Marriott Building Bombing is Pakistan's 9/11

Unknown Terrorist Group Claims Responsibility For Marriott Bombing

by Winter Patriot
(source)

In a phone call to an Islamabad TV station, "a group calling itself Fedayeen-i-Islam" has claimed responsibility for the bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, according to the Pakistani newspaper Dawn.

Fedayeen-i-Islam is "a little-known group" according to Bloomberg. But just how little-known?

Dawn’s report quotes "a senior [Pakistani] government official" as saying:

“We have not heard the name of the organisation but we are trying to locate its network.”

Amazing.

Ever since Saturday night’s bombing the media have been wrestling with the big question: "Why did al Qaeda do this?"

But now they have to deal with a different question: "How is Fedayeen-i-Islam related to al Qaeda?"

It goes without saying that Fedayeen-i-Islam must be a violent radical Islamofascist group and that they must have bombed the hotel. And they must have been assisted, if not directed, by al Qaeda, and probably the Taliban as well. After all, who else but the world’s most violent Islamic terrorists could make an anonymous phone call to a TV station?

It’s nice to know the big questions are looked after. That gives us leeway — here in the frozen corners of the blogosphere — to ask meaningless little insignificant questions, like:

What were US Marines doing in the Marriott Hotel just before the attack?

According to Pakistan Daily, after the blast, a fire broke out on the fourth and fifth floors of the hotel.

Why these floors and not the others? The official explanation didn’t make much sense. On the other hand, according to an eyewitness report from a member of Pakistan’s Parliament, a group of US Marines had recently visited the hotel, while Admiral Mike Mullen was there.

According to the eyewitness, all access to the hotel was closed off while the Marines unloaded steel boxes from a white US Embassy truck, bypassed both Pakistani and hotel security, and took these boxes directly to the fourth and fifth floors of the hotel — just where the fires mysteriously broke out.

Were the Marines loading the building with incendiaries? It certainly wouldn’t be the first time a building was primed by insiders for a subsequent "terrorist attack".

I wasn’t kidding in my prior post when I called the Marriott bombing "Pakistan’s 9/11". But I didn’t explain myself particularly well, either.

There’s a long list of similarities between the two attacks, including the rush by both politicians and the media to cast the event as "an attack on democracy", when in both cases the attacks came at critical times for governments which falsely claimed to have been legitimately elected.

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari can now claim to be in an all-out war against radical Islamic terrorists, and he may even be able to build up enough "political capital" to drag his nation in a direction in which it doesn’t wish to go.

As usual, the attack has been followed by a barrage of media nonsense, such as a report from the Financial Times which says men with ties to al Qaeda have been arrested in Pakistan in connection with the Marriot bombing.

Pakistani investigators yesterday said they had found new evidence of al-Qaeda’s involvement in the suicide truck bombing of Islamabad’s Marriott hotel. Intelligence officials also reported the arrest of up to five militants in connection with planning attacks [...]

According to an intelligence official, two of the five arrested men "came with conclusive evidence of close links to al-Qaeda. Their connection to the militant group is beyond any doubt."

Let’s see now: The police are arresting members of one group while another group claims responsibility. Does this not undermine the claims of the police?

If you were tripped up by this little bit of logic, you must be a Democrat, since according to the Republicans, the Democrats have failed to learn the lessons of September 11th, 2001.

And the primary lesson from September 11th, of course, is that logic, evidence, and science are all past their prime.

Therefore, we don’t use forensic evidence to solve crimes anymore; we label the crimes acts of war, destroy the forensic evidence, and attack defenseless countries instead. For revenge. Or something.

If you believe that this massive bombing attack was perpetrated by a Pakistani terrorist group that the Pakistani government has never even heard of, then it’s not much of a stretch to believe that this hitherto-unknown group must have hitherto-unknown ties to al Qaeda, as well.

As the AP reported (via the Toronto Star):

Interior Ministry chief Rehman Malik said "all roads lead to FATA" in major Pakistani suicide attacks – referring to Federally Administered Tribal Areas, where U.S. officials fear Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda No.2 Ayman al-Zawahri are hiding.

And there you have it; it doesn’t matter who did it; it doesn’t matter who claimed responsibility; it doesn’t matter why Marines were acting mysteriously (and evading security) in the building shortly before it was attacked; it doesn’t matter what evidence is collected during the investigation; it doesn’t even matter whether there is an investigation.

What matters is that the media and the politicians have already decided who’s going to be blamed, and who’s going to pay the price. And once again — just like 9/11 — it won’t be the perpetrators.

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World of Unreal Finance Hitting the Real Economy

source

By: David_Chu

Politics

Best Financial Markets Analysis Article“It's not the economy, stupid!” - Bill Clinton's campaign slogan was: “It's the economy, stupid!”

Actually that was James Carville's maxim and battle cry for the 1992 presidential election. Mr. “Ragin' Cajun” Carville, as you probably don't remember, was the commander-in-chief of Bill Clinton's first campaign for the White House. He was and is married to Mary Joe Matalin who happened to be working on George H.W. Bush's 1992 re-election campaign! Ms. Matalin was also an assistant to President George W. Bush and a special counselor to Vice President Dick Cheney until 2003.

Talk about sleeping with the enemy! If their marriage of political convenience and ”political operativeness” does not wake you up like a freezing morning shower, then you should go back to sleep in the Matrix (i.e., how they can be involved in both the Republican and Democrat presidential campaigns in 1992 at the highest levels and sleep in the same bed literally, and still be able to get away with it is a testimony to the blatant and absolute corruptness in U.S. politics):

Every four years the powers-that-be (PTB) that control Washington, D.C. and Wall Street trod out candidates from two sides of the same coin that they own. The little people, programmed by the corporate mass media and separated into two self-feeding troughs called the “left” and the “right” as in donkeys and elephants, cheer as though their candidate is the one who is finally going to lead them to their promised land. And every four years, the disappointment on both sides grows and grows.

Were not the Democrats elected to Congress during the 2006 election to stop the Iraq war? What happened? All that the madam speaker of the House, the Democrat congresswoman from San Francisco, has to do to stop the illegal and inhuman Iraq war is to withdraw military funding for the war by not considering the spending amendments and bills that come up which is the fiduciary prerogative of the U.S. Congress. It's pretty simple, but she doesn't want to do that for many reasons that will not be discussed here.

Mr. Obama, under the tutelage and supervision of “neolib” Zbigniew Brzezinski, has openly stated, but not widely reported in the corporate mass media, that he wants to move many U.S. troops out of Iraq into Afghanistan for more fighting there. Why?

Mr. Brzezinski is the Democrat soulmate of Dick Cheney: both want wars without end for their masters in the U.S. corporate military industrial complex, but they differ in their approach and who their proclaimed public enemy is. For Mr. Cheney and the neocons, the enemies are the so-called “Islamofacists” who were created by the neolibs, specifically by Mr. Brzezinski, to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan when he was the national security advisor to the peanut farmer from Georgia. Neolib's new enemy during a possible Obama administration will be an old enemy: the Russians. And that is why Mr. Obama wants those troops moved.

According to Patrick Briley who writes for Newswithviews.com, this man may be Obama's “Rasputin” (google his article titled “Brzezinski: Obama's Globalist ‘Rasputin'”). Mr. Brzezinski is a geopolitical chameleon and opportunist, but, even more significantly, a presidential “handler” who needs to be watched very carefully as you would with Dick Cheney and Henry Kissinger:

Zbigniew Brzezinski is Barack Obama's foreign policy advisor. Brzezinski was the national security advisor for President Carter from 1977 to 1981. In 1988 he endorsed HW Bush for President and was Co-Chair of the HW Bush national security advisory task force. From 1987 to 1989 he also served on the HW Bush's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Clinton Secretary of State Madeline Albright was a student of Brzezinski. GW Bush Secretary of State, Condi Rice (also a former national security advisor), who studied under Albright's father, shares many of the same world government views with Brzezinski and Albright.

Were not the Republicans elected every four years to cut government spending as they keep promising a smaller federal government that only grows exponentially? In case you haven't noticed, the total U.S. public debt has exploded from just under $6 trillion at the beginning of 2000 to approximately $14.5 trillion now (this latest tally includes Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgage liabilities that the U.S. Treasury unilaterally assumed for the U.S. a couple of weeks ago without any input from the American people or their so-called representatives in Washington, D.C.)

From a historical perspective and for comparison sake, it took the U.S. from 1776 to 2000 to reach a total public debt of just under $6 trillion. The current resident of the White House has more than doubled the taxpayers' debt! What took 224 years to accomplish if you can call it that, the current president did it in less than 8 years! How is that for the legacy of a “conservative,” “free market,” “small government,” “we are not into nation building,” Republican president?

What about Mr. McCain? What about him? Is he not the one who has publicly stated that he wants a war for one hundred years in Iraq alone? In response to a question from the audience (at a New Hampshire town hall meeting) concerning the possibility that the U.S. military might be staying in Iraq for the next 50 years, Mr. McCain dryly replied, “Make it a hundred.”

Didn't he also recently confess to the Wall Street Journal editorial board, “I don't really understand economics”? He then pointed to former Senator Gramm whom he had brought to this meeting and told everyone in the room that Mr. Gramm is the expert he turns to for expertise on the subject of economics (the former Senator, for those who don't know, is one of two people most responsible for the financial crisis at hand, the other being Alan Greenspan!).

And Mr. McCain is going to take over the captaincy of the U.S.S. Titanic just as it careens towards the derivatives “debt berg” straight ahead in plain sight? Enough said.

Politics is just a game.

To the PTB and their public servants like Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain, politics is just a means to swindle the little people every four years by lying and promising anything and everything to get elected. This 2008 election will be the “crossing the Rubicon” moment for the U.S. The little people are the ones who do the real work and create the real wealth by producing tangible goods and services that are needed in the arena of human commerce. This brings us back to the topic of this article.

The Real and the Unreal

What is confusing about what's going on with the financial markets crashing on Wall Street and the mega bailouts raining down like manna from Washington, D.C. is because most Americans don't understand the difference between two concepts: the “ real economy ” of goods and services versus the world of “ unreal finances ” (my present day term for what has been called the “money trust”* in the past) where money is created out of nothing and money is made on top of money. This mental confusion or brain fog over the real economy and unreal finances is purposefully maintained by the corporate mass media and the public education system through their deafening silence on the difference between the two.

The definition of the word “economy” is “the wealth and resources of a country or region, especially in terms of the production and consumption of goods and services.” And the definition of the word “finances” is “the monetary resources and affairs of a country, organization or person.”

To differentiate the word “finances” that you and I understand and use in our everyday lives, i.e., paying bills and earning a daily wage, versus the world of high-powered money used on Wall Street, I am calling theirs “unreal finances.”

And to illuminate these rather dry but crucial and even life-and-death concepts, I am going to quote at length from a very important newsletter written by Joel Skousen from the World Affairs Brief on March 14, 2008. Mr. Skousen provides penetrating analysis, commentary and insight into the reasons and causes behind the news in politics, economics and finances. An annual subscription to his weekly online newsletter is only $48 and is highly recommended ( www.worldaffairsbrief.com ). My comments are in brackets below.

In reality, there are two separate economic worlds now, not one--even though they are interconnected [just to be clear: there is one “economic” world where real goods and services are produced, and there is one “financial” world where money is created from nothing]. One is real and public [the “real economy” where the little people live and breathe] ; the other is a world of secret monetary creation and financial flows between speculators and insiders with first or second access to new money (and they hoard gold in central banks, incidentally, as the ultimate value) [the world of “unreal finances” of Wall Street and Washington, D.C.] . Yes, eventually the new money flows down into the real markets of goods and services, but there is a huge financial world out there that operates solely on the trillions of dollars that have been created out of nothing. It's a world that does nothing but play on the rise and fall of trends within paper markets.

The real economy of business, industry and actual production of goods is relatively slow to change and grow. It takes time to transform entrepreneurial ideas into concrete products and services. Real productive enterprises create jobs and increase productivity and overall efficiency by providing goods and services that do something better than what existed previously. Economic growth and progress in the real world only comes through making a profit and investing those savings in new enterprises [this is the general theory of the ”free enterprise system” which doesn´t really exist at the upper echelons of the market place] . This takes time. Even in the old world of finance, things took more time. Savings were invested in banks that loaned out funds to other endeavors, and were paid back with interest. Banks could only loan funds as new money came in or as old loans were repaid.

All of that changed with the invention of fiat money, created out of nothing and spent into the economy by government [and by the banks through the creation of loans: approximately 95% of the U.S. money supply is created by the banking system, while the rest is created by the U.S. government through the Federal Reserve] . This monetary and credit creation did not need to wait on tax revenues or savings to be generated and thus it altered the speed of monetary circulation within the economy. The only reason it wasn't highly inflationary is that foreign trade kept absorbing large amounts of our inflated currency, shielding the US from hyperinflation [one of the only reasons why the U.S. has not yet experienced the hyperinflation of Weimar Germany from the 1920's is because the U.S. exports the billions of dollars it creates from nothing to other nations in exchange for their real goods and services--this is the greatest economic and financial scam or pyramid scheme in the world and probably in history] .

A large portion of this government induced inflation surged into the economy through the military industrial complex, leading to huge profits and exaggerated compensation for top executives. Over several decades this habit of paying millions in salary and bonus to executives worked its way through civilian companies. This excess compensation, including fat pension funds, coupled with inflated stock options fed the spectacular rise of mutual funds and investment banking that ultimately funded the dot com boom of the 90's. Yes, the high tech boom would have happened at some time, but not as fast were it not for excessive monetary inflation flooding the markets.

Injection of fiat money alters the natural risk factors of the economy by vastly increasing the number of insider wealthy people who can afford to take high risks--because they are tapped into the bottomless pit of government contracts, or are downstream of those contracts. People who have first access to the free money become high rollers like government itself. That's why government makes such bad investment decisions full of waste and fraud. If it's lost, there is little personal liability. They just create more money next year.

In the presence of government inflation of the monetary supply (especially when it exceeds the true growth of economic output) an increasing number of people (with first, second and third use of the new money) have a lot of excess money looking for a place to earn a profit. Normal, solid business opportunities don't interest them. These take time to provide a return and it is usually less than 8% unless you are the business owner himself--which few nouveau riche want to become. Thus, speculative markets begin to grow exponentially as places to park money and make high profits without having to wait years for a business to succeed and mature.

There have always been markets for paper assets, but they have grown much larger in recent decades as a percentage of the entire economy compared to what I call the real economy of production. These paper asset markets are essential to the function of business and industry [only to a certain and limited degree] , but they now have a life of their own and feed off speculative market moves alone. This is not a rant against speculation per se, because you technically can't distinguish between good and bad speculation until the results are in [I submit to you that all derivatives speculations are bad and non-productive as they pertain to the real economy and the little people] . But, I can recognize when people and institutions are simply gambling on the markets with no thought of producing anything of benefit, except huge profits. . . .

And their even bigger losses are now typically bailed out by the U.S. taxpayers, care of the U.S. Treasury and the Fed.
The End Run

What is taking place with the financial collapse of Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, AIG, Washington Mutual, et al. is taking place in the world of unreal finances , not in the real economy. Very key difference. However, let's be totally clear: what happens in the world of unreal finances will eventually spill over and affect the real economy sooner or later.

This is because real businesses, as one example, require loans to expand production and growth in many cases. The collapse of the investment banks in the world of unreal finances is resulting in the collapse of perhaps the entire banking system including commercial banks that do business in the real economy. This is adversely affecting the ability of businesses to borrow money from commercial banks, or to repay existing loans as their banks suddenly collapse and/or are swallowed up by the key insiders corporations like JPMorgan Chase, Citicorp, Bank of America, etc.

What the PTB are attempting to do is to delay the inevitable collapse in unreal finances buy adding more gasoline (what I have called “financial heroin” in my last article) to the financial fires on Wall Street. This will cause the temporary financial euphorias on Wall Street that we are witnessing with increasing frequency. But that is not all that the PTB are attempting to accomplish.

There are at least three crucial objectives that the PTB are trying to push and rush through the U.S. Congress under the guise and rare opportunity of the current financial crisis:

• Bail out their servant class and their insider corporations on Wall Street with hundreds of billions and even trillions of U.S. taxpayer's money.

• Usurp more unconstitutional control by creating an executive position, a new U.S. Treasury Secretary, that borders on financial dictatorship.

• Kill the intent and purpose of the Glass-Steagall Act once and for all by combining so-called investment banks like JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley with commercial banks such as Washington Mutual, Wachovia, and Bank of America as is being done right now by these investment banks.**
It's the Unreal Finances, Stupid!

The $700 billion dollars [a number admittedly pulling out of the thin air as a U.S. Treasury spokeswoman reportedly told Forbes.com last Tuesday: “It's not based on any particular data point. We just wanted to choose a really large number.”] bailout scheme proposed by the U.S. Treasury Secretary and probably the Fed Chairman is solely for the rescue the world of unreal finances: those who have played one too many financial crapshoot games with trillions of dollars of bets on such toxic financial instruments or so-called investments as “credit default swaps,” “interest rate derivatives,” and “mortgage backed securities,” just to name a few.

They are crying out to Uncle Sam to bail them out after they have made and lost trillions of dollars on their atrocious gambles. As Catherine Austin Fitts (former Assistant Housing Secretary under George H.W. Bush) said on the Jeff Rense Radio Program (rense.com) last Wednesday, and I am really paraphrasing here: “It would be akin to you and I picking the wrong Super Lotto numbers and then having Uncle Sam come and bail us out by rewarding us the jackpot even though we didn't pick the winning numbers!”

That is what Wall Street is attempting to do with the crucial assistance and blatant insistence of one of their very own who now controls the U.S. Treasury and who wants unlimited power to do whatever he pleases to become the financial dictator of the United States. Henry Merritt “Hank” Paulson Jr. was the chairman and chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs. Now he is the 74th U.S. Treasury Secretary. And he wants to be the financial dictator of the United States!

The Paulson Act and Financial Dictatorship

To wit: the $700 billion bailout scheme proposed by Paulson, Bernanke and Bush will institute the following unconstitutional powers (italicized and bolded emphasis is mine):

• "The Secretary's authority to purchase mortgage-related assets under this Act shall be limited to $700,000,000,000 outstanding at any one time ."

• “Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion , and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.”

I would list more egregious usurpation of power proposed by this mother-of-all bailout scheme but these are the only two statements that I could find on the Internet on this bill, which should be truthfully called the “Paulson Act.” But these two statements are quite enough.

What the former Goldman Sachs CEO wants to do is to consolidate total unlimited financial powers of the United States in the hands of one person, in himself as the Treasury Secretary, untouchable by any judicial courts--even the U.S. Supreme Court.

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A Furnace Seal'd: The Wondrous Death Squads of the American Elite

Chris Floyd www.uruknet.info?p=47284 Terror the Human Form Divine And Secrecy the Human Dress -- William Blake I. Another way station on our plunge into darkness was passed last week with the publication of Bob Woodward's new book, The War Within. Along with the usual backstairs gossip dished out by self-serving insiders eager to plant their spin on events, Woodward revealed -- or, rather, confirmed -- the existence of what he called the key element to the "success" of Bush's escalation of the war crime in Iraq: a "secret killing program" aimed at assassinating anyone arbitrarily deemed a "terrorist" by the leaders of the foreign forces occupying the conquered land. In a TV appearance to puff the book, Woodward celebrated the arbitrary murder, by methods unknown, of people designated "terrorists," by criteria unknown, as "a wonderful example of American ingenuity solving a problem in war, as we often have." The White House acknowledged the existence of the assassination program, but insisted that it was the "surge" of troops that was mainly responsible for the drop in violence from the howling hell of 2006 to today's level, which, as Juan Cole has pointed out, is still greater than some of the most horrific civic conflicts of the last century. (It is a strange country indeed that can celebrate the creation of a blood-gushing sinkhole of violence and destruction as a "success beyond our wildest dreams," to use Barack Obama's new take on the surge.) Of course, Woodward, the consummate Beltway courtier, embraces this bipartisan conventional wisdom about the success of the surge. And he is certainly right, at least from one point of view, as we noted here recently: The "surge" -- which in addition to an influx of troops included the ruthless ethnic cleansing of Baghdad, the walled ghettoization of vast swathes of the city, and the arming and funding of violent sectarian militias across the land -- certainly succeeded in extending the duration of the murder, suffering and chaos engendered by America's armed and belligerent presence in Iraq. So it is indeed a great "success" ... in the same way that, say, Albert Speer's miraculous efforts to keep the Nazi war machine going from 1943 to 1945 -- resulting in the deaths of millions of people, including the worst ravages of the Holocaust -- was a "success." But beyond this little insider quibble over the most effective element in the prolongation of the war -- Woodward, a former military intelligence officer, naturally plumps for the covert op, while the White House ballyhoos the high-profile presidential directive to increase troop levels -- what is most noteworthy about the "revelations" is that they have provoked no controversy at all. The United States admits that it is operating secret death squads in Iraq, and this barely rates a passing mention in the press, and certainly no comment whatsoever on the campaign trail, no debate among the national leadership. And this despite the fact that, as Woodward makes clear, the targets of the American death squads are not merely "terrorists," as the general public broadly understands the term -- i.e., religious extremists in the al Qaeda mold -- but anyone arbitrarily designated an "insurgent" or a leader in "the resistance." That is, anyone who resists the invasion and occupation of his native land is deemed a legitimate target for a secret death squad. For execution without charges, without trial, without evidence. And this, to Woodward, is "wonderful" and "amazing." By this logic, of course, the Nazis were fully justified in murdering leaders of the French resistance in World War II. The British would certainly have been justified in sneaking into George Washington's house and killing the insurgent leader in his bed. (And his wife too, no doubt, as an acceptable level of "collateral damage.") In fact, Woodward sternly warns members -- members, mind you, not just leaders -- of "the resistance" to "get your rear end out of town;" i.e., leave your native land or else be murdered in your bed by secret assassins of the occupying power. This is the heroic, honorable stance of the American elite in the 21st century. What the Nazis did, we do, and for the same reason: to secure the forcible occupation of a land we conquered through an unprovoked war of aggression. It is indeed wonderful and amazing that such a state of affairs -- such an abyss of depravity -- is accepted so calmly by the great and good among us....and by tens of millions of our fellow citizens. II. But as noted above, there is really nothing new about Woodward's "revelations." I've been writing here, and elsewhere, for several years about the "global death squad" of the Terror War. These reports were based not on any insider knowledge but on universally accessible stories from the most staid and respectable media sources: mainstream papers, news agencies, leading magazines, etc. And of course, it began long before the war crime in Iraq. As I noted in 2005: On September 17, 2001, George W. Bush signed an executive order authorizing the use of "lethal measures" against anyone in the world whom he or his minions designated an "enemy combatant." This order remains in force today. No judicial evidence, no hearing, no charges are required for these killings; no law, no border, no oversight restrains them. Bush has also given agents in the field carte blanche to designate "enemies" on their own initiative and kill them as they see fit. The existence of this universal death squad – and the total obliteration of human liberty it represents – has not provoked so much as a crumb, an atom, a quantum particle of controversy in the American Establishment, although it's no secret. The executive order was first bruited in the Washington Post in October 2001. I first wrote of it in my Moscow Times column in November 2001. The New York Times added further details in December 2002. That same month, Bush officials made clear that the dread edict also applied to American citizens, as the Associated Press reported. The first officially confirmed use of this power was the killing of an American citizen in Yemen by a CIA drone missile on November 3, 2002. A similar strike occurred in Pakistan this month, when a CIA missile destroyed a house and purportedly killed Abu Hamza Rabia, a suspected al Qaeda figure. But the only bodies found at the site were those of two children, the houseowner's son and nephew, Reuters reports. The grieving father denied any connection to terrorism. An earlier CIA strike on another house missed Rabia but killed his wife and children, Pakistani officials reported. But most of the assassinations are carried out in secret, quietly, professionally, like a contract killing for the mob. As a Pentagon document unearthed by the New Yorker in December 2002 put it, the death squads must be "small and agile," and "able to operate clandestinely, using a full range of official and non-official cover arrangements to…enter countries surreptitiously." The dangers of this policy are obvious, as a UN report on "extrajudicial killings" noted in December 2004: " Empowering governments to identify and kill 'known terrorists' places no verifiable obligation upon them to demonstrate in any way that those against whom lethal force is used are indeed terrorists… While it is portrayed as a limited 'exception' to international norms, it actually creates the potential for an endless expansion of the relevant category to include any enemies of the State, social misfits, political opponents, or others." It's hard to believe that any genuine democracy would accept a claim by its leader that he could have anyone killed simply by labeling them an "enemy." It's hard to believe that any adult with even the slightest knowledge of history or human nature could countenance such unlimited, arbitrary power, knowing the evil it is bound to produce. Yet this is what the great and good in America have done. And this is what they continue to do, to this very day, this very hour, as the non-response to Woodward's macabre and freakish celebration of covert murder demonstrates so clearly. In Iraq, the death squads were in operation almost from the start. For example, one of the earliest reports about the American formation of "paramilitaries" and "commando squads" to "track down" insurgents came from the Washington Post in December 2003: Two weeks ago, the U.S. occupation authority decided to form a paramilitary unit to track down insurgents. The unit, composed of Iraqi militiamen from the country's five largest political parties, will work with U.S. Special Forces soldiers, and their operations will be overseen by U.S. military commanders. Since the summer, the CIA has recruited and trained some former Iraqi intelligence agents to help identify the insurgents... An even earlier Post report, in August 2003, also noted the hiring of Baathist operatives to hunt "insurgents." As I put it in the Moscow Times that month: Here's a headline you don't see every day: "War Criminals Hire War Criminals to Hunt Down War Criminals." Perhaps that's not the precise wording used by the Washington Post this week, but it is the absolute essence of its story about the Bush Regime's new campaign to put Saddam's murderous security forces on America's payroll. Yes, the sahibs in Bush's Iraqi Raj are now doling out American tax dollars to hire the murderers of the infamous Mukhabarat and other agents of the Baathist Gestapo – perhaps hundreds of them. The logic, if that's the word, seems to be that these bloodstained "insiders" will lead their new imperial masters to other bloodstained "insiders" responsible for bombing the UN headquarters in Baghdad – and killing another dozen American soldiers while Little George was playing with his putts during his month-long Texas siesta. Naturally, the Iraqi people – even the Bush-appointed leaders of the Potemkin "Governing Council" – aren't exactly overjoyed at seeing Saddam's goons return, flush with American money and firepower. And they're certainly not reassured by the fact that the Bushists have also re-opened Saddam's most notorious prison, the dread Abu Ghraib, and are now, Mukhabarat-like, filling it with Iraqis – men, women and children as young as 11 – seized from their homes or plucked off the street to be held incommunicado, indefinitely, without due process, just like the old days. As The Times reports, weeping relatives who dare approach the gleaming American razor-wire in search of their "disappeared" loved ones are referred to a crude, hand-written sign pinned to a spike: "No visits are allowed, no information will be given and you must leave." Perhaps an Iraqi Akhmatova will do justice to these scenes one day. So here -- in August 2003 -- the leading newspaper in the nation's capital is openly reporting that goon squads are being sent to take care of insurgents and "terrorists," while the leading newspaper in the capital of America's war ally, Britain, is openly reporting that the notorious Abu Ghraib prison is being glutted with new captives -- including children -- sealed off behind American razor wire. The seedbed of the whole panalopy of the horrors to come was already there, in the open, from the very beginning. And so it went on. As I noted early last year: As Sy Hersh has reported ("The Coming Wars," New Yorker, Jan. 24, 2005), after his re-election in 2004, George W. Bush signed a series of secret presidential directives that authorized the Pentagon to run virtually unrestricted covert operations, including a reprise of the American-backed, American-trained death squads employed by authoritarian regimes in Central and South America during the Reagan Administration, where so many of the Bush faction cut their teeth – and made their bones. "Do you remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador?" a former high-level intelligence official said to Hersh. "We founded them and we financed them. The objective now is to recruit locals in any area we want. And we aren’t going to tell Congress about it." A Pentagon insider added: "We’re going to be riding with the bad boys." Another role model for the expanded dirty war cited by Pentagon sources, said Hersh, was Britain's brutal repression of the Mau Mau in Kenya during the 1950s, when British forces set up concentration camps, created their own terrorist groups to confuse and discredit the insurgency, and killed thousands of innocent civilians in quashing the uprising. Bush's formal greenlighting of the death-squad option built upon an already securely-established base, part of a larger effort to turn the world into a "global free-fire zone" for covert operatives, as one top Pentagon official told Hersh. For example, in November 2002 a Pentagon plan to infiltrate terrorist groups and "stimulate" them into action was uncovered by William Arkin, then writing for the Los Angeles Times. The new unit, the "Proactive, Pre-emptive Operations Group," was described in the Pentagon documents as "a super-Intelligence Support Activity" that brings "together CIA and military covert action, information warfare, intelligence and cover and deception." Later, in August 2004, then deputy Pentagon chief Paul Wolfowitz appeared before Congress to ask for $500 million to arm and train non-governmental "local militias" to serve as U.S. proxies for "counter-insurgency and "counterterrorist" operations in "ungoverned areas" and hot spots around the world, Agence France Presse (and virtually no one else) reported at the time. These hired paramilitaries were to be employed in what Wolfowitz called an "arc of crisis" that just happened to stretch across the oil-bearing lands and strategic pipeline routes of Central Asia, the Middle East, Africa and South America... Brazen daylight raids by "men dressed in uniforms" of Iraqi police or Iraqi commandos or other Iraqi security agencies swept up dozens of victims at a time. For months, U.S. "advisers" to Iraqi security agencies – including veterans of the original "Salvador Option" – insisted that these were Sunni insurgents in stolen threads, although many of the victims were Sunni civilians. Later, the line was changed: the chief culprits were now "rogue elements" of the various sectarian militias that had "infiltrated" Iraq's institutions. But as investigative reporter Max Fuller has pointed out in his detailed examination of information buried in reams of mainstream news stories and public Pentagon documents, the vast majority of atrocities then attributed to "rogue" Shiite and Sunni militias were in fact the work of government-controlled commandos and "special forces," trained by Americans, "advised" by Americans and run largely by former CIA assets. As Fuller puts it: "If there are militias in the Ministry of Interior, you can be sure that they are militias that stand to attention whenever a U.S. colonel enters the room." ...With the Anglo-American coalition so deeply embedded in dirty war – infiltrating terrorist groups, "stimulating" them into action," protecting "crown jewel" double-agents no matter what the cost, "riding with the bad boys," greenlighting the "Salvador Option" – it is simply impossible to determine the genuine origin of almost any particular terrorist outrage or death squad atrocity in Iraq. All of these operations take place in the shadow world, where terrorists are sometimes government operatives and vice versa, and where security agencies and terrorist groups interpenetrate in murky thickets of collusion and duplicity. This moral chaos leaves "a kind of blot/To mark the full-fraught man and best indued/With some suspicion," as Shakespeare's Henry V says. Or as Blake put it: The Human Dress is forged Iron The Human Form a fiery Forge The Human Face a Furnace Seal'd The Human Heart its hungry Gorge

Link: www.chris-floyd.com/content/view/1604/135/ Full story/Permalink

Almond Growers Sue USDA to Halt Mandatory Chemical Fumigation of Raw Almonds

By Mike Adams


Natural News

After having their organic almond businesses devastated by the
USDA's bizarre decision requiring mandatory chemical fumigation of
almonds, the almond industry is fighting back. Fifteen American almond
growers have filed a lawsuit against the USDA in an attempt to repeal
the requirements that all almonds grown in California be fumigated or
pasteurized. (Virtually all almonds sold in the United States are grown
in California.)


Since the USDA's ruling in 2007, organic
almond growers in California have been economically devastated by the
mandatory fumigation of almonds.
Because USDA rules don't apply to almonds being imported from other
countries, however, the industry has seen a huge shift away from U.S.
growers and towards almond growers in Spain and other countries. Some
American almond farmers
have even called the USDA's decision "a plan to destroy the U.S. almond
industry and put small organic farmers out of business."

The USDA's plot to deceive consumers over "raw"

The mandatory almond fumigation requirement is seen by
health-conscious consumers as not merely bizarre, but downright
fraudulent. That's because the USDA's regulations allow fumigated and
pasteurized almonds to be labeled "raw," thereby intentionally
deceiving the consuming public and instantly destroying consumer trust
in the labeling of all almonds.



By any honest measure, the people making these decisions at the USDA can only be described as either idiotic or criminal. To enforce regulations requiring the intentional mislabeling of raw food seems more like the actions of a criminal racket than a government agency. While online pharmacies selling mislabeled pharmaceuticals
are routinely raided and shut down by U.S. authorities, when the
government itself engages in similar deceptions, it declares itself
above the law and immune to prosecution.



This lawsuit by U.S. almonds growers aims to overturn the USDA's deception. These fraudulent actions on the part of the USDA have generated an enormous amount of criticism from the raw food community, whose members depend on almonds to make raw almond milk, raw almond "burgers" and other raw foods preparations. As leaders of the raw foods movement rightly insist, fumigating or pasteurizing nuts
destroys as much as 90 percent of their original nutritional value,
altering proteins and destroying disease-fighting phytonutrients. The
USDA, however, remains remarkably illiterate on this topic, have never
made a single statement acknowledging any qualitative difference
between cooked foods and raw foods.

Is the USDA actually trying to destroy consumer health?

As the editor of NaturalNews.com, I find the USDA's ignorance on fundamental matters of nutrition to be nothing short of astonishing. As it is the U.S. government department responsible for much of the food supply,
it should be on the leading edge of nutritional knowledge, not stuck in
the 1950's, before scientists knew about plant enzymes and
disease-fighting phytochemicals that are easily destroyed by heat or chemicals.



Notably, the USDA has also supported the FDA's plot to irradiate the
U.S. food supply while intentionally misleading consumers over the fact
that their foods have been irradiated. See my article, "FDA Plots to
Mislead Consumers Over Irradiated Foods" at http://www.naturalnews.com/023956.html



My only explanation for the USDA's insistence that the U.S. food supply
should be fumigated, irradiated and cooked to the point of nutrient
destruction is that the USDA is pursuing a campaign of intentional nutrient depletion
for the U.S. population. With Big Pharma now deciding key regulatory
decisions of the U.S. government, the USDA's actions seemed designed to
create a nation of health degenerates who will demand unprecedented
levels of pharmaceutical "treatments" that enrich the drug companies.



If that sounds a little too conspiratorial, rest assured that U.S.
corporations engage in conspiracies all the time: Conspiracies to hide
negative drug studies, conspiracies to influence the USDA's Food Guide
Pyramid to avoid saying things like "eat less meat," and conspiracies
to ensnare consumers in an endless cycle of consumption, disease and
debt.



In fact, most of what happens between government and private industry
today is founded on conspiracy -- which simply means two people sitting
in a room, plotting how to bilk consumers for the most profits.



Whether the USDA is openly conspiring to destroy the U.S. food supply
-- or is merely run by bumbling idiots who are nutritionally illiterate
-- is debatable. But the results of its actions are not. By destroying
the healing qualities of fresh produce
and nuts, the USDA is denying consumers access to the very plant-based
nutrients that are just barely keeping people from developing
full-blown cancer, diabetes and other serious medical conditions. As
more and more fresh foods are destroyed by USDA regulations, our
population will spiral downward into a state of degenerative disease
and misery.

Why the USDA is more dangerous than terrorists

In doing so, the USDA will have accomplished what all the terrorists
in the world could not do: Destroying the U.S. food supply and leaving
its population to rot.


It is unimaginable to think that this
could be happening accidentally. For government agencies like the USDA
and FDA to put such policies into place, somebody at the top must be calling the shots.
In other words, somebody wants to deny consumers access to raw food.
They want everything to be dead, processed, fumigated, homogenized,
pasteurized, irradiated or otherwise destroyed. This is most likely
being pursued solely for corporate profits (a diseased population is
not only easier to control, it also spends a lot more money on
pharmaceuticals and medical services).



I've said it before, but it's worth repeating: No nation that destroys the nutritive value of its food supply has any real future. If such policies are allowed to continue, you can kiss the United States
of America goodbye. It will never survive the disease, death and
financial bankruptcy that's sure to follow such assaults on its food
supply.


That's why this lawsuit by California almond growers
is so important: It may allow us to free almonds from the destructive
designs of the USDA, restoring the integrity of this important source
of nutrients.



Of course, suing the USDA is hardly the correct response to such
terrorism assaults on our national food supply. If we actually lived in
a country that sought to protect its population, the Pentagon would
send a team of Navy Seals into the offices of the USDA (and the Almond
Board of California) with flashbangs and assault rifles, and they'd
arrest these criminals for their attempts to threaten the U.S. food
supply. After sentencing, they could be shackled and lined up in a
California park where consumers could throw -- what else? -- irradiated
rotten tomatoes at them.



What follows is yesterday's press release on this issue from the Cornucopia Institute:

Almond Growers and Handlers File Federal Lawsuit - Seeking to End "Adulteration" of Raw Nuts

Lawsuit Would Halt Treatment of Almonds with Toxic Fumigant or Steam Heat



WASHINGTON, D.C. – A group of fifteen American almond growers and
wholesale nut handlers filed a lawsuit in the Washington, D.C. federal
court on Tuesday, September 9 seeking to repeal a controversial
USDA-mandated treatment program for California-grown raw almonds.



The almond farmers and handlers contend that their businesses have been
seriously damaged and their futures jeopardized by a requirement that
raw almonds be treated with propylene oxide (a toxic fumigant
recognized as a carcinogen by the EPA) or steam-heated before they can
be sold to American consumers. Foreign-grown almonds are exempt from
the treatment scheme and are rapidly displacing raw domestic nuts in
the marketplace.



Tens of thousands of angry consumers have contacted the USDA to protest
the compulsory almond treatment since the agency's new regulation went
into effect one year ago. Some have expressed outrage that even though
the nuts have been processed with a fumigant, or heat, they will still
be labeled as "raw."



"The USDA's raw almond treatment mandate has been economically
devastating to many family-scale and organic almond farmers in
California," said Will Fantle, the research director for the
Wisconsin-based Cornucopia Institute. Cornucopia has been working with
almond farmers and handlers to address the negative impacts of the USDA
rule, including the loss of markets to foreign nuts.



The USDA, in consultation with the Almond Board of California, invoked
its treatment plan on September 1, 2007 alleging that it was a
necessary food safety requirement. Salmonella-tainted almonds twice
this decade caused outbreaks of food related illnesses. USDA
investigators were never able to determine how salmonella
bacteria somehow contaminated the raw almonds that caused the food
illnesses but they were able to trace back one of the contaminations,
in part, to the country's largest "factory farm," growing almonds and
pistachios on over 9000 acres.


Instead of insisting that
giant growers reduce risky practices, the USDA invoked a rule that
requires the gassing or steam-heating of California raw almonds in a
way that many consumers have found unacceptable.



"For those of us who are interested in eating fresh and wholesome food
the USDA's plan, to protect the largest corporate agribusinesses
against liability, amounts to the adulteration of our food supply,"
said Jill Richardson, a consumer activist and blogger at: http://www.lavidalocavore.org/



"This ruling is a financial disaster and has closed a major customer
group that we have built up over the years," said Dan Hyman, an almond
grower and owner of D&S Ranches in Selma, CA. His almond business
relies on direct sales to consumers over the internet. Hyman notes that
his customers were never consulted by the USDA or the Almond Board
before they were denied "a healthy whole natural raw food that they
have eaten with confidence, enjoyment and benefit for decades."



The lawsuit contends that the USDA exceeded its authority, which is
narrowly limited to regulating quality concerns in almonds such as
dirt, appearance and mold. And even if the USDA sought to regulate
bacterial contamination, the questionable expansion of its authority
demanded a full evidentiary hearing and a producer referendum, to
garner public input – neither of which were undertaken by the USDA.



"The fact that almond growers were not permitted to fully participate
in developing and approving this rule undermines its legitimacy," said
Ryan Miltner, the attorney representing the almond growers. "Rather
than raising the level of income for farmers and providing handlers
with orderly marketing conditions," added Miltner, "this particular
regulation creates classes of economic winners and losers. That type of
discriminatory economic segregation is anathema to the intended purpose
of the federal marketing order system. "



Retailers of raw almonds have also been expressing their unhappiness,
based on feedback from their customers, with the raw almond treatment
rule. "We've been distributing almonds grown by family farmers in
California for over 30 years and we regard them as the common heritage
of the American people," said Dr. Jesse Schwartz, President of Living
Tree Community Foods in Berkeley, CA. "We can think of no reply more
fitting than to affirm our faith that ultimately the wisdom and good
sense of the American people will prevail in this lawsuit."



Barth Anderson, Research & Development Coordinator for The Wedge, a
Minneapolis-based grocery cooperative, noted that their mission has
always been to support family farmers. "We weren't surprised when Wedge
shoppers and members wrote nearly 500 individual letters expressing
disapproval of the USDA's mandatory fumigation law for domestic
almonds," Anderson said. "Our members especially did not like the idea
that fumigated almonds could be called 'raw.'"



According to the USDA, there is no requirement for retailers to alert
consumers to the toxic, propylene oxide fumigation or steam treatment
applied to raw almonds from California.



"This rule is killing the California Organic Almond business," said
Steve Koretoff, a plaintiff in the lawsuit and owner of Purity Organics
located in Kerman, CA. "Because foreign almonds do not have to be
pasteurized their price is going up while our price is going down
because of the rule. It makes no sense." Koretoff added.



Two groups of consumers that have been particularly vocal in their
opposition to the almond treatment rule are raw food enthusiasts and
vegans. These consumers may obtain as much as 30% of their daily
protein intake from raw almonds, after grinding them for flour and
other uses. Studies exploring nutritional impacts following fumigant
and steam treatment have yet to be publicly released. A Cornucopia
Institute freedom of information request for the documents is awaiting
a response from the USDA.



"We raw vegans believe raw foods, from non-animal sources, contains
valuable nutrients – some not yet well-understood by scientists,"
stated Joan Levin, a retired attorney living in Chicago. "These
nutrients can be destroyed by heat, radiation and toxic chemicals. We
support the continued availability of fresh produce free of industrial
age tampering," explained Levin.



Cornucopia's Fantle noted that the Washington, D.C. federal district
court has already assigned the almond lawsuit a case number, beginning
its move through the judicial system. "We believe this is a strong
legal case and hope for a favorable decision in time to protect this
year's almond harvest," Fantle said.

Full story/Permalink