fit these facts:

1) He started off as a US intelligence agent, but was won over by the LeT, and was acting on their behalf.

2) The US intelligence agency employing him was complicit in the 26/11 attacks. Since the most likely fallout of such attacks would be increased tension and even armed clashes on the Pakistan-India border, and since it appears to be a priority of US foreign policy to reduce such tension, this would suggest that Headley was being handled by a rogue element in US intelligence.

3) The third possibility is that he remained loyal to the US agency, which in turn was following US policy. His brief, unknown to the FBI, was to infiltrate the LeT, find out their plans, and report to the US agency so that those plans could be foiled. In order to infiltrate the LeT, he had to win their trust by participating in their activities, including preparations for their Bombay attacks, and while he was doing so, the FBI got on his trail. He did, in fact, pass on intelligence of the planned 26/11 attacks to his US handlers, who in turn passed it on to Indian intelligence.

More »

NewWeapons Committee

Toxic and carcinogenic metals, able to produce genetic mutations, have been found in the tissues of people wounded in Gaza during Israeli military operations of 2006 and 2009. The research has been carried out on wounds provoked by weapons that did not leave fragments in the bodies of the victims, a peculiarity that was pointed out repeatedly by doctors in Gaza. This shows that experimental weapons, whose effects are still to be assessed, were used.

The researchers compared the quantity of 32 elements present in the tissues through ICP/MS (a type of highly sensitive mass spectrometry) . The job, carried out by laboratories of Sapienza University of Rome (Italy), Chalmer University (Sweden) and Beirut University (Lebanon), was coordinated by the New Weapons Research Group (Nwrg), an independent committee of scientists and experts based in Italy, who is studying the use of unconventional weapons and their mid-term effects on the population of after-war areas. The relevant presence of toxic and carcinogenic metals found in the wound tissues points to direct risks for survivors, but also to the possibility of environmental contamination.

More »

Stephen Lendman

Ameer Makhoul is an Israeli citizen, human rights activist, and head of the internationally recognized Ittijah NGO, engaged in "strengthen(ing) and empower(ing) the Palestinian people within the Green Line (1.5 million Israeli citizens by) promoting the development of Palestinian civil society and advocating for political change, economic and social development."

He's also chair of the Public Committee for the Defence of Political Freedom within the Arab Higher Monitoring Committee in Israel.

On May 10, Haaretz writers Jack Khoury, Amos Harel and Asshel Pfeffer headlined, "Two Israeli Arabs arrested on suspicion of spying, contact with Hezbollah," saying:

"Reports of the arrests circulated widely on unofficial websites and blogs, but government censors had banned the Israeli press from reporting them until the gag order was lifted late Sunday night," May 9.

Makhoul's brother, Assam, a former Hadash MK, "said the family had no details of the investigation but they suspected authorities had singled out the activist because of his campaigns against the government's 'racist and discriminatory policies' against Israeli Arabs."

He's well known as a regular participant in conferences on the topic and for actively criticizing government policies.

Hussein Abu Hasin, a lawyer familiar with these type cases, told Haaretz that Israeli espionage charges are so vague and wide-ranging that incidental Internet chats or phone conversations with anyone about anything might be used as a pretext to prosecute for communicating with someone in an "enemy state." Hasin called these laws "draconian," and in the case of Makhoul:

"sparked outrage among Arab organizations and rights groups, who claim that (he and other activists are) disappeared from their homes in the middle of the night. (The) courts (are also) at the beck and call of security services, who often bar suspects from visits with lawyers or from obtaining legal counsel."

More »

Jeff Gates
Criminal State

Who was surprised to find Pakistan associated with a “significant terrorist event” in New York? Was anyone surprised that this “car bomb” incident occurred in the same city as the last significant event? Or that news reports promptly featured the Taliban of Pakistan?

Who labeled it a significant terrorist event? A “security analyst” with IntelCenter. Visit the site and remember the old adage: Best Story Wins.

Was this a genuine terrorist event? Or was this an agent provocateur operation meant to freshen up a stale storyline: the Global War on Terrorism?

Remember the “Christmas Day Bomber”? Were you surprised to find that “significant terrorist event” was an Israeli operation? Or have you not yet realized its source? See Christmas Day Crotch Bomber Tied to Israel, FBI

Was anyone surprised at the post-event surge in the market value of firms that produce body-scanning equipment? Or that Israel is an industry leader?

Who was surprised to learn that the industry is represented by the law firm of former Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff?

If none of this surprises you, read no further because you already have a grip on reality.

For everyone else, please reflect on the seductive fictions that induced us to invade Iraq. And recall the central role played by mainstream media in that successful deceit.

Facts are only valued by those who value a system of law based on facts.

Yet many of us were seduced to become True Believers in what we now know was phony intelligence that took us to war—based on that phony intelligence.

More »

Christopher King

A bus packed with explosives detonated outside a busy
restaurant near a Baquba court. Most of the 40 dead were
women and children and many of the bodies were too
badly burned to be identified. (BBC)

Are the bombers Al-Qaeda, the CIA or Israel?

Christopher King argues that it is likely that the American CIA – or Israel acting on its behalf – is responsible for recent atrocities in Iraq, in order to extend and consolidate the occupation, just as it is probable that the Times Square bomber was, wittingly or otherwise, acting for the CIA or Israel, to justify the US military intervention in South Asia.

On 10 May there were more than two dozen bombings and shootings in Iraq that killed at least 85 people and injured at least 300.These were coordinated attacks, clearly by the same organization.

The American response to this and other recent attacks is to delay plans for withdrawal of troops from Iraq. Obama’s election promise was to withdraw troops from Iraq by May this year. Not only is that obviously not going to happen but we learned after his election that “withdrawal” meant leaving 50,000 troops as ‘trainers’ as well as 4,500 special forces and tens of thousands of para-military contractors.

Now, the US is reviewing even the slipped drawdown schedule out of concern for the security of the Iraqi people. Considering the million killed by the US and the four to five million refugees created by them I would not have thought that they would be bothered by fewer than one hundred dead in a little internal trouble. It might be said to be an improvement on US outcomes.

As these attacks are providing the US with an excuse for delaying even its token withdrawal however, we need to think about who is behind them.

More »

Chris Floyd

The fact that the Obama Administration is operating a secret prison in Afghanistan in which captives rounded up on the usual little or no evidence are being tortured even as we speak -- and even as the president was making his funny-haha jokes about predator drones -- does not come as any surprise. The horror of this reality is by now so routine that it almost defies comment. Or as Arthur Silber puts it in a powerful new essay:

The concept of "depravity" has been rendered close to meaningless. When so much of what happens every day, here and abroad, is so unfathomably depraved, what does it signify to state that another 40 murders of innocent human beings represent still one more monstrous act, or that the torture of another dozen or three dozen or a hundred innocent human beings is unforgivably evil, or that the rape of another 10 or 30 or 50 girls and women constitutes a crime so immense in its magnitude that it makes all commentary completely beside the point, and even itself obscene?

None of it is fully real. Most of it is never even noticed. None of it appears to matter, not in ways which cause a critical number of people to resist in ways which might momentarily slow down the machinery of cruelty and death.

So today I am not going to go through blood-soaked chapter and shit-smeared verse on this latest continuous atrocity, nor dissect the howling, puke-evoking hypocrisy of the Comedian-in-Chief of the War Machine. Instead, I just want to note one comment I ran across in reading about the story. It's from a leading progressive voice, Digby, who does, to her credit, go through chapter-and-verse on the gulag hell-hole.

More »

Pepe Escobar

"All the same, a steady, relentless drip of leaks has built an official narrative of Shahzad linked to the TTP, meeting its leaders, training in Waziristan - and even being coached by US-born imam Anwar al-Awlaki, now hiding in Yemen, who conveniently had just become an assassination target for the Obama administration. Evidence? Nothing concrete."

Intricate shadowplay surrounds the (failed) smoking sports utility vehicle Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad. Earlier in 2010, the Central Intelligence Agency warned al-Qaeda might try an attack inside the US "within the next six months". It did happen - like clockwork - with the added bonus that the alleged perpetrators are even more convenient than al-Qaeda.

United States Attorney General Eric Holder is now sure "the Pakistani Taliban was behind the attack. We know that they helped facilitate it. We know that they probably helped finance it and that he [Shahzad] was working at their direction". President Barack Obama's homeland security and counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan basically said the same thing.

More »

Paul Driessen

CFACT's Driessen: "Senators have some explaining to do"

The new Kerry-Lieberman climate bill mandates a 17% reduction in US carbon dioxide emissions by 2020. It first targets power plants that provide reliable, affordable electricity for American homes, schools, hospitals, offices and factories. Six years later, it further hobbles the manufacturing sector itself.

Like the House-passed climate bill, Kerry-Lieberman also requires an 83% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2050. Once population growth and transportation, communication and electrification technologies are taken into account, this translates into requiring US emission levels last seen around 1870!

House Speaker Pelosi says “every aspect of our lives must be subjected to an inventory,” to ensure that America achieves these emission mandates. This means replacing what is left of our free-market economy with an intrusive Green Nanny State, compelling us to switch to unreliable wind and solar power, and imposing skyrocketing energy costs on every company and citizen.

Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency is implementing its own draconian energy restrictions, in case Congress does not enact punitive legislation.

It’s time to ask these politicians some fundamental questions.

More »

Stephen Lendman

Caged queue - a Palestinian's lifeline to work (SMH)

On April 23, Arizona's racist immigration bill became law. Called "Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhood Act," it requires proof of legal entry or citizenship or face arrest, fines, jailing, and/or deportation.

Under South African apartheid, pass laws segregated blacks from whites, restricted their movements, required pass books be carried at all times, and produced on demand or face arrest and prosecution. Evolving from the 18th and 19th century until their 1986 repeal, they restricted entry to cities, forcibly relocated blacks, denied them most public amenities and many forms of employment, and became apartheid's most hated symbol.

Under Israeli military occupation, repression is worse than South Africa's. It's a sophisticated form of social, economic, political and racial discrimination, strangulation, and genocide, incorporating the worst elements of colonialism and apartheid as well as repressive dispossession, displacement and state terrorism to separate Palestinians from their land and heritage, deny them their rightful civil and human rights, and gradually remove or eliminate them altogether.

Apartheid is the worst form of racism. Israeli militarized occupation is the worst form of apartheid, incorporating violence, military incursions, land theft, home demolitions, targeted assassinations, murder, mass arrests, torture, destruction of agricultural land, and isolation - measures amounting to genocide, including starving Gazans under siege.

The ID/permit system is one of many elements designed to make greater Israel an ethnically pure Jewish state.

More »

Tim King

Tim King, Executive News Editor of the US website Salem-News.com, vows to continue highlighting the plight of the Palestinian people and the brutality of their Israeli oppressors, following a relentless attack and false accusations of “anti-Semitism” by a pro-Israel bigot.

"False accusations of anti-Semitism are easily dismissed by those who know us; for those who don't, the only thing we're guilty of is honest reporting on a very hard topic." ~ Tim King

People who are dialled into the news know that Israel struck the people of Gaza during the winter of 2008-09 in an unprecedented military attack called "Operation Cast Lead" that killed more than 1,400 people, primarily civilians, including over 340 children.

Salem-News.com has been under attack in recent days in every imaginable public setting because we tell the truth about Israel's military tactics and oppression of the Palestinians.

The person attacking us claims that photos shown of Palestinian children killed in Gaza are "forged", even though there are more published online than anyone could count.

We have said it a thousand times and I will say again now, that we engage this subject for the sake of humanity. We do not believe that any group has the right to subjugate, imprison or eliminate another group of people. We are accused of something that is utterly false; we are accused of being anti-Semitic, when the only thing we do is report from the perspective of the oppressed, unarmed, poverty stricken, hungry and tired people of Gaza. We care because these people are under fire.

More »

Kelley B. Vlahos

"The Best Years of Our Lives"

There is a scene in the 1946 classic The Best Years of Our Lives when Homer Parrish, played by real World War II veteran Harold Russell, shows his girl what it is like to dress himself for bed with the rudimentary metal hooks that have replaced his left and right hands in the war.

“I want you to come upstairs and see what happens,” he says, daring Wilma to bear witness to his shame, and what could be her own tragic burden if she chooses to stay with him. The girl next door comes through this test with such grace and understanding that the audience breathes a collective sigh of relief – Homer, the former All-American high school athlete, now with two hooks for hands and meager prospects, will have this angel for a wife. All is good in the world.

I have always had mixed feelings about this film, which was directed lovingly by William Wyler, a director of renown who also survived World War II as a major in the U.S. Army Air Forces. There is a maturity and realism, albeit soft and sometimes fleeting, about this character study, which explores the repercussions of quickie pre-deployment marriages, divorce, depression, alcoholism, unemployment, disability, and ordinary civilian readjustment. Fred Derry, played by a straight-on Dana Andrews as the former Air Force “glamour boy,” finds himself at one point in the aircraft graveyard with a flashback coming on. He is headed for those graves, a dusty, banged-up hull of a man – until someone, another vet, gives him a job, and he gets a second chance at living the American dream circa 1946.

More »

Juan Cole

Pakistani authorities doing the hard police work in Karachi of attempting to trace the network of friends and contacts of attempted Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad have come up empty-handed. There is nothing in Shahzad’s background that links him to the Tehrik-i Taliban Pakistan (TTP or Taliban Movement of Pakistan), based in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). Pakistani police found one person in Shahzad’s circle, a relative of his wife’s, who in turn had ties to a fundamentalist group. Muhammad Rehan is a “not very active” member of the radical organization, Jaish-i Muhammadi. He and Shahzad traveled last year to the Pashtun northwest, though this trip is unremarkable because their family is Pashtuns and they are from that region. Rumors that Rehan had been arrested or that he had long lived near the radical mosque turn out not to be true, according to the Pakistani periodical, “The Nation”.

Pakistani police are unable to find any link between Rehan and the Pakistani Taliban, and can’t even find evidence of active membership in the Jaish-i Muhammad. Nor is there evidence that he introduced Shahzad to the Pakistani Taliban. Shahzad is apparently a braggart (ego inflation and delusions of grandeur are typical of terrorists) and his claim that he received training in a Taliban camp is not believable given that he had not the slightest idea how to construct a simple truck bomb. If there is one thing the Pakistani Taliban are good at, as guest op-ed contributor Stephan Salisbury noted here on Monday, it is blowing up things. In fact, the results of the intensive Pakistani investigation vindicate Salisbury’s skepticism about claims made by civilian US officials concerning this case. Informed Pakistani writer Rahim Yusufzai exhibits the same skepticism.

More »

Stephen Lendman

At the BP oil leak Senate hearings, oil company executives
pointed fingers at each other. The gulf oil spill totals more
than 4 million gallons and counting. Flickr photo.

On April 22, AP reported the news - an initial April 20 explosion, then a larger one igniting Deepwater Horizon's oil drilling platform that burned for more than a day before sinking and releasing thousands of barrels of oil daily into surrounding waters, enough potentially to cause the greatest ever environmental disaster if not sealed in time to prevent.

Transocean Ltd. owned and operated the Deepwater Horizon platform under contract to BP Exploration and Production Inc., a division of BP - 4th on Fortune Global 500 with $239 billion in 2009 operating revenue and $14 billion in profits. It ranked fourth behind Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil and Wal-Mart. Of the world's 10 largest companies, six are oil giants. Transocean, an offshore drilling contractor, owns operates about 140 drilling rigs. More on its culpability below.

More »

Jeff Schmidt / Stephen Lendman

Canadian Professor Denis Rancourt

Challenging Canadian Civil Liberties Association Members for Opposing Academic and Expression Freedoms at the University of Ottawa - by Jeff Schmidt

Denis Rancourt is a distinguished, tenured Professor of Physics, a recognized expert in his field, and an Environmental Science Researcher at the University of Ottawa, Canada.

Yet because of his activist position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he was unfairly fired and barred from campus on threat of arrest - a violation of his tenure, academic freedom, and beliefs about human rights and equal justice.

Author Jeff Schmidt wrote the following article and letter, calling on Canadian Civil Liberties Association board members to repudiate their organization's attack on a man to be honored, not vilified or abused.

Stephen Lendman

More »

Matt Taibbi

"The Obama administration said Sunday it would seek a law allowing investigators to interrogate terrorism suspects without informing them of their rights, as Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. flatly asserted that the defendant in the Times Square bombing attempt was trained by the Taliban in Pakistan." ~ via Attorney General Backs Miranda Limit for Terror Suspects – NYTimes.com.

Memo to those Tea Party activists out there who’ve been howling about those liberal wusses in the Obama Justice Department who read Faisal Shahzad his Miranda rights: congratulations. You’ve just opened the door for a major new expansion of government power.

Having followed the Tea Party around on and off for a few months now it’s been hard not to notice some of the contradictory messages emanating from the movement. You’ll hear the same people who want to abolish the EPA complaining about the slow federal response to the Gulf oil spill, or the same people who are stocking up on guns to ward off the inevitable government assault on their property cheering for beefed-up drug enforcement laws and the no-knock search warrant.

More »

Stephen Lendman

On May 8, Haaretz Service and Reuters headlined, "PLO executive committee approves new peace talks with Israel," saying:

"The Palestinian Authority on Saturday got the green light to restart peace talks with Israel after the PLO's executive voted to approve indirect negotiations," excluding Hamas - the legitimate government after Palestinians overwhelmingly elected them in January 2006. Instead, coup d'etat leader (whose presidential term expired in January 2009) Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will participate, PLO spokesperson Yasser Abed Rabbo saying that "negotiations will take one form: shuttling between President Abu Mazen (Abbas) and the Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu." Talks have now begun.

Obama's Middle East special envoy, former Senator and Walt Disney chairman, George Mitchell will do the honors, trying to force Palestinian negotiators to accede to Israeli demands and declare success, until inevitable new violence forces a restart of the whole process at some future time. The charade continues.

Recurrent negotiations have gone on for decades, always with the same result. Rita Mae Brown (in her book "Sudden Death"), and some say Albert Einstein, called it insanity, or the practice of "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." In this case, results are what Israel predetermines, Palestinians having no say whatever about a process designed to fail.

For a detailed analysis, see this writer's article titled, "Peace Process Hypocrisy: Stillborn from Inception."

More »

Chris Floyd

The found poetry of state terror continues its strange mutilations of the English language. The bizarre verbal heavings of Donald Rumsfeld, for example, are rightly celebrated as choice examples of the genre. And noted English playwright David Hare once fashioned a whole play built largely on the "thought-tormented music" wrought from verbatim transcripts of the principal authors of the war crime in Iraq.

In this regard, as in almost every aspect of the Terror War, "continuity" has been the hallmark of the Obama Administration. But we would do the progressive, forward-looking president a grave disservice if we were to imply that this dynamic, historic figure has confined himself to mere continuity. No, in field after field of governmental endeavor, Barack Obama has striven mightily not just to uphold the many authoritarian and militarist innovations of the Bush Administration, but to expand them -- increasing their scope and depth, codifying, normalizing and making permanent many practices which his predecessors had enshrouded with ambiguity, deception and deliberate murk. Bush and Cheney were afflicted with a vestigial embarrassment at the howling illegality and constitutional subversion of many of their Terror War policies, and seemed to fear these acts would provoke some kind of public outcry or political controversy -- or even prosecution -- should they be made too explicit.

More »

Michael Hudson

Riddle: How are the Greek rioters like America’s Tea Party movement?
Answer: Both reject government being taken over by the financial oligarchy to shift the tax burden onto labor.

The difference is that the Tea Partiers have lost faith in government. This is just what the financial oligarchy wants, of course. Giving up hope of gaining electoral control to pursue a fair fiscal agenda, the Tea Partiers have abandoned the centuries-long fight for reform to make governments better by giving them the power to check predatory finance and wealth. Sliding to the right wing of the political spectrum and acting mainly out of frustration, they have succumbed to a utopian desire simply to shrink a government that they see acting adversely to their interests.

Financial lobbyists are using the Greek crisis as an object lesson to warn about the need to cut back public spending on Social Security and Medicare. This is the opposite of what the Greek demonstrators are demanding: to reverse the global tax shift off property and finance onto labor, and to give labor’s financial claims for retirement pensions priority over claims by the banks to get fully paid on hundreds of billions of dollars of recklessly bad loans recently reduced to junk status.

Bank lobbyists know that the financial game is over. They are playing for the short run. The financial sector’s aim is to take as much bailout money as it can and run, with large enough annual bonuses to lord it over the rest of society after the Clean Slate finally arrives. Less public spending on social programs will leave more bailout money to pay the banks for their exponentially rising bad debts that cannot possibly be paid in the end. It is inevitable that loans and bonds will default in the usual convulsion of bankruptcy.

More »

Lia Tarachansky

I’m too distracted to fall asleep. Everyone is quietly snoring. The sun rises ever so slowly and the wings of the plane rudely cut through the calmness of the clouds. It’s hard to believe that the intensity of the sun repeats itself with this beauty every day. That it’s not for this special day that led me to be on this flight, on my way to Barcelona. I guess my mind makes it negligible just to maintain every-day continuity. Can’t comprehend all of chaos theory at once.

So how did I get on this flight? Around 9 p.m. last night I found out that The Real News got an in-kind donation to send me to Barcelona to cover the Russell Tribunal on Palestine. By midnight I was packed up and by 2 am I was at the airport. Someone thought this tribunal was so important and had the kind of faith in my reporting that frankly makes me terrified.

Last month I took international friends to the airport. When internationals fly alone out of Israel, they get a “6” or a “5”. This number is a sticker you get on your passport and bags that helps the Israeli airport security evaluate your level of Zionism. “1” is awesome, “6” is you’re fucked. 1 is reserved for white Jewish Israelis, 2 is for white Jewish non-Israelis and friendly internationals, 3 is a suspicious Israeli or international, 4 is sometimes given to non-white Israelis, 5 is for Arab Israelis or questionable internationals, and 6 is for Palestinians, Muslims, and hostile internationals. Hostile is defined as not Zionist or suspected of questioning Zionism. Anything above a 3 means interrogation. Of course these are my definitions based on the people I’ve talked to who’ve gotten one of the six. I don’t know what the official language they use says.

More »

Stephen Lendman

Much about the New York bomb incident is worrisome, besides the media already pronouncing sentence, biasing future jurors to convict or face the wrath of public opinion, their communities, friends and even family. As a result, Faisal Shahzad doesn't stand a chance, guilty or innocent, regardless of his alleged confession and the plausibility that he was set up - used as a convenient dupe with his device rigged not to go off but to emit smoke to be found. Why not given America's history of using false flag incidents for political advantage.

Again, the possibility is real, given the incident's similarity to the Christmas 2009 airline one involving Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. He was also used as a convenient dupe, his explosive device no more powerful than a firecracker.

Understand also how involved CIA operatives and assets are globally, especially in Eurasia. Pakistan's ISI (its intelligence service) is a de facto adjunct, both working together destabilizing the region for US geopolitical interests. So-called terror incidents in America or the West are directly connected, perhaps the New York one the latest using Shahzad as a convenient dupe.

More »