Al-Qaedas Suspect Humanitarianism Is bin Ladens concern for flood victims a ruse to destabilise Pakistan? By Maidhc Cathail October 06, 2010:lol:-- If we are to believe the Associated Press, that demmed elusive Osama bin Laden has s***en again. According to the worlds oldest and largest newsgathering organization, the fugitive al-Qaeda leader, who some intelligence experts believe has been dead since December 2001, has just released an audiotape in which he calls for the creation of a new relief body to help Muslims affected by this summers devastating floods in Pakistan. Bin Laden, AP suggests, is seeking to exploit discontent by depicting the regions governments as uncaring. Seemingly unfazed by news of the CIAs 3,000-strong Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams hot on its trail, al-Qaeda has, in recent weeks, according to the AP report, put out three messages, including the one featuring bin Laden, concerning the massive floods that affected around 20 million people in Pakistan, signaling a concentrated campaign by the terror group to tap into anger over the flooding to rally support. APs sole source for the 11-minute tape, with the oddly contemplative title Reflections on the Method of Relief Work, is SITE Intelligence Group. The U.S.-based group, which purportedly monitors jihadi forums, provided AP with a copy of the message that it claims was posted on unnamed Islamic militant websites. There are questions, however, about whether SITE Intelligence is the most objective source of information about terrorism. SITE co-founder Rita Katz, an Israeli Defense Forces veteran, is an Iraqi-born Jew, whose father was publicly hanged in Iraq after the 1967 Six-Day War as an Israeli spy. Considering Tel Avivs obvious interest in having the worlds only superpower fight a global war on terror against the Jewish states Muslim neighbours, it somehow never occurred to Associated Press, or other mainstream media outlets, to ask the question, Like father, like daughter? Moreover, there are reasonable grounds for suspicion aboutal-Qaedas other pronouncements on the floods in Pakistan. In a recent video, presumably also found online by Rita Katzs SITE, al-Qaedas California-born s***esman, Adam Gadahn, castigated Islamabad for its sluggish and halfhearted response to the floods, and called on Muslims in Pakistan to join the Islamist militants fighting the government. Gadahn, who has since 2001 run al-Qaedas media wing, As-Sahab, found his way to the Islamic Society of Orange County while living with his grandfather, Carl Pearlman, a board member of the Anti-Defamation League.
a civil rights organization set up to fight anti-Semitism, the ADL is a de facto adjunct of the Israeli government which, significantly, has been caught spying on American critics of Israel. Like grandpa, like grandson? In a previous video, Ayman al-Zawahiri, said to be al-Qaedas second-in-command, also incited Pakistanis to rise up against their government due to its failure to provide relief to flood victims. But when Neal Krawetz, a researcher and computer security consultant, analysed a 2006 video of al-Zawahiri for alterations and enhancements, he discovered that the logos of As-Sahab and IntelCenter (the other group supposedly tracking terrorists online) had been added at the same time. IntelCenter is run by Ben Venzke, former director of intelligence at iDefense, a VeriSign company. VeriSign is a partner of Verint, formerly known as Comverse Infosys, which was founded by former Israeli intelligence officer Jacob Kobi Alexander. In 2006, Alexander fled to Namibia after the U.S. Department of Justice indicted him on multiple counts of fraud. Comverse/Verint, one of a number of Israeli eavesdropping and surveillance companies created by veterans of Unit 8200, the technology intel unit of the Israeli Defense Forces Intelligence Corps, has been widely suspected of spying on Americans. If, as seems likely, the al-Qaeda messages concerningthis summers floods in Pakistan are fakes, they would seem to provide further evidence of an Israeli-inspiredcampaign to destabilise the worlds only Islamic nuclear power. The question then becomes, what, if anything, Islamabad will do to counter such efforts before it too goes the way of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Americans tend to believe that American lives are more valuable than the lives of other people. When Americans are killed we never stop talking about it. It, literally, goes down in the history books. But when we kill innocent women and children in other countries we simply say, "Oops, sorry 'bout that," then expect the people to forget about it.
By Eric L. Wattree The American propa****a machine tells us that Muslims are a hostile people who hate American freedom. The most cursory examination of that claim reveals that the evidence the claim is based upon is highly flawed, yet the American people have been persuaded that it's true. That suggests that the American people have learned nothing from our experience with the Nazi's, and it also suggests that the biggest threat to America is the propa****a machine itself. The primary argument against the claim that Muslims are inherently hostile toward America is the fact that we had absolutely no problem with Muslims at all until we, Western "Christians" and "Jews," began our imperialistic excursion into the Middle East. Prior to that time Muslims were content to be left alone to practice their religion in their own lands.
So when we consider Muslim hostility towards America we must keep two things in mind. First, we need to consider all the hell we're raising over the loss of 3000 citizens during 9/11. If we've been impacted to our core over the loss of 3000 of Americans, how do you think Muslims feel over the loss of hundreds of thousands of their people resulting from the unjust and illegal invasion of Iraq? And secondly, we must remember that while we're quick to call Muslims aggressors, we're invading their countries, they're not invading ours.
Americans tend to believe that American lives are more valuable than the lives of other people. When Americans are killed we never stop talking about it. It, literally, goes down in the history books. But when we kill innocent women and children in other countries we simply say, "Oops, sorry 'bout that," then expect the people to forget about it.
Look at what Obama said about Bush and Cheney's war crimes - "We want to look forward, not back." What the hell is he talking about? Bush killed close to a million people for nothing more than corporate greed. How can we expect to dismiss the killing of a million men, women, and children by simply saying, let's let bygones be bygones? One can only wonder if Obama would have taken that position if his family had been among that million? Somehow, I doubt it.
It was that one remark that opened my eyes regarding our president. While I consider Obama the best that we've got, I also recognize that he's far from an angel. The remark served to remind me that Obama is also the product of a propa****a machine - his own. So while I continue to support Obama, I never allow myself to forget that even though he's an impressive man, he's also a politician, not the Messiah.
Americans need to recognize that life is not a football game. It's not good enough to just pull for our side, regardless to whether we're talking about the nation, political parties, or individual politicians. We should always pull for justice, period - regardless to whose political ox it gores. Because if we continue to allow the various propa****a machines to cloud our minds to the truth, none of us will be safe. It's Muslims who are being demonized today, but tomorrow it may be Blacks, Hispanics, Jews, activists, the entire middle class, or whatever group is convenient to meet our rulers' needs. And yes, I said rulers, because those who control our minds, control our destiny.
But the propa****a machine is an insidious device, because it tells us what we want to hear, and helps us hide what we don't want to see, so it has the seductive properties of a drug. Take the issue of terrorism for example. Terrorism is defined as the killing of innocent noncombatants for political gain. Keeping that definition in mind, we must not forget that we are the ONLY country on Earth who has ever dropped an atomic bomb on not one, but two cities, killing and maiming hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women, and children. As horrible as 9/11 was, the horror of that atrocity makes 9/11 look insignificant.
But accepting the fact that we committed such a horrible atrocity is inconsistent with the image that we so passionately embrace of "that shining light on the hill," our propa****a machine swung into action. It helped us to justify that action by convincing us that we only did it to save the lives of thousands of American troops. But there's a very serious flaw in that argument. By embracng that argument it affirms that we accept the fact that there are times when terrorism is justified. Thus, by our own definition the United States is, in fact, a terrorist state. So the fact is, the only difference between Muslim terrorists and American, or "Christian," terrorists is that we have a much more efficient delivery system.
Now, before someone gets upset and start shouting that I'm un-American, please remember that truth and justice is the American way - and what I've just told you is both true and just. What I've said here is not simply my opinion. Every word I've written is verifiable, and based on pure logic - and like mathematics, logic doesn't lie.
October 06, 2010 "The Age" -- After all the hope and hype, Obama's foreign policy mirrors the ugliness of the Bush years.
The election to the presidency of a mixed-race Democrat, vowing to heal America's wounds at home and restore its reputation abroad, was greeted with a wave of ideological euphoria not seen since the days of Kennedy. The shameful interlude of Republican swagger and criminality was over. George Bush and Dick Cheney had broken the continuity of a multilateral American leadership that had served the country well throughout the Cold War and after. Barack Obama would now restore it.
Rarely has self-interested mythology - or well-meaning gullibility - been more quickly exposed. There was no fundamental break in foreign policy between the Bush and Obama regimes. The strategic goals and imperatives of the US imperium remain the same, as do its principal theatres and means of operation.
Obama's line towards Israel would be manifest even before he took office. On December 27, 2008, the Israeli Defence Forces launched an all-out air and ground assault on the population of Gaza. Bombing, burning, killing continued without interruption for 22 days, during which time the president-elect uttered not a syllable of reproof. By pre-arrangement, Tel Aviv called off its blitz a few hours before his inauguration on January 20, 2009, not to spoil the party.
Once installed, Obama called, like every US president, for peace between the two suffering peoples of the Holy Land, and again, like every predecessor, for Palestinians to recognise Israel and for Israel to stop its settlements in the territories it seized in 1967. Within a week of the President's speech in Cairo pledging opposition to further settlements, the governing Netanyahu coalition was extending Jewish properties in East Jerusalem with impunity.
However, war-zones further east have the first call on imperial attention. In 2002, on his way up the political ladder as a low-profile state senator in Illinois, Obama opposed the attack on Iraq; it was politically inexpensive to do so. By the time he was elected President, his first act was to maintain Bush's Defence Secretary, Robert Gates, long-time CIA functionary and veteran of the Iran-Contra affair, in the Pentagon. A cruder and more demonstrative signal of political continuity could hardly have been conceived.
Before his election, Obama promised a withdrawal of all US ''combat'' troops from Iraq within 16 months of his taking office, that is, by May 2010 - with a safety clause that the pledge could be ''refined'' in the light of events. It promptly was.
There persists the uneasy thought that the Iraqi resistance, capable of inflicting such damage on the US military machine only yesterday, might just be biding its time after its heavy losses and the defection of an important segment, and could still visit havoc on the collaborators tomorrow, should the US pull out altogether. To ensure against any such danger, Washington has put down markers in the modern equivalents - vastly larger and more hideous - of the Crusader fortresses of old.
As for Iran, schemes for a grand reconciliation between the two states had to be set aside. The calculation was upset by political polarisation in Iran itself. For Obama, the opportunity for ideological posturing was too great to resist. In a peerless display of sanctimony, he lamented with moist-eyed grief the death of a demonstrator killed in Tehran on the same day his drones wiped out 60 villagers, most of them women and children, in Pakistan.
The Democratic administration has now reverted to the line of its predecessor, attempting to corral Russia and China - European acquiescence can be taken for granted - into an economic blockade of Iran, in the hope of so strangling the country that the Supreme Leader will either be overthrown or obliged to come to terms.
From Palestine through Iraq to Iran, Obama has acted as just another steward of the US empire, pursuing the same aims as his predecessors, with the same means but with a more emollient rhetoric. In Afghanistan, he has gone further, widening the front of imperial aggression with a major escalation of violence, both technological and territorial.
When he took office, Afghanistan had already been occupied by US and satellite forces for more than seven years. During his election campaign, Obama - determined to outdo Bush in prosecuting a ''just war'' - pledged more troops and fire-power to crush the Afghan resistance, and more ground intrusions and drone attacks in Pakistan to burn out support for it across the border. This is one promise he has kept.
In what The New York Times delicately described as a ''statistic that the White House has not advertised'', it has informed its readers that ''since Mr Obama came to office, the Central Intelligence Agency has mounted more Predator drone strikes into Pakistan than during Mr Bush's eight years in office''.
Desperate to claim victory in a self-chosen ''just war'', Obama has dispatched a still larger expeditionary force, expanding the war to a neighbouring country where the enemy is suspected of finding succour. It was announced that Pakistan and Afghanistan would henceforward be treated as an integrated war-zone: ''Afpak''.
If a textbook illustration were needed of the continuity of American foreign policy across administrations, and the futility of so many softheaded attempts to treat the Bush-Cheney years as exceptional rather than essentially conventional, Obama's conduct has provided it. From one end of the Middle East to the other, the only significant material change he has brought is a further escalation of the War on Terror - or ''Evil'', as he prefers to call it - with Yemen now being seen as the next target.
Still, it would be a mistake to think that nothing has changed. No administration is exactly like any other, and each president leaves a stamp on his own. Substantively, vanishingly little of US imperial dominion has altered under Obama. But propa****istically, there has been a significant upgrade. In Cairo, at West Point, at Oslo, the world has been treated to one uplifting homily after another, to describe America's glowing mission in the world, and modest avowal of awe and sense of responsibility in carrying it forward.
Cant still goes a long way to satisfy those who yearn for it.
Re: Jewish Propa****a.Al-Qaedas Suspect HumanitarianismIs bin Ladens concern for flood victims a ruse to destabilise Pakist
Jews though in minority in US are king makers there.They have complete control of media and money.They present what they think are in their interest and they dont spare a chance to harm Muslims.
