US Government Strategy of Terror

USA SHOOTINGS – BUGS RAPLIN

AANGIRFAN

Bob Roberts is a 1992 film which chronicles the rise of Bob Roberts, a right-wing politician.

In the film, reporter Bugs Raplin talks about false flag terrorism, of the sort that happened in Colorado and Wisconsin.

Prof. James F. Tracy

Professor James F. Tracy, at Global Research on 10 August 2012, wrote “False Flag Terror and Conspiracies of Silence“.

Professor Tracy quotes Bugs Raplin:

“The reason Iran-Contra happened is because no one did anything substantial about Watergate.

“And the reason Watergate happened is because there were no consequences from the Bay of Pigs.

“They’re all the same operatives – the foot soldiers at the Bay of Pigs, the plumbers that got busted at Watergate, the gunrunners in Iran-Contra – all the same people, same faces.

Lemnitzer (left)

“Now it doesn’t take a genius to figure out the connection here: A secret government beyond the control of the people and accountable to no one.

“And the closer we are to discovering the connection, the more Congress turns a blind eye to it. ‘We can’t talk about that in open session,’ they say. ‘National security reasons.’

“The truth lies dormant in their laps and they stay blind out ofchoice. A conspiracy of silence.”

According to Professor Tracy:

“Many more events may arguably be added to such a shadow government’s achievements – the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1995 Oklahoma City Murrah Federal Building bombing, the September 11 terror attacks, the non-existent weapons of mass destruction prompting the occupation of Iraq, the July 7, 2005 London tube bombings, the shoe and underwear ‘bombings’ – all of which have contributed to the official justification of imperial wars abroad and an ever-expanding police state at home…

“The most recent set of events that give pause are the horrific, military-style shootings in Aurora Colorado and Oak Creek Wisconsin that authorities maintain were carried out by ‘lone wolf’ gunmen.

“A potential backdrop and precursor to the Colorado and Wisconsin events is the oft-forgotten Operation Gladio, a campaign involving US and British intelligence-backed paramilitaries anonymously carrying out mass shootings and bombings of civilian targets throughout Europe.

Bologna railway station.

“Hundreds of such attacks took place between the late 1960s and early 1980s by ‘stay behind armies’ of right wing and fascist saboteurs in an overall effort to terrorize populations, deploy a ‘strategy of tension,’ and thereby maintain a centrist politicalstatus quo.

“In the uncertain environment the petrified citizenry pled for stepped-up security and stood poised to part with personal freedoms.

“At the same time the maneuver allowed for political adversaries … to be blamed for the attacks and thereby demonized in the public mind.

“The string of still unresolved US political assassinations throughout the 1960s suggest how such practices were not restricted to foreign countries.

“Nor were they solely the terrain of intelligence agencies.

“Along lines similar to Gladio, in the early 1960s the US Joint Chiefs of Staff proposed Operation Northwoods, where terrorist attacks would be initiated against US civilians in American cities and the violence blamed on Cuban combatants to justify war against the island nation…

“While Northwoods exhibited the capacity for government to conceive and propose such plans, Gladio was demonstrably carried out against Western civilian populations in multiplelocations over many years.

“Consideration of Gladio and Northwoods might be dismissed were it not for early eyewitness accounts following the Colorado and Wisconsin shootings contending how there were two or more killers present at each incident – testimonies contradicting official government narratives that have accordingly been suppressed in the public mind.

Operation Gladio

“As communications historian Christopher Simpson observes, ‘the tactics that created the [Gladio] stay behinds in the first place are still in place and continue to be used today. They are standard operating procedure.’…

“A LexisNexis Academic search for “Operation Gladio” retrieves a mere 31 articles in English language news outlets – most in British newspapers.

“In fact, only four articles discussing Gladio ever appeared in US publications – three in the New York Times and one brief mention in the Tampa Bay Times.

“Barring a 2009 BBC documentary no network or cable news broadcasts have ever referenced the maneuver.

Andreotti

“Almost all of the articles related to Gladio appeared in 1990 when Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti publicly admitted Italy’s participation in the process.

“The New York Times downplayed any US involvement, misleadingly calling Gladio ‘an Italian creation’ in a story buried on page A16.

“In reality, former CIA director William Colby revealed in his memoirs that covert paramilitaries were a significant agency undertaking set up after World War II, including ‘the smallest possible coterie of the most reliable people, in Washington [and] NATO.’

“Gladio’s successful concealment for so many years demonstrates how mass atrocities can be carried out by a shadow network with complete impunity.

“Most incidents from the Gladio period remain unsolved by authorities.

Wisconsin

“In the US, however, a plausible narrative appears to be required for public consumption. For example, just a few hours after the Wisconsin Sikh temple shooting Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) officials swept in and wrested the case from Oak Creek authorities by classifying it as an act of ‘domestic terrorism.’

“Less than twenty four hours later one of the federal government’s foremost de facto propaganda and intelligence-gathering arms – the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) – developed a storyline that was unquestioningly lapped up by major news media.

Website for this image

“In an August 6 Democracy Now interview with SPLC spokesman Mark Potok and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Don Walker, Potok explained in unusual detail how the alleged killer was involved in ‘white supremacist groups,’ ‘Nazi skinhead rock bands,’ and that the SPLC had been ‘tracking’ the groups he was in since 2000.

“Potok’s remarks, which dominate the exchange and steer clear of the suspect’s experience in psychological operations, contrasted sharply with Walker’s, who more cautiously pointed out that the suspect’s ‘work in [US Army] PsyOps is still a bit of a mystery to all of us … We talked to a psychiatrist who said that [being promoted to PsyOps is] like going from the lobby to the 20th floor very quickly.’

“Like the Aurora Colorado storyline of a crazed shooter who expertly booby-trapped his apartment with exotic explosives, such appealingly sensationalistic narratives serve to sideline the countervailing testimonies of eyewitnesses and are difficult to contest or dislodge once they are driven home by would-be experts through almost every major news outlet.

“A similar scenario played out in the wake of the Oklahoma City federal building bombing when the ATF, FBI and SPLC together constructed the dominant frame of Timothy McVeigh as the lone bomber, an account that likewise diverged with the local authorities’ initial findings, early news reports of unexploded ordinance and a mysterious accomplice of McVeigh, and the overall conclusions of the Oklahoma City Bombing Investigation Committee’s Final Report.

“The narrative nevertheless served to maintain the political status quo while securing the Clinton administration’s second term in office.

“To this day most Americans believe McVeigh was solely responsible for the bombing despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

“For its time Raplin’s prognosis was an accurate description of America’s cascading socio-political nightmare.

“Elected officials abdicate their responsibility of oversight for personal gain and thus perpetuate ‘a conspiracy of silence.’

“Yet over the past two decades, the quickening pace of “terrorist” events suggests how shadow networks have grown in boldness and strength, while each attack has contributed to the steady erosion of civil society and constitutional rights…”

Iran Proves To Be the Monkey-Wrench In King Abdullah’s Royal Plans for Syria

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu and his Iranian counterpart Ali Akbar Salehi met in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia on Wednesday.

Iran Promises To Oppose Syria’s Islamic Group Suspension

By Fiona MacDonald

Iran set the scene for a diplomatic showdown with fellow Islamic states over the suspension of Syria at a summit in the Saudi Arabian city of Mecca.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi told reporters in Jeddah that his country would oppose the exclusion of President Bashar al-Assad’s government from the 57-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation, which has been recommended by the group’s foreign ministers

“Suspending does not mean that the problem will be solved,” he said. “With such a reaction, you just erase the problem.”

The meeting is being attended by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad together with leaders from other Muslim states who are being asked to agree Syria’s suspension as a response to 17 months of civil conflict that has killed more than 21,000 people, according to estimates from the opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Syria was suspended from the Arab League in November.

“Some countries, like Iran, will have the right to object to it, but most countries have adopted it,” Isam Shanti, director of the OIC information department, said by phone from Jeddah. The resolution will be debated by Islamic leaders later today. Iran “wouldn‘t agree to the plan for the exclusion of Syria,’’ Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast told reporters today.

Syrian opposition fighters yesterday said they’d shot down a government MiG-23 on a bombing run over eastern Syria. The state-run Syrian Arab News Agency said the warplane crashed due to a ‘‘technical problem’’ during a training mission.

Captured Pilot

Video on Al Jazeera television from the Free Syrian Army showed what rebels said was the downing in flames of the MiG-23. Gunfire can be heard and a flame is seen emerging from the aircraft. A video link e-mailed by the Local Coordination Committees, an activist group, and posted by the Sham News Network on YouTube, showed the captured pilot, who identified himself as Colonel Mufeed Mohamed Suleiman. The authenticity of the footage could not be confirmed.

The pilot calls on officers of the regular army to ‘‘defect from this gang’’ and says the bruises on his face are from the crash.

‘‘We’ve seen a very troubling and despicable uptick in attacks from the air perpetrated by the Syrian regime,’’ Pentagon spokesman George Little told reporters in Washington. He said the U.S. was unable to confirm the rebels’ claim of a shootdown.

Plans to establish a no-fly zone over Syria are ‘‘not on the front burner,’’ U.S. Defense SecretaryLeon Panetta told Associated Press in an interview published today. While the U.S. armed forces could do the job, it would require a ‘‘major, major policy decision’’ to do so.

No-Fly Zone

The Obama administration is reviewing the possibility of a no-fly zone to protect Syrian civilians from air attacks, White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan said on Aug. 8. The president of the opposition Syrian National Council, Abdelbaset Sieda, called on Aug. 12 for the creation of a no-fly zone in border areas.

A United Nations-arranged cease-fire, agreed to in April, has failed to halt fighting. Syrian government forces killed 114 people yesterday, including 66 in Damascus and its suburbs, the Local Coordination Committees said in an e-mailed statement. Shelling continued in Damascus suburbs and Homs today, the group said.

Germany’s Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle called for an intensification of planning for a Syria without Assad in a phone call late yesterday with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, U.K. Foreign Secretary William Hague and Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu.

Violence Increasing

The Syrian president’s special envoy, Buthaina Shaaban, will hold talks with Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi during a visit to China from today, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said in a statement posted on the ministry’s website yesterday. China is also considering inviting Syrian opposition groups to visit the country, Qin said.

‘‘It is clear that violence is increasing in many parts of Syria,” Lieutenant General Babacar Gaye, head of the UN’s monitoring force, told journalists in Damascus yesterday. “The indiscriminate use of heavy weapons by the government and targeted attacks by the opposition in urban centers are inflicting a heavy toll on innocent civilians.” The UN monitoring mission expires at the end of the week.

To contact the reporter on this story: Fiona MacDonald in Kuwait atfmacdonald4@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Shaji Mathew at shajimathew@bloomberg.net

CIA Agent McGovern Wants Us To Believe That Bombing Iran Is Not On America’s Agenda (After November)

[Like all countries in the region, Iran's borders must be erased, so that Washington can redraw the map of the Greater Middle East.]

Israel’s ‘Bomb Iran’ Timetable

RAY MCGOVERN 

London, (Pal Telegraph) – More Washington insiders are coming to the conclusion that Israel’s leaders are planning to attack Iran before the U.S. election in November in the expectation that American forces will be drawn in. There is widespread recognition that, without U.S. military involvement, an Israeli attack would be highly risky and, at best, only marginally successful.

 

At this point, to dissuade Israeli leaders from mounting such an attack might require a public statement by President Barack Obama warning Israel not to count on U.S. forces — not even for the “clean-up.” Though Obama has done pretty much everything short of making such a public statement, he clearly wants to avoid a confrontation with Israel in the weeks before the election.

However, Obama’s silence regarding a public warning speaks volumes to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The recent pilgrimages to Israel by very senior U.S. officials — including the Secretaries of State and Defense carrying identical “PLEASE DON’T BOMB IRAN JUST YET” banners — has met stony faces and stone walls.

Like the Guns of August in 1914, the dynamic for war appears inexorable. Senior U.S. and Israeli officials focus publicly on a “window of opportunity,” but different ones.

On Thursday, White House spokesman Jay Carney emphasized the need to allow the “most stringent sanctions ever imposed on any country time to work.” That, said Carney, is the “window of opportunity to persuade Iran … to forgo its nuclear weapons ambitions.”

That same day a National Security Council spokesman dismissed Israeli claims that U.S. intelligence had received alarming new information about Iran’s nuclear program. “We continue to assess that Iran is not on the verge of achieving a nuclear weapon,” the spokesman said.

Still, Israel’s window of opportunity (what it calls the “zone of immunity” for Iran building a nuclear bomb without Israel alone being able to prevent it) is ostensibly focused on Iran’s continued burrowing under mountains to render its nuclear facilities immune to Israeli air strikes, attacks that would seek to maintain Israel’s regional nuclear-weapons monopoly.

But another Israeli “window” or “zone” has to do with the pre-election period of the next 12 weeks in the United States. Last week, former Mossad chief Efraim Halevi told Israeli TV viewers, “The next 12 weeks are very critical in trying to assess whether Israel will attack Iran, with or without American backup.”

It would be all too understandable, given Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s experience with President Obama, that Netanyahu has come away with the impression that Obama can be bullied, particularly when he finds himself in a tight political spot.

For Netanyahu, the President’s perceived need to outdistance Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in the love-for-Israel department puts Obama in a box. This, I believe, is the key “window of opportunity” that is uppermost in Netanyahu’s calculations.

Virtually precluded, in Netanyahu’s view, is any possibility that Obama could keep U.S. military forces on the sidelines if Israel and Iran became embroiled in serious hostilities. What I believe the Israeli leader worries most about is the possibility that a second-term Obama would feel much freer not to commit U.S. forces on Israel’s side. A second-term Obama also might use U.S. leverage to force Israeli concessions on thorny issues relating to Palestine.

If preventing Obama from getting that second term is also part of Netanyahu’s calculation, then he also surely knows that even a minor dustup with Iran, whether it escalates or not, would drive up the price of gasoline just before the election — an unwelcome prospect for Team Obama.

It’s obvious that hard-line Israeli leaders would much rather have Mitt Romney to deal with for the next four years. The former Massachusetts governor recently was given a warm reception when he traveled to Jerusalem with a number of Jewish-American financial backers in tow to express his solidarity with Netanyahu and his policies.

Against this high-stakes political background, I’ve personally come by some new anecdotal information that I find particularly troubling. On July 30, the Baltimore Sun posted my op-ed, “Is Israel fixing the intelligence to justify an attack on Iran?” Information acquired the very next day increased my suspicion and concern.

Former intelligence analysts and I were preparing a proposal to establish direct communications links between the U.S. and Iranian navies, in order to prevent an accident or provocation in the Persian Gulf from spiraling out of control. Learning that an official Pentagon draft paper on that same issue has been languishing in the Senate for more than a month did not make us feel any better when our own proposal was ignored. (Still, it is difficult to understand why anyone wishing to avoid escalation in the Persian Gulf would delay, or outright oppose, such fail-safe measures.)

Seeking input from other sources with insight into U.S. military preparations, I learned that, although many U.S. military moves have been announced, others, with the express purpose of preparation for hostilities with Iran, have not been made public.

One source reported that U.S. forces are on hair-trigger alert and that covert operations inside Iran (many of them acts of war, by any reasonable standard) have been increased. Bottom line: we were warned that the train had left the station; that any initiative to prevent miscalculation or provocation in the Gulf was bound to be far too late to prevent escalation into a shooting war.

SEARCHING FOR A CASUS BELLI

A casus belli — real or contrived — would be highly desirable prior to an attack on Iran. A provocation in the Gulf would be one way to achieve this. Iran’s alleged fomenting of terrorism would be another.

In my op-ed of July 30, I suggested that Netanyahu’s incredibly swift blaming of Iran for the terrorist killing of five Israelis in Bulgaria on July 18 may have been intended as a pretext for attacking Iran. If so, sadly for Netanyahu, it didn’t work. It seems the Obama administration didn’t buy the “rock-solid evidence” Netanyahu adduced to tie Iran to the attack in Bulgaria.

If at first you don’t succeed … Here’s another idea: let’s say there is new reporting that shows Iran to be dangerously close to getting a nuclear weapon, and that previous estimates that Iran had stopped work on weaponization was either wrong or overtaken by new evidence.

According to recent Israeli and Western media reports, citing Western diplomats and senior Israeli officials, U.S. intelligence has acquired new information — “a bombshell” report — that shows precisely that. Imagine.

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Israeli Radio that the new report is “very close to our [Israel’s] own estimates, I would say, as opposed to earlier American estimates. It transforms the Iranian situation to an even more urgent one.”

Washington Post neocon pundit Jennifer Rubin was quick to pick up the cue, expressing a wistful hope on Thursday that the new report on the Iranian nuclear program “would be a complete turnabout from the infamous 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that asserted that Iran had dropped its nuclear weapons program.”

“Infamous?” Indeed. Rubin warned, “The 2007 NIE report stands as a tribute and warning regarding the determined obliviousness of our national intelligence apparatus,” adding that “no responsible policymaker thinks the 2007 NIE is accurate.”

Yet, the NIE still stands as the prevailing U.S. intelligence assessment on Iran’s nuclear intentions, reaffirmed by top U.S. officials repeatedly over the past five years. Rubin’s definition of “responsible” seems to apply only to U.S. policymakers who would cede control of U.S. foreign policy to Netanyahu.

The 2007 NIE reported, with “high confidence,” the unanimous judgment of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies that Iran stopped working on a nuclear weapon in the fall of 2003 and had not restarted it. George W. Bush’s own memoir and remarks by Dick Cheney make it clear that this honest NIE shoved a steel rod into the wheels of the juggernaut that had begun rolling off toward war on Iran in 2008, the last year of the Bush/Cheney administration.

The key judgments of the 2007 NIE have been re-asserted every year since by the Director of National Intelligence in formal testimony to Congress.

And, unfortunately for Rubin and others hoping to parlay the reportedly “new,” more alarmist “intelligence” into an even more bellicose posture toward Iran, a National Security Council spokesman on Thursday threw cold water on the “new” information, saying that “the U.S. intelligence assessment of Iran’s nuclear activities had not changed.”

Relying on the unconfirmed Israeli claim about “new” U.S. information regarding Iran’s nuclear program, Rubin had already declared the Obama administration’s Iran policy a failure, writing:

“Foreign policy experts can debate whether a sanctions strategy was flawed from its inception, incorrectly assessing the motivations of the Iranian regime, or they can debate whether the execution of sanctions policy (too slow, too porous) was to blame. But we are more than 3 1/2 years into the Obama administration, and Iran is much closer to its goal than at the start. By any reasonable measure, the Obama approach has been a failure, whatever the NIE report might say.”

Pressures Will Persist

The NSC’s putdown of the Israeli report does not necessarily guarantee, however, that President Obama will continue to withstand pressure from Israel and its supporters to “fix” the intelligence to “justify” supporting an attack on Iran.

Promise can be seen in Obama’s refusal to buy Netanyahu’s new “rock-solid evidence” on Iran’s responsibility for the terrorist attack in Bulgaria. Hope can also be seen in White House reluctance so far to give credulity to the latest “evidence” on Iran’s nuclear weapons plans.

An agreed-upon casus belli can be hard to create when one partner wants war within the next 12 weeks and the other does not. The pressure from Netanyahu and neocon cheerleaders like Jennifer Rubin — not to mention Mitt Romney — will increase as the election draws nearer, agreed-upon casus belli or not.

Netanyahu gives every evidence of believing that — for the next 12 weeks — he is in the catbird seat and that, if he provokes hostilities with Iran, Obama will feel compelled to jump in with both feet, i. e., selecting from the vast array of forces already assembled in the area.

Sadly, I believe Netanyahu is probably correct in that calculation. Batten down the hatches.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. During his 27 years in CIA’s analysis division, his duties included preparing and delivering the President’s Daily Brief and chairing National Intelligence Estimates.

Copyright © 2012 Consortiumnews