Waving False Flags, Negroponte, etc.

The Israel connection to the Hariri assassination won’t go away. The Xymphora blogger wrote this:

I can't think of another example of a case where the party so generally accused of the crime was more harmed by the results of the crime. Are we supposed to believe that the Syrians are insane and/or stupid? Do they want to invite an American-Israeli attack? Do they want to provide the biggest excuse possible to force them to leave Lebanon?

Here, for example, is what Bill Van Auken said:

The timing of the assassination, barely a week after Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas announced their truce in Egypt, is noteworthy. It is quite possible that any limited concessions the Israeli regime may agree to make as part of the “peace process” with the Palestinians will be repaid by Washington giving the green light for Israeli provocations and military actions against Syria.

… It is not just a question of motive, however. Israel has a long history of utilizing
assassination as an instrument of state policy. The Israeli regime has not infrequently carried out acts of terror and blamed them on its enemies.

Among the more infamous examples was the so-called Lavon Affair, in which the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad organized a covert network inside Egypt which
launched a series of bombing attacks in 1953. The targets included US diplomatic facilities, and the attackers left behind phony evidence implicating anti-American Arabs. The aim was to disrupt US ties to Egypt.

In its long history of assassinations of Palestinian leaders, many of them carried out in Beirut, the Israeli regime has routinely attempted to implicate rival Palestinian factions.

Car bomb killings in Beirut are a regular part of Mossad’s repertoire. In the 1970s and 1980s, when the Israelis invaded Lebanon, such bombings were a fact of daily life, and many of them were attributed to Israel.

Among the more recent killings is that of Elie Hobeika, an ex-Lebanese cabinet minister and former Christian warlord, in January 2002. He was killed along with three bodyguards by a remote-controlled car bomb on a Beirut street. Hobeika, who participated in the massacre of Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in 1976, had announced just days earlier that he was prepared to testify on the role played by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in the killings.

Last June, a Lebanese magistrate indicted five Arabs who were said to be working for Mossad in connection with a plot to assassinate Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah. At least one of the defendants testified that Mossad had organized the Hobeika assassination.

In May 2002, Mossad carried out the assassination of Mohammed Jihad Jibril, the son of Ahmed Jibril, the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command. Israeli Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer commented cynically at the time, “Not everything that blows up in Beirut has a connection with the State of Israel.”

In August 2003, Ali Hassan Saleh, a leader of Hezbollah, was assassinated in Beirut. Israel denied any knowledge of the killing, but it was seen throughout Lebanon as a Mossad operation.

Since 2002, Mossad has been headed by Meir Dagan, who formerly commanded the Israeli occupation zone in Lebanon. Sharon reportedly gave Dagan a mandate to revive the traditional methods of Mossad, including assassinations abroad.

Washington has itself revived the methods of “murder incorporated” that were historically associated with the CIA, boasting of assassinations of alleged Al Qaeda
operatives in Yemen and elsewhere.

While the Washington Post and other US media outlets echo the White House in denouncing Syria as a “rogue regime” guilty of the Hariri assassination, the two governments responsible for the great bulk of the killing and political murders in the Middle East are Israel and the United States.

The fact that so many stories are percolating around accusing the US and Israel of the assassination explains Donald Rumsfeld’s frustration with the internet or, as he put it, “bloggers and hackers and chat rooms.” Or why Popular Mechanics put out a cover story trying to debunk 911 truth theories. See this, this and this about that. There is clearly a risk in high-level debunking that you are drawing more attention to the “conspiracy theory” itself. The good news is that, thanks to the internet, you don’t have to rely on the monopoly press and government propaganda for information. The bad news is that the internet can be shut down and you can believe that the Rumsfeld types are working on that. Sure you will be able to go “on-line” but it won’t be the uncontrollable, open and decentralized internet. It would be corporate owned.

The thing that always amazes me about Rumsfeld is his compulsive truth-telling. At the beginning on this “War on Terrorism” he said that the government would lie to us, that it will infiltrate groups, cause them to commit terrorist acts then use that as an excuse to wipe them out. He once referred to what hit the Pentagon on 911 as a "missile." He also said last December that the “same people” who shot the plane down in Pennsylvania were responsible for 911 and the beheadings in Iraq. Here is the quote:

And I think all of us have a sense if we imagine the kind of world we would face if the people who bombed the mess hall in Mosul, or the people who did the bombing in Spain, or the people who attacked the United States in New York, shot down the plane over Pennsylvania and attacked the Pentagon, the people who cut off peoples' heads on television to intimidate, to frighten -- indeed the word "terrorized" is just that. Its purpose is to terrorize, to alter behavior, to make people be something other than that which they want to be.

We crazy heretics knew that, but who knew Rumsfeld would come right out and say it?

On another matter, the Pentagon announced that it is spending more than $100 billion on developing robot warriors. That, of course, is frightening, especially when combined with new drugs they are coming out with to make the biological soldiers more “effective,” such as the one that keeps you awake for days without getting tired (not the old fashioned stimulants that kept you awake but caused exhaustion and psychosis) or the one that prevents the formation of traumatic memories (a conscience-blocker, just what we need!). The military has always worked on this stuff. What seems new is they don’t keep it secret. It’s like they want to scare the crap out of the world hoping that no one will sink the dollar.

All in all, though, it has been a dark week. The news that John Negroponte has been nominated as head of all intelligence in the US or Deputy Reichsfuhrer or whatever they are calling it weighs especially heavily. He is the one in charge of training, ordering and paying for the people who raped and killed nuns, priests and social workers in Central America in the 1980s. The man who oversaw mass political murder in the US embassy in Saigon during the Vietnam War and who is currently US ambassador to Iraq. That is as clear a sign as any that things are going to get lots worse quickly.

Here is what Signs of the Times said about Negroponte when he lied to the congressional committee about the death squads during his confirmation hearings for the UN Ambassadorship:

He can certainly lie with a straight face. Of course, from his twisted, corrupt, and fascist way of thinking, killing women by throwing them out of helicopters doesn't amount to death squads. It's just a normal day's work. Look at the behaviour of US troops in Vietnam and now in Iraqi cities like Falluja.

Check out the Wikipedia entry on Negroponte. While he was US ambassador to Honduras from 1981-85, US military aid to the country increased from $4 million a year to over $77 million! This money went towards the war against the democratically elected government in Nicaragua, and Honduran death squads that got their jollies from torturing women:

Records also show that a special intelligence unit (commonly referred to as a "death squad") of the Honduran armed forces, Battalion 3-16, trained by the CIA and Argentine military, kidnapped, tortured and killed hundreds of people, including US missionaries. Critics charge that Negroponte knew about these human rights violations and yet continued to collaborate with the Honduran military while lying to Congress.

In May 1982, a nun, Sister Laetitia Bordes, who had worked for ten years in El Salvador, went on a fact-finding delegation to Honduras to investigate the whereabouts of thirty Salvadoran nuns and women of faith who fled to Honduras in 1981 after Archbishop Oscar Romero's
assassination. Negroponte claimed the embassy knew nothing. But in a 1996 interview with the Baltimore Sun, Negroponte's predecessor, Jack Binns, said that a group of Salvadorans, among whom were the women Bordes had been looking for, were captured on April 22, 1981, and savagely tortured by the DNI, the Honduran Secret Police, and then later thrown out of helicopters alive.

A job well done dealing with "sub-humans" in Latin America, Negroponte went into the "private sector" to make a few bucks before he was made US ambassador to the UN in 2001, just in time to ram through the war on Afghanistan and the destruction of Iraq. After a stint as US ambassador to Iraq, he is now being rewarded with the newly created position of US National Intelligence Director.

But hey, every fascist leader needs a trustworthy, sadistic guy like Negroponte at the head of intelligence operations to torture and kill all enemies of "freedom and democracy", right? And if Negroponte supported the murder of US missionaries in Honduras, he certainly won't have a problem dealing with US citizens deemed to be "enemy combatants"...

These are the types of people rewarded by the Bush administration with positions of great power. Dave Lindorff put it, “The Scum Also Rises.”