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Google Pushed for Regime Change in Syria

WTF:

Google in 2012 sought to help insurgents overthrow Syrian President Bashar Assad, according to State Department emails receiving fresh scrutiny this week. Messages between former secretary of state Hillary Clinton's team and one of the company's executives detailed the plan for Google to get involved in the region.

What happened to "do no evil"???

Same Old Shit, Brussels Edition

The day after the mass bombings in Brussels that killed 34 people and wounded another 230, it emerged that Belgian authorities had specific forewarnings of the attack and had already last year identified the men who carried out the assault as Islamist terrorists.

The Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz reported Wednesday that Zavantem Airport and the Maelbeek metro station were known to be targets for planned terror attacks. It wrote, “The Belgian security services, as well as other Western intelligence agencies, had advance and precise intelligence warnings regarding the terrorist attacks in Belgium on Tuesday, Ha'aretz has learned. The security services knew, with a high degree of certainty, that attacks were planned in the very near future for the airport and, apparently, for the subway as well.”

The suspected attackers were well known to police authorities. Two of the suicide bombers, Khalid El Bakraoui, who attacked the metro station, and his brother Ibrahim El Bakraoui, who exploded a bomb at the airport, had been convicted of armed robbery and were known to have connections to the November 13 attacks in Paris carried out by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Both were identified post-mortem by their fingerprints.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said Ibrahim El Bakraoui had been detained in Turkey and identified as an Islamist fighter, then deported to the Netherlands last year. “One of the perpetrators of the Brussels attack is a person whom we detained in June 2015 in [the southeastern province of] Gaziantep and deported… We informed the Brussels Embassy of the deportation process of the attacker with a note on July 14, 2015. However, the Belgians released the attacker despite his deportation,” Erdoğan said. Erdoğan added that Belgian authorities were unable to establish any ties between El Bakraoui and terrorist activity despite the Turkish warnings, which were “ignored.”

Another bomber who blew himself up at the airport has still to be identified, and the third airport attacker, identified as Najim Laachraoui, remains on the run. Belgian authorities said they were looking for a man of Turkish origin, 22 years old, driving an old, dark Audi A4 car. These reports raise the most serious questions as to how and why Belgian and allied intelligence agencies allowed the Brussels bombings to occur.

In the fifteenth year of the “war on terror” declared by Washington and its European allies after the September 11, 2001 bombings, intelligence agencies have at their disposal sophisticated spying techniques capable of tracking virtually all cell phone and Internet activity. Claims that the attack occurred because Belgian and allied intelligence agencies somehow failed to “connect the dots” are simply not believable. Belgium has been on high alert. Large numbers of soldiers and police were deployed in Brussels when the city was placed on lockdown following the November 13 attacks in Paris, and again after last week’s capture of November 13 attacker Salah Abdeslam. Belgian forces had advance notice of the targets of an attack and the identity of the attackers. Nonetheless, the ISIS team was able to amass a large stock of bomb-making equipment undisturbed and plan, prepare and execute devastating and coordinated terror bombings.

During the first lockdown, in the aftermath of the Paris attacks, 16 people were arrested and 22 searches were made, which produced nothing. All the while, Abdeslam was living a few kilometers from his parents’ home. Abdeslam’s capture in last week’s police raid apparently pushed the ISIS terrorists to put their plans into action. Ibrahim El Bakraoui’s laptop was found in a dustbin in the street. On it police found a recording of Bakraoui saying he was “acting in a rush” and “did not [know] what to do anymore,” as he was being “searched for everywhere and was no longer safe.” If “he stuck around” he was likely “to end up in a prison cell.”

Police located El Bakraoui’s apartment by speaking to the taxi driver who dropped off the attackers at Zavantem airport. He told police he picked them up from 4 rue Max Roos in the Schaerbeek area of Brussels. Police searched the apartment and found 15 kilos of explosives, 150 litres of acetone, 30 litres of hydrogen peroxide, detonators, a case full of nails and screws and other bomb-making materials.

There are as yet no calls for mass sackings in Belgian and European intelligence circles after this stunning breakdown of security. The reason is that powerful factions within the ruling elite and the state, far from being genuinely revolted by these attacks, view them as a political godsend, allowing them to press for policies on which there is broad agreement in ruling circles: stepped-up military intervention in the Middle East, police-state surveillance measures in Europe and incitement of anti-Muslim racism.

New York Times columnists Thomas Friedman and Roger Cohen published articles yesterday that in virtually identical terms argued for an escalation of the war in Syria, ostensibly to fight ISIS. Cohen declared that “the West’s ponderous wait-them-out approach to the murderous fanatics of the caliphate looks like capitulation,” while Friedman asked whether “Obama hasn’t gotten so obsessed with defending his hands-off approach to Syria that he underestimates both the dangers of his passivity and the opportunity for US power to tilt the region our way.”

Whatever Happened to the Good Old Days of False Flags?

Now, it's Islam = terrorism, all the time, on the Alex Jones site. Cripes.

I had some hopes with the shot they used as the video preview, but no, it's all this Watson asshole bitching about Islam.




Wow, even on WhatReallyHappened, there's no blaming Israel for the Brussels attack (but I see a great ad for Trump).

How far they have fallen....


By the way, I had a tiny amount of hope for Trump before his AIPAC speech, but it turns out he's a stooge to Israel like most politicians.

You know who DIDN'T talk to AIPAC?

Bernie Sanders.

Wow.

Terror Attack in Brussels

Of course, be very skeptical of the official story, and of course there are all sorts of reasons this series of horrific attacks could have been set off to influence politics around the world, particularly in the US, with primary elections still going on.

But the bottom line is: be scared, be very scared:

IS trains 400 fighters to attack Europe in wave of bloodshed

Modeling the WTC Destruction

This video is cute, but modeling the WTC is very tricky, as I well know.



The main problem that I found when I tried to model the WTC, is that scaling down really doesn't work very well. It's extremely easy to make the columns in the model too strong, even if you are using seemingly flimsy objects or materials for the columns.

Watching this, though, made me think about WTC demolition again-- particularly when they show a good shot of the WTC1 spire about 13.5 minutes in.

The 3 major oddities of the WTC destruction are:

1) the incredibly rapid downward fall, showing almost no resistance from the floors below

2) the incredible pulverization of the structure-- the complete destruction of everything in the tower, even the concrete floors were largely disintegrated

3) the tall central core hollowed out "spire" that remained after the initial fall of the outer floors, that then fell from the base up, apparently

It's actually hard to think of a single demolition or collapse mechanism that explain all three of these things. So, what are the possibilities here?

We can easily rule out the official story of gravity-induced collapse by itself.

Thermite or conventional explosives require too much preparation, and just too many of these devices/much of this material was required to be in the building, to be a practical explanation.

Underground nukes have never made any sense.

Mini-nukes could pulverize the building components if placed properly, but how would they leave the spire?

You could imagine micro-nukes tearing the floors away from the core, allowing for rapid fall, but how was everything pulverized inside the tower?

Unconventional weaponry, a la Judy Wood, could explain this ONLY BECAUSE it's basically a vague catch-all mechanism that has no specific explanation. So that is very unsatisfying. and even then, there is still no single weapon that can account for everything.

The only thing feasible to me are:

1) mini/micro nukes, because of their power and easier installation.

2) different types of demolition at different stages of destruction.
   a) a good-size centrally-planted mini-nuke to blow out the plane impact section and start the destruction process
   b) a series of mini-nukes to take out the floors-- perhaps one of each side in the center of the floor, every 5th floor or so-- this is required for the pulverization of the concrete floors and building components
   c) a mini-nuke in the core to take out the spire
 
Here's an old video I made on the spire:


I won't say I still stand by every word here, but I think it still makes some good points.

It's so bizarre and creepy to think of nuking the WTC, but what other feasible explanation is there?

The Radicalization of Anwar al-Awlaki by the FBI

Interesting interview with Scott Shane of the NYTimes.

Here's the key bit:

SCOTT SHANE: He spoke—he was a luncheon speaker at the Pentagon. He preached at the Capitol. And, you know, looking back, I have often thought that he might have been a national voice for American Muslims in the last 15 years, a voice that has not really existed at the highest level, sort of on the Sunday TV shows and that kind of thing. He was certainly capable of that. And I think that was where he was headed. 

But some personal things and some external sort of world developments intervened. The first personal thing that happened was he discovered—he was actually planning—he was very happy in the U.S. He was planning to stay and keep his career going. The FBI, which had looked into him after 9/11, had concluded he had no ties to al-Qaeda and no ties to the 9/11 plot, even though a few of the hijackers had prayed at his mosques, and so they were worried about that, but they had essentially cleared him. 

But what he found out was that in the process of following him around to see if he had any ties to al-Qaeda, they had discovered that he had the habit of visiting prostitutes in Washington hotels on a regular basis. And one of the managers of one of these escort services that he had been using called him out—called him up and told him the FBI knew all about these visits. And he panicked. And he—you know, he was a conservative preacher with a conservative congregation, and he just could not stand the idea that he would be exposed as a hypocrite before the world. 

And he flew off to the U.K. and abandoned his career in the U.S. And so, we had this guy with a lot of talent and a lot of ambition, and he was sort of in play at this point, and he was looking for a new place to take his career. And the other thing that happened, while he was in the U.K. preaching and taking an increasingly radical line, although it was always shaped at that point in terms of Islamic history and sort of the history of jihad in Muhammad’s—in the Prophet Muhammad’s time—but the other thing that happened, of course, was the U.S. had invaded Afghanistan, which Anwar al-Awlaki denounced, but in a fairly modest way, mild way. 

But when the U.S. invaded Iraq, that had a huge impact on him. And, you know, I think he began to think about what bin Laden had already said, which was that there was a war between the U.S. and Islam, and you had to take sides. And eventually he ended up in Yemen. He was in prison for a year and a half without charges, in part with the encouragement of the United States, which was worried about his influence as a radicalizer. And when he got out of prison, not long after that, he moved to the tribal territories in Yemen and hooked up with al-Qaeda. And so, when he made that second video, he was, you know, a quite influential member of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and he was a part of a small cell within that group that was focused, not as the bulk of the group was on the Yemeni government and the Saudi monarchy, but on the so-called far enemy, as al-Qaeda called it, the United States.

(Emphasis added)

It seems pretty clear from this, that the FBI used the information of the prostitution (odd for a true holy man), to blackmail al-Awlaki to become a terrorist agent. The UK stop-over may have involved some nice programming courtesy of the Brits. Once he was out of the US, the CIA probably took over, making him truly al-CIA-duh.

In any case, this whole case, including the drone killing, stinks like crap.

33s of the Day

Obama tells Dems to unite behind Hillary Clinton at $33,400 per plate fundraiser. 

33 year old Trump supporter profiled in PBS NewsHour sports prominent white power/neo-Nazi tattoos.

Overcoming Pro-Israeli Brainwashing

This is kind of funny:

I Was the Pro-Israel Poster Boy at Brandeis — Here’s Why I Quit 
by Gabriel Goldstein

Can make analogies to overcoming US govt propaganda on 9/11, etc

The Police State Nightmare Continues Unabated

NSA data will soon routinely be used for domestic policing that has nothing to do with terrorism

Callous, Corrupt and Clueless: Hillary Clinton's Terrible Record in Foreign Policy

This piece is spot on in describing how Hillary is as reckless as George W. Bush and why her presidency would be terrible:

"As reckless as George W. Bush: Hillary Clinton helped create disorder in Iraq, Libya, Syria — and, scarier, doesn’t seem to understand how"

I hate to say it, but Trump would probably be more sane foreign policy-wise than Hillary, and he's a unpredictable maniac. But Hillary is a known interventionist and destabilizer, regime-changer. A war-monger. At least Trump called out the Iraq war as a huge mistake based on lies.

That being said, I think the best bet for a sane foreign policy is Bernie Sanders.

There's also this:
"Before Her Murder, Berta Cáceres Singled Out Hillary Clinton for Criticism. The presidential candidate has ignored criticism of her role in enabling the consolidation of the Honduran coup."

Bernie Sanders Gives a History Lesson

Sanders:

...What that was about was saying that the United States was wrong to try to invade Cuba, that the United States was wrong trying to support people to overthrow the Nicaraguan government, that the United States was wrong trying to overthrow in 1954, the government—democratically elected government of Guatemala. Throughout the history of our relationship with Latin America we've operated under the so-called Monroe Doctrine, and that said the United States had the right do anything that they wanted to do in Latin America. So I actually went to Nicaragua and I very shortly opposed the Reagan administration's efforts to overthrow that government. And I strongly opposed earlier Henry Kissinger and the—to overthrow the government of Salvador Allende in Chile. I think the United States should be working with governments around the world, not get involved in regime change. And all of these actions, by the way, in Latin America, brought forth a lot of very strong anti-American sentiments. That's what that was about.

The fact is, the US has a horrific history of regime change around the world, particularly in Latin America, but also obviously in the Middle East and in Indochina. We have instigated just a massive amount of death and destruction where we have intervened. Just a few examples are listed in the linked post.

I applaud Sanders for opposing regime change as a US policy of choice.

I applaud Sanders for raising these points in the national debates with Hillary Clinton, a politician who LOVES regime change, and who is part of the sick Washington DC consensus and power elite. Enough is enough of their crap.

Even if he doesn't win the presidency, Sanders is on the proper side of history and humanity.

RIP Keith Emerson

One of my teenage heroes:

Power Politics in the Middle East-- Interview with Vijay Prasad

This in a fantastic interview on the "Unauthorized Disclosure" podcast with Vijay Prasad. It's very refreshing to hear about the Middle East and not hear any mention of terrorism. There's nothing about conspiracy either, but the discussions on the relationship between Saudi Arabia and the US have very much to do with conspiracy and 9/11.

Some key excerpts-- first about Libya's destruction being like Iraq's and Hillary's role:

KHALEK: Let’s start with Libya. Because of the election, a lot of what is happening in the Middle East right now has sort of been put on the back burner, media-wise. But the U.S. just started bombing Libya again, and it’s basically a lawless hellhole that’s turned into this haven for extremists, for ISIS. A few years ago, the U.S. apparently liberated Libya. So, give us a rundown of what happened and—I thought Libya was free now. Why didn’t our bombs work? 

PRASHAD: If you go back to 2011, the United States was pushed by the French and the British to join a regime change operation in Libya based on the worry, at the time, that there would be enormous civilian casualties as a result of Moammar Gaddafi’s army moving on the city of Benghazi. As it turned out, and as some of us were saying at the time, evidence for the massive casualties was very weak. 

There was a reliance on the Saudi media, particularly on Al Arabiya, which was arguing at the time that tens of thousands of civilians had already been killed in the space of just a few weeks. Later, Human Rights Watch found that at most 350 civilians had been killed and the male-female ratio was skewed in such a way that it looked like mainly men had been killed. So, when you do a study of civilian casualties, when one generally finds civilian deaths, there is a basically a population balance of male-female. Because, if say an army is shelling houses, it’s as likely for women to die as men. 

When you look for instance at Israeli bombing in Gaza, the male-female ratio is almost close to the ratio of the population. But in Libya, in 2011, it was mainly men dying and not so many women, and the numbers were far below what the Saudi media had been broadcasting and what the Americans, French and the British started to talk about in the United Nations. So, under the pretext of violations of human rights, the French and the British particularly pushed the Americans. 

In the United States government, Hillary Clinton played a very important role. She essentially carried the baton of the French and the British and convinced the Obama administration to join this regime change operation. Under cover of a UN resolution, they went in saying that they were only going to protect civilians, but very quickly their bombing transformed itself into the destruction of the Libyan state. 

Once you destroy state institutions, once you empower various factions on the ground who are being supplied by mainly Gulf Arabs—This is a very important issue is that on the ground the Gulf Arabs, particularly the Qataris, the Emiratis, and the Saudis, were picking and choosing their preferred proxies on the ground, and given the character of the Qatari and Emirati disposition, their view of what is a good proxy, the people on the ground that were well-armed were largely extremist. So, NATO then became the air force for the extremists and allowed a regime change operation to essentially destroy the Libyan state. 

The destruction of Libya was not somehow rooted in the culture of Libya or in the history of Libya over the last fifty years. It was actually rooted in the nature of the regime change operation. Since 2011-2012, matters have become much graver in Libya. There is now virtually no rule of law. There are at least three governments in Libya—a Western-backed government that is in Bayda near Benghazi and Tobruk and there is a government, which is largely an Islamist government, sections of the Muslim Brotherhood, sections of fighters who have previously been with al Qaida in Afghanistan, including Mr. Belhadj, who had been delivered to the Libyans by the British. He’s a very popular man in Tripoli. So, there is a Tripoli government, there’s the Bayda-Tobruk government, and then there’s the ISIS government, which has rooted itself in the central Libyan city of Sirte. 

You have a country, which is oil-rich, which had pretty high social indicators, which indeed had a suffocating political atmosphere for the last several decades but nonetheless was not where we are now, which is a destroyed state, a malfunctioning social order, and where there are assassinations of decent people happening on a weekly basis. This is really the destruction of a country before our eyes by Britain, France, and the United States. 

KHALEK: Because there wasn’t an invasion, it did seem like a lighter version of the way that the Iraq War happened, where you had faulty intelligence that people were saying was faulty. That the idea of bombing was based on faulty intelligence that was being pushed by someone like Hillary Clinton and others. And they went in with no plan for afterwards, and they overthrew a regime and now ISIS has expanded. It just seems like a replaying of that, but for some reason, it just hasn’t received as much scorn. I’m not really sure why that is. 

When you look across the Middle East, what’s happening in Libya is recurring in other places. It just seems like that situation has replicated itself in other parts of the Middle East, where you have the Gulf Arab states funneling weapons to extremists and making sure that democratic revolutions can’t happen. And then, you have the U.S. and European forces allying with various rebel groups to topple governments but not explicitly. It seems like that’s what is happening in Syria in a way. 

PRASHAD: Let’s back for a minute to your earlier statement about Iraq, which is important. After the regime change operation in Iraq in 2003, there was dissatisfaction among the kind of European liberal intelligentsia, which worried that George W. Bush had destroyed the legitimacy of the West to intervene when the West wanted to. So, two years after George Bush’s invasion of Iraq, the UN Security Council—In total, the UN Secretariat moved an agenda called responsibility to protect or the R2P doctrine, which was then adopted the UN in 2005.

On the relationship with the US and Saudi Arabia:

GOSZTOLA: I’d like to ask you a question about what you’re talking about with the media failing in its ability to cover U.S. foreign policy, and specifically, to look at Saudi Arabia. I want to know your thoughts on how this country continues to hold such a great influence over the political class in the United States. Specifically, David Sirota and Andy Perez reported last year that the Clinton Foundation, that a number of its donors were able to obtain weapons deals through Hillary Clinton’s State Department. And so, we see the extreme influence that this country has over what is happening here in the United States, and I’d like to hear your thoughts on what this means for what we see happening in these Middle Eastern countries. 

PRASHAD: You see, there is a kind of suicidal death pact between the American elites and the Saudi elites, and this goes back to the 1970s. Some of it manifests itself on the surface as a mutually conjoined interest in engaging Iran. This goes back to the Carter Doctrine of 1979, where essentially the U.S. government pledges itself to protect the Saudi royal family. On the surface, it appears what unites them is something like Iran. On the surface, it also appears that this has to do with oil, but we know that the United States is actually not reliant on Saudi oil imports. 

It’s not the oil itself that’s important. It’s not Iran itself that’s important. It’s the massive amount of liquidity of wealth that the Saudis have in their pockets. Even now, when there’s a crisis in Saudi Arabia, they still have reserves of over 600 billion dollars. Their sovereign fund is still quite flush, even though their balance of payments struggles now because of low oil prices. So, what is underneath this surface phenomenon of Iran or oil exports? Well, at least two things. Both of them are reflected in the question you ask, but let’s do the first one. 

The first one is that Saudi Arabia has an enormous amount of wealth that it has to hold in some currency or the other, and what it has held that wealth in since the ’50s, but really since 1973, since the time when oil prices spiked and their profits went through the roof. Saudi hold their profits in dollars, and we call that the petrodollar market. That’s a market of dollars, which allows the United States Treasury Department to print money with abandon, without fear of inflation. Because so much of the dollars, of the liquidity produced in America flows out into the Euro dollar and the petrodollar market. So, you have this enormous service that Saudi Arabia provides to the dollar. 

And linked to that is that Saudi Arabia puts parts of its enormous amount of its profits in American banks, providing them again with a different kind of liquidity. In other words, on the one side, it provides the government with the opportunity to deficit finance without worries of inflation, without worries of having some kind of credit problem because they are able to print money. And linked to that is that the Saudis basically take their oil profits and put them in American banks. So, Saudi oil money liquifies the U.S. banks and the U.S. Treasury Department. This is an enormous service that the Saudis provide. 

Recently, last year, the Russians turned to the Chinese, and they said why don’t you buy oil from us. We are having a hard time selling to Europe because of the sanctions over the Ukraine. So, you buy oil from us and we’ll take payment not in dollars but in renminbi, in the Chinese currency. Angola, China’s second-largest supplier of oil, also accepts payments in renminbi. Saudi Arabia’s sales to China flattened because they cannot afford to take payment in renminbi. They are entirely linked into the dollar system, and it would be a great political betrayal for them to start denominating their oil sales to China in the renminbi. So, the first great service the Saudis is this financial service. 

The second major service is what you alluded to, what you mentioned, which is, of course, that Saudi Arabia is the great recycler of the arms industry. They put a lot of their profit into buying weapons from very important arms dealers in the United States, and as a recycler of arms, we know that the arms industry has a big role in Washington, DC. There’s a terrific film that will come out this year called “The Shadow World,” and it’s a film about the global arms industry. What you learn from this is, of course, countries like Saudi Arabia, which basically very rarely have any strategic gains they can make with their weapons. We see this in Yemen, where they have been bombing the country since March 26, but they’ve made no strategic gains at all. 

But they have an enormous arms industry, which essentially is a warehouse of the global arms dealers, who then recycle Saudi profits back into the 1% of the United States. So, these are the two reasons why there is a close, as I said a kind of suicide death pact between the elites of Saudi Arabia and the United States. It’s because they are reliant of the recycling of dollars and the recycling of dollars through arms purchases. It’s not entirely about Iran or entirely about oil sales.

There are very interesting points about Iran and Saudi history and recent conflicts. 

Is Trump a Psy-Op?

Trump is certainly doing a major number on this country, with his presidential run.

Now, the media is going nuts about his ties to white supremacy, and his xenophobic views-- and I think they are correct, largely about this.

Curiously, they have NOT given Trump a particularly hard time about his affiliation with Alex Jones and Trump's support of various conspiracy theories.

The big conspiracy theory out there about Trump is that he is an agent sent by Clinton, to destroy the GOP.  I'm open to that idea but don't give it a high chance of likelihood.

Basically, I think Trump is just a massive egoist who is very good at appealing to the GOP base. The strangest thing is how he gets away with saying an absolutely unbelievable amount of horrendous shit (e.g. more torture, killing terrorist families, keeping muslims out of the US, crude name calling and mockery, etc) but still saying true stuff that would normally be verboten for a GOP candidate (namely that Bush lied us into the Iraq war and it was a disaster).

In any case, the one way I would be sure that Trump is a psy-op is if he comes out saying 9/11 was an inside job (he hasn't explicitly said this so far), and then the media starts using the white supremacist criticism to link with 9/11 truth, and totally blast Donald and smear 9/11 truth.

At the same time, if Trump REALLY came out strongly for 9/11 truth, I might consider voting for him, even though I think that would kill his campaign.

To be clear though, my thinking is if Trump does come out saying 9/11 was an inside job, then that would indicate he is a psy-op, of some sort.


I will give Bernie Sanders a lot of credit for knowing what the CIA is all about.

Sanders also understands how evil Kissinger's foreign policy was, and is a strong supporter of civil liberties and supports Snowden against the NSA.