A new book entitled The Pearl Harbor Myth: Rethinking the Unthinkable by George Victor and published by Potomac Books Inc. of Washington, D.C. is well researched and gives a very clear picture of how and why the Pearl Harbor myth was created. This “patriotic political myth” states that the attack by the Japanese was unprovoked and was a surprise to the Roosevelt administration, as well as, the key military personnel in Washington; but the commanders of Pearl Harbor were at fault for not being ready. Based on a good summary of the up-to-date research the author, who is an approving admirer of Roosevelt, concludes that Roosevelt deliberately provoked the attack and that he and his key military and administrative advisers clearly knew, well in advance, that the Japanese were going to attack both Pearl Harbor and the Philippines. Roosevelt wanted to get into the European War but he had been unsuccessful in provoking Germany; therefore, he considered the sacrifice of Pearl Harbor and the Philippines as the best way to get into the European War through the back door of Japan. The cover-up of this strategy started immediately after the attack and continues to this day. The author concludes that this information of the coming attack was intentionally withheld from the military commanders because it was known that the Japanese were depending upon the element of surprise and if warnings had been sent to the commanders of Pearl Harbor and the Philippines, their preparation for the attack would have caused the Japanese to cancel their plans.
The losses and damages at Pearl Harbor are described by Victor as follows:
“In the Pearl Harbor attack, the United States lost twenty-four hundred troops along with a quarter of her fleet. Many military leaders and Knox, Hull, and Roosevelt had underestimated the harm Japan could do, even by a surprise attack. And U.S. losses were much increased by two unlikely events. A Japanese bomb penetrated the battleship Arizona’s armor at an odd angle, reaching her magazine and causing her to explode. And the torpedoed battleship Oklahoma capsized. The explosion of the Arizona and the capsizing of the Oklahoma resulted in the drowning of sixteen hundred sailors.”
The tremendous losses in the Philippines have been virtually hidden from the American public but they were mostly the native soldiers and civilians. Victor states:
“The Philippines suffered widespread destruction and was captured. Twenty-four hundred troops and seventy civilians were lost in Hawaii. In the Philippines, one hundred forty thousand troops were lost and civilian deaths – still unreported – are estimated to have been as high as three million. Nonetheless, the defeat at Pearl Harbor became a wrenching tragedy, and the administration sacrificed the commanders there to restore public confidence, while the defeat in the Philippines became a noble defense. Despite devastation and loss of the Philippines, a public relations operation turned MacArthur into a hero and he was promoted. The public reaction is not strange, however, when seen in the light of government control of information – a usual wartime practice.”
The author states that the most recent Pearl Harbor investigation by Congress in October, 2000 resulted in a resolution by Congress “calling on President William Clinton to restore the reputations of Short and Kimmel. It provoked the flurry of accusations that Congress was usurping the job of historians, revising history, and reviving a long-discredited conspiracy theory. Clinton took no action on the resolution.”
Exclusive: Though the 9/11 attacks occurred more than a decade ago, Congress continues to exploit them to pass evermore draconian laws on “terrorism,” with the Senate now empowering the military to arrest people on U.S. soil and hold them without trial, a serious threat to American liberties, says ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.
By Ray McGovern
December 3, 2011
Consortiumnews.com
Ambiguous but alarming new wording, which is tucked into the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and was just passed by the Senate, is reminiscent of the “extraordinary measures” introduced by the Nazis after they took power in 1933.
And the relative lack of reaction so far calls to mind the oddly calm indifference with which most Germans watched the erosion of the rights that had been guaranteed by their own Constitution. As one German writer observed, “With sheepish submissiveness we watched it unfold, as if from a box at the theater.”
The writer was Sebastian Haffner (real name Raimond Pretzel), a young German lawyer worried at what he saw in 1933 in Berlin, but helpless to stop it since, as he put it, the German people “collectively and limply collapsed, yielded and capitulated.”
“The result of this millionfold nervous breakdown,” wrote Haffner at the time, “is the unified nation, ready for anything, that is today the nightmare of the rest of the world.” Not a happy analogy.
The Senate bill, in effect, revokes an 1878 law known as the Posse Comitatus Act, which banned the Army from domestic law enforcement after the military had been used —and often abused — in that role during Reconstruction. Ever since then, that law has been taken very seriously — until now. Military officers have had their careers brought to an abrupt halt by involving federal military assets in purely civilian criminal matters.
But that was before 9/11 and the mantra, “9/11 changed everything.” In this case of the Senate-passed NDAA – more than a decade after the terror attacks and even as U.S. intelligence agencies say al-Qaeda is on the brink of defeat – Congress continues to carve away constitutional and legal protections in the name of fighting “terrorism.”
Detainees at Guantanamo Bay in 2002
The Senate approved the expanded military authority despite opposition from Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and FBI Director Robert Mueller – and a veto threat from President Barack Obama.
The Senate voted to authorize – and generally to require – “the Armed Forces of the United States to detain covered persons” indefinitely. And such “covered persons” are defined not just as someone implicated in the 9/11 attacks but anyone who “substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act or has directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces.”
James Corbett interviews Sibel Edmonds of BoilingFrogsPost.com about her recent article, “US-NATO-Chechen Militia Joint Operations Base.” They discuss the American financing, funding and protection of Islamic terrorists in Central Asia, the history of Turkish links with the CIA, the heart of Edmonds’ gagged whistleblower story, and the real endgame for the competing world powers in the Caucasus.
Note that governments – acting like members of organized crime – are employing terrorist acts or the threat of terrorism – to ensure access to resources they covet.
Site Administrator’s note: The same people who murdered John F. Kennedy also murdered Robert F. Kennedy. This is a news update on the patsy in the RFK Killing: Sirhan Sirhan.
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By Michael Martinez, CNN
November 27, 2011
Sirhan Sirhan is taken into custody after the fatal shooting of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in 1968
Los Angeles (CNN) — Sirhan Sirhan, convicted of the 1968 assassination of presidential candidate Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, should be freed from prison or granted a new trial based on “formidable evidence” asserting his innocence and “horrendous violations” of his rights, defense attorneys said in federal court papers filed this week.
In a U.S. District Court brief, Sirhan’s lawyers also say that an expert analysis of recently uncovered evidence shows two guns were fired in the assassination and that Sirhan’s revolver was not the gun that shot Kennedy.
Attorneys William F. Pepper and Laurie D. Dusek also allege that fraud was committed in Sirhan’s 1969 trial when the court allowed a substitute bullet to be admitted as evidence for a real bullet removed from Kennedy’s neck.
The attorneys further assert that Sirhan was hypno-programmed to be a diversion for the real assassin and allege that Sirhan would be easily blamed for the assassination because he is an Arab. Sirhan, 67, is a Christian Palestinian born in Jerusalem whose parents brought him and his siblings to America in the 1950s.
Sirhan “was an involuntary participant in the crimes being committed because he was subjected to sophisticated hypno programming and memory implantation techniques which rendered him unable to consciously control his thoughts and actions at the time the crimes were being committed,” court papers said.
The California Attorney General’s office declined to comment Saturday on Sirhan’s court filings, said spokeswoman Lynda Gledhill.
Court papers filed by Sirhan’s attorneys say the state “refuses to acknowledge that hypno programming/mind control is not fiction but reality and has been used for years by the U.S. military, Central Intelligence Agency and other covert organizations.
“Though the practices of hypno programming/mind control is hardly new, the public has been shielded from the darker side of the practice. The average person is unaware that hypnosis can and is used to induct antisocial conduct in humans,” Sirhan’s court filings say.
Pepper and Dusek represented Sirhan earlier this year in his unsuccessful request for parole from Pleasant Valley State Prison in Coalinga, California, 200 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles. He is serving a life sentence.
Sirhan was convicted of killing Kennedy and wounding five other people during the June 5, 1968, shooting inside the kitchen service pantry of the former Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
Three bullets struck Kennedy’s body while a fourth bullet passed harmlessly through the shoulder of his suit coat. Kennedy, the most seriously wounded of the six victims, died the next day. The other five people survived their wounds.
“A myth or untruth told by the Elite to preserve social harmony and the position of that Elite”
The Intel Hub
By Holland Van den Nieuwenhof – Red Dirt Report
November 28, 2011
As the writer and producer for the newly-released A Noble Lie, a documentary exposing the official lie behind the Oklahoma City bombing, I was more than interested in a recent Newsweek article that chronicles the undercover activities of John Matthews.
Matthews, disillusioned by the illegal activities and plots of violence within the circle of Right Wing extremists that he ran with, became an FBI informant and reported on their activities for years. I was intrigued at the prospect of a mainstream account of the FBI’s undercover activities against domestic terror threats in the Nineties and PATCON in particular.
PATCON, short for Patriot Conspiracy, was a very hush-hush (“PATCON will get you killed”) FBI undercover operation directed against Right Wing groups across the nation like the Texas Reserve Militia and the Civilian Military Assistance group, referred to as the CMA.
PATCON-targeted groups were implicated in stealing military hardware from bases and plotting assassinations and bombings.
Revelations about the Oklahoma City bombing by journalists, researchers and whistleblowers, as detailed in A Noble Lie, indicate that the FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the ATF, were involved in an undercover sting operation that culminated disastrously with the bombing, and the subsequent cover-up. The Oklahoma City bombing may have had its genesis in PATCON.
Frankly I was surprised that a mainstream rag like Newsweek would investigate PATCON, given the magazine’s past examples of complicity in government cover-ups and subservience to corporate interests.
I was tipped off to the upcoming article by Jesse Trentadue, an attorney from Salt Lake City, Utah and interview subject in our film, whose brother Kenneth Trentadue (warning: graphic photos) was tortured and murdered in federal custody weeks after the Oklahoma City bombing.
It was later determined that Kenneth had been killed in a case of mistaken identity, that the FBI thought he was John Doe Number 2, one of the alleged accomplices to Tim McVeigh, the convicted perpetrator.
“My Life as a White Supremacist,” put out through Newsweek’s online organ, The Daily Beast, was a far cry from a true expose of the FBI’s undercover activities against the Far Right in the Nineties.
While an interesting story of paid undercover operative John Matthews in his adrenaline-fueled escapades with haters and wanna-be terrorists, it neglects to even mention the name of the operation he was working for: PATCON.
Along comes the Sipsey Street Irregulars, a blog edited by Mike Vanderboegh, former editor of the John Doe Times. Sipsey Street has demonstrated the rising power of independent media, by collaborating with a small number of journalists and blogs to push the ATF’s Gunwalker scandal into the mediaspace and prompting some very harsh Congressional inquiries, and calls for the resignation of Attorney General Eric Holder.
Gunwalker is name given by Vanderboegh to the ATF’s Operation Fast and Furious, whereby thousands of guns were allowed by ATF agents to be purchased in the U.S. by Mexican drug cartel operatives and taken into Mexico, to be used in the deadly drug wars that have claimed tens of thousands of lives so far.
It is estimated that at least 200 Mexican soldiers and citizens have been killed by Gunwalker weapons, and two American law enforcement officers.
Attorney General Eric Holder, who authorized and Fast and Furious, refused to take responsibility for the murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry by a Gunwalker weapon.
Previously Holder, as Assistant Attorney General under Janet Reno, had been in charge of the Trentadue Mission, the Justice Department’s attempts to cover up evidence in the murder of Kenneth Trentadue.
In the SSI article written by Vanderboegh, he reveals what was gutted from the original article by Tina Brown, Editor-in-Chief at Newsweek. The leaked original shows that undercover informant John Matthews reported seeing Tim McVeigh with bombing suspect Andreas Strassmeier before the bombing.
Strassmeier was a German citizen and “former” intelligence officer who made the tour of the White Supremacist movement in the early Nineties and then settled down in a separatist community in Eastern Oklahoma called Elohim City.
Tim McVeigh is known to have made several phone calls and visits to Elohim City, despite FBI protests to the contrary. And Strassmeier was living with several members of the Aryan Republican Army, also implicated in the bombing, but their roles ignored by the FBI.
Leaked FBI teletypes obtained by Jesse Trentadue show that Andy Strassmeier was acting as an undercover informant for the government under the cloak of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which was providing information on extremist groups to the FBI. So it is very curious that Newsweek chose to cut out all references to McVeigh, Strassmeier and PATCON.
Tina Brown’s Newsweek also excised the portion of the article detailing the harrowing journey of Jesse Trentadue in his quest to find out the truth of his brother’s murder, which led to startling revelations about the OKC bombing.
The Justice Department certainly did not want Newsweek to expose its readership to the court-proven cover-up that was perpetrated in the torture and murder of an innocent man, and the flood of documents pertaining to the bombing, that Trentadue continues to expose through Freedom of Information Act battles with the FBI and CIA.
Jesse is currently suing the FBI over the videotapes on or around the stricken Murrah building that would show exactly who perpetrated the deed, and how it was done. The FBI claims that they cannot find these tapes, the most important pieces of evidence in the OKC bombing.
The fact that a mainstream media machine like Newsweek still feels it is necessary to bow to the wishes of the Justice Department over its true role in the OKC bombing demonstrates why the independent media is so relevant today.
A Noble Lie is the first full-length documentary examining the Oklahoma City bombing in the light of new and suppressed evidence that shows the official story to be a lie, from top to bottom. Released the same week as the censored Newsweek story broke, in an uncanny sense of timing and relevance that has defined its making, the film highlights the exact information that Editor-in-Chief Tina Brown deemed too sensitive for our eyes.
A Noble Lie demonstrates that McVeigh, Strassmeier and other suspects were operating under the careful eye of the FBI and ATF, and that Strassmeier was seen by a witness in the doomed Murrah Federal Building with bomb materiel. The film shows the exact documents relating to Strassmeier’s infiltration of the Texas Reserve Militia, and reported to the FBI by John Matthews, that were cut from the original Newsweek article.
From the beginning of the making of this film, we have been committed to presenting the real history of the bombing, to ask the questions that need to be asked for the sake of the victims, and for the sake of freedom in this country.
The ongoing Gunwalker scandal demonstrates the capacity of the Justice Department to tolerate outrageous crimes in order to pursue a political end. Operation Fast and Furious has already killed more people than the Oklahoma City bombing, and is receiving front page headlines across America. Did Operation PATCON kill 168 people in Oklahoma City, including nineteen children?
By Pepe Escobar
November 22, 2011
Asia Times Online
Last week, independent journalist Sam Husseini went to a news conference by Prince Turki al-Faisal of Saudi Arabia at Washington’s National Press Club – where Husseini is a member.
Then he did something that is alien to United States corporate media culture. He behaved as an actual journalist and asked a tough, pertinent, no-holds-barred question. Here it is, as relayed by Husseini’s blog:
I want to know what legitimacy your regime has, sir. You come before us, representative of one of the most autocratic, misogynistic regimes on the face of the earth. Human Rights Watch and other reports of torture, detention of activists, you squelched the democratic uprising in Bahrain, you tried to overturn the democratic uprising in Egypt and indeed you continue to oppress your own people. What legitimacy does your regime have – other than billions of dollars and weapons? [1]
Prince Turki, former Saudi intelligence supremo, former pal of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, former Saudi ambassador to the US, reacted by changing the subject. [2]
Were this to happen in the Middle East, Husseini would have been duly kidnapped by Saudi intel, tortured and snuffed out. Ask the remains of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. For much less – saying out loud in an Arab League meeting that King Abdullah was a traitor, because he was encouraging the George W Bush administration to invade Iraq – the House of Saud did everything in its power, for years, to make sure Gaddafi was taken out.
Turki exhibits all the trademark democratic credentials of the House of Saud. He refers to the push for democracy in the Arab world as “Arab Troubles”.
After the Turki shoot
According to Husseini, on the same day of the news conference he received “a letter informing me that I was suspended from the National Press Club ‘due to your conduct at a news conference’. The letter, signed by the executive director of the club, William McCarren, accused me of violating rules prohibiting ‘boisterous and unseemly conduct or language’.”
By Pepe Escobar
November 11, 2011
Asia Times Online
Get ready for a flurry of fuzzy satellite ”intelligence” of generic warehouses all across Iran frantically described as segments of a nuclear bomb assembly line (Remember a famous ”secret nuclear facility” in Syria not long ago? It was a textile factory.)
Get ready for a flurry of crude diagrams depicting suspect devices, or the containers that hide them, all capable of reaching Europe in 45 minutes.
Get ready for a flurry of ”experts” on Fox, CNN and the BBC endlessly dissecting all this extended black ops dressed up as ”evidence”. For instance, former UN weapons inspector David Albright, now at the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), has already pulled his return of the living dead stunt, displaying his ”bomb Iran” credentials complete with diagrams and satellite intel.
Forget Iraq – it’s sooo 2003. Hit the new groove; hyping overdrive for the war on Iran.
Turning Japanese
First of all, ditch common sense.
If Iran were developing a nuclear weapon, it would be diverting uranium for it. The report released by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) this week – as politicized as it may be – flatly denies it.
If Iran were developing a nuclear weapon, UN inspectors working for the IAEA would have been thrown out of the country.
Iraq did not have a nuclear weapons program in 2002. And yet it was shocked and awed. The same rationale applies to Iran.
What Tehran may have conducted – if the compromised intel used in the IAEA report is to be believed – is a bunch of experiments and computer simulations. Everybody does it – for instance countries which have renounced the bomb, such as Brazil and South Africa.
What the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) – in charge of the civilian nuclear program – certainly wants is a deterrent.
That is, the possibility of building up a nuclear bomb in case they face an unequivocally established threat of regime change, provoked, most likely, by a US attack and invasion.
Doubts swirl about the competence – or the impartiality – of the new IAEA head, the meek Japanese Yukya Amano. The best answer is in this WikiLeaks cable.
As for the origin of most of the IAEA’s self-described ”credible” intel, even the New York Times was forced to report that ”some of that information came from the United States, Israel and Europe.” Gareth Porter offers the definitive debunking of the report.
Moreover, expect major pressure on the CIA to renege the crucial 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), which established – irrefutably – that Tehran had ditched a nuclear weapons program way back in 2003.
All this dovetails with the dogs of war already barking.
Police forces like those seen here at Occupy Oakland on October 26th, 2011, are part of a national trend toward using military-style tactics and weapons. (photo: JP Dorbin/iOccupyWallStreet)
By Arthur Rizer and Joseph Hartman
The Atlantic
09 November 11, 2011
Over the past 10 years, law enforcement officials have begun to look and act more and more
like soldiers. Here’s why we should be alarmed.”
At around 9:00 a.m. on May 5, 2011, officers with the Pima County, Arizona, Sheriff’s Department’s Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team surrounded the home of 26-year-old José Guerena, a former US Marine and veteran of two tours of duty in Iraq, to serve a search warrant for narcotics. As the officers approached, Guerena lay sleeping in his bedroom after working the graveyard shift at a local mine. When his wife Vanessa woke him up, screaming that she had seen a man outside the window pointing a gun at her, Guerena grabbed his AR-15 rifle, instructed Vanessa to hide in the closet with their four-year-old son, and left the bedroom to investigate.
Within moments, and without Guerena firing a shot – or even switching his rifle off of “safety” – he lay dying, his body riddled with 60 bullets. A subsequent investigation revealed that the initial shot that prompted the SWAT team barrage came from a SWAT team gun, not Guerena’s. Guerena, reports later revealed, had no criminal record, and no narcotics were found at his home.
Sadly, the Guerenas are not alone; in recent years we have witnessed a proliferation in incidents of excessive, military-style force by police SWAT teams, which often make national headlines due to their sheer brutality. Why has it become routine for police departments to deploy black-garbed, body-armored SWAT teams for routine domestic police work? The answer to this question requires a closer examination of post-9/11 US foreign policy and the War on Terror.
Ever since September 14, 2001, when President Bush declared war on terrorism, there has been a crucial, yet often unrecognized, shift in United States policy. Before 9/11, law enforcement possessed the primary responsibility for combating terrorism in the United States. Today, the military is at the tip of the anti-terrorism spear. This shift appears to be permanent: in 2006, the White House’s National Strategy for Combating Terrorism confidently announced that the United States had “broken old orthodoxies that once confined our counterterrorism efforts primarily to the criminal justice domain.”
In an effort to remedy their relative inadequacy in dealing with terrorism on US soil, police forces throughout the country have purchased military equipment, adopted military training, and sought to inculcate a “soldier’s mentality” among their ranks. Though the reasons for this increasing militarization of American police forces seem obvious, the dangerous side effects are somewhat less apparent.
Undoubtedly, American police departments have substantially increased their use of military-grade equipment and weaponry to perform their counterterrorism duties, adopting everything from body armor to, in some cases, attack helicopters. The logic behind this is understandable. If superior, military-grade equipment helps the police catch more criminals and avert, or at least reduce, the threat of a domestic terror attack, then we ought deem it an instance of positive sharing of technology – right? Not necessarily. Indeed, experts in the legal community have raised serious concerns that allowing civilian law enforcement to use military technology runs the risk of blurring the distinction between soldiers and peace officers.
“A myth or untruth told by the Elite to preserve social harmony and the position of that Elite”