The Road to Armageddon

http://www.prisonplanet.com/the-road-to-armageddon.html

Paul Craig Roberts
Prison Planet.com
Thursday, February 25, 2010

The Washington Times is a newspaper that looks with favor upon the Bush/Cheney/Obama/neocon wars of aggression in the Middle East and favors making terrorists pay for 9/11. Therefore, I was surprised to learn on February 24 that the most popular story on the paper’s website for the past three days was the “Inside the Beltway” report, “Explosive News,” about the 31 press conferences in cities in the US and abroad on February 19 held by Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, an organization of professionals which now has 1,000 members.

I was even more surprised that the news report treated the press conference seriously.

How did three World Trade Center skyscrapers suddenly disintegrate into fine dust? How did massive steel beams in three skyscrapers suddenly fail as a result of short-lived, isolated, and low temperature fires? “A thousand architects and engineers want to know, and are calling on Congress to order a new investigation into the destruction of the Twin Towers and Building 7,” reports the Washington Times.

The paper reports that the architects and engineers have concluded that the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the National Institute of Standards and Technology provided “insufficient, contradictory and fraudulent accounts of the circumstances of the towers’ destruction” and are “calling for a grand jury investigation of NIST officials.”

The newspaper reports that Richard Gage, the spokesperson for the architects and engineers said: “Government officials will be notified that ‘Misprision of Treason,’ U.S. Code 18 (Sec. 2382) is a serious federal offense, which requires those with evidence of treason to act. The implications are enormous and may have profound impact on the forthcoming Khalid Sheik Mohammed trial.”

There is now an organization, Firefighters for 9/11 Truth. At the main press conference in San Francisco, Eric Lawyer,the head of that organization, announced the firefighters’ support for the architects and engineers’ demands. He reported that no forensic investigation was made of the fires that are alleged to have destroyed the three buildings and that this failure constitutes a crime.

Mandated procedures were not followed, and instead of being preserved and investigated, the crime scene was destroyed. He also reported that there are more than one hundred first responders who heard and experienced explosions and that there is radio, audio and video evidence of explosions.

Also at the press conference, physicist Steven Jones presented the evidence of nano-thermite in the residue of the WTC buildings found by an international panel of scientists led by University of Copenhagen nano-chemist Professor Niels Harrit. Nano-thermite is a high-tech explosive/pyrotechnic capable of instantly melting steel girders.

Before we yell “conspiracy theory,” we should be aware that the architects, engineers, firefighters, and scientists offer no theory. They provide evidence that challenges the official theory. This evidence is not going to go away.

If expressing doubts or reservations about the official story in the 9/11 Commission Report makes a person a conspiracy theory kook, then we have to include both co-chairmen of the 9/11 Commission and the Commission’s legal counsel, all of whom have written books in which they clearly state that they were lied to by government officials when they conducted their investigation, or, rather, when they presided over the investigation conducted by executive director Philip Zelikow, a member of President George W. Bush’s transition team and Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and a co-author of Bush Secretary of State Condi “Mushroom Cloud” Rice.

There will always be Americans who will believe whatever the government tells them no matter how many times they know the government has lied to them. Despite expensive wars that threaten Social Security and Medicare, wars based on non-existent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, non-existent Saddam Hussein connections to al Qaida, non-existent Afghan participation in the 9/11 attacks, and the non-existent Iranian nukes that are being hyped as the reason for the next American war of aggression in the Middle East, more than half of the U.S. population still believes the fantastic story that the government has told them about 9/11, a Muslim conspiracy that outwitted the entire Western world.

Moreover, it doesn’t matter to these Americans how often the government changes its story. For example, Americans first heard of Osama bin Laden because the Bush regime pinned the 9/11 attacks on him. Over the years video after video was served up to the gullible American public of bin Laden’s pronouncements. Experts dismissed the videos as fakes, but Americans remained their gullible selves. Then suddenly last year a new 9/11 “mastermind” emerged to take bin Laden’s place, the captive Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the detainee waterboarded 183 times until he confessed to mastermining the 9/11 attack.

In the Middle Ages confessions extracted by torture constituted evidence, but self-incrimination has been a no-no in the U.S. legal system since our founding. But with the Bush regime and the Republican federal judges, whom we were assured would defend the U.S. Constitution, the self-incrimination of Sheik Mohammed stands today as the only evidence the U.S. government has that Muslim terrorists pulled off 9/11.

If a person considers the feats attributed to Khalid Sheik Mohammed, they are simply unbelievable. Sheik Mohammed is a more brilliant, capable superhero than V in the fantasy movie, “V for Vendetta.” Sheik Mohammed outwitted all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies along with those of all U.S. allies or puppets, including Israel’s Mossad. No intelligence service on earth or all of them combined was a match for Sheik Mohammed.

Sheik Mohammed outwitted the U.S. National Security Council, Dick Cheney, the Pentagon, the State Department, NORAD, the U.S. Air Force, and Air Traffic Control.
He caused Airport Security to fail four times in one morning. He caused the state-of-the-art air defenses of the Pentagon to fail, allowing a hijacked airliner, which was off course all morning while the U.S. Air Force, for the first time in history, was unable to get aloft intercepter aircraft, to crash into the Pentagon.

Sheik Mohammed was able to perform these feats with unqualified pilots.

Sheik Mohammed, even as a waterboarded detainee, has managed to prevent the FBI from releasing the many confiscated videos that would show, according to the official story, the hijacked airliner hitting the Penagon.

How naive do you have to be to believe that any human, or for that matter Hollywood fantasy character, is this powerful and capable?

If Sheik Mohammed has these superhuman capabilities, how did the incompetent Americans catch him? This guy is a patsy tortured into confession in order to keep the American naifs believing the government’s conspiracy theory.

What is going on here is that the U.S. government has to bring the 9/11 mystery to an end. The government must put on trial and convict a culprit so that it can close the case before it explodes. Anyone waterboarded 183 times would confess to anything.

The U.S. government has responded to the evidence being arrayed against its outlandish 9/11 conspiracy theory by redefining the war on terror from external to internal enemies. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said on February 21 that American extremists are now as big a concern as international terrorists. Extremists, of course, are people who get in the way of the government’s agenda, such as the 1,000 Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. The group used to be 100, now it is 1,000. What if it becomes 10,000?

Cass Sunstein, an Obama regime official, has a solution for the 9/11 skeptics: Infiltrate them and provoke them into statements and actions that can be used to discredit or to arrest them. But get rid of them at all cost.

Why employ such extreme measures against alleged kooks if they only provide entertainment and laughs? Is the government worried that they are on to something?

Instead, why doesn’t the U.S. government simply confront the evidence that is presented and answer it?

If the architects, engineers, firefighters, and scientists are merely kooks, it would be a simple matter to acknowledge their evidence and refute it. Why is it necessary to infiltrate them with police agents and to set them up?

Many Americans would reply that “their” government would never even dream of killing Americans by hijacking airliners and destroying buildings in order to advance a government agenda. But on February 3, National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair told the House Intelligence Committee that the U.S. government can assassinate its own citizens when they are overseas. No arrest, trial, or conviction of a capital crime is necessary. Just straight out murder.

Obviously, if the U.S. government can murder its citizens abroad it can murder them at home, and has done so. For example, 100 Branch Davidians were murdered in Waco, Texas, by the Clinton administration for no legitimate reason. The government just decided to use its power knowing that it could get away with it, which it did.

Americans who think “their” government is some kind of morally pure operation would do well to familiarize themselves with Operation Northwoods. Operation Northwoods was a plot drawn up by the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff for the CIA to commit acts of terrorism in American cities and fabricate evidence blaming Castro so that the U.S. could gain domestic and international support for regime change in Cuba. The secret plan was nixed by President John F. Kennedy and was declassified by the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board. It is available online in the National Security Archive. There are numerous online accounts available, including Wikipedia. James Bamford’s book, Body of Secrets, also summarizes the plot:

“Operation Northwoods, which had the written approval of the Chairman [Gen. Lemnitzer] and every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called for innocent people to be shot on American streets; for boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba to be sunk on the high seas; for a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, D.C., Miami, and elsewhere. People would be framed for bombings they did not commit; planes would be hijacked. Using phony evidence, all of it would be blamed on Castro, thus giving Lemnitzer and his cabal the excuse, as well as the public and international backing, they needed to launch their war.”

Prior to 9/11 the American neoconservatives were explicit that the wars of aggression that they intended to launch in the Middle East required “a new Pearl Harbor.”

For their own good and that of the wider world, Americans need to pay attention to the growing body of experts who are telling them that the government’s account of 9/11 fails their investigation. 9/11 launched the neoconservative plan for U.S. world hegemony. As I write the U.S. government is purchasing the agreement of foreign governments that border Russia to accept U.S. missile interceptor bases. The U.S. intends to ring Russia with U.S. missile bases from Poland through central Europe and Kosovo to Georgia, Azerbaijan and central Asia. [see www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17709 ] U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke declared on February 20 that al Qaida is moving into former central Asian constituent parts of the Soviet Union, such as Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan. Holbrooke is soliciting U.S. bases in these former Soviet republics under the guise of the ever-expanding “war on terror.”

The U.S. has already encircled Iran with military bases. The U.S. government intends to neutralize China by seizing control over the Middle East and cutting China off from oil.

This plan assumes that Russia and China, nuclear armed states, will be intimidated by U.S. anti-missile defenses and acquiesce to U.S. hegemony and that China will lack oil for its industries and military.

The U.S. government is delusional. Russian military and political leaders have responded to the obvious threat by declaring NATO a direct threat to the security of Russia and by announcing a change in Russian war doctrine to the pre-emptive launch of nuclear weapons. The Chinese are too confident to be bullied by a washed up American “superpower.”

The morons in Washington are pushing the envelop of nuclear war. The insane drive for American hegemony threatens life on earth. The American people, by accepting the lies and deceptions of “their” government, are facilitating this outcome.

Afghan heroin and the CIA

Afghan heroin & the CIA

Andrew G. Marshall

GeopoliticalMonitor.com

http://www.beachnet.com/~hoffman/Sabow.html

Contents
1. Executive Summary
2. The Anglo-Americans and the Origins of the Taliban
3. Anglo-American Involvement in the Afghan Opium Trade
4. The British and the Taliban
5. Who Profits from the Drug Trade?
6. Endnotes

1. Executive Summary

This report is about American and British involvement in the Afghan drug trade in opium, focusing on the history of such involvement, and the nature of the drug trade since the 2001 occupation of Afghanistan. Today, Afghanistan supplies “more than 90 per cent of the world’s illicit opium, from which heroin is made,”[1] so who’s profiting from the trade?

2. The Anglo-Americans and the Origins of the Taliban

The CIA Creates Al-Qaeda

In 1998, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser, said in an interview with a French publication, Le Nouvel Observateur, that the US intervention in the Afghan-Soviet war did not begin in the 1980s, but that, “it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul,” which precipitated the Soviet invasion into Afghanistan.[2] From the Soviet invasion, a bloody ten-year war followed.

Amazingly, “Before 1979 Pakistan and Afghanistan exported very little heroin to the West,”[3] but by 1981, “trucks from the Pakistan army’s National Logistics Cell arriving with CIA arms from Karachi often returned loaded with heroin – protected by ISI [Pakistan’s internal security service] papers freeing them from police search.”[4] This change occurred in 1981 when then CIA Director William Casey, Prince Turki bin Faisal of Saudi intelligence and the ISI worked together to create a foreign legion of jihadi Muslims or so-called Arab Afghans. More than 100,000 Islamic militants were trained in Pakistan between 1986 and 1992 in camps overseen by the CIA and [British] MI6. The SAS [British special forces] trained future Al-Qaida and Taliban fighters in bomb-making and other black arts” while their leaders were trained at a CIA camp in Virginia.[5] Further, “CIA aid was funneled through [Pakistani President] General Zia and the ISI in Pakistan.”[6]

Creating the Taliban

In the mid-1990s, an obscure group of “Pashtun country folk” had become a powerful military and political force in Afghanistan, known as the Taliban.[7] During that same time the Taliban acquired contacts with the ISI,[8] often referred to as Pakistan’s “shadow government.” In 1995, the ISI was actively aiding the Taliban in Afghanistan’s civil war against the warlords that controlled the country.[9] In addition, just as in the Afghan war against the Soviet Union in the previous decade, the ISI looked to Saudi intelligence to provide the funding for the Taliban, and the ties between the ISI and Saudi intelligence grew much closer.[10] The Taliban’s rise to power in Afghanistan was also aided by the CIA, which worked with the Pakistani ISI.[11]

A few years after the Taliban came to power they began a campaign to eradicate Afghanistan’s opium crops, and “The success of Afghanistan’s 2000 drug eradication program under the Taliban government was recognized by the United Nations” as a monumental feat, in that “no other country was able to implement a comparable program.”[12] In October of 2001, the UN acknowledged that the Taliban reduced opium production in Afghanistan from 3300 tons in 2000 to 185 tons in 2001.[13]

In June of 2001, a few months before 9/11, it was reported that a “recent gift of $43 million to the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan” was announced “by Secretary of State Colin Powell, in addition to other recent aid, [which] made the United States the main sponsor of the Taliban.”[14]

3. Anglo-American Involvement in the Afghan Opium Trade

The World’s #1 Narco-State

Drug trafficking is the largest global commodity in profits after the oil and arms trade, consequently, “immediately following the October 2001 invasion opium markets were restored. Opium prices spiraled. By early 2002, the domestic price of opium in Afghanistan (in dollars/kg) was almost 10 times higher than in 2000.”[15] The Anglo-American invasion of Afghanistan successfully restored the drug trade. The Guardianrecently reported that, “In 2007 Afghanistan had more land growing drugs than Colombia, Bolivia and Peru combined.”[16]

The British

In 2005 it was reported by the Independent that Afghanistan’s Interior Minister had resigned, “amid reports he had quit because of the involvement of senior government officials in the illegal drug trade.” He had “been outspoken over the involvement of officials in the drug trade and is believed to have had differences with President Karzai over the appointment of Provincial officials.”[17] In 2006, the Independent reported that, “British intelligence officers and military commanders accused the US of undermining British policies in Iraq and Afghanistan, after the sacking of a key British ally in the Afghan province of Helmand.” The British “blamed pressure from the CIA for President Hamid Karzai’s decision to dismiss Mohammed Daud as governor of Helmand.” Mr. Daud “had survived several Taliban assassination attempts, was seen as a key player in Britain’s anti-drugs campaign in Helmand,” and was fired after Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s President, “listened to advice from ‘other powerful Western players’.”[18]

Former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, wrote in a 2007 article in the UK Daily Mail, that what has been achieved in Afghanistan is “the highest harvests of opium the world has ever seen.”[19] Murray elaborated that, “Our economic achievement in Afghanistan goes well beyond the simple production of raw opium. In fact Afghanistan no longer exports much raw opium at all. It has succeeded in what our international aid efforts urge every developing country to do. Afghanistan has gone into manufacturing and ‘value-added’ operations.” This means that Afghanistan “now exports not opium, but heroin. Opium is converted into heroin on an industrial scale, not in kitchens but in factories. Millions of gallons of the chemicals needed for this process are shipped into Afghanistan by tanker. The tankers and bulk opium lorries on the way to the factories share the roads, improved by American aid, with NATO troops.” Murray explains that this was able to happen because “the four largest players in the heroin business are all senior members of the Afghan government.” Murray stated that, “Our only real achievement to date is falling street prices for heroin in London.”[20]

The Americans

In 2002, former Additional Secretary in the Cabinet Secretariat of the Government of India wrote that, in regard to the failure to combat the rise in opium production, “this marked lack of success in the heroin front is due to the fact that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the USA, which encouraged these heroin barons during the Afghan war of the 1980s in order to spread heroin-addiction amongst the Soviet troops, is now using them in its search for bin Laden and other surviving leaders of the Al Qaeda.”[21]

The Hindu reported in 2008 that, “90 per cent of the heroin sold in Russia comes from Afghanistan,” and Putin was quoted as saying, “Unfortunately, they (NATO) are doing nothing to reduce the narcotic threat from Afghanistan even a tiny bit,” and that the coalition forces were “sitting back and watching caravans haul drugs across Afghanistan to the former Soviet Union and Europe.” The article then reported that, “according to unconfirmed reports the U.S. military transport aviation is used for the delivery of drugs from Afghanistan to the American airbases, Ganci in Kyrgyzstan and Incirlik in Turkey,” and that, “It has been reported earlier that the CIA is involved in Afghanistan’s opium production, or is at least protecting it.” One Russian journalist quoted anonymous Afghan officials as saying, “85 per cent of all drugs produced in southern and southeastern provinces are shipped abroad by U.S. aviation.”[22]

4. The British and the Taliban

Training the Taliban

The Independent reported in 2008 that “Britain planned to build a Taliban training camp for 2,000 fighters in southern Afghanistan, as part of a top-secret deal to make them swap sides. The plans were discovered on a memory stick seized by Afghan secret police in December.” Further, “The camp would provide military training for 1,800 ordinary Taliban fighters and 200 low-level commanders.”[23]

The article explained that, “the Afghans feared the British were training a militia with no loyalty to the central government. Intercepted Taliban communications suggested they thought the British were trying to help them.” The article further reported that, the program was bankrolled by the British,” and that, “the memory stick revealed that $125,000 (£64,000) had been spent on preparing the camp and a further $200,000 was earmarked to run it in 2008,” which “sparked allegations that British agents were paying the Taliban.” Further, “the Afghan government took issue with plans to provide military training to turn the insurgents into a defence force.” On top of that, “the memory stick revealed plans to train the Taliban to use secure satellite phones, so they could communicate directly with UK officials.” “Officially, the British embassy remains tight-lipped, fuelling speculation that the plan may have been part of a wider clandestine operation.”[24]

5. Who Profits from the Drug Trade?

Wall Street and Big Banks

Michel Chossudovsky describes the heroin trade as a “hierarchy of prices,” with the drug’s street price, (what it is sold for in largely Western cities around the world), is 80 to 100 times the price paid to the farmers who cultivate it in Afghanistan.[25] The IMF reported that in the late 1990s, money laundering accounted for 2-5% of the world’s GDP, and that a large percentage of the 590 billion to 1.5 trillion dollars in annual money laundering is “directly linked to the trade in narcotics.” This lucrative trade in narcotics produces profits which are “laundered in the numerous offshore banking havens in Switzerland, Luxembourg, the British Channel Islands, the Cayman Islands and some 50 other locations around the globe.” These offshore havens “are controlled by major Western banks and financial institutions” which “have a vested interest in maintaining and sustaining the drug trade.”[26]

An example of the interest of Wall Street and London bankers in the international drug trade, we can look to Columbia and the FARC rebel group. In “1999, NYSE [New York Stock Exchange] Chairman Dick Grasso traveled to Columbia and met with the leader of the FARC rebels controlling the southern third of the country.” “Grasso had asked the Columbian rebels to invest their profits in Wall Street.”[27] The Associated Press reported that Grasso told the rebel leader to, “make peace and expect great economic benefits from global investors,” and invited the rebel leader to visit Wall Street.[28] To allow for drug investment in Western financial institutions, “major banks like Citigroup, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, and JPMorgan Chase all offer private client services for the very wealthy with very few questions asked.”[29]

6. Endnotes

[1] Stephen Fidler, UN alarm at spread of Afghan opium. Financial Times: March 4, 2008: http://us.ft.com/ftgateway/superpage.ft?news_id=fto030420081933091960

[2] Bill Blum (translator). The CIA’s Intervention in Afghanistan. Global Research: October 15, 2001: http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BRZ110A.html

[3-4] Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of North America. University of California Press: 2007, page 124

[5] Peter Dale Scott, Ibid, page 122-23

[6] Peter Dale Scott, Ibid, page 123

[7] Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001. Penguin Books, New York, 2004: Page 328

[8] Steve Coll, Ibid, page 293

[9] Steve Coll, Ibid, pages 293-294

[10] Steve Coll, Ibid, pages 295-296

[11] Times of India, CIA worked in tandem with Pak to create Taliban. Times of India Online: March 7, 2001: http://www.multiline.com.au/~johnm/taliban.htm

[12] Michel Chossudovsky, America’s War on Terrorism, 2nd ed. Center for Research on Globalization: Québec, 2005: Page 226

[13] Michel Chossudovsky, Ibid, page 227

[14] Robert Scheer, Bush’s Faustian Deal With the Taliban. The Nation: June 4, 2001: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20010604/20010522

[15] Michel Chossudovsky, Op cit, page 228

[16] Patrick Wintour, Opium economy will take 20 years and £1bn to remove. The Guardian: February 6, 2008: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/06/afghanistan.politics

[17] Justin Huggler, Afghan minister quits over opium trade. The Independent: September 28, 2005: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/afghan
-minister-quits-over-opium-trade-508664.html

[18] Robert Fox, CIA is undermining British war effort, say military chiefs. The Independent: December 10, 2006: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/cia-is-undermining-

british-war-effort-say-military-chiefs-427848.html

[19-20] Craig Murray, Britain is protecting the biggest heroin crop of all time. UK Daily Mail: July 21, 2007: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_

id=469983&in_page_id=1770&in_page_id=1770&expand=true

[21] B. Raman, Assassination of Jaki Abdul Qadeer in Kabul. South Asia Analysis Group: Paper no. 489, August 7, 2002: http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/papers5/paper489.html

[22] Vladimir Radyuhin, Russia: victim of narco-aggression. The Hindu: February 4, 2008: http://www.hindu.com/2008/02/04/stories/2008020453271000.htm

[23-24] Jerome Starkey, Revealed: British plan to build training camp for Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. The Independent: February 4, 2008: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/revealed-british-plan-to-build
-training-camp-for-taliban-fighters-in-afghanistan-777671.html

[25] Michel Chossudovsky, Op cit, page 230

[26] Michel Chossudovsky, Ibid, page 233

[27] Michael C. Ruppert, Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil. New Society Publishers: Canada, 2004: Page 57

[28] CBS MarketWatch, NYSE’s Grasso met with Colombia’s FARC. AP: June 29, 1999: http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/-nyses-grasso-met-colombias/

story.aspx?guid=%7B571A6F96-E694-4D58-A7A9-F5DBFF132F4A%7D

[29] Michael C. Ruppert, Op cit, page 61

MK-ULTRA: The CIA's Mind Control Program

MK-ULTRA: The CIA's Mind Control Program

MK-ULTRA: The CIA's Mind Control Program - by Stephen Lendman

MK-ULTRA was the code name for a secret CIA mind control program, begun in 1953, under Director Allen Dulles. Its purpose was multifold, including to perfect a truth drug for interrogating suspected Soviet spies during the Cold War. It followed earlier WW II hypnosis, primitive drugs research, and the US Navy's Project Chatter, explained by its Bureau of Medicine and Surgery in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request as follows:

It began "in the fall of 1947 focusing on the identification and testing of drugs (LSD and others) in interrogations and the recruitment of agents. The research included laboratory experiments on both animal and human subjects. The program ended shortly after the Korean War in 1953."

It was run under the direction of Dr. Charles Savage of the Naval Medical Research Institute, Bethesda, MD from 1947 - 1953, after which CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence continued it under the name Project Bluebird, its first mind control program to:

-- learn how to condition subjects to withstand information from being extracted from them by known means;

-- develop interrogation methods to exert control;

-- develop memory enhancement techniques; and

-- establish ways to prevent hostile control of Agency personnel.

In 1951, it was renamed Project Artichoke, then MK-ULTRA under Deputy CIA Director Richard Helms in 1953. It aimed to control human behavior through psychedelic and hallucinogenic drugs, electroshock, radiation, graphology, paramilitary techniques, and psychological/sociological/anthropological methods, among others - a vast open-field of mind experimentation trying anything that might work, legal or otherwise on willing and unwitting subjects.

Ongoing at different times were 149 sub-projects in 80 US and Canadian universities, medical centers and three prisons, involving 185 researchers, 15 foundations and numerous drug companies. Everything was top secret, and most records later destroyed, yet FOIA suits salvaged thousands of pages with documented evidence of the horrific experiments and their effects on human subjects.

Most were unwitting guinea pigs, and those consenting were misinformed of the dangers. James Stanley was a career soldier when given LSD in 1958 along with 1,000 other military "volunteers." They suffered hallucinations, memory loss, incoherence, and severe personality changes. Stanley exhibited uncontrollable violence. It destroyed his family, impeded his working ability, and he never knew why until the Army asked him to participate in a follow-up study.

He sued for damages under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA), his case reaching the Supreme Court in United States v. Stanley. Argued and decided in 1987, the Court dismissed his claim (5 - 4), ruling his injuries occurred during military service. Justices Thurgood Marshall, William Brennan and Sandra Day O'Conner wrote dissenting opinions, saying the Nuremberg Code applies to soldiers as well as civilians. In 1996, Stanley got $400,000 in compensation, but no apology from the government.

Perhaps MK-ULTRA's most publicized victim was Frank Olsen, a biochemist working for the Army Chemical Corps' Special Operations Division at Ft. Detrick, MD. On November 18, 1953, he was administered LSD. Immediately, he became agitated and severely paranoid. Nine days later, he reportedly committed suicide by jumping 13 stories to his death through a New York hotel's closed window. His family members didn't know he was drugged until MK-ULTRA was exposed in 1975.

President Gerald Ford apologized, granted a $750,000 settlement, but Olson's son discovered documents suggesting his father was killed. In 1994, he exhumed the body, had it forensically evaluated, and the conclusion was homicide based on a previously undetected skull fracture suggesting a blow on the head and other disturbing evidence.

Stanley Glickman was another MK-ULTRA tragedy, an unwitting victim of hallucinogenic drugs and electroshock treatment. He became traumatized, couldn't work, barely ate, suffered a psychological breakdown and never fully recovered. After learning about the CIA's LSD experiments, he sued in 1983. The trial was delayed 16 years, he died, but his sister Gloria Kronisch pursued the case.

MK-ULTRA chief Stanley Gottleib was at issue, hired to run its Technical Service Staff (TSS) to develop poisons to assassinate political opponents, truth serum drugs for interrogating spies, and mind control techniques to create robot assassins or unwitting double agents. He used Nazi scientists and their state of the art methods, perfected on concentration camp victims. Some were known as programmers, skilled professionals in the art of breaking down and controlling the human mind.

Joseph Mengele did similar work, experimenting extensively with children and adults using mescaline, electroshock therapy, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, torture, rape, starvation, and trauma bonding. He was so successful with the latter technique that survivors expressed strong affection for him.

The CIA and US military copied the Nazi methodology through numerous programs, including MK-ULTRA, MK being an abbreviation for words "mind control" in German. According to obtained documents, it works best when severe trauma (such as rape) occurs by age three, the result often causing the personality to split or dissociate (called dissociative identity disorder or DID) to repress painful memories.

Therapists can cause multiple personality disorder (MPD) by mind manipulation, but early in life trauma makes victims especially vulnerable. Gottlieb focused on LSD for mind control and exotic poisons and drugs for political assassinations.

Under Operation Paperclip, 9,000 Nazi scientists and technicians were recruited to help undermine the Soviet Union.

In 1952, Gottlieb met Glickman in a Paris cafe, bought him a drink and laced it with LSD. After finally being held to account, he became ill. The trial was postponed, and on the eve of its resumption he died unexpectedly. At the time, New York Times and Los Angeles Times obituaries reported that his family refused to disclose the cause. The online WorldNet Daily explained it was after a "month-long bout with pneumonia," saying that after being admitted to the University of Virginia Medical Center, he lapsed into a coma, never recovered, but foul play couldn't be determined.

At trial against his estate, the judge died of a heart attack while exercising. The question again arose. Was it natural or was he killed, especially since his replacement was prejudicial to the plaintiff having thrown out his case two years earlier. Perhaps so after the jury ruled against Glickman's family, denying them justice.

On December 22, 1974, Seymour Hersh exposed MK-ULTRA in a New York Times article. Headlined, "Huge CIA Operation Reported in US Against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years," it documented illegal activities, including secret experiments on US citizens during the 1960s and earlier. Church Committee Congressional investigations followed, headed by Senator Frank Church, on abusive intelligence practices, replaced by the Pike Committee five months later. The Rockefeller Commission, under vice president Nelson Rockefeller, also examined the domestic activities of the CIA, FBI, and military intelligence agencies.

By summer 1975, it was learned that CIA and Department of Defense had conducted illegal experiments on willing and unwitting subjects as part of an exhaustive program to influence human behavior through psychoactive drugs (including LSD and mescaline) and other chemical, biological, psychological, and other methods.

Origins of CIA Mind Manipulation Practices

CIA became interested in Montreal Dr. Ewen Cameron's work at McGill University's Allan Memorial Institute. With full knowledge of the Canadian government, he was funded to perform bizarre experiments on his psychiatric patients, including keeping them asleep and isolated for weeks, then administering large doses of electroshock and experimental drug cocktails, LSD and PCP angel dust among them.

Though clearly unethical, Cameron believed by blasting the human brain with an array of shocks, he could unmake impaired minds, rebuilding them with new personalities cleansed of their previous state. It was voodoo science and failed, but CIA gained a wealth of knowledge it's used to this day.

In 1951, the Agency engaged McGill's director of psychology, Dr. Donald Hebb, and others to conduct sensory-deprivation experiments on volunteer students. They showed intense isolation disrupts clear thinking enough to make subjects receptive to suggestion. They were also formidable interrogation techniques amounting to torture when forcibly administered.

These early experiments laid the foundation for CIA's two-stage torture process - sensory deprivation followed by overload. University of Wisconsin historian Alfred McCoy documented them in his book, "A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror," calling them "the first real revolution in the cruel science of pain in more than three centuries."

CIA developed and codified them in manuals, used extensively in Southeast Asia, Central America, Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo, and at secret black sites globally. McCoy referred to an offshore information extraction mini-gulag during the Cold War and War on Terror. Out of sight, nothing is banned, including physical harshness and psychologically crippling mind control methods that turn human beings into mush.

MK-ULTRA was one of them, even though Gerald Ford's 1976 Executive Order (EO 11905) "establish(ed) policies to improve the quality of intelligence needed for national security (and) establish(ed) effective oversight to assure compliance with law in the management and direction of intelligence agencies and departments of the national government."

The EO prohibited "experimentation with drugs on human subjects, except with their informed consent, in writing and witnessed by a disinterested party, of each such human subject," according to guidelines issued by the National Commission. Subsequent Carter and Reagan directives banned all human experimentation. Nonetheless, they continue, in violation of the Nuremberg Code that prohibits:

-- medical experiments without the voluntary consent of human subjects - "without coercion, fraud, deceit, and the full disclosure of known risks;"

-- those "where there is an a priori reason to believe that death or disabling injury will occur;" and

-- only ones expected "to yield fruitful results for the good of society, unprocurable by other methods or means of study...."

Conducting human mind control experiments are clearly illegal and unethical. They're more sophisticated than ever today, and claims that MK-ULTRA experiments were halted in the 1970s were false. Renamed they continue and much more.

America's Long History of Human Experimentation

Prior examples include:

-- In 1931, Dr. Cornelius Rhoads infected human subjects with cancer cells under the auspices of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Investigations; Rhoads later conducted radiation exposure experiments on American soldiers and civilian hospital patients;

-- In 1932, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study began on 200 black men; they're weren't told of their illness, were denied treatment, and were used as human guinea pigs to follow their disease symptoms and progression; they all subsequently died;

-- in 1940, 400 Chicago prisoners were infected with malaria to study the effects of new and experimental drugs;

-- from 1942 - 1945, the US Navy used human subjects (locked in chambers) to test gas masks and clothing;

-- since the 1940s, human radiation experiments were conducted to test its effects and determine how much can kill; unwitting subjects were used in prisons, hospitals, orphanages, and mental institutions, including men, women, children, and the unborn of all races, mostly people from lower socio-economic brackets; in addition, more than 200,000 US soldiers were exposed to above ground nuclear tests; many later became ill and died;

-- in 1945, the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) implemented "Program F," the most exhaustive American study of fluoride's health effects - a key component in atomic bomb production and one of the most toxic chemicals known; it causes marked adverse central nervous system effects; in the interest of national security, the information was suppressed;

-- in 1945, VA hospital patients became guinea pigs for medical experiments;

-- in 1947, the AEC's Colonel EE Kirkpatrich issued secret document #07075001, stating that the agency will begin administering intravenous doses of radioactive substances to human subjects;

-- in 1949, the US Army released biological agents in US cities to study the effects of a real germ warfare attack; tests continued secretly through at least the 1960s in San Francisco, New York, Washington, DC, Panama City and Key West, FL, Minnesota, other midwest locations, along the Pennsylvania turnpike and elsewhere;

-- in 1950, the Defense Department (DOD) began open-air testing of nuclear weapons in desert areas, then monitored downwind residents for medical problems and mortality rates;

-- in 1951, African-Americans were exposed to potentially fatal stimulants as part of a race-specific fungal weapons test in Virginia;

-- in 1953, DOD released zinc cadmium sulfide gas over Winnipeg, Canada, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Fort Wayne, the Monocacy River Valley, MD, and Leesburg, VA - to determine how efficiently chemical agents can be dispersed;

-- in 1953, joint Army-Navy-CIA experiments were conducted in New York and San Francisco, exposing tens of thousands of people to the airborne agents Serratia marcescens and Bacillus glogigii;

-- in 1955, the CIA released bacteria from the Army's Tampa, FL biological warfare arsenal to test its ability to infect human populations;

-- in 1956, the US military released mosquitoes infected with Yellow Fever over Savannah, GA and Avon Park, FL to test the health effects on humans;

-- in 1965, Homesburg State Prison, Philadelphia prisoners were subjected to dioxin, the highly toxic Agent Orange agent, to study their carcinogenic effects;

-- in 1966, the New York subway system was used for a germ warfare experiment;

-- in 1969, an apparent nerve agent killed thousands of sheep in Utah;

-- in 1970, the Military Review reported that "ethnic weapons" development was intensified to be able to target specific ethnic groups thought susceptible to genetic differences and DNA variations;

-- in 1976, Americans were warned about an earlier Swine Flu scare, urging everyone to be vaccinated; millions complied, many of whom were harmed; 500 Guillan-Barre Syndrome (GBS - the deadly nerve disorder) resulted; people died from respiratory failure after severe paralysis, and experts said the vaccine increased the GBS risk level eight-fold;

-- in 1985 and 1986, open-air biological agents testing was done in populated areas;

-- in 1990, over 1,500 six-month old Los Angeles black and hispanic babies were given an experimental measles vaccine, never informing parents of the potential harm

-- in 1990 and 1991 before deploying to the Persian Gulf, all US troops were inoculated with experimental anthrax and botulinum toxoid vaccines, even though concerns were raised about their adverse long-term effects; over 12,000 died and over 30% became ill from non-combat-related factors in what subsequently was called Gulf War Syndrome, the result of exposure to a variety of toxins;

-- in 1994, Senator Jay Rockefeller issued a report revealing that for the past 50 or more years, DOD used hundreds of thousands of US military personnel, exposing them to dangerous substances experimentally; materials included mustard and nerve gas, ionizing radiation, psychochemicals, hallucinogens, and other drugs;

-- in 1995, Dr. Garth Nicolson discovered that toxic agents used during the Gulf War were pre-tested on Texas Department of Corrections prisoners;

-- in 1996, DOD admitted that Gulf War troops were exposed to chemical agents; and

-- in 2009, experimental vaccines were again used to inoculate people globally in response to another hyped Swine Flu scare; scattered reports of illnesses and deaths followed.

MK-ULTRA Victim Maryam Ruhullah

This writer will interview Ruhullah and Dr. James Randall Noblitt, a licensed psychologist, on The Progressive Radio News Hour (on The Progressive Radio Network), February 18 at 10AM US Central time to discuss MK-ULTRA, Ruhullah's experience and Noblitt's work with survivors of extreme abuse and individuals afflicted with identity dissociation. Noblitt is a Professor at the California School of Professional Psychology and Chair of the International Society of Trauma and Dissociation Ritual Abuse/Mind Control Interest Group.

The program will be archived for later listening.

As an MK-ULTRA victim, Ruhullah's memory was impaired and somewhat still is because of what she experienced. She explained it as follows.

In the early 1970s, she lived in Boston, MA, was married with a six-year old son, and as a lawyer worked for a prestigious firm, its name she can't remember. "One day, two federal agents came to (her) home unannounced," asking her to be a federal witness against an alleged organized crime figure. For her safety, they explained, she'd be placed in protective custody for a period not exceeding six months. She was asked to leave her family and job immediately, and say nothing to her husband and employer.

She "was forced to leave (her) home with the agents that day." She got no choice, and "was treated more like a prisoner than a witness." She couldn't use the phone or communicate with anyone, was transfered frequently, and held in "very low budget places," during which time her life "became a succession of abuses and exploitations."

"To this day," she says, she doesn't know precisely "when or why the government decided to use" her for MK-ULTRA experimentation, "but one day (she) was a mother, wife, and attorney, then, (later) had no memory of (her) past."

Having partly recovered it, she recalls "being given non-medically necessary electro-shock treatments. This was done to create amnesia (to block her) core personality and replac(e) it with" only need-to-know information.

She remembers "that the shock treatment given (her) was so severe and often that one day something happened and" she wasn't returned to her room. She now speaks of "an unbelievable long list of horrid exploitations and inhumane abuses" done to her.

In the late 1980s, fragments of her memory returned. She sought information on her case through an FOIA request, but was told no records were found. From 1992 - 1996, no one helped her until a member of B'nai Brith, Stephanie Suleiman, offered to do so but needed a few weeks to complete other work.

When Ruhullah recontacted her, she learned that "this thirty-two year old mother of two died of a heart attack," very suspicious given her age.

Ruhullah also explains that federal agents stopped communicating with her. Her experiences were "totally removed from the public record," and she went from "being a missing person to becoming a person erased." She's now divorced and unable to contact her children and former friends. "The US government does not want (her) story told."

She adds that the "only way (she) can measure (her) length of time held (is) by her son's age. (He) was six when (agents) entered (her) home, and he is (now) in his late thirties." She considers herself to have been continuously separated from her children, grandchildren, family, friends, assets, memories, and educated skills.

She calls each day "an experience of being held against (her) will while living in a vat of bureaucratic arrogance which refuses to acknowledge what was done (made worse by stopping (her) from getting (her) life back." Each day she's "being more injured and having more of (her) life robbed from" her.

She says she "was not released from custody." After being used for medical experiments, she was "given an implanted false identity, then left penniless and without proof of (her) true identity or lineage." She still considers herself a prisoner, a body with no persona, with little knowledge of her former self, stripped of everything important in her life.

KASHMIR IS THE DEFINING ISSUE OF INDIAN IDENTITY

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/05/AR2010020503438.html

by Subramanian Swamy

I believe that the Kashmir "issue"[1] can no more be solved by dialogue either with the Pakistanis or the Hurriyat[2] This is because the Pakistan army has now a majority of captains and colonels owing allegiance to the Taliban. In another five years, they will reach, by promotions, the corp commander level. We know that the government in Pakistan is controlled by the seven corp commanders of the army. Therefore a Taliban government in Pakistan is inevitable and a jehad against India the logical consequence of the same. In turn the Hurriyat is an organization that cannot go against Pakistan.

Hence India has about five years to prepare for a decisive and defining war with Pakistan and we must prepare to win it. We therefore have to throw out of office in the coming elections all those Indian politicians who crave or preen themselves on being popular in Pakistan by sounding reasonable and secular as also equivocating on every issue. For the survival of the ancient civilization of India we have to win that inevitable war and recover the whole of Kashmir.

I will not blame the jehadis for the coming war. They are after all programmed that way by Islamic theology. I will blame ourselves for not understanding the fundamentals of Islam as propounded in the Sira and the Hadith. It teaches that if Muslims are in a majority, they must rule [Darul Islam], and then everyone else is a dhimmi and a kafir who do not have equal rights of worship. Thus in Saudi Arabia, you cannot even display a picture of a Hindu god inside your own home! When Muslims are in a hopeless minority, then Sira and Hadith urges Muslims to make a deal with the majority and make no demands [Darul Ahad]. In US and Australia for example, Muslims will therefore never ask for separate shariat personal law. If Muslims are not hopelessly in a minority, then Islam directs that true Muslims conduct subversions and act against all human values to leverage their position [Darul Harab] to become of defining influence in the polity and ultimately rulers. We saw this in Kashmir recently when the government was made to cave in on the most humane gesture of allotting land to make Hindu pilgrims feel comfortable while on arduous journey to Amarnath caves. And we have it on the authority of the Chief Minister of the state that the agitation against the allotment was financed by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

It is foolish therefore in the face of this reality to expound the banal sentiment that "all Muslims are not terrorists or fanatics". Of course that is true. Or that Koran is a message of peace. May be it is. However, the Islam of the cutting edge of Muslim thought propounded by leaders such as Osama Bin Laden is in Sira and Hadith, which calls on the faithful to wage war against the infidels who cannot strike back effectively and crush them.

The struggle for Kashmir by the jehadis thus is not just for independence. They instead want a Darul Islam there and for the state to become a part of the Caliphate. Hindus are a special target because despite Iran, Iraq, Egypt and other countries becoming majority Muslim after less than two decades of conquest and brutalization, India after a thousand years of massacres, mayhem and rape remained dominantly Hindu. This is a living affront for the fundamentalist Muslim, and in their seminaries and madrassas in Iran and Saudi Arabia, they even today debate and agonize over it.

Contrary to the British imperialist propaganda, Hindus did not just lie down and be conquered by foreign invaders. Hindu fighting spirit had never dimmed even if weakened by traitors within. Periodically Hindus rose in revolt symbolized by the Vijayanagaram empire [which lasted 300 years] or in Shivaji's bravery, or Guru Gobind Singh's campaigns or the Mahratta national onslaught.

Most of us thus remained Hindus, defiant, even if in poverty and misery singing Vande Mataram.[3] This is the true history of India which the fundamentalist Muslim and the British imperialist historians cannot bear to acknowledge.

Accommodation and compromise with Islamic terrorists is self-defeating and suicidal. We have instead to fight back, for which Kashmir is the starting point. Hindu renaissance, long overdue, will be nurtured if we look for an opportunity to seize back the occupied areas of Kashmir, and make the jehadis feel that in India there can only be Darul Ahad for Muslims. We had opportunities earlier to demonstrate that: e.g.,in 1948, 1971, 1999, and 2001. But we let it go.

Hence, let there be no more intellectual confusion about the identity of India as a Hindu Rashtra [Nation], which means a land of Hindus and those others who acknowledge proudly that their ancestors are Hindus. If Muslims acknowledge this truth, then they are welcome as a part of our family. And those who do not so acknowledge cannot be equal citizens in India. Hence, we shall not agree to any more truncation of Indian territory

We have to therefore disown UN Resolutions and India-Pakistan treaties such as signed in Simla [1972] as unauthorized Nehruvian policy blunders. The legality of the Instrument of Accession signed in favour of India by the then Maharaja of J&K on October 26, 1947 has to prevail. Otherwise it will create a plethora of legal issues including what will become the status of the Maharaja if we abrogate this Instrument. Will Dr. Karan Singh, the son of Maharaja Hari Singh, have then a claim to be regarded again as an independent and sovereign King of J&K? In the Junagadh issue, Pakistan had held the Instrument once signed is "final, irrevocable, and not requiring the wishes of the people to be ascertained". That is the correct position. But the Junagadh Nawab after signing the Instrument in favour of Pakistan, invaded the neighbouring princely states, states which had acceded to India. So when the Indian Army was moved by Patel to defend these areas, the Nawab ran away to Pakistan. His subjects were mostly Hindu who then welcomed the Indian army.

Furthermore, on what legal basis can we de novo seek to ascertain the wishes of the people of J&K when the Indian Independence Act [1947] passed by the British Parliament makes no provision for the same? After all it was this same Act which created a legal entity called Pakistan, carved out from the united India. India under the Act was a settled and continuing entity out which the British Parliament made a new entity called Pakistan. Never in previous history there was ever a country called Pakistan. The concept itself was formulated only in 1947.

By what mechanism can then Pakistan today seek to amend or even de-recognise the Act without unwittingly undermining the legal status of Pakistan itself? That is, if the Instrument of Accession is called into question, will not Partition itself be subject to challenge as without legal basis on the same consideration? I raise this question also because in the case of Beruberi in Eastern India, the transfer of that area to Bangla Desh although agreed to, has been enmeshed in prolonged litigation in the Indian Supreme Court because of Article 1 of the Indian Constitution which bars de-merger of any Indian territory after 1950.

Indian army jawans[4] created Bangla Desh out of Pakistan. But despite that, and drunk with their Darul Islam status, the Bengali Muslims have not only driven out the Hindus or butchered them or forcibly converted them but millions of Bengali Muslims have sneaked into India and are happily working with Hindus in India. Partition was agreed to by Hindus only for those Muslims who could not bear to live under Hindu hegemony. And now after getting their territory, they cannot now say that they are happy to live in India with Hindus.

Hence, a virat Hindu Rashtra [nation] should tell Bangla Desh to take back their Muslims or hand over one-third of Bangla Desh territory as compensation. If they do not agree, then we must send two divisions of Indian army from Sylhet to Khulna and annex one third of north Bangla Desh as our due for bearing the economic and political burden of Bangla Deshis in our country. This will make our access to Assam and Northeast much easier too.But most of all it will send a powerful and salutary signal to Pakistani terrorists that Hindus will no more be passive.

These actions are possible if we gear up diplomatically for it. Today the world is sick of the terrorism and the greed of Muslims nations to make money out the sale of oil which they have got by sheer accident of geology. Hence, we must make strong allies. Israel is one such country. We must find ways to make China see our interests. It can be done if we know how to come to an understanding with them. This is essential for isolating Pakistan. At present China has begun to see the tinder box that Pakistan has become. Uighurs from Xinjiang have been to madrassas of Pakistan for training in subversion in Urumuchi and to sabotage the Beijing Olympics This worries China. It should concern us too.

Hence to lay the foundation for the liberation of Kashmir, we must have President's Rule for some time. India should refuse to engage in any dialogue on Kashmir in which the other side does not accept the whole of Kashmir as an integral and inalienable part of India. The people of Kashmir should be left in no doubt in their minds where the citizens of Hindu Rashtra stand on the future of the state: that it lies with us. Every Hindu has a claim on Kashmir. I for one claim it because my gotra [lineage, clan] is Kashyapa. It was RShi Kashyapa who invented Kashmir out the Dal lake. Hence my claim.

We should undo the "cleansing" of the state of Kashmiri Hindu Pandits by sending 1 million ex-servicemen and families into the Kashmir valley for re-settlement. Article 370 of the Constitution will have to be removed for that purpose, but according to the Constitution itself, it is supposed to be a "temporary provision" not requiring a Parliamentary two-thirds majority for amendment. It can be erased by a Presidential Notification on the recommendation of the Union Cabinet.

Then we await a war. We do not have to go to war with Pakistan on Kashmir because a Talibanised Pakistan will provide us with the opportunity. What I am advocating here is that we prepare mentally and militarily for that eventuality, and having been provided that opportunity, go for the jackpot -- to use an American slang.


Editor's End Notes (Not part of the Original article)

[1] Kashmir Issue. Because of agitation by Indian Muslims, India was partitioned in 1947 into two independent states: India and Pakistan. This was accompanied by a large population exchange. When the dust settled, Pakistan was mostly Muslim, India was Hindu with a sizable Muslim population. To read the excellent analysis by Jeffrey Weiss, "India and Pakistan -- a Cautionary Tale for Israel and Palestine," click here. Muslims have continued to agitate for more territory.

[2] The Hurriyat is an umbrella group of Muslim political, business and religious organizations, which have banded together to promote Kashmir separatism. As noted on www.satp.org: "Since the international community frowned upon the resort to violence by non-state actors, the Hurriyat was an ideal platform to promote the Kashmiri secessionist cause." The Hurriyat views Kashmir as the 'unfinished agenda of Partition.'

[3] Vande Mataram ("Hail to the Mother(land") is India's especially beloved song, its nationalist song, which since the late 1800s conveyed the Indian desire to be free of British rule. It visualizes the nation as Mother Durga, a Hindu goddess. It was rejected as the national anthem because its imagery was considered offensive to Muslims.

[4] Young man. Private soldier.

Subramanian Swamy is an economist, who has taught on the university level both in India and U.S.A. He was a founding member of the Janata Party in India and has served as a cabinet minister. He has promoted normalizing relations with China and Israel.

Nicolas Sarkozy: portrait de l’homme et du président

Par Andreï Fediachine, RIA Novosti

L'infatigable Nicolas Sarkozy, président de la République Française, soufflera ses 55 bougies le 28 janvier.
L'hyper-énergique "Super-Sarko" fêtera son anniversaire à un moment où sa popularité n'est pas à son apogée: après deux ans et 9 mois de présidence (il est entré en fonction le 16 mai 2007), seuls 38% des Français approuvent son activité.
La cote de popularité du 6e président de la Ve République aurait été plus médiocre encore (à peine plus de 34% en décembre), si la France n'avait pas réagi en janvier avec tant de compassion à la tragédie haïtienne. Les électeurs ont apprécié. En France, il y a de nombreux immigrés, et entre autres, beaucoup d'immigrés d'Haïti francophone, ancienne colonie française.

Deux ans et 9 mois ne sont pas un prétexte pour analyser sérieusement les réalisations et les erreurs de Sarkozy.
Mais à l’occasion de son anniversaire, on peut dresser le portrait de Sarkozy, homme et président.
D'autant plus que certains détails de son comportement donnent à réfléchir.

Lorsqu'un pays réputé pour sa galanterie, son vin et ses parfums est mécontent de son dirigeant (65% des Français sont mécontents de leur président), on peut se demander comment des éléments aussi raffinés que politesse et délicatesse ont pu faire sa réputation.
Toute l'ingratitude française pour celui qui a été élu par la nation avec 53% des voix (Sarkozy a devancé sa concurrente de 6%) ressort dans les ouvrages des caricaturistes français. Sarkozy est leur pain quotidien.

Depuis la fin de l'année dernière, l'image caricaturale « Le Sarko » s’est enrichi des attributs de Napoléon et a des notes évidentes de mégalomanie, de narcissisme, de vanité, d'arrogance, d'affection pour le luxe et la bravade.
Elle laisse un arrière-goût de méchanceté et de jalousie envers les hommes politiques mondiaux et les opposants intérieurs.

Si l'on croit les journalistes français au courant de ce qui se produit à l'Elysée, ces derniers dix-huit mois, le 23e président français a pris l'habitude d'exposer de façon longue et pathétique ses réalisations lors de réunions de cabinet; de souligner qui et comment il a incité à prendre des décisions historiques (suggérant des idées, aidant à éviter un fiasco foudroyant, sauvant, retirant de l'abîme, etc).
Ces monologues se terminent invariablement par des paroles péjoratives à l'adresse d'autres dirigeants mondiaux qui, si Sarko n'existait pas, "n'auraient pu faire, n'auraient pas compris ou n'auraient pas osé".

Ces derniers mois, Sarkozy est mécontent d'Obama. Les experts français affirment que Sarkozy est offensé de la conduite du président américain qui n'a pas réagi comme il se devait (avec enthousiasme et obséquiosité) à l'amitié proposée, n'a pas suivi les recommandations faites par Sarkozy pour venir à bout de la crise financière et de nombreux autres conseils dans le domaine de la politique étrangère.
A la "cour de Sarkozy" (selon l’expression des journaux français), on ne comprend pas. Sarkozy s’est mis à qualifier Obama de "surestimé", "malchanceux" et faible. En fin de compte, après avoir été un fervent atlantiste, Sarkozy s'est tourné vers l'Allemagne.

Dans les rapports avec la chancelière d'Allemagne, entre Merkel et Sarkozy, on entend de plus en plus « Lieber Nicolas » et « Chère Angela ».
Il est vrai, il y a aussi une autre échelle des valeurs, selon laquelle le tournant vers l'Allemagne est le résultat du désir naturel de renforcer le partenariat entre les deux plus grandes économies de l'Europe.
Certains experts disent même que le revirement de Sarkozy vers Berlin s'explique par la crainte que Berlin ne se rapproche de Moscou et que ce processus puisse se faire sans la France.
Certains reporters affirment que Sarkozy se plait à raconter comment, lors de sa première visite de travail à Moscou en octobre 2007, il a littéralement "hypnotisé" Vladimir Poutine, alors président.

On peut citer ses autres sujets préférés : "Comment j'ai sauvé l'Union européenne de l'échec total et prévenu, par la même occasion, l'irruption russe en Géorgie et la guerre dans tout le Caucase".
Cela correspond partiellement à la réalité, compte tenu du rôle joué par Sarkozy dans le sauvetage du traité de Lisbonne de l'UE et dans la médiation lors des pourparlers russo-géorgiens à l'automne 2008.

Comme tous ceux qui sont issus de familles d'immigrés (le père de Nicolas Sarkozy s'est enfui en 1944 de Hongrie après l'entrée des troupes soviétiques dans ce pays et s'est marié à Marseille avec la fille d'un célèbre médecin juif), Sarkozy peut se permettre à l'égard des immigrés ce qu'ils n'auraient pas toléré de la part d'un autochtone. Son approche des problèmes de l'immigration et de la criminalité des immigrés est très dure.

Parmi les dernières initiatives patriotiques du président, on peut citer celle qui ressemble beaucoup aux recherches russe de l'"idée nationale".
A la manière de Sarkozy, cela s'appelle le grand débat sur l'identité nationale, amorcé en novembre de l'année dernière et qui devrait s'achever fin janvier.
Ce débat se déroule sous la devise d’un retour à la "Douce France". Le "point de repère" est une chanson de 1943 (durant l'occupation) sur la bonne vieille France, plus idéalisante et nostalgique que réaliste. Sarkozy (un autre trait des immigrés) tâche d'être plus français que les Français. Ces derniers, selon lui, manquent actuellement de patriotisme.

Par conséquent, ce que disent les journaux et les revues au sujet de Sarkozy n'est pas étonnant. Sarkozy est maintenant représenté (en couleurs et en collages) montant à l'assaut de la Bastille en 1789, assis à côté de Churchill et Staline en 1945 à Yalta, découvrant la pénicilline et l'Amérique, et même fondateur des Beatles.

Bref, les Français semblent montrer qu'ils en ont "assez" de Nicolas Sarkozy. Ils en ont assez de Sarkozy seul et de Sarkozy avec Carla Bruni (sa troisième épouse).
Ils en ont assez de Pal Istvan Sarkozy de Nagy-Bosca, son père, âgé de 81 ans qui s'essaie à la peinture et qui profite du nom de son fils. Il présentera même en avril une exposition à la galerie parisienne Espace Pierre Cardin, dont le clou sera un portrait de Carla Bruni et Nicolas Sarkozy-fils.

Les Français ne seraient pas autant lassés de leur président, s'il ne s'était pas adonné à la débauche aussitôt après son élection, irritant la France par son penchant pour la douceur de vivre, son amour démonstratif du luxe, ses actes pour épater, son divorce, son nouveau mariage, etc. Les Français en ont assez de la quantité d'escapades indignes du président.

La France de Sarkozy et la France des Français s'éloignent de plus en plus l'une de l'autre.
La France des Français comprend mal ce que le président attend d'elle, ce qu'il fait d'elle et ce qu'on peut attendre de lui.....

http://www.bladi.net/forum/28185-laicite-francaise-intolerance-letat-laique/

Malgré son apparente intolérance étatique, les dérogations à la laïcité continuent principalement en faveur des Églises catholiques, protestantes et juives mais contre d’autres religions, en particulier l’Islam, malgré que la France compte entre 5 et 6 millions de Musulmans. Aujourd'hui la laïcité en France est devenue une arme anti-sémite anti-arabe et anti-islamique dans une pratique d'intolérance sélective...

La secte talmudique, franc-maconnique au pouvoir en France et ailleurs..., utilise la laicite pour provoquer une guerre des civilisations en occident... La laicite est la religion incréée de la franc-maconnerie, jamais mise reellement en pratique, elle est l'arme de la haine, du racisme, de la division, de l'occupation, de la discrimination contre les minorités et contre les Musulmans qui ne se soumettront jamais a la secte talmudo franc maconique jacobine, ni a ses partis politiques responsables des genocides des peuples au service du sionisme mondialisant de ce debut de 21 ieme siecle. Il n'y aura jamais d'Islaam 'de France' ni d'Islaam 'laic', la laicite etant un instrument de domination coloniale en France comme ailleurs, les israeliens de France ont un agenda de guerre civile, ils ne font que se jetter dans leurs propres tombes tant il est aisé de lire dans le livre des chiens enragés de Tel Aviv.... comme l'histoire se repete....

Canada’s ambassador in Iran was ‘CIA asset’ in 1970s

Ken Taylor

Canada’s former ambassador to Iran has admitted that he and the embassy’s head of security secretly worked for the CIA in the late 1970s. Ambassador Ken Taylor and Canadian fellow-diplomat Jim Edward became the CIA’s “most valuable asset[s]” in Iran, following the November 4, 1979, seizure of the US embassy in Tehran by student groups allied to the Islamic Revolution. The revelation was made public last weekend in a new book entitled Our Man in Tehran, by Trent University historian Robert Wright, which examines intelligence aspects of the Iranian Revolution. In it, Dr. Wright says that ambassador Taylor became “the de facto CIA station chief” in the Iranian capital, after he and Edward accepted an American request to do so, which was communicated personally to Canadian Prime Minister Joe Clark by US President Jimmy Carter. Until he left the country, on January 27, 1980, Taylor and Edward provided the US with “aggressive intelligence” and an operations base for CIA agents, authorized the CIA’s use of false Canadian travel documents, and helped the Agency plan an “armed incursion” into Iran. The information was kept secret for over 30 years, reportedly because successive Canadian governments feared “a negative political fallout if the Canadian public learned that one of its envoys was a US spook”. Most news reports on the revelation convey a slightly amused tone, but Muck Centre of International Studies (University of Toronto) professor Wesley Wark is certainly not amused. He calls the concealed CIA role of a Canadian Ambassador an “unprecedented” and “irregular”, and warns that the news could cause the Canadian embassy in Iran to be seen as “a nest of [American] spies”, since there is still no US embassy in the country. The revelation could potentially place Canada’s current diplomatic ties with Iran at risk, he says.

The extensive covert links between USA and Israel

When Comverse Infosys founder and CEO Jacob "Kobi" Alexander fled to Israel and later Namibia in 2006, the former Israeli intelligence officer and entrepreneur took along a little extra cash for his extended "vacation"--$57 million to be precise.

According to investigative journalist James Bamford's exposé of the National Security Agency, The Shadow Factory, Alexander was facing a thirty-two-count indictment by the Justice Department "charging him with masterminding a scheme to backdate millions of Comverse stock options ... that allowed Alexander to realize $138 million in profits--profits stolen from the pockets of the company's shareholders."

When the scandal broke, one former colleague told The New York Times, "The one thing about Kobi is that he did have a sense of entitlement," said Stephen R. Kowarsky, who was an executive at Comverse from 1985-97. "Most people are a little bit shy or self-effacing about asking for something, but not Kobi. It was easy for him to say, 'I want that. I deserve that.'"

Sounds like business as usual to me!

But there is a darker side to Verint. As investigative journalist Christopher Ketcham revealed on the muckraking website CounterPunch, U.S. intelligence agencies are wary of Israeli penetration and interception of U.S. military systems and advanced computing applications through a backdoor, called a "trojan," secretly built into enterprise architecture. Ketcham wrote,

According to former CIA officer [Philip] Giraldi and other US intelligence sources, software manufactured and maintained by Verint, Inc. handles most of American law enforcement's wiretaps. Says Giraldi: "Phone calls are intercepted, recorded, and transmitted to US investigators by Verint, which claims that it has to be 'hands on' with its equipment to maintain the system." Giraldi also notes Verint is reimbursed for up to 50 percent of its R&D costs by the Israeli Ministry of Industry and Trade. According to Giraldi, the extent of the use of Verint technology "is considered classified," but sources have spoken out and told Giraldi they are worried about the security of Verint wiretap systems. The key concern, says Giraldi, is the issue of a "trojan" embedded in the software. (Christopher Ketcham, "An Israeli Trojan Horse," CounterPunch, Weekend Edition, September 27-28, 2008)

Yet despite alarms raised by a score of federal law enforcement agencies, including the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), fearful that sensitive wiretap information was finding its way into the hands of international narcotrafficking cartels, virtually nothing has been done to halt the outsourcing of America's surveillance apparatus to firms with intimate ties to foreign intelligence entities. Indeed, as America's spy system is turned inward against the American people, corporations such as Verint work hand-in-glove with a spooky network of security agencies and their corporatist pals in the telecommunications industry.

Kobi Alexander would've certainly known the drill, exploiting family connections for advantage over competitors with movers and shakers in Washington. As they say, the fruit doesn't fall far from the tree. Kobi's father Zvi was a fabulously wealthy oil baron who wound up running Israel's state oil company. Bamford recounts how Zvi won drilling franchises: he'd bribe African cabinet ministers, "often in partnership with the U.S. tax cheat Marc Rich, who became a fugitive and was given sanctuary in Israel."

That is, until Rich was handed a pardon during the waning days of the Clinton administration. In the aftermath of Clinton's "gifting" the tax scofflaw with a "get-out-of-jail-free" card, Rich's close confidant, attorney and convicted felon, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, denied that Rich had conspired to hide illegal profits or violate U.S. laws.

Yet despite a documentary record of shady dealings that spanned continents--and decades--a "neutral, leaning towards favorable" opinion on Rich's petition for pardon was signed-off by none other than former U.S. Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder, Barack Obama's apparent pick for U.S. Attorney General.

Like Kobi Alexander and his pals at Comverse, Rich too, had a dirty little secret as CNN reported back in 2001: "Marc Rich did help the Israeli security services in some way." CNN doesn't specify how Rich curried favor with Mossad, only that he did. Which just goes to show its a small world--of one hand washing the other.

(Memo to Obama supporters: you can forget about future Justice Department investigations of Bush cronies and war criminals. Why? Shortly before entering private practice at the tony law firm Covington & Burling, Holder was Bush's Acting Attorney General until John Ashcroft's nomination was confirmed by the U.S. Senate. Out of government, Holder made a killing defending Chiquita Brands International against charges that the firm paid the far-right Colombian, narcotrafficking AUC death squad millions in "protection money" to murder labor activists. But I digress.)

Meanwhile in the heimat, enterprising innovators such as Verint are inside--deep inside--America's telephone and internet infrastructure. Keeping "America safe"--from its citizens--has become a veritable cash cow for dozens of corporate embeds busy as proverbial bees inventing new products for an alphabet-soup mix of intelligence agencies such as the FBI, CIA, DHS, DIA, NGA, NRO and NSA.

Five months after the 9/11 attacks, the security bubble was rapidly expanding and the "homeland security" market was touted by Wall Street gurus as "the next big thing" on the corporate grifting horizon.

Alexander (before fleeing to the dry, but relatively safe harbor in Windhoek) rebranded Comverse Infosys, Verint Systems, Inc., an acronym for "verified intelligence." The company, which made a fortune on a digital suite of wiretapping tools, AudioDisk, describes itself as a "a leading provider of actionable intelligence solutions for workforce optimization, IP video, communications interception, and public safety."

Soon thereafter according to Bamford, Verint was selling its "actionable intelligence solutions" to "more than 5,000 organizations in over 100 countries" world-wide, including the worst human rights abusers on the planet. And why wouldn't they? Verint's already brisk business took off like a bat out of hell after 9/11.

As USA Today reported in 2006, "Most of the growth this decade will come from building what Homeland Security Research calls 'a homeland defense infrastructure.' Growth areas are likely to include technology for surveillance and for detection of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction." Or illegal spying by unaccountable state agencies and their private partners.

According to a Business Week company profile,

Verint Systems, Inc. provides analytic software-based solutions for the security and business intelligence markets. Its analytic solutions collect, retain, and analyze voice, fax, video, email, Internet, and data transmissions from voice, video and IP networks for the purpose of generating actionable intelligence for decision makers. The company primarily offers communications interception solutions, such as STAR-GATE, RELIANT, and VANTAGE; networked video solutions that include NEXTIVA; and contact center actionable intelligence solutions, which include ULTRA. Verint Systems serves government entities, global corporations, law enforcement agencies, financial institutions, transportation agencies, retail stores, utilities, and communications service providers. (Verint Systems, Inc. Business Week, Information Technology Sector, accessed November 26, 2008)

With total revenues of $249.8 million and gross profits in 2005 of $137.1 million, Verint, while not the largest firm in the security and intelligence "marketplace" nonetheless is connected to a host of spooky clients, including the National Security Agency and their "partners" at Verizon Communications.

As I wrote back in March, whistleblower and security consultant Babak Pasdar revealed how Verizon handed the FBI and one assumes the NSA, unrestricted access to their customers' voice communications and electronic data via the Bureau's "Quantico circuit."

In a signed affidavit to the whistleblowing protection group, the Government Accountability Project (GAP), Pasdar described how his unnamed client (revealed by The Washington Post as Verizon Communications), listened in and recorded all conversations en-masse; collected and recorded mobile phone data use en-masse; obtained data that the company accessed from mobile phone usage, including internet access, e-mail and web browsing; trended calling patterns and call behavior; identified inbound and outbound callers; tracked all inbound and outbound calls; and traced a user's physical location.

While Verizon and fellow telecom spy AT&T may have handed the FBI and NSA a treasure trove of their customer's personal details, niche telecom companies such as Verint, rival Narus (another spooky Israeli security firm), Siemans and Ericsson to name but a few of the multinationals that build the surveillance tools hard-wired into America's telecommunications infrastructure, have made a killing destroying our privacy.

The Ties that Bind: Verint's Spooky Board of Directors

The close interconnections amongst firms such as Verint and the U.S. and Israeli National Security States are revealed by a glance at the firm's Board of Directors.

When Kobi Alexander fled the country in 2006, Dan Bodner became the company's CEO. According to Business Week, Bodner, a Comverse Infosys insider, "served in the Israeli Defense Forces in an engineering capacity." A graduate of Technion, Israel's Institute of Technology, Bodner was previously the President and CEO of Comverse Government Systems Corporation.

David T. Ledwell, Verint's Chief Strategic Officer since 2003, was formerly the President and CEO of Verint subsidiary Loronix Information Systems, according to Business Week. Apparently Loronix has been folded into its parent company Verint, and no longer exists as a separate corporate entity. However, the firm's products made the transition. According to Verint, the former Loronix division was responsible for its Nextiva IP Video Surveillance System. The "Nextiva portfolio" is loaded with "a broad array of solutions" for video recording and analysis in the banking, critical infrastructure, retail and mass transit "markets."

Andre Dahan, CEO, President and Executive Director of Verint's parent company Comverse Technology Inc., was a former CEO and President of AT&T Wireless Services Inc., Business Week reveals. Dahan, a graduate of the Jerusalem Institute of Technology, is described as having "more than 30 years of leadership experience in the information technology industry."

Victor DeMarines, a Verint board member since 2002 and Advisor to National Security Solutions, Inc., a "private equity firm" that focuses on "services and software" in the security and homeland defense industries, served as President and CEO of the spooky MITRE Corporation, where he worked in the "command and control" field as general manager of MITRE's Center for Integrated Intelligence Systems and oversaw the non-profit's Intelligence and Electronic Warfare Systems. Interestingly enough, from 1967-1969 DeMarines "managed MITRE's Bangkok, Thailand, site, where he helped coordinate MITRE's support for Air Force systems ... on support operations issues," according to Business Week. In addition to his duties at Verint and MITRE, DeMarines is a member of the advisory group for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) that oversees operations of America's fleet of military spy satellites.

Howard Safir, formerly New York City Police Commissioner under "Mr. 9/11" himself, Mayor Rudy Giuliani, has been a Verint board member since 2002 according to his Business Week profile. After his tenure as Police Commissioner, Safir became the CEO of SafirRosetti, the intelligence and security division of GlobalOptions Group, Inc., described as a firm that provides "crisis management and emergency response plans for disaster mitigation, continuity of operations, and other emergency management issues."

Larry Myers, another MITRE alumni was MITRE's Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer. At MITRE, Myers' brief included work on that firms' wide-ranging contracts for computer systems for the Department of Defense, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Internal Revenue Service and "several organizations" in the "U.S. intelligence community," according to Business Week. He joined Verint's board in 2003.

Paul D. Baker, Vice President of Corporate Marketing and Corporate Communications of Comverse Technology, joined Verint's board in 2002 according to his Business Week profile. Additionally, Baker is a director with Ulticom, Inc., a firm that provides the telecommunications industry with "Mobility, Location, Payment, Switching and Messaging services within wireless, IP and wireline networks," according to Ulticom's website.

Lt. General (retired) Kenneth Minihan, joined Verint's board in 2002, according to Business Week. Described by the business publication as the "most connected" member on Verint's board of directors, after leaving his post as the Director of the National Security Agency, NSA's Central Security Service and Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Minihan became managing director of the Paladin Capital Group. A private equity firm based (where else!) in Washington, D.C. Paladin's management team is loaded with heavy-hitting embeds from the security-intelligence complex, including among others, Dr. Alf Andreassen, described by his Paladin profile as having "promoted technological innovation in the area of national security ... for AT&T's support of classified national programs in the areas of Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence" (C3I). Minihan is well placed on some 17 boards of directors to implement the Pentagon's vision of creating a panoptic police state. Indeed, while at NSA Minihan oversaw that agency's transition into the digital age of surveillance.

Shortly after Minihan's appointment to Verint's board, Verizon Communications installed STAR-GATE, an intrusive communications interception system. According to a blurb on the firm's website,

STAR-GATE ... [is] designed to manage vast numbers of targets, concurrent sessions, call data records, and communications, STAR-GATE transparently accesses targeted communications without alerting subscribers or disrupting service. Verint partners with leading switch and network equipment vendors across the globe to deliver passive, active, and hybrid solutions for a wide range of communication technologies and communication services. ... STAR-GATE can manage network topologies from small, single-switch implementations to country-wide deployments. (Verint, "STAR-GATE Lawful Interception and Data Retention Compliance Solutions for Communication Service Providers," accessed November 28, 2008)

Another product marketed by Verint for security and intelligence agencies world-wide is RELIANT, described by the firm as a monitoring center for "interception compliance, evidence gathering and historical data analysis by law enforcement agencies." The Verint brochure touts RELIANT's ability "to collect, retain, analyze, investigate and distribute intercepted voice data and multimedia communications and historical data to facilitate more productive investigations and the gathering of evidence."

VANTAGE, according to Verint's product description, is specifically designed for "mass and target communications interception, investigation and analysis, including COMINT for intelligence and national security agencies." Indeed the VANTAGE monitoring center promises to deliver a "mass and target interception system" that "intercepts, filters, and analyzes voice, data and multimedia for intelligence purposes, with sophisticated probing technology for passively collecting maximum communications, with Verint’s real-time filtering mechanisms to extract the most important information, and stored data analysis for generating intelligence from data collected over time."

Amongst the "features" touted by Verint are: mass communications related to specific "areas of interest;" target interception of "known entities;" a "unified interception" and "investigation workflow" specifically designed for "intelligence generation;" the "historical data analysis of call records" conveniently "imported from service providers;" and "tools" that facilitate the "passive monitoring of virtually any type of network."

The Failure of the National Security-Surveillance State

While America turns its intelligence and security apparatus inward and targets its own citizens, especially leftist dissenters, labor organizers, environmentalists and antiglobalization activists, threats from well-trained far-right jihadis--many of whom were witting or unwitting Western intelligence assets deployed on countless battlefields from Afghanistan to Kosovo and beyond--or neo-Nazi hooligans training for the next Oklahoma City atrocity, go unaddressed.

"Reading the tea leaves" from petaflops (a quadrillion bits) of data vacuumed-up from the internet, cell phones, land lines, spy satellites, personal business transactions or CCTV cameras is not "intelligence" but the height of folly as the recently-concluded attacks in Mumbai starkly demonstrate. The Indian intelligence apparatus, particularly its Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) are hardly slouches when its comes to tradecraft or high-tech security "solutions."

The close relationship built-up over decades amongst RAW and Mossad for example, did not prevent commandos with alleged links to Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET), a militant group aligned with al-Qaeda and Pakistan's "state within a state," the Inter-Sevices Intelligence agency (ISI) from striking at the heart of India's financial center with devastating effect. While it appears unlikely that the Pakistani government was involved in the Mumbai massacre, pro-Taliban elements within ISI or the military may be seeking to enflame tensions between the two South Asian nuclear nations.

RAW, like their counterparts in the CIA, MI6 or Mossad, rely on an inexhaustible stream of signals intelligence (SIGINT), communications intelligence (COMINT), human intelligence (HUMINT) and increasingly, imagery intelligence (IMINT) from India's fleet of spy satellites to prevent attacks. Indeed, Verint and other high-tech firms have sold RAW the same equipment with the same promise of "security" that they sold their American and European counterparts. RAW's headquarters in New Delhi may sport the latest in surveillance technologies, including high-speed supercomputers and yet, 195 people's lives were snuffed-out by a determined gang of miscreants.

While high-tech "solutions" may give the cops the geolocation of young anarchists slated for preemptive arrest or which journalists may pose "problems," all the data-mining on the planet will not prevent terrorism; indeed terrorism is the reactionary handmaid of a system at the end of its rope. As the global capitalist economic crisis deepens as industry after industry succumb to the hammer blows of an historic crisis of confidence, new social and political struggles inevitably, appear on the horizon.

Although the close--and well compensated--interconnections amongst securocrats and corporate grifters capitalizing on the homeland security investment bubble will continue well into the next administration, real security in any meaningful sense of the word will only come by creating a just society. Anything less is a fraudulent exercise in self-delusion fueled by the Gordon Gekko's and Kobi Alexander's of America's (very profitable) "war on terror."