The Latest UFO Disclosure Hearing
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Dedicated to fighting authoritarianism, bigotry, greed, corruption, climate change denial, white supremacy, racism, stupidity and general evil, as well as the exploration of interesting ideas and conspiracy theories including 9/11, UFOs, ET's, the paranormal and the general unknown.
Police have found a sizable piece of one of the engines from a plane that crashed into the World Trade Center, more than 11 years after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
The piece of landing gear was found wedged between two buildings just blocks from Ground Zero- in between the buildings at 51 Park Place and 50 Murray Street in downtown Manhattan.
This is very very weird...
The location is particularly noteworthy because 51 Park Place is the site of the Islamic Cultural Center that stirred up controversy and months of protests two years ago when the site developers wanted to turn it into a mosque.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev attended a workshop sponsored by the CIA-linked Jamestown Foundation, Izvestia reports today (see English translation here). The Russian newspaper cites documents produced by the Counterintelligence Department Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia confirming that the NGO “Fund of Caucasus” held workshops in the summer of 2012 and Tsarnaev attended.
In 2012, Tsarnaev spent six months in Dagestan, a region neighboring Chechnya. The FBI interviewed him the previous year but said it found no evidence that he was a threat. On Tuesday, Homeland Security boss Janet Napolitano said her agency was aware of the trip and, on Wednesday, Secretary of State John Kerry stated Tsarnaev returned from Russian trip “with a willingness to kill people.”
The Caucasus Fund was established in November, 2008, following the Georgian-Ossetian conflict. The main purpose of the organization, according to Izvestia, is “to recruit young people and intellectuals of the North Caucasus to enhance instability and extremism in the southern regions of Russia.”
Moscow has explicitly criticized the Jamestown Foundation for engaging in an anti-Russian propaganda campaign. “Organizers again and again resorted to deliberately spreading slander about the situation in Chechnya and other republics of the Russian North Caucasus using the services of supporters of terrorists and pseudo-experts. Speakers were given carte blanche to spread extremist propaganda, [and] incite ethnic and inter-religious discord,” said the Foreign Ministry of Russia in December, 2007.
The Jamestown Foundation is a known CIA front. It “is only an element in a huge machine, which is controlled by Freedom House and linked to the CIA,” writes the Voltaire Network. “In practice, it has become a specialized news agency in subjects such as the communist and post-communist states and terrorism.” It “publishes specialized bulletins on both the post-communist world and terrorism, which serve as reference for Washington’s think tanks. University scholars and journalists are dedicated to depict a ghost-filled world whose very same hostility justifies the U.S. empire.”
CIA director William Casey and Russian dissident Arkady Shevchenko were instrumental in creating the organization. Jamestown’s board of directors includes Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor to Jimmy Carter. Brzezinski, a high-level globalist operative, initiated the CIA’s recruitment of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan that ultimately produced al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
The notorious russophobe Brzezinski heads up the foundation’s American Committee for Peace in Chechnya, an NGO based at the Freedom House, the latter funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, the CIA front designed to foment color revolutions and overthrow governments. It also receives funding from Soros Foundations, the CIA’s Ford Foundation, and the U.S. Agency for International Development, the outfit used by the U.S. government to run “humanitarian” NGOs instrumental in running color revolutions in former Russian states.
The revelation about Tsarnaev’s whereabouts in 2012 and his connection to an anti-Russian NGO sponsored by the CIA should be considered the missing link in the story concerning his purported radicalization at the hands of Salafist militants. However, since the establishment is providing the script and narrative for the official story, we expect the corporate media to give it zero credence.Translated Russian article here.
1. Wear a backwards hat and no sunglasses. Unlike his older brother, Dzhokhar made little effort to prevent cameras from capturing his face, making him easier to identify when the FBI released security camera photos on Thursday. Indeed, classmates at University of Massachusetts–Dartmouth did see him in the photos, but dismissed the similarity because it seemed so far-fetched.
2. Not react to the explosions. For three days, investigators pored over all available photos and surveillance videos of the blast area searching for abnormal reactions. The complaint filed in federal court on Monday specifically cites Dzhokhar's reaction to the first explosion as a giveaway; per the complaint, he glanced in the direction of the first blast only briefly.
3. Leave the car in the shop. The Wall Street Journal reported that Dzhokhar stopped by an auto-body shop in Watertown on Tuesday to pick up the Mercedes he'd brought in for repairs.
4. Stay in Boston. The second bomb exploded at 2:49 p.m. last Monday. Tamerlan carjacked a Mercedes at 10:39 p.m.* on Thursday. What did they do in the interim three days? Go to the gym, check in on their busted car, and, in Dzhokhar's case, go to a party on the UMass–Dartmouth campus. During the three-day window in which their involvement was unknown, they made no attempt to flee.
5. Kill an MIT police officer. Why did the brothers shoot 26-year-old Sean Collier? The murder at 10:30 p.m. on Thursday set in motion the events that would ultimately lead to their capture.
6. Run out of cash. When Tamerlan carjacked a Mercedes on Thursday night, he and his brother had one thing in mind: Get cash, and fast. They emptied $800 from an ATM using their victim's PIN number, before they reached the account limit. Holding up a stranger for money suggests a woeful lack of planning on their part (they hadn't budgeted) that helped alert them to the authorities.
7. Not understand how ATMs work. After reaching the daily withdrawal limit at one ATM, the Tsarnaevs, apparently not realizing that the machines are part of an interconnected system, decided to try their luck at two different machines. The quest to find a working ATM was how they ended up, coincidentally, at a 7/11 in Cambridge around the same time it was the scene of an armed robbery, and were spotted on the store security camera.
8. Confess to the hostage. According to the complaint, when Dzhokhar got into the Mercedes, he immediately told the driver, "Did you hear about the Boston explosion? I did that." That meant their cover would be immediately blown if the driver escaped.
9. Stop for snacks. The Los Angeles Times reported that the hostage escaped after the brothers stopped at a gas station on Memorial Drive to buy snacks.
10. Keep the hostage's phone. The Tsarnaevs continued on without their hostage—but they did have his phone, which allowed police to track their location via GPS.
11. Bring a BB gun. The weapons used by the two suspects, according to police: a pressure-cooker bomb, seven IEDs, an M4 carbine, two handguns, and a BB gun. Why a BB gun?Some of this pattern fits two guilty guys who thought they got away with it, but then realized they had been identified and lamely, very lamely tried to get away.
Every year the bureau spends $3.3 billion on counterterrorism, the largest portion of its $8.2 billion annual budget.
ALICE HOGLAN:
I took the phone and I heard my son's voice and he said to me, "Mom, this is Mark Bingham." I knew from that he was trying to maintain composure, but I could tell he was a little rattled because he was giving me his first and last names. He said, "I want to let you know that I love you. I'm on a flight from Newark to San Francisco, and there are three guys on board who have taken over the plane and they say they have a bomb."
KIRSTY WALK:
No-one will ever know how the plan to attack the terrorists was hatched, but early indications from analysis of the recordings suggest it began in the front of the plane in first class. Mark Bingham was sitting next to Todd Beamer whose call to the operator suggests he was not talking to her, but someone else, possibly Mark, about jumping the guy with the bomb saying, "You ready? Ok, let's roll."
ALICE HOGLAN:
It sounded as if someone was speaking to him quietly, possibly sitting right next to him, then he came back on the line and said, "You believe me, don't you?" I said, "I believe you, who are these guys?" There was another long pause. I listened and then the phone went dead. (snip)
ALICE HOGLAN:
(snip) Aside from having Mark Bingham as my son, perhaps having those babies for Vaughn and Cathy was the most important thing I've done."
This was not, however, the first time the young man dealt in troubling telephone calls. Zubeidat and her husband Anzor Tsarnaev have claimed that their oldest son received a call from the FBI accusing him of the attack, to which he responded: 'That's your problem.'
Tamerlan Tsarnaeva, who was killed following a shoot out with the police on April 19, called his mother two or three days after the marathon bombings to tell her about the call from the FBI, his father said.Doesn't this sound totally like a tip-off call, from his handler?
Dr. Christopher Swift, is a professor at Georgetown University, lawyer, and former Treasury Department official who researches terrorist organizations. His work has taken him to both the Middle East and Chechnya. He said the Russian government often participates in information exchanges with U.S. law enforcement officials about terrorism.It's just not fucking credible that the FBI ignored this, given how they monitor mosques constantly and all sorts of Jihadist wannabes.
“These are routine,” Swift said of Russia’s request to the FBI. “On terrorism issues, this is one of the few places where the United States and Russia maintain some semblance of a functional relationship.”
The Tsarnaev brothers' forceful and charismatic aunt, Maret Tsarnaeva, had barely begun her lecture to the press that had gathered outside her Toronto house this morning when she crossed the line:
"I'm suspicious that this was staged. The picture was staged," she said. And she suggested dark motives behind framing her nephews. "When you are blowing up people and you want to bring attention to something for some person — you do that math," she said.
The men's father said more or less the same thing: "Someone framed them. I don't know who exactly did it, but someone did. And being cowards, they shot the boy dead. There are cops like this."
The Tsarnaevs may sound like the craziest figures of the American fringe. But they come by their paranoia honestly: Russia's cynical and brutal governments have, for centuries, murdered their citizens in general, and their Chechen citizens and subjects in particular, under any number of pretexts.
Even the Chechen Republic's president, Ramzan Kadyrov, included a bizarre note of paranoia in the words he posted to Instagram, a note of doubt about the suspects' guilt — and about one suspect's death.
"It is evident that the special services needed to calm society by any means possible," Kadyrov, an ally of President Vladimir Putin, wrote.
This may sound paranoid. But paranoids can have real enemies. And you don't have to be crazy to believe Chechen allegations of baroque and brutal government conspiracies — at least, not when they're directed at the Russian government.
Reasonable people have directed truly horrendous allegations at President Vladimir Putin and his security services. Former Washington Post reporter David Satter argued convincingly in his 2003 book on Russia, Darkness at Dawn, that the Russian government had directed deadly and incomprehensible bombings of Russian apartment buildings in 1999, which killed 300 people — to justify a new invasion of Chechnya and to speed Putin's rise.
"They are ascribing to America things that are familiar to them at home," Satter told BuzzFeed Friday, of the sort of incident that fringe lunatics in the United States claim as "false flag" attacks and that Russians call "provocations." "It's not surprising that people have reacted that way," he said.
Indeed, Tsarnaeva cited her experience back home in making her strange intimations of conspiracy.
"I am used to being set up. Before I left former Soviet Union countries, that's how I lived," she said.
That does not, of course, have any bearing on what appears to be an extremely clear case against Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsaraev. It speaks, instead, to what it means to be a citizen of Vladimir Putin's Russia.
"The evidence against these characters is overwhelming," Satter said. "And also — we just don't do that kind of thing. Our institutions and our society and our values all work against it, whereas in Russia it's par for the course."YES!!! Because America is SOOOO much fucking better than fucking Russia, right?
Tsarnaev mother: My son was under FBI surveillance
By REUTERS
One of the two ethnic Chechens suspected by US officials of being behind the Boston Marathon bombings had been under FBI surveillance for at least three years, his mother said. Zubeidat Tsarnaeva told the English-language Russia Today state television station in a phone interview, a recording of which was obtained by Reuters, that she believed her sons were innocent and had been framed.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, was killed in a shootout with police and his 19-year-old brother Dzhokhar was captured after a day-long manhunt.
Boston suspects' father: Somebody framed them
"He (Tamerlan) was 'controlled' by the FBI, like, for three to five years," she said, speaking in English and using the direct English translation of a word in Russian that means monitored. "They knew what my son was doing, they knew what sites on the Internet he was going to," she said in what Russia Today described as a call from Makhachkala, where she lives in Russia's Dagestan region after returning from the United States.
Tsarnaeva echoed the boys' father, Anzor, who said on Friday that he believed they had been framed. Both suggested in separate interviews that the FBI had made no secret of the fact that at least one of the brothers was being watched.
"I do not believe that my sons could have planned and organized the terrorist act, because they knew US national security services were keeping an eye on them," Anzor Tsarnaev told Russia's Channel One television. "They (the security services) said 'We know what you eat, what you read on the Internet'," he said, without making clear how the security officers had made contact.
In her interview with Russia Today, Tsarnaeva suggested FBI officers had visited her home when she still lived in the United States and told her that Tamerlan "was really an extremist leader and that they were afraid of him."
FBI interviewed Boston bombing suspect in 2011 -source
By Mark Hosenball and Warren Strobel | Reuters
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The FBI in 2011 interviewed one of the brothers suspected in the deadly Boston Marathon bombings, a U.S. law enforcement source said on Friday, a disclosure that could raise questions about whether the government missed potential warning signs about the men's behavior.
The source said the FBI's dealings two years ago with Tamerlan Tsarnaev occurred following a request from an unidentified foreign government.
The FBI did not produce any "derogatory" information on Tsarnaev and agents then put the matter "to bed," said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev died overnight in Boston in a shootout with police. His younger brother, Dzhokhar, was taken into custody on Friday evening in the Boston suburb of Watertown after a dramatic, day-long manhunt, Boston police said.
The revelation that the elder Tsarnaev was on U.S. law enforcement authorities' radar screens seemed likely to raise uncomfortable questions for the Obama administration about whether it could have done anything to detect and stop the plot.
"It's new information to me and it's very disturbing that he's on the FBI radar screen," Rep. Michael McCaul, Texas Republican and chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said on CNN late Friday.
It is not known when the Boston Marathon bombings were planned, or whether there were clues that could have allowed authorities to pre-empt it.
National security and law enforcement authorities said on earlier Friday that they had not turned up any evidence that the Tsarnaevs had contacts with al Qaeda or other militants overseas. The brothers were in the United States legally.
The officials said they were leaning toward the theory that the bombings were motivated by Islamic extremism, although that remained unproven.
(snip)Another top priority for investigators is to determine whether the brothers had any confederates either inside the United States or overseas, one U.S. official said. This official and others spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.
Three people were taken into custody for questioning in New Bedford, Massachusetts, police said on Friday. Two men and a woman are being questioned by the FBI "on the assumption there is an affiliation with" Tsarnaev, Lieutenant Robert Richard of the New Bedford Police said.
One official said the possibility that the U.S. government had information that should have raised questions about the Tsarnaev brothers before the attack could not be ruled out. Other officials said they were unaware that such material had turned up.
In several recent cases, U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies failed to put together clues that, in hindsight, might have led them to pre-empt a plot.
In 2009, U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Hassan killed 13 people and wounded another 32 at Fort Hood, Texas. Prior to the shooting spree, Hassan had email contacts with Anwar al-Awlaki, the U.S.-born cleric and leader of al Qaida's affiliate in Yemen who was later killed in a U.S. drone strike. U.S. authorities had investigated Hassan's emails, but concluded they posed no threat of violence.
The father of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the so-called "underwear bomber" who tried to bring down a U.S. jetliner over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, reported suspicions about his son's activities to the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria. But Abdulmutallab's U.S. visa was never revoked.
A report by the Senate intelligence committee heavily criticized U.S. intelligence agencies for failing to act on available information in that case.19-year-old Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev-- younger brother of the two bombing suspects-- seemed like a normal teenager, into smoking pot, liked "Breaking Bad" and meth and thought 9/11 was an inside job.
To justify frequent drone strikes that regularly kill innocent people, risk serving as a terrorist recruiting tool, and terrorize whole communities understandably averse to drones buzzing above their homes, Obama Administration officials give the impression that al-Qaeda terrorists are the main targets.
As it turns out, they haven't just helped hide the fact that the Bush Administration kicked off America's drone campaign in Pakistan by killing someone at the request of Pakistan's government -- as Jonathan S. Landay explains, Obama officials have misled us about their own behavior. "Contrary to assurances it has deployed U.S. drones only against known senior leaders of al Qaida and allied groups, the Obama administration has targeted and killed hundreds of suspected lower-level Afghan, Pakistani and unidentified 'other' militants in scores of strikes in Pakistan's rugged tribal area, classified U.S. intelligence reports show," he reports.
The misleading rhetoric includes words spoken by President Obama himself...
In Hopes Of Identifying More Remains, NYC Begins Sifting Through September 11 Debris Again
About 60 truckloads of debris that could contain tiny fragments of bone or tissue were unearthed by construction crews that have been working on the new World Trade Center in recent years. That material is now being transported to a park built on top of the former Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, where investigators will attempt to identify any possible remains during the next 10 weeks, the city said.
The city’s last sifting effort ended in 2010. This time, crews were able to dig up parts of the trade center site that were previously inaccessible to workers, the city said. Some 2,750 people died at the World Trade Center in the 2001 terrorist attacks, but only 1,634 people have been identified. “We have been monitoring the World Trade Center site over time and monitoring the construction,” said Ellen Borakove, a spokeswoman for the medical examiner’s office. “And if they see any material that could possibly contain human remains, we collect that material.”
About 9,000 human remains recovered from the ruins of the World Trade Center remain unidentified because they are too degraded to match victims by DNA identification. The remains are stored at an undisclosed location monitored by the medical examiner’s office and will eventually be transferred to a subterranean chamber at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum.
When I first came to Congress I saw how easily we slipped into conflict. I saw how normally placid people could get swept up by war fever. It led me to study war. I learned that during the course of the 20th century more than 100,000,000 people perished in wars. Today, violence is an overarching theme, encompassing personal, group, national and international conflict, extending to the production of nuclear, biological, chemical weapons of mass destruction which have been developed for use on land, air, sea and space. Such conflict is taken as a given of the human condition without questioning whether the structures of thought, word and deed which the people of the United States have inherited are any longer sufficient for the maintenance , growth and survival of the United States and the world.
Personal violence in the United States has great human and financial costs, costing hundreds of billions of dollars annually, not including war-related costs. Child abuse and neglect cost over $100 billion annually.
We are in a new millennium and the time has come to review age-old challenges with new thinking, wherein we can conceive of peace as not simply being the absence of violence but the active presence of the capacity for a higher evolution of human awareness, of respect, trust and integrity, a condition that allows us all to tap the infinite capabilities of humanity to transform the consciousness and conditions which impel or compel violence at a personal, group or national level toward developing a new understanding of and commitment to compassion and love, in order to create a "shining city on a hill," the light of which is the light of nations.
It was this thinking, this articulation which I was privileged to bring forth on July 11, 2001, fully two months before 9/11, and to introduce a bill, HR 808, to create a cabinet level Department of Peace, a bill soon to be reintroduced by Congresswoman Barbara Lee as the Department of Peace Building.
Imagine coming from a position of love of our country and for each other, if we moved forward without judgment, to meet the promise of a more perfect union by meeting the challenge of violence in our homes, our streets, our schools, our places of work and worship, meet the challenge of violence in our society through the creation of a new structure in our society which can directly address domestic violence, spousal abuse, child abuse, gun violence, gang violence, violence against gays. This goes much deeper than legislation forbidding such conduct, or creating systems to deal with victims. Those are necessary - but not sufficient. We need to go much deeper if we are to, at last, shed the yoke of violence which we carry through our daily lives.
We know violence is a learned response. So is nonviolence. We must replace a culture of violence with a culture of peace, not through the antithetical use of force, not through endless "thou shalt nots" and not through mere punishment, but through tapping our higher potential to teach principles of peace building and peace sharing at the earliest ages as part of a civic education in a democratic society.
Carl Rogers, the humanist psychologist, has written "the behavior of the human organism may be determined by the external influences to which it has been exposed, but it may also be determined by the creative and integrative insight of the organism itself." We are not victims of the world we see; we become victims of the way we see the world. If we are prepared to confidently call forth a new America, if we have the courage to not simply re-describe America but to reclaim it, we will once again fall in love with the light which so many years ago shone through the darkness of human existence to announce the birth of a new freedom.Some say he's a dreamer, but he's not the only one. The piece has much more, and should be spread widely.
"As President Obama tries to shame Congress for not passing gun control, the U.S. has been one of the leading countries blocking a U.N. treaty to regulate the $70 billion international arms trade, torpedoing it last summer and dragging its feet on it this week at the United Nations. While Iran, Syria, North Korea are generating headlines for officially blocking the treaty, less attention has been paid to the role of the United States and outside groups, including the National Rifle Association."
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But this issue of requiring all 193 members of the United Nations, a complete consensus on a treaty, is that the normal method for deciding on these treaties, or is this one way that the United States used to make it more—make it possible for even just the United States by itself to block a treaty?
ANDREW FEINSTEIN: I think that was the intention of consensus. It’s used in some negotiations at the U.N., but certainly not all. And I think the U.S. and then President Obama, with the election in mind, to be quite honest, was thinking about the pressures that would come from the NRA itself, but also from large defense contractors, the interest groups that keep this multibillion-dollar industry going—an industry that, I should mention, is wracked by corruption, in which the boundaries between the illegal and the legal are extremely fuzzy and are constantly broken. So I think the U.S. insisted on this mechanism in these particular negotiations, and in some senses it has now come back to haunt the U.S.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But specifically, there’s been talk about how the current version has been watered down. What would the treaty do, in real life? Because the United Nations, of course, is notorious for its ineffectiveness in terms of being able to police other governments in various other treaties. How would this work?
ANDREW FEINSTEIN: Well, the idea is that it would raise the stakes. It would make it incumbent upon those countries that sign up to it to put in place certain mechanisms that would govern the way in which they export and import weaponry. The difficulty is, and to be honest with you, the treaty, in its current form, is a lot weaker than I would like to see. I think there are a lot of issues that haven’t been adequately addressed. There is also no meaningful enforcement mechanism. But to the credit of the civil society organizations and activist groups who have pushed for this treaty, it will be the first set of international rules. And I think what its real use will be will actually be giving activists and civil society organizations a lever with which to exert pressure on their own governments.
...
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, I just wanted to ask, to follow up on that, can you give examples of some of the provisions that would bring progress on the question of control in the arms flow?
ANDREW FEINSTEIN: Certainly. What governments would have to do is they would have to consider certain criteria before authorizing the export of materiel, military equipment, weaponry, from their country. Those would include the likelihood of it contributing to an intensification of conflict, atrocities against their own citizenry or citizenry from other countries. It would also mean that they would have to document exactly what they were both exporting and importing. So there are a whole number of ways in which it would apply regulation that doesn’t currently exist. However, again let me emphasize, without strong enforcement mechanisms and without really committed political will from individual nation states, the utility and effectiveness of this treaty still will remain to be seen.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk about the National Rifle Association’s role at the talks. On Saturday, the NRA thanked Republican Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma for introducing an amendment during the Senate’s budget to preemptively prevent the United States from entering into the U.N. arms trade treaty. His amendment passed in the Senate early Saturday morning in a 53-to-46 vote. The executive director of the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action, Chris Cox, said in a statement, quote, "Thanks to the efforts of Senator Inhofe, we are one step closer to ensuring the UN will not trample on the freedoms our Founding Fathers guaranteed to us," unquote. Well, last July, NRA chief Wayne LaPierre testified at the United Nations opposing the global arms treaty.
WAYNE LAPIERRE: The NRA is the largest and most active firearms rights organization in the world, with four million members who represent 100 million Americans who own firearms. On behalf of those 100 million American gun owners, I am here to announce NRA’s strong opposition to anti-freedom policies that disregard American citizens’ right to self-defense. No foreign influence has jurisdiction over the freedoms our Founding Fathers guaranteed to us. We will not stand idly by while international organizations, whether state-based or stateless, attempt to undermine the fundamental liberties our men and women in uniform have fought so bravely to preserve and on which our entire American system of government is based.AMY GOODMAN: That was NRA chief Wayne LaPierre last July. But it was the U.S. government—interesting, strange bedfellows here, the NRA and the Obama administration—it was the Obama administration that, at the last minute, ended these talks last July. You had the head of Amnesty International saying, "This was [a] stunning cowardice [act] by the Obama administration, which at the last minute did an about-face and scuttled progress toward a global arms treaty," so that people, especially the activists, couldn’t even organize, because it happened at the very end. So, NRA and Obama together, when here at home they seem like they have their sights set on each other.
ANDREW FEINSTEIN: Let me make an initial point, and that is that the NRA has peddled untruths about this international arms trade treaty since the beginning. It is suggested that it would in some way impact on their ability internally within the United States to bear arms, which is an absolute nonsense. So, not only are they strange bedfellows on the international stage, but even what is happening domestically should be put in its place by the Obama administration itself domestically. But it has used the NRA, effectively, and I think for domestic political reasons in the lead-up to an election, to prevent the passage of the treaty.
And, yes, it was done in an enormously cynical way at the tail end of the negotiations that led activist groups and civil society in an impossible position. And even in the current negotiations, the United States has attempted to weaken the treaty in a whole range of ways, some of which, unfortunately, have come to fruition. And I think one has to bear in mind that there are massive interest groups here: the NRA plus the large defense contractors in the United States and around the world, who want to see as weak an arms trade treaty as possible, if there has to be one at all.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, of course, this is in the context of our nation being by far the largest merchant of weapons in the world, dwarfing any other country in the world in terms of exporting of weapons of destruction around the—around the globe.
ANDREW FEINSTEIN: The United States sells and buys almost as much weaponry as the rest of the world combined. So what happens in the United States is absolutely crucial to the future of arms control in the entire world. So, the influence of Mr. LaPierre can unfortunately be extraordinarily damaging. And I would hope that the sort of distance that has been created between the administration and the NRA domestically is replicated internationally once this treaty is passed by the United Nations General Assembly, hopefully, last week, and that the untruths that the NRA has been peddling for years now about this treaty are finally put to rest.