Operation to Re-Elect Republicans

Operation Reelect Republicans in 2006 is proceeding with the arrest of some more patsy “terrorist plotters” in Florida. Yawn.

Miami men accused of discussing attacks

By Michael Christie

Seven people arrested in Miami discussed attacks on the landmark Sears Tower in Chicago, the FBI building in Miami and other government buildings in a mission "just as good or greater" than September 11, U.S. officials said on Friday.

But Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told a news conference in Washington that the plotting of the seven, who were called part of a "a home-grown terrorism cell," never went beyond the earliest planning stages.

"There was no immediate threat," Gonzales said, acknowledging the defendants never had any contact with al Qaeda and did not have any weapons. "They didn't have the materials required."

An indictment handed up against the men by a grand jury in south Florida said they pledged loyalty to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda in order to "wage war" against the U.S. government and build an Islamic army.

It said at least one of them plotted to blow up the 110-story Sears Tower, the tallest building in the United States.

But Deputy FBI Director John Pistole said at the Justice Department news conference that the discussions to attack the Sears Tower were "aspirational rather than operational."

Gonzales emphasized there was no immediate threat to the Sears Tower or the five government buildings in the Miami area.

The men, named as Narseal Batiste, Patrick Abraham, Stanley Grant Phanor, Naudimar Herrera, Burson Augustin, Lyglenson Lemorin and Rotschild Augustine, were due to appear in a Miami magistrate's court later on Friday.

Justice Department officials said five were Americans and two were from Haiti, and that one of the two Haitians was in the country illegally.

'WE ARE NOT TERRORISTS'

The defendants thought they were discussing the attacks with a member of al Qaeda, but in reality the person was an informant cooperating with the FBI, the officials said.

They were arrested on Thursday after heavily armed FBI agents and other law enforcement agencies swooped on a warehouse in one of Miami's poorest neighborhoods, Liberty City, a predominantly black area that has witnessed some of Miami's worst race riots.

A man identified as a member of the "Seas of David" religious group told CNN on Thursday that five of his fellow members were among those arrested and that they had no connection to terrorists.

"We are not terrorists. We are members of David, Seas of David," said the man, identified as Brother Corey. He said the group had "soldiers" in Chicago, but reiterated it was peaceful movement. Miami media said the group of men sold hair grease and shampoo in the streets. Some worked on construction crews.

The indictment said all of the defendants also referred to themselves as "Brothers."

It said one of the men, Batiste, told an FBI informant he believed to be an al Qaeda representative that he wanted to attend a training camp with some of his "soldiers" and wage a "full ground war" against the United States.

Their aim was to "'kill all the devils we can' in a mission that would 'be just as good or greater than 9/11,' beginning with the destruction of the Sears Tower," according to the indictment.

A parade through Miami to celebrate the victory by the Miami Heat team in the National Basketball Association championship, expected to attract about 200,000 people, was still due to go ahead on Friday and the authorities stressed that citizens were never at risk.

It was unclear what impact if any the arrests might have on public opinion ahead of mid-term congressional elections in November, and amid a deep slump in President George W. Bush's popularity and in public support for the Iraq war.

These poor patsies, probably mind control victims (see the interesting quotes in some wire service reports from neighbors who described the young men as “brainwashed”), were clearly set up by the FBI informant in an operation reminiscent of the recent arrests in Canada which, after the initial fear-mongering headlines, ended up being a laughingstock.

Once you read the details, you realize how flimsy the so-called “plot” was. No doubt the plot would not have existed at all without the informant. But that doesn’t matter when you are running a psychological operation on the U.S. public. All that matters is the headline, repeated endlessly over the last day.

There is also the leak of selected parts of the Pentagon’s chemical weapons report, widely trumpeted by buffoonish Senator Rick Santorum:

New intel report reignites Iraq arms fight

By Katherine Shrader, Associated Press Writer

Fri Jun 23, 3:33 AM ET

Hundreds of chemical weapons found in Iraq were produced before the 1991 Gulf War and probably are so old they couldn't be used as designed, intelligence officials said Thursday.

Two lawmakers — Sen. Rick Santorum (news, bio, voting record), R-Pa., and House Intelligence Chairman Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich. — on Wednesday circulated a one-page summary of a military intelligence report that says coalition forces have recovered about 500 munitions with mustard or sarin agents, and more could be discovered around Iraq. "We now have found stockpiles," Santorum asserted.

But intelligence officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the subject's sensitive nature, said the weapons were produced before the 1991 Gulf War and there is no evidence to date of chemical munitions manufactured since then. They said an assessment of the weapons concluded they are so degraded that they couldn't now be used as designed.

They probably would have been intended for chemical attacks during the Iran-Iraq War, said David Kay, who headed the U.S. weapons-hunting team in Iraq from 2003 until early 2004.

He said experts on Iraq's chemical weapons are in "almost 100 percent agreement" that sarin nerve agent produced from the 1980s would no longer be dangerous.

"It is less toxic than most things that Americans have under their kitchen sink at this point," Kay said.

And any of Iraq's 1980s-era mustard would produce burns, but it is unlikely to be lethal, Kay said.

Asked about the potential danger to U.S. troops, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said: "They are weapons of mass destruction. They are harmful to human beings. And they have been found."

The newly declassified military intelligence report was released Wednesday by National Intelligence Director John Negroponte. Santorum and Hoekstra had urged him to release the report this week during congressional debates on Iraq.

The senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee questioned the timing of the report's release. "What worries me is that the intelligence community — Ambassador Negroponte in particular — may be playing a partisan role in the 2006 election," California Rep. Jane Harman (news, bio, voting record) said.

Hoekstra said the document is not a "smoking gun." But he hinted that the chemical agents could be significant because they may have been added to the discovered artillery shells after the first Gulf War. He noted that one of the declassified findings says the munitions could be lethal.

"David Kay says anything produced prior to 1991 is not lethal anymore, so what is the discrepancy here?" Hoekstra said. "I am 100 percent sure if David Kay had the opportunity to look at the reports that describe these things, he would agree with the finding that ... these things are lethal and deadly."

Intelligence officials said the munitions were found in ones, twos and maybe slightly larger collections over the past couple of years. One official conceded that these pre-Gulf War weapons did not pose a threat to the U.S. military before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. They were not maintained or part of any organized program run by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

There is no evidence that insurgents have found the chemical munitions. But one official said that insurgents have improvised conventional weapons, so they could apply similar creativity with the vintage weapons.

The funny thing is the article keeps referencing "1980s-era chemical weapons" without mentioning that they were sold to Saddam Hussein by none other than Donald Rumsfeld himself! See the following by Wayne Madsen:

June 23, 2006 -- The "swift boating" of Army counterintelligence personnel who blew the whistle on Rumsfeld's/Carlyle's Iraqi WMDs and prisoner torture in Iraq. In 2003, Frank Greg Ford, a 32-year veteran of military and counter-intelligence assignments, served in Samara with the 223rd Military Intelligence Battalion of the California National Guard during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Samara is the ancient capital of Mesopotamia, Ford and Dave DeBatto. a former US Army Counterintelligence Special Agent who was assigned in 2003 to Iraq, took part in thousands of interrogations in Iraq. Ford revealed details of U.S. torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, a tactic that resulted in an aggravation of the Iraqi insurgency. DeBatto found evidence of an even greater crime, the provision of deadly nerve agents to Saddam Hussein by Ronald Reagan, his envoy Donald Rumsfeld, and George H. W. Bush.

DeBatto and Ford also stumbled across evidence that the only WMDs, nerve agents that had deteriorated over the years, had been supplied to Iraq by the Reagan and Bush I administrations for their war against Iran. Reagan's Special Envoy to Saddam Hussein, Donald Rumsfeld, worked out the deal to supply the WMDs to Iraq. It is these components, known to various UN weapons inspection teams and counter-intelligence teams like those of DeBatto and Ford, that are the subject of Sen. Rick Santorum's and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Peter Hoekstra's proclamation, ballyhooed by Sean Hannity, that the weapons of mass destruction have been discovered in Iraq. These weapons are made in America, supplied by Carlyle, and were known to Rumsfeld as well as senior members of the Bush I and II administrations, including Dick Cheney.

In December 2004, a right-wing organization based in McLean, Virginia, "Veriseal.org," which is tied to other "swift boating" type organizations went on the attack against Ford and DeBatto. They claim that Ford, a former Navy corpsman, never served with the Navy SEALS and had manufactured his record. The site also castigated DeBatto for writing a fictional book on Army counter-intelligence. The swift boating of veterans by a group of mysteriously-funded cranks operating from a P.O. Box near CIA headquarters in Langley is part of a general policy by the right-wing to debase any veteran who questions the illegal war in Iraq and the other outrages of the neo-cons.

And we can add to campaign to re-elect Republicans and keep Bush out of jail the fear campaign and war games targeting North Korea. It looks like the entire political establishment is calling for an attack on North Korea to destroy the missile that can supposedly hit the United States. Here is Walter Mondale, former Vice President and former Ambassador to Japan:

Mondale backs pre-emptive missile strike

Former Vice President Walter Mondale said Friday he supports a pre-emptive U.S. strike against a North Korean missile, saying the U.S. should tell North Korea to dismantle the missile or "we are going to take it out."

"I think it would end the nuclear long-range dreams of this dangerous country," said Mondale, who was the 1984 Democratic presidential nominee and a former U.S. ambassador to Japan.

The tensions are over North Korea's apparent preparations to test-fire a Taepodong-2 missile, which is believed to have a range of up to 9,300 miles. That would make it capable of hitting much of the U.S. mainland.

Mondale, 78, said North Korea already has nuclear weapons and its ambition to develop a long-range missile is "one of the most dangerous developments in recent history." It's so dangerous, he said, because of the nation's isolation from the international community and its unpredictable leader, Kim Jong Il.

"Here's this bizarre, hermit kingdom over there with a paranoid leader getting ready to test a missile system that can hit us," Mondale said.

Former President Clinton's defense secretary, William Perry, also advocated a pre-emptive strike in The Washington Post, but National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley brushed aside Perry's suggestion. Mondale spoke about a pre-emptive strike during an appearance on WCCO-AM in Minneapolis.

Mondale and President Jimmy Carter took office in 1976 and were defeated by Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980. Mondale lost as the Democratic presidential nominee in 1984. He was appointed ambassador to Japan in 1993 and is now practicing law in Minneapolis.

Thanks, Mondale, for cooperating with Karl Rove’s psyop campaign! Idiot.

Maybe They Won’t Bomb Iran

More evidence to support the thesis that Iran’s natural allies are Israel and the United States. The find announced today by professional liars at the Pentagon of fake evidence on a laptop supposedly containing the plans of the fake “al-Qaeda” contains a startling announcement.

First, the find is clearly as fake as “Al-Zarqawi.” Whenever the U.S. “find” an insurgent or al-Qaeda laptop, you know it’s fake. The importance, though, is that the contents indicate the new direction of U.S. propaganda and psyops. You can tell this by the revelation that the fake “insurgents” to whom the laptop supposedly belonged think the situation of the insurgency is “gloomy.” Now that is surely a projection, since if anyone should feel gloomy it should be the U.S. the U.K. and their local collaborators in Iraq. In fact, the seized laptop’s documents seem to parallel Bush’s talking points on Iraq:

The al-Qaida document said its insurgency was being hurt by an increase in U.S.-trained Iraqi forces, by widespread arrests and seizures of weapons, and by a crackdown on financial outlets.

However, the laptop also detailed a supposed strategy of the fake “al-Qaeda” to foment a war between Iran and the United States!

That, to me, is good news, since it means the United States is backing away from confrontation with Iran and taking steps towards a covert alliance with Iran. Iran will get under the table security guarantees from the U.S., and strong influence in Iran through their connections with Iraqi Shiite leadership, who in turn will get a firmer grip on Iraq. This will help the United States to hold onto Iraq (one main objective) and to keep it mired in civil war (the other main objective). The Iranians can pledge that the Shiites will not start attacking U.S. forces in Iraq.

The oil interests who put Bush in power will get high oil prices without having to suffer the complete collapse of the U.S. empire that would have followed an attack on Iran. It must be a hard pill for George Jr. and the Israeli neocons to swallow, but, so far, the interests of oil producers and the Anglo-American oil companies trumps neocon ideology. Even Iran has an interest in supressing Iraqi oil production, so they benefit as well.

The United States military and political leadership may finally be coming to grips with the fact that they are close to military defeat in Iraq.

More Coincidence Theory

Found this in Juan Cole’s blog:

Al-Hayat reports on the political atmosphere in Iran. It says that the circle of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad does not expect an escalation to war with the US. One official said that the crisis could pass if the US specified a "reasonable level of enrichment" that Iran could carry out on uranium for its peaceful nuclear energy program. Another joked that there was not need for the US to invade Iran. He said that the US had invaded Afghanistan and established an Islamic republic there. Then it had done the same thing in Iraq. Since Iran has had an Islamic republic for 27 years, he said, there really isn't a point in a US invasion. [It is a joke but there is much truth to it. The Northern Alliance that the US installed in Afghanistan is a coalition of the Sunni Jami'at-i Islami and the Hazara Shiite Hizb-i Vahdat. And in Iraq, you now have the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Da'wa Party, not to mention the Sunni Iraqi Accord Front, as the leading parties, and the new constitution forbids legislation contradicting Islamic law.] The Iranian officials also said that the US is depending on Iranian cooperation in its hopes for a troop draw-down in Iraq.

Now why, if the U.S. claims to be fighting “Islamic extremism” is it busy spending billions of our money and millions of lives setting up radical Islamicist regimes? Think about that for a while.

Not only that, but the U.S. has been toppling secular Arab regimes. Now pay no attention to the fact that all this has been a long-term strategy of Israel. That’s just a coincidence.

False Flag Week

Some weeks the false-flag psyops lies get too much to take. Last week was one of those weeks.

First there was an “al-Qaeda” (or “al-CIAduh” as Kurt Nimmo puts it) terror plot broken up in Canada, conveniently timed to reinforce police state plans by the new Neocon Prime Minister. The whole thing is so ridiculous. I recommend Xymphora’s analysis. See this and this and this and this. He or she is Canadian and so knows a lot more than I do about the various agencies, etc.

Here are some highlights:

It will be entertaining to watch the case against the 17 ‘terrorist’ suspects arrested by police in Toronto slowly unravel. We’ve been down this same road before, with the post-September 11 arrest of 19 suspected terrorists in Toronto, a case which fell apart. There is already a page of doubts on the latest arrests at YayaCanada.com. The main crux of the official case, the fact that the ‘terrorists’ ordered a large quantity of fertilizer, has been revealed to be a police sting operation, something the police didn’t bother to mention when they crowed about the arrests. Isn’t it just a bit odd that, in this day and age, ‘terrorists’ living in downtown Toronto would think they could get away with ordering tons of ammonium nitrate without attracting any official attention? All the alleged terrorist equipment they had will have innocent explanations (cell phones?; soldering irons?; walkie-talkies?), with the exception of the handgun, which will probably end up leaving a net result of one minor firearms charge.

And,

The Official Story on the 17 arrested ‘terrorists’ in Toronto shifted from no mention of a police sting operation, to a report by the Toronto Star, which seems to have all the sources on this matter, that the supply of the tons of fertilizer was a RCMP sting, to a denial that it was a sting. The Official Story is now the heroic one that the RCMP intercepted the shipment and replaced the dangerous fertilizer with an non-dangerous substance. Obviously, some bigwig at the RCMP realized that the sting story would be used by lawyers for the defendants, and ordered that a safer story be spread. Rapid changes in the Official Story is a sure sign of official shenanigans.

CSIS has an unfortunate history of using informants. In the late 80’s, the terrorist threat du jour was extreme right-wing terrorism. CSIS hired a man named Grant Bristow to infiltrate right-wing groups. He did such a good job that he almost ended up as the leader, and how far he went in fitting in with his extremist pals is till the subject of controversy. Unfortunately for CSIS, there were no right-wing extremist groups to speak of in Canada prior to Bristow. There were a few loud-mouths with no money and essentially no followers. Some of the money supplied by CSIS was used to fund the main group, the Heritage Front. CSIS was therefore the founder of right-wing extremism in Canada!

…You can see how this operation works. The government finds a particularly loud hot head, and puts an informant in close to him. The informant steers him to more and more radical positions, at least rhetorically. He forms a group, which becomes the ‘terrorist cell’. The end game is to suggest that the informant can obtain some contraband, like fertilizer, and the shipment of the fertilizer is the end of the sting. The hot head may in fact not even be aware of the fertilizer (in this case, a younger member of the group is alleged to have purchased it), or have no bad plans for it, but he, and by extension his group, and suddenly in jail as ‘terrorists’. Everything they own is depicted as part of a terrorist attack, and everything they have done is a ‘training exercise’.

And,

Every summer, young Canadian men head for the woods to drink beer and shoot guns at things. Except (perhaps) for the beer, young Muslim Canadian men do the same thing. Once you are labeled a ‘terrorist’, all the innocent stupidities turn into something sinister. There is a history in this area of rushing to judgment based on the wild imaginations of police and the media.

It is becoming obvious that CSIS found a hot-headed leader, and took its time to cultivate the leader and his ‘cell’, probably through guidance from an insider informant who carefully developed all most the radical ideas, up to and including the RCMP-supplied fertilizer. The reason CSIS didn’t act more quickly is that it needed to build up the group to the extent where it could use it to form the basis for requests for more money and power. It is completely ridiculous to believe that the group wasn’t aware that it was being watched, since the Muslim community was completely aware. What kind of group carries on its activities knowing it is being watched by the police? The kind of group that knows it is doing nothing wrong.

Then there was the fake killing of the already dead fake “Al-Zarqawi.” See Joe Quinn’s piece in the Signs of the Times for some interesting observations on how the story doesn’t add up.

Bush has the gall to "hail" the killing of Zarqawi while simultaneously asserting that nothing will change in Iraq. We are repeatedly told that Zarqawi was the "mastermind of sectarian attacks in Iraq", but now that he is dead, absolutely nothing will change, the attacks will continue.

Bush states all of this with the surety of a man that knows exactly who is carrying out the attacks in Iraq and that he can count on them to continue.

Do not, even for one second, be foolish enough to think that the timing of Zarqawi's death was anything but a carefully planned operation designed to force the American people to find new faith in the righteousness of the war on non-existent Islamic terror, and thereby prop up the failed state that is America under the Bush administration.

The official file on Zarqawi, whose real name was Ahmad Fadil al-Khalayleh, tells us that he was born in Jordan. Barely literate, he became a petty criminal until the call to arms came with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. After his time in the terror training camps of Afghanistan Zarqawi returned to his home with a radical Islamist agenda. The intersting part of his file, the part that is generally omitted from such reports, is that the training camps in Afghanistan before and during the soviet invasion of that country that Zarqawi attended, were funded and run by the CIA, making Zarqawi and others like him, assets of the US government.

… Zarqawi was on the CIA's books for over twenty years and when the Neocons came to power in 2000, they immediately went about the task of gathering together a group of likely fundamentlist Islamic patsies to take the rap for the Neocon's planned war on fake Islamic terrorism.

On Wednesday morning at 6am, a U.S. airforce F-16 dropped two 500lb bombs on a single isolated safehouse outside the city of Baqubah, 30 miles northwest of Baghdad, where, we are told, Zarqawi was staying with 5 comrades. In doing so, the NeoCons sacrificed a valuable 'Islamic terrorist' bogeyman. That is not to say, however, that Zarqawi was actually in that "safe house".

As Craig Unger reported in his Vanity Fair article yesterday, during the 70's and 80's, Neocons like Michael Ledeen made something of an artform out of inventing stories of Communist threats to America. In our 'New American Century', these skills of the Neocons are being put to use in inventing equally bogus stories about Islamic terrorism. In Zarqawi, we had a creation of people like Michael Ledeen. As such, there is no reason to believe that Zarqawi was actually in that "safe house", or that he has been in Iraq in recent years.

Have you ever seen the effects of a 500lb bomb? Have you ever seen the effects of two? Generally, such bombs will obliterate everything in the immediate vicinity leaving a large crater at the site of the bombing and cause extensive damage over a wide area. Take the opportunity to watch the video on CNN of the bombing. Notice the extent of the massive explosion.

… Now look at the … image of Zarqawi who, we are told, was in the house at the time these two massive pieces of ordenance were dropped, essentially on his head.

An abrasion on his cheek and a cut on his forehead and above his left eye. All of which leads us to conclude that either 'al-Zarqawi' really was a super human Islamic terrorist or someone in the US government thinks we are all very, very stupid.

Someone in the Signs of the Times Forum suggested that the fake “Al-Zarqawi” had to be eliminated in order to make room for a new bogey-man, one who will no doubt be Iranian:

Well, Zarqawi is Jordanian and was formenting sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shiites. This is inconvenient because we have no immediate plans to invade Jordan. It would be much better if sectarian violence came from Iran, not Jordan. To do this we need to kill off Zarqawi.

…Sure enough, in the second half hour [of the Today Show], Matt Lauer was interviewing the NBC "terrorism expert" Roger Cressey (he is one of the talking heads that NBC trots out whenever they need a talking head to wax on about the war of terror), and sure enough, near the end, Matt mentions the possibility that Iran may step in to continue activism in the sectarian violence. Cressey says "maybe" and the subject is dropped. However, the seed is planted!

How convenient. The new story line is only hours old and already the MSM is falling in line.

So the new story is:

Zarqawi is dead.

Sectarian violence continues.

Gee, whiz, we discover that it seems like Iran is supporting the Shiites.

This undermines the impact of their cooperation on the Nuclear Enrichment issue.

We (i.e. the USA) get to say to the world and Russia and China in particular "see we told you so!"

Sanctions are imposed, with terms and conditions that are impossible to meet.

Iran does not meet the conditions because of that impossibility.

We bomb them.

Iran sends missles into Haifa.

We nuke them.

That is the plan, anyway.

Jeff Rense Exposed

The whole Jeff Rense thing (not just his wig) has always seemed a little weird. When a supposed dissident alternative news source clearly has big-time funding, there should always be suspicion of some kind of fake opposition psy-op. His site even got mentioned by the U.S. State Department disclaimer about “conspiracy theory.” Then there’s the constant vectoring towards nativism and away from the Pentagon and 911.

Now Lisa Guiliani has exposed Rense as a fraud for extensive lying on his resume. Thanks to Lisa for giving the truth to lies.

Here is an excerpt:

Patsy Smullin has run KOBI-TV for the last 30 years, and her father founded it. If anybody would have known Jeff Rense and the supposed 5,000 newscasts he claims to have made, it would be Patsy.

As it happens, Patsy Smullin does remember Jeff Rense, and in two different telephone conversations I had with her over the past few days, she confirmed that he did have a position at her television station for a brief time as a reporter and news anchor. Smullin stressed that Jeff Rense, or “a guy calling himself Jeff Rense” (her words), was employed at KOBI (an NBC affiliate) from June 1983 to May 1984, and she is not aware of him working at any other station in the state of Oregon either prior to his employment at KOBI-TV or afterward. [I would think if he'd worked at other stations previous to his KOBI position, these would be listed on his job application or resume when given to KOBI-TV.]

Patsy had more to say. She revealed that in her experience as Jeff Rense’s employer (and this is a direct quote), “He was not known for his honesty.” Think about it. Patsy Smullin was Rense’s employer some twenty-odd years ago. After all this tiime, the characteristic that has remained clearly in her memory is that “he was not known for his honesty”. What does that say to you? According to Ms. Smullin, at that time Jeff was also involved in several court battles with other people. One wonders if it has anything to do with him not being known for his honesty?

When asked if she could elaborate on the comment she'd made regarding Rense not being known for his honesty, her response was: "Sure. He was a compulsive liar." Also, when questioned as to the claim that Jeff anchored and produced “5000 newscasts,” Patsy Smullin laughed heartily and stated, “This is absolutely false. He never did that here.” Okay, if not at KOBI-TV, then where? Perhaps Jeff Rense will reveal this to us all at some point so we can check it out.

But on his own website, Jeff Rense claims to have been an award winning news director and TV news anchor for 10-12 years (accounts vary). If not at KOBI, then where?