Twain's Ghost

Will the Real Al Qaeda Please Stand Up?

"Beware the Green Menace!" Cue Dramatic Music

Some of the most significant mysteries regarding Al Qaeda may not involve bin Laden's perennially vague whereabouts, the latest purported Al Qaeda message broadcast on Al Jazeera or the nature of Al Qaeda's purported evolution from an organization per se to an ideology. They may involve questions regarding the very authorship of Al Qaeda. They may involve questions much closer to home.

It is well known, if widely ignored and explained-away, that Osama Bin Laden was one of the CIA's mujahideen "Afghan Arabs" that it used to battle the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. As late as July 2001, two months before 9/11, the CIA was publicly in contact with Osama Bin Laden when he was a patient at the American Hospital in Dubai. The supposed estranged nature of Osama's relationship with his Saudi relatives has been doubtful at best. His 9/11-confession tape is readily questionable.

But if the conventional picture painted of Al Qaeda as America's desperate and implacable enemy is questionable, then what exactly is Al Qaeda? Well, the first problem, perhaps, to get out of the way is the black vs. white matter. In other words, an underlying assumption in debates (such as they are) regarding the Official vs. the competing 9-11 conspiracy theories is the idea that Al Qaeda is our sworn enemy in a straightforward way and it committed 9-11 or the U.S. government really orchestrated all these things and Al Qaeda is not a real enemy. But Al Qaeda can be real and something else altogether at the same time. What should be kept in mind is that in the world of covert operations, up is down, black is white - it is a virtual not-so-funhouse of mirrors. The point is that Al Qaeda, or especially its smaller lights and foot soldiers, may in fact be very serious about being an enemy of the United States and all things non-Islamo-fascist at the very same time that the organization or many of its cells may in fact be controlled by Western (including U.S., British, German, Italian, and Israeli) intelligence agencies. That Al Qaeda is now more diverse, and, some say, nearly an ideology as opposed to a centralized organization, would only make it easier for covert operators to manipulate enough of it to shape perceptions as well as events and trends.

This notion of Al Qaeda's realness being taken at face value and thus used as proof in itself of the non-U.S. government authorship of 9-11 is not only promoted by the usual suspects in the illiberal media, but also by self-described leftist critics of the going order. For instance, in the October 2007 issue of Z Magazine, Alternative Radio host David Barsamian spewed discredit on the 9-11 truth movement, thus:

There are certain what I hesitate to call schools of thought in the United States, Canada and elsewhere that say that it was not bin Laden and al-Qa'ida that carried out the attacks on September 11. Is there any doubts in your head that it was, in fact, bin Laden and al-Qa'ida?

To which his interviewee, Abdel Bari Atwan, editor-in-chief of the London-based Arabic daily newspaper, Al-Quds al-Arabi, replied:

From day one I said it is most likely the work of al-Qa'ida because I knew they were planning something really big (…) all the indications are clearly that al-Qa'ida did it.

Notice how "Al Qaeda did it" is conflated with "Al Qaeda did it all by itself from a cave in Afghanistan." Barsamian failed to mention, if he is even aware of it, that the evidence shows that al-Qa'ida is certainly connected to these things, but that the reality of Al Qaeda as advertised and to whom and what it is connected are the relevant questions. However, with one smarmy sweep of his hand, Barsamian has dismissed all of the evidence that Al Qaeda is in fact fake (in that it is connected to and manipulated by Western intelligence and police agencies) AND guilty of terrorism. This sort of either/or-ism is part and parcel of the mainstream (and leftist) dismissals in defense of the Official Conspiracy Theory. But in fact it is a form of stupidity that should be self-evident to the reader.

Al Qaeda, 'the base', (or, 'the toilet', according to some sources, perhaps half seriously) is the Arabic name given by western intelligence agencies to a computer database of Jihadis trained and armed by the United States and its allies to fight the Soviets in the 1980s. The former British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, revealed this in July 2005. A month later he passed away unexpectedly.

A database?!

Emad Ali Salem, a former high-ranking Egyptian military intelligence officer and FBI informant, facilitated the Al Qaeda-authored1993 World Trade Center, providing safe houses where plans were made and bombs manufactured. He also provided weapons to the plotters. The FBI knew well in advance that the plans were active and the bombs already made.

Ali Mohamed [pdf] a former Egyptian army major, has been an active co-conspirator in all of Al Qaeda's terrorist acts (as far as we know), successful and unsuccessful, except for the U.S.S. Cole bombing and 9/11, including:

· The November 5, 1990 assassination of Zionist extremist Rabbi Meir Kahane
· The February 26, 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center
· The June 24, 1993 New York "Landmarks" foiled bomb plot
· The August 7, 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania

During much of this time, Mohamed ran an Al Qaeda cell from his Santa Clara, California home. Tellingly, Mohamed has had quite a career working with and for U.S. military, law enforcement and intelligence agencies, including:

· The U.S. Army special forces at Fort Bragg, where he was eventually an officer and instructor in the 1980s
· The CIA as a mujahideen operative. In the 1980s, while he was in the U.S. Army, he took leave to go to Afghanistan to fight as an Islamic Jihadi. In the 1995 trial of WTC bomber Sheik Abdul Rahman it is discovered that Mohamed was able to enter the U.S. through a CIA-controlled special visa program even though supposedly he had long been terrorist watch list.
· The FBI as an informant in the 1990s.

Mohamed was arrested in 1998. As of July 2001, according to Peter Lance's timeline (source for this article), Ali Mohamed was in custody, to be sentenced for a number of crimes (he plead guilty to involvement in the embassy bombings). As of 2006 this U.S. Army Special Forces officer, CIA operative and FBI informant still had not been publicly sentenced and his exact location, and whether or not he was still incarcerated, was unknown.

Undermining the Official Conspiracy Theory further is the fact that on the orders of Donald Rumsfeld, the U.S. military evacuated thousands of Al Qaeda troops and their Pakistani military handlers over the Hindu Kush to the Waziristan region of Pakistan in November 2001. This is the very region that has subsequently been called the new home of Al Qaeda from which it plots more 9-11 level mayhem.

Aside from this evidence of U.S. connections to Al Qaeda terrorists, there is evidence of such connections between it and our allies, Britain and Israel. In 2005 British agents were caught by Iraqi police driving through the southern Iraqi city of Basra dressed like Arabs in a car full of weapons and explosives. Startling, you say? But wait, there's more. When the Iraqis arrested the Brits and through them in jail, the Brits responded by bulldozing the jail with a tank to set the pair free (along with other jailbirds)! Is this the nature of the so-called Al Qaeda in Iraq? Western commandos dressed like Arabs? Sound crazy? Well, it's a crazy world, so get used to it.

There was also the case of Israelis setting up a fake Al Qaeda cell (what other kind is there?) in Gaza a few years ago. The only weird thing, I suppose, is the fact they got caught!

You combine the startling and (to the U.S. and its allies) unflattering facts about the real Al Qaeda (and I have by no means listed them exhaustively) with the highly questionable nature of the official Conspiracy Theory about 9/11 starring a cave-dwelling Osama Bin Laden and 19 Arab hijackers, some of whom lived through the fireballs and tons of cascading concrete it seems, and it becomes clear that the real world is upside-down to our stage-managed perceptions.

Don't let patriotism or the pretense of it render you utterly stupid and without meaningful moral sense. Even if everyone from Bill O'Reilly to Bill Maher, ostensible opposites, rants and raves against "conspiracy theories" involving 9/11, open your mind to the facts. You will be disappointed, yes, and maybe even terrified. But no one said the truth would be easy or fun.

Fighting the Fake Fight

When Warfare-state propagandists Dress Like Critics

Loyal opposition war critic Andrew Bacevich ('Fighting the Real Fight', Los Angeles Times, November 6, 2007), writes, while claiming the Bush Administration has in effect given up on the War on Terror even while it sticks to its Iraq war guns, "once a conflict becomes an exercise in improvisation, it ceases to be meaningful. It becomes the antithesis of war - killing without purpose or moral justification."

I would argue, first, that most wars meet half that definition anyway: they kill with purpose but without moral justification. Of course, one could argue that wars often seem to be senseless given their stated purpose. However, for anyone not living in La-La-Land and steer clear of Fox news as often as they can (and who are not merely making their judgments from within the liberal/conservative nationalistic/patriotic framework) should be able to grasp the elementary fact that government's lie about their purposes, especially governments at war. This means that a war that seems, given its stated purpose, senseless might actually be rumbling along just fine according to some unstated purpose. That's why, from Democrats to Republicans (and plenty of "independents"), the assumption is that the war is well-intentioned and genuinely motivated by national security concerns if, as many Democrats and some Republicans would say, it was based on "mistaken" intelligence and is has been badly managed. Often however, the unstated purposes are nevertheless self-evident (even if the above mentioned crowd doesn't see them). Sometimes they are only guessed-at - if not by those in La-La Land.

Bacevich (who I think is sincere and whose limited criticisms are often very useful to more fundamental criticisms), being from the more-or-less liberal end of the conventional spectrum of war criticism, says, in regards to the Bush Administration's abandonment of the War on Terror, "Don't expect to hear this from the White House any time soon." And this is true of course. But one might ask what we should not expect to hear from the likes of Bacevich anyt time soon? Bacevich's kind of statements have been the sort that have become a sort of mantra of the mainstream war critics that not only has the Iraq war been merely mismanaged (not that it was in fact a seriously criminal war), but also that it has been a distraction from the "real fight", the War on Terror, with its primary focus being the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the capture of the supposed author of 9/11, Osama Bin Laden. The Bush Adminstration and the illiberal media have tried to do damage-control on this issue by exaggerating (or even manipulating) the Al Qaeda presence in Iraq (which was non-existent there before the U.S. invasion).

So let us consider the Afghan war. Is its purpose the stated purpose? That assumption is likely hard to sustain these days, except among the most hardened aficionados of the Official Conspiracy Theory and the War to Get the Bad Guys.

Once you consider an early American covert-op in Afghanistan in November 2001 that helped Pakistan-supported Al Qaeda troops to flee to Pakistan, the fakery of the war comes into focus. Why were they helped to escape? Is this not in and of itself one of the most damning facts revealing the true nature of the War on Terror?

Once you consider the fact that while the U.S. committed a relatively small (government) force to Iraq, it nevertheless dwarfs the force that was sent to the supposed central front in the War on Terror, Afghanistan, the fakery becomes even more obvious.

Then there was the Pentagon poster-boy Pat Tillman who turned out to be not only brave but also a genuine critic of the Iraq occupation. Why was he killed and why was his death covered up?

Perhaps Afghanistan is really just a must-do war, to keep up the pretense that the War on Terror is in fact just that, and not an new imperialistic war. Of course, there are realpolitik reasons for being in central asia, per Zbigniew Brzezinski's "Grand Chessboard" instruction manual.

And what about the Iraq war, what might its purpose be? Earlier in the week I discussed what I see as the intentional splitting of Iraq. The chaos in Iraq, some of it provoked, seems certain to lead to that outcome, despite U.S. claims that it really just wants to give Iraq democracy and freedom.

Bacevich is not the sort of critic as, say, Randolph Bourne was ("war is the health of the state"), nor is he the sort as Smedley Butler ("war is a racket"). Bacevich is the sort that sustains the warfare-state by being way-too-friendly sort of critic.

Defeat Al Qaeda!

When the Cold War ended, we were thrilled, for sure. But we also felt a little lost, didn't we? Who are we? Where are we? Why are we here? Why do we have the most expensive and bloated military machine in the world, sprawled across half the planet? God (and Lockheed Martin) knows. We stumbled a bit, looking for our special purpose. But then, a miracle occurred: Al Qaeda magically appeared. It was as if God knew we would have to have a reason to keep up Cold War level military spending and throw our weight around. The Project for a New American Century (a 1990s think tank filled with beloved Reaganites and Bushies, who, thank Jehovah, took power in 2000) knew this; they acknowledged that if we were to "grow" our domination of the world, it would require a "catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor." Well, from their lips to God's ears. That was in 2000. Just one year later they got their "new Pearl Harbor" - 9/11. And people say God is not on our side! So, expect miracles, but in the meantime...

Defeat Al Qaeda!

Former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook may have said in 2005 that "Al Qaeda" is not a real terrorist organization, but rather an Arabic term the CIA used to refer to its 'database' of mujahideen trained with their buddy Osama bin Laden in the 1980's, but we know that is just Old Europe raining on our parade (or, peeing on our perceptions, to put it another way). Cook died a month after saying that. Clearly Al Qaeda killed him for saying they were just a CIA computer file. And anyway, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that if you think Al Qaeda doesn't exist as such, it makes it really hard to convince yourself that we must in fact...

Defeat Al Qaeda!

The situation's so dire there's no time for liberal distractions like the fact that Ali Mohamed, former Egyptian intelligence officer and U.S. Army Green Beret, linked to the CIA (including as a jihadi in Afghanistan while he was a member of the U.S. Army), shielded by the FBI and kept as an informant, and who wrote Al Qaeda's training manual, was a trainer and guiding hand in nearly all of Al Qaeda's early operations, including: the assassination of Zionist hero Rabbi Meir Kahane in 1990 (Al Qaeda's first act), the 1993 WTC bombing, the foiled 1993 "Day of Terror" plot, the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in East Africa. (He was in U.S. custody during 9/11 and apparently remains there, publicly unsentenced.) A veritable mastermind, you might say. And just because the State Department complained that Ali remained free after many opportunities for the U.S. to grab him, it doesn't mean the U.S. government was helping him, even though it was like when the CIA gave him a special visa even though he was on a terrorist watch list. But anyway Liberals and other foreigners infiltrate the State Department! The FBI shielded him from prosecution in order to, well, do something really important for national security. The Feds want us to ignore Ali's existence, so let's ignore it, patriotically. Real patriots, like Senator Craig, don't ask and don't tell. But they do remember that we must...

Defeat Al Qaeda!

The links between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Al Qaeda were all non-existent - in that annoying liberal sort of truthy way. But after the smashing success of our invasion and occupation, the link is there now, isn't it? So stop your liberal bitching. Recall also the Iraq war might have really gone sideways if it wasn't for Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). And we mean 'sideways' in the sense that matters: an unmanageable increase in the already overwhelming public opposition to the continuation of the war. AQI saved our butts - the butts that is of the 20 to 30 % that never, ever ask why or how long when it comes to war even if it is criminal, fraudulent and badly managed. Forget that the presence of 'foreign fighters' in Iraq (other than our own) is pretty miniscule and that the operations and size of Al Qaeda in Iraq is greatly exaggerated. AQI is a menace even if it's "microscopic" according to fancy liberal experts like U.S. intelligence officers. Reality has a liberal bias, too. General David Petrayus can be believed simply because he wears a uniform: AQI is small, but big, insignificant, but important. We're fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq so we don't have to invent Al Qaeda in America and then fight them.

Remember: Al Qaeda might be a fabulous fabrication, but that doesn't mean it's not real!

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A By-Golly-You're-Right production of Citizens Against Ruining Patriotism, in cooperation with the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Formulating Popular Certainty

Splitting Iraq: The Overt and the Covert Aspects of A U.S.-Israeli Policy

It is possible the U.S. and Israel believed the Iraq/Iran War (1980-1988) - during which they were assisting both sides, prolonging and worsening the conflict - would lead to that would bring about the dissolution of the Iraqi state.

But that didn't happen. As bad as the Iran/Iraq War was (some 1 million dead), it did not lead to the break-up of Iraq. However, though the Reagan and Bush administrations continued to support Iraq (after apparently abandoning Iran in the wake of the Iran-Contra scandal) even during the period of some of its worst atrocities against the Kurds and Shiites, something shifted.

The Kuwaiti dictatorship, another U.S. ally, began to provoke the Iraqis in ways that any leader, not just Saddam Hussein, would have responded to. They began violating the border between the two countries, drilling into Iraqi oil fields. And one must remember, at the risk of sounding like a defender of Hussein, Kuwait was once a part of Iraq and was only split off by the British early on as an obvious means of controlling the Arab lands beyond.

So, anyway, the Kuwaitis were fucking with the Iraqis at a time when the post-war Iraqi economy was in sad shape. The Iraqis were pissed off. But they decided not to respond immediately to what could justifiably be considered an act of war. Instead, in April 1990, Hussein essentially asked George Bush Sr.'s U.S. ambassador at time, April Glaspie, "Hey, the Kuwaitis are fucking with us, do you care if we take care of this?" Glaspie essentially said, "We don't care." And since the U.S. had supported Iraq's invasion of Iran ten years earlier, Hussein had every reason to believe the U.S. meant it when it said it could take on Kuwait and the U.S. would support it or at least look the other way. Well, we know that history: Iraq invaded Kuwait and the U.S. went ape-shit, crying foul and claiming the Iraqis were acting atrociously. (Even though the U.S. had just six months earlier invaded Panama and killed roughly the same number of innocents there as the Iraqis had killed in Kuwait.) People bought it (sort of; opposition to the war was surprisingly broad, if ineffective in stopping it). Then came a limited war against Iraq (unless you ask the thousands of civilians killed in the U.S. air campaign), and an expulsion of its forces from Kuwait.

Story over? Well, not really. In the wake of the war the U.S. held Iraq to a deal of not pursuing weapons programs. Iraq, it was claimed, balked early on. Economic sanctions were put in place. The U.S., under a U.N. fig leaf, imposed and enforced no-fly zones on Iraq (zones which more or less corresponded with the areas to be split off from Iraq per Israel's 1982 plan).

However, Iraq actually did disarm and gave up most of its programs by the mid-1990s, just a few years after the end of Persian Gulf War. An Iraqi defector named Hussein Kamal confirmed this. The weapons inspections confirmed this. But the U.S. persisted. Economic sanctions on Iraq continued, though they killed tens of thousands. Bombings of the country continued, though they also killed many Iraqis. All under the pretext that Iraq was cheating on the WMD front. This matter came to a head in 2003 after a propaganda campaign of some ten years. Though the evidence showed Iraq was compliant, the propaganda nevertheless was so overwhelming (though, tellingly, people in and out of government were able to see through it even before the war) that the U.S. was able to maintain its benevolent pose and sell an invasion in 2002-2003, leading to a years-long occupation and countless thousands of Iraqi and some fewer American and allied deaths.

In the interim, a pretense has arisen along with a civil war: the idea, namely, that the U.S. government could not have foreseen a fragmented Iraq and certainly did not welcome it.

If you consider the possibility that the U.S. stated position of getting Iraq back on its feet may be no more than a public position used to mask an underlying agenda; and if you consider the circumstantial evidence that the U.S. and its allies have been fomenting violence in Iraq, you may find it easier to deal with the possibility that the U.S. and its allies have been seeking to facilitate, not prevent the break-up of Iraq.

The only evidence the U.S. and its allies may have been trying foment violence in Iraq came in 2005, but its nothing to sneeze at. In September of that year British agents were caught by Iraqi police driving through the southern Iraqi city of Basra dressed like Arabs in a car full of weapons and explosives. Startling, you say? But wait, there's more. When the Iraqis arrested the Brits and threw them in jail, the Brits responded by bulldozing the jail with a tank to set the pair free (along with other jailbirds)! (see this and this) Consider also that Israeli presence in northern Iraq, while hush-hush, is beyond dispute. (see this and this)

This break-up part of this agenda is not secret, but the apparent provocation part of it would be. Many U.S. officials and opinion shapers have stated the break-up-Iraq part openly. They have said, in effect, hey, we tried, but maybe Iraq is just too volatile, a lost cause, you know. Maybe it should be split into to, say, three pieces.

Now I know this sounds like bad old fashioned imperialistic hubris, dividing other people's countries, drawing new borders, etc., etc. But don't let meaning get in the way of a good patriotic feeling, right? So let's just say if the U.S. really is trying to divide Iraq, maybe it's for some benevolent reason. And since the U.S. says (and saying it must make it true) that it is not an arrogant, self-serving imperialistic state, how does it go about dividing Iraq into three pieces without looking like an arrogant, self-serving imperialistic state? Well, one good possibility is to covertly create the rational basis for it on the ground by fomenting violence and civil strife between the three groups that make up the Iraqi population: the Shiites, the Sunnis and the Kurds. If they can't live together, who are we to stand in their way? Now, of course, this violence has been mostly confined to the Shiites and the Sunnis. Perhaps this is because the Kurds essentially are already split off from the rest of Iraq. But where does this idea of splitting Iraq come from? Serioso Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden? The big thinkers in the media and think tanks? Well, not so much. Actually, the idea originated with the Israelis.

That's right. The Israelis. But you might as well holster your cynical "anti-Semite" accusation-phasers, because I can point to the evidence the Israelis came up with the divide-Iraq-into-three-pieces scheme.

In 1982, Oded Yinon, an Israeli official writes in the World Zionist Organization journal Directions: 

In Iraq, a division into provinces along ethnic/religious lines as in Syria during Ottoman times is possible. So, three (or more) states will exist around the three major cities: Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, and Shi’ite areas in the south will separate from the Sunni and Kurdish north.

Now, most recently, numerous U.S. politicians and media stars, ostensible critics of Bush's Iraq policy who are merely trying to clean up the mess and move on, have supported the idea of dividing Iraq. After so much effort on the part of the U.S. and Israel to create the conditions that would lead to a division of Iraq, it just so happens that U.S. war critics are supporting the final completion of the long-standing goal. The ideological influence of the Neocons (a weird amalgam of Christian fundamentalists and the Israeli lobby) have nothing to do with this outcome, we are to suppose.

Al-Kidda: Did an al Qaeda preteen set California fire?

My opinions tend to be, well, "un-American with a capital L", in the words of one less-than-completely-sober correspondent. So, as a service to my right-wing readers, all three of them, I decided to make space available on my blog for the views of Mr. Hobart Griggs, founding member of Citizens Against Ruining Patriotism. Over the next few weeks I will post more items by Mr. Griggs. He says his half sister Oralene gave him the line about 'al-Kidda'. -TG

Al-Kidda: Did an al Qaeda preteen set California fire?

By Hobart Griggs, CARP Guest Correspondent
October 31, 2007

It was reported today that a preteen boy "accidentally" started the Buckweed fire in Southern California while playing with matches. Some smartasses in the Islamo-liberal media suggested that this meant somehow that al Qaeda was not involved after all, despite the fact last week that Fox News said it was.

But the obvious question for real Americans is: What makes the Islamo-flaccid media think the preteen boy is not in fact a member of al Qaeda?!

They simply report that a preteen boy admitted "accidentally" starting the fire, and ipso facto, abra-freaking-cadabra, the al Qaeda link to the terror fires is suddenly out the window like a teenage boy scrambling from his girlfriend's room after her father stomps up the stairs with a Louisville slugger suffering with the knowledge that he will in fact never, ever regain his own vibrant but wasted youth.

I know, I know, some of you are thinking: preteen members of al Qaeda??

But consider the fact that there are preteens who are Muslim! Consider next the truth that there are also preteens who are un-American! There must be, anyway, since Un-Americans are still allowed to rub their [edited] together. Add a box of matches, a cheesy plot and a lot of faith and you got a story Jerry Bruckheimer could make into a major motion picture with two sequels, a prequel and a line of action figures.

Of course the namby-pamby Los Angeles DA's office is considering whether to press charges. Well, we know what the Islamo-Democrats would say! Let the boy go, he's a preteen! Boo-hoo! Ignore his ties to global terrorism because he has ADD! Boo-hoo!!

But how are we supposed to win the War On Terror if we are unwilling to prosecute preteens when the opportunity presents itself?

We can't, that's how!

Besides, it's the fear that matters, not the facts. Facts can muddy an entire mythology, to put it nicely. And myth is important! It is the great framer and motivator. The Pyramids weren't built in a day by a bunch of critical thinking, latte-drinking Islamo-factistas! If we can't understand the world and live in peace, we at least need to make up a good reason why not.

So I think for the time being, we should listen to Fox News, even if they are being pressured by Islamo-head shakers to give it up. We must patriotically assume our wackiest raghead-hatin' fantasies are true. True in a way that transcends facts. We must assume al Qaeda in fact started the fires in California with the help of a Boy Scout sleeper cell.

And if you don't believe it, then, in the words of my great friend and honorary CARPer Bill O'Reilly: "Shut up, shut up or I'll cut off your mic!"

Mr. Hobart Griggs is a proud American, he says, "from California in reality but Texas in spirit." He claims to have voted for Bush "as much as I could" and states proudly that his memory is heavily redacted. He is the founder and most of the membership of Citizens Against Ruining Patriotism (C.A.R.P.).

The CAMERA Never Lies

Unless it is the pro-Israel 'Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reports in America'

CAMERA paints false picture of Ariel Sharon’s massacre responsibility and Israeli history even as it notices Christopher Hitchens’ hypocrisy.

It is important to note that accuracy is not the aim of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reports in America (CAMERA). In its latest 'CAMERA ALERT' (January 10, 2006), CAMERA promotes the long-discredited notion that Ariel Sharon, and Israel in general, bears no responsibility for the September 1982 massacres in the Lebanese Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, and attacks a recent piece at Slate by Christopher Hitchens.

To support this notion, the writer Ricki Hollander plays a silly game with facts. She states (emphasis mine):  "Yes, there was a massacre in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, but these were not carried out by Israeli soldiers.  Christian Phalangist militia men under Elie Hobeika, operating in territory controlled by Israel, were responsible for the attack."  The first problem with this is the fact that no one, starting with the focus of Hollander's and CAMERA's wrath, Christopher Hitchens, has said Israeli soldiers took direct part in the massacre. The second problem is that she leaves out something when she admits that the Phalangists (Lebanese Christian fascists modeled on the Spanish Falangists) were "operating in territory controlled by Israel." Not only were they operating in territory controlled by Israel, damning enough as this is, they were also given access to the refugee camps by Sharon, whose troops had encircled the camps earlier. Not only that, according to the BBC documentary, 'The Accused', Ariel Sharon didn’t want the Israeli troops to enter the camps, that he specifically sent the Lebanese militia into the camps. And, asks the BBC narrator, Fergal Keanne, "Could Ariel Sharon have been in any doubt about what would have happened if you sent the Phalangists into a Palestinian refugee camp, an undefended camp?" Of course, the likely reason Sharon didn't want Israelis to enter the camps is that he and troops under his command had been caught massacring civilians twice in the past, at El-Bureig in August 1953 and at Qibya, Jordanian-occupied West Bank in October 1953.  Better to merely facilitate their Christian fascist allies to do the killing.

Hollander cites the Kahan Commission report, an Israeli government commission report that essentially exonerated Sharon and Israel. Unlike Hitchens, Hollander doesn't mention that Noam Chomsky has written a, as Hitchens put it, "mordantly brilliant critique" of that report, which has been called a cover-up and part of which remains secret. But, the Kahan report nevertheless found the following (as quoted and annotated in the Counterpunch article, 'The Crimes of Ariel Sharon', published as he rose to the peak of Israeli government power in early 2001):

"It is our view that responsibility is to be imputed to the Minister of Defense [Sharon] for having disregarded ["entirely cognizant of" would have been a better choice of words] the danger of acts of vengeance and bloodshed by the Phalangists against the population of the refugee camps, and having failed [i.e."eagerly taken this into consideration"] to take this danger into account when he decided to have the Phalangists enter the camps. In addition, responsibility is to be imputed to the Minister of Defense for not ordering appropriate measures for preventing or reducing the danger of massacre as a condition for the Phalangists' entry into the camps. These blunders constitute the non-fulfillment of a duty with which the Defense Minister was charged".

Hollander apparently cannot refute Chomsky’s argument against that report as a wrist-slapping for Sharon, so she does the worst but most effective thing possible: she defames Chomsky. She refers to Chomsky and another Jewish critic of Israel, Israel Shahak as "rabidly anti-Zionist extremists." (It is worth noting, and a bit amusing, that while Hitchens does not even mention Israel Shahak, Hollander does. Look into Israel Shahak’s critiques of Israel and Zionism. They are, like Chomsky's, devastating and I imagine Hollander may be end up being sorry she mentioned him. A eulogy for him was published in The Nation by none of than Christopher Hitchens.)

Hollander also disputes Hitchens' (accurate) depiction of Sharon's role in the destruction of the Palestinian village of Qibya in 1953. The West Bank town had in fact been a refuge of Palestinian fighters  (always "terrorists" in Zionist-CAMERA parlance) much like Tel Aviv is a refuge of Israeli fighters! But what the Israelis under Sharon's direct command did was akin to what the Nazis did in the Czechoslovak town of Lidice in 1942, a comparison made long before I made it just now. After the death of high-ranking Nazi Reinhard Heydrich at the hand of Czech fighters (or "terrorists", as the Nazis put it), the Nazis leveled the town, killing everyone. In the case of Qibya, the killing of three Israeli civilians by unknown infiltrators led to the slaughter of some 67 Arab civilians, the making of a couple thousand refugees and the total destruction of the town. This imbalance of death has always characterized the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians.

Let me deal with the remainder of Hollander's claims paragraph by paragraph:

• "Rather than providing hard facts, the author fills his column with innuendo and false comparisons.  Leaving out all context, he describes Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon as "being one of the most disastrous as well as the most gruesome operations in recent history," with the implication that the invasion was an unprovoked, brutal attack led by Ariel Sharon."

Menachem Begin, like Sharon, a long-standing Zionist terrorist, and who was the Prime Minister of Israel in 1982 when Sharon was the Minister of Defense, referred to the invasion of Lebanon as a "war of choice", which implies that it was more than a mere reaction to provocation, and that Israel in fact started the war (as it did the wars of 1956 and 1967, according to Begin. The invasion of Lebanon involved much more than attacking PLO fighters near the border, which were often responding to Israeli attacks (see Noam Chomsky’s book Fateful Triangle). It was a full-scale invasion of Lebanon. So it was unprovoked given its scope as well as due to Begin’s admission. It was also brutal. It involved the slaughter of 20,000 people at the hands of the Israelis, including the facilitation by the Israelis of the previously mentioned massacres at Sabra and Shatila. Disputing the invasion’s brutality is ridiculous. And Sharon was the civilian commander, ranking just below Begin, in charge of the invasion. So it is also ridiculous to dispute that he led the invasion.

• "But this is wrong. The PLO, with a multi-thousand man army, had taken over southern Lebanon and terrorized Lebanese of all faiths, as well as shelling northern Israeli communities, and carrying out cross-border attacks against Israeli civilians. Israel's decision to invade Lebanon was made in an attempt to stop the Palestinian terrorism emanating from that territory."

The Palestinians, including the PLO fighters in southern Lebanon in 1982 were refugees from their own homeland, now occupied by the Zionist Israelis. To object to or be surprised by their attacks on Israel as unjust is to object to and be surprised by all rightful anger. But it remains the case that it was Israeli behavior that was provocative, in keeping with their behavior in other "wars of choice".

Also, the Palestinians did not exactly "take over" southern Lebanon, they fled there (as well as to Syria and Jordan) after the 1948 war, after being chased at gun-point from their homes in what became Israel. (The Lebanese government mistreated them, much as Palestinians are mistreated in Israel, but such mistreatment is no excuse for Israeli mistreatment, as it seems often to be used.)

Palestinian "attacks on Lebanese of all faiths" is Zionist spin for their battles with the Israeli-aligned fascist Lebanese Christian militia, the Phalange; the same group that, with Israeli help, butchered thousands of Palestinian civilians at Sabra and Shatila in September 1982. There have been many acts of terrorism in the long war between Palestinians and the Israeli Zionist occupiers. There is no doubt that horrible things have been done in the name of the Palestinian cause. But they do not compare to the horrors that have been committed in the name of the Israeli cause. The Palestinians have always suffered the most. Compounding the fact they have been shoved off their own lands. For the core fact remains: Israel/Palestine is the homeland of Palestinians and they have been ethnically cleansed from their land. That is the only reason for the long dispute even if other Arab governments use the matter for their own ends!

• "For example, PLO terrorists from July 1981 and June 1982 killed 15 and wounded 250 in Israel, the West Bank, and overseas. Aborted or disrupted plans included a rocket attack on Eilat, blowing up buses and phone booths, and an attempt to explode a kindergarten near Tel Aviv. In March 1982, Israeli offices in Paris and Athens were attacked, and on April 3, PLO terrorists murdered an Israeli embassy official in Paris.  The final provocation was the attempted assassination of  Shlomo Argov, Israel's ambassador to Britain by Palestinian terrorists."

Recall Hollander’s insistence on the importance of context? Well, in the time in takes her to write two of her own paragraphs, she forgets context, perhaps realizing how it would hurt her argument. She mentions the attempted assassination of Israeli diplomat Shlomo Argov in London and the fact that 15 Israelis were killed and 250 wounded in the year before the invasion.

First of all, the attack on the Israeli diplomat in Paris was not carried out by the PLO. It was carried out by The Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Faction (LARF) (as stated at the Israel website of the Institute of Counter-Terrorism, which also says the Israeli official, Yaacov Barsimantov, was injured, not murdered in the attack). The LARF   "grew out of the grew out of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – Special Operations Group (PFLP-SOG)", an enemy of the PLO. This latter group is often (intentionally?) confused with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - Special Operations Group was never part of the PLO. 

Second of all,  the attempted assassination of Shlomo Argov in London is also not tied to PLO.  The attack on Argov was the work of an enemy of the PLO, the Abu Nidal Organization, a frequent murderer of PLO officials. It is important to note that The Abu Nidal group, in seeming irony, has been tied to the Israeli government (false flag operations being a frequent tool of the Israelis)!!

The attempted assassination Argov in London and the other Israeli diplomat in Paris (both carried out by fringe enemies of the PLO) was used as an excuse to bomb the Palestinians in Lebanon. The PLO then responded with rocket attacks across the border into Israel. The Israelis then used this as the excuse to launch its “war of choice” aggression against Lebanon and the Palestinian refugees living there which caused the deaths of 20,000 – considerably more than the 15 Israelis Hollander mentions.

And to reiterate on the matter of accuracy: Twice Hollander managed to attribute (if in the second case, vaguely) to the popular PLO the actions of minor groups not affiliated and often violently opposed to it!

• "And the "gruesome" nature of the violence was due to the fact "the PLO had become permeated with thugs and adventurers" (Washington Post, June 25, 1982), with numerous Lebanese telling of rape, mutilation and murders committed by PLO forces.  For example, Palestinians and Lebanese leftists destroyed the city of Damour and massacred hundreds of its inhabitants. According to then- New York Times correspondent David Shipler, the PLO had turned the town into a military base, "using its churches as strongholds and armories" (New York Times, June 21, 1982)."

Gruesome crimes by some PLO members do not explain Israeli atrocities against both Palestinian and Lebanese civilians. The attack against Damour was a real crime, and an inexcusable one. But again, context tells a fuller story. The Damour massacre came after a massacre two days earlier of 1000 Palestinians at the town Karantina at the hands of fascist Lebanese Christian Phalangists. That Hollander offers the massacres at Damour (devoid of context) as a counterpoint to Israeli brutality and massacres suggests she does not give a crap about such atrocities but only that she wants to deflect attention from Israeli or Israeli supported atrocities. This hardly serves as a convincing defense of Ariel Sharon’s humanity.

• "Similarly Hitchens leaves out facts and context to portray Ariel Sharon's military actions in the 1956 Suez campaign as a "lawless attack"and his counter-terrorism operations in Gaza as "brutal enforce[ment] of occupation," suggesting that Israel has no right to defend itself or its citizens."

The factually and contextually challenged Hollander has some nerve. Recall that Menachem Begin admitted Israel chose to start the 1956 war, thus it was hardly a case of self-defense. It was a war of aggression, not a war of "self-defense", carried out following a then secret British, French and Israeli agreement that Israeli should attack with their support (Britain and France were smarting over Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal). Ariel Sharon’s actions in that war of aggression were considered questionable even by the Israeli government at the time! I am not familiar with Sharon's actions in Gaza in the period after 1967, but frankly I doubt they were qualitatively different than the actions that characterized the remainder of his military and political life.

• "Hitchens also inaccurately describes an Israeli "status quo of mingled apartheid and colonization," parroting Palestinian and leftist propagandists, but offering no examples or substantiation of this false allegation.  In fact, 23% of the country is non-Jewish, mainly Arab Muslims and Christians, and they are the freest Arabs of the Middle East, with members of these communities serving in the Israeli parliament, the armed forces, and the Supreme Court. The term "colonization" (which implies an alien community established in foreign territory by an imperial power) also certainly doesn't apply to Israel's presence on the land of the Jews' ancient kingdom in the disputed territory."

It should be pointed out that Israeli apartheid has been called as much by those who suffered under the South African version of it, including Jewish and Christian South Africans, and thus recognize it for what it is.  As for colonization, Israel is clearly a colonized land. The Jewish inhabitants of Israel came from somewhere else to settle in land taken from the Palestinians or descend from people who did in the last fifty years. This is colonization, if words mean anything. Ancient ownership means nothing.

• The author describes Sharon's "conversion" as exemplified by his willingness to accept a Palestinian state as "one of the better ironies of history."  But the real irony is that while Hitchens' own conversion is exemplified by loudly defending the U.S. war on terrorism – ["the important thing is to have it understood that the United States is absolutely serious. The jihadists have in the past bragged that America is too feeble and corrupt to fight. A lot is involved in disproving that delusion on their part" (from an interview with Front Page Magazine)] - he does not feel that Israel shares this right to defend itself and confront terrorism.  When it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Hitchens reverts to his past.  As he told Jamie Glazov in the Front Page interview: "One of the advantages of a Marxist and internationalist training is that it exposes one to the early writings of those Jewish cosmopolitans who warned from the first day that Zionism would be a false Messiah for the Jews and an injustice to the Arabs.

Here, Hollander is on firmer ground against Hitchens, even if the argument reverts to an unfavorable place upon serious consideration. Yes, Hitchens is inconsistent in that he has become an excuse-maker for American atrocities such as the war in Iraq even as he remembers his better self in attacking Sharon and Israel for theirs. But that hardly means he is wrong about Sharon and Israel. I’ll let Hitchens' words to Jamie Glazov stand as the best and truest thing he said in that interview.

• The question is why Slate -- knowing Hitchens' anti-Zionist views -- considered it appropriate for him to "eulogize" Sharon?

Salon didn’t choose Hitchens to eulogize Sharon. Hitchens, in his weekly column, chose to write about Sharon. Duh.

In fact, Hitchens does offer a “good word” (eulogy) about Sharon in the sense that he mentions that Sharon, of all people, may have finally come to realize both the immorality of the Israeli occupation and the futility of Zionist dreams of a great Israeli Reich stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates:

"Bertrand Russell used to employ the method of "evidence against interest"; in other words of deciding that a critique of capital punishment, say, carried more weight if it came from a prison governor. (My friend John O'Sullivan puts it like this: If the pope says he believes in God, he's only doing his job; if he says he doesn't believe in God, he may be on to something.) Thus, when Ariel Sharon—the Arik who had been the hero of the settlers and of those who believed in "transfer" or expulsion—announced that "occupation" was the only word to describe the situation in the territories, the shock was quite something. When he added that the idea of Eretz Israel Ha'shlema—the "complete" land of Israel—was in fact a demographic impossibility, the shock was even greater. Together with his colleague and possible successor, Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, he publicly told the old Zionist hard-liners that the expansionist dream of Vladimir Jabotinsky was one that would have to be abandoned. He must have been aware of the ideological danger here, because he had always been the first to say that any challenge to the right of settlement anywhere was implicitly a challenge to the legitimacy of the state itself. It didn't cost him too much to let Sinai go—for some odd reason, the meeting place of Moses and his maker isn't included in the God-given territories—but any retreat on the West Bank or Gaza would have been a challenge to his core beliefs."

I am sure Hollander and other Zionist extremists are very careful in their eulogies to the Butcher of Beirut to leave out such discomforting insights from their hero.

Thus is the quality of all pro-Zionist extremists’ arguments.

(See also Confessions of a newly-minted Zionist apologist )

Israeli Hints At Preparation To Stop Iran

Israel Hints At Preparation To Stop Iran

Nobody Hints At Preparation To Stop Israel.

U.S. State Dept. Staff Scans World, Finds Badness Far from Our Shores

They May Suffer From a Rare Case of Group Myopia. It's Nasty. So don’t Laugh. It Could Happen to You.

Scanning the world for badness, the U.S. State Department announced last Friday that “Venezuela is planning a ‘buying spree’ for military equipment that goes beyond the country's legitimate needs”, a move that “could contribute to destabilization in Latin America.” Smarting from previous destabilization attempts by the United States, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez responded with a really puzzled look.

Heads up to the sales staff of LensCrafters (HELPING PEOPLE SEE BETTER, ONE HOUR AT A TIME®): Apparently the peaceniks at the DOS suffer from a condition known as nearsightedness. This condition renders the patient incapable of seeing things right under his or her fucking nose. But you all know that! Perhaps a friendly email to the government is in order:

Dear Dept. Of State peaceniks,

I read the news reports of spokesman Sean McCormack noting that your department is objecting to the military buildup in Venezuela. I have little doubt that your department is motivated by anything other than a focused agenda of global American hegemony... I mean, you are fighting the Good Fight for freedom and democracy and fairness and everything nice.

However, as an American taxpayer and upright citizen who cares deeply for the bureaucrats that serve my Nation’s flag, I must inform you that your no-doubt crack staff of observers scanning the world for badness and all things icky, may indeed suffer from an inability to see what’s right under their cocaine-tinged noses. And I mean that in a nice way.

The reason I bring this up at this juncture, and I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, is some ingrates might say that you have to be mentally damaged in a seriously unfunny way if you have to go all the way down the East Coast, through Florida and across the Caribbean to find an overlarge, invasive and destablizing military machine. What am I getting at? Well, there’s an overlarge, invasive and destablizing military machine just across the Potomac River from your posh offices. If you peek out the window, you might be able to see its HQ with your opera glasses. If you squint. Anyway, it’s not that far away. It’s way closer than Venezuela. Unlike Venezuela, suggest the cynical, the bloated military machine headquartered at the Pentagon has already been used just the very way you folks fear Hugo will use his vast legions: destabilizing and attacking and generally throwing its weight around in other countries.

A cynic might also note that unlike Venezuela, the U.S. actually maintains the most expensive and sophisticated military machine in the world and it is spread across the world. Apparently some wiseass seems to think there are some 350,000 U.S. troops abroad. According to another liberal whiner named Chalmers Johnson, “the Pentagon currently owns or rents 702 overseas bases in about 130 countries and HAS another 6,000 bases in the United States and its territories.” I know that as good Americans we are not supposed to notice such outlandish hypocrisy and bullshitting from our own government, so I promise, henceforth, not to notice it anymore. I promise. Sir. (Smiley face)

And you know about Bush’s famed madness and Cheney’s nervous tick? You know too about the, some say, bullshit-based Iraq war and the Pentagon gouging and massmurder and lying and corruption and menacing sneers at the American people and all that stuff, right? I know you know. Of course you know.

Don’t get me wrong, I mean, as military machines go, Venezuela’s could threaten significant portions of suburban Detroit. I also know that it is completely ridiculous and obviously communistic to suggest that previous threatening and destabilizing acts by the United States against Venezuela hardly constitute an excuse for Hugo Chavez’s nefarious attempt to purchase a handful of non-state of the art propeller-driven aircraft from Brazil. We both know he wants to nuke Newark, Jersey (even though it looks like it was nuked already). And don’t listen to those liberal Bush-haters who say Venezuela doesn’t have nukes either. If Israel says they do, then they do. They ought to know what nukes like, right?

Yours in freedomness,
Ron

Anyway, I’ve sent my email to the Department of State spokesman. I cc’d Condi Rice and LensCrafters. Pray for your government’s eyesight. It’s not a game, mister.

FLAME Out

Deconstructing Zionist Propaganda

Facts and Logic About the Middle East (FLAME) is a public relations organization that publishes information regarding Israel online and in print. FLAME, according to its own ads, purports its "purpose is the research and publication of facts regarding the Middle East and exposing false propaganda that might harm the interests of the United States and its allies in that area of the world." The FLAME ad in question, 'Arabian Fables (I)', published in the back of the January 9/16, 2006 issue of The Nation magazine, repeats a number of times the notion that pro-Arab propagandists attempt to "persuade" and/or "sway" a "misinformed" and/or "uninformed" world away from the truth “by endlessly repeating myths and lies that have no basis in fact.”

However, a critical reading of the ad, a mere glance at the factual claims and logic deployed in this, a typical FLAME infomercial, reveals the claim they are publishing facts and exposing false propaganda is pretty much bullshit. As it turns out, FLAME is publishing factual errors and using flaky and inconsistent logic to push a pro-Israel, or more correctly, a pro-Zionist point of view. FLAME is essentially what they claim to be fighting, namely, liars.

FLAME posits three myths used to bash Israel and "soften up world opinion" for the Arabs' "final assault." Each myth, in the FLAME ad, is surrounded by quote marks, nudging the reader to see irony where he or she may not.

The Palestinians

FLAME claims the Palestinian nation does not exist, in fact, because the "concept of 'Palestinians' is one that did not exist until 1948", that is, not until the onset of the 1948 war. FLAME also states Palestinians do not really exist because they are mere Arabs, no different from Jordanians, Syrians and others.

But all of this is patently irrelevant, even if true, because the fact remains the Palestinian Arabs have lived for hundreds of years in the area that has become Israel. It is their home, whether or not the term used for them was used only in 1948 and whether or not they are ethnically and culturally distinct, in any degree, from the Jordanians and Syrians. I’ll leave those irrelevant questions to Arab specialists. But, however they are answered, they will remain irrelevant to the matter at hand. After all, are Austrians distinct from the Germans who live in Germany and the Germans who live in Switzerland? All three groups might answer yes, but in fact they all are extremely similar, both culturally and ethnically. Does this invalidate Swiss German and Austrian German claims to their homes? Of course not.

The West Bank

Again, FLAME places great importance on the provenance of terminology. The "West Bank" was created both territorially and semantically only when the Jordanians occupied the area during the 1948 war, therefore, ipso facto, implies FLAME, Palestinian claims to the area are invalid. FLAME even goes one step further in the terminology game. They claim the area is really called Judea and Samaria, and was so "since time immemorial" (echoing the title of Joan Peters’ discredited pro-Israel book and Alan Dershowitz plagiary source, From Time Immemorial). 2000 year old place names are no proper claim to territory. If it was, I’d say I want back the Alps of my Celtic forebears, and I want them now! If you don't give it to me, you're just an anti-Celtic racist. But then I'm part English (Germanic) too, so I am so confused. Again, the origin of a term, in this case "West Bank", is irrelevant. Yes, Jordan occupied the area and the area is on the western bank of the Jordan River. That is the extent of the significance here. Perhaps the Jordanians were attempting to permanently hold the territory. But, according to FLAME, they and the Palestinians are indistinct anyway, so why would FLAME, or any other Zionist deploying similar logic, object? Originally, of course, the West Bank had been part of the area given to the Palestinians (the Arabs of Palestine, and indistinct from the Jordanians, say FLAME) by the 1947 U.N. partition plan.  If it was not then called the "West Bank", but only a year later, supposedly, how is that an argument justifying Israeli occupation and the oppression of the Palestinians living there? How is it an argument justifying anything at all? Whatever it was called and whoever called it whatever, again, the fact remains Palestinians (Arabs native to Palestine by whatever name), lived in the region now known as the West Bank for hundreds of years. Tiny little arguments about the terminology do not change this fact.

The Occupied Territories

The dispute over this term seems to be simply that these areas were also occupied (illegally) by Jordan and Egypt, respectively, for some 19 years (between the 1948 and 1967 wars) and nobody seemed to care so why should anyone object to the illegal Israeli occupation of the same areas. Well, if the Jordanians are culturally and ethnically indistinct from the Palestinians, given the assumptions of racist and nationalistic thinking that pervades Zionism, then the Jordanians had a right to occupy the West Bank. As for the Egyptians, presumably the FLAMErs recognize them as distinct from the Palestinians, therefore, they were indeed wrong to occupy the Gaza Strip. But either way, it collapses back on the Zionists. If the related Jordanians and partially-unrelated Egyptians were wrong to occupy the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza Strip, how much more so is it wrong for the completely unrelated European Jews to occupy them?

Also, while on the one hand FLAME wants to dispute European decision-making vis-a-vis the Middle East when it comes to the inclusion of the West Bank in the original territory of Transjordan (the British Mandate), at the same time it cites European decision-making as validating when it comes to the very existence of Israel on traditional Arab land (the Balfour Declaration). Only in the realm of dogma, not facts and logic, do such logical contortions pass muster.

The Zionist invasion and occupation of Palestine is the moral and intellectual equivalent of kicking Austrians out of Austria so the Celts (Irish, Welsh and Scots) can return to their ancestral homeland. The Celts, who now live only in Ireland, Wales, Scotland and a tiny sliver of western France, once dominated the entirety of central and western Europe. The original homeland, some 3,000 years ago, was in present-day Austria and Switzerland, both now homelands of Germanic groups. By Zionist logic, the Celts have the right (of return) to migrate as a people back to Austria, kick out the Austrians (since they are just Germans and can go back to Germany to live with the other Germans) and reestablish their ancestral homeland. What would we think if that were attempted? We would have no problem understanding the Celts were in the wrong. The Celts don’t dominate those areas anymore. That’s not the fault of the people living there now, even if they are the descendants of the ones who dispossessed the Celts. However, when it comes to Zionist Israel, and when our heads are filled with pro-Zionist propaganda, crazy sounds sane and wrong seems right. Propaganda like FLAME's, "by endlessly repeating myths and lies that have no basis in fact", serves to sway the world away from reality and "soften it up" for G-d knows what (or here).

In closing, as a peace gesture, I offer that FLAME consider a name change. Neat names, the acronyms of which spell out cool words, are not easy to find. Towards this end, I offer the following possibilities: Myths and Lies Invented by Colonialist Europeans (MALICE); Several Myths Offered Kindly to Everyone (SMOKE); Myths Invented Righteously and Reverently Over Rocks (MIRROR); Facts Inverted, Richly Embellished (FIRE). Feel free, FLAME, to use any one of them.

CIA’s Pope Shooter Early Al Qaeda?

Did Mehmet Ali Agca Go to the CIA School of False Flag Operations?

The man who served 19 years in an Italian prison (and 5 additional years in Turkey on unrelated charges) for shooting and attempting to assassinate the late Pope John Paul II in 1981 has been released from prison. Then, as now, the story of Mehmet Ali Agca’s supposed links to Soviet-era Bulgarian Secret Police plots to off the pontiff were taken seriously in some quarters. Back in the day, people like right-wing, fascist-sympathizing American politicos like Michael Ledeen were fans of this conspiracy theory. In fact, Ledeen has hardly given up on such mindfuck maneuvers. (It is suspected that Ledeen had a hand in the forged Nigerian yellowcake uranium documents  that provided the infamous “16 words” in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union Address that prehaps provided the final straw in the Bush Administration's campaign to push the country into its aggression against Iraq.)

According to the Bulgarian journalist Krum Blagov, a tape purported as proof of the ‘Bulgarian Connection’ to the Pope shooting, and which surfaced in 1991, was fabricated for $1,000. Care to wager from which U.S. government office building in Virginia the money originated? It could prove interesting to follow the money on that one. Or maybe it was merely an internal Bulgarian thing – trying to curry favor with the West in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, trying to cement anti-Communist sentiment with anti-Communist myths, etc. However, aside from the paucity of evidence for such a thing, the assassination attempt as a Communist plot occurs to me as one of those too-perfectly Evil and too-straight forward acts on the part of the Official Enemy to be true. Along the lines of 9-11, if you press me (or even if you don’t).

Pope John Paul’s anti-Communism was well known, then as now. He was a right-wing Pole who had always promoted the West in favor of the East. But not fanatically so, it would seem; he also reserved some criticism for the West. He was certainly no more extreme than other popes, and perhaps less so than some (say, the likes of the present Pope, for instance). Why would the Communists target him? Why at a moment when the West, under the leadership of Reagan and Thatcher, was likely to renew the Cold War in any event, as they did, would they kill a symbolic leader likely to replaced by a similarly anti-Communist in any event? Why be antagonistic at that very moment for such a pitiful and questionable gain? Is it possible they could have hoped the College of Cardinals would elect a new Communist-friendly Pope once John Paul was out of the way? No. Not hardly. The evidence of a Bulgarian or Soviet link to Ali Agca was never impressive at all. The evidence that he was a right-winger associated with the CIA was always more significant. He was a member of the Turkish fascist group the Grey Wolves, a group more likely to be aligned with the CIA than the Bulgarian Stalinists. In fact, the CIA employed the Grey Wolves against the Turkish left in the 1960s and 1970s.  Does it seem likely that a Grey Wolf would suddenly do the bidding of the Bulgarian Communists?

Prefiguring recent revelations about the CIA skewing evidence to support the story about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (don’t tell me you need a link about that!), ex-CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman told "the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1990 that his CIA colleagues, under pressure from agency higher-ups, had skewed their reports to try to lend credence to the notion of a Soviet plot to murder the pope."

Just as one can reasonably question whether former CIA asset Osama Bin Laden is actually formerly so, it is right to wonder whether Mehmet Ali Agca, would-be assassin of a Pope, was ever really anything other than a CIA asset. Was Agca and the CIA coziness with the essentially Islamo-fascist Grey Wolves a foreshadowing of the relationships it had with Osama Bin Laden and the Islamo-fascists that it set up to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan later in the 1980s?

After all, what had the U.S. government to gain from killing the Pope and blaming it on the Communists? Similarly, what has the U.S. government to gain from killing 3,000 Americans and blaming it on crazed Middle Easterners?

Are these serious questions???

Just take a look around.