On March 1, Ryan Singel, writing for Wired, accused the government of plotting to destroy the open and freedom-loving internet. Readers of Infowars and Prison Planet have known this for some time, but it is nice to know a quasi-establishment publication is now telling the truth and warning its readers about the threat to liberty posed by the government.
Cyber ShockWave, a “war game” designed to hype the supposed threat to U.S. infrastructure.
“The biggest threat to the open internet is not Chinese government hackers or greedy anti-net-neutrality ISPs, it’s Michael McConnell, the former director of national intelligence,” writes Singel. “McConnell’s not dangerous because he knows anything about SQL injection hacks, but because he knows about social engineering. He’s the nice-seeming guy who’s willing and able to use fear-mongering to manipulate the federal bureaucracy for his own ends, while coming off like a straight shooter to those who are not in the know.”
The former intel boss, now vice president of the spooky Booz Allen Hamilton corporation (notorious for connections to 9/11 and a key DARPA client), has been trotted out to sell “Cybaremaggedon” (as Singel appropriately characterizes it) to the American people. McConnell insists the internet needs to be re-engineered:
We need to develop an early-warning system to monitor cyberspace, identify intrusions and locate the source of attacks with a trail of evidence that can support diplomatic, military and legal options — and we must be able to do this in milliseconds. More specifically, we need to re-engineer the Internet to make attribution, geo-location, intelligence analysis and impact assessment — who did it, from where, why and what was the result — more manageable. The technologies are already available from public and private sources and can be further developed if we have the will to build them into our systems and to work with our allies and trading partners so they will do the same.
“He’s talking about changing the internet to make everything anyone does on the net traceable and geo-located so the National Security Administration can pinpoint users and their computers for retaliation if the U.S. government doesn’t like what’s written in an e-mail, what search terms were used, what movies were downloaded,” writes Singel. “Or the tech could be useful if a computer got hijacked without your knowledge and used as part of a botnet.”
McConnell says the government needs to create a new Cold War, “one complete with the online equivalent of ICBMs and Eisenhower-era, secret-codenamed projects.”
Not directed against Muslims in remote backwater caves, mind you, but the real enemy — the American people who are increasingly aroused, thanks in large part to the internet.
Alex Jones talks about cybersecurity legislation on Russia TV.
The Bush era intel boss hyped the overblown Chinese hacker threat in “breathless” stories published in The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. The world’s largest security companies McAfee and Symantec have downplayed the story. Singel points out that such fear-mongering is almost completely void of facts.
The anti-open internet echo chamber includes a speech delivered by Lawrence E. Strickling, Assistant Commerce Secretary:
In fact, “leaving the Internet alone” has been the nation’s internet policy since the internet was first commercialized in the mid-1990s. The primary government imperative then was just to get out of the way to encourage its growth. And the policy set forth in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was: “to preserve the vibrant and competitive free market that presently exists for the Internet and other interactive computer services, unfettered by Federal or State regulation.”
This was the right policy for the United States in the early stages of the Internet, and the right message to send to the rest of the world. But that was then and this is now.
Now? The Pentagon wants to take out enemies with the online equivalent of ICBMs in order to prevent cyberattacks, privacy intrusions and copyright violations (and, of course, take out the real threat — the alternative media overshadowing the staid establishment corporate media).
“As anyone slightly versed in the internet knows, the net has flourished because no government has control over it,” writes Singel. “But there are creeping signs of danger.”
The primary creeping sign is the cybersecurity bill now in the Senate under the direction of the renown internet hater, senator Jay Rockefeller. If passed, Obama would have the ability to initiate “network contingency plans to ensure key federal or private services did not go offline during a counterattack of unprecedented scope,” according to Tony Romm of The Hill.
“Too much is at stake for us to pretend that today’s outdated cybersecurity policies are up to the task of protecting our nation and economic infrastructure,” Rockefeller said. “We have to do better and that means it will take a level of coordination and sophistication to outmatch our adversaries and minimize this enormous threat.”
Rockefeller and the government have but one serious adversary — the American people who are circumventing establishment propaganda via the internet.
The recently passed House cybersecurity bill and the Senate’s version now under considered are peddled as urgent action against Russian and Chinese hackers hellbent on taking down the power grid and the smart phone network.
In fact, all the fear-mongering is a smoke screen for the real purpose of this legislation — to close down the free and open internet and viciously attack those who dare tell the truth and organize opposition to a predatory and dictatorial government.
Now that Montag, who is apparently an actor on MTV, is encouraging people to sign up for Infowars and Prison Planet twitter alerts (see screenshot) at http://twitter.com/PrisonPlanet. She is also linking directly to our articles.
Imagine, sitting at your computer, it’s twilight. The front window blinds are open out to the street, it’s peaceful. You’ve been trying to sell your house for five months, and have only had two prospects. The prospective buyers that were supposed to come by today turned out to be a group of Century 21 realtors seeking a preview. No doubt to determine their bid when it goes up for auction due to foreclosure.
All of a sudden, the dogs began barking. Through the window I saw two men scurrying up to my front door, then a knock. I opened the door and there stood the county sheriff, a man I know. The second fellow I recognize as the chief of police. The sheriff says, “Hi JT… we need to talk with you.” Thinking it’s a social visit, I invite them in for a cup of coffee. My friend the sheriff says, “No, JT we will have to talk outside.” It was then I realized something was up.
We moved out onto the front lawn, and my friend Sheriff John Minor began the story, “JT, in a couple of minutes your home is going to be searched by DEA. A search warrant was issued this afternoon, which I have here. It seems that a group of realtors who viewed your house today, saw what they believe to be a methamphetamine lab in your downstairs bathroom!”
My reaction was a surprised laugh. “You’ve got to be kidding me John!” He replied, “I am really sorry about this, JT, I didn’t know about it until after the warrant was issued, and I am here to make sure that it stays low-key.” He continued, “I have told everyone involved in this that I will buy them the highest priced steak dinner in the county if they find anything drug related in your house.”
The warrant was in good order, so John signaled down the block and within seconds around the corner of my garage came marching four guys in full battle regalia, helmets with visors, body armor, full camouflage, with MP-5’s and M-16s. And then one other fellow in hazmat gear. The team was in my house less than five minutes, when the team leader came out and said, “there’s no meth lab in there… what is it you do in the bathroom, sir?”
A d v e r t i s e m e n t
I am a gunsmith, and work out of my house I restore antique firearm as a specialty, which involves annealing old brass cartridge cases, as well as manufacturing new cases out of other more modern brass for use in these 100+-year-old firearms, which involves heat and water. The heat is provided by a propane torch with which I heat the brass to a cherry red and then quench it in the sink filled with cold water. My downstairs bathroom which I share with my cats, the place for their litter boxes, food dishes etc. is where I do my brass annealing. The process must be done in a dimly lit room, but, it gives off fumes. So on the counter next to the sink there is a box fan with a length of drier vent tubing that attaches to the bathroom ceiling fan and keeps the buildup of noxious fumes from the annealing process from filling the room when I’m working.
It was at this point that the young man, the team leader, smiled and shook my hand, saying, “God bless you Sir! You are keeping the old ones alive.” Referring to the fact that I restore old firearms. At this point we all stood around and chatted for about 20 minutes. My first question was, “Are realtors being trained by DEA to sniff out drugs these days?”
The answer was that real estate companies are giving DEA courses on how to identify certain types of drug manufacturing processes, and how to report them. Any time a methamphetamine lab is suspected, DEA must be called in because of the hazardous materials involved. The short answer is yes.
I asked my friend Sheriff John Minor what would’ve happened had he not known and came to warn me of what was about to happen, what would have been the standard procedure? His answer was chilling. Because I was there, the house was occupied so all exits would have been covered, the main force would have hammer-jacked open the front door and quickly entered, locked and loaded.
The look on the man’s face told the story, it was obvious that it would’ve been a horrible mistake, in this particular case it would have turned very ugly very quickly. As it turned out what was described by the realtor in the complaint that caused the warrant to be issued was fantasy, a delusion, or a fabrication… a fantasy that could very easily have gotten people killed.
Paul Joseph Watson & Kurt Nimmo Prison Planet.com
Monday, June 1, 2009
The Obama administration’s new Cybersecurity system will only make the Internet more vulnerable to attack, while creating the framework for a massively upgraded government surveillance grid that will control and regulate every aspect of our daily lives through the implementation of “smart” technology.
Obama’s announcement of the new cybersecurity grid dovetails with a recently introduced Senate bill, the Cybersecurity Act of 2009, that would hand the president the power to shut down the entire Internet in the event of a “cybersecurity” crisis.
“The bill’s draft states that “the president may order a cybersecurity emergency and order the limitation or shutdown of Internet traffic” and would give the government ongoing access to “all relevant data concerning (critical infrastructure) networks without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule, or policy restricting such access,” reports Raw Story.
The legislation would allow the government to tap into any digital aspect of every citizen’s information without a warrant. Banking, business and medical records would be wide open to inspection, as well as personal instant message and e mail communications.
This is President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program on steroids, yet the reaction from the liberal left has been muted to say the least.
Furthermore, the reasoning behind the proposal is a farce, since cybersecurity will make the Internet even more vulnerable to attack.
According to Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the program would “basically establish a path for the bad guys to skip down.”
One of the bill’s authors, Democratic Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, admitted that the bill was about more than just military or intelligence concerns. “It is a lot more than that. It suddenly gets into the realm of traffic lights and rail networks and water and electricity,” said Rockefeller.
Essentially, this is the framework within which every aspect of our lives will be managed and regulated by a gargantuan government bureaucracy designed to control and shape every aspect of our behavior through our dependence on technology.
Under the cybersecurity grid, our electricity consumption, our water consumption and every other basic utility that we rely upon will be subject to state regulation.
This is already being introduced through “smart” technology, manifesting in such things as fridges that are controlled by power companies and not the individual. If you are deemed to have bypassed government-approved levels of consumption, your fridge will be automatically turned off remotely.
“A domestic refrigerator that can be turned on and off by the electricity supplier without the homeowner being aware is to go on trial,” reported the Daily Mail in January. “Npower will distribute 300 ‘smart fridges’ free to homeowners throughout Britain within the next five weeks as part of the energy companies’ efforts to tackle climate change.”
“At times of high demand, the National Grid will activate the switches in the fridges to achieve a balance in the power supply. The development means that, for the first time, consumers will lose control over the use of electricity in their own homes,” stated the report.
All British homes are also set to have “smart” electricity and gas meters installed by law by 2020. The meters would “record energy use” according to a Reuters report.
Likewise, water companies are preparing to force homeowners to install water meters so that water consumption can be accurately recorded and restricted in times of drought.
This is just the beginning of the imposition of a suffocating prison planet whereby our every action will not only be recorded by big brother but also subject to government approval and control.
The Cybersecurity grid will also be an upgrade of the pervasive snoop network that has already been operating under NSA auspices for decades.
During a speech last week on “cybersecurity,” Obama told a whopper. He said the government’s effort to protect us from cyber bad guys “will not include monitoring private sector networks or Internet traffic. We will preserve and protect the personal privacy and civil liberties that we cherish as Americans.”
Is it possible Obama has never heard of Mark Klein, the retired AT&T communications technician who said years ago that the company shunted all Internet traffic — including traffic from peering links connecting to other Internet backbone providers — to semantic traffic analyzers, installed in a secret room inside the AT&T central office on Folsom Street in San Francisco? There are similar rooms in Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles and San Diego, all sucking up internet data.
Klein explained that the multinational corporation is doing this at the behest of the NSA. It is “vacuum-cleaner surveillance” approach that grabs everything. “Despite what we are hearing, and considering the public track record of [the Bush] administration, I simply do not believe their claims that the NSA’s spying program is really limited to foreign communications or is otherwise consistent with the NSA’s charter or with FISA [the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act],” said Klein in 2006.
After the NSA showed up in 2002 at AT&T’s Folsom Street facility, Klein began connecting the dots. “You might recall there was a big blowup in the news about the Total Information Awareness [TIA] program, led by Adm. [John] Poindexter, which caused the big upsetness in Congress, because what Poindexter was proposing to do was draw in databases from everywhere — and this was in The New York Times — draw in Internet data, bank records, travel records, everything into one big conglomeration which could be searchable by the government so they could find out everything about what anybody’s doing at any time of day,” Klein told PBS. “And all this would be done without any warrants. This is how it was presented by Poindexter himself in The New York Times, and that caused a great upset, brouhaha, in Congress.”
On January 16, 2003, Senator Russ Feingold introduced legislation to suspend the activity of the Total Information Awareness program pending a Congressional review of privacy issues involved. In February 2003, Congress passed legislation suspending activities of the IAO (Information Awareness Office) pending a Congressional report of the office’s activities.
A d v e r t i s e m e n t
Congress acted after William Safire published an article in the New York Times claiming “[TIA] has been given a $200 million budget to create computer dossiers on 300 million Americans” (see You Are a Suspect, November 14, 2002).
Of course, the program didn’t go away. Legislators included a classified annex to the Defense Appropriations Act that preserved funding for TIA’s component technologies, if they were transferred to other government agencies. TIA projects continued to be funded under classified annexes to Defense and Intelligence appropriation bills.
“Total Information Awareness — the all-seeing terrorist spotting algorithm-meets-the-mother-of-all-databases that was ostensibly de-funded by Congress in 2003, never actually died, and was largely rebuilt in secret by the NSA, according to the Wall Street Journal’s Siobhan Gorman,” Ryan Singel wrote for Wired on March 10, 2008. “There’s been no real debate in Congress or in the press about whether the government should be allowed to track every Americans phone calls, emails and web browsing.”
Jon Stokes, writing for Ars Technica, notes that TIA technology is nothing new. “TIA-like efforts are still going on” Stokes wrote in 2005, and “the government has been trying to use new technology, like database tech and voice recognition, for domestic surveillance for a long time. And when I say a long time, I mean well before the current administration came into office.” It really got a boost under Clinton in 1995 when the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) was passed. “CALEA mandated that the telcos aid wiretapping by installing remote wiretap ports onto their digital switches so that the switch traffic would be available for snooping by law enforcement.” In other words, Mark Klein had but scratched the surface.
Truman created the NSA in 1952, supposedly to serve as “America’s ears” abroad, but the agency has long served as a secret Stasi-like organization dedicated to snooping on Americans. The NSA, writes Siobhan Gorman for the Wall Street Journal, “and other intelligence agencies were found to be using their spy tools to monitor Americans for political purposes.”
The NSA’s predecessor, the Armed Forces Security Agency, launched Project SHAMROCK in 1945. It obtained copies of all telegraphic information exiting or entering the United States with the full cooperation of RCA, ITT and Western Union. A sister project known as Project MINARET involved the creation of “watch lists,” by each of the intelligence agencies and the FBI, of those accused of “subversive” domestic activities. The watch lists included such notables as Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Jane Fonda, Joan Baez and Dr. Benjamin Spock, according to Patrick S. Poole, writing for Nexus Magazine in 1999. The FBI, the NSA, and other intelligence agencies were actively involved in creating the watch lists.
NSA has attempted to keep up on technology as the secretive agency continues to snoop on “subversives” and others the government considers miscreants. In February, trade publications reported the agency is offering “billions” to any firm able to offer reliable eavesdropping on Skype IM and voice traffic. Skype is particularity troublesome because it utilizes P2P networks, that is to say peer-top-peer (no central server owned and operated by a telecom required). The government and the corporate media may tell you they want to crack down on P2P — for instance, the vastly popular BitTorrent — because of copyright infringement, but a more practical reason is because the government has yet to figure out how to crack the file sharing protocol. Skype and BitTorrent account for a large amount of traffic on the internet.
If you think Obama will roll back the government’s massive and unconstitutional snoop program, think again. On April 3, the Obama Department of Justice filed a motion to dismiss one of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s landmark lawsuits against illegal spying by the NSA. The DOJ demanded that the entire lawsuit be dismissed based on both the Bush administration’s claim that a “state secrets” privilege bars any lawsuits against the executive branch for illegal spying, as well as a novel “sovereign immunity” claim that the Patriot Act bars lawsuits of any kind for illegal government surveillance (see the EFF press release, Obama Administration Embraces Bush Position on Warrantless Wiretapping and Secrecy).
In March, Obama’s coordinator for cybersecurity programs, Rod Beckstrom, a former Silicon Valley entrepreneur, quit because he opposed the role of the NSA in the so-called cybersecurity initiative. Beckstrom said “the threats to our democratic processes are significant if all top level government network security and monitoring are handled by” the NSA.
“Obama’s moves drew praise from key lawmakers on Capitol Hill, who vowed to work with the president to implement new security measures as needed,” CQPolitics reported shortly after his “cybersecurity” speech. “Obama said his cybersecurity adviser — who will be a member of both the National Security Staff and the National Economic Council staff — will head a new office within the White House.”
“We applaud President Obama for highlighting the extraordinarily serious issue of cybersecurity,” Sens. Johns D. Rockefeller IV, D-W.V., and Olympia J. Snowe , R-Maine, said in a joint statement. “No other president in American history has elevated this issue to that level and we think him for his leadership.”
No other president so far has had the power to shut down the internet. The Rockefeller-Snowe bill, S 778, would grant Obama dictatorial power declare a so-called “cyber emergency” and pull the plug, or at least cripple networks deemed a threat. The U.S. government is not seriously worried about Chinese hackers or mischievous kids in Latvia (as Rockefeller cited as a danger) but rather fear free and unfettered speech and activism on the part of its own citizens.
Obama’s promise is merely an effort to string you along with a big fat lie. He has absolutely no respect for you or the Bill of Rights.
Alex Jones’ latest DVD documentary release, Reflections And Warnings – An Interview With Aaron Russo, pays homage to maverick patriot Aaron Russo, who left this mortal coil in August 2007 after a long battle with cancer. The film is a 90 minute full version of Jones’ seminal interview with Russo, which took place months before his death.
This was Russo’s final videotaped interview before he passed away, but his legacy as the founder of the movement to end the power monopoly of the Federal Reserve makes the documentary more contemporary than ever before in light of how the Federal Reserve has increased its stranglehold over the American economy since the beginning of the financial crisis last year.
The DVD is interspersed with new footage of Jones highlighting the progression of many things that Russo warned were part of the ultimate agenda for the prison planet before he passed away.
Russo was perhaps best known for managing star of stage and screen Bette Midler, as well as producing Trading Places starring Eddie Murphy, but his last great work was undoubtedly the most important of his life – Russo’s groundbreaking exposé of the criminal run-for-profit Federal Reserve system, the documentary America: From Freedom to Fascism.
The interview opens with Russo talking about how he first started to become aware of the fact that something was very wrong in America, when cops set him up and raided his Chicago night club and later demanded protection money, mafia style.
The conversation on the DVD features many shocking revelations that were divulged by Russo’s one-time close friend Nick Rockefeller about the elite’s agenda for mankind.
After his popular video Mad As Hell was released and he began his campaign to become Governor of Nevada, Russo was noticed by Rockefeller and introduced to him by a female attorney. Seeing Russo’s passion and ability to affect change, Rockefeller set about on a subtle mission to recruit Russo into the elite.
During one conversation, Rockefeller asked Russo if he was interested in joining the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) but Russo rejected the invitation, saying he had no interest in “enslaving the people” to which Rockefeller coldly questioned why he cared about the “serfs.”
“I used to say to him what’s the point of all this,” said Russo, “you have all the money in the world you need, you have all the power you need, what’s the point, what’s the end goal?” to which Rockefeller replied (paraphrasing), “The end goal is to get everybody chipped, to control the whole society, to have the bankers and the elite people control the world.”
A d v e r t i s e m e n t
Rockefeller even assured Russo that if he joined the elite his chip would be specially marked so as to avoid undue inspection by the authorities.
In another conversation, Russo states that Rockefeller told him, “Eleven months before 9/11 happened there was going to be an event and out of that event we were going to invade Afghanistan to run pipelines through the Caspian sea, we were going to invade Iraq to take over the oil fields and establish a base in the Middle East, and we’d go after Chavez in Venezuela.”
Rockefeller also told Russo that he would see soldiers looking in caves in Afghanistan and Pakistan for Osama bin Laden and that there would be an “Endless war on terror where there’s no real enemy and the whole thing is a giant hoax,” so that “the government could take over the American people,” according to Russo, who said that Rockefeller was cynically laughing and joking as he made the astounding prediction.
“Eleven months to a year later that’s what happened….he certainly knew that something was going to happen,” said Russo.
In a later conversation, Rockefeller asked Russo what he thought women’s liberation was about. Russo’s response that he thought it was about the right to work and receive equal pay as men, just as they had won the right to vote, caused Rockefeller to laughingly retort, “You’re an idiot! Let me tell you what that was about, we the Rockefeller’s funded that, we funded women’s lib, we’re the one’s who got all of the newspapers and television – the Rockefeller Foundation.”
Rockefeller told Russo of two primary reasons why the elite bankrolled women’s lib, one because before women’s lib the bankers couldn’t tax half the population and two because it allowed them to get children in school at an earlier age, enabling them to be indoctrinated into accepting the state as the primary family, breaking up the traditional family model.
This revelation dovetails previous admissions on behalf of feminist pioneer Gloria Steinem (pictured) that the CIA bankrolled Ms. Magazine as part of the same agenda of breaking up traditional family models.
Rockefeller was often keen to stress his idea that “the people have to be ruled” by an elite and that one of the tools of such power was population reduction, that there were “too many people in the world,” and world population numbers should be reduced by at least half.
Russo talks at length in the interview about how any attempt at taking America back from the criminal elite needs to be focused around dismantling the private criminal enterprise known as the Federal Reserve, by returning America to a system where the government prints its own money backed by gold without having to be in debt and pay interest to a private cabal of elitists.
At the end of the interview, Russo describes how he had plans to further fight the new world order once he overcame his cancer, which unfortunately was not to be. However, Aaron’s legacy will live on through this interview, through his outstanding documentary America: From Freedom To Fascism and through the countless people in his life who he brought joy to by way of his engaging, warm and above all, innately human personality.
Watch the trailer for the documentary below.
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Subscribers can see this new documentary before its June 3rd DVD release exclusively at Prison Planet.tv. Click here to become a member and get instant access to a deluge of other documentary films and special video reports, as well as daily Alex Jones Show and The Infowarrior archives, as well as live video feeds. Click here to pre-order the DVD from the Alex Jones store.
Staged photos lifted from porn websites purporting to be images of U.S. troops raping female detainees at Abu Ghraib are again circulating at the height of the torture scandal, discrediting the very real and admitted accounts of rape described in Major General Antonio Taguba’s military report into the Abu Ghraib prison.
Despite the fact that these photos were vehemently discredited and proven to be taken from porn websites when they first emerged in 2004, they are again being erroneously cited as examples of photos showing rape that the Obama administration is blocking from public release – providing debunkers with ammunition to dismiss the validity of the torture scandal altogether.
In light of the Pentagon and the White House’s bizarre efforts to deny the reality of their own internal investigation and pull a crude bait and switch yesterday in claiming that the blocked photos do not show rape, it can only be assumed that these fake photos are again being pushed as a means of discrediting the proven instances of U.S. prison guards and others raping women and children at Abu Ghraib and other detention facilities.
“New photos obtained by Press TV have revealed alleged sexual harassment and rape of Iraqi prisoners at US-run Abu Ghraib detention center by American soldiers. The alleged pictures illustrate American soldiers raping and sexually harassing Iraqi detainees,” states the report.
However, the photos do not illustrate American soldiers at all, the uniforms worn by the men in the images are clearly not those worn by U.S. troops in Iraq, they are cheap military fatigues that anyone could find at Wal-Mart or any other discount clothing store.
Furthermore, it was admitted five years ago that the photos were taken from porn websites after they were first published by the Boston Globe.
A d v e r t i s e m e n t
“Graphic photos appearing on Arabic websites of U.S. servicemen raping and sexually abusing Iraqi women were actually taken from American and Hungarian pornography sites,” reported World Net Daily.
The photos, which were published under the headline “The Abu Ghraib Prison Photos,” by a Tunisian website, were lifted from an American porn website called “Babes in Iraq,” as well as a Hungarian porn website called “Sex in War.”
The websites were registered under the HotSpotCity.com domain, which hosts “cheap unrestricted adult XXX porn websites” and is a subsidiary of MacNew Enterprises. Owner Linda MacNew told World Net Daily that the photos had originated from the porn websites and they were subsequently shut down.
The fact that the photos are being cited as proof of rape at Abu Ghraib when they are clearly lifted from amateur porn websites, a point that was confirmed no less than five years ago, makes it highly suspicious that these images are again circulating as the torture scandal reaches new heights and threatens to embroil top Democrats, who are complicit because they gave their approval for the Bush torture program in the first place.
It seems that every time the torture scandal escalates, fake images, video and testimony is released to poison the well and convince the public that the whole issue is a hoax.
In May 2006, a video emerged in which a self-proclaimed Army Ranger called Jesse MacBeth claimed that his unit was told to kill Iraqi men, their wives and children indiscriminately if they didn’t explicitly follow orders. The video became wildly popular on the Internet but soon turned out to be a hoax, there was no record of MacBeth being an Army Ranger.
As soon as the video was declared a hoax, neo-cons like Michelle Malkin jumped on the issue to claim that accounts of Iraqis being indiscriminately killed were all fraudulent, despite the fact that a BBC News interview with soldiers who had served in Iraq, in which the troops admitted to witnessing war crimes, proved the allegations of indiscriminate murder to be true.
Similarly, at the height of the Abu Ghraib scandal in May 2004, the London Mirror published photos of British soldiers allegedly urinating on detainees in Iraq. The images were later proven to be fraudulent and the hoax was exploited by the corporate media and the government to discredit other proven cases of torture and abuse carried out by British soldiers in Iraq.
We see the same pattern over and over again – every time the torture scandal escalates, fake images are released to poison the well and dampen outrage about the very real torture and sexual abuse of women and children that is documented in the U.S. military’s own internal report into the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.
The fact that Press TV and the individual quoted in the article have fallen for this simplistic propaganda yet again is beyond belief. It’s a case of ‘fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.’ We have alerted them to the hoax and hope to see the story removed as soon as possible before people like Michelle Malkin cite it as proof that the very real rape scandal is non-existent.
It only took five years, but the mainstream media has finally acknowledged the truth behind why certain photos and videos from the infamous Abu Ghraib prison camp have been blocked from public release – they show U.S. soldiers and other prison guards raping female detainees as well as children.
In an interview with the London Telegraph, Major General Antonio Taguba, the former army officer who conducted an inquiry into the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq, confirmed the details of his original army report, that the unreleased photos showed rape and sexual abuse of women and minors.
“At least one picture shows an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner while another is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee,” reports the Telegraph, adding, “Further photographs are said to depict sexual assaults on prisoners with objects including a truncheon, wire and a phosphorescent tube.”
Taguba also verified the credibility of eyewitness statements from other detainees that described an American-Egyptian male translator in uniform raping teenage boys.
Among the graphic statements, which were later released under US freedom of information laws, is that of Kasim Mehaddi Hilas in which he says: “I saw [name of a translator] ******* a kid, his age would be about 15 to 18 years. The kid was hurting very bad and they covered all the doors with sheets. Then when I heard screaming I climbed the door because on top it wasn’t covered and I saw [name] who was wearing the military uniform, putting his **** in the little kid’s ***…. and the female soldier was taking pictures.”
A d v e r t i s e m e n t
“These pictures show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency,” Taguba told the Telegraph.
Taguba’s confirmation that the photos depict rape mean that President Obama could only have been lying when he claimed, “I want to emphasize that these photos that were requested in this case are not particularly sensational, especially when compared to the painful images that we remember from Abu Ghraib.”
As we reported last week, such horrors have been on the record for years, yet corporate media coverage of the Abu Ghraib scandal still frames the entire issue in the context that the “abuse” consisted merely of college fraternity-style humiliation and stacking prisoners in human pyramids.
In reality, the very worst of the torture has never been seen and it includes raping women and children, as well as brutally beating detainees to death.
“Some of the worst things that happened you don’t know about, okay?” said Hersh. “Videos, there are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib … The women were passing messages out saying ‘Please come and kill me, because of what’s happened’ and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror. It’s going to come out.”
Following his refusal to release the unseen photos, the ACLU charged that President Obama “has essentially become complicit with the torture that was rampant during the Bush years by being complicit in its coverup.” The Obama administration has also sought to protect intelligence officials involved in torture from prosecution at every turn.
Alex Jones discusses the IFC film “New World Order”– which features the firebrand owner of Infowars.com & PrisonPlanet.com along with other like-minded patriots during a promo for IFC.
This includes Alex driving around spreading the word to downtown Austin via a megaphone mounted on top of a car.
A state of war officially exists again between North and South Korea for the first time since the end of hostilities in 1953 following North Korea’s announcement that they would henceforth refuse to abide by the terms of the peace armistice.
“The Korean People’s Army will not be bound to the Armistice Agreement any longer,” the official Korean Central News Agency said in a statement today. Any attempt to inspect North Korean vessels will be countered with “prompt and strong military strikes.” South Korea’s military said it will “deal sternly with any provocation” from the North, reports Bloomberg.
As we have highlighted, any North Korean attack on South Korea will be countered by the United States, which is allied with South Korea. North Korea is allied with China, and Chinese military forces will support North Korea in any conflict just as they did in the 1950’s before the armistice was signed.
North Korea’s renouncement of the peace armistice follows yesterday’s threat by a Japanese ruling party minister that Japan should change the terms of its pacifist constitution in order to conduct cruise missile strikes on North Korea.
Meanwhile, Russia has warned that the conflict could go nuclear and has made preparations to safeguard its far eastern regions.
An interesting back story to this crisis is the fact that, as we reported in October last year, the RAND corporation has been intensely lobbying the Pentagon to become embroiled in a new war. Although North Korea was ruled out as a target because RAND demanded a bigger conflict, the eventual consequences of a war between the Koreas could lead to a global military confrontation involving Russia and China.
A d v e r t i s e m e n t
The origins of this whole crisis lead back to the question of how North Korea obtained its nuclear weapons in the first place, and for that we have to thank the usual suspects – the U.S. military industrial complex.
In 2004, Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan’s atom bomb program, admitted sharing nuclear technology via a worldwide smuggling network that included facilities in Malaysia that manufactured key parts for centrifuges.
Khan’s collaborator B.S.A. Tahir ran a front company out of Dubai that shipped centrifuge components to North Korea.
Despite Dutch authorities being deeply suspicious of Khan’s activities as far back as 1975, the CIA prevented them from arresting him on two occasions.
“The man was followed for almost ten years and obviously he was a serious problem. But again I was told that the secret services could handle it more effectively,” former Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers said. “The Hague did not have the final say in the matter. Washington did.”
Lubbers stated that Khan was allowed to slip in and out of the Netherlands with the blessing of the CIA, eventually allowing him to become the “primary salesman of an extensive international network for the proliferation of nuclear technology and know-how,” according to George W. Bush himself, and sell nuclear secrets that allowed North Korea to build nuclear bombs.
“Lubbers suspects that Washington allowed Khan’s activities because Pakistan was a key ally in the fight against the Soviets,” reports CFP. “At the time, the US government funded and armed mujahideen such as Osama bin Laden. They were trained by Pakistani intelligence to fight Soviet troops in Afghanistan. Anwar Iqbal, Washington correspondent for the Pakistani newspaper Dawn, told ISN Security Watch that Lubbers’ assertions may be correct. “This was part of a long-term foolish strategy. The US knew Pakistan was developing nuclear weapons but couldn’t care less because it was not going to be used against them. It was a deterrent against India and possibly the Soviets.”
In September 2005 it emerged that the Amsterdam court which sentenced Khan to four years imprisonment in 1983 had lost the legal files pertaining to the case. The court’s vice-president, Judge Anita Leeser, accused the CIA of stealing the files. “Something is not right, we just don’t lose things like that,” she told Dutch news show NOVA. “I find it bewildering that people lose files with a political goal, especially if it is on request of the CIA. It is unheard of.”
With this history in mind, the shock, condemnation and indignation being expressed by the U.S. government in response to North Korea’s second nuclear bomb test is tinged with hypocrisy to say the least. Through their policies in aiding North Korea to build light water reactors, and via the CIA asset AQ Khan who was protected at every step of the way while he helped provide North Korea with the means to build a nuclear arsenal, the U.S. government itself is directly complicit in providing North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il with the nuclear weapons that they are now condemning him for testing.
Amidst the cacophony of condemnation from all sides following North Korea’s second nuclear bomb test, there has been no mention whatsoever of how the secretive Stalinist state got its weapons in the first place – they were paid for by the U.S. government.
Both the Clinton and Bush administrations played a key role in helping Kim Jong-Il develop North Korea’s nuclear prowess from the mid 1990’s onwards.
The hypocrisy being spewed forth from all sides in reaction to today’s news that North Korea tested an underground nuclear device equivalent to 10 times the power of their first test in October 2006 is akin to when the U.S. cited Iraq’s possession of chemical and biological weapons as a reason to invade in 2003, having first checked the receipt of course, since it was Donald Rumsfeld who brokered the deal to supply Saddam with those weapons in the first place.
Rumsfeld was also the man who presided over a $200 million dollar contract to deliver equipment and services to build two light water reactor stations in North Korea in January 2000 when he was an executive director of ABB (Asea Brown Boveri). Wolfram Eberhardt, a spokesman for ABB confirmed that Rumsfeld was at nearly all the board meetings during his involvement with the company.
Rumsfeld was merely picking up the baton from the Clinton administration, who in 1994 agreed to replace North Korea’s domestically built nuclear reactors with light water nuclear reactors. So-called government-funded ‘experts’ claimed that light water reactors couldn’t be used to make bombs. Not so according to Henry Sokolski, head of the Non-proliferation Policy Education Centre in Washington, who stated, “LWRs could be used to produce dozens of bombs’ worth of weapons-grade plutonium in both North Korea and Iran. This is true of all LWRs — a depressing fact U.S. policymakers have managed to block out.”
“These reactors are like all reactors, they have the potential to make weapons. So you might end up supplying the worst nuclear violator with the means to acquire the very weapons we’re trying to prevent it acquiring,” said Sokolski.
The U.S. State Department claimed that the light water reactors could not be used to produce bomb grade material and yet in 2002 urged Russia to end its nuclear co-operation with Iran for the reason that it didn’t want Iran armed with weapons of mass destruction. At the time, Russia was building light water reactors in Iran. According to the State Department, light water reactors in Iran can produce nuclear material but somehow the same rule doesn’t apply in North Korea.
In April 2002, the Bush administration announced that it would release $95 million of American taxpayer’s dollars to begin construction of the ‘harmless’ light water reactors in North Korea. Bush argued that arming the megalomaniac dictator Kim Jong-Il with the potential to produce a hundred nukes a year was, “vital to the national security interests of the United States.” Bush released even more money in January 2003, as was reported by Bloomberg News.
Bush released the funds despite the startling revelation, reported by South Korean newspapers, that a North Korean missile warhead had been found in Alaska.
Construction of the reactors was eventually suspended, but North Korea had an alternative source through which they could obtain the nuclear secrets vital to building an atom bomb arsenal – CIA asset and international arms smuggler AQ Khan.
In 2004, Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan’s atom bomb program, admitted sharing nuclear technology via a worldwide smuggling network that included facilities in Malaysia that manufactured key parts for centrifuges.
Khan’s collaborator B.S.A. Tahir ran a front company out of Dubai that shipped centrifuge components to North Korea.
A d v e r t i s e m e n t
Despite Dutch authorities being deeply suspicious of Khan’s activities as far back as 1975, the CIA prevented them from arresting him on two occasions.
“The man was followed for almost ten years and obviously he was a serious problem. But again I was told that the secret services could handle it more effectively,” former Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers said. “The Hague did not have the final say in the matter. Washington did.”
Lubbers stated that Khan was allowed to slip in and out of the Netherlands with the blessing of the CIA, eventually allowing him to become the “primary salesman of an extensive international network for the proliferation of nuclear technology and know-how,” according to George W. Bush himself, and sell nuclear secrets that allowed North Korea to build nuclear bombs.
“Lubbers suspects that Washington allowed Khan’s activities because Pakistan was a key ally in the fight against the Soviets,” reports CFP. “At the time, the US government funded and armed mujahideen such as Osama bin Laden. They were trained by Pakistani intelligence to fight Soviet troops in Afghanistan. Anwar Iqbal, Washington correspondent for the Pakistani newspaper Dawn, told ISN Security Watch that Lubbers’ assertions may be correct. “This was part of a long-term foolish strategy. The US knew Pakistan was developing nuclear weapons but couldn’t care less because it was not going to be used against them. It was a deterrent against India and possibly the Soviets.”
In September 2005 it emerged that the Amsterdam court which sentenced Khan to four years imprisonment in 1983 had lost the legal files pertaining to the case. The court’s vice-president, Judge Anita Leeser, accused the CIA of stealing the files. “Something is not right, we just don’t lose things like that,” she told Dutch news show NOVA. “I find it bewildering that people lose files with a political goal, especially if it is on request of the CIA. It is unheard of.”
With this history in mind, the shock, condemnation and indignation being expressed by the U.S. government in response to North Korea’s second nuclear bomb test is tinged with hypocrisy to say the least. Through their policies in aiding North Korea to build light water reactors, and via the CIA asset AQ Khan who was protected at every step of the way while he helped provide North Korea with the means to build a nuclear arsenal, the U.S. government itself is directly complicit in providing North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il with the nuclear weapons that they are now condemning him for testing.
North Korea is controlled by a hereditary Stalinist dictatorship that has starved two million of its citizens to death in favor of building a million-man army. Some people put the figure at four million, one-quarter of the population. In the far north of the country there is a network of forced labor gulags where people who have ‘expressed a bland political opinion’ are, along with their entire families, tortured, raped and executed. Horrific bio-chemical experiments are performed on mass numbers of people. Babies are delivered and then stamped to death by the camp guards. If the mother screams while the guards are stamping on the baby’s neck, she is immediately assassinated by a firing squad. These guards are rewarded with bonuses and promotions for ripping out prisoners’ eyeballs.
The North Korean people are enslaved by a government that is using food as a weapon. Perhaps this is why the EU and the United States, via the UN World Food Program, resumed the shipment of hundreds of thousands of tons in food aid at the end of February 2003. This goes directly to the sitting dictatorship, which then decides who gets it by their level of allegiance to the state. Food aid only increases the power of Kim Jong-Il and yet it is veiled by the UN in bleeding heart humanitarian rhetoric. The money goes straight to enabling the North Korean leadership to live in the lap of westernized luxury with casinos and lavish new cars.
President Bush publicly claimed to loathe Kim Jong-Il and yet his administration, like Bill Clinton before him, set the policy to help North Korea obtain nuclear expertise. The U.S. intelligence network also protected AQ Khan and allowed him to provide the means with which North Korea aqcuired their nuclear capability.
Now the corporate media, along with Obama, the UN, Israel and others, are expressing their grave condemnation that North Korea is testing the very same nuclear weapons technology that was initially bankrolled by the U.S. government itself. Sanctions are already in the pipeline and others are even talking of military confrontation, which could ultimately lead to a conflict with China, North Korea’s close neighbor and ally.
PortalScape 
